So, let me clarify: on the same Internet connections, under the same bandwidth circumstances, using the same computers and same mic/headset equipment, Skype sounds noticeably better than Asterisk. That's my experience. I don't think Skype sounds GOOD, mind you -- it's like a poor cell phone connection -- but it sounds better than the alternatives we have explored.
I use SIP to connect to an Asterisk server approximately 10,000 miles away - the other side of the planet. My connection here is a fairly lousy 1024/384 ADSL line, shared with a BitTorrent fiend. Adverse conditions, to say the least. And yet the call quality with my Polycom IP501 is better than I'd get on a local landline call.
So I must wonder whether you are either operating in an extremely bandwidth-constrained environment, or perhaps something else has gone very wrong during your trials.
Also, they did not go at all after corporate customers. I'd love my university to have Skype officialy, and just be able to type the name of the person I want and boom, I talk to them. But no, there has been NO marketing of this that I have been aware of. So in the end I can talk only to my friends, because no staff/etc has Skype IDs.
Many universities have rolled out VoIP systems that integrate with or replace their existing voice networks. Click-to-dial and other features are common.
However, the primary reason none of them have used Skype is not because Skype's failure to "go after" them. It's because Skype is a closed system, which makes it almost impossible to integrate with the existing hardware and software that large customers use. So they'd have to replace everything, which is very expensive and a huge risk, particularly with a new, unproven technology. Nobody in their right mind would do it.
Incidentally, it's worth asking around - you may find that your university has already gone VoIP, but you are missing out because you are stuck in the proprietary Skype toy VoIP world.
I agree also. This really is the wrong forum for the cognoscenti.
Good God, this sub-thread has devolved into one pathetic wankfest.
For example, the Ubykh language (Circassian) is no more, with the last speaker dying in 1992. As a culture, they had skills and methods that are now lost to us. The skills may not be important to a Chinese trying to understand an Indian speaking English on front line support, but they were damn good horse breeders and riders and could foretell the future by casting beans or looking at a shoulder blade of an animal.
Alas poor cognoscenti, if only The Last Ubykh had spent more time in the gym and less time tossing his beans, maybe you could have interrogated him before he kicked it, and unlocked the secrets of the future. Armed with his ancient knowledge, you'd spend your days in the zoo, reading the shoulder blades of its inhabitants just as if they were tomorrow morning's newspaper.
One of the most interesting things I've read about Latin is regarding the future perfect tense. While it exists in English, the explanation I read of its use in Latin was that a native speaker would use it much more frequently, leading to a mentality more along the lines of future events being immutable.
People write a lot of stuff like that, just because they like the way it sounds. Doesn't make it true.
So how exactly did your author support his claimed direction of causality? Doesn't Occam's Razor suggest that native Latin speakers used the future perfect more frequently because that's how they tended to think, rather than the other way around?
I mean, English speakers talk about athiesm a lot more than the ancient Greeks did, even though it's their word. You really it's the English language's fondness for the word that has eroded faith in the powers of heaven?
This is false. In africa, the amazon, and other places with lots of tribes and villages living close to one another, who regularly trade and intermarry, it is commonplace for a person growing up to speak five or six languages.
Here in Malaysia, I don't know a single person who is not bilingual. The overwhelming majority of my friends are trilingual or more.
There are multiple major languages for cultural and political reasons; the people are living side-by-side with each other - no geographic isolation required.
Have you heard Flemish? With the amount of expectoration that is inherent in speaking the language, volume for volume it's basically the same as pissing.
I studied Russian for awhile (I'm American) and found the methods that they used to construct sentences underlie a different thought process. For example the sentence structure in the US is subj, verb, predicate; in Russia (okay, I'm no expert) it is subj, predicate, verb. Now, when I was learning to speak the language (terribly) I found that I had to PLAN a little differently.
Once you become fluent, that'll stop, and the sentences will just flow out without planning. Do you normally plan most of your sentences in English?
Strict grammar and coordinating declensions, etc. are clues that a society THINKS differently or has different values than in English.
That's quite a stretch. People speak English everywhere from Jamaica to Malaysia. You think they all have the same values because their grammar is roughly the same?
Try chatting with a Native North American one day, and ask how they feel about the extinction of indigenous languages.
Every one of these indigenous languages is nothing more than the rubble and bones of the languages that came before it and were wiped out because some other group had a better way of farming, or were more ferocious warriors, or had traditions that made them better judges of the land.
There is nothing magical or special about the languages that people of today happen to be nostalgic for. They're just like all the lost and unlamented languages that made room for the ones we're worrying about now.
Cultural diversity alternatively stutters and flowers, the reflection of a thousand forces.
The only big difference in this day and age is that we have the free time to sit around bellyaching about it, and the arrogance to think that we ought to try to micromanage the process that has done so well for us so far. Imagine how much worse off we'd be if a bunch of sentimental hand-wringers 5000 years ago had mandated that every little village must at all costs preserve the shallow pidgins spoken there, precluding the development of the intricate and remarkable languages in use today.
all other languages' spellings are being changed all the time, according to the changes that happen to the spoken language, so in most languages, you actually have a 1 to 1 mapping of letters to sounds
Yeah, like, uh, Chinese.
But anyway, I don't see that English orthography is such a problem. People learn it - or nobody would be able to read and write Chinese. The brain is well-suited for the task. And having spellings consistent over time makes a far broader range of historic materials readily available to readers.
If we employed your proposal, then the fragmentation of English would accelerate rapidly. The language as spoken in Scotland, and as spoken in Singapore, are extremely dissimilar, and both are dissimilar to the sounds of American English. So they should, by your suggestion, already have adjusted their spellings to match. Anyone care to go see a nice lomantic fellum tonight?
The situation for the US, or any Western government which might want to get involved militarily in Myanmar today is simple - involve your military today in Myanmar, and you will almost certainly find yourself facing the very threatening military might of China, their strongest ally.
I really doubt that. Burma isn't worth a major war to China. It's just some oil and gas, one of the many backup sources that China has been lining up by spending a few hundred million on development and sweetheart trade deals - a cheaper approach than that taken by Bush, who'd prefer to spend a few hundred billion on bombs to achieve the same thing.
Maybe there is some way a communications satellites could boost the signal so that ordinary mobile phones could be turned into satellite phones?
No, that won't make it possible for mobile phones to transmit with the strength necessary to reach orbit, or to cope with the signal delay.
One interesting tidbit: On the Thai side of the very porous Burmese border, you can go into any 7-Eleven and buy an AIS One-2-Call SIM card for as little as 50 baht (about US$1.50). AIS often run cheap deals where you can get many hours of GPRS time for almost nothing. Along the border in Thailand you'll see cell towers, with antennas pointing in all directions, notably including into Burma. I find that I can get a signal from hilltops many miles into the country.
Movement within Burma is restricted, but there is no practical way to stop something as small as a micro-SD card from moving to the border regions. So it should theoretically be possibly to set up an Underground Railroad for data, albeit one that works on a scale of days rather than microseconds. I think one of the main things preventing this at the moment is a lack of technical sophistication on the part of the people inside. I work with Burmese refugee groups from time to time, and it is amazing to me how many technological possibilities remain to be explored.
When you see the mental hunger of someone who has just made it out of Burma, ended up at a refugee welfare organisation in Thailand, and stays up until dawn surfing the web night after night, preferring to read the BBC web site than eat or go to the bathroom, it's clear why that sophistication is missing. People just have no exposure to information technology and haven't had any chance to develop their skills; those who do are either (1) wealthy and connected, (2) returnees from abroad, or (3) very exceptional self-motivators, who are in small numbers anywhere. What works there in terms of slowing the movement of information would never work in other countries.
Why is a measure to curb piracy always "worthless"? Just because piracy won't stop tomorrow doesn't mean the approach is bad, or that it isn't making a difference. We still haven't eliminated crime, yet we still pour government funding into police. We can't cure a plethora of diseases, yet we still try to treat them. Why is it always so black and white?
We still try to treat diseases, yes, but that doesn't meant that anything someone does in the name of fighting disease is automatically admirable.
When Media Defender and its clients take an adversarial, immature, destructive, and ultimately futile approach to dealing with piracy, they don't score any points with me. Similarly, if someone says they are "fighting disease" by hauling away kids with the flu and tossing them into quarantine cells in Guantanamo Bay, I don't think they deserve a pass just because their stated purpose sounds nice.
As others have said, there are plenty of ways to fight piracy that don't involve a digital arms race. Probably nobody has done more to fight piracy than Steve Jobs, who finally made a way to buy music online that was so easy and low-friction that people actually used it. The recording companies ought to spend less time talking about child porn with the boobs at Media Defender, and a whole lot more time studying what Apple did right.
I like to use webmail because I can access it anywhere. If I were downloading all my mail to my hard drive, I'd be concerned about my hard drive crashing.
Um, IMAP. Keep as many copies of your mail in as many places as you want, access it anywhere.
About 50% of the time, at least 25 countries a year. Never used webmail except when I need to help someone else figure out why it's not working for them.
Right, but the big unanswered question is, WHAT FEATURES?
None of the information on the Mozilla page gave me any indication of why I might want to try Penelope or Eudora or whatever it's called. Not even a screenshot.
He chose to act like an arrogant prick and cause the kids and father in the car lots of grief.
Sounds to me like the father was well with him.
More importantly, those kids deserve a future in which they still have their civil rights. Fighting for those rights is more important than a few tears in a parking lot. How many times have they cried over being called for bedtime or told to stop picking their nose at the dinner table?
In fact, yes if you walked in and observed them choking customers on their way out and you continued to go in and buy something, you would be consenting.
That is flatly untrue. It's so ridiculous I have to wonder if you even read what you wrote. You honestly think that we lose our legal rights merely witnessing someone else lose theirs?
If I see a mugger attack someone, and then I walk down the same street the next day and the mugger attacks me, have I consented to be mugged?
In fact somebody just might file suit against you for knowingly participating!
Ah, and if you are mugged on day 3, are you going to file suit against me for getting mugged on day 2? That ought to go real well.
Well, it makes it about 95% legal in a trivial case like receipt checking.
Receipt checking is legal if you consent to it, of course. But you can make the decision about that consent at any point up until when they ask to see your receipt.
I think you misunderstand "terms of entry". When they post those terms, all that means is that if you fail to observe them, they can deny you entry or ask you to leave.
If you are willing to forego entry (or to leave when asked), then you are under no circumstances obliged to adhere to the terms. The only rights you yield when entering private property are those which affect the property. You do not yield rights affecting your person.
it's prone to being overturned by the Supreme Court just like other Bush administration experiments have been.
Unfortunately, I don't see that happening for the next 20 years or so, now that the Supreme Court itself has become yet another Bush administration experiment.
Yes he did. He phoned the police because the store manager was illegally detaining him, and he wanted the police to defend his legal right to leave the premises, which is their job.
Instead, however, the police compounded the problem by aiding and abetting the store manager's illegal conduct and then by making a false arrest.
I see your point, but I still feel that this guy cut off his nose to spite his face. Right or wrong, it was a knee-jerk reaction and did not seem to do him a lot of good
He's taking the long view. It's a hassle today, but in the long run he is striking a blow for freedom for all of us. We need more people who are able to look past momentary inconvenience and see the big picture.
The majority of Nokia's sales are bottom of the market crud phones. I know because I have one myself.
There is a very mysterious form of logic at work here.
I own an expensive Nokia. Do I therefore "know" that "the majority of Nokia's sales" are high-end phones?
There is not a Nokia phone made today that the Apple iPhone doesn't blow out off the water "value-proposition-wise" with it's first iteration.
Until Apple comes up with a keyboard and an open apps platform, they're not blowing Nokia out of the water. Nobody can type faster on their iPhone than I can on a proper physical keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
I use SIP to connect to an Asterisk server approximately 10,000 miles away - the other side of the planet. My connection here is a fairly lousy 1024/384 ADSL line, shared with a BitTorrent fiend. Adverse conditions, to say the least. And yet the call quality with my Polycom IP501 is better than I'd get on a local landline call.
So I must wonder whether you are either operating in an extremely bandwidth-constrained environment, or perhaps something else has gone very wrong during your trials.
It is competitive against direct-dialed calls from hotel phones, sure.
But it is definitely not competitive against the more aggressive VoIP providers.
Check out the rates at VoipCheap or similar.
Many universities have rolled out VoIP systems that integrate with or replace their existing voice networks. Click-to-dial and other features are common.
However, the primary reason none of them have used Skype is not because Skype's failure to "go after" them. It's because Skype is a closed system, which makes it almost impossible to integrate with the existing hardware and software that large customers use. So they'd have to replace everything, which is very expensive and a huge risk, particularly with a new, unproven technology. Nobody in their right mind would do it.
Incidentally, it's worth asking around - you may find that your university has already gone VoIP, but you are missing out because you are stuck in the proprietary Skype toy VoIP world.
Good God, this sub-thread has devolved into one pathetic wankfest.
Alas poor cognoscenti, if only The Last Ubykh had spent more time in the gym and less time tossing his beans, maybe you could have interrogated him before he kicked it, and unlocked the secrets of the future. Armed with his ancient knowledge, you'd spend your days in the zoo, reading the shoulder blades of its inhabitants just as if they were tomorrow morning's newspaper.
People write a lot of stuff like that, just because they like the way it sounds. Doesn't make it true.
So how exactly did your author support his claimed direction of causality? Doesn't Occam's Razor suggest that native Latin speakers used the future perfect more frequently because that's how they tended to think, rather than the other way around?
I mean, English speakers talk about athiesm a lot more than the ancient Greeks did, even though it's their word. You really it's the English language's fondness for the word that has eroded faith in the powers of heaven?
Here in Malaysia, I don't know a single person who is not bilingual. The overwhelming majority of my friends are trilingual or more.
There are multiple major languages for cultural and political reasons; the people are living side-by-side with each other - no geographic isolation required.
Have you heard Flemish? With the amount of expectoration that is inherent in speaking the language, volume for volume it's basically the same as pissing.
Once you become fluent, that'll stop, and the sentences will just flow out without planning. Do you normally plan most of your sentences in English?
That's quite a stretch. People speak English everywhere from Jamaica to Malaysia. You think they all have the same values because their grammar is roughly the same?
Every one of these indigenous languages is nothing more than the rubble and bones of the languages that came before it and were wiped out because some other group had a better way of farming, or were more ferocious warriors, or had traditions that made them better judges of the land.
There is nothing magical or special about the languages that people of today happen to be nostalgic for. They're just like all the lost and unlamented languages that made room for the ones we're worrying about now.
Cultural diversity alternatively stutters and flowers, the reflection of a thousand forces.
The only big difference in this day and age is that we have the free time to sit around bellyaching about it, and the arrogance to think that we ought to try to micromanage the process that has done so well for us so far. Imagine how much worse off we'd be if a bunch of sentimental hand-wringers 5000 years ago had mandated that every little village must at all costs preserve the shallow pidgins spoken there, precluding the development of the intricate and remarkable languages in use today.
Yeah, like, uh, Chinese.
But anyway, I don't see that English orthography is such a problem. People learn it - or nobody would be able to read and write Chinese. The brain is well-suited for the task. And having spellings consistent over time makes a far broader range of historic materials readily available to readers.
If we employed your proposal, then the fragmentation of English would accelerate rapidly. The language as spoken in Scotland, and as spoken in Singapore, are extremely dissimilar, and both are dissimilar to the sounds of American English. So they should, by your suggestion, already have adjusted their spellings to match. Anyone care to go see a nice lomantic fellum tonight?
I really doubt that. Burma isn't worth a major war to China. It's just some oil and gas, one of the many backup sources that China has been lining up by spending a few hundred million on development and sweetheart trade deals - a cheaper approach than that taken by Bush, who'd prefer to spend a few hundred billion on bombs to achieve the same thing.
No, that won't make it possible for mobile phones to transmit with the strength necessary to reach orbit, or to cope with the signal delay.
One interesting tidbit: On the Thai side of the very porous Burmese border, you can go into any 7-Eleven and buy an AIS One-2-Call SIM card for as little as 50 baht (about US$1.50). AIS often run cheap deals where you can get many hours of GPRS time for almost nothing. Along the border in Thailand you'll see cell towers, with antennas pointing in all directions, notably including into Burma. I find that I can get a signal from hilltops many miles into the country.
Movement within Burma is restricted, but there is no practical way to stop something as small as a micro-SD card from moving to the border regions. So it should theoretically be possibly to set up an Underground Railroad for data, albeit one that works on a scale of days rather than microseconds. I think one of the main things preventing this at the moment is a lack of technical sophistication on the part of the people inside. I work with Burmese refugee groups from time to time, and it is amazing to me how many technological possibilities remain to be explored.
When you see the mental hunger of someone who has just made it out of Burma, ended up at a refugee welfare organisation in Thailand, and stays up until dawn surfing the web night after night, preferring to read the BBC web site than eat or go to the bathroom, it's clear why that sophistication is missing. People just have no exposure to information technology and haven't had any chance to develop their skills; those who do are either (1) wealthy and connected, (2) returnees from abroad, or (3) very exceptional self-motivators, who are in small numbers anywhere. What works there in terms of slowing the movement of information would never work in other countries.
We still try to treat diseases, yes, but that doesn't meant that anything someone does in the name of fighting disease is automatically admirable.
When Media Defender and its clients take an adversarial, immature, destructive, and ultimately futile approach to dealing with piracy, they don't score any points with me. Similarly, if someone says they are "fighting disease" by hauling away kids with the flu and tossing them into quarantine cells in Guantanamo Bay, I don't think they deserve a pass just because their stated purpose sounds nice.
As others have said, there are plenty of ways to fight piracy that don't involve a digital arms race. Probably nobody has done more to fight piracy than Steve Jobs, who finally made a way to buy music online that was so easy and low-friction that people actually used it. The recording companies ought to spend less time talking about child porn with the boobs at Media Defender, and a whole lot more time studying what Apple did right.
You, sir, are a noble public servant.
Um, IMAP. Keep as many copies of your mail in as many places as you want, access it anywhere.
You know how indexing works, right? I can search an awful lot of mail in one second using Apple Mail, nothing magic about Gmail.
About 50% of the time, at least 25 countries a year. Never used webmail except when I need to help someone else figure out why it's not working for them.
Right, but the big unanswered question is, WHAT FEATURES?
None of the information on the Mozilla page gave me any indication of why I might want to try Penelope or Eudora or whatever it's called. Not even a screenshot.
Sounds to me like the father was well with him.
More importantly, those kids deserve a future in which they still have their civil rights. Fighting for those rights is more important than a few tears in a parking lot. How many times have they cried over being called for bedtime or told to stop picking their nose at the dinner table?
That is flatly untrue. It's so ridiculous I have to wonder if you even read what you wrote. You honestly think that we lose our legal rights merely witnessing someone else lose theirs?
If I see a mugger attack someone, and then I walk down the same street the next day and the mugger attacks me, have I consented to be mugged?
Ah, and if you are mugged on day 3, are you going to file suit against me for getting mugged on day 2? That ought to go real well.
Receipt checking is legal if you consent to it, of course. But you can make the decision about that consent at any point up until when they ask to see your receipt.
I think you misunderstand "terms of entry". When they post those terms, all that means is that if you fail to observe them, they can deny you entry or ask you to leave.
If you are willing to forego entry (or to leave when asked), then you are under no circumstances obliged to adhere to the terms. The only rights you yield when entering private property are those which affect the property. You do not yield rights affecting your person.
Unfortunately, I don't see that happening for the next 20 years or so, now that the Supreme Court itself has become yet another Bush administration experiment.
Yes he did. He phoned the police because the store manager was illegally detaining him, and he wanted the police to defend his legal right to leave the premises, which is their job.
Instead, however, the police compounded the problem by aiding and abetting the store manager's illegal conduct and then by making a false arrest.
He's taking the long view. It's a hassle today, but in the long run he is striking a blow for freedom for all of us. We need more people who are able to look past momentary inconvenience and see the big picture.
There is a very mysterious form of logic at work here.
I own an expensive Nokia. Do I therefore "know" that "the majority of Nokia's sales" are high-end phones?
Until Apple comes up with a keyboard and an open apps platform, they're not blowing Nokia out of the water. Nobody can type faster on their iPhone than I can on a proper physical keyboard.