It means you were smart. My family bought ALL of our groceries from WebVan for about a year. I had read that they lost $50 on each order - so I decided to get as many $50s as I could before they got smart.:-)
Seriously, the quality of their produce and meat was unparallelled, and their customer service was stupendous. I wouldn't call anyone who used them a dumbass.
That's not much different than my situation here in Silicon Valley, California, USA.
I am lucky enough to have DSL - 384KB down; 128KB up. I guess that qualifies as "broadband", though just barely. When we had it installed we were JUST beyond the distance limit - we were 18000 cable-feet from the central office. Some of our neighbors could get it to work; others could not. I was lucky...but 384Kb was the max I could get.
I've had the service for years now. Recently, every single month I get a piece of mail from SBC offering to upgrade me to "DSL Pro" - megabit or more speeds - for just a few dollars more than I'm paying now.
Three times I called them up to place the order.
Three times they accepted the order and gave me an installation date.
Three times their engineering department cancelled the order without any notice to me.
Three times they increased my bill to the "DSL Pro" rate, even though they hadn't bothered to actually install "DSL Pro".
I finally got the details of my situation out of them.
My service, as I said, is a long haul pair that goes from my house all the way back to the CO. NOW they have neighborhood concentrators scattered around, so they run a single highspeed link to the concentrator, and then just connect pairs from various houses to the concentrator. So the old cable length limitations are mostly gone, at least in my neighborhood.
Problem is that because of the way their system works, in order to switch from the OLD service to the NEW service they first have to disconnect the OLD one - then wait TWO WEEKS for all of the databases to update, then re-install me on the new service.
TWO WEEKS of downtime to upgrade! The kids would go ballistic. No thanks.
Meanwhile, they continue to send me snail mail every single month begging me to upgrade...knowing perfectly well that they don't have a credible way to upgrade me.
If I was going to upgrade to anything, I'd march down to Comcast and walk home with a shiny new cable modem - hook it up and be running with no downtime at all.
SO, I'm not feeling so sorry for the original poster in BT-land. The situation isn't any better over here.
But but but... you CAN already do that! At least with the GSM carriers, you can already buy any phone you want, from any source you want, stick in your SIM card, and away you go.
Of course - and this is the part you won't like - you'll have to pay full price for the phone. But that's fair - if Cingular doesn't like a particular phone then why should they pay more than half the price of it for you?
Darn - it would be convenient if this was a "big nasty corporation vs little guy" story. But it's just an "I don't want to pay for my own toys" story after all....
Not irrelevant at all. You hit precisely on the issue - "as long as... the device works". Is the total energy produced over the WORKING LIFE of the device > the total energy required to produce it?
I'd like to see a definitive source that proves that solar cells are indeed net energy sources, and not just very expensive batteries.
I saw the press release a few weeks ago announcing that Google had purchased Keyhole, and downloaded a copy. It's absolutely amazing.
The program still has a few rough edges, but even at this stage it's the most fun I've ever had for $30 - at least 10 times more entertaining than the $50 that I blew on Doom 3 ("every black pixel carefully rendered by hand").
Keyhole combined aerial photography with topographic data. It uses the topo data to construct a 3-D surface that maps to the actual terrain. It then lays the aerial photography down on the 3-D surface to provide a 3-D model of the terrain. You can fly through the 3-D space just like you were in a helicopter.
For mountainous areas the 3-D representation is eerily realistic. The skyline as viewed from my house looks PRECISELY like the view out my window.
You can also lay down custom images on top of the terrain. I took a trail map of the park by my house and easily laid it down on top of the park itself. By controlling the opacity of the map, I could easily use the map to help identify buildings and trails that I could see on the photos. There are lots of custom overlays on their bbs - so you can, for example, lay the nighttime light map of the world on top of the real world, and fade back-n-forth from the daytime view via keyhole and the nighttime view. Fun for answering the question, "so what city is THAT bright spot?"
Cities look a bit silly in 3D, since the topo data doesn't know about building heights. Manhattan is pretty flat, with lots of tall buildings painted on the ground. But mountains look unbelievably realistic.
I've shown it to about a dozen people since I got it, and at least 4 have purchased their own copy.
Yes, that's how GPRS data works. No, it's not free.
If you pay for the $20 / month unlimited internet plan, you can connect your computer to the internet through your cellphone by having the computer dial *99***2#.
Their T-Zones WAP service similarly dials the 'net by using *99***1#.
But it ain't free. They'll be happy to bill you for each and every KB you send - unless you're on the $19.95 / month unlimited plan.
While I'm sure it's exciting that Cingular will provide high-speed Internet, I'm more interested in when they will provide reliable voice service. Unfortunately my neighborhood in Silicon Valley gets either zero bars or one bar of signal from Cingular, and the same from T-Mobile (who uses the Cingular network).
I read a non-Star Trek sci-fi novel a very long time ago that used the same line. In the story, a species of space-faring sentient beings saw in microwaves instead of human-visible light. They basically could see through humans; we were visible simply as shadowy blobs with some internal structure. So their name for humans was "ugly bags of dirty water".
The Star Trek people stole it! I'm shocked!
(Of course, I can't recall who wrote the novel I'm thinking of, or when - so I can't reconstruct the chain of events - but I'm SURE the ST folks are guilty. Yeah.)
Other mainframe scripting languages were just disasters. I vividly remember replacing more than 1000 lines of EXEC-2 scripts with about 100 lines of REXX, and thinking that Mike Cowlishaw should be knighted.
And REXX beat ksh hands down in terms of power and readability as well.
I gave a speech ~ 1991 at a REXX Symposium about "REXX in UNIX". I had the crowd of mainframe and OS/2 people literally rolling in the aisles with laughter as I tried to explain ksh syntax to them. I made slides of some examples from the appendix in the KSH book, and it was hilarious. Even the geekiest UNIX geek has to admit that sh / ksh are disasters as programming languages. REXX was 10000% better.
On the other hand, as I pointed out in my speech that day, there was another new language coming up that was 20000% better. It was called Perl. Perhaps you've heard of it.:-)
REXX was originally intended to be a scripting language simple enough to allow non-professional-programmers to use. None of the UNIX scripting languages, including Perl, hit that mark - but REXX does.
I haven't written any REXX in 10 years, and haven't missed it. But it WAS a big step forward, and should have been a better success.
For $99 he coulda had a 40 GB TiVo that hooks up to satellite, PLUS the satellite dish.
TiVo service is $5 per month through DirecTV.
Sorta a no-brainer.
Huge empire falls apart, very slowly. Sounds like a great book (like Asimov's Foundation)...but sounds like horrible TV.
It would rapidly morph from "let's watch things come unglued" (which is sorta boring) into "let's watch the new regime take over"...and suddenly you've got Planet Of The Apes! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek.
Of course... but the proper way to write USD values is with 2 digits to the right of the decimal point. Apparently the "Mandrake touch" is a lazily written Perl program.:-)
Snort... the preorder page is a perfect summary of the Linux experience:
"...discover the powerful graphical tools and utilities, high-performance system optimizations, impressive selection of first-class applications, and the world-famous "Mandrake Linux touch".
Price : 59.9 USD"
Tools so powerful and impressive that they are unable to display monetary amounts using standard conventions! Sheesh.
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It means you were smart. My family bought ALL of our groceries from WebVan for about a year. I had read that they lost $50 on each order - so I decided to get as many $50s as I could before they got smart. :-)
Seriously, the quality of their produce and meat was unparallelled, and their customer service was stupendous. I wouldn't call anyone who used them a dumbass.
...now that Enterprise is dead.
That's not much different than my situation here in Silicon Valley, California, USA.
I am lucky enough to have DSL - 384KB down; 128KB up. I guess that qualifies as "broadband", though just barely. When we had it installed we were JUST beyond the distance limit - we were 18000 cable-feet from the central office. Some of our neighbors could get it to work; others could not. I was lucky...but 384Kb was the max I could get.
I've had the service for years now. Recently, every single month I get a piece of mail from SBC offering to upgrade me to "DSL Pro" - megabit or more speeds - for just a few dollars more than I'm paying now.
Three times I called them up to place the order.
Three times they accepted the order and gave me an installation date.
Three times their engineering department cancelled the order without any notice to me.
Three times they increased my bill to the "DSL Pro" rate, even though they hadn't bothered to actually install "DSL Pro".
I finally got the details of my situation out of them.
My service, as I said, is a long haul pair that goes from my house all the way back to the CO. NOW they have neighborhood concentrators scattered around, so they run a single highspeed link to the concentrator, and then just connect pairs from various houses to the concentrator. So the old cable length limitations are mostly gone, at least in my neighborhood.
Problem is that because of the way their system works, in order to switch from the OLD service to the NEW service they first have to disconnect the OLD one - then wait TWO WEEKS for all of the databases to update, then re-install me on the new service.
TWO WEEKS of downtime to upgrade! The kids would go ballistic. No thanks.
Meanwhile, they continue to send me snail mail every single month begging me to upgrade...knowing perfectly well that they don't have a credible way to upgrade me.
If I was going to upgrade to anything, I'd march down to Comcast and walk home with a shiny new cable modem - hook it up and be running with no downtime at all.
SO, I'm not feeling so sorry for the original poster in BT-land. The situation isn't any better over here.
So take their free phone, and then move the SIM card into the phone you bought. Throw their phone in the trash. Big deal.
You ARE taking about a GSM carrier, right? That's what I was referring to in the original post. The non-GSM carriers have more lockin.
But but but ... you CAN already do that! At least with the GSM carriers, you can already buy any phone you want, from any source you want, stick in your SIM card, and away you go.
Of course - and this is the part you won't like - you'll have to pay full price for the phone. But that's fair - if Cingular doesn't like a particular phone then why should they pay more than half the price of it for you?
Darn - it would be convenient if this was a "big nasty corporation vs little guy" story. But it's just an "I don't want to pay for my own toys" story after all....
Well! If the wikipedia says it, it MUST be true. How about a citation to an actual study or source?
Not irrelevant at all. You hit precisely on the issue - "as long as ... the device works". Is the total energy produced over the WORKING LIFE of the device > the total energy required to produce it?
I'd like to see a definitive source that proves that solar cells are indeed net energy sources, and not just very expensive batteries.
You can buy a new computer for $189? Wow, that's great! (It's also what VMWare Workstation costs....)
I saw the press release a few weeks ago announcing that Google had purchased Keyhole, and downloaded a copy. It's absolutely amazing.
The program still has a few rough edges, but even at this stage it's the most fun I've ever had for $30 - at least 10 times more entertaining than the $50 that I blew on Doom 3 ("every black pixel carefully rendered by hand").
Keyhole combined aerial photography with topographic data. It uses the topo data to construct a 3-D surface that maps to the actual terrain. It then lays the aerial photography down on the 3-D surface to provide a 3-D model of the terrain. You can fly through the 3-D space just like you were in a helicopter.
For mountainous areas the 3-D representation is eerily realistic. The skyline as viewed from my house looks PRECISELY like the view out my window.
You can also lay down custom images on top of the terrain. I took a trail map of the park by my house and easily laid it down on top of the park itself. By controlling the opacity of the map, I could easily use the map to help identify buildings and trails that I could see on the photos. There are lots of custom overlays on their bbs - so you can, for example, lay the nighttime light map of the world on top of the real world, and fade back-n-forth from the daytime view via keyhole and the nighttime view. Fun for answering the question, "so what city is THAT bright spot?"
Cities look a bit silly in 3D, since the topo data doesn't know about building heights. Manhattan is pretty flat, with lots of tall buildings painted on the ground. But mountains look unbelievably realistic.
I've shown it to about a dozen people since I got it, and at least 4 have purchased their own copy.
In short, it's an infinite timesink. Lots of fun.
...and always struck me as a reasonable fellow. I have to say I'm somewhat encouraged.
Yes, that's how GPRS data works. No, it's not free.
If you pay for the $20 / month unlimited internet plan, you can connect your computer to the internet through your cellphone by having the computer dial *99***2#.
Their T-Zones WAP service similarly dials the 'net by using *99***1#.
But it ain't free. They'll be happy to bill you for each and every KB you send - unless you're on the $19.95 / month unlimited plan.
While I'm sure it's exciting that Cingular will provide high-speed Internet, I'm more interested in when they will provide reliable voice service. Unfortunately my neighborhood in Silicon Valley gets either zero bars or one bar of signal from Cingular, and the same from T-Mobile (who uses the Cingular network).
First things first. Voice before data. Sigh.
There's no obvious straightforward way to buy this in the US that I can find. How much does it cost?
...maybe the dinosaur is hollow, and it's all an elaborate Geocache? (TNLNSDino)
I read a non-Star Trek sci-fi novel a very long time ago that used the same line. In the story, a species of space-faring sentient beings saw in microwaves instead of human-visible light. They basically could see through humans; we were visible simply as shadowy blobs with some internal structure. So their name for humans was "ugly bags of dirty water".
The Star Trek people stole it! I'm shocked!
(Of course, I can't recall who wrote the novel I'm thinking of, or when - so I can't reconstruct the chain of events - but I'm SURE the ST folks are guilty. Yeah.)
Um...in emacs:
M-x occur (return) foo (return)
Does precisely the same thing as the "all/foo/" command of XEDIT/KEDIT, and has been there for 10+ years.
Mike Cowlishaw had another project after REXX called LEXX. It was a syntax-directed text editor - very kewl for 198x.
Other mainframe scripting languages were just disasters. I vividly remember replacing more than 1000 lines of EXEC-2 scripts with about 100 lines of REXX, and thinking that Mike Cowlishaw should be knighted.
:-)
And REXX beat ksh hands down in terms of power and readability as well.
I gave a speech ~ 1991 at a REXX Symposium about "REXX in UNIX". I had the crowd of mainframe and OS/2 people literally rolling in the aisles with laughter as I tried to explain ksh syntax to them. I made slides of some examples from the appendix in the KSH book, and it was hilarious. Even the geekiest UNIX geek has to admit that sh / ksh are disasters as programming languages. REXX was 10000% better.
On the other hand, as I pointed out in my speech that day, there was another new language coming up that was 20000% better. It was called Perl. Perhaps you've heard of it.
REXX was originally intended to be a scripting language simple enough to allow non-professional-programmers to use. None of the UNIX scripting languages, including Perl, hit that mark - but REXX does.
I haven't written any REXX in 10 years, and haven't missed it. But it WAS a big step forward, and should have been a better success.
If you are, then the clauses that say "we ownz everything you do" are invalid. They only ownz things you do that are related to your job.
For $99 he coulda had a 40 GB TiVo that hooks up to satellite, PLUS the satellite dish. TiVo service is $5 per month through DirecTV. Sorta a no-brainer.
Huge empire falls apart, very slowly. Sounds like a great book (like Asimov's Foundation)...but sounds like horrible TV. It would rapidly morph from "let's watch things come unglued" (which is sorta boring) into "let's watch the new regime take over"...and suddenly you've got Planet Of The Apes! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek.
I wonder - where would a GeForce 3 (the card *I* have) come up on these charts? Naturally, it's a bit too old to have been tested.
I'd hate to trade yesterday's top-end card for today's midrange card and wind up going backwards...
Or so they claim. Could make Xmas a little happer for you.
Of course ... but the proper way to write USD values is with 2 digits to the right of the decimal point. Apparently the "Mandrake touch" is a lazily written Perl program. :-)
"Price : 59.9 USD"
Snort ... the preorder page is a perfect summary of the Linux experience:
"...discover the powerful graphical tools and utilities, high-performance system optimizations, impressive selection of first-class applications, and the world-famous "Mandrake Linux touch".
Price : 59.9 USD"
Tools so powerful and impressive that they are unable to display monetary amounts using standard conventions! Sheesh.