I have heard that electrical wiring in the new hybrids run through all sorts of places, including roof and roof posts.
You need to keep up on your education. My Prius does have wireing in the roof. Duh, it has a courtesy light. Not new technology or unique to a hybrid and has been around for years.
I have also heard of their being multiple batteries.
No suprise here either. For safety, most lights, heaters, cruise control, AC, lighter, dash lights, engine computer, etc... still run on 12 volts. A 12 volt heater fan motor won't get the car to accelerate from a stop. Something with a lot more kick is needed. Therefore a larger high voltage battery, motors/generators, and control systems. I have not seen any hybrid with just one battery.
Finally, the presence of air bags everywhere all over the car frame is great, they can explode at random times.
The presense of air bags and their sensors is not unique to hybrids. This is a red herring and nothing else. Hybrids have safety items pretty much the same as conventional cars. News flash!! Hybrid cars have pressurised tires that may explode in a fire!
Learn the rescue techniques. Not all cars are just a sheet metal box with seats and an engine. Old school is don't cut fuel lines and fuel tanks. You know where they are. New technology, Don't cut the high voltage battery pack and cables. Learn where they are. Don't cut the air bag sensor wireing. Learn where it is and leave it alone.
In nice weather, I roll the windows down. I can hear a bycycle aproach and not slow down for the stop sign while riding on the left side of the road. Making extra noise at the stop sign would keep me from hearing the cyclists that don't stop for stop signs assuming that I saw them before pulling out in front of them. They need to add the noise and bright lights to bycycles (like a harley) so they can be seen and heard. I usualy do see a bicycle at at an intersection IF they come up to the intersection in the proper lane and stop for the stop sign. That's not the cyclist I pull out in front of because I didn't see them. It's the ones on the other side of the road that didn't stop that don't get seen. A pedesterian gets seen because he is at the corner when the driver looks checking trafic, not 35 feet back from the corner traveling 30 MPH into the intersection.
Don't count on it. Word quickly gets out that this or that simply doesn't work. Here is an example.. Digital Television. It's expensive. Sets don't include a tuner. It's even more expensive. It doesn't seem to work where multipath is a problem. Hmmmm. I think I'll wait till someone in my block gets one to see if it will work for me. That's a lot of money for something that might not work.
Remember the DataPlay mini CD player? Expensive media (write once) Limited selection of pre-recorded content (also high priced). Did you buy one, or wait for the portable player market to take shape? If the I-Pod was a dud like the DataPlay (or was it PlayData), there would never have been a fiasco with the time bomb of battery life. Nobody would have noticed. I have seen the little CD player for sale on a store shelf. I can't say the same for an i-Pod, but I know which one didn't have the demand.
That's what qtFairUse did - snagged the data as it went through quicktime. But PlayFair is different and better - dvdJohn figured out how iTunes generates the key (from HD serial number and stuff) and that's the trick. No breaking of encryption is involved.
And due to the fact I like to tinker and there is the DMCA, I refuse to install iTunes and it's like so the temptation to tinker won't land me in jail. I look for the Compact Disk logo to avoid DRM CD's, Rip them with CDEX, Organize the NON-DRM MP3's into playlists with Winamp, and play the MP3's off CD's in my car and my portable. iTunes simply doesn't fit in the mix. It's just an incompatible format. JANUS seems to be just another incompatible format and nothing more.
The trick is going to be getting wide spread adoption like the Circuit City DVD format.;-)
You're kidding right? There is a mandated possibility that everyone will be adopting digital technology.
Yeah right! When color TV came out, it was expensive. Black and white still worked. After prices came down after about a decade we finaly got one. VCR's were expensive. Blank tapes were $25 for a T120. Blank tapes are now about a buck each and recorders sell for under $100. CD players were expensive in the 700-1200 dollar range. After about 5 years I got one for under $100. CD writers were expensive. I now have several CD burners. Blanks are about 5/$100. DVD's were expensive with players near $1000 each. I got one last year for under $100. DTV is very expensive and tuners are included on only the high end sets. Maybe in 5-10 years when the prices come down, (and the broadcast flag & DRM squabbles settle) I'll probably get one, but only if the content is avaliable for it at a fair price. If content is priced like today's pre-recorded music CD's and includes severe DRM then I see no reason to buy the hardware to play it.
This is the exact same spin put on flash memory. New cameras have to use Smart Media, SD, Picture memory, instead of Compact Flash. Compact Flash is so slow....
Yeah right. I have a 5 in one card reader in my PC. I downloaded my 256 Meg CF card in about 10 minutes. My wife's sister has a camera that uses SD. I downloaded her 128 Meg camera card in 35 minutes. The cards were both from SanDisk. I need to give up CF for what reason?
I'm happy with my MP3 player. I know the new ones are so much better because they can play MP3's and WMA or AAC files. Big deal. I'll stick with what works. Maybe I'll need new JANUS equipment for some JANUS content, but it'll reside next to the Laserdisk player. I only have it because I have some content that can be played only on that format player. My buying decisions will be based on value as always. DRM at this time is high consumer cost for less.. It lacks value for the consumer. This is what is realy slowing the DTV in the market. A 20 inch analog TV with a tuner and a VCR in it can be bought for under $150. You can't buy a 20 inch DTV with a built in tuner (DTV not NTSC) at any price. Only the expensive sets (home theatre) begin to touch over the air DTV reception. There is no value DTV. Somehow I expect JANUS to get slow adoption due to cost and DRM. Other things on the market simply work. As an example; DVD's, insert disk, push play, not enter CC number, subscriber number, answer how many days and number of viws would you like.... JANUS seems to be an online version of the famus Circuit City DVD. You buy special hardware and buy time and/or views limited content that won't work in your neighbors player. I don't have much use for the high priced hardware to play the restricted content. There is plenty of other stuff out there.
I have a little fire safe that I keep important stuff in, like car titles, contracts and cd-rom backups of my computer files.
Check the UL rating. If you use it just for a locking container, it's probably OK. But almost all home fire safes will not protect recorded media. They are rated to protect paper from scortching. The car registration will be fine except for the melted blob of plastic on it. Find offsite storage for plastic recordable media for fire protection. A home fire safe is no protection from fire.
I prefer a 3 strikes and you are out system. It kills a dictionary attack almost everytime. My home safe has it. My ATM uses it. Why doesn't user accounts? My login at work uses it. Why don't more systems use failed login lockout?
You could work out a differential system to turn them both in the same direction for top speed, or power one more than the other to turn
The first thing that came to mind was the Toyota Prius transmission. It's continusely variable from forward through reverse. The actual gearbox is very tiny and needs no clutches or friction bands/plates of any kind. The mechanical part they just call a power split device in the new car. The variable ratio is all taken care of with a pair of motor/generators on a gearbox configured simular to a car differential. It should run cool with lots of low speed torque for the ultimate in manuverablility.
However, having read the article, they want to get the mono wheel land speed record. That can't be done with any dual wheel vehicle.
There's no mistaking a legitimate program that user chooses to install
You mean like installing Microsoft Products. You want a word processer but don't want a product that phones home with a Globaly Unique Identification that can track you where ever you go. Right... Try installing the software and not installing the spyware. The line gets pretty fine between a useful program and a program that does things in the background. I wouldn't be suprised if even MS had a few things to say on the subject. They of course need to have software to phone home to be activatated as part of the war on piracy regardless of what other user demographic marketing things could be collected.
They are picking on schools because getting a fake account is hard to do. It's not as simple as phoning an ISP with a stolen credit card and dialing in. To get a school account needs real ID most of the time. The schools tend to keep better logs most of the time with always connected machines keeping an IP for long periods of time. The trick is to protect against defending yourself if your rogue wireless access point was used by someone else. If you could prove you were running an open wireless access point, it may work somewhat in your defense as the burden is to prove you were the one providing the files.
Can they get a patent on this? There is too much prior art out there. As an example my Magellan GPS Map330 has a power button that doubles as a backlight switch. A short press turns the unit on/off. A long press turns the backlight on or dims the backlight. The mark/goto button operates the same way. A short press brings up a list of destinations to go to. A long press marks the present location to add to the waypoint list. I'm sure there are lots of other examples of prior art out there other than the handheld GPS that came to mind.
Last year I read about the rising cost of college textbooks. Now cost effective alternatives are taking care of the publishers gouging. I love a free market. Next year look for the printed books to fall in price and new online publishers competing with traditional publishers.
Most people don't want to hear it, but gas prices use the same market forces. For transportation gas and oil have the highest energy per pound so 400 miles on a tank is acheivable at relatively low cost. When gas gets too expensive, look for electric cars with their short range, natural gas (short range), biodiesel (emission problems), fuel effecient hybrids, fuel cells, hydrogen, and methanol alternatives to start to make inroads on the petrochemical market share. Currently gas and oil have provided the most cost effective transportation fuel. Prices have been cheap enough people bought fuel ineffecient big vehicles with little regard to energy costs. With raising rates, higher cost fuel alternatives will start to be competitive. This only happens in a free market.
I've already made the switch. There is a 6 month backlog of Toyots Prius Hybrid orders. The rising gas prices is moving the market away from high energy cost vehicles. Higher electric rates will follow, followed by more fuel effecient housing and apliances.
have you ever gone to autozone? Actualy I started going there after the lawsuit. The hard to find 100 amp fuses I needed for a project were on the card rack unlike most auto stores I visited. I like their selection. They don't have a rack 10 feet long with 15 pegs for each size light bulb like most other auto parts stores. (large isles but poor selection of only high volume parts)
You mean to say that you would EVER support SCO again? Sure, soon as they drop all the lawsuits, admit the mistake, make restitution for damage and expenses, contribute freely to open source (maybe WINE or sound & printer driver support), and provide a high quaility product at a reasonable price etc. I'm not holding my breath with the current board of directors in office.
Umm, Wasn't TurboLinux bought by SCO? A quick Google search brings up the snip- SCO has announced a number of professional services offerings around TurboLinux's TurboLinux and SuSE's Linux
I don't plan on supporting SCO in any way until the litigation is over.
There is this one guy who hangs out with lepers, prostitutes and even tax collectors. He had this funny habit of loving everyone despite their sins or social status
He came to save them from their wicked ways, asking them to repent (repent-turn from the bad things you do and not do it anymore) and be saved. I think there was some mention of go and sin no more. Not much on endorsing the sins, but asking for change. Look up the story of the short tax collector who collected a little extra for himself. Jesus wanted to go to his house for lunch. Read the rest of the story. It doesn't say he was encouraged to continue overtaxing and keeping the extra for himself. It does talk about forgiving past sins, not saying it was OK to continue. See if you can find what is realy said about homosexuals and then comment. The part about repenting (not doing it anymore) seems to be forgotten as part of the forgiveness Jesus spoke of. [ducks]
Scientific principles absolutely demand that someone must go up there and search for it.
The bible has been used for many sucessesful searches in the past. Many new cities are built upon ruins of ancient cities. Many ancient cities no longer exist due to boarder wars, but have been found in digs. Where to dig came from the bible. I'm waiting to see if anyone can find any preserved brass or iron remnants from the Roman Chariots and armor lost in the crossing of the Red Sea. That could be another bible inspired search for artifacts to support some history recorded in the bible. Even if you don't believe in God, the bible is still one of the more acurate history books in existance with discriptions of places and things that are just now being found.
I say let the team go search. If they do find something, there will be many theories on what it was and how it got there with lots of people claiming it's impossible to float a boat that high even if all the polar ice caps and world wide glaciers melted. You are welcome to provide your own theories and try to prove or disprove any of them, including the great flood and Noah's arc.
Yes but then you have to take a day off of work to contest the ticket!
Are you kidding? When I receive a ticket (other circumstances) I mail a copy back with a photocopy of the supporting evidance (dated reciept) and a I believe this is in error, please take care of it letter. Ususaly works as the court would like to clear the docket of expensive court time.
i remember my days at Radio Shack, as well... You worked at a Radio Shack with a working scope, function generator sine, triangle, square wave etc. with sweep, AC voltmeter (that read in DB, DBmV down to -60 DBmV minimum) and not just a multimeter that might measuure a 50mV 3Khz tone? Where is this fully equiped Radio Shack? Most I've been to have no idea what a scope or function generator is let alone anyone that knew how to use them to measure frequency response, S/N ratio, THD, etc.
When does any sales person do the above. He is out to make his companies product look better than any other, thats what SuSE paid him to do and thats what Microsoft will pay him to do.
Believe it or not, some salesmen only sell for companies they believe in. When I was in sales in my early years, I used to demonstrate how some pieces of audio gear were better than others such as showing RMS verses Peak power ratings. Then comparing both for a customer with test equipment to show the level clipping occured. I sold the honest company's product. I would have been a very poor recruit for the shoddy product advertising 250 watts peak power (12 watts RMS/ch into 2 ohms in reality, not 50 Watts RMS into 4 ohms with no more than 0.01% THD of the honest product).
This can be handy to use against people you don't like or just random strangers with nice cars, etc. Anyways it seems like a big problem.
The best defense is your printed ticket from the machine showing the spot, time parked and expiration time. If the parking violation is during your receipted time, case closed. Keep your receipts!
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I have heard that electrical wiring in the new hybrids run through all sorts of places, including roof and roof posts.
You need to keep up on your education. My Prius does have wireing in the roof. Duh, it has a courtesy light. Not new technology or unique to a hybrid and has been around for years.
I have also heard of their being multiple batteries.
No suprise here either. For safety, most lights, heaters, cruise control, AC, lighter, dash lights, engine computer, etc... still run on 12 volts. A 12 volt heater fan motor won't get the car to accelerate from a stop. Something with a lot more kick is needed. Therefore a larger high voltage battery, motors/generators, and control systems. I have not seen any hybrid with just one battery.
Finally, the presence of air bags everywhere all over the car frame is great, they can explode at random times.
The presense of air bags and their sensors is not unique to hybrids. This is a red herring and nothing else. Hybrids have safety items pretty much the same as conventional cars. News flash!! Hybrid cars have pressurised tires that may explode in a fire!
Learn the rescue techniques. Not all cars are just a sheet metal box with seats and an engine. Old school is don't cut fuel lines and fuel tanks. You know where they are. New technology, Don't cut the high voltage battery pack and cables. Learn where they are. Don't cut the air bag sensor wireing. Learn where it is and leave it alone.
In nice weather, I roll the windows down. I can hear a bycycle aproach and not slow down for the stop sign while riding on the left side of the road. Making extra noise at the stop sign would keep me from hearing the cyclists that don't stop for stop signs assuming that I saw them before pulling out in front of them. They need to add the noise and bright lights to bycycles (like a harley) so they can be seen and heard. I usualy do see a bicycle at at an intersection IF they come up to the intersection in the proper lane and stop for the stop sign. That's not the cyclist I pull out in front of because I didn't see them. It's the ones on the other side of the road that didn't stop that don't get seen. A pedesterian gets seen because he is at the corner when the driver looks checking trafic, not 35 feet back from the corner traveling 30 MPH into the intersection.
THAT is when they will find out. But too late.
Don't count on it. Word quickly gets out that this or that simply doesn't work. Here is an example.. Digital Television. It's expensive. Sets don't include a tuner. It's even more expensive. It doesn't seem to work where multipath is a problem. Hmmmm. I think I'll wait till someone in my block gets one to see if it will work for me. That's a lot of money for something that might not work.
Remember the DataPlay mini CD player? Expensive media (write once) Limited selection of pre-recorded content (also high priced). Did you buy one, or wait for the portable player market to take shape? If the I-Pod was a dud like the DataPlay (or was it PlayData), there would never have been a fiasco with the time bomb of battery life. Nobody would have noticed. I have seen the little CD player for sale on a store shelf. I can't say the same for an i-Pod, but I know which one didn't have the demand.
That's what qtFairUse did - snagged the data as it went through quicktime. But PlayFair is different and better - dvdJohn figured out how iTunes generates the key (from HD serial number and stuff) and that's the trick. No breaking of encryption is involved.
;-)
And due to the fact I like to tinker and there is the DMCA, I refuse to install iTunes and it's like so the temptation to tinker won't land me in jail. I look for the Compact Disk logo to avoid DRM CD's, Rip them with CDEX, Organize the NON-DRM MP3's into playlists with Winamp, and play the MP3's off CD's in my car and my portable. iTunes simply doesn't fit in the mix. It's just an incompatible format. JANUS seems to be just another incompatible format and nothing more.
The trick is going to be getting wide spread adoption like the Circuit City DVD format.
You're kidding right? There is a mandated possibility that everyone will be adopting digital technology.
Yeah right! When color TV came out, it was expensive. Black and white still worked. After prices came down after about a decade we finaly got one. VCR's were expensive. Blank tapes were $25 for a T120. Blank tapes are now about a buck each and recorders sell for under $100. CD players were expensive in the 700-1200 dollar range. After about 5 years I got one for under $100. CD writers were expensive. I now have several CD burners. Blanks are about 5/$100. DVD's were expensive with players near $1000 each. I got one last year for under $100. DTV is very expensive and tuners are included on only the high end sets. Maybe in 5-10 years when the prices come down, (and the broadcast flag & DRM squabbles settle) I'll probably get one, but only if the content is avaliable for it at a fair price. If content is priced like today's pre-recorded music CD's and includes severe DRM then I see no reason to buy the hardware to play it.
This is the exact same spin put on flash memory. New cameras have to use Smart Media, SD, Picture memory, instead of Compact Flash. Compact Flash is so slow....
Yeah right. I have a 5 in one card reader in my PC. I downloaded my 256 Meg CF card in about 10 minutes. My wife's sister has a camera that uses SD. I downloaded her 128 Meg camera card in 35 minutes. The cards were both from SanDisk. I need to give up CF for what reason?
I'm happy with my MP3 player. I know the new ones are so much better because they can play MP3's and WMA or AAC files. Big deal. I'll stick with what works. Maybe I'll need new JANUS equipment for some JANUS content, but it'll reside next to the Laserdisk player. I only have it because I have some content that can be played only on that format player. My buying decisions will be based on value as always. DRM at this time is high consumer cost for less.. It lacks value for the consumer. This is what is realy slowing the DTV in the market. A 20 inch analog TV with a tuner and a VCR in it can be bought for under $150. You can't buy a 20 inch DTV with a built in tuner (DTV not NTSC) at any price. Only the expensive sets (home theatre) begin to touch over the air DTV reception. There is no value DTV. Somehow I expect JANUS to get slow adoption due to cost and DRM. Other things on the market simply work. As an example; DVD's, insert disk, push play, not enter CC number, subscriber number, answer how many days and number of viws would you like.... JANUS seems to be an online version of the famus Circuit City DVD. You buy special hardware and buy time and/or views limited content that won't work in your neighbors player. I don't have much use for the high priced hardware to play the restricted content. There is plenty of other stuff out there.
I have a little fire safe that I keep important stuff in, like car titles, contracts and cd-rom backups of my computer files.
Check the UL rating. If you use it just for a locking container, it's probably OK. But almost all home fire safes will not protect recorded media. They are rated to protect paper from scortching. The car registration will be fine except for the melted blob of plastic on it. Find offsite storage for plastic recordable media for fire protection. A home fire safe is no protection from fire.
I prefer a 3 strikes and you are out system. It kills a dictionary attack almost everytime. My home safe has it. My ATM uses it. Why doesn't user accounts? My login at work uses it. Why don't more systems use failed login lockout?
You could work out a differential system to turn them both in the same direction for top speed, or power one more than the other to turn
The first thing that came to mind was the Toyota Prius transmission. It's continusely variable from forward through reverse. The actual gearbox is very tiny and needs no clutches or friction bands/plates of any kind. The mechanical part they just call a power split device in the new car. The variable ratio is all taken care of with a pair of motor/generators on a gearbox configured simular to a car differential. It should run cool with lots of low speed torque for the ultimate in manuverablility.
However, having read the article, they want to get the mono wheel land speed record. That can't be done with any dual wheel vehicle.
There's no mistaking a legitimate program that user chooses to install
You mean like installing Microsoft Products. You want a word processer but don't want a product that phones home with a Globaly Unique Identification that can track you where ever you go. Right... Try installing the software and not installing the spyware. The line gets pretty fine between a useful program and a program that does things in the background. I wouldn't be suprised if even MS had a few things to say on the subject. They of course need to have software to phone home to be activatated as part of the war on piracy regardless of what other user demographic marketing things could be collected.
They are picking on schools because getting a fake account is hard to do. It's not as simple as phoning an ISP with a stolen credit card and dialing in. To get a school account needs real ID most of the time. The schools tend to keep better logs most of the time with always connected machines keeping an IP for long periods of time. The trick is to protect against defending yourself if your rogue wireless access point was used by someone else. If you could prove you were running an open wireless access point, it may work somewhat in your defense as the burden is to prove you were the one providing the files.
Can they get a patent on this? There is too much prior art out there. As an example my Magellan GPS Map330 has a power button that doubles as a backlight switch. A short press turns the unit on/off. A long press turns the backlight on or dims the backlight. The mark/goto button operates the same way. A short press brings up a list of destinations to go to. A long press marks the present location to add to the waypoint list. I'm sure there are lots of other examples of prior art out there other than the handheld GPS that came to mind.
Last year I read about the rising cost of college textbooks. Now cost effective alternatives are taking care of the publishers gouging. I love a free market. Next year look for the printed books to fall in price and new online publishers competing with traditional publishers.
Most people don't want to hear it, but gas prices use the same market forces. For transportation gas and oil have the highest energy per pound so 400 miles on a tank is acheivable at relatively low cost. When gas gets too expensive, look for electric cars with their short range, natural gas (short range), biodiesel (emission problems), fuel effecient hybrids, fuel cells, hydrogen, and methanol alternatives to start to make inroads on the petrochemical market share. Currently gas and oil have provided the most cost effective transportation fuel. Prices have been cheap enough people bought fuel ineffecient big vehicles with little regard to energy costs. With raising rates, higher cost fuel alternatives will start to be competitive. This only happens in a free market.
I've already made the switch. There is a 6 month backlog of Toyots Prius Hybrid orders. The rising gas prices is moving the market away from high energy cost vehicles. Higher electric rates will follow, followed by more fuel effecient housing and apliances.
have you ever gone to autozone?
Actualy I started going there after the lawsuit. The hard to find 100 amp fuses I needed for a project were on the card rack unlike most auto stores I visited. I like their selection. They don't have a rack 10 feet long with 15 pegs for each size light bulb like most other auto parts stores. (large isles but poor selection of only high volume parts)
You mean to say that you would EVER support SCO again?
Sure, soon as they drop all the lawsuits, admit the mistake, make restitution for damage and expenses, contribute freely to open source (maybe WINE or sound & printer driver support), and provide a high quaility product at a reasonable price etc. I'm not holding my breath with the current board of directors in office.
Umm, Wasn't TurboLinux bought by SCO? A quick Google search brings up the snip- SCO has announced a number of professional services offerings around TurboLinux's TurboLinux and SuSE's Linux
I don't plan on supporting SCO in any way until the litigation is over.
Egyptian Romans or some other kind?
;-)
I guess I deserve that one for posting at the end of the graveyard shift.. Got me on that one.
There is this one guy who hangs out with lepers, prostitutes and even tax collectors. He had this funny habit of loving everyone despite their sins or social status
He came to save them from their wicked ways, asking them to repent (repent-turn from the bad things you do and not do it anymore) and be saved. I think there was some mention of go and sin no more. Not much on endorsing the sins, but asking for change. Look up the story of the short tax collector who collected a little extra for himself. Jesus wanted to go to his house for lunch. Read the rest of the story. It doesn't say he was encouraged to continue overtaxing and keeping the extra for himself. It does talk about forgiving past sins, not saying it was OK to continue. See if you can find what is realy said about homosexuals and then comment. The part about repenting (not doing it anymore) seems to be forgotten as part of the forgiveness Jesus spoke of. [ducks]
Scientific principles absolutely demand that someone must go up there and search for it.
The bible has been used for many sucessesful searches in the past. Many new cities are built upon ruins of ancient cities. Many ancient cities no longer exist due to boarder wars, but have been found in digs. Where to dig came from the bible. I'm waiting to see if anyone can find any preserved brass or iron remnants from the Roman Chariots and armor lost in the crossing of the Red Sea. That could be another bible inspired search for artifacts to support some history recorded in the bible. Even if you don't believe in God, the bible is still one of the more acurate history books in existance with discriptions of places and things that are just now being found.
I say let the team go search. If they do find something, there will be many theories on what it was and how it got there with lots of people claiming it's impossible to float a boat that high even if all the polar ice caps and world wide glaciers melted. You are welcome to provide your own theories and try to prove or disprove any of them, including the great flood and Noah's arc.
Yes but then you have to take a day off of work to contest the ticket!
Are you kidding? When I receive a ticket (other circumstances) I mail a copy back with a photocopy of the supporting evidance (dated reciept) and a I believe this is in error, please take care of it letter. Ususaly works as the court would like to clear the docket of expensive court time.
i remember my days at Radio Shack, as well...
;-)
You worked at a Radio Shack with a working scope, function generator sine, triangle, square wave etc. with sweep, AC voltmeter (that read in DB, DBmV down to -60 DBmV minimum) and not just a multimeter that might measuure a 50mV 3Khz tone? Where is this fully equiped Radio Shack? Most I've been to have no idea what a scope or function generator is let alone anyone that knew how to use them to measure frequency response, S/N ratio, THD, etc.
I know, it's humor, laugh
Yep, Their cannon was no match for a slashdotting!
When does any sales person do the above. He is out to make his companies product look better than any other, thats what SuSE paid him to do and thats what Microsoft will pay him to do.
Believe it or not, some salesmen only sell for companies they believe in. When I was in sales in my early years, I used to demonstrate how some pieces of audio gear were better than others such as showing RMS verses Peak power ratings. Then comparing both for a customer with test equipment to show the level clipping occured. I sold the honest company's product. I would have been a very poor recruit for the shoddy product advertising 250 watts peak power (12 watts RMS/ch into 2 ohms in reality, not 50 Watts RMS into 4 ohms with no more than 0.01% THD of the honest product).
Say all the ill you want about MS for doing this, but they are doing what any company would do, hiring the best people they can to do the job!
End snip, now to read between the lines...
Is it hiring the best people for the job or is it removing the worst enemy from active duty?
Someone who is honest and displays a fair comparison between products may not be your best recruit for the job of promoting spin.
This can be handy to use against people you don't like or just random strangers with nice cars, etc. Anyways it seems like a big problem.
The best defense is your printed ticket from the machine showing the spot, time parked and expiration time. If the parking violation is during your receipted time, case closed. Keep your receipts!