Satellite Internet has horrible latency, never mind the fact that it is also traveling half way around the globe. Vonage cuts out quite a bit as your latency increases, if it were 200ms per packet, that would be quite a delay and perhaps even borderline unusable.
This was one of my first "Feedback" suggestions when I got my gmail account. A slick interface like this should be available for non @gmail accounts.
My work automatically drops e-mails from "free" systems as they consider it spam or not work related. I assume other companies do this as well and this is the main reason why I can't use a gmail.com as my main e-mail address.
Here is another use of this service as long as it is Free. If you just enter the number you wish to call, and then the system calls you back, couldn't you just use this for Free Long Distance???
I have worked closely with Telesat in Canada and have been testing hardware such as this over the past few years for my company and dealerships. It is true that satellite Internet has horrible ping times and as such is not suitable for Internet gaming where latency is important.
However for "normal" web surfing it is quite usiable. Over the past few years, caching techniques for satellite have improved. There are multi levels of caching available depending on what unit you have installed at your home or office.
For example, web pages can of course be cached on your own PC, but they are also cached on the installed hardware at your house (there is a hard drive built in) then it is cached again at Telesat's satellite HUB before it actually reaches the Internet.
Telesat also implements advanced caching techniques such as IP spoofing to speed up your connection. This prevents some packets from actually having to travel all the way over the satellite link and the Internet to the destination server.
I don't recall what the bandwidth is, but it seems quite comparable to a low grade DSL line and is differently better then ISDN for DIAL-UP access.
I company I work for has looked at a solution at a corporate solution for this very problem. After much research, we have decided to use Xerox's Docushare solution with flowport.
Basically you walk over to a Xerox copier with a sheet feeder attached and using a cover sheet created in flowport, scan in your documents into Docushare. They are stored as fairly high quality PDFs. The Docushare software also does an OCR on the files and then makes them text searchable.
Although not perfect, it is by far the best solution I have seen. It sounds like you do not have the funds to implement this at your school (the price of the Xerox copier and dedicated docushare server) but if you only have a limited number of these documents, then you would not need to have the infrastructure and perhaps Xerox would do this for you. Xerox has many offices in major cities.
1)Eolas wins, microsoft is crippled.
2)Microsoft wins, stupid patents are crippled.
I really don't see how either of these 2 outcomes are likely. Maybe I am a realist but it is probabily going to go 1 of 2 ways:
1) Microsoft buys the company, as they have so many times before. Granted I do not know if this is a public company or not, but being private would be their saving grace. Not that it would really matter, their are not many small companies that can take 4 YEARS of rounds in the court room if this will be dragged out like Microsoft's other trials.
2) Eolas wins, and as it says in the article, only gives their patent to one or two browsers. We will say Netscape for example. Now, isn't Netscape all of a sudden a monopoly in the browser market?
It is reasons like this that some patients should never be upheld. You should never give 1 company the legal right to change the free market as they see fit - Hence the whole Microsoft Trial.
Maybe I'm overstating all this, but it definitely looks cool. And it's cheap, too. Carrot-powered car, coming our way !
This has more meaning then you might think for the economy. The idea that a country will not have to import oil any longer to maintain its power systems / gas requirements is just as important as the savings for the individual from not having to go to the gas station.
This would put farmers back to work producing carets in every country in the world, even giving 3rd world countries an exportable resource. Not to mention the environmental effects of having thousands of caret crops producing oxygen on top of a mass reduction of toxins being thrown into the air.
With this, every 3rd world country that does not have pollution laws will find it cheaper not to pollute, and everyone could meet the Kyoto protocol.
I can just imagine the new commercials coming out from the "Juice Man" now. With him dumping his carets into a juicer and drinking the juice, putting the pulp into his car...
- DOJ says Microsoft is a Monopoly and needs competition
- Microsoft owns 1/4 of Corel
- MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint etc. is the Standard for business use.
What do you get when you put it all together?
- Microsoft has competition as they do NOT want Corel to go under. This deal will help Corel's future.
- Microsoft makes money off this deal, if Corel is profitable and around.
- Microsoft will sell a version of office/Word ON TOP of the money it made from the Wordperfect sale to the OEM. And even more versions of office will be sold, considering people who had Works with a full version of Word probably would not have purchased a copy of office.
I have the older i85s model, which is almost the same phone but does not flip and is not in colour.
The first question I asked myself when I heard about this phone is, why is this in colour? One might think that it will allow you to view colour pictures with the web browser, but all iDen phones including this one support text only web browsing. I guess the very high price tag for the colour screen might be justified if colour games/apps are important to you.
Living in Windsor, Ontario Canada, the biggest feature to using Telus Mike / Nextel as a phone carrier is free long distance into the US. My local calling area is from Lansing, MI all the way to Chatham, Ontario, no LD no roaming charges. Not bad if you work accross the border or make a lot of phone calls to/from there. I am told Nextel has the same deal for calling into Canada.
The only caveat to the i85s I noticed is that the battery life was over stated. I can not even get 24 hrs of standby. The other is Telus does not support downloading Java apps to the phone or syncing the PDA with your home computer, features that they keep telling me will be available soon (it's been a year now). I hear it works great if you use Nextel in the US though.
In the article he states that he needed to hire help because of his 400 orders after EPII. Considering the site is slashdotted now, I am sure he will be selling way more then 400 this month. Perfect time to get into the black-smith business, not to be confused with the dark side...
I do not know how it is at other Universities, but at mine, the U of Windsor in Canada, 1 or 1.5 years would be impossible for a CS degree. I say this because it seems that every university's CompSCI program in Ontario is unique.
At Windsor, it is not focused on programming. I have ONLY had 3 REAL programming classes. And even though you may be able to easily get credit / pass these classes, it is the others that will set you back a few years.
These classes include topics that I am sure you are knowledgeable: data types; induction and recursion and some that you may not: algebraic characterization; syntax; semantics; formal logic; soundness, completeness, and decidability; specification, implementation, and determinism; complexity
And that is the first class. A quick list of other non-programming topics:
Computer Languages, Grammars, and Translators
Including: both pragmatic and theoretical aspects of grammars, recognizers, and translators for computer languages. Regular languages: regular expressions, regular grammars, finite-state machines (automata), regular language recognizers, automatic regular-language-recognizer generator: lex. Context-free languages: context-free grammars and pushdown automata (stack machine), LL grammars and top-down recognition and parsing: LL(1) and recursive-descent parsers, LR grammars and bottom-up recognition and parsing: LR(0), SLR(1), LR(1), and LALR(1) parsers. Automatic context-free-language parser generator: YACC. Attribute grammars, syntaz-directed translation, computer-language processors: interpreters and compilers.
Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science
Including: propositional logic, first order logic, proof techniques, mathematical induction, sets, operations on sets, relations, operations on relations, functions, countable and uncountable sets, basic definitions in graph theory, connectivity, isomorphism of graphs, trees, Euler graphs, Hamilton graphs, planar graphs, graph colouring
File Structures
Including: performance differences between primary and secondary storage; secondary storage devices; fundamental file structures; sequential files; indexing; B trees; B+ trees; index sequential files; hashing; sorting and searching techniques on secondary storage devices.
Computer System Organisation
Including: Examination of the fundamentals of modern computer organization and architecture. Historical development. The computer system in terms of interconnection structures, memory, I/O and operating system software. CPU structure and function, including numeric representations, instruction sets, addressing modes and formats. Control unit. Alternate architectures and performance enhancement.
Those are just the basic classes that you need to know before you can take the challenging stuff. This is on Top of the "other" classes you must take, The Maths (Calc, Alg, Stats, Fundamentals of Math) your Social Sciences, etc.
But don't worry about all of that, you will have those 3 programming classes out of the way!
When the subject of RTS and turn based games came up, I remembered the good ol' days of the BBS scene. I used to play this game, where in the beginning you got a copy of the map of the galaxy. From there you could build different attacking star ships, Destroyers etc. And colonise empty planets, or bombard an occupied planet to take it over.
Does anyone know what game this was, or if you can still play it? Maybe over telnet?
I personally cannot believe how Microsoft could do something like this! The bundling of audio-visual components?? An MP3 Player in an OS??? Would NEVER happen in Linux/Mac/BE/etc....
Oh wait... wouldn't that make it a de facto standard for an OS???
Slashdot Mirror
Satellite Internet has horrible latency, never mind the fact that it is also traveling half way around the globe. Vonage cuts out quite a bit as your latency increases, if it were 200ms per packet, that would be quite a delay and perhaps even borderline unusable.
My work automatically drops e-mails from "free" systems as they consider it spam or not work related. I assume other companies do this as well and this is the main reason why I can't use a gmail.com as my main e-mail address.
Here is another use of this service as long as it is Free. If you just enter the number you wish to call, and then the system calls you back, couldn't you just use this for Free Long Distance???
I have worked closely with Telesat in Canada and have been testing hardware such as this over the past few years for my company and dealerships. It is true that satellite Internet has horrible ping times and as such is not suitable for Internet gaming where latency is important.
However for "normal" web surfing it is quite usiable. Over the past few years, caching techniques for satellite have improved. There are multi levels of caching available depending on what unit you have installed at your home or office.
For example, web pages can of course be cached on your own PC, but they are also cached on the installed hardware at your house (there is a hard drive built in) then it is cached again at Telesat's satellite HUB before it actually reaches the Internet.
Telesat also implements advanced caching techniques such as IP spoofing to speed up your connection. This prevents some packets from actually having to travel all the way over the satellite link and the Internet to the destination server.
I don't recall what the bandwidth is, but it seems quite comparable to a low grade DSL line and is differently better then ISDN for DIAL-UP access.
Basically you walk over to a Xerox copier with a sheet feeder attached and using a cover sheet created in flowport, scan in your documents into Docushare. They are stored as fairly high quality PDFs. The Docushare software also does an OCR on the files and then makes them text searchable.
Although not perfect, it is by far the best solution I have seen. It sounds like you do not have the funds to implement this at your school (the price of the Xerox copier and dedicated docushare server) but if you only have a limited number of these documents, then you would not need to have the infrastructure and perhaps Xerox would do this for you. Xerox has many offices in major cities.
2)Microsoft wins, stupid patents are crippled.
I really don't see how either of these 2 outcomes are likely. Maybe I am a realist but it is probabily going to go 1 of 2 ways:
1) Microsoft buys the company, as they have so many times before. Granted I do not know if this is a public company or not, but being private would be their saving grace. Not that it would really matter, their are not many small companies that can take 4 YEARS of rounds in the court room if this will be dragged out like Microsoft's other trials.
2) Eolas wins, and as it says in the article, only gives their patent to one or two browsers. We will say Netscape for example. Now, isn't Netscape all of a sudden a monopoly in the browser market?
It is reasons like this that some patients should never be upheld. You should never give 1 company the legal right to change the free market as they see fit - Hence the whole Microsoft Trial.
This has more meaning then you might think for the economy. The idea that a country will not have to import oil any longer to maintain its power systems / gas requirements is just as important as the savings for the individual from not having to go to the gas station.
This would put farmers back to work producing carets in every country in the world, even giving 3rd world countries an exportable resource. Not to mention the environmental effects of having thousands of caret crops producing oxygen on top of a mass reduction of toxins being thrown into the air.
With this, every 3rd world country that does not have pollution laws will find it cheaper not to pollute, and everyone could meet the Kyoto protocol. I can just imagine the new commercials coming out from the "Juice Man" now. With him dumping his carets into a juicer and drinking the juice, putting the pulp into his car...
- DOJ says Microsoft is a Monopoly and needs competition
- Microsoft owns 1/4 of Corel
- MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint etc. is the Standard for business use.
What do you get when you put it all together?
- Microsoft has competition as they do NOT want Corel to go under. This deal will help Corel's future.
- Microsoft makes money off this deal, if Corel is profitable and around.
- Microsoft will sell a version of office/Word ON TOP of the money it made from the Wordperfect sale to the OEM. And even more versions of office will be sold, considering people who had Works with a full version of Word probably would not have purchased a copy of office.
Not to bad of a deal for Microsoft.
I have the older i85s model, which is almost the same phone but does not flip and is not in colour.
The first question I asked myself when I heard about this phone is, why is this in colour? One might think that it will allow you to view colour pictures with the web browser, but all iDen phones including this one support text only web browsing. I guess the very high price tag for the colour screen might be justified if colour games/apps are important to you.
Living in Windsor, Ontario Canada, the biggest feature to using Telus Mike / Nextel as a phone carrier is free long distance into the US. My local calling area is from Lansing, MI all the way to Chatham, Ontario, no LD no roaming charges. Not bad if you work accross the border or make a lot of phone calls to/from there. I am told Nextel has the same deal for calling into Canada.
The only caveat to the i85s I noticed is that the battery life was over stated. I can not even get 24 hrs of standby. The other is Telus does not support downloading Java apps to the phone or syncing the PDA with your home computer, features that they keep telling me will be available soon (it's been a year now). I hear it works great if you use Nextel in the US though.
In the article he states that he needed to hire help because of his 400 orders after EPII. Considering the site is slashdotted now, I am sure he will be selling way more then 400 this month. Perfect time to get into the black-smith business, not to be confused with the dark side...
At Windsor, it is not focused on programming. I have ONLY had 3 REAL programming classes. And even though you may be able to easily get credit / pass these classes, it is the others that will set you back a few years.
These classes include topics that I am sure you are knowledgeable: data types; induction and recursion and some that you may not: algebraic characterization; syntax; semantics; formal logic; soundness, completeness, and decidability; specification, implementation, and determinism; complexity
And that is the first class. A quick list of other non-programming topics:
Computer Languages, Grammars, and Translators
Including: both pragmatic and theoretical aspects of grammars, recognizers, and translators for computer languages. Regular languages: regular expressions, regular grammars, finite-state machines (automata), regular language recognizers, automatic regular-language-recognizer generator: lex. Context-free languages: context-free grammars and pushdown automata (stack machine), LL grammars and top-down recognition and parsing: LL(1) and recursive-descent parsers, LR grammars and bottom-up recognition and parsing: LR(0), SLR(1), LR(1), and LALR(1) parsers. Automatic context-free-language parser generator: YACC. Attribute grammars, syntaz-directed translation, computer-language processors: interpreters and compilers.
Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science
Including: propositional logic, first order logic, proof techniques, mathematical induction, sets, operations on sets, relations, operations on relations, functions, countable and uncountable sets, basic definitions in graph theory, connectivity, isomorphism of graphs, trees, Euler graphs, Hamilton graphs, planar graphs, graph colouring
File Structures
Including: performance differences between primary and secondary storage; secondary storage devices; fundamental file structures; sequential files; indexing; B trees; B+ trees; index sequential files; hashing; sorting and searching techniques on secondary storage devices.
Computer System Organisation
Including: Examination of the fundamentals of modern computer organization and architecture. Historical development. The computer system in terms of interconnection structures, memory, I/O and operating system software. CPU structure and function, including numeric representations, instruction sets, addressing modes and formats. Control unit. Alternate architectures and performance enhancement.
Those are just the basic classes that you need to know before you can take the challenging stuff. This is on Top of the "other" classes you must take, The Maths (Calc, Alg, Stats, Fundamentals of Math) your Social Sciences, etc.
But don't worry about all of that, you will have those 3 programming classes out of the way!
When the subject of RTS and turn based games came up, I remembered the good ol' days of the BBS scene. I used to play this game, where in the beginning you got a copy of the map of the galaxy. From there you could build different attacking star ships, Destroyers etc. And colonise empty planets, or bombard an occupied planet to take it over. Does anyone know what game this was, or if you can still play it? Maybe over telnet?
I personally cannot believe how Microsoft could do something like this! The bundling of audio-visual components?? An MP3 Player in an OS??? Would NEVER happen in Linux/Mac/BE/etc....
Oh wait... wouldn't that make it a de facto standard for an OS???