Wired occasionally has something worth reading, but most of it is just fluff and ads for expensive toys. I stopped taking it seriously years ago. Articles like this remind me why.
Yes, like when I call Charter Communications because my cable modem keeps dropping its connection for a day at a time, every other day. Both times I called, I suggested it was a line problem, the second time because I had actually looked to see what the signal strength was when it managed to connected.
Some of the amazing things that were asserted to me:
* I needed to turn off my computer, even though there was a wireless router between me and the cable modem, as that might have some bearing on whether the cable modem was able to find a usable channel.
* I needed to plug my computer directly into the modem, even though I already had the very same cable modem HTTP diagnostic pages we were headed for pulled up on my wireless laptop through my wireless router, as though those were a figment of my imagination or somehow flawed.
* I have to power-cycle the cable modem anytime I change the plug in its Ethernet port so that the computer plugged into it will be able to discover it. Amazing advances like hot-plugging 10Base-T and DHCP apparently don't exist.
* The cable modem's signal strength indicator "usually lies", even though it amazingly registered just about exactly what a physical test of the line showed on a following service call.
While some of these steps were probably in the tech support checklist, I suspect the tech support workers were filling in the reasons behind those steps with their own misconceptions. I've taken to simply lying to the tech support person when I can tell a step is totally pointless, and that shouldn't be necessary to get prompt resolution.
The sad truth is that many of those staffing front-line tech support are clueless, too, just at a slightly higher level.
* One last bonus one. Okay, this wasn't Charter, but our phone company when I was checking out their new DSL product a few years ago. This "technical" guy I was transferred to insisted that you couldn't put together a LAN behind a Linux-based router and share an outbound Internet connection because--not in his words, but what he feebly tried to explain--that the HTTP requests would serialize, each computer waiting for other computers' HTTP requests to finish before theirs began.
The Senate has moderation; it's called the people who vote the Senators into office. And just like slashdot the "moderators" are usually equally as clueless.
And like many Slashdot moderators don't bother to fully read and understand the article and the individual post before expressing their "-1, Flamebait" or "+1, Insightful" opinions, many voters don't bother to understand the issues or discover what their chosen candidate says or votes.
You don't have to tell them that you're insured, since it's irrelevant to the case. And I don't think that the Piratbyran Insurance Group is going to reveal that information to them voluntarily! So the RIAA would have no way to know if you're insured, and would have to act accordingly (i.e., by assuming that you're not.)
Why would they choose that course? If someone *can* get ensured, and they're used to jacking up their prices until they reach what people are willing to pay, why wouldn't they raise their amounts to match what an insured person would pay? Then people worried about it *would* get insurance.
In fact, RIAA might be able to make that into a money-making venture over and above the lawsuits themselves. Buy into one or more of the insurance companies offering this insurance and keep the pressure up just enough so that the demand for the insurance is high but they're not spending too much money paying themselves off. (Would that fall under the RICO Act?)
For example: 20th Century Fox is part of http://www.newscorp.com/operations/other.html which owns the NY Post, The Sun and the Times in the UK, and many many many more news outlets all over the world. There is not a snowball's chance in Hell of getting negative publicity over any MPAA action in a News Corp media business.
Or.. what a bunch of idiots to believe people would forget that easily.
Sadly, though, recent evidence suggests that many people believe falsehoods said with sufficient conviction, particularly if there's enough repetition.
Actually I would expect this being a Lithium-Air fire. Nothing electrical in it, except for the activation energy. The explosions would have been the other cells rupturing.
That might be why I called it a "chemical fire in an electrical device" rather than an "electrical fire".
I had thought that also, especially as there seems to be a water slick on the tablecloth. I wasn't sure if the water was there from before, causing the fire, or after, trying to put it out.
I hope nobody tried to extinguish a chemical fire in an electrical device with water.
If you do happen to see toast about to fall, and can't catch it in time, consider giving it a healthy whack across the room. This changes the proportion between the rotational speed and the vertical speed, making it more random as to whether or not it falls butter side down.
And, I would imagine, more likely to splat up against the wall, butter side in.
If you want to do something different, use a different tool. Don't bitch about a screwdriver being a bad tool for painting the walls.
Except, of course, when some inexperienced developer actually does it because that's the only tool he knows.
Software development is immature in the sense that we haven't gotten as formal about training, experience, and roles as physical construction. Physical construction is planned by engineers and architects who take on the responsibility for the correct design, function, and safety of the project, and the plans are executed by craftsmen. Craftsmen are traditionally separated into the apprentice, journeyman, and master levels, with guidelines on how to get to each of those levels and what they should be expected to be able to accomplish.
In my experience, though, most software development has apprentice- and journeyman-level craftsmen developers who are trying to act as either architects or master craftsmen, which is why we get such poorly-scaling constructions built with the wrong tools and materials.
it missed a huge section... can't see how it could hope to cover the whole floor evenly going the route it appeared to be trying to take
Watch the product video on their website, there is an animation that demonstrates the way it covers the room. It doesn't systematically clean sections of the room systematically. Rather, it follows a circuitous path around the room, presumably to discover the extent of the room and clean at the same time. Admittedly it looks a little haphazard, but their animation claims it covers the room pretty well over the cycle. (I don't own one myself, so I can't give first-hand confirmation of this.)
If the information on the hard drive was so sensitive, why didn't the couple destroy it themselves?
In my case, they didn't give me the option to do it.
To make a long story short, I had kept sending my Best Buy purchased laptop in for service under their service plan. They don't do work on laptops in the store, apparently, they send them out somewhere. It kept getting sent in and returned with no fix to the problem.
The previous trip in, instead of tracking down the faulty bit that was preventing any batteries from charging, they called me directly and claimed my hard drive controller was reporting drive errors. I told they guy no, that problem wasn't what it was in for, and could they please zarking fix the charging board, since SMART errors on the hard drive have diddly-squat to do with charging batteries.
So they sent it back claiming I refused service. I complained to the guy at the desk about it, and they sent it back AGAIN with a note insisting that the problem be dealt with.
It came back with a brand spanking new hard drive and a continuing inability to charge a battery. After being denied permission to take my hard drive, they did it anyway and claimed afterwards the same thing they promised these people, that it was destroyed and no, I couldn't have it back.
To make matters worse, their support people couldn't understand why I would want to leave my login locked, they insisted they needed the admin password reset so they could get into the OS, just in case the battery recharging problem was due to an OS setting in Windows, because "a computer is a very complex piece of equipment."
I have absolutely no problem at all with 100% public surveillance, as long as all of the video feeds are available to any person at any time, and not just Big Brother.
I think I may agree with you, but such a thing would be hard to manage with existing technology. Not accomplishing it technically, but ensuring the all-access provisions. Many governments (including the current USAn administration) do not like to let the general public have information when keeping it a secret is an option.
An extremely fictional example of a kind of technology that would force all-access monitoring is described in The Light of Other Days. It's a little hard for the government to stop (or even detect) someone spying on someone else with a nanoscale wormhole.
XP is fine, but damn some of these wonky dell laptops won't act right coming out of hibernation.
I guess I should have stated that my experience with Hibernate is almost exclusively on Compaq laptops of various vintage.
I regularly leave a CD in the DVD/CDRW combo drive and sometimes a leave a PCMCIA CompactFlash adapter plugged in, and both work fine after returning from hibernation. The built-in wireless adapter flawlessly comes back up, as does the LAN connections and any browsers, email clients, and IM clients that happen to have been left running.
I absolutely agree with this. I've had other XP users claim Hibernate fails to work for them, but I've used it heavily on my laptops since XP was released in fall 2001 and have never had a problem that seemed to be due to Hibernate.
Slashdot Mirror
Wired occasionally has something worth reading, but most of it is just fluff and ads for expensive toys. I stopped taking it seriously years ago. Articles like this remind me why.
Wired is to technology as Discover is to science.
English is a huge language with a vast amount of momentum, It needs to be replaced.
In a couple decades, we'll all be speaking Mandarin anyway.
How about some -real- stories?
Yes, like when I call Charter Communications because my cable modem keeps dropping its connection for a day at a time, every other day. Both times I called, I suggested it was a line problem, the second time because I had actually looked to see what the signal strength was when it managed to connected.
Some of the amazing things that were asserted to me:
* I needed to turn off my computer, even though there was a wireless router between me and the cable modem, as that might have some bearing on whether the cable modem was able to find a usable channel.
* I needed to plug my computer directly into the modem, even though I already had the very same cable modem HTTP diagnostic pages we were headed for pulled up on my wireless laptop through my wireless router, as though those were a figment of my imagination or somehow flawed.
* I have to power-cycle the cable modem anytime I change the plug in its Ethernet port so that the computer plugged into it will be able to discover it. Amazing advances like hot-plugging 10Base-T and DHCP apparently don't exist.
* The cable modem's signal strength indicator "usually lies", even though it amazingly registered just about exactly what a physical test of the line showed on a following service call.
While some of these steps were probably in the tech support checklist, I suspect the tech support workers were filling in the reasons behind those steps with their own misconceptions. I've taken to simply lying to the tech support person when I can tell a step is totally pointless, and that shouldn't be necessary to get prompt resolution.
The sad truth is that many of those staffing front-line tech support are clueless, too, just at a slightly higher level.
* One last bonus one. Okay, this wasn't Charter, but our phone company when I was checking out their new DSL product a few years ago. This "technical" guy I was transferred to insisted that you couldn't put together a LAN behind a Linux-based router and share an outbound Internet connection because--not in his words, but what he feebly tried to explain--that the HTTP requests would serialize, each computer waiting for other computers' HTTP requests to finish before theirs began.
The Senate has moderation; it's called the people who vote the Senators into office. And just like slashdot the "moderators" are usually equally as clueless.
And like many Slashdot moderators don't bother to fully read and understand the article and the individual post before expressing their "-1, Flamebait" or "+1, Insightful" opinions, many voters don't bother to understand the issues or discover what their chosen candidate says or votes.
1. User/administration Error.
2. Programmer/Developer error.
any remote vulnerabilities fall under 2, and any configuration errors fall under 1.
Users aren't vulnerable to remote exploits? Trojans and social engineering attacks rely on those.
You don't have to tell them that you're insured, since it's irrelevant to the case. And I don't think that the Piratbyran Insurance Group is going to reveal that information to them voluntarily! So the RIAA would have no way to know if you're insured, and would have to act accordingly (i.e., by assuming that you're not.)
Why would they choose that course? If someone *can* get ensured, and they're used to jacking up their prices until they reach what people are willing to pay, why wouldn't they raise their amounts to match what an insured person would pay? Then people worried about it *would* get insurance.
In fact, RIAA might be able to make that into a money-making venture over and above the lawsuits themselves. Buy into one or more of the insurance companies offering this insurance and keep the pressure up just enough so that the demand for the insurance is high but they're not spending too much money paying themselves off. (Would that fall under the RICO Act?)
For those ready to call BS on this,
/ 03/20/puck_death_ap/
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/hockey/news/2002
For example: 20th Century Fox is part of http://www.newscorp.com/operations/other.html which owns the NY Post, The Sun and the Times in the UK, and many many many more news outlets all over the world. There is not a snowball's chance in Hell of getting negative publicity over any MPAA action in a News Corp media business.
Bring on the Blipverts!
Or.. what a bunch of idiots to believe people would forget that easily.
Sadly, though, recent evidence suggests that many people believe falsehoods said with sufficient conviction, particularly if there's enough repetition.
Actually I would expect this being a Lithium-Air fire. Nothing electrical in it, except for the activation energy. The explosions would have been the other cells rupturing.
That might be why I called it a "chemical fire in an electrical device" rather than an "electrical fire".
I had thought that also, especially as there seems to be a water slick on the tablecloth. I wasn't sure if the water was there from before, causing the fire, or after, trying to put it out.
I hope nobody tried to extinguish a chemical fire in an electrical device with water.
For that reason, somehow I suspect I'll always be voting for the "sucks least" candidate.
(Insert "Cthulhu For President" reference here.)
If you do happen to see toast about to fall, and can't catch it in time, consider giving it a healthy whack across the room. This changes the proportion between the rotational speed and the vertical speed, making it more random as to whether or not it falls butter side down.
And, I would imagine, more likely to splat up against the wall, butter side in.
CRAP, THIS IS GOING TO TAKE A WHILE.
If you want to do something different, use a different tool. Don't bitch about a screwdriver being a bad tool for painting the walls.
Except, of course, when some inexperienced developer actually does it because that's the only tool he knows.
Software development is immature in the sense that we haven't gotten as formal about training, experience, and roles as physical construction. Physical construction is planned by engineers and architects who take on the responsibility for the correct design, function, and safety of the project, and the plans are executed by craftsmen. Craftsmen are traditionally separated into the apprentice, journeyman, and master levels, with guidelines on how to get to each of those levels and what they should be expected to be able to accomplish.
In my experience, though, most software development has apprentice- and journeyman-level craftsmen developers who are trying to act as either architects or master craftsmen, which is why we get such poorly-scaling constructions built with the wrong tools and materials.
I can't wait until a fuel-cell version is available.
Powered by alcohol!
Just pour a beer on the floor to refuel it.
it missed a huge section... can't see how it could hope to cover the whole floor evenly going the route it appeared to be trying to take
Watch the product video on their website, there is an animation that demonstrates the way it covers the room. It doesn't systematically clean sections of the room systematically. Rather, it follows a circuitous path around the room, presumably to discover the extent of the room and clean at the same time. Admittedly it looks a little haphazard, but their animation claims it covers the room pretty well over the cycle. (I don't own one myself, so I can't give first-hand confirmation of this.)
So far, it seems pretty happy mopping the floor, and has shown no tendancy to find Sarah Conner.
...and clean her?
And to a lesser extent, Eon by Greg Bear.
If the information on the hard drive was so sensitive, why didn't the couple destroy it themselves?
In my case, they didn't give me the option to do it.
To make a long story short, I had kept sending my Best Buy purchased laptop in for service under their service plan. They don't do work on laptops in the store, apparently, they send them out somewhere. It kept getting sent in and returned with no fix to the problem.
The previous trip in, instead of tracking down the faulty bit that was preventing any batteries from charging, they called me directly and claimed my hard drive controller was reporting drive errors. I told they guy no, that problem wasn't what it was in for, and could they please zarking fix the charging board, since SMART errors on the hard drive have diddly-squat to do with charging batteries.
So they sent it back claiming I refused service. I complained to the guy at the desk about it, and they sent it back AGAIN with a note insisting that the problem be dealt with.
It came back with a brand spanking new hard drive and a continuing inability to charge a battery. After being denied permission to take my hard drive, they did it anyway and claimed afterwards the same thing they promised these people, that it was destroyed and no, I couldn't have it back.
To make matters worse, their support people couldn't understand why I would want to leave my login locked, they insisted they needed the admin password reset so they could get into the OS, just in case the battery recharging problem was due to an OS setting in Windows, because "a computer is a very complex piece of equipment."
I absolutely LOATHE Best Buy for some reason.
I have absolutely no problem at all with 100% public surveillance, as long as all of the video feeds are available to any person at any time, and not just Big Brother.
I think I may agree with you, but such a thing would be hard to manage with existing technology. Not accomplishing it technically, but ensuring the all-access provisions. Many governments (including the current USAn administration) do not like to let the general public have information when keeping it a secret is an option.
An extremely fictional example of a kind of technology that would force all-access monitoring is described in The Light of Other Days . It's a little hard for the government to stop (or even detect) someone spying on someone else with a nanoscale wormhole.
I really wanted to mod this funny, but I've already contributed to this thread. Made me laugh out loud.
XP is fine, but damn some of these wonky dell laptops won't act right coming out of hibernation.
I guess I should have stated that my experience with Hibernate is almost exclusively on Compaq laptops of various vintage.
I regularly leave a CD in the DVD/CDRW combo drive and sometimes a leave a PCMCIA CompactFlash adapter plugged in, and both work fine after returning from hibernation. The built-in wireless adapter flawlessly comes back up, as does the LAN connections and any browsers, email clients, and IM clients that happen to have been left running.
Sleep sucks. Hibernate is where it's at.
I absolutely agree with this. I've had other XP users claim Hibernate fails to work for them, but I've used it heavily on my laptops since XP was released in fall 2001 and have never had a problem that seemed to be due to Hibernate.
Yet your claim is that the boxes are so ubiquitous they interfered with the normal operation of the computer.
Since deleting a desktop shortcut is such an uncommon task that a half-dozen pop-up confirmation dialogs won't be too much of a bother, after all.