Phone-to-Mac Bluetooth really is superb. Caller ID is displayed on-screen. SMS can be sent directly from the computer. You can dial the phone from Address Book. iCal and Address Book sync to the phone. And it was a cinch to configure GPRS Internet access. It works so well... on the Mac.
I've been using a Bluetooth-enabled phone (Nokia 3650) for a month or so, and I've tried to get it working with three different Windows-based computers (98, XP Home, and XP Professional). It's absolutely a crapshoot and the dice are loaded against you.
On XP I had an absolute nightmare of installing 3Com's crappy Bluetooth stack, rebooting whenever Bluetooth got confused and "lost track" of the phone, fiddling with services that simulate a serial port, Outlook add-ins that don't work half the time, blah blah blah. I can see why Bluetooth has a reputation for being difficult on that platform.
The Linux hit appears to come from an Akamai server, which is a distributed cache, under contract by Microsoft. You can bet the actual Windows Update servers are in fact running Windows.
Actually, that's pretty good, since the Standard for Robot Exclusion was proposed in 1994. I'd say IBM "understood" it several years before most people did.
You're partly right. StuffIt was the main compression format until OS X came along, but it's not the only format that preserves resource forks.
Today you'll mainly see.dmg (disk image) format, which features compression, optional encryption, and preserves resource forks. Also common are.pkg (a compressed installer, which can include files with resource forks) and.tar.gz files (I don't think they preserve resource forks).
The way to have made the "golden dollar" successful would be to use it in daily transactions.
Most people don't get coins from a bank. You get paper bills from your bank, but almost all the coins you have came as change from a retail transaction.
No retailers that I know of were using the golden dollar in change. If the Treasury had teamed up with a high-profile retailer like McDonalds or Safeway it would have been much more successful and others would have followed suit.
The link you have says this was proposed, it does not say nor can I find any evidence that it was ever enacted.
In this (interesting) discussion from the House of Representatives in 2000, they talk about the current state of anti-counterfeit technology and mention that some copiers "scar" or refuse to print bills -- and discussion of implementing this in scanners too -- but there is no mention of serial number tracking.
Unfortunately Snopes hasn't said anything on the subject yet.
Posted to SDF message board by the owner of NWLink:
For starters let me say that I fully support SDF and what they are doing as a long time net user and admin of public access unix boxes. Having been the victim of multiple attacks over the past 15 years I know how much of a pain they are.
Over the past 3 weeks SDF has been attacked 3 times that we can document, we believe that one more network related issue was directed towards them as well but we were not able track down the destination while it was occurring.
Yesterday morning as in the other events we shut down SDFs port and had the IP blocked at each of our backbone providers (UUNet, Verio %26 ELI). This effectively shutdown our entire customer base while the Distributed Denial of Service attack was under way and until we had the ip blocked. During and Following these attacks we receive notice from our large line customers that have Quality of Service provisions in their contracts that they want credits.
These credits are somewhat substantial and which we are contractually obligated to provide. We have issued over $30K in credits over the past 3 weeks when these attacks occur. This coupled with the customers that cancel because of their inability to use the service they are paying for has caused more then a little harm to my business.
Steven has full access to the equipment at this time, we are not holding it hostage as the webpage page maintains. In fact we suggested he go to Semaphore directly, this is where we have our network equipment in Seattle. This was following a move on Thursday from our old Bellevue location. He acknowledged to me in a phone call a few minutes ago that he is working with them to get a contract signed. It is going to cost more, however I suspect the price that he is paying to them is more then fair for his bandwidth usage. What NWlink was charging was an excellent deal for the bandwidth being used.
Steven explained to me that he was quite surprised by the direction this had taken when I spoke to him a short time ago. He knew what we did and why we did it. I to am sorry to see any customer go but had no choice in this matter to keep our other customers functional who pay the bills and salarys of my staff.
Doug Palin CEO
Re:Easy to get rid of a company you don't like
on
SDF Punted, Due to DDOS
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Doug Palin, owner of NWLink, posted his explanation to the Lonestar message board (I won't Slashdot it, you can find it yourself).
NWLink (aka Pacifier aka Europa) has tens of thousands of customers here in the Northwest, including me, and the DoS effectively shut down their entire customer base -- 3 times over the past 3 weeks.
Either they were going to get complaints from one customer, lonestar.org, or they were going to get complaints from thousands of other customers (many of whom they had to pay monetary damages to make up for the loss of service). I can put up with my Internet access being cut off once, twice, but the 3rd time it happens I'm going to seriously consider switching providers. NWLink did what they had to do to save most of their customer base.
You don't just need 10-digit dialing, you need 11-digit dialing because 11-digit dialing is deterministic. For example, say you are visiting another city and someone gives you a phone number to call -- an area code you don't recognize. In the US there is no way to be sure you are dialing the number correctly.
To properly dial a number in the traditional US system, you have to know: (1) what area code you are in now, (2) what area code you are dialing, (3) the physical location of the number you are calling relative to where you are now, (4) the inter-LATA boundaries of the area you are in.
Numbers in the same area code may be long-distance (requiring 11-digit dialing) or not (requiring 7-digit dialing). Traditionally, you would try it one way -- if it didn't work, try it the other way.
With mandatory (or even optional) 11-digit dialing for local numbers you can now dial a number and know for sure that it is going through. For example, you can program your notebook's modem to call your local ISP using 11-digit dialing and it will work no matter where in the country you are (even from home).
The problem is unique to North America: most countries require you to dial an access code before the phone number, such as 0 before domestic calls in Europe. Effectively that works the same way as 11-digit dialing will work here.
They don't use UPC codes outside of the United States and Canada either.
...which is a problem because almost everyone else uses EAN codes. North America is a large market, but not large enough for some companies. Ace Hardware for example had a hard time getting its suppliers to re-label their products with UPCs "just" for the American market.
So the US and Canada are switching to EAN. Or, technically, to a version of UPC which is compatible with EAN.
If you're a manufacturer using UPCs you've got until Jan. 1, 2005 to switch. Possibly this would be a good time to consider RFID as an alternative.
There are no 2-byte Unicode characters, only encodings (such as UTF-16) which use two or more bytes to represent each character. Some Unicode characters, those not in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), require more than two bytes to represent in UTF-16.
And 7-bit ASCII is a strict subset of UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 encodes each character to one or more bytes, with characters up to 127 defined the same as in ASCII. If your text is strict 7-bit ASCII, it is also a UTF-8 file.
You could also use UTF-32 (UCS-4), which represents each character as 4 bytes, but that is overkill for most applications.
The main problem with multibyte encodings such as Shift-JIS and Big 5 was lead-byte detection: you couldn't jump into the middle of a string and determine if you were looking at the only, first, or second byte of a character. You had to start parsing at the beginning of the string in order to synchronize your character detection. Unicode has done away with this by strictly defining the lead byte ranges in such a way that there is never any ambiguity.
Whoa, Google News links to this story (actually an older version of it) as a headline. Slashdot gathers news from around the web, Google gathers news from Slashdot. How meta is that?
This seems like an exceptionally fragile way to get broadband, after all the ice sheets on which the cable is laid are constantly moving. The Amundsen station itself has moved over the years. Locating and repairing the cable when it inevitably snaps is going to be very expensive.
Unfortunately a microwave-based solution would be overwhelmed by the weather conditions there. And RF probably won't provide enough bandwidth. So they may not have many other options.
The scary thing is, while this sounds absurd to a normal person, this is exactly the logic that broadcasters and advertisers are using.
Eventually, any monopoly will come to believe that it has a "right" to continue to receive income from its business model, even if that model is outdated, superceded by a newer, more innovative one, and rejected by the market. And, by the way, "things are different this time". Yeah, they always are.
Go Craig! There is no fucking "contract" between me and the broadcasters to watch their commercials. The fact that they choose to finance their publicly broadcast product with that type of advertising is not my problem.
And yes, I would be willing to pay a reasonable monthly fee to watch the same programs without commercials.
I am sure it will evolve into a comfortable workstation OS, as Linux is, and I'm sure many folks here use FreeBSD on their desktop on a daily basis. But its heart and soul is in the server realm where things like sound and CD ripping don't really matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Phone-to-Mac Bluetooth apparently is superb.
Phone-to-Mac Bluetooth really is superb. Caller ID is displayed on-screen. SMS can be sent directly from the computer. You can dial the phone from Address Book. iCal and Address Book sync to the phone. And it was a cinch to configure GPRS Internet access. It works so well... on the Mac.
I've been using a Bluetooth-enabled phone (Nokia 3650) for a month or so, and I've tried to get it working with three different Windows-based computers (98, XP Home, and XP Professional). It's absolutely a crapshoot and the dice are loaded against you.
On XP I had an absolute nightmare of installing 3Com's crappy Bluetooth stack, rebooting whenever Bluetooth got confused and "lost track" of the phone, fiddling with services that simulate a serial port, Outlook add-ins that don't work half the time, blah blah blah. I can see why Bluetooth has a reputation for being difficult on that platform.
The Linux hit appears to come from an Akamai server, which is a distributed cache, under contract by Microsoft. You can bet the actual Windows Update servers are in fact running Windows.
Actually, that's pretty good, since the Standard for Robot Exclusion was proposed in 1994. I'd say IBM "understood" it several years before most people did.
You're partly right. StuffIt was the main compression format until OS X came along, but it's not the only format that preserves resource forks.
Today you'll mainly see .dmg (disk image) format, which features compression, optional encryption, and preserves resource forks. Also common are .pkg (a compressed installer, which can include files with resource forks) and .tar.gz files (I don't think they preserve resource forks).
And some folks still use Stuffit .sit files.
The way to have made the "golden dollar" successful would be to use it in daily transactions.
Most people don't get coins from a bank. You get paper bills from your bank, but almost all the coins you have came as change from a retail transaction.
No retailers that I know of were using the golden dollar in change. If the Treasury had teamed up with a high-profile retailer like McDonalds or Safeway it would have been much more successful and others would have followed suit.
When's the last time they actually printed a $2 bill?
1996 (series 1995)
The link you have says this was proposed, it does not say nor can I find any evidence that it was ever enacted.
In this (interesting) discussion from the House of Representatives in 2000, they talk about the current state of anti-counterfeit technology and mention that some copiers "scar" or refuse to print bills -- and discussion of implementing this in scanners too -- but there is no mention of serial number tracking.
Unfortunately Snopes hasn't said anything on the subject yet.
Posted to SDF message board by the owner of NWLink:
Doug Palin, owner of NWLink, posted his explanation to the Lonestar message board (I won't Slashdot it, you can find it yourself).
NWLink (aka Pacifier aka Europa) has tens of thousands of customers here in the Northwest, including me, and the DoS effectively shut down their entire customer base -- 3 times over the past 3 weeks.
Either they were going to get complaints from one customer, lonestar.org, or they were going to get complaints from thousands of other customers (many of whom they had to pay monetary damages to make up for the loss of service). I can put up with my Internet access being cut off once, twice, but the 3rd time it happens I'm going to seriously consider switching providers. NWLink did what they had to do to save most of their customer base.
You don't just need 10-digit dialing, you need 11-digit dialing because 11-digit dialing is deterministic. For example, say you are visiting another city and someone gives you a phone number to call -- an area code you don't recognize. In the US there is no way to be sure you are dialing the number correctly.
To properly dial a number in the traditional US system, you have to know: (1) what area code you are in now, (2) what area code you are dialing, (3) the physical location of the number you are calling relative to where you are now, (4) the inter-LATA boundaries of the area you are in.
Numbers in the same area code may be long-distance (requiring 11-digit dialing) or not (requiring 7-digit dialing). Traditionally, you would try it one way -- if it didn't work, try it the other way.
With mandatory (or even optional) 11-digit dialing for local numbers you can now dial a number and know for sure that it is going through. For example, you can program your notebook's modem to call your local ISP using 11-digit dialing and it will work no matter where in the country you are (even from home).
The problem is unique to North America: most countries require you to dial an access code before the phone number, such as 0 before domestic calls in Europe. Effectively that works the same way as 11-digit dialing will work here.
That's right, it costs $50 million for RFIDs to track half a billion palettes.
Were you thinking that was expensive?
...which is a problem because almost everyone else uses EAN codes. North America is a large market, but not large enough for some companies. Ace Hardware for example had a hard time getting its suppliers to re-label their products with UPCs "just" for the American market.
So the US and Canada are switching to EAN. Or, technically, to a version of UPC which is compatible with EAN.
If you're a manufacturer using UPCs you've got until Jan. 1, 2005 to switch. Possibly this would be a good time to consider RFID as an alternative.
Just make sure you're still pingable as that is how a lot of DHCP servers test for an address in use.
There are no 2-byte Unicode characters, only encodings (such as UTF-16) which use two or more bytes to represent each character. Some Unicode characters, those not in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), require more than two bytes to represent in UTF-16.
And 7-bit ASCII is a strict subset of UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 encodes each character to one or more bytes, with characters up to 127 defined the same as in ASCII. If your text is strict 7-bit ASCII, it is also a UTF-8 file.
You could also use UTF-32 (UCS-4), which represents each character as 4 bytes, but that is overkill for most applications.
The main problem with multibyte encodings such as Shift-JIS and Big 5 was lead-byte detection: you couldn't jump into the middle of a string and determine if you were looking at the only, first, or second byte of a character. You had to start parsing at the beginning of the string in order to synchronize your character detection. Unicode has done away with this by strictly defining the lead byte ranges in such a way that there is never any ambiguity.
Whoa, Google News links to this story (actually an older version of it) as a headline. Slashdot gathers news from around the web, Google gathers news from Slashdot. How meta is that?
And finally, finding a break in the fiber wouldn't be too hard, ever heard of a time-delay reflectometer?
It will tell you the distance to the break, but it won't help you physically locate the S-curved, sunk-in-the-ice, location-shifted, cable!
Unless you have GPS transmitters attached to it. Hmmm...
T-Mobile == Deutsche Telekom
One of the world's largest phone companies. Currently looking to unload the US portion of T-Mobile (aka "Voicestream") on AT&T or Cingular.
Pony up $250 million and I'm sure ATTBI would be happy to provide you with broadband, too.
This seems like an exceptionally fragile way to get broadband, after all the ice sheets on which the cable is laid are constantly moving. The Amundsen station itself has moved over the years. Locating and repairing the cable when it inevitably snaps is going to be very expensive.
Unfortunately a microwave-based solution would be overwhelmed by the weather conditions there. And RF probably won't provide enough bandwidth. So they may not have many other options.
You might not discover cold fusion in your garage, bug you might create a breeder reactor in your garden shed after school.
The scary thing is, while this sounds absurd to a normal person, this is exactly the logic that broadcasters and advertisers are using.
Eventually, any monopoly will come to believe that it has a "right" to continue to receive income from its business model, even if that model is outdated, superceded by a newer, more innovative one, and rejected by the market. And, by the way, "things are different this time". Yeah, they always are.
Nate
Go Craig! There is no fucking "contract" between me and the broadcasters to watch their commercials. The fact that they choose to finance their publicly broadcast product with that type of advertising is not my problem.
And yes, I would be willing to pay a reasonable monthly fee to watch the same programs without commercials.
Nate
C# is an ECMA standard. How much more open can you get? Download your copy of C# for Linux today.
Now if you were talking about the .NET Framework, then you'd have a point. While much of the Framework is standardized, many things (esp. the GUI stuff) is not. If you have FreeBSD try Microsoft's release of .NET for FreeBSD, which includes the standardized portions but not the rest.
Nate
You would know, but would your Accounts Payable department know?
I'm probably replying to a troll, but...
FreeBSD is a server OS. Who cares about sound?
I am sure it will evolve into a comfortable workstation OS, as Linux is, and I'm sure many folks here use FreeBSD on their desktop on a daily basis. But its heart and soul is in the server realm where things like sound and CD ripping don't really matter.
The FreeBSD slogan is... "The Power To Serve."