Actually, no he's not. Verizon recently signed a partnership with Microsoft for search. Shortly afterwards, search done on the Droid phone was handled by Bing instead of Google.
The AC made it up, then. My Droid, with the latest (2.0.1) Verizon-issued firmware, uses Google by default for everything involving network search. I've never even tried to see if Bing displays properly on it.
Just because you read it on Slashdot, doesn't make it true -- often the opposite, in fact. (I recognize and accept that this concept invalidates my own commentary to a similar extent.)
Like a lot of folks with an IT badge these days, I do informal PC fixing for a few small businesses and a handful of individuals for extra cash.
It's amazing the stuff that comes back from Best Buy. One lady took her Dell laptop in, with a mangled hard drive. Best Buy told her there was nothing could be done, that all of her data was toast, and she should just buy a new computer.
Now, this lady doesn't really do much with a computer: A bit of Ebay, email, photos of the kids, and that's...it.
I put a new drive in. I reinstalled Windows and plugged in the normal set of up-to-date drivers. I recovered her old pictures. She was ecstatic to pay me hourly for this.
When I brought the machine back to her, I advised her to get more RAM (IIRC, the machine only had 256MB). She asked if it was expensive, I said no. She asked if she could do it herself, and I said yes, and showed her how, complete with a brief rundown on static electricity and grounding. I gave her a couple of options on Newegg, which she bookmarked. I didn't hear from her for months.
When I ran into her again, she gives me the familiar "My laptop works so much better than it ever did before, even when it was new!" She'd ordered and installed the new RAM herself, no problem.
I'm sure I won't hear from her again until the machine eats itself (which should take quite awhile), so it's not a very profitable thing for me. She knows a bit more about her machine, and what makes it work. And, most importantly, she knows never to trust Best Buy again.
I pull about 2.5 megabits per second over Verizon's 3G on my Droid, every place I've bothered to test it. This is a good bit faster than most intentionally-free public access points that I've used, and I'm very pleased with its performance on CDMA. 3G coverage has been absolute, for me, as well -- except in a few small rural Ohio towns where no cell phones work at all.
At home and at work over WiFi, sure, I can do a little better than that (6 and 7Mbps, respectively) -- but not better enough to actually notice, since most of my wait-states are spent waiting for the 500MHz-ish CPU to render things, not waiting for the network to catch up.
It's not like I'm downloading ISO images with the thing. But if I were, and WiFi were available, you can bet that I'd using my laptop for that instead of a phone.
And speaking of moot points: It's a cell phone -- of course people use it on the road. That's what it's for.
Furthermore, as an early-adopter geek who is near hotspots 90% of the day: I almost always keep WiFi turned off, just to save on battery, since the added speed (and/or reduced latency) of local WiFi is often nearly imperceptible.
However, I think my behavior (and battery life!) would change if I couldn't do 3G at all.
I think the confusion lies in the bizarre implication that we humans are somehow unnatural, as if no other species has ever hunted another to extinction.
Oh. You've got the high-speed stuff, but that's not even the real problem as I see it.
The consists of this: One or two minutes of actual work. And then some previews. And then a commercial. And then some review of the stuff we just bloody saw. Then, it's onto the other team's project for a minute or two. And some previews. And a commercial. More review. Back to the first project for a minute or two. Then, eventually, a kaboom, a splash, or a crash. Followed by more review.
Rinse, repeat. Blah, blah, blah.
The whole show could be linearized, stripped of commercials and redundancy, and be reduced to approximately 8 minutes total without losing any content at all.
I don't care what's popular -- I could give two shits what you, for instance, enjoy watching. Honestly.
If I wanted to hear people talk, I'd turn on the radio. A TV, however, is showing me 30 pictures per second, each one of which might be worth a thousand words. All I can think when I see a ballgame, or practically anything on Discovery these days is this: Shut the FUCK up unless you have something that's actually meaningful to add to the pictures on the screen.
Ok, I'll tell you: I went from an XT, to a short series of 386SX's, to a VLB 486, and then into the PCI-equipped P5 era that we still seem to be unable to totally escape. None of these machines had EISA or MCA.
You forgot some other somewhat cold and dead things: MCA, EISA, PCMCIA, PCI-X. And ESDI, parallel SCSI, ST-506 MFM, and the similar RLL. And, let's not forget the current Newfangled Great Idea that Nobody Gives a Fuck About, BTX.
Why should I assume that 4k sectors won't just be a small and dismal blip on the technological radar like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture>Microchannel or EISA was, as just another seemingly good idea that nobody ever actually wanted badly enough to buy it?
It's easy enough to remember. Myself, I remember Teh Intarwebs being strangely useless and broken that morning, until I finally found that Slashdot was surviving just fine. Nothing worked.
Horror settled in. I was doing construction contracting at the time, and we were in the office gearing up for the day ahead. After we got the news from Slashdot, we gave the boss a "WTF?" phone call, and he told us to forget work for the day. I went and woke my Dad up, told him what happened, and his first words were "Yeah, right." He didn't say another word for over an hour after I switched his TV on.
I even ended up joining the US Army over the event, immediately following W's speech about "you're either with us, or you're against us," being personally very fearful that some other powerful nation might actually take him to his word on that and figuring that we'd need all the help we could get: I parsed that speech as declaring war on most of the rest of the world.
Fortunately, for us in the US, it turns out that my interpretation/prediction was very wrong.
But, yeah. It statistically was a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things, but at the same time, it wasn't: The people that died in the WTC and Pentagon attacks weren't old, or sick. They didn't see this coming. They were, by simple virtue of their placement in such an expensive bit of real estate (if nothing else) doing important work.
Metaphorically, they simply all happened to get run over by a bus on the same day. What are the odds?
Accordingly, it's easy to forget. But that doesn't make it unimportant to remember.
Less safe than drunk person? Nay, it was worse. I've driven in all states of chemical and/or natural inebriation, and the 22 hour of continuous stone-sober driving was the worst ever. I woke up (!!!!!!) several times, mostly in metropolitan Columbus, OH during morning rush hour, on the tail end of that trip. Landed home safely, without a scratch on the truck or the towed parts car I went to pick up, but blah: Never again. That's all the risky long-distance driving I'll ever need.
12 or so hours in a day is pretty manageable, though. Stretch Google's 22 hour road-time estimate into a planned 40-48 hour trip, and things will probably end up being realistically comfortable, maybe even with enough time to stop and see whatever it is that seems interesting along the way.
[*: Pause required for modems properly requiring a delay before dropping to data mode, as patented by Hayes. Other, non-supporting/paying modems used the same commands, but did not require silence between +++ and a command: A properly-crafted ping command was sufficient to take such modems/users completely neatly offline in an age of TCP/IP, though a link for a citation evades me in these modern times.]
Just don't forget: Just because Google says it takes 22 hours, doesn't mean that it takes 22 hours. You'll have to stop for fuel, to get food, and to recycle the last batch of food.
And, at least for me, 22 hours on the road is a LONG TIME - last time I drove that long at a single stretch, my body was ruined for the next 20 or so hours. I'm not ever doing it again without a chance to get a night's sleep in the middle, and while a hotel isn't usually very expensive, sleeping does take up a fair bit of time. (Though, if you had passengers who could share the driving, it might be very practical and inexpensive to just drive it in a rental car compared to any alternative.)
You don't need it from your end of the network, anyway, do you? So why not just either remove or renumber runlevel 1 in inittab? (Never tried this, and it might be unconventional enough that it blows other things up in strange ways. But it's easy to test.)
Also: Have syslogd (or whatever) send your logs to an offsite box somewhere that you maintain physical control of, so that you get an undoctored log of what goes on (at least when the network is up).
None of this will withstand a local attack with a copy of Knoppix, of course, but it seems like a good place to start.
The common backup around here seems to be a simple venturi, driven with tapwater. It's wasteful, since water pressure is a fairly expensive way to produce work, but it'll generally work until the power comes back on (however long that takes). Not quite as good as a battery system, I suppose, since it can't run in total isolation...but it's a lot simpler, with a lot fewer things to go wrong.
Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold(TM) that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
Quality guidelines - specific guidelines
Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don't send automated queries to Google.
Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
Emphasis mine, on the areas that Target is plainly and obviously not following. There's a bunch of other stuff listed which they might be doing as well, but I can't be bothered to look into it any further at the moment.
The problem with everything you just wrote is that these things are all connected together. The alternator, the battery, and the rest of the car are all in parallel. No diodes, no switching, no magic -- just a bit of heavy copper wire.
How, pray tell, do the little electrons destined for (say) the headlamps know that they'd better be starting out at the battery instead of at the alternator? How does the alternator know that it is only there to recharge the battery?
Especially since the alternator is outputting a higher voltage potential than the battery's nominal charge.
I'll answer these questions for you: They don't, and it can't.
It's the alternator's primary job to charge the battery, for sure. But, in doing so, it must power the rest of the electrical load. Sure, it's noisy as hell compared to straight DC, but much of that noise is filtered by the battery (or additional capacitance in noise-sensitive devices), and...well, that's it. There's nothing more to say.
Voltage dividers, in this application, are only useful when the power is of a fixed (already regulated) voltage. Car batteries are nominally 12V, but charge at somewhere between 13.8 and 14.4V.
Please show me an example of an example of a modern (say, last 5 years?) cheapass lighter plug charger.
Disclaimer: Where I work, among our various trades, we sell cellular phones and accessories. We get cheap Chinese chargers for less than $2 each (and mark them up x15, but that's a different story), and inside of each of these little widgets is a tiny switching regulator circuit.
Slashdot Mirror
The AC made it up, then. My Droid, with the latest (2.0.1) Verizon-issued firmware, uses Google by default for everything involving network search. I've never even tried to see if Bing displays properly on it.
Just because you read it on Slashdot, doesn't make it true -- often the opposite, in fact. (I recognize and accept that this concept invalidates my own commentary to a similar extent.)
Indeed.
Like a lot of folks with an IT badge these days, I do informal PC fixing for a few small businesses and a handful of individuals for extra cash.
It's amazing the stuff that comes back from Best Buy. One lady took her Dell laptop in, with a mangled hard drive. Best Buy told her there was nothing could be done, that all of her data was toast, and she should just buy a new computer.
Now, this lady doesn't really do much with a computer: A bit of Ebay, email, photos of the kids, and that's...it.
I put a new drive in. I reinstalled Windows and plugged in the normal set of up-to-date drivers. I recovered her old pictures. She was ecstatic to pay me hourly for this.
When I brought the machine back to her, I advised her to get more RAM (IIRC, the machine only had 256MB). She asked if it was expensive, I said no. She asked if she could do it herself, and I said yes, and showed her how, complete with a brief rundown on static electricity and grounding. I gave her a couple of options on Newegg, which she bookmarked. I didn't hear from her for months.
When I ran into her again, she gives me the familiar "My laptop works so much better than it ever did before, even when it was new!" She'd ordered and installed the new RAM herself, no problem.
I'm sure I won't hear from her again until the machine eats itself (which should take quite awhile), so it's not a very profitable thing for me. She knows a bit more about her machine, and what makes it work. And, most importantly, she knows never to trust Best Buy again.
That'd be really great if it worked on modern operating systems, but it doesn't.
Wayfuckingfaster? Baah.
I pull about 2.5 megabits per second over Verizon's 3G on my Droid, every place I've bothered to test it. This is a good bit faster than most intentionally-free public access points that I've used, and I'm very pleased with its performance on CDMA. 3G coverage has been absolute, for me, as well -- except in a few small rural Ohio towns where no cell phones work at all.
At home and at work over WiFi, sure, I can do a little better than that (6 and 7Mbps, respectively) -- but not better enough to actually notice, since most of my wait-states are spent waiting for the 500MHz-ish CPU to render things, not waiting for the network to catch up.
It's not like I'm downloading ISO images with the thing. But if I were, and WiFi were available, you can bet that I'd using my laptop for that instead of a phone.
And speaking of moot points: It's a cell phone -- of course people use it on the road. That's what it's for.
Furthermore, as an early-adopter geek who is near hotspots 90% of the day: I almost always keep WiFi turned off, just to save on battery, since the added speed (and/or reduced latency) of local WiFi is often nearly imperceptible.
However, I think my behavior (and battery life!) would change if I couldn't do 3G at all.
So?
Since when is killing oneself illegal?
Coincidentally, since Vista came out, I've seen less than a dozen Vista computers -- total.
It either Just Works, or it's really unpopular. I suspect both, though I never had any particular problems with it on my own machines...
Being more inexpensive does not always entail being more cost effective.
I think the confusion lies in the bizarre implication that we humans are somehow unnatural, as if no other species has ever hunted another to extinction.
Oh. You've got the high-speed stuff, but that's not even the real problem as I see it.
The consists of this: One or two minutes of actual work. And then some previews. And then a commercial. And then some review of the stuff we just bloody saw. Then, it's onto the other team's project for a minute or two. And some previews. And a commercial. More review. Back to the first project for a minute or two. Then, eventually, a kaboom, a splash, or a crash. Followed by more review.
Rinse, repeat. Blah, blah, blah.
The whole show could be linearized, stripped of commercials and redundancy, and be reduced to approximately 8 minutes total without losing any content at all.
Better because I like it that way.
I don't care what's popular -- I could give two shits what you, for instance, enjoy watching. Honestly.
If I wanted to hear people talk, I'd turn on the radio. A TV, however, is showing me 30 pictures per second, each one of which might be worth a thousand words. All I can think when I see a ballgame, or practically anything on Discovery these days is this: Shut the FUCK up unless you have something that's actually meaningful to add to the pictures on the screen.
I don't care if you think it's boring.
Ok, I'll tell you: I went from an XT, to a short series of 386SX's, to a VLB 486, and then into the PCI-equipped P5 era that we still seem to be unable to totally escape. None of these machines had EISA or MCA.
You forgot some other somewhat cold and dead things: MCA, EISA, PCMCIA, PCI-X. And ESDI, parallel SCSI, ST-506 MFM, and the similar RLL. And, let's not forget the current Newfangled Great Idea that Nobody Gives a Fuck About, BTX.
Why should I assume that 4k sectors won't just be a small and dismal blip on the technological radar like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture>Microchannel or EISA was, as just another seemingly good idea that nobody ever actually wanted badly enough to buy it?
As someone who actually possesses an attention span, I cannot watch Mythbusters without being aggravated over the formatting.
I submit that it's far better to be boring, than to be actively annoying.
*shrug*
Speaking merely as a bull-headed American: European/Middle-Eastern terrorism doesn't affect me much. Sorry. I worry more about my own problems.
As should you, wherever you are.
Whatever.
It's easy enough to remember. Myself, I remember Teh Intarwebs being strangely useless and broken that morning, until I finally found that Slashdot was surviving just fine. Nothing worked.
I eventually found this: http://slashdot.org/articles/01/09/11/1314258.shtml.
Horror settled in. I was doing construction contracting at the time, and we were in the office gearing up for the day ahead. After we got the news from Slashdot, we gave the boss a "WTF?" phone call, and he told us to forget work for the day. I went and woke my Dad up, told him what happened, and his first words were "Yeah, right." He didn't say another word for over an hour after I switched his TV on.
I even ended up joining the US Army over the event, immediately following W's speech about "you're either with us, or you're against us," being personally very fearful that some other powerful nation might actually take him to his word on that and figuring that we'd need all the help we could get: I parsed that speech as declaring war on most of the rest of the world.
Fortunately, for us in the US, it turns out that my interpretation/prediction was very wrong.
But, yeah. It statistically was a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things, but at the same time, it wasn't: The people that died in the WTC and Pentagon attacks weren't old, or sick. They didn't see this coming. They were, by simple virtue of their placement in such an expensive bit of real estate (if nothing else) doing important work.
Metaphorically, they simply all happened to get run over by a bus on the same day. What are the odds?
Accordingly, it's easy to forget. But that doesn't make it unimportant to remember.
Less safe than drunk person? Nay, it was worse. I've driven in all states of chemical and/or natural inebriation, and the 22 hour of continuous stone-sober driving was the worst ever. I woke up (!!!!!!) several times, mostly in metropolitan Columbus, OH during morning rush hour, on the tail end of that trip. Landed home safely, without a scratch on the truck or the towed parts car I went to pick up, but blah: Never again. That's all the risky long-distance driving I'll ever need.
12 or so hours in a day is pretty manageable, though. Stretch Google's 22 hour road-time estimate into a planned 40-48 hour trip, and things will probably end up being realistically comfortable, maybe even with enough time to stop and see whatever it is that seems interesting along the way.
You mean:
+++
[pause*]
ATH0
ATDT18400MODITUP
[*: Pause required for modems properly requiring a delay before dropping to data mode, as patented by Hayes. Other, non-supporting/paying modems used the same commands, but did not require silence between +++ and a command: A properly-crafted ping command was sufficient to take such modems/users completely neatly offline in an age of TCP/IP, though a link for a citation evades me in these modern times.]
Interesting stuff.
Just don't forget: Just because Google says it takes 22 hours, doesn't mean that it takes 22 hours. You'll have to stop for fuel, to get food, and to recycle the last batch of food.
And, at least for me, 22 hours on the road is a LONG TIME - last time I drove that long at a single stretch, my body was ruined for the next 20 or so hours. I'm not ever doing it again without a chance to get a night's sleep in the middle, and while a hotel isn't usually very expensive, sleeping does take up a fair bit of time. (Though, if you had passengers who could share the driving, it might be very practical and inexpensive to just drive it in a rental car compared to any alternative.)
You don't need it from your end of the network, anyway, do you? So why not just either remove or renumber runlevel 1 in inittab? (Never tried this, and it might be unconventional enough that it blows other things up in strange ways. But it's easy to test.)
Also: Have syslogd (or whatever) send your logs to an offsite box somewhere that you maintain physical control of, so that you get an undoctored log of what goes on (at least when the network is up).
None of this will withstand a local attack with a copy of Knoppix, of course, but it seems like a good place to start.
The common backup around here seems to be a simple venturi, driven with tapwater. It's wasteful, since water pressure is a fairly expensive way to produce work, but it'll generally work until the power comes back on (however long that takes). Not quite as good as a battery system, I suppose, since it can't run in total isolation...but it's a lot simpler, with a lot fewer things to go wrong.
Dear AC,
If you'd R'd the FA, you'd have noticed this: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atarget.com+%22We+could+not+find+matches+for%22.
Therein, are some 14 million dead links which land on Target's do-nothing search page.
Will you really have me believe that target.com has been linked to for over 14 million specific products which they no longer sell?
Not even Newegg, who tends to keep old product pages around for ages after they've stopped selling an item, has this problem: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=site%3Anewegg.com+%22this+product+is+no+longer+available%22 tops out at a perfectly believable 149,000 hits.
Really. 14 million?
FFS: Something here stinks.
Generating them is wrong, according to Google:
Quality guidelines - basic principles
Quality guidelines - specific guidelines
Emphasis mine, on the areas that Target is plainly and obviously not following. There's a bunch of other stuff listed which they might be doing as well, but I can't be bothered to look into it any further at the moment.
Please explain to me why should I care about shareholder value when trying (and failing) to find a product with Google.
Meh, indeed.
Right. So.
The problem with everything you just wrote is that these things are all connected together. The alternator, the battery, and the rest of the car are all in parallel. No diodes, no switching, no magic -- just a bit of heavy copper wire.
How, pray tell, do the little electrons destined for (say) the headlamps know that they'd better be starting out at the battery instead of at the alternator? How does the alternator know that it is only there to recharge the battery?
Especially since the alternator is outputting a higher voltage potential than the battery's nominal charge.
I'll answer these questions for you: They don't, and it can't.
It's the alternator's primary job to charge the battery, for sure. But, in doing so, it must power the rest of the electrical load. Sure, it's noisy as hell compared to straight DC, but much of that noise is filtered by the battery (or additional capacitance in noise-sensitive devices), and...well, that's it. There's nothing more to say.
[[citation needed]]
Voltage dividers, in this application, are only useful when the power is of a fixed (already regulated) voltage. Car batteries are nominally 12V, but charge at somewhere between 13.8 and 14.4V.
Please show me an example of an example of a modern (say, last 5 years?) cheapass lighter plug charger.
Disclaimer: Where I work, among our various trades, we sell cellular phones and accessories. We get cheap Chinese chargers for less than $2 each (and mark them up x15, but that's a different story), and inside of each of these little widgets is a tiny switching regulator circuit.