6245307
submission
goombah99 writes:
VOIP provider ooma offers no-charge, no-strings-attached, commercial-free, VOIP to anywhere in the US. While the service is free forever, you do have to buy their unit. Unlike Magic Jack or Skype, this is a stand-alone unit so it does not need your PC to operate and behaves like a regular hassle free phone. Moreover, reviews say the voice quality is consistently as good or better than Vonage, my current carrier. Since the price of the unit on Amazon is less than about 7 months of Vonage+taxes & fees, I'm thinking of making the jump. But somehow this seems too good to be true: given the quick payback period why is everyone not using this? So I'm asking Slashdot users about their experience. A summary and links to reviews can be found here and the most in depth ones are on Amazon. They claim there is no catch: it will stay free forever as long as ooma stays in business or your voip modem does not need to be replaced (e.g. you break it or want to upgrade it) I note that since 2005, there have been regular unfulfilled predictions they would shortly be out of business, but webmeters show their traffic has grown 450% in the last year and they are now up to about 1/8th Vonage's website traffic, so it seems like they have taken root. On the otherhand ooma's bundled services (voicemail, local calling, etc...) have changed from year to year so what you get depends on when you bought into it. Is there a catch?"
6241661
submission
goombah99 writes:
Back in 2005,I heard about the free voip phone service ooma, but their peculiar business model at the time let them make local calls on your local land line in return for free long distance VOIP turned me off. That business model is gone now and they are simply offering no-charge, no-strings-attached, commercial-free, VOIP to anywhere in the US. Since the price of the unit on Amazon is less than about 7 months of Vonage+taxes & fees, I'm thinking of making the jump. Unlike Magic Jack or Skype, this is a stand-alone unit so it does not need your PC to operate. Moreover, reviews say the voice quality is as good or better than Vonage, my current carrier. But somehow this seems too good to be true: given the quick payback period why is everyone not using this? So I'm asking Slashdot users about their experience. A summary and links to reviews can be found here and the most in depth ones are on Amazon. They claim there is no catch: it will stay free forever as long as ooma stays in business or your voip modem does not need to be replaced (e.g. you break it or want to upgrade it) I note that since 2005, there have been regular unfulfilled predictions they would shortly be out of business, but webmeters show their traffic has grown 450% in the last year and they are now up to about 1/8th Vonage's website traffic, so it seems like they have taken root. Is there a catch?
6232505
submission
goombah99 writes:
Back in 2005,I saw the free voip phone service ooma a few years ago, but their wonky model of using your conventional land line in return for free voip turned me off. But now they are simply offering no-charge, no-strings-attached, commercial-free, VOIP to anywhere in the US and cheap rates outside the US. This will stay free forever as long as ooma stays in business or your voip modem does not bust. Since the price of the unit on Amazon is less than about 8 months of Vonage+taxes & fees, I'm thinking of making the jump. (The only recurring charge from ooma is $12 in E911 fees per year.) All reviews say the voice quality is as good or better than Vonage, my current carrier. I note that since 2005, there have been regular unfulfilled predictions they would shortly be out of business, but webmeters show their traffic has grown 450% in the last year and they are now up to about 1/8th Vonage's traffic, so it seems like they have taken root. But somehow this seems too good to be true: given the quick payback period why is everyone not using this? So I'm asking Slashdot users about their experience. Unlike Magic Jack or Skype, this is a stand-alone unit so it does not need your PC to operate. A summary and links to reviews can be found here and the best ones are on Amazon.Link to Original Source
5663425
submission
goombah99 writes:
TGD Daily reports that due to a notification glitch dating back to 1984, the UK laws governing DVD piracy are said to be unenforceable until the European Union Commission can meet to accept the UK law. This is said to be unlikely to happen before 2010. The problem arose in 1984 and was repeated in 1990, when the laws governing pornography and DVD piracy in the UK were not, as required under the EU agreement, sent to the the EU commission for approval.
5532391
submission
goombah99 writes:
"On Tuesday, a U.S. district court in Texas issued a permanent injunction that bars Microsoft from selling recent versions of its Word software." reports many news outlets. Sales must cease in 60 days. MS will appeal to a higher court, however in addition to the judge's ruling, previously a jury as well upheld the patent infringement and awarded 200 million dollars. The ruling also bars not just Office 2008 but also any translation of documents between docx to word 2003 and later. The patent itself is for a specific way of serializing an XML document. Instead of putting markup tags amidst the text, you simply write the text out raw with out any inline tags. Then in a separate storage area you list each xml tag followed by a pointer to the character position it should be inserted into that bulk text. Since the tags and raw content can be stored separately, the claim is this encoding has the desired feature that changes to format tags won't require re-writing the whole document body, and you could associate many different format tags sets with the same raw text for different "views". The regenerated document inverts this to produce XML which can then be handled normally.
4901135
submission
goombah99 writes:
NyTimes Columnist Kirstof reports that the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, an organization that creates freespeech internet passages for China and other countries saw a surge of 200 million hits from 400,000 unique visitors on Wednesday. Since the release of the Farsi version of Freegate, a firewall evading anonymous browsing system, there are now almost as many Iranian users than Chinese. Note the Global Internet Freedom Organization is concerned about their servers overwhelming so I'm not supplying a direct link to quash the slashdot effect. Kristof notes that a pending bill in congress would support funding of block evading software platforms and it needs your help.
3250823
submission
goombah99 writes:
Aptera is making all a hybrid powered car it says will get 300MPG on gasoline or 125 miles on a plug in electric charge and be priced in the range $30,000 . There's YouTubes of it driving around Carlsbad Colorado from CNN and Aptera's promo. It's been road tested since 2007. The "Typ-1" model looks looks like a stylish 3-wheeled airplane fuselage (think beechcraft). A four wheeled 5 passenger Typ-2 only exists on the drawing board still but the target selling price is even less (mid 20K). It's not the goofiest looking electric vehicle on display.
2944965
submission
goombah99 writes:
Macrumors live text and photo feed of the Apple Keynote is being live-hacked with various comments reporting on fake events like Steve Job's death and insertion of links to odd web sites, and bogus ads.
1328059
submission
goombah99 writes:
What kinds of jobs are best in a recession? Is it better to be a freelance contractor or an employee? Are operations centric jobs (e.g. IT staff) more secure than coders? Are coders more secure than R&D and algorithm design jobs? I suspect that many computer industry giants (Apple, MS, Cisco, Amazon) have large cash reserves and probably see no reason to change strategies--in fact it's a time when cash reserves can give them a competitive advantage as competitors retract in R&D and manufacturers have excess capacity (e.g. if there's too little business, manufacturers might take ipod or Xbox or Router component contracts at slightly below costs just to be able to pay the long-term mortgages on their facilities). And then there's the venture capital markets. When stocks tank, and lending is scary, does that mean that there is going to be more money chasing ownership positions in Ventures or less? Without prospects for IPOs will investors be content with more long term horizons on their capital given the dismal ROI for other uses of it? How's it looking at your company?
799595
submission
goombah99 writes:
After snapping up virtualization company InnoTek at the beginning of the year, Sun has recently released VirtualBox as a fully functional and highly polished free GPL open source x86 Virtual Macine. It can host 32 or 64 bit Linux, Windows XP vista and 98, openSolaris and DOS. It runs on mac, windows, and unix platforms. The download is just 27MB. A review of it on macworld, showing HD movies playing inside widows XP on a mac, demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware. Like it's competition it can run other OS's in rootless, rooted, or seamless modes display modes (where all the applications have their windows mixed at the same time). Each VM instance can only run single core (though I/O is multi-core), and it does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries however, so some gamers may be disappointed. Slashdot discussed the InnoTek acquisition here and here."
797775
submission
goombah99 writes:
After snapping up virtualization company InnoTek at the beginning of the year, Sun has recently released VirtualBox as a fully functional and highly polished free GPL open source called. Among many OS it can host 32 or 64 bit Linux, Windows XP, openSolaris and DOS. It runs on mac, windows, and unix platforms. The download is just 27MB. A review of it on macworld, showing HD movies playing inside widows XP on a mac, demonstrates performance visually comparable to VMware. Like it's competition it can run other OS's in rootless, rooted, or seamless modes display modes (where all the applications have their windows mixed at the same time). It does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries however, so some gamers may be disappointed. Slashdot discussed the InnoTek acquisition here and here.
756175
submission
goombah99 writes:
A teenage boy has modified a laser-etching machine to burn robot and space invader designs into his skin. He was filmed being branded by the industrial machine and then uploaded the video — along with full instructions — to the internet.
671420
submission
goombah99 writes:
In a colossal design error, Vonage has debuted a new killer feature for its customers with cell phones called "simul-ring" that due to a logic error unintentionally prevents cell phone users from calling their own home phones. Unlike ordinary call forwarding, simul-ring, will ring the cell phone and Vonage land line simultaneously allowing the user to answer either phone without delay. Conceptually this simple tweak of call-forwarding is a killer application enabled at minimal cost Vonage because, cleverly, the call to the cell phone is handled by the smart home routers themselves not by a central system (just like vonage does with 3-way calling). But they failed to realize that a cascade of independent design choices left it with a fatal flaw. Here's the cascade: 1) Virtually all cell phone carriers require the accounts to have Voice mail as a feature that cannot be turned off. 2) Nearly all of these are rigged so that dialing your own number connects you to the cell service voice mail. 3) When you call home from your cell phone, the simul ring, re-directs makes a call back to the cell phone and designating the call origin as the cell-phone itself 4) the cell phone detects the incoming call as coming from itself, just like you had dialed your own number. 5) So instead of being diverted to call-waiting, the voice mail on the cell phone answers instantly and so the home phone never rings. Thus when simul-ring is on, you cannot call the home phone from the cell phone, defeating it's utility. This is clearly a design logic problem since the solution is conceptually trivial: the router should never call back to the phone number the call came from, or at least never back to the simul-ring handset.
oopsie!
647200
submission
goombah99 writes:
Princeton Professor, Ed Felton, has had a series (1,2,3) of blog entries in which he shows the printed tapes he obtained from the NJ voting mahines don't report the ballots correctly. In response to the first one, Sequoia admitted that the machines had a known software design error that did not correctly record which kind of ballots were cast (republican or democratic primary ballots) but insisted the vote totals were correct. Then, further tapes showed this explanation to be insufficient. In response, State officials insisted that the (poorly printed) tapes were misread by Felton. Again further tapes showed this not to be a sufficient explanation. However all those did not foreclose the optimistic assessment that the errors were benign — that is, the possibility that vote totals might really be correct even though the ballot totals were wrong and origin of the errors had not been explained. Now he has found (well printed) tapes that show what appears to be hard proof that it's the vote totals that are wrong, since two different readout methods don't agree. Sequoia has made trade-secret legal threats against those wishing to have an independent examination of the equipment. One small hat tip to Sequoia: at least they are reporting enough raw data in different formats that these kinds of errors can come to light — that lesson should be kept in mind when writing future requirements doc for voting machines.
646432
submission
goombah99 writes:
Popular science reported that flat video screen were available in 1958, and apparently robust enough for avionic pilot displays. For a time RCA was set to license and produce the Flat Screen TVs, then they changed their minds. "Meeting for the final approval, somebody on the Board of Directors' of RCA said, "Wait a minute, we've forgotten something. How are we going to explain to our stockholders that we wasted millions of dollars on the wrong tube?" And there was silence. And that did it. They said, "No, we will not take a license." If you like that one then this 1954 vision of the future of transistors forecast things resembling VCRs, color Plasma TVs and solar cells. They forecast Video phones and cable TV but accurately anticipated these would be slow to come until enough bandwidth was possible.
