The current rate to call the US from Australia is about AU$.24/min and you can get 1/2 hr blocks for AU$8 or the special Optus deal that has a cap of $9 for up to three hours. MCI runs deals to call from the US here for US$.05/min at select times. I have a firend that lives in a small town about 2 hours drive outside of Melbourne. It was cheaper to call her from the US than it was to call her from Melbourne. I guess that shows just how screwy the rates are.
I just read on the Optus web site that they are now doing unlimited local calls (like in the US) for about AU$35/mo so that puts it slightly higher than SW Bell.
I wonder if Senator Alston knows that Australia is loosing thousands of jobs in the call center area because of Telstras overcharging. If US compaines are willing to route their call center calls to Ireland, why not route then to Australia as well?
I wonder if the wireless x.net is going to take off. I need more connectivity.
Personaly it sounds like blamestorming where the US compaines are being blamed for the high price of the trans-pacific link costs.
The real reason access to the internet cost so much in Austrlia a simply Telstra is makeing way too much profit (to the tune of about $1000 profit per person in the county per year). Right now Telstra is 1/2 owned by the goverment and 1/4 owned by Aussies and 1/4 owend by large institutions. It can't compete in the real world because the goverment won't let it and they use all these lame excuses about service to the remote parts of the country and thats way stuff is expensive blah, blah. The areas where there is phone service in Oz is more dense than where there is phone service in the US plus it much cheaper to run cables (no ice--ever).
My company pays about $1000/mo for 128K isdn access from Telstra. We pay $.19/megabyte for incomming traffic even though most of it comes from other sites on Telstras joke of a backbone.
We just got a E1 for a digial modem. The set up fee was $1600 for the first 10 phone lines. Extra sets of 10 are an additional $800 each. The installed a 6 foot rack full of equipment to provide the E1. It was not a low cost solution.
Telstra -- the cheapest phone company on earth unless you want to use the phone
The current good cheap 12 ch recivers are getting about 5m most of the time.
GPS cost way too much for this sort of locataion. With some of the cellphone location tech getting under 1m, I don't see any reason to use GPS which only works correctly outside anyway.
For what its worth, the cell towers all use GPS clock to get their timing info so maybe they are using GPS afterall.
Using Mindstorms is a much better idea than what I would have sugessted. It allows them to get to the level they want without hitting stupid limitations and teaches what is going on inside the computer at the real level. Things like VB and OODish things don't teach that.
I started out at age 10 by building bit sliced comptuers to run my model railroad. This started out with simple hardware to flash crossing lights and grew into a general purpose 4 bit cpu that could do some basic switching operations and keep the trains from crashing into each other. It took about a year but by the time I gave up on the railroad, I had gotten into building biger and faster bitslice stuff out of any spare 74LS parts I could scavage. My first year in college I designed and built a 32 bit computer and a few years later had unix running on it.
All the best programmers I know have a few things in common: 1) they were doing software and hardware from the start. 2) the were using assembly within a year of first dealing with computer. 3) none of them could stand CS classes. 4) They got into software to solve some other problem.
Most of the best I know aren't CS people. Their trained field are things like chemistry, engineering and math.
Most of the MSCE's I know started out with a well organized formal CS course of study and are clueless about what the computer has to do just to get a button to look like its depressing on a pretty screen.
Ummm... The Philippines didn't have billion dollars in losses. As far as I can tell the only place the losses ever amounted to much was in the US. Europe and Aisa didn't get hit nearly as bad as the US.
All this did was show the world that the Philippines has enough tech-savy to do billions of dollars worth of abuse to US companines computers.
What would have happened had this been an attack from a hostile country? It seems like it could have been quite effective.
"I believe the only true solution to Microsoft's abusive monopoly is to have at least three independent companies each offering their own compatible version of Windows."
Everytime I've proposed that here, I've been flamed. Its seems that even/.ers don't want billys company broken up.
Look at the facts: You can no longer get into the Word Processing or Spread Sheet software game because of the integration of MS Office. If you wrote a new spreadsheet today, there is no way you could get it to function as cleanly as excel because you don't have access to that info. That is a result of abusing power of being a monopoly. OS's are the same way. The current proposlas for breaking up MS are just plain stupid since they don't make of the new groupos compete agsint themselves. Keep in mind the Judge claimed this was the worst abuse since Standard Oil and that was broken up into about 20 companies.
"Cast your mind back to 1987"... like when xfish was new? and X10 was considered cool?
I'm not sure what has been added since then other than non-rectangular windows... and much bloat.
X was desinged to get stupid boxes that could draw lines to do something useful. some boxes were so stupid that they couldn't debounce mouse or keyboard clicks. Now were are stuck with graphics chips that can do 3d texture blits and all they are doing is X-atoms.
A new windows system needs to be designed to deal with issues like: where are the 3d chips heading? what do most programs need? what do the odd ball programs need? what do the window managers need?
So far all these thigns conflict just enough to keep X alive and kicking.
This worm has shown that if virus writter can get a large enough click rate going, the thing will spread. Some other rplay mentioned that the payload should be quite for a few weeks--this thing proves that doesn't help. Keep in mind this thing was spreading as fast as the earth was spinning. It had already nailed Asia while the major virus defendors were snug in their beds. The first indication I saw that something big was going down as the total lack of info from the Internet Weather Report.
I think the virus writter got lucky and didn't think the responce would be quite like this. For example, it destorys lots of files and hides mp3s (to fill up disk?) but didn't trash the dlls. If you want to be mean to a windows user, trash a needed dll from a 3 year old app. They may never get the machine working the same way again. Most users don't have backups at all and would be hard pressed to lay their hands on the driver disks.
Unless its in a preview window or is a special type that windows knows about. See l0pht about an example.
There are still many unexpolored ares in the windows virus arena. I suspect the next ones to bite will make use of ms-tnef or the auto-icon buffer overflows.
>I blame people who write e-mail programs that don't just send text, or try to run applications. Elm never does this to me.
What terminal emulator are you using? Can I send you some email? There have been abuses of elm in the past and it can run code since the trojan writer has all the unix tools to play with.
How is this done?
Use escape sequence that reprograms a key (like enter?) and then send a sequence to send the message to the shell '|/bin/sh' works nice and then see what happens.
Now most terminal emulators don't have these sorts of "reprogram enter" feature but since they are in the VT100++ specs then do find their way into programs.
>Yes, IMHO Microsoft and dummy user base are to blame
Colt has the same problem. They are getting sued because they are providing a product to a stupid user base that is causing society a problem. Some argue that there is a legitimate use of the product and some claim there is no ligit use of the product.
If there is reason to think that many of the users are under 13, they must take steps to gets parents permission. I run a sight that has sample tests from the FAA and I ask for some info. Since there have only been a few people under 18, (and you have to be 17 anyway to fly airplanes) its within the law to assume the users are all adults. Now if the link gets linked to from a k12 school project and I get thousands of users that are 10, then I would have to change things. I would say that if there is any hint that more than 2% of the napster users are in the age group, they have violated the law (depending on when they did this).
What I'm wondering is, did they find Napster users publishing Metalllica or did they just Napster users?
The real big issue is to get GPS useable for the FAA's WAAS system. Right now other countries are not taking it serious because of Selective unAvailability (S/A or SA).
The other issue is the Europeans keep trying to get into the GPS frequency range. As long as its military system there isn't much opposition. If its a fully civil system used for aviation then its much more likely that GPS will maintain its exclusive use of the frequency.
Basics of how GPS works: Sats send out the time from their atomic clocks. The receiver figures out what time it is and difference between its time and the received time. It calculates its position based on the time difference between the sats and their position. It gets a better idea of the real time and keeps updating its time/position. The internal oscolators can be within 10 ns of "real time" even on the cheap GPS receivers. To keep the bad guys from using GPS against the US, the sats will delay their time transmissions by some pseudo random time. The device to do this has never worked on the older sats and is broken on others (I think prn #1, #20, #6)
As far as if the US military receivers are any better than the cheap handhelds, I'm not sure they are better. Trimble has had the best receivers in the world for some time and their best are not the military systems (but use the encrypted signal to help do some phase calculations). There have been reports that the better marine units were giving better position reports than the military units the last time S/A was turned off.
Also the Russian system GLONASS has a number of problems and may never get any more sats launched. They currently have 10 listed as working and another 9 listed as unusable and there should be 28 sats total. There had been rumors that Sweeden was going to by it.
The link I couldn't find before. It turns out that the info that I remember reading before isn't there anymore. After a bit of research it does apprear that Klingon speakers are rare and there are a fair amount of Esperanto resources on the web. Have never meet anyone that speaks Esperanto I do find the 2 to 10 million mark to be very high but I tend to hang out in countries where English is the offical language.
Have you looked at a top 40 chart lately? How many of thouse bands are any good vs how many of them are made by members of RIAA? How many more times are we going to be forced to listen to beach boy's untalented offspring if we listen to the radio? Has Madona's kid been signed yet? When is the single going to hit? Some record exec in Oz is building the next spice girls. You can even pre-order their new album -- no thanks, I will listen to them first and then decide if I like the music. I can make decision like that on my own and I don't need someone else help.
I put up mp3's of local bands and so far I've had some mixed attitudes from the bands. Some love people all over the world downloading their songs while others are very protective of their music and others would like to sell their CD's but are not in a position to do so. How do you sell a AU$15 cd to someone 1/2 a world away. E-commerce is helping that but by the time the CD gets there its cost has doubled and there is a fair amount of loss. I've got mp3s from 4 groups and a few thousand downloads of most tracks and the bands do get positve feedback. Within a day of putting on the second bands work, they got their first international order. Another band got a gig overseas in part becuase of the MP3s. None of these bands will hit the US top 40 but they play good stuff and you can listen to it now and if you like it you can try to find some arrangement to get a CD. Its like buying a CD after a gig out of the band van except the nets now in between.
I've played some of the best.
on
Solving Chess?
·
· Score: 2
I'm not sure they are human. Sure they can cope with rook to K3 but they are completely useless with in a game of 4-sqareso what does this leave? It laves the reality vs spcial training....
In about 1978 I played the 5th ranked player in the US in the age group at the time (Bert Iz.*cwi.*a?) and he said I missed betting him by one move.
He was rasied to play chess and he was good at it. He would have beeted my 10:1 at least (by my account) but I was rasied to build digital comptuters (thinks to some old bastards at NASA). I couldn't beet Bert at chess but I could program a computer to beat him but what does that get me. A box that can bet Bert-- so what. I still want to build a machine that can out think him that that just isn't going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
The current rate to call the US from Australia is about AU$.24/min and you can get 1/2 hr blocks for AU$8 or the special Optus deal that has a cap of $9 for up to three hours. MCI runs deals to call from the US here for US$.05/min at select times. I have a firend that lives in a small town about 2 hours drive outside of Melbourne. It was cheaper to call her from the US than it was to call her from Melbourne. I guess that shows just how screwy the rates are.
I just read on the Optus web site that they are now doing unlimited local calls (like in the US) for about AU$35/mo so that puts it slightly higher than SW Bell.
I wonder if Senator Alston knows that Australia is loosing thousands of jobs in the call center area because of Telstras overcharging. If US compaines are willing to route their call center calls to Ireland, why not route then to Australia as well?
I wonder if the wireless x.net is going to take off. I need more connectivity.
Is this good news or not?
Personaly it sounds like blamestorming where the US compaines are being blamed for the high price of the trans-pacific link costs.
The real reason access to the internet cost so much in Austrlia a simply Telstra is makeing way too much profit (to the tune of about $1000 profit per person in the county per year). Right now Telstra is 1/2 owned by the goverment and 1/4 owned by Aussies and 1/4 owend by large institutions. It can't compete in the real world because the goverment won't let it and they use all these lame excuses about service to the remote parts of the country and thats way stuff is expensive blah, blah. The areas where there is phone service in Oz is more dense than where there is phone service in the US plus it much cheaper to run cables (no ice--ever).
My company pays about $1000/mo for 128K isdn access from Telstra. We pay $.19/megabyte for
incomming traffic even though most of it comes from other sites on Telstras joke of a backbone.
We just got a E1 for a digial modem. The set up fee was $1600 for the first 10 phone lines. Extra sets of 10 are an additional $800 each. The installed a 6 foot rack full of equipment to provide the E1. It was not a low cost solution.
Telstra -- the cheapest phone company on earth unless you want to use the phone
The current good cheap 12 ch recivers are getting about 5m most of the time.
GPS cost way too much for this sort of locataion. With some of the cellphone location tech getting under 1m, I don't see any reason to use GPS which only works correctly outside anyway.
For what its worth, the cell towers all use GPS clock to get their timing info so maybe they are using GPS afterall.
Using Mindstorms is a much better idea than what I would have sugessted. It allows them to get to the level they want without hitting stupid limitations and teaches what is going on inside the computer at the real level. Things like VB and OODish things don't teach that.
I started out at age 10 by building bit sliced comptuers to run my model railroad. This started out with simple hardware to flash crossing lights and grew into a general purpose 4 bit cpu that could do some basic switching operations and keep the trains from crashing into each other. It took about a year but by the time I gave up on the railroad, I had gotten into building biger and faster bitslice stuff out of any spare 74LS parts I could scavage. My first year in college I designed and built a 32 bit computer and a few years later had unix running on it.
All the best programmers I know have a few things in common:
1) they were doing software and hardware from the start.
2) the were using assembly within a year of first dealing with computer.
3) none of them could stand CS classes.
4) They got into software to solve some other problem.
Most of the best I know aren't CS people. Their trained field are things like chemistry, engineering and math.
Most of the MSCE's I know started out with a well organized formal CS course of study and are clueless about what the computer has to do just to get a button to look like its depressing on a pretty screen.
Photo CD can't run code. It was designed to be platform indpendant.
Which is why I suspect MS is tring to get rid of it. May the DOJ will notice but I'm guessing not for a few years.
'Is not just a lie - he's actually saying "you shouldn't break us up because we'll make less profit".'
What happened to AT&T's profit after their breakup? The resulting companies are making much more profit now than AT&T would have.
How about the profit of the Standard Oil breakup?
Breaking up M$ will be very, very good for its stockholders (except the one that wan't to "be in charge")
Ummm... The Philippines didn't have billion dollars in losses. As far as I can tell the only place the losses ever amounted to much was in the US. Europe and Aisa didn't get hit nearly as bad as the US.
All this did was show the world that the Philippines has enough tech-savy to do billions of dollars worth of abuse to US companines computers.
What would have happened had this been an attack from a hostile country? It seems like it could have been quite effective.
"I believe the only true solution to Microsoft's abusive monopoly is to have at least three independent companies each offering their own
/.ers don't want billys company broken up.
compatible version of Windows."
Everytime I've proposed that here, I've been flamed. Its seems that even
Look at the facts:
You can no longer get into the Word Processing or Spread Sheet software game because of the integration of MS Office. If you wrote a new spreadsheet today, there is no way you could get it to function as cleanly as excel because you don't have access to that info. That is a result of abusing power of being a monopoly. OS's are the same way. The current proposlas for breaking up MS are just plain stupid since they don't make of the new groupos compete agsint themselves. Keep in mind the Judge claimed this was the worst abuse since Standard Oil and that was broken up into about 20 companies.
"Cast your mind back to 1987"...
like when xfish was new? and X10 was considered cool?
I'm not sure what has been added since then other than non-rectangular windows... and much bloat.
X was desinged to get stupid boxes that could draw lines to do something useful. some boxes were so stupid that they couldn't debounce mouse or keyboard clicks. Now were are stuck with graphics chips that can do 3d texture blits and all they are doing is X-atoms.
A new windows system needs to be designed to deal with issues like:
where are the 3d chips heading?
what do most programs need?
what do the odd ball programs need?
what do the window managers need?
So far all these thigns conflict just enough to keep X alive and kicking.
This worm has shown that if virus writter can get a large enough click rate going, the thing will spread. Some other rplay mentioned that the payload should be quite for a few weeks--this thing proves that doesn't help. Keep in mind this thing was spreading as fast as the earth was spinning. It had already nailed Asia while the major virus defendors were snug in their beds. The first indication I saw that something big was going down as the total lack of info from the Internet Weather Report.
I think the virus writter got lucky and didn't think the responce would be quite like this. For example, it destorys lots of files and hides mp3s (to fill up disk?) but didn't trash the dlls. If you want to be mean to a windows user, trash a needed dll from a 3 year old app. They may never get the machine working the same way again. Most users don't have backups at all and would be hard pressed to lay their hands on the driver disks.
>Users have to run the attachment manually!
Unless its in a preview window or is a special type that windows knows about. See l0pht about an example.
There are still many unexpolored ares in the windows virus arena. I suspect the next ones to bite will make use of ms-tnef or the auto-icon buffer overflows.
All ILOVEYOU did was rasie the bar a bit.
>I blame people who write e-mail programs that don't just send text, or try to run applications. Elm never does this to me.
What terminal emulator are you using? Can I send you some email? There have been abuses of elm in the past and it can run code since the trojan writer has all the unix tools to play with.
How is this done?
Use escape sequence that reprograms a key (like enter?) and then send a sequence to send the message to the shell '|/bin/sh' works nice and then see what happens.
Now most terminal emulators don't have these sorts of "reprogram enter" feature but since they are in the VT100++ specs then do find their way into programs.
>Yes, IMHO Microsoft and dummy user base are to blame
Colt has the same problem. They are getting sued because they are providing a product to a stupid user base that is causing society a problem. Some argue that there is a legitimate use of the product and some claim there is no ligit use of the product.
Maybe colt needs a shrink wrap license.
I wonder if DNA would notice if the questions he was given didn't include any reference to the number 42.
All you have to do is get the tape archive of Echelon and then you've got copies of everything.
The hard drive heads use air to keep from touching the disk. A hd in space needs some air.
There are also problems with heat transfer because of no air. Cooling in space is not an easy thing to do.
Real OS's can make files that look like they are 3 to 5mb but are full of zeros and don't take much space at all.
// make a 3+mb file that doens't take 3mb on the disk
main() {
int fd=creat("stuff.mp3",0666);
lseek(fd,3456454,0);
write(fd,"",1);
}
If there is reason to think that many of the users are under 13, they must take steps to gets parents permission. I run a sight that has sample tests from the FAA and I ask for some info. Since there have only been a few people under 18, (and you have to be 17 anyway to fly airplanes) its within the law to assume the users are all adults. Now if the link gets linked to from a k12 school project and I get thousands of users that are 10, then I would have to change things. I would say that if there is any hint that more than 2% of the napster users are in the age group, they have violated the law (depending on when they did this).
What I'm wondering is, did they find Napster users publishing Metalllica or did they just Napster users?
Wow, the Whitehouse didn't just put out a press relase...they did something too. SA is off!
Heres a graph of the improved accuracy.
This isn't so far off. A few of the calcutations for voyager involved using the value of 3 for pi.
The real big issue is to get GPS useable for the FAA's WAAS system. Right now other countries are not taking it serious because of Selective unAvailability (S/A or SA).
The other issue is the Europeans keep trying to get into the GPS frequency range. As long as its military system there isn't much opposition. If its a fully civil system used for aviation then its much more likely that GPS will maintain its exclusive use of the frequency.
Basics of how GPS works:
Sats send out the time from their atomic clocks.
The receiver figures out what time it is and difference between its time and the received time.
It calculates its position based on the time difference between the sats and their position.
It gets a better idea of the real time and keeps updating its time/position. The internal oscolators can be within 10 ns of "real time" even on the cheap GPS receivers.
To keep the bad guys from using GPS against the US, the sats will delay their time transmissions by some pseudo random time.
The device to do this has never worked on the older sats and is broken on others (I think prn #1, #20, #6)
As far as if the US military receivers are any better than the cheap handhelds, I'm not sure they are better. Trimble has had the best receivers in the world for some time and their best are not the military systems (but use the encrypted signal to help do some phase calculations). There have been reports that the better marine units were giving better position reports than the military units the last time S/A was turned off.
Also the Russian system GLONASS has a number of problems and may never get any more sats launched. They currently have 10 listed as working and another 9 listed as unusable and there should be 28 sats total. There had been rumors that Sweeden was going to by it.
You can do DGPS over the internet too.
The link I couldn't find before. It turns out that the info that I remember reading before isn't there anymore. After a bit of research it does apprear that Klingon speakers are rare and there are a fair amount of Esperanto resources on the web. Have never meet anyone that speaks Esperanto I do find the 2 to 10 million mark to be very high but I tend to hang out in countries where English is the offical language.
Have you looked at a top 40 chart lately? How many of thouse bands are any good vs how many of them are made by members of RIAA? How many more times are we going to be forced to listen to beach boy's untalented offspring if we listen to the radio? Has Madona's kid been signed yet? When is the single going to hit? Some record exec in Oz is building the next spice girls. You can even pre-order their new album -- no thanks, I will listen to them first and then decide if I like the music. I can make decision like that on my own and I don't need someone else help.
I put up mp3's of local bands and so far I've had some mixed attitudes from the bands. Some love people all over the world downloading their songs while others are very protective of their music and others would like to sell their CD's but are not in a position to do so. How do you sell a AU$15 cd to someone 1/2 a world away. E-commerce is helping that but by the time the CD gets there its cost has doubled and there is a fair amount of loss. I've got mp3s from 4 groups and a few thousand downloads of most tracks and the bands do get positve feedback. Within a day of putting on the second bands work, they got their first international order. Another band got a gig overseas in part becuase of the MP3s. None of these bands will hit the US top 40 but they play good stuff and you can listen to it now and if you like it you can try to find some arrangement to get a CD. Its like buying a CD after a gig out of the band van except the nets now in between.
I'm not sure they are human.
Sure they can cope with rook to K3 but they are completely useless with in a game of 4-sqareso what does this leave? It laves the reality vs spcial training....
In about 1978 I played the 5th ranked player in the US in the age group at the time (Bert Iz.*cwi.*a?) and he said I missed betting him by one move.
He was rasied to play chess and he was good at it. He would have beeted my 10:1 at least (by my account) but I was rasied to build digital comptuters (thinks to some old bastards at NASA). I couldn't beet Bert at chess but I could program a computer to beat him but what does that get me. A box that can bet Bert-- so what. I still want to build a machine that can out think him that that just isn't going to happen.
I wish I could find the link...
There are more speakers of Klingon than Esperanto according to numbers of books sold in the language.