I'll grant you that those are three compelling examples, however, they don't even come near the examples that can be generated showing the liberal bias of the media. I was considering providing numerous examples, but we'd just get into a pissing match. Let me just say, that I've *NEVER* heard anyone ever use the term conservative to describe the media - ever. You are definately wrong in saying they never go after the republicans; perhaps a function of a very selective memory? Iran-contra? Bush I approved congress's tax incresses? Newt Gingrich? Pluheese! You can bet they'll be all over this enron crap. At the minimum, republicans get it too. However, I still contend they get it worse. It's not just about issues that are mention; the media bias comes through in many ways such as placement, wording, amount of air time. Considering how extreme clinton's abuse of power was, he got off (heh, heh) easy.
I'll grant that the indian rant was more off-topic. However, what you call theft, others call it winning a lawsuit. There are two sides to the story. Just because you call it stealing, does not mean it was stealing. The story is not that simple. I never said we have prisine politics, but I do believe there seems to be more accountability and far less tolerance for dirty politics in general in united states elections. However, clinton seems to have been able to get away with it and will serve as an inspiration for others.
I whine all the time, but I'm not republican, nor do I wish to be seen with the tax-dodging libertarians. I don't think anyone has a monoply on whining - it's an american pastim; but for some reason it's getting harder to hear anything from my left. However, I am very happy to hear from you; I don't think I've ever encountered such liberalism; very reviving. It's sort of like how everything at the Gilroy garlic festivial smells so much better in contrast after walking out of porta-poty next to the brautwurst-n-beer garden. Thanks!
...Fine! We're going to take our toys and play somewhere else then!! (pout, pout) In othere words, just another normal day in the government. Same ol' manipulation games. "If we can't have it our way, then we'll just stop everything and blame it on the judge." I once saw this hidden-agenda, passive-agressive, move played out very succesfully. Washington State University was going to get a budget cut. In desperation, they paid a few debate team members to drive to Olympia and help make their case to the state legislature (I knew these students). Being the good WSU students they were, they spent most of the money and time on having a wild drunken parties. They drove there hours before the hearing with barely enough time shower. Everyone during the hearing was spouting off about how important education is and how good of a school WSU is, blah, blah. One of the debaters decide to take a different approach. He said, "Look, you (the legisature) are going to keep hearing all sorts of wonderful lies about the college all day long. So I won't bore you more with such nonsense. That's not the point here. The point is that if you cut the budget, WSU will then change the budget so that non-important and unheard of programs will get more money and important and prominent programs will be made to suffer so they can blame you and ask for more than they are going to get with out this cut. Thus, you look like the bad guys for hurting education and they always look like the good guys by 'fighting' for education. It would save you more time, money and popularity if you give up the idea of cutting their budget and only challenge them when they ask for increases in the budget." The WSU people were very uncomfortable in their seats suddenly, but the congressmen leaned forwared and paid attention. In the end, budget wasn't cut.
Malcontent is such an apt nick name for this author. Since when is the 'media' conservative? Perhaps he means that the media outlets that are conservative (all three, or so, of them) won't report on it. If he is referring to the dominant media outlets, such as NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post (har! like people *read*), ABC, CBS, NBC NPR, and CNN, he is just plain wrong. Perhaps the author maybe SO far to the left that the popular media -seems- to the right; something I find difficult to grasp. In summary, I don't think I could trust the credibility of the author because it's obvious they have such and extreme emotional bias.
Look, let's be realistic here. Most media outlets are not going to report it mainly because they don't care because most of the target audience don't care. One may be able to hope NPR could pick of the story; they do well providing depth to underreported liberal stories, and they do it very well. The reality is that our markets and our lives are getting more and more segmented. This will get reported in small outlets that deliver local news and to regional people that care. No one has the resources to care about all the things they need to care about anymore. Thus, there needs to be more power given to the people, so that the people closest to the problems can wisely and most effectively deal with the problems, with out offending the nations primary values. Given the libearal bias of the author, I would guess the author sees the solution to the indian plight as one that involves telling everyone the stories, hope for sympathy, and action from washington. I tend to be conservative in such matters because the unneeded and unhealthy consolodation of moeny and power centralized in washington *IS* the problem, and it takes away powers for normal citizens to positivly govern themselves and to fix (as opposed to placate) problems. And let me say, there is not a single media outlet that considers that a valid point of view any more.
About the indian plight: I grep up on or near reservations and I am sympathetic to their plight. But I also realize that each tribe has it's own unique problems, and that one can not generalize the problems of one tribe to all tribes. I sucks to lose a war and be a conquered people. Ask the scotts what they think of england... or the basque, or the palistinians, etc. But there comes a point where you have to decide to live with it, move on, and effect on the future, but living the past only brings regret and sorrow. However, often some tribes have brought their own sorrow upon themselves; it's not purely the white man's fault anymore. Many tribes have very dirty politics. Well, dirty for american standards, but normal for the rest of the world where bribery and manipulation are the status quo. Certian prominent tribes try and buy votes through creative definitions of what makes you a tribe member. Some prominent tribes say that you are a member no matter what percentage of your ethnic heratige. Most stop at 1/8th. But those others know that they will get more indian votes and more people on their side through such creative ideas. If you can't defend your idea based on merit, reason or the law, the idea can then be considered liberal. Such politicial games, only beget more games, and consolidation of power to overcome local powers, only makes it harder to use that power in the future. Some tribes have done very well for themselves, and none of those tribes are ones that whine or play petty politicial games.
In regards to the win v. unix comparison at...
http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2001/1018.t co.html
... you missed somethings in your incredible bias.
-An IPX can _not_ run solaris 7 or 8, due to limitations of the boot prom.
I believe it is technicially possible to get a new boot prom, but it's as
practical as a screen door on a submarine - not gonna happen.
-for your school, did you happen to think of the faculty?!?
-for the school, the students will be better programmers, with little
market to go to. The could learn java, but not the all important MFC and
other M$ bs. A part of a school's mission is vocational, and most of the
jobs out there involve microsoft. What this does mean is the school will
have to sell it self to a niche market, which translates to increased
advertising and marketing expenses - to attract both students and faculty.
-school: initial increases in costs due to reorienting everyone who knows
mac and windows to the unix way of life
-school: one part time admin!!!!?!! WTF! are you nuts!! You expect one
admin to retrain an entire school to unix, while building out the unix
network, while maintaining it, fixing it, backing it up, testing, chasing
security, etc. !!??! No damn way! At *least* three. I would also add
that I've worked for a major univeristy computer department with about 500
unix workstations and even more windoze stations. I know the difference.
It takes about the same staff. The difference is that you can find
anyone, at almost any salary that you can train to be a windoze monkey, as
long as you have one smart one who's paid well to work nice and never
leave that mess. The unix people cost WAY more. However, they aren't
stressed out running from one problem to the next. The are proactive,
adding features to the network. When a true emergency happenes, they are
calm and prepared. They tend to be very mature, document the network, and
are orderly. This may at first seem counterintuative (if you know unix types),
but when two types of experienced admins stand side by side, you
can see the difference.
-school: don't forget the cost of teaching materials. While sql server
may cost a gabillion dollars and have the uptime of a fruit fly in a
blender, it has at least a gajillion books out there covering it. There
are millions of crappy books and a few good ones covering M$ topics.
Unix, very very few. Sure there's the hundreds of oracle books (which,
btw, oracle doesn't always give schools cheap licenses; another HUGE
expense if you decide to use it). Theres the wonderfully written orielly
books, and some of the other unix classics. But then, that's it. For
every readable text (online doesn't count - school doesn't make residual
money on that) on KDE programming, I can find you ten on M$ programming.
Schools may have the instructor develop the materials, and that's great,
but it's yet another expense.
-In summary, you school comparison is far to broken too be considered a
good comparison. This won't even work as propaganda (published on linux
world - what do you expect). You conviently overlooked other systems
(there is more than sun you know). You neglected the savings, reliability
and performance differeneces in the storage area (unix would win). You
neglected all of the special deals that can be pitched for academic
pricing. M$/Dell (and others) gives can give great academic pricing if
you show you like them. Sun has acedemic pricing, per se, but I never
considered it a real discount. They do, however, give you a they option
to trade in your old gear on new stuff, and the discount is much better
than you'd get from selling it. IBM is much more generous academically
than Sun, but that seemed to something you were willing to overlook, which
is ironic considering big blues linux offerings.
If you have to 'request' pricing, ask for a quote, 'just' call and talk to anyone, it is WAY too expensive to consider. Most of the time, this is the way to sort out the hobbiest doing it for the love, from the professional doing it for the dough. It will be especially bad if they'll only give a price on the phone, where the sales person has to act as a trauma counsellor after you hear the price. When getting a quote requires a *visit* from a sales person, you'd better hope they bring an anesthesiologist - 'cuz it's gonna be painful.
That is an interesting thread. I wouldn't put 'perl for admins' in that category though; I really liked that book quite a bit, and use it often (not as much at the cookbook though). I will admit that I gave away my MySQL book. Personally, I've also avoided the bat book out of pure fear.
For criticial business systems, I'd easily chose sun over intel systems. If you make a fair comparision, prices are about the same, but more stable on the sun gear. Compaq has a nifty but weird remote admin card/app for their servers, but it's very pricy. For Sun remot admin, a stock modem and a stock term server works beautifully (btw, the cyclades terms servers are the best I've ever seen or worked with). Of course, ssh port forwarding for exporting those graphic apps. If the system gets hosed (if it's not clustered), dial in, "boot net install", and do a full bare-metal recovery remotely. Elegent.
However, I still have to somewhat agree with the AC. Sun's hardware is still great, but it's not the same quality that it used to be. It's b/c of the switch from sbus to pic. It's made things somewhat more affordable, and certianly easier to pick up. I'd guess my ye olde sparc 2 weighs as much as ten of those new sun blade 100's.
--
Hearing all the words of many others, doesn't make a difference when they're wrong. -King's X
Huh!?! I just took the time to say the Author of those books did not do a good job! Excuse me for not pointing out that the author of the aformentioned books is Janice Winsor. Those books are in category two -- NOT good. They are not cheap, and nor are they good. They'd make a better use soaking up coffee spills. I just said that books made in association with the product producer weren't all that hot, and were only good for (perhaps) passing the test. You might have missed that fact when you were typing in that the books were published by Sun. Oh wait, maybe I don't know these books and they are published by the egyptian sun god -- na, probably not.
The Janice Windsor books are only good if you can't do "man man | lp" As the Eistein quote goes, "the only infinite things are the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not so sure about the former" -- Anonymous Coward; Walk the plank!! And someone tell Janice I want my money back!:)
However, I'd argue that one of the most important sun commands are "eeprom" and such. If you're not spending much money, the boot prom is the main advantage of having a sun system. Of course, if you have the cash for a big system, Sun's scalability is the reason to buy. Slowaris can get really good with the SMP, and I'd love to try out those sunfire systems; unix acting like a mainframe. Oh, and lest I forget the other *really* important commands; how to soft reboot (this will pretty much update everything except the kernel - useful for hotswapping)... killer feature. Oh, and one other note, use SEPP (from the people who brought you MRTG!) or some other concurrent software control system for that java muck. You'll be much happier in the long run.
Soft reboot commands: (in/usr/sbin) drvconfig, devlinks, disks, ports, tapes, audlinks &/usr/ucb/ucblinks. -- no reboot (Take that Win2k!)
These categories are especially apt for solaris books. First are the ones that are rushed to press, full of screen shots and man pages (Sams, Que, etc). Of these books in my library, I've found them most useful for holding up monitors. However, they can't be completely disreguarded. Sometimes it's nice to read a large man page on paper (csh, cvs, etc). Thus, IMHO, these two inch thick volumes should look *great* to the eye and be easy to read and STAY OPEN sitting on a desk. Alas, most of these books don't fit their niche. Their main assest is that they are cheap and first to market. I've also noticed that these books age quicker than milk left out on blacktop on a hot summers day. At least these books are made by using the product. There was a great thread about "Solaris 8: The Complete Reference" in comp.unix.solaris recently that shows both sides (and expresses what a waste of time and money the book was for me).
The second type of books are the ones produced by or in association with the producer of the software. Think M$ press, Oracle Press and the God-aweful Janice Winsor books on Solaris. These seem to be produced by asking people about the product and then writing down their answers. Thus, you never seem to get the best answer to questions, but you get the correct answer for the Sun, or Cisco or Oracle point of view. This is vitial for the lame certification tests out there. The correct answer isn't the right answer, it's the Cisco right answer. Thus, the best books from this group are the test prep books. These books (which can be even bigger than the first category) are also useful for reference material that you may need once a month or so. I use these books as book-ends for the books I actually read and use.
Third, as you may have guessed, are the *good* books that you actually read, use and learn from. I am always impressed with the readabilty and content of O'Reilly books. There have been so few bad books from them. It also seems their books age quite well. An impressive feat for their market. Text books also end up in their category. Most texts are bad and overpriced. However, with time, the diamonds start to show from adison-wesley (tcp/ip books) and prentice-hall (unix systems administrator's handbook - THE must read for solaris and all unix).
The point of this rant is to look for the third type of books that you may *like* to read and that will age well. Try going to a college book store and look around; they have great book ideas there. Of course, you would NEVER buy anything there (try a local used bookstore or allbookstores.com). I am currently reading those type two books, and I can say that "Solaris Internals: Core Kernel Architecture" seems to be a good book so far. It's certianly better than most of "reference" books out there.
Cripes!! Do we really need a new word to describe desperate marketing?!? As Steve Taylor has said, there are three things unavoidable things in life: Death, Taxes and Repackaging.
This is closer, but still a bit off. Remember, m$ is way ahead of everyone. They have many allies (stock holders) who will help them succeed (sometime, analize their rise to power as if the were generals; very interesting). M$ is very driven, but somewhere deep in the middle of their little charcoal hearts, they are human(oid). They have worked hard and want to retire and live off their spoils. It's the ultimate capitialism; get more, do less. IMHO, they are still competing with IBM. They want to be a blue chip. M$ didn't make it in to that top 100 companies list that was posted a while ago. IBM did. What IBM (AT&T too) mostly do is license their patents. They learn something new, and let others do the work, for a small fee. Mark Twain would be proud.
How does this apply to Hairstorm? They'll get things in place and provide authentication, but I doubt they even think for a moment they'll replace the current finacial infrustructure. What they will have is one of the largest research areas to do some data mining. They will also be able to "pave the streets" of commerce (so to speak). That is to mean, through setting up schemas (which can patented and copywrited) they will enable people to find and exchange goods and information. These schemas will define the agreed upon standards for exchange of data and exchange of goods, etc. Thus, any one wishing to get into the b-to-b of (for example) selling car parts to retailers, will have to decribe their inventory and exchanges through m$ schemas, and will have to pay m$ to use that commerce toll road.
THAT is what they really want. That is what they actually CAN do.
I seriously HATE the 31337 RTFM brain dead response! As one poster said, the real person who suffers is the one whose done the reading and has a real question. What we all need to remember is that *all* tech support is sucking dirt. And I'd agree that it's management's fault. Management to realize there's a big difference between m$ bob and oracle financials! Those of us who do the reading, often find that it's not documented, thus wasting all of that time. It's been mentioned before, those of us with a clue, really need a password to get us past the morons and scripts to the *real* tech support.
I propose that there should be three different kinds of tech support...
a) m$ bob
b) gnu
c) enterprise
a) This is the current type of tech support offered: multiple tiers, scripts, clueless users, even worse managers and evil salespeople. status quo
b) support for free software should proceed like this. read the faq. search the docs. search the mailing list/newsgroup. ask on the maillist/newsgroup. In emergencies, search out an irc channel. I think that is very reasonable to do for when you paid nothing. Of course, the option is available to pay someone like linuxcare to get the enterprise level support (mentioned below). The point in this is to have effective and searchable documentation and archives. Note: just b/c someones asks a question, don't automaticially assume that you're 31337 and they can't read. Sometimes, sysadmins have human like characteristics, such as making mistakes and skipping over the one sentance fragment that mentions the clue that leads to an answer. Often, the main reason clueful people turn to tech support is they don't know how to ask the right question.
c) enterprise software. This is the stuff you paid for... paid a LOT of money for. From m$ office pro to siebel. If you paid for it, there should be a certain legal obligation (perhaps under the uniform commecial code) to make sure it support it for some standard ammount of time. {egads! even a broken-record Katz is right once in a while!} If I paid for software, I want to have updated, complete and accurate documentation. During the initial install cycle, I want to call someone who's read the docs, knows the docs, and has done this before and is familiar with the known issues and knows how to troubleshoot. I am so sick and tired finding and issue with a premium (read: damn expensive) enterprise product only to talk to rahim who will kindly search the docs for me. A such a service shouldn't be a part of a seperate support package - and that's the point I think Katz was trying to make, but I think he might have gotten tried in the middle of writing this one.
First, the effects were fresh. Second, the movie had enough depth to please the the people who like to think they are deep thinkers and movies need to be meaningful (critics). Third, the movie flowed well, while still keeping the mtv seven second attention span crowd occupied. Fourth, there is quite a bit to be said about how *good* the actual art of the movie and how the story was told. Multiple viewing will show you there was much attention to detail.
Fifth, and my big point, the slashdot crowd seems to think they know a whole bunch about philosophy -- somthing I can't can't confirm or deny b/c I don't think I know all that much about philosophy. However, I do know about world religion. I think the strongest reason the movie was strong was it evangelized a belief system that peopel have with out knowing the name for it. The name, of course, being Gnosticism. This is a belief system that many technology types tend to act in IMHO. Although it may not resemble the early christian heresy in modern times, much of the core system is still there. In my viewing of the movie, it is undeiable that the Wachowski brothers were fully aware of this and ment to communicate this. For those familiar, doesn't it make sense that the movie can be devided in to the following acts: a call, a new adam, a last supper, an oracle (tranfiguration in the garden), a passion & decent, and of course a resurection. Why would they chose trinity as a chareter name? morpheous, the god of dreams? the opening baptism sceens at the "corner of wells & lake"?! The ship is call the "Nebuchadnezzar"; interesting. How about this, the ship's model number is mark 3, no 11, ie mark 3:11. Currious, eh? I heard there the script was rewritten twenty times. Details such as the above to accidently show up with that many revisions.
It's clear to me this is what they intended to say, and their story met a very willing world. The Matrix isn't philosophy; it's a modern and effective retelling of the old religion Gnosticism.
Re:Pacific Bell is a solution? I don't think so
on
DSL Woes
·
· Score: 1
Obviously 5000 people isn't enough to get you to wake up. Hear that? That's opportunity knocking! Do it yourself. Start a not-for-profit co-op. Get's those 5000 people all to pitch in to pay for you and the equipment costs. In the world of dsl, my money is on that you it at least faster; maybe even better! In addition, you be setting a good precedence to keep the competition lively. Go for it!!
WTF! Is slashdot just going to become a forum for free vaporware advertising?!!
As I've said before, I've talked to cogent before. They spent alot of money on dark fiber and infrastucture. So what! Who cares!! They've got lots of hopes and little reality. What they can't solve is the last mile problem. Sure you can get dark fiber to a few select business districts, but what about getting it from the curb to the MPOE in the building? Where are they going to place their equipment? In short, their buisness model does not matter much until they secure or buy a great deal of access agreements, to which, real estate people love money more than access.
Additionally, I'm happy for them for (supposedly) doing something new with gigabit backbone, but even if they have it, there are bigger issues. Out of curriosity, where are their peering points? Are they a part of the big boy backbone networks that act like they own the net? Who's currently hosted on their backbone that you'd want to get to?
If they were wise, they'd charge a lot more and sell themselves as a superior vlan/vpn provider. I'm sick of hearing about them: all cisco hype and no bite... and let's be careful about the free advertising pretending to be a breakthrough guys. Thanks.
"Hearing all the words of many others, doesn't make a difference when they're wrong." -King's X
I just suffered through this and did all the research. My specs started with the phone. I felt that if I was to have this phone with me 24x7, it had better be easy to live with. In reading about the different phones, I decided that I like the Nokia 8290 & 8260. The 8290 is a bit more feature rich (more colors, IR data/fax port, config and backup computer program, voice dialing), but both of them had the important 2-way text & email messaging (late-night pages are better than phone calls IMHO), reminder features, etc. The most imporant feature is that you have all of the above in an incredibly small size. It's just a bit bigger than a pager. It has great power management that keeps it alive for quite a while. The antena is built in, thus, I just carry it around in my pocket instead of having something permanently attached to my hip or something poking me in the wrong place; it's very easy to live with. I prefered the 8290 but decided on the 8260 because it featured tri-mode (analog 800, digitial TDMA 800/1900), which I suspected would give me better coverage when traveling. Most of the 8290's super cool features come from being a GSM phone. GSM is inherintly digitial and widely used in europe, however, it's not going to be installed where I travel.
Once you decided on a phone, you then see that you have a much eaiser time finding a service provider. I found shopping for this service (and phones) highly irritating. There doesn't seem to be a single store that carries more than one voice provider. This made comparison shopping highly difficult. Having just been layed off, I learned the problem of using your work cell phone for a contact. I decided I would buy the phone, but the new company pays the monthly usage. I wanted to be very conservative with the phone price, and the phones I was looking at are expensive. Being in southern california, my choices were PacBell (8290) or AT&T (8260). I may have been able to order the phone and set it up to use sprint or verizon, but either way, I wouldn't get any nifty discounts on the phone upon signing up. I decided on At&t, because I was getting a phone for my wife at the same time, and I n the needed the most discounts.
There are many hidden fees and plans. First, they want you to stay local to their antennas (so to speak). Everytime you connect using some other network, they don't make money. Because of this, they tend to offer different sorts of plans: local, regional, national, international. All of the plans give you so many minutes to start with (and the more you spend/month, the better the deals). The local is ment to be more affordable. The big money maker for them is the hidden fees. When you aren't using the local network, they call it "roaming". When you "roam" they tend to add another $.35 to your per minute charge. In addition, if you roam out of your state, they'll tack on another $.60 per minute. Oh, and if that call you're making is long distance call, they'll add $.15. If you get the cheap plan, be careful. The regional plan takes away the first roaming charge. The national plans tend to take away all the roaming charges and usally throw in long distance, but their regular per minute charges will be sightly higher (expect a minimum of $.35/min). I also checked up on pre-paid. To summarize, per-paid sucks -- it's only good if you're of horrible credit or want to be anonymous.
I decided on the cheapest local plan for my wife and the "digitial one rate" national plan for my self (since work is footing that bill).
Thus, it comes down to a cheap but quality phone (because of mail-in rebates), and $60/month that my work will pay. Don't forget to search for hidden fees, like a cancelation fee or call forwarding fee. Watch out for full minute rounding. Full-minute rounding is where if you make a call lasting a minute and one second, it's billed as two minutes. Very evil, unethicial practice, that every provider except nextel uses (I actually like nextel quite a bit, but their cheapest account was unafforable for me). Also, try and go with someone like At&t that will give you a guarantee. Here's a summary of what I spent...
Nokia 8260 [grey] $200, TDMA/analog
Network Activiation $ 25
Digial One Rate $ 60/month
450 minutes / month included
additional minutes @ $.35/min
long distance is an additional charge of $.0/min
regional roaming, additional $.0/min
national roaming, additional $.0/min
(the ultimate domestic call would be $.35/min)
1 year term (commitment), $120/cancellation
upgrade without pentalties
full minute rounding
It would be nice of them to through in a satisfation guarentee
Features (free, but you have to ask for them):
Call Forwarding $ 0 (need to find out per min charge)
3-way calling $ 0
Voicemail $ 0
2-way text messaging $ 0
Discounts:
mail-in rebate for nokia 8260 purchase -$50
mail-in rebate for sign-up > $28 -$75
mail-in rebate of on-line sign-up -$50
see...
http://www.attws.com/general/offers/clickfordetail s.shtml#50rebate
when I called, they said they could match it
no shipping or handling
no tax
no other hidden fees
Just a FYI, from what I can tell, Cogent can't deliver what they are marketing.
I had heard about them, and wanted to find out more when I was at interop. I have worked with ISPs and especially "last-mile" ISP's long enought to be excited by what they said they could offer. I am also able to ask some insightful questions from the practicial perspective.
In speaking with them and some of thier chief officers, it became clear to me that they are a combination of a nifty business plan and cisco money.
It could work, but at this point in time, their real business is raising capitial. They want to be first with their business model, which, BTW, didn't seem to include peering agreements. IMHO, the $100/month is just theoreticial marketing numbers.
My bet is that they will charge $100/month for circuit, and bill for internet bandwidth usage, or maybe even a reasonable/meg charge. In any case, they will realize (when they start *really* selling) how capitial intensive the business model is, and how little they are bringing in, how expensiver engineers are, and how greedy stock holders can be.
The whole idea seems to be, we could get sued if someone underage sees porn. However, by running blocking software, you have legally demonstrated that you can censor, thus, you set your self up for a lawsuit for the time that the software doesn't work. By not running software (that doesn't work), and sticking by social engineer and acceptable use policies, you use things that are effective, and legally viable.
Plenty of stores install mirrors and fake cameras to discourge bad behavior. It's a good thing, as long as it's not in private changing rooms. If you install filtering, you also have a sort of cameras, but that monitoring can not tell between private email and porn. A situation could arise that because you had these logs, you should have seen that junior was going to some twisted sites, and that you should have seen this and acted, and because you didn't act on it, you're responsible
The law also can quite easily handle contract and policies. Set up a acceptable use policy, and follow it and make users follow it. Have penaties built in to the contract. Thus, when trouble comes, you have nothing to hide, and you've done due dilligence.
The last thing we need is for filtering to become popular. If lawmakers or judges see it work in one case, they make the rest of the other situations that don't work, comply with their technologicaly clueless whims.
Today it's porn, tomorrow they'll want you to filter for liabel. If they see filtering work on "dirty" talk and pictures, the next step is they will want negative reviews of corporations, organizations and governments filtered. At that point, the promise of the internet will have died.
The point is, the internet was built by people who wanted to promote free speech. No solution will fully work, but it isn't very often that the courts are technologically reasonable. If a court sees that you offer a filtered service, and that filter fails, they will find you liabel. Where as, if you place the burden of socially acceptable behavior on the user per contract, the courts would dismiss the case.
I don't think it's the fault of capitialism or any other "ism". Perhaps is the lack of an "ism". IMHO, it seems that the crazy psychologist mights have been right.
Frued was all about "the will to pleasure" and that mankind is driven to do things by pleasure, and that when that is unchecked by the super-ego, it leads to polymorphus perversity. In other words, we're getting everything we want, and that's what's hurting us. It seems we've tolerated away religion, so much so that our conscience can tolerate anything, except making less then our neighbor. To misquote Marx, opiates are the religions of the masses.
Alder was another psychologist who was all about the "will to power". In other words, he felt that mankinds modivation was to dominate and control. While the majoryity of us have been pursuing plesure, it seems that we've let these others, who live for power, in control. And this is especially troubling considering, our social leader, that are to hold capitialism in check (politicians), and no long interested in doing the right thing. They will only do what brings them more power. For a short time, republicans furthered the cause of capitialism and the democrats kept them in balance. It seems that now both parties have lost their way.
Frankyl, argued that man's ultimate drive was not power or pleasure, but meaning. It seems to me, that our hope for the future lies an a global search for meaning. The "will to meaning" is the ultimate. When a person does not have hope, they stop living.
As our lives loose options if a franchised feudalism, we need a revolution of hope. Who we are is so much more important that what we own or build. Besides, freedom from materialism brings joy - and you can't buy or rent joy.
Is anyone aware of a load balancer project? If there isn't one started, I'd be interested in getting it going on OpenBSD. Please email me at slashdot@remove-this-part.chaosmt.net
I saw and used the cisco phone at interop. VoIP appliances like this do sound great, but they are far from being ready. Just to clarify, this isn't some phone you plug and through some vodoo, you can make phone calls. It requires alot of special and expensive networking to make it happen, and it's just not there yet.
At this point in time, the phone requires a wall-wart, dc power cord going to the phone as well as an ethernet cable. Everybody at the conference was very sure that they will soon send power with the signal in the ethernet cable (there were a couple vendors there selling that technology -- cisco just spent a fortune for the rights to it [I think it's breeze com that is one of them]). However, coupling power and signal is not standard on any switchs, and will never be used on any gigabit switch. Thus, you have to plug your phone into the right network switch, not just any ol' ethernet jack, therefore, you can't just plug in anywhere else and the phone number goes with it. You would have to plug in to the same special VoIP network that has the same gateway and call manager.
These cisco phones are also considered thin phones b/c they don't have the full h.323 implimination in them, meaning, the real guts (and $$) are in another special cisco product in your network.
When I asked the people there what did they think it would cost, they thought that just that executive phone (cool display and features) would cost about $600, and thousands for the rack unit.
The final bit of discouragement for me was that at some point, you are going to have to get the signal back on to the pstn (public switched telephone network), and that's going to require the same old pri that you would order locally any way.
So, if you're thinking of becoming a clec, with t-1's and ds-3's going all over the place, hoping to sell VoIP at the edge of your network to back haul the traffic and concentrate it at the core, it doesn't sound like it would work out, and definiatly is not profitable (yet). The telco's are just huge networks that we need, and we will need for quite some time. Check out multi-casting or IPv6 - much more cool factor.
Doesn't the governmennt pay (so to speak), for home work spaces already. I was under the impression that if you work from home (for self or for others), you can claim an exemption from your taxes. Thus, this is a move for corporate government to pay for this, and not federal government. Personally, I think (if there really needs to be a law) that employers should provide for work at home office expenses only if they require or don't provide normal on-site resources.
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I'll grant you that those are three compelling examples, however, they don't even come near the examples that can be generated showing the liberal bias of the media. I was considering providing numerous examples, but we'd just get into a pissing match. Let me just say, that I've *NEVER* heard anyone ever use the term conservative to describe the media - ever. You are definately wrong in saying they never go after the republicans; perhaps a function of a very selective memory? Iran-contra? Bush I approved congress's tax incresses? Newt Gingrich? Pluheese! You can bet they'll be all over this enron crap. At the minimum, republicans get it too. However, I still contend they get it worse. It's not just about issues that are mention; the media bias comes through in many ways such as placement, wording, amount of air time. Considering how extreme clinton's abuse of power was, he got off (heh, heh) easy.
I'll grant that the indian rant was more off-topic. However, what you call theft, others call it winning a lawsuit. There are two sides to the story. Just because you call it stealing, does not mean it was stealing. The story is not that simple. I never said we have prisine politics, but I do believe there seems to be more accountability and far less tolerance for dirty politics in general in united states elections. However, clinton seems to have been able to get away with it and will serve as an inspiration for others.
I whine all the time, but I'm not republican, nor do I wish to be seen with the tax-dodging libertarians. I don't think anyone has a monoply on whining - it's an american pastim; but for some reason it's getting harder to hear anything from my left. However, I am very happy to hear from you; I don't think I've ever encountered such liberalism; very reviving. It's sort of like how everything at the Gilroy garlic festivial smells so much better in contrast after walking out of porta-poty next to the brautwurst-n-beer garden. Thanks!
...Fine! We're going to take our toys and play somewhere else then!! (pout, pout) In othere words, just another normal day in the government. Same ol' manipulation games. "If we can't have it our way, then we'll just stop everything and blame it on the judge." I once saw this hidden-agenda, passive-agressive, move played out very succesfully. Washington State University was going to get a budget cut. In desperation, they paid a few debate team members to drive to Olympia and help make their case to the state legislature (I knew these students). Being the good WSU students they were, they spent most of the money and time on having a wild drunken parties. They drove there hours before the hearing with barely enough time shower. Everyone during the hearing was spouting off about how important education is and how good of a school WSU is, blah, blah. One of the debaters decide to take a different approach. He said, "Look, you (the legisature) are going to keep hearing all sorts of wonderful lies about the college all day long. So I won't bore you more with such nonsense. That's not the point here. The point is that if you cut the budget, WSU will then change the budget so that non-important and unheard of programs will get more money and important and prominent programs will be made to suffer so they can blame you and ask for more than they are going to get with out this cut. Thus, you look like the bad guys for hurting education and they always look like the good guys by 'fighting' for education. It would save you more time, money and popularity if you give up the idea of cutting their budget and only challenge them when they ask for increases in the budget." The WSU people were very uncomfortable in their seats suddenly, but the congressmen leaned forwared and paid attention. In the end, budget wasn't cut.
Malcontent is such an apt nick name for this author. Since when is the 'media' conservative? Perhaps he means that the media outlets that are conservative (all three, or so, of them) won't report on it. If he is referring to the dominant media outlets, such as NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post (har! like people *read*), ABC, CBS, NBC NPR, and CNN, he is just plain wrong. Perhaps the author maybe SO far to the left that the popular media -seems- to the right; something I find difficult to grasp. In summary, I don't think I could trust the credibility of the author because it's obvious they have such and extreme emotional bias.
Look, let's be realistic here. Most media outlets are not going to report it mainly because they don't care because most of the target audience don't care. One may be able to hope NPR could pick of the story; they do well providing depth to underreported liberal stories, and they do it very well. The reality is that our markets and our lives are getting more and more segmented. This will get reported in small outlets that deliver local news and to regional people that care. No one has the resources to care about all the things they need to care about anymore. Thus, there needs to be more power given to the people, so that the people closest to the problems can wisely and most effectively deal with the problems, with out offending the nations primary values. Given the libearal bias of the author, I would guess the author sees the solution to the indian plight as one that involves telling everyone the stories, hope for sympathy, and action from washington. I tend to be conservative in such matters because the unneeded and unhealthy consolodation of moeny and power centralized in washington *IS* the problem, and it takes away powers for normal citizens to positivly govern themselves and to fix (as opposed to placate) problems. And let me say, there is not a single media outlet that considers that a valid point of view any more.
About the indian plight: I grep up on or near reservations and I am sympathetic to their plight. But I also realize that each tribe has it's own unique problems, and that one can not generalize the problems of one tribe to all tribes. I sucks to lose a war and be a conquered people. Ask the scotts what they think of england... or the basque, or the palistinians, etc. But there comes a point where you have to decide to live with it, move on, and effect on the future, but living the past only brings regret and sorrow. However, often some tribes have brought their own sorrow upon themselves; it's not purely the white man's fault anymore. Many tribes have very dirty politics. Well, dirty for american standards, but normal for the rest of the world where bribery and manipulation are the status quo. Certian prominent tribes try and buy votes through creative definitions of what makes you a tribe member. Some prominent tribes say that you are a member no matter what percentage of your ethnic heratige. Most stop at 1/8th. But those others know that they will get more indian votes and more people on their side through such creative ideas. If you can't defend your idea based on merit, reason or the law, the idea can then be considered liberal. Such politicial games, only beget more games, and consolidation of power to overcome local powers, only makes it harder to use that power in the future. Some tribes have done very well for themselves, and none of those tribes are ones that whine or play petty politicial games.
In regards to the win v. unix comparison at ...
t co.html
... you missed somethings in your incredible bias.
http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2001/1018.
-An IPX can _not_ run solaris 7 or 8, due to limitations of the boot prom.
I believe it is technicially possible to get a new boot prom, but it's as
practical as a screen door on a submarine - not gonna happen.
-for your school, did you happen to think of the faculty?!?
-for the school, the students will be better programmers, with little
market to go to. The could learn java, but not the all important MFC and
other M$ bs. A part of a school's mission is vocational, and most of the
jobs out there involve microsoft. What this does mean is the school will
have to sell it self to a niche market, which translates to increased
advertising and marketing expenses - to attract both students and faculty.
-school: initial increases in costs due to reorienting everyone who knows
mac and windows to the unix way of life
-school: one part time admin!!!!?!! WTF! are you nuts!! You expect one
admin to retrain an entire school to unix, while building out the unix
network, while maintaining it, fixing it, backing it up, testing, chasing
security, etc. !!??! No damn way! At *least* three. I would also add
that I've worked for a major univeristy computer department with about 500
unix workstations and even more windoze stations. I know the difference.
It takes about the same staff. The difference is that you can find
anyone, at almost any salary that you can train to be a windoze monkey, as
long as you have one smart one who's paid well to work nice and never
leave that mess. The unix people cost WAY more. However, they aren't
stressed out running from one problem to the next. The are proactive,
adding features to the network. When a true emergency happenes, they are
calm and prepared. They tend to be very mature, document the network, and
are orderly. This may at first seem counterintuative (if you know unix types),
but when two types of experienced admins stand side by side, you
can see the difference.
-school: don't forget the cost of teaching materials. While sql server
may cost a gabillion dollars and have the uptime of a fruit fly in a
blender, it has at least a gajillion books out there covering it. There
are millions of crappy books and a few good ones covering M$ topics.
Unix, very very few. Sure there's the hundreds of oracle books (which,
btw, oracle doesn't always give schools cheap licenses; another HUGE
expense if you decide to use it). Theres the wonderfully written orielly
books, and some of the other unix classics. But then, that's it. For
every readable text (online doesn't count - school doesn't make residual
money on that) on KDE programming, I can find you ten on M$ programming.
Schools may have the instructor develop the materials, and that's great,
but it's yet another expense.
-In summary, you school comparison is far to broken too be considered a
good comparison. This won't even work as propaganda (published on linux
world - what do you expect). You conviently overlooked other systems
(there is more than sun you know). You neglected the savings, reliability
and performance differeneces in the storage area (unix would win). You
neglected all of the special deals that can be pitched for academic
pricing. M$/Dell (and others) gives can give great academic pricing if
you show you like them. Sun has acedemic pricing, per se, but I never
considered it a real discount. They do, however, give you a they option
to trade in your old gear on new stuff, and the discount is much better
than you'd get from selling it. IBM is much more generous academically
than Sun, but that seemed to something you were willing to overlook, which
is ironic considering big blues linux offerings.
If you have to 'request' pricing, ask for a quote, 'just' call and talk to anyone, it is WAY too expensive to consider. Most of the time, this is the way to sort out the hobbiest doing it for the love, from the professional doing it for the dough. It will be especially bad if they'll only give a price on the phone, where the sales person has to act as a trauma counsellor after you hear the price. When getting a quote requires a *visit* from a sales person, you'd better hope they bring an anesthesiologist - 'cuz it's gonna be painful.
That is an interesting thread. I wouldn't put 'perl for admins' in that category though; I really liked that book quite a bit, and use it often (not as much at the cookbook though). I will admit that I gave away my MySQL book. Personally, I've also avoided the bat book out of pure fear.
For criticial business systems, I'd easily chose sun over intel systems. If you make a fair comparision, prices are about the same, but more stable on the sun gear. Compaq has a nifty but weird remote admin card/app for their servers, but it's very pricy. For Sun remot admin, a stock modem and a stock term server works beautifully (btw, the cyclades terms servers are the best I've ever seen or worked with). Of course, ssh port forwarding for exporting those graphic apps. If the system gets hosed (if it's not clustered), dial in, "boot net install", and do a full bare-metal recovery remotely. Elegent.
However, I still have to somewhat agree with the AC. Sun's hardware is still great, but it's not the same quality that it used to be. It's b/c of the switch from sbus to pic. It's made things somewhat more affordable, and certianly easier to pick up. I'd guess my ye olde sparc 2 weighs as much as ten of those new sun blade 100's.
--
Hearing all the words of many others, doesn't make a difference when they're wrong. -King's X
Huh!?! I just took the time to say the Author of those books did not do a good job! Excuse me for not pointing out that the author of the aformentioned books is Janice Winsor. Those books are in category two -- NOT good. They are not cheap, and nor are they good. They'd make a better use soaking up coffee spills. I just said that books made in association with the product producer weren't all that hot, and were only good for (perhaps) passing the test. You might have missed that fact when you were typing in that the books were published by Sun. Oh wait, maybe I don't know these books and they are published by the egyptian sun god -- na, probably not.
:)
The Janice Windsor books are only good if you can't do "man man | lp" As the Eistein quote goes, "the only infinite things are the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not so sure about the former" -- Anonymous Coward; Walk the plank!! And someone tell Janice I want my money back!
{ahem} I believe you mean... reboot -- -r
/usr/sbin) drvconfig, devlinks, disks, ports, tapes, audlinks & /usr/ucb/ucblinks. -- no reboot (Take that Win2k!)
However, I'd argue that one of the most important sun commands are "eeprom" and such. If you're not spending much money, the boot prom is the main advantage of having a sun system. Of course, if you have the cash for a big system, Sun's scalability is the reason to buy. Slowaris can get really good with the SMP, and I'd love to try out those sunfire systems; unix acting like a mainframe. Oh, and lest I forget the other *really* important commands; how to soft reboot (this will pretty much update everything except the kernel - useful for hotswapping)... killer feature. Oh, and one other note, use SEPP (from the people who brought you MRTG!) or some other concurrent software control system for that java muck. You'll be much happier in the long run.
Soft reboot commands: (in
Sometimes silence is the most beautiful sound
These categories are especially apt for solaris books. First are the ones that are rushed to press, full of screen shots and man pages (Sams, Que, etc). Of these books in my library, I've found them most useful for holding up monitors. However, they can't be completely disreguarded. Sometimes it's nice to read a large man page on paper (csh, cvs, etc). Thus, IMHO, these two inch thick volumes should look *great* to the eye and be easy to read and STAY OPEN sitting on a desk. Alas, most of these books don't fit their niche. Their main assest is that they are cheap and first to market. I've also noticed that these books age quicker than milk left out on blacktop on a hot summers day. At least these books are made by using the product. There was a great thread about "Solaris 8: The Complete Reference" in comp.unix.solaris recently that shows both sides (and expresses what a waste of time and money the book was for me).
The second type of books are the ones produced by or in association with the producer of the software. Think M$ press, Oracle Press and the God-aweful Janice Winsor books on Solaris. These seem to be produced by asking people about the product and then writing down their answers. Thus, you never seem to get the best answer to questions, but you get the correct answer for the Sun, or Cisco or Oracle point of view. This is vitial for the lame certification tests out there. The correct answer isn't the right answer, it's the Cisco right answer. Thus, the best books from this group are the test prep books. These books (which can be even bigger than the first category) are also useful for reference material that you may need once a month or so. I use these books as book-ends for the books I actually read and use.
Third, as you may have guessed, are the *good* books that you actually read, use and learn from. I am always impressed with the readabilty and content of O'Reilly books. There have been so few bad books from them. It also seems their books age quite well. An impressive feat for their market. Text books also end up in their category. Most texts are bad and overpriced. However, with time, the diamonds start to show from adison-wesley (tcp/ip books) and prentice-hall (unix systems administrator's handbook - THE must read for solaris and all unix).
The point of this rant is to look for the third type of books that you may *like* to read and that will age well. Try going to a college book store and look around; they have great book ideas there. Of course, you would NEVER buy anything there (try a local used bookstore or allbookstores.com). I am currently reading those type two books, and I can say that "Solaris Internals: Core Kernel Architecture" seems to be a good book so far. It's certianly better than most of "reference" books out there.
Cripes!! Do we really need a new word to describe desperate marketing?!? As Steve Taylor has said, there are three things unavoidable things in life: Death, Taxes and Repackaging.
"Lt. Obvious - give them the finger"
This is closer, but still a bit off. Remember, m$ is way ahead of everyone. They have many allies (stock holders) who will help them succeed (sometime, analize their rise to power as if the were generals; very interesting). M$ is very driven, but somewhere deep in the middle of their little charcoal hearts, they are human(oid). They have worked hard and want to retire and live off their spoils. It's the ultimate capitialism; get more, do less. IMHO, they are still competing with IBM. They want to be a blue chip. M$ didn't make it in to that top 100 companies list that was posted a while ago. IBM did. What IBM (AT&T too) mostly do is license their patents. They learn something new, and let others do the work, for a small fee. Mark Twain would be proud.
How does this apply to Hairstorm? They'll get things in place and provide authentication, but I doubt they even think for a moment they'll replace the current finacial infrustructure. What they will have is one of the largest research areas to do some data mining. They will also be able to "pave the streets" of commerce (so to speak). That is to mean, through setting up schemas (which can patented and copywrited) they will enable people to find and exchange goods and information. These schemas will define the agreed upon standards for exchange of data and exchange of goods, etc. Thus, any one wishing to get into the b-to-b of (for example) selling car parts to retailers, will have to decribe their inventory and exchanges through m$ schemas, and will have to pay m$ to use that commerce toll road.
THAT is what they really want. That is what they actually CAN do.
I propose that there should be three different kinds of tech support...
a) m$ bob
b) gnu
c) enterprise
a) This is the current type of tech support offered: multiple tiers, scripts, clueless users, even worse managers and evil salespeople. status quo
b) support for free software should proceed like this. read the faq. search the docs. search the mailing list/newsgroup. ask on the maillist/newsgroup. In emergencies, search out an irc channel. I think that is very reasonable to do for when you paid nothing. Of course, the option is available to pay someone like linuxcare to get the enterprise level support (mentioned below). The point in this is to have effective and searchable documentation and archives. Note: just b/c someones asks a question, don't automaticially assume that you're 31337 and they can't read. Sometimes, sysadmins have human like characteristics, such as making mistakes and skipping over the one sentance fragment that mentions the clue that leads to an answer. Often, the main reason clueful people turn to tech support is they don't know how to ask the right question.
c) enterprise software. This is the stuff you paid for... paid a LOT of money for. From m$ office pro to siebel. If you paid for it, there should be a certain legal obligation (perhaps under the uniform commecial code) to make sure it support it for some standard ammount of time. {egads! even a broken-record Katz is right once in a while!} If I paid for software, I want to have updated, complete and accurate documentation. During the initial install cycle, I want to call someone who's read the docs, knows the docs, and has done this before and is familiar with the known issues and knows how to troubleshoot. I am so sick and tired finding and issue with a premium (read: damn expensive) enterprise product only to talk to rahim who will kindly search the docs for me. A such a service shouldn't be a part of a seperate support package - and that's the point I think Katz was trying to make, but I think he might have gotten tried in the middle of writing this one.
Fifth, and my big point, the slashdot crowd seems to think they know a whole bunch about philosophy -- somthing I can't can't confirm or deny b/c I don't think I know all that much about philosophy. However, I do know about world religion. I think the strongest reason the movie was strong was it evangelized a belief system that peopel have with out knowing the name for it. The name, of course, being Gnosticism. This is a belief system that many technology types tend to act in IMHO. Although it may not resemble the early christian heresy in modern times, much of the core system is still there. In my viewing of the movie, it is undeiable that the Wachowski brothers were fully aware of this and ment to communicate this. For those familiar, doesn't it make sense that the movie can be devided in to the following acts: a call, a new adam, a last supper, an oracle (tranfiguration in the garden), a passion & decent, and of course a resurection. Why would they chose trinity as a chareter name? morpheous, the god of dreams? the opening baptism sceens at the "corner of wells & lake"?! The ship is call the "Nebuchadnezzar"; interesting. How about this, the ship's model number is mark 3, no 11, ie mark 3:11. Currious, eh? I heard there the script was rewritten twenty times. Details such as the above to accidently show up with that many revisions.
It's clear to me this is what they intended to say, and their story met a very willing world. The Matrix isn't philosophy; it's a modern and effective retelling of the old religion Gnosticism.
Obviously 5000 people isn't enough to get you to wake up. Hear that? That's opportunity knocking! Do it yourself. Start a not-for-profit co-op. Get's those 5000 people all to pitch in to pay for you and the equipment costs. In the world of dsl, my money is on that you it at least faster; maybe even better! In addition, you be setting a good precedence to keep the competition lively. Go for it!!
Isn't this another example of the conflict of interests in the networking market? Hrmm...
As I've said before, I've talked to cogent before. They spent alot of money on dark fiber and infrastucture. So what! Who cares!! They've got lots of hopes and little reality. What they can't solve is the last mile problem. Sure you can get dark fiber to a few select business districts, but what about getting it from the curb to the MPOE in the building? Where are they going to place their equipment? In short, their buisness model does not matter much until they secure or buy a great deal of access agreements, to which, real estate people love money more than access.
Additionally, I'm happy for them for (supposedly) doing something new with gigabit backbone, but even if they have it, there are bigger issues. Out of curriosity, where are their peering points? Are they a part of the big boy backbone networks that act like they own the net? Who's currently hosted on their backbone that you'd want to get to?
If they were wise, they'd charge a lot more and sell themselves as a superior vlan/vpn provider. I'm sick of hearing about them: all cisco hype and no bite... and let's be careful about the free advertising pretending to be a breakthrough guys. Thanks.
"Hearing all the words of many others, doesn't make a difference when they're wrong."
-King's X
According to http://www.nokiausa.com/beauty1/1,1585,47,FF.html , the 8290 does not do analog (but I really wish that it did).
I just suffered through this and did all the research. My specs started with the phone. I felt that if I was to have this phone with me 24x7, it had better be easy to live with. In reading about the different phones, I decided that I like the Nokia 8290 & 8260. The 8290 is a bit more feature rich (more colors, IR data/fax port, config and backup computer program, voice dialing), but both of them had the important 2-way text & email messaging (late-night pages are better than phone calls IMHO), reminder features, etc. The most imporant feature is that you have all of the above in an incredibly small size. It's just a bit bigger than a pager. It has great power management that keeps it alive for quite a while. The antena is built in, thus, I just carry it around in my pocket instead of having something permanently attached to my hip or something poking me in the wrong place; it's very easy to live with. I prefered the 8290 but decided on the 8260 because it featured tri-mode (analog 800, digitial TDMA 800/1900), which I suspected would give me better coverage when traveling. Most of the 8290's super cool features come from being a GSM phone. GSM is inherintly digitial and widely used in europe, however, it's not going to be installed where I travel.
Once you decided on a phone, you then see that you have a much eaiser time finding a service provider. I found shopping for this service (and phones) highly irritating. There doesn't seem to be a single store that carries more than one voice provider. This made comparison shopping highly difficult. Having just been layed off, I learned the problem of using your work cell phone for a contact. I decided I would buy the phone, but the new company pays the monthly usage. I wanted to be very conservative with the phone price, and the phones I was looking at are expensive. Being in southern california, my choices were PacBell (8290) or AT&T (8260). I may have been able to order the phone and set it up to use sprint or verizon, but either way, I wouldn't get any nifty discounts on the phone upon signing up. I decided on At&t, because I was getting a phone for my wife at the same time, and I n the needed the most discounts.
There are many hidden fees and plans. First, they want you to stay local to their antennas (so to speak). Everytime you connect using some other network, they don't make money. Because of this, they tend to offer different sorts of plans: local, regional, national, international. All of the plans give you so many minutes to start with (and the more you spend/month, the better the deals). The local is ment to be more affordable. The big money maker for them is the hidden fees. When you aren't using the local network, they call it "roaming". When you "roam" they tend to add another $.35 to your per minute charge. In addition, if you roam out of your state, they'll tack on another $.60 per minute. Oh, and if that call you're making is long distance call, they'll add $.15. If you get the cheap plan, be careful. The regional plan takes away the first roaming charge. The national plans tend to take away all the roaming charges and usally throw in long distance, but their regular per minute charges will be sightly higher (expect a minimum of $.35/min). I also checked up on pre-paid. To summarize, per-paid sucks -- it's only good if you're of horrible credit or want to be anonymous. I decided on the cheapest local plan for my wife and the "digitial one rate" national plan for my self (since work is footing that bill).
Thus, it comes down to a cheap but quality phone (because of mail-in rebates), and $60/month that my work will pay. Don't forget to search for hidden fees, like a cancelation fee or call forwarding fee. Watch out for full minute rounding. Full-minute rounding is where if you make a call lasting a minute and one second, it's billed as two minutes. Very evil, unethicial practice, that every provider except nextel uses (I actually like nextel quite a bit, but their cheapest account was unafforable for me). Also, try and go with someone like At&t that will give you a guarantee. Here's a summary of what I spent...
Nokia 8260 [grey] $200, TDMA/analog Network Activiation $ 25 Digial One Rate $ 60/month 450 minutes / month included additional minutes @ $.35/min long distance is an additional charge of $.0/min regional roaming, additional $.0/min national roaming, additional $.0/min (the ultimate domestic call would be $.35/min) 1 year term (commitment), $120/cancellation upgrade without pentalties full minute rounding It would be nice of them to through in a satisfation guarentee Features (free, but you have to ask for them): Call Forwarding $ 0 (need to find out per min charge) 3-way calling $ 0 Voicemail $ 0 2-way text messaging $ 0 Discounts: mail-in rebate for nokia 8260 purchase -$50 mail-in rebate for sign-up > $28 -$75 mail-in rebate of on-line sign-up -$50 see... http://www.attws.com/general/offers/clickfordetail s.shtml#50rebate
when I called, they said they could match it
no shipping or handling
no tax
no other hidden fees
Good Luck!!!
Just a FYI, from what I can tell, Cogent can't deliver what they are marketing. /meg charge. In any case, they will realize (when they start *really* selling) how capitial intensive the business model is, and how little they are bringing in, how expensiver engineers are, and how greedy stock holders can be.
I had heard about them, and wanted to find out more when I was at interop. I have worked with ISPs and especially "last-mile" ISP's long enought to be excited by what they said they could offer. I am also able to ask some insightful questions from the practicial perspective.
In speaking with them and some of thier chief officers, it became clear to me that they are a combination of a nifty business plan and cisco money.
It could work, but at this point in time, their real business is raising capitial. They want to be first with their business model, which, BTW, didn't seem to include peering agreements. IMHO, the $100/month is just theoreticial marketing numbers.
My bet is that they will charge $100/month for circuit, and bill for internet bandwidth usage, or maybe even a reasonable
The whole idea seems to be, we could get sued if someone underage sees porn. However, by running blocking software, you have legally demonstrated that you can censor, thus, you set your self up for a lawsuit for the time that the software doesn't work. By not running software (that doesn't work), and sticking by social engineer and acceptable use policies, you use things that are effective, and legally viable.
Plenty of stores install mirrors and fake cameras to discourge bad behavior. It's a good thing, as long as it's not in private changing rooms. If you install filtering, you also have a sort of cameras, but that monitoring can not tell between private email and porn. A situation could arise that because you had these logs, you should have seen that junior was going to some twisted sites, and that you should have seen this and acted, and because you didn't act on it, you're responsible
The law also can quite easily handle contract and policies. Set up a acceptable use policy, and follow it and make users follow it. Have penaties built in to the contract. Thus, when trouble comes, you have nothing to hide, and you've done due dilligence.
The last thing we need is for filtering to become popular. If lawmakers or judges see it work in one case, they make the rest of the other situations that don't work, comply with their technologicaly clueless whims.
Today it's porn, tomorrow they'll want you to filter for liabel. If they see filtering work on "dirty" talk and pictures, the next step is they will want negative reviews of corporations, organizations and governments filtered. At that point, the promise of the internet will have died.
The point is, the internet was built by people who wanted to promote free speech. No solution will fully work, but it isn't very often that the courts are technologically reasonable. If a court sees that you offer a filtered service, and that filter fails, they will find you liabel. Where as, if you place the burden of socially acceptable behavior on the user per contract, the courts would dismiss the case.
Frued was all about "the will to pleasure" and that mankind is driven to do things by pleasure, and that when that is unchecked by the super-ego, it leads to polymorphus perversity. In other words, we're getting everything we want, and that's what's hurting us. It seems we've tolerated away religion, so much so that our conscience can tolerate anything, except making less then our neighbor. To misquote Marx, opiates are the religions of the masses.
Alder was another psychologist who was all about the "will to power". In other words, he felt that mankinds modivation was to dominate and control. While the majoryity of us have been pursuing plesure, it seems that we've let these others, who live for power, in control. And this is especially troubling considering, our social leader, that are to hold capitialism in check (politicians), and no long interested in doing the right thing. They will only do what brings them more power. For a short time, republicans furthered the cause of capitialism and the democrats kept them in balance. It seems that now both parties have lost their way.
Frankyl, argued that man's ultimate drive was not power or pleasure, but meaning. It seems to me, that our hope for the future lies an a global search for meaning. The "will to meaning" is the ultimate. When a person does not have hope, they stop living.
As our lives loose options if a franchised feudalism, we need a revolution of hope. Who we are is so much more important that what we own or build. Besides, freedom from materialism brings joy - and you can't buy or rent joy.
Is anyone aware of a load balancer project? If there isn't one started, I'd be interested in getting it going on OpenBSD. Please email me at slashdot@remove-this-part.chaosmt.net
At this point in time, the phone requires a wall-wart, dc power cord going to the phone as well as an ethernet cable. Everybody at the conference was very sure that they will soon send power with the signal in the ethernet cable (there were a couple vendors there selling that technology -- cisco just spent a fortune for the rights to it [I think it's breeze com that is one of them]). However, coupling power and signal is not standard on any switchs, and will never be used on any gigabit switch. Thus, you have to plug your phone into the right network switch, not just any ol' ethernet jack, therefore, you can't just plug in anywhere else and the phone number goes with it. You would have to plug in to the same special VoIP network that has the same gateway and call manager.
These cisco phones are also considered thin phones b/c they don't have the full h.323 implimination in them, meaning, the real guts (and $$) are in another special cisco product in your network.
When I asked the people there what did they think it would cost, they thought that just that executive phone (cool display and features) would cost about $600, and thousands for the rack unit.
The final bit of discouragement for me was that at some point, you are going to have to get the signal back on to the pstn (public switched telephone network), and that's going to require the same old pri that you would order locally any way.
So, if you're thinking of becoming a clec, with t-1's and ds-3's going all over the place, hoping to sell VoIP at the edge of your network to back haul the traffic and concentrate it at the core, it doesn't sound like it would work out, and definiatly is not profitable (yet). The telco's are just huge networks that we need, and we will need for quite some time. Check out multi-casting or IPv6 - much more cool factor.
Doesn't the governmennt pay (so to speak), for home work spaces already. I was under the impression that if you work from home (for self or for others), you can claim an exemption from your taxes. Thus, this is a move for corporate government to pay for this, and not federal government. Personally, I think (if there really needs to be a law) that employers should provide for work at home office expenses only if they require or don't provide normal on-site resources.