AGs have different powers and restrictions in different states.
In Wisconsin for example, the very conservative AG has been blocked from joinging the anti-mandate lawsuit by the very liberal Governer and Legislature.
Back in 2001/2002 I was doing drive testing for US Cellular. One day we were cruising through some random suburb of northern Illinois. My driver that day was an Iranian American. Nice guy, but not the usual bleached white skin tones folks are used to seeing in such a location. Someone called us in to the police as possible terror suspects, driving the neighborhood around with "computer equipment".
So we got pulled over by a fleet of police. Took about 5 seconds for them to realise what we were doing and we went on our way.
As to the original question, we ran two phones, one that would continuously make short duration calls to test the ability to the network to identify and connect new call, and another that would try to stay online for as long as possible, testing the network's ability to hand off calls from one tower to the next.
If you are planning on testing a decent sized area, I would recommend using a similar system. If you're just going to go to specific hot spots and run a couple of tests at each location, I wouldn't go to such lengths though.
I tell ya what, go catch a ball thrown by your child and dislocate a couple of fingers. Pop them back into place the come back here and type about the impact on your living conditions. Go through a couple of joint surgeries and get medically discharged from the Navy after blowing out your knees for the third time, then joke about an elderly grandmother.
All in all though, the hyper flexibility is the lesser of her concerns, but understanding it has allowed the doctors to better treat her primary health concerns.
In a world filled with perfect Doctors, I would agree with you. But in today's world of general practitioners who spend as little time with their patients as possible, individuals must take some amount of the research on to themselves.
My wife for example, is extremely flexible, to the point of being able to touch her fore-arm with her thumb on the same hand, dislocating joints, and other non-normal flexibility issues. She asked her doctor about it and got the basic "Is it causing you pain? No? Ignore it." But while researching another medical condition that she had been diagnosed with, she came across a reference to a genetic disease that causes this type of flexibility. She talked to her mother about it, 60 years old and still quite limber. She talked to her grandmother about it, 90 years old and she can still touch her toes with out bending her knees and join her hands behind her back (one over the shoulder, one under). It was pretty clear that the female side of her family was carrying this trait.
So next time she went to see her doctor, she mentioned the disease and the family history, the doc laughed and told her to leave the diagnosis to the "pros".
A month later when she was going to her new patient exam with her new general practitioner, she brought up the disease and family history. The doc listened, ordered some tests, and discovered that she did indeed have the disease. And it altered the treatment of her other condition.
So I'm just saying, even a good general practitioner won't be able to suss out all of your ailments if they are trying to diagnose you based on a 5 minute interview and what's in your chart. But if you point out some of the research you've done, even if they don't take you at your word, it can be enough to make them want to investigate that same avenue.
I go on vacation. I leave my back door unlocked. Someone enters my house while I'm on vacation with out my permission. They bring with them a CD that they shop lifted from a store. They use my computer equipment to rip 1 song off of that CD.
I agree completely. I should have spoken more clearly.
My co-worker's personal small business has 1 employee: him. He is a skilled tech guy who can handle most of the work himself. He had 3 options:
1) Move to the cloud for ~$150/month. supreme uptime, no hassle scaling, everything is managed for him 2) Move to a more robust dedicated virtual machine for ~$150/month. solid up time, scaling available, all network stuff is managed for him 3) Buy a server and business cable line to his residence for ~$750 one time purchase, but $20 less a month than he is currently spending on residential cable. He has to manage everything himself.
If he keeps the server/cable running for 3 years, it pays for itself, assuming he pays himself $150 a month for his own work. But really, his own work is volunteer, so against the opportune cost, he's in the green after 5 months. Even against his current costs he's in the green in under a year.
If his small business grows to the point that his cable line can't handle the bandwidth, or his cheap server needs more umph, or if his time becomes more valuable, the advantage will quickly switch back to the cloud.
Sharepoint isn't a cloud, it's a CMS with a whole lot of crap mixed in.
Microsoft's cloud service is called Azure. One of my coworkers was looking at it to host his company's web site and services. The scalability there was actually quite impressive for simple hosting and heavy loads. I don't know the details, but he seemed pretty impressed by it, just not by the cost. It was right on par cost wise as having a dedicated VM with decent resources. The only real difference he was looking at going from a dedicated VM to their cloud was that he could instantly spool up a second (or third, fourth, etc...) instance of his system on the cloud, although he would be getting charged for each of them.
Until they can get the cost to be lower than the TCO of a cheap server, UPS, and business cable line though, I can't see making the jump for small businesses.
If BP raises their prices, it opens the door for their competitors to under cut them.
The price of oil will be set by the supply and demand of the other producers if BP raises it's price. The the other producers can't meet demand, the price will rise to BP's costs. If the can, then BP will be losing sales and income to them.
A few years back I worked for an awesome company that did a IVR (interactive voice recording) systems.
We had voice driven interactive systems that would provide the caller with a variety of different mental health tests (we work a lot with identifying depression, early onset dementia, Alzheimer, and other cognitive issues.
The voice recognition wasn't perfect, but we had a review system that dealt with a "gold standard". I wrote a tool that would allow a human being to identify individual words and to label them. Then we would run a number of different voice recognition systems against the same audio chunk and compare their output to the human version. It effectively allowed us to unit test our changes to the voice recognition software.
Dialing in a voice recognition system is an amazing process. The amount of properties, dictionaries, scripting, and sentence forming engines are mind blowing.
Two of the hardest tests for our system were things like: Count from 1 to 20 alternating between numbers and letters as fast as you can, for example 1-A-2-B-3-C. And list every animal you can think of.
The 1-A-2-B was killer because when people speak quickly, their words merge. You literally start creating the sound of the A while the end of the 1 is still coming. It makes it extremely difficult to identify word breaks and actual words. And if you dial in a system specifically to parse that, you'll wind up with issues parsing slower sentences.
The all animals question had a similar issue, people would slur their words together, and the dictionary was huge. It was even more challenging when one of the studies that was nation wide. We had to deal with phonetic spellings from the north east coast and southern states accents. What was even worse was that there was no sentences. We couldn't count on predictive dictionary work to identify the most likely word out of those that would match the phonetics.
That said, getting voice recognition to work on pre-scripted commands and sentences was pretty easy.
And I can only imagine the process has been improving in the years since. Although we were looking into SMS based options, not for a dislike of IVR, but because our usage studies with children were showing most of them were skipping the voice system and using the key pad anyway. So why bother with IVR if the study's target demographic was the youth.
That sounds like a great basis for a CIVIL suit, you know, where the plaintiff could prove damages and the defendant, if found guilty based on a preponderance of the evidence, would have to pay for those damages.
Problem though, they brought about a CRIMINAL suit.
If this had been a civilian company, it wouldn't have been anything. Dude gets fired, won't cough up the passwords. The company invests labor in manually resetting the hardware's passwords and reloading configs. Then calcs the cost of the down time and labor, and sues his pants off.
I get that the courts ruled that the FCC can't mandate how ISP route their traffic. They can't enforce net neutrality.
But, in this case we had the ISP injecting packets to cause end user software to abort a communication. Last I checked, man in the middle attacks that interfere with network communications was worthy of felony hacking charges. So what is Comcast geting off so easy?
It is also because if the footage wasn't grainy and of poor quality/distance, then the object will almost always be identified. And if the flying object is identified, it can not be a UFO.
UFO doesn't mean aliens, space visitors, or conspiracies.
It means: Unidentified Flying Object.
If you see a condensation trail high in the sky, you know that there is something creating it, but if it is too high for you to see, it is unidentified. It is flying. It is an object. You have just witnessed a UFO. There is nothing ridiculous about it at all.
If this class focuses on the spotting of things you don't understand, and the process in which you go through to try to discover it's identity, then I'm all for it. A class that pushes students to come up with multiple possible theories and find ways to research them, to prove or exclude them, and to report on their findings.
The problem isn't the monopoly. It is the ability of the company to use it's presence in one market (iPad) to drown out competitors in another market (app store).
That was what MS got into trouble over years ago. Using their power in the PC OS market (Windows) to control what choices consumers had in the office productivity market (MS Office).
Currently, Apple is in a pretty safe position. Sure, they are dominating the portable music player market, but they don't have their own recording label and the iTunes store isn't exactly reducing consumer choice. But the super-portable market is still really young, and while Apple has a lead out of the gates, there are a number of competitors that will be working hard to catch them. But if Google fumbles and MS can't get their tablet off the ground, it could lead to another situation where Apple dominates the hardware market. And if they control that market and they use that power to control the application market (as they've already been accused of doing), they could wind up in a significantly less stable position.
It all maters on their market share as the super-portable market matures. Personally, I'd rather see minor tweaks to them now than waiting until we have another Ma-Bell/Microsoft like situation where the government has to step in and break up companies.
Personally, I'd rather have my consumer and tax dollars going elsewhere than funding monopolies and anti-trust cases.
When Apple entered the phone market, there were a number of entrenched competitors already in place. Even so, the iPhone has manage to hit what, 25% market share?
When Apple entered the portable music player market, there were a number of weaker competitors. It was the first affordable, viable, and stable digital player available. They now enjoy a 75% market share.
Now that Apple has entered the super-portable PC market, there are virtually no meaningful competitors. They are almost guaranteed a significant market share, even if their batteries start exploding. If they see market share in the super-portable arena like they do in the portable music player arena, you can bet that there will be a fair bit of scrutiny that comes down on the App Store.
The problem remains. The two lines that are up now (1 phone, 1 cable) are up due to significant subsidies funded by local tax payers. The cost of running last mile wire is so high, that new entrants to the market will not be able to fully fund their own wires and remain competitive to the cost of the existing services. So for townships to break the monopoly, you have two primary options:
1) Subsidize more competitors to build lines 2) "Localize" the lines and lease them out to service providers, multiple providers when technology allows, and a single provider with a yearly review (open to the public) in situations were such technologies are not available.
So if the Tea Baggers are backing increased taxes, or the government take over of last mile fiber/copper, I must have misunderstood the goal of the their party.
So as a tea bagger, you would prefer that local elected town leaders force their property tax paying citizens to subsidize the cost of 9 more cables to be hung?
Man, I think my understanding of the tea bag party's goals is in error.
n Japan, where everybody looks at Japan as being so far ahead, they may have faster speeds, but we have higher utilization of people using the Internet.
What we we utilizing these people that are using the internet for?
Assuming he meant to say "we have more people using the internet..." wouldn't that make sense, seeing as how we have almost triple their population?
Yes. Verizon has put more fiber in from Boston to Washington than all the Western European countries combined
Imagine that, Western European countries haven't put as much fiber in from Boston to Washington... who'da thunk it?
Ahh well, I should have double checked before posting that;)
Most of those cars (not all) though you'll find the CVT option were either short lived, exceptionally light on torque, or used design patterns that differed from the traditional CVT system. (Note that the Hybrids on that list don't actually use CVTs, they use a 2-input system that shares some design elements with CVTs, but are completely different in function.)
In anycase, they handle less torque, they are more expensive, and with out a specifically tuned engine, they aren't going to produce any better milage than a traditional hydrolic automatic.
If you are looking for a highly efficient transmission, a DSG is pretty much the creame of the crop right now. Beating out traditional manual transmissions in performance (up to their torque limit) and efficiency. New hydrolic automatics have improved a lot since the old days of slush boxes, but you still have to deal with the torque converter (until you are cruising) and parasitic power loss. All in all though, a standard manual transmission is probably going to be the cheapest option (not quite as efficient as a DSG, but cheaper to buy and replace/service) over the life of the car.
Sure. CVTs aren't used in automobiles. They can't handle the torque that most people put through there vehicles daily. That is even a problem for the DSG. I think the top I've heard of them handling is ~250 ft-lbs, anything over that and the computer thins out the mix to prevent the clutch from slipping. CVT's are awesome for drill presses and go-carts (~6 ft-lbs) where you're talking about exceptionally low torque. But systems for higher torque applications are significantly more expensive, harder to maintain, and bulky.
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AGs have different powers and restrictions in different states.
In Wisconsin for example, the very conservative AG has been blocked from joinging the anti-mandate lawsuit by the very liberal Governer and Legislature.
-Rick
Back in 2001/2002 I was doing drive testing for US Cellular. One day we were cruising through some random suburb of northern Illinois. My driver that day was an Iranian American. Nice guy, but not the usual bleached white skin tones folks are used to seeing in such a location. Someone called us in to the police as possible terror suspects, driving the neighborhood around with "computer equipment".
So we got pulled over by a fleet of police. Took about 5 seconds for them to realise what we were doing and we went on our way.
As to the original question, we ran two phones, one that would continuously make short duration calls to test the ability to the network to identify and connect new call, and another that would try to stay online for as long as possible, testing the network's ability to hand off calls from one tower to the next.
If you are planning on testing a decent sized area, I would recommend using a similar system. If you're just going to go to specific hot spots and run a couple of tests at each location, I wouldn't go to such lengths though.
-Rick
I tell ya what, go catch a ball thrown by your child and dislocate a couple of fingers. Pop them back into place the come back here and type about the impact on your living conditions. Go through a couple of joint surgeries and get medically discharged from the Navy after blowing out your knees for the third time, then joke about an elderly grandmother.
All in all though, the hyper flexibility is the lesser of her concerns, but understanding it has allowed the doctors to better treat her primary health concerns.
-Rick
In a world filled with perfect Doctors, I would agree with you. But in today's world of general practitioners who spend as little time with their patients as possible, individuals must take some amount of the research on to themselves.
My wife for example, is extremely flexible, to the point of being able to touch her fore-arm with her thumb on the same hand, dislocating joints, and other non-normal flexibility issues. She asked her doctor about it and got the basic "Is it causing you pain? No? Ignore it." But while researching another medical condition that she had been diagnosed with, she came across a reference to a genetic disease that causes this type of flexibility. She talked to her mother about it, 60 years old and still quite limber. She talked to her grandmother about it, 90 years old and she can still touch her toes with out bending her knees and join her hands behind her back (one over the shoulder, one under). It was pretty clear that the female side of her family was carrying this trait.
So next time she went to see her doctor, she mentioned the disease and the family history, the doc laughed and told her to leave the diagnosis to the "pros".
A month later when she was going to her new patient exam with her new general practitioner, she brought up the disease and family history. The doc listened, ordered some tests, and discovered that she did indeed have the disease. And it altered the treatment of her other condition.
So I'm just saying, even a good general practitioner won't be able to suss out all of your ailments if they are trying to diagnose you based on a 5 minute interview and what's in your chart. But if you point out some of the research you've done, even if they don't take you at your word, it can be enough to make them want to investigate that same avenue.
-Rick
I go on vacation.
I leave my back door unlocked.
Someone enters my house while I'm on vacation with out my permission.
They bring with them a CD that they shop lifted from a store.
They use my computer equipment to rip 1 song off of that CD.
And >I get fined $100.
What... the... crap...
-Rick
As it was said before: "never take software advice from a bug tracking system salesman" -AV
I agree completely. I should have spoken more clearly.
My co-worker's personal small business has 1 employee: him. He is a skilled tech guy who can handle most of the work himself. He had 3 options:
1) Move to the cloud for ~$150/month. supreme uptime, no hassle scaling, everything is managed for him
2) Move to a more robust dedicated virtual machine for ~$150/month. solid up time, scaling available, all network stuff is managed for him
3) Buy a server and business cable line to his residence for ~$750 one time purchase, but $20 less a month than he is currently spending on residential cable. He has to manage everything himself.
If he keeps the server/cable running for 3 years, it pays for itself, assuming he pays himself $150 a month for his own work. But really, his own work is volunteer, so against the opportune cost, he's in the green after 5 months. Even against his current costs he's in the green in under a year.
If his small business grows to the point that his cable line can't handle the bandwidth, or his cheap server needs more umph, or if his time becomes more valuable, the advantage will quickly switch back to the cloud.
-Rick
Sharepoint isn't a cloud, it's a CMS with a whole lot of crap mixed in.
Microsoft's cloud service is called Azure. One of my coworkers was looking at it to host his company's web site and services. The scalability there was actually quite impressive for simple hosting and heavy loads. I don't know the details, but he seemed pretty impressed by it, just not by the cost. It was right on par cost wise as having a dedicated VM with decent resources. The only real difference he was looking at going from a dedicated VM to their cloud was that he could instantly spool up a second (or third, fourth, etc...) instance of his system on the cloud, although he would be getting charged for each of them.
Until they can get the cost to be lower than the TCO of a cheap server, UPS, and business cable line though, I can't see making the jump for small businesses.
-Rick
of this alarmist drivel is that there are only 2 adds on the poster's page.
-Rick
If BP raises their prices, it opens the door for their competitors to under cut them.
The price of oil will be set by the supply and demand of the other producers if BP raises it's price. The the other producers can't meet demand, the price will rise to BP's costs. If the can, then BP will be losing sales and income to them.
-Rick
A few years back I worked for an awesome company that did a IVR (interactive voice recording) systems.
We had voice driven interactive systems that would provide the caller with a variety of different mental health tests (we work a lot with identifying depression, early onset dementia, Alzheimer, and other cognitive issues.
The voice recognition wasn't perfect, but we had a review system that dealt with a "gold standard". I wrote a tool that would allow a human being to identify individual words and to label them. Then we would run a number of different voice recognition systems against the same audio chunk and compare their output to the human version. It effectively allowed us to unit test our changes to the voice recognition software.
Dialing in a voice recognition system is an amazing process. The amount of properties, dictionaries, scripting, and sentence forming engines are mind blowing.
Two of the hardest tests for our system were things like: Count from 1 to 20 alternating between numbers and letters as fast as you can, for example 1-A-2-B-3-C. And list every animal you can think of.
The 1-A-2-B was killer because when people speak quickly, their words merge. You literally start creating the sound of the A while the end of the 1 is still coming. It makes it extremely difficult to identify word breaks and actual words. And if you dial in a system specifically to parse that, you'll wind up with issues parsing slower sentences.
The all animals question had a similar issue, people would slur their words together, and the dictionary was huge. It was even more challenging when one of the studies that was nation wide. We had to deal with phonetic spellings from the north east coast and southern states accents. What was even worse was that there was no sentences. We couldn't count on predictive dictionary work to identify the most likely word out of those that would match the phonetics.
That said, getting voice recognition to work on pre-scripted commands and sentences was pretty easy.
And I can only imagine the process has been improving in the years since. Although we were looking into SMS based options, not for a dislike of IVR, but because our usage studies with children were showing most of them were skipping the voice system and using the key pad anyway. So why bother with IVR if the study's target demographic was the youth.
-Rick
That sounds like a great basis for a CIVIL suit, you know, where the plaintiff could prove damages and the defendant, if found guilty based on a preponderance of the evidence, would have to pay for those damages.
Problem though, they brought about a CRIMINAL suit.
If this had been a civilian company, it wouldn't have been anything. Dude gets fired, won't cough up the passwords. The company invests labor in manually resetting the hardware's passwords and reloading configs. Then calcs the cost of the down time and labor, and sues his pants off.
-Rick
Asimo wasn't built on a $20,000 budget.
-Rick
IIRC The McGhee and Harrington case was dismissed a few months ago after the former prosecutors and them reached a multi-million dollar settlement.
-Rick
I get that the courts ruled that the FCC can't mandate how ISP route their traffic. They can't enforce net neutrality.
But, in this case we had the ISP injecting packets to cause end user software to abort a communication. Last I checked, man in the middle attacks that interfere with network communications was worthy of felony hacking charges. So what is Comcast geting off so easy?
-Rick
It is also because if the footage wasn't grainy and of poor quality/distance, then the object will almost always be identified. And if the flying object is identified, it can not be a UFO.
-Rick
UFO doesn't mean aliens, space visitors, or conspiracies.
It means: Unidentified Flying Object.
If you see a condensation trail high in the sky, you know that there is something creating it, but if it is too high for you to see, it is unidentified. It is flying. It is an object. You have just witnessed a UFO. There is nothing ridiculous about it at all.
If this class focuses on the spotting of things you don't understand, and the process in which you go through to try to discover it's identity, then I'm all for it. A class that pushes students to come up with multiple possible theories and find ways to research them, to prove or exclude them, and to report on their findings.
Seems like an awesome class idea to me.
-Rick
The problem isn't the monopoly. It is the ability of the company to use it's presence in one market (iPad) to drown out competitors in another market (app store).
That was what MS got into trouble over years ago. Using their power in the PC OS market (Windows) to control what choices consumers had in the office productivity market (MS Office).
Currently, Apple is in a pretty safe position. Sure, they are dominating the portable music player market, but they don't have their own recording label and the iTunes store isn't exactly reducing consumer choice. But the super-portable market is still really young, and while Apple has a lead out of the gates, there are a number of competitors that will be working hard to catch them. But if Google fumbles and MS can't get their tablet off the ground, it could lead to another situation where Apple dominates the hardware market. And if they control that market and they use that power to control the application market (as they've already been accused of doing), they could wind up in a significantly less stable position.
It all maters on their market share as the super-portable market matures. Personally, I'd rather see minor tweaks to them now than waiting until we have another Ma-Bell/Microsoft like situation where the government has to step in and break up companies.
Personally, I'd rather have my consumer and tax dollars going elsewhere than funding monopolies and anti-trust cases.
-Rick
When Apple entered the phone market, there were a number of entrenched competitors already in place. Even so, the iPhone has manage to hit what, 25% market share?
When Apple entered the portable music player market, there were a number of weaker competitors. It was the first affordable, viable, and stable digital player available. They now enjoy a 75% market share.
Now that Apple has entered the super-portable PC market, there are virtually no meaningful competitors. They are almost guaranteed a significant market share, even if their batteries start exploding. If they see market share in the super-portable arena like they do in the portable music player arena, you can bet that there will be a fair bit of scrutiny that comes down on the App Store.
-Rick
The difference here is that 1 party opposed the health insurance reform. Neither party is opposed to ACTA.
-Rick
The problem remains. The two lines that are up now (1 phone, 1 cable) are up due to significant subsidies funded by local tax payers. The cost of running last mile wire is so high, that new entrants to the market will not be able to fully fund their own wires and remain competitive to the cost of the existing services. So for townships to break the monopoly, you have two primary options:
1) Subsidize more competitors to build lines
2) "Localize" the lines and lease them out to service providers, multiple providers when technology allows, and a single provider with a yearly review (open to the public) in situations were such technologies are not available.
So if the Tea Baggers are backing increased taxes, or the government take over of last mile fiber/copper, I must have misunderstood the goal of the their party.
-Rick
So as a tea bagger, you would prefer that local elected town leaders force their property tax paying citizens to subsidize the cost of 9 more cables to be hung?
Man, I think my understanding of the tea bag party's goals is in error.
-Rick
n Japan, where everybody looks at Japan as being so far ahead, they may have faster speeds, but we have higher utilization of people using the Internet.
What we we utilizing these people that are using the internet for?
Assuming he meant to say "we have more people using the internet..." wouldn't that make sense, seeing as how we have almost triple their population?
Yes. Verizon has put more fiber in from Boston to Washington than all the Western European countries combined
Imagine that, Western European countries haven't put as much fiber in from Boston to Washington... who'da thunk it?
-Rick
Ahh well, I should have double checked before posting that ;)
Most of those cars (not all) though you'll find the CVT option were either short lived, exceptionally light on torque, or used design patterns that differed from the traditional CVT system. (Note that the Hybrids on that list don't actually use CVTs, they use a 2-input system that shares some design elements with CVTs, but are completely different in function.)
In anycase, they handle less torque, they are more expensive, and with out a specifically tuned engine, they aren't going to produce any better milage than a traditional hydrolic automatic.
If you are looking for a highly efficient transmission, a DSG is pretty much the creame of the crop right now. Beating out traditional manual transmissions in performance (up to their torque limit) and efficiency. New hydrolic automatics have improved a lot since the old days of slush boxes, but you still have to deal with the torque converter (until you are cruising) and parasitic power loss. All in all though, a standard manual transmission is probably going to be the cheapest option (not quite as efficient as a DSG, but cheaper to buy and replace/service) over the life of the car.
-Rick
Sure. CVTs aren't used in automobiles. They can't handle the torque that most people put through there vehicles daily. That is even a problem for the DSG. I think the top I've heard of them handling is ~250 ft-lbs, anything over that and the computer thins out the mix to prevent the clutch from slipping. CVT's are awesome for drill presses and go-carts (~6 ft-lbs) where you're talking about exceptionally low torque. But systems for higher torque applications are significantly more expensive, harder to maintain, and bulky.
-Rick