Just as futile, respected (I suppose) game blogs like Kotaku have been going on about this...
Yes, that is absolutely right. Posting on the Internet is like screaming into the wind but it has more of a chance of being heard than a single silent letter to the company.
The best way to stop is to get a law against it. Making it illegal to force activations, forget the US government, we know who's side they'll pick (HINT: it wont be the violent commie gaming terrorists) so Europeans, petition the EU, Australians try the ACCC. If we don't stand up for consumer rights, we'll lose them.
This is probably the best way to stop game activations and the whole defective by design ideology behind DRM. I'm surprised that activations aren't attacked by the consumers on the grounds of them buying a product for which every time they need permission to use it by the company selling it. The whole "you're not purchasing" you're "licensing" software so you lose your consumer rights is another piece of bunk that needs to be attacked and consumer rights need to be handled just the same as physical products. This "activations" thing sounds like something that current and past laws should be able to handle to remove the leash from around your neck with you decide to buy a game for your kids.
I'm wondering if there isn't some past case law on the books somewhere of a buyer being obstructed by the seller in the usage of the product and having a court case decide that the buyer has the right to do as he wishes with the product that he made, even reselling it, but short of copying it and selling it again. Sounds like something out there should have already decided this case and just needs to be brought back into the light of day and used again.
Send a letter? What is this, the 1970's? Get real, nobody is going to read your letter or care what it says and it will be junked as soon as it is opened. They are not going to rush your letter to the CEO personally letting him know that you are unsatisfied. The upper management won't care about some complaining doofus still writing letters, griping about something or other. You're targeting the wrong people with your letters and there is not enough distribution to them.
Instead write a Blog entry or a Forum post and get vocal about the reason why you won't buy the game. Have some people reply to what you wrote and start up an angry thread. Target the people who care about the issue, because obviously the game company doesn't otherwise it wouldn't be implemented, and try to reach a wider audience regarding your grievance. The more people who hear about the problem the more they know and the less likely they will be to spend money on some game where everyone is complaining about.
Would you buy a product that had terrible reviews online and by word of mouth because everyone and their aunt knew it sucked and they found out about the suckyness beforehand?
I have noticed that while web browsing and even when using the currently latest Mozilla Firefox 3.5.7 or 3.6 with Ad-Block Plus and PDF Download add-ons installed I still would get hit with a web page that would automatically push a Adobe Reader PDF file to me and I would have it open automatically. That PDF would be just a page full of random words but when inspected in Adobe Acrobat in depth when you go into the Advanced \ Document Processing \ Edit All JavaScript... menu you immediately see a script inside the PDF that is launched upon opening that PDF. When I analyzed the script I saw calls strange calls to the execution functions and methods along with calls to write out encoded data from an array holding hexadecimal values to files.
With the known exploits in Adobe Reader 9.0 versions and earlier it was easy for me to see why this product was used as a popular attack vector in the last few months for viruses to spread on the Internet.
Luckily, I use my computer as an ordinary user and use Run As with User Account Control requesting a password for any administrative work and program installation I avoided being infected with these Trojan horse PDFs.
Some of you might recommend using the Mozilla No Script add-in to block all scripts but the reality is that there is so much JavaScript code out there on the web that turning scripting off makes many web sites unusable since they've all be designed with this reliance on scripting for navigation.
I was working at a major investment bank around the year 2000 or 2001 and my manager and I interviewed candidates from your school, Stevens Institute in Hoboken, for a summer internship that year. We came back with three male interns for a Windows Server Administration department who I worked with personally. Their internship was pretty good for us but kind of boring for the kids as we'd see them spend more time on the Internet browsing than learning how to do real work, then again I don't blame these kids since corporate server work is pretty dull from their perspective. We took the interns along with us on all the interesting projects and support cases and even gave them long term design and coding projects to do during their term. We got some help out of their internship and they got a taste of what it is like to work in a major corporation over a fairly easy summer.
I saw the movie first as a kid and didn't understand it except for the basic plot of sand, worms, spice, good guys vs bad buys, emperor, Bene Gesserit, the Guild, a lot of scheming, but loved the dark visuals and the gritty feel of the movie. I had to watch it again once or twice to try and understand it more but still couldn't grasp the details of the whole story, there was just too much missing from the movie.
Then The Whole Book Series
Then a few years later I decided to read the whole series from front to back and the movie really helped me wrap my head around the look of the Dune universe and how things should look. However the picture that the series drew in my mind was a bit different than what the movie portrayed and some of the style and look from the movie did not fit. I felt like the book series starts centered around Paul's life, then the series widens up to his sister and family, then broadens the horizons towards the Jihad and the expanse of the known universe, until the God Emperor comes and overshadows all, and then starts to collapses again back towards Duncan's experience. The movie helped me put some faces to the characters for the first few books and get a start on the story but detail in the books quickly built up that the movie just became overshadowed.
I saw the movie a once or twice after finishing the series and I just wasn't so thrilled by it anymore as I was before. The dreamlike hold of the movie was lost on me since I found the background story between the shifts of power in the universe in the book series a lot more interesting than the personal adventures of Paul and his friends.
Old Movie, PC Game, and Miniseries
I liked the books very much and I like the original movie because the look and feel were almost right and were great on their own. The movie was a bit different than the story but it was faithful to idea in the books. I also played the original Dune game on the PC so I got to play through the story of the movie and liked that very much, even though even the game was a bit off the movie. I also loved the original Dune 2 real time strategy game since it was the first tank warfare game before Command & Conquer and World of Warcraft showed up on the scene.
I did not like the SciFi Dune miniseries at all since I felt that even with the better acting I could not associate the actors and the characters they played with the people in the books. They all just felt very wrong and no matter how much prettier and more colorful the miniseries was it made me feel that the miniseries looked more like a theatrical production than a TV series.
New Movie
As for new Dune movie with 3D worms, I say good luck to them and let's see what'll happen with that. I won't hold my breath though since I don't believe that these are the times in which a good rendition of the Dune series can be made. There's just too much Wow! factor required in today's movies and even though I liked Avatar 3D and saw it twice, I can't say much for the predictable story. I predict that this Dune movie will be similar, great visuals and an entertaining movie but just a snip of the real story without much depth.
I say good luck to them and show us something entertaining!
I have owned many Prius's. I currently drive a 2010 one. Let's say that I'm in some place where the speed 85 mph is legal. I can nudge my cruise control speed lever and my speed barely goes up, say from 80 to 81.I nudge at again and again, up to 83. Then I nudge it again and the car takes off, no speed limit. Nudging the cruise speed control lever down has no effect until I've done it about 10 times or more. By then my Prius is doing 97. It's scary because it's so wrong and so out of your normal control. I tested this over and over the night I observed it.
It's scary because you don't think of things like putting the car in neutral when this happens. I am sure you can't turn the car off with the keyless power button, the only option on this model.
Braking does disable this scary cruise control effect. It is a natural response, so the problem is mitigated a great deal.
I have not seen this happen before so I think it's new to the 2010. I have the package which includes parallel parking assist and cruise control distance limiter.
My old 1994 Chrysler New Yorker had a similar problem with cruise control but it wasn't as acute as was Steve describes. If I was going up any small hill on a highway and I hit the cruise control speed up button once, twice, three times the car would try to accelerate a little and then rev up like mad and try to speed up by almost +10 miles per hour until it was going much faster than I intended, making me hold the coast button for a while unit it slows down or by turning off cruise control all together with the Off button or by a light tap on the breaks.
Oh and I'm not trying to play down the problem with Toyota's accelerator pedal recall or now this cruise control issue, there is a real issue there that needs to be addressed and it appears like there is some cover-up and a lack of accountability and openness about these problems from Toyota's reactions.
So that's the reason why Toyota cars are flying off the bridges every morning with people screaming on their cell phones while monkeys come flying out of their butts smelling like oatmeal and coffee?
Less Dangerous Than A Blown Tire
It's a rarely occurring problem with a faulty part in the accelerator pedal manifold that happens to some cars rarely and only after a long time in usage. If the pedal gets stuck, you hit the breaks and set the transmission to neutral gear, or click the ignition off to ACC, while it coast it to a safe location. The car is not going to explode or wheels are not going to fall off because of this problem, you will merely have to bring the car to a slow and safe stop.
This problem is by far less dangerous than a blown tire at highway speeds that takes you be surprise, jerks you car to one side, and makes it nearly uncontrollable while you wrestle with the steering wheel to get the car over to a safe spot without slamming you into the mid-barrier, another car, or pulling you off the road into a ditch, to hopefully change out the tire and be on your way. A stuck accelerator pedal gives you a nice straight ride where the car is still in control, and you just have to slow it down.
Conspiracy Explanation = Difficult Diagnosis
Toyota has been experiencing this problem for a while and it's been happening here and there and because it is a rare occurrence it has most likely been difficult to figure out. Hell, from computer diagnosis experience you should know that trying to figure out a rarely reoccurring problem solely from a user's non-technical and nearly-retarded description of the problem is difficult even when you have full access to their desktop to try and troubleshoot it. It's more difficult for them since they are trying to diagnose a problem that also has an environmental and humidity aspect to it along with french fries and burger wrappers sitting on the floor all covered with spilled sticky sweet soft-drink gunk.
Think With Your Wallet Not Your Ass
I bet Toyota is in the same boat here. I'm sure that if they did figure out this problem there would be no conspiracy to cover it up, they would just tell CTS "Hey your accelerator pedal part is faulty, here's the cause, fix it for free, and make sure all the new cars ship with it from now on!" They would order a few thousand extras for us to replace the existing ones where technicians notice problems during maintenance or where people complain. It would be a passive dealer recall that would be quiet and would cost the car company almost nothing since they would get CTS to cover the replacements because of their faulty part.
Moronic Panic
People who think like you about conspiracy theories just fan the flames of this little problem that should have not ballooned up as it did in the last few weeks. This is not a huge safety problem with the car if you can still drive it to safety when it happens if it ever does in your life.
This is a worthless story trying to bash electronics for a mechanical failure, and even the story admits that the electronics are not the problem in this specific case. What a load of hogwash. The article doesn't even mention or link to the real source of the problem and it fails to provide additional sources of information for people who might be affected. Someone's got to kick timothy in the ass for getting this dribble posted on the front page. At least post a story about a real electronics's failure causing serious problems such as the O2 sensor issue that the poster above mentioned, now that's a scary situation.
Our New Car
I just bought a 2010 Toyota Camry LE 2.5L I4 6-speed Automatic with EX (Upgraded Radio) and QA (Aluminum Wheels) as a first car for my wife and I as we have just moved across the country to a new city. This was the choice after a lot of researching and test driving of other vehicles and then eliminating them based on real cost of ownership, fuel efficiency, components used, safety ratings, the quality of built, the comfort of the ride, and the headaches or having to deal with the specific sales people (Honda, I'm looking at you!).
Just to make it clear that I'm not a Toyota fan boy and I am not a car person at all since don't find cars "sexy" and I was perfectly happy with my old 1994 Chrysler. This new car is not the perfect vehicle for us, it was just the best in the class for the price. There are some deficiencies in the car, such as the trip computer not showing you fuel efficiency ratings, the quality of the construction in the plastic covering under the engine, cheap plywood backing covering the spare tire in the trunk, and louder than normal wind noise coming from the front roof support posts and root during 80 mpg highway driving speeds, a cup holder divider that comes out anytime you take a cup out of it, and probably a bunch of other issues that we'll find out after more than 4-weeks of owning it.
This recall does not really trouble us since it is mentioned that the issue is rare, it only happens in cars sued for a while already, there is a environmental and humidity aspect to the problem with regards to condensation, and the cause is a gradual wearing down of a bushing that causes additional friction preventing the accelerator pedal from returning back to the home position that happens overtime and is noticeable with a pedal that starts becoming slow to return.
Our car was just manufactured in 2009-11 in Kentucky and I'll be checking the information below today on the weekend to see if our pedal is in the recall or not, most likely it it because it most likely has the CTS manufactured part. I'll call the dealer and arrange for a replacement in a few weeks while after they get a handle on all the people that are coming to them now. No rush on this. I've also instructed my wife on how to resolve this problem if it does occur to her when she's driving by hitting the breaks and shifting into neutral gear, then turning the ignition off when she's safely off the road.
The condition is rare and generally does not occur suddenly. It seems to occur when the pedal mechanism becomes worn and, in certain conditions, the accelerator pedal may become harder to depress, slower to return or, in the worst case, stuck in a partially depressed position.
3. What is the actual issue affecting accelerator pedals?
In rare instances, there is a possibility that the affected accelerator pedal may stick in a partially downward position or slowly return to the non-pressed position.
4. Is there actually a problem with the vehicle's compu
I got my CompTIA A+ certification working as a repair technician in Computer City (defunct now) in 1999. Their two tests were pretty good at determining if you had basic skills to be junior computer repair technician. Their test was valued by employers who wanted some kind of a basic measure of people who did not have a college diploma or a vocational certification from DeVry to determine if they should even bother interviewing you for basic computer support jobs in repair or help desk. This test is still a basic benchmark of computer repair ability.
Later as I started working as a junior Windows Desktop & Server Administrator at a small company and I liked what I learned in the study books from the previous exam and I started gaining skills in server administration so I bought study books to learn more and took their new Network+ and Server+ certifications. I liked that the study guides gave me a general but well rounded overview of network and server administration and it certainly taught me a few things about the field even though I was already administering two dozen Windows 95 desktops and four Windows NT 4.0 at the company along with the network and Internet connection. Later CompTIA released a beta of the Security+ exam and they invited me to take it and get the certification if I passed the exam after answering and commenting on each of the questions in it.
I am planning to go back to take the Linux+ certification sometime this year to round-out my CompTIA certification list since I've been doing a little more work with Linux with Asterisk PBX on CentOS based Elastix release. I know just enough Linux to get around and configure Asterisk but not nearly enough to do any type of even basic administration since I don't use the OS on a daily basis as most people. I looked at the study guide and it gives a nice rounded view of things to know about Linux to fill in some of the holes that I have in my knowledge and since I'll be reading the guide that I already bought a while back I might as well take the certification.
Since then I've put 10-years behind my belt and am now a senior Windows Server Engineer with three MCSE's and various vendor hardware certifications like the HP ASE and others. I will be working on my fourth MCSE this year and some more high end certifications like Cisco, VMWare, Symantec, etc.
CompTIA Became Almost Irrelevant
What a strategy for CompTIA, if this passed they would have become irrelevant in the certification field because they decided to change their minds and renege on their past promise of lifetime certification. If they did decide to expire all the lifetime certifications then I certainly wouldn't bother retaking any of them and I would let them expire since I've moved way beyond what those certifications offer. I bet that most of the folks in my position would just give up on CompTIA then and forget about them. The only folks that would have to worry are those in help desk, desktop support and computer repair who need their cert for their job since they haven't moved up from those jobs yet or their employers who would need to spend even more money to keep their techs certified so they can advertise as an A+ certified shop. Most of these folks who have plans on upward movement within their career already have or will be moving on to the Microsoft Certified Processional (MCP) certifications by now for Windows and Office and I think that they wouldn't bother retaking the CompTIA upgrade exams anyway.
Microsoft Tried to Expire MCSE Certifications Also
You forget that you take responsibility for what is on the form, even if it is pre-filled the moment you sign it. There's nothing stopping the government from sending you a blank or zero form and you'll just sign it and send it in thinking that you won't get prosecuted for the offshore tax haven account that you have. They'll still go after you no matter what.
Less Fraud, More Correct Taxes
There will be no increase of fraud due to this but I predict that most people will actually send their taxes in quicker and more of them will be more correct than the current numbers. We already have the IRS eFile system to let you do the web form part but they are all blank. It would be nice if they were pre-filled in with your information already. You'll just glance at it, take your Standard Deduction instead of Itemized Deduction for most people, type in your bank account or credit card number to pay or receive payment. You wouldn't have to look for or dig out those W2 or 1099 forms trying to figure out all the income.
Special Interests At Work
The simple point is that in the United States the government is run by "special interest" groups. The founding fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison warned us about the dire effects that special interest groups will have on the government if they are allowed to mass their money and influence the rule of the country. It's all in their speeches that we all should have been forced to read in elementary and high school history and civics courses. America's educational failure.
Now what do we have, a special interest part such as Intuit who is responsible for the Turbo Tax software and their electronic filing service trying to prevent the government from offering a pre-filled tax form service to the people. Just imagine how quickly Intuit would change its mind if the government approached them and told them that they would be the sole company responsible for getting people's taxes filed and I can guarantee that the first year you'll be presented with almost completed and pre-filled forms once your type in your Tax ID number.
Educational Gaming
We need a multi-genra massively multi-player video game where at first you play a First Person Shooter with friends as a team of The Founding Fathers and you first kick the British out of the colonies, then it switches to Real Time Strategy game where you maneuver the troops during the colonial war, and later it switches to a Civilization type diplomatic game where you negotiate terms of the new constitution and treaties with European countries. It'd be a nice way to have kids experience a modern way of what the history taught us. Sprinkle in a good load of historic facts in the game and you'll have kids arguing their view points because of the game.
Because H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is Mature! We have availability of fast and reliable open source x264 H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC encoder and the wide spread usage of Matroska (MKV) container files and MPEG 4 (MP4) container files. Even some set-top boxes support playback of video and audio from both containers now and more are announced for this year. There is also a demand now for HD content in both 720p an and 1080i/p formats H.264 is required to give reasonable file sizes versus XviD/DivX (MPEG-4 ASP).
Also Audio Video Interleave (AVI) container files are problematic and have limitations since they don't allow the inclusion of chapters or subtitles, are not compatible with newer audio encoding formats such as AAC and lossless Dolby Digital or DTS audio formats, and don't work really well with some of the newer video formats.
It is time to move on from this old container format and also move away from older DivX and XviD (MPEG-4 ASP) formats onto the newer H.264 / MPEG-4 (x264) video encoding formats.
I second everything that Tubmleweed mentioned since it's dead-on accurate. The real debate is between Verizon (great coverage) versus Sprint (great 3G speed), with AT&T and T-Mobile being runners up.
Be aware that if you plan to "tether" (connect your phone to your computer to let your computer have wireless Internet access over your phone) then Sprint will allow you to do that for free as long as you have an existing unlimited data plan ($15 for base plans or included in new plans), but Verizon will try to charge you per-megabyte costing you hundreds of dollars a month once they find out. Also be aware that Sprint also includes "Any Mobile-to-Mobile" add-on in many of their plans calling any of your friends on any mobile network completely free.
The iPhone is no longer a booster to AT&T's service since there are other alternative phones out or about to come out this year to rival the iPhone. T-Mobile is a company that has changed names three times already always hiding from a bad rep but trying to make money on we-cut-our-own-throat prices.
Some HTC phones that are are out already for Sprint and Verizon networks (both CDMA based) and are also GSM six-band phones so you have international usage, or additionally if they are Hard-SPL flashed, Secure Unlocked, and flashed with a custom WU World Unlocked Radio they can use US mobile carrier SIM cards letting you use AT&T, T-Mobile, or other carriers with regular or pre-paid SIM cards. You simply let the phone choose the network automatically by availability or manually by switching between CDMA and GSM only modes on the phone.
This CDMA & GSM access makes these phones almost universal in usage since they are carrier independent. On top of this you can flash them with tons of custom ROMs giving you access to all versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 and 6.5 already including tons of custom applications written for these operating systems. You can even build your own custom ROMs from "kitchens" customizing the settings, drivers, and software available on these phones. They sell for $325-350 on eBay and can be activated with either carrier without a contract. Be sure to only by the Sprint or Verizon (CDMA & GSM enabled) HTC Touch Pro 2 phones and not the AT&T or T-Mobile (GSM only) since you won't have access to both wireless network types and the GSM only phones have a slower processor.
Just to put a little background on this post, I've worked in New York City for most of the Fortune 100 finance companies, including Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Charles Schwab, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Credit Suisse as a consultant or employee in my past 10-years as a Windows Server Administrator. I have known people who worked for the other top finance firms that I just happened to never work at such as Citibank, Lehman Brothers, and others so I would like to say that I am a little qualified to tell you how to get a job at one of these companies since I've been able to do so.
I started my professional computer career with work in my high school to help them at the computer lab, and I mentioned this on my resume, then I had a little after-hours computer job as a junior computer guy at a technical telephone company. After I dropped out of high school in the beginning of my junior year I got my GED diploma and decided to go into the job market right away since I knew that computers are where my future lies.
Computer City, Dot.com Bomb
My first real job was doing computer repair at Computer City (now out of business) and then I moved up to desktop support and junior Windows server administration at a tiny dot.com company with only 5-servers. But in this time I had gotten my CompTIA A+ hardware certification, a number of minor printer and desktop computer certs from Hewlett-Packard, and I was studying for my MCSE 4.0 at the dot.com company. After months of studying and hands-on practice at work and at home I was able to complete it by passing each test, one at a time slowly studying all the material for that test including extra information from TechNet and MSDN to get a good feel or what problems show up and how they are resolved. I did not attend college or any type of formal education training program but instead relied on study guides and hands-on practice to get my skills and I have been successful at doing this, even up to my third MCSE and now going for the forth, MCSE 2008.
In the early days of my career I also started taking the rest of the CompTIA certifications such as Network+, Server+, and Security+ to round-out my knowledge in those fields because frankly I didn't know much about anything but I realized that the study guides were written for novices like myself and they gave me a good overview of things. Since then I've used certification study guides to learn new things because I find that the guides are so generally written that they are a great starting point for learning, and later on as you get experience you get more in-depth with more difficult books. So if you are one of those people that scoff at certifications as useless or just empty papers, realize that while the title and test are not all that useful the study guides are actually great sources of general knowledge material to get start on.
Goldman Sachs
After the dot.com company went bust I signed up with job web sites such as Monster.com (not so good anymore), JobSeekers.com, and I believe Dice.com (the most important one for IT workers). A recruiter found my resume online with a good history of computer jobs and most importantly with the MCSE 4.0 certification an A+ that was in demand at the time by all the large firms. That first A+ certification and MCSE certification got the recruiter to look at my resume, then they looked at my short but upwards moving career in IT and offered to set me up with an interview at the firms. The recruiter submitted my resume for a consulting position paying $45 per hour back in the early 2000's, that was twice the rate of my previous job. After three weeks of waiting Goldman Sachs scheduled a phone interview screening for me where they asked basic and intermediate technical Windows questions and I did well enough to move me to the next stage.
They then scheduled the first of three in person interviews where I met the senior members of the team, one at a time who basically grilled me with technical questions and scenarios. I
There was a not very popular mad for Quake 2 called Action Quake 2 that sucked me in back in the early days when mods started to gain popularity as alternatives to the plain vanilla game. The Urban Terrormod is basically an improved copy for Quake 3 with different weapons.
The idea is the same though, realistic weapon mechanics, including long reload times, very powerful bullet hits resulting in a lot of damage, hits require bandaging to avoid bleeding out and dying, bandaging requires you to stand still for many seconds unable to protect yourself or run away. Grenades are absolutely deadly with very large blast radiuses making them very powerful but they require time to prime and throw that can result in you getting shot and killed before you throw your grenade off. There are many, many one-shot kills due to snipers, well placed automatic gun fire at your head, grenade blasts clearing hallways on the front-line of the fight between bases.
The Capture The Flag type games turn into a grenade spam, sniper alley, and death-rush type of scenarios if both teams have competent players who can hold and defend a mid-point front-line bottleneck such as a hallway or two. Most maps have multiple routes to the enemy's base resulting in 2 or 3 front-line bottleneck hallways, with shotgunners camping waiting for people to run through, noobs grenade spamming the hallway, and snipers sitting far back picking off any folks showing their heads.
The more interesting game is the Last Man Standing with teams where each team goes against the other and there are no respawns but usually in those games the team with better squad work and team work will take out the uncoordinated noobs running around looking for a fight. Ambush scenarios are very common with multiple people camping a well known walk-by spot to catch a few folks from the other team off-guard. Camping is usually the default tactic so you end up walking along walls and checking all corners before walking through them.
These two mods kept my interest a lot longer than the run-and-gun type games since there was more skill required to survive and larger penalties for failure when you did get shot. Marksmanship became important since even a lowly shotgun or sub-machinegun was a great weapon and you didn't require ultra power rocket launchers or plasma guns. Pistol battles and knife attacks were also quite common since the reload time penalty was so high that it was faster to draw your sidearm and try to finish off a wounded guy in a firefight than it was to reload your primary gun. You could hear this happening all over the levels with trrrat, trraat, trraat machinegun fire then a pause, with pop, pop, pop pistol fire.
Very interesting and engaging mods. A lot of good memories and times.
I have a Series 1 DirecTiVo and it's gathering dust in a box ever since I tried to sell it off on eBay early this year and had TiVo shutdown two of my eBay auctions on me, even after I complied and tried to sell it without the access card. Everything in the TiVo is legit and the access card is original. The only upgrades that I made to the box was to install a network card in it so that I could get guide data downloads without a phone line that I no longer have in the house. I canceled my DirecTV with TiVo service last year because of this and also because I got tired of TV.
eBay and their Vero system is full of crap about checking authenticity. They complained about selling the box with their Intelectual Property and sent me a nasty e-mail about the access card. So I re-listed it again without the access card and still got shutdown with a warning that a third violation will close my eBay account. My next step was going to be to file a federal lawsuit against eBay and TiVo for preventing me from re-selling my own bought property under the right of first sale but I got busy around the house and never filled out the paperwork.
Forget the TiVo, forget eBay Vero, they suck.
Buy yourself a $70 USD Intel Atom 330 motherboard with Dual-Core 1.6 GHz x86 compatible processors and 1Gbig NIC with 2-SATA, 1-PATA, and 1-DDR2 DRAM slot and go crazy with it. I did just the thing with Elastix PBX. The cost savings in power and frustration will pay for any money you save with that obsolete 8-year TiVo!
You're absolutely right about how badly implemented the random client connection protocol is for BitTorrent clients. There is a project and a plug-in called Ono for Vuze (formely Azureus) BitTorrent clients. I used it before to resolve this problem but I found that the non-stop creation of many ping.exe threads to analyze latency was causing some slow-downs on my own system and additional upstream congestion on my upstream limited broadband pipe.
I am still surprised that a better protocol for proximity favored peer connections wasn't developed for BitTorrent and other P2P systems to maximize performance by connecting to peers on the same or close-by networks. I have a feeling that with the huge increases in demand for content there will be a need for optimized connection protocols once we start demanding more than the capacity that we have.
Netmask Flaws
One solution that is simple to implement is the one that you mentioned for netmask calculations but I fear that this is solution won't work reliability since the way that network ranges are created and managed internally by large broadband ISPs is unpredictable and neighboring ranges are owned by different ISPs or are in other countries. Plus netmask information doesn't tell you anything about closest neighbors to connect to once you exhaust the connections in your own netmask.
Routing Table Solution
I think that the best solution would be one based on information in the routing protocols that the routers have but since this information is not available to the individual clients the applications have no way of looking at the overall routing structure to determine exactly who the closest and best neighbors. are based on latency, bandwidth, cost, and hop count information.
If there was a way for the application to query the router for a partial list of the routing table (e.g. 5 or 10-hops) and then prioritize the peer addresses from the tracker according to the routing table based an algorithm that takes bandwidth up-and-down, latency, cost, and hop count into account we would have an optimal solution to the order of connections for peers.
Latency and Hop Count Not Enough
The problem is that the routers won't share the routing table information with the clients. The solution becomes the one like Ono plug-in in that the client has to ping and/or trace route to the peer addresses to determine optimal choices based only on latency and hop count without knowing anything about bi-directional bandwidth availability or cost associated. Without the bandwidth info the whole thing falls apart because latency isn't enough to determine maximum throughput and there is no practical way of doing a bandwidth check bi-directionally in a meaningful way between peers without taking up a lot of time and bandwidth in the process itself.
Upstream Throttling (Not Choking)
Hopefully, this new uTP protocol will at least give us a benefit and improvement on the upstream bandwidth side by auto-throttling the upstream to prevent choking the connection.
If only the clients could peek at the routing tables of our routers...
Mandatory reference below. Read it and get informed about SSD's, performance, and issues with controllers and firmware problems. Long story short, Intel is on top of the market, OCZ Vertex is a very close contender using Indilinx controllers. Samsung, JMicron based drives suck very much.
Also, be aware of shrinking flash cell sizes, 50nm was original flash chips, now 34nm in Intel's G2 line of MLC SSDs is popular. Multi-Level Cells store 2 or more bits per cell, decreasing price at the cost of performance and reliability of read back. Also future 3 or more bit MLC drives will offer even lower cost but also a lower reliability and less write cycles. There was a great article about this problem a while back on Slashdot so just search for it.
I had to build such a full-fledged system but one that had to be dependable, reliable, small, quiet, unobtrusive, long lasting, cool running, low-power, well performing, be built of standard parts, and be able to accept one PCI or PCIe expansion card for the telephone TDM interface for incoming FXO lines.
I'm in the process of setting up a phone system PBX with up to 4-incoming telephone lines and a phone menu system to provide basic business information (e.g. hours, address, directions, information, etc.) for a friend's business and also offer the standard features such as voice mail, faxing, internal analog extensions, VoIP capability for future expansion, customization, etc. built on Linux using Elastix that is based on Asterisk PBX.
I checked out my favorite hardware review site AnandTech and read a number of articles about the new Mini-ITX form factor motherboards that came out to get an introduction to the form factor and expectations.
I read the articles with a lot of interest but when I looked at the prices of these Ion based motherboard with well performing graphics chips I found that I wasn't interested in paying so much for a feature that would not be used very much in a server type PBX system. Also some of these systems didn't have any PCI expansion slots so they were no good for my PBX type project.
Processor - Intel Atom 330
So I turned to look at other Mini-ITX based offerings and came across the good 'ol Intel Atom motherboards. I found the Intel Atom 230, 270 based boards to be a little low performing in many of the benchmark results that I saw but that the dual core Intel Atom 330 chip was doing quite well for only a few dollars more and very little increase in power. I looked at the offerings at my favorite retailer, Newegg and saw a nice list of choices.
I started my process of filtering so I ignored low powered systems that came with VIA C7 chips and the Intel Atom 230 chips. I came up with these three choices.
Out of these choices, I wasn't too thrilled with a Foxconn built motherboard because I had no experience with this company for any hardware. I wasn't so sure that the extra money spent on the Asus motherboard is really going to offer anything at all, so the choice went down to Intel because I wanted reliability for a system that was being built for someone else. I read a few good review of the Intel motherboard below.
To me Windows 7 is a lot like a refreshed version of Windows XP with newer graphics, a few better interoperability features (Windows Key + Left, Right, Up, Down), and new hardware support.
I've used Windows 2000 Professional as my personal OS, skipping Windows XP until they finally fixed all the issues with that OS somewhere around SP2 time line then I switched. I did the same thing with this new OS also, I skipped on Windows Vista, until SP3 (aka Windows 7) came out and have been using it since the Beta, then Release Candidate, and soon Release To Manufacturing release that I'll be installing this weekend.
My experience at each OS switch has been roughly the same, newer and more graphical interface, some new features, and hardware support for newer devices. It's been the same release pattern with Microsoft for quite a few OS releases now. There is always a release that gets skipped because it isn't deemed worthy of usage by the general population. (Do you remember MS-DOS 4.11 -> 5.0 -> (skip 6.0) -> 6.22 release cycle?, what about Microsoft Windows 2 -> 3.0 -> (skip 3.1) -> 3.11 Windows for Workgroups or Windows 95 -> Windows 98 OSR2 -> (skip Windows ME) -> Windows 2000 Pro)
Now if someone at Microsoft could see their own history they would be wiser in the future to build a whole new OS, shelve it for internal usage only, get disgusted and fix the problems, then release the new updated version to the public? It would save us the problems of being public beta testers.
Seeing as people have already mentioned Power Supply Unit as a likely cause of flaky computer problems and random reboots I want to expand on why this is the case and how to diagnose these problems on the cheap. Since some PSU problems are quick and easy to diagnose by checking for dead, low, or high +3.3, +5, or +12 Volt rails others are more problematic such as transient voltage drops that occur randomly or under load or due to thermal overload. These PSU problems usually happens due to old and aged capacitors that have weakened, leaked, have blown, or just plain failed.
If you have a power supply that is easy to open you can do a quick cursory check by opening it and looking for any bulged, blown, or discolored tops on capacitors (those tall cylinders). Be careful not to touch any of the power leads inside the power supply since the capacitors hold charges even when disconnected from power and some of the discharges might be dangerous or deadly.
Digital MultiMeter Voltage Readings and Load Generation Programs
First, you'll need a Digital MultiMeter (DMM) that gives you a simple DC Voltage output and then connect the black write to the ground and the red write to the "hot" red or yellow wires on the Molex connectors to test for voltage. Then you should get yourself a load generating application, such as Prime95 for Processor and Memory loading and a Graphics Card loading application like 3DMark benchmark. Leave your DMM leads inside the molex power connectors for one of the voltage rails (+5 or +12) and start the application. Watch the DMM for any voltage drops or droops and let the application run for a few minutes, 5-10 should be enough, to generate enough load over time to create build up a thermal load on the PSU and the computer subsystems you are testing. If your voltage drops more than 5% of the original you should suspect a problem with the voltage regulation for that rail under load. Make sure to test the other rail also, so if you tested +5 then do the +12 rail to check.
My Own Case of Failing Power Supply
I had to use this procedures to diagnose failing and faulty power supplies in many computers, including my very own system that had a 4-year power supply that suddenly started drooping in voltage on the +5 rail going down from +5.05 to +4.78 under load causing my hard drives to drop out of my RAID arrays. You can read my own issues with PSU problems in the thread below, including detailed diagnostic steps I took and pictures of my issues.
This story of GPS disappearing within 1-hour of leaving it in a car is something that I hear very often from many people who I have personally known to have their cars broken into because of this. Just two weeks ago a friend of mine took his GPS with him but left the sticky window mount in the car and his car was broken into and searched for the GPS but he had it with him.
Stolen Item = Revenue Restart
I'm surprised that Amazon doesn't just disassociate the user's account from the device until he buys a new one, and leave the lost or stolen device as available for new activation by the new person who finds it or steals it. Knowing Amazon's business ethics it would be profitable for them to active these missing devices to new users to restart the revenue stream from these users purchasing new books with their new accounts. As long as they don't tell anyone and nobody gets access to their information they should be good to go with this plan. Until someone rats them out for activating stolen devices, but who's going to prosecute them or fine them?
Misunderstanding Police - They're NOT Here To Help You
It seems that you are one of the many people here who misunderstand the purpose of Police and believe that they are an agency to aid individuals-in-need like yourself. The Police are not here to help individuals they are here to uphold the law for the common good of society as a whole. They deal with crime and apply the law en-mass to prevent the communities that they are based in from falling into chaos. It only appears that they deal with individual cases to the people involved and those who fail to see the big picture of how the Police apply their efforts to trim certain crime outbreaks down to manageable levels before focusing on other areas.
Even the US Supreme Court ruled that they police do not have to protect you as an individual from certain and imminent deadly harm because that is up to their discretion. So if the Police don't have to save your life why would they care about saving your property?
Take a good look at a Police officer tomorrow when you see one and try to realize that his job is to protect the community and society and that he has full discretion backed by the highest court in the land to watch you get killed or your property taken without having the obligation to help you in any way shape or form. When you come to this realization that not even the Police are here to help you, you will start learning and appreciating personal independence and you will start taking better care for your personal safety, freedom, and your property. The idea of taking responsibility for your own actions and more importantly, the ability to imagine future outcomes of your actions will start coming to you when you break out of the fog thinking that there will be help available anytime you need it. Learn to help yourself first.
My Lost Full GPS Enabled Cell Phone Experience
My wife left her Sprint HTC Mogul (PPC-6800) that has a full GPS enabled receiver in a bathroom at Universal Studios Florida. Within 30-minutes we contacted park authorities who came to the bathroom to investigate only to find that the purse and phone were missing. The office on duty said that the most common outcome is that the cash money is taken out of the purses or wallets and they are discarded into the trash cans to hide the evidence. They contacted the cleaning crew right away by radio but were told that the garbage was already taken out and cleared out to the back. My wife's phone was turned on in the purse so it was active. Calling it gave the standard 4-rings then voice mail response confirming that it was still operational and powered on, otherwise it would be 1
This really seems like a very unlikely event to happen to trigger the problem on these drives for most users since from my experience personally and professionally I have yet to see anyone actually know about BIOS passwords, much less about setting a password on the drive using the ATA secure drive password feature. I am surprised that this was even caught by anyone unless it was a complete fluke or there actually are people or companies using this type of a feature for security. (I don't doubt it but haven't seen it.)
I personally own the first generation Intel X25-M 80GB MLC SSD and I have written about it extensively here on this forum. I heard rumors that the new TRIM feature support will only made available to this second generation release of these drives but I'm unsure if that is really true. I'm on the fence right now whether I should sell my G1 drive and upgrade to the G2 because of this feature and also for a little more performance because I am so happy with the performance of this drive and also the current 8820 firmware that solved the fragmentation and slowdown issues.
If you are one of those folks who is still sitting around not knowing what to do when all of this Solid State Disk news is coming out all over then you are missing the biggest paradigm shift to computing performance since the transfer from floppy disks to hard drives.
With the upcoming re-release of this newly affordable drive around 2009-08-28 from Intel X25-M G2 80GB MLC SSD at ~$230 USD from Newegg or ZipZoomFly you should definitely dig down deep and save a little money to buy one of these drives and experience the biggest performance and responsiveness improvement to your computer that you could imagine.
If you need a primer on the SSD revolution check out my previous post regarding the articles to read.
I had a very bad experience with my old nVidia nForce4 Chipset motherboard RAID chip while using it and just recently found that none of the old or new drivers work correctly when the Intel X25-M 80GB SSD is plugged into the motherboard causing my Windows OS to freeze during boot-up when the driver is initialized or the RAID capability just doesn't work at all. I even wrote up an entire account of this problem in a few threads, one on nVidia's forum and another on HardOCP Forum to warn users about trying to use Intel SSDs with their older nForce4 hardware that I linked to below.
The Silicon Image 3114 PCI to SATA 1 controller chip has serious issues also that caused it to drop my RAID-5 and destroy the 2 TB array. It has issues with PCI bus contention and also is incompatible with the Creative Labs X-Fi PCI sound card on the same bus causing audio stuttering and pops. A few people mentioned that the issue might be IRQ sharing but I tried the sound card in all different PCI slots with different IRQs and the problem was still there. Jet another bad experience with off-brand storage chips.
My current Asus P6T motherboard for Intel Core i7 with the JMicron JMB363 PCIe to SATA chip and JMicron JMB322 SATA 1 to 2 Port Multiplier chip are also having issues with the internal SATA ports where one of them is port-multiplied and if a hard drive and an LG Blu-Ray optical drive is connected at the same time to the internal ports the optical drive will randomly disappear and re-appear in the operating system.
So Marvell is not the one and only manufacturer of storage interconnect chips to have these problems. My experience is that pretty much all of them have issues to varying degrees driving users mad when they realize after purchasing the motherboard and trying to use these chips.
Since this phone uses the real GPSOne chip with aGPS (assisted GPS) the GPS lock-on time is fantastically fast usually around 1-5 or sometimes 10 seconds for a lock anywhere outside or inside of residential buildings such as my apartment. In commercial buildings such as stores or shopping centers the lock-on time is slower since there is no easy access to a line-of-sight for the sky but the GPS will still work most of the time and get a lock. The GPS also works flawlessly a fast in forested areas such as when we went camping last week. The GPS also gets a lock but after 30-seconds or more inside Manhattan where the sky is obscured and there are many tall buildings that cause the GPS signals to be blocked or to bounce around causing multi-path problems.
GPS Chip Sleep Mode and TomTom Navigator Annoyance
I have had only a few occasions where the GPS does not get a lock and that is usually caused by the GPS chip that goes to sleep mode after turning the phone off while TomTom Navigator is still running causing the GPS chip not to wake up after powering on and making TomTom lose the location permanently. This situation cannot be corrected by restarting the application so a soft reset is required to power-cycle the phone to get the GPS chip re-initialized from the boot to get it to work. I've had this happen a few times to me so I learned to not turn the phone off while TomTom Navigator is still running but to exit the application without clearing my navigation data and then to turn the phone off, such as when I'm leaving the car on a pit-stop while driving somewhere. After I get back in the car I re-mount my phone in the holder, turn it on, start up TomTom Navigator again and the application remembers my last navigation data and destination so it does not have to recalculate the whole route but just to update itself again in a second and get the GPS lock in a second or two. That's about the biggest annoyance that I had to deal with with GPS and this phone but I've learned to work around the problem and it never happens anymore for many months now so I don't have to soft reset anymore.
The vast majority of time the GPS in my phone locks on nearly automatically or within a short and reasonable period of time and I can depend on it to just work and get me where I am going.
I've had the HTC Titan (Sprint Mogul PPC-6800) phone since it came out and it has a real GPSOne chip inside for aGPS satelite reception and not just cell tower ID triangulation for fake GPS. Before that I had the HTC Apache (Sprint PCC-6700) that required a separate GPS Receiver connected by Bluetooth and that also worked great since I only had to turn on the receiver when navigating.
I've been using TomTom Navigator version 6 and now 7 installed on this phone running Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0, 6.1, and soon 6.5. I've used my phone to navigate here in the US, Canada, and also in Europe without any problems at all, except for having to copying the 500MB maps to my storage card before I go, since I only had a 1 GB storage card. If I had a large capacity SDHC storage card then I could keep all the maps on it for the entire world.
PPCKitchen BuildOS and Radio ROM Firmware
I've been taking advantage of the phone customization software such as PPCKitchen BuildOS software for creating and loading customized and updated versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system builds on to my phone that allowed me to go from 6.0, to 6.1, and now to 6.5. I've been updating the Radio ROM firmware on my phone with the instructions from XDA Developer Wiki page for HTC Titan to the latest releases to enable GPS functionality on this phone since the original release of the phone did not have the Radio ROM firmware to allow interfacing with the GPS chip until Sprint released it a year after the phone became available.
Little Inconveniences
Since Sprint uses the US only CDMA network cell phone standard I couldn't use my phone in Europe to make calls but I still retained the full GPS functionality. On top of this we use Google Maps software loaded on these phones for locating stores and saving them as contacts so we can then use TomTom to navigate to those contacts. Everything works great except when Google Maps decides to be lazy and not save the zip-code in the address in the contact or when the address line in the contact includes additional numbers such as apartment or suite then TomTom gets confused thinking those are street numbers since they match European address standards such as "16 Main Street Suite 2" to "16/2 Main Street". We then have to manually edit the contact to remove the apartment or suite number and add the zip code, it is a pain and we are waiting for TomTom to fix their software since this bug existed sine version 6 and now with 7.450.
Convenience Through Convergence
My wife also uses the same exact phone since we share the same phone plan and company and she loves the ability to be able to take the car and go anywhere she wants with her friends without worry
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that is absolutely right. Posting on the Internet is like screaming into the wind but it has more of a chance of being heard than a single silent letter to the company.
This is probably the best way to stop game activations and the whole defective by design ideology behind DRM. I'm surprised that activations aren't attacked by the consumers on the grounds of them buying a product for which every time they need permission to use it by the company selling it. The whole "you're not purchasing" you're "licensing" software so you lose your consumer rights is another piece of bunk that needs to be attacked and consumer rights need to be handled just the same as physical products. This "activations" thing sounds like something that current and past laws should be able to handle to remove the leash from around your neck with you decide to buy a game for your kids.
I'm wondering if there isn't some past case law on the books somewhere of a buyer being obstructed by the seller in the usage of the product and having a court case decide that the buyer has the right to do as he wishes with the product that he made, even reselling it, but short of copying it and selling it again. Sounds like something out there should have already decided this case and just needs to be brought back into the light of day and used again.
Send a letter? What is this, the 1970's? Get real, nobody is going to read your letter or care what it says and it will be junked as soon as it is opened. They are not going to rush your letter to the CEO personally letting him know that you are unsatisfied. The upper management won't care about some complaining doofus still writing letters, griping about something or other. You're targeting the wrong people with your letters and there is not enough distribution to them.
Instead write a Blog entry or a Forum post and get vocal about the reason why you won't buy the game. Have some people reply to what you wrote and start up an angry thread. Target the people who care about the issue, because obviously the game company doesn't otherwise it wouldn't be implemented, and try to reach a wider audience regarding your grievance. The more people who hear about the problem the more they know and the less likely they will be to spend money on some game where everyone is complaining about.
Would you buy a product that had terrible reviews online and by word of mouth because everyone and their aunt knew it sucked and they found out about the suckyness beforehand?
I have noticed that while web browsing and even when using the currently latest Mozilla Firefox 3.5.7 or 3.6 with Ad-Block Plus and PDF Download add-ons installed I still would get hit with a web page that would automatically push a Adobe Reader PDF file to me and I would have it open automatically. That PDF would be just a page full of random words but when inspected in Adobe Acrobat in depth when you go into the Advanced \ Document Processing \ Edit All JavaScript... menu you immediately see a script inside the PDF that is launched upon opening that PDF. When I analyzed the script I saw calls strange calls to the execution functions and methods along with calls to write out encoded data from an array holding hexadecimal values to files.
With the known exploits in Adobe Reader 9.0 versions and earlier it was easy for me to see why this product was used as a popular attack vector in the last few months for viruses to spread on the Internet.
Luckily, I use my computer as an ordinary user and use Run As with User Account Control requesting a password for any administrative work and program installation I avoided being infected with these Trojan horse PDFs.
Some of you might recommend using the Mozilla No Script add-in to block all scripts but the reality is that there is so much JavaScript code out there on the web that turning scripting off makes many web sites unusable since they've all be designed with this reliance on scripting for navigation.
I was working at a major investment bank around the year 2000 or 2001 and my manager and I interviewed candidates from your school, Stevens Institute in Hoboken, for a summer internship that year. We came back with three male interns for a Windows Server Administration department who I worked with personally. Their internship was pretty good for us but kind of boring for the kids as we'd see them spend more time on the Internet browsing than learning how to do real work, then again I don't blame these kids since corporate server work is pretty dull from their perspective. We took the interns along with us on all the interesting projects and support cases and even gave them long term design and coding projects to do during their term. We got some help out of their internship and they got a taste of what it is like to work in a major corporation over a fairly easy summer.
First Movie As a Kid
I saw the movie first as a kid and didn't understand it except for the basic plot of sand, worms, spice, good guys vs bad buys, emperor, Bene Gesserit, the Guild, a lot of scheming, but loved the dark visuals and the gritty feel of the movie. I had to watch it again once or twice to try and understand it more but still couldn't grasp the details of the whole story, there was just too much missing from the movie.
Then The Whole Book Series
Then a few years later I decided to read the whole series from front to back and the movie really helped me wrap my head around the look of the Dune universe and how things should look. However the picture that the series drew in my mind was a bit different than what the movie portrayed and some of the style and look from the movie did not fit. I felt like the book series starts centered around Paul's life, then the series widens up to his sister and family, then broadens the horizons towards the Jihad and the expanse of the known universe, until the God Emperor comes and overshadows all, and then starts to collapses again back towards Duncan's experience. The movie helped me put some faces to the characters for the first few books and get a start on the story but detail in the books quickly built up that the movie just became overshadowed.
I saw the movie a once or twice after finishing the series and I just wasn't so thrilled by it anymore as I was before. The dreamlike hold of the movie was lost on me since I found the background story between the shifts of power in the universe in the book series a lot more interesting than the personal adventures of Paul and his friends.
Old Movie, PC Game, and Miniseries
I liked the books very much and I like the original movie because the look and feel were almost right and were great on their own. The movie was a bit different than the story but it was faithful to idea in the books. I also played the original Dune game on the PC so I got to play through the story of the movie and liked that very much, even though even the game was a bit off the movie. I also loved the original Dune 2 real time strategy game since it was the first tank warfare game before Command & Conquer and World of Warcraft showed up on the scene.
I did not like the SciFi Dune miniseries at all since I felt that even with the better acting I could not associate the actors and the characters they played with the people in the books. They all just felt very wrong and no matter how much prettier and more colorful the miniseries was it made me feel that the miniseries looked more like a theatrical production than a TV series.
New Movie
As for new Dune movie with 3D worms, I say good luck to them and let's see what'll happen with that. I won't hold my breath though since I don't believe that these are the times in which a good rendition of the Dune series can be made. There's just too much Wow! factor required in today's movies and even though I liked Avatar 3D and saw it twice, I can't say much for the predictable story. I predict that this Dune movie will be similar, great visuals and an entertaining movie but just a snip of the real story without much depth.
I say good luck to them and show us something entertaining!
Re:Floor mat, really? (Score:5, Interesting)
by SteveWoz (152247) writes: Alter Relationship on 2009-11-04 0:12 (#29973870)
My old 1994 Chrysler New Yorker had a similar problem with cruise control but it wasn't as acute as was Steve describes. If I was going up any small hill on a highway and I hit the cruise control speed up button once, twice, three times the car would try to accelerate a little and then rev up like mad and try to speed up by almost +10 miles per hour until it was going much faster than I intended, making me hold the coast button for a while unit it slows down or by turning off cruise control all together with the Off button or by a light tap on the breaks.
Oh and I'm not trying to play down the problem with Toyota's accelerator pedal recall or now this cruise control issue, there is a real issue there that needs to be addressed and it appears like there is some cover-up and a lack of accountability and openness about these problems from Toyota's reactions.
So that's the reason why Toyota cars are flying off the bridges every morning with people screaming on their cell phones while monkeys come flying out of their butts smelling like oatmeal and coffee?
Less Dangerous Than A Blown Tire
It's a rarely occurring problem with a faulty part in the accelerator pedal manifold that happens to some cars rarely and only after a long time in usage. If the pedal gets stuck, you hit the breaks and set the transmission to neutral gear, or click the ignition off to ACC, while it coast it to a safe location. The car is not going to explode or wheels are not going to fall off because of this problem, you will merely have to bring the car to a slow and safe stop.
This problem is by far less dangerous than a blown tire at highway speeds that takes you be surprise, jerks you car to one side, and makes it nearly uncontrollable while you wrestle with the steering wheel to get the car over to a safe spot without slamming you into the mid-barrier, another car, or pulling you off the road into a ditch, to hopefully change out the tire and be on your way. A stuck accelerator pedal gives you a nice straight ride where the car is still in control, and you just have to slow it down.
Conspiracy Explanation = Difficult Diagnosis
Toyota has been experiencing this problem for a while and it's been happening here and there and because it is a rare occurrence it has most likely been difficult to figure out. Hell, from computer diagnosis experience you should know that trying to figure out a rarely reoccurring problem solely from a user's non-technical and nearly-retarded description of the problem is difficult even when you have full access to their desktop to try and troubleshoot it. It's more difficult for them since they are trying to diagnose a problem that also has an environmental and humidity aspect to it along with french fries and burger wrappers sitting on the floor all covered with spilled sticky sweet soft-drink gunk.
Think With Your Wallet Not Your Ass
I bet Toyota is in the same boat here. I'm sure that if they did figure out this problem there would be no conspiracy to cover it up, they would just tell CTS "Hey your accelerator pedal part is faulty, here's the cause, fix it for free, and make sure all the new cars ship with it from now on!" They would order a few thousand extras for us to replace the existing ones where technicians notice problems during maintenance or where people complain. It would be a passive dealer recall that would be quiet and would cost the car company almost nothing since they would get CTS to cover the replacements because of their faulty part.
Moronic Panic
People who think like you about conspiracy theories just fan the flames of this little problem that should have not ballooned up as it did in the last few weeks. This is not a huge safety problem with the car if you can still drive it to safety when it happens if it ever does in your life.
BitZtream = Troll!
This is a worthless story trying to bash electronics for a mechanical failure, and even the story admits that the electronics are not the problem in this specific case. What a load of hogwash. The article doesn't even mention or link to the real source of the problem and it fails to provide additional sources of information for people who might be affected. Someone's got to kick timothy in the ass for getting this dribble posted on the front page. At least post a story about a real electronics's failure causing serious problems such as the O2 sensor issue that the poster above mentioned, now that's a scary situation.
Our New Car
I just bought a 2010 Toyota Camry LE 2.5L I4 6-speed Automatic with EX (Upgraded Radio) and QA (Aluminum Wheels) as a first car for my wife and I as we have just moved across the country to a new city. This was the choice after a lot of researching and test driving of other vehicles and then eliminating them based on real cost of ownership, fuel efficiency, components used, safety ratings, the quality of built, the comfort of the ride, and the headaches or having to deal with the specific sales people (Honda, I'm looking at you!).
Just to make it clear that I'm not a Toyota fan boy and I am not a car person at all since don't find cars "sexy" and I was perfectly happy with my old 1994 Chrysler. This new car is not the perfect vehicle for us, it was just the best in the class for the price. There are some deficiencies in the car, such as the trip computer not showing you fuel efficiency ratings, the quality of the construction in the plastic covering under the engine, cheap plywood backing covering the spare tire in the trunk, and louder than normal wind noise coming from the front roof support posts and root during 80 mpg highway driving speeds, a cup holder divider that comes out anytime you take a cup out of it, and probably a bunch of other issues that we'll find out after more than 4-weeks of owning it.
This recall does not really trouble us since it is mentioned that the issue is rare, it only happens in cars sued for a while already, there is a environmental and humidity aspect to the problem with regards to condensation, and the cause is a gradual wearing down of a bushing that causes additional friction preventing the accelerator pedal from returning back to the home position that happens overtime and is noticeable with a pedal that starts becoming slow to return.
Our car was just manufactured in 2009-11 in Kentucky and I'll be checking the information below today on the weekend to see if our pedal is in the recall or not, most likely it it because it most likely has the CTS manufactured part. I'll call the dealer and arrange for a replacement in a few weeks while after they get a handle on all the people that are coming to them now. No rush on this. I've also instructed my wife on how to resolve this problem if it does occur to her when she's driving by hitting the breaks and shifting into neutral gear, then turning the ignition off when she's safely off the road.
Below is some real information about this recall.
Toyota.com - Latest News About Toyota's Safety Recall Campaign
My CompTIA Certification Story
I got my CompTIA A+ certification working as a repair technician in Computer City (defunct now) in 1999. Their two tests were pretty good at determining if you had basic skills to be junior computer repair technician. Their test was valued by employers who wanted some kind of a basic measure of people who did not have a college diploma or a vocational certification from DeVry to determine if they should even bother interviewing you for basic computer support jobs in repair or help desk. This test is still a basic benchmark of computer repair ability.
Later as I started working as a junior Windows Desktop & Server Administrator at a small company and I liked what I learned in the study books from the previous exam and I started gaining skills in server administration so I bought study books to learn more and took their new Network+ and Server+ certifications. I liked that the study guides gave me a general but well rounded overview of network and server administration and it certainly taught me a few things about the field even though I was already administering two dozen Windows 95 desktops and four Windows NT 4.0 at the company along with the network and Internet connection. Later CompTIA released a beta of the Security+ exam and they invited me to take it and get the certification if I passed the exam after answering and commenting on each of the questions in it.
I am planning to go back to take the Linux+ certification sometime this year to round-out my CompTIA certification list since I've been doing a little more work with Linux with Asterisk PBX on CentOS based Elastix release. I know just enough Linux to get around and configure Asterisk but not nearly enough to do any type of even basic administration since I don't use the OS on a daily basis as most people. I looked at the study guide and it gives a nice rounded view of things to know about Linux to fill in some of the holes that I have in my knowledge and since I'll be reading the guide that I already bought a while back I might as well take the certification.
Since then I've put 10-years behind my belt and am now a senior Windows Server Engineer with three MCSE's and various vendor hardware certifications like the HP ASE and others. I will be working on my fourth MCSE this year and some more high end certifications like Cisco, VMWare, Symantec, etc.
CompTIA Became Almost Irrelevant
What a strategy for CompTIA, if this passed they would have become irrelevant in the certification field because they decided to change their minds and renege on their past promise of lifetime certification. If they did decide to expire all the lifetime certifications then I certainly wouldn't bother retaking any of them and I would let them expire since I've moved way beyond what those certifications offer. I bet that most of the folks in my position would just give up on CompTIA then and forget about them. The only folks that would have to worry are those in help desk, desktop support and computer repair who need their cert for their job since they haven't moved up from those jobs yet or their employers who would need to spend even more money to keep their techs certified so they can advertise as an A+ certified shop. Most of these folks who have plans on upward movement within their career already have or will be moving on to the Microsoft Certified Processional (MCP) certifications by now for Windows and Office and I think that they wouldn't bother retaking the CompTIA upgrade exams anyway.
Microsoft Tried to Expire MCSE Certifications Also
You forget that you take responsibility for what is on the form, even if it is pre-filled the moment you sign it. There's nothing stopping the government from sending you a blank or zero form and you'll just sign it and send it in thinking that you won't get prosecuted for the offshore tax haven account that you have. They'll still go after you no matter what.
Less Fraud, More Correct Taxes
There will be no increase of fraud due to this but I predict that most people will actually send their taxes in quicker and more of them will be more correct than the current numbers. We already have the IRS eFile system to let you do the web form part but they are all blank. It would be nice if they were pre-filled in with your information already. You'll just glance at it, take your Standard Deduction instead of Itemized Deduction for most people, type in your bank account or credit card number to pay or receive payment. You wouldn't have to look for or dig out those W2 or 1099 forms trying to figure out all the income.
Special Interests At Work
The simple point is that in the United States the government is run by "special interest" groups. The founding fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison warned us about the dire effects that special interest groups will have on the government if they are allowed to mass their money and influence the rule of the country. It's all in their speeches that we all should have been forced to read in elementary and high school history and civics courses. America's educational failure.
Now what do we have, a special interest part such as Intuit who is responsible for the Turbo Tax software and their electronic filing service trying to prevent the government from offering a pre-filled tax form service to the people. Just imagine how quickly Intuit would change its mind if the government approached them and told them that they would be the sole company responsible for getting people's taxes filed and I can guarantee that the first year you'll be presented with almost completed and pre-filled forms once your type in your Tax ID number.
Educational Gaming
We need a multi-genra massively multi-player video game where at first you play a First Person Shooter with friends as a team of The Founding Fathers and you first kick the British out of the colonies, then it switches to Real Time Strategy game where you maneuver the troops during the colonial war, and later it switches to a Civilization type diplomatic game where you negotiate terms of the new constitution and treaties with European countries. It'd be a nice way to have kids experience a modern way of what the history taught us. Sprinkle in a good load of historic facts in the game and you'll have kids arguing their view points because of the game.
Because H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is Mature! We have availability of fast and reliable open source x264 H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC encoder and the wide spread usage of Matroska (MKV) container files and MPEG 4 (MP4) container files. Even some set-top boxes support playback of video and audio from both containers now and more are announced for this year. There is also a demand now for HD content in both 720p an and 1080i/p formats H.264 is required to give reasonable file sizes versus XviD/DivX (MPEG-4 ASP).
Also Audio Video Interleave (AVI) container files are problematic and have limitations since they don't allow the inclusion of chapters or subtitles, are not compatible with newer audio encoding formats such as AAC and lossless Dolby Digital or DTS audio formats, and don't work really well with some of the newer video formats.
It is time to move on from this old container format and also move away from older DivX and XviD (MPEG-4 ASP) formats onto the newer H.264 / MPEG-4 (x264) video encoding formats.
I second everything that Tubmleweed mentioned since it's dead-on accurate. The real debate is between Verizon (great coverage) versus Sprint (great 3G speed), with AT&T and T-Mobile being runners up.
Be aware that if you plan to "tether" (connect your phone to your computer to let your computer have wireless Internet access over your phone) then Sprint will allow you to do that for free as long as you have an existing unlimited data plan ($15 for base plans or included in new plans), but Verizon will try to charge you per-megabyte costing you hundreds of dollars a month once they find out. Also be aware that Sprint also includes "Any Mobile-to-Mobile" add-on in many of their plans calling any of your friends on any mobile network completely free.
The iPhone is no longer a booster to AT&T's service since there are other alternative phones out or about to come out this year to rival the iPhone. T-Mobile is a company that has changed names three times already always hiding from a bad rep but trying to make money on we-cut-our-own-throat prices.
Some HTC phones that are are out already for Sprint and Verizon networks (both CDMA based) and are also GSM six-band phones so you have international usage, or additionally if they are Hard-SPL flashed, Secure Unlocked, and flashed with a custom WU World Unlocked Radio they can use US mobile carrier SIM cards letting you use AT&T, T-Mobile, or other carriers with regular or pre-paid SIM cards. You simply let the phone choose the network automatically by availability or manually by switching between CDMA and GSM only modes on the phone.
This CDMA & GSM access makes these phones almost universal in usage since they are carrier independent. On top of this you can flash them with tons of custom ROMs giving you access to all versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 and 6.5 already including tons of custom applications written for these operating systems. You can even build your own custom ROMs from "kitchens" customizing the settings, drivers, and software available on these phones. They sell for $325-350 on eBay and can be activated with either carrier without a contract. Be sure to only by the Sprint or Verizon (CDMA & GSM enabled) HTC Touch Pro 2 phones and not the AT&T or T-Mobile (GSM only) since you won't have access to both wireless network types and the GSM only phones have a slower processor.
HTC Touch Pro 2 (aka RhodiumW) - 2 x CDMA, 6 x GSM, 480x800, 528MHz, 288/512 MB
Sprint - HTC Touch Pro 2
Verizon - HTC Touch Pro 2
Websites that you must visit.
XDA-Developers.com
PPCGeeks
If you can wait a bit longer and wish to spend $750 or more then you can consider this phone.
HTC HD2 or wait for the predicted but not confirmed HTC HD2 Pro (with keyboard and CDMA later this year).
Just to put a little background on this post, I've worked in New York City for most of the Fortune 100 finance companies, including Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Charles Schwab, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Credit Suisse as a consultant or employee in my past 10-years as a Windows Server Administrator. I have known people who worked for the other top finance firms that I just happened to never work at such as Citibank, Lehman Brothers, and others so I would like to say that I am a little qualified to tell you how to get a job at one of these companies since I've been able to do so.
I started my professional computer career with work in my high school to help them at the computer lab, and I mentioned this on my resume, then I had a little after-hours computer job as a junior computer guy at a technical telephone company. After I dropped out of high school in the beginning of my junior year I got my GED diploma and decided to go into the job market right away since I knew that computers are where my future lies.
Computer City, Dot.com Bomb
My first real job was doing computer repair at Computer City (now out of business) and then I moved up to desktop support and junior Windows server administration at a tiny dot.com company with only 5-servers. But in this time I had gotten my CompTIA A+ hardware certification, a number of minor printer and desktop computer certs from Hewlett-Packard, and I was studying for my MCSE 4.0 at the dot.com company. After months of studying and hands-on practice at work and at home I was able to complete it by passing each test, one at a time slowly studying all the material for that test including extra information from TechNet and MSDN to get a good feel or what problems show up and how they are resolved. I did not attend college or any type of formal education training program but instead relied on study guides and hands-on practice to get my skills and I have been successful at doing this, even up to my third MCSE and now going for the forth, MCSE 2008.
In the early days of my career I also started taking the rest of the CompTIA certifications such as Network+, Server+, and Security+ to round-out my knowledge in those fields because frankly I didn't know much about anything but I realized that the study guides were written for novices like myself and they gave me a good overview of things. Since then I've used certification study guides to learn new things because I find that the guides are so generally written that they are a great starting point for learning, and later on as you get experience you get more in-depth with more difficult books. So if you are one of those people that scoff at certifications as useless or just empty papers, realize that while the title and test are not all that useful the study guides are actually great sources of general knowledge material to get start on.
Goldman Sachs
After the dot.com company went bust I signed up with job web sites such as Monster.com (not so good anymore), JobSeekers.com, and I believe Dice.com (the most important one for IT workers). A recruiter found my resume online with a good history of computer jobs and most importantly with the MCSE 4.0 certification an A+ that was in demand at the time by all the large firms. That first A+ certification and MCSE certification got the recruiter to look at my resume, then they looked at my short but upwards moving career in IT and offered to set me up with an interview at the firms. The recruiter submitted my resume for a consulting position paying $45 per hour back in the early 2000's, that was twice the rate of my previous job. After three weeks of waiting Goldman Sachs scheduled a phone interview screening for me where they asked basic and intermediate technical Windows questions and I did well enough to move me to the next stage.
They then scheduled the first of three in person interviews where I met the senior members of the team, one at a time who basically grilled me with technical questions and scenarios. I
There was a not very popular mad for Quake 2 called Action Quake 2 that sucked me in back in the early days when mods started to gain popularity as alternatives to the plain vanilla game. The Urban Terrormod is basically an improved copy for Quake 3 with different weapons.
The idea is the same though, realistic weapon mechanics, including long reload times, very powerful bullet hits resulting in a lot of damage, hits require bandaging to avoid bleeding out and dying, bandaging requires you to stand still for many seconds unable to protect yourself or run away. Grenades are absolutely deadly with very large blast radiuses making them very powerful but they require time to prime and throw that can result in you getting shot and killed before you throw your grenade off. There are many, many one-shot kills due to snipers, well placed automatic gun fire at your head, grenade blasts clearing hallways on the front-line of the fight between bases.
The Capture The Flag type games turn into a grenade spam, sniper alley, and death-rush type of scenarios if both teams have competent players who can hold and defend a mid-point front-line bottleneck such as a hallway or two. Most maps have multiple routes to the enemy's base resulting in 2 or 3 front-line bottleneck hallways, with shotgunners camping waiting for people to run through, noobs grenade spamming the hallway, and snipers sitting far back picking off any folks showing their heads.
The more interesting game is the Last Man Standing with teams where each team goes against the other and there are no respawns but usually in those games the team with better squad work and team work will take out the uncoordinated noobs running around looking for a fight. Ambush scenarios are very common with multiple people camping a well known walk-by spot to catch a few folks from the other team off-guard. Camping is usually the default tactic so you end up walking along walls and checking all corners before walking through them.
These two mods kept my interest a lot longer than the run-and-gun type games since there was more skill required to survive and larger penalties for failure when you did get shot. Marksmanship became important since even a lowly shotgun or sub-machinegun was a great weapon and you didn't require ultra power rocket launchers or plasma guns. Pistol battles and knife attacks were also quite common since the reload time penalty was so high that it was faster to draw your sidearm and try to finish off a wounded guy in a firefight than it was to reload your primary gun. You could hear this happening all over the levels with trrrat, trraat, trraat machinegun fire then a pause, with pop, pop, pop pistol fire.
Very interesting and engaging mods. A lot of good memories and times.
I have a Series 1 DirecTiVo and it's gathering dust in a box ever since I tried to sell it off on eBay early this year and had TiVo shutdown two of my eBay auctions on me, even after I complied and tried to sell it without the access card. Everything in the TiVo is legit and the access card is original. The only upgrades that I made to the box was to install a network card in it so that I could get guide data downloads without a phone line that I no longer have in the house. I canceled my DirecTV with TiVo service last year because of this and also because I got tired of TV.
eBay and their Vero system is full of crap about checking authenticity. They complained about selling the box with their Intelectual Property and sent me a nasty e-mail about the access card. So I re-listed it again without the access card and still got shutdown with a warning that a third violation will close my eBay account. My next step was going to be to file a federal lawsuit against eBay and TiVo for preventing me from re-selling my own bought property under the right of first sale but I got busy around the house and never filled out the paperwork.
Forget the TiVo, forget eBay Vero, they suck.
Buy yourself a $70 USD Intel Atom 330 motherboard with Dual-Core 1.6 GHz x86 compatible processors and 1Gbig NIC with 2-SATA, 1-PATA, and 1-DDR2 DRAM slot and go crazy with it. I did just the thing with Elastix PBX. The cost savings in power and frustration will pay for any money you save with that obsolete 8-year TiVo!
Ono Plug-In
You're absolutely right about how badly implemented the random client connection protocol is for BitTorrent clients. There is a project and a plug-in called Ono for Vuze (formely Azureus) BitTorrent clients. I used it before to resolve this problem but I found that the non-stop creation of many ping.exe threads to analyze latency was causing some slow-downs on my own system and additional upstream congestion on my upstream limited broadband pipe.
I am still surprised that a better protocol for proximity favored peer connections wasn't developed for BitTorrent and other P2P systems to maximize performance by connecting to peers on the same or close-by networks. I have a feeling that with the huge increases in demand for content there will be a need for optimized connection protocols once we start demanding more than the capacity that we have.
Netmask Flaws
One solution that is simple to implement is the one that you mentioned for netmask calculations but I fear that this is solution won't work reliability since the way that network ranges are created and managed internally by large broadband ISPs is unpredictable and neighboring ranges are owned by different ISPs or are in other countries. Plus netmask information doesn't tell you anything about closest neighbors to connect to once you exhaust the connections in your own netmask.
Routing Table Solution
I think that the best solution would be one based on information in the routing protocols that the routers have but since this information is not available to the individual clients the applications have no way of looking at the overall routing structure to determine exactly who the closest and best neighbors. are based on latency, bandwidth, cost, and hop count information.
If there was a way for the application to query the router for a partial list of the routing table (e.g. 5 or 10-hops) and then prioritize the peer addresses from the tracker according to the routing table based an algorithm that takes bandwidth up-and-down, latency, cost, and hop count into account we would have an optimal solution to the order of connections for peers.
Latency and Hop Count Not Enough
The problem is that the routers won't share the routing table information with the clients. The solution becomes the one like Ono plug-in in that the client has to ping and/or trace route to the peer addresses to determine optimal choices based only on latency and hop count without knowing anything about bi-directional bandwidth availability or cost associated. Without the bandwidth info the whole thing falls apart because latency isn't enough to determine maximum throughput and there is no practical way of doing a bandwidth check bi-directionally in a meaningful way between peers without taking up a lot of time and bandwidth in the process itself.
Upstream Throttling (Not Choking)
Hopefully, this new uTP protocol will at least give us a benefit and improvement on the upstream bandwidth side by auto-throttling the upstream to prevent choking the connection.
If only the clients could peek at the routing tables of our routers...
Mandatory reference below. Read it and get informed about SSD's, performance, and issues with controllers and firmware problems. Long story short, Intel is on top of the market, OCZ Vertex is a very close contender using Indilinx controllers. Samsung, JMicron based drives suck very much.
AnandTech's - Storage
Below is my own post about this topic a little while back when I got into SSD's.
Slashdot.org - Solid State Disk Benchmarks (Score 3, Informative)
Also, be aware of shrinking flash cell sizes, 50nm was original flash chips, now 34nm in Intel's G2 line of MLC SSDs is popular. Multi-Level Cells store 2 or more bits per cell, decreasing price at the cost of performance and reliability of read back. Also future 3 or more bit MLC drives will offer even lower cost but also a lower reliability and less write cycles. There was a great article about this problem a while back on Slashdot so just search for it.
Phone System PBX Project
I had to build such a full-fledged system but one that had to be dependable, reliable, small, quiet, unobtrusive, long lasting, cool running, low-power, well performing, be built of standard parts, and be able to accept one PCI or PCIe expansion card for the telephone TDM interface for incoming FXO lines.
I'm in the process of setting up a phone system PBX with up to 4-incoming telephone lines and a phone menu system to provide basic business information (e.g. hours, address, directions, information, etc.) for a friend's business and also offer the standard features such as voice mail, faxing, internal analog extensions, VoIP capability for future expansion, customization, etc. built on Linux using Elastix that is based on Asterisk PBX.
Wishlist - PBX PC - Intel Atom 330, 1GB DDR2 667, OCZ Agility 30GB SSD, 120mm Fan, Apex Mini-ITX - $316.94 USD
Form Factor - Mini-ITX
I checked out my favorite hardware review site AnandTech and read a number of articles about the new Mini-ITX form factor motherboards that came out to get an introduction to the form factor and expectations.
AnandTech.com - Two New Ions: ASUS AT3N7A-I and ASRock Ion 330
TomsHardware.com - Does Intel's Dual-Core Atom Improve Efficiency?
I read the articles with a lot of interest but when I looked at the prices of these Ion based motherboard with well performing graphics chips I found that I wasn't interested in paying so much for a feature that would not be used very much in a server type PBX system. Also some of these systems didn't have any PCI expansion slots so they were no good for my PBX type project.
Processor - Intel Atom 330
So I turned to look at other Mini-ITX based offerings and came across the good 'ol Intel Atom motherboards. I found the Intel Atom 230, 270 based boards to be a little low performing in many of the benchmark results that I saw but that the dual core Intel Atom 330 chip was doing quite well for only a few dollars more and very little increase in power. I looked at the offerings at my favorite retailer, Newegg and saw a nice list of choices.
Motherboards, Motherboard / CPU / VGA Combo - Mini ITX
I started my process of filtering so I ignored low powered systems that came with VIA C7 chips and the Intel Atom 230 chips. I came up with these three choices.
Foxconn 45CSX Intel Atom 330 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo - Retail - $69.99 USD
Intel BOXD945GCLF2D Intel Atom processor 330 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo - Retail - $79.99 USD
ASUS AT3GC-I Intel Atom 330 479 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo - Retail - $89.99
Motherboard - Intel D945GCLF2
Out of these choices, I wasn't too thrilled with a Foxconn built motherboard because I had no experience with this company for any hardware. I wasn't so sure that the extra money spent on the Asus motherboard is really going to offer anything at all, so the choice went down to Intel because I wanted reliability for a system that was being built for someone else. I read a few good review of the Intel motherboard below.
To me Windows 7 is a lot like a refreshed version of Windows XP with newer graphics, a few better interoperability features (Windows Key + Left, Right, Up, Down), and new hardware support.
I've used Windows 2000 Professional as my personal OS, skipping Windows XP until they finally fixed all the issues with that OS somewhere around SP2 time line then I switched. I did the same thing with this new OS also, I skipped on Windows Vista, until SP3 (aka Windows 7) came out and have been using it since the Beta, then Release Candidate, and soon Release To Manufacturing release that I'll be installing this weekend.
My experience at each OS switch has been roughly the same, newer and more graphical interface, some new features, and hardware support for newer devices. It's been the same release pattern with Microsoft for quite a few OS releases now. There is always a release that gets skipped because it isn't deemed worthy of usage by the general population. (Do you remember MS-DOS 4.11 -> 5.0 -> (skip 6.0) -> 6.22 release cycle?, what about Microsoft Windows 2 -> 3.0 -> (skip 3.1) -> 3.11 Windows for Workgroups or Windows 95 -> Windows 98 OSR2 -> (skip Windows ME) -> Windows 2000 Pro)
Now if someone at Microsoft could see their own history they would be wiser in the future to build a whole new OS, shelve it for internal usage only, get disgusted and fix the problems, then release the new updated version to the public? It would save us the problems of being public beta testers.
Suspect the Power Supply Unit
Seeing as people have already mentioned Power Supply Unit as a likely cause of flaky computer problems and random reboots I want to expand on why this is the case and how to diagnose these problems on the cheap. Since some PSU problems are quick and easy to diagnose by checking for dead, low, or high +3.3, +5, or +12 Volt rails others are more problematic such as transient voltage drops that occur randomly or under load or due to thermal overload. These PSU problems usually happens due to old and aged capacitors that have weakened, leaked, have blown, or just plain failed.
If you have a power supply that is easy to open you can do a quick cursory check by opening it and looking for any bulged, blown, or discolored tops on capacitors (those tall cylinders). Be careful not to touch any of the power leads inside the power supply since the capacitors hold charges even when disconnected from power and some of the discharges might be dangerous or deadly.
Digital MultiMeter Voltage Readings and Load Generation Programs
First, you'll need a Digital MultiMeter (DMM) that gives you a simple DC Voltage output and then connect the black write to the ground and the red write to the "hot" red or yellow wires on the Molex connectors to test for voltage. Then you should get yourself a load generating application, such as Prime95 for Processor and Memory loading and a Graphics Card loading application like 3DMark benchmark. Leave your DMM leads inside the molex power connectors for one of the voltage rails (+5 or +12) and start the application. Watch the DMM for any voltage drops or droops and let the application run for a few minutes, 5-10 should be enough, to generate enough load over time to create build up a thermal load on the PSU and the computer subsystems you are testing. If your voltage drops more than 5% of the original you should suspect a problem with the voltage regulation for that rail under load. Make sure to test the other rail also, so if you tested +5 then do the +12 rail to check.
My Own Case of Failing Power Supply
I had to use this procedures to diagnose failing and faulty power supplies in many computers, including my very own system that had a 4-year power supply that suddenly started drooping in voltage on the +5 rail going down from +5.05 to +4.78 under load causing my hard drives to drop out of my RAID arrays. You can read my own issues with PSU problems in the thread below, including detailed diagnostic steps I took and pictures of my issues.
HardForum.com - 0.30 V drop only on +5V rail during Prime95 - Is this normal?
GPS Theft - Very Common Occurance
This story of GPS disappearing within 1-hour of leaving it in a car is something that I hear very often from many people who I have personally known to have their cars broken into because of this. Just two weeks ago a friend of mine took his GPS with him but left the sticky window mount in the car and his car was broken into and searched for the GPS but he had it with him.
Stolen Item = Revenue Restart
I'm surprised that Amazon doesn't just disassociate the user's account from the device until he buys a new one, and leave the lost or stolen device as available for new activation by the new person who finds it or steals it. Knowing Amazon's business ethics it would be profitable for them to active these missing devices to new users to restart the revenue stream from these users purchasing new books with their new accounts. As long as they don't tell anyone and nobody gets access to their information they should be good to go with this plan. Until someone rats them out for activating stolen devices, but who's going to prosecute them or fine them?
Misunderstanding Police - They're NOT Here To Help You
It seems that you are one of the many people here who misunderstand the purpose of Police and believe that they are an agency to aid individuals-in-need like yourself. The Police are not here to help individuals they are here to uphold the law for the common good of society as a whole. They deal with crime and apply the law en-mass to prevent the communities that they are based in from falling into chaos. It only appears that they deal with individual cases to the people involved and those who fail to see the big picture of how the Police apply their efforts to trim certain crime outbreaks down to manageable levels before focusing on other areas.
Even the US Supreme Court ruled that they police do not have to protect you as an individual from certain and imminent deadly harm because that is up to their discretion. So if the Police don't have to save your life why would they care about saving your property?
NY Times - [US] Justices Rule Police Do Not Have a Constitutional Duty to Protect Someone
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Published: June 28, 2005
Take a good look at a Police officer tomorrow when you see one and try to realize that his job is to protect the community and society and that he has full discretion backed by the highest court in the land to watch you get killed or your property taken without having the obligation to help you in any way shape or form. When you come to this realization that not even the Police are here to help you, you will start learning and appreciating personal independence and you will start taking better care for your personal safety, freedom, and your property. The idea of taking responsibility for your own actions and more importantly, the ability to imagine future outcomes of your actions will start coming to you when you break out of the fog thinking that there will be help available anytime you need it. Learn to help yourself first.
My Lost Full GPS Enabled Cell Phone Experience
My wife left her Sprint HTC Mogul (PPC-6800) that has a full GPS enabled receiver in a bathroom at Universal Studios Florida. Within 30-minutes we contacted park authorities who came to the bathroom to investigate only to find that the purse and phone were missing. The office on duty said that the most common outcome is that the cash money is taken out of the purses or wallets and they are discarded into the trash cans to hide the evidence. They contacted the cleaning crew right away by radio but were told that the garbage was already taken out and cleared out to the back. My wife's phone was turned on in the purse so it was active. Calling it gave the standard 4-rings then voice mail response confirming that it was still operational and powered on, otherwise it would be 1
This really seems like a very unlikely event to happen to trigger the problem on these drives for most users since from my experience personally and professionally I have yet to see anyone actually know about BIOS passwords, much less about setting a password on the drive using the ATA secure drive password feature. I am surprised that this was even caught by anyone unless it was a complete fluke or there actually are people or companies using this type of a feature for security. (I don't doubt it but haven't seen it.)
I personally own the first generation Intel X25-M 80GB MLC SSD and I have written about it extensively here on this forum. I heard rumors that the new TRIM feature support will only made available to this second generation release of these drives but I'm unsure if that is really true. I'm on the fence right now whether I should sell my G1 drive and upgrade to the G2 because of this feature and also for a little more performance because I am so happy with the performance of this drive and also the current 8820 firmware that solved the fragmentation and slowdown issues.
If you are one of those folks who is still sitting around not knowing what to do when all of this Solid State Disk news is coming out all over then you are missing the biggest paradigm shift to computing performance since the transfer from floppy disks to hard drives.
With the upcoming re-release of this newly affordable drive around 2009-08-28 from Intel X25-M G2 80GB MLC SSD at ~$230 USD from Newegg or ZipZoomFly you should definitely dig down deep and save a little money to buy one of these drives and experience the biggest performance and responsiveness improvement to your computer that you could imagine.
If you need a primer on the SSD revolution check out my previous post regarding the articles to read.
Required Reading for Solid State Drives (Score 1)
I had a very bad experience with my old nVidia nForce4 Chipset motherboard RAID chip while using it and just recently found that none of the old or new drivers work correctly when the Intel X25-M 80GB SSD is plugged into the motherboard causing my Windows OS to freeze during boot-up when the driver is initialized or the RAID capability just doesn't work at all. I even wrote up an entire account of this problem in a few threads, one on nVidia's forum and another on HardOCP Forum to warn users about trying to use Intel SSDs with their older nForce4 hardware that I linked to below.
The Silicon Image 3114 PCI to SATA 1 controller chip has serious issues also that caused it to drop my RAID-5 and destroy the 2 TB array. It has issues with PCI bus contention and also is incompatible with the Creative Labs X-Fi PCI sound card on the same bus causing audio stuttering and pops. A few people mentioned that the issue might be IRQ sharing but I tried the sound card in all different PCI slots with different IRQs and the problem was still there. Jet another bad experience with off-brand storage chips.
My current Asus P6T motherboard for Intel Core i7 with the JMicron JMB363 PCIe to SATA chip and JMicron JMB322 SATA 1 to 2 Port Multiplier chip are also having issues with the internal SATA ports where one of them is port-multiplied and if a hard drive and an LG Blu-Ray optical drive is connected at the same time to the internal ports the optical drive will randomly disappear and re-appear in the operating system.
So Marvell is not the one and only manufacturer of storage interconnect chips to have these problems. My experience is that pretty much all of them have issues to varying degrees driving users mad when they realize after purchasing the motherboard and trying to use these chips.
[H]ard|Forum > [H]ard|Ware > Data Storage Systems - The Hidden Cost of an SSD Upgrade (Intel SSD + nForce4 Chipset = No RAID! -> Upgrade)
[H]ard|Forum > [H]ard|Ware > Motherboards - nVidia nForce MediaShield 15.23, .25, .26 - Does Not Install!
NVIDIA Forums > nZone > Hardware > nForce Mobos > nVidia nForce MediaShield 15.23, .25, .26 - Does Not Install!, MediaShield installer does not install services, GUI, or files
OverclockersClub Forums Hardware Processors, Motherboards and Memory - Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi and Silicon Image 3114 on DFI SLI-DR
Fast GPS Lock-On Time
Since this phone uses the real GPSOne chip with aGPS (assisted GPS) the GPS lock-on time is fantastically fast usually around 1-5 or sometimes 10 seconds for a lock anywhere outside or inside of residential buildings such as my apartment. In commercial buildings such as stores or shopping centers the lock-on time is slower since there is no easy access to a line-of-sight for the sky but the GPS will still work most of the time and get a lock. The GPS also works flawlessly a fast in forested areas such as when we went camping last week. The GPS also gets a lock but after 30-seconds or more inside Manhattan where the sky is obscured and there are many tall buildings that cause the GPS signals to be blocked or to bounce around causing multi-path problems.
GPS Chip Sleep Mode and TomTom Navigator Annoyance
I have had only a few occasions where the GPS does not get a lock and that is usually caused by the GPS chip that goes to sleep mode after turning the phone off while TomTom Navigator is still running causing the GPS chip not to wake up after powering on and making TomTom lose the location permanently. This situation cannot be corrected by restarting the application so a soft reset is required to power-cycle the phone to get the GPS chip re-initialized from the boot to get it to work. I've had this happen a few times to me so I learned to not turn the phone off while TomTom Navigator is still running but to exit the application without clearing my navigation data and then to turn the phone off, such as when I'm leaving the car on a pit-stop while driving somewhere. After I get back in the car I re-mount my phone in the holder, turn it on, start up TomTom Navigator again and the application remembers my last navigation data and destination so it does not have to recalculate the whole route but just to update itself again in a second and get the GPS lock in a second or two. That's about the biggest annoyance that I had to deal with with GPS and this phone but I've learned to work around the problem and it never happens anymore for many months now so I don't have to soft reset anymore.
The vast majority of time the GPS in my phone locks on nearly automatically or within a short and reasonable period of time and I can depend on it to just work and get me where I am going.
HTC Titan with GPS Chip
I've had the HTC Titan (Sprint Mogul PPC-6800) phone since it came out and it has a real GPSOne chip inside for aGPS satelite reception and not just cell tower ID triangulation for fake GPS. Before that I had the HTC Apache (Sprint PCC-6700) that required a separate GPS Receiver connected by Bluetooth and that also worked great since I only had to turn on the receiver when navigating.
Mount and Charger
I use the cheap Arkon CM929-S phone mount to keep my phone in-front of me connected to an air-vent while I drive and also the Motorola Mini-USB Car Charger for keeping my phone powered up during long trips.
TomTom Navigator 6 and 7
I've been using TomTom Navigator version 6 and now 7 installed on this phone running Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0, 6.1, and soon 6.5. I've used my phone to navigate here in the US, Canada, and also in Europe without any problems at all, except for having to copying the 500MB maps to my storage card before I go, since I only had a 1 GB storage card. If I had a large capacity SDHC storage card then I could keep all the maps on it for the entire world.
PPCKitchen BuildOS and Radio ROM Firmware
I've been taking advantage of the phone customization software such as PPCKitchen BuildOS software for creating and loading customized and updated versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system builds on to my phone that allowed me to go from 6.0, to 6.1, and now to 6.5. I've been updating the Radio ROM firmware on my phone with the instructions from XDA Developer Wiki page for HTC Titan to the latest releases to enable GPS functionality on this phone since the original release of the phone did not have the Radio ROM firmware to allow interfacing with the GPS chip until Sprint released it a year after the phone became available.
Little Inconveniences
Since Sprint uses the US only CDMA network cell phone standard I couldn't use my phone in Europe to make calls but I still retained the full GPS functionality. On top of this we use Google Maps software loaded on these phones for locating stores and saving them as contacts so we can then use TomTom to navigate to those contacts. Everything works great except when Google Maps decides to be lazy and not save the zip-code in the address in the contact or when the address line in the contact includes additional numbers such as apartment or suite then TomTom gets confused thinking those are street numbers since they match European address standards such as "16 Main Street Suite 2" to "16/2 Main Street". We then have to manually edit the contact to remove the apartment or suite number and add the zip code, it is a pain and we are waiting for TomTom to fix their software since this bug existed sine version 6 and now with 7.450.
Convenience Through Convergence
My wife also uses the same exact phone since we share the same phone plan and company and she loves the ability to be able to take the car and go anywhere she wants with her friends without worry