It took a few days, but I checked: There is no such nomenclature on the doors of either of the two McDonald's restaurants in my town.
They are, therefore, McDonald's. Period. Because that's who they do business as, according to all visible signage. And if I sue one of them, I will be sueing "McDonalds, 2042 Central Ave."
Relying on "fire safes" that are stored on-site is pretty silly anyway unless you have a concrete building with sprinklers. Given the ease of moving it off site, the cheapest solution is off-site backup.
Oh, and also: I rely on a paid fire department staffed 24x7 to provide sprinklers on-demand. Houses here never, ever burn to the ground, and the blaze is always contained in short order. These guys get from dead-sleep to trucks-rolling in a couple of minutes, and my house itself is 3 minutes from the main station: That's a long time in terms of general destruction, but not in terms of a typical fire safe.
It's not cheap, but I pay for it whether I use it or not. I might as well rely on it.
(Or, if data is the only important thing in the house and other belongings are simply material, a sprinkler head installed above the fire safe is a safe bet. PEX is cheap and easy, and sprinkler heads are cheap as well. And once it's paid for, it's done. But continually moving data off-site is cumulative and never-ending.)
125F? Why 125F? Is that temperature magic, somehow? I mean: CDs in my car don't die in temperatures well above 125F on a hot sunny day with the windows closed... Even as a test, not long after I got a CD burner, I kept a few CDs on the rear deck of my car, unprotected, for a couple of years. They worked fine when I declared that the experiment was over.
Would a magnetic tape survive? Maybe, depending on the Curie point. But CDs aren't magnetic tape, and I strongly suspect that the 125F temperature is based upon the fragility of rust -- not compact discs or DVDs.
A friend of mine's house burned once. (It was a disaster for his belongings, but he and his family were fine, and the house recovered after a thorough gutting. Not so much luck for the dog and the fish.)
In his office was a wire rack of CDs in jewel cases: Data CDs, audio CDs, whatever CDs.
Many of these had the paper liner inserts badly degraded, and the jewel cases melted into strange shapes. The fire department had created a vent in his computer room, with the goal of exhausting the heat of the fire through that space: I have no idea how hot it was there, but just down the stairs from there the fire marshal said that things were hot enough for the couch to have burned by flashover alone.
The housings for his monitors and computers were limp and sagging.
The CDs themselves? Fine. All of them. A bit of soap and water to clean the soot off, and they worked great. Every single one of them worked fine. I started the process of duping them on my then-high-tech Plextor gear as an archival measure, only to realize that there was no need: There weren't any reported errors, and the reads were fast (indicative of a very low BER).
I stopped working on duping them, bought him some new jewel cases, and just cleaned up the rest and gave them back to him. No problems.
UL standards for fire safes designed to keep paper are 350 degrees F and rated in hours, and the glass transition temperature of polycarbonate is about 297 F. Simply cut the hour-rating in half, and you've got a conservative estimate for what it will take to keep CDs readable in a fire.
Proof? Easy. Fire up the oven, set it to an actual 290-or-so degrees, put a CD on the rack supported by the center ring, wait for awhile, and see if it's readable.
Anyone with a few extra blanks and a few hours time can test it easily enough.
I use two Luks-encrypted backups that I can take and leave at work. Becasue it is encrypted, I don't need to worry about it being compromised at work or in transit. I have two of these so that one is always out of my house.
It seems that it might be better to have at least three backups, that way you can have one that is local to the data, one that is in transit, and one that it remote. At no time must all three copies be in the same place at the same time in normal use.
Because with just two, you have times when all backups (all both of them) are in the same place at the same time. Which means trouble, potentially, since whatever event capable of destroying one will most assuredly also destroy the other....unless you count the data itself as being the third copy, which is a lot like more like trusting RAID than a good backup regimen: A live, spinning filesystem is not a backup, and can blow up at any time.
(And, with an extra backup set, you automatically get more versioning, which is often a nice thing to have.)
I once made some business cards on a Laserjet III, and shoved a stack of them into my wallet. The printing chipped off pretty quickly, but then maybe the old (though new-ish at the time) printer wasn't able to compensate properly for the heavy stock. (Subsequent iterations of my business card have been wet-offset printed, which of course works fine.)
As a more recent anecdote, I get my paychecks mailed to me from a town 40 miles away, packaged in plain double-window envelopes. There is often an image transferred to the inside of the plastic windows, and that's just from being handled and bundled for a day or three.
And nevermind how easily a bit of soft vinyl can grab onto and lift toner, just sitting together in close contact.
All that said, though: Printing documents and putting them in the firesafe, where they're not jostled, the humidity is reasonably constant, it is always dark, and they're amongst their laser-printed peers instead of stuck against plastic or being abused in a sweaty wallet? Probably absolutely fine, at least within the confines of the lifetime of the Asker.:)
I'd print it all out using Paperback, along with a human-readable copy, put it all inside of a manilla envelope or file folder, and call it a day.
If I am handing out a business card, then I am handing it out to someone for their address book. I am not giving a business card, then saying "Oh, now could I have that back, because it is the only one I have with me."
I think you somehow managed to miss the entire fucking point, AC.
A QR code on personalized business card, wherein that QR code contains contact information for the person handing it to you (not a link to that information, but the information itself), is fantastic.
In my own use-case, I can snap the QR code and quickly and effortlessly add the information address book on my phone, which updates all of the other stuff I have which has an address book.
At that point, the card is totally useless to me. I might as well hand it back, where it can be directly reused, because otherwise I'm just going to toss it into the nearest waste bin.
Of course the person handing it to me isn't going to ask for it back -- they gave it to me, and I can do what I want with it -- I can keep it, stomp on it, turn it into a little airplane, wad it up and throw it, file it in my wallet, or, you know, just give it back when I'm done.
But I don't want to go down the rabbit hole. I don't get paid for that. And I don't know how that's useful to me.
Things I care about:
Troubleshooting a digital Astro or P.25 system on 700/800MHz? Check.
2.4GHz Wifi? You betcha.
Unlicensed 5.4/5.7GHz? Sure. Lots of spectrum there, but gotta avoid weather Doppler radar for parts of it, depending on orientation.
~60GHz microwave links? Ugh, because the alignment is contingent (literally) on time of day and phase of moon, but, sure: A solid full-duplex 1Gbps Ethernet link between points without wires or optics sure is nifty.
VHF FM for public safety voice paging? Absolutely: I get the volunteer firemen where they're going, just as I do with EMS squads.
Broadcast VHF FM radio in my car? Sure: I get annoyed when I can't get NPR properly, when I'm driving long distances during a time when All Things Considered is aired.
~1MHz AM? No. Don't really care -- nobody is going to pay me for that, and I don't want to hear it anyway. It's just interesting that 1330kHz is notched out so appropriately, corresponding to a local AM transmitter, using VDSL gear that I've had in-place for several years.
Right now, worst-case, with any manner of STB (including a PS3 or an Android widget): I can turn on all of the appropriate gear, select an album/playlist/podcast/whatever, play it, and turn the TV back off.
The music continues.
So I guess I don't care if a modern TV can grok FLAK and OGG, if I have to keep the expensive (in terms of lifetime and energy) display running during that time. I'd rather get a cheaper TV, with the same LCD panel (and color gamut and viewing angle and refresh rate and contrast ratio), without the extra stuff that I won't use..
I'll still need a device to work with OGG and FLAC and MKV and [...], but that's now independent of my display device.
But, you know, that might just be me: For my home theater, I have a preamp and a bunch of amplifiers. I've always been a fan of separates. Even my desktop PC has a good soundcard feeding an active crossover feeding a pair of amplifiers, with one of them driving the subwoofer and the other the satellites.
Some people buy simplicity over and over again; I strive to complicate it from the beginning and simplify as I go.
As an anecdote: One of my primary clients has a number of cell phone stores. I used to be able to raid their junk bin for old Android devices and I'd come up with at least a couple of "whole" phones during each raid. (Obviously broken screen on one handset + one that doesn't power up == one "whole" phone, plus or minus some wrenching.) Sometimes, I'd even be able to score a phone that actually worked, didn't need any wrenching, and actually had a useable battery...though I always wondered why it was that such a device ended up in the junk bin to begin with.
Lately, within the past year, there have been zero whole Android phones.
I'll ask the next time I'm in there, but I strongly suspect that these devices are being traded to another party for pennies on the dollar. And since it's all Verizon, which is CDMA at heart and really not very useful in very many other, less fortunate countries: I really think they're just being scrapped.
I was once tasked with hauling gasoline up 12 flights of stairs to fuel a generator for a LEO repeater that was down due to a power outage caused by a ridiculous, one-in-a-few-lifetimes flood.
Yeah, I did pretty good at getting that done -- especially with the small, efficient Honda Inverter generator we had up there at first. But when the Honda died after a couple of days, and the gasoline-hauling sessions went from about 0.75 times per day to three times a day because the only available replacement generator was both huge and thirsty, nobody was harmed when the repeater would drop because I was delayed en-route*.
Indeed: They had other (simplex) channels they could talk on, and worst-case, every LEO had a cell phone.
*: What, you think it's easy getting from dry ground out-of-town to a repeater location that is in the river valley and surrounded by water? Nevermind a working place to buy gasoline to begin with. It was hard work getting that done, and the sleep deprivation didn't help any.
**: As an unreferenced footnote, it's not that any of this matters. It seems that Detroit suffered a central dispatch failure. And in that instance, depending on the pervasiveness of that failed system, it might have been impossible to look up a cell phone number.
In a Motorola Astro trunked radio system, a loss of connectivity puts that site ("tower") into site-trunking mode.
There are still talkgroups. Everything still works as usual. What doesn't work is communications between sites.
But people within earshot of that site can still talk amongst themselves. And units can still talk in simplex amongst eachother, in talk-around form, from radio to radio.
Stand-by backup site? That's just wasted bandwidth and infrastructure, at least in terms of how Ohio MARCS is arranged. There may be backup antennas, and back up repeaters, but whole sites? Nope.
What's -supposed to happen- is that a truck/trailer rolls out, fully equipped to handle a single site failure, and works intermediate communication from that point using humans. This keeps the otherwise-affected police policing, the ambulances ambulatory, and the fire trucks trucking.
Meanwhile, a cellphone rings, which sets of a chain of other cell phones, which introduce a slew of tired radio techs into the mix to make things work again post-haste.
But what happened in Detroit seems to have been a failure of central dispatch, not any sort of repeater malfunction. Which is a different problem entirely. (In Ohio, we have backup agencies who can handle dispatching for neighboring agencies that have centralized problems. But Detroit? I don't work on Detroit's stuff, so that's not my fault.)
Where are the other vendors? They're out there bidding too.
You mean, vendors like Avtec? Whose Ethernet interfaces take a permanent shit over minor grounding issues? (Ethernet. Grounding issue. Multiple recurrent permanent failures. Turn that over in your head for a minute, and get back with me about how impossible that all must be.)
Or do you mean Orbacom/IPC/Positron, whose IO boards go to out to lunch periodically and need resetting? (The immediate response from support was "Can't you just have someone push the reset button?" and I'm all like: Yeah, sure I can. We'll just have the customer hire a four new guys to push the button in shifts.)
Perhaps you mean Telex, where things just silently stop working?
Or maybe you mean Zetron, where nobody ever needs anything better than an 8088 to get anything done? You want to take about interface issues?
Yeah, sure: Motorola stuff breaks. So does everything else.
In other news, both Dell and HP make computer systems that are simultaneously awesome and variously lousy, and even a well-serviced BMW or Toyota can leave you stranded.
Indeed. It seems like a contractual error, more than anything else: Motorola (for various incarnations of "Motorola") apparently didn't make sure that their failsafe arrangement actually would fail safe, even though they were paid in advance to do so.
(Disclaimer: I work with Motorola communications, dispatch, and radio systems in public safety use. It seems to generally be quite good gear, but it fails just like anything else. And, sometimes, testing is a logistic nightmare...but if I'm paid to do it, I (myself) get it done, just as I would ensure that the backup routine for $random_server can actually be used to restore the box to a useful state.)
Old Android phones are getting more scarce, at a time when they should be plentiful and cheap.
There is even an automated, vending-machine style kiosk at the mall, here, which eats phones and pays money for them.
Where do these devices go? One theory suggests that they're refurbished and resold. Another (which I personally favor) suggests that they're paid by carriers to get old phones off the market, thus (hopefully!) eliminating the used market for useful "old" phones, and that the devices themselves end up being scrapped for metal recovery.
in reality i just want a monitor with a remote to turn it on and off. I don't use the tuner. I don't change the input source. It's all through my receiver and cable box. If anything, I want a dumb tv.
(Also: Context. Sometimes it even lets you answer your own questions.)
My favored VPN provider takes bitcoin. I guess I'll now have to find out, kicking and screaming, exactly how to turn real money into bitcoin so I can buy service with it.
You may have written checks and not been aware of it.
Do you use your bank/credit union's online bill payment? If the place (or person) you're sending money to isn't hooked in with ACS or some other newfangled electronic system, they just print a check with your name on it and mail it out.
(How do I know this? Because I have received such checks from both people and businesses for services I've rendered. They look a little funny, and have way too many words on them, but they turn into cash just fine.)
If the walls are already up, and the phone wiring already exists, and none of it is Cat-anything: Put the DSLAM (or whatever) in a closet, just like you would a gigabit switch.
And done.
Sure, it costs money. But so does any other chunk of infrastructure that people are willing to pay for.
(Also: Cat6 is unnecessary for the gigabit standard that we commonly use today, 802.3ab, which says you can go 100 meters on Cat5. Even Cat5e is overkill. Cat6? Meh.)
My VDSL link from AT&T already does noise measurement. Buried inside of the web page for the magic box on my end, I can see a graph of what portions of its spectrum it is actually using.
Seems to work OK: There is a very neat notch which corresponds with a nearby AM broadcast tower.
Meanwhile, it doesn't have to turn off the entire signal all at once. Just parts of it. One end says "Hey, George, we're going to turn off 1.6MHz and look for noise there," and the other end says "OK Bob. Let's do it."
I feel sorry for my son because his girlfriend comes over just sits on her phone every second texting and posting to facebook eventually he gets bored and goes to play the xbox. She doesn't even notice and will still just sit there texting and posting on facebook until she leaves. If I was him I would break up with her on facebook while she was sitting right next to me and ignoring me.
That's just the behavior that you see. Perhaps it is an entirely different game when there isn't anyone else around. (I was young once, too.)
Car analogy fail: If I want a Nissan, I don't have to buy it from a Nissan dealer. I can buy one from my neighbor or from Craigslist or Ebay or whatever. There is a clear delineation in the layman's mind between Nissan (the manufacturer) and Nissan (some random dealer).
McDonald's does not have such a clear distinction: I can't buy aftermarket, OEM-quality parts for a Big Mac. I can't buy box of McDonald's fish fillets from a distributor. And I'm certainly not going to pay money for a used McChicken.
Nissan, however, will gleefully sell me a brand new engine, all by itself, as long as I'm able to pony up the cash for it. It will be handled just as any other transaction at a Nissan dealer's parts counter for any other special-order item.
Furthermore, car dealers are very prominent in proclaiming who it is that is responsible for the dealership: There is a big sign by the road that says something like Middletown Nissan, and it is clear that this is a different establishment than Bob's Nissan.
McDonald's? The signs just say McDonald's. The receipts just say McDonald's. How would a layperson know any different? They've done a very good job of cloaking the fact that their restaurants are operating franchisees, and purposefully instilling consistency amongst them, to such an extent that a common person shouldn't be able to tell the difference.
So, yeah: In common parlance, it ought to be acceptable to state that McDonald's was sued. If anything, it is simply an error of being imprecise, but I do not think it is any more incorrect than Xerox(tm)'ing a document on a non-Xerox machine, calling a non-Band-Aid-brand adhesive bandage a "Band-Aid," or reaching for a box of Kleenex(tm) -- even if the box says Puffs on it.
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It took a few days, but I checked: There is no such nomenclature on the doors of either of the two McDonald's restaurants in my town.
They are, therefore, McDonald's. Period. Because that's who they do business as, according to all visible signage. And if I sue one of them, I will be sueing "McDonalds, 2042 Central Ave."
Srsly.
I might, as well. But first, I'm going to read the QR code, unless I'm trying to prove a point about just how lousy the vendor must be.
Oh, and also: I rely on a paid fire department staffed 24x7 to provide sprinklers on-demand. Houses here never, ever burn to the ground, and the blaze is always contained in short order. These guys get from dead-sleep to trucks-rolling in a couple of minutes, and my house itself is 3 minutes from the main station: That's a long time in terms of general destruction, but not in terms of a typical fire safe.
It's not cheap, but I pay for it whether I use it or not. I might as well rely on it.
(Or, if data is the only important thing in the house and other belongings are simply material, a sprinkler head installed above the fire safe is a safe bet. PEX is cheap and easy, and sprinkler heads are cheap as well. And once it's paid for, it's done. But continually moving data off-site is cumulative and never-ending.)
125F? Why 125F? Is that temperature magic, somehow? I mean: CDs in my car don't die in temperatures well above 125F on a hot sunny day with the windows closed... Even as a test, not long after I got a CD burner, I kept a few CDs on the rear deck of my car, unprotected, for a couple of years. They worked fine when I declared that the experiment was over.
Would a magnetic tape survive? Maybe, depending on the Curie point. But CDs aren't magnetic tape, and I strongly suspect that the 125F temperature is based upon the fragility of rust -- not compact discs or DVDs.
A friend of mine's house burned once. (It was a disaster for his belongings, but he and his family were fine, and the house recovered after a thorough gutting. Not so much luck for the dog and the fish.)
In his office was a wire rack of CDs in jewel cases: Data CDs, audio CDs, whatever CDs.
Many of these had the paper liner inserts badly degraded, and the jewel cases melted into strange shapes. The fire department had created a vent in his computer room, with the goal of exhausting the heat of the fire through that space: I have no idea how hot it was there, but just down the stairs from there the fire marshal said that things were hot enough for the couch to have burned by flashover alone.
The housings for his monitors and computers were limp and sagging.
The CDs themselves? Fine. All of them. A bit of soap and water to clean the soot off, and they worked great. Every single one of them worked fine. I started the process of duping them on my then-high-tech Plextor gear as an archival measure, only to realize that there was no need: There weren't any reported errors, and the reads were fast (indicative of a very low BER).
I stopped working on duping them, bought him some new jewel cases, and just cleaned up the rest and gave them back to him. No problems.
UL standards for fire safes designed to keep paper are 350 degrees F and rated in hours, and the glass transition temperature of polycarbonate is about 297 F. Simply cut the hour-rating in half, and you've got a conservative estimate for what it will take to keep CDs readable in a fire.
Proof? Easy. Fire up the oven, set it to an actual 290-or-so degrees, put a CD on the rack supported by the center ring, wait for awhile, and see if it's readable.
Anyone with a few extra blanks and a few hours time can test it easily enough.
It seems that it might be better to have at least three backups, that way you can have one that is local to the data, one that is in transit, and one that it remote. At no time must all three copies be in the same place at the same time in normal use.
Because with just two, you have times when all backups (all both of them) are in the same place at the same time. Which means trouble, potentially, since whatever event capable of destroying one will most assuredly also destroy the other. ...unless you count the data itself as being the third copy, which is a lot like more like trusting RAID than a good backup regimen: A live, spinning filesystem is not a backup, and can blow up at any time.
(And, with an extra backup set, you automatically get more versioning, which is often a nice thing to have.)
I once made some business cards on a Laserjet III, and shoved a stack of them into my wallet. The printing chipped off pretty quickly, but then maybe the old (though new-ish at the time) printer wasn't able to compensate properly for the heavy stock. (Subsequent iterations of my business card have been wet-offset printed, which of course works fine.)
As a more recent anecdote, I get my paychecks mailed to me from a town 40 miles away, packaged in plain double-window envelopes. There is often an image transferred to the inside of the plastic windows, and that's just from being handled and bundled for a day or three.
And nevermind how easily a bit of soft vinyl can grab onto and lift toner, just sitting together in close contact.
All that said, though: Printing documents and putting them in the firesafe, where they're not jostled, the humidity is reasonably constant, it is always dark, and they're amongst their laser-printed peers instead of stuck against plastic or being abused in a sweaty wallet? Probably absolutely fine, at least within the confines of the lifetime of the Asker. :)
I'd print it all out using Paperback, along with a human-readable copy, put it all inside of a manilla envelope or file folder, and call it a day.
I think you somehow managed to miss the entire fucking point, AC.
A QR code on personalized business card, wherein that QR code contains contact information for the person handing it to you (not a link to that information, but the information itself), is fantastic.
In my own use-case, I can snap the QR code and quickly and effortlessly add the information address book on my phone, which updates all of the other stuff I have which has an address book.
At that point, the card is totally useless to me. I might as well hand it back, where it can be directly reused, because otherwise I'm just going to toss it into the nearest waste bin.
Of course the person handing it to me isn't going to ask for it back -- they gave it to me, and I can do what I want with it -- I can keep it, stomp on it, turn it into a little airplane, wad it up and throw it, file it in my wallet, or, you know, just give it back when I'm done.
But I don't want to go down the rabbit hole. I don't get paid for that. And I don't know how that's useful to me.
Things I care about:
Troubleshooting a digital Astro or P.25 system on 700/800MHz? Check.
2.4GHz Wifi? You betcha.
Unlicensed 5.4/5.7GHz? Sure. Lots of spectrum there, but gotta avoid weather Doppler radar for parts of it, depending on orientation.
~60GHz microwave links? Ugh, because the alignment is contingent (literally) on time of day and phase of moon, but, sure: A solid full-duplex 1Gbps Ethernet link between points without wires or optics sure is nifty.
VHF FM for public safety voice paging? Absolutely: I get the volunteer firemen where they're going, just as I do with EMS squads.
Broadcast VHF FM radio in my car? Sure: I get annoyed when I can't get NPR properly, when I'm driving long distances during a time when All Things Considered is aired.
~1MHz AM? No. Don't really care -- nobody is going to pay me for that, and I don't want to hear it anyway. It's just interesting that 1330kHz is notched out so appropriately, corresponding to a local AM transmitter, using VDSL gear that I've had in-place for several years.
AM sideband? Phooey. :)
Hope the graph was useful.
Yeah, but: Meh.
Right now, worst-case, with any manner of STB (including a PS3 or an Android widget): I can turn on all of the appropriate gear, select an album/playlist/podcast/whatever, play it, and turn the TV back off.
The music continues.
So I guess I don't care if a modern TV can grok FLAK and OGG, if I have to keep the expensive (in terms of lifetime and energy) display running during that time. I'd rather get a cheaper TV, with the same LCD panel (and color gamut and viewing angle and refresh rate and contrast ratio), without the extra stuff that I won't use..
I'll still need a device to work with OGG and FLAC and MKV and [...], but that's now independent of my display device.
But, you know, that might just be me: For my home theater, I have a preamp and a bunch of amplifiers. I've always been a fan of separates. Even my desktop PC has a good soundcard feeding an active crossover feeding a pair of amplifiers, with one of them driving the subwoofer and the other the satellites.
Some people buy simplicity over and over again; I strive to complicate it from the beginning and simplify as I go.
As an anecdote: One of my primary clients has a number of cell phone stores. I used to be able to raid their junk bin for old Android devices and I'd come up with at least a couple of "whole" phones during each raid. (Obviously broken screen on one handset + one that doesn't power up == one "whole" phone, plus or minus some wrenching.) Sometimes, I'd even be able to score a phone that actually worked, didn't need any wrenching, and actually had a useable battery...though I always wondered why it was that such a device ended up in the junk bin to begin with.
Lately, within the past year, there have been zero whole Android phones.
I'll ask the next time I'm in there, but I strongly suspect that these devices are being traded to another party for pennies on the dollar. And since it's all Verizon, which is CDMA at heart and really not very useful in very many other, less fortunate countries: I really think they're just being scrapped.
Again, I'll ask.
Indeed, cell phones work for temporary problems.
I was once tasked with hauling gasoline up 12 flights of stairs to fuel a generator for a LEO repeater that was down due to a power outage caused by a ridiculous, one-in-a-few-lifetimes flood.
Yeah, I did pretty good at getting that done -- especially with the small, efficient Honda Inverter generator we had up there at first. But when the Honda died after a couple of days, and the gasoline-hauling sessions went from about 0.75 times per day to three times a day because the only available replacement generator was both huge and thirsty, nobody was harmed when the repeater would drop because I was delayed en-route*.
Indeed: They had other (simplex) channels they could talk on, and worst-case, every LEO had a cell phone.
*: What, you think it's easy getting from dry ground out-of-town to a repeater location that is in the river valley and surrounded by water? Nevermind a working place to buy gasoline to begin with. It was hard work getting that done, and the sleep deprivation didn't help any.
**: As an unreferenced footnote, it's not that any of this matters. It seems that Detroit suffered a central dispatch failure. And in that instance, depending on the pervasiveness of that failed system, it might have been impossible to look up a cell phone number.
Nonsense.
In a Motorola Astro trunked radio system, a loss of connectivity puts that site ("tower") into site-trunking mode.
There are still talkgroups. Everything still works as usual. What doesn't work is communications between sites.
But people within earshot of that site can still talk amongst themselves. And units can still talk in simplex amongst eachother, in talk-around form, from radio to radio.
Stand-by backup site? That's just wasted bandwidth and infrastructure, at least in terms of how Ohio MARCS is arranged. There may be backup antennas, and back up repeaters, but whole sites? Nope.
What's -supposed to happen- is that a truck/trailer rolls out, fully equipped to handle a single site failure, and works intermediate communication from that point using humans. This keeps the otherwise-affected police policing, the ambulances ambulatory, and the fire trucks trucking.
Meanwhile, a cellphone rings, which sets of a chain of other cell phones, which introduce a slew of tired radio techs into the mix to make things work again post-haste.
But what happened in Detroit seems to have been a failure of central dispatch, not any sort of repeater malfunction. Which is a different problem entirely. (In Ohio, we have backup agencies who can handle dispatching for neighboring agencies that have centralized problems. But Detroit? I don't work on Detroit's stuff, so that's not my fault.)
You mean, vendors like Avtec? Whose Ethernet interfaces take a permanent shit over minor grounding issues? (Ethernet. Grounding issue. Multiple recurrent permanent failures. Turn that over in your head for a minute, and get back with me about how impossible that all must be.)
Or do you mean Orbacom/IPC/Positron, whose IO boards go to out to lunch periodically and need resetting? (The immediate response from support was "Can't you just have someone push the reset button?" and I'm all like: Yeah, sure I can. We'll just have the customer hire a four new guys to push the button in shifts.)
Perhaps you mean Telex, where things just silently stop working?
Or maybe you mean Zetron, where nobody ever needs anything better than an 8088 to get anything done? You want to take about interface issues?
Yeah, sure: Motorola stuff breaks. So does everything else.
In other news, both Dell and HP make computer systems that are simultaneously awesome and variously lousy, and even a well-serviced BMW or Toyota can leave you stranded.
*shrug*
Indeed. It seems like a contractual error, more than anything else: Motorola (for various incarnations of "Motorola") apparently didn't make sure that their failsafe arrangement actually would fail safe, even though they were paid in advance to do so.
(Disclaimer: I work with Motorola communications, dispatch, and radio systems in public safety use. It seems to generally be quite good gear, but it fails just like anything else. And, sometimes, testing is a logistic nightmare...but if I'm paid to do it, I (myself) get it done, just as I would ensure that the backup routine for $random_server can actually be used to restore the box to a useful state.)
Old Android phones are getting more scarce, at a time when they should be plentiful and cheap.
There is even an automated, vending-machine style kiosk at the mall, here, which eats phones and pays money for them.
Where do these devices go? One theory suggests that they're refurbished and resold. Another (which I personally favor) suggests that they're paid by carriers to get old phones off the market, thus (hopefully!) eliminating the used market for useful "old" phones, and that the devices themselves end up being scrapped for metal recovery.
That's nice and all, but why on Earth would I want to turn on the television just to listen to some music?
Answer: One doesn't.
(Also: Context. Sometimes it even lets you answer your own questions.)
I guess so.
My favored VPN provider takes bitcoin. I guess I'll now have to find out, kicking and screaming, exactly how to turn real money into bitcoin so I can buy service with it.
You may have written checks and not been aware of it.
Do you use your bank/credit union's online bill payment? If the place (or person) you're sending money to isn't hooked in with ACS or some other newfangled electronic system, they just print a check with your name on it and mail it out.
(How do I know this? Because I have received such checks from both people and businesses for services I've rendered. They look a little funny, and have way too many words on them, but they turn into cash just fine.)
Won't a vertical strip of black tape in the middle of a very wide monitor accomplish the same thing?
Apartment buildings.
If the walls are already up, and the phone wiring already exists, and none of it is Cat-anything: Put the DSLAM (or whatever) in a closet, just like you would a gigabit switch.
And done.
Sure, it costs money. But so does any other chunk of infrastructure that people are willing to pay for.
(Also: Cat6 is unnecessary for the gigabit standard that we commonly use today, 802.3ab, which says you can go 100 meters on Cat5. Even Cat5e is overkill. Cat6? Meh.)
It is interesting stuff to me also. I made a screenshot:
http://s23.postimg.org/rw44oefaz/1330am.png
It's a graphical representation of the frequencies that are deemed most useful for my particular circuit (which is an edge-case at around 3000 feet.)
No idea about sidebands since I don't work with AM, or anything else in that part of the spectrum. And the other notches are unexplained as well.
My VDSL link from AT&T already does noise measurement. Buried inside of the web page for the magic box on my end, I can see a graph of what portions of its spectrum it is actually using.
Seems to work OK: There is a very neat notch which corresponds with a nearby AM broadcast tower.
Meanwhile, it doesn't have to turn off the entire signal all at once. Just parts of it. One end says "Hey, George, we're going to turn off 1.6MHz and look for noise there," and the other end says "OK Bob. Let's do it."
Or at least, that's one way. *shrug*
That's just the behavior that you see. Perhaps it is an entirely different game when there isn't anyone else around. (I was young once, too.)
Car analogy fail: If I want a Nissan, I don't have to buy it from a Nissan dealer. I can buy one from my neighbor or from Craigslist or Ebay or whatever. There is a clear delineation in the layman's mind between Nissan (the manufacturer) and Nissan (some random dealer).
McDonald's does not have such a clear distinction: I can't buy aftermarket, OEM-quality parts for a Big Mac. I can't buy box of McDonald's fish fillets from a distributor. And I'm certainly not going to pay money for a used McChicken.
Nissan, however, will gleefully sell me a brand new engine, all by itself, as long as I'm able to pony up the cash for it. It will be handled just as any other transaction at a Nissan dealer's parts counter for any other special-order item.
Furthermore, car dealers are very prominent in proclaiming who it is that is responsible for the dealership: There is a big sign by the road that says something like Middletown Nissan, and it is clear that this is a different establishment than Bob's Nissan.
McDonald's? The signs just say McDonald's. The receipts just say McDonald's. How would a layperson know any different? They've done a very good job of cloaking the fact that their restaurants are operating franchisees, and purposefully instilling consistency amongst them, to such an extent that a common person shouldn't be able to tell the difference.
So, yeah: In common parlance, it ought to be acceptable to state that McDonald's was sued. If anything, it is simply an error of being imprecise, but I do not think it is any more incorrect than Xerox(tm)'ing a document on a non-Xerox machine, calling a non-Band-Aid-brand adhesive bandage a "Band-Aid," or reaching for a box of Kleenex(tm) -- even if the box says Puffs on it.
People make words mean the darndest things.