You should vote with your feet and move to a GSM provider. Don't let them lock you in.
But it's OK to be locked into GSM?;)
I think the GP meant locked into your handset. With a GSM phone it's easy to get a new handset: buy new phone, take out SIM card from old phone, insert it into new phone, that's it. Often even your addresses are stored in the SIM card, not in the handset.
Do some CDMA providers also use GSM?
Not that I know of. CDMA is a much more efficient use of their radio spectrum
So why are newer operators in the US (T-Mobile, Cingular) using GSM, when the standard there is (was) CDMA? Why, in India, are the CDMA companies (Reliance, Tata) faring so poorly, with so many complaints of flaky service and hidden costs, compared to the GSM ones (Airtel, Hutch/Orange, RPG, BSNL,...)? Could it be just that GSM is a more mature technology with less vendor lock-in?
Some of use prefer prepaid. When I was in the US I used Verizon's little-known prepaid which cost me about $20 a month with my usage patterns, as compared to $40 a month that the cheapest "plan" would offer. I couldn't figure out why more companies weren't offering it (but recently I read a NYT article about how stores like 7-Eleven are now offering their own branded prepaid cellphones, so people seem to be wising up now).
In India too I use prepaid (I spend perhaps US$8 a month -- incoming calls are free and outgoing local calls cost under 5 cents / min), and bought the phone separately. I bought a phone that cost close to $100; a $20 phone would have been good enough if it can make calls and SMS.
It's in KDE 3.5 CVS. That means you can get it if you want it, though not as part of a "release". If/when Mozilla passes the test it will be available in the nightlies before an official release. IE, well, different question.
Seems like just yesterday people were saying Linux doesn't yet deliver as an alternative to Solaris
Obviously you didn't RTFA. What the FA says (as opposed to what the Slashdot blurb says) is "Sun has a long way to go before it can claim to provide the same wide platform support that's available from the top Linux vendors." Nobody ever claimed, yesterday or the day before, that Linux supports fewer platforms than Solaris.
It should work like the Economist.com. Most material is free excepting the business intelligence
No, most material there is not free. Perhaps the front page looks that way, but try clicking on "current issue".
But you're right, they have a terrific business model. They got me hooked with the free stuff and eventually I got tired of not being able to read the rest and subscribed. And I'm not alone: they recently hit the million subscriber mark.
I certainly wouldn't subscribe to the NYT if it tried that stunt, but I'm sure there are people who would. In fact, there may be people who already do, to read the archives.
The Hindu is one of India's top papers (and one of the most respected). Not a religious paper -- it was named in the 19th century when "Hindu" and "Indian" were sort of synonymous in normal usage.
Doesn't fix spelling errors
on
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It's autocomplete, but not like the "did you mean" feature. If you type "slshdot" or "wahington" it shows suggestions with a few hundred or few thousand hits each but no corrections.
France seemed astonishingly relaxed about these things. I was there for two years and had a Visa/Carte Bleue debit card (which is what everyone seemed to have -- I never met anyone with a credit card). With that card, I could basically overspend and send my bank balance below zero, nobody would care. I was told cheques aren't bounced for lack of funds either, unless they're really large -- it's ok for your balance to go in the red for a bit -- but I didn't try that. The only time I got a warning letter was when I went around 6500 francs (around $1000 then) in the red. But when I went to the bank with the letter to sort things out, they basically told me not to worry about it ("ne vous inquietez pas")...
Just what does that restriction to a single expression have to do with whitespace? Or are you unaware that a line can be split with a backslash?
Lambda as a concept comes from functional languages. In purely functional programming, there is no statement separator because there is only one statement because functions don't have side-effects. In other words, if only the last function evaluation counts, results of previous function evaluations are thrown away, and every function evaluation takes input and returns output without changing the state of the world in any way, there is no situation where you need to execute multiple "statements" with separators. That, of course, is a very different approach to programming, but it's fun and I found it surprisingly intuitive and productive after the initial what-the-heck feeling: try it. (Sometimes you do need functions with side-effects like print statements, but you don't need them in a lambda definition.)
FreeBSD 5.3 was released on November 6, 2004. And it's first release for version 5.
FreeBSD isn't Microsoft Windows. People have been able to run version 5 since 5.0-CURRENT was branched off. And NetBSD isn't Microsoft Windows either. In fact they aren't even Linux: you don't depend on a Linus to do releases, you can download the CVS tree any time you like. And yes, people who do these tests are aware of debugging options, WITNESS/INVARIANTS/etc, and know how to turn them off.
konq from kde 3.3.0 didn't crash on any of the examples either. Firefox did on a couple. I find konq much more reliable lately: less crash-prone (in fact I can't remember it crashing in months) and it actually renders some pages Moz/Firefox don't (of course, they too render some pages Konq doesn't, but it seems to me konq does better overall).
...and to still expect handouts from first world countries because they're so poor.
Rubbish. India has been self-sufficient in food since the early 1970s. Some aid for health, education and infrastructure does come in, but even that is mostly loans, not "handouts". American and Japanese aid comes with too many ridiculous strings attached, India learned long ago not to get too entrapped with it. As for the nukes: America was worried about war with a country on the other side of the world. India has gone to war with two countries on its borders, one of whom (China) is truly the 800lb gorilla of Asia with whom there continue to be unresolved border disputes, and is an acknowledged nuclear power. You saying India has less right than the USA to nukes? I don't like nukes either, but let's abolish them all, maybe step by step, rather than say the big five can keep what they have and make more while they're at it.
What on earth was that rant about? I saw nothing about America in the OP. Just a remark I was about to make myself, that suggesting satellite launches and outsourcing aren't "sensible" for India is ridiculous.
I thought it probably deserved some credence and discussion for the light it shines on the social order of FreeBSD.
That's because it's a cut and paste from an old and outdated (Feb 2003) post (non-troll, or at least, non-anonymous) on freebsd-chat -- search the archives.
Some FreeBSD people are jerks, but that's true everywhere. And some people believe that FreeBSD-5 went in an over-complicated and ultimately unmaintainable direction, and I don't disagree that the delay in making it stable is alarming. (But people had the same worries about linux during the 2.3.x and early 2.4.x days.) And that doesn't mean FreeBSD-5 work is junk: things regularly get merged in from FreeBSD-5 to DragonFly.
The reviewer complains about not having MSN Messenger-lookalikes: kopete works fine for me, as did gaim last time I checked; and if he wants something to run on crossover, he can try trillian which is supported. I know windows users who switched from the official MSN client to trillian because MSN was too intrusive.
Exactly exactly exactly. I have news for these paranoiacs: there's hundreds of millions of bacteria in your gut, right now. There are bacteria in the same family (E. coli) that cause some deadly foodborne diseases. Quick, flush your gut with disinfectant!
are you asserting that functional language programs always work perfectly the first time you run them?
Most of the time, yes. The reasons are, first, the strict checks it does before even agreeing to run your program, which eliminates a huge class of errors (usually emanating from typos that C will ignore), and the generally clean structure of the language that makes it easier to code what you have in mind. Consequently any errors you see when running the program are likely to be bugs in your algorithm itself, not in the implementation.
in a lot of higher-level languages, eg functional languages like lisp, haskell and ocaml. But not only debugging: in these languages you tend to write code that doesn't have bugs in the first place. No need for mallocs, no buffer overflows, no memory leaks. And if you're careful to write in a functional style, no "side-effect" bugs (variables that change value when you weren't expecting them to). For a language that started out in the 1950s, it's amazing how far ahead it was and still is as a development environment. This paper is a fascinating read, especially the section on Worse is better that describes why Unix/C won. And there are other languages like the ML family and Haskell. OCaml (Objective Caml, a descendant of ML) is as concise and elegant as python, but produces native-code binaries quite competitive in speed with C, and occasionally faster. I'm wondering why anyone uses C-like languages anymore.
This story is on NetBSD -- for that reason alone, your story is offtopic, flamebait and a troll.
Regrettably, however, there is truth in a lot of what you say. There was a time when FreeBSD was clearly a superior solution to Linux in every department, but today Linux has better SMP support, far better hardware support, and better software support too. FreeBSD 5.x is still not really "stable", 4.x is very stable but has lagging hardware support and poor SMP and threading, and the linuxulator can handle most but not all Linux binaries.
As for NetBSD, some of the above applies to it too. Its hardware support is often a bit better than FreeBSD (or even Linux -- NetBSD was the first free OS to have USB support, for example). But the smallness of its userbase means it will always lag linux in some hardware support and some usability aspects at the very least.
Nevertheless, after a year or so with Linux, I switched back to BSD (specifically, to DragonFly, a FreeBSD fork). Why? For the learning experience. The BSDs take their documentation seriously: not just commands and function names, but entire kernel subsystems are carefully documented in the manpages. And the source code is much cleaner. These things didn't matter to me earlier but I'm doing more and more programming now and find BSD a much nicer environment. You also learn a lot lurking on the lists. The linux kernel list is just too chaotic for me, this is not my primary focus in life. FreeBSD has the sense to use separate lists for separate topics (-current, -stable, -hackers, -mobile, -arch, -hardware, and most crucially -chat for the "offtopic" stuff), and DragonFly is still small enough that its lists are quite clean.
Your link states that Dave Brubeck couldn't read music in 1942 when he graduated from university. But it seems unlikely to me that he never learned.
It's possible he learned, and I should have said "couldn't".
How do you think he communicates his symphonies to the orchestra? By humming?
Well, other people who can't write music have written for orchestras, like Ravi Shankar. Someone else could have transcribed it. Or maybe he can write, laboriously, but not read (ie, not sight-read, or even follow a score in close to real-time: the notation is simple enough that anyone can learn the rules in a minute, I assume that's not what's meant by musicians "knowing to read").
Slashdot Mirror
I think the GP meant locked into your handset. With a GSM phone it's easy to get a new handset: buy new phone, take out SIM card from old phone, insert it into new phone, that's it. Often even your addresses are stored in the SIM card, not in the handset.
So why are newer operators in the US (T-Mobile, Cingular) using GSM, when the standard there is (was) CDMA? Why, in India, are the CDMA companies (Reliance, Tata) faring so poorly, with so many complaints of flaky service and hidden costs, compared to the GSM ones (Airtel, Hutch/Orange, RPG, BSNL, ...)? Could it be just that GSM is a more mature technology with less vendor lock-in?
In India too I use prepaid (I spend perhaps US$8 a month -- incoming calls are free and outgoing local calls cost under 5 cents / min), and bought the phone separately. I bought a phone that cost close to $100; a $20 phone would have been good enough if it can make calls and SMS.
It's in KDE 3.5 CVS. That means you can get it if you want it, though not as part of a "release". If/when Mozilla passes the test it will be available in the nightlies before an official release. IE, well, different question.
I don't know but I've always assumed it was a reference to "de Raadt".
But you do have faith in aircraft components or software from India? If not, you're out of luck...
Obviously you didn't RTFA. What the FA says (as opposed to what the Slashdot blurb says) is "Sun has a long way to go before it can claim to provide the same wide platform support that's available from the top Linux vendors." Nobody ever claimed, yesterday or the day before, that Linux supports fewer platforms than Solaris.
No, most material there is not free. Perhaps the front page looks that way, but try clicking on "current issue".
But you're right, they have a terrific business model. They got me hooked with the free stuff and eventually I got tired of not being able to read the rest and subscribed. And I'm not alone: they recently hit the million subscriber mark.
I certainly wouldn't subscribe to the NYT if it tried that stunt, but I'm sure there are people who would. In fact, there may be people who already do, to read the archives.
Because it's newsworthy?
The Hindu is one of India's top papers (and one of the most respected). Not a religious paper -- it was named in the 19th century when "Hindu" and "Indian" were sort of synonymous in normal usage.
It's autocomplete, but not like the "did you mean" feature. If you type "slshdot" or "wahington" it shows suggestions with a few hundred or few thousand hits each but no corrections.
France seemed astonishingly relaxed about these things. I was there for two years and had a Visa/Carte Bleue debit card (which is what everyone seemed to have -- I never met anyone with a credit card). With that card, I could basically overspend and send my bank balance below zero, nobody would care. I was told cheques aren't bounced for lack of funds either, unless they're really large -- it's ok for your balance to go in the red for a bit -- but I didn't try that. The only time I got a warning letter was when I went around 6500 francs (around $1000 then) in the red. But when I went to the bank with the letter to sort things out, they basically told me not to worry about it ("ne vous inquietez pas")...
Just what does that restriction to a single expression have to do with whitespace? Or are you unaware that a line can be split with a backslash? Lambda as a concept comes from functional languages. In purely functional programming, there is no statement separator because there is only one statement because functions don't have side-effects. In other words, if only the last function evaluation counts, results of previous function evaluations are thrown away, and every function evaluation takes input and returns output without changing the state of the world in any way, there is no situation where you need to execute multiple "statements" with separators. That, of course, is a very different approach to programming, but it's fun and I found it surprisingly intuitive and productive after the initial what-the-heck feeling: try it. (Sometimes you do need functions with side-effects like print statements, but you don't need them in a lambda definition.)
FreeBSD isn't Microsoft Windows. People have been able to run version 5 since 5.0-CURRENT was branched off. And NetBSD isn't Microsoft Windows either. In fact they aren't even Linux: you don't depend on a Linus to do releases, you can download the CVS tree any time you like. And yes, people who do these tests are aware of debugging options, WITNESS/INVARIANTS/etc, and know how to turn them off.
HawkinsOS "guys"? It's one single disgruntled troll: please don't give him any importance or publicity.
konq from kde 3.3.0 didn't crash on any of the examples either. Firefox did on a couple. I find konq much more reliable lately: less crash-prone (in fact I can't remember it crashing in months) and it actually renders some pages Moz/Firefox don't (of course, they too render some pages Konq doesn't, but it seems to me konq does better overall).
Rubbish. India has been self-sufficient in food since the early 1970s. Some aid for health, education and infrastructure does come in, but even that is mostly loans, not "handouts". American and Japanese aid comes with too many ridiculous strings attached, India learned long ago not to get too entrapped with it. As for the nukes: America was worried about war with a country on the other side of the world. India has gone to war with two countries on its borders, one of whom (China) is truly the 800lb gorilla of Asia with whom there continue to be unresolved border disputes, and is an acknowledged nuclear power. You saying India has less right than the USA to nukes? I don't like nukes either, but let's abolish them all, maybe step by step, rather than say the big five can keep what they have and make more while they're at it.
What on earth was that rant about? I saw nothing about America in the OP. Just a remark I was about to make myself, that suggesting satellite launches and outsourcing aren't "sensible" for India is ridiculous.
That's because it's a cut and paste from an old and outdated (Feb 2003) post (non-troll, or at least, non-anonymous) on freebsd-chat -- search the archives.
Some FreeBSD people are jerks, but that's true everywhere. And some people believe that FreeBSD-5 went in an over-complicated and ultimately unmaintainable direction, and I don't disagree that the delay in making it stable is alarming. (But people had the same worries about linux during the 2.3.x and early 2.4.x days.) And that doesn't mean FreeBSD-5 work is junk: things regularly get merged in from FreeBSD-5 to DragonFly.
The reviewer complains about not having MSN Messenger-lookalikes: kopete works fine for me, as did gaim last time I checked; and if he wants something to run on crossover, he can try trillian which is supported. I know windows users who switched from the official MSN client to trillian because MSN was too intrusive.
Exactly exactly exactly. I have news for these paranoiacs: there's hundreds of millions of bacteria in your gut, right now. There are bacteria in the same family (E. coli) that cause some deadly foodborne diseases. Quick, flush your gut with disinfectant!
Most of the time, yes. The reasons are, first, the strict checks it does before even agreeing to run your program, which eliminates a huge class of errors (usually emanating from typos that C will ignore), and the generally clean structure of the language that makes it easier to code what you have in mind. Consequently any errors you see when running the program are likely to be bugs in your algorithm itself, not in the implementation.
in a lot of higher-level languages, eg functional languages like lisp, haskell and ocaml. But not only debugging: in these languages you tend to write code that doesn't have bugs in the first place. No need for mallocs, no buffer overflows, no memory leaks. And if you're careful to write in a functional style, no "side-effect" bugs (variables that change value when you weren't expecting them to). For a language that started out in the 1950s, it's amazing how far ahead it was and still is as a development environment. This paper is a fascinating read, especially the section on Worse is better that describes why Unix/C won. And there are other languages like the ML family and Haskell. OCaml (Objective Caml, a descendant of ML) is as concise and elegant as python, but produces native-code binaries quite competitive in speed with C, and occasionally faster. I'm wondering why anyone uses C-like languages anymore.
So you don't post to mailing lists either?
BTW, the google-by-mail thing's webpage is here.
Regrettably, however, there is truth in a lot of what you say. There was a time when FreeBSD was clearly a superior solution to Linux in every department, but today Linux has better SMP support, far better hardware support, and better software support too. FreeBSD 5.x is still not really "stable", 4.x is very stable but has lagging hardware support and poor SMP and threading, and the linuxulator can handle most but not all Linux binaries.
As for NetBSD, some of the above applies to it too. Its hardware support is often a bit better than FreeBSD (or even Linux -- NetBSD was the first free OS to have USB support, for example). But the smallness of its userbase means it will always lag linux in some hardware support and some usability aspects at the very least.
Nevertheless, after a year or so with Linux, I switched back to BSD (specifically, to DragonFly, a FreeBSD fork). Why? For the learning experience. The BSDs take their documentation seriously: not just commands and function names, but entire kernel subsystems are carefully documented in the manpages. And the source code is much cleaner. These things didn't matter to me earlier but I'm doing more and more programming now and find BSD a much nicer environment. You also learn a lot lurking on the lists. The linux kernel list is just too chaotic for me, this is not my primary focus in life. FreeBSD has the sense to use separate lists for separate topics (-current, -stable, -hackers, -mobile, -arch, -hardware, and most crucially -chat for the "offtopic" stuff), and DragonFly is still small enough that its lists are quite clean.
"Linux isn't dead, it just smells that way"
It's possible he learned, and I should have said "couldn't".
How do you think he communicates his symphonies to the orchestra? By humming?
Well, other people who can't write music have written for orchestras, like Ravi Shankar. Someone else could have transcribed it. Or maybe he can write, laboriously, but not read (ie, not sight-read, or even follow a score in close to real-time: the notation is simple enough that anyone can learn the rules in a minute, I assume that's not what's meant by musicians "knowing to read").