I'm shocked. As a Brit, I would feel ripped off if I bought a new car that didn't make 120,000 miles without anything more severe than servicing, oil, brakes and tyres (well, maybe a clutch). There's an ecological impact to this as well -- more metals refined, more junk thrown away
Imagine if you were an American who bought into the marketing of "buy american"... doing your best to support and thinking that buying that $20,000 new car means your putting food on the plate of your other americans. Oddly enough it's somewhat common for people to buy a new car, make the payments, and at the end trade it in for another new car after 3-5 years. I think that's foolish... but that's me.
At least in the states most of this metal is recovered that I'm aware of. Any car dealer will accept any car as a trade in on a new one and give you $500... doesn't need to be running even. If you are not buying a new car then you might be able to sell it to a scrap yard or if worse comes to worse you can pay someone $50.00 to scrap it. This isn't to say most of the plastic might hit the landfills, but the metal is easy enough to recover.
There also is this american SUV that I know of, forget the make, that eats transmisions for breakfast. Fortunatly transmisions are easy enough to replace.
I have a sister for example who lives back east, where the cost of labor is very low for auto repair. She buys american not because of any obligation to her country of birth but simply because they are lightly cheaper and the fact that they come with large engines for towing a boat, something you don't really want to do on a sub 2l 4cyl. Also the harsh winters tend to eat Japanese steal faster as they salt the roads and keep them salted for many months.
Anyways she found a nice deal on a company who offers a lifetime warranty on their replacement engines. It cost a pretty penny... about $2500 installed, so higher than the cost of a head rebuild, but she's on her 3rd engine. A pretty penny but a small price to pay to keep the car that you actually like on the road for the longest period of time. As a bonus they rebuild the pulled engines for the next person that comes along.
I don't know where you get that idea from. The details are really where American cars look good.
My niece bought into a used car some time back. Not very used... a Mitubishi something or another... 1999 or so... $5000 there and abouts, under 60,000 miles. She bought this thing because it was pretty and because for the most part Japanese cars are more reliable than their american counterparts. Well... as it turns out this Mitubshi has a Crysler engine... and those puppies need a head rebuild after about 50,000 miles. In fact I don't know any one who bought an american car new or otherwise in the past 7 years who was able to drive it for more than 50,000 without needing at the very least their valves ground. From the Dodge Neon to the Pontiac.
In fact, helping out a nice girl from Germany... the speech I gave her for buying a sub $1000 used car was "Don't buy American... Japansese is good, German is good, sweedish is good... but don't buy an American". She didn't really understand and was all hip to buying a $500 1998 dodge something or another. She didn't quite understand there was a good reason that a newer Dodge was 1/4 the price than a 20 year old toyota... cause they were crap.
So sure you can get your self a midsized buick with that v6 engine and faux hardwood interior trim... large front seats and a trailer hitch for your boat. And sure the seats are nice, the trim sparkles, and in all fairness is less prone to rust than your typical japanese import. Going by looks alone, american cars have much to offer. Just don't expect it to go more than 50,000 miles without some major engine work, or major transmition work.
Maybe they can use their new PDA's to surf over to halfoff.com and buy some cheap books, eh?
Shipping? Think $20 for a book... think $5.00 to $10 per book if shipping 17 in a single box. That's about the limit before you hit 70lbs via regular means. This is assuming the shipping company is nice enough to charge you the actual shipping cost and not special handeling fees for shipping to another country, and nice enough to put all the books you are ordering into a single box and not be charged the $20 per package to ship.
This is assuming their school system is in English... as opposed to Swahili which I think is as offical as english as the national language, or Gikuyu and Luyia which from my understanding are two of many languages which are popular there, not to speak of Luo and Kamba
If we don't use them in the west why would they want them in the third world?
Because to deploy something new in a region that doesn't have much in the way of an existing infrastructure is easier than trying change a deeply rooted society. Further, given they don't have much in the way of text books to begin with they are the most likely people to accept pocketpc books in lue of regular books as something is always better than nothing.
Further... have you ever tried to ship books? Books are huge, heavy, bulky bits of compressed wood. A single hardcover edition can weigh in at 3 to 5 pounds. Shipping a crap load of pocketPCs that in turn can be updated without shipping anything is strangly appealing for nations off the main shipping routes.
For me to ship one 4 pound book from the US to Kenya would cost a minium of $20.00... 17 4 pound books $220, and 68 (4 packages under 70lbs) 4 pound books $880. Assuming three classes that's $2640 in shipping costs plus the cost of 204 4 pound books which are likely to cost between $4000 and $8000 best case scenero for new books, even used books the $100 per student yearly is easy to believe. You can easily see why this gift was accepted... saves students a ton of money.
Personally, I leave my wireless network deliberately open, and the login message (when seen) says "welcome to...". I do this in a public minded spirit, in the hope that if I need a public network in some other place, some other kind soul will leave one open as well.
This is lots of fun. I setup a simple open access point that resolved everything to a cached copy of goatex. Sitting on the front lawn drinking iced tea watching the war drivers go past, stop, surf, get disguested, and squeel away.
People leave their cars/houses unlocked. This doesn't mean it's perfectly acceptable to steal/rob them!
Is it acceptable to steal them? No!
Is it legal to steal them? Not really.
Could you procucute a someone for taking off in your car you left unlocked with the keys in it? This would be hard. If they got the keys... the person who "borrowed" you car could say "He lent it to me". And according to my local police in that situation you have to send a certified letter asking for the return of the car before they'll even declare it stolen if they don't respond after 14 or 28 days (don't remember exactly). The point is this, while it's not legal to steal someone else's car but if you left your keys in it and they took off it's possible for them to get away with stealing your car cause you were a dumb ass.
"It ain't stolen, I got the keys" works very well from what i've observed.
There is nothing wrong with that attitude in and of itself. The problem is that things almost always get extended beyond their initial application. Cleartext TELNET is good enough for it's original application -- carrying terminal sessions between a handful of computers operated by a group of people who all know each other. TELNET becomes insecure when used on the modern Internet, where your packets might go anywhere, to anyone.
Yes, I get blasted at times for using telnet on a house network to linux box and then from there ssh. I get big lectures about how insecure telnet is and how any old joe could packet sniff my passwords and data. And I stop and wonder as I look at my hub located 1.5 meters away if I have an issue with little gnomes with little laptops that hide under my chair and jack in when i'm looking at the screen and promptly disapear when I look at the hub.
But I wasn't grasping they were using the name network to feed unencrypted unscrambled signals to the rooms as they were using for billing and TV access. I'm suprised they don't scramble the signal so it's at least somewhat unuseable.
Re:"screenshots" of internet access being *BROADCA
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Hacking Hotels 101
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm willing to bet that all of these channels are using standard cable frequencies (most which fall in the broadcast TV UHF range, albiet with different frequencies), which can be picked up with a cheap $15 B&W portable TV with a slide tuner.
Are they really too cheap to just use a regular network and WEB-TV-like units in the rooms?
Hmmm... those cable channels fall into the high VHF range. There are some channels used between 6 and 7 , but I can't remember off the top of my head. I.e. cable channel 14 is the same distance from TV 13 is from TV 12, but UHF 14 IIRC VHF 13 is 210-216Mhz CATV is 14(sic) 216-222Mhz (also used in marine radio) and UHF 14 is 470-476Mhz... I stand corrected... channel 13 + 6mhz = catv 23 there and about. My memory is fuzzy as those first generation digital dial but manual analog tuners allowed you to access a slew stuff before cable ready TVs were popular. You do have CATV channels 95-99 91.25-119.775mhz smack dab between channels 6 and 7.. which just so happen to be used by FM radio, which would explain why sometimes you could get the playboy channel on your radio.
But that's not the point, or rather the whole frequency spectrium being totally screwy isn't the point. Why I bothered with that whole paragraph when you were talking about those cheep slide tuner TVs that can access all sorts of weird stuff is beyond me.
The point is this... Yes, they really are too cheap. Wouldn't you be? Why go with any sort of encryption on a system which for the most part is protected by physical security... lock and key. Got a key, your spending money. If you spend more money to watch a movie, hotel makes a buck, the provide makes bucks, everyone is happy. Cable feed, monitors broadcast via radio waves from a centralized location in a room without windows deep in employee only zone. If some jack ass steals a TV... well they lost a $800 TV. If some jackass steals a 22 inch network termianl... well they just lost something worth a few grand. Not to speak of support issues, damage, power surges.
While *i'd* prefer the webTv experence, point and click movies without issues of analog signal degrading by the rats in the walls... I respect the fact that traditional TV from a centeralized broadcast location is really the way to go. Hell even for a net terminal i'd still go with a dumb monitor with keyboard relay.
Dont you mean "Security through apathy"
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Hacking Hotels 101
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· Score: 1
This is a classic case of "security through obscurity". The hotels (or rather, their vendors) are relying on the fact that nobody knows how their system works to keep it secure. They just broadcast everything and figure, "Hey, you need one of our special remotes to do anything, so we're safe".
I think, generally speaking... no one gives enough of a shit to even bother hacking a hotel broadcast network. And the minority that do... the very small minority are for the most part paying upwards of $50/night just to be there, generally not worth it to hang out and commit an act of theft of service. Investing something resembling a secure system would be a hell of alot more costly than just a slew of comercial TVs that can be remote controled from a central location and tuned to some high VHF frequency if you click the little buy a movie button. The system is good enough for it's application.
Re:This is old news within the hospitality industr
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Hacking Hotels 101
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· Score: 1
In most cases if you do it fast enough they may just think it's a glitch, but the idea is to prevent the theft of the TV, I don't think they care about the programming so you could say the picture sucked or something, as long as they see the TV is still there.
If asked just say "i'm hooking in a camcorder, i'm on vacation and i'm making a home movie". Works perfectly well for me when i'm on vacation and making a home movie.
Every hotel I've been at (including "premium" ones) have free local calls.
The last hotel I stayed in that one might consider premium was a two room suite holiday inn... utah when they had the hurricane, or rather the night before. I think it was a holiday in... apparently there was a convention in town and it was the only room. Anyhow the phonecall to the airport, local call I might add was $1.25, which is annoying the fact that the room was pretty upscale on the price yet everything in there including the 8bit nintendo was pay access only.
Most Motels... and sub $80/night i've noted had free local calls... where many a hilton or Hyette it was cheaper to use the payphone than the room phone... except incomming calls were free.
As in premium channels... things you pay extra (a premium) for. That stupid soft core porn is a premium, as well as pay per view movies and such. Once thing nice about cell phones is you don't have to worry about the premium phone service in those premium hotels that costs an arm and a leg just to make a local call, chances are the mobile is cheaper.
The problem with getting the premium service for free is the fact that people feel that they are being robbed blind by freeloaders even though they set up the service as being an option which you can pay for. I use to travel with a VCR/camcorder rather than pay for VCR rental for example. This was some hotel outside vancouver. I got a big speech about how my bring my own vcr was theft of service because this was a service provided by the hotel that I wasn't paying for. The cops were amused when they found out they were called about some yank who heaven forbid went on vacation with a camcorder and was watching home video of Stanely Park. Needless to say the TV was listed as an amenity, vcr and tapes were listed as a seperate premium.
Thickness of the package should be no greater than that of a standard DVD package and no less than the thickness of a CD jewel case.
You know... I'm perfectly happy with the standard CD jewel. Anything I backup and burn goes in the standard jewel. Come to think about it the things I buy get thrown in a standard jewel as well if not double or quad jewels. If they find they must go with a different than CD package, go super jewel or super long jewel.
The regular long box fits in a drawer almost as badly as VHS tape did... for this reason i'd prefer either thin long box, super jewel long, jewel/super jewel. I would prefer sticking with the same standard as CD since DVD players will play CDs it only makes sense that they all fit on the same style shelf.
What happened to the good old days, when pin counts lasted years and years?
Ummm... we have socket 754 which is pretty much supports the older athlons as well as the Sempron and Athlon 64s. This is common on those sub $400 pcs that you find on the retail circuit.
It's sort of like the old super socket 7 of old. Nice the fact that AMD offered CPUS as fast as 450 and 550 IIRC, even a tad higher than 450mhz in the amd k6-3 mobile if you were lucky enough to find them. While not nessicarly the best upgrade choice they are not only an option for the budget minded but most importantly those last generation high end chips either hold their value or increase in value. The socket-7 run would have been limited to 233/266mhz had it not been for AMD.
But this is all accidemic as well... Socket-a has been around for a very long time... offering speeds as low as the 600mhz... as high as 3.2ghz AFAIA. More over they are still in production.
So what happened to the good old days when pin counts lasted for years and years? They are still here, and in fact improved thanks to AMD so long as you ignore Slot-A. While I would strongly reccomend going 939 if you can, 754/slot-a is still an option even for those who gotta have 64bit CPUs. Just like the end of the 21st century when you "could" go slot-1 or stay with (super) socket 7 a while longer, or hell even 72pin simms if you really wanted to.
However, PLEASE try and remember something. The people you talk to and buy things from are not the store owners. In fact, they're lucky if they've ever even met the franchise owner of the store, let alone the owner of the company.
In an ideal world, employees would discover what policies are blatently offencive to customers and rather than deal with a bad situation they would leave.
But unfortunatly no one needs morality when there isn't enough to eat.
If you turned off the Workplace shell, and replaced it with something real small like a program called Filebar, OS/2 was fantastic on 4MB machines. Even ran on 2MB machines
If I knew about that then I might have actually used OS/2. Unfortunatly my evaluation was based entirely of the product out the box without any software tweeking, and to get it to run efficently required about $300 extra in ram, something I wasn't willing to invest in at the time. Few people were.
I never had any problems with OS/2 drivers at all. I was running it on a 486SX-25mhz with 8mb of RAM with Waffle BBS answering a modem in a DOS VDM, while I ran Win3.1 apps. It was an incredible OS, and to this very day, even the latest, greatest Windows GUI is still just a fancied-up version of the original Chicago shell, which was a retarded rip-off of WPS. I have a feeling that a good many of the OS/2 users end up either going to Linux or MacOS
My only real beef with OS/2 was the fact that it ran rather like a dog on 4megs of ram, and the cost to upgrade to 8megs was rather high. I gave it a good honest shot when I upgraded to 8 but at the time I was running mostly dos apps.. so I could either run OS/2 which took up a good deal of HD space and ram, or desqview which took up about 2megs of disk space and squat in the way of ram. By the time the pentiums came out and memory prices dropped to a point something like os/2 was practical and spiffy win95 was already out.
I'm not saying I didn't like the product, it was just too much for what I needed at the time, which was running a dos app and word once and a while and terminal emulation which at the time worked so much better in a dos window.
What I didn't like were those OS2 prophets. Nothing worse walking down the street and getting one of those jackasses with the "end is neigh" signs trying to convert me to OS2, when I was perfectly happy putting along in dos and desqview.
Re:Won't somebody please think of the ATM machines
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IBM Officially Kills OS/2
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Last time I checked, large numbers of ATM machines ran OS2, which is why you don't see the BSOD when you go to grab some cash.
And i'm sure they'll still be running OS/2 even after IBM stops selling it.
Oh, believe me, I know this. The issue, as you so accurately pointed out, is that the software involved is fairly intensive in its memory usage.
I've tried enabling networking with various service software packages loaded. They all crash with the network present.
There was an old trick one could do on older systems in dos... map some area beyond 640k into conventional memory disabling VGA support. Worked perfectly on a mono herc card and I seem to remember it worked on a VGA card though disabling the graphics. The extra 128k was a godsend when dealing with the need for TSRs and programs that needed almost every once of that 640k. But damned if I could remember the software that permited this trick.
I don't know motorola software well, have only used their pager programing software which pretty much requires a TTL level serial port and a 386. Other software got TTL levels from the paralell port which was far more sensative to timing issues. I feel your pain.
Example, from my own lab: Programming and servicing many makes of Motorola 2-way radios. I could not do so were it not for a DOS-based system which has no ability to network at all. Many of the Motorola radio service software packages won't run on Windows, mainly because they were written long before Windows was in force and Motorola has chosen not to re-write them. Also, most such programs require direct control of the serial port, something that Windows versions above (I think) 95 do not allow.
Ummm, you can network in dos. It's a pain in the tookus and you are limited to about 20 or so shares, but it's very much possible and actually practical in situations that you'd otherwise have to take floppies between systems.
Now whether you can load the TSRs and still have enough memory for your software is another story.
Sure you can! There is no offical write protect tab, this is true but with a good center punch and hammer I can guarantee you'll never be able to write to it... ever!
The media is a lot cheaper, and support is near universal.
Since AOL stopped giving away floppies I had to resort to buying new floppies from time to time. I discovered very quickly that HD 3.5 inch discs cost upwards of 25c/each mail order, upwards of 50cent/each in stores.
If I needed to exchange a file, even if it was below 1meg, the cost is roughly equal to CD-R, and support is near universal, in fact more near universal for CD than floppy these days.
Actually, I preferred the old HP way of having the heads in the cartridge. Why? Heads get scratched. They get clogged. They wear out. Instead of buying some insanely expensive and hard-to-replace printhead, all you have to do is swap out the cartridge and you're printing like new. It's the same thing with HP's lasers...The imaging drum and the toner cartridge are in the same package. It might increase the price of the carts a little, but maintenance isn't as big of a deal. Besides if you want to max out your drum life, you can always refill the toner.
I actually prefered the the approach of seperate developers and drums that you would only replace when it started to get warn. The only problem with this approach is by the time you need to repalce it, the cost to replace the printer is there and abouts of the same of a new printer. But at least you could keep spares and they don't take up the same amount of space as a spare printer.
What I want is a balance between the HP and the Canon approach. A printhead you can reuse and reduce waste but doesn't cost as much as the printer to replace when needed. Or better still if epson would actually put in a gasket that doesn't get knocked out of place causing the head to clog.
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I'm shocked. As a Brit, I would feel ripped off if I bought a new car that didn't make 120,000 miles without anything more severe than servicing, oil, brakes and tyres (well, maybe a clutch). There's an ecological impact to this as well -- more metals refined, more junk thrown away
Imagine if you were an American who bought into the marketing of "buy american"... doing your best to support and thinking that buying that $20,000 new car means your putting food on the plate of your other americans. Oddly enough it's somewhat common for people to buy a new car, make the payments, and at the end trade it in for another new car after 3-5 years. I think that's foolish... but that's me.
At least in the states most of this metal is recovered that I'm aware of. Any car dealer will accept any car as a trade in on a new one and give you $500... doesn't need to be running even. If you are not buying a new car then you might be able to sell it to a scrap yard or if worse comes to worse you can pay someone $50.00 to scrap it. This isn't to say most of the plastic might hit the landfills, but the metal is easy enough to recover.
There also is this american SUV that I know of, forget the make, that eats transmisions for breakfast. Fortunatly transmisions are easy enough to replace.
I have a sister for example who lives back east, where the cost of labor is very low for auto repair. She buys american not because of any obligation to her country of birth but simply because they are lightly cheaper and the fact that they come with large engines for towing a boat, something you don't really want to do on a sub 2l 4cyl. Also the harsh winters tend to eat Japanese steal faster as they salt the roads and keep them salted for many months.
Anyways she found a nice deal on a company who offers a lifetime warranty on their replacement engines. It cost a pretty penny... about $2500 installed, so higher than the cost of a head rebuild, but she's on her 3rd engine. A pretty penny but a small price to pay to keep the car that you actually like on the road for the longest period of time. As a bonus they rebuild the pulled engines for the next person that comes along.
I don't know where you get that idea from. The details are really where American cars look good.
My niece bought into a used car some time back. Not very used... a Mitubishi something or another... 1999 or so... $5000 there and abouts, under 60,000 miles. She bought this thing because it was pretty and because for the most part Japanese cars are more reliable than their american counterparts. Well... as it turns out this Mitubshi has a Crysler engine... and those puppies need a head rebuild after about 50,000 miles. In fact I don't know any one who bought an american car new or otherwise in the past 7 years who was able to drive it for more than 50,000 without needing at the very least their valves ground. From the Dodge Neon to the Pontiac.
In fact, helping out a nice girl from Germany... the speech I gave her for buying a sub $1000 used car was "Don't buy American... Japansese is good, German is good, sweedish is good... but don't buy an American". She didn't really understand and was all hip to buying a $500 1998 dodge something or another. She didn't quite understand there was a good reason that a newer Dodge was 1/4 the price than a 20 year old toyota... cause they were crap.
So sure you can get your self a midsized buick with that v6 engine and faux hardwood interior trim... large front seats and a trailer hitch for your boat. And sure the seats are nice, the trim sparkles, and in all fairness is less prone to rust than your typical japanese import. Going by looks alone, american cars have much to offer. Just don't expect it to go more than 50,000 miles without some major engine work, or major transmition work.
Maybe they can use their new PDA's to surf over to halfoff.com and buy some cheap books, eh?
Shipping? Think $20 for a book... think $5.00 to $10 per book if shipping 17 in a single box. That's about the limit before you hit 70lbs via regular means. This is assuming the shipping company is nice enough to charge you the actual shipping cost and not special handeling fees for shipping to another country, and nice enough to put all the books you are ordering into a single box and not be charged the $20 per package to ship.
This is assuming their school system is in English... as opposed to Swahili which I think is as offical as english as the national language, or
Gikuyu and Luyia which from my understanding are two of many languages which are popular there, not to speak of Luo and Kamba
If we don't use them in the west why would they want them in the third world?
Because to deploy something new in a region that doesn't have much in the way of an existing infrastructure is easier than trying change a deeply rooted society. Further, given they don't have much in the way of text books to begin with they are the most likely people to accept pocketpc books in lue of regular books as something is always better than nothing.
Further... have you ever tried to ship books? Books are huge, heavy, bulky bits of compressed wood. A single hardcover edition can weigh in at 3 to 5 pounds. Shipping a crap load of pocketPCs that in turn can be updated without shipping anything is strangly appealing for nations off the main shipping routes.
For me to ship one 4 pound book from the US to Kenya would cost a minium of $20.00... 17 4 pound books $220, and 68 (4 packages under 70lbs) 4 pound books $880. Assuming three classes that's $2640 in shipping costs plus the cost of 204 4 pound books which are likely to cost between $4000 and $8000 best case scenero for new books, even used books the $100 per student yearly is easy to believe. You can easily see why this gift was accepted... saves students a ton of money.
Personally, I leave my wireless network deliberately open, and the login message (when seen) says "welcome to...". I do this in a public minded spirit, in the hope that if I need a public network in some other place, some other kind soul will leave one open as well.
This is lots of fun. I setup a simple open access point that resolved everything to a cached copy of goatex. Sitting on the front lawn drinking iced tea watching the war drivers go past, stop, surf, get disguested, and squeel away.
People leave their cars/houses unlocked. This doesn't mean it's perfectly acceptable to steal/rob them!
Is it acceptable to steal them? No!
Is it legal to steal them? Not really.
Could you procucute a someone for taking off in your car you left unlocked with the keys in it? This would be hard. If they got the keys... the person who "borrowed" you car could say "He lent it to me". And according to my local police in that situation you have to send a certified letter asking for the return of the car before they'll even declare it stolen if they don't respond after 14 or 28 days (don't remember exactly). The point is this, while it's not legal to steal someone else's car but if you left your keys in it and they took off it's possible for them to get away with stealing your car cause you were a dumb ass.
"It ain't stolen, I got the keys" works very well from what i've observed.
There is nothing wrong with that attitude in and of itself. The problem is that things almost always get extended beyond their initial application. Cleartext TELNET is good enough for it's original application -- carrying terminal sessions between a handful of computers operated by a group of people who all know each other. TELNET becomes insecure when used on the modern Internet, where your packets might go anywhere, to anyone.
Yes, I get blasted at times for using telnet on a house network to linux box and then from there ssh. I get big lectures about how insecure telnet is and how any old joe could packet sniff my passwords and data. And I stop and wonder as I look at my hub located 1.5 meters away if I have an issue with little gnomes with little laptops that hide under my chair and jack in when i'm looking at the screen and promptly disapear when I look at the hub.
But I wasn't grasping they were using the name network to feed unencrypted unscrambled signals to the rooms as they were using for billing and TV access. I'm suprised they don't scramble the signal so it's at least somewhat unuseable.
I'm willing to bet that all of these channels are using standard cable frequencies (most which fall in
the broadcast TV UHF range, albiet with different frequencies), which can be picked up with a cheap $15 B&W portable TV with a slide tuner.
Are they really too cheap to just use a regular network and WEB-TV-like units in the rooms?
Hmmm... those cable channels fall into the high VHF range. There are some channels used between 6 and 7 , but I can't remember off the top of my head. I.e. cable channel 14 is the same distance from TV 13 is from TV 12, but UHF 14 IIRC VHF 13 is 210-216Mhz CATV is 14(sic) 216-222Mhz (also used in marine radio) and UHF 14 is 470-476Mhz... I stand corrected... channel 13 + 6mhz = catv 23 there and about. My memory is fuzzy as those first generation digital dial but manual analog tuners allowed you to access a slew stuff before cable ready TVs were popular. You do have CATV channels 95-99 91.25-119.775mhz smack dab between channels 6 and 7.. which just so happen to be used by FM radio, which would explain why sometimes you could get the playboy channel on your radio.
But that's not the point, or rather the whole frequency spectrium being totally screwy isn't the point. Why I bothered with that whole paragraph when you were talking about those cheep slide tuner TVs that can access all sorts of weird stuff is beyond me.
The point is this... Yes, they really are too cheap. Wouldn't you be? Why go with any sort of encryption on a system which for the most part is protected by physical security... lock and key. Got a key, your spending money. If you spend more money to watch a movie, hotel makes a buck, the provide makes bucks, everyone is happy. Cable feed, monitors broadcast via radio waves from a centralized location in a room without windows deep in employee only zone. If some jack ass steals a TV... well they lost a $800 TV. If some jackass steals a 22 inch network termianl... well they just lost something worth a few grand. Not to speak of support issues, damage, power surges.
While *i'd* prefer the webTv experence, point and click movies without issues of analog signal degrading by the rats in the walls... I respect the fact that traditional TV from a centeralized broadcast location is really the way to go. Hell even for a net terminal i'd still go with a dumb monitor with keyboard relay.
This is a classic case of "security through obscurity". The hotels (or rather, their vendors) are relying on the fact that nobody knows how their system works to keep it secure. They just broadcast everything and figure, "Hey, you need one of our special remotes to do anything, so we're safe".
I think, generally speaking... no one gives enough of a shit to even bother hacking a hotel broadcast network. And the minority that do... the very small minority are for the most part paying upwards of $50/night just to be there, generally not worth it to hang out and commit an act of theft of service. Investing something resembling a secure system would be a hell of alot more costly than just a slew of comercial TVs that can be remote controled from a central location and tuned to some high VHF frequency if you click the little buy a movie button. The system is good enough for it's application.
In most cases if you do it fast enough they may just think it's a glitch, but the idea is to prevent the theft of the TV, I don't think they care about the programming so you could say the picture sucked or something, as long as they see the TV is still there.
If asked just say "i'm hooking in a camcorder, i'm on vacation and i'm making a home movie". Works perfectly well for me when i'm on vacation and making a home movie.
Every hotel I've been at (including "premium" ones) have free local calls.
The last hotel I stayed in that one might consider premium was a two room suite holiday inn... utah when they had the hurricane, or rather the night before. I think it was a holiday in... apparently there was a convention in town and it was the only room. Anyhow the phonecall to the airport, local call I might add was $1.25, which is annoying the fact that the room was pretty upscale on the price yet everything in there including the 8bit nintendo was pay access only.
Most Motels... and sub $80/night i've noted had free local calls... where many a hilton or Hyette it was cheaper to use the payphone than the room phone... except incomming calls were free.
What the hell is premium content?
As in premium channels... things you pay extra (a premium) for. That stupid soft core porn is a premium, as well as pay per view movies and such. Once thing nice about cell phones is you don't have to worry about the premium phone service in those premium hotels that costs an arm and a leg just to make a local call, chances are the mobile is cheaper.
The problem with getting the premium service for free is the fact that people feel that they are being robbed blind by freeloaders even though they set up the service as being an option which you can pay for. I use to travel with a VCR/camcorder rather than pay for VCR rental for example. This was some hotel outside vancouver. I got a big speech about how my bring my own vcr was theft of service because this was a service provided by the hotel that I wasn't paying for. The cops were amused when they found out they were called about some yank who heaven forbid went on vacation with a camcorder and was watching home video of Stanely Park. Needless to say the TV was listed as an amenity, vcr and tapes were listed as a seperate premium.
Some of the K56Flex modems were flashable to V.90. The one I had was, anyway.
Yes! Pitty the fool who bought into HST, Compucom, or USR x2.
Thickness of the package should be no greater than that of a standard DVD package and no less than the thickness of a CD jewel case.
You know... I'm perfectly happy with the standard CD jewel. Anything I backup and burn goes in the standard jewel. Come to think about it the things I buy get thrown in a standard jewel as well if not double or quad jewels. If they find they must go with a different than CD package, go super jewel or super long jewel.
The regular long box fits in a drawer almost as badly as VHS tape did... for this reason i'd prefer either thin long box, super jewel long, jewel/super jewel. I would prefer sticking with the same standard as CD since DVD players will play CDs it only makes sense that they all fit on the same style shelf.
What happened to the good old days, when pin counts lasted years and years?
Ummm... we have socket 754 which is pretty much supports the older athlons as well as the Sempron and Athlon 64s. This is common on those sub $400 pcs that you find on the retail circuit.
It's sort of like the old super socket 7 of old. Nice the fact that AMD offered CPUS as fast as 450 and 550 IIRC, even a tad higher than 450mhz in the amd k6-3 mobile if you were lucky enough to find them. While not nessicarly the best upgrade choice they are not only an option for the budget minded but most importantly those last generation high end chips either hold their value or increase in value. The socket-7 run would have been limited to 233/266mhz had it not been for AMD.
But this is all accidemic as well... Socket-a has been around for a very long time... offering speeds as low as the 600mhz... as high as 3.2ghz AFAIA. More over they are still in production.
So what happened to the good old days when pin counts lasted for years and years? They are still here, and in fact improved thanks to AMD so long as you ignore Slot-A. While I would strongly reccomend going 939 if you can, 754/slot-a is still an option even for those who gotta have 64bit CPUs. Just like the end of the 21st century when you "could" go slot-1 or stay with (super) socket 7 a while longer, or hell even 72pin simms if you really wanted to.
However, PLEASE try and remember something. The people you talk to and buy things from are not the store owners. In fact, they're lucky if they've ever even met the franchise owner of the store, let alone the owner of the company.
In an ideal world, employees would discover what policies are blatently offencive to customers and rather than deal with a bad situation they would leave.
But unfortunatly no one needs morality when there isn't enough to eat.
Windows as a multimedia player plays everything out there, someone said here the other day. Oh, yeah, right, moron.
What's odd, what's really odd is this also happened to me using quicktime alternative.
If you turned off the Workplace shell, and replaced it with something real small like a program called Filebar, OS/2 was fantastic on 4MB machines. Even ran on 2MB machines
If I knew about that then I might have actually used OS/2. Unfortunatly my evaluation was based entirely of the product out the box without any software tweeking, and to get it to run efficently required about $300 extra in ram, something I wasn't willing to invest in at the time. Few people were.
I never had any problems with OS/2 drivers at all. I was running it on a 486SX-25mhz with 8mb of RAM with Waffle BBS answering a modem in a DOS VDM, while I ran Win3.1 apps. It was an incredible OS, and to this very day, even the latest, greatest Windows GUI is still just a fancied-up version of the original Chicago shell, which was a retarded rip-off of WPS. I have a feeling that a good many of the OS/2 users end up either going to Linux or MacOS
My only real beef with OS/2 was the fact that it ran rather like a dog on 4megs of ram, and the cost to upgrade to 8megs was rather high. I gave it a good honest shot when I upgraded to 8 but at the time I was running mostly dos apps.. so I could either run OS/2 which took up a good deal of HD space and ram, or desqview which took up about 2megs of disk space and squat in the way of ram. By the time the pentiums came out and memory prices dropped to a point something like os/2 was practical and spiffy win95 was already out.
I'm not saying I didn't like the product, it was just too much for what I needed at the time, which was running a dos app and word once and a while and terminal emulation which at the time worked so much better in a dos window.
What I didn't like were those OS2 prophets. Nothing worse walking down the street and getting one of those jackasses with the "end is neigh" signs trying to convert me to OS2, when I was perfectly happy putting along in dos and desqview.
Last time I checked, large numbers of ATM machines ran OS2, which is why you don't see the BSOD when you go to grab some cash.
And i'm sure they'll still be running OS/2 even after IBM stops selling it.
Oh, believe me, I know this. The issue, as you so accurately pointed out, is that the software involved is fairly intensive in its memory usage.
I've tried enabling networking with various service software packages loaded. They all crash with the network present.
There was an old trick one could do on older systems in dos... map some area beyond 640k into conventional memory disabling VGA support. Worked perfectly on a mono herc card and I seem to remember it worked on a VGA card though disabling the graphics. The extra 128k was a godsend when dealing with the need for TSRs and programs that needed almost every once of that 640k. But damned if I could remember the software that permited this trick.
I don't know motorola software well, have only used their pager programing software which pretty much requires a TTL level serial port and a 386. Other software got TTL levels from the paralell port which was far more sensative to timing issues. I feel your pain.
Example, from my own lab: Programming and servicing many makes of Motorola 2-way radios. I could not do so were it not for a DOS-based system which has no ability to network at all. Many of the Motorola radio service software packages won't run on Windows, mainly because they were written long before Windows was in force and Motorola has chosen not to re-write them. Also, most such programs require direct control of the serial port, something that Windows versions above (I think) 95 do not allow.
Ummm, you can network in dos. It's a pain in the tookus and you are limited to about 20 or so shares, but it's very much possible and actually practical in situations that you'd otherwise have to take floppies between systems.
Now whether you can load the TSRs and still have enough memory for your software is another story.
You can't write protect a hard drive easily
Sure you can! There is no offical write protect tab, this is true but with a good center punch and hammer I can guarantee you'll never be able to write to it... ever!
The media is a lot cheaper, and support is near universal.
Since AOL stopped giving away floppies I had to resort to buying new floppies from time to time. I discovered very quickly that HD 3.5 inch discs cost upwards of 25c/each mail order, upwards of 50cent/each in stores.
If I needed to exchange a file, even if it was below 1meg, the cost is roughly equal to CD-R, and support is near universal, in fact more near universal for CD than floppy these days.
Actually, I preferred the old HP way of having the heads in the cartridge. Why? Heads get scratched. They get clogged. They wear out. Instead of buying some insanely expensive and hard-to-replace printhead, all you have to do is swap out the cartridge and you're printing like new. It's the same thing with HP's lasers...The imaging drum and the toner cartridge are in the same package. It might increase the price of the carts a little, but maintenance isn't as big of a deal. Besides if you want to max out your drum life, you can always refill the toner.
I actually prefered the the approach of seperate developers and drums that you would only replace when it started to get warn. The only problem with this approach is by the time you need to repalce it, the cost to replace the printer is there and abouts of the same of a new printer. But at least you could keep spares and they don't take up the same amount of space as a spare printer.
What I want is a balance between the HP and the Canon approach. A printhead you can reuse and reduce waste but doesn't cost as much as the printer to replace when needed. Or better still if epson would actually put in a gasket that doesn't get knocked out of place causing the head to clog.