WTF? eBay requires ActiveX? Since when? I don't recall PayPal ever requiring installation of an ActiveX control, much less eBay. I really think you're spreading misinformation...
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but encryption doesn't mean much: if you can connect, you can sniff others, unless they'd use a ystem that can encrypt each user's connection with a key that's locally negotiated and not subject to sniffing. I don't know much about WPA2 to know if it provides such capability, but then note that there probably are devices that don't support WPA2.
Huh? Both the U.S. patent and the copyright systems are in existence due to the "promotion" clause in the U.S. Constitution. They have the same reason for existence (or lack thereof), they just cover different aspects of it.
What I do not understand is — had the jury determined Eolas's patents valid [...]
Let's be blunt: that makes the jury look stupid, not the patent somehow ethically OK. The patent was nothing new, there was plenty of prior art. They got lucky with a silly examiner, that's all.
Yeah, but you're talking about technology that doesn't exist. In terms of space hardware, if it hasn't been to orbit yet, then you don't need to worry about it. That is, unless you're the one who is developing it, in which case you need to worry a lot.
It's not about giving up. It's about the reality of chemical rockets. As long as they are the only thing available, we simply don't have chemical energy resources on Earth to move all the people off this rock. End of story.
Nope. The difference is in the amount of energy needed to go anywhere, but of course it has been left out of the discussion and thus is assumed to be irrelevant. It's not as newsworthy, perhaps -- too bad. The energy expended by the Apollo rockets that got to the moon is probably greater than the total muscle and wind energy used for sailing in the entirety of human history up to say 1500s. All space launches in our history probably expended thermal energy equivalent to all wind, muscle and coal energy used for sailing up to 1850s, by my rather quick napkin calculations...
It's not about pessimism, you dolt. It's about being realistic. Just because you wish something it won't make it true if what you wish for is not realizable in the universe we live in. Sorry, Nature cannot be fooled.
There's nature, and then there's good wishes and optimism. Nature doesn't care about the latter. There's pessimism, then there's being a realist. Chemical rocket technology is going nowhere but where it's been at for the last half century. You want to efficiently travel even within a solar system, you need another technology. That's where there's room for optimism, not where we have all the theory and engineering we need to know that we've hit the limits and that's the end of it.
Usually it's not about parts, but about quality of the design of the circuit (and parts, too, of course). It takes a whole lot of money to open a chip fab, no one will a-priori decide "hey, we're making a fab for poor quality chips!". A, say, 6502 or Z80 CPU used in one of those "consumer crap" devices is not graded for consumer crap (except for temperature range, and they avoid the use of the term "consumer crap"), it's the same one that went, at the time, into industrial and T&M equipment.
From my experience, the quality is almost always about design of the product, the individual components are rarely to blame for anything (with some notable exceptions -- IC sockets that don't use machined pins are almost universally crap, but we all learned that lesson quite well I presume). Sure, you'd argue that those consumer products were poorly designed, and I can't but agree in many cases, but that doesn't make them inherently finicky! If you have a poorly laid out board, it doesn't get worse over time, you know. Same goes for most any other poor design decision, unless it affects component longevity, and there the major issue is heat, and a minor but omnipresent issue is transients on signals due to poor board layout. Regular ICs and discrete semiconductors usually don't give a damn about heat as long as the die stays below 100C, same goes for many other discrete non-semiconductor parts. Only electrolytic capacitors are really an issue here, and perhaps PC board that gets hot enough to discolor -- usually from resistors that are too hot as designed (just my anecdotal experience).
Basically it goes like this: if there's a problem, you troubleshoot, figure it out, and fix it. It may be less enjoyable if the design was poor to begin with (Apple Time Capsule's baked PSU caps, I'm looking at you!), but just because it was from the 80s and was consumer grade does not make it somehow special simply due to its age! I'd say that an ABC-80 (a Swedish microcomputer) with its horrible socketed daughterboards for 80 column mode (I have a 25+ year old specimen) is not any different than the Time Capsule. Both had aspects that were improperly designed, and you address those deficiencies as you fix them - better connectors and stress reliefs for ABC-80, "forever" tantalum caps and a fan reorientation for the Time Capsule.
Electrolytic cans are one thing, another thing is probably the abysmal power distribution (long, winding tracks) and poor decoupling techniques. A 5MHz "clean" clock has useful harmonics up to about 50MHz, so a decoupling cap that's far away from all the circuit points where the clock goes/comes from may be useless -- and you have to measure along the traces, not as crow flies. When you design with general purpose electrolytic caps, you pretty much assume that for digital logic decoupling purposes they are open circuits above a couple hundred kHz. That's the only sane conservative assumption, unless you characterize the ESR of the parts you actually use (no substitutions!), and then test their behavior in final circuit.
You're completely, absolutely, out of you mind deluded. Sorry. At work I use some test instruments, made by Tektronix and HP, where the date codes on chips are all in the 70s. They work beautifully, and I regularly "hack" on them. They are anywhere between 30 to 40 years old at this point. There's nothing fussy and temperamental about those systems, and some of them are so complex that a consumer-grade microcomputer or game console holds no candle to them. I'd say that all of the consumer systems that this chip replacement would go into are comparably simple. If you would really have a problem with them, then it's your problem, not a general one. If you want complex, take any modern PC and try replacing a BGA chip in it. I'd take a 30 year old piece of gear any day, I probably could do chip swaps in those blindfolded.
In fact, Tesla cars have well-to-wheel (well, mine-to-wheel) energy consumption that's 50% or less of the best gasoline-powered car in same class. In spite of electricity transmission losses, they still win in the end by a factor of 2+.
I guess when I'm driving the car I don't care at all how it looks from the outside. It's not a penis enlarger. I care how it looks, feels and handles -- all the things you get to experience from the inside.
Considering that it's a cancer drug, I say: meh, it's not bad at all. Chemo usually makes you toxic enough that others are not allowed to touch you for crying out loud, you have to wear warning tags! You're taking chemo at levels that produce acute toxicity: that's normal dosage, duh. This drug is a walk in the park, and given how bad Alzheimer's is, I'd take it without blinking an eye if it worked on humans and I was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
I generally agree, and I've never had an eBay cable fail. I have another anecdote, though. Dollar Tree (a dollar store) sold some perhaps 2' USB cables that had absolutely puny cross sections on power conductors. They'd never be considered USB compliant. They worked OK for self-powered devices but not for anything that would suck more than about 100mA. This isn't exactly a failure, but those were not good for what I tried them for (devices that suck ~350mA).
I don't think that's true. They have had foam issues from day one; foam is pretty brittle when cold and it really needed some sort of a metal matrix to make it stable (think of lath used for stucco).
Doesn't it happen to be the propellant for the Dragon's thrusters -- used for launch escape, orbital maneuvering, attitude control, and perhaps even controlled descent. I don't see that last one panning out all that well: you probably don't want to step out from a Dragon capsule right after it touched down on Earth and breathe the fumes. There's always a bit of unburned stuff around, and it doesn't take much to make you sick AFAIK. Space Shuttle is a much bigger vehicle so it can support you hanging around until it's safe to egress -- just listen to NASA TV recordings from Shuttle landings and hear how long they stay after landing, doing checklists... On a Dragon there would be not much to do, and I don't know how much oxygen is left in the Spacecraft segment after landing -- i.e. how long can you stay put before popping the hatch; especially in emergency situations -- say somehow they blow a tank a-la Apollo 13 and need to get back ASAP, it'd be a sad thing to land safely just to get killed by hydrazine vapors... I'm sure they are considering all that, but it'd be interesting to read some documents giving a bit more detail to the procedures...
I guess the "premium" from a distributor is for the fact that there is a stock number, and a stock to go with it -- perhaps even stock that won't vanish in a year. And some sort of acceptance process, presumably with people who know their shit and are not just buying whatever is the cheapest at the moment. With a random off-brand cable you'll have no recourse if they faked their USB compliance -- it's likely that in a month you'll not be able to buy exact same make of cable anymore, never mind trying a return... Sure, for non-critical use it's OK, but you'll probably agree that paying 2x the price for certain peace of mind doesn't exactly hurt. The cable you got on Amazon is of course not from amazon itself, but from some 3rd party vendor. It's no different than buying on eBay. All that amazon and eBay do is provide hosting, payment processing, and supposedly enforce some basic rules. Now I do buy critical infrastructure parts (patch cables, network switches, servers, UPSes) from eBay sellers, but that's after I vet a vendor and test the products they offer. If I need a replacement sight-unseen tomorrow, I buy either directly from the manufacturer (say from HP or Dell), or I go to a distributor like Digi-Key, Allied Electronics, Mouser, Newark, Jameco, etc. Or, better yet, if I truly need a replacement within 24 hours, I just keep one on hand.
Apple I think is working hard at reimplementing a SMB client. When you have enough money, it's probably not too hard to get good people. They could have probably set up one team to properly document the protocol from Samba source code and packet captures, and then the other team can work on implementation. Samba development is seemingly slow mainly due to lack of resources. I doubt that say RedHat would have millions to throw every year at what amounts to a fringe project to them. I doubt anyone buys RHEL license for Samba, and if you're serious about Samba then you'll be running a sernet or self compiled package (recent), not something obsolete that RedHat ships.
I have to agree. Their prices are mostly competitive, they even have deals that can compete with eBay -- say, refurbed white intel macbooks. You can always get a lemon, but with eBay you can never be sure how easy the return and refund is going to be.
I don't think it has to be a sad life. He just doesn't care for stuff he doesn't care about, it's a matter of taste in art and nothing else. Such things are subjective choices and are not up for discussion -- such would be very unproductive and pointless methinks.
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WTF? eBay requires ActiveX? Since when? I don't recall PayPal ever requiring installation of an ActiveX control, much less eBay. I really think you're spreading misinformation...
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but encryption doesn't mean much: if you can connect, you can sniff others, unless they'd use a ystem that can encrypt each user's connection with a key that's locally negotiated and not subject to sniffing. I don't know much about WPA2 to know if it provides such capability, but then note that there probably are devices that don't support WPA2.
Huh? Both the U.S. patent and the copyright systems are in existence due to the "promotion" clause in the U.S. Constitution. They have the same reason for existence (or lack thereof), they just cover different aspects of it.
What I do not understand is — had the jury determined Eolas's patents valid [...]
Let's be blunt: that makes the jury look stupid, not the patent somehow ethically OK. The patent was nothing new, there was plenty of prior art. They got lucky with a silly examiner, that's all.
Yeah, but you're talking about technology that doesn't exist. In terms of space hardware, if it hasn't been to orbit yet, then you don't need to worry about it. That is, unless you're the one who is developing it, in which case you need to worry a lot.
It's not about giving up. It's about the reality of chemical rockets. As long as they are the only thing available, we simply don't have chemical energy resources on Earth to move all the people off this rock. End of story.
Nope. The difference is in the amount of energy needed to go anywhere, but of course it has been left out of the discussion and thus is assumed to be irrelevant. It's not as newsworthy, perhaps -- too bad. The energy expended by the Apollo rockets that got to the moon is probably greater than the total muscle and wind energy used for sailing in the entirety of human history up to say 1500s. All space launches in our history probably expended thermal energy equivalent to all wind, muscle and coal energy used for sailing up to 1850s, by my rather quick napkin calculations...
It's not about pessimism, you dolt. It's about being realistic. Just because you wish something it won't make it true if what you wish for is not realizable in the universe we live in. Sorry, Nature cannot be fooled.
There's nature, and then there's good wishes and optimism. Nature doesn't care about the latter. There's pessimism, then there's being a realist. Chemical rocket technology is going nowhere but where it's been at for the last half century. You want to efficiently travel even within a solar system, you need another technology. That's where there's room for optimism, not where we have all the theory and engineering we need to know that we've hit the limits and that's the end of it.
Usually it's not about parts, but about quality of the design of the circuit (and parts, too, of course). It takes a whole lot of money to open a chip fab, no one will a-priori decide "hey, we're making a fab for poor quality chips!". A, say, 6502 or Z80 CPU used in one of those "consumer crap" devices is not graded for consumer crap (except for temperature range, and they avoid the use of the term "consumer crap"), it's the same one that went, at the time, into industrial and T&M equipment.
From my experience, the quality is almost always about design of the product, the individual components are rarely to blame for anything (with some notable exceptions -- IC sockets that don't use machined pins are almost universally crap, but we all learned that lesson quite well I presume). Sure, you'd argue that those consumer products were poorly designed, and I can't but agree in many cases, but that doesn't make them inherently finicky! If you have a poorly laid out board, it doesn't get worse over time, you know. Same goes for most any other poor design decision, unless it affects component longevity, and there the major issue is heat, and a minor but omnipresent issue is transients on signals due to poor board layout. Regular ICs and discrete semiconductors usually don't give a damn about heat as long as the die stays below 100C, same goes for many other discrete non-semiconductor parts. Only electrolytic capacitors are really an issue here, and perhaps PC board that gets hot enough to discolor -- usually from resistors that are too hot as designed (just my anecdotal experience).
Basically it goes like this: if there's a problem, you troubleshoot, figure it out, and fix it. It may be less enjoyable if the design was poor to begin with (Apple Time Capsule's baked PSU caps, I'm looking at you!), but just because it was from the 80s and was consumer grade does not make it somehow special simply due to its age! I'd say that an ABC-80 (a Swedish microcomputer) with its horrible socketed daughterboards for 80 column mode (I have a 25+ year old specimen) is not any different than the Time Capsule. Both had aspects that were improperly designed, and you address those deficiencies as you fix them - better connectors and stress reliefs for ABC-80, "forever" tantalum caps and a fan reorientation for the Time Capsule.
Electrolytic cans are one thing, another thing is probably the abysmal power distribution (long, winding tracks) and poor decoupling techniques. A 5MHz "clean" clock has useful harmonics up to about 50MHz, so a decoupling cap that's far away from all the circuit points where the clock goes/comes from may be useless -- and you have to measure along the traces, not as crow flies. When you design with general purpose electrolytic caps, you pretty much assume that for digital logic decoupling purposes they are open circuits above a couple hundred kHz. That's the only sane conservative assumption, unless you characterize the ESR of the parts you actually use (no substitutions!), and then test their behavior in final circuit.
You're completely, absolutely, out of you mind deluded. Sorry. At work I use some test instruments, made by Tektronix and HP, where the date codes on chips are all in the 70s. They work beautifully, and I regularly "hack" on them. They are anywhere between 30 to 40 years old at this point. There's nothing fussy and temperamental about those systems, and some of them are so complex that a consumer-grade microcomputer or game console holds no candle to them. I'd say that all of the consumer systems that this chip replacement would go into are comparably simple. If you would really have a problem with them, then it's your problem, not a general one. If you want complex, take any modern PC and try replacing a BGA chip in it. I'd take a 30 year old piece of gear any day, I probably could do chip swaps in those blindfolded.
Arguably, this can be emulated. I don't know if this implementation does it, though.
I guess not all chemo is the same :) She was lucky.
In fact, Tesla cars have well-to-wheel (well, mine-to-wheel) energy consumption that's 50% or less of the best gasoline-powered car in same class. In spite of electricity transmission losses, they still win in the end by a factor of 2+.
I guess when I'm driving the car I don't care at all how it looks from the outside. It's not a penis enlarger. I care how it looks, feels and handles -- all the things you get to experience from the inside.
Considering that it's a cancer drug, I say: meh, it's not bad at all. Chemo usually makes you toxic enough that others are not allowed to touch you for crying out loud, you have to wear warning tags! You're taking chemo at levels that produce acute toxicity: that's normal dosage, duh. This drug is a walk in the park, and given how bad Alzheimer's is, I'd take it without blinking an eye if it worked on humans and I was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
I generally agree, and I've never had an eBay cable fail. I have another anecdote, though. Dollar Tree (a dollar store) sold some perhaps 2' USB cables that had absolutely puny cross sections on power conductors. They'd never be considered USB compliant. They worked OK for self-powered devices but not for anything that would suck more than about 100mA. This isn't exactly a failure, but those were not good for what I tried them for (devices that suck ~350mA).
I don't think that's true. They have had foam issues from day one; foam is pretty brittle when cold and it really needed some sort of a metal matrix to make it stable (think of lath used for stucco).
Doesn't it happen to be the propellant for the Dragon's thrusters -- used for launch escape, orbital maneuvering, attitude control, and perhaps even controlled descent. I don't see that last one panning out all that well: you probably don't want to step out from a Dragon capsule right after it touched down on Earth and breathe the fumes. There's always a bit of unburned stuff around, and it doesn't take much to make you sick AFAIK. Space Shuttle is a much bigger vehicle so it can support you hanging around until it's safe to egress -- just listen to NASA TV recordings from Shuttle landings and hear how long they stay after landing, doing checklists... On a Dragon there would be not much to do, and I don't know how much oxygen is left in the Spacecraft segment after landing -- i.e. how long can you stay put before popping the hatch; especially in emergency situations -- say somehow they blow a tank a-la Apollo 13 and need to get back ASAP, it'd be a sad thing to land safely just to get killed by hydrazine vapors... I'm sure they are considering all that, but it'd be interesting to read some documents giving a bit more detail to the procedures...
I guess the "premium" from a distributor is for the fact that there is a stock number, and a stock to go with it -- perhaps even stock that won't vanish in a year. And some sort of acceptance process, presumably with people who know their shit and are not just buying whatever is the cheapest at the moment. With a random off-brand cable you'll have no recourse if they faked their USB compliance -- it's likely that in a month you'll not be able to buy exact same make of cable anymore, never mind trying a return... Sure, for non-critical use it's OK, but you'll probably agree that paying 2x the price for certain peace of mind doesn't exactly hurt. The cable you got on Amazon is of course not from amazon itself, but from some 3rd party vendor. It's no different than buying on eBay. All that amazon and eBay do is provide hosting, payment processing, and supposedly enforce some basic rules. Now I do buy critical infrastructure parts (patch cables, network switches, servers, UPSes) from eBay sellers, but that's after I vet a vendor and test the products they offer. If I need a replacement sight-unseen tomorrow, I buy either directly from the manufacturer (say from HP or Dell), or I go to a distributor like Digi-Key, Allied Electronics, Mouser, Newark, Jameco, etc. Or, better yet, if I truly need a replacement within 24 hours, I just keep one on hand.
Apple I think is working hard at reimplementing a SMB client. When you have enough money, it's probably not too hard to get good people. They could have probably set up one team to properly document the protocol from Samba source code and packet captures, and then the other team can work on implementation. Samba development is seemingly slow mainly due to lack of resources. I doubt that say RedHat would have millions to throw every year at what amounts to a fringe project to them. I doubt anyone buys RHEL license for Samba, and if you're serious about Samba then you'll be running a sernet or self compiled package (recent), not something obsolete that RedHat ships.
A 3' USB 2 cable costs $2.02 at Digi-Key (stock# Q361-ND), qty 1. With USPS shipping it'll still be less than $10 total ;)
If you're buying something that's a generic electronic component/assembly, you don't go to a computer store, you go to an electronics distributor.
I have to agree. Their prices are mostly competitive, they even have deals that can compete with eBay -- say, refurbed white intel macbooks. You can always get a lemon, but with eBay you can never be sure how easy the return and refund is going to be.
I don't think it has to be a sad life. He just doesn't care for stuff he doesn't care about, it's a matter of taste in art and nothing else. Such things are subjective choices and are not up for discussion -- such would be very unproductive and pointless methinks.