Nothing beats when they came to my college for a.Net dropoff. Total retail value of what each participant got was over $1,200 bucks. Everyone got a fully licensed version of XP Pro,.Net Pro, Office XP Pro, for starters. All the departments were given XP Server, and the school got XP Enterprise Server (or whatever the top end version is).
And thereby they one. Those people are now accustomed to MS widgets and thoughtforms, and will be resistant to migration, moreso through each generation of adaptation.
-GiH Whiskey, a technological invention that whisks you off to a land of happiness and faeries, afterwards returning you home without your key.
FUD,.net, their 'rent our code' initiative, and of course, details about their enterprise wide lisencing schemas in order to properly confuse education IT pros and such forth that are finally looking at an open source solutions as a sincere posilbility.
There are some things I fear though; 1) A MS Distro with proprietary libraries and a proprietary office product 2) officially renting a floor space in order to be able to make official complaints regarding the 'competitions' advertising practices. 3) They want to Buy you. Not win you over, not get you to trust them, straight up, here's a free copy of XP, try it out. I've seen this at the chicago CIO conference, where it was brutally succesful.
Of course.. we all know what will really beat MS in the long run, better pr0n harvesting utilities... at least if the succesful net sites are anything to go by.
What were they trying to do? Send cocaine over Cat5 Cabling?
Heh, Packet sniffing takes on whole new dimensions.
-GiH A goose is loose in the sluce for juice.
Re:Not the first time
on
MP3 for Gameboy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Do they have a chance of making a well-distributed product, or will this just be offered on some catalogs and bought by geeks?
Of course this will probably remain more of a tech-toy than a mass-market attactor, but if it gets kids (and who else is going to use a GBA as an MP3 player rather than just buying the real deal), into working with technology and specifically computing, BOOH YAH!
I have a kid sister, who has consistently anoyed me for the past 12 years or so with requests for assistance with one PC issue or another. Yesterday I went back to the folks place for a visit and found her sitting at a table playing with those new cell-phone mods. Totally geeked out, little screwdrivers all around, cell bits scatered over about a square meter of table space. Suddenly my heart swelled with joy, and I forgot how much I hated nokia for all those stupid little mods.. they get people teched out. Anything, Everything, that introduces folk young and old to the idea that it is Okay to go into the gutts of their machine and muck around, is better for the tech world in the long run.
Though maybe not for geek salaries.. hmmm
-GiH This is your mind, This is your mind roasting on the back of a Celeron overclocked to 1.3 gigahertz. Any Questions?
If it were sold in Europe and treated as Art, which code can be, than Zimmerman would have full authority to audit and suggest changes in course on any future revisions on his 'art'.
Is Code a product, or a design, design's are art, objects are property.
-Gih Didn't you read the sign? Accepting this lawnmower at discount enables us to come install this here billboard on your yard! Damn illiterate lawn users.
And Look! What kind of Bio is this for an "adventurer": Fossett's other adventures have including swimming the English Channel, piloting a dog sled in the Iditarod race in Alaska, driving in the LeMans auto endurance race in France and finishing the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii.
I see no Dragons! No Kobolds! Not even a little steenking goblin.
What makes anyone think that the US government could do any better securing wireless devices than the millions of geeks currently working on the subject?
They don't do the work better, they're just a little less kind in their critisism. One of the big holes in Open Source / Free software is a nearly complete lack of proper Quality Assurance practices.
Finidng a public body willing to test your work for you is a coders wet dream, finding one that will grant you an air of reliability, all the better.
-GiH My dog ran away with my wife, but it's okay, I have coffee.
Well, if the only thing that changes are the comments and something like variable names, then yeah, I'd agree the students probably copied off each other, wouldn't you?
Got nailed for that once in college, the other fellow and I were both big enthuthiasts for minamalist coding.
The teach supplied the method, we only had to implement, decide where to break up the process into functions, etc. There are only so many permutations on names for variables to hold random digits. Foo, Bar, Gloop.. we ended up with code that was identical in process, lottsa whitespace differences etc.. but our variables were all named identically.
We went on to hate each other.
-GiH My brain is a very powerful computer, this society is a very destructive virus.
You gotta admit though, he's got the earmarks to be one of those great mythological figures one day.
Can you prove it? Wait here for a few minutes.. **a few minutes later** Here are the passwords for your central switches, I had them on file in one of my drop points down the street. Lucky me that it was still there. **laywer fumbles and swears**
Remember, Hackers are like boyscouts, they're always prepared.. they just prepare for alot more than preventing forest fires and walking old ladies across the road.
-GiH -This isn't my dog, this is an aibo. My dog is years more advanced than this.
is the cost of installation and any retraining that needs to be paid for to use the new system. I have a feeling - unless it offers a HUGE advantage over standard methods - Intel et al. would be very reluctant to adopt a new process.
Bah, obvious and trite, possibly uninformed. Smaller is better. With a new process chip-makers can hide more margin in the increased costs of retooling and retraining, which they need to do every time they step down the chanel widths as it is.
At the end of the day, it's becoming increasingly clear that speeed and transistor count will soon be a moot item. Instead, we will begin to evaluate chips based on their native inteligence, and the elegance of their code.
Okay, this chip has sixteen trillion gates, but are they designed in such a way as to be elegant, and do they create strong tools for developers?
Even that is too late. By the time you start typing, every line of the program should already be set in stone. Every line of code should have been evaluated and approved long before it was typed. It doesn't require a "perfect world". It could happen in this one (& does in rare cases). However, you have to believe that it is possible, and then you have to choose to do it.
I think the worst sources of error are the third and fourth generation patches to fix the errors created by the send and third generation patches. When it begins to reach the point where the currect coder can only take on faith that the function of object being edited still lives up to spec... which I suppose is your whole point.
Again, this is a failure in the planning & design. Why would the designers plan & code something that the users don't want (or won't use, or can't use, etc.). This is one of the bigger problems I've seen. People design applications without finding out what the users want it to do.
That's not so black and white as it should be, at the most basic level, people don't know what they really want until after the product is delievered. Something sounds like a great feature, and all the users like it on paper, and then they play with the prototype and demand it be removed.
The outrage is spreading; this has to be a rough day for the NPR ombudsman who's deluged with email by now... ~24 hours after Cory's report.
Oh no!
A few thousand web-heads took our legal parachute seriously and started e-mailing us! Oh no, oh what can we do?::delete:: Ahhh.. that's better.
Seriously.. this is worthy of being slashdotted how? If they authorize people to link to their sites as static pages, it implies an agreement that the page content will remain static. Which on-line news pages generally do not. It's known that most stories from the big sites are altered on a whim, all this grants them is a legal parachute against folk who quotted them in research, or any other nut-job that wants to hold them responsible for maintaining static pages.
Besides, less link to their sites, less spiders crawling in trying to archive.
The sad thing is, it is likely true in every case that *avoiding* the bugs is cheaper than *correcting* the bugs. Yet we keep introducing bugs & assuming they will be found & corrected later.
Can I live in your world? No really!? A world where bugs can be caught, all the time, every time, because you don't put them in. Nice theory. Too bad there's no such thing as a spell checker built into most compilers. Just simple, as you type, error notification would be cute.
Anyway, I work in QA, the QA process starts in the design stage, where we look for issues in the design that will be prone to errors, and try to find alternate means, and carries right through running antivirus software on the disc when it goes gold.
Not all bugs are code, many 'bugs' are exactly what the designer intended... but the users hate it.
Some of these things can be seen, and good testing helps find them. But methodology is the key to testing, choosing a structured method of testing, and sticking with it... always.
I think this is one case where they could simply set up some distributed PC's (different IP's in different class C's) and just have P2P clients serving 'bad' versions of their own copyrighted music. Set up a little consortium of several different records companies, and it becomes DAMN hard to apply an effective filter.
Time to build the undernet. The issue with the internet today is that everyone is welcome, as it should be. But it also mean that when devising open ended software systems, any user can recieve and make use of those tools, and by the same token, any user can misuse those tools.
The solution would be an undernet. Existing alongside the current internet, it would rely on some extenssions to the Protocol that are not made widely available. Software could then be written that would function only for memebers of the undernet. Now, change the phrasing slightly, to undernets. Append a group identifier to all packet headers sent by undernet members to other undernet members. If abstracted widely enough, it could even allow different members to remain connected while cycling through spoofed IPs.
This is most clearly desireable when the group that supports the undernet is working toward common goals or ideas. Then if members begin to polute the data-pool with broken files, picking out and removing the offender becomes both easier, and more effective.
I'm sure a one of the IP wizards could come up with something more graceful and effective, so don't judge the superficiality of the proposed solution, so much as the concept of the closed group with regulated, but anonomous, access.
Nintend has been building and selling emulators ever-since the super mario collection came out for the SNES.. and don't forget the gameboy cartdridge for same, which allowed people who didn't want to buy a gameboy to use their SNES instead.
What they don't like is the whole concept of so-called 'abandonware', the providers of which often tend to assume that software not currently for sale.. is abandoned (when in reality, the publisher has some several years before copyrights and publishing rights expire).
Then there's the whole deal with ROM trading openly illegal files.::shrug::
Emulation == good. Theft == bad.That is of course, IMHO.
Not to mention the other equally inexplicable down sides:
1) security - intermediate nodes can tap your calls
And plucking the signals out of the air currently is more difficult because...
2) security - intermediate nodes can reroute or prevent your calls
Only if there's a single point of routing, see the Internet Protocol. Routers should send individual packets down whatever path is available.
3) quality - packet loss for a number of consequtive wireless links would be stupendous
It's lossy, but with a wider bandwidth, some more error protection becomes affordable.
4) quality - cumulative delay from a number of consequtive links would be disastrous (more so, if link layer retransmissions were used to improve packet loss)
This I'd have to see in action or actual research, it would at worst be similar to voice over IP.
5) you've got no neighbours, you've got no calls - where do you get the people who are willing to stand in a chain between you and the tower, while you yabber on with your girlfriend?
Increase the singal power.. until you're back to a regular old borring cell phone, still to far off? Request a tower. Where does this leave you? Right where you are now. Meanwhile other folk get to enjoy the benefits of urban enviroments, namely, a more rapid acceptance of advanced technology, and the ability to exploit the number of near-by humans to decrease the expense of group services.
6) would you pay for that service? Would you trust the intermediate nodes to meter your call? Might be a few surprises in store when the bill arrives... I would trust the same billing service I trust now.. you're still going through a tower.. I'm not sure I see your point here. No, I will not pay these individuals for playing their part in the mutually beneficial grid anymore than I would pay the fellow down the road for running a Ham Radio repeater tower.
Thing is, your battery has a standby time of 48 hours, but a talk time of what? 1 hour? 90 minutes? Most of that power isn't going to sound circuitry, it's going to the radio, and if your phone is busy relaying a call that radio will be pulling just as much power.
Ah, not just a radio, a powerful radio (relatively speaking), with a shared resources system, the signal strength could be lowered, less drain on the battery, the signal range need only be as great as the distance between you, and the next phone over.
Which is where my whole point of sending a straighter signal comes in, rather than a wide area power wasting brute force attempt (pump enough juice into the transmitter to reach the tower), the range of your signal can be lessened to less than a few dozen feet in an urban enviroment. Pico-cells. Each one supports the other cell callers further from the nearest cell, extending in a chain of small spheres back to the tower, rather than one large sphere that wastes all kind of energy sending random radiation off in all directions as far as it can reach.
Aw come on, My cell with the lith-ion battery has a standby of about 48 hours. It came free with my AT&T cellular service (yeah, a contract.. which is already up), it's just a cute little ericson full-sized. Yeah, the mini ones run out faster (AMAZING!), smaller batteries and all.
May I also point out, that at no point is your phone truly 'idle' It's sending packets to the nearby cell tower going 'here I am' every once an awhile anyway, and it's always actively scanning the signals it recieves for the messages that are intened for it. So yes.. this will affect the battery life on a phone, yes if you want to get by with an ancient phone (older than 2 years) it'd suck. No, this technology isn't Implemented in those phones, so they could neither benefit nor suffer from this service.
In cities, where I have trouble getting a signal on the sidewalk (too much concrete, no line of sight), being about to bounce a signal off other phones would be awesome!
so far as security goes, no more, no less, than a wireless is now. the fact that the broadcast power would be lesser might even help, would get the signal closer to the ultimate in secure transmission, a Beam.
A virus could alter Microsoft Word so that opening any Word document at all would erase every file on your hard drive, making every single Word document in existence a deadly threat -- to you, and to you alone.
This is an excellent example of why you shouldn't do actual work and day to day tasks while logged in with the super user/administrator account. If you're not using an OS that allows user specific file access, change to NT (or it's derivitive MS Windows X Professional series), or Linux.
When you need super user access to install new software globally, or to change system settings, quickly log in, do your work, log out. This way any potentially dangerous software you execute can only access the files that you have read/write/change/delete access to. This is EXACTLY why I maintain a few different logins with my Linux box. Depending on what I'm doing on the system, I log in as a different user, who can only access the specific files associated with the task at hand. (examples; Browsing, Authoring, Coding, and Work)
This is one of those classic lessons you either learn when you first start using computers, or it seems ridiculous.. right up until one of your pals decides it'd be real funny to hop in front of your machine and do an rm -rf (Comp Sci majors are funny when their drunk and bored.. no.. REALLY!):/
I'm not saying I distrust any podunk agency. I'd much rather not particularly need to. Desperately.
I'm thinking this may be a slightly more important office than would be suggested by it's name. Kind of like the Department of the Interior for the US.
Remember that as we continue to advance technologically, the ability of society to observe itself will only increase. When we can put sensing equipment in nanites the size of a dust particle, will we?
The cure is not in legislation, it is in revitilization of simple core concepts of succesful society, namely, politeness, respect, and active participation in a shared cultural goal.
Or we can just accept continued branding and enforcement policies that have become popular in the last century. #099-11-1234 you will not go out with that woman, as she is.67 years older than the upper limit of the codified regulations of interpersonal relations, sub section 3 of section 123, page 197. Please refrain from further fraternization, or suffer the penalty of public sporking.
-GiH I love sporks, they're the camels of eating utensils.
Slashdot Mirror
Bitterness is not a way of life.
Arogance is a sign of youth.
-GiH
This is the end of the line.
Nothing beats when they came to my college for a .Net dropoff. Total retail value of what each participant got was over $1,200 bucks. Everyone got a fully licensed version of XP Pro, .Net Pro, Office XP Pro, for starters. All the departments were given XP Server, and the school got XP Enterprise Server (or whatever the top end version is).
And thereby they one. Those people are now accustomed to MS widgets and thoughtforms, and will be resistant to migration, moreso through each generation of adaptation.
-GiH
Whiskey, a technological invention that whisks you off to a land of happiness and faeries, afterwards returning you home without your key.
FUD, .net, their 'rent our code' initiative, and of course, details about their enterprise wide lisencing schemas in order to properly confuse education IT pros and such forth that are finally looking at an open source solutions as a sincere posilbility.
There are some things I fear though;
1) A MS Distro with proprietary libraries and a proprietary office product
2) officially renting a floor space in order to be able to make official complaints regarding the 'competitions' advertising practices.
3) They want to Buy you. Not win you over, not get you to trust them, straight up, here's a free copy of XP, try it out. I've seen this at the chicago CIO conference, where it was brutally succesful.
Of course.. we all know what will really beat MS in the long run, better pr0n harvesting utilities... at least if the succesful net sites are anything to go by.
-GiH
Foot, meet mouth, mouth mrrphrmmm...
What were they trying to do? Send cocaine over Cat5 Cabling?
Heh, Packet sniffing takes on whole new dimensions.
-GiH
A goose is loose in the sluce for juice.
Do they have a chance of making a well-distributed product, or will this just be offered on some catalogs and bought by geeks?
Of course this will probably remain more of a tech-toy than a mass-market attactor, but if it gets kids (and who else is going to use a GBA as an MP3 player rather than just buying the real deal), into working with technology and specifically computing, BOOH YAH!
I have a kid sister, who has consistently anoyed me for the past 12 years or so with requests for assistance with one PC issue or another. Yesterday I went back to the folks place for a visit and found her sitting at a table playing with those new cell-phone mods. Totally geeked out, little screwdrivers all around, cell bits scatered over about a square meter of table space. Suddenly my heart swelled with joy, and I forgot how much I hated nokia for all those stupid little mods.. they get people teched out. Anything, Everything, that introduces folk young and old to the idea that it is Okay to go into the gutts of their machine and muck around, is better for the tech world in the long run.
Though maybe not for geek salaries.. hmmm
-GiH
This is your mind, This is your mind roasting on the back of a Celeron overclocked to 1.3 gigahertz. Any Questions?
If it were sold in Europe and treated as Art, which code can be, than Zimmerman would have full authority to audit and suggest changes in course on any future revisions on his 'art'.
Is Code a product, or a design, design's are art, objects are property.
-Gih
Didn't you read the sign? Accepting this lawnmower at discount enables us to come install this here billboard on your yard! Damn illiterate lawn users.
They didn't even say what his class was!
And Look! What kind of Bio is this for an "adventurer":
Fossett's other adventures have including swimming the English Channel, piloting a dog sled in the Iditarod race in Alaska, driving in the LeMans auto endurance race in France and finishing the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii.
I see no Dragons! No Kobolds! Not even a little steenking goblin.
Heh, some adventurer he is.
-GiH
Come here, that I might BRAIN thee!
What makes anyone think that the US government could do any better securing wireless devices than the millions of geeks currently working on the subject?
They don't do the work better, they're just a little less kind in their critisism. One of the big holes in Open Source / Free software is a nearly complete lack of proper Quality Assurance practices.
Finidng a public body willing to test your work for you is a coders wet dream, finding one that will grant you an air of reliability, all the better.
-GiH
My dog ran away with my wife, but it's okay, I have coffee.
Anyway, my point is, before you start making fun of the Boy Scouts, you might want to check into what they're *really* all about.
Eh, no offense intended, the focus was more on the hackers than the Boy Scouts there for me.
-GiH
This is my rationalizer, for centuries men have used it to make the world makes sense, some call it; Beer.
Well, if the only thing that changes are the comments and something like variable names, then yeah, I'd agree the students probably copied off each other, wouldn't you?
Got nailed for that once in college, the other fellow and I were both big enthuthiasts for minamalist coding.
The teach supplied the method, we only had to implement, decide where to break up the process into functions, etc. There are only so many permutations on names for variables to hold random digits. Foo, Bar, Gloop.. we ended up with code that was identical in process, lottsa whitespace differences etc.. but our variables were all named identically.
We went on to hate each other.
-GiH
My brain is a very powerful computer, this society is a very destructive virus.
You gotta admit though, he's got the earmarks to be one of those great mythological figures one day.
Can you prove it?
Wait here for a few minutes..
**a few minutes later**
Here are the passwords for your central switches, I had them on file in one of my drop points down the street. Lucky me that it was still there.
**laywer fumbles and swears**
Remember, Hackers are like boyscouts, they're always prepared.. they just prepare for alot more than preventing forest fires and walking old ladies across the road.
-GiH
-This isn't my dog, this is an aibo. My dog is years more advanced than this.
is the cost of installation and any retraining that needs to be paid for to use the new system. I have a feeling - unless it offers a HUGE advantage over standard methods - Intel et al. would be very reluctant to adopt a new process.
Bah, obvious and trite, possibly uninformed. Smaller is better. With a new process chip-makers can hide more margin in the increased costs of retooling and retraining, which they need to do every time they step down the chanel widths as it is.
At the end of the day, it's becoming increasingly clear that speeed and transistor count will soon be a moot item. Instead, we will begin to evaluate chips based on their native inteligence, and the elegance of their code.
Okay, this chip has sixteen trillion gates, but are they designed in such a way as to be elegant, and do they create strong tools for developers?
Competition will soon be fun again..
-GiH
Even that is too late. By the time you start typing, every line of the program should already be set in stone. Every line of code should have been evaluated and approved long before it was typed. It doesn't require a "perfect world". It could happen in this one (& does in rare cases). However, you have to believe that it is possible, and then you have to choose to do it.
I think the worst sources of error are the third and fourth generation patches to fix the errors created by the send and third generation patches. When it begins to reach the point where the currect coder can only take on faith that the function of object being edited still lives up to spec... which I suppose is your whole point.
Again, this is a failure in the planning & design. Why would the designers plan & code something that the users don't want (or won't use, or can't use, etc.). This is one of the bigger problems I've seen. People design applications without finding out what the users want it to do.
That's not so black and white as it should be, at the most basic level, people don't know what they really want until after the product is delievered. Something sounds like a great feature, and all the users like it on paper, and then they play with the prototype and demand it be removed.
-GiH
The outrage is spreading; this has to be a rough day for the NPR ombudsman who's deluged with email by now... ~24 hours after Cory's report.
::delete::
Oh no!
A few thousand web-heads took our legal parachute seriously and started e-mailing us! Oh no, oh what can we do?
Ahhh.. that's better.
Seriously.. this is worthy of being slashdotted how? If they authorize people to link to their sites as static pages, it implies an agreement that the page content will remain static. Which on-line news pages generally do not. It's known that most stories from the big sites are altered on a whim, all this grants them is a legal parachute against folk who quotted them in research, or any other nut-job that wants to hold them responsible for maintaining static pages.
Besides, less link to their sites, less spiders crawling in trying to archive.
-GiH
Blah, who dropped this house on my wife..
The sad thing is, it is likely true in every case that *avoiding* the bugs is cheaper than *correcting* the bugs. Yet we keep introducing bugs & assuming they will be found & corrected later.
Can I live in your world?
No really!? A world where bugs can be caught, all the time, every time, because you don't put them in. Nice theory. Too bad there's no such thing as a spell checker built into most compilers. Just simple, as you type, error notification would be cute.
Anyway, I work in QA, the QA process starts in the design stage, where we look for issues in the design that will be prone to errors, and try to find alternate means, and carries right through running antivirus software on the disc when it goes gold.
Not all bugs are code, many 'bugs' are exactly what the designer intended... but the users hate it.
Some of these things can be seen, and good testing helps find them. But methodology is the key to testing, choosing a structured method of testing, and sticking with it... always.
-GiH
I think this is one case where they could simply set up some distributed PC's (different IP's in different class C's) and just have P2P clients serving 'bad' versions of their own copyrighted music. Set up a little consortium of several different records companies, and it becomes DAMN hard to apply an effective filter.
Time to build the undernet.
The issue with the internet today is that everyone is welcome, as it should be. But it also mean that when devising open ended software systems, any user can recieve and make use of those tools, and by the same token, any user can misuse those tools.
The solution would be an undernet. Existing alongside the current internet, it would rely on some extenssions to the Protocol that are not made widely available. Software could then be written that would function only for memebers of the undernet. Now, change the phrasing slightly, to undernets. Append a group identifier to all packet headers sent by undernet members to other undernet members. If abstracted widely enough, it could even allow different members to remain connected while cycling through spoofed IPs.
This is most clearly desireable when the group that supports the undernet is working toward common goals or ideas. Then if members begin to polute the data-pool with broken files, picking out and removing the offender becomes both easier, and more effective.
I'm sure a one of the IP wizards could come up with something more graceful and effective, so don't judge the superficiality of the proposed solution, so much as the concept of the closed group with regulated, but anonomous, access.
-GiH
Nintend has been building and selling emulators ever-since the super mario collection came out for the SNES.. and don't forget the gameboy cartdridge for same, which allowed people who didn't want to buy a gameboy to use their SNES instead.
::shrug::
What they don't like is the whole concept of so-called 'abandonware', the providers of which often tend to assume that software not currently for sale.. is abandoned (when in reality, the publisher has some several years before copyrights and publishing rights expire).
Then there's the whole deal with ROM trading openly illegal files.
Emulation == good.
Theft == bad.That is of course, IMHO.
-GiH
Not to mention the other equally inexplicable down sides: 1) security - intermediate nodes can tap your calls
And plucking the signals out of the air currently is more difficult because...
2) security - intermediate nodes can reroute or prevent your calls
Only if there's a single point of routing, see the Internet Protocol. Routers should send individual packets down whatever path is available.
3) quality - packet loss for a number of consequtive wireless links would be stupendous
It's lossy, but with a wider bandwidth, some more error protection becomes affordable.
4) quality - cumulative delay from a number of consequtive links would be disastrous (more so, if link layer retransmissions were used to improve packet loss)
This I'd have to see in action or actual research, it would at worst be similar to voice over IP.
5) you've got no neighbours, you've got no calls - where do you get the people who are willing to stand in a chain between you and the tower, while you yabber on with your girlfriend?
Increase the singal power.. until you're back to a regular old borring cell phone, still to far off? Request a tower. Where does this leave you? Right where you are now. Meanwhile other folk get to enjoy the benefits of urban enviroments, namely, a more rapid acceptance of advanced technology, and the ability to exploit the number of near-by humans to decrease the expense of group services.
6) would you pay for that service? Would you trust the intermediate nodes to meter your call? Might be a few surprises in store when the bill arrives...
I would trust the same billing service I trust now.. you're still going through a tower.. I'm not sure I see your point here. No, I will not pay these individuals for playing their part in the mutually beneficial grid anymore than I would pay the fellow down the road for running a Ham Radio repeater tower.
-Gih
There is a llama behind you.
Thing is, your battery has a standby time of 48 hours, but a talk time of what? 1 hour? 90 minutes? Most of that power isn't going to sound circuitry, it's going to the radio, and if your phone is busy relaying a call that radio will be pulling just as much power.
Ah, not just a radio, a powerful radio (relatively speaking), with a shared resources system, the signal strength could be lowered, less drain on the battery, the signal range need only be as great as the distance between you, and the next phone over.
Which is where my whole point of sending a straighter signal comes in, rather than a wide area power wasting brute force attempt (pump enough juice into the transmitter to reach the tower), the range of your signal can be lessened to less than a few dozen feet in an urban enviroment. Pico-cells. Each one supports the other cell callers further from the nearest cell, extending in a chain of small spheres back to the tower, rather than one large sphere that wastes all kind of energy sending random radiation off in all directions as far as it can reach.
-GiH
There is no Sig.
Aw come on,
My cell with the lith-ion battery has a standby of about 48 hours. It came free with my AT&T cellular service (yeah, a contract.. which is already up), it's just a cute little ericson full-sized. Yeah, the mini ones run out faster (AMAZING!), smaller batteries and all.
May I also point out, that at no point is your phone truly 'idle' It's sending packets to the nearby cell tower going 'here I am' every once an awhile anyway, and it's always actively scanning the signals it recieves for the messages that are intened for it. So yes.. this will affect the battery life on a phone, yes if you want to get by with an ancient phone (older than 2 years) it'd suck. No, this technology isn't Implemented in those phones, so they could neither benefit nor suffer from this service.
In cities, where I have trouble getting a signal on the sidewalk (too much concrete, no line of sight), being about to bounce a signal off other phones would be awesome!
so far as security goes, no more, no less, than a wireless is now. the fact that the broadcast power would be lesser might even help, would get the signal closer to the ultimate in secure transmission, a Beam.
-GiH
A virus could alter Microsoft Word so that opening any Word document at all would erase every file on your hard drive, making every single Word document in existence a deadly threat -- to you, and to you alone.
:/
This is an excellent example of why you shouldn't do actual work and day to day tasks while logged in with the super user/administrator account. If you're not using an OS that allows user specific file access, change to NT (or it's derivitive MS Windows X Professional series), or Linux.
When you need super user access to install new software globally, or to change system settings, quickly log in, do your work, log out. This way any potentially dangerous software you execute can only access the files that you have read/write/change/delete access to. This is EXACTLY why I maintain a few different logins with my Linux box. Depending on what I'm doing on the system, I log in as a different user, who can only access the specific files associated with the task at hand. (examples; Browsing, Authoring, Coding, and Work)
This is one of those classic lessons you either learn when you first start using computers, or it seems ridiculous.. right up until one of your pals decides it'd be real funny to hop in front of your machine and do an rm -rf (Comp Sci majors are funny when their drunk and bored.. no.. REALLY!)
-GiH
No thanks, I don't smoke.
So tell me, is ignorance bliss?
-GiH
"The department of Interior Decoration Issues."
;)
aka, the office of the NSA in the White House.. now that would be amusing.
-GiH
I'm not saying I distrust any podunk agency. I'd much rather not particularly need to. Desperately.
I'm thinking this may be a slightly more important office than would be suggested by it's name. Kind of like the Department of the Interior for the US.
But then again, I'm no Brit..
-GiH
Remember that as we continue to advance technologically, the ability of society to observe itself will only increase. When we can put sensing equipment in nanites the size of a dust particle, will we?
.67 years older than the upper limit of the codified regulations of interpersonal relations, sub section 3 of section 123, page 197. Please refrain from further fraternization, or suffer the penalty of public sporking.
The cure is not in legislation, it is in revitilization of simple core concepts of succesful society, namely, politeness, respect, and active participation in a shared cultural goal.
Or we can just accept continued branding and enforcement policies that have become popular in the last century. #099-11-1234 you will not go out with that woman, as she is
-GiH
I love sporks, they're the camels of eating utensils.