At first we just wanted good service, this is now their advertising corner stone
I really hope that you're talking about the signal strength (which to be fair, is quite good), because in my experience with Verizon over the past two years, they tend to treat their customers like dirt. This experience seems to be mirrored by everyone else I know who use it....
If you've got a problem (ie. you were overbilled, which occurs frequently enough that some might consider it criminal....), you have a choice between waiting for hours on end on hold, for some poor CSR to tell you that he can't do anything to help your problem, OR driving out to a Verizon store, where you can wait in line for hours (much akin to the DMV!) to be told by some poor CSR that he can't do anything to help your problem.
I've been living in the UK for the past few months, and I've got to say that my prepay carrier has vastly superior customer service than either AT&T or Verizon -- and I'm not a heavy user by any means (I probably top-up somewhere in the range of £10/month).
If you top up less than £15/month, you're forced to pay 5p/minute to call customer service, which really doesn't bother me, given that I can get a helpful native English speaker on the phone who will solve my problem in under 5 minutes without requiring me to ever wait on hold. Virtual Carriers FTW!
No.... that would be the US. We'll cling on to our beloved imperial system until the rapture comes.
That said, the Brits are "officially" on the metric system, although imperial units are still colloquially used quite frequently. (If you want a laugh, ask a Brit what he weighs -- he'll give you an answer in terms of units that even educated Americans have never heard of...)
But really, everyone knows the metric system (much like the US is educating kids to do these days, which is one of few things that I'm mighty proud of!), and it's not really much of a problem, since the everyone in the country knows metric, and simply chooses not to use it.
Come to think of it, it is rather accurate reflection of the UK's participation in the EU.....
To be perfectly fair, the JWST will *not* be a drop-in replacement for the Hubble, as it's going to be primarily geared toward observing the infrared spectrum, whereas the Hubble is capable of observing everything between Ultraviolet and Infrared (visible light obviously being included between the two)
Although there's indeed a great value of having a dedicated IR scope up there, I think that astronomers would agree that keeping the Hubble in orbit will be a very good thing, not to mention the obvious benefits of having two scopes versus one (on the other hand, if it's cheaper to build another Hubble that indeed does fulfill all of the important roles of the current one, than I agree that NASA should by all means pursue that route)
Not good enough. 99% of users aren't going to have a clue how to do that, it's not officially supported, and there's no support on the iPod (sorry, but like it or not, this one is absolutely crucial for it to be successful)
Ogg Vorbis, however, is truly the best option, since 1) it has the best technical performance of any of them, and 2) it's completely free and open, not just in implementation and code but also is free of patents. I keep all my ripped music in O-V format, which works equally well on my home machine playing Amarok, and on my portable iRiver H330.
1) Care to provide any concrete studies stating that OGG is "technically" superior to MP3, AAC, or WMA? AFAIK, all four have been shown to shine in some areas, and perform poorly in others, whilst the average listener probably won't notice the difference for 95% of the music out there.
2) And, no. OGG is not the best of them. The fact that OGG isn't supported on either of the two major operating systems or most portable audio players/devices counts pretty strongly against it. I think Sony's proprietary ATRAC format might even be supported on more devices than OGG is (ouch!)
However, if you explicitly define best in terms of the legal flexibility of the codec, I will agree that OGG is the clear winner. As much as I'd love for OGG to succeed, from a pragmatist's point of view, MP3 is a pretty darn good solution -- the quality is quite good, and is almost universally supported.
1) Lots of people (even in affluent areas of the US) have well water. Although it might not be purified, or pressurized in Peru, it's still not the worst thing on the planet. It's also been suggested that although getting sick from your drinking water is indeed quite unpleasant, that you'll end up with an immune system that's much stronger overall as a result.
2) Is it really a good idea to be sending laptops to children with no electricity? I know I've been a fairly vocal critic of the OLPC project, but I really want people to start stating specific and exact ways in which the laptops will help these children pull themselves out of poverty, because I'm not at all convinced that it's a wise allocation of money. (Apart from Wikipedia, there's no magic library full of free textbooks and reading materials available to OLPC users that the rest of us somehow don't know about)
We haven't really done anything to Mexico to overtly anger them, or create any sort of populist uprising against our people and government. To be perfectly fair, our core cultural values aren't all that different, and NAFTA is quite a lucrative arrangement for Mexico.
So, no. There really isn't much risk of any sort of ideological Mexican terrorists, apart from the random nutjob that might appear out of the blue (which is equally possible *anywhere*, and is probably still the biggest "threat" to us).
If anything, a populist uprising in Mexico would want to suck up to the US in order to increase trade, and relax border controls -- or they'd turn on their own government for whatever reason. If the US were to impose trade sanctions against Mexico (with Canada likely following, should they be accused of "harboring terrorists"), it would be absolutely devastating to the entire country. Mexico has far too much to lose, and almost nothing to gain by threatening the US)
The rest of the world, on the other hand, we've done quite a bit to piss off over the past hundred years or so. Mexico might very well be among the least threatening countries to the US.
The shuttle as originally designed wasn't a half-bad launch vehicle in either respect, even if it was a bit more expensive than launching separate missions for personnel and cargo.
However, politics got in the way, and we wound up with a worst-of-all-worlds vehicle that's insanely expensive to operate and maintain.
The shuttle was supposed to have extremely low variable costs by virtue of the fact that it's supposed to be completely reusable. It's pretty easy to see how it completely missed the mark in this regard.
It's at this point that I should troll and mention that the Soyuz program has been proven to be rather safe and inexpensive over the past 20 years (although earlier variants of the vehicle weren't quite as good). It's also got an escape system that has been successfully used, whereas the shuttle's escape system consists entirely of the astronauts putting on a parachute and jumping out of the main hatch.
I've got FIOS, and I've had no problem saturating my connection to the full 15Mbps, as long as there's been enough bandwidth on the remote end to actually send that much data to a single client.
The theoretical maximum for a 15Mbps connection is 1.875MBps/sec, and I've come close enough to that number on enough occasions to safely conclude that Verizon's advertised speeds are indeed accurate. (No connection actually saturates itself to 100% due to TCP overhead, error-checking/correction, etc...)
If you'll read up on the underlying tech, you'll also see that the FiOS network itself isn't quite as vulnerable to over-provisioning as cable networks are, as a unique optical signal gets sent out to each residence from the CO (plus a broadcast video signal).
32 residences are served via a single fiber extending from the CO or OLT. Each residence has its own set of optical wavelengths, that get passively split out from the main fiber (analogous to the physical layer of a bus topology, although the similarities end there...). In other words, ever residence always has exactly 1/32 of the OLT's bandwidth available to it, regardless of how much bandwidth the other 31 residences are using.
Although this isn't the most efficient way to distribute bandwidth, it is certainly the most equitable, and is also immune to the pitfalls oversubscription, as you can't simply tack on another residence (and then another, and another....) without adding an additional OLT.
This of course, assumes that there is sufficient bandwidth to the CO and OLT, which may not be the case. However, similar bottlenecks exist on every broadband system, and experience seems to indicate that Verizon's backend network is adequately robust.
Cable, on the other hand, suffers the pitfalls of being a "shared" system. Although you could theoretically allocate a massive amount of bandwidth to a single customer, there wouldn't be anything left for the remaining customers attached to that circuit, even if you had an infinite amount of bandwidth at the CO. Plus, every customer that gets added to the circuit decreases the bandwidth available to everyone else.
Assuming that a FiOS CO has infinite bandwidth, there's no difference between maxing out a single connection, or maxing out every connection running out of that CO, as every customer effectively has a direct line into the CO.
If google wants to be taken seriously in the enterprise market (due to the obvious privacy implications you mention), they need to start offering network appliances that allow users to privately host their own google service locally without requiring a direct connection to Google.
Of course, that all said, I don't particularly feel that Google's applications are well-suited to the enterprise to begin with. Microsoft's got that market pretty well cornered, and the level of integration provided by Exchange is simply unmatched. Along the same lines, although I find GMail and GCal both to be fantastic, they're both missing that sort of "snappiness" that you'd get from a desktop application.
Google's services are attractive to anyone who can't afford their own server (and the staff to run it). Anyone else should probably look elsewhere (and hopefully, we'll start seeing some good OSS packages that can rival Exchange)
The credibility of the US is at stake here? Some needs to write Mr. Ting a memo, reminding him that since that commitment is made, not one but TWO shuttles have been blown to flinders along with their brave crews.
The Challenger blew up in 1986, whereas the commitment was made in 1994. I don't think that anyone has ever questioned the fact that strapping yourself to the top of hundreds of tons of high explosives is inherently dangerous.
If you want to make a more valid point, you could indicate that neither the space shuttle or the ISS are particularly well-suited for the purpose that they were designed to fulfill (and I'd imagine that many of the ISS's woes are stemming from the issues with the fact that the space shuttle is expensive, dangerous, and can't carry very big payloads -- literally the worst of all worlds).
For what it's cost to send the shuttle into orbit umpteen times delivering parts to the ISS, I imagine that we could have designed and built a large rocket that could have delivered most of the payload in one or two trips. We'd already done it twice -- the US had the Saturn vehicles, and Russia more recently had the the Energia platform.
If we had a better platform than the shuttle for sending large parts to the ISS, we might have actually been able to get some legitimate science done on it. The shuttle was *never* an optimal launch vehicle, even before the safety issues came to light.
"Salar de Uyuni is a vast plain of white salt in the mountains of Bolivia, with a total elevation range of less than 80 centimeters - the flattest place on earth. Beginning in 2002, geophysicist Adrian Borsa led a survey that resulted in precise GPS measurements of the salt flat. The
In other news, Adrian Borsa* has the most boring and tedious job on the planet.
Perhaps we misunderstood each other. I prefer CC to RMS.
For one, RMS needs to hire a good PR frontman, or start practicing good hygiene and work on his interpersonal skills if he wants to be taken seriously, or to lead a socially-responsible revolution.... otherwise, you start to look like Michael Moore.
I will easily concede that CC would almost certainly not have happened without RMS and the GPL (and I really *do* appreciate the original visionaries for that). However, CC is presented in a manner that's much more easily digested by artists and the public.
CC does not mandate that works are necessarily free, although it *does* give the artists a great degree of flexibility over how they want their work to be displayed, presented, or shared. It's a very nice transition between draconian copyright measures, and total freedom of information.
Hopefully we'll transition to a more free society, but this is a transition that will take a long time to occur, and I think that CC is perhaps our greatest hope for this actually happening without drastic measures.
It's really easy for this to slip into a socialism vs. communism debate. Within any "revolution", there are concessions that have to be made, and it's always a tough call where to draw the line. Personally, I think that we'll continue to have a balance of GPL, LGPL, and BSD-style, CC, etc... licenses, as each suits a rather specific purpose.
(The "future" clause absolutely seals the deal, making the GPL completely and totally unacceptable, and is completely contrary to the spirit of the FSF, not to mention being wide open to abuse)
Oh, I never doubted that it wasn't successful. PERL *is* a good language. However, I don't foresee all too many new PERL programmers jumping on board, when Python and PHP are easier to learn, and are more or less "just as good" as PERL.
However, programmer-friendliness is crucial these days for new languages. The number of fairly apt computer users is quickly growing, whereas the number of professional programmers isn't changing all that much. It therefore stands to reason that languages that don't require an advanced degree in order to competently understand are going to become quite popular.
Although it's not the best comparison to make, take a look at the success of BASIC. Like it or not, PHP is the BASIC of our generation. Reasonably competent users had no problem understanding BASIC, and there were many great tools developed with it by common folk. The difference with PHP is that those "simple" programs can be made into large-scale applications with relative ease thanks to tools like memcached, and the general robustness of the language -- it's got more than its fair share of shortcomings in the eyes of professionals, but it's second to none in terms of the ratio between ease of use and "powerfulness"
Although I wouldn't bet on amateurs replacing professional programmers for enterprise apps, I would bet on a whole lot more innovative "amateur" web-apps becoming successful, and then being grown into legitimate large-scale applications thanks to the fact that the "easy" languages sufficiently robust for large-scale deployment. (Facebook is a textbook example of this)
Like so many other "good" languages, PERL is quickly becoming a dinosaur. At least with PERL, we do have a number of decent replacements -- Python and PHP are both fantastic for their target audiences. Let's hope we can do the same for other ones like LaTeX that are quickly becomind dated (although a fantastic language, LaTeX has one of the worst interpreters on the planet -- Donald Knuth may be a CS God, but he has absolutely no aptitude for writing comprehensible error messages, or being forgiving of even the slightest syntax error....)
2) How about vertically centering an element within another element? That also tends to be somewhat hairy...
3) You're ignoring the glaring bit about the lack of the ability to center elements as well. This is undoubtedly the most frustrating of CSS's shortcomings. Developing a good page is tough, but writing various "hacks" to make centering (or columns) work properly should not be part of the learning curve. I'll happily agree to allow my pages to conform to a few slight limitations for the sake of a simpler language, although the fact that CSS has so many glaring omissions makes that extremely difficult for a designer to do.
4) Although it's a nice goal to be able to support as many display formats as possible within one document, it's simply not feasable in most cases, and you wind up with a half-assed approach from all angles. If you attempt to cater to too many audiences, you end up with a product that's really suitable to none of them.
You *are* right that the web is an entirely unique format, although you've got to remember that it's one format. Attempting to project it onto other various mediums often simply isn't practical. Although it's nice to be able to present a different stylesheet for printing, or mobile devices, the web is very much a visual medium, and no amount of stylesheet hackery is going to be able to change that.
A few years ago, ATI's CEO hinted at an investor meeting that Apple was about to release a brand-new iMac, and that the entire line would sport ATI graphics hardware.
Two days later, Apple did indeed release a new line iMacs... all of which contained nVidia graphics hardware.
AT&T may just have done the same exact thing. If you're doing business with Apple, do not fuck with the NDA, or you will almost certainly find yourself out of your lucrative and exclusive contract with them.
This is Apple's mode of business, and it is absolutely sacred to them. AT&T slipped up, and now they are going to have to pay the price.
I don't know perl. I find it daunting and intimidating. The syntax looks like there was an explosion at an ASCII factory.
Just like the flamewar that exploded yesterday over HTML/CSS, the success of a language is largely dependent upon how easy it is for newbs or non-technical folk (ie. designers) to pick up. Not all of us have PhDs in CS, or enough time to pour over volumes of texts to learn the language. If you make the language easy to learn, and put in safeguards against common newb mistakes, it's bound to be successful.
RMS has always worried me. He's a bit too much of an idealist, and things like the "future license" clause make the GPL extremely vulnerable in the future.
I don't know if I'd call the FSF's current leadership "principled and uncorruptible" as much as I'd call it stubborn and headstrong, with RMS being one of the most unjustifiably arrogant public figures of the moment. Don't get me wrong, the FSF has done some absolutely fantastic work, to which much credit is owed to RMS. However, something about their ideology just never sat right with me.
Since the inevitable "RMS is a communist" comparison will come up, I should point out that Lenin was a pretty reasonable guy, who gave himself far too much power, which let his successors (ie. Stalin) piss all over what he built.
Free software, and freedom of information are both fantastically good things. However, the FSF's approach to it feels somewhat impractical, and likely to blow up in the future. Perhaps you could make the analogy GFDL is to Creative Commons as Communism is to Socialism. One is a great idea in theory but is completely impractical in reality, whereas the other one makes a few small concessions in order to make it practical.
That page was last updated in 1997, so I'm not 100% sure it's up to date.
From Wikipedia:
Dialing 9-1-1 from a mobile phone (Cellular/PCS) in the United States originally reached the state police or highway patrol, instead of the local public safety answering point (PSAP). The caller had to describe his/her exact location so that the agency could transfer the call to the correct local emergency services. This happens because the exact location of the cellular phone isn't normally transmitted with the voice call.
In 2000 the FCC issued an order requiring wireless carriers to determine and transmit the location of callers who dial 9-1-1. They set up a phased program: Phase I transmitted the location of the receiving antenna for 9-1-1 calls, while Phase II transmitted the location of the calling telephone. The order set up certain accuracy requirements and other technical details, and milestones for completing the implementation of wireless location services. Subsequent to the FCC's order, many wireless carriers requested waivers of the milestones, and the FCC granted many of them. As of mid-2005, the process of Phase II implementation is generally underway, but limited by the complexity of coordination required between wireless carriers, PSAPs, local telephone companies and other affected government agencies, and the limited funding available to local agencies for the conversion of PSAP equipment to display the location data (usually on computerized maps).
I'm not 100% sure, but this seems to suggest that the bit about the highway patrol might no longer be true, although I *am* referencing Wikipedia, which means it should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
That said, if they know your exact (lat/lon) location, they're just as equipped to help you out as anybody else is, and since it's a big centralized call center, they're theoretically less likely to be overwhelmed with calls than a small local call center would be.
(I also didn't even know that police stations *had* their own actively monitored emergency numbers any more -- AFAIK, the ones in my area were phased out in order to encourage the adoption of 911, and make more efficient use of resources by not requiring a person in each town to stand by the phone 24/7. In the rural area where I live, local emergency services are dispatched by a country operator at night so that every single station doesn't need to keep a very bored person on call all night...)
1) If you just want emergency calls, any mobile phone or landline will get through to 911 regardless of whether or not you pay the bill. I don't think you even need to have a SIM in a GSM handset in order to make the call. Literally any device capable of making a call connected to any American telephone network should be able to call 911.
2) Not to turn this into a mudslinging contest, but I clearly addressed your point. If you're given both options (and there's no reason for you *not* to be if you're indoors, given #1 above), I would indeed reach for the landline due to the reliability issues you mention -- ditto for making regular calls! However, if reaching the landline entails leaving the victim, I would use the mobile. Once you're connected, there shouldn't be much of a difference.
And the "hypothetical" I used would be in the case where the cell tower is in a different PSAP area than your building is. At the very worst, you'll be routed to the call center for the next town over, which would be just as equipped to handle your emergency. In that case, the odds of you being put on hold are a crapshoot depending upon which call center is busy.
Throwing your landline away is foolish for any number of reasons, and I certainly would recommend keeping it around in the event of an emergency, and using it instead of a cell phone if you've got both on hand. However, if you're not near a landline, and have a signal on your mobile, there's no reason to be paranoid about using it to cal 911.
Certainly input from graphics designers is appropriate, but beyond a certain point, it is just adding unnecessarily to the noise level.
Yes. Ignoring all of those designers who wanted to center or vertically position page elements certainly helped CSS quite a bit.
CSS is an absolutely fantastic innovation, but there are oh so many things about it that make you scratch yourself on the head, and ask yourself WTF they were smoking when they designed it.
CSS3 will hopefully fix many of the problems, although we're still left with the mess we've got now, not to mention that it really could have been done better to start with.
The language needs to be simple enough for designers to understand it, and needs to actually contain the facilities to do what they want them to. Their input is very important, or else you'll wind up with a turing-complete stylesheet language that is infinitely flexible, and can uniformly produce any style on the planet, but is completely incomprehensible to anybody without a PhD in Computer Sciencee.
...and while I'm dreaming of writing up an invoice big enough to make a DoD contract agent drop his jaw in fear.../blockquote The past four years have proven this phenomenon to be physically impossible.
And what the hell is the deal with the whole "per child" bit? Sure, it's fashionable to help save the children, but the last time I checked, there were quite a few adults and families that needed help too. If we're going to be sending mobile phones down, I'd give them to responsible adults first, and if we're sending laptops, "one or two per teacher" sounds like it'd be a whole lot more practical...
I'm sorry to troll, but this sort of popular "faux-philanthropy" is really starting to get under my skin.
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I really hope that you're talking about the signal strength (which to be fair, is quite good), because in my experience with Verizon over the past two years, they tend to treat their customers like dirt. This experience seems to be mirrored by everyone else I know who use it....
If you've got a problem (ie. you were overbilled, which occurs frequently enough that some might consider it criminal....), you have a choice between waiting for hours on end on hold, for some poor CSR to tell you that he can't do anything to help your problem, OR driving out to a Verizon store, where you can wait in line for hours (much akin to the DMV!) to be told by some poor CSR that he can't do anything to help your problem.
I've been living in the UK for the past few months, and I've got to say that my prepay carrier has vastly superior customer service than either AT&T or Verizon -- and I'm not a heavy user by any means (I probably top-up somewhere in the range of £10/month).
If you top up less than £15/month, you're forced to pay 5p/minute to call customer service, which really doesn't bother me, given that I can get a helpful native English speaker on the phone who will solve my problem in under 5 minutes without requiring me to ever wait on hold. Virtual Carriers FTW!
No.... that would be the US. We'll cling on to our beloved imperial system until the rapture comes.
That said, the Brits are "officially" on the metric system, although imperial units are still colloquially used quite frequently. (If you want a laugh, ask a Brit what he weighs -- he'll give you an answer in terms of units that even educated Americans have never heard of...)
But really, everyone knows the metric system (much like the US is educating kids to do these days, which is one of few things that I'm mighty proud of!), and it's not really much of a problem, since the everyone in the country knows metric, and simply chooses not to use it.
Come to think of it, it is rather accurate reflection of the UK's participation in the EU.....
To be perfectly fair, the JWST will *not* be a drop-in replacement for the Hubble, as it's going to be primarily geared toward observing the infrared spectrum, whereas the Hubble is capable of observing everything between Ultraviolet and Infrared (visible light obviously being included between the two)
Although there's indeed a great value of having a dedicated IR scope up there, I think that astronomers would agree that keeping the Hubble in orbit will be a very good thing, not to mention the obvious benefits of having two scopes versus one (on the other hand, if it's cheaper to build another Hubble that indeed does fulfill all of the important roles of the current one, than I agree that NASA should by all means pursue that route)
Not good enough. 99% of users aren't going to have a clue how to do that, it's not officially supported, and there's no support on the iPod (sorry, but like it or not, this one is absolutely crucial for it to be successful)
Whenever I go to work, I typically sit thinking to myself for several minutes.... "How could this be made more like cheap air travel?
I am glad to see that Intel has now answered that call.
1) Care to provide any concrete studies stating that OGG is "technically" superior to MP3, AAC, or WMA? AFAIK, all four have been shown to shine in some areas, and perform poorly in others, whilst the average listener probably won't notice the difference for 95% of the music out there.
2) And, no. OGG is not the best of them. The fact that OGG isn't supported on either of the two major operating systems or most portable audio players/devices counts pretty strongly against it. I think Sony's proprietary ATRAC format might even be supported on more devices than OGG is (ouch!)
However, if you explicitly define best in terms of the legal flexibility of the codec, I will agree that OGG is the clear winner. As much as I'd love for OGG to succeed, from a pragmatist's point of view, MP3 is a pretty darn good solution -- the quality is quite good, and is almost universally supported.
1) Lots of people (even in affluent areas of the US) have well water. Although it might not be purified, or pressurized in Peru, it's still not the worst thing on the planet. It's also been suggested that although getting sick from your drinking water is indeed quite unpleasant, that you'll end up with an immune system that's much stronger overall as a result.
2) Is it really a good idea to be sending laptops to children with no electricity? I know I've been a fairly vocal critic of the OLPC project, but I really want people to start stating specific and exact ways in which the laptops will help these children pull themselves out of poverty, because I'm not at all convinced that it's a wise allocation of money. (Apart from Wikipedia, there's no magic library full of free textbooks and reading materials available to OLPC users that the rest of us somehow don't know about)
We haven't really done anything to Mexico to overtly anger them, or create any sort of populist uprising against our people and government. To be perfectly fair, our core cultural values aren't all that different, and NAFTA is quite a lucrative arrangement for Mexico.
So, no. There really isn't much risk of any sort of ideological Mexican terrorists, apart from the random nutjob that might appear out of the blue (which is equally possible *anywhere*, and is probably still the biggest "threat" to us).
If anything, a populist uprising in Mexico would want to suck up to the US in order to increase trade, and relax border controls -- or they'd turn on their own government for whatever reason. If the US were to impose trade sanctions against Mexico (with Canada likely following, should they be accused of "harboring terrorists"), it would be absolutely devastating to the entire country. Mexico has far too much to lose, and almost nothing to gain by threatening the US)
The rest of the world, on the other hand, we've done quite a bit to piss off over the past hundred years or so. Mexico might very well be among the least threatening countries to the US.
I'd say it's a combination of 1) and 2).
The shuttle as originally designed wasn't a half-bad launch vehicle in either respect, even if it was a bit more expensive than launching separate missions for personnel and cargo.
However, politics got in the way, and we wound up with a worst-of-all-worlds vehicle that's insanely expensive to operate and maintain.
The shuttle was supposed to have extremely low variable costs by virtue of the fact that it's supposed to be completely reusable. It's pretty easy to see how it completely missed the mark in this regard.
It's at this point that I should troll and mention that the Soyuz program has been proven to be rather safe and inexpensive over the past 20 years (although earlier variants of the vehicle weren't quite as good). It's also got an escape system that has been successfully used, whereas the shuttle's escape system consists entirely of the astronauts putting on a parachute and jumping out of the main hatch.
I've got FIOS, and I've had no problem saturating my connection to the full 15Mbps, as long as there's been enough bandwidth on the remote end to actually send that much data to a single client.
The theoretical maximum for a 15Mbps connection is 1.875MBps/sec, and I've come close enough to that number on enough occasions to safely conclude that Verizon's advertised speeds are indeed accurate. (No connection actually saturates itself to 100% due to TCP overhead, error-checking/correction, etc...)
If you'll read up on the underlying tech, you'll also see that the FiOS network itself isn't quite as vulnerable to over-provisioning as cable networks are, as a unique optical signal gets sent out to each residence from the CO (plus a broadcast video signal).
32 residences are served via a single fiber extending from the CO or OLT. Each residence has its own set of optical wavelengths, that get passively split out from the main fiber (analogous to the physical layer of a bus topology, although the similarities end there...). In other words, ever residence always has exactly 1/32 of the OLT's bandwidth available to it, regardless of how much bandwidth the other 31 residences are using.
Although this isn't the most efficient way to distribute bandwidth, it is certainly the most equitable, and is also immune to the pitfalls oversubscription, as you can't simply tack on another residence (and then another, and another....) without adding an additional OLT.
This of course, assumes that there is sufficient bandwidth to the CO and OLT, which may not be the case. However, similar bottlenecks exist on every broadband system, and experience seems to indicate that Verizon's backend network is adequately robust.
Cable, on the other hand, suffers the pitfalls of being a "shared" system. Although you could theoretically allocate a massive amount of bandwidth to a single customer, there wouldn't be anything left for the remaining customers attached to that circuit, even if you had an infinite amount of bandwidth at the CO. Plus, every customer that gets added to the circuit decreases the bandwidth available to everyone else.
Assuming that a FiOS CO has infinite bandwidth, there's no difference between maxing out a single connection, or maxing out every connection running out of that CO, as every customer effectively has a direct line into the CO.
If google wants to be taken seriously in the enterprise market (due to the obvious privacy implications you mention), they need to start offering network appliances that allow users to privately host their own google service locally without requiring a direct connection to Google.
Of course, that all said, I don't particularly feel that Google's applications are well-suited to the enterprise to begin with. Microsoft's got that market pretty well cornered, and the level of integration provided by Exchange is simply unmatched. Along the same lines, although I find GMail and GCal both to be fantastic, they're both missing that sort of "snappiness" that you'd get from a desktop application.
Google's services are attractive to anyone who can't afford their own server (and the staff to run it). Anyone else should probably look elsewhere (and hopefully, we'll start seeing some good OSS packages that can rival Exchange)
The credibility of the US is at stake here? Some needs to write Mr. Ting a memo, reminding him that since that commitment is made, not one but TWO shuttles have been blown to flinders along with their brave crews.
The Challenger blew up in 1986, whereas the commitment was made in 1994. I don't think that anyone has ever questioned the fact that strapping yourself to the top of hundreds of tons of high explosives is inherently dangerous.
If you want to make a more valid point, you could indicate that neither the space shuttle or the ISS are particularly well-suited for the purpose that they were designed to fulfill (and I'd imagine that many of the ISS's woes are stemming from the issues with the fact that the space shuttle is expensive, dangerous, and can't carry very big payloads -- literally the worst of all worlds).
For what it's cost to send the shuttle into orbit umpteen times delivering parts to the ISS, I imagine that we could have designed and built a large rocket that could have delivered most of the payload in one or two trips. We'd already done it twice -- the US had the Saturn vehicles, and Russia more recently had the the Energia platform.
If we had a better platform than the shuttle for sending large parts to the ISS, we might have actually been able to get some legitimate science done on it. The shuttle was *never* an optimal launch vehicle, even before the safety issues came to light.
In other news, Adrian Borsa* has the most boring and tedious job on the planet.
*Or his grad students
Perhaps we misunderstood each other. I prefer CC to RMS.
For one, RMS needs to hire a good PR frontman, or start practicing good hygiene and work on his interpersonal skills if he wants to be taken seriously, or to lead a socially-responsible revolution.... otherwise, you start to look like Michael Moore.
I will easily concede that CC would almost certainly not have happened without RMS and the GPL (and I really *do* appreciate the original visionaries for that). However, CC is presented in a manner that's much more easily digested by artists and the public.
CC does not mandate that works are necessarily free, although it *does* give the artists a great degree of flexibility over how they want their work to be displayed, presented, or shared. It's a very nice transition between draconian copyright measures, and total freedom of information.
Hopefully we'll transition to a more free society, but this is a transition that will take a long time to occur, and I think that CC is perhaps our greatest hope for this actually happening without drastic measures.
It's really easy for this to slip into a socialism vs. communism debate. Within any "revolution", there are concessions that have to be made, and it's always a tough call where to draw the line. Personally, I think that we'll continue to have a balance of GPL, LGPL, and BSD-style, CC, etc... licenses, as each suits a rather specific purpose.
(The "future" clause absolutely seals the deal, making the GPL completely and totally unacceptable, and is completely contrary to the spirit of the FSF, not to mention being wide open to abuse)
Oh, I never doubted that it wasn't successful. PERL *is* a good language. However, I don't foresee all too many new PERL programmers jumping on board, when Python and PHP are easier to learn, and are more or less "just as good" as PERL.
However, programmer-friendliness is crucial these days for new languages. The number of fairly apt computer users is quickly growing, whereas the number of professional programmers isn't changing all that much. It therefore stands to reason that languages that don't require an advanced degree in order to competently understand are going to become quite popular.
Although it's not the best comparison to make, take a look at the success of BASIC. Like it or not, PHP is the BASIC of our generation. Reasonably competent users had no problem understanding BASIC, and there were many great tools developed with it by common folk. The difference with PHP is that those "simple" programs can be made into large-scale applications with relative ease thanks to tools like memcached, and the general robustness of the language -- it's got more than its fair share of shortcomings in the eyes of professionals, but it's second to none in terms of the ratio between ease of use and "powerfulness"
Although I wouldn't bet on amateurs replacing professional programmers for enterprise apps, I would bet on a whole lot more innovative "amateur" web-apps becoming successful, and then being grown into legitimate large-scale applications thanks to the fact that the "easy" languages sufficiently robust for large-scale deployment. (Facebook is a textbook example of this)
Like so many other "good" languages, PERL is quickly becoming a dinosaur. At least with PERL, we do have a number of decent replacements -- Python and PHP are both fantastic for their target audiences. Let's hope we can do the same for other ones like LaTeX that are quickly becomind dated (although a fantastic language, LaTeX has one of the worst interpreters on the planet -- Donald Knuth may be a CS God, but he has absolutely no aptitude for writing comprehensible error messages, or being forgiving of even the slightest syntax error....)
1) Not all pages are designed to scroll
2) How about vertically centering an element within another element? That also tends to be somewhat hairy...
3) You're ignoring the glaring bit about the lack of the ability to center elements as well. This is undoubtedly the most frustrating of CSS's shortcomings. Developing a good page is tough, but writing various "hacks" to make centering (or columns) work properly should not be part of the learning curve. I'll happily agree to allow my pages to conform to a few slight limitations for the sake of a simpler language, although the fact that CSS has so many glaring omissions makes that extremely difficult for a designer to do.
4) Although it's a nice goal to be able to support as many display formats as possible within one document, it's simply not feasable in most cases, and you wind up with a half-assed approach from all angles. If you attempt to cater to too many audiences, you end up with a product that's really suitable to none of them.
You *are* right that the web is an entirely unique format, although you've got to remember that it's one format. Attempting to project it onto other various mediums often simply isn't practical. Although it's nice to be able to present a different stylesheet for printing, or mobile devices, the web is very much a visual medium, and no amount of stylesheet hackery is going to be able to change that.
A few years ago, ATI's CEO hinted at an investor meeting that Apple was about to release a brand-new iMac, and that the entire line would sport ATI graphics hardware.
Two days later, Apple did indeed release a new line iMacs... all of which contained nVidia graphics hardware.
AT&T may just have done the same exact thing. If you're doing business with Apple, do not fuck with the NDA, or you will almost certainly find yourself out of your lucrative and exclusive contract with them.
This is Apple's mode of business, and it is absolutely sacred to them. AT&T slipped up, and now they are going to have to pay the price.
I don't know perl. I find it daunting and intimidating. The syntax looks like there was an explosion at an ASCII factory.
Just like the flamewar that exploded yesterday over HTML/CSS, the success of a language is largely dependent upon how easy it is for newbs or non-technical folk (ie. designers) to pick up. Not all of us have PhDs in CS, or enough time to pour over volumes of texts to learn the language. If you make the language easy to learn, and put in safeguards against common newb mistakes, it's bound to be successful.
RMS is an idealist, whilst the people behind the CC organization are pragmatists.
I'll concede that both sorts of people are necessary, although I certainly know which one I'd put my money behind.
RMS has always worried me. He's a bit too much of an idealist, and things like the "future license" clause make the GPL extremely vulnerable in the future.
I don't know if I'd call the FSF's current leadership "principled and uncorruptible" as much as I'd call it stubborn and headstrong, with RMS being one of the most unjustifiably arrogant public figures of the moment. Don't get me wrong, the FSF has done some absolutely fantastic work, to which much credit is owed to RMS. However, something about their ideology just never sat right with me.
Since the inevitable "RMS is a communist" comparison will come up, I should point out that Lenin was a pretty reasonable guy, who gave himself far too much power, which let his successors (ie. Stalin) piss all over what he built.
Free software, and freedom of information are both fantastically good things. However, the FSF's approach to it feels somewhat impractical, and likely to blow up in the future. Perhaps you could make the analogy GFDL is to Creative Commons as Communism is to Socialism. One is a great idea in theory but is completely impractical in reality, whereas the other one makes a few small concessions in order to make it practical.
From Wikipedia:
I'm not 100% sure, but this seems to suggest that the bit about the highway patrol might no longer be true, although I *am* referencing Wikipedia, which means it should be taken with a huge grain of salt.
That said, if they know your exact (lat/lon) location, they're just as equipped to help you out as anybody else is, and since it's a big centralized call center, they're theoretically less likely to be overwhelmed with calls than a small local call center would be.
(I also didn't even know that police stations *had* their own actively monitored emergency numbers any more -- AFAIK, the ones in my area were phased out in order to encourage the adoption of 911, and make more efficient use of resources by not requiring a person in each town to stand by the phone 24/7. In the rural area where I live, local emergency services are dispatched by a country operator at night so that every single station doesn't need to keep a very bored person on call all night...)
1) If you just want emergency calls, any mobile phone or landline will get through to 911 regardless of whether or not you pay the bill. I don't think you even need to have a SIM in a GSM handset in order to make the call. Literally any device capable of making a call connected to any American telephone network should be able to call 911.
2) Not to turn this into a mudslinging contest, but I clearly addressed your point. If you're given both options (and there's no reason for you *not* to be if you're indoors, given #1 above), I would indeed reach for the landline due to the reliability issues you mention -- ditto for making regular calls! However, if reaching the landline entails leaving the victim, I would use the mobile. Once you're connected, there shouldn't be much of a difference.
And the "hypothetical" I used would be in the case where the cell tower is in a different PSAP area than your building is. At the very worst, you'll be routed to the call center for the next town over, which would be just as equipped to handle your emergency. In that case, the odds of you being put on hold are a crapshoot depending upon which call center is busy.
Throwing your landline away is foolish for any number of reasons, and I certainly would recommend keeping it around in the event of an emergency, and using it instead of a cell phone if you've got both on hand. However, if you're not near a landline, and have a signal on your mobile, there's no reason to be paranoid about using it to cal 911.
And please, only make one call.
Yes. Ignoring all of those designers who wanted to center or vertically position page elements certainly helped CSS quite a bit.
CSS is an absolutely fantastic innovation, but there are oh so many things about it that make you scratch yourself on the head, and ask yourself WTF they were smoking when they designed it.
CSS3 will hopefully fix many of the problems, although we're still left with the mess we've got now, not to mention that it really could have been done better to start with.
The language needs to be simple enough for designers to understand it, and needs to actually contain the facilities to do what they want them to. Their input is very important, or else you'll wind up with a turing-complete stylesheet language that is infinitely flexible, and can uniformly produce any style on the planet, but is completely incomprehensible to anybody without a PhD in Computer Sciencee.
How about food and vaccines?
And what the hell is the deal with the whole "per child" bit? Sure, it's fashionable to help save the children, but the last time I checked, there were quite a few adults and families that needed help too. If we're going to be sending mobile phones down, I'd give them to responsible adults first, and if we're sending laptops, "one or two per teacher" sounds like it'd be a whole lot more practical...
I'm sorry to troll, but this sort of popular "faux-philanthropy" is really starting to get under my skin.