Look at all those people telling you what a dickhead you are for refusing to delete your own work.
I'm amazed, as prolific as the Slashdot crowd tends to be in their favoritism toward openness and information sharing at any expense, that these same truth-loving geeks turn so hypocritical over a few pictures that they're not even involved with.
You'd think that they'd understand just what the implications are of revising history. Alas.
Keep it up. Just because someone did something in the past (whether for fun, sport, eroticism, criminal intent, or whatever), regrets it now, and wants to wash it all away, does not somehow compel another free man to do anything about it.
If it did, we'd be living in a very different world right now, with every journalist, blogger, photographer, and webmaster busily rewriting history, pro bono, for anyone who has a problem with the past.
I've invented a few things, though I hold no patents on them because I've understood it to be a very expensive process for a simple individual such as myself.
Every now and then, I run across a patent for an idea that I've had, or a project that I've built, filed sometimes years after I've already invented the thing. It's annoying and frustrating, especially for the stuff that I've written about and/or published, since I also understand it to be a very expensive process to litigate a patent.
So. I have a short list of things that I've invented which I'll realistically never be able to monetize, just because someone else patented them first. That prior art existed really does not seem to matter at this stage of the game without deep pockets.
Back in the context of cellular networks and bandwidth:
It's very interesting that you pick out Idaho as an example of likely unprofitable places, since the low population density and flat topology lend themselves very well wireless connectivity. There's few reasons to string fiber to every house in Idaho, when other technologies may be able to do it cheaper and better in that particular environment.
In terms of profitability, here's the thing: In the all-or-nothing game, some company most certainly would jump at the chance to cover the entire state of Idaho. It might be expensive to build, whether wireless, fiber, or otherwise, but that just means that they'd have to charge more (per capita) to generate profit. Doing it this way allows the true cost of the product to be shown in the cost charged for that product, instead of being artificially low due to taxation, kickbacks, and lies.
Of course, it's likely to be a lot more expensive for the good folks in Idaho than it currently is. It's also likely to be more expensive than places like rural Ohio, which is far more densely populated than Idaho is. So what?
For what it's worth, plenty of people simply don't have the budgeting ability to deal with a shock month or two over the course of a year, even if it averages out to being cheaper overall.
In my experience, it depends a lot on the material.
I've got a reasonably well-calibrated 52" Samsung 1080p LCD, which I sit about 9 feet from.
The biggest problem I've noticed with Blu-Ray is that some (mostly older) releases are badly transferred, as if someone simply took some 480p DVD video and scaled it up. The picture is too soft.
Usually, though, things look (and sound!) rather nice. And I consider myself quite a picky bastard when it comes to encoding errors.
Perhaps your display is just set up poorly, in such a way as to accentuate Blu-Ray's artifacts? (Hint: The sharpness control for digital sources should always be rather a lot closer to 0, than any positive integer.)
I've been using my new Android phone for all manner of streaming audio in the car, and really enjoying the hell out of it. But I can't say that I miss imeem.
I don't know if this app is dramatically different, but:
On my iPod Touch, which I only use these days to run SplashID for password management, the thing will run for weeks between charges with the app loaded.
To resume, I just press power, slide a finger, and (no great surprise) the app is just sort of right there.
Am I missing something? I'm sure that the craft-project Christmas card app is smart enough to know that it's supposed to, you know, stop doing stuff when the device is sleeping...isn't it?
When I still cared about color inkjet printers*, I made sure to print -something- on them at least once a week, in full color, in order to maintain the print head. Both at work, and at home. Whether printhead-with-cartridge (HP), or separate ink tank (Canon, Epson). This had non-zero cost, of course, but I considered it regular maintenance. The printers I gave this treatment to all lasted as long as I found them useful.
*: Lately, I don't care. I used to print out maps with driving directions, where color was useful. But with Garmin GPS, an iPod Touch, and, lately, a Motorola Droid, I just don't care about that. I used to print pictures that I'd taken with my digital camera, but lately, it's cheaper, easier, and better to get wet-process photographic prints made within minutes at walmart.com. So at work, when I need a color print for some reason or other, I use one of the color Laserjets. And at home, I just haven't needed it at all for years -- I have a nice, duplexing HP Photosmart that I keep meaning to plug back in, but keep failing to find a good reason to do so since my old, venerable, and dirt-cheap HP Laserjet 5 keeps slogging out quality black-and-white prints for almost no money, has simple driver support, and connects directly to the network.
I also know that neither geothermal nor other heat pumps work particularly effectively here during the cold months -- there just isn't enough ambient thermal energy that it can be efficiently extracted using that technique, most of the time during the heating season.
That said, if I were installing central air conditioning, I'd certainly look at using a system which can be reversed for heating during the more moderate times of spring and fall. Mechanically, at least, it's an easy upgrade, and would work well with my existing high-efficiency forced-air furnace. I'm just not interested in that at all right now (since the only rooms which become "too hot" in the summer are those equipped with multiple computers, which are easily and cheaply cooled using a couple of window units).
Remember, I'm interested only in BTU per dollar, which includes the amortized expense of installing and maintaining whatever it is. My existing system, even if it is not perfect, is very cheap to maintain and, to me, was zero cost to install. I don't care about being "green." I'm a liberal capitalist, if you believe that such a thing can exist.
(This is why I discount photovoltaics out-of-hand. Last time I looked, which wasn't so long ago, it was something like a 20-year payoff on initial investment...with an expected life expectancy of about 20 years. Which is all like: Great! I get to spend all of this money NOW, and MAYBE in 20 years (if storm damage doesn't ruin the whole thing first) I'll recover my investment...and then I get to do it all over again!!!! Honestly, I'd rather burn money in my firepit out back, than go through those zero-sum gyrations.)
And I welcome the opportunity to be shown that I'm wrong. So far, though, you've failed.
Besides, simplicity and predictability has its merits.
I know that here in Ohio, the temperature ranges from +115 to -20 F. I know that I didn't decide to install this furnace -- it simply came with the house that I was forced to move into (which is a very unrelated, and far longer story). I know that geothermal and other heat pumps can work well in certain climates, including most of the early spring and late fall in this part of the world (with efficiency dropping off as the environment turns more extreme at either side). And I know I have enough land, even here in town, to install a proper network of geothermal piping.
I even know how to do most of this sort of work myself.
However, I also know this: The last time it was -20F was last winter, which is particularly cold for here. The furnace ran continuously for three entire days, and though it never did quite catch up, it did keep the house reasonably comfortable. It was comforting to rely solely on natural gas for this, as it never seems to suffer from the issues of peak demand electicity sometimes does.
I know that I don't have any nearby industrial processes to tap waste heat from. The only factory which is even remotely close is a small plastics plant that makes field tile. They're certainly not generating enough waste heat molding up their low-temperature polystyrene plastic pipe to heat my house and the rest of them in between. I also know that we don't have any heavy industry, proper, to speak of within tens of miles of my house: I live in a town employed by light industry, commerce, farming, and warehousing, none of which make for any sort of efficient capture of waste heat.
I know that electricity, per BTU, is a lot more expensive here than natural gas is. And I know that the utility buys it for a very low rate, which makes cogeneration an ugly joke.
Just to throw an equation out there: x - (y+m) = z. Where X is the cost to generate my own electricity, Y is the the proceeds from selling my extra electricity, and M is what the cost of my normal electrical usage. This leaves a positive value, Z, which is what it costs me to "save energy" using cogeneration.
Even though the equation is broken by favoring your point (M does not include the discounted rate for selling energy back to the electric grid), it's still ugly.
And I know that we're still only talking about a maximum gain of 5%, since anyone with an elementary understanding of physics must know that a process cannot exceed 100% efficiency, and we're already at 95%. And I'm already using the least expensive (dollars per BTU of heat) form of heat I can get around here, aside from cutting my own firewood from my own stand of trees (which I do not have)...but wood heat is a different sort of lie: Instead of spending my time making money to pay for fuel to stay warm, I spend my time in the cold cutting fuel into little pieces so I can burn it to stay warm.
Please, then: Tell me something I don't know.
And please realize that I'm not opposed to change. I'm just opposed to doing stupid things. For instance, I like the idea of solar energy, though I firmly believe that the math on current photovoltaics is -- at best -- really fucking scary. I am exploring the opportunity to use direct solar heating, though, and do plan on experimenting with it some next year -- at least during the warmer months to keep the pool warm and maybe preheat municipal water before it goes into the water heater.
But most of what you say doesn't make any sense, which is why I'm not looking at doing any of that.
At the end of the day, here's what matters to me: Useful (to me!) BTUs of heat per dollar (of mine).
It's very plainly going to be far cheaper for me to heat my house this winter (and for many winters to come) using my natural gas furnace, than to install a gas turbine, a fancy heat exchanger system for it, a cogeneration rig, additional resistive heating so I can actually use the electricity produced for something other than Folding@Home, etc.
There's just no fucking way this will begin to approach the total monetary efficiency of the inexpensive and simple heating system I already have. It's already at 95%, not accounting for transmission losses (but those exist no matter what). Squeezing anything more out the remaining 5% is going to be expensive enough that it's simply not worth considering.
If it were possible to recover all of the waste heat from a reciprocating engine and do something useful with it, we'd be living in a different world right now, and would not be having this conversation.
Meanwhile, here in reality, I think I'll keep my 95% efficient natural gas furnace, and try to turn electronics off when not in use. Thanks.
I work on computers. I work on them some at work, and some more outside of work. Every now and then, someone comes to me with some horrible problem or other on their Windows box that I cannot simply fix -- a problem so pervasive, that the only sane conclusion is to nuke and reinstall.
My own clients are family users, or small businesses. My clients at my day job are typically industrial or government. In all cases, they invariably only have, at most, a few tens of gigabytes of data that they want to keep. At most. Usually, it's just a collection of small documents and family photos.
So, I fire up Acronis (my own favorite; to each their own) and image the drive. It doesn't take long, generally -- and I'm free to do other things while this is happening. Sometime later, it's done. My own investment in time (plug drive in, start Acronis, click the mouse a few times) and materials (what's a hundred gig of temporary space cost?) is very little.
I then nuke and reinstall, do the whole data-recovery thing (whatever that means), and just leave the image sitting there on my server. Eventually, when I notice a few months later that the image is still there, I delete it.
I'm not hurting for space here, and storage is cheap.
So far, nobody has come back asking for additional data, probably because I try to be thorough the first time. But if they did want more, in some reasonable timeframe, I think they'd be very pleased that I would be able to accommodate their unforeseen need. I would bill them accordingly, and I strongly suspect that they (MY clients, at least) would have no problem paying for it.
I really think you should practice being a little less loathsome toward the people who allow you to be employed in the capacity that you are. If you want to support end-users and not be frustrated by their antics, then you must realize that they're just humans. These folks didn't come to you for service because they had all the answers; they came to you because they had a problem that they didn't know how to solve, and were hoping that you would be able to help them. It's your job at that point to use your accumulated wisdom of the topic to foresee what particular challenges a given job might entail (be they social or technical), and deal with them in advance in any capacity that might be reasonably afforded to you. If that means imaging the disk before fixing it, then so be it.
Failing to behave in a rational way (or, as you seem to do, purposefully behaving in an irrational way) does nothing to service your clients' needs, and eventually just drives them away.
I realize that it might seem over-the-top, and sometimes, it certainly is. My own clients have come to expect this sort of behavior from me, however, which allows me to charge a premium that my get-r-dun!!!! competitors cannot, while keeping my customers happy enough that they never bother to shop for a different IT gunther.
The only bit of networking gear I've ever seen burst into flames was a (not so old at the time) SMC 10/100 switching hub. It was expensive, steel, rackmount, had connectors for a battery backup...and it turned into fire in my apartment one day when I was out.
I did the same thing with my fridge, range, dishwasher, my TV, and the TV before that. I've never bought any home appliance without paying at least 40% less than the sticker price.
I usually ended up at the same store at the end of the bargaining, where the salesfolk were friendly and seemed to actually have half a clue, and were willing to deal.
Unfortunately, they're no longer in business.:( I suspect I may have had something to do with that.
Though I'm running 7 right now, I did try Remote Assistance under Vista on my own machine one time to get some help with from the author of a Firefox plugin that was giving me fits.
It took me about 20 minutes to make it work. I still had to research port numbers and set up forwarding. There was nothing automagic about the process AT ALL, though he said it worked pretty well once he was (eventually) able to log in.
I'm a smoker. Have been for decades, now. My electronics don't fail. They aren't covered in grime. They get the usual dust buildup (which is comprised of paper, cotton, and shed human skin, and cat hair primarily), with a bit of a brown tinge sometimes which I might count toward my smoking habit, but it hasn't been a problem.
I blow them out from time to time. No oily, impossible-to-remove contaminates are left behind - the componentry is always left looking clean, dust-free, and non-sticky after a good dousing with an aircan.
We did have a substantial flood a couple of years ago, which left my computer room and a bunch of electronics stored in the garage under water for a few days. It left behind a special sort of Diesel/shit-smelling, thick brown crud as the water receded.
I cleaned the affected electronics (which were all disconnected during the flood) with Scrubbing Bubbles. I just hosed them down with the stuff. I then rinsed off the cleaner thoroughly with tap water, rinsed the tapwater off with distilled water, then rinsed off the distilled water with 93% alcohol (accelerate drying and minimize oxidation as this occured).
The boards all came out looking shiny and new, free of even a trace solder flux. I relubricated the potentiometers and switches, to ensure that they'd behave properly and... Every single component that got this treatment is still working just fine, including power supplies and motherboards.
So, no: I don't believe that it was impossible to clean your pub PCs. Sure, they were gross, but I think that you didn't really try, preferring instead to go "Eww! It's gross and broken! Obviously it's broken because the gross! Yuck! Throw that thing away!!!".
What kind of tech are you?
(Where I work at, we occasionally get electronics in from places like Ford engine plants, which are oozing in black goop, with fans seized, and everything covered in crap. We clean 'em up, fix them, and give them back to the customer. They last for a few years before we need to revisit them, and then we literally just rinse and repeat.)
Danger? When I installed OpenSSH on via Cydia, I got a big fat warning about being sure to change the password (the default is "alpine".)
I, of course, did so immediately. As I would've done anyway, even if Cydia didn't prompt me to do so.
The problem here, at the root of it, is this: Apple ships the device with a default password, but no means of remote access, so that's OK. User comes by and plugs in a remote-access application (OpenSSH), fails to heed the warnings about enabling SSH without changing the password, and gets pwned.
I'd like to assume that most people who are interested in SSH are also clued enough to understand the threat therein. But you know what they say about assumptions...
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Just, wow.
Look at all those people telling you what a dickhead you are for refusing to delete your own work.
I'm amazed, as prolific as the Slashdot crowd tends to be in their favoritism toward openness and information sharing at any expense, that these same truth-loving geeks turn so hypocritical over a few pictures that they're not even involved with.
You'd think that they'd understand just what the implications are of revising history. Alas.
Keep it up. Just because someone did something in the past (whether for fun, sport, eroticism, criminal intent, or whatever), regrets it now, and wants to wash it all away, does not somehow compel another free man to do anything about it.
If it did, we'd be living in a very different world right now, with every journalist, blogger, photographer, and webmaster busily rewriting history, pro bono, for anyone who has a problem with the past.
Hrm.
I've invented a few things, though I hold no patents on them because I've understood it to be a very expensive process for a simple individual such as myself.
Every now and then, I run across a patent for an idea that I've had, or a project that I've built, filed sometimes years after I've already invented the thing. It's annoying and frustrating, especially for the stuff that I've written about and/or published, since I also understand it to be a very expensive process to litigate a patent.
So. I have a short list of things that I've invented which I'll realistically never be able to monetize, just because someone else patented them first. That prior art existed really does not seem to matter at this stage of the game without deep pockets.
Back in the context of cellular networks and bandwidth:
It's very interesting that you pick out Idaho as an example of likely unprofitable places, since the low population density and flat topology lend themselves very well wireless connectivity. There's few reasons to string fiber to every house in Idaho, when other technologies may be able to do it cheaper and better in that particular environment.
In terms of profitability, here's the thing: In the all-or-nothing game, some company most certainly would jump at the chance to cover the entire state of Idaho. It might be expensive to build, whether wireless, fiber, or otherwise, but that just means that they'd have to charge more (per capita) to generate profit. Doing it this way allows the true cost of the product to be shown in the cost charged for that product, instead of being artificially low due to taxation, kickbacks, and lies.
Of course, it's likely to be a lot more expensive for the good folks in Idaho than it currently is. It's also likely to be more expensive than places like rural Ohio, which is far more densely populated than Idaho is. So what?
For what it's worth, plenty of people simply don't have the budgeting ability to deal with a shock month or two over the course of a year, even if it averages out to being cheaper overall.
There. Fixed that for you.
In my experience, it depends a lot on the material.
I've got a reasonably well-calibrated 52" Samsung 1080p LCD, which I sit about 9 feet from.
The biggest problem I've noticed with Blu-Ray is that some (mostly older) releases are badly transferred, as if someone simply took some 480p DVD video and scaled it up. The picture is too soft.
Usually, though, things look (and sound!) rather nice. And I consider myself quite a picky bastard when it comes to encoding errors.
Perhaps your display is just set up poorly, in such a way as to accentuate Blu-Ray's artifacts? (Hint: The sharpness control for digital sources should always be rather a lot closer to 0, than any positive integer.)
In my version of the "good old days," we hadn't yet heard from Jon Katz on these pages.
I've been using my new Android phone for all manner of streaming audio in the car, and really enjoying the hell out of it. But I can't say that I miss imeem.
I don't know if this app is dramatically different, but:
On my iPod Touch, which I only use these days to run SplashID for password management, the thing will run for weeks between charges with the app loaded.
To resume, I just press power, slide a finger, and (no great surprise) the app is just sort of right there.
Am I missing something? I'm sure that the craft-project Christmas card app is smart enough to know that it's supposed to, you know, stop doing stuff when the device is sleeping...isn't it?
When I still cared about color inkjet printers*, I made sure to print -something- on them at least once a week, in full color, in order to maintain the print head. Both at work, and at home. Whether printhead-with-cartridge (HP), or separate ink tank (Canon, Epson). This had non-zero cost, of course, but I considered it regular maintenance. The printers I gave this treatment to all lasted as long as I found them useful.
*: Lately, I don't care. I used to print out maps with driving directions, where color was useful. But with Garmin GPS, an iPod Touch, and, lately, a Motorola Droid, I just don't care about that. I used to print pictures that I'd taken with my digital camera, but lately, it's cheaper, easier, and better to get wet-process photographic prints made within minutes at walmart.com. So at work, when I need a color print for some reason or other, I use one of the color Laserjets. And at home, I just haven't needed it at all for years -- I have a nice, duplexing HP Photosmart that I keep meaning to plug back in, but keep failing to find a good reason to do so since my old, venerable, and dirt-cheap HP Laserjet 5 keeps slogging out quality black-and-white prints for almost no money, has simple driver support, and connects directly to the network.
Oh. I forgot:
I also know that neither geothermal nor other heat pumps work particularly effectively here during the cold months -- there just isn't enough ambient thermal energy that it can be efficiently extracted using that technique, most of the time during the heating season.
That said, if I were installing central air conditioning, I'd certainly look at using a system which can be reversed for heating during the more moderate times of spring and fall. Mechanically, at least, it's an easy upgrade, and would work well with my existing high-efficiency forced-air furnace. I'm just not interested in that at all right now (since the only rooms which become "too hot" in the summer are those equipped with multiple computers, which are easily and cheaply cooled using a couple of window units).
Remember, I'm interested only in BTU per dollar, which includes the amortized expense of installing and maintaining whatever it is. My existing system, even if it is not perfect, is very cheap to maintain and, to me, was zero cost to install. I don't care about being "green." I'm a liberal capitalist, if you believe that such a thing can exist.
(This is why I discount photovoltaics out-of-hand. Last time I looked, which wasn't so long ago, it was something like a 20-year payoff on initial investment...with an expected life expectancy of about 20 years. Which is all like: Great! I get to spend all of this money NOW, and MAYBE in 20 years (if storm damage doesn't ruin the whole thing first) I'll recover my investment...and then I get to do it all over again!!!! Honestly, I'd rather burn money in my firepit out back, than go through those zero-sum gyrations.)
And I welcome the opportunity to be shown that I'm wrong. So far, though, you've failed.
Besides, simplicity and predictability has its merits.
I know a few things.
I know that here in Ohio, the temperature ranges from +115 to -20 F. I know that I didn't decide to install this furnace -- it simply came with the house that I was forced to move into (which is a very unrelated, and far longer story). I know that geothermal and other heat pumps can work well in certain climates, including most of the early spring and late fall in this part of the world (with efficiency dropping off as the environment turns more extreme at either side). And I know I have enough land, even here in town, to install a proper network of geothermal piping.
I even know how to do most of this sort of work myself.
However, I also know this: The last time it was -20F was last winter, which is particularly cold for here. The furnace ran continuously for three entire days, and though it never did quite catch up, it did keep the house reasonably comfortable. It was comforting to rely solely on natural gas for this, as it never seems to suffer from the issues of peak demand electicity sometimes does.
I know that I don't have any nearby industrial processes to tap waste heat from. The only factory which is even remotely close is a small plastics plant that makes field tile. They're certainly not generating enough waste heat molding up their low-temperature polystyrene plastic pipe to heat my house and the rest of them in between. I also know that we don't have any heavy industry, proper, to speak of within tens of miles of my house: I live in a town employed by light industry, commerce, farming, and warehousing, none of which make for any sort of efficient capture of waste heat.
I know that electricity, per BTU, is a lot more expensive here than natural gas is. And I know that the utility buys it for a very low rate, which makes cogeneration an ugly joke.
Just to throw an equation out there: x - (y+m) = z. Where X is the cost to generate my own electricity, Y is the the proceeds from selling my extra electricity, and M is what the cost of my normal electrical usage. This leaves a positive value, Z, which is what it costs me to "save energy" using cogeneration.
Even though the equation is broken by favoring your point (M does not include the discounted rate for selling energy back to the electric grid), it's still ugly.
And I know that we're still only talking about a maximum gain of 5%, since anyone with an elementary understanding of physics must know that a process cannot exceed 100% efficiency, and we're already at 95%. And I'm already using the least expensive (dollars per BTU of heat) form of heat I can get around here, aside from cutting my own firewood from my own stand of trees (which I do not have)...but wood heat is a different sort of lie: Instead of spending my time making money to pay for fuel to stay warm, I spend my time in the cold cutting fuel into little pieces so I can burn it to stay warm.
Please, then: Tell me something I don't know.
And please realize that I'm not opposed to change. I'm just opposed to doing stupid things. For instance, I like the idea of solar energy, though I firmly believe that the math on current photovoltaics is -- at best -- really fucking scary. I am exploring the opportunity to use direct solar heating, though, and do plan on experimenting with it some next year -- at least during the warmer months to keep the pool warm and maybe preheat municipal water before it goes into the water heater.
But most of what you say doesn't make any sense, which is why I'm not looking at doing any of that.
Bah.
Your proposal sucks.
At the end of the day, here's what matters to me: Useful (to me!) BTUs of heat per dollar (of mine).
It's very plainly going to be far cheaper for me to heat my house this winter (and for many winters to come) using my natural gas furnace, than to install a gas turbine, a fancy heat exchanger system for it, a cogeneration rig, additional resistive heating so I can actually use the electricity produced for something other than Folding@Home, etc.
There's just no fucking way this will begin to approach the total monetary efficiency of the inexpensive and simple heating system I already have. It's already at 95%, not accounting for transmission losses (but those exist no matter what). Squeezing anything more out the remaining 5% is going to be expensive enough that it's simply not worth considering.
If it were possible to recover all of the waste heat from a reciprocating engine and do something useful with it, we'd be living in a different world right now, and would not be having this conversation.
Meanwhile, here in reality, I think I'll keep my 95% efficient natural gas furnace, and try to turn electronics off when not in use. Thanks.
I don't know whether to laugh, or to cry.
Yeah.
And it's crazy to spend BTUs fold proteins for sport, where the same energy is available cheaper in the form of gas, oil, or wood.
Whatever.
I live in a small town in Ohio. The whole state has seen negative growth for years.
I stopped reading when you started blaming geography.
Maybe I'm just not busy enough, but:
I work on computers. I work on them some at work, and some more outside of work. Every now and then, someone comes to me with some horrible problem or other on their Windows box that I cannot simply fix -- a problem so pervasive, that the only sane conclusion is to nuke and reinstall.
My own clients are family users, or small businesses. My clients at my day job are typically industrial or government. In all cases, they invariably only have, at most, a few tens of gigabytes of data that they want to keep. At most. Usually, it's just a collection of small documents and family photos.
So, I fire up Acronis (my own favorite; to each their own) and image the drive. It doesn't take long, generally -- and I'm free to do other things while this is happening. Sometime later, it's done. My own investment in time (plug drive in, start Acronis, click the mouse a few times) and materials (what's a hundred gig of temporary space cost?) is very little.
I then nuke and reinstall, do the whole data-recovery thing (whatever that means), and just leave the image sitting there on my server. Eventually, when I notice a few months later that the image is still there, I delete it.
I'm not hurting for space here, and storage is cheap.
So far, nobody has come back asking for additional data, probably because I try to be thorough the first time. But if they did want more, in some reasonable timeframe, I think they'd be very pleased that I would be able to accommodate their unforeseen need. I would bill them accordingly, and I strongly suspect that they (MY clients, at least) would have no problem paying for it.
I really think you should practice being a little less loathsome toward the people who allow you to be employed in the capacity that you are. If you want to support end-users and not be frustrated by their antics, then you must realize that they're just humans. These folks didn't come to you for service because they had all the answers; they came to you because they had a problem that they didn't know how to solve, and were hoping that you would be able to help them. It's your job at that point to use your accumulated wisdom of the topic to foresee what particular challenges a given job might entail (be they social or technical), and deal with them in advance in any capacity that might be reasonably afforded to you. If that means imaging the disk before fixing it, then so be it.
Failing to behave in a rational way (or, as you seem to do, purposefully behaving in an irrational way) does nothing to service your clients' needs, and eventually just drives them away.
I realize that it might seem over-the-top, and sometimes, it certainly is. My own clients have come to expect this sort of behavior from me, however, which allows me to charge a premium that my get-r-dun!!!! competitors cannot, while keeping my customers happy enough that they never bother to shop for a different IT gunther.
Pedant.
Talk about trash...
The only bit of networking gear I've ever seen burst into flames was a (not so old at the time) SMC 10/100 switching hub. It was expensive, steel, rackmount, had connectors for a battery backup...and it turned into fire in my apartment one day when I was out.
I've avoided them since.
I did the same thing with my fridge, range, dishwasher, my TV, and the TV before that. I've never bought any home appliance without paying at least 40% less than the sticker price.
I usually ended up at the same store at the end of the bargaining, where the salesfolk were friendly and seemed to actually have half a clue, and were willing to deal.
Unfortunately, they're no longer in business. :( I suspect I may have had something to do with that.
Mmmm. Entitlement knows no bounds.
Though I'm running 7 right now, I did try Remote Assistance under Vista on my own machine one time to get some help with from the author of a Firefox plugin that was giving me fits.
It took me about 20 minutes to make it work. I still had to research port numbers and set up forwarding. There was nothing automagic about the process AT ALL, though he said it worked pretty well once he was (eventually) able to log in.
This is not the path for the light-minded.
Nothing? Really? NOTHING could clean them?
Feh.
I'm a smoker. Have been for decades, now. My electronics don't fail. They aren't covered in grime. They get the usual dust buildup (which is comprised of paper, cotton, and shed human skin, and cat hair primarily), with a bit of a brown tinge sometimes which I might count toward my smoking habit, but it hasn't been a problem.
I blow them out from time to time. No oily, impossible-to-remove contaminates are left behind - the componentry is always left looking clean, dust-free, and non-sticky after a good dousing with an aircan.
We did have a substantial flood a couple of years ago, which left my computer room and a bunch of electronics stored in the garage under water for a few days. It left behind a special sort of Diesel/shit-smelling, thick brown crud as the water receded.
I cleaned the affected electronics (which were all disconnected during the flood) with Scrubbing Bubbles. I just hosed them down with the stuff. I then rinsed off the cleaner thoroughly with tap water, rinsed the tapwater off with distilled water, then rinsed off the distilled water with 93% alcohol (accelerate drying and minimize oxidation as this occured).
The boards all came out looking shiny and new, free of even a trace solder flux. I relubricated the potentiometers and switches, to ensure that they'd behave properly and... Every single component that got this treatment is still working just fine, including power supplies and motherboards.
So, no: I don't believe that it was impossible to clean your pub PCs. Sure, they were gross, but I think that you didn't really try, preferring instead to go "Eww! It's gross and broken! Obviously it's broken because the gross! Yuck! Throw that thing away!!!".
What kind of tech are you?
(Where I work at, we occasionally get electronics in from places like Ford engine plants, which are oozing in black goop, with fans seized, and everything covered in crap. We clean 'em up, fix them, and give them back to the customer. They last for a few years before we need to revisit them, and then we literally just rinse and repeat.)
GP was talking about smoking and the non-damage has caused to computers, in his own experience. Computers don't get cancer.
You lose, strawman.
Danger? When I installed OpenSSH on via Cydia, I got a big fat warning about being sure to change the password (the default is "alpine".)
I, of course, did so immediately. As I would've done anyway, even if Cydia didn't prompt me to do so.
The problem here, at the root of it, is this: Apple ships the device with a default password, but no means of remote access, so that's OK. User comes by and plugs in a remote-access application (OpenSSH), fails to heed the warnings about enabling SSH without changing the password, and gets pwned.
I'd like to assume that most people who are interested in SSH are also clued enough to understand the threat therein. But you know what they say about assumptions...