In my country, the "road toll" is the number of people who have died (or maybe just been in an accident) due to road accidents in the holidays (eg. Easter road toll of 3). You can imagine how I read the title, satellite-assisted road accidents??
The only charges we have are occasional ones such as when they built a new expensive bridge across a harbour, you had to pay $1 when you want across. Now that they've regained all the money, you don't have to pay anymore.
I was quite surprised to see this article, because I thought of it a couple of years ago, and to be honest, I assumed they already did it! It seemed so logical to me that I thought someone was bound to have thought of it already, and that all drives were like that. Maybe I should have patented it:)
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if it just takes a couple of days. Granted I haven't read the article yet, but it could be as simple as taking the HD out of the box, and putting it into your PC, and voilà! On the other hand, they might be in some weird proprietary format:(
We had a similar system here in New Zealand, where calls were charged in some obscure way that the ISPs were making money from people dialling up. Telecom (the telco that owns all the lines) had some obscure deal with Clear (the competition, who use Telecom's lines) where if a Telecom customer called a Clear customer, Telecom would pay Clear something like 2c/min. We had about 5 completely free ISPs (which used Clear for their dialup lines) - you just dialled up and used the net! No ad banners, no platform restrictions, or anything. Telecom simply paid Clear for all the calls, who then passed the revenue onto the ISPs (Clear's a "good" company). Unfortunately, Telecom revised their interconnect agreement with Clear, and these free ISPs have disappeared.
Anyway, a standard dial-up account costs around US$12/month here. I have a 128k DSL account that costs around $35/month (half to the ISP, and half to Telecom, who owns all the exchanges). I wish it was faster but Telecom has decided that if you want anything faster than 128k, then you pay by the MB:( This pricing structure hasn't been revised for 4 years, but they're introducing movies over DSL later this year and will hopefully update the prices then.
So I go onto the Philips site to get the PPC version, then find that you meant Pocket PC. Usually the term "PPC" means "PowerPC" (which is what I have).
I haven't had a single stupid/annoying/frustrating/etc message out of RealOne since I first installed it several months ago. However, I am on a Mac, and the Windows version may very well be much worse.
PS. I love QuickTime for Mac, and hate QuickTime for Windows!
Over here in New Zealand, lots of teenagers would much rather pay 20c (NZ) for an SMS than 69c a minute or whatever it is for voice. The fact that you can easily say a lot more in one minute than u can with an SMS seems to be irrelevant!
"Available the second half of 2003". For all we know, this could mean that Apple gets them first, and they're available to everyone ELSE in the second half of 2003 maybe? I'm pretty sure IBM and Apple would have some sort of deal, they'd be stupid not to.
Yeah, the vodafone prepay is great, especially since I only make about 1 call a month! I'm actually in NZ and we get pretty much the same deal as you guys, and I'd much rather pay NZ$20 a year for the prepay instead of being on an account:)
Plus there's none of that ridiculous "get charged for receiving calls" that they have in the US....
I can't believe you have to pay for incoming calls! I'm in New Zealand, using Vodafone, and I pay US$11 per year (not month), and pay for outgoing calls, outgoing SMS messages, and voicemail. That's all! I'm not charged for incoming calls or anything like that. I think the other major provider here has a similar pricing structure too.
I don't know about other countries, but here in New Zealand all the money is a kind of plastic. It doesn't rip, doesn't get damaged when it gets wet, etc. Is this the same sort of material?
This isn't really related to 802.11, but while we're on the topic of FCC, I heard that DSL is limited to 1.5 Mb/s in the USA. Is this true? I'm in New Zealand and I'm currently connected at a little over 4.4 Mb/s, with a theoretical maximum of 8.
If what I heard is true, I wonder what the reason is? Sorry about the OT, I've been wondering about this for a while and saw this as a chance to jump in and ask:)
Slashdot Mirror
In my country, the "road toll" is the number of people who have died (or maybe just been in an accident) due to road accidents in the holidays (eg. Easter road toll of 3). You can imagine how I read the title, satellite-assisted road accidents??
The only charges we have are occasional ones such as when they built a new expensive bridge across a harbour, you had to pay $1 when you want across. Now that they've regained all the money, you don't have to pay anymore.
Would they become worthless? I hope so. But even if they don't, we can continue to ignore the patents and make fun of SCO just like we do now :)
If this works like they want it to, then it'll be great for open source. But I'm sure you knew that anyway :)
I was quite surprised to see this article, because I thought of it a couple of years ago, and to be honest, I assumed they already did it! It seemed so logical to me that I thought someone was bound to have thought of it already, and that all drives were like that. Maybe I should have patented it :)
I didn't know most of that. I just wrote about what I did know, or at least what I thought i knew, be it correct or otherwise :)
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if it just takes a couple of days. Granted I haven't read the article yet, but it could be as simple as taking the HD out of the box, and putting it into your PC, and voilà! On the other hand, they might be in some weird proprietary format :(
Anyway, a standard dial-up account costs around US$12/month here. I have a 128k DSL account that costs around $35/month (half to the ISP, and half to Telecom, who owns all the exchanges). I wish it was faster but Telecom has decided that if you want anything faster than 128k, then you pay by the MB :( This pricing structure hasn't been revised for 4 years, but they're introducing movies over DSL later this year and will hopefully update the prices then.
I'm sure this was a really interesting rant :)
So I go onto the Philips site to get the PPC version, then find that you meant Pocket PC. Usually the term "PPC" means "PowerPC" (which is what I have).
I haven't had a single stupid/annoying/frustrating/etc message out of RealOne since I first installed it several months ago. However, I am on a Mac, and the Windows version may very well be much worse. PS. I love QuickTime for Mac, and hate QuickTime for Windows!
And somehow I don't find this at all surprising.
Over here in New Zealand, lots of teenagers would much rather pay 20c (NZ) for an SMS than 69c a minute or whatever it is for voice. The fact that you can easily say a lot more in one minute than u can with an SMS seems to be irrelevant!
"Available the second half of 2003". For all we know, this could mean that Apple gets them first, and they're available to everyone ELSE in the second half of 2003 maybe? I'm pretty sure IBM and Apple would have some sort of deal, they'd be stupid not to.
Didn't they make Gnutella too?
Yeah, the vodafone prepay is great, especially since I only make about 1 call a month! I'm actually in NZ and we get pretty much the same deal as you guys, and I'd much rather pay NZ$20 a year for the prepay instead of being on an account :)
Plus there's none of that ridiculous "get charged for receiving calls" that they have in the US....
I'm wondering the same thing - anyone??
I can't believe you have to pay for incoming calls! I'm in New Zealand, using Vodafone, and I pay US$11 per year (not month), and pay for outgoing calls, outgoing SMS messages, and voicemail. That's all! I'm not charged for incoming calls or anything like that. I think the other major provider here has a similar pricing structure too.
I don't know about other countries, but here in New Zealand all the money is a kind of plastic. It doesn't rip, doesn't get damaged when it gets wet, etc. Is this the same sort of material?
This isn't really related to 802.11, but while we're on the topic of FCC, I heard that DSL is limited to 1.5 Mb/s in the USA. Is this true? I'm in New Zealand and I'm currently connected at a little over 4.4 Mb/s, with a theoretical maximum of 8. If what I heard is true, I wonder what the reason is? Sorry about the OT, I've been wondering about this for a while and saw this as a chance to jump in and ask :)
Just thinking about building hobbit holes outside of NZ is a disgrace! :P
It's on the R4 version too. And if you're really curious, you can do the same thing on disc 1 to get a different video, but be warned, it's sick.