I don't travel outide of the US much anymore...just do to the anti-US feelings I perceive to be out there...
My friend, you're making a big mistake. As someone with a US passport who's been to about 25 countries since the onset of the latest Iraq war, almost half of them with majority muslim populations, your perception is way off. There are occasionally people who want to engage me in political discussions but never once have I felt like it was anything personal (except with the very rare immature European, but like I said they're very rare, and easily ignored).
Get on the plane and find out for yourself. This whole "they hate us out there" thing is the product of US political propagandists, with the goal of getting US voters to disregard the reported opinions of people in other countries on the grounds that "they hate us anyway, so who cares what they think".
Huh? I thought control-alt-delete on Windows *can* be sent on the application level. I mean, when I use RealVNC on my Windows box, I can remotely send control-alt-delete via any VNC client.
Causing the OS to respond as if to the control-alt-delete sequence is not a problem - the OS puts up its dialog box which is presumably secure.
The concern is if an application can intercept it when you do it on your keyboard, and stop the OS from putting up the box, but instead put up its own version that looks the same.
So rather than inform an obvious newcomer to your country of this fact, you instead took the chance to be an asshole. And your country is better...how?
I wouldn't worry about it too much - it's the fakest story I ever read.
The closest it may come to the truth is that one day he and his friends were drinking a few pints and someone said "wouldn't it funny if..."
That's the stupidest solution I've heard all day. Just how long do you think it would take malicious coders to spoof the required key combo as well?
That's the stupidest response I've read all day. The point is that the key combo has to be one that's intercepted below the application level, just like control-alt-delete on Windows. Nobody can "spoof" anything unless they've already got their evil code into the OS itself, at which point this is all moot.
(We left because we wanted a society built on meritoracy, not based on racial preferences which to this day Malaysia still has - affirmative action for Malays, which forms the MAJORITY of the population in Malaysia, meaning minorities(Chinese, Indians) are discriminated against!!!!)
I live in Malaysia, and it's pretty clear to me that the main victims of this discrimination scheme are the Malays. It's a powerful demotivator. Unfortunately it's got a lot of demagogue resonance, so it's probably not going anywhere anytime soon. But as long as it lasts, you can expect the Malays to be underrepresented in business and overrepresented in unsatisfying token government jobs.
The only problem that I can see is that the treatment process is run in a country like Singapore. It is not a Western nation and does not have the same quality standards that exist in the West: Japan, USA, Canada, etc.
Singapore is a Chinese society. I would not consume any food or drink exported from Singapore.
Perhaps because you're too busy smoking crack?
I visit Singapore about once a month. It's about the cleanest place you'll ever see. It's one of the few places where if I dropped half my candy bar on the sidewalk I would cheerfully pick it up and eat it.
I would have to guess that you dont live in a major metro area, eg LA, NYC, DC, or some other random places like New Jersey. Have you ever tasted the tap water that comes out of these places? You can feel your life shortening by weeks at a time with each gulp of it. It is NASTY and just tastes like chemicals.
I dont live in a big city but hvae visited all places mentioned above.
Did you drink the water? New York's water is about the best there is, far better than almost any bottled water you can buy, for example. Maybe you were in a building with bad pipes.
Now DC's water, that's got a funny taste. And of course there was the issue this year with all the leader feeder pipes...
For the most of the poor countries, I think they simply would use used (old) PCs which has hardware something like ancient P4 celerons or Durons, with pirated copies of all sorts of software. That would cost something around $150(or less), with runs (almost) every software they would like, much cheaper, higher performance.
With a price tag like $189, It's impossible to compete with 'free (beer) software'. Who in China buys (legal copies of) Windows?
I think you're on to something. Perhaps Microsoft's participation in this is an attempt to finally capture at least some revenue from these piracy-intensive markets.
Comparared to a $1000 or even entry level $500 machine it IS low cost. Whereas before in those countries computers could be afforded only by the wealthy and other institutions, they are now in the realm of affordability for the average citizen.
Where is this mythical place where right now you have to spend $1000 for a computer, but thanks to AMD you'll now only have to spend $350?
If it costs $1000 for a computer, that's because of one or both of the following:
High import duties on technology
Tiny market means there are just a handful of distributors, who, without competition, jack up the price on what they import
I don't see how this is going to address those key cost factors.
I'd certainly consider buying something like that myself, but I would imagine that those who couldn't afford a computer for more than $350 also could not easily afford the broadband access that the inclusion of the NIC would imply.
In China, 512K DSL costs $10/month (works pretty well too, even in moderately out-of-the-way places) and at the moment they're adding one million new users every month. It's the most amazing feat of communications infrastructure development out there.
Someone who spends $350 on a computer is right on track to spend $10/month for connectivity.
Although it's been a few years since I've lived on campus, I do know some of the people who take care of the network, and I don't think calling it a mess is at all accurate. They firewall off students because students are dumb, and do dumb things, like getting infected with spam bots.
But most other schools don't do it. So either you're saying that RPI students are dumber than most (fair enough), or that RPI staff have been unable to come up with the sorts of solutions that have been judged acceptable elsewhere.
i just moved from a school teaching C/PASCAL to a school teaching C++/VB.Net, and ill give you 2 guesses which one provides more technological advantages.
Wow, you must be bummin'. Any chance the original school will let you transfer back? Did the new school tell you this in their materials? You might be able to pursue legal action.
same thing here a university of michigan. a number of the no's should be yes.
Yep - like everyone else there I had a free web site available on IFS almost 10 years ago, and it's still online now.
I'm quite sure the Princeton Review had a bored-sounding $7/hr telemarketing reject dial 764-1817 and rattle off the questions at the first person who picked up the phone. Any answer more elaborate than "no" or "yes" was randomly assigned one of those two values. This is the kind of methodology that sort of "works" when you're trying to get an overview of the aggregate position of a large number of people. But when you are trying to represent the answers of individual survey participants, it's irresponsible and fundamentally useless. Either pay to do the research right or go write some other story that your editor will give you an appropriate budget for.
Sad that people will be making decisions based on this survey - first, because the metrics are pretty meaningless in the first place, and secondly, because from all the schools I know well enough to check on, they were resoundingly wrong. In some cases, facilities were overstated; in others, understated. But never anything remotely approaching accurate.
He's also right about getting along with the folks around you. Chances are, you'll always stand out, but if you make an effort to fit in it will help. For example, in many places, people wear long pants even when it's very hot out. If you wear shorts, you stand out, and you *look* like a tourist -- a tourist is a target. If you wear long pants, you may still look like a tourist, but you may be mistaken for a tourist who has been around for long enough that he won't fall for the scams.
I don't think that pant length has that much to do with it, though this viewpoint could just be in service to my strong preference for shorts (which was only a problem once, when the police in Riyadh made me change - I thought that at 3am I could get away with it).
I've been around long enough not to fall for the scams, and pretty much nobody tries to scam me anymore, despite the fact that I doggedly persist in wearing clothing because it's comfortable rather than because it's locally popular. I think it's a lot more about how you carry yourself; that's something that does come from experience, and unlike changing your pants, can't be taught, only learned.
And by the way, in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar customs and social networks, there is nothing stupider than arming yourself with anything but a hefty dose of awareness and an unfailingly polite manner. You don't know who's carrying what, how good they are with it, and who's on whose side. Your tactic in difficult situations should be to make as many allies as possible.
The PowerBook has a wonderful ability to span the video to an external monitor or composite monitor/TV. The native 1024x768 12" iBook/Powerbook screen is the bare minimum usable realestate.... The iBook can output to an external video monitor, but again, it's only going to mirror to it.
You can screen-span with the iBook too. If it weren't possible; I wouldn't have bought the iBook, as connecting a large external monitor is absolutely essential for me when I'm at home.
I take my Powerbook to work every day and throw it around everywhere. It has a hard and strong shell. The iBook probably wouldn't fare quite as well since it has such a highly-polished shell.
Agreed with you here. My iBook has been around the block a bit in its year of life (running around Iraq, rainstorms in Kathmandu, a bad case of sand infestation in Mexico) and it's definitely showing some wear on the shell. I take it as a badge of honor though. The white really shows dirt, by the way, especially on the touchpad.
Also, the ink has worn off many of the keycaps (NSTRL and all the vowels); not sure if that means I type too much or that my fingertips are particularly abrasive. Either way, I don't notice it much, but whenever someone else uses it, they get very confused.
umm, yes. windows has this thing with trying NOT to use memory..how does that benefit anything? unused memory is just unused.
Resale value. Nobody wants memory with a lot of mileage on it. If you can say "and check this out: 256 megabytes of this baby just sat in the allocation pool the whole time" you've added hundreds to its value.
And yet, this attitude magically disappears in an MP3 or movie piracy article? Suddenly, THAT kind of piracy isn't "theft?" Honestly, what's the difference? In both cases, someone else's copyrighted materials are taken and used for their own purposes.
I don't get the Slashdot double standard. Copyright only ever matters when some person's GPL code gets taken. Then, all the sudden people have morals. If you pirate movies and music, would you get up in arms if someone took your GPL code and did what they wanted without giving you credit?
Read the legend of Robin Hood and then get back to us if this elementary aspect of human psychology continues to elude you.
Also, it's pronounced "HUman", not "hu-MON", and I don't care how many of our earth years you have been traveling to get here, you can't learn everything about us just from our transmissions into space, so sit back and observe awhile before getting all persnickety.
Having dedicated switching that is suited to dial up (isochorous etc) means you can stuff more dial up calls through a given wire than IP calls (which must carry all the extra IP crap).
Only if you use the full channel bandwidth for the entire duration of every call (and you don't, unless you always have music playing in the background on your phone calls or something). The closer to you the call is packetized, the more the wires between you and the other end can be used for other stuff.
Otherwise the dynamic infrastructure utilization of VoIP will more than overcome the protocol overhead.
The days of high cost international calls are limited. Here in New Zealand I can use my Vodafone mobile to call various countries (Australia, Canada, US, UK, Ireland) at the same rate as a local call.
So far, VoIP's main attraction has been lower cost calls. THis won't last and VoIP will have to find a better way to justify its existence.
Um... The reason your Vodaphone international calls are so cheap is because they are VoIP. So apparently it's already justified its existence with you after all.
Anyway, the really exciting stuff (which I guess the links in the original article will talk about, though admittedly I haven't read them yet) is the ability to completely customize call handling.
I'm Australian. We used to have paper money. We had both paper and plastic while we changed to plastic. Plastic is far superior.
Yeah, I lived in Australia for a couple years, which happened to coincide with the first plastic $5 and $10 notes coming into major circulation.
Look, I agree that they last longer, I just find that asesthetically they are inferior, and I stand by my point that a major component of this is the wear curve - they start looking like shit almost immediately, and then go on to last forever in that shitty-looking state. Personally I like notes that wear gracefully.
You may continue to make blanket unsupported rebuttals like "plastic is far superior" in response to my personal statements of opinion, but such rebuttals will remain both nonsensical and insubstantiable - I'm not arguing objective metrics, and none have been set forth as items of debate. On the other hand, you are more than free to like plastic money more.
Rubbish. You can iron the wrinkles out of plastic money far better than you can with paper money.
Apparently only one of us has actually tried this. The creases remain (admittedly the tendency to fold on its own will be abated), and they pick up additional warping.
I call bullshit. I've got, in front of me right now, my last US$20 and my last AUS$20, which I've had floating around my wallet as 'souvenirs' for the last 2 years. Guess which one is more worn, and which one still looks exactly the way it did when I got it, crisp from the bank down under?
I give up, which one?
But it doesn't matter much, since sitting in your wallet for two years doesn't constitute a very typical wear profile for a currency note. All you can learn from your experiment is which note was more worn to start with.
Live for a while in a place with both plastic and paper notes and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Are you somehow implying that paper money does not develop permanent creases? Because I've seen a fair share of paper bills all but breaking from folding... no just "ugly", but "about to rip in two". Three different countries' currency.
You can get rid of creases in paper money by leaving it straight for a while or by bending against the crease - or even by ironing it. No such luck with the plastic stuff.
Let's put it this way: They have different wear curves. Paper money moves pretty smoothly and almost imperceptibly from brand new to worn-out rag. Plastic money starts brand new, almost immediately becomes significantly worn, and then stays there long after paper money would have dissolved to shreds.
Which is better? Aesthetically, I prefer the paper money curve, even though I realize that it is more expensive for the issuing authority since the overall lifespan is lower.
Why yes, I have. Aussie money I can go surfing with, diving, swim all day, enter the desert, no problems. Get back to the beach, buy my mates beer. Money is fully intact.
That plastic money is "robust" for very limited values of robust.
It maintains a certain sort of structural integrity after various kinds of wear, sure. But after just a few folds it develops ugly permanent creases that make it look horribly worn (and make it frustrating to try to get it to lay flat).
Contributing each additional marginal dollar hurts those with more less than it hurts those with less.
The people with more have earned (or inherited, or stolen) their more in the context of a legal and enforcement framework provided by the government, and consequently their obligation to that system is greater.
In the absence of their contributions, the system will be unable to perform its functions and the context in which they gained and maintain their wealth will disappear. It's the same as insurance - you pay more to insure a $100,000 Maserati than a $50 ten-speed bike.
Slashdot Mirror
My friend, you're making a big mistake. As someone with a US passport who's been to about 25 countries since the onset of the latest Iraq war, almost half of them with majority muslim populations, your perception is way off. There are occasionally people who want to engage me in political discussions but never once have I felt like it was anything personal (except with the very rare immature European, but like I said they're very rare, and easily ignored).
Get on the plane and find out for yourself. This whole "they hate us out there" thing is the product of US political propagandists, with the goal of getting US voters to disregard the reported opinions of people in other countries on the grounds that "they hate us anyway, so who cares what they think".
Causing the OS to respond as if to the control-alt-delete sequence is not a problem - the OS puts up its dialog box which is presumably secure.
The concern is if an application can intercept it when you do it on your keyboard, and stop the OS from putting up the box, but instead put up its own version that looks the same.
I wouldn't worry about it too much - it's the fakest story I ever read.
The closest it may come to the truth is that one day he and his friends were drinking a few pints and someone said "wouldn't it funny if..."
That's the stupidest response I've read all day. The point is that the key combo has to be one that's intercepted below the application level, just like control-alt-delete on Windows. Nobody can "spoof" anything unless they've already got their evil code into the OS itself, at which point this is all moot.
I live in Malaysia, and it's pretty clear to me that the main victims of this discrimination scheme are the Malays. It's a powerful demotivator. Unfortunately it's got a lot of demagogue resonance, so it's probably not going anywhere anytime soon. But as long as it lasts, you can expect the Malays to be underrepresented in business and overrepresented in unsatisfying token government jobs.
Yeah, because now Singapore's stuck being one of the richest, safest, and most-developed countries on the planet, poor suckers.
Perhaps because you're too busy smoking crack?
I visit Singapore about once a month. It's about the cleanest place you'll ever see. It's one of the few places where if I dropped half my candy bar on the sidewalk I would cheerfully pick it up and eat it.
Did you drink the water? New York's water is about the best there is, far better than almost any bottled water you can buy, for example. Maybe you were in a building with bad pipes.
Now DC's water, that's got a funny taste. And of course there was the issue this year with all the leader feeder pipes...
I think you're on to something. Perhaps Microsoft's participation in this is an attempt to finally capture at least some revenue from these piracy-intensive markets.
Where is this mythical place where right now you have to spend $1000 for a computer, but thanks to AMD you'll now only have to spend $350?
If it costs $1000 for a computer, that's because of one or both of the following:
High import duties on technology
Tiny market means there are just a handful of distributors, who, without competition, jack up the price on what they import
I don't see how this is going to address those key cost factors.
In China you can already buy a cheap PC for $200.
In China, 512K DSL costs $10/month (works pretty well too, even in moderately out-of-the-way places) and at the moment they're adding one million new users every month. It's the most amazing feat of communications infrastructure development out there.
Someone who spends $350 on a computer is right on track to spend $10/month for connectivity.
But most other schools don't do it. So either you're saying that RPI students are dumber than most (fair enough), or that RPI staff have been unable to come up with the sorts of solutions that have been judged acceptable elsewhere.
Wow, you must be bummin'. Any chance the original school will let you transfer back? Did the new school tell you this in their materials? You might be able to pursue legal action.
Yep - like everyone else there I had a free web site available on IFS almost 10 years ago, and it's still online now.
I'm quite sure the Princeton Review had a bored-sounding $7/hr telemarketing reject dial 764-1817 and rattle off the questions at the first person who picked up the phone. Any answer more elaborate than "no" or "yes" was randomly assigned one of those two values. This is the kind of methodology that sort of "works" when you're trying to get an overview of the aggregate position of a large number of people. But when you are trying to represent the answers of individual survey participants, it's irresponsible and fundamentally useless. Either pay to do the research right or go write some other story that your editor will give you an appropriate budget for.
Sad that people will be making decisions based on this survey - first, because the metrics are pretty meaningless in the first place, and secondly, because from all the schools I know well enough to check on, they were resoundingly wrong. In some cases, facilities were overstated; in others, understated. But never anything remotely approaching accurate.
I don't think that pant length has that much to do with it, though this viewpoint could just be in service to my strong preference for shorts (which was only a problem once, when the police in Riyadh made me change - I thought that at 3am I could get away with it).
I've been around long enough not to fall for the scams, and pretty much nobody tries to scam me anymore, despite the fact that I doggedly persist in wearing clothing because it's comfortable rather than because it's locally popular. I think it's a lot more about how you carry yourself; that's something that does come from experience, and unlike changing your pants, can't be taught, only learned.
And by the way, in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar customs and social networks, there is nothing stupider than arming yourself with anything but a hefty dose of awareness and an unfailingly polite manner. You don't know who's carrying what, how good they are with it, and who's on whose side. Your tactic in difficult situations should be to make as many allies as possible.
You can screen-span with the iBook too. If it weren't possible; I wouldn't have bought the iBook, as connecting a large external monitor is absolutely essential for me when I'm at home.
Agreed with you here. My iBook has been around the block a bit in its year of life (running around Iraq, rainstorms in Kathmandu, a bad case of sand infestation in Mexico) and it's definitely showing some wear on the shell. I take it as a badge of honor though. The white really shows dirt, by the way, especially on the touchpad.
Also, the ink has worn off many of the keycaps (NSTRL and all the vowels); not sure if that means I type too much or that my fingertips are particularly abrasive. Either way, I don't notice it much, but whenever someone else uses it, they get very confused.
Resale value. Nobody wants memory with a lot of mileage on it. If you can say "and check this out: 256 megabytes of this baby just sat in the allocation pool the whole time" you've added hundreds to its value.
Read the legend of Robin Hood and then get back to us if this elementary aspect of human psychology continues to elude you.
Also, it's pronounced "HUman", not "hu-MON", and I don't care how many of our earth years you have been traveling to get here, you can't learn everything about us just from our transmissions into space, so sit back and observe awhile before getting all persnickety.
Only if you use the full channel bandwidth for the entire duration of every call (and you don't, unless you always have music playing in the background on your phone calls or something). The closer to you the call is packetized, the more the wires between you and the other end can be used for other stuff.
Otherwise the dynamic infrastructure utilization of VoIP will more than overcome the protocol overhead.
Um... The reason your Vodaphone international calls are so cheap is because they are VoIP. So apparently it's already justified its existence with you after all.
Anyway, the really exciting stuff (which I guess the links in the original article will talk about, though admittedly I haven't read them yet) is the ability to completely customize call handling.
Yeah, I lived in Australia for a couple years, which happened to coincide with the first plastic $5 and $10 notes coming into major circulation.
Look, I agree that they last longer, I just find that asesthetically they are inferior, and I stand by my point that a major component of this is the wear curve - they start looking like shit almost immediately, and then go on to last forever in that shitty-looking state. Personally I like notes that wear gracefully.
You may continue to make blanket unsupported rebuttals like "plastic is far superior" in response to my personal statements of opinion, but such rebuttals will remain both nonsensical and insubstantiable - I'm not arguing objective metrics, and none have been set forth as items of debate. On the other hand, you are more than free to like plastic money more.
Apparently only one of us has actually tried this. The creases remain (admittedly the tendency to fold on its own will be abated), and they pick up additional warping.
I give up, which one?
But it doesn't matter much, since sitting in your wallet for two years doesn't constitute a very typical wear profile for a currency note. All you can learn from your experiment is which note was more worn to start with.
Live for a while in a place with both plastic and paper notes and you'll see what I'm talking about.
You can get rid of creases in paper money by leaving it straight for a while or by bending against the crease - or even by ironing it. No such luck with the plastic stuff.
Let's put it this way: They have different wear curves. Paper money moves pretty smoothly and almost imperceptibly from brand new to worn-out rag. Plastic money starts brand new, almost immediately becomes significantly worn, and then stays there long after paper money would have dissolved to shreds.
Which is better? Aesthetically, I prefer the paper money curve, even though I realize that it is more expensive for the issuing authority since the overall lifespan is lower.
That plastic money is "robust" for very limited values of robust.
It maintains a certain sort of structural integrity after various kinds of wear, sure. But after just a few folds it develops ugly permanent creases that make it look horribly worn (and make it frustrating to try to get it to lay flat).
Give me the paper stuff any time.
For that matter, just send it snail mail now. It'll probably arrive after you're dead anyway.
Contributing each additional marginal dollar hurts those with more less than it hurts those with less.
The people with more have earned (or inherited, or stolen) their more in the context of a legal and enforcement framework provided by the government, and consequently their obligation to that system is greater.
In the absence of their contributions, the system will be unable to perform its functions and the context in which they gained and maintain their wealth will disappear. It's the same as insurance - you pay more to insure a $100,000 Maserati than a $50 ten-speed bike.