Friend of mine lives in Fukuoka, Japan. Has fiber-to-the-house. Has had it for years. Pays less for it than you'd pay for xDSL or cablemodem here, and the bandwidth is incredible.
I vote for the telcos actually rolling out all the fiber they promised us (and the FCC?) they would 15 years ago. They hung 72-strand SieCor in front of my folks' house back then, for commercial customers.
Well, if we're going to be pedantic, English 101 would be a non-remedial first-semester course at most schools; remedial classes would be sub-100, like ENG 090. But I've never taken any, and I suppose Isaac hasn't either.
-Dan (without whose name one cannot spell "pedantic")
I've been in nice (4-star) hotels in 3 cities in China in the last couple months, and all of them have had relatively "universal" power outlets. 250ish volts, mind you, but most electronics can handle that nowadays. The simplest ones had 2 outlets, one of which could handle US 2- and 3-prong and international 2-round-prong plugs, and the other of which could handle 2- and 3-prong slanted plugs (Asia? Australia?) The more sophisticated ones, in for example the Beijing Continental Grand Hotel, looked like the female end of one of those "universal" plug adapters... all the different holes just blended together. I haven't needed a single plug adapter in all those cities, and I hope China exports these things to everywhere else in the world.
A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC includes at least:
* 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1. * 1 GB of system memory.
Since this is Microsoft, I presume "incldues at least" means "this is the level of hardware on which the OS will install, given sufficient patience, and will limp along in a painfully slow manner?"
1. Terraced garden in front of my parents' house. Laid out the design, foraged (along with my dad) discarded railroad timbers (i.e. ones that had rotted out or whatever), and replaced an ugly old cinderblock wall with a set of nice wooden terraces.
2. Cubic compost enclosure made of wood and wire mesh (because the rats will eat right through plastic), with a hinged top and a hinged side. Built it with my daughter, who was about 5-6 at the time. (I'm a longtime slashdotter, and my wife is even smarter than me in non-geeky stuff, so our daughter can do just about anything.)
3. At some point in school I took some basic ways of making paper airplanes and made variations, seeing how different I could make derivatives look. So I've got a paper airplane design that is basically mine - never seen anyone else make it.:)
A friend of mine works at the LHC, and I consistently misspell it while chatting with her. She hasn't corrected me yet... but then again, she's the type to say that she'd rather be making love than doing physics.;)
I'm on track to fly about 100,000 miles this calendar year, maybe more. I almost never go to the movies, largely because I know I'll see them all on planes. It's gotten to the point where I'll see a movie on an intercontinental flight one week, the be disappointed by it being on other flights in subsequent weeks, since I've already seen it.
(In-flight magazines also get really old, really fast, when you're doing several flights on an airline in the space of a month.)
Being able to bring a bunch of my own video on my iPod - and charge it to boot - sounds like a great deal to me. I've been flying one of Continental/KLM/Air France's partner airlines, so I hope that one will get on board also.
Offtopic, but - who's up for a "no kids" airline? I'd definitely pay an extra $10 per flight to ensure there aren't any crying babies onboard.
How much extra would I have to pay for cabin crew who aren't twice my age, and can fit down the aisle without difficulty? I support the idea of flight attendants having unions, but I wish people didn't perceive it as a career they should do 'til their teeth fall out
I'm happy that you're enjoying access to the resources you want.
I was in Beijing from October 14-23 at an international (read: U.N.) conference hosted by China at the Beijing International Conference Center, not far from where the Olympics will be in 2 years.
While American press web sites were pretty readily accessible, the BBC rather pointedly was not. (I'm American, but I like some diversity in my news.)
Also, when it came time to upload some coverage of the last day of the conference to a web site in Canada, I discovered that strangely, I could get from China to all kinds of other places, and could get from all kinds of other places to that site in Canada, but could no longer get from China to that site in Canada directly.
So... I think a flashing red "YMMV" belongs right about here.
On the other hand, the buses and trains were clean, well-utilized and on-time, and the pandas in the zoo were cute, and donkey meat turned out to be tastier than I ever expected.
This may be old-school... okay, it is old-school. Back around '97 or '98 I had a bunch of simple CGI scripts in use on various sites that would be fed a munged or bogus email address, and generate a redirect to a mailto link to the real address.
So, for example, one might click on the link resulting from code looking like:
I too have a job - actually, a few. The main one is research support in academentia, which pays peanuts (75% less than I was making in the dot-com world), but caps the number of hours I can work in a year and has some flexibility in scheduling. The others are also research support, but through a temp agency.
I'm here under the auspices of a donation-funded non-profit NGO, so everything has to cost them as little as possible. That means digging 'til I found $1765 RT ITO-NBO (and ITO is about the furthest place from NBO), staying in a training hotel run by students from a hotel-management school, and so on.:)
This "trust fund" idea sounds promising... where's the line form?
Actually, if you could just replace the area lost in the Brazilian rain forest in the last 3 years, you'd do more than 20 Kyoto Accords put together.
I'm at the UN Climate Change conference in Nairobi right now (and will be 'til it ends on the 17th), and was at last year's in Montreal, and believe me, there are plenty of people out there who'll cheerily plant trees to absorb your carbon, for a fairly modest price.
For example, DrivingGreen will plant trees to offset the carbon emissions from a car for a year, for probably less than it costs to fill that car's tank once, in the US. At Montreal, I ran the numbers for my '93 Accord and I think it came out to $26.
Last night, while hanging out with a friend who runs a community-based organization in Kenya encouraging students to run tree nurseries and such (the Mount Kenya Youth Initiative for Ecosystem Restoration), I was introduced to the head of NEMA, which is basically Kenya's equivalent of the EPA in the US. He's gung-ho about planting trees anywhere possible.
Look at it this way - if you're a developing country, or a Least Developed Country, and you can get some amount of money in from wealthier nations (or companies, or individuals in those nations) to plant trees, and planting trees improves your own country's environment and soil conservation and all that, it's a pretty darned good deal, eh?
Come on, we've got enough geeks of all varieties here - surely someone else must be in Nairobi for the 12th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and 2nd Conference of Parties/Meeting of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol... right?
(Of course, if any other Slashdotters are here, they probably know, as I do, that "Global Warming" is an overly simplistic term that hardly anyone serious about climate change would ever think to use any more, since global climate change has different effects different places...)
Anyway, if anybody else from/. is here at Gigiri, drop me a line or something - I'm here doing tech for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin reporting team, and you can find an email link to me at the bottom of our coverage of the conference.
Making possible more sources of DRMed content for iPods just gives those who don't mind DRM that many more reasons to have iPods, so I don't really think Apple's going to complain, since they'll either maintain or gain share in the player market if this happens.:)
After not leaving the ol' US of A at all for the first 33 years of my life, in the last 24 months, I've spent time (not in the airport) in Beijing, Kampala, London, Mexico City, Meppel, Montreal, Nairobi, New Delhi, Paris, Rome, and Vienna. I'll add Dundee to that list in a few days.
With few exceptions, all those places have everything I need. New Delhi's air quality isn't good enough for me to live there for more than about a week. Beijing's is better, but it might still be an issue long-term, although the Chinese government plans to spend huge amounts of money on improving the environment leading up to the 2008 olympics, which could put it back in the running. Mexico City's is better than Beijing's, but still a little smoggy.
If I had to pick a single one off the list, it'd probably be Kampala. The climate is very close to that of Hawaii, people there are friendly, and we're nearing the point where Malaria vaccines will become available. Plus, the currency is devalued, banks pay double-digit interest rates, and anyone with IT skills can probably scrounge telecommuting work that pays amounts the average Ugandan would be shocked at. One can live on about $7000 a year there, so you can imagine what a western paycheck would get you.
If I wanted seasons, Rome or Meppel or maybe even Dundee might be nice... and Beijing favorably impressed me when I was there, too.
I can't remember whether it was in Montreal, Paris, or Mexico, but I've seen The Daily Show come on right after a "real" news show on CNN International. And I didn't see any disclaimer about it being satire, either. Folks elsewhere must have a really interesting perception of what's going on in the U.S.;)
With shuttle trips running on the order of a billion dollars these days, what will generate more actual scientific data? Squander those kind of funds on a rocket ride to fix the aging hubble, or, invest half of it in modern ground based observing infrastructure, then take the other half and feed it into the scientific welfare system known as grants over a period of 20 years.
Modern ground based observing infrastructure... we've already got that, don't we? With adaptive optics or interferometry, Keck can get angular detail smaller than the best plate scale Hubble has available. Combining AO and interferometry, they should be able to do almost 10x better than Hubble. And the technology being developed for Webb? The instrument labs aren't in space. The prototype of the 16-megapixel sensor array for NIRCAM (which will be on Webb) lives at the U. of Hawaii observatory, in a three-year-old camera called ULBCAM. Production versions of the array have already been built into cameras for other terrestrial observatories, including the WFCAM wide-field camera at the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT). So by the time Webb launches, this will be "old" tried-and-true technology.
Yes, there are some things that are developed specifically for use in space, then found to be useful for something on earth, but a lot more things that are sent into space are designed, developed, prototyped, and as the case above shows sometimes even implemented on the ground long before they go into space.
Dell's M2010 is far better looking than then notebooks being sold by Apple.
Yes, in much the same way that a Corvette is far better looking than an apple pie.
(The M2010 isn't a notebook. It doesn't even pretend to be a notebook. It weighs eighteen pounds, for Pete's sake - it's a luggable, at best. You could carry three Apple notebooks and be weighed down less.:)
I'm a consumer in Hawaii, which had a cap on (wholesale) gas prices. The cap was determined each week based on some spot prices on the mainland. When the cap was in effect, our gas was consistently a certain amount above the average of those spot prices.
So the oil companies said, "you know, if your gas price cap weren't there, your prices wouldn't be linked to the mainland prices and you'd probably pay less.
And enough fools believed them that the cap was done away with.
Shortly thereafter, mainland prices dropped something like 40 cents a gallon.
Ours didn't budge.
The moral? Don't believe an oil company that claims to be showing you a way to give it less money.
I think our prices have now, after several weeks or months, dropped about 20 cents. Some places on the mainland, gas is under $2 a gallon again; here, the cheap stuff is $3.40.
Various BSDish Unices point out specifically that the -n flag to "halt" (which prevents syncing before rebooting or halting) "can be used if a disk or the processor is on fire." Somehow, this vital piece of information was left out of Miquel's corresponding manpage on my Linux box.
Slashdot Mirror
Friend of mine lives in Fukuoka, Japan. Has fiber-to-the-house. Has had it for years. Pays less for it than you'd pay for xDSL or cablemodem here, and the bandwidth is incredible.
I vote for the telcos actually rolling out all the fiber they promised us (and the FCC?) they would 15 years ago. They hung 72-strand SieCor in front of my folks' house back then, for commercial customers.
Well, if we're going to be pedantic, English 101 would be a non-remedial first-semester course at most schools; remedial classes would be sub-100, like ENG 090. But I've never taken any, and I suppose Isaac hasn't either.
-Dan (without whose name one cannot spell "pedantic")
I've been in nice (4-star) hotels in 3 cities in China in the last couple months, and all of them have had relatively "universal" power outlets. 250ish volts, mind you, but most electronics can handle that nowadays. The simplest ones had 2 outlets, one of which could handle US 2- and 3-prong and international 2-round-prong plugs, and the other of which could handle 2- and 3-prong slanted plugs (Asia? Australia?) The more sophisticated ones, in for example the Beijing Continental Grand Hotel, looked like the female end of one of those "universal" plug adapters... all the different holes just blended together. I haven't needed a single plug adapter in all those cities, and I hope China exports these things to everywhere else in the world.
Oooog, yeah. Because of course VARs read /.
Also known as 10 Best IT product press releases nobody here is actually going to care about. Bleah.
Then again, it is CRN, so what else would we expect?
Down, not across.
A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC includes at least:
* 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1.
* 1 GB of system memory.
Since this is Microsoft, I presume "incldues at least" means "this is the level of hardware on which the OS will install, given sufficient patience, and will limp along in a painfully slow manner?"
1. Terraced garden in front of my parents' house. Laid out the design, foraged (along with my dad) discarded railroad timbers (i.e. ones that had rotted out or whatever), and replaced an ugly old cinderblock wall with a set of nice wooden terraces.
:)
2. Cubic compost enclosure made of wood and wire mesh (because the rats will eat right through plastic), with a hinged top and a hinged side. Built it with my daughter, who was about 5-6 at the time. (I'm a longtime slashdotter, and my wife is even smarter than me in non-geeky stuff, so our daughter can do just about anything.)
3. At some point in school I took some basic ways of making paper airplanes and made variations, seeing how different I could make derivatives look. So I've got a paper airplane design that is basically mine - never seen anyone else make it.
A friend of mine works at the LHC, and I consistently misspell it while chatting with her. She hasn't corrected me yet... but then again, she's the type to say that she'd rather be making love than doing physics. ;)
We need more women like that in science...
I'm on track to fly about 100,000 miles this calendar year, maybe more. I almost never go to the movies, largely because I know I'll see them all on planes. It's gotten to the point where I'll see a movie on an intercontinental flight one week, the be disappointed by it being on other flights in subsequent weeks, since I've already seen it.
(In-flight magazines also get really old, really fast, when you're doing several flights on an airline in the space of a month.)
Being able to bring a bunch of my own video on my iPod - and charge it to boot - sounds like a great deal to me. I've been flying one of Continental/KLM/Air France's partner airlines, so I hope that one will get on board also.
How much extra would I have to pay for cabin crew who aren't twice my age, and can fit down the aisle without difficulty? I support the idea of flight attendants having unions, but I wish people didn't perceive it as a career they should do 'til their teeth fall out
I'm happy that you're enjoying access to the resources you want.
I was in Beijing from October 14-23 at an international (read: U.N.) conference hosted by China at the Beijing International Conference Center, not far from where the Olympics will be in 2 years.
While American press web sites were pretty readily accessible, the BBC rather pointedly was not. (I'm American, but I like some diversity in my news.)
Also, when it came time to upload some coverage of the last day of the conference to a web site in Canada, I discovered that strangely, I could get from China to all kinds of other places, and could get from all kinds of other places to that site in Canada, but could no longer get from China to that site in Canada directly.
So... I think a flashing red "YMMV" belongs right about here.
On the other hand, the buses and trains were clean, well-utilized and on-time, and the pandas in the zoo were cute, and donkey meat turned out to be tastier than I ever expected.
This may be old-school... okay, it is old-school. Back around '97 or '98 I had a bunch of simple CGI scripts in use on various sites that would be fed a munged or bogus email address, and generate a redirect to a mailto link to the real address.
i l me</a>
So, for example, one might click on the link resulting from code looking like:
<a href="/cgi-bin/mailto:abuse@localhost">email me</a>
Or:
<a href="/cgi-bin/mailto:shagmeep@meepmy.domain">ema
And the CGI script would spit out a redirect to:
mailto:shag@my.domain
Always seemed to work quite well. I'm sure it could just as easily be done in PHP or Ruby or whatever.
I too have a job - actually, a few. The main one is research support in academentia, which pays peanuts (75% less than I was making in the dot-com world), but caps the number of hours I can work in a year and has some flexibility in scheduling. The others are also research support, but through a temp agency.
:)
I'm here under the auspices of a donation-funded non-profit NGO, so everything has to cost them as little as possible. That means digging 'til I found $1765 RT ITO-NBO (and ITO is about the furthest place from NBO), staying in a training hotel run by students from a hotel-management school, and so on.
This "trust fund" idea sounds promising... where's the line form?
And the 100-meter limit applies to Home networking... because...?
There aren't a lot of homes out there where that's going to be a problem.
Oh, so you missed the post about Diebold buying out OSTG?
I'm at the UN Climate Change conference in Nairobi right now (and will be 'til it ends on the 17th), and was at last year's in Montreal, and believe me, there are plenty of people out there who'll cheerily plant trees to absorb your carbon, for a fairly modest price.
For example, DrivingGreen will plant trees to offset the carbon emissions from a car for a year, for probably less than it costs to fill that car's tank once, in the US. At Montreal, I ran the numbers for my '93 Accord and I think it came out to $26.
Last night, while hanging out with a friend who runs a community-based organization in Kenya encouraging students to run tree nurseries and such (the Mount Kenya Youth Initiative for Ecosystem Restoration), I was introduced to the head of NEMA, which is basically Kenya's equivalent of the EPA in the US. He's gung-ho about planting trees anywhere possible.
Look at it this way - if you're a developing country, or a Least Developed Country, and you can get some amount of money in from wealthier nations (or companies, or individuals in those nations) to plant trees, and planting trees improves your own country's environment and soil conservation and all that, it's a pretty darned good deal, eh?
Come on, we've got enough geeks of all varieties here - surely someone else must be in Nairobi for the 12th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and 2nd Conference of Parties/Meeting of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol... right?
/. is here at Gigiri, drop me a line or something - I'm here doing tech for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin reporting team, and you can find an email link to me at the bottom of our coverage of the conference.
(Of course, if any other Slashdotters are here, they probably know, as I do, that "Global Warming" is an overly simplistic term that hardly anyone serious about climate change would ever think to use any more, since global climate change has different effects different places...)
Anyway, if anybody else from
Making possible more sources of DRMed content for iPods just gives those who don't mind DRM that many more reasons to have iPods, so I don't really think Apple's going to complain, since they'll either maintain or gain share in the player market if this happens. :)
After not leaving the ol' US of A at all for the first 33 years of my life, in the last 24 months, I've spent time (not in the airport) in Beijing, Kampala, London, Mexico City, Meppel, Montreal, Nairobi, New Delhi, Paris, Rome, and Vienna. I'll add Dundee to that list in a few days.
With few exceptions, all those places have everything I need. New Delhi's air quality isn't good enough for me to live there for more than about a week. Beijing's is better, but it might still be an issue long-term, although the Chinese government plans to spend huge amounts of money on improving the environment leading up to the 2008 olympics, which could put it back in the running. Mexico City's is better than Beijing's, but still a little smoggy.
If I had to pick a single one off the list, it'd probably be Kampala. The climate is very close to that of Hawaii, people there are friendly, and we're nearing the point where Malaria vaccines will become available. Plus, the currency is devalued, banks pay double-digit interest rates, and anyone with IT skills can probably scrounge telecommuting work that pays amounts the average Ugandan would be shocked at. One can live on about $7000 a year there, so you can imagine what a western paycheck would get you.
If I wanted seasons, Rome or Meppel or maybe even Dundee might be nice... and Beijing favorably impressed me when I was there, too.
I can't remember whether it was in Montreal, Paris, or Mexico, but I've seen The Daily Show come on right after a "real" news show on CNN International. And I didn't see any disclaimer about it being satire, either. Folks elsewhere must have a really interesting perception of what's going on in the U.S.
Modern ground based observing infrastructure... we've already got that, don't we? With adaptive optics or interferometry, Keck can get angular detail smaller than the best plate scale Hubble has available. Combining AO and interferometry, they should be able to do almost 10x better than Hubble. And the technology being developed for Webb? The instrument labs aren't in space. The prototype of the 16-megapixel sensor array for NIRCAM (which will be on Webb) lives at the U. of Hawaii observatory, in a three-year-old camera called ULBCAM. Production versions of the array have already been built into cameras for other terrestrial observatories, including the WFCAM wide-field camera at the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT). So by the time Webb launches, this will be "old" tried-and-true technology.
Yes, there are some things that are developed specifically for use in space, then found to be useful for something on earth, but a lot more things that are sent into space are designed, developed, prototyped, and as the case above shows sometimes even implemented on the ground long before they go into space.
Yes, in much the same way that a Corvette is far better looking than an apple pie.
(The M2010 isn't a notebook. It doesn't even pretend to be a notebook. It weighs eighteen pounds, for Pete's sake - it's a luggable, at best. You could carry three Apple notebooks and be weighed down less.
I'm a consumer in Hawaii, which had a cap on (wholesale) gas prices. The cap was determined each week based on some spot prices on the mainland. When the cap was in effect, our gas was consistently a certain amount above the average of those spot prices.
So the oil companies said, "you know, if your gas price cap weren't there, your prices wouldn't be linked to the mainland prices and you'd probably pay less.
And enough fools believed them that the cap was done away with.
Shortly thereafter, mainland prices dropped something like 40 cents a gallon.
Ours didn't budge.
The moral? Don't believe an oil company that claims to be showing you a way to give it less money.
I think our prices have now, after several weeks or months, dropped about 20 cents. Some places on the mainland, gas is under $2 a gallon again; here, the cheap stuff is $3.40.
Various BSDish Unices point out specifically that the -n flag to "halt" (which prevents syncing before rebooting or halting) "can be used if a disk or the processor is on fire." Somehow, this vital piece of information was left out of Miquel's corresponding manpage on my Linux box.
16MB of flash RAM, with 3MB used by the OS, leaves a whopping 13MB.
Maybe they should say "enough room for a web browser... maybe."