The Amazon Marketplace, ZShops, etc., are a huge moneymaker for Amazon now. They are also a safety net for a lot of people who have lost their jobs.
Do the states that are pushing for sales tax collection really expect all of these small-scale sellers to set aside and remit taxes to the hundreds of separate jurisdictions in the USA? Or, do they expect Amazon to collect the tax based on where the 3rd party seller says they are located?
I am one of those people who listens to AM radio a lot because I like to listen to talk and news radio. There are a number of services on XM that appeal to people with such tastes:
BBC World Service
Fox News
CNN Headline News
ABC News and Talk
The Weather Channel
CNBC
CNNfn
Bloomberg News
CNET Radio
C-SPAN Radio
These are services that you can't get on the radio in 99 percent of the country, unless you use satellite radio. How many people will pay for this? Not many, but, this is probably another vertical market similar to over-the-road truckers.
I haven't bought an XM receiver because I don't think the service will survive in its present form, and I don't have the disposable income that I had prior to the recession.
I haven't seen this posted elsewhere in this discussion, but an AM radio station in NYC has already brought HD-Radio on-line. This is interesting because I don't know of any receiver I can buy the handles this service at the moment. If HD-Radio doesn't add to the programming options we receive, however, no consumer will care about it. Then, IMHO, all it will be is a long-term way for the broadcasters to reduce transmission costs.
GPRS gives you the "always-on" capability that would let you turn a Treo and a POP3 mailbox into a pager on steroids that is competitive with the Blackberry devices from RIM. GPRS would also provide you with the ability to develop services that were packet-oriented instead of call-oriented: things like instant messaging or network device monitoring.
FWIW, the Treo lets you use all of the other Palm applications (with the exception of Internet access) while a mobile phone call is in progress. So, you can make notes into your Palm when you are on the phone.
I am not sure whether GPRS will work while a voice call is in progress, once the GPRS upgrade is available. But, that would be great, wouldn't it?
I live in Central New Jersey, so I think I am in the same service area that you are. As far as I know, your only Treo-compatible service option in the New York / Philadelphia area today is VoiceStream. Cingular and AT&T Wireless are still TDMA in these markets. Supposedly, AT&T Wireless is on the verge of rolling out GSM, but they would not tell me what the deployment dates were in the New York and Philadelphia markets.
VoiceStream service has been very good in New Jersey. My Treo drops far fewer calls than my Nokia 8860 did on AT&T Wireless, particularly in Central and Southern New Jersey along the New Jersey Turnpike.
I was just as worried as you were about giving up TDMA for GSM. My advice is to check out a VoiceStream coverage map, and see if they say they have service where you spend most of your time. Sounds stupid, but that's how I got the courage up to try the Treo.
Regarding email service and the comparison between the Treo and a Blackberry, I have to tell you that the Blackberry is a better email device today. It will probably continue to be a better email device until the Treo gets GPRS support. Once the GPRS upgrade becomes available, then the questions will be:
How much GPRS service do you use?
How much will that add to your bill?
Will GPRS service be available throughout your provider's GSM coverage area?
I believe that the Treo 180 shipped in the United States is dual band (900/1900 mHz), see Treo specs.
Sorry if you think the review is too US-centric. I wanted to emphasize the current GSM network availability issues in the United States, without implying to Europeans and Asians that the phone wouldn't work for them. I believe the 900/1800 version offered in those areas works very well, and has fewer limitations than the US version.
There does not appear to be a provision for connecting the Treo to a laptop. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) What I would have liked is for the Treo to support Bluetooth and have it be switchable in the same way that the mobile phone feature is.
It feels the same to me as the keyboards on the Blackberry pagers from Research in Motion. The difference is in the size of the keyboard: the Treo keyboard is 2/3 to 3/4 of the size of the Blackberries. I should also point out that the Treo keyboard has slightly convex keytops which makes it easier for someone with large fingers to hit the right key. This is an improvement over the RIM 850 that I have.
Yes, you can turn off the cell phone and leave the PDA on. It works just like a normal Palm OS device at that point. All you do is hold down the Power button at the top of the unit until you hear a series of three decending musical tones.
Yes, CTDATA.com and RCNJ.org have their roots in Slash 0.3, although we made lots of modifications to run as we do today. My colleague Richard Ziegler and I spent two months working through that code line-by-line to get Slash 0.3 to work in the following configuration (drum roll please):
Solaris 2.7
Netscape Enterprise Server 3.6
Sybase 11.9.2
Don't try that at home.... One day soon our sites will make the jump to the current distro.
The leaders of the Slash project have always made me feel at home. I help out answering technical and non-technical questions whenever I can. And, both of our sites have been listed in the YASS list, despite the fact that they are not derived from the current distro. We're all in this together.
I have been using Mozilla 0.9.2.x since I upgraded my laptop to RedHat 7.2. If you use "Search Mail/News Messages" on a large mailbox, performance is bad. Has search speed been improved in subsequent major Mozilla builds?
Also, why is RedHat so far behind in terms of its adoption of Mozilla builds to its RedHat Network service?
My company became a customer of Comcast Business Communications over the summer, because our new office in Central New Jersey is out of range of DSL. We were very nervous about using a cable modem for our office's internet access. But, so far, things have worked out rather well.
Yes, Comcast does offer a business-class service. See the Comcast Business Communications site for more details. We have the Comcast business-class service. It works. We have discussed Comcast internet access issues extensively on CTDATA.com.
Save the talk of disenfrachisement. You may have lost a paycheck or two. OTOH, six or seven thousand people are dead. My aunt's brother, my friend's brother are among them. I'm looking for a job at the moment, as are many of you.
In all of these situations, people need the help of strangers in order to make it. Fair dealing is the foundation of all organized society. Now more than ever, we need to treat others the way we would like to be treated.
I apologize, but, I read the arbitrator's decision first. At the time I posted my first comment on the Slashdot article, I didn't realize that the the CNET article reported that the Federal judge contradicted the arbitrator. --
OK, now I see that the CNET article says that eReferee lost. But, the arbitration decision seems to contradict this.
Ah, I see now, the arbitrator's ruling was part of the ICANN dispute resolution process. Referee Magazine didn't like the result, went to Federal Court and won. And, since the ICANN process is non-binding, eReferee really lost.
Guys, if I understand this correctly, the Slashdot story really doesn't reflect what happened. --
The Network Computing Vulerability Assessment Scanner Article is very well written and is particularly helpful to server administrators who have not focused on security issues. I think the Slashdot article could be improved by citing the following passage from the review:
We set up 17 of
the most common and critical vulnerabilities out there, and not one
product detected them all.... The closest was the Nessus Security Scanner, which nailed
15 of the 17. But even one hole is too many. Because all the products
failed to identify key vulnerabilities, none of them received our Editor's
Choice award.
The comparison is quite detailed, considering the fact that it appears in a magazine that can be bought on the newsstand.
It may be a bit unfair to take the paragraph I cited out of context because the article goes on to do a good job of weighing the individual pros and cons of the highly rated scanners. Nevertheless, I think the article's key finding is that even the best of the tools they evaluated failed to catch all of the vulnerabilities that they had intentionally installed. Every opportunity should be taken to emphasize this point to the readers. --
Audible, Inc. publishes a lot of technology-related content in streaming audio formats. In the past, they have published presentations at conferences, speeches and speech series, audio versions of investment newsletters about technology (i.e. DEMOLetter from IDG), as well as straight-forward audiobooks.
The problems with Audible, from your perspective, are that they distribute content electronically and the services that you see on their Web Site are aimed at individuals. In addition, they use security on some formats of their audio programs that is supposed to restrict your ability to use it on many different players.
However, this company has changed its offerings several times since it began, and it has a loyal following among people who appreciate spoken word audio. I would recommend that your company contact Audible by phone or email and ask them if they have ever made a distribution deal with a corporate library. --
The big thing that all of these discussions seem to miss is the idea of satellite delivered spoken word, or what the industry refers to as "talk radio". Many people discount this because they think it would only going to bring us programs like Rush Limbaugh or Dr. Laura. But consider a few other possibilities:
Non-computer technical support programs like Car Talk
These programs could be aggregated by genre to produce a financial planning radio channel or a car maintenance radio channel. If you aren't used to listening to stuff like this, you may turn up your nose, but each of these programs have huge, loyal audiences, and would help make satellite radio commercially viable. --
As an occasional participant in this community, I want you all to know that I appreciate the statements made about this man. Clearly, his work benefitted many hundreds of people who participate actively in this community.
I also wanted to point out that this is the most appropriate thread of messages I have ever seen after the death of a person has been noted on Slashdot. Negative comments about an individual are never appropriate in the period immediately following their death.
We should all remember what it was like to read these rememberances the next time someone passes away and we are tempted to be critical of them. --
I think Microsoft started to make strides in improving their software through research when they hired Nathan Myhrvold, way back in 1986. Myhrvold took a leave of absense from MSFT in mid-1999 (which may be permanent), but he seems to have been the driving force on the development of a research business at Microsoft.
Microsoft often doesn't get much credit from this community, and they certainly don't receive praise from me too frequently. But, I think Rob Pike deserves credit for having the guts to talk about their research in positive terms. Microsoft has improved the state of end-user computing in a number of ways, even if many of us disagree with them on their design decisions. --
When I went to RPI to begin my undergraduate education in 1985, I wanted very much to study Computer Science. After all, the only conclusion I could make as a high school kid from Bell Labs Country was that CS graduates were the ones who wrote the software that people used on their PCs.
Wrong.
It took me until mid-1987 to realize it, and until 1990 to be able to articulate it, but Computer Science was a terrible field to study if you were interested in writing software that people actually used. Of course, research that came out of these environments gave us UNIX and a lot of the fundimental networking technologies that are the basis of our world today. But these breakthroughs were the exceptions.
After 10 successful (and profitable) years in the consulting business, I firmly believe that the universities themselves are not the problem -- it's the classical CS pedagogy. There are ways to learn skills at universities that will help you produce usable software. But the best field of study is not likely to be CS for many of the reasons that Rob Pike suggested.
A lot of schools, including Rensselaer, are coming up with Information Technology curricula that blend the core science and engineering courses with business school courses, humanities courses, and fundimental programming and application architecture. You may laugh, but these IT curricula stand a much better chance of graduating productive software developers who can think outside the box than even the most reformed CS programs do. --
Slashdot Mirror
Do the states that are pushing for sales tax collection really expect all of these small-scale sellers to set aside and remit taxes to the hundreds of separate jurisdictions in the USA? Or, do they expect Amazon to collect the tax based on where the 3rd party seller says they are located?
- BBC World Service
- Fox News
- CNN Headline News
- ABC News and Talk
- The Weather Channel
- CNBC
- CNNfn
- Bloomberg News
- CNET Radio
- C-SPAN Radio
These are services that you can't get on the radio in 99 percent of the country, unless you use satellite radio. How many people will pay for this? Not many, but, this is probably another vertical market similar to over-the-road truckers.I haven't bought an XM receiver because I don't think the service will survive in its present form, and I don't have the disposable income that I had prior to the recession.
I haven't seen this posted elsewhere in this discussion, but an AM radio station in NYC has already brought HD-Radio on-line. This is interesting because I don't know of any receiver I can buy the handles this service at the moment. If HD-Radio doesn't add to the programming options we receive, however, no consumer will care about it. Then, IMHO, all it will be is a long-term way for the broadcasters to reduce transmission costs.
GPRS gives you the "always-on" capability that would let you turn a Treo and a POP3 mailbox into a pager on steroids that is competitive with the Blackberry devices from RIM. GPRS would also provide you with the ability to develop services that were packet-oriented instead of call-oriented: things like instant messaging or network device monitoring.
I am not sure whether GPRS will work while a voice call is in progress, once the GPRS upgrade is available. But, that would be great, wouldn't it?
VoiceStream service has been very good in New Jersey. My Treo drops far fewer calls than my Nokia 8860 did on AT&T Wireless, particularly in Central and Southern New Jersey along the New Jersey Turnpike.
I was just as worried as you were about giving up TDMA for GSM. My advice is to check out a VoiceStream coverage map, and see if they say they have service where you spend most of your time. Sounds stupid, but that's how I got the courage up to try the Treo.
Regarding email service and the comparison between the Treo and a Blackberry, I have to tell you that the Blackberry is a better email device today. It will probably continue to be a better email device until the Treo gets GPRS support. Once the GPRS upgrade becomes available, then the questions will be:
- How much GPRS service do you use?
- How much will that add to your bill?
- Will GPRS service be available throughout your provider's GSM coverage area?
Hope this helps,Sorry if you think the review is too US-centric. I wanted to emphasize the current GSM network availability issues in the United States, without implying to Europeans and Asians that the phone wouldn't work for them. I believe the 900/1800 version offered in those areas works very well, and has fewer limitations than the US version.
- Solaris 2.7
- Netscape Enterprise Server 3.6
- Sybase 11.9.2
Don't try that at home.... One day soon our sites will make the jump to the current distro.The leaders of the Slash project have always made me feel at home. I help out answering technical and non-technical questions whenever I can. And, both of our sites have been listed in the YASS list, despite the fact that they are not derived from the current distro. We're all in this together.
Also, why is RedHat so far behind in terms of its adoption of Mozilla builds to its RedHat Network service?
You'll find more about my experience with Comcast broadband services on my company's web site, if you are interested.
We have posted a number of articles about our experience with Comcast internet access on our Web Site. Our latest article talks about the ComputerWorld article and our experience with both the business and residential Comcast cable modem services. Basically, we think that people who are serious about VPN use need the QOS guarantees and 24-hour tech support that Comcast offers to business users.
Yes, Comcast does offer a business-class service. See the Comcast Business Communications site for more details. We have the Comcast business-class service. It works. We have discussed Comcast internet access issues extensively on CTDATA.com.
In all of these situations, people need the help of strangers in order to make it. Fair dealing is the foundation of all organized society. Now more than ever, we need to treat others the way we would like to be treated.
--
Dave Aiello
Ah, I see now, the arbitrator's ruling was part of the ICANN dispute resolution process. Referee Magazine didn't like the result, went to Federal Court and won. And, since the ICANN process is non-binding, eReferee really lost.
Guys, if I understand this correctly, the Slashdot story really doesn't reflect what happened.
--
Dave Aiello
It may be a bit unfair to take the paragraph I cited out of context because the article goes on to do a good job of weighing the individual pros and cons of the highly rated scanners. Nevertheless, I think the article's key finding is that even the best of the tools they evaluated failed to catch all of the vulnerabilities that they had intentionally installed. Every opportunity should be taken to emphasize this point to the readers.
--
Dave Aiello
The problems with Audible, from your perspective, are that they distribute content electronically and the services that you see on their Web Site are aimed at individuals. In addition, they use security on some formats of their audio programs that is supposed to restrict your ability to use it on many different players.
However, this company has changed its offerings several times since it began, and it has a loyal following among people who appreciate spoken word audio. I would recommend that your company contact Audible by phone or email and ask them if they have ever made a distribution deal with a corporate library.
--
Dave Aiello
- technical discussions like Dr. Dobb's Technetcast
- Geeks in Space
- Financial planning programs like MoneyTalk
- Non-computer technical support programs like Car Talk
These programs could be aggregated by genre to produce a financial planning radio channel or a car maintenance radio channel. If you aren't used to listening to stuff like this, you may turn up your nose, but each of these programs have huge, loyal audiences, and would help make satellite radio commercially viable.--
Dave Aiello
I also wanted to point out that this is the most appropriate thread of messages I have ever seen after the death of a person has been noted on Slashdot. Negative comments about an individual are never appropriate in the period immediately following their death.
We should all remember what it was like to read these rememberances the next time someone passes away and we are tempted to be critical of them.
--
Dave Aiello
Microsoft often doesn't get much credit from this community, and they certainly don't receive praise from me too frequently. But, I think Rob Pike deserves credit for having the guts to talk about their research in positive terms. Microsoft has improved the state of end-user computing in a number of ways, even if many of us disagree with them on their design decisions.
--
Dave Aiello
Wrong.
It took me until mid-1987 to realize it, and until 1990 to be able to articulate it, but Computer Science was a terrible field to study if you were interested in writing software that people actually used. Of course, research that came out of these environments gave us UNIX and a lot of the fundimental networking technologies that are the basis of our world today. But these breakthroughs were the exceptions.
After 10 successful (and profitable) years in the consulting business, I firmly believe that the universities themselves are not the problem -- it's the classical CS pedagogy. There are ways to learn skills at universities that will help you produce usable software. But the best field of study is not likely to be CS for many of the reasons that Rob Pike suggested.
A lot of schools, including Rensselaer, are coming up with Information Technology curricula that blend the core science and engineering courses with business school courses, humanities courses, and fundimental programming and application architecture. You may laugh, but these IT curricula stand a much better chance of graduating productive software developers who can think outside the box than even the most reformed CS programs do.
--
Dave Aiello
--
Dave Aiello