"If you had had a PubSub.com SEC Edgar subscription, you would have been one of the first to see this filing." - was this advertisement strictly necessary?
You can most certainly get a basic phone here in Mexico, since we have a larger need for cheap models like low-end Nokias (3300 series and 1100 are popular) and the Sony Ericsson T106, which are basic no-frills phones, good for making calls and sending SMS (which is really useful) and nothing more. B&W screens and monophonic ringtones are the norm at this level. Just cuz they don't sell in the US doesn't mean they don't exist. And while cameras I think are superfluous, color screens and poly ringtones are really nice to have, and connectivity options like bluetooth and infrared enable one to use the phone as a communications tool (which it is!) for your digital devices.
I'll never forgive CMP for running Byte Magazine into the ground only 4 months after I subscribed. They robbed me of 8 months' worth of subscription money and they even had the nerve to suggest switching my subscription to Windows Magazine. The horror! at least Byte was more encompassing and had general-interest articles about other platforms and computer science in general, not just Windows blabber and publicity. The thieves.. filthy little thieves... Don't ever let CMP run your magazine.
is not the phones in themselves, it's that people have no education and no respect for everyone else. It's a simple matter of not being annoying: don't use your cellphone when doing so turns you into a hazard for other people (driving), be smart when choosing the phone's alerts (don't select your loudest, most annoying ringtone when you're at a classical concert) and for god's freaking sake, DON'T YELL WHEN ON THE PHONE!!
Well, you wanted worldwide data so here's a point for you. In Mexico you can get ADSL service from Telmex (phone company) under the Prodigy Infinitum brand; they charge $499 pesos a month for 256 kbps speed, 899 a month for 512 kbps speed, and $4599 a month for 2 mbps. Translated to US dollars (about $10.25 pesos per dollar) that comes to about 49, 88 and 449 dollars per month respectively.
You can also get broadband via the cable TV company, this costs about 249 pesos for the company I know of (Cablevision), this is about 24.50 bucks a month.
Keep in mind you already need to have the "basic" service, either a phone line (for the phone company option) or cable for your tv (for cable modem access). These basics cost about the same, about 20 bucks a month.
I have a Toshiba portege 3010 with a 10-inch 800x600 screen and use windowmaker without a problem. Icons are not that big. I also guess you could disable the dock; now that I think of it, I hardly ever use it.
expectations were high for an Apple PDA which would compete with the Palm and PocketPC. Instead, Apple gave us the iPod, which CmdrTaco called a "lame mp3 player". Is it lame? maybe, but it's been quite successful.
Check out Request Tracker. It's not constrained to problem reports or bugs, it can be used for general requests, and you can customize the hell out of it, it's easily the most versatile tracking system I've seen. Chances are you'll be able to adapt it to your needs.
As for phone or in-person requests, all you need is the discipline to capture the request in RT, or perhaps a policy that all requests must be entered into the system either via the web interface or by e-mail. Perhaps my only complaint with RT is that it's somewhat cumbersome to set up, but the instructions will take you step by step, just be sure to follow them closely.
TAP is a protocol that enables one to connect via modem to a special dialup number and interface directly with the pager service. In essence this allows one to talk directly with the pager system at AT&T and send messages from there.
Why is this important? assume you'd normally use the pager provider's web page to send messages. This is very easy to script using curl or several other tools. However, what if the failed service is your internet connection, router or something else that prevents you from reaching the web server and sending the message this way?
This is where TAP comes to the rescue, since we bypass the network and require only a modem and a working, standard phone line. If both the network connection and the phone line failed at the same time, or worse, the provider's paging system is off-line, then it means a major disaster has struck and any reports about network condition are most likely futile.
My recommendation would be to get a cell phone that can receive SMS and modify your monitoring scripts so they use your cell phone provider's web page to send messages. Then get a dial up access account, one that doesn't depend on your network being up, and configure things so that, if your main network link is down, your scripts first start a connection on your alternate dial up account, in order to reach your provider's web page and alert you. Another option, one that would only depend on the POTS and your cell phone being operational, would involve rigging the Festival voice synthesizer with mgetty+voice to enable the system to call you on your cell phone directly and deliver the failure message by voice. Still, I think that the redundancy built into the first solution is good enough.
the last starfighter is THE landmark movie for CGI effects, in that all of the special effects were done with a computer (a cray supercomputer which was tied up with the production for several months). The movie itself is quite bad and the CGI loks primitive by today's standards (heck, my desktop PC can render better graphics) but its influence was undeniable and, perhaps until Pixar and the advent of the full-length, entirely CGI movie, it was the most important milestone for CGI use in movies.
as someone else already mentioned, the DVD includes a very detailed documentary on all this.
Since water boils at 100 degrees C, you can't really have water at any higher temperature (unless it's pressurized).
Part of the problem is, coffee has to be brewed with really hot water (90-95 celsius is the recommended temperature). This is in order to get proper flavor extraction. So, coffee-wise, mcdonalds was right in brewing it that hot. Now, if you really want them to use colder water, you might as well order a frozen cappuccino or something like that!
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CDs".
A 747 has a cargo volume of 703 cubic meters. Assuming you can fit 384 50-disc spindles per cubic meter, that means the 747 can carry 13497600 CDs. Let's say they're recordable DVDs holding 4.7 GB of information apiece. That would be 63438720 GB of information, or a little over 63 petabytes (63,000 terabytes). Over a 20-hour flight, that translates into 881.093 GB/s of bandwidth. A lot of bandwidth indeed.
IN the early 90's, Mexico's formerly state-owned telephone company, Telmex, was privatised. Previous to this process, service was abysmal, as befits any government branch; you could expect to wait 3 months for a new phone line, technology lagged behind by a big margin, customer attention at offices was pathetic with queues of 100's of people.
After it got privatised, things improved significantly for customers, but that's because they were so bad, they had no place to go but up (improvement). With private capital infussion, Telmex modernized its technology, hired more and more competent staff, and started offering new services. This sounds good, however it's really not.
The problem when you privatise something like this is that you get an "instant monopoly", and that's what Telmex is. With 95% market share for land lines, over 50% long-distance, and 70% cell phone share, all competitors face an uphill battle, plus they also have to depend on Telmex's infrastructure to provide their services. Telmex owns the land line infrastructure and, as such, is the only provider of ADSL service, leaving all other competitors at a serious disadvantage.
All in all, it would appear to be a bad idea to do this; a possible option would have been to sell the former state-owned company in parts, to avoid having a single point of control. Another would be having better government controls over the company (right now the federal telecommunications commision, COFETEL, is basically a puppet, unable to put telmex in check for their anticompetitive behavior). Because right now it looks like all competitors will eventually be out of business, either by bankruptcy or giving up on competing with a monopoly such as Telmex, and then the Telmex will probably have no incentive to keep innovating, which so far has been the only positive consequence of the privatisation. (ok, and they now install new phone lines in an average of 10 days)
I use SpamProbe, it's quite mature, actively maintained, has good performance and plenty of features. Of course this depends on your platform, for Windows ive heard good things about POPFile.
a few months before it got cancelled, Byte magazine published a great article entitled crash-proof computing, exploring the reasons why PCs are so tremendously unreliable. This goes beyond merely stating the known fact that Windows is horribly unstable and recognizing Linux particularly as a more stable solution; the article compares the entire PC architecture, design and current manufacturing and implementation techniques to big-iron systems like mainframes, with "5 nines" availability, MTBF of 20 years (yes, that means the computer is spec'd by the manufacturer to crash only once every 20 years), and other such techniques meant to justify those 6 and 7-figure pricetags.
I'm assuming the S series is what's otherwise known as "digital elph". If these have anything in common with the traditional Canon Elph, I'd advise caution. I once dropped my Elph from about 1/2 foot on a sandy beach. No impact damage, but a bit of sand got on the lens retracting mechanism which started making horrible grinding noises and died on me 3 days later. Cost me 150 bucks to have the thing fixed. It wasn't even that much sand. I've treated the thing extremely carefully since then. This Elph is 5 years old and their designs might be sturdier, but moving parts are always a point of failure.
Mexico's only DSL provider, Telmex/Prodigy, has been disallowing use of their SMTP servers to relay any mail not having a local @prodigy.net.mx part. The problem comes for a lot of people who connect via Prodigy DSL, but have other domains, hosted elsewhere, and want to have addresses @mycompany.com or similar. Whether Prodigy did this as a measure to coerce customers into getting "integral" solutions from them and kicking other ISPs and consultants out of the game is open to debate.
So far, the option we've been using for our customers is configuring a local SMTP server which then delivers directly to destination. We use Linux for this, and configure it so that it only allows incoming SMTP from the local network.
Recently, however, customers started reporting lots of bounced messages. Further diagnostics indicate several large mail providers are now blocking SMTP connections from dynamically assigned DSL IP addresses. I personally checked this happening with yahoo, AOL and Earthlink.
It sucks that the Internet is becoming such a hostile place; I think of those quiet towns where everybody can leave their doors unlocked at night. Now it's become like any large city where doing such a thing is equivalent to giving away all your belongings. It also sucks that Prodigy (and, doubtless, other ISPs worldwide) won't let customers use their SMTP servers; this is, after all, a service I'm paying for. Fairly, we should get a discount for NOT using their servers, given that they're completely useless for our configuration.
For now, the solution we've devised is using SMTP AUTH to let the customers' email be sent using our own SMTP server, which normally won't allow SMTP relaying from addresses outside our own IP network. However this feels like a hack and puts additional configuration burden on us.
Is spam the ultimate cause for all this hostility on the net? maybe so. And if that's the case, here's another reason why perhaps the next war we see should be the one against spammers.
chrooting can accomplish much of what you want. Even if the process in question has an exploit, it is used, and the process gets compromised, the damage is contained to the chroot jail. And it's easy to find chrooted versions of popular (vulnerable) services. ftp, httpd, probably even sendmail.
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"If you had had a PubSub.com SEC Edgar subscription, you would have been one of the first to see this filing." - was this advertisement strictly necessary?
down to the wording "simplicity of dv with beauty of hd"... :)
just wait till this guy gets into a nigerian scam and loses everything.. i bet the wife will be thrilled.
I kid you not, altough this time it was my idea. Get a good pineapple with a large crest of green leaves. Beats a flower basket any day.
get some penguin mints from thinkgeek and stop pretending you like coffee.
You can most certainly get a basic phone here in Mexico, since we have a larger need for cheap models like low-end Nokias (3300 series and 1100 are popular) and the Sony Ericsson T106, which are basic no-frills phones, good for making calls and sending SMS (which is really useful) and nothing more. B&W screens and monophonic ringtones are the norm at this level. Just cuz they don't sell in the US doesn't mean they don't exist. And while cameras I think are superfluous, color screens and poly ringtones are really nice to have, and connectivity options like bluetooth and infrared enable one to use the phone as a communications tool (which it is!) for your digital devices.
I'll never forgive CMP for running Byte Magazine into the ground only 4 months after I subscribed. They robbed me of 8 months' worth of subscription money and they even had the nerve to suggest switching my subscription to Windows Magazine. The horror! at least Byte was more encompassing and had general-interest articles about other platforms and computer science in general, not just Windows blabber and publicity. The thieves.. filthy little thieves... Don't ever let CMP run your magazine.
is not the phones in themselves, it's that people have no education and no respect for everyone else. It's a simple matter of not being annoying: don't use your cellphone when doing so turns you into a hazard for other people (driving), be smart when choosing the phone's alerts (don't select your loudest, most annoying ringtone when you're at a classical concert) and for god's freaking sake, DON'T YELL WHEN ON THE PHONE!!
Mod me redundant cuz I'm here voting as another person who won't miss Enterprise a bit. It's boring! I don't even know why I watch it anymore.
Well, you wanted worldwide data so here's a point for you. In Mexico you can get ADSL service from Telmex (phone company) under the Prodigy Infinitum brand; they charge $499 pesos a month for 256 kbps speed, 899 a month for 512 kbps speed, and $4599 a month for 2 mbps. Translated to US dollars (about $10.25 pesos per dollar) that comes to about 49, 88 and 449 dollars per month respectively.
You can also get broadband via the cable TV company, this costs about 249 pesos for the company I know of (Cablevision), this is about 24.50 bucks a month.
Keep in mind you already need to have the "basic" service, either a phone line (for the phone company option) or cable for your tv (for cable modem access). These basics cost about the same, about 20 bucks a month.
I have a Toshiba portege 3010 with a 10-inch 800x600 screen and use windowmaker without a problem. Icons are not that big. I also guess you could disable the dock; now that I think of it, I hardly ever use it.
expectations were high for an Apple PDA which would compete with the Palm and PocketPC. Instead, Apple gave us the iPod, which CmdrTaco called a "lame mp3 player". Is it lame? maybe, but it's been quite successful.
I've had great success booting with knoppix and using gnu parted for this. It's terminal-based but works fine for me.
As for phone or in-person requests, all you need is the discipline to capture the request in RT, or perhaps a policy that all requests must be entered into the system either via the web interface or by e-mail. Perhaps my only complaint with RT is that it's somewhat cumbersome to set up, but the instructions will take you step by step, just be sure to follow them closely.
Why is this important? assume you'd normally use the pager provider's web page to send messages. This is very easy to script using curl or several other tools. However, what if the failed service is your internet connection, router or something else that prevents you from reaching the web server and sending the message this way?
This is where TAP comes to the rescue, since we bypass the network and require only a modem and a working, standard phone line. If both the network connection and the phone line failed at the same time, or worse, the provider's paging system is off-line, then it means a major disaster has struck and any reports about network condition are most likely futile.
My recommendation would be to get a cell phone that can receive SMS and modify your monitoring scripts so they use your cell phone provider's web page to send messages. Then get a dial up access account, one that doesn't depend on your network being up, and configure things so that, if your main network link is down, your scripts first start a connection on your alternate dial up account, in order to reach your provider's web page and alert you. Another option, one that would only depend on the POTS and your cell phone being operational, would involve rigging the Festival voice synthesizer with mgetty+voice to enable the system to call you on your cell phone directly and deliver the failure message by voice. Still, I think that the redundancy built into the first solution is good enough.
as someone else already mentioned, the DVD includes a very detailed documentary on all this.
Part of the problem is, coffee has to be brewed with really hot water (90-95 celsius is the recommended temperature). This is in order to get proper flavor extraction. So, coffee-wise, mcdonalds was right in brewing it that hot. Now, if you really want them to use colder water, you might as well order a frozen cappuccino or something like that!
A 747 has a cargo volume of 703 cubic meters. Assuming you can fit 384 50-disc spindles per cubic meter, that means the 747 can carry 13497600 CDs. Let's say they're recordable DVDs holding 4.7 GB of information apiece. That would be 63438720 GB of information, or a little over 63 petabytes (63,000 terabytes). Over a 20-hour flight, that translates into 881.093 GB/s of bandwidth. A lot of bandwidth indeed.
After it got privatised, things improved significantly for customers, but that's because they were so bad, they had no place to go but up (improvement). With private capital infussion, Telmex modernized its technology, hired more and more competent staff, and started offering new services. This sounds good, however it's really not.
The problem when you privatise something like this is that you get an "instant monopoly", and that's what Telmex is. With 95% market share for land lines, over 50% long-distance, and 70% cell phone share, all competitors face an uphill battle, plus they also have to depend on Telmex's infrastructure to provide their services. Telmex owns the land line infrastructure and, as such, is the only provider of ADSL service, leaving all other competitors at a serious disadvantage.
All in all, it would appear to be a bad idea to do this; a possible option would have been to sell the former state-owned company in parts, to avoid having a single point of control. Another would be having better government controls over the company (right now the federal telecommunications commision, COFETEL, is basically a puppet, unable to put telmex in check for their anticompetitive behavior). Because right now it looks like all competitors will eventually be out of business, either by bankruptcy or giving up on competing with a monopoly such as Telmex, and then the Telmex will probably have no incentive to keep innovating, which so far has been the only positive consequence of the privatisation. (ok, and they now install new phone lines in an average of 10 days)
I use SpamProbe, it's quite mature, actively maintained, has good performance and plenty of features. Of course this depends on your platform, for Windows ive heard good things about POPFile.
Overall a very good read, highly recommended.
OK, so here's the incentive we've all been waiting for, we should all migrate to BSD now. I swear by OpenBSD :)
it's meant to be funny.
I'm assuming the S series is what's otherwise known as "digital elph". If these have anything in common with the traditional Canon Elph, I'd advise caution. I once dropped my Elph from about 1/2 foot on a sandy beach. No impact damage, but a bit of sand got on the lens retracting mechanism which started making horrible grinding noises and died on me 3 days later. Cost me 150 bucks to have the thing fixed. It wasn't even that much sand. I've treated the thing extremely carefully since then. This Elph is 5 years old and their designs might be sturdier, but moving parts are always a point of failure.
So far, the option we've been using for our customers is configuring a local SMTP server which then delivers directly to destination. We use Linux for this, and configure it so that it only allows incoming SMTP from the local network.
Recently, however, customers started reporting lots of bounced messages. Further diagnostics indicate several large mail providers are now blocking SMTP connections from dynamically assigned DSL IP addresses. I personally checked this happening with yahoo, AOL and Earthlink.
It sucks that the Internet is becoming such a hostile place; I think of those quiet towns where everybody can leave their doors unlocked at night. Now it's become like any large city where doing such a thing is equivalent to giving away all your belongings. It also sucks that Prodigy (and, doubtless, other ISPs worldwide) won't let customers use their SMTP servers; this is, after all, a service I'm paying for. Fairly, we should get a discount for NOT using their servers, given that they're completely useless for our configuration.
For now, the solution we've devised is using SMTP AUTH to let the customers' email be sent using our own SMTP server, which normally won't allow SMTP relaying from addresses outside our own IP network. However this feels like a hack and puts additional configuration burden on us.
Is spam the ultimate cause for all this hostility on the net? maybe so. And if that's the case, here's another reason why perhaps the next war we see should be the one against spammers.
chrooting can accomplish much of what you want. Even if the process in question has an exploit, it is used, and the process gets compromised, the damage is contained to the chroot jail. And it's easy to find chrooted versions of popular (vulnerable) services. ftp, httpd, probably even sendmail.