Now let's see you try to use the internet without the web.
I do that every day. Instant messaging, e-mail, VOIP, ping, telnet, ssh, rsh, multiplayer gaming, bittorrent and other P2P, and freedb, just to name a few non-web ways that I have made use of the Internet in the past couple of days.
Even without the web, the Internet would still be extremely useful. Without the Internet, however, surfing the web would be a rather frustrating experience.
Obviously, neither is going away. Hypothetically speaking, however, if such a thing were possible then the WWW would be FAR easier to replace than the Internet. Something like gopher could be evolved into a replacement for the web much more quickly and easily than the physical infrastructure and core protocols of the Internet could be reimplemented.
It's not fair to say that "VOIP" is lacking features when you're only talking about Vonage. My office is all VOIP, and we have none of the problems you mention. Faxes work flawlessly, as do modem connections. Voice mail works perfectly. As for a lack of features, that must be a Vonage thing, too. I can't think of a single feature that we don't have available should we decide to use it.
Don't assume that "VOIP" as a technology is lacking just because you had experience with a single sub-par implementation.
As far as call quality, it blows away our old land line service. The only way our conversations could be clearer would be to be in the same room with someone.
In case you're interested, it is possible to attach an external modem to the TiVo and get the TiVo service functional again. Or, if you want to go the extra mile, you could add a network card and set it up to do daily calls over your Internet connection, plus all of the other cool hacks that become possible once you have network connectivity.
And by the way, are you really trying to make the case that there are drivers out there so incompetent that they can't PRESS DOWN on a brake pedal?
If you really believe that proper braking in an emergency situation is nothing more than simply pressing down on the brake pedal, I'd have to say that you're one of the incompetent drivers being discussed.
I guess the tradition is that I spend the next 12 years crying myself to sleep every night, right?
Eh, fuck that, I think I'll just go ahead and laugh at the ignorant fuck that modded me down. Fact is that he's probably an 18 year old college student who has never spent a single day of his life in the "real world"...
Should be fun watching him "adjust" once mommy and daddy stop paying his bills for him and he actually ends up in the unfortunate situation of needing to earn a paycheck.
(At which point he'll probably be seeking out either myself or people like me to give him advice...)
For those of you who don't buy into my little rant about Indian employees stealing jobs from Americans, let me provide a little anecdote....
Back in the early 90's I was working for a "tiny" little company that was, at the time, operating under the name of "Norwest". I was, at that time, a wicked C/C++ programmer, but management had some sort of "PC" program going on where they needed to put foreigners in high paying positions in order to look good on some report that was coming up....
To make a long story short, I spent a lot of time in the break room talking to the Indian programmers who actually got the jobs that I wanted. They told me a lot about how much they hated living in this country, and how they were sending every penny that they earned back to their families. All I ever heard from them was how they couldn't wait to complete their "tour of duty" in the US, and get back home.
Meanwhile, they were asking me and my colleages for help. One guy, who was supposed to be an "expert" C programmer offered to pay me 500 bucks to explain pointers to him. I was making 40 grand, he was making upwards of a hundred, and he was asking me to teach him the very basics of his job...
I had an app in for that job, but it was never even looked at because I wasn't "foreign enough".
There's something VERY, VERY wrong when the "law of the land" dictates preferential treatment for incompetent foreigners while highly skilled locals are forced to occupy the lower ranks in the name of "quotas".
I'm only 34, an I'm already disgusted with the complete lack of affordable beach property that my country has waiting for me when I reach retirement age.
INVADE MEXICO NOW!!!!
And while we're at it, let's carpet bomb India with nukes. Those fucking assholes are coming over here, stealing jobs from home-grown Americans, and then moving back to India. The sick part of it is, the foreigners get preferential treatment for job openings at most big companies.
The United States DOESN'T FUCKING NEED to import talent. There is plenty of talent right here at home. What we need is to get rid of the visas, and start hiring the people who were raised here.
Everyone seems to think that we're "importing talent". The truth is that we're "exporting education".
I travel the world with my job all the time and you think you have it all - which you don't.
There is some beautiful countries out there, all I'm saying is look around - you'll be surprised what you find.
Oh, there certainly are. My biggest complaint with our government is that we haven't annexed them yet.
Take Mexico for example. With the Florida coast jammed beyond capicity with old farts, the US desparately needs more beach property. It would take about a 2 week war for us to gain control of Mexico. I wish we'd just do it and get it over with.
See, I could easily move to Cancun and live in a much more pleasurable climate that I'm in right now, but I'd also be living in the Mexican economy, which would mean a shitty salary.
If, on the other hand, we just fired up the 101st Airborne for a few weeks, we could have 7 or 9 more states (depending on how they divided things up) and I could move to Cancun, live on the beach, and earn an American salary.
As an added bonus, after a few years we would increase the standard of living down there to such a degree that we wouldn't all of these wetbacks invading our workforce.
It's a legitimate, functional technology. This is all too reminiscent of the media companies' fear of a threat to their established business models.
Regardless of any efforts to block its use, once people realise the advantages of VOIP, organisations, whether Governments or companies who want to enforce some kind of monopoly, will have to embrace this worthwhile development.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Get away from your keyboard for a little while and try to run a business. You'll find that outside of the geek community, NOBODY cares about "embracing worthwhile developments" unless it can do one of two things for them.
1) Make them a shitload of money. 2) Give them power.
Nobody in a decision making postition gives a fuck about H.323 vs SIP. Nobody in a decision making position gives a fuck about Linux vs Windows. Nobody in a decision making position gives a fuck about software patents.
I admire your idealism, but I have to tell you that it's horribly futile. The world operates on the concepts of "more money" and "more power".
Simply "not liking it" won't change anything. If you want to change things, you'll need either a lot of money, or a lot of power. Both of those goals will pretty much require you to play buy the current rules for a good long time before you're in a position to make a difference.
Not anymore. Ever since 9/11 we've been practically begging our government to take our freedoms away.
For fuck's sake, I now have to take my shoes off and have them inspected just to board an airplane. That's bad enough. What REALLY makes me sick is that almost every other person on that plane is happy that our govt is "taking such good care of us".
Meanwhile, the opened Mt. Dew bottle in my laptop bag passed through X-ray without being questioned. It happened to be filled with vodka, but it could just as easily have been filled with some nasty bio agent.
But THANK GOD they kept my cigarette lighter and nail clippers off of the flight!
Can you actually be on a phone call, and be using the cellphone for internet from your bluetooth-enabled device at the same time? I'm pretty sure that's not possible with my Treo, at least.
Depends. CDMA based phones are not able to do data and voice simultaneously, while GSM based phones are.
While this would seem to be a huge argument in favor of GSM, I still ended up sticking with CDMA due to the better coverage in my part of the country. The ability to use voice and data at the same time doesn't mean much when you have no signal in the first place.
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Now let's see you try to use the internet without the web.
I do that every day. Instant messaging, e-mail, VOIP, ping, telnet, ssh, rsh, multiplayer gaming, bittorrent and other P2P, and freedb, just to name a few non-web ways that I have made use of the Internet in the past couple of days.
Even without the web, the Internet would still be extremely useful. Without the Internet, however, surfing the web would be a rather frustrating experience.
Obviously, neither is going away. Hypothetically speaking, however, if such a thing were possible then the WWW would be FAR easier to replace than the Internet. Something like gopher could be evolved into a replacement for the web much more quickly and easily than the physical infrastructure and core protocols of the Internet could be reimplemented.
It's not fair to say that "VOIP" is lacking features when you're only talking about Vonage. My office is all VOIP, and we have none of the problems you mention. Faxes work flawlessly, as do modem connections. Voice mail works perfectly. As for a lack of features, that must be a Vonage thing, too. I can't think of a single feature that we don't have available should we decide to use it.
Don't assume that "VOIP" as a technology is lacking just because you had experience with a single sub-par implementation.
As far as call quality, it blows away our old land line service. The only way our conversations could be clearer would be to be in the same room with someone.
In case you're interested, it is possible to attach an external modem to the TiVo and get the TiVo service functional again. Or, if you want to go the extra mile, you could add a network card and set it up to do daily calls over your Internet connection, plus all of the other cool hacks that become possible once you have network connectivity.
I'm in the same boat as you, almost.
First, I have no real desire to move beyond the 4.x code. Second, I actually have a MythTV box hooked up in addition to my DTIVOs.
While Myth is worthless for recording anything other than OTA TV, the other funtionality that it provides comes in handy.
Oh, the blurry thing in your back yard is a UFO. ;)
Cool! That's fuckin' awesome! And here I was thinking it might be something mundane like my lawn mower....
On Google Maps I can easily make out my house. Google Earth lets me zoom in a few more notches and I can make out my truck and boat in the driveway.
There's also something sitting in my back yard in the picture, but it's too blurry to make out what it is.
And by the way, are you really trying to make the case that there are drivers out there so incompetent that they can't PRESS DOWN on a brake pedal?
If you really believe that proper braking in an emergency situation is nothing more than simply pressing down on the brake pedal, I'd have to say that you're one of the incompetent drivers being discussed.
Yeah, they do shove a year of "free" service down your throat.
That does not, however, does that prevent you from clipping the antenna cable.
That's not a good business to get into...
Once you've had your first three-breasted prostitute, it's just never the same anymore...
The real market is in the two-breasted "girl next door" types... Funny part is, the bio-engineering geeks don't "get" that....
Aww... Shit...
I got modded down as "flamebait"....
I guess the tradition is that I spend the next 12 years crying myself to sleep every night, right?
Eh, fuck that, I think I'll just go ahead and laugh at the ignorant fuck that modded me down. Fact is that he's probably an 18 year old college student who has never spent a single day of his life in the "real world"...
Should be fun watching him "adjust" once mommy and daddy stop paying his bills for him and he actually ends up in the unfortunate situation of needing to earn a paycheck.
(At which point he'll probably be seeking out either myself or people like me to give him advice...)
Someone made 16 billion bucks just from us sending a few guys to the moon?
Damn, that's fuckin' cool.
I wish I was a good enough businessman to make that sort of coin off of such a pointless project...
Holy shit, thank you for posting that... I now have a newfound respect for Halliburton.
For those of you who don't buy into my little rant about Indian employees stealing jobs from Americans, let me provide a little anecdote....
Back in the early 90's I was working for a "tiny" little company that was, at the time, operating under the name of "Norwest". I was, at that time, a wicked C/C++ programmer, but management had some sort of "PC" program going on where they needed to put foreigners in high paying positions in order to look good on some report that was coming up....
To make a long story short, I spent a lot of time in the break room talking to the Indian programmers who actually got the jobs that I wanted. They told me a lot about how much they hated living in this country, and how they were sending every penny that they earned back to their families. All I ever heard from them was how they couldn't wait to complete their "tour of duty" in the US, and get back home.
Meanwhile, they were asking me and my colleages for help. One guy, who was supposed to be an "expert" C programmer offered to pay me 500 bucks to explain pointers to him. I was making 40 grand, he was making upwards of a hundred, and he was asking me to teach him the very basics of his job...
I had an app in for that job, but it was never even looked at because I wasn't "foreign enough".
There's something VERY, VERY wrong when the "law of the land" dictates preferential treatment for incompetent foreigners while highly skilled locals are forced to occupy the lower ranks in the name of "quotas".
I'm only 34, an I'm already disgusted with the complete lack of affordable beach property that my country has waiting for me when I reach retirement age.
INVADE MEXICO NOW!!!!
And while we're at it, let's carpet bomb India with nukes. Those fucking assholes are coming over here, stealing jobs from home-grown Americans, and then moving back to India. The sick part of it is, the foreigners get preferential treatment for job openings at most big companies.
The United States DOESN'T FUCKING NEED to import talent. There is plenty of talent right here at home. What we need is to get rid of the visas, and start hiring the people who were raised here.
Everyone seems to think that we're "importing talent". The truth is that we're "exporting education".
Aaand that's reason to murder and torture practitioners?
Maybe it is, maybe it's not.
It doesn't matter. Nobody cares.
So, essentially, China and the US are on equal ground here.
The mechanisms are (on the surface) a bit different, but the list of allies that you need in order to be succesful are strikingly similar.
I would imagine China blocking VoIP not due to cost, but because they want to control the information.
You're exactly right. There is only one thing in the world more valuable and useful than money. Power.
I travel the world with my job all the time and you think you have it all - which you don't.
There is some beautiful countries out there, all I'm saying is look around - you'll be surprised what you find.
Oh, there certainly are. My biggest complaint with our government is that we haven't annexed them yet.
Take Mexico for example. With the Florida coast jammed beyond capicity with old farts, the US desparately needs more beach property. It would take about a 2 week war for us to gain control of Mexico. I wish we'd just do it and get it over with.
See, I could easily move to Cancun and live in a much more pleasurable climate that I'm in right now, but I'd also be living in the Mexican economy, which would mean a shitty salary.
If, on the other hand, we just fired up the 101st Airborne for a few weeks, we could have 7 or 9 more states (depending on how they divided things up) and I could move to Cancun, live on the beach, and earn an American salary.
As an added bonus, after a few years we would increase the standard of living down there to such a degree that we wouldn't all of these wetbacks invading our workforce.
Sounds like a win-win situation to me.
It's a legitimate, functional technology. This is all too reminiscent of the media companies' fear of a threat to their established business models.
Regardless of any efforts to block its use, once people realise the advantages of VOIP, organisations, whether Governments or companies who want to enforce some kind of monopoly, will have to embrace this worthwhile development.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Get away from your keyboard for a little while and try to run a business. You'll find that outside of the geek community, NOBODY cares about "embracing worthwhile developments" unless it can do one of two things for them.
1) Make them a shitload of money.
2) Give them power.
Nobody in a decision making postition gives a fuck about H.323 vs SIP. Nobody in a decision making position gives a fuck about Linux vs Windows. Nobody in a decision making position gives a fuck about software patents.
I admire your idealism, but I have to tell you that it's horribly futile. The world operates on the concepts of "more money" and "more power".
Simply "not liking it" won't change anything. If you want to change things, you'll need either a lot of money, or a lot of power. Both of those goals will pretty much require you to play buy the current rules for a good long time before you're in a position to make a difference.
That's the world we live in. Get used to it.
You clearly don't work in the telecom industry.
I dunno, that seems a little spendy...
I'd go $0.75 an hour to build handsets for my own voip service, though.
The UN? Doing the right thing? Are you fucking kidding me?
And, for that matter, why should we bother to look outside of our own back yard? What would be in it for us?
Not flamebait, this is a serious question.
Not true.
You simply buy it at Barnes and Noble, pay cash, take it home and enjoy. No paper trail, no problems.
Not anymore. Ever since 9/11 we've been practically begging our government to take our freedoms away.
For fuck's sake, I now have to take my shoes off and have them inspected just to board an airplane. That's bad enough. What REALLY makes me sick is that almost every other person on that plane is happy that our govt is "taking such good care of us".
Meanwhile, the opened Mt. Dew bottle in my laptop bag passed through X-ray without being questioned. It happened to be filled with vodka, but it could just as easily have been filled with some nasty bio agent.
But THANK GOD they kept my cigarette lighter and nail clippers off of the flight!
You clearly don't work in the telecom industry.
Can you actually be on a phone call, and be using the cellphone for internet from your bluetooth-enabled device at the same time? I'm pretty sure that's not possible with my Treo, at least.
Depends. CDMA based phones are not able to do data and voice simultaneously, while GSM based phones are.
While this would seem to be a huge argument in favor of GSM, I still ended up sticking with CDMA due to the better coverage in my part of the country. The ability to use voice and data at the same time doesn't mean much when you have no signal in the first place.