Previous attempts at replacing JavaScript always suffered from a boot strapping problem. While there are only a small number of major desktop browsers, overall, there are actually a lot of different minor browsers that people expect to work. And even among the desktop browsers, not everybody always runs the most recent release.
Content producers don't really like writing content that only 30% of their users can view. So, unless a new technology is rolled out to 90+% of the deployed browsers, nobody is going to write content for it. On the other hand, if nobody writes content, the rest of the browser manufacturers won't put any resources into adding support for the new technology.
Both asm.js and WebAssembly have a fallback mode that uses plain JavaScript, as available in virtually 100% of all browsers. Performance will obviously be degraded, but that's much better than making the content completely inaccessible. And users are more likely to upgrade their browsers, if they can see a low-fidelity version of the content and know by switching to a newer browser they'll get the high-fidelity version. So, unlike the previous scenario, this is actually a virtuous circle.
I am always surprised that American cities don't learn from the rest of the world and install round-abouts instead of intersections. Many European countries have been aggressively converting their intersections to traffic circles; and they found that accident rates go down, throughput goes up, there are zero operating costs (i.e. no need for traffic lights), and often the round-about needs the same or even less space than traditional intersections.
It takes a little bit of time for everybody to get used to the new design -- and that means both city planners, drivers, and pedestrians. But in the end the benefits are very obvious.
Have you tried calling Microsoft's customer support about this? In the past, they have always been super friendly whenever I talked to them. They know that their licensing is super confusing and it is easily possible to trip up the automated license enforcement mechanisms. But in my experience they are usually willing to work with you. If your complaint sounds at least somewhat plausible, they will either figure out how to undo the damage you did, or they will send you a new license.
Of course, if you just make up bull shit to try to get a free license for the copy of Windows that you downloaded from Bittorrent, don't expect that they'll be able or willing to help.
I converted the whole house to LED about a year or two ago. And yes, that required rewiring some of the fluorescent fixtures. It's generally not a big deal, although it took a bit of effort to rewire the fixture in our range hood. Thank God for pop rivets:-)
But I just saw that Home Depot has started selling LED lights that apparently are compatible with electronic ballasts. They no longer require rewiring of the fixture. I am a little skeptical and haven't tried them myself, but Home Depot has an excellent return policy. So, if I had any remaining fluorescent fixtures that needed converting, I'd probably give the Home Depot product a try first.
Our pediatrician recommended that we can start feeding eggs within a couple of months of starting the kids on solids. The nutrients in eggs are great, and the risk of food allergies is not particularly extreme.
Having said that, he recommended we gradually start with small amounts and then slowly increase the serving size, just so that we don't unnecessarily put the kid at risk of having a really severe reaction, if they turn out to be allergic. Also, he suggested to initially only feed soft-boiled egg yolks as they are less likely to trigger allergies than egg whites.
This all naturally worked out quite easily with our schedule of introducing solids, as we did "baby led weaning". Once they showed interest in solids, we just offered them some of our food, picking easier and softer foods initially (e.g. toast, tofu, smoothies, puddings, finely cut veggies and meat/fish...). This also meant, our kids knew how to drink from a straw at about 10 months old -- such an amazingly useful skill when taking them to restaurants!
We never bothered with ready- or home-made baby foods, as right from the beginning we could always find some of our adult foods that our kids happily started chewing on.
The advice against feeding honey to babies is not because of allergies, but because there is an -- admittedly small -- risk of it being contaminated. A baby's immune system isn't sufficiently mature yet, and this type of infection is potentially fatal.
So, yes, most parents are probably not going to notice anything bad about giving honey to their little ones. But as there is no particular unique benefit to eating honey, even the minor risk is worthwhile avoiding. This is the same reason, why pregnant women are advised against eating fresh cheese and raw fish. The risk is small, as evidenced by Japanese women eating sushi during pregnancy. But there still is a minor risk for an infection that could prove fatal to the unborn. Why take chances, if there are so many other alternative foods. And it is only for a couple of months anyway.
This is all very different from allergens. While allergies are not fully understood, there does appear to be some evidence that early exposure to allergens can reduce the statistical likelihood of developing allergies later in life. This must be traded off with the risk that allergic reactions can happen unexpectedly (i.e. somebody suddenly becomes allergic to something they previously didn't have problems with) and food allergies can easily be so severe that they are life threatening.
I never bought into the theory that avoiding peanuts for infants somehow helped them avoid developing allergies. So, these newer findings don't surprise me much. But I did buy into the precaution of avoiding peanuts for really young children, as a possible allergic reaction would almost certainly put them at increased risk of dying from anaphylactic shock.
The conclusion for us was: no raw fish during pregnancy, no raw honey or peanuts during the first year of life, but no additional restrictions after these times. We still carefully watch the kids, when they eat nuts, though -- just in case. And we generally encourage a diverse diet, always asking the kids to try new things.
All of the work-arounds for mailing lists are broken in one way or another. Often so much so, that it breaks the overall usability of the mailing list in quite subtle and annoying ways.
All mailing lists that I am subscribed to have taken the more expedient option of banning Yahoo users from subscribing to their lists. This has the nice side-effect that it makes users switch to a more modern e-mail provider in the process. After everything was said and done, most users were actually quite thankful for this...
I think, Yahoo would have been smart to wait with the switch until after they worked on getting OAR to work. But that would actually require putting some work into this project; and as of lately, I am not sure Yahoo is really clear on which technologies they still want to seriously invest into, as opposed to putting everything into extended maintenance mode.
Sounds like interference from a microwave oven. You need to find the frequency that this microwave operates on, and you should then avoid that channel. The good news is that it is most likely one of your immediate neighbors. So, you could ask them to check on the label or in the manual for the microwave.
Have you actually driven a car with a modern Diesel engine?
I had a Diesel rental about 20 years ago, and was impressed how little difference there was to a gasoline engine. But yes, you are right, back then Diesels did lack some of the "oomph" that I had come to expect from a high-powered gasoline engine.
In the last couple of years though, Diesel engines have gotten so good, there really is no reason whatsoever to buy a gasoline engine -- unless of course, you drive an incredibly small number of miles, in which case fuel efficiency doesn't matter and the slightly higher cost for the Diesel engine does.
Other than that, modern Diesels drive just like gasoline cars, are a lot more fuel efficient, and are extremely clean. I have read (slightly tongue in cheek) research saying that tail pipe emissions tend to be cleaner than the intake air:-) It's pretty much just CO2 and water.
According to Wikipedia, 33.3% of the world population considers themselves Christian, 21.0% considers themselves Muslim, and 0.2% considers themselves Jewish. All of these are Abrahamic religions who recognize the bible. Although they might not all agree on the interpretation and on the relevance of all parts of the bible, in particular of the texts in the New Testament.
All of these religions also have additional written or oral traditions that go beyond the texts in the bible.
In other words, about 55.6% of the world population believe that the bible tells the truth or part thereof; at the very least, they believe that it is the truth as perceived by its various authors. Of course, as with any historic text, it is difficult to understand more than the most superficial meaning without also knowing the author's background and the frame of reference of the targeted readership.
Historians and religious scholars both continuously work to sort out these details. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they later discover that they got things wildly wrong. This isn't exactly easy research, and has often be the cause of political and religious conflicts and wars.
What you are asking for is arguably a very specific feature and something that is probably too complicated for typical end-users. But it is nonetheless quite useful and something that should in fact be available for power users who don't get confused by the fact that they might accidentally disable all data-communications on their device.
On GSM/UMTS devices, you can probably do most of what you want to do by installing APNDroid from the Android market. It allows you to selectively disable non-Wifi data connections. There are a few other applications (e.g. Timeriffic) that are aware of APNDroid and that can be configured to en-/disable data based on other factors (e.g. time of day). I believe there are similar applications that can trigger based on location, but I haven't tried that myself.
Unfortunately, I believe that this option is not really available for CDMA devices such as the Droid. Last I checked, APNDroid only worked on devices that actually use APNs -- and that's a GSM/UMTS technology.
Normally, in a situation like this, I would suggest you look at community-firmware such as the Cyanogen project, as they tend to be quite good about adding a lot of features for power users. But again, I think that won't help you. Last I checked, the Droid was difficult to work with and didn't have much in the way of community-firmware.
Sorry that I can't be of more help. But maybe some of these suggestions will give you an idea on where to look for a solution.
Android phones will use Wifi if available and only use 3G for existing TCP connections. The latter should be far and few between, and they are unlikely to use much data. You'd only have those if you started a connection on 3G and then walked into an area that has Wifi.
By default, Android phones disable Wifi when the phone is not in active use. So, background applications can still incur some 3G usage. This setting made sense on older hardware (e.g. G1, ADP) which needed a lot of power to keep Wifi connections active. Having Wifi permanently turned on would result in sharply reduced battery life.
For more recent Android hardware (e.g. Nexus One), it is generally a good idea to change the Wifi "sleep policy" to never. This will keep Wifi active even when the screen is turned off. And in fact, it often results in better battery life. It turns out, on these devices Wifi is a lot more efficient than 3G. So, not only are you conserving your data quota, but also your battery power.
Most of the channels pay the cable companies to carry their programs. And the channel in turn makes money through advertisement. The consumer is not really the customer here; instead, the consumer's eyeballs are the goods that are for sale.
If the consumers weren't so ready to pay for cable service, the cable companies would offer it for free, and still make money from the channels that they carry.
That should give you an idea, why most of the content is so poor and merely a cheap vehicle to help deliver ads.
Pay-per-view and premium channels are different, but those are the once that consumers have to pay extra for.
Most cheap [hm]otels in the US offer free WiFi these days. Strangely enough, though, the expensive hotels tend to still charge an access fee. Just call ahead before making a reservation, and ask whether the hotel has free WiFi.
If you are willing to invest a little time, you can already get pretty much all of this at a similar pricepoint. Buy a Linksys SPA 3102 and an Asus WL500 Premium; install OpenWRT and Asterisk on the Asus router; and connect it to the Linksys. Voila, instant VoIP PBXo
If you still have a POTS line, use it to route 911 calls, local calls (unless you have a metered line), and toll-free calls using the FXS port on the SPA3102. All other outgoing calls go over VoIP. If you open an account with one of the BetaMax companies (e.g. internetcalls.com), you can get very cheap long-distance and international calling; the pricing model for these companies is a little unusual, so it is hard to exactly say how much you'll pay, but it should work out as somewhere between $3 and $4/mo.
For incoming calls, you can either use the FXS port and a POTS line, or you can get a phone number that rings your VoIP phone. There are a few companies that give you those numbers for free (usually with limited availability per area code), and a whole bunch of others that give you arbitrary US numbers for a small monthly fee. Many other countries have similar deals. Browse voip-info.org for more details and suggestions.
If you need additional FXO ports, just get a used PAPv2 of eBay (about $20), unlock it (if the model that you got was locked), and you'll end up with two more ports for plugging in your telephones. In fact, if you don't even have a POTS line anymore, you can just get a PAPv2 instead of a SPA3102. That'll save you about $50.
As an additional benefit, you can set up a callback or dial-through number on your Asterisk router, giving you cheap international calls from your cellphone.
I agree that all of this is not quite as slick as David Rowe's router, but you can get it now, and it won't cost you more than $100 or $200 (depending on exactly how many ports you need).
If you install chan_cellphone.so, and you have one of the supported Bluetooth cell phones, you might even be able to build your own GSM to PSTN gateway. No need to buy expensive hardware, or to tie yourself to Skype.
I never quite understood the claim that DVD-R are supposedly more compatible than DVD+R. Most standalone DVD players that I tried, can either read both formats, or none. In fact, there appears to be a slight advantage in favor of DVD+R.
There is one thing that I noticed, though. Some of the older players refuse to play back DVD+R, because they do not recognize the book type. This can be easily fixed by adjusting the book type prior to burning (on Linux, you'd do something like "dvd+rw-booktype -dvd-rom-spec -unit+r/dev/cdrom"). Maybe, this is where the myth of DVD+R's incompatibility originated from.
>>In the EU we have a minimum warranty of minimum 2 years on all products.
>Really? How's that 2 year old Big Mac taste?
I think there is a lot of confusion here. The two year warranty does not neccessarily guarantee that the product will still be in perfect order two years from the date of sale. Rather, it promises that the product was in perfect condition (the interpretation of which depends on the type of product and is ultimately decided by the courts) at the time of sale. If the customer discovers a defect, he has to report this to the vendor as soon as he notices the defect and is guaranteed a replacement or repair (or even refund) if this event occurs within the first two years after the sale.
There are a couple of tricky issues to this. As explained above, the warranty only covers pre-existing defects (i.e. normal wear-and-tear or expiration of food items are obviously not covered). But within the first six months, there is a general assumption that any defects noticed are a result of a hidden defect pre-existing at the time of sale; and the burden of proof is on the vendor to show otherwise (this is usually impossible to proof, thus the customer is going to get a replacement/repair unless the item is known to have a typical lifetime less than six months).
After six months, the burden of proof typically reverses (this might be different between different European countries, but I know that this cut-off is true for at least some of them). Nonetheless, most countries have laws that mitigate the effect of this reversal (typically something along the lines of the vendor being allowed multiple attempts to repair instead of issuing a refund, but in the turn the vendor has to assume the burden of proof again).
Now, some of you wondered what the difference is between the two year warranty mandated by law and the manufacturer's warranty which might be either longer or shorter. The reason for this is that there never is a legal contract between the manufacturer and the customer, only between the vendor and the customer. So, it would be impossible for the customer to enforce any legal obligations against the manufacturer (short maybe of gross negligence because of a dangerously defective item that should have been recalled or never sold in the first place).
Any warranty offered by the manufacturer to the customer is purely voluntary and customers are usually adviced to take a defective product to their vendor as long as it is still covered under the two year mandatory warranty. They get far better legal protection this way than by relying on some voluntary terms offered by the manufacturer.
The good thing with this law is, that it covers all sales. So, if a customer returns a defective product after nine months, that does not mean that the vendor has to cover the cost, but instead he can use the same law to recover the cost from his respective whole seller -- going back in this chain you ultimately get to the original manufacturer.
There is a small caveat to this though. Under certain conditions, which might vary from country to country, it is possible for the two parties to agree on a shortened warranty period of only one year. This can typically only happen between between two commercial entities (so, be careful when you buy something for the office rather than for home use!) or when buying used goods. The assumption is that commercial users might want the flexibility of agreeing to alternative contract terms such as a 15% discount in exchange for the retailer not requiring the full warranty coverage from his whole seller.
This actually spawned a new industry, and insurance companies are now starting to offer policies that cover the cost incurred by items still being under warranty for the end-user but not for the vendor who sold it to them. I read an informal survey done a while ago and most vendors approved of the new law and figured that it helps improve the overall quality of goods, encourages the sale of new goods over used ones (which, as I said, are often only covered by a one year warranty), and harmonizes business contracts throughout the European economy.
OK, that's it. I hope, I have given a reasonable overview of the most important issues with this new law. As always, since I am not a lawyer, you should check with one before you act on any of this information.
Re:How well does Internet Explorer work?
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Crossover Gets Quicken
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· Score: 4, Informative
I haven't tested the newest version of CrossOver, yet, so support for IE might have improved by now. As for testing compatibility of web sites, my main problems were that:
IE would not always start under Linux, whereas all the other office programs always worked fine (with a few minor bugs). I never figured out why IE would sometimes just refuse to run.
IE doesn't come with all the neccessary components and I could never work out how to install them afterwards. This means, if your web page requires Asian fonts or non-standard plugins, then there really isn't too much you can do.
Apart from these restrictions (which might very well be fixed with the new release of CrossOver), I have successfully tested my web pages using IE on Linux.
I never had the need to run multiple instances of IE at the same time, but you can do so pretty easily under Linux. If I had to do this, I'd probably just use multiple instances of User Mode Linux, because it gives full guaranteed isolation and it is pretty straight forward to set up for this purpose. If you don't quite need this much isolation, then there probably is some way you can make CrossOver run multiple instances of Wine (possibly by using some "chroot()" tricks).
When questioned about the filter, Yahoo claimed the filter was "double plus good". I am sure that would read twice add good. (Need to remove those dangerous keywords).
I hope I am not just feeding a troll here, but the poster is right in so far as that different versions of getty obviously do have different options.
I guess, I should have pointed out the distribution that I tested this on. This is for Debian Linux. The current release of util-linux is 2.11n, but as far as I remember the -I option has been there for ever. I did check, and it seems that Debian's getty program is based on agetty; so there is a chance that there are other versions of getty that have different command line parameters.
Since you said that you have access to mgetty I can make a suggestion that might work for you (I haven't tested this myself). It seems that mgetty can take a -i option to override the/etc/issue file that is displayed before prompting for the user's id and password. If you create seperate issue files for each virtual terminal, you should be able to stick the different escape sequences into these files. This is admittedly not as elegant as the original solution, but it should achieve the same effect.
In the future, it might help if you didn't complain, but rather replied with a question asking why you had problems replicating the configuration on your system (and please tell us, which distribution you are using). Before your next post, you might want to consult the Smart Questions FAQ. Oh, and please do let us know if my suggestion for mgetty worked, or if you need additional assistance.
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Previous attempts at replacing JavaScript always suffered from a boot strapping problem. While there are only a small number of major desktop browsers, overall, there are actually a lot of different minor browsers that people expect to work. And even among the desktop browsers, not everybody always runs the most recent release.
Content producers don't really like writing content that only 30% of their users can view. So, unless a new technology is rolled out to 90+% of the deployed browsers, nobody is going to write content for it. On the other hand, if nobody writes content, the rest of the browser manufacturers won't put any resources into adding support for the new technology.
Both asm.js and WebAssembly have a fallback mode that uses plain JavaScript, as available in virtually 100% of all browsers. Performance will obviously be degraded, but that's much better than making the content completely inaccessible. And users are more likely to upgrade their browsers, if they can see a low-fidelity version of the content and know by switching to a newer browser they'll get the high-fidelity version. So, unlike the previous scenario, this is actually a virtuous circle.
I am always surprised that American cities don't learn from the rest of the world and install round-abouts instead of intersections. Many European countries have been aggressively converting their intersections to traffic circles; and they found that accident rates go down, throughput goes up, there are zero operating costs (i.e. no need for traffic lights), and often the round-about needs the same or even less space than traditional intersections.
It takes a little bit of time for everybody to get used to the new design -- and that means both city planners, drivers, and pedestrians. But in the end the benefits are very obvious.
Have you tried calling Microsoft's customer support about this? In the past, they have always been super friendly whenever I talked to them. They know that their licensing is super confusing and it is easily possible to trip up the automated license enforcement mechanisms. But in my experience they are usually willing to work with you. If your complaint sounds at least somewhat plausible, they will either figure out how to undo the damage you did, or they will send you a new license.
Of course, if you just make up bull shit to try to get a free license for the copy of Windows that you downloaded from Bittorrent, don't expect that they'll be able or willing to help.
I converted the whole house to LED about a year or two ago. And yes, that required rewiring some of the fluorescent fixtures. It's generally not a big deal, although it took a bit of effort to rewire the fixture in our range hood. Thank God for pop rivets :-)
But I just saw that Home Depot has started selling LED lights that apparently are compatible with electronic ballasts. They no longer require rewiring of the fixture. I am a little skeptical and haven't tried them myself, but Home Depot has an excellent return policy. So, if I had any remaining fluorescent fixtures that needed converting, I'd probably give the Home Depot product a try first.
How about the 3-way Cree bulbs that Amazon sells: http://smile.amazon.com/Cree-B...
Would that meet your requirements?
Our pediatrician recommended that we can start feeding eggs within a couple of months of starting the kids on solids. The nutrients in eggs are great, and the risk of food allergies is not particularly extreme.
Having said that, he recommended we gradually start with small amounts and then slowly increase the serving size, just so that we don't unnecessarily put the kid at risk of having a really severe reaction, if they turn out to be allergic. Also, he suggested to initially only feed soft-boiled egg yolks as they are less likely to trigger allergies than egg whites.
This all naturally worked out quite easily with our schedule of introducing solids, as we did "baby led weaning". Once they showed interest in solids, we just offered them some of our food, picking easier and softer foods initially (e.g. toast, tofu, smoothies, puddings, finely cut veggies and meat/fish...). This also meant, our kids knew how to drink from a straw at about 10 months old -- such an amazingly useful skill when taking them to restaurants!
We never bothered with ready- or home-made baby foods, as right from the beginning we could always find some of our adult foods that our kids happily started chewing on.
The advice against feeding honey to babies is not because of allergies, but because there is an -- admittedly small -- risk of it being contaminated. A baby's immune system isn't sufficiently mature yet, and this type of infection is potentially fatal.
So, yes, most parents are probably not going to notice anything bad about giving honey to their little ones. But as there is no particular unique benefit to eating honey, even the minor risk is worthwhile avoiding. This is the same reason, why pregnant women are advised against eating fresh cheese and raw fish. The risk is small, as evidenced by Japanese women eating sushi during pregnancy. But there still is a minor risk for an infection that could prove fatal to the unborn. Why take chances, if there are so many other alternative foods. And it is only for a couple of months anyway.
This is all very different from allergens. While allergies are not fully understood, there does appear to be some evidence that early exposure to allergens can reduce the statistical likelihood of developing allergies later in life. This must be traded off with the risk that allergic reactions can happen unexpectedly (i.e. somebody suddenly becomes allergic to something they previously didn't have problems with) and food allergies can easily be so severe that they are life threatening.
I never bought into the theory that avoiding peanuts for infants somehow helped them avoid developing allergies. So, these newer findings don't surprise me much. But I did buy into the precaution of avoiding peanuts for really young children, as a possible allergic reaction would almost certainly put them at increased risk of dying from anaphylactic shock.
The conclusion for us was: no raw fish during pregnancy, no raw honey or peanuts during the first year of life, but no additional restrictions after these times. We still carefully watch the kids, when they eat nuts, though -- just in case. And we generally encourage a diverse diet, always asking the kids to try new things.
All of the work-arounds for mailing lists are broken in one way or another. Often so much so, that it breaks the overall usability of the mailing list in quite subtle and annoying ways.
All mailing lists that I am subscribed to have taken the more expedient option of banning Yahoo users from subscribing to their lists. This has the nice side-effect that it makes users switch to a more modern e-mail provider in the process. After everything was said and done, most users were actually quite thankful for this...
I think, Yahoo would have been smart to wait with the switch until after they worked on getting OAR to work. But that would actually require putting some work into this project; and as of lately, I am not sure Yahoo is really clear on which technologies they still want to seriously invest into, as opposed to putting everything into extended maintenance mode.
Sounds like interference from a microwave oven. You need to find the frequency that this microwave operates on, and you should then avoid that channel. The good news is that it is most likely one of your immediate neighbors. So, you could ask them to check on the label or in the manual for the microwave.
What are you all talking about. Need to adjust my hearing aids
Have you actually driven a car with a modern Diesel engine?
I had a Diesel rental about 20 years ago, and was impressed how little difference there was to a gasoline engine. But yes, you are right, back then Diesels did lack some of the "oomph" that I had come to expect from a high-powered gasoline engine.
In the last couple of years though, Diesel engines have gotten so good, there really is no reason whatsoever to buy a gasoline engine -- unless of course, you drive an incredibly small number of miles, in which case fuel efficiency doesn't matter and the slightly higher cost for the Diesel engine does.
Other than that, modern Diesels drive just like gasoline cars, are a lot more fuel efficient, and are extremely clean. I have read (slightly tongue in cheek) research saying that tail pipe emissions tend to be cleaner than the intake air :-) It's pretty much just CO2 and water.
According to Wikipedia, 33.3% of the world population considers themselves Christian, 21.0% considers themselves Muslim, and 0.2% considers themselves Jewish. All of these are Abrahamic religions who recognize the bible. Although they might not all agree on the interpretation and on the relevance of all parts of the bible, in particular of the texts in the New Testament.
All of these religions also have additional written or oral traditions that go beyond the texts in the bible.
In other words, about 55.6% of the world population believe that the bible tells the truth or part thereof; at the very least, they believe that it is the truth as perceived by its various authors. Of course, as with any historic text, it is difficult to understand more than the most superficial meaning without also knowing the author's background and the frame of reference of the targeted readership.
Historians and religious scholars both continuously work to sort out these details. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they later discover that they got things wildly wrong. This isn't exactly easy research, and has often be the cause of political and religious conflicts and wars.
What you are asking for is arguably a very specific feature and something that is probably too complicated for typical end-users. But it is nonetheless quite useful and something that should in fact be available for power users who don't get confused by the fact that they might accidentally disable all data-communications on their device.
On GSM/UMTS devices, you can probably do most of what you want to do by installing APNDroid from the Android market. It allows you to selectively disable non-Wifi data connections. There are a few other applications (e.g. Timeriffic) that are aware of APNDroid and that can be configured to en-/disable data based on other factors (e.g. time of day). I believe there are similar applications that can trigger based on location, but I haven't tried that myself.
Unfortunately, I believe that this option is not really available for CDMA devices such as the Droid. Last I checked, APNDroid only worked on devices that actually use APNs -- and that's a GSM/UMTS technology.
Normally, in a situation like this, I would suggest you look at community-firmware such as the Cyanogen project, as they tend to be quite good about adding a lot of features for power users. But again, I think that won't help you. Last I checked, the Droid was difficult to work with and didn't have much in the way of community-firmware.
Sorry that I can't be of more help. But maybe some of these suggestions will give you an idea on where to look for a solution.
Android phones will use Wifi if available and only use 3G for existing TCP connections. The latter should be far and few between, and they are unlikely to use much data. You'd only have those if you started a connection on 3G and then walked into an area that has Wifi.
By default, Android phones disable Wifi when the phone is not in active use. So, background applications can still incur some 3G usage. This setting made sense on older hardware (e.g. G1, ADP) which needed a lot of power to keep Wifi connections active. Having Wifi permanently turned on would result in sharply reduced battery life.
For more recent Android hardware (e.g. Nexus One), it is generally a good idea to change the Wifi "sleep policy" to never. This will keep Wifi active even when the screen is turned off. And in fact, it often results in better battery life. It turns out, on these devices Wifi is a lot more efficient than 3G. So, not only are you conserving your data quota, but also your battery power.
Most of the channels pay the cable companies to carry their programs. And the channel in turn makes money through advertisement. The consumer is not really the customer here; instead, the consumer's eyeballs are the goods that are for sale.
If the consumers weren't so ready to pay for cable service, the cable companies would offer it for free, and still make money from the channels that they carry.
That should give you an idea, why most of the content is so poor and merely a cheap vehicle to help deliver ads.
Pay-per-view and premium channels are different, but those are the once that consumers have to pay extra for.
Most cheap [hm]otels in the US offer free WiFi these days.
Strangely enough, though, the expensive hotels tend to still charge an access fee. Just call ahead before making a reservation, and ask whether the hotel has free WiFi.
If you are willing to invest a little time, you can already get pretty much all of this at a similar pricepoint. Buy a Linksys SPA 3102 and an Asus WL500 Premium; install OpenWRT and Asterisk on the Asus router; and connect it to the Linksys. Voila, instant VoIP PBXo
If you still have a POTS line, use it to route 911 calls, local calls (unless you have a metered line), and toll-free calls using the FXS port on the SPA3102. All other outgoing calls go over VoIP. If you open an account with one of the BetaMax companies (e.g. internetcalls.com), you can get very cheap long-distance and international calling; the pricing model for these companies is a little unusual, so it is hard to exactly say how much you'll pay, but it should work out as somewhere between $3 and $4/mo.
For incoming calls, you can either use the FXS port and a POTS line, or you can get a phone number that rings your VoIP phone. There are a few companies that give you those numbers for free (usually with limited availability per area code), and a whole bunch of others that give you arbitrary US numbers for a small monthly fee. Many other countries have similar deals. Browse voip-info.org for more details and suggestions.
If you need additional FXO ports, just get a used PAPv2 of eBay (about $20), unlock it (if the model that you got was locked), and you'll end up with two more ports for plugging in your telephones. In fact, if you don't even have a POTS line anymore, you can just get a PAPv2 instead of a SPA3102. That'll save you about $50.
As an additional benefit, you can set up a callback or dial-through number on your Asterisk router, giving you cheap international calls from your cellphone.
I agree that all of this is not quite as slick as David Rowe's router, but you can get it now, and it won't cost you more than $100 or $200 (depending on exactly how many ports you need).
If you install chan_cellphone.so, and you have one of the supported Bluetooth cell phones, you might even be able to build your own GSM to PSTN gateway. No need to buy expensive hardware, or to tie yourself to Skype.
Wozniak got in trouble for paying with $2 bills, too. Although, his story is a little funnier: http://www.woz.org/letters/general/78.html
I never quite understood the claim that DVD-R are supposedly more compatible than DVD+R. Most standalone DVD players that I tried, can either read both formats, or none. In fact, there appears to be a slight advantage in favor of DVD+R.
/dev/cdrom"). Maybe, this is where the myth of DVD+R's incompatibility originated from.
There is one thing that I noticed, though. Some of the older players refuse to play back DVD+R, because they do not recognize the book type. This can be easily fixed by adjusting the book type prior to burning (on Linux, you'd do something like "dvd+rw-booktype -dvd-rom-spec -unit+r
>Really? How's that 2 year old Big Mac taste?
I think there is a lot of confusion here. The two year warranty does not neccessarily guarantee that the product will still be in perfect order two years from the date of sale. Rather, it promises that the product was in perfect condition (the interpretation of which depends on the type of product and is ultimately decided by the courts) at the time of sale. If the customer discovers a defect, he has to report this to the vendor as soon as he notices the defect and is guaranteed a replacement or repair (or even refund) if this event occurs within the first two years after the sale.
There are a couple of tricky issues to this. As explained above, the warranty only covers pre-existing defects (i.e. normal wear-and-tear or expiration of food items are obviously not covered). But within the first six months, there is a general assumption that any defects noticed are a result of a hidden defect pre-existing at the time of sale; and the burden of proof is on the vendor to show otherwise (this is usually impossible to proof, thus the customer is going to get a replacement/repair unless the item is known to have a typical lifetime less than six months).
After six months, the burden of proof typically reverses (this might be different between different European countries, but I know that this cut-off is true for at least some of them). Nonetheless, most countries have laws that mitigate the effect of this reversal (typically something along the lines of the vendor being allowed multiple attempts to repair instead of issuing a refund, but in the turn the vendor has to assume the burden of proof again).
Now, some of you wondered what the difference is between the two year warranty mandated by law and the manufacturer's warranty which might be either longer or shorter. The reason for this is that there never is a legal contract between the manufacturer and the customer, only between the vendor and the customer. So, it would be impossible for the customer to enforce any legal obligations against the manufacturer (short maybe of gross negligence because of a dangerously defective item that should have been recalled or never sold in the first place).
Any warranty offered by the manufacturer to the customer is purely voluntary and customers are usually adviced to take a defective product to their vendor as long as it is still covered under the two year mandatory warranty. They get far better legal protection this way than by relying on some voluntary terms offered by the manufacturer.
The good thing with this law is, that it covers all sales. So, if a customer returns a defective product after nine months, that does not mean that the vendor has to cover the cost, but instead he can use the same law to recover the cost from his respective whole seller -- going back in this chain you ultimately get to the original manufacturer.
There is a small caveat to this though. Under certain conditions, which might vary from country to country, it is possible for the two parties to agree on a shortened warranty period of only one year. This can typically only happen between between two commercial entities (so, be careful when you buy something for the office rather than for home use!) or when buying used goods. The assumption is that commercial users might want the flexibility of agreeing to alternative contract terms such as a 15% discount in exchange for the retailer not requiring the full warranty coverage from his whole seller.
This actually spawned a new industry, and insurance companies are now starting to offer policies that cover the cost incurred by items still being under warranty for the end-user but not for the vendor who sold it to them. I read an informal survey done a while ago and most vendors approved of the new law and figured that it helps improve the overall quality of goods, encourages the sale of new goods over used ones (which, as I said, are often only covered by a one year warranty), and harmonizes business contracts throughout the European economy.
OK, that's it. I hope, I have given a reasonable overview of the most important issues with this new law. As always, since I am not a lawyer, you should check with one before you act on any of this information.
- IE would not always start under Linux, whereas all the other office programs always worked fine (with a few minor bugs). I never figured out why IE would sometimes just refuse to run.
- IE doesn't come with all the neccessary components and I could never work out how to install them afterwards. This means, if your web page requires Asian fonts or non-standard plugins, then there really isn't too much you can do.
Apart from these restrictions (which might very well be fixed with the new release of CrossOver), I have successfully tested my web pages using IE on Linux.I never had the need to run multiple instances of IE at the same time, but you can do so pretty easily under Linux. If I had to do this, I'd probably just use multiple instances of User Mode Linux, because it gives full guaranteed isolation and it is pretty straight forward to set up for this purpose. If you don't quite need this much isolation, then there probably is some way you can make CrossOver run multiple instances of Wine (possibly by using some "chroot()" tricks).
When questioned about the filter, Yahoo claimed the filter was "double plus good".
I am sure that would read twice add good. (Need to remove those dangerous keywords).
For funny Eliza sessions check out AOLiza. The page hasn't been updated in a while, but it is definitly a classic.
I guess, I should have pointed out the distribution that I tested this on. This is for Debian Linux. The current release of util-linux is 2.11n, but as far as I remember the -I option has been there for ever. I did check, and it seems that Debian's getty program is based on agetty; so there is a chance that there are other versions of getty that have different command line parameters.
Since you said that you have access to mgetty I can make a suggestion that might work for you (I haven't tested this myself). It seems that mgetty can take a -i option to override the /etc/issue file that is displayed before prompting for the user's id and password. If you create seperate issue files for each virtual terminal, you should be able to stick the different escape sequences into these files. This is admittedly not as elegant as the original solution, but it should achieve the same effect.
In the future, it might help if you didn't complain, but rather replied with a question asking why you had problems replicating the configuration on your system (and please tell us, which distribution you are using). Before your next post, you might want to consult the Smart Questions FAQ. Oh, and please do let us know if my suggestion for mgetty worked, or if you need additional assistance.