I know its proprietary but I have to say, we just had an Inter-Tel system installed in our offices and it works great. Our main office (read: old) is still using a digital system but the other two offices are connected to our main office via VOIP. In our other two offices there is simply a 1U system (Axxess 5000) and a few POE switch and thats our entire phone system. The phones work great and we have an couple IPRC (Internet Protocol Resoure Cards) in our system so people can take IP phones home (or wherever) and make calls as if they were in the office.
Our current configuration has PRIs at each location with inter-office calls done via VOIP.
Especially once you combine this system with their Unified Communicator (call routing w/ greetings etc based on caller id, custom greetings, collaboration, find me follow me, presence management, desktop sharing..etc) The thing I love about that is that if joe blow calls in I can have my desk phone ring, and if i dont answer, it goes to voicemail. If my boss calls in and I don't answer then system picks up the line and says "Hi XYZ, hold on the line while the system finds me" and then attempts to call my cell phones or other locations and then will finally dump to vmail if It still cant find me.
The other thing I like about Inter-Tel is the fact that they can do their own financing. In our case we are leasing the equipment which makes it a much smaller amount of money each month and that cost covers service calls, insurance on the hardware, loss/theft, software upgrades, etc. So in 3 years we can look at what technologies we are using/not using and change our configuation from there.
Our business size is fairly small - about 200 people across 3 offices (10+ miles from eachother).
Again, while proprietary - its a total solution that, if leased, can be incredible cheap to operate (on a monthly basis).
SBC Currently blocks any traffic on port 25 to dissuade would-be spammers. Whats stopping them from filtering out any VOIP traffic unless you pay X dollars so that you use said services?
On the other hand, why don't these phone companies realize that POTS is no longer their core revenue stream an focus on tranporting data and wireless services?
The wonderful thing about Macs is that its a closed system. Everything works so well because instead of having to always keep the absolute least common denominator in mind (XP running on a 300MHz PII) they can keep the amount of hardware it runs on fairly slim, and not have to go crazy with drivers, support, etc. IMHO that goes a long way keeping the system fast and stable.
I don't have a Mac and would love to have OSX on my thinkpad, but not at the expense of having it run like Windows.
Lets just ban having any passengers in the vehicle too as they also require me to be 'part of a conversation'. Also - we need to ban stereos in cars too, as they are going to take your attention away too.
This doesn't mean only ONE channel in the service is HDTV, it means that you can only receive 1 HDTV channel at a time. If I only have 1 TV in my house that is HDTV complaint - thats fine, I can watch any of the HDTV channels on it, however, if I have more than ONE HDTV in the house, they are both going to have to be tuned to the same channel. Also, if you have more than 4 TVs in the house going at the same time, 2 of them would have to be watching the same show. While maybe the assume that many people wouldn't have more than 1 HDTV and 3 SDTVs it almost sounds like a step back to the days of pre-multiswitch satellite, when you had your 1 receiver feeding all the tvs in the house the same show.
Its worth mentioning that AT&T still owns the rights to the AT&T Wireless name and will re-emerge in the near future as AT&T Wireless but basically reselling Sprint's service.
My sister does research 6 months out of the year in Antartica for the British Antarctic Survey. Believe it or not - its fairly easy to email from there (although no WiFi AFAIK)
As far as I know there are a couple different pirated copies of XP out there. There is the original DevilsOwn patched version, then there are the VLK/Corporate versions and so on. I am going to guess that the majority of people pirating XP are using the corporate version which AFAIK currently has no problem connecting to WindowsUpdate.
Now - even if Microsoft does block everyone with any kind of pirated version of XP out - what is stopping someone from setting up their own WindowsUpdate server (I have done so at my office) and allowing people to update themselves from there (unless of course the WindowsUpdate allows for the person to download and once it attempts to install finds the illegitimate key and then stops there).
With the piracy scene these days it shouldnt take but a couple days for someone to figure out a way around all this activation stuff and sometimes even MS makes it easier to get around. Take Office XP - it requires activation which can be gotten around and if you attempt to install updates (esp. Service packs) it will ask you for the original CD. However, if you just download the entire SP3 for Office XP you can install the service pack without ever needing the original disks for XP.
If you can program some sort of protection - someone else will figure out a way around it. MS Activation, PGP, etc, etc, etc. Almost everyone wants something for nothing and will spend a lot of time to figure out how to do it.
Unless you suffer from a power outage. Then your 'NOC' is down, your servers down. Everything is useles and out of your control.
Author should mention either hopping on eBay and getting a used rackmount UPS or building a battery backup yourself using car batteries. As crude as it sounds if you have the space (a seperate room) you can build a huge battery back up system for (relatively) next to nothing and be able to simply add more batteries for longer uptime, etc.
I have had Cingular (formerly Pacbell Wireless) since '98. My last contract with Cingular expired in '99. After that I was obviously month-to-month and have been ever since. I can change my rate plan as frequently as I would like without worrying about signing another contract and when I want a phone I just go to one of the reputable resellers online and buy myself a new unlocked phone. I find that most phones are $20-$50 bought at retail than what Cingular would charge me for the phone including the contract.
With and unlocked phone and no contract I am free to switch providers and use number portability whenever I wish. My phone will work with any of the GSM carriers (Cingular, AT&T, T-Mobile) so I don't need to get into a new contract if I change providers. People need to have more foresight into NOT getting sucked into these 'deals' that providers offer for free cell phones and getting tangled in a contract.
My browsers - Firebird and IE both keep history for a few days. It used to be that when i accidentally typed something in and the domain could not be found that it wouldn't be in my history since it wouldn't resolve. Now - thanks to URL resolving my history is gradually starting to fill full of crap. So when im in a hurry and select something out of my history i sometimes end up getting a sitefinder page instead of what I was looking for. ARRRGH.
Reading this story totally infuriates me. The RIAA just jumps on the thing they can find that could POSSIBLY be related to music in some form. Is GOOGLE next? It can be used in the same way. Meh - THE RIAA SUCKS.
So Corel has been bought. This is the death of Corel as a company. Parts will be sold off and liquidated and thats it. There will not be new releases of any of their software. Long live Corel. Corel is dead.
Is this why when I tried to move one of my.org domains from Dotster to Godaddy that it didnt go through? I moved a.net domain and the.org at the same time. The.net went through this morning..:(
I beg to differ on the tourist thing. My sister and her husband both work for the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and are both currently stationed in Antarctica at this time. They are currently seeing quite a bit of tourist traffic, as much as 3 large boats a week of tourists, whom all want to take pictures and use the local Post Office (apparently people get a kick out of receiving mail with HRM on a stamp from Antarctica). Sadly some of these people take off and DO leave trash around, they have found penguins with plastic crap around their heads..etc. Also, keep in mind that each of these tourists that want to go to Antarctica have spent ~$10K for it. As it gets cheaper and cheaper more and more people will want to go down there. While there isn't much to see in the winter there (and much of its abandoned because of the temperatures/weather) when summer comes Antactica and its outlying islands have a lot to see.
On the other hand, I am all for better connectivity down there. It is currently more reliable and quicker for my sister to get on the radio with a base on an outlying island and READ the email to me than it is to try and send anything out via satellite.
"The signature species of Antarctica -- the mascot, if you will -- is the penguin. There are not one but no fewer than 17 species of penguins, of which only four breed on the Antarctic continent itself. These include the Adelie, the Emperor, the Chinstrap and the Gentoo penguins. Several other species are sometimes found within the Antarctic region, and penguins are found as far north as the Galapagos Islands, straddling the equator. But in general, the link in the public imagination between Antarctica and penguins is supported by the numbers -- there are millions of nesting pairs of Chinstrap penguins alone, and they are by far the most numerous creatures in the region."
A Pentium 100? I hope not. Waiting in line at the DMV takes me long enough already.
Also, keep in mind that when all these proprietary software companies start shutting down and closing their doors, and OSS is the only way, developers will not have the money or the resources to spent their time coding for free. America and any country with a decent economy THRIVES off capitalism, making everything free is NOT a good answer.
Consider looking at something like GoBeam. Although they do most of the work for you, it uses VoIP. It is all controlled via a web interface - you can set it to follow you (so if you dont answer your desk, it rings to your cell, then your pager..etc). You can set up specific groups for people who should be able to get through all the time, people who will get voice mail every time and so on, so you can restrict whom you talk to. Voicemails can be sent to your mailbox or previewed online. The units provide dialtone to whatever location your using it at so you can use digital OR analog phones (and fax machines). We had their service for a year and it was great, excellent at work and worked fine on my lines at home (1.5/128k AT&T Cable and a 1.1/1.1 SDSL line). Pricing is good too.
Haven't companies tried that already? Seems like no matter what kind of prevention they make - the software STILL gets bootlegged. I have seen the sudden worry among XP warezers about SP1 and CD keys - but I am willing to guarantee someone will find a way around it.
If the software is for educational use - why not just charge whatever it cost to get the physical product to the user. So, if a copy of Office is being bought for educational use it costs say $10 - the price of the packaging, materials, shipping and handling. If the software is being used by a FOR-profit organization, the retail pricing applies. This allows educational institutions to legally own the software, while not 'hurting' the software company quite as bad. It would simply require selling more in the retail sector to make up for the R&D and programming costs. I do understand that you can get NFR copies of software, but even then the prices of these products are way over the physical cost of the product.
Make software more affordable and people will buy it instead of pirating it. Yes, you will still have people who insist on having a free lunch, but I think this would curtail the problem considerably.
It seems like VR stuff has advanced very slowly in the past few years - except the graphics part of it. We are now getting to the point with the new cards from ATi and Nvidia that movies can be rendered real time so the visual experience is great, but physically its still cumbersome. Why isn't the equipment wireless, using bluetooth or something similar for everything to communicate. Its not going to feel very realistic to me if I have a strand of wires attached to me. I think the VR industry needs to step back and worry less about pretty graphics and more about making the hardware more user friendly to help add to the experience.
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I know its proprietary but I have to say, we just had an Inter-Tel system installed in our offices and it works great. Our main office (read: old) is still using a digital system but the other two offices are connected to our main office via VOIP. In our other two offices there is simply a 1U system (Axxess 5000) and a few POE switch and thats our entire phone system. The phones work great and we have an couple IPRC (Internet Protocol Resoure Cards) in our system so people can take IP phones home (or wherever) and make calls as if they were in the office.
Our current configuration has PRIs at each location with inter-office calls done via VOIP.
Especially once you combine this system with their Unified Communicator (call routing w/ greetings etc based on caller id, custom greetings, collaboration, find me follow me, presence management, desktop sharing..etc) The thing I love about that is that if joe blow calls in I can have my desk phone ring, and if i dont answer, it goes to voicemail. If my boss calls in and I don't answer then system picks up the line and says "Hi XYZ, hold on the line while the system finds me" and then attempts to call my cell phones or other locations and then will finally dump to vmail if It still cant find me.
The other thing I like about Inter-Tel is the fact that they can do their own financing. In our case we are leasing the equipment which makes it a much smaller amount of money each month and that cost covers service calls, insurance on the hardware, loss/theft, software upgrades, etc. So in 3 years we can look at what technologies we are using/not using and change our configuation from there.
Our business size is fairly small - about 200 people across 3 offices (10+ miles from eachother).
Again, while proprietary - its a total solution that, if leased, can be incredible cheap to operate (on a monthly basis).
SBC Currently blocks any traffic on port 25 to dissuade would-be spammers. Whats stopping them from filtering out any VOIP traffic unless you pay X dollars so that you use said services?
On the other hand, why don't these phone companies realize that POTS is no longer their core revenue stream an focus on tranporting data and wireless services?
The wonderful thing about Macs is that its a closed system. Everything works so well because instead of having to always keep the absolute least common denominator in mind (XP running on a 300MHz PII) they can keep the amount of hardware it runs on fairly slim, and not have to go crazy with drivers, support, etc. IMHO that goes a long way keeping the system fast and stable.
I don't have a Mac and would love to have OSX on my thinkpad, but not at the expense of having it run like Windows.
Lets just ban having any passengers in the vehicle too as they also require me to be 'part of a conversation'. Also - we need to ban stereos in cars too, as they are going to take your attention away too.
3 SDTV and 1 HDTV channel.
This doesn't mean only ONE channel in the service is HDTV, it means that you can only receive 1 HDTV channel at a time. If I only have 1 TV in my house that is HDTV complaint - thats fine, I can watch any of the HDTV channels on it, however, if I have more than ONE HDTV in the house, they are both going to have to be tuned to the same channel. Also, if you have more than 4 TVs in the house going at the same time, 2 of them would have to be watching the same show. While maybe the assume that many people wouldn't have more than 1 HDTV and 3 SDTVs it almost sounds like a step back to the days of pre-multiswitch satellite, when you had your 1 receiver feeding all the tvs in the house the same show.
I'll keeo my DirecTV and TiVos thanks.
Its worth mentioning that AT&T still owns the rights to the AT&T Wireless name and will re-emerge in the near future as AT&T Wireless but basically reselling Sprint's service.
Ah! The confusion!
My sister does research 6 months out of the year in Antartica for the British Antarctic Survey. Believe it or not - its fairly easy to email from there (although no WiFi AFAIK)
As far as I know there are a couple different pirated copies of XP out there. There is the original DevilsOwn patched version, then there are the VLK/Corporate versions and so on. I am going to guess that the majority of people pirating XP are using the corporate version which AFAIK currently has no problem connecting to WindowsUpdate.
Now - even if Microsoft does block everyone with any kind of pirated version of XP out - what is stopping someone from setting up their own WindowsUpdate server (I have done so at my office) and allowing people to update themselves from there (unless of course the WindowsUpdate allows for the person to download and once it attempts to install finds the illegitimate key and then stops there).
With the piracy scene these days it shouldnt take but a couple days for someone to figure out a way around all this activation stuff and sometimes even MS makes it easier to get around. Take Office XP - it requires activation which can be gotten around and if you attempt to install updates (esp. Service packs) it will ask you for the original CD. However, if you just download the entire SP3 for Office XP you can install the service pack without ever needing the original disks for XP.
If you can program some sort of protection - someone else will figure out a way around it. MS Activation, PGP, etc, etc, etc. Almost everyone wants something for nothing and will spend a lot of time to figure out how to do it.
Unless you suffer from a power outage. Then your 'NOC' is down, your servers down. Everything is useles and out of your control.
Author should mention either hopping on eBay and getting a used rackmount UPS or building a battery backup yourself using car batteries. As crude as it sounds if you have the space (a seperate room) you can build a huge battery back up system for (relatively) next to nothing and be able to simply add more batteries for longer uptime, etc.
I have had Cingular (formerly Pacbell Wireless) since '98. My last contract with Cingular expired in '99. After that I was obviously month-to-month and have been ever since. I can change my rate plan as frequently as I would like without worrying about signing another contract and when I want a phone I just go to one of the reputable resellers online and buy myself a new unlocked phone. I find that most phones are $20-$50 bought at retail than what Cingular would charge me for the phone including the contract.
With and unlocked phone and no contract I am free to switch providers and use number portability whenever I wish. My phone will work with any of the GSM carriers (Cingular, AT&T, T-Mobile) so I don't need to get into a new contract if I change providers. People need to have more foresight into NOT getting sucked into these 'deals' that providers offer for free cell phones and getting tangled in a contract.
"...proposes that we develop robots to assist in the construction of a lunar solar array..."
Yup. We're screwed.
How long HAVE you been paying $35/yr for your domains?!
My browsers - Firebird and IE both keep history for a few days. It used to be that when i accidentally typed something in and the domain could not be found that it wouldn't be in my history since it wouldn't resolve. Now - thanks to URL resolving my history is gradually starting to fill full of crap. So when im in a hurry and select something out of my history i sometimes end up getting a sitefinder page instead of what I was looking for. ARRRGH.
Verisign Sucks. They always have and always will.
DirecTV should do themselves a favor and just hire the guy as an engineer and pay him minimum wage.
Reading this story totally infuriates me. The RIAA just jumps on the thing they can find that could POSSIBLY be related to music in some form. Is GOOGLE next? It can be used in the same way. Meh - THE RIAA SUCKS.
So Corel has been bought. This is the death of Corel as a company. Parts will be sold off and liquidated and thats it. There will not be new releases of any of their software. Long live Corel. Corel is dead.
Is this why when I tried to move one of my .org domains from Dotster to Godaddy that it didnt go through? I moved a .net domain and the .org at the same time. The .net went through this morning.. :(
I beg to differ on the tourist thing. My sister and her husband both work for the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and are both currently stationed in Antarctica at this time. They are currently seeing quite a bit of tourist traffic, as much as 3 large boats a week of tourists, whom all want to take pictures and use the local Post Office (apparently people get a kick out of receiving mail with HRM on a stamp from Antarctica). Sadly some of these people take off and DO leave trash around, they have found penguins with plastic crap around their heads..etc. Also, keep in mind that each of these tourists that want to go to Antarctica have spent ~$10K for it. As it gets cheaper and cheaper more and more people will want to go down there. While there isn't much to see in the winter there (and much of its abandoned because of the temperatures/weather) when summer comes Antactica and its outlying islands have a lot to see.
On the other hand, I am all for better connectivity down there. It is currently more reliable and quicker for my sister to get on the radio with a base on an outlying island and READ the email to me than it is to try and send anything out via satellite.
You are misinformed.
There are a *lot* of Penguins in Antarctica
Quote:
"The signature species of Antarctica -- the mascot, if you will -- is the penguin. There are not one but no fewer than 17 species of penguins, of which only four breed on the Antarctic continent itself. These include the Adelie, the Emperor, the Chinstrap and the Gentoo penguins. Several other species are sometimes found within the Antarctic region, and penguins are found as far north as the Galapagos Islands, straddling the equator. But in general, the link in the public imagination between Antarctica and penguins is supported by the numbers -- there are millions of nesting pairs of Chinstrap penguins alone, and they are by far the most numerous creatures in the region."
Cisco 350 Series 802.11b equipment operates at 100mw.
A Pentium 100? I hope not. Waiting in line at the DMV takes me long enough already.
Also, keep in mind that when all these proprietary software companies start shutting down and closing their doors, and OSS is the only way, developers will not have the money or the resources to spent their time coding for free. America and any country with a decent economy THRIVES off capitalism, making everything free is NOT a good answer.
Consider looking at something like GoBeam. Although they do most of the work for you, it uses VoIP. It is all controlled via a web interface - you can set it to follow you (so if you dont answer your desk, it rings to your cell, then your pager..etc). You can set up specific groups for people who should be able to get through all the time, people who will get voice mail every time and so on, so you can restrict whom you talk to. Voicemails can be sent to your mailbox or previewed online. The units provide dialtone to whatever location your using it at so you can use digital OR analog phones (and fax machines). We had their service for a year and it was great, excellent at work and worked fine on my lines at home (1.5/128k AT&T Cable and a 1.1/1.1 SDSL line). Pricing is good too.
Haven't companies tried that already? Seems like no matter what kind of prevention they make - the software STILL gets bootlegged. I have seen the sudden worry among XP warezers about SP1 and CD keys - but I am willing to guarantee someone will find a way around it.
If the software is for educational use - why not just charge whatever it cost to get the physical product to the user. So, if a copy of Office is being bought for educational use it costs say $10 - the price of the packaging, materials, shipping and handling. If the software is being used by a FOR-profit organization, the retail pricing applies. This allows educational institutions to legally own the software, while not 'hurting' the software company quite as bad. It would simply require selling more in the retail sector to make up for the R&D and programming costs. I do understand that you can get NFR copies of software, but even then the prices of these products are way over the physical cost of the product.
Make software more affordable and people will buy it instead of pirating it. Yes, you will still have people who insist on having a free lunch, but I think this would curtail the problem considerably.
It seems like VR stuff has advanced very slowly in the past few years - except the graphics part of it. We are now getting to the point with the new cards from ATi and Nvidia that movies can be rendered real time so the visual experience is great, but physically its still cumbersome. Why isn't the equipment wireless, using bluetooth or something similar for everything to communicate. Its not going to feel very realistic to me if I have a strand of wires attached to me. I think the VR industry needs to step back and worry less about pretty graphics and more about making the hardware more user friendly to help add to the experience.