I agree with many other commenters that the hand-wavey interface makes better cinema than UI. I'd find it tiring too, and besides, if I want to scratch an itch on my body or something, I wouldn't want the computer to delete files or something. Being able to lose contact with the computer is handy.
But the comment about iris-reading billboards reminds me of what really scares me. That was a clever fictional technique in its day, but who needs it when there's RFID? You have a chip in your clothes, wallet, sneakers, EasyPass, SpeedPass, passport, or under your skin, and anybody can read who you are without the relatiavely tricky effort of reading irises. Big Brother's then able to find you, even if it turns out to be the same "personalized advertising" provider that reads the web cookies. (And has a feed into federal, state and local police.)
And remembert to turn the aGPS in their cellphone to "911 only"....
You want to go farther back, the Poster Child for deregulation dates back to Carter, not Reagan. Back in the Nixon era, airline fares were regulated by the Civil Aviation Board (CAB). Carter's CAB removed price controls from air tickets, allowing cut-rate carriers to operate (such as startup People Express) in competition with legacy carriers. The CAB then did something rather unusual for a government agency -- it went out of business.
Airlines are naturally competitive; a plane can be shifted from airport to airport to meet demand. There's no shortage of planes, either. Regulation did allow for cross-subsidization of rates to low-volume airports; small markets now have more commuter planes and fewer big jets than before. Overall, airline rate deregulation was a big success, and it made "deregulation" sound like a good thing.
But not many other regulated industries really resemble airlines....
You're right about throwing around words as pejoratives without regard for their real meaning -- everybody who disagrees is a kommie or a terr'ist these days....
But the correct definition of Communism does not preclude competition. Sure, the means of production are held by the people, rather than by capitalists, but the people can hold competing means of production. This is actually the case in China nowadays, where some old-time Communist state-owned industries remain under public ownership, but operate in competitive markets.
Stalinism was a perversion that substituted a command economy, under the control of a Party ruling class, in place of a market. That is not the only way that Communism can exist, but it sure did a good job of showing how not to make it work!
I tried it a few times in the past, and never got usable results. Upgrading was a slow process where the system ground and crunched for a while, finally producing a spooged system that needed to be wiped out anyway.
With 10.1, the upgrade actually worked! Wonders never cease.
Interesting comment -- I just moved from 98 to 2K last year, and while the family has XP on some machines, I don't like it for my own use. I am concerned that Longhorn will be more of the same, with the added harm that 2K support will get worse.
Of course the real topic is back-porting Longhorn features to XP. Since I'm not enthusiastic about XP, I'm not expecting to make much use of those features unless/until some killer app makes it worth my while. I used OS/2 until its Win3.1 subsystem became too out of sync with available software. I play with Linux but its apps don't meet my needs. (I do a *lot* with Access.)
ClearType? Win2k does a fine job, better than any Open Source X-based system. MS is good at coding eye candy.
Multiple users is nice, especially on the family machine. Eats RAM though, since we always have too many things running.
I don't play with the taskbar. I guess XP does a better job with its separate recent-task menu, since I *hate* how XP's Start menu dynamically hides not-recently-used items. But XP's Start box, like every other graphical item, is too damned big! XP is a horrible waster of screen space.
I know RAM is cheaper than it used to be, but that's really not an excuse for the bloated code that everybody accepts nowadays. Longhorn sounds like a monster. XP's bad enough. It would be nice to see a real cleanup, but I'm afraid that would be counterproductive, breaking old apps that ran fine on 32MB Win98 systems five years ago.
That was taken from a posting to the isp-clec mailing list. The Slashdot audience doesn't know the whole context, so let me add to it here.
The Verizon Telephone Companies are legally "common carriers", which means in this case that they are obligated to provide service to any willing customer. They cannot turn down a customer because they see it as a competitor, for instance. Verizon Online, an unregulated ISP, is a customer of the Verizon Telephone Companies. This two-company relationship allows other ISPs to pay for common carriage.
The FCC, under outgoing chair Michael "the lesser" Powell, has given Verizon an awful lot of privileges. If they string FiOS to a house, then Verizon is allowed to (literally) cut the wire, even if it is leased, or desired, by a competitive Common Carrier (CLEC) such as Covad, who provides DSL service (using Verizon's raw copper, not electronics or network) to independent ISPs. So if FiOS is in, CLECs are out, except for one low-rate voice channel per house. No data. No ISPs via CLECs.
Verizon's copper DSL is still common carrier service, open to ISPs. Verizon does not like this. It is less clear if FiOS itself is subject to common carriage, but I think it still is. So Verizon has to let other ISPs on it. For now. They have however petitioned the FCC to "forbear" from enforcing that part of the law, claiming that cable modems are competition enough for them, and other ISPs don't matter any more. (As noted, they consider content providers to be the only "ISPs" who count, just as, I suppose, a child might consider ice cream, cookies and cake to be the only meat and vegetables that count.)
The FCC has not ruled yet on said Forbearance, which is identified as "WC Docket 04-440", and whose public Comments can be read (the deadline for non-late submission is over) using the FCC's Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS), entering "04-440" in the "Search for Filed Comments" dialog. Since it's still an open Docket, Verizon is on its good behavior. What they do if and when they get Forbearance is, well, a different question. Expect a lot of ISPs to be shut down.
And remember, with Verizon Online, you can't receive most email from out of the country, and you can't even send email that doesn't say "@verizon.net" in the From: field, so if you want to use a third-party mail provider, have fun letting people know not to believe your From: field. (Look for an outside provider whose encrypted access tunnel can slip through he Verizon censor's blocks.)
Broadband Radio Service isn't what you think it is. Existing licenses were largely granted by lottery, before auctions were allowed, or later by auction. They were indeed called "wireless cable"; HBO was a big item back in the 1980s. A few video systems are still running there. Licenses were usually on a per-transmitter basis, but some were on a geographic-area basis (BTA, if I recall).
The rules were changed last year; the names "MDS" and "MMDS" were merged into "BRS". The adjacent "ITFS" channels, used by educational institutions but often partially leased out too, were renamed "EBS". More imporantly, the FCC ordered frequencies to be re-jiggered, with the cost of rearranging everyone in an MTA left to the company that initiates the request. Existing licenses remain in effect, however, on their old and later new frequencies within that band.
Because many licenses (all ITFS and most MMDS) were on a radius basis, there are some gaps between the license coverage areas. The FCC plans to auction these off on a geographic area basis. So you can't file for a license any more (unless you're eligible for an EBS license and there's a free channel). Instead, you'll be able to purchase the license at auction. It'll be for the geography minus the 35-mile radii of older licensees -- think "Swiss cheese".
BTW the bulk of BRS licenses belong now to Nextel (who bought most of them from MCI/Worldcom) and Sprint (through many acquisitions); when those two merge, the band will be largely theirs, period.
The 3650 MHz band provides a possible alternative, but the new rules are not out yet; three regions of the country are out, because of existing federal users (I hope the Report and Order is specific about their locations).
I too am using Firefox with popups disabled, and the space site still had a popup - this for a supposed spyware remover (possibly a trojan, who knows?). The latest round of popups has gotten past the common blockers.
Firefox also said that it had blocked popups, so presumably some were stopped, just not that one.
Frankly, when a minor-league topical news site engages in such tactics, I start to question the veracity of their stories.
Car companies are smart. They market cars to specific demographic groups. Political leanings may line up with car makes, and that's part of the appeal.
Take Ford, for instance. They market Jaguars to Republicans and Volvos to Democrats. Not a 100% line-up of owners, but "Volvo-driving" is a Republican epithet which for some reason they think Democrats find insulting. GM plays the game too. The Hummer was born of Gulf War I, a civilian way to feel militaristic and super-macho. Those are ideals associated nowadays with Repubilcans. The Prius was born of the environmental movement, a way to feel good about saving gas, while paying a bigger premium for the car than you'd probably save on gas over its lifetime. That's targeted marketing.
If Ah-nold has a hybrid Hummer, then it's his own way of trying to have it both ways. That's part of his success as a politician -- he isn't firmly in one camp or another; he leans Republican and wears that badge, but he's married to a Kennedy and opposes the Republican party line on many issues, particularly concerning sex.
Actually, I'm aghast at the 1984-esque access of GPS tracking of anybody, and refuse to even have an EZ-Pass in my car. That's the main point of the thread. But also the point is that the GPS plan does subsidize Hummers by reducing their gas tax vis-a-vis that paid by owners of the Prius, Corolla, Civic, Cobalt, Escape Hybrid, and other gas sippers. Which, being lighter, cause less road wear.
But Gropernor Ah-nold owns several Hummers. As a big friend of Dick Cheney and the Shrub, he likes wasting gas. So he wants a subsidy for Hummer owners and a tax on Prius owners.
Betch fewer than 25% of Prius owners are Republicans.
Note that the 04-440 pointer you gave is wrong (the -405 pointer didn't respond for me)... The FCC's numbering scheme is confusing. The Docket in question is "WC Docket 04-440", not one of the other bureau dockets that could have the same number, or the FCC Number (FCC 04-440), which refers to something else, or as you posted the DA number, which refers to something else. Same with -405. ECFS uses the bureau (not FCC) docket number without the bureau code, so if you try to look up a WC Docket that has the same number as say an active WT docket, they'll both show up. A model of administrative efficiency. Not.
It's confusing, but you're conflating several different FCC rulings.
Phone companies are common carriers. ISPs are not; IP traffic is not common carriage (unless it's "phone to phone" VoIP, wherein IP is transparent within the network, as with the Qwest voice backbone). ISPs will never be common carriers.
In 2003, the FCC reduced the ability of Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) to access the wires that belong to the Incumbent LECs (like the Bells). CLECs can theoretically offer DSL over Bell wire, but not everywhere, and it's getting harder in many places. So your house might be in a no-CLEC-DSL neighborhood. And with the December 2004 ruling, CLECs will have a considerably harder time delivering voice too.
At present, telephone company DSL consists of two components, a common carrier service (raw DSL, available to any ISP) and an unregulated information service (the retail ISP layer). A pair of Petitions (BellSouth and Verizon so far, but SBC and Qwest are waiting in the wings) call for the common carrier layer to be done away with, so the telcos can cut off other ISPs from their DSL networks. The CLECs are already having their legs cut out from under them, so the net result, which the ILECs are asking for, is an ISP duopoly between the cable company and the ILEC. Independent ILECs need not apply (or exist). Or they can dig their own trenches down the street. CLECs will remain an option in a few places, but not everywhere.
Under US law, as interpreted by the FCC, ISPs are engaged in "information service". This is a service rendered atop underlying "telecommunications", which, if provided as a "service" (for a fee), would be common carriage. But what that means is that ISPs usually buy their bandwidth from common carriers. (They can also self-provision, as via wireless, or when a cable companies provides it over its own wire. Then there's telecommunications without common carriage.)
ISPs, as information services, are expected to do more than pass along raw information. Indeed one of the legal justifications for their being treated a "information" rather than "carriers" is because they do have the right to pay attention and sometimes do. Spam filtering, address-range blocking, virus filtering, pr0n filtering, etc., are all "information processing".
Now along comes VoIP. It flaunts its non-common carrier status. Vonage got an FCC ruling (now being appealed by state regulators) that it is not a telephone company subject to common carrier rules (and taxes). The logic basically goes like this:
- Telephony is common carriage - IP is usually used to carry information - Information is carried above common carriage - VoIP is carried inside IP packets - Therefore VoIP is information, not telephony.
If you look carefully, you can see why the states are upset. As an analogy, assume that postmen wore gray suits and policemen wore green suits. If a postman put on green trousers, could he give you a traffic ticket? (There's a minor technical flaw in their reasoning, because Vonage-type companies actually interconnect with the telephone network via regulated, taxed telephone companies. But they don't always play by the same rules.)
Still, the point is that ISPs are not common carriers. Vonage and other parasitic VoIP service providers (that's a technically-correct description, not an insult, because they take advantage of ISP and telecom services already paid for by their customer) don't pay like telephone companies, and have to adapt to the underlying transport (ISPs), to whom they pay nothing. So if the ISP wants to block them, it's perfectly legal. Your recourse is to change ISPs. Telephone companies pay for their wire. It shows up in the price.
Now here's the catch -- what choice of ISPs do you have? Cable companies don't usually offer choice, or else usually only offer two (themselves and maybe one little-advertised option). Telco DSL is technically a common carrier telecommunications service that has to offer service to any ISP that asks; Verizon Online is supposed to be just another ISP to the Verizon Telephone Companies. That's why Speakeasy can run over Verizon wire. However, Verizon and BellSouth have petitioned the FCC to drop all of those rules. They want to not be common carriers, and want instead to use their wire to carry their own ISP, period, no choice. See the FCC's web site, e-filing, ECFS, Docket # 04-405 and 04-440. As "self-provisioned ISPs" (like cable companies), they would be allowed to block Vonage freely, and deny you access to competing ISPs. This is what the Bush FCC appears to have planned for you.
Federal law no longer permits exclusivity in cable franchises. If somebody else wanted to overbuild the government-owned cable, they could. It may not be profitable, though -- unless it gets a big market share, it is hard to break even on an overbuild. And it might take effort to get the city to give the rights of way, though I doubt they could refuse forever.
Telephone systems are also competitive, but telephone cooperatives, common in rural areas, are generally exempt from it. Cable, AFAIK, has no such protection.
The X Window System started in the early 1980s and went through versions 1 though 10 rather quickly before getting to version 11, where the high-order digit got stuck.
Then it went through releases fairly quickly until getting to Release 6, where it got stuck.
Now it's two more significant digits to the right. X Windows is not the only product with this kind of number inertia, but it's a classic. As the product matures, the version numbers stop incrementing, but <i>the number of significant digits in the version number</i> increments instead!
So we're at Stage 4 now, and maybe we'll end up with something like X11R6v8.2.3 soon.
AT&T is, alas, a sad shadow of its former self, and by that I mean its post-divestiture former self. But it is still a significant competitor, both the largest long distance company (a declining-revenue market, to be sure) and a significant local player (its TCG is a big player in metro fiber). Plus they've got some ISP operations. It would be sad to see Ed's Evil Empire get a hold of them.
Ed Whittacre wants them for the same reason he bought SNET and AT&T Wireless (which was not owned by AT&T at the time) -- he's constantly trying to be bigger than Verizon. I call it a "P.D." contest, where "D." stands for Dimensions. Frank Zappa had a song by that name, in case you can't guess what the dick I'm talking about.;-) If he gets AT&T, he feels his P. is again bigger than that of Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon (or especially Ivan's predecessor Ray Smith, whose ghost hangs over the place).
AT&T's core problem is that they are operating in highly competitive markets, and their internal culture grew up in a monpopoly and never adapted. SBC, on the other hand, is, uh, well, if the question is acting competitive, they're like asking a tropical fish to be a downhill ski instructor. Without monpopoly power, SBC is dead meat.
Why does anybody's choice of connectivity provider have anything to do with their choice of email provider? Sure, my DSL ISP gives me a mailbox and a shell account, but all I do with that mailbox is set it to forward to my real email to handle occasional administrative messages from the DSL folks.
Don't worry, Verizon is working hard to prevent you from doing that! They and BellSouth have petitioned the FCC to allow them to cut off all other ISPs' access to their raw DSL services. They're also making it harder for CLECs to offer DSL in competition with them. So you will get Verizon Online or nothing on DSL. If you don't like this, go the http://www.fcc.gov/ , go to e-filings, ECFS, read the comments and then leave one of your own on "04-440" (Verizon) or a Reply Comment (closing later this week) in "04-405" (BellSouth). SBC and Qwest will no doubt get the same privileges that the other Bells get.
I don't know if Verizon Online blocks Port 25, but if you use their mail server, you must have "@verizon.net" in the From: field. If you try to use your own domain, you commie terrorist spammer punk, your mail will be blocked. And if you want mail from foreigners, you commie terrorist, they will tell you to use Hotmail.
And if the FCC accepts their Petition, you won't have a choice if you want DSL. At least Comcast has a smart Port 25 filter (passes a limited number of mails, blocking spam blasters) and allows From: whatever.
I don't know how much of Cutler's original work was in Assembler and how much was in BLISS, since that too was a popular language at DEC. I heard long ago (around the time of VMS v3) that Cutler's original work was really crude -- he was the master of a quick V1, but his code was inefficient, so it had largely been rewritten early on. Maybe he did just use Assembler and leave BLISS to other "wimpier" coders.
Also bear in mind that the original VAX instruction set was really huge, allowing one assembler instruction to do things that were quite long on other systems. It turned out, in most cases, that a macro of small instructions could do it faster than the VAX microcode, so instructions fell out of the ISA over time (mainly when the MicroVAX chips came out), but it didn't hurt performance. The VAX-11 was the apotheosis of CISC, a philosophy that probably was designed to help assembly-language coders.
VMS didn't even have a C complier for years, and it wasn't much good for a long time. But it did have a lot of other strange languages. Those were the "we ain't Unix and we like it that way" days.
The Gigaset SL740 is a DECT phone. That's a European standard, for which frequencies are allocated on that side of the puddle, but it's probably strictly verboten in the United States. The manual is only on line in German. That's a clue.
Homology, what country are you in?
There is a small unlicensed band in the United States at 1910 MHz. It just got smaller, as the FCC has reallocated 10 MHz of what had been a 20 MHz "Unlicensed PCS" band to licensed users. (5 MHz to Nextel, 5 MHz up for auction in the future.) The DECT Forum had wanted permission to operate there, but I don't think they got exactly what they wanted. It may be possible under current rules to build a DECT-like phone for the USA, but I don't think an import would be legal.
The 2.4 GHz band is a mess! In the USA, I suggest using 5.8 GHz cordless phones, or 900 MHz if you can find a digital one (analog is too easy to listen in on). The 2.4 band not only has WiFi and Bluetooth, it also has microwave ovens. So a 2.4 GHz phone doesn't work well in the kitchen. I found that out by experimentation (and returned the phone). For data, in crowded places it may be worthwhile to move to 802.11a (5.2-5.8 GHz). I suspect that may be what the OP ends up having to do.
To be more precise, the ARPAnet first went live in 1969, using NCP, and TCP/IP was invented in the early 1970s. In 1983, NCP support was turned off, and TCP/IP became mandatory. But it had been bopping around the lab, and to some extent the net, for years before "flag day".
And while it's probably true that NCP as it existed wasn't adequate, TCP/IP is rather kludgey too for today's use. It is there because of inertia and religious support for it (people worship it as if it were handed to Moses on Sinai). Technically speaking, it rather sucks. IPv6 is worse, however, which tells you how competent the now-commercially-motivated protocol community is.
Ding ding ding! Mod the parent up. That's quite the point.
I, for one, think that Free software is just swell, as a concept, but I also need software that does the job, and FOSS doesn't always cut it. And I do attribute that to the commercial vendor's incentive to do the job, in order to get more customers and thus make more money. FOSS is more often changed because some software writer wants to "scratch an itch", making the software more appropriate for his own use -- but what's good for a programmer isn't always good for The Rest Of Us! That's probably why most FOSS is modeled after Unix, the "programmer's operating system", which has remarkably few civilian users. Stallman's "freedoms" are primarily relevant to programmers, not users. A typical user doesn't want the freedom to modify sources -- C code is just as foreign as Croatian.
So Mozilla turns out to be the best family of browsers, and is FOSS (although I think under corporate sponsorship), and that's good, but there's no FOSS equivalent of Eudora or or even a virus-resistant FOSS answer to LookOut! yet. Certainly not Thunderbird, though that's pretty good, or Evolution, which I suppose fits some corporate desktops pretty well. They've done the first 90% of the job, but that last 10% probably will take 90% of the work, and it's not as much fun for programmers as doing the first 60% again using another k3wl toolk1t.
And don't get me started on what pass for GUI rippers under Linux. Asking a user for the SCSI ID of an IDE drive is just nuts! (And yes, I do know about the SCSI Emulation layer, but users shouldn't have to.) Even then most don't work. (I couldn't find a single one in Mandrake 10.1 that actually worked with any usable degree of reliability, though the underlying command-line tools do work.)
It was on the FCC web site, concerning Mid-Rivers Telephone coop in Terry, Montana: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/at tachmatch/ FCC-04-252A1.pdf
This is getting silly. FTTH PON is a star network (2 branch points) topology, from the wire center on out. Fiber (unlike SONET, it uses one strand for both directions; the upstream has its own lambda) straight to the neighborhood, then a splitter, then a second splitter, then a drop. It has nothing to do with SONET rings. Sure, there's a SONET ring carrying the voice calls to the CO switch where it then feeds the voice onto the PON, and the ISP router in the CO might use SONET for its feed. But the PON does not depend on a SONET ring in the field (I'm talking local exchange plant, not interoffice plant); it is usually a parallel network.
Check out Fujitsu's literature on BPON. Or Tellabs (was AFC).
Hey, I *like* SONET, and recommend it whenever applicable (I'm not a fan of raw Gig-E over fiber in the public network; Ethernet-over-SONET usually makes more sense). But it's just not what the telcos are doing for FTTH.
Was your "Secure Business Internet" site a HOME? No, you're talking about business. I'm talking about the residential market. Telcos (ILEC and CLEC) use SONET rings to reach business locations, but plan to use PON to reach residential locations. (Large apartment buidings, of course, are a special case. I'm talking single family.)
The cheapest SONET ring box is well over $1k now, though prices are falling towards that level. PON is designed to use Optical Network Terminals which are now available in the $500 range. That is the high end of what the residential market can tolerate, but prices are falling as volume picks up.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with many other commenters that the hand-wavey interface makes better cinema than UI. I'd find it tiring too, and besides, if I want to scratch an itch on my body or something, I wouldn't want the computer to delete files or something. Being able to lose contact with the computer is handy.
But the comment about iris-reading billboards reminds me of what really scares me. That was a clever fictional technique in its day, but who needs it when there's RFID? You have a chip in your clothes, wallet, sneakers, EasyPass, SpeedPass, passport, or under your skin, and anybody can read who you are without the relatiavely tricky effort of reading irises. Big Brother's then able to find you, even if it turns out to be the same "personalized advertising" provider that reads the web cookies. (And has a feed into federal, state and local police.)
And remembert to turn the aGPS in their cellphone to "911 only"....
Old Mandriva,
That Old Mandriva,
He don't say nothin', but he must know somethin'
That old Mandriva, he just keeps rolling along....
(Apologies to Hammerstein and Kern)
You want to go farther back, the Poster Child for deregulation dates back to Carter, not Reagan. Back in the Nixon era, airline fares were regulated by the Civil Aviation Board (CAB). Carter's CAB removed price controls from air tickets, allowing cut-rate carriers to operate (such as startup People Express) in competition with legacy carriers. The CAB then did something rather unusual for a government agency -- it went out of business.
Airlines are naturally competitive; a plane can be shifted from airport to airport to meet demand. There's no shortage of planes, either. Regulation did allow for cross-subsidization of rates to low-volume airports; small markets now have more commuter planes and fewer big jets than before. Overall, airline rate deregulation was a big success, and it made "deregulation" sound like a good thing.
But not many other regulated industries really resemble airlines....
You're right about throwing around words as pejoratives without regard for their real meaning -- everybody who disagrees is a kommie or a terr'ist these days....
But the correct definition of Communism does not preclude competition. Sure, the means of production are held by the people, rather than by capitalists, but the people can hold competing means of production. This is actually the case in China nowadays, where some old-time Communist state-owned industries remain under public ownership, but operate in competitive markets.
Stalinism was a perversion that substituted a command economy, under the control of a Party ruling class, in place of a market. That is not the only way that Communism can exist, but it sure did a good job of showing how not to make it work!
Just being pedantic...
Yes, upgrades are improved.
I tried it a few times in the past, and never got usable results. Upgrading was a slow process where the system ground and crunched for a while, finally producing a spooged system that needed to be wiped out anyway.
With 10.1, the upgrade actually worked! Wonders never cease.
Interesting comment -- I just moved from 98 to 2K last year, and while the family has XP on some machines, I don't like it for my own use. I am concerned that Longhorn will be more of the same, with the added harm that 2K support will get worse.
Of course the real topic is back-porting Longhorn features to XP. Since I'm not enthusiastic about XP, I'm not expecting to make much use of those features unless/until some killer app makes it worth my while. I used OS/2 until its Win3.1 subsystem became too out of sync with available software. I play with Linux but its apps don't meet my needs. (I do a *lot* with Access.)
ClearType? Win2k does a fine job, better than any Open Source X-based system. MS is good at coding eye candy.
Multiple users is nice, especially on the family machine. Eats RAM though, since we always have too many things running.
I don't play with the taskbar. I guess XP does a better job with its separate recent-task menu, since I *hate* how XP's Start menu dynamically hides not-recently-used items. But XP's Start box, like every other graphical item, is too damned big! XP is a horrible waster of screen space.
I know RAM is cheaper than it used to be, but that's really not an excuse for the bloated code that everybody accepts nowadays. Longhorn sounds like a monster. XP's bad enough. It would be nice to see a real cleanup, but I'm afraid that would be counterproductive, breaking old apps that ran fine on 32MB Win98 systems five years ago.
That was taken from a posting to the isp-clec mailing list. The Slashdot audience doesn't know the whole context, so let me add to it here.
The Verizon Telephone Companies are legally "common carriers", which means in this case that they are obligated to provide service to any willing customer. They cannot turn down a customer because they see it as a competitor, for instance. Verizon Online, an unregulated ISP, is a customer of the Verizon Telephone Companies. This two-company relationship allows other ISPs to pay for common carriage.
The FCC, under outgoing chair Michael "the lesser" Powell, has given Verizon an awful lot of privileges. If they string FiOS to a house, then Verizon is allowed to (literally) cut the wire, even if it is leased, or desired, by a competitive Common Carrier (CLEC) such as Covad, who provides DSL service (using Verizon's raw copper, not electronics or network) to independent ISPs. So if FiOS is in, CLECs are out, except for one low-rate voice channel per house. No data. No ISPs via CLECs.
Verizon's copper DSL is still common carrier service, open to ISPs. Verizon does not like this. It is less clear if FiOS itself is subject to common carriage, but I think it still is. So Verizon has to let other ISPs on it. For now. They have however petitioned the FCC to "forbear" from enforcing that part of the law, claiming that cable modems are competition enough for them, and other ISPs don't matter any more. (As noted, they consider content providers to be the only "ISPs" who count, just as, I suppose, a child might consider ice cream, cookies and cake to be the only meat and vegetables that count.)
The FCC has not ruled yet on said Forbearance, which is identified as "WC Docket 04-440", and whose public Comments can be read (the deadline for non-late submission is over) using the FCC's Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS), entering "04-440" in the "Search for Filed Comments" dialog. Since it's still an open Docket, Verizon is on its good behavior. What they do if and when they get Forbearance is, well, a different question. Expect a lot of ISPs to be shut down.
And remember, with Verizon Online, you can't receive most email from out of the country, and you can't even send email that doesn't say "@verizon.net" in the From: field, so if you want to use a third-party mail provider, have fun letting people know not to believe your From: field. (Look for an outside provider whose encrypted access tunnel can slip through he Verizon censor's blocks.)
Broadband Radio Service isn't what you think it is. Existing licenses were largely granted by lottery, before auctions were allowed, or later by auction. They were indeed called "wireless cable"; HBO was a big item back in the 1980s. A few video systems are still running there. Licenses were usually on a per-transmitter basis, but some were on a geographic-area basis (BTA, if I recall).
The rules were changed last year; the names "MDS" and "MMDS" were merged into "BRS". The adjacent "ITFS" channels, used by educational institutions but often partially leased out too, were renamed "EBS". More imporantly, the FCC ordered frequencies to be re-jiggered, with the cost of rearranging everyone in an MTA left to the company that initiates the request. Existing licenses remain in effect, however, on their old and later new frequencies within that band.
Because many licenses (all ITFS and most MMDS) were on a radius basis, there are some gaps between the license coverage areas. The FCC plans to auction these off on a geographic area basis. So you can't file for a license any more (unless you're eligible for an EBS license and there's a free channel). Instead, you'll be able to purchase the license at auction. It'll be for the geography minus the 35-mile radii of older licensees -- think "Swiss cheese".
BTW the bulk of BRS licenses belong now to Nextel (who bought most of them from MCI/Worldcom) and Sprint (through many acquisitions); when those two merge, the band will be largely theirs, period.
The 3650 MHz band provides a possible alternative, but the new rules are not out yet; three regions of the country are out, because of existing federal users (I hope the Report and Order is specific about their locations).
Agreeing with an AC who's post is at 0...
I too am using Firefox with popups disabled, and the space site still had a popup - this for a supposed spyware remover (possibly a trojan, who knows?). The latest round of popups has gotten past the common blockers.
Firefox also said that it had blocked popups, so presumably some were stopped, just not that one.
Frankly, when a minor-league topical news site engages in such tactics, I start to question the veracity of their stories.
My, you're being awfully sensitive, aren't you?!
Car companies are smart. They market cars to specific demographic groups. Political leanings may line up with car makes, and that's part of the appeal.
Take Ford, for instance. They market Jaguars to Republicans and Volvos to Democrats. Not a 100% line-up of owners, but "Volvo-driving" is a Republican epithet which for some reason they think Democrats find insulting. GM plays the game too. The Hummer was born of Gulf War I, a civilian way to feel militaristic and super-macho. Those are ideals associated nowadays with Repubilcans. The Prius was born of the environmental movement, a way to feel good about saving gas, while paying a bigger premium for the car than you'd probably save on gas over its lifetime. That's targeted marketing.
If Ah-nold has a hybrid Hummer, then it's his own way of trying to have it both ways. That's part of his success as a politician -- he isn't firmly in one camp or another; he leans Republican and wears that badge, but he's married to a Kennedy and opposes the Republican party line on many issues, particularly concerning sex.
Actually, I'm aghast at the 1984-esque access of GPS tracking of anybody, and refuse to even have an EZ-Pass in my car. That's the main point of the thread. But also the point is that the GPS plan does subsidize Hummers by reducing their gas tax vis-a-vis that paid by owners of the Prius, Corolla, Civic, Cobalt, Escape Hybrid, and other gas sippers. Which, being lighter, cause less road wear.
Your arguments are entirely correct, of course.
But Gropernor Ah-nold owns several Hummers. As a big friend of Dick Cheney and the Shrub, he likes wasting gas. So he wants a subsidy for Hummer owners and a tax on Prius owners.
Betch fewer than 25% of Prius owners are Republicans.
Betcha more than 50% of Hummer owners are.
Note that the 04-440 pointer you gave is wrong (the -405 pointer didn't respond for me)... The FCC's numbering scheme is confusing. The Docket in question is "WC Docket 04-440", not one of the other bureau dockets that could have the same number, or the FCC Number (FCC 04-440), which refers to something else, or as you posted the DA number, which refers to something else. Same with -405. ECFS uses the bureau (not FCC) docket number without the bureau code, so if you try to look up a WC Docket that has the same number as say an active WT docket, they'll both show up. A model of administrative efficiency. Not.
It's confusing, but you're conflating several different FCC rulings.
Phone companies are common carriers. ISPs are not; IP traffic is not common carriage (unless it's "phone to phone" VoIP, wherein IP is transparent within the network, as with the Qwest voice backbone). ISPs will never be common carriers.
In 2003, the FCC reduced the ability of Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) to access the wires that belong to the Incumbent LECs (like the Bells). CLECs can theoretically offer DSL over Bell wire, but not everywhere, and it's getting harder in many places. So your house might be in a no-CLEC-DSL neighborhood. And with the December 2004 ruling, CLECs will have a considerably harder time delivering voice too.
At present, telephone company DSL consists of two components, a common carrier service (raw DSL, available to any ISP) and an unregulated information service (the retail ISP layer). A pair of Petitions (BellSouth and Verizon so far, but SBC and Qwest are waiting in the wings) call for the common carrier layer to be done away with, so the telcos can cut off other ISPs from their DSL networks. The CLECs are already having their legs cut out from under them, so the net result, which the ILECs are asking for, is an ISP duopoly between the cable company and the ILEC. Independent ILECs need not apply (or exist). Or they can dig their own trenches down the street. CLECs will remain an option in a few places, but not everywhere.
ISPs are most explicitly NOT common carriers!
Under US law, as interpreted by the FCC, ISPs are engaged in "information service". This is a service rendered atop underlying "telecommunications", which, if provided as a "service" (for a fee), would be common carriage. But what that means is that ISPs usually buy their bandwidth from common carriers. (They can also self-provision, as via wireless, or when a cable companies provides it over its own wire. Then there's telecommunications without common carriage.)
ISPs, as information services, are expected to do more than pass along raw information. Indeed one of the legal justifications for their being treated a "information" rather than "carriers" is because they do have the right to pay attention and sometimes do. Spam filtering, address-range blocking, virus filtering, pr0n filtering, etc., are all "information processing".
Now along comes VoIP. It flaunts its non-common carrier status. Vonage got an FCC ruling (now being appealed by state regulators) that it is not a telephone company subject to common carrier rules (and taxes). The logic basically goes like this:
- Telephony is common carriage
- IP is usually used to carry information
- Information is carried above common carriage
- VoIP is carried inside IP packets
- Therefore VoIP is information, not telephony.
If you look carefully, you can see why the states are upset. As an analogy, assume that postmen wore gray suits and policemen wore green suits. If a postman put on green trousers, could he give you a traffic ticket? (There's a minor technical flaw in their reasoning, because Vonage-type companies actually interconnect with the telephone network via regulated, taxed telephone companies. But they don't always play by the same rules.)
Still, the point is that ISPs are not common carriers. Vonage and other parasitic VoIP service providers (that's a technically-correct description, not an insult, because they take advantage of ISP and telecom services already paid for by their customer) don't pay like telephone companies, and have to adapt to the underlying transport (ISPs), to whom they pay nothing. So if the ISP wants to block them, it's perfectly legal. Your recourse is to change ISPs. Telephone companies pay for their wire. It shows up in the price.
Now here's the catch -- what choice of ISPs do you have? Cable companies don't usually offer choice, or else usually only offer two (themselves and maybe one little-advertised option). Telco DSL is technically a common carrier telecommunications service that has to offer service to any ISP that asks; Verizon Online is supposed to be just another ISP to the Verizon Telephone Companies. That's why Speakeasy can run over Verizon wire. However, Verizon and BellSouth have petitioned the FCC to drop all of those rules. They want to not be common carriers, and want instead to use their wire to carry their own ISP, period, no choice. See the FCC's web site, e-filing, ECFS, Docket # 04-405 and 04-440. As "self-provisioned ISPs" (like cable companies), they would be allowed to block Vonage freely, and deny you access to competing ISPs. This is what the Bush FCC appears to have planned for you.
Federal law no longer permits exclusivity in cable franchises. If somebody else wanted to overbuild the government-owned cable, they could. It may not be profitable, though -- unless it gets a big market share, it is hard to break even on an overbuild. And it might take effort to get the city to give the rights of way, though I doubt they could refuse forever.
Telephone systems are also competitive, but telephone cooperatives, common in rural areas, are generally exempt from it. Cable, AFAIK, has no such protection.
The X Window System started in the early 1980s and went through versions 1 though 10 rather quickly before getting to version 11, where the high-order digit got stuck.
Then it went through releases fairly quickly until getting to Release 6, where it got stuck.
Now it's two more significant digits to the right. X Windows is not the only product with this kind of number inertia, but it's a classic. As the product matures, the version numbers stop incrementing, but <i>the number of significant digits in the version number</i> increments instead!
So we're at Stage 4 now, and maybe we'll end up with something like X11R6v8.2.3 soon.
AT&T is, alas, a sad shadow of its former self, and by that I mean its post-divestiture former self. But it is still a significant competitor, both the largest long distance company (a declining-revenue market, to be sure) and a significant local player (its TCG is a big player in metro fiber). Plus they've got some ISP operations. It would be sad to see Ed's Evil Empire get a hold of them.
;-) If he gets AT&T, he feels his P. is again bigger than that of Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon (or especially Ivan's predecessor Ray Smith, whose ghost hangs over the place).
Ed Whittacre wants them for the same reason he bought SNET and AT&T Wireless (which was not owned by AT&T at the time) -- he's constantly trying to be bigger than Verizon. I call it a "P.D." contest, where "D." stands for Dimensions. Frank Zappa had a song by that name, in case you can't guess what the dick I'm talking about.
AT&T's core problem is that they are operating in highly competitive markets, and their internal culture grew up in a monpopoly and never adapted. SBC, on the other hand, is, uh, well, if the question is acting competitive, they're like asking a tropical fish to be a downhill ski instructor. Without monpopoly power, SBC is dead meat.
Why does anybody's choice of connectivity provider have anything to do with their choice of email provider? Sure, my DSL ISP gives me a mailbox and a shell account, but all I do with that mailbox is set it to forward to my real email to handle occasional administrative messages from the DSL folks.
Don't worry, Verizon is working hard to prevent you from doing that! They and BellSouth have petitioned the FCC to allow them to cut off all other ISPs' access to their raw DSL services. They're also making it harder for CLECs to offer DSL in competition with them. So you will get Verizon Online or nothing on DSL. If you don't like this, go the http://www.fcc.gov/ , go to e-filings, ECFS, read the comments and then leave one of your own on "04-440" (Verizon) or a Reply Comment (closing later this week) in "04-405" (BellSouth). SBC and Qwest will no doubt get the same privileges that the other Bells get.
I don't know if Verizon Online blocks Port 25, but if you use their mail server, you must have "@verizon.net" in the From: field. If you try to use your own domain, you commie terrorist spammer punk, your mail will be blocked. And if you want mail from foreigners, you commie terrorist, they will tell you to use Hotmail.
And if the FCC accepts their Petition, you won't have a choice if you want DSL. At least Comcast has a smart Port 25 filter (passes a limited number of mails, blocking spam blasters) and allows From: whatever.
I don't know how much of Cutler's original work was in Assembler and how much was in BLISS, since that too was a popular language at DEC. I heard long ago (around the time of VMS v3) that Cutler's original work was really crude -- he was the master of a quick V1, but his code was inefficient, so it had largely been rewritten early on. Maybe he did just use Assembler and leave BLISS to other "wimpier" coders.
Also bear in mind that the original VAX instruction set was really huge, allowing one assembler instruction to do things that were quite long on other systems. It turned out, in most cases, that a macro of small instructions could do it faster than the VAX microcode, so instructions fell out of the ISA over time (mainly when the MicroVAX chips came out), but it didn't hurt performance. The VAX-11 was the apotheosis of CISC, a philosophy that probably was designed to help assembly-language coders.
VMS didn't even have a C complier for years, and it wasn't much good for a long time. But it did have a lot of other strange languages. Those were the "we ain't Unix and we like it that way" days.
The Gigaset SL740 is a DECT phone. That's a European standard, for which frequencies are allocated on that side of the puddle, but it's probably strictly verboten in the United States. The manual is only on line in German. That's a clue.
Homology, what country are you in?
There is a small unlicensed band in the United States at 1910 MHz. It just got smaller, as the FCC has reallocated 10 MHz of what had been a 20 MHz "Unlicensed PCS" band to licensed users. (5 MHz to Nextel, 5 MHz up for auction in the future.) The DECT Forum had wanted permission to operate there, but I don't think they got exactly what they wanted. It may be possible under current rules to build a DECT-like phone for the USA, but I don't think an import would be legal.
The 2.4 GHz band is a mess! In the USA, I suggest using 5.8 GHz cordless phones, or 900 MHz if you can find a digital one (analog is too easy to listen in on). The 2.4 band not only has WiFi and Bluetooth, it also has microwave ovens. So a 2.4 GHz phone doesn't work well in the kitchen. I found that out by experimentation (and returned the phone). For data, in crowded places it may be worthwhile to move to 802.11a (5.2-5.8 GHz).
I suspect that may be what the OP ends up having to do.
To be more precise, the ARPAnet first went live in 1969, using NCP, and TCP/IP was invented in the early 1970s. In 1983, NCP support was turned off, and TCP/IP became mandatory. But it had been bopping around the lab, and to some extent the net, for years before "flag day".
And while it's probably true that NCP as it existed wasn't adequate, TCP/IP is rather kludgey too for today's use. It is there because of inertia and religious support for it (people worship it as if it were handed to Moses on Sinai). Technically speaking, it rather sucks. IPv6 is worse, however, which tells you how competent the now-commercially-motivated protocol community is.
Ding ding ding! Mod the parent up. That's quite the point.
I, for one, think that Free software is just swell, as a concept, but I also need software that does the job, and FOSS doesn't always cut it. And I do attribute that to the commercial vendor's incentive to do the job, in order to get more customers and thus make more money. FOSS is more often changed because some software writer wants to "scratch an itch", making the software more appropriate for his own use -- but what's good for a programmer isn't always good for The Rest Of Us! That's probably why most FOSS is modeled after Unix, the "programmer's operating system", which has remarkably few civilian users. Stallman's "freedoms" are primarily relevant to programmers, not users. A typical user doesn't want the freedom to modify sources -- C code is just as foreign as Croatian.
So Mozilla turns out to be the best family of browsers, and is FOSS (although I think under corporate sponsorship), and that's good, but there's no FOSS equivalent of Eudora or or even a virus-resistant FOSS answer to LookOut! yet. Certainly not Thunderbird, though that's pretty good, or Evolution, which I suppose fits some corporate desktops pretty well. They've done the first 90% of the job, but that last 10% probably will take 90% of the work, and it's not as much fun for programmers as doing the first 60% again using another k3wl toolk1t.
And don't get me started on what pass for GUI rippers under Linux. Asking a user for the SCSI ID of an IDE drive is just nuts! (And yes, I do know about the SCSI Emulation layer, but users shouldn't have to.) Even then most don't work. (I couldn't find a single one in Mandrake 10.1 that actually worked with any usable degree of reliability, though the underlying command-line tools do work.)
It was on the FCC web site, concerning Mid-Rivers Telephone coop in Terry, Montana:t tachmatch/ FCC-04-252A1.pdf
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/a
WC Docket 02-78.
This is getting silly. FTTH PON is a star network (2 branch points) topology, from the wire center on out. Fiber (unlike SONET, it uses one strand for both directions; the upstream has its own lambda) straight to the neighborhood, then a splitter, then a second splitter, then a drop. It has nothing to do with SONET rings. Sure, there's a SONET ring carrying the voice calls to the CO switch where it then feeds the voice onto the PON, and the ISP router in the CO might use SONET for its feed. But the PON does not depend on a SONET ring in the field (I'm talking local exchange plant, not interoffice plant); it is usually a parallel network.
Check out Fujitsu's literature on BPON. Or Tellabs (was AFC).
Hey, I *like* SONET, and recommend it whenever applicable (I'm not a fan of raw Gig-E over fiber in the public network; Ethernet-over-SONET usually makes more sense). But it's just not what the telcos are doing for FTTH.
Was your "Secure Business Internet" site a HOME? No, you're talking about business. I'm talking about the residential market. Telcos (ILEC and CLEC) use SONET rings to reach business locations, but plan to use PON to reach residential locations. (Large apartment buidings, of course, are a special case. I'm talking single family.)
The cheapest SONET ring box is well over $1k now, though prices are falling towards that level. PON is designed to use Optical Network Terminals which are now available in the $500 range. That is the high end of what the residential market can tolerate, but prices are falling as volume picks up.