Good point. However, rolling back the odometer is against the law because we have decided that to do so is a gross mis-representation of the value of the item in question. A vehicle's age/lifespan is generally acceptable as measured in terms of the mileage. You aren't cheating the auto maker, you're cheating the person you're selling the car to. Once the automaker has your money (or the bank's money) they don't give a flip what you do with the car.
Windows95 is an old piece of crap. If you relabel your (legal) copy and sell it as "The New Windows2006" to some poor unsuspecting schmuck, you've committed fraud. I think this is a little closer to rolling back the odometer than maybe what I was referring to.
I also think the TiVo thing is a little bit different as well. I pay a monthly fee to TiVo for the service they provide me - primarily guide data, but also access through the TiVo to things like Live365, etc. I can stop paying the fee, and then I will have to either figure out a way to get the guide data into the TiVo myself, or schedule programs manually. I will grant that you lose some functionality - most maybe - by not paying the monthly fee. However, because I bought mine, TiVo will not come and reposses my box OR revoke my right to use it (not 100% on this one...) if I cancel my service.
TiVo actually seems to be an exception to the rule. You can upgrade your harddrive if you want. You've broken your warranty, but they aren't going to drag you into court under the DMCA for it. In theory they could, because you've just "cheated" them out of revenue by upgrading the internals instead of buying a new box.
I agree, except that it really isn't a choice for the end-user. How long before the automobile goes the way of modern IP? Right now, if I buy a car from you I can do whatever the hell I want to it. I can take it apart to see how it works. I can build another car similar to it if I have the time and the skill. I can take the engine out of your car and put it in a different car and you can't say a word about it. I can even *GASP* remove the alternator and sell it to someone else. Or I can sell the entire car, which may be nothing like the car you designed because I modified it. I can drive it on dirt roads, I can use it to deliver pizzas. I can autocross it, or add a rollbar and better suspension for a road rally. That is my *right*. I bought the damn car, I own it, so I'm going to do with it what I please.
I realize that at some point the analogy breaks down because a car can't be put into a replicator like a DVD can. However, it seems to me that we are becoming less and less of an ownership society and more of a "borrow" society. I talked to someone the other day who works for a large firm, and they pay 160 grand a MONTH to license some software for their business. That does not include any changes they want made to the software - that costs extra.
I don't have a problem with profit. I have a problem with racketeering. I don't really know where this whole "you don't own it, you only licensed it from us and we can screw you anytime we want" started, but it is one reason why I'm such a big fan of OSS. I don't mind paying for software. But I get really pissed when I'm told I a) have to pay for it continuously and b) am not allowed to do anything with it except that which is outlined by the lawyers for giant-corp who wrote it and took my money for it. What a scam. DRM is coming to hardware near you, and it is going to compound this problem. Until now, it was _mostly_ software that kept the consumer on a leash.
How long until we have to pay a fee to (GM|Ford|etc) before our car will start every month? When will our GE fridge start requiring a dollar every time we open it? I don't like rent-an-appliance places because they're a rip off. You never get to stop paying for the item (unless you rent to own, at about 2-3x the cost you could have bought the item).
Am I paranoid chicken little here? How many of us as kids tinkered with everything in the house, but find today that if we do, we're breaking the law?
This is properly tantamount to a voluntary tax upon bilinguals
So, by your reasoning we should suspend activities such as:
- Big Brothers/Big Sisters - Frats and VFW groups who do highway/litter cleanup - Museum volunteers - Reference desk volunteers at the local library - Volunteers for the Red Cross and other relief orgs who are at least partially funded through tax dollars - but whose volunteers are not paid for their work - Civics groups who put on things like Shakespeare in the Park - Volunteer firefighters and EMTs - College students who pay money to take their springbreak repairing the houses of dirt poor black americans in towns in the south where racism still lurks ominously. That is *double* taxation - not only have I paid to make the trip and buy the building materials, but I also spent weeks of my own time doing it. Why doesn't the gov't step in and pay me me! me!! to help these poverty-stricken people?
Maybe you got your degree from this guy so you don't understand that people who are paid by the gov't are paid out of your tax dollars. Very simple math. Gov't hires 10 more people, your taxes go to paying those ten extra people instead of whatever social program you fancy today. Give a little time as a volunteer (to do whatever, not nessecarily translate docs), and you save yourself a few dollars in taxes and get to have a little bit of civic pride. But it seems like you want us to all run around like a bunch of self-centered little dumbasses.
God forbid you should help an old lady cross the street without expecting a check for your "services".
I'm a sucker? No. Like I've said in other stories where this inevitably comes up, I pay not to have to deal with the bullshit. I fight with computers every day because it is my job, and because it is a hobby. Yet, I don't want to have to mess with kernels or libraries or dependencies or drivers or modules or the latest bug in mythTV or lousy hardware or whatever other problem there might be with running a typical PC. MythTV has its uses, and some people swear by it. Maybe you like it when your video card craps out on you. Maybe you're the type that walks/swims 8 miles to work instead of paying the bridge toll (haha sucker - I live under my desk!). I have no idea.
I pay 13$/month because I don't want to screw with my television (+DVR), I just want it to work. TiVo obviously provides me a service for this - the most obvious being the guide data. It is a small price to pay, imho, for the (nearly) worry-free joy that is my TiVo. If the series3 isn't vaporware, I'm all about it.
I wondered about that as well. My first consideration, however, was the weight. IIRC the History channel show about paint, the type used on aircraft is specifically designed to be lightweight. One might not think of paint as having any weight to it, until you consider how much paint is needed for an entire aircraft, and how much difference a couple of hundred pounds affects the performance of an aircraft. TFA doesn't say how much weight per-unit all that copper adds.
Turn the passenger compartment into a Faraday cage
I'd like to put a few people in a Faraday cage...ie the car I saw a few months ago driving like an idiot -- until I realized she had a cellphone in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
I won't be asked to shut down my iPod for takeoff and landing
Just conjecture, but I believe you're asked to put away your iPod during takeoff and landing for reasons that have nothing to do with EM interference. Takeoff and landing are the two most dangerous regular bits of your flight. This means that an iPod becomes a missle, and the fewer things flying through the air during a crash or emergency manuver, the better. Secondly, they want your headphones off (ever notice how the in-flight headphone music is turned off during these periods?) so you can hear crew instructions. Not just the "here's how to fasten your seatbelt" but any emergency directions. If you were the only one on the plane it might not matter. But you unable to hear the crew can interfere with other passengers' ability to, for example, get the hell out.
Again conjecture, but I think the difference between your cellphone and the on-board airline provided phone might simply be financial, but it is also a) a known quantity and b) a known item. That is, the flight crew knows how many of them there are (and the NSA can listen in easier...) and in case of emergency, can flip a switch and turn them off. It is a known item because the frequencies and EM output can be carefully controlled not to interfere. My GSM phone causes major and audible interference with stereo speakers (computer, car, professional concert, etc) when it talks to the tower. If the phone is anywhere near any speakers, I can tell a call is coming about 4 seconds before the phone rings. I'm not willing to bet my life that the interference is limited to speakers.
As for "how the hell can a multi-million dollar [aircraft] GPS system be subject to interference when my 350$ car unit doesn't seem to be affected?", let me suggest to you that if you're off by a few meters in your car driving in the city, it isn't a big deal. You adjust or get into a fender bender. If your fuel gauge quits working you can just pull over to the side of the road. A several hundred ton aircraft at 300 knots off by a few meters because the instruments are screwy can very easily turn into a major disaster.
Of course, they don't rely on just the GPS for guidance. What about the ILS? 50 meters vertical deviation is the difference between the runway threshold and the lake.
Who cares what creationists think?...it's not really a problem - just something smart people find funny about the way stupid people think.
There's a good way to convince others you're right - by hurling insults at anyone who doesn't think like you do. Your argument for evolution and against intelligent design/creationism seems pretty simple:
A) all creationists are stupid B) all non-creationists are smart
Therefore, there is no reason to engage the issue or even bother to make a case for your point of view. That isn't very open-minded and tolerant of you, is it? Shallow and narrow-minded people debase those who disagree with them because they're too lazy to form a coherent argument.
Those that you mock are the same ones that you have to convince that there is nothing bigger than us (God, Allah, a Supreme Being, the creepy Burger King clown, etc) if you want to eliminate spirituality from schools, government, public life, and then completely. Those "stupid people" still get to vote. If you plan to actually win the argument, consider convincing others with valid and thoughtful evidence, rather than invectives. Who knows, maybe you'll learn something in the process.
Aristotle didn't score points by calling anyone "stupid".
I hate it when people place two statistics side by side as if they are comparable
I personally avoid text messages because I get charged (US, Cingular) for every text message I send or receive. (Being a socio-phobic geek, not that I really have a g/f or a bunch of people I would want sending me inane messages...) I also get charged by the kilobyte for data, be that on the phone itself or (when it works) using the phone as a modem for my laptop. I paid for the 5MB data plan one month - a waste. A simple SSH session was plagued by latency, compression or no. With windoze, you have very little control over what bits of the system decide to contact the 'net (certain processes cannot be firewalled or things like DNS stop working also), so that eats away at your small quota as well.
Yes, there are "data" plans, but they tend to be stupidly expensive for what you get - 10$ for 5MB/month or 20$/month for "unlimited" usage in addition to the 45$/month I'm already paying for the voice service. (Verizon was or is 70$/mo and you are "required" to purchase a PCMCIA card, as well as sign another contract.) There are also "text messaging" plans which for like 5$/month would give me 100 messages or something like that. (I can't find "unlimited text messaging" on cingular's site) I'm not paying for it. They already nickel-and-dime (and 1.75$ for 411 calls) me nearly to death. This isn't much different, IMO, than the state of broadband. They get decent service and bandwidth overseas for a reasonable price, or so I read. We get jack customer service, lousy speeds (or 500$/month for a T1 and an SLA) and the prices continue to go up.
Speaking OT for a moment, where are the broadband connections that aren't a) way overpriced or b) so damn asymmetric that I could walk the 15mi to my university office faster than I can move files (14 hours to upload 2GB of data) or wait for my X session to catch up? Where are the providers that let you take some of that downstream bandwidth and convert it into upstream for a slightly more symmetric link?
TFA kind of obscures the fact a little that P10 isn't complaining so much about Google indexing their site per-se, but rather sites of people who have ripped off P10's images and reposted them elsewhere.
Like if there is no robots.txt file, it should default to not indexing?
So we should change the entire ruleset that governs robots.txt because one company has their proverbial panties in a wad about their images being ripped off by their own subscribers and then indexed by spiders? Any RFCs you'd like to throw out while you're at it? Maybe we should abandon TCP because that is the mechanism used to transport these images illegally across the internet.
There may be an option to add a no-index header to a jpeg file, maybe in EXIF metadata area which perhaps the search engine could honor. (Or does EXIF already have a copyright flag?) This extends an existing standard without breaking any old ones. Problem is it would be trivial to strip the bit from the file before re-posting.
Google and A9 aren't the only engines which index images. The spiders don't really (and shouldn't, save honoring robots.txt) care what the content is. They just index it so it can be found. Oddly enough, the search engines are what allow most people to find sites like P10. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. (Okay, search engines and spam.)
Google has deep pockets, so they're a target instead of the people who are actually stealing the images in the first place. I don't like the idea of stuff being ripped off. I like even less the idea of turning a well-established standard on its head. Maybe instead of attacking Google and A9 they should leverage Google, as someone else has already mentioned, to find the infringers and go after them. The pirates would just change their robots file to allow their content to be indexed anyways.
I feel like 99% of the web desperately wants to be on Google, hence it should be opt-out.
No clue what the first part of that means, hence flying monkeys are desperately wanting to come out of my butt (?)
I might be missing something here, but I was reading a business model essay from ~1995 a couple of weeks ago. One company specifically mentioned was Sony. They've come up with some really incredible ideas and made them into products - like the Walkman. Patents were never within the scope of this paper, but the author talked about how Sony wanted to stay on top and to do so they continued to innovate and create new products. Other companies cloned their products and sold them as knock offs. I really don't understand what changed in the patent law that allows things like NTP/RIMM. Not interested in starting an NTP/RIMM flame war, it just goes to my point.
Each of them came up with an idea of how to do something (this is a process?) but RIMM marketed a product. NTP sat on it their version of the patent. Is there any evidence that RIMM broke into NTP's offices and stole plans for the Blackberry? I guess I just can't figure out how such generic ideas about how to accomplish a task could be patented and then turn into a big huge lawsuit.
AFAIK, and I could be wrong, Sony never sued anyone for cloning the portable cassette player. I understand capitalism and everyone has a "right" to make money off of their own ideas. However, my impression is that the current patent/DMCA situation has done more to stifle innovation than to encourage it. Who wants to invent something only to make some money and some jackass comes along after you're successful - with his lawyers - to claim that he is entitled to your profits?
So you come up with an idea for a better GPS system. I happen to come up with the same idea, completely independently of you. Why can't we both market our products instead of getting sued by someone else who thought up a similar, but more generic method, 2 years ago and just sat on it, waiting for someone else to happen to come up with a similar idea? Why does it seem that it is no longer true that you and I could go into business together and (gasp!) improve on that third party's idea with a new product?
Another example to illustrate. Thomas Edison invents the lightbulb. He patents his method for "using electrical energy passing through a sealed chamber of inert gases to generate light" (I don't know the actual patent phrasing.) Can he be sued by the inventor of the gas street light? Can Edison sue the maker of the flourescent bulb? It sounds ridiculous, and IANAL but thats what it seems to me is basically going on.
I just noticed, Thunderbird, which is used "frequently" was "Last Used On" 11/04/2005. Firefox, which is running right now, was last used 5 days ago. Nice, eh?
it knows what applications you typically use and at what times so it'll preload them into memory making it seem snappier
Could you please provide a link to this article? While I'm interested to read it, I don't really buy this. Friggin' XP can't figure out how often I use programs now. (When you go to "Add/Remove Programs" it is supposed to tell you how often the program is used.) For example what XP says/actual:
Adobe Acrobat: "occasionally" / several times a day APC PowerChute Personal Edition: "rarely" / is _always_ running Gaim: "occasionally" / is _always_ running Firefox: "occasionally" / default browser Thunderbird: "frequently" / finally got one right WinRAR archiver: "rarely" / several times a day
I don't want Microsoft deciding which programs it thinks I use most often and wasting memory + CPU "pre-loading" things. Maybe, just maybe if the damn OS wasn't so bloated they wouldn't need to preload applications. Then again, if the OS wasn't so bloated it would stop crashing because they could get all their garbage out of kernel space and back into userspace where it belongs. As it is, they have to put things in kernel space to keep the entire system from grinding to a halt when you run 'calc.exe'. Basically, get the entire GUI out of kernel space. AFAIK they can't do that because it would be way too slow.
Granted TFA was very much non-technical, some things missing from the list: (If I'm wrong about any of these being in XP, please feel free to correct me.)
- for-real no-shit multitasking. Linux has it. OS X has it. It aggarvates me to no end that the system severely drags and/or blocks while doing things like copying large files, burning a CD, scanning the "network neighborhood", or basically any other process which the kernel determines is "intensive". I can do 8 semi-CPU intensive things at once with no problem on a *nix machine without X slowing to a crawl. Good luck trying that on XP. A user-space process or application should never be allowed to block.
- Real ability to disable write caching. This is more a technical point, but nonetheless. The little box that is supposed to disable write caching for USB/Firewire devices seems to have no effect. I'm constantly getting the "This device cannot be stopped right now, try again later" BS from XP. Again, this is a "feature" to speed things up because the system is so inefficent.
- Stop the auto-mounter. Goes along with the above: the ability to turn off automounting of filesystems, or at the very least mount them as read-only. Windows will *always* try to write to a filesystem no matter what. Writing to a hosed disk is a good way to make it worse. Sure you can mount the disk while acting as user who doesn't have write privs to files, but that isn't the same. XP stills writes system and metadata to the disk.
- Unbinding IE from the system. I thought this was decided by a court that they had to do this. The last time I tried to uninstall IE the clipboard stopped functioning in MSOffice. Until I reinstalled IE, of course.
- Make it easier/possible to stop services that are not critical. This fails on XP mostly because nearly all of the services are "critical" to the operation of the OS. Again, to compare this to the *nix model - I can stop almost any service except for init and the system will continue to run. Why can't I enable networking and disable the filesharing by stopping the service that makes the SMB ports listen? A firewall is needed, yes. But it would be even more useful to be able to stop those services which should not be listening anyways.
- Stop telling me "access denied" when I'm the fracking system admin. I really hate that. Processes can't be killed, services can't be stopped, files can't be deleted, etc because "Access denied". Kill the damn process if I tell you to.
- Stop with the stupid exclusive file locks. Some of this is the fault of applications
Okay, thats just dumb. First of all, there is a good chance they can find out. If not from you, from your references, or from your tax returns, or some other method using your SSN and DOB. If like me, you're an employee of the government/university, your pathetic salary is public record.
Besides the fact that you're starting a position with a new employer on the basis of dishonesty (since when did integrity become a bad thing?), it is almost always grounds for immediate termination (that means you get fired) when they find out you lied about anything during the hiring process. Doesn't matter what you lied about, the fact that you did is enough.
If you don't want to tell them, then don't. But don't be an idiot and lie or you might find yourself explaining to your new McManager why you don't have any employment for the last 6 months, why you're living in your mom's basement at 34, and why he can't call your former employer for a reference.
I'll second this recommendation. I've had a series2 for about 3 years now and have been extremely happy with it. Out of the box it works just fine. No need to hack it if you don't want to. It is easy enough that your grandma could figure it out - which may seem like the TiVo isn't for the hardcore geek. The simplicity is the beauty of the whole thing. I spend most of my day dealing with computers - windoze, linux, clients, servers, code, the list goes on - something always needs fixed or updated or reinstalled. I don't want to fight with my fracking television too.
The only "hack" I've applied is the 30-second skip. And that is just S-P-S-30-S on the remote (Do it while an already recorded show is playing - tends to work better there.) Has to be done after power failures and reboots, but those don't happen very often. A bunch of major software updates later TiVo has left that "feature" in, albeit disabled by default. I think someone else mentioned tivocommunity. A great resource. Figured out how to upgrade my 40GB to 80GB there - was a piece of cake (I still have the 40GB drive intact just in case the drive I put in there blows up.) The only hacking advice I would add is that if you hack your TiVo badly, you'll bork the OS and it won't be able to pull service updates, or worse - guide data.
Like zerocool^ said, you can grab Tivo2Go from tivo's website free (I think someone wrote a java clone) and download as much as you want to your PC. Nvidia has a codec you can buy for like 20$ (not sure why T2go doesn't come with one) that lets you burn DVDs with the application of your choice. I think there is Sonic something or other which is a burning app and a codec in one package. IIRC it is made by Roxio, so I stayed away from it. I won't tell you what to do, but I would suggest not P2P'ng the files as a matter of principle. The MPAA and RIAA are enough of a pain in the ass. They don't need any more excuses to go after things like TiVo, and it discourages content providers from partnering with DVR makers if they feel they're just getting ripped off.
Downsides: get a newer one - and hope it has USB2 or built-in ethernet. Transferring a show to or from the PC (I think USB1 is my issue) takes a long time - about 85-90% of the show's length. If you decide to get a wireless adapter, triple check to make sure it is the right one. One letter difference in the adapter's model and it is useless. Over three years, the TiVo unit has gotten progressively slower to respond - a lot of people have complained about this and it seems to be due to the 7.x software updates. No idea what, if anything, TiVo is doing about it. It is annoying sometimes, but not unbearable.
Upsides of TiVo: TivoCentral: schedule programs remotely without putting a hole in your firewall. It definitely "just works" - which is why I have avoided MythTV, WindowsMC, etc - no need - my TiVo makes me happy. Now if only finding a g/f were this easy... talk about vaporware, geez.
...there is absolutely no money in this area... and quite frankly I don't care. I just want to build something cool.
The mortgage, car loan+insurance, electric bill, groceries, etc don't pay themselves. I would enjoy spending my time running my own business. But I'm not in a position to quit my day job right now and expect the lights to be on for very long.
That being said, this is America - you can do and be nearly anything you want if you're willing to work at it. You might have to get a McJob to pay the rent if you want to build robots in your garage (HP, Atari?), but no one can force you to work for corp this or that. In your case, if robotics is a field that interests you, hunt for and complete your education and then maybe a job in the industrial sector (heavy machinery, vehicle production, other factory-type settings) working on their equipment. You might not be building "something cool" for a while, but the experience will be invaluable.
Just a few thoughts from someone who should have studied harder in school...
I found and installed CounterSpy the other day and haven't been thrilled with it so far. After a 40 minute scan, it found a few bad cookies (only scans for IE cookies?) and some odd registry entries, then reported false positives on a couple of md5.h files and winPcap. There doesn't seem to be a way to tell CS to ignore those files - you can only ignore the spyware it thinks it found. (ie, it thought winPcap was the Ace password sniffer - so if you 'ignore' you'll never see warnings about that password sniffer again.) On the positive side, I got an email back from Sunbelt saying they'd corrected these false positives in the next definitions push.
The computer drops to hibernate after a few hours of being idle, but when I start it back up again, CounterSpy goes through another system-intensive 40 minute disk-thrashing scan. I probably need to fiddle with the settings to fix this, but there are other dumb things - like dialogs that can't fit all the information but don't have scrollbars, or dialog messages (ie, what tasks CS has completed) that are just flat-out wrong.
CounterSpy, IMHO, has an interface that needs serious help, over-taxes the disk, and is generally a waste of time.
In all seriousness, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure - layer your security if possible with things like: a NAT device between you and the cable/DSL modem, a good desktop virus scanner, a desktop firewall (Sunbelt recently took over Kerio Personal Firewall - I'm waiting to see if they screw that up.), use Firefox/Opera, etc. If you've got malware that is really stuck and can't be pried loose - you're looking at reformatting.:/
I recently used ndiswrapper to get a Winbook mini-pci wireless card working on my Dell laptop. It wasn't all that difficult, really - just required a little patience. I wrote up some instructions for setting it up for the OSU wireless network, but put a bunch of references at the bottom, including this one on the fedora forums that should give you a pretty good idea of how to get it setup on your network.
Its been about a year since I last used it, but ZA was a pain in the ass. It blocks things that I've told it not to block, and doesn't block things I've told it to block. It also doesn't work transparently - that is, when you say 'disable firewall' ZA doesn't disable itself, but still firewalls things. It doesn't seem to be related to my lack of being able to come up with the correct settings, but rather that ZA is just stupid sometimes. IIRC, it also dumps all of your open connections when enabling/disabling the firewall.
I've been much happier with Kerio (now Sunbelt) Personal Firewall. It installs easily, can run in auto or advanced/learn mode, and doesn't get in my way. One of my personal favorite features of Kerio is the ability to stop applications from launching other applications - ie, realplayer wants to launch realsched - mark the box 'create a rule' and say 'no'. KPF also adds some signature and hueristics checking to the packets, if you want it to.
Kerio was providing a 30-day trial (+30 some features disabled) without any hassle. Looks like Sunbelt wants your email address first, however.
Like others, I got a free trial of XM with my 2005 car. The "digital quality" adverts that XM makes are a joke. I don't know about Sirius, but the compression seems extremely lossy. It often sounds like a badly encoded MP3 - regardless of equalizer settings, location, or vehicle speed (stopped). You don't notice it as much with the talk channels, but most of the music channels I've listened to are quite poor. The local FM stations have, imho, far superior sound quality. Hell, I'd even argue that the AM stations can rival the sound quality of XM.
I'm not an engineer by any means, but it seems like they compress the signal in order to cram as many "stations" as possible into the bandwidth. Instead of actually having less channels and better quality sound, they've gone for quantity. (Do we really need channels that play only one particular radio show or one particular artist all the time?) Thank the cable companies for that model. A couple of hundred totally useless channels you'll never watch, but you still get to pay for them.
Why on earth would I want to record something that sounded that lousy? Or is that the point?
Can anyone point to another industry that is so anti-consumer that survived? My impression is that the RIAA/MPAA fight every advance, every technical innovation that would benefit consumers as a threat to their bottom line. Instead of embracing new technologies and finding new ways to make money from it, they waste time and energy trying to quash it. They're not just wasting "their" money, either - they are wasting OUR tax dollars tying up the courts or trying to get draconian legislation passed when Congress might have something a little less useless to be working on, etc.
VHS tapes and decks are more robust than DVDs which scratch easily and have to be handled with great care, lest the dirt and grime from your 4 year-old's fingers damage the disc or transfer grime to the laser damaging the player itself. A big portion of Walmart's target customer base is lower-to-middle income families with young kids. The kids aren't going to miss the "digital quality picture and sound".
Sure, you can copy a DVD but a) it is technically illegal (DMCA) and b) a royal PITA for your average Joe to get his hands on software that will do this, since most of the commercial shops have been sued out of existence. Easier to give the kids something they will have a hard time destroying by accident.
Except that this never happened to me with Verizon (about 4 different phone models IIRC), but happens all the time now that I have Cingular and a Nokia 6230 phone. Roommate also switched to Cingular and has some generic motorola flip that causes the same noises when his phone is chatting with the tower. Happens at work, in the car, and at home. Roommate said it generated the noises (albeit much louder) in a professional sound system during a presentation a few months ago as he was in the front row.
It may be solved by switching to shielded speakers, but something about the frequencies and/or power that cingular is using makes it different than verizon with the same speakers.
Best Buy has been very good to my friends and me with regards to warranty service.
The Ohio AG is (was?) investigating Best Buy for a variety of reasons, among them failure to honor warranties, IIRC.
I will never purchase anything from BestBuy anymore. I bought a car CD player there a few years ago, and when it broke, I had to take it out of the car and have it sent in. Not only was the original problem not fixed, but the "fix" had created an entirely new an unrelated problem with the unit. After about 3 times of taking it back and getting crap about how nothing was wrong with it (!!), they said that they were just going to, as per the extended warranty, replace it.
Unfortunatley, my model was no longer made, so the tech guy decided he'd pick out what he thought was an equivalent model - priced about 100$ less than what I'd paid for my model and it lacked several features that I'd bought the original for. I asked him about the lack of one of these features on the model, and he said something to the effect of "thats not an important feature". I was royally pissed off, partly because the guy was being a real prick. They pulled some other crap, like sending the wiring harness (sold seperately) to the repair shop and not replacing it.
Their idea of a replacement model sucked, so I bit the bullet and paid about 25$ more to get a model that I wanted, since I couldn't get a refund or a store credit. I'm dreading going back there again, because this model is crapping out as well. I think this time I'm going to insist on all the same features, sell the unopened product on ebay, and buy what I want from crutchfields.
Needless to say, this as well as stories like this and this mean that I warn everyone I talk to about electronics to find somewhere besides Best Buy to shop.
If I had that kind of speed on my cell, I'd prolly get rid of my cablemodem!
Thats why Sprint stopped selling the data cables, or so I'm told by the CSRs. Apparently they have some kind of rule against using the phones at all for modems, but they tend not to say much unless you start racking up traffic and it looks like you're using it for a general ISP.
Maybe I'm completely missing something here, but the best I've been able to get is 14.4k. I have the motorola 701c (I think thats the model) and it can do the highspeed thing, but VZW wants a ton of extra cash for that, and I'm not willing to shell out for it. Already paid damn near 80$ for the software+cable, a huge mistake.
Are you saying there is a way to get better than 14.4 with your mobile and not having to bend over for VZW? Please, do tell, because I've been considering going to Sprint, which as I understand it, gives you ISDN-like speeds. I'm told, however, they have spotty coverage where I work near Ohio State.
I've used both ZoneAlarm and Kerio. I'm much happier with Kerio. It is much less of a pain to use, and you can two-click enable/disable it without affecting any of your existing network connections.
KPF also monitors processes spawning other processes - allows you to catch a lot of things that try to run but shouldn't.
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Good point. However, rolling back the odometer is against the law because we have decided that to do so is a gross mis-representation of the value of the item in question. A vehicle's age/lifespan is generally acceptable as measured in terms of the mileage. You aren't cheating the auto maker, you're cheating the person you're selling the car to. Once the automaker has your money (or the bank's money) they don't give a flip what you do with the car.
Windows95 is an old piece of crap. If you relabel your (legal) copy and sell it as "The New Windows2006" to some poor unsuspecting schmuck, you've committed fraud. I think this is a little closer to rolling back the odometer than maybe what I was referring to.
I also think the TiVo thing is a little bit different as well. I pay a monthly fee to TiVo for the service they provide me - primarily guide data, but also access through the TiVo to things like Live365, etc. I can stop paying the fee, and then I will have to either figure out a way to get the guide data into the TiVo myself, or schedule programs manually. I will grant that you lose some functionality - most maybe - by not paying the monthly fee. However, because I bought mine, TiVo will not come and reposses my box OR revoke my right to use it (not 100% on this one...) if I cancel my service.
TiVo actually seems to be an exception to the rule. You can upgrade your harddrive if you want. You've broken your warranty, but they aren't going to drag you into court under the DMCA for it. In theory they could, because you've just "cheated" them out of revenue by upgrading the internals instead of buying a new box.
Your choice. My choice.
I agree, except that it really isn't a choice for the end-user. How long before the automobile goes the way of modern IP? Right now, if I buy a car from you I can do whatever the hell I want to it. I can take it apart to see how it works. I can build another car similar to it if I have the time and the skill. I can take the engine out of your car and put it in a different car and you can't say a word about it. I can even *GASP* remove the alternator and sell it to someone else. Or I can sell the entire car, which may be nothing like the car you designed because I modified it. I can drive it on dirt roads, I can use it to deliver pizzas. I can autocross it, or add a rollbar and better suspension for a road rally. That is my *right*. I bought the damn car, I own it, so I'm going to do with it what I please.
I realize that at some point the analogy breaks down because a car can't be put into a replicator like a DVD can. However, it seems to me that we are becoming less and less of an ownership society and more of a "borrow" society. I talked to someone the other day who works for a large firm, and they pay 160 grand a MONTH to license some software for their business. That does not include any changes they want made to the software - that costs extra.
I don't have a problem with profit. I have a problem with racketeering. I don't really know where this whole "you don't own it, you only licensed it from us and we can screw you anytime we want" started, but it is one reason why I'm such a big fan of OSS. I don't mind paying for software. But I get really pissed when I'm told I a) have to pay for it continuously and b) am not allowed to do anything with it except that which is outlined by the lawyers for giant-corp who wrote it and took my money for it. What a scam. DRM is coming to hardware near you, and it is going to compound this problem. Until now, it was _mostly_ software that kept the consumer on a leash.
How long until we have to pay a fee to (GM|Ford|etc) before our car will start every month? When will our GE fridge start requiring a dollar every time we open it? I don't like rent-an-appliance places because they're a rip off. You never get to stop paying for the item (unless you rent to own, at about 2-3x the cost you could have bought the item).
Am I paranoid chicken little here? How many of us as kids tinkered with everything in the house, but find today that if we do, we're breaking the law?
This is properly tantamount to a voluntary tax upon bilinguals
So, by your reasoning we should suspend activities such as:
- Big Brothers/Big Sisters
- Frats and VFW groups who do highway/litter cleanup
- Museum volunteers
- Reference desk volunteers at the local library
- Volunteers for the Red Cross and other relief orgs who are at least partially funded through tax dollars - but whose volunteers are not paid for their work
- Civics groups who put on things like Shakespeare in the Park
- Volunteer firefighters and EMTs
- College students who pay money to take their springbreak repairing the houses of dirt poor black americans in towns in the south where racism still lurks ominously. That is *double* taxation - not only have I paid to make the trip and buy the building materials, but I also spent weeks of my own time doing it. Why doesn't the gov't step in and pay me me! me!! to help these poverty-stricken people?
Maybe you got your degree from this guy so you don't understand that people who are paid by the gov't are paid out of your tax dollars. Very simple math. Gov't hires 10 more people, your taxes go to paying those ten extra people instead of whatever social program you fancy today. Give a little time as a volunteer (to do whatever, not nessecarily translate docs), and you save yourself a few dollars in taxes and get to have a little bit of civic pride. But it seems like you want us to all run around like a bunch of self-centered little dumbasses.
God forbid you should help an old lady cross the street without expecting a check for your "services".
I'm a sucker? No. Like I've said in other stories where this inevitably comes up, I pay not to have to deal with the bullshit. I fight with computers every day because it is my job, and because it is a hobby. Yet, I don't want to have to mess with kernels or libraries or dependencies or drivers or modules or the latest bug in mythTV or lousy hardware or whatever other problem there might be with running a typical PC. MythTV has its uses, and some people swear by it. Maybe you like it when your video card craps out on you. Maybe you're the type that walks/swims 8 miles to work instead of paying the bridge toll (haha sucker - I live under my desk!). I have no idea.
I pay 13$/month because I don't want to screw with my television (+DVR), I just want it to work. TiVo obviously provides me a service for this - the most obvious being the guide data. It is a small price to pay, imho, for the (nearly) worry-free joy that is my TiVo. If the series3 isn't vaporware, I'm all about it.
I wondered about that as well. My first consideration, however, was the weight. IIRC the History channel show about paint, the type used on aircraft is specifically designed to be lightweight. One might not think of paint as having any weight to it, until you consider how much paint is needed for an entire aircraft, and how much difference a couple of hundred pounds affects the performance of an aircraft. TFA doesn't say how much weight per-unit all that copper adds.
Turn the passenger compartment into a Faraday cage
I'd like to put a few people in a Faraday cage...ie the car I saw a few months ago driving like an idiot -- until I realized she had a cellphone in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
I won't be asked to shut down my iPod for takeoff and landing
Just conjecture, but I believe you're asked to put away your iPod during takeoff and landing for reasons that have nothing to do with EM interference. Takeoff and landing are the two most dangerous regular bits of your flight. This means that an iPod becomes a missle, and the fewer things flying through the air during a crash or emergency manuver, the better. Secondly, they want your headphones off (ever notice how the in-flight headphone music is turned off during these periods?) so you can hear crew instructions. Not just the "here's how to fasten your seatbelt" but any emergency directions. If you were the only one on the plane it might not matter. But you unable to hear the crew can interfere with other passengers' ability to, for example, get the hell out.
Again conjecture, but I think the difference between your cellphone and the on-board airline provided phone might simply be financial, but it is also a) a known quantity and b) a known item. That is, the flight crew knows how many of them there are (and the NSA can listen in easier...) and in case of emergency, can flip a switch and turn them off. It is a known item because the frequencies and EM output can be carefully controlled not to interfere. My GSM phone causes major and audible interference with stereo speakers (computer, car, professional concert, etc) when it talks to the tower. If the phone is anywhere near any speakers, I can tell a call is coming about 4 seconds before the phone rings. I'm not willing to bet my life that the interference is limited to speakers.
As for "how the hell can a multi-million dollar [aircraft] GPS system be subject to interference when my 350$ car unit doesn't seem to be affected?", let me suggest to you that if you're off by a few meters in your car driving in the city, it isn't a big deal. You adjust or get into a fender bender. If your fuel gauge quits working you can just pull over to the side of the road. A several hundred ton aircraft at 300 knots off by a few meters because the instruments are screwy can very easily turn into a major disaster.
Of course, they don't rely on just the GPS for guidance. What about the ILS? 50 meters vertical deviation is the difference between the runway threshold and the lake.
Who cares what creationists think? ...it's not really a problem - just something smart people find funny about the way stupid people think.
There's a good way to convince others you're right - by hurling insults at anyone who doesn't think like you do. Your argument for evolution and against intelligent design/creationism seems pretty simple:
A) all creationists are stupid
B) all non-creationists are smart
Therefore, there is no reason to engage the issue or even bother to make a case for your point of view. That isn't very open-minded and tolerant of you, is it? Shallow and narrow-minded people debase those who disagree with them because they're too lazy to form a coherent argument.
Those that you mock are the same ones that you have to convince that there is nothing bigger than us (God, Allah, a Supreme Being, the creepy Burger King clown, etc) if you want to eliminate spirituality from schools, government, public life, and then completely. Those "stupid people" still get to vote. If you plan to actually win the argument, consider convincing others with valid and thoughtful evidence, rather than invectives. Who knows, maybe you'll learn something in the process.
Aristotle didn't score points by calling anyone "stupid".
I hate it when people place two statistics side by side as if they are comparable
I personally avoid text messages because I get charged (US, Cingular) for every text message I send or receive. (Being a socio-phobic geek, not that I really have a g/f or a bunch of people I would want sending me inane messages...) I also get charged by the kilobyte for data, be that on the phone itself or (when it works) using the phone as a modem for my laptop. I paid for the 5MB data plan one month - a waste. A simple SSH session was plagued by latency, compression or no. With windoze, you have very little control over what bits of the system decide to contact the 'net (certain processes cannot be firewalled or things like DNS stop working also), so that eats away at your small quota as well.
Yes, there are "data" plans, but they tend to be stupidly expensive for what you get - 10$ for 5MB/month or 20$/month for "unlimited" usage in addition to the 45$/month I'm already paying for the voice service. (Verizon was or is 70$/mo and you are "required" to purchase a PCMCIA card, as well as sign another contract.) There are also "text messaging" plans which for like 5$/month would give me 100 messages or something like that. (I can't find "unlimited text messaging" on cingular's site) I'm not paying for it. They already nickel-and-dime (and 1.75$ for 411 calls) me nearly to death. This isn't much different, IMO, than the state of broadband. They get decent service and bandwidth overseas for a reasonable price, or so I read. We get jack customer service, lousy speeds (or 500$/month for a T1 and an SLA) and the prices continue to go up.
Speaking OT for a moment, where are the broadband connections that aren't a) way overpriced or b) so damn asymmetric that I could walk the 15mi to my university office faster than I can move files (14 hours to upload 2GB of data) or wait for my X session to catch up? Where are the providers that let you take some of that downstream bandwidth and convert it into upstream for a slightly more symmetric link?
TFA kind of obscures the fact a little that P10 isn't complaining so much about Google indexing their site per-se, but rather sites of people who have ripped off P10's images and reposted them elsewhere.
Like if there is no robots.txt file, it should default to not indexing?
So we should change the entire ruleset that governs robots.txt because one company has their proverbial panties in a wad about their images being ripped off by their own subscribers and then indexed by spiders? Any RFCs you'd like to throw out while you're at it? Maybe we should abandon TCP because that is the mechanism used to transport these images illegally across the internet.
There may be an option to add a no-index header to a jpeg file, maybe in EXIF metadata area which perhaps the search engine could honor. (Or does EXIF already have a copyright flag?) This extends an existing standard without breaking any old ones. Problem is it would be trivial to strip the bit from the file before re-posting.
Google and A9 aren't the only engines which index images. The spiders don't really (and shouldn't, save honoring robots.txt) care what the content is. They just index it so it can be found. Oddly enough, the search engines are what allow most people to find sites like P10. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. (Okay, search engines and spam.)
Google has deep pockets, so they're a target instead of the people who are actually stealing the images in the first place. I don't like the idea of stuff being ripped off. I like even less the idea of turning a well-established standard on its head. Maybe instead of attacking Google and A9 they should leverage Google, as someone else has already mentioned, to find the infringers and go after them. The pirates would just change their robots file to allow their content to be indexed anyways.
I feel like 99% of the web desperately wants to be on Google, hence it should be opt-out.
No clue what the first part of that means, hence flying monkeys are desperately wanting to come out of my butt (?)
I might be missing something here, but I was reading a business model essay from ~1995 a couple of weeks ago. One company specifically mentioned was Sony. They've come up with some really incredible ideas and made them into products - like the Walkman. Patents were never within the scope of this paper, but the author talked about how Sony wanted to stay on top and to do so they continued to innovate and create new products. Other companies cloned their products and sold them as knock offs. I really don't understand what changed in the patent law that allows things like NTP/RIMM. Not interested in starting an NTP/RIMM flame war, it just goes to my point.
Each of them came up with an idea of how to do something (this is a process?) but RIMM marketed a product. NTP sat on it their version of the patent. Is there any evidence that RIMM broke into NTP's offices and stole plans for the Blackberry? I guess I just can't figure out how such generic ideas about how to accomplish a task could be patented and then turn into a big huge lawsuit.
AFAIK, and I could be wrong, Sony never sued anyone for cloning the portable cassette player. I understand capitalism and everyone has a "right" to make money off of their own ideas. However, my impression is that the current patent/DMCA situation has done more to stifle innovation than to encourage it. Who wants to invent something only to make some money and some jackass comes along after you're successful - with his lawyers - to claim that he is entitled to your profits?
So you come up with an idea for a better GPS system. I happen to come up with the same idea, completely independently of you. Why can't we both market our products instead of getting sued by someone else who thought up a similar, but more generic method, 2 years ago and just sat on it, waiting for someone else to happen to come up with a similar idea? Why does it seem that it is no longer true that you and I could go into business together and (gasp!) improve on that third party's idea with a new product?
Another example to illustrate. Thomas Edison invents the lightbulb. He patents his method for "using electrical energy passing through a sealed chamber of inert gases to generate light" (I don't know the actual patent phrasing.) Can he be sued by the inventor of the gas street light? Can Edison sue the maker of the flourescent bulb? It sounds ridiculous, and IANAL but thats what it seems to me is basically going on.
I just noticed, Thunderbird, which is used "frequently" was "Last Used On" 11/04/2005. Firefox, which is running right now, was last used 5 days ago. Nice, eh?
it knows what applications you typically use and at what times so it'll preload them into memory making it seem snappier
Could you please provide a link to this article? While I'm interested to read it, I don't really buy this. Friggin' XP can't figure out how often I use programs now. (When you go to "Add/Remove Programs" it is supposed to tell you how often the program is used.) For example what XP says/actual:
Adobe Acrobat: "occasionally" / several times a day
APC PowerChute Personal Edition: "rarely" / is _always_ running
Gaim: "occasionally" / is _always_ running
Firefox: "occasionally" / default browser
Thunderbird: "frequently" / finally got one right
WinRAR archiver: "rarely" / several times a day
I don't want Microsoft deciding which programs it thinks I use most often and wasting memory + CPU "pre-loading" things. Maybe, just maybe if the damn OS wasn't so bloated they wouldn't need to preload applications. Then again, if the OS wasn't so bloated it would stop crashing because they could get all their garbage out of kernel space and back into userspace where it belongs. As it is, they have to put things in kernel space to keep the entire system from grinding to a halt when you run 'calc.exe'. Basically, get the entire GUI out of kernel space. AFAIK they can't do that because it would be way too slow.
Granted TFA was very much non-technical, some things missing from the list: (If I'm wrong about any of these being in XP, please feel free to correct me.)
- for-real no-shit multitasking. Linux has it. OS X has it. It aggarvates me to no end that the system severely drags and/or blocks while doing things like copying large files, burning a CD, scanning the "network neighborhood", or basically any other process which the kernel determines is "intensive". I can do 8 semi-CPU intensive things at once with no problem on a *nix machine without X slowing to a crawl. Good luck trying that on XP. A user-space process or application should never be allowed to block.
- Real ability to disable write caching. This is more a technical point, but nonetheless. The little box that is supposed to disable write caching for USB/Firewire devices seems to have no effect. I'm constantly getting the "This device cannot be stopped right now, try again later" BS from XP. Again, this is a "feature" to speed things up because the system is so inefficent.
- Stop the auto-mounter. Goes along with the above: the ability to turn off automounting of filesystems, or at the very least mount them as read-only. Windows will *always* try to write to a filesystem no matter what. Writing to a hosed disk is a good way to make it worse. Sure you can mount the disk while acting as user who doesn't have write privs to files, but that isn't the same. XP stills writes system and metadata to the disk.
- Unbinding IE from the system. I thought this was decided by a court that they had to do this. The last time I tried to uninstall IE the clipboard stopped functioning in MSOffice. Until I reinstalled IE, of course.
- Make it easier/possible to stop services that are not critical. This fails on XP mostly because nearly all of the services are "critical" to the operation of the OS. Again, to compare this to the *nix model - I can stop almost any service except for init and the system will continue to run. Why can't I enable networking and disable the filesharing by stopping the service that makes the SMB ports listen? A firewall is needed, yes. But it would be even more useful to be able to stop those services which should not be listening anyways.
- Stop telling me "access denied" when I'm the fracking system admin. I really hate that. Processes can't be killed, services can't be stopped, files can't be deleted, etc because "Access denied". Kill the damn process if I tell you to.
- Stop with the stupid exclusive file locks. Some of this is the fault of applications
Okay, thats just dumb. First of all, there is a good chance they can find out. If not from you, from your references, or from your tax returns, or some other method using your SSN and DOB. If like me, you're an employee of the government/university, your pathetic salary is public record.
Besides the fact that you're starting a position with a new employer on the basis of dishonesty (since when did integrity become a bad thing?), it is almost always grounds for immediate termination (that means you get fired) when they find out you lied about anything during the hiring process. Doesn't matter what you lied about, the fact that you did is enough.
If you don't want to tell them, then don't. But don't be an idiot and lie or you might find yourself explaining to your new McManager why you don't have any employment for the last 6 months, why you're living in your mom's basement at 34, and why he can't call your former employer for a reference.
I'll second this recommendation. I've had a series2 for about 3 years now and have been extremely happy with it. Out of the box it works just fine. No need to hack it if you don't want to. It is easy enough that your grandma could figure it out - which may seem like the TiVo isn't for the hardcore geek. The simplicity is the beauty of the whole thing. I spend most of my day dealing with computers - windoze, linux, clients, servers, code, the list goes on - something always needs fixed or updated or reinstalled. I don't want to fight with my fracking television too.
... talk about vaporware, geez.
The only "hack" I've applied is the 30-second skip. And that is just S-P-S-30-S on the remote (Do it while an already recorded show is playing - tends to work better there.) Has to be done after power failures and reboots, but those don't happen very often. A bunch of major software updates later TiVo has left that "feature" in, albeit disabled by default. I think someone else mentioned tivocommunity. A great resource. Figured out how to upgrade my 40GB to 80GB there - was a piece of cake (I still have the 40GB drive intact just in case the drive I put in there blows up.) The only hacking advice I would add is that if you hack your TiVo badly, you'll bork the OS and it won't be able to pull service updates, or worse - guide data.
Like zerocool^ said, you can grab Tivo2Go from tivo's website free (I think someone wrote a java clone) and download as much as you want to your PC. Nvidia has a codec you can buy for like 20$ (not sure why T2go doesn't come with one) that lets you burn DVDs with the application of your choice. I think there is Sonic something or other which is a burning app and a codec in one package. IIRC it is made by Roxio, so I stayed away from it. I won't tell you what to do, but I would suggest not P2P'ng the files as a matter of principle. The MPAA and RIAA are enough of a pain in the ass. They don't need any more excuses to go after things like TiVo, and it discourages content providers from partnering with DVR makers if they feel they're just getting ripped off.
Downsides: get a newer one - and hope it has USB2 or built-in ethernet. Transferring a show to or from the PC (I think USB1 is my issue) takes a long time - about 85-90% of the show's length. If you decide to get a wireless adapter, triple check to make sure it is the right one. One letter difference in the adapter's model and it is useless. Over three years, the TiVo unit has gotten progressively slower to respond - a lot of people have complained about this and it seems to be due to the 7.x software updates. No idea what, if anything, TiVo is doing about it. It is annoying sometimes, but not unbearable.
Upsides of TiVo: TivoCentral: schedule programs remotely without putting a hole in your firewall. It definitely "just works" - which is why I have avoided MythTV, WindowsMC, etc - no need - my TiVo makes me happy. Now if only finding a g/f were this easy
...there is absolutely no money in this area ... and quite frankly I don't care. I just want to build something cool.
The mortgage, car loan+insurance, electric bill, groceries, etc don't pay themselves. I would enjoy spending my time running my own business. But I'm not in a position to quit my day job right now and expect the lights to be on for very long.
That being said, this is America - you can do and be nearly anything you want if you're willing to work at it. You might have to get a McJob to pay the rent if you want to build robots in your garage (HP, Atari?), but no one can force you to work for corp this or that. In your case, if robotics is a field that interests you, hunt for and complete your education and then maybe a job in the industrial sector (heavy machinery, vehicle production, other factory-type settings) working on their equipment. You might not be building "something cool" for a while, but the experience will be invaluable.
Just a few thoughts from someone who should have studied harder in school...
I found and installed CounterSpy the other day and haven't been thrilled with it so far. After a 40 minute scan, it found a few bad cookies (only scans for IE cookies?) and some odd registry entries, then reported false positives on a couple of md5 .h files and winPcap. There doesn't seem to be a way to tell CS to ignore those files - you can only ignore the spyware it thinks it found. (ie, it thought winPcap was the Ace password sniffer - so if you 'ignore' you'll never see warnings about that password sniffer again.) On the positive side, I got an email back from Sunbelt saying they'd corrected these false positives in the next definitions push.
:/
The computer drops to hibernate after a few hours of being idle, but when I start it back up again, CounterSpy goes through another system-intensive 40 minute disk-thrashing scan. I probably need to fiddle with the settings to fix this, but there are other dumb things - like dialogs that can't fit all the information but don't have scrollbars, or dialog messages (ie, what tasks CS has completed) that are just flat-out wrong.
CounterSpy, IMHO, has an interface that needs serious help, over-taxes the disk, and is generally a waste of time.
In all seriousness, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure - layer your security if possible with things like: a NAT device between you and the cable/DSL modem, a good desktop virus scanner, a desktop firewall (Sunbelt recently took over Kerio Personal Firewall - I'm waiting to see if they screw that up.), use Firefox/Opera, etc. If you've got malware that is really stuck and can't be pried loose - you're looking at reformatting.
I recently used ndiswrapper to get a Winbook mini-pci wireless card working on my Dell laptop. It wasn't all that difficult, really - just required a little patience. I wrote up some instructions for setting it up for the OSU wireless network, but put a bunch of references at the bottom, including this one on the fedora forums that should give you a pretty good idea of how to get it setup on your network.
Its been about a year since I last used it, but ZA was a pain in the ass. It blocks things that I've told it not to block, and doesn't block things I've told it to block. It also doesn't work transparently - that is, when you say 'disable firewall' ZA doesn't disable itself, but still firewalls things. It doesn't seem to be related to my lack of being able to come up with the correct settings, but rather that ZA is just stupid sometimes. IIRC, it also dumps all of your open connections when enabling/disabling the firewall.
I've been much happier with Kerio (now Sunbelt) Personal Firewall. It installs easily, can run in auto or advanced/learn mode, and doesn't get in my way. One of my personal favorite features of Kerio is the ability to stop applications from launching other applications - ie, realplayer wants to launch realsched - mark the box 'create a rule' and say 'no'. KPF also adds some signature and hueristics checking to the packets, if you want it to.
Kerio was providing a 30-day trial (+30 some features disabled) without any hassle. Looks like Sunbelt wants your email address first, however.
Like others, I got a free trial of XM with my 2005 car. The "digital quality" adverts that XM makes are a joke. I don't know about Sirius, but the compression seems extremely lossy. It often sounds like a badly encoded MP3 - regardless of equalizer settings, location, or vehicle speed (stopped). You don't notice it as much with the talk channels, but most of the music channels I've listened to are quite poor. The local FM stations have, imho, far superior sound quality. Hell, I'd even argue that the AM stations can rival the sound quality of XM.
I'm not an engineer by any means, but it seems like they compress the signal in order to cram as many "stations" as possible into the bandwidth. Instead of actually having less channels and better quality sound, they've gone for quantity. (Do we really need channels that play only one particular radio show or one particular artist all the time?) Thank the cable companies for that model. A couple of hundred totally useless channels you'll never watch, but you still get to pay for them.
Why on earth would I want to record something that sounded that lousy? Or is that the point?
Can anyone point to another industry that is so anti-consumer that survived? My impression is that the RIAA/MPAA fight every advance, every technical innovation that would benefit consumers as a threat to their bottom line. Instead of embracing new technologies and finding new ways to make money from it, they waste time and energy trying to quash it. They're not just wasting "their" money, either - they are wasting OUR tax dollars tying up the courts or trying to get draconian legislation passed when Congress might have something a little less useless to be working on, etc.
VHS tapes and decks are more robust than DVDs which scratch easily and have to be handled with great care, lest the dirt and grime from your 4 year-old's fingers damage the disc or transfer grime to the laser damaging the player itself. A big portion of Walmart's target customer base is lower-to-middle income families with young kids. The kids aren't going to miss the "digital quality picture and sound".
Sure, you can copy a DVD but a) it is technically illegal (DMCA) and b) a royal PITA for your average Joe to get his hands on software that will do this, since most of the commercial shops have been sued out of existence. Easier to give the kids something they will have a hard time destroying by accident.
Except that this never happened to me with Verizon (about 4 different phone models IIRC), but happens all the time now that I have Cingular and a Nokia 6230 phone. Roommate also switched to Cingular and has some generic motorola flip that causes the same noises when his phone is chatting with the tower. Happens at work, in the car, and at home. Roommate said it generated the noises (albeit much louder) in a professional sound system during a presentation a few months ago as he was in the front row.
It may be solved by switching to shielded speakers, but something about the frequencies and/or power that cingular is using makes it different than verizon with the same speakers.
Best Buy has been very good to my friends and me with regards to warranty service.
The Ohio AG is (was?) investigating Best Buy for a variety of reasons, among them failure to honor warranties, IIRC.
I will never purchase anything from BestBuy anymore. I bought a car CD player there a few years ago, and when it broke, I had to take it out of the car and have it sent in. Not only was the original problem not fixed, but the "fix" had created an entirely new an unrelated problem with the unit. After about 3 times of taking it back and getting crap about how nothing was wrong with it (!!), they said that they were just going to, as per the extended warranty, replace it.
Unfortunatley, my model was no longer made, so the tech guy decided he'd pick out what he thought was an equivalent model - priced about 100$ less than what I'd paid for my model and it lacked several features that I'd bought the original for. I asked him about the lack of one of these features on the model, and he said something to the effect of "thats not an important feature". I was royally pissed off, partly because the guy was being a real prick. They pulled some other crap, like sending the wiring harness (sold seperately) to the repair shop and not replacing it.
Their idea of a replacement model sucked, so I bit the bullet and paid about 25$ more to get a model that I wanted, since I couldn't get a refund or a store credit. I'm dreading going back there again, because this model is crapping out as well. I think this time I'm going to insist on all the same features, sell the unopened product on ebay, and buy what I want from crutchfields.
Needless to say, this as well as stories like this and this mean that I warn everyone I talk to about electronics to find somewhere besides Best Buy to shop.
If I had that kind of speed on my cell, I'd prolly get rid of my cablemodem!
Thats why Sprint stopped selling the data cables, or so I'm told by the CSRs. Apparently they have some kind of rule against using the phones at all for modems, but they tend not to say much unless you start racking up traffic and it looks like you're using it for a general ISP.
Maybe I'm completely missing something here, but the best I've been able to get is 14.4k. I have the motorola 701c (I think thats the model) and it can do the highspeed thing, but VZW wants a ton of extra cash for that, and I'm not willing to shell out for it. Already paid damn near 80$ for the software+cable, a huge mistake.
Are you saying there is a way to get better than 14.4 with your mobile and not having to bend over for VZW? Please, do tell, because I've been considering going to Sprint, which as I understand it, gives you ISDN-like speeds. I'm told, however, they have spotty coverage where I work near Ohio State.
I've used both ZoneAlarm and Kerio. I'm much happier with Kerio. It is much less of a pain to use, and you can two-click enable/disable it without affecting any of your existing network connections.
KPF also monitors processes spawning other processes - allows you to catch a lot of things that try to run but shouldn't.