Aaah the old days of Tottenham Court Road. It's still a good place if you want to buy electronics cheaply and quickly - the shops will usually give a considerable discount for cash.
The original poster is traveling from the USA. Most items will cost 50% more on Tottenham Court Road than he can get online with overnight delivery at home.
If you're going to be bringing lots of powered appliances / chargers, I tend to find the cheapest / easiest solution is to bring a multi-way extender, and one plug adapter, rather than lots of plug adapters (although this is a habit I started for business travel, I now pack this for personal travel too, especially when travelling with my girlfriend, since it just makes things easier for charging phones, iPods etc.).
I go the other way. After making 10-20 international trips per year I was fed up with dealing with all the plugs.
I picked one plug type to standardise on for all the devices I travel with. I went with the US earthed type because they're the most compact and they don't fall out of the sockets. My laptop, phone charger, etc., all have that plug (and I have a power strip of that type at my desk at home).
Then I carry a little 3-way cube (one plug and three sockets). It's tiny, 2.5cm per side plus the pluggy bits sticking out. picture here
Then I bring the appropriate single-purpose adapter for the countr(ies) I'll be visiting. I hate the multi-plug ones (the kinds with slidey bits to change which plug they go into) because they always fall apart. The single-purpose ones last for years. I use WonPro WA-II series, which have no moving parts, provide proper earthing when possible, and accept any type of plug. pictures here. They cost about $3 each at shops in town and are indestructible.
I plug my stuff into the cube, the cube into the country-specific one, and the country-specific one into the wall. This approach is more compact, more reliable, and way cheaper than the alternatives. From one outlet (often all you'll get in a hotel), I get 3 US-style outlets and one universal outlet.
did you ever consider that more services like Opera Mini means more difficulty enforcing the censorship, and a higher chance of cracks in the firewall?
No, but I have considered that you've posted some 4,000 near-identical shallow messages in defense of this decision which makes you sound like an Opera shill (whether or not you are).
Nevertheless, I'll consider it now.
Are you arguing that Opera is really bad at implementing censorship, and so people will find ways through just by virtue of them being involved?
Or are you arguing that they will deliberately make it easy for Chinese to evade censorship by putting in place a weak implementation?
Or are you just trying to have your cake and eat it too?
What were Opera's options? Do you even know what actually happened? But hey, let's not worry about sacrificing Opera's employees in China, right?
Are jobs more important than principles? That's the question you're leading us to. What's your answer? Do you have some complicated rationale about how being an enabler for China's information control society but employing 26 of China's 1.3 billion people in desk jobs is a net gain for the people of China? Can you elaborate on it a bit further?
Exactly what I was going to say. I've been providing support this way for years, it's free and works extremely well even when I'm on the other side of the planet.
I run a moderately popular URL shortener, and I set up the namespace for the URLs in such a way that it wouldn't interfere with most other uses of the domain in the event that URL shortening proves to be too much of a pain in the ass (which it is starting to, with all the spam policing required these days).
The domain is probably much more valuable than the shortening service, so I am loth to sign any agreement that turns it over in the event that I give up on shortening. So even though it would be easy for me to sell the domain with a proviso that already-shortened URLs continue to work (that part of it is just a static database and a tiny redirector script), I can't participate in 301works (at least as I understand it).
Fair point, I do not get all these PDA functions and HSDPA whatsits from my landline phone, I'll scratch that from my revised version of this argument to be trotted out in a later Slashdot thread.
Where the hell do you live that a cell phone costs $600?
I said "a good mobile". I can get one for $30, but it will have one feature (alarm clock or maybe calculator if I'm lucky).
Phones cost about the same everywhere. You can get them subsidised by your carrier in some markets, but not here, where $15 buys all the phone service that most people need:
about 400 outgoing domestic or international (selected destinations) voice minutes or 500 SMS,
unlimited incoming calls and SMS
outgoing calls $0.04/minute after that
tack on unlimited 3G data for another $15
group as many lines together as you like as a "family" for unlimited free calls/SMS/MMS between them.
It would take them over 3 years to recover the full cost of the phone before the first penny went to paying for the phone service. Hence I pay $600 for that $600 phone. Well worth it; in the long run it's cheaper than paying exorbitant monthly service charges.
ISDN is on the way out. It's still used for office phone systems that need a lot of lines, and it seems to be popular among people who wear lederhosen, but other than that it's a dead end.
One reason is that the hardware and the service are extremely expensive.
VoIP can get you the same functionality (except for the reliability, which can be excellent with ISDN) for pennies on the dollar.
Why on earth are you still using a landline? A mobile phone will probably be cheaper, you can take it with you anywhere (even in your home), and most of them can sync with your computer contacts (or even your contacts in the cloud).
My landline is free (included with DSL, they're desperate to keep subscribers), whereas my mobile costs me $15/month.
The cordless phone works perfectly everywhere in the house, whereas the mobile only works in certain magic spots (they tell me this is a normal consequence of living way up in a high-rise).
The landline has crystal clear quality at all times, whereas the mobile is compressed and ugly even under the best of circumstances.
The landline lets me use any number of nice, easy-to-hold phones with great speakerphones, whereas the mobile only lets me use tiny little things that are impossible to rest on my shoulder while using my hands for anything.
The landline integrates perfectly with my Asterisk VoIP setup at no cost, whereas the mobile requires me to pay $0.04/minute when I route calls to it.
The landline + VoIP arrangement lets me call almost any country I need to at piddling charges ($0.00-$0.02/minute); the mobile is $0.05/minute at best for international calls and skyrockets upward from there for certain destinations.
A good landline phone costs $40 and a good VoIP phone costs $200. A good mobile costs $600.
I mean, I can see arguments for preferring a central fusebox or breaker panel, but I am completely flummoxed about why someone would prefer to have the option to go without shuttering. I mean, what advantage do you get other than the warm, fuzzy feeling of "You're not the boss of me!"
If the pins weren't finger-sized, there wouldn't be such a need for shuttering.
The US sockets are small enough that you have to look around to find something to fit in there. If you're putting that much effort into it, surely you'll figure out how to defeat the shutter on a UK plug with a toothpick, pen, key, or whatever else you have lying around.
I have never in my 28 years seen a British plug fall out of a socket, no matter how old. The pins, as mentioned, are very chunky and do not bend.
Are you serious? I go around the house every few days nudging all the elephantine 3-way UK plug adapters back into their sockets, because they slowly creep out until they reach a near-equilibrium point where they start buzzing and sparking because the malevolent mechanism inside the wall socket isn't sure whether to cut them off or not.
Brittish: hate it. It's enormous, makes it impractical to fork one outlet into many.
Correct. I live in Malaysia, where we have to use these abominable British plugs.
A simple power strip is the size of a small car. I could fit 6 earthed Euro plugs, or about 15 earthed American plugs, into the space that gets me 3 or 4 chunky UK beasts.
I have wired my computer work are with US outlets so that I can plug in a reasonable number of things without filling 80% of the room with plugs and receptacles. It's easy to buy things with US ends on them and they're rated for 250V anyway.
And just wait until you step on a British plug. You'll be lucky to regain use of your foot after years of physical therapy. It's designed to go up in between the bones and pull them apart like a hollow-point bullet.
Did you read the post you are replying to? He was pointing out that in the event of a short circuit, the 15A device wouldn't receive the circuit-breaker protection it expected.
Yeah, but our neighbours across the southern bridge can get 100mbps, plus look at how happy they are in that photo. I mean, I understand why he's happy, but why are the girls so thrilled? Dude set up their 100mpbs service with a Linksys b/g router that can't push half that speed.
Looking forward to this here in Malaysia. Global Transit's HQ is just 200m from my house. When I see the truck pulling the final bit of cable wet and dripping from its long sea voyage, I'll slip the dudes a few bucks to tap a slice off for me.
Seriously, though, this is a country where almost all content of interest is foreign: unlike Japan or Thailand, say, there's no significant local-language content industry. Everyone reads English and/or Chinese and therefore skips straight past the homegrown small-potatoes sites, on to the major international sites (in fact I think most Americans would be surprised how well-integrated Malaysians are into the American view of the web). Every little bit of overseas capacity makes a big difference. Most Malaysian users' home broadband is capped to a measly maximum 4mbps because demand for bandwidth so far outstrips supply.
Latin seems foreign to most Japanese people, I think.
Here in Malaysia, almost all phones support Latin and Chinese, and some also support Thai.
I suspect my phone (Nokia E61i) has the capacity to support most major scripts; as when I travel elsewhere I often get SMS spam in local character sets (Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, etc). Complex scripts are correctly rendered.
There are less that two hundred, not millions, of potential ccTLDs.
How do you come by that calculation? There are thousands of characters in the Chinese space alone. Is your desk perhaps being affected by a factorial dampening field?
There's only a handful languages that use strict ascii, one is dead, and a bunch is a small family of closely related languages spoken by about 2 million people in the Pacific, which is what TFS and TFA describes TLDs as being able to do.
Strict-ASCII nations Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia collectively amount to 370 million people, 185 times your estimate. And that's before we get to all the little countries floating around here.
most cell phones and video game consoles and other specialized devices have no way at all to enter foreign alphabets.
Huh? Most cell phones are sold in non-ASCII markets and have ample ways to enter foreign alphabets. Maybe you were just talking about most cell phones in your pocket.
Unicode can mean many things - UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 - so specifying Unicode is not detailed enough to implement and by not specifying, it is opening a can of worms IMO.
You seem to know enough to sling a lot of words (and boy have you slung a lot of irrelevant words) but not enough to understand what you're talking about.
I'll help. You're talking about different encodings. Well, punycode is also an encoding, in the category of UTF8 and UTF16. And it's specified. So that's all they need to do.
Actually it was possible already for a few years to register domain names in Chinese characters in Hong Kong, but still ending in.hk. Now that part can also become Chinese characters as replacement for.hk,.cn or.tw.
The catch was that a Chinese URL would work only within HK/China. Now this will also start to work worldwide.
There has been nothing stopping you from visiting a Chinese-character.hk domain name for lo these many years, they've worked fine.
What's changing is that now the.hk part itself can be in Chinese characters.
US ASCII isn't even considered good enough for british english because of loan words - it can do three languages right: Latin, US English and Hawai'ian.
Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog, and I'm sure many many more.
Slashdot Mirror
The original poster is traveling from the USA. Most items will cost 50% more on Tottenham Court Road than he can get online with overnight delivery at home.
I go the other way. After making 10-20 international trips per year I was fed up with dealing with all the plugs.
I picked one plug type to standardise on for all the devices I travel with. I went with the US earthed type because they're the most compact and they don't fall out of the sockets. My laptop, phone charger, etc., all have that plug (and I have a power strip of that type at my desk at home).
Then I carry a little 3-way cube (one plug and three sockets). It's tiny, 2.5cm per side plus the pluggy bits sticking out. picture here
Then I bring the appropriate single-purpose adapter for the countr(ies) I'll be visiting. I hate the multi-plug ones (the kinds with slidey bits to change which plug they go into) because they always fall apart. The single-purpose ones last for years. I use WonPro WA-II series, which have no moving parts, provide proper earthing when possible, and accept any type of plug. pictures here. They cost about $3 each at shops in town and are indestructible.
I plug my stuff into the cube, the cube into the country-specific one, and the country-specific one into the wall. This approach is more compact, more reliable, and way cheaper than the alternatives. From one outlet (often all you'll get in a hotel), I get 3 US-style outlets and one universal outlet.
No, but I have considered that you've posted some 4,000 near-identical shallow messages in defense of this decision which makes you sound like an Opera shill (whether or not you are).
Nevertheless, I'll consider it now.
Are you arguing that Opera is really bad at implementing censorship, and so people will find ways through just by virtue of them being involved?
Or are you arguing that they will deliberately make it easy for Chinese to evade censorship by putting in place a weak implementation?
Or are you just trying to have your cake and eat it too?
Are jobs more important than principles? That's the question you're leading us to. What's your answer? Do you have some complicated rationale about how being an enabler for China's information control society but employing 26 of China's 1.3 billion people in desk jobs is a net gain for the people of China? Can you elaborate on it a bit further?
Exactly what I was going to say. I've been providing support this way for years, it's free and works extremely well even when I'm on the other side of the planet.
I run a moderately popular URL shortener, and I set up the namespace for the URLs in such a way that it wouldn't interfere with most other uses of the domain in the event that URL shortening proves to be too much of a pain in the ass (which it is starting to, with all the spam policing required these days).
The domain is probably much more valuable than the shortening service, so I am loth to sign any agreement that turns it over in the event that I give up on shortening. So even though it would be easy for me to sell the domain with a proviso that already-shortened URLs continue to work (that part of it is just a static database and a tiny redirector script), I can't participate in 301works (at least as I understand it).
I completely agree. Frankly I'm not sure why Google hasn't already dropped his sites for a week or so just to let everyone know what's really what.
Fair point, I do not get all these PDA functions and HSDPA whatsits from my landline phone, I'll scratch that from my revised version of this argument to be trotted out in a later Slashdot thread.
I said "a good mobile". I can get one for $30, but it will have one feature (alarm clock or maybe calculator if I'm lucky).
Phones cost about the same everywhere. You can get them subsidised by your carrier in some markets, but not here, where $15 buys all the phone service that most people need:
It would take them over 3 years to recover the full cost of the phone before the first penny went to paying for the phone service. Hence I pay $600 for that $600 phone. Well worth it; in the long run it's cheaper than paying exorbitant monthly service charges.
ISDN is on the way out. It's still used for office phone systems that need a lot of lines, and it seems to be popular among people who wear lederhosen, but other than that it's a dead end.
One reason is that the hardware and the service are extremely expensive.
VoIP can get you the same functionality (except for the reliability, which can be excellent with ISDN) for pennies on the dollar.
My landline is free (included with DSL, they're desperate to keep subscribers), whereas my mobile costs me $15/month.
The cordless phone works perfectly everywhere in the house, whereas the mobile only works in certain magic spots (they tell me this is a normal consequence of living way up in a high-rise).
The landline has crystal clear quality at all times, whereas the mobile is compressed and ugly even under the best of circumstances.
The landline lets me use any number of nice, easy-to-hold phones with great speakerphones, whereas the mobile only lets me use tiny little things that are impossible to rest on my shoulder while using my hands for anything.
The landline integrates perfectly with my Asterisk VoIP setup at no cost, whereas the mobile requires me to pay $0.04/minute when I route calls to it.
The landline + VoIP arrangement lets me call almost any country I need to at piddling charges ($0.00-$0.02/minute); the mobile is $0.05/minute at best for international calls and skyrockets upward from there for certain destinations.
A good landline phone costs $40 and a good VoIP phone costs $200. A good mobile costs $600.
Telephone exchanges are better hidden and have fewer vulnerable exterior parts.
If the pins weren't finger-sized, there wouldn't be such a need for shuttering.
The US sockets are small enough that you have to look around to find something to fit in there. If you're putting that much effort into it, surely you'll figure out how to defeat the shutter on a UK plug with a toothpick, pen, key, or whatever else you have lying around.
Are you serious? I go around the house every few days nudging all the elephantine 3-way UK plug adapters back into their sockets, because they slowly creep out until they reach a near-equilibrium point where they start buzzing and sparking because the malevolent mechanism inside the wall socket isn't sure whether to cut them off or not.
Correct. I live in Malaysia, where we have to use these abominable British plugs.
A simple power strip is the size of a small car. I could fit 6 earthed Euro plugs, or about 15 earthed American plugs, into the space that gets me 3 or 4 chunky UK beasts.
I have wired my computer work are with US outlets so that I can plug in a reasonable number of things without filling 80% of the room with plugs and receptacles. It's easy to buy things with US ends on them and they're rated for 250V anyway.
And just wait until you step on a British plug. You'll be lucky to regain use of your foot after years of physical therapy. It's designed to go up in between the bones and pull them apart like a hollow-point bullet.
Did you read the post you are replying to? He was pointing out that in the event of a short circuit, the 15A device wouldn't receive the circuit-breaker protection it expected.
Yeah, but our neighbours across the southern bridge can get 100mbps, plus look at how happy they are in that photo. I mean, I understand why he's happy, but why are the girls so thrilled? Dude set up their 100mpbs service with a Linksys b/g router that can't push half that speed.
Looking forward to this here in Malaysia. Global Transit's HQ is just 200m from my house. When I see the truck pulling the final bit of cable wet and dripping from its long sea voyage, I'll slip the dudes a few bucks to tap a slice off for me.
Seriously, though, this is a country where almost all content of interest is foreign: unlike Japan or Thailand, say, there's no significant local-language content industry. Everyone reads English and/or Chinese and therefore skips straight past the homegrown small-potatoes sites, on to the major international sites (in fact I think most Americans would be surprised how well-integrated Malaysians are into the American view of the web). Every little bit of overseas capacity makes a big difference. Most Malaysian users' home broadband is capped to a measly maximum 4mbps because demand for bandwidth so far outstrips supply.
Latin seems foreign to most Japanese people, I think.
Here in Malaysia, almost all phones support Latin and Chinese, and some also support Thai.
I suspect my phone (Nokia E61i) has the capacity to support most major scripts; as when I travel elsewhere I often get SMS spam in local character sets (Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, etc). Complex scripts are correctly rendered.
How do you come by that calculation? There are thousands of characters in the Chinese space alone. Is your desk perhaps being affected by a factorial dampening field?
What does that even mean? UTF-8 isn't a character set.
Strict-ASCII nations Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia collectively amount to 370 million people, 185 times your estimate. And that's before we get to all the little countries floating around here.
Huh? Most cell phones are sold in non-ASCII markets and have ample ways to enter foreign alphabets. Maybe you were just talking about most cell phones in your pocket.
You seem to know enough to sling a lot of words (and boy have you slung a lot of irrelevant words) but not enough to understand what you're talking about.
I'll help. You're talking about different encodings. Well, punycode is also an encoding, in the category of UTF8 and UTF16. And it's specified. So that's all they need to do.
There has been nothing stopping you from visiting a Chinese-character .hk domain name for lo these many years, they've worked fine.
What's changing is that now the .hk part itself can be in Chinese characters.
Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog, and I'm sure many many more.