Crap on it all you like, but it's still the best anyone has built.
Not necessarily true. Even NASA admits that the Buran was a great achievement. (Ok, it was a direct shuttle ripoff, but it was still a different system.)
Any vehicle using cryogenics will have a similar system.
True. SS1 burned a modified rubber compound rather than a liquid fuel. I'm not sure that it will get you to orbit, but it will help you prove out a lot of other unproven systems. I can't wait to see what their final solution is for reaching orbit. Maybe it will be cryogenic. But cryogenic systems can be built a lot more safely than the Shuttle design. I find it interesting that all astronaut deaths to date are directly attributable to the design of the boosters, which is forced in part by the design of the spacecraft. If a Saturn V had blown in flight, at least you had a fighting chance with the ejection tower. And there was none of this foam nonsense. I love watching a Saturn V shed big chunks of ice on launch.
That's right -- the Shuttle provides unique capability.
I agree. But my original question still holds, which is "for what purpose?" Other than being a great jobs program, I can't think of a single advance that ISS or the Shuttle has given us since the inception of either program. Hubble and other great science programs could all have been launched on expendable systems. When Hubble was found to have a flaw, we could have built and flown a new one for a lot less than the Shuttle program has cost this nation.
For what it's worth, I'm not against manned spaceflight. I'm against manned spaceflight that could be done by other means for less money. The only lesson that we've learned from the Shuttle and ISS is that bigger is not necessarily better. Let's put together real missions back to the Moon and Mars and have the local junkyard dealer come pick up the remaining Shuttle fleet. Hopefully the value of the recyclables will offset the towing charge.
I see some merit in your argument, but will respectfully disagree. I fall into the camp that says that building a weapon and using it are two different things. Actually, there are three categories - those who build it, those who use it, and those who order its use. Building a weapon is neither right nor wrong, primarily because any technology can be used for good or evil. Advanced nuclear weapon design has had both positive and negative benefits.
Those who use weapons bear responsibility for their misuse when their actions are unlawful. Put a gun in the hands of a soldier and he's ok as long as he's following lawful orders. But even a soldier is expected to disobey an unlawful order when he knows that it is such. Carrying this over to a civilian context, it's ok for a cop to shoot a bad guy during the commission of a crime, but a hit man would not be operating lawfully.
Finally, there are those who order the use of weapons. They have the greatest responsibility to get it right. No matter how you feel about our President (whom I support), I think that he bears a great deal of the responsibility of the use of arms in Iraq and that he should be held accountable for the current war there.
The one reason that I have sympathy for your argument is that I feel that an entire nation is responsible for its actions, so a nuclear physicist is just as responsible for the construction and use of a nuclear weapon as any other citizen of that country. The notion of "innocent civilians" absolves a nation of any responsibility for the actions of its leadership. In a Republic such as ours where we actively elect our leaders, we cannot and should not place the sole blame on others who do our bidding. This means that in every war since the inception of our country, we all bear some responsibility for the deaths of those whom our soldiers have killed. Some of those deaths have been justified while others have not. That doesn't necessarily make us all hit men, it just means that we all need to make very, very sure that pulling the trigger is the right thing to do.
Well, I think that there are three factors here that contribute to the low cost. First, there are no people on board to have to worry about. I don't know exactly how much NASA is spending to have the shuttle sitting on the pad right now, but I hear the term "millions" coming from the news media. One or two delays in manned spaceflight can come pretty close to paying for an unmanned mission.
The second factor at work here is that the private space business doesn't have all the overhead that a government operation does. Look at Spaceship One. No fancy designs, no high priced systems. Just some good old fashioned engineering and the kind of "can do" attitude that made NASA great in its early days. You know how NASA got the first Mercury space capsule to the pad? A sheet of plywood, an old mattress, and a pickup truck. That would never happen any more, and not necessarily because it's a bad way to transport a space capsule. Many of NASA's expenditures are to support its contractor constituency and its public image.
The third and final factor is that NASA's primary mission these days seems to be searching for ET. Don't get me wrong - Missions like Cassini and the Mars Rovers are great, but not because NASA thinks that there's probably life out there somewhere. The commercially funded missions are focused on doing real work that people can understand, stuff like going to the Moon and mining it for its resources. The missions to the outer planets represent a kind of pseudo-science that doesn't have any practical day-to-day benefit. This, of course, is always the problem with science, since the public is less interested in what makes something tick than what it will do for them. But riding the coat tails of ET isn't a good way to approach it. I can tell my friends that Deep Impact will help us understand how comets work and what might need to be done in order steer them away from Earth if they're on a collision course. If we happen to get some great science along the way and better understand the makeup of comets then that's a good thing. It's much harder to make the case that spending billions for Cassini is in the public interest just because there might be life on Titan.
What's ironic is that the ISS was sold to Congress and the public based on its practical merits, yet it can barely support the two occupants currently stationed there. The cost of doing research on board ISS is prohibitive since it is supported primarily with manned flights. When commericial enterprises can start to leverage space at a reasonable expense then that's when we'll see the promise of all the engineering advancements that a weightless environment can provide.
Hey, you gotta admit that they have some really great commercials. Like the one where you stick in all your money into the machine and it counts it bill by bill, displaying each bill with a large picture on the screen so that the guy behind you can see just how much cash you just deposited. I hear rumors circulating that their next innovation will be to have the machine count out the bills that it's dispensing in a loud, clear voice - just like a real teller would. You know, "one hundred, two hundred, three hundred..."
How about harnessing the 1KW:m^2 solar energy incident on ocean water?
Solar panels don't float.:-)
In all seriousness, you'd need tremendous amounts of ocean real estate to set up such a system. I believe that solar panels are still around 15% efficient at best, so multiply your surface size by a factor of 6 over ideal. Trying to keep the system alive in a hurricane/typhoon would be virtually impossible. At least you could put your nuke plants on barges and move them out of the way if you needed.
I gotta say that the thing I love about the "hydrogen economy" is that it really just boils down to creating electricity somewhere in the chain (input, output, or both), so there's really not one single answer. With a gasoline powered car with a mechanical transmission, you need gasoline or something approximate. Make that car a hybrid, and then you can start thinking about alternate means of providing energy to run the electric motors that power the wheels. You can even build dual-fuel systems to help aid the transition of the infrastructure. This means that you don't have to immediately replace all the gas stations with hydrogen stations. This is all on the "output" side. On the "input" side, we support multiple technologies for generating hydrogen, or any other technology that will ultimately provide electricity to power those wheels.
How about putting a big-ass nuke plant out in the middle of the ocean? You could produce tons of hydrogen through hydrolysis, and if it decides to blow then you don't have nearly the fallout problem.
I agree with the sentiment here, but be careful how you approach this. People are paying you for what you know, so if all you do is ask them what they want then they'll find other avenues to get it. The strategy that I use is this:
Ask them what they are trying to accomplish. Never ask a client "What do you need?", but rather "What are you trying to do?" If you ask them what they need, they'll answer in terms of what they think is or is not available. To get real out-of-the-box thinking, ask them what they are trying to accomplish and you'll get a better picture of what really needs to be done.
Go research the problem. This is where it's easy to jump the gun, mainly because we think that people want immediate satisfaction. Many people will tell you that they want it "right now", but they'll usually be willing to wait for the right solution to a problem. Tell them up front, "I can give you a half-assed solution now or a complete solution with a little more work." (Usually I try to word this a little more diplomatically:-)
Once you have a solution or two in hand, meet with the folks who need to make the decision as to what the next steps are going to be. Keep the meeting short and sweet, and use your new found expertise to guide them down the path that you think that they should be on. Don't give them a million options. Just say, "I think we should do it this way and here's how this solution is going to help you get the job done". Don't walk away from the meeting without either a decision to move forward or a timeline on when a decision will be made.
Deliver a solution in the time frame that you said you would. Nothing will kill your reputation like not delivering on time. Make sure to budget enough time to get the job done. If something unforeseen comes up, tell your client what's happening and your strategy for getting an answer. Whatever you do, get rid of the unknown variables as quickly as possible. If you're unsure of something and wait until the end of the project, it is sure to bite you in the ass. If you get rid of the unknowns up front, you'll have time to react when one becomes a problem, and it's always easier to renegotiate a delivery date earlier in the cycle rather than later.
Whatever you do, do all your projects that way that you'd like them done if you were responsible for them. Assume that your client is intelligent and capable of understanding the concepts that are key to their business. Don't go too far into any detail unless they ask.
I hope that you were just repeating what the record execs said and don't really believe this crap. It's just like the big stink recently over the US government putting out weather data in XML format. Apparently, it's *always* anti-competitive for citizens to compete against industry as far as some folks are concerned.
Don't get me wrong - there's tons of stuff that's better left to private industry. It's tough to know where to draw the line sometimes. In a case like this it's pretty clear though - the government is just giving back to the public what it already owns. Nothing wrong with that.
There's a great site that documents in great detail the Vandenberg Air Force Base launches. Since they launch smaller vehicles, any information about "how far you can see" should be useful in helping you predict a launch at Kennedy. The obvious difference is that in CA you can get up in the hills, but I don't think that this makes a huge amount of difference once the booster makes it more than a couple of thousand feet off the ground. You might want to contact the webmaster to see if he/she knows of a similar site for Kennedy.
There's a well known thought experiment called Schrodinger's Server. You put a Windows Server in a box along with a test tube full of poison capped by a single atom. You then seal the box. According to the Windows Heisenberg Uncertainty Server Principal, at any point in time the server in the box is simultaneously dead and dead.
US, please notice calling yourself "America" basically takes that title away from Canadians and South Americans.
It's funny really - I'm a US citizen and married to a Canadian. We cross the border to visit family all the time. The only people who have every been concerned with this is the Canadian border guards, who are quick to tell you that "we're all American". So now I just say "US citizen" to make them happy. But as for the rest of Canada, they could really give a rat's ass about people in the US calling themselves "American". In fact, they usually refer to "you Americans" in a disparaging way when we're talking politics (ie Iraq War).
One of the things that I dislike about KDE is that it tries to be too much like windows
So why not both? After all, if KDE gets people to switch from Windows to Linux/BSD then that's a Good Thing (tm). Along with the users come the vendors so that we see stable device drivers, et al. Because the platform isn't locked, creative folks can then build on top of the platform and create the kind of UI that you're looking for.
I'm really curious as to what it was about BeOS that would make you want to part with your hard-earned money to buy a copy. Was there some feature of the OS that you felt made it worth the cash?
There's a real fine line between doing something that no one else is doing versus doing something because you don't like the way other people did it. I'd be open to switching my OS if a new OS did everything that my existing OS did *and* added a bunch of new stuff that made the effort worthwhile. My (admittedly limited) experience with alternative OS projects is that they're trying to solve problems that others have already solved. A new OS probably won't make that much of a difference to me.
That being said, what's great about FOSS is that I can build on an existing platform. So if there's a *piece* of the system that I don't like then I can replace it but still build on all the hard work that others have contributed. The plethora of Linux distros is great because you can start with a baseline distribution and tweak it however you want. If you can find enough other people who share your values then you can build up a nice little community without too much trouble.
In the business world, a VoIP deployment is meant to replace the traditional PBX...
I agree that that's one of the methods of deployment, but the article specifically mentions small business which is not likely to deploy dedicated service. For those of us who have just a few phone lines, VoIP is a cost-effective solution only by using services such as Vonage or Lingo over a cable or DSL connection. I'm sure that I can get great call quality if I'm willing to spend the money, but then that would be a step backwards, wouldn't it?
Regardless, if something goes wrong and you don't understand it, it's unfortunately a natural reaction to write off the technology instead of the implementation.
And unfortunately, it's a natural reaction to tell people that they're ignorant if they challenge the guys who really love a technology regardless of its limitations. Having worked with TCP/IP for a long time, I understand the limitations of the Internet Protocol. It was never designed to handle real-time traffic, and despite the attempts to shoehorn QoS on top, it's still not really the right protocol for the job. As a friend of mine once said, it's like putting wings on a '56 Chevy and making it fly.
Well obviously people can't spot a joke when they see it. Not even if you link to it. Had you been reading/. all day long (yeah, I nothin' better to do on the 4th), you'd have seen this question come up on nearly every post. I guess that it just must have been late at night and people didn't get it.
The real question
on
Real Wood iPod
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Could this open some eyes and increase interest in alternative (Linux, Mac) offerings?
I tried OZ about six months ago and was pretty unimpressed. The OS was behind the 3.10 ROM from Sharp from an application perspective. I couldn't find any kind of web browser. The focus seemed to be on PIM apps, but that's not of real interest to me unless I can sync. At the time I did the upgrade, there hadn't been a lot of activity on the OZ web site, making me wonder if there was any real dev activity going on. Looking at it now, it seems like it's still an active project.
I have a 5500 and would love to use it for real work. Being able to run X windows apps remotely as well as rdesktop would be really cool. That would make it a real laptop replacement on road trips where all I really need to do is remote into either a Linux or Windows machine to tweak some settings.
Depends on what you're selling. If I'm selling ketchup to a price-sensitive client then they'll probably judge me what the number of the bottom of their invoice looks like and if the product was delivered on time. When you sell service, people judge you on how knowledgable they think you are and how professional you come across. Consider the following two calls:
Copper: Mr X: Hello, could you please tell me about your service? Me: Yes, we are a professional organization that can help you with your problem. Mr X: Thank you. You have my business.
VoIP: Mr X: Hello, could you please tell me about your service? Me: Yes, we are a professional o.. zati... that can... with your prob... Hello, are... still the...? Mr X: Thank you. We'll get back to you.
My telco offers all-you-can-eat long distance for $20/month. I don't think that they'd do this if there wasn't competition from VoIP and cell, so I'm thankful for that. I log about 80 hours of outbound LD in a month, so I'm saving some around $200/month.
The only problem is that no one knows how its supposed to work.
They work much like warp speed - start out low and end high. The higher the epsiode number, the higher the range. I think that it's derived from fishing, where "the big one that got away" gets bigger each time the story is told.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily true. Even NASA admits that the Buran was a great achievement. (Ok, it was a direct shuttle ripoff, but it was still a different system.)
Any vehicle using cryogenics will have a similar system.
True. SS1 burned a modified rubber compound rather than a liquid fuel. I'm not sure that it will get you to orbit, but it will help you prove out a lot of other unproven systems. I can't wait to see what their final solution is for reaching orbit. Maybe it will be cryogenic. But cryogenic systems can be built a lot more safely than the Shuttle design. I find it interesting that all astronaut deaths to date are directly attributable to the design of the boosters, which is forced in part by the design of the spacecraft. If a Saturn V had blown in flight, at least you had a fighting chance with the ejection tower. And there was none of this foam nonsense. I love watching a Saturn V shed big chunks of ice on launch.
That's right -- the Shuttle provides unique capability.
I agree. But my original question still holds, which is "for what purpose?" Other than being a great jobs program, I can't think of a single advance that ISS or the Shuttle has given us since the inception of either program. Hubble and other great science programs could all have been launched on expendable systems. When Hubble was found to have a flaw, we could have built and flown a new one for a lot less than the Shuttle program has cost this nation.
For what it's worth, I'm not against manned spaceflight. I'm against manned spaceflight that could be done by other means for less money. The only lesson that we've learned from the Shuttle and ISS is that bigger is not necessarily better. Let's put together real missions back to the Moon and Mars and have the local junkyard dealer come pick up the remaining Shuttle fleet. Hopefully the value of the recyclables will offset the towing charge.
I haven't looked at the script, but I assume that it only blocks attempts on port 22.
Those who use weapons bear responsibility for their misuse when their actions are unlawful. Put a gun in the hands of a soldier and he's ok as long as he's following lawful orders. But even a soldier is expected to disobey an unlawful order when he knows that it is such. Carrying this over to a civilian context, it's ok for a cop to shoot a bad guy during the commission of a crime, but a hit man would not be operating lawfully.
Finally, there are those who order the use of weapons. They have the greatest responsibility to get it right. No matter how you feel about our President (whom I support), I think that he bears a great deal of the responsibility of the use of arms in Iraq and that he should be held accountable for the current war there.
The one reason that I have sympathy for your argument is that I feel that an entire nation is responsible for its actions, so a nuclear physicist is just as responsible for the construction and use of a nuclear weapon as any other citizen of that country. The notion of "innocent civilians" absolves a nation of any responsibility for the actions of its leadership. In a Republic such as ours where we actively elect our leaders, we cannot and should not place the sole blame on others who do our bidding. This means that in every war since the inception of our country, we all bear some responsibility for the deaths of those whom our soldiers have killed. Some of those deaths have been justified while others have not. That doesn't necessarily make us all hit men, it just means that we all need to make very, very sure that pulling the trigger is the right thing to do.
The second factor at work here is that the private space business doesn't have all the overhead that a government operation does. Look at Spaceship One. No fancy designs, no high priced systems. Just some good old fashioned engineering and the kind of "can do" attitude that made NASA great in its early days. You know how NASA got the first Mercury space capsule to the pad? A sheet of plywood, an old mattress, and a pickup truck. That would never happen any more, and not necessarily because it's a bad way to transport a space capsule. Many of NASA's expenditures are to support its contractor constituency and its public image.
The third and final factor is that NASA's primary mission these days seems to be searching for ET. Don't get me wrong - Missions like Cassini and the Mars Rovers are great, but not because NASA thinks that there's probably life out there somewhere. The commercially funded missions are focused on doing real work that people can understand, stuff like going to the Moon and mining it for its resources. The missions to the outer planets represent a kind of pseudo-science that doesn't have any practical day-to-day benefit. This, of course, is always the problem with science, since the public is less interested in what makes something tick than what it will do for them. But riding the coat tails of ET isn't a good way to approach it. I can tell my friends that Deep Impact will help us understand how comets work and what might need to be done in order steer them away from Earth if they're on a collision course. If we happen to get some great science along the way and better understand the makeup of comets then that's a good thing. It's much harder to make the case that spending billions for Cassini is in the public interest just because there might be life on Titan.
What's ironic is that the ISS was sold to Congress and the public based on its practical merits, yet it can barely support the two occupants currently stationed there. The cost of doing research on board ISS is prohibitive since it is supported primarily with manned flights. When commericial enterprises can start to leverage space at a reasonable expense then that's when we'll see the promise of all the engineering advancements that a weightless environment can provide.
Hey, you gotta admit that they have some really great commercials. Like the one where you stick in all your money into the machine and it counts it bill by bill, displaying each bill with a large picture on the screen so that the guy behind you can see just how much cash you just deposited. I hear rumors circulating that their next innovation will be to have the machine count out the bills that it's dispensing in a loud, clear voice - just like a real teller would. You know, "one hundred, two hundred, three hundred..."
They've updated the error message in Longhorn to make it much more comprehensible to the average user. The new message reads:
Solar panels don't float. :-)
In all seriousness, you'd need tremendous amounts of ocean real estate to set up such a system. I believe that solar panels are still around 15% efficient at best, so multiply your surface size by a factor of 6 over ideal. Trying to keep the system alive in a hurricane/typhoon would be virtually impossible. At least you could put your nuke plants on barges and move them out of the way if you needed.
I gotta say that the thing I love about the "hydrogen economy" is that it really just boils down to creating electricity somewhere in the chain (input, output, or both), so there's really not one single answer. With a gasoline powered car with a mechanical transmission, you need gasoline or something approximate. Make that car a hybrid, and then you can start thinking about alternate means of providing energy to run the electric motors that power the wheels. You can even build dual-fuel systems to help aid the transition of the infrastructure. This means that you don't have to immediately replace all the gas stations with hydrogen stations. This is all on the "output" side. On the "input" side, we support multiple technologies for generating hydrogen, or any other technology that will ultimately provide electricity to power those wheels.
How about putting a big-ass nuke plant out in the middle of the ocean? You could produce tons of hydrogen through hydrolysis, and if it decides to blow then you don't have nearly the fallout problem.
Unless, of course, your company still is using a baseband cable for a backbone, in which case you'll need to drill into it to make a connection.
Whatever happened to the good old days when you could ruin a $500 cable just by misaligning the tap?
- Ask them what they are trying to accomplish. Never ask a client "What do you need?", but rather "What are you trying to do?" If you ask them what they need, they'll answer in terms of what they think is or is not available. To get real out-of-the-box thinking, ask them what they are trying to accomplish and you'll get a better picture of what really needs to be done.
- Go research the problem. This is where it's easy to jump the gun, mainly because we think that people want immediate satisfaction. Many people will tell you that they want it "right now", but they'll usually be willing to wait for the right solution to a problem. Tell them up front, "I can give you a half-assed solution now or a complete solution with a little more work." (Usually I try to word this a little more diplomatically
:-)
- Once you have a solution or two in hand, meet with the folks who need to make the decision as to what the next steps are going to be. Keep the meeting short and sweet, and use your new found expertise to guide them down the path that you think that they should be on. Don't give them a million options. Just say, "I think we should do it this way and here's how this solution is going to help you get the job done". Don't walk away from the meeting without either a decision to move forward or a timeline on when a decision will be made.
- Deliver a solution in the time frame that you said you would. Nothing will kill your reputation like not delivering on time. Make sure to budget enough time to get the job done. If something unforeseen comes up, tell your client what's happening and your strategy for getting an answer. Whatever you do, get rid of the unknown variables as quickly as possible. If you're unsure of something and wait until the end of the project, it is sure to bite you in the ass. If you get rid of the unknowns up front, you'll have time to react when one becomes a problem, and it's always easier to renegotiate a delivery date earlier in the cycle rather than later.
Whatever you do, do all your projects that way that you'd like them done if you were responsible for them. Assume that your client is intelligent and capable of understanding the concepts that are key to their business. Don't go too far into any detail unless they ask.I hope that you were just repeating what the record execs said and don't really believe this crap. It's just like the big stink recently over the US government putting out weather data in XML format. Apparently, it's *always* anti-competitive for citizens to compete against industry as far as some folks are concerned.
Don't get me wrong - there's tons of stuff that's better left to private industry. It's tough to know where to draw the line sometimes. In a case like this it's pretty clear though - the government is just giving back to the public what it already owns. Nothing wrong with that.
There's a great site that documents in great detail the Vandenberg Air Force Base launches. Since they launch smaller vehicles, any information about "how far you can see" should be useful in helping you predict a launch at Kennedy. The obvious difference is that in CA you can get up in the hills, but I don't think that this makes a huge amount of difference once the booster makes it more than a couple of thousand feet off the ground. You might want to contact the webmaster to see if he/she knows of a similar site for Kennedy.
There's a well known thought experiment called Schrodinger's Server. You put a Windows Server in a box along with a test tube full of poison capped by a single atom. You then seal the box. According to the Windows Heisenberg Uncertainty Server Principal, at any point in time the server in the box is simultaneously dead and dead.
It's funny really - I'm a US citizen and married to a Canadian. We cross the border to visit family all the time. The only people who have every been concerned with this is the Canadian border guards, who are quick to tell you that "we're all American". So now I just say "US citizen" to make them happy. But as for the rest of Canada, they could really give a rat's ass about people in the US calling themselves "American". In fact, they usually refer to "you Americans" in a disparaging way when we're talking politics (ie Iraq War).
So why not both? After all, if KDE gets people to switch from Windows to Linux/BSD then that's a Good Thing (tm). Along with the users come the vendors so that we see stable device drivers, et al. Because the platform isn't locked, creative folks can then build on top of the platform and create the kind of UI that you're looking for.
I'm really curious as to what it was about BeOS that would make you want to part with your hard-earned money to buy a copy. Was there some feature of the OS that you felt made it worth the cash?
That being said, what's great about FOSS is that I can build on an existing platform. So if there's a *piece* of the system that I don't like then I can replace it but still build on all the hard work that others have contributed. The plethora of Linux distros is great because you can start with a baseline distribution and tweak it however you want. If you can find enough other people who share your values then you can build up a nice little community without too much trouble.
I agree that that's one of the methods of deployment, but the article specifically mentions small business which is not likely to deploy dedicated service. For those of us who have just a few phone lines, VoIP is a cost-effective solution only by using services such as Vonage or Lingo over a cable or DSL connection. I'm sure that I can get great call quality if I'm willing to spend the money, but then that would be a step backwards, wouldn't it?
Regardless, if something goes wrong and you don't understand it, it's unfortunately a natural reaction to write off the technology instead of the implementation.
And unfortunately, it's a natural reaction to tell people that they're ignorant if they challenge the guys who really love a technology regardless of its limitations. Having worked with TCP/IP for a long time, I understand the limitations of the Internet Protocol. It was never designed to handle real-time traffic, and despite the attempts to shoehorn QoS on top, it's still not really the right protocol for the job. As a friend of mine once said, it's like putting wings on a '56 Chevy and making it fly.
Well obviously people can't spot a joke when they see it. Not even if you link to it. Had you been reading /. all day long (yeah, I nothin' better to do on the 4th), you'd have seen this question come up on nearly every post. I guess that it just must have been late at night and people didn't get it.
Could this open some eyes and increase interest in alternative (Linux, Mac) offerings?
I have a 5500 and would love to use it for real work. Being able to run X windows apps remotely as well as rdesktop would be really cool. That would make it a real laptop replacement on road trips where all I really need to do is remote into either a Linux or Windows machine to tweak some settings.
Copper:
Mr X: Hello, could you please tell me about your service?
Me: Yes, we are a professional organization that can help you with your problem.
Mr X: Thank you. You have my business.
VoIP: ... with your prob... Hello, are ... still the...?
Mr X: Hello, could you please tell me about your service?
Me: Yes, we are a professional o.. zati... that can
Mr X: Thank you. We'll get back to you.
My telco offers all-you-can-eat long distance for $20/month. I don't think that they'd do this if there wasn't competition from VoIP and cell, so I'm thankful for that. I log about 80 hours of outbound LD in a month, so I'm saving some around $200/month.
I really hope that you paid Mr Stoller to use *his* word in your subject line. If not, you should be expecting a call real soon from his lawyers.
They work much like warp speed - start out low and end high. The higher the epsiode number, the higher the range. I think that it's derived from fishing, where "the big one that got away" gets bigger each time the story is told.