The Chinese government sponsors and somewhat aggressively supports their own Linux distribution. I think this is about Lenovo and Steve Ballmer, and not Chairman Mao's ghost.
Finally, one has to be careful about the commercial case. There -is- infrastructure in Africa & other areas. The problem isn't so much lack of technology as abusive pricing by national telecom operators. I can't imagine they would allow a system like O3B to operate in their country without charging a license fee (like mobiles).
So go around the monopolies. Google can leaflet villages with plans of how to build an earth station using a wok and parts cannibalized from old car stereos.
If your LAN has more than 2ms latency, you may want to think about replacing the tin cans and string with actual, you know, wires.
Anyway, where I am, ping times to the USA are about 300ms, and it's fine for most normal uses (web, email, VoIP, ssh sessions, etc.). I'm not a gamer, but as you say that's probably not Google's major concern at the moment.
And for managing prisoners with "Nothing to lose" - they have something to lose - their life. Riot in prison, we extend your term. If your on life, we give you the death penalty
Considering that taxes pay for those extended sentences and expensive (except in China) executions, it seems to me that just tossing a few set-top boxes into the joint would be a whole lot cheaper.
I was refuting the ridiculous claim by SuperKendall that "if this somehow was possible, I'm confident Steve Jobs would step in and either set AT&T straight or foot the bill himself."
You must feel like a big man, refuting an obvious joke. Next try poking holes in the one about the three rabbis that walked into a bar.
What about ads from companies like Boeing and Lockheed? Nonspecific ads from companies like Nike and Adidas? Hell, the Visa ads narrated by Morgan Freeman that ran during the olympics? None of them tell you to buy anything specific. Instead, they all convey an image and associate the brand with that image.
Exactly. Interview Joe Sixpack after he watches one of those new-agey Boeing ads, and ask him to give you some quick bullet-point reactions. You'll get "high-tech", "futuristic", "exciting", "global", etc.
Now show him this Microsoft ad. You'll get "cheap shoes", "Bill Gates' saggy ass", and "what the fuck?"
They are also trying to get people to discuss the ad. In that they clearly succeeded.
In that case, they could have just shown a close-up of a steaming pile of dog turds for 90 seconds, then closed with the Microsoft logo. You can bet people would have talked about that.
Surely they wanted more for their money than a little attention. You don't hire Jerry Seinfeld and pay for minute-and-a-half spots just to get people discussing whether or not you have a good ad.
We had a Thai intern at work a few years ago, and from her account Thailand has industrialized and is no longer a third world country.
Well, we know where she comes from then (the city). There's two very different countries inside Thailand's borders. A few pockets of expensive development, some shiny high-tech factories... and thousands of miles of desperately poor rural areas.
it appears that even though they may no longer be a third world country, their government is still authoritarian.
Actually I would say that remarkable restraint has been the main hallmark of the present uprising.
The military has largely been standing and watching, most of the police have been ordered to leave their batons at the station, and even the beseiged PM has insisted against a violent crackdown (unless things changed dramatically since last I read the news 12 hours ago).
From what I've read, the short of this state of emergency is simply an elite urban ruling class that supports the Thai monarchy and abolished the prime minister back in 2006. The elite class is calling itself the People's Alliance for Democracy even though they have little to nothing to do with fair representation across the entire state. Again, I don't live there, this is second hand information.
It's more like this:
From 2001 to 2006, PM Thaksin Shinawatra presided over an administration that systematically violated the human rights of its subjects, and which stole public money at a rate unprecedented in the history of democratic Thailand. For every dollar stolen, he gave a few cents to the poor in rural areas. To be fair, these poor people hadn't really seen much of anything before, so even those few cents were pretty exciting to them.
This polarised the country:
On the one hand, you had the middle and upper class, who were on relatively solid economic ground and didn't benefit much from Thaksin's giveaway programmes. They had the luxury of focusing their attention on the waves of brutal extrajudicial killings, the wholesale expropriation of national assets into Thaksin family portfolios, and the repeated clampdowns on Thaksin's political opposition.
On the other hand, you had the rural poor, who were more numerous, and for whom human rights and national financial stewardship were only high-falutin' mumbo-jumbo. All they knew was suddenly they were getting paved roads through their villages and other cheap but highly visible handouts. They came to the polling place in droves and re-elected Thaksin in 2005.
Finally, in 2006, a military coup with some level of support from the king deposed Thaksin and sent him to exile.
Now, we have a new PM, viewed by many on both sides as being nothing more than a puppet for Thaksin. That view helped get him elected by the rural masses, and it predisposed the educated urban population to disliking him. As his government continued to pursue policies aimed at defending Thaksin and freeing his assets from the legal system, the people in the cities launched the present unrest.
I really don't think this is as simple as "lovely democratic government ousted by wealthy elite pigs". It's more like "successful kleptocratic demagogues ousted by democracy-agnostic educated classes".
That's because when roaming you use your home country's short message centre. The available routes for your messages is the same as it would be if you where actually at home. The OP asserts that messages originated from a local SIM, which uses the native SMS-C by default, is not able to interoperate with certain international destinations. This behaviour is not contradicted by your experience.
I simplified for the sake of brevity.
I travel with two phones. One holds my home SIM, and one gets a prepaid SIM.
The old beat-up one containing my home SIM is really just for receiving SMS, since that's the number published as "SMS:" on my business card and I don't have any way of forwarding those (anyone know of a service to route SMS to IP?).
The one with the prepaid SIM is used for sending SMS (since it's almost always cheaper than way than via roaming), and for receiving calls (forwarded to it via my VoIP number which is the one I give out).
It's true that the two phones often experience different SMS connectivity gaps (though they're also normally on different local networks, since the one I bought a prepaid card for may not be the first one that my roaming SIM makes friends with).
Nevertheless it works almost all the time on both phones, and it's been many years since I've seen the garbled-text thing from an encoding problem when an SMS is in a non-Latin script.
They'd have two choices from there though. Design a new chinese keyboard (very possible) or try to adapt an querty keyboard to access those thousands of characters... I shudder to think it, but they'd have to force chinese to fit into the querty character set just for entry... Damn difficult/annoying task that.
Are you posting from 1975? What you talk about was solved decades ago already.
Chinese SMS messages are entered with pinyin (at least on my phone). You type on the roman-alphabet keyboard and get Chinese characters. For example, type 'bei' and then it shows you all the different characters that match, and you scroll to select one. A bit more tedious than typing in a European language but my Chinese friends seem to zip right along.
My phone also seems to support a stroke-based method of entering Chinese characters but I have no idea how that works. I've only ever seen people using the pinyin method.
While an SMS service exists in China, I was speaking from the point of view of sending and receiving SMS messages to and from China. I doubt that the existing networks or handsets are compatible with each other, and the main reason for the lack of connectivity with Chinese or other networks is that the telcoms companies have not bothered to invest in the necessary upgrades. Given that international SMS text messages still cost a pretty penny, there is likely little demand for them to do so at this time.
Everything you say is still wrong.
UCS2-encoded SMS is a standard and works between handsets and networks. You honestly think that the billion Chinese speakers have all segregated themselves by handset maker, and Nokia users only SMS with other Nokia users? It's a preposterous notion and obviously false.
The "lack of connectivity with Chinese or other networks" hasn't been demonstrated. It's been asserted and then met with scores of counterexamples in this discussion. I myself have carried a phone to some 50 countries in the past few years, most of them poor and haggard, and my phone has worked in all of them (except Japan and Korea, where I had to rent at the airport). China included. I have received welcome messages and spam in the local scripts, as well as roaming info messages from my own Malaysian carrier in English. My friends have SMSed me and the messages have instantaneously appeared on my phone.
SMS messages may cost you a pretty penny, but it doesn't mean they're expensive in the abstract. My carrier charges me a flat EUR0.04 per outbound international text no matter where it's to, and they are making a profit doing it. So the raw cost (whatever they pay to the SMS exchange company) is clearly less than that.
What I think we have here, is an OP whose own carrier had some sort of problem exchanging messages with one number in China when he tried once or twice. Which is more forgivable than you, who are pulling cardinal nonsense straight out of your arse based on nothing at all.
1) Why do people still use SMS?
2) When will they stop, and stfu already?
We use it because it's built into the phone, it works with every phone no matter how old and crappy, it's supported pretty much everywhere, and the people we are communicating with already know how to use it.
I have been many places where there was simply no data service available via the cell networks (at least that I could come up with - let me know if you know how to get online in Syria using a prepaid SIM). But I've never been anywhere that SMS didn't work.
No. A more pragmatic answer would be that SMS does not and probably will never support Chinese characters, or logograms of any kind. It probably doesn't even support languages written in Greek or Cyrillic characters. SMS can created by latin script societies, and like ASCII before it, probably makes the most possible use out of the fairly small latin character set.
How on earth was this rated +4, insightful? It's patently retarded. I think a lot of people just score up anything that's longer than a few paragraphs without actually reading it.
I live in Malaysia where people send Chinese text messages all day long. I get them now and then as wrong numbers (my friends know I don't read Chinese). When I travel to Thailand I get Thai SMS spam on my phone all damn night long when I'm trying to sleep.
I did not install any special software or do anything special to my phone; it just worked. Worked with my previous phone too.
When I set my phone's input language to Chinese, the number of characters I can type per SMS charging unit changes from 160 to 70. A few seconds of googling based on that discovery turned up the fact that SMS messages can be encoded in UCS2 which allows most if not all Unicode characters. Read here: http://www.dreamfabric.com/sms/ for more than you ever wanted to know about the message format.
Have you ever set foot outside of Amsterdam during your stay in that country?
Yes, my stay in that country has lasted a major portion of my life, more than half of it in a small town. I'm just pointing out that the rules aren't as cut-and-dried as presented here. A significant share of the population lives within a reasonable bike ride of supermarkets that are open on Sunday. Over time the number of these will only increase.
Every single American living there hates the country with a passion and is counting the days until they can leave again.
Nope. It's simply that Expatica is a magnet for disaffected Americans who find it impossible to adjust to even the tiniest changes in anything about their life. It's a self-selected group of people who spend their days whining to each other about the rigorous bureaucracy and steep staircases.
The Netherlands is full of many thousands of Americans, of whom about 25 make a regular habit of this online whinery. To take that as representative of anything would be to spit in the eye of all scientists and particularly statisticians everywhere.
I have yet to meet a Dutch person whose English was anything less than excellent.
Go to the Netherlands and head out into the countryside. Many of my older rural relatives can barely squeeze out a sentence in English. Even younger people in the smaller towns have a hard time with it, since they never practise outside of school. Many TV shows are in English, true, but they're subtitled, so it's easy to "cheat".
This is not to deny that overall the level of English in the Netherlands is excellent for a completely non-native tongue. But definitely not every Dutch person is fluent; far from it.
Slashdot Mirror
The Chinese government sponsors and somewhat aggressively supports their own Linux distribution. I think this is about Lenovo and Steve Ballmer, and not Chairman Mao's ghost.
So go around the monopolies. Google can leaflet villages with plans of how to build an earth station using a wok and parts cannibalized from old car stereos.
Are you allowed to build a tower?
If your LAN has more than 2ms latency, you may want to think about replacing the tin cans and string with actual, you know, wires.
Anyway, where I am, ping times to the USA are about 300ms, and it's fine for most normal uses (web, email, VoIP, ssh sessions, etc.). I'm not a gamer, but as you say that's probably not Google's major concern at the moment.
It wouldn't be any fun if it came with a rimshot...
Considering that taxes pay for those extended sentences and expensive (except in China) executions, it seems to me that just tossing a few set-top boxes into the joint would be a whole lot cheaper.
I've never lived in a house with more than one TV. Is it that common? (I ask out of genuine ignorance)
Never! That's a sure way to get the TV Licence people to your door.
I don't know, but his face sure rings a bell.
You must feel like a big man, refuting an obvious joke. Next try poking holes in the one about the three rabbis that walked into a bar.
Exactly. Interview Joe Sixpack after he watches one of those new-agey Boeing ads, and ask him to give you some quick bullet-point reactions. You'll get "high-tech", "futuristic", "exciting", "global", etc.
Now show him this Microsoft ad. You'll get "cheap shoes", "Bill Gates' saggy ass", and "what the fuck?"
Quite a different story.
In that case, they could have just shown a close-up of a steaming pile of dog turds for 90 seconds, then closed with the Microsoft logo. You can bet people would have talked about that.
Surely they wanted more for their money than a little attention. You don't hire Jerry Seinfeld and pay for minute-and-a-half spots just to get people discussing whether or not you have a good ad.
What kind of weird bar was this, where they applaud commercials?
Actually, forget that, please answer this instead: What were the "right spots" at which to laugh? I sure missed those.
I did not say (nor do I think I implied) that a paved road has no value.
I simply said that for every dollar Thaksin stole from the government, he spent only a small amount on improvements to that benefitted the poor.
It's a sad statement about Thailand that this small amount of spending was so much more than the poor had seen in the past.
Pronounced "poo-KET".
Well, we know where she comes from then (the city). There's two very different countries inside Thailand's borders. A few pockets of expensive development, some shiny high-tech factories... and thousands of miles of desperately poor rural areas.
Actually I would say that remarkable restraint has been the main hallmark of the present uprising.
The military has largely been standing and watching, most of the police have been ordered to leave their batons at the station, and even the beseiged PM has insisted against a violent crackdown (unless things changed dramatically since last I read the news 12 hours ago).
It's more like this:
From 2001 to 2006, PM Thaksin Shinawatra presided over an administration that systematically violated the human rights of its subjects, and which stole public money at a rate unprecedented in the history of democratic Thailand. For every dollar stolen, he gave a few cents to the poor in rural areas. To be fair, these poor people hadn't really seen much of anything before, so even those few cents were pretty exciting to them.
This polarised the country:
On the one hand, you had the middle and upper class, who were on relatively solid economic ground and didn't benefit much from Thaksin's giveaway programmes. They had the luxury of focusing their attention on the waves of brutal extrajudicial killings, the wholesale expropriation of national assets into Thaksin family portfolios, and the repeated clampdowns on Thaksin's political opposition.
On the other hand, you had the rural poor, who were more numerous, and for whom human rights and national financial stewardship were only high-falutin' mumbo-jumbo. All they knew was suddenly they were getting paved roads through their villages and other cheap but highly visible handouts. They came to the polling place in droves and re-elected Thaksin in 2005.
Finally, in 2006, a military coup with some level of support from the king deposed Thaksin and sent him to exile.
Now, we have a new PM, viewed by many on both sides as being nothing more than a puppet for Thaksin. That view helped get him elected by the rural masses, and it predisposed the educated urban population to disliking him. As his government continued to pursue policies aimed at defending Thaksin and freeing his assets from the legal system, the people in the cities launched the present unrest.
I really don't think this is as simple as "lovely democratic government ousted by wealthy elite pigs". It's more like "successful kleptocratic demagogues ousted by democracy-agnostic educated classes".
I simplified for the sake of brevity.
I travel with two phones. One holds my home SIM, and one gets a prepaid SIM.
The old beat-up one containing my home SIM is really just for receiving SMS, since that's the number published as "SMS:" on my business card and I don't have any way of forwarding those (anyone know of a service to route SMS to IP?).
The one with the prepaid SIM is used for sending SMS (since it's almost always cheaper than way than via roaming), and for receiving calls (forwarded to it via my VoIP number which is the one I give out).
It's true that the two phones often experience different SMS connectivity gaps (though they're also normally on different local networks, since the one I bought a prepaid card for may not be the first one that my roaming SIM makes friends with).
Nevertheless it works almost all the time on both phones, and it's been many years since I've seen the garbled-text thing from an encoding problem when an SMS is in a non-Latin script.
Are you posting from 1975? What you talk about was solved decades ago already.
Chinese SMS messages are entered with pinyin (at least on my phone). You type on the roman-alphabet keyboard and get Chinese characters. For example, type 'bei' and then it shows you all the different characters that match, and you scroll to select one. A bit more tedious than typing in a European language but my Chinese friends seem to zip right along.
My phone also seems to support a stroke-based method of entering Chinese characters but I have no idea how that works. I've only ever seen people using the pinyin method.
Everything you say is still wrong.
UCS2-encoded SMS is a standard and works between handsets and networks. You honestly think that the billion Chinese speakers have all segregated themselves by handset maker, and Nokia users only SMS with other Nokia users? It's a preposterous notion and obviously false.
The "lack of connectivity with Chinese or other networks" hasn't been demonstrated. It's been asserted and then met with scores of counterexamples in this discussion. I myself have carried a phone to some 50 countries in the past few years, most of them poor and haggard, and my phone has worked in all of them (except Japan and Korea, where I had to rent at the airport). China included. I have received welcome messages and spam in the local scripts, as well as roaming info messages from my own Malaysian carrier in English. My friends have SMSed me and the messages have instantaneously appeared on my phone.
SMS messages may cost you a pretty penny, but it doesn't mean they're expensive in the abstract. My carrier charges me a flat EUR0.04 per outbound international text no matter where it's to, and they are making a profit doing it. So the raw cost (whatever they pay to the SMS exchange company) is clearly less than that.
What I think we have here, is an OP whose own carrier had some sort of problem exchanging messages with one number in China when he tried once or twice. Which is more forgivable than you, who are pulling cardinal nonsense straight out of your arse based on nothing at all.
We use it because it's built into the phone, it works with every phone no matter how old and crappy, it's supported pretty much everywhere, and the people we are communicating with already know how to use it.
I have been many places where there was simply no data service available via the cell networks (at least that I could come up with - let me know if you know how to get online in Syria using a prepaid SIM). But I've never been anywhere that SMS didn't work.
How on earth was this rated +4, insightful? It's patently retarded. I think a lot of people just score up anything that's longer than a few paragraphs without actually reading it.
I live in Malaysia where people send Chinese text messages all day long. I get them now and then as wrong numbers (my friends know I don't read Chinese). When I travel to Thailand I get Thai SMS spam on my phone all damn night long when I'm trying to sleep.
I did not install any special software or do anything special to my phone; it just worked. Worked with my previous phone too.
When I set my phone's input language to Chinese, the number of characters I can type per SMS charging unit changes from 160 to 70. A few seconds of googling based on that discovery turned up the fact that SMS messages can be encoded in UCS2 which allows most if not all Unicode characters. Read here: http://www.dreamfabric.com/sms/ for more than you ever wanted to know about the message format.
Yes, my stay in that country has lasted a major portion of my life, more than half of it in a small town. I'm just pointing out that the rules aren't as cut-and-dried as presented here. A significant share of the population lives within a reasonable bike ride of supermarkets that are open on Sunday. Over time the number of these will only increase.
Nope. It's simply that Expatica is a magnet for disaffected Americans who find it impossible to adjust to even the tiniest changes in anything about their life. It's a self-selected group of people who spend their days whining to each other about the rigorous bureaucracy and steep staircases.
The Netherlands is full of many thousands of Americans, of whom about 25 make a regular habit of this online whinery. To take that as representative of anything would be to spit in the eye of all scientists and particularly statisticians everywhere.
Go to the Netherlands and head out into the countryside. Many of my older rural relatives can barely squeeze out a sentence in English. Even younger people in the smaller towns have a hard time with it, since they never practise outside of school. Many TV shows are in English, true, but they're subtitled, so it's easy to "cheat".
This is not to deny that overall the level of English in the Netherlands is excellent for a completely non-native tongue. But definitely not every Dutch person is fluent; far from it.