Here in New Zealand, Telecom have a monopoly on the DSL market, and there is no cable...
There are various DSL plans available. The cheapest, at $NZ49/month, gives you 400MB/month downloads, with 20c/MB thereafter.
There's also a 600MB plan for $69/month (and 20c/MB thereafter), and a 1500MB plan for $199/month (and 18c/MB thereafter)
If you go for a business rather than home plan, they range up to 10GB for $888/month, and 10.7c/MB thereafter. (there's also 3gig and 5gig plans... with prices that fit the patterns - $310/14.3c and $488/12.5c respectively)
There's always the cheaper rate-limited home plan, 128kb/s for $60/month, and they refuse to give you a static IP on it. (if fact, they drop your connection every few days to make sure you don't keep your IP...)
I think it's safe to say that many New Zealanders would gladly pay $NZ100 or so a month for a decent broadband connection.
The GUI didn't have any really good features as such... to make it really usable would have required an extra few thousand lines of code. At the time I was more interested in the graphics side of things, and in building a decent event model... I dropped it shortly after this as it got boring.
This is heavily compressed; I'm not sure how big the actual system will be, but it must be considerably more than 1.44megs.
and as for the GUI... the QNX GUI isn't particularly advanced. I once wrote a GUI with similar functionality in less than 5000 lines of QuickBasic code.
"lets see you render a 3d forest full of trees in quake1 or 2, and then let 200 ppl run around in it"
I've never played EQ, but from the screenshots I've seen it looks like the trees are mostly sprites... this allows for far greater performance as you don't have to render a complex 3d shape anymore, rather just draw a bitmap on the screen to show the tree.
This technique should also be possible in Quake, although it may require a minor modification to the code. And Quake1 is open-sourced now, isn't it?
Just read something the other day, seems that Lord of the Rings is also being rendered under Linux... seems that $15,000 Linux boxes do the work "more than twice as fast" as $40,000 SGI Octane boxes running IRIX.
oh, the market's open to competition, alright. Telecom has about the same level of competition from Clear as Microsoft has from IBM/OS2Warp. The only area where Clear has any sort of hold, is long-distance calls. The problem is, when it was privatised, the market was totally deregulated, and Telescum owns all of the lines.
At the moment, we're just hoping that the new wideband wireless bandwidth the government is selling, will encourage competition within the next few years.
umm... here in New Zealand, we had Telecom privatised about 10 years ago. Before then, we had a state-of-the-art telephone system.... now, the system is badly run down and totally obsolete. Only about half of the lines in rural areas are even capable of sustaining a 14.4k modem connection.
Telecom NZ has a contract with the government... the "Kiwishare agreement"... that forces them to keep local phone calls free. They've been using every possible opportunity to try and get around it... the 0867 scheme is a good example, forcing data calls to go through a seperate network so they could charge 2c a minute after 10 hours, except for calls that went to ISPs with 0867-prefixed numbers (so they could then degrade service to all ISPs except their own, XTRA, maybe...)
then there's also the time they decided to make all current prepaid phone cards obsolete with no refunds.... 19 million dollars worth of them. They didn't get to do that, thank god.
They pull something like 12 billion dollars a year out of this country. For a country as small as New Zealand, that's one hell of a lot. Overall, I'd be happier if Telescum were still owned by the government.
Here in New Zealand (which I think would definitely classify as "far flung" and outside US jurisdiction) we have unlimited free local telephone calls, and free unlimited dial-up internet access (thanks to companies like i4free, surf4nix, freenet, zfree and so on); 56k is pretty damn fast when all you're sending is text messages.
Sticking a spanner across the terminals of a car battery is pretty spectacular, because the spanner has close to zero ohms resistance and therefore will theoretically let the full 700 amperes or so to flow.
I'm not sure what the resistance of human skin is, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that under normal conditions it's something like 50 kilo-ohms per centimetre. Even just assuming that 50K, the current at 5 volts would be: I=E/R I=5/50000 I= 0.1 milliamperes, which I'm pretty sure won't kill you.
Couple of weeks back, the sysadmin at my school wanted to set up a WinNT terminal server for a lab of diskless workstations... 'cept NT refused to install on the server (SCSI probs).
After I explained to him that Linux would do the same (seeing as he only wanted to use StarOffice under NT anyhow), much better, and would also save him $NZ15k on licences for Citrix Metaframe... not to mention all the NT terminal server licences... he said "Go for it"
it's almost fully set up, just have to sort out the username policy;-(
If there's a Trek series not about Starfleet, it'd have to be about something like the Maquis, maybe about a shipload of rebel Romulans. Nothing else non-Starfleet would really work. I think Starfleet Academy would be quite good, or maybe a ground-based Starfleet security force on some planet in a dangerous place?
Slashdot Mirror
Here in New Zealand, Telecom have a monopoly on the DSL market, and there is no cable...
There are various DSL plans available. The cheapest, at $NZ49/month, gives you 400MB/month downloads, with 20c/MB thereafter.
There's also a 600MB plan for $69/month (and 20c/MB thereafter), and a 1500MB plan for $199/month (and 18c/MB thereafter)
If you go for a business rather than home plan, they range up to 10GB for $888/month, and 10.7c/MB thereafter. (there's also 3gig and 5gig plans... with prices that fit the patterns - $310/14.3c and $488/12.5c respectively)
There's always the cheaper rate-limited home plan, 128kb/s for $60/month, and they refuse to give you a static IP on it. (if fact, they drop your connection every few days to make sure you don't keep your IP...)
I think it's safe to say that many New Zealanders would gladly pay $NZ100 or so a month for a decent broadband connection.
ok, ok, actually I mean the "look and feel"
The GUI didn't have any really good features as such... to make it really usable would have required an extra few thousand lines of code. At the time I was more interested in the graphics side of things, and in building a decent event model... I dropped it shortly after this as it got boring.
This is heavily compressed; I'm not sure how big the actual system will be, but it must be considerably more than 1.44megs.
and as for the GUI... the QNX GUI isn't particularly advanced. I once wrote a GUI with similar functionality in less than 5000 lines of QuickBasic code.
I've never played EQ, but from the screenshots I've seen it looks like the trees are mostly sprites... this allows for far greater performance as you don't have to render a complex 3d shape anymore, rather just draw a bitmap on the screen to show the tree.
This technique should also be possible in Quake, although it may require a minor modification to the code. And Quake1 is open-sourced now, isn't it?
Just read something the other day, seems that Lord of the Rings is also being rendered under Linux... seems that $15,000 Linux boxes do the work "more than twice as fast" as $40,000 SGI Octane boxes running IRIX.
oh, the market's open to competition, alright. Telecom has about the same level of competition from Clear as Microsoft has from IBM/OS2Warp. The only area where Clear has any sort of hold, is long-distance calls. The problem is, when it was privatised, the market was totally deregulated, and Telescum owns all of the lines.
At the moment, we're just hoping that the new wideband wireless bandwidth the government is selling, will encourage competition within the next few years.
umm... here in New Zealand, we had Telecom privatised about 10 years ago. Before then, we had a state-of-the-art telephone system.... now, the system is badly run down and totally obsolete. Only about half of the lines in rural areas are even capable of sustaining a 14.4k modem connection.
Telecom NZ has a contract with the government... the "Kiwishare agreement"... that forces them to keep local phone calls free. They've been using every possible opportunity to try and get around it... the 0867 scheme is a good example, forcing data calls to go through a seperate network so they could charge 2c a minute after 10 hours, except for calls that went to ISPs with 0867-prefixed numbers (so they could then degrade service to all ISPs except their own, XTRA, maybe...)
then there's also the time they decided to make all current prepaid phone cards obsolete with no refunds.... 19 million dollars worth of them. They didn't get to do that, thank god.
They pull something like 12 billion dollars a year out of this country. For a country as small as New Zealand, that's one hell of a lot. Overall, I'd be happier if Telescum were still owned by the government.
Here in New Zealand (which I think would definitely classify as "far flung" and outside US jurisdiction) we have unlimited free local telephone calls, and free unlimited dial-up internet access (thanks to companies like i4free, surf4nix, freenet, zfree and so on); 56k is pretty damn fast when all you're sending is text messages.
I'm not sure what the resistance of human skin is, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that under normal conditions it's something like 50 kilo-ohms per centimetre. Even just assuming that 50K, the current at 5 volts would be:
I=E/R
I=5/50000
I= 0.1 milliamperes,
which I'm pretty sure won't kill you.
Couple of weeks back, the sysadmin at my school wanted to set up a WinNT terminal server for a lab of diskless workstations... 'cept NT refused to install on the server (SCSI probs).
;-(
After I explained to him that Linux would do the same (seeing as he only wanted to use StarOffice under NT anyhow), much better, and would also save him $NZ15k on licences for Citrix Metaframe... not to mention all the NT terminal server licences... he said "Go for it"
it's almost fully set up, just have to sort out the username policy
If there's a Trek series not about Starfleet, it'd have to be about something like the Maquis, maybe about a shipload of rebel Romulans. Nothing else non-Starfleet would really work. I think Starfleet Academy would be quite good, or maybe a ground-based Starfleet security force on some planet in a dangerous place?