Analogy fail fail, fail: In the transaction you specify, there are just two parties: A party consisting of McDonald's, and a party consisting of both Dude and an unnamed individual.
We go on Slashdot from repeating that IT is like a janitor's job, to discussions about the idiosyncrasies of different databases and the specialties required therein.
Is there a middleground wherein an IT janitor can do his job AND properly maintain a database? Because that seems the question.
The vendor/author/distribution/licensing of that database seems irrelevant.
Now that you've lectured me on the difference between impedance and resistance (which is not something I'm confused about), perhaps you'll care to explain why it's "much harder" to drive a low-impedance speaker in a system designed to do nothing but that.
Actually, that's one thing Bose did get right with speakers: Making them all sound about the same.
I don't particularly like that sound, but it is what it is.
Meanwhile, there's nothing wrong with 1 Ohm speakers, except for the fact that they seem to be the only ones doing it. Really. If nothing else, it can simplify the power supply of the amplifier by reducing the voltage on the rails.
And if you wanted to, you could have easily-enough used some transformers to convert that 1-Ohm nominal impedance to whatever suited your fancy.
I mean, it's an upgraded factory stereo. They've been making these difficult to upgrade for twenty+ years, and it normally doesn't matter: Most folks who tick the "please sell me a bad-sounding $2500 stereo" box on the dealer order sheet will never do anything different with it.
I'll keep that in mind as I continue to not buy or specify HP products for a myriad of other reasons.
(That they killed Alpha and whatever was decent about Compaq was already sufficient. Nevermind the fact that their laptops are the least-service-friendly machines I've ever laid a screwdriver on. Or the crazy bullshit computers that I've wasted countless man-days troubleshooting unique problems on in the late 90s. Or the home-oriented desktops they once built which were impossible to open the case on without subjecting them to severe punishment. I don't care if they're "better now," especially now that it seems plain that they're getting worse: I never bought 'em, never will.)
(Hay! Without HPAQ/DEC/MSFT's misgivings, we could have been doing the 64-bit OS dance fifteen years ago and had it all settled out long before now! Instead, Windows 8 still comes in a 32-bit incarnation.....)
The most recent statement from HP, following another warning from Technion, admitted that 'all HP StoreVirtual Storage systems are equipped with a mechanism that allows HP support to access the underlying operating system if permission and access is provided by the customer.' While HP describes the backdoors as being usable only with permission of the customer, that restriction is part of HP's own customer-service rulesâ"not a limitation built in to limit use of backdoors.
Without reading TFA, which I expect to be even more sensationalist crap:
I grok this to mean that a backdoor exists for customer service, which can be activated by a customer (by two factors: permission and network access), and that without action on the part of the customer, said backdoor is closed.
Did I miss something?
If so, please synopsize in non-sensationalist terms.
Indeed, whatever the case: Please post a not-purposefully-scary summary of the actual problem below, because right now it sounds a whole lot like the not-backdoor that Remote Assistance is under Windows.
The people are demanding that. The politicians are claiming that the people are demanding that.
(I assume this is a typo or an error of omission, and that you meant for there to be an aren't in there somewhere.)
You haven't heard the friendly, give-you-the-shirt-off-their-back folks I know who rail against "them Muslims." They live in the midwest and don't really do anything but work every day, live simple lives, and go to church on Sunday. They seldom leave the county for anything, let alone the state or country.
The anti-terrorist tactics don't affect them at all because they're completely unexposed to them. But terrorism (at least as a concept) is a threat to their simple and repetitive lifestyle (not that there is a single thing wrong with being simple and repetitive) so they're vehemently against that, at any expense, especially if it does not affect them.
These people (they are my friends and my neighbors) also vote. It's not that they don't care about freedom -- they're usually a very patriotic bunch -- but that they can't or won't see how their fellow countryman's freedom is also their responsibility.
*shrug*
(You wanna borrow a pickup truck or a trailer or a power tool or a ladder or need a place to stay for awhile? You want help swapping out a transmission or moving heavy things from A to B? These are your people, no questions asked. And they just don't see that the terrorists have won -- the win does not affect them.)
The distinction isnt subtle.
To be honest, I think it is a bit subtle. Fortunately for the distinction itself, English allows for it to be both subtle and profound.
GTE was going to have to pay almost $25k to get the line to them
[...]
These days, this exact same couple would be able to pay $40 to $80 a month to get a cell phone. The tower will be a couple of hills over, with a microwave feed back to the home network and a small diesel generator on-site. For the cost of one phone line, an entire area can get phone and internet service.
Where can I buy a tower, a two points worth of microwave gear, a pile of appropriate cell-phone back-end radios, a shelter, appropriate coax/heliax/waveguide and connectors, appropriate antennas, real estate, and a small diesel generator for "almost $25k?"
(And nevermind site selection, propagation studies, FCC licensing, a crew to install and configure it all, and getting power to it, unless it's just going to run on diesel, in which case it needs regular diesel deliveries and vastly increased maintenance.)
"almost $25k," really? If you can get it all done for that price, there's no reason in the world why you'd not be a very rich man. (Except for that whole sparse-population limited-market problem that is the subject of TFA, which might make even "almost $25k" waaaay too expensive in terms of return-on-investment.)
In terms of hardware I'm pretty sure it's down, there used to be a lot more to tinkering with your PC. Today you grab a motherboard, slap in a quad core, single high end gaming card, 16GB RAM and a SSD and call it pretty much done for a moderate enthusiast build.
Yeah, just like you used to buy a 386 board, slap in a CPU, a multi-IO card, some manner of video card, as much RAM as you could afford or make use of, and the largest IDE hard drive that you could get your wallet around. If you liked games or making music, you also installed a sound card.
And...done. You turned it on, defined the hardware in BIOS, and it worked.
Even in ISA world (prior to Plug-and-Pray), the default settings of most hardware was generally fine for a normal computer (such as that described above) and things tended to just plug in and work (with a driver or two, perhaps).
Unless, of course, you got hysterical about it: I, for one, was certainly overclocking RAM and CPUs and ISA buses in the 386 days, futzing with RAM drives and expansion cards to improve disk performance, and using cleverness to get as much RAM as possible into a machine, and playing with interrupt and IO assignment in a bizarre and zero-sum game to see how many serial ports I could reliably get working on one machine at one time using commodity hardware.
I still do all of this today, sometimes including the serial port game. I just do it with newer different hardware.
The only meaningful difference between is that what used to be configured with jumpers is now configured with menus, and some of the mundanity of telling the computer what hardware it has installed is taken care of on my behalf.
Yes, modding, rooting, etc the phone means it *can* run a later release. Just because there are some people who are technically capable of installing it via a manual process the masses can not and will not. What percent of the population is technically capable of performing this task? Less than 1%? Maybe 1%? That means almost every older phone out there will never have the patch that fixes this security vulnerability.
*shrug*
Back when I was a kid, people upgraded their own computers: From MS-DOS 3.3 to MS-DOS 5, from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.
They usually even got it right. I'm pretty sure the Mac and Amiga usually got it right, too.
You think that just because it's an Android pocket computer, that people can't get it right? Hogwash. I have (albeit only slightly) more faith in folks than that.
The problem, I think, is that there weren't any books per se to begin with: Everything is tabulated with a computer, and the computer is wrong.
And when the computer is off by tens of thousands of pounds/dollars/whatever: OMFG.
But lying? No. Telling the truth is good, especially when it comes to official money. "I don't know what's happening because we're off by a huge amount of money, far more than we could ever accomplish in a day's business" is a good starting point.
(Just because the books are already cooked by some outside force, does not mean that one must continue to cook them.)
Yes, this was very asshole of me, but it goes to show where is a will, there is a way.
In what way were you being an asshole? Someone (or something) was trying to defraud you, and you stood your ground and made them (or it) stop. That's not being an asshole; that's merely being responsible.
I seem to have a vehement argument toward using CDs and perhaps DVDs stored in normal firesafes.
But more to the point: Maybe you should realize that this is Slashdot, where free thought is both encouraged and argued against using science and experience, and FUD is actively dismantled. I'd have thought, given your 5-digit UID, that you'd have understood that by now.
Maybe you should give your UID back to the person you bought it from?
Slashdot Mirror
Analogy fail fail, fail: In the transaction you specify, there are just two parties: A party consisting of McDonald's, and a party consisting of both Dude and an unnamed individual.
And there will continue to be, as long as 32-bit operating systems are available.
The question is this: Is it your logic that is circular, or is it mine?
We go on Slashdot from repeating that IT is like a janitor's job, to discussions about the idiosyncrasies of different databases and the specialties required therein.
Is there a middleground wherein an IT janitor can do his job AND properly maintain a database? Because that seems the question.
The vendor/author/distribution/licensing of that database seems irrelevant.
Now that you've lectured me on the difference between impedance and resistance (which is not something I'm confused about), perhaps you'll care to explain why it's "much harder" to drive a low-impedance speaker in a system designed to do nothing but that.
Actually, that's one thing Bose did get right with speakers: Making them all sound about the same.
I don't particularly like that sound, but it is what it is.
Meanwhile, there's nothing wrong with 1 Ohm speakers, except for the fact that they seem to be the only ones doing it. Really. If nothing else, it can simplify the power supply of the amplifier by reducing the voltage on the rails.
And if you wanted to, you could have easily-enough used some transformers to convert that 1-Ohm nominal impedance to whatever suited your fancy.
I mean, it's an upgraded factory stereo. They've been making these difficult to upgrade for twenty+ years, and it normally doesn't matter: Most folks who tick the "please sell me a bad-sounding $2500 stereo" box on the dealer order sheet will never do anything different with it.
OK. So let's just dismember the standing army, and see if anything happens.
I'm game for the experiment.
Are you?
Yes, that.
Interestingly, I just acquired a Dell laptop from the same lineage as the "clean the fans" song.
There is a cover on the bottom, removable with one screw. Beneath is the heatsink. Just beyond is the fan.
The heatsink itself is copper, and can be easily removed, cleaned/rinsed/whatever, and reinstalled.
Yay.
Sweet! Thanks.
I'll keep that in mind as I continue to not buy or specify HP products for a myriad of other reasons.
(That they killed Alpha and whatever was decent about Compaq was already sufficient. Nevermind the fact that their laptops are the least-service-friendly machines I've ever laid a screwdriver on. Or the crazy bullshit computers that I've wasted countless man-days troubleshooting unique problems on in the late 90s. Or the home-oriented desktops they once built which were impossible to open the case on without subjecting them to severe punishment. I don't care if they're "better now," especially now that it seems plain that they're getting worse: I never bought 'em, never will.)
(Hay! Without HPAQ/DEC/MSFT's misgivings, we could have been doing the 64-bit OS dance fifteen years ago and had it all settled out long before now! Instead, Windows 8 still comes in a 32-bit incarnation.....)
Dear sir, I do believe that you are an idiot. Good luck with your island, lest they with the bigger guns take it from you.
Without reading TFA, which I expect to be even more sensationalist crap:
I grok this to mean that a backdoor exists for customer service, which can be activated by a customer (by two factors: permission and network access), and that without action on the part of the customer, said backdoor is closed.
Did I miss something?
If so, please synopsize in non-sensationalist terms.
Indeed, whatever the case: Please post a not-purposefully-scary summary of the actual problem below, because right now it sounds a whole lot like the not-backdoor that Remote Assistance is under Windows.
(I assume this is a typo or an error of omission, and that you meant for there to be an aren't in there somewhere.)
You haven't heard the friendly, give-you-the-shirt-off-their-back folks I know who rail against "them Muslims." They live in the midwest and don't really do anything but work every day, live simple lives, and go to church on Sunday. They seldom leave the county for anything, let alone the state or country.
The anti-terrorist tactics don't affect them at all because they're completely unexposed to them. But terrorism (at least as a concept) is a threat to their simple and repetitive lifestyle (not that there is a single thing wrong with being simple and repetitive) so they're vehemently against that, at any expense, especially if it does not affect them.
These people (they are my friends and my neighbors) also vote. It's not that they don't care about freedom -- they're usually a very patriotic bunch -- but that they can't or won't see how their fellow countryman's freedom is also their responsibility.
*shrug*
(You wanna borrow a pickup truck or a trailer or a power tool or a ladder or need a place to stay for awhile? You want help swapping out a transmission or moving heavy things from A to B? These are your people, no questions asked. And they just don't see that the terrorists have won -- the win does not affect them.)
To be honest, I think it is a bit subtle. Fortunately for the distinction itself, English allows for it to be both subtle and profound.
Yes.
So can solitude.
But I like roads, bridges, and military protection.
That's more than 1 horsepower, on average, for sixty seconds.
(I'm sure his lady-friends enjoy his, uh, company.)
As any person who has been married for any significant length of time can tell you:
Yes, it can be difficult. It can also be worthwhile.
[...]
Where can I buy a tower, a two points worth of microwave gear, a pile of appropriate cell-phone back-end radios, a shelter, appropriate coax/heliax/waveguide and connectors, appropriate antennas, real estate, and a small diesel generator for "almost $25k?"
(And nevermind site selection, propagation studies, FCC licensing, a crew to install and configure it all, and getting power to it, unless it's just going to run on diesel, in which case it needs regular diesel deliveries and vastly increased maintenance.)
"almost $25k," really? If you can get it all done for that price, there's no reason in the world why you'd not be a very rich man. (Except for that whole sparse-population limited-market problem that is the subject of TFA, which might make even "almost $25k" waaaay too expensive in terms of return-on-investment.)
Yeah, just like you used to buy a 386 board, slap in a CPU, a multi-IO card, some manner of video card, as much RAM as you could afford or make use of, and the largest IDE hard drive that you could get your wallet around. If you liked games or making music, you also installed a sound card.
And...done. You turned it on, defined the hardware in BIOS, and it worked.
Even in ISA world (prior to Plug-and-Pray), the default settings of most hardware was generally fine for a normal computer (such as that described above) and things tended to just plug in and work (with a driver or two, perhaps).
Unless, of course, you got hysterical about it: I, for one, was certainly overclocking RAM and CPUs and ISA buses in the 386 days, futzing with RAM drives and expansion cards to improve disk performance, and using cleverness to get as much RAM as possible into a machine, and playing with interrupt and IO assignment in a bizarre and zero-sum game to see how many serial ports I could reliably get working on one machine at one time using commodity hardware.
I still do all of this today, sometimes including the serial port game. I just do it with newer different hardware.
The only meaningful difference between is that what used to be configured with jumpers is now configured with menus, and some of the mundanity of telling the computer what hardware it has installed is taken care of on my behalf.
*shrug*
It may be.
No, I mean trick. Though it's a trap might be an appropriate footnote.
[Yes, this is a trick question.]
*ahem*
The poor guy at the help desk: Was he, or was he not representing the company?
*shrug*
Back when I was a kid, people upgraded their own computers: From MS-DOS 3.3 to MS-DOS 5, from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.
They usually even got it right. I'm pretty sure the Mac and Amiga usually got it right, too.
You think that just because it's an Android pocket computer, that people can't get it right? Hogwash. I have (albeit only slightly) more faith in folks than that.
The problem, I think, is that there weren't any books per se to begin with: Everything is tabulated with a computer, and the computer is wrong.
And when the computer is off by tens of thousands of pounds/dollars/whatever: OMFG.
But lying? No. Telling the truth is good, especially when it comes to official money. "I don't know what's happening because we're off by a huge amount of money, far more than we could ever accomplish in a day's business" is a good starting point.
(Just because the books are already cooked by some outside force, does not mean that one must continue to cook them.)
In what way were you being an asshole? Someone (or something) was trying to defraud you, and you stood your ground and made them (or it) stop. That's not being an asshole; that's merely being responsible.
Eh?
I seem to have a vehement argument toward using CDs and perhaps DVDs stored in normal firesafes.
But more to the point: Maybe you should realize that this is Slashdot, where free thought is both encouraged and argued against using science and experience, and FUD is actively dismantled. I'd have thought, given your 5-digit UID, that you'd have understood that by now.
Maybe you should give your UID back to the person you bought it from?