I can't tell you how many times I've had VOIP vendors approach me with their hair-brained notion of saving us money. The ridiculous per-line charge is where they start to fall on deaf ears with me.
How high was the per-line charge? I only have a single line and I'm paying US$6/month; I can't imagine it would get more expensive per line as your volume increases.
One thing I think people fail to realize is that in the US there is much more area to cover with broadband, than in Europe and Japan.
I think their failure to fail to realize that is made clear by the many references to better-wired Canada, which has a similar urban/rural breakdown to the USA and is a far larger country.
until then I guess be patient
Why be patient? Why not try to make things better?
The fact that more Americans don't want high speed internet access isn't a bad thing, it isn't a good thing either. It's just what makes the people of this country unique.
Oh, so that's what makes the USA unique. I'd been wondering.
The internet is more a part of the life of the average South Korean, so more South Koreans choose to buy high speed internet access.
In every other country this has worked the other way around: where broadband uptake was low, it increased once the cost-performance ratio improved. In order for you to persuade anyone that this is different just in the USA, you'll have to offer more than just an unsupported assertion. I find it very hard to believe that there is some ancient cultural value of high-speed internet access that has passed down through the generations in Korea.
The fact is, broadband is now very expensive in the US compared to elsewhere, and the service is lousy, and so it isn't that attractive an option compared to just staying put with dialup. I work all over the world, mostly in poorish developing countries. Three or four years ago, my DSL in Washington DC was the envy of all I met. These days, other than the desperately poor countries in Africa, and the hopelessly messed up countries of Latin America, my DC Verizon DSL is at best middle-of-the-road. And I'm not even talking about rich countries like Japan and Singapore.
In my experience, communications services in Europe traditionally offer the least bang-for-the-buck and the most punitive usage-based charging of anywhere on the planet. But even my parents (who live in the Netherlands, are in their 60s/70s, and really only use the net for a daily email check and a bit of light web surfing, and have no inherent interest in high-speed anything) finally got DSL because they could get flat rate service for EUR14/month, which was less than they were spending on dialup + local phone time. When a communications service is cheaper in the Netherlands than in the USA, something is very seriously wrong in the USA.
Based on what I've heard, Meetups are usually fairly popular - I don't think many organizers will have a problem with the fee
They will in some places. Where I live, $19 is enough to take a family of four out to dinner five nights in a row. I can almost guarantee that the Meetups in such places will shrivel up and die, ideally to be replaced by something homegrown.
Will be able to one-to-one message eachother. This used to be a Meetup+ service ($5 a month). You couldn't even one-to-one message if you were an organizer.
You mean, once we pay $19, we will finally be allowed to use our email clients to send each other messages? Amazing!
The web site you quoted is from 1998. That's 7 years ago. Before OSX, before, well, almost anything. What does that have to do with this discussion?
Also, something was wrong, because I regularly copied files of that size back then on far weaker Mac hardware and it was lickety-split.
Re:Keyboard included at your house
on
Return of the Mac
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· Score: 1
Most PCs sold in the last five years come with PS/2 - not USB - peripherals.
I just bought a dual PS/2 -> single USB adaptor, perfect for connecting old Wintel keyboards and mice to Macs, for $6. Surely that's not going to be the deciding factor.
And even if one does have a USB keyboard around, the fact of the matter is that not having the Mac keys on there is going to be confusing for most consumers.
For an additional $1, I bought a refill pack of putty-knife blades (admittedly I bought those a few weeks ago, for another reason), one of which I used to scrape the windows logo off the keyboard. 10 seconds with a Sharpie and it was reborn with the Apple squiggle.
And chalk me up among the other people confused about the $250 monitor. Monitors start at under $100. My perfectly fine flat-screen 17" Samsung Syncmaster 765MB cost $115 brand-new including tax, at the first store I checked, a 10 minute walk from my home (and I must say that's about the limit of comfortable walking-home-with-a-monitor-box distance).
The military uses 225-400 MHz for air-to-ground communications and for navigation aids. That's a bright idea, jamming the United States Air Force. It's not like they could make your life miserable or anything.
Yeah, right, I'd like to see them try.
"Airman, can you give me the coordinates of this scofflaw raju1kabir's house so we can bomb the crap out of it?"
"Sure, Lieutenant. He's at -------skraawwwwwwwwwkkkkkh-------"
"Airman? Airman? Dammit, how am I supposed to find him with all this interference on our radio system?"
Don't use ANY form of encryption method. It's illegal. Do not use vocal codes or cyphers, or digital modulation other than the approved methods. Don't intentionally obfuscate the meaning of your conversations with codewords or code phrases.
Am I required to speak in English? Can I talk with my Navaho friends and relatives in our language? What if I am Private Charlie Whitehorse?
I think this would be good for the 50 and up crowd who would like the convience of a Cell phone for emergency use but cant justify a monthly bill or minutes that expire of 90 days (pre-pay).
Also, in their declining years, with a wide selection of Natural Causes just over the horizon, they have less reason to worry about the long-term effects of living a few meters away from an antenna putting out however many watts of juicy RF goodness.
I wonder if the price is because of the cost of the connection (probobly a satellite phone), or something else.... What do you guys think?
I don't think that alone can account for it. When I lived there years ago (before the internet was allowed at all), Saudis would just dial internationally (to Bahrain if it was an innocuous site, or to the USA if not) to get online, and nobody was spending $26 to pull down one web page.
These days, international calls are much cheaper than they were now. I think the cost would have to be for the "expertise" in using an encrypting proxy they set up on a $10/month hosting account somewhere (e.g., by typing ssh -D 8000 hostname).
It's strange that the Asia/Pacific airlines haven't jumped on it, given the typical length of flights.
Like Singapore Airlines, China Airlines, Japan Airlines, and ANA? From what I can tell, they readily outnumber the European airlines that have it running. Which is not a surprise since they outdo the European airlines in everything else too (okay, to be fair, China Airlines mainly only outdoes them in crashes, but the others...).
So do you tune out that whole portion of the flight attendant's spiel where they tell you that FAA regulations prohibit you from using any equipment that can send or receive a signal while onboard the airplane?
You mean like the wifi card that is required in order to use the service in the first place?
I think I see the revenue model now.
1. Advertise in-flight wifi
2. Charge for it
3. Don't bother actually providing the service
4. When people complain, ask them how they know it doesn't work, and if they say it's because they tried, turn them over to the Feds for operating a transmitting device aboard a plane
Seems to me, that at least 4 years ago Lufthansa was rather at the top in terms of leg room...
A lot has happened in 4 years, and most of it has been various flavors of European airlines going downhill under intense price pressure from the LCCs. I don't think LH has any planes with 34" seat pitch anymore. You're lucky if you get 32". Check SeatGuru for up-to-date info.
Almost any flight to India is going to be awful; you can't blame Northwest for that. They do seem to be running those old DC-10s into the ground, but on the other hand Lufthansa doesn't do seatback video either that I've seen. At least Northwest has it on its new planes, and they went all-out, video-on-demand with dozens of movies.
Malaysia Airlines is excellent, more or less on par with Singapore. More legroom, nicer staff, but the in-flight entertainment isn't quite as good.
Lufthansa is one of the most wretched airlines in the sky (unless you're in the front of the plane), so don't cry too much. Basically Lufthansa is a European-style low-cost carrier (zero service, zero amenities, treat the customers like something that got stuck on their shoes on the way into work) with high-cost carrier fares (and a slightly lucrative business and first-class trade that has nothing to do with their horrid economy class offering).
Addicted to net access though I am, I'd take Northwest with a good book over Lufthansa with wifi any day of the week. At least I'll have someplace to put my legs, will be served something approximating edible food, and I won't be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from being yelled at by the flight attendants for 12 hours.
Anyway, good airlines, like Singapore Air also offer Conexion and fly from the US to Japan (e.g., SQ11, LAX-NRT), so you can have it both ways.
You're a stronger man than I. After a week of puttering with Broadvoice and asterisk (and getting no help from Broadvoice, which is fine since they didn't claim to offer asterisk support), I gave up and went with a la carte incoming and outgoing services (still via asterisk).
I never managed to get asterisk to complete a SIP registration with Broadvoice's servers, or to complete an outgoing call.
Malaysia. Also featuring the world's best food. And large numbers of the aforementioned wifi-suffused restaurants and cafes are open 24 hours a day, for those periods when I need to be up late for time-zone-sync purposes.
I'd go nuts without cow-orkers to talk too, different scenery and the social aspects of the office. I did work out of my house for a couple of years so I do have something to compare it to.
When I started telecommuting, I decided to go all the way, and moved to a tropical country with good net connections. My expenses are so low that I could take a 50% pay cut and still be well ahead of the game.
Now I work from shady sidewalk cafes, sipping fresh-squeezed fruit juice for $1 every few hours and basking in the warm life-giving rays of 802.11b that saturate the area.
Who needs co-workers when you have an endless procession of passers-by to peoplewatch? All the distraction with none of the heartache.
That's only if you want to keep your existing analog phone line. If you aren't wedded to your number then you can just get a new virtual number from LibreTel or someone like that.
Buy your outgoing minutes from any of dozens of cheap wholesalers (1 or 2 cents/minute) and you can do everything via IP without any need for analog phone line interfaces, at least facing the outside.
Slashdot Mirror
Meteor strikes aside, when will the future end so they can make that determination? What are you asking?
How high was the per-line charge? I only have a single line and I'm paying US$6/month; I can't imagine it would get more expensive per line as your volume increases.
I think their failure to fail to realize that is made clear by the many references to better-wired Canada, which has a similar urban/rural breakdown to the USA and is a far larger country.
Why be patient? Why not try to make things better?
Oh, so that's what makes the USA unique. I'd been wondering.
In every other country this has worked the other way around: where broadband uptake was low, it increased once the cost-performance ratio improved. In order for you to persuade anyone that this is different just in the USA, you'll have to offer more than just an unsupported assertion. I find it very hard to believe that there is some ancient cultural value of high-speed internet access that has passed down through the generations in Korea.
The fact is, broadband is now very expensive in the US compared to elsewhere, and the service is lousy, and so it isn't that attractive an option compared to just staying put with dialup. I work all over the world, mostly in poorish developing countries. Three or four years ago, my DSL in Washington DC was the envy of all I met. These days, other than the desperately poor countries in Africa, and the hopelessly messed up countries of Latin America, my DC Verizon DSL is at best middle-of-the-road. And I'm not even talking about rich countries like Japan and Singapore.
In my experience, communications services in Europe traditionally offer the least bang-for-the-buck and the most punitive usage-based charging of anywhere on the planet. But even my parents (who live in the Netherlands, are in their 60s/70s, and really only use the net for a daily email check and a bit of light web surfing, and have no inherent interest in high-speed anything) finally got DSL because they could get flat rate service for EUR14/month, which was less than they were spending on dialup + local phone time. When a communications service is cheaper in the Netherlands than in the USA, something is very seriously wrong in the USA.
They will in some places. Where I live, $19 is enough to take a family of four out to dinner five nights in a row. I can almost guarantee that the Meetups in such places will shrivel up and die, ideally to be replaced by something homegrown.
You mean, once we pay $19, we will finally be allowed to use our email clients to send each other messages? Amazing!
The web site you quoted is from 1998. That's 7 years ago. Before OSX, before, well, almost anything. What does that have to do with this discussion?
Also, something was wrong, because I regularly copied files of that size back then on far weaker Mac hardware and it was lickety-split.
I just bought a dual PS/2 -> single USB adaptor, perfect for connecting old Wintel keyboards and mice to Macs, for $6. Surely that's not going to be the deciding factor.
For an additional $1, I bought a refill pack of putty-knife blades (admittedly I bought those a few weeks ago, for another reason), one of which I used to scrape the windows logo off the keyboard. 10 seconds with a Sharpie and it was reborn with the Apple squiggle.
And chalk me up among the other people confused about the $250 monitor. Monitors start at under $100. My perfectly fine flat-screen 17" Samsung Syncmaster 765MB cost $115 brand-new including tax, at the first store I checked, a 10 minute walk from my home (and I must say that's about the limit of comfortable walking-home-with-a-monitor-box distance).
Yeah, right, I'd like to see them try.
Am I required to speak in English? Can I talk with my Navaho friends and relatives in our language? What if I am Private Charlie Whitehorse?
Also, in their declining years, with a wide selection of Natural Causes just over the horizon, they have less reason to worry about the long-term effects of living a few meters away from an antenna putting out however many watts of juicy RF goodness.
I don't think that alone can account for it. When I lived there years ago (before the internet was allowed at all), Saudis would just dial internationally (to Bahrain if it was an innocuous site, or to the USA if not) to get online, and nobody was spending $26 to pull down one web page.
These days, international calls are much cheaper than they were now. I think the cost would have to be for the "expertise" in using an encrypting proxy they set up on a $10/month hosting account somewhere (e.g., by typing ssh -D 8000 hostname).
Like Singapore Airlines, China Airlines, Japan Airlines, and ANA? From what I can tell, they readily outnumber the European airlines that have it running. Which is not a surprise since they outdo the European airlines in everything else too (okay, to be fair, China Airlines mainly only outdoes them in crashes, but the others...).
You mean like the wifi card that is required in order to use the service in the first place?
I think I see the revenue model now.
1. Advertise in-flight wifi
2. Charge for it
3. Don't bother actually providing the service
4. When people complain, ask them how they know it doesn't work, and if they say it's because they tried, turn them over to the Feds for operating a transmitting device aboard a plane
...
-I Use ICMP ECHO instead of UDP datagrams.
A lot has happened in 4 years, and most of it has been various flavors of European airlines going downhill under intense price pressure from the LCCs. I don't think LH has any planes with 34" seat pitch anymore. You're lucky if you get 32". Check SeatGuru for up-to-date info.
Almost any flight to India is going to be awful; you can't blame Northwest for that. They do seem to be running those old DC-10s into the ground, but on the other hand Lufthansa doesn't do seatback video either that I've seen. At least Northwest has it on its new planes, and they went all-out, video-on-demand with dozens of movies.
Malaysia Airlines is excellent, more or less on par with Singapore. More legroom, nicer staff, but the in-flight entertainment isn't quite as good.
Lufthansa is one of the most wretched airlines in the sky (unless you're in the front of the plane), so don't cry too much. Basically Lufthansa is a European-style low-cost carrier (zero service, zero amenities, treat the customers like something that got stuck on their shoes on the way into work) with high-cost carrier fares (and a slightly lucrative business and first-class trade that has nothing to do with their horrid economy class offering).
Addicted to net access though I am, I'd take Northwest with a good book over Lufthansa with wifi any day of the week. At least I'll have someplace to put my legs, will be served something approximating edible food, and I won't be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from being yelled at by the flight attendants for 12 hours.
Anyway, good airlines, like Singapore Air also offer Conexion and fly from the US to Japan (e.g., SQ11, LAX-NRT), so you can have it both ways.
-raju1kabir, 50000 miles in 2005 and counting
Um, you do know what network 172.16 is in, right? Next will you be launching a DOS against 127.0.0.1?
You're a stronger man than I. After a week of puttering with Broadvoice and asterisk (and getting no help from Broadvoice, which is fine since they didn't claim to offer asterisk support), I gave up and went with a la carte incoming and outgoing services (still via asterisk).
I never managed to get asterisk to complete a SIP registration with Broadvoice's servers, or to complete an outgoing call.
Malaysia. Also featuring the world's best food. And large numbers of the aforementioned wifi-suffused restaurants and cafes are open 24 hours a day, for those periods when I need to be up late for time-zone-sync purposes.
When I started telecommuting, I decided to go all the way, and moved to a tropical country with good net connections. My expenses are so low that I could take a 50% pay cut and still be well ahead of the game.
Now I work from shady sidewalk cafes, sipping fresh-squeezed fruit juice for $1 every few hours and basking in the warm life-giving rays of 802.11b that saturate the area.
Who needs co-workers when you have an endless procession of passers-by to peoplewatch? All the distraction with none of the heartache.
That's only if you want to keep your existing analog phone line. If you aren't wedded to your number then you can just get a new virtual number from LibreTel or someone like that.
Buy your outgoing minutes from any of dozens of cheap wholesalers (1 or 2 cents/minute) and you can do everything via IP without any need for analog phone line interfaces, at least facing the outside.
It's impossible to be so much as a departmental secretary and not know what a PBX is.
You can also get cell phones with US numbers in Iraq. Local calls are routed to local interconnect; everything else gets hauled via IP to New York.