Do you realize that with U-Verse, leaving your TV on 24/7 doesn't consume any Internet bandwidth?
Do you realize that it uses multicast, so that n people watching a show only consume n*1 bandwidth? And that it doesn't go over the Internet at all? (It's on AT&T's network, which happens to use IP, but that doesn't mean that the TV show's bandwidth is internetworked in any meaningful and contextually accurate sense.)
There's a million reasons why they should not care how much TV you watch, even if you're sucking down 4 different 1080i HD channels 24/7. And, they don't.
If your experience is true, then lack of cited opposition is, I think, is where a less-preachy re-write would be most useful.
By rewriting the text to be a bit more humane, while keeping the informational intent and the relevant citations, perhaps some well-learned folks from the privilege side will take the concept seriously enough to add their own two cents in with citations of their own. In other words, I think a rewrite might encourage others to do some of my homework for me.
Meanwhile, please understand that I don't care how it works out in the end. I've always been content with the privilege concept of driving, and I'll continue to be content whether or not that changes...either way, if I turn out to be a provably bad or dangerous driver at some point, I expect my privilege/right (as it may be) to become limited, much as the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater is very justifiably limited irrespective of how the First Amendment reads by itself.
I realize that you haven't asked me to do this, and I wouldn't care if you had.:) My goal is merely to have fewer lies in the world, and that is all the reason that I need.
(Not directed at you, 8169. Just directed at the philosophies espoused in this thread.)
FWIW, I just hired Expensify, having become aware of them from this Slashdot submission.
I recently became self-employed and I'd actually been looking for...something...to make tracking receipts and expenses easier ("easier," as in "easy enough that I don't talk myself into not ever doing it at all"), to minimize the IRS ass reaming that will happen next time taxes roll around.
To be clear, I don't much care if were a Windows app, or a Linux app, or a cloud thing, or a hosted thing, or a [whatever] thing -- I don't care a whit who has access to my expenses, so long as I can enter them on the road with my Droid and get the data into Quickbooks without invoking perl/awk/sed/grep/whatever. And Expensify does this (or at least it claims to -- I've only been goofing with it for a few minutes so far).
And, frankly, I could care less what their hiring practices are, as long as it works: I just got back from buying some Wal-Mart brand Ol' Roy dog food, and I'm sure there's a huge string of bad employment practices behind that bag of kibble, probably going all the way back to the farmers who grow the stuff that goes into it.
And I don't care, because feeding Ol' Roy to my giant Doberman makes her fart less than anything else, and it breaks down quickly in the yard after going through the dog. Those are the two parameters I most care about for dog food. That it's cheaper than most others is simply a nice touch, but (yet again) I don't care where it comes from.
Expensify, meanwhile, is free for me (though it's $5/head/month for bigger companies). If it does what I want, and it sure looks like it does, then I don't CARE if they don't like.NET programmers.
In my line of work (government public safety communications), it takes two proactive steps to send out an alert:
First, press/click the "unlock" button.
Second, press the "send alert" button.
Pressing "send alert" without "unlock" first does nothing -- it's just a dead button.
This works fine. It's not unlike a safety cover on a toggle switch: The act of opening the cover indicates that you're serious about your next action, and the system does not question you when you throw the switch since you've already clearly indicated your intent (either electronically, or mechanically in this brief analogy).
And if it didn't work fine, my phone would be ringing regularly with complaints and requests to come up with a better solution.
We also have variations that include pressing and holding a dedicated, physical unlock button while activating an alert. In this particular scenario, the button exists on a separate hardware piece, and it takes two hands (or some clever discomfort) to make it work. The operation is not dissimilar from the safety interlocks on an industrial press.
At no time is a confirmation displayed. It would be easy to do so (it's just software), but it would only waste time when people actually need help.
Of course, my examples are all for voice communications. But in this new-fangled textual world of alerting folks, everyone seems to have forgotten these concepts, which elsewhere have been in use for many decades...
These new-school HTML jockeys[1] have a lot to learn, it seems. I wish they'd GTFO my lawn, and stop presenting "Are you sure?" prompts wherever they can't understand how to implement reasonably idiotproof systems.
[1]: I deduce that it is a forms-oriented HTML-based system simply because of the "Submit" term confusion. I'd research it to find it if I'm right or wrong, but this being Slashdot, I'm quite certain that someone will flatly tell me that wrong I'm in short order.
Now, what strikes me as weird are thoise Acer Ferrari LCDs
Perhaps they offered the best bang-for-the-buck. Or perhaps they were reasonably priced to such an extent that the premium for the Ferrari logo was minimal, and worth the fun.
And worse yet, the analog Panasonic phone. I mean, having the best and latest in telecom technology and using an analog Panasonic PBX?
I don't see a Panasonic phone anywhere.
I do see something awfully close to a Nortel/Aastra M5316, which is anything but an analog phone. And it makes sense: Verizon, like many former RBOCs, likes Nortel just fine and uses/sells/maintains their switches all over the place -- why not at home?
It's not IP, but that really doesn't matter: From the looks of their beautifully-presented 110 blocks (replete with waxed string), these guys won't bat an eyelid at cabling in a dedicated pair for a phone in an office.
I, myself, doubt that the author is a good writer.
If the author is neither a decent writer nor even a mediocre photographer, what business does he have publishing anything involving both of these concepts at once?
Don't get me wrong. I think anyone should be allowed to publish anything, no matter how insipid, inane, or even purposefully incorrect it might be. But I also feel that editors exist for a reason, and that this particular FA should've been edited into oblivion rather than posted on Slashdot.
I find your Babelfish to be unintelligible: Apparently, they're translating from Russian to Spanish to English.
Much is lost.
Would a native Spanish speaker care to contribute a better translation of the linked and translated article, or (much better) a native Russian speaker care to find the interview in its original dialect and convert it (even in brief) to English in one step?
I've always understood that driving is a privilege that can be revoked. It's just what I've learned growing up -- I have no particular source for the origin of my mindset. Until tonight, I honestly didn't believe it was a right -- or even that it should be. I'd never considered the possibility at all.
Learning differently is somewhat like (and please pardon the analogy) learning about circumcision: I assumed, early on, that everyone's cock was shaped like mine, and it turns out that they generally are...but only after modification.
But at the same time, I read the text like I remember reading about Texas's failed attempt(s?) at succession: Epic Fail.
Meanwhile, it is plain: Driving privilege (such as it may be) is dictated by the state. If there is a Constitutional right to drive, backed by the court(s), then this dictation is simply false: That's the way the Guvament works.
I won't forget this concept. And when I get a chance to do so, I'll dig up the sections of the Ohio Revised Code (since that's where I am), and chase down all of the myriad of citations presented in your linked article.
Why? Just because I'm an autistic altruist, and whenever I'm forced to do something arbitrary in exchange for being "allowed" to do something else that should be reasonable, I want to understand whether or not that force is fair and just.
That's an interesting lot of verbiage and citations that you linked to. I don't care for the preachy structure of it, but the fact that I don't like the structure doesn't mean that the content is somehow incorrect.
I'm lead to wonder in what manner a formal rebuttal would proceed with proving it wrong.
I've saved the text for later parsing, and/or re-writing to make it more approachable.
I remember hearing stories about someone who started putting a teensy little dot on the sleeve of any bad Netflix discs, because he was convinced they were just sending him the same ones he'd just returned, and indeed sometimes they were.
That sounds very unlikely.
Every time I have had a bad disc from Netflix (it's happened a couple of times over the two or three years I've used the service), I just click a simple and obvious series of buttons on their web site.
They then send out a different copy immediately, and I return the bad disc at my leisure. At no time have I been requested to return the bad disc first.
In the US, we have a long precedent of making free calls from landlines to local numbers (and, more recently, any number in the country), which is rather unlike how billing typically worked on the other side of the pond.
While you guys were paying per-call to dial across the street, we've been doing that for "free" since...forever.
The introduction of proper cellular telephones in the late 80's and early 90's simply had insufficient momentum to change that for us: We never grew out of expecting every local number to be free to call.
And since someone must pay (towers and infrastructure don't build themselves), we let the owner of the (then very expensive and uncommon) cell phone foot the bill, instead of the caller.
Inertia has kept it this way.
I agree that it might seem backward, but I certainly enjoyed unmetered local calling back in the BBS days, whereas I'd sometimes see my friends overseas piss and moan about the cost to dial a BBS. And still today, I think I might prefer it: It doesn't matter what US number I dial -- I already know that it won't cost me a cent extra.
It is applicable to me, the consumer: It can cost me $1,500 now, or $1,500 later. In the former case, I (again, the consumer) get a warranty and never miss a day without my new car.
In the latter, I spend the same money, may or may not get a reasonable warranty with it, will lose at least a few hours or a couple of days of use for my new car, and may spend the rest of my term with that car wondering why things don't integrate as well as they should.
Obviously, it's cheaper for Ford (or whoever) to do this work than [random aftermarket dude]* and they therefore make a fair bit of coin on these accessories. And obviously, as a consumer, I want the best stuff I can get for the minimum amount of money -- whatever that stuff is.
But do you really believe that profit is a sin? FFS, lack of profit was the entire reason behind the recent and near-universal collapse of the domestic car market!
FFFFS, do you believe in a competitive market?
If Ford charged what it actually cost to install a good audio system, there'd be no fucking way that Clarion (to pick another example) would even be allowed to exist anymore. Fortunately, due to competition, Ford doesn't have to charge so little as that and so Clarion continues to be able to exist. Hooray! Consumer choice wins.
*: I don't work much with car audio, these days, but I do work with most every other avenue of automotive electronics. Specific to this context, I outfit ambulances with communications gear. I know first-hand that it's far easier and faster (and therefore cheaper) to get my stuff installed in a new squad while it's still being assembled, much as Ford can do, than it is to install the same gear into a squad which has already been delivered.
But I, the provider of communications (and the company behind me) charge the same either way. The difference in time spent shows directly in my own pocketbook as profit, while the result for the end-user is the same: Either way, the spend X, and get Y.
Just like, for the purposes of my argument, a Ford stereo vs. paying someone else to figure it out and make it work.
They were expensive, so I see no reason to dispose of them. And now and then, I have a need to assemble or repair an ancient PC for whatever arcane reason, and having a hard drive available with a suitable interface and capacity is a good start.
Eventually, I'll harvest the magnets from them for fun, and make wind chimes from the platters.
And in terms of gravitational collapse, it's not the mass of the hard drives that I should be worried about, but the pile of old (and proper) audio gear that works excellently but really should be put on Ebay so that they might actually be enjoyed by someone.
At least my collection of dead cars has shrunken recently.:)
Let me just pick an example. (I'll use a car analogy.)
A premium factory sound system might be $1,500. It will be well-integrated into a modern car: The speaker grills will match the interior, the lighting will match other electronic stuff in the car, and it will function with steering wheel/rear seat controls or voice command or whatever other gee-whiz functions the car happens to have.
Can you buy a better audio system for $1,500? Sure, no problem. Will it integrate well? Probably not, even if you put a lot of time, effort and research into it, and do the work yourself, but it might.
Can you pay someone else $1,500 and end up with a stereo+car combination that both sounds better and integrates every bit as well as well as the factory option would? How about having the installer optimize a DSP to make the parts work as well as possible in that particular car? Er, uh...probably not. (And don't kid yourself: Ford, to pick a common-enough example, has been using model-specific DSP programming to smooth out their factory audio systems since at least the middle 90's. GM isn't much different.)
Doubtful.
Another example: Backup sensors.
Can you add an aftermarket distance sensor to a car cheaper than the factory? Sure -- the kits are cheap. Can you smoothly integrate the electronics into the rest of the car? Probably -- the beep-beep-beep function is pretty basic, and all it needs for signalling is a reverse switch. But can you get the sensors installed in the rear bumper and painted to match the rest of the car, and still save money? Probably so, if you do it all yourself. If you're paying someone else to do it, however, it might as well be Ford (or whoever).
I take offense to your implied reference of Slashdot being a blog, even though it predates the common use of the term and though it certainly meets every modern standard of it.
I shall sue you for your indiscretion in civil court.
Kid, I used to have an Seagate ST-225 MFM 20 megabyte drive. I lent it to a friend, who gave it up for a debt (for some reason, the loan shark didn't heed my pleas that it was my drive when I asked for it back), and last I heard (it's been a long while, but the drive was plenty old long before then) it was still working just fine.
The replacement 120MB Seagate is still chugging along just fine, AFAICT, if anyone would ever bother to power it up.
But I've got a dead 2.5 gig Seagate. And, lo! A live 2.5 gig Seagate of exactly the same model, purchased at the same time!
I've seen 20GB Maxtors fail. And I've still got a sack full of 80GB Western Digitals that simply won't die.
And an 80GB Samsung!
Back in the day, a friend of mine was recommended Quantum disks for his server, for reliability and speed. Later, Quantum was condemned when it was realized that their Bigfoot series of drives were complete shit. (And more later, Quantum was absorbed by Maxtor.)
But, wait! I've got a 420MB Maxtor that still works fine.
And a 90MB Fujitsu.
But nevermind that. I remember when IBM made excellent hard drives. In fact, kid, I don't just remember it: I can *see* it! Over on my shelf are 3 7200RPM ultra-wide SCSI IBM Ultrastors. They work just fine, both of the 9 gigs and the 4.5.
If only they'd hold more than a DVD worth of data...
But then, hey! IBM released the Deathstar series a couple of years after that, and after an incredible amount of bad press they sold their HDD division sold to Hitachi a few months later, apparently in shame.
And what of Micropolis? Why, they had the fastest, meanest, biggest, most expensive drives of all.... didn't they just shivel up and disappear?
Nevermind that. Many a good story have been told around a symphony of Fujitsu drives with their ball bearings screaming like jet engines (but working just fine), and this tale, Lad, will be no exception.
See there, son, hanging on the wall? Those shiny things, hanging there on the nails. That, boy, is the world's greatest JPEG porn collection! All properly sorted by hair color and facial expression, of course. Why is it on the wall, all dismantled like that? Because it was on a 30GB Maxtor that died while I was out of town for a week, that's why! Just look at 'em! You can see where the heads have worn grooves in the platters! Those were my fav'rites.
I can't tell you much, boy, but I can tell you this: There's been nary a time when a hard drive was certain to be reliable. So throw a dart at the board, pick one, MAKE YOUR FUCKING BACKUPS, and enjoy it like a good bottle - when she's done, she's done.
I've thought of that before. Trouble is, a low voltage cut-off kills the settings on my stereo, unless I wire around it. But if I do that, then I'll also wire things to keep the GPS powered up, and the box for the remote start/keyless entry. And I might as well wire in the engine computer so it doesn't forget the fuel injection and ignition settings that it has learned...and then I'm back to not really having a cut-off switch at all.
Please recall that the root of the problem is that I'm already unwilling to deal with time-to-first-fix on the GPS.
I just want my car to start when it's very cold out without complaint or indications of low voltage, and without bothering to switch off the GPS.
I think I'll just install this nifty solar panel and see how that goes. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly: It won't be reported by anyone.
Nobody cares.
Not off-topic at all.
But I have to laugh at this.
Do you realize that with U-Verse, leaving your TV on 24/7 doesn't consume any Internet bandwidth?
Do you realize that it uses multicast, so that n people watching a show only consume n*1 bandwidth? And that it doesn't go over the Internet at all? (It's on AT&T's network, which happens to use IP, but that doesn't mean that the TV show's bandwidth is internetworked in any meaningful and contextually accurate sense.)
There's a million reasons why they should not care how much TV you watch, even if you're sucking down 4 different 1080i HD channels 24/7. And, they don't.
If your experience is true, then lack of cited opposition is, I think, is where a less-preachy re-write would be most useful.
By rewriting the text to be a bit more humane, while keeping the informational intent and the relevant citations, perhaps some well-learned folks from the privilege side will take the concept seriously enough to add their own two cents in with citations of their own. In other words, I think a rewrite might encourage others to do some of my homework for me.
Meanwhile, please understand that I don't care how it works out in the end. I've always been content with the privilege concept of driving, and I'll continue to be content whether or not that changes...either way, if I turn out to be a provably bad or dangerous driver at some point, I expect my privilege/right (as it may be) to become limited, much as the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater is very justifiably limited irrespective of how the First Amendment reads by itself.
I realize that you haven't asked me to do this, and I wouldn't care if you had. :) My goal is merely to have fewer lies in the world, and that is all the reason that I need.
(Not directed at you, 8169. Just directed at the philosophies espoused in this thread.)
FWIW, I just hired Expensify, having become aware of them from this Slashdot submission.
I recently became self-employed and I'd actually been looking for...something...to make tracking receipts and expenses easier ("easier," as in "easy enough that I don't talk myself into not ever doing it at all"), to minimize the IRS ass reaming that will happen next time taxes roll around.
To be clear, I don't much care if were a Windows app, or a Linux app, or a cloud thing, or a hosted thing, or a [whatever] thing -- I don't care a whit who has access to my expenses, so long as I can enter them on the road with my Droid and get the data into Quickbooks without invoking perl/awk/sed/grep/whatever. And Expensify does this (or at least it claims to -- I've only been goofing with it for a few minutes so far).
And, frankly, I could care less what their hiring practices are, as long as it works: I just got back from buying some Wal-Mart brand Ol' Roy dog food, and I'm sure there's a huge string of bad employment practices behind that bag of kibble, probably going all the way back to the farmers who grow the stuff that goes into it.
And I don't care, because feeding Ol' Roy to my giant Doberman makes her fart less than anything else, and it breaks down quickly in the yard after going through the dog. Those are the two parameters I most care about for dog food. That it's cheaper than most others is simply a nice touch, but (yet again) I don't care where it comes from.
Expensify, meanwhile, is free for me (though it's $5/head/month for bigger companies). If it does what I want, and it sure looks like it does, then I don't CARE if they don't like .NET programmers.
Subsonic is free and GPL. I use it to make my music available at home, at work, at a friend's house, when I'm visiting my family, when I'm vacation...
It works on my iPod, it works on my Droid, it works on my laptop, it works on my desktop, it works on my friend's Mac.
Etc.
I tried to get my usage information for my (internet-only) 12/1.5 U-verse account, and instead saw the following:
Note: Your internet plan provides you with unlimited usage. There are no usage details to display.
*shrug*
In my line of work (government public safety communications), it takes two proactive steps to send out an alert:
First, press/click the "unlock" button.
Second, press the "send alert" button.
Pressing "send alert" without "unlock" first does nothing -- it's just a dead button.
This works fine. It's not unlike a safety cover on a toggle switch: The act of opening the cover indicates that you're serious about your next action, and the system does not question you when you throw the switch since you've already clearly indicated your intent (either electronically, or mechanically in this brief analogy).
And if it didn't work fine, my phone would be ringing regularly with complaints and requests to come up with a better solution.
We also have variations that include pressing and holding a dedicated, physical unlock button while activating an alert. In this particular scenario, the button exists on a separate hardware piece, and it takes two hands (or some clever discomfort) to make it work. The operation is not dissimilar from the safety interlocks on an industrial press.
At no time is a confirmation displayed. It would be easy to do so (it's just software), but it would only waste time when people actually need help.
Of course, my examples are all for voice communications. But in this new-fangled textual world of alerting folks, everyone seems to have forgotten these concepts, which elsewhere have been in use for many decades...
These new-school HTML jockeys[1] have a lot to learn, it seems. I wish they'd GTFO my lawn, and stop presenting "Are you sure?" prompts wherever they can't understand how to implement reasonably idiotproof systems.
[1]: I deduce that it is a forms-oriented HTML-based system simply because of the "Submit" term confusion. I'd research it to find it if I'm right or wrong, but this being Slashdot, I'm quite certain that someone will flatly tell me that wrong I'm in short order.
Perhaps they offered the best bang-for-the-buck. Or perhaps they were reasonably priced to such an extent that the premium for the Ferrari logo was minimal, and worth the fun.
I don't see a Panasonic phone anywhere.
I do see something awfully close to a Nortel/Aastra M5316, which is anything but an analog phone. And it makes sense: Verizon, like many former RBOCs, likes Nortel just fine and uses/sells/maintains their switches all over the place -- why not at home?
It's not IP, but that really doesn't matter: From the looks of their beautifully-presented 110 blocks (replete with waxed string), these guys won't bat an eyelid at cabling in a dedicated pair for a phone in an office.
I, myself, doubt that the author is a good writer.
If the author is neither a decent writer nor even a mediocre photographer, what business does he have publishing anything involving both of these concepts at once?
Don't get me wrong. I think anyone should be allowed to publish anything, no matter how insipid, inane, or even purposefully incorrect it might be. But I also feel that editors exist for a reason, and that this particular FA should've been edited into oblivion rather than posted on Slashdot.
I find your Babelfish to be unintelligible: Apparently, they're translating from Russian to Spanish to English.
Much is lost.
Would a native Spanish speaker care to contribute a better translation of the linked and translated article, or (much better) a native Russian speaker care to find the interview in its original dialect and convert it (even in brief) to English in one step?
Please?
That, exactly.
I've always understood that driving is a privilege that can be revoked. It's just what I've learned growing up -- I have no particular source for the origin of my mindset. Until tonight, I honestly didn't believe it was a right -- or even that it should be. I'd never considered the possibility at all.
Learning differently is somewhat like (and please pardon the analogy) learning about circumcision: I assumed, early on, that everyone's cock was shaped like mine, and it turns out that they generally are...but only after modification.
But at the same time, I read the text like I remember reading about Texas's failed attempt(s?) at succession: Epic Fail.
Meanwhile, it is plain: Driving privilege (such as it may be) is dictated by the state. If there is a Constitutional right to drive, backed by the court(s), then this dictation is simply false: That's the way the Guvament works.
I won't forget this concept. And when I get a chance to do so, I'll dig up the sections of the Ohio Revised Code (since that's where I am), and chase down all of the myriad of citations presented in your linked article.
Why? Just because I'm an autistic altruist, and whenever I'm forced to do something arbitrary in exchange for being "allowed" to do something else that should be reasonable, I want to understand whether or not that force is fair and just.
How can they send you the same (bad) disc again, if it is still in either your possession or that of the USPS?
*boggle*
That's an interesting lot of verbiage and citations that you linked to. I don't care for the preachy structure of it, but the fact that I don't like the structure doesn't mean that the content is somehow incorrect.
I'm lead to wonder in what manner a formal rebuttal would proceed with proving it wrong.
I've saved the text for later parsing, and/or re-writing to make it more approachable.
Thanks, I think.
That sounds very unlikely.
Every time I have had a bad disc from Netflix (it's happened a couple of times over the two or three years I've used the service), I just click a simple and obvious series of buttons on their web site.
They then send out a different copy immediately, and I return the bad disc at my leisure. At no time have I been requested to return the bad disc first.
In the US, we have a long precedent of making free calls from landlines to local numbers (and, more recently, any number in the country), which is rather unlike how billing typically worked on the other side of the pond.
While you guys were paying per-call to dial across the street, we've been doing that for "free" since...forever.
The introduction of proper cellular telephones in the late 80's and early 90's simply had insufficient momentum to change that for us: We never grew out of expecting every local number to be free to call.
And since someone must pay (towers and infrastructure don't build themselves), we let the owner of the (then very expensive and uncommon) cell phone foot the bill, instead of the caller.
Inertia has kept it this way.
I agree that it might seem backward, but I certainly enjoyed unmetered local calling back in the BBS days, whereas I'd sometimes see my friends overseas piss and moan about the cost to dial a BBS. And still today, I think I might prefer it: It doesn't matter what US number I dial -- I already know that it won't cost me a cent extra.
I read all of those comments when the thread started.
So...what was your point, again?
Is profit a sin?
It is applicable to me, the consumer: It can cost me $1,500 now, or $1,500 later. In the former case, I (again, the consumer) get a warranty and never miss a day without my new car.
In the latter, I spend the same money, may or may not get a reasonable warranty with it, will lose at least a few hours or a couple of days of use for my new car, and may spend the rest of my term with that car wondering why things don't integrate as well as they should.
Obviously, it's cheaper for Ford (or whoever) to do this work than [random aftermarket dude]* and they therefore make a fair bit of coin on these accessories. And obviously, as a consumer, I want the best stuff I can get for the minimum amount of money -- whatever that stuff is.
But do you really believe that profit is a sin? FFS, lack of profit was the entire reason behind the recent and near-universal collapse of the domestic car market!
FFFFS, do you believe in a competitive market?
If Ford charged what it actually cost to install a good audio system, there'd be no fucking way that Clarion (to pick another example) would even be allowed to exist anymore. Fortunately, due to competition, Ford doesn't have to charge so little as that and so Clarion continues to be able to exist. Hooray! Consumer choice wins.
*: I don't work much with car audio, these days, but I do work with most every other avenue of automotive electronics. Specific to this context, I outfit ambulances with communications gear. I know first-hand that it's far easier and faster (and therefore cheaper) to get my stuff installed in a new squad while it's still being assembled, much as Ford can do, than it is to install the same gear into a squad which has already been delivered.
But I, the provider of communications (and the company behind me) charge the same either way. The difference in time spent shows directly in my own pocketbook as profit, while the result for the end-user is the same: Either way, the spend X, and get Y.
Just like, for the purposes of my argument, a Ford stereo vs. paying someone else to figure it out and make it work.
They were expensive, so I see no reason to dispose of them. And now and then, I have a need to assemble or repair an ancient PC for whatever arcane reason, and having a hard drive available with a suitable interface and capacity is a good start.
Eventually, I'll harvest the magnets from them for fun, and make wind chimes from the platters.
And in terms of gravitational collapse, it's not the mass of the hard drives that I should be worried about, but the pile of old (and proper) audio gear that works excellently but really should be put on Ebay so that they might actually be enjoyed by someone.
At least my collection of dead cars has shrunken recently. :)
Depends on the tech.
Let me just pick an example. (I'll use a car analogy.)
A premium factory sound system might be $1,500. It will be well-integrated into a modern car: The speaker grills will match the interior, the lighting will match other electronic stuff in the car, and it will function with steering wheel/rear seat controls or voice command or whatever other gee-whiz functions the car happens to have.
Can you buy a better audio system for $1,500? Sure, no problem. Will it integrate well? Probably not, even if you put a lot of time, effort and research into it, and do the work yourself, but it might.
Can you pay someone else $1,500 and end up with a stereo+car combination that both sounds better and integrates every bit as well as well as the factory option would? How about having the installer optimize a DSP to make the parts work as well as possible in that particular car? Er, uh...probably not. (And don't kid yourself: Ford, to pick a common-enough example, has been using model-specific DSP programming to smooth out their factory audio systems since at least the middle 90's. GM isn't much different.)
Doubtful.
Another example: Backup sensors.
Can you add an aftermarket distance sensor to a car cheaper than the factory? Sure -- the kits are cheap. Can you smoothly integrate the electronics into the rest of the car? Probably -- the beep-beep-beep function is pretty basic, and all it needs for signalling is a reverse switch. But can you get the sensors installed in the rear bumper and painted to match the rest of the car, and still save money? Probably so, if you do it all yourself. If you're paying someone else to do it, however, it might as well be Ford (or whoever).
And then: How about a warranty? Or financing?
(I can go on, but I don't see any need to do so.)
Dir sir,
Touche'.
Go fuck yourself. :)
16 looks legal in, at least, some parts of .au.
IIRC, it was rather lower (14?) not too many years ago. (Someone will correct me on this whether I am wrong or not.)
I take offense to your implied reference of Slashdot being a blog, even though it predates the common use of the term and though it certainly meets every modern standard of it.
I shall sue you for your indiscretion in civil court.
Let us allow the jury decide who is right.
Ah, piss. This again?
Kid, I used to have an Seagate ST-225 MFM 20 megabyte drive. I lent it to a friend, who gave it up for a debt (for some reason, the loan shark didn't heed my pleas that it was my drive when I asked for it back), and last I heard (it's been a long while, but the drive was plenty old long before then) it was still working just fine.
The replacement 120MB Seagate is still chugging along just fine, AFAICT, if anyone would ever bother to power it up.
But I've got a dead 2.5 gig Seagate. And, lo! A live 2.5 gig Seagate of exactly the same model, purchased at the same time!
I've seen 20GB Maxtors fail. And I've still got a sack full of 80GB Western Digitals that simply won't die.
And an 80GB Samsung!
Back in the day, a friend of mine was recommended Quantum disks for his server, for reliability and speed. Later, Quantum was condemned when it was realized that their Bigfoot series of drives were complete shit. (And more later, Quantum was absorbed by Maxtor.)
But, wait! I've got a 420MB Maxtor that still works fine.
And a 90MB Fujitsu.
But nevermind that. I remember when IBM made excellent hard drives. In fact, kid, I don't just remember it: I can *see* it! Over on my shelf are 3 7200RPM ultra-wide SCSI IBM Ultrastors. They work just fine, both of the 9 gigs and the 4.5.
If only they'd hold more than a DVD worth of data...
But then, hey! IBM released the Deathstar series a couple of years after that, and after an incredible amount of bad press they sold their HDD division sold to Hitachi a few months later, apparently in shame.
And what of Micropolis? Why, they had the fastest, meanest, biggest, most expensive drives of all.... didn't they just shivel up and disappear?
Nevermind that. Many a good story have been told around a symphony of Fujitsu drives with their ball bearings screaming like jet engines (but working just fine), and this tale, Lad, will be no exception.
See there, son, hanging on the wall? Those shiny things, hanging there on the nails. That, boy, is the world's greatest JPEG porn collection! All properly sorted by hair color and facial expression, of course. Why is it on the wall, all dismantled like that? Because it was on a 30GB Maxtor that died while I was out of town for a week, that's why! Just look at 'em! You can see where the heads have worn grooves in the platters! Those were my fav'rites.
I can't tell you much, boy, but I can tell you this: There's been nary a time when a hard drive was certain to be reliable. So throw a dart at the board, pick one, MAKE YOUR FUCKING BACKUPS, and enjoy it like a good bottle - when she's done, she's done.
I've thought of that before. Trouble is, a low voltage cut-off kills the settings on my stereo, unless I wire around it. But if I do that, then I'll also wire things to keep the GPS powered up, and the box for the remote start/keyless entry. And I might as well wire in the engine computer so it doesn't forget the fuel injection and ignition settings that it has learned...and then I'm back to not really having a cut-off switch at all.
Please recall that the root of the problem is that I'm already unwilling to deal with time-to-first-fix on the GPS.
I just want my car to start when it's very cold out without complaint or indications of low voltage, and without bothering to switch off the GPS.
I think I'll just install this nifty solar panel and see how that goes. Thanks.