"Currently, ADSL alone in Japan offers 12Mbps, for a slightly cheaper price than in the states."
/me drools
I'm in rural Ontario, Canada and we can get only 28.8 dialup. 31.2 if we're lucky. Up the street is worse (usually 21.6.)
As discussed above, satellite is just not worth the money due to the bad pings. As in Japan, geography here is the problem (except it's not mountains, it's the remoteness of the homes.) The houses are far apart that if you set up a wireless access point, you'd get in the very best case about 5 homes in a 1000 foot radius. Typically 2 or 3. And this is not accounting for the very dense trees which are full of water and block WAP signals. I don't think we'll EVER get decent broadband out here.
Now the best case in my area is if you live in the city and can get 1.5Mb cable or the new "upgraded" G.Lite DSL connections (960Kb.) (That is, unless you pull a T1 in.)
The moral of the story is that due to geography, some locations will NEVER have decent internet access for a good price in the forseeable future. That's just the way it is so some of us either have to live with it or relocate.
I'm not saying that they're interested in freedom for their people. I am saying that the government wants freedom in the ability to run its economy in any way it wants. This is the distinctiion that I didn't make clear in the original message.
I do agree that the advantage would be in the government's hands and they wouldn't use it to increase the 'freedoms' of the average Chinese citizen.
"I'd be more willing to bet some smartass
with a catapult is having fun at the ice factory."
It must be some monster catapult, considering that these ice hunks have hit in Spain, Australia and Mexico. Or perhaps it is the mutual hobby of ice factory workers all over the world.
An automated spell check is insufficient. It won't catch you when you say you posses excellent communication skills. (This is as opposed to possess. Look it up if you don't know the difference!)
One really great (windows) freeware tool I use all the time on any important written document is Readplease 2000. It reads the document out loud, making many hard-to-detect errors easy to find. It is also useful for people who are vision impaired because you don't need your eyes to 'read' the content of a document.
Some other pet peeves are the confusion of possessive pronouns versus plural pronouns (its|it's|it is|it has) and in general, messed up plurals versus possessive words.
If you're the type whose final carefully-checked document has grammar errors, then get someone else to check it! It constantly amazes me how often people whose first language is English and have an English-based university education still mix up homonyms.
This is madness. It's like banning those ramps people walk up to get onto aeroplanes because you've got a problem with some pesky malcontents using the planes as large missiles.
I have already spent dozens of hours narrowing down from dozens of google-identified cards based on price, chipset, brand, features, compatibility, availibility and so on. This involved contacting many manufacturers about the details of their cards, extensive usenet searching, examining many vendor catalogues, etc. Using google alone to determine which device should be purchased is foolish.
Here is a non-fiction story: Some years ago, a luser deliberately sent thousands of threatening messages to a local grade-school with my e-mail in the from: field. The school called the police and eventually I was interviewed.
Basically I explained to the officer (who admitted she didn't even own a computer and didn't know why she got the case) how it was extremely easy to forge all of this, and from the header snippets in the printout (they knew nothing about full headers) that it probably came from a certain local ISP.
The officer understood and I never heard anything about it again.
If the CEO is stupid enough to go to law enforcement to try to have you put away and the law enforcement doesn't laugh it off, you can probably explain it to the officers and the CEO will get the results of the investigation and hopefully realise that s/he was pretty clueless to persue the whole endavour.
"Send him a polite note explaining that he is mistaken. Your were the victim of a virus, and the virus forged your name on the email."
Keep in mind that Klez does not use your e-mail address found on the sending machine as the from: address in any subsequent e-mails. It gets addresses of other people from your outlook address book.
So if I'm stupid enough to use outlook and then stupid enough to let Klez loose on my machine and you're in my address book, then your address could appear on the from: field on the next victim's inbox. So even if you are using an ultra-secure unix box and read your mail with pine (which is a text-only client, so it is impossible to get any infection from an e-mail,) your friend who uses outlook can still cause you grief in this way.
This makes it hard to track down the source of the worm and that's why Klez is still fairly old but running rampant in the wild.
That POS $9 firewire card won't support OHCI due to a low-value ancient chipset so you can say hello to hellish proprietary windows-only drivers and flaky-at-best linux support. And I'm willing to bet it won't support an internal power connection so you won't be able to recharge the iPod through via power through the firewire cord. And good luck getting any modern-day DV cam connected to it.
You have to spend some good money to get a good firewire card. I am leaning toward the Adaptec DuoConnect because it has Firewire, USB 2.0, Internal connectors for those interfaces and PSU supplied power. (Cost: CDN$132)
"It will become Big Brother On A Chip, worse than Palladium probably."
I believe that this is a very short-sighted and narrow-minded view of what's happenning here. This is not about being able to spy or citizens or having control of citizens' computers. This is about having economic freedom. It's about building an technologically based governmental system and economy built from the ground up in a way which is not regulated by Western governments and corporations. It is similar to the Linux movement and that's why they're getting Linux to run on it.
By building computer systems from the ground up on their own hardware, own chips, own Linux builds with their own applications, they are no longer on the leash represented by terms of service agreements with intel, microsoft, and any other company and have the freedom to do their business their way.
And I greatly admire this sentiment because it represents a 100% swing away from being controlled by anyone and anything.
And don't just think of this in the context of China! The scope of this is much bigger. For example, why do we use Linux? It's because we want to achieve freedom from the requirements, restrictions, fallacies, and roadblocks imposed by using solutions owned by big companies with who knows what code in them. We use Linux because we control it and it represents freedom from the restrictions of some other software maker. China has taken this one step further and has built their own architecture so they can do exactly what they want with no silly restrictions designed to channel money so some exective in a Western office tower. Wouldn't you like to do that?
I give TWO BIG THUMBS UP to China and their initiative in making a non-half-assed attempt to build their system their way. They have the long-term vision to realise that they need true economic freedom from the West to achieve modern-day economic greatness and I admire their initiative. I wish we were all so lucky.
"Im not in favor of random lawsuits, but theyve got it coming."
I wouldn't be surprised. In this case it's probably easier to quantify the damage done in terms of dollars and cents. In this respect, it's quite different than spyware which steals privacy and bandwidth, but not (directly) money.
I hope that the people at Lavasoft get Ad-aware to clean this up quickly.
"I firmly believe that pre-emptive medical scanning - that is, determining and eliminating the possibility of a given illness before it occurs - will be one of the major scientific breakthroughs of our time."
"I also know lots of people who don't live in cities. Guess what our broadband choices are? ISDN and a T1, or satellite. That's it."
I don't live in a city and my choices are: 28.8 modem (too far for 56k) or satellite. And you still need a modem for upstream on the satellite and have to run the f~ng windows packet wrapping software.
If decent broadband was actually available where I live in rural Canada, I would buy it. For this reason, I am actually looking into buying a house in the city. This is a university city so if I bought something near the campus, the rent would be nicely paid by student tenants.
"many of these are the same people who are paying $25/month for AOL dial-up. Otherwise there is a large number of 'normal' people (from what i've see anyway) who use "the internet" solely for work purposes..."
AOL != Normal ?!? Perhaps you have not been paying attention to the latest AOL television ad campaign.
Let me quote you a line (I am not making this up): "With AOL, you don't have to worry about anybody you meet online, they're just like you and me!"
Yes, on AOL, they assure that everyone using the service is 100% normal. (Follow the link to see some images of people you WON'T find on AOL. Don't worry, it's an at-the-office-safe link.)
"Reminds me a customer that called our ISP to sign up. He asked if he could get the Internet on floppies instead of a CD because he didn't have a CDROM drive."
I have heard of situations where newbies pay their ISPs by making cheques payable to "The Internet."
You've gotta wonder what to say to the person when they do something like that... I would generate an analogy, asking them of they pay their cable bill by making the cheque payable to "Cable TV."
", and it will probably take even longer for 3G since GSM allready handles talking."
Not necessarily. 3G is being depolyed in areas that are not GSM strongholds (i.e. in Korea, USA, Canada.) One thing that bothers me here in Canada is that people simply don't care about text messaging. or a certain quantity of information, you can send it more cheaply with text but do it more quickly and expensively with voice. Most folks here simply don't want to learn to type on a handset.
"umm what happens when you have no 802.11b signal what do you fall down to ?
what happens when your out in the middle of backwater and you really do need that towtruck ?
you need GSM still "
And from the article:
"The new thinking will also impact places where wireless penetration is conspicuously low -- among real water lilies and frogs, ironically, in some of the most rural, remote parts of our world. A dirty little secret about 802.11b is that it can cover more than 20 kilometers with suitably directional antennas."
I agree that WiFi, even with 20 km PoPs, is still not a GSM or 3G, etc replacement. I live in a rural area myself and there are no WiFi spots that I know of. This is mainly because you can ONLY get dialup!! What's the point of sharing a 28.8 (sorry, we are too far from the city 56k) over 1000 feet whetn your closest neighbour is 1 km away and you don't have a big enough pipe to support your own home LAN?
Yes, I agree that mobile phones will not go away any time soon, but it would be more interesting for VoIP to be able to tap into 802.11 frequencies automatically and communicate over the internet. Now THAT would make both 802.11 and mobile phones more useful, and give companies that produce both devices a new lease on life. It would also allow for you to get phone reception in your apartment, in the hallway, in the basement, etc where you don't get any signal right now.
(Note: I have heard that such things were tried already in Europe, under the name of 'Kermit' and some other names as well. They were failures. The difference here is that the phone would use 802.11 as a backup as opposed to tying you down to a PoP all the time.
"then it wouldn't be an "mp3" portable. So don't ask."
I think that the meaning of the word "mp3" has metamorphasised in its useage in online culture. "mp3" I think now means digital music suitable for online trading as opposed to audio compressed with mpeg layer 3 technology. That's really what it means. The average mp3 user knows nothing about fraunhofer. Heck, I still call my ogg + wma + few mp3 directory "mp3" because it fits the purpose.
"VideoLAN and ogle both use libdvdcss for CSS authentication and decryption. What saves you in the case of rpc-2 drives is that libdvdcss implements not one, but three different CSS access mechanisms. Two of them (called "key" and "disc") use the drive for authentication and require the drive region and disc region to match. However, the third method (called "title") attacks the algorithm cryptographically, and in most cases works even if the regions don't match."
Slashdot Mirror
/me drools
I'm in rural Ontario, Canada and we can get only 28.8 dialup. 31.2 if we're lucky. Up the street is worse (usually 21.6.)
As discussed above, satellite is just not worth the money due to the bad pings. As in Japan, geography here is the problem (except it's not mountains, it's the remoteness of the homes.) The houses are far apart that if you set up a wireless access point, you'd get in the very best case about 5 homes in a 1000 foot radius. Typically 2 or 3. And this is not accounting for the very dense trees which are full of water and block WAP signals. I don't think we'll EVER get decent broadband out here.
Now the best case in my area is if you live in the city and can get 1.5Mb cable or the new "upgraded" G.Lite DSL connections (960Kb.) (That is, unless you pull a T1 in.)
The moral of the story is that due to geography, some locations will NEVER have decent internet access for a good price in the forseeable future. That's just the way it is so some of us either have to live with it or relocate.
Damn, I've been living in the country for too long...
I do agree that the advantage would be in the government's hands and they wouldn't use it to increase the 'freedoms' of the average Chinese citizen.
It must be some monster catapult, considering that these ice hunks have hit in Spain, Australia and Mexico. Or perhaps it is the mutual hobby of ice factory workers all over the world.
An automated spell check is insufficient. It won't catch you when you say you posses excellent communication skills. (This is as opposed to possess. Look it up if you don't know the difference!)
One really great (windows) freeware tool I use all the time on any important written document is Readplease 2000. It reads the document out loud, making many hard-to-detect errors easy to find. It is also useful for people who are vision impaired because you don't need your eyes to 'read' the content of a document.
Some other pet peeves are the confusion of possessive pronouns versus plural pronouns (its|it's|it is|it has) and in general, messed up plurals versus possessive words.
If you're the type whose final carefully-checked document has grammar errors, then get someone else to check it! It constantly amazes me how often people whose first language is English and have an English-based university education still mix up homonyms.
This is madness. It's like banning those ramps people walk up to get onto aeroplanes because you've got a problem with some pesky malcontents using the planes as large missiles.
I have already spent dozens of hours narrowing down from dozens of google-identified cards based on price, chipset, brand, features, compatibility, availibility and so on. This involved contacting many manufacturers about the details of their cards, extensive usenet searching, examining many vendor catalogues, etc. Using google alone to determine which device should be purchased is foolish.
Interesting ... I was just about to buy that thing. Keep in mind that for US$132 your thoughts would make perfect sense to me but for CAD$132 ... maybe.
Basically I explained to the officer (who admitted she didn't even own a computer and didn't know why she got the case) how it was extremely easy to forge all of this, and from the header snippets in the printout (they knew nothing about full headers) that it probably came from a certain local ISP.
The officer understood and I never heard anything about it again.
If the CEO is stupid enough to go to law enforcement to try to have you put away and the law enforcement doesn't laugh it off, you can probably explain it to the officers and the CEO will get the results of the investigation and hopefully realise that s/he was pretty clueless to persue the whole endavour.
Keep in mind that Klez does not use your e-mail address found on the sending machine as the from: address in any subsequent e-mails. It gets addresses of other people from your outlook address book.
So if I'm stupid enough to use outlook and then stupid enough to let Klez loose on my machine and you're in my address book, then your address could appear on the from: field on the next victim's inbox. So even if you are using an ultra-secure unix box and read your mail with pine (which is a text-only client, so it is impossible to get any infection from an e-mail,) your friend who uses outlook can still cause you grief in this way.
This makes it hard to track down the source of the worm and that's why Klez is still fairly old but running rampant in the wild.
Finally, there will be salvation for the Canadian National Igloo!! I have been so worried about it melting due to global warming!
That POS $9 firewire card won't support OHCI due to a low-value ancient chipset so you can say hello to hellish proprietary windows-only drivers and flaky-at-best linux support. And I'm willing to bet it won't support an internal power connection so you won't be able to recharge the iPod through via power through the firewire cord. And good luck getting any modern-day DV cam connected to it.
You have to spend some good money to get a good firewire card. I am leaning toward the Adaptec DuoConnect because it has Firewire, USB 2.0, Internal connectors for those interfaces and PSU supplied power. (Cost: CDN$132)
I agree, but don't forget to factor in the cost of a firewire card!
I believe that this is a very short-sighted and narrow-minded view of what's happenning here. This is not about being able to spy or citizens or having control of citizens' computers. This is about having economic freedom. It's about building an technologically based governmental system and economy built from the ground up in a way which is not regulated by Western governments and corporations. It is similar to the Linux movement and that's why they're getting Linux to run on it.
By building computer systems from the ground up on their own hardware, own chips, own Linux builds with their own applications, they are no longer on the leash represented by terms of service agreements with intel, microsoft, and any other company and have the freedom to do their business their way.
And I greatly admire this sentiment because it represents a 100% swing away from being controlled by anyone and anything.
And don't just think of this in the context of China! The scope of this is much bigger. For example, why do we use Linux? It's because we want to achieve freedom from the requirements, restrictions, fallacies, and roadblocks imposed by using solutions owned by big companies with who knows what code in them. We use Linux because we control it and it represents freedom from the restrictions of some other software maker. China has taken this one step further and has built their own architecture so they can do exactly what they want with no silly restrictions designed to channel money so some exective in a Western office tower. Wouldn't you like to do that?
I give TWO BIG THUMBS UP to China and their initiative in making a non-half-assed attempt to build their system their way. They have the long-term vision to realise that they need true economic freedom from the West to achieve modern-day economic greatness and I admire their initiative. I wish we were all so lucky.
Ever heard of GARBAGE COLLECTION in Java? :-P
I mean, really, if Java had proper garbage collection, most programs would self-delete on execution.
I wouldn't be surprised. In this case it's probably easier to quantify the damage done in terms of dollars and cents. In this respect, it's quite different than spyware which steals privacy and bandwidth, but not (directly) money.
I hope that the people at Lavasoft get Ad-aware to clean this up quickly.
It's already been done.
Two words:
Holy Gattaca!
I don't live in a city and my choices are: 28.8 modem (too far for 56k) or satellite. And you still need a modem for upstream on the satellite and have to run the f~ng windows packet wrapping software.
If decent broadband was actually available where I live in rural Canada, I would buy it. For this reason, I am actually looking into buying a house in the city. This is a university city so if I bought something near the campus, the rent would be nicely paid by student tenants.
AOL != Normal ?!? Perhaps you have not been paying attention to the latest AOL television ad campaign.
Let me quote you a line (I am not making this up): "With AOL, you don't have to worry about anybody you meet online, they're just like you and me!"
Yes, on AOL, they assure that everyone using the service is 100% normal. (Follow the link to see some images of people you WON'T find on AOL. Don't worry, it's an at-the-office-safe link.)
I have heard of situations where newbies pay their ISPs by making cheques payable to "The Internet."
You've gotta wonder what to say to the person when they do something like that... I would generate an analogy, asking them of they pay their cable bill by making the cheque payable to "Cable TV."
Not necessarily. 3G is being depolyed in areas that are not GSM strongholds (i.e. in Korea, USA, Canada.) One thing that bothers me here in Canada is that people simply don't care about text messaging. or a certain quantity of information, you can send it more cheaply with text but do it more quickly and expensively with voice. Most folks here simply don't want to learn to type on a handset.
And from the article:
"The new thinking will also impact places where wireless penetration is conspicuously low -- among real water lilies and frogs, ironically, in some of the most rural, remote parts of our world. A dirty little secret about 802.11b is that it can cover more than 20 kilometers with suitably directional antennas."
I agree that WiFi, even with 20 km PoPs, is still not a GSM or 3G, etc replacement. I live in a rural area myself and there are no WiFi spots that I know of. This is mainly because you can ONLY get dialup!! What's the point of sharing a 28.8 (sorry, we are too far from the city 56k) over 1000 feet whetn your closest neighbour is 1 km away and you don't have a big enough pipe to support your own home LAN?
Yes, I agree that mobile phones will not go away any time soon, but it would be more interesting for VoIP to be able to tap into 802.11 frequencies automatically and communicate over the internet. Now THAT would make both 802.11 and mobile phones more useful, and give companies that produce both devices a new lease on life. It would also allow for you to get phone reception in your apartment, in the hallway, in the basement, etc where you don't get any signal right now.
(Note: I have heard that such things were tried already in Europe, under the name of 'Kermit' and some other names as well. They were failures. The difference here is that the phone would use 802.11 as a backup as opposed to tying you down to a PoP all the time.
I think that the meaning of the word "mp3" has metamorphasised in its useage in online culture. "mp3" I think now means digital music suitable for online trading as opposed to audio compressed with mpeg layer 3 technology. That's really what it means. The average mp3 user knows nothing about fraunhofer. Heck, I still call my ogg + wma + few mp3 directory "mp3" because it fits the purpose.
Thank you, I did not know this!