I've been playing with RocketChat for a while and it's a fairly decent Slack alternative that's under active development. If you want to go off the record in a private chat, click the button, wait for the other person to confirm, and your conversation is now end to end encrypted. It's fairly easy to install if you want to self host, and they offer hosted versions too. I'm a fan.
I'll give a +1 for dspam. I run it on a couple of accounts via procmail under qmail and it works really well. When spam gets through to my inbox I just move it to a spam training folder and an hourly cron task passes that folder's contents back to dspam for training.
I remember The Spot! And back in those days, we had dial up internet access at my work.. with a caching proxy server.. and I used to use the front page of The Spot to see if the caching was working right..
Clear out your browser cache, request thespot.com, and see how fast it came up.. fast as you like? The proxy server's doing its thing! Slower than a dog? Something's broke in the computer room..
Ah, those were the days *sighs*
Whether it'll be successful this time round? Meh, anyone's guess.. I can't even remember why it shut down the first time.. how are they gonna make any money?
I remember about 4 years ago when I was working in the UK we played around with WAP and even had a working demo of a WAP front end to our payment gateway (so you could authorise and process credit card payments from a WAP-enabled phone). I also remember stating at the time "WAP is wank". Funny how it never really caught on big style..
Yeah, I've got a Targus rucksack and love it. The laptop goes in the back, then the front section has these rigid plastic angled shelf things that are great for putting all your bits and pieces in without it all going all over the place.
Great for travelling too - fits in the overhead locker a treat. When I travel it's laptop + bathroom in the rucksack, everything else in checked luggage.
They have something like that in the UK. It used to be called Economy 7 amongst other names and was commonly used for stored energy heating. At 11pm or midnight, a relay would click and your storage heaters would start sucking power to heat some bricks inside them. 7 hours later, the relay clicks off and the heaters release their heat through the course of the day. Electricity consumed during this period was cheaper per unit than daytime power consumption.
A lot of appliances like dish washers and washing machines had timers that would delay the start of the cycle so you could put stuff in at 10pm, head off to bed, then later on the device would do it's stuff when power was cheaper.
But isn't that a risk you take? If you're going to depend on VoIP as your sole method of communication, you accept risks like 911 service not being perfect. It's like people who don't have a land line and depend 24/7 on a cell phone. Oops, you're out of coverage.. Oops, the network's down for maintenance or there's congestion etc.. Want reliable service with a guaranteed way to call 911? Get a landline!
Sky have "nearly on demand" with their Pay Per View movies but here in Vancouver Shaw (the local cable provider) have recently launched true video on demand. You pick a movie from your browser, they send a magic signal to change your cable box to an otherwise unselectable channel, and your chosen movie begins. You can fast forward, pause, rewind etc from a remote control window in your browser or using your digital cable terminal remote control if you've had the software upgrade.
Have you seen Bowling For Columbine? Interesting segment in there on how US news is all scare mongering "Another brutal murder/stabbing/shooting", "Anthrax everywhere", "Alarms sounded at the nuclear reprocessing plant earlier today" etc then they showed a clip of of Canadian news "Surrey residents are annoyed at not being consulted before the speed bumps were installed".
As an Englishman living in Canada I thought it was kinda interesting to see the comparison being made. Then the other night, I ended up watching Q13 news (out of Seattle) and barring the Anthrax reference, it was exactly as above - alarms HAD gone off at a nuclear facility of some kind, there HAD been a brutal murder in Tacoma.. Usually I switch off cos it's irrelevant but I had the TV on in the background while I was working and found it quite interesting - the whole pace of the show was very fast and urgent, but there was a lot of stirring things up too..
This whole obsession with competition in North America cracks me up. In the UK there's one satellite system. Sky Digital. You take it or leave it. Sure, there's a handful of cable operators in different areas, but cable isn't half as popular as it is on this side of the pond. Most people either go for their handful of terrestrial channels, or fork out for Sky Digital.
I'm a previous Sky Digital customer, having had their analogue service prior to that. It's a great system. Picture's great, the user interface is second to none, the remote control is well designed... (tell me who came up with the idea of banner ads taking up half my program guide screen with so called digital cable here?)
Now ok, the scale's a bit different, but it seems to work well back in the UK.
What's with those two satellite radio providers in the US? I heard a rumble in the jungle that one or both was in a shakey financial situation. Now they could merge, create a maintainable business that continue, at the cost of loss of choice/competition.. or, they could be prevented from merging and both go tits up.. who wins then? Uh.. choice versus no service? the consumer's just lost big time..
Don't get me started on the different cellular companies and their internetworking with each other and the rest of the world.. or lack of..:-)
When a bunch of guys left my previous employer and setup in business for ourselves, we wrote our own billing package. Well actually, I did.
They were very pro NT and used Allaire's ColdFusion which I had to learn.. but I did it.. and wrote an administration and billing system.
We were setting up as an e-commerce solutions provider (which sounds posh now but means jack). The billing system allowed us to bill one off charges as well as taking care of variable period recurring charges. Customers received an email telling them that a bill had been produced. They'd view it on line and print it themselves from their browser if they required a paper copy. Payment online via credit card. Worked a treat.
Off the shelf accounts packages don't often deal with recurring charges. Billing packages do but it's $$$s (or £££s in our case).
We were a start up on a low budget, rolling our own worked for us. An export to a regular accounting package kept the finance director happy.
Seems I'm not the only one in here to have had experience with home grown billing systems.. I hear you with "Real databases! No transactions in MySQL! You get what you pay for!" rally calls.. but it seems by reading all the other posts that it can be done cheaply and effectively..
Again, just my £0.02:-) (anyone want to buy an administration and billing system written in ColdFusion?);-)
Ok.. first time I've posted on here for AGES.. but you're wrong.
The code is 020. The number is the next 8 digits. YES, Central London numbers start with a 7, Outer London numbers start with an 8, but the local part of the number IS 8 DIGITS.
In the future there'll be 020 6xxx xxxx numbers etc as demand increases.
I must admit that the lack of sub selects was one of the biggest things to bug me when I first started using MySQL. I got around it by looping through queries in my code. Maybe a bit less efficient, but it works.
I use MS SQL Server 7 in my job, but still dabble with MySQL. I find it a lot easier to use and administer.
My point? Not sure.. I dabbled with Postgres and found the learning curve a bit steeper compared to MySQL. It could be argued that it's a more advanced/complicated product so that's to be expected. I don't want to start a flame war! For what I need to do, MySQL fits the bill perfectly. I'm an ardant fan!
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I've been playing with RocketChat for a while and it's a fairly decent Slack alternative that's under active development. If you want to go off the record in a private chat, click the button, wait for the other person to confirm, and your conversation is now end to end encrypted. It's fairly easy to install if you want to self host, and they offer hosted versions too. I'm a fan.
I'll give a +1 for dspam. I run it on a couple of accounts via procmail under qmail and it works really well. When spam gets through to my inbox I just move it to a spam training folder and an hourly cron task passes that folder's contents back to dspam for training.
I remember The Spot! And back in those days, we had dial up internet access at my work.. with a caching proxy server.. and I used to use the front page of The Spot to see if the caching was working right..
Clear out your browser cache, request thespot.com, and see how fast it came up.. fast as you like? The proxy server's doing its thing! Slower than a dog? Something's broke in the computer room..
Ah, those were the days *sighs*
Whether it'll be successful this time round? Meh, anyone's guess.. I can't even remember why it shut down the first time.. how are they gonna make any money?
I remember about 4 years ago when I was working in the UK we played around with WAP and even had a working demo of a WAP front end to our payment gateway (so you could authorise and process credit card payments from a WAP-enabled phone). I also remember stating at the time "WAP is wank". Funny how it never really caught on big style..
*waits for the masses to disagree*
No no no.. DTMF specs are 0 through 9, *, #, and A through D
Yeah, I've got a Targus rucksack and love it. The laptop goes in the back, then the front section has these rigid plastic angled shelf things that are great for putting all your bits and pieces in without it all going all over the place.
Great for travelling too - fits in the overhead locker a treat. When I travel it's laptop + bathroom in the rucksack, everything else in checked luggage.
They have something like that in the UK. It used to be called Economy 7 amongst other names and was commonly used for stored energy heating. At 11pm or midnight, a relay would click and your storage heaters would start sucking power to heat some bricks inside them. 7 hours later, the relay clicks off and the heaters release their heat through the course of the day. Electricity consumed during this period was cheaper per unit than daytime power consumption.
A lot of appliances like dish washers and washing machines had timers that would delay the start of the cycle so you could put stuff in at 10pm, head off to bed, then later on the device would do it's stuff when power was cheaper.
But isn't that a risk you take? If you're going to depend on VoIP as your sole method of communication, you accept risks like 911 service not being perfect. It's like people who don't have a land line and depend 24/7 on a cell phone. Oops, you're out of coverage.. Oops, the network's down for maintenance or there's congestion etc.. Want reliable service with a guaranteed way to call 911? Get a landline!
Just my 0.02
They are no more... AT&T Canada are now known as Allstream.
Sky have "nearly on demand" with their Pay Per View movies but here in Vancouver Shaw (the local cable provider) have recently launched true video on demand. You pick a movie from your browser, they send a magic signal to change your cable box to an otherwise unselectable channel, and your chosen movie begins. You can fast forward, pause, rewind etc from a remote control window in your browser or using your digital cable terminal remote control if you've had the software upgrade.
Check out http://www.shawondemand.ca/ for more info and a demo.
Have you seen Bowling For Columbine? Interesting segment in there on how US news is all scare mongering "Another brutal murder/stabbing/shooting", "Anthrax everywhere", "Alarms sounded at the nuclear reprocessing plant earlier today" etc then they showed a clip of of Canadian news "Surrey residents are annoyed at not being consulted before the speed bumps were installed".
:-)
As an Englishman living in Canada I thought it was kinda interesting to see the comparison being made. Then the other night, I ended up watching Q13 news (out of Seattle) and barring the Anthrax reference, it was exactly as above - alarms HAD gone off at a nuclear facility of some kind, there HAD been a brutal murder in Tacoma.. Usually I switch off cos it's irrelevant but I had the TV on in the background while I was working and found it quite interesting - the whole pace of the show was very fast and urgent, but there was a lot of stirring things up too..
*shrugs* just my £0.02
This whole obsession with competition in North America cracks me up. In the UK there's one satellite system. Sky Digital. You take it or leave it. Sure, there's a handful of cable operators in different areas, but cable isn't half as popular as it is on this side of the pond. Most people either go for their handful of terrestrial channels, or fork out for Sky Digital.
:-)
I'm a previous Sky Digital customer, having had their analogue service prior to that. It's a great system. Picture's great, the user interface is second to none, the remote control is well designed... (tell me who came up with the idea of banner ads taking up half my program guide screen with so called digital cable here?)
Now ok, the scale's a bit different, but it seems to work well back in the UK.
What's with those two satellite radio providers in the US? I heard a rumble in the jungle that one or both was in a shakey financial situation. Now they could merge, create a maintainable business that continue, at the cost of loss of choice/competition.. or, they could be prevented from merging and both go tits up.. who wins then? Uh.. choice versus no service? the consumer's just lost big time..
Don't get me started on the different cellular companies and their internetworking with each other and the rest of the world.. or lack of..
When a bunch of guys left my previous employer and setup in business for ourselves, we wrote our own billing package. Well actually, I did.
:-) (anyone want to buy an administration and billing system written in ColdFusion?) ;-)
They were very pro NT and used Allaire's ColdFusion which I had to learn.. but I did it.. and wrote an administration and billing system.
We were setting up as an e-commerce solutions provider (which sounds posh now but means jack). The billing system allowed us to bill one off charges as well as taking care of variable period recurring charges. Customers received an email telling them that a bill had been produced. They'd view it on line and print it themselves from their browser if they required a paper copy. Payment online via credit card. Worked a treat.
Off the shelf accounts packages don't often deal with recurring charges. Billing packages do but it's $$$s (or £££s in our case).
We were a start up on a low budget, rolling our own worked for us. An export to a regular accounting package kept the finance director happy.
Seems I'm not the only one in here to have had experience with home grown billing systems.. I hear you with "Real databases! No transactions in MySQL! You get what you pay for!" rally calls.. but it seems by reading all the other posts that it can be done cheaply and effectively..
Again, just my £0.02
Ok.. first time I've posted on here for AGES.. but you're wrong.
The code is 020. The number is the next 8 digits. YES, Central London numbers start with a 7, Outer London numbers start with an 8, but the local part of the number IS 8 DIGITS.
In the future there'll be 020 6xxx xxxx numbers etc as demand increases.
I must admit that the lack of sub selects was one of the biggest things to bug me when I first started using MySQL. I got around it by looping through queries in my code. Maybe a bit less efficient, but it works.
I use MS SQL Server 7 in my job, but still dabble with MySQL. I find it a lot easier to use and administer.
My point? Not sure.. I dabbled with Postgres and found the learning curve a bit steeper compared to MySQL. It could be argued that it's a more advanced/complicated product so that's to be expected. I don't want to start a flame war! For what I need to do, MySQL fits the bill perfectly. I'm an ardant fan!