I'm surprised that there's not a market in refurbished cars.
Accident free models with no frame problems or known gremlins. Go over the mechanicals with a fine toothed comb, put the suspension wear parts back to new, make sure all the systems work and work within new specs. Swap out the interior with a new interior -- seats, headliner, console, maybe even dash and instrumentation. Paint the body and replace any worn parts.
Make the car nearly new appearance wise. I'm sure it's a ton of labor, which is why I would kind of expect some kind of cottage industry in India (like shipbreaking). The parts might be expensive, but the idea would be to put in aftermarket components as much as possible, and maybe at some kind of scale build your own and build in upgrades to dash/electronics.
Maybe it's all unrealistic, but I do know there is a cottage industry in rebuilding insurance writeoffs. I knew a guy whose business it was to buy insurance wrecks, repair or rebuild them and then sell them. I saw a couple and they were really nice and cheaper than used models of the same age.
I just think the carmakers like Toyota have built some increadibly durable cars that often wear out not because the drivetrain is worn out, but because the interior is shot, the paint is faded. Refurbished (with good attention to the drivetrain) it'd be like new, especially if the interior had infotainment upgrades.
Reading your statement and looking at a picture of a white Pekingese next to a brindled Great Dane and trying to understand how normal, healthy humans can vary by 10x in mass and 3-5x in height and girth.
There is no Russian pavilion. There have been rumors and plans of one, but it has never been built.
I keep waiting for the SJWs to complain about the lack of an African pavilion. There's kind of a pit stop space that could house one, but it's never been built. I suppose the counter argument might be that they instead built an entire theme park for Africa, Animal Kingdom, but a fair amount of that park isn't specifically set in Africa although the Tree of Life and the safari part of it give it an African dominated theme.
I've always wondered who runs the country pavilions. They have a slightly not-run-by-Disney feel them. Sure, you can use your magic band to pay for stuff in their food stalls and restaurants and gift shops and the employees have Disney nametags on, but it always seems sort of not quite Disney otherwise. The Chinese pavilion even more so. And AFAICT they are staffed almost entirely by nationals of the country.
I think the Chinese pavilion was there when the park opened (we went as a family in Christmas of '82), so if it was staffed with Chinese nationals, maybe the FBI was being just kind of run of the mill paranoid about a bunch of Party-approved nationals being in the US during a relatively heated part of the cold war a short drive from NASA and all its space technology.
Overall, it seems kind of paranoid. Were they worried about the Chinese undermining our lead in audio animatronics and Imagineering?
It makes me wonder if there's an underground market for wifi gear that is capable of exceeding the power limits to help deal with this.
I know it's illegal (and maybe it wouldn't help, either, since you'd have to hack the clients, too, to get full use out of it). I'd kind of chalk it up, though, to how are they gonna catch you? I don't often see FCC radio snooping vans driving down my street (they do have little rotating dishes on the roof, don't they?). And I know that nobody in my neighborhood would think to call anyone because their wireless didn't work well, either.
I think there's a lot of reasons for this, most surrounding money.
My perception with a lot of owner-run businesses is that they see every dollar spent on expenses as a dollar out of their pockets. I mostly see this as short-sighted, but it's probably an impossible bias not to have as a small business owner. But it's mostly short-sighted because they're all too willing to scrimp on useful updates that will save them labor hours and save them from data loss. They'd get a lot of benefit from a small enough amount of money that it wouldn't really affect their income or wealth.
I think they may also (mostly wisely) be trying to avoid the complexity and money sinkhole of buying too much technology. I think they want to keep businesses at a simple enough level that they can control and understand a lot of details. Maybe this becomes too much of a micromanagement obsession, but maybe a simple, easy to run business is more likely to succeed than an optimally computerized one that gets bogged down in complexity.
My understanding (and experience) with opioids is that the tolerance is mostly to the psychological effects, not the actual pain reduction.
This was also my personal experience after an accident ripped my hand up, requiring half of a finger to be amputated and a bone fusion in the other finger.
I got decent pain relief on a fixed quantity of oxycodone for about 4-5 months.
Not sure if that counts as "chronic pain" but without oxycodone, my hand hurt like crazy until it had sufficiently healed. Maybe it's different for people with irreparable back problems or something where there's a greater level of pain.
Do think this is always true, and if so, how do you explain something like the NY Times publication of the Pentagon Papers or the Washington Post investigation into Watergate?
In both of those cases, the paper went heavily against establishment interests, which would presumably mean for the most part, corporate interests, too.
Do they do animal testing with drugs like this on chimps or monkeys to ascertain this kind of safety ahead of time before giving it to humans?
I would imagine they might have given it to rats just to make sure they didn't fall over dead immediately, maybe dogs, too, but I would expect that chimps would have a brain structure more similar to humans and might have been more revealing in safety of a drug like this.
I can appreciate where some chimp experiments might be a bit harsh, but a pain killer that you have good reason to think might work and might relieve pain would seem to be on the lighter side of animal testing and certainly better than dead humans.
Of course we do, all the truly effective ones now are opioids and they get you high, too, and our Calvinist morality and repressive drug control regime hates this, so we are desperately trying to find something, anything, that actually works as a painkiller without any euphoric side effects.
True, there are some alternatives, but all the really heavy anti-inflammatories have nasty cardiovascular risks and the others, like gabapentin do some nasty things to neurotransmitters and really only have marginal effectiveness (in addition to getting you weirdly high the first few days you take them, I know first hand).
We *could* just try to figure out tests that help sort out why some people are prone to addiction from opioids and make sure to monitor their therapies more closely (or come up with ways to augment them to reduce addiction risk), but that would mean allowing the rest of the population pain relief and euphoria, and that's just not right with God's Plan.
At least one of the Honeywell programmables I've owned had an external temperature sensor option so that the thermostat actually knew what the temperature outside was. I think the manual said something about the thermostat having better recovery logic and/or better setpoint holding.
I guess it makes sense, it gives you a better sense of how the heating system responds to actual outdoor temperature conditions, enabling improved recovery and keeping the internal temperature more even, probably by adjusting the deadzone.
I could mostly buy into the idea that this was something of a self-reinforcing process where the people who got into tribal leadership positions initially did so through some genetic advantages in health, strength, and intelligence.
The initial advantage (probably in hunting) gave them access to superior nutrition, increasing their own survival and increasing the likelihood of having offspring, and offspring that grew larger and healthier.
As cultures and roles solidified, these people were in a good place to claim leadership based on demonstrated attributes (leading more successful hunts, killing more enemies) as well as possessing some inherent personality traits that gave them more charisma or being able to defeat challengers from within their own ranks.
Over time this leadership group evolved into an aristocracy, whose superior access to food, shelter, selection of mates (IIRC, there have been cross-cultural studies of beauty that align with physical traits associated with childbearing) likely enabled their children significant advantages, warding off some of the endemic developmental problems of poor nutrition, disease exposure, and so on, in addition to situational advantages -- like being able to gain exposure to learning and teaching versus taking immediate risks (I would imagine being taught how to hunt dangerous game or fight in combat by someone skilled and successful at it would have some survival value versus doing it without much exposure to training).
I doubt it's a perfect long term system, as eventually the aristocracy can grow sclerotic and actual shelter the weak, in addition to inbreeding promoting genetic defects -- look at hemophilia among the European aristocracy.
As a side note, I've done some work at an extremely exclusive country club, and I'm always kind of surprised at how healthy and vigorous appearing the rich are. Slim, well-toned, attractive, few signs of any of the dietary-driven obesity of poor people or evidence of the chronic illnesses and development issues.
My best guess is some kind of differential pricing strategy, lowering prices somewhat for some markets as the price they extract, er, charge, in some markets is too high for all markets and they don't want people arbitraging on their own to get a discount.
There might also be contractual terms that require them to guarantee exclusivity in a given market. If you have the rights in some small country which neither creates the content or manufactures the physical product, you might be worried about your market getting flooded with lower-cost versions and you want to be sure the license holder makes some effort to keep that product out of your area.
Or may be the contractual terms the content creator agreed to with the cast/crew, with differing royalties and rights available in different markets.
And maybe it's not even that, but some kind of on-paper accounting scheme that frees them from taxes or something on products sold in other regions.
Then there's the censorship conspiracy angle, where it might have been believed that region coding would be considered friendly to censorship-minded authorities. The DVD region map kind of aligns along broad cultural and more narrow political boundaries. If a particular title is acceptable in Region 1 but offends some country in another region, the region code (in theory, not in practice) provides a "but we tried" excuse that prevents objectionable content from appearing in a given region.
Given that Blu-Ray collapsed the region scheme into 3 regions, this is probably not extremely likely, but it doesn't seem entirely unlikely it didn't somehow get into the sales pitch for the original DVD region scheme.
I am not aware of any other mainstream competitors for flat-fee all-you-can-view offerings.
Amazon is a reasonable challenger -- a lot of Netflix catalog overlap, and their original programming is nearly on par with Netflix, maybe better depending on your tastes. They also don't seem to have as many of the licensing problems that Netflix has that hinder their selection; they seem to have a slightly better catalog of films. And you get all the other benefits of prime,which these days are nothing to sneeze at -- lots of cloud storage, their cloud music, and cheap, fast product delivery.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been hornswaggled by a Netflix movie that sounded good but ended up being awful. At this point its only streaming value seems to be the TV catalog (which isn't truly awful) and the original series, which have mostly been good.
At this stage, if I lived without the Greek Chorus of wife and son complaining about their inability to "just watch TV" I'd probably ditch Netflix completely and just buy stuff I knew I would like. I might check Amazon instant for series, but I'm really kind of tired of the selection/quality decision paralysis of streaming.
I have an ancient PS/2 IBM branded keyboard and, frankly, it is pretty gross, even after a liberal application of clorox wipes and a shop vac.
Has anyone every run a an IBM buckling spring keyboard through a dishwasher, and then let it air dry for a good long while, maybe in front of a fan or even sealed in a bag with a metric shitload of silica gel?
I'm sorely tempted to do this, even though I could probably just buy a Unicomp.
That's interesting. We ended up replacing a 2100 with an R530 at one client, and nothing is being done with the 2100 now, so it might be amusing to see what could be done.
Do you know of any specific links to repurposing netgear storage with linux or other open source software?
I guess I'm old and time-challenged enough that the sheer hackery isn't worth it to me. I would be super interested if there was an Nas4Free/FreeNAS build known to work on them. The idea of totally rolling my own with them from ground up is just more work than the results..
Every one of the Honeywell programmables I've ever used has had an internal recovery logic that tracks the time it takes to get from the setback temperature to the set point temperature by the time next program starts.
I doubt it's Google, cloud supercomputing logic, but it worked well for me with hot water heat and fine with forced air.
The learning curve seems to be an average over some recent period of time, so in Minnesota if we have a sudden warm snap after a period of very cold weather I will notice it recover slightly early for a day or two, but it's really not much of an issue because the warmer outdoor weather also means that the house doesn't lose as much heat, either.
I use 60 as my overnight (10-5:30 am) set back temperature and the same during the day (8 am - 5 PM) and never walk into a cold house unless I come in at 2 PM or something. Middle of the night bathroom trips can be frosty.
Maybe if I owned the devices, yeah, but as customer owned equipment that had to basically work the day they were bought it's really not an option.
My suspicion is the 32xx 12 bay model is probably enough of a real x86 system on the inside that you might even get something like FreeNAS/NAS4Free installed on them. I think the 21xx models would be a lot harder to work with with oddball ARM CPUs and ROM firmware that would require some kind of custom bootloader to work around.
I limit my use of them, too, to scenarios where I need a limited amount of "advanced" functionality and the knowledge the customer would never pay for enterprise hardware. The storage products are merely backup targets.
What's even more frustrating is that they worked well enough for long enough that we even became official Netgear resellers and the fucking channel people were total tools. I exchanged email explaining in detail my experience across the entire product line and requesting access to tier II+ technical support to at least find out how to gather more advanced troubleshooting info than the lame internal logging system.
The answer was "Well, if you have case numbers..." and I'm like fuck you, we're not paying $99/incident for 5 devices for your tier I morons (did it once, worst experience ever, the recording from card services is more intelligent).
I told the sales people the storage devices were verboten on any project I worked on and that I would physically sabotage the equipment to avoid using it, so put on your big boy pants and sell something else. As it turns out, for the typical kinds of backup storage we need a low-end Dell R530 has been mostly cost competitive and beats the living shit out of the crippled ntegears in performance.
What's obnoxious about the lack of movie content isn't just that there's little there, it's how Netflix floods the movies that are there with the most atrocious, D-list content imaginable and then plays games to make browsing the content extremely difficult in order to mask how little there is to watch.
Amazon Instant isn't a lot better, but lately I've been noticing more quality movie titles on Amazon Instant than Netflix.
When HBONOW became available I subscribed and while their movie content is smaller, the quality level is so much higher. I would seriously consider dropping Netflix (except for the disc service, which I still use) if my son didn't find a bunch of stuff to watch on there. We already axed cable to the lowest basic level (it's the only viable ISP), so cutting Netflix would put me on the TV shitlist at home.
The NY Times reported they have something like 25 straight days (as in 25x24 hours) worth of original content coming within the next year, maybe that will help, but I feel like they're pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel of what content they're able to license.
I used to be something of a loyalist of Netgear products as a decent tradeoff of high end functionality vs. low end pricing, but lately they've been really letting me down and I've been avoiding them.
The last Netgear 12 port PoE managed switch I got could not be managed by any browser other than Firefox. Neither any shade of IE I had nor bog-standard Chrome could get into it. Their interface is also extremely tedious to use. Slow responses and stuff like setting VLANs requires constantly navigating a series of dropdowns that get collapsed as soon as you select something. You also have to be careful not to completely lock yourself out of the management UI; it's possible to actually leave management on a VLAN not assigned to any port. It's factory-reset time there. You could also do that with a Cisco, but the Netgear doesn't have a serial port to fix this.
Their ReadyNAS storage devices also gained horrible bugs around November 2014 that still aren't fixed. Under sustained loads they will completely lose all network connectivity -- no web UI, no iSCSI, no ping -- power cycle is the only thing that fixes them. Prior to this update they were extremely reliable, taking hours of pounding via iSCSI every day without any hiccup. I saw this up and down the entire product line, from the 12 bay units to the older 4 bay units. It really pissed me off on the 12 bay units, they're basically full-size 2U servers and should have more than enough compute inside.
It's sad because I once had a client with a nearly new HP ProCurve testing a flash based SAN and unable to get the throughput he was expecting. As an almost joke, we dropped my GS108 (unmanaged, jumbo-capable) 8 port gigabit in place of it and met his performance numbers.
I have a Honeywell 7 day and with lithium AAAs I get 18 months before a low battery warning.
I just don't see the value add from the added complexity of the Nest. The day periods and days on mine are individually programmable and for the most part it really fits our lives just fine. If by chance I'm home during a programmed turndown, it's really not hard to bump up the temperature and it will automatically go back to following the program at the next interval start period.
I pretty much don't want the air conditioning to dial back when we're gone in the summer, having to recover a couple of degrees of cooling from 5 PM onward in the summer is really slow. Nor am I convinced that cooling the house off in the winter when we're gone for a couple of hours is worth the continuous run necessary to recover the temperature. Long periods overnight are fine, we're under down comforters and I sleep better in cool temps anyway.
I can only guess that if there was a new schema for phone numbers (er, maybe "communications identifiers") one of two things would happen.
The geeks would win, and the identifiers would be obnoxiously long because some committee decided it needed to scale out to pan-galactic levels, include a cryptographic signature and be directly transliterable across every language, including Klingon, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and the language of a tribe in the Amazon basin that only uses clicks and whistles and writes only by stacking the skulls of its enemies.
Or, the marketers would win, in which case the free identifiers would include an ad for a product and all the intelligible identifiers would be owned by McCann-Erickson advertising.
Yeah, but it's a profit center. There are people literally willing to pay to work in exchange for the official title of "Planetary Defense Officer".
You can walk into a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and tell them to pipe down, you're not working on national defense, you're working on planetary defense.
Whatever new standard we had would end with the rough equivalent of a machine-generated Google mail address. BobMa1283.
You could possibly use a scheme like base-36 instead of just numbers. 212-555-1212 shortens up to Z5HXT9, but I'm not sure that's necessarily easier to remember. I can easily see some kind neuropsychologist explaining that a longer all-digit number is actually easier to remember because it has fewer symbols.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised that there's not a market in refurbished cars.
Accident free models with no frame problems or known gremlins. Go over the mechanicals with a fine toothed comb, put the suspension wear parts back to new, make sure all the systems work and work within new specs. Swap out the interior with a new interior -- seats, headliner, console, maybe even dash and instrumentation. Paint the body and replace any worn parts.
Make the car nearly new appearance wise. I'm sure it's a ton of labor, which is why I would kind of expect some kind of cottage industry in India (like shipbreaking). The parts might be expensive, but the idea would be to put in aftermarket components as much as possible, and maybe at some kind of scale build your own and build in upgrades to dash/electronics.
Maybe it's all unrealistic, but I do know there is a cottage industry in rebuilding insurance writeoffs. I knew a guy whose business it was to buy insurance wrecks, repair or rebuild them and then sell them. I saw a couple and they were really nice and cheaper than used models of the same age.
I just think the carmakers like Toyota have built some increadibly durable cars that often wear out not because the drivetrain is worn out, but because the interior is shot, the paint is faded. Refurbished (with good attention to the drivetrain) it'd be like new, especially if the interior had infotainment upgrades.
Reading your statement and looking at a picture of a white Pekingese next to a brindled Great Dane and trying to understand how normal, healthy humans can vary by 10x in mass and 3-5x in height and girth.
There is no Russian pavilion. There have been rumors and plans of one, but it has never been built.
I keep waiting for the SJWs to complain about the lack of an African pavilion. There's kind of a pit stop space that could house one, but it's never been built. I suppose the counter argument might be that they instead built an entire theme park for Africa, Animal Kingdom, but a fair amount of that park isn't specifically set in Africa although the Tree of Life and the safari part of it give it an African dominated theme.
I've always wondered who runs the country pavilions. They have a slightly not-run-by-Disney feel them. Sure, you can use your magic band to pay for stuff in their food stalls and restaurants and gift shops and the employees have Disney nametags on, but it always seems sort of not quite Disney otherwise. The Chinese pavilion even more so. And AFAICT they are staffed almost entirely by nationals of the country.
I think the Chinese pavilion was there when the park opened (we went as a family in Christmas of '82), so if it was staffed with Chinese nationals, maybe the FBI was being just kind of run of the mill paranoid about a bunch of Party-approved nationals being in the US during a relatively heated part of the cold war a short drive from NASA and all its space technology.
Overall, it seems kind of paranoid. Were they worried about the Chinese undermining our lead in audio animatronics and Imagineering?
It makes me wonder if there's an underground market for wifi gear that is capable of exceeding the power limits to help deal with this.
I know it's illegal (and maybe it wouldn't help, either, since you'd have to hack the clients, too, to get full use out of it). I'd kind of chalk it up, though, to how are they gonna catch you? I don't often see FCC radio snooping vans driving down my street (they do have little rotating dishes on the roof, don't they?). And I know that nobody in my neighborhood would think to call anyone because their wireless didn't work well, either.
I think there's a lot of reasons for this, most surrounding money.
My perception with a lot of owner-run businesses is that they see every dollar spent on expenses as a dollar out of their pockets. I mostly see this as short-sighted, but it's probably an impossible bias not to have as a small business owner. But it's mostly short-sighted because they're all too willing to scrimp on useful updates that will save them labor hours and save them from data loss. They'd get a lot of benefit from a small enough amount of money that it wouldn't really affect their income or wealth.
I think they may also (mostly wisely) be trying to avoid the complexity and money sinkhole of buying too much technology. I think they want to keep businesses at a simple enough level that they can control and understand a lot of details. Maybe this becomes too much of a micromanagement obsession, but maybe a simple, easy to run business is more likely to succeed than an optimally computerized one that gets bogged down in complexity.
My understanding (and experience) with opioids is that the tolerance is mostly to the psychological effects, not the actual pain reduction.
This was also my personal experience after an accident ripped my hand up, requiring half of a finger to be amputated and a bone fusion in the other finger.
I got decent pain relief on a fixed quantity of oxycodone for about 4-5 months.
Not sure if that counts as "chronic pain" but without oxycodone, my hand hurt like crazy until it had sufficiently healed. Maybe it's different for people with irreparable back problems or something where there's a greater level of pain.
Do think this is always true, and if so, how do you explain something like the NY Times publication of the Pentagon Papers or the Washington Post investigation into Watergate?
In both of those cases, the paper went heavily against establishment interests, which would presumably mean for the most part, corporate interests, too.
Do they do animal testing with drugs like this on chimps or monkeys to ascertain this kind of safety ahead of time before giving it to humans?
I would imagine they might have given it to rats just to make sure they didn't fall over dead immediately, maybe dogs, too, but I would expect that chimps would have a brain structure more similar to humans and might have been more revealing in safety of a drug like this.
I can appreciate where some chimp experiments might be a bit harsh, but a pain killer that you have good reason to think might work and might relieve pain would seem to be on the lighter side of animal testing and certainly better than dead humans.
Of course we do, all the truly effective ones now are opioids and they get you high, too, and our Calvinist morality and repressive drug control regime hates this, so we are desperately trying to find something, anything, that actually works as a painkiller without any euphoric side effects.
True, there are some alternatives, but all the really heavy anti-inflammatories have nasty cardiovascular risks and the others, like gabapentin do some nasty things to neurotransmitters and really only have marginal effectiveness (in addition to getting you weirdly high the first few days you take them, I know first hand).
We *could* just try to figure out tests that help sort out why some people are prone to addiction from opioids and make sure to monitor their therapies more closely (or come up with ways to augment them to reduce addiction risk), but that would mean allowing the rest of the population pain relief and euphoria, and that's just not right with God's Plan.
At least one of the Honeywell programmables I've owned had an external temperature sensor option so that the thermostat actually knew what the temperature outside was. I think the manual said something about the thermostat having better recovery logic and/or better setpoint holding.
I guess it makes sense, it gives you a better sense of how the heating system responds to actual outdoor temperature conditions, enabling improved recovery and keeping the internal temperature more even, probably by adjusting the deadzone.
I could mostly buy into the idea that this was something of a self-reinforcing process where the people who got into tribal leadership positions initially did so through some genetic advantages in health, strength, and intelligence.
The initial advantage (probably in hunting) gave them access to superior nutrition, increasing their own survival and increasing the likelihood of having offspring, and offspring that grew larger and healthier.
As cultures and roles solidified, these people were in a good place to claim leadership based on demonstrated attributes (leading more successful hunts, killing more enemies) as well as possessing some inherent personality traits that gave them more charisma or being able to defeat challengers from within their own ranks.
Over time this leadership group evolved into an aristocracy, whose superior access to food, shelter, selection of mates (IIRC, there have been cross-cultural studies of beauty that align with physical traits associated with childbearing) likely enabled their children significant advantages, warding off some of the endemic developmental problems of poor nutrition, disease exposure, and so on, in addition to situational advantages -- like being able to gain exposure to learning and teaching versus taking immediate risks (I would imagine being taught how to hunt dangerous game or fight in combat by someone skilled and successful at it would have some survival value versus doing it without much exposure to training).
I doubt it's a perfect long term system, as eventually the aristocracy can grow sclerotic and actual shelter the weak, in addition to inbreeding promoting genetic defects -- look at hemophilia among the European aristocracy.
As a side note, I've done some work at an extremely exclusive country club, and I'm always kind of surprised at how healthy and vigorous appearing the rich are. Slim, well-toned, attractive, few signs of any of the dietary-driven obesity of poor people or evidence of the chronic illnesses and development issues.
My best guess is some kind of differential pricing strategy, lowering prices somewhat for some markets as the price they extract, er, charge, in some markets is too high for all markets and they don't want people arbitraging on their own to get a discount.
There might also be contractual terms that require them to guarantee exclusivity in a given market. If you have the rights in some small country which neither creates the content or manufactures the physical product, you might be worried about your market getting flooded with lower-cost versions and you want to be sure the license holder makes some effort to keep that product out of your area.
Or may be the contractual terms the content creator agreed to with the cast/crew, with differing royalties and rights available in different markets.
And maybe it's not even that, but some kind of on-paper accounting scheme that frees them from taxes or something on products sold in other regions.
Then there's the censorship conspiracy angle, where it might have been believed that region coding would be considered friendly to censorship-minded authorities. The DVD region map kind of aligns along broad cultural and more narrow political boundaries. If a particular title is acceptable in Region 1 but offends some country in another region, the region code (in theory, not in practice) provides a "but we tried" excuse that prevents objectionable content from appearing in a given region.
Given that Blu-Ray collapsed the region scheme into 3 regions, this is probably not extremely likely, but it doesn't seem entirely unlikely it didn't somehow get into the sales pitch for the original DVD region scheme.
I am not aware of any other mainstream competitors for flat-fee all-you-can-view offerings.
Amazon is a reasonable challenger -- a lot of Netflix catalog overlap, and their original programming is nearly on par with Netflix, maybe better depending on your tastes. They also don't seem to have as many of the licensing problems that Netflix has that hinder their selection; they seem to have a slightly better catalog of films. And you get all the other benefits of prime,which these days are nothing to sneeze at -- lots of cloud storage, their cloud music, and cheap, fast product delivery.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been hornswaggled by a Netflix movie that sounded good but ended up being awful. At this point its only streaming value seems to be the TV catalog (which isn't truly awful) and the original series, which have mostly been good.
At this stage, if I lived without the Greek Chorus of wife and son complaining about their inability to "just watch TV" I'd probably ditch Netflix completely and just buy stuff I knew I would like. I might check Amazon instant for series, but I'm really kind of tired of the selection/quality decision paralysis of streaming.
I have an ancient PS/2 IBM branded keyboard and, frankly, it is pretty gross, even after a liberal application of clorox wipes and a shop vac.
Has anyone every run a an IBM buckling spring keyboard through a dishwasher, and then let it air dry for a good long while, maybe in front of a fan or even sealed in a bag with a metric shitload of silica gel?
I'm sorely tempted to do this, even though I could probably just buy a Unicomp.
That's interesting. We ended up replacing a 2100 with an R530 at one client, and nothing is being done with the 2100 now, so it might be amusing to see what could be done.
Do you know of any specific links to repurposing netgear storage with linux or other open source software?
I guess I'm old and time-challenged enough that the sheer hackery isn't worth it to me. I would be super interested if there was an Nas4Free/FreeNAS build known to work on them. The idea of totally rolling my own with them from ground up is just more work than the results..
Every one of the Honeywell programmables I've ever used has had an internal recovery logic that tracks the time it takes to get from the setback temperature to the set point temperature by the time next program starts.
I doubt it's Google, cloud supercomputing logic, but it worked well for me with hot water heat and fine with forced air.
The learning curve seems to be an average over some recent period of time, so in Minnesota if we have a sudden warm snap after a period of very cold weather I will notice it recover slightly early for a day or two, but it's really not much of an issue because the warmer outdoor weather also means that the house doesn't lose as much heat, either.
I use 60 as my overnight (10-5:30 am) set back temperature and the same during the day (8 am - 5 PM) and never walk into a cold house unless I come in at 2 PM or something. Middle of the night bathroom trips can be frosty.
Maybe if I owned the devices, yeah, but as customer owned equipment that had to basically work the day they were bought it's really not an option.
My suspicion is the 32xx 12 bay model is probably enough of a real x86 system on the inside that you might even get something like FreeNAS/NAS4Free installed on them. I think the 21xx models would be a lot harder to work with with oddball ARM CPUs and ROM firmware that would require some kind of custom bootloader to work around.
I limit my use of them, too, to scenarios where I need a limited amount of "advanced" functionality and the knowledge the customer would never pay for enterprise hardware. The storage products are merely backup targets.
What's even more frustrating is that they worked well enough for long enough that we even became official Netgear resellers and the fucking channel people were total tools. I exchanged email explaining in detail my experience across the entire product line and requesting access to tier II+ technical support to at least find out how to gather more advanced troubleshooting info than the lame internal logging system.
The answer was "Well, if you have case numbers..." and I'm like fuck you, we're not paying $99/incident for 5 devices for your tier I morons (did it once, worst experience ever, the recording from card services is more intelligent).
I told the sales people the storage devices were verboten on any project I worked on and that I would physically sabotage the equipment to avoid using it, so put on your big boy pants and sell something else. As it turns out, for the typical kinds of backup storage we need a low-end Dell R530 has been mostly cost competitive and beats the living shit out of the crippled ntegears in performance.
What's obnoxious about the lack of movie content isn't just that there's little there, it's how Netflix floods the movies that are there with the most atrocious, D-list content imaginable and then plays games to make browsing the content extremely difficult in order to mask how little there is to watch.
Amazon Instant isn't a lot better, but lately I've been noticing more quality movie titles on Amazon Instant than Netflix.
When HBONOW became available I subscribed and while their movie content is smaller, the quality level is so much higher. I would seriously consider dropping Netflix (except for the disc service, which I still use) if my son didn't find a bunch of stuff to watch on there. We already axed cable to the lowest basic level (it's the only viable ISP), so cutting Netflix would put me on the TV shitlist at home.
The NY Times reported they have something like 25 straight days (as in 25x24 hours) worth of original content coming within the next year, maybe that will help, but I feel like they're pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel of what content they're able to license.
I used to be something of a loyalist of Netgear products as a decent tradeoff of high end functionality vs. low end pricing, but lately they've been really letting me down and I've been avoiding them.
The last Netgear 12 port PoE managed switch I got could not be managed by any browser other than Firefox. Neither any shade of IE I had nor bog-standard Chrome could get into it. Their interface is also extremely tedious to use. Slow responses and stuff like setting VLANs requires constantly navigating a series of dropdowns that get collapsed as soon as you select something. You also have to be careful not to completely lock yourself out of the management UI; it's possible to actually leave management on a VLAN not assigned to any port. It's factory-reset time there. You could also do that with a Cisco, but the Netgear doesn't have a serial port to fix this.
Their ReadyNAS storage devices also gained horrible bugs around November 2014 that still aren't fixed. Under sustained loads they will completely lose all network connectivity -- no web UI, no iSCSI, no ping -- power cycle is the only thing that fixes them. Prior to this update they were extremely reliable, taking hours of pounding via iSCSI every day without any hiccup. I saw this up and down the entire product line, from the 12 bay units to the older 4 bay units. It really pissed me off on the 12 bay units, they're basically full-size 2U servers and should have more than enough compute inside.
It's sad because I once had a client with a nearly new HP ProCurve testing a flash based SAN and unable to get the throughput he was expecting. As an almost joke, we dropped my GS108 (unmanaged, jumbo-capable) 8 port gigabit in place of it and met his performance numbers.
I have a Honeywell 7 day and with lithium AAAs I get 18 months before a low battery warning.
I just don't see the value add from the added complexity of the Nest. The day periods and days on mine are individually programmable and for the most part it really fits our lives just fine. If by chance I'm home during a programmed turndown, it's really not hard to bump up the temperature and it will automatically go back to following the program at the next interval start period.
I pretty much don't want the air conditioning to dial back when we're gone in the summer, having to recover a couple of degrees of cooling from 5 PM onward in the summer is really slow. Nor am I convinced that cooling the house off in the winter when we're gone for a couple of hours is worth the continuous run necessary to recover the temperature. Long periods overnight are fine, we're under down comforters and I sleep better in cool temps anyway.
I can only guess that if there was a new schema for phone numbers (er, maybe "communications identifiers") one of two things would happen.
The geeks would win, and the identifiers would be obnoxiously long because some committee decided it needed to scale out to pan-galactic levels, include a cryptographic signature and be directly transliterable across every language, including Klingon, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and the language of a tribe in the Amazon basin that only uses clicks and whistles and writes only by stacking the skulls of its enemies.
Or, the marketers would win, in which case the free identifiers would include an ad for a product and all the intelligible identifiers would be owned by McCann-Erickson advertising.
Does it come with a cute little pile of unused cable management arms in the corner?
Yeah, but it's a profit center. There are people literally willing to pay to work in exchange for the official title of "Planetary Defense Officer".
You can walk into a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and tell them to pipe down, you're not working on national defense, you're working on planetary defense.
Whatever new standard we had would end with the rough equivalent of a machine-generated Google mail address. BobMa1283.
You could possibly use a scheme like base-36 instead of just numbers. 212-555-1212 shortens up to Z5HXT9, but I'm not sure that's necessarily easier to remember. I can easily see some kind neuropsychologist explaining that a longer all-digit number is actually easier to remember because it has fewer symbols.