The real problems is companies that treat CallerID as a method of identification. CallerID never was, never has been, and never will be a way of positively identifying who's calling. The best you can do is use it as a hint.
This is so brain dead simple to set up it isn't even funny. I can do this at work easily. All you need:
A computer running Linux and Asterisk
A T100P (Asterisk T1 card)
A PRI to a telco that lets you specify Calling-Party-ID (you can get this pretty easily from a lot of CLECs)
About 30 minutes of coding up a simple perl or PHP script to parse a web form and use the data to dump a call request file into Asterisk's outbound spool directory.
Voila. Done. Setup cost is whatever you pay for the computer plus $500 for the T1 card (or spring for the quad T1 model at $1500). Your monthly cost to run this service should be no more than about $500 per PRI, plus a little more if you'd rather colo the box somewhere.
Hmm I'm kinda bummed to hear that, because road construction is one thing I've always thought I'd like to try someday, after I finally get fed up with IT as a job (it's a nice hobby though.)
The problem with this article is that while it's got the right idea, it's using the wrong facts. Wifi is really a bad example; it just frequency hops plus uses collision detection. Sure, you can run more than one AP in the same area on the same frequency, but it just makes them all run slower and slower since they're all competing for the same slice of bandwidth.
There are new technologies out there that will let a radio listen on a frequency and selectively mask out the stuff it doesn't want to hear. It's like a bunch of people talking at a pary...everyone's talking in the same "frequency band", but when you're having a conversation your brain selectively pushes all the other voices into the background and fixates on the voice of the person with whom you're conversing.
The automakers are certainly part of it, but i have family who have worked directly on projects trying to get mass transit started, and it always came down to the outlying counties (read: Oakland and Macomb) not wanting to be part of the system. They really are deathly afraid that if people can get from Detroit to the suburbs easily that it will be the end of civilization for them.
Sounds like you're 21, male, and have SR-22 insurance because your liscense was revoked.
Nope. Male yes, but 30, single, never had my license suspended, no tickets since a speeding ticket in 1994 and no at-fault accidents since 1992 (or maybe it was 91? I don't remember.) I've been hit a couple times by people running red lights but those are in the past two years and so far do not seem to have affected my rates (nor should they, since I had nothing to do with either one other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.)
2004 Saturn VUE, 4 cylinder AWD model. Before that it was a 2001 Saturn L200 sedan. The latter was only about $20/mo cheaper. It seriously is more related to where I live than what i drive. I could move out of the city but then the money I save on insurance I'd end up paying out for rent or mortgage.
And what's next? Since people talking on cell phone tend to cause accidents will I be penalized on my insurance just because I own a cell phone? Maybe we should also provide discounts for people who don't drink coffee? And don't forget the discount for not having a car stereo...people fiddling with the dials cause accidents too.
Also in *some* cases, if there are a lot of people breaking a law it may be because the law needs to be changed. Speed limit laws come to mind. I remember reading that the ideal speed limit on a given stretch or road is the speed that 70% of drivers pick as their "comfortable" speed. Michigan seems to have done well in this regard; our freeway speed limit is 55 in a few areas (mostly in densely populated areas) and goes up to 65 and 70 outside the cities.
The problem is really that insurance companies are starting to get more than a little TOO nosey. Try getting insurance with bad credit. I know people who have...it's not pretty. I can understand requiring large deposits if your credit is bad, but your rate should not be affected.
Yep I have a similar problem. $200/mo for car insurance simply because i live within the City of Detroit. That's with State Farm...GEICO was over $300/mo! It tends to slowly creep up every six months too...not my much, maybe a few bucks at a time...but it's annoying and ridiculous. Only accidents I've been in in the past 13 years were two cases of being hit by OTHER people running red lights. Last ticket of any kind I got other than a parking ticket was a speeding ticket in Indiana in 1994.
Auto insurance is a scam that you have no choice but to bend over for. For political reasons Detroit has no usable mass transit (rich white folks north of the city, second richest county in the US, are terrified that *black people* might be able to come up there if we had busses or trains....the horror!). And it's not like I can walk 35 miles to work every day.:(
It would still be illegal copying, just without the added offense of circumventing the copy protection.
Anyway consumer DVD burners are incapable of writing to the portion of the disc holding the CSS keys, so there is no way for an average user to burn a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD without decrypting the data first. Commercial DVD authoring systems can do it, but they're not exactly cheap, and neither is the blank media.
Signed me up for Sports Illustrated on one visit and Entertainment Weekly on another, when I've always declined the (annoying) offer.
I always wish they'd use a little common sense when they make those sales pitches. The fact that I have long hair, glasses and am buying Puny Puny Poemi (anime, for those not in the know) should be a clue that I'm very very likely NOT interested in SI or EW or pretty much anything else they've tried to pawn off on me lately.
X number of employees getting paid Y (probably minimum wage plus commission) per hour. Each of these employees are getting paid regardless whether they are talking to a pita customer or not . Unless every other employee is busy, there really isn't any difference if the PITA customer is taking up someone's time.
Of course this is only true if the Best Buy in question is at or above the necessary staffing level. Never have I seen this to be the case at my local BB. I almost had to walk up the "employees only" ladder to get the AV receiver I wanted during my last trip because there were no employees to be found.
And on the subject of staffing what REALLY annoys me more than anything is having to wait forever in the checkout. They'll have 2 registers open, each with huge lines (usually held up because they're selling those damn PSPs...). Having to wait too long in line is one of the few things that can (and has) made me put down my merchandise and walk out. By the time I walk into the store I've already checked the website to make sure that they have what I want and that I'm willing to pay what they're charging so I'm usually looking to get in and out as fast as possible.
I've found that if you calmly explain economics to these types of customers they usually understand. Like the guy who once asked me why only his main account could dial in and not the extra four email addresses. I calmly pointed out that this would basically mean I'm giving away $50 in service for $10 a month, and he never mentioned it again.
You'll always get an asshole now and then, but most people seem to be reasonable. They know that you have to make money to live on too.
Comerica does that too. I get two free "teller-assisted" transactions per month; anything over that is $2 a pop. The two freebies basically go to my two bi-monthly paycheck deposits (oh how I wish my company would do direct deposit again.) Anything else I either use an ATM for or just wait until my next paycheck deposit.
The only reason I stick with Comerica is because there are lots of branches and ATMs near both home and office. TCF is much nicer but the nearest branch is 25 minutes away and there are no TCF ATMs around here that I've ever seen (TCF basically doesn't care about us actually *in* Detroit I guess.) My only other choice around here would be Bank One, and now Chase and Bank One are merging I hear so there's one less choice.:(
At the rate things are going very soon we're all just going to be customers of The Bank, because there will be only one left. And that frightens me.
I can imagine this will make road repairs a real joy, because now you have to *carefully* pry out all these electronic studs before you can repave (or even just reseal) the road surface.
A regular Sparc 5 definitely *is* nostalgic. I have several old Sun machines at the house including a Sparc 5, Sparc 20 and an IPX (talk about nostalgia...those IPCs and IPXs are so cute:) )
I have a few old Ultras here at work (Ultra 1s mostly) and I do have Debian on them. Worst install I've ever done...the Sparc installer for Debian is *horrible*. And yes, I know it's beta at best, but still.
If turbines killed three people a day I'd welcome the resulting increase (however small) in the overall intelligence of the human race, because anyone stupid enough to walk into a wind turbine doesn't need to be part of the human race.:-)
It should also be noted here that all that's being asked for is the source to any modifications they've made to the OSS software on the router, such as the kernel drivers for the Broadcom chipset. And there really isn't anything special about the Linksys routers from a hardware standpoint anyway. If I'm not mistaken it's almost a reference design slapped into a plastic case with some OSS software running on it.
What makes the Linksys units nice (IMHO) is the web interface. That's implemented as CGI scripts on the unit and such scripts, provided they are 100% custom, would not be a derived work and thus do not need to be open sourced. So nobody is going to take the code and use it to "clone" the unit as was suggested in the article. Hell if anyone did want to clone it it wouldn't be that difficult to do even without the code. Like I said the hardware isn't all that special.
I think perhaps one of the real reasons for Cisco/Linksys not putting out the code is that if you can upload your own firmware to the box you can essentially get all the features of the higher end router models in one of the cheaper WAP-only models. Nothing is stopping the cheaper models from routing other than the web interface scripts not allowing you to add routes.
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The real problems is companies that treat CallerID as a method of identification. CallerID never was, never has been, and never will be a way of positively identifying who's calling. The best you can do is use it as a hint.
This is so brain dead simple to set up it isn't even funny. I can do this at work easily. All you need:
A computer running Linux and Asterisk
A T100P (Asterisk T1 card)
A PRI to a telco that lets you specify Calling-Party-ID (you can get this pretty easily from a lot of CLECs)
About 30 minutes of coding up a simple perl or PHP script to parse a web form and use the data to dump a call request file into Asterisk's outbound spool directory.
Voila. Done. Setup cost is whatever you pay for the computer plus $500 for the T1 card (or spring for the quad T1 model at $1500). Your monthly cost to run this service should be no more than about $500 per PRI, plus a little more if you'd rather colo the box somewhere.
I love MySQL but given their version of the SQL language, perhaps the fork should be :
:)
ICantBelieveItsNotSQL
Hmm I'm kinda bummed to hear that, because road construction is one thing I've always thought I'd like to try someday, after I finally get fed up with IT as a job (it's a nice hobby though.)
The problem with this article is that while it's got the right idea, it's using the wrong facts. Wifi is really a bad example; it just frequency hops plus uses collision detection. Sure, you can run more than one AP in the same area on the same frequency, but it just makes them all run slower and slower since they're all competing for the same slice of bandwidth.
There are new technologies out there that will let a radio listen on a frequency and selectively mask out the stuff it doesn't want to hear. It's like a bunch of people talking at a pary...everyone's talking in the same "frequency band", but when you're having a conversation your brain selectively pushes all the other voices into the background and fixates on the voice of the person with whom you're conversing.
The automakers are certainly part of it, but i have family who have worked directly on projects trying to get mass transit started, and it always came down to the outlying counties (read: Oakland and Macomb) not wanting to be part of the system. They really are deathly afraid that if people can get from Detroit to the suburbs easily that it will be the end of civilization for them.
Sounds like you're 21, male, and have SR-22 insurance because your liscense was revoked.
Nope. Male yes, but 30, single, never had my license suspended, no tickets since a speeding ticket in 1994 and no at-fault accidents since 1992 (or maybe it was 91? I don't remember.) I've been hit a couple times by people running red lights but those are in the past two years and so far do not seem to have affected my rates (nor should they, since I had nothing to do with either one other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.)
$200 a month? What do you drive?
2004 Saturn VUE, 4 cylinder AWD model. Before that it was a 2001 Saturn L200 sedan. The latter was only about $20/mo cheaper. It seriously is more related to where I live than what i drive. I could move out of the city but then the money I save on insurance I'd end up paying out for rent or mortgage.
And what's next? Since people talking on cell phone tend to cause accidents will I be penalized on my insurance just because I own a cell phone? Maybe we should also provide discounts for people who don't drink coffee? And don't forget the discount for not having a car stereo...people fiddling with the dials cause accidents too.
Also in *some* cases, if there are a lot of people breaking a law it may be because the law needs to be changed. Speed limit laws come to mind. I remember reading that the ideal speed limit on a given stretch or road is the speed that 70% of drivers pick as their "comfortable" speed. Michigan seems to have done well in this regard; our freeway speed limit is 55 in a few areas (mostly in densely populated areas) and goes up to 65 and 70 outside the cities.
The problem is really that insurance companies are starting to get more than a little TOO nosey. Try getting insurance with bad credit. I know people who have...it's not pretty. I can understand requiring large deposits if your credit is bad, but your rate should not be affected.
Yep I have a similar problem. $200/mo for car insurance simply because i live within the City of Detroit. That's with State Farm...GEICO was over $300/mo! It tends to slowly creep up every six months too...not my much, maybe a few bucks at a time...but it's annoying and ridiculous. Only accidents I've been in in the past 13 years were two cases of being hit by OTHER people running red lights. Last ticket of any kind I got other than a parking ticket was a speeding ticket in Indiana in 1994.
:(
Auto insurance is a scam that you have no choice but to bend over for. For political reasons Detroit has no usable mass transit (rich white folks north of the city, second richest county in the US, are terrified that *black people* might be able to come up there if we had busses or trains....the horror!). And it's not like I can walk 35 miles to work every day.
It would still be illegal copying, just without the added offense of circumventing the copy protection.
Anyway consumer DVD burners are incapable of writing to the portion of the disc holding the CSS keys, so there is no way for an average user to burn a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD without decrypting the data first. Commercial DVD authoring systems can do it, but they're not exactly cheap, and neither is the blank media.
Signed me up for Sports Illustrated on one visit and Entertainment Weekly on another, when I've always declined the (annoying) offer.
I always wish they'd use a little common sense when they make those sales pitches. The fact that I have long hair, glasses and am buying Puny Puny Poemi (anime, for those not in the know) should be a clue that I'm very very likely NOT interested in SI or EW or pretty much anything else they've tried to pawn off on me lately.
X number of employees getting paid Y (probably minimum wage plus commission) per hour. Each of these employees are getting paid regardless whether they are talking to a pita customer or not . Unless every other employee is busy, there really isn't any difference if the PITA customer is taking up someone's time.
Of course this is only true if the Best Buy in question is at or above the necessary staffing level. Never have I seen this to be the case at my local BB. I almost had to walk up the "employees only" ladder to get the AV receiver I wanted during my last trip because there were no employees to be found.
And on the subject of staffing what REALLY annoys me more than anything is having to wait forever in the checkout. They'll have 2 registers open, each with huge lines (usually held up because they're selling those damn PSPs...). Having to wait too long in line is one of the few things that can (and has) made me put down my merchandise and walk out. By the time I walk into the store I've already checked the website to make sure that they have what I want and that I'm willing to pay what they're charging so I'm usually looking to get in and out as fast as possible.
I've found that if you calmly explain economics to these types of customers they usually understand. Like the guy who once asked me why only his main account could dial in and not the extra four email addresses. I calmly pointed out that this would basically mean I'm giving away $50 in service for $10 a month, and he never mentioned it again.
You'll always get an asshole now and then, but most people seem to be reasonable. They know that you have to make money to live on too.
Comerica does that too. I get two free "teller-assisted" transactions per month; anything over that is $2 a pop. The two freebies basically go to my two bi-monthly paycheck deposits (oh how I wish my company would do direct deposit again.) Anything else I either use an ATM for or just wait until my next paycheck deposit.
:(
The only reason I stick with Comerica is because there are lots of branches and ATMs near both home and office. TCF is much nicer but the nearest branch is 25 minutes away and there are no TCF ATMs around here that I've ever seen (TCF basically doesn't care about us actually *in* Detroit I guess.) My only other choice around here would be Bank One, and now Chase and Bank One are merging I hear so there's one less choice.
At the rate things are going very soon we're all just going to be customers of The Bank, because there will be only one left. And that frightens me.
I can imagine this will make road repairs a real joy, because now you have to *carefully* pry out all these electronic studs before you can repave (or even just reseal) the road surface.
Ugh, Airplane 2 flashback...
"Get them to flash IN sequence"
I was wondering when someone would notice that.
:) )
A regular Sparc 5 definitely *is* nostalgic. I have several old Sun machines at the house including a Sparc 5, Sparc 20 and an IPX (talk about nostalgia...those IPCs and IPXs are so cute
I have a few old Ultras here at work (Ultra 1s mostly) and I do have Debian on them. Worst install I've ever done...the Sparc installer for Debian is *horrible*. And yes, I know it's beta at best, but still.
If turbines killed three people a day I'd welcome the resulting increase (however small) in the overall intelligence of the human race, because anyone stupid enough to walk into a wind turbine doesn't need to be part of the human race. :-)
It should also be noted here that all that's being asked for is the source to any modifications they've made to the OSS software on the router, such as the kernel drivers for the Broadcom chipset. And there really isn't anything special about the Linksys routers from a hardware standpoint anyway. If I'm not mistaken it's almost a reference design slapped into a plastic case with some OSS software running on it.
What makes the Linksys units nice (IMHO) is the web interface. That's implemented as CGI scripts on the unit and such scripts, provided they are 100% custom, would not be a derived work and thus do not need to be open sourced. So nobody is going to take the code and use it to "clone" the unit as was suggested in the article. Hell if anyone did want to clone it it wouldn't be that difficult to do even without the code. Like I said the hardware isn't all that special.
I think perhaps one of the real reasons for Cisco/Linksys not putting out the code is that if you can upload your own firmware to the box you can essentially get all the features of the higher end router models in one of the cheaper WAP-only models. Nothing is stopping the cheaper models from routing other than the web interface scripts not allowing you to add routes.
Google is your friend :)
6 17 17.Ph.r.html
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/mar99/9219
It's probably some version of the very ancient Eliza program, which I'm sure SCO will lay IP claims to very soon now. :)
Now what we need are some good Darl audio clips to make a nifty mp3 techno song...
"Don't sue me!....no c'mon.....don't sue me!.....I hate that!"
(a reference to the 'Terrible Mr. G' mp3. If you haven't heard it you should go download it)