We used to sell some H.323 IP stuff from Altigen, early in the VOIP game. These phones, when we first started with them, we an odd breed: They'd be happy enough to deal with the latency and packet loss associated with a public network, but were totally unable to deal with NAT. At all. Not even a DMZ was helpful until different firmware came out years later which finally addressed a few of these problems.
So: Perhaps Ford simply has 16.7 million Altigen IP phones.:)
(Yes, yes. A VPN would work, but my experience with VPN+H.323 hss been pretty dismal as well.)
Just like with telephone extensions: Imagine the fallout if the five-digit telephone extensions overlapped! Couple that with overlapping assembly lines, and overlapping administration, and what you'd get would be mass hysteria.
Or, rather, it wouldn't be. It's just another problem that needs addressed (pardon the pun) with a change as large as a merger.
The ubiquitous shiny LCDs are enough to keep me far, far away from all retail (and otherwise pre-packaged) laptops.
I tend to like Dell machines, but there's plenty of other companies which will install a Bluetooth module in a custom-built laptop. The built-in Bluetooth on my Inspiron 6000i was, IIRC, only $15 or $20, was worth every cent, and its inclusion was not tied to any other features or functions.
I bought a Logitech V330 Bluetooth mouse for my Inspiron 6000 laptop a few years ago. Here are my observations:
Battery life is good. With regular use (several hours per day), the batteries last for months. With occasional use, they last for more than a year. And, interestingly, the mouse is perfectly happy to run from only one (1) battery, though it has space for two -- this has been helpful a few times.
Range is insanely good. Something like 40 feet in an indoor, open space, in my experience. This has been helpful for presentations.
The wake up delay is sometimes annoying. No, not always. And, in fact, I don't believe I've noticed it at all since putting Vista on the machine with its stock Bluetooth stack.
It was slightly more expensive, but being dongle-free is worth that to me.
Small, but shaped well enough that it's not a problem for my big hands. Fits nicely in a side pouch on my backpack.
The downsides:
Pairing. Not a big problem with just one OS, but was a continual issue when I was dual-booting Ubuntu on this machine. Every time I switched operating systems and wanted to use a mouse, I'd have to re-pair it.
Feet. This isn't a Bluetooth problem, but: The feet wore out in less than a year. I ordered new ones from slicksurf.com and couldn't be happier with them.
It's not in production anymore, and I won't ever be selling mine.
Like I said, this mouse is a few years old. I don't know if things have gotten worse since then.
On my U3 drives (both of them), the following would happen upon insertion:
Loading drivers Found USB hub! Loading drivers Found USB mass storage device! Loading drivers Found USB CD-ROM!
The drives that appear are as follows:
A regular read/write USB flash drive, empty except for whatever I've put into it A read-only CD-ROM
After the drivers all load (automatically and without intervention, under most Windowses), it would autorun the virtual CD drive as configured in windows.
Of course, I now have U3 disabled (more because I find no need for it, than because it is somehow evil), but that's how it worked for me.
When I'm doing networking for clients, it is between a central patch panel and a wallplate. From there, the right way to do it is with a relatively short patch cord to the networked device or the switch or whatever.
Funnily enough, I have no particular love for Belkin's products. The only good thing about them is that they're everywhere, and therefore are easy to find. But they're expensive and, in my experience, no better than other (often much, much cheaper) products.
Here's a 10 foot snagless Belkin Cat5e cable from Staples for $6.49. Meanwhile, Deep Surplus has a very very similar cable for $1.72 with a 90-day no-restocking-fee return policy. At the high end, Black Box sells cables which are even more expensive than Belkin, and are guaranteed against everything forever.
But it's not clear to me, in my experience, that either Belkin or Black Box have common cables which are substantially better than the stuff at Deep Surplus. They're all assembled by machine, they're all tested by machine, and I'll wager that in all the wire itself is purchased from whatever supplier is cheapest this week. And if I'm only paying a third as much for them, ala Deep Surplus, I can afford to guarantee them myself.
It's also prudent to have a decoy. That's why there's two of them.
In the case that it wouldn't be prudent to name an aircraft with a "One" suffix even with the President on board (say, a real disaster/evac operation, or where there were any threat), I feel confident that steps are in place to call either the real craft and the decoy something other than "Air Force One," while still making it clear to air traffic controllers and military leaders that the plane has priority.
Whatever you think of the stupidity of the US government as a whole, the folks responsible for protecting the President are without question some of the sharpest knives in the drawer. They are perfectly capable of being deceitful, in any capacity necessary, and without any real budgetary concern, to ensure the President's safety.
But on a normal day? We're just good, freedom-loving Americans - of course it should be announced that the President has arrived on a craft named Air Force One. Anything less would appear cowardly.
I was going to say something like this, but the parent poster beat me to it.
Really, folks: To react with such, well, terror over every little thing, is only an indications that the terrorists have won.
There's no realistic way to outrun a jet on foot, or an elevator. So why bother with the panic? For fuck's sake: The only way to get out of the way of something like this means that the last thing going through your mind will be your spleen.
I, for one, would take this as a sign that I should go up on the roof to have a cigar and watch the strangeness, perhaps after asking the boss if he'd like to join me with the bottle of bourbon that he always keeps in his desk drawer.
Of all the things to be scared of, terrorism in the US should not be one of them.
My opinion is a little different: Don't build them one at a time. And don't buy them one at a time, either.
Just pick up a bunch of different lengths of pre-terminated cable from the good folks at deep-surplus.com. Buy a bunch of 1-foot cables, along with some 3-foot cables. 5-foot cables. 7-foot cables. 12-foot cables. So on, so forth. Then, when you need a cable of a given length, you've (gasp!) already got one!
They're easy to use, too! Just reach up on the shelf, and get one! Way faster than finding the strippers, the cutters, the crimpers, the box of ends, and the box of wire... And then you've still got to cut, strip, sort, cut, insert, and crimp the shit together, before doing the same thing on the other end.
Feh.
They cables from deep-surplus cheap, they're Chinese, they're durable, consistent[1], and I have never had a bad cable after years of doing this whenever possible. Plus, every order comes with a bag of Skittles.
The trick to making this economical and time-efficient is to put it all on one PO.
[1]: Speaking of consistency: I do have the occasional cable that I make myself go wonky, in applications where prefab cabling doesn't apply, like UV-rated Cat5 up a radio tower. This, despite using a good crimper with a good die, and high-quality ends which are made specifically for the wire in question, and a lot of practice to develop decent workmanship. The Chinese cables are consistently more consistent, and always work.
I googled your google of the google about "solar flare crystal planet" and you're not yet first. But: I've seen solar flares on crystal planet, with solar flares within the flares on the crystal planet. I submit that the normal solar flares on crystal planet, while beautiful, are no match for the when the solar flares on crystal planet nest within eachother. (Such that you have one solar flare on crystal planet, with one or more other solar flares on crystal planet within.)
A couple of years ago, at tax time, my wife gave me a deadline: Thee shall conclude thine taxes before Sunday at Midnight, or else.
My venerable HP Laserjet III (which was old enough by that point to legally drive a car) was giving me fits, because the power supply was finally dieing. And I couldn't see spending $20 to e-file state taxes for the measly little refund I get from the state. Plus, in order for the taxes to be truly concluded, I'd have to physically hand my wife a hardcopy of the results.
So forth I went to the local all-night department store, where, lo, a nice HP Photosmart printer was found. It was on clearance, and it was good.
So I brought it home. It came with six colors of ink (none of them black), and all of them were past their expiration date and performing lousily. I did eventually coax the printer into producing some relatively even, mostly grey text -- before Midnight -- and thus I was saved from the burden of finding out exactly what "or else" meant.
Meanwhile, I dreaded spending money on new ink for new printer. So I called HP and explained the situation. The very nice, Midwestern-American-sounding lady on the phone apologized, had me fax a receipt in to show the date of purchase, and I had a new set of sane (CMY and black(!)) cartridges in-hand in about 48 hours.
(I have no idea how well their in-warranty service is on actual hardware, because I've never had HP hardware fail within warranty. Which is good enough service for me.)
I *hate* Denny's. Have never had good food there. Have never had good service there. Have never had food on the table in less than an hour there - even when the place is almost empty.
My wife loves Denny's, though. She says the food is good, fast, and the service is excellent. She doesn't understand why I harbor such hatred for the place that I refuse to even entertain the notion of ever eating there again.
It's plain, then, that folks can have wildly different opinions of the exact same vendor.
My experience with online buying has generally been good, aside from some strangeness early on.
For instance: Back in the day, I ordered something from Directron, and there was a problem with the order (credit card off by a digit, address mismatch, some dumb thing). Their official instructions, at that time, suggested I post the details of my order onto their public web forum for the world to see, and only then would they be able to help me rectify the problem online.
I let that order wither and die, and vowed never to attempt to give them any money ever again. (I hope their processes have improved.)
Other times have been remarkably good. I think I've only dealt with Newegg on the phone once, and whatever it was got resolved like a breeze. Every other issue I've had has been handled neatly and quickly online and without any real human interaction, from exchanging bad RAM for something different, to accidentally ordering a half dozen of 2.5" SATA drives when I needed ATA (woops).
The whole thing is so slick and painless at Newegg, that I really don't bother to price shop them anymore. Sometimes, they just don't have what I want, but if they do, I see no merit in going further toward bottom dollar on the stuff they sell.
Hell, even on Ebay, the only time I've ever been burned was as a seller. Every single thing I've ever picked up from there has been just exactly as described, shipped quickly, and totally painless, whether it be expensive and heavy like a used pro audio amplifier, or fickle and cheap like a USB hub from Hong Kong, or bizarrely complete and inexpensive, like a complete engine gasket set for a BMW M50 for $60. (Just add rings, bearings, and valves, and you've got yourself a new motor.)
I guess I have better luck buying things online than I do getting food at Denny's, which is a tradeoff that I'm perfectly OK with.
...as if the P3 was the only chip to ever contain a unique number which could be used to identify someone.
Modern hard drives also report their serial number to any software clever enough to figure out how to ask. And, I notice that some companies (notably Newegg) record the serial numbers of such things before shipping them out.
Just because they can't identify you by a string in the CPU, doesn't mean that the rest of the system isn't full of such things.
Windows 2000 is plainly the successor of NT 4, and as such wasn't released with home desktops in mind[1]. The year-based naming trend for business operating systems then continued with 2003 and 2008.
The only non-numerical 32-bit releases of Windows are XP, and Vista, all of which are primarily aimed at the home desktop. Not ironically, all released 32-bit operating systems from Microsoft which are intended for home users have alphabetic names.
I'm tactfully ignoring the backwater sludge that was 95, 95 with USB support, 95 OSR2, 98, 98SE, and ME, and in doing so, the naming schemes don't seem anywhere near as schizophrenic.
[1]: That 2000 does in fact make a fine home desktop operating system, even in 2009, despite Microsoft's intentions, is beside the point.
First: Of course the shielding must be contiguous in order to work. Bloody hell: The rest of the wires need to be conductive, too, or the system doesn't work.
To wit: Coax is grounded at demarc. Connects to television. Television has 2-prong plug. (Ground?)
Commercial 2-way radio systems: Coax (or Heliax or whatever) comes from outside antenna, hits a ground bus bar (either with a bulkhead connector or a polyphaser), ends at radio. Radio runs from a 13.8VDC supply which is essentially a battery charger. (Ground?)
10base2: Yeah, I'm digging into antiquities here, but the physics are constant. A 10base2 adapter of proper design is transformer-isolated, and does not ground the shield. A well-designed 10base2 network has exactly one ground point on the network segment.
Of course, balanced signals on correct twisted pair wiring should generally not need a shield -- Ethernet over UTP Cat5/5e/6 fits the bill pretty well as an example of things done right. I've made this point elsewhere.
On the other hand, a quick search for "ethernet stp grounding" turns up nothing but a bunch of hits which look like this article, which agrees with me in that the shield of STP cabling should be grounded only at one end. Why? To eliminate ground loops.
Yet, somehow, I feel that no matter how many ways I show that you're wrong, you'll continue to be right.
Keep on truckin'. I've seen enough expensive lightning-induced ground loops to be motivated to understand the problem, and to avoid it in the course of my daily work. You, on the other hand, seem to act as if you get a bonus every time a bit of gear eats itself for no particularly obvious reason.
Free? As in beer? What do you want, another Geocities?
Try Dreamhost. Not free, but totally not-sucky for the price, IMHO. Includes a Linux shell, if you're into that sort of thing, and a fair bit of space that you can use for backups of your own files.
Been with them for years; still getting used to the whole "buy now, we bill you, and then you pay your bill sometime later" philosophy, which seems to be totally lacking in this field.
(Note to mods: I'd be spamming if I posted a referral link to Dreamhost. I, however, did no such thing.)
Yet again you show your disdain for best practices. Conduit != lightning protection[1].
The more of you I read, the more I think you're the moral equivalent of the unscrupulous electrical trades mentioned earlier in the thread.
The cable TV reference is particularly telling, though you fail to understand it. Far too many cable TV installers ignore the NEC when it comes to grounding. They, seemingly more often than not, look around the demarc point for a ground, don't find one, and drive their own rod. Or they'll use nearby spigot, attaching to it with a copper strap, without ever verifying that it's actually metallic pipe all the way back to ground. And they'll make no attempt to tie this additional ground point into the building's electrical ground. Because, simply: If they were willing to go to that extreme, they'd have never tried to ground the cable TV coax to a metal water spigot (which may actually be connected with PVC or PEX or go through a dielectric fitting along the way) to begin with.
This creates ground loops, which can be dynamic (and dynamically destructive) in nature.
Please, Cramer, go read the NEC, paying particular attention to the sections covering communication system grounding. It's a quick download, the topic in question is a quick read, and you'll thank yourself for spending the time doing so. Not all of it is obvious, but all of it is grounded in best practice. Understanding why the NEC says what it does about grounding will help you understand why things explode.
Please stop costing your clients so much money.
[1]: With regard to lightning rods: I have an installation with a number of IP cameras mounted atop dedicated 100' high towers, connected home with some wireless networking gear, in a wooded, lightning-prone area. Talk about a lightning magnet. I've got tower-mounted radios, tower mounted cameras, tower mounted switches, tower mounted IR illuminators. Appropriate and thoughtful grounding has, in the four years the system has been installed, mitigated all lightning-related damage.[2]
[2]: But I'm all theory and books here, so ya'know, just ignore me and keep doing what you're doing. Go, telco guy, go!
Depends on the application. We're all here talking about HD video on computers, and then you start talking about televisions. You made this transition without comparing the differences between the two.
When I had a 4x3 32" CRT TV in my living room, 1080i was a joke. The TV could do it, being a relatively badass Trinitron from the end of the badass CRT days, but the quality wasn't substantially better than anamorphic 480p with my eyes and my viewing distance (about 7 feet away).
On my 15.4" laptop though, it's a totally different story. The screen supports 1920x1200, and it is way more fun to watch 1080p on it than it is lower-resolution video.
The difference, of course, is viewing distance. I'm less than an arms-length away from the laptop while I'm using it, and I can see the individual pixels rather clearly at that distance. Meanwhile, the TV is on the other side of the room.
Apples and oranges.
I submit that it is therefore generally more important to have high-resolution video on a PC, than on a television, even though the screens are generally very small by comparison.
Having done my share of cabling in structures of all ages and varieties, I don't think I'd have much trouble getting a proper ground on the third floor of a building.
That said, I don't think I'd have tried to begin with.
The microwave signal from the "satellite transmitter" would be so far out-of-band compared to the signals on a T1 span that the first thing I'd do would be to give the T1 wire a few wraps around a ferrite bead, to reduce the amount of common-mode RFI. (The ferrite could be located wherever convenient.)
If I added too much inductance and the T1 got worse, I'd back off a couple of turns. If it were still flaky, I'd add a couple more.
And chances are, at that point, that I'd call it a day.
If this didn't work, and I had a good reason to suspect that shielded cabling might help, I'd run new. We keep some Belden Cat5e on hand for certain industrial applications which would probably do the trick just fine:
It has bonded pairs, greatly reducing induction potential by keeping the wires of a pair a precise distance from eachother. It has a mylar wrapper around the conductors, to allow them to slip around a little more freely and therefore not stretch out the twists as the cable bends during and after installation. It has a solid and rather heavy aluminum foil shield over the mylar, crimped against itself at the seam to eliminate leakage. Surrounding that, it has a substantial braided shield. After that, the whole thing is wrapped with a copper drain wire, which keeps the shielding components in close contact with eachother. And the jacket is both UV resistant and tough like nails. (I'd be comfortable using this wire any place except for below ground.)
I would ground this new wire at the local equipment end.
And, then, if it still didn't work, I'd fix the ground, because it is demonstrably crap. Installing a proper grounding system which is capable of providing a low-impedance path to ground at RF frequencies is not exactly rocket science, but that by itself is no reason to believe that the folks who installed the ground in the equipment closet (if it even has a dedicated communications ground) had their wits about them.
I'd start with the obvious (making sure the wire is sufficiently large for the distance involved, and that the far end actually connects to a usefully-grounded point), and then move onto the esoteric (ensuring that there are no sharp bends anywhere, and that the connectors are oriented correctly).
It's just RF. It's not voodoo. There's no goats blood required - this stuff just makes sense.
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Because the noise would be too random?
We used to sell some H.323 IP stuff from Altigen, early in the VOIP game. These phones, when we first started with them, we an odd breed: They'd be happy enough to deal with the latency and packet loss associated with a public network, but were totally unable to deal with NAT. At all. Not even a DMZ was helpful until different firmware came out years later which finally addressed a few of these problems.
So: Perhaps Ford simply has 16.7 million Altigen IP phones. :)
(Yes, yes. A VPN would work, but my experience with VPN+H.323 hss been pretty dismal as well.)
I know, right?
Just like with telephone extensions: Imagine the fallout if the five-digit telephone extensions overlapped! Couple that with overlapping assembly lines, and overlapping administration, and what you'd get would be mass hysteria.
Or, rather, it wouldn't be. It's just another problem that needs addressed (pardon the pun) with a change as large as a merger.
In the US, which is plainly the context here, power generation and distribution are almost entirely done by private (non-government) entities.
This small detail un-funnies the rest of your comment.
You bought a laptop in a store?
Gads.
The ubiquitous shiny LCDs are enough to keep me far, far away from all retail (and otherwise pre-packaged) laptops.
I tend to like Dell machines, but there's plenty of other companies which will install a Bluetooth module in a custom-built laptop. The built-in Bluetooth on my Inspiron 6000i was, IIRC, only $15 or $20, was worth every cent, and its inclusion was not tied to any other features or functions.
I bought a Logitech V330 Bluetooth mouse for my Inspiron 6000 laptop a few years ago. Here are my observations:
Battery life is good. With regular use (several hours per day), the batteries last for months. With occasional use, they last for more than a year. And, interestingly, the mouse is perfectly happy to run from only one (1) battery, though it has space for two -- this has been helpful a few times.
Range is insanely good. Something like 40 feet in an indoor, open space, in my experience. This has been helpful for presentations.
The wake up delay is sometimes annoying. No, not always. And, in fact, I don't believe I've noticed it at all since putting Vista on the machine with its stock Bluetooth stack.
It was slightly more expensive, but being dongle-free is worth that to me.
Small, but shaped well enough that it's not a problem for my big hands. Fits nicely in a side pouch on my backpack.
The downsides:
Pairing. Not a big problem with just one OS, but was a continual issue when I was dual-booting Ubuntu on this machine. Every time I switched operating systems and wanted to use a mouse, I'd have to re-pair it.
Feet. This isn't a Bluetooth problem, but: The feet wore out in less than a year. I ordered new ones from slicksurf.com and couldn't be happier with them.
It's not in production anymore, and I won't ever be selling mine.
Like I said, this mouse is a few years old. I don't know if things have gotten worse since then.
Activate? The...software?
Eh?
On my U3 drives (both of them), the following would happen upon insertion:
Loading drivers
Found USB hub!
Loading drivers
Found USB mass storage device!
Loading drivers
Found USB CD-ROM!
The drives that appear are as follows:
A regular read/write USB flash drive, empty except for whatever I've put into it
A read-only CD-ROM
After the drivers all load (automatically and without intervention, under most Windowses), it would autorun the virtual CD drive as configured in windows.
Of course, I now have U3 disabled (more because I find no need for it, than because it is somehow evil), but that's how it worked for me.
You're doing it wrong.
When I'm doing networking for clients, it is between a central patch panel and a wallplate. From there, the right way to do it is with a relatively short patch cord to the networked device or the switch or whatever.
Funnily enough, I have no particular love for Belkin's products. The only good thing about them is that they're everywhere, and therefore are easy to find. But they're expensive and, in my experience, no better than other (often much, much cheaper) products.
Here's a 10 foot snagless Belkin Cat5e cable from Staples for $6.49. Meanwhile, Deep Surplus has a very very similar cable for $1.72 with a 90-day no-restocking-fee return policy. At the high end, Black Box sells cables which are even more expensive than Belkin, and are guaranteed against everything forever.
But it's not clear to me, in my experience, that either Belkin or Black Box have common cables which are substantially better than the stuff at Deep Surplus. They're all assembled by machine, they're all tested by machine, and I'll wager that in all the wire itself is purchased from whatever supplier is cheapest this week. And if I'm only paying a third as much for them, ala Deep Surplus, I can afford to guarantee them myself.
I'd pick cigars. And bourbon.
I thought I already said that.
I have a 24" LCD on my desk, too. The resolution is nice, but really, the DPI isn't very impressive compared to 1920x1200 on my 15.4" laptop. :)
Why, sure it is.
It's also prudent to have a decoy. That's why there's two of them.
In the case that it wouldn't be prudent to name an aircraft with a "One" suffix even with the President on board (say, a real disaster/evac operation, or where there were any threat), I feel confident that steps are in place to call either the real craft and the decoy something other than "Air Force One," while still making it clear to air traffic controllers and military leaders that the plane has priority.
Whatever you think of the stupidity of the US government as a whole, the folks responsible for protecting the President are without question some of the sharpest knives in the drawer. They are perfectly capable of being deceitful, in any capacity necessary, and without any real budgetary concern, to ensure the President's safety.
But on a normal day? We're just good, freedom-loving Americans - of course it should be announced that the President has arrived on a craft named Air Force One. Anything less would appear cowardly.
I was going to say something like this, but the parent poster beat me to it.
Really, folks: To react with such, well, terror over every little thing, is only an indications that the terrorists have won.
There's no realistic way to outrun a jet on foot, or an elevator. So why bother with the panic? For fuck's sake: The only way to get out of the way of something like this means that the last thing going through your mind will be your spleen.
I, for one, would take this as a sign that I should go up on the roof to have a cigar and watch the strangeness, perhaps after asking the boss if he'd like to join me with the bottle of bourbon that he always keeps in his desk drawer.
Of all the things to be scared of, terrorism in the US should not be one of them.
My opinion is a little different: Don't build them one at a time. And don't buy them one at a time, either.
Just pick up a bunch of different lengths of pre-terminated cable from the good folks at deep-surplus.com. Buy a bunch of 1-foot cables, along with some 3-foot cables. 5-foot cables. 7-foot cables. 12-foot cables. So on, so forth. Then, when you need a cable of a given length, you've (gasp!) already got one!
They're easy to use, too! Just reach up on the shelf, and get one! Way faster than finding the strippers, the cutters, the crimpers, the box of ends, and the box of wire... And then you've still got to cut, strip, sort, cut, insert, and crimp the shit together, before doing the same thing on the other end.
Feh.
They cables from deep-surplus cheap, they're Chinese, they're durable, consistent[1], and I have never had a bad cable after years of doing this whenever possible. Plus, every order comes with a bag of Skittles.
The trick to making this economical and time-efficient is to put it all on one PO.
[1]: Speaking of consistency: I do have the occasional cable that I make myself go wonky, in applications where prefab cabling doesn't apply, like UV-rated Cat5 up a radio tower. This, despite using a good crimper with a good die, and high-quality ends which are made specifically for the wire in question, and a lot of practice to develop decent workmanship. The Chinese cables are consistently more consistent, and always work.
I googled your google of the google about "solar flare crystal planet" and you're not yet first. But: I've seen solar flares on crystal planet, with solar flares within the flares on the crystal planet. I submit that the normal solar flares on crystal planet, while beautiful, are no match for the when the solar flares on crystal planet nest within eachother. (Such that you have one solar flare on crystal planet, with one or more other solar flares on crystal planet within.)
Also: I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
A couple of years ago, at tax time, my wife gave me a deadline: Thee shall conclude thine taxes before Sunday at Midnight, or else.
My venerable HP Laserjet III (which was old enough by that point to legally drive a car) was giving me fits, because the power supply was finally dieing. And I couldn't see spending $20 to e-file state taxes for the measly little refund I get from the state. Plus, in order for the taxes to be truly concluded, I'd have to physically hand my wife a hardcopy of the results.
So forth I went to the local all-night department store, where, lo, a nice HP Photosmart printer was found. It was on clearance, and it was good.
So I brought it home. It came with six colors of ink (none of them black), and all of them were past their expiration date and performing lousily. I did eventually coax the printer into producing some relatively even, mostly grey text -- before Midnight -- and thus I was saved from the burden of finding out exactly what "or else" meant.
Meanwhile, I dreaded spending money on new ink for new printer. So I called HP and explained the situation. The very nice, Midwestern-American-sounding lady on the phone apologized, had me fax a receipt in to show the date of purchase, and I had a new set of sane (CMY and black(!)) cartridges in-hand in about 48 hours.
(I have no idea how well their in-warranty service is on actual hardware, because I've never had HP hardware fail within warranty. Which is good enough service for me.)
Hear, hear.
I *hate* Denny's. Have never had good food there. Have never had good service there. Have never had food on the table in less than an hour there - even when the place is almost empty.
My wife loves Denny's, though. She says the food is good, fast, and the service is excellent. She doesn't understand why I harbor such hatred for the place that I refuse to even entertain the notion of ever eating there again.
It's plain, then, that folks can have wildly different opinions of the exact same vendor.
My experience with online buying has generally been good, aside from some strangeness early on.
For instance: Back in the day, I ordered something from Directron, and there was a problem with the order (credit card off by a digit, address mismatch, some dumb thing). Their official instructions, at that time, suggested I post the details of my order onto their public web forum for the world to see, and only then would they be able to help me rectify the problem online.
I let that order wither and die, and vowed never to attempt to give them any money ever again. (I hope their processes have improved.)
Other times have been remarkably good. I think I've only dealt with Newegg on the phone once, and whatever it was got resolved like a breeze. Every other issue I've had has been handled neatly and quickly online and without any real human interaction, from exchanging bad RAM for something different, to accidentally ordering a half dozen of 2.5" SATA drives when I needed ATA (woops).
The whole thing is so slick and painless at Newegg, that I really don't bother to price shop them anymore. Sometimes, they just don't have what I want, but if they do, I see no merit in going further toward bottom dollar on the stuff they sell.
Hell, even on Ebay, the only time I've ever been burned was as a seller. Every single thing I've ever picked up from there has been just exactly as described, shipped quickly, and totally painless, whether it be expensive and heavy like a used pro audio amplifier, or fickle and cheap like a USB hub from Hong Kong, or bizarrely complete and inexpensive, like a complete engine gasket set for a BMW M50 for $60. (Just add rings, bearings, and valves, and you've got yourself a new motor.)
I guess I have better luck buying things online than I do getting food at Denny's, which is a tradeoff that I'm perfectly OK with.
*shrug*
...as if the P3 was the only chip to ever contain a unique number which could be used to identify someone.
Modern hard drives also report their serial number to any software clever enough to figure out how to ask. And, I notice that some companies (notably Newegg) record the serial numbers of such things before shipping them out.
Just because they can't identify you by a string in the CPU, doesn't mean that the rest of the system isn't full of such things.
Will this be anything like the oral arguments I make with my wife in the bedroom? If so, will there be video?
(Farewell Karma, I knew thee well...)
Sorta, kinda.
Windows 2000 is plainly the successor of NT 4, and as such wasn't released with home desktops in mind[1]. The year-based naming trend for business operating systems then continued with 2003 and 2008.
The only non-numerical 32-bit releases of Windows are XP, and Vista, all of which are primarily aimed at the home desktop. Not ironically, all released 32-bit operating systems from Microsoft which are intended for home users have alphabetic names.
I'm tactfully ignoring the backwater sludge that was 95, 95 with USB support, 95 OSR2, 98, 98SE, and ME, and in doing so, the naming schemes don't seem anywhere near as schizophrenic.
[1]: That 2000 does in fact make a fine home desktop operating system, even in 2009, despite Microsoft's intentions, is beside the point.
First: Of course the shielding must be contiguous in order to work. Bloody hell: The rest of the wires need to be conductive, too, or the system doesn't work.
On the rest, I call bullshit.
Regarding cable TV: Single-point ground. Almost-friggin-always.
To wit: Coax is grounded at demarc. Connects to television. Television has 2-prong plug. (Ground?)
Commercial 2-way radio systems: Coax (or Heliax or whatever) comes from outside antenna, hits a ground bus bar (either with a bulkhead connector or a polyphaser), ends at radio. Radio runs from a 13.8VDC supply which is essentially a battery charger. (Ground?)
10base2: Yeah, I'm digging into antiquities here, but the physics are constant. A 10base2 adapter of proper design is transformer-isolated, and does not ground the shield. A well-designed 10base2 network has exactly one ground point on the network segment.
Of course, balanced signals on correct twisted pair wiring should generally not need a shield -- Ethernet over UTP Cat5/5e/6 fits the bill pretty well as an example of things done right. I've made this point elsewhere.
On the other hand, a quick search for "ethernet stp grounding" turns up nothing but a bunch of hits which look like this article, which agrees with me in that the shield of STP cabling should be grounded only at one end. Why? To eliminate ground loops.
Yet, somehow, I feel that no matter how many ways I show that you're wrong, you'll continue to be right.
Keep on truckin'. I've seen enough expensive lightning-induced ground loops to be motivated to understand the problem, and to avoid it in the course of my daily work. You, on the other hand, seem to act as if you get a bonus every time a bit of gear eats itself for no particularly obvious reason.
Free? As in beer? What do you want, another Geocities?
Try Dreamhost. Not free, but totally not-sucky for the price, IMHO. Includes a Linux shell, if you're into that sort of thing, and a fair bit of space that you can use for backups of your own files.
Been with them for years; still getting used to the whole "buy now, we bill you, and then you pay your bill sometime later" philosophy, which seems to be totally lacking in this field.
(Note to mods: I'd be spamming if I posted a referral link to Dreamhost. I, however, did no such thing.)
Right. So, they're not very hip, and they don't play much outside of local bars and animal clubs. But here is a band that does want you want with Myspace.
It's not impossible.
Yet again you show your disdain for best practices. Conduit != lightning protection[1].
The more of you I read, the more I think you're the moral equivalent of the unscrupulous electrical trades mentioned earlier in the thread.
The cable TV reference is particularly telling, though you fail to understand it. Far too many cable TV installers ignore the NEC when it comes to grounding. They, seemingly more often than not, look around the demarc point for a ground, don't find one, and drive their own rod. Or they'll use nearby spigot, attaching to it with a copper strap, without ever verifying that it's actually metallic pipe all the way back to ground. And they'll make no attempt to tie this additional ground point into the building's electrical ground. Because, simply: If they were willing to go to that extreme, they'd have never tried to ground the cable TV coax to a metal water spigot (which may actually be connected with PVC or PEX or go through a dielectric fitting along the way) to begin with.
This creates ground loops, which can be dynamic (and dynamically destructive) in nature.
Please, Cramer, go read the NEC, paying particular attention to the sections covering communication system grounding. It's a quick download, the topic in question is a quick read, and you'll thank yourself for spending the time doing so. Not all of it is obvious, but all of it is grounded in best practice. Understanding why the NEC says what it does about grounding will help you understand why things explode.
Please stop costing your clients so much money.
[1]: With regard to lightning rods: I have an installation with a number of IP cameras mounted atop dedicated 100' high towers, connected home with some wireless networking gear, in a wooded, lightning-prone area. Talk about a lightning magnet. I've got tower-mounted radios, tower mounted cameras, tower mounted switches, tower mounted IR illuminators. Appropriate and thoughtful grounding has, in the four years the system has been installed, mitigated all lightning-related damage.[2]
[2]: But I'm all theory and books here, so ya'know, just ignore me and keep doing what you're doing. Go, telco guy, go!
Depends on the application. We're all here talking about HD video on computers, and then you start talking about televisions. You made this transition without comparing the differences between the two.
When I had a 4x3 32" CRT TV in my living room, 1080i was a joke. The TV could do it, being a relatively badass Trinitron from the end of the badass CRT days, but the quality wasn't substantially better than anamorphic 480p with my eyes and my viewing distance (about 7 feet away).
On my 15.4" laptop though, it's a totally different story. The screen supports 1920x1200, and it is way more fun to watch 1080p on it than it is lower-resolution video.
The difference, of course, is viewing distance. I'm less than an arms-length away from the laptop while I'm using it, and I can see the individual pixels rather clearly at that distance. Meanwhile, the TV is on the other side of the room.
Apples and oranges.
I submit that it is therefore generally more important to have high-resolution video on a PC, than on a television, even though the screens are generally very small by comparison.
Having done my share of cabling in structures of all ages and varieties, I don't think I'd have much trouble getting a proper ground on the third floor of a building.
That said, I don't think I'd have tried to begin with.
The microwave signal from the "satellite transmitter" would be so far out-of-band compared to the signals on a T1 span that the first thing I'd do would be to give the T1 wire a few wraps around a ferrite bead, to reduce the amount of common-mode RFI. (The ferrite could be located wherever convenient.)
If I added too much inductance and the T1 got worse, I'd back off a couple of turns. If it were still flaky, I'd add a couple more.
And chances are, at that point, that I'd call it a day.
If this didn't work, and I had a good reason to suspect that shielded cabling might help, I'd run new. We keep some Belden Cat5e on hand for certain industrial applications which would probably do the trick just fine:
It has bonded pairs, greatly reducing induction potential by keeping the wires of a pair a precise distance from eachother.
It has a mylar wrapper around the conductors, to allow them to slip around a little more freely and therefore not stretch out the twists as the cable bends during and after installation.
It has a solid and rather heavy aluminum foil shield over the mylar, crimped against itself at the seam to eliminate leakage.
Surrounding that, it has a substantial braided shield.
After that, the whole thing is wrapped with a copper drain wire, which keeps the shielding components in close contact with eachother.
And the jacket is both UV resistant and tough like nails. (I'd be comfortable using this wire any place except for below ground.)
I would ground this new wire at the local equipment end.
And, then, if it still didn't work, I'd fix the ground, because it is demonstrably crap. Installing a proper grounding system which is capable of providing a low-impedance path to ground at RF frequencies is not exactly rocket science, but that by itself is no reason to believe that the folks who installed the ground in the equipment closet (if it even has a dedicated communications ground) had their wits about them.
I'd start with the obvious (making sure the wire is sufficiently large for the distance involved, and that the far end actually connects to a usefully-grounded point), and then move onto the esoteric (ensuring that there are no sharp bends anywhere, and that the connectors are oriented correctly).
It's just RF. It's not voodoo. There's no goats blood required - this stuff just makes sense.