seems odd that telco's would look at the popularity of "cheap" online alternatives and be upset, as opposed to altering their pricing schemes to be more appealing to "the populaces"
For years, telcos in developing countries used international call charges as a sort of "tax" on emigrants. People would move out of the country, go live in the US or UK or Germany or wherever, earn a whole lot more money, and spend some of it calling their relatives left behind in the homeland. And then the exhorbitant settlement rate would funnel money back from overseas.
Arguably, this is a good thing since it allows comparatively wealthy migrants to subsidize service to poor locals who would otherwise not be able to afford it. Of course, in practice the telcos are usually so incompetent that the money just gets wasted or disappears into various people's pockets.
This changed a lot, of course, when the FCC unilaterally initiated settlement rate reform in 1998, one of the most brilliant pieces of public policy the US has ever pulled off. Now, the amount by which inbound callers can be gouged is strictly limited (hence the drastic decrease in international call costs that we've seen in the past few years).
However, telcos are still free to gouge their own citizens, presumably carrying on the spirit of the earlier "tax" by indirectly siphoning away some of the money that these people's overseas relatives send home.
Anyway, without the large sums received from hiked-up international call charges, many of these telcos would fall apart. In the current post-1998 climate, this might not be a bad thing - eliminating communications-cost friction certainly would bring about long-term productivity improvements in developing economies. But you can't expect the telcos to be excited about it.
Leaving a car on a street unlocked with the keys inside is entrapment.
Only if you can convince a jury that an ordinary person would be compelled to steal the car under such circumstances, a tough sell if you ask me.
You've never seen a car left running unattended at the curb outside a store? I live in Washington DC - not exactly Mayberry - and I see that regularly.
So instead of investigating existing car robberies, they use our tax money to buy a car that is meant to be stolen. Great.
What, you think that each thief steals one car and then retires?
What they're doing here makes it less likely that your car will be stolen. If your car is the only one on the street, and someone wants to steal a car, there's a 100% chance that it'll be yours, and some <100% chance that it'll be recovered.
On the other hand, if this trap car is also on the streets, then there's only a 50% chance yours will be selected for theft. And there's a 100% chance the thief will be caught before he comes back to steal your car.
You should be on your knees thanking the Arlington police for this.
(Personally, I don't like it, because I believe that car theft improves urban quality-of-life by driving up the cost of car ownership, but that's neither here nor there for this discussion.)
Someone needs to reverse-engineer the protocols used by these programs and start shoving gigabytes of bogus data down their throats.
In short order they'll either cut your IP range off, in which case you've done a fine service for your ISP's fellow customers, or they'll start aggregating clearly bogus data which will decrease its marketability to their clients.
Are they going to take you to court and say "Your honor, we were secretly spying on this person and he's started lying to us about what he was doing online..."?
I was hoping that one year on they would have sorted out the stability issues. I have used many Unices in my life: Irix, SunOS, NeXT, Linux, *BSD but MacOS X is probably the least reliable (apart from Irix on the O2 in its later years). To still be in this position after a year is a little shameful. I have certainly had major problems while watching DVDs (major DVD slowdowns and loss of audio, failure to detect a DVD, inability to play some DVDs and inability to eject DVDs
Oh? You've had better luck playing DVDs on Irix, SunOS, and NeXT?
They are recommended because MOST other OSes use file extensions to type files and this is a wired world we live in.
Most? Only Windows relies on them. Unix uses a hodgepodge of magic (not the Harry Potter stuff, but bits in the beginning of the file that tell it what it is), extensions, and guesswork.
Do you really need your laptop? If not, don't bring it.
Amen.
I travel to a pretty diverse range of countries on a fairly regular basis. I have long ago given up on toting a laptop around unless I specifically need it for a meeting.
Outside of the US (where I assume you're posting from) internet cafes are thick on the ground. In developed countries, the service is much faster than you'll get by dialing in, and quite often cheaper than the phone call.
I use the mindterm Java applet to provide an SSH terminal from my web server.
In some places, mainly in Asia, I've found Linux-based internet cafes where I could ssh home and tunnel X through the connection, running my home desktop on the screen.
Uh, you need like 300 servers if you use Windows? I think it's safe to assume he's talking about workstations.
That depends on the size of your installation, doesn't it? I mean, if I am replacing 100 P2/166 FreeBSD servers with P4/1000 Windows boxes, then yes, I probably do need "like 300 servers."
And it's precisely when you're dealing with larger server herds that you start to hate GUI tools with a bitter passion.
Anti-VNC would be XP intentionally disabling ports that are commonly used by VNC. Having a license that reads "Under these vague terms, you need a license of XP on the client machine" doesn't say to me 'We hate VNC', it says to me "We want more money if you're using our OS to do things on two computers."
"Disabling the ports" is a silly measure, since it is trivially overcome by the VNC developers.
The advantage of the legal approach is that it works by intent rather than implementation detail, and so can survive adjustments that programmers make to get around restrictions.
I agree that it's unlikely they were thinking of VNC in particular, but they would be vexed by a version of VNC that created phantom virtual video cards so that multiple users could have their own screen space.
We have one of these and I would issue only a cautious recommendation.
It will not print 1-color gray (!!!) in enhanced or high-quality mode. Instead you get a 4-color composite gray that looks like a yellowish tan. This is the number one problem we have the printer and frankly, it's ridiculous behavior, making it useless for a large number of basic print jobs. I've spent a lot of time on the phone with Xerox/Tektronix about this and the nutshell summary is yes, they're sorry, it is dumb, but it's not fixable.
The solid ink, while very vibrant, is really thick and shiny, creating a look not dissimilar to those cheapass puffy-ink business cards carried by ultimate cheesemaster door-to-door insurance salesmen.
Its color matching is not very good, despite all sorts of claims about Pantone calibration.
Effective color resolution is much lower than the HP color lasers.
Many light colors come out really freckled-looking because the dots are fixed-size and comparatively large.
In short, if you're looking for a general-purpose, cost-effective printer for PowerPoint slides and printing out web pages to tack on the break-room bulletin board, this might be the printer for you.
If, on the other hand, you're expecting to do any serious proofing, graphics work, etc., then run, don't walk, away as fast as you can.
If you care at all about security, do yourself a big (and cheap!) favor. Install an emergency exhaust fan...Something cheap like this can keep you up and running while you fix the expensive HVAC gear; without leaving the door open overnight.
An alternative is to mount a lockable steel mesh door on the free side of the door frame leading into the server room. You can get such a door for a couple hundred bucks, which may be cheaper than having the wall cut or windows adjusted for an exterior exhaust fan.
Then pick up a big floor fan at CostCo and you've got a way to steal A/C from the rest of the building when necessary.
I have had a hard time finding speakerphones that will work in a server room. With almost all half-duplex phones (except for the very rare model where you can manually adjust switching sensitivity) the ambient hum of all the servers and UPSes is so loud that it triggers the switching mechanism such that you don't hear much of the person at the other end.
The only really effective experience I had was spiriting the expensive full-duplex Polycom from the conference room into the server room. It was later tracked down and I was the recipient of some profoundly dirty looks.
(they actually have a policy that they are part library and not just a bookstore, it's how they stay open on Sundays when other bookstores must remain closed)
Ye gods, what sort of hellhole do you live in where stores don't get to choose their own hours? Even at home in the Netherlands they can choose which days and hours, though they are for inane reasons limited to a fixed number of hours per week (which, thankfully, is slowly growing over the years).
One thing that makes me look forward to the Chinese taking over the world is that Chinese merchants do not put up with crap like this. They stay open as long as they can manage. That, and the fact that Chinese communities pave the way for universal comfort by disregarding local norms forbidding the wearing of shorts, until finally it's just accepted.
First the satellites may not be able to transmit at another frequency. Second the receivers that people use to listen may not be able to receive on another frequency.
So what? Millions of people are using 802.11b. About 30 people are using Sirius Satellite Radio, and that's likely to go down when the layoffs start.
Why should those millions have to decommission their equipment just to satisfy some idiotic business model put forth by a company that can't even hire a competent engineer to work out interference issues before launching its satellites?
<PARANOID>Wait a sec! "decommission their equipment." The WiFi market has already sold to the millions of people most likely to adopt the technology. So now, Lucent, SMC, etc., prod Sirius into this move, and then those customers will have to buy their equipment all over again - and we already know they're willing to! What a brilliant scheme.</PARANOID>
In other news, I've contacted Sirius to let them know that from this day forward I'll be doing my best to make sure that nobody I know or meet ever uses their service. I encourage others to do the same. Based on XM's numbers, I can't imagine Sirius is overly secure about its prospects, and the chance of losing a whole lot of nerds - their most likely customers, I'd guess - can't be heartening.
It's about the right to choose. I want to be able to control IF my email gets spam filtered.
So who's stopping you? You can run an SMTP server and do anything you want with your incoming mail.
Or, if you're too lazy and stupid for that, just switch ISPs.
But to demand that an arbitrary ISP should be forced to pipe spam through to you is as silly as demanding that the New York Times run the column your cousin writes for the Louisiana Southern Tech campus paper. You can choose to see that column if you want to, but not everyone is required to specifically enable it.
back when i was a freshman in college someone managed to assemble an email list of all the students/faculty/staff. It was first used by someone outside the school to spam the entire campus, with all the addresses in the To and Cc fields, making the list available to anyone who received it. So someone attempted to sell their Chem Eng books, and you can picture the hell that broke out.
Quickly the list became nothing but people hitting reply-all and saying "knock it off!" and "get me off the list!"
I find this story very hard to believe, unless you attended that tiny western college with 12 students.
Say a typical email address is 20 characters. Say that a smallish school has 4000 students and 500 faculty/staff. That's a 90K header. How many MUAs can parse that? Not many. Even fewer in sufficient time that your random punter would hang around waiting for it to happen.
It has a row of internet 'phone' booths on its most popular shopping street (Orchard Road).
Those things? All you can do is look up a few info pages (shopping directory, etc.) and video chat with people in other booths on Orchard Road.
It was cheaper for me to phone the UK from my my hotel than it was for a person in the UK to phone me. Cheaper from a hotel phone.
Singapore has a great policy wherein hotels are not permitted to mark up phone charges. So you are billed at the regular direct dial rate for calls.
I can assure everyone that the people I worked with in Singapore were quite bright enough to run systems properly, and every bit as interested as their Western equivalents in doing so.
Well, they have their share of idiots like anyone else, but at least they speak English, lah, so they can deal intelligently with complaints from the rest of the world, and keep up on security updates.
I was reading on a UK's paper site that BT was planning to roll out the world's first internet booths - I was reading it from an internet booth in Singapore.
I don't know when you were there, but I saw internet phone booths in the Netherlands long before in Singapore, and even in Malaysia there were internet kiosks (half BSOD'd at any given time, granted) before such were spotted in Singapore.
Nevertheless, the general point obtains. They do pay a lot of attention to new technology and tend to be early adopters. Why not - they manufacture the stuff.
There is no difference between the messenger who suggests the article and the editor who prints/publishes it.
That is a truly ignorant statement.
Fora such as newspaper editorial pages specifically solicit and print divergent points of view in order to provide readers with a range of perspectives beyond those of the staff.
Just after the Baltics broke away, I was visiting the University of Latvia. I asked to see the computer facilities and was led to a room full of Norsk Data text-based terminals with cyrillic keyboards. The displays were able to show both cyrillic and roman characters. I do not, sadly, remember any specifics of the computer they were connected to other than that it had a lot of wires hanging everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
For years, telcos in developing countries used international call charges as a sort of "tax" on emigrants. People would move out of the country, go live in the US or UK or Germany or wherever, earn a whole lot more money, and spend some of it calling their relatives left behind in the homeland. And then the exhorbitant settlement rate would funnel money back from overseas.
Arguably, this is a good thing since it allows comparatively wealthy migrants to subsidize service to poor locals who would otherwise not be able to afford it. Of course, in practice the telcos are usually so incompetent that the money just gets wasted or disappears into various people's pockets.
This changed a lot, of course, when the FCC unilaterally initiated settlement rate reform in 1998, one of the most brilliant pieces of public policy the US has ever pulled off. Now, the amount by which inbound callers can be gouged is strictly limited (hence the drastic decrease in international call costs that we've seen in the past few years).
However, telcos are still free to gouge their own citizens, presumably carrying on the spirit of the earlier "tax" by indirectly siphoning away some of the money that these people's overseas relatives send home.
Anyway, without the large sums received from hiked-up international call charges, many of these telcos would fall apart. In the current post-1998 climate, this might not be a bad thing - eliminating communications-cost friction certainly would bring about long-term productivity improvements in developing economies. But you can't expect the telcos to be excited about it.
Um, I think it's the other way around - Palau used to be a US territory until a few years ago.
Only if you can convince a jury that an ordinary person would be compelled to steal the car under such circumstances, a tough sell if you ask me.
You've never seen a car left running unattended at the curb outside a store? I live in Washington DC - not exactly Mayberry - and I see that regularly.
What, you think that each thief steals one car and then retires?
What they're doing here makes it less likely that your car will be stolen. If your car is the only one on the street, and someone wants to steal a car, there's a 100% chance that it'll be yours, and some <100% chance that it'll be recovered.
On the other hand, if this trap car is also on the streets, then there's only a 50% chance yours will be selected for theft. And there's a 100% chance the thief will be caught before he comes back to steal your car.
You should be on your knees thanking the Arlington police for this.
(Personally, I don't like it, because I believe that car theft improves urban quality-of-life by driving up the cost of car ownership, but that's neither here nor there for this discussion.)
Someone needs to reverse-engineer the protocols used by these programs and start shoving gigabytes of bogus data down their throats.
In short order they'll either cut your IP range off, in which case you've done a fine service for your ISP's fellow customers, or they'll start aggregating clearly bogus data which will decrease its marketability to their clients.
Are they going to take you to court and say "Your honor, we were secretly spying on this person and he's started lying to us about what he was doing online..."?
You mean, put a sign inside the building that says "By opening that door a few minutes ago, you agreed to be shot."
Oh? You've had better luck playing DVDs on Irix, SunOS, and NeXT?
Most? Only Windows relies on them. Unix uses a hodgepodge of magic (not the Harry Potter stuff, but bits in the beginning of the file that tell it what it is), extensions, and guesswork.
Amen.
I travel to a pretty diverse range of countries on a fairly regular basis. I have long ago given up on toting a laptop around unless I specifically need it for a meeting.
Outside of the US (where I assume you're posting from) internet cafes are thick on the ground. In developed countries, the service is much faster than you'll get by dialing in, and quite often cheaper than the phone call.
I use the mindterm Java applet to provide an SSH terminal from my web server.
In some places, mainly in Asia, I've found Linux-based internet cafes where I could ssh home and tunnel X through the connection, running my home desktop on the screen.
You use a very special tool called a "tunglade".
That depends on the size of your installation, doesn't it? I mean, if I am replacing 100 P2/166 FreeBSD servers with P4/1000 Windows boxes, then yes, I probably do need "like 300 servers."
And it's precisely when you're dealing with larger server herds that you start to hate GUI tools with a bitter passion.
"Disabling the ports" is a silly measure, since it is trivially overcome by the VNC developers.
The advantage of the legal approach is that it works by intent rather than implementation detail, and so can survive adjustments that programmers make to get around restrictions.
I agree that it's unlikely they were thinking of VNC in particular, but they would be vexed by a version of VNC that created phantom virtual video cards so that multiple users could have their own screen space.
We have one of these and I would issue only a cautious recommendation.
In short, if you're looking for a general-purpose, cost-effective printer for PowerPoint slides and printing out web pages to tack on the break-room bulletin board, this might be the printer for you.
If, on the other hand, you're expecting to do any serious proofing, graphics work, etc., then run, don't walk, away as fast as you can.
More like $30 per. But the term is cake, not puck. At least in our office.
An alternative is to mount a lockable steel mesh door on the free side of the door frame leading into the server room. You can get such a door for a couple hundred bucks, which may be cheaper than having the wall cut or windows adjusted for an exterior exhaust fan.
Then pick up a big floor fan at CostCo and you've got a way to steal A/C from the rest of the building when necessary.
I have had a hard time finding speakerphones that will work in a server room. With almost all half-duplex phones (except for the very rare model where you can manually adjust switching sensitivity) the ambient hum of all the servers and UPSes is so loud that it triggers the switching mechanism such that you don't hear much of the person at the other end.
The only really effective experience I had was spiriting the expensive full-duplex Polycom from the conference room into the server room. It was later tracked down and I was the recipient of some profoundly dirty looks.
Serve the public interest or sever the public interest...?
Ye gods, what sort of hellhole do you live in where stores don't get to choose their own hours? Even at home in the Netherlands they can choose which days and hours, though they are for inane reasons limited to a fixed number of hours per week (which, thankfully, is slowly growing over the years).
One thing that makes me look forward to the Chinese taking over the world is that Chinese merchants do not put up with crap like this. They stay open as long as they can manage. That, and the fact that Chinese communities pave the way for universal comfort by disregarding local norms forbidding the wearing of shorts, until finally it's just accepted.
So what? Millions of people are using 802.11b. About 30 people are using Sirius Satellite Radio, and that's likely to go down when the layoffs start.
Why should those millions have to decommission their equipment just to satisfy some idiotic business model put forth by a company that can't even hire a competent engineer to work out interference issues before launching its satellites?
<PARANOID>Wait a sec! "decommission their equipment." The WiFi market has already sold to the millions of people most likely to adopt the technology. So now, Lucent, SMC, etc., prod Sirius into this move, and then those customers will have to buy their equipment all over again - and we already know they're willing to! What a brilliant scheme.</PARANOID>
In other news, I've contacted Sirius to let them know that from this day forward I'll be doing my best to make sure that nobody I know or meet ever uses their service. I encourage others to do the same. Based on XM's numbers, I can't imagine Sirius is overly secure about its prospects, and the chance of losing a whole lot of nerds - their most likely customers, I'd guess - can't be heartening.
So who's stopping you? You can run an SMTP server and do anything you want with your incoming mail.
Or, if you're too lazy and stupid for that, just switch ISPs.
But to demand that an arbitrary ISP should be forced to pipe spam through to you is as silly as demanding that the New York Times run the column your cousin writes for the Louisiana Southern Tech campus paper. You can choose to see that column if you want to, but not everyone is required to specifically enable it.
Hey, just charge it to the person at the top of the list (then write your own name on the bottom...)
I find this story very hard to believe, unless you attended that tiny western college with 12 students.
Say a typical email address is 20 characters. Say that a smallish school has 4000 students and 500 faculty/staff. That's a 90K header. How many MUAs can parse that? Not many. Even fewer in sufficient time that your random punter would hang around waiting for it to happen.
Those things? All you can do is look up a few info pages (shopping directory, etc.) and video chat with people in other booths on Orchard Road.
Singapore has a great policy wherein hotels are not permitted to mark up phone charges. So you are billed at the regular direct dial rate for calls.
Well, they have their share of idiots like anyone else, but at least they speak English, lah, so they can deal intelligently with complaints from the rest of the world, and keep up on security updates.
I don't know when you were there, but I saw internet phone booths in the Netherlands long before in Singapore, and even in Malaysia there were internet kiosks (half BSOD'd at any given time, granted) before such were spotted in Singapore.
Nevertheless, the general point obtains. They do pay a lot of attention to new technology and tend to be early adopters. Why not - they manufacture the stuff.
That is a truly ignorant statement.
Fora such as newspaper editorial pages specifically solicit and print divergent points of view in order to provide readers with a range of perspectives beyond those of the staff.
Not that helpful, but...
Just after the Baltics broke away, I was visiting the University of Latvia. I asked to see the computer facilities and was led to a room full of Norsk Data text-based terminals with cyrillic keyboards. The displays were able to show both cyrillic and roman characters. I do not, sadly, remember any specifics of the computer they were connected to other than that it had a lot of wires hanging everywhere.