Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Not cheap... (Score 2) 141

by aleph (#42088559) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Management Software For Small Independent ISP?

But you could look and see if Jet is within your budget.

http://www.obsidian.com.au/products/jet/jet-isp-telco

At the very least a base install will give you some billing software and hooks for other automation. It wouldn't hurt to drop them a line, at any rate.

disclaimer: I used to work for obsidian ~6 years ago. they're a small company, but full of bright people and they have a lot of experience in the area. if jet isn't for you i have no doubts they can at least give you some honest advice on what to look at instead that's within your budget, fits your needs.

Comment Re:Try Australia (Score 2) 188

by aleph (#36635890) Attached to: 40GB of Data That Costs the Same As a House

Drifting from the point of the article, but just for reference a 3 bedroom house in Sydney costs $600,000 easily, and in many suburbs well over a million. And at present the 1 Australian dollar is trading for $1.07 US dollars. They haven't had their property crash in Australia. Yet.

$600k for a 3br house? You're talking like 90+ minutes from the city, right? ;-)

$400k+ for a decent 1br+study apartment in the inner suburbs.
Biotech

iPhone Opens Up Bluetooth For Data 129

Posted by Soulskill from the slowly-but-surly dept.
WildNahviss writes "Apple has loosened its tight grip on the iPhone and allowed a third party to develop a health device that exchanges data with the iPhone and their hardware. Is this the start of a trend for Apple that will relax constraints on non-audio Bluetooth use, or is this an exception? Does anyone know of any other devices for the iPhone that allows non-audio Bluetooth transmission of data?" Reader climenole points out an article about another health-sensor system, dubbed a "body area network," that is built to work with Android devices, but not via Bluetooth.
Privacy

Highly Directional Terahertz Laser Demonstrated 125

Posted by kdawson from the break-out-the-tinfoil-underware dept.
eldavojohn writes "A new paper published this week in the journal Nature Materials announces a successful demonstration of highly directional terahertz semiconductor lasers. You might not think it's a big deal that some Harvard and University of Leeds researchers (funded partially by the US Air Force) figured out how to better direct lasers; but this means the ability to see what's in someone's pockets and clothing, at a distance of possibly hundreds of meters, or farther. The big benefit is that they are lower in energy than X-Rays and are less invasive, since they cannot pass through water or metal. Coming soon to an airport near you or buzzing around on board a drone in civilian airspace?"
Google

Google Voice Opens To All 185

Posted by kdawson from the is-this-the-party-to-whom-i-am-speaking dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Google Voice is now open to anyone in the US, removing the need to search for an invite. At the Google Voice site, anyone with a US IP address and a US phone number can sign up for an account. Non-US IPs are blocked, and non-US-based phone numbers are prevented from attaching to Google Voice (with the single odd exception of the 403 area code of southern Alberta)." Good timing on the part of Frontier Communications Corp., which just filed a lawsuit claiming that the Google Voice feature connecting a user's home, work, and cell phone numbers to another number infringes one of their patents.
Sun Microsystems

Sneak Peek At Sun's SPARC Server Roadmap 113

Posted by Soulskill from the measuring-stick-for-oracle dept.
The folks at The Register have gotten their hands on Sun's confidential roadmap from June, which outlines the company's plans for SPARC product lines. The chart has some basic technical details for the UltraSPARC T-series and the SPARC64 line. The long-anticipated "Rock" line is not mentioned. "We can expect a goosed SPARC64-VII+ chip any day now, which will run at 2.88 GHz and which will be a four-core, eight-threaded chip like its 'Jupiter' predecessor. This Jupiter+ chip is implemented in the same 65 nanometer process as the Jupiter chip was, and it is made by Fujitsu, a company that is in the process of outsourcing its chip manufacturing to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. ... not only has Sun cut back on the threads with [the 2010 UltraSPARC model, codenamed Rainbow Falls], it has also cut back on the socket count, keeping it at the same four sockets used by the T5440 server. And instead of hitting something close to 2 GHz as it should be able to do as it shifts from a 65 nanometer to a 45 nanometer process in the middle of 2010, Sun is only telling customers that it can boost clock speeds to 1.67 GHz with Rainbow Falls."
Software

ESA Embraces Open Source With New SAR Toolbox 62

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the other-applications dept.
phyr writes "The European Space Agency (ESA) has released its Next ESA SAR Toolbox (NEST) freely as GPL for Linux and Windows. It provides an integrated viewer for reading, calibrating, post-processing and analysis of ESA (ERS 1&2, ENVISAT) and 3rd party (Radarsat2, TerraSarX, Alos Palsar, JERS) SAR level 1 data and higher. ESA has chosen to distribute the software as fully open source to allow the remote sensing community to easily develop new readers/writers and post-processors for SAR data with their NEST Java API. The software provides both a command line interface and GUI for all features including data conversion, graph processing, coregistration, multilooking, filtering, and band arithmetic."
The Internet

Raising Doubts About Australia's Broadband Upgrade Plan 98

Posted by timothy from the doubt-doubt-doubt dept.
RcK writes "In addition to the rising controversy of the possible Australian version of the Great Firewall Of China already mentioned several times of late here on Slashdot; the viability of the proposed AU$5Billion internet infrastructure upgrade promised by the Federal Government during their 2007 election campaign is under fire. The MD of arguably Australia's leading internet company, iinet, has branded the proposal a waste of taxpayers money. Steve Ballmer, during his current Australian visit, has also weighed in on the topic and diplomatically indicated that Australia should get on with the job. Much of the current criticism appears to surround the likelihood of people in remote areas being left out of the proposed plan. Ironically, where I lived previously (remote town in central Aus — nearest town over 400km away) everyone had, at the absolute least, subsidized satellite internet, and most had ADSL. In my case a flawless 512k connection for ~4years. However, I now live 5 minutes from the center of a capital city and due to archaic telephone infrastructure cannot get ADSL, and even line noise is too great for dialup!" Today's front page at Whirlpool Broadband News also features several articles relating to the saga.
Microsoft

Microsoft Bids To Take Over Open Document Format 256

Posted by kdawson from the pinching-the-oxygen-feed dept.
what about sends in a Groklaw alert warning that, by PJ's reading, Microsoft may be trying to take over ODF via a stacked SC 34 committee. The article lists the attendees at an SC 34 meeting in July and gives their affiliations, which the official meeting materials do not. (The attendees of the October 1 meeting, which generated a takeover proposal to OASIS, are not known in full.) "Why do I say Microsoft, when this is SC 34? Look at this ... list of participants in the July meeting in Japan of the SC 34 committee. The committee membership is so tilted by Microsoft employees and such, if it were a boat, it would capsize ... Of the 19 attendees, 8 are outright Microsoft employees or consultants, and 2 of them are Ecma TC45 members. So 10 out of 19 are directly controlled by Microsoft/Ecma ... [I]f the takeover were to succeed, SC 34 would get to maintain ODF as well as Microsoft's competing parody 'standard,' OOXML. How totally smooth and shark-like. Under the guise of 'synchronized maintenance,' without which they claim SC 34 can't fulfill its responsibilities, they get control of everything." A related submission from David Gerard points out that BoycottNovell has leaked the ISO OOXML documents, which ISO has kept behind passwords.

Comment Duh (Score 1) 146

by aleph (#23800841) Attached to: Anti-Technology Technologies?
The poster makes it sound like the sky is falling. OMG, if you download terrabytes of data/month on your residental account they might *gasp* charge you!

Australia has had metered plans pretty much since inception. Most are of the "XXgb then shape to 128kbps" variety. There have been companies offering unlimited, but they either go under, or oversell at a horrendous ratio.

If the cost of bandwidth, as a proportion of operating cost, goes up for the ISP, then something has to break. Either they introduce some type of allocation (metered plans) or the overall quality of service needs to go down (they oversell more). It's not some grand conspiracy, it's *possibly* money grubbing, but it's far more likely just trying to keep on top of a ballooning cost.

Really, unless you're streaming hdtv 24/7. it's *not* a huge issue. I have 60gb/month in total, and even when I'm leeching a bit I'll be lucky to go through half of that. Often I'll only use a couple of gigs. And I'm still considered a _heavy_ user ffs.

Slashdot Top Deals

So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand

Close