"Fance, for instance, you can get a T1 line for values near 50$/month, similar thing in Sweden."
You can get 1.5MBit/1MBit DSL from Qwest for around $35 a month, including ISP.
They don't use T1s in Europe - it's a US standard, they use E1s.
There's no conspiracy. The facts are clear: the US government hasn't paid to put in the broadband infastructure. It's been the individual companies - Qwest, Verizon, Comcast and others - who have paid for the equipment and labor.
We don't have "super fast" access because no one gives a shit. 95% of Americans probably couldn't tell you what "bandwidth" was - nor would they care. The biggest problem facing broadband adoption is not infastructure or cost, it's the fact that people already have dial-up and they don't see any reason to change.
We have low broadband adoption for the same reason that we drive POS Chevys and eat absolute shit as food - we don't bother to demand a better product.
"Sounds like the US and UK strategy is to squeeze as much as possible from our antiquated telephone and cable networks, and we'll worry about laying fiber some time later...."
FIOS *is* Fiber to the Premises
It's not a future promise, it's not "squeezing the telephone network". It's a new network based on fiber to your house, it's fast, and it's being deployed NOW. Verizon is investing 2.5 billion in deploying it through 2005.
Besides, what's wrong with copper and coax? ADSL2 offers 25Mbit speeds when used on good loops, and each QAM cable channel (there are at least 125) offers 40MBps of bandwidth.
"That was my point.:-) Download speeds aren't complainable at the moment. I would love to have 1 meg up, at least, so I could effectively share home movies and such. Sending an compressed HD home movie from a cable user to another is still an agonizing ordeal."
Try DSL. Around here, Qwest offers 1.5/1.0 (they claim 896K but the modem snycs at 1.0) ADSL for $28 a month. You need an ISP, but Qwest offers a basic one for $7 a month (no email/web hosting/etc. - just connectivity).
"The reality is that the RSA key is a godsend for protecting your accounts. Many Americans are simply unaware of the fact that the Taiwanese have essentially given all the key computer technologies to mainland China. Beijing can now assemble a supercomputer based solely on the technology from Acer, a Taiwanese company with major investments in mainland China. This supercomputer can easily crack the passwords of many accounts at your bank, brokerage, etc. The RSA will help to protect Western bank/brokerage accounts from Chinese theft. That the majority of stolen credit card numbers end up in the hands of Chinese gangs, aided and abetted by Beijing, in Southeast Asia should surprise no one."
Nice troll. The fact is that the Chinese, as well as *the rest of the world* have had access to computer technology equivilent to that which exists in the US for *years*. There's nothing new.
Moreover, you don't use a "supercomputer" to crack bank accounts. The fact is, you can't brute force the passwords on bank accounts unless you are able to steal the password hashes - and by then you've already broken the system.
Bank accounts are being stolen using phishing, not supercomputers.
Outlook security problems have been few and far between. Most of the flaws, like other IE flaws, posted on websites like Bugtraq or Secunia are nonfunctional.
"- Remote image blocking"
Outlook 2003 has this.
"- No IE core"
Do you honestly care if your email reader supports all of CSS2 correctly?
"- RSS reader"
What the hell? Everyone wants to add RSS to everything. We don't need RSS enabled mail clients, games, toasters, or breadmakers.
"or ADSL as it is known it France, where it was invented"
That's a load of bull. DSL evolved from ISDN and was developed primarily by John Cioffi, a Stanford professor, along with help from Broadcom.
ADSL is a type of DSL. The A is for asyncronous - your upstream is different from your downstream.
If you have TV-over-DSL, it's probably not ADSL at all. VDSL requires a much shorter run (usually to a local box with fiber) but provides 50MBPS bandwidth.
Who the hell writes these articles? If you click on "TV Services" from Qwest's HOME PAGE, this is what you get. DOES ANYONE BOTHER TO DO THEIR RESEARCH ANYMORE?
"Two things of note - if you don't patch a Mac, right now you have a working unpatched Mac. "
Yes, but that's because no one bothers to write Mac OS worms. There have been plenty of remote root flaws in OS X.
"All Macs come set up to update weekly, so issues are patched quickly "
XP SP2 gives you a big scary screen when you install it, begging you to turn on automatic updates. If you turn them off, it bugs you to turn them back on.
"AND because of the security setup in OS X you'd have to have the administrator password from the user to be able to disable this process"
"current flash chips have horrible RW speeds my 1 GB flash card takes almost 1/2 hor to download."
1: Learn to use commas. 2: Good flash devices today can handle about 10MB/second. That's about as fast as a 68x CD-ROM. You need a USB2 flash reader and a good SD card to get that kind of performance. My generic SD card and generic USB2 flash reader does about 7MB/second.
"so it would take 16 hours to get my data (photos) of a 32 Gbyt "
3: This article is for a 32 gigabit flash chip, not a 32 gigabyte flash card.
"We can send just enough power to the lan card to have it start the computer, so why not leave just enough power to the memory to keep the system up. I guess that's what standby tries to do, but poorly accomplishes."
Standby indeed does exactly this. Standby rocks, but only if you have an OS with a good ACPI implementation. Even the 2.6 kernel has a horribly broken suspend system - neither my desktop nor my notebook will enter S3 under Linux.
With Windows, though, my notebook suspends in about two seconds and wakes in about three. Battery drain is about 5% per day. I have it set to wake up after 24 hours and suspend to disk (hibernate).
"Maybe I'm missing something obvious, because I haven't seen this anywhere, but what?"
You haven't seen this anywhere? Perhaps you haven't used Windows 2000 / XP / 2003. It's called hibernate.
There's even support for this in Linux, although it has a number of issues (particularly with X).
In Windows, Hibernate dumps the memory, processor state, and other info to disk and shuts down. When you reboot, it restores. Depending on your system and how much memory you have (the more you have, the longer it takes), this can be as little as 5-10 seconds.
Personally, I don't bother with Hibernate. S3 suspend shuts off just about everything except the RAM, and my laptop can resume from S3 in about three seconds. My desktop takes around 5 seconds, but it has a dated BIOS.
"Of course, with roaming in the US being so unbelievably crap compared to other places in the world (mainly Europe, although here in Australia, the cell phone coverage is generally excellent too), as well as having many different competing standards, I'll agree with you on one thing, I don't see them installing cell phone nodes in planes anytime soon."
Is you opinion based on some sort of actual data, or is it just utter crap?
CDMA can hand-off extremely quickly because, in a CDMA system, handoffs are "soft" - more than one tower is handling the call at the same time. There isn't a fixed point when the phone switches from one tower to the next like there is with GSM.
"but in this case Google and Apple got to the market first with a product MS promised "
Google perhaps, but remember:
TIGER HAS NOT SHIPPED
I love people who comparine a publicly-available Microsoft product to an Apple product that is not publicly available and proclaim that Microsoft is "copying" Apple.
Repeat after me:
* Microsoft announced WinFS *before* Apple announced Tiger
* MSN Desktop search can be downloaded TODAY. Tiger is only available to developers.
"Microsoft now license the original software for us on the Pocket PC."
The Transcriber handwriting recognition on the Pocket PC is a modified version of Calligrapher, from PhatWare. It was not developed by Apple.
The block recognizer is based on Graffiti licensed from Xerox. The letter recognizer is based on Jot licensed from CIC, the same company that developed Graffiti 2.
I have the Sony RM-VL900. It's simple (hard buttons only) but has full learning capabilities and macros. It's also only about $60, and it goes forever on 4 AAs.
Three clicks from the Dell homepage. It's $200, has a 312MHz CPU, 32MB of flash and 32MB of memory.
If Dell can make a *profit* on a $200 system, Microsoft could definately create a $200 system that would break even. All they need to do is call up their buddies at HTC and ask for a cheap gaming system.
Slashdot Mirror
"Fance, for instance, you can get a T1 line for values near 50$/month, similar thing in Sweden."
You can get 1.5MBit/1MBit DSL from Qwest for around $35 a month, including ISP.
They don't use T1s in Europe - it's a US standard, they use E1s.
There's no conspiracy. The facts are clear: the US government hasn't paid to put in the broadband infastructure. It's been the individual companies - Qwest, Verizon, Comcast and others - who have paid for the equipment and labor.
We don't have "super fast" access because no one gives a shit. 95% of Americans probably couldn't tell you what "bandwidth" was - nor would they care. The biggest problem facing broadband adoption is not infastructure or cost, it's the fact that people already have dial-up and they don't see any reason to change.
We have low broadband adoption for the same reason that we drive POS Chevys and eat absolute shit as food - we don't bother to demand a better product.
"Sounds like the US and UK strategy is to squeeze as much as possible from our antiquated telephone and cable networks, and we'll worry about laying fiber some time later...."
FIOS *is* Fiber to the Premises
It's not a future promise, it's not "squeezing the telephone network". It's a new network based on fiber to your house, it's fast, and it's being deployed NOW. Verizon is investing 2.5 billion in deploying it through 2005.
Besides, what's wrong with copper and coax? ADSL2 offers 25Mbit speeds when used on good loops, and each QAM cable channel (there are at least 125) offers 40MBps of bandwidth.
"That was my point. :-) Download speeds aren't complainable at the moment. I would love to have 1 meg up, at least, so I could effectively share home movies and such. Sending an compressed HD home movie from a cable user to another is still an agonizing ordeal."
Try DSL. Around here, Qwest offers 1.5/1.0 (they claim 896K but the modem snycs at 1.0) ADSL for $28 a month. You need an ISP, but Qwest offers a basic one for $7 a month (no email/web hosting/etc. - just connectivity).
Total: $35.
Apparently, you haven't heard of the 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid...
"I mean, in the US, it's pretty much legal to say just about anything in an advertisements. In the UK, you have to be actually not misleading."
And in the US, you can't be sued for libel if you're telling the truth.
There is a balance here, you know.
"The reality is that the RSA key is a godsend for protecting your accounts. Many Americans are simply unaware of the fact that the Taiwanese have essentially given all the key computer technologies to mainland China. Beijing can now assemble a supercomputer based solely on the technology from Acer, a Taiwanese company with major investments in mainland China. This supercomputer can easily crack the passwords of many accounts at your bank, brokerage, etc.
The RSA will help to protect Western bank/brokerage accounts from Chinese theft. That the majority of stolen credit card numbers end up in the hands of Chinese gangs, aided and abetted by Beijing, in Southeast Asia should surprise no one."
Nice troll. The fact is that the Chinese, as well as *the rest of the world* have had access to computer technology equivilent to that which exists in the US for *years*. There's nothing new.
Moreover, you don't use a "supercomputer" to crack bank accounts. The fact is, you can't brute force the passwords on bank accounts unless you are able to steal the password hashes - and by then you've already broken the system.
Bank accounts are being stolen using phishing, not supercomputers.
"Four New Unpatched Windows Vulnerabilities"
What a load of bull. This article is blatant Microsoft bashing.
Repeat after me: XP SP2 is not affected
Since when has "fixed in SP2" been the same as "unpatched"?
"- Security"
Outlook security problems have been few and far between. Most of the flaws, like other IE flaws, posted on websites like Bugtraq or Secunia are nonfunctional.
"- Remote image blocking"
Outlook 2003 has this.
"- No IE core"
Do you honestly care if your email reader supports all of CSS2 correctly?
"- RSS reader"
What the hell? Everyone wants to add RSS to everything. We don't need RSS enabled mail clients, games, toasters, or breadmakers.
"or ADSL as it is known it France, where it was invented"
That's a load of bull. DSL evolved from ISDN and was developed primarily by John Cioffi, a Stanford professor, along with help from Broadcom.
ADSL is a type of DSL. The A is for asyncronous - your upstream is different from your downstream.
If you have TV-over-DSL, it's probably not ADSL at all. VDSL requires a much shorter run (usually to a local box with fiber) but provides 50MBPS bandwidth.
Qwest offers a similar service in the US.
Qwest offers TV-Over-DSL, and they have been doing so for *years*. This is not new AT ALL.
c es/index.html
http://www.qwest.com/residential/products/tvservi
Who the hell writes these articles? If you click on "TV Services" from Qwest's HOME PAGE, this is what you get. DOES ANYONE BOTHER TO DO THEIR RESEARCH ANYMORE?
"Two things of note - if you don't patch a Mac, right now you have a working unpatched Mac. "
Yes, but that's because no one bothers to write Mac OS worms. There have been plenty of remote root flaws in OS X.
"All Macs come set up to update weekly, so issues are patched quickly "
XP SP2 gives you a big scary screen when you install it, begging you to turn on automatic updates. If you turn them off, it bugs you to turn them back on.
"AND because of the security setup in OS X you'd have to have the administrator password from the user to be able to disable this process"
The same is the case with XP.
" Yes he committed a crime and a crime is a crime but this isn't murder we're talking about people. "
And he's not going to prison for 40+ years, either.
"current flash chips have horrible RW speeds my 1 GB flash card takes almost 1/2 hor to download."
1: Learn to use commas.
2: Good flash devices today can handle about 10MB/second. That's about as fast as a 68x CD-ROM. You need a USB2 flash reader and a good SD card to get that kind of performance. My generic SD card and generic USB2 flash reader does about 7MB/second.
"so it would take 16 hours to get my data (photos) of a 32 Gbyt "
3: This article is for a 32 gigabit flash chip, not a 32 gigabyte flash card.
" backwards compatibility. This reason can't be stressed enough. I just can't believe Intel couldn't put a x86 core on the Itanium chip."
They did. The Itanium had an x86 instuction translator. On the later-generation Itaniums, it was about as fast as the host CPU, clock for clock.
"We can send just enough power to the lan card to have it start the computer, so why not leave just enough power to the memory to keep the system up. I guess that's what standby tries to do, but poorly accomplishes."
Standby indeed does exactly this. Standby rocks, but only if you have an OS with a good ACPI implementation. Even the 2.6 kernel has a horribly broken suspend system - neither my desktop nor my notebook will enter S3 under Linux.
With Windows, though, my notebook suspends in about two seconds and wakes in about three. Battery drain is about 5% per day. I have it set to wake up after 24 hours and suspend to disk (hibernate).
"Maybe I'm missing something obvious, because I haven't seen this anywhere, but what?"
You haven't seen this anywhere? Perhaps you haven't used Windows 2000 / XP / 2003. It's called hibernate.
There's even support for this in Linux, although it has a number of issues (particularly with X).
In Windows, Hibernate dumps the memory, processor state, and other info to disk and shuts down. When you reboot, it restores. Depending on your system and how much memory you have (the more you have, the longer it takes), this can be as little as 5-10 seconds.
Personally, I don't bother with Hibernate. S3 suspend shuts off just about everything except the RAM, and my laptop can resume from S3 in about three seconds. My desktop takes around 5 seconds, but it has a dated BIOS.
"Of course, with roaming in the US being so unbelievably crap compared to other places in the world (mainly Europe, although here in Australia, the cell phone coverage is generally excellent too), as well as having many different competing standards, I'll agree with you on one thing, I don't see them installing cell phone nodes in planes anytime soon."
Is you opinion based on some sort of actual data, or is it just utter crap?
"CDMA"
CDMA can hand-off extremely quickly because, in a CDMA system, handoffs are "soft" - more than one tower is handling the call at the same time. There isn't a fixed point when the phone switches from one tower to the next like there is with GSM.
"They come in a format that is all ready to be played on your computer (if you so desire)"
Last time I checked, my PC played DVDs. So does my laptop.
"but in this case Google and Apple got to the market first with a product MS promised "
Google perhaps, but remember:
TIGER HAS NOT SHIPPED
I love people who comparine a publicly-available Microsoft product to an Apple product that is not publicly available and proclaim that Microsoft is "copying" Apple.
Repeat after me:
* Microsoft announced WinFS *before* Apple announced Tiger
* MSN Desktop search can be downloaded TODAY. Tiger is only available to developers.
* WinFS IS NOT Spotlight.
"Microsoft now license the original software for us on the Pocket PC."
The Transcriber handwriting recognition on the Pocket PC is a modified version of Calligrapher, from PhatWare. It was not developed by Apple.
The block recognizer is based on Graffiti licensed from Xerox. The letter recognizer is based on Jot licensed from CIC, the same company that developed Graffiti 2.
I have the Sony RM-VL900. It's simple (hard buttons only) but has full learning capabilities and macros. It's also only about $60, and it goes forever on 4 AAs.
An 8-char letters+numbers+ucase password is approximately as secure as an 11-char lowercase only password.
I'd rather remember more lowercase letters, personally.
Of course, if you want security, you should go with tolken-based authentication.
"I own both a Dual 1.8 G5"
and... a toaster?
"I haven't seen a CE device for less than $300"
e tails.aspx/axim_x30_low?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s= dhs
You need to open your eyes, then.
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productd
Three clicks from the Dell homepage. It's $200, has a 312MHz CPU, 32MB of flash and 32MB of memory.
If Dell can make a *profit* on a $200 system, Microsoft could definately create a $200 system that would break even. All they need to do is call up their buddies at HTC and ask for a cheap gaming system.