Of course the cheapest route is always analogue, so it's not a great advert for VOIP:)
I'd have to disagree there... Broadvoice.com has some pretty cheap unlimited packages--especially if you BYOD (bring your own device, such as Asterisk.) I've only been trying them out a little while, but to be honest I haven't been incredibly impressed with their support (hard to reach over the phone, occasional high latency at some locations, etc.) But for $20/mo you get unlimited calling to 21 countries (including US and Canada.)
Of course, if you're not making many non-local calls, I guess analog is still the way to go. Especially if you don't already have high-speed Internet.
Comcast upgraded our area to 4Mbit close to a year ago with no announcement or additional charge. That's great, but I've been thinking about switching back to DSL anyway since Comcast's high-speed Internet access has been dropping out several times a month in my neighborhood. Sometimes it drops out for an hour, sometimes for a whole day.
When I had DSL I only lost service once in the course of an entire year.
I love firing up vi for a cool Perl 6 coding session. And it flies under optimized Gentoo.
I'm sure I'll probably get modded down by some Debian/BSD zealot. They're probably just pissed off because their rigs are so bogged down from emacs and python trying to run together on a non-optimized system.
Maybe I'm mistaken here, but does this even allow you to search files that you wouldn't otherwise be able to access via Windows' built in search? If not then this whole google/spyware freak-out is just a bunch of bullshit and the people propagating it are idiots.
It seems to me that the typical person I deal with lately catches on pretty quickly to the idea of using a different web browser. Every single home computer I've worked on in the last couple months has been barely usable due to all the spyware on them.
After cleaning up their machines I install Firefox and tell them about the pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing. I tell them that at this point they should only use IE as a last resort. The explaination literally takes about 30 seconds and I haven't had any problems with people not "getting it."
I've done this for easily a dozen different people in the last month, and every one I've talked to afterwards has mentioned how much nicer it is browsing with Firefox.
Maybe I've just been lucky with the people I've done work for recently, but it seems to me that most people are more than happy to make the switch once the software is installed and demonstrated to them.
Undoubtedly there are people out there that just can't be bothered (from what I've read on here at least,) but at that point it's their problem and they'll be paying me if I have to come back and clean the crap off their computer again.
PS: I just wish Firefox would render Slashdot consistently. WTF?
I'm not an American but I can imagine that this process would be humiliating.
I think a lot of us (but obviously not all) feel more humiliated by the way the last four years have turned out. I'm voting in Florida this year, and I for one welcome our European overseers.
My X-box is hooked into my entertainment center, so it'd be handy to be able to use it to play music and video off my linux server. Being able to ssh into it (or control it otherwise) from my workstation or notebook is an additional bonus.
Other than that, there is the cool factor you mentioned.
I don't have any inside information about how they came to the decision so I really can't argue with what you're saying. I'm not sure your response contradicts my point anyway.
I submit that assisting the Chinese government in masking their censorship just so you can remain in the market most certainly qualifies as "evil."
Would it be better to have the people of China banned from Google entirely? I think Google is doing the right thing by not just walking away and leaving them in the dark so to speak.
I've got a friend of mine that's working as a claims adjuster in Punta Gorda right now. He just called me yesterday to see if I could mail him a copy of Office so he can update Office on his notebook computer. Since he's working out of a hotel, downloading it off a server isn't an option. Driving 4+ hours to get his original disc isn't either.
The bullshit that requires you to have your office disc to perform certain updates is the biggest thing about Office that pisses me off. Carrying all your discs with you just isn't feasible when you're on the road a lot.
It looks like Jacksonville Beach is going to be spared the worst of this storm, but as usual, you really don't know where the storm is going to land until the last minute.
If the storm turns towards us at a bad time a lot of people are going to be heading to shelters. I'm heading to our hosting facility. Diesel backup power, redundant Internet connections, built like a bunker, away from the ocean.
My servers are in the safest place I can think to go.
Auto-update notified me of the patch yesterday on my workstation. I accepted it to check it out, but it never downloaded.
Today I got the notification on my notebook and decided to try the same thing on that one as well. Same thing--the update box goes away but nothing appears to download.
It's not that big of a deal, but I do want to get it installed on at least one of my machines to see if it would break anything.
There are not many unique addresses in the list; most are repeated many times throughout the it. And there are a couple that just aren't valid IP addresses at all. Not much of a list yet, but good luck with it anyway.
People bring this up everytime some company announces a large-scale rollout of high-speed like this. My guess is the same thing will happen this time. Their customers will have 30Mbps to the home, but will only see that kind of speed on things cached close by, and get the same speed as the rest of us broadband users on everything else. That is, until the backbones are upgraded. I don't think we'll see the backbones "suffer" though.
I guess it is too much to hope that the source code is publicly available, but really shouldn't it be?
Even if it was, we still wouldn't have the source code to some of the underlying components, such as Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Access.
I really don't have a whole lot of faith that my vote will be counted properly this election. Closed voting system, no verifiable voting trail, our governor is the president's brother, tons of shady stories from the last presidential election, little news coverage about the new system...like someone else recommended, I should just bet some money on Bush so at least I won't feel like it's a total waste of time when GWB wins Florida again.
Slackware is k00l for it's own reasons, but keeping sendmail is the kind of thing that makes people say "wtf are these guys smoking?" x.org is cool because it supposedly is better for the end user than xfree86, but who knows at this point.
note: this an off-the-cuff remark that I would have usually posted anonymously, but remarks like this have gotten me banned from posting anonymously on Slashdot.
I have a couple of friends that have spent time in prison (both for non-violent 'crimes' related to posession of certain plants.) Neither of them told any rape stories, but clearly they both needed to commit violent acts just to survive in prison--and neither of these guys were ever violent people.
One of them spent two years in a Georgia state prison. If you could get money from the outside you could get drugs easily from the DoC officers. If someone gave you a problem and you didn't fight back, you were immediately a target for anyone there that wanted to take advantage of you. If someone beats the crap out of you, you can rat on them, but then you're marked as a rat and everyone will be after you.
One day his watch was stolen by his cellmate and sold to another prisoner. The watch wasn't the big deal, it was the fact that everyone knew it was his watch and if he didn't do something about it, then he'd be a target from then on. So he ended up smashing his cellmate in the face with a padlock and then bashing several of his teeth out on the edge of his bunk. When they were questioned what happened both he and the guy that he beat up told the guards that he fell by accident. They still put my friend in solitary for a couple weeks, but no charges were filed against him.
It's a wierd feeling to have someone you know to be a friendly, intelligent, non-violent person telling you a story like this like they're simply describing a bad experience with tech support. It's easy to see how US prisons are creating violent criminals out of people that weren't necessarily violent before.
The conversation came up because he was talking about how he has to see a parole officer for the next several years. (for 10 years from the date he was released.) He said he'd never let them send him back--even if it meant they'd have to kill him to catch him.
Maybe you worked in a prison where these type of things didn't happen, but to say that all prisons are like that is definately false. Violence is a way of life in US prisons. It's not just GA prisons either. I've talked with more than just one person that has been to prison, and known two of them well enough to know that they aren't liars. Please don't try to bury the problem by saying it doesn't happen, or that we shouldn't talk about it. That's part of the problem.
Think about this: thousands of people go to prison for posession of marijuana every year. Very few of these people are violent. Most are no threat to anyone. And they are locked up with rapists, murderers, and people that are just mentally ill and violent because of it. Forgetting the whole matter of justice being served for a moment, what exactly is it that we are accomplishing by doing this?
When you see an opportunity for a first post on Slashdot, click on it quickly, then hit reply immediately. Now you have to wait 20 seconds before posting. Use them wisely. Otherwise you're just another troll.
The DMCA works for corporations because they can afford the cost of litigation. Your average person isn't going to be able to afford to win a DMCA case against the RIAA companies.
You'll notice that these DMCA cases are never seen through to the end. The little guy runs out of money, has to give up, and the big corps get their way.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the cheapest route is always analogue, so it's not a great advert for VOIP :)
I'd have to disagree there... Broadvoice.com has some pretty cheap unlimited packages--especially if you BYOD (bring your own device, such as Asterisk.) I've only been trying them out a little while, but to be honest I haven't been incredibly impressed with their support (hard to reach over the phone, occasional high latency at some locations, etc.) But for $20/mo you get unlimited calling to 21 countries (including US and Canada.)
Of course, if you're not making many non-local calls, I guess analog is still the way to go. Especially if you don't already have high-speed Internet.
Comcast upgraded our area to 4Mbit close to a year ago with no announcement or additional charge. That's great, but I've been thinking about switching back to DSL anyway since Comcast's high-speed Internet access has been dropping out several times a month in my neighborhood. Sometimes it drops out for an hour, sometimes for a whole day.
When I had DSL I only lost service once in the course of an entire year.
We both forgot to mention Macs though. Suprising, since there are literally thousands of people using them these days :)
I love firing up vi for a cool Perl 6 coding session. And it flies under optimized Gentoo.
I'm sure I'll probably get modded down by some Debian/BSD zealot. They're probably just pissed off because their rigs are so bogged down from emacs and python trying to run together on a non-optimized system.
Maybe I'm mistaken here, but does this even allow you to search files that you wouldn't otherwise be able to access via Windows' built in search? If not then this whole google/spyware freak-out is just a bunch of bullshit and the people propagating it are idiots.
It seems to me that the typical person I deal with lately catches on pretty quickly to the idea of using a different web browser. Every single home computer I've worked on in the last couple months has been barely usable due to all the spyware on them.
After cleaning up their machines I install Firefox and tell them about the pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing. I tell them that at this point they should only use IE as a last resort. The explaination literally takes about 30 seconds and I haven't had any problems with people not "getting it."
I've done this for easily a dozen different people in the last month, and every one I've talked to afterwards has mentioned how much nicer it is browsing with Firefox.
Maybe I've just been lucky with the people I've done work for recently, but it seems to me that most people are more than happy to make the switch once the software is installed and demonstrated to them.
Undoubtedly there are people out there that just can't be bothered (from what I've read on here at least,) but at that point it's their problem and they'll be paying me if I have to come back and clean the crap off their computer again.
PS: I just wish Firefox would render Slashdot consistently. WTF?
Moderators, say goodbye to your moderation priviledges.
(not kidding.)
I'm not an American but I can imagine that this process would be humiliating.
I think a lot of us (but obviously not all) feel more humiliated by the way the last four years have turned out. I'm voting in Florida this year, and I for one welcome our European overseers.
My X-box is hooked into my entertainment center, so it'd be handy to be able to use it to play music and video off my linux server. Being able to ssh into it (or control it otherwise) from my workstation or notebook is an additional bonus.
Other than that, there is the cool factor you mentioned.
I don't have any inside information about how they came to the decision so I really can't argue with what you're saying. I'm not sure your response contradicts my point anyway.
I submit that assisting the Chinese government in masking their censorship just so you can remain in the market most certainly qualifies as "evil."
Would it be better to have the people of China banned from Google entirely? I think Google is doing the right thing by not just walking away and leaving them in the dark so to speak.
I've got a friend of mine that's working as a claims adjuster in Punta Gorda right now. He just called me yesterday to see if I could mail him a copy of Office so he can update Office on his notebook computer. Since he's working out of a hotel, downloading it off a server isn't an option. Driving 4+ hours to get his original disc isn't either.
The bullshit that requires you to have your office disc to perform certain updates is the biggest thing about Office that pisses me off. Carrying all your discs with you just isn't feasible when you're on the road a lot.
It looks like Jacksonville Beach is going to be spared the worst of this storm, but as usual, you really don't know where the storm is going to land until the last minute.
If the storm turns towards us at a bad time a lot of people are going to be heading to shelters. I'm heading to our hosting facility. Diesel backup power, redundant Internet connections, built like a bunker, away from the ocean.
My servers are in the safest place I can think to go.
Auto-update notified me of the patch yesterday on my workstation. I accepted it to check it out, but it never downloaded.
Today I got the notification on my notebook and decided to try the same thing on that one as well. Same thing--the update box goes away but nothing appears to download.
It's not that big of a deal, but I do want to get it installed on at least one of my machines to see if it would break anything.
There are not many unique addresses in the list; most are repeated many times throughout the it. And there are a couple that just aren't valid IP addresses at all. Not much of a list yet, but good luck with it anyway.
People bring this up everytime some company announces a large-scale rollout of high-speed like this. My guess is the same thing will happen this time. Their customers will have 30Mbps to the home, but will only see that kind of speed on things cached close by, and get the same speed as the rest of us broadband users on everything else. That is, until the backbones are upgraded. I don't think we'll see the backbones "suffer" though.
I guess it is too much to hope that the source code is publicly available, but really shouldn't it be?
Even if it was, we still wouldn't have the source code to some of the underlying components, such as Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Access.
I really don't have a whole lot of faith that my vote will be counted properly this election. Closed voting system, no verifiable voting trail, our governor is the president's brother, tons of shady stories from the last presidential election, little news coverage about the new system...like someone else recommended, I should just bet some money on Bush so at least I won't feel like it's a total waste of time when GWB wins Florida again.
I've posted about this on Slashdot before but looks like it's appropriate to post again.
Here's a link to the realaudio stream of the radio show I refered to.
In our state our governor, Jeb Bush, is against the whole verified voting idea. Suprising considering the whole fiasco here in Florida last time.
I was listening to Day to Day/Science Friday in the car the other day and I believe they said the next one is in 8 years.
"We haven't worked out how to open-source Java, but at some point it will happen," Srinivas said."
When I heard this earlier today I thought the same thing, this is a non-announcement.
Delirious B. Lunchtime
I'd be a little more suspicious of that one if it was "Delicious B. Lunchtime."
Slackware is k00l for it's own reasons, but keeping sendmail is the kind of thing that makes people say "wtf are these guys smoking?" x.org is cool because it supposedly is better for the end user than xfree86, but who knows at this point.
note: this an off-the-cuff remark that I would have usually posted anonymously, but remarks like this have gotten me banned from posting anonymously on Slashdot.
I have a couple of friends that have spent time in prison (both for non-violent 'crimes' related to posession of certain plants.) Neither of them told any rape stories, but clearly they both needed to commit violent acts just to survive in prison--and neither of these guys were ever violent people.
One of them spent two years in a Georgia state prison. If you could get money from the outside you could get drugs easily from the DoC officers. If someone gave you a problem and you didn't fight back, you were immediately a target for anyone there that wanted to take advantage of you. If someone beats the crap out of you, you can rat on them, but then you're marked as a rat and everyone will be after you.
One day his watch was stolen by his cellmate and sold to another prisoner. The watch wasn't the big deal, it was the fact that everyone knew it was his watch and if he didn't do something about it, then he'd be a target from then on. So he ended up smashing his cellmate in the face with a padlock and then bashing several of his teeth out on the edge of his bunk. When they were questioned what happened both he and the guy that he beat up told the guards that he fell by accident. They still put my friend in solitary for a couple weeks, but no charges were filed against him.
It's a wierd feeling to have someone you know to be a friendly, intelligent, non-violent person telling you a story like this like they're simply describing a bad experience with tech support. It's easy to see how US prisons are creating violent criminals out of people that weren't necessarily violent before.
The conversation came up because he was talking about how he has to see a parole officer for the next several years. (for 10 years from the date he was released.) He said he'd never let them send him back--even if it meant they'd have to kill him to catch him.
Maybe you worked in a prison where these type of things didn't happen, but to say that all prisons are like that is definately false. Violence is a way of life in US prisons. It's not just GA prisons either. I've talked with more than just one person that has been to prison, and known two of them well enough to know that they aren't liars. Please don't try to bury the problem by saying it doesn't happen, or that we shouldn't talk about it. That's part of the problem.
Think about this: thousands of people go to prison for posession of marijuana every year. Very few of these people are violent. Most are no threat to anyone. And they are locked up with rapists, murderers, and people that are just mentally ill and violent because of it. Forgetting the whole matter of justice being served for a moment, what exactly is it that we are accomplishing by doing this?
When you see an opportunity for a first post on Slashdot, click on it quickly, then hit reply immediately. Now you have to wait 20 seconds before posting. Use them wisely. Otherwise you're just another troll.
The DMCA works for corporations because they can afford the cost of litigation. Your average person isn't going to be able to afford to win a DMCA case against the RIAA companies.
You'll notice that these DMCA cases are never seen through to the end. The little guy runs out of money, has to give up, and the big corps get their way.