IIRC they went from outragously high to fairly high.
Afaict you can take most US mobiles anywhere in the US without paying roaming charges but in the EU you will pay roaming charges as soon as you leave your own country.
You have to think of this as a user interface problem. If the driver planned the route with the SAT NAV that says go down such and such a road but the sign says don't go down the road, what is the driver to do? Leave the sat nav on but ignore it for a bit, if you have a map (which you should) get it out and try and find another road that leaves in the same general direction.
Once the satnav realises you have strayed from it's route it will calculate a new one.
OK so why is this good but the Microsoft format is bad?
Fact is that some proprietary formats become defacto standards. If the proprietary owners are willing to make them more open then they should be recognized as official standards. If the vendor puts the effort in to make it really open and other vendors pick up on the format then yes a popular format should eventually be recognised as an offical standard.
That effort involves documenting your format to the best of your ability then responding to complaints about ambiguities and differences between your published spec until you have a high quality spec that everyone agrees describes the format.
The proof of the opening is the existance of an independent implementation based on the spec that can be reasonablly expected to give correct results. If there are no decent independent implementations then your format doesn't deserve to be a standard either because your spec sucks or because noone cares about your format enough to implement it.
PDF has passed this. There are many PDF creators and many PDF viewers and I can reasonablly expect to be able to view the output of any PDF creator in any PDF viewer with everything in the right place. Therefore it is right and proper for the spec to be blessed by a standards body.
MS did NOT do this, they produced a specification with many holes that did not reflect what thier implementation did then they tried to ramrod it through as an ISO standard despite the lack of either a good standard document or high quality independent implementations.
P.S. I get the feeling that ODF probablly shouldn't have been approved either. Anyone who things IBM and SUN play any less dirty than MS is deluding themselves.
Afaict there are plenty of B roads that have similar capacities to the smaller A roads, they just weren't considered as such important parts of the network when the road numbering was done.
I would think it would at the very least be driving without due care and attention.
Driving down a road which is unsuitable for your vehicle type ignoring signs that say so and then getting stuck doesn't just negatively affect you. It causes an obstruction to other traffic and quite likely damages whatever you get stuck between.
I'm going to use british prices because that is what I am familiar with, things may be a bit different in the US but I doubt it will be that significant.
First there is the cost of the payphones themselves. Afaict this is about £150 or so for a basic payphone. More than double that if you want something moderately vandal resistant.
If you use POTs there is the cost of the line and if you use phones that work on the pay to start speaking method (many cheap end ones do) the cost of calls where the person at the other end picks up but the user never pays.
If you set up a payphone at a location that is unlikely to be vandalised, is already being cleaned and where there is someone to empty it who is handling cash anyway this is pretty much the limit of your costs.
Lets say you charge 40p for a call up to 20 minuites (same as BT charge) and your calls average 5 minuites With only a negligable proportion going over the 20 minuites. Lets further say you pay 2p per minuite for your calls (probablly a little more than you will actually pay if you choose a decent provider) and avoid line rental by putting the phone on VOIP using an existing internet connection your profit will be 30p per call.
So if your phone cost £150 and your VOIP adaptor £30 your startup cost is £180 you need 600 calls to make back your investment, that is about a call a day for a year. In other words putting a payphone in your shop/hotel/etc for customers/passers by to use will cost you very little and may even make you some profit.
Phone boxes are going to cost a lot more (sorry I don't have figures for how much), beyond the cost of the box itself you have to send people out to clean the boxes, check them for vandalism and empty them. Those people and thier transportation are going to cost you significant money which afaict only the best locations can make back. And since you probablly won't have an existing internet connection you can use you will have to pay line rental to someone too.
The distinct impression I get is phone boxes operated primerally for profit (BT payphones aren't, BT inherited the commitement to maintain them from thier days as a government department) are only viable in a relatively small (and shrinking) number of locations.
I think my last bill was around 5 euros or something ($7) Was that a months bill? a quarters bill? or a years bill?
I'm not in the US but afaict the main issue with mobiles over there is very short expiry of minuites on prepay plans. The result of this is they have to keep spending just to keep thier mobile active even if they hardly ever use it. Contract plans there tend to have a lot of included minuites but also very high subscription costs.
Over here in the UK things are much better in that regard. On 02 from what I can find you just have to make or receive one call every 180 days to stay active.
On the other hand we europeans suffer from high roaming and international call charges within the EU while those in the USA get calls across the entire USA included at reasonable rates.
my understanding is in the US you pay for incoming on cellphone plans. In europe you don't generally pay for incoming but calls from landlines to mobiles and from some mobile plans to mobiles on other networks are considerablly more expensive than calls to landlines.
Here in the uk calling a payphone costs no more than any other landline and you don't have to pay for incoming on them. Is the situation the same in the USA?
I think many geeks just don't fit in very well in normal society because they don't care about the same things normal people do and this is often percieved as being anti-social. Let them communicate with each other though and you see a very different situation.
HAM radio had a high startup cost, anything that used the phone system legitimately had a high operationg cost.
Afaict phone phreaking while illegal had low start up and operating costs (just the cost of getting to/from the payphone) so appealed to the younger/poorer section of geeks.
Now the internet has made communication nearly free communities can form over a very diverse area even among people with relatively little money without having to turn to illegal means.
256 is a bit low by modern standards but provided you avoid the big name megabloat desktops and applications (KDE, GNOME, openoffice etc) it should be usable as a desktop.
For big buisness it isn't really that onerous, you set one (or two for redundancy) machine up as a KMS and make sure all your machines can access it every so often. No big deal.
Ordinary home users at least in the west will mostly buy big brand machines and get bios locked media that does not need activation.
The people it really hits are enthusiasts who build thier own PCs and modify them at lot, small time PC repair places that must have either have loads of different types of bios locked media or convince MS to activate whitebox windows using those machines keys over the phone and small buisnesses who have a mixture of PC brands and either don't have a volume license agreement or don't have enough machines to deploy a KMS.
Right, any software company risks being sued for patent infringement because of the huge number of dodgy patents out there.
But there is a big difference in risk between shipping software that might happen to violate some patent you've never heared of and knowingly shipping code that is both a copyright and a patent violation where the holder of the copyright and patents is a company that passionately hates the OS you are shipping it with.
but I agree for a corporate security emergency room such a setup doesn't make sense because the number of people, the ammount of information and the time criticality are all likely to be much lower.
Some of us who go hiking in remote areas do pick up whatever litter we can transport Sure you may pick up stuff you find on the surface but I doubt you go digging for it.
Do you genuinely think that the cable cost 10$ to produce ? not when if I buy 250 or more (or buy any number at university discount) I can get them for £2.20 each (ex VAT).
IIRC sony were planning to ship the PS3 with linux so it could be used as a general purpose computer as well as a games console but they bottled out at the last minuite (they let you install linux if you want but don't preload it or provide media for it).
From a previous poster: "The biggest provider of oil to the US is Canada. Saudi Arabia is second with Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria finishing the top five providers of oil to the US"
Now where are those U.S. military bases in Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria? Even SA has moved the U.S. bases out although it does continue to some air bases there. Yes sure most of the oil actually used in the US comes from countries local to the US because that simply makes financial sense.
However if the middle east significantly reduces production the price of oil everywhere will head skywards even faster than it is doing at the moment. The countries that are supplying most of the united states oil demand aren't going to sell them that oil at significantly below the world market price.
But its slower Sadly this seems to be almost a given with new OS releases.
needs all new drivers bullshit, a few specific device classes have new/modified models (video drivers for this GPU multitasking, sound drivers mainly becase of DRM) but for the most part the driver model remains the same.
uses more resources See comment about slower
and has backwards compatibility issues. there are a few but afaict most of them are more related to userland changes than to anything to do with the kernel. The biggest issues seem to be IE (lots of stuff breaks with IE7 on XP too) and UAC
And in the microsoft world we simply haven't really had to deal with this level of change since the mid nineties. NT3, NT4, 2000Pro, XPPro - each had its own new issues, but they were OSX 10.2 to 10.3 type stuff, not OS9 to OSX type stuff. Vista x64 for example is a MAJOR change. Afaict from a kernel perspective vista isn't really a hugely major change. Probablly less significant than 2K (which introduced WDM and plug and play to the NT line).Going to 64 bit is a major change for a vendor who has not thought about portability before but that is not really a vista issue (XP supported x86, ia64 and later x64).
XP won't support gpu multitasking True but I still think this is a fairly minor feature that could be easilly backported if MS cared to without really affecting anything other than graphics card drivers and applications that chose to use it.
it won't support 4+ GB of RAM Windows has supported more than 4GB of ram since 2K but MS disabled the support in 32 bit desktop editions due to issues with poorly written drivers. I belive this is still the case with vista. 64 bit editions have supported more than 4GB of ram for some time.
rid of the DRM on your existing music and did not allow you to upgrade music obtained through iTunes promotions (except by re-buying it at full price).
how can either of them be seen as still wanting to lock people into DRM? If you want to use DRM media on the iPod you have to buy it from apple. If you buy DRM media from apple then it is for the most part restricted to iPods (iirc there were a couple of phones that licensed "fairplay" but they had very low storage capacity).
I belive the situation with the zune is similar.
IIRC prior to one of the major labels offering DRM free music to a competitor apple did not offer any DRM free music on the iTms even when the artist and label wanted it. Once one of the major labels started offering DRM free music anywhere apple had to accept it to avoid having an inferior product. However they still charged more for non-drm, charged an upgrade fee to get
If they use SSL and advise users to use a browser that implements it properly (IE doesn't) then the ISP and CA would have to work together to manipulate stuff and there would be a not insignificant risk of dection.
also for students using university machines or thier own machines on the university network the data need never leave the university network at all.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC they went from outragously high to fairly high.
Afaict you can take most US mobiles anywhere in the US without paying roaming charges but in the EU you will pay roaming charges as soon as you leave your own country.
You have to think of this as a user interface problem. If the driver planned the route with the SAT NAV that says go down such and such a road but the sign says don't go down the road, what is the driver to do?
Leave the sat nav on but ignore it for a bit, if you have a map (which you should) get it out and try and find another road that leaves in the same general direction.
Once the satnav realises you have strayed from it's route it will calculate a new one.
IIRC a few busses have got themselves damaged by those bollards too by tailgating each other rather than following proper procedure.
I wonder if the ability to seriously damage vehicles was deliberate or just a side affect of overspecing the rise mechanism.
OK so why is this good but the Microsoft format is bad?
Fact is that some proprietary formats become defacto standards. If the proprietary owners are willing to make them more open then they should be recognized as official standards.
If the vendor puts the effort in to make it really open and other vendors pick up on the format then yes a popular format should eventually be recognised as an offical standard.
That effort involves documenting your format to the best of your ability then responding to complaints about ambiguities and differences between your published spec until you have a high quality spec that everyone agrees describes the format.
The proof of the opening is the existance of an independent implementation based on the spec that can be reasonablly expected to give correct results. If there are no decent independent implementations then your format doesn't deserve to be a standard either because your spec sucks or because noone cares about your format enough to implement it.
PDF has passed this. There are many PDF creators and many PDF viewers and I can reasonablly expect to be able to view the output of any PDF creator in any PDF viewer with everything in the right place. Therefore it is right and proper for the spec to be blessed by a standards body.
MS did NOT do this, they produced a specification with many holes that did not reflect what thier implementation did then they tried to ramrod it through as an ISO standard despite the lack of either a good standard document or high quality independent implementations.
P.S. I get the feeling that ODF probablly shouldn't have been approved either. Anyone who things IBM and SUN play any less dirty than MS is deluding themselves.
Afaict there are plenty of B roads that have similar capacities to the smaller A roads, they just weren't considered as such important parts of the network when the road numbering was done.
I would think it would at the very least be driving without due care and attention.
Driving down a road which is unsuitable for your vehicle type ignoring signs that say so and then getting stuck doesn't just negatively affect you. It causes an obstruction to other traffic and quite likely damages whatever you get stuck between.
This is a BRITISH village we are talking about, ordinary cops in britan don't carry either guns or tasers.
I'm going to use british prices because that is what I am familiar with, things may be a bit different in the US but I doubt it will be that significant.
First there is the cost of the payphones themselves. Afaict this is about £150 or so for a basic payphone. More than double that if you want something moderately vandal resistant.
If you use POTs there is the cost of the line and if you use phones that work on the pay to start speaking method (many cheap end ones do) the cost of calls where the person at the other end picks up but the user never pays.
If you set up a payphone at a location that is unlikely to be vandalised, is already being cleaned and where there is someone to empty it who is handling cash anyway this is pretty much the limit of your costs.
Lets say you charge 40p for a call up to 20 minuites (same as BT charge) and your calls average 5 minuites With only a negligable proportion going over the 20 minuites. Lets further say you pay 2p per minuite for your calls (probablly a little more than you will actually pay if you choose a decent provider) and avoid line rental by putting the phone on VOIP using an existing internet connection your profit will be 30p per call.
So if your phone cost £150 and your VOIP adaptor £30 your startup cost is £180 you need 600 calls to make back your investment, that is about a call a day for a year. In other words putting a payphone in your shop/hotel/etc for customers/passers by to use will cost you very little and may even make you some profit.
Phone boxes are going to cost a lot more (sorry I don't have figures for how much), beyond the cost of the box itself you have to send people out to clean the boxes, check them for vandalism and empty them. Those people and thier transportation are going to cost you significant money which afaict only the best locations can make back. And since you probablly won't have an existing internet connection you can use you will have to pay line rental to someone too.
The distinct impression I get is phone boxes operated primerally for profit (BT payphones aren't, BT inherited the commitement to maintain them from thier days as a government department) are only viable in a relatively small (and shrinking) number of locations.
I think my last bill was around 5 euros or something ($7)
Was that a months bill? a quarters bill? or a years bill?
I'm not in the US but afaict the main issue with mobiles over there is very short expiry of minuites on prepay plans. The result of this is they have to keep spending just to keep thier mobile active even if they hardly ever use it. Contract plans there tend to have a lot of included minuites but also very high subscription costs.
Over here in the UK things are much better in that regard. On 02 from what I can find you just have to make or receive one call every 180 days to stay active.
On the other hand we europeans suffer from high roaming and international call charges within the EU while those in the USA get calls across the entire USA included at reasonable rates.
my understanding is in the US you pay for incoming on cellphone plans. In europe you don't generally pay for incoming but calls from landlines to mobiles and from some mobile plans to mobiles on other networks are considerablly more expensive than calls to landlines.
Here in the uk calling a payphone costs no more than any other landline and you don't have to pay for incoming on them. Is the situation the same in the USA?
I think many geeks just don't fit in very well in normal society because they don't care about the same things normal people do and this is often percieved as being anti-social. Let them communicate with each other though and you see a very different situation.
HAM radio had a high startup cost, anything that used the phone system legitimately had a high operationg cost.
Afaict phone phreaking while illegal had low start up and operating costs (just the cost of getting to/from the payphone) so appealed to the younger/poorer section of geeks.
Now the internet has made communication nearly free communities can form over a very diverse area even among people with relatively little money without having to turn to illegal means.
256 is a bit low by modern standards but provided you avoid the big name megabloat desktops and applications (KDE, GNOME, openoffice etc) it should be usable as a desktop.
For big buisness it isn't really that onerous, you set one (or two for redundancy) machine up as a KMS and make sure all your machines can access it every so often. No big deal.
Ordinary home users at least in the west will mostly buy big brand machines and get bios locked media that does not need activation.
The people it really hits are enthusiasts who build thier own PCs and modify them at lot, small time PC repair places that must have either have loads of different types of bios locked media or convince MS to activate whitebox windows using those machines keys over the phone and small buisnesses who have a mixture of PC brands and either don't have a volume license agreement or don't have enough machines to deploy a KMS.
Right, any software company risks being sued for patent infringement because of the huge number of dodgy patents out there.
But there is a big difference in risk between shipping software that might happen to violate some patent you've never heared of and knowingly shipping code that is both a copyright and a patent violation where the holder of the copyright and patents is a company that passionately hates the OS you are shipping it with.
You look at pictures of say nasa mission control ( http://images.google.com/images?q=nasa+mission+control&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.debian:en-GB:unofficial&client=iceweasel-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi ) and they look pretty similar. Big displays with vital real time information where everyone can see it,point to it etc and then individual consoles for dealing with the finer details.
but I agree for a corporate security emergency room such a setup doesn't make sense because the number of people, the ammount of information and the time criticality are all likely to be much lower.
Some of us who go hiking in remote areas do pick up whatever litter we can transport
Sure you may pick up stuff you find on the surface but I doubt you go digging for it.
Do you genuinely think that the cable cost 10$ to produce ?
not when if I buy 250 or more (or buy any number at university discount) I can get them for £2.20 each (ex VAT).
presumbablly you know what to look for as a marker because either your team put it there or the team who dug it last time told you what it was.
the important bit is it is an obvious marker to tell you when to switch from backfill removal to archeological excavation.
IIRC sony were planning to ship the PS3 with linux so it could be used as a general purpose computer as well as a games console but they bottled out at the last minuite (they let you install linux if you want but don't preload it or provide media for it).
From a previous poster: "The biggest provider of oil to the US is Canada. Saudi Arabia is second with Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria finishing the top five providers of oil to the US"
Now where are those U.S. military bases in Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria? Even SA has moved the U.S. bases out although it does continue to some air bases there.
Yes sure most of the oil actually used in the US comes from countries local to the US because that simply makes financial sense.
However if the middle east significantly reduces production the price of oil everywhere will head skywards even faster than it is doing at the moment. The countries that are supplying most of the united states oil demand aren't going to sell them that oil at significantly below the world market price.
But its slower
Sadly this seems to be almost a given with new OS releases.
needs all new drivers
bullshit, a few specific device classes have new/modified models (video drivers for this GPU multitasking, sound drivers mainly becase of DRM) but for the most part the driver model remains the same.
uses more resources
See comment about slower
and has backwards compatibility issues.
there are a few but afaict most of them are more related to userland changes than to anything to do with the kernel. The biggest issues seem to be IE (lots of stuff breaks with IE7 on XP too) and UAC
And in the microsoft world we simply haven't really had to deal with this level of change since the mid nineties. NT3, NT4, 2000Pro, XPPro - each had its own new issues, but they were OSX 10.2 to 10.3 type stuff, not OS9 to OSX type stuff. Vista x64 for example is a MAJOR change.
Afaict from a kernel perspective vista isn't really a hugely major change. Probablly less significant than 2K (which introduced WDM and plug and play to the NT line).Going to 64 bit is a major change for a vendor who has not thought about portability before but that is not really a vista issue (XP supported x86, ia64 and later x64).
XP won't support gpu multitasking
True but I still think this is a fairly minor feature that could be easilly backported if MS cared to without really affecting anything other than graphics card drivers and applications that chose to use it.
it won't support 4+ GB of RAM
Windows has supported more than 4GB of ram since 2K but MS disabled the support in 32 bit desktop editions due to issues with poorly written drivers. I belive this is still the case with vista. 64 bit editions have supported more than 4GB of ram for some time.
rid of the DRM on your existing music and did not allow you to upgrade music obtained through iTunes promotions (except by re-buying it at full price).
how can either of them be seen as still wanting to lock people into DRM?
If you want to use DRM media on the iPod you have to buy it from apple. If you buy DRM media from apple then it is for the most part restricted to iPods (iirc there were a couple of phones that licensed "fairplay" but they had very low storage capacity).
I belive the situation with the zune is similar.
IIRC prior to one of the major labels offering DRM free music to a competitor apple did not offer any DRM free music on the iTms even when the artist and label wanted it. Once one of the major labels started offering DRM free music anywhere apple had to accept it to avoid having an inferior product. However they still charged more for non-drm, charged an upgrade fee to get
the versions in between all failed to build on at least one architecture so wouldn't have migrated anyway.
If they use SSL and advise users to use a browser that implements it properly (IE doesn't) then the ISP and CA would have to work together to manipulate stuff and there would be a not insignificant risk of dection.
also for students using university machines or thier own machines on the university network the data need never leave the university network at all.