the Great Green Arkleseazure. Why don't they just name him after all??? Science should be all about finding out what we should do when the great white hankerchief cometh...
"Also, the city could make the case that it is necessary to do this to provide equal access to education."
Providing large scale wireless internet access for a city would not be a proper action to provide equal access to education. Public libraries usually offer free internet access. Besides just offering the service would not mean that everyone had the hardware to use it.
As far as giving away service for free is concerned, I used a free service in a small U.S. town which was offered by local shop owners based on DSL. They actually got together and offered the service to attract more customers. Free of charge and no purchase necessary.
DSL may be an established technology. That does not mean that providers have extended their coverage area to every part of the country. Apart from that, investments in infrastructure continue as technology advances. You can get 5 MBit DSL here now, which was technically impossible 6 years ago when you got DSL. Besides, I would bet that you paid more for DSL 6 years ago or had less bandwidth than you do now. The service has become cheaper. I am not saying that it has reached a reasonable price but providers have to pay IP carriers, too, and of course they want to make a profit, too. Other providers are just resellers of a competitors technology and therefore cannot underbid his prices significantly. I still think that I am paying too much for DSL, too, but things used to be a LOT more expensive some time ago.
I am probably wrong though in comparing my country's situation to other country's markets which have different laws and regulatory policies...
I have to admit that reality is far more complex than I stated.
What you describe about low demand and low prices only applies to a company entering a market with good financial backing. Even that company will have to face the fact that if you raise prices,there is a maximum price the customer is willing to pay for a certain service.
Besides, if there is demand, it attracts competitors. If their analysis of the business situation indicates that they can offer the service at a lower price and still earn a profit, they might decide to enter the market. Contracts are then used to bind customers. After the company has a large enough customer base, they could raise prices, but that might also drive customers away. As prices climb, competitors can enter the market to skim customers from established competitors by underbidding their prices.
There is a certain equilibrium. In the end, the price will balance itself out according to the demand and what the custom believes a service is really worth.
Although there's a huge demand for internet services in Germany, the prices are still low compared to other countries because companies are still trying to enlarge their customer base. Another reason being that they are trying to offer other/related services to that customer base. We have regulatory authorities for telecommunications markets which had to intervene several times to keep the companies with the biggest market shares to use agressive price dumping to drive competitors out of the market.
I have never studied business science though, so maybe I'm wrong after all.
Competition is what is supposed to drive the prices down. If the prices are high, that no only indicates that the providers are looking for return of their investments into the infrastructure but it also indicates that there is not enough public demand for the technology itself. If the broad public would demand a cheaper service and actually use it, I am pretty sure it would exist. In Germany, wireless networks became a hype too, but in reality they are not used nearly as much as the providers expected.
Also, our laws prohibit the public administration to enter markets where already enough private companies compete against each other. After all, the government is not supposed to use tax money to drive private competition out of the market. Tax money may be used to install wireless where private companies see no chance for revenue. On the other hand that would lead to the question of whether there's enough demand at that certain location anyway.
Additionally, the authorities would face huge network administration duties that normal providers face.
Last but not least, you could argue that there are privacy concerns if the public offices run a city-wide wireless network (big brother is watching you surf).
The Smart car is actually of Swiss origin. The project was started by Swiss watch (Swatch) manufacturer Hayek who approached Volkswagen with his ideas (which were at that stage much more enviromentally friendly). Volkswagen did not have the guts to actually produce the vehicle and Hayek ended up with a joint venture with Mercedes Benz. The design was altered and ended up the way it is now (a car for cities featuring low fuel consumption but with only standard technology). The brand name Smart consists of the parts S for Swatch, M for Mercedes Benz and A for art.
When the Smart hit the market, it met initial setbacks and marketing fiascos for Mercedes when spectacular accidents occured. Smart cars would lose traction and fall over backwards due to the heavy engine being located in the back end. After the cars were given ESP (electronic stability program) as a standard feature, this effect seems to have disappeared and the Smart has become a car that especially people in bigger cities love because of the fact that you always manage to find a parking spot:-)
I am not surprised that Mercedes Benz/Daimler Crysler does not advertise this as their car because in the U.S. their main line of cars are even more of a luxury item than they are over here in Germany. Selling a shopping cart for young people does not fit their image as a luxury car manufacturer.
Whether the Smart is able to compete with the recent trend of asian hybrid vehicles in the U.S. is another story and remains to be seen. I guess those fall into another category because they are full size cars:-)
Even with the release of a personal edition missing, SuSE still lets you try out every release either as a LiveCD or as a completely free ftp install (which in the past pretty much equalled the Personal version).
AFAIK, the difference between SuSE Personal and SuSE Professional was just the amount of software (=CDs) shipped with it. Apart from that, they were the same anyway.
Albeit, the ftp release is always about a month late compared to the official CD release but I reckon if you get something completely free, you should be able to accept a slight delay.
My home country Germany still has simple sheets of paper which have instructions on how many votes you have and where you just check one of the large boxes next to the names/partys. I have to admit that it's low tech, but it does not have the error rates of punching cards or deploying an electronic system that is vulnerable to simple attacks.
Now I understand that Germany is about the size of North Dakota (world population rank 15 whereas the U.S. are rank 4 CIA World Fact Book Link) but we have the first preliminary results after 6 p.m. when the voting offices close and the final results on the next day. If enough people help counting, I would imagine this to be possible in the US too. At least until they figure out a somewhat secure way of e-voting.
Of course I have no idea how many volunteers they have to help in the voting process...
When I first started programming with Turbo Pascal in the early 90s, I learnt how to make the PC speaker play a tune. However, I was never able to convince anyone to put their ear that close to my bigtower:-)
One of the chapters discusses how travel to other stars would be possible. As far as I remember there is another technical solution in discussion which would involve nuclear detonations as part of a propulsion system. (I might have confused something there, though)
I do not understand why you should not be able to carry USB or firewire devices to the office. All the IT department needs to do is disable ordinary user access for installing these devices.
"Continuity: Doc Ock pulls the giant sun ball and its support down onto himself, so he should be under it as they descend, yet in the final shot of him sinking into the ocean, the ball is below him and he is falling after it."
This assumption shows that the person making it does not know much about physics. When Doc Ock starts falling with the sun ball, they together form a kind of pendulum with him being the lighter end of said pendulum. If the pendulum falls long enough, it will almost inevitably lean to one side , the heavy end will turn and nearly always end up pointing down whereas the light end (Doc Ock) will be pointing up. Wile this process will probably happen slower under water as compared to in mid-air, it still should physically turn out quite the same. It's a matter of acceleration and mass AFAIK. Tell me if I am wrong.
This is not necessarily true. In Germany, for example, a gift is a binding contract which is formed when the beneficiary accepts the offer. It has to be in written form though. Oral promises are not binding unless the gift has already changed hands, which makes it non-revokeable.
Nope, does not work. If you followed the news lately, you would have read that the first vulnerability and the corresponding proof-of-concept exploit after the MS win2k source leak involved a buffer overflow caused by a hex-edited image file. As Outlook will probably use IE for viewing, you are still vulnerable to attack. The Acrobat reader has also had a series of vulnerabilities.
That's just the risk of attachments. The only way to be quite safe is not to open _or_ view any attachment that is sent to you by someone you do not know (and if course disable things like a preview pane).
This is not a new development. While I have never heard about any manufacturer wanting to do away with the hood, the automotive industry is trying harder and harder to secure their marketshare not only when selling new cars but also when it comes to the maintenance market. As far as new cars are concerned, Volkswagen just got fined a huge sum by the European Union because they were threatening dealersips in the countries adjacent to Germany that they would lose their license if they sold cars to Germans (attempt to eliminate the reimport market, by which people by cheaper cars abroad due to tax differences). As far as the maintenance market is concerned automotive companies have had clauses in their warranty for some time, stating that the yearly inspection/oil change has to be performed by a dealership of the same brand. Furthermore, since cars are becoming more and more reliable on microprocessors (especially engine control), the firmware for these devices is encrypted to make it harder for other companies/garages to offer maintenance and repair services. Do not be surprised if this becomes more and more common place in the next years. It is up to the customer to voice his discontent with this development.
I read an interesting article lately about a company in Vienna, Austria, which has developed a machine called "cable runner" that can deploy fibre cables in sewage tunnels. This eliminates the need for digging. It mentions though, that this is not meant for a wide network but rather for point to point connections. Oh, here's the company's website.
It seems hard for a small buisness to fight for a good page rank with all those scripted sites flooding Google with irrelevant Linkexchange or other sites that get you nowhere near your desired information. This is especially true since Google gives those pages a higher rank that contain the keyword in the url (hence all the blabla?cheap+shoe+store) links).
Judging from my personal impression Google has become less useful lately...
Linux (read: VDR) is the only solution that supports digital TV, a.k.a. MPG-DVB. Microsoft etc. do not. Plus it let's you record multiple programs at the same time using multiple DVB cards, cutting out ads and much more. Plus it is free:-)
Garfinkel article on Technoloy Review
on
The State of IPv6
·
· Score: 1
There is another interesting article about this on Technology Review written by Simon Garfinkel which covers possible security risks of early IPv6 software routing as opposed to hardware routing as the technology becomes widely used. In addition to that, he predicts that p2p will actually increse due to the fact that NAT troubles disappear.
Slashdot Mirror
German news magazine "Der Spiegel" has a pretty high credibility and they carry the same story:
0 0.html
http://www.spiegel.de/auto/aktuell/0,1518,424288,
Unfortunately, the article does not seem to available in English.
Almost one year :-)
m l
k ype-usb-adapter-not-coming-to-us-025688.php
Here's the joint press release from Siemens and Skype:
http://www.skype.com/company/news/2004/siemens.ht
There may still be a market because Gizmodo states that Siemens does not deliver their adapter to the U.S.:
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/software/siemens-s
the Great Green Arkleseazure. Why don't they just name him after all??? Science should be all about finding out what we should do when the great white hankerchief cometh...
"Also, the city could make the case that it is necessary to do this to provide equal access to education."
Providing large scale wireless internet access for a city would not be a proper action to provide equal access to education. Public libraries usually offer free internet access. Besides just offering the service would not mean that everyone had the hardware to use it.
As far as giving away service for free is concerned, I used a free service in a small U.S. town which was offered by local shop owners based on DSL. They actually got together and offered the service to attract more customers. Free of charge and no purchase necessary.
DSL may be an established technology. That does not mean that providers have extended their coverage area to every part of the country. Apart from that, investments in infrastructure continue as technology advances. You can get 5 MBit DSL here now, which was technically impossible 6 years ago when you got DSL. Besides, I would bet that you paid more for DSL 6 years ago or had less bandwidth than you do now. The service has become cheaper. I am not saying that it has reached a reasonable price but providers have to pay IP carriers, too, and of course they want to make a profit, too. Other providers are just resellers of a competitors technology and therefore cannot underbid his prices significantly. I still think that I am paying too much for DSL, too, but things used to be a LOT more expensive some time ago.
I am probably wrong though in comparing my country's situation to other country's markets which have different laws and regulatory policies...
I have to admit that reality is far more complex than I stated.
,there is a maximum price the customer is willing to pay for a certain service.
What you describe about low demand and low prices only applies to a company entering a market with good financial backing. Even that company will have to face the fact that if you raise prices
Besides, if there is demand, it attracts competitors. If their analysis of the business situation indicates that they can offer the service at a lower price and still earn a profit, they might decide to enter the market. Contracts are then used to bind customers. After the company has a large enough customer base, they could raise prices, but that might also drive customers away. As prices climb, competitors can enter the market to skim customers from established competitors by underbidding their prices.
There is a certain equilibrium. In the end, the price will balance itself out according to the demand and what the custom believes a service is really worth.
Although there's a huge demand for internet services in Germany, the prices are still low compared to other countries because companies are still trying to enlarge their customer base. Another reason being that they are trying to offer other/related services to that customer base. We have regulatory authorities for telecommunications markets which had to intervene several times to keep the companies with the biggest market shares to use agressive price dumping to drive competitors out of the market.
I have never studied business science though, so maybe I'm wrong after all.
Competition is what is supposed to drive the prices down. If the prices are high, that no only indicates that the providers are looking for return of their investments into the infrastructure but it also indicates that there is not enough public demand for the technology itself. If the broad public would demand a cheaper service and actually use it, I am pretty sure it would exist. In Germany, wireless networks became a hype too, but in reality they are not used nearly as much as the providers expected.
Also, our laws prohibit the public administration to enter markets where already enough private companies compete against each other. After all, the government is not supposed to use tax money to drive private competition out of the market. Tax money may be used to install wireless where private companies see no chance for revenue. On the other hand that would lead to the question of whether there's enough demand at that certain location anyway.
Additionally, the authorities would face huge network administration duties that normal providers face.
Last but not least, you could argue that there are privacy concerns if the public offices run a city-wide wireless network (big brother is watching you surf).
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The Smart car is actually of Swiss origin. The project was started by Swiss watch (Swatch) manufacturer Hayek who approached Volkswagen with his ideas (which were at that stage much more enviromentally friendly). Volkswagen did not have the guts to actually produce the vehicle and Hayek ended up with a joint venture with Mercedes Benz. The design was altered and ended up the way it is now (a car for cities featuring low fuel consumption but with only standard technology). The brand name Smart consists of the parts S for Swatch, M for Mercedes Benz and A for art.
:-)
:-)
When the Smart hit the market, it met initial setbacks and marketing fiascos for Mercedes when spectacular accidents occured. Smart cars would lose traction and fall over backwards due to the heavy engine being located in the back end. After the cars were given ESP (electronic stability program) as a standard feature, this effect seems to have disappeared and the Smart has become a car that especially people in bigger cities love because of the fact that you always manage to find a parking spot
I am not surprised that Mercedes Benz/Daimler Crysler does not advertise this as their car because in the U.S. their main line of cars are even more of a luxury item than they are over here in Germany. Selling a shopping cart for young people does not fit their image as a luxury car manufacturer.
Whether the Smart is able to compete with the recent trend of asian hybrid vehicles in the U.S. is another story and remains to be seen. I guess those fall into another category because they are full size cars
Even with the release of a personal edition missing, SuSE still lets you try out every release either as a LiveCD or as a completely free ftp install (which in the past pretty much equalled the Personal version).
AFAIK, the difference between SuSE Personal and SuSE Professional was just the amount of software (=CDs) shipped with it. Apart from that, they were the same anyway.
Albeit, the ftp release is always about a month late compared to the official CD release but I reckon if you get something completely free, you should be able to accept a slight delay.
this video, which shows how they work:
:-)
Voting Machine
My home country Germany still has simple sheets of paper which have instructions on how many votes you have and where you just check one of the large boxes next to the names/partys. I have to admit that it's low tech, but it does not have the error rates of punching cards or deploying an electronic system that is vulnerable to simple attacks.
Now I understand that Germany is about the size of North Dakota (world population rank 15 whereas the U.S. are rank 4 CIA World Fact Book Link) but we have the first preliminary results after 6 p.m. when the voting offices close and the final results on the next day. If enough people help counting, I would imagine this to be possible in the US too. At least until they figure out a somewhat secure way of e-voting.
Of course I have no idea how many volunteers they have to help in the voting process...
This should get you playing in no time.
http://zerowing.idsoftware.com:6969/
When I first started programming with Turbo Pascal in the early 90s, I learnt how to make the PC speaker play a tune. However, I was never able to convince anyone to put their ear that close to my bigtower :-)
Hehe, you probably had these pictures in mind:
http://www.ntk.net/bo2k/
alternatively:
Google 1st picture, Google 2nd picture
Back Orifice indeed had this functionality back in 1998. We used it on friends a couple of times for fun.
The program was released by CDC
The feature list contains the following:
"Multimedia control
Play wav files, capture screen shots, and capture video or still frames from any video input device (like a Quickcam)."
Here's a link to the whole feature list and application.
Back Orifice was followed by the second version, Back Orifice 2k (BO2k) which still seems to be maintained.
At the time, Netbus was another alternative.
For those of you who are - like me - not experts in physics, this technology was featured in the BBC documentary "Space" presented by Sam Neill.
c at ,5,,11,science,831
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0273608/
http://www.bbcshop.com/invt/bbcdvd1090&bklist=i
One of the chapters discusses how travel to other stars would be possible. As far as I remember there is another technical solution in discussion which would involve nuclear detonations as part of a propulsion system. (I might have confused something there, though)
that is, of course, 42
I do not understand why you should not be able to carry USB or firewire devices to the office. All the IT department needs to do is disable ordinary user access for installing these devices.
k b; en-us;823732
e.g. for Windows XP and USB flash media:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
Without a doubt, there is a similar solution for unix-flavours.
That also eliminates the need to harrass your employees by their personal belongings.
correct me if I'm wrong
"Continuity: Doc Ock pulls the giant sun ball and its support down onto himself, so he should be under it as they descend, yet in the final shot of him sinking into the ocean, the ball is below him and he is falling after it."
This assumption shows that the person making it does not know much about physics. When Doc Ock starts falling with the sun ball, they together form a kind of pendulum with him being the lighter end of said pendulum. If the pendulum falls long enough, it will almost inevitably lean to one side , the heavy end will turn and nearly always end up pointing down whereas the light end (Doc Ock) will be pointing up. Wile this process will probably happen slower under water as compared to in mid-air, it still should physically turn out quite the same. It's a matter of acceleration and mass AFAIK. Tell me if I am wrong.
This is not necessarily true. In Germany, for example, a gift is a binding contract which is formed when the beneficiary accepts the offer. It has to be in written form though. Oral promises are not binding unless the gift has already changed hands, which makes it non-revokeable.
Nope, does not work. If you followed the news lately, you would have read that the first vulnerability and the corresponding proof-of-concept exploit after the MS win2k source leak involved a buffer overflow caused by a hex-edited image file. As Outlook will probably use IE for viewing, you are still vulnerable to attack. The Acrobat reader has also had a series of vulnerabilities.
That's just the risk of attachments. The only way to be quite safe is not to open _or_ view any attachment that is sent to you by someone you do not know (and if course disable things like a preview pane).
This is not a new development. While I have never heard about any manufacturer wanting to do away with the hood, the automotive industry is trying harder and harder to secure their marketshare not only when selling new cars but also when it comes to the maintenance market. As far as new cars are concerned, Volkswagen just got fined a huge sum by the European Union because they were threatening dealersips in the countries adjacent to Germany that they would lose their license if they sold cars to Germans (attempt to eliminate the reimport market, by which people by cheaper cars abroad due to tax differences). As far as the maintenance market is concerned automotive companies have had clauses in their warranty for some time, stating that the yearly inspection/oil change has to be performed by a dealership of the same brand. Furthermore, since cars are becoming more and more reliable on microprocessors (especially engine control), the firmware for these devices is encrypted to make it harder for other companies/garages to offer maintenance and repair services. Do not be surprised if this becomes more and more common place in the next years. It is up to the customer to voice his discontent with this development.
Just my 2c
I read an interesting article lately about a company in Vienna, Austria, which has developed a machine called "cable runner" that can deploy fibre cables in sewage tunnels. This eliminates the need for digging. It mentions though, that this is not meant for a wide network but rather for point to point connections. Oh, here's the company's website.
Looked like an interesting idea to me.
It seems hard for a small buisness to fight for a good page rank with all those scripted sites flooding Google with irrelevant Linkexchange or other sites that get you nowhere near your desired information. This is especially true since Google gives those pages a higher rank that contain the keyword in the url (hence all the blabla?cheap+shoe+store) links).
Judging from my personal impression Google has become less useful lately...
just my 2cents
Linux (read: VDR) is the only solution that supports digital TV, a.k.a. MPG-DVB. Microsoft etc. do not. Plus it let's you record multiple programs at the same time using multiple DVB cards, cutting out ads and much more. Plus it is free :-)
There is another interesting article about this on Technology Review written by Simon Garfinkel which covers possible security risks of early IPv6 software routing as opposed to hardware routing as the technology becomes widely used. In addition to that, he predicts that p2p will actually increse due to the fact that NAT troubles disappear.
German version
English version (free registration, blabla)