As noted above, the technology seems to have been bought from another company by IBM and dates back to the 80s. I remember using exactly this sort of system in 1999 at a firm that I worked for. Each computer would contact the central server for verification before being authorized to get online with the stock exchange computers. Every time the program was run, in fact. Not some obscure patent rotting in a file cabinet, but dozens of actual commercial level products back in the 90s.
In fact, a search of "Direct Access Trading 1994 shows multiple hits. The software was in use forever - and it always used verification like this to ensure that the person using the software was in fact the right person.
The Patent Office needs to change its operating standards to require all applicants to prove that there is no prior art, not the other way around where people have to show that the Patent Office was wrong, if they want to be granted critical IP and software patents.
If you consider most criminal's attitudes and ideas about society and work, you'll find that they are by and large lazy and opportunistic. Doing an honest job or taking care of business in a proper manner are the last things on their minds, generally. So to them, a death penalty has little or no weight. They live like they want, and they don't care about the future - they never imagined living past 30 anyways. Our society goes on and on about it, but that's just us putting our emotions into it. The criminal usually doesn't even have enough of a sense of guilt in any case for it to matter to them one way or another. (aside from saving their own self, that is)
The death penalty is simply not working as an actual punishment. It's too soft and too humane of a solution for someone who has done horrible things.
If it was me, I'd bring back hard labor. Make them work and give the money they make to the victims. They end up being finally of some use to society, and the victims get some actual moral and physical compensation as well.
I'm not sure how all of that could be summed up in the one sentence answers they want on jury selection panels, though...;)
Well, that actually would make a lot of business sense.
After all, if this drags on long enough, Samsung will be fighting over old technology that's no longer being sold, and then they can just drop the entire thing or settle. Without losing their market share or momentum. Apple's real goal of crushing their competition will have been thwarted, and Samsung just has to pay a fine.
As for prior art, there has been hardly anything that hasn't involved stealing ideas from someone else in the last couple of hundred years. What we need is a more sane approach to it, like do in the fashion industry. Without everyone tacitly agreeing to allow some copying of ideas, the industry itself would simply implode and cease to work properly. Because they do, though, there are rarely legal challenges and everyone prospers (or at least has the ability to try to do so). Innovation requires copying and improving upon existing ideas. Without any ability to do so, people simply go to where they can. ie - China, currently.
Apple is slowly killing itself off in the mad rush to protect everything down to the placement of a screw and the color of a connector. They're so focused upon the minor tiny crap that they are losing sight of the reality of the marketplace. People buy your product because of the total package that you offer. They could care less what some minor effect or component looks like or where it came from. The more money they waste and the more bad press they generate, the closer they come to the mess they created in the mid 90s. They go down while clutching onto their patents and pride while the majority of the consumers have simply moved on to less expensive and less restrictive products.
Except this time, there is no Jobs to rescue them. And Wozniak isn't coming to save anything, either.
True, but for the next 40 or 50 years, it's 100% likely that record players and CD players will still be available. So the entire library of music, worldwide, from about 1940-2010 will be available to me to use if I wish. What future generations do with it hardly matters as I have the physical originals and the digital copies of them.
You hit upon the real reason driving this, though. Which is that a book usually DOES go through several owners before it becomes unreadable. And a bunch of kids in a classroom do share a single book in some poorer areas of the world. Of course they hate the idea of re-sale since they no longer have control of it. Their wet dream is to find a way to force each and every person who ever reads it to pay full price for a new copy.
You see this with video games as well. Almost every game now is essentially online-only and you have to pay a rather large fee if you buy the game used to play online. The publishers have been trying for over twenty years to drive places like Gamestop out of business and move towards a digital-only model.
Used record/CD store. $1-$3. Rip them yourself. No DRM, no idiocy, and you have the physical copy which is still worth nearly as much as you paid for it.
This is yet another reason I don't have any online music, e-books, or other media, and still prefer the old-fashioned physical types.
Plus, it's fun to go out and get records for a dollar or two at the local used music store and rip them myself. $1 for a record of 10-12 songs. That's excellent economics and the quality doesn't need to be perfect if it's being compressed anyways. Used books? You can buy almost any fictional novel these days for under $3, used. Most are closer to a dollar.
You don't have to worry much. The first time they try to actually fire it and the chamber fails and blows their hand completely off will be the last time they try to make such a device. Sure, the parts like the stock and trigger assembly and so on can be made out of most anything, but even the smallest rounds are in the 20-25K PSI range. It's simply going to explode as plastics like these machines use are brittle under extreme stress. If you've ever seen Pyrex/plate glass/etc shatter, you have an idea of what will happen. Big nasty razor sharp shards. Metal typically doesn't shatter like this, so it's actually many times more dangerous than a gun out of metal blowing up.
These guys are going to make a plan, get it out to the public, and then some idiot will have his machine calibrated a few thousandths of an inch off, use the wrong plastic, forget to do some step correctly, or any number of a dozen other issues and it'll be a grenade in his face. Then we all suffer as the lawyers get involved to save our kids from themselves.
Just go out to Wal-Mart and get a cheap.22 rifle. Leave this stuff to the pros.
I ran over the actual numbers and it's not a small difference any more.
35% to the author if they want full control. 70% if they enable sharing. Cost to the purchaser is identical either way, as it's set by the author as a flat fee regardless of their cut. So the actual problem is with Amazon trying to force authors to give up many of their rights in order to be paid a fair amount versus the competition. Amazon has essentially admitted that they are fine with a 30% take for themselves to run the service. So it's not like enabling sharing is increasing the price to you or I.
As an end user, I don't personally care. This is between the authors and Amazon to work out. A $1 book will still BE a $1 book as long as the author decides to price it that low.
35% vs 70% is a huge difference and 35% is indeed very small when you consider that Amazon is admitting that they can still make a good profit at 70% payout. Digital distribution costs are negligible, after all, compared to traditional printed books.
I still think that you are taking this wrong. Amazon pays the author a (very) small percentage if you buy the book the first time. Check. If you lend the book, a much smaller percentage goes to the author, effectively raising the payout to the author, since it's 100% Amazon's contract from start to finish. In other words, in order to get your full payout as an author, you need to allow lending. Otherwise you're getting less. This is just between Amazon and the author.
"We'll pay you more if you allow lending, but IFF actual lending is happening." That's perfectly fair, IMO.
If the Author thinks it's wrong, they can opt out. As the end user, we get the same price anyways.
Given how amazingly little Amazon pays the authors, and if it's *Amazon* paying them this tiny amount extra, I see no problem. None at all.
I think Amazon is stupid to pay them money for anything past the first sale, but whatever - they can waste money all they want to generate business if they wish to do so.
The real deal here is how the person in question here can monetize his (future) site. Perhaps work out some deal with Amazon, maybe, to run their ads or links to them, since he's doing it already? If he can become the site associated with this feature, he's got a real possible business. Or at least make enough money to pay for the server and connection.
Correct. They are basically spamming because they are pissed at the way things work and likely didn't read the contract they signed. And because it's Amazon and other huge companies that the ebooks are managed under, they are boned when it comes to re-working their contracts with them. If the Kindle allows sharing, until it doesn't any more, you have a legitimate right to use the function if they allowed it when they signed up.
The person in question needs to get his own server and net connection set up (actual leased line - bypass the ISP entirely). Then he can simply roundfile everything and they'll be forced to take actual legal action to get him to stop. Which they won't. His response should always be "Contact Kindle/Amazon/etc and complain to them to disable the feature - you said it was OK when you signed up." C&D *notices* are as worthless as those notices to pay 20 year old credit card debts. You'll still get them from time to time, but you can toss them and ignore them.
The only way to deal with asshats like this is to always fight it out and win. No, I'm not a lawyer, but this is truly a no-brainer. Don't let the bullies ruin your dream.
I personally think that it's time for you to move on to other areas of game design. Anyone with a decade or more of experience should be able to eventually get into project management or possibly something in the design areas of gaming as that uses less of your wrote memory areas of your brain and more of your creative areas. A project manager or level designer (as examples) can also keep (and is expected to) copious notes. So you can use your job to minimize most of your impairment's problems.
Plus, you'll have less stress and make a lot more money. The only reason anyone, and I really mean ANYONE would be a programmer these days is because they are either planning on making the next great app that takes off or they are planning on working for a major company in internet security or the like or a government institution (Nasa or similar). The other jobs are too much stress and too little reward.
Yet, what are typical MP3s encoded at? If you are lucky, they are only throwing away 2/3 of the data from the original recording. This further compresses the dynamic range. If you know it's useless to do a high quality recording, you simply skip the fine parts of the process. One reason autotune is so prevalent is because when you convert it (it sounds terrible on CD) to MP3, it smooths it out and you can hardly hear the rapid oscillations. Suddenly anyone can sound like a star, even if they can't sing.
Add in the fact that it's through a portable device or in your car, and you can almost skip the engineering process completely. Not really, but pretty much throw in some synth and/or sampled sounds, a drum machine, and a cheap melody, and you're done. It's all you're going to hear anyways through little ear buds.
One reason they do this is to make the songs sound good when they are compressed as MP3s. Ie - there's no point in microphonics, blending, and higher frequencies if it's all going to be stripped out as soon as it hits iTunes anyways.
So given your rather pathetically limited storage on most consoles (when I can but a 1TB drive for well under $75 now), what happens when you have to un-install a game to make room from a new one? Right - if you want the original; game back, well, get ready to spend all night downloading it again. A physical copy would be a 1-2 minute install and you're done. And 1/10th or less of the drive space required.
My main issue, and in fact, THE main issue with downloads is that they take up a tremendous amount of space on your hard drive. Most consoles and that upcoming SteamBox have pathetically tiny hard drives such that a dozen games that you've downloaded pretty much stuff it full, while a physical disc just has game data on it. If you've tried to download a full game from most online services for a console, it's an all-evening scenario as well.
I've been a computer tech and consultant for almost exactly 20 years now. Back when I started, nobody could afford to just get a new drive or do data recovery. We had to try things to get them to work if at all possible, or to recover the data. So we learned a lot of tricks..000001 - Run air over your drives. ALWAYS. 90% of the reason drives die is due to excessive heat and no way to get rid of it in the case. If you have a big fan at the rear and are generating negative pressure, placing your drive(s) in slot 1 and 3 and opening up the panel cover for slot #2 also works. Mount the drives with one upside-down so that the circuit boards are in the airflow. Or use a fan to push air over the drives. If they are too hot to easily touch, they are literally frying and will die in a year or two. Sometimes in a few months.
0.5 - Run your system in Raid 1. This uses a drive as a live backup, so if there's a physical problem with one, the array crashes - pull the bad drive and reboot - it's a normal single drive system now. WAY cheaper than data recovery. I use 250-300GB drives or whatever is smallest and reliable for the boot drive array and the main programs and data is on a second drive. It's almost always the main boot drive that gets corrupted or dies due to the higher usage.
1 - If the drive is a brick, it's almost always the controller board that fried. A swap will work, though it will also lose track of what sectors are bad, so you want to mount the drive as a data drive or under linux/knoppix so that you're only reading data off of it. If you get it up, aim for the email and critical personal files entirely. Ignore the applications directory and system as those will need to be be re-installed anyways.
2 - If turns on but fails to spin up/clicks and does nothing (it'll make a small "tiktik" sound), the motor and bearings are gummed up or shot. The solution is to get the computer in as dust-free of an environment as possible. Get your data recovery software running. Put the drive in an external drive box. Leave the top off. Try cycling the drive several times - it will mount and un-mount the drive - and if it spins up, do data recovery immediately. If it doesn't spin up after about ten tries, carefully un-do the screws on the top while it isn't running. DO NOT take the lid off. Get your fingers clean and take the cover off. Power up the drive and when you see the drive nudge a bit and try to start, give it a little help with your fingers around the center spindle assembly. Do not touch the platters, obviously. Once it starts up, put the lid back on and put something fairly heavy on it to seal the lid a bit. Since the drive is compromised and dust can cause crashes and data errors, you have one shot to get the data off, essentially. Dump it all and toss the old drive.
2a: if you see a massive scratch in the surface and the head is at one end of it (this will cause the motor to also jam up). you've had a classic "head crash" - see #4 below. Earthquakes often cause this or dropping your laptop. Most drives park their heads between writes, but it's also why you should try to keep the system from running tons of background crap all the time - because when one DOES hit, the drive will be reading or writing (say, you run a torrent program or a game server all the time)
note - usually you can hear bearings going out long beforehand. Whining drives are a sign of a drive nearing its end of life. IME, most drives last about 3 years of daily use before they start to have issues.
3: if it starts up do you see no data, the boot sectors likely got fried. Power surges and unmounting drives without turning them off usually will eventually lead to the area where it parks the heads getting fried or worn out. Download a tool like Easy Recovery Professional. The trial version only allows you to recover 1 file, but the main mounting tool and boot sector repair tools function just like in the full version. Sometimes I've gotten clients data visible b
No, that ship was never built in the first place. They just told us it was.
It's amazing what people actually believe of the nonsense that we are taught in school. Theories are great. The reality on the streets hasn't changed much in the last 2000 years, though.
Body armor that protects your head is essentially worthless versus firearms as anyone in the military will tell you. Sure, it will maybe keep you from dying, or deflect a poorly aimed round occasionally (it's more to protect versus fragments and schrapneil, actually), but it's certainly not going to keep you from being injured or suffering from major trauma. If you look at the massive amount of bruising and sometimes broken ribs that happens after a bulletproof vest is shot, a single shot to his head would have disoriented him or made him simply collapse with a concussion or cracked skull.
ie - body armor is nice and all, but it's still like getting hit with a baseball bat or worse. Anything you can do is always better than just sitting there like a sheep. Even throwing a chair gives him maybe 1-2 less bullets that hit someone. It amazes me how many people have this passive attitude that we can't do anything. If you're going to likely die anyways, you surely can at least try to take the criminal out with you. Flight 93 was a good example of this. Often it's still a losing game for the would-be hero, but think of how bad it would have been if the plane had actually hit its target.
The issue, though, is that only AT&T and T Mobile offer per-minute plans any more as well as Android phones. Boost mobile does, but it's 20 cents a minute. Net 10 doesn't offer any decent modern phones. That's why I said "while it lasts" as Verizon and Sprint have already moved to monthly plans and effectively killed off their 10 cents a minute offerings. AT&T will likely do this as well in the next year, and T-Mobile in probably another year or two after that.
I guess you could buy an unlocked phone and use it, but the cheap plans aren't likely to stay around for much longer. I just like owning the thing outright. It always seemed wrong that essentially to get an iPhone, you had to pay a 2 year rental charge.
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As noted above, the technology seems to have been bought from another company by IBM and dates back to the 80s. I remember using exactly this sort of system in 1999 at a firm that I worked for. Each computer would contact the central server for verification before being authorized to get online with the stock exchange computers. Every time the program was run, in fact. Not some obscure patent rotting in a file cabinet, but dozens of actual commercial level products back in the 90s.
In fact, a search of "Direct Access Trading 1994 shows multiple hits. The software was in use forever - and it always used verification like this to ensure that the person using the software was in fact the right person.
The Patent Office needs to change its operating standards to require all applicants to prove that there is no prior art, not the other way around where people have to show that the Patent Office was wrong, if they want to be granted critical IP and software patents.
But hardly anything these days runs or works without some sort of installed or embedded software. Even your coffee maker has a CPU in it.
Catch-22.
Interesting side note:
If you consider most criminal's attitudes and ideas about society and work, you'll find that they are by and large lazy and opportunistic. Doing an honest job or taking care of business in a proper manner are the last things on their minds, generally. So to them, a death penalty has little or no weight. They live like they want, and they don't care about the future - they never imagined living past 30 anyways. Our society goes on and on about it, but that's just us putting our emotions into it. The criminal usually doesn't even have enough of a sense of guilt in any case for it to matter to them one way or another. (aside from saving their own self, that is)
The death penalty is simply not working as an actual punishment. It's too soft and too humane of a solution for someone who has done horrible things.
If it was me, I'd bring back hard labor. Make them work and give the money they make to the victims. They end up being finally of some use to society, and the victims get some actual moral and physical compensation as well.
I'm not sure how all of that could be summed up in the one sentence answers they want on jury selection panels, though... ;)
Well, that actually would make a lot of business sense.
After all, if this drags on long enough, Samsung will be fighting over old technology that's no longer being sold, and then they can just drop the entire thing or settle. Without losing their market share or momentum. Apple's real goal of crushing their competition will have been thwarted, and Samsung just has to pay a fine.
As for prior art, there has been hardly anything that hasn't involved stealing ideas from someone else in the last couple of hundred years. What we need is a more sane approach to it, like do in the fashion industry. Without everyone tacitly agreeing to allow some copying of ideas, the industry itself would simply implode and cease to work properly. Because they do, though, there are rarely legal challenges and everyone prospers (or at least has the ability to try to do so). Innovation requires copying and improving upon existing ideas. Without any ability to do so, people simply go to where they can. ie - China, currently.
Apple is slowly killing itself off in the mad rush to protect everything down to the placement of a screw and the color of a connector. They're so focused upon the minor tiny crap that they are losing sight of the reality of the marketplace. People buy your product because of the total package that you offer. They could care less what some minor effect or component looks like or where it came from. The more money they waste and the more bad press they generate, the closer they come to the mess they created in the mid 90s. They go down while clutching onto their patents and pride while the majority of the consumers have simply moved on to less expensive and less restrictive products.
Except this time, there is no Jobs to rescue them. And Wozniak isn't coming to save anything, either.
True, but for the next 40 or 50 years, it's 100% likely that record players and CD players will still be available. So the entire library of music, worldwide, from about 1940-2010 will be available to me to use if I wish. What future generations do with it hardly matters as I have the physical originals and the digital copies of them.
You hit upon the real reason driving this, though. Which is that a book usually DOES go through several owners before it becomes unreadable. And a bunch of kids in a classroom do share a single book in some poorer areas of the world. Of course they hate the idea of re-sale since they no longer have control of it. Their wet dream is to find a way to force each and every person who ever reads it to pay full price for a new copy.
You see this with video games as well. Almost every game now is essentially online-only and you have to pay a rather large fee if you buy the game used to play online. The publishers have been trying for over twenty years to drive places like Gamestop out of business and move towards a digital-only model.
Used record/CD store. $1-$3. Rip them yourself. No DRM, no idiocy, and you have the physical copy which is still worth nearly as much as you paid for it.
This is yet another reason I don't have any online music, e-books, or other media, and still prefer the old-fashioned physical types.
Plus, it's fun to go out and get records for a dollar or two at the local used music store and rip them myself. $1 for a record of 10-12 songs. That's excellent economics and the quality doesn't need to be perfect if it's being compressed anyways. Used books? You can buy almost any fictional novel these days for under $3, used. Most are closer to a dollar.
You don't have to worry much. The first time they try to actually fire it and the chamber fails and blows their hand completely off will be the last time they try to make such a device. Sure, the parts like the stock and trigger assembly and so on can be made out of most anything, but even the smallest rounds are in the 20-25K PSI range. It's simply going to explode as plastics like these machines use are brittle under extreme stress. If you've ever seen Pyrex/plate glass/etc shatter, you have an idea of what will happen. Big nasty razor sharp shards. Metal typically doesn't shatter like this, so it's actually many times more dangerous than a gun out of metal blowing up.
These guys are going to make a plan, get it out to the public, and then some idiot will have his machine calibrated a few thousandths of an inch off, use the wrong plastic, forget to do some step correctly, or any number of a dozen other issues and it'll be a grenade in his face. Then we all suffer as the lawyers get involved to save our kids from themselves.
Just go out to Wal-Mart and get a cheap .22 rifle. Leave this stuff to the pros.
It also sounds a lot like someone fishing for ideas to put into their next novel or screen play. It's way too specific.
To the original poster:
Do your own work and stop bugging us. If you can't cut it, perhaps you need to decide on a different major/job/career.
I ran over the actual numbers and it's not a small difference any more.
35% to the author if they want full control. 70% if they enable sharing. Cost to the purchaser is identical either way, as it's set by the author as a flat fee regardless of their cut. So the actual problem is with Amazon trying to force authors to give up many of their rights in order to be paid a fair amount versus the competition. Amazon has essentially admitted that they are fine with a 30% take for themselves to run the service. So it's not like enabling sharing is increasing the price to you or I.
As an end user, I don't personally care. This is between the authors and Amazon to work out. A $1 book will still BE a $1 book as long as the author decides to price it that low.
35% vs 70% is a huge difference and 35% is indeed very small when you consider that Amazon is admitting that they can still make a good profit at 70% payout. Digital distribution costs are negligible, after all, compared to traditional printed books.
I still think that you are taking this wrong. Amazon pays the author a (very) small percentage if you buy the book the first time. Check.
If you lend the book, a much smaller percentage goes to the author, effectively raising the payout to the author, since it's 100% Amazon's contract from start to finish. In other words, in order to get your full payout as an author, you need to allow lending. Otherwise you're getting less. This is just between Amazon and the author.
"We'll pay you more if you allow lending, but IFF actual lending is happening." That's perfectly fair, IMO.
If the Author thinks it's wrong, they can opt out. As the end user, we get the same price anyways.
Given how amazingly little Amazon pays the authors, and if it's *Amazon* paying them this tiny amount extra, I see no problem. None at all.
I think Amazon is stupid to pay them money for anything past the first sale, but whatever - they can waste money all they want to generate business if they wish to do so.
The real deal here is how the person in question here can monetize his (future) site. Perhaps work out some deal with Amazon, maybe, to run their ads or links to them, since he's doing it already? If he can become the site associated with this feature, he's got a real possible business. Or at least make enough money to pay for the server and connection.
Correct. They are basically spamming because they are pissed at the way things work and likely didn't read the contract they signed. And because it's Amazon and other huge companies that the ebooks are managed under, they are boned when it comes to re-working their contracts with them. If the Kindle allows sharing, until it doesn't any more, you have a legitimate right to use the function if they allowed it when they signed up.
The person in question needs to get his own server and net connection set up (actual leased line - bypass the ISP entirely). Then he can simply roundfile everything and they'll be forced to take actual legal action to get him to stop. Which they won't. His response should always be "Contact Kindle/Amazon/etc and complain to them to disable the feature - you said it was OK when you signed up." C&D *notices* are as worthless as those notices to pay 20 year old credit card debts. You'll still get them from time to time, but you can toss them and ignore them.
The only way to deal with asshats like this is to always fight it out and win. No, I'm not a lawyer, but this is truly a no-brainer. Don't let the bullies ruin your dream.
I personally think that it's time for you to move on to other areas of game design. Anyone with a decade or more of experience should be able to eventually get into project management or possibly something in the design areas of gaming as that uses less of your wrote memory areas of your brain and more of your creative areas. A project manager or level designer (as examples) can also keep (and is expected to) copious notes. So you can use your job to minimize most of your impairment's problems.
Plus, you'll have less stress and make a lot more money. The only reason anyone, and I really mean ANYONE would be a programmer these days is because they are either planning on making the next great app that takes off or they are planning on working for a major company in internet security or the like or a government institution (Nasa or similar). The other jobs are too much stress and too little reward.
Yet, what are typical MP3s encoded at? If you are lucky, they are only throwing away 2/3 of the data from the original recording. This further compresses the dynamic range. If you know it's useless to do a high quality recording, you simply skip the fine parts of the process. One reason autotune is so prevalent is because when you convert it (it sounds terrible on CD) to MP3, it smooths it out and you can hardly hear the rapid oscillations. Suddenly anyone can sound like a star, even if they can't sing.
Add in the fact that it's through a portable device or in your car, and you can almost skip the engineering process completely. Not really, but pretty much throw in some synth and/or sampled sounds, a drum machine, and a cheap melody, and you're done. It's all you're going to hear anyways through little ear buds.
One reason they do this is to make the songs sound good when they are compressed as MP3s. Ie - there's no point in microphonics, blending, and higher frequencies if it's all going to be stripped out as soon as it hits iTunes anyways.
I bet it'll be even worse a decade from now.
So given your rather pathetically limited storage on most consoles (when I can but a 1TB drive for well under $75 now), what happens when you have to un-install a game to make room from a new one? Right - if you want the original; game back, well, get ready to spend all night downloading it again. A physical copy would be a 1-2 minute install and you're done. And 1/10th or less of the drive space required.
My main issue, and in fact, THE main issue with downloads is that they take up a tremendous amount of space on your hard drive. Most consoles and that upcoming SteamBox have pathetically tiny hard drives such that a dozen games that you've downloaded pretty much stuff it full, while a physical disc just has game data on it. If you've tried to download a full game from most online services for a console, it's an all-evening scenario as well.
I've been a computer tech and consultant for almost exactly 20 years now. Back when I started, nobody could afford to just get a new drive or do data recovery. We had to try things to get them to work if at all possible, or to recover the data. So we learned a lot of tricks. .000001 - Run air over your drives. ALWAYS. 90% of the reason drives die is due to excessive heat and no way to get rid of it in the case. If you have a big fan at the rear and are generating negative pressure, placing your drive(s) in slot 1 and 3 and opening up the panel cover for slot #2 also works. Mount the drives with one upside-down so that the circuit boards are in the airflow. Or use a fan to push air over the drives. If they are too hot to easily touch, they are literally frying and will die in a year or two. Sometimes in a few months.
0.5 - Run your system in Raid 1. This uses a drive as a live backup, so if there's a physical problem with one, the array crashes - pull the bad drive and reboot - it's a normal single drive system now. WAY cheaper than data recovery. I use 250-300GB drives or whatever is smallest and reliable for the boot drive array and the main programs and data is on a second drive. It's almost always the main boot drive that gets corrupted or dies due to the higher usage.
1 - If the drive is a brick, it's almost always the controller board that fried. A swap will work, though it will also lose track of what sectors are bad, so you want to mount the drive as a data drive or under linux/knoppix so that you're only reading data off of it. If you get it up, aim for the email and critical personal files entirely. Ignore the applications directory and system as those will need to be be re-installed anyways.
2 - If turns on but fails to spin up/clicks and does nothing (it'll make a small "tiktik" sound), the motor and bearings are gummed up or shot. The solution is to get the computer in as dust-free of an environment as possible. Get your data recovery software running. Put the drive in an external drive box. Leave the top off. Try cycling the drive several times - it will mount and un-mount the drive - and if it spins up, do data recovery immediately. If it doesn't spin up after about ten tries, carefully un-do the screws on the top while it isn't running. DO NOT take the lid off. Get your fingers clean and take the cover off. Power up the drive and when you see the drive nudge a bit and try to start, give it a little help with your fingers around the center spindle assembly. Do not touch the platters, obviously. Once it starts up, put the lid back on and put something fairly heavy on it to seal the lid a bit. Since the drive is compromised and dust can cause crashes and data errors, you have one shot to get the data off, essentially. Dump it all and toss the old drive.
2a: if you see a massive scratch in the surface and the head is at one end of it (this will cause the motor to also jam up). you've had a classic "head crash" - see #4 below. Earthquakes often cause this or dropping your laptop. Most drives park their heads between writes, but it's also why you should try to keep the system from running tons of background crap all the time - because when one DOES hit, the drive will be reading or writing (say, you run a torrent program or a game server all the time)
note - usually you can hear bearings going out long beforehand. Whining drives are a sign of a drive nearing its end of life. IME, most drives last about 3 years of daily use before they start to have issues.
3: if it starts up do you see no data, the boot sectors likely got fried. Power surges and unmounting drives without turning them off usually will eventually lead to the area where it parks the heads getting fried or worn out. Download a tool like Easy Recovery Professional. The trial version only allows you to recover 1 file, but the main mounting tool and boot sector repair tools function just like in the full version. Sometimes I've gotten clients data visible b
No, that ship was never built in the first place. They just told us it was.
It's amazing what people actually believe of the nonsense that we are taught in school. Theories are great. The reality on the streets hasn't changed much in the last 2000 years, though.
Body armor that protects your head is essentially worthless versus firearms as anyone in the military will tell you. Sure, it will maybe keep you from dying, or deflect a poorly aimed round occasionally (it's more to protect versus fragments and schrapneil, actually), but it's certainly not going to keep you from being injured or suffering from major trauma. If you look at the massive amount of bruising and sometimes broken ribs that happens after a bulletproof vest is shot, a single shot to his head would have disoriented him or made him simply collapse with a concussion or cracked skull.
ie - body armor is nice and all, but it's still like getting hit with a baseball bat or worse. Anything you can do is always better than just sitting there like a sheep. Even throwing a chair gives him maybe 1-2 less bullets that hit someone. It amazes me how many people have this passive attitude that we can't do anything. If you're going to likely die anyways, you surely can at least try to take the criminal out with you. Flight 93 was a good example of this. Often it's still a losing game for the would-be hero, but think of how bad it would have been if the plane had actually hit its target.
The issue, though, is that only AT&T and T Mobile offer per-minute plans any more as well as Android phones. Boost mobile does, but it's 20 cents a minute. Net 10 doesn't offer any decent modern phones. That's why I said "while it lasts" as Verizon and Sprint have already moved to monthly plans and effectively killed off their 10 cents a minute offerings. AT&T will likely do this as well in the next year, and T-Mobile in probably another year or two after that.
I guess you could buy an unlocked phone and use it, but the cheap plans aren't likely to stay around for much longer. I just like owning the thing outright. It always seemed wrong that essentially to get an iPhone, you had to pay a 2 year rental charge.