It's a better plan over here in the UK, where we don't have to pay to receive calls. (why you lot put up with paying for incoming calls, I don't understand....)
Because when you add everything up, it's cheaper that way.
Remember, you don't only receive calls, you make them too (even if you personally only receive calls, there would be no calls to receive if people in general weren't making them).
Studies have shown again and again in that receiver-pays markets (e.g., USA, Singapore, China), the total amount paid by consumers per unit of mobile phone airtime is lower.
This is because the person who is paying for the call is the same person who has market power in the relationship with the service provider. In the caller-pays system, the person who is paying for the call has no way to express their dissatisfaction with the rate by switching to a different provider, so it is not a competitive factor. The people who pay have to put up with whatever rates are in effect, or not make the call at all.
Caller-pays is a huge swindle, built on a transparent lie, and it's costing European consumers billions.
I haven't been impressed. I don't know if it's the codec, or something else about Skype, but the quality is underwhelming.
I live in Asia, and have non-mind-blowing DSL (1024/384, with 300ms ping to the USA). I use VoIP providers via Asterisk on a colo box in the USA to place and receive calls via a Sipura SPA-1001. Most people I talk with in Europe or the USA can't tell that I'm using VoIP or on the other side of the planet.
However, whenever I use Skype (from here or elsewhere) there's this sort of cycling effect, about 1Hz, where the quality of the sound changes from "wide" to "narrow" and the volume pulses as well. Dropouts are frequent. This is over the exact same connections that work fine with the Sipura box (and the people I've Skyped with are very well connected).
But the cost and quality both suck in comparison to alienw's suggestion. You can spend a lot less rolling your own with Asterisk. Of course it takes a lot more time to get it going. But between the price, geek factor and the customizability, it's a sure win for any Slashdotter worth his/her salt.
Now George, you know you aren't supposed to be posting on Slashdot. You have countries to invade. I hear Iran is still working on their nuclear weapons.
Oh, those? I'm cool with them. That's why I haven't made a move on North Korea. Heck, we got a million of 'em here. It's the nucular ones that give me the heebie-jeebies.
There's not a perfect rule, but the oft-repeated rul-of-thumb is that you should leave 35% spare 'space' if you write in English. The way I understand the rule is that if your text in English takes up 65% of the space that you could use for text then you probably have enough room to place the translated text in that location for any other language.
Some southeast Asian languages (e.g., Burmese and Khmer) stack letters vertically in certain cases, so they end up taking a lot more space. What I mean is, these languages run horizontally like English, but certain combinations require some letters to be placed above or below others instead of next to them. They take stylized forms that don't require a full extra line-height but there's still a considerable amount of extra inter-line space required. It's sort of like mandatory double-spacing.
Don't ask me what to do if English isn't the language you authour your text in.
Why, get with the program and start writing in English, of course.
authour
Wow, you Canadians are even more British than the British!
The students had a wonderful opportunity to show what a complete failure such draconian policies can be. But, just like with illegal file sharing, they'd rather push the other way, and end up further behind than when they started.
Huh? Thanks to illegal file sharing, we now have iTunes and a dozen other shops selling songs online at reasonable prices without having to buy a whole album.
And thanks to these kids' shenanigans, some fussbudget technophobe school administrators are ending up with red faces, the kids are getting an education in the law, parents are going to get together and organize and start paying attention to what goes on in the schools, and if you think a single kid from this story will serve a minute in jail or pay so much as a penny of fines, you're crazy.
But the world doesn't need too many ditch diggers who can't balance a checkbook or read the instructions on a can of peaches.
This ain't nucular physics they's teaching in high school. This is the basic stuff you need to retain - at least some of - in order to function in most roles in society. Some people can/will learn it other ways without the benefit of school, but we can't assume these are the same people who fail to behave in the classroom.
Anyway, we were all learning to program and one of the more savvy programmers wrote a program to calculate PI and store the results to the HD. Once he finally got it working he wanted to try to run it on the server as a benchmark. Well, we were all new to programming and it turned out that the program used an infinite loop and wrote directly to the HD. Yes, that's right, it accessed the HD directly, on the hardware level.
I call BS. This is the most implausible story I've ever read in all my long years of reading people's stupid made-up stories on Slashdot.
Make them build their own computer without assistance by the age of 5 or 6. let them choose an o/s, and give them a balance of games and apps like photoshop, nero, wordprocessing, etc.
I didn't realize Adobe was targeting the "pile of wires held together by boogers" platform with its latest Photoshop release. Serves me right for ignoring Slashdot for a few weeks.
Anyway, while it is true that many African cities have running water, sewage, electricity and phones in certain neighborhoods, it's simplistic and uninformed to suggest that this means they're as developed as a typical town in Arizona.
North of the Sahara, things usually work pretty well. Likewise in South Africa, and a few other scattered places. But mostly, the electricity is spotty, the water is unsafe to drink, the sewage runneth over, and the phone systems are archaic - sometimes with multi-year waits for landline installs. If you think otherwise then your experience in Africa (if any) was very sheltered indeed.
I won't even get into transportation, commercial infrastructure, health care, and so on.
Oh, don't be so harsh on them. It's easily as independent as the country I started in my parents' basement when they wouldn't let me go sleep over at my friend's house one time. Out of historical interest, I will reproduce its Constitution in its entirety here: "No grownups."
As far as I've been able to tell, that's the same law that governs Sealand.
I can't tell whether or not you're being serious (I will charitably assume you are not) but either way, you're making me laugh, so consider yourself a success.
is anyone else having trouble with IP bans on slashdot? I get 2 downmods on apost and suddenly I'm IP banned! I only got this posted through Tor, but that's not that much better as slashdot blocks most of the nodes there too. Any help?
Slashdot bans the transparent web proxy used by almost all DSL connections in Malaysia, so that's an entire nation of nerds excluded. And a very nerdy nation it is - on Friday night the computer malls are more crowded than the discos. Slashdot's loss.
I just use ssh -D to set up a little socks proxy via a shell account elsewhere; I haven't had any problems that way.
and this wonderful little program called cain does this wonderful little thing called arp poisoning, and it can even hijack HTTPS traffic with no issues at all.
One huge issue: The person you're sniffing gets a warning that the site certificate's authenticity could not be verified. Unless they are very stupid, this is usually a big red flag.
Q: When I use HTTPS sniffer the client's browser popups a dialog telling him that the certificate comes from an untrusted certification authority, why ? A: Because that server certificate is not the real one signed by a Trusted Root Certification Authority. It has been generated, self signed and injected by Cain to the client's browser.
No problem. I assume you're posting from the USA, which is about a 7 (on a scale of 1-10) in terms of public wifi. Most of western and north-central Europe is in the 5-8 range. Europe has many more net cafes than the USA, but on the other hand not as many broadband subscribers with unsecured access points.
Parts of Asia (such as Singapore and the biggest cities in Malaysia) score a 10. Here in Kuala Lumpur there is public wifi pretty much anywhere with any significant amount of foot traffic and disposable income, much of it intentionally free.
There has been a "trial" program in the Vienna airport which offers free wireless access in a few areas (both landside and airside), so if you're flying through there, you can easily get a fix. It's supposed to switch to paid access, but it's been free for quite a while now. There's no free wireless in Frankfurt airport that I know of (paid is available though) and I haven't been to Prague recently.
I got back Friday night from travelling in Eastern Europe since early May. It was a sometimes-working holiday, so I actually had my laptop WITH ME, but publically available wireless access was basically non-existent, so most places I had to deal with internet cafe-style public terminals as my only internet access.
I'm quite surprised you weren't able to plug your laptop into their network. Most net cafes have a dangling ethernet cable or two just for that purpose. Even if they don't, it's very rare that they won't let you pull the ethernet out of the back of one of their machines and plug it into yours.
I STILL suddenly started getting a flood of bounces and virus-filter alerts, mostly from Austrian domains, so I'm guessing it was the internet cafe in Vienna that trapped my password somehow.
Almost certainly not. Why on earth would someone bother to steal your password just to send email? Makes no sense; it's like breaking into your house in order to write a bunch of letter with your return address on them. Either you or someone you correspond with is infected with an email worm.
That's why I support privatization of utilities. Luckily, where I live, the water system is run by a private company. And the last thing a private company worries about is buying fucking potted plants.
Spoken like someone who's never once been to a corporate HQ.
That, or you've just successfully baited me with some smooth sarcasm.
No - all in all, if it's all the same to you, I'd prefer other people (a council in this case) did *not*, on my behalf, take my money and decide what they want to spend it on.
You must have burst a blood vessel when you discovered the municipal water company bought new potted plants for their lobby without your permission.
This (free wifi in public spaces paid out of my taxes) is exactly the sort of thing I want the government doing more of. It costs me almost nothing and gets people out of their houses. It's genius policy.
So...let's get the right; the council has said "we're going to charge you money and provide WiFi and if you don't like what we offer, well that's just too bad - you can pay a second time for a commerical provider (if one dares to come along, given they know that to use their service you'll be paying twice)."
Twice schmice. Get real; this will cost me a penny a year. A competing commercial service will cost actual money.
OpenOffice.org does not run on a Mac because it is... a X11... app.
Actually, that's precisely why it does run on a Mac.
However, it's also as ugly as all the rest of the X11 apps, which is why it has a hard time finding much acceptance among Mac users (other than the NeoOffice/J version).
porn is already blocked en mass by corporate nonsense, but badly and in such a way that it blocks legitimate stuff.
Right, but that's a state of affairs that suits the porn operators just fine. They have no interest in porn being effectively targeted by corporate filters - that just means less business for them. As long as filters don't work that well, there will be more resistance to using them, as well as more ways around them.
Anything that makes it easy to block porn - unless it very precisely works only for users that can lead to legal problems, like minors - is anathema to porn vendors. Which is sensible enough. They are not in business to improve workplace productivity.
Slashdot Mirror
Because when you add everything up, it's cheaper that way.
Remember, you don't only receive calls, you make them too (even if you personally only receive calls, there would be no calls to receive if people in general weren't making them).
Studies have shown again and again in that receiver-pays markets (e.g., USA, Singapore, China), the total amount paid by consumers per unit of mobile phone airtime is lower.
This is because the person who is paying for the call is the same person who has market power in the relationship with the service provider. In the caller-pays system, the person who is paying for the call has no way to express their dissatisfaction with the rate by switching to a different provider, so it is not a competitive factor. The people who pay have to put up with whatever rates are in effect, or not make the call at all.
Caller-pays is a huge swindle, built on a transparent lie, and it's costing European consumers billions.
I haven't been impressed. I don't know if it's the codec, or something else about Skype, but the quality is underwhelming.
I live in Asia, and have non-mind-blowing DSL (1024/384, with 300ms ping to the USA). I use VoIP providers via Asterisk on a colo box in the USA to place and receive calls via a Sipura SPA-1001. Most people I talk with in Europe or the USA can't tell that I'm using VoIP or on the other side of the planet.
However, whenever I use Skype (from here or elsewhere) there's this sort of cycling effect, about 1Hz, where the quality of the sound changes from "wide" to "narrow" and the volume pulses as well. Dropouts are frequent. This is over the exact same connections that work fine with the Sipura box (and the people I've Skyped with are very well connected).
But the cost and quality both suck in comparison to alienw's suggestion. You can spend a lot less rolling your own with Asterisk. Of course it takes a lot more time to get it going. But between the price, geek factor and the customizability, it's a sure win for any Slashdotter worth his/her salt.
Oh, those? I'm cool with them. That's why I haven't made a move on North Korea. Heck, we got a million of 'em here. It's the nucular ones that give me the heebie-jeebies.
Some southeast Asian languages (e.g., Burmese and Khmer) stack letters vertically in certain cases, so they end up taking a lot more space. What I mean is, these languages run horizontally like English, but certain combinations require some letters to be placed above or below others instead of next to them. They take stylized forms that don't require a full extra line-height but there's still a considerable amount of extra inter-line space required. It's sort of like mandatory double-spacing.
Why, get with the program and start writing in English, of course.
Wow, you Canadians are even more British than the British!
Huh? Thanks to illegal file sharing, we now have iTunes and a dozen other shops selling songs online at reasonable prices without having to buy a whole album.
And thanks to these kids' shenanigans, some fussbudget technophobe school administrators are ending up with red faces, the kids are getting an education in the law, parents are going to get together and organize and start paying attention to what goes on in the schools, and if you think a single kid from this story will serve a minute in jail or pay so much as a penny of fines, you're crazy.
But the world doesn't need too many ditch diggers who can't balance a checkbook or read the instructions on a can of peaches.
This ain't nucular physics they's teaching in high school. This is the basic stuff you need to retain - at least some of - in order to function in most roles in society. Some people can/will learn it other ways without the benefit of school, but we can't assume these are the same people who fail to behave in the classroom.
You can stuff your pity putty in the potty, Patty. Oh Lord, what have I come to?
I call BS. This is the most implausible story I've ever read in all my long years of reading people's stupid made-up stories on Slashdot.
I didn't realize Adobe was targeting the "pile of wires held together by boogers" platform with its latest Photoshop release. Serves me right for ignoring Slashdot for a few weeks.
For instance, a giant robot Mom that roams around the house with chainsaw arms and flames shooting out of its eye sockets.
Like any true geek, he went back in time and gave his grandfather a laptop.
What is an "internet subsystem"?
Anyway, while it is true that many African cities have running water, sewage, electricity and phones in certain neighborhoods, it's simplistic and uninformed to suggest that this means they're as developed as a typical town in Arizona.
North of the Sahara, things usually work pretty well. Likewise in South Africa, and a few other scattered places. But mostly, the electricity is spotty, the water is unsafe to drink, the sewage runneth over, and the phone systems are archaic - sometimes with multi-year waits for landline installs. If you think otherwise then your experience in Africa (if any) was very sheltered indeed.
I won't even get into transportation, commercial infrastructure, health care, and so on.
Sure there is. The coast of Antarctica is protected by hundreds of miles of solid ice.
Oh, don't be so harsh on them. It's easily as independent as the country I started in my parents' basement when they wouldn't let me go sleep over at my friend's house one time. Out of historical interest, I will reproduce its Constitution in its entirety here: "No grownups."
As far as I've been able to tell, that's the same law that governs Sealand.
I can't tell whether or not you're being serious (I will charitably assume you are not) but either way, you're making me laugh, so consider yourself a success.
Slashdot bans the transparent web proxy used by almost all DSL connections in Malaysia, so that's an entire nation of nerds excluded. And a very nerdy nation it is - on Friday night the computer malls are more crowded than the discos. Slashdot's loss.
I just use ssh -D to set up a little socks proxy via a shell account elsewhere; I haven't had any problems that way.
One huge issue: The person you're sniffing gets a warning that the site certificate's authenticity could not be verified. Unless they are very stupid, this is usually a big red flag.
From the Cain FAQ:
No problem. I assume you're posting from the USA, which is about a 7 (on a scale of 1-10) in terms of public wifi. Most of western and north-central Europe is in the 5-8 range. Europe has many more net cafes than the USA, but on the other hand not as many broadband subscribers with unsecured access points.
Parts of Asia (such as Singapore and the biggest cities in Malaysia) score a 10. Here in Kuala Lumpur there is public wifi pretty much anywhere with any significant amount of foot traffic and disposable income, much of it intentionally free.
There has been a "trial" program in the Vienna airport which offers free wireless access in a few areas (both landside and airside), so if you're flying through there, you can easily get a fix. It's supposed to switch to paid access, but it's been free for quite a while now. There's no free wireless in Frankfurt airport that I know of (paid is available though) and I haven't been to Prague recently.
I'm quite surprised you weren't able to plug your laptop into their network. Most net cafes have a dangling ethernet cable or two just for that purpose. Even if they don't, it's very rare that they won't let you pull the ethernet out of the back of one of their machines and plug it into yours.
Almost certainly not. Why on earth would someone bother to steal your password just to send email? Makes no sense; it's like breaking into your house in order to write a bunch of letter with your return address on them. Either you or someone you correspond with is infected with an email worm.
I hope he doesn't use it in restaurants, which is far more dangerous.
Spoken like someone who's never once been to a corporate HQ.
That, or you've just successfully baited me with some smooth sarcasm.
You must have burst a blood vessel when you discovered the municipal water company bought new potted plants for their lobby without your permission.
This (free wifi in public spaces paid out of my taxes) is exactly the sort of thing I want the government doing more of. It costs me almost nothing and gets people out of their houses. It's genius policy.
Twice schmice. Get real; this will cost me a penny a year. A competing commercial service will cost actual money.
Actually, that's precisely why it does run on a Mac.
However, it's also as ugly as all the rest of the X11 apps, which is why it has a hard time finding much acceptance among Mac users (other than the NeoOffice/J version).
Right, but that's a state of affairs that suits the porn operators just fine. They have no interest in porn being effectively targeted by corporate filters - that just means less business for them. As long as filters don't work that well, there will be more resistance to using them, as well as more ways around them.
Anything that makes it easy to block porn - unless it very precisely works only for users that can lead to legal problems, like minors - is anathema to porn vendors. Which is sensible enough. They are not in business to improve workplace productivity.