I really don't understand why it's so difficult to get program guide data reliably and for free. It would seem to be in the station's interest to give this data to people as I assume they want people to watch their programs.
In Europe this has been done for ages using Teletext. Basically one text page is sent as a spurt of digital data with each video frame. The pages are numbered and you use the remote on your TV to choose which one to view. They contain program listings, weather, news headlines, traffic info, and so on. It's supported by almost all TVs, though some do it better than others - some buffer lots of pages while others make you wait around until the page comes around again (which could take a few seconds).
For an example, see this teletext-www gateway. It's in Dutch but you should be able to figure it out, seeing as how Dutch is the closest significant living language to English (and is probably closer to English than a lot of the garbled crap people write on Slashdot). Vandaag means today, morgen is tomorrow, overmorgen is the day after tomorrow. Nederland 1, Nederland 2, V8, Discovery, YORIN, etc., are different channels. Teletext pages are all numbered; just put the number into the little remote control thing at the right and then click gaan (which means "go").
You could literally enlist one million homeless people, pay them $50K a year, and still have the defense budget come out cheaper than Medicare+Medicaid. You could even do that for only half of the means tested entitlements budget. Lets phrase it a different way:
The US spends enough on programs for the poor that you could give every homeless person a six figure salary.
The homeless are by and large the people that these programs pass by.
If you were to divert the other programs to paying 6-figure salaries to the homeless, you have many millions more homeless instead.
If you have any interest in making a valid point, why not tally up the gap between income and budget for all those other people served by domestic aid programs, divide by the number of beneficiaries, and then see what a handsome salary it works out to.
I don't know whether they ever went bankrupt (far as I know they've been owned by Student Advantage, those discount card people, for about 5 years). But they're not a content management system, they're a membership organization - similar to AP - that allows college newspapers to exchange stories.
Additionally, there is a lot of resistance to open-source solutions in the network administrations on college campuses. Most colleges have Novell or Windows based infrastructure everywhere but the science and computer/engineering schools.
This description fits a lot of small schools but certainly not the huge ones. Most of them find their needs far in excess of what the commercial vendors (other than Sun and a handful of other unix vendors) can provide.
Either they roll their own (lots of key standards and toolsets, such as IMAP, LDAP, etc. came about this way) or they draw on the successful experiences of their peers, using open source software developed elsewhere.
It's the same way with college newspapers, from what I've seen. The little ones use commercial packages or services. The big ones cobble together their own.
Since the typical effects of a Slashdotting are well known at this point, a 'victim' could as easily make the argument that posting just the link here was not simply distribution of information, but in fact a malicious attack on the site.
And I could "easily" make the argument that a casting director who puts you in the lead role of a major motion picture was actually maliciously trying to get you stalked by paparazzi for the rest of your life.
I don't get tabbed browsing. I can only pay attention to one page at a time, why would I want to have multiple pages open but only be able to look at one?
For so many reasons.
For instance, when I read your posting and decided to reply to it, I center-clicked the "Reply" link and then kept reading what I was doing while Slashdot's "Post Comment" page loaded. Once the tab color changed to indicate it was done loading, I clicked over to write this. Not only did I not have to wait for the reply page to appear, but when I was done, I didn't have to wait for the original page to reload before I could keep reading.
Any time I'm reading a page with a bunch of interesting links (maybe a news article or something), I'll center-click them all and then, once I've finished the original article (thus preserving my train of thought) I can read through 'em, one by one, and they're all pre-loaded and ready to go.
When I want to compare a bunch of pages (maybe pulling up 7 or 8 country profiles from the World Factbook or something) I can center-click all the links in rapid succession and then flip back and forth between them with ease.
It saves me an incredible amount of time and enables me to manage viewing a substantially larger number of web pages. It's the only browser innovation in years that's excited me at all.
The TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991) will never be used to cover spam, not should it. If it were to be changed, then it would be challeneged by every major Ralwasky wannabe, thus possibly rendering the whole thing dead for the duration. Telemarketers would love to for this to happen. An often used defense (yet still struck down every time) is the suggestion that it (TCPA) violates the First Admendment.
I don't follow your logic. All the time you have crackpots arguing that they don't have to pay federal taxes because they are only citizens of their individual state and not of the USA. You think that every time someone makes a change in the federal tax code they're worrying about one of these trailer park accountants finally mounting the legal challenge that gets the IRS deported to Cuba?
Of course not. Just because a few people don't like a law doesn't mean they have a good argument against it. They only have a good argument against it if they have a good argument against it.
Except for this: when you enter a contact in your Palm, that contact info gets on all your computers (via iSync), acessible from all your applications, including your web address book for those situations when you're away from your own computers, and you've left the Palm at the office (or wherever).
Sounds kind of like something I wish I had for a long time now...and please don't tell me Exchange is a *solution* for this.
ok.. so you turn the machine on by putting your palm on the screen. then have to immediatly grab the windex and a cloth to wipe off the smear you left. isn't there a better way to turn the machine on that won't prints all over?
One suggestion: wash your hands every once in a while.
I think that education would move along faster if they spent the money on teachers rather than on Internet access.
This isn't Laos government money getting spent. The amount of money available is for all practical purposes unlimited.
People who think teachers are useful will donate to hire teachers. People who think computers are useful will donate to buy computers. These are by and large not intersecting groups. Some donors donate to technology projects. Others donate to more traditional projects.
Very few donors (or individuals) wake up one morning and decide, "I want to donate a fixed amount to empower Laotian villagers!" and then search for the first approach that comes along. Instead, they are solicited by projects based on their history of funding certain types of efforts.
As for the general question of teachers vs computers, both are useful. In many cases I think a computer is more useful than a foreign teacher with imperfect language and cultural skills who will learn more about Laos than they'll learn from him/her. An effective Laotian teacher would be the best of all, but they may be in short supply and I suspect the reason for this is not because of a shortage of salary money (i.e., direct staff funding) but rather a shortage of the institutional educational resources that are required to manufacture effective teachers in the first place.
I don't think that Laos needs free Internet connections. I think what they need is houses, and a literacy rate above 60%. How do expect a small village, only 60% literate, to know how to use the Internet?
So you don't think that anyone should be able to do anything beyond subsistence until everyone has been raised to their level?
You have to keep education and opportunity moving forward, or else there's no room for people to grow into.
Among the 60% who are literate, some will do great things given the opportunity. They will also be able to prepare their society for a smoother transition into greater capacity when more resources are available, because computers will not be alien to them.
Of course, you and Trotsky are free to disagree with me.
Walmart certainly helped supporting Lindows, which i hope succedes as a desktop replacement.
A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a salesperson in a Walmart-like store in a developing country which shall remain nameless. They were selling no-name machines with Linux installed; had 'em right up in the prime space at the front of the electronics area. About half the price of the cheapest XP machine (maybe US$300 including small CRT monitor).
He said that as far as he knew, most people just bought them to save money and then illegally installed W2K or XP over top. This seems plausible to me, as Linux awareness in said country was not high.
So maybe those Lindows sales can't all go in the Linux column.
How the hell do you people get free long distance on mobile phones? Over here (UK), we have quite a bit of competition in the mobile phone sector (supposedly), yet calls to a land line are significantly expensive (several pence per minute, worse at peak rate). Yet over in America, all long distance calls are free?? Don't your companies have operating costs??
This should suggest to you that you're being schnookered by your phone companies about how much it really costs to run a phone company. The infrastructure finance costs can be recovered from the monthly subscription fees and from the limited number of poorly-informed high-usage customers paying overage. Once the infrastructure is in place and sufficiently capacious, there's little marginal cost to the company per minute of use.
Consider, as well, that immensely profitable US phone companies all manage to offer free local calls to residential landline customers - while BT charges more to call across the street in London during the day than it costs me to call London from 3000 miles away in Washington DC.
Either they are lying to you or they are grossly inefficient. Either way it's a crime.
The businesses that operate payphones are going out of business. So, the call is 50 cents trying to keep the place from going under. It's not going to work, because too many people say "50 cents? Screw that". I know I did, but at least now I understand why it's 50 cents, so next time I use a payphone, I'll understand.
I don't. Pricing yourself out of the market is dumb. I used to be a very frequent pay phone user (had a cell, hated it, gave it up). Now that it's 50c, though, I usually don't bother. It's not so much the money as they fact that I don't often have 2 quarters to spare. If the US had near-ubiquitous card pay phones like in the developed world, I'd happily pay the 50 cents.
I know of some that will accept incoming calls, so if I'm running late to meet someone with caller ID, I can call and hang up and they'll call me back (my friends are used to this). But otherwise I just cadge calls from courtesy phones now. There's added fun in figuring out how to get outside dialtone on a hotel lobby phone.
The biggest thing we're losing here, by the way, is the ability to make near-anonymous phone calls. There are still plenty of pay phones out of the reach of surveillance cameras, but it won't be that way for long.
Did you read the article? It works quite well until the lower TCP starts dropping packets, and the upper TCP notices the long delay and starts retransmitting.
You've probably never used it when that happens. Try using TCP-over-TCP in a congested network, and watch it grind to a halt.
I'm using ppp-over-ssh in a few sites now, including one where I have to open an inbound terminal session over the top of a 2-hour daily rsync job that completely saturates the 128K line in question.
Keyboard echo is slow during that time, but not any more than I'd expect across a fully-congested slow line halfway around the planet. And the rsync job proceeds at the expected rate.
Possibly more importantly for my applications, though, ppp-over-ssh can be implemented in about 2 minutes using ubiquitous components - no fiddling around or building of complex software is required. In a few minutes I can explain over the phone or via IM to anyone, regardless of partial language barriers, how to set up their end of the link.
I went to the CIPE site and they don't even have documentation online (downloadable texinfo format doesn't count, any more than if it were available in Sumerian on a stone tablet under a camel somewhere) so I can't get a sense of the scale of the installation process. But when they're talking about kernel patches on the main page, I can pretty much guess it's not going to be 2 minutes and fiddle-free.
The correct approach to
access control is to require a controlled token
to connect. An IP address is not a controlled
token, and using it as one, as JSTOR does, is
incompetent web service design.
Easy to say, but hard to implement.
When you talk about university campuses, you've got tens of thousands of authorized users that may or may not be in some centralized database. You expect JSTOR to go to each campus, set up a card table outside the cafeteria, and assign IDs to the students, faculty, staff, and other assorted parties covered by their contract?
Or, you expect the universities to all create some uniform authentication database for JSTOR to query against?
I doubt either one is going to happen (though the second, perhaps as a contract stipulation, seems slightly more likely).
Seriously -- have you ever travelled on the Tube? If so, have you ever travelled on any other comparable train system, such as the NYC subway (don't get me started on the unbearable heat in the stations, the even more unbearable heat in the trains, the noise as the trains squeal their way around corners, the dangerous nature of travelling on it during the day-time, never mind the night...)?
The heat in the NYC stations is in part a result of air-conditioning the trains and in part a result of the fact that it (duh) gets a whole lot hotter in New York than it does in London.
The system is dangerous neither in the daytime nor at night, and the fact that you'd suggest otherwise makes it pretty clear that if you're from anywhere near NYC, it's Long Island or Jersey.
Is it safer than London at night? Well that's a moot question, isn't it, because the London system DOESN'T RUN AT NIGHT. Good thing the pubs close at 11, or it'd be totally flurkin' useless.
And if you didn't hear squealing on curves in the London Underground, you didn't ride it very much. What, Leicester Square, Covent Garden, Covent Garden, Covent Garden, and Piccadilly?
The Tube is wonderful -- nice trains and stations, easy-to-read electronic signs to advise you when the next train is coming (at the platform), or where the next stop is (on the train), and very well interconnected.
Very well interconnected? Meaning what exactly?
The London system has suffered a similar plight to the NYC system -- massive population growth (both in terms of residents and of visitors) which has over-burdened the elderly infrastructure. But if you compare the relative ages of both cities and look at how they've each handled the problem, London has done a far better job, in my opinion.
Lemme guess - you went to London for two weeks and came back with a British accent you pretended not to be aware of.
Like the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where the first web browser (Mosaic) was developed.
Mosaic was not the first web browser; it was just one of many fairly early ones. The first web browser was developed at CERN on the Swiss-French border, the same place the first web server was developed.
You will need to adjust the following:
You Need Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP
If it makes you feel any better, this is what I get:
Thank you for your interest in Movielink. We want you to take part in the powerful Internet movie rental experience that Movielink delivers, but it is presently unavailable to users outside of the United States.
You don't need to make it uncopyable. You just have to make it less appealing than copying it another way. If someone can copy it from a DVD, they won't bother trying to copy it from Movielink.
So why do they protect DVDs? People can dupe movies from VHS.
The trick is to never stand in a line. Always go right for the ticket ATM machines. I buy ahead with my card on movietickets.com, and then just swipe my card in the machine in the theater. It spits out however many tickets I've ordered for the show, end of story.
With that trick, you can probably even skip the web site.
At least in at the Union Station megaplex in Washington DC, there's always a long line for the ticket windows, and never a single person using the pay-by-credit-card machine. Just walk up, stick in the card, grab your ticket - which looks exactly like the one you get from the long-line window - and saunter on in to the theater. Buying the ticket then and there just takes three more screen pokes than collecting a pre-paid ticket - surely less effort than the web site. And there's no $1 fee. Unless you think the movie is going to be sold out more than 15 minutes prior to showing (which in a sleepy burg like DC is what, opening weekend from 7-10pm?), there's no point using the internet.
In terms of speed, for a machine that's not churning millions of mail a day, it's "good enough". Don't need a club to kill mosquitos
Sure, but Sendmail is a resource hog, and you could be using those resources to do other things. No point tiring yourself out swinging a flyswatter around if there aren't any mosquitos.
Sigh. Obviously its a TCP/IP network produced using 32 IP addresses. Do you know nothing about packet switching?
32 IP addresses?
Assuming you meant 32-bit IP addresses, you're still inventing terminology. And what does the number of bits in an address have to do with knowing things about packet switching? That's an implementation detail.
Slashdot Mirror
In Europe this has been done for ages using Teletext. Basically one text page is sent as a spurt of digital data with each video frame. The pages are numbered and you use the remote on your TV to choose which one to view. They contain program listings, weather, news headlines, traffic info, and so on. It's supported by almost all TVs, though some do it better than others - some buffer lots of pages while others make you wait around until the page comes around again (which could take a few seconds).
For an example, see this teletext-www gateway. It's in Dutch but you should be able to figure it out, seeing as how Dutch is the closest significant living language to English (and is probably closer to English than a lot of the garbled crap people write on Slashdot). Vandaag means today, morgen is tomorrow, overmorgen is the day after tomorrow. Nederland 1, Nederland 2, V8, Discovery, YORIN, etc., are different channels. Teletext pages are all numbered; just put the number into the little remote control thing at the right and then click gaan (which means "go").
Outside of California and Texas it's pretty difficult to get a decent burrito for any price, let alone the $3 that one costs there.
I know; I used to live in the Burrito Zone and now I'm out of it.
Try New York, for instance - entry price for a burrito the size you pay $2.00 in the deep Mission for is $7, and it tastes like ass.
The homeless are by and large the people that these programs pass by.
If you were to divert the other programs to paying 6-figure salaries to the homeless, you have many millions more homeless instead.
If you have any interest in making a valid point, why not tally up the gap between income and budget for all those other people served by domestic aid programs, divide by the number of beneficiaries, and then see what a handsome salary it works out to.
I don't know whether they ever went bankrupt (far as I know they've been owned by Student Advantage, those discount card people, for about 5 years). But they're not a content management system, they're a membership organization - similar to AP - that allows college newspapers to exchange stories.
This description fits a lot of small schools but certainly not the huge ones. Most of them find their needs far in excess of what the commercial vendors (other than Sun and a handful of other unix vendors) can provide.
Either they roll their own (lots of key standards and toolsets, such as IMAP, LDAP, etc. came about this way) or they draw on the successful experiences of their peers, using open source software developed elsewhere.
It's the same way with college newspapers, from what I've seen. The little ones use commercial packages or services. The big ones cobble together their own.
And I could "easily" make the argument that a casting director who puts you in the lead role of a major motion picture was actually maliciously trying to get you stalked by paparazzi for the rest of your life.
But I'd rightly be considered an idiot.
For so many reasons.
It saves me an incredible amount of time and enables me to manage viewing a substantially larger number of web pages. It's the only browser innovation in years that's excited me at all.
I can't think of anything worse that could be missing and still leave a functioning browser. Once you go to tabs, you can't go back.
I don't follow your logic. All the time you have crackpots arguing that they don't have to pay federal taxes because they are only citizens of their individual state and not of the USA. You think that every time someone makes a change in the federal tax code they're worrying about one of these trailer park accountants finally mounting the legal challenge that gets the IRS deported to Cuba?
Of course not. Just because a few people don't like a law doesn't mean they have a good argument against it. They only have a good argument against it if they have a good argument against it.
No, but LDAP plus a little homework is.
One suggestion: wash your hands every once in a while.
This isn't Laos government money getting spent. The amount of money available is for all practical purposes unlimited.
People who think teachers are useful will donate to hire teachers. People who think computers are useful will donate to buy computers. These are by and large not intersecting groups. Some donors donate to technology projects. Others donate to more traditional projects.
Very few donors (or individuals) wake up one morning and decide, "I want to donate a fixed amount to empower Laotian villagers!" and then search for the first approach that comes along. Instead, they are solicited by projects based on their history of funding certain types of efforts.
As for the general question of teachers vs computers, both are useful. In many cases I think a computer is more useful than a foreign teacher with imperfect language and cultural skills who will learn more about Laos than they'll learn from him/her. An effective Laotian teacher would be the best of all, but they may be in short supply and I suspect the reason for this is not because of a shortage of salary money (i.e., direct staff funding) but rather a shortage of the institutional educational resources that are required to manufacture effective teachers in the first place.
So you don't think that anyone should be able to do anything beyond subsistence until everyone has been raised to their level?
You have to keep education and opportunity moving forward, or else there's no room for people to grow into.
Among the 60% who are literate, some will do great things given the opportunity. They will also be able to prepare their society for a smoother transition into greater capacity when more resources are available, because computers will not be alien to them.
Of course, you and Trotsky are free to disagree with me.
A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a salesperson in a Walmart-like store in a developing country which shall remain nameless. They were selling no-name machines with Linux installed; had 'em right up in the prime space at the front of the electronics area. About half the price of the cheapest XP machine (maybe US$300 including small CRT monitor).
He said that as far as he knew, most people just bought them to save money and then illegally installed W2K or XP over top. This seems plausible to me, as Linux awareness in said country was not high.
So maybe those Lindows sales can't all go in the Linux column.
Actually, it's a special class of abbreviation called an acronym. In other words, it's both.
This should suggest to you that you're being schnookered by your phone companies about how much it really costs to run a phone company. The infrastructure finance costs can be recovered from the monthly subscription fees and from the limited number of poorly-informed high-usage customers paying overage. Once the infrastructure is in place and sufficiently capacious, there's little marginal cost to the company per minute of use.
Consider, as well, that immensely profitable US phone companies all manage to offer free local calls to residential landline customers - while BT charges more to call across the street in London during the day than it costs me to call London from 3000 miles away in Washington DC.
Either they are lying to you or they are grossly inefficient. Either way it's a crime.
I don't. Pricing yourself out of the market is dumb. I used to be a very frequent pay phone user (had a cell, hated it, gave it up). Now that it's 50c, though, I usually don't bother. It's not so much the money as they fact that I don't often have 2 quarters to spare. If the US had near-ubiquitous card pay phones like in the developed world, I'd happily pay the 50 cents.
I know of some that will accept incoming calls, so if I'm running late to meet someone with caller ID, I can call and hang up and they'll call me back (my friends are used to this). But otherwise I just cadge calls from courtesy phones now. There's added fun in figuring out how to get outside dialtone on a hotel lobby phone.
The biggest thing we're losing here, by the way, is the ability to make near-anonymous phone calls. There are still plenty of pay phones out of the reach of surveillance cameras, but it won't be that way for long.
I'm using ppp-over-ssh in a few sites now, including one where I have to open an inbound terminal session over the top of a 2-hour daily rsync job that completely saturates the 128K line in question.
Keyboard echo is slow during that time, but not any more than I'd expect across a fully-congested slow line halfway around the planet. And the rsync job proceeds at the expected rate.
Possibly more importantly for my applications, though, ppp-over-ssh can be implemented in about 2 minutes using ubiquitous components - no fiddling around or building of complex software is required. In a few minutes I can explain over the phone or via IM to anyone, regardless of partial language barriers, how to set up their end of the link.
I went to the CIPE site and they don't even have documentation online (downloadable texinfo format doesn't count, any more than if it were available in Sumerian on a stone tablet under a camel somewhere) so I can't get a sense of the scale of the installation process. But when they're talking about kernel patches on the main page, I can pretty much guess it's not going to be 2 minutes and fiddle-free.
Easy to say, but hard to implement.
When you talk about university campuses, you've got tens of thousands of authorized users that may or may not be in some centralized database. You expect JSTOR to go to each campus, set up a card table outside the cafeteria, and assign IDs to the students, faculty, staff, and other assorted parties covered by their contract?
Or, you expect the universities to all create some uniform authentication database for JSTOR to query against?
I doubt either one is going to happen (though the second, perhaps as a contract stipulation, seems slightly more likely).
The heat in the NYC stations is in part a result of air-conditioning the trains and in part a result of the fact that it (duh) gets a whole lot hotter in New York than it does in London.
The system is dangerous neither in the daytime nor at night, and the fact that you'd suggest otherwise makes it pretty clear that if you're from anywhere near NYC, it's Long Island or Jersey.
Is it safer than London at night? Well that's a moot question, isn't it, because the London system DOESN'T RUN AT NIGHT. Good thing the pubs close at 11, or it'd be totally flurkin' useless.
And if you didn't hear squealing on curves in the London Underground, you didn't ride it very much. What, Leicester Square, Covent Garden, Covent Garden, Covent Garden, and Piccadilly?
Very well interconnected? Meaning what exactly?
Lemme guess - you went to London for two weeks and came back with a British accent you pretended not to be aware of.
Mosaic was not the first web browser; it was just one of many fairly early ones. The first web browser was developed at CERN on the Swiss-French border, the same place the first web server was developed.
If it makes you feel any better, this is what I get:
So why do they protect DVDs? People can dupe movies from VHS.
With that trick, you can probably even skip the web site.
At least in at the Union Station megaplex in Washington DC, there's always a long line for the ticket windows, and never a single person using the pay-by-credit-card machine. Just walk up, stick in the card, grab your ticket - which looks exactly like the one you get from the long-line window - and saunter on in to the theater. Buying the ticket then and there just takes three more screen pokes than collecting a pre-paid ticket - surely less effort than the web site. And there's no $1 fee. Unless you think the movie is going to be sold out more than 15 minutes prior to showing (which in a sleepy burg like DC is what, opening weekend from 7-10pm?), there's no point using the internet.
Sure, but Sendmail is a resource hog, and you could be using those resources to do other things. No point tiring yourself out swinging a flyswatter around if there aren't any mosquitos.
32 IP addresses?
Assuming you meant 32-bit IP addresses, you're still inventing terminology. And what does the number of bits in an address have to do with knowing things about packet switching? That's an implementation detail.
Sigh indeed.