As someone who used to be a VP in a mid-sized International telecommunications carrier, I can confirm that this kind of thing does happen all the time-- particularly in Eastern Europe and "developing" countries where everyone is corrupt and their currency is near worthless.
The only part of your story that I find hard to believe is that anyone would end up in a foreign jail. Usuallly the people in these kinds of operations end up using a combination of bribes, photocopied passports from locals, and completely ficticious identities to avoid any trouble from the local police.
Has anyone out there actually used a p2p filesharing service for something OTHER than stealing music, videos, or pirating software? Out of the years I've been using Kazaa, Gnucleus, and the like... I think that I have used it maybe once or twice for legitamite purposes like finding a shareware program.
Really.. Is anyone out there using these tools for sharing research documents and music tracks from noname bands that don't have a label?
Re:Oh dear God! The Religious Wars!
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 1
My house has 20 years of handy-geek add-ons -solar heating, X-10, encrypted cam surveillance, a 12ft HDTV wall, etc.- but I'll freely admit that I count myself as knowledgeably conversant with more technologies than I've actually used. My planned to-do list is longer now than ever, and judging by history, at best 1/3 will be permanent additions
If you don't mind me asking... how did you do the 12ft HDTV wall? --jry@iname.com
I was one of the P800's early adopters. Back in January, I ordered the P800 SDK from Metrowerks at a premium price of $1200 (hey it came with a free t-shirt).
First let me say that I freaking love this phone. I have it set to display pictures of the callers when they call me (forget distinctive ringtones!)... The bluetooth headset I got with it is amazingly kewl. I get to look like I'm szicho talking to myself 30 feet away from the phone... and the camera in there is at least good enough that I don't bother to take my old cannon digicam with me anywhere anymore.
Last but not least, I get to use Opera on this thing with GRPS Internet. T-Mobile's Internet service is kinda flakey, but when its working, well, its nice to be able to use a real web browser on my phone and go to real websites.
Downsides? Plenty of 'em:(...
First off, the thing crashes often. That might be because I'm using pre-release software, but the phone crashes at least 3-4 times per week.
Second, the handwriting recognition is, uh, different. If you are used to grafiti or whatever iPAQ uses, get ready to learn something completely different.
Third, the built in storage space is kinda low if you load the thing up with MP3 ringtones and use the cam often. Fortunately you can use sony memory sticks to expand the memory, but you have to tell every application in the phone to specifically use it.
Fourth... My P800 inexplicably died last week. As they aren't being officially sold yet in the USA, they also aren't being officially repaired in the USA. After 3 days of calling Sony-Ericsson and Metrowerks repeatedly, they finally told me that I'd have to mail my phone to DENMARK of all places, at my expense. I sent it 4 days ago... Nothing yet. Sigh.
But yeah, overall, the P800 is great. I'd buy it again in a minute.
I didn't mention this up above, but there is more...
- Many of the side charectars, shop keepers, etc., in Kingdom Hearts are well known Disney charectars or charectars from past Squaresoft games. For instance, Donald Duck is the chief magician to the court. Cid from FFVII runs an items shop. Even Wakka from FFX makes an appearance.
- The Disney voice acting and animation seem to be authentic. i.e. Donald Duck moves and sounds exactly how you would expect him to. Check out one of the movies where he enters the throne room and says good morning (in Japanese), and runs into Pluto. The camera angles and the voices look like they are right out of those old Disney cartoons that we all grew up with.
Last but not least... Make sure to check out the opening movie. Its ABSOLUTELY AMAZING, and 10-times better than any FMV from FFX, which is saying a lot as FFX FMVs look 10-times better than any CGI DVD I've seen.
what are we gonna do about it? tivo needs the $...
on
TiVo Service Cost Rising
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've been a Tivo subscriber for a while... I was pretty pissed when I received an email from TiVo about the rate increase, but its not like there is anything I can do about it. So why piss and moan?
There are basically two options available for me as a TiVo subscriber: $9.95/month (now $12.95/month), or $199 (or $249 off-season) for a lifetime subscription, which is the lifetime of the TiVo, not the subscriber. So of course, it only makes sense to get the month-to-month subscription, as who can predict if they will still have the same TiVo box 15-19 months from now?
Also, TiVo is BLEEDING money. They have never had a profitible quarter-- losing between $50 MILLION and $34 MILLION net for every quarter that they have posted so far. According to their published #'s, without some serious additional financing, TiVo will be out of cash in a year. I can't really blame them for increasing their service fees...
I know this is going to sound like a PR piece, but its really more of a public service announcements for our out of work friends.
While major telecom companies like Global Crossing, Network+, WorldxChange, even WorldCom and Qwest are all in financial trouble, the company I work for, NOBEL, has been growing by an order of magnitude every month since its founding in 1998.
Many of our competitors, especially larger ones, made the mistake of overspending on technology infrastructure and on marketing-- blowing through billions of dollars in debt and equity financing. NOBEL is both extremely cost efficient (i.e. we make sure every expenditure is justified by generating additional profit), and we are self funded.
The attitude in our team is that we are going to take over telecom in the USA over the next 5-10 years. We are ALWAYS looking for people with strong telecom experience, both on the business end of things and in technology.
Well as the marketing director for an unscrupulous business, let me be the first to say how much I am looking foward to being able to rate my competitors' websites on one of the most popular search engines.
The Verizon Building shown in the detail map is aparently where my company's T1 is routed from. We went down for about 4 hours on the day of the attack, and that building is still marked as 'severely damaged'. I guess losing your Internet connection isn't nearly as bad as losing your life, your loved ones, or even your office space-- but its still not a trip through the park.
Has anyone else been affected by the damage to Verizon's infrastructure? Does anyone know if they rerouted the lines to go somewhere else?
I've tried letting programmers and graphic designers work from home... and it just doesn't work.
When someone works from home, they have terrible communications with the office. They often can't be reached during the business day. To make matters worse, productivity -ALWAYS- goes down and excuses -ALWAYS- go up.
I work at an online phone card company (NobelCom.com if anyone cares). Our website traffic (and order volume) nearly doubled on the 11th as people frantically trying to make long distance phone calls through an increasingly unavailable 1+ long distance service turned to phone cards to get through to their loved ones.
Thanks to Akamai, our site remained as fast as ever, and no one reported any kind of trouble getting through to us. Even without Akamai, I don't think that the site would have gone down like CNN-- but it sure would have made things worse, adding another problem to what was already a tense situation for us.
Yes they "discriminate," but it is in the classic definition of the word. The way you discriminate when you refuse to buy milk that is just past it's expiration date, even though it is entirely possible that the milk hasn't really spoiled yet. Maybe you believe that the Red Cross hates gay men and druggies and whoremongers...
What I object to is putting gay men in the same category as expired milk, druggies, and "whoremongers". I'm no more virulant than any straight man. If they asked "how many sexual partners have you been with?" rather than discriminating against all gay men, there wouldn't be a problem.
I've spent about $200 cumulatively on Diablo 2 LoD equipment.
The way I see it-- I can either spend 40-100 hours trying to find really good stuff (which, at my income level comes out to about $1000-$2500 worth of my time), or I can just buy the good stuff on ebay for much less and waste far fewer hours playing the game.
I still get to build a high level charectar by killing stuff for exp, I still do the quests, and I still have fun... More so than the traditional way even. So why not?
One of the main problems with PVRs like TiVo and ReplayTV is that it is preforming lossy compression on what is already a low-quality signal coming through your cable system. Think recoding VHS in SP vs LP/EP. In SP, its almost as good as watching whatever quality it was in the original broadcast-- Thats about what you get from 'High Quality' on a PVR, if even that.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who used to be a VP in a mid-sized International telecommunications carrier, I can confirm that this kind of thing does happen all the time-- particularly in Eastern Europe and "developing" countries where everyone is corrupt and their currency is near worthless.
The only part of your story that I find hard to believe is that anyone would end up in a foreign jail. Usuallly the people in these kinds of operations end up using a combination of bribes, photocopied passports from locals, and completely ficticious identities to avoid any trouble from the local police.
Did anyone else read 'DoA' and think 'Department of Agriculture'?
Has anyone out there actually used a p2p filesharing service for something OTHER than stealing music, videos, or pirating software? Out of the years I've been using Kazaa, Gnucleus, and the like... I think that I have used it maybe once or twice for legitamite purposes like finding a shareware program.
Really.. Is anyone out there using these tools for sharing research documents and music tracks from noname bands that don't have a label?
P.S. yeah it does look kinda like a shower tile...
I was one of the P800's early adopters. Back in January, I ordered the P800 SDK from Metrowerks at a premium price of $1200 (hey it came with a free t-shirt).
:(...
First let me say that I freaking love this phone. I have it set to display pictures of the callers when they call me (forget distinctive ringtones!)... The bluetooth headset I got with it is amazingly kewl. I get to look like I'm szicho talking to myself 30 feet away from the phone... and the camera in there is at least good enough that I don't bother to take my old cannon digicam with me anywhere anymore.
Last but not least, I get to use Opera on this thing with GRPS Internet. T-Mobile's Internet service is kinda flakey, but when its working, well, its nice to be able to use a real web browser on my phone and go to real websites.
Downsides? Plenty of 'em
First off, the thing crashes often. That might be because I'm using pre-release software, but the phone crashes at least 3-4 times per week.
Second, the handwriting recognition is, uh, different. If you are used to grafiti or whatever iPAQ uses, get ready to learn something completely different.
Third, the built in storage space is kinda low if you load the thing up with MP3 ringtones and use the cam often. Fortunately you can use sony memory sticks to expand the memory, but you have to tell every application in the phone to specifically use it.
Fourth... My P800 inexplicably died last week. As they aren't being officially sold yet in the USA, they also aren't being officially repaired in the USA. After 3 days of calling Sony-Ericsson and Metrowerks repeatedly, they finally told me that I'd have to mail my phone to DENMARK of all places, at my expense. I sent it 4 days ago... Nothing yet. Sigh.
But yeah, overall, the P800 is great. I'd buy it again in a minute.
You can find it on the Advanced Book Exchange for about $7.00.
I didn't mention this up above, but there is more...
- Many of the side charectars, shop keepers, etc., in Kingdom Hearts are well known Disney charectars or charectars from past Squaresoft games. For instance, Donald Duck is the chief magician to the court. Cid from FFVII runs an items shop. Even Wakka from FFX makes an appearance.
- The Disney voice acting and animation seem to be authentic. i.e. Donald Duck moves and sounds exactly how you would expect him to. Check out one of the movies where he enters the throne room and says good morning (in Japanese), and runs into Pluto. The camera angles and the voices look like they are right out of those old Disney cartoons that we all grew up with.
Last but not least... Make sure to check out the opening movie. Its ABSOLUTELY AMAZING, and 10-times better than any FMV from FFX, which is saying a lot as FFX FMVs look 10-times better than any CGI DVD I've seen.
There are basically two options available for me as a TiVo subscriber: $9.95/month (now $12.95/month), or $199 (or $249 off-season) for a lifetime subscription, which is the lifetime of the TiVo, not the subscriber. So of course, it only makes sense to get the month-to-month subscription, as who can predict if they will still have the same TiVo box 15-19 months from now?
Also, TiVo is BLEEDING money. They have never had a profitible quarter-- losing between $50 MILLION and $34 MILLION net for every quarter that they have posted so far. According to their published #'s, without some serious additional financing, TiVo will be out of cash in a year. I can't really blame them for increasing their service fees...
well you can't forget the classic ^]...
While major telecom companies like Global Crossing, Network+, WorldxChange, even WorldCom and Qwest are all in financial trouble, the company I work for, NOBEL, has been growing by an order of magnitude every month since its founding in 1998.
Many of our competitors, especially larger ones, made the mistake of overspending on technology infrastructure and on marketing-- blowing through billions of dollars in debt and equity financing. NOBEL is both extremely cost efficient (i.e. we make sure every expenditure is justified by generating additional profit), and we are self funded.
The attitude in our team is that we are going to take over telecom in the USA over the next 5-10 years. We are ALWAYS looking for people with strong telecom experience, both on the business end of things and in technology.
I figured that out.
Well as the marketing director for an unscrupulous business, let me be the first to say how much I am looking foward to being able to rate my competitors' websites on one of the most popular search engines.
Get a satalite dish, Taco! You'll get 4 or 5 UPNs from around the country, including WSBK in Boston among others.
The Verizon Building shown in the detail map is aparently where my company's T1 is routed from. We went down for about 4 hours on the day of the attack, and that building is still marked as 'severely damaged'. I guess losing your Internet connection isn't nearly as bad as losing your life, your loved ones, or even your office space-- but its still not a trip through the park.
Has anyone else been affected by the damage to Verizon's infrastructure? Does anyone know if they rerouted the lines to go somewhere else?
I've tried letting programmers and graphic designers work from home... and it just doesn't work.
When someone works from home, they have terrible communications with the office. They often can't be reached during the business day. To make matters worse, productivity -ALWAYS- goes down and excuses -ALWAYS- go up.
Thanks to Akamai, our site remained as fast as ever, and no one reported any kind of trouble getting through to us. Even without Akamai, I don't think that the site would have gone down like CNN-- but it sure would have made things worse, adding another problem to what was already a tense situation for us.
I don't think it is reasonable.. not when there is such a need for blood, and when testing methods are so extremely advanced.
Its at times like this that it becomes particularly painful that the American Red Cross does not allow gay men to donate blood.
I've spent about $200 cumulatively on Diablo 2 LoD equipment.
The way I see it-- I can either spend 40-100 hours trying to find really good stuff (which, at my income level comes out to about $1000-$2500 worth of my time), or I can just buy the good stuff on ebay for much less and waste far fewer hours playing the game.
I still get to build a high level charectar by killing stuff for exp, I still do the quests, and I still have fun... More so than the traditional way even. So why not?
DVD quality? I don't think so.
One of the main problems with PVRs like TiVo and ReplayTV is that it is preforming lossy compression on what is already a low-quality signal coming through your cable system. Think recoding VHS in SP vs LP/EP. In SP, its almost as good as watching whatever quality it was in the original broadcast-- Thats about what you get from 'High Quality' on a PVR, if even that.
you need a bigger mug.
It adds a lot of atmosphere to my 150 square feet of books and computers.
I had meant to add a *sarcasm* to the end of my original post.. I was looking for 'Funny', not 'Insightful' :)..
But I'll take all the karma I can get.