I've got Sirius in my vehicle. The answer is that it varies based on the station. "Octane", a popular/alternative/semi-hard-but-not-heavy-metal station (think KROQ), is totally uncensored. And then there are stations like "The Pulse" which is geared more toward pop and softer rock. "The Pulse" censors music to a degree that I find a bit disturbing, I've heard them censor metaphors for drug use that do not actually contain any bad words. They once played a song on this station...it's on the tip of my tonque but I can't remember it's name..., that was actually ABOUT growing up in a crappy neighborhood where drug use, gangs, and prostitution were a huge problem; I'd swear that they rubbed out 5-10% of the lyrics of the song.
I have an aftermarket Sirius unit in my 2003 Chevrolet Silverado. The variety is absolutely awesome, but in my case the sound quality isn't. The reason for this is that my satellite receiver is connected to my truck's head unit via an FM modulator. The XM receiver integrated into my Mom's Honda Accord sounds dramatically better. If you visit satellite radio fan sites, you'll find that people generally accept the quality of satellite radio if FM modulation is not involved, and are not fond of it otherwise.
Both the XM and Sirius radio streams are compressed to somewhere in the neighborhood of 64kpbs. They sound far better than what one would normally expect at that bitrate (I'm the type of person who encodes MP3s at 256k-320k). I believe each system uses its own proprietary codecs, and both have the capability to update those codecs over time and continue to work with existing equipment. Anyway, back to the point, it's a highly compressed audio stream. Between the compression and FM modulation, the music takes on a very dull sound. I do not think it is worth buying satellite radio unless you can have it direct input into your head unit.
I've finally managed to locate a company ("SoundGate") who makes an adapter to connect my Kenwood sat. receiver directly into the back of the truck's head unit (GM makes this a big PITA, by not providing a direct input unless you speak their proprietary protocol). It shows up this week or next, and I can't wait.
kcontrol is integrated and pretty much all-encompassing, while GNOME is constantly shifting from CORBA over XML to a binary registry and back. GNOME has become so bad that they actually added a regedit style "config editor" and apparently really expect users to use it to configure applications. Hint: This is the kind of nightmare people want to get rid of when they switch from Windows to Linux.
This statement is incorrect. Much (all?) of Gnome's configuration data is handled by GConf. GConf is a registry, but all the data is stored in XML. Just look at your.gconf directory if you have any applications that use it. You'll find nothing but XML files.
The "registry editor" you're referring to is gconf-editor. Gconf-editor is not intended to be used by end users. It's quite similar to the windows registry editor (though it does seem to be better layed-out than that). I've personally only had to use it to make very geek-oriented adjustments, such as binding keys to launch terminals and skip songs in XMMS.
There's very little conceptual difference between storing config information in a bunch of "dot-files" off your home directory and storing them in a directory hierarchy containing XML files off the ~/.gconf directory.
They knew about it, and management wouldn't let them do shit about it.
"They" in the context of my statement is Microsoft. As a software user, I'm unconcerned with what part of Microsoft caused this to happen.
They knew about it, but addressing it would take significant time and effort, so they opted to defer that to a later release. After all, a million people running a mediocre firewall is better than a million people running no firewall at all.
Yes, I imagine this is what happened. However, I cannot agree with your justification of it. Windows XP was released more than two years ago. And they provided what appeared to be a firewall. A firewall I have myself relied on, that purported to effectively secure the machine from external attack. It did not do this. I would have preferred that the firewall not be provided such that I could have taken other security measures to properly secure machines.
They didn't actually realize it until later on. Are you psychic, or do you just happen to have a buddy who was on the ICF dev team?
That's why I phrased my comment as "...it strikes me as...", obviously my opinion on the subject, like most everything else posted in the comments section of Slashdot. I don't believe an understanding of the paranormal is required in this case...a good knowledge of software engineering ought to suffice. I refuse to believe that these people were unaware of the lifecycle of their firewall service.
In earlier versions of Windows, there is a window of time between when the network stack was running and when ICF provides protection. This results in the ability for a packet to be received and delivered to a service without ICF filtering and potentially exposes the computer to vulnerabilities. This was due to the firewall driver not starting to filter until the firewall service was loaded and had applied appropriate policy. The firewall service has a number of dependencies which causes the service to wait until those dependencies are cleared before it pushes the policy down to the driver. This time period is based upon the speed of the computer.
What bugs me about this is that it strikes me as a problem that was well known about when the developers were writing the original code for ICF. They knew about it, and they didn't do shit about it.
Motorcyclists already have to pay closer attention things on the road -- and the conditions of the road itself -- wet leaves, potholes, puddles -- than those on four wheels. Is putting more -- continually -- in their visual frame a good idea from the standpoint of safety? (and yes, all the cracks about why-are-you-on-a-motorcycle in the first place stand, but there's a difference between risking death and egging it on)
You've hit the nail right on the head. But the real problem with heads up displays is their use in combat aircraft. I mean, come on, the workload of an F-15 driver is high enough as it is. Can you imagine how difficult it might be to operate such a beast with the blinking lights of a HUD right in your field of vision?
Seriously though, the point of the "heads-up display" is right in its name: you don't have to look down at instrumentation. I wouldn't worry about the "distracting like an interior light in a car" effect that you suggest...the display on these things will be unobtrusively lit (or no one will buy them).
I'm seriously sick and tired of the "this new technology is a dumb idea and here's my baseless argument to support that opinion" posts on/.
Reply to this post if you wrote a web application that used this technique on or before May 20, 1998 (one year before the patent application date).
(I did, and I'm pretty sure I still have a few of 'em laying around here somewhere).
And this brings up one more question: Why the F*** did Netscape and MSIE include this capability but for providing developers the ability to do exactly what is described in this patent?
The major thing I mind about Eugenia's reviews is they can belittle products for things that are very obscure. And they delve into the obscure RIGHT AWAY. In this article, the obscure is introduced in the second paragraph:
"I installed it on/dev/hdd3 as / (a single partition for / and/boot) and used a 512 MB/swap on/dev/hdd2. I told the boot manager to get installed on/dev/hdd3 as I don't want my existing bootmanager to get nuked."
For starters, if you're going to review an OS, first install it on a machine on a blank hard drive on a machine that will *ONLY* be running the tested OS, do a fairly standard install. Talk about how that works. Then try and set it up the way you like it, the way you'd use it to do your daily work. Then go see how it interoperates on a machine with 17 other test operating systems on it.
I like the way the reviews go in depth about the OSes, I just find it annoying the way they are structured.
I'm just curious to know what magnitude of storage capacity is required to effectively record HDTV data? Tivo requires about 1GB/hour for basic quality and 3GB/hour for best quality. I don't recall if Tivo what encoding Tivo uses to store data though. Will such a device simply store the broadcast digital stream, or will it reencode it?
(Please excuse me for being a bit of a newb on HDTV here)
You are almost right on the airports, depending on where you're flying, type of aircraft and and how many engines you must be within a certain flying time of a suitable airport. Its called ETOPS.
Just to educate the slashdotting public and clarify your use of the acronym, "ETOPS", it's an industry term for "Engines Thrust Or People Swim".
Some less-enlightened inviduals might lead you to believe that it means, "Extending Twin OPerations" though, referring to the use of twin engined aircraft like 767s and 777s for transcontinental flights where you must effectively be able to have each engine produce all the required thrust for a short time to get you to the nearest capable airport.
The other problem with that thing is that it doesn't tell you which CDs you'll need in advance. It was nice of them to add this feature to the install when you are selecting packages, but it would be better if it was also shown here. Reason being, it will install the local RPMS first, and then if you don't have the CDs, you wind up in a somewhat annoying position.
I've got Fedora Core 1 running at home, and soon will be upgrading the RH9 machine at work. Java and Eclipse seem to work fine (which is the major requirement for me). Fedora appears to me to be exactly what I would have expected from a "Red Hat 10" distribution.
Now for my three issues:
#1. GTK/Gnome file selector *still* sucks. We all already knew that, and yes it's going to be fixed in the next GTK. But I wish RH had seen fit to do what the folks at Ximian did, and at least pretty up the existing one and make it somewhat usable. Those "Home" "Desktop" and "Documents" quick access buttons in the XD2 version make things much nicer.
#2. No menu editing. Again, it's a Gnome problem, and is due to be fixed in the next Gnome (2.6), I believe. Unfortunately I just read a mailing list posting indicating that they while they were fixing the menu architecture, they weren't all that concerned with providing editing capability. I'm not certain I understand what's going on here though, as I wish RH would just support the same menu-editing functionality found in Ximian Desktop 2. It's not great, but at least it's possible.
#3. Using the RedHat network configurator, I changed the hostname of the machine from localhost to something a little more personalized. It failed to add the new hostname to the/etc/hosts file, and as a result all my GConf stuff (I think) got corrupted to the point that Gnome couldn't start without displaying a few error messages every time. I added the entry manually, and would up having to delete all the gnome/gconf config data in my user account to make Gnome happy again. This issue ought to be easily enough resolved, and I'll be reporting it as a bug.
Other than that though, it's very nice. As far as I can tell, it's an all around improvement over RH9. I can't wait till these last few rough edges get smoothed out.
My last two cellular phones were both by Motorola. The first was a v60, and the second, a T720.
They both had reasonably well designed user interfaces. On the surface, I couldn't say enough about them. They were small. They were comfortable to talk on. They had nice displays. They were easy to dial without looking at the keypad. They had cool and most importantly "clean" designs.
But then I had just a few "minor" problems with these telephones:
1. You couldn't make or receive calls on them. 2. They would not notify you when you had voicemail (from the calls you missed, even while you might have been standing outside in the middle of their coverage area). 3. The software was defective. 4. They had major design flaws.
The v60 exhibited all of the above problems, and when I complained, they suggested I pick up a v60i which supposedly had fixed all the problems. Basically, they wanted me to pay $150 for a new phone that was the exact same model as the one I already had, but with the bugs removed.
I held on to the v60 for another month, until the antenna broke off (due to an admitted-by-the-rep design flaw) and I wasn't about to wait FOUR to SIX weeks to have it repaired. I bought the T720.
Big mistake #2.
The supposedly wonderful 3G GSM service was anything but. It didn't work anywhere (I'm in California), and worse, it would stop trying to connect to the network after 30 minutes of not being able to reach its network. When it did this it wouldn't even so much as beep, or show any indication on the external display (you had to open it to find out). Given that the reception was terrible, this happened at least once but more often 2+ times a day.
After a few months of that, I raised all hell with AT&T wireless, broke the contract (and with another 1/2 hour of yelling, avoided the $175 cancellation fee). I now have an LG phone with Verizon. I love it. It has this neat feature called "being able to make and receive telephone calls".
Until I hear that Motorola has made MAJOR changes to their strategy, I'm not interested in any of their cellular products, no matter how cool they might seem.
This scam hurts the worst of all. This is how it usually goes down. He would really send you a cashiers check for the amount he said. You would deposit it and wait a couple days. Then you'd call the bank, and they'd tell you everything is great. You'd send him the car, and the difference. Then after a few weeks the bank would call you and tell you, 'sorry, that cashier's check was a fraud, we're debiting the amount from your accounts, please bring in X dollars.' And you, my friend, would be completely out of luck. Owing the full amount to the bank, and the scammer would have your car, and the extra money you sent him/her/it.
I've heard about this one before too when a friend of mine got a similar offer when selling a motorcycle. (Fortunately he was advised of the scam before the bike+money was sent). My question is (to anyone who might know): how can a bank state that the check has "cleared" when it actually a fake. What is the proper state of confirmation for a check such that you are guaranteed that the transaction has been completed? This seems like a problem with our banking procedures. A customer should be able to receive a proper 'transaction complete' acknowledgement from a bank to indicate that his/her liability has ended. After that, if anything goes wrong, it's not the customers problem.
My windows machine has no speakers and no CD-R. I'd love to use iTunes, but the DRM-laden AAC files cannot be freely copied (from what I have been led to believe). My only option at this point seems to be to buy a CD-R (okay, they're cheap), and then burn the tracks to CDs, then rip the tracks back from the CDs and re-encode as high-quality Oggs. There's two problems with that approach though: first, it's a pain-in-the-ass, and second, I'd be multiplying two lossy compression alogrithms onto the music, which can't be good for it.
Any suggestions? While this is somewhat of a rant, I really and truly would like to buy music through iTunes, and am very intersted in finding a workable solution.
Although I lived almost three years in Northern California and disliked the place as a whole, the one thing that did stand out is the outstanding traffic control system with optical and pavement vehicle sensors. The volume of traffic notwithstanding, it was the fairest traffic systems I've ever seen.
I don't travel to Northern California much, but in Southern California, especially new sections, it's exactly the opposite. I work in the city of Irvine. This city was incorporated in 1972, and before that few people lived in the area. Money has always been present here, so they've always had the opportunity to do things right.
There's a slang term that everyone who lives or works around Irvine has learned: "Irvine lights". Our brand new intersections will stop 50 cars to let one go. It can take you ten minutes to go a mile on wide, uncrowded streets if you have to pass through five traffic lights. I personally think that if the lights were coordinated properly, the perception of traffic in this area would be reduced by half.
And no, I'm not supporting people buying these devices.
Back in 97, I was working at a startup where we were using the usual array of Microsoft tools to create web-based applications: IIS, ASP, Visual Basic (COM controls), and SQL server. The more I learned, the more I grew not to like it. The straw to break the camel's back was finding a significant bug in MDAC (which was acknowledged by a high-level tech once the ticket was escalated), and then having to wait 6 months for a fix. We thus moved away from the MS platform to Java/Linux, a combination that we found to be superior for our needs. I haven't looked back since.
I think I thus fall into the anti-Microsoft camp. I'd prefer to think of myself as being in the "pro-well-written-software" camp though. If Microsoft started writing good, secure, and interoperable software, I'd welcome them with open arms. My problem with MS is that in my "learned-the-hard-way" opinion, they don't.
The author does not define the term "anti-Microsoft". So my question is, what connotation do people try and draw up with the term "anti-Microsoft"? In my opinion, fabricated terms that begin with "anti-" tend to be used to describe an irrational hatred of something, and that's what I'm seeing here.
Thanks for replying...didn't think about that at all. I've actually written JS code to send this info back before, but never though of using an image. Makes a great deal of sense though. You wouldn't have to deal with a 404 either, just build up a URL-encoded paramter string and make a request to a service that hands back a blank GIF.
If anyone's going, I'd be interested in hearing their response to a particular question. When they start talking about the new color printing features provided by Gimp-Print, and their inclusion of Apache HTTPD, Samba, CUPS, and OpenSSH/OpenSSL, ask the following:
"You are stating that you will be including a lot of open-source software within future versions of your operating systems. SCO is on the record for making many statements to the effect that such open-source software is undoubtedly built with stolen intellectual property. If this is true then using an SCO OS puts my business at risk, whether or not you indmenify your customers from direct litigation. What reason do you have to believe that these products are legitimate, while Linux is not?
Probably would best be compacted a bit, but you get the point. I may have to sign up for the Irvine show just to ask that!
Slashdot Mirror
Is there censorship???
I've got Sirius in my vehicle. The answer is that it varies based on the station. "Octane", a popular/alternative/semi-hard-but-not-heavy-metal station (think KROQ), is totally uncensored. And then there are stations like "The Pulse" which is geared more toward pop and softer rock. "The Pulse" censors music to a degree that I find a bit disturbing, I've heard them censor metaphors for drug use that do not actually contain any bad words. They once played a song on this station...it's on the tip of my tonque but I can't remember it's name..., that was actually ABOUT growing up in a crappy neighborhood where drug use, gangs, and prostitution were a huge problem; I'd swear that they rubbed out 5-10% of the lyrics of the song.
I have an aftermarket Sirius unit in my 2003 Chevrolet Silverado. The variety is absolutely awesome, but in my case the sound quality isn't. The reason for this is that my satellite receiver is connected to my truck's head unit via an FM modulator. The XM receiver integrated into my Mom's Honda Accord sounds dramatically better. If you visit satellite radio fan sites, you'll find that people generally accept the quality of satellite radio if FM modulation is not involved, and are not fond of it otherwise.
Both the XM and Sirius radio streams are compressed to somewhere in the neighborhood of 64kpbs. They sound far better than what one would normally expect at that bitrate (I'm the type of person who encodes MP3s at 256k-320k). I believe each system uses its own proprietary codecs, and both have the capability to update those codecs over time and continue to work with existing equipment. Anyway, back to the point, it's a highly compressed audio stream. Between the compression and FM modulation, the music takes on a very dull sound. I do not think it is worth buying satellite radio unless you can have it direct input into your head unit.
I've finally managed to locate a company ("SoundGate") who makes an adapter to connect my Kenwood sat. receiver directly into the back of the truck's head unit (GM makes this a big PITA, by not providing a direct input unless you speak their proprietary protocol). It shows up this week or next, and I can't wait.
kcontrol is integrated and pretty much all-encompassing, while GNOME is constantly shifting from CORBA over XML to a binary registry and back. GNOME has become so bad that they actually added a regedit style "config editor" and apparently really expect users to use it to configure applications. Hint: This is the kind of nightmare people want to get rid of when they switch from Windows to Linux.
.gconf directory if you have any applications that use it. You'll find nothing but XML files.
This statement is incorrect. Much (all?) of Gnome's configuration data is handled by GConf. GConf is a registry, but all the data is stored in XML. Just look at your
The "registry editor" you're referring to is gconf-editor. Gconf-editor is not intended to be used by end users. It's quite similar to the windows registry editor (though it does seem to be better layed-out than that). I've personally only had to use it to make very geek-oriented adjustments, such as binding keys to launch terminals and skip songs in XMMS.
There's very little conceptual difference between storing config information in a bunch of "dot-files" off your home directory and storing them in a directory hierarchy containing XML files off the ~/.gconf directory.
They knew about it, and management wouldn't let them do shit about it.
"They" in the context of my statement is Microsoft. As a software user, I'm unconcerned with what part of Microsoft caused this to happen.
They knew about it, but addressing it would take significant time and effort, so they opted to defer that to a later release. After all, a million people running a mediocre firewall is better than a million people running no firewall at all.
Yes, I imagine this is what happened. However, I cannot agree with your justification of it. Windows XP was released more than two years ago. And they provided what appeared to be a firewall. A firewall I have myself relied on, that purported to effectively secure the machine from external attack. It did not do this. I would have preferred that the firewall not be provided such that I could have taken other security measures to properly secure machines.
They didn't actually realize it until later on. Are you psychic, or do you just happen to have a buddy who was on the ICF dev team?
That's why I phrased my comment as "...it strikes me as...", obviously my opinion on the subject, like most everything else posted in the comments section of Slashdot. I don't believe an understanding of the paranormal is required in this case...a good knowledge of software engineering ought to suffice. I refuse to believe that these people were unaware of the lifecycle of their firewall service.
In earlier versions of Windows, there is a window of time between when the network stack was running and when ICF provides protection. This results in the ability for a packet to be received and delivered to a service without ICF filtering and potentially exposes the computer to vulnerabilities. This was due to the firewall driver not starting to filter until the firewall service was loaded and had applied appropriate policy. The firewall service has a number of dependencies which causes the service to wait until those dependencies are cleared before it pushes the policy down to the driver. This time period is based upon the speed of the computer.
What bugs me about this is that it strikes me as a problem that was well known about when the developers were writing the original code for ICF. They knew about it, and they didn't do shit about it.
For anyone who is as utterly clueless as I was about what's going on between China and Taiwan, take a look at this:
a iwan.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/china/china-t
Motorcyclists already have to pay closer attention things on the road -- and the conditions of the road itself -- wet leaves, potholes, puddles -- than those on four wheels. Is putting more -- continually -- in their visual frame a good idea from the standpoint of safety? (and yes, all the cracks about why-are-you-on-a-motorcycle in the first place stand, but there's a difference between risking death and egging it on)
/.
You've hit the nail right on the head. But the real problem with heads up displays is their use in combat aircraft. I mean, come on, the workload of an F-15 driver is high enough as it is. Can you imagine how difficult it might be to operate such a beast with the blinking lights of a HUD right in your field of vision?
Seriously though, the point of the "heads-up display" is right in its name: you don't have to look down at instrumentation. I wouldn't worry about the "distracting like an interior light in a car" effect that you suggest...the display on these things will be unobtrusively lit (or no one will buy them).
I'm seriously sick and tired of the "this new technology is a dumb idea and here's my baseless argument to support that opinion" posts on
Reply to this post if you wrote a web application that used this technique on or before May 20, 1998 (one year before the patent application date).
(I did, and I'm pretty sure I still have a few of 'em laying around here somewhere).
And this brings up one more question: Why the F*** did Netscape and MSIE include this capability but for providing developers the ability to do exactly what is described in this patent?
How can a company claim that:
There will not be any patches issued in the month of december
and
they release patches more promptly than Linux vendors?
The major thing I mind about Eugenia's reviews is they can belittle products for things that are very obscure. And they delve into the obscure RIGHT AWAY. In this article, the obscure is introduced in the second paragraph:
/dev/hdd3 as / (a single partition for / and /boot) and used a 512 MB /swap on /dev/hdd2. I told the boot manager to get installed on /dev/hdd3 as I don't want my existing bootmanager to get nuked."
"I installed it on
For starters, if you're going to review an OS, first install it on a machine on a blank hard drive on a machine that will *ONLY* be running the tested OS, do a fairly standard install. Talk about how that works. Then try and set it up the way you like it, the way you'd use it to do your daily work. Then go see how it interoperates on a machine with 17 other test operating systems on it.
I like the way the reviews go in depth about the OSes, I just find it annoying the way they are structured.
I'm just curious to know what magnitude of storage capacity is required to effectively record HDTV data? Tivo requires about 1GB/hour for basic quality and 3GB/hour for best quality. I don't recall if Tivo what encoding Tivo uses to store data though. Will such a device simply store the broadcast digital stream, or will it reencode it?
(Please excuse me for being a bit of a newb on HDTV here)
You are almost right on the airports, depending on where you're flying, type of aircraft and and how many engines you must be within a certain flying time of a suitable airport. Its called ETOPS.
Just to educate the slashdotting public and clarify your use of the acronym, "ETOPS", it's an industry term for "Engines Thrust Or People Swim".
Some less-enlightened inviduals might lead you to believe that it means, "Extending Twin OPerations" though, referring to the use of twin engined aircraft like 767s and 777s for transcontinental flights where you must effectively be able to have each engine produce all the required thrust for a short time to get you to the nearest capable airport.
Thanks! I remember seeing something about that before, but couldn't find it when I need it.
The other problem with that thing is that it doesn't tell you which CDs you'll need in advance. It was nice of them to add this feature to the install when you are selecting packages, but it would be better if it was also shown here. Reason being, it will install the local RPMS first, and then if you don't have the CDs, you wind up in a somewhat annoying position.
I've got Fedora Core 1 running at home, and soon will be upgrading the RH9 machine at work. Java and Eclipse seem to work fine (which is the major requirement for me). Fedora appears to me to be exactly what I would have expected from a "Red Hat 10" distribution.
/etc/hosts file, and as a result all my GConf stuff (I think) got corrupted to the point that Gnome couldn't start without displaying a few error messages every time. I added the entry manually, and would up having to delete all the gnome/gconf config data in my user account to make Gnome happy again. This issue ought to be easily enough resolved, and I'll be reporting it as a bug.
Now for my three issues:
#1. GTK/Gnome file selector *still* sucks. We all already knew that, and yes it's going to be fixed in the next GTK. But I wish RH had seen fit to do what the folks at Ximian did, and at least pretty up the existing one and make it somewhat usable. Those "Home" "Desktop" and "Documents" quick access buttons in the XD2 version make things much nicer.
#2. No menu editing. Again, it's a Gnome problem, and is due to be fixed in the next Gnome (2.6), I believe. Unfortunately I just read a mailing list posting indicating that they while they were fixing the menu architecture, they weren't all that concerned with providing editing capability. I'm not certain I understand what's going on here though, as I wish RH would just support the same menu-editing functionality found in Ximian Desktop 2. It's not great, but at least it's possible.
#3. Using the RedHat network configurator, I changed the hostname of the machine from localhost to something a little more personalized. It failed to add the new hostname to the
Other than that though, it's very nice. As far as I can tell, it's an all around improvement over RH9. I can't wait till these last few rough edges get smoothed out.
My last two cellular phones were both by Motorola. The first was a v60, and the second, a T720.
They both had reasonably well designed user interfaces. On the surface, I couldn't say enough about them. They were small. They were comfortable to talk on. They had nice displays. They were easy to dial without looking at the keypad. They had cool and most importantly "clean" designs.
But then I had just a few "minor" problems with these telephones:
1. You couldn't make or receive calls on them.
2. They would not notify you when you had voicemail (from the calls you missed, even while you might have been standing outside in the middle of their coverage area).
3. The software was defective.
4. They had major design flaws.
The v60 exhibited all of the above problems, and when I complained, they suggested I pick up a v60i which supposedly had fixed all the problems. Basically, they wanted me to pay $150 for a new phone that was the exact same model as the one I already had, but with the bugs removed.
I held on to the v60 for another month, until the antenna broke off (due to an admitted-by-the-rep design flaw) and I wasn't about to wait FOUR to SIX weeks to have it repaired. I bought the T720.
Big mistake #2.
The supposedly wonderful 3G GSM service was anything but. It didn't work anywhere (I'm in California), and worse, it would stop trying to connect to the network after 30 minutes of not being able to reach its network. When it did this it wouldn't even so much as beep, or show any indication on the external display (you had to open it to find out). Given that the reception was terrible, this happened at least once but more often 2+ times a day.
After a few months of that, I raised all hell with AT&T wireless, broke the contract (and with another 1/2 hour of yelling, avoided the $175 cancellation fee). I now have an LG phone with Verizon. I love it. It has this neat feature called "being able to make and receive telephone calls".
Until I hear that Motorola has made MAJOR changes to their strategy, I'm not interested in any of their cellular products, no matter how cool they might seem.
Get a Lucent Orinoco card. At least in the 802.11b days, they were *by far* the best, and they work great with Linux (if that's a concern for you).
This scam hurts the worst of all. This is how it usually goes down. He would really send you a cashiers check for the amount he said. You would deposit it and wait a couple days. Then you'd call the bank, and they'd tell you everything is great. You'd send him the car, and the difference. Then after a few weeks the bank would call you and tell you, 'sorry, that cashier's check was a fraud, we're debiting the amount from your accounts, please bring in X dollars.' And you, my friend, would be completely out of luck. Owing the full amount to the bank, and the scammer would have your car, and the extra money you sent him/her/it.
I've heard about this one before too when a friend of mine got a similar offer when selling a motorcycle. (Fortunately he was advised of the scam before the bike+money was sent). My question is (to anyone who might know): how can a bank state that the check has "cleared" when it actually a fake. What is the proper state of confirmation for a check such that you are guaranteed that the transaction has been completed? This seems like a problem with our banking procedures. A customer should be able to receive a proper 'transaction complete' acknowledgement from a bank to indicate that his/her liability has ended. After that, if anything goes wrong, it's not the customers problem.
You don't honestly expect me to "upgrade" from Linux 9.0 to Linux 1.0 do you? At this rate we'll never catch Windows 2000.
My windows machine has no speakers and no CD-R. I'd love to use iTunes, but the DRM-laden AAC files cannot be freely copied (from what I have been led to believe). My only option at this point seems to be to buy a CD-R (okay, they're cheap), and then burn the tracks to CDs, then rip the tracks back from the CDs and re-encode as high-quality Oggs. There's two problems with that approach though: first, it's a pain-in-the-ass, and second, I'd be multiplying two lossy compression alogrithms onto the music, which can't be good for it.
Any suggestions? While this is somewhat of a rant, I really and truly would like to buy music through iTunes, and am very intersted in finding a workable solution.
Although I lived almost three years in Northern California and disliked the place as a whole, the one thing that did stand out is the outstanding traffic control system with optical and pavement vehicle sensors. The volume of traffic notwithstanding, it was the fairest traffic systems I've ever seen.
I don't travel to Northern California much, but in Southern California, especially new sections, it's exactly the opposite. I work in the city of Irvine. This city was incorporated in 1972, and before that few people lived in the area. Money has always been present here, so they've always had the opportunity to do things right.
There's a slang term that everyone who lives or works around Irvine has learned: "Irvine lights". Our brand new intersections will stop 50 cars to let one go. It can take you ten minutes to go a mile on wide, uncrowded streets if you have to pass through five traffic lights. I personally think that if the lights were coordinated properly, the perception of traffic in this area would be reduced by half.
And no, I'm not supporting people buying these devices.
What exactly does "anti-Microsoft" mean?
Back in 97, I was working at a startup where we were using the usual array of Microsoft tools to create web-based applications: IIS, ASP, Visual Basic (COM controls), and SQL server. The more I learned, the more I grew not to like it. The straw to break the camel's back was finding a significant bug in MDAC (which was acknowledged by a high-level tech once the ticket was escalated), and then having to wait 6 months for a fix. We thus moved away from the MS platform to Java/Linux, a combination that we found to be superior for our needs. I haven't looked back since.
I think I thus fall into the anti-Microsoft camp. I'd prefer to think of myself as being in the "pro-well-written-software" camp though. If Microsoft started writing good, secure, and interoperable software, I'd welcome them with open arms. My problem with MS is that in my "learned-the-hard-way" opinion, they don't.
The author does not define the term "anti-Microsoft". So my question is, what connotation do people try and draw up with the term "anti-Microsoft"? In my opinion, fabricated terms that begin with "anti-" tend to be used to describe an irrational hatred of something, and that's what I'm seeing here.
Thanks for replying...didn't think about that at all. I've actually written JS code to send this info back before, but never though of using an image. Makes a great deal of sense though. You wouldn't have to deal with a 404 either, just build up a URL-encoded paramter string and make a request to a service that hands back a blank GIF.
How do you determine screen resolution using an image web bug?
If anyone's going, I'd be interested in hearing their response to a particular question. When they start talking about the new color printing features provided by Gimp-Print, and their inclusion of Apache HTTPD, Samba, CUPS, and OpenSSH/OpenSSL, ask the following:
"You are stating that you will be including a lot of open-source software within future versions of your operating systems. SCO is on the record for making many statements to the effect that such open-source software is undoubtedly built with stolen intellectual property. If this is true then using an SCO OS puts my business at risk, whether or not you indmenify your customers from direct litigation. What reason do you have to believe that these products are legitimate, while Linux is not?
Probably would best be compacted a bit, but you get the point. I may have to sign up for the Irvine show just to ask that!