Envisional Ltd. is a company that does very little at all, if anything. They 'monitor intellectual-property rights violations'? They'd be more aptly labled 'master serach engine operators'.
Based on what I've been told by a friend of mine who works there, that's roughly what they are. They employ a number of people who have been researching information retrieval. They can run more sophisticated searches than ordinary search engines, because they don't try to get a quick answer. I don't know whether or when they chose to specialise in looking for IPR violations.
It is also confusing that indymedia is just as much populated by anarchists as it is by the nonviolent "peaceful" protestors.
There are troublemakers who call themselves anarchists, but they're still just troublemakers. See The Anarchist FAQ if you want to know what peaceful anarchists mean by the word. Personally I don't buy into the philosophy but I recognise that anarchists have been misrepresented.
I think you've missed an important part about wireless versus "standard" phones. A standard phone costs about $20/month, unlimited calls, with consistent quality.
In the US, yes. In the UK it would be about £6/month plus an average call cost of perhaps 2p/min, depending on provider (note: long distance calls cost little if anything more than local calls). Calls to mobiles are too expensive though (about 20p/min). Some ISPs and phone service providers have arrangements to allow unlimited calls for a higher subscription.
On the other hand, a wireless (cellular) phone will cost significantly more for unlimited time, and in metropolitan areas there are significant under-capacity issues, particularly at rush hour and during any type of traffic emergency.
In the UK I'm getting essentially unlimited off-peak calls for only £40/year - much cheaper than a landline. However, calls to other mobile networks are even more expensive than from a landline (about 30p/min) and peak-time calls are expensive. This won't replace a landline, but it's a cheap addition.
When was the last time a land-line call just "dropped" for no reason? And yet we accept that as the norm for cellular calls.
True.
In a nutshell, cellular is still expensive and unreliable compared to more traditional phones. Cellular phone will continue to get better, and hopefully the price will drop.
The drop in price has already happened in the UK, and in other parts of Europe.
This is way over-rated, but since I'm posting not moderating:
First off,
the good things that people have mentioned about cell phones (triangulating position from signal strength to save lives):
no longer necessary in the future--
The FCC's e911 regulation means that mobile phones will now give their location using GPS coordinates so that 911 call centers can locate the phone immediately and accurately.
Cell-phones do not have and are not likely to gain GPS receivers soon. The same techniques are being used for finding the location of cell-phones; the difference is that this can now be done automatically on a routine basis and there are standard means for network operators to pass on this information to parties such as emergency services and location-based information services.
Two:
the article uses the number 900mhz.
We are WAY beyond 900mhz. 900 is giving way to 1800 for Europe/Middle East. In the states, we have as high as 1900mhz -- and it's gonna get higher.
GSM networks outside the US use frequencies around either 900 MHz or 1800 MHz. Neither is 'giving way' to the other; they're just two different bands that were available in most countries' radio spectra, and which are sufficiently far apart that a dual-band handset can be made fairly cheaply. The US PCS band is different because that was what was available.
Europe is largely GSM (which is like TDMA nested in CDMA)
'TDMA' and 'CDMA' are two different techniques of dividing out bandwidth in an efficient way. Confusingly, the terms are also used more specifically for the common IS-54 and IS-95 systems (I could be wrong about those numbers) which are respectively based on those two techniques. GSM is a different TDMA-based system.
The VNC server for Windows is inefficient because it scans the screen for changes rather than working as a display driver and intercepting graphics calls. The original author (hi Tim) couldn't find a way to make it work as a driver in the limited time available to him.
The Mobile Internet Kit includes web clipping for the rest of us. It requires (and includes) OS 3.5 so it's no good for IIIe users, but it works with all the other III, V and m series Palms. Palm sells it for $39.95 + S I got it for £18 (about $26) at an airport shop.
You have misunderstood the use of the ETag field. A server may provide different versions (variants) of a resource depending on request fields such as Accept (accepted types), Accept-Language (accepted languages), or User-Agent. The ETag response field is used to identify the variant that is being returned. The Vary response fields specifies which request fields the server may use in selecting variants of the resource. If a user-agent or proxy needs to fetch a resource, and has one or more variants in its cache (that haven't expired), but the values it would use for the request fields listed in the Vary response field differ from those used to obtain the cached variants, it needs to make a new request from the server. It can use the If-Not-Match request field to avoid re-fetching data if the server selects one of the variants it already has. This is all completely orthogonal to checking for modification of the resource.
The company I used to work for has arrangements with some of its customers to keep its sources (and presumably the custom build tools) in escrow, to be released to the customers in the event of the company's bankruptcy. This would allow them to remove any licence restrictions and possibly to continue development.
That's a stupid way to do things, because later you'll find out that there are bugs in those requirements. There needs to be a way to find that out before the requirements get so large. (Oh, and I suspect that there's a lot of duplication in there, making it extremely difficult to maintain consistency once you start fixing those bugs.)
ASCAP and BMI (the people who collect royalties for radio performance) have voluntarily made their operations work -like- compulsory licenses, where anybody who ponies up a certain amount of money can play a certain amount of music (different rant about how ASCAP and BMI don't pay the people who's music is ACTUALLY played by the people who pay the fees... but they pay the people who are POPULAR *sigh*).
And this works for radio play too - the radio stations play whatever the record companies - sorry, I mean "independent promoters" - pay them to play.
Sometimes its refreshing to be able to choose your own way to do things, and to know that other people like you just want the damn program to work, with a minimum of futzing with things vaguely related to the problem you are solving (i.e., memory management ala C++ -- just how to exceptions and delete interact in a class hierarchy?) Who cares - every app I have written in the past 2 years has not needed to worry about these sorts of vaguely related things - why FORCE me to?
Add a garbage collector to C++ and you'll never need to delete. You may think Perl does the same, but if you introduce a circular reference...oh dear, there's a leak. (I know Perl 6 promises to fix this though.)
That's very silly, because TLDs aren't allowed to start with a digit. This is meant to ensure that domain names are distinguishable from numeric addresses. (Obviously you can't have '2000' in a numeric address. But the rule for distinguishing names and numeric addresses needs to be easy to apply.) These people are fuckwits.
Remember, clock frequency isn't everything. Perhaps it just did very little in one clock cycle. For instance, an instruction that added two registers with n bits (I don't know what the real word size was) might take n+2 cycles whereas on a later computer it would take 1 cycle (or maybe less since it could execute in parallel with another instruction).
People may not use.rhosts, but they may still use IP addresses in tcp.allow/deny, Apache's access.conf, etc. I know I've done this - but it was backed up by a firewall configuration that prevented external spoofing, and I already trusted the other network users enough to be sharing a house with them.
Hijacking the TCP connection underlying an SSH session doesn't allow you to do anything interesting with the session because you don't know the secret key that's being used. All you can usefully do is disrupt the session.
The company I work for develops software for WinCE (among other things) so we use them as test units, demonstration units for salespeople, and as an enticement for people to give us their business cards at shows. It took a long time after the launch to get the first units, but we've managed to buy quite a few since then.
DOS has a lot of overhead - you need to switch into real mode to call it. A database couldn't perform faster under DOS. But it could just use DOS to boot and then take over the entire computer. However, it would need to include a whole load of device drivers. That seems like a lot of work for little gain.
Unless PCS is some general term and TDMA and CDMA in no way like one-another.
Correct. TDMA and CDMA are two incompatible systems for multiplexing radio channels, i.e. making them share radio bandwidth. (Multiplexing allows a band to carry more channels by reducing the bandwidth wasted in guard bands, and it can make the channels less susceptible to narrow-band interference (though TDMA doesn't help as much as CDMA).) There is a phone available in Japan that can operate on both GSM (TDMA-based) and CDPD (CDMA-based), but it's rather expensive and has to be assigned different numbers for the two systems. PCS is a set of services defined by the US FCC that can be implemented by various different mobile phone systems using bands aroudn 1900 MHz: GSM, CDMA IS-95 (aka CDMAone), and TDMA IS-136.
Slashdot Mirror
Based on what I've been told by a friend of mine who works there, that's roughly what they are. They employ a number of people who have been researching information retrieval. They can run more sophisticated searches than ordinary search engines, because they don't try to get a quick answer. I don't know whether or when they chose to specialise in looking for IPR violations.
They should be able to find a local copy of the DTD by its public ID in the local SGML catalogue - that's if it has a public ID, of course.
There are troublemakers who call themselves anarchists, but they're still just troublemakers. See The Anarchist FAQ if you want to know what peaceful anarchists mean by the word. Personally I don't buy into the philosophy but I recognise that anarchists have been misrepresented.
I got that too. Did you ask for that message? I certainly didn't. Please don't support businesses that spam, and don't use this site.
In the US, yes. In the UK it would be about £6/month plus an average call cost of perhaps 2p/min, depending on provider (note: long distance calls cost little if anything more than local calls). Calls to mobiles are too expensive though (about 20p/min). Some ISPs and phone service providers have arrangements to allow unlimited calls for a higher subscription.
In the UK I'm getting essentially unlimited off-peak calls for only £40/year - much cheaper than a landline. However, calls to other mobile networks are even more expensive than from a landline (about 30p/min) and peak-time calls are expensive. This won't replace a landline, but it's a cheap addition.
True.
The drop in price has already happened in the UK, and in other parts of Europe.
This is way over-rated, but since I'm posting not moderating:
Cell-phones do not have and are not likely to gain GPS receivers soon. The same techniques are being used for finding the location of cell-phones; the difference is that this can now be done automatically on a routine basis and there are standard means for network operators to pass on this information to parties such as emergency services and location-based information services.
GSM networks outside the US use frequencies around either 900 MHz or 1800 MHz. Neither is 'giving way' to the other; they're just two different bands that were available in most countries' radio spectra, and which are sufficiently far apart that a dual-band handset can be made fairly cheaply. The US PCS band is different because that was what was available.
'TDMA' and 'CDMA' are two different techniques of dividing out bandwidth in an efficient way. Confusingly, the terms are also used more specifically for the common IS-54 and IS-95 systems (I could be wrong about those numbers) which are respectively based on those two techniques. GSM is a different TDMA-based system.
Some PCS networks (Cingular, VoiceStream, maybe others) use GSM, but in a different frequency band from the rest of the world.
The VNC server for Windows is inefficient because it scans the screen for changes rather than working as a display driver and intercepting graphics calls. The original author (hi Tim) couldn't find a way to make it work as a driver in the limited time available to him.
The Mobile Internet Kit includes web clipping for the rest of us. It requires (and includes) OS 3.5 so it's no good for IIIe users, but it works with all the other III, V and m series Palms. Palm sells it for $39.95 + S I got it for £18 (about $26) at an airport shop.
In the UK the forms are almost always worded the other way round - you have to tick the box to opt out. Still, it's not difficult to do.
You have misunderstood the use of the ETag field. A server may provide different versions (variants) of a resource depending on request fields such as Accept (accepted types), Accept-Language (accepted languages), or User-Agent. The ETag response field is used to identify the variant that is being returned. The Vary response fields specifies which request fields the server may use in selecting variants of the resource. If a user-agent or proxy needs to fetch a resource, and has one or more variants in its cache (that haven't expired), but the values it would use for the request fields listed in the Vary response field differ from those used to obtain the cached variants, it needs to make a new request from the server. It can use the If-Not-Match request field to avoid re-fetching data if the server selects one of the variants it already has. This is all completely orthogonal to checking for modification of the resource.
The company I used to work for has arrangements with some of its customers to keep its sources (and presumably the custom build tools) in escrow, to be released to the customers in the event of the company's bankruptcy. This would allow them to remove any licence restrictions and possibly to continue development.
That's a stupid way to do things, because later you'll find out that there are bugs in those requirements. There needs to be a way to find that out before the requirements get so large. (Oh, and I suspect that there's a lot of duplication in there, making it extremely difficult to maintain consistency once you start fixing those bugs.)
And this works for radio play too - the radio stations play whatever the record companies - sorry, I mean "independent promoters" - pay them to play.
They actually used PDP-10s - the same kind of computer they used at Harvard to develop BASIC for MITS using their own cross-assembler and emulator.
Paul Allen was at one time giving out accounts on a PDP-10 clone.
Add a garbage collector to C++ and you'll never need to delete. You may think Perl does the same, but if you introduce a circular reference...oh dear, there's a leak. (I know Perl 6 promises to fix this though.)
That's very silly, because TLDs aren't allowed to start with a digit. This is meant to ensure that domain names are distinguishable from numeric addresses. (Obviously you can't have '2000' in a numeric address. But the rule for distinguishing names and numeric addresses needs to be easy to apply.) These people are fuckwits.
So all we really need to do to use this "alternate root" is to add "xs2.net" to our list of domain suffixes to search.
They have clutch pedals for automatic gearboxes? That's weird.
Remember, clock frequency isn't everything. Perhaps it just did very little in one clock cycle. For instance, an instruction that added two registers with n bits (I don't know what the real word size was) might take n+2 cycles whereas on a later computer it would take 1 cycle (or maybe less since it could execute in parallel with another instruction).
People may not use .rhosts, but they may still use IP addresses in tcp.allow/deny, Apache's access.conf, etc. I know I've done this - but it was backed up by a firewall configuration that prevented external spoofing, and I already trusted the other network users enough to be sharing a house with them.
Hijacking the TCP connection underlying an SSH session doesn't allow you to do anything interesting with the session because you don't know the secret key that's being used. All you can usefully do is disrupt the session.
The company I work for develops software for WinCE (among other things) so we use them as test units, demonstration units for salespeople, and as an enticement for people to give us their business cards at shows. It took a long time after the launch to get the first units, but we've managed to buy quite a few since then.
DOS has a lot of overhead - you need to switch into real mode to call it. A database couldn't perform faster under DOS. But it could just use DOS to boot and then take over the entire computer. However, it would need to include a whole load of device drivers. That seems like a lot of work for little gain.
Correct. TDMA and CDMA are two incompatible systems for multiplexing radio channels, i.e. making them share radio bandwidth. (Multiplexing allows a band to carry more channels by reducing the bandwidth wasted in guard bands, and it can make the channels less susceptible to narrow-band interference (though TDMA doesn't help as much as CDMA).) There is a phone available in Japan that can operate on both GSM (TDMA-based) and CDPD (CDMA-based), but it's rather expensive and has to be assigned different numbers for the two systems. PCS is a set of services defined by the US FCC that can be implemented by various different mobile phone systems using bands aroudn 1900 MHz: GSM, CDMA IS-95 (aka CDMAone), and TDMA IS-136.