DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS PERSON. I am living in Shanghai, I am from america. My company has sent over 200 people from the US & the UK to Shanghai. Nobody has ever had a phone confiscated. Heck, nobody has even come close to having anything confiscated.I suspect there are some details missing from this story as to who they were, where they were going or what they were doing.
I recently accepted a long-term (2-year) assignment in Shanghai. As an american the basic approach to cell phone marketing is very different and could use some clarification. First of all all phones & cell plans are separate. You buy a an "unlocked" phone, then you buy a sim card. Put the card in the phone & it works. 90% of sim cards are pre-paid. Typically you put down $15 dollars (100 rmb) and you are good for a week to a month, depending on usage. The other 10% are monthly subscription plans that require a bank account in a chinese bank.
I live in Shanghai and there are 3 major carriers: China Mobile: The biggest company in the world, overall very good coverage China Unicom: Second biggest presence in Shanghai China Telecom: I don't know very much about them
If you want 3G you'll have to choose your phone/provider carefully. China Mobile uses TD-SCDMA, this is a technology developed in china and pretty much used only in china. You'll have to buy a Chinese phone to use it. China Unicom uses W-CDMA, which is widely available in the US. China telecom uses CDMA2000. My company provides China Mobile sim-cards and my iphone co-workers only get access to the edge network.
I recommend buying an "unlocked" phone before you go to china and a sim card when you arrive. The primary reason is that unless you speak chinese you will have difficulty using the phone & any pre-installed apps. You can change the language of some (android) phones, but this doesn't cause all the app's to magically speak chinese....which can be very frustrating. I would go with an W-CDMA phone & china unicom so that you can use it when you return to the states. Both AT&T and T-Mobile off pre-paid sim-card plans for really low prices. I don't think the average american understands how much of their monthly fee goes toward the phone and how little goes to the service plan. I also recommend a smart phone. The ability to run google translate is a lifesaver.
There is a lot of hype/talk on the net about phone prices. Don't believe it. Shanghai is a large, mature, market. the vendors sell things for a fair price. If you are getting a better price its because you aren't aware of everything you are (are not) buying. That being said taxes, import duties, etc... cause prices to be about 10-15% higher than the exact same product in the us. To shop prices try www.amazon.cn, use google-chrome for realtime translation and you can see what someone in china pays for the same product. Note chinese prices are the price, including all taxes and fee's.
So what did I do: (I had a coworker that convinced me buying a phone in china was the right move....he of course spoke chinese)
--for myself I purchased a GT-I9008L, galaxy S smart phone. I wanted data, I wanted the latest tech, my company provides me with a ChinaMobile sim card. So I went to www.amazon.cn and shopped for 3G phones. It doesn't run google market, it does run the amazon market, I'm adapting. The only complaint is the map software from the amazon market doesn't always sync to the GPS, and I have a bunch of apps I cannot use 'cause they are in chinese. As a side project I'm working on porting cyanogenmod to the phone. Unfortunately samsung locked the boot-loader. I have managed to root the phone but I have also near-bricked it 3 times trying to get the clockwork mod installed. (near-brick means I found rom's on the net and did a full factory-install of the phone 3 times to recover it)
--for my wife: I purchased an "HTC desire", followed the FAQ on cyanogenmod to get an all-english platform, bought a sim-card with this plan and life is good.
--what I would do if I where still in the states: I would buy the google nexus S and purchase a china unicom sim card when I arrived.
Last year I moved across the country & was going to be without highspeed access for a month or two. I picked up an AOL account as an easy way to maintain net-access since they do make it very easy to find a local access number. When the move was complete I also changed banks, canceled my bank of america visa and picked up a mastercard. The AOL account was registered against the visa. I figured canceling the card was all I had to do. AOL would try to charge a defunct card, cancel the account & all would be good. Boy was I wrong.
We continued to receive bills from BOA. When I called to enquire they stated I had a contract with AOL and they weren't legally allowed to break that contract. A law I suspect is in place for people who buy refrigerators on a 12-month payment plan and use a credit card. It got worst before it got better, AOL wanted me to confirm my credit card before cancelling. BOA kept sending me bills. Eventually everyone fessed up and AOL even credited me for the time, but for awhile I was really starting to wonder what was going on.
As a side note I am pissed that BOA took AOL's side over mine & would be very leary of opening an account with them again. Needless to say I will _never_ open another AOL account, making that type of arrangement with Visa is just pure cheeze.
I do agree that the "knowledgable users" have the wrong aproach. But I have seen IT departments that get a serious case of NIH (not invented here) mentality.
I started as a developer working at a startup that started with 8 people and grew to 80. When there were 8 I covered the basic IT roles and eventually transitioned that support to dedicated staff when we got to 80.
Later our company was purchased by a mega-corp & I witnessed things that IMHO are very difficult to justify as cost related:
-limited hard-drive space: hard drives cost about $1/gb, there is very little reason to limit users, you spend more man-hours explaining the limit than dealing with it. Backup policy is the reason this could get expensive. Offsite/longterm storage gets very expensive. But in many cases its cheaper to by additional hard drives
-limited availability: I believe Dell is to blame here. They sell warrantys that come with "guaranteed 4-hour response time". It sounds good, it sounds standard but its often cheaper for a large company to identify crtical nodes on their network & simply by extra hardware. For example I've seen a network go down because a key switch was down & we waited for Dell to provide a new one within 4 hours. The company had dozens of these switches throughout the network. If they had simply bought the "next day service" contract they would have saved enough money to buy 2-3 extra switches and have their own staff replace the defective equipment in much less than 4 hours. Then go back to dell to replace the defective equipment without the entire office being aware of it.
Buying gold, characters, etc... is simply like buying a new game. These games are take much longer to "beat" than a typical standalone game. Each part of the beginning/middle/endgame is comparable (on a per-hour basis) to a standalone game.
If you spend $60 to avoid 40 hours of "play" you are simply buying a new game....the one that starts at level 60. I don't have a problem with this. If you get bored but want to see the raid-driven/end-game...spend the money & have fun.
Make sure you are using #include (or #include_once) and function calls
Put as much "code" into function calls in files grouped by purpose, database, formatting, drop-down-menus, etc... Keep the function calls in their own files that are included when you need them.
You want to strive for 2 layers of code, one is the page being presented, which can change every time. While the rest of the code is "included", those included files get easier to re-use over time & you figure out how you like em.
the internet was originally designed to provide a communications network that could survive a nuclear attack.....now the CIA thinks that a group of terrorists can take it out?
C/C++ is great for embedded work, its the perfect abstraction for what you do in assembly, but this isn't what the "cool hackers" are doing these days.
They are doing higher-level applications with more abstraction. At this level Python/Perl/Php are extremely flexible/powerful/easy to use.
Before you drive your camry make sure you check out the saturns:-)
faster machine == lower income?!?
on
Paid To Spam
·
· Score: 1
So this scam pays more to run on slower machines?!!
No, your aren't missing anything. You are simply caught in the crossfire. Your users will either have to have different values in the "from" & "replyto" fields or you will have to help them configure their mail-client to use your server for outbound mail.
The basic premise of SPF/caller-id is that the mail server and the domain are part of the same operation.
Once that loophole is closed you will see a growing number of black/white-lists that will make it much easier to limit/prevent spam.
Jacksons biggest flaw is that he didn't realize the book was really about hobbits, the simple common folk that act like hero's when necessary.
He thought it was about great leaders of men rising up to take their place in the world, in reality it was always about how salt-of-the-earth hobbits will do what needs getting done. Will do what men are unable to do.
Destroying rings, Stabbing nazgul, etc...
Thats why he rewrote the entire encounter with faramir and cut the scouring of the shire.
He completely missed the subtle heroics of the common folk, as portrayed by a hobbit.
In 3 years, when a customer decides they want enterprise support/reliability, how do you plan on helping them transition from a fedora distro that has been updated 5 times to an enterprise product that is backward compatible with todays product?
Ok, they ditch their middle-ground product to focus on "enterprise" (business) and "fedora" (hobbiest) markets and then go and reccomend a specific competitor for the desktop?
He's entitled to his opinion, but he could have been more diplomatic by saying "RH doesn't match up well in the desktop market" instead of saying "you should use product X"
All signs indicate that RH is giving up on the desktop market.
I suspect that I will reccomend my company pony up and pay for enterprise just to minimize surprises. But for my at-home boxes fedora sounds as good as starting over. So redhat has now convinced me to do something I was to lazy to do in the past.
Take a closer look at their competition
So what happens if debian/slackware/suse measure up better than fedora? It means in 2-3 years I reccomend my company switch, and guess what, they will.
I have a handfule of servers and found it very convienant to pay $60/year per machine to have a centralized place (rhn) to track updates & perform installations.
This wasn't profitable?!?
Fedora's rapid-update cycle ruins it for me, keeping machines on software/releases that are "patchable", without an upgrade, will simply take to much effort
The new IE will generate a warning when processing an OBJECT tag that references external data. The only exception to this will be OBJECT tags generated from within javascript
The warning will be a dialog box with a single choice "OK" after that the active-X component (flash, java, quicktime, etc..) will function normally
To see a good sample on how to use OBJECT tags in the new version of IE look here
It made a very good point that if you think google is an oracle then your expectations are to high.
Google simply ranks whats actually on the web
If you are searching for "flowers" and expecting gardening tips you are in the minority, if you weren't then results would be different.
ps-shame on all the MSN-flameing, the article didn't mention MSN and I'm embarrassed that so many slashdotters condemned the article 'cause the intro mentioned MSN!
the article was about people treating google like an oracle, proved why it wasn't, but got pretty obtuse after that
DOD is a prime move in funding research & development. Since this research is govt funded most/all of it is released to the public domain and therefor "open source"
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops, meant to include a link to the sim-plan I purchased:
http://www.sh.10086.cn/brand/m-zone/cost/0/6/322.html (basic voice+data)
http://www.sh.10086.cn/whatsnew/event/qpp/0/5/50.html (unlimited calling to friends/family for $1/month, add-on)
DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS PERSON. I am living in Shanghai, I am from america. My company has sent over 200 people from the US & the UK to Shanghai. Nobody has ever had a phone confiscated. Heck, nobody has even come close to having anything confiscated.I suspect there are some details missing from this story as to who they were, where they were going or what they were doing.
China cell phone basics:
I recently accepted a long-term (2-year) assignment in Shanghai. As an american the basic approach to cell phone marketing is very different and could use some clarification. First of all all phones & cell plans are separate. You buy a an "unlocked" phone, then you buy a sim card. Put the card in the phone & it works. 90% of sim cards are pre-paid. Typically you put down $15 dollars (100 rmb) and you are good for a week to a month, depending on usage. The other 10% are monthly subscription plans that require a bank account in a chinese bank.
I live in Shanghai and there are 3 major carriers:
China Mobile: The biggest company in the world, overall very good coverage
China Unicom: Second biggest presence in Shanghai
China Telecom: I don't know very much about them
If you want 3G you'll have to choose your phone/provider carefully. China Mobile uses TD-SCDMA, this is a technology developed in china and pretty much used only in china. You'll have to buy a Chinese phone to use it. China Unicom uses W-CDMA, which is widely available in the US. China telecom uses CDMA2000. My company provides China Mobile sim-cards and my iphone co-workers only get access to the edge network.
I recommend buying an "unlocked" phone before you go to china and a sim card when you arrive. The primary reason is that unless you speak chinese you will have difficulty using the phone & any pre-installed apps. You can change the language of some (android) phones, but this doesn't cause all the app's to magically speak chinese....which can be very frustrating. I would go with an W-CDMA phone & china unicom so that you can use it when you return to the states. Both AT&T and T-Mobile off pre-paid sim-card plans for really low prices. I don't think the average american understands how much of their monthly fee goes toward the phone and how little goes to the service plan. I also recommend a smart phone. The ability to run google translate is a lifesaver.
There is a lot of hype/talk on the net about phone prices. Don't believe it. Shanghai is a large, mature, market. the vendors sell things for a fair price. If you are getting a better price its because you aren't aware of everything you are (are not) buying. That being said taxes, import duties, etc... cause prices to be about 10-15% higher than the exact same product in the us. To shop prices try www.amazon.cn, use google-chrome for realtime translation and you can see what someone in china pays for the same product. Note chinese prices are the price, including all taxes and fee's.
So what did I do:
(I had a coworker that convinced me buying a phone in china was the right move....he of course spoke chinese)
--for myself I purchased a GT-I9008L, galaxy S smart phone. I wanted data, I wanted the latest tech, my company provides me with a ChinaMobile sim card. So I went to www.amazon.cn and shopped for 3G phones. It doesn't run google market, it does run the amazon market, I'm adapting. The only complaint is the map software from the amazon market doesn't always sync to the GPS, and I have a bunch of apps I cannot use 'cause they are in chinese. As a side project I'm working on porting cyanogenmod to the phone. Unfortunately samsung locked the boot-loader. I have managed to root the phone but I have also near-bricked it 3 times trying to get the clockwork mod installed. (near-brick means I found rom's on the net and did a full factory-install of the phone 3 times to recover it)
--for my wife: I purchased an "HTC desire", followed the FAQ on cyanogenmod to get an all-english platform, bought a sim-card with this plan and life is good.
--what I would do if I where still in the states: I would buy the google nexus S and purchase a china unicom sim card when I arrived.
It sez the $120 is available now. I'm willing to spend an extra $20 to play with it today. How do I get one?
Last year I moved across the country & was going to be without highspeed access for a month or two. I picked up an AOL account as an easy way to maintain net-access since they do make it very easy to find a local access number. When the move was complete I also changed banks, canceled my bank of america visa and picked up a mastercard. The AOL account was registered against the visa. I figured canceling the card was all I had to do. AOL would try to charge a defunct card, cancel the account & all would be good. Boy was I wrong.
We continued to receive bills from BOA. When I called to enquire they stated I had a contract with AOL and they weren't legally allowed to break that contract. A law I suspect is in place for people who buy refrigerators on a 12-month payment plan and use a credit card. It got worst before it got better, AOL wanted me to confirm my credit card before cancelling. BOA kept sending me bills. Eventually everyone fessed up and AOL even credited me for the time, but for awhile I was really starting to wonder what was going on.
As a side note I am pissed that BOA took AOL's side over mine & would be very leary of opening an account with them again. Needless to say I will _never_ open another AOL account, making that type of arrangement with Visa is just pure cheeze.
I do agree that the "knowledgable users" have the wrong aproach. But I have seen IT departments that get a serious case of NIH (not invented here) mentality.
I started as a developer working at a startup that started with 8 people and grew to 80. When there were 8 I covered the basic IT roles and eventually transitioned that support to dedicated staff when we got to 80.
Later our company was purchased by a mega-corp & I witnessed things that IMHO are very difficult to justify as cost related:
-limited hard-drive space: hard drives cost about $1/gb, there is very little reason to limit users, you spend more man-hours explaining the limit than dealing with it. Backup policy is the reason this could get expensive. Offsite/longterm storage gets very expensive. But in many cases its cheaper to by additional hard drives
-limited availability: I believe Dell is to blame here. They sell warrantys that come with "guaranteed 4-hour response time". It sounds good, it sounds standard but its often cheaper for a large company to identify crtical nodes on their network & simply by extra hardware. For example I've seen a network go down because a key switch was down & we waited for Dell to provide a new one within 4 hours. The company had dozens of these switches throughout the network. If they had simply bought the "next day service" contract they would have saved enough money to buy 2-3 extra switches and have their own staff replace the defective equipment in much less than 4 hours. Then go back to dell to replace the defective equipment without the entire office being aware of it.
Buying gold, characters, etc... is simply like buying a new game. These games are take much longer to "beat" than a typical standalone game. Each part of the beginning/middle/endgame is comparable (on a per-hour basis) to a standalone game.
If you spend $60 to avoid 40 hours of "play" you are simply buying a new game....the one that starts at level 60. I don't have a problem with this. If you get bored but want to see the raid-driven/end-game...spend the money & have fun.
Make sure you are using #include (or #include_once) and function calls
r
Put as much "code" into function calls in files grouped by purpose, database, formatting, drop-down-menus, etc... Keep the function calls in their own files that are included when you need them.
You want to strive for 2 layers of code, one is the page being presented, which can change every time. While the rest of the code is "included", those included files get easier to re-use over time & you figure out how you like em.
My favorite model for breaking down code into modules/libraries is the Model-View-Controller (MVC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_view_controlle
As you start to tweak/modify your librarys/modules storing them in CVS is great way to track how they evolve over the ages
the internet was originally designed to provide a communications network that could survive a nuclear attack.....now the CIA thinks that a group of terrorists can take it out?
Java vs C/C++ is the wrong comparison!
:-)
C/C++ is great for embedded work, its the perfect abstraction for what you do in assembly, but this isn't what the "cool hackers" are doing these days.
They are doing higher-level applications with more abstraction. At this level Python/Perl/Php are extremely flexible/powerful/easy to use.
Before you drive your camry make sure you check out the saturns
So this scam pays more to run on slower machines?!!
No, your aren't missing anything. You are simply caught in the crossfire. Your users will either have to have different values in the "from" & "replyto" fields or you will have to help them configure their mail-client to use your server for outbound mail.
The basic premise of SPF/caller-id is that the mail server and the domain are part of the same operation.
Once that loophole is closed you will see a growing number of black/white-lists that will make it much easier to limit/prevent spam.
To bad, the scouring of the shire is what brings the hobbits adventure full circle.
Our regional cell-phone provider "intelos" was forced to change their name to "ntelos" because intel wasn't happy with the name.
Jacksons biggest flaw is that he didn't realize the book was really about hobbits, the simple common folk that act like hero's when necessary.
He thought it was about great leaders of men rising up to take their place in the world, in reality it was always about how salt-of-the-earth hobbits will do what needs getting done. Will do what men are unable to do.
Destroying rings, Stabbing nazgul, etc...
Thats why he rewrote the entire encounter with faramir and cut the scouring of the shire.
He completely missed the subtle heroics of the common folk, as portrayed by a hobbit.
If someone is listening continuously wouldn't they be able to provide emergency/roadside assistance?
Does this mean once they fix that "bug" that the FBI will be back in business? All in all not a big win for privacy & security
In 3 years, when a customer decides they want enterprise support/reliability, how do you plan on helping them transition from a fedora distro that has been updated 5 times to an enterprise product that is backward compatible with todays product?
Sounds like the highlander effect, first film challenges your imagination to dream of a world beyond your comprehension.
Then the sequels quickly demonstrate that some things are better left unsaid
Ok, they ditch their middle-ground product to focus on "enterprise" (business) and "fedora" (hobbiest) markets and then go and reccomend a specific competitor for the desktop?
He's entitled to his opinion, but he could have been more diplomatic by saying "RH doesn't match up well in the desktop market" instead of saying "you should use product X"
All signs indicate that RH is giving up on the desktop market.
I suspect that I will reccomend my company pony up and pay for enterprise just to minimize surprises. But for my at-home boxes fedora sounds as good as starting over. So redhat has now convinced me to do something I was to lazy to do in the past.
Take a closer look at their competition
So what happens if debian/slackware/suse measure up better than fedora? It means in 2-3 years I reccomend my company switch, and guess what, they will.
I have a handfule of servers and found it very convienant to pay $60/year per machine to have a centralized place (rhn) to track updates & perform installations.
This wasn't profitable?!?
Fedora's rapid-update cycle ruins it for me, keeping machines on software/releases that are "patchable", without an upgrade, will simply take to much effort
The new IE will generate a warning when processing an OBJECT tag that references external data. The only exception to this will be OBJECT tags generated from within javascript
The warning will be a dialog box with a single choice "OK" after that the active-X component (flash, java, quicktime, etc..) will function normally
To see a good sample on how to use OBJECT tags in the new version of IE look here
I liked the article
It made a very good point that if you think google is an oracle then your expectations are to high.
Google simply ranks whats actually on the web
If you are searching for "flowers" and expecting gardening tips you are in the minority, if you weren't then results would be different.
ps-shame on all the MSN-flameing, the article didn't mention MSN and I'm embarrassed that so many slashdotters condemned the article 'cause the intro mentioned MSN!
the article was about people treating google like an oracle, proved why it wasn't, but got pretty obtuse after that
DOD is a prime move in funding research &
development. Since this research is govt funded
most/all of it is released to the public domain
and therefor "open source"
I rediscover this game every year, and
am never disapointed to find that it has
been improved/expanded/enhanced.
Nothing can touch it!