My advice - get yourself signed up with "Samknows" at http://www.testmyisp.com/. If you get picked for the sample population, samknows will send you a device that probes the network and reports back. It only samples when the connection is idle (it won't perform tests when you're actively using the connection.) You need to agree to let samknows contact your ISP to gather information on your contracted connection.
You'll get monthly status reports showing what their tested results are, and these reports include bandwidth, latencies, etc.
Here is where it gets good - your operator knows that you'll be testing them (by matter of samknows contacting them) and they also know that your results will be rolled into the national broadband reporting stats that get published widely. So you might get better service. I know that within a month of getting my samknows box that Comcast sent us a new modem, with some oddball excuse for why they were refreshing the equipment. Our throughput was already pretty good but seems that it got even better.
There is only one more catch, if you are on a data cap plan (or a heavy user) this sampling adds about 25 to 50 GB per month of traffic. I think they make that part pretty clear when you go through the signup process.
This is partially true, but what it looks like is that nobody around here is "handy" any more. People just don't get the practice of tearing things apart and fixing them. I get a lot of enjoyment out of being able to fix things, but many people don't.
I picked up a huge snowblower that my neighbor was throwing away (his answer? "duhhh doesn't work") and it just needed to have the carburetor cleaned out - total cost was about $10 in parts, and a couple of hours or my time. To top it all off I learned something. I also loved it because I had nothing to lose except some tinkering time - the thing was already broken, so if I made it more broken no big deal. However if I got it working then it was like winning the jackpot. (BTW the thing has enough power to throw snow across the street!)
Other neighbors had a combo stereo that just didn't work. And they had no clue of what to do. Didn't power on, so I popped the cover off and found the fuse blown. One trip to the hardware store later and I now have a great garage stereo with CD changer and even a remote control!
I could go on and on about my brother in law and his fixit dis-abilities, but maybe I'll save all of those "no common sense" stories for a book. (It has been a complete blast to fix things for my inlaws, they look at me like I'm some sort of magician or technological priest.)
Maybe that's what the problem is, either people think their time is too valuable (thanks marketers), or they just don't feel like learning anything. All of this takes common sense and a thirst for knowledge, something that people seem to be really short on any more. They'd rather sit in front of the idiot box for hours, or piss away hours with angry birds.... it is just too easy.
Definitely saw this when I was in business school. A handful of students attempted to use their laptops to take notes, and the problem was trying to fit the lectures into the framework of Word, or Powerpoint. Very hard to insert diagrams (which would be a piece of cake to sketch with a pen and paper.) Also they spent probably half of their time playing with formatting, etc.
In all, it seemed that they spent so much time trying to input the information into their computer that they had no time left to actually pay attention to the lecture. They had even less time (effectively zero) to actually participate in any discussions.
Like others have posted, an MP3 at bitrates comparable to what the digital cellular systems use would probably not work. For CDMA (Verizon and Sprint, plus others) you are talking about a variable rate vocoder with a top bitrate of 8 kbps. The average bitrate would then be much much lower. There is a newer vocoder that can handle voice in less than 4 kbps.
The fewer bits you use per conversation frees up more bits for other conversations, increasing the overall capacity and lowering the cost per conversation to the operator. Conversely you could dedicate more bits for better quality, and get less capacity, but I would doubt if that will happen.
The companies would probably allow the first few electric cars to recharge, as it would let their green people claim "hey, we're a hip company and we support electric cars." Cheap marketing.
Then, once more people start showing up with their electric cars, and the electric bill grows (at which point to the company it feels more like freeloading), watch them change their mind.
I would be willing to bet that your dad's machine has a bad CD drive. That is the one thing that seems to be in common to all of your tests - dad's machine won't read CD's. Although I'm confused about which machine you ran a virtual machine but I would also be willing to be that it was yours and not your dad's.
When you need to recharge your phone, just put it in the microwave oven for 30 seconds and whammo you have 4 bars of battery! Saves you from having to carry your charger with you.
to get around the taxes maybe they'll go to "ebay-style" pricing: Good in question costs $1 and you can pay tax on that. "Shipping and handling" will cost $199 or whatever it takes to make up the balance.
Then it will take a few years for the govt to close that loophole.
A buddy of mine patented an idea that saved his company $150 million in the first year. He may have gotten a steak dinner out of it.
When his management asked him what he would recommend to his peers to get patents his answer was "don't do it, there is almost no personal benefit in doing it."
I have heard that Illinois does not have the ability to send violation tickets to out-of-state drivers. That also means that out-of-staters that pay tolls are doing it only to suit their conscience.
The only way then that you could get a ticket is if a policeman nails you driving through the easy-pass lanes w/o a transponder. They used to do that on I-90 coming out from O'Hare before the easy-lanes were put in. They would sit right past the outlet of the transponder lanes and pick off the people that ran through. But I doubt they can do it any more.
The batteries in my first transponder died and I drove around like that for a year and a half (no tickets or anything) before I got stuck in a manual lane with an arm and then had to call in.
I used to cherry-pick hard drives back in the old days (a few years ago) when Circuit City and Best Buy used to give those huge rebates.
Those were the good days when you could get a relatively large hard drive at either place - I never spent more then $35 after all of the rebates.
I do know that I went into one over the summer and it seemed like they had never seen a customer before - I got hit up by probably no less than 6 people and all I was doing was shopping for a TV.
That transmission every 10-20 minutes is called a "registration" and is basically a keep-alive timer for your phone. In order to not waste resources paging a user that has left the area or has turned off their phone the system will automatically deactivate the user (and send straight to voicemail) if the phone hasn't checked in for so many registrations (usually an hour or two.) Granted it was mentioned in another post of the "registration" and explicit "de-registration" when you power off, but de-registration messages don't need an ack so they sometimes fail to go through completely.
You'll have an opposite problem if you are on the border between two systems (two cities) or two regions. Your phone will scan, pick up one network and immediately register. After a few seconds it might pick up the other network and then register there. That constant ping-ponging will drain your battery in no time.
But it has to be done, because the network has to know where to send your call notification. The amount of time between when you are on the new network and have not updated your location database in the network means that you will miss calls in that short amount of time.
I thought IRDA (Infrared) was supposed to do this - my Palmpilot had infrared syncing, and HP tried with some of its printers, and I had a Motorola 2-way pager that also had the ability. My Dell laptop still has an infrared window on it.
It seems to make more sense to me when I think of project managers as time accountants. They have time budgets and scopes and reports and things that relate along the lines of a financial manager running a business.
Only Project Managers have completely different names for those things, but the better ones do a lot of time reporting and time budgeting.
Sprint has the spectrum, they paid for it a long time ago. Now that Nextel isn't generating as much free cash they don't have the money to build the network, so that is where the outside investors come in.
The tightening credit market has not helped either.
You have to spend money to make money. There are already a lot of last-mile data solutions out there, so someone has to spend a lot of money get the ball rolling. Have to make the market in this case.
Well the "razor and blades" business model where you give away the console and then make it up over the long run on the games depends on both pieces of the deal happening. Over time the razor/blades model has proven to be favored by the general buying public. Would you want to pay full price for the console (including proper profit margin) and then pay something lower for the games? That would affect the uptake as a higher base console price would shut people out.
Alternatively people always rant on something like "companies are evil and should not make money". But in the US what else makes things interesting from a business perspective? Everything is a business people, and businesses are not usually in the business of NOT making money.
Everyone has a choice - buy it or walk away. Also there is NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH. You're going to pay for it somewhere - so maybe the food is free but you can bet for sure you paid for it somehow, by getting bombarded with ads, or giving up personal information (again so you can get junk mail.)
So this is all neato and the capabilities at this point are only limited by your imagination.
The thing that will be the deal-breaker is going to be the price. Having separate pieces will drive up the costs of the subassemblies, in turn driving up the price to the end user. And the majority of the market for cellphones is based primarily on price (hey sorry, the truth is that's what the majority of people do). And with the high price will come low volume/quantities which will exacerbate the cost problem.
My advice - don't "formalize" your processes.
The PHBs will do this: 1. they'll hire a big consultancy to tell you what the best way to formalize things will be, 2. they'll then recommend to start up a big huge group of people responsible for the process of formalizing the processes, and then 3. you'll then have to create a bunch of auditors that will then run around continuously checking that what you are doing matches what you said you would do in the formal documentations.
Of course this is all overhead, and when you establish your "ministry of process" and prioritize their work, their work will take all precedence over any real work. Your business will gradually grind to a halt as productivity goes backwards under the weight of all the processes.
Hey isn't this what camera phones were made for? Take a picture and email it outta there before you get caught!
Sort of surprised that Harvard doesn't have some whiz-bang online syllabus etc where they would list the book titles, and someone could be convinced to also supply the ISBN codes so you could do all your shopping w/o even getting up from the desk.
Slashdot Mirror
My advice - get yourself signed up with "Samknows" at http://www.testmyisp.com/. If you get picked for the sample population, samknows will send you a device that probes the network and reports back. It only samples when the connection is idle (it won't perform tests when you're actively using the connection.) You need to agree to let samknows contact your ISP to gather information on your contracted connection.
You'll get monthly status reports showing what their tested results are, and these reports include bandwidth, latencies, etc.
Here is where it gets good - your operator knows that you'll be testing them (by matter of samknows contacting them) and they also know that your results will be rolled into the national broadband reporting stats that get published widely. So you might get better service. I know that within a month of getting my samknows box that Comcast sent us a new modem, with some oddball excuse for why they were refreshing the equipment. Our throughput was already pretty good but seems that it got even better.
There is only one more catch, if you are on a data cap plan (or a heavy user) this sampling adds about 25 to 50 GB per month of traffic. I think they make that part pretty clear when you go through the signup process.
This is partially true, but what it looks like is that nobody around here is "handy" any more. People just don't get the practice of tearing things apart and fixing them. I get a lot of enjoyment out of being able to fix things, but many people don't.
I picked up a huge snowblower that my neighbor was throwing away (his answer? "duhhh doesn't work") and it just needed to have the carburetor cleaned out - total cost was about $10 in parts, and a couple of hours or my time. To top it all off I learned something. I also loved it because I had nothing to lose except some tinkering time - the thing was already broken, so if I made it more broken no big deal. However if I got it working then it was like winning the jackpot. (BTW the thing has enough power to throw snow across the street!)
Other neighbors had a combo stereo that just didn't work. And they had no clue of what to do. Didn't power on, so I popped the cover off and found the fuse blown. One trip to the hardware store later and I now have a great garage stereo with CD changer and even a remote control!
I could go on and on about my brother in law and his fixit dis-abilities, but maybe I'll save all of those "no common sense" stories for a book. (It has been a complete blast to fix things for my inlaws, they look at me like I'm some sort of magician or technological priest.)
Maybe that's what the problem is, either people think their time is too valuable (thanks marketers), or they just don't feel like learning anything. All of this takes common sense and a thirst for knowledge, something that people seem to be really short on any more. They'd rather sit in front of the idiot box for hours, or piss away hours with angry birds.... it is just too easy.
Definitely saw this when I was in business school. A handful of students attempted to use their laptops to take notes, and the problem was trying to fit the lectures into the framework of Word, or Powerpoint. Very hard to insert diagrams (which would be a piece of cake to sketch with a pen and paper.) Also they spent probably half of their time playing with formatting, etc.
In all, it seemed that they spent so much time trying to input the information into their computer that they had no time left to actually pay attention to the lecture. They had even less time (effectively zero) to actually participate in any discussions.
Witless Stenographer is a perfect label for this.
Like others have posted, an MP3 at bitrates comparable to what the digital cellular systems use would probably not work. For CDMA (Verizon and Sprint, plus others) you are talking about a variable rate vocoder with a top bitrate of 8 kbps. The average bitrate would then be much much lower. There is a newer vocoder that can handle voice in less than 4 kbps.
The fewer bits you use per conversation frees up more bits for other conversations, increasing the overall capacity and lowering the cost per conversation to the operator.
Conversely you could dedicate more bits for better quality, and get less capacity, but I would doubt if that will happen.
The companies would probably allow the first few electric cars to recharge, as it would let their green people claim "hey, we're a hip company and we support electric cars." Cheap marketing.
Then, once more people start showing up with their electric cars, and the electric bill grows (at which point to the company it feels more like freeloading), watch them change their mind.
I would be willing to bet that your dad's machine has a bad CD drive. That is the one thing that seems to be in common to all of your tests - dad's machine won't read CD's.
Although I'm confused about which machine you ran a virtual machine but I would also be willing to be that it was yours and not your dad's.
When you need to recharge your phone, just put it in the microwave oven for 30 seconds and whammo you have 4 bars of battery!
Saves you from having to carry your charger with you.
I guess this means that other crap idea of the space elevator is dead? (Maybe if we built a huge wooden badger.)
Then it will take a few years for the govt to close that loophole.
I'm not sure you will be able to take advantage of the best of the speeds for an external drive. Won't your interface be the limiting factor?
Probably better to buy more RAM.
Good luck with that though.
Great answer. Why not convert them into cold hard cash. And once you get the cash then you may be able to put that to better use than taking up space.
Or you could send it to me if you have too much {computers|cash} laying around.
You are so right with this one.
A buddy of mine patented an idea that saved his company $150 million in the first year. He may have gotten a steak dinner out of it.
When his management asked him what he would recommend to his peers to get patents his answer was "don't do it, there is almost no personal benefit in doing it."
I have heard that Illinois does not have the ability to send violation tickets to out-of-state drivers. That also means that out-of-staters that pay tolls are doing it only to suit their conscience.
The only way then that you could get a ticket is if a policeman nails you driving through the easy-pass lanes w/o a transponder. They used to do that on I-90 coming out from O'Hare before the easy-lanes were put in. They would sit right past the outlet of the transponder lanes and pick off the people that ran through. But I doubt they can do it any more.
The batteries in my first transponder died and I drove around like that for a year and a half (no tickets or anything) before I got stuck in a manual lane with an arm and then had to call in.
I used to cherry-pick hard drives back in the old days (a few years ago) when Circuit City and Best Buy used to give those huge rebates.
Those were the good days when you could get a relatively large hard drive at either place - I never spent more then $35 after all of the rebates.
I do know that I went into one over the summer and it seemed like they had never seen a customer before - I got hit up by probably no less than 6 people and all I was doing was shopping for a TV.
That transmission every 10-20 minutes is called a "registration" and is basically a keep-alive timer for your phone. In order to not waste resources paging a user that has left the area or has turned off their phone the system will automatically deactivate the user (and send straight to voicemail) if the phone hasn't checked in for so many registrations (usually an hour or two.) Granted it was mentioned in another post of the "registration" and explicit "de-registration" when you power off, but de-registration messages don't need an ack so they sometimes fail to go through completely.
You'll have an opposite problem if you are on the border between two systems (two cities) or two regions. Your phone will scan, pick up one network and immediately register. After a few seconds it might pick up the other network and then register there. That constant ping-ponging will drain your battery in no time. But it has to be done, because the network has to know where to send your call notification. The amount of time between when you are on the new network and have not updated your location database in the network means that you will miss calls in that short amount of time.
I thought IRDA (Infrared) was supposed to do this - my Palmpilot had infrared syncing, and HP tried with some of its printers, and I had a Motorola 2-way pager that also had the ability. My Dell laptop still has an infrared window on it.
It seems to make more sense to me when I think of project managers as time accountants. They have time budgets and scopes and reports and things that relate along the lines of a financial manager running a business.
Only Project Managers have completely different names for those things, but the better ones do a lot of time reporting and time budgeting.
I find that I get the most work done at the BAR. No kids running around.
Life Size map of the earth: "and it is a bitch to fold" - Steven Wright
Sprint has the spectrum, they paid for it a long time ago. Now that Nextel isn't generating as much free cash they don't have the money to build the network, so that is where the outside investors come in.
The tightening credit market has not helped either.
You have to spend money to make money. There are already a lot of last-mile data solutions out there, so someone has to spend a lot of money get the ball rolling. Have to make the market in this case.
Well the "razor and blades" business model where you give away the console and then make it up over the long run on the games depends on both pieces of the deal happening. Over time the razor/blades model has proven to be favored by the general buying public. Would you want to pay full price for the console (including proper profit margin) and then pay something lower for the games? That would affect the uptake as a higher base console price would shut people out.
Alternatively people always rant on something like "companies are evil and should not make money". But in the US what else makes things interesting from a business perspective? Everything is a business people, and businesses are not usually in the business of NOT making money.
Everyone has a choice - buy it or walk away. Also there is NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH. You're going to pay for it somewhere - so maybe the food is free but you can bet for sure you paid for it somehow, by getting bombarded with ads, or giving up personal information (again so you can get junk mail.)
So this is all neato and the capabilities at this point are only limited by your imagination.
The thing that will be the deal-breaker is going to be the price. Having separate pieces will drive up the costs of the subassemblies, in turn driving up the price to the end user. And the majority of the market for cellphones is based primarily on price (hey sorry, the truth is that's what the majority of people do). And with the high price will come low volume/quantities which will exacerbate the cost problem.
My advice - don't "formalize" your processes.
The PHBs will do this:
1. they'll hire a big consultancy to tell you what the best way to formalize things will be,
2. they'll then recommend to start up a big huge group of people responsible for the process of formalizing the processes, and then
3. you'll then have to create a bunch of auditors that will then run around continuously checking that what you are doing matches what you said you would do in the formal documentations.
Of course this is all overhead, and when you establish your "ministry of process" and prioritize their work, their work will take all precedence over any real work. Your business will gradually grind to a halt as productivity goes backwards under the weight of all the processes.
Desktop Synchrotron? No thanks, but I've already got one.
Hey isn't this what camera phones were made for? Take a picture and email it outta there before you get caught!
Sort of surprised that Harvard doesn't have some whiz-bang online syllabus etc where they would list the book titles, and someone could be convinced to also supply the ISBN codes so you could do all your shopping w/o even getting up from the desk.