... but it irks me to no end that I get charged $150/hour for any onsite work, regardless of the complexity. Installing a new hard drive on a workstation shouldn't...
No, but that $150 for the first hour tries to cover the overheads - sourcing parts, organising the tech, getting to your site, etc. It also acts as a discouragement, to prevent you from calling them out to replace printer toner, paper, help people locate their "Any" key, etc.
(Don't laugh - I've seen people call out their IT contractors for 2 of those 3 things...)
The $150 for the second and subsequent hours is because, by that time, it is getting to a suitable level of difficulty...
When your battery powered unit quits working because your batteries have gone dead, I'll be nice and let you listen to my hand cranked radio.
And when your hand-cranked radio is useless because of the E.M.P., I'll lend you my kidnapped geologist to find you some galena crystals to make your own crystal set.
Seriously: when the big one drops, find yourself a geologist and a biologist to hang out with. At a pinch, a physicist and botanist will do...
Ramsey Electronics sells 50 watt LPFM stations in a box starting at $4000.
Yes, but I could build a 50W AM transmitter from the junk lying on my workbench. Not only do I not have to hope Ramsey is still open and shipping after the Apocalypse, but I won't even have to walk down to the letterbox!
(Actually, looking at my workbench now, I've probably got the bits for a LP FM transmitter too. Still, my workbench may be exceptional - while it's possible to build an AM transmitter out of anything more complicated than a torch...)
The "I demand something for nothing crowd" is a very small percentage of the internet surfing population.
And this is the sort of insulting attitude that makes people hate advertising men and the mealy-minded companies that barrage us with advertising.
Since when did wanting an unobstructed and unpolluted field of view equal demanding something for nothing?
(Hint: the answer is "since advertising companies decided to spin it that way, and the companies that use them decided to make the promotions department a revenue centre"...)
I don't want something for nothing. I'm quite happy to pay for my purchases, thank you. What I'm not prepared to do is pay for your promotions multiple times - at point of purchase, every time I visit your website, every time I visit Google, every time I visit some other random website, every time I check my email, every time I'm watching a TV show (I'll cut you some slack for actual ad breaks, but not the overlays/banners/split-screens during programs...), etc, etc.
And to all those who complain that places like/. wouldn't survive without advertising : well, too bad. You want a website that people will visit? Be prepared to pay for it. You wanted it, you made it, you pay for it. How you pay for it is not my problem.
Listening to you whinge that people aren't playing fair when they block your ads is, unfortunately, my problem - because it's becoming increasingly hard to get away from...
RS-232 is very simple compared to ethernet and USB, and thus could be expected to be more reliable.
Also, if needs must, you can make a (very basic!) RS-232 display terminal out of a couple of 9v or 12v batteries, a switch or two, a bunch of relays, and a handful of light bulbs. Try doing that with USB!
Ha! It should, but it's been a long time since I've seen one that does - for many years now, most implementations use TTL levels, which is definitely sailing too close to the minimum +-3v in the spec, particularly for longer lines. I've even seen devices that have had their interfaces destroyed because they were given +-12v levels!
Having said that, there's plenty of proper RS-232 driver chipsets around - it's just that everybody saves 10c by not using them, and it mostly works. Personally, I blame IBM, although they didn't start it...
FWIW, RS-232 is not a data comms standard - it's primarily an electrical / mechanical standard (e.g. maximum o/c V of +-25V; logic 1=-ve, logic 0=+ve, signalling types, connector type (OK, so it's a slack standard in that respect...)), etc.
I'm just grumpy because they did away with the good ol' 20mA current loop...;-)
Actually, when I learned it, I was taught ~32V was the sweet spot between practicality, I^R losses, component size, and load type. Mind you, back then it was electrical / electromechanical loads (lights, motors, contactors, relays, etc) not electronic. And that was from a telco background (-48V), which made me wonder "well, why tell us that about 32V?";-)
But the point is, what the sweet spot is depends mostly upon the characteristics of the load - so it's wrong to come out with blanket statements like "12v happens to be a sweet spot in terms of cost of the converter components as well as overall efficiency". Yes, today, particularly with switchmode supplies and the actual maximum load V being 5v or less, it is. Tomorrow, when everything runs on 3.3v or less, it'll be closer to 5v~6v.
The other half of your argument only holds for certain types of power supplies too - but I'll give you a pass on that, seeing as you did explicitly state "synchronous buck" designs. It doesn't necessarily hold true, however, for other classes like linear, boost, buck-boost, etc. Your final assertation, however - that, for a given cost, the overall converter efficiency is usually highest if your input voltage is relatively close to the output voltage - is spot-on. Too far away from that, and the ol' V=I*R rule starts to bite you...
If it's a US-centric forum, you can't avoid partisanship. One of the very cornerstones of US political practice is partisanship - the system has largely been warped from a rational discussion of issues and direction into an "us vs them" argument ("this isn't an argument, it's just contradiction!" "No it's not..."). Of course, there'll always be a few truely non-partisan people around - the people you want to attract - but they always seem to end up being attacked by both sides.
And that's another point: you will be attacked. Trolls, swarming, astroturf, DoS, legal threats - anything and everything, every dirty trick, will be used by one or the other to destroy you. Because you threaten their beliefs, because you threaten their cosy bipolar system, and sometimes just because they need to rile up their army of like-mided followers to attack something.
(A little aside: every organisation of any power or size has some sort of hidden master/slave structure. In left-wing organisations, the two parts are sometimes called "members & militants". The militants are, well, militant; they make policy, choose targets, etc. Members exist so that (a) the militants can point and say "look, we have 30,000 supporters, so we must be right!", and (b) because 30,000 members turning up at a rally is much more impressive than 10 militants...)
Finally, it's impossible to keep it non-partisan. Gradually, in 100 different little ways, the group will show a consensus biased towards one side or the other. Even these little biases will attract one or two like-thinking members, and discourage one or two others. Eventually the tipping point is reached - and in these things, that point is almost invisible - and the bias becomes unrecoverable.
So, nice idea - and one I applaud tremendously; I can see my own country's political system becoming more and more party partisan every day because that's what the parties desire. But, ultimately, doomed to failure. It'd be a nice windmill to tilt at for a while, though...
Hmmm... which will get more press these days : an AOL "exclusive world premiere", limited to the ever-dwindling number of USAians who even bother to look at AOL, or a "OMFG! Look! A new Weird Al video on YouTube!" email & blog campaign?
I have to admit I saw it a couple of days ago on YouTube. But I likely would never have seen it if it had been released traditionally, except maybe as a filler clip on the local late-night music video program. Weird Al is not something I'd bother waiting up for or recording, even though I often get a mild chuckle from his stuff...
... was all incompetent Democrat election commissioner stuff.
Now, right there is one of the many roots of all the problems with your electoral system. Why is the position of electoral comissioner - arguably the most important position in a democracy when it comes to, y'know, actually being a democracy - a politicised position?
That's why, in real political systems the world over, the public service is traditionally staunchly apolitical. Sure, political appointments still happen - but only at the very top level; the department itself still runs fairly apolitically despite that. And, surprisingly enough, it's often those very political appointees who turn and bite the hand that fed them.
This doesn't seem to happen in the US, where every middling-to-high-level position appears to be a political appointee with complete loyalty to the Party.
As far as my knowledge goes, in my country no comissioner of elections - state or federal - has been a political appointment, even during the reign of some extremely corrupt and manipulative governments (like now, for instance...). Then again, we have a totally separate department tasked with conducting elections, right down to voter enrollment / monitoring advertising / conducting the poll / etc, and don't leave it up to the political parties to run them...
... "VoIP with bandwidth to spare, controlled low latency, and QoS is sometimes almost as good as a dedicated voice network"?
Gee, any telco engineer or high-level tech could have told you that...
Disclaimer: I've been one. From a purely technical POV, VoIP is something of a con. It's attractive to end-users because it offers a chance to break free from the telcos. It's attractive to telcos because it allows them to homogenise their networks onto a single IP-based platform. Technically, though, it's a shitload of kludges to shoehorn something into a transmission platform that was never designed for the requirements of that kind of traffic. Underneath those kludges it's unreliable, inconsistent, and doesn't scale terribly well - though, because it's based on commodity technology, it's relatively cheap to implement/expand.
Still, it's the wrong way to do it - it should be packaged as a 640x480 file (not quite, but close enough, and you've got to account for all the square-pixel PC displays...) with a widescreen/AR/anamorphic flag. That way, the player gets to decide how to play it - centre cut (with or without P&S vectors), letterboxed, or both (14:9).
Most modern codecs support such flags in the bitstream, as do modern container formats - MPEG (codec & PS/TS/ES),.mov,.mp4 (based on.mov),.mkv, etc (.avi doesn't, but let's not go there...)
(This is something the feckin' idiots in the US ruined for the rest of the world. Why not learn to set the display mode properly in your DVD players, rather than bitching about black bars or tall skinny people on your 4:3 TV's - forcing distributors to letterbox perfectly good 16:9 & 2.21:1 content into a 4:3 flagged frame?)
If you're using a tube-based NTSC television, you're only seeing ~200 lines of resolution anyway.
Crap - or if it's true, NTSC TV's suck way more than I thought they did. I know in PAL-land, measuring actual standard def CRT screen resolution of 76cm 16:9 sets by using a linen tester or similar, you get numbers in the order of 700~850 discernable lines. This is a function of the shadow mask/grid size/layout and beam deflection circuitry. HD CRT's of the same size generally top out ~1000 lines.
So, in effect, for SD sets in PAL countries the vertical resolution of the CRT tube is 25%~50% higher than that of the video signal (576 lines, less overscan). I should imagine it's similar - or possibly even better, given that they likely use the same tube &/or mask for NTSC - in the US.
Neatness is one thing, but those examples just look like an advertising photo for nylon wire ties. I mean, they look nice now, but what happens when you need to move one of those connections around, say from one port to another?
You don't - that's the back of the rack you're looking at, not the front of the patch-panel...
(And if you do need to change a subrack for something different, you pretty much have to replace all the cabling anyway.)
Having said that, those pics look like nothing more than (what used to be) standard telco cabling practices. We used to do that, day in, day out, with 100/200 pr cotton-braided cable - and we didn't have zip-ties, we did block-lacing. Hell, if I'd done work as sloppy as some of that 20+ years ago when I was an apprentice, I would have been failed!
Has a case against region locking ever reached a court in any country?
In Australia, it was determined by the ACCC that regional restrictions on DVDs were "an anti-competitive practice and a breach of the Trade Practices Act", on the basis that "It is a breach of Australian law to make an agreement off-shore that harms competition in Australia".
(No primary source links because the fsckin' ACCC website is down...)
More relevant to the discussion at hand : the Sony vs Stevens case, where (after much to-ing, fro-ing, and appeals) it was ruled that mod chips to circumvent game region locking were legal, having "substantial non-infringing use" in allowing owners to play imported games.
Note that the current status of both of these has been considerably muddied by subsequent events, particularly the AUSFTA and copyright amendment reviews.
You've got my point wrong; or maybe I didn't really make it properly.
You're right, for the most part: it doesn't really matter - except that, each time they do it, they're lying to you. Every night, day after day, week after week, year after year, they're playing viewers for suckers. Hardly the way to build a trust relationship is it? And yet, that's exactly what networks claim they want - for you, the loyal viewer, to trust them, the benevolent and responsible provider. Why else do they often build their advertising around that very fact?
Then there's the few times when it does matter. We've had a run of cases here recently where important local, or even statewide, events have been ignored, or gotten half-arsed - or, in a couple of cases, totally wrong - coverage, purely because they've almost no local capacity left, preferring to wing it from the other end of the country.
And, sometimes, you have no choice. If all the radio & TV stations are networked and headquarted elsewhere, and all the local papers are subsidiaries of national (or even international) organisations, then you don't have choice at all - not even the choice to stop watching/reading...
Interesting - I didn't know about Club Internet, but I remember reading a while ago that France Telecom / Orange was planning on ditching MS in favour of something that actually worked - Nokia, or maybe Siemens.
I'm particularly intrigued by their choice of a pink tampon as representative of the average clubinternet user...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
(Don't laugh - I've seen people call out their IT contractors for 2 of those 3 things...)
The $150 for the second and subsequent hours is because, by that time, it is getting to a suitable level of difficulty...
It's a vegetable shaped like a ... you know ... a thingy.
...
Which is ironic, because
Seriously: when the big one drops, find yourself a geologist and a biologist to hang out with. At a pinch, a physicist and botanist will do...
(Actually, looking at my workbench now, I've probably got the bits for a LP FM transmitter too. Still, my workbench may be exceptional - while it's possible to build an AM transmitter out of anything more complicated than a torch...)
Since when did wanting an unobstructed and unpolluted field of view equal demanding something for nothing?
(Hint: the answer is "since advertising companies decided to spin it that way, and the companies that use them decided to make the promotions department a revenue centre"...)
I don't want something for nothing. I'm quite happy to pay for my purchases, thank you. What I'm not prepared to do is pay for your promotions multiple times - at point of purchase, every time I visit your website, every time I visit Google, every time I visit some other random website, every time I check my email, every time I'm watching a TV show (I'll cut you some slack for actual ad breaks, but not the overlays/banners/split-screens during programs...), etc, etc.
And to all those who complain that places like
Listening to you whinge that people aren't playing fair when they block your ads is , unfortunately, my problem - because it's becoming increasingly hard to get away from...
There's a lot of good info and advice in the Bible...
Ah. Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Having said that, there's plenty of proper RS-232 driver chipsets around - it's just that everybody saves 10c by not using them, and it mostly works. Personally, I blame IBM, although they didn't start it...
FWIW, RS-232 is not a data comms standard - it's primarily an electrical / mechanical standard (e.g. maximum o/c V of +-25V; logic 1=-ve, logic 0=+ve, signalling types, connector type (OK, so it's a slack standard in that respect...)), etc.
I'm just grumpy because they did away with the good ol' 20mA current loop...
Actually, when I learned it, I was taught ~32V was the sweet spot between practicality, I^R losses, component size, and load type. Mind you, back then it was electrical / electromechanical loads (lights, motors, contactors, relays, etc) not electronic. And that was from a telco background (-48V), which made me wonder "well, why tell us that about 32V?" ;-)
But the point is, what the sweet spot is depends mostly upon the characteristics of the load - so it's wrong to come out with blanket statements like "12v happens to be a sweet spot in terms of cost of the converter components as well as overall efficiency". Yes, today, particularly with switchmode supplies and the actual maximum load V being 5v or less, it is. Tomorrow, when everything runs on 3.3v or less, it'll be closer to 5v~6v.
The other half of your argument only holds for certain types of power supplies too - but I'll give you a pass on that, seeing as you did explicitly state "synchronous buck" designs. It doesn't necessarily hold true, however, for other classes like linear, boost, buck-boost, etc. Your final assertation, however - that, for a given cost, the overall converter efficiency is usually highest if your input voltage is relatively close to the output voltage - is spot-on. Too far away from that, and the ol' V=I*R rule starts to bite you...
A few reasons :
If it's a US-centric forum, you can't avoid partisanship. One of the very cornerstones of US political practice is partisanship - the system has largely been warped from a rational discussion of issues and direction into an "us vs them" argument ("this isn't an argument, it's just contradiction!" "No it's not..."). Of course, there'll always be a few truely non-partisan people around - the people you want to attract - but they always seem to end up being attacked by both sides.
And that's another point: you will be attacked. Trolls, swarming, astroturf, DoS, legal threats - anything and everything, every dirty trick, will be used by one or the other to destroy you. Because you threaten their beliefs, because you threaten their cosy bipolar system, and sometimes just because they need to rile up their army of like-mided followers to attack something.
(A little aside: every organisation of any power or size has some sort of hidden master/slave structure. In left-wing organisations, the two parts are sometimes called "members & militants". The militants are, well, militant; they make policy, choose targets, etc. Members exist so that (a) the militants can point and say "look, we have 30,000 supporters, so we must be right!", and (b) because 30,000 members turning up at a rally is much more impressive than 10 militants...)
Finally, it's impossible to keep it non-partisan. Gradually, in 100 different little ways, the group will show a consensus biased towards one side or the other. Even these little biases will attract one or two like-thinking members, and discourage one or two others. Eventually the tipping point is reached - and in these things, that point is almost invisible - and the bias becomes unrecoverable.
So, nice idea - and one I applaud tremendously; I can see my own country's political system becoming more and more party partisan every day because that's what the parties desire. But, ultimately, doomed to failure. It'd be a nice windmill to tilt at for a while, though...
Hmmm... which will get more press these days : an AOL "exclusive world premiere", limited to the ever-dwindling number of USAians who even bother to look at AOL, or a "OMFG! Look! A new Weird Al video on YouTube!" email & blog campaign?
I have to admit I saw it a couple of days ago on YouTube. But I likely would never have seen it if it had been released traditionally, except maybe as a filler clip on the local late-night music video program. Weird Al is not something I'd bother waiting up for or recording, even though I often get a mild chuckle from his stuff...
That's why, in real political systems the world over, the public service is traditionally staunchly apolitical. Sure, political appointments still happen - but only at the very top level; the department itself still runs fairly apolitically despite that. And, surprisingly enough, it's often those very political appointees who turn and bite the hand that fed them.
This doesn't seem to happen in the US, where every middling-to-high-level position appears to be a political appointee with complete loyalty to the Party.
As far as my knowledge goes, in my country no comissioner of elections - state or federal - has been a political appointment, even during the reign of some extremely corrupt and manipulative governments (like now, for instance...). Then again, we have a totally separate department tasked with conducting elections, right down to voter enrollment / monitoring advertising / conducting the poll / etc, and don't leave it up to the political parties to run them...
F00F
... "VoIP with bandwidth to spare, controlled low latency, and QoS is sometimes almost as good as a dedicated voice network"?
Gee, any telco engineer or high-level tech could have told you that...
Disclaimer: I've been one. From a purely technical POV, VoIP is something of a con. It's attractive to end-users because it offers a chance to break free from the telcos. It's attractive to telcos because it allows them to homogenise their networks onto a single IP-based platform. Technically, though, it's a shitload of kludges to shoehorn something into a transmission platform that was never designed for the requirements of that kind of traffic. Underneath those kludges it's unreliable, inconsistent, and doesn't scale terribly well - though, because it's based on commodity technology, it's relatively cheap to implement/expand.
Still, it's the wrong way to do it - it should be packaged as a 640x480 file (not quite, but close enough, and you've got to account for all the square-pixel PC displays...) with a widescreen/AR/anamorphic flag. That way, the player gets to decide how to play it - centre cut (with or without P&S vectors), letterboxed, or both (14:9).
.mov, .mp4 (based on .mov), .mkv, etc (.avi doesn't, but let's not go there...)
Most modern codecs support such flags in the bitstream, as do modern container formats - MPEG (codec & PS/TS/ES),
(This is something the feckin' idiots in the US ruined for the rest of the world. Why not learn to set the display mode properly in your DVD players, rather than bitching about black bars or tall skinny people on your 4:3 TV's - forcing distributors to letterbox perfectly good 16:9 & 2.21:1 content into a 4:3 flagged frame?)
So, in effect, for SD sets in PAL countries the vertical resolution of the CRT tube is 25%~50% higher than that of the video signal (576 lines, less overscan). I should imagine it's similar - or possibly even better, given that they likely use the same tube &/or mask for NTSC - in the US.
(And if you do need to change a subrack for something different, you pretty much have to replace all the cabling anyway.)
Having said that, those pics look like nothing more than (what used to be) standard telco cabling practices. We used to do that, day in, day out, with 100/200 pr cotton-braided cable - and we didn't have zip-ties, we did block-lacing. Hell, if I'd done work as sloppy as some of that 20+ years ago when I was an apprentice, I would have been failed!
(No primary source links because the fsckin' ACCC website is down...)
More relevant to the discussion at hand : the Sony vs Stevens case, where (after much to-ing, fro-ing, and appeals) it was ruled that mod chips to circumvent game region locking were legal, having "substantial non-infringing use" in allowing owners to play imported games.
Note that the current status of both of these has been considerably muddied by subsequent events, particularly the AUSFTA and copyright amendment reviews.
Yeah - by cutting them in half and counting the rings...
You've got my point wrong; or maybe I didn't really make it properly.
You're right, for the most part: it doesn't really matter - except that, each time they do it, they're lying to you. Every night, day after day, week after week, year after year, they're playing viewers for suckers. Hardly the way to build a trust relationship is it? And yet, that's exactly what networks claim they want - for you, the loyal viewer, to trust them, the benevolent and responsible provider. Why else do they often build their advertising around that very fact?
Then there's the few times when it does matter. We've had a run of cases here recently where important local, or even statewide, events have been ignored, or gotten half-arsed - or, in a couple of cases, totally wrong - coverage, purely because they've almost no local capacity left, preferring to wing it from the other end of the country.
And, sometimes, you have no choice. If all the radio & TV stations are networked and headquarted elsewhere, and all the local papers are subsidiaries of national (or even international) organisations, then you don't have choice at all - not even the choice to stop watching/reading...
Interesting - I didn't know about Club Internet, but I remember reading a while ago that France Telecom / Orange was planning on ditching MS in favour of something that actually worked - Nokia, or maybe Siemens.
;-)
I'm particularly intrigued by their choice of a pink tampon as representative of the average clubinternet user...