Re:GPS - Receive-Only Power Burner; Wireless Syner
on
Advertising Via GPS
·
· Score: 1
emergency services calling in the US; most of the world uses 999
This is a bit off-topic, but where are you getting this from? 999 is used in the UK (IIRC), and quite possibly in other places too, but in general each country has its own emergency number(s). The EU is trying to standardize on 112 for its members, and 112 is already working in some of them, and on all GSM phones. Other than that, I believe that you'll find a variety of numbers used throughout the world.
This machine uses NTSC color encoding, so this would seem to imply future plans for America, and the ability to buy one (and some discs) next time I'm in Japan.
Japan uses NTSC as well, so this fact alone doesn't say much.
I stand corrected... I thought that all GSM phones were limited to 9.6kbps, but I guess I was wrong. How is the higher transfer rate achieved? Are they still using one full rate timeslot but limiting the overhead, or what?
You may want to go with a Nokia handset (6100 series - not the 8800 series) as I understand they have better data throughput than the Ericsson handsets.
No, the transfer rate is limited by the network, not the phone. On the other hand, Nokia makes much better phones in almost every other respect (and they look way better too), but in this case it might be irrelevant, because AFAIK Nokia doesn't make a 1900/900 Mhz GSM model.
Re:Why you should boycott this movie
on
Battlefield Earth
·
· Score: 1
This cult is incredibally destructive, and relies on brainwashing, psuedopsychology, fake science, and so on to induct more and more members (especially rich ones) to give them shitloads of money.
I don't disagree with you, but my question is are they really that much worse than any other religion/cult? I tend to think that all religions are evil to more or less the same extent, but the newer ones take most of the heat because they're not as well established...
For the past year I've been using the Xing codec. I don't know if the Xing codec is available under Linux, but it's part of the Windows based AudioCatalyst program.
Yes, the Xing encoder is available for Linux, and it works really well. It takes about 50% of the duration of the song for VBR encoding (at an average of about 160kbps) on my K6-2 400. And it sounds quite good too. But, it's not free (as in beer and speech).
Wrong, the 5100 and 6100 series models for North America don't have IR. They have a piece of plastic that looks like the IR window, but there's nothing behind it.
if you are canadian, you are definitly going to want to go with Microcell. They have most of canada covered in GSM.
They have much of the population of Canada covered, but very little geographic coverage. If you live outside a few major cities, you are out of luck. This generally holds for all 1900Mhz networks in Canada.
For those of you that need AMPS and CDMA, give it a few weeks and the dual-mode Zuma will be released.
Actually, the dual-mode (800Mhz AMPS/CDMA) Zuma has been out for over a year (I think). My roomate has one, and it's a really nice phone, although the terrible network he uses doesn't do it justice. However, you can't even get Sony CDMA phones anymore, since Sony pulled out of the CDMA market a few months back.
Last I heard PCS is really only GSM on a different frequency... (1900 MHz?). I've got a Motorola triband phone, and it handles GSM 900, 1800 and 1900, and according to the docs, 1900 is for use in the US.
PCS is a much-abused term that doesn't mean very much any more. It's true meaning is just services offered at 1900Mhz (cellular or paging). The FCC has allowed more than one standard for digital cellular. This is in contrast to Europe, where GSM is the only standard allowed. So there are three different digital cellular standards available at 1900Mhz: IS-136 (TDMA based system), IS-95 (CDMA based system) and GSM (TDMA based system). IS-136 and IS-95 are also offered at 800 Mhz, using part of the bandwidth allocated for AMPS (analog cellular). The same is not possible with GSM, because GSM was not designed to co-exist with AMPS (which makes perfect sense, since the countries where GSM originated in didn't have AMPS service).
So "PCS" might mean GSM-1900, but not always. I personally consider the term PCS useless, and prefer to refer to the cellular standard + frequency. Some carriers have even used PCS to describe their 800Mhz digital service, so as you can see it really has no meaning any more. What's even worse, some people use the term "cellular" to refer to 800Mhz and PCS to refer to 1900Mhz, as if the "PCS" services are not cellular!
I recommend Steve Romaine's cellular information site. If you're Canadian, this is really all you need to know. A lot of the discussion of plans will be immaterial for yanks, but he also has detailed reviews of the various handsets. I found this really helpful. -Tim
Unfortunatelly, although there is some information to be found at that site, there are often errors (some of which I brought to the author's attention about a year ago and are mostly still there), so unless you already know much about these things you can't be too sure if what you're reading is true or not. Steve Punter is a very frequent contributor in the alt.cellular* groups, and really "gets it". He maintains a web page with a wealth of information that is very accurate, as far as I can tell, and it's quite objective as well (although he doesn't try to hide his personal preference). It's again Canadian, and it's Ontario-centric, but I found most information quite useful in British Columbia as well. His site can be found at www.arcx.com/sites/
Because it's not possible to keep secrets on an untrusted computer that needs to access them. If the program needs to decrypt the URL list itself, than so can anyone with a copy of the program, if they spend the effort. You can sue the best crypto alogrithm in the world, but then they key is stored somewhere in the program, where the owenr of the computer can get at it.
Yes, but they could just calculate one-way hashes of the URLs and store them, so that they can't be decrypted. Then they would calculate the one-way hash of every URL that is tested, and see if it exists in the list... Sort of what happens with Unix passwords.
Re:Programmer's Code of Ethics
on
Database Nation
·
· Score: 1
C'mon people, a code of ethics is a great idea! That would be at least a starting point for a way to enforce the fact that you own information about you. Code a project that takes inadequate steps to protect privacy? Tweeet, you've been sentenced to work for the EFF for a week. We could start it with "First, reveal no one's personal data."
I think that in this day and age, "I just work here" has ceased to be an adequate excuse.
The ACM has a code of ethics and professional conduct. You can take a look here
The first Linux I installed was Slackware based on the 1.0.8 kernel. I've since upgraded that box to something more, erm, recent.
Those were the days... I first installed a 0.99 something based Slackware. I had to download the floppies with a 2400 modem from a shell account with a 2mb quota that allowed me one hour a day (translation: I could only get one disk per day)... It took me a a few days before I had the base install. I couldn't do much with it other than boot and play around on the comand line, but was I ever excited about it...
I was under the impression that cell phones always send out signals in order to keep in contact with/find the nearest tower. So doesn't that mean that people don't even have to be talking for this to work? Could someone clarify this for me please.
In general cellular phones will send a registration message to their closest tower, and will start monitoring the control channel of that tower. Once the signal becomes weak (for example, as you are getting further from one tower), the phone will scan for towers again and will pick the strongest one, and will register again. It will also register just to indicate that it's powered on every now and then anyway. This transmition takes a very small amount of time.
This is mostly true for analog cellular. Digital systems have improved this process to increase battery life and reduce control channel congestion. Depending on the technology, you might see very few registrations after the initial one. I believe GSM won't even register with every new cell it enters, because the provider groups a whole bunch of cells together and the phone needs to register only when it crosses group boundaries. So it sounds to me like this is not sufficient for this use, but what do I know...
Slashdot Mirror
This is a bit off-topic, but where are you getting this from? 999 is used in the UK (IIRC), and quite possibly in other places too, but in general each country has its own emergency number(s). The EU is trying to standardize on 112 for its members, and 112 is already working in some of them, and on all GSM phones. Other than that, I believe that you'll find a variety of numbers used throughout the world.
Japan uses NTSC as well, so this fact alone doesn't say much.
Hmm, is this the first tail-recursive acronym? Congratulations!
True, I didn't realize it was out yet. I just checked and it seems to have been released...
I stand corrected... I thought that all GSM phones were limited to 9.6kbps, but I guess I was wrong. How is the higher transfer rate achieved? Are they still using one full rate timeslot but limiting the overhead, or what?
No, the transfer rate is limited by the network, not the phone. On the other hand, Nokia makes much better phones in almost every other respect (and they look way better too), but in this case it might be irrelevant, because AFAIK Nokia doesn't make a 1900/900 Mhz GSM model.
I don't disagree with you, but my question is are they really that much worse than any other religion/cult? I tend to think that all religions are evil to more or less the same extent, but the newer ones take most of the heat because they're not as well established...
Yes, the Xing encoder is available for Linux, and it works really well. It takes about 50% of the duration of the song for VBR encoding (at an average of about 160kbps) on my K6-2 400. And it sounds quite good too. But, it's not free (as in beer and speech).
Wrong, the 5100 and 6100 series models for North America don't have IR. They have a piece of plastic that looks like the IR window, but there's nothing behind it.
They have much of the population of Canada covered, but very little geographic coverage. If you live outside a few major cities, you are out of luck. This generally holds for all 1900Mhz networks in Canada.
Actually, the dual-mode (800Mhz AMPS/CDMA) Zuma has been out for over a year (I think). My roomate has one, and it's a really nice phone, although the terrible network he uses doesn't do it justice. However, you can't even get Sony CDMA phones anymore, since Sony pulled out of the CDMA market a few months back.
PCS is a much-abused term that doesn't mean very much any more. It's true meaning is just services offered at 1900Mhz (cellular or paging). The FCC has allowed more than one standard for digital cellular. This is in contrast to Europe, where GSM is the only standard allowed. So there are three different digital cellular standards available at 1900Mhz: IS-136 (TDMA based system), IS-95 (CDMA based system) and GSM (TDMA based system). IS-136 and IS-95 are also offered at 800 Mhz, using part of the bandwidth allocated for AMPS (analog cellular). The same is not possible with GSM, because GSM was not designed to co-exist with AMPS (which makes perfect sense, since the countries where GSM originated in didn't have AMPS service).
So "PCS" might mean GSM-1900, but not always. I personally consider the term PCS useless, and prefer to refer to the cellular standard + frequency. Some carriers have even used PCS to describe their 800Mhz digital service, so as you can see it really has no meaning any more. What's even worse, some people use the term "cellular" to refer to 800Mhz and PCS to refer to 1900Mhz, as if the "PCS" services are not cellular!
Unfortunatelly, although there is some information to be found at that site, there are often errors (some of which I brought to the author's attention about a year ago and are mostly still there), so unless you already know much about these things you can't be too sure if what you're reading is true or not. Steve Punter is a very frequent contributor in the alt.cellular* groups, and really "gets it". He maintains a web page with a wealth of information that is very accurate, as far as I can tell, and it's quite objective as well (although he doesn't try to hide his personal preference). It's again Canadian, and it's Ontario-centric, but I found most information quite useful in British Columbia as well. His site can be found at www.arcx.com/sites/
Acrobat Reader is one of those amazing programs that choke when you try to run them at 24bpp under XFree86... Very annoying.
Yes, but they could just calculate one-way hashes of the URLs and store them, so that they can't be decrypted. Then they would calculate the one-way hash of every URL that is tested, and see if it exists in the list... Sort of what happens with Unix passwords.
I think that in this day and age, "I just work here" has ceased to be an adequate excuse.
The ACM has a code of ethics and professional conduct. You can take a look here
Those were the days... I first installed a 0.99 something based Slackware. I had to download the floppies with a 2400 modem from a shell account with a 2mb quota that allowed me one hour a day (translation: I could only get one disk per day)... It took me a a few days before I had the base install. I couldn't do much with it other than boot and play around on the comand line, but was I ever excited about it...
It's a site where no one ever wait()s on child processes, so they all eventually become zombies. ;-)
In general cellular phones will send a registration message to their closest tower, and will start monitoring the control channel of that tower. Once the signal becomes weak (for example, as you are getting further from one tower), the phone will scan for towers again and will pick the strongest one, and will register again. It will also register just to indicate that it's powered on every now and then anyway. This transmition takes a very small amount of time.
This is mostly true for analog cellular. Digital systems have improved this process to increase battery life and reduce control channel congestion. Depending on the technology, you might see very few registrations after the initial one. I believe GSM won't even register with every new cell it enters, because the provider groups a whole bunch of cells together and the phone needs to register only when it crosses group boundaries. So it sounds to me like this is not sufficient for this use, but what do I know...
Check out the above newsgroup for endless endertainment, and the occasional piece of useful information :)
>A lot of fiber lines run along railroad >rights-of-way (hence the SP in SPRINT: Southern >Pacific).
AFAIK the name Sprint didn't stand for anything initially, and the Southern Pacific whatever abbrevation was made up later.