According to the site it is a GSM phone. This means that it'll use any SIM card that you care to stick into it. The reason that you can't use it in Ireland is that it's not a triple band phone. In Europe and much of the rest of the world GSM operates in the 900 and 1800 MHz bands. In North America moblie phones operate at 800 and 1900 MHz with GSM being used only in the 1900 MHz band. It's a bit unfortunate that this happened. The Europeans tend to turn their noses up at the North Americans as if this incompatability were somehow their fault despite the fact that the frequency bands were allocated in North America before they were in Europe.
This problem can be overcome by getting a triple mode phone or borrowing a phone (putting in your own SIM) when you cross the pond. The site also indicates that Handspring is working on a triple-band phone module that will be avaliable for those who live in !North America or frequently travel around the world.
As for the SIM cards, why would you expect them to be provider independant? They are your means of authenticating yourself to the network. Seems kind of silly to think that they would be provided by someone other than the network operator. _____________
This is actually an older from of treatment. The difference is that previously the child being treated had to go to the doctor's office to be connected to a similar helmet the feedback consisted of some blinking lights. Now instead of using blinking lights to indicate progress the game reduces the random delay in the controller to make the game more fun. It's still the same idea just that these guys have found a way of doing it that's a little more palatable. It's kind of like the cherry flavor they put in cough syrup, most everyone thinks that it tastes terrible, but it's better than the taste of the medicine without. _____________
I wouldn't even take port scanning as seriously as this. I see it as being more akin to looking around in the convenience store and seeing which of the usual convenience store products they offer. Perhaps one store offers only Pepsi products while others in the same neighborhood offer Coke products as well while some others also offer beer. However, sales of beer are restricted and identification must be presented to access beer. Does this make it wrong to enter sever stores in a neighborhood and notice if or if not they offer beer for sale? _____________
And what kind of crack were you smoking when you decided to give up your 500 series printer? I'm still using my Deskjet 500 and will continue to do so until I can no longer get replacement cartridges for it. Yeah, it's only 300x300dpi but that's pretty good quality for B&W text and it never jams, prints fast. That was just a great product. _____________
The thing about the APCS course and test is that it is largely intended to be an introduction of computer science. I believe that an introduction to computer science should focus mostly on the larger concepts of computer science. However, CS is an applied field and the students must be given a way of expressing the new algorithms, data structures and other concepts that they are learning. The best way to apply these sorts of ideas is to use a language which you have a compiler for and it is easier if everyone in the class is using the same language. In an introductory course it seems fair to assume that the students do not have much experience with any particular (non brain dead i.e. VB) computer language so the choice of language isn't particularly relevant as long as it's a comprehensive language with a syntax that isn't overly difficult to grok. Java is a fine choice for this as are C++ and Pascal (in which I took the exam in '96. Passed with a 4.). My memories from when I took the APCS exam are that it had very few questions regarding the particular syntax of Pascal and that the majority of the questions focused on sorting algorithms and other big concepts. _____________
I'm not quite sure about that but I'm sure that someone will come up with a way to make a free, ad-based ad blocking service. Afterall this is the new economy, you don't have to make any sense to get funding. _____________
Actually I've noticed that most of the Region 1 DVDs do have a french soundtrack. In fact a French soundtrack/subtitles seems to be more common than Spanish a language spoken by a much larger portion of the North American population. I presume that this is because the French Canadians have more money than the more populous Hispanic Americans. _____________
It doesn't... It simply isn't under the default path for normal users on a few distributions.
While the later part of this statement is true and solutions have been suggested by other posters the former part is not true. traceroute does have to be run as root. On most distros it is installed as a suid program. To my knowledge this is safe since it is a well tested program without any expliot problems. _____________
One of my friends was using his digicam as a webcam for a while. One of the problems that he had with it was that the camera would turn itself off after a period of time without human interaction and cease to work. It may be worth checking if your camera has this "feature". I've had very good success using a camcorder as a webcam. My last semester in college my roommates and I ran a webcam using this process. In this particular case, the video capture card lived in a Mac, but I could have done the same with my linux box and a shell script. _____________
I really can't agree with you on this one. At least for me, the biggest appeal of video games is that it's not something I have to watch it's something I can do. There is certianly something to be said about the wonder of watching a master go about his work be it athletics, music, metal working, coding or gaming. The difference is that video games are so accessable to the average guy and therein lies their appeal. When games are unwinnable on their own people develop cheats or lose interest quickly. Therefore, most good video games aren't really all that difficult to play well, they may be difficult to really master but I usually lose interest after I've learned a game well enough to be successful most of the time. _____________
Ok, just for fun let's have a look at what's happened since Fall 1990. In the Fall of 1990 my father purchased a new computer for our family. It cost about $2k. In the 10 years that have elapsed since that time 6-2/3 cycles of 18 months have passed. 2^6-2/3 comes out to ~102 times the performance/transistor density/capacity expected of a similarly priced machine today. So let's see what 2 grand will buy us today. I'd say that after throwing in a monitor and printer this box from Best Buy would be pretty comparable to a Packard-Bell from Best Buy in the early 90's. Let's do a little comparing:
Part | 1990 | 2000 | Difference
Proc | 286 12MHz | Athlon 1GHz | 83X faster clock
Memory | 1 MB | 128MB | 128X more and faster
HD | 42MB | 60GB | 1500X more and faster
Modem | 2.4kbps | 56kbps | 23.3X faster
Network | none | 100Mbps | 41kX faster than 2400 modem
video | 320x240 256 colors | 1600x1200 2^24 colors | 25X more pixels 2^16X more colors
Make of this what you will, some components have increased in power faster than Moore might have predicted, some slower, but there is no mistake that every single part of the computer has made huge strides in the last decade. It's true that today the processor is less likely to be the bottle neck on a system than 10 year ago, but the performance increase is huge nonetheless. _____________
The ctrl+alt+bksp combo is what I usually use to recover from an X crash. However, X does grab the keyboard and mouse interface and a sufficiently violent crash can render them useless.
I'm not going to disagree with you that FAT is a really bad filesystem, but it is a little more tolerant of improper unmounting than ext2. The obvious solution is to use ReiserFS. It seems to be quite good at recovering from improper unmounting and resumes normal operation very quickly upon reboot. I had the opportunity to try this out last week when I accidently pulled the wrong cord out behind my desk. _____________
Yeah, it'll be great when users are exposed to quality stable Linux projects like Netscape. From an end user's perspective, there's no real difference between the operating system being taken out by an application and the X session being taken out by an application. If you're lucky you have another computer in the room so that you can telnet to the locked box and kill X. Otherwise, you have little recourse besides the reset switch when the mouse and keyboard don't respond anymore. Either way you lose any unsaved work in open applications, just like in a Windows crash. When running Linux instead of windows however you run the risk of doing quite a bit of damage to the file system during a reset. _____________
any more than an unlocked mailbox implies an invitation to open the mailbox and read the mail inside.
Well, that's just what I'm pondering. I would believe that I'd be within my rights to make use of a public resource (such as a mailbox) even if it does not belong to me. It is completely acceptable for me to deposit my outgoing mail into an unlocked mailbox (provided that said letters are not in themselves illegal). However, it is not permissable for me to remove things from the mailbox which do not belong to me or to place things into the mailbox which do not belong there.
It is my belief that open ports on computer systems are an invitation to make use (note: I am not saying abuse) of those resources. If you don't want those resources used by the general public then you need to close those ports or protect them in some other way. _____________
Just because they don't put a lock on the door doesn't constitue an invitation.
There's a little bit of a difference when you place a service on the internet. By leaving the port for some service open to the public you have in effect issued an invitation. Placing a public resource in a public place and being surprised when it is used by the public is stupid. If I open port 80 on my machine I should not be surprised when people connect to it and attempt to use the http resources on my machine. Why would I expect it to be any different if I leave port 25 open on my machine?
I think that an apt analogy is if I were to put a drinking fountian on my front lawn adjacent to the sidewalk. If you happened to feel thirsty as you walked past my home you could reasonable expect that I had extended an invitation to you to drink from the fountian since it was placed in a public place. If you were to connect a hose to it and use it to fill your swimming pool that might well be a different legal and ethical question.
One should be able to place a resource avaliable that is available to the world and expect that it not be abused. The internet and human nature being what they are though that just might not be the wisest decision. Something to think about anyway... _____________
Seems like USB would be a pretty good choice for this application. It's as fast as a 10BT network and much faster than a parallel port. For the rare occasions when a hard drive needs to be reimaged I doubt that blazing fast speed is a huge priority. If USB drivers for DOS can't be found it might be possible to fall back to a parallel port and some Iomega product. I know that they will work in DOS, but will certianly be quite slow.
Overall SCSI wouldn't be a terrible thing either. However it's not a very standard interface in desktop class machines. You would have to go out of your way to see to it that your desktop machines were fitted with a scsi port. Your laptop machines will likely never have an external scsi port, but you could keep a PCMCIA SCSI card with your drive for use in the laptop machines. _____________
If my cable modem company said otherwise, I'd say bye-bye.
If my cable modem company started blocking port 25 I'd only be able to send mail about 75% of the time. Their mailserver (mail.rdc1.il.home.com) is so unreliable as to render it pretty much worthless. So far I haven't had too much trouble with sending mail from my 24.0.0.0 IP address, If it starts getting blocked a lot I'll have to find a different solution, but using the ISP's server is a pretty bad one. _____________
Why would they charge people for something they already own anyways??? If I "own" a picture, I don't need MS to print it.
-----Begin Sarcasm----- You're absolutely right it's totally unfair to charge for the reproduction of images for the benefit of the copyright holder. It's absolutely unfair that some heartless corporation charges me $7.50 to make prints of a roll of film. I own the copyright to the pictures on that film. They have no right what so ever to make a profit from my work! The same goes for Kinkos. They have no right to make a profit when I photocopy a report that I hold the copyright to. That's my intellectual property they can't charge me to make copies! -----End Sarcasm-----
They are simply providing a reproduction service for images hosted on their server and charging for the service. Seems pretty resonable to me. If you happen to be a professional photographer and wish to sell your work to make a living this probably isn't a very acceptable arrangement. Don't use it. If you're just an average joe and want to post your pictures so that your friends can look at them you probably don't care. _____________
Vile looks like a pretty cool program. However, I must admit that it took more than a little bit of courage to click on a link pointing to http://www.vile.cx/. Given the vile nature of a certian site which has a name in the Christmas Island TLD I was pretty concerned about clicking on a.cx site that actually has vile in the name.:) _____________
I'd have to agree with you there. The mandrake 7.2 install is much easier than any install I've done with windows. It did fail to properly recognize my soundcard, but I think that I may have confused it by having both a on motherboard card and an ISA card in place.The only serious problem that I've had with my Mandrake 7.2 install is that KDE2 wants every font to be LedFixed. This is a very large, very ugly font and it makes me want to shoot my computer. Does anyone know how to fix this problem? Help me please! _____________
You hit it right on there. I did tech support one summer while I was in college. Being a college student I had been to more school than most of the managers and from what I hear I was at a pretty damn good place. The only college graduates in the place worked on the Canadian contracts, but they weren't IT grads they were French majors. _____________
That article is terrible. It's really not all that confusing to press 10 buttons instead of 7. There's just nothing that's all that difficult about it. I've lived in places (Baltimore) with overlay area codes and they really aren't that confusing. If it's long distance you have to press 1 first (total 11 digits) if it's local you don't (total 10 digits). As far as telling the difference it's not any more confusing than determining if a number in the same area code is local or long distance. Just dial it as local first and if it doesn't work then try again with a 1 in front.
As far as this being necessary I really don't understand. Where I live now (Iowa) we just split the 319 area code. This gives the ~2 million people in Iowa 5 area codes or a total of 50 million possible phone numbers. I realize that some of these start with 0 or 1 or x11 and can't be used but it just seems pretty excessive. How can the system be this inefficient? Do we really need to have 25 phone#s per person? _____________
Actually that's what I usually do. I (or my girlfriend) sits there and we talk about what we're going to eat for the next several days. As each food item is mentioned it gets added to the appropriate section of the list. So, yes it does get typed in all at once, and yes I do need the list. _____________
Slashdot Mirror
This problem can be overcome by getting a triple mode phone or borrowing a phone (putting in your own SIM) when you cross the pond. The site also indicates that Handspring is working on a triple-band phone module that will be avaliable for those who live in !North America or frequently travel around the world.
As for the SIM cards, why would you expect them to be provider independant? They are your means of authenticating yourself to the network. Seems kind of silly to think that they would be provided by someone other than the network operator.
_____________
This is actually an older from of treatment. The difference is that previously the child being treated had to go to the doctor's office to be connected to a similar helmet the feedback consisted of some blinking lights. Now instead of using blinking lights to indicate progress the game reduces the random delay in the controller to make the game more fun. It's still the same idea just that these guys have found a way of doing it that's a little more palatable. It's kind of like the cherry flavor they put in cough syrup, most everyone thinks that it tastes terrible, but it's better than the taste of the medicine without.
_____________
I wouldn't even take port scanning as seriously as this. I see it as being more akin to looking around in the convenience store and seeing which of the usual convenience store products they offer. Perhaps one store offers only Pepsi products while others in the same neighborhood offer Coke products as well while some others also offer beer. However, sales of beer are restricted and identification must be presented to access beer. Does this make it wrong to enter sever stores in a neighborhood and notice if or if not they offer beer for sale?
_____________
And what kind of crack were you smoking when you decided to give up your 500 series printer? I'm still using my Deskjet 500 and will continue to do so until I can no longer get replacement cartridges for it. Yeah, it's only 300x300dpi but that's pretty good quality for B&W text and it never jams, prints fast. That was just a great product.
_____________
The thing about the APCS course and test is that it is largely intended to be an introduction of computer science. I believe that an introduction to computer science should focus mostly on the larger concepts of computer science. However, CS is an applied field and the students must be given a way of expressing the new algorithms, data structures and other concepts that they are learning. The best way to apply these sorts of ideas is to use a language which you have a compiler for and it is easier if everyone in the class is using the same language. In an introductory course it seems fair to assume that the students do not have much experience with any particular (non brain dead i.e. VB) computer language so the choice of language isn't particularly relevant as long as it's a comprehensive language with a syntax that isn't overly difficult to grok. Java is a fine choice for this as are C++ and Pascal (in which I took the exam in '96. Passed with a 4.). My memories from when I took the APCS exam are that it had very few questions regarding the particular syntax of Pascal and that the majority of the questions focused on sorting algorithms and other big concepts.
_____________
I'm not quite sure about that but I'm sure that someone will come up with a way to make a free, ad-based ad blocking service. Afterall this is the new economy, you don't have to make any sense to get funding.
_____________
Actually I've noticed that most of the Region 1 DVDs do have a french soundtrack. In fact a French soundtrack/subtitles seems to be more common than Spanish a language spoken by a much larger portion of the North American population. I presume that this is because the French Canadians have more money than the more populous Hispanic Americans.
_____________
While the later part of this statement is true and solutions have been suggested by other posters the former part is not true. traceroute does have to be run as root. On most distros it is installed as a suid program. To my knowledge this is safe since it is a well tested program without any expliot problems.
_____________
One of my friends was using his digicam as a webcam for a while. One of the problems that he had with it was that the camera would turn itself off after a period of time without human interaction and cease to work. It may be worth checking if your camera has this "feature". I've had very good success using a camcorder as a webcam. My last semester in college my roommates and I ran a webcam using this process. In this particular case, the video capture card lived in a Mac, but I could have done the same with my linux box and a shell script.
_____________
I really can't agree with you on this one. At least for me, the biggest appeal of video games is that it's not something I have to watch it's something I can do. There is certianly something to be said about the wonder of watching a master go about his work be it athletics, music, metal working, coding or gaming. The difference is that video games are so accessable to the average guy and therein lies their appeal. When games are unwinnable on their own people develop cheats or lose interest quickly. Therefore, most good video games aren't really all that difficult to play well, they may be difficult to really master but I usually lose interest after I've learned a game well enough to be successful most of the time.
_____________
Part | 1990 | 2000 | Difference
Proc | 286 12MHz | Athlon 1GHz | 83X faster clock
Memory | 1 MB | 128MB | 128X more and faster
HD | 42MB | 60GB | 1500X more and faster
Modem | 2.4kbps | 56kbps | 23.3X faster
Network | none | 100Mbps | 41kX faster than 2400 modem
video | 320x240 256 colors | 1600x1200 2^24 colors | 25X more pixels 2^16X more colors
Make of this what you will, some components have increased in power faster than Moore might have predicted, some slower, but there is no mistake that every single part of the computer has made huge strides in the last decade. It's true that today the processor is less likely to be the bottle neck on a system than 10 year ago, but the performance increase is huge nonetheless.
_____________
I'm not going to disagree with you that FAT is a really bad filesystem, but it is a little more tolerant of improper unmounting than ext2. The obvious solution is to use ReiserFS. It seems to be quite good at recovering from improper unmounting and resumes normal operation very quickly upon reboot. I had the opportunity to try this out last week when I accidently pulled the wrong cord out behind my desk.
_____________
Can you explain to me exactly what Cyan Yellow Magenta blacK has to do with what year it is?
_____________
Yeah, it'll be great when users are exposed to quality stable Linux projects like Netscape. From an end user's perspective, there's no real difference between the operating system being taken out by an application and the X session being taken out by an application. If you're lucky you have another computer in the room so that you can telnet to the locked box and kill X. Otherwise, you have little recourse besides the reset switch when the mouse and keyboard don't respond anymore. Either way you lose any unsaved work in open applications, just like in a Windows crash. When running Linux instead of windows however you run the risk of doing quite a bit of damage to the file system during a reset.
_____________
Well, that's just what I'm pondering. I would believe that I'd be within my rights to make use of a public resource (such as a mailbox) even if it does not belong to me. It is completely acceptable for me to deposit my outgoing mail into an unlocked mailbox (provided that said letters are not in themselves illegal). However, it is not permissable for me to remove things from the mailbox which do not belong to me or to place things into the mailbox which do not belong there.
It is my belief that open ports on computer systems are an invitation to make use (note: I am not saying abuse) of those resources. If you don't want those resources used by the general public then you need to close those ports or protect them in some other way.
_____________
There's a little bit of a difference when you place a service on the internet. By leaving the port for some service open to the public you have in effect issued an invitation. Placing a public resource in a public place and being surprised when it is used by the public is stupid. If I open port 80 on my machine I should not be surprised when people connect to it and attempt to use the http resources on my machine. Why would I expect it to be any different if I leave port 25 open on my machine?
I think that an apt analogy is if I were to put a drinking fountian on my front lawn adjacent to the sidewalk. If you happened to feel thirsty as you walked past my home you could reasonable expect that I had extended an invitation to you to drink from the fountian since it was placed in a public place. If you were to connect a hose to it and use it to fill your swimming pool that might well be a different legal and ethical question.
One should be able to place a resource avaliable that is available to the world and expect that it not be abused. The internet and human nature being what they are though that just might not be the wisest decision. Something to think about anyway...
_____________
Overall SCSI wouldn't be a terrible thing either. However it's not a very standard interface in desktop class machines. You would have to go out of your way to see to it that your desktop machines were fitted with a scsi port. Your laptop machines will likely never have an external scsi port, but you could keep a PCMCIA SCSI card with your drive for use in the laptop machines.
_____________
If my cable modem company started blocking port 25 I'd only be able to send mail about 75% of the time. Their mailserver (mail.rdc1.il.home.com) is so unreliable as to render it pretty much worthless. So far I haven't had too much trouble with sending mail from my 24.0.0.0 IP address, If it starts getting blocked a lot I'll have to find a different solution, but using the ISP's server is a pretty bad one.
_____________
-----Begin Sarcasm-----
You're absolutely right it's totally unfair to charge for the reproduction of images for the benefit of the copyright holder. It's absolutely unfair that some heartless corporation charges me $7.50 to make prints of a roll of film. I own the copyright to the pictures on that film. They have no right what so ever to make a profit from my work! The same goes for Kinkos. They have no right to make a profit when I photocopy a report that I hold the copyright to. That's my intellectual property they can't charge me to make copies!
-----End Sarcasm-----
They are simply providing a reproduction service for images hosted on their server and charging for the service. Seems pretty resonable to me. If you happen to be a professional photographer and wish to sell your work to make a living this probably isn't a very acceptable arrangement. Don't use it. If you're just an average joe and want to post your pictures so that your friends can look at them you probably don't care.
_____________
Vile looks like a pretty cool program. However, I must admit that it took more than a little bit of courage to click on a link pointing to http://www.vile.cx/. Given the vile nature of a certian site which has a name in the Christmas Island TLD I was pretty concerned about clicking on a .cx site that actually has vile in the name. :)
_____________
I'd have to agree with you there. The mandrake 7.2 install is much easier than any install I've done with windows. It did fail to properly recognize my soundcard, but I think that I may have confused it by having both a on motherboard card and an ISA card in place.The only serious problem that I've had with my Mandrake 7.2 install is that KDE2 wants every font to be LedFixed. This is a very large, very ugly font and it makes me want to shoot my computer. Does anyone know how to fix this problem? Help me please!
_____________
You hit it right on there. I did tech support one summer while I was in college. Being a college student I had been to more school than most of the managers and from what I hear I was at a pretty damn good place. The only college graduates in the place worked on the Canadian contracts, but they weren't IT grads they were French majors.
_____________
As far as this being necessary I really don't understand. Where I live now (Iowa) we just split the 319 area code. This gives the ~2 million people in Iowa 5 area codes or a total of 50 million possible phone numbers. I realize that some of these start with 0 or 1 or x11 and can't be used but it just seems pretty excessive. How can the system be this inefficient? Do we really need to have 25 phone#s per person?
_____________
Actually that's what I usually do. I (or my girlfriend) sits there and we talk about what we're going to eat for the next several days. As each food item is mentioned it gets added to the appropriate section of the list. So, yes it does get typed in all at once, and yes I do need the list.
_____________
Do tell, How does one manage to do this? I'd love to be rid of those flashing, RAM hogging, ugly things.
_____________