I had a Weatherpak connector (not quoted, because I believe it actually was a Weatherpak(tm) and not just something similar) fail: The connector on the coolant temperature sensor on my work truck broke into little pieces when I was changing the spark plug wires, just a few weeks ago.
Of course, changing plug wires is one of the lowest-impact maintenance events that ever happens on a vehicle. If I'd broken it doing something else (like wrenching out a stuck spark plug with a breaker bar, two u-joints, various extensions, and grunt, and a blackened thumbnail), that would seem reasonable, but this wasn't one of those situations.
Further investigation revealed that that the sensor-side of the connector was very brittle, and bits would break off easily in my fingers: One might say it had intrinsically failed all on its own long before I nudged it into disintegration: If it hadn't been nudged by me, it would've nudged itself eventually. Fortunately, water seemed to have mostly stayed out and the cable-end of the connector seemed OK, but if I hadn't nudged it into complete failure at that time it might have festered into a more difficult repair.
It was an OEM sensor, as supplied by the factory, on a 2002 GMC Safari with a bit less than 125k miles. For this sort of failure, I consider it neither particularly old, nor high-mileage: It was early.
The replacement was cheap and easy to find, and the truck would've run mostly properly it broken, but the point is simple: Just because it's Weatherpak doesn't mean it'll last forever.
From the war stories department, I've seen more than several instances of unfused wire running through a jagged hole in the firewall before being wedged between the battery and the positive cable on a side-terminal GM, to actual working fire trucks with looms of plastic-insulated wire that had lost its plasticity, cracked, and would short randomly with very pretty sparks if wiggled anywhere under the dash.
I once saw an antenna cable catch fire that was routed through the roof of a brand new ambulance. (The ambulance survived, the fire self-extinguished, and the tech responsible learned a few things about assumptions, as did the rest of us.)
Part of my day job involves working with sirens, lights, and communications on public safety vehicles. Much of it is good (or at least safe) work, some of it is excellent, but the rest of the stuff I find is so scary that I cannot (in good conscience) leave it that way even if it's unrelated to the other work that I'm doing. This is the level of incidental repair work where I start taking pictures and documenting every splice, and the customer is always glad to have it fixed and always pays the bill, but...
Back to your main topic (if you're reading this far), what are you using for an ODB-II reader? I've been thinking of putting together some kit (possibly over Bluetooth so it works with both my Droid and laptop) to better understand the workings of that truck, and to diagnose it on the go (if I'm going anywhere far, it's likely for work) and am interested in any opinions or anecdotes you have about specific gear. (And since I'm a sucker for helping folks out, I'll probably end up using it on a lot of different vehicles...)
Pretend, for a moment, that I am not well-versed in encryption concepts.
Dropbox says that they will protect my files, and that they can also share them with others at my choosing.
I, being ignorant of encryption concepts (as most folks certainly are), do not see the two concepts as being mutually exclusive, even though they plainly are to those with more clue.
Therefore, I (the ignorant layperson) am mislead.
This might not seem important to the Slashdot crowd, but Dropbox is being marketed at common folk, not just those who have any sort of technical prowess.
And it seems to me that the general populace is still being mislead...which, of course, is just a different term for being lied to.
"Dropbox protects your files without you needing to think about it."
Dropbox protects your files without you needing to think about it.
Dropbox keeps a one-month history of your work.
Any changes can be undone, and files can be undeleted.
All transmission of file data occurs over an encrypted channel (SSL)./li>
All files stored on Dropbox are encrypted (AES-256).
I maintain that I, myself, am boring enough to not be bothered with folks potentially perusing the stuff I store on Dropbox. But it's still a lie -- it has been shown to be hardly protected at all.
On my desktop system, I routinely read data from disk at more than 20MB/sec on a live system when burning DVDs. This isn't exactly your 25MB/sec claim, but it's the most disk-intensive thing I do, and it never breaks a sweat.
The only thing I do special when burning DVDs is limit the process to one burning process per spindle, since a single head assembly obviously can't keep up with more than one such process.
Otherwise, things chew along just fine according to the monitoring tools I sometimes gawk at when burning DVDs. I get similarly good results over the network, from a Samba share on an old Athlon box. (None of these disks are particularly new, some are downright old, and none were particularly awesome when they were new.)
Sometimes, I'll even burn three DVDs at once, each from their own spindle, and things just collectively *shrug* and plod along without complaint.
Interestingly, the biggest improvement I've made in desktop Windows performance in years was something very simple, and quite by accident: I was running low on space, and added another hard drive. I then made an effort to move much of my largest software over to it, to free up space.
The improvement in speed was completely unexpected, and was in the leaps-and-bounds category of improvement. Just freeing up the system drive from the burden of dealing with $giant_ass_program made this old Q6600 feel like a new machine, across the board.
The extra disk was free-ish (I was able to just shuffle some hardware around to free it up).
Unfortunately, this has made me a believer in using a proper SSD for desktop use, since I can now clearly see just how limiting a common hard disk can be in common use.
Mine does, right behind the battery cover. Most others, AFAICT, use SD as well.
Is there some reason why the SD card installed in a phone would not be taxed?
(Yes, I'm being vague with my terms, since my phone uses MicroSD and cameras usually generally use SD, but the two of them are electrically identical, and both are part of the same set of specifications.)
Just press enter (or return, or whatever the hell the represents newline on the slide-out keyboard), which tells Google Search to launch whatever the default action is for the data you've entered. For a phone number, that means that Dialer loads up, and -- well -- dials.
Thanks for the insight on investigative tactics: Methods learned from Pedo Bear cases are not something I'd thought of previously. I suppose this has, indeed, allowed folks (from all sides) to fine-tune their tactics.
One question lingers, though:
The step following identifying the account holder is to seize the computers for discovery. All of them that could be potentially connected to that ISP account.
That's all well and good, but: Are they going to track down my friends? What about my friends' friends, who might also quite reasonably have the key? I don't rotate my WPA passphrase, both because I generally trust folks whom I give it to and (mostly) because it's a pain in the ass for everyone involved.
But, at least I try, a little. I don't want to deprive my friends of bandwidth, but I also don't want to be responsible for their actions.
Incidentally, just before I started writing this I finished connecting my LAN through a router to a neighbor's WLAN (SSID: "NETGEAR", no encryption), because AT&T earlier today trashed my 12/1.5 VDSL connection (replete with ladders and cable, and culminating in a complete loss of signal for me), and I wanted a Slashdot fix.
Tomorrow, the outside line techs should show up to futz around with fixing what they broke earlier, and I'll go back to paying for bandwidth.
I know the neighbor, and I know he just doesn't care.
You do if you want a _decent_ smartphone. If you get an android phone with a physical keyboard, you still have to use the screen to make or answer calls.
Hmm. I'd never actually tried that, so I just gave it a shot:
On my Droid 1, I slid out the keyboard. I then entered a phone number. I pressed enter.
It worked great. I see no reason why I'd have to use the screen, at all, to do this: The behavior was very predictable.
Next time the phone rings, I'll try to answer it without the touchscreen. Who knows, it might work fine, but frankly it does sound a little bit more inconvenient than just sliding my finger across the screen (which I can already do without looking at it).
I don't care, so much, if my poorly-backed-up collection of media gets destroyed: Most if it is not something that will be difficult to find (or rip) again.
I do care, however, about the stuff I made myself, and that's what Dropbox is good for. I even keep some of my financial and billing data there.
Of course I "should" encrypt things, but why? My identity is too useless to steal, and my own data is only valuable to me. I mean, seriously: What would someone find if they did attack my Dropbox account? A letter from my wife, or learn what I did last week at work, a few drunken rants and some decades-old Photoshop creations, and some random snapshots?
Who gives a shit? It's not stuff that I'd like to publish intentionally, but it's also not anything worth hiding.
Dropbox may not be all that secure, but to me, it seems roughly the same as keeping the same sorts of data on paper in a hypothetical filing cabinet with an automagic off-site backup: Someone might break in and look at its contents, and copy it, but it's just so bloody boring that they won't bother, and it can't be destroyed anyway.
If my data were something other than the boring pile of tripe that it is, I'd pay more attention to encryption (which is quite easy enough with Truecrypt). But it's not, so I don't.
I understand data security paranoia, and I do coach others about it when it might benefit them, but for me: Meh. I got nothin'.
To use a property analogy: I do lock the front door on my house, but I don't have bars on the windows. It's not worth it.
So, then, as a practical matter (which is, perhaps, only a little bit hypothetical):
I own a house. It has one IP address, which is shared amongst the people in the house (I have a family, and rent out a couple of rooms -- it's a big house), and (possibly!) clever snoopers who manage to crack my not-so-hard WPA passphrase. I also share my wireless network freely with visitors, and make no attempt to prohibit them from using my wireless network when they are not actually visiting.
Obviously, nothing that happens from this particular IP address can be truthfully pinned down to any one person without a fair bit of investigation, and likely not even then.
And while I'm certainly thankful the court has ruled in favor of this obvious fact, the question remains: Should I worry? Why, or why not?
Oh, and another reply, just because the story is at the end of the front page and nobody will read it except, perhaps, you:
Some of our most stable systems are, in fact, 8088-based boxes that do alphanumeric and stored-voice paging. These proprietary designs haven't changed substantially in ~30 years, and they just don't fail: In this market, such gear is (still!) considered high-end. (It might be important to also note that they don't have any moving parts, except for perhaps a few relays.)
Sometimes, old tech is the most reliable tech. I've seen a lot more dead Pentium 4/Athlon machines than 8088 PCs: The former fail in expensive and hard-to-track ways (bad caps, bad solder joints), while the 8088s likely never failed at all (but were just binned because they were no longer useful enough to stay in service).
I'm confused: You seem to be thinking as "coax" as being somewhat different from "ethernet," when the former term usually means "10base2," which the latter ("ethernet," or 802.3) encompasses.
[/pedant]
I'll attempt to meet your agricultural horror story with one of my own, though: Radio communications gear on a grain elevator.
Everything is covered in muck, inside and out: It is literally filled with flour (be it from corn, beans, or wheat), which has been degenerated by ambient moisture, insects, and time.
If the gear needs fan cooling to survive, forget it: Filtering the air is a non-starter because it would be a never-ending maintenance disaster, and complex HVAC systems aren't usually allowed by the owner due to the (perfectly rational) fear of explosion from sparks...and systems which would successfully mitigate that fear are both too expensive, and too big.
And, of course, using fan cooling but not filtering the air at all would cause rapid failure, as the gear itself would become the filter.
Simple, enclosed cabinets don't work, because things get hot in the summertime, and the lack of airflow causes failure in a hurry.
The best solution is open, 2-post racks, with passive convection cooling, a lot of muck, and occasional failures (which are tolerable in this application).
I still ponder how it is, exactly, that rodents are able to survive on top of a 200' grain elevator.
But, dude: Coax between buildings? That's just asking for catastrophic failures and/or fire, without rather special grounding considerations (see, for example, Motorola R56 for an idea) to make it safe, and even then it's a bad idea for reliability. Cat5 isn't much better.
Meh, I say. Liquidate the assets to pay the creditors, and let those creditors bathe in the bathwater that they themselves drew -- just as with any other failed business. Loaning money is never without risk; loaning money to GM should be no different.
In the aftermath is a bit of a mess, but the end result is cleaner: The assets that were worth anything would be reutilized, while the assets that were worth little will fester and die (and, as is likely in the case of an old factory, be sold as scrap to be turned into new Mazdas). The worthwhile people who worked for them will either find a new job with the new owner of whatever asset, or they'll end up doing something else.
*shrug*
And I say this even though I'm a stupid American, raised in a Chevy family, and I'd actually consider some of their cars if I were in the market for something new at the moment.
Back to the topic at-hand: A government-sponsored bailout of Cable is not so far fetched. I dropped subscription-based broadcast TV service a year ago (though with U-Verse), and haven't looked back. Netflix provides what I want just fine, and the rest comes in via antenna. I hate TV news, I don't watch sports, and MTV has been shit for a couple of decades. There's just not much on TV that I care about.
We also dropped our home phone line at the same time, just because we hardly ever used it (everyone's got a cell phone).
Oh, sure: I do miss out on the latest releases with paid on-demand PPV services, but I never used that much at all anyway (and if I did want to, the PS3 offers similar functionality...if Sony would ever get their network back online, anyway. I was rather impressed with it the one time I did use it).
So, the cable TV provider (whether AT&T or Time Warner) went from close to $150 per month in revenue from my house, to $45. This must hurt them, but I just don't care: They're simply not offering me anything else that I want to pay extra for.
If this buries them, so be it. Liquidate the gear, the right-of-ways, and the infrastructure, and let someone else figure out how to make money with it (and if that's impossible, even at pennies-on-the-dollar pricing, simply scrap it and turn it into new Mazdas).
Akin to leaving your keys in the car - someone uses it and damages another's prorperty - then you would be liable.
Right, because as we all know, leaving the keys for anything in plain sight is an open invitation for people to come and use that thing, even though they know that the thing does not belong to them.
That's right up there with the "Did you see what she was wearing? Dressed like that, she was just ASKING to be raped!" line of "reasoning."
No, it's not horribly complicated. But keeping good, off-site backups can be.
But that's not the point, is it? The point is that you don't like Dropbox for reasons that I fully understand, and but which I simply don't care about.
Considering that the summed total of everything digital that I've ever actually created fits nicely on my free Dropbox account there is no good reason not to use them as a convenient, transparent, and immediate part of a complete backup solution.
It's nice having the same pile of stuff available to me, whether I'm at my desktop, using my laptop, or fiddling with my Droid, and the revision history is simply awesome.
I don't use Dropbox to share files with others -- that's what Apache is for. (YMMV.)
(And, no, I don't use any uber-seecret encryption on Dropbox. My data is far too uninteresting to bother with any of that.)
That's a little unfair. When hunting what one would consider a "distraction from the task at hand" becomes an advantage. People with ADD/ADHD are simply able to focus more quickly on whatever piques their interest. Noticing a low-hanging branch or an easier prey or a sharp rock in the path i.e. sudden obstacles and potential opportunities in a world full of organized chaos that would be missed by those focused on just "getting that one animal".
So, with ADD: You're running after the wildebeest, get distracted by assessing a fast-moving ground squirrel, then smash your head on the low-hanging branch, and break a leg on the sharp rock. The worst parts of this would've never happened to those focused on just "getting that one animal," because they'd never have been distracted by the squirrel and would have been able to better observe the obstacles in their path.
Some linear power supplies (think transformer, diode bridge, caps) that are designed for 60Hz will fail in ugly ways with 50Hz power. The current capacity of the transformer is reduced, and for power supplies that are already heavily loaded (which is disturbingly common for unregulated supplies) this can push them over the edge. (Not to mention the effects that frequency has on the desired size of filter caps, which might also be insufficient at 50Hz)
Much of the audio gear I have would be unhappy at 50Hz.
The opposite usually works fine, though: Linear supplies designed to operate at 50Hz are generally happy at 60Hz, as the current capacity increases.
On the other hand, most of the current breed of switching supplies don't really care much about input voltage, frequency, or waveform: They're so not picky, these days, you can pretty much feed them anything resembling AC and they'll either produce proper output, or no output.
It's an ATI X300 on a PCI Express bus, with 128mb of proper dedicated RAM. It also did overclock very well back when I still cared about mobile gaming. It's an R300 core, configured most similarly to a (much more common) Radeon 9550.
I could've ordered the same computer with GMA instead, but meh. That stuff was pretty horrible even for daily tasks and video at the time.
Anyway, the X300 runs games from that era quite well enough, usually even at the display's native 1920x1200 resolution, and also does well with Windows 7's bells and whistles (though it is, IIRC, literally the oldest chip to be officially supported by ATI's drivers on 7).
That said, the Xbox is considered (according to Wikipedia) to have something very similar to, specifically, a GeForce 4 Ti 4200. The comparisons I find from back then are at best vague -- but they generally put the 4200 ahead of either a 9550 or an X300.
This chart seems to indicate that the 4200 is likely to be about twice as good, whatever that means.
those consoles had the best GPU in them when they were designed. The best GPU right now takes two PCI slots because its cooler is so huge.
The point was simple: If "the best GPU" is installed in a console, and it's cheaper to use less cooling instead of more cooling (which it is, to a practical limit), then that's what they'll do.
There's reasons why a 360 can often sound like a jet engine in normal use, and they really just boil down to MSFT being cheap. While designing and building quiet and effective semiconductor cooling systems is not exactly rocket surgery, it does entail a non-zero cost.
Which, you know, is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to be doing: If I were selling widgets at a loss, I'd try to save money wherever possible as well.
Meanwhile...I guess it depends on the notebook. My notebook, which I've used every day and carried with me for nearly 7 years, is the most reliable computer I've ever had. The GPU isn't quite as slick as that in, say, an Xbox, but the CPU is far faster, it's got a lot more RAM, and it runs both quietly and on batteries. (It was also rather expensive.)
Indeed. Keeping the connectors clean is paramount. These days, I'm a huge fan of DeoxIT DN5 for recovering electrical contacts that have seen all types of abuse, including video games, but alcohol by itself works reasonably well for stuff that is merely filthy.
Back in the day Nintendo would send out cleaning kits if you called to complain about the system not working properly (or at least they did for us). The kit consisted of some swabs for the games, a widget that could be used to easily clean the slot, and a small bottle of particularly smelly alcohol. It worked OK, though the amount of black crud the system seemed to generate by itself was amazing.
Meanwhile, new cartridge connectors are still available for the NES for cheap, and replacing them is just a matter of some basic disassembly/reassembly work (no soldering required).
Slashdot Mirror
I had a Weatherpak connector (not quoted, because I believe it actually was a Weatherpak(tm) and not just something similar) fail: The connector on the coolant temperature sensor on my work truck broke into little pieces when I was changing the spark plug wires, just a few weeks ago.
Of course, changing plug wires is one of the lowest-impact maintenance events that ever happens on a vehicle. If I'd broken it doing something else (like wrenching out a stuck spark plug with a breaker bar, two u-joints, various extensions, and grunt, and a blackened thumbnail), that would seem reasonable, but this wasn't one of those situations.
Further investigation revealed that that the sensor-side of the connector was very brittle, and bits would break off easily in my fingers: One might say it had intrinsically failed all on its own long before I nudged it into disintegration: If it hadn't been nudged by me, it would've nudged itself eventually. Fortunately, water seemed to have mostly stayed out and the cable-end of the connector seemed OK, but if I hadn't nudged it into complete failure at that time it might have festered into a more difficult repair.
It was an OEM sensor, as supplied by the factory, on a 2002 GMC Safari with a bit less than 125k miles. For this sort of failure, I consider it neither particularly old, nor high-mileage: It was early.
The replacement was cheap and easy to find, and the truck would've run mostly properly it broken, but the point is simple: Just because it's Weatherpak doesn't mean it'll last forever.
From the war stories department, I've seen more than several instances of unfused wire running through a jagged hole in the firewall before being wedged between the battery and the positive cable on a side-terminal GM, to actual working fire trucks with looms of plastic-insulated wire that had lost its plasticity, cracked, and would short randomly with very pretty sparks if wiggled anywhere under the dash.
I once saw an antenna cable catch fire that was routed through the roof of a brand new ambulance. (The ambulance survived, the fire self-extinguished, and the tech responsible learned a few things about assumptions, as did the rest of us.)
Part of my day job involves working with sirens, lights, and communications on public safety vehicles. Much of it is good (or at least safe) work, some of it is excellent, but the rest of the stuff I find is so scary that I cannot (in good conscience) leave it that way even if it's unrelated to the other work that I'm doing. This is the level of incidental repair work where I start taking pictures and documenting every splice, and the customer is always glad to have it fixed and always pays the bill, but...
Back to your main topic (if you're reading this far), what are you using for an ODB-II reader? I've been thinking of putting together some kit (possibly over Bluetooth so it works with both my Droid and laptop) to better understand the workings of that truck, and to diagnose it on the go (if I'm going anywhere far, it's likely for work) and am interested in any opinions or anecdotes you have about specific gear. (And since I'm a sucker for helping folks out, I'll probably end up using it on a lot of different vehicles...)
Meh.
Pretend, for a moment, that I am not well-versed in encryption concepts.
Dropbox says that they will protect my files, and that they can also share them with others at my choosing.
I, being ignorant of encryption concepts (as most folks certainly are), do not see the two concepts as being mutually exclusive, even though they plainly are to those with more clue.
Therefore, I (the ignorant layperson) am mislead.
This might not seem important to the Slashdot crowd, but Dropbox is being marketed at common folk, not just those who have any sort of technical prowess.
And it seems to me that the general populace is still being mislead...which, of course, is just a different term for being lied to.
"Dropbox protects your files without you needing to think about it."
They're still lying. From https://www.dropbox.com/features>https://www.dropbox.com/features:
Dropbox protects your files without you needing to think about it.
I maintain that I, myself, am boring enough to not be bothered with folks potentially perusing the stuff I store on Dropbox. But it's still a lie -- it has been shown to be hardly protected at all.
On my desktop system, I routinely read data from disk at more than 20MB/sec on a live system when burning DVDs. This isn't exactly your 25MB/sec claim, but it's the most disk-intensive thing I do, and it never breaks a sweat.
The only thing I do special when burning DVDs is limit the process to one burning process per spindle, since a single head assembly obviously can't keep up with more than one such process.
Otherwise, things chew along just fine according to the monitoring tools I sometimes gawk at when burning DVDs. I get similarly good results over the network, from a Samba share on an old Athlon box. (None of these disks are particularly new, some are downright old, and none were particularly awesome when they were new.)
Sometimes, I'll even burn three DVDs at once, each from their own spindle, and things just collectively *shrug* and plod along without complaint.
Interestingly, the biggest improvement I've made in desktop Windows performance in years was something very simple, and quite by accident: I was running low on space, and added another hard drive. I then made an effort to move much of my largest software over to it, to free up space.
The improvement in speed was completely unexpected, and was in the leaps-and-bounds category of improvement. Just freeing up the system drive from the burden of dealing with $giant_ass_program made this old Q6600 feel like a new machine, across the board.
The extra disk was free-ish (I was able to just shuffle some hardware around to free it up).
Unfortunately, this has made me a believer in using a proper SSD for desktop use, since I can now clearly see just how limiting a common hard disk can be in common use.
Does your Android phone have an SD card in it?
Mine does, right behind the battery cover. Most others, AFAICT, use SD as well.
Is there some reason why the SD card installed in a phone would not be taxed?
(Yes, I'm being vague with my terms, since my phone uses MicroSD and cameras usually generally use SD, but the two of them are electrically identical, and both are part of the same set of specifications.)
Yep, mine too.
Just press enter (or return, or whatever the hell the represents newline on the slide-out keyboard), which tells Google Search to launch whatever the default action is for the data you've entered. For a phone number, that means that Dialer loads up, and -- well -- dials.
Cool.
Thanks for the insight on investigative tactics: Methods learned from Pedo Bear cases are not something I'd thought of previously. I suppose this has, indeed, allowed folks (from all sides) to fine-tune their tactics.
One question lingers, though:
That's all well and good, but: Are they going to track down my friends? What about my friends' friends, who might also quite reasonably have the key? I don't rotate my WPA passphrase, both because I generally trust folks whom I give it to and (mostly) because it's a pain in the ass for everyone involved.
But, at least I try, a little. I don't want to deprive my friends of bandwidth, but I also don't want to be responsible for their actions.
Incidentally, just before I started writing this I finished connecting my LAN through a router to a neighbor's WLAN (SSID: "NETGEAR", no encryption), because AT&T earlier today trashed my 12/1.5 VDSL connection (replete with ladders and cable, and culminating in a complete loss of signal for me), and I wanted a Slashdot fix.
Tomorrow, the outside line techs should show up to futz around with fixing what they broke earlier, and I'll go back to paying for bandwidth.
I know the neighbor, and I know he just doesn't care.
Should he care?
Hmm. I'd never actually tried that, so I just gave it a shot:
On my Droid 1, I slid out the keyboard. I then entered a phone number. I pressed enter.
It worked great. I see no reason why I'd have to use the screen, at all, to do this: The behavior was very predictable.
Next time the phone rings, I'll try to answer it without the touchscreen. Who knows, it might work fine, but frankly it does sound a little bit more inconvenient than just sliding my finger across the screen (which I can already do without looking at it).
Indeed.
I don't care, so much, if my poorly-backed-up collection of media gets destroyed: Most if it is not something that will be difficult to find (or rip) again.
I do care, however, about the stuff I made myself, and that's what Dropbox is good for. I even keep some of my financial and billing data there.
Of course I "should" encrypt things, but why? My identity is too useless to steal, and my own data is only valuable to me. I mean, seriously: What would someone find if they did attack my Dropbox account? A letter from my wife, or learn what I did last week at work, a few drunken rants and some decades-old Photoshop creations, and some random snapshots?
Who gives a shit? It's not stuff that I'd like to publish intentionally, but it's also not anything worth hiding.
Dropbox may not be all that secure, but to me, it seems roughly the same as keeping the same sorts of data on paper in a hypothetical filing cabinet with an automagic off-site backup: Someone might break in and look at its contents, and copy it, but it's just so bloody boring that they won't bother, and it can't be destroyed anyway.
If my data were something other than the boring pile of tripe that it is, I'd pay more attention to encryption (which is quite easy enough with Truecrypt). But it's not, so I don't.
I understand data security paranoia, and I do coach others about it when it might benefit them, but for me: Meh. I got nothin'.
To use a property analogy: I do lock the front door on my house, but I don't have bars on the windows. It's not worth it.
So, then, as a practical matter (which is, perhaps, only a little bit hypothetical):
I own a house. It has one IP address, which is shared amongst the people in the house (I have a family, and rent out a couple of rooms -- it's a big house), and (possibly!) clever snoopers who manage to crack my not-so-hard WPA passphrase. I also share my wireless network freely with visitors, and make no attempt to prohibit them from using my wireless network when they are not actually visiting.
Obviously, nothing that happens from this particular IP address can be truthfully pinned down to any one person without a fair bit of investigation, and likely not even then.
And while I'm certainly thankful the court has ruled in favor of this obvious fact, the question remains: Should I worry? Why, or why not?
Oh, and another reply, just because the story is at the end of the front page and nobody will read it except, perhaps, you:
Some of our most stable systems are, in fact, 8088-based boxes that do alphanumeric and stored-voice paging. These proprietary designs haven't changed substantially in ~30 years, and they just don't fail: In this market, such gear is (still!) considered high-end. (It might be important to also note that they don't have any moving parts, except for perhaps a few relays.)
Sometimes, old tech is the most reliable tech. I've seen a lot more dead Pentium 4/Athlon machines than 8088 PCs: The former fail in expensive and hard-to-track ways (bad caps, bad solder joints), while the 8088s likely never failed at all (but were just binned because they were no longer useful enough to stay in service).
I'm confused: You seem to be thinking as "coax" as being somewhat different from "ethernet," when the former term usually means "10base2," which the latter ("ethernet," or 802.3) encompasses.
[/pedant]
I'll attempt to meet your agricultural horror story with one of my own, though: Radio communications gear on a grain elevator.
Everything is covered in muck, inside and out: It is literally filled with flour (be it from corn, beans, or wheat), which has been degenerated by ambient moisture, insects, and time.
If the gear needs fan cooling to survive, forget it: Filtering the air is a non-starter because it would be a never-ending maintenance disaster, and complex HVAC systems aren't usually allowed by the owner due to the (perfectly rational) fear of explosion from sparks...and systems which would successfully mitigate that fear are both too expensive, and too big.
And, of course, using fan cooling but not filtering the air at all would cause rapid failure, as the gear itself would become the filter.
Simple, enclosed cabinets don't work, because things get hot in the summertime, and the lack of airflow causes failure in a hurry.
The best solution is open, 2-post racks, with passive convection cooling, a lot of muck, and occasional failures (which are tolerable in this application).
I still ponder how it is, exactly, that rodents are able to survive on top of a 200' grain elevator.
But, dude: Coax between buildings? That's just asking for catastrophic failures and/or fire, without rather special grounding considerations (see, for example, Motorola R56 for an idea) to make it safe, and even then it's a bad idea for reliability. Cat5 isn't much better.
Yep.
But remember, they're too big to fail, right?
Meh, I say. Liquidate the assets to pay the creditors, and let those creditors bathe in the bathwater that they themselves drew -- just as with any other failed business. Loaning money is never without risk; loaning money to GM should be no different.
In the aftermath is a bit of a mess, but the end result is cleaner: The assets that were worth anything would be reutilized, while the assets that were worth little will fester and die (and, as is likely in the case of an old factory, be sold as scrap to be turned into new Mazdas). The worthwhile people who worked for them will either find a new job with the new owner of whatever asset, or they'll end up doing something else.
*shrug*
And I say this even though I'm a stupid American, raised in a Chevy family, and I'd actually consider some of their cars if I were in the market for something new at the moment.
Back to the topic at-hand: A government-sponsored bailout of Cable is not so far fetched. I dropped subscription-based broadcast TV service a year ago (though with U-Verse), and haven't looked back. Netflix provides what I want just fine, and the rest comes in via antenna. I hate TV news, I don't watch sports, and MTV has been shit for a couple of decades. There's just not much on TV that I care about.
We also dropped our home phone line at the same time, just because we hardly ever used it (everyone's got a cell phone).
Oh, sure: I do miss out on the latest releases with paid on-demand PPV services, but I never used that much at all anyway (and if I did want to, the PS3 offers similar functionality...if Sony would ever get their network back online, anyway. I was rather impressed with it the one time I did use it).
So, the cable TV provider (whether AT&T or Time Warner) went from close to $150 per month in revenue from my house, to $45. This must hurt them, but I just don't care: They're simply not offering me anything else that I want to pay extra for.
If this buries them, so be it. Liquidate the gear, the right-of-ways, and the infrastructure, and let someone else figure out how to make money with it (and if that's impossible, even at pennies-on-the-dollar pricing, simply scrap it and turn it into new Mazdas).
Am I missing something?
Right, because as we all know, leaving the keys for anything in plain sight is an open invitation for people to come and use that thing, even though they know that the thing does not belong to them.
That's right up there with the "Did you see what she was wearing? Dressed like that, she was just ASKING to be raped!" line of "reasoning."
No, it's not horribly complicated. But keeping good, off-site backups can be.
But that's not the point, is it? The point is that you don't like Dropbox for reasons that I fully understand, and but which I simply don't care about.
Ah, well that's your problem right there: You think that NASCAR is racing. :)
Throw away that metric altogether, and you'll find a whole world full of really great stuff including, no surprise, trucks.
They can have my identity. It is just as uninteresting, and far more useless.
Considering that the summed total of everything digital that I've ever actually created fits nicely on my free Dropbox account there is no good reason not to use them as a convenient, transparent, and immediate part of a complete backup solution.
It's nice having the same pile of stuff available to me, whether I'm at my desktop, using my laptop, or fiddling with my Droid, and the revision history is simply awesome.
I don't use Dropbox to share files with others -- that's what Apache is for. (YMMV.)
(And, no, I don't use any uber-seecret encryption on Dropbox. My data is far too uninteresting to bother with any of that.)
Nascar Camping World Truck Series
Baja 500
Dakar Rally
Mint 400
And so on, and so forth, et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.
"No one," indeed.
So, with ADD: You're running after the wildebeest, get distracted by assessing a fast-moving ground squirrel, then smash your head on the low-hanging branch, and break a leg on the sharp rock. The worst parts of this would've never happened to those focused on just "getting that one animal," because they'd never have been distracted by the squirrel and would have been able to better observe the obstacles in their path.
Did I miss anything?
Some linear power supplies (think transformer, diode bridge, caps) that are designed for 60Hz will fail in ugly ways with 50Hz power. The current capacity of the transformer is reduced, and for power supplies that are already heavily loaded (which is disturbingly common for unregulated supplies) this can push them over the edge. (Not to mention the effects that frequency has on the desired size of filter caps, which might also be insufficient at 50Hz)
Much of the audio gear I have would be unhappy at 50Hz.
The opposite usually works fine, though: Linear supplies designed to operate at 50Hz are generally happy at 60Hz, as the current capacity increases.
On the other hand, most of the current breed of switching supplies don't really care much about input voltage, frequency, or waveform: They're so not picky, these days, you can pretty much feed them anything resembling AC and they'll either produce proper output, or no output.
No need to guess -- you could've just asked.
It's an ATI X300 on a PCI Express bus, with 128mb of proper dedicated RAM. It also did overclock very well back when I still cared about mobile gaming. It's an R300 core, configured most similarly to a (much more common) Radeon 9550.
I could've ordered the same computer with GMA instead, but meh. That stuff was pretty horrible even for daily tasks and video at the time.
Anyway, the X300 runs games from that era quite well enough, usually even at the display's native 1920x1200 resolution, and also does well with Windows 7's bells and whistles (though it is, IIRC, literally the oldest chip to be officially supported by ATI's drivers on 7).
That said, the Xbox is considered (according to Wikipedia) to have something very similar to, specifically, a GeForce 4 Ti 4200. The comparisons I find from back then are at best vague -- but they generally put the 4200 ahead of either a 9550 or an X300.
This chart seems to indicate that the 4200 is likely to be about twice as good, whatever that means.
So, yeah. It's not quite as slick.
I feel like I'm feeding the trolls...
The point was simple: If "the best GPU" is installed in a console, and it's cheaper to use less cooling instead of more cooling (which it is, to a practical limit), then that's what they'll do.
There's reasons why a 360 can often sound like a jet engine in normal use, and they really just boil down to MSFT being cheap. While designing and building quiet and effective semiconductor cooling systems is not exactly rocket surgery, it does entail a non-zero cost.
Which, you know, is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to be doing: If I were selling widgets at a loss, I'd try to save money wherever possible as well.
Meanwhile...I guess it depends on the notebook. My notebook, which I've used every day and carried with me for nearly 7 years, is the most reliable computer I've ever had. The GPU isn't quite as slick as that in, say, an Xbox, but the CPU is far faster, it's got a lot more RAM, and it runs both quietly and on batteries. (It was also rather expensive.)
Indeed. Keeping the connectors clean is paramount. These days, I'm a huge fan of DeoxIT DN5 for recovering electrical contacts that have seen all types of abuse, including video games, but alcohol by itself works reasonably well for stuff that is merely filthy.
Back in the day Nintendo would send out cleaning kits if you called to complain about the system not working properly (or at least they did for us). The kit consisted of some swabs for the games, a widget that could be used to easily clean the slot, and a small bottle of particularly smelly alcohol. It worked OK, though the amount of black crud the system seemed to generate by itself was amazing.
Meanwhile, new cartridge connectors are still available for the NES for cheap, and replacing them is just a matter of some basic disassembly/reassembly work (no soldering required).
No, because I made the thing for me, and I'll still be using it the way I feel like.
If someone else feels like using it in a different fashion, I frankly don't care.