I'm not sure what fanboy coolaid you are drinking, but nokia have been far from innovative in handset design. It took them years to understand that phones could actually be designed a tad more stylish than the standard house brick format.
I think you're making his point for him.
I don't give a shit about how stylish my phone is.
I want one that lets me do what I need to do as efficiently as possible.
To date, Nokia kicks everyone else's ass in that regard. On average, the interface requires the fewest button presses to do the most common things, and it's relatively internally consistent compared to most other handset brands.
There used to be a number you could call and it would connect you to a, more or less, party line. It worked the same as you described but with no time lady. It worked for about a week then went away. I'm thinking around 1970ish or so.
Back in the 1980s, in 616 (home of Slashdot) there were several of these. They pretty much always worked.
The problem here is that the original poster was willing to do this but to no avail from the monopoly holder. This goes against what you are saying. I think it should be a requirement of the cable company if the customer is ready to pay the fees associated with getting the wire to their land.
As others have explained, the problem is that while the customer was willing to pay the extra charge to install the cable to his property, there was no way for him to pay the extra ongoing costs of maintaining that cable, because the monthly subscription rates are fixed by the regulator.
My god...and in this day and age. People who don't live in cities are all of a sudden second class? All of a sudden aren't part of civilization?
Well, that's what civilisation is about. People came in out of the woods and banded together and organised themselves into permanent settlements.
You will note that NOWHERE did I demand, or even suggest, that there is any sort of entitlement for all rural locations to be given free broadband, and yet people keep complaining like that is what is being asked for. It's not.
If it costs $500/month to provide the broadband, and you want it for $50, then I'd say you might as well be asking to get it for free. The difference between $450 and $500 isn't the issue.
We've been here before. Phones? Electricity? Monopolies were handed out, but those companies were REQUIRED to offer those services to all, not just to the most profitable, in exchange for said monopoly.
Plenty of places without electricity.
If it weren't for those that choose to live outside of urban centers, you would not have the civilization you currently so ignorantly enjoy.
And if the rest of us didn't live in cities, you wouldn't have an internet to whine about using.
My folks can't get DSL in their home town; one town over has their choice of DSL providers and bitrates. Verizon never bothered to provide anything more than their shitty 1.5mbit/128kbit (yes, 128kbit!) service and sDSL at insanely expensive prices.
How much is Verizon's 1.5/128 ADSL? $20/month? I don't see how that's the same as "can't get DSL".
No, you're right. Silly people choosing to not live in cities, what ever are they thinking.
But let me ask you this: Do you like to eat?
Love it.
And I will pay the market price for food. If broadband internet is essential to make the plants grow, then I guess every farmer will have to get it installed, and the cost will be reflected at the supermarket checkout. But if it's not, then some farmers won't have it, and they'll have lower costs than the rest, and they'll keep the price of food down where it belongs.
Fact is, living outside of civilisation is a lifestyle choice, and those of us who live in civilisation shouldn't have to subsidise it more than we already do. If you don't want to grow the food, I'm sure we can find some other misanthropes who do.
Would you say the same if this were about phone service? How about water? Electricity?
Absolutely. Living in a rural area is an entirely voluntary decision, and I don't see why I should have to pay even a penny to support the antisocial weirdos who make it.
This is why Washington DC instituted the zone system. You pay a flat fare based on which zone of the city you got in the cab, and which zone you got out of it. Each taxi has a map that shows common landmarks to help you figure out what the fare will be.
Of course, this has its pitfalls too. Some very short rides cost more than they should, because they straddle a zone boundary.
I finally gave up on NeoOffice for a reason which sounds sort of trivial, but over time came to annoy me so much that I couldn't stand it any longer.
Whenever I launch NeoOffice, my web browser pops to the front and some stupid NeoOffice web page loads. I've never looked at the page; it may be something very important, but I find this sort of behaviour so annoying that I always close it as it's loading. A program should do what you tell it to. This stupid business with windows always opening and seizing focus as side-effects of other things is exactly why I hate the Windows interface, and I sure don't want it on my Mac.
I searched on the web and never found a way to disable this nuisance, so I gave up and switched to OpenOffice.org's version.
I am a little worried that this is a result of Singapore Airlines management knowing something that the rest of us don't - namely, that it won't be long before laptops are banned from the passenger cabin for "security" reasons.
SQ is already the preferred airline for most business travelers who fly their routes. After this, they'll be able to lock up the rest, providing at least a usable means for productivity to business travelers who would otherwise have to sit on their hands the entire flight.
Someday I hope to fly Singapore -- their reputation is the best in the sky.
Isn't that Qantas?
They have a good-looking safety record in absolute terms, primarily because they have very few flights compared to major airlines. If you bust out the statistics textbook you'll see that Southwest kicks their ass.
But no, I think the person you responded to is talking about in-flight experience, where Qantas is nothing special (unless you're only used to European airlines). Qantas has some of the rudest crew in the sky (again, unless you compare with European airlines).
Singapore's in-flight experience is considerably nicer than Qantas. And Malaysia Airlines' is nicer than Singapore's - except that MAS still has some older planes that haven't been retrofitted with the newer entertainment system, used on low-margin flights. Singapore gets around this by calling those flights SilkAir and disavowing the in-flight experience.
One area where Singapore excels everyone else is that they don't censor the movies. You can hear people talking as the writer intended, and see them wearing (or not wearing) what the director intended.
Yeah, that will be real useful system with no execute privileges. They won't be able run any applications! You might as well give them an etch-a-sketch. Restricting write access is pointless if they can run a binary from the USB drive; they'll just escalate privileges and change them as they like.
I would think the idea is that any given filesystem is mounted either read-write, or exec, but not both. So they can run the applications that are provided, but not their own. And they can still save their documents on the USB stick or RAMdisk.
Bullshit. The flight from Vegas to the Netherlands is NOT five hours, unless you're on the Concord. The flight from New York to the Netherlands isn't five hours either, so you're either lying to us, or you can't tell time.
+1 Informative?
How long do you think the flight from Las Vegas to New York is?
WHAT? That's horrible. Almost every task can be done in Freehand in about half the time it takes in Illustrator. I can't believe they killed it. Well, yes I can.
Here's hoping the last version of Freehand keeps working in newer versions of OSX. The day it doesn't is the day I stop doing drawing on the computer.
I still think brute-force attacks are a waste of time, and only stupid spammers would try it.
The economics of spamming have changed since back when they had to hold onto their "bulletproof servers" and pay for bandwidth.
These days the spam comes from botnets which effectively give them infinite resources. If it only takes an hour to alter the spam software to do a brute force mailing in addition to running through address lists, then their investment per attempt is basically zero. So even if it's incredibly ineffective, it's still going to get a bite now and then, so it's still worth their while.
Is your personal domain one which someone might think hosts a lot of email accounts?
I wouldn't think so. It's a fairly strange-looking one in one of those obscure TLDs from a country with almost no actual internet users.
If your server generated NDRs for these invalid addresses rather than just rejecting them, you'd be sending thousands of NDRs to random people every single day. Which is to say, people who know their servers are subject to brute-force attacks should be even more careful to limit NDR generation than people who's mail servers aren't, rather than use it as an excuse not to.
Agreed. I drop those on the floor. Years ago I noticed that 99% of the lingering items in my outbound queue were undeliverable failure reports which were clearly never going to get anywhere, and never going to be of use to anyone even if they did.
I really wish there were a way I could reject the invalid-address inbound messages as soon as they send RCPT TO, but with all the complicated arrangements for various clients on these servers it's pretty much impossible.
Apple doesn't sell business iPhones yet because iPhones have to be activated through iTunes and use iTunes to organize.
I think you have it exactly backwards.
The reason you still have to use iTunes to activate the phone, is because Apple doesn't sell business iPhones - not the other way around.
Or do you honestly think that after all the effort that went into developing the phone, the only stumbling block between them and the business market is Apple's inability to invent a way to activate it without using iTunes?
STEVE JOBS: Dammit people, we've already spent $80 million trying to come up with a non-iTunes iPhone activator, what's the problem?
DEVELOPER: Sorry Steve, it's just too hard. Maybe next year.
STEVE JOBS: Ok, fair enough. I only wish I'd listened to that guy Anonymous McCartneyf on Slashdot. I guess we'll shelve our huge plans to launch the iPhone in the business market and focus on something more realistic, like a time machine.
I run the mail servers for several domains, and brute-force attacks just don't happen.
Ah, well, then that's settled then.
I am looking at the logs in real-time (tail -f) on a mail server, and I am watching the brute force spam runs fly by - many simultaneous ones from different sources interleaved, in fact, but the patterns clearly visible. What explains this, if they "just don't happen"? Alternate universe? I wonder if there is some way I could pass through Slashdot and emerge in your pleasant reality for a vacation.
The only possible way to do these sorts of attacks would be to use a vast distributed botnet, and even then it's not going to work. It would be easy (and fun) to build a system that watches for such attacks and blacklists any IP involved.
Over any reasonable period of time, your list of IPs will converge with the union of all dynamic IP addresses assigned to consumers.
The most compelling evidence I have that this sort of thing doesn't help is my "catch-all" domain. I have a subdomain I use when sites request an email address; and every single address at it is valid (except for ones I specifically block). When I first set this up I felt sure I was going to be flooded with spam from brute force or dictionary attacks at this domain. That was a few years ago. I still accept anything@sub.example.com because to date, because I have yet to receive a single message which wasn't sent to a published address.
That's nice. Last time I checked, my personal domain (registered about 10 years ago) receives over 20,000 delivery attempts to invalid addresses daily.
It won't be compatible with the newest version of Clippy or Microsoft Bob or whatever, so nobody will want it. All they have to do is add some new stupid pseudofeature and restrict it to the rented computers, and all the sheep will migrate.
Yes, but the reboots would be clustered near the supernodes, because of the correlation between latency and time zone (nearby systems have lower latency to each other and are likely to be in the same time zone). So there would be a rolling overstress of their P2P architecture.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're making his point for him.
I don't give a shit about how stylish my phone is.
I want one that lets me do what I need to do as efficiently as possible.
To date, Nokia kicks everyone else's ass in that regard. On average, the interface requires the fewest button presses to do the most common things, and it's relatively internally consistent compared to most other handset brands.
Do people who live on Baffin Island have some sort of irresistable compulsion to post 23 times about their stupid watch?
Back in the 1980s, in 616 (home of Slashdot) there were several of these. They pretty much always worked.
For me 4.2.2.1 resolves to one in Los Angeles, which is about 9000 miles away. Surely there is a closer DNS server somewhere.
As others have explained, the problem is that while the customer was willing to pay the extra charge to install the cable to his property, there was no way for him to pay the extra ongoing costs of maintaining that cable, because the monthly subscription rates are fixed by the regulator.
Well, that's what civilisation is about. People came in out of the woods and banded together and organised themselves into permanent settlements.
If it costs $500/month to provide the broadband, and you want it for $50, then I'd say you might as well be asking to get it for free. The difference between $450 and $500 isn't the issue.
Plenty of places without electricity.
And if the rest of us didn't live in cities, you wouldn't have an internet to whine about using.
How much is Verizon's 1.5/128 ADSL? $20/month? I don't see how that's the same as "can't get DSL".
Love it.
And I will pay the market price for food. If broadband internet is essential to make the plants grow, then I guess every farmer will have to get it installed, and the cost will be reflected at the supermarket checkout. But if it's not, then some farmers won't have it, and they'll have lower costs than the rest, and they'll keep the price of food down where it belongs.
Fact is, living outside of civilisation is a lifestyle choice, and those of us who live in civilisation shouldn't have to subsidise it more than we already do. If you don't want to grow the food, I'm sure we can find some other misanthropes who do.
Absolutely. Living in a rural area is an entirely voluntary decision, and I don't see why I should have to pay even a penny to support the antisocial weirdos who make it.
Ok, thanks, in that case I will give the new one a try.
This is why Washington DC instituted the zone system. You pay a flat fare based on which zone of the city you got in the cab, and which zone you got out of it. Each taxi has a map that shows common landmarks to help you figure out what the fare will be.
Of course, this has its pitfalls too. Some very short rides cost more than they should, because they straddle a zone boundary.
I finally gave up on NeoOffice for a reason which sounds sort of trivial, but over time came to annoy me so much that I couldn't stand it any longer.
Whenever I launch NeoOffice, my web browser pops to the front and some stupid NeoOffice web page loads. I've never looked at the page; it may be something very important, but I find this sort of behaviour so annoying that I always close it as it's loading. A program should do what you tell it to. This stupid business with windows always opening and seizing focus as side-effects of other things is exactly why I hate the Windows interface, and I sure don't want it on my Mac.
I searched on the web and never found a way to disable this nuisance, so I gave up and switched to OpenOffice.org's version.
I am a little worried that this is a result of Singapore Airlines management knowing something that the rest of us don't - namely, that it won't be long before laptops are banned from the passenger cabin for "security" reasons.
SQ is already the preferred airline for most business travelers who fly their routes. After this, they'll be able to lock up the rest, providing at least a usable means for productivity to business travelers who would otherwise have to sit on their hands the entire flight.
They have a good-looking safety record in absolute terms, primarily because they have very few flights compared to major airlines. If you bust out the statistics textbook you'll see that Southwest kicks their ass.
But no, I think the person you responded to is talking about in-flight experience, where Qantas is nothing special (unless you're only used to European airlines). Qantas has some of the rudest crew in the sky (again, unless you compare with European airlines).
Singapore's in-flight experience is considerably nicer than Qantas. And Malaysia Airlines' is nicer than Singapore's - except that MAS still has some older planes that haven't been retrofitted with the newer entertainment system, used on low-margin flights. Singapore gets around this by calling those flights SilkAir and disavowing the in-flight experience.
One area where Singapore excels everyone else is that they don't censor the movies. You can hear people talking as the writer intended, and see them wearing (or not wearing) what the director intended.
I would think the idea is that any given filesystem is mounted either read-write, or exec, but not both. So they can run the applications that are provided, but not their own. And they can still save their documents on the USB stick or RAMdisk.
+1 Informative?
How long do you think the flight from Las Vegas to New York is?
WHAT? That's horrible. Almost every task can be done in Freehand in about half the time it takes in Illustrator. I can't believe they killed it. Well, yes I can.
Here's hoping the last version of Freehand keeps working in newer versions of OSX. The day it doesn't is the day I stop doing drawing on the computer.
The economics of spamming have changed since back when they had to hold onto their "bulletproof servers" and pay for bandwidth.
These days the spam comes from botnets which effectively give them infinite resources. If it only takes an hour to alter the spam software to do a brute force mailing in addition to running through address lists, then their investment per attempt is basically zero. So even if it's incredibly ineffective, it's still going to get a bite now and then, so it's still worth their while.
I wouldn't think so. It's a fairly strange-looking one in one of those obscure TLDs from a country with almost no actual internet users.
Agreed. I drop those on the floor. Years ago I noticed that 99% of the lingering items in my outbound queue were undeliverable failure reports which were clearly never going to get anywhere, and never going to be of use to anyone even if they did.
I really wish there were a way I could reject the invalid-address inbound messages as soon as they send RCPT TO, but with all the complicated arrangements for various clients on these servers it's pretty much impossible.
I think you have it exactly backwards.
The reason you still have to use iTunes to activate the phone, is because Apple doesn't sell business iPhones - not the other way around.
Or do you honestly think that after all the effort that went into developing the phone, the only stumbling block between them and the business market is Apple's inability to invent a way to activate it without using iTunes?
STEVE JOBS: Dammit people, we've already spent $80 million trying to come up with a non-iTunes iPhone activator, what's the problem?
DEVELOPER: Sorry Steve, it's just too hard. Maybe next year.
STEVE JOBS: Ok, fair enough. I only wish I'd listened to that guy Anonymous McCartneyf on Slashdot. I guess we'll shelve our huge plans to launch the iPhone in the business market and focus on something more realistic, like a time machine.
Ah, well, then that's settled then.
I am looking at the logs in real-time (tail -f) on a mail server, and I am watching the brute force spam runs fly by - many simultaneous ones from different sources interleaved, in fact, but the patterns clearly visible. What explains this, if they "just don't happen"? Alternate universe? I wonder if there is some way I could pass through Slashdot and emerge in your pleasant reality for a vacation.
Over any reasonable period of time, your list of IPs will converge with the union of all dynamic IP addresses assigned to consumers.
That's nice. Last time I checked, my personal domain (registered about 10 years ago) receives over 20,000 delivery attempts to invalid addresses daily.
It won't be compatible with the newest version of Clippy or Microsoft Bob or whatever, so nobody will want it. All they have to do is add some new stupid pseudofeature and restrict it to the rented computers, and all the sheep will migrate.
Do you know any Skype users who have neither a landline nor a cell phone? I don't.
Do you know anyone who's called 911 with Skype? I don't.
In fact, for most Skype users, 911 isn't even a valid number where they live.
All the central server has to do is instruct each endpoint to UDP tickle each other, then they can talk directly through NAT.
Yes, but the reboots would be clustered near the supernodes, because of the correlation between latency and time zone (nearby systems have lower latency to each other and are likely to be in the same time zone). So there would be a rolling overstress of their P2P architecture.
I agree. Every two-day outage of a web service can only logically be explained as a consequence of George Bush spying on you.
One-day and three-day outages, that's something else entirely.