I feel you. My wife and I travel to the US once or twice a year, and do want continuous connectivity. My experience: pay-as-you-go for data sucks in the US. Coverage is a problem. Americans can't call non-US numbers. If you want to use your cell connection as a broadband replacement, expect to pay through the nose.
Since some of our family live in the boondocks, T-Mobile and Sprint are not really an option, and even AT&T coverage is spotty. Having driven extensively through "fly over" country, Verizon seems to be the only provider with close to full coverage. As others have pointed out here, if you're mostly staying in cities (100k+), you might be OK with the others as well.
For the last four years, we had a Mifi on contract ($50/month), with 5G of data. Until this year, Verizon allowed suspending the contract when we were out of the country, and re-activating it just before we got to the US again. Unfortunately, the suspension is now limited to a max. of 90 days per year. Since most of our friends and family don't have international calls enabled on their contracts, they can't call our European numbers. So we did continue to have an AT&T Go SIM ($100/year to keep the account active). As others have pointed out, the pay-as-you-go options don't have international roaming enabled, or might not even offer it (boo AT&T), so dealing with that from abroad can be a pain. Before that, we tried various options, including VirginMobile (uses Sprint) and T-Mobile.
We've now convinced a friend to get us on his family plan with Verizon, and we have one iPhone (incl. tethering) on there for $15/month. We're sharing his 12GB data, which is good enough for our purposes. Since the phone is on contract, international roaming is available. We did buy the phone, so there's no SIM lock on it, and we can use it with other SIMs.
While in the US, we use about 1GB per week. Most nights, we're somewhere where we have Wifi, so it's mostly on the move usage (navigation in the car, music, FB posts, etc.) Hotel wifi mostly sucks, so when we're staying in a hotel, we're using the cell data. For large downloads or uploads, we try and wait until we're back on Wifi, but I've been syncing my photos and videos with iCloud and Dropbox as I'm taking them, so we're not completely constraining ourselves.
The Federal Republic is the successor to the Weimar Republic, so the state was not "destroyed". Apparently, when an estate goes to the state, it goes to the state (Bundesland) where the deceased was last registered to live, not Germany; Hitler was registered as living in Munich. That's why it's Bavaria.
Not where I come from. In Europe, telco's have to foot the bill for lawful intercept equipment. They can charge the agencies only a nominal fee for intercepts. Industry organisations have estimated the additional capital expenditure at up to a hundred million Euros for Germany alone.
Their train signals are mostly decoration, as well, even though the system controlling the trains follows similar rules to real-world trains, and could easily control signals as well.
On the other hand, the immersive qualities are really amazing. I bet you a good German beer that you won't hold the missing lighting and signage against them after having been there even just five minutes.
Unless Oracle steps up and makes Mac OS X a primary platform for JDK releases, this might be rather annoying. Ultimately, I might be forced to do development on Linux or Windows. That would blow.
But maybe this decision encourages some group to package a kick ass JDK, and have more timely updates and developer snapshots... one can dream.
WIth the App store and Flash removal, I'm not keeping my hopes up though.
I would only consider Vodafone and T-Mobile as your options, these two have established cell networks, all the others borrow on these networks and as such tend to be at the bottom of the traffic prioritization.
Nonsense. There's four network operators in Germany: T-Mobile, Vodafone, E-Plus, and O2 Germany. While T-Mobile and Vodafone have a larger buildout (higher density, more towers in rural areas), E-Plus and O2 are not that far behind. I find that O2's network works really well in cities, with no noticable degradation compared to T-Mobile.
All four operators have their own "value" brands, and there's a couple of MVNOs, and as far as I can tell, no priorisation is in effect for any user. If you do have coverage, chances are that you will have excellent throughput. Nothing like certain US operators...
Not in general, you must have been locky. They're different companies, with different provider IDs, and the SIM lock won't accept the other's SIM. Besides T-Mobile USA has very few phones that work on the European freqencies, so you might be out of luck anyway.
First T-Mobile USA has very little to do with T-Mobile Germany, except having the same owner. In fact, there's rumors that Deutsche Telekom wants to divest of T-Mobile USA, similarly to what the recently did in the UK. My experience has been that T-Mobile USA don't really care what's going on elsewhere in the world.
Fonic is a service brand of O2 Germany (owned by Telefonica), offering pay as you go prepaid services, both voice and data. Their data offering is 2.50 Euros per calendar day, for a maximum of 1 GB transfer volume. O2's UMTS network offers HSUPA with up to 3.6Mbps down, 384 kbps up. Their coverage tends to be concentrated in urban areas; rural areas might have no coverage. If you exceed the transfer volume, speed will be limited to 64kbps for that day. Adding credit to the account can be done through credit card, direct debit from a German bank account, or by purchasing vouchers available at many stores. The sell a USB data stick for 60 Euros.
There's a couple more offerings, but most come with additional strings attached. With any offering, you technically will need a residency permit in the EU, with appropriate paperwork; some shops are less stringent than others. If you do have friends in Germany, have them order the package online in advance. You might want to get a seperate prepaid SIM for voice service as well, instead of international roaming.
Finally, if you do have friends living in Germany, ask them if their DSL or cable provider has good deals on package extensions for mobile data options. For example, Alice offers up to ten SIM cards for free, and has a 6 Euro per month data option available. Billing would go to whomever is paying for the DSL/Cable.
Why do you think a sector antenna would be emitting only -40 dBm? That is on the level of a micro- or nano cell. The maximum allowable is well north of 10 kW EIRP, so even if that cell is tuned down to only cover a small sector, it still will be putting out 40 to 50 dBm. Otherwise, as you rightly state, reception inside builings would be nearly impossible.
I don't particularly believe in electro-sensitivity, so wouln't be too concerned even with that number, but I still would feel a bit uneasy about potential power levels. Maybe it's worthwile checking FCC permits for this particular site and the actual max. EIRP they're allowed to push out. Shielding those walls with copper mesh wall paper probably puts you right with the tinfoil hat brigade, but might avoid potential interference of any wireless equipment you might want to use.
A bank I did some consulting work for had a very effective cultural rule to force people to lock their machines when they left their desks: if you find an unlocked machine, pull up the email client and send a message to everyone: "today's my birthday, drinks on me after work!" (other NSFW messages left to the readers imagination.)
Apparently, very few people left their machines unlocked more than once...
Maybe 8250 chips have been superseded, but 8250 compatible ports continue to be available on many mainboards. And there's always USB adapters. And given how cheap a serial port is to implement, I'm sure we will continue to see it for at least service access to many devices going forward.
- Remember 2400bps modems? Long dead. How about accoustic couplers?
Again, V.22bis only modems are not sold anymore, but practically any modem that support V.92 will also support V.22 (and probably Bell 212 and even Bell 103 modes). And accoustic couplers do the same thing, but were motivated mostly by the insistence of Bell that you couldn't hook up your own equipment to the phone line directly. Until high-speed links get a better coverage, people in the boondocks will continue to rely on modems to get online.
- We had pensioned CGA and EGA - and gone for VGA by 1993. SVGA came soon afterwards.
But the VGA signal standard (plug, levels, etc.) has continued to work, and even fancy new 24" 1920x1200 monitors will display a 640x480@60Hz signal, just because creaky old BIOSes still start up with this or other equally outdated video modes.
On July 10, 1962, the first communications satellite, Telstar 1, was launched with a 2 W, 4 GHz RCA-designed TWT transponder used for transmitting RF signals back to the earth. Syncom 2, the first synchronous satellite (Syncom 1 did not reach its final orbit), launched on July 26, 1963 with two 2 W, 1850 MHz Hughes-designed TWT transponders (one active and one spare).
They could if they wanted to. I haven't looked at their bitrates recently, but I'm suspecting they're in the 800kbit/s range. You can get decent quality out of h.264 for 720p30 at around 4 Mbit/s. That's less than an order of magnitude, and Flash can play back videos at that rate on many machines, including Atom-based ones.
My personal prediction is that we'll habve full-blown "Internet TV stations" in less than five years. Think Hulu or Netflix, just with Internet-only distribution of original programming.
Of course the main issue are the rights holders and their inability to untangle the legal mess that are the distribution agreements. But like the music industry, they have no chance but to adapt.
There may be a reason behind the practice of shipping single sheets of paper individually boxed. It makes them look important. This policy may have been established following an important customer accidentally tossing licenses or keys out while unpacking s/w manuals and media.
When working for a software distributor 12 years back, we had that exact problem: server software license keys worth about 100k USD were sent by the software maker in plain envelopes. At first, we sent them on to the customers in that form, but quite a number of them never made it to the customer's—presumably, they got trashed as yet another spam mailing or whatever. The customers were understandibly quite upset that they couldn't run their expensive production equipment.
We then started shipping the license keys in A4 sized boxes with "IMPORTANT" stickers on top; that solved that. Of course, nowadays everthing's done via email or a self-service web portal, so it's not really a problem anymore.
At the same time, it was quite interesting to have a tiny shelf with a couple of envelopes in our warehouse having a book value easily exceeding everything else around it:-)
Amazing what a bunch of unhelpful whiners take the time to *not* answer the actual question, and get modded up for it.
For this example, I'm assuming that your email is joe@example.com and your gmail address is joe-example@gmail.com.
Create an alias (/etc/mail/aliases) for the address that get's forwarded to gmail.
joe: joe-example@gmail.com
Also create an alias for <foo>-owner:
joe-owner: joe
Sendmail will look for this special <foo>-owner alias whenever sending mail to the <foo> alias, and use it as the envelope sender on the outgoing mail. So any mail that is sent to joe@example.com will be resent by sendmail with a sender address of joe@example.com. The header addresses will remain unchanged, so hitting reply will still go to the right person.
Is this the solution to all SPF forwarding brokeness? Of course not, but it's a surpisingly simple solution to a number of common forwarding situation. Note that you better be careful about spam filtering on your machine, or your mail server (your sender's address) will appear to Google as a source of spam, and might get filtered.
A couple friends and I are running three dedicated machines, one at a mass hoster, two at the local ISP round the corner. We're all working in the industry, so in general, everbody knows what they're doing. Everybody has root (via sudo) and all important config files are in a CVS repository with commit mails, so everone knows when someone changes something. We all want the control over the main services we use (email, web pages, some VPN stuff), and this way, we can all save a bit of money by sharing the costs for the necessary infrastructure.
The important bit here is: we all trust each other to keep things running and not make grave mistakes.
On the other hand, I have helped friends with technical things they felt they couln't handle themselves, and quite a number of times, they demanded a level of service that would have cost hundreds, if not thousands a year commercially, but didn't want to spend that money. Instead those "friends" assumed I would provide that service for free, since "you do that anyway, and it's really easy for you". Don't fall into that trap.
Reknowned IT publisher Heise is already offering an even better solution: c't Offline Update. Update W2K, XP, Vista, Office in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and some 20 more languages by using Microsofts update catalog to download all chosen updates, then creates an ISO image per OS (CD-sized) or for everything (DVD needed). The included scripts allow for a fully automated install of all updates from the CD or DVD, even including any necessary intervening reboots.
Slashdot Mirror
They are talking about the controller, not the sensor.
is available, like most of the talks for 35c3, on media.ccc.de: https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-95...
I feel you. My wife and I travel to the US once or twice a year, and do want continuous connectivity. My experience: pay-as-you-go for data sucks in the US. Coverage is a problem. Americans can't call non-US numbers. If you want to use your cell connection as a broadband replacement, expect to pay through the nose.
Since some of our family live in the boondocks, T-Mobile and Sprint are not really an option, and even AT&T coverage is spotty. Having driven extensively through "fly over" country, Verizon seems to be the only provider with close to full coverage. As others have pointed out here, if you're mostly staying in cities (100k+), you might be OK with the others as well.
For the last four years, we had a Mifi on contract ($50/month), with 5G of data. Until this year, Verizon allowed suspending the contract when we were out of the country, and re-activating it just before we got to the US again. Unfortunately, the suspension is now limited to a max. of 90 days per year. Since most of our friends and family don't have international calls enabled on their contracts, they can't call our European numbers. So we did continue to have an AT&T Go SIM ($100/year to keep the account active). As others have pointed out, the pay-as-you-go options don't have international roaming enabled, or might not even offer it (boo AT&T), so dealing with that from abroad can be a pain. Before that, we tried various options, including VirginMobile (uses Sprint) and T-Mobile.
We've now convinced a friend to get us on his family plan with Verizon, and we have one iPhone (incl. tethering) on there for $15/month. We're sharing his 12GB data, which is good enough for our purposes. Since the phone is on contract, international roaming is available. We did buy the phone, so there's no SIM lock on it, and we can use it with other SIMs.
While in the US, we use about 1GB per week. Most nights, we're somewhere where we have Wifi, so it's mostly on the move usage (navigation in the car, music, FB posts, etc.) Hotel wifi mostly sucks, so when we're staying in a hotel, we're using the cell data. For large downloads or uploads, we try and wait until we're back on Wifi, but I've been syncing my photos and videos with iCloud and Dropbox as I'm taking them, so we're not completely constraining ourselves.
Hahaha, that's a good one!
The Federal Republic is the successor to the Weimar Republic, so the state was not "destroyed". Apparently, when an estate goes to the state, it goes to the state (Bundesland) where the deceased was last registered to live, not Germany; Hitler was registered as living in Munich. That's why it's Bavaria.
Not where I come from. In Europe, telco's have to foot the bill for lawful intercept equipment. They can charge the agencies only a nominal fee for intercepts. Industry organisations have estimated the additional capital expenditure at up to a hundred million Euros for Germany alone.
Their train signals are mostly decoration, as well, even though the system controlling the trains follows similar rules to real-world trains, and could easily control signals as well.
On the other hand, the immersive qualities are really amazing. I bet you a good German beer that you won't hold the missing lighting and signage against them after having been there even just five minutes.
Unless Oracle steps up and makes Mac OS X a primary platform for JDK releases, this might be rather annoying. Ultimately, I might be forced to do development on Linux or Windows. That would blow.
But maybe this decision encourages some group to package a kick ass JDK, and have more timely updates and developer snapshots... one can dream.
WIth the App store and Flash removal, I'm not keeping my hopes up though.
Excellent! That was exactly what I was looking for. Looks like a very decent improvement with many fonts.
My google-fu must be weak today: is there an example comparing small font sizes with and without the byte code interpreter enabled?
I would only consider Vodafone and T-Mobile as your options, these two have established cell networks, all the others borrow on these networks and as such tend to be at the bottom of the traffic prioritization.
Nonsense. There's four network operators in Germany: T-Mobile, Vodafone, E-Plus, and O2 Germany. While T-Mobile and Vodafone have a larger buildout (higher density, more towers in rural areas), E-Plus and O2 are not that far behind. I find that O2's network works really well in cities, with no noticable degradation compared to T-Mobile.
All four operators have their own "value" brands, and there's a couple of MVNOs, and as far as I can tell, no priorisation is in effect for any user. If you do have coverage, chances are that you will have excellent throughput. Nothing like certain US operators...
Not in general, you must have been locky. They're different companies, with different provider IDs, and the SIM lock won't accept the other's SIM. Besides T-Mobile USA has very few phones that work on the European freqencies, so you might be out of luck anyway.
First T-Mobile USA has very little to do with T-Mobile Germany, except having the same owner. In fact, there's rumors that Deutsche Telekom wants to divest of T-Mobile USA, similarly to what the recently did in the UK. My experience has been that T-Mobile USA don't really care what's going on elsewhere in the world.
Fonic is a service brand of O2 Germany (owned by Telefonica), offering pay as you go prepaid services, both voice and data. Their data offering is 2.50 Euros per calendar day, for a maximum of 1 GB transfer volume. O2's UMTS network offers HSUPA with up to 3.6Mbps down, 384 kbps up. Their coverage tends to be concentrated in urban areas; rural areas might have no coverage. If you exceed the transfer volume, speed will be limited to 64kbps for that day. Adding credit to the account can be done through credit card, direct debit from a German bank account, or by purchasing vouchers available at many stores. The sell a USB data stick for 60 Euros.
There's a couple more offerings, but most come with additional strings attached. With any offering, you technically will need a residency permit in the EU, with appropriate paperwork; some shops are less stringent than others. If you do have friends in Germany, have them order the package online in advance. You might want to get a seperate prepaid SIM for voice service as well, instead of international roaming.
Finally, if you do have friends living in Germany, ask them if their DSL or cable provider has good deals on package extensions for mobile data options. For example, Alice offers up to ten SIM cards for free, and has a 6 Euro per month data option available. Billing would go to whomever is paying for the DSL/Cable.
Finally, have fun!
Why do you think a sector antenna would be emitting only -40 dBm? That is on the level of a micro- or nano cell. The maximum allowable is well north of 10 kW EIRP, so even if that cell is tuned down to only cover a small sector, it still will be putting out 40 to 50 dBm. Otherwise, as you rightly state, reception inside builings would be nearly impossible.
I don't particularly believe in electro-sensitivity, so wouln't be too concerned even with that number, but I still would feel a bit uneasy about potential power levels. Maybe it's worthwile checking FCC permits for this particular site and the actual max. EIRP they're allowed to push out. Shielding those walls with copper mesh wall paper probably puts you right with the tinfoil hat brigade, but might avoid potential interference of any wireless equipment you might want to use.
A bank I did some consulting work for had a very effective cultural rule to force people to lock their machines when they left their desks: if you find an unlocked machine, pull up the email client and send a message to everyone: "today's my birthday, drinks on me after work!" (other NSFW messages left to the readers imagination.)
Apparently, very few people left their machines unlocked more than once...
- Remember 8250 UART serial ports? Long dead.
Maybe 8250 chips have been superseded, but 8250 compatible ports continue to be available on many mainboards. And there's always USB adapters. And given how cheap a serial port is to implement, I'm sure we will continue to see it for at least service access to many devices going forward.
- Remember 2400bps modems? Long dead. How about accoustic couplers?
Again, V.22bis only modems are not sold anymore, but practically any modem that support V.92 will also support V.22 (and probably Bell 212 and even Bell 103 modes). And accoustic couplers do the same thing, but were motivated mostly by the insistence of Bell that you couldn't hook up your own equipment to the phone line directly. Until high-speed links get a better coverage, people in the boondocks will continue to rely on modems to get online.
- We had pensioned CGA and EGA - and gone for VGA by 1993. SVGA came soon afterwards.
But the VGA signal standard (plug, levels, etc.) has continued to work, and even fancy new 24" 1920x1200 monitors will display a 640x480@60Hz signal, just because creaky old BIOSes still start up with this or other equally outdated video modes.
Huh?! Traveling-wave tube:
They could if they wanted to. I haven't looked at their bitrates recently, but I'm suspecting they're in the 800kbit/s range. You can get decent quality out of h.264 for 720p30 at around 4 Mbit/s. That's less than an order of magnitude, and Flash can play back videos at that rate on many machines, including Atom-based ones.
My personal prediction is that we'll habve full-blown "Internet TV stations" in less than five years. Think Hulu or Netflix, just with Internet-only distribution of original programming.
Of course the main issue are the rights holders and their inability to untangle the legal mess that are the distribution agreements. But like the music industry, they have no chance but to adapt.
All hail the Hypno Toad!
When working for a software distributor 12 years back, we had that exact problem: server software license keys worth about 100k USD were sent by the software maker in plain envelopes. At first, we sent them on to the customers in that form, but quite a number of them never made it to the customer's—presumably, they got trashed as yet another spam mailing or whatever. The customers were understandibly quite upset that they couldn't run their expensive production equipment.
We then started shipping the license keys in A4 sized boxes with "IMPORTANT" stickers on top; that solved that. Of course, nowadays everthing's done via email or a self-service web portal, so it's not really a problem anymore.
At the same time, it was quite interesting to have a tiny shelf with a couple of envelopes in our warehouse having a book value easily exceeding everything else around it :-)
It's owner-<foo>, not the other way around. So the aliases example should read:
joe: joe-example@gmail.com
owner-joe: joe
See the aliases man page for further details.
For this example, I'm assuming that your email is joe@example.com and your gmail address is joe-example@gmail.com.
Create an alias (/etc/mail/aliases) for the address that get's forwarded to gmail.
joe: joe-example@gmail.com
Also create an alias for <foo>-owner:
joe-owner: joe
Sendmail will look for this special <foo>-owner alias whenever sending mail to the <foo> alias, and use it as the envelope sender on the outgoing mail. So any mail that is sent to joe@example.com will be resent by sendmail with a sender address of joe@example.com. The header addresses will remain unchanged, so hitting reply will still go to the right person.
Is this the solution to all SPF forwarding brokeness? Of course not, but it's a surpisingly simple solution to a number of common forwarding situation. Note that you better be careful about spam filtering on your machine, or your mail server (your sender's address) will appear to Google as a source of spam, and might get filtered.
Right now on http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/?p=downloadday there's a SVN merge conflict. You would have thought they would prepare for this event a bit more solidly...
A couple friends and I are running three dedicated machines, one at a mass hoster, two at the local ISP round the corner. We're all working in the industry, so in general, everbody knows what they're doing. Everybody has root (via sudo) and all important config files are in a CVS repository with commit mails, so everone knows when someone changes something. We all want the control over the main services we use (email, web pages, some VPN stuff), and this way, we can all save a bit of money by sharing the costs for the necessary infrastructure.
The important bit here is: we all trust each other to keep things running and not make grave mistakes.
On the other hand, I have helped friends with technical things they felt they couln't handle themselves, and quite a number of times, they demanded a level of service that would have cost hundreds, if not thousands a year commercially, but didn't want to spend that money. Instead those "friends" assumed I would provide that service for free, since "you do that anyway, and it's really easy for you". Don't fall into that trap.
Reknowned IT publisher Heise is already offering an even better solution: c't Offline Update. Update W2K, XP, Vista, Office in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and some 20 more languages by using Microsofts update catalog to download all chosen updates, then creates an ISO image per OS (CD-sized) or for everything (DVD needed). The included scripts allow for a fully automated install of all updates from the CD or DVD, even including any necessary intervening reboots.
c't Offline Update Project Download Page