I think CDs will go the way of dinosaurs before tape does
I doubt it. One of the main reasons I used when I pitched Laserdisc (failed) and later DVD (successful) to my parents was that I was sick and tired of those stupid "To rewind is divine" stickers on videos....
Tape's the same thing. Very rarely do I want to pick up a recording 1:32 into a 3:36 song. I really don't like missing that first minute in a song, and it's incredibly convenient being able to queue up the start of a song with the push of a button. Plus being able to fast-forward past a song you don't feel like hearing is a major advantage.
I'm only 24, but I have *never* bought a cassette that wasn't blank, and I switched to CDRs 10 years ago for my recording. I still have a couple of blank 90-minute cassettes in their original wrapper; I'm thinking of hanging on to them for another 20 years and selling them on whatever's become of e-bay by that time. They're certainly of no use to me.
Oh, and I've seen audiobooks on CD and on DVD-A. They're divided up into at the very least one track per chapter, and often somewhat more frequent (like one track every couple of pages). If I was in the market for books on tape, I would think that hearing the last little bit before I left off would be a good thing, as a little reminder of where the story was when I left off.
That's not a clone of Slack 10.1, it's an officially sanctionned port.
Furthermore, Slack 10.1 will run just fine on AMD64, because AMD64, and ia64 as well, are backwards compatible and will run code intended for 32-bit processors. The difference is that the code in slamd64 is optimized for Athlon64/Opteron, a feat which is entirely doable by anybody who knows how to compile a kernel and their own software.
Don't get me wrong. It's a great boon to people who prefer Slack and run AMD64, but that only comes in saving them the time to compile their own, but it's by no means the great saviour: I've been running Slack 10.1 on my Athlon64-based server for a while, and all I had to do was compile a kernel and recompile Apache/PHP/MySQL/Sendmail/UW-IMAP. Technically, I didn't even have to recompile those, either....
Without getting too much into the details, such a service could be implemented for less than $1,000, one time.
If the government is providing a list of the sites to block, and keeps it updated, then the ISP doesn't even need to pay an IT department to maintain the list, either. They can simply add it to the job description of somebody to update the government's list monthly, or weekly, if you prefer. Depending on how the government implements it, you could even set up the updates to be automatic, and get 'em to run daily.
How, you ask? Simple. Buy a couple of computers. Don't need to be super powerful ones, don't need high end graphics, or even a large hard drive. A 100mbit ethernet connection is enough, but you may prefer a gigabit. Use these computers to provide alternate DNS services, with a blacklist of hosts. It's actually incredibly easy to blackhole a domain name in BIND; I'm doing it myself for about 1700 hosts, and it takes about 3 minutes to update the list.
When a customer asks to block the questionable sites, set a toggle in their user profile. In this case, keep two groups in the RAS settings, one for those who are blocking, and one for those who aren't. For the ones who are blocking, assign them the DNS numbers for these new servers. For those who aren't, give 'em unfettered DNS.
Really simple to set up. Could be done in a day or two, and would only take a few minutes to update every week or so. Net cost to the ISP? Negligible. If they really wanna be dinks about it, tack on a $0.25/month surcharge for the blocking service, and it'll pay for itself within a month or two. Concerned parents and elderly folk who don't want the hassle of configuring their computer or having to install software will gobble the service up. A DNS server sitting on a 100mbit connection can handle a hundred thousand concurrent users with relative ease, especially if it defers to the real DNS server for anything that isn't in its blacklist. DNS traffic simply doesn't suck up that much bandwidth.
I may disagree with requiring it by law, but that's because I think it's simply bad business to not offer that service. Bleating about the cost to the ISP is a non-starter. And before somebody says it, people who are smart enough to set up their own DNS server to get around this service are probably smart enough to block their own content. Or, more importantly, probably smart enough to not ask the ISP to block it in the first place.
Incidentally, an ad-blocking service would be just as easy to implement. I'm blocking ads at the DNS level on my network, and it's remarkably effective. A good 95% of the ads on the internet come from the same set of hosts, which, incidentally, don't usually serve anything other than ads.
RTFA. It's a *bill*, not a *law*. It's nowhere near passing, it's being introduced to parliament for debate.
Writing to your MP is a good thing at this point. But let me explain something about Canadian politics: just because a bill gets introduced to parliament does not mean that it actually passes into law. More than that, Parliament breaks up for the summer and any bills that are still on the dock at breakup usually end up getting forgotten for a while when Parliament returns to session and has to deal with important stuff again. On more than one occasion in the past, bills have been forgotten completely and never revisited after the summer break.
No, I'm not worried. I'm interested in the outcome because I run a website which has been the target of CRIA's advances before, but even if they're ever able to launch a lawsuit, there's absolutely no way they'd win the way the laws currently stand. Even under the US laws they wouldn't win....
The raw number of sales between Unix-based and Microsoft-based servers not being considered by the article. The dollar-value of sales is what they're looking at. In terms of dollar value, as much money was spent on Microsoft-based servers as on Unix-based servers, at $4.2bn
If you're going to talk about the real number of servers being implemented, you need to consider the fact that, in general, Microsoft-based solutions cost a whole lot more than Unix-based solutions.
Interestingly enough, $1.2bn was spent on Linux-based servers, and Linux-based servers accounted for the largest increase in sales.
The theatre where I saw it on Thursday had it playing on 4 screens. 4 screens, 4 showings per day each, and when I saw it at 5:30 the theatre was 75% full. On a Thursday. 75% of 500 seats, times 4 screens, times 4 showings per day, is a whole lot of people going to see the movie on opening day. And I'd bet my left nut that there were a lot more people at the later showings, and at the 12:01 showing that morning. On a Thursday. On Friday, they were sold out.
FWIW, I went into it expecting a crappy script and crappy acting. I was disappointed by the quality of some of the CG (particularly when dealing with CG versions of human actors, the physics were way off). Other than that, though, it was decent entertainment. It'll be a much bigger blockbuster than Attack of the Clowns or The Phantom Script were.
It's a proxy server with server-side compression. Plain and simple. That's all it does. One of my former ISP's was doing this years ago, and it wasn't that great.
Of course this isn't the "high end" OS. This is the "Starter" OS. Just as the Duron is the "Starter" CPU. If you can afford an Athlon, you can afford Windows XP Professional instead of Starter Edition.
It has SFA to do with them trying to lock out Linux. They're obviously of the opinion that if you can afford the "high-end" CPU, you can afford the "high-end" OS version.
They're also apparently oblivious to the fact that an Athlon CPU+MoBo costs about the same as a Celeron CPU+MoBo. All other things equal (v/c, hdd, opticals, RAM, peripherals), an Athlon system costs about the same as a Celeron. This depends on where you are, of course, but basically, the jump from Duron -> Athlon is nowhere near as expensive a jump as from Celeron -> P4.
I'm not, strictly speaking, opposed to this. As long as the OS will *boot* on a better CPU, even though it won't *install* on one, I don't really see anything wrong with the decision: it's their product, and it will not in any way affect me. For one, my copies of WinXP Pro are 100% legal (one came with my laptop, the other came from MSDN/AA); for two, my primary OS is Linux anyway. Of course, it probably won't hurt Linux, either, as most tech-type people will probably be pissed by the move.
What is the Slackware Community backup plan for when Pat is eventually disabled or dies?
Ever hear of "Mini-Me"?
Seriously, though, I don't know. Hopefully, Pat is training a replacement. Hopefully, Pat will have enough advance notice to choose a replacement. If not, then I'll probably stick with whatever version I have installed at the time until I can see what becomes of it. If somebody steps forward, great. If a bunch of people step forward, so be it, as long as they can stay friendly (I doubt it, considering the fallout when Pat decided to drop Gnome, and when he decided to replace the Java SDK). If I decide to leave Slack, I'll probably go to a Slack-based distro like Vector, or to a BSD of some sort.
There's the rub. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?
I can't honestly say what I'd do, because I don't know what'll happen to the project if Pat stops working on it.
It was brought to painful light a few months ago when Pat V's health took a turn for bad. He's recovering now, and so's the entire Slackware community, but we're all 100% aware of what vendor dependance means.
For those that don't know, and what rock have you been hiding under?, Pat Volkerding is the only developper for Slackware. A few months ago, he had a sudden health problem, a lung infection that threatened his life. Since he was the only developper for the distro, there was much fear that the project would die, or would splinter unrecoverably should the unthinkable happen. We're all grateful that Pat's health is improving, not only because he's a really nice guy, but because of how much we owe him. With Pat still around, there was/is a unifying vision (tm) behind the project that has allowed it to remain viable as, IIRC, the oldest Linux distro around.
Most of us already know this. And at least in the Slackware community, Pat's illness brought to the forefront the dangers of vendor dependance. I don't like vendor dependance, but Slack is the only distro I've seen that actually lives up to Microsoft's new mantra: It just works. On every oddball configuration I've thrown at it (7 computers, 3 of them laptop), it has "just worked" right out of the box. Or off the ISO as the case is. And it has "just worked" for me for quite a while. I could still install from source (and in fact, I do for some things), but we need more binary distros that "just work" to really compete with commercial systems: joe user isn't going to want to have to compile his own software.
I'm not trying to evangelise. The great thing about Linux is that there's so many flavours out there, and there's so much choice. You may prefer Debian or Yoper or RH or Vector or Tomsrtbt for all I care. The point I'm trying to get across is that even in OSS, vendor dependance is bad, mmkay?
Oh, and as for all of the other reasons, they're there too. It is free if you choose (though I, like many others, feel that at least some of it is worth paying for), and the support from the community is phenomenal. If you're having trouble getting support from OSS, you're on the wrong forum. The one that I frequent (as much to answer questions as to ask them) is a great example of the community pulling together and making the switch really easy. But the real fear, and the only one that matters with any solution, is the danger of becoming dependant.
As long as AMD's CPU offerings are cheaper, they're going to continue in sales strength. After a failed attempt with a Cyrix 6x86, I haven't bought a computer that didn't have an AMD since.
Why? Because they're cheaper. Long before I ever considered the implications towards gaming, I considered the implications towards my pocketbook, and AMD came out tops.
Joe user may *think* that Intel is better, but in a world where money is king, AMD will win as long as it keeps its prices on low-mid-range hardware down. For most people buying computers out there, it's not which is better, it's which is good enough. Only the hardcore gamers and server ops really care about which is more powerful, and most gamers know that AMD is better for gaming, just as most sysops that I know prefer Intel for its stability and wider support. As the mantra goes, if you want bang for buck, buy AMD. If you want rock-solid stability, go with Intel.
If you couldn't convince your brother to buy an AMD, then I need to ask two questions: 1. How old is your brother? 2. On what basis were you trying to convince him?
Incidentally, as I flip through the ads in my local computer rag, Monitor, I notice that just about every computer that's billed as a "gaming" system has an AMD of some sort.:)
Start portscanning, and when people have virus ports open, send them notification. If the ports aren't closed within 3 days, unplug their room from the hub. Don't plug them back in until they've proven to you that the system has been disinfected. If they claim to need an internet connection to do that, direct them to grisoft.com and give them 30 minutes before unplugging them. On a 100mbit, that should be more than enough time.
It should be pretty easy to set up a script to portscan the network and e-mail you an alert when something bad happens, and then set up a cron to invoke it.
I'm afraid you have to be an asshole about it. It won't take long before they get the message.
The article didn't say that Cell was doing the decoding live. Most likely, they recorded Cell/their OS doing the decoding straight to a TV screen, and were replaying the video of that on Windows Media Player.
According to Spider Robinson, time travel has been invented 3 times.
The first method was a belt invented in the early 21st century. It had two knobs, one for time, one for space. It was indeed an instantaneous space travel belt as well as time, but required a great knowledge of physics and math to be able to operate successfully. Only one such belt was ever built.
The second method was a device invented in the late 27th century. It was widely used for a short while, and then fell out of use. Not much is known about it, except that its major advantage was that it automatically corrected for the shifts in space.
The third method doesn't appear to use any machinery at all. The user just "thinks" their destination, and they are there. This is the method used by Mike Callahan, Lady Sally, Mickey and Mary Finn, Nikola Tesla, and Jake Stonebender's daughter, Erin.
More information is available in Callahan's Con, one of Robinson's better books. (though I still prefer Callahan's Lady and Lady Slings the Booze above the rest):)
The cell phone companies heavily subsidize the new phones, to convince you to sign up for a term contract. If you sign such a contract, they'd ding you for cancelling early. If you didn't sign the contract, then the phone cost a lot more.
Either way, it'd be cheaper to buy a specialized device, and the spec. device would provide much better quality product.
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I think CDs will go the way of dinosaurs before tape does
I doubt it. One of the main reasons I used when I pitched Laserdisc (failed) and later DVD (successful) to my parents was that I was sick and tired of those stupid "To rewind is divine" stickers on videos....
Tape's the same thing. Very rarely do I want to pick up a recording 1:32 into a 3:36 song. I really don't like missing that first minute in a song, and it's incredibly convenient being able to queue up the start of a song with the push of a button. Plus being able to fast-forward past a song you don't feel like hearing is a major advantage.
I'm only 24, but I have *never* bought a cassette that wasn't blank, and I switched to CDRs 10 years ago for my recording. I still have a couple of blank 90-minute cassettes in their original wrapper; I'm thinking of hanging on to them for another 20 years and selling them on whatever's become of e-bay by that time. They're certainly of no use to me.
Oh, and I've seen audiobooks on CD and on DVD-A. They're divided up into at the very least one track per chapter, and often somewhat more frequent (like one track every couple of pages). If I was in the market for books on tape, I would think that hearing the last little bit before I left off would be a good thing, as a little reminder of where the story was when I left off.
In my eyes, any free OS, is a good OS..
y'know, technically a boot sector virus is a free OS....
GUI is what happens when you swat a theif with a semi.
That's not a clone of Slack 10.1, it's an officially sanctionned port.
Furthermore, Slack 10.1 will run just fine on AMD64, because AMD64, and ia64 as well, are backwards compatible and will run code intended for 32-bit processors. The difference is that the code in slamd64 is optimized for Athlon64/Opteron, a feat which is entirely doable by anybody who knows how to compile a kernel and their own software.
Don't get me wrong. It's a great boon to people who prefer Slack and run AMD64, but that only comes in saving them the time to compile their own, but it's by no means the great saviour: I've been running Slack 10.1 on my Athlon64-based server for a while, and all I had to do was compile a kernel and recompile Apache/PHP/MySQL/Sendmail/UW-IMAP. Technically, I didn't even have to recompile those, either....
I'd do that, but it'd make running the air conditionner even more expensive.... It hit 35'C with 70% humidity today, making it feel like 42'C (107'F).
:)
Can't wait until August, when it really gets hot.
Without getting too much into the details, such a service could be implemented for less than $1,000, one time.
If the government is providing a list of the sites to block, and keeps it updated, then the ISP doesn't even need to pay an IT department to maintain the list, either. They can simply add it to the job description of somebody to update the government's list monthly, or weekly, if you prefer. Depending on how the government implements it, you could even set up the updates to be automatic, and get 'em to run daily.
How, you ask? Simple. Buy a couple of computers. Don't need to be super powerful ones, don't need high end graphics, or even a large hard drive. A 100mbit ethernet connection is enough, but you may prefer a gigabit. Use these computers to provide alternate DNS services, with a blacklist of hosts. It's actually incredibly easy to blackhole a domain name in BIND; I'm doing it myself for about 1700 hosts, and it takes about 3 minutes to update the list.
When a customer asks to block the questionable sites, set a toggle in their user profile. In this case, keep two groups in the RAS settings, one for those who are blocking, and one for those who aren't. For the ones who are blocking, assign them the DNS numbers for these new servers. For those who aren't, give 'em unfettered DNS.
Really simple to set up. Could be done in a day or two, and would only take a few minutes to update every week or so. Net cost to the ISP? Negligible. If they really wanna be dinks about it, tack on a $0.25/month surcharge for the blocking service, and it'll pay for itself within a month or two. Concerned parents and elderly folk who don't want the hassle of configuring their computer or having to install software will gobble the service up. A DNS server sitting on a 100mbit connection can handle a hundred thousand concurrent users with relative ease, especially if it defers to the real DNS server for anything that isn't in its blacklist. DNS traffic simply doesn't suck up that much bandwidth.
I may disagree with requiring it by law, but that's because I think it's simply bad business to not offer that service. Bleating about the cost to the ISP is a non-starter. And before somebody says it, people who are smart enough to set up their own DNS server to get around this service are probably smart enough to block their own content. Or, more importantly, probably smart enough to not ask the ISP to block it in the first place.
Incidentally, an ad-blocking service would be just as easy to implement. I'm blocking ads at the DNS level on my network, and it's remarkably effective. A good 95% of the ads on the internet come from the same set of hosts, which, incidentally, don't usually serve anything other than ads.
RTFA. It's a *bill*, not a *law*. It's nowhere near passing, it's being introduced to parliament for debate.
Writing to your MP is a good thing at this point. But let me explain something about Canadian politics: just because a bill gets introduced to parliament does not mean that it actually passes into law. More than that, Parliament breaks up for the summer and any bills that are still on the dock at breakup usually end up getting forgotten for a while when Parliament returns to session and has to deal with important stuff again. On more than one occasion in the past, bills have been forgotten completely and never revisited after the summer break.
No, I'm not worried. I'm interested in the outcome because I run a website which has been the target of CRIA's advances before, but even if they're ever able to launch a lawsuit, there's absolutely no way they'd win the way the laws currently stand. Even under the US laws they wouldn't win....
Have you ever been to The 13th Floor?
As is always the case...
The raw number of sales between Unix-based and Microsoft-based servers not being considered by the article. The dollar-value of sales is what they're looking at. In terms of dollar value, as much money was spent on Microsoft-based servers as on Unix-based servers, at $4.2bn
If you're going to talk about the real number of servers being implemented, you need to consider the fact that, in general, Microsoft-based solutions cost a whole lot more than Unix-based solutions.
Interestingly enough, $1.2bn was spent on Linux-based servers, and Linux-based servers accounted for the largest increase in sales.
I'd like to see the stories of Exar Kun or Nomi Sunrider, but that's about 5,000 years before the current set of movies.
The theatre where I saw it on Thursday had it playing on 4 screens. 4 screens, 4 showings per day each, and when I saw it at 5:30 the theatre was 75% full. On a Thursday. 75% of 500 seats, times 4 screens, times 4 showings per day, is a whole lot of people going to see the movie on opening day. And I'd bet my left nut that there were a lot more people at the later showings, and at the 12:01 showing that morning. On a Thursday. On Friday, they were sold out.
FWIW, I went into it expecting a crappy script and crappy acting. I was disappointed by the quality of some of the CG (particularly when dealing with CG versions of human actors, the physics were way off). Other than that, though, it was decent entertainment. It'll be a much bigger blockbuster than Attack of the Clowns or The Phantom Script were.
They've been legally buying it from Microsoft Canada. Theoretically MS Canada is a separate trade entity from MS in the USA.
You did know that Canada is Cuba's biggest trading partner, right? Yay Helms-Burton law. Really effective....
It's a proxy server with server-side compression. Plain and simple. That's all it does. One of my former ISP's was doing this years ago, and it wasn't that great.
i cs2
http://webaccelerator.google.com/support.html#bas
Revolutionary, it is not.
Of course this isn't the "high end" OS. This is the "Starter" OS. Just as the Duron is the "Starter" CPU. If you can afford an Athlon, you can afford Windows XP Professional instead of Starter Edition.
It has SFA to do with them trying to lock out Linux. They're obviously of the opinion that if you can afford the "high-end" CPU, you can afford the "high-end" OS version.
They're also apparently oblivious to the fact that an Athlon CPU+MoBo costs about the same as a Celeron CPU+MoBo. All other things equal (v/c, hdd, opticals, RAM, peripherals), an Athlon system costs about the same as a Celeron. This depends on where you are, of course, but basically, the jump from Duron -> Athlon is nowhere near as expensive a jump as from Celeron -> P4.
I'm not, strictly speaking, opposed to this. As long as the OS will *boot* on a better CPU, even though it won't *install* on one, I don't really see anything wrong with the decision: it's their product, and it will not in any way affect me. For one, my copies of WinXP Pro are 100% legal (one came with my laptop, the other came from MSDN/AA); for two, my primary OS is Linux anyway. Of course, it probably won't hurt Linux, either, as most tech-type people will probably be pissed by the move.
What is the Slackware Community backup plan for when Pat is eventually disabled or dies?
Ever hear of "Mini-Me"?
Seriously, though, I don't know. Hopefully, Pat is training a replacement. Hopefully, Pat will have enough advance notice to choose a replacement. If not, then I'll probably stick with whatever version I have installed at the time until I can see what becomes of it. If somebody steps forward, great. If a bunch of people step forward, so be it, as long as they can stay friendly (I doubt it, considering the fallout when Pat decided to drop Gnome, and when he decided to replace the Java SDK). If I decide to leave Slack, I'll probably go to a Slack-based distro like Vector, or to a BSD of some sort.
There's the rub. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?
I can't honestly say what I'd do, because I don't know what'll happen to the project if Pat stops working on it.
It was brought to painful light a few months ago when Pat V's health took a turn for bad. He's recovering now, and so's the entire Slackware community, but we're all 100% aware of what vendor dependance means.
For those that don't know, and what rock have you been hiding under?, Pat Volkerding is the only developper for Slackware. A few months ago, he had a sudden health problem, a lung infection that threatened his life. Since he was the only developper for the distro, there was much fear that the project would die, or would splinter unrecoverably should the unthinkable happen. We're all grateful that Pat's health is improving, not only because he's a really nice guy, but because of how much we owe him. With Pat still around, there was/is a unifying vision (tm) behind the project that has allowed it to remain viable as, IIRC, the oldest Linux distro around.
Most of us already know this. And at least in the Slackware community, Pat's illness brought to the forefront the dangers of vendor dependance. I don't like vendor dependance, but Slack is the only distro I've seen that actually lives up to Microsoft's new mantra: It just works. On every oddball configuration I've thrown at it (7 computers, 3 of them laptop), it has "just worked" right out of the box. Or off the ISO as the case is. And it has "just worked" for me for quite a while. I could still install from source (and in fact, I do for some things), but we need more binary distros that "just work" to really compete with commercial systems: joe user isn't going to want to have to compile his own software.
I'm not trying to evangelise. The great thing about Linux is that there's so many flavours out there, and there's so much choice. You may prefer Debian or Yoper or RH or Vector or Tomsrtbt for all I care. The point I'm trying to get across is that even in OSS, vendor dependance is bad, mmkay?
Oh, and as for all of the other reasons, they're there too. It is free if you choose (though I, like many others, feel that at least some of it is worth paying for), and the support from the community is phenomenal. If you're having trouble getting support from OSS, you're on the wrong forum. The one that I frequent (as much to answer questions as to ask them) is a great example of the community pulling together and making the switch really easy. But the real fear, and the only one that matters with any solution, is the danger of becoming dependant.
Why? Because they're cheaper. Long before I ever considered the implications towards gaming, I considered the implications towards my pocketbook, and AMD came out tops.
Joe user may *think* that Intel is better, but in a world where money is king, AMD will win as long as it keeps its prices on low-mid-range hardware down. For most people buying computers out there, it's not which is better, it's which is good enough. Only the hardcore gamers and server ops really care about which is more powerful, and most gamers know that AMD is better for gaming, just as most sysops that I know prefer Intel for its stability and wider support. As the mantra goes, if you want bang for buck, buy AMD. If you want rock-solid stability, go with Intel.
If you couldn't convince your brother to buy an AMD, then I need to ask two questions:
1. How old is your brother?
2. On what basis were you trying to convince him?
Incidentally, as I flip through the ads in my local computer rag, Monitor, I notice that just about every computer that's billed as a "gaming" system has an AMD of some sort.
Ask and ye shall receive....
The humans finally found a use for all those dead T-1000's after winning: the world's biggest lan party.
"virus ports" as in ports that're usually usurped by viruses.
y'know, trojans? you did know they exist, right?
Start portscanning, and when people have virus ports open, send them notification. If the ports aren't closed within 3 days, unplug their room from the hub. Don't plug them back in until they've proven to you that the system has been disinfected. If they claim to need an internet connection to do that, direct them to grisoft.com and give them 30 minutes before unplugging them. On a 100mbit, that should be more than enough time.
It should be pretty easy to set up a script to portscan the network and e-mail you an alert when something bad happens, and then set up a cron to invoke it.
I'm afraid you have to be an asshole about it. It won't take long before they get the message.
The article didn't say that Cell was doing the decoding live. Most likely, they recorded Cell/their OS doing the decoding straight to a TV screen, and were replaying the video of that on Windows Media Player.
According to Spider Robinson, time travel has been invented 3 times.
:)
The first method was a belt invented in the early 21st century. It had two knobs, one for time, one for space. It was indeed an instantaneous space travel belt as well as time, but required a great knowledge of physics and math to be able to operate successfully. Only one such belt was ever built.
The second method was a device invented in the late 27th century. It was widely used for a short while, and then fell out of use. Not much is known about it, except that its major advantage was that it automatically corrected for the shifts in space.
The third method doesn't appear to use any machinery at all. The user just "thinks" their destination, and they are there. This is the method used by Mike Callahan, Lady Sally, Mickey and Mary Finn, Nikola Tesla, and Jake Stonebender's daughter, Erin.
More information is available in Callahan's Con, one of Robinson's better books. (though I still prefer Callahan's Lady and Lady Slings the Booze above the rest)
Your head is at about where mine was back in 1995.
Funny you should say that.... I got my first cell phone in 1987. From the level of your writing, I'm assuming you weren't alive back then.
The cell phone companies heavily subsidize the new phones, to convince you to sign up for a term contract. If you sign such a contract, they'd ding you for cancelling early. If you didn't sign the contract, then the phone cost a lot more.
Either way, it'd be cheaper to buy a specialized device, and the spec. device would provide much better quality product.