That reminds me of an inadvertant experiment I once did writing a large file to floppy on my Apple II and then printing it out. It printed about the same speed as it wrote to disk...
I had a remarkably similar experience moving domains away from yahoo-- at one point I called Melbourne IT on the phone and they answered pretty quickly (no time on hold) and gave me accurate and useful information about how to get it done.
I had another domain that I registered with yahoo years ago when they used NetSol. When yahoo switched to Melbourne, they basically abandoned the users signed up through NetSol, except for collecting their money (which was higher than through Melbourne). NetSol was also pretty straightforward for getting control back over my domain (fax them a copy of an ID or something, and a single form).
After those experiences I'll never register a domain through a reseller-- it just creates too much hassle.
I had friends who had a non profit web site and they missed a renewal, the domain was immediately grabbed by porn spammers and they even used the site's original graphics. The generated site was probably entirely automated.
I deal with that sort of thing by keeping all my domains on my snapnames "get me this domain" list-- they don't charge you unless you get the domain, and since I already own them and set them to renew, it shouldn't cost anything. But if something stupid happens (credit card in the autorenew thing expires while I'm in a coma for 6 months) then at least theres at least some attempt to keep the domain.
Most banks offer a SSL encrypted login page but don't explicitly encourage people to use it.... Gmail has a secure login page as well but you have to explicitly type in https in order to get to it.
Huh? The Wells Fargo front page defaults to SSL, as does Gmail-- I just typed "Gmail.com" into two different browsers (one of which I reset first) and got an SSL encrypted page.
Maybe someone at google saw your post and fixed things.
I've seen it a couple times in LAX and Burbank. It shows up pretty obviously as a computer to computer network in OS X. I tried at least once to exploit it (from OS X) to surf but it wasn't actually hooked up to the world.
the one time I tried this was with a domain that looked like it was owned by a regular person who had let it lapse-- it was near expiration when I decided I wanted the name so I looked up ways to snag it without having to try to buy it from the owner. I ended up using SnapNames.Com, who only charge you if you win. They did manage to snag it for me, which was kind of a surprise. The downside is they they work with a variety of registrars, so you can end up with your domain registered someplace strange for a while until the waiting period on transfers expires. The registrar that they hooked me up with (4Domains/bluehill) had a slightly oddball set of control panels but were very civilized and easy to transfer from when I went to consolidate under one registrar-- I'll keep them in mind for future registrations.
Well, it'd be pretty weird if Consumer Reports was a pain in the ass company.
CR can be a pain in the ass company, but mostly to people who make bad products. I've had an online/print subscription for quite a while and have been pretty happy with them. They do try to upsell once or twice a year with mailings for their extra stuff for cars and for travel, but it's pretty infrequent, and they don't have people call and pester or anything.
Probably the important thing to note about them is that they don't accept advertising, so the subscribers *are* the customers. For magazines (and TV and Radio) that get their revenue from ads, the advertisers are the customers and the subscribers are the product.
Not a chance man. If it was, the elephants would have eaten it already.
No, that would be if it were peanut shaped.
Monkeys would eat a banana shaped universe. And there just may not be enough monkeys far enough back in time when the universe was small for them to eat it.
will be required not only to examine your birth certificate and social security card, but also to scan and create digital copies of them in their system
This makes no sense at all-- neither of those actually serves to identify the bearer. When I got my first (and only) social security card way back about 25 years ago it said on it something to the effect of "this is not identification", and was printed on cheap stock with an easily copied pattern and a number just typed on it. It had exactly zero value as an identity document. I lost or destroyed it years ago, and when I was renewing my drivers license a while back it turned out they had a typo in my SSN and asked to see my card. I simply looked at him like he was crazy. We eventually figured out that they had a typo and didn't try to make me come back with a soc. sec. card, but had they tried I probably would have returned with an attorney instead.
Birth certificates are similar-- they don't have anything useful about them to identify what physical person they correspond to, particularly when the person is 25 or more years post birth.
This is very possibly what's happening in the tests-- the mail server that the mail is coming from may not be set up properly to look like a respectable non-spamming server and earthlink is simply dumping email that comes from it.
I use earthlink for some of my email, and when I send email that uses postfix on my mac at home as the outgoing server earthlink drops it on the way in (as do many other large ISPs). I think most of my other accounts (including my web hosting service at hub.org) do a better job of not dropping it.
I use the local server because either a)I'm in a hotel room or on an open WAP where the mail relays get confused somewhere, or b)I'm trying to do web stuff that sends me an email and using the localhost server for testing. If I use my hosting service for the web stuff, where the mail servers are set up in a non-spamming way, then the mail comes through.
Biggest problem is that Earthlink uses a white-list spam blocking setup that sends back a time-limited challenge to the sender ("Please go to this link and fill in this form so that this user can receive your mail").
The whitelist is an opt-in thing. Their email service defaults to not using it-- I still use earthlink email for a lot of stuff for historical reasons (it's a pita to change a lot of people over to a new address). I don't think I've had much mail go missing, but I might send myself some tests.
much of the faculty at the university where I did my undergraduate studies only had to come in for about six hours a week
Most Faculty I know work far more than 40 hours/week. The 6 hr/week they might have to be in the classroom is just the visible part. It takes a lot of hours to prepare the content for the classroom time, plus time grading things, supervising graduate students and post-docs. Then there's the research, which gets paid for by writing proposals for grants and research contracts (which takes a huge amount of time, but pays for the grad students and post-docs), the actual time spent doing the research, and then writing the papers and presentations of it.
So they may have 6 hrs/week of stage time/office hours, but they typically work a lot more than that.
I know and see a lot of garage bands, and they all pay to have their CDs pressed, and printed professionally, including the cases. Some do jewel cases, and others cardboard sleeves, and the number of colors may vary, but they're usually 4 color. Most look and sound pretty good, and it's not that expensive, even though they're typically doing runs of 1000-2000.
Occasionally people have home burned CDs, much like they used to do home duped tapes back in the days of vinyl disks and mylar tape, but even bands I know that are barely capable of feeding themselves (both financially and logistically) manage to get CDs burned.
I used to produce a moderate number of documents to be released as PDF for general public consumption and discovered a long time ago that you can do things like hide text behind objects (like a picture or a box) and then later on in acrobat be able to move the object to reveal the text. I was always very tempted to put easter eggs in the pdfs, but never did.
I can easily spend much more than 500 minutes a month to Canada and am neither a telemarketer nor unemployed. Put on a headset and talk while you're doing other things. And given the time zone differences can't always do nights and weekends.
I can see from your other related posts that you've got a pretty limited view of requirements people might have for phones, but for some situations Vonage is more useful than a cell or Skype.
I suspect that in the long run Vonage (and possibly Skype as well) will either disappear or morph considerably, but for now it fills a niche pretty well.
Paying for phone service won't disappear for a while. Eventually you'll just pay for a data connection and send what you want over it, but that's a few years out.
Austin is pretty small. There are still plenty of places in LA where you won't get free WiFi, and the phones that switch from GSM to WiFi on the fly probably need a couple generations before they behave well.
In the meantime, there are actually people who can't use a cell phone at home. Wasn't it only about a year ago that a cell company exec publicly opined that customers were pretty unreasonable in expecting their cell phones to work *in buildings*.
I live in a hole in the ground (actually an arroyo), and despite being a densely populated area, there's no cell service in the house or yard. It sometimes works up at the street. Sometimes. When the GSM/VOIP phone is working well I'll probably get one. There are also plenty of people who don't have high speed net access at home, or who travel to places where it's not very available and cell coverage is bad, or aren't served well by mobile phones for any number of reasons. Landlines still work very well, and if you interact frequently with people who depend on POTS (which I do), Vonage is a lot less hassle than Skype-- you don't impose any requirement on the other party if you use Vonage, where you do with Skype (or you pay for Skypeout/in). I can also just plug any old handset into my VOIP router and it works. Until the GSM/VOIP phones show themselves to be reliable and inexpensive I have a wireless phone in the house so I can wander around and talk on the phone without being tied to the computer or having to cobble something together.
(parent modded a troll, but I think is just misguided)
Vonage and Skype are similar services with different pricing and marketing models.
Vonage is trying to compete directly with POTS for all calls, and prices on the assumption that you will be making lots of calls to non-Vonage phones. It offers convenience, a single telephone and number to deal with (with some nice options on that), and you don't have to worry about whether you're calling a Vonage or POTS phone-- it just acts like a phone. They don't provide the handset, just the router.
Skype offers similar service, but AFAIK you have to use your computer as the base station (rather than any old phone), and while in-network calls are free, you have to pay by the minute for out-of-network calls. If you want to use it like a regular phone you could very easily end up paying about the same for Skype as for Vonage, they just use a different hook to attract you, and they use some viral marketing to get people to sign up (It's free to call in-network).
Vonage has some nice features that made me pick them over one of the VOIP services offered by the phone company:
-it's no extra charge to US and Canada (and now parts of Europe)- ATT may have been offering that when I signed up for Vonage, but I had to dig around on the website and it wasn't unambiguously stated.
- I can get virtual phone numbers in area codes where I want people to be able to call me with a local call, and for less than the cost of LD service or an additional vonage account, I get two-way unlimited long distance dialing. Combine that with forwarding and it can be very handy and flexible.
If you're just eating at freeway exits this might be true, but there are also plenty of places where the fast food restaurants don't do that great because there's plenty of cheap decent food that's not fast food.
Part of why fast food came about is that you can't tell whether some random restaurant is going to be good or bad, but fast food is very consistent and predictable. Los Angeles has zillions of excellent restaurants buried in dumpy strip malls-- look while you're driving by and it's just another strip mall with some random food. Read a few reviews or talk to some people and there are some inexpensive places that are amazing. A lot of the best ones spend almost nothing on the atmosphere and are family run. They look quite plain, but they're packed with people. My rule of thumb is that if there are two restaurants near each other and one is empty and the other packed, it's probably for a reason, and the crowded one is likely worth the wait (I don't go near trendy places).
I've heard about some doctors getting frustrated, then refusing to take any healthcare plans, finding that they can offer their services for cash, and still cover expenses while charging less than many people's deductables.
I know a guy who has an ambulance company that only works special events (movies, sporting events, anybody who wants an ambulance on standby) because he doesn't want to have to deal with insurance companies. He has about 4 ambulances and a bunch of EMTs and charges standard rates for being on standby and has a pretty good price for transportation to the hospital if someone does end up needing a ride.
Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups and I've seen too many cases at level 2 and higher where the obvious was missed because the caller claimed they had already carried out a step. of course, in cases like that the caller will blame the tech support guy, not themselves for missing the obvious.
Years ago I had a summer job doing tech support for a software package for the mac (it shipped on a single floppy, to give you some idea of how long ago). It was a little company with all the programmers in one room, and a tiny business office with one desk.
They didn't even have enough computers for me to have one, but someone was on vacation when I started so I got to play with one for a week, but mostly worked from the manual. The biggest problem people had was "It won't install". I would walk them through the install, and it worked every time. Almost every one of them would then say "but I did all that 6 times already. why does it work when you're on the phone?" I sometimes gave them a joking reply about software that could tell they were on the phone with tech support.
The other approach to most problems was to look up really fast in the manual where the answer to their question was and say "On page X of the manual it says to do..." and sometimes walk them through it if necessary. This at least gave them the idea that they should look in the manual first.
Kids don't seem to be learning how to deliver mail in school anymore.
People have used couriers of one form or another for ages, and never really "delivered mail"-- mail is a substitute for showing up in person to communicate something.
A better analogy is auto shop - a lot of schools used to have auto shops where kids could learn to work on cars, either repairing their own or those of people in the local community. I've been hearing of a lot of those programs going away due budget cuts, even though it's a very useful class and not just for kids who want to be auto mechanics. Kids going into any sort of hands on thing (e.g. machinist) benefit from it, and it can also demystify mechanical things for the "white collar" crowd.
And yeah, I think it's bad when they cut auto shop programs.
Slashdot Mirror
That reminds me of an inadvertant experiment I once did writing a large file to floppy on my Apple II and then printing it out. It printed about the same speed as it wrote to disk...
I had a remarkably similar experience moving domains away from yahoo-- at one point I called Melbourne IT on the phone and they answered pretty quickly (no time on hold) and gave me accurate and useful information about how to get it done.
I had another domain that I registered with yahoo years ago when they used NetSol. When yahoo switched to Melbourne, they basically abandoned the users signed up through NetSol, except for collecting their money (which was higher than through Melbourne). NetSol was also pretty straightforward for getting control back over my domain (fax them a copy of an ID or something, and a single form).
After those experiences I'll never register a domain through a reseller-- it just creates too much hassle.
I had friends who had a non profit web site and they missed a renewal, the domain was immediately grabbed by porn spammers and they even used the site's original graphics. The generated site was probably entirely automated.
I deal with that sort of thing by keeping all my domains on my snapnames "get me this domain" list-- they don't charge you unless you get the domain, and since I already own them and set them to renew, it shouldn't cost anything. But if something stupid happens (credit card in the autorenew thing expires while I'm in a coma for 6 months) then at least theres at least some attempt to keep the domain.
Most banks offer a SSL encrypted login page but don't explicitly encourage people to use it....
Gmail has a secure login page as well but you have to explicitly type in https in order to get to it.
Huh? The Wells Fargo front page defaults to SSL, as does Gmail-- I just typed "Gmail.com" into two different browsers (one of which I reset first) and got an SSL encrypted page.
Maybe someone at google saw your post and fixed things.
I've seen it a couple times in LAX and Burbank. It shows up pretty obviously as a computer to computer network in OS X. I tried at least once to exploit it (from OS X) to surf but it wasn't actually hooked up to the world.
the one time I tried this was with a domain that looked like it was owned by a regular person who had let it lapse-- it was near expiration when I decided I wanted the name so I looked up ways to snag it without having to try to buy it from the owner. I ended up using SnapNames.Com, who only charge you if you win. They did manage to snag it for me, which was kind of a surprise. The downside is they they work with a variety of registrars, so you can end up with your domain registered someplace strange for a while until the waiting period on transfers expires. The registrar that they hooked me up with (4Domains/bluehill) had a slightly oddball set of control panels but were very civilized and easy to transfer from when I went to consolidate under one registrar-- I'll keep them in mind for future registrations.
You mean like in "Canadian Tire"?
And the reason they're keeping the denominations secret is that the bugs were actually found in Canadian Tire money.
Well, it'd be pretty weird if Consumer Reports was a pain in the ass company.
CR can be a pain in the ass company, but mostly to people who make bad products. I've had an online/print subscription for quite a while and have been pretty happy with them. They do try to upsell once or twice a year with mailings for their extra stuff for cars and for travel, but it's pretty infrequent, and they don't have people call and pester or anything.
Probably the important thing to note about them is that they don't accept advertising, so the subscribers *are* the customers. For magazines (and TV and Radio) that get their revenue from ads, the advertisers are the customers and the subscribers are the product.
...mentions The Jackson Laboratory, but that is not appear to be traded. Because it's a non-profit research lab: http://www.jax.org/mission/index.htmlNot a chance man. If it was, the elephants would have eaten it already.
No, that would be if it were peanut shaped.
Monkeys would eat a banana shaped universe. And there just may not be enough monkeys far enough back in time when the universe was small for them to eat it.
will be required not only to examine your birth certificate and social security card, but also to scan and create digital copies of them in their system
This makes no sense at all-- neither of those actually serves to identify the bearer. When I got my first (and only) social security card way back about 25 years ago it said on it something to the effect of "this is not identification", and was printed on cheap stock with an easily copied pattern and a number just typed on it. It had exactly zero value as an identity document. I lost or destroyed it years ago, and when I was renewing my drivers license a while back it turned out they had a typo in my SSN and asked to see my card. I simply looked at him like he was crazy. We eventually figured out that they had a typo and didn't try to make me come back with a soc. sec. card, but had they tried I probably would have returned with an attorney instead.
Birth certificates are similar-- they don't have anything useful about them to identify what physical person they correspond to, particularly when the person is 25 or more years post birth.
This is very possibly what's happening in the tests-- the mail server that the mail is coming from may not be set up properly to look like a respectable non-spamming server and earthlink is simply dumping email that comes from it.
I use earthlink for some of my email, and when I send email that uses postfix on my mac at home as the outgoing server earthlink drops it on the way in (as do many other large ISPs). I think most of my other accounts (including my web hosting service at hub.org) do a better job of not dropping it.
I use the local server because either a)I'm in a hotel room or on an open WAP where the mail relays get confused somewhere, or b)I'm trying to do web stuff that sends me an email and using the localhost server for testing. If I use my hosting service for the web stuff, where the mail servers are set up in a non-spamming way, then the mail comes through.
Biggest problem is that Earthlink uses a white-list spam blocking setup that sends back a time-limited challenge to the sender ("Please go to this link and fill in this form so that this user can receive your mail").
The whitelist is an opt-in thing. Their email service defaults to not using it-- I still use earthlink email for a lot of stuff for historical reasons (it's a pita to change a lot of people over to a new address). I don't think I've had much mail go missing, but I might send myself some tests.
much of the faculty at the university where I did my undergraduate studies only had to come in for about six hours a week
Most Faculty I know work far more than 40 hours/week. The 6 hr/week they might have to be in the classroom is just the visible part. It takes a lot of hours to prepare the content for the classroom time, plus time grading things, supervising graduate students and post-docs. Then there's the research, which gets paid for by writing proposals for grants and research contracts (which takes a huge amount of time, but pays for the grad students and post-docs), the actual time spent doing the research, and then writing the papers and presentations of it.
So they may have 6 hrs/week of stage time/office hours, but they typically work a lot more than that.
I know and see a lot of garage bands, and they all pay to have their CDs pressed, and printed professionally, including the cases. Some do jewel cases, and others cardboard sleeves, and the number of colors may vary, but they're usually 4 color. Most look and sound pretty good, and it's not that expensive, even though they're typically doing runs of 1000-2000.
Occasionally people have home burned CDs, much like they used to do home duped tapes back in the days of vinyl disks and mylar tape, but even bands I know that are barely capable of feeding themselves (both financially and logistically) manage to get CDs burned.
How about Stephen Harper Eats Babies
I used to produce a moderate number of documents to be released as PDF for general public consumption and discovered a long time ago that you can do things like hide text behind objects (like a picture or a box) and then later on in acrobat be able to move the object to reveal the text. I was always very tempted to put easter eggs in the pdfs, but never did.
I can easily spend much more than 500 minutes a month to Canada and am neither a telemarketer nor unemployed. Put on a headset and talk while you're doing other things. And given the time zone differences can't always do nights and weekends.
I can see from your other related posts that you've got a pretty limited view of requirements people might have for phones, but for some situations Vonage is more useful than a cell or Skype.
I suspect that in the long run Vonage (and possibly Skype as well) will either disappear or morph considerably, but for now it fills a niche pretty well.
Paying for phone service won't disappear for a while. Eventually you'll just pay for a data connection and send what you want over it, but that's a few years out.
Austin is pretty small. There are still plenty of places in LA where you won't get free WiFi, and the phones that switch from GSM to WiFi on the fly probably need a couple generations before they behave well.
In the meantime, there are actually people who can't use a cell phone at home. Wasn't it only about a year ago that a cell company exec publicly opined that customers were pretty unreasonable in expecting their cell phones to work *in buildings*.
I live in a hole in the ground (actually an arroyo), and despite being a densely populated area, there's no cell service in the house or yard. It sometimes works up at the street. Sometimes. When the GSM/VOIP phone is working well I'll probably get one. There are also plenty of people who don't have high speed net access at home, or who travel to places where it's not very available and cell coverage is bad, or aren't served well by mobile phones for any number of reasons. Landlines still work very well, and if you interact frequently with people who depend on POTS (which I do), Vonage is a lot less hassle than Skype-- you don't impose any requirement on the other party if you use Vonage, where you do with Skype (or you pay for Skypeout/in). I can also just plug any old handset into my VOIP router and it works. Until the GSM/VOIP phones show themselves to be reliable and inexpensive I have a wireless phone in the house so I can wander around and talk on the phone without being tied to the computer or having to cobble something together.
(parent modded a troll, but I think is just misguided)
Vonage and Skype are similar services with different pricing and marketing models.
Vonage is trying to compete directly with POTS for all calls, and prices on the assumption that you will be making lots of calls to non-Vonage phones. It offers convenience, a single telephone and number to deal with (with some nice options on that), and you don't have to worry about whether you're calling a Vonage or POTS phone-- it just acts like a phone. They don't provide the handset, just the router.
Skype offers similar service, but AFAIK you have to use your computer as the base station (rather than any old phone), and while in-network calls are free, you have to pay by the minute for out-of-network calls. If you want to use it like a regular phone you could very easily end up paying about the same for Skype as for Vonage, they just use a different hook to attract you, and they use some viral marketing to get people to sign up (It's free to call in-network).
Vonage has some nice features that made me pick them over one of the VOIP services offered by the phone company:
-it's no extra charge to US and Canada (and now parts of Europe)- ATT may have been offering that when I signed up for Vonage, but I had to dig around on the website and it wasn't unambiguously stated.
- I can get virtual phone numbers in area codes where I want people to be able to call me with a local call, and for less than the cost of LD service or an additional vonage account, I get two-way unlimited long distance dialing. Combine that with forwarding and it can be very handy and flexible.
If you're just eating at freeway exits this might be true, but there are also plenty of places where the fast food restaurants don't do that great because there's plenty of cheap decent food that's not fast food.
Part of why fast food came about is that you can't tell whether some random restaurant is going to be good or bad, but fast food is very consistent and predictable. Los Angeles has zillions of excellent restaurants buried in dumpy strip malls-- look while you're driving by and it's just another strip mall with some random food. Read a few reviews or talk to some people and there are some inexpensive places that are amazing. A lot of the best ones spend almost nothing on the atmosphere and are family run. They look quite plain, but they're packed with people. My rule of thumb is that if there are two restaurants near each other and one is empty and the other packed, it's probably for a reason, and the crowded one is likely worth the wait (I don't go near trendy places).
I've heard about some doctors getting frustrated, then refusing to take any healthcare plans, finding that they can offer their services for cash, and still cover expenses while charging less than many people's deductables.
I know a guy who has an ambulance company that only works special events (movies, sporting events, anybody who wants an ambulance on standby) because he doesn't want to have to deal with insurance companies. He has about 4 ambulances and a bunch of EMTs and charges standard rates for being on standby and has a pretty good price for transportation to the hospital if someone does end up needing a ride.
Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups and I've seen too many cases at level 2 and higher where the obvious was missed because the caller claimed they had already carried out a step. of course, in cases like that the caller will blame the tech support guy, not themselves for missing the obvious.
Years ago I had a summer job doing tech support for a software package for the mac (it shipped on a single floppy, to give you some idea of how long ago). It was a little company with all the programmers in one room, and a tiny business office with one desk.
They didn't even have enough computers for me to have one, but someone was on vacation when I started so I got to play with one for a week, but mostly worked from the manual. The biggest problem people had was "It won't install". I would walk them through the install, and it worked every time. Almost every one of them would then say "but I did all that 6 times already. why does it work when you're on the phone?" I sometimes gave them a joking reply about software that could tell they were on the phone with tech support.
The other approach to most problems was to look up really fast in the manual where the answer to their question was and say "On page X of the manual it says to do..." and sometimes walk them through it if necessary. This at least gave them the idea that they should look in the manual first.
Kids still do, and they have risen to the occasion-- they chip their cars for performance.
There are also still plenty of mechanical parts in a car that need to be worked on.
Kids don't seem to be learning how to deliver mail in school anymore.
People have used couriers of one form or another for ages, and never really "delivered mail"-- mail is a substitute for showing up in person to communicate something.
A better analogy is auto shop - a lot of schools used to have auto shops where kids could learn to work on cars, either repairing their own or those of people in the local community. I've been hearing of a lot of those programs going away due budget cuts, even though it's a very useful class and not just for kids who want to be auto mechanics. Kids going into any sort of hands on thing (e.g. machinist) benefit from it, and it can also demystify mechanical things for the "white collar" crowd.
And yeah, I think it's bad when they cut auto shop programs.