Actually, the reason your rates are lower now than before is that before, long distance subsidized local calls. Now, that is not the case.
As for California's competency - considering how they bungled managing their power system (making generation be regulated but deregulating sales), you be the judge.
I'm not saying that all monopolies are well regulated - one need look no furthur than Redmond for that to be proven. However, what I am saying is that in many cases, a well regulated monopoly IS the best solution. The problem is insuring that those who regulate monopolies do their job.
I. Did Not. Have Billing. Relations. With that company.
Considering some of the connotations that "relationships" can have, this might be more accurate than not. Unfortunately, I think the relationship Microsoft wants to have with me is much the same as the relationship the large, tattooed, shaven-headed man in the prison cell wishes to have with me....
Of course, many have said that the GUI is a "caveman interface" - point and grunt, err, click.
This really strikes me as the verbal equivelent of Palm's Grafitti - if normal interactions (printing/speaking) is too hard, make a simplified interface (Grafitti/grunting) that isn't.
I don't know, but I already learned one interface (typing) to make my computer's life easier. Why should I do all the work?
What is the transconductance? The maximum switching speed? The gain/bandwidth product? In short, where are all the specs on this transistor that a real engineer would need to evaluate it?
I don't care if you can make a transistor with a gate length of.1 Planck length, if the thing only has gain below 1 Hz it won't be very useful.
Until Bell releases some more data on how this device can perform, don't get too excited....
If you REALLY want to get their attention, send them a telegram. That way, you don't worry about the anthrax problem, and you really stand out. Also, you have to be brief in what you say, so you are more likely to be read by the congressdrone.
Many people have compared Wesley Crusher to Adric on the Dr. Who. In both cases, the character was reviled because of the way the writers handled him. What are your thoughts on this? How would you recommend an actor handle this sort of situation in the future?
Normally, I don't respond to ACs, as anybody who doesn't care enough to establish an account ususally has nothing worth saying. However, in this case it is worth responding to.
As I said previously in this thread, contact your local Corporation Commission. They have the legal power to compell a licenses monopoly to provide proper service.
Now, a point about DNS. I've found that ***everybodies*** DNS servers are getting hammered. Where I work gets connectivity from UUNET, and their DNS servers are taking on average about 2 seconds to respond to a simple DNS lookup. So we just set up our own DNS server, configured NOT to forward to SpewScrewNyet. I suggest you do the same.
DNS was designed to have lots of servers supporting hundreds of users, but ISPs keep having thousands of users accessing the same three DNS servers. SpewScrewNet, AT&T, and several others I've dealt with have had the same problem. Especially with all the Windows clients that do NO caching of lookups.
OK, let's take a look:
1) PacBell no longer says it'll take 3 months to set up my DSL Not knowing where you are, but is PacBell still a monopoly in your area? Could the real problem possibly be that PacBell is busy supporting not only their own DSL customers, but also the customers of other DSL providers that are nothing but billing services that cost PacBell money in order to provide sham competition.
2) PacBell's DSL in the area doesn't go down for hours every week There are strong service support regulations for true monopolies. Again, is this really a problem with them being a well regulated monopoly?
3) My local phone bills don't still cost more for a phone call several blocks down than a call to Texas Sounds like you should change your intrastate long distance provider. You can, you know, because they aren't a monopoly anymore.
4) Cable to my apartment is less than $40 a month, base package Not knowing what your basic cable package contains, nor what your basic cable bill is, I have no way to judge if it is unfair. Have you considered writing your local Corporation Commission and bitching to them, since they are the ones who regulate a monopoly? Where I live, the local cable company has been gigged several times by the local corporation commission for excessive prices. The CC has the legal right to do this only because they are a monopoly.
5) PacBell's tech support does something other than open tickets, and then close them without notifying the complainant or fixing the problem
Again, is this a problem with them being a well regulated monopoly, or with them having to deal with the other provider's customers?
6) The traffic on the cable modem network doesn't consist largely of port scans from Code Red
7) I can actually access the web pages I want to access from my Linux box
And what monopoly is this because of? Microsoft, who are in court because they are not regulated as a monopoly yet.
I'm not sure if your are being sarcastic or serious, but regulation isn't the socialist approach - socialism would require the State to provide connectivity. Facism would require the State to force the private sector to provide connectivity in fashion and at the price the State demands, and capitalism would require the State to butt out and allow The Market to provide whatever the Market felt was profitable.
OK, let's look at the monopoly issue. Monopolies per se are neither bad nor unlawful - only when they are improperly regulated are they bad and unlawful. Only one electric company can provide service to my house, because it is just not cost effective for there to be more than one power line to my house. It's what is called a "natural monopoly" - look it up in your Econ textbooks. Now, if somebody comes up with a disruptive technology (Mr. Fusion, anyone?), then that natural monopoly ceases to exists, and competition is restored, but until then it makes sense to allow the monopoly to exists but regulate it!
Now, DSL service is a natural monopoly - there is one owner of the phone lines running to my house, and therefor trying to create fake competition by allowing multiple companies to bill me just doesn't work. I get my telephony, DSL, and Internet service from the same company (my phone company), and so when I have a problem, it isn't the "The wires are bad, talk to the phone company" "No, the DSLAM is bad. Talk to the DSL company" "No, the router is dead. Talk to the ISP" garbage. I say "Gene, my DSL is down." "Yes sir, we'll get it fixed right away."
The same for cable modems - there is only one owner of the coax to your house. Pretending there can be more than one provider of cable modem service is not the answer - regulating the cable company is.
Now, on to the second item - the technologies involved.
cable modems - a hacky technology done right. The idea of shared bandwidth, limited upstream bandwidth, and using a line topology rather than a star topology went out of fashion when 10Base-2 died. However, due to the standards, I can buy just about any cable modem, take it home, plug it in, call the cable company and give them the MAC, and I'm on the air.
DSL - a better technology done horribly wrong. Layering TCP atop PPP atop ATM was bad and wrong. I was helping an aquantance fix his DSL service - we had to reset his router to factory defaults. We couldn't get it to connect because it was unable to automatically determine the virtual circuit number - it saw the DSLAM, but it wouldn't move freight. We ended up calling the DSL provider, and waiting an hour and a half for them to call us back with the parameters to reset the router. Not that we were doing anything complex - we weren't doing VOIP or VODSL - we were just moving TCP/IP packets.
Wireless Great in that there is no "last mile" to wire up, but there are only so many MHz of bandwidth to modulate a signal on. You get too many customers in an area, and you are going to get slowdowns.
Satelite Sorry, but until somebody can work out how to get a signal to geosync and back faster than C, this is great for FTPing down an ISO, but not for browsing.
When we finally realize that the wire to your house is a natural monopoly, allow the companies to own it as such, and then have the local corporation commissions watch them like hawks, we will always see broadband being priced below what it really costs to provide, and thus going out of business.
One last thought: what if we did a Rural Electrification Act style program for deployment of broadband?
What would be cool would be if Slash supported the Link command - it could set up the headlines on the main page, possibly the other sections, and within a story perhaps set up the links from the story.
I want the list of applicants for a.biz domain. That way, I can make sure that I have no money invested in them, for clearly they will be going out of ".bizness" due to a complete lack of sense.
When I had my Lego set, I just got a pile of blocks. The only "plans" were those I created. I created spacecraft, forts, lighthouses (with pieces of a flashlight). As I grew older, I used Lego to build frames for motors, apparatus to work with my 100 in 1 kit from Radio Shack (that dates me, considering they are over 200 in 1 now) (really dating myself - my 100-in-1 kit had an "IC" that was nothing but a ceramic substrate with printed film resistors and a transistor on it).
It's like anything else - games, toys, video tapes. When you give the kid a definition of what they are supposed to do, you stunt their imagination. If you give them the tools, and turn them loose, they develop their imagination. Don't buy the "Lego StarFortress", just buy a bunch of Lego. Buy an [erector|mechanno} set, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, [1-n]00 in one kits. Let the kid read books, not watch Disney. When they are older, get them playing D&D, not Stupid Moron Brothers by NonMindO.
(Of course, my earlier experience with small, modular components might account for my being a big OOP fan. Use at your own risk.)
Reading this story was like reading a story on IE-XP: do you think you could have made some more words into links?
Furthurmore, it wasn't PARC that introduced us to GUIs, it was Douglas C. Engelbart.
However, this IS a good question - is the "Desktop" metaphor the height of the GUI? I've read about some folks playing around with REAL uses for 3-D on the desktop: modeling files as a sort of "billboard" shaped like a U, with your point of view being at the bottom of the U. The part you are focusing on is at the bend of the U, closest to you and in highest res, the other parts are on the sides of the U and are show receding into the distance in decreasing res. You scroll data along the U, bringing interesting bits close but still having some awareness of the other parts.
Now, why doesn't somebody make THAT into a UI?
Simple: the same reason KDE and (to a lesser extent) Gnome look like Windows - if you make a radically different desktop interface, Joe Bloggs and his family will have their heads explode when they see it. Their tiny little minds are burned like a PROM to only accept the Windows(tm) way, and anything else will cause catastrophic cranial overpressure failure.
It may be out of the mud at the bottom, but until it is actually on the tender boat, it ain't lifted yet. The cables could snap, the sub could break apart, any number of really bad things could happen.
I saw that Yahoo (the online service, not the Aussy actor) had made the same mistake.
True, BSDi is a commercial, closed-source project. However, my point was that I could just about as easily embed [Open|Net|Free]BSD and avoid WRS altogether. Therefor BSDi has little value-add from my perspective.
I wish I could say I was surprised by this turn of events, but having the misfortune of dealing with WRS professionally, I cannot. My experience with WRS has been pretty dismal - of the 10 severe problems I've had with their products, their FAEs have solved only 1 for me; all others I have either had to live with or have solved myself. The company I work for has been told "Y'know that version of VxWorks you have licensed? Well, we aren't going to support it anymore, but you still have to pay us for a service contract if you want to continue to ship. Oh, and you will STILL have to pay us a per-unit license fee on top of that. But don't call us with any problems."
When they bought BSD I really wondered what they were thinking, as I was at a loss to see how BSD fit into their corporate strategy. The BSD kernel is much more competent than the VxWorks kernel, but being Free Software there is little value added from WRS - I can just embed BSD and avoid dealing with WRS. If they had a good history of decent board support packages I might see where they would be of value to me, but given how poorly they've supported VxWorks with BSPs, I have little confidence they would really have a benefit for their support.
Now, had WRS been able to buy Cygnus before RedHat, that would have made sense - Tornado (Wind River's VxWorks development package) uses the GCC toolchain, so owning the primary developers for GCC would have made sense. But I cannot see where the advantage to owning BSD is to WRS.
However, this just goes to show the power of Free Software - while WRS may screw up BSD.COM, they can never kill BSD.
#include <std-disclaimer.h>
The views expressed here are mine, not my employer.
Obviously, if I have access to the source, I can recompile. What I meant by "running other people's code" is "running other people's binaries for which you have no source", an unfortunate occurrance that sometimes happens to real engineers but that posers like yourself have never encountered.
As I said in some earlier posts, I really dislike kiddies who think they actually know something. Try growing up, learning to express yourself without being obscene, and getting some real-world experience. Engineering is about making do with what you have, not living in some fantasy perfect world.
Yah, those damn last time buys kill you on inventory costs. I wish the tax laws would be changed to prevent inventory from being taxed (and taxed, and taxed....). We have to maintain several years for our stuff, and it raises the bill of material.
You are correct, the -120dBm is for a BW limited signal of 30 kHz around the frequency of interest, however making the front end be able to cover the entire 3GHz range gets tricky. (http://www.ifrsys.com for an idea of what I do).
As to your project - well, I took a shot. Yah, RF astronomy is even worse than comms systems (especially since comm systems keep trying to encroach on the astronomy bands!). Just out of curiosity, what band you working in?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the reason your rates are lower now than before is that before, long distance subsidized local calls. Now, that is not the case.
As for California's competency - considering how they bungled managing their power system (making generation be regulated but deregulating sales), you be the judge.
I'm not saying that all monopolies are well regulated - one need look no furthur than Redmond for that to be proven. However, what I am saying is that in many cases, a well regulated monopoly IS the best solution. The problem is insuring that those who regulate monopolies do their job.
I. Did Not. Have Billing. Relations. With that company.
Considering some of the connotations that "relationships" can have, this might be more accurate than not. Unfortunately, I think the relationship Microsoft wants to have with me is much the same as the relationship the large, tattooed, shaven-headed man in the prison cell wishes to have with me....
Of course, many have said that the GUI is a "caveman interface" - point and grunt, err, click.
This really strikes me as the verbal equivelent of Palm's Grafitti - if normal interactions (printing/speaking) is too hard, make a simplified interface (Grafitti/grunting) that isn't.
I don't know, but I already learned one interface (typing) to make my computer's life easier. Why should I do all the work?
What is the transconductance? The maximum switching speed? The gain/bandwidth product? In short, where are all the specs on this transistor that a real engineer would need to evaluate it?
.1 Planck length, if the thing only has gain below 1 Hz it won't be very useful.
I don't care if you can make a transistor with a gate length of
Until Bell releases some more data on how this device can perform, don't get too excited....
If you REALLY want to get their attention, send them a telegram. That way, you don't worry about the anthrax problem, and you really stand out. Also, you have to be brief in what you say, so you are more likely to be read by the congressdrone.
Come on Jon Katz, you can post under your real ID....
Many people have compared Wesley Crusher to Adric on the Dr. Who. In both cases, the character was reviled because of the way the writers handled him. What are your thoughts on this? How would you recommend an actor handle this sort of situation in the future?
Normally, I don't respond to ACs, as anybody who doesn't care enough to establish an account ususally has nothing worth saying. However, in this case it is worth responding to.
As I said previously in this thread, contact your local Corporation Commission. They have the legal power to compell a licenses monopoly to provide proper service.
Now, a point about DNS. I've found that ***everybodies*** DNS servers are getting hammered. Where I work gets connectivity from UUNET, and their DNS servers are taking on average about 2 seconds to respond to a simple DNS lookup. So we just set up our own DNS server, configured NOT to forward to SpewScrewNyet. I suggest you do the same.
DNS was designed to have lots of servers supporting hundreds of users, but ISPs keep having thousands of users accessing the same three DNS servers. SpewScrewNet, AT&T, and several others I've dealt with have had the same problem. Especially with all the Windows clients that do NO caching of lookups.
OK, let's take a look:
1) PacBell no longer says it'll take 3 months to set up my DSL
Not knowing where you are, but is PacBell still a monopoly in your area? Could the real problem possibly be that PacBell is busy supporting not only their own DSL customers, but also the customers of other DSL providers that are nothing but billing services that cost PacBell money in order to provide sham competition.
2) PacBell's DSL in the area doesn't go down for hours every week
There are strong service support regulations for true monopolies. Again, is this really a problem with them being a well regulated monopoly?
3) My local phone bills don't still cost more for a phone call several blocks down than a call to Texas
Sounds like you should change your intrastate long distance provider. You can, you know, because they aren't a monopoly anymore.
4) Cable to my apartment is less than $40 a month, base package
Not knowing what your basic cable package contains, nor what your basic cable bill is, I have no way to judge if it is unfair. Have you considered writing your local Corporation Commission and bitching to them, since they are the ones who regulate a monopoly? Where I live, the local cable company has been gigged several times by the local corporation commission for excessive prices. The CC has the legal right to do this only because they are a monopoly.
5) PacBell's tech support does something other than open tickets, and then close them without notifying the complainant or fixing the problem
Again, is this a problem with them being a well regulated monopoly, or with them having to deal with the other provider's customers?
6) The traffic on the cable modem network doesn't consist largely of port scans from Code Red
7) I can actually access the web pages I want to access from my Linux box
And what monopoly is this because of? Microsoft, who are in court because they are not regulated as a monopoly yet.
I'm not sure if your are being sarcastic or serious, but regulation isn't the socialist approach - socialism would require the State to provide connectivity. Facism would require the State to force the private sector to provide connectivity in fashion and at the price the State demands, and capitalism would require the State to butt out and allow The Market to provide whatever the Market felt was profitable.
OK, let's look at the monopoly issue. Monopolies per se are neither bad nor unlawful - only when they are improperly regulated are they bad and unlawful. Only one electric company can provide service to my house, because it is just not cost effective for there to be more than one power line to my house. It's what is called a "natural monopoly" - look it up in your Econ textbooks. Now, if somebody comes up with a disruptive technology (Mr. Fusion, anyone?), then that natural monopoly ceases to exists, and competition is restored, but until then it makes sense to allow the monopoly to exists but regulate it!
Now, DSL service is a natural monopoly - there is one owner of the phone lines running to my house, and therefor trying to create fake competition by allowing multiple companies to bill me just doesn't work. I get my telephony, DSL, and Internet service from the same company (my phone company), and so when I have a problem, it isn't the "The wires are bad, talk to the phone company" "No, the DSLAM is bad. Talk to the DSL company" "No, the router is dead. Talk to the ISP" garbage. I say "Gene, my DSL is down." "Yes sir, we'll get it fixed right away."
The same for cable modems - there is only one owner of the coax to your house. Pretending there can be more than one provider of cable modem service is not the answer - regulating the cable company is.
Now, on to the second item - the technologies involved.
cable modems - a hacky technology done right. The idea of shared bandwidth, limited upstream bandwidth, and using a line topology rather than a star topology went out of fashion when 10Base-2 died. However, due to the standards, I can buy just about any cable modem, take it home, plug it in, call the cable company and give them the MAC, and I'm on the air.
DSL - a better technology done horribly wrong. Layering TCP atop PPP atop ATM was bad and wrong. I was helping an aquantance fix his DSL service - we had to reset his router to factory defaults. We couldn't get it to connect because it was unable to automatically determine the virtual circuit number - it saw the DSLAM, but it wouldn't move freight. We ended up calling the DSL provider, and waiting an hour and a half for them to call us back with the parameters to reset the router. Not that we were doing anything complex - we weren't doing VOIP or VODSL - we were just moving TCP/IP packets.
Wireless Great in that there is no "last mile" to wire up, but there are only so many MHz of bandwidth to modulate a signal on. You get too many customers in an area, and you are going to get slowdowns.
Satelite Sorry, but until somebody can work out how to get a signal to geosync and back faster than C, this is great for FTPing down an ISO, but not for browsing.
When we finally realize that the wire to your house is a natural monopoly, allow the companies to own it as such, and then have the local corporation commissions watch them like hawks, we will always see broadband being priced below what it really costs to provide, and thus going out of business.
One last thought: what if we did a Rural Electrification Act style program for deployment of broadband?
What would be cool would be if Slash supported the Link command - it could set up the headlines on the main page, possibly the other sections, and within a story perhaps set up the links from the story.
Sounds like both Apple and HP looked at how many standards Microsoft was going to own, and came to their senses.
Either that, or the constant barrage of hostile emails had an effect.
If I had to bet, I'd bet on the former, not the latter....
I want the list of applicants for a .biz domain. That way, I can make sure that I have no money invested in them, for clearly they will be going out of ".bizness" due to a complete lack of sense.
That's GNU/Open Sesame!
You had walls? We had to make do with the side of a tree. Well, we called it a tree, actually it was a ravinous cave bear. And WE LIKED IT.
(to the other responder - You have to REALLY go for the absurd when playing the Old Soldier game).
There are plans for Lego?
When I had my Lego set, I just got a pile of blocks. The only "plans" were those I created. I created spacecraft, forts, lighthouses (with pieces of a flashlight). As I grew older, I used Lego to build frames for motors, apparatus to work with my 100 in 1 kit from Radio Shack (that dates me, considering they are over 200 in 1 now) (really dating myself - my 100-in-1 kit had an "IC" that was nothing but a ceramic substrate with printed film resistors and a transistor on it).
It's like anything else - games, toys, video tapes. When you give the kid a definition of what they are supposed to do, you stunt their imagination. If you give them the tools, and turn them loose, they develop their imagination. Don't buy the "Lego StarFortress", just buy a bunch of Lego. Buy an [erector|mechanno} set, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, [1-n]00 in one kits. Let the kid read books, not watch Disney. When they are older, get them playing D&D, not Stupid Moron Brothers by NonMindO.
(Of course, my earlier experience with small, modular components might account for my being a big OOP fan. Use at your own risk.)
Reading this story was like reading a story on IE-XP: do you think you could have made some more words into links?
Furthurmore, it wasn't PARC that introduced us to GUIs, it was Douglas C. Engelbart.
However, this IS a good question - is the "Desktop" metaphor the height of the GUI? I've read about some folks playing around with REAL uses for 3-D on the desktop: modeling files as a sort of "billboard" shaped like a U, with your point of view being at the bottom of the U. The part you are focusing on is at the bend of the U, closest to you and in highest res, the other parts are on the sides of the U and are show receding into the distance in decreasing res. You scroll data along the U, bringing interesting bits close but still having some awareness of the other parts.
Now, why doesn't somebody make THAT into a UI?
Simple: the same reason KDE and (to a lesser extent) Gnome look like Windows - if you make a radically different desktop interface, Joe Bloggs and his family will have their heads explode when they see it. Their tiny little minds are burned like a PROM to only accept the Windows(tm) way, and anything else will cause catastrophic cranial overpressure failure.
It may be out of the mud at the bottom, but until it is actually on the tender boat, it ain't lifted yet. The cables could snap, the sub could break apart, any number of really bad things could happen.
I saw that Yahoo (the online service, not the Aussy actor) had made the same mistake.
What if it is cold outside, and you are wearing gloves?
True, BSDi is a commercial, closed-source project. However, my point was that I could just about as easily embed [Open|Net|Free]BSD and avoid WRS altogether. Therefor BSDi has little value-add from my perspective.
I wish I could say I was surprised by this turn of events, but having the misfortune of dealing with WRS professionally, I cannot. My experience with WRS has been pretty dismal - of the 10 severe problems I've had with their products, their FAEs have solved only 1 for me; all others I have either had to live with or have solved myself. The company I work for has been told "Y'know that version of VxWorks you have licensed? Well, we aren't going to support it anymore, but you still have to pay us for a service contract if you want to continue to ship. Oh, and you will STILL have to pay us a per-unit license fee on top of that. But don't call us with any problems."
When they bought BSD I really wondered what they were thinking, as I was at a loss to see how BSD fit into their corporate strategy. The BSD kernel is much more competent than the VxWorks kernel, but being Free Software there is little value added from WRS - I can just embed BSD and avoid dealing with WRS. If they had a good history of decent board support packages I might see where they would be of value to me, but given how poorly they've supported VxWorks with BSPs, I have little confidence they would really have a benefit for their support.
Now, had WRS been able to buy Cygnus before RedHat, that would have made sense - Tornado (Wind River's VxWorks development package) uses the GCC toolchain, so owning the primary developers for GCC would have made sense. But I cannot see where the advantage to owning BSD is to WRS.
However, this just goes to show the power of Free Software - while WRS may screw up BSD.COM, they can never kill BSD.
#include <std-disclaimer.h>
The views expressed here are mine, not my employer.
Obviously, if I have access to the source, I can recompile. What I meant by "running other people's code" is "running other people's binaries for which you have no source", an unfortunate occurrance that sometimes happens to real engineers but that posers like yourself have never encountered.
As I said in some earlier posts, I really dislike kiddies who think they actually know something. Try growing up, learning to express yourself without being obscene, and getting some real-world experience. Engineering is about making do with what you have, not living in some fantasy perfect world.
Yah, those damn last time buys kill you on inventory costs. I wish the tax laws would be changed to prevent inventory from being taxed (and taxed, and taxed....). We have to maintain several years for our stuff, and it raises the bill of material.
You are correct, the -120dBm is for a BW limited signal of 30 kHz around the frequency of interest, however making the front end be able to cover the entire 3GHz range gets tricky. (http://www.ifrsys.com for an idea of what I do).
As to your project - well, I took a shot. Yah, RF astronomy is even worse than comms systems (especially since comm systems keep trying to encroach on the astronomy bands!). Just out of curiosity, what band you working in?