Much less city land devoted to parking, because none of it has to be for "your" car
So, if I want to visit, say, two stores, buy some things in one and some things in another, I will not be able to keep my purchases in the trunk while I am in the second store?
Also, I'd rather have my own car than rent (and pay) a car each time I want to go somewhere. Then I can keep some things in the car permanently (in case I need them on the road), have a good sound system or just use a model that I like.
I drive an old car (my main car has a manual gearbox, but I sometimes drive a car with an automatic one), so I may not be the best suited to explain this, but here's how I park:
1. Park the car in the required place (foot on brake and clutch). 2. Put the car in gear (manual) or Park (automatic), if the car is on on incline, apply the handbrake. 3. Turn off the engine. 4. Turn off the radio (if it did not turn off automatically). 5. Check that the headlights are off (I usually turn them off before turning off the engine). 6. Exit car. 7. Close and lock the door, check if other doors are locked (no central locking).
I probably would not hear the chime, especially if I had the radio volume turned up a bit. I also would not look at the screen.
took foot off brake, opened door exiting vehicle and closed door
This happens every time I park my car as part of me actually exiting the car.
So, the feature would get activated every time I managed to press the shift button twice (or press it once, but get it detected as twice), because all the other operations are the same (put in Park, take foot off brake, exit the car). This looks to me like they made the feature too easy to accidentally turn on.
How about a separate button that you need to push (and hold for a couple of seconds) after putting the car in Park?
An example of something done right is the Ctrl-Alt-Del key combination - before Windows, it would just reboot the PC, so the keys were chosen such that it was extremely difficult to press them by accident but quite easy to do it on purpose.
OTA TV is digital-only in Lithuania too. However, cable companies were providing analog signals before and continue to do so, because people like the fact that you can split the cable and connect multiple TVs to it without paying for multiple boxes (if the TVs do not support DVB-C) or decryption cards (if the channels are encrypted).
IPTV needs a box of course (and since I am an admin of a few networks of small ISPs, I can tell you that making different boxes cooperate would be very difficult).
However, when someone says cable TV I think about coax cable which does not require the box.
I have cable TV (analog signal on coax) from one company and internet (FTTH) from another.
Situation in the EU (at least my country) is better:
The cable TV usually contains analog signal that you can connect to any TV and in addition digital channels transmitted using DVB-C which is supported by new TVs natively and older TVs need an external tuner (STB). Some channels are encrypted, for those you need to pay for a decryption card (looks like a SIM card) that you insert into the TV or tuner.
And under Capitalism people don't starve and aren't purged? (though I would be all for exiling the various banksters to Siberia).
Also, the lie in Russia prior to the Communist revolution wasn't great either (kinda the reason for the revolution).
True Communism and true Capitalism both do not work and cause people to die of starvation. What we need is some of both.
I, for example, am all for Free Market. As long as it is enforced to be free (sound weird I know), that is, no company is allowed to take the market over and establish a monopoly. If some company grows too big ("too big to fail" or simply having much larger market share than the 2nd place), it should become nationalized and democracy should be used to control it (elect the CEO the same way you elect a Mayor or a President or the elected government could appoint one).
The reason is this: As long as there are multiple (almost) equal alternatives, capitalism works better than communism or planned economy. However, once a company grows too large, it can start to buy out its competitors and establish a monopoly. Especially if the entry to market is difficult (like creating a new ISP or a power distribution company). This can result in a situation worse than communism because now the company can afford to pay low wages, raise the prices all to inflate the pockets of the managers and the shareholders (because if there is no viable competition where are you going to go?). In addition, companies should have a "maximum profit" enforced - that is, once the profit of the company becomes x (a large number) times the salary of the lowest paid employee or y (a smaller number) times the combined salaries of all employees except the highest paid 1%, the government should take the "overprofit" away, this is to encourage companies to provide larger salaries for everyone without. The x and y numbers should shrink once a company gets larger. Small businesses can do whatever they want as long as they obey other laws and pay taxes (which should be progressive of course).
And to me it looks kinda OK. I just compared to how it was with "real" communism, just that in the USSR you had to work for your money (even if the job you did was useless) instead of just drinking alcohol.
Well, if the national average alcohol consumption rivals that of Russia, I'd say that there are a few people getting welfare and buying alcohol with that money (you can't really keep a job if you are drunk all the time).
So? You are saying as if communism is automatically "bad".
In the USSR everybody had a job (it was actually mandatory for adults who are not studying), which means that 1) there was less time for drinking (showing up drunk at work was not OK) and 2) everybody had some money, there was no need to look for food in garbage bins.
Now that we are capitalists and free, a lot of people do not have a job. I guess one solution would be to let them starve to death, however, that tends to increase crime (since a hungry person is more likely to steal or rob) and some people oppose it for humanitarian reasons. So we have welfare - give free money to the poor. Most of that money gets spent on alcohol (well, you are poor and do not have a job, you have nothing better to do).
The side effect of capitalism is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, however, in the long run that is bad for the economy because more and more money is settling down in the bank accounts of the rich, which means there is less and less "active" money. The rich also find ways to avoid taxes and may end up paying less than a poor man who has a job (because he cannot afford to set up offshore companies for tax evasion purposes etc).
Technology increases productivity, which is great, now everybody can make more in the same time. Which means that in the future, everybody will be working for half the time and producing the same or more than we are now (a prediction from the past). Oh wait, currently instead of everybody working for half the time, half of the people are unemployed and those that have a job, work full time.
I personally believe that some communism would be great. That is, individuals should be free to do what they want (within reason) and private property should be respected, but large companies (companies, that have a too high influence on the market) should be kept on a very short leash - larger companies get a shorter leash.
The employee would make coffee whether the PC booted in 1 second or 2 minutes (of course if the PC boots longer than it takes to make and drink the coffee then it's a real problem).
Yes, a new PC faster, has more features, but if you are using it for typing/editing documents, then a new version of MS Office can actually be worse than the old version you know. And you do not really need an 8 core CPU with 64GB of RAM and a RAID10 of SSDs.
This has been my observation of others. I personally like a faster computer and extremely dislike rebooting (because of lost state), but I usually build one that is really good so that I do not need to upgrade for a few years (current main PC is 2x Opteron 4238, 32GB RAM, 15kRPM hard drive) and I added a SSD to my laptop a few days ago.
As for downloads - I have a 600mbps connection now, but I have been downloading games even when I had dial-up (evenings/weekends only), it took a while to download an iso.
Usually the computer is turned on in the morning and turned off after work ends, during the boot time, the employee makes coffee or whatever (I somehow really doubt that making office computers boot 2 minutes sooner would make the employees start work 2 minutes sooner unless the boss is really strict).
Rebooting the computer during the day is usually not a good idea unless you really use it very rarely, because the reboot process, no mater how short it is, resets the state (open programs etc). Also, while an employee is reading/editing a Word document, the computers stays mostly idle, but you still cannot turn it off.
The companies that use very old computers are usually those that try to save every cent. An older PC uses more power may cost more money in a couple of years, but getting a new PC means paying for it now (and not over two years) and then employees will work slower for a while because you took away Windows XP (or 7) that they know and replaced it with Windows 8 or 10.
Anyway, since computers (desktops and laptops) last longer before they are replaced now, their sales are lower, even though pretty much everyone has a desktop or a laptop at home.
I was not saying that laptops are difficult to repair or upgrade, though the consumer class laptops are (and business class laptops are more expensive). I just noticed that people usually keep a desktop for a long time before buying a new one (with repairs/upgrades or without), while a laptop is more easily damaged (by spilling liquid on its keyboard or something) and people buy new laptops slightly more often than desktops. OTOH, people replace phones/tablets with newer models even more often.
Which means, that the desktop sales are lower than phone sales, that makes some people say that "the desktop is dying, phones are taking over", even though pretty much everybody has a desktop or at least a laptop at home.
As for businesses, some companies that I know tend to buy desktops unless the employee needs to carry the computer with him outside of the office. The reason is that a desktop is cheaper, you can reuse an old monitor etc. Some other companies I know use 10 year old desktops ("If it was good enough when I bought it new, it's good enough now").
Almost nobody uses desktops? Really? Or is it just the fact that desktops 1) can be upgraded and 2) last longer anyway, so people are not buying a new one every year like they do with a phone?
It all depends on the usage scenario of the storage. For a database, random access is very important. For a big VOD server it's not as important, especially if the cache is big enough. Even 5400RPM 6TB drives are good enough for that (a 34 drive RAID10 array of them that is) as the access is not done in 4K blocks, but in 128K-1M blocks or even bigger.
$10k for a ~12TB max of storage (if you used RAID0). I paid ~$800 for 6x3TB WD REDs (used in RAID6), getting the same 12TB. According to WD, the drives use 4.1W each when being accessed. That's ~25W total. Let's say the PSU is 80% efficient, so that's 32W from the wall. Electricity costs $0.12/kWh, so for the $9200 I saved by buying HDDs, I can get 76MWh of electricity, which would be enough to run these drives for 270 years.
Hell, for that money, I can pay all my electricity bills for 3 years.
270 years until SSDs pay off is a bit too long in my opinion. Of course, if you need the performance, then there is no way around it, but for me (infrequently accessed archival storage and backups of other servers), HDDs are enough.
Actually I recently built a ~100TB VOD server using a big RAID10 of hard drives with a couple of PCI-E SSDs (Intel P3700) as cache. The client would not have paid for 100TB of SSDs.
That's because the drives were designed to be low cost consumer devices. There were 5.25" Full height SCSI drives for a while before and after the bigfoot. I have one such drive - a 1.2GB drive made in 1992. Still works.
Intel 3700 series SSD, while good, are really expensive. A 100TB server made from them would be really expensive and there is no point in that, where a big RAID10 array of hard drives with 1TB of SSD caching (using 3700 series) is much cheaper. Especially if the server itself is used to store video files.
It is like this because not all MCUs support USB device mode netively and also because it is easier to program the MCU to communicate in RS232 and then stick the converter chip between it and USB and then use the driver provided by the manufacturer of the chip instead of writing your own. This is suitable if the device does not need high speeds, the FTDI chips can do about 1mbps IIRC.
This is great for things like device programmers, 3d printers, diagnostic and/or control of industrial machines and other low bandwidth applications.
Of course, real serial ports are still used, for example for console access of a managed switch (mainly for initial configuration or recovery) or other similar devices. Hell, I even use serial console (on linux) on a couple of servers to hopefully get some diagnostic information if the server crashes.
All the more reason to turn off automatic updates if you have Windows 7 or 8. The good thing of that is that when Microsoft stops releasing new updates for these versions, nobody will care.
In my opinion, this is worse. The previous driver corrupted the chip, but did not do anything else and the chip could be repaired in Linux. However, inserting fake data in the stream is much worse because of how the device might react to it, for example, if such a thing happened with a USB-to-serial converter connected to an APC UPS, it would cause the UPS to run battery calibration discharging the battery. This may not be that bad unless power failed soon after, but if the system is left unattended, the UPS will run the calibration over an over staying at low battery and wearing out the battery in the process.
What about some industrial machines? the fake data may open/close valves etc causing damage to the machine or even an injury.
And all this because the manufacturer of the machine was scammed - paid full price for a fake chip (or the chips got switched out in the assembly plant).
How about making the driver just not work or at most cause bluescreens?
Slashdot Mirror
Much less city land devoted to parking, because none of it has to be for "your" car
So, if I want to visit, say, two stores, buy some things in one and some things in another, I will not be able to keep my purchases in the trunk while I am in the second store?
Also, I'd rather have my own car than rent (and pay) a car each time I want to go somewhere. Then I can keep some things in the car permanently (in case I need them on the road), have a good sound system or just use a model that I like.
I drive an old car (my main car has a manual gearbox, but I sometimes drive a car with an automatic one), so I may not be the best suited to explain this, but here's how I park:
1. Park the car in the required place (foot on brake and clutch).
2. Put the car in gear (manual) or Park (automatic), if the car is on on incline, apply the handbrake.
3. Turn off the engine.
4. Turn off the radio (if it did not turn off automatically).
5. Check that the headlights are off (I usually turn them off before turning off the engine).
6. Exit car.
7. Close and lock the door, check if other doors are locked (no central locking).
I probably would not hear the chime, especially if I had the radio volume turned up a bit. I also would not look at the screen.
took foot off brake, opened door exiting vehicle and closed door
This happens every time I park my car as part of me actually exiting the car.
So, the feature would get activated every time I managed to press the shift button twice (or press it once, but get it detected as twice), because all the other operations are the same (put in Park, take foot off brake, exit the car). This looks to me like they made the feature too easy to accidentally turn on.
How about a separate button that you need to push (and hold for a couple of seconds) after putting the car in Park?
An example of something done right is the Ctrl-Alt-Del key combination - before Windows, it would just reboot the PC, so the keys were chosen such that it was extremely difficult to press them by accident but quite easy to do it on purpose.
OTA TV is digital-only in Lithuania too. However, cable companies were providing analog signals before and continue to do so, because people like the fact that you can split the cable and connect multiple TVs to it without paying for multiple boxes (if the TVs do not support DVB-C) or decryption cards (if the channels are encrypted).
IPTV needs a box of course (and since I am an admin of a few networks of small ISPs, I can tell you that making different boxes cooperate would be very difficult).
However, when someone says cable TV I think about coax cable which does not require the box.
I have cable TV (analog signal on coax) from one company and internet (FTTH) from another.
Situation in the EU (at least my country) is better:
The cable TV usually contains analog signal that you can connect to any TV and in addition digital channels transmitted using DVB-C which is supported by new TVs natively and older TVs need an external tuner (STB). Some channels are encrypted, for those you need to pay for a decryption card (looks like a SIM card) that you insert into the TV or tuner.
And under Capitalism people don't starve and aren't purged? (though I would be all for exiling the various banksters to Siberia).
Also, the lie in Russia prior to the Communist revolution wasn't great either (kinda the reason for the revolution).
True Communism and true Capitalism both do not work and cause people to die of starvation. What we need is some of both.
I, for example, am all for Free Market. As long as it is enforced to be free (sound weird I know), that is, no company is allowed to take the market over and establish a monopoly. If some company grows too big ("too big to fail" or simply having much larger market share than the 2nd place), it should become nationalized and democracy should be used to control it (elect the CEO the same way you elect a Mayor or a President or the elected government could appoint one).
The reason is this: As long as there are multiple (almost) equal alternatives, capitalism works better than communism or planned economy. However, once a company grows too large, it can start to buy out its competitors and establish a monopoly. Especially if the entry to market is difficult (like creating a new ISP or a power distribution company). This can result in a situation worse than communism because now the company can afford to pay low wages, raise the prices all to inflate the pockets of the managers and the shareholders (because if there is no viable competition where are you going to go?). In addition, companies should have a "maximum profit" enforced - that is, once the profit of the company becomes x (a large number) times the salary of the lowest paid employee or y (a smaller number) times the combined salaries of all employees except the highest paid 1%, the government should take the "overprofit" away, this is to encourage companies to provide larger salaries for everyone without. The x and y numbers should shrink once a company gets larger. Small businesses can do whatever they want as long as they obey other laws and pay taxes (which should be progressive of course).
It may not be, but if you cannot walk straight, they are not going to ask whether you drank beer or vodka.
and almost no-one would want to live this way so most people would choose to work
As long as they can get a job that is.
And to me it looks kinda OK. I just compared to how it was with "real" communism, just that in the USSR you had to work for your money (even if the job you did was useless) instead of just drinking alcohol.
Well, if the national average alcohol consumption rivals that of Russia, I'd say that there are a few people getting welfare and buying alcohol with that money (you can't really keep a job if you are drunk all the time).
So? You are saying as if communism is automatically "bad".
In the USSR everybody had a job (it was actually mandatory for adults who are not studying), which means that 1) there was less time for drinking (showing up drunk at work was not OK) and 2) everybody had some money, there was no need to look for food in garbage bins.
Now that we are capitalists and free, a lot of people do not have a job. I guess one solution would be to let them starve to death, however, that tends to increase crime (since a hungry person is more likely to steal or rob) and some people oppose it for humanitarian reasons. So we have welfare - give free money to the poor. Most of that money gets spent on alcohol (well, you are poor and do not have a job, you have nothing better to do).
The side effect of capitalism is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, however, in the long run that is bad for the economy because more and more money is settling down in the bank accounts of the rich, which means there is less and less "active" money. The rich also find ways to avoid taxes and may end up paying less than a poor man who has a job (because he cannot afford to set up offshore companies for tax evasion purposes etc).
Technology increases productivity, which is great, now everybody can make more in the same time. Which means that in the future, everybody will be working for half the time and producing the same or more than we are now (a prediction from the past). Oh wait, currently instead of everybody working for half the time, half of the people are unemployed and those that have a job, work full time.
I personally believe that some communism would be great. That is, individuals should be free to do what they want (within reason) and private property should be respected, but large companies (companies, that have a too high influence on the market) should be kept on a very short leash - larger companies get a shorter leash.
The employee would make coffee whether the PC booted in 1 second or 2 minutes (of course if the PC boots longer than it takes to make and drink the coffee then it's a real problem).
Yes, a new PC faster, has more features, but if you are using it for typing/editing documents, then a new version of MS Office can actually be worse than the old version you know. And you do not really need an 8 core CPU with 64GB of RAM and a RAID10 of SSDs.
This has been my observation of others. I personally like a faster computer and extremely dislike rebooting (because of lost state), but I usually build one that is really good so that I do not need to upgrade for a few years (current main PC is 2x Opteron 4238, 32GB RAM, 15kRPM hard drive) and I added a SSD to my laptop a few days ago.
As for downloads - I have a 600mbps connection now, but I have been downloading games even when I had dial-up (evenings/weekends only), it took a while to download an iso.
Usually the computer is turned on in the morning and turned off after work ends, during the boot time, the employee makes coffee or whatever (I somehow really doubt that making office computers boot 2 minutes sooner would make the employees start work 2 minutes sooner unless the boss is really strict).
Rebooting the computer during the day is usually not a good idea unless you really use it very rarely, because the reboot process, no mater how short it is, resets the state (open programs etc). Also, while an employee is reading/editing a Word document, the computers stays mostly idle, but you still cannot turn it off.
The companies that use very old computers are usually those that try to save every cent. An older PC uses more power may cost more money in a couple of years, but getting a new PC means paying for it now (and not over two years) and then employees will work slower for a while because you took away Windows XP (or 7) that they know and replaced it with Windows 8 or 10.
Anyway, since computers (desktops and laptops) last longer before they are replaced now, their sales are lower, even though pretty much everyone has a desktop or a laptop at home.
I was not saying that laptops are difficult to repair or upgrade, though the consumer class laptops are (and business class laptops are more expensive). I just noticed that people usually keep a desktop for a long time before buying a new one (with repairs/upgrades or without), while a laptop is more easily damaged (by spilling liquid on its keyboard or something) and people buy new laptops slightly more often than desktops. OTOH, people replace phones/tablets with newer models even more often.
Which means, that the desktop sales are lower than phone sales, that makes some people say that "the desktop is dying, phones are taking over", even though pretty much everybody has a desktop or at least a laptop at home.
As for businesses, some companies that I know tend to buy desktops unless the employee needs to carry the computer with him outside of the office. The reason is that a desktop is cheaper, you can reuse an old monitor etc. Some other companies I know use 10 year old desktops ("If it was good enough when I bought it new, it's good enough now").
Almost nobody uses desktops? Really? Or is it just the fact that desktops 1) can be upgraded and 2) last longer anyway, so people are not buying a new one every year like they do with a phone?
It all depends on the usage scenario of the storage. For a database, random access is very important. For a big VOD server it's not as important, especially if the cache is big enough. Even 5400RPM 6TB drives are good enough for that (a 34 drive RAID10 array of them that is) as the access is not done in 4K blocks, but in 128K-1M blocks or even bigger.
$10k for a ~12TB max of storage (if you used RAID0). I paid ~$800 for 6x3TB WD REDs (used in RAID6), getting the same 12TB. According to WD, the drives use 4.1W each when being accessed. That's ~25W total. Let's say the PSU is 80% efficient, so that's 32W from the wall. Electricity costs $0.12/kWh, so for the $9200 I saved by buying HDDs, I can get 76MWh of electricity, which would be enough to run these drives for 270 years.
Hell, for that money, I can pay all my electricity bills for 3 years.
270 years until SSDs pay off is a bit too long in my opinion. Of course, if you need the performance, then there is no way around it, but for me (infrequently accessed archival storage and backups of other servers), HDDs are enough.
Actually I recently built a ~100TB VOD server using a big RAID10 of hard drives with a couple of PCI-E SSDs (Intel P3700) as cache. The client would not have paid for 100TB of SSDs.
That's because the drives were designed to be low cost consumer devices. There were 5.25" Full height SCSI drives for a while before and after the bigfoot. I have one such drive - a 1.2GB drive made in 1992. Still works.
And what's the price difference?
Intel 3700 series SSD, while good, are really expensive. A 100TB server made from them would be really expensive and there is no point in that, where a big RAID10 array of hard drives with 1TB of SSD caching (using 3700 series) is much cheaper. Especially if the server itself is used to store video files.
Well, the people who are using older Windows versions might just need to install a proper browser.
After a while Windows 10 and the spyware backports will become a "important" updates.
It is like this because not all MCUs support USB device mode netively and also because it is easier to program the MCU to communicate in RS232 and then stick the converter chip between it and USB and then use the driver provided by the manufacturer of the chip instead of writing your own. This is suitable if the device does not need high speeds, the FTDI chips can do about 1mbps IIRC.
This is great for things like device programmers, 3d printers, diagnostic and/or control of industrial machines and other low bandwidth applications.
Of course, real serial ports are still used, for example for console access of a managed switch (mainly for initial configuration or recovery) or other similar devices. Hell, I even use serial console (on linux) on a couple of servers to hopefully get some diagnostic information if the server crashes.
A lot of USB devices internally use USB-to-RS232 converters (see the recent FTDI problem) and are detected as a COM port by Windows.
All the more reason to turn off automatic updates if you have Windows 7 or 8. The good thing of that is that when Microsoft stops releasing new updates for these versions, nobody will care.
In my opinion, this is worse. The previous driver corrupted the chip, but did not do anything else and the chip could be repaired in Linux. However, inserting fake data in the stream is much worse because of how the device might react to it, for example, if such a thing happened with a USB-to-serial converter connected to an APC UPS, it would cause the UPS to run battery calibration discharging the battery. This may not be that bad unless power failed soon after, but if the system is left unattended, the UPS will run the calibration over an over staying at low battery and wearing out the battery in the process.
What about some industrial machines? the fake data may open/close valves etc causing damage to the machine or even an injury.
And all this because the manufacturer of the machine was scammed - paid full price for a fake chip (or the chips got switched out in the assembly plant).
How about making the driver just not work or at most cause bluescreens?