Someone else by now must have pointed out that a DX33 80386 is probably not what Linus bought.
He probably bought a 486-DX33.
I know that the first version of Linux I ever ran I installed on my 486-DX25, with 4MB RAM and two 40MB SCSI drives, which was running NetWare 3.01 at the time. what a bear, Slackware 0.9 was a struggle but I got it out of a book called 'the Internet CD' by Vivian Veou. What an awesome book!
Then I got a 486-DX2/66 and another 4MB RAM. And some bigger drives. And I 'demoted' the DX25 to 'just' Linux.
For a while I was running MySQL, PHP, Apache, and Perl on both NetWare and Linux. Was fun. Making Squid work like BorderManager was impossible, but Squid actually did what I wanted. BorderManager did enhance my Internet experience, mostly by blocking doubleclick and many other ad sites, back when that was easy. But I had my own email server out there running either Red Hat or Fedora for over 12 years, probably more. Now it's hosted, and I miss updating it and fussing over the hosts.deny and Sendmail settings. Well, not that much, I guess.
After about NetWare 5.x, the thrill was gone. But Linux is not. Thanks, Linus.
I'm not saying 'give up'. Far from it. Do something productive:
- Re-establish onshore manufacturing. As in stop penalizing offshoring with tax, immigration, and other policies.
- Educate ourselves. A local newspaper ad claims that in Arizona, if you eat at a chain restaraunt, $17 of every $100 of your bill stays in the local economy, while if you eat at a locally-owned restaraunt, $47 of every $100 stays. I dunno or care about the exact numbers. Buying goods made in foreign countries can't be as productive or profitable to our economy as buying them made here. And yet, I wonder how that works with automobiles....
- Change the attitude. Maybe we can't make crap in the U.S. that is competitively priced with foreign crap. Ok, at least lets focus on the right products. Perhaps flat-panel displays, consumer electronics, and clothing?
- Also, understand the reality (point 2 revisited). Why do Nike etc. assemble sneakers in Vietnam? Besides cheap labor, they avoid problems with regulatory agencies regarding working conditions such as hours, lighting, pollution. Just the adhesives used are often either banned or conditions controlled so that it is much cheaper to manufacture overseas and avoid the protections. How can we convince Vietnam to raise their standards so that we can effectively take back that business? Not likely. So perhaps we need to work with manufacturers to create products and processes that are economically viable in the U.S. Or deal with it and see if a sneaker maker exists in the U.S. And one does. New Balance.
It is hard to find stuff NOT made in China. I hate buying shoes, because no matter the brand, they all seem to be made in China. I treasure the shirts I have made in India, Bangladesh, even Brunei, though of course some of these countries are not models of freedom and tolerance. But lately, anything but China has been my goal. It's been a while since I coudl find any made in the U.S., even Brazil or Puerto Rico, where the plants in my former home state went to. It ain't easy.
No, it's saying that if you stop shopping at Wal-Mart, you'll stop buying stuff made in China, and so stop financing their human-rights abuses.
Wwhich is wrong twice:
1. China was committing human rights abuses long before prosperity, even before Mao. Cutting off the money will NOT make things better.
2. You cannot avoid buying stuff made in China, unless you pay very close attention to what you buy and where. And even then, you will be buying some stuff made in China, and made with stuff gotten from China.
We need to lose the 'don't buy Chinese stuff' mentality, and stop discouraging industries from making stuff here in the U.S.
We could be buying stuff made in Japan and South Korea, and Taiwan, but even those industries are beholden to China too often.
In a few weeks, we will have heard every crticism and praise of Avatar.
It's anti-technology. It glorifies technology. It is anti-military. It isn't anti-military, that's not a military force, it's mercenaries. It's anti-corporation. No, it's anti-consumption. No, it's anti-technology.
This is only one small loop. There are others, and they intersect.
I liked the movie a lot (saw the 3D Saturday night). But:
- The 3D has a ways to go to be perfect. Some scenes, especially those of the transport with everyone waking up, and those of the link room, do not seem to take 3D very well. Other scenes took good advantage, and reached out to me. I sat far right 1/3 up in the auditorium. If anyone tells me I should have sat center stage, well, then that 3D has a lot of work to do. You should get the same experience in any seat other than the poor blighters underneath the screen, or it isn't serving all your patrons. Which is cool.
- The story was somewhat predictable but then again I've been reading Sci-Fi for about 40 years, and truly inventive plots are few and far between.
- It was told well, which makes up for the plot.
- The effects were truly wonderful. But let's be honest. At least one other Na'vi should get dirty in everyday life, right? Effects get a 9.0 from me for lifelike rendering. Better than Star Wars, with the sad cels sticking out.
- If this is the future of cinema, we will get a lot of 3D crap soon. Crap is still crap. Effects are still effects.
Overall, I would like to see it again, but may not - my wife will NOT go again.
It certainly LOOKS like $500mil, but is it worth it? Maybe...
That is one of the dillemas of the Internet. So perhaps localized vendors need to come to grips with the problem of advertising on global media. This was not much of a problem when newspapers were essentially local, exceptions being the WSJ etc.
But to hear mass media such as Fox News complain about this would be truly unfortunate. And to hear their web advertisers complain would be ludicrous.
Of course, local newspapers that could attract global (or even far-flung) advertisers based on their attraction to remote readers don't have much to complain about. Of courese they can always say no.
Just no complaining about how many people hit your site, ok? Sheesh.
Actually, I closed my post pointing out that the White Knight project could become competitive. And yes, other commercial ventures might come out if there was the opportunity to compete for launches.
But the money is merely a choice. NASA is a small part of even the minimal Federal budget, not counting the current expansion thereof.
And when you complain that I ignore the commercial launch industry, then earlier in your post you point out that Atlas and Delta are commercial designs. I suspect we could agree that as EELVs, they are old and inefficient designs, save for their reliability. Heavy, un-reusable, old school in a way that costs more. But they are well understood and reliable, so long as you remember to use the right software load and rulers.
I distinguish between Atlas and Atlas-Centaur on the basis of payload. They are indeed both Atlas on the bottom. How old is that vehicle design? Didn't I watch Atlas launches in the Mercury program?
The money is an investment, on par with healthcare and roads. We made incredible progress because of the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs. Something similar would take at least 15 years to complete, and would leave behind a relatively huge science infrastructure that would change the world again. Those engineers would be the ones solving pollution, energy, and transportation problems for the world. Unless other nations do this, and then we might finally end up buying the really cool stuff from someone else. I want MAKE and SELL the realy cool stuff. Not iPods, but ultra high efficiency personal vehicles. Not personal computing, but massively parallel processing power for the masses. Not the next MRI machines, but telesurgery. Not wind farms, but thorium reactors. Not sustainable agriculture, but completely portable agriculture.
We learn how to make those things not by going back to the Moon, but by going to Mars, by building a second ISS, by making space travel routine, by solving problems we don't have right now with techniques and technology that we can't quite imagine now.
But we need that imagination. Do we, as a nation, possess that imagination any more?
But we can at least speculate on a realistic plan for frequent launches:
1. Adopting a limited number of launch vehicle types. Atlas, Titan, Delta, Ares or whatever it becomes, and maybe a commercial design or two in there, but probably just one. The Virgin/Scaled Composites projects are out of scope for this, let them do their own thing.
2. After certifying new designs and man-rating them, we move from testing to 'production'.
3. Ramp up launches so that you are probably only launching every 3-5 weeks realistically.
4. Allow for more launches when needed.
5. Multiple pads are in use. Currently, pads 36A&B, 39A&B, 40, and 46 are active, 37 and 41 are under construction for Ares (probably) and Delta IV respectively. So we could have 2-3 pads for big lifts, and 3-4 pads for utility launches. This makes some 3-8 week turnarounds practical, and some shorter.
6. Some rockets have different prep times. I suspect the goal of the Ares-type launch vehicle is to get it into a rapid cycle, but I dunno if Atlas, Atlas-Centaur, and Delta can be prepped that quickly. However, if you tell them you need 15 Delta launches a year, I be they can do it.
7. Now to get some payload for these. Certainly, sending a new set of Mars Rovers up would be cheapo science. I bet the guys at ASU could have them ready in a year. How about sending a set of them to a Saturn moon? Need bigger panels of course, and improved radios, but maybe send a Surveyor-style satellite up there also as a multipurpose mapper and relay? More solar expeditions? Venus has been neglected. replacement and maybe even return and refurbishing of some communications birds? There are plenty of projects.
8. Benefits; Regular routine launching gets everyone in the mode of a business-as-usual launch team. Practice makes perfect. Small problems should be detected and resolved. Obviously big problems get attention and maybe even a stand-down to work the problem. A multitude of small payloads spreads the potential loss, though in some cases I bet the vehicle is more expensive than the payload, if small science is a goal. And, and, maybe there builds pressure for more reusable vehicles. Routine launching makes the ISS easier to maintain, in a way, if you have regular smaller deliveries. Losing one doesn't hurt so much, and repairs can be done faster. Faster crew exchanges might be useful, especially if you just send a specialist up for a 3-week project, knowing they will be able to go back up in 6 months. You can work to improve experiments in a way you can't much do now with the expense and time needed to send up crew and equipment.
Can we hope there is some economy of scale? I'm not sure how important that is, since I think NASA should be getting a LOT more money, but I'm a space wonk.
Then again, maybe Rutan and Branson team up and make a servicable small payload launch version of the White Knight, and we get competition.
Thinking this through, NASA could probably do a lot of launches with not too much problem. And we could build or rebuild a few pads...
Yup. My wife's Curve will go three days, and would longer but she drives to work through the desert where there is no service. Hunting for service DRAINS the battery.
I know of at least 4 towers in the Phoenix area that do not hand off gracefully at least 80% of the time during peak periods. Probably a capacity issue with neighboring towers. UMTS here has interesting moments when it fails to EDGE, sometimes for days. Caling CS is pointless, it never gets escalated before it is fixed.
"What problems? What enhancements? I can browse the Internet on my phone pretty well without any proxy."
Apparently, you do NOT have a BB.
And for what it's worth, I had to set my user agent to a desktop version to get iGoogle to display properly on my G1. Safari handles that fine, if you make a change, I believe, but Google messed with iGoogle pages 8-9 months ago and tried to jack up phone browsers with mobile-enhanced pages (that means 'minimal' for you RAZR users out there).
But many phone browsers are just not as capable as an iPhone or Android, like RIM's browsers for instance. The BIS proxy helps with this, especially with Javascript. I dunno about Flash, since Adobe can't make it work on Android 1.0, 1.1, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, and 2.1. Some phones have it slammed in there by the carrier, and Cyanogen I think now has that in the base ROM he puts out. I will root my phone soon to get that and waste even more bandwidth.
What newer release? Can you actually delete POP emails, empty the trash, and have them gone? Does Yahoo Mail work or do you need a premium account?
I still see reports from Google Codesite issue #1507 for every Android platform I am aware of that is in release. No fixes for these errors, and no reports of magical resolution for typical IMAP sync errors.
"The only confusing part to me is why people buy themselves a non-corporate blackberry."
Because, as you implied in your post, BlackBerry phones 'just work'. Most of the time.
Push e-mail? A BIS phone works splendidly. BIS handles the actual polling. Even OWA seems to work fo those of us without BB servers at the home office. Ask your favorite Android user how their POP/IMAP email is working. Full disclosure; I am an Android user, G-1 on Donut. iPhone users, I have no idea how you POP mail works, but it can't be too bad or you all would have ditched... wait, nevermind.
Web browsing? Very well done, considering the platform, since your BES is essentially a proxy server that solves some problems and gives you an enhanced experience. BIS does this also, just not as customizable as having a BES of your own.
BIS is a good idea, though it does expose the single-point-of-failure issue. But, consider your cell service in general:
- Most of us forget that the first single-point-of-failure is probably a cell tower. Yep, you might have two or three that can serve you, but if the backhaul from your tower is fritzed, you might have to wait until you get paroled from that tower, and move one to one that isn't hosed.
- The next single-point-of-failure is probably a metro area uplink for your carrier. I don't know for sure, but I suspect redundancy here is not universal.
- God forbid your carrier is architected like T-Mobile, or your single-point-of-failure is either a GSM service that has to be responsive or your phone is doing rock imitations, or a similar CDMA. I hear CDMA doesn't have the same architecture, but if your carrier can't authenticate you to the network, u b hosed.
RIM has had more than its share of outages over the last two years, but they have been notable because of the popularity of the platform. I ditched my BB to try Android. My wife has not been affected by either outage this month - be they natiowide or global or whatever. Her BB Curve hasn't missed a beat. Lucky I guess. And she would not like my G1, or Andriod, at all. Too much fuss. She just wants mail and minimal web when she wants it.
Dump on RIM if you want, but their platform works very well. Outages aside, it is a superior corporate solution, and makes most other platforms look like pants. Wait, are there ANY other corporate platforms?
"In a four-page letter sent to Holder, Grayson accuses Langley of lying to federal elections and requests that she be fined and imprisoned for five years."
And what in that statement is either unfair or unbalanced?
You could at least serve up a helping of fact with your irrationality, eh? If that statement is your basis for calling Fox News unfair and/or unbalanced, you are at least a zip code away from reality.
Please, you don't need to make stuff up. Politics, news, the media, and journalism are pretty much fracked up in America. The plain facts are more than enough to make your point without this apparent disconnect.
"This would effect who could donate to her committee and how much"
No, you should have used the word 'would'. I suspect if I send in a contribution for supporting the candidate who will oppose an idiot congressman from Arizona (my home state, and certainly no lack of idiot congressmen here), they will take my money and that is good enough to upset this moron's premise.
What they *actually* spend the money on will be irrelevant, so long as it's to further their campaigning goals. As if any prominent Democrat dares complain about misuse of PAC money. Their supporters offer plenty of examples to compare to this.
Really, you couldn't unload DOS. Novell 3x servers let you 'remove DOS' and free up a little low RAM. Not so with Windows.
Technically, you're mostly correct. But DOS was still there, and real-mode existed. Floppy drivers for instance, and other hardware demanded the DOS calls.
Windows up to WfW3.11 was a user environment. MS-DOS/PC-DOS were the OS choices.
Of course, Windows 1.x up to 3.0 was somewhat limited by CGA and VGA displays. Garish is what you get with 16 colors. At 256, you just get stark. After that, you get displays useful for pr0n. And Doom.
That would be a good choice, but I was expecting people to think of Bangor, Ireland, what with the Antiphonary and all.
But Bangor, Maine was probably named after Bangor, Ireland, incorrectly as the Rev. Seth Noble might have been humming the hymn 'Bangor', and spoke out its name, instead of the intended city name of Sunbury. Which is, actually, a good choice in my opinion. Would have spared us all the 'banger' jokes. And much mispronunciation, which seems to have plagued the fair city for some time.
What's in a name, anyways? There are towns named Moscow, Mexico, Peru, Canaan, China, New Sweden, and more national names I can't remember immediately.
And of course, Indian names - Millinocket, Kenduskeag, Whitipitlock, so many more. Kennbunkport, of course.
Though I think Pennsylvania has the whackiest names...
Slashdot Mirror
Someone else by now must have pointed out that a DX33 80386 is probably not what Linus bought.
He probably bought a 486-DX33.
I know that the first version of Linux I ever ran I installed on my 486-DX25, with 4MB RAM and two 40MB SCSI drives, which was running NetWare 3.01 at the time. what a bear, Slackware 0.9 was a struggle but I got it out of a book called 'the Internet CD' by Vivian Veou. What an awesome book!
Then I got a 486-DX2/66 and another 4MB RAM. And some bigger drives. And I 'demoted' the DX25 to 'just' Linux.
For a while I was running MySQL, PHP, Apache, and Perl on both NetWare and Linux. Was fun. Making Squid work like BorderManager was impossible, but Squid actually did what I wanted. BorderManager did enhance my Internet experience, mostly by blocking doubleclick and many other ad sites, back when that was easy. But I had my own email server out there running either Red Hat or Fedora for over 12 years, probably more. Now it's hosted, and I miss updating it and fussing over the hosts.deny and Sendmail settings. Well, not that much, I guess.
After about NetWare 5.x, the thrill was gone. But Linux is not. Thanks, Linus.
I'm not saying 'give up'. Far from it. Do something productive:
- Re-establish onshore manufacturing. As in stop penalizing offshoring with tax, immigration, and other policies.
- Educate ourselves. A local newspaper ad claims that in Arizona, if you eat at a chain restaraunt, $17 of every $100 of your bill stays in the local economy, while if you eat at a locally-owned restaraunt, $47 of every $100 stays. I dunno or care about the exact numbers. Buying goods made in foreign countries can't be as productive or profitable to our economy as buying them made here. And yet, I wonder how that works with automobiles....
- Change the attitude. Maybe we can't make crap in the U.S. that is competitively priced with foreign crap. Ok, at least lets focus on the right products. Perhaps flat-panel displays, consumer electronics, and clothing?
- Also, understand the reality (point 2 revisited). Why do Nike etc. assemble sneakers in Vietnam? Besides cheap labor, they avoid problems with regulatory agencies regarding working conditions such as hours, lighting, pollution. Just the adhesives used are often either banned or conditions controlled so that it is much cheaper to manufacture overseas and avoid the protections. How can we convince Vietnam to raise their standards so that we can effectively take back that business? Not likely. So perhaps we need to work with manufacturers to create products and processes that are economically viable in the U.S. Or deal with it and see if a sneaker maker exists in the U.S. And one does. New Balance.
It is hard to find stuff NOT made in China. I hate buying shoes, because no matter the brand, they all seem to be made in China. I treasure the shirts I have made in India, Bangladesh, even Brunei, though of course some of these countries are not models of freedom and tolerance. But lately, anything but China has been my goal. It's been a while since I coudl find any made in the U.S., even Brazil or Puerto Rico, where the plants in my former home state went to. It ain't easy.
But give up? Nope.
No, it's saying that if you stop shopping at Wal-Mart, you'll stop buying stuff made in China, and so stop financing their human-rights abuses.
Wwhich is wrong twice:
1. China was committing human rights abuses long before prosperity, even before Mao. Cutting off the money will NOT make things better.
2. You cannot avoid buying stuff made in China, unless you pay very close attention to what you buy and where. And even then, you will be buying some stuff made in China, and made with stuff gotten from China.
We need to lose the 'don't buy Chinese stuff' mentality, and stop discouraging industries from making stuff here in the U.S.
We could be buying stuff made in Japan and South Korea, and Taiwan, but even those industries are beholden to China too often.
This will take decades to fix.
"I think Cook County may be the only county in the country that is legally permitted to levy its own sales tax, but I'm not sure"
In Arizona, they call it a 'privilege tax', but yes, it is a county sales tax.
In any county that wants to here.
In Maine, counties share in tax revenues. Just a different collection scheme.
Really? Go back to your fvwm desktop and stop the rumor-mongering. Ok?
In a few weeks, we will have heard every crticism and praise of Avatar.
It's anti-technology.
It glorifies technology.
It is anti-military.
It isn't anti-military, that's not a military force, it's mercenaries.
It's anti-corporation.
No, it's anti-consumption.
No, it's anti-technology.
This is only one small loop. There are others, and they intersect.
I liked the movie a lot (saw the 3D Saturday night). But:
- The 3D has a ways to go to be perfect. Some scenes, especially those of the transport with everyone waking up, and those of the link room, do not seem to take 3D very well. Other scenes took good advantage, and reached out to me. I sat far right 1/3 up in the auditorium. If anyone tells me I should have sat center stage, well, then that 3D has a lot of work to do. You should get the same experience in any seat other than the poor blighters underneath the screen, or it isn't serving all your patrons. Which is cool.
- The story was somewhat predictable but then again I've been reading Sci-Fi for about 40 years, and truly inventive plots are few and far between.
- It was told well, which makes up for the plot.
- The effects were truly wonderful. But let's be honest. At least one other Na'vi should get dirty in everyday life, right? Effects get a 9.0 from me for lifelike rendering. Better than Star Wars, with the sad cels sticking out.
- If this is the future of cinema, we will get a lot of 3D crap soon. Crap is still crap. Effects are still effects.
Overall, I would like to see it again, but may not - my wife will NOT go again.
It certainly LOOKS like $500mil, but is it worth it? Maybe...
"Soviet defense spending was flat throughout the '80s"
Citation needed.
That is one of the dillemas of the Internet. So perhaps localized vendors need to come to grips with the problem of advertising on global media. This was not much of a problem when newspapers were essentially local, exceptions being the WSJ etc.
But to hear mass media such as Fox News complain about this would be truly unfortunate. And to hear their web advertisers complain would be ludicrous.
Of course, local newspapers that could attract global (or even far-flung) advertisers based on their attraction to remote readers don't have much to complain about. Of courese they can always say no.
Just no complaining about how many people hit your site, ok? Sheesh.
Actually, I closed my post pointing out that the White Knight project could become competitive. And yes, other commercial ventures might come out if there was the opportunity to compete for launches.
But the money is merely a choice. NASA is a small part of even the minimal Federal budget, not counting the current expansion thereof.
And when you complain that I ignore the commercial launch industry, then earlier in your post you point out that Atlas and Delta are commercial designs. I suspect we could agree that as EELVs, they are old and inefficient designs, save for their reliability. Heavy, un-reusable, old school in a way that costs more. But they are well understood and reliable, so long as you remember to use the right software load and rulers.
I distinguish between Atlas and Atlas-Centaur on the basis of payload. They are indeed both Atlas on the bottom. How old is that vehicle design? Didn't I watch Atlas launches in the Mercury program?
The money is an investment, on par with healthcare and roads. We made incredible progress because of the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs. Something similar would take at least 15 years to complete, and would leave behind a relatively huge science infrastructure that would change the world again. Those engineers would be the ones solving pollution, energy, and transportation problems for the world. Unless other nations do this, and then we might finally end up buying the really cool stuff from someone else. I want MAKE and SELL the realy cool stuff. Not iPods, but ultra high efficiency personal vehicles. Not personal computing, but massively parallel processing power for the masses. Not the next MRI machines, but telesurgery. Not wind farms, but thorium reactors. Not sustainable agriculture, but completely portable agriculture.
We learn how to make those things not by going back to the Moon, but by going to Mars, by building a second ISS, by making space travel routine, by solving problems we don't have right now with techniques and technology that we can't quite imagine now.
But we need that imagination. Do we, as a nation, possess that imagination any more?
But we can at least speculate on a realistic plan for frequent launches:
1. Adopting a limited number of launch vehicle types. Atlas, Titan, Delta, Ares or whatever it becomes, and maybe a commercial design or two in there, but probably just one. The Virgin/Scaled Composites projects are out of scope for this, let them do their own thing.
2. After certifying new designs and man-rating them, we move from testing to 'production'.
3. Ramp up launches so that you are probably only launching every 3-5 weeks realistically.
4. Allow for more launches when needed.
5. Multiple pads are in use. Currently, pads 36A&B, 39A&B, 40, and 46 are active, 37 and 41 are under construction for Ares (probably) and Delta IV respectively. So we could have 2-3 pads for big lifts, and 3-4 pads for utility launches. This makes some 3-8 week turnarounds practical, and some shorter.
6. Some rockets have different prep times. I suspect the goal of the Ares-type launch vehicle is to get it into a rapid cycle, but I dunno if Atlas, Atlas-Centaur, and Delta can be prepped that quickly. However, if you tell them you need 15 Delta launches a year, I be they can do it.
7. Now to get some payload for these. Certainly, sending a new set of Mars Rovers up would be cheapo science. I bet the guys at ASU could have them ready in a year. How about sending a set of them to a Saturn moon? Need bigger panels of course, and improved radios, but maybe send a Surveyor-style satellite up there also as a multipurpose mapper and relay? More solar expeditions? Venus has been neglected. replacement and maybe even return and refurbishing of some communications birds? There are plenty of projects.
8. Benefits; Regular routine launching gets everyone in the mode of a business-as-usual launch team. Practice makes perfect. Small problems should be detected and resolved. Obviously big problems get attention and maybe even a stand-down to work the problem. A multitude of small payloads spreads the potential loss, though in some cases I bet the vehicle is more expensive than the payload, if small science is a goal. And, and, maybe there builds pressure for more reusable vehicles. Routine launching makes the ISS easier to maintain, in a way, if you have regular smaller deliveries. Losing one doesn't hurt so much, and repairs can be done faster. Faster crew exchanges might be useful, especially if you just send a specialist up for a 3-week project, knowing they will be able to go back up in 6 months. You can work to improve experiments in a way you can't much do now with the expense and time needed to send up crew and equipment.
Can we hope there is some economy of scale? I'm not sure how important that is, since I think NASA should be getting a LOT more money, but I'm a space wonk.
Then again, maybe Rutan and Branson team up and make a servicable small payload launch version of the White Knight, and we get competition.
Thinking this through, NASA could probably do a lot of launches with not too much problem. And we could build or rebuild a few pads...
1. My G1 actually polls my POP server directly. And it fails.
2. T-Mobile's authentication servers went down in that outage. If Verizon suffered the same outage, your call to customer service will in vain.
Yup. My wife's Curve will go three days, and would longer but she drives to work through the desert where there is no service. Hunting for service DRAINS the battery.
I know of at least 4 towers in the Phoenix area that do not hand off gracefully at least 80% of the time during peak periods. Probably a capacity issue with neighboring towers. UMTS here has interesting moments when it fails to EDGE, sometimes for days. Caling CS is pointless, it never gets escalated before it is fixed.
"What problems? What enhancements? I can browse the Internet on my phone pretty well without any proxy."
Apparently, you do NOT have a BB.
And for what it's worth, I had to set my user agent to a desktop version to get iGoogle to display properly on my G1. Safari handles that fine, if you make a change, I believe, but Google messed with iGoogle pages 8-9 months ago and tried to jack up phone browsers with mobile-enhanced pages (that means 'minimal' for you RAZR users out there).
But many phone browsers are just not as capable as an iPhone or Android, like RIM's browsers for instance. The BIS proxy helps with this, especially with Javascript. I dunno about Flash, since Adobe can't make it work on Android 1.0, 1.1, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, and 2.1. Some phones have it slammed in there by the carrier, and Cyanogen I think now has that in the base ROM he puts out. I will root my phone soon to get that and waste even more bandwidth.
What newer release? Can you actually delete POP emails, empty the trash, and have them gone? Does Yahoo Mail work or do you need a premium account?
I still see reports from Google Codesite issue #1507 for every Android platform I am aware of that is in release. No fixes for these errors, and no reports of magical resolution for typical IMAP sync errors.
"The only confusing part to me is why people buy themselves a non-corporate blackberry."
Because, as you implied in your post, BlackBerry phones 'just work'. Most of the time.
Push e-mail? A BIS phone works splendidly. BIS handles the actual polling. Even OWA seems to work fo those of us without BB servers at the home office. Ask your favorite Android user how their POP/IMAP email is working. Full disclosure; I am an Android user, G-1 on Donut. iPhone users, I have no idea how you POP mail works, but it can't be too bad or you all would have ditched... wait, nevermind.
Web browsing? Very well done, considering the platform, since your BES is essentially a proxy server that solves some problems and gives you an enhanced experience. BIS does this also, just not as customizable as having a BES of your own.
BIS is a good idea, though it does expose the single-point-of-failure issue. But, consider your cell service in general:
- Most of us forget that the first single-point-of-failure is probably a cell tower. Yep, you might have two or three that can serve you, but if the backhaul from your tower is fritzed, you might have to wait until you get paroled from that tower, and move one to one that isn't hosed.
- The next single-point-of-failure is probably a metro area uplink for your carrier. I don't know for sure, but I suspect redundancy here is not universal.
- God forbid your carrier is architected like T-Mobile, or your single-point-of-failure is either a GSM service that has to be responsive or your phone is doing rock imitations, or a similar CDMA. I hear CDMA doesn't have the same architecture, but if your carrier can't authenticate you to the network, u b hosed.
RIM has had more than its share of outages over the last two years, but they have been notable because of the popularity of the platform. I ditched my BB to try Android. My wife has not been affected by either outage this month - be they natiowide or global or whatever. Her BB Curve hasn't missed a beat. Lucky I guess. And she would not like my G1, or Andriod, at all. Too much fuss. She just wants mail and minimal web when she wants it.
Dump on RIM if you want, but their platform works very well. Outages aside, it is a superior corporate solution, and makes most other platforms look like pants. Wait, are there ANY other corporate platforms?
"In a four-page letter sent to Holder, Grayson accuses Langley of lying to federal elections and requests that she be fined and imprisoned for five years."
And what in that statement is either unfair or unbalanced?
You could at least serve up a helping of fact with your irrationality, eh? If that statement is your basis for calling Fox News unfair and/or unbalanced, you are at least a zip code away from reality.
Please, you don't need to make stuff up. Politics, news, the media, and journalism are pretty much fracked up in America. The plain facts are more than enough to make your point without this apparent disconnect.
"This would effect who could donate to her committee and how much"
No, you should have used the word 'would'. I suspect if I send in a contribution for supporting the candidate who will oppose an idiot congressman from Arizona (my home state, and certainly no lack of idiot congressmen here), they will take my money and that is good enough to upset this moron's premise.
What they *actually* spend the money on will be irrelevant, so long as it's to further their campaigning goals. As if any prominent Democrat dares complain about misuse of PAC money. Their supporters offer plenty of examples to compare to this.
And Windows/386 made no real-mode calls?
Even 3.x did that.
Really, you couldn't unload DOS. Novell 3x servers let you 'remove DOS' and free up a little low RAM. Not so with Windows.
Technically, you're mostly correct. But DOS was still there, and real-mode existed. Floppy drivers for instance, and other hardware demanded the DOS calls.
This is about OSes.
Windows up to WfW3.11 was a user environment. MS-DOS/PC-DOS were the OS choices.
Of course, Windows 1.x up to 3.0 was somewhat limited by CGA and VGA displays. Garish is what you get with 16 colors. At 256, you just get stark. After that, you get displays useful for pr0n. And Doom.
Piss off one of those hucksters and see who impacts your life..
I fell off my dinosaur the first time I heard that. Time to upgrade, my friend.
That would be a good choice, but I was expecting people to think of Bangor, Ireland, what with the Antiphonary and all.
But Bangor, Maine was probably named after Bangor, Ireland, incorrectly as the Rev. Seth Noble might have been humming the hymn 'Bangor', and spoke out its name, instead of the intended city name of Sunbury. Which is, actually, a good choice in my opinion. Would have spared us all the 'banger' jokes. And much mispronunciation, which seems to have plagued the fair city for some time.
What's in a name, anyways? There are towns named Moscow, Mexico, Peru, Canaan, China, New Sweden, and more national names I can't remember immediately.
And of course, Indian names - Millinocket, Kenduskeag, Whitipitlock, so many more. Kennbunkport, of course.
Though I think Pennsylvania has the whackiest names...
There are probably 49 Springfields. Not one in Hawaii, I bet.
Give it up. I was born in Bangor. Which one comes to mind first?
I moved to Portland. No, not that one, the other one.
I did a lot ofbusiness in Augusta. That one is not known for golf.
If you just say 'Washington', most people think 'D.C.', and rightly so, since it impacts their lives much more.
A common mistake, get over it. Or move where the rain doesn't make you so cranky. That would NOT be Portland, Maine.