bad timing i suppose. i think the ink on the design was already drying by the time the net really took off. It was always envisioned as a voice system.
A clarification on Economic bug #2, the satellites can actually be programmed to stop broadcasting when they fly over a given land area in the case where it is prohibited by a government. I remember in the beginning that feature wasn't quite as automatic as needed to be.. and sometimes they wouldn't turn back on. It's quite good now =) Also on the licences.. the politics of those are really tricky. It explains a lot of why the business model was designed like it is.. many independently owned gateways all over the world. The fact that this is a chinese owned gateway is probably the only reason the communists allowed it. (they run the gateway) So it's certainly a very valid point that many of those licences could be in jeopardy depending on who wants to take over.
Of course as far as I'm concerned, any communist or non-free country can stay in the dark ages. I just wish we'd eliminate our immigration laws so their citizens could come here.
I don't know if it ever has.. but the FBI (among others i'm sure) did have the authority to wiretap a specific phone, assuming it was homed in the US. It isn't a simple 'flip a switch' process though.
The main problem with the system is not the phones or even the prices, It's the cost of maintaining and building the system that was impossible to overcome. There was also way too much overhead built into the network. I don't think it could ever sustain all the gateways which exist. Legal issues in other countries do often require some sort of entity to exist in the country in order to sell the service. I was extremely impressed with the Motorola 9505 phones. They are relatively compact and come with all the international accessories and cables you should ever need. Iridium LLC also never took advantage of the Maritime market. They never dropped their rates for coastal waters to a competative level. Had they done that, it would have certainly captured everything in that realm. Another example, The cruise lines were great customers. They were some of our largest usage customers. Also, the paging service never got the backing it needed. The thing that most impressed me about them was that they actually worked while you were flying in an airplane. There are lots of reasons why Iridium should have been able to succeed, but too many others why it didn't. I still feel, we all did, that it is a great product which many greate niche markets where it's extraordinarily valuable. I hope someone understands that and saves it before it plunges into the atmosphere.
btw. I worked at the N. American Gateway as a programmer/analyst and I'm in need of a job.;)
well... motorola maintains them. There are some rumors that General Dynamics was looking to partner with Crescent Communications, and run the system for quite a bit less.
They already do act in a way similar to GPS. The resolution isn't very good, but the billing records indicate a Location Area where the call is made. We don't define many Location areas smaller than a U.S. state. I think there could be a lot of useful applications combining Iridium Data service with GPS. The major criticism is that the speed is only about 2400bps.
All these distros make FreeBSD look more and more appealing to me. It's certainly not a bad thing to have more choices, but it may seriously hurt the ability of admins and helpdesk people out there to effectively support linux.
that mycio scan is really pathetic. It essentially requires you to submit the scan request from the server you want scanned.. which assumes that it actually has a javascript supporting browser. (lynx didn't seems to fit that bill.)
I truely believe JKH's contribution to the FreeBSD project deserves recognition. I have been constantly impressed with the quality and completeness of the fbsd distributions over the past few years. I trust no other OS to perform as reliably and to be as easily maintained.
Salary is great.. especially when it is compensated for mad crazy overtime hours. even better is comp time for any major off-hours work.
Personally, I'm working part-time now.. and am paid hourly. i'm getting really annoyed by the accounting people always bugging me for my hours worked.. i'm just terrible at keeping track.
Lets take a moment here and analyse monopolies.. This is a excercerpt of the Alan Greenspan article in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
A "coercive monopoly" is a business concern that can set its prices and production policies independent of the market, with immunity from competition, from the law of supply and demand. An economy dominated by such monopolies would be rigid and stagnant.
The necessary precondition of a coercive monopoly is closed entry--the barring of all competing producers form a given field. THis can be accomplised only by an act of government intervention, in the form of special regulations, subsidies or franchises.
The 'rail barrons' you spoke of were put in place by government land grants (thereby creating a monopoly in the west) for the railroads. Give Greenspan's definition of a monopoly, Microsoft does not even come close to qualifying. As for the baby bells.. were it not for the largly restrictive FCC regulations, we would see even more comptetion for the communications market. There is however plenty of competiton in the market. For example, here in phoenix, We have the option of using USWest for phone, internet, and/or television (via HDSL) OR Cox (@HOME) for cable, voice telephone service or internet. Not to mention cellular providers.. over even sattelite service (ie. Iridium)
Despite my dislike for crappy MS products, I would applaud any effort on their part to change antitrust laws or reduce their enforcement. They are arbitrary laws which can be used against any business. These laws are written so unclearly that there literally is no defense available. I would highly suggest reading Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal There is a great article by Alan Greenspan about these horrible anti-trust laws.
the article never mentions that as a hotmail user.. you never pay for support or even service. If you want greater control over your mail.. there is plenty of competition.. local ISPs.. large national and worldwide too. The key is that you have to pay something for it. Open source isn't the answer to everything. As far as I am concerned the only thing it has proved to do is breed innovation and stable, relatively bug-free applications. It doesn't however come with any guarantees.
since MTV has become about the channel for anything but music.. how about abe listing some of his favorite bands. Wonder when the next 7 day real world marathon starts on MTV.. *sigh*
Garmin.. one of the larger GPS makers claims all their GPSs will be ok. Some models may need to scan the sky again.. and a few need some software fixes.. overall not much to worry about.
iridium satellites go from horizon to horizon in about 12 minutes. Your call is handed off to the next one in the constellation. It's worked great for me. The inmarsat phones need to be quite a bit bigger and heavier to reach the geosync. orbit. The iridium phones, especially the kyocera satellite phones are really quite compact and convienient to carry around.
funny.. but there is no truth to that at all. Iridium used launch sites all over the world.. including former USSR, China, and the US. The majority of the space vehicles were launched from the US.
it doesn't matter if this is a good or bad idea.. there is all sorts of competition on the horizion in telecom. I just hope the anti-trust socialists stay out.
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bad timing i suppose. i think the ink on the design was already drying by the time the net really took off. It was always envisioned as a voice system.
A clarification on Economic bug #2, the satellites can actually be programmed to stop broadcasting when they fly over a given land area in the case where it is prohibited by a government. I remember in the beginning that feature wasn't quite as automatic as needed to be.. and sometimes they wouldn't turn back on. It's quite good now =) Also on the licences.. the politics of those are really tricky. It explains a lot of why the business model was designed like it is.. many independently owned gateways all over the world. The fact that this is a chinese owned gateway is probably the only reason the communists allowed it. (they run the gateway) So it's certainly a very valid point that many of those licences could be in jeopardy depending on who wants to take over.
Of course as far as I'm concerned, any communist or non-free country can stay in the dark ages. I just wish we'd eliminate our immigration laws so their citizens could come here.
I don't know if it ever has.. but the FBI (among others i'm sure) did have the authority to wiretap a specific phone, assuming it was homed in the US. It isn't a simple 'flip a switch' process though.
That doesn't mean they are monitoring communications through that facilicy, they aren't
The main problem with the system is not the phones or even the prices, It's the cost of maintaining and building the system that was impossible to overcome. There was also way too much overhead built into the network. I don't think it could ever sustain all the gateways which exist. Legal issues in other countries do often require some sort of entity to exist in the country in order to sell the service.
;)
I was extremely impressed with the Motorola 9505 phones. They are relatively compact and come with all the international accessories and cables you should ever need.
Iridium LLC also never took advantage of the Maritime market. They never dropped their rates for coastal waters to a competative level. Had they done that, it would have certainly captured everything in that realm. Another example, The cruise lines were great customers. They were some of our largest usage customers.
Also, the paging service never got the backing it needed. The thing that most impressed me about them was that they actually worked while you were flying in an airplane.
There are lots of reasons why Iridium should have been able to succeed, but too many others why it didn't. I still feel, we all did, that it is a great product which many greate niche markets where it's extraordinarily valuable. I hope someone understands that and saves it before it plunges into the atmosphere.
btw. I worked at the N. American Gateway as a programmer/analyst and I'm in need of a job.
well... motorola maintains them. There are some rumors that General Dynamics was looking to partner with Crescent Communications, and run the system for quite a bit less.
They already do act in a way similar to GPS. The resolution isn't very good, but the billing records indicate a Location Area where the call is made. We don't define many Location areas smaller than a U.S. state. I think there could be a lot of useful applications combining Iridium Data service with GPS. The major criticism is that the speed is only about 2400bps.
I certainly wouldn't go that far.
All these distros make FreeBSD look more and more appealing to me. It's certainly not a bad thing to have more choices, but it may seriously hurt the ability of admins and helpdesk people out there to effectively support linux.
that mycio scan is really pathetic. It essentially requires you to submit the scan request from the server you want scanned.. which assumes that it actually has a javascript supporting browser. (lynx didn't seems to fit that bill.)
I truely believe JKH's contribution to the FreeBSD project deserves recognition. I have been constantly impressed with the quality and completeness of the fbsd distributions over the past few years. I trust no other OS to perform as reliably and to be as easily maintained.
Salary is great.. especially when it is compensated for mad crazy overtime hours. even better is comp time for any major off-hours work.
Personally, I'm working part-time now.. and am paid hourly. i'm getting really annoyed by the accounting people always bugging me for my hours worked.. i'm just terrible at keeping track.
This is a excercerpt of the Alan Greenspan article in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
A "coercive monopoly" is a business concern that can set its prices and production policies independent of the market, with immunity from competition, from the law of supply and demand. An economy dominated by such monopolies would be rigid and stagnant.
The necessary precondition of a coercive monopoly is closed entry--the barring of all competing producers form a given field. THis can be accomplised only by an act of government intervention, in the form of special regulations, subsidies or franchises.
The 'rail barrons' you spoke of were put in place by government land grants (thereby creating a monopoly in the west) for the railroads. Give Greenspan's definition of a monopoly, Microsoft does not even come close to qualifying. As for the baby bells.. were it not for the largly restrictive FCC regulations, we would see even more comptetion for the communications market. There is however plenty of competiton in the market. For example, here in phoenix, We have the option of using USWest for phone, internet, and/or television (via HDSL) OR Cox (@HOME) for cable, voice telephone service or internet. Not to mention cellular providers.. over even sattelite service (ie. Iridium)
Despite my dislike for crappy MS products, I would applaud any effort on their part to change antitrust laws or reduce their enforcement. They are arbitrary laws which can be used against any business. These laws are written so unclearly that there literally is no defense available.
I would highly suggest reading Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal There is a great article by Alan Greenspan about these horrible anti-trust laws.
the article never mentions that as a hotmail user.. you never pay for support or even service. If you want greater control over your mail.. there is plenty of competition.. local ISPs.. large national and worldwide too. The key is that you have to pay something for it. Open source isn't the answer to everything. As far as I am concerned the only thing it has proved to do is breed innovation and stable, relatively bug-free applications. It doesn't however come with any guarantees.
"The Internet has a diameter of about 10,000 pookies." Any idea what the def. of a pookie is?
Anyone? Anyone?
looks like they disabled that cgi.
since MTV has become about the channel for anything but music.. how about abe listing some of his favorite bands. Wonder when the next 7 day real world marathon starts on MTV.. *sigh*
Was it just my GPS.. or did the week actually roll over to 0 a few seconds before the clock hit midnight?
Garmin.. one of the larger GPS makers claims all their GPSs will be ok. Some models may need to scan the sky again.. and a few need some software fixes.. overall not much to worry about.
iridium satellites go from horizon to horizon in about 12 minutes. Your call is handed off to the next one in the constellation. It's worked great for me. The inmarsat phones need to be quite a bit bigger and heavier to reach the geosync. orbit. The iridium phones, especially the kyocera satellite phones are really quite compact and convienient to carry around.
funny.. but there is no truth to that at all. Iridium used launch sites all over the world.. including former USSR, China, and the US.
The majority of the space vehicles were launched from the US.
The data option isn't really available yet. They are holding out for faster speeds.
it doesn't matter if this is a good or bad idea.. there is all sorts of competition on the horizion in telecom. I just hope the anti-trust socialists stay out.
a quick note: Monopolies cannot exist in the long term in a free market. Those that do are nearly always government enforced.