I've currently got enough gear to start a wireless broadband ISP sitting here in my house in Melbourne. I've got two high spots with access points that are installed and ready to go as well as a 10mb uplink.
I don't have a telecommunications license. Thats going to require setting up the right type of company and then paying the 1st $10,000 application fee. Rumors from someone thats just started the 1st years paper work is saying its going to cost $50,000 just to get to the second year.
Damn cuting into Ziggys gravy train is a hard game to play.
Lucky for me I can ship all this gear over the Tasman sea where the political situation is so messed up.
How about read distances?
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'll worry about this when someone makes a reader that works well when several tags are in the field at one time. Currently farmers downunder are getting RFID tags for all their cows and most sheep. The farmers are sort of sold on a concept like Mr Spock's transponder saying Bessy is 126 meters at heading 74 with an arrow pointing at the cow. The problem is the current readers are good to read a cows tag at nearly.5 meters and when you consider how wide a cow is there is a bit of a problem.
In an unrelated subject, if someone has any clue about RF and DSPs and pulling several cruddy analog low powered alalog signals out of the either, I know someone that would like to talk to you.
a ziped.wav tends to be a bit larger than just the.wav. There are ways of doing lossessless compression on CD quality audio that will knock about 20% off the download time.
Whats with all these "old-timers" talking about fido net links? Most of the uucp links were doing real smtp by the time that stuff was being done.
I found a copy of the old uucp-path code and used it to create a connectivity graph of current top 1000 usenet servers. The result was a score that could be used with/24 addresses to guage how spamy a network is.
True names is a must read for any IRC junky or bofh since part of the story involves larting someone like an irc scriptkiddie. Google for don.mac and mailman and see what shows up. The book is once again in print so you should pick it up at your local book store.
I disagree about it being technically dated. The terms are a bit odd, but aren't wrong. The concepts are spot on. In the story the police have reason to suspect people of cybercrimes if they have too much storage space so a guy has a NAS hiding under his house. The terms aren't quit right but in todays world, but the views of the police in the story are the same as how RIAA views a teenager with a few 120+ gig drives. The story was published in 1981.
I recently picked up John von Neumans "The Computer and the Brain" from 1958 and he uses terms such as "organs" for what today would be called modules or subroutines and "participants" as a term for a jump or loop target. Like Vinge's book the conecpts are correct but the terms are not modern.
If you think of wather as a mostly dampened system you will find that in the winter and summer its cycle is long but in the sping and fall it approaches 2 to 3 days. In the transtion when the cycle would be 6 to 8 days it does tend to gets streched or shrunk to fit the week and the result is once it starts raining on the weekends, it will keep doing it for several more weeks.
Now prices for T3's are approaching or are less than T1 prices. A medium sized ISP could be paying $50/megabit for anything over say 5mb links. The local loop charges could be less than $400/mo depending on the area. On an WISP list someone mentioned that its cheaper to break out a T3 and a T1 and the T1 customers are more likly to default on the bill and thats pushing T3 prices down. I don't know when your prices are from but about two years ago a client bought a 45mb link for $6000/mo.
Microsoft made bad software and they will get sued for it. This flaw isn't a direct flaw (read Naders Unsafe at Any Speed about the Corvair) but an indirect flaw (Pintos that went boom after being hit). There are two different classes of product irresponsibility and MS is clearly guilty because they didn't do everything in their power to stop this problem and it lead to direct financial damages to others. They are going to get sued and they will not win.
In Australia, the big problem was the excessive abouts people ended up paying when their links went full thottle and the ISP is clicking away at $.20/megabyte. That is a result of giving Telstra too much power and clueless mangment of the entire telcom regulations and that is mostly Sen Alston's fault. What I think would be interesting is get enough people for a class action aginst MS and tell them you won't sue if they get Alston out of his current job. I'm not sure what would happen, but it would be fun to watch from the sidelines.
They claim its becasue of the huge costs of running the underseas cables. In NZ that doesn't explain the.02/mb for NZ traffic over the 500m. All the compaines that run underseas cables have been replacing their transponders to reduce their expenses. If they put in new transponders they can go up to 150km between them where the old ones were needed ever 20km. When they upgrade the transponders they get a gain out of the fiber in the order of 1000x or even more. There was already a glut of bandwidth between the US, NZ and Aus before the upgrades started. Tyco also appears to be putting down a new cable from Guam.
I've been working on starting a WISP in both NZ and AUS and its be an interesting situation. My base station for a kiwi town is stuck in customs in Australia. Australia requires a $10,000/yr telecomuniations license if you sell network services but for that you get the rights to dig holes anyplace you want.
In some areas I could provide a typical home users 10 gig/mo of broadband for a cost of about $18/mo. That includes the upstream pipes but not their radio, installation, tech support or the stupid telecom license.
NZ has a bit of a problem with their phone switches in that they used a model that isn't used anywhere else in the world. That chould cause some price increase over other systems but since they use the same phones as the rest of the world, it can't be that bad.
Thats common in law suits, you go after the group that can exert pressure to get the results you want but has little to gain by winning. The result is a settelment and then Apple, Dell and Gateway tell Seagate that they will only buy drives that are labled in some way. The result is Seagate caves in to its largest buyers. If they went after Seagate directly, then Seagate would have a very strong reason to keep with their current system since it makes their drives look bigger and would cost them a great deal to change and they have US law behind them about SI. Remember US law says SI the system of measurement even if no one but the scientist and drug dealers use the metric system.
Who cares what the size across the glass envelope is -- I wanna know how big my screen is, dammit! Its like air plane tickets tell you when the plane leaves. There are only two people on board that care when it leaves. Nearly everyone else needs to know when they must be there to check in but its been that way for years so it continues and decreases flexability. The airlines can't easily let people know they need to be there a bit early because its a busy time and a monitor company can't roll out improvments in their glass effecency since now that 19" monitor is 18.9".
Hasn't anyone looked at the syntax for/etc/inittab and wondered why there is a name in field 1? The init spec allowed other keywords in field 3 to allow make like dependencies of the things named by the 1st field. This was to get around makes one-way dependencies since shutdown tends to need to work in a different order which isn't always the reverse of how they were started up.
Today on a road I used to drive nearly every had had someone shot. This is very odd for Australia and the hand gun used was found at the scene. I wonder if it was road rage. Considering there are about 100,000 clueless drivers driving that road every day, it wouldn't surprise me. Its a top quailty road and over 95% of the people are driving under the speed limit of 100km an hour. Its a road safty experts wet dream and its only 4 times more deadly than any highway like it anywhere in the world. Nothing like people driving on the highway at 1/2 the speed limit to keep things moving smoothly.
Its interesting the every culture that doesn't have a problem with suicide has strict penalties for the family if they hurt others while offing themselves. Maybe its time for that to come around to other places.
Parents should be criminally responsible for the actions of their offspring. That would fix most of these kinds of problems but most of the world is tring to get to the point where the mother of young kids is working full time and not being a mother and that results in millions of f*cked up kids.
I didn't read the article because I just got an urgent importaint message.
I just got this email saying the bell company was about to put a $50 per month tax on all modems. We must write congress at once to stop this. Most of us can afford to call BBSes if this goes through so write a letter now!
I have never seen a vehicle for the general market that didn't have a ground clearance that wasn't a bit less than 1/2 the wheel diameter. The extra height does is help move the center of gravity up and anyone that passed physics would know what that means.
I know about 10 people that routinely look over sendmail. Its has been checked and rechecked by more people than any other bit of code with the possible exception of the linux kernel. It still has problems but it has resulted in lots of examples of what not to do. Most of the race conditions that are found in other programs (and still exist it many complex programs) were 1st found in sendmail.
Remember most of the sendmail patches over the last two decades are to workaround bugs in the OS or external delivery agents or the interfaces. Those classes of bugs are excluded from the reward.
Millions of people every day play that "one in a million" chance with their local lottry.
Whats more interesting is what are the odds of winning the lottery without buying a ticket? Its not zero but there seem to be about 20 people who have won major prizes and were given a ticket or found one.
How about that special person that is one in a millon? That means their are about 6000 just like them:-)
Until we have some way to cope with a real threat, it should be beaten into the general public that big stuff falls out of the sky and does very bad things to most of the living creatures on earth.
America has great infastructure thanks to scaremongering of the cold war. There are parallel pipelines through most of the country, there are very good roads in places that could never justify the cost of an Interstate highway. The highways are there only because of the threat of the evil commies back years ago and the pipelines are a result of parinoia of Japanese spys from WW2. If the congress gets confused enough about the issue there might be some money to fund it but right now I'm guessing over 75% of congress thinks that "God will not let this happen to us".
There are two sides to this: 1) I don't buy sun hardware for the fluff (java is fluff). I buy sun hardware to run solaris and thats it. I choose sun because in the past I could get upgrades for a nominal fee and when I need more hardware, I order another box and it comes with the latest os and it plays nice with other stuff on my network. I bet you can't name 10 features of solaris 9 that I use that sunos 4.1.4 didn't have. If sun gets too out of hand, I can always run freebsd on the sun hardware but then why do I buy sun hardware if I don't get the reliability of the good mix between the os and the equipment. 2) If I get staroffice per user and all the normal crud the PC users get, then its a great deal but until I see a solid version of something to replace Act and an accounting system, the windows PCs stay.
There is no money in software. Its an art and like any art, after it stops being trendy, there is no cash in it. Just ask your local painter or sculputure author or musician if you need a clue about how much money is in arts. There is money is selling hardware and the software is just a cost of doing business. Any company that fails to understand that won't be here in 20 years. For those that are going to say "look at MS", look at where they make their money, they sell software to hardware vendors that didn't want to do that themselves.
I disagree about health care. By the time I'm in the geriatric ward, there won't be enough doctors and I expect a typical doctors exam will be thanks to a web cam and a doc in a different part of the world. The question is why wait, maybe I could start a company to do that today.
Slashdot Mirror
I've currently got enough gear to start a wireless broadband ISP sitting here in my house in Melbourne. I've got two high spots with access points that are installed and ready to go as well as a 10mb uplink.
I don't have a telecommunications license.
Thats going to require setting up the right type of company and then paying the 1st $10,000 application fee. Rumors from someone thats just started the 1st years paper work is saying its going to cost $50,000 just to get to the second year.
Damn cuting into Ziggys gravy train is a hard game to play.
Lucky for me I can ship all this gear over the Tasman sea where the political situation is so messed up.
I'll worry about this when someone makes a reader that works well when several tags are in the field at one time. Currently farmers downunder are getting RFID tags for all their cows and most sheep. The farmers are sort of sold on a concept like Mr Spock's transponder saying Bessy is 126 meters at heading 74 with an arrow pointing at the cow. The problem is the current readers are good to read a cows tag at nearly .5 meters and when you consider how wide a cow is there is a bit of a problem.
In an unrelated subject, if someone has any clue about RF and DSPs and pulling several cruddy analog low powered alalog signals out of the either, I know someone that would like to talk to you.
a ziped .wav tends to be a bit larger than just the .wav. There are ways of doing lossessless compression on CD quality audio that will knock about 20% off the download time.
Whats with all these "old-timers" talking about fido net links? Most of the uucp links were doing real smtp by the time that stuff was being done.
/24 addresses to guage how spamy a network is.
I found a copy of the old uucp-path code and used it to create a connectivity graph of current top 1000 usenet servers. The result was a score that could be used with
-tim
ihnp4!occrsh!gorgo!creator!tim
True names is a must read for any IRC junky or bofh since part of the story involves larting someone like an irc scriptkiddie. Google for don.mac and mailman and see what shows up. The book is once again in print so you should pick it up at your local book store.
I disagree about it being technically dated. The terms are a bit odd, but aren't wrong. The concepts are spot on. In the story the police have reason to suspect people of cybercrimes if they have too much storage space so a guy has a NAS hiding under his house. The terms aren't quit right but in todays world, but the views of the police in the story are the same as how RIAA views a teenager with a few 120+ gig drives. The story was published in 1981.
I recently picked up John von Neumans "The Computer and the Brain" from 1958 and he uses terms such as "organs" for what today would be called modules or subroutines and "participants" as a term for a jump or loop target. Like Vinge's book the conecpts are correct but the terms are not modern.
If you think of wather as a mostly dampened system you will find that in the winter and summer its cycle is long but in the sping and fall it approaches 2 to 3 days. In the transtion when the cycle would be 6 to 8 days it does tend to gets streched or shrunk to fit the week and the result is once it starts raining on the weekends, it will keep doing it for several more weeks.
Now prices for T3's are approaching or are less than T1 prices. A medium sized ISP could be paying $50/megabit for anything over say 5mb links. The local loop charges could be less than $400/mo depending on the area. On an WISP list someone mentioned that its cheaper to break out a T3 and a T1 and the T1 customers are more likly to default on the bill and thats pushing T3 prices down. I don't know when your prices are from but about two years ago a client bought a 45mb link for $6000/mo.
Microsoft made bad software and they will get sued for it. This flaw isn't a direct flaw (read Naders Unsafe at Any Speed about the Corvair) but an indirect flaw (Pintos that went boom after being hit). There are two different classes of product irresponsibility and MS is clearly guilty because they didn't do everything in their power to stop this problem and it lead to direct financial damages to others. They are going to get sued and they will not win.
In Australia, the big problem was the excessive abouts people ended up paying when their links went full thottle and the ISP is clicking away at $.20/megabyte. That is a result of giving Telstra too much power and clueless mangment of the entire telcom regulations and that is mostly Sen Alston's fault. What I think would be interesting is get enough people for a class action aginst MS and tell them you won't sue if they get Alston out of his current job. I'm not sure what would happen, but it would be fun to watch from the sidelines.
They claim its becasue of the huge costs of running the underseas cables. In NZ that doesn't explain the .02/mb for NZ traffic over the 500m. All the compaines that run underseas cables have been replacing their transponders to reduce their expenses. If they put in new transponders they can go up to 150km between them where the old ones were needed ever 20km. When they upgrade the transponders they get a gain out of the fiber in the order of 1000x or even more. There was already a glut of bandwidth between the US, NZ and Aus before the upgrades started. Tyco also appears to be putting down a new cable from Guam.
I've been working on starting a WISP in both NZ and AUS and its be an interesting situation. My base station for a kiwi town is stuck in customs in Australia. Australia requires a $10,000/yr telecomuniations license if you sell network services but for that you get the rights to dig holes anyplace you want.
In some areas I could provide a typical home users 10 gig/mo of broadband for a cost of about $18/mo. That includes the upstream pipes but not their radio, installation, tech support or the stupid telecom license.
NZ has a bit of a problem with their phone switches in that they used a model that isn't used anywhere else in the world. That chould cause some price increase over other systems but since they use the same phones as the rest of the world, it can't be that bad.
Thats common in law suits, you go after the group that can exert pressure to get the results you want but has little to gain by winning. The result is a settelment and then Apple, Dell and Gateway tell Seagate that they will only buy drives that are labled in some way. The result is Seagate caves in to its largest buyers. If they went after Seagate directly, then Seagate would have a very strong reason to keep with their current system since it makes their drives look bigger and would cost them a great deal to change and they have US law behind them about SI. Remember US law says SI the system of measurement even if no one but the scientist and drug dealers use the metric system.
Who cares what the size across the glass envelope is -- I wanna know how big my screen is, dammit!
Its like air plane tickets tell you when the plane leaves. There are only two people on board that care when it leaves. Nearly everyone else needs to know when they must be there to check in but its been that way for years so it continues and decreases flexability. The airlines can't easily let people know they need to be there a bit early because its a busy time and a monitor company can't roll out improvments in their glass effecency since now that 19" monitor is 18.9".
Hasn't anyone looked at the syntax for /etc/inittab and wondered why there is a name in field 1? The init spec allowed other keywords in field 3 to allow make like dependencies of the things named by the 1st field. This was to get around makes one-way dependencies since shutdown tends to need to work in a different order which isn't always the reverse of how they were started up.
Today on a road I used to drive nearly every had had someone shot. This is very odd for Australia and the hand gun used was found at the scene. I wonder if it was road rage. Considering there are about 100,000 clueless drivers driving that road every day, it wouldn't surprise me. Its a top quailty road and over 95% of the people are driving under the speed limit of 100km an hour. Its a road safty experts wet dream and its only 4 times more deadly than any highway like it anywhere in the world. Nothing like people driving on the highway at 1/2 the speed limit to keep things moving smoothly.
Have you had french wine? ick...
Its interesting the every culture that doesn't have a problem with suicide has strict penalties for the family if they hurt others while offing themselves. Maybe its time for that to come around to other places.
Parents should be criminally responsible for the actions of their offspring. That would fix most of these kinds of problems but most of the world is tring to get to the point where the mother of young kids is working full time and not being a mother and that results in millions of f*cked up kids.
I didn't read the article because I just got an urgent importaint message.
I just got this email saying the bell company was about to put a $50 per month tax on all modems. We must write congress at once to stop this. Most of us can afford to call BBSes if this goes through so write a letter now!
I have never seen a vehicle for the general market that didn't have a ground clearance that wasn't a bit less than 1/2 the wheel diameter. The extra height does is help move the center of gravity up and anyone that passed physics would know what that means.
If id's games always blow you away, your not pulling the trigger soon enough.
I know about 10 people that routinely look over sendmail. Its has been checked and rechecked by more people than any other bit of code with the possible exception of the linux kernel. It still has problems but it has resulted in lots of examples of what not to do. Most of the race conditions that are found in other programs (and still exist it many complex programs) were 1st found in sendmail.
Remember most of the sendmail patches over the last two decades are to workaround bugs in the OS or external delivery agents or the interfaces. Those classes of bugs are excluded from the reward.
One in a million...
:-)
Millions of people every day play that "one in a million" chance with their local lottry.
Whats more interesting is what are the odds of winning the lottery without buying a ticket? Its not zero but there seem to be about 20 people who have won major prizes and were given a ticket or found one.
How about that special person that is one in a millon? That means their are about 6000 just like them
Until we have some way to cope with a real threat, it should be beaten into the general public that big stuff falls out of the sky and does very bad things to most of the living creatures on earth.
America has great infastructure thanks to scaremongering of the cold war. There are parallel pipelines through most of the country, there are very good roads in places that could never justify the cost of an Interstate highway. The highways are there only because of the threat of the evil commies back years ago and the pipelines are a result of parinoia of Japanese spys from WW2. If the congress gets confused enough about the issue there might be some money to fund it but right now I'm guessing over 75% of congress thinks that "God will not let this happen to us".
There are two sides to this:
1) I don't buy sun hardware for the fluff (java is fluff). I buy sun hardware to run solaris and thats it. I choose sun because in the past I could get upgrades for a nominal fee and when I need more hardware, I order another box and it comes with the latest os and it plays nice with other stuff on my network. I bet you can't name 10 features of solaris 9 that I use that sunos 4.1.4 didn't have. If sun gets too out of hand, I can always run freebsd on the sun hardware but then why do I buy sun hardware if I don't get the reliability of the good mix between the os and the equipment.
2) If I get staroffice per user and all the normal crud the PC users get, then its a great deal but until I see a solid version of something to replace Act and an accounting system, the windows PCs stay.
There is no money in software. Its an art and like any art, after it stops being trendy, there is no cash in it. Just ask your local painter or sculputure author or musician if you need a clue about how much money is in arts. There is money is selling hardware and the software is just a cost of doing business. Any company that fails to understand that won't be here in 20 years. For those that are going to say "look at MS", look at where they make their money, they sell software to hardware vendors that didn't want to do that themselves.
I disagree about health care. By the time I'm in the geriatric ward, there won't be enough doctors and I expect a typical doctors exam will be thanks to a web cam and a doc in a different part of the world. The question is why wait, maybe I could start a company to do that today.
You mean like Egypt where its easier to get a phone along the Nile than it is to get clean water?