A fire caused by these cheap parts is actually fairly rare - less than one in a thousand machines (probably much less).
In 2001, 10% of the 100+ new Dell monitors burst into flames within the first two months. Because of very high ceilings, there were no real damage. And because we were a very big customer anyhow, they were falling over themselves to replace all the monitors, throw in plenty of extra equipment for free, and give us their bullshit form speech about how they take safety seriously, so there was no reason to turn it into a lawsuit.
Dell has a long history of all their products being fire hazards (a quick web search turns up plenty), and very, very few of them have ended up as product recalls.
This is simply taking advantage of mom 'n pop consumers who are just out to buy a nice birthday gift or something like that and don't read consumer electronics news sites.
There's probably nothing in particular that can be done to stop it.
It amazes me how people are consistently willing to accept that the stores where they shop need do NOTHING but provide shelf space for manufacturers...
Retailers have full discretion. They can chose to only stock products that meet their quality standards. Instead, they find it more profitable, in the short term, to cash-in on the trust they've previous established with their customers, and sell the cheapest crap they can find, for the highest price they can get away with, for as long as they can.
Many people have fallen for it, and just keep buying the cheap crap, instead of paying 10% more for a higher quality product that will last 10X longer. In the end, customers will simply get suspicious of the stores, and simply won't buy much of anything from the retailer again. It seems Wal-mart is starting to find that they've nearly exhausted the supply of rubes and suckers, and while Wal-Mart's growth and profits are rapidly slowing, the better quality retailers, like Target are, at the same time, instead seeing ever faster growth.
But I digress...
Retailers risk seriously angering and possibly losing their customers by dumping cheap, end-of-life equipment on unsuspecting shoppers. If they care about their customers at all, they should either put up a nice big warning sign letting people know it's obsolete, or at least educate their employees on the subject so they can appropriately warn the buyer. If that results in fewer sales, they can and should send the unsold units back to the manufacturer.
Curious... Why do you even need a Blu-ray or HD-DVD burner? If you're just distributing relatively short high-def videos like commercials, you could simply follow the Blu-ray HD-DVD standards for high-def video on a DVD-9, far, far cheaper, with length being the only drawback. As long as you're not making feature-length films, I don't see the need.
WMV DRM is just simply not available to Windows older than XP, by Microsoft's choice.
That's simply not true. WMP has included DRM for years... I've been playing DRMed WMV files from long before XP even came out. There are numerous WMVHD DVDs out there that are, of course DRMed, but will play in WMP on versions of Windows before XP.
No doubt WMP for MacOS includes at least some older version of Microsoft's DRM.
Doc> Unfortunately you never know when or where it's ever going to strike.
In fact, scientists are really quite good at causing a storm to develop a lightning strike exactly where they want it. Shoot a grounded cable into the clouds, and you've got extremely good odds. For a more sustainable method, building a tower in the absolute middle of nowhere in the flat plains of the US would guarantee a steady supply of lightning strikes, without moving parts, or much maintenance.
* Computer running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or higher, or Windows Vista
* Internet Explorer version 6 or higher
* Windows Media Player version 11 (DRM version 5145) or later
Well gee, that makes the service pretty much useless to me unless I want to watch movies in a VM on my laptop, instead of on my TV.
You need XP, but if you're willing to do just a small bit of work, you can use with Media Player 9 or above (I use v10), and Firefox or any other browser.
With anything but IE, you just change the user agent, and then parse the HTML to find the links to the media. I do this regularly with Firefox on FreeBSD6.2. I simply transfer them over the network to the XP box, strip the DRM, and transfer them again to my DVR PC, and watch them on my TV. Needing XP to remove the DRM is an irritating step, but a relatively small one.
I'd blame Netflix for using a de facto single platform codec.
VC-1/WMV9/WMV3 is an open, SMPTE standard. Licensing is handled by MPEG-LA, just like h.264 (used by Quicktime) and under nearly identical prices.
They could have used Theora, which is open. They could have used QuickTime, which has Windows support. They could have used RealPlayer (as horrid as that would be), because it's at least available on both platforms. There is also Flash which is immensely popular and multi-platform.
None of which provides any built-in DRM system, which makes them complete non-starters for Netflix.
Windows XP/Vista is the only platform supported, because that's what Netflix wanted to support. They could very, very easily have supported Windows 2000, 9x, etc. I imagine they could also have supported most Macs, via the rather old Mac WMP release. They could also have supported web browsers like Firefox, rather than being IE-only quite easily.
Netflix chose, instead, to write their player to exclude all other possible platforms, and browsers. It's a very explicit decision. Choosing a different codec wouldn't have helped or hurt.
With a discharge like that, the only thing that can charge it up is a bolt of lighting!
I realize this is just a joke, but that is in fact a great idea. We are looking for ever cheaper energy, and lightning is extremely high power, and rather constant in certain areas. If cheap enough storage devices could instantly store it, it would make an incredibly good power source.
And, no doubt, like every other year, it will be filled with previously disproven and utterly ridiculous urban legends, because they happen to sound better than the real thing.
I think Snopes (or perhaps Mythbusters if you're desperate) should have a "Darwin Awards" special every year.
Do you really need air conditioning? What do you think they did a hundred years ago?
1) They stayed the hell away from the south western US. 2) They used the evaporative cooling. 3) They had ice shipped in, and paid exorbitant fees for it. 4) The old and infirm, quite simply, died.
The "savings" I see on my electric bill during the summer months isn't worth the hassle and the possibility of having a dog with heatstroke.
Any remotely healthy dog can handle 88F degrees easily. My dogs RUN AROUND in direct sunlight for hours, while the temperature in the shade is 120F, with no ill effects.
Computers run at 160F plus, a room getting to 120F won't faze them.
Not true at all. If you want your computer to be able to operate in 120F degrees ambient for any length of time, you need absolutely massive fans to cycle huge amounts of air through the case. Far different than existing PC designs.
CPUs may be able to take 160F degrees without flinching, but the fans and heatsinks supporting them simply aren't designed to keep the CPU cool in such high ambient temperatures.
Unless you're lucky enough to have a fan pointed directly at your DDR RAM, you can expect that to overheat first, locking up your computer in no time. If you cool the RAM, expect a terribly shortened life for your hard drive, unless it is also directly, actively cooled. Next up is probably the northbridge (non-AMD64 systems), as they all too often run near their limits even with cool ambient temperatures, and often don't have a fan. Expect a short lifetime for your PSU as well, as they are bearing 200F+ temperatures, as they have to deal with the ambient heat + heat from nearby components + heat it generates as well.
You can certainly design a computer to handle such temperatures, as the components can handle such heat, but nobody does, and you wouldn't want to be within earshot while it is operating.
California, with the exception of the Central Valley and a few deserts (not all that populated) is not all that hot.
Right... EXCEPT FOR THE MAJORITY OF THE STATE, where many, many millions of people live, California isn't a giant, record-setting, insanely hot desert... Nope.
The fact that Nevada and Arizona border California doesn't mean anything at all... Weather like the Arctic, that California.
You know how many old/infirm people die every year due to the heat or cold?
I do, in fact. They, however, die from not having ANY cooling or heating, most certainly NOT from their thermostats being 2 degrees off, for a couple hours a day.
How do you even begin to calculate the damage that might have caused to prospective customers or partners?
The potential damages dictate the level of precautions that should be taken.
If company X is going to lose significant money from such pranks, they should NOT have left the IR sensors exposed. Pretty trivial technical measure to stop potential financial loss. If a company wants to argue for damages, the first question they have to answer is "Why didn't you take the simplest and cheapest of steps to prevent this from happening?"
I see things like this constantly. Whenever there is a car, bus, train, or plane accident, you can bet that the go-to answer is driver/pilot error. Without overwhelming evidence, that will remain the official conclusion... Never mind that the company left some gaping safety flaw wide open, because their bean counters calculated that it would be slightly cheaper to pay off all the lawsuits of the casualties that it would be to fix the problem.
While there are innumerable cases of companies trying to scapegoat individuals for institutional failures. I think the most relevant example today is the Airbus A-300... At maneuvering speed, it takes 20 lbs of force to deflect the rudder AT ALL, but less than 40 lbs of force will cause the tail to sheer off entirely, just about guaranteeing that everyone aboard will be killed...
"Airbus, the plane's manufacturer, blamed the pilot's actions"
The fix? Pilots are now simply told "DON'T DO THAT"... When the next A-300 crashes, I have no doubt it will be chalked up to pilot error, because he didn't happen to have a pressure gauge on his shoes, and put just a bit too much force on the rudder. Clearly, pilot error.
No there isn't. There is, inherently, an ARAB profile, but they are at the forefront now ONLY because they have been pretty successful in recent years.
Ted Kazinsky, Timothy McVeigh, etc., do NOT fit the Arab Terrorist profile, yet they were terrorists, and killed many people.
How about the race of the primary suspect in the anthrax mailings, or the utterly incorrect profiling of the "Beltway Sniper"?
How about the Americans who joined up? John Phillip Walker Lindh and (Insert name of US Marine who tossed a live grenade into a barracks).
It isn't just Arabs who are terrorists, and it isn't just Arab terrorists who might be interested in taking down a jet.
Some places have a more inteligent system: The signal turns the light Red (in all directions), and the emergency vechicles just go through the red lights.
That might be preferable at intersections with very light traffic, but nowhere else. At many intersections around here that would just ensure gridlock the emergency vehicles can't penetrate. Making the light green in the appropriate direction gives stopped vehicles a sign they should move, and gives them a few seconds chance to get out of the way.
The government is *ALWAYS* ten years late on supporting technology, and usually picks the wrong one. [...] One more reason to vote for someone who believes that open markets will drive innovation a lot faster than corporate/agricultural welfare,
Absolutely... Because we want the OIL COMPANIES to decide what fuel to develop.
Tell me something... Exactly what is it about the current government that is STOPPING someone from developing this magic breakthrough technology?
Ron Paul is an amazing guy. He rants about how Fox wouldn't let him into the Republican debates, and then he turns around and rants about removing the few regulations there are... There would be nothing more ironic than corporations using their power to stop Ron Paul from being elected.
The sheer obliviousness and ignorance it takes to be a proud Libertarian astounds me.
On the upside small cars like the smart car(search youtube for the smart car road test hitting a brick wall at high speed with no cabin intrusion) are made to withstand accidents exceedingly well,
The Smart Car looks great after the crash test... A sure sign everyone inside would have been killed.
The passenger compartment remaining intact is just one of two ingredients in crash safety... That part really helps to prevent minor injuries, NOT the major ones.
The Smart Car is all passenger compartment, no crumple zones. That means your body experiences the full speed impact, and your neck breaks instantly.
I've found that aside from the occasional nut, the majority of people do not drive any faster than they are comfortable with (hazardous conditions aside), and if traffic is consistently faster than the posted limits then the limits are too low.
Unfortunately, there is ample proof that you are wrong.
If you look at Montana's fatal accident rate, with and without speed limits, you find something peculiar... Fatalities went up when speed limits were imposed.
And when the maximum interstate speed was finally increased from 55 mph? Fatalities increased dramatically. I never knew anyone to drive 80MPH when the limit was 55, but now they do. The roads haven't changed, yet people are now comfortable driving far, far faster. These days, I don't see anyone driving 55 on the freeway.
So the problem isn't that it can't go up hills with heavy loads, it's that fatass American families won't buy a car that can only do 4 mph up the hill to their home
No, actually, the problem is that going 4 mph, when traffic is rounding the corner behind you at 80mph, is a great way to eliminate yourself from the gene pool.
it can handle incredible grades, weather conditions, and high levels of water...
The military version can. The commercial version, can't.
in light of the success of the hummer, i think we should commercialize for the public IED-resistance troop transports. this is the next logical evolution in american automobile tastes
Not a big fan of that Cougar, but I'd gladly buy a Stryker. 8 wheel drive is nice. Don't get ripped off buying the slat armor option, though... it's a gimmick.
If you instead have like a parabolic dish that tracks the receiver, the losses will be lower, but what happens to kitty or your eyeballs if they get in the way?
I've passed under 100W light bulbs, and direct sunlight, millions of times in my life, and yet my eyeballs continue to function just fine.
The strength drops off as the CUBE of the distance, so any significant distance is a no-go.
Only true with onmidirectional... A high-gain antenna, or collimated beam like a laser, and you can get very good distances with very little loss (not counting conversion losses, inherent at any distance).
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In 2001, 10% of the 100+ new Dell monitors burst into flames within the first two months. Because of very high ceilings, there were no real damage. And because we were a very big customer anyhow, they were falling over themselves to replace all the monitors, throw in plenty of extra equipment for free, and give us their bullshit form speech about how they take safety seriously, so there was no reason to turn it into a lawsuit.
Dell has a long history of all their products being fire hazards (a quick web search turns up plenty), and very, very few of them have ended up as product recalls.
It amazes me how people are consistently willing to accept that the stores where they shop need do NOTHING but provide shelf space for manufacturers...
Retailers have full discretion. They can chose to only stock products that meet their quality standards. Instead, they find it more profitable, in the short term, to cash-in on the trust they've previous established with their customers, and sell the cheapest crap they can find, for the highest price they can get away with, for as long as they can.
Many people have fallen for it, and just keep buying the cheap crap, instead of paying 10% more for a higher quality product that will last 10X longer. In the end, customers will simply get suspicious of the stores, and simply won't buy much of anything from the retailer again. It seems Wal-mart is starting to find that they've nearly exhausted the supply of rubes and suckers, and while Wal-Mart's growth and profits are rapidly slowing, the better quality retailers, like Target are, at the same time, instead seeing ever faster growth.
But I digress...
Retailers risk seriously angering and possibly losing their customers by dumping cheap, end-of-life equipment on unsuspecting shoppers. If they care about their customers at all, they should either put up a nice big warning sign letting people know it's obsolete, or at least educate their employees on the subject so they can appropriately warn the buyer. If that results in fewer sales, they can and should send the unsold units back to the manufacturer.
Curious... Why do you even need a Blu-ray or HD-DVD burner? If you're just distributing relatively short high-def videos like commercials, you could simply follow the Blu-ray HD-DVD standards for high-def video on a DVD-9, far, far cheaper, with length being the only drawback. As long as you're not making feature-length films, I don't see the need.
That's simply not true. WMP has included DRM for years... I've been playing DRMed WMV files from long before XP even came out. There are numerous WMVHD DVDs out there that are, of course DRMed, but will play in WMP on versions of Windows before XP.
No doubt WMP for MacOS includes at least some older version of Microsoft's DRM.
In fact, scientists are really quite good at causing a storm to develop a lightning strike exactly where they want it. Shoot a grounded cable into the clouds, and you've got extremely good odds. For a more sustainable method, building a tower in the absolute middle of nowhere in the flat plains of the US would guarantee a steady supply of lightning strikes, without moving parts, or much maintenance.
You need XP, but if you're willing to do just a small bit of work, you can use with Media Player 9 or above (I use v10), and Firefox or any other browser.
With anything but IE, you just change the user agent, and then parse the HTML to find the links to the media. I do this regularly with Firefox on FreeBSD6.2. I simply transfer them over the network to the XP box, strip the DRM, and transfer them again to my DVR PC, and watch them on my TV. Needing XP to remove the DRM is an irritating step, but a relatively small one.
VC-1/WMV9/WMV3 is an open, SMPTE standard. Licensing is handled by MPEG-LA, just like h.264 (used by Quicktime) and under nearly identical prices.
None of which provides any built-in DRM system, which makes them complete non-starters for Netflix.
Windows XP/Vista is the only platform supported, because that's what Netflix wanted to support. They could very, very easily have supported Windows 2000, 9x, etc. I imagine they could also have supported most Macs, via the rather old Mac WMP release. They could also have supported web browsers like Firefox, rather than being IE-only quite easily.
Netflix chose, instead, to write their player to exclude all other possible platforms, and browsers. It's a very explicit decision. Choosing a different codec wouldn't have helped or hurt.
I realize this is just a joke, but that is in fact a great idea. We are looking for ever cheaper energy, and lightning is extremely high power, and rather constant in certain areas. If cheap enough storage devices could instantly store it, it would make an incredibly good power source.
And, no doubt, like every other year, it will be filled with previously disproven and utterly ridiculous urban legends, because they happen to sound better than the real thing.
I think Snopes (or perhaps Mythbusters if you're desperate) should have a "Darwin Awards" special every year.
1) They stayed the hell away from the south western US.
2) They used the evaporative cooling.
3) They had ice shipped in, and paid exorbitant fees for it.
4) The old and infirm, quite simply, died.
What do I win?
Any remotely healthy dog can handle 88F degrees easily. My dogs RUN AROUND in direct sunlight for hours, while the temperature in the shade is 120F, with no ill effects.
Not true at all. If you want your computer to be able to operate in 120F degrees ambient for any length of time, you need absolutely massive fans to cycle huge amounts of air through the case. Far different than existing PC designs.
CPUs may be able to take 160F degrees without flinching, but the fans and heatsinks supporting them simply aren't designed to keep the CPU cool in such high ambient temperatures.
Unless you're lucky enough to have a fan pointed directly at your DDR RAM, you can expect that to overheat first, locking up your computer in no time. If you cool the RAM, expect a terribly shortened life for your hard drive, unless it is also directly, actively cooled. Next up is probably the northbridge (non-AMD64 systems), as they all too often run near their limits even with cool ambient temperatures, and often don't have a fan. Expect a short lifetime for your PSU as well, as they are bearing 200F+ temperatures, as they have to deal with the ambient heat + heat from nearby components + heat it generates as well.
You can certainly design a computer to handle such temperatures, as the components can handle such heat, but nobody does, and you wouldn't want to be within earshot while it is operating.
Right... EXCEPT FOR THE MAJORITY OF THE STATE, where many, many millions of people live, California isn't a giant, record-setting, insanely hot desert... Nope.
The fact that Nevada and Arizona border California doesn't mean anything at all... Weather like the Arctic, that California.
I do, in fact. They, however, die from not having ANY cooling or heating, most certainly NOT from their thermostats being 2 degrees off, for a couple hours a day.
The potential damages dictate the level of precautions that should be taken.
If company X is going to lose significant money from such pranks, they should NOT have left the IR sensors exposed. Pretty trivial technical measure to stop potential financial loss. If a company wants to argue for damages, the first question they have to answer is "Why didn't you take the simplest and cheapest of steps to prevent this from happening?"
I see things like this constantly. Whenever there is a car, bus, train, or plane accident, you can bet that the go-to answer is driver/pilot error. Without overwhelming evidence, that will remain the official conclusion... Never mind that the company left some gaping safety flaw wide open, because their bean counters calculated that it would be slightly cheaper to pay off all the lawsuits of the casualties that it would be to fix the problem.
While there are innumerable cases of companies trying to scapegoat individuals for institutional failures. I think the most relevant example today is the Airbus A-300... At maneuvering speed, it takes 20 lbs of force to deflect the rudder AT ALL, but less than 40 lbs of force will cause the tail to sheer off entirely, just about guaranteeing that everyone aboard will be killed...
"Airbus, the plane's manufacturer, blamed the pilot's actions"
The fix? Pilots are now simply told "DON'T DO THAT"... When the next A-300 crashes, I have no doubt it will be chalked up to pilot error, because he didn't happen to have a pressure gauge on his shoes, and put just a bit too much force on the rudder. Clearly, pilot error.
No there isn't. There is, inherently, an ARAB profile, but they are at the forefront now ONLY because they have been pretty successful in recent years.
Ted Kazinsky, Timothy McVeigh, etc., do NOT fit the Arab Terrorist profile, yet they were terrorists, and killed many people.
How about the race of the primary suspect in the anthrax mailings, or the utterly incorrect profiling of the "Beltway Sniper"?
How about the Americans who joined up? John Phillip Walker Lindh and (Insert name of US Marine who tossed a live grenade into a barracks).
It isn't just Arabs who are terrorists, and it isn't just Arab terrorists who might be interested in taking down a jet.
That might be preferable at intersections with very light traffic, but nowhere else. At many intersections around here that would just ensure gridlock the emergency vehicles can't penetrate. Making the light green in the appropriate direction gives stopped vehicles a sign they should move, and gives them a few seconds chance to get out of the way.
Absolutely... Because we want the OIL COMPANIES to decide what fuel to develop.
Tell me something... Exactly what is it about the current government that is STOPPING someone from developing this magic breakthrough technology?
Ron Paul is an amazing guy. He rants about how Fox wouldn't let him into the Republican debates, and then he turns around and rants about removing the few regulations there are... There would be nothing more ironic than corporations using their power to stop Ron Paul from being elected.
The sheer obliviousness and ignorance it takes to be a proud Libertarian astounds me.
Even if so (seems extremely unlikely), you're ignoring all manner of other sources... Primarily, urban run-off.
No. You're merely reading those two sentences out of context.
The Smart Car looks great after the crash test... A sure sign everyone inside would have been killed.
The passenger compartment remaining intact is just one of two ingredients in crash safety... That part really helps to prevent minor injuries, NOT the major ones.
The Smart Car is all passenger compartment, no crumple zones. That means your body experiences the full speed impact, and your neck breaks instantly.
Unfortunately, there is ample proof that you are wrong.
If you look at Montana's fatal accident rate, with and without speed limits, you find something peculiar... Fatalities went up when speed limits were imposed.
And when the maximum interstate speed was finally increased from 55 mph? Fatalities increased dramatically. I never knew anyone to drive 80MPH when the limit was 55, but now they do. The roads haven't changed, yet people are now comfortable driving far, far faster. These days, I don't see anyone driving 55 on the freeway.
No, actually, the problem is that going 4 mph, when traffic is rounding the corner behind you at 80mph, is a great way to eliminate yourself from the gene pool.
The military version can. The commercial version, can't.
Not a big fan of that Cougar, but I'd gladly buy a Stryker. 8 wheel drive is nice. Don't get ripped off buying the slat armor option, though... it's a gimmick.
I've passed under 100W light bulbs, and direct sunlight, millions of times in my life, and yet my eyeballs continue to function just fine.
Only true with onmidirectional... A high-gain antenna, or collimated beam like a laser, and you can get very good distances with very little loss (not counting conversion losses, inherent at any distance).