We had an underground splice fail in our front yard once, about ten years after we moved in. One day everything just went dark for us and a neighbor. Friendly neighbors offered a working outlet for extension cords to run our refrigerator until the power company was able to fix the problem.
The electrician said the cause was the original splice was poorly protected from the natural elements. Someone apparently didn't get the entire splice sealed, and corrosion did the rest.
Sure, that's been once in 20 years. And none of the rest of the neighbors ever had a problem with their immediate wires. My point is that it's not impossible to have damage, mostly that I was unlucky.
Nobody calls to have utilities marked before they dig.
That's insane! The law is clear: if you called (and hand dig in the indicated areas,) the utilities are responsible for the damage and repairs. But if you didn't call and you cause damage by digging, the repair bill is 100% yours.
I've had them out to mark my lot three times in the last three years for various projects and home improvements. The service is completely free, and they guarantee all utilities will be marked within 48 hours. I can't imagine the amount of stupidity required to assume the risks of both injury and liability just because someone is too lazy to dial an f'ing telephone number.
Perhaps that is why the recommendation from Kodak as to how to backup digital photos is to print them on archival quality, photographic paper and stick 'em in an air-tight box in a dark cupboard.:-)
You smiley-faced that, but it's true. The long-term storage properties of photographic paper are fairly well understood. Magnetic media, on the other hand, is a fairly young technology.
Some of the issues I know about that have affected properly-stored media in the past include:
The adhesives used to bind magnetic media to a mylar tape or disc base deteriorate, causing the media to flake off.
The lubricants used on hard drive spindles have separated or degraded, causing "stiction" and preventing the low-torque platter motor from starting to spin. This used to happen a lot with old drives, and I found that by holding the unmounted drive in my hand and quickly rotating my wrist in line with the axis of rotation of the platter, I could sometimes get them to spin up.
Ball or roller bearings that sit idle for a long time develop tiny flat spots at the points of contact, which turn into destructive platter vibration when it is spun up.
The dyes used in various CD-Rs have faded, causing failure on playback.
Dust and dirt in the floppy drive mechanism scratched and destroyed the discs we were trying to restore from. (Of course, this was not a failure of the media but rather a failiure of ours to inspect the old hardware before trying to use it.)
The rumor mill also is pretty effective, and I've heard about the following but I'm not sure if I believe it:
Fears that the aluminium in a commercially stamped CD will degrade. I believe this was a marketing lie told in order to sell the 'gold' master CDs back in the late 1980s. (I also believe these people are now selling Monster cables at Radio Shack.)
I know most of these problems have been addressed by technological changes since the problems were discovered. Drive spindle lubrication, adhesives, bearings, and dyes have all been reformulated and reengineered since these problems arose. But it's still very hard to predict how welll some of this stuff will perform 20 years from now.
Thomas Edison beat you to this a hundred years ago.
The story I heard was that he was arguing before the court that some invention was not obvious. He placed a raw egg on the bench in front of the judges, and challenged the judges to make it stand on its pointy end. They tried balancing it, shaking it to break up the yolk, spinning it, and finally declared the task impossible. Mr. Edison took the egg and crushed the pointy end of the eggshell down on the bench, where he easily stood it on its end. One of the judges said "well, that's obvious." Mr. Edison pointed out that, not thirty seconds prior, they had declared the task impossible but now it's obvious. And that's why his patent should stand.
Of course now that I've typed it up, I can find no reference to the story. Typical me.:-( Can someone help me out?
Who here as a pile of audio CDs they bought in the 90s that are degraded beyond use?
Not me, unless you count "two" as a pile. And those two failed because I let them bang around in my truck and get scratched to hell, not because they were played or otherwise magically rotted.
Given much less care than LPs or cassette tapes, virtually all of them play as well now as they did when I bought them. ExactAudioCopy does occasionally report an error or two when I'm ripping them. I'd estimate that 90% of my discs are error free, and the rest are mostly 99% or better (EAC figures.) And while I don't deliberately manhandle them, I'm far from a paranoid audiophile with alcohol swabs and white gloves.
And as far as burn-'em-yourself discs, I've not had any data discs degrade on me (that I'm aware of.) Those, I definitely treat better than audio discs, with limited handling and their lives spent inside clean CaseLogic CD folders.
As for hard drives, I certainly haven't had the good luck you seem to be having. If I have an older drive that is powered down for a couple of years, the chances of it spinning up seem to be far from 100%. And that's not just cheap Maxtors I'm talking about (although Maxtor is no proof against failure), I've had it happen with a number of server-class SCSI drives, too. While it's certainly not a 50% fail rate, I'd guess that long-term stored hard drives seem to have only about a 90-95% chance of spinning up again.
No medium is perfect. And there's another point I've not mentioned yet, and that's the availability of readers / interface electronics. If I had backed up all my valuables on an old Winchester drive, what are the chances I'd be able to read it today? First, I'd have to find a working machine with an ISA bus, video card, possibly a monitor, a keyboard, and some kind of boot drive. I'd need to scrounge a copy of DOS, although pirating an ancient one off the Internet seems pretty doable (but creating a bootable disk is less simple.) Then, I'd have to find a WD503 ISA card for it, and cables. I'd probably have to come up with a network card, too, so I could get the data off the machine.
Of course, these same arguments will hold true for CDs and DVDs at some point in the not-too-distant future, as well as any current hard drive communications bus. Maybe it won't be BluRay or HD-DVD that spells doom for the CD/DVD/hard-drive backup plan, but it will be something.
The point of being here is the discussion. The point of being on digg is to see the article "dugg" by 1000 people, 4 times a day.
(You are off by a couple orders of magnitude, but that's OK.) What got me was TFA's "According to recent Alexa data" line. How many slashdotters have all of the common statistics-gathering sites in their adblock files already?
Besides, how much can we trust alexa, anyway? In the Top 10 society list, they included not only Digg and Slashdot, but the National Institute of Health and the IRS. I don't know how many of you chat with your buds over on forums.irs.gov, but I haven't been there much lately.
It may be, but the Ansari X-Prize didn't come with a time frame. Don't they think it's a little late to start asking industry to come up with a solution for 2010? Three and a half years may seem like a long time to get a project off the ground (so to speak,) but to design and build an entire orbit-achieving spaceship, it seems pretty short to me.
This isn't just a reworked White Knight we're talking about here. The White Knight was specifically designed to win the X-prize. Van said all along that it was a suborbital design from the get go, and was specifically not designed as a first-stage-to-orbit kind of ship.
My guess is that one of the booster makers (like Boeing or Lockheed) is going to paste a passenger capsule on top of an existing rocket. The technology of lifting is already done.
Those people don't produce enough oil on their skin.
The Pay-By-Touch salesman wasn't referring to the "oily fingerprints left as evidence at the scene of a crime", he was referring to the actual ridges and whorls on the surface of the skin. The PBT reader doesn't look for skin oils, it just reads the surface profile looking at the ridges, intersections and islands. The pineapple pickers simply don't have any texture at all on their fingertips.
Superglue, cameras, blank circuit boards, and etchant are required to make the mold. All crap I have had laying around my house for the past 20 years. And gelatin is require to make the fingerprints. That's in my pantry, and not so old. The last two ingredients are knowledge (see the link) and the lack of ethics that keep normal people from committing crimes (in sadly short supply.)
"Gummibear fingerprints" are not certainly not FUD (although they're not made from real gummibears.) They're a real attack that's easy to make, and fun to eat!
The reasons they'd work so well for fraud are numerous. First, while it's pretty easy to keep track of your fingers, it's virtually impossible to "guard" your fingerprints. You leave them everywhere -- your phone, doorknobs, keyboards, dishes, plastic bags, everywhere. It just takes a little bit of "Hardy Boys Detective Handbook" work to photograph them. Making a circuit board from a photograph is something I did a lot in 7th grade, but nowdays digital cameras and laser printers are more common than photographic enlargers. And even I can mix up gelatin without burning down the kitchen.
The neat thing is that gelatin itself is the ideal material for forging fingerprints. It is simply animal protein (it's pretty much ground up cow hooves and collagen, if you want the real details.) It's biotic matter, so it has roughly the same electrical capacitive properties as human skin. It's thin and transparent, so a "pulse detector" that senses the infrared pulses given off by circulating blood can see right through it. And if you wet it, it's kind of sticky and can easily be applied to the fingertips before heading to the cash register. Once applied, they're virtually impossible to see. Gelatin is almost indistinguishable in every way from human skin.
Everything that a fingerprint scanner can be built to look for (at a cheap enough price to sell to grocery stores) is right there on your fingertip. Even if the alarm bells sounded and the guards came running, you'd still have time to pop your finger into your mouth and eat the evidence.
The Pay-By-Touch sales representative that I met with a couple years ago told me that about 1-2% of the population has fingerprints that can't be read by their machine. Particularly affected were 'pineapple pickers.' He said the combination of the enzymes and acids in the pineapple juices plus the rough texture of the plants caused their fingerprints to be completely obliterated.
From TFA: The company pledges not to sell or rent personal information, or access to it.
I read this line too and it made me want to scream. "Company pledges" are worth exactly shit these days. "We pledge to protect your privacy and retain the right to alter this pledge at any time." "We pledge to never sell or distribute all of this personal information that we insist on gathering, really, unless we're bought out by another company that doesn't pledge this."
I don't want pledges. I don't want them to have this info, period. I don't want to receive marketing from them any more than I want it from third parties.
Now, if there was accountability behind these pledges, such as "We are bonded for a $10,000 per customer coverage to never leak any customer information" or "Under penalties of perjury with a minimum of five years prison time to be served by each member of the entire Board of Directors, we pledge to never sell or otherwise distribute any personal information collected by us. Furthermore, under threat of the same penalites we pledge to use this information only for verification of your account, and never for marketing purposes of any sort."
Those are some pledges that I'd be slightly more inclined to believe.
Oh, yeah, that was just amazing when we got our DECwriter and a 300 baud modem. It was like hog heaven, especially for some of the chatting and gaming. If you had a 300 baud terminal on MU,COMBAT, for example, you RULED the kids with the 110 baud.
The funniest thing about my post above, though, is that it's all true. We were on a time-shared CDC Cyber 73 with 60 bit words divided up into 10 characters per word. It lent a certain similarity to many programs: for example chat and mail programs all seemed to coincidentally offer 10 character nicknames. But six bits isn't enough for both upper and lower case.
But try telling any of that to kids these days and they just don't understand.:-)
Sorry, I completely missed the direction you were headed. I misread the last statement of your previous reply as saying that somehow government protections brought about the rise of the bureaus faster than pure capitalism alone, and that we'd be better off without them. Mentally that fit with the quote of mine that you chose in your rebuttal as well, as my original complaint was actually regarding the use of credit data by corporations other than credit lenders (and not simply the abuse of the data and the way it affected you.)
So it looks like we're both in agreement then, that the bureaus have too much power as a result of inadequate accountability. Whew! Glad that's over!:-)
My dad, for example, writes e-mails in all capital letters. He doesn't know not to, and I figure he's old enough to have the right to e-mail people however the hell he wants. A programmer would never write an e-mail like that.
Speak for yourself, young'n. I was programming before you were an itch in your daddy's pants. And back when I was a kid, we only HAD capital letters. Yes, sir, a six-bit character set was all we had, and we liked it! We were grateful for every one of the six bits we were given, thankful that we had a character set that supported both letters AND numbers.
Who needed those fancy-schmancy lower case letters, anyway? They were for show-offs, them and their lah-dee-dah eight-bit character sets. "Oooh, look at me, Mater, I've got both UPPER and lower case in my EBCDIC character set! I'm off to punch cards by the Grand Piano!" Well, we didn't have that rich-kid kind of money. Even if our terminal controllers did send us seven bits, we only had an upper case font cylinder in our Model 33 TeleType. And it was good enough for us! And we sent our email to real names, like SWEETHEART and PILOT and POET, not to any of these special character leet-speeking punks, them and their hoity-toity "domains"....
... zzzZZZzzz...
Wha? What are you doing here? Get off my lawn, you damn kids!
So I believe you're saying the laws governing our corporations are "socialist", or that at least they offer socialist-style protections to corporations that they don't offer to individuals. That may be, but these protections are in no way responsible for the corporate use of credit bureau data. At the most, they may affect accuracy (as you pointed out) but the protectionist laws have nothing to do with the existance of the bureaus or the or use of their data.
In a purely capitalist driven society (say in a mythical country with no protectionary laws, let's call it Aynrandia) these credit bureaus would have come about anyway. As another poster clearly stated, we consumers are not their clients. Banks and other corporations are their clients. In its role as a "back end" provider, the consumer has no direct control over the forces driving the banks to use these providers. It's conceivable (but highly unlikely) that a consumer group could organize a boycott against banks using Equifax; but the banks would then simply switch to Trans Union. The reality is that a capitalist market doesn't consider how banks do their jobs internally -- as long as their money is safe. And using a credit bureau is really a "safe" decision for a bank. "Charge people interest according to the likelihood that they'll give the money back" seems to be an ideal business decision for a bank.
So credit bureaus are good for banks. If the "socialist" or "protectionist" laws were removed, the bureaus would still exist because the capitalist pressures driving banks to use them would remain. The bureaus might be more responsive to complaints of erroneous data, but they'd still exist -- just with better data.
What about the insurance industry using the data in Aynrandia? Again, there's a behind the scenes business-to-business provider relationship. Is there a correlation between credit scores and longevity? The actuaries claim there is one. Is there a causal relationship? I'm sure we could rationalize one, but it's not likely to be very direct; in reality it doesn't matter as long as the correlation holds mostly true. So the insurance companies are free to use credit scores to set their rates. And as was the case with banking, the consumers have no leverage to control the actuarial formulas created by the insurance industry.
Protectionist laws don't matter in this case -- the bureaus created a product that is very useful to businesses and sell it aggressively. The stockholders of the banks and insurance companies are likely to be in favor of any tool that reduces their risk and maximizes their investment. And the consumers have no control over the business relationship. There's nowhere else to shop -- any bank that refused to use a credit bureau would quickly be overrun by con artists with no intentions of repaying their loans.
When you fully understand that the source of the problem with corporations is the government protection and immunities granted to them by government, you'll see the way out.
I find absolutely no correlation between government protection of corporations and the rise of the credit bureaus. The immunities have effect only on their accuracy, but none on their existance and none on their use.
Please educate yourself on how the unit works and what the buttons do before you spout off that it is "bad".
I'm afraid you have fallen completely into the trap of "accepting badness". (Don't blame yourself, bad UI is standard practice in the computer industry, honest.)
The device itself is not bad, and I did not say the device was bad. The device sounds like a wonderful piece of technology that could solve a real problem for most people. (By the way, if you work for "ASPHALT PAVING" and you called my house seven times last week, YOU SUCK!;-) And I am not now slagging the function of the device. According to what you wrote, this device couldn't be better if it transmuted lead into gold. I was convinced even before reading your post that it does a great job, and I'm seriously thinking about getting one for myself.
And none of that has anything to do with the point of my post. The user interface is still bad.
I learned everything I needed to know by watching the accompanying instructional video all the way through. It was awful to watch: Press the 'select' button a couple of times until this tiny icon shaped like a cassette tape (tapes have not been used in answering machines designed in the last seven years) and that's supposed to make me think "answering machine?" Is an answering machine good or bad? Do I want my friends to not be able to use the answering machine? Do I still "select" this person even if I don't like them? Do I hit the select button one time or twice if they're a telemarketer? (And I don't want to "save" a telemarketer anyway, I'll leave that to Jesus!)
The designer should have asked himself "does this device require icons at all?" All the buttons and the on-screen word "CALL" are printed in English, which strongly indicates the hardware is not internationalized. The "SAVE DATABASE OK!" text seems to be in roughly the same English as "ALL YOUR BASE." And think about that word -- does the average user even know what a database is, much less care? Since English seems to be the language of the device, why can't the screen display the number's state in English, too, instead of outdated icons?
Other screen oddities: why does a user care what "CALL #" it is? Does the tiny phone handset mean something useful regarding the operation of this device? What about the inverted [R] in a box or the circled (!) exclamation point? And what about the unlabeled blinking red light; is that a good thing or a bad thing? None of those are immediately intuitive nor do they seem useful for operating the device itself. (Sure, they may have some hidden meaning wrapped up in "saving or selecting", which just adds further to my point.)
Those are just some of the examples of a horrible user interface. I'm sure I could add more.
The root of the problem is the device was designed by extremly smart people. They came up with a cool idea, built hardware and wrote software to solve the problem. But these people were so close to the design of the solution that they built the UI completely around the solution they came up with and not around the problem it's solving.
The flip side of the problem is that intelligent users such as yourself recognize the device as so powerful that you're willing to overlook how badly written the manual is and learn the weird button sequences just so you can enjoy its functionality. But that doesn't mean the user interface is any good, it just means you're personally clever and adaptable.
I have no doubts that you, I and probably the rest of Slashdot would have no problems picking one up and using it. So would 20% of the population; if you stretch it, maybe 50% of Americans could eventually figure it out on their own. But why does it have to be so complex to learn and use that it requires instructions at all? It's an extremely simple device, doing an extremely simple task. It's identifying friends and foes based on their telephone number. So why
Ahh, thanks. My last working modem died a few years after I got cable internet but before I got caller ID, so I never actually got to see the CID data for myself.
Nice f'ing ad hominem attack there. Did I say anywhere it was the humans having to put the energy into this work equation? Did you actually read the very next line where I mentioned idler wheels? (FYI, statistically very few people that are born with idler wheels are accepted into the astronaut program.)
The only thing I wrote that said anything about human effort was the difficulty it would add to walking. Otherwise, I was referring mostly to machinery and energy, which, coincidentally enough, is the topic of TFA about mining. The "sticky" looks like it was simply a bad idea pasted on by the submitter of the article.
Yes, the ISS denizens are denied the health benefits of gravity. Yes, the residents will have to work hard to maintain some semblance of muscle mass, and even then they're almost certain to be wheelchair bound upon their return to earth several years later. (A mars trip would end in a year-long zero-G voyage, just what they wouldn't need after their extended 1/3 G stay on the surface.) They may even end up in something like an iron lung for a while, if the air pressure isn't kept high enough to keep their diaphragm working against earth-weight air pressure. But frankly, I don't care all that much -- it's a known hazard, and anyone accepting these missions knows full well what they've got to look forward to upon their return. It's part of the sacrifice that every single one of them is volunteering to make. Sure, it'd be nice if they weren't severely weakened by the environment, but it's their choice. Not mine, and not yours.
P.S. Maybe next time you'd get a less snotty reply if you didn't open your post with an accusation. A little politeness goes a long way.
In this particular case I think the credit reporting agencies have way too much power. Their information is used for everything from cell phone contracts to insurance rates to employment background checks. And they've done it without oversight, without honesty and without ethics. They will collect, report and do anything to sell someone another peek at your Fair Isaac score. And every company wanting to sell anything at all gets to use this automated system of discrimination ("hey, it's not a race/ethnic thing, it's just your computer score and the computer is color blind." As if having an address in The Projects would be anybody's choice, yet it all factors into your score.)
We've evolved our own Big Brother via capitalism.
Somewhere, Karl Marx and George Orwell are sharing a laugh from beyond the grave.
It should have five buttons: one button labeled "BAD NUMBER" and a different button labeled "GOOD NUMBER". A scroll up and down button and a "FORGET NUMBER" button would complete everything it needs. No "save", no "select", no "menu", no "timer", no "dialing". It doesn't need time and date (good god, not every device need a fracking clock these days!,) and it doesn't need to be "preprogrammed". It just has to route junk calls to the answering machine, not "manage my caller ID lists."
Basically, what I'm saying is if my mom needs me to come over and figure it out for her, it's too complex. This is really close to a great product. Simplify the interface and it's a winner.
I didn't get the whole "sticky floor" suggestion. I would think less gravity would be a huge boon to getting more work done for the same effort. You sure as hell wouldn't want idler wheels dragging on sticky floors; think of the inefficiencies!
If all they're looking to do is increase traction, there are much saner ways than pouring glue on their boots, (which would also cost you extra effort with every footstep.) Non-skid surfaces, for a start. I suppose they could bring a pot of glue with them and spread locally-mined crystalline silica if they wanted to save ferrying a pound or two of sand from earth.
What would be better is to find ways to use the advantage of the reduced gravity without worrying about the traction. Depending on the problem, solutions like "cable cars" or "conveyor belts" don't have to rely on motor-to-ground friction at all.
Finally, look back to the U.S. moon landings in the 1970s. Dust got everywhere. It was a huge problem. Do you honestly think "sticky" surfaces would last more than an hour before being rendered useless by the layer of dust?
the lesson remains that they'd have had a much easier time of it if only they'd paid more attention to their corporate image in the first place.
Wal-mart is a corporation, not a person, and suggesting that it somehow "learns a lesson" is misplaced anthropomorphism. Wal-mart has to fight zoning commissions and town councils in virtually every municipality they build in these days. Their business is wildly successful despite incessant criticism, bad press, illegal labor practices, and even vitriolic hatred from some of its most outspoken opponents. If they are capable of learning any lesson it is "what we're doing now makes money by the boat-load, don't change a single thing except for those few times when we get shut-out or caught."
And getting back on topic, the same is true with Apple. Bangalore's too expensive? Good bye, and thanks for trying, here's a hearty handshake and two months severance. The lesson they obviously learned is "go where it's cheap, and maximizes return on investment," not "treat your offshore employees well and they'll reward you with quality products delivered on time."
Slashdot Mirror
The electrician said the cause was the original splice was poorly protected from the natural elements. Someone apparently didn't get the entire splice sealed, and corrosion did the rest.
Sure, that's been once in 20 years. And none of the rest of the neighbors ever had a problem with their immediate wires. My point is that it's not impossible to have damage, mostly that I was unlucky.
That's insane! The law is clear: if you called (and hand dig in the indicated areas,) the utilities are responsible for the damage and repairs. But if you didn't call and you cause damage by digging, the repair bill is 100% yours.
I've had them out to mark my lot three times in the last three years for various projects and home improvements. The service is completely free, and they guarantee all utilities will be marked within 48 hours. I can't imagine the amount of stupidity required to assume the risks of both injury and liability just because someone is too lazy to dial an f'ing telephone number.
You smiley-faced that, but it's true. The long-term storage properties of photographic paper are fairly well understood. Magnetic media, on the other hand, is a fairly young technology.
Some of the issues I know about that have affected properly-stored media in the past include:
- The adhesives used to bind magnetic media to a mylar tape or disc base deteriorate, causing the media to flake off.
- The lubricants used on hard drive spindles have separated or degraded, causing "stiction" and preventing the low-torque platter motor from starting to spin. This used to happen a lot with old drives, and I found that by holding the unmounted drive in my hand and quickly rotating my wrist in line with the axis of rotation of the platter, I could sometimes get them to spin up.
- Ball or roller bearings that sit idle for a long time develop tiny flat spots at the points of contact, which turn into destructive platter vibration when it is spun up.
- The dyes used in various CD-Rs have faded, causing failure on playback.
- Dust and dirt in the floppy drive mechanism scratched and destroyed the discs we were trying to restore from. (Of course, this was not a failure of the media but rather a failiure of ours to inspect the old hardware before trying to use it.)
The rumor mill also is pretty effective, and I've heard about the following but I'm not sure if I believe it:- Fears that the aluminium in a commercially stamped CD will degrade. I believe this was a marketing lie told in order to sell the 'gold' master CDs back in the late 1980s. (I also believe these people are now selling Monster cables at Radio Shack.)
I know most of these problems have been addressed by technological changes since the problems were discovered. Drive spindle lubrication, adhesives, bearings, and dyes have all been reformulated and reengineered since these problems arose. But it's still very hard to predict how welll some of this stuff will perform 20 years from now.Thomas Edison beat you to this a hundred years ago.
The story I heard was that he was arguing before the court that some invention was not obvious. He placed a raw egg on the bench in front of the judges, and challenged the judges to make it stand on its pointy end. They tried balancing it, shaking it to break up the yolk, spinning it, and finally declared the task impossible. Mr. Edison took the egg and crushed the pointy end of the eggshell down on the bench, where he easily stood it on its end. One of the judges said "well, that's obvious." Mr. Edison pointed out that, not thirty seconds prior, they had declared the task impossible but now it's obvious. And that's why his patent should stand.
Of course now that I've typed it up, I can find no reference to the story. Typical me. :-( Can someone help me out?
Not me, unless you count "two" as a pile. And those two failed because I let them bang around in my truck and get scratched to hell, not because they were played or otherwise magically rotted.
Given much less care than LPs or cassette tapes, virtually all of them play as well now as they did when I bought them. ExactAudioCopy does occasionally report an error or two when I'm ripping them. I'd estimate that 90% of my discs are error free, and the rest are mostly 99% or better (EAC figures.) And while I don't deliberately manhandle them, I'm far from a paranoid audiophile with alcohol swabs and white gloves.
And as far as burn-'em-yourself discs, I've not had any data discs degrade on me (that I'm aware of.) Those, I definitely treat better than audio discs, with limited handling and their lives spent inside clean CaseLogic CD folders.
As for hard drives, I certainly haven't had the good luck you seem to be having. If I have an older drive that is powered down for a couple of years, the chances of it spinning up seem to be far from 100%. And that's not just cheap Maxtors I'm talking about (although Maxtor is no proof against failure), I've had it happen with a number of server-class SCSI drives, too. While it's certainly not a 50% fail rate, I'd guess that long-term stored hard drives seem to have only about a 90-95% chance of spinning up again.
No medium is perfect. And there's another point I've not mentioned yet, and that's the availability of readers / interface electronics. If I had backed up all my valuables on an old Winchester drive, what are the chances I'd be able to read it today? First, I'd have to find a working machine with an ISA bus, video card, possibly a monitor, a keyboard, and some kind of boot drive. I'd need to scrounge a copy of DOS, although pirating an ancient one off the Internet seems pretty doable (but creating a bootable disk is less simple.) Then, I'd have to find a WD503 ISA card for it, and cables. I'd probably have to come up with a network card, too, so I could get the data off the machine.
Of course, these same arguments will hold true for CDs and DVDs at some point in the not-too-distant future, as well as any current hard drive communications bus. Maybe it won't be BluRay or HD-DVD that spells doom for the CD/DVD/hard-drive backup plan, but it will be something.
(You are off by a couple orders of magnitude, but that's OK.) What got me was TFA's "According to recent Alexa data" line. How many slashdotters have all of the common statistics-gathering sites in their adblock files already?
Besides, how much can we trust alexa, anyway? In the Top 10 society list, they included not only Digg and Slashdot, but the National Institute of Health and the IRS. I don't know how many of you chat with your buds over on forums.irs.gov, but I haven't been there much lately.
Hey, at least you got there in the first place. More than most of your readership will ever accomplish!
This isn't just a reworked White Knight we're talking about here. The White Knight was specifically designed to win the X-prize. Van said all along that it was a suborbital design from the get go, and was specifically not designed as a first-stage-to-orbit kind of ship.
My guess is that one of the booster makers (like Boeing or Lockheed) is going to paste a passenger capsule on top of an existing rocket. The technology of lifting is already done.
The Pay-By-Touch salesman wasn't referring to the "oily fingerprints left as evidence at the scene of a crime", he was referring to the actual ridges and whorls on the surface of the skin. The PBT reader doesn't look for skin oils, it just reads the surface profile looking at the ridges, intersections and islands. The pineapple pickers simply don't have any texture at all on their fingertips.
"Gummibear fingerprints" are not certainly not FUD (although they're not made from real gummibears.) They're a real attack that's easy to make, and fun to eat!
The reasons they'd work so well for fraud are numerous. First, while it's pretty easy to keep track of your fingers, it's virtually impossible to "guard" your fingerprints. You leave them everywhere -- your phone, doorknobs, keyboards, dishes, plastic bags, everywhere. It just takes a little bit of "Hardy Boys Detective Handbook" work to photograph them. Making a circuit board from a photograph is something I did a lot in 7th grade, but nowdays digital cameras and laser printers are more common than photographic enlargers. And even I can mix up gelatin without burning down the kitchen.
The neat thing is that gelatin itself is the ideal material for forging fingerprints. It is simply animal protein (it's pretty much ground up cow hooves and collagen, if you want the real details.) It's biotic matter, so it has roughly the same electrical capacitive properties as human skin. It's thin and transparent, so a "pulse detector" that senses the infrared pulses given off by circulating blood can see right through it. And if you wet it, it's kind of sticky and can easily be applied to the fingertips before heading to the cash register. Once applied, they're virtually impossible to see. Gelatin is almost indistinguishable in every way from human skin.
Everything that a fingerprint scanner can be built to look for (at a cheap enough price to sell to grocery stores) is right there on your fingertip. Even if the alarm bells sounded and the guards came running, you'd still have time to pop your finger into your mouth and eat the evidence.
The Pay-By-Touch sales representative that I met with a couple years ago told me that about 1-2% of the population has fingerprints that can't be read by their machine. Particularly affected were 'pineapple pickers.' He said the combination of the enzymes and acids in the pineapple juices plus the rough texture of the plants caused their fingerprints to be completely obliterated.
I read this line too and it made me want to scream. "Company pledges" are worth exactly shit these days. "We pledge to protect your privacy and retain the right to alter this pledge at any time." "We pledge to never sell or distribute all of this personal information that we insist on gathering, really, unless we're bought out by another company that doesn't pledge this."
I don't want pledges. I don't want them to have this info, period. I don't want to receive marketing from them any more than I want it from third parties.
Now, if there was accountability behind these pledges, such as "We are bonded for a $10,000 per customer coverage to never leak any customer information" or "Under penalties of perjury with a minimum of five years prison time to be served by each member of the entire Board of Directors, we pledge to never sell or otherwise distribute any personal information collected by us. Furthermore, under threat of the same penalites we pledge to use this information only for verification of your account, and never for marketing purposes of any sort."
Those are some pledges that I'd be slightly more inclined to believe.
Oh, yeah, that was just amazing when we got our DECwriter and a 300 baud modem. It was like hog heaven, especially for some of the chatting and gaming. If you had a 300 baud terminal on MU,COMBAT, for example, you RULED the kids with the 110 baud.
The funniest thing about my post above, though, is that it's all true. We were on a time-shared CDC Cyber 73 with 60 bit words divided up into 10 characters per word. It lent a certain similarity to many programs: for example chat and mail programs all seemed to coincidentally offer 10 character nicknames. But six bits isn't enough for both upper and lower case.
But try telling any of that to kids these days and they just don't understand. :-)
So it looks like we're both in agreement then, that the bureaus have too much power as a result of inadequate accountability. Whew! Glad that's over! :-)
Speak for yourself, young'n. I was programming before you were an itch in your daddy's pants. And back when I was a kid, we only HAD capital letters. Yes, sir, a six-bit character set was all we had, and we liked it! We were grateful for every one of the six bits we were given, thankful that we had a character set that supported both letters AND numbers.
Who needed those fancy-schmancy lower case letters, anyway? They were for show-offs, them and their lah-dee-dah eight-bit character sets. "Oooh, look at me, Mater, I've got both UPPER and lower case in my EBCDIC character set! I'm off to punch cards by the Grand Piano!" Well, we didn't have that rich-kid kind of money. Even if our terminal controllers did send us seven bits, we only had an upper case font cylinder in our Model 33 TeleType. And it was good enough for us! And we sent our email to real names, like SWEETHEART and PILOT and POET, not to any of these special character leet-speeking punks, them and their hoity-toity "domains"....
Wha? What are you doing here? Get off my lawn, you damn kids!
In a purely capitalist driven society (say in a mythical country with no protectionary laws, let's call it Aynrandia) these credit bureaus would have come about anyway. As another poster clearly stated, we consumers are not their clients. Banks and other corporations are their clients. In its role as a "back end" provider, the consumer has no direct control over the forces driving the banks to use these providers. It's conceivable (but highly unlikely) that a consumer group could organize a boycott against banks using Equifax; but the banks would then simply switch to Trans Union. The reality is that a capitalist market doesn't consider how banks do their jobs internally -- as long as their money is safe. And using a credit bureau is really a "safe" decision for a bank. "Charge people interest according to the likelihood that they'll give the money back" seems to be an ideal business decision for a bank.
So credit bureaus are good for banks. If the "socialist" or "protectionist" laws were removed, the bureaus would still exist because the capitalist pressures driving banks to use them would remain. The bureaus might be more responsive to complaints of erroneous data, but they'd still exist -- just with better data.
What about the insurance industry using the data in Aynrandia? Again, there's a behind the scenes business-to-business provider relationship. Is there a correlation between credit scores and longevity? The actuaries claim there is one. Is there a causal relationship? I'm sure we could rationalize one, but it's not likely to be very direct; in reality it doesn't matter as long as the correlation holds mostly true. So the insurance companies are free to use credit scores to set their rates. And as was the case with banking, the consumers have no leverage to control the actuarial formulas created by the insurance industry.
Protectionist laws don't matter in this case -- the bureaus created a product that is very useful to businesses and sell it aggressively. The stockholders of the banks and insurance companies are likely to be in favor of any tool that reduces their risk and maximizes their investment. And the consumers have no control over the business relationship. There's nowhere else to shop -- any bank that refused to use a credit bureau would quickly be overrun by con artists with no intentions of repaying their loans.
When you fully understand that the source of the problem with corporations is the government protection and immunities granted to them by government, you'll see the way out.
I find absolutely no correlation between government protection of corporations and the rise of the credit bureaus. The immunities have effect only on their accuracy, but none on their existance and none on their use.
Just as it was an engineering decision by these same folks to include "!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN" as a totally random string of bytes?
World domination is certainly on their minds. They just don't see that as an 'evil' goal. There's a difference.
I'm afraid you have fallen completely into the trap of "accepting badness". (Don't blame yourself, bad UI is standard practice in the computer industry, honest.)
The device itself is not bad, and I did not say the device was bad. The device sounds like a wonderful piece of technology that could solve a real problem for most people. (By the way, if you work for "ASPHALT PAVING" and you called my house seven times last week, YOU SUCK! ;-) And I am not now slagging the function of the device. According to what you wrote, this device couldn't be better if it transmuted lead into gold. I was convinced even before reading your post that it does a great job, and I'm seriously thinking about getting one for myself.
And none of that has anything to do with the point of my post. The user interface is still bad.
I learned everything I needed to know by watching the accompanying instructional video all the way through. It was awful to watch: Press the 'select' button a couple of times until this tiny icon shaped like a cassette tape (tapes have not been used in answering machines designed in the last seven years) and that's supposed to make me think "answering machine?" Is an answering machine good or bad? Do I want my friends to not be able to use the answering machine? Do I still "select" this person even if I don't like them? Do I hit the select button one time or twice if they're a telemarketer? (And I don't want to "save" a telemarketer anyway, I'll leave that to Jesus!)
The designer should have asked himself "does this device require icons at all?" All the buttons and the on-screen word "CALL" are printed in English, which strongly indicates the hardware is not internationalized. The "SAVE DATABASE OK!" text seems to be in roughly the same English as "ALL YOUR BASE." And think about that word -- does the average user even know what a database is, much less care? Since English seems to be the language of the device, why can't the screen display the number's state in English, too, instead of outdated icons?
Other screen oddities: why does a user care what "CALL #" it is? Does the tiny phone handset mean something useful regarding the operation of this device? What about the inverted [R] in a box or the circled (!) exclamation point? And what about the unlabeled blinking red light; is that a good thing or a bad thing? None of those are immediately intuitive nor do they seem useful for operating the device itself. (Sure, they may have some hidden meaning wrapped up in "saving or selecting", which just adds further to my point.)
Those are just some of the examples of a horrible user interface. I'm sure I could add more.
The root of the problem is the device was designed by extremly smart people. They came up with a cool idea, built hardware and wrote software to solve the problem. But these people were so close to the design of the solution that they built the UI completely around the solution they came up with and not around the problem it's solving.
The flip side of the problem is that intelligent users such as yourself recognize the device as so powerful that you're willing to overlook how badly written the manual is and learn the weird button sequences just so you can enjoy its functionality. But that doesn't mean the user interface is any good, it just means you're personally clever and adaptable.
I have no doubts that you, I and probably the rest of Slashdot would have no problems picking one up and using it. So would 20% of the population; if you stretch it, maybe 50% of Americans could eventually figure it out on their own. But why does it have to be so complex to learn and use that it requires instructions at all? It's an extremely simple device, doing an extremely simple task. It's identifying friends and foes based on their telephone number. So why
Ahh, thanks. My last working modem died a few years after I got cable internet but before I got caller ID, so I never actually got to see the CID data for myself.
Sorry, no-body. It's late and I'll go to bed now.
Nice f'ing ad hominem attack there. Did I say anywhere it was the humans having to put the energy into this work equation? Did you actually read the very next line where I mentioned idler wheels? (FYI, statistically very few people that are born with idler wheels are accepted into the astronaut program.)
The only thing I wrote that said anything about human effort was the difficulty it would add to walking. Otherwise, I was referring mostly to machinery and energy, which, coincidentally enough, is the topic of TFA about mining. The "sticky" looks like it was simply a bad idea pasted on by the submitter of the article.
Yes, the ISS denizens are denied the health benefits of gravity. Yes, the residents will have to work hard to maintain some semblance of muscle mass, and even then they're almost certain to be wheelchair bound upon their return to earth several years later. (A mars trip would end in a year-long zero-G voyage, just what they wouldn't need after their extended 1/3 G stay on the surface.) They may even end up in something like an iron lung for a while, if the air pressure isn't kept high enough to keep their diaphragm working against earth-weight air pressure. But frankly, I don't care all that much -- it's a known hazard, and anyone accepting these missions knows full well what they've got to look forward to upon their return. It's part of the sacrifice that every single one of them is volunteering to make. Sure, it'd be nice if they weren't severely weakened by the environment, but it's their choice. Not mine, and not yours.
P.S. Maybe next time you'd get a less snotty reply if you didn't open your post with an accusation. A little politeness goes a long way.
We've evolved our own Big Brother via capitalism.
Somewhere, Karl Marx and George Orwell are sharing a laugh from beyond the grave.
It should have five buttons: one button labeled "BAD NUMBER" and a different button labeled "GOOD NUMBER". A scroll up and down button and a "FORGET NUMBER" button would complete everything it needs. No "save", no "select", no "menu", no "timer", no "dialing". It doesn't need time and date (good god, not every device need a fracking clock these days!,) and it doesn't need to be "preprogrammed". It just has to route junk calls to the answering machine, not "manage my caller ID lists."
Basically, what I'm saying is if my mom needs me to come over and figure it out for her, it's too complex. This is really close to a great product. Simplify the interface and it's a winner.
If all they're looking to do is increase traction, there are much saner ways than pouring glue on their boots, (which would also cost you extra effort with every footstep.) Non-skid surfaces, for a start. I suppose they could bring a pot of glue with them and spread locally-mined crystalline silica if they wanted to save ferrying a pound or two of sand from earth.
What would be better is to find ways to use the advantage of the reduced gravity without worrying about the traction. Depending on the problem, solutions like "cable cars" or "conveyor belts" don't have to rely on motor-to-ground friction at all.
Finally, look back to the U.S. moon landings in the 1970s. Dust got everywhere. It was a huge problem. Do you honestly think "sticky" surfaces would last more than an hour before being rendered useless by the layer of dust?
Sticky is a non-starter.
the lesson remains that they'd have had a much easier time of it if only they'd paid more attention to their corporate image in the first place.
Wal-mart is a corporation, not a person, and suggesting that it somehow "learns a lesson" is misplaced anthropomorphism. Wal-mart has to fight zoning commissions and town councils in virtually every municipality they build in these days. Their business is wildly successful despite incessant criticism, bad press, illegal labor practices, and even vitriolic hatred from some of its most outspoken opponents. If they are capable of learning any lesson it is "what we're doing now makes money by the boat-load, don't change a single thing except for those few times when we get shut-out or caught."
And getting back on topic, the same is true with Apple. Bangalore's too expensive? Good bye, and thanks for trying, here's a hearty handshake and two months severance. The lesson they obviously learned is "go where it's cheap, and maximizes return on investment," not "treat your offshore employees well and they'll reward you with quality products delivered on time."