Things are even more sketchy (and more varied among carriers) when you're talking small to medium cities, in the 50k to 300k population range and their surroundings. I live in a town of about 50k and formerly lived in a city of 120k which is a state capital.
Further out, like a cross-country road trip, you'd find AT&T has no actual coverage at all once you're just a few miles off the interstate highway system. Verizon and US Cellular do well in many of those areas using CDMA, while Sprint and T-Mobile don't do any better (and sometimes worse) than AT&T.
In my town, Sprint (and Virgin since it uses Sprint's network) offers 3G while AT&T, US Cellular, and Verizon don't. I don't recall for sure if T-Mobile does, but I think they do.
Verizon offers service according to their map in my town, but I can't order it online. There's a store about 45 miles away that will activate service for people in my area, though.
AT&T actually kicked my sister and brother-in-law off their service because their house was only serviced by AT&T's roaming partners, and they're less than 30 miles from where AT&T keeps trying to sell me their great nationwide coverage.
If you plan to travel outside the major metropolitan areas (even outside of fairly large cities like St. Louis, Indianapolis, Kansas City, or Cincinnati by just a half hour or so on the highway) then try to find out what locals have to say about the phone services where you're planning to travel.
As for me, I'm with US Cellular and happy with the coverage. My wife is with AT&T. We can get AT&T to port my number to their service, but we'd still need two plans.
AT&T can't figure out how to put us on a family plan because we have numbers from two different markets in Illinois and live in a third. Her number is from southern Illinois area code 618, which was assign to the area in 1947. She lived in Illinois when she got it, and we live in Illinois now. They keep telling us it's a Missouri number and that part of the problem is that our numbers cross state boundaries. My number is from an adjacent area code. Go figure.
Stars work as can, for much travel, road signs, maps, satellite GPS, and even GPS-like information from towers such as cell phone towers. Triangulate your position from multiple sources. If we have trouble maintaining one big natural global reference point, why wouldn't we invest in many more local reference points than we have now?
Of course the electorate is largely stupid and lazy. For one, it's made up of people and that's probably enough to assume some stupidity and laziness. For another, if people weren't stupid, lazy, greedy, rude, aggressive slobs we would've never decided we needed a government to protect us from one another and enforce rules of behavior. Problem solved: go somewhere your life can only be affected by smart, friendly, honest, hard-working people.
We still have that choice in the US, which is why we bitch about the bad laws and try to fix them. People still die trying to get to the US or other countries with bad laws which at least let you bitch about them or turn around and leave again,.
Are you suggesting the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the US Constitution, which rather plainly state the government has no right to force us to give them data privileged to ourselves and our doctors? I agree.
Also, you could be stating that providing healthcare coverage isn't regulating interstate commerce and isn't enumerated as a power of the government. I think that's a hard argument to make these days, as that horse left the barn years ago.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Yet we as a society train lawyers to be research librarians first and foremost because the US Code is a CD full of information. Good luck with never running afoul of the law you'll never be able to hold even a decent summary of in your head. BTW, the US already houses more inmates for state and federal crimes as a percentage of population than almost any other country on the planet. Do we really need more reasons to lock people up?
A chalk board and chalk is a form of RAM. Damned if it's going to be part of my main system memory, though. I don't think FRAPS would even bother giving me a reading.
I think the people worried about a few hundred config files wasting most 4K of space each (which their FS probably does unless they've already researched this issue and gone with one that tail packs) just don't want to admit that most of their files are 4G porn DVD images.
Have you tried XP Mode for Windows 7? I've not had any problems, and your XP just has to deal with the image file. No direct access to the drive means the drive's characteristics are moot.
If you're dual booting because you've had problems, please let us know what to watch out for. If you just haven't tried XP Mode, you might want to try it if you have the virtualization support necessary.
Mandriva vows 5 years minimum of package updates for server editions. They only offer 12 months on GUI thingys and 18 months for the base system for the desktop editions, but a new version comes out twice a year. You can get the new versions of the desktop every year for a few tens of dollars with tech support or free with on-your-own support (although their forums answer pretty much anything their knowledge base doesn't). Most, but not all, software not part of the distro just works after an upgrade. Per-incident support can be bought for downloaded versions starting at $33 per incident and getting cheaper if you buy bundles. I've never needed to contact their support department, so I can't comment on the quality of their support staff.
Red Hat charges a good deal for support, but you get really good support. At least you did a decade ago.
I've not dealt with the paid support for Novell or Canonical, makers of Suse and Ubuntu. I can't comment on them.
AppleCare is expensive, but I've known people to have new Macs overnighted as loaners so they could ship whole systems to Apple for diagnosing application crashes and still keep using their other apps. Apple's support for PPC suffered near the end of the end-of-life period IMO, though. Beware of Apple products that barely precede a major shift in lines.
Try Microsoft's support on for size when you buy a PC loaded with OEM Windows from a manufacturer that has a one-year warranty. The only thing you'll get for nine of your ten years are updates and headaches. Guess how most people get Windows?
I'm not saying Microsoft's support isn't worthwhile. I'm just saying it's not as outstanding compared to everything else as some are saying. Most other OS vendors offer their support, such as it is, even when the OS is sold installed. MS's OEM pricing with the PC vendor required to do the customer contact part of support means MS isn't even responsible for most copies of Windows. You don't know how good your Windows support is until you have tried contacting your PC vendor.
That really depends on how many applications you're supporting on top of the OS, whether or not they are also OSS, what outside support you have through contracts, the automation and centralization you have in place for administration of the desktops, the quality of your distro, and the technical sophistication of your users.
Imagine a scenario in which you have a solid, stable distro with good vendor support or in which your own support staff is expert and you only have to support a handful of fairly straightforward and well-implemented apps. A customer service rep often needs no more than a browser and maybe a simple word processor, for example. In this scenario, you're not likely to see more support costs for Linux, Firefox, and OpenOffice Writer than for Windows, IE, and MS Word. If you can give them AbiWord or KWrite you may get lower costs.
That would be true if some ISPs weren't still supplying just a bridge to part of their customers. Those ISPs would at least have to move everyone to routers or tunnel the customer's IPv4.
The first word that popped in my head was "ghettoization". They may be trying to show their disdain for the department and trying to bust some egos. However, they may be trying to actually help. Many IT guys complain about being required to wear nice professional attire then getting it stained, filthy, torn, and scuffed working below floors, above ceiling tiles, under desks, and up against cheap computer cases and racks. Maybe there's a problem with people breaking the dress code right now, and this is a (misguided) attempt to address that. All of these are questions I'd ask before I made a serious judgment about the situation.
I'm sure many of those people are going to need a hotel room again in the future. Guess which company they'll remember fondly. How much that means is hard to tell and differs from customer to customer. If I had to bet, I'd put money on the goodwill among those customers plus the positive press outweighing the cost of the mistake across the chain as a whole. That particular property might not make it back individually, but chains need to support the chain image. One or two bad chain experiences can cost the entire chain a person's business for life. Good ones don't carry as much weight over time, but it should help for a while at many of the chain's properties.
This is a pretty long string of "ifs", but it might be an idea for that Iowa schools that wants to use technical means to cut down on phone use during class.
if it blocks the radiation effectively enough to prevent reception sufficiently
if you require the kids to have their phone in it during class under normal circumstances
if you're willing to enforce the rule
if not all the kids are sufficiently sneaky to keep an unshielded phone from being found
... then this sort of Faraday enclosure, even if it's just a small separate bag and not part of the clothing, might fit the needs of schools that wish to prevent general disruption but still allow emergency use of the phones and to allow use of them between classes or at lunch.
At least dihydrogen monoxide can be dangerous, unlike 2.4 Ghz low-power equipment. It's known to fill in low spaces and force out breathable air. People with more dihydrogen monoxide in their lungs than air tend can suffer brain damage and even death. An unconscious human can asphyxiate in even a shallow pool of this stuff. It's so common, in fact, that there's a special word for it. It's called "drowning".
Emergency workers would likely be the ones to respond to an emergency. People fall down stairs, assault other people, have critical asthma attacks, get stung by insects to which they have allergies, have heart attacks, and get food poisoning even if they are school students or faculty. If the school catches on fire or there is a tornado (fairly likely in Iowa compared to most of the world) and the kids can't call their parents, there will be hell to pay.
What makes you think, exactly, that all Slashdot geeks are CS geeks? Face it, there were technical-minded people long before your precious 20 computer languages were written. I'm willing to bet some of the geeks here are geeks of "sciences" that actually contain science.
Now, as for bragging about having a girlfriend... wow. Just, wow. You think you're defeating a comedic stereotype by feeling the need to pitch yourself as a brave explorer breaking out of it for the first time? That just proves how sad you, personally, really are. People are all individuals and are not defined by stereotypes. Stereotypes exist because there are general tendencies among certain groups which certain members fit to greater or lesser extents. Maybe you should have your liberal arts girlfriend explain Western social culture to you some time.
Do mind the set-aside time for cheese-filled or cheese- topped foods like pizzas and burritos cooked in the microwave, though, because cheese can be a minor danger just from the excess heat. Frozen burritos cooked in the microwave and not allowed to cool properly have been known to cause first and second degree burns on the lips.
The directions call for overheating and then cooling because cooking for any less time might leave frozen spots in foods cooked from frozen, but you really should honor the cool-down times when cooking for the full time stated. I should know. I had a second-degree burn from a tasty El Monterey frozen burrito once. Damned absent-minded scarfing will catch up a person sooner or later.
Slashdot Mirror
Things are even more sketchy (and more varied among carriers) when you're talking small to medium cities, in the 50k to 300k population range and their surroundings. I live in a town of about 50k and formerly lived in a city of 120k which is a state capital.
Further out, like a cross-country road trip, you'd find AT&T has no actual coverage at all once you're just a few miles off the interstate highway system. Verizon and US Cellular do well in many of those areas using CDMA, while Sprint and T-Mobile don't do any better (and sometimes worse) than AT&T.
In my town, Sprint (and Virgin since it uses Sprint's network) offers 3G while AT&T, US Cellular, and Verizon don't. I don't recall for sure if T-Mobile does, but I think they do.
Verizon offers service according to their map in my town, but I can't order it online. There's a store about 45 miles away that will activate service for people in my area, though.
AT&T actually kicked my sister and brother-in-law off their service because their house was only serviced by AT&T's roaming partners, and they're less than 30 miles from where AT&T keeps trying to sell me their great nationwide coverage.
If you plan to travel outside the major metropolitan areas (even outside of fairly large cities like St. Louis, Indianapolis, Kansas City, or Cincinnati by just a half hour or so on the highway) then try to find out what locals have to say about the phone services where you're planning to travel.
As for me, I'm with US Cellular and happy with the coverage. My wife is with AT&T. We can get AT&T to port my number to their service, but we'd still need two plans.
AT&T can't figure out how to put us on a family plan because we have numbers from two different markets in Illinois and live in a third. Her number is from southern Illinois area code 618, which was assign to the area in 1947. She lived in Illinois when she got it, and we live in Illinois now. They keep telling us it's a Missouri number and that part of the problem is that our numbers cross state boundaries. My number is from an adjacent area code. Go figure.
Stars work as can, for much travel, road signs, maps, satellite GPS, and even GPS-like information from towers such as cell phone towers. Triangulate your position from multiple sources. If we have trouble maintaining one big natural global reference point, why wouldn't we invest in many more local reference points than we have now?
I think that explains pages 2 though 743.
Of course the electorate is largely stupid and lazy. For one, it's made up of people and that's probably enough to assume some stupidity and laziness. For another, if people weren't stupid, lazy, greedy, rude, aggressive slobs we would've never decided we needed a government to protect us from one another and enforce rules of behavior. Problem solved: go somewhere your life can only be affected by smart, friendly, honest, hard-working people.
We still have that choice in the US, which is why we bitch about the bad laws and try to fix them. People still die trying to get to the US or other countries with bad laws which at least let you bitch about them or turn around and leave again,.
Do you visit a doctor sometimes? Read this 3,000 page orgy of special-interest pork carved from the swine we call taxpayers.
Are you suggesting the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the US Constitution, which rather plainly state the government has no right to force us to give them data privileged to ourselves and our doctors? I agree.
Also, you could be stating that providing healthcare coverage isn't regulating interstate commerce and isn't enumerated as a power of the government. I think that's a hard argument to make these days, as that horse left the barn years ago.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Yet we as a society train lawyers to be research librarians first and foremost because the US Code is a CD full of information. Good luck with never running afoul of the law you'll never be able to hold even a decent summary of in your head. BTW, the US already houses more inmates for state and federal crimes as a percentage of population than almost any other country on the planet. Do we really need more reasons to lock people up?
A chalk board and chalk is a form of RAM. Damned if it's going to be part of my main system memory, though. I don't think FRAPS would even bother giving me a reading.
I think the people worried about a few hundred config files wasting most 4K of space each (which their FS probably does unless they've already researched this issue and gone with one that tail packs) just don't want to admit that most of their files are 4G porn DVD images.
Have you tried XP Mode for Windows 7? I've not had any problems, and your XP just has to deal with the image file. No direct access to the drive means the drive's characteristics are moot.
If you're dual booting because you've had problems, please let us know what to watch out for. If you just haven't tried XP Mode, you might want to try it if you have the virtualization support necessary.
I'm glad your 1982 Celica is still under warranty. Care to tell us how you conned Toyota into that?
Mandriva vows 5 years minimum of package updates for server editions. They only offer 12 months on GUI thingys and 18 months for the base system for the desktop editions, but a new version comes out twice a year. You can get the new versions of the desktop every year for a few tens of dollars with tech support or free with on-your-own support (although their forums answer pretty much anything their knowledge base doesn't). Most, but not all, software not part of the distro just works after an upgrade. Per-incident support can be bought for downloaded versions starting at $33 per incident and getting cheaper if you buy bundles. I've never needed to contact their support department, so I can't comment on the quality of their support staff.
Red Hat charges a good deal for support, but you get really good support. At least you did a decade ago.
I've not dealt with the paid support for Novell or Canonical, makers of Suse and Ubuntu. I can't comment on them.
AppleCare is expensive, but I've known people to have new Macs overnighted as loaners so they could ship whole systems to Apple for diagnosing application crashes and still keep using their other apps. Apple's support for PPC suffered near the end of the end-of-life period IMO, though. Beware of Apple products that barely precede a major shift in lines.
Try Microsoft's support on for size when you buy a PC loaded with OEM Windows from a manufacturer that has a one-year warranty. The only thing you'll get for nine of your ten years are updates and headaches. Guess how most people get Windows?
I'm not saying Microsoft's support isn't worthwhile. I'm just saying it's not as outstanding compared to everything else as some are saying. Most other OS vendors offer their support, such as it is, even when the OS is sold installed. MS's OEM pricing with the PC vendor required to do the customer contact part of support means MS isn't even responsible for most copies of Windows. You don't know how good your Windows support is until you have tried contacting your PC vendor.
That really depends on how many applications you're supporting on top of the OS, whether or not they are also OSS, what outside support you have through contracts, the automation and centralization you have in place for administration of the desktops, the quality of your distro, and the technical sophistication of your users.
Imagine a scenario in which you have a solid, stable distro with good vendor support or in which your own support staff is expert and you only have to support a handful of fairly straightforward and well-implemented apps. A customer service rep often needs no more than a browser and maybe a simple word processor, for example. In this scenario, you're not likely to see more support costs for Linux, Firefox, and OpenOffice Writer than for Windows, IE, and MS Word. If you can give them AbiWord or KWrite you may get lower costs.
That would be true if some ISPs weren't still supplying just a bridge to part of their customers. Those ISPs would at least have to move everyone to routers or tunnel the customer's IPv4.
The first word that popped in my head was "ghettoization". They may be trying to show their disdain for the department and trying to bust some egos. However, they may be trying to actually help. Many IT guys complain about being required to wear nice professional attire then getting it stained, filthy, torn, and scuffed working below floors, above ceiling tiles, under desks, and up against cheap computer cases and racks. Maybe there's a problem with people breaking the dress code right now, and this is a (misguided) attempt to address that. All of these are questions I'd ask before I made a serious judgment about the situation.
I'm sure many of those people are going to need a hotel room again in the future. Guess which company they'll remember fondly. How much that means is hard to tell and differs from customer to customer. If I had to bet, I'd put money on the goodwill among those customers plus the positive press outweighing the cost of the mistake across the chain as a whole. That particular property might not make it back individually, but chains need to support the chain image. One or two bad chain experiences can cost the entire chain a person's business for life. Good ones don't carry as much weight over time, but it should help for a while at many of the chain's properties.
Or Will Smith?
This is a pretty long string of "ifs", but it might be an idea for that Iowa schools that wants to use technical means to cut down on phone use during class.
At least dihydrogen monoxide can be dangerous, unlike 2.4 Ghz low-power equipment. It's known to fill in low spaces and force out breathable air. People with more dihydrogen monoxide in their lungs than air tend can suffer brain damage and even death. An unconscious human can asphyxiate in even a shallow pool of this stuff. It's so common, in fact, that there's a special word for it. It's called "drowning".
I'd bet at least one of the 1500 students in a typical high school could turn on a cell phone before the principal got back to the jammer switch.
Emergency workers would likely be the ones to respond to an emergency. People fall down stairs, assault other people, have critical asthma attacks, get stung by insects to which they have allergies, have heart attacks, and get food poisoning even if they are school students or faculty. If the school catches on fire or there is a tornado (fairly likely in Iowa compared to most of the world) and the kids can't call their parents, there will be hell to pay.
What makes you think, exactly, that all Slashdot geeks are CS geeks? Face it, there were technical-minded people long before your precious 20 computer languages were written. I'm willing to bet some of the geeks here are geeks of "sciences" that actually contain science.
Now, as for bragging about having a girlfriend... wow. Just, wow. You think you're defeating a comedic stereotype by feeling the need to pitch yourself as a brave explorer breaking out of it for the first time? That just proves how sad you, personally, really are. People are all individuals and are not defined by stereotypes. Stereotypes exist because there are general tendencies among certain groups which certain members fit to greater or lesser extents. Maybe you should have your liberal arts girlfriend explain Western social culture to you some time.
Only when she's home. Sometimes she goes to work to support him or goes out with her new boyfriend, Lily.
Do mind the set-aside time for cheese-filled or cheese- topped foods like pizzas and burritos cooked in the microwave, though, because cheese can be a minor danger just from the excess heat. Frozen burritos cooked in the microwave and not allowed to cool properly have been known to cause first and second degree burns on the lips.
The directions call for overheating and then cooling because cooking for any less time might leave frozen spots in foods cooked from frozen, but you really should honor the cool-down times when cooking for the full time stated. I should know. I had a second-degree burn from a tasty El Monterey frozen burrito once. Damned absent-minded scarfing will catch up a person sooner or later.