It never ceases to amaze me at the things the/. collective can come up with.
Here's a guy who is risking his life doing something no one has ever done before, being busted on because he isn't sending 10,000 children in Africa to school, or because he gets all sort of publicity hyped up about his attemps.
And yet, people on here will praise the next dork who comes along and cuts a hole in his computer's case. Oooo, maybe he's got a neon light in it. Thats really innovative, nothing like the boring, redundant attempt to fly an unpowered machine higher than virtually any human alive will ever go.
Maybe I should repent because I burned through $300 worth of brake pads and $200 worth of gas a couple weeks ago driving my car around on a race track. Thats, God, twelve or thirteen children I could've sent to school. Shame on me.
I used a slightly modified PovRay to do a yearbook
on
POV-Ray 3.5 Rendered
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· Score: 2
Back in high school, I designed and rendered full-color 3-D covers for our senior yearbook -- front and back rendered at 8.5"x11" at (if I recall correctly) 75dpi. The yearbook committee payed a lot of money to get color laser prints of the front and back covers which were then sent to the publisher. The results were great (award-winning, actually), but I remember each of them took almost two weeks to render on a 486/50DX (not DX2).
I'm sure it would be mere minutes on this 2.52ghz screamer I have here at work, now. Those were the days though -- models built using a ripped-off copy of 3-D Studio, exported as CSV files (if I recall correctly), manipulated using a bunch of Modula-2 utilities I wrote and rendered using surface textures that had to be created via trial and error.
The world's changed a lot since then. I'm glad to see POVRay is still around!
1) Most manufacturers in fact do NOT provide any information about their ECM codings or diagnostic trouble codes. The ONLY published codes are typically the OBD codes, which everyone knows anyway. While we're all proud of you for having three systems to do that at home, clearly you've never used them for actually diagnosing real non-emissions related problems with your car, or you own an older-model (early OBD2) American car.
2) Also blatently incorrect. Companies absolutely hold this information close. In the example I used, Audi's tech manuals cost well over an order of magnitude more than the "consumer" level manuals cost. They are virtually impossible to purchase, anyway, if you're not certified by them. Not coincidentally, virtually all certified mechanics work for dealerships. The manuals that we end users have access to have the very bare minimum of information to perform very basic maintennance on the car. For example, say I want to flush my brake fluid. The procedure that the consumer manuals lists is very different from what the tech manuals list -- they don't even mention that you need to cycle the ABS controller using a VAG tool.
a) Yeah, thats a pretty common excuse stated by people who want to spout off and make people think they know what they're talking about b) In most cases, this is also blatently wrong. The basic principles of how cars work have not changed much. No one needs to know how the internal code that runs the engine works, but knowing what all the errors it can tell you mean is pretty damn important. Knowing that changing your brake fluid the "old" way isn't doing the job completely is important to know too. This isn't stuff that "backyard" mechanics don't understand, this is stuff they are being deliberately not told. There's a big difference.
You know, you're right, there's a big problem with people who believe what they read. On here, though, there's a bigger problem with people who know a lot less than they think they know. Not that I'm pointing any fingers directly at you.
I've never found a damn thing of use in the S4 Bentley manual. It has minimal documentation of ECM codings, and no way to search by DTC. The one or two things I've had to look up how to do in there have been wrong, as well. Maybe VW ones are better...
Its funny, because its sort of related to the Ask Slashdot question about car performance tuning software a week ago. All these computerized systems have left cars incredibly complex to tune, repair, or modify.
Thankfully for some vehicle types, the enthusiast market has reverse engineered a lot of these protocols and codes. I've driven two different Audi's for the last three years, and spent an ungodly large amount of time and money tweaking and otherwise customizing them. Our enthusiast community has software like VAG-COM which can provide a suprisingly large amount of capability for Volkswagen, Audi's and other VAG-group cars. But now Audi (and presumably Volkswagen) is changing their protocols yet again, keeping things proprietary and secret. Thankfully, I'm sure they'll be reverse engineered yet again.
Even with the capabilities the software has, we're still faced with having very good documentation for what most "sensor" blocks are, but essentially none for what the "settings" blocks are. I can read anything I want, but without insider VAG knowledge, I can't recode a damn thing.
Amazingly through trial and error, people have even figured out how to reprogram basic functionality on their cars, like how the automatic transmissions shift.
I would love to see this law passed, but it doesn't help things much if its just emissions codes that have to be released.
I spend enough of my life hitting refresh on Audiworld without running into that stuff here too! Slashdot is where I go when I have to stop thinking about the tradeoff between a house and K04's.
Anyway, I did have a reason for replying. VAG-COM doesn't do OBD-II, it just identifies if the functions exist on the car. You need other OBD-II software, although the interface cable will work with them. You might be able to do something simple like clear codes, but I'm not sure you can even do that.
Also, GIAC (via the engineers at AWE and PES), as well as companies like APR do a lot of extensive engineering well beyond simple remapping. Garret Lim is in a slightly different position of not actually doing any engineering himself -- he's purely a software guy, but he works very closely with the engineers via data logging to tune.
If you really want to generate bug free code, you have to keep one rule in mind at ALL times. A bug occuring in the code is a failure in the methodology you are currently using to avoid them. Sounds very basic, but a lot of companies forget that.
When you have a problem with bugs, you need to figure out where in the process the problem happened. Was the unit spec wrong? Documentation? Implementation? Unit testing procedures? Was it a correctable problem caused by the engineer involved?
If you really want to be bug-free, every time one shows up you have to figure out why it happened, and change things.
Personally, I think the biggest one is to make engineers work 9-5. Not 9-7, or 11-9. Tell them to go home at 5, even if they're in the middle of something. Software engineering is a very complex task that takes a lot of energy and concentration to do right. Just like Doctors who work long hours make mistakes (resulting, often, in people dying), engineers who work too long make mistakes too.
Being in the "zone" is often the death of good code. You get lots of cool code written, but none of it is double-checked, none of it is verified to match spec, and it often ends up afterwards difficult to understand.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't do any of this, and my crap is FULL of bugs, but thats what you need to do if you really want to help it. Writing buggy code is like a public works program for QA people. Who wants a hundred thousand unemployed anal-retentive QA people nitpicking something else like your car's inspection or your tax forms? Better to keep them in the software where they can't do any harm;-)
Because I can only think of one reason to have a laptop in the bathroom, and having it in black and white would be like going back to 320x200-style like you'd get off of BBS's fifteen years ago.
Who cares what the percentage of homes with DVD players is? The fact that you do is why they are making these decisions at a giant nation-wide chain, and you are reading Slashdot...
Think about it -- the *only* figure that matters is what percentage of people who routinely buy movies have DVD players. The number of people with VCRs doesn't matter any more than the number of people who like SpongeBob SquarePants matters in a decision like this one.
Its also a very different issue from one of, say, Blockbuster dropping VHS -- they won't, because I'd guess its a safe bet that the percentage of people who rent videos who don't have DVD players is a lot higher than the percentage of people who buy movies who don't have DVD players.
Very few make much sense, and very few are (hopefully) from people who have done it before. For what its worth, I have.
People talking about system security, shutting off services, firewalls and the like are just plain wrong. I hope, very strongly, that no place I've ever entered my credit card information online was designed by these hacks. Unfortunately, as those of us who had our info stolen from egghead two years ago learned, morons are the rule not the exception when it comes to security.
There is only one way to make this secure -- absolutely no network access to that box whatsoever. Not to the database, and not to anything that can talk to the database. Complete electronic and physical isolation. As someone else said, you need a client/server application that communicates over serial, with a very carefully scrutinized protocol that allows credit cards to enter, and not leave.
Thats the *only* way to be secure. None of the other things people are talking about works. If the data is accessable, no security can totally protect it.
That was over-hyped media BS, and absolutely nothing more. Anyone with any experience in automotive sports, in particular, can tell you what happens when you run a tire outside of its spec. They blow, often catastrophically.
Ford was telling people to run the tires more than 25% below they're recommended inflation pressure because the proper safe pressure made the ride in these soccer-mom driven deathmobiles too harsh. If you look at how most street tires are manufactured, its very obvious that running at too low of a pressure will eventually cause a separation in the steel belts or braid in the tire, leading to weakening. It also puts too much strain on the sidewall, which weakens and eventually blows.
But, you know what? Its not Ford's fault either. There is one reason, and one reason only why these people were injured or killed: driver incompetance. A well-trained driver who is actually save behind the wheel knows how to maintain proper air pressure, knows how to control a car when a tire has blown, and most importantly knows not to jerk the wheel when you have traction on only one side of the vehicle. Otherwise you roll over and die, especially in a top-heavy truck like an SUV.
Hell, a number of published independant tests blew out the sidewalls on Ford SUV's and the cars stopped perfectly straight and in a controlled manner. An inexcusably poorly trained driver doing the exact wrong thing is the only thing that can lead to an accident in cases like that one. *Any* good driver knows that perfectly well. Its embarassing how easy it is for any idiot to get a license in the US, and people die because of it.
They do NOT die because of a non-existant policy to cover up a problem in a product.
In the case you are talking about, there are multiple rates and axis of acceleration happening to your body. The stretching (and squishing, depending on the axis and angle of acceleration) happens because different parts of your body are being accelerated at different rates. For example, you jump off a building. You die when you hit the ground because the bottom most part of you is accellerating (changing momentum, not just going faster, since in this case you are going slower) at a rate different than the top of you. It has nothing to do with gravity, it has to do with uneven rates of acceleration.
Same thing going into a black hole. Your feet are moving downward faster than your head. One of two things will happen in that case, your head moves faster, or you rip in two.
Here's another thing you can do. Climb up on your chair and step off. Guess what, your feet just accellerated faster than your head, just like with the black hole, because they are (very slightly) in a different reference frame than the rest of your body, being closer to the primary source of acceleration in your vacinity -- the Earth. When you hit the ground, you squish a little bit, because your feet are changing speed a LOT faster than your head. Your head has its existing momentum, plus a small amount of acceleration from the Earth, whereas your feet are losing speed much faster thanks to the (incredibly stronger) electroweak force making damn sure the atoms in your feet don't go through the floor.
This is really basic physics... any book about general relativity (even one of the really poor pop-science examples) will get these correct.
Because your post isn't interesting or informative, its just plain wrong. Go pick up an elementary physics textbook. There is absolutely no physical difference between a strong gravitational field from a reference frame at rest and a weak one as experienced from an accellerating reference frame. General relativity goes as far as to say its absolutely impossible to differentiate between the two.
So, good attempt at trying to look smart, but it didn't work, kid.
They don't do it to maintain competition, they do it to keep the industry skill sets high. With the massive budget cuts in defense spending at the end of the cold war, mergers and layoffs were destroying the skilled worker base that had been built up. By spreading around contracts (and, in some cases, pushing companies to partner with other companies in the design and construction of larger projects), they ensure that companies with particular skill sets, and their highly skilled machinists, etc all remained in business and employed.
Thats the biggest reason that projects like the Seawolf continue -- to keep companies like Electric Boat in business, and to keep the extremely valuable skills their worker base represents available for future projects.
You can say a lot of things about our government, but you can't say the people doing these things are stupid. Just because the general public isn't up to speed on the reasoning doesn't mean there aren't very good reasons for them doing things the way they do them.
That seems to depend a lot on what you call descent. If it was a track car, yeah, that might be a good starter used car, but a nice used 911 isn't going to be $3800.
I couldn't even get a decent set of wheels for my car for that...
Um. Its trivial to make it work with PAL...
on
TiVo Series 2 Review
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· Score: 4, Informative
A ten second Google search would have told you that.
Its one of the first hacks that were available for the Tivo. In fact, an awful lot of the Tivo hacking is done by folks in Australia (including the guy who wrote Samba), and they all run them PAL.
Well, actually we've all seen stories appear and disappear on here, and its pretty easy to jump into a database and start changing fields. A lot of people saw the spoiler last night out on the west coast before it was on, but two guys at work today flipped out because they had neither seen the spoiler or the episode yesterday, and the problem *could've* been fixed for them today. The story could've been removed, or the headline and description could've been changed to make it clear that there was a serious spoiler and not to click on it if you haven't seen the episode.
Don't mind me though, its a dreary, snowy April Monday, and I have my summer tires on my car, so I'll be taking the T home if the weather doesn't improve. So I'm just bitter.:)
But gaffs like the Lone Gunmen thing today are complately inexcusable. It didn't matter to me -- I saw it live last night, but its rare these days that I watch TV live, and was just a fluke.
I don't think the story was at all necessary, and shouldn't have been posted with spoilers on the homepage no matter what time it was posted.
It sucks to say it, but four years ago, I would've subscribed in a heartbeat, but the ratio of interesting stories to recycled crap has changed so dramatically on here, its basically force of four or five years habit that I check the site a few times a day.
These just won't fly until they can get power levels up. Right now I've got a nice compact powerplant downstairs under my hood that cranks out 272 kilowatts of power.
Until they have hybrid sources or fuel cells that can crank out that kind of power levels, I'm just not interested. Environment, fuel costs, everything else be damned. Thats what I care about. When I push down on the pedal, I want gobs of power available at my command to deliver to the ground.
Tivo spent a good bit of time ensuring that 3.0 works with TivoNet, TurboNet, and AirNet (or whatever the 802.11b thing is called).
Its rudementary support right now -- just allows your daily call to go over the net, instead of dial up. When Tivo "officially" adds support for interactive and multimedia content via a USB adapter to the Gen2 units, they will also support that functionality on the Gen1 units that have been hacked.
Slashdot Mirror
Like any Slashdot readers go hiking. That means actually going outside and being with Nature!
It never ceases to amaze me at the things the /. collective can come up with.
Here's a guy who is risking his life doing something no one has ever done before, being busted on because he isn't sending 10,000 children in Africa to school, or because he gets all sort of publicity hyped up about his attemps.
And yet, people on here will praise the next dork who comes along and cuts a hole in his computer's case. Oooo, maybe he's got a neon light in it. Thats really innovative, nothing like the boring, redundant attempt to fly an unpowered machine higher than virtually any human alive will ever go.
Maybe I should repent because I burned through $300 worth of brake pads and $200 worth of gas a couple weeks ago driving my car around on a race track. Thats, God, twelve or thirteen children I could've sent to school. Shame on me.
Back in high school, I designed and rendered full-color 3-D covers for our senior yearbook -- front and back rendered at 8.5"x11" at (if I recall correctly) 75dpi. The yearbook committee payed a lot of money to get color laser prints of the front and back covers which were then sent to the publisher. The results were great (award-winning, actually), but I remember each of them took almost two weeks to render on a 486/50DX (not DX2).
I'm sure it would be mere minutes on this 2.52ghz screamer I have here at work, now. Those were the days though -- models built using a ripped-off copy of 3-D Studio, exported as CSV files (if I recall correctly), manipulated using a bunch of Modula-2 utilities I wrote and rendered using surface textures that had to be created via trial and error.
The world's changed a lot since then. I'm glad to see POVRay is still around!
My girlfriends does.
Oh, wait...
1) Most manufacturers in fact do NOT provide any information about their ECM codings or diagnostic trouble codes. The ONLY published codes are typically the OBD codes, which everyone knows anyway. While we're all proud of you for having three systems to do that at home, clearly you've never used them for actually diagnosing real non-emissions related problems with your car, or you own an older-model (early OBD2) American car.
2) Also blatently incorrect. Companies absolutely hold this information close. In the example I used, Audi's tech manuals cost well over an order of magnitude more than the "consumer" level manuals cost. They are virtually impossible to purchase, anyway, if you're not certified by them. Not coincidentally, virtually all certified mechanics work for dealerships. The manuals that we end users have access to have the very bare minimum of information to perform very basic maintennance on the car. For example, say I want to flush my brake fluid. The procedure that the consumer manuals lists is very different from what the tech manuals list -- they don't even mention that you need to cycle the ABS controller using a VAG tool.
a) Yeah, thats a pretty common excuse stated by people who want to spout off and make people think they know what they're talking about
b) In most cases, this is also blatently wrong. The basic principles of how cars work have not changed much. No one needs to know how the internal code that runs the engine works, but knowing what all the errors it can tell you mean is pretty damn important. Knowing that changing your brake fluid the "old" way isn't doing the job completely is important to know too. This isn't stuff that "backyard" mechanics don't understand, this is stuff they are being deliberately not told. There's a big difference.
You know, you're right, there's a big problem with people who believe what they read. On here, though, there's a bigger problem with people who know a lot less than they think they know. Not that I'm pointing any fingers directly at you.
I've never found a damn thing of use in the S4 Bentley manual. It has minimal documentation of ECM codings, and no way to search by DTC. The one or two things I've had to look up how to do in there have been wrong, as well. Maybe VW ones are better...
Its funny, because its sort of related to the Ask Slashdot question about car performance tuning software a week ago. All these computerized systems have left cars incredibly complex to tune, repair, or modify.
Thankfully for some vehicle types, the enthusiast market has reverse engineered a lot of these protocols and codes. I've driven two different Audi's for the last three years, and spent an ungodly large amount of time and money tweaking and otherwise customizing them. Our enthusiast community has software like VAG-COM which can provide a suprisingly large amount of capability for Volkswagen, Audi's and other VAG-group cars. But now Audi (and presumably Volkswagen) is changing their protocols yet again, keeping things proprietary and secret. Thankfully, I'm sure they'll be reverse engineered yet again.
Even with the capabilities the software has, we're still faced with having very good documentation for what most "sensor" blocks are, but essentially none for what the "settings" blocks are. I can read anything I want, but without insider VAG knowledge, I can't recode a damn thing.
Amazingly through trial and error, people have even figured out how to reprogram basic functionality on their cars, like how the automatic transmissions shift.
I would love to see this law passed, but it doesn't help things much if its just emissions codes that have to be released.
I spend enough of my life hitting refresh on Audiworld without running into that stuff here too! Slashdot is where I go when I have to stop thinking about the tradeoff between a house and K04's.
Anyway, I did have a reason for replying. VAG-COM doesn't do OBD-II, it just identifies if the functions exist on the car. You need other OBD-II software, although the interface cable will work with them. You might be able to do something simple like clear codes, but I'm not sure you can even do that.
Also, GIAC (via the engineers at AWE and PES), as well as companies like APR do a lot of extensive engineering well beyond simple remapping. Garret Lim is in a slightly different position of not actually doing any engineering himself -- he's purely a software guy, but he works very closely with the engineers via data logging to tune.
Oh well, time to go hit refresh on Audiworld.
If you really want to generate bug free code, you have to keep one rule in mind at ALL times. A bug occuring in the code is a failure in the methodology you are currently using to avoid them. Sounds very basic, but a lot of companies forget that.
;-)
When you have a problem with bugs, you need to figure out where in the process the problem happened. Was the unit spec wrong? Documentation? Implementation? Unit testing procedures? Was it a correctable problem caused by the engineer involved?
If you really want to be bug-free, every time one shows up you have to figure out why it happened, and change things.
Personally, I think the biggest one is to make engineers work 9-5. Not 9-7, or 11-9. Tell them to go home at 5, even if they're in the middle of something. Software engineering is a very complex task that takes a lot of energy and concentration to do right. Just like Doctors who work long hours make mistakes (resulting, often, in people dying), engineers who work too long make mistakes too.
Being in the "zone" is often the death of good code. You get lots of cool code written, but none of it is double-checked, none of it is verified to match spec, and it often ends up afterwards difficult to understand.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't do any of this, and my crap is FULL of bugs, but thats what you need to do if you really want to help it. Writing buggy code is like a public works program for QA people. Who wants a hundred thousand unemployed anal-retentive QA people nitpicking something else like your car's inspection or your tax forms? Better to keep them in the software where they can't do any harm
Because I can only think of one reason to have a laptop in the bathroom, and having it in black and white would be like going back to 320x200-style like you'd get off of BBS's fifteen years ago.
That was a reply to a different post...
Who cares what the percentage of homes with DVD players is? The fact that you do is why they are making these decisions at a giant nation-wide chain, and you are reading Slashdot...
Think about it -- the *only* figure that matters is what percentage of people who routinely buy movies have DVD players. The number of people with VCRs doesn't matter any more than the number of people who like SpongeBob SquarePants matters in a decision like this one.
Its also a very different issue from one of, say, Blockbuster dropping VHS -- they won't, because I'd guess its a safe bet that the percentage of people who rent videos who don't have DVD players is a lot higher than the percentage of people who buy movies who don't have DVD players.
Very few make much sense, and very few are (hopefully) from people who have done it before. For what its worth, I have.
People talking about system security, shutting off services, firewalls and the like are just plain wrong. I hope, very strongly, that no place I've ever entered my credit card information online was designed by these hacks. Unfortunately, as those of us who had our info stolen from egghead two years ago learned, morons are the rule not the exception when it comes to security.
There is only one way to make this secure -- absolutely no network access to that box whatsoever. Not to the database, and not to anything that can talk to the database. Complete electronic and physical isolation. As someone else said, you need a client/server application that communicates over serial, with a very carefully scrutinized protocol that allows credit cards to enter, and not leave.
Thats the *only* way to be secure. None of the other things people are talking about works. If the data is accessable, no security can totally protect it.
That was over-hyped media BS, and absolutely nothing more. Anyone with any experience in automotive sports, in particular, can tell you what happens when you run a tire outside of its spec. They blow, often catastrophically.
Ford was telling people to run the tires more than 25% below they're recommended inflation pressure because the proper safe pressure made the ride in these soccer-mom driven deathmobiles too harsh. If you look at how most street tires are manufactured, its very obvious that running at too low of a pressure will eventually cause a separation in the steel belts or braid in the tire, leading to weakening. It also puts too much strain on the sidewall, which weakens and eventually blows.
But, you know what? Its not Ford's fault either. There is one reason, and one reason only why these people were injured or killed: driver incompetance. A well-trained driver who is actually save behind the wheel knows how to maintain proper air pressure, knows how to control a car when a tire has blown, and most importantly knows not to jerk the wheel when you have traction on only one side of the vehicle. Otherwise you roll over and die, especially in a top-heavy truck like an SUV.
Hell, a number of published independant tests blew out the sidewalls on Ford SUV's and the cars stopped perfectly straight and in a controlled manner. An inexcusably poorly trained driver doing the exact wrong thing is the only thing that can lead to an accident in cases like that one. *Any* good driver knows that perfectly well. Its embarassing how easy it is for any idiot to get a license in the US, and people die because of it.
They do NOT die because of a non-existant policy to cover up a problem in a product.
General relativity is very specific about this.
In the case you are talking about, there are multiple rates and axis of acceleration happening to your body. The stretching (and squishing, depending on the axis and angle of acceleration) happens because different parts of your body are being accelerated at different rates. For example, you jump off a building. You die when you hit the ground because the bottom most part of you is accellerating (changing momentum, not just going faster, since in this case you are going slower) at a rate different than the top of you. It has nothing to do with gravity, it has to do with uneven rates of acceleration.
Same thing going into a black hole. Your feet are moving downward faster than your head. One of two things will happen in that case, your head moves faster, or you rip in two.
Here's another thing you can do. Climb up on your chair and step off. Guess what, your feet just accellerated faster than your head, just like with the black hole, because they are (very slightly) in a different reference frame than the rest of your body, being closer to the primary source of acceleration in your vacinity -- the Earth. When you hit the ground, you squish a little bit, because your feet are changing speed a LOT faster than your head. Your head has its existing momentum, plus a small amount of acceleration from the Earth, whereas your feet are losing speed much faster thanks to the (incredibly stronger) electroweak force making damn sure the atoms in your feet don't go through the floor.
This is really basic physics... any book about general relativity (even one of the really poor pop-science examples) will get these correct.
Because your post isn't interesting or informative, its just plain wrong. Go pick up an elementary physics textbook. There is absolutely no physical difference between a strong gravitational field from a reference frame at rest and a weak one as experienced from an accellerating reference frame. General relativity goes as far as to say its absolutely impossible to differentiate between the two.
So, good attempt at trying to look smart, but it didn't work, kid.
NASA doesn't reckon those numbers at all. The shuttle costs a billion and a half to launch. The space station is well over $100bn.
How do you figure (and what sources have you seen) that makes you think those numbers are correct within even an order of magnitude?
They don't do it to maintain competition, they do it to keep the industry skill sets high. With the massive budget cuts in defense spending at the end of the cold war, mergers and layoffs were destroying the skilled worker base that had been built up. By spreading around contracts (and, in some cases, pushing companies to partner with other companies in the design and construction of larger projects), they ensure that companies with particular skill sets, and their highly skilled machinists, etc all remained in business and employed.
Thats the biggest reason that projects like the Seawolf continue -- to keep companies like Electric Boat in business, and to keep the extremely valuable skills their worker base represents available for future projects.
You can say a lot of things about our government, but you can't say the people doing these things are stupid. Just because the general public isn't up to speed on the reasoning doesn't mean there aren't very good reasons for them doing things the way they do them.
That seems to depend a lot on what you call descent. If it was a track car, yeah, that might be a good starter used car, but a nice used 911 isn't going to be $3800.
I couldn't even get a decent set of wheels for my car for that...
A ten second Google search would have told you that.
Its one of the first hacks that were available for the Tivo. In fact, an awful lot of the Tivo hacking is done by folks in Australia (including the guy who wrote Samba), and they all run them PAL.
Tip: try searching "tivo PAL hack" on Google.
Well, actually we've all seen stories appear and disappear on here, and its pretty easy to jump into a database and start changing fields. A lot of people saw the spoiler last night out on the west coast before it was on, but two guys at work today flipped out because they had neither seen the spoiler or the episode yesterday, and the problem *could've* been fixed for them today. The story could've been removed, or the headline and description could've been changed to make it clear that there was a serious spoiler and not to click on it if you haven't seen the episode.
:)
Don't mind me though, its a dreary, snowy April Monday, and I have my summer tires on my car, so I'll be taking the T home if the weather doesn't improve. So I'm just bitter.
But gaffs like the Lone Gunmen thing today are complately inexcusable. It didn't matter to me -- I saw it live last night, but its rare these days that I watch TV live, and was just a fluke.
;-)
I don't think the story was at all necessary, and shouldn't have been posted with spoilers on the homepage no matter what time it was posted.
It sucks to say it, but four years ago, I would've subscribed in a heartbeat, but the ratio of interesting stories to recycled crap has changed so dramatically on here, its basically force of four or five years habit that I check the site a few times a day.
It'd probably be easier to quit smoking!
These just won't fly until they can get power levels up. Right now I've got a nice compact powerplant downstairs under my hood that cranks out 272 kilowatts of power.
Until they have hybrid sources or fuel cells that can crank out that kind of power levels, I'm just not interested. Environment, fuel costs, everything else be damned. Thats what I care about. When I push down on the pedal, I want gobs of power available at my command to deliver to the ground.
Tivo spent a good bit of time ensuring that 3.0 works with TivoNet, TurboNet, and AirNet (or whatever the 802.11b thing is called).
Its rudementary support right now -- just allows your daily call to go over the net, instead of dial up. When Tivo "officially" adds support for interactive and multimedia content via a USB adapter to the Gen2 units, they will also support that functionality on the Gen1 units that have been hacked.
For what its worth, the whole northeast follows the exact same laws.