Guess you were wrong. At this point, we can posit the existence of at least one female on Slashdot. Given the lack of a second downward moderation, however, we can likely bound the number at less than 2 * (1 / p) where p is the probability of a given user getting mod points today, assuming a normal distribution....:-D
It's probably not the weight of the camera that decreases the flight time, but rather the power needed to transmit a video signal back to your receiving station without too much signal degradation....
What forms of 2 factor authentication would you propose for a public computer btw? Some kind of USB dongle or something? What if the cafe didn't allow those? The risk might be reduced with a 2 factor system, but I still think it's better to avoid banking on a public terminal.
Factor 1: pin number. This is something you know. Usually 4 digits, but may be arbitrary. Probability of guessing: 1/ 10^k where k is the number of digits. If digit count is variable, this makes it even more fun since 0004 and 4 are then different values.
Factor 2: CryptoCard token or similar. You push a button and it gives you the next number in a pseudorandom sequence that was pre-seeded. The computer on the other end knows the next few numbers in the sequence (the exact number probably varies depending on configuration) and if the number you enter isn't one of those, it rejects the login attempt. No number can be used twice. Probability of a successful guess: about 1 / 50,000 - 1/200,000, depending on the bank's level of paranoia about skipping numbers without a resync.:-)
Total probability: 1 / 500,000,000 - 1/2,000,000,000 depending on paranoia level for number skipping and assuming a 4 digit PIN....
Even better, I think the resync process is also basically protected against identity theft unless you have the pin number, since you can't substitute a different token and get two numbers in a sequence that would be valid for the original token, IIRC, and the resync doesn't buy you anything other than a few more tries to guess the PIN number.
They could have made it several orders of magnitude harder by adding two-factor authentication with a SecurID or CryptoCard style of physical token. At that point, the only way to commit real identity theft (as opposed to simply being able to see the partial account numbers (your bank does only list part of the account numbers, right?) shown on the screen) would be to inject a man-in-the-middle proxy that was configured for your particular bank with detection and interception of the logout click and returning a bogus "you have logged out" page, then transferring control over the session immediately to a human operator to work with it further. While such sophisticated attacks are possible, they are much less trivial, and thus much less likely.
I find it utterly hilarious that my webmail at work is orders of magnitude more secure than online banking. Instead of fixing the problem of authentication, the banks would rather come up with more and more absurd "solutions" like making your passwords impossible to remember (and incompatible with passwords from other online banking sites due to different rules) so you have to write them down, then setting up lists of security questions for the inevitable forgotten password. I mean jeez, a CryptoCard token is what, $70 in quantities? They probably spend close to that for each user every year just because of the extra customer support overhead of their draconian password schemes....
No, my PG&E rates start at about 8 cents per kWhr, which is on the high side for the U.S., but not obscene, and is close to the 6 cent per kWhr rate that most companies reportedly use when they say you can get the price-equivalent of 150 MPG. That's for the first few hundred kWhr units, though, the baseline rate designed to be typical for an impoverished home with one refrigerator, no A/C, no freezer, no servers, etc. The price per unit rapidly increases to more than 4x that, though, bringing the MPG down to less than the equivalent of 40 MPG, which is pretty much right in line with my math.
Yeah, we're getting screwed by not being eligible for time-of-day metering where I live. If we could do time-of-day metering, those off-peak hours would be billed at only 6 cents per kWhr, and plug-in hybrids would be a real savings. *sigh*
If that's drawing the full 15 amps, at my current rate of $0.33/kWhr (we don't have time-of-day billing, so every extra kW I use is billed at that tier), that comes to about $4.75 worth of power every night. How far does it go on this? If it's less than about 60 miles, a Prius will run cheaper on gasoline without plugging it in.... (Since it only gets 40 miles on that charge, so much for your "big savings".)
Plug-in hybrids are only a huge cost savings if you live somewhere where power is cheap or if you can convince somebody else to provide power for you (e.g. plugging in at work, at the supermarket, etc.). Otherwise, you may actually find gasoline cheaper, and since so much power production comes from fossil fuels, barring a national policy change to push for more solar, hydro, wind, wave, and nuclear power, that is unlikely to change (and since those power sources are all at least currently more expensive than fossil fuels, it is still unlikely to change for a long time to come even if we had such a policy change).
TANSTAAFL. You either need a car or you don't, and you're not really going to get around for dramatically less money by buying a more efficient vehicle, since the cost savings of the more efficient vehicle are almost always more than factored into the purchase price of the vehicle up front (and that assumes that the more efficient vehicle really would save you money anyway). My advice to car buyers is to just pick a vehicle that meets your needs and only consider fuel economy in terms of environmental impact, not in terms of impact on your pocketbook.... Trying to reduce the latter is a fool's errand.
While we're at it, let's ban any books that teach dangerous ideas. We'll start with the most vile of books, e.g. hate speech, terrorism aids, anything about manufacturing weapons like The Anarchist Cookbook or nuclear physics texts, etc. Then we'll move our way up the chain to progressively more subtle subversive threats like 1984 and anything by Ayn Rand.
Helpful tip: after collecting the books, for easier disposal, heat them to 451 degrees Fahrenheit....
Yeah, these laws are absurd. It doesn't take a village to raise a child, it takes a parent. The sooner we stop expecting the village to raise our kids for us, the better off everyone will be.
If they can sufficiently suppress this story, they will have a lot less jurors quoting the news byte as absolute proof that DNA evidence can't be trusted.
And of course DNA can't be trusted without other corroborating evidence. If they find my hair in the car of somebody who turns up dead (or vice-versa) there's many orders of magnitude greater chance that one of us gave the other a ride than that one of us killed the other (unless I'm dead, in which case, fry her, please. KIDDING!)
The harsh reality is that even if you ignore/solve the issue of family members sharing genetic markers and other flaws in common testing procedures, DNA is still just as circumstantial as pretty much any other non-eyewitness/videotape evidence of the crime. What's scary is how many people hear about a sample of DNA being found at the scene of the crime and automatically jump to a conclusion of guilt because they saw on Law & Order (or insert any other similar show here) that DNA was a way to reliably identify the criminal, and then are slack-jawed in disbelief when it is revealed that the person had an airtight alibi (e.g. he/she was in another country at the time of the crime). That's both entertaining and terrifying all at the same time.
Safe to say at this point that if they were the only survivors of a world war, it would be a nuclear war, and they would come out with Geiger counters in every hand....
Boot from a RAMdisk filesystem and make it as small as possible. Rip out all the startup scripts and write your own that just runs the one or two things you actually need running, runs ifconfig, route, etc. manually with hard-coded info (or starts dhclient/pump/dhcpcd). Compile the minimum number of possible drivers into the kernel and don't include any modules at all, nor tools to load modules. Include a bare-bones GUI layer like Nano-X and write your applications using pure Xlib if you can. Otherwise, use the most lightweight WM and GUI toolkit you can find (e.g. straight Tcl/Tk).
For permanent storage, mount a small (e.g. 300 MB) filesystem on a flash card so that the fsck takes just a couple of seconds even if forced.:-)
You're assuming that the routers at both ends know how to handle high latency upstream connections and don't clog the pipe with retransmits when they haven't received an ACK for so long. It's easy to envision a factor of 3 multiplier....:-D
Depends. If it's a mesh dish, you may get much less reflection of higher frequency signals once the wavelength gets shorter than about twice the distance between bars in the mesh, IIRC. Probably not going to work too well for Ku band because the wavelength gets below 2 cm, so you'd need a mesh spacing of less than about.8 or.9 cm... I think.... If it is a solid dish, it should just work; a parabola is a parabola. Even still, it might work, but you won't get nearly the amount of extra reflection you'd ordinarily get from using such a large dish.
I've never had to repair anything due to mishaps, and I treat my laptop with reasonable care. However, I have had to replace two laptop hard drives on three occasions due to drive failures in the last ten years. Actually, make that two in the past five years, and none prior to that. One was an acoustic failure (loud, whining drive, but worked perfectly for the better part of a year in that state before I bothered to get it replaced). The other one... I put the machine to sleep, woke it up a minute later, and the drive wouldn't spin up, making a click-of-death "can't find track zero" noise. My suspicion is that it was a failure of the head due to abrasion as it drags across the ramp when parking.
Mechanical failures don't just happen to people who abuse their machines. Yes, they happen much more frequently to people who treat their machines like excrement, but they also happen randomly for no apparent reason... usually due to flaws in the mechanical design. Some drives have bad ramps that put too much stress on the heads when they park. Some drives have bearings that eventually start to leak oil all over the disk surface. And so on. I'd be much happier if I never had to deal with a Winchester drive again... particularly in laptops.
Fair enough, but then again, eBay doesn't know how much the winning bidder was willing to pay, either, at least in the case of sniping, since it usually is rapidly cranked up by repeated competing submissions by a dozen bots hitting the servers in rapid succession....:-) Besides, I'm not saying it is entirely rational to look at it as having lost by a dollar over a $750 bid, but it certainly is human nature to do so even if the sniper sent a bid in the last second for $1,000.
That said, the argument that non-snipe bidding is foolish based on the way eBay currently works seems like a valid argument. The run-up bidding is inherently capped by random network bandwidth variations. Most sniping behavior I've seen has involved sniping at a percentage above the current price, not at some insanely high maximum reserve, followed by sniping higher if it detects that it has been outbid. That's why I've been able to out-snipe snipers by hand on occasion. With that in mind, if you know that the majority of bids will happen in the last five seconds and is likely to be based on the price a few seconds prior to the end of the auction rather than some predetermined maximum bid (as would be the case if everyone simply entered a proxy bid and walked away), it is therefore in the best interest of everyone (except the seller) for no users to bid until the last five seconds. That way, the run-up bidding starts as low as possible and when eBay arbitrarily cuts off the run-up bidding at the predetermined time, the person who wins will do so at a lower price than if there were bids prior to the last five seconds....
No, just because you don't understand the complaint doesn't make it invalid. Yes, the people who care more about winning than about getting the merchandise at a decent price are suckers. The reality, however, is that because there are so many of those people, all of whom bid with bots, the odds of anyone -ever- buying -anything- at a reasonable price on eBay rapidly approaches zero, making it a waste of people's time to even bother bidding unless it is at the last second in hopes that your random snipe bot might generate the lucky closing bid and do so at a price that is still under your personal maximum for the item.
Also, searching for items on eBay takes time. If that auction is then snatched by somebody else at the last second for only a dollar more than your high bid, people naturally feel cheated---not because they didn't bid what they felt the item was worth to them, but because the amount of extra money somebody else paid was so small that the value of the time they have to spend searching for another one and bidding for it exceeds the amount of extra money they would have had to pay to win the auction. That's what makes the last-second bidding thing absolutely suck for buyers.
Finally, there's the problem of snipe bidders who then turn around and resell the products on eBay. They calculate the average selling price minus fees and shipping costs and effectively guarantee that no product will ever sell below that price. In effect, this creates an artificial supply shortage and drives up the average selling price of goods for everyone. Of course, eBay doesn't want to stop that because they rake in money from fees every time somebody does it.
And then there's the issue of shill bidding---somebody bidding against you to find out what your maximum bid is and make you pay as much as possible. Of course, they might accidentally go too far on occasion, but odds are somebody will outbid them, and if not, they could always retract the bid (and then rebid as a different user for just a little less than your maximum bid). It's probably safe to assume that such things happen far more than eBay would like us to believe.
I have participated in many auctions on eBay, and with only one or two exceptions, the only ones I have ever "won" were because I bid low initially, then sniped against myself and the other snipers at the end (and even then, success is limited). The system is utterly broken as it stands now, and I have basically stopped buying anything through eBay unless it has either a "buy-it-now" option or an "or-best-offer" option.... Either every bid should require you to key in the text from a CAPTCHA or bidding should be extended by five minutes every time someone bids within the last minute of the auction. Either one would fix the problem. Until the problem is fixed, eBay is, IMHO, an utter waste of my time.
Re:Clever new tools for kernel config
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Linux 2.6.26 Out
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· Score: 1
What would be ideal would be to have new device detection that:
Knows where the kernel source lives.
Knows how to edit the configuration file.
Knows which drivers to enable to support the device (based on device/vendor ID hints stored in some plist file or something).
Positive. One of those was in a laptop, so it is unrelated to the other two. The others had two fans blowing air from outside the machine right across the drive. The two drives were identical except that one was SATA, so given that one worked perfectly (until it started making noises like a chainsaw), it's safe to say that the power supply isn't the issue, and since the second Seagate drive (random data corruption with no errors reported) also misbehaved in my TiVo (whose power supply voltage I adjusted myself), I'm pretty sure that the drive has issues....:-)
The first one was in a MythTV box. Bursts of continuous I/O with long periods of inactivity in between. Two fans pulling air from outside the machine and blowing it at full blast right across the top and bottom of the drive.... Failed after about ten months of use with a head crash. Walked into my house one night and heard the infamous chainsaw-of-death sound.... Cloned the data off to another drive. Lost a few blocks in the media partition, but no big deal.
The second one was in a laptop. Failed after about ten months with click-of death. That one hurt a bit more.
Third was in the MythTV box. The drive was used for about two weeks in my TiVo, but kept causing it to reboot and it wouldn't boot successfully about 90% of the time (but behaved flawlessly in a FIreWire case), so I swapped back to the previous drive, assuming the misbehavior was the fault of the somewhat ancient ATA chipset in the old S1 TiVo. Well, when I swapped it in as a place to dump a clone of the first Seagate 500 GB drive, I quickly got the MythTV back up and running, but after three weeks of use, it started misbehaving massively. Daemons and libraries started randomly failing. I'd copy in replacements from another machine and then something else would break. This kept happening for three days before I realized that the drive was just randomly corrupting data during reads.... I think I finally have that machine working again after cloning it off to the replacement SATA drive (which I got back from Seagate last week)....
Three different models of drives, three radically different failure modes.
Linksys is the one manufacturer that's on my "never" list. My previous employer used to use their hubs and cascaded them into a network switch. The darn things kept losing track of what MAC addresses were hanging off them and refusing to route traffic. You only have to have one complete and utter failure like that to be written off in my book.
That said, I've recently also written off Netgear. After about my fourth or fifth Netgear card went dead (I think I have one left that is still functioning after three or four years), I started avoiding their cards like the plague. Then, I bought one of their consumer hubs a couple of months ago and it was dropping something like 80% of the packets that went through it (between any two devices including upstream). I took it back to Fry's and replaced it with a D-Link and it worked flawlessly. (And no, I didn't have something hooked up to the uplink and the non-uplink port beside it. Been there, done that.)
Bottom line is that after three hard drive failures in the course of a little over a month (yes, I have a third Seagate drive misbehaving massively, randomly corrupting data), I've pretty much come to the conclusion that nearly all electronics built today are mass-Chinese-manufactured crap that barely works and doesn't even do that for very long. Very sad, really.
That's as much an overly simplistic view of terrorism as the Bush view of it. There are many reasons that they hate us, and different people in those organizations are in it for different reasons. Al Qaeda in Islamic states works in much the same way as the KKK works in the U.S. They look for the issue of the day---reasons for people to be angry at a particular group of people---and then exploit that issue to attract members, who they then indoctrinate into a culture of hate.
Some members of Al Qaeda joined because they were angry over military bases, sure, but far more militants joined because they hate our support of Israel. Far more than that hate us because our country is relatively wealthy and is seen as being greedy (and to some degree, rightly so). Far more people than that hate our general tendency to interfere in the way Arab countries are run, our interference in wars, etc. Still others are determined to spread strict adherence to Sharia (Islamic holy law) worldwide and hate the fact that the U.S. law is so thoroughly different. That last group are the ones who are pretty much going to hate us until we turn into a totalitarian state....
If you really want to combat the problem, you have to take a three-pronged approach. The first, unfortunately, is attacking the immediate threat, which we did to some extent in Afghanistan. It wasn't a pleasant war, but it was arguably necessary.
The second is a policy issue: we need to make a lot of changes in the area of foreign policy to improve relations with the Muslim world, not the least of which is bullwhipping Israel every time they do something stupid like launching missiles into a neighboring country and killing 200 people because some Palestinian killed a single police officer somewhere. We're far too tolerant of such knee-jerk Israeli actions, and the sooner our foreign policy reflects that, the better. We also need to reduce our dependence on oil from that region. This won't in any way make anyone hate us less, but it will at least discourage future U.S. leaders from letting future foreign policy decisions be dictated by oil needs.
The third, ironically, is to promote better understanding of the Muslim religion among Muslim people in the MIddle East. By better educating Muslims about what the Qur'an does and does not say, it will in thwart the perversion of the Qur'an into a text of hatred and war by these terrorists and encourage people to actually follow the teachings of Muhammad (which do not encourage hate or wars, but rather encourage caring for others and behaving in a morally upright fashion).
Funny, ever since we removed our bases from Saudi Arabia (Bush's pals you know), we haven't been attacked. Hrm cause and effect?
By that standard, our war on terrorism has also been completely successful. After all, since we started making people strip down and take off their shoes at airports, nobody has carried a bomb onto an airplane. So it must be working. (This despite the fact that the last bomb on a U.S. airplane prior to the Richard Reid incident was Pan Am Flight 103 way back in 1988....)
P.S. The last Al Qaeda attack on U.S. interests was in 2005. Three American hotels in Jordan were bombed. That was more than 2 1/2 years after the U.S. pulled out of Saudi military bases. So no, it almost certainly is not cause and effect....
Slashdot Mirror
Guess you were wrong. At this point, we can posit the existence of at least one female on Slashdot. Given the lack of a second downward moderation, however, we can likely bound the number at less than 2 * (1 / p) where p is the probability of a given user getting mod points today, assuming a normal distribution.... :-D
It's probably not the weight of the camera that decreases the flight time, but rather the power needed to transmit a video signal back to your receiving station without too much signal degradation....
That certainly explains the whole 1984 thing as of late.
Factor 1: pin number. This is something you know. Usually 4 digits, but may be arbitrary. Probability of guessing: 1/ 10^k where k is the number of digits. If digit count is variable, this makes it even more fun since 0004 and 4 are then different values.
Factor 2: CryptoCard token or similar. You push a button and it gives you the next number in a pseudorandom sequence that was pre-seeded. The computer on the other end knows the next few numbers in the sequence (the exact number probably varies depending on configuration) and if the number you enter isn't one of those, it rejects the login attempt. No number can be used twice. Probability of a successful guess: about 1 / 50,000 - 1/200,000, depending on the bank's level of paranoia about skipping numbers without a resync. :-)
Total probability: 1 / 500,000,000 - 1/2,000,000,000 depending on paranoia level for number skipping and assuming a 4 digit PIN....
Even better, I think the resync process is also basically protected against identity theft unless you have the pin number, since you can't substitute a different token and get two numbers in a sequence that would be valid for the original token, IIRC, and the resync doesn't buy you anything other than a few more tries to guess the PIN number.
They could have made it several orders of magnitude harder by adding two-factor authentication with a SecurID or CryptoCard style of physical token. At that point, the only way to commit real identity theft (as opposed to simply being able to see the partial account numbers (your bank does only list part of the account numbers, right?) shown on the screen) would be to inject a man-in-the-middle proxy that was configured for your particular bank with detection and interception of the logout click and returning a bogus "you have logged out" page, then transferring control over the session immediately to a human operator to work with it further. While such sophisticated attacks are possible, they are much less trivial, and thus much less likely.
I find it utterly hilarious that my webmail at work is orders of magnitude more secure than online banking. Instead of fixing the problem of authentication, the banks would rather come up with more and more absurd "solutions" like making your passwords impossible to remember (and incompatible with passwords from other online banking sites due to different rules) so you have to write them down, then setting up lists of security questions for the inevitable forgotten password. I mean jeez, a CryptoCard token is what, $70 in quantities? They probably spend close to that for each user every year just because of the extra customer support overhead of their draconian password schemes....
No, my PG&E rates start at about 8 cents per kWhr, which is on the high side for the U.S., but not obscene, and is close to the 6 cent per kWhr rate that most companies reportedly use when they say you can get the price-equivalent of 150 MPG. That's for the first few hundred kWhr units, though, the baseline rate designed to be typical for an impoverished home with one refrigerator, no A/C, no freezer, no servers, etc. The price per unit rapidly increases to more than 4x that, though, bringing the MPG down to less than the equivalent of 40 MPG, which is pretty much right in line with my math.
Yeah, we're getting screwed by not being eligible for time-of-day metering where I live. If we could do time-of-day metering, those off-peak hours would be billed at only 6 cents per kWhr, and plug-in hybrids would be a real savings. *sigh*
Did anybody ever build an Apple II joystick with snap-through feedback? Those were analog thirty years ago.
If that's drawing the full 15 amps, at my current rate of $0.33/kWhr (we don't have time-of-day billing, so every extra kW I use is billed at that tier), that comes to about $4.75 worth of power every night. How far does it go on this? If it's less than about 60 miles, a Prius will run cheaper on gasoline without plugging it in.... (Since it only gets 40 miles on that charge, so much for your "big savings".)
Plug-in hybrids are only a huge cost savings if you live somewhere where power is cheap or if you can convince somebody else to provide power for you (e.g. plugging in at work, at the supermarket, etc.). Otherwise, you may actually find gasoline cheaper, and since so much power production comes from fossil fuels, barring a national policy change to push for more solar, hydro, wind, wave, and nuclear power, that is unlikely to change (and since those power sources are all at least currently more expensive than fossil fuels, it is still unlikely to change for a long time to come even if we had such a policy change).
TANSTAAFL. You either need a car or you don't, and you're not really going to get around for dramatically less money by buying a more efficient vehicle, since the cost savings of the more efficient vehicle are almost always more than factored into the purchase price of the vehicle up front (and that assumes that the more efficient vehicle really would save you money anyway). My advice to car buyers is to just pick a vehicle that meets your needs and only consider fuel economy in terms of environmental impact, not in terms of impact on your pocketbook.... Trying to reduce the latter is a fool's errand.
While we're at it, let's ban any books that teach dangerous ideas. We'll start with the most vile of books, e.g. hate speech, terrorism aids, anything about manufacturing weapons like The Anarchist Cookbook or nuclear physics texts, etc. Then we'll move our way up the chain to progressively more subtle subversive threats like 1984 and anything by Ayn Rand.
Helpful tip: after collecting the books, for easier disposal, heat them to 451 degrees Fahrenheit....
Yeah, these laws are absurd. It doesn't take a village to raise a child, it takes a parent. The sooner we stop expecting the village to raise our kids for us, the better off everyone will be.
Just wait until they decide that political speech could destroy the innocence of youth. Great Firewall of China, here we come.
And of course DNA can't be trusted without other corroborating evidence. If they find my hair in the car of somebody who turns up dead (or vice-versa) there's many orders of magnitude greater chance that one of us gave the other a ride than that one of us killed the other (unless I'm dead, in which case, fry her, please. KIDDING!)
The harsh reality is that even if you ignore/solve the issue of family members sharing genetic markers and other flaws in common testing procedures, DNA is still just as circumstantial as pretty much any other non-eyewitness/videotape evidence of the crime. What's scary is how many people hear about a sample of DNA being found at the scene of the crime and automatically jump to a conclusion of guilt because they saw on Law & Order (or insert any other similar show here) that DNA was a way to reliably identify the criminal, and then are slack-jawed in disbelief when it is revealed that the person had an airtight alibi (e.g. he/she was in another country at the time of the crime). That's both entertaining and terrifying all at the same time.
Safe to say at this point that if they were the only survivors of a world war, it would be a nuclear war, and they would come out with Geiger counters in every hand....
Boot from a RAMdisk filesystem and make it as small as possible. Rip out all the startup scripts and write your own that just runs the one or two things you actually need running, runs ifconfig, route, etc. manually with hard-coded info (or starts dhclient/pump/dhcpcd). Compile the minimum number of possible drivers into the kernel and don't include any modules at all, nor tools to load modules. Include a bare-bones GUI layer like Nano-X and write your applications using pure Xlib if you can. Otherwise, use the most lightweight WM and GUI toolkit you can find (e.g. straight Tcl/Tk).
For permanent storage, mount a small (e.g. 300 MB) filesystem on a flash card so that the fsck takes just a couple of seconds even if forced. :-)
You're assuming that the routers at both ends know how to handle high latency upstream connections and don't clog the pipe with retransmits when they haven't received an ACK for so long. It's easy to envision a factor of 3 multiplier.... :-D
Depends. If it's a mesh dish, you may get much less reflection of higher frequency signals once the wavelength gets shorter than about twice the distance between bars in the mesh, IIRC. Probably not going to work too well for Ku band because the wavelength gets below 2 cm, so you'd need a mesh spacing of less than about .8 or .9 cm... I think.... If it is a solid dish, it should just work; a parabola is a parabola. Even still, it might work, but you won't get nearly the amount of extra reflection you'd ordinarily get from using such a large dish.
I've never had to repair anything due to mishaps, and I treat my laptop with reasonable care. However, I have had to replace two laptop hard drives on three occasions due to drive failures in the last ten years. Actually, make that two in the past five years, and none prior to that. One was an acoustic failure (loud, whining drive, but worked perfectly for the better part of a year in that state before I bothered to get it replaced). The other one... I put the machine to sleep, woke it up a minute later, and the drive wouldn't spin up, making a click-of-death "can't find track zero" noise. My suspicion is that it was a failure of the head due to abrasion as it drags across the ramp when parking.
Mechanical failures don't just happen to people who abuse their machines. Yes, they happen much more frequently to people who treat their machines like excrement, but they also happen randomly for no apparent reason... usually due to flaws in the mechanical design. Some drives have bad ramps that put too much stress on the heads when they park. Some drives have bearings that eventually start to leak oil all over the disk surface. And so on. I'd be much happier if I never had to deal with a Winchester drive again... particularly in laptops.
Dead Bull wrecks your wings?
Fair enough, but then again, eBay doesn't know how much the winning bidder was willing to pay, either, at least in the case of sniping, since it usually is rapidly cranked up by repeated competing submissions by a dozen bots hitting the servers in rapid succession.... :-) Besides, I'm not saying it is entirely rational to look at it as having lost by a dollar over a $750 bid, but it certainly is human nature to do so even if the sniper sent a bid in the last second for $1,000.
That said, the argument that non-snipe bidding is foolish based on the way eBay currently works seems like a valid argument. The run-up bidding is inherently capped by random network bandwidth variations. Most sniping behavior I've seen has involved sniping at a percentage above the current price, not at some insanely high maximum reserve, followed by sniping higher if it detects that it has been outbid. That's why I've been able to out-snipe snipers by hand on occasion. With that in mind, if you know that the majority of bids will happen in the last five seconds and is likely to be based on the price a few seconds prior to the end of the auction rather than some predetermined maximum bid (as would be the case if everyone simply entered a proxy bid and walked away), it is therefore in the best interest of everyone (except the seller) for no users to bid until the last five seconds. That way, the run-up bidding starts as low as possible and when eBay arbitrarily cuts off the run-up bidding at the predetermined time, the person who wins will do so at a lower price than if there were bids prior to the last five seconds....
No, just because you don't understand the complaint doesn't make it invalid. Yes, the people who care more about winning than about getting the merchandise at a decent price are suckers. The reality, however, is that because there are so many of those people, all of whom bid with bots, the odds of anyone -ever- buying -anything- at a reasonable price on eBay rapidly approaches zero, making it a waste of people's time to even bother bidding unless it is at the last second in hopes that your random snipe bot might generate the lucky closing bid and do so at a price that is still under your personal maximum for the item.
Also, searching for items on eBay takes time. If that auction is then snatched by somebody else at the last second for only a dollar more than your high bid, people naturally feel cheated---not because they didn't bid what they felt the item was worth to them, but because the amount of extra money somebody else paid was so small that the value of the time they have to spend searching for another one and bidding for it exceeds the amount of extra money they would have had to pay to win the auction. That's what makes the last-second bidding thing absolutely suck for buyers.
Finally, there's the problem of snipe bidders who then turn around and resell the products on eBay. They calculate the average selling price minus fees and shipping costs and effectively guarantee that no product will ever sell below that price. In effect, this creates an artificial supply shortage and drives up the average selling price of goods for everyone. Of course, eBay doesn't want to stop that because they rake in money from fees every time somebody does it.
And then there's the issue of shill bidding---somebody bidding against you to find out what your maximum bid is and make you pay as much as possible. Of course, they might accidentally go too far on occasion, but odds are somebody will outbid them, and if not, they could always retract the bid (and then rebid as a different user for just a little less than your maximum bid). It's probably safe to assume that such things happen far more than eBay would like us to believe.
I have participated in many auctions on eBay, and with only one or two exceptions, the only ones I have ever "won" were because I bid low initially, then sniped against myself and the other snipers at the end (and even then, success is limited). The system is utterly broken as it stands now, and I have basically stopped buying anything through eBay unless it has either a "buy-it-now" option or an "or-best-offer" option.... Either every bid should require you to key in the text from a CAPTCHA or bidding should be extended by five minutes every time someone bids within the last minute of the auction. Either one would fix the problem. Until the problem is fixed, eBay is, IMHO, an utter waste of my time.
What would be ideal would be to have new device detection that:
You get the idea. :-)
Positive. One of those was in a laptop, so it is unrelated to the other two. The others had two fans blowing air from outside the machine right across the drive. The two drives were identical except that one was SATA, so given that one worked perfectly (until it started making noises like a chainsaw), it's safe to say that the power supply isn't the issue, and since the second Seagate drive (random data corruption with no errors reported) also misbehaved in my TiVo (whose power supply voltage I adjusted myself), I'm pretty sure that the drive has issues.... :-)
The first one was in a MythTV box. Bursts of continuous I/O with long periods of inactivity in between. Two fans pulling air from outside the machine and blowing it at full blast right across the top and bottom of the drive.... Failed after about ten months of use with a head crash. Walked into my house one night and heard the infamous chainsaw-of-death sound.... Cloned the data off to another drive. Lost a few blocks in the media partition, but no big deal.
The second one was in a laptop. Failed after about ten months with click-of death. That one hurt a bit more.
Third was in the MythTV box. The drive was used for about two weeks in my TiVo, but kept causing it to reboot and it wouldn't boot successfully about 90% of the time (but behaved flawlessly in a FIreWire case), so I swapped back to the previous drive, assuming the misbehavior was the fault of the somewhat ancient ATA chipset in the old S1 TiVo. Well, when I swapped it in as a place to dump a clone of the first Seagate 500 GB drive, I quickly got the MythTV back up and running, but after three weeks of use, it started misbehaving massively. Daemons and libraries started randomly failing. I'd copy in replacements from another machine and then something else would break. This kept happening for three days before I realized that the drive was just randomly corrupting data during reads.... I think I finally have that machine working again after cloning it off to the replacement SATA drive (which I got back from Seagate last week)....
Three different models of drives, three radically different failure modes.
Been that kind of year.
Linksys is the one manufacturer that's on my "never" list. My previous employer used to use their hubs and cascaded them into a network switch. The darn things kept losing track of what MAC addresses were hanging off them and refusing to route traffic. You only have to have one complete and utter failure like that to be written off in my book.
That said, I've recently also written off Netgear. After about my fourth or fifth Netgear card went dead (I think I have one left that is still functioning after three or four years), I started avoiding their cards like the plague. Then, I bought one of their consumer hubs a couple of months ago and it was dropping something like 80% of the packets that went through it (between any two devices including upstream). I took it back to Fry's and replaced it with a D-Link and it worked flawlessly. (And no, I didn't have something hooked up to the uplink and the non-uplink port beside it. Been there, done that.)
Bottom line is that after three hard drive failures in the course of a little over a month (yes, I have a third Seagate drive misbehaving massively, randomly corrupting data), I've pretty much come to the conclusion that nearly all electronics built today are mass-Chinese-manufactured crap that barely works and doesn't even do that for very long. Very sad, really.
But I like FormatLikeBabbageDiffEngine.
That's as much an overly simplistic view of terrorism as the Bush view of it. There are many reasons that they hate us, and different people in those organizations are in it for different reasons. Al Qaeda in Islamic states works in much the same way as the KKK works in the U.S. They look for the issue of the day---reasons for people to be angry at a particular group of people---and then exploit that issue to attract members, who they then indoctrinate into a culture of hate.
Some members of Al Qaeda joined because they were angry over military bases, sure, but far more militants joined because they hate our support of Israel. Far more than that hate us because our country is relatively wealthy and is seen as being greedy (and to some degree, rightly so). Far more people than that hate our general tendency to interfere in the way Arab countries are run, our interference in wars, etc. Still others are determined to spread strict adherence to Sharia (Islamic holy law) worldwide and hate the fact that the U.S. law is so thoroughly different. That last group are the ones who are pretty much going to hate us until we turn into a totalitarian state....
If you really want to combat the problem, you have to take a three-pronged approach. The first, unfortunately, is attacking the immediate threat, which we did to some extent in Afghanistan. It wasn't a pleasant war, but it was arguably necessary.
The second is a policy issue: we need to make a lot of changes in the area of foreign policy to improve relations with the Muslim world, not the least of which is bullwhipping Israel every time they do something stupid like launching missiles into a neighboring country and killing 200 people because some Palestinian killed a single police officer somewhere. We're far too tolerant of such knee-jerk Israeli actions, and the sooner our foreign policy reflects that, the better. We also need to reduce our dependence on oil from that region. This won't in any way make anyone hate us less, but it will at least discourage future U.S. leaders from letting future foreign policy decisions be dictated by oil needs.
The third, ironically, is to promote better understanding of the Muslim religion among Muslim people in the MIddle East. By better educating Muslims about what the Qur'an does and does not say, it will in thwart the perversion of the Qur'an into a text of hatred and war by these terrorists and encourage people to actually follow the teachings of Muhammad (which do not encourage hate or wars, but rather encourage caring for others and behaving in a morally upright fashion).
By that standard, our war on terrorism has also been completely successful. After all, since we started making people strip down and take off their shoes at airports, nobody has carried a bomb onto an airplane. So it must be working. (This despite the fact that the last bomb on a U.S. airplane prior to the Richard Reid incident was Pan Am Flight 103 way back in 1988....)
P.S. The last Al Qaeda attack on U.S. interests was in 2005. Three American hotels in Jordan were bombed. That was more than 2 1/2 years after the U.S. pulled out of Saudi military bases. So no, it almost certainly is not cause and effect....