I had a recent encounter with Comcast. I went to visit my mother, who by the way, has hammers in her garage. She was talking about getting a computer to send email and such. So I called Comcast to check on the price of the Internet connection.
The guy is very friendly and tells me the cost and such.
So I ask, "What is the speed?"
"Six megabits", he says.
I respond, "Is that up and down?" but I knew there was no way.
"384K up and 572K down" he said confidently.
"That doesn't come out to six megabits", I replied.
The next sound I heard was a short click and the recorded message said, "Your expected wait is 30 minutes."
I don't know if someone had told him to do that when he got some techie troublemaker but it sure looked good on the log that he could answer my questions so fast.
(I hung up and called back. The female voice seemed more informed.)
One bit of additional info: I had just tried to call Qwest and got a recording saying they were closed on Saturday.
The troubling thing to me is that both of the main residential Internet providers had serious issues with a potential customer. The old joke points out the difference between prospects and customers. Neither one treated a prospect reasonably. What does that say about the way they treat customers.
I would expect to pay an extra two bucks Is this supposed to be humor?
I looked at my phone bill last weekend. The phone service costs $35 and the voice mail costs $8. The total bill, after adding the "taxes": $63. You figure it.
Cell phone bill? Same sort of silliness.
An internet bill would likely work the same way as regards taxes.
It seems to me NZ is the unstable one here... oh, and the US and Canada... when they change the dates for daylight savings. Why do I really care when it changes so long as its the same every year.
Maybe everyone could just quit bickering and use my time zone and my DST dates. Then there wouldn't be any of this silly conversion stuff.
"It is incredibly difficult to learn a tonal language if you grow up speaking a non-tonal one."
I think the lack of inflection, declension and such makes Mandarin Chinese much easier to learn. (The written language is much more a barrier to world domination than the tonal nature of it. The written language could change but that change might feel very wrong to the Chinese and that might prevent acceptance of a change.)
"I can say I'd rather deal with grammar complexities than trying to figure out which tone is being used."
That's the only part I can agree with. You definitely would rather avoid the tones.
I, however, kind of like the tones. I'm no expert with one year of college Chinese, but I found it easier than German or Greek to speak. It turns out that if you misuse the tones you mostly sound foreign and only occasionally make a proper fool of yourself or fail to communicate.
I know... it's not a SAN. But a PB isn't what it used to be.
When a large university graduates (say 8000 people) you have to figure that in that stadium, auditorium, whatever each graduate has 20GB in their pocket between the phone and the music player plus, say, 3 family members with video recorder or cameras between 1 and 10 GB. Let's say it averages 2 GB.
(20 GB + 2 GB * 3) * 8000 graduates = 208 TB
I know its a quick estimate but that's a lot of storage and that's just what they are carrying around in their pockets.
When in college I cut some of my right ring finder off with a power saw. Now my left side is considerably better at Math than my right side. Its a good thing it happened in grad school after I already had the old Math degree.
in about 1984 when IBM released their new PC AT running at a staggering 6 MHz clock speed and capable holding of multiple Megabytes of RAM memory.
The funny thing about it is that they said it was for power workstation users running advanced applications and that no normal office worker would need such power.
It's the same story every time. But as long as I have to wait for anything this silly computer does, I need a faster one. As far as I am concerned, if anything takes more that 1/10th second, its too slow. Why would I want to spend my time waiting on a machine?
to Jira (or Bugzilla or whatever) on the Open Source projects and it could submit the bug reports automatically and after only... three days to three years all those bugs would get fixed.
They may have Apple logos on them but did you ever notice the Apple logo is sometimes upside down so it is readable when the laptop lid is open.
BTW - Did anyone notice a new Nissan commercial where the guy uses an Apple monitor. I wonder if Nissan had to pay Apple to use its logo on the ad or did Apple have to pay Nissan to get its monitor in the ad.
As for speech, I believe the learning curve for babies to talk depends on how they are spoken to. If you GooGoo and GaaGaa at them all day in gibberish baby talk, they aren't going to learn how to speak very easily. But if you talk to them as you would talk to a young child, they are more apt to speak early themselves.
I always hoped my kids would be smarter than that. Only really stupid people repeat just what they hear. Smarter people are more selective.
In some ways, every time a bank makes a loan, some money gets manufactured.
The bank is limited, in the US, by banking rules that say they can lend up to so many times the amount they hold in deposits. I image similar rules apply in every country.
When they make a loan, they write you a check or increase the balance in your account or wire money somewhere. To do that they either transfer money they control in someone else's account or they borrow from the Federal Reserve system or some other financial entity.
If it doesn't get hidden by the time it takes to transfer the money all over the country, it becomes a credit that isn't balanced by cash but by the knowledge that the Fed is good for it.
The end result is that there is more money in circulation than there was before you borrowed the money. You can write a check for your new car or house or business purchase and the money just moves around in the system. It only disappears as you take your income and reduce the loan and then only as the total of all loans from any particular "bank" exceeds their deposits.
If you look in the Wall Street Journal you can see the amount of such money but I forget what it is called.
The oldest such applications I've had to deal with are time logging application. My employers have had to charge by the hour for my time with the clients. So they always have some sort of web based time logging application. Usually there is also a way to enter expenses and such for reimbursement.
Every one of these application that I have had to deal with has been very difficult to use. My theory is that they sell the application to one of the bosses based on the way the reports look. They make the user interface for the reports work well. That helps two people per company and saves their time. The people who enter time get the short end of the stick and 200 people waste their time and energy trying to enter hours.
I mean... how hard is it to write a web site to enter hours and tasks.
The first one I had to use only worked right if you used the "right" screen resolution. You were supposed to change your screen resolution to run their application. And, if you didn't, the windows would be too small. They wouldn't scroll. They wouldn't resize. And you couldn't see the OK button at the bottom.
Another one, two years later, would lose everything you entered if you tried to print it at the wrong time.
The one I am using now (in 2006 after 5 years of these sinister felons) makes you go through 5 screen clicks to add more than 40 hours. If you go in to enter your hours after 6 pm on Friday it will default to next week. The first time I didn't know it and entered and submitted all my hours on the wrong week.
I think the it shows the real problem with the business model. There is no incentive to improve the time usage for the people that do the work. The word comes down from on high because the sales doesn't have to convince more than a few people that use the application. This makes the choice of such software a burden on the company's bottom line because, by choosing it, they waste their employee's time.
Face it. There is no reason talking on the phone for one minute should cost more than sending and receiving 500K of data. That uses the old way of converting voice to data--64K bits per second. (64,000 bps * 60 secs/min / 8 bits per byte = 480,000 bytes/min)
It is, after all, just data going from point A to point B (and coming back). I don't know the current numbers but, back in the 90's, voice only consumed a few percent of the total of the transferred data.
The network should be good enough to get the data moved in a reasonable time frame.
The devices to convert what the microphone picks up to data packets should not be expensive to buy.
The monthly payment to your ISP should cover the data transfer, even if it is digital voice.
The use of compression should reduce the bandwidth needed by a factor of six (but I'm no expert). That's what I read.
In the US, we add a little bit to our phone bill to subsidize people who live in rural areas. They need longer wires and such than the city folks. That shouldn't add too much to the bill.
The only justification for phone service costing more than that is that we will pay it. It's a classic concept of dividing the market into groups of customers. Some will pay more than others for the same service. You work out a way to get more from those who will pay it while still charging less for those who won't pay more.
Its a tricky thing to work out. The ones who pay more may resist paying more if they know someone else is paying less.
But we have business phones and personal phones and business pays more but they don't really get more. Their phones don't work any better. They don't get extended hours of use. They just pay more for the same thing because they will.
Somehow we have gotten into a situation where the data containing voices costs us more to tranfer than data containing photos or music or email or accounts payable. There is no good reason but the marketers have got us to believe it should be that way.
I think all we are seeing is a market upheaval caused by some people rejecting that premise and others selling stuff to facilitate sending voice data for less.
I should pay an ISP to accept bits from me and transfer them to wherever I want them to go. Some other ISPs will be accepting bits from someone else and sending them to me. For that, they should pay. It's just a messenger service. If they have to subcontract with backbone providers, so be it. They have to charge me enough to take care of that.
I think the "magic" of the technology hides the simple realities from most consumers.
I think, from listening to my two teenage daughters, that "date" and "sex" are close to synonymous. They tend to be more precise than us old guys. "I'm going to Starbucks with..." or "a movie" or whatever is what they say when we would have said "I have a date with..." and meant we were going to a movie or a restaurant or whatever.
They say, "Daaaaad! We're not dating. Yuk!"
(Of course, like geeky me could get a "date" back then.)
If there are any patents involved there could be problems.
An open source project that uses some patents that belong to a company that supports the open source project (or fathers it) does not cause a problem. The company allows the open source project to use the patents for the same reasons it pays people to write code for it.
If that company is bought by another company that cracks down on the patents, a whole-nother situation can result. Of course, they will say "We have to protect our patents or they will become useless."
Re:Why can't the movie theatre _tell_ the phone
on
Polite Cell Phones
·
· Score: 1
I'd rather it vibrate in a loud place. I can't hear it above the din no matter how loud anyway.
But the interesting issue is when a bar with live music is next door to the public library. How does the phone know which of the competing signals to listen to. Whatever they program into it to do would irritate someone. We know that either cell phone programmers aren't all that smart or someone at the company won't let them do it right. Just look at the "features" we have now.
The first "virus" I heard about was mid-80s when a virus got into the Dallas EDS office and infected a bunch of Macs. This was when a Mac was a tall beige box with a 9" screen at the top and a floppy disk slot below it. As I remember, someone got arrested for that. I heard about it from some guys I knew who got paid to go in and remove it.
The first "virus" I remember getting was STONED. I'm guessing early 90's time frame. It came in on a customer machine that was being upgraded. Infected most of the floppy disks in the repair center and then started spreading through the building. It was easy to remove but you had to do it on each and every one of the hundreds of floppy disks in the building. What a pain.
My bank's web site is very difficult to log into using Firefox. You can't just type in the id and password and click GO. You have to figure out how to bring up the alternate login page and use it.
I just switch to IE for banking and then go back to Firefox for other stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a recent encounter with Comcast. I went to visit my mother, who by the way, has hammers in her garage. She was talking about getting a computer to send email and such. So I called Comcast to check on the price of the Internet connection.
The guy is very friendly and tells me the cost and such.
So I ask, "What is the speed?"
"Six megabits", he says.
I respond, "Is that up and down?" but I knew there was no way.
"384K up and 572K down" he said confidently.
"That doesn't come out to six megabits", I replied.
The next sound I heard was a short click and the recorded message said, "Your expected wait is 30 minutes."
I don't know if someone had told him to do that when he got some techie troublemaker but it sure looked good on the log that he could answer my questions so fast.
(I hung up and called back. The female voice seemed more informed.)
One bit of additional info: I had just tried to call Qwest and got a recording saying they were closed on Saturday.
The troubling thing to me is that both of the main residential Internet providers had serious issues with a potential customer. The old joke points out the difference between prospects and customers. Neither one treated a prospect reasonably. What does that say about the way they treat customers.
I looked at my phone bill last weekend. The phone service costs $35 and the voice mail costs $8. The total bill, after adding the "taxes": $63. You figure it.
Cell phone bill? Same sort of silliness.
An internet bill would likely work the same way as regards taxes.
It seems to me NZ is the unstable one here ... oh, and the US and Canada ... when they change the dates for daylight savings. Why do I really care when it changes so long as its the same every year.
Maybe everyone could just quit bickering and use my time zone and my DST dates. Then there wouldn't be any of this silly conversion stuff.
"It is incredibly difficult to learn a tonal language if you grow up speaking a non-tonal one."
I think the lack of inflection, declension and such makes Mandarin Chinese much easier to learn. (The written language is much more a barrier to world domination than the tonal nature of it. The written language could change but that change might feel very wrong to the Chinese and that might prevent acceptance of a change.)
"I can say I'd rather deal with grammar complexities than trying to figure out which tone is being used."
That's the only part I can agree with. You definitely would rather avoid the tones.
I, however, kind of like the tones. I'm no expert with one year of college Chinese, but I found it easier than German or Greek to speak. It turns out that if you misuse the tones you mostly sound foreign and only occasionally make a proper fool of yourself or fail to communicate.
Well ... my wife and I only speak one language between us and I haven't noticed communication being that easy.
There's a lot more to communication than a shared language though it is a good start.
As I remember, we didn't like the UN back when George Bush ran a baseball team. Probably before ...
I know ... it's not a SAN. But a PB isn't what it used to be.
When a large university graduates (say 8000 people) you have to figure that in that stadium, auditorium, whatever each graduate has 20GB in their pocket between the phone and the music player plus, say, 3 family members with video recorder or cameras between 1 and 10 GB. Let's say it averages 2 GB.
(20 GB + 2 GB * 3) * 8000 graduates = 208 TB
I know its a quick estimate but that's a lot of storage and that's just what they are carrying around in their pockets.
When in college I cut some of my right ring finder off with a power saw. Now my left side is considerably better at Math than my right side. Its a good thing it happened in grad school after I already had the old Math degree.
in about 1984 when IBM released their new PC AT running at a staggering 6 MHz clock speed and capable holding of multiple Megabytes of RAM memory.
The funny thing about it is that they said it was for power workstation users running advanced applications and that no normal office worker would need such power.
It's the same story every time. But as long as I have to wait for anything this silly computer does, I need a faster one. As far as I am concerned, if anything takes more that 1/10th second, its too slow. Why would I want to spend my time waiting on a machine?
to Jira (or Bugzilla or whatever) on the Open Source projects and it could submit the bug reports automatically and after only ... three days to three years all those bugs would get fixed.
They may have Apple logos on them but did you ever notice the Apple logo is sometimes upside down so it is readable when the laptop lid is open.
BTW - Did anyone notice a new Nissan commercial where the guy uses an Apple monitor. I wonder if Nissan had to pay Apple to use its logo on the ad or did Apple have to pay Nissan to get its monitor in the ad.
As for speech, I believe the learning curve for babies to talk depends on how they are spoken to. If you GooGoo and GaaGaa at them all day in gibberish baby talk, they aren't going to learn how to speak very easily. But if you talk to them as you would talk to a young child, they are more apt to speak early themselves.
I always hoped my kids would be smarter than that. Only really stupid people repeat just what they hear. Smarter people are more selective.
I think we should jail the building contractors that build the buildings where the filming takes place. They are at least as culpable as Google.
In some ways, every time a bank makes a loan, some money gets manufactured.
The bank is limited, in the US, by banking rules that say they can lend up to so many times the amount they hold in deposits. I image similar rules apply in every country.
When they make a loan, they write you a check or increase the balance in your account or wire money somewhere. To do that they either transfer money they control in someone else's account or they borrow from the Federal Reserve system or some other financial entity.
If it doesn't get hidden by the time it takes to transfer the money all over the country, it becomes a credit that isn't balanced by cash but by the knowledge that the Fed is good for it.
The end result is that there is more money in circulation than there was before you borrowed the money. You can write a check for your new car or house or business purchase and the money just moves around in the system. It only disappears as you take your income and reduce the loan and then only as the total of all loans from any particular "bank" exceeds their deposits.
If you look in the Wall Street Journal you can see the amount of such money but I forget what it is called.
The oldest such applications I've had to deal with are time logging application. My employers have had to charge by the hour for my time with the clients. So they always have some sort of web based time logging application. Usually there is also a way to enter expenses and such for reimbursement.
... how hard is it to write a web site to enter hours and tasks.
Every one of these application that I have had to deal with has been very difficult to use. My theory is that they sell the application to one of the bosses based on the way the reports look. They make the user interface for the reports work well. That helps two people per company and saves their time. The people who enter time get the short end of the stick and 200 people waste their time and energy trying to enter hours.
I mean
The first one I had to use only worked right if you used the "right" screen resolution. You were supposed to change your screen resolution to run their application. And, if you didn't, the windows would be too small. They wouldn't scroll. They wouldn't resize. And you couldn't see the OK button at the bottom.
Another one, two years later, would lose everything you entered if you tried to print it at the wrong time.
The one I am using now (in 2006 after 5 years of these sinister felons) makes you go through 5 screen clicks to add more than 40 hours. If you go in to enter your hours after 6 pm on Friday it will default to next week. The first time I didn't know it and entered and submitted all my hours on the wrong week.
I think the it shows the real problem with the business model. There is no incentive to improve the time usage for the people that do the work. The word comes down from on high because the sales doesn't have to convince more than a few people that use the application. This makes the choice of such software a burden on the company's bottom line because, by choosing it, they waste their employee's time.
time is money
Face it. There is no reason talking on the phone for one minute should cost more than sending and receiving 500K of data. That uses the old way of converting voice to data--64K bits per second. (64,000 bps * 60 secs/min / 8 bits per byte = 480,000 bytes/min)
It is, after all, just data going from point A to point B (and coming back). I don't know the current numbers but, back in the 90's, voice only consumed a few percent of the total of the transferred data.
The network should be good enough to get the data moved in a reasonable time frame.
The devices to convert what the microphone picks up to data packets should not be expensive to buy.
The monthly payment to your ISP should cover the data transfer, even if it is digital voice.
The use of compression should reduce the bandwidth needed by a factor of six (but I'm no expert). That's what I read.
In the US, we add a little bit to our phone bill to subsidize people who live in rural areas. They need longer wires and such than the city folks. That shouldn't add too much to the bill.
The only justification for phone service costing more than that is that we will pay it. It's a classic concept of dividing the market into groups of customers. Some will pay more than others for the same service. You work out a way to get more from those who will pay it while still charging less for those who won't pay more.
Its a tricky thing to work out. The ones who pay more may resist paying more if they know someone else is paying less.
But we have business phones and personal phones and business pays more but they don't really get more. Their phones don't work any better. They don't get extended hours of use. They just pay more for the same thing because they will.
Somehow we have gotten into a situation where the data containing voices costs us more to tranfer than data containing photos or music or email or accounts payable. There is no good reason but the marketers have got us to believe it should be that way.
I think all we are seeing is a market upheaval caused by some people rejecting that premise and others selling stuff to facilitate sending voice data for less.
I should pay an ISP to accept bits from me and transfer them to wherever I want them to go. Some other ISPs will be accepting bits from someone else and sending them to me. For that, they should pay. It's just a messenger service. If they have to subcontract with backbone providers, so be it. They have to charge me enough to take care of that.
I think the "magic" of the technology hides the simple realities from most consumers.
And that's enough babbling for now.
Sorry ... can't hear you . Please repeat.
I think, from listening to my two teenage daughters, that "date" and "sex" are close to synonymous. They tend to be more precise than us old guys. "I'm going to Starbucks with ..." or "a movie" or whatever is what they say when we would have said "I have a date with ..." and meant we were going to a movie or a restaurant or whatever.
They say, "Daaaaad! We're not dating. Yuk!"
(Of course, like geeky me could get a "date" back then.)
If there are any patents involved there could be problems.
An open source project that uses some patents that belong to a company that supports the open source project (or fathers it) does not cause a problem. The company allows the open source project to use the patents for the same reasons it pays people to write code for it.
If that company is bought by another company that cracks down on the patents, a whole-nother situation can result. Of course, they will say "We have to protect our patents or they will become useless."
I'd rather it vibrate in a loud place. I can't hear it above the din no matter how loud anyway.
But the interesting issue is when a bar with live music is next door to the public library. How does the phone know which of the competing signals to listen to. Whatever they program into it to do would irritate someone. We know that either cell phone programmers aren't all that smart or someone at the company won't let them do it right. Just look at the "features" we have now.
Torvalds and Stallman - sounds like a law firm
I suspect some of those children would much prefer the $200 and would sell their laptop to you.
...
There is the problem of wandering around until you find the right child, but
"... Steve Gibson is ... a little wacky"
/. because we're all well adjusted?
....
And we're here on
Right
The first "virus" I heard about was mid-80s when a virus got into the Dallas EDS office and infected a bunch of Macs. This was when a Mac was a tall beige box with a 9" screen at the top and a floppy disk slot below it. As I remember, someone got arrested for that. I heard about it from some guys I knew who got paid to go in and remove it.
The first "virus" I remember getting was STONED. I'm guessing early 90's time frame. It came in on a customer machine that was being upgraded. Infected most of the floppy disks in the repair center and then started spreading through the building. It was easy to remove but you had to do it on each and every one of the hundreds of floppy disks in the building. What a pain.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
My bank's web site is very difficult to log into using Firefox. You can't just type in the id and password and click GO. You have to figure out how to bring up the alternate login page and use it.
I just switch to IE for banking and then go back to Firefox for other stuff.