Well, the tooth thing is a minor problem. It doesn't hurt at all, and it can be dealt with (paid for) eventually. It's just a few hundred bucks that I don't have right now (and I'm not complaining about this particular cost -- it takes time for a small crew of skilled professionals to deal with a broken tooth, no matter the approach, and they need to eat too.)
It's interesting that vision costs more in Canada. Do you mean examinations, or lenses, or both?
Meanwhile, I also understand (from my perspective as a USian) that many drugs are cheaper there and that more of them are available over-the-counter. Drysol, for instance: I need it to keep my feet from literally rotting and will continue to need it indefinitely, but my choices are that I can either pay to see the doctor once a year and get a script for it, or just buy it from Canada where anyone can pick it up the store.
So, contrary to who-knows-how-many laws, I order Drysol from Canada. And a very allergic friend of mine orders a certain expectorant in bulk powder form from Canada and stuffs his own capsules, because he says he can't get it here at all.
But the $640,000 question is this: If Joe the Bum gets cancer in Canada, is he reasonably taken care of or is he shown the door? In the States, a hospital is only required to provide basic stabilizing treatment and/or transfer to another facility, which is almost certainly inadequate for treatment of a long-term illness. And even then, the facility is expected to eat that cost themselves when the patient can't/doesn't pay. (Read: "Unfunded mandate.")
So it works like this: I can go to the ER after an accident, they'll patch me up as good as they can, and send me home with a bill. I can ignore the bill, happen into another accident, and they'll do the same thing. Unquestionably. Rinse and repeat, and they'll just keep on with the "basic stabilizing care."
Which, you know, might be good enough. But accordingly, our hospitals are very expensive for those of us who "can" pay: Think $6,000-per-night expensive for a saline drip, some ibuprofen, and "observation" (which seems to really mean "a call button that gets ignored").
And those families who suffer such a fate end up being totally fucked in terms of their credit rating.
"Congrats, Jones Family! Due to Dad's recent spat with Mono, your credit will be so fucked that not only will you have to stay in your existing house forever, but nobody will even rent you a decent apartment if you decide it's time to move on! And good luck getting a cell phone!"
I've had better, more effective, and more prompt service from a shitty $39-per-night motel (with some tips) and a few bottles of Gatorade, but I still owe the hospital damned near a decade later for having mono.
Back to the topic: I enjoy the hell out of my cheap unmetered 12/1.5Mbps pipe in small-town Ohio, and Netflix et. al are certainly very cool, but I'd much rather have some semblance of healthcare for myself and my peers. IMHO. YMMV.
I don't want to be snide, but I'm going to be anyway: We USians lack a lot of things that many other countries take for granted.
I have fairly cheap bandwidth and a wide array of inexpensive streaming services to use it with (my peak usage in a month was something like 480GB), but at the same time I do very much wish that I could afford to see a dentist about the molar I broke a couple of weeks ago.
It's all tradeoffs.
I'd rather have decent, socialized healthcare and a tooth pulled (I won't miss it much, though fixing it would be preferred) and expensive bandwidth, than perform home dentistry (150 grit sandpaper takes the knife-edge off of a broken tooth nicely, FYI) and have Netflix.
This trick has worked for decades with all manner of subscription-oriented, consumer-related companies. Glad it worked for you, but don't stop with the cable company: There's a good chance you're paying too much for other things that you use around your house, too.
Typically, you don't even have to make a comparison to a competitor or another pricing scheme -- just mention that you want to cancel because it's "too expensive," and viola! It gets cheaper.
Some money is better than no money.
Hell, some companies will even -give away- service for free, just for asking. I got a freebie AOL account once because I needed dialup while traveling (before the ubiquity of WiFi and 3G and no, I'm not proud), and got 3 months of free service when I called to cancel. Rinse, repeat -- I had a working account for over a year without ever giving them a red cent.
That depends. If I give you $5 with the understanding you will buy a beverage, but am upset when I find out you bought beer, generally you can tell me to get bent.
Indeed. The root of the problem is that it is made plain from the proposals from Washington that $x is available combined with a more localized mindset that if $x is not fully exploited, that "money was left on the table" and elections are lost/promotions are skipped/"we'll never get $x again, because the last time they gave us $x, we didn't use it all."
If you give me $5 for "beverage," it's certainly OK for me to buy some high-dollar spring water, or a latte, or a couple of 40's, or a single 9-ounce bottle of Trappist ale.
The need I have for a beverage that you intend to satisfy for me by giving me $5 may easily met by a $.99 bottle of water, or a $1.50 cup of coffee, or a single $0.99 24-ounce can of Labatt Ice. The problem is, as things stand, there's no advantage to anyone to give the remainder back, or just leave it on the table, at least in the scale of TFA.
None. Zero. Zilch.
If you give me (literally) $5 to procure a beverage for myself (which may be reasonable sum these days, sadly), and I'll buy a beverage with that and bring you back the change, because that's the right thing to do. And if I don't bring back the change, it's really not a big deal: It's just five bucks. Life moves on, and beverages are consumed.
But if you give me (again, just as an example) $5*1,000,000 and tell me to make teh Intarwebs happen, you can bet your ass that I will spend at least$5,000,000 making that happen. Because, simply: If it really only costs $250,000, I have to give back $4,750,000, and that makes for ugly headlines: "Head of new broadband initiative turns away millions in new rollout."
Why? Because The alternative headline of "$LocalArea gets $5,000,000 for new broadband rollout" sounds so much more....marketable, unfortunetely.
If there is any answer for this problem, I'm all ears.
PoE is (in my experience) basically only used for door access control card readers and biometrics, and IP cameras, and copper Ethernet extenders, and 802.11 wireless access points, and pro audio gear.
Meanwhile, the only VoIP phones I've ever installed needed a local 5V wall-wart and did not support PoE (would've been nice).
Your mileage plainly differs.
That said: It's easy to segregate PoE devices, because there typically are only so many of them, and it's also ridiculously easy to add PoE into any existing infrastructure -- especially if the only thing using it is a bunch of bandwidth-efficient telephones. Cross-connect cables and human time are cheaper, all day long, than superfluously providing PoE to every port.
I program both Astro and APX "Motorola monsters" for our statewide Homeland Security-funded trunking system using my 8-year-old Dell laptop under Windows (worth about $100), some special software (also about $100), and a fancy cable with some active electronics built in ($75).
If there is an area where a "$20k station" is required to do this job, please let me know where it is so that I may immediately relocate to there and begin seriously considering retiring while I'm still young.
(All sarcasm aside: Please note that I said "program," but then so did you. The gear to properly diagnose and service a 2-way radio which is misbehaving (ANY 2-way radio) is indeed awfully bloody goddamn expensive, but that's the nature of specialized test equipment in any field, especially when it comes to the calibre of gear that includes NIST-traceable calibration. Indeed, $20k seems a bit low to outfit a shop to do such work. But none of that is required, or even really very useful, for simple programming.)
In the US, at least, I've even seen variations between retail movies and rental movies: The rentals sometimes have both extra crap, and the extra features (deleted scenes, wanking commentary) yanked out...even though it is plainly more expensive to stamp out two different versions of a new movie than just one version.
That said: In this day of Amazon reviews, forums, and Google searches, there is no good reason for anyone so-motivated to be unable to find a DVD player which cannot skip the "unskippable" portions with some minor modification.
A dozen or so years ago, such players (sometimes with an easy firmware hack, sometimes with a button combo) were available at extraordinarily cheap prices Stateside from importers such as Apex, but I remember from that time that players in the UK were even more widely known to be modifiable (mostly because of the nonsense related to regional coding, the solutions for which also often allowed for skipping the unskippable).
Even at the polar opposite end of the price spectrum: I have in my living room a Krell DVD Standard that some schmuck[1] once paid $8,000.00 for (and no, that's neither a typo or an exaggeration, but just the actual MSRP). My Krell's firmware current load allows skipping.
So, I guess my point is this: If someone wants to skip the crap before the movie and has any motivation to do so, it will be fairly painless to do so and/or a Google away.
[1]: And, no, the schmuck was not me. I got the player literally for free and use it pretty much exclusively as a regular CD player, which it excels at. It is also a fine example of engineering overkill on all levels, though I'd never pay anywhere near that much for a single piece of AV gear no matter how pretty it looks inside the box. Meanwhile, the Wal Mart-sourced PS3 Slim beside it does a plainly and obviously better job of playing movies (1080P over HDMI vs. 480P over analog RGBHV on BNC connectors), but then again PS3 can't skip the unskippable bits...
FWIW, I find that placing red vinyl electrical tape over an eye-burning blue LED tones it down appropriately enough that it can still be seen, but is never too bright.
My application of it is sloppy, but at least I can look at the damned things once the tape is covering them. (I could trim the tape with a good knife if I cared, but I really don't.)
Amusingly, capacitive buttons (such as those on the external Lite-On DVD-R drive on my desk) still work fine even with the tape over top of them.
But this doesn't help unless other competing tools actually can use it. Since you typically can't upload an entire existing mail archive to the major hosted webmail providers, it doesn't matter if you can download it from whichever one you picked first, you're still effectively locked in and there is a significant barrier to competition.
Then fault the major hosted webmail providers for that. Gmail supports IMAP, which is a well-supported and open standard predating webmail in general. It's plenty easy to move huge volumes of arbitrary mail either to or from one's Gmail account.
That other providers might not allow such maneuvers is not Google's fault.
Would it be fair to say that John McAfee's legacy is somewhat akin to that of Phil Katz, plus or minus some hookers and blow?
It saddens me that these men, whose freely-available software was the defacto standard in the the late 80s and much of the 90s (not so much because of popular momentum, but rather because it really was quite good at that time) have fallen apart financially and perhaps otherwise, and -- in the case of Katz -- died in vain.
To me, it's as absurd as the prospects of John Carmack or perhaps even Bill Gates falling on hard times and hitting the bottom: Nobody would ever expect Carmack or Bill G. of having unsolvable life/lifeissues, but I likewise would've never suspected McAfee or Katz...until I learned otherwise.
So, I ask you, Slashdot: Are there any steps we, as a community, can do to prevent such turmoil in the future amongst important developers of software that actually works? Is it possible to prevent the next Phil Katz or Hans Reiser from ruining everything they have in their life?
And (perhaps) to the native trolls: Should we? Or are our neighboring geeks so expendable that it doesn't matter?
Visible line-of-sight issues ruin the possibility in many applications. Rain is murderous to low-power visible light connections, as is fog and snow. Even wind will affect a laser-based length over any substantial distance as the end-points sway (and yes, all towers sway in the breeze).
Meanwhile, cell towers quite commonly already link with microwave: The big parabolic reflectors covered with fiberglass radomes that you see on many (perhaps most, or nearly all) cellular towers are not for subscriber usage, but to link neighboring towers together. This is often done using licensed frequencies, though unlicensed bands are also used.
There are generally also redundant backhauls using copper or fiber or both, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that cell towers -already- use wireless RF backhauls...and that the tech described in the article isn't likely to change that.
As it stands, resistance to rain-fade and other weather seems to be excellent, at least anecdotally: I've never experienced it, and I've carried a cell phone for at least 1.5 decades.
(Disclaimer: I work with RF and wide-area long-range wireless networking as part of my day job, though not necessarily with back-end cellular systems in particular. Just because optical networking seems like a general non-starter to me doesn't mean that it's unsuitable for the uses that you suggest.)
Even though I subscribe to the provider with the best coverage (for my particular area), I do find myself without bandwidth from time to time and, occasionally, still need to know the tensile strength of a shoelace.
In fact, between being on the road a lot in the rural midwest, and working inside of buildings where every single ceiling, floor and wall (interior, too!) is either steel-reinforced concrete, sometimes with welded panels of 3/16" plate covering even that, I may be without bandwidth during work for days or weeks at a time.
So, yes: I find myself collecting apps for my pocket computer (which some people might call a "smart phone"), so that I can still do useful things with it even if Teh Intarwebs are unreachable.
AFAICT, having dug into it recently enough to remember the details but long enough ago that I can't provide a citation without spending way too much effort: Regular AT&T-branded residential AT&T DSL is capped at 150GB/month. Period. This system is implemented and apparently actually working.
A U-Verse cap was announced concurrently, but (again) AFAICT no cap has ever actually been implemented for U-Verse.
That said, my U-Verse usage is normally just under 250GB according to my own router, but there are occasional months that approach 500GB....which the wife won't be happy about if they ever start actually charging folks.
Agreed. I'd like to add that even if disabling (read: literally simply turning off some BART-operated bi-directional amplifiers and/or a DAS) cell service does effectively disrupt the organization of an ongoing protest, that this simply moves the protesters into more conventional forms of organization.
Simple audio and both licensed and unlicensed land mobile 2-way radio come to mind immediately as being absolutely useful for such a task. Leaders in the tunnel can communicate with intermediates outside the tunnel using portable 2-way radios (which can legally have vastly higher output levels than a handheld cellphone which is restricted to 600mW ERP), who in turn use the topside cell network (which is not controlled by BART) to communicate with others using phone calls, SMS, and the greater Internet.
Meanwhile, these same leaders can use simple audio cues (ie: a megaphone) to coordinate efforts underground.
End result is that all that a shutdown does is up the ante slightly: Next time, folks will be better prepared.
Meanwhile, intentional active jamming (to block a licensed 2-way radio) is a whole different sort of game than passively turning some cellular repeaters off. The FCC has always had a very dim view of intentional, active jamming of licensed communications.
So, as I see it, here's the score in this card game:
BART: 1 Protesters: 0
But BART has played their cards, and shown their hand. Meanwhile, the rest of us have plenty of perfectly legitimate tricks up our sleeves.
To quote Counterstrike: "Terrorists WIN!"
(Disclaimer: I really don't give a shit either way -- it's not my fight.)
I know you were trying to be a little funny, it doesn't sound like a real programming job, unless you consider configuring cron to be "programming."
Instead, it sounds like a job for an Ashly Protea, or a Soundweb, or some other dedicated DSP hardware with simple digital IO (Peavey and QSC also come to mind) and decent configurability.
And, since it's already running over CobraNet, chances are very good indeed that an appropriate DSP is already in place, and therefore free.
So, for this project (as described by the Asker), here's what I'd do: Just throw Linux at it with some contact closures to signal the DSP box to switch modes, set up cron to do so and also play sound sound files, add audio outputs as appropriate (and no, I know of no OSS CobraNet software), and call it done.
Additional geek credit can be earned by talking to the DSP over IP and changing modes and values that way, but I don't see the point: It just adds a lot of time to the project, and only saves the expense of few relays and some way to turn them on and off (PCI parallel port cards are both cheap and well-supported for this role using OSS).
Thank you. I may adopt a similar procedure when it comes to my own computer-fixing. (I don't run Linux on a desktop currently, but I did do so on my primary machine for almost a decade and a half... I can re-learn the modern GUI-isms in no time. And of course, the rest hasn't changed much, ever.)
Question 1: Do any of your customers ever call to ask about Netflix or similar DRM-riddled-but-really-quite-awesome services that are all the rage with the kids these days? I'm sure that it can be hammered into functioning on Linux, but I'm not -ever- handholding someone through the process, and I strongly suspect that supporting it would be more costly and frustrating to them (the user) than paying me periodically to make Windows run properly again (and again).
Question 2: Peripheral hardware support seems to finally be getting back to the state it was in during the brief period in the 90s after Linux gained enough developer popularity to be a real useable system with random hardware, but before Winmodems became ubiquitous, complex 3D acceleration became common, and undocumented and non-replaceable hardware became somewhat the rule (Broadcom, in particular, should die in a fire).
For that brief period close to 1.5 decades ago, everything just worked, and it sure seems that Linux systems are just about back to that same level of excellence and ease. (Well, you had to roll your own kernel to get it working, but from then on it was all gravy and tended to stay working indefinitely.)
Do you have any real issues, these days, with making the system work? Specifically: If you charge a flat rate, how frequently do you kick yourself for doing so because an installation has turned unexpectedly difficult due to hardware compatibility?
More to the point (and I'm not sure what the point is, since I'm late in the thread and did not read most of it) there are rack enclosures that can be purchased off-the-shelf with heating and air conditioning built-in.
I've not used the specific brand that I linked, but I've done some work inside of a fully-equipped all-stainless rack that stood outside in the elements, and it really was a joy to deal with. The gear inside was both clean and happy. It was approximately the same dimensions as any other computer-oriented rack.
Best part: No re-purposing needed!
And like any other big chunk of industrial-ish stuff with moving parts, such things do appear on the used market for all manner of reasons...
I, myself, don't want this because exactly what I don't want want is galvanic corrosion issues due to multiple paths to ground to cause high-pressure water to flood my equipment room from the inside of the gear, out.
Or because I don't want a water-to-water heat exchanger to isolate the cooling loops, but keep the corrosion issue.
Or because I don't want to pay a properly certified bonding expert to understand and correct the corrosion issue.
Or because I don't want liquid-cooled computers running wherein the liquid is so cold that it causes condensation to form inside the gear, whenever there a warm day happenswhen the ambient humidity is high and someone decides to take a shower.
Or because I don't want complicated thermostatic valving and separate cold-water and a not-so-cold-water cooling loops to eliminate the condensation issue which can/will in ways that traditional (simple) water cooling systems cannot.
Or, maybe just because by the time all of this is addressed and paid for and tweaked into good working order, I'll quite likely rather have a thinner wallet every month and that portion of my life back.
Other than that, it's a nice idea. It would be absolutely wonderful to have cooling jacks built into the house that one could plug the computer into and have the waste heat efficiently recycled into something useful. Sort it out and put it together in a shiny box for less than a few hundred bucks, and I'd be interested, but otherwise I think one would have to totally and utterly marry the project in order to make it work reliably.
And it does double duty as an excellent bi-wired speaker cable with low cross-talk.
If by "excellent" you mean "has capacitance issues which are such that [many] solid state power amplifiers will go into fits of high-frequency oscillation of sufficient magnitude to nuke the voice coil of a tweeter," then you're spot-on.
(I'd not be so snarky about this had I not seen this problem first hand. It was repeatable, and expensive, and was completely eliminated by using a length of zip cord in lieu of network cable[1]. Please never do this. Even in a pinch. Thank you.)
[1]: Yes, using an amplifier not prone to oscillation would certainly also be a fine fix for the issue, but, seriously. You're potentially doing yourself the opposite of a favor by using cat 3/5/5e/6 as speaker wire. Even a pair of coat hangers with some electrical tape wrapped around them is a less destructive means of connection.
You can do that today: Just hold your nose, drop a Mentos into the bottle, plug the end of the bottle into your mouth, and hope the muscles at the back of your throat pick the right pipe for the stuff to be forced down...
Or, you know: Drink a shot. Easier, faster, cleaner, more compact, and (if cost efficiency is a primary concern) often cheaper.
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Well, the tooth thing is a minor problem. It doesn't hurt at all, and it can be dealt with (paid for) eventually. It's just a few hundred bucks that I don't have right now (and I'm not complaining about this particular cost -- it takes time for a small crew of skilled professionals to deal with a broken tooth, no matter the approach, and they need to eat too.)
It's interesting that vision costs more in Canada. Do you mean examinations, or lenses, or both?
Meanwhile, I also understand (from my perspective as a USian) that many drugs are cheaper there and that more of them are available over-the-counter. Drysol, for instance: I need it to keep my feet from literally rotting and will continue to need it indefinitely, but my choices are that I can either pay to see the doctor once a year and get a script for it, or just buy it from Canada where anyone can pick it up the store.
So, contrary to who-knows-how-many laws, I order Drysol from Canada. And a very allergic friend of mine orders a certain expectorant in bulk powder form from Canada and stuffs his own capsules, because he says he can't get it here at all.
But the $640,000 question is this: If Joe the Bum gets cancer in Canada, is he reasonably taken care of or is he shown the door? In the States, a hospital is only required to provide basic stabilizing treatment and/or transfer to another facility, which is almost certainly inadequate for treatment of a long-term illness. And even then, the facility is expected to eat that cost themselves when the patient can't/doesn't pay. (Read: "Unfunded mandate.")
So it works like this: I can go to the ER after an accident, they'll patch me up as good as they can, and send me home with a bill. I can ignore the bill, happen into another accident, and they'll do the same thing. Unquestionably. Rinse and repeat, and they'll just keep on with the "basic stabilizing care."
Which, you know, might be good enough. But accordingly, our hospitals are very expensive for those of us who "can" pay: Think $6,000-per-night expensive for a saline drip, some ibuprofen, and "observation" (which seems to really mean "a call button that gets ignored").
And those families who suffer such a fate end up being totally fucked in terms of their credit rating.
"Congrats, Jones Family! Due to Dad's recent spat with Mono, your credit will be so fucked that not only will you have to stay in your existing house forever, but nobody will even rent you a decent apartment if you decide it's time to move on! And good luck getting a cell phone!"
I've had better, more effective, and more prompt service from a shitty $39-per-night motel (with some tips) and a few bottles of Gatorade, but I still owe the hospital damned near a decade later for having mono.
Back to the topic: I enjoy the hell out of my cheap unmetered 12/1.5Mbps pipe in small-town Ohio, and Netflix et. al are certainly very cool, but I'd much rather have some semblance of healthcare for myself and my peers. IMHO. YMMV.
I don't want to be snide, but I'm going to be anyway: We USians lack a lot of things that many other countries take for granted.
I have fairly cheap bandwidth and a wide array of inexpensive streaming services to use it with (my peak usage in a month was something like 480GB), but at the same time I do very much wish that I could afford to see a dentist about the molar I broke a couple of weeks ago.
It's all tradeoffs.
I'd rather have decent, socialized healthcare and a tooth pulled (I won't miss it much, though fixing it would be preferred) and expensive bandwidth, than perform home dentistry (150 grit sandpaper takes the knife-edge off of a broken tooth nicely, FYI) and have Netflix.
YMMV.
This trick has worked for decades with all manner of subscription-oriented, consumer-related companies. Glad it worked for you, but don't stop with the cable company: There's a good chance you're paying too much for other things that you use around your house, too.
Typically, you don't even have to make a comparison to a competitor or another pricing scheme -- just mention that you want to cancel because it's "too expensive," and viola! It gets cheaper.
Some money is better than no money.
Hell, some companies will even -give away- service for free, just for asking. I got a freebie AOL account once because I needed dialup while traveling (before the ubiquity of WiFi and 3G and no, I'm not proud), and got 3 months of free service when I called to cancel. Rinse, repeat -- I had a working account for over a year without ever giving them a red cent.
Interesting perspective.
I guess that's why I've been installing IP cameras on physically separate networks for all these years.
Being able to present an argument in algebraic form does not absolve you from *whoosh*
Indeed. The root of the problem is that it is made plain from the proposals from Washington that $x is available combined with a more localized mindset that if $x is not fully exploited, that "money was left on the table" and elections are lost/promotions are skipped/"we'll never get $x again, because the last time they gave us $x, we didn't use it all."
If you give me $5 for "beverage," it's certainly OK for me to buy some high-dollar spring water, or a latte, or a couple of 40's, or a single 9-ounce bottle of Trappist ale.
The need I have for a beverage that you intend to satisfy for me by giving me $5 may easily met by a $.99 bottle of water, or a $1.50 cup of coffee, or a single $0.99 24-ounce can of Labatt Ice. The problem is, as things stand, there's no advantage to anyone to give the remainder back, or just leave it on the table, at least in the scale of TFA.
None. Zero. Zilch.
If you give me (literally) $5 to procure a beverage for myself (which may be reasonable sum these days, sadly), and I'll buy a beverage with that and bring you back the change, because that's the right thing to do. And if I don't bring back the change, it's really not a big deal: It's just five bucks. Life moves on, and beverages are consumed.
But if you give me (again, just as an example) $5*1,000,000 and tell me to make teh Intarwebs happen, you can bet your ass that I will spend at least$5,000,000 making that happen. Because, simply: If it really only costs $250,000, I have to give back $4,750,000, and that makes for ugly headlines: "Head of new broadband initiative turns away millions in new rollout."
Why? Because The alternative headline of "$LocalArea gets $5,000,000 for new broadband rollout" sounds so much more....marketable, unfortunetely.
If there is any answer for this problem, I'm all ears.
PoE is (in my experience) basically only used for door access control card readers and biometrics, and IP cameras, and copper Ethernet extenders, and 802.11 wireless access points, and pro audio gear.
Meanwhile, the only VoIP phones I've ever installed needed a local 5V wall-wart and did not support PoE (would've been nice).
Your mileage plainly differs.
That said: It's easy to segregate PoE devices, because there typically are only so many of them, and it's also ridiculously easy to add PoE into any existing infrastructure -- especially if the only thing using it is a bunch of bandwidth-efficient telephones. Cross-connect cables and human time are cheaper, all day long, than superfluously providing PoE to every port.
Huh, weird.
I program both Astro and APX "Motorola monsters" for our statewide Homeland Security-funded trunking system using my 8-year-old Dell laptop under Windows (worth about $100), some special software (also about $100), and a fancy cable with some active electronics built in ($75).
If there is an area where a "$20k station" is required to do this job, please let me know where it is so that I may immediately relocate to there and begin seriously considering retiring while I'm still young.
(All sarcasm aside: Please note that I said "program," but then so did you. The gear to properly diagnose and service a 2-way radio which is misbehaving (ANY 2-way radio) is indeed awfully bloody goddamn expensive, but that's the nature of specialized test equipment in any field, especially when it comes to the calibre of gear that includes NIST-traceable calibration. Indeed, $20k seems a bit low to outfit a shop to do such work. But none of that is required, or even really very useful, for simple programming.)
In the US, at least, I've even seen variations between retail movies and rental movies: The rentals sometimes have both extra crap, and the extra features (deleted scenes, wanking commentary) yanked out...even though it is plainly more expensive to stamp out two different versions of a new movie than just one version.
That said: In this day of Amazon reviews, forums, and Google searches, there is no good reason for anyone so-motivated to be unable to find a DVD player which cannot skip the "unskippable" portions with some minor modification.
A dozen or so years ago, such players (sometimes with an easy firmware hack, sometimes with a button combo) were available at extraordinarily cheap prices Stateside from importers such as Apex, but I remember from that time that players in the UK were even more widely known to be modifiable (mostly because of the nonsense related to regional coding, the solutions for which also often allowed for skipping the unskippable).
Even at the polar opposite end of the price spectrum: I have in my living room a Krell DVD Standard that some schmuck[1] once paid $8,000.00 for (and no, that's neither a typo or an exaggeration, but just the actual MSRP). My Krell's firmware current load allows skipping.
So, I guess my point is this: If someone wants to skip the crap before the movie and has any motivation to do so, it will be fairly painless to do so and/or a Google away.
[1]: And, no, the schmuck was not me. I got the player literally for free and use it pretty much exclusively as a regular CD player, which it excels at. It is also a fine example of engineering overkill on all levels, though I'd never pay anywhere near that much for a single piece of AV gear no matter how pretty it looks inside the box. Meanwhile, the Wal Mart-sourced PS3 Slim beside it does a plainly and obviously better job of playing movies (1080P over HDMI vs. 480P over analog RGBHV on BNC connectors), but then again PS3 can't skip the unskippable bits...
FWIW, I find that placing red vinyl electrical tape over an eye-burning blue LED tones it down appropriately enough that it can still be seen, but is never too bright.
My application of it is sloppy, but at least I can look at the damned things once the tape is covering them. (I could trim the tape with a good knife if I cared, but I really don't.)
Amusingly, capacitive buttons (such as those on the external Lite-On DVD-R drive on my desk) still work fine even with the tape over top of them.
I parse what you write as "I really don't like to listen to music, so I don't care about any of this."
Then fault the major hosted webmail providers for that. Gmail supports IMAP, which is a well-supported and open standard predating webmail in general. It's plenty easy to move huge volumes of arbitrary mail either to or from one's Gmail account.
That other providers might not allow such maneuvers is not Google's fault.
Would it be fair to say that John McAfee's legacy is somewhat akin to that of Phil Katz, plus or minus some hookers and blow?
It saddens me that these men, whose freely-available software was the defacto standard in the the late 80s and much of the 90s (not so much because of popular momentum, but rather because it really was quite good at that time) have fallen apart financially and perhaps otherwise, and -- in the case of Katz -- died in vain.
To me, it's as absurd as the prospects of John Carmack or perhaps even Bill Gates falling on hard times and hitting the bottom: Nobody would ever expect Carmack or Bill G. of having unsolvable life/lifeissues, but I likewise would've never suspected McAfee or Katz...until I learned otherwise.
So, I ask you, Slashdot: Are there any steps we, as a community, can do to prevent such turmoil in the future amongst important developers of software that actually works? Is it possible to prevent the next Phil Katz or Hans Reiser from ruining everything they have in their life?
And (perhaps) to the native trolls: Should we? Or are our neighboring geeks so expendable that it doesn't matter?
Excellent. Good to know.
Thanks!
Visible line-of-sight issues ruin the possibility in many applications. Rain is murderous to low-power visible light connections, as is fog and snow. Even wind will affect a laser-based length over any substantial distance as the end-points sway (and yes, all towers sway in the breeze).
Meanwhile, cell towers quite commonly already link with microwave: The big parabolic reflectors covered with fiberglass radomes that you see on many (perhaps most, or nearly all) cellular towers are not for subscriber usage, but to link neighboring towers together. This is often done using licensed frequencies, though unlicensed bands are also used.
There are generally also redundant backhauls using copper or fiber or both, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that cell towers -already- use wireless RF backhauls...and that the tech described in the article isn't likely to change that.
As it stands, resistance to rain-fade and other weather seems to be excellent, at least anecdotally: I've never experienced it, and I've carried a cell phone for at least 1.5 decades.
(Disclaimer: I work with RF and wide-area long-range wireless networking as part of my day job, though not necessarily with back-end cellular systems in particular. Just because optical networking seems like a general non-starter to me doesn't mean that it's unsuitable for the uses that you suggest.)
What about those who have died/become incarcerated/joined the Amish since publishing their apps? Nobody updates those apps.
End result: In some cases, what was working 2 weeks ago, stopped working a few days ago. And users suffer.
Eh...mostly.
Even though I subscribe to the provider with the best coverage (for my particular area), I do find myself without bandwidth from time to time and, occasionally, still need to know the tensile strength of a shoelace.
In fact, between being on the road a lot in the rural midwest, and working inside of buildings where every single ceiling, floor and wall (interior, too!) is either steel-reinforced concrete, sometimes with welded panels of 3/16" plate covering even that, I may be without bandwidth during work for days or weeks at a time.
So, yes: I find myself collecting apps for my pocket computer (which some people might call a "smart phone"), so that I can still do useful things with it even if Teh Intarwebs are unreachable.
AFAICT, having dug into it recently enough to remember the details but long enough ago that I can't provide a citation without spending way too much effort: Regular AT&T-branded residential AT&T DSL is capped at 150GB/month. Period. This system is implemented and apparently actually working.
A U-Verse cap was announced concurrently, but (again) AFAICT no cap has ever actually been implemented for U-Verse.
That said, my U-Verse usage is normally just under 250GB according to my own router, but there are occasional months that approach 500GB....which the wife won't be happy about if they ever start actually charging folks.
Agreed. I'd like to add that even if disabling (read: literally simply turning off some BART-operated bi-directional amplifiers and/or a DAS) cell service does effectively disrupt the organization of an ongoing protest, that this simply moves the protesters into more conventional forms of organization.
Simple audio and both licensed and unlicensed land mobile 2-way radio come to mind immediately as being absolutely useful for such a task. Leaders in the tunnel can communicate with intermediates outside the tunnel using portable 2-way radios (which can legally have vastly higher output levels than a handheld cellphone which is restricted to 600mW ERP), who in turn use the topside cell network (which is not controlled by BART) to communicate with others using phone calls, SMS, and the greater Internet.
Meanwhile, these same leaders can use simple audio cues (ie: a megaphone) to coordinate efforts underground.
End result is that all that a shutdown does is up the ante slightly: Next time, folks will be better prepared.
Meanwhile, intentional active jamming (to block a licensed 2-way radio) is a whole different sort of game than passively turning some cellular repeaters off. The FCC has always had a very dim view of intentional, active jamming of licensed communications.
So, as I see it, here's the score in this card game:
BART: 1
Protesters: 0
But BART has played their cards, and shown their hand. Meanwhile, the rest of us have plenty of perfectly legitimate tricks up our sleeves.
To quote Counterstrike: "Terrorists WIN!"
(Disclaimer: I really don't give a shit either way -- it's not my fight.)
I know you were trying to be a little funny, it doesn't sound like a real programming job, unless you consider configuring cron to be "programming."
Instead, it sounds like a job for an Ashly Protea, or a Soundweb, or some other dedicated DSP hardware with simple digital IO (Peavey and QSC also come to mind) and decent configurability.
And, since it's already running over CobraNet, chances are very good indeed that an appropriate DSP is already in place, and therefore free.
So, for this project (as described by the Asker), here's what I'd do: Just throw Linux at it with some contact closures to signal the DSP box to switch modes, set up cron to do so and also play sound sound files, add audio outputs as appropriate (and no, I know of no OSS CobraNet software), and call it done.
Additional geek credit can be earned by talking to the DSP over IP and changing modes and values that way, but I don't see the point: It just adds a lot of time to the project, and only saves the expense of few relays and some way to turn them on and off (PCI parallel port cards are both cheap and well-supported for this role using OSS).
KISS. Wire's cheap.
Thank you. I may adopt a similar procedure when it comes to my own computer-fixing. (I don't run Linux on a desktop currently, but I did do so on my primary machine for almost a decade and a half... I can re-learn the modern GUI-isms in no time. And of course, the rest hasn't changed much, ever.)
Question 1: Do any of your customers ever call to ask about Netflix or similar DRM-riddled-but-really-quite-awesome services that are all the rage with the kids these days? I'm sure that it can be hammered into functioning on Linux, but I'm not -ever- handholding someone through the process, and I strongly suspect that supporting it would be more costly and frustrating to them (the user) than paying me periodically to make Windows run properly again (and again).
Question 2: Peripheral hardware support seems to finally be getting back to the state it was in during the brief period in the 90s after Linux gained enough developer popularity to be a real useable system with random hardware, but before Winmodems became ubiquitous, complex 3D acceleration became common, and undocumented and non-replaceable hardware became somewhat the rule (Broadcom, in particular, should die in a fire).
For that brief period close to 1.5 decades ago, everything just worked, and it sure seems that Linux systems are just about back to that same level of excellence and ease. (Well, you had to roll your own kernel to get it working, but from then on it was all gravy and tended to stay working indefinitely.)
Do you have any real issues, these days, with making the system work? Specifically: If you charge a flat rate, how frequently do you kick yourself for doing so because an installation has turned unexpectedly difficult due to hardware compatibility?
More to the point (and I'm not sure what the point is, since I'm late in the thread and did not read most of it) there are rack enclosures that can be purchased off-the-shelf with heating and air conditioning built-in.
I've not used the specific brand that I linked, but I've done some work inside of a fully-equipped all-stainless rack that stood outside in the elements, and it really was a joy to deal with. The gear inside was both clean and happy. It was approximately the same dimensions as any other computer-oriented rack.
Best part: No re-purposing needed!
And like any other big chunk of industrial-ish stuff with moving parts, such things do appear on the used market for all manner of reasons...
I, myself, don't want this because exactly what I don't want want is galvanic corrosion issues due to multiple paths to ground to cause high-pressure water to flood my equipment room from the inside of the gear, out.
Or because I don't want a water-to-water heat exchanger to isolate the cooling loops, but keep the corrosion issue.
Or because I don't want to pay a properly certified bonding expert to understand and correct the corrosion issue.
Or because I don't want liquid-cooled computers running wherein the liquid is so cold that it causes condensation to form inside the gear, whenever there a warm day happenswhen the ambient humidity is high and someone decides to take a shower.
Or because I don't want complicated thermostatic valving and separate cold-water and a not-so-cold-water cooling loops to eliminate the condensation issue which can/will in ways that traditional (simple) water cooling systems cannot.
Or, maybe just because by the time all of this is addressed and paid for and tweaked into good working order, I'll quite likely rather have a thinner wallet every month and that portion of my life back.
Other than that, it's a nice idea. It would be absolutely wonderful to have cooling jacks built into the house that one could plug the computer into and have the waste heat efficiently recycled into something useful. Sort it out and put it together in a shiny box for less than a few hundred bucks, and I'd be interested, but otherwise I think one would have to totally and utterly marry the project in order to make it work reliably.
Other opinions may vary. :)
If by "excellent" you mean "has capacitance issues which are such that [many] solid state power amplifiers will go into fits of high-frequency oscillation of sufficient magnitude to nuke the voice coil of a tweeter," then you're spot-on.
(I'd not be so snarky about this had I not seen this problem first hand. It was repeatable, and expensive, and was completely eliminated by using a length of zip cord in lieu of network cable[1]. Please never do this. Even in a pinch. Thank you.)
[1]: Yes, using an amplifier not prone to oscillation would certainly also be a fine fix for the issue, but, seriously. You're potentially doing yourself the opposite of a favor by using cat 3/5/5e/6 as speaker wire. Even a pair of coat hangers with some electrical tape wrapped around them is a less destructive means of connection.
You can do that today: Just hold your nose, drop a Mentos into the bottle, plug the end of the bottle into your mouth, and hope the muscles at the back of your throat pick the right pipe for the stuff to be forced down...
Or, you know: Drink a shot. Easier, faster, cleaner, more compact, and (if cost efficiency is a primary concern) often cheaper.