Nine times out of ten, the solution is simple and just got overlooked in all the comlpexity.
Indeed.
Like the very first thing: never buy any product from any technology company sufficiently ignorant to be running IIS. Like Pelco.
This was the tip of the iceberg. Not coincidentally, a bunch of standalone computers requiring reasonable security and reliability are now left not only with the extra per unit expense of a Windows license, but also the many liabilities which come with that Windows license.
Now, since his client has already committed such a stupid act, he might well be screwed.
If there are two places where Windows has absolutely no place whatsoever, it's in the server farm and the standalone special application department. (Note I'm not a blind anti-Windows fanatic; I'm running it on my desktop right now. But in the face of better quality free alternatives for the former applications, Windows is the choice of the ignorant.)
Not too long ago, I was consulting for a broadcaster who wanted an alternative to cart players. I checked out Prophet Systems until their IIS-powered site puked and died. I sent them an e-mail asking them what assurance I had that their Windows-powered systems would be any more reliable at inserting bumpers and commercials than their Windows-powered webservers were at dispensing the PDF file I was getting when the server puked. Commercial time is around $250 per minute on this station and in this market - how much will the dead air cost while Windows reboots?
Usually it's the Boss's computer heavily infected (No one dare to go into their rooms to clean up the virus), and usually the rule allows all the Boss's computers to access that security cam website.
Or you (the computer-illiterate boss) simply hire employees who will walk into your office and make fun of you for having opened the "Just Click Here fore [sic] a Bigger Penis" e-mail. His skill was that required to run a business; mine was in making fun of anyone without computer savvy (which somehow extended to avoidance of snake-oil salesman who'd discovered the Internet). Most days, Pat and I got along great.
Circumcision? That quackery? It must kill you that the only people who do that dick cutting bullshit are backwards peoples in the Middle East and Africa... oh and the United States.
And Canada. And Australia. And New Zealand. And upper-class British. And guess what? I was born in the uncircumcised philistine land of Wales. I spent my first 22 years with a foreskin. Lemme tell you, after I was circumcised, I had a new appreciation for our Jewish friends.
You see, sex is based on a reciprocating motion. As a lonely virgin, I can understand that you don't understand this, but during the "OUT" stroke, you pull the skin over the head and you don't feel a damned thing. Enter circumcision. In over ten years, the only down side was that I couldn't bag a slut with a smegma fetish. Too bad, so sad. I cry, I really do. Boo-hoo.
The joys of boxer shorts more than made up for the "shortcomings" of having had part of my dick cut off. So stop whining and treat Yourself (capitalization quite deliberate), as a fellow circumcised man (who probably needs a hausfrau cause to redeem yourself), to some silk.
I'm convinced the sheeple out here would vote 80% to 20% for the "Golden Beaches Environment Protection Act", even if it was actually a 2 Trillion dollar bond to exterminate all white men.
Of course! The solution is to enact a law where you are exluded from voting if you are:
Inflicted with any Bachelor of Arts degree,
A hausfau incapable of even simple mathematics (and therefore analytical scientific understanding) like differentiating e^3x,
An uncircumcised philistine, since there is no intelligent or rational scientific argument against male circumcision if your culture requires wearing pants.
There must be a serious plague of exploding N64s and MP3 players in Japan.
Well, in all seriousness though, this is a problem.
Lots of early consumer electronics devices won't even remotely approach modern safety standards. Consider early radios and TV sets which often used a "hot chassis" (where the steel chassis was directly connected to one side of the power line as part of a system avoiding the use of an expensive power transformer), like those using the traditional "All American Five" tube lineup (50B5 or 50C5, 35W4, 12AV6, 12BE6, 12BA6), or the flip-leaf toasters of the 1920s. These items constitute only a very small risk because they will mostly be in very casual use by informed collectors and restorers, and short of mounting them in fireproof plexiglass boxes with isolation transformers, they will never even approach modern safety standards. (Note that a hot chassis wasn't as big a risk before they became surrounded by modern grounded electrical equipment - in their designed surroundings, you were unlikely to touch a grounded object at the same time as the radio. Also note that *many* post-war Japanese radios used the All-American Five design!)
Such a rule would effectively eliminate the collectable marketplace and probably result in the loss of many of the early products of companies which later became leaders in their fields. The first Sony transistor radio is historically significant, as is the first JVC VHS VCR, as is...
Japan is also noted among automotive enthusiasts for similarly draconian rules surrounding old cars - I cannot corroborate this, but I have heard that the *entire* braking system must be replaced in all cars over a certain number of years of age.
The grisly irony, of course, is that this is from a culture which reveres aged people... but they're apparently happy to destroy the remaining artifacts those people built.
(By the way, good rule of thumb: *never* leave any piece of electronic equipment made before about 1980 running unattended, inspect them for possible dangers like rotten insulation, and *always* assume that any exposed metal pieces are connected to one side of the power line.)
You must be American. The rest of the world figured out years ago that front-loaders use less water, clean better, and DON'T leak. Well, not from the front seal, anyway!
Nope, I'm a Canadian, with a degree in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Chemistry, and who paid at least part of his way through university by repairing major appliances.
Im a drycleaner, and its normal for commercial cleaning operations to use a front-loading washer, be it for laundry or dry-cleaning. I can not, in the last 15 years, recall even *once* having to replace a door-seal, even on a dry-cleaning machine that used a rather volatile solvent; nevermind a washing machine that uses water and a carefully balanced chemical mixture.
I cannot, in recorded history, tell you of an incident where gravity has failed to keep a liquid in a container.
Certainly we changed a number of seals on other parts, but on the front-loading doors? Thats your concern? Honestly, how silly. Besides, a rubber door seal, should it ever *need* replacing, can be replaced EASILY with wait for it...more rubber.
In consumer installations, this will rarely happen. Think about it! How many of your customers will whine, "it's too complicated!" if you were to pass them a door seal and a Philips screwdriver for their front-load washing machine.
or, as is used on on drycleaning washer/extractor and similarly on the solvent reclaimer: a cork seal, which is going on use for 5 years this easter and isnt showing a sign of a problem.
Five years! Wow! That's almost 1/10th the age of my washing machine, a 1954 Maytag which trusts in gravity to retain the water!
Nevermind the other benefits of a front-loading machine, such as less used space (imagine a washing machine large enough to do 60lbs of laundry as a top-fill machine, itd be rather large) and it would need more water to do the same job. Remember, in a top-fill you have to fill it with water completely over the level of the clothing; not so with a front-loading washer (i believe the models we use fill something like 60% or so of the drum) and you get a better cleaning, because theres more agitation, because theres more room, unless you absolutely stuff it full, for the clothes to move around.
The sole and singual benefit of a front-loader is that they're stackable. That's it.
Less water consumption = less cleanliness. Go take a university-level chemistry course or two. Make careful notes of such concepts as solubility concepts. Remember that it's not the detergent or the agitation which dissolves the dirt, it's the universal solvent which does it.
In addition, you can clean large items like blankets and comforters or long items like tablecloths and such without the risk of them tangling around the vertical agitator and causing the damned things to sieze (odd enough, my manager recently tried washing her comforter at home in a large top-loading washer and ruined it, of all the people...)
I dunno. I'm not sufficiently ignorant to overload any washing machine, rather it be a real one or a eurotrash front-loader.
I always find it funny when they require ten years of experience and don't pay nearly enough money. I actually just had an interview this morning for an electronics assembly position that pays minimum wage! I have friends with only their highschool and no experience making 4 times that much in unskilled labor positions.
Hopefully you laughed at them as you were getting up to leave?
While I was with Litton (designing radar video systems), I got a call from a recruiter who asked me to come in for a meeting. I asked for details and was told that it was a good high-tech firm. I went to the meeting, where I discovered that the "position" was a pyramid scheme where I'd be selling long distance plans.
I blew up immediately, yelling obscenities about them wasting my time, and walked out. The people in the reception area heard me too; several of them left with me.
I guess that was how I learned the hard way (well, waste of my time) to *never* go to an interview for a recruiter who won't tell me the name of the company. (The line I use is this: "I need to know the name of the employer so I can properly prepare to meet with them. I am not interested in approaching them independently; you guys did the legwork on matching me to them, you are due your commission or fee.")
If the recruiter still won't tell me the name after that (perfectly reasonable) explanation, I tell them I'm not interested in having anything to do with them.
Here in Los Angeles, we don't measure distances in miles, but in driving time. As an example, LAX is about half an hour from Studio City, unless you're talking Rush Hour, in which case figure about an hour and a quarter to an hour and three quarters.
Same thing up here in Canada.
How far away is Toronto? 'Bout 5 hours down the 401.
Where's Wal*Mart? Less than five minutes that way.
I think a lot of it comes from the metricism which happened in 1976. It became "politically incorrect" to tell people something was a mile down the road. And I was raised in the Metric generation, but kilometers are still not as natural to human perception of distance as miles are. So virtually everyone talks in terms of time.
But of the idiot who chose C as a name for a product. It is the same with menu product names that are also real words. Even happens with products that are not real worlds but have come in common use. PHP is of course also the extension used for php pages and so any search will not just return jobs requiring PHP but also jobs who got a url with php.
Heheh... I have a late 1960s Sound A-5000 stereo amplifier. I love the thing and have restored it completely; with a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4x and a modified SoundBlaster 16 ISA (yeah... pretty hard to find a new motherboard for it!), my computer's sound system is lovely.
One day, I got it into my head that there were probably schematics for my Sound A-5000 out there somewhere. Of course, searching the 'net was utterly futile.
So, this is about a motor that makes claims that are pretty universally accepted to be impossible. The poster, of course, is affiliated with the site hosting the page, so he really should have read the article the same way I did.
Heheh... what should be enough to tip off those readers *without* an Electrical Engineering degree is the fact that the site is hosted on IIS. I mean, immediately when I find a site is running on IIS, its owners (and therefore content) lose all credibility.
>100% efficiency is simply impossible. There's the resistance of the windings, there's the reluctance of the laminates, there's the air resistance to the moving armature, there's the bearing friction. If it were true, these guys would have figured out a way to break every known law of physics.
One of the things about these sites which really irritates me is that ignorant hausfrau and hippies get it into their heads that such things are really possible, then start writing their congressmen, who in turn legislate asinine and counter-productive "energy efficiency" measures like hybrid cars (shorter lifespans due to expensive service and replacement batteries - just watch the wrecking yards in a couple of years), those silly front-load washing machines (what kind of idiot trusts a rubber seal to contain the water when there's gravity there? How long will the seal last before the machine starts leaking and gets pitched?) and low-flush toilets (flushing four times to get rid of dark matter is *not* a net water savings).
Oh my god, 7W! I'll have to take out a second mortgage on the house. What a maroon.
The point is that you will be using more energy in the regulation process than the energy you actually deliver to your load. Yes, it is only seven watts, but if you're doing that with ten wall-warts, it's 70 watts of waste because of your limited electronics knowledge. And it'll eat into your pornography budget.
Oh my... I just went to their webpage. I haven't clicked anything, but their lack of product and development focus and the sheer incredulity of some of their products is reminiscent of the stuff advertised in the back of Mad Magazine. All they need is X-ray glasses, sea monkeys and a secret decoder ring. And a hoverconversion kit for 1981-1983 Delorean DMC-12 sports cars.
I would assume that one could (ab)use "electron migration" to store information, provided an easy way of resetting the electrons existed. This would have the benefit of not needing any magnetic mechanisms (which may mean you could get higher densities) but it would certainly be slower to write to, and likely to read from. I would suspect that something similar will offer much better opportunities for solid-state non-volatile storage in the future, precisely because it should be capable of far higher densities.
If I recall from engineering school, this is how flash memories work; a charge is "trapped" in the gate oxide of a MOSFET (thereby making the MOSFET conduct or not when the data is read), and with current technologies can stay there for several years. The issue (besides write speed, caused by parasitic gate capacitance) is the relatively low number of write cycles before the gate oxide begins to fail. I forget the exact mechanism, but I assume it does have to do with electromigration (as opposed to electron migration) causing the trapping layer in the gate oxide to eventually puncture through to the substrate.
I got my first computer (Texas Instruments TI-99/4A) in the early 1980s, back in the days when Compute! and other similar magazines were *full* of games and other programs which you'd have to type into your computer.
I credit them with my blazing fast typing speed, my good accuracy typing code (which is a lot different from typing text, of course!) and my ability to troubleshoot.
I'd type run, and I'd get
* INCORRECT STATEMENT 440
Then fix that line, and the program would run... but some text would be wrong somewhere.
(Oops, the text segment was supposed to be from 1 to A, not 1 to B.)
Now, it's honestly been 15 years since I last did *any* programming in TI Extended BASIC, but I still remember most of the syntax, including CALL SOUND being (duration, frequency, volume {,frequency2,volume2,frequency3,volume3,noise}).
The repetition from retyping is valuable rote.
The other thing is how well can we trust media? Tape has finite lifespan, disks have finite lifespans, and how do we know the security of data trusted to CD and DVD dyes? They haven't been around long enough to say for sure. So you're gonna have to make a point of recopying your media every year or so in order to ensure any deterioration doesn't cause loss of data. Fine, now you'll have multiple backups, in a few years at least one of those DVDs should be legible.
On the other hand, print the code to the laser printer (or even the old Okidata dot matrix every true computer geek still has kicking around - hell, I still have my trusty first printer, the Xerox Diablo D25 daisywheel; I still sometimes use it to print letters and stuff just for the fun of it).
Once it's on good quality paper, you know you'll be able to OCR it someday. Whether it's tomorrow or 50 years from now, I think we can rest assured there'll still be paper - and therefore scanners.
Oh, and by the way, importing my old TI and Amiga software into my current machine was no fun. I had cassette tapes, 5.25" diskettes in TI format, 3.5" diskettes in Amiga format, and that whole Amiga hard drive image. Transferred to my PC by XMODEM and a Laplink cable. All these tasks were possible only because I still have my old hardware, and it still works - and PCs still, for the most part, have RS-232 ports.
My first computer was an Amiga 1000 (PAL version). Ah, endless afternoons (I was about 8 at that time, so I was told to sleep during night) of hacking BASIC. Creating animations with DPaint was fun too. Or writing Amiga-DOS scripts, to automate what ever small task. And sometimes recreation with the FlightSimulator. Oh, the days!
Amiga (A1000 in particular) was my *second* platform - and, in fact, I still have all the hardware! Remember AREXX? Or your startup-script? df0? Soldering in a socket to use Amiga 500/2000 Kickstart ROMs? [happy smile, remembering the good old days when my e-mail address was a spam-free UUCP account...]
My first was the TI-99/4A. (And of course I still have that hardware!)
(I should note at this point that I still have every computer I've ever cared about: my TI-99/4A with its many expansions and modifications, and my Amiga 1000. The rest (x86) are soulless and disposable commodities with no unique architectural features.)
Now, aside from its popularity, the C-64 was about as mundane as any computer could possibly be and so I eschewed it as the Jack Tramiel cardboard-RF-shield garbage that it was. The TI-99/4 series was downright *weird* but capable of great power in the right hands; getting to know it means relatively capable multitasking on hardware introduced in 1979. (The TI was exceptionally powerful for its day by virtue of its TMS9900 16-bit CPU and registers in RAM, though its BASIC *really* sucked.) Getting *really* familiar with it meant adding 80-column graphics boards, hard disk controllers, and whipping out the soldering iron to circumvent the RAM's 16/8 bus multiplexer. 1979 hardware with a slight revision in 1981, and I was multitasking.
When finally I could no longer cope with 40-column text in Funylwriter (about my third year of high school), I scooped a used Amiga 1000. A few hacks later and I had WYSIWYG text editing with horrible MOD files playing in the background (ah, but it was so neat in an era when Sidekick was just starting to become popular on the 386s my classmates had).
Choice of the TI-99/4A? I was *ten years old*; combining paper route, birthday and Christmas money, I could have had a TI-99/4A, a Timex-Sinclair 1000 or a Commodore VIC-20. I chose the TI because their machine did more than either (even though they didn't know how to advertise or market that to the public!), and their logo was on most of the chips in old stuff I'd taken apart.
Choice of an Amiga? I got used to having power with the TI, and the small and tight-knit usergroups of an unusual platform. In terms of bang for the buck, I don't think too many intelligent or informed people would put a 1985 Amiga 1000 up against any PC until at least a 1990 486 with 1993's Windows 3.1. Yah, Microsoft was writing busines apps for the PC, but since when have they actually been a harbinger of quality, power, or reliability? And here we are in 2006 - the competition is old enough to drink in Utah but the Wintel platform still can't do two screen resolutions simultaneously on the same display.
We pay the TV licence so fund the BBC, if they wish to develope beyond that they should raise their own funds and not charge us for it. If I buy 1 PC, 2 PCs or 10 PCs, I may never use them to watch BBC content and as such I'm paying for fresh air in effect.
Is it based on the number of television receivers in your home? I collect early television receivers, I have at least 60 television sets right now.
Here in Canada, the CBC tax isn't based on receiver licenses, it's sucked right out of the federal budget. Each and every Canadian gets to spend over $35 for a radio and television network which few of us actually use due to its lame programming.
Surely there's still at least one in the power supply?
Seriously, though, the market being as trend-based and as fast-moving as it is, one can expect that all innovative tech companies will alternate between boom and bust, with the bust times being spent retooling to meet current demands.
SG deserves credit for their work and the sheer quality of their hardware; even though they may be playing catchup right now, they have my wishes for their success. Every now and then I fondle the Indigo (and many Suns, Sun being in a bad position too) with sheer admiration for being built to last in a field where so little is.
BTW, you can thank Linux for doing serious damage to all these guys - who'd have ever thought that a commodity PC could do nearly as much as a professional-grade Unix workstation? I am a huge Linux fan, but it must be remembered that making a transition from a proprietary OS to Linux is a *huge* deal for companies who've probably made most of their incomes on software and support.
I agree. I am a computer services provider for mostly home users and I often find NAV and internet tools to be single greatest contributor to draining system resources. I usually recommend disabling NAV, using safe internet practices, and scanning weekly or if there appears to be a problem.
Oh yeah, but I've yet to find any antivirus software which doesn't do this.
I have also found that attempting to educate users about safe Internet practices is futile at best. I do, quite literally, have my father as the perfect example; despite many government-sponsored training courses, he still doesn't actually know the difference between two windows. "Dad, a window is an area on the screen which belongs to a program. The idea of a window is that it lets you do several things at once. Choose a window by pointing at its title bar - right there - and clicking on it. You can have several windows open at once, allowing you to choose your task as quickly as you can reach for the mouse."
So, what do I get from other, more advanced, users?
"Use FireFox instead of IE." - "You're just being alarmist, Internet Explorer can't be that bad."
"Don't open executables, especially if they're from strangers." - "My friend sent me trojan.scr, so I opened it."
"Don't open Word, Excel or PowerPoint files which didn't originate on your computer." - "All of my spreadsheets stopped working and one of them tried to dial a 1-900 number!"
Microsoft's support forum is quickly filling up with complaints about this problem, ma...
Having had to use and support enough Microsoft crap over the years, I consider it to be suspicious that there's a "problem" appearing after Microsoft introduces a competing product.
Although I am sure that Microsoft's anti-virus/anti-spyware uses less CPU and memory, what with all the undocumented Windows features which were mysteriously used in their software.
Bastards. I hope Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, all employees and all shareholders of that company contract inoperable colorectal cancer.
Out of interest, have you ever seen Syllable? Not because it has a good user interface or anything (It doesn't, yet) but because they're not doing "Designed by geeks, for geeks".
Well, it sure is pretty, and I like the fact it's got Unixish guts!
Of course, only time will tell whether or not anything useful will come of it - based on a quick read, I think there's gonna have to be a lot of work to make it run Linux stuff out of the box, since at least that will give it a software base to start with.
My first car was a 1981 honda accord hatchback. It didn't have power steering. (it did at one point, but it was broken long before I bought the car)
That's a safety issue. If the car is equipped with power steering, the power assist should be working. The geometry of power steering systems is often slightly different than that of a manual steering vehicle. Furthermore, if the reason it failed was a worn assist valve, it's not impossible that the assist valve can wedge into a position where it allows fluid to one side of the rack, causing the steering wheel to be pulled (stronger than you are!) in the direction in which the valve is stuck. In short, loss of steering control.
Let me tell you power steering is practically useless. The only time I could even tell I didn't have it was when I was turning the steering wheel while stopped, which you aren't supposed to do anyway.
Dry steering (steering when stopped) is an excellent way to wear flat spots onto tires, and in cheap underbuilt cars (like Honda products in general - exceptionally well assembled but still very underbuilt), the extra stress wears tie-rod ends noticeably and can even warp the front clip's sheetmetal. Don't do it at all unless you've got a solid full-frame vehicle and a new set of tires on order.
OTOH, power steering is very helpful in slow-speed maneovers, like parallel parking. Though it's not as important in small cars. My own 1976 Dodge Ram (fullsize pickup truck) doesn't have power steering, and urban driving was hell until my arms bulked up. I could have swapped a power steering box into it, but I kind of enjoy tossing the keys to a more delicate friend and asking him or her to move it for me - a touchy gas pedal attached to a 4-barrel 400CID (6.6L) V8 was the first surprise as the rear wheels started to sing, lack of power steering was the other.
Now power brakes were very noticible. My car had trouble maintaining an idle so when I put in the clutch the engine would frequently stall, unless I gave it gas.
Carbureted Accord. Point an unlit blowtorch over all the vacuum lines; if the engine revs up, you've found a cracked hose or something. Check your idle speed screw, set your idle mixture with an exhaust gas analyzer or at the very least with a vacuum gauge on the manifold. Check the carb float. If it was a mixture or float issue, your gas mileage would probably also have improved substantially. None of these repairs would take more than 1/2 hour and a few basic hand tools, even on a pain in the ass car like an Accord.
Now I was 16, a new driver, and had my car stalling out at ~50 mph while I was shifting from fourth gear to fifth gear. It wasn't that big of a deal. I coasted put it in neutral and restarted the engine. No sweat.
Why not just put it into the desired gear and pop the clutch? The forward momentum will spin the engine, the starter motor will spin the engine. Either one will make the engine start again - this doesn't require taking your hands off the shifter and steering wheel.
What was worse was when I was slowing to a stop, put in the clutch, and the car stalled. Then braking got tough, but it wasn't that difficult either.
When the engine stalls, it's no longer producing vacuum on the intake system. Since the power brakes are operated by engine vacuum, the power brakes will stop working soon after the engine stalls. You should have fixed the stalling problem.
Presumably the police wouldn't disable the cars electronics while the car is approaching a traffic light, most likely after he goes through a light, but even if they did it shouldn't be a big deal.
I don't think these taggers actually disable the car, simply provide for letting the police cars fall back, reducing the speed of the chase, and still allowing them to find the perp later.
Disabling a car's electronics at any time during a high speed chase could be extremely dangerous, especially in a car with power steering and an intoxicated driver. The driver might not recognize or be able to respond to the changes in the car's handling and braking after the engine stops running, and might therefore be unable to control the car for the last few seconds.
Sensible defaults are better than telling people to customise what is out of the box the Worst... Interface... Ever.
Oh boy...
Along those lines, did you know that the PC LOAD LETTER error can be changed on most LaserJet II/III models? Maybe like "OUT OF LETTER" or "FEED ME A4". I still encounter these things in offices, and I still see one of the most cryptic error messages ever written. Exact proof of your statement: sensible defaults are essential, most people never figured out how to set the clocks on the VCRs; there's no way they can handle something like customizing a menu.
Years ago, I wrote a big long rant on why Linux isn't ready for the desktop; the GUI for virtually everything in Linux sucks. "Designed by geeks, for geeks" works great for admin-type stuff, but absolutely not at all for Joe Sixpack or PHB's e-mail client.
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Nine times out of ten, the solution is simple and just got overlooked in all the comlpexity.
Indeed.
Like the very first thing: never buy any product from any technology company sufficiently ignorant to be running IIS. Like Pelco.
This was the tip of the iceberg. Not coincidentally, a bunch of standalone computers requiring reasonable security and reliability are now left not only with the extra per unit expense of a Windows license, but also the many liabilities which come with that Windows license.
Now, since his client has already committed such a stupid act, he might well be screwed.
If there are two places where Windows has absolutely no place whatsoever, it's in the server farm and the standalone special application department. (Note I'm not a blind anti-Windows fanatic; I'm running it on my desktop right now. But in the face of better quality free alternatives for the former applications, Windows is the choice of the ignorant.)
Not too long ago, I was consulting for a broadcaster who wanted an alternative to cart players. I checked out Prophet Systems until their IIS-powered site puked and died. I sent them an e-mail asking them what assurance I had that their Windows-powered systems would be any more reliable at inserting bumpers and commercials than their Windows-powered webservers were at dispensing the PDF file I was getting when the server puked. Commercial time is around $250 per minute on this station and in this market - how much will the dead air cost while Windows reboots?
Usually it's the Boss's computer heavily infected (No one dare to go into their rooms to clean up the virus), and usually the rule allows all the Boss's computers to access that security cam website.
Or you (the computer-illiterate boss) simply hire employees who will walk into your office and make fun of you for having opened the "Just Click Here fore [sic] a Bigger Penis" e-mail. His skill was that required to run a business; mine was in making fun of anyone without computer savvy (which somehow extended to avoidance of snake-oil salesman who'd discovered the Internet). Most days, Pat and I got along great.
Circumcision? That quackery? It must kill you that the only people who do that dick cutting bullshit are backwards peoples in the Middle East and Africa... oh and the United States.
And Canada. And Australia. And New Zealand. And upper-class British. And guess what? I was born in the uncircumcised philistine land of Wales. I spent my first 22 years with a foreskin. Lemme tell you, after I was circumcised, I had a new appreciation for our Jewish friends.
You see, sex is based on a reciprocating motion. As a lonely virgin, I can understand that you don't understand this, but during the "OUT" stroke, you pull the skin over the head and you don't feel a damned thing. Enter circumcision. In over ten years, the only down side was that I couldn't bag a slut with a smegma fetish. Too bad, so sad. I cry, I really do. Boo-hoo.
The joys of boxer shorts more than made up for the "shortcomings" of having had part of my dick cut off. So stop whining and treat Yourself (capitalization quite deliberate), as a fellow circumcised man (who probably needs a hausfrau cause to redeem yourself), to some silk.
I'm convinced the sheeple out here would vote 80% to 20% for the "Golden Beaches Environment Protection Act", even if it was actually a 2 Trillion dollar bond to exterminate all white men.
Of course! The solution is to enact a law where you are exluded from voting if you are:
Any questions?
There must be a serious plague of exploding N64s and MP3 players in Japan.
Well, in all seriousness though, this is a problem.
Lots of early consumer electronics devices won't even remotely approach modern safety standards. Consider early radios and TV sets which often used a "hot chassis" (where the steel chassis was directly connected to one side of the power line as part of a system avoiding the use of an expensive power transformer), like those using the traditional "All American Five" tube lineup (50B5 or 50C5, 35W4, 12AV6, 12BE6, 12BA6), or the flip-leaf toasters of the 1920s. These items constitute only a very small risk because they will mostly be in very casual use by informed collectors and restorers, and short of mounting them in fireproof plexiglass boxes with isolation transformers, they will never even approach modern safety standards. (Note that a hot chassis wasn't as big a risk before they became surrounded by modern grounded electrical equipment - in their designed surroundings, you were unlikely to touch a grounded object at the same time as the radio. Also note that *many* post-war Japanese radios used the All-American Five design!)
Such a rule would effectively eliminate the collectable marketplace and probably result in the loss of many of the early products of companies which later became leaders in their fields. The first Sony transistor radio is historically significant, as is the first JVC VHS VCR, as is...
Japan is also noted among automotive enthusiasts for similarly draconian rules surrounding old cars - I cannot corroborate this, but I have heard that the *entire* braking system must be replaced in all cars over a certain number of years of age.
The grisly irony, of course, is that this is from a culture which reveres aged people... but they're apparently happy to destroy the remaining artifacts those people built.
(By the way, good rule of thumb: *never* leave any piece of electronic equipment made before about 1980 running unattended, inspect them for possible dangers like rotten insulation, and *always* assume that any exposed metal pieces are connected to one side of the power line.)
You must be American. The rest of the world figured out years ago that front-loaders use less water, clean better, and DON'T leak. Well, not from the front seal, anyway!
Nope, I'm a Canadian, with a degree in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Chemistry, and who paid at least part of his way through university by repairing major appliances.
So, thrall me with your acumen.
Im a drycleaner, and its normal for commercial cleaning operations to use a front-loading washer, be it for laundry or dry-cleaning. I can not, in the last 15 years, recall even *once* having to replace a door-seal, even on a dry-cleaning machine that used a rather volatile solvent; nevermind a washing machine that uses water and a carefully balanced chemical mixture.
I cannot, in recorded history, tell you of an incident where gravity has failed to keep a liquid in a container.
Certainly we changed a number of seals on other parts, but on the front-loading doors? Thats your concern? Honestly, how silly. Besides, a rubber door seal, should it ever *need* replacing, can be replaced EASILY with wait for it...more rubber.In consumer installations, this will rarely happen. Think about it! How many of your customers will whine, "it's too complicated!" if you were to pass them a door seal and a Philips screwdriver for their front-load washing machine.
or, as is used on on drycleaning washer/extractor and similarly on the solvent reclaimer: a cork seal, which is going on use for 5 years this easter and isnt showing a sign of a problem.Five years! Wow! That's almost 1/10th the age of my washing machine, a 1954 Maytag which trusts in gravity to retain the water!
Nevermind the other benefits of a front-loading machine, such as less used space (imagine a washing machine large enough to do 60lbs of laundry as a top-fill machine, itd be rather large) and it would need more water to do the same job. Remember, in a top-fill you have to fill it with water completely over the level of the clothing; not so with a front-loading washer (i believe the models we use fill something like 60% or so of the drum) and you get a better cleaning, because theres more agitation, because theres more room, unless you absolutely stuff it full, for the clothes to move around.The sole and singual benefit of a front-loader is that they're stackable. That's it.
Less water consumption = less cleanliness. Go take a university-level chemistry course or two. Make careful notes of such concepts as solubility concepts. Remember that it's not the detergent or the agitation which dissolves the dirt, it's the universal solvent which does it.
Note also that I don't believe in waste, it's just that I'm not sufficiently ignorant to tow the party line. Want to save water? Here's how, including pictures of my own washer and installation.
In addition, you can clean large items like blankets and comforters or long items like tablecloths and such without the risk of them tangling around the vertical agitator and causing the damned things to sieze (odd enough, my manager recently tried washing her comforter at home in a large top-loading washer and ruined it, of all the people...)I dunno. I'm not sufficiently ignorant to overload any washing machine, rather it be a real one or a eurotrash front-loader.
That way you don't need OCR to get the code back into digital form, just a barcode scanner, which is much more reliable.
Sure! It's great, but... let's say RFID takes over and UPC codes (and other barcodes) are gone within 5 years.
I always find it funny when they require ten years of experience and don't pay nearly enough money. I actually just had an interview this morning for an electronics assembly position that pays minimum wage! I have friends with only their highschool and no experience making 4 times that much in unskilled labor positions.
Hopefully you laughed at them as you were getting up to leave?
While I was with Litton (designing radar video systems), I got a call from a recruiter who asked me to come in for a meeting. I asked for details and was told that it was a good high-tech firm. I went to the meeting, where I discovered that the "position" was a pyramid scheme where I'd be selling long distance plans.
I blew up immediately, yelling obscenities about them wasting my time, and walked out. The people in the reception area heard me too; several of them left with me.
I guess that was how I learned the hard way (well, waste of my time) to *never* go to an interview for a recruiter who won't tell me the name of the company. (The line I use is this: "I need to know the name of the employer so I can properly prepare to meet with them. I am not interested in approaching them independently; you guys did the legwork on matching me to them, you are due your commission or fee.")
If the recruiter still won't tell me the name after that (perfectly reasonable) explanation, I tell them I'm not interested in having anything to do with them.
Here in Los Angeles, we don't measure distances in miles, but in driving time. As an example, LAX is about half an hour from Studio City, unless you're talking Rush Hour, in which case figure about an hour and a quarter to an hour and three quarters.
Same thing up here in Canada.
How far away is Toronto? 'Bout 5 hours down the 401.
Where's Wal*Mart? Less than five minutes that way.
I think a lot of it comes from the metricism which happened in 1976. It became "politically incorrect" to tell people something was a mile down the road. And I was raised in the Metric generation, but kilometers are still not as natural to human perception of distance as miles are. So virtually everyone talks in terms of time.
But of the idiot who chose C as a name for a product. It is the same with menu product names that are also real words. Even happens with products that are not real worlds but have come in common use. PHP is of course also the extension used for php pages and so any search will not just return jobs requiring PHP but also jobs who got a url with php.
Heheh... I have a late 1960s Sound A-5000 stereo amplifier. I love the thing and have restored it completely; with a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4x and a modified SoundBlaster 16 ISA (yeah... pretty hard to find a new motherboard for it!), my computer's sound system is lovely.
One day, I got it into my head that there were probably schematics for my Sound A-5000 out there somewhere. Of course, searching the 'net was utterly futile.
So, this is about a motor that makes claims that are pretty universally accepted to be impossible. The poster, of course, is affiliated with the site hosting the page, so he really should have read the article the same way I did.
Heheh... what should be enough to tip off those readers *without* an Electrical Engineering degree is the fact that the site is hosted on IIS. I mean, immediately when I find a site is running on IIS, its owners (and therefore content) lose all credibility.
>100% efficiency is simply impossible. There's the resistance of the windings, there's the reluctance of the laminates, there's the air resistance to the moving armature, there's the bearing friction. If it were true, these guys would have figured out a way to break every known law of physics.
One of the things about these sites which really irritates me is that ignorant hausfrau and hippies get it into their heads that such things are really possible, then start writing their congressmen, who in turn legislate asinine and counter-productive "energy efficiency" measures like hybrid cars (shorter lifespans due to expensive service and replacement batteries - just watch the wrecking yards in a couple of years), those silly front-load washing machines (what kind of idiot trusts a rubber seal to contain the water when there's gravity there? How long will the seal last before the machine starts leaking and gets pitched?) and low-flush toilets (flushing four times to get rid of dark matter is *not* a net water savings).
Oh my god, 7W! I'll have to take out a second mortgage on the house. What a maroon.
The point is that you will be using more energy in the regulation process than the energy you actually deliver to your load. Yes, it is only seven watts, but if you're doing that with ten wall-warts, it's 70 watts of waste because of your limited electronics knowledge. And it'll eat into your pornography budget.
Oh my... I just went to their webpage. I haven't clicked anything, but their lack of product and development focus and the sheer incredulity of some of their products is reminiscent of the stuff advertised in the back of Mad Magazine. All they need is X-ray glasses, sea monkeys and a secret decoder ring. And a hoverconversion kit for 1981-1983 Delorean DMC-12 sports cars.
I would assume that one could (ab)use "electron migration" to store information, provided an easy way of resetting the electrons existed. This would have the benefit of not needing any magnetic mechanisms (which may mean you could get higher densities) but it would certainly be slower to write to, and likely to read from. I would suspect that something similar will offer much better opportunities for solid-state non-volatile storage in the future, precisely because it should be capable of far higher densities.
If I recall from engineering school, this is how flash memories work; a charge is "trapped" in the gate oxide of a MOSFET (thereby making the MOSFET conduct or not when the data is read), and with current technologies can stay there for several years. The issue (besides write speed, caused by parasitic gate capacitance) is the relatively low number of write cycles before the gate oxide begins to fail. I forget the exact mechanism, but I assume it does have to do with electromigration (as opposed to electron migration) causing the trapping layer in the gate oxide to eventually puncture through to the substrate.
I think I've already got one of these. It's right between my cold fusion device and my copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
I just installed one in my flying Delorean's MP3 player.
Printed out, of course. File cabinets full.
Don't laugh!
I got my first computer (Texas Instruments TI-99/4A) in the early 1980s, back in the days when Compute! and other similar magazines were *full* of games and other programs which you'd have to type into your computer.
I credit them with my blazing fast typing speed, my good accuracy typing code (which is a lot different from typing text, of course!) and my ability to troubleshoot.
I'd type run, and I'd get
* INCORRECT STATEMENT 440
Then fix that line, and the program would run... but some text would be wrong somewhere.
890 CALL SAY(SEG$(1,B,$OUTWORD)) :: CALL SOUND(10,2500,0)
(Oops, the text segment was supposed to be from 1 to A, not 1 to B.)
Now, it's honestly been 15 years since I last did *any* programming in TI Extended BASIC, but I still remember most of the syntax, including CALL SOUND being (duration, frequency, volume {,frequency2,volume2,frequency3,volume3,noise}).
The repetition from retyping is valuable rote.
The other thing is how well can we trust media? Tape has finite lifespan, disks have finite lifespans, and how do we know the security of data trusted to CD and DVD dyes? They haven't been around long enough to say for sure. So you're gonna have to make a point of recopying your media every year or so in order to ensure any deterioration doesn't cause loss of data. Fine, now you'll have multiple backups, in a few years at least one of those DVDs should be legible.
On the other hand, print the code to the laser printer (or even the old Okidata dot matrix every true computer geek still has kicking around - hell, I still have my trusty first printer, the Xerox Diablo D25 daisywheel; I still sometimes use it to print letters and stuff just for the fun of it).
Once it's on good quality paper, you know you'll be able to OCR it someday. Whether it's tomorrow or 50 years from now, I think we can rest assured there'll still be paper - and therefore scanners.
Oh, and by the way, importing my old TI and Amiga software into my current machine was no fun. I had cassette tapes, 5.25" diskettes in TI format, 3.5" diskettes in Amiga format, and that whole Amiga hard drive image. Transferred to my PC by XMODEM and a Laplink cable. All these tasks were possible only because I still have my old hardware, and it still works - and PCs still, for the most part, have RS-232 ports.
Those WERE the days! I remember getting the Amiga 500 for Christmas in wha...
Hey Will! Rainbow Computers in Ottawa for me.
tic.......tic.......tic.......tic.......tic..... ..tic.......tic.......
Yah, there was a running Amiga in my bedroom for *far* too many years.
(Hey, all you Latinos who know what "Amiga" actually means, STFU; I'm gay, and even the friggin' Amiga disk checks had nothing to do with it!)
My first computer was an Amiga 1000 (PAL version). Ah, endless afternoons (I was about 8 at that time, so I was told to sleep during night) of hacking BASIC. Creating animations with DPaint was fun too. Or writing Amiga-DOS scripts, to automate what ever small task. And sometimes recreation with the FlightSimulator. Oh, the days!
Amiga (A1000 in particular) was my *second* platform - and, in fact, I still have all the hardware! Remember AREXX? Or your startup-script? df0? Soldering in a socket to use Amiga 500/2000 Kickstart ROMs? [happy smile, remembering the good old days when my e-mail address was a spam-free UUCP account...]
My first was the TI-99/4A. (And of course I still have that hardware!)
(I should note at this point that I still have every computer I've ever cared about: my TI-99/4A with its many expansions and modifications, and my Amiga 1000. The rest (x86) are soulless and disposable commodities with no unique architectural features.)
Now, aside from its popularity, the C-64 was about as mundane as any computer could possibly be and so I eschewed it as the Jack Tramiel cardboard-RF-shield garbage that it was. The TI-99/4 series was downright *weird* but capable of great power in the right hands; getting to know it means relatively capable multitasking on hardware introduced in 1979. (The TI was exceptionally powerful for its day by virtue of its TMS9900 16-bit CPU and registers in RAM, though its BASIC *really* sucked.) Getting *really* familiar with it meant adding 80-column graphics boards, hard disk controllers, and whipping out the soldering iron to circumvent the RAM's 16/8 bus multiplexer. 1979 hardware with a slight revision in 1981, and I was multitasking.
When finally I could no longer cope with 40-column text in Funylwriter (about my third year of high school), I scooped a used Amiga 1000. A few hacks later and I had WYSIWYG text editing with horrible MOD files playing in the background (ah, but it was so neat in an era when Sidekick was just starting to become popular on the 386s my classmates had).
Choice of the TI-99/4A? I was *ten years old*; combining paper route, birthday and Christmas money, I could have had a TI-99/4A, a Timex-Sinclair 1000 or a Commodore VIC-20. I chose the TI because their machine did more than either (even though they didn't know how to advertise or market that to the public!), and their logo was on most of the chips in old stuff I'd taken apart.
Choice of an Amiga? I got used to having power with the TI, and the small and tight-knit usergroups of an unusual platform. In terms of bang for the buck, I don't think too many intelligent or informed people would put a 1985 Amiga 1000 up against any PC until at least a 1990 486 with 1993's Windows 3.1. Yah, Microsoft was writing busines apps for the PC, but since when have they actually been a harbinger of quality, power, or reliability? And here we are in 2006 - the competition is old enough to drink in Utah but the Wintel platform still can't do two screen resolutions simultaneously on the same display.
We pay the TV licence so fund the BBC, if they wish to develope beyond that they should raise their own funds and not charge us for it. If I buy 1 PC, 2 PCs or 10 PCs, I may never use them to watch BBC content and as such I'm paying for fresh air in effect.
Is it based on the number of television receivers in your home? I collect early television receivers, I have at least 60 television sets right now.
Here in Canada, the CBC tax isn't based on receiver licenses, it's sucked right out of the federal budget. Each and every Canadian gets to spend over $35 for a radio and television network which few of us actually use due to its lame programming.
And I did not know SGI still had fans!
Surely there's still at least one in the power supply?
Seriously, though, the market being as trend-based and as fast-moving as it is, one can expect that all innovative tech companies will alternate between boom and bust, with the bust times being spent retooling to meet current demands.
SG deserves credit for their work and the sheer quality of their hardware; even though they may be playing catchup right now, they have my wishes for their success. Every now and then I fondle the Indigo (and many Suns, Sun being in a bad position too) with sheer admiration for being built to last in a field where so little is.
BTW, you can thank Linux for doing serious damage to all these guys - who'd have ever thought that a commodity PC could do nearly as much as a professional-grade Unix workstation? I am a huge Linux fan, but it must be remembered that making a transition from a proprietary OS to Linux is a *huge* deal for companies who've probably made most of their incomes on software and support.
I agree. I am a computer services provider for mostly home users and I often find NAV and internet tools to be single greatest contributor to draining system resources. I usually recommend disabling NAV, using safe internet practices, and scanning weekly or if there appears to be a problem.
Oh yeah, but I've yet to find any antivirus software which doesn't do this.
I have also found that attempting to educate users about safe Internet practices is futile at best. I do, quite literally, have my father as the perfect example; despite many government-sponsored training courses, he still doesn't actually know the difference between two windows. "Dad, a window is an area on the screen which belongs to a program. The idea of a window is that it lets you do several things at once. Choose a window by pointing at its title bar - right there - and clicking on it. You can have several windows open at once, allowing you to choose your task as quickly as you can reach for the mouse."
So, what do I get from other, more advanced, users?
"Use FireFox instead of IE." - "You're just being alarmist, Internet Explorer can't be that bad."
"Don't open executables, especially if they're from strangers." - "My friend sent me trojan.scr, so I opened it."
"Don't open Word, Excel or PowerPoint files which didn't originate on your computer." - "All of my spreadsheets stopped working and one of them tried to dial a 1-900 number!"
Microsoft's support forum is quickly filling up with complaints about this problem, ma...Having had to use and support enough Microsoft crap over the years, I consider it to be suspicious that there's a "problem" appearing after Microsoft introduces a competing product.
Although I am sure that Microsoft's anti-virus/anti-spyware uses less CPU and memory, what with all the undocumented Windows features which were mysteriously used in their software.
Bastards. I hope Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, all employees and all shareholders of that company contract inoperable colorectal cancer.
Out of interest, have you ever seen Syllable? Not because it has a good user interface or anything (It doesn't, yet) but because they're not doing "Designed by geeks, for geeks".
Well, it sure is pretty, and I like the fact it's got Unixish guts!
Of course, only time will tell whether or not anything useful will come of it - based on a quick read, I think there's gonna have to be a lot of work to make it run Linux stuff out of the box, since at least that will give it a software base to start with.
My first car was a 1981 honda accord hatchback. It didn't have power steering. (it did at one point, but it was broken long before I bought the car)
That's a safety issue. If the car is equipped with power steering, the power assist should be working. The geometry of power steering systems is often slightly different than that of a manual steering vehicle. Furthermore, if the reason it failed was a worn assist valve, it's not impossible that the assist valve can wedge into a position where it allows fluid to one side of the rack, causing the steering wheel to be pulled (stronger than you are!) in the direction in which the valve is stuck. In short, loss of steering control.
Let me tell you power steering is practically useless. The only time I could even tell I didn't have it was when I was turning the steering wheel while stopped, which you aren't supposed to do anyway.Dry steering (steering when stopped) is an excellent way to wear flat spots onto tires, and in cheap underbuilt cars (like Honda products in general - exceptionally well assembled but still very underbuilt), the extra stress wears tie-rod ends noticeably and can even warp the front clip's sheetmetal. Don't do it at all unless you've got a solid full-frame vehicle and a new set of tires on order.
OTOH, power steering is very helpful in slow-speed maneovers, like parallel parking. Though it's not as important in small cars. My own 1976 Dodge Ram (fullsize pickup truck) doesn't have power steering, and urban driving was hell until my arms bulked up. I could have swapped a power steering box into it, but I kind of enjoy tossing the keys to a more delicate friend and asking him or her to move it for me - a touchy gas pedal attached to a 4-barrel 400CID (6.6L) V8 was the first surprise as the rear wheels started to sing, lack of power steering was the other.
Now power brakes were very noticible. My car had trouble maintaining an idle so when I put in the clutch the engine would frequently stall, unless I gave it gas.Carbureted Accord. Point an unlit blowtorch over all the vacuum lines; if the engine revs up, you've found a cracked hose or something. Check your idle speed screw, set your idle mixture with an exhaust gas analyzer or at the very least with a vacuum gauge on the manifold. Check the carb float. If it was a mixture or float issue, your gas mileage would probably also have improved substantially. None of these repairs would take more than 1/2 hour and a few basic hand tools, even on a pain in the ass car like an Accord.
Now I was 16, a new driver, and had my car stalling out at ~50 mph while I was shifting from fourth gear to fifth gear. It wasn't that big of a deal. I coasted put it in neutral and restarted the engine. No sweat.Why not just put it into the desired gear and pop the clutch? The forward momentum will spin the engine, the starter motor will spin the engine. Either one will make the engine start again - this doesn't require taking your hands off the shifter and steering wheel.
What was worse was when I was slowing to a stop, put in the clutch, and the car stalled. Then braking got tough, but it wasn't that difficult either.When the engine stalls, it's no longer producing vacuum on the intake system. Since the power brakes are operated by engine vacuum, the power brakes will stop working soon after the engine stalls. You should have fixed the stalling problem.
Presumably the police wouldn't disable the cars electronics while the car is approaching a traffic light, most likely after he goes through a light, but even if they did it shouldn't be a big deal.I don't think these taggers actually disable the car, simply provide for letting the police cars fall back, reducing the speed of the chase, and still allowing them to find the perp later.
Disabling a car's electronics at any time during a high speed chase could be extremely dangerous, especially in a car with power steering and an intoxicated driver. The driver might not recognize or be able to respond to the changes in the car's handling and braking after the engine stops running, and might therefore be unable to control the car for the last few seconds.
Sensible defaults are better than telling people to customise what is out of the box the Worst... Interface... Ever.
Oh boy...
Along those lines, did you know that the PC LOAD LETTER error can be changed on most LaserJet II/III models? Maybe like "OUT OF LETTER" or "FEED ME A4". I still encounter these things in offices, and I still see one of the most cryptic error messages ever written. Exact proof of your statement: sensible defaults are essential, most people never figured out how to set the clocks on the VCRs; there's no way they can handle something like customizing a menu.
Years ago, I wrote a big long rant on why Linux isn't ready for the desktop; the GUI for virtually everything in Linux sucks. "Designed by geeks, for geeks" works great for admin-type stuff, but absolutely not at all for Joe Sixpack or PHB's e-mail client.
My original rant, only slightly appended over the years.
Until the Open Source community actively recruits user interface experts, we will never get Linux out of the server closet.