I'm not that old -- I just started young. There's lots of older geeks than I, though the beard has been getting a little grey lately...
I never got into phreaking, so my BBS days (as in, my BBS -- I still called some later) were over just as soon as I discovered that cyberspace.org (defunct) offered free Internet access. All you had to do was call it up and make an account, and foot the long distance. I forget the details, but it was a UNIXy system, and I believe it did have some fashion of proper shell available. Not long after, they started offering SLIP. Woot.
One day, I woke up around 3:00PM or so, and headed over to the computer to see if my download had finished. And, wtf? It was disconnected. So I picked up the phone, and it had no dialtone. I look out the window directly to my left, and see the phone line laying on the roof, cut in two.
I knew immediately what that meant: The jig was up.
Later that day, my parents showed me a $600 phone bill. And that was the end.
Fast forward a bunch, and I help folks with computers from time to time. I've got a few business clients that use me, and they're all pretty cool to deal with. It's just a side job that I've never marketed at all. The clueless home users that I get from time to time are the absolute worst: First, they don't understand why I want to charge them money for my time. Then, they don't understand why I won't help them steal software. And then, they turn unpleasant when they see the bill. And then, they call later with unrelated problems, and act is if I owe them fixes for some new problem, as if they're already paid in advance for that, too. And while I'm generally very happy to help folks (any folks) with a few minutes of my time to help THEM solve a problem (in a "teach a man to fish" sort of way), I'm not taking ownership of the issue for myself without money.
This, sir, is why I still have a regular hourly day job where the clientele are all businesses and local government. I don't know how you stand it.
Since it only has a couple of buttons and two connectors, and no removable hardware or user-serviceable parts, then yes, I expect Apple to keep things pretty well sealed up.
Since you apparently have to look inside the headphone jack to see it, and most people don't even know that such things as "liquid sensors" even exist, or would be bothered with looking even if they did know, then I guess you're probably right: There aren't throngs of folks at Apple stores questioning things.
That, however, does not mean there aren't throngs of folks with tripped sensors happily using their phones.
For you young pups out there who don't remember a time before MSN Search, for when gopher, FTP and telnet ruled, for when having a SLIP connection at home (instead of something arcane line a terminal dialup into a VAX) was not only unheard of but impossible for most folks, years and years before the September That Never Ended, when this World Wide Web thing was still young and very disorganized, and MUDs were still cool, Yahoo was useful.
Yahoo faded from usefulness just as quickly (or slowly) as search engines became useful (rather than being a glorified text search, displayed in no particular order)). I've been around Teh Intarwebs long enough to remember a time when, if you wanted to find something. It was just a big, human-sorted list of sites. It didn't have everything, but it had a starting point for most stuff. There were lots of other lists in no time, but Yahoo's was the largest and broadest.
I remember the birth of Altavista, which was the first nail in Yahoo's coffin (there were other early players which contributed, but none of them sucked less than Altavista).
Ever since, it's just been getting worse for them. Indexes of websites are hardly useful these days. Yahoo tried to branch out, with chat, and news, and forums, and lots of other things... But, ultimately, it seems they're failing because their original focus and purpose has become all but useless, as the slug around the expensive weight of all the other stuff they've tried to do since. When I went there a second ago, I couldn't even find the index anymore in all the noise they have on their front page. (Does it even exist?)
Google's uncanny usefulness was one of the next nails in the coffin. Bing and other useful search engines, have driven the last spikes.
It's very interesting to me that, back in Google's infancy, long before adwords, or any ads at all within Google, their chief source of revenue was Yahoo, who used them as their search engine. That's right: Yahoo used to pay Google for search services. And now the two big search engines both want to pay Yahoo for the same thing.
Others have mentioned HPNA, which also works fine on old wire, even with splitters and such buried in the walls, and RG-59 with crimped-on terminals. A good friend of mine is actually using it this way at his house, which I cabled myself a long time ago (before I knew better).
Coexists with TV signals. 320Mbit/second. QoS. 64 devices on a segment. Thousands of feet (!) of distance over coax*.
Of course, it's always better to pull in some Cat5e or somesuch. But not everyone wants to be a residential data networking installer in their spare time, which is loathsome work in most finished houses.
*: Which is really interesting. Even if it's a lie by an order of magnitude, or is based on best-case scenarios, it's easy to extrapolate that worst case (old RG-59, stapled wrongly, tired connections, sharp bends) is still pretty fucking useful.
I have a bit (not a lot) of knowledge about the cellular industry, since the company I work has a few shops that sell phones and service.
Chargers are junk, and cost no more than $2 in blister packs (less than that without them). These are marked up to $30 (but it includes a lifetime warranty, from us, for whatever the fuck that's worth at $28 in profit on the original sale).
I had one of the cheap car chargers for my Droid. It interfered with the AM radio in the car, badly, and could barely deliver enough current to keep the phone running with the display on and GPS going, let alone charge anything while that was happening.
So, I bought a proper Motorola-branded charger from Amazon. Cost was $10. It puts out 950mA of current, charges the phone quickly no matter what I'm doing with it, looks better (though I could honestly care less what it looks like), and has a better cable.
With shipping, it was still way cheaper than the junk they sell at cell phone stores, and way, way better.
I just have to ask: What is it like inside of Phil Jones' ass? Perhaps the climate in there could explain some of what you're experiencing while you ejaculate these submissive, non-thinking words.
(-1, Flamebait - don't care, got a decade worth of good karma built up already. I'm just sick of blind fanboyism.)
And while I'm sure you'll probably never read this, I'm willing to bet that you're wrong (and I only bet on a sure thing).
I own the dealxtreme bluetooth adapter that I linked, and I've had it apart*.
The antenna is just a short pattern of traces that looks like this:
_ _ _ _ | | | | | | | |
|_| |_| |_|
The proportions are about right**, incidentally, in ASCII form. The widgth of the squiggle is about 6mm according to my ruler. And, frankly, there ain't much fractal about that -- it's just a squiggle printed on a circuit board. It works OK; certainly well enough for the Personal Area Networking stuff that bluetooth is made for, and also for the near-range stuff that the 802.11 device mentioned in TFA is meant for.
*: I've had it apart, because it's a lousy little thing. It worked at best intermittently, by default. I cursed it, took it apart, looked at it, and soldered the crystal to the ground pad beneath it. It has been flawless since. One might say that it is a poorly assembled, poorly designed adapter, but for less than $2 shipped plus a bit of ingenuity, I'm not complaining. It really does work rather well within a dozen or so feet, after modification. I'd not expect 802.11 to behave much differently.
**: And since Slashdot's preview function seems to be trashing my wonderful ASCII art: If the picture it looks illegible, the idea is this:/\/\/\/\. Except, with square corners. It's not a very special antenna.
I think I was referring more to "releases that break stuff and therefore cost extra money" per decade, than "major releases per decade." At my advanced age (ha!) I find I'm looking for minimum pain-in-the-ass and expense as time marches on. I've got plenty of interesting things that I like to do with computers of all kinds, but playing version-wars is my most hated of them.
But thanks, AC, for making my point a little more pointier.
For some reason, your post makes me think that an upgrade path consisting of XP Pro to Windows 7 Ultimate is, ultimately, very inexpensive.
The Windows people have all of their software working just fine for at least nearly a decade, or perhaps lots more, between upgrades. The Mac people often get to reinvent the wheel with new point releases.
(Disclaimer: I write this from a 7 box, but I'm not a great fan of any current desktop operating system, including the *NIXes.)
Through the miracles of emulation, a U3 device (such as the Sandisk drives being discussed here) presents itself as two physically separate USB peripherals, along with a virtualized USB hub to connect them to the host. One of them is a USB CD-ROM, and the other is a USB storage device.
The emulated storage device only has one partition on it, which fills the entire available area of the disk (as limited by hardware). Read more about it at Wikipedia.
This is a special function of the hardware, not just a partition table trick. You can write zeros over the entire accessible thing, and U3 will survive.
Several years ago, I bought a used 2-gig U3 Cruzer Micro from a friend. The software annoyed me, so I Googled it and removed it. It required a download from Sandisk, but was a very trouble-free process.
Not too long after, I filled that one up. I bought an 8-gig version of the same thing (I like the form factor). Removing/disabling U3 on that one was dead simple: It was in the menu built into the system.
I like these drives just fine. I carry one everywhere, hanging on my keyring off of a belt loop. It gets thrown, stepped on, washed, dried, and abused on a regular basis, and never fails.
But anyway, your annoyances, in your order:
a) So what? That's the market. Would it really displease you less if it were some gee-whiz multiplatform thing that worked on every device with a USB port, or would you then just complain about the fact that it's too expensive and consumes too much space? Or perhaps you'd prefer that hardware companies stop adding features to their devices to differentiate them from their competition?
b) So, fix it. You're bold enough to concoct legitimate complaints about technical things, but too big of a sissy to be bothered with rearranging drive letters? (Personally, I think the larger abomination here is that anyone is still using drive letters at all...)
c) It does not install anything; Windows does. U3 devices just appear to the OS as a USB hub. Connected to that hub, is a CD-ROM drive and some flash storage. After that, Windows sees this pile of newly-connected hardware and just tries to load drivers for it, just as it would with anything else USB or other hot-pluggable bus. In the case of U3, it succeeds, since Windows already has drivers for these sorts of devices built-in out-of-the-box. (An Ubuntu machine will undergo similar gyrations when presented with a U3 device; it's just quieter about the loading process.) And all of this is for one reason: To allow it to autorun on Windows XP, not to unleash some sort of bizarre and new evil unto the world.
You made an absolute statement about management positions.
Like most absolute statements, particularly those involving social matters, it is false.
I've performed long-term management tasks for my current employer, but was hired as a mere lackey. Therefore, I have previous management experience, and ostensibly meet the (admittedly) ridiculous (and mostly ubiquitous) qualification that you cite, even though I gained this experience without ever having done managerial tasks prior to my current employ.
I could apply for a management position at a different company and honestly say that I have previous experience.
(That all said, I consider myself to be a very lousy manager, but that's not at all the point...)
Funny you should mention that; a week or so ago, I printed out that same passage, and the page or two surrounding it, and stowed it away in my wallet for the next time a clerk insists on seeing my ID in order to complete a sale.
(Some people might think I'm a man of principle. Most others would probably say that I'm just an asshole, making it harder for the commonfolk who "are just doing their jobs." Myself, I see it like this: If I have to follow the rules when I deal with people, then so does everyone-fucking-else when they deal with me.)
But the question, then, is as such: Is it cheaper to use a craigslist/ebay pen plotter and make it less precise in software, or to build an inherently imprecise robot arm that (ostensibly) produces the same sort of result?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not that old -- I just started young. There's lots of older geeks than I, though the beard has been getting a little grey lately...
I never got into phreaking, so my BBS days (as in, my BBS -- I still called some later) were over just as soon as I discovered that cyberspace.org (defunct) offered free Internet access. All you had to do was call it up and make an account, and foot the long distance. I forget the details, but it was a UNIXy system, and I believe it did have some fashion of proper shell available. Not long after, they started offering SLIP. Woot.
One day, I woke up around 3:00PM or so, and headed over to the computer to see if my download had finished. And, wtf? It was disconnected. So I picked up the phone, and it had no dialtone. I look out the window directly to my left, and see the phone line laying on the roof, cut in two.
I knew immediately what that meant: The jig was up.
Later that day, my parents showed me a $600 phone bill. And that was the end.
Fast forward a bunch, and I help folks with computers from time to time. I've got a few business clients that use me, and they're all pretty cool to deal with. It's just a side job that I've never marketed at all. The clueless home users that I get from time to time are the absolute worst: First, they don't understand why I want to charge them money for my time. Then, they don't understand why I won't help them steal software. And then, they turn unpleasant when they see the bill. And then, they call later with unrelated problems, and act is if I owe them fixes for some new problem, as if they're already paid in advance for that, too. And while I'm generally very happy to help folks (any folks) with a few minutes of my time to help THEM solve a problem (in a "teach a man to fish" sort of way), I'm not taking ownership of the issue for myself without money.
This, sir, is why I still have a regular hourly day job where the clientele are all businesses and local government. I don't know how you stand it.
No.
Since it only has a couple of buttons and two connectors, and no removable hardware or user-serviceable parts, then yes, I expect Apple to keep things pretty well sealed up.
It would be rather bloody easy.
Since you apparently have to look inside the headphone jack to see it, and most people don't even know that such things as "liquid sensors" even exist, or would be bothered with looking even if they did know, then I guess you're probably right: There aren't throngs of folks at Apple stores questioning things.
That, however, does not mean there aren't throngs of folks with tripped sensors happily using their phones.
Yes, I liked it just fine.
For you young pups out there who don't remember a time before MSN Search, for when gopher, FTP and telnet ruled, for when having a SLIP connection at home (instead of something arcane line a terminal dialup into a VAX) was not only unheard of but impossible for most folks, years and years before the September That Never Ended, when this World Wide Web thing was still young and very disorganized, and MUDs were still cool, Yahoo was useful.
Past-tense. Way-past. But, still.
Whatever.
Yahoo faded from usefulness just as quickly (or slowly) as search engines became useful (rather than being a glorified text search, displayed in no particular order)). I've been around Teh Intarwebs long enough to remember a time when, if you wanted to find something. It was just a big, human-sorted list of sites. It didn't have everything, but it had a starting point for most stuff. There were lots of other lists in no time, but Yahoo's was the largest and broadest.
I remember the birth of Altavista, which was the first nail in Yahoo's coffin (there were other early players which contributed, but none of them sucked less than Altavista).
Ever since, it's just been getting worse for them. Indexes of websites are hardly useful these days. Yahoo tried to branch out, with chat, and news, and forums, and lots of other things... But, ultimately, it seems they're failing because their original focus and purpose has become all but useless, as the slug around the expensive weight of all the other stuff they've tried to do since. When I went there a second ago, I couldn't even find the index anymore in all the noise they have on their front page. (Does it even exist?)
Google's uncanny usefulness was one of the next nails in the coffin. Bing and other useful search engines, have driven the last spikes.
It's very interesting to me that, back in Google's infancy, long before adwords, or any ads at all within Google, their chief source of revenue was Yahoo, who used them as their search engine. That's right: Yahoo used to pay Google for search services. And now the two big search engines both want to pay Yahoo for the same thing.
Buh-bye, Yahoo.
Cannot? Ever? DOCSIS, anyone?
Others have mentioned HPNA, which also works fine on old wire, even with splitters and such buried in the walls, and RG-59 with crimped-on terminals. A good friend of mine is actually using it this way at his house, which I cabled myself a long time ago (before I knew better).
Here are some specs:
Coexists with TV signals.
320Mbit/second.
QoS.
64 devices on a segment.
Thousands of feet (!) of distance over coax*.
Of course, it's always better to pull in some Cat5e or somesuch. But not everyone wants to be a residential data networking installer in their spare time, which is loathsome work in most finished houses.
*: Which is really interesting. Even if it's a lie by an order of magnitude, or is based on best-case scenarios, it's easy to extrapolate that worst case (old RG-59, stapled wrongly, tired connections, sharp bends) is still pretty fucking useful.
The cheap chargers tend to be junk.
I have a bit (not a lot) of knowledge about the cellular industry, since the company I work has a few shops that sell phones and service.
Chargers are junk, and cost no more than $2 in blister packs (less than that without them). These are marked up to $30 (but it includes a lifetime warranty, from us, for whatever the fuck that's worth at $28 in profit on the original sale).
I had one of the cheap car chargers for my Droid. It interfered with the AM radio in the car, badly, and could barely deliver enough current to keep the phone running with the display on and GPS going, let alone charge anything while that was happening.
So, I bought a proper Motorola-branded charger from Amazon. Cost was $10. It puts out 950mA of current, charges the phone quickly no matter what I'm doing with it, looks better (though I could honestly care less what it looks like), and has a better cable.
With shipping, it was still way cheaper than the junk they sell at cell phone stores, and way, way better.
I wasn't trying to attack an argument. I was trying to attack a faction.
I thought I made that clear.
Easy. You just price it high enough to be profitable, and hope the market (however small) will bear it.
I just have to ask: What is it like inside of Phil Jones' ass? Perhaps the climate in there could explain some of what you're experiencing while you ejaculate these submissive, non-thinking words.
(-1, Flamebait - don't care, got a decade worth of good karma built up already. I'm just sick of blind fanboyism.)
And while I'm sure you'll probably never read this, I'm willing to bet that you're wrong (and I only bet on a sure thing).
I own the dealxtreme bluetooth adapter that I linked, and I've had it apart*.
The antenna is just a short pattern of traces that looks like this:
The proportions are about right**, incidentally, in ASCII form. The widgth of the squiggle is about 6mm according to my ruler. And, frankly, there ain't much fractal about that -- it's just a squiggle printed on a circuit board. It works OK; certainly well enough for the Personal Area Networking stuff that bluetooth is made for, and also for the near-range stuff that the 802.11 device mentioned in TFA is meant for.
*: I've had it apart, because it's a lousy little thing. It worked at best intermittently, by default. I cursed it, took it apart, looked at it, and soldered the crystal to the ground pad beneath it. It has been flawless since. One might say that it is a poorly assembled, poorly designed adapter, but for less than $2 shipped plus a bit of ingenuity, I'm not complaining. It really does work rather well within a dozen or so feet, after modification. I'd not expect 802.11 to behave much differently.
**: And since Slashdot's preview function seems to be trashing my wonderful ASCII art: If the picture it looks illegible, the idea is this: /\/\/\/\. Except, with square corners. It's not a very special antenna.
So? Cite it or naff off.
I think I was referring more to "releases that break stuff and therefore cost extra money" per decade, than "major releases per decade." At my advanced age (ha!) I find I'm looking for minimum pain-in-the-ass and expense as time marches on. I've got plenty of interesting things that I like to do with computers of all kinds, but playing version-wars is my most hated of them.
But thanks, AC, for making my point a little more pointier.
You didn't read your own fucking link. The article you referred to is about a gasoline-powered machine, not propane.
Try again, please.
For some reason, your post makes me think that an upgrade path consisting of XP Pro to Windows 7 Ultimate is, ultimately, very inexpensive.
The Windows people have all of their software working just fine for at least nearly a decade, or perhaps lots more, between upgrades. The Mac people often get to reinvent the wheel with new point releases.
(Disclaimer: I write this from a 7 box, but I'm not a great fan of any current desktop operating system, including the *NIXes.)
No, you did not.
Through the miracles of emulation, a U3 device (such as the Sandisk drives being discussed here) presents itself as two physically separate USB peripherals, along with a virtualized USB hub to connect them to the host. One of them is a USB CD-ROM, and the other is a USB storage device.
The emulated storage device only has one partition on it, which fills the entire available area of the disk (as limited by hardware). Read more about it at Wikipedia.
This is a special function of the hardware, not just a partition table trick. You can write zeros over the entire accessible thing, and U3 will survive.
It takes magic to turn this function off. GParted does not include such magic.
Eh?
What makes these guys any different than any other customer? That they happen to be clever?
Kingston has never made their own chips. Ever.
They've always been a packager and a PCB maker -- a middleman to assemble the parts and sell them.
It's a perfectly valid thing to be doing, and a useful one: I can get Kingston-packaged RAM for just about bloody anything.
Several years ago, I bought a used 2-gig U3 Cruzer Micro from a friend. The software annoyed me, so I Googled it and removed it. It required a download from Sandisk, but was a very trouble-free process.
Not too long after, I filled that one up. I bought an 8-gig version of the same thing (I like the form factor). Removing/disabling U3 on that one was dead simple: It was in the menu built into the system.
I like these drives just fine. I carry one everywhere, hanging on my keyring off of a belt loop. It gets thrown, stepped on, washed, dried, and abused on a regular basis, and never fails.
But anyway, your annoyances, in your order:
a) So what? That's the market. Would it really displease you less if it were some gee-whiz multiplatform thing that worked on every device with a USB port, or would you then just complain about the fact that it's too expensive and consumes too much space? Or perhaps you'd prefer that hardware companies stop adding features to their devices to differentiate them from their competition?
b) So, fix it. You're bold enough to concoct legitimate complaints about technical things, but too big of a sissy to be bothered with rearranging drive letters? (Personally, I think the larger abomination here is that anyone is still using drive letters at all...)
c) It does not install anything; Windows does. U3 devices just appear to the OS as a USB hub. Connected to that hub, is a CD-ROM drive and some flash storage. After that, Windows sees this pile of newly-connected hardware and just tries to load drivers for it, just as it would with anything else USB or other hot-pluggable bus. In the case of U3, it succeeds, since Windows already has drivers for these sorts of devices built-in out-of-the-box. (An Ubuntu machine will undergo similar gyrations when presented with a U3 device; it's just quieter about the loading process.) And all of this is for one reason: To allow it to autorun on Windows XP, not to unleash some sort of bizarre and new evil unto the world.
You made an absolute statement about management positions.
Like most absolute statements, particularly those involving social matters, it is false.
I've performed long-term management tasks for my current employer, but was hired as a mere lackey. Therefore, I have previous management experience, and ostensibly meet the (admittedly) ridiculous (and mostly ubiquitous) qualification that you cite, even though I gained this experience without ever having done managerial tasks prior to my current employ.
I could apply for a management position at a different company and honestly say that I have previous experience.
(That all said, I consider myself to be a very lousy manager, but that's not at all the point...)
Does it?
Funny you should mention that; a week or so ago, I printed out that same passage, and the page or two surrounding it, and stowed it away in my wallet for the next time a clerk insists on seeing my ID in order to complete a sale.
(Some people might think I'm a man of principle. Most others would probably say that I'm just an asshole, making it harder for the commonfolk who "are just doing their jobs." Myself, I see it like this: If I have to follow the rules when I deal with people, then so does everyone-fucking-else when they deal with me.)
I agree. He should just put everything on Amazon S3, and let the cloud take care of it. (Oh, and fire a couple of people to pay for it.)
Ok, I guess that makes it more interesting. :)
But the question, then, is as such: Is it cheaper to use a craigslist/ebay pen plotter and make it less precise in software, or to build an inherently imprecise robot arm that (ostensibly) produces the same sort of result?