I don't deal with this stuff at all. I sent a fax to buy my last car.
It basically said, "Here's the price - I know the vehicle I want with the following features is on your lot. Take it or leave it."
(Of course, it was worded much more nicely and professionally.)
I had a call back from the "Internet Sales Manager" within 30 minutes, and he asked for $80 more dollars. $80 bucks on a car over $12k? Hah...okay... whatever. Done deal.
As one who already is a pilot, and trained to fly professionally but didn't go into it as a career...
If you have time to surf from the cockpit, you aren't doing your job properly.
There's destination weather to check, PIREP's to file (no one does this, and it's damn useful to other pilots), engine and systems gauges to check and double-check, Jepp charts to update/file/get out for the approach you're about to fly, and of course... monitoring the autopilot (i.e. FLYING THE DAMN PLANE).
You're paid to be a professional in a job that requires your full attention. Keep your wireless off on your laptop and your head where it belongs. You're responsible for 100-300 people in a high-speed hollow aluminum tube, flyboy.
Oh boy, here we go... yep, this is mostly Bullshit, alright.
First, tracking today's trunked radio systems is child's play, unless the control channels are encrypted.
This is starting to happen, but slowly. Many agencies can't afford the upgrades necessary.
You wouldn't believe how much simple encryption costs in commercial the two-way radio business -- it's an add-on feature, and some companies get upwards of $200 a radio.
Okay, I have to ask this one:
Is it legal in your area to have a police scanner in a PARKED vehicle?
The whole "moving vehicle" thing sounds like either a stupid law, or you're not really reading your local laws very well. Most laws have been changed to say that police scanners can not be used in the commision of a crime. Much more useful law, when written that way -- perhaps you should suggest it to your local representative legislators. I feel sorry for you if your elected representatives were dumb enough to pass that whole "moving vehicle" thing. I'd also love to see how they're enforcing such a rule.
As far as your pontification about RF topics:
RF travels great distances in both ground-wave and sky-wave propagation when the correct frequencies for the distance are used. Your 70 mile story only accounts for VHF/UHF typical distances. HF frequencies easily circumnavigate the globe, but require large antenna systems to be effective.
What you're describing is "using antennas and radios that are reasonably-sized for a police car".
There's not that much keeping any agency that needs longer-distance communication from getting it. There's land-line linking of radio systems, VoIP radio system linking built into most modern products (poorly, but done - one major manufacturer uses multicast packets between the dispatch console on a PC and the radio on the mountain with no provision for checking to see if they actually arrived and the voice of the dispatcher really went out over the air... better do a damn good job making THAT data network redundant, if they're a Public Safety Dispatcher!), simulcasting (two transmitter sites, accurately time-synchronized to be received in a common "overlap" area), and a whole plethora of other options for wide-area coverage systems. My own home State has a system that allows for statewide radio-to-radio private calls, interagency communication between field units and dispatchers alike, and the entire system is backhauled via microwave -- almost no reliance on the PSTN at all. And we're a western State with a lot of open back-country and have the Continental Divide running down the middle. An officer in any agency participating in the system can go two or three hundred miles in any direction and still talk to their dispatcher, far outside of their normal coverage areas. This stuff isn't hard.
Your experience is very limited here, and it shows.
Satellites are not the only answer, and the latency involved in transmitting and receiving to satellites in geosynchronous orbit is too high for VoIP to really be effective and good-quality. It can be done, but it's not the best solution, at all.
As far as your comments about RF distance go:
Depending on geography one can place the remote-bases or repeaters high on mountaintops overlooking town or on large structures like buildings in city skylines. Towers are not the only available answer there, either. FAA has been doing this for at least 30 years, for just one small example. RCO's (or "Remote Communication Outlets") are how Center controllers talk to virtually every aircraft in the sky.
I guess what bugs me the most is that everyone always forgets the basics in these discussions:
This whole discussion about VoIP over RF is retarded. If the police or any other agency wanted it, they can push VoIP over any fast data system out there. Remember the Seven Layer OSI model... build a Physical layer, and work your way up.
Analyze what you have and layer. Any data transport of any kind can
TiVo has really gone out of their way to NOT have simple ways to provide customer feedback. I can't find a single-click method on the website to "Send Feedback".
I have plenty of really neat ideas, I understand cost vs. benefit analysis, and most of the ideas I've thought up for my TiVo are rediculously easy/cheap... but I'm not going to spend hours fiddling around in the TiVo forums, or hunting for a way to send them. Is there a "simple" way?
By simple I mean: - E-mail address. Yes we all get spam, and we all deal with it. The company I work for has a Global Tech Support e-mail address, why can't TiVo? - One-click web-form right on the front page of tivo.com.
Seriously -- it's like you guys go out of your way to NOT listen to customers.
Run your corporation through it and it'll come out squeaky clean and smelling like that New Car Smell.
You even get a Judge to tell you who to pay off first, so there's no bickering amongst your debtors.
[Disclaimer: Only works for Corporate "Citizens"... regular Citizens will have their lives trashed by the Bankruptcy Car-Wash and should not partake if at all possible.]
They already have this... "Press Thumbs Up for More Information!" comes up on some commercials.
Usually this means that your Tivo has pre-recorded/downloaded some longer commercials from this company to your hard disk and is prepared to play them for you.
Chevy, American Express, and others have all used it recently on my Tivo. It's not distracting nor do you have to use it, it's just there if you happen to be watching the commercial instead of skipping it.
Tivo also sends other commercials to your unit from time to time and they're shown on the main menu as things like "Check out the latest from XYZ Company"... and a menu underneath with a couple of commercials and even a "Send me more information" that supposedly works if your profile is updated with them for your home address, etc.
I too have been a long-time Dish customer and am about to leave. (And yes, I've let them know this -- zero-response.)
I've had a couple of old receivers for many many years (even moved using "DishMover" and left my antenna at the previous house for the new homeowner, an interesting tactic offered up by Dish).
I watch as friends and co-workers order new Dish service these days and get four rooms installed free and all their hardware free, and I've paid Dish cold hard lotsa cash for many years and they don't even offer me a reasonable upgrade price for hardware to keep up with their slow new software these units download once in a while.
The old receivers I have are sluggish and when I see the guide and other features at friend's houses, I can tell my old hardware is just too slow to handle what they're asking it to do nowadays.
Mix that with the fact that I only have two rooms installed, and would have to pay full price to have some dude come install another two rooms, why should I show Dish any loyalty?
Comcast is aggressively courting people in my area, with one-year bottom-dollar pricing... so I could drop Dish, go to Comcast for a year, and then come back to Dish and get subsidized hardware and free four-room installation?
Dumb. Real dumb. They're going to kill any customer loyalty they have left.
I would like to see where in your TOS that your ISP actually tells you that they expect "generally interactive" services be used.
If they sold you a bitrate and they have no such interactivity clause in their TOS, then they deserve to sink with their ship.
Someone else (yes, perhaps more expensive) will come along to take their place immediately if there's money to be made from the original customer base and proper contracts.
You get what you pay for, but in most States you also get what you were promised, or consumer protection laws kick in.
If that bankrupts some idiots who didn't know how to properly set up TOS with their clients, so be it. The data transport business is hard.
Time for Bobby Businessowner who owns the ISP to go back to the sandbox and play with his little-boy toys if he can't learn to hire a lawyer and write a proper service contract and TOS for and with his customers.
I used to work for a co-location company that both had proper TOS contracts for everything, including maximum burst and sustained rates as well as a slew of other metrics, but who also gave 100% refunds for down-time. Even DNS server outages were considered... yes... downtime.
Damn yes, they were more expensive than their competition, but the 100% uptime guarantee drew a crowd of folks who simply didn't want to deal with network problems, and wanted to focus on their business.
It also drove some pretty damn nice engineering to avoid down-time in the back-end and paid for good quality hardware to do it with.
If all you want and expect is crap, that's what you'll get.
Market pressure goes where the price/performance curves cross, and in residential service, people are all too easily convinced their performance is going to be low. Not enough people vote with their wallets.
I specifically use a small local ISP run by solid businesspeople and staffed by smart geeks at a higher price than the local burger-joint DSL provider known as Qwest.
Qwest is required to provide them access to their backbone (someone mentioned common-carrier laws -- yes, we have them here, and Qwest doesn't like to mention it) and I get transport services from Qwest to their POP and then out through their well-staffed, decently-paid, happy to serve when called staff member's, and relatively speedy network with good uplinks to the world.
I get one bill from Qwest for the transport and another bill from the ISP for their routing and server services, basically. Put together, the price is competitive with all but the lowest bait-and-switch Qwest pricing, and when I call on the phone I talk to a real human sysadmin for things like DNS reverse delegation and I fill out a standard ARIN form for static IP's when needed and pay very little for them.
I have a high-quality experience at very little extra cost. A true class-act shop, like most small businesses that have their pricing and marketing done correctly and aren't in a constant death-struggle with bankruptcy.
Reliability is relative to EXACTLY how the network is designed in your local area... and they're not going to tell you how it's really built, so you just have to try it to find out.
I still remember the night when the Dry Creek Central Office switch that hosted all of Qwest's Denver pager phone numbers (not the paging terminal itself, just the numbers routed there) for their own staff went down, and they couldn't page their own staff in to fix it. Of course, word gets around quick, but it noticibly slowed their response.
Of course this also affected all their other customers at the time including Law Enforcement and EMS for some south Denver cities, as well as a whole lot of other more mundane folks.
The transmitters on the mountains were working, the microwave links to them were working, but you couldn't get from the PSTN to the paging terminal. No secondary route.
Exactly the reason most of the cell sites are sitting right on top of most of the casinos.
The guy who got all giddy about having signal in the elevator shaft at the Venetian was probably only a few floors and one concrete wall away from the cell site.
The real reason businesses don't use Linux is because they don't want it. Simple market rule - consumer doesn't want something they won't buy it.
Linux has to offer something so good everyone wants it instead of Windows. Pretty simple really.
People will pay anything for something they want. (Example: iPod -- there are better or exact capability replacements cheaper, but the iPod rules the sales numbers.)
Linux doesn't have a serious marketing campaign (and neither do any of the linux vendors), and therefore will never win the desktop, because they will never have a huge base of people who want the product or think they want the product irrationally.
This all comes back to the fact that most management can't seem to learn -- you shouldn't have a job.
Sorry, but Quality Assurance is an attitude, not a department.
Making it into a Department is a sign that people actally WANT someone to blame everything on, instead of taking the correct amount of time and resources to design and build correctly in the first place.
The author is an idiot to write an article about waste and environmental impact for ZDNet, of all things.
I'm sure he wrote the article on a PC made of all sorts of lovely substances.
That same computer is burning tons more power than his cell phone ever dreamed of, even if the PC were idling and the phone was in use.
Then he posted it to ZD's web farm, which I'm sure is housed in a large datacenter that burns power like mad.
And I'm also pretty confident that all the machines in ZD's webfarms have some more lovely substances inside them too.
What an ass-hat. We'll take him seriously when he submits his next ZDNet article using a pen that uses organic ink and paper he made in his press in his backyard from leftover garden biomass.
Even then, he'll have to submit an environmental impact statement regarding how he's going to properly dispose of all that paper after he delivers one personally to everyone who read the article on-line.
It has less to do about a calendar date and more to do with the character of the powerful people making the decisions that create the uncertainty, many of whom have little regard for the lives they are entrusted with. People will work themselves hard for those they trust.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't deal with this stuff at all. I sent a fax to buy my last car.
It basically said, "Here's the price - I know the vehicle I want with the following features is on your lot. Take it or leave it."
(Of course, it was worded much more nicely and professionally.)
I had a call back from the "Internet Sales Manager" within 30 minutes, and he asked for $80 more dollars. $80 bucks on a car over $12k? Hah...okay... whatever. Done deal.
As one who already is a pilot, and trained to fly professionally but didn't go into it as a career...
If you have time to surf from the cockpit, you aren't doing your job properly.
There's destination weather to check, PIREP's to file (no one does this, and it's damn useful to other pilots), engine and systems gauges to check and double-check, Jepp charts to update/file/get out for the approach you're about to fly, and of course... monitoring the autopilot (i.e. FLYING THE DAMN PLANE).
You're paid to be a professional in a job that requires your full attention. Keep your wireless off on your laptop and your head where it belongs. You're responsible for 100-300 people in a high-speed hollow aluminum tube, flyboy.
Methinks you've confused "frequency" with "bandwidth".
You can't fight in here gentlemen! This is the War Room!
(From the Best Satire Ever... Dr. Strangelove.)
Not to mention the guy posted it on what could arguably be one of the world's largest "blogs"... Slashdot's comments area.
A rant against "blogs" on Slashdot. This is rich!
You use a clueful non-U.S.-based Linux distribution or one that is not a public corporation scared of lawsuits.
Oh boy, here we go... yep, this is mostly Bullshit, alright.
First, tracking today's trunked radio systems is child's play, unless the control channels are encrypted.
This is starting to happen, but slowly. Many agencies can't afford the upgrades necessary.
You wouldn't believe how much simple encryption costs in commercial the two-way radio business -- it's an add-on feature, and some companies get upwards of $200 a radio.
Okay, I have to ask this one:
Is it legal in your area to have a police scanner in a PARKED vehicle?
The whole "moving vehicle" thing sounds like either a stupid law, or you're not really reading your local laws very well. Most laws have been changed to say that police scanners can not be used in the commision of a crime. Much more useful law, when written that way -- perhaps you should suggest it to your local representative legislators. I feel sorry for you if your elected representatives were dumb enough to pass that whole "moving vehicle" thing. I'd also love to see how they're enforcing such a rule.
As far as your pontification about RF topics:
RF travels great distances in both ground-wave and sky-wave propagation when the correct frequencies for the distance are used. Your 70 mile story only accounts for VHF/UHF typical distances. HF frequencies easily circumnavigate the globe, but require large antenna systems to be effective.
What you're describing is "using antennas and radios that are reasonably-sized for a police car".
There's not that much keeping any agency that needs longer-distance communication from getting it. There's land-line linking of radio systems, VoIP radio system linking built into most modern products (poorly, but done - one major manufacturer uses multicast packets between the dispatch console on a PC and the radio on the mountain with no provision for checking to see if they actually arrived and the voice of the dispatcher really went out over the air... better do a damn good job making THAT data network redundant, if they're a Public Safety Dispatcher!), simulcasting (two transmitter sites, accurately time-synchronized to be received in a common "overlap" area), and a whole plethora of other options for wide-area coverage systems. My own home State has a system that allows for statewide radio-to-radio private calls, interagency communication between field units and dispatchers alike, and the entire system is backhauled via microwave -- almost no reliance on the PSTN at all. And we're a western State with a lot of open back-country and have the Continental Divide running down the middle. An officer in any agency participating in the system can go two or three hundred miles in any direction and still talk to their dispatcher, far outside of their normal coverage areas. This stuff isn't hard.
Your experience is very limited here, and it shows.
Satellites are not the only answer, and the latency involved in transmitting and receiving to satellites in geosynchronous orbit is too high for VoIP to really be effective and good-quality. It can be done, but it's not the best solution, at all.
As far as your comments about RF distance go:
Depending on geography one can place the remote-bases or repeaters high on mountaintops overlooking town or on large structures like buildings in city skylines. Towers are not the only available answer there, either. FAA has been doing this for at least 30 years, for just one small example. RCO's (or "Remote Communication Outlets") are how Center controllers talk to virtually every aircraft in the sky.
I guess what bugs me the most is that everyone always forgets the basics in these discussions:
This whole discussion about VoIP over RF is retarded. If the police or any other agency wanted it, they can push VoIP over any fast data system out there. Remember the Seven Layer OSI model... build a Physical layer, and work your way up.
Analyze what you have and layer. Any data transport of any kind can
Perhaps you could comment on this:
TiVo has really gone out of their way to NOT have simple ways to provide customer feedback. I can't find a single-click method on the website to "Send Feedback".
I have plenty of really neat ideas, I understand cost vs. benefit analysis, and most of the ideas I've thought up for my TiVo are rediculously easy/cheap... but I'm not going to spend hours fiddling around in the TiVo forums, or hunting for a way to send them. Is there a "simple" way?
By simple I mean:
- E-mail address. Yes we all get spam, and we all deal with it. The company I work for has a Global Tech Support e-mail address, why can't TiVo?
- One-click web-form right on the front page of tivo.com.
Seriously -- it's like you guys go out of your way to NOT listen to customers.
Ahh.. the Great American Bankruptcy Car-Wash.
Run your corporation through it and it'll come out squeaky clean and smelling like that New Car Smell.
You even get a Judge to tell you who to pay off first, so there's no bickering amongst your debtors.
[Disclaimer: Only works for Corporate "Citizens"... regular Citizens will have their lives trashed by the Bankruptcy Car-Wash and should not partake if at all possible.]
Yeah, eventually they'll probably kill it... but the whining about having to turn it back on is unfounded...
I've had my Tivo quite a while, and only done the 30 second jump reset 3, maybe 4 times total, including software upgrades.
Maybe you have lots of power outages where you live.
They already have this... "Press Thumbs Up for More Information!" comes up on some commercials.
Usually this means that your Tivo has pre-recorded/downloaded some longer commercials from this company to your hard disk and is prepared to play them for you.
Chevy, American Express, and others have all used it recently on my Tivo. It's not distracting nor do you have to use it, it's just there if you happen to be watching the commercial instead of skipping it.
Tivo also sends other commercials to your unit from time to time and they're shown on the main menu as things like "Check out the latest from XYZ Company"... and a menu underneath with a couple of commercials and even a "Send me more information" that supposedly works if your profile is updated with them for your home address, etc.
I too have been a long-time Dish customer and am about to leave. (And yes, I've let them know this -- zero-response.)
I've had a couple of old receivers for many many years (even moved using "DishMover" and left my antenna at the previous house for the new homeowner, an interesting tactic offered up by Dish).
I watch as friends and co-workers order new Dish service these days and get four rooms installed free and all their hardware free, and I've paid Dish cold hard lotsa cash for many years and they don't even offer me a reasonable upgrade price for hardware to keep up with their slow new software these units download once in a while.
The old receivers I have are sluggish and when I see the guide and other features at friend's houses, I can tell my old hardware is just too slow to handle what they're asking it to do nowadays.
Mix that with the fact that I only have two rooms installed, and would have to pay full price to have some dude come install another two rooms, why should I show Dish any loyalty?
Comcast is aggressively courting people in my area, with one-year bottom-dollar pricing... so I could drop Dish, go to Comcast for a year, and then come back to Dish and get subsidized hardware and free four-room installation?
Dumb. Real dumb. They're going to kill any customer loyalty they have left.
And DirecTivo doesn't support TivoToGo at all.
Finally! Something I have that I purchased that's older than the latest-and-greatest gizmo -- works BETTER than the recent one! ;-)
I would like to see where in your TOS that your ISP actually tells you that they expect "generally interactive" services be used.
If they sold you a bitrate and they have no such interactivity clause in their TOS, then they deserve to sink with their ship.
Someone else (yes, perhaps more expensive) will come along to take their place immediately if there's money to be made from the original customer base and proper contracts.
You get what you pay for, but in most States you also get what you were promised, or consumer protection laws kick in.
If that bankrupts some idiots who didn't know how to properly set up TOS with their clients, so be it. The data transport business is hard.
Time for Bobby Businessowner who owns the ISP to go back to the sandbox and play with his little-boy toys if he can't learn to hire a lawyer and write a proper service contract and TOS for and with his customers.
I used to work for a co-location company that both had proper TOS contracts for everything, including maximum burst and sustained rates as well as a slew of other metrics, but who also gave 100% refunds for down-time. Even DNS server outages were considered... yes... downtime.
Damn yes, they were more expensive than their competition, but the 100% uptime guarantee drew a crowd of folks who simply didn't want to deal with network problems, and wanted to focus on their business.
It also drove some pretty damn nice engineering to avoid down-time in the back-end and paid for good quality hardware to do it with.
If all you want and expect is crap, that's what you'll get.
Market pressure goes where the price/performance curves cross, and in residential service, people are all too easily convinced their performance is going to be low. Not enough people vote with their wallets.
I specifically use a small local ISP run by solid businesspeople and staffed by smart geeks at a higher price than the local burger-joint DSL provider known as Qwest.
Qwest is required to provide them access to their backbone (someone mentioned common-carrier laws -- yes, we have them here, and Qwest doesn't like to mention it) and I get transport services from Qwest to their POP and then out through their well-staffed, decently-paid, happy to serve when called staff member's, and relatively speedy network with good uplinks to the world.
I get one bill from Qwest for the transport and another bill from the ISP for their routing and server services, basically. Put together, the price is competitive with all but the lowest bait-and-switch Qwest pricing, and when I call on the phone I talk to a real human sysadmin for things like DNS reverse delegation and I fill out a standard ARIN form for static IP's when needed and pay very little for them.
I have a high-quality experience at very little extra cost. A true class-act shop, like most small businesses that have their pricing and marketing done correctly and aren't in a constant death-struggle with bankruptcy.
Small and limp.
Reliability is relative to EXACTLY how the network is designed in your local area... and they're not going to tell you how it's really built, so you just have to try it to find out.
I still remember the night when the Dry Creek Central Office switch that hosted all of Qwest's Denver pager phone numbers (not the paging terminal itself, just the numbers routed there) for their own staff went down, and they couldn't page their own staff in to fix it. Of course, word gets around quick, but it noticibly slowed their response.
Of course this also affected all their other customers at the time including Law Enforcement and EMS for some south Denver cities, as well as a whole lot of other more mundane folks.
The transmitters on the mountains were working, the microwave links to them were working, but you couldn't get from the PSTN to the paging terminal. No secondary route.
Oops.
Details, details.
Exactly the reason most of the cell sites are sitting right on top of most of the casinos.
The guy who got all giddy about having signal in the elevator shaft at the Venetian was probably only a few floors and one concrete wall away from the cell site.
The real reason businesses don't use Linux is because they don't want it. Simple market rule - consumer doesn't want something they won't buy it.
Linux has to offer something so good everyone wants it instead of Windows. Pretty simple really.
People will pay anything for something they want. (Example: iPod -- there are better or exact capability replacements cheaper, but the iPod rules the sales numbers.)
Linux doesn't have a serious marketing campaign (and neither do any of the linux vendors), and therefore will never win the desktop, because they will never have a huge base of people who want the product or think they want the product irrationally.
Don't leave the computer unattended in a public area of the school.
The teacher keeps the computer in a public area and doesn't know any better.
TEACHER... Supposedly intelligent person... Instructor of knowledge...
Sounds like the teacher got schooled.
This all comes back to the fact that most management can't seem to learn -- you shouldn't have a job.
Sorry, but Quality Assurance is an attitude, not a department.
Making it into a Department is a sign that people actally WANT someone to blame everything on, instead of taking the correct amount of time and resources to design and build correctly in the first place.
Darn, I was hoping he said "Texans".
The author is an idiot to write an article about waste and environmental impact for ZDNet, of all things.
I'm sure he wrote the article on a PC made of all sorts of lovely substances.
That same computer is burning tons more power than his cell phone ever dreamed of, even if the PC were idling and the phone was in use.
Then he posted it to ZD's web farm, which I'm sure is housed in a large datacenter that burns power like mad.
And I'm also pretty confident that all the machines in ZD's webfarms have some more lovely substances inside them too.
What an ass-hat. We'll take him seriously when he submits his next ZDNet article using a pen that uses organic ink and paper he made in his press in his backyard from leftover garden biomass.
Even then, he'll have to submit an environmental impact statement regarding how he's going to properly dispose of all that paper after he delivers one personally to everyone who read the article on-line.
It has less to do about a calendar date and more to do with the character of the powerful people making the decisions that create the uncertainty, many of whom have little regard for the lives they are entrusted with. People will work themselves hard for those they trust.