Something like "it doesn't show weird ass icons and bars when Slashdot decides to change CSS" is probably much more important. Firefox 3 totally screws up Slashdot in Default mode.
I had to AdBlock "http://c.fsdn.com/sd/cs_sic_controls_new.png?T_2_5_0_261a" and then it was all better.
He says pulse sucks for games . Although he is exaggerating the latencies, I can believe it. It is so, so for video (you can get occasional lack of sync)
So for everything I'd actually want sound for it's broken, but for system beeps it's great, eh?
It does audio very nicely - mixing works fine, you can play different streams to different cards (yes, I do that), you can play streams on remote servers, you can combine all local sound cards into a single virtual device etc.
Cool, I can have broken audio go all over the place.
Audio and video problems are the main reasons why I gave up on Linux as a desktop in 2004 (ironically shortly before Ubuntu came out, which solved some of my other complaints). I just got tired of my video breaking every few months during an upgrade, and sound working or not depending on the day and what apps I was running (and in which order I loaded them!).
Looks like the situation has really not changed. Super-cool features like programmable stream outputs are useless if it doesn't play audio correctly in the first place. Or more importantly, if the userbase can get it to play audio correctly.
So the problem is not that we do not have good solutions. It is that we have different solutions with different strengths and it is not clear which should be the default. He thinks pulse should not be the default. I like pulse although I would like the latency and reliabliity issues dealt with.
Why do we have to choose between broken in one way and broken in a different way? Windows and OS X's audio systems have mixing, low latency, and are reliable. Why can't Linux's audio system, whatever it is?
Every P2P app, every Skype, every game server, every random application you want to post has to have a unique port number across your entire network.
So? For the inbound ports, uPnP or NAT-PMP takes the administrative hassle of assigning ports out of the way for applications that don't need a well-known one.
Anyways, not every stream needs a new port number. Consider this example:
There, I just made 5 outbound connections using two NAT ports. The NAT will have to take the remote IP/port into consideration instead of just the port number for its translation, which is more work on the NAT device, but entirely possible.
So now I need a new port for: 1. Every new outbound connection to the same destination IP 2. Every inbound (LISTENING) connection
Let's say you're torrenting 1,000 different Linux ISOs to 4,000 of your closest friends. You could potentially be using 2 ports - one for inbound, one for outbound, since we're only making one outbound connection to each IP. 1 port for 4,000 outbound streams, 1 port for inbound.
Let's add another machine doing the same thing, but with FreeBSD ISOs. If he's sending to 4,000 different people, then you only need one additional port - for the inbound.
1(one!) port for 8,000 outbound streams, 2 ports for inbound.
For web traffic, you'll have a proxy inside your network making all the web requests. Not only will that speed access through caching (and therefore less streams), but the proxy will be able to consolidate streams to the website. Instead of 5 clients opening 5 streams to slashdot.org, the proxy will open one or two and pipeline requests down them.
What usage pattern are you expecting that you'll exceed 65,000 ports behind one IP? Remember these are only inbound listening port or simultaneous outbound streams - the instant that the outbound stream disconnects, the port number is available for reuse.
People who don't understand NAT at all like IPv6. People who only barely understand it, like yourself, think IPv4+NAT is spiffy. People who actually understand NAT and what it implies think that it needs to be taken out back and shot.
NAT is hideous and ugly. It's a pain to program for and administrate. I'd love to see IPv6 replace it.. but NAT does in fact work just fine for now. Learn to live with it, because IPv4 isn't going away any time soon.
That only handles multiple domains on the same IP, not multiple servers. You have to switch at the HTTP level (as srvivn21 described) to have multiple machines served by the same IP, and then you'd adding a new single point of failure.
Two routers (cross connected) |x| Two load balancers (HSRP/VRRP to share one IP) | | | | | Farm of web load balancers (for example Squid) | | | | | Farms of Farm of web servers (5 servers for site A, 7 for site B, 13 for site C)
It can be done, and often is done this way in large enterprises. No single point of failure, only one IP, and web servers need know nothing about the outside world or each other.
You need a new IP for every SSL site, but you can put that on the IP load balancers and map them to different ports on the web load balancers.
Let's say you're using Skype or bittorrent. And you want to do it on more than one computer, and you want to do it relatively efficiently. You need IPV6. Creating P2P apps is a pain with all of the NAT in the world.
Not exactly the greatest of examples. Skype is the king of NAT busting, no user intervention required.
Torrents need one port forwarded per machine at the router, which is either not that hard, or automatic. Many torrent clients can use uPnP or NAT-PMP to map the port automatically.
Apple never should have caved on the iphone price change retroactivity, now they can't improve anything without the existing users demanding free upgrades for life.
As someone who stood in line on day one, I agree. Of *course* it's going to drop in price as time goes on. It was worth the money at the time, so I bought it. The fact that someone else can later buy it for less doesn't change the fact that I thought the original price was worth it.
BTW I still am using that original phone. It might be finally time to upgrade - the TomTom app is actually very compelling, since I don't already have a GPS. I like the new headphones too, and it sounds like they bumped the CPU - I do a lot of browsing and a faster Safari would be awesome. The rest is nice, but not compelling for me.
Sure, you're fine as long as you don't share your password or have an easily guessed one, but I'm still not completely comfortable about the idea. My wife and I know most of each others passwords, so what would keep her from using the service to send an urgent ring to interrupt whatever I'm doing for whatever she thinks is important?
Let me paraphrase: "I allowed someone control over my data/device. What if they use it?!?!"
Either you allow the person to have control over your device, or don't.
Yeah, I don't expect wide scale hacking of the service by strangers, but the potential for griefing among peers or interruptions from family is certainly something I'm not looking forward to.
So.. change your passwords to something they wouldn't guess and then don't give your passwords out? Duh?
Well first off Skype sucks. Not trolling, I promise. It just really sucks for quality and that is my own experience and that of several others.
I use Skype as my home phone, and dial in to conference calls for work. The quality is as good as my cell phone - it's not CD quality, but it's perfectly fine.
One big problem is most people have crappy audio on their computers, for example trying to use built-in laptop speakers and microphone. A decent microphone and headphones (not speakers) does wonders. I use a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 and some random iPod headphones.
I've tried Skype on my iPhone as well and the people I called couldn't tell the difference between calling using my cell minutes and using Skype.
A nice landlane-to-landline call is of course better quality - but how often does that happen any more? Many providers now use VoIP for backhaul, and even my desk phone at work is VoIP.
Skype also does require you to "pony up" more money to connect to "regular" phones. So it's not as free of a solution as one might think and I believe the person in the article wants to connect to the regular or traditional phone systems.
If you pay per minute, it's $0.021/minute, so if you use more than 142 minutes a month (about two and a half hours) then the subscription is better.
If you get an incoming number, it's $60/year ($5/month), but it's half off if you also get the unlimited outbound calling, so winds up being $60/2/12 = $2.50/month for inbound plus $2.99 month for outbound = $5.49/month for in and outbound. Plus they threw in free voicemail.
So for $5.49/month I get a phone that works anywhere in the world I have internet. I'm quite happy with Skype.
Slightly related, I'm going to plug my other favorite virtual service - http://www.earthclassmail.com/ They receive your snail mail, scan it via robots (frickin robots!), and give you SSL website access to the PDFs. $10/month for the basic plan, which is plenty for me since I have e-bills for most things, and basically only the government sends me dead trees. For physical things that make it to your mailbox (like replacement credit cards) they'll store it until you're ready to ship it to yourself. They're awesome.
I've been a paying customer of both Skype and ECM for about a year a and half now, and I'm very happy with both services.
Transfer caps do nothing to alleviate prime-time congestion, which is what actually drives ISP costs.
ISPs have to upgrade their infrastructure to handle peak load. Once they have that capacity, there is no difference in cost between running it 90% only during prime time and running it 90% all the time.
The same thing has happened with telephone service - it doesn't cost the telephone companies anything to handle additional off-peak traffic. So, in many cases, it's free. Some cell phone providers are even flat rate per month, local and long distance (for example MetroPCS in Florida) because once they've paid for the equipment to handle peak load, the additional load during offpeak doesn't matter.
If ISPs want to meter peak usage and have free offpeak, that would at least have some sort of relation to their costs. Metering all the time is just greed.
You cannot not develop for 90% of the market because you don't like their OS.
If you're a large software corporation (or hoping to be), I'd agree. This should be remembered every time someone complains about their favorite large coporation only writing for Windows.
However, if you're a small shop, that 10% looks mighty big!
There are a number of Mac or Linux-only shops that do quite well for themselves. They'll never be billion dollar corporations, but not everyone has to be (or wants to).
Now your looters are going to be using bombs as big as the one that was used in Oklahoma City (that's what it would take to take down an 80 ton, smooth, round tubular tower with an concrete anchor base) and then organizing freaking underwater salvage operations, all for $30k of copper? And all before anyone notices?
How thick are the tubes? I'm thinking using an axle-grinder/welding torch for an hour, tower falls over, hoist the coil into a waiting boat/truck (depending on if it's on land or in the water), drive away with a $30k payday. $30k is a lot of money to some people, especially for a night's work. Come back next month when you're out of booze.
People already take out live power lines for copper.
Im glad that it works for you, but it comes at the cost of having your 'workflow' decided for you by Apple.
What workflow is there for a portable music player besides "decide what goes on it, put that stuff on it"?
There's two exceptions I can think of, that both have the same root problem: one is moving music off the device to a host, and the other is syncing the device from two different hosts. The root problem is that the two host libraries aren't synced, and the problem is much better corrected through host library syncing than having the music player act as a go-between (as opposed to being, you know, a music player).
On a final note, and this extends to ALOT of the apple product line. You are expected to do things the apple way in almost EVERYTHING they make.
Yep. Apple products tend to support one way of doing things. This allows simplicity of design, and they work hard to make sure that one design will please MOST people, but of course it can't please everyone. Rather than try to support that minority and mess everyone else up, they leave some people unserviced.
Personally, I used to manage a folder of MP3s; at some point I threw them all in iTunes. I didn't lose any functionality, and actually gained a few tricks like smart playlists (list all my unrated songs so I can go rate them, show me top-rated but not recently played songs, etc).
Same with iPhoto. Folder of JPGs -> iPhoto. Now I can actually find that one picture of whatshisface that's not with the rest of them because I can search on keywords (and now faces). It's easy to do minor corrections, and I can still pull out the original file to work it over in an image editor if I want to.
If you absolutely hate the UI of iTunes/iPhoto, I could see that being a problem. I personally don't care; what I care about is easy access to my data, and I get that.
Most of computing is moving to big bags of data as opposed to files living in specific folders; Google is the forefront of this IMHO. Virtual email folders, keyword tagging, desktop search, smart playlists - the idea is eventually you don't care about how things are stored on disk (or where), just that they are.
Instead of manually putting things in folders, groups of items (correlations) are found automatically that cover most usage cases, and manual groups can still be created via tagging.
If they run ads, then their denial of commercial interest to the judge may be misplaced. If I were judge, I might presume the same thing: Advertisements = commercial revenue. Does anyone have any theories as to how it might be viewed any other way?
In the US, the IRS used to let ham radio clubs, BBSes, etc collect subscription fees and even sell things while remaining a "hobby" and not pay taxes on it. Not sure of the laws today. At least to the IRS, taking in money (even through advertisements) did not automatically make you a commercial operation. The "character" of the operation mattered (and obviously, how much more you took in than you spent).
Sweden's laws are not the same as the US, so who knows how their system works.
This summary reads like something out of The Day After Tomorrow, or perhaps Star Trek: Voyager.
I only saw the first 20-30 minutes of The Day After Tomorrow, after a few people were introduced and then killed off a few of them. Since I hated everyone they had introduced and I was happy to see them bite it, I stopped watching so I wouldn't have to find out that perhaps one of them lived. This way I can imagine that everyone in that movie died in some horrible way.
"Just imagine, they argue, what television programs would be available if there were no commercials to fund their production. "
-TV show funding comes from the corporations that provide the financial backing from a variety of sources, not just advertising.
Originally TV shows were funded by a certain sponsor. "Now back to StupidRandomShow, brought to you by CrappyProduct, the Product with Zing!". It's rather difficult to block that, and it's not terrible intrusive in the first place. There's also public television, which in the UK is quite good.
Besides advertising, the other obvious model is subscription television. Perhaps over some sort of cable. Oh wait, they tried that, and then decided to be greedy and have the subscription revenue AND advertising fees. Cable and satellite (which is the majority of TV now anyways) could return to subscription-fee-only.
DVDs, children's toys, t-shirts, fan clubs, ringtones, etc are all ways to make money from TV shows without advertising.
I think the problem with these last few is that they make money for the *show*, not for the television station. We'd have to switch to a model where TV stations sell airtime, and the shows sell other stuff and buy the airtime. TV stations don't want that because then the shows would buy internet "air time" instead.
Just because they make bitmap printers doesn't mean they can't document the wire interface to print a bitmap. If they did, the free software community could put together a CUPS driver that uses Ghostscript, a GPL interpreter for the PostScript language, and have it run even on a low-cost subnotebook that relies on a USB cellular card for its Internet access. So why don't they?
Good question.
Costs: - engineer's and tech writer's time
Risks: - Documentation may reveal mistakes/exploits/patent infringement - Documentation may give out "valuable intellectual property" (it won't, but this is the thinking)
Rewards: - Some dudes might write a driver, and the driver might sell more printers
Now if you were the boss, you'd look at the costs and risks, and assign them a dollar amount and probability. Then you look at the rewards, and assign them a probable dollar amount. Most likely, even the certain costs of the documentation are going to be less than the rewards of a few more printers sold, without even considering the possible costs of the risks.
Don't laser printers compatible with Free operating systems still cost more than the early termination fee?
Yep. HP and Samsung makes some cheapo lasers that work with Linux, but they run non-Free drivers. If you insist on running only Free software, you will pay more for the printer.
So yeah about $220 more, but at the same time the Free one is a much more powerful printer - 35 ppm vs 15 ppm, 1200x1200 vs 400x600, etc. The manufacturers save a fair amount of money by moving all the processing to the host, so really only workgroup printers support Postscript in hardware.
On the other hand, an old HP LaserJet 4 or 5 will be cheap on eBay and support Postscript in hardware.
If the only reason you have to print is to print out bills, then yeah I could see getting paper bills as an option - it depends on your motive. If you're trying to stay away from paper because you don't want to waste physical resources, well, you're just shifting the printing to someone else. The company's printing will no doubt be more efficient, but then you have to add transportation to your house, so I'm not sure you're actually conserving anything.
If you're just trying to save money and not buy printer/paper/toner, then paper bills will help you do that. So will mooching off a friend's/workplace printer, but I'm not sure I'd recommend that long term.:)
I get PDFs from the utilities/banks and just print them as needed (which is usually never). I traded my USPS post office box for a mail scanning/forwarding service (http://www.earthclassmail.com, they're awesome) so the few paper bills I get are actually turned into PDFs for me. About $140 a year (depends on volume of mail); by comparison a PO Box is $132 (depends on location, size).
To be blunt it is f'ing childish and can be taken as a sign that the debater has nothing better to do than character assassination.
Indeed it is, but most people will miss that and concentrate on the attack itself. Again: if it is effective, it will be used.
Be prepared to take second place to better educated neighbours overseas.
Ad hominem attacks are used worldwide.
try convincing your doctor, engineer, scientist, educated clergy etc with those methods and they will just look at you with pity.
Doctors, engineers, scientists, and educated clergy have been fired and/or discredited by things unrelated to their expertise. Common topics are religious beliefs, sexual orientation, political views, etc. Humans are humans.
That's all fine and dandy, had I been told such a "lock" was in place, permanently. Only problem was that I wasn't told(and yes, I looked at the contract I signed...tried for 2 years to get out of it). As a matter of fact, the clerk that sold me the service responded with "Of course!" when I specifically asked about taking my phone to another service after my contract ran out.
While some phones are indeed locked to a carrier (which the carrier can usually undo at the end of your contract), CDMA vs GSM is like diesel vs gasoline. They simply don't work together; it's a completely different technology.
You can move a phone from one CDMA carrier to another (Sprint, Verizon) or from one GSM carrier to another (AT&T, T-mobile) but not between the two types.
I now use that same cellphone to RECORD such conversations. One has to do what one has to do when they intentionally mis-bill you in order to renew your contract when you ask for a paper copy of the bill(considered an "added" service...which renews your contract).
Be sure you're notifying the other side that you're recording. Recording without both parties' consent is illegal in some states.
As for paper bill - why aren't you printing out the PDF? Way easier.
Re:Rogue Wireless Carrier SysAdmin
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Cellular Repo Man
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Unfortunately, by the time Stu has run his timebomb, Stu has also had fractions of a cent transferred to a bank account in the Caymans and is now living somewhere in the Bahamas under the pseudonym Leonard Stumonias, Esquire.
But he still gets salt on his Margarita. He asked for no salt, no salt. He could burn this whole place down.
But to seek punitive damages when it is imposed like in this story (which doesnt really harm her in the slightest), is far beyond the role of government and the legal system
You can sue anyone at any time for any reason; it doesn't mean you'll win (or even have the suit go to trial).
What really pisses me off is the entitlement attitude people are getting. The government is supposed to give me XYZ rather than me working for it myself. The government is supposed to protect me from XYZ. This is just one example of that.
Ideally everyone would be fine upstanding citizens who not only provide for themselves to the best of their ability, but help others as they are able. In reality.. http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler.html
Some collective pooling of resources makes sense; that's why we have insurance, police, government roads, etc in the first place.
which doesnt really harm her in the slightest
People stay anonymous for various reasons - the biggest is to avoid violence (or other reprisals) when speaking unpopular opinions. Look at Octomom or AIG execs - while they may be reprehensible, they've now had death threats. People are crazy, especially with so many "hate/outrage as entertainment" vendors today.
Aside from outright violence, there's the problem of future employers or government employees judging her based on that speech. Being denied a job, being repeatedly audited by the IRS, or losing your family custody case is hard to prove as a direct consequence of her speech, but these things do happen.
Going from an anonymous blogger to a target is indeed harm in my opinion. I'm not sure the courts agree; the court probably isn't sure either, which is probably why it wasn't immediately thrown out - there is a question of whether harm was done or not. The trial should decide that.
Slashdot Mirror
I had to AdBlock "http://c.fsdn.com/sd/cs_sic_controls_new.png?T_2_5_0_261a" and then it was all better.
So for everything I'd actually want sound for it's broken, but for system beeps it's great, eh?
Cool, I can have broken audio go all over the place.
Audio and video problems are the main reasons why I gave up on Linux as a desktop in 2004 (ironically shortly before Ubuntu came out, which solved some of my other complaints). I just got tired of my video breaking every few months during an upgrade, and sound working or not depending on the day and what apps I was running (and in which order I loaded them!).
Looks like the situation has really not changed. Super-cool features like programmable stream outputs are useless if it doesn't play audio correctly in the first place. Or more importantly, if the userbase can get it to play audio correctly.
Why do we have to choose between broken in one way and broken in a different way? Windows and OS X's audio systems have mixing, low latency, and are reliable. Why can't Linux's audio system, whatever it is?
Maybe he actually meant "I could sloppy", although that sentence no verb.
So? For the inbound ports, uPnP or NAT-PMP takes the administrative hassle of assigning ports out of the way for applications that don't need a well-known one.
Anyways, not every stream needs a new port number. Consider this example:
10.0.0.1:4444 -> NAT:1111 -> 1.1.1.1:80
10.0.0.1:4445 -> NAT:1111 -> 2.2.2.2:80
10.0.0.2:5555 -> NAT:1111 -> 3.3.3.3:80
10.0.0.3:6666 -> NAT:1111 -> 4.4.4.4:80
10.0.0.1:4446 -> NAT:1112 -> 1.1.1.1:80
There, I just made 5 outbound connections using two NAT ports. The NAT will have to take the remote IP/port into consideration instead of just the port number for its translation, which is more work on the NAT device, but entirely possible.
So now I need a new port for:
1. Every new outbound connection to the same destination IP
2. Every inbound (LISTENING) connection
Let's say you're torrenting 1,000 different Linux ISOs to 4,000 of your closest friends. You could potentially be using 2 ports - one for inbound, one for outbound, since we're only making one outbound connection to each IP. 1 port for 4,000 outbound streams, 1 port for inbound.
Let's add another machine doing the same thing, but with FreeBSD ISOs. If he's sending to 4,000 different people, then you only need one additional port - for the inbound.
1(one!) port for 8,000 outbound streams, 2 ports for inbound.
For web traffic, you'll have a proxy inside your network making all the web requests. Not only will that speed access through caching (and therefore less streams), but the proxy will be able to consolidate streams to the website. Instead of 5 clients opening 5 streams to slashdot.org, the proxy will open one or two and pipeline requests down them.
What usage pattern are you expecting that you'll exceed 65,000 ports behind one IP? Remember these are only inbound listening port or simultaneous outbound streams - the instant that the outbound stream disconnects, the port number is available for reuse.
NAT is hideous and ugly. It's a pain to program for and administrate. I'd love to see IPv6 replace it.. but NAT does in fact work just fine for now. Learn to live with it, because IPv4 isn't going away any time soon.
Two routers (cross connected)
|x|
Two load balancers (HSRP/VRRP to share one IP)
| | | | |
Farm of web load balancers (for example Squid)
| | | | |
Farms of Farm of web servers (5 servers for site A, 7 for site B, 13 for site C)
It can be done, and often is done this way in large enterprises. No single point of failure, only one IP, and web servers need know nothing about the outside world or each other.
You need a new IP for every SSL site, but you can put that on the IP load balancers and map them to different ports on the web load balancers.
Not exactly the greatest of examples. Skype is the king of NAT busting, no user intervention required.
Torrents need one port forwarded per machine at the router, which is either not that hard, or automatic. Many torrent clients can use uPnP or NAT-PMP to map the port automatically.
1980: The world needs ditch diggers too!
2010: The world needs gravel spreaders too!
No, the timeout on the returned data is set very low, so it expires immediately.
They may wonder why they're sending/receiving megabytes of DNS traffic though.
As someone who stood in line on day one, I agree. Of *course* it's going to drop in price as time goes on. It was worth the money at the time, so I bought it. The fact that someone else can later buy it for less doesn't change the fact that I thought the original price was worth it.
BTW I still am using that original phone. It might be finally time to upgrade - the TomTom app is actually very compelling, since I don't already have a GPS. I like the new headphones too, and it sounds like they bumped the CPU - I do a lot of browsing and a faster Safari would be awesome. The rest is nice, but not compelling for me.
Let me paraphrase: "I allowed someone control over my data/device. What if they use it?!?!"
Either you allow the person to have control over your device, or don't.
So.. change your passwords to something they wouldn't guess and then don't give your passwords out? Duh?
Have you met the rest of humanity?
I use Skype as my home phone, and dial in to conference calls for work. The quality is as good as my cell phone - it's not CD quality, but it's perfectly fine.
One big problem is most people have crappy audio on their computers, for example trying to use built-in laptop speakers and microphone. A decent microphone and headphones (not speakers) does wonders. I use a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 and some random iPod headphones.
I've tried Skype on my iPhone as well and the people I called couldn't tell the difference between calling using my cell minutes and using Skype.
A nice landlane-to-landline call is of course better quality - but how often does that happen any more? Many providers now use VoIP for backhaul, and even my desk phone at work is VoIP.
Indeed, it's $2.99/month for unlimited outbound calls to the US: http://www.skype.com/allfeatures/subscriptions/uscanada/
If you pay per minute, it's $0.021/minute, so if you use more than 142 minutes a month (about two and a half hours) then the subscription is better.
If you get an incoming number, it's $60/year ($5/month), but it's half off if you also get the unlimited outbound calling, so winds up being $60/2/12 = $2.50/month for inbound plus $2.99 month for outbound = $5.49/month for in and outbound. Plus they threw in free voicemail.
So for $5.49/month I get a phone that works anywhere in the world I have internet. I'm quite happy with Skype.
Slightly related, I'm going to plug my other favorite virtual service - http://www.earthclassmail.com/ They receive your snail mail, scan it via robots (frickin robots!), and give you SSL website access to the PDFs. $10/month for the basic plan, which is plenty for me since I have e-bills for most things, and basically only the government sends me dead trees. For physical things that make it to your mailbox (like replacement credit cards) they'll store it until you're ready to ship it to yourself. They're awesome.
I've been a paying customer of both Skype and ECM for about a year a and half now, and I'm very happy with both services.
Transfer caps do nothing to alleviate prime-time congestion, which is what actually drives ISP costs.
ISPs have to upgrade their infrastructure to handle peak load. Once they have that capacity, there is no difference in cost between running it 90% only during prime time and running it 90% all the time.
The same thing has happened with telephone service - it doesn't cost the telephone companies anything to handle additional off-peak traffic. So, in many cases, it's free. Some cell phone providers are even flat rate per month, local and long distance (for example MetroPCS in Florida) because once they've paid for the equipment to handle peak load, the additional load during offpeak doesn't matter.
If ISPs want to meter peak usage and have free offpeak, that would at least have some sort of relation to their costs. Metering all the time is just greed.
If you're a large software corporation (or hoping to be), I'd agree. This should be remembered every time someone complains about their favorite large coporation only writing for Windows.
However, if you're a small shop, that 10% looks mighty big!
There are a number of Mac or Linux-only shops that do quite well for themselves. They'll never be billion dollar corporations, but not everyone has to be (or wants to).
How thick are the tubes? I'm thinking using an axle-grinder/welding torch for an hour, tower falls over, hoist the coil into a waiting boat/truck (depending on if it's on land or in the water), drive away with a $30k payday. $30k is a lot of money to some people, especially for a night's work. Come back next month when you're out of booze.
People already take out live power lines for copper.
What workflow is there for a portable music player besides "decide what goes on it, put that stuff on it"?
There's two exceptions I can think of, that both have the same root problem: one is moving music off the device to a host, and the other is syncing the device from two different hosts. The root problem is that the two host libraries aren't synced, and the problem is much better corrected through host library syncing than having the music player act as a go-between (as opposed to being, you know, a music player).
Yep. Apple products tend to support one way of doing things. This allows simplicity of design, and they work hard to make sure that one design will please MOST people, but of course it can't please everyone. Rather than try to support that minority and mess everyone else up, they leave some people unserviced.
Personally, I used to manage a folder of MP3s; at some point I threw them all in iTunes. I didn't lose any functionality, and actually gained a few tricks like smart playlists (list all my unrated songs so I can go rate them, show me top-rated but not recently played songs, etc).
Same with iPhoto. Folder of JPGs -> iPhoto. Now I can actually find that one picture of whatshisface that's not with the rest of them because I can search on keywords (and now faces). It's easy to do minor corrections, and I can still pull out the original file to work it over in an image editor if I want to.
If you absolutely hate the UI of iTunes/iPhoto, I could see that being a problem. I personally don't care; what I care about is easy access to my data, and I get that.
Most of computing is moving to big bags of data as opposed to files living in specific folders; Google is the forefront of this IMHO. Virtual email folders, keyword tagging, desktop search, smart playlists - the idea is eventually you don't care about how things are stored on disk (or where), just that they are.
Instead of manually putting things in folders, groups of items (correlations) are found automatically that cover most usage cases, and manual groups can still be created via tagging.
In the US, the IRS used to let ham radio clubs, BBSes, etc collect subscription fees and even sell things while remaining a "hobby" and not pay taxes on it. Not sure of the laws today. At least to the IRS, taking in money (even through advertisements) did not automatically make you a commercial operation. The "character" of the operation mattered (and obviously, how much more you took in than you spent).
Sweden's laws are not the same as the US, so who knows how their system works.
I only saw the first 20-30 minutes of The Day After Tomorrow, after a few people were introduced and then killed off a few of them. Since I hated everyone they had introduced and I was happy to see them bite it, I stopped watching so I wouldn't have to find out that perhaps one of them lived. This way I can imagine that everyone in that movie died in some horrible way.
Originally TV shows were funded by a certain sponsor. "Now back to StupidRandomShow, brought to you by CrappyProduct, the Product with Zing!". It's rather difficult to block that, and it's not terrible intrusive in the first place. There's also public television, which in the UK is quite good.
Besides advertising, the other obvious model is subscription television. Perhaps over some sort of cable. Oh wait, they tried that, and then decided to be greedy and have the subscription revenue AND advertising fees. Cable and satellite (which is the majority of TV now anyways) could return to subscription-fee-only.
DVDs, children's toys, t-shirts, fan clubs, ringtones, etc are all ways to make money from TV shows without advertising.
I think the problem with these last few is that they make money for the *show*, not for the television station. We'd have to switch to a model where TV stations sell airtime, and the shows sell other stuff and buy the airtime. TV stations don't want that because then the shows would buy internet "air time" instead.
Good question.
Costs:
- engineer's and tech writer's time
Risks:
- Documentation may reveal mistakes/exploits/patent infringement
- Documentation may give out "valuable intellectual property" (it won't, but this is the thinking)
Rewards:
- Some dudes might write a driver, and the driver might sell more printers
Now if you were the boss, you'd look at the costs and risks, and assign them a dollar amount and probability. Then you look at the rewards, and assign them a probable dollar amount. Most likely, even the certain costs of the documentation are going to be less than the rewards of a few more printers sold, without even considering the possible costs of the risks.
TLDR version: it's not worth it financially
Yep. HP and Samsung makes some cheapo lasers that work with Linux, but they run non-Free drivers. If you insist on running only Free software, you will pay more for the printer.
Going off this list: http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/printers
HP LaserJet P1005 (non-Free) is $79: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828115079
HP LaserJet P2055dn (Free) is $299: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828115365
So yeah about $220 more, but at the same time the Free one is a much more powerful printer - 35 ppm vs 15 ppm, 1200x1200 vs 400x600, etc. The manufacturers save a fair amount of money by moving all the processing to the host, so really only workgroup printers support Postscript in hardware.
On the other hand, an old HP LaserJet 4 or 5 will be cheap on eBay and support Postscript in hardware.
If the only reason you have to print is to print out bills, then yeah I could see getting paper bills as an option - it depends on your motive. If you're trying to stay away from paper because you don't want to waste physical resources, well, you're just shifting the printing to someone else. The company's printing will no doubt be more efficient, but then you have to add transportation to your house, so I'm not sure you're actually conserving anything.
If you're just trying to save money and not buy printer/paper/toner, then paper bills will help you do that. So will mooching off a friend's/workplace printer, but I'm not sure I'd recommend that long term. :)
I get PDFs from the utilities/banks and just print them as needed (which is usually never). I traded my USPS post office box for a mail scanning/forwarding service (http://www.earthclassmail.com, they're awesome) so the few paper bills I get are actually turned into PDFs for me. About $140 a year (depends on volume of mail); by comparison a PO Box is $132 (depends on location, size).
Indeed it is, but most people will miss that and concentrate on the attack itself. Again: if it is effective, it will be used.
Ad hominem attacks are used worldwide.
Doctors, engineers, scientists, and educated clergy have been fired and/or discredited by things unrelated to their expertise. Common topics are religious beliefs, sexual orientation, political views, etc. Humans are humans.
While some phones are indeed locked to a carrier (which the carrier can usually undo at the end of your contract), CDMA vs GSM is like diesel vs gasoline. They simply don't work together; it's a completely different technology.
You can move a phone from one CDMA carrier to another (Sprint, Verizon) or from one GSM carrier to another (AT&T, T-mobile) but not between the two types.
Be sure you're notifying the other side that you're recording. Recording without both parties' consent is illegal in some states.
As for paper bill - why aren't you printing out the PDF? Way easier.
But he still gets salt on his Margarita. He asked for no salt, no salt. He could burn this whole place down.
You can sue anyone at any time for any reason; it doesn't mean you'll win (or even have the suit go to trial).
Ideally everyone would be fine upstanding citizens who not only provide for themselves to the best of their ability, but help others as they are able.
In reality.. http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler.html
Some collective pooling of resources makes sense; that's why we have insurance, police, government roads, etc in the first place.
People stay anonymous for various reasons - the biggest is to avoid violence (or other reprisals) when speaking unpopular opinions. Look at Octomom or AIG execs - while they may be reprehensible, they've now had death threats. People are crazy, especially with so many "hate/outrage as entertainment" vendors today.
Aside from outright violence, there's the problem of future employers or government employees judging her based on that speech. Being denied a job, being repeatedly audited by the IRS, or losing your family custody case is hard to prove as a direct consequence of her speech, but these things do happen.
Going from an anonymous blogger to a target is indeed harm in my opinion. I'm not sure the courts agree; the court probably isn't sure either, which is probably why it wasn't immediately thrown out - there is a question of whether harm was done or not. The trial should decide that.