When can we see some integration between Miro and UPNP clients like the PS3 and Xbox 360?
I'm fully appreciative of downloading torrents with my 6 down 1 up DSL, which peers in a typical torrent seem to like. I really do like Miro's interface.
But the computer is in the computer room. And the TV and PS3 are in the living room. And while the computer monitor I'm looking at right now is rather nice, I'd rather watch TV on the 52" Samsung while sitting on my couch in the living room.
When are these folks going to start bringing content outside of the PC, so people can sit somewhere more relaxing (or with more people) than in front of a PC?
The timeframe is pretty close - my story happened late in 2004. The network admins in my story were pretty livid as well. (Well, panicked, followed by angry and lividity once they'd found the fault. They blamed everyone, including us for selling them unmanaged switches in their telephones, and promised to find the responsibile party and throw them under the bus. It never happened. I hope that they eventually turned STP on.)
It seems to be common in network administration to think (and I've mistakenly thought this way, too) that once some random person does something stupid and the entire fucking thing crashes that they'd just simply undo whatever it was and never do it again. Nevertheless, if lay people (or, no offense, students) were all that good at networking or computers, they'd probably never have produced the problem to begin with.
These days, in my day job, I work with salespeople and law enforcement. They're not stupid -- in fact, most of the clients I work with do things daily that I could never accomplish -- but they occasionally do stupid things with computers and networks. I try hard to avoid blaming them for what they've done wrong, and to instead try to use it as an opportunity to better (and gently) show them how things actually work.
I learned this, oddly enough, when pulling some Cat5 at a plastics factory. I moved a ceiling tile in an office that had a photo sensor fire alarm in it, and it went off. The entire plant was evacuated. The fire department showed up. Of course, there was no real fire -- the dust from the fiberglass insulation that I'd set the photo sensor on was enough to trigger it. And, thankfully, they were understanding. Because of my mistake, they learned a few weaknesses of their fire alarm system (some employees couldn't hear it and had to be found and dragged outside, which is a very real problem), and they considered it to be a good fire drill. They continue to hire us back for work today, and I learned not to do that again.:)
You didn't read my post. The folks next door were white. My description of them as being niggers was, therefore, not racial.
Words are good. All of them. Some of them are more powerful than others, and some of them are more hurtful than others. But all words (all of them) are good.
We have truly reached a new low in society if wherein it is suggested that one cannot discuss a word if such a discussion involves use of that word. If you, sir, see my discussion of the word "nigger," in pontification of how I learned how not to use the word "nigger," then you sir are as blind and stupid as the bigotry which you seem to attempt to renounce.
So blind, in fact, that you cannot see that I am trying to prevent further abuses of the term. Where are we, kindergarten? Should I really write "n*****" instead of "nigger" on such a liberal forum as Slashdot?
Were you in Salem in 1692, I expect that you'd have been one of the ones in the streets with a torch or a pitchfork.
Naw. Stuff sometimes, yaknow, happens. People sometimes make mistakes, and hardware sometimes just breaks. It's not always ignorance -- especially, I'd guess, at the level of Slashdot's back end.
I once implemented a VoIP phone system at a factory in an evening. (This, in itself, was an undertaking - close to 200 extensions, up and running, between Wednesday at close of business and Thursday when folks started showing up, including three hours on the phone with Sprint to get the PRI and T1 circuits reconfigured at 2:00AM.)
We left, tired and groggy, with an IP phone placed in a common area for the facilities network admins to train any staff who needed training, at about 7:30AM. At 8:30, after I finally got home and managed to close my eyes, my phone rang. It was the network admin. He had a few minor issues which could've waited, but the real problem was that their network was totally fucked: Packets everywhere. No capacity to do anything. An amazing cascading failure of the sort that one hopes to never see.
And it wasn't any hodge-podge network, either. HP Procurve switches configured in a redundant fabric mode with gigabit fiber links - hot stuff or the time, especially for a factory. The wiring was all new, and was all good. The network had been designed specifically to avoid the limitations of Ethernet, and was successful to that end (a non-trivial task in an existing building complex). But it was tripping all over itself.
Turns out that someone had taken that fancy IP phone in the common area with its built-in unmanaged switch, and plugged both of its 10/100 Ethernet jacks into the wall. (Nobody knows who.)
The ensuing packet storm broke everything. Unplugging one of them fixed the problem pretty much immediately.
I wrote about this here once before, and everyone's immediate reply was this: "Well, duh. They should've turned the Spanning Tree Protocol on, and this wouldn't have happened. They're obviously idiots."
But the truth is so much more simple: People make mistakes. It was a mistake to keep STP turned off in that environment, and it was a mistake to plug two fancy ports of a Procurve switch into two dumb ports on an IP phone. Had either of those mistakes not happened, things would've been fine.
But mistakes happen anyway. We do our best, as IT professionals, to minimize these mistakes, or at least keep them away from production. But sometimes, despite having the best people and the best tools and all the knowledge it takes to make stuff work, shit just happens.
What about Centaur/IDT? They were bought by VIA as well, but prior to that they were definitely making inexpensive x86-compatibile chips with the WinChip name.
Back in the day (yes, you're old -- just look at your UID), a friend of mine gave me a Baby-AT desktop case with an LED display, which he'd been using for awhile.
It was jumpered to say "HI".
This seemed at the time (and indeed now) to be the most useful function of such a thing. I left it that way.
Before Win98, we had Windows 95 OSR2 with USB support. And before that, we had strange kernel options about OHCI controllers that seemed somehow related to a motherboard pin grid header which nobody knew what to do with, and which no hardware was available to work with, but which Intel was pushing along with their chipsets for some seemingly-benign reason . . .
I used to use the word nigger a lot. We had some niggers next door who would do stuff like steal the neighborhood's bikes, occasionally harbor a garage full of strange cars or ATVs, do burnouts in the street, congregate in my back yard, fight dogs in their own, and generally behave in a loud fashion whenever the temperature rose above 75 degrees. Those jobless niggers had a swat team kick their back door in twice in the past year.
Except, generally, the niggers next door where fair skinned with blond hair. There was an occasional black person over there, and the color was never a problem -- the problem was the behavior. Nigger described this better than any other word I could conjure.
I explained this once to a good friend of mine that I've known my entire life, who happens to be a black man who is both better educated than I and who has been around the block a few more times. He told me that, though he appreciated the fact that my use of nigger was not racially descriptive, that it was still an ugly word. I explained to him a bit more about the situation with the niggers next door, and he agreed with me that their behavior is not something that should be socially-acceptable in what is otherwise a very decent neighborhood.
He told me that the a more descriptive and less hurtful term might be that they were doing some gangsta shit, or perhaps that they were up to some nigga shit, but that using nigger, no matter how good my intentions were, was probably the wrong thing to do.
I've been using those terms since, except right now to illustrate a point.
Is my use of the word "nigger" in this post, as a description and pontification of how I learned to better use English, a troll which should be automatically modded down? It's offtopic in an energy discussion, for sure, but I'm not trolling. I'm just relaying a snippet of my life for those who will read it.
For this reason, we need human moderators, not automated an censor.
I'll improve your argument for you, and then proceed to sneeze at it.
You say $500. I say: Let's increase that a little to $2 per day.
I can look at this number, this $2 figure, and know that it's not worth it. Maybe if I lived by myself. But if I have to fight about it with the kids when they don't turn things off, if my wife hates it that the clock on the microwave doesn't work anymore, or that she's got to go and turn the thing on every time she uses it, then what you're suggesting will cost me quite a lot more than $2 in pain on an average day.
Case in point: The exhaust fan in the bathroom costs me a lot more than $2 per day when left running during the winter time, as it pumps a few few hundred CFM per minute of 72-degree air outside, which gets replaced with 0-20 degree air. I value my peace more than I value my money, however, so I don't fight about it when it gets left on by accident. (I'd put a timer on it, which would help, but in the summer, there's no particular reason to ever turn it off. We don't have air conditioning and it helps circulate air and keep humidity down somewhat in the bathroom. The fan itself is pretty efficient. I'm not rewiring my switches twice a year to save a couple of dozens of dollars in the wintertime, though.)
It's also a lot cheaper and more convenient to keep the current wife[1] and kids, than to get different ones. Just as it is to keep my (perfectly functional) non-Energy Star microwave, instead of buying a new one.
[1]: I'll be certain, though, that when the current wife wears out, that the new model will be more energy efficient. Is there a federal mandate on Energy Star labeling for females, yet?
This doesn't help the efficiency of the system[1].
1: I've done this, too, back in the day. Had a big, full-height 15MB MFM ST-419 Seagate drive which I wanted to use along with my (much faster) half-height 20MB Seagate ST-225 drive. Trouble was, the big-ass 15MB drive couldn't spin up and initialize fast enough to satisfy the controller in my XT at boot time. Answer? Another power supply, with its own switch, so I could manually power the full-height drive up before the rest of the system. I scored a full-sized AT power supply which seemed to work OK, but had an issue whereby it would only behave if it were substantially loaded on the 12V line. A friend and I tried to fix it properly, desoldering caps and checking them with a meter, and eventually gave up. The final solution, which worked until that computer was retired, was a pair of sandcast resistors hung right in front of the exhaust fan, loading the 12V rail down enough just enough so that the PSU would still function. Computers haven't been anywhere near as much fun since[2].
2: Kids, these days, with their video card overclocks and SLI RAM. Get off my lawn[3]!
3: I write this from an overclocked SLI 9800GT quad-core SLACR Q6600 Alienware box. Kids, indeed[4].
I was working in a jail on some communications gear. Poor signal quality was killing my phone fast, but I needed to use it (at length, on the phone to the manufacturer) to get this gear working correctly.
The wall-mount charger was at home. I could've left to get it, but instead: I got the car charger from my work truck, just outside, along with a pair of test leads. Plugged the test leads into an available battery (nearly all radio communications stuff is built around a 13.8VDC supply, often with a gel cell battery in parallel for backup power) and clipped them onto the car charger's contacts, and was off to the races with a Bluetooth headset so that I had some mobility.
Wait. Your laptop allows brighter backlighting when plugged in than it does when on battery? IE, your laptop limits your maximum brightness only when on battery?
What model of laptop is this? I'm in the market to replace my ~4-year-old laptop right now, and I want to avoid whatever you have at all costs.
It works fine without admin rights. It just that it tries (and fails) to write data to protected (system) directories, apparently to save user preferences at exit. This is bad design -- user preferences should only go into user directories, and these have been pretty well defined since Windows 95.
I don't know what Core Temp is, but if its name is descriptive, it's a gadget that looks at core temps. I don't want users on my systems to be running things which access hardware at the level of directness which it sounds like it wants. So for me, this looks like correct behavior.
Handbrake's profile issue is, again, the same as DVD Decryptor. It's obviously trying to put data in places it shouldn't: Again, user files go into user directories. The rest of the filesystem is for the system.
Rightmark's rmclock program also cannot run without admin under Vista, again for very good reasons: This is a program which can directly manipulate CPU clocks and voltage. I REALLY don't want users doing that.
I live in Ohio, and I have the same issue with most of the area around here (though unlike you, Google Earth is just a fun toy that I'm not trying to do anything particularly useful with).
But: I work with public safety every day. Every county I work with has a dedicated GIS person, or at least someone that they contract with. This system is used to provide photographic maps for the auditor's office, and for the E911 system, and the street department, utilities planning, and so on. Aerial photographs of much of the area are regularly (about annually) updated, and are of rather high resolution and accuracy.
In fact, for my county, such imagery is already available on the auditor's web site.
So, given my level of knowledge, if I had your problem, I'd first begin talking to the county, who I think would be inclined to help a situation like that if they could. Start with the IT person if they have one, since they'll either have a good answer for you (and the truth might be that Google already shows you the best and most recent photos), or be able to direct you to someone who does. And I don't know how Nevada is structured, but if it's anything like Ohio, the next person I'd talk to would be the sheriff or the county commissioners, all of whom are paid and elected public servants. The latter might not be of much direct help, but they'll point you in the right direction and will probably be happy to grease the wheels for you.
I'd be very surprised if, given these steps, you would be unable to find an arrangement which will let you access the photographs that you're interested in, if they exist at all.
I installed Quicktime the other day, and got iTunes and the updater along with it.
This, of course, means that in order to put a minimal iTunes install on a PC, one should not install iTunes, but should instead download and install Quicktime. *boggle*
It's never been clear to me if it was occupational (working with loudspeakers, power supplies, and radio transmitters) or if they've worn out over time from normal use, but I've certainly had the magstripe on my bank card fail. Not a big deal, usually -- merchants can still key in the numbers manually, and some still have the old-school carbon paper credit card machines as backup.
So my fear (which doesn't even matter since I'm not in Utah) is that folks would find, one day, that their perfectly working card doesn't function anymore. And if it's required to work, then that presents a problem when people can't buy the things which they'd otherwise be legally entitled to have.
On the other hand, I make a point of erasing my Ohio license with a strong neodymium magnet whenever I get a new one. I can't stand it when merchants scan my license as proof that I'm old enough to be buying whatever it is that I'm buying. The reason is simple: I'm paying cash, and there's nothing that they need other than proof that I'm old enough. I don't trust them to dispose of my drivers license number properly, or to not feed a demographics database with it.
Mythbusters did a lousy job, because their samples were too pristine, and too few.
Over here in reality, people do play street hockey with their CDs, and then put them into the computer. The scratches and cracks which occur on disks that people actually use are stress relief points for the polycarbonate to shatter on.
Ever try to punch through a plexiglass window? I have. It's frustrating as all hell, until you score a big X into it with a knife or a rock or something, and then it becomes very easy.
My father in law had a disk break in his PC about a year ago, and called me asking for help tearing it apart to clean up the mess inside. (Surprisingly, the drive recovered just fine.)
And none of this is to mention disks which are also out of balance. I've had old audio CDs which, when used in a PC, were so unbalanced I felt certain that something would break. The sides of the case would rattle, the plastic at the front would vibrate like mad, so on, so forth.
Combine these problems and spin the disk at around 10,000 RPM, and things do sometimes (though certainly not very often) get interesting.
There are many, many embedded devices on non-x86 platforms. Routers, phones, TVs, compute blades, etc. There are probably hundreds of thousands (or maybe higher, I don't have good numbers) of developers working on these devices....how does that qualify as "dead"?
You act as if I live in a bubble.
I have an iPod Touch hacked and running an ssh server under its Darwin kernel on my desk, with its ARM chip pulling the weight, which is far faster and has far more RAM and storage than the first computer I ran Linux on. I have a WRT54G in the wiring closet in my house, running a very customized distribution of Linux on its MIPS core from a SD card. I even have an iMac G3 running Ubuntu. My old cable TV box had a dual-core Sparc chip. My current Uverse box is, if I recall, a fast ARM-based platform. And, as I write this, I'm shuffling data in preparation for installing PPC Linux on my PS3, just for fun.
None of these, nor an IBM Power6, are modern desktop computers. They, simply, don't count in the argument that I was attempting to make.
I was in the US Army once, for about four months. (My contractual commitment was four years active, four years reserve.)
It's possible, though not easy or straight-forward, to leave (or be removed from) the military -- without judicial consequence.
Of course, it goes down on your permanent record, and will show up on background checks and such. But: This hasn't stopped me from having clearance in sensitive military manufacturing facilities as a private sector contractor, working on -- of all things -- security systems.
(I'd post this anon, but anyone who would care about it already knows.)
Trouble is, there's a big part of me that wants simplicity. I could go to work in a factory, building tires all day or something, and come home feeling like I'd accomplished nothing but earn a paycheck (which might be quite well enough). Or, I could continue what I'm doing, both unable to say no to a task and completely able to master it given enough time, feeling most days like I've accomplished little. See, it takes time to switch between tower jockey and systems integrator. It takes time to stop thinking about IP camera woes, and move onto IP telephony duties. It takes time to go from maintaining the Gentoo mail server and working with networks, to dealing with a public safety dispatch console with transmit problems.
A tire builder only has to worry about building tires all day. My days are seldom so well scripted. I talk to people, and they all submit that they'd love to be able to different things every day, but having never experienced it I don't think they really understand the human mental difficulties in doing so.
On the other hand, I'd probably be totally unsatisfied building tires all day. I'm sure that within a week on such a job, I'd get in trouble with the union for not just doing my job, but for fixing machines and improving processes. It seems like I'm doomed to a life of always-changing goals and endeavors.
But, it goes like this: We work for public safety (mostly law enforcement), and a little bit of military. There isn't any (current) local competition for the things that we do, and it's impractical for them to hire work from far away (when things break, they need fixing NOW, not after someone manages to drive for a few hours to get there). When times turn tough, crime increases, and public safety budgets increase.
Then, they buy more stuff from us. We're about as recession-proof as a technical service company could be.
I can't run Firefox on a PPC chip on a modern desktop computer.
Therefore, it's dead. There's no reason to include embedded and specialty markets when discussing the death of a platform. I mean, really: The Zilog Z80 has been dead for about as long as the TRS-80 has been. That I personally installed about 40 embedded Z80s a few months ago, as part of some new radio communications gear, does not affect its status as dead.
Slashdot Mirror
When can we see some integration between Miro and UPNP clients like the PS3 and Xbox 360?
I'm fully appreciative of downloading torrents with my 6 down 1 up DSL, which peers in a typical torrent seem to like. I really do like Miro's interface.
But the computer is in the computer room. And the TV and PS3 are in the living room. And while the computer monitor I'm looking at right now is rather nice, I'd rather watch TV on the 52" Samsung while sitting on my couch in the living room.
When are these folks going to start bringing content outside of the PC, so people can sit somewhere more relaxing (or with more people) than in front of a PC?
No, I'd probably be running from those people. I assume that you'd be the guy running down the street yelling "n****r" at the top of his lungs.
And that's where we'll have to agree to disagree. You're afraid of words. I understand; myself, I'm afraid of spiders.
I'm really very sorry.
The timeframe is pretty close - my story happened late in 2004. The network admins in my story were pretty livid as well. (Well, panicked, followed by angry and lividity once they'd found the fault. They blamed everyone, including us for selling them unmanaged switches in their telephones, and promised to find the responsibile party and throw them under the bus. It never happened. I hope that they eventually turned STP on.)
It seems to be common in network administration to think (and I've mistakenly thought this way, too) that once some random person does something stupid and the entire fucking thing crashes that they'd just simply undo whatever it was and never do it again. Nevertheless, if lay people (or, no offense, students) were all that good at networking or computers, they'd probably never have produced the problem to begin with.
These days, in my day job, I work with salespeople and law enforcement. They're not stupid -- in fact, most of the clients I work with do things daily that I could never accomplish -- but they occasionally do stupid things with computers and networks. I try hard to avoid blaming them for what they've done wrong, and to instead try to use it as an opportunity to better (and gently) show them how things actually work.
I learned this, oddly enough, when pulling some Cat5 at a plastics factory. I moved a ceiling tile in an office that had a photo sensor fire alarm in it, and it went off. The entire plant was evacuated. The fire department showed up. Of course, there was no real fire -- the dust from the fiberglass insulation that I'd set the photo sensor on was enough to trigger it. And, thankfully, they were understanding. Because of my mistake, they learned a few weaknesses of their fire alarm system (some employees couldn't hear it and had to be found and dragged outside, which is a very real problem), and they considered it to be a good fire drill. They continue to hire us back for work today, and I learned not to do that again. :)
*sigh*
You didn't read my post. The folks next door were white. My description of them as being niggers was, therefore, not racial.
Words are good. All of them. Some of them are more powerful than others, and some of them are more hurtful than others. But all words (all of them) are good.
We have truly reached a new low in society if wherein it is suggested that one cannot discuss a word if such a discussion involves use of that word. If you, sir, see my discussion of the word "nigger," in pontification of how I learned how not to use the word "nigger," then you sir are as blind and stupid as the bigotry which you seem to attempt to renounce.
So blind, in fact, that you cannot see that I am trying to prevent further abuses of the term. Where are we, kindergarten? Should I really write "n*****" instead of "nigger" on such a liberal forum as Slashdot?
Were you in Salem in 1692, I expect that you'd have been one of the ones in the streets with a torch or a pitchfork.
Naw. Stuff sometimes, yaknow, happens. People sometimes make mistakes, and hardware sometimes just breaks. It's not always ignorance -- especially, I'd guess, at the level of Slashdot's back end.
I once implemented a VoIP phone system at a factory in an evening. (This, in itself, was an undertaking - close to 200 extensions, up and running, between Wednesday at close of business and Thursday when folks started showing up, including three hours on the phone with Sprint to get the PRI and T1 circuits reconfigured at 2:00AM.)
We left, tired and groggy, with an IP phone placed in a common area for the facilities network admins to train any staff who needed training, at about 7:30AM. At 8:30, after I finally got home and managed to close my eyes, my phone rang. It was the network admin. He had a few minor issues which could've waited, but the real problem was that their network was totally fucked: Packets everywhere. No capacity to do anything. An amazing cascading failure of the sort that one hopes to never see.
And it wasn't any hodge-podge network, either. HP Procurve switches configured in a redundant fabric mode with gigabit fiber links - hot stuff or the time, especially for a factory. The wiring was all new, and was all good. The network had been designed specifically to avoid the limitations of Ethernet, and was successful to that end (a non-trivial task in an existing building complex). But it was tripping all over itself.
Turns out that someone had taken that fancy IP phone in the common area with its built-in unmanaged switch, and plugged both of its 10/100 Ethernet jacks into the wall. (Nobody knows who.)
The ensuing packet storm broke everything. Unplugging one of them fixed the problem pretty much immediately.
I wrote about this here once before, and everyone's immediate reply was this: "Well, duh. They should've turned the Spanning Tree Protocol on, and this wouldn't have happened. They're obviously idiots."
But the truth is so much more simple: People make mistakes. It was a mistake to keep STP turned off in that environment, and it was a mistake to plug two fancy ports of a Procurve switch into two dumb ports on an IP phone. Had either of those mistakes not happened, things would've been fine.
But mistakes happen anyway. We do our best, as IT professionals, to minimize these mistakes, or at least keep them away from production. But sometimes, despite having the best people and the best tools and all the knowledge it takes to make stuff work, shit just happens.
What about Centaur/IDT? They were bought by VIA as well, but prior to that they were definitely making inexpensive x86-compatibile chips with the WinChip name.
How did they avoid being sued into oblivion?
Back in the day (yes, you're old -- just look at your UID), a friend of mine gave me a Baby-AT desktop case with an LED display, which he'd been using for awhile.
It was jumpered to say "HI".
This seemed at the time (and indeed now) to be the most useful function of such a thing. I left it that way.
Before Win98, we had Windows 95 OSR2 with USB support. And before that, we had strange kernel options about OHCI controllers that seemed somehow related to a motherboard pin grid header which nobody knew what to do with, and which no hardware was available to work with, but which Intel was pushing along with their chipsets for some seemingly-benign reason . . .
I used to use the word nigger a lot. We had some niggers next door who would do stuff like steal the neighborhood's bikes, occasionally harbor a garage full of strange cars or ATVs, do burnouts in the street, congregate in my back yard, fight dogs in their own, and generally behave in a loud fashion whenever the temperature rose above 75 degrees. Those jobless niggers had a swat team kick their back door in twice in the past year.
Except, generally, the niggers next door where fair skinned with blond hair. There was an occasional black person over there, and the color was never a problem -- the problem was the behavior. Nigger described this better than any other word I could conjure.
I explained this once to a good friend of mine that I've known my entire life, who happens to be a black man who is both better educated than I and who has been around the block a few more times. He told me that, though he appreciated the fact that my use of nigger was not racially descriptive, that it was still an ugly word. I explained to him a bit more about the situation with the niggers next door, and he agreed with me that their behavior is not something that should be socially-acceptable in what is otherwise a very decent neighborhood.
He told me that the a more descriptive and less hurtful term might be that they were doing some gangsta shit, or perhaps that they were up to some nigga shit, but that using nigger, no matter how good my intentions were, was probably the wrong thing to do.
I've been using those terms since, except right now to illustrate a point.
Is my use of the word "nigger" in this post, as a description and pontification of how I learned to better use English, a troll which should be automatically modded down? It's offtopic in an energy discussion, for sure, but I'm not trolling. I'm just relaying a snippet of my life for those who will read it.
For this reason, we need human moderators, not automated an censor.
I'll improve your argument for you, and then proceed to sneeze at it.
You say $500. I say: Let's increase that a little to $2 per day.
I can look at this number, this $2 figure, and know that it's not worth it. Maybe if I lived by myself. But if I have to fight about it with the kids when they don't turn things off, if my wife hates it that the clock on the microwave doesn't work anymore, or that she's got to go and turn the thing on every time she uses it, then what you're suggesting will cost me quite a lot more than $2 in pain on an average day.
Case in point: The exhaust fan in the bathroom costs me a lot more than $2 per day when left running during the winter time, as it pumps a few few hundred CFM per minute of 72-degree air outside, which gets replaced with 0-20 degree air. I value my peace more than I value my money, however, so I don't fight about it when it gets left on by accident. (I'd put a timer on it, which would help, but in the summer, there's no particular reason to ever turn it off. We don't have air conditioning and it helps circulate air and keep humidity down somewhat in the bathroom. The fan itself is pretty efficient. I'm not rewiring my switches twice a year to save a couple of dozens of dollars in the wintertime, though.)
It's also a lot cheaper and more convenient to keep the current wife[1] and kids, than to get different ones. Just as it is to keep my (perfectly functional) non-Energy Star microwave, instead of buying a new one.
[1]: I'll be certain, though, that when the current wife wears out, that the new model will be more energy efficient. Is there a federal mandate on Energy Star labeling for females, yet?
This doesn't help the efficiency of the system[1].
1: I've done this, too, back in the day. Had a big, full-height 15MB MFM ST-419 Seagate drive which I wanted to use along with my (much faster) half-height 20MB Seagate ST-225 drive. Trouble was, the big-ass 15MB drive couldn't spin up and initialize fast enough to satisfy the controller in my XT at boot time. Answer? Another power supply, with its own switch, so I could manually power the full-height drive up before the rest of the system. I scored a full-sized AT power supply which seemed to work OK, but had an issue whereby it would only behave if it were substantially loaded on the 12V line. A friend and I tried to fix it properly, desoldering caps and checking them with a meter, and eventually gave up. The final solution, which worked until that computer was retired, was a pair of sandcast resistors hung right in front of the exhaust fan, loading the 12V rail down enough just enough so that the PSU would still function. Computers haven't been anywhere near as much fun since[2].
2: Kids, these days, with their video card overclocks and SLI RAM. Get off my lawn[3]!
3: I write this from an overclocked SLI 9800GT quad-core SLACR Q6600 Alienware box. Kids, indeed[4].
4: Get off my lawn anyway. :)
I've done this, too.
I was working in a jail on some communications gear. Poor signal quality was killing my phone fast, but I needed to use it (at length, on the phone to the manufacturer) to get this gear working correctly.
The wall-mount charger was at home. I could've left to get it, but instead: I got the car charger from my work truck, just outside, along with a pair of test leads. Plugged the test leads into an available battery (nearly all radio communications stuff is built around a 13.8VDC supply, often with a gel cell battery in parallel for backup power) and clipped them onto the car charger's contacts, and was off to the races with a Bluetooth headset so that I had some mobility.
Worked great.
Wait. Your laptop allows brighter backlighting when plugged in than it does when on battery? IE, your laptop limits your maximum brightness only when on battery?
What model of laptop is this? I'm in the market to replace my ~4-year-old laptop right now, and I want to avoid whatever you have at all costs.
DVD Decryptor hasn't been updated in ages.
It works fine without admin rights. It just that it tries (and fails) to write data to protected (system) directories, apparently to save user preferences at exit. This is bad design -- user preferences should only go into user directories, and these have been pretty well defined since Windows 95.
I don't know what Core Temp is, but if its name is descriptive, it's a gadget that looks at core temps. I don't want users on my systems to be running things which access hardware at the level of directness which it sounds like it wants. So for me, this looks like correct behavior.
Handbrake's profile issue is, again, the same as DVD Decryptor. It's obviously trying to put data in places it shouldn't: Again, user files go into user directories. The rest of the filesystem is for the system.
Rightmark's rmclock program also cannot run without admin under Vista, again for very good reasons: This is a program which can directly manipulate CPU clocks and voltage. I REALLY don't want users doing that.
FWIW.
I live in Ohio, and I have the same issue with most of the area around here (though unlike you, Google Earth is just a fun toy that I'm not trying to do anything particularly useful with).
But: I work with public safety every day. Every county I work with has a dedicated GIS person, or at least someone that they contract with. This system is used to provide photographic maps for the auditor's office, and for the E911 system, and the street department, utilities planning, and so on. Aerial photographs of much of the area are regularly (about annually) updated, and are of rather high resolution and accuracy.
In fact, for my county, such imagery is already available on the auditor's web site.
So, given my level of knowledge, if I had your problem, I'd first begin talking to the county, who I think would be inclined to help a situation like that if they could. Start with the IT person if they have one, since they'll either have a good answer for you (and the truth might be that Google already shows you the best and most recent photos), or be able to direct you to someone who does. And I don't know how Nevada is structured, but if it's anything like Ohio, the next person I'd talk to would be the sheriff or the county commissioners, all of whom are paid and elected public servants. The latter might not be of much direct help, but they'll point you in the right direction and will probably be happy to grease the wheels for you.
I'd be very surprised if, given these steps, you would be unable to find an arrangement which will let you access the photographs that you're interested in, if they exist at all.
It's worse than that.
I installed Quicktime the other day, and got iTunes and the updater along with it.
This, of course, means that in order to put a minimal iTunes install on a PC, one should not install iTunes, but should instead download and install Quicktime. *boggle*
I've had cards erased before.
It's never been clear to me if it was occupational (working with loudspeakers, power supplies, and radio transmitters) or if they've worn out over time from normal use, but I've certainly had the magstripe on my bank card fail. Not a big deal, usually -- merchants can still key in the numbers manually, and some still have the old-school carbon paper credit card machines as backup.
So my fear (which doesn't even matter since I'm not in Utah) is that folks would find, one day, that their perfectly working card doesn't function anymore. And if it's required to work, then that presents a problem when people can't buy the things which they'd otherwise be legally entitled to have.
On the other hand, I make a point of erasing my Ohio license with a strong neodymium magnet whenever I get a new one. I can't stand it when merchants scan my license as proof that I'm old enough to be buying whatever it is that I'm buying. The reason is simple: I'm paying cash, and there's nothing that they need other than proof that I'm old enough. I don't trust them to dispose of my drivers license number properly, or to not feed a demographics database with it.
Mythbusters did a lousy job, because their samples were too pristine, and too few.
Over here in reality, people do play street hockey with their CDs, and then put them into the computer. The scratches and cracks which occur on disks that people actually use are stress relief points for the polycarbonate to shatter on.
Ever try to punch through a plexiglass window? I have. It's frustrating as all hell, until you score a big X into it with a knife or a rock or something, and then it becomes very easy.
My father in law had a disk break in his PC about a year ago, and called me asking for help tearing it apart to clean up the mess inside. (Surprisingly, the drive recovered just fine.)
And none of this is to mention disks which are also out of balance. I've had old audio CDs which, when used in a PC, were so unbalanced I felt certain that something would break. The sides of the case would rattle, the plastic at the front would vibrate like mad, so on, so forth.
Combine these problems and spin the disk at around 10,000 RPM, and things do sometimes (though certainly not very often) get interesting.
There are many, many embedded devices on non-x86 platforms. Routers, phones, TVs, compute blades, etc. There are probably hundreds of thousands (or maybe higher, I don't have good numbers) of developers working on these devices....how does that qualify as "dead"?
You act as if I live in a bubble.
I have an iPod Touch hacked and running an ssh server under its Darwin kernel on my desk, with its ARM chip pulling the weight, which is far faster and has far more RAM and storage than the first computer I ran Linux on. I have a WRT54G in the wiring closet in my house, running a very customized distribution of Linux on its MIPS core from a SD card. I even have an iMac G3 running Ubuntu. My old cable TV box had a dual-core Sparc chip. My current Uverse box is, if I recall, a fast ARM-based platform. And, as I write this, I'm shuffling data in preparation for installing PPC Linux on my PS3, just for fun.
None of these, nor an IBM Power6, are modern desktop computers. They, simply, don't count in the argument that I was attempting to make.
PPC is dead.
That's not precisely true.
I was in the US Army once, for about four months. (My contractual commitment was four years active, four years reserve.)
It's possible, though not easy or straight-forward, to leave (or be removed from) the military -- without judicial consequence.
Of course, it goes down on your permanent record, and will show up on background checks and such. But: This hasn't stopped me from having clearance in sensitive military manufacturing facilities as a private sector contractor, working on -- of all things -- security systems.
(I'd post this anon, but anyone who would care about it already knows.)
Thanks for the vote of confidence.
Trouble is, there's a big part of me that wants simplicity. I could go to work in a factory, building tires all day or something, and come home feeling like I'd accomplished nothing but earn a paycheck (which might be quite well enough). Or, I could continue what I'm doing, both unable to say no to a task and completely able to master it given enough time, feeling most days like I've accomplished little. See, it takes time to switch between tower jockey and systems integrator. It takes time to stop thinking about IP camera woes, and move onto IP telephony duties. It takes time to go from maintaining the Gentoo mail server and working with networks, to dealing with a public safety dispatch console with transmit problems.
A tire builder only has to worry about building tires all day. My days are seldom so well scripted. I talk to people, and they all submit that they'd love to be able to different things every day, but having never experienced it I don't think they really understand the human mental difficulties in doing so.
On the other hand, I'd probably be totally unsatisfied building tires all day. I'm sure that within a week on such a job, I'd get in trouble with the union for not just doing my job, but for fixing machines and improving processes. It seems like I'm doomed to a life of always-changing goals and endeavors.
*sigh*
Fuck 'em. I don't really think there's anyone else in the world who can match my skillset at so many different things.
At the end of the day, they could employ several specialists, or one generalist named Adolf. So here I am...
Perl only covers 75 sq km.
That's really interesting.
But, it goes like this: We work for public safety (mostly law enforcement), and a little bit of military. There isn't any (current) local competition for the things that we do, and it's impractical for them to hire work from far away (when things break, they need fixing NOW, not after someone manages to drive for a few hours to get there). When times turn tough, crime increases, and public safety budgets increase.
Then, they buy more stuff from us. We're about as recession-proof as a technical service company could be.
I can't run Firefox on a PPC chip on a modern desktop computer.
Therefore, it's dead. There's no reason to include embedded and specialty markets when discussing the death of a platform. I mean, really: The Zilog Z80 has been dead for about as long as the TRS-80 has been. That I personally installed about 40 embedded Z80s a few months ago, as part of some new radio communications gear, does not affect its status as dead.