I advertise my consulting business using Adwords, and many of my clients have no idea that they clicked on a paid advertisement to get to me. I know this because I always ask how they found me. I've even had several inquire how I got my website ranked so highly on google... when I tell them that it's not, that they clicked on a paid ad, they often tell me I'm wrong! I had a client last week that *insisted* my site was in the free results, which I know is not the case for the keywords she claimed she used.
If you read the article carefully (or not so carefully), you'll note that this product does NOT include a fully distributed / decentralized tracker... an web server tracker is still necessary for the initial torrent retrieval. If that tracker becomes overloaded / unavailable this system will have real value, but there's still an originating central tracker for the MPAA to go after.
However, it's only a very short matter of time. The author explains that such a thing could be easily created with this framework. Clearly he could have done it if he wanted, so I'm guessing this is a purposeful strategy on his part to avoid any potential direct or indirect personal liability or legal issues down the road...
Have to second that about the deals. Depsite how much they push web ordering, the phone sales force is hungry and incented... call them on the phone, and pretend you're walking into a used car dealership. They routinely beat the pricing they give even to their resellers (must suck to be one of them), especially if you're ordering a server listing at $10k or more...
I think this is the ultimate acknowledgement that they have been unsucessful getting the cable companies to license / resell their technology. Tivo's obviously been trying to make themselves less threatening to content vendors by limiting PC interoperability. But, since "big cable" is for the most part not going with Tivo for DVR, the incentives for Tivo to kiss their asses has gone away.
Yes, it's a desperate attempt to stay in business... Tivo has realized that, aside from DirecTV, they're going to have to sell their own units on their own merits, and that they'd better close the gap in PC interoperability. Let's hope it's not too late.
Of course, it will be a cold day in hell before any of these new features makes it to my DirecTivo... DirecTV is as strict as any about content control.
This is a little off-topic, but allow me to rant. I do home computer support professionally, which means that these days I'm basically a professional spyware cleaner. I've come in numerous times after techie family members supposedly cleaned up a machine, only to find they didn't do a very good job.
So please, if you are going to clean spyware up for your family, you should know the following:
1. As good as Spybot and Ad-aware are, neither is comprehensive. Run both. And you're still probably going to be missing some things (see #3 below).
2. After getting spybot and ad-aware installed with the latest updates, set a system restore point (if the OS supports it and system restore is working), and then *reboot into safe mode*. Running the cleaners in safe mode is much more effective than with all the junk running, and you won't end up rebooting and re-scanning to get open files. If you get warnings that there are files that can't be cleaned because of a running process, use a boot cd of some sort to delete it manually... much faster than running a re-scan.
3. After Spybot and Adaware *think* the machine is clean, use the "advanced" tools in spybot to examine the BHO, ActiveX, Startup and LSP lists to be sure. Don't recognize something? Google it. Chances are, if it's not in google, it doesn't belong. If it's a startup item, be sure to delete the target file (or files). The Spybot ActiveX deletion feature doesn't work so well... delete those manually from the location referenced. This usually is necessary to get the trojans and viruses that Adaware and spybot won't warn about.
4. Reboot, connect to the Internet, and then go back and check advanced tools in spybot to see if anything got added to the startup, BHO or other lists... changed entries are bolded, so it's easy to tell.
Then, and only then, will you know that the machine is clean. Keeping it clean is another issue, but at least this will get it done.
Verizon has been digging up yards in our neighborhood (in Northern Virginia suburbs of DC) for the last week, dropping fiber orange conduit in the ground with concrete junction boxes for each house. I guess this explains why... I was getting pretty PO'd because I just spent a bunch of time and effort planting new grass, but if this is the reason, I'll be much happier about it.
I can't imagine how much this costs to do... they are having to dig a 1' by 3' hole severl feed deep every 30-40 ft, and it's all being done by hand with manual tools (except the tunneling between the holes). How many millions of people is Verizon planning to roll this out to eventually?
There are some pretty clear differences between a "hobby or passion" and addiction. I believe psychologists start using diagnostic language like "addiction" when the activity in question starts to interfere with the other aspects of your life, like holding down a job, paying bills on time, keeping up with friends, etc...
Also, just because someone "bounces back" from an addiction doesn't mean they don't have a problem... alchoholics, compulsive gamblers, and others may have a cycle of trying to give it up every so often when things start get get really out of control, then relapsing once they've gotten their act together.
My father in law was an alchoholic, but had been sober for over a decade when he died. He told me that drinking and going cold turkey were both possible for someone addicted to alchohol, but that the sign of a true alchoholic is that they can't drink in moderation. The idea of drinking only one or two drinks per day is inconceivable to them... and I believe this is true for other addictions as well. This is why 12 step programs don't talk about being "cured"... you're always an addict, and you're either clean, or you're not. There is no middle ground.
The measure of addiction is not the impact it has on those around you- it's about your state of mind, and how easily you can quit. Your example of someone quitting a job and playing Evercrack until they're broke is a perfect example of this... outside circumstances (poverty) forced them to stop. I can't think of a better description of addiction.
I signed up for AT&T's Callvantage VOIP service after looking at Vonage, Packet8, and others. Now, I'm not looking for free long distance to Bangledesh... I wanted a replacement for my second POTS line at my house that I use for business, and needed the following things:
1. Full-featured voicemail accessible when I'm not in the office (e-mail integration a big plus) 2. Flexible options to forward calls to my cellphone when I'm not in the office 3. High call quality 4. Extremely reliable voicemail and forwarding features in case my broadband goes down 5. Transfer of my existing number to the VOIP service 6. No local toll charges for calls in my metro area 7. Lower cost than the $55 I was paying to Verizon for a comparable featureset on my POTS line
For these needs, AT&T's service is a great deal. The pricing is a little higher than other VOIP services, but it's not "nickel and dime", and frankly from a reliability perspective, I trust AT&T a hell of a lot more than I trust a startup (that's coming from the well-informed perspective of someone who's worked in several startups and seen the inside of many different datacenters, telco and otherwise). Callvantage does have some nice features many others don't, like ringing several phones simultaneously to "find you", scheduled "Do not disturb", and real conference calling.
So far, reliability and call quality have been excellent... better than my old POTS in fact, since the voice is travelling 3 ft over analog copper rather than 3 miles.
Anyway, I'm happy with it, saving $20 / month for a service with better quality and features than what I had before. I think they'll be successful with people with needs like me. People who are just looking for cheap calls and don't need the other features will probably all move to P2P VOIP eventually, but that's a completely different market, and will coexist fine with the more commercial offerings.
I don't see why everyone is getting bent out of shape about this... the article doesn't specify much about the nature of the AT&T "specifications". It doesn't say anywhere that they're altering the VOIP standard to include proprietary elements. I'm guessing that the proprietary stuff is layered around VOIP and has a lot more to do with management and back-end systems, like automated provisioning, accounting, billing, and other things that don't involve the VOIP standard directly, but still are important parts of putting together a large-scale, robust service.
Think about it- right now they're shipping out pre-configured TAs, which is necessary for "plug and play" functionality that will work for joe sixpack (so is Vonage). It would be better for everyone involved if Joe could go out and buy any old TA that, upon being given some the most basic information (like the address of the provider's provisioning server) would automatically download all necessary configuration. Similar to the DOCSIS standards for cable modems. Absent of an existing standard, AT&T is just trying to get the ball rolling on their own, and I'm sure Vonage & co. would do the same thing if they had similar market clout.
If you want to buy a Dell, call the sales line. Seriously- pick out what you want on the web, drop it in a shopping cart, then get someone on the phone, point them at a cart, and say you need it cheaper. The sales folks have discounts available to them that aren't on the site, and can usually knock another 5% off without working too hard.
If you're buying a server, the discounts are deeper... the sales folks are very aggressive, and you can often get a better price than their poor resellers can.
Hardware for image acquisition: Check to see if the department copy machine has scan functions... most built in the past few years do, even if they aren't used in most places for that. You'll get a decent sheet feeder and way faster scanning than most desktop sheet-fed scanners.
If you have to buy something and have to go *really* cheap, you could get a multi-function print / scan / fax thing. Most will handle legal size, because they're not actually moving the sheet fed paper onto the flatbed glass... the image element stays stationary while the paper goes by. But, of course, you get what you pay for... expect to spend time dealing with paperjams and skipped pages. However, it should be faster than hand-feeding a flatbed.
Software: I mention this simply because nobody else has (that I've found): Scansoft Omnipage Pro is designed for highly repetitive, batch-oriented OCR. It has options for doing automated or hand-tweaked "area recognition" (separating text from graphics) and has the best proofreading UI I've seen... it flags "low confidence" recognitions automatically, and displays both it's best dictionary guesses and the actual scanned words. Not sure it will help much with hand-written work, but for printed material it works well.
Format: Your primary concern when looking for a destination file format should be longevity... will the files be readable 5 years from now? I've seen a number of people recommending highly efficient but obscure compression schemes, which are a terrible idea if you want the data to stick around. Saving a few bits doesn't do you much good if you can't figure out what they mean. I recommend that people scan to two formats, just for safety (Omnipage can do this automatically).
Getting a Mac, moving to Linux and switching to Firefox etc... are all excellent suggestions, but I've found that they aren't always practical. Many people learn by rote, and switching between all-MS products at work and other applications at home may generate even more confusion (and thus work for you) than the security problems they solve. And although Firefox is getting really good (it's my full-time browser), I do encounter bugs and incompatible pages more frequently than I did when I used IE, and have not had good luck with semi-skilled users I've switched to it.
This is all a long winded way of saying that *if* for some reason you're in a situation were you need to leave the machine in basically "pure Windows / MS" form, here are some ideas:
If you're cheap: Keep virus protection current (look to AVG or Panda if you need something free). The google toolbar for IE is a decent popup blocker and will take care of most of the spyware popups as well as make searching easier. Install both Ad-aware and Spybot Search & Destroy... manually update and run them when you visit, and use the Spybot "innoculate" feature. If they've got XP, demote their user accounts so that they aren't administrators, and either install all software for them or teach them to change accounts to do it themselves. VNC is nice, but the built-in remote assistance also works, and the full-blown remote access built into XP Pro works well over low-bandwidth connections when configured properly.
If you / they are willing to spend a few bucks and don't have a complete allergy to commercial software: Norton Internet Security isn't a bad package (if you turn off the parental controls crap) and will do most of what you need. The Antivirus and firewall are reasonably solid and very easy to use, as is Norton Antispam, which takes care of popups and browser-based spyware installation as well as mail filtering that's well-integrated and easy to use with Outlook and OE.
While at one level you're right that earth's ecosystem is a "closed loop" for the most part and there is LOTS of water in the system, I think only about 1% is fresh, while the rest is seawater, which isn't nearly as useful for human purposes. You might also point out that fresh water is not a finite resource like oil or coal- it is being created continuously by evaporation and deposited as precipitation.
However, it takes time for water to completge the cycle. Water that you "use" to water your lawn, take a shower or build a computer doesn't go straight back into the reserves of usable water- it either evaporates or is polluted.
In many parts of the country and world, we are starting to run out of fresh water because it is being pulled out of wells, lakes and rivers faster than it is being replenished by nature. The result is that the water levels in the huge underground aquifers that are the primary repository of fresh water are starting to drop, with potentially dire ecological consequences. Sure, it will come back if we stop using it, but that doesn't seem to happen.
So basically, yes, it matters a lot how much water is "used" in the making of a computer.
Yeah, I was hoping for something that would save me time, but suspected this was the case. I've had the dell diags save my bacon a few times when there was strange damage to parallel ports and the like, and was hoping to find a general-case tool. I do all on-site work so I'm on the clock in front of the customer, which means that there's huge time pressure and even a quick way to comprehensively discriminate between driver and hardware issues (especially with video hardware in laptops) would be a boon.
I work as an independent computer support consultant servicing mostly Windows users, and I can assure you that a large portion of "regular joe" users have huge problems with viruses, spyware, and trojan horses. Most of them don't even know it- they just complain about having a lot of popup windows (spyware) or having trouble with their Internet connection (Blaster). Many of them continue to struggle to use their computer for months with these problems.
And it's not just my clients (who obviously are limited to the set of folks who have problems bad enough to call a professional)... the percentage is high in my social network as well.
Now yes- I agree an expert can avoid these things. I didn't even have virus protection on my primary machine for years, and yet I never got an infection. But that was because I never got attachments from untrusted sources. And I never downloaded "risky" software. But average users and even "experts" who are unfamiliar with this particular OS are vulnerable, and it's ludicrous to suggest that these huge problems are an issue of user skill.
Frankly, from a purely financial perspective, what MS is doing is bad for my business... I really should send a nice thank you note to the turd that wrote Blaster. But something tells me I'm not going to be running out of work anytime soon...
-R
Re:Driving a Truck Through This One
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Global Dimming
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· Score: 1
Umm, about the astonomer thing... if you'd read the *whole* article, you would have seen that the dimming is happening during cloudy times:
"If it's cloudy then it's darker, but when it's sunny things haven't changed much."
I don't know too many astonomers making observation during cloud cover...
I listened to some of the FCC discussion on CSPAN, and with all the mindless "let VOIP be free" perspectives being spouted here, let me raise a few of the more valid concerns I heard with letting VOIP go completely unregulated (and forecasting a dramatic drop in POTS usage as broadband spreads and people use it for phone):
1. Emergency use: VOIP will not have the level of reliability of POTS, especially during natural disasters and other emergencies. In theory an IP network can be made just as reliable, but the simple issue of powering the phones is a big issue... the phone system generally has been significantly more reliable than the power system. With a VOIP phone, you're dead if you lose power. Traditional phones keep going.
This may seem like a small issue, but an example cited during the hearing was a major weather-related power outage in California, where the utility determined after the fact that customers were less annoyed by the fact that the power was off than the fact that the phone system at the power company was not equipped to give them good repair status information. People count on the phone system, and it needs to be there, especially for 911 emergency use.
2. Funding and effectiveness of 911 The 911 system is funded by POTS and cellular surcharges. Even a 25% drop in POTS usage due to VOIP would be disasterous from a funding perspective. And remember that when you call 911 from a landline (and in more and more areas, cellular), they know where you are. VOIP is extremely far away from having any sort of location capability.
3. Funding of Universal Access Everyone in the country has access to phone service, no matter how rural / remote they are. This has been a tremendously important program, but would have funding problems similar to 911 if a big chunk of POTS goes away.
Anyway, my point is that despite how "retro" POTS is technically, it has significant merits that VOIP currently does not provide. I'm not suggesting that any of the problems described above are unsolveable for VOIP, but I think it's awfully unlikely that "market forces" will magically provide the answers. There needs to be some regulation in order that the good in POTS is preserved going forward.
I've already seen at least one "grow up and get some self-discipline" post. Easy to say, much, much harder to do. I've struggled with the same issues and I think that the roots are in my modern upbringing- I think motivation is something we *learn*.
Going back a couple of generations, kids were forced to do chores and work their butts off (on farms, etc...). You learn self-discipline pretty quick when the alternative is getting beaten by your parents. From one perspective, this is cruel and comes with its own host of problems, but children did learn how to work hard. There's a reason why parents used to send undisciplined kids to military schools (or the military)... many came out the better for it.
So in addition to putting rewards or "carrots" in front of you as many have suggested, it can also be helpful to find some "sticks". This is very hard to do on a "micro", day-to-day level... learning discipline is *hard*, and you'll have to go through some pain to make it happen. It's best to make one big decision to go through the process, and then take the day-to-day decisions out of your hands. Take some time off from school, and try something like the following:
* Join the military, or an alternative like the Peace Corps * Spend a year working in a construction trade * Spend a summer as a forest fire fighter * Do some sort of extended "outward bound"-type thing
You'll learn endurance, confidence and self-discipline, and it will stick with you after the fact. It's an investment in your character and personality, and will benefit you for the rest of your life.
If large ISPs could run competent, reliable and consistently performing outbound SMTP mail servers, you'd have a good point. Unfortunately, I have have a single broadband provider to choose from in my location, and their SMTP servers routinely delay messages by an hour or more (and, although I can't prove it, drop messages).
"If you want to run a real mail server, perhaps you should get a real internet conenction, like Colocation or T1."
So only people with a couple hundred bucks a month to drop on bandwidth have a "right" to operate them? I've had a personal domain name since 1994 that for the last 4 years has been hosted on a 486/66 using home DSL / cable lines. I don't run any commercial services from it, but I do host a number of e-mail lists that have become important to the personal communities I'm involved in (church, college alums, etc...). I do under 1000 messages / day, which is a miserably small amount of bandwidth, even for DSL. My 486 is bored. A T1 or a colo server is absolute, utter, complete overkill, and unnecessary for me. Wealth doesn't automatically accompany knowledge... just because I have the capability and desire to run a mail server doesn't mean I have the need or the means to pay for high-end commercial services. And yes, I was bitten by this new, unpublished policy last week.
"Relay through your ISP" isn't always a good answer either. I've tried it. My current ISP's outgoing mail servers routinely delay mail by an hour or more. This is a major, first-tier provider. When my machine is delivering directly, I can look in my own logs to troubleshoot delivery problems (which users often end up asking me about, and invariably are on their end).
I fully understand the arguments that blocking DSL and cable lines will stop a lot of spam. I even think that *some* kind of blocking of this nature is a good idea. But it's really, really fascist to implement it the way they have done- it is disrupting mail service for hundreds of thousands of legitimate mail users. AOL is just contributing to the gradual erosion of technical community / cooperation that the net depends on to function.
Here are some ideas to do this in a more "Internet-friendly" way:
1. Throttle inbound mail delivery from DSL / cable IP blocks. Don't stop it completely, but limit it to 1 simultaneous connection / host, and 5 messages / minute.
2. Limit the total number of unique AOL subscribers that a given DSL / cable host can send mail to in a 24 hour period. This could be a relatively large number (1000) and still effectively stop spammers.
3. Maintain a "whitelist" of IPs of server admins who know what they are doing. Have an automated system drop mail to postmaster@[IP]. Provide a phone number and a randomized code where a person (it must be a human) can call in and get their IP re-activated for sending mail.
The basic idea is to raise the threshold of "pain" above what a spammer can profitably deal with. I am willing to go to some trouble to have my single IP unblocked (assuming the number of ISPs doing such blocking remains relatively low), but spammers must deal with massive quantities and can't afford to waste time on machines that can only mail 1000 AOL addresses / day or require manual confirmation.
I would, of course, try to say this to someone at AOL, but because I don't work for an ISP the "postmaster" helpdesk won't even talk to me and you can guess how much their customer service folks like talking to non-customers.
GRRRR!
-R
The articles simply don't mention life
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Europan Life In Doubt
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I read both articles, and neither one mentiones that the discovery of a neutral gas ring around Jupiter generated by Europa has any bearing on the possibility of life on Europa. Am I missing something? Far as I know, water does an good job of blocking ionizing radiation... that's why they store nuclear fuels and waste in big honking pools of it.
TT for the web is OK - I used it last year. Just pray that you don't need to get tech support. I don't have super-complicated taxes (mortgage, no kids, stock investments) and I ran into a case where it appeared to be missing a feature that was necessary for me to file my return. The online docs seem plentiful at first glance, but they lacked the level of detail I needed. I contacted support, and I was connected with someone who, despite my repeated insistance that I was using the web based product, gave me instructions that were for the desktop version. He knew NOTHING, and was clearly just going through scripts. I did get my tech support fee refunded , and I eventually figured out through trial and error how to do what I needed, but it was a painful experience.
Slashdot Mirror
I advertise my consulting business using Adwords, and many of my clients have no idea that they clicked on a paid advertisement to get to me. I know this because I always ask how they found me. I've even had several inquire how I got my website ranked so highly on google... when I tell them that it's not, that they clicked on a paid ad, they often tell me I'm wrong! I had a client last week that *insisted* my site was in the free results, which I know is not the case for the keywords she claimed she used.
Of course, I'm not complaining...
-R
If you read the article carefully (or not so carefully), you'll note that this product does NOT include a fully distributed / decentralized tracker... an web server tracker is still necessary for the initial torrent retrieval. If that tracker becomes overloaded / unavailable this system will have real value, but there's still an originating central tracker for the MPAA to go after.
However, it's only a very short matter of time. The author explains that such a thing could be easily created with this framework. Clearly he could have done it if he wanted, so I'm guessing this is a purposeful strategy on his part to avoid any potential direct or indirect personal liability or legal issues down the road...
-R
Have to second that about the deals. Depsite how much they push web ordering, the phone sales force is hungry and incented... call them on the phone, and pretend you're walking into a used car dealership. They routinely beat the pricing they give even to their resellers (must suck to be one of them), especially if you're ordering a server listing at $10k or more...
-R
I think this is the ultimate acknowledgement that they have been unsucessful getting the cable companies to license / resell their technology. Tivo's obviously been trying to make themselves less threatening to content vendors by limiting PC interoperability. But, since "big cable" is for the most part not going with Tivo for DVR, the incentives for Tivo to kiss their asses has gone away.
Yes, it's a desperate attempt to stay in business... Tivo has realized that, aside from DirecTV, they're going to have to sell their own units on their own merits, and that they'd better close the gap in PC interoperability. Let's hope it's not too late.
Of course, it will be a cold day in hell before any of these new features makes it to my DirecTivo... DirecTV is as strict as any about content control.
-R
This is a little off-topic, but allow me to rant. I do home computer support professionally, which means that these days I'm basically a professional spyware cleaner. I've come in numerous times after techie family members supposedly cleaned up a machine, only to find they didn't do a very good job.
So please, if you are going to clean spyware up for your family, you should know the following:
1. As good as Spybot and Ad-aware are, neither is comprehensive. Run both. And you're still probably going to be missing some things (see #3 below).
2. After getting spybot and ad-aware installed with the latest updates, set a system restore point (if the OS supports it and system restore is working), and then *reboot into safe mode*. Running the cleaners in safe mode is much more effective than with all the junk running, and you won't end up rebooting and re-scanning to get open files. If you get warnings that there are files that can't be cleaned because of a running process, use a boot cd of some sort to delete it manually... much faster than running a re-scan.
3. After Spybot and Adaware *think* the machine is clean, use the "advanced" tools in spybot to examine the BHO, ActiveX, Startup and LSP lists to be sure. Don't recognize something? Google it. Chances are, if it's not in google, it doesn't belong. If it's a startup item, be sure to delete the target file (or files). The Spybot ActiveX deletion feature doesn't work so well... delete those manually from the location referenced. This usually is necessary to get the trojans and viruses that Adaware and spybot won't warn about.
4. Reboot, connect to the Internet, and then go back and check advanced tools in spybot to see if anything got added to the startup, BHO or other lists... changed entries are bolded, so it's easy to tell.
Then, and only then, will you know that the machine is clean. Keeping it clean is another issue, but at least this will get it done.
-R
Verizon has been digging up yards in our neighborhood (in Northern Virginia suburbs of DC) for the last week, dropping fiber orange conduit in the ground with concrete junction boxes for each house. I guess this explains why... I was getting pretty PO'd because I just spent a bunch of time and effort planting new grass, but if this is the reason, I'll be much happier about it.
I can't imagine how much this costs to do... they are having to dig a 1' by 3' hole severl feed deep every 30-40 ft, and it's all being done by hand with manual tools (except the tunneling between the holes). How many millions of people is Verizon planning to roll this out to eventually?
-R
There are some pretty clear differences between a "hobby or passion" and addiction. I believe psychologists start using diagnostic language like "addiction" when the activity in question starts to interfere with the other aspects of your life, like holding down a job, paying bills on time, keeping up with friends, etc...
Also, just because someone "bounces back" from an addiction doesn't mean they don't have a problem... alchoholics, compulsive gamblers, and others may have a cycle of trying to give it up every so often when things start get get really out of control, then relapsing once they've gotten their act together.
My father in law was an alchoholic, but had been sober for over a decade when he died. He told me that drinking and going cold turkey were both possible for someone addicted to alchohol, but that the sign of a true alchoholic is that they can't drink in moderation. The idea of drinking only one or two drinks per day is inconceivable to them... and I believe this is true for other addictions as well. This is why 12 step programs don't talk about being "cured"... you're always an addict, and you're either clean, or you're not. There is no middle ground.
The measure of addiction is not the impact it has on those around you- it's about your state of mind, and how easily you can quit. Your example of someone quitting a job and playing Evercrack until they're broke is a perfect example of this... outside circumstances (poverty) forced them to stop. I can't think of a better description of addiction.
-R
I signed up for AT&T's Callvantage VOIP service after looking at Vonage, Packet8, and others. Now, I'm not looking for free long distance to Bangledesh... I wanted a replacement for my second POTS line at my house that I use for business, and needed the following things:
1. Full-featured voicemail accessible when I'm not in the office (e-mail integration a big plus)
2. Flexible options to forward calls to my cellphone when I'm not in the office
3. High call quality
4. Extremely reliable voicemail and forwarding features in case my broadband goes down
5. Transfer of my existing number to the VOIP service
6. No local toll charges for calls in my metro area
7. Lower cost than the $55 I was paying to Verizon for a comparable featureset on my POTS line
For these needs, AT&T's service is a great deal. The pricing is a little higher than other VOIP services, but it's not "nickel and dime", and frankly from a reliability perspective, I trust AT&T a hell of a lot more than I trust a startup (that's coming from the well-informed perspective of someone who's worked in several startups and seen the inside of many different datacenters, telco and otherwise). Callvantage does have some nice features many others don't, like ringing several phones simultaneously to "find you", scheduled "Do not disturb", and real conference calling.
So far, reliability and call quality have been excellent... better than my old POTS in fact, since the voice is travelling 3 ft over analog copper rather than 3 miles.
Anyway, I'm happy with it, saving $20 / month for a service with better quality and features than what I had before. I think they'll be successful with people with needs like me. People who are just looking for cheap calls and don't need the other features will probably all move to P2P VOIP eventually, but that's a completely different market, and will coexist fine with the more commercial offerings.
-R
I don't see why everyone is getting bent out of shape about this... the article doesn't specify much about the nature of the AT&T "specifications". It doesn't say anywhere that they're altering the VOIP standard to include proprietary elements. I'm guessing that the proprietary stuff is layered around VOIP and has a lot more to do with management and back-end systems, like automated provisioning, accounting, billing, and other things that don't involve the VOIP standard directly, but still are important parts of putting together a large-scale, robust service.
Think about it- right now they're shipping out pre-configured TAs, which is necessary for "plug and play" functionality that will work for joe sixpack (so is Vonage). It would be better for everyone involved if Joe could go out and buy any old TA that, upon being given some the most basic information (like the address of the provider's provisioning server) would automatically download all necessary configuration. Similar to the DOCSIS standards for cable modems. Absent of an existing standard, AT&T is just trying to get the ball rolling on their own, and I'm sure Vonage & co. would do the same thing if they had similar market clout.
-R
If you want to buy a Dell, call the sales line. Seriously- pick out what you want on the web, drop it in a shopping cart, then get someone on the phone, point them at a cart, and say you need it cheaper. The sales folks have discounts available to them that aren't on the site, and can usually knock another 5% off without working too hard.
If you're buying a server, the discounts are deeper... the sales folks are very aggressive, and you can often get a better price than their poor resellers can.
-R
Hardware for image acquisition:
Check to see if the department copy machine has scan functions... most built in the past few years do, even if they aren't used in most places for that. You'll get a decent sheet feeder and way faster scanning than most desktop sheet-fed scanners.
If you have to buy something and have to go *really* cheap, you could get a multi-function print / scan / fax thing. Most will handle legal size, because they're not actually moving the sheet fed paper onto the flatbed glass... the image element stays stationary while the paper goes by. But, of course, you get what you pay for... expect to spend time dealing with paperjams and skipped pages. However, it should be faster than hand-feeding a flatbed.
Software:
I mention this simply because nobody else has (that I've found): Scansoft Omnipage Pro is designed for highly repetitive, batch-oriented OCR. It has options for doing automated or hand-tweaked "area recognition" (separating text from graphics) and has the best proofreading UI I've seen... it flags "low confidence" recognitions automatically, and displays both it's best dictionary guesses and the actual scanned words. Not sure it will help much with hand-written work, but for printed material it works well.
Format: Your primary concern when looking for a destination file format should be longevity... will the files be readable 5 years from now? I've seen a number of people recommending highly efficient but obscure compression schemes, which are a terrible idea if you want the data to stick around. Saving a few bits doesn't do you much good if you can't figure out what they mean. I recommend that people scan to two formats, just for safety (Omnipage can do this automatically).
-R
Getting a Mac, moving to Linux and switching to Firefox etc... are all excellent suggestions, but I've found that they aren't always practical. Many people learn by rote, and switching between all-MS products at work and other applications at home may generate even more confusion (and thus work for you) than the security problems they solve. And although Firefox is getting really good (it's my full-time browser), I do encounter bugs and incompatible pages more frequently than I did when I used IE, and have not had good luck with semi-skilled users I've switched to it.
This is all a long winded way of saying that *if* for some reason you're in a situation were you need to leave the machine in basically "pure Windows / MS" form, here are some ideas:
If you're cheap: Keep virus protection current (look to AVG or Panda if you need something free). The google toolbar for IE is a decent popup blocker and will take care of most of the spyware popups as well as make searching easier. Install both Ad-aware and Spybot Search & Destroy... manually update and run them when you visit, and use the Spybot "innoculate" feature. If they've got XP, demote their user accounts so that they aren't administrators, and either install all software for them or teach them to change accounts to do it themselves. VNC is nice, but the built-in remote assistance also works, and the full-blown remote access built into XP Pro works well over low-bandwidth connections when configured properly.
If you / they are willing to spend a few bucks and don't have a complete allergy to commercial software: Norton Internet Security isn't a bad package (if you turn off the parental controls crap) and will do most of what you need. The Antivirus and firewall are reasonably solid and very easy to use, as is Norton Antispam, which takes care of popups and browser-based spyware installation as well as mail filtering that's well-integrated and easy to use with Outlook and OE.
-R
While at one level you're right that earth's ecosystem is a "closed loop" for the most part and there is LOTS of water in the system, I think only about 1% is fresh, while the rest is seawater, which isn't nearly as useful for human purposes. You might also point out that fresh water is not a finite resource like oil or coal- it is being created continuously by evaporation and deposited as precipitation.
However, it takes time for water to completge the cycle. Water that you "use" to water your lawn, take a shower or build a computer doesn't go straight back into the reserves of usable water- it either evaporates or is polluted.
In many parts of the country and world, we are starting to run out of fresh water because it is being pulled out of wells, lakes and rivers faster than it is being replenished by nature. The result is that the water levels in the huge underground aquifers that are the primary repository of fresh water are starting to drop, with potentially dire ecological consequences. Sure, it will come back if we stop using it, but that doesn't seem to happen.
So basically, yes, it matters a lot how much water is "used" in the making of a computer.
Yeah, I was hoping for something that would save me time, but suspected this was the case. I've had the dell diags save my bacon a few times when there was strange damage to parallel ports and the like, and was hoping to find a general-case tool. I do all on-site work so I'm on the clock in front of the customer, which means that there's huge time pressure and even a quick way to comprehensively discriminate between driver and hardware issues (especially with video hardware in laptops) would be a boon.
-R
Actually, this is exactly what I'm doing. Unfortunately, opened software is exempt from a lot of return policies... we'll see what happens.
-R
I work as an independent computer support consultant servicing mostly Windows users, and I can assure you that a large portion of "regular joe" users have huge problems with viruses, spyware, and trojan horses. Most of them don't even know it- they just complain about having a lot of popup windows (spyware) or having trouble with their Internet connection (Blaster). Many of them continue to struggle to use their computer for months with these problems.
And it's not just my clients (who obviously are limited to the set of folks who have problems bad enough to call a professional)... the percentage is high in my social network as well.
Now yes- I agree an expert can avoid these things. I didn't even have virus protection on my primary machine for years, and yet I never got an infection. But that was because I never got attachments from untrusted sources. And I never downloaded "risky" software. But average users and even "experts" who are unfamiliar with this particular OS are vulnerable, and it's ludicrous to suggest that these huge problems are an issue of user skill.
Frankly, from a purely financial perspective, what MS is doing is bad for my business... I really should send a nice thank you note to the turd that wrote Blaster. But something tells me I'm not going to be running out of work anytime soon...
-R
Umm, about the astonomer thing... if you'd read the *whole* article, you would have seen that the dimming is happening during cloudy times:
"If it's cloudy then it's darker, but when it's sunny things haven't changed much."
I don't know too many astonomers making observation during cloud cover...
-R
I listened to some of the FCC discussion on CSPAN, and with all the mindless "let VOIP be free" perspectives being spouted here, let me raise a few of the more valid concerns I heard with letting VOIP go completely unregulated (and forecasting a dramatic drop in POTS usage as broadband spreads and people use it for phone):
1. Emergency use:
VOIP will not have the level of reliability of POTS, especially during natural disasters and other emergencies. In theory an IP network can be made just as reliable, but the simple issue of powering the phones is a big issue... the phone system generally has been significantly more reliable than the power system. With a VOIP phone, you're dead if you lose power. Traditional phones keep going.
This may seem like a small issue, but an example cited during the hearing was a major weather-related power outage in California, where the utility determined after the fact that customers were less annoyed by the fact that the power was off than the fact that the phone system at the power company was not equipped to give them good repair status information. People count on the phone system, and it needs to be there, especially for 911 emergency use.
2. Funding and effectiveness of 911
The 911 system is funded by POTS and cellular surcharges. Even a 25% drop in POTS usage due to VOIP would be disasterous from a funding perspective. And remember that when you call 911 from a landline (and in more and more areas, cellular), they know where you are. VOIP is extremely far away from having any sort of location capability.
3. Funding of Universal Access
Everyone in the country has access to phone service, no matter how rural / remote they are. This has been a tremendously important program, but would have funding problems similar to 911 if a big chunk of POTS goes away.
Anyway, my point is that despite how "retro" POTS is technically, it has significant merits that VOIP currently does not provide. I'm not suggesting that any of the problems described above are unsolveable for VOIP, but I think it's awfully unlikely that "market forces" will magically provide the answers. There needs to be some regulation in order that the good in POTS is preserved going forward.
see parent- it's at 1, should be 5, given all those asking for a torrent in this thread.
I've already seen at least one "grow up and get some self-discipline" post. Easy to say, much, much harder to do. I've struggled with the same issues and I think that the roots are in my modern upbringing- I think motivation is something we *learn*.
Going back a couple of generations, kids were forced to do chores and work their butts off (on farms, etc...). You learn self-discipline pretty quick when the alternative is getting beaten by your parents. From one perspective, this is cruel and comes with its own host of problems, but children did learn how to work hard. There's a reason why parents used to send undisciplined kids to military schools (or the military)... many came out the better for it.
So in addition to putting rewards or "carrots" in front of you as many have suggested, it can also be helpful to find some "sticks". This is very hard to do on a "micro", day-to-day level... learning discipline is *hard*, and you'll have to go through some pain to make it happen. It's best to make one big decision to go through the process, and then take the day-to-day decisions out of your hands. Take some time off from school, and try something like the following:
* Join the military, or an alternative like the Peace Corps
* Spend a year working in a construction trade
* Spend a summer as a forest fire fighter
* Do some sort of extended "outward bound"-type thing
You'll learn endurance, confidence and self-discipline, and it will stick with you after the fact. It's an investment in your character and personality, and will benefit you for the rest of your life.
-R
...like a promo for the new X-men movie? :-)
-R
If large ISPs could run competent, reliable and consistently performing outbound SMTP mail servers, you'd have a good point. Unfortunately, I have have a single broadband provider to choose from in my location, and their SMTP servers routinely delay messages by an hour or more (and, although I can't prove it, drop messages).
-R
"If you want to run a real mail server, perhaps you should get a real internet conenction, like Colocation or T1."
So only people with a couple hundred bucks a month to drop on bandwidth have a "right" to operate them? I've had a personal domain name since 1994 that for the last 4 years has been hosted on a 486/66 using home DSL / cable lines. I don't run any commercial services from it, but I do host a number of e-mail lists that have become important to the personal communities I'm involved in (church, college alums, etc...). I do under 1000 messages / day, which is a miserably small amount of bandwidth, even for DSL. My 486 is bored. A T1 or a colo server is absolute, utter, complete overkill, and unnecessary for me. Wealth doesn't automatically accompany knowledge... just because I have the capability and desire to run a mail server doesn't mean I have the need or the means to pay for high-end commercial services. And yes, I was bitten by this new, unpublished policy last week.
"Relay through your ISP" isn't always a good answer either. I've tried it. My current ISP's outgoing mail servers routinely delay mail by an hour or more. This is a major, first-tier provider. When my machine is delivering directly, I can look in my own logs to troubleshoot delivery problems (which users often end up asking me about, and invariably are on their end).
I fully understand the arguments that blocking DSL and cable lines will stop a lot of spam. I even think that *some* kind of blocking of this nature is a good idea. But it's really, really fascist to implement it the way they have done- it is disrupting mail service for hundreds of thousands of legitimate mail users. AOL is just contributing to the gradual erosion of technical community / cooperation that the net depends on to function.
Here are some ideas to do this in a more "Internet-friendly" way:
1. Throttle inbound mail delivery from DSL / cable IP blocks. Don't stop it completely, but limit it to 1 simultaneous connection / host, and 5 messages / minute.
2. Limit the total number of unique AOL subscribers that a given DSL / cable host can send mail to in a 24 hour period. This could be a relatively large number (1000) and still effectively stop spammers.
3. Maintain a "whitelist" of IPs of server admins who know what they are doing. Have an automated system drop mail to postmaster@[IP]. Provide a phone number and a randomized code where a person (it must be a human) can call in and get their IP re-activated for sending mail.
The basic idea is to raise the threshold of "pain" above what a spammer can profitably deal with. I am willing to go to some trouble to have my single IP unblocked (assuming the number of ISPs doing such blocking remains relatively low), but spammers must deal with massive quantities and can't afford to waste time on machines that can only mail 1000 AOL addresses / day or require manual confirmation.
I would, of course, try to say this to someone at AOL, but because I don't work for an ISP the "postmaster" helpdesk won't even talk to me and you can guess how much their customer service folks like talking to non-customers.
GRRRR!
-R
I read both articles, and neither one mentiones that the discovery of a neutral gas ring around Jupiter generated by Europa has any bearing on the possibility of life on Europa. Am I missing something? Far as I know, water does an good job of blocking ionizing radiation... that's why they store nuclear fuels and waste in big honking pools of it.
TT for the web is OK - I used it last year. Just pray that you don't need to get tech support. I don't have super-complicated taxes (mortgage, no kids, stock investments) and I ran into a case where it appeared to be missing a feature that was necessary for me to file my return. The online docs seem plentiful at first glance, but they lacked the level of detail I needed. I contacted support, and I was connected with someone who, despite my repeated insistance that I was using the web based product, gave me instructions that were for the desktop version. He knew NOTHING, and was clearly just going through scripts. I did get my tech support fee refunded , and I eventually figured out through trial and error how to do what I needed, but it was a painful experience.