Alarms do not work very well in Mozilla calendar. Ideally, I should receive alarms for events even when Mozilla is not open, perhaps provided by a cron job that runs whenever my calendar file changes. This job would look for any changes and add/delete items from the crontab. When an event comes due in cron, it would trigger a small system beep or biff-like notifier.
5:39:09 PM    

What the MVC-for-the-web crowd are really trying to achieve is a clear separation of concerns. Put your database code in one place, your application code in another, your presentation code in a third place.

User experiences with satelite internet access

Another Stab At Internet Access By Satellite - some interesting user experiences with satelite internet access:

• "Typical upstream speeds is 30-100kbps and downstream is about 1Mbit-1.4Mbit on the two-way (DirecWay) systems my company has installed."
• "ja.net [ja.net] (The UK organisation for education networking) is currently trialing 2 way satellite and I'd have to say I was impressed at the network access conference I went to recently.
  The guy was brave enough to do a live demo (The dish having been rigged up only a couple of hours earlier). ping times were a consistant 600ms and bandwidth was a symmetric 2M.
  It seems like a very good solution for the rural, the only barriers are the latency (which isn't as bad as I thought it would be) and the high cost. dc-sat.net [dc-sat.net] are the company involved in the trial."
• "2-way service does exist. The latency is approx. 800ms minimum, and the download is around 400kbps (for most connections you don't pay thousands for)"
• "You wonder why there are so few hits from African countries? Because the only reliable link is over satellite, which usually connects to a European ISP. Yes indeed, this message is brought to you over PanAmSat connect to the Irish Web-Sat ISP from the oil-rich country of Nigeria. My upstream is 64kbytes/sec, downstream is 2Mbits. Unless it rains a tropical storm, in which case the connection ceases to exist. For the interested, check out http://www.directonpc.com."
• "Down in Antarctica, the only internet access available is by satellite -- and it's so impossibly slow that when that woman down there got breast cancer, they barely could get the doctor's recommendations and instructions for a biopsy over the satellite, since it only worked every few hours at best and the transfer rate was something akin (no exaggeration!) to 300Bps. In fact, it's so bad that some groups are actually considering running a digital fiber line all the way to the south pole."
• "The latency thing is really bad. Forget about meaningfull VPN or SSH sessions. WWW and Email is all its good for. I have it. I live in suburbia, too far from the local CO for DSL and Adelphia isn't in shape for upgrading the cable plant as they are running out of $$$ really fast. -snip- Starband's downstream reaches almost 1Mb/s (average is around 700K or so). Its a fat pipe, but its a really long one. Latency sucks (~600ms), forget games or video conf. Upstream tops out at 110K (average ~70K). Obvious conclusion: Cable if you can get it, DSL if cable not avail. Dial-up/ISDN for interactive (if no Cable or DSL). Sat. for www or email and large downloads :)."
• "I live in rural Norway and have looked at the possibility for satellite and found TiscaliSat (should be avaiable in most countries), but the prices are high. Setting up the sat costs $2000+ and the monthly fee is $200+. I don't forsee satellite as a viable artenative for private consumers, maybe for small corporations (with need for fast connection in rural areas?)"
• "While I'm glad for the guy in the middle of nowhere now that he finally has some way to access the Internet, I do not envy anyone who has to use satellite for their Internet connection. The laws of physics dictate that you will get a minimum of 500 milliseconds ping time to anywhere on the net. Packets must travel 22k miles from the planet to the satellite, then 22k miles back down to your ISP. That's already about 240 milliseconds. Then add the transit time from your ISP to the destination site; for the sake of argument, say it's instantaneous and adds no transit time. Then add in the return trip of 240 milliseconds, for a total of 480 milliseconds. This represents the absolute minimum round-trip time for data sent via satellite. Of course, in the real world, it will be somewhat longer than that, but it depends on your ISP and the rest of the hops between you and the destination."
• "I work for a company that provides internet access to REALLY rural schools. Bush Alaska. It's hard to get more rural than that. I oversee the maintenance of over 140 servers across the state (at least one per site) and have to both use SSH and a web interface on a regular basis. Not just to monitor the server status, but also to UPDATE the damn things (software packages of over 20 MB on occasion). Unless the weather at the site is crap (or has been, and has knocked the dish off axis a bit) I hardly ever have trouble with keeping a reliable SSH connection. Waiting for the web interface to load takes a bit more time over the satellite link is a noticible delay, but it doesn't render my job impossible. Not even unenjoyable. We used to use NT 4 and PC Anywhere. That was unenjoyable, but not impossible. Yeah, we use a proxy (Squid) at the sites to make browsing a bit more responsive (it is a noticeable difference), but that doesn't affect messengers (MSN, Yahoo, AIM) or video conferencing (distance learning, or one teacher at one site teaching classes at several sites, WITH INTERACTION). Sure, satellite sucks in comparison to terrestrial bandwidth delivery, but it's not the tar pit that so many people here claim it to be."
• "I only have a three-word reply: "4,000 milisecond latency. Just ask India, because that's all they have."
  
  Here is the counterpoint: "4,000 milisecond latency." Just ask India, because that's all they have. While I love to pick on the poor Indians too, this just isn't true. I've run a network to my company's office in India for the last five years. Internet access from VSNL is very good and has a latency of 275 ms round trip to my office in the USA. My private line is 252 ms round trip, so it only cost me 23 ms to come via the Internet instead of my private circuit. Now, providers other than VSNL leave a lot to be desired. Most come via satellite (500ms-750ms) and suffer from terrible congestion and packet loss."
• "Sheesh. I am *amazed* at the amount of disinformation most of these people are posting. Yes, I know it's slashdot, but WOW. Feel free to e-mail me with any other questions if you want. I am qualified to answer this question because my mom has Starband internet, and I often end up doing things on her computer for her. (She runs RedHat linux and windows dual-boot) For IRC, it'll be fine if you use low-scroll rooms. but if they are fast, it'll probably be a bit hard to follow. For command-line apps and whatnot, it's a tad annoying, since everything you do has a 1/2 delay at least. If you are used to typing without immediate feedback, it's OK. For X apps, or VNC, it's pretty nasty. If you just have a quick change or something to do, it's doable, but you won't be wanting to do much at all over that connection. If you consider remotely administering a server to be connecting with VNC or whatever windows has as it's new remote desktop thing, then you are going to be dissapointed for any task that takes more than about a dozen mouse clicks."
• " Now try the best. [nebulink.net] No, I don't work for them. No, I don't use their service anymore (I got WiFi based 'net now). Yes, they support Linux (they even developed a custom, in-house applicaiton for it). No, they don't do any of that leaky-bucket BS that infuriates anyone using most of the competing services. Yes, they sell to anyone who can receive their signal in any country. [Canadians note: If you get their service and want to remain within the law, avoid surfing any sites within Canada]."

  The coolest part is that it's Ku-Band and it uses standard DVB. This means you can get the dish to receive it for next to nothing, and you can use _any_ DVB card you like.

  Oh, and I wrote a (crappy) mini-HOWTO for Linux that you can check on their forums (sorry, they're locked to the public)."

• " You may get DSL before you think (Score:1) by Proc6 on Wednesday November 20, @04:50PM (#4719037) (User #518858 Info) My business partner works from his home in the small town of Dayton, Iowa. We're talking so small they have a caseys, and thats about it. I imagined he'd be on dialup for life. He now has 256k DSL and could go much higher if he wanted to pay for it. Apparently there are some easy-to-implement turn-key solutions for small telephone co-ops. The co-op that runs the phones for his dinky town, another even dinkier town, and one "small" town (maybe 2 caseys!) bought into it. I get the impression what they do is put a DSLAM in each town center, and since no house is outside of a 16,000 wirefoot range, pretty much 1 DSLAM covers the entire town. So the phone co-op buys 3, puts one in each town, and then probably buy into some bigger ISP with a T1 from their main office to the ISP's office or something for the big pipe. "
• " Ok. Satellite. What $10,000 per pound to orbit? Latency issues? Reparability? Space junk? All issues. So what do you do about it? I think they should run up some Gyromills into the jet stream and hand antennas on em and build a 20,000 foot wireless cloud. - http://www.bbc.co.uk/.../tw/items/ 010328_windmillsinthesky.shtml - Some people are thinking dirigibles or UAV's etc. but a Gigawatt generating kite seems like a better idea. Generate clean power and get high bandwidth low latency wireless connections. I also say you could put em up like a ring around a city to prevent unwanted air space violations. Nothing stops a errant plane like a steel cable."

Microsoft Bulgaria will provide about $1 million to build a national network for the training of 30,000 civil servants in computer skills, managing director Teodor Milev told journalists on Tuesday.

On May 17, State Administration Minister Dimitar Kalchev and the director of Microsoft Bulgaria signed an agreement by which the state administration would receive 30,000 packages of MS Windows XP and MS Office XP software in Bulgarian. The cost of the programme products is $13,650,000 or $455 per package. According to the agreement, Microsoft Bulgaria will cover the training costs.

The Bulgarian government is getting the software for half-price - very nice - but still, there goes $13.6 million dollars out of their economy. And I imagine that the 30,000 seats needed is grossly over-estimated. Many governments in Europe are looking towards Linux - why did Bulgaria, with many good programmers - buck the trend?
Bulgaria News Gov't IT 10:37:56 AM