Not everyone has a natural desire/motivation/reason to learn. People in poor areas have the same mental capacity as any other group of people in the world. A simple spark may be all it takes to get a majority of people the desire to excel. That spark may not come from the internet and computers but that is what the attempt is for. When I was about 6 years old, I got a nice colorful 100-150 piece puzzle of the United States. Each state had the capital labeled and some generic overview of each state (Iowa showed corn, Ohio showed tires, Pennsylvania showed coal and steel etc..). I enjoyed and learned my states from it. In later years of school, geography was my best subject, not from what I learned from the puzzle, but the previous interest I had in the states from the puzzle. This also carried over to US history and so on. The puzzle was not the source of the information but something that sparked my interest. Of course I do nothing with geography now but...
I would assume that if a customer feels the need to record a support call, they are probably trying to cover their own buts. Why would you feel you had to disconnect and what made you feel uncomfortable with being recorded? If you were doing a good job and following the requirements of your compnay, there will be no problems at all. If you want to return cuss words and act like the potential idiot on the other line then you may have issues. Are you afaid you would guide someone in the wrong direction or feel your support would be the suck? I've done support for companies at all different levels, sometimes with a group of many, and others by myself. Someone recording a call would not bother me at all as I am accountable for what I say either way and I am the same person either way and I am confident in what I tell them. If I do not know, I tell them, if I am unsure of something, I tell them, if I need time to research and call them back, I do. If it is something i can not handle, I find someone that can or call them back. Unless you are making stuff up on the phone and providing people with bogus information, you should have no worries at all. If your company is giving YOU obviously wrong information and you pass it along, you are not the problem, the compnay is and any recordings provided would just prove you were following the company policy. If a If I was dealing with a company that had a "get rid of them" if they record policy, I would be looking elsewhere for service or expect crappy service if I did really need help.
I agree with you to a point but ram is not exactly a fast moving technology either. Compare CPU prices and technology to the same with RAM. It would appear that if you took everything into account including R&D and amount sold, that a stick of 512MB ram should cost MANY times less then any CPU, even a recently produced low end Celeron or Duron. You can buy a decent (not top of the line) much newer and technically advanced video card that has magnatudes less in total sales for about the same price as 1GB of ram. Considering those video card companies also had to have R&D and a large software side support stucture that memory companies do not require at all. That just does not seem right.
A rivet gun with aluminum pop rivets would work great. Replacing screws with rivets would be enough a deterent to prevent others from secretly probing inside. A rivet gun and a variety pack of rivets costs about $6. The aluminum being much softer then steel would not damage the threads and screws could be put back in place when you need to get into it yourself.
I bought two of them in Dec 2003 for $199 each. The only issue was a flaky built in network card on one of them (they both have a MSI MS-6378 motherboard). Instead of trying to figure out if it was driver related, I put in an old Intel 100 that I am more familiar with. Other that that, no issues at all and they are running more then they are not. In fact, they never shut them off so I solved that issue by running shutdown from cron on weekday nights at 23:00.
At my previous job, we used regular old HP Vectra's outside running 24/7 year round in extreme conditions and other then the floppy drive (which we started removing because they did not need them anyway), they did not break anymore then the PC's indoors. I am talking about an airline and the specific PC's were at the curbside checkin, outside baggage areas, and remote maintenance areas. Cold, dry, hot, humid, rain, snow, sun, wind, dust, dirt and people using them that did not care... Obviously getting rained on directly is not a good idea but I'd assume you'd have much bigger problems if that happens.
Okay, whoever else is viewing http://216.76.95.195:8090/remote6/, stop panning to the window, I want to zoom in on the desk. It should be my turn to control the camera now.
Here is a thread from rec.toys.lego from 1994 with the same arguement. If you plan to reply, I would send it to the thread and email the authors as I doubt anyone is still monitoring that thread for replies.
You need some crack? You can get it from a guy with a red hat standing on the corner of 15th and K. Can I now be charged with distributing also? What amount do you charge me with selling? How ever much he has with him or how ever much he sold since I told you where he was? What if I use different wording to describe the exact same thing. CAUTION, I saw the idiot with a red hat at the corner of 15th and K selling crack, he must be stopped, please avoid him at all costs and call the cops!!! Can I be charged for that also? I still told you where you could get it.
Do people who steal credit card receipts and signatures only take them from customers that bought something large? Large, small, expensive, or cheap, I have no idea what point you are trying to make here.
Insightful I guess but you miss the entire point. The RIAA is not forcing Apple to only allow online music purchased from the iTunes store to work with the iPod, which Apple is actively trying to maintain. I am just pointing that out as many people posting seem to be ignoring the true point of what the lawsuit is really about. EVERY consumer with an iPod would benefit from multiple online store compatibility regardless of how much you like or want to defend Apple, only Apple benefits from forcing you to buy from iTunes. The agruement is not about "it just works" or the fact that you may like the interface, functionality, integration, price and whatever with the iTunes store, it is about having a choice. These facts can not be disputed. Apple would not HAVE to bear any extra costs by allowing other store fronts to sell supported songs that work on the iPod as others have claimed in past stories about this topic.
My opinion.. If you don't like Apples (or any company) policies, don't buy the product.
Or someone uses a really small font and they get hidden behind your Trinitrons apature grill support lines. Of course Sonys patent has expired and other companies have starting using thier apature grill design also.
I bought a 19in LCD monitor recently. The price was almost the same as the 19in CRT's. $299USD. The response time is average for an LCD (15/10) and it has DVI input. I did consider both carefully and with such little difference in price, the LCD won. At work we have a 50in plasma and several projectors that we setup for users in conference rooms for presentations. They normally request the plasma screen once as they must think it is great. They go right back to the LCD projectors the next time because overall the screen looks much better, has higher resolution, and it can be projected much larger for less then 1/2 the price.
I fully agree with you on accuracy but the second method does not justify for much of a cost increase. I guess in mass production of cheap audio equipment, every penny counts and I have no doubt the cheaper router is almost always taken. I can not speak for a seperate power supply but a 555 timer chip costs about 50 cents. I am digging deep here as I've been out of the electonics field for a while but I remember a lot of communications and test equipment using frequency dividers to improve accuracy, ie produce a 400MHZ clock, square it off and divide it down 2-4x to get a much more accurate lower speed clock.
Most low-end equipment I've managed to peek inside of contain poorly implemented clocks.
Care to give some examples of what you thought was a poor design? If you were able to see that with a quick peek I assume you could also describe to us a design in a piece of equipment you thought was poor. I only ask because clocking is one the most basic functions and used in almost every piece of electonic equipment made in recent history. I could understand different designs but could not imagine anything that costs that much more to get a "decent" clock. I'd assume the process would be very straight forward by now. I'm sure the difference in price between high end and low end equipment has much more to do with the economy of scale then simply the type of clock used.
I guess I've only seen the good ones then?;) Is the ability to see the beam have anything to do with the "quality" of the laser itself? I thought the ability to see the beam was a result of reflections from particulates in the air. With nothing to reflect the light out of the path, you should see nothing in route. Or, different wavelengths of light may reflect off of particles typically found in the air but is the color of the beam define what makes a laser "better"?
The connection between the legible and non legible signatures is directly related to the amount of times you have to sign something. There are exceptions but for the most part, that seems to be the trend. Doctors being the extreme example and entertainers and sports figures being the general exception as they want their name to remain legible to retain some actual value. When I was in the in the US Navy doing nuclear work, we had to sign and initial multiple documents in multiple places all the time. My signature quickly evolved into something unique that no longer represented the individual letters in my name. I still use that format to this day.
I noticed that as well. The other issue is this statement:
one man had been arrested after investigators found the warehouse illegally re-labeling as many as one million chips as AMD Athlon XP microprocessors.
So they found one million of them in the warehouse or they have reason to believe that 1 million have passed through there or what? I have no idea how many cpus AMD sells but they do sell them directly to businesses in large quantities but this place would seem very suspicious to have bought 1 million of the things. No one thought that was a little odd? Again, maybe I am way off and the practice of selling 1 million chips to a no name company that does not even appear to actually sell PC's seems a little odd. Maybe that quantity is normal.
You are probably very right. I do only have a 36in crt but the screen itself is next in line to be replaced with something larger. I get more out of the audio portions of action movies when I can crank them up in Dolby Digital 5.1. I have 5 speakers, all full size (2 front + 2 rear + center) and a seperate Yamaha amplifier driving 2 12in subwoofers.
I have not been to a movie theater since 1992 when I got my first Dolby Pro Logic Surround setup at the house. I did not miss anything since then and I think I would like the theater even less now with all the cell phone activity and ads that everyone claims the movies have now. I am not into the Hollywood or entertainment scenes at all so I have no problem buying DVD's when they are released. In fact I do not even "wait" for a DVD to be released, I just happen to see them in the store endcaps and if it a movie I heard something good about, I buy it. My teenage kids go to the movies about once a month but I think it is more for the social experience and not really for the movie content.
This is done so they can hire unskilled labor, give them instructions with lots of pretty pictures and the product will always be the same
Not really. Unskilled jobs (which may or may not be filled with unskilled people) make it easy for a person to pickup the requirements by following pictures or a simple guide. These types of jobs are everywhere like every fast food chain and Quicky Mart. The fact that all McDonalds train the same way is a moot point as I doubt they have a high rate of people transfering from one McDonalds to another. The real reason they are consistant across the world is to build customer confidence and providee a consistant menu and experience to the consumer. You know what they have, what it is going to taste like and when they stop serving breakfast so you feel comfortable going there and will come back.
it's still not fast enough to save a couple of thirty-megabyte Word docs in any reasonable time. Even 100 mbit/sec (the Holy Grail of the modern American broadband user) is marginal in the context of Windows applications and data.
Existing applications are based on having a local area network. Have you ever try using MS Outlook 2000 and prior to a corporate Exchange server over dialup? It sucks in a major way, no dialog boxes to indicate download progress, large attachments appear to freeze because you have no idea that it is transfering the 10MB attachment in the background, some loser uses a nice colorful HTML background in their email and it is 675KB in size just to say "call me later", any glitch in the network causes the connection to be lost and recovery may not happen automatically etc. Point being, it is designed for a local network. MS Word and other apps COULD have the ability to save just the difference in the file (like rsync and others) and it could also save to a local buffer and transfer the file in the background while you return to your work. You could also run a remote copy like Citrix where the file does not have to travel between your PC and the remote storage location, just the screen data. I am not trying to give specifics for every situation, only point out that the bottlenecks you've mentioned could be worked around if remote computing were really the goal.
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Not everyone has a natural desire/motivation/reason to learn. People in poor areas have the same mental capacity as any other group of people in the world. A simple spark may be all it takes to get a majority of people the desire to excel. That spark may not come from the internet and computers but that is what the attempt is for. When I was about 6 years old, I got a nice colorful 100-150 piece puzzle of the United States. Each state had the capital labeled and some generic overview of each state (Iowa showed corn, Ohio showed tires, Pennsylvania showed coal and steel etc..). I enjoyed and learned my states from it. In later years of school, geography was my best subject, not from what I learned from the puzzle, but the previous interest I had in the states from the puzzle. This also carried over to US history and so on. The puzzle was not the source of the information but something that sparked my interest. Of course I do nothing with geography now but...
I would assume that if a customer feels the need to record a support call, they are probably trying to cover their own buts. Why would you feel you had to disconnect and what made you feel uncomfortable with being recorded? If you were doing a good job and following the requirements of your compnay, there will be no problems at all. If you want to return cuss words and act like the potential idiot on the other line then you may have issues. Are you afaid you would guide someone in the wrong direction or feel your support would be the suck? I've done support for companies at all different levels, sometimes with a group of many, and others by myself. Someone recording a call would not bother me at all as I am accountable for what I say either way and I am the same person either way and I am confident in what I tell them. If I do not know, I tell them, if I am unsure of something, I tell them, if I need time to research and call them back, I do. If it is something i can not handle, I find someone that can or call them back.
Unless you are making stuff up on the phone and providing people with bogus information, you should have no worries at all. If your company is giving YOU obviously wrong information and you pass it along, you are not the problem, the compnay is and any recordings provided would just prove you were following the company policy. If a If I was dealing with a company that had a "get rid of them" if they record policy, I would be looking elsewhere for service or expect crappy service if I did really need help.
I agree with you to a point but ram is not exactly a fast moving technology either. Compare CPU prices and technology to the same with RAM. It would appear that if you took everything into account including R&D and amount sold, that a stick of 512MB ram should cost MANY times less then any CPU, even a recently produced low end Celeron or Duron. You can buy a decent (not top of the line) much newer and technically advanced video card that has magnatudes less in total sales for about the same price as 1GB of ram. Considering those video card companies also had to have R&D and a large software side support stucture that memory companies do not require at all. That just does not seem right.
A rivet gun with aluminum pop rivets would work great. Replacing screws with rivets would be enough a deterent to prevent others from secretly probing inside. A rivet gun and a variety pack of rivets costs about $6. The aluminum being much softer then steel would not damage the threads and screws could be put back in place when you need to get into it yourself.
I bought two of them in Dec 2003 for $199 each. The only issue was a flaky built in network card on one of them (they both have a MSI MS-6378 motherboard). Instead of trying to figure out if it was driver related, I put in an old Intel 100 that I am more familiar with. Other that that, no issues at all and they are running more then they are not. In fact, they never shut them off so I solved that issue by running shutdown from cron on weekday nights at 23:00.
At my previous job, we used regular old HP Vectra's outside running 24/7 year round in extreme conditions and other then the floppy drive (which we started removing because they did not need them anyway), they did not break anymore then the PC's indoors. I am talking about an airline and the specific PC's were at the curbside checkin, outside baggage areas, and remote maintenance areas. Cold, dry, hot, humid, rain, snow, sun, wind, dust, dirt and people using them that did not care... Obviously getting rained on directly is not a good idea but I'd assume you'd have much bigger problems if that happens.
Okay, whoever else is viewing http://216.76.95.195:8090/remote6/, stop panning to the window, I want to zoom in on the desk. It should be my turn to control the camera now.
Here is a thread from rec.toys.lego from 1994 with the same arguement. If you plan to reply, I would send it to the thread and email the authors as I doubt anyone is still monitoring that thread for replies.
You need some crack? You can get it from a guy with a red hat standing on the corner of 15th and K.
Can I now be charged with distributing also? What amount do you charge me with selling? How ever much he has with him or how ever much he sold since I told you where he was? What if I use different wording to describe the exact same thing.
CAUTION, I saw the idiot with a red hat at the corner of 15th and K selling crack, he must be stopped, please avoid him at all costs and call the cops!!! Can I be charged for that also? I still told you where you could get it.
The law is not as cut and dry as you think it is.
Do people who steal credit card receipts and signatures only take them from customers that bought something large? Large, small, expensive, or cheap, I have no idea what point you are trying to make here.
Insightful I guess but you miss the entire point. The RIAA is not forcing Apple to only allow online music purchased from the iTunes store to work with the iPod, which Apple is actively trying to maintain. I am just pointing that out as many people posting seem to be ignoring the true point of what the lawsuit is really about. EVERY consumer with an iPod would benefit from multiple online store compatibility regardless of how much you like or want to defend Apple, only Apple benefits from forcing you to buy from iTunes. The agruement is not about "it just works" or the fact that you may like the interface, functionality, integration, price and whatever with the iTunes store, it is about having a choice. These facts can not be disputed. Apple would not HAVE to bear any extra costs by allowing other store fronts to sell supported songs that work on the iPod as others have claimed in past stories about this topic.
My opinion.. If you don't like Apples (or any company) policies, don't buy the product.
Or someone uses a really small font and they get hidden behind your Trinitrons apature grill support lines.
Of course Sonys patent has expired and other companies have starting using thier apature grill design also.
I bought a 19in LCD monitor recently. The price was almost the same as the 19in CRT's. $299USD. The response time is average for an LCD (15/10) and it has DVI input. I did consider both carefully and with such little difference in price, the LCD won.
At work we have a 50in plasma and several projectors that we setup for users in conference rooms for presentations. They normally request the plasma screen once as they must think it is great. They go right back to the LCD projectors the next time because overall the screen looks much better, has higher resolution, and it can be projected much larger for less then 1/2 the price.
I fully agree with you on accuracy but the second method does not justify for much of a cost increase. I guess in mass production of cheap audio equipment, every penny counts and I have no doubt the cheaper router is almost always taken.
I can not speak for a seperate power supply but a 555 timer chip costs about 50 cents. I am digging deep here as I've been out of the electonics field for a while but I remember a lot of communications and test equipment using frequency dividers to improve accuracy, ie produce a 400MHZ clock, square it off and divide it down 2-4x to get a much more accurate lower speed clock.
Most low-end equipment I've managed to peek inside of contain poorly implemented clocks.
Care to give some examples of what you thought was a poor design? If you were able to see that with a quick peek I assume you could also describe to us a design in a piece of equipment you thought was poor. I only ask because clocking is one the most basic functions and used in almost every piece of electonic equipment made in recent history. I could understand different designs but could not imagine anything that costs that much more to get a "decent" clock. I'd assume the process would be very straight forward by now. I'm sure the difference in price between high end and low end equipment has much more to do with the economy of scale then simply the type of clock used.
I guess I've only seen the good ones then? ;)
Is the ability to see the beam have anything to do with the "quality" of the laser itself?
I thought the ability to see the beam was a result of reflections from particulates in the air. With nothing to reflect the light out of the path, you should see nothing in route. Or, different wavelengths of light may reflect off of particles typically found in the air but is the color of the beam define what makes a laser "better"?
I've never understood why most multiple-offense terms are severd concurrently
Does it have anything to do with when they are eligible for parole?
The connection between the legible and non legible signatures is directly related to the amount of times you have to sign something. There are exceptions but for the most part, that seems to be the trend. Doctors being the extreme example and entertainers and sports figures being the general exception as they want their name to remain legible to retain some actual value. When I was in the in the US Navy doing nuclear work, we had to sign and initial multiple documents in multiple places all the time. My signature quickly evolved into something unique that no longer represented the individual letters in my name. I still use that format to this day.
I noticed that as well. The other issue is this statement:
one man had been arrested after investigators found the warehouse illegally re-labeling as many as one million chips as AMD Athlon XP microprocessors.
So they found one million of them in the warehouse or they have reason to believe that 1 million have passed through there or what? I have no idea how many cpus AMD sells but they do sell them directly to businesses in large quantities but this place would seem very suspicious to have bought 1 million of the things. No one thought that was a little odd? Again, maybe I am way off and the practice of selling 1 million chips to a no name company that does not even appear to actually sell PC's seems a little odd. Maybe that quantity is normal.
Panaphonics? What a scam. That must be cheap knockoff of the Pansunic brand that I see the guys selling in the streets.
You are probably very right. I do only have a 36in crt but the screen itself is next in line to be replaced with something larger. I get more out of the audio portions of action movies when I can crank them up in Dolby Digital 5.1. I have 5 speakers, all full size (2 front + 2 rear + center) and a seperate Yamaha amplifier driving 2 12in subwoofers.
I have not been to a movie theater since 1992 when I got my first Dolby Pro Logic Surround setup at the house. I did not miss anything since then and I think I would like the theater even less now with all the cell phone activity and ads that everyone claims the movies have now. I am not into the Hollywood or entertainment scenes at all so I have no problem buying DVD's when they are released. In fact I do not even "wait" for a DVD to be released, I just happen to see them in the store endcaps and if it a movie I heard something good about, I buy it. My teenage kids go to the movies about once a month but I think it is more for the social experience and not really for the movie content.
This is done so they can hire unskilled labor, give them instructions with lots of pretty pictures and the product will always be the same
Not really. Unskilled jobs (which may or may not be filled with unskilled people) make it easy for a person to pickup the requirements by following pictures or a simple guide. These types of jobs are everywhere like every fast food chain and Quicky Mart. The fact that all McDonalds train the same way is a moot point as I doubt they have a high rate of people transfering from one McDonalds to another. The real reason they are consistant across the world is to build customer confidence and providee a consistant menu and experience to the consumer. You know what they have, what it is going to taste like and when they stop serving breakfast so you feel comfortable going there and will come back.
it's still not fast enough to save a couple of thirty-megabyte Word docs in any reasonable time. Even 100 mbit/sec (the Holy Grail of the modern American broadband user) is marginal in the context of Windows applications and data.
Existing applications are based on having a local area network. Have you ever try using MS Outlook 2000 and prior to a corporate Exchange server over dialup? It sucks in a major way, no dialog boxes to indicate download progress, large attachments appear to freeze because you have no idea that it is transfering the 10MB attachment in the background, some loser uses a nice colorful HTML background in their email and it is 675KB in size just to say "call me later", any glitch in the network causes the connection to be lost and recovery may not happen automatically etc. Point being, it is designed for a local network. MS Word and other apps COULD have the ability to save just the difference in the file (like rsync and others) and it could also save to a local buffer and transfer the file in the background while you return to your work. You could also run a remote copy like Citrix where the file does not have to travel between your PC and the remote storage location, just the screen data. I am not trying to give specifics for every situation, only point out that the bottlenecks you've mentioned could be worked around if remote computing were really the goal.
You can not fire model rockets within a certain range of an airport, the package and included instructions say so!
BTW, what exactly does a few pieces of tin foil do that would be so drastic? I think a flock of birds would be far worse.