What, you mean they decided to throw in $5 worth of cables?
This wouldn't be a big deal if all of the major computer chain stores weren't price fixing their cables. $27 for a USB cable, that's fucking ridiculous. cables4less.com and other sites have them for like $2. Don't tell me the pretty package is worth $25, although you'd think so from how frickin hard those types of packages are to open.
Anyone know if Fry's has jumped on the "rape your customers" bandwagon yet?
The managing director may not be lying. It's possible he doesn't even know. He could have went around and asked his programmers if the claims were true, and for fear of their jobs, they lied.
All it takes is one lazy programmer, especially if he thinks he's in over his head.
They are having trouble because Legos are an insane ripoff. They've always been expensive, but why in the hell would I buy a tiny set of them for $30 when I could go and get something electronic that I can stick in pocket for the same price?
Kids get hooked on these things at a young age, and parents aren't willing to spend the huge amount of money it takes to get a decent collection for a 6 or 7 year old that's possibly going to lose half the pieces.
Erector set is just as bad. I saw a really cool set at Zainy Brainy the other day, just a little moon buggy looking thing, but it was sweet. The damn kit was lik $50. I'm not going to spend $50 for something so small on me, let alone at little kid.
I just sold my old G3 (just out of warranty) iBook on Ebay and bought a new G4 model. I sold it back in November, and the girl who bought it emailed me asking about viruses or something. Said that it acted all strange and then died, and when she tries to turn it on she gets a blank screen. It turns out the symptoms it has are that of a failed logic board. Warranty ran out in sept, and it just died now.
Apparently the cost of replacing the board through apple is almost as much as just buying a new laptop. I feel kinda bad about it. But I guess that's the risk you run when you buy things out of warranty, which is part of the reason I got rid of it (which is the reason I used to justify buying a new toy). I hope it's not the logic board and just something that can be fixed easily, but all signs point to hardware failure.
What if this is cyclical due to "gravitation friction" of the other planets on earth? Obviously not all of the planets pass by the earth at the same points during it's orbit because orbits are eliptical. Maybe the last few years we have not passed as closely to the other planets and therefore their gravity has not had such an effect on us. Maybe in 2000 years, we'll pass more closely during each orbit and we'll have to shave off 3 or 4 seconds. What we really need is several thousand years of data for this phenomenon, and compare it to how closely other planets passed to the earth during those years. Then we could try to correlate that data and see if this is in fact the reason we witness this.
We could just ask the aliens at Area 51 for their observational data they have on us.
Search the mailing list archives at dsm.org. I seem to remember some people talking about this, specifically, someone had found a small box that plug in via USB if I remember right, and it had like 24 analog inputs and 8 digital. I think there were even linux drivers for it.
Additionally, if you're car is OBDII compliant, you could order a cable and use FreeDiag to pull the information. All of those sensors feed back to your car's computer anyway, why try to duplicate the data collection functionality when it's already there. Plus, you won't have to worry about skewing the signals received by your ECU when you start tapping wires into things. You won't have to worry about finding the specs on each sensor either (like 0-1 volts == 0-1200 degrees)
I was considering doing a similar thing to you awhile back, and freediag seems like the best way to collect this data. If you manage to get something working, you should start a sourceforge project for it. I'd definitely be willing to contribute.
Also, a couple of years ago, some company came out with an 8" TFT touchscreen that plugged in via USB. They had released a driver for linux that allowed you to run an X-server on it. It was $300 or so. Does anyone remember the name of this thing? It would make an excellent display to mount in the dash.
Actually, NAT-T ports vary between vendors. Cisco uses 10000, Nortel uses 10001 or 10002. And the admin of the VPN concentrator can change that to whatever port he wants. Just allow all UDP through and it will work fine.
Just scan it, store it in a database. Then you can sort it however you like depending on how you need to go through it.
What??!?!? There's no app for linux to do this? Write one, I'll give you $20.
Right now, I'm just storing them as.png files in a directory structure organized by biller->year->month
It works well, but something actually designed for this would be much nicer. I guess Omnipage for windows and mac is supposed to be quite good for this, but it's $500. Ouch.
This reminds me of when I used to work for Marketwatch.com. I was bored one day, and wrote a program called ThomCalandra.pl. It used Markov word chains to generate new news stories based on Thom Calandra's previous articles and new news stories coming in. Just glancing over the story, it looked legit, but then it would say things like "Deutch Bank filed for bankruptcy" and things like that which were totally false. It was entertaining though, especially when you fed it a mixture of articles by Thom Calandra, and Smoove B or Herbert Cornfeld from the Onion. Then you'd get things like:
"Baby, you are so beautiful, I'm going to make sweet love to you all night long, and the Euro is increasing in value against the dollar."
or
"The muthafucking DJIA has dropped another 10%, and those bitches from accountz recievable are responsible."
What's the point? People don't use 802.11 in their cars unless they are wardriving. If you've ever gone, each signal is out of range within a matter of seconds. The range just isn't good enough to use it in a moving vehicle.
Usually when people are using a hotspot, they are sitting on a park bench or at a coffee shop. I can't see what purpose it serves to add roaming capability to something which typically has a maximum range of a couple hundred yards without using a directional antenna.
Maybe if the range was a couple of miles, this would be useful, but not in it's current state.
Yeah, it's always a good idea to have half-assed homemade piping filled with water above your server racks.
This reminds me of this guy I knew back in high school. We ran out of wood for the stove in the garage (working on snowmobiles). So he suggested we just fill a coffee can half full of gasoline and light the top of it. I'm quite sure it would have had the desired effect on the temperature of the garage, but the side effects likely would not have been quite as pleasant.
I have a much better idea. Just turn off the servers on hot days. You don't wanna be in the office anyway, go play golf or drink.
Most police departments won't allow that, or they will ignore direct calls from alarm systems. Something like greater than 90% of all alarms are false, and this puts the filtering on the police staff. Most require you to go through a 3rd party.
In fact, I'd rather have it go through a 3rd party as they will track you down by phone when there is an alarm before dispatching police, call you after the fact for fire (which gives them time a short amount of time to cancel the call if it's false), deal with durress passwords, etc... Can you rely on a public employee that's part of a union to go through that much trouble? Probably not.
Get a security system. ADT and Brinks suck, I had them before and when I got broken into, no one called or showed up. When I called to ask them why they weren't on the ball, they said they though it was a false alarm, but they didn't even bother to check.
Go with a local company. I'm in Minneapolis and use Sentry Systems, they are cheap, $40 a month. And, you can add a temp sensor that they will monitor for only the price of the sensor ($45 on ebay). They also have water sensors, which I place by my drains in the basement in case the sewer backs up (which it has). They'll call you when one of them throws an alarm. You just give them a list of numbers to try in order.
I went into t-mobile on Monday the 24th and filled out all of the paperwork. 12 days later, 10 hours of hold time, and several nasty calls later, my phone still isn't ported.
ATT's system keeps coming back with some "Not Authorized" message when they try to port it. I'm pissed.
I wouldn't be switching, but ATT's coverage map says they have native coverage where I work, but they don't. I roam on t-mobile for 69 cents a minute. That's bullshit.
T-mobile customers don't pay anything to roam on ATT's network either. ATTWS's GSM network was slowly getting better until they signed the roaming agreement with t-mobile. Now they really have no incentive to keep building their network when they're sucking down 70 cents a minute from their customers that roam. To make it all worse, they TDMA network has gone to hell for some reason, and there are huge dead spots now where there used to be full signal. With all of the IT problems that I've heard about over there, I think they are in deep trouble.
Too bad, I've been with them for 7 years, and was happy until about a year ago. Now that I started a new job a couple of weeks ago and don't get coverage where they say I should, that's the last straw. I've complained several times and they just tell me they'll send me a new phone, even though I've tried using 3 different ones. They told my friend when he complained that he should just switch providers. ATT Wireless sucks now.
break the MS office monopoly
on
AOL's $299 PC
·
· Score: 1
While I think AOL is for wusses... a lot of people sign up for it and use it. With them shipping Sun's office suite, there's a good chance this might put a dent in MS's Office monopoly. Businesses won't be buying these, so it will simply be consumers using something other than MS, but you have to start somewhere right?
Additionally, how does this work in CA? Remember a couple of years ago when MSN was offering free computers if you signed up for a year contract, but CA law let's you cancel the contract at any time so people were just getting free pc's? Wouldn't this be subject to the same CA law?
Just buy youself a copy of X-plane. Some airplane manufacturers use it when designing planes. I don't know if it would give you the data you want, but at least it would give you a very good idea of what would happen.
There are some legit companies that use it. A place I used to work used it for sending user-configured news and stock alerts. Interestingly enough, the box is a rebranded dell running freebsd. I have my suspicions they are using qmail on it also just because of the way it behaves. Everything is hidden behind a nice little interface though, so you have to boot with a floppy to poke around, which I never got around to doing.
The boxes are $30k each last I checked. On a revenue of $10 million, that's likely under 300 machines if you include a support contract. Not selling many of them...:) It is a good product though, you would have serious trouble getting that kind of performance out of a standard mailserver using the same hardware.
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The apple wireless keyboard uses encryption to prevent this sort of thing. For $69, it's one of the nicest keyboards you can get. I love mine.
It's not ergonomic though, which kinda sucks if that's what you're looking for.
Bukkake means "Crude Hair" :)
This thing is great for keeping your wrist from getting screwed up during alone time with your joystick.
What, you mean they decided to throw in $5 worth of cables?
This wouldn't be a big deal if all of the major computer chain stores weren't price fixing their cables. $27 for a USB cable, that's fucking ridiculous. cables4less.com and other sites have them for like $2. Don't tell me the pretty package is worth $25, although you'd think so from how frickin hard those types of packages are to open.
Anyone know if Fry's has jumped on the "rape your customers" bandwagon yet?
Yeah, but the Shuttle can't reach geosynchronous orbit. So you're just going to wrap the Earth in a giant ball of twine.
Holy shit! Then we'd attract giant space cats that would knock us out of orbit!
That's it, I'm totally against this whole space elevator thing. I'm sending a letter to Bush now warning him of the space cat threat.
The managing director may not be lying. It's possible he doesn't even know. He could have went around and asked his programmers if the claims were true, and for fear of their jobs, they lied.
All it takes is one lazy programmer, especially if he thinks he's in over his head.
...why some people have shit for brains.
They are having trouble because Legos are an insane ripoff. They've always been expensive, but why in the hell would I buy a tiny set of them for $30 when I could go and get something electronic that I can stick in pocket for the same price?
Kids get hooked on these things at a young age, and parents aren't willing to spend the huge amount of money it takes to get a decent collection for a 6 or 7 year old that's possibly going to lose half the pieces.
Erector set is just as bad. I saw a really cool set at Zainy Brainy the other day, just a little moon buggy looking thing, but it was sweet. The damn kit was lik $50. I'm not going to spend $50 for something so small on me, let alone at little kid.
Gouging your customers will only get you so far.
Alternatively, you could attach wires from the outlet to your toes or weewee. I bet you'd only sleep long enough to let the alarm go off once...
I just sold my old G3 (just out of warranty) iBook on Ebay and bought a new G4 model. I sold it back in November, and the girl who bought it emailed me asking about viruses or something. Said that it acted all strange and then died, and when she tries to turn it on she gets a blank screen. It turns out the symptoms it has are that of a failed logic board. Warranty ran out in sept, and it just died now.
Apparently the cost of replacing the board through apple is almost as much as just buying a new laptop. I feel kinda bad about it. But I guess that's the risk you run when you buy things out of warranty, which is part of the reason I got rid of it (which is the reason I used to justify buying a new toy). I hope it's not the logic board and just something that can be fixed easily, but all signs point to hardware failure.
Steve Jobs unveils the 100th Anniversary iMac.
What if this is cyclical due to "gravitation friction" of the other planets on earth? Obviously not all of the planets pass by the earth at the same points during it's orbit because orbits are eliptical. Maybe the last few years we have not passed as closely to the other planets and therefore their gravity has not had such an effect on us. Maybe in 2000 years, we'll pass more closely during each orbit and we'll have to shave off 3 or 4 seconds. What we really need is several thousand years of data for this phenomenon, and compare it to how closely other planets passed to the earth during those years. Then we could try to correlate that data and see if this is in fact the reason we witness this.
We could just ask the aliens at Area 51 for their observational data they have on us.
Search the mailing list archives at dsm.org. I seem to remember some people talking about this, specifically, someone had found a small box that plug in via USB if I remember right, and it had like 24 analog inputs and 8 digital. I think there were even linux drivers for it.
Additionally, if you're car is OBDII compliant, you could order a cable and use FreeDiag to pull the information. All of those sensors feed back to your car's computer anyway, why try to duplicate the data collection functionality when it's already there. Plus, you won't have to worry about skewing the signals received by your ECU when you start tapping wires into things. You won't have to worry about finding the specs on each sensor either (like 0-1 volts == 0-1200 degrees)
I was considering doing a similar thing to you awhile back, and freediag seems like the best way to collect this data. If you manage to get something working, you should start a sourceforge project for it. I'd definitely be willing to contribute.
Also, a couple of years ago, some company came out with an 8" TFT touchscreen that plugged in via USB. They had released a driver for linux that allowed you to run an X-server on it. It was $300 or so. Does anyone remember the name of this thing? It would make an excellent display to mount in the dash.
Don't block UDP/500UDP/500 (ISAKMP), UDP/4500UDP/4500 (NAT-T)
Actually, NAT-T ports vary between vendors. Cisco uses 10000, Nortel uses 10001 or 10002. And the admin of the VPN concentrator can change that to whatever port he wants. Just allow all UDP through and it will work fine.
Just scan it, store it in a database. Then you can sort it however you like depending on how you need to go through it.
.png files in a directory structure organized by biller->year->month
What??!?!? There's no app for linux to do this? Write one, I'll give you $20.
Right now, I'm just storing them as
It works well, but something actually designed for this would be much nicer. I guess Omnipage for windows and mac is supposed to be quite good for this, but it's $500. Ouch.
This reminds me of when I used to work for Marketwatch.com. I was bored one day, and wrote a program called ThomCalandra.pl. It used Markov word chains to generate new news stories based on Thom Calandra's previous articles and new news stories coming in. Just glancing over the story, it looked legit, but then it would say things like "Deutch Bank filed for bankruptcy" and things like that which were totally false. It was entertaining though, especially when you fed it a mixture of articles by Thom Calandra, and Smoove B or Herbert Cornfeld from the Onion. Then you'd get things like:
"Baby, you are so beautiful, I'm going to make sweet love to you all night long, and the Euro is increasing in value against the dollar."
or
"The muthafucking DJIA has dropped another 10%, and those bitches from accountz recievable are responsible."
What's the point? People don't use 802.11 in their cars unless they are wardriving. If you've ever gone, each signal is out of range within a matter of seconds. The range just isn't good enough to use it in a moving vehicle.
Usually when people are using a hotspot, they are sitting on a park bench or at a coffee shop. I can't see what purpose it serves to add roaming capability to something which typically has a maximum range of a couple hundred yards without using a directional antenna.
Maybe if the range was a couple of miles, this would be useful, but not in it's current state.
Yeah, it's always a good idea to have half-assed homemade piping filled with water above your server racks.
This reminds me of this guy I knew back in high school. We ran out of wood for the stove in the garage (working on snowmobiles). So he suggested we just fill a coffee can half full of gasoline and light the top of it. I'm quite sure it would have had the desired effect on the temperature of the garage, but the side effects likely would not have been quite as pleasant.
I have a much better idea. Just turn off the servers on hot days. You don't wanna be in the office anyway, go play golf or drink.
Most police departments won't allow that, or they will ignore direct calls from alarm systems. Something like greater than 90% of all alarms are false, and this puts the filtering on the police staff. Most require you to go through a 3rd party.
In fact, I'd rather have it go through a 3rd party as they will track you down by phone when there is an alarm before dispatching police, call you after the fact for fire (which gives them time a short amount of time to cancel the call if it's false), deal with durress passwords, etc... Can you rely on a public employee that's part of a union to go through that much trouble? Probably not.
...with baby oil.
Get a security system. ADT and Brinks suck, I had them before and when I got broken into, no one called or showed up. When I called to ask them why they weren't on the ball, they said they though it was a false alarm, but they didn't even bother to check.
Go with a local company. I'm in Minneapolis and use Sentry Systems, they are cheap, $40 a month. And, you can add a temp sensor that they will monitor for only the price of the sensor ($45 on ebay). They also have water sensors, which I place by my drains in the basement in case the sewer backs up (which it has). They'll call you when one of them throws an alarm. You just give them a list of numbers to try in order.
I went into t-mobile on Monday the 24th and filled out all of the paperwork. 12 days later, 10 hours of hold time, and several nasty calls later, my phone still isn't ported.
ATT's system keeps coming back with some "Not Authorized" message when they try to port it. I'm pissed.
I wouldn't be switching, but ATT's coverage map says they have native coverage where I work, but they don't. I roam on t-mobile for 69 cents a minute. That's bullshit.
T-mobile customers don't pay anything to roam on ATT's network either. ATTWS's GSM network was slowly getting better until they signed the roaming agreement with t-mobile. Now they really have no incentive to keep building their network when they're sucking down 70 cents a minute from their customers that roam. To make it all worse, they TDMA network has gone to hell for some reason, and there are huge dead spots now where there used to be full signal. With all of the IT problems that I've heard about over there, I think they are in deep trouble.
Too bad, I've been with them for 7 years, and was happy until about a year ago. Now that I started a new job a couple of weeks ago and don't get coverage where they say I should, that's the last straw. I've complained several times and they just tell me they'll send me a new phone, even though I've tried using 3 different ones. They told my friend when he complained that he should just switch providers. ATT Wireless sucks now.
While I think AOL is for wusses... a lot of people sign up for it and use it. With them shipping Sun's office suite, there's a good chance this might put a dent in MS's Office monopoly. Businesses won't be buying these, so it will simply be consumers using something other than MS, but you have to start somewhere right?
Additionally, how does this work in CA? Remember a couple of years ago when MSN was offering free computers if you signed up for a year contract, but CA law let's you cancel the contract at any time so people were just getting free pc's? Wouldn't this be subject to the same CA law?
Just buy youself a copy of X-plane. Some airplane manufacturers use it when designing planes. I don't know if it would give you the data you want, but at least it would give you a very good idea of what would happen.
There are some legit companies that use it. A place I used to work used it for sending user-configured news and stock alerts. Interestingly enough, the box is a rebranded dell running freebsd. I have my suspicions they are using qmail on it also just because of the way it behaves. Everything is hidden behind a nice little interface though, so you have to boot with a floppy to poke around, which I never got around to doing.
:) It is a good product though, you would have serious trouble getting that kind of performance out of a standard mailserver using the same hardware.
The boxes are $30k each last I checked. On a revenue of $10 million, that's likely under 300 machines if you include a support contract. Not selling many of them...