It is no different than operating a printing press, and copying (NOT stealing) copyrighted books for distribution, which was (not incidentally) why we got copyright law in the first place.
That it is convenient because one has some gear to help get it done, does not change the crime from "copying" to "stealing."
I just have one question: Were you referring to the part about your average-sized dick, or some other portion of the comment?;)
Part of what's frustrating about what I wrote, is that I really do like to help people when I can. It seems universal amongst the best thinkers I know, though, that they have a hard time correctly explaining things to layfolk. One way in which they differ is that some of keep trying to be helpful, even though it's a lot harder than it should be, and the rest have gotten so sick of being treated badly for being smart that they just don't bother to offer help anymore.
I was following right along with what you said, until I got to the part about The ignition coil (if your car has one), and then my mind went blank with imagery of sheer stupidy.
Every modern gasoline-fired car has an ignition coil. As does every single genuine antique gas-powered vehicle that I can think of. It is, essentially, a prerequisite of making spark plugs spark.
My own car has six of them. My previous car had three. The car before that had two. And, way back when, I had a car that just had one coil.
And all but the last of these were electronically-controlled, and would not charge the coil (nor discharge it into a sparkplug) when set to "Off" (or "Lock" or "Default" or whatever the fuck you want to call it.)
I had two houses for the about the past two years, while I could only afford one. And five years ago, my job moved from four blocks away to 35 miles down the highway. (I still work there, it's just more expensive than it used to be than it used to be.)
You speak as if noone has ever experienced these things. I've experienced the important parts of both, and still, I recommend seeking a household where there is bandwidth, if that's what is important.
Just as some people seek houses with municipal water and sewer hookups. Or natural gas. Or cable TV. Or trash service. Or snailmail-to-your-door. Or a house within walking distance of the grocery, or the commercial downtown. I see no problem with seeking proper DSL or cable on similar terms.
If bandwidth is so important, and not available where [whoever] is at, then so be it: They should move.
Turning the key off, in most vehicles that I am experienced with over the past 30 or so model years, also locks the steering wheel.
Having to choose between a runaway vehicle, or a vehicle which can be slowed but cannot be steered is an ugly fucking choice that should not have to be made.
Some manufacturers don't build vehicles that work that way -- for instance, my 1995 BMW does not lock the steering until the key is not just turned off, but completely removed. It is therefore safe to turn this car off, also safe to steer and slow it to a stop.
In a GM? Fahgetaboutit. Dig it: After reaching an uncongested and straight bit of road during the uncontrollable acceleration event which you are trying to eliminate, you first ensure that the steering wheel is set appropriately, and turn the key to "Off. Then, you forget about steering lest it lock in some horror-causing orientation that sends you cartwheeling through a ditch. You wait for the motor to stop running and turn the key back on so you can operate the gearshift lever. Then, quickly, you put the transmission in neutral (before the motor restarts), and then turn the car back on (so you can bloody steer again...). Meh. Double-meh, even. Various variations depending on make and the interlocks in play, but that just adds more complications to an unexpected and irrefutably bad sitatuion. Triple-fucking meh.
No, sir. Neutral is a far better choice. I've driven unmodified factory motors at or near redline for tens of thousands of miles, while bouncing off the rev limiter on every bloody shift. A half-minute or so of a modern gasoline engine hitting the rev limiter while you safely slow to a stop is ALWAYS going to cost less than the alternatives, on average. Worse case? Broken valves. But at least you'll fucking live.
It ain't "movie speed," you're right about that. But four people have died. You wanna make yourself the fifth?
I own a car that has drive by wire throttle, to facilitate traction control. Here's the cool part about it:
It also has a bog-standard, completely separate, isolated cable-driven mechanical throttle.
The two of them are merely placed in series in the intake path. So, I get a real throttle control all for me, and the traction control system gets one for itself as well.
The extra throttle body and plate default to being wide open. The worse case failure is that it closes due to a logic fault, the car decelerates as if you've lifted your foot off the gas, and then you just lift the hood, unplug the sodden thing and drive away.
(I've actually been considering unplugging the sodden thing anyway, in order to get more oversteer while maintaining the brake-actuating TCS functions, but that's another story altogether.)
I don't remember much of anything except my mistakes, because it usually doesn't seem important to me to do so unless the potentially-memorable thing is repetitious enough to make it worthwhile. Instead, I just figure it out.
For example, I remember common Unix command syntax because I need it frequently, but I don't have any reason to NOT re-think the interactions of awk, sed, and grep for the few times a year that I do something clever with them. Trying to remember it from last time is hard and error-prone, and training myself so that I remember it better is even harder. But, then, if I worked with awk frequently, I'd remember it very well indeed. In other words, I find it much easier to just re-learn those seldom-used programs for the task at hand, and move on (yes, every single time), than to bother exercising my memory about it.
It probably helps that I'm an introvert with some autistic tendencies -- I've been thinking about things my whole life, completely by default. It's something I enjoy. I see a thing that I don't understand, but where the workings of it are interesting or necessary for some task or other, and I study it and think until what I want/need to know is clear to me. And then, I remember just the generalities, the ties that the thing has in common with all of the other stuff that was general enough to remember in the first place, and the details fade pretty quickly unless there was something remarkably clever about them.
Occupationally, this tactic makes me very much a generalist and an expert at whatever I'm doing, since my work is closely related to my own interests. The non-thinkers around me come to me when they find something they've never seen before (read: never had a chance to remember) and get stuck when looking for answers to some new problem or other. And I'll observe the problem (which I haven't seen before either, or at least don't specifically remember) and apply some rational thought. An answer usually comes forth fairly quickly, and it's usually correct (which I know because if it were usually wrong, folks wouldn't usually come to me for help when they're stuck).
And, in response to GP, this ability comes with some challenges. You see, my IQ measures high enough that I can be at a party with a hundred strangers, and probably not have time to find one my equal, though there's likely to be a couple in there somewhere. And I'm not bragging -- that's just simply how it is. I can't do anything about more about my IQ than I can my own height (which is exactly average) or the size of my dick (unfortunately, also precisely average). Here on Slashdot, it's likely that a lot of people will read this with a higher IQ than I have, but out there IRL, it's just not so common.
I've tried telling people to "just figure it out" when they ask me questions about problems that I can easily solve when I think they can work it out themselves. They, rightly, get offended when I say that. Hell, I get offended when I ask someone who uses memorization something that I know they already possess an answer for and they just won't divulge it. It's a waste of time.
On the other hand, folks don't usually like it when I see them doing something, assimilate it in a hurry, and (unprompted) give them the concise answer they were working for: Depending on the inflection used when conveying the answer, they think I'm either a smart ass (if I'm being jovial) or a condescending and arrogant prick (if I have any sort of seriousness about my tone). My own feelings are that I see someone working a problem, that I have already solved, and that I'm pleased to have helped them. It saved them some time, and cost me little of my own.
So, there's a conflict in communication. I give people quick answers, and they tell me that they don't understand it even when it is obvious to them that it's correct, or that they would rather have puzzled it out for themselves. I give people more lengthy answers so they understand it better, and they say I'
Why don't you just move to a place which has better bandwidth? Availability of bandwidth has always been a substantial part of my home-choosing criteria.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that installs, and occasionally rebuilds, laptops in police cars.
We have a department that we service which started off using Ultra notebooks. Good enough machines, I guess, since they're just a rebadged Mitac, Sager, or whatever boxes like almost anything else, but they didn't hold up very well. Failures included backlight tubes broken or dark, non-functional inverters, broken or sloppy hinges, malfunctioning LCD data cables, broken power connectors, missing keys, etc.
On the other hand, we have a department that installed Toughbooks at about the same time. The biggest complaint I hear from them: The batteries are all worn out, and the old Pentium III CPUs just aren't very fast anymore. Meanwhile, the machines still just fucking work. They tend to outlast the vehicles they're installed in.
So, anyway, the Ultras were lasting only a year or two (the department has since switched to Toughbooks). The Toughbooks have lasted for far longer.
So, anecdotally at least, the machines sure do seem to be better built. Add to that the public safety mentality of "it must always just fucking work, at any rational expense" whenever it comes to gear that lives depend on, and very quickly the preference grows toward "rugged" computers from Motorola, Dell, Mitac, Panasonic, or whoever, versus "consumer" computers from the same brands.
And don't assume that they'll treat their computers as gently as you treat your own. As an elder co-worker of mine told me once, "they aren't always too nice to these cars."
(ObDisclaimer: I've unintentionally put my 4.5 year old Dell Inspiron 6000i through many of the same tests seen in the video in the article, except for the water, without any lasting damage. The main problems that I have with the machine is that the display hinges have a bad design for their mounting points, which causes the screws to loosen over time in even normal use, and that the hard drive died after I used it at length outside in most days one particularly cold January. But perhaps I'm not as abusive as I think I am.
ObFurtherDisclaimer: I tried to use my boss's rugged Motorola laptop in 5F, windy weather on a rooftop one day, and the machine never even booted up. Seems the thing is so rugged that it has a heater for the hard drive, to solve the very problem I experienced with my own Dell, except that after a half hour of waiting for it to warm up and, you know, work, I gave up and moved on to other instrumentation.))
You're ignoring cost. All that international bandwidth costs more money, at the end of the day, than more localized bandwidth would. You, the customer, bear the brunt of these expenses in the forms of increased subscription fees and the ongoing war against P2P.
What is it with foreigners, and their various and sundry prose. For example: There is a clear trend for some of them to write a message which is primarily a statement, and to always end it with a question mark?
It looks like a good method to manage one's upload speed in order to keep local latency low for other purposes. However, I also don't think it'll help at the ISP level at all -- the tubes are just too big for my paltry 1-megabit upstream to make any measurable difference in the latency on them.
What would, however, make a big difference (and I've been saying it for years): Geographically-aware peering.
It's obviously more efficient on the network if you download something from someone a 4 hops away, than if you download something from someone who is 8 hops out. Further, it's more efficient to download from someone in the same locality -- assuming the routes are sane -- than it is from someone on another continent.
So do both, and try to balance it out. Prefer peers which are closer (both network-wise and map-wise), and everyone (including, ultimately, the customer) saves money.
I know that IP geolocation services are sometimes flaky, but it doesn't even need to be anywhere near perfect since currently, BitTorrent implementations don't bother with any of this at all. Even a half-assed solution seems likely to make the whole thing a lot cheaper to route.
WHY WOULD YOU EVER CONSIDER INSTALLING ANYTHING ON THIS HARDWARE?
Because they can, not because it's useful. Though it could be: I used to have a multi-user Linux box running Slackware and plugged into a lightly-used T1 (which was pretty fast, back then). It served mail, HTTP, DNS, ran an IRC server, and multiple shell sessions for half a dozen folks at once. 'Twas a 25MHz 486 with 24 megs of RAM and a few hundred megs of disk.
It worked great. For years and years. And it'd work just as well these days, doing similar things.
I once picked up a couple of DEC VT330 terminals in good condition for a few bucks each, and plugged them into my desktop machine. Why? Because I could.
Not too many years ago, I scrounged an old XT, which had one 5.25" floppy drive, no hard drive, integrated 10base-2 Ethernet, and monochrome graphics. I ran MS-DOS on it, with a resident(!) FTP server to get data back and forth, and had telnet and a few other basic networking tools working just great. Just because I could.
It's really no different than hacking an SD card into your WRT54 router. Or teaching your TI graphing calculator to play Tetris. Or playing chess. Or softball. Or any other thing that seems totally boring to some folks, but which regardless is interesting enough to be rewarding to the person who is actually doing it.
Obviously you love your Supra. Nothing wrong with that; I've grown fond of cars as well.
But when the auto tranny (4L30E) gave up on my '95 325i, I didn't blame me, or the car. I blamed GM for building a shoddy transmission. And I blamed BMW for using it. And then, I blamed BMW some more for using it in an application where GM themselves would have been using a 4L60E. And then I blamed BMW even more for not including a dip stick on the transmission, for using a "lifetime transmission fluid*" and for making changing that fluid extraordinarily difficult. But it wasn't the car's fault. (And now, it has a wonderfully short-geared 5-speed Getrag.)
And when the head gasket died on the Beretta (the aforementioned car with the miscellaneous rear wheel failures) gave up, I didn't blame the car. I blamed the 70,000 miles of abuse that I had delivered to it, nearly hitting the rev limiter on every shift, and driving sideways whenever possible (can you say throttle lift oversteer?), for -years-. Hell, even when the wheel fell off (twice), I didn't blame the car.
But for all the failures of that car, and all the bad results that could have been, there were hundreds of times when I thanked the car for not killing me. Same with the BMW, or the Firebird, or even that Villager I mentioned.
Some day, eventually (if you both live long enough), some part on one of your Supra will fail unexpectedly. A caliper bolt will shear off, a ball joint stud will break, a tie tod end will fail -- something. Would it be the car's fault? No. You, the owner/driver/inspector supreme, should've noticed it and fixed it before it tried to kill you. Why? Because you love your car.
The rest of the world, though -- they don't bother. That makes it always the car's fault in their eyes.
(* "Lifetime transmission fluid, never needing replace during vehicle's lifetime" seems to translate from marketingspeak literally as "transmission fluid dictates lifetime of vehicle.")
I had a spindle break in two on the rear axle once. This caused the entire wheel (tire, brake drum, hub) to fall completely off, suddenly and without warning. It was the left-side wheel, and I was making a right-hand turn when it happened. The car and I went sideways across a bridge, and managed to stop neatly at the side of the road just shy of a ravine.
No, there was no crash -- but all the components were there for one to occur, except lateral impact. It required all new rotating bits from the axle on out.
The same car also had a back tire separate from the rim, causing a fit of crossed-up driving and a trip backward through a ditch, at pretty decent speed. I'm hesitant to mention it, though, since tires are a "wear item," but the potential for a screaming, cartwheeling death was certainly present.
Also different had a front control arm fail at the ball joint while out of state. Not surprisingly, it was also during a turn, and it was the outside wheel which was affected. And since all that was holding that side together was, at that point, a strut and a tie rod, the afflicted wheel turned hard in one direction and locked there, pinned against the fender.
No, there was no crash there, either -- just a bit of humor and a lot of bad vibes as the thing slid to a smoking stop directly in front of a junk yard in South Carolina. But the components of a crash were all present, except (again) impact. This required a new half-shaft, strut, control arm, tire, fender . . .
My wife had a car accelerate uncontrollably once. It then ran itself, sideways, into her neighbor's porch. Lots of bodywork and paint required, plus a porch, and a lot of fiddling to make the car never do that again.
These were all semi-modern vehicles (1995, 1993, 1996, respectively), and all events happened when the cars were only 5 or 6 years old.
Cars are doing pretty good, I must say - I think automakers have done fairly well in general for the past 15 or 20 years. But they're by no means immune to sudden catastrophic failure.
I didn't see this mentioned in the other comments, but scratch the Mybook World Edition. It's the slowest thing ever.
On the surface, things look good: Enough RAM and CPU to be useful, a lot of space, nearly meaningless power consumption, gigabit network, easily hackable, convection cooled, nearly silent...
There's just one problem: The network interface is so poorly implemented that it can, at best, push 3-4 megabytes per second before the CPU pegs at 100%. Accordingly, since the throughput is CPU-bound, running anything else on the box has an immediate and noticeable impact on speeds.
After a few months of tinkering with it trying to make it suck less, I found that the best use for my 1TB Mybook World Edition NAS was to strip the drive out of the enclosure, put it into a real PC, and throw the rest away.
Because they wants their bunnies, which aren't aren't included in the repositories.
To wit:
For the OMG Ponies!!2! screensaver, just save this file to your desktop, and double-click your mouse on it when the download finishes. Then just follow the instructions on the screen, enter your password when prompted, and you'll be all OMG! in no time!"
Barely. You'd think it would be as simple as supplying +5VDC and ground to make it charge, like most other mini-USB-equipped devices with a rechargeable battery. But in Motorola's infinite wisdom, this will only result in the screen displaying "Unauthorized Charger."
According to pinouts.ru, and my own experience, Motorola's mini-usb plug is anything but universal. It takes some cross-pinning and a resistor to make the phone charge from a dumb +5VDC power source, or the correct driver installed on an attached computer.
Why should we place any higher value on your particular commentary, than all of the other rampant speculation which will be posted below by additional ACs?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Just, wow.
Are you fucking kidding me?
So much for the Internet being, well, an Internet.
It is no different than operating a printing press, and copying (NOT stealing) copyrighted books for distribution, which was (not incidentally) why we got copyright law in the first place.
That it is convenient because one has some gear to help get it done, does not change the crime from "copying" to "stealing."
I just have one question: Were you referring to the part about your average-sized dick, or some other portion of the comment? ;)
Part of what's frustrating about what I wrote, is that I really do like to help people when I can. It seems universal amongst the best thinkers I know, though, that they have a hard time correctly explaining things to layfolk. One way in which they differ is that some of keep trying to be helpful, even though it's a lot harder than it should be, and the rest have gotten so sick of being treated badly for being smart that they just don't bother to offer help anymore.
*sigh*
Very interesting. Almost.
I was following right along with what you said, until I got to the part about The ignition coil (if your car has one), and then my mind went blank with imagery of sheer stupidy.
Every modern gasoline-fired car has an ignition coil. As does every single genuine antique gas-powered vehicle that I can think of. It is, essentially, a prerequisite of making spark plugs spark.
My own car has six of them. My previous car had three. The car before that had two. And, way back when, I had a car that just had one coil.
And all but the last of these were electronically-controlled, and would not charge the coil (nor discharge it into a sparkplug) when set to "Off" (or "Lock" or "Default" or whatever the fuck you want to call it.)
What were you going on about, again?
Whatever, AC.
I had two houses for the about the past two years, while I could only afford one. And five years ago, my job moved from four blocks away to 35 miles down the highway. (I still work there, it's just more expensive than it used to be than it used to be.)
You speak as if noone has ever experienced these things. I've experienced the important parts of both, and still, I recommend seeking a household where there is bandwidth, if that's what is important.
Just as some people seek houses with municipal water and sewer hookups. Or natural gas. Or cable TV. Or trash service. Or snailmail-to-your-door. Or a house within walking distance of the grocery, or the commercial downtown. I see no problem with seeking proper DSL or cable on similar terms.
If bandwidth is so important, and not available where [whoever] is at, then so be it: They should move.
Turning the key off, in most vehicles that I am experienced with over the past 30 or so model years, also locks the steering wheel.
Having to choose between a runaway vehicle, or a vehicle which can be slowed but cannot be steered is an ugly fucking choice that should not have to be made.
Some manufacturers don't build vehicles that work that way -- for instance, my 1995 BMW does not lock the steering until the key is not just turned off, but completely removed. It is therefore safe to turn this car off, also safe to steer and slow it to a stop.
In a GM? Fahgetaboutit. Dig it: After reaching an uncongested and straight bit of road during the uncontrollable acceleration event which you are trying to eliminate, you first ensure that the steering wheel is set appropriately, and turn the key to "Off. Then, you forget about steering lest it lock in some horror-causing orientation that sends you cartwheeling through a ditch. You wait for the motor to stop running and turn the key back on so you can operate the gearshift lever. Then, quickly, you put the transmission in neutral (before the motor restarts), and then turn the car back on (so you can bloody steer again...). Meh. Double-meh, even. Various variations depending on make and the interlocks in play, but that just adds more complications to an unexpected and irrefutably bad sitatuion. Triple-fucking meh.
No, sir. Neutral is a far better choice. I've driven unmodified factory motors at or near redline for tens of thousands of miles, while bouncing off the rev limiter on every bloody shift. A half-minute or so of a modern gasoline engine hitting the rev limiter while you safely slow to a stop is ALWAYS going to cost less than the alternatives, on average. Worse case? Broken valves. But at least you'll fucking live.
It ain't "movie speed," you're right about that. But four people have died. You wanna make yourself the fifth?
I own a car that has drive by wire throttle, to facilitate traction control. Here's the cool part about it:
It also has a bog-standard, completely separate, isolated cable-driven mechanical throttle.
The two of them are merely placed in series in the intake path. So, I get a real throttle control all for me, and the traction control system gets one for itself as well.
The extra throttle body and plate default to being wide open. The worse case failure is that it closes due to a logic fault, the car decelerates as if you've lifted your foot off the gas, and then you just lift the hood, unplug the sodden thing and drive away.
(I've actually been considering unplugging the sodden thing anyway, in order to get more oversteer while maintaining the brake-actuating TCS functions, but that's another story altogether.)
Indeed.
I don't remember much of anything except my mistakes, because it usually doesn't seem important to me to do so unless the potentially-memorable thing is repetitious enough to make it worthwhile. Instead, I just figure it out.
For example, I remember common Unix command syntax because I need it frequently, but I don't have any reason to NOT re-think the interactions of awk, sed, and grep for the few times a year that I do something clever with them. Trying to remember it from last time is hard and error-prone, and training myself so that I remember it better is even harder. But, then, if I worked with awk frequently, I'd remember it very well indeed. In other words, I find it much easier to just re-learn those seldom-used programs for the task at hand, and move on (yes, every single time), than to bother exercising my memory about it.
It probably helps that I'm an introvert with some autistic tendencies -- I've been thinking about things my whole life, completely by default. It's something I enjoy. I see a thing that I don't understand, but where the workings of it are interesting or necessary for some task or other, and I study it and think until what I want/need to know is clear to me. And then, I remember just the generalities, the ties that the thing has in common with all of the other stuff that was general enough to remember in the first place, and the details fade pretty quickly unless there was something remarkably clever about them.
Occupationally, this tactic makes me very much a generalist and an expert at whatever I'm doing, since my work is closely related to my own interests. The non-thinkers around me come to me when they find something they've never seen before (read: never had a chance to remember) and get stuck when looking for answers to some new problem or other. And I'll observe the problem (which I haven't seen before either, or at least don't specifically remember) and apply some rational thought. An answer usually comes forth fairly quickly, and it's usually correct (which I know because if it were usually wrong, folks wouldn't usually come to me for help when they're stuck).
And, in response to GP, this ability comes with some challenges. You see, my IQ measures high enough that I can be at a party with a hundred strangers, and probably not have time to find one my equal, though there's likely to be a couple in there somewhere. And I'm not bragging -- that's just simply how it is. I can't do anything about more about my IQ than I can my own height (which is exactly average) or the size of my dick (unfortunately, also precisely average). Here on Slashdot, it's likely that a lot of people will read this with a higher IQ than I have, but out there IRL, it's just not so common.
I've tried telling people to "just figure it out" when they ask me questions about problems that I can easily solve when I think they can work it out themselves. They, rightly, get offended when I say that. Hell, I get offended when I ask someone who uses memorization something that I know they already possess an answer for and they just won't divulge it. It's a waste of time.
On the other hand, folks don't usually like it when I see them doing something, assimilate it in a hurry, and (unprompted) give them the concise answer they were working for: Depending on the inflection used when conveying the answer, they think I'm either a smart ass (if I'm being jovial) or a condescending and arrogant prick (if I have any sort of seriousness about my tone). My own feelings are that I see someone working a problem, that I have already solved, and that I'm pleased to have helped them. It saved them some time, and cost me little of my own.
So, there's a conflict in communication. I give people quick answers, and they tell me that they don't understand it even when it is obvious to them that it's correct, or that they would rather have puzzled it out for themselves. I give people more lengthy answers so they understand it better, and they say I'
Why don't you just move to a place which has better bandwidth? Availability of bandwidth has always been a substantial part of my home-choosing criteria.
Gosh. I didn't know that MAC addresses were illegal goods.
Here's mine, FYI:
00-25-3c-2c-3e-f5
Do as you will with it.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that installs, and occasionally rebuilds, laptops in police cars.
We have a department that we service which started off using Ultra notebooks. Good enough machines, I guess, since they're just a rebadged Mitac, Sager, or whatever boxes like almost anything else, but they didn't hold up very well. Failures included backlight tubes broken or dark, non-functional inverters, broken or sloppy hinges, malfunctioning LCD data cables, broken power connectors, missing keys, etc.
On the other hand, we have a department that installed Toughbooks at about the same time. The biggest complaint I hear from them: The batteries are all worn out, and the old Pentium III CPUs just aren't very fast anymore. Meanwhile, the machines still just fucking work. They tend to outlast the vehicles they're installed in.
So, anyway, the Ultras were lasting only a year or two (the department has since switched to Toughbooks). The Toughbooks have lasted for far longer.
So, anecdotally at least, the machines sure do seem to be better built. Add to that the public safety mentality of "it must always just fucking work, at any rational expense" whenever it comes to gear that lives depend on, and very quickly the preference grows toward "rugged" computers from Motorola, Dell, Mitac, Panasonic, or whoever, versus "consumer" computers from the same brands.
And don't assume that they'll treat their computers as gently as you treat your own. As an elder co-worker of mine told me once, "they aren't always too nice to these cars."
(ObDisclaimer: I've unintentionally put my 4.5 year old Dell Inspiron 6000i through many of the same tests seen in the video in the article, except for the water, without any lasting damage. The main problems that I have with the machine is that the display hinges have a bad design for their mounting points, which causes the screws to loosen over time in even normal use, and that the hard drive died after I used it at length outside in most days one particularly cold January. But perhaps I'm not as abusive as I think I am.
ObFurtherDisclaimer: I tried to use my boss's rugged Motorola laptop in 5F, windy weather on a rooftop one day, and the machine never even booted up. Seems the thing is so rugged that it has a heater for the hard drive, to solve the very problem I experienced with my own Dell, except that after a half hour of waiting for it to warm up and, you know, work, I gave up and moved on to other instrumentation.))
You're ignoring cost. All that international bandwidth costs more money, at the end of the day, than more localized bandwidth would. You, the customer, bear the brunt of these expenses in the forms of increased subscription fees and the ongoing war against P2P.
What is it with foreigners, and their various and sundry prose. For example: There is a clear trend for some of them to write a message which is primarily a statement, and to always end it with a question mark?
It looks like a good method to manage one's upload speed in order to keep local latency low for other purposes. However, I also don't think it'll help at the ISP level at all -- the tubes are just too big for my paltry 1-megabit upstream to make any measurable difference in the latency on them.
What would, however, make a big difference (and I've been saying it for years): Geographically-aware peering.
It's obviously more efficient on the network if you download something from someone a 4 hops away, than if you download something from someone who is 8 hops out. Further, it's more efficient to download from someone in the same locality -- assuming the routes are sane -- than it is from someone on another continent.
So do both, and try to balance it out. Prefer peers which are closer (both network-wise and map-wise), and everyone (including, ultimately, the customer) saves money.
I know that IP geolocation services are sometimes flaky, but it doesn't even need to be anywhere near perfect since currently, BitTorrent implementations don't bother with any of this at all. Even a half-assed solution seems likely to make the whole thing a lot cheaper to route.
*shrug*
The X-Fi (an OEM model, SB0770) I have has worked just fine with 32-bit Vista, 64-bit Vista, and now 64-bit 7, including the bells and whistles.
A quick search says the going rate for this card is about $40, which is just slightly more than what I see the Xtreme Sound 7.1 selling for.
Because they can, not because it's useful. Though it could be: I used to have a multi-user Linux box running Slackware and plugged into a lightly-used T1 (which was pretty fast, back then). It served mail, HTTP, DNS, ran an IRC server, and multiple shell sessions for half a dozen folks at once. 'Twas a 25MHz 486 with 24 megs of RAM and a few hundred megs of disk.
It worked great. For years and years. And it'd work just as well these days, doing similar things.
I once picked up a couple of DEC VT330 terminals in good condition for a few bucks each, and plugged them into my desktop machine. Why? Because I could.
Not too many years ago, I scrounged an old XT, which had one 5.25" floppy drive, no hard drive, integrated 10base-2 Ethernet, and monochrome graphics. I ran MS-DOS on it, with a resident(!) FTP server to get data back and forth, and had telnet and a few other basic networking tools working just great. Just because I could.
It's really no different than hacking an SD card into your WRT54 router. Or teaching your TI graphing calculator to play Tetris. Or playing chess. Or softball. Or any other thing that seems totally boring to some folks, but which regardless is interesting enough to be rewarding to the person who is actually doing it.
Obviously you love your Supra. Nothing wrong with that; I've grown fond of cars as well.
But when the auto tranny (4L30E) gave up on my '95 325i, I didn't blame me, or the car. I blamed GM for building a shoddy transmission. And I blamed BMW for using it. And then, I blamed BMW some more for using it in an application where GM themselves would have been using a 4L60E. And then I blamed BMW even more for not including a dip stick on the transmission, for using a "lifetime transmission fluid*" and for making changing that fluid extraordinarily difficult. But it wasn't the car's fault. (And now, it has a wonderfully short-geared 5-speed Getrag.)
And when the head gasket died on the Beretta (the aforementioned car with the miscellaneous rear wheel failures) gave up, I didn't blame the car. I blamed the 70,000 miles of abuse that I had delivered to it, nearly hitting the rev limiter on every shift, and driving sideways whenever possible (can you say throttle lift oversteer?), for -years-. Hell, even when the wheel fell off (twice), I didn't blame the car.
But for all the failures of that car, and all the bad results that could have been, there were hundreds of times when I thanked the car for not killing me. Same with the BMW, or the Firebird, or even that Villager I mentioned.
Some day, eventually (if you both live long enough), some part on one of your Supra will fail unexpectedly. A caliper bolt will shear off, a ball joint stud will break, a tie tod end will fail -- something. Would it be the car's fault? No. You, the owner/driver/inspector supreme, should've noticed it and fixed it before it tried to kill you. Why? Because you love your car.
The rest of the world, though -- they don't bother. That makes it always the car's fault in their eyes.
(* "Lifetime transmission fluid, never needing replace during vehicle's lifetime" seems to translate from marketingspeak literally as "transmission fluid dictates lifetime of vehicle.")
'95 Chevy Beretta, '93 Mercury Villager, '96 Pontiac Firebird. All of these cars behaved just fine after these incidents.
I had a spindle break in two on the rear axle once. This caused the entire wheel (tire, brake drum, hub) to fall completely off, suddenly and without warning. It was the left-side wheel, and I was making a right-hand turn when it happened. The car and I went sideways across a bridge, and managed to stop neatly at the side of the road just shy of a ravine.
No, there was no crash -- but all the components were there for one to occur, except lateral impact. It required all new rotating bits from the axle on out.
The same car also had a back tire separate from the rim, causing a fit of crossed-up driving and a trip backward through a ditch, at pretty decent speed. I'm hesitant to mention it, though, since tires are a "wear item," but the potential for a screaming, cartwheeling death was certainly present.
Also different had a front control arm fail at the ball joint while out of state. Not surprisingly, it was also during a turn, and it was the outside wheel which was affected. And since all that was holding that side together was, at that point, a strut and a tie rod, the afflicted wheel turned hard in one direction and locked there, pinned against the fender.
No, there was no crash there, either -- just a bit of humor and a lot of bad vibes as the thing slid to a smoking stop directly in front of a junk yard in South Carolina. But the components of a crash were all present, except (again) impact. This required a new half-shaft, strut, control arm, tire, fender . . .
My wife had a car accelerate uncontrollably once. It then ran itself, sideways, into her neighbor's porch. Lots of bodywork and paint required, plus a porch, and a lot of fiddling to make the car never do that again.
These were all semi-modern vehicles (1995, 1993, 1996, respectively), and all events happened when the cars were only 5 or 6 years old.
Cars are doing pretty good, I must say - I think automakers have done fairly well in general for the past 15 or 20 years. But they're by no means immune to sudden catastrophic failure.
I didn't see this mentioned in the other comments, but scratch the Mybook World Edition. It's the slowest thing ever.
On the surface, things look good: Enough RAM and CPU to be useful, a lot of space, nearly meaningless power consumption, gigabit network, easily hackable, convection cooled, nearly silent...
There's just one problem: The network interface is so poorly implemented that it can, at best, push 3-4 megabytes per second before the CPU pegs at 100%. Accordingly, since the throughput is CPU-bound, running anything else on the box has an immediate and noticeable impact on speeds.
After a few months of tinkering with it trying to make it suck less, I found that the best use for my 1TB Mybook World Edition NAS was to strip the drive out of the enclosure, put it into a real PC, and throw the rest away.
That you didn't install any drivers yourself, does not mean that your Linux box didn't already have one to begin with.
Look at the output of dmesg after you've plugged your phone in to see for sure.
Because they wants their bunnies, which aren't aren't included in the repositories.
To wit:
For the OMG Ponies!!2! screensaver, just save this file to your desktop, and double-click your mouse on it when the download finishes. Then just follow the instructions on the screen, enter your password when prompted, and you'll be all OMG! in no time!"
Barely. You'd think it would be as simple as supplying +5VDC and ground to make it charge, like most other mini-USB-equipped devices with a rechargeable battery. But in Motorola's infinite wisdom, this will only result in the screen displaying "Unauthorized Charger."
According to pinouts.ru, and my own experience, Motorola's mini-usb plug is anything but universal. It takes some cross-pinning and a resistor to make the phone charge from a dumb +5VDC power source, or the correct driver installed on an attached computer.
Dear AC,
Why should we place any higher value on your particular commentary, than all of the other rampant speculation which will be posted below by additional ACs?
Best regards.
But such an ability does not exist.
One cannot legislate technology into existence.