I don't know your situation very well, but the most obvious scenario (assuming there is bandwidth and power available at the "main road") is as follows:
1. Put a small cabinet by the main road to house some gear. Add power and broadband. Install high-gain antenna (I prefer parabolic reflectors for hairy links, YMMV) and some manner of reasonably powerful all-in-one WiFi radio. (Engenius makes some that I've been reasonably pleased with long-term which are rather inexpensive.)
2. Point it that-a-way.
3. Do the same at the other end (perhaps without a cabinet).
4. Done.
Now, I'm making assumptions here. I'm assuming that it's reasonable to try to burn through the foliage (which soaks up 2.4GHz pretty readily) by using a combination of power and directivity, in an environment that I have not seen. I'm assuming that there's very little other 2.4GHz gear nearby to further destroy the SNR. I'm assuming that there's no hill in between to put a big chunk of Earth in the way. I'm assuming that it's reasonable to put a cabinet by the road (whether because your folks own the land, or because they've got a friendly neighbor who doesn't mind losing a few square feet of property indefinitely). I'm assuming that when it's all said and done, you'd be very pleased with perhaps a couple of megabits per second of throughput, as long as it was consistent on a day-to-day basis.
Elsewhere, you've mentioned your willingness to procure a DSLAM or to pull fiber to the road. If you're willing to go to those extreme sorts of measures, there's bound to be a way to make it work without being too elaborate in the implementation. The above is simply one relatively uninformed suggestion.
But yeah, whatever the case: I'd bloody well hope that the USF should help to mitigate situations like your folks have, especially now, since that's exactly the sort of thing that it is for. Time will tell on that one...
Depends on the zip cord. I've had common, clear vinyl-insulated zip cord turn all gross and corroded inside down the entire length, and while that may not actually affect things much, it does make good (clean) connections rather difficult to accomplish.
I use direct-burial low-voltage lighting cable a lot, these days. It's cheap, easy to find, heavily insulated (durable), has a high strand count (ie: flexible), is UV resistant, and it's always been bright and shiny when I cut into it. Oh, and it's black by default, as God intended wires to be.:)
But for very high-power stuff, very long runs, or stage use, there are far better options. (None of which, obviously, are made from silver...)
I've seen Haier stuff for sale in the US for years -- mostly on goods that involve refrigeration of some kind. Looking at your link, I see that its available offerings have not changed much recently.
I have a Haier chest freezer in my utility room, and it was already rather old when I got a couple of years ago.
The BYD Cars thing is another point entirely, but I (for one) am completely satisfied at calling Bullshit on exactly 50% of your post.
How will this affect the cheap stuff I buy from Dealextreme and similar (including Ebay) sites in China, whose wares show up often properly-branded (sometimes even including hologram tags) on my doorstep quickly and inexpensively?
Meh. Despite the timestamp above that says it's Thursday at about midnight:30, I'm up for the count even if it is fast approaching 4:30AM. I gave up on sleeping at night a year or two ago, and am better (healthier, happier) for it. YMM[probably]V. (And perhaps unusually or unexpectedly, money and family has stayed about the same for me, even with my somewhat-recently-self-imposed "strange" hours for work/sleep/play.)
As to clean installs, it even works on Android phone: Wipe everything, install the latest Cyanogenmod (or whatever), restore apps and useful data, and done.
Looking back, starting from a clean install would've easily saved me a lot of effort even when I was using OS/2. I wish I'd learned it sooner, though I don't know that I'd have ever really tried it unless I figured it out the hard way.
Well, sure. Modern Linux distros (save the tailored Gentoo install and the like) tend to autoconfig every bit of necessary hardware at every single boot, as if every boot is a new install. It happens so fast that it doesn't even matter, and RAM and disk are damn near free at this minute level on any semi-modern PC.
I blame the good folks behind Knoppix for first figuring out how to get this right (not that it is in any way a bad thing).
But in the NT4 days, I remember things generally being very different from automagic. And they were.
Meanwhile: At work, we have two identical HPaq ML330 Windows Server 2003 boxes. One is basically an offline spares kit, and the other gets used daily. Things on the working box are backed up daily in disk image format.
More than a few times, usually just after the end of the year, the in-house accountant has asked to be able to look at last year's stuff as it existed at that time, in isolation from the rest of the accountancy stuff.
Doing so is easy: Just plug the spare ML330 in, restore the entire hard disk with Acronis, and....done. It boots up and works just like it was turned off yesterday (or yesteryear). I haven't tried it, but I strongly suspect that it'd work just as well under VMWare as on actual bare metal.
So, I really don't think that things are as bad, these days, as you assert that they were well over a decade ago. Everything seems to have improved a lot in that time.
About the same for me, except it was an Advansys SCSI card and a Plextor PR-820 CD-R burner. (I forget if it was Win2k or an early XP.)
Everything has worked so well more-or-less since then, regardless of interface or software, that I haven't really thought about it much. I've got three DVD-RW drives tied to my desktop right now: One internal PATA, one PATA-over-cheapshit-Chinese-USB-dongle, and one prepackaged USB external -- all of very different brands and vintages. I abuse them all variously for all manner of CD-shaped media, sometimes all at once, and things really do just work under Windows.
Even with the weird concoction I have of software ATAPI emulators, transparent DVD decryption tools like AnyDVD, and such that are always present on my system: No problem.
My rather old daily-use Dell laptop somewhat bizarrely has a PATA burner on an internal SATA channel, and it's the same story: It just works. Always has. This laptop came with XP, I put Vista on it just to learn it, and it's now on 7. No issues, ever. (Er. Well. The first drive eventually gave up and was replaced, but that's not exactly Microsoft's fault. I blame Sony.)
I suppose that by comparison to that XP was a dream but I'm comparing it to Linux and *BSD where I've frequently moved system disks to completely different machines without any changes beyond "oh, the network devices have new names, better change/etc/ipf.rules". Windows OTOH will throw a multi-hour fit if you move your disk to a seemingly identical machine...
You, sir, have never run an incarnation of Slackware from the NT4 era. You'd build your own kernel and modules, and you wanted things to be as lean as possible to save on RAM (which was precious in ways which seem unfathomable today), reduce complexity, and keep the lengthy compile times to a minimum.
So, generally, you only included the system devices that you needed. Blindly move a disk to a completely different system? Get ready for an extended round of booting from floppy, fighting with LILO, and learning how to build a new kernel on a box that only half-way works (what network device? what CD-ROM?) so that it can be brought up fully.
It might be preferable to NT4's own hairy mess, but not by much.
It was painful enough that I learned how to pre-configure the existing installation to suit the new box, which was at least half-way sane but still involved hoops of flaming sodium if I'd made an improper assumption. And it didn't work at all in the event that I was changing the disk over to a new machine due to some other fatal hardware problem.
Perhaps more to the point, all of that pain has taught me that when I migrate to a new machine I should just do a clean install on the new box. Once I get the hardware running properly, I install the requisite services and user programs. And then I move any user and configuration data over, test it, change the hostname and IP address, and call it done. Almost no downtime required, and all accomplished with a great amount of leisure since the old system is still running during all of this. (It works under Windows, too, though the details can be very different indeed.)
(The *BSDs, in stock form, did seem to behave much better with random hardware changes at that time, but they were also far more mature than the typical Linux distribution...)
The last time I saw an ATAPI error under Windows was in the (relative) infancy of CD burners, when folklore and back-end customization waged war against the much-vaunted coaster.
But the war is over, and it simply turns out that it wasn't so complicated after all: The software and hardware sucked, and the hacks to mitigate that sucked harder. After a time, software simply improved, and the old hardware was replaced. (The hacks disappeared naturally.)
Are you doing anything consistently peculiar with your system?
I live in a big house which, while definitely in-town by any measure, sits on a fair bit of land. There are something like 16 access points shown on my Droid while standing in my driveway...but four of them are mine. (I've currently got two access points that I actually use, just because I can. The PS3 also becomes an access point when it's turned off for Remote Play(tm). And I use AT&T's provided access point only to broadcast obscure and sometimes dirty SSID beacons, again just because I can...)
Of the remaining twelve, two are open. Their signal is so weak inside of my house that I cannot connect to and use them without extraordinary means.
One of them is an illegally-amplified access point operated by the local municipality, located about five miles away. (I really should get around to complaining to the FCC about that.)
Almost all of the rest of them are on one channel, so I use the other two non-overlapping channels.
The rest of them just constitute a bit of noise, which seems OK: My 802.11g is as fast as any practical benchmark or testing arrangement says that it should be, and my portable devices don't seem to suffer undue battery drain when I leave their WiFi on. In terms of signal-to-noise, I think it's working fine.
And so, while I don't see much detrimental interference in the 5GHz bands when using a spectrum analyzer around here, I also simply don't experience any at 2.4GHz as a consumer even though I can see that many of my neighbors are sharing that spectrum with me.
And, of course, just because you see a plurality SSID broadcast doesn't mean that they're actually using any meaningful chunk of available wireless bandwidth. Most folks are just the usual occasional Youtube watcher who otherwise does light web browsing, and that doesn't generally have much effect on things. 802.11 is pretty good about being fairly quiet when it doesn't have actual data packets to transmit, making it a rather good neighbor (unlike some other things such as Motorola Canopy).
So for the manual, they need to produce an entirely unique production line, with little product overlap, for an entirely different non-luxury model, for a shrinking market which can't be advertised to.
Bah. I switched my BMW from an auto to a manual.
Everything was already there, including the metal clips on the body that hold the hydraulic clutch line in place.
One just replaces the transmission, driveshaft, and starter, and a few snap-together interior parts. One adds a clutch pedal (the factory pedal assembly already has a place for it, even on an auto) and some plumbing. One also performs a small amount of easy wiring changes to get the reverse lights to work, the engine into the "in-gear" mode, and to keep the car from starting without the clutch pedal depressed (and some of this can be done with software instead of wiring, from an manufacturing perspective).
Bleed the hydraulics, test the wiring, and done. (Bonus points are awarded for replacing the differential to keep a sane overall gear ratio, but the rest of the rear-end stays the same.)
Please note the lack of drilling, cutting, and irreversible modification in this process.
This is not the sort of change that requires "an entirely unique production line." The two chassis are identical, and the parts are interchangeable. One just takes the car apart, and puts it back together differently.
(The problem with generalizations is that they're generally often wrong.)
The singular manual transmission car I've had in the US which behaved in the manner you describe (a mid-90's Chevy with DRL and automatic headlights) also had a real, honest-to-god headlight switch:
Turn it on, and the lights are on.
Key in, key out, any position, engine running, engine stopped, parking brake engaged or not. You want lights? Turn them on.
Working on dropbox? Meh. I'm just passively whoring referrals trying to get to the maximum of 8GB of free storage for myself, at a rate of 250MB per referral. I'm nearly there, and will stop whenever it's done.
The folks I refer also get an extra 250MB compared to if they'd just signed up blindly at the dropbox.com, which helps them out a small bit if they're interested. (I wish I knew this when I joined.)
I like your idea, but you started off talking about home users in the first paragraph, and then launched into some CDMA fantasy that no home user will want to pay for -- let alone install.
For the common home user in the US (in a normal home, not a McMansion or a city apartment that is densely packed amongst others) the best answer to limited coverage is to install one or more higher-gain antennas at the (singular) access point. And then...well, that's all. There is no "and then."
There aren't any hand-off/roaming issues. There aren't multiple infrastructure devices to try to figure out how to configure cohesively. There is no need to install a myriad of difficult or unsightly (pick one) runs of Cat5. Nor any reason to actively avoid self-interference on one's own network.
Just buy a better antenna, plug it in, and call it done -- just like folks used to do with TVs before everyone had 57 channels and nothin' on. No magic required. (I've seen perfectly reasonable antennas on the shelf at Wal-Mart, even.)
The general case in other countries might be different. But here in the US, things are usually relatively spread out, there are generally at most just a few Wifi devices in a given home which are capable of consuming large amounts of bandwidth, and most of that bandwidth will be bottlenecked at the relatively slow connection to the Internet. 802.11's typical CSMA works very well for this scenario, especially since the vast majority of typical traffic is in exactly one direction: From the access point, to something else, perhaps with some TCP ACKs coming back the other way.
Local bandwidth isn't usually a big deal, unless the local geek is transferring huge files between systems or performing backups or whatever. And most homes don't have a local geek anyway. But if they do have a geek then 802.11a/b/g/n allows for such processes to be very speedy indeed on a one-to-one basis (compared to any other widely-used and inexpensive wireless method).
Meanwhile, in my own house: If I'd just spent a pile of money and effort refitting the house with a bunch of 802.11u CDMA femtocells, and the maximum bandwidth per device was only 2.5mbit/sec, my wife would kill me because her Netflix movies would turn ugly and her WOW machine would take even longer to patch on Tuesday.
We get far better performance than that right now (with our not-atypical usage) out of a single ancient WRT54G, and don't have to pay Qualcomm a dime in CDMA patent royalties. (I'd be also be very happy to jump onto the 5GHz 802.11n boat, but we currently own zero client devices which can use it. I -could- upgrade my laptop, but I'm happy enough to plug it in when I've got big things to transfer.)
That all said, I'm not quite so dense as to suppose that you're only talking about the common home use scenario. I understand that even a busy coffee shop might be sufficient to throw a monkey-wrench into the works. And certainly, I'd be pleased as hell if I could actually get a consistent 2.5mbit/sec connection at a coffee house (or a library or a university or...).
But please realize that while CDMA is very good for some things, it can be just as lousy for other things, and that most of CDMA's practical advantages in a limited environment can be realized about as well with CSMA, RTS/CTS, QoS, and per-device limits. (The fact that virtually zero consumer devices support 802.11u is a different topic altogether.)
Right, clearly. But when a studio "uploads all their shit," I just figured that shit would include a film such as Saving Private Ryan which, while a bit old, is still pretty far away from the discount bin.
You'd be crazy to set up a MMDS system now, with the wifi wanna be hackers trying to use channel 14 to get away from the noise and some microwave oven interference. So that chunk of bandwidth is kind of a wasteland that no one can use, more or less.
Watch TV has used it for a long time for subscription TV service, and it's still a popular (though regional) alternative to cable or satellite. They're located not too far from me, and it's fairly typical to see their telltale parabolic reflectors on small towers near farmhouses and on multi-story commercial buildings.
In areas served by Watch TV, I have every expectation that 802.11 channel 14 is an unmitigatable sea of TV signals, and that any wifi wanna be hacker would quickly abandon the attempt except for at very short distances.
I've had an Intel 802.11a/b/g wireless card in my laptop for well over half a decade, and have never encountered an access point in the 5GHz band that I want to use when out and about. Nobody, in my not-so-limited experience, operates a public 5GHz hotspot.
To be clear: I do use the various 5GHz ISM bands for all kinds of long-range communication in my day job, and really appreciate the available spectrum and general lack of interference as compared with the near-universal mess that exists at 2.4GHz.
But as a consumer, I'd have been better off getting the cheaper 2.4GHz-only adapter and spending the difference in price on a bottle of mid-grade tequila.
True, this is much more advanced technology and seems to be amazingly effective, but a good photoshop editor has been able to fool the public for quite a long time now.
The best part about this tech is that it does not require a "good" photoshop editor to sort out the light paths and shadows/reflections/etc manually, but just a person willing to graphically describe the scene using a GUI. After that, arbitrary 3D objects can be more-or-less added arbitrarily with uncanny realism.
This includes, perhaps unfortunately, realtors.
(And to the English Nazi(s) reading this: "graphically" and "GUI" are not redundant terms in this context.)
It sure ain't natural language, and it's not a literal response to the question you posed, but on my Droid, I just unambiguously say "Navigate to Wal-Mart," and it pretty well invariably routes me to the nearest store.
Which is OK. Because, presumably if you're wondering where the nearest Wal-Mart is, you need stuff, and your next course of action will be to go there to buy that stuff.
If not, then you're just evaluating your options (perhaps KMart or Target might also be suitable for the stuff you want and might be closer). And for that, Google Places will work better than Siri or Android's voice search.
(Unless, of course, you're just being pedantic and expecting literal statistics, but this is a voice-search function on a phone intended to be used by layfolk as a practical tool in their daily lives, not Wolfram-Alpha. Pick the right tool for the job.)
Ideally, I want to ask: "Where is the nearest place to buy [diapers/beer/contact lens solution]" and currently, everything fails pretty miserably at that task. (I know that Wal-Mart carries all of these things, but if the corner store that is twelve miles closer also has the item, I'd rather go there...and not even Places will help me with that.)
That all said: I'd totally expect Siri to give me a street address for the nearest Wal-Mart, and offer to guide me there. If it doesn't, then it's so full of fail that it's not even funny. I want to get things done, not enter into a discussion with a glorified, DARPA-funded ChatBot clone with a broken sense of conversational context.
The same holds true for Google's voice search, which requires network communication in order to perform its duty: Presumably, every single instance of attempted usage is available to the developers for refinement and curation.
What's to stop Siri from having its usability sadly degrade due to Apple hiring a team of monkeys on meth to maintain it?
Meanwhile, I find Google's voice recognition to be ridiculously good as well, with two exceptions:
1. It doesn't understand my wife's first name. It insists that it should be spelled with a Y where there is, in fact, an E, and refuses (or is unable) to perform any phonetic matching of the contents of my Contacts.
2. It tends to put spaces into some acronyms. Saying "play Skrillex" works fine, but saying "play KMFDM" comes back with "K M F D M," which my music app(s) can't (and shouldn't have to) parse into something usable.
But it seems to work quite well for composing a text message, finding directions, or calling anyone but my wife, and it gets better with age as it learns my particular monotone mumble.
What it doesn't have is any semblance of AI, which I'm OK with...though AI has potential to be handy.
Just last night, I stumbled upon a complete copy of Saving Private Ryan on Youtube. It wasn't segmented or adulterated, and seemed to be a very good rip (though at low resolution, it was at least as good as I remember seeing it on VHS), with good audio, and correct aspect ratio, and correct color.
I watched it for awhile, mostly because I find that it is an easy film to get sucked into, but the point is simple: If automated tools can determine the validity of such material, they certainly should've caught that. And, apparently, they didn't.
She needed help getting the ringer to work, so I had a look at it. The volume was all the way up, and the settings all looked fine. Meanwhile, Youtube videos certainly had sound, so it wasn't a hardware problem.
So, I decided to ask Siri. Several times. Siri never could figure it out, either, and couldn't come up with any helpful responses to my natural-language queries.
Eventually, I fired up Safari, did some Googling using the old-fashioned way, and learned that there was a hardware switch on the side which was almost completely obscured by the case the device was in. I flipped the switch back the other way, and things obviously then worked fine...
IMHO, if Siri should be able to do one thing and do it well, that thing should be the ability to play Tier-1 tech support for the device that it runs on.
Let it be known that the 2kW online sinewave UPS had an excellent price: One might even say that I was paid to bring it home and use it. I'm simply very lucky to have such a modern and featureful unit. My only complaint is that the cooling fan is very loud, but I keep it in a closet so I don't hear it much.
If I were buying new, it'd almost certainly be a simple standby model with an AVR function (and/or "line interactive") to look after any voltage spikes or dips. (I'm wary of the concept because I've seen a lot of inexpensive, name-brand UPSs fail, sometimes spectacularly with smoke and everything, but that might just be because they're also by far the most common.)
I used to have a couple of big Best Ferrups units which weighed about 80 and 140 pounds, respectively, and they were particularly industrious things. But they eventually needed new batteries which I couldn't afford, and I didn't trust them at all after a flood subsequently kept them submerged in river water for 2 or 3 days.
They were pretty cool because of the giant ferroresonant transformer in them, which was completely capable of -passively- smoothing out the AC line voltage and killing any inbound/outbound RFI. The inverter was also capable of continuous duty, though the units were standby in design (the resonant transformer was able to roll right over the power loss detection/switching time like a flywheel, with no meaningful interruption in output). I'd thought about installing the smaller one in my work truck since it used a single 12V battery, to run small power tools or a soldering station from, or just to charge the truck battery in case I'd run it down somehow, but unfortunately didn't get around to it before the flood.
Those were free, too. The folks who had them knew they'd be useful to somebody. But they're too heavy and bulky to bother with trying to ship on an Ebay sale, so they were just happy to have someone haul them out (the other realistic option was that they'd have to carry them to the trash themselves).
Keep your eyes open. I'm sure these finds exist in your neck of the woods, also.
Back to power: Lots of commercial buildings here have 3-phase, 480V power. It's used for motor loads (AC compressors, blowers, elevators) mostly, and makes perfect sense in that application. I'm not sure how they bring it down to 120/240V single-phase for other more mundane loads just because I haven't had a good reason to study up on it. But whatever the method, it oddly leaves a leg of 208V available, which generally gets used for fixed overhead fluorescent lighting.
A lot of stage lighting gear and pro audio amplifiers here are also very happy with 208V. I really wish I fully understood why 208V is so common in such environments, while the rest of the usual stuff in this country uses voltages that are integer factors of 120V, but all I really know is that it mostly precludes using that sort of stuff at home on split-phase 240.
Some areas are wired for 3-phase, but almost zero residential areas are as such: 240V split-phase is absolutely the rule for home use, and 120V is absolutely the rule for small appliances that folks are expected to plug in themselves. (It's easy enough to discern the absence of 3-phase just by counting the overhead lines.)
And, really: I'm still shocked that you can't (generally) get high-current single-phase 240V where you're at, while my mind boggles at the possibility of having residential 3-phase. It's ideal for motor loads, and it really would be more efficient (in terms of Watt-hours per unit of work) for a lot of things around the average American home.
So. Despite your small main breaker, you've damned near got me as jealous about 3-phase power availability as I am about your bandwidth.:)
(Are Lithuanian girls hot? How is your immigration policy? Are German cars affordable there? What's the national stance on piracy and copyright? Do skilled people in Lithuania generally have English skills as good as your own, or will I want to learn the language first?);)
Heh. What a bizarre set of circumstances: Expensive power, plentiful bandwidth.
Here in the States, folks would kill eachother to be the first person in line to subscribe to 300mbps symmetric service. My own VDSL connection is 12/1.5Mbps, and is considered rather fast by most of my (local) peers. The ISP does not offer anything higher than 18Mbps.
At my place, I've got two thirsty gaming rigs that stay powered up 24x7 (one for the wife), and another desktop that sleeps almost all of the time.
There's also a very lightweight (by today's standards) Athlon XP box with Gentoo which plays headless server 24x7 that can do whatever I ask of it except realtime video encoding. I could easily sidegrade that machine to something Atom-based and likely save enough on power to pay for it, but it's so bloody stable (with uptimes often measured in years, and zero crashes) that I really don't want to touch it.
Most of this runs from a 2kW inverter in a stout little UPS, which isn't the most efficient way to do things...but on the other hand, I haven't lost a power supply or hard drive since I started doing things that way. It's funny that this UPS could run half of a standard 4kW feed there.:)
As to split-phase wiring: Yeah, it's dumb. There's no good reason for it. Hypothetically 120V is safer, but it uses twice as much copper in the walls, in extension cords, in the primary windings of the transformers in all sorts of gear, and in electric motors as 240V does to do the same work. And it allows all sorts of issues with the neutral wire (lights can brighten when something big fires up on the other 120V leg) which just can't happen on straight single-phase power.
But that's just how it's always been, so we're stuck with it.
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I don't know your situation very well, but the most obvious scenario (assuming there is bandwidth and power available at the "main road") is as follows:
1. Put a small cabinet by the main road to house some gear. Add power and broadband. Install high-gain antenna (I prefer parabolic reflectors for hairy links, YMMV) and some manner of reasonably powerful all-in-one WiFi radio. (Engenius makes some that I've been reasonably pleased with long-term which are rather inexpensive.)
2. Point it that-a-way.
3. Do the same at the other end (perhaps without a cabinet).
4. Done.
Now, I'm making assumptions here. I'm assuming that it's reasonable to try to burn through the foliage (which soaks up 2.4GHz pretty readily) by using a combination of power and directivity, in an environment that I have not seen. I'm assuming that there's very little other 2.4GHz gear nearby to further destroy the SNR. I'm assuming that there's no hill in between to put a big chunk of Earth in the way. I'm assuming that it's reasonable to put a cabinet by the road (whether because your folks own the land, or because they've got a friendly neighbor who doesn't mind losing a few square feet of property indefinitely). I'm assuming that when it's all said and done, you'd be very pleased with perhaps a couple of megabits per second of throughput, as long as it was consistent on a day-to-day basis.
Elsewhere, you've mentioned your willingness to procure a DSLAM or to pull fiber to the road. If you're willing to go to those extreme sorts of measures, there's bound to be a way to make it work without being too elaborate in the implementation. The above is simply one relatively uninformed suggestion.
But yeah, whatever the case: I'd bloody well hope that the USF should help to mitigate situations like your folks have, especially now, since that's exactly the sort of thing that it is for. Time will tell on that one...
Depends on the zip cord. I've had common, clear vinyl-insulated zip cord turn all gross and corroded inside down the entire length, and while that may not actually affect things much, it does make good (clean) connections rather difficult to accomplish.
I use direct-burial low-voltage lighting cable a lot, these days. It's cheap, easy to find, heavily insulated (durable), has a high strand count (ie: flexible), is UV resistant, and it's always been bright and shiny when I cut into it. Oh, and it's black by default, as God intended wires to be. :)
But for very high-power stuff, very long runs, or stage use, there are far better options. (None of which, obviously, are made from silver...)
I've seen Haier stuff for sale in the US for years -- mostly on goods that involve refrigeration of some kind. Looking at your link, I see that its available offerings have not changed much recently.
I have a Haier chest freezer in my utility room, and it was already rather old when I got a couple of years ago.
The BYD Cars thing is another point entirely, but I (for one) am completely satisfied at calling Bullshit on exactly 50% of your post.
FWIW, YMMV, et cetera.
Black-banned?
I understand the term "black-balled."
I also understand the term "banned"
But "black-banned?" Please define.
How will this affect the cheap stuff I buy from Dealextreme and similar (including Ebay) sites in China, whose wares show up often properly-branded (sometimes even including hologram tags) on my doorstep quickly and inexpensively?
Meh. Despite the timestamp above that says it's Thursday at about midnight:30, I'm up for the count even if it is fast approaching 4:30AM. I gave up on sleeping at night a year or two ago, and am better (healthier, happier) for it. YMM[probably]V. (And perhaps unusually or unexpectedly, money and family has stayed about the same for me, even with my somewhat-recently-self-imposed "strange" hours for work/sleep/play.)
As to clean installs, it even works on Android phone: Wipe everything, install the latest Cyanogenmod (or whatever), restore apps and useful data, and done.
Looking back, starting from a clean install would've easily saved me a lot of effort even when I was using OS/2. I wish I'd learned it sooner, though I don't know that I'd have ever really tried it unless I figured it out the hard way.
Well, sure. Modern Linux distros (save the tailored Gentoo install and the like) tend to autoconfig every bit of necessary hardware at every single boot, as if every boot is a new install. It happens so fast that it doesn't even matter, and RAM and disk are damn near free at this minute level on any semi-modern PC.
I blame the good folks behind Knoppix for first figuring out how to get this right (not that it is in any way a bad thing).
But in the NT4 days, I remember things generally being very different from automagic. And they were.
Meanwhile: At work, we have two identical HPaq ML330 Windows Server 2003 boxes. One is basically an offline spares kit, and the other gets used daily. Things on the working box are backed up daily in disk image format.
More than a few times, usually just after the end of the year, the in-house accountant has asked to be able to look at last year's stuff as it existed at that time, in isolation from the rest of the accountancy stuff.
Doing so is easy: Just plug the spare ML330 in, restore the entire hard disk with Acronis, and....done. It boots up and works just like it was turned off yesterday (or yesteryear). I haven't tried it, but I strongly suspect that it'd work just as well under VMWare as on actual bare metal.
So, I really don't think that things are as bad, these days, as you assert that they were well over a decade ago. Everything seems to have improved a lot in that time.
About the same for me, except it was an Advansys SCSI card and a Plextor PR-820 CD-R burner. (I forget if it was Win2k or an early XP.)
Everything has worked so well more-or-less since then, regardless of interface or software, that I haven't really thought about it much. I've got three DVD-RW drives tied to my desktop right now: One internal PATA, one PATA-over-cheapshit-Chinese-USB-dongle, and one prepackaged USB external -- all of very different brands and vintages. I abuse them all variously for all manner of CD-shaped media, sometimes all at once, and things really do just work under Windows.
Even with the weird concoction I have of software ATAPI emulators, transparent DVD decryption tools like AnyDVD, and such that are always present on my system: No problem.
My rather old daily-use Dell laptop somewhat bizarrely has a PATA burner on an internal SATA channel, and it's the same story: It just works. Always has. This laptop came with XP, I put Vista on it just to learn it, and it's now on 7. No issues, ever. (Er. Well. The first drive eventually gave up and was replaced, but that's not exactly Microsoft's fault. I blame Sony.)
*shrug*
You, sir, have never run an incarnation of Slackware from the NT4 era. You'd build your own kernel and modules, and you wanted things to be as lean as possible to save on RAM (which was precious in ways which seem unfathomable today), reduce complexity, and keep the lengthy compile times to a minimum.
So, generally, you only included the system devices that you needed. Blindly move a disk to a completely different system? Get ready for an extended round of booting from floppy, fighting with LILO, and learning how to build a new kernel on a box that only half-way works (what network device? what CD-ROM?) so that it can be brought up fully.
It might be preferable to NT4's own hairy mess, but not by much.
It was painful enough that I learned how to pre-configure the existing installation to suit the new box, which was at least half-way sane but still involved hoops of flaming sodium if I'd made an improper assumption. And it didn't work at all in the event that I was changing the disk over to a new machine due to some other fatal hardware problem.
Perhaps more to the point, all of that pain has taught me that when I migrate to a new machine I should just do a clean install on the new box. Once I get the hardware running properly, I install the requisite services and user programs. And then I move any user and configuration data over, test it, change the hostname and IP address, and call it done. Almost no downtime required, and all accomplished with a great amount of leisure since the old system is still running during all of this. (It works under Windows, too, though the details can be very different indeed.)
(The *BSDs, in stock form, did seem to behave much better with random hardware changes at that time, but they were also far more mature than the typical Linux distribution...)
The last time I saw an ATAPI error under Windows was in the (relative) infancy of CD burners, when folklore and back-end customization waged war against the much-vaunted coaster.
But the war is over, and it simply turns out that it wasn't so complicated after all: The software and hardware sucked, and the hacks to mitigate that sucked harder. After a time, software simply improved, and the old hardware was replaced. (The hacks disappeared naturally.)
Are you doing anything consistently peculiar with your system?
I live in a big house which, while definitely in-town by any measure, sits on a fair bit of land. There are something like 16 access points shown on my Droid while standing in my driveway...but four of them are mine. (I've currently got two access points that I actually use, just because I can. The PS3 also becomes an access point when it's turned off for Remote Play(tm). And I use AT&T's provided access point only to broadcast obscure and sometimes dirty SSID beacons, again just because I can...)
Of the remaining twelve, two are open. Their signal is so weak inside of my house that I cannot connect to and use them without extraordinary means.
One of them is an illegally-amplified access point operated by the local municipality, located about five miles away. (I really should get around to complaining to the FCC about that.)
Almost all of the rest of them are on one channel, so I use the other two non-overlapping channels.
The rest of them just constitute a bit of noise, which seems OK: My 802.11g is as fast as any practical benchmark or testing arrangement says that it should be, and my portable devices don't seem to suffer undue battery drain when I leave their WiFi on. In terms of signal-to-noise, I think it's working fine.
And so, while I don't see much detrimental interference in the 5GHz bands when using a spectrum analyzer around here, I also simply don't experience any at 2.4GHz as a consumer even though I can see that many of my neighbors are sharing that spectrum with me.
And, of course, just because you see a plurality SSID broadcast doesn't mean that they're actually using any meaningful chunk of available wireless bandwidth. Most folks are just the usual occasional Youtube watcher who otherwise does light web browsing, and that doesn't generally have much effect on things. 802.11 is pretty good about being fairly quiet when it doesn't have actual data packets to transmit, making it a rather good neighbor (unlike some other things such as Motorola Canopy).
(YMMV, of course. I'm just one data point.)
Bah. I switched my BMW from an auto to a manual.
Everything was already there, including the metal clips on the body that hold the hydraulic clutch line in place.
One just replaces the transmission, driveshaft, and starter, and a few snap-together interior parts. One adds a clutch pedal (the factory pedal assembly already has a place for it, even on an auto) and some plumbing. One also performs a small amount of easy wiring changes to get the reverse lights to work, the engine into the "in-gear" mode, and to keep the car from starting without the clutch pedal depressed (and some of this can be done with software instead of wiring, from an manufacturing perspective).
Bleed the hydraulics, test the wiring, and done. (Bonus points are awarded for replacing the differential to keep a sane overall gear ratio, but the rest of the rear-end stays the same.)
Please note the lack of drilling, cutting, and irreversible modification in this process.
This is not the sort of change that requires "an entirely unique production line." The two chassis are identical, and the parts are interchangeable. One just takes the car apart, and puts it back together differently.
(The problem with generalizations is that they're generally often wrong.)
The singular manual transmission car I've had in the US which behaved in the manner you describe (a mid-90's Chevy with DRL and automatic headlights) also had a real, honest-to-god headlight switch:
Turn it on, and the lights are on.
Key in, key out, any position, engine running, engine stopped, parking brake engaged or not. You want lights? Turn them on.
*shrug*
Working on dropbox? Meh. I'm just passively whoring referrals trying to get to the maximum of 8GB of free storage for myself, at a rate of 250MB per referral. I'm nearly there, and will stop whenever it's done.
The folks I refer also get an extra 250MB compared to if they'd just signed up blindly at the dropbox.com, which helps them out a small bit if they're interested. (I wish I knew this when I joined.)
And besides, it's free stuff. :)
I like your idea, but you started off talking about home users in the first paragraph, and then launched into some CDMA fantasy that no home user will want to pay for -- let alone install.
For the common home user in the US (in a normal home, not a McMansion or a city apartment that is densely packed amongst others) the best answer to limited coverage is to install one or more higher-gain antennas at the (singular) access point. And then...well, that's all. There is no "and then."
There aren't any hand-off/roaming issues. There aren't multiple infrastructure devices to try to figure out how to configure cohesively. There is no need to install a myriad of difficult or unsightly (pick one) runs of Cat5. Nor any reason to actively avoid self-interference on one's own network.
Just buy a better antenna, plug it in, and call it done -- just like folks used to do with TVs before everyone had 57 channels and nothin' on. No magic required. (I've seen perfectly reasonable antennas on the shelf at Wal-Mart, even.)
The general case in other countries might be different. But here in the US, things are usually relatively spread out, there are generally at most just a few Wifi devices in a given home which are capable of consuming large amounts of bandwidth, and most of that bandwidth will be bottlenecked at the relatively slow connection to the Internet. 802.11's typical CSMA works very well for this scenario, especially since the vast majority of typical traffic is in exactly one direction: From the access point, to something else, perhaps with some TCP ACKs coming back the other way.
Local bandwidth isn't usually a big deal, unless the local geek is transferring huge files between systems or performing backups or whatever. And most homes don't have a local geek anyway. But if they do have a geek then 802.11a/b/g/n allows for such processes to be very speedy indeed on a one-to-one basis (compared to any other widely-used and inexpensive wireless method).
Meanwhile, in my own house: If I'd just spent a pile of money and effort refitting the house with a bunch of 802.11u CDMA femtocells, and the maximum bandwidth per device was only 2.5mbit/sec, my wife would kill me because her Netflix movies would turn ugly and her WOW machine would take even longer to patch on Tuesday.
We get far better performance than that right now (with our not-atypical usage) out of a single ancient WRT54G, and don't have to pay Qualcomm a dime in CDMA patent royalties. (I'd be also be very happy to jump onto the 5GHz 802.11n boat, but we currently own zero client devices which can use it. I -could- upgrade my laptop, but I'm happy enough to plug it in when I've got big things to transfer.)
That all said, I'm not quite so dense as to suppose that you're only talking about the common home use scenario. I understand that even a busy coffee shop might be sufficient to throw a monkey-wrench into the works. And certainly, I'd be pleased as hell if I could actually get a consistent 2.5mbit/sec connection at a coffee house (or a library or a university or...).
But please realize that while CDMA is very good for some things, it can be just as lousy for other things, and that most of CDMA's practical advantages in a limited environment can be realized about as well with CSMA, RTS/CTS, QoS, and per-device limits. (The fact that virtually zero consumer devices support 802.11u is a different topic altogether.)
Right, clearly. But when a studio "uploads all their shit," I just figured that shit would include a film such as Saving Private Ryan which, while a bit old, is still pretty far away from the discount bin.
You'd be crazy to set up a MMDS system now, with the wifi wanna be hackers trying to use channel 14 to get away from the noise and some microwave oven interference. So that chunk of bandwidth is kind of a wasteland that no one can use, more or less.
Watch TV has used it for a long time for subscription TV service, and it's still a popular (though regional) alternative to cable or satellite. They're located not too far from me, and it's fairly typical to see their telltale parabolic reflectors on small towers near farmhouses and on multi-story commercial buildings.
In areas served by Watch TV, I have every expectation that 802.11 channel 14 is an unmitigatable sea of TV signals, and that any wifi wanna be hacker would quickly abandon the attempt except for at very short distances.
I've had an Intel 802.11a/b/g wireless card in my laptop for well over half a decade, and have never encountered an access point in the 5GHz band that I want to use when out and about. Nobody, in my not-so-limited experience, operates a public 5GHz hotspot.
To be clear: I do use the various 5GHz ISM bands for all kinds of long-range communication in my day job, and really appreciate the available spectrum and general lack of interference as compared with the near-universal mess that exists at 2.4GHz.
But as a consumer, I'd have been better off getting the cheaper 2.4GHz-only adapter and spending the difference in price on a bottle of mid-grade tequila.
The best part about this tech is that it does not require a "good" photoshop editor to sort out the light paths and shadows/reflections/etc manually, but just a person willing to graphically describe the scene using a GUI. After that, arbitrary 3D objects can be more-or-less added arbitrarily with uncanny realism.
This includes, perhaps unfortunately, realtors.
(And to the English Nazi(s) reading this: "graphically" and "GUI" are not redundant terms in this context.)
Hmm.
It sure ain't natural language, and it's not a literal response to the question you posed, but on my Droid, I just unambiguously say "Navigate to Wal-Mart," and it pretty well invariably routes me to the nearest store.
Which is OK. Because, presumably if you're wondering where the nearest Wal-Mart is, you need stuff, and your next course of action will be to go there to buy that stuff.
If not, then you're just evaluating your options (perhaps KMart or Target might also be suitable for the stuff you want and might be closer). And for that, Google Places will work better than Siri or Android's voice search.
(Unless, of course, you're just being pedantic and expecting literal statistics, but this is a voice-search function on a phone intended to be used by layfolk as a practical tool in their daily lives, not Wolfram-Alpha. Pick the right tool for the job.)
Ideally, I want to ask: "Where is the nearest place to buy [diapers/beer/contact lens solution]" and currently, everything fails pretty miserably at that task. (I know that Wal-Mart carries all of these things, but if the corner store that is twelve miles closer also has the item, I'd rather go there...and not even Places will help me with that.)
That all said: I'd totally expect Siri to give me a street address for the nearest Wal-Mart, and offer to guide me there. If it doesn't, then it's so full of fail that it's not even funny. I want to get things done, not enter into a discussion with a glorified, DARPA-funded ChatBot clone with a broken sense of conversational context.
The same holds true for Google's voice search, which requires network communication in order to perform its duty: Presumably, every single instance of attempted usage is available to the developers for refinement and curation.
What's to stop Siri from having its usability sadly degrade due to Apple hiring a team of monkeys on meth to maintain it?
Meanwhile, I find Google's voice recognition to be ridiculously good as well, with two exceptions:
1. It doesn't understand my wife's first name. It insists that it should be spelled with a Y where there is, in fact, an E, and refuses (or is unable) to perform any phonetic matching of the contents of my Contacts.
2. It tends to put spaces into some acronyms. Saying "play Skrillex" works fine, but saying "play KMFDM" comes back with "K M F D M," which my music app(s) can't (and shouldn't have to) parse into something usable.
But it seems to work quite well for composing a text message, finding directions, or calling anyone but my wife, and it gets better with age as it learns my particular monotone mumble.
What it doesn't have is any semblance of AI, which I'm OK with...though AI has potential to be handy.
Just last night, I stumbled upon a complete copy of Saving Private Ryan on Youtube. It wasn't segmented or adulterated, and seemed to be a very good rip (though at low resolution, it was at least as good as I remember seeing it on VHS), with good audio, and correct aspect ratio, and correct color.
I watched it for awhile, mostly because I find that it is an easy film to get sucked into, but the point is simple: If automated tools can determine the validity of such material, they certainly should've caught that. And, apparently, they didn't.
My boss's wife recently got an iPhone 4S.
She needed help getting the ringer to work, so I had a look at it. The volume was all the way up, and the settings all looked fine. Meanwhile, Youtube videos certainly had sound, so it wasn't a hardware problem.
So, I decided to ask Siri. Several times. Siri never could figure it out, either, and couldn't come up with any helpful responses to my natural-language queries.
Eventually, I fired up Safari, did some Googling using the old-fashioned way, and learned that there was a hardware switch on the side which was almost completely obscured by the case the device was in. I flipped the switch back the other way, and things obviously then worked fine...
IMHO, if Siri should be able to do one thing and do it well, that thing should be the ability to play Tier-1 tech support for the device that it runs on.
Well...
Let it be known that the 2kW online sinewave UPS had an excellent price: One might even say that I was paid to bring it home and use it. I'm simply very lucky to have such a modern and featureful unit. My only complaint is that the cooling fan is very loud, but I keep it in a closet so I don't hear it much.
If I were buying new, it'd almost certainly be a simple standby model with an AVR function (and/or "line interactive") to look after any voltage spikes or dips. (I'm wary of the concept because I've seen a lot of inexpensive, name-brand UPSs fail, sometimes spectacularly with smoke and everything, but that might just be because they're also by far the most common.)
I used to have a couple of big Best Ferrups units which weighed about 80 and 140 pounds, respectively, and they were particularly industrious things. But they eventually needed new batteries which I couldn't afford, and I didn't trust them at all after a flood subsequently kept them submerged in river water for 2 or 3 days.
They were pretty cool because of the giant ferroresonant transformer in them, which was completely capable of -passively- smoothing out the AC line voltage and killing any inbound/outbound RFI. The inverter was also capable of continuous duty, though the units were standby in design (the resonant transformer was able to roll right over the power loss detection/switching time like a flywheel, with no meaningful interruption in output). I'd thought about installing the smaller one in my work truck since it used a single 12V battery, to run small power tools or a soldering station from, or just to charge the truck battery in case I'd run it down somehow, but unfortunately didn't get around to it before the flood.
Those were free, too. The folks who had them knew they'd be useful to somebody. But they're too heavy and bulky to bother with trying to ship on an Ebay sale, so they were just happy to have someone haul them out (the other realistic option was that they'd have to carry them to the trash themselves).
Keep your eyes open. I'm sure these finds exist in your neck of the woods, also.
Back to power: Lots of commercial buildings here have 3-phase, 480V power. It's used for motor loads (AC compressors, blowers, elevators) mostly, and makes perfect sense in that application. I'm not sure how they bring it down to 120/240V single-phase for other more mundane loads just because I haven't had a good reason to study up on it. But whatever the method, it oddly leaves a leg of 208V available, which generally gets used for fixed overhead fluorescent lighting.
A lot of stage lighting gear and pro audio amplifiers here are also very happy with 208V. I really wish I fully understood why 208V is so common in such environments, while the rest of the usual stuff in this country uses voltages that are integer factors of 120V, but all I really know is that it mostly precludes using that sort of stuff at home on split-phase 240.
Some areas are wired for 3-phase, but almost zero residential areas are as such: 240V split-phase is absolutely the rule for home use, and 120V is absolutely the rule for small appliances that folks are expected to plug in themselves. (It's easy enough to discern the absence of 3-phase just by counting the overhead lines.)
And, really: I'm still shocked that you can't (generally) get high-current single-phase 240V where you're at, while my mind boggles at the possibility of having residential 3-phase. It's ideal for motor loads, and it really would be more efficient (in terms of Watt-hours per unit of work) for a lot of things around the average American home.
So. Despite your small main breaker, you've damned near got me as jealous about 3-phase power availability as I am about your bandwidth. :)
(Are Lithuanian girls hot? How is your immigration policy? Are German cars affordable there? What's the national stance on piracy and copyright? Do skilled people in Lithuania generally have English skills as good as your own, or will I want to learn the language first?) ;)
Heh. What a bizarre set of circumstances: Expensive power, plentiful bandwidth.
Here in the States, folks would kill eachother to be the first person in line to subscribe to 300mbps symmetric service. My own VDSL connection is 12/1.5Mbps, and is considered rather fast by most of my (local) peers. The ISP does not offer anything higher than 18Mbps.
At my place, I've got two thirsty gaming rigs that stay powered up 24x7 (one for the wife), and another desktop that sleeps almost all of the time.
There's also a very lightweight (by today's standards) Athlon XP box with Gentoo which plays headless server 24x7 that can do whatever I ask of it except realtime video encoding. I could easily sidegrade that machine to something Atom-based and likely save enough on power to pay for it, but it's so bloody stable (with uptimes often measured in years, and zero crashes) that I really don't want to touch it.
Most of this runs from a 2kW inverter in a stout little UPS, which isn't the most efficient way to do things...but on the other hand, I haven't lost a power supply or hard drive since I started doing things that way. It's funny that this UPS could run half of a standard 4kW feed there. :)
As to split-phase wiring: Yeah, it's dumb. There's no good reason for it. Hypothetically 120V is safer, but it uses twice as much copper in the walls, in extension cords, in the primary windings of the transformers in all sorts of gear, and in electric motors as 240V does to do the same work. And it allows all sorts of issues with the neutral wire (lights can brighten when something big fires up on the other 120V leg) which just can't happen on straight single-phase power.
But that's just how it's always been, so we're stuck with it.