I was born at the end of the baby boom, we came of age in the late 70's and early 80's, when the country was going through a backlash against the counterculture and political tumoil of the late 60's and early 70's. Gone was the optimism and hope for a better world replaced by greed. Everyone was trying to get MBA or Law degrees. Engineering, science, the arts? Most people we're interested. As my age group entered the workforce and started and gained experience they only seemed to care about making money, and as much money as fast as possible. And remember, it wasn't only Wall Street. The whole Dot Com boom was awash from get-rich-quick speculative investing from the Boomers and managed by the late boomers. The whole cynical stupidity of the browser wars was driven by assholes to make the web into electric metaphors for things that the Boomers knew how to monetize.
The visionaries behind the Web were outgunned by the banal greed of Bill Gates who is a classic Robber Baron, who is now in the stage of life where he is trying to buy redemption with good deeds. And even then, his good deeds are making him money. I've heard this from a number of NGOs who have worked with his foundation. They don't give unless they can get. And then we had the fake hippie Steve Jobs who helped spark the PC revolution and then spent the last half of his life doing everything in his power to crush it and turn general computing devices that could be customized and extended to fit you into consumer electronics that forced people to do things the way that Jobs wanted you to do.
For every Woz there were a hundred or more Jobs. Woz and those like him, Steward Brand is an early boomer, Linus is a later boomer but they are the rare exceptions that prove the rule. So yeah, the late boomers, we really did and do suck.
I started started out using Pine, way way back when, then switched to the email client on my NeXT Color Slab. I replaced the NeXT box with an SGI Indy and used their built in email client. But when that died and I moved over to Linux I tried out Emacs Gnus which was fantastic and used that for 10 years. The only drawback to Gnus is search and I finally bit the bullet and moved from Gnus to Emacs Mu4e. It's not as powerful as Gnus, but it has a powerful index engine Mu that runs outside of Emacs and the Emacs client Mu4e is fast, clean and does pretty much everything that I need in a client. My mail is in a Google Apps account under my own domain so I grab email from Google using IMAP using mbsync, and then Mu indexes and syncs. I run this setup on two different machines, one in the office and one at home. Last year I had to split my time between three job sites and used a laptop as well. These tools allow me to integrate email into my entire workflow, I can link to specific emails in document, my task lists and manage issues on our GitLab server that is integrated with code in my git repos, notes and drafts of papers and blog posts (though I have't blogged in a while)
If I don't have access to any of my boxes running Mu4e I can always slum it and use the Gmail web client, it's not nice, because it isn't a good fit with my tool chain and work flow, but in a pinch it will do if I need to see an email on a mobile phone or someone else's computer.
I have two screens, the big one runs Emacs with two windows side by side, with Mu4e running in one and elfeed (an Emacs RSS reader) in the other. Any links open in Firefox running in the other monitor.
Honorable mentions go to Anything which is another Emacs email client and Mutt.
Hackers were not called Phreakers. Hackers were called hackers, which had nothing to do with malicious activities. It was the mainstream media that twisted the term because they didn't understand the difference between hacking, cracking and whatever the idiot script kiddies thought they were cutting and pasting at the time.... When I was starting out in Unix in the 80's you weren't allowed to call yourself a hacker unless someone who was a master of their craft called you that first. I'll never forget the first time that my mentor, a hacker working for Motorolla in Hong Kong introduced me at a conference in front of a large audience as a Unix Hacker. It was, and should still be a point of pride. Hacking is a method and philosophy of learning and problem solving that flattens hierarchies and cuts across disciplinary borders whose roots date back to the days of WWII project based weapons research and development.
The mobile phone system is terrible in the States. It's expensive, you get charged for receiving and sending calls, 3G is bad, and 4G is spotty at best. I get better mobile service out here were I live in Vientiene, Laos and Phnom Penh Cambodia! My parents in boston complain about how expensive it is to call me, but it's as cheap for me to call the States as it is to make a local call.
That said, when I do have to go to the States I use a T-mobile prepaid and maintain a Google-Voice number in between.
I suggest you rethink moving back to the States.
Mobile phones will be the least of your disappointments.
Yahoo is developing something called Hadoop on Demand which might work. Hadoop is the Amazon clone of Google's GFS (Google File System). Hadoop on demand is supposed to allow you to use unused volumes on any machine to create an ad hoc hadoop cluster. I'm not sure if it's been released yet, or if it works with Windows. But it would be cool it it did.
Go to Thailand and even the worst carrier is far cheaper, with better quality of service than the best carrier in the States. And ATT is certainly not the best carrier in the States.
Cingular has a tendency to eat the last few dollars on prepaid phones, even if your phone is turned off. The phones they give you are locked, you get charged for incoming and outgoing calls, SMS and sending images from a camera phone cost a fortune, international rates are double or triple what you pay in other countries and there are huge dead areas with no signal even in major cities.
I know that the same can be said for all carriers in the States. But you call this OK?
But you're missing the point. The only thing believers have had to hold up as evidence of the existence of God are these experiences.
Now these experiences can not only be explained, but duplicated in a laboratory.
If that's all there is to back up belief, it doesn't prove that something doesn't exist, but on the other hand there isn't anything left that can't be rationally explained and duplicated to believe there is one.
Is this an excuse for HBO? HBO in Thailand which is offered through UBC shows series like Deadwood and Rome at least a year after they have aired in the States.
Battlestar, is also shown a full year after it airs in the States....
Television might have some lasting value in syndication but it is far more transient than feature length motion pictures.
Television get's their money from the first run on the network it was created for, and then possibly, later as syndicated series.
For the most part, TV does not translate to VCD, or DVD sales--some does but most doesn't. So TV doesn't see themselves hurt as much by piracy as the film industry.
Hong Kong has had number portability for years. The cell companies immediately used it as a marketing vehicle to get new customers.
It lowers the barrier for people to switch, which means that companies will find it easier to get new customers as well as will find that it's easier to loose customers as well. It all balances out...
I don't know if they do the same here in Thailand, but then most people buy rechargeable SIMS instead of signing up for an account. It would be great to be able to move one of these numbers but then it sort of defeats the whole purpose of not having to have the hassle of getting a bill every month...
I remember 3-4 years back there was an announcement that Sun would provide the major contractor for both the hardware and software for Chinese filtering.
This was a year after SGI had sold a load of Challenge DM servers for the same purpose which were never used and are probably still collecting dust somewhere in the bowels of the China Resources Building in Hong Kong.
This may very well have changed since then, but it sounded like a pretty big contract. There might even be a press release somewhere in the Sun archives about it.
I remember at the time, being pretty dissapointed with SUN.
I was wondering why there was no mention of this on./ before. The launch was a few weeks ago! They went officially on sale for the first time in Japan today -- they expect to sell a million units in the first two days.
They are already in shops in Hong Kong (at twice the list price) and look pretty cool. We were playing with one today.
I'll wait until you can buy a hacked box in Bangkok which supports all zones as well as PAL and NTSC -- bit of a waste of money to buy one for the Japanese market -- 110 Volt and NTSC.... That shouldn't take more than a month or two.
Whatever you decide to do, find an organization like Linux International or the Linux Fund to channel the money through.
Find what you want to donate to and then let them manage the money and ensure it does what you intend it to do.
This is what we are intending to do for any donations to our project, which is promoting localization of Linux in South East Asian countries to help third world developers and small companies.
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I was born at the end of the baby boom, we came of age in the late 70's and early 80's, when the country was going through a backlash against the counterculture and political tumoil of the late 60's and early 70's. Gone was the optimism and hope for a better world replaced by greed. Everyone was trying to get MBA or Law degrees. Engineering, science, the arts? Most people we're interested. As my age group entered the workforce and started and gained experience they only seemed to care about making money, and as much money as fast as possible. And remember, it wasn't only Wall Street. The whole Dot Com boom was awash from get-rich-quick speculative investing from the Boomers and managed by the late boomers. The whole cynical stupidity of the browser wars was driven by assholes to make the web into electric metaphors for things that the Boomers knew how to monetize.
The visionaries behind the Web were outgunned by the banal greed of Bill Gates who is a classic Robber Baron, who is now in the stage of life where he is trying to buy redemption with good deeds. And even then, his good deeds are making him money. I've heard this from a number of NGOs who have worked with his foundation. They don't give unless they can get. And then we had the fake hippie Steve Jobs who helped spark the PC revolution and then spent the last half of his life doing everything in his power to crush it and turn general computing devices that could be customized and extended to fit you into consumer electronics that forced people to do things the way that Jobs wanted you to do.
For every Woz there were a hundred or more Jobs. Woz and those like him, Steward Brand is an early boomer, Linus is a later boomer but they are the rare exceptions that prove the rule. So yeah, the late boomers, we really did and do suck.
I started started out using Pine, way way back when, then switched to the email client on my NeXT Color Slab. I replaced the NeXT box with an SGI Indy and used their built in email client. But when that died and I moved over to Linux I tried out Emacs Gnus which was fantastic and used that for 10 years. The only drawback to Gnus is search and I finally bit the bullet and moved from Gnus to Emacs Mu4e. It's not as powerful as Gnus, but it has a powerful index engine Mu that runs outside of Emacs and the Emacs client Mu4e is fast, clean and does pretty much everything that I need in a client. My mail is in a Google Apps account under my own domain so I grab email from Google using IMAP using mbsync, and then Mu indexes and syncs. I run this setup on two different machines, one in the office and one at home. Last year I had to split my time between three job sites and used a laptop as well. These tools allow me to integrate email into my entire workflow, I can link to specific emails in document, my task lists and manage issues on our GitLab server that is integrated with code in my git repos, notes and drafts of papers and blog posts (though I have't blogged in a while)
If I don't have access to any of my boxes running Mu4e I can always slum it and use the Gmail web client, it's not nice, because it isn't a good fit with my tool chain and work flow, but in a pinch it will do if I need to see an email on a mobile phone or someone else's computer.
I have two screens, the big one runs Emacs with two windows side by side, with Mu4e running in one and elfeed (an Emacs RSS reader) in the other. Any links open in Firefox running in the other monitor.
Honorable mentions go to Anything which is another Emacs email client and Mutt.
Hackers were not called Phreakers. Hackers were called hackers, which had nothing to do with malicious activities. It was the mainstream media that twisted the term because they didn't understand the difference between hacking, cracking and whatever the idiot script kiddies thought they were cutting and pasting at the time.... When I was starting out in Unix in the 80's you weren't allowed to call yourself a hacker unless someone who was a master of their craft called you that first. I'll never forget the first time that my mentor, a hacker working for Motorolla in Hong Kong introduced me at a conference in front of a large audience as a Unix Hacker. It was, and should still be a point of pride. Hacking is a method and philosophy of learning and problem solving that flattens hierarchies and cuts across disciplinary borders whose roots date back to the days of WWII project based weapons research and development.
The mobile phone system is terrible in the States. It's expensive, you get charged for receiving and sending calls, 3G is bad, and 4G is spotty at best.
I get better mobile service out here were I live in Vientiene, Laos and Phnom Penh Cambodia! My parents in boston complain about how expensive it is to call me, but it's as cheap for me to call the States as it is to make a local call.
That said, when I do have to go to the States I use a T-mobile prepaid and maintain a Google-Voice number in between.
I suggest you rethink moving back to the States.
Mobile phones will be the least of your disappointments.
Yahoo is developing something called Hadoop on Demand which might work. Hadoop is the Amazon clone of Google's GFS (Google File System). Hadoop on demand is supposed to allow you to use unused volumes on any machine to create an ad hoc hadoop cluster. I'm not sure if it's been released yet, or if it works with Windows. But it would be cool it it did.
Compared to what?
Go to Thailand and even the worst carrier is far cheaper, with better quality of service than the best carrier in the States. And ATT is certainly not the best carrier in the States.
Cingular has a tendency to eat the last few dollars on prepaid phones, even if your phone is turned off. The phones they give you are locked, you get charged for incoming and outgoing calls, SMS and sending images from a camera phone cost a fortune, international rates are double or triple what you pay in other countries and there are huge dead areas with no signal even in major cities.
I know that the same can be said for all carriers in the States. But you call this OK?
But you're missing the point. The only thing believers have had to hold up as evidence of the existence of God are these experiences.
Now these experiences can not only be explained, but duplicated in a laboratory.
If that's all there is to back up belief, it doesn't prove that something doesn't exist, but on the other hand there isn't anything left that can't be rationally explained and duplicated to believe there is one.
Is this an excuse for HBO? HBO in Thailand which is offered through UBC shows series like Deadwood and Rome at least a year after they have aired in the States.
Battlestar, is also shown a full year after it airs in the States....
Television might have some lasting value in syndication but it is far more transient than feature length motion pictures.
Television get's their money from the first run on the network it was created for, and then possibly, later as syndicated series.
For the most part, TV does not translate to VCD, or DVD sales--some does but most doesn't. So TV doesn't see themselves hurt as much by piracy as the film industry.
Silly silly silly...
Hong Kong has had number portability for years. The cell companies immediately used it as a marketing vehicle to get new customers.
It lowers the barrier for people to switch, which means that companies will find it easier to get new customers as well as will find that it's easier to loose customers as well. It all balances out...
I don't know if they do the same here in Thailand, but then most people buy rechargeable SIMS instead of signing up for an account. It would be great to be able to move one of these numbers but then it sort of defeats the whole purpose of not having to have the hassle of getting a bill every month...
I remember 3-4 years back there was an announcement that Sun would provide the major contractor for both the hardware and software for Chinese filtering.
This was a year after SGI had sold a load of Challenge DM servers for the same purpose which were never used and are probably still collecting dust somewhere in the bowels of the China Resources Building in Hong Kong.
This may very well have changed since then, but it sounded like a pretty big contract. There might even be a press release somewhere in the Sun archives about it.
I remember at the time, being pretty dissapointed with SUN.
I was wondering why there was no mention of this on ./ before. The launch was a few weeks ago! They went officially on sale for the first time in Japan today -- they expect to sell a million units in the first two days.
They are already in shops in Hong Kong (at twice the list price) and look pretty cool. We were playing with one today.
I'll wait until you can buy a hacked box in Bangkok which supports all zones as well as PAL and NTSC -- bit of a waste of money to buy one for the Japanese market -- 110 Volt and NTSC.... That shouldn't take more than a month or two.
Whatever you decide to do, find an organization like Linux International or the Linux Fund to channel the money through.
Find what you want to donate to and then let them manage the money and ensure it does what you intend it to do.
This is what we are intending to do for any donations to our project, which is promoting localization of Linux in South East Asian countries to help third world developers and small companies.