Excellent example. It's how I teach the Boy Scouts to make change when selling hot dogs at fund raisers.
Unfortunately for all concerned, it slows down cash register lines in the real world. If the computer can spit out "CHANGE DUE $7.53" in 10 msec, the cashier can count the bills and coins faster than they can count up the change the "right" way.
The customers who actually care about their change know that if they handed the cashier a $20 for a $2.47 purchase, when they see the display that says $7.53, they know they better get $17+ back, not $7+ and so the problem of mis-keyed bills is headed off earlier in the process.
I did research on trying to use a box with a picture of the cash drawer and big 2 ONE$ and 1 FIVE$ kind of pictures, but it is not feasible to keep track of the individual bills in the till. So the register might tell someone to hand out one ten, one five, two ones, but if the till has no ten dollar bills, they would get seriously confused. I am not joking.
So, what do the cashiers do when the computers go down? It's quite simple, Charlie Brown; you don't let the computers stay down.
Disclaimer: I write programs for cash registers as my day job.
I purchased a TI-89 for my son for his math classes, but his school's rules are no calculator smarter than a TI-83. Apparently using the "solver" tool is a problem when it comes to standardized tests, and the SAT doesn't allow a TI-89. I had to buy him a TI-83. So much for being a cool dad. Of course, getting a hand-me-down TI-89 wasn't the worst thing that could happen to me...:-)
As for me, calculators were forbidden in my high school math courses, but allowed in science. At that time, though, calculators were pretty much useless for anything but simple math and elementary trig.
When you consider that they probably have WiFi access points on just about every floor, it's pretty easy to say "within a margin of error of one floor."
This sounds similar to the triangulation the cell phone companies tried to use to locate phones when ordered to do so by law enforcement (to comply with CALEA and ostensibly E-911.) That didn't work well enough in rural cell areas, however, thus the move to on-board GPS receivers in cell phones.
The thing that amused me the most was the error in the Salon article's description of the technology involved:
The location-tracking software itself, developed by a 15-year-old student at the university, draws upon triangulation technology used by global positioning system (GPS) devices. The PDAs figure out their locations by comparing the strength levels of signals traveling from the devices to various Wi-Fi antennas.
GPS does not use signal strength. GPS uses differential timing. This system and software work like a GPS in the same way that a kitchen stove works like a microwave oven. Love them Salon facts.
Did you watch the credits? (My family and I were alone in the theater watching them.) There were probably more model makers than programmers on the project. I was amazed, I had thought that they had switched entirely to CGI.
But, according to IMDB they listed 48 model makers in the credits.
I've read that AotC actually used more models than any movie ever before.
But yeah, no CGI character I've ever seen has ever come close to the Taun-taun that Han Solo went riding in Ep 5. That was excellent puppetry.
I hope those batteries are properly ventilated, keeping all the generated hydrogen away from ignition sources such as monitor switches, light switches, etc. (Of course, you wouldn't have that particular hazard with sealed or gel cell batteries, but you didn't "waste" your money that way.)
I also hope that they're on a concrete slab or on a floor over a beam designed to hold up the unusual amount of weight. If it's just a wooden joist construction room on an interior wall, you may find your floor sagging in a year or two as the nails slowly release.
The other thing is that your UPS may run fine until a deep discharge or two, and then blow out the charger because you're drawing more current than the power supply was designed to deliver.
The author cautions about taking an existing UPS and trying to add more, bigger or extra batteries. The power supply inside is built (cheaply) to deliver only the amount of current required to charge the battery it was designed for, and no more.
However, you can probably replace the battery in your UPS with a similar model for less than the cost of a new UPS. Either find the manual for your UPS, search for your UPS model on line, or open up your UPS and see if it has any labelling regarding the battery capacity, or (better) a "replace battery with XXXXXX model or equivalent." Find an equivalent on line (thanks, Google!)
Check with a battery store (most major metropolitan areas will have several.) It may be worth the drive, as batteries are heavy, cost much to ship, and can only be delivered via ground (slowly.) And if you're uncomfortable working with live circuits or very hazardous materials, they'll probably be able to replace it for you for a small fee.
Finally, PLEASE RECYCLE YOUR OLD BATTERY! In most states, it is illegal to dispose of any lead acid batteries in the garbage or in a landfill. They are filled with corrosive toxic sludge. Please be responsible.
According to the article, his solution can be any amount of money you care to spend, from less than an off the shelf APC ($90 USD for a small one) to far more than your PC cost you.
You'd probably get more bang for the buck though if you already owned some of the components, such as a decent marine battery or a 25A power supply.
His article was more to say that if you roll your own, you can stack up a basement wall full of lead-acid batteries and run your PC for a week offline if you want. And you can do that cheaper than you can buy a real industrial power supply.
We took a family vacation to Cedar Point two years ago just to ride Millenium Force.
That ride is psychologically addictive. I have never before ridden anything so intense and scary and fun in my life. EVERYTHING about that ride is engineered to give you the biggest thrill ride you have ever experienced.
This is a spoiler warning: if you haven't ridden the ride, you may not want to read about my experience.
The park has random arcs from Millenium Force visible from almost everywhere in the park. It lurks in your mind, beckoning you to ride it; taunting you that you haven't summoned the courage to go stand in line yet. You tell yourself "when the line gets shorter." It never does.
You finally queue up beneath the final turn into the station, where you hear the screaming and cheering of the riders as they fly into the only brake at about 55 MPH. You then watch trains of people grinning ear-to-ear as they get off, and you can hear them discussing how long the wait will be to ride it again. All the while, you are looking up 310 feet to the top of that first hill, wondering if you actually want to ride it.
You are quickly loaded into the train. A two-month-old ride has a suspiciously frayed lap belt, and a pull-down "T" lap bar serve as your only protection. A loudspeaker is braying cautionary words that are completely unheard by everyone present.
As you sit there, you realize what makes this train so completely different from every other roller coaster train you've been on: it has no deep sides to hide behind. It's like two rows of folding chairs sitting ankle deep below a deck.
You stare up the side of a 30 story building watching the silver dog as it glides down the track and silently attaches to your train.
It quickly and quietly starts pulling you up. (At this point, my 12-year-old clutched my wife's arm and whimpered, "I suppose it's too late now." That almost broke her.)
You realize you're flying up the first hill faster than any roller coaster has ever lifted you before, but because the hill is so high, it takes longer than ever. With no sides, the feeling of openness is overwhelming. If you can focus on anything but the bar in front of you, you realize that you're passing a stunning view of the lake, and you can see flat land and water for dozens of miles in every direction.
As you near the top, you feel the train actually speeding up! They don't intend to drop you from the top of the hill, you realize they are going to THROW you down. You are completely, utterly at the mercy of the engineers.
As you fly past the surprisingly huge glittery brass ball on the lightning rod, you know that nothing at all can stop the train anymore. The intensity of the rush reaches a level it's never hit before.
The first descent is engineered so that your view of the track is obscured. All you see for a very long three seconds is the ground, a long ways away but approaching faster than you can imagine, and the fear turns into the biggest rush of adrenaline you have ever had as you realize you're plunging face down a 30 story drop.
When you hit the bottom of the track, the average person will weigh about half a ton, and will be moving 90 MPH through the wind. A hundred feet of dead flat track passes by in less than a second and you arch up into a wonderfully smooth, graceful arc.
Two kinds of people are now present on the train: those that have absolutely fallen in love with the coaster, and those who are so terrified that they have literally wet their pants (about one or two riders on every other train has a "code yellow", according to the park employees who load the ride.)
If you're the kind who was terrified, you are hanging on, eyes shut, praying to any god who might spare you long enough to get off. If you're the other kind of rider, you realize that nothing will ever erase the rush from your mind. Believe it or not, I still get a rush just remembering the ride.
Either way, it is truly a lifelong memory that will be burned in your mind that day. And to Hell and damnation with Congressman Markey for even suggesting limiting rollercoasters.
You raise an excellent point. However, I have found that it's tough to tell the banner-shaped static ads from the banner-shaped blinking and flashing ads.
Hmm. Maybe should adjust it to pass banners, yet somehow prevent the cycle of animations. I wonder if I can selectively do that in the Proxomitron...
If you don't find an ad usefull and you don't pay attention to it, it's ok.
[ First, I use both Mozilla and IE (my employer has pages that are designed only for IE, and it's their computer anyway, so fine.) I have Mozilla running through the Proxomitron filtering out ads, but I have IE running straight. ]
Anyway, I accidentally went to some news site on the IE browser. O My God! It has been literally years since I saw crap like that on my screen. These giant flashing blocks of color went sweeping across the screen, swooping up to an advertisement. The banner ads across the top were flashing contrasting colors so violently and rapidly that I had to scroll them out of view before I could focus on the text. I then closed IE (and the pop-unders it had left behind) and brought the same news site up in Mozilla behind the Proxomitron. I'm very serious, all I could see was the news article, but all I could feel was an overwhelming pity for folks who don't have blocking software.
Am I taking a free ride? I have certain sites that I frequent in my Proxomitron bypass list, and occasionally click on an ad just to give them a hit or two. (Hi Thinkgeek!) I pay for the shareware I use. I support faqs.org via the Amazon Honor System. The next time I use sneakemail, I'm sending them $12. Others (such as that news site) inspire me to implement and even write new filters. But is it a free ride?
So now I have other questions. Do you hit "30-second skip" on your ReplayTV remote while watching prerecorded shows? If you don't own a ReplayTV, do you fast forward through the commercials at the start of a video tape? Do you wait for the end of a TV show to go to the bathroom, or do you temporarily forget your ethics, sneak out and do it while the commercials are on? Are you taking a free ride then?
It gets even more absurd: does it take you two hours to read a "free" newspaper because you feel you have to read all the ads before you read the comics? Do you read every flyer tucked under your windshield wiper? Of course not! Nobody does. But where do you draw the line? So, then what makes it OK to dodge this ad because it's on paper or videotape, but not duck that ad because it's on the web?
Ads on TV still hit lots of viewers -- those who are watching real-time, those who can't afford a VCR, those who are watching a TV not under their control. Ads on the web still hit lots of viewers, too -- those who aren't savvy enough to realize they don't have to.
My vote is this: advetisers that are patently offensive (flash, animation, javascript, DHTML, motion or blinking all qualify to me) should be blocked on principle. For example, I haven't felt the need to run out and write a 'Google Sponsored Link blocking filter,' but I sure devoted time to wipe out a handful of obscene javascript and flash tricks. I view ads on a few selected sites. So, am I free-riding? I've finally decided that I don't care if I am.
It sounds like it's too late, but if you check inside the header that came with your STL, you might find that you can define a flag that will alter the default allocator's behavior to something that suits your needs better.
Obviously, telling you to grovel through someone else's template declarations isn't a particularily strong argument in favor of the STL, but it might solve your problem.
I almost always agree with this particular argument. We almost never need new laws, we have plenty of old ones. But not this time. Here are some back-of-the-envelope computations I came up with for what Brilliant Digital is asking for when I click on "I Agree":
First, unused cycles are ordinarily "optimized out" by my CPU. In other words, it runs slower and consumes less electricity when not being used. Most modern CPUs go into a low-power-consumption mode when not actively performing real processing. (If you doubt this, check your CPU temperature while it's been sitting idle with a blank screen for an hour or two. Compare that to the temperature after playing an hour of Quake III or even just running a graphics intensive screen saver for an hour. I know I could certainly feel the difference when I was running the distributed.net client at home. I just wish I had metered it.) So, I "hereby grant BDE the right to access and use the unused computing power" is another way of saying I will freely donate my electricity. Let's find out just how "free" that is.
First, let's assume that I pay $.0816/kWh for electricity (the 1999 national consumer average (page 14).) Let's also assume that I leave the computer powered on constantly (because I do.) Finally, let's assume that my computer consumes 60W when idle, but 120W when actively crunching numbers (because it's an Athlon.) So that's an extra 60W/hr I would unknowningly consume on behalf of Kazaa.
60W/hr x 8766 hours/year = 525960 watt-hours per year.
525960 / 1000 = 525.960 kWh per year
525.960 * $.0816/kWh = $42.91 per year.
Look at it a different way: Assume there are 2,000,000 KaZaa users.
60W/hr * 2,000,000 = 120,000,000 watt-hours.
Thats 120 megawatts per hour. We're talking California-rolling-blackout-sized consumption of energy here. It's Environmental Impact Statement time.
Is it still so unreasonable to ask them to say "Click here to agree with the above and oh, by the way, we're going to use about $40 worth of your electricity per year", or does something a bit more drastic have to happen?
You wanna know WHY they ask you if you want help every three minutes? It has nothing to do with your prior refusal to accept their help, or anything to do with actually helping you.
Their loss prevention staff has them offering you help so that you don't steal stuff. It reduces theft greatly to have everyone feel "noticed." And if you're not buying, you'll feel compelled to leave.
Apparently, they lose more in theft than they do in pissed-off customers who walk out.
If not, but you take it upon yourself to write one, there's even a better hack approach to take. Modify sendmail to 'tarpit' the spammers.
Once the RCPT TO: <certain_spammer@my.domain> identifies an inbound-but-unwanted letter, rather than have it drop the connection, have it S...L...O...W - I...T...S...E...L...F - D...O...W...N. Spam works because they can send thousands out easily. They still have to establish thousands of connections. Make any appreciable percent of those difficult, and spam will not work as well.
This might not work so well with true $$MAKE_MONEY_FAST$$ spam, but it should work for those companies who refuse to stop sending you email. They're usually more clueless than you might expect.
Unused cycles are "optimized out" by my CPU. In other words, it runs slower and consumes less electricity when not being used. Most modern CPUs go into a low-power-consumption mode when not actively performing real processing. If you doubt this, check your CPU temperature while it's been sitting idle with a blank screen for an hour or two. Compare that to the temperature after playing an hour of Quake III or even just running a graphics intensive screen saver for an hour. I know I could certainly feel the difference when I was running the distributed.net client at home.
So, I "hereby grand BDE the right to access and use the unused computing power" is another way of saying I will freely donate my electricity? Let's find out just how "free" that is.
First, let's assume that you pay $.10/kWh for electricity. Let's also assume that you leave the computer powered on constantly. Finally, let's assume that your computer consumes 60W when idle, but 120W when actively crunching numbers. So that's an extra 60W/hr you spend on behalf of Kazaa.
60W/hr x 8766 hours = 525960 watt-hours per year.
525960 / 1000 = 525.960 kWh per year
525.960 *.10/kWh = $52.60 per year.
Let's look at it a different way: Assume there are 2,000,000 KaZaa users.
60W/hr * 2,000,000 = 120,000,000 watt-hours.
Thats 120 megawatts per hour.
I think they need to file an Environmental Impact Statement before releasing this kind of crap.
This is a really flawed argument. Since every single human they've tested with was conceived, born, and grew up subjected to gravity, a *model* is hard wired?
I think before he can claim this, we'd need to see the results of testing on space-born and -bred animals.
I was actively doing major sleeping at the time of the power failure. The computer had been idle, perhaps a game of solitaire had been left open, a screen saver pushing a few polygons around to entertain the bogeyman, but that's it.
Of course, XP will always have the registry open, and who knows what else it might have fired up at 2:00 AM on a Saturday morning. Perhaps it was time for its scheduled system recovery backup thing. I really can't keep track of all the randomness Microsoft introduces in each version of Windows.
I agree that it shouldn't have been trashed by a mere power failure. (Of course I'd agree!) But I can say that I have never seen a drive so lost after a crash that didn't end up being physically damaged. This damage was quite extensive. (Chkdsk found lots to clean up, but I think it may have caused even more damage than I originally had.)
So, now I just don't know. Was my crash really a FAT32 fault? Or is there a hidden hardware demon lurking in the sectors, scraping cylinders from my drive?
Then this is where the bashing happens. Microsoft obviously took no great pains to keep critical data out of harms' way. Not only did I lose the registry, but I lost hal.dll and ntoskrnl.exe in the power failure, too. There was absolutely nothing left to boot from. I was just fortunate that none of the newer files (read: my not-yet-backed-up files) seemed to have been affected.
Because I wanted the ability to dual boot with Windows ME. I've been having problems with XP and the performance of the OpenGL game Armagetron.
I've been using NTFS for years at work, and with all the blue screens, crashes and power failures I've put many hundreds of machines through, I've never lost more than an occasional file to corruption.
Sigh. I should have known better. Hell, I DO know better, and that's even worse.
Looks like I'll just have to keep a FAT32 partition for ME, and not even bother to mount it under XP, just to keep it safe in the future.
I dunno. My home box running XP lost power in a weekend storm, and the FAT32 took a major hit. I lost random stuff from all over the drive. After "recovering" what I could from it, I reinstalled XP and had it convert to NTFS, which Microsoft *promises* me is a more "robust" file system.
My question is: am I allowed to bash them for recent past failings? I'm still doing major clean up, and since the entire registry was among those files that were forever lost, I'm still kind of bitter.
Umm, Microsoft says they do it too when Office XP is installed (if your machine is 400MHz or faster) and you check the "Speech Recognition" box. Not quite default, but once it's clicked "The Audience is Listening."
Remember, kids, make sure you don't have WinAmp sampling your "CD audio in" for visualization while dictating...
Hey, I wonder if we could use this to finally learn the lyrics to "Louie, Louie"?
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately for all concerned, it slows down cash register lines in the real world. If the computer can spit out "CHANGE DUE $7.53" in 10 msec, the cashier can count the bills and coins faster than they can count up the change the "right" way.
The customers who actually care about their change know that if they handed the cashier a $20 for a $2.47 purchase, when they see the display that says $7.53, they know they better get $17+ back, not $7+ and so the problem of mis-keyed bills is headed off earlier in the process.
I did research on trying to use a box with a picture of the cash drawer and big 2 ONE$ and 1 FIVE$ kind of pictures, but it is not feasible to keep track of the individual bills in the till. So the register might tell someone to hand out one ten, one five, two ones, but if the till has no ten dollar bills, they would get seriously confused. I am not joking.
So, what do the cashiers do when the computers go down? It's quite simple, Charlie Brown; you don't let the computers stay down.
Disclaimer: I write programs for cash registers as my day job.
After rereading all your stories, I think I'll give the kid'll a slide rule.
As for me, calculators were forbidden in my high school math courses, but allowed in science. At that time, though, calculators were pretty much useless for anything but simple math and elementary trig.
This sounds similar to the triangulation the cell phone companies tried to use to locate phones when ordered to do so by law enforcement (to comply with CALEA and ostensibly E-911.) That didn't work well enough in rural cell areas, however, thus the move to on-board GPS receivers in cell phones.
The thing that amused me the most was the error in the Salon article's description of the technology involved:
The location-tracking software itself, developed by a 15-year-old student at the university, draws upon triangulation technology used by global positioning system (GPS) devices. The PDAs figure out their locations by comparing the strength levels of signals traveling from the devices to various Wi-Fi antennas.
GPS does not use signal strength. GPS uses differential timing. This system and software work like a GPS in the same way that a kitchen stove works like a microwave oven. Love them Salon facts.
Did you watch the credits? (My family and I were alone in the theater watching them.) There were probably more model makers than programmers on the project. I was amazed, I had thought that they had switched entirely to CGI. But, according to IMDB they listed 48 model makers in the credits.
I've read that AotC actually used more models than any movie ever before.
But yeah, no CGI character I've ever seen has ever come close to the Taun-taun that Han Solo went riding in Ep 5. That was excellent puppetry.
You just don't want it in your backpack if they go offline...
I also hope that they're on a concrete slab or on a floor over a beam designed to hold up the unusual amount of weight. If it's just a wooden joist construction room on an interior wall, you may find your floor sagging in a year or two as the nails slowly release.
The other thing is that your UPS may run fine until a deep discharge or two, and then blow out the charger because you're drawing more current than the power supply was designed to deliver.
However, you can probably replace the battery in your UPS with a similar model for less than the cost of a new UPS. Either find the manual for your UPS, search for your UPS model on line, or open up your UPS and see if it has any labelling regarding the battery capacity, or (better) a "replace battery with XXXXXX model or equivalent." Find an equivalent on line (thanks, Google!)
Check with a battery store (most major metropolitan areas will have several.) It may be worth the drive, as batteries are heavy, cost much to ship, and can only be delivered via ground (slowly.) And if you're uncomfortable working with live circuits or very hazardous materials, they'll probably be able to replace it for you for a small fee.
Finally, PLEASE RECYCLE YOUR OLD BATTERY! In most states, it is illegal to dispose of any lead acid batteries in the garbage or in a landfill. They are filled with corrosive toxic sludge. Please be responsible.
You'd probably get more bang for the buck though if you already owned some of the components, such as a decent marine battery or a 25A power supply.
His article was more to say that if you roll your own, you can stack up a basement wall full of lead-acid batteries and run your PC for a week offline if you want. And you can do that cheaper than you can buy a real industrial power supply.
Hell, "marriage" isn't a word, either. It's a sentence.
That ride is psychologically addictive. I have never before ridden anything so intense and scary and fun in my life. EVERYTHING about that ride is engineered to give you the biggest thrill ride you have ever experienced.
This is a spoiler warning: if you haven't ridden the ride, you may not want to read about my experience.
-
The park has random arcs from Millenium Force visible from almost everywhere in the park. It lurks in your mind, beckoning you to ride it; taunting you that you haven't summoned the courage to go stand in line yet. You tell yourself "when the line gets shorter." It never does.
-
You finally queue up beneath the final turn into the station, where you hear the screaming and cheering of the riders as they fly into the only brake at about 55 MPH. You then watch trains of people grinning ear-to-ear as they get off, and you can hear them discussing how long the wait will be to ride it again. All the while, you are looking up 310 feet to the top of that first hill, wondering if you actually want to ride it.
-
You are quickly loaded into the train. A two-month-old ride has a suspiciously frayed lap belt, and a pull-down "T" lap bar serve as your only protection. A loudspeaker is braying cautionary words that are completely unheard by everyone present.
-
As you sit there, you realize what makes this train so completely different from every other roller coaster train you've been on: it has no deep sides to hide behind. It's like two rows of folding chairs sitting ankle deep below a deck.
-
You stare up the side of a 30 story building watching the silver dog as it glides down the track and silently attaches to your train.
-
It quickly and quietly starts pulling you up. (At this point, my 12-year-old clutched my wife's arm and whimpered, "I suppose it's too late now." That almost broke her.)
-
You realize you're flying up the first hill faster than any roller coaster has ever lifted you before, but because the hill is so high, it takes longer than ever. With no sides, the feeling of openness is overwhelming. If you can focus on anything but the bar in front of you, you realize that you're passing a stunning view of the lake, and you can see flat land and water for dozens of miles in every direction.
-
As you near the top, you feel the train actually speeding up! They don't intend to drop you from the top of the hill, you realize they are going to THROW you down. You are completely, utterly at the mercy of the engineers.
-
As you fly past the surprisingly huge glittery brass ball on the lightning rod, you know that nothing at all can stop the train anymore. The intensity of the rush reaches a level it's never hit before.
-
The first descent is engineered so that your view of the track is obscured. All you see for a very long three seconds is the ground, a long ways away but approaching faster than you can imagine, and the fear turns into the biggest rush of adrenaline you have ever had as you realize you're plunging face down a 30 story drop.
-
When you hit the bottom of the track, the average person will weigh about half a ton, and will be moving 90 MPH through the wind. A hundred feet of dead flat track passes by in less than a second and you arch up into a wonderfully smooth, graceful arc.
-
Two kinds of people are now present on the train: those that have absolutely fallen in love with the coaster, and those who are so terrified that they have literally wet their pants (about one or two riders on every other train has a "code yellow", according to the park employees who load the ride.)
-
If you're the kind who was terrified, you are hanging on, eyes shut, praying to any god who might spare you long enough to get off. If you're the other kind of rider, you realize that nothing will ever erase the rush from your mind. Believe it or not, I still get a rush just remembering the ride.
Either way, it is truly a lifelong memory that will be burned in your mind that day. And to Hell and damnation with Congressman Markey for even suggesting limiting rollercoasters.Hmm. Maybe should adjust it to pass banners, yet somehow prevent the cycle of animations. I wonder if I can selectively do that in the Proxomitron...
Thanks for the insight.
[ First, I use both Mozilla and IE (my employer has pages that are designed only for IE, and it's their computer anyway, so fine.) I have Mozilla running through the Proxomitron filtering out ads, but I have IE running straight. ]
Anyway, I accidentally went to some news site on the IE browser. O My God! It has been literally years since I saw crap like that on my screen. These giant flashing blocks of color went sweeping across the screen, swooping up to an advertisement. The banner ads across the top were flashing contrasting colors so violently and rapidly that I had to scroll them out of view before I could focus on the text. I then closed IE (and the pop-unders it had left behind) and brought the same news site up in Mozilla behind the Proxomitron. I'm very serious, all I could see was the news article, but all I could feel was an overwhelming pity for folks who don't have blocking software.
Am I taking a free ride? I have certain sites that I frequent in my Proxomitron bypass list, and occasionally click on an ad just to give them a hit or two. (Hi Thinkgeek!) I pay for the shareware I use. I support faqs.org via the Amazon Honor System. The next time I use sneakemail, I'm sending them $12. Others (such as that news site) inspire me to implement and even write new filters. But is it a free ride?
So now I have other questions. Do you hit "30-second skip" on your ReplayTV remote while watching prerecorded shows? If you don't own a ReplayTV, do you fast forward through the commercials at the start of a video tape? Do you wait for the end of a TV show to go to the bathroom, or do you temporarily forget your ethics, sneak out and do it while the commercials are on? Are you taking a free ride then?
It gets even more absurd: does it take you two hours to read a "free" newspaper because you feel you have to read all the ads before you read the comics? Do you read every flyer tucked under your windshield wiper? Of course not! Nobody does. But where do you draw the line? So, then what makes it OK to dodge this ad because it's on paper or videotape, but not duck that ad because it's on the web?
Ads on TV still hit lots of viewers -- those who are watching real-time, those who can't afford a VCR, those who are watching a TV not under their control. Ads on the web still hit lots of viewers, too -- those who aren't savvy enough to realize they don't have to.
My vote is this: advetisers that are patently offensive (flash, animation, javascript, DHTML, motion or blinking all qualify to me) should be blocked on principle. For example, I haven't felt the need to run out and write a 'Google Sponsored Link blocking filter,' but I sure devoted time to wipe out a handful of obscene javascript and flash tricks. I view ads on a few selected sites. So, am I free-riding? I've finally decided that I don't care if I am.
Obviously, telling you to grovel through someone else's template declarations isn't a particularily strong argument in favor of the STL, but it might solve your problem.
First, unused cycles are ordinarily "optimized out" by my CPU. In other words, it runs slower and consumes less electricity when not being used. Most modern CPUs go into a low-power-consumption mode when not actively performing real processing. (If you doubt this, check your CPU temperature while it's been sitting idle with a blank screen for an hour or two. Compare that to the temperature after playing an hour of Quake III or even just running a graphics intensive screen saver for an hour. I know I could certainly feel the difference when I was running the distributed.net client at home. I just wish I had metered it.) So, I "hereby grant BDE the right to access and use the unused computing power" is another way of saying I will freely donate my electricity. Let's find out just how "free" that is.
First, let's assume that I pay $.0816/kWh for electricity (the 1999 national consumer average (page 14).) Let's also assume that I leave the computer powered on constantly (because I do.) Finally, let's assume that my computer consumes 60W when idle, but 120W when actively crunching numbers (because it's an Athlon.) So that's an extra 60W/hr I would unknowningly consume on behalf of Kazaa.
Look at it a different way: Assume there are 2,000,000 KaZaa users.
- 60W/hr * 2,000,000 = 120,000,000 watt-hours.
Thats 120 megawatts per hour. We're talking California-rolling-blackout-sized consumption of energy here. It's Environmental Impact Statement time.Is it still so unreasonable to ask them to say "Click here to agree with the above and oh, by the way, we're going to use about $40 worth of your electricity per year", or does something a bit more drastic have to happen?
Their loss prevention staff has them offering you help so that you don't steal stuff. It reduces theft greatly to have everyone feel "noticed." And if you're not buying, you'll feel compelled to leave.
Apparently, they lose more in theft than they do in pissed-off customers who walk out.
Once the RCPT TO: <certain_spammer@my.domain> identifies an inbound-but-unwanted letter, rather than have it drop the connection, have it S...L...O...W - I...T...S...E...L...F - D...O...W...N. Spam works because they can send thousands out easily. They still have to establish thousands of connections. Make any appreciable percent of those difficult, and spam will not work as well.
This might not work so well with true $$MAKE_MONEY_FAST$$ spam, but it should work for those companies who refuse to stop sending you email. They're usually more clueless than you might expect.
Unused cycles are "optimized out" by my CPU. In other words, it runs slower and consumes less electricity when not being used. Most modern CPUs go into a low-power-consumption mode when not actively performing real processing. If you doubt this, check your CPU temperature while it's been sitting idle with a blank screen for an hour or two. Compare that to the temperature after playing an hour of Quake III or even just running a graphics intensive screen saver for an hour. I know I could certainly feel the difference when I was running the distributed.net client at home.
So, I "hereby grand BDE the right to access and use the unused computing power" is another way of saying I will freely donate my electricity? Let's find out just how "free" that is.
First, let's assume that you pay $.10/kWh for electricity. Let's also assume that you leave the computer powered on constantly. Finally, let's assume that your computer consumes 60W when idle, but 120W when actively crunching numbers. So that's an extra 60W/hr you spend on behalf of Kazaa.
60W/hr x 8766 hours = 525960 watt-hours per year. .10/kWh = $52.60 per year.
525960 / 1000 = 525.960 kWh per year
525.960 *
Let's look at it a different way: Assume there are 2,000,000 KaZaa users.
60W/hr * 2,000,000 = 120,000,000 watt-hours.
Thats 120 megawatts per hour.
I think they need to file an Environmental Impact Statement before releasing this kind of crap.
I think before he can claim this, we'd need to see the results of testing on space-born and -bred animals.
Of course, XP will always have the registry open, and who knows what else it might have fired up at 2:00 AM on a Saturday morning. Perhaps it was time for its scheduled system recovery backup thing. I really can't keep track of all the randomness Microsoft introduces in each version of Windows.
I agree that it shouldn't have been trashed by a mere power failure. (Of course I'd agree!) But I can say that I have never seen a drive so lost after a crash that didn't end up being physically damaged. This damage was quite extensive. (Chkdsk found lots to clean up, but I think it may have caused even more damage than I originally had.)
So, now I just don't know. Was my crash really a FAT32 fault? Or is there a hidden hardware demon lurking in the sectors, scraping cylinders from my drive?
Then this is where the bashing happens. Microsoft obviously took no great pains to keep critical data out of harms' way. Not only did I lose the registry, but I lost hal.dll and ntoskrnl.exe in the power failure, too. There was absolutely nothing left to boot from. I was just fortunate that none of the newer files (read: my not-yet-backed-up files) seemed to have been affected.
I've been using NTFS for years at work, and with all the blue screens, crashes and power failures I've put many hundreds of machines through, I've never lost more than an occasional file to corruption.
Sigh. I should have known better. Hell, I DO know better, and that's even worse.
Looks like I'll just have to keep a FAT32 partition for ME, and not even bother to mount it under XP, just to keep it safe in the future.
My question is: am I allowed to bash them for recent past failings? I'm still doing major clean up, and since the entire registry was among those files that were forever lost, I'm still kind of bitter.
Remember, kids, make sure you don't have WinAmp sampling your "CD audio in" for visualization while dictating...
Hey, I wonder if we could use this to finally learn the lyrics to "Louie, Louie"?
In keeping with the rest of the posts on this thread, nope, can't be done. And here's where you can download it.