The Summary is misleading but the problem didn't end in 2005. Replacement parts were just as faulty as the original parts and continued to be shipped to customers at least 4 years after they started selling new PCs with those parts and a least a year or two after warranties expired. Worse for people that didn't have warranty coverage and paid hundreds of dollars for a replacement motherboard. It's bad enough when you get your replacement part for "free" and it works worse than what you had before, it's even worse when you pay hundreds of dollars for a replacement part that doesn't work properly.
Another problem is that a board with a failed capacitor may well appear to be fine most of the time and the failure isn't always especially obvious. It's perfectly possible that a faulty board will "pass" and wind up being supplied as a replacement. This might be the explanation for replacements which turned out worst than whatever they replaced.
GM released certain models where the stepper motors for the odometers where bunk. they quickly came in for repair and were fixed no questions asked... the only problem was that they were fixed with the same defective part because GM couldn't get good motors built fast enough. the thought was to fix them make the customer happy and then fix them again with good parts when they broke again.
Hope they didn't do anything really daft like give both the good and bad parts the same part number:)
Number of advisories is not the problem. It's how quickly the issues were fixed.
It's also important how exploitable the issue is in the real world and what the likely consequences are of an exploit actually are.
I'd worry about how long a known exploit remains open for before I'd worry about how many exploits they've had in the past. In this regard both MS and Apple have very bad records.
Also with proprietary software you only have one source of a possible fix. Which may take a long time or wind up bundled with "enhancements" for marketing/political reasons.
Well, I've been an advocate of replacing coal power with nuclear power for quite some time, but even I'll admit that NG generally results in less than half the CO2 emissions for the energy production, and relative to a reactor is far cheaper to build.
It would be possible to build a power plant which was multi fuel or even convert an existing one to a different fuel. Steam turbines don't care what the source of heat to produce the steam is.
But if the MPAA is correct, the people aren't apathetic, they are simply doing what they believe is right.
Consider also that the MPAA has been caught "pirating" both movies and software. There are only interested in protecting their "intellectual property". Quite possibly some of what they claim as "theirs" actually isn't...
California is totally into green technology lately. I've got a great idea for them. Normal non-powered license plates. Once created they use no energy and produce no emissions.
And are unlikely to cause problems if someone wants to take their car/truck out of California (or even out of the US).
Secondly, there are NO SITUATIONS in which that trade-off is acceptable. NONE. There is no such thing as, "We will abuse the rights of some, just a little bit, but it will work out net positive".
AFAIK there's no historical example of this ever having happened. On top of this you often get "anti-terrorism" laws used against people who are self evidently not terrorists, not used against actual terrorists, even turn out to be useless/redundant when it actually comes to dealing with terrorism.
I say we need to invert these things: the drinking age should be 16, the driving age 21. People should learn how to drink from their parents, and that includes how to drink at restaurants and bars, and teenagers should not be driving cars.
Having a driving age higher than the the drinking age also means that you can identify people who have problems drinking responsibly before letting them loose with a highly dangerous machine in public.
Destruction, yes. Retention? No. Obviously governements will say "But phone companies hold the same information". The big difference is that the reason telcos hold that information is not to give so much help to Big Brother but rather be able to send bills and collect money.
The billing is also between telcos as well as between them and customers. Thus a single call may end up contributing to several bills. In the same way that lending libraries keep records of who has borrowed what so that they can chase overdue borrowers in order to either get their property back or get payment. Not so that "Big Brother" can find out what people are reading, watching or listening to.
The author must have missed his history lesson explaining that family names only became popular in Western European culture when governments started tabulating people. In a rural village everyone knows that Jack the butcher is different from Jack the baker.
*Even if the system did a conversion to a latin representation of an asian name most people can't pronounce them because they are based on different sound primitives.
Such a "translation" can easily be one to many, dependent on various factors.
Which is why Asians tend to adopt westernised versions of their real names.
Or they adopt a regular English, German, French, Spanish, etc name to be known by.
This is reasonable, and is already in practice through what is called "distributed generation". It is the generation that is provided by rooftop solar panels, backyard wind turbines, sewage/landfill gas turbines and similar small generators.
IIRC sewage systems are more likely to use spark ignition engines. Since they need both heat and electricity, it being easier to get this using a modified car engine than from the fast moving exhaust of a gas turbine. It's also possible to extract methane from a landfill and put it into the same distribution system as "natural gas".
No, they can't. Aluminum smelters are near hydroelectric dams for a reason: enormous amounts of consistent, inexpensive energy. Wind generators can not provide this.
You can't easily stop or slowdown a smelt in the middle of performing it, we are dealing with enormous amounts of energy and molten metal salts. If there are huge inconsistencies in the power then the process can be very inefficient and possibly even dangerous.
Lost of power means that salts and metal might well change from liquid to solid, which could shut the whole process down.
The better answer is nuclear.
Or geothermal.
There are tons of designs for small-scale nuclear power generators,
e.g. as used to power ships.
they can easily be built close to the site of power consumption, many of the designs are low-maintenence,
Compared to producing the equivalent power with coal or natural gas, the distributed wind option is more difficult and expensive. One major reason is that it's harder to operate because the output of wind generators is not constant, consistent or controllable. That means you also need "back-up" generation powered by traditional fuels on standby and expensive power electronic control devices to correct the power factor on line-commutated turbines.
These "back-up" generating systems are unlikely to be operating at their most efficient. Even when "idle" a steam turbine driven system still consumes fuel to keep the steam hot. (Regardless of if the heat source is combustion or nuclear fission).
There is also the issue of having many more assets out in the field that require annual maintenance and skilled labor.
In order to be useful a wind turbine has to be subject to all weather conditions. To get to do the maintanance is going to require all sorts of vehicles. AFAIK there are no electric full size helicoptors.
At my small office workplace we are down to one remaining Windows 2000 computer, majority XP, no Vista, and one Windows 7. It was a pain to convert our roaming desktops from 2k/XP style to Vista/7 style (samba server).
The "preexec" as well as the "%m" subsitution could be useful in a mixed environment. To be honest I've no idea how people running Windows servers manage without half the things you can do with Samba, ISC DHCP server, etc.
personally really like Windows 7 though it of course comes with the assortment of upgrading pains and things that make you slap your forehead and say "WHY?!" -- example, out of the box Windows 7 runs a maintenance task that deletes broken shortcuts. Unfortunately for whatever reason it believes shortcuts to documents and programs on our network shares are broken, and so they repeatedly disappeared until we figured that out.
IMHO Windows has always tended to run unnecessary services. e.g. What is the point of running "Wireless Zero Config" when no applicable hardware is present?
Why can't I pin a network share/document/application to the start bar?
I wasn't aware you could do this in any version of Windows. Even with "mapped drives"? (Who's smart idea was it to put settings to stop Windows moaning about running executables from network drives under "Internet Settings" too!)
Re:Time to change your OS to OSX or BSD
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
Windows hasn't really changed THAT much,
The whole "User Profile" structure has changed radically between XP and Vista/7. After having been stable for over a decade. Similarly the interface to MS Office was recently radically changed.
certainly not as much as moving to another OS and set of applications would.
Windows dosn't include applications. Unlike, for example, a Linux distribution which comes with a huge number of applications. Some of which are quite general purpose, others of which are very special purpose. But all managed through the same mechanism as the core OS.
do you really imagine a Fortune 500 company can just 'migrate off Win XP' incurring only "training costs"? Every end-user, desktop support tech, and server admin will need exhaustive retraining, plus many, many new applications will need to be evaluated to replace all those handy applications they've used for years...
The software isn't going to magically install itself, in zero time, either. Microsoft also likes to blur the distinction between OS and applications. Most notably MS Office "updating" sections of the OS. I recall a situation where a scanner would fail due to a DLL change made by an MS Office install. Yet replacing the original DLL caused no problems to Office. Whereas with just about any other platform the idea of an application messing up a hardware driver would be laughable.
Dont need "equilivant" Wine recently is far more stable.
It's possible to have wine configured per app. Which can work out better than running certain combinations of apps nativly on Windows.
Re:Time to change your OS to OSX or BSD
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
Windows is entrenched because of the massively unthinkable amounts of in-house, custom software that can't/won't be rewritten for another os.
In this context "another OS" may include a different version of Windows. Worst case senarion is if such software appears to operate under Vista/7 initially only to fail in some strange way weeks/months/years later.
Is why many publishers would be happy to close all libraries if it were politically viable.
Or at very least have a "pay for lend" system similar to audio and video recordings for books. If lending libraries didn't predate copyright they probably couldn't be invented under current copyright laws. That would be all libraries, including "video rentals", which are libraries operated as a business.
The government of the United States was never supposed to be the top heavy behemoth it is today. At the time our nation was formed, the states of our federation were intended to be much more autonomous - for exactly the reasons outlined in the article.
That was with only 13 states too. Indeed the original USA was smaller, both in terms of area and population, than some individual states now.
You are also right that even the police don't know the laws which they enforce. An example of the later involves several instances of police here in TN enforcing non-existent gun laws.
Like there are not enough real laws being broken... There's also something seriously wrong if this kind of thing happens frequently.
But if you're like most people and show up with nothing (this actually happened in many cases I witnessed while waiting to be called), then you can't expect to win against someone who shows up prepared.
If your opponent shows up with nothing (or dosn't show up at all) you don't need to be very prepared to beat them. Which may well mean that lawyers representing corporates in such courts typically show up with the bare minimum to win an uncontested case.
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The Summary is misleading but the problem didn't end in 2005.
Replacement parts were just as faulty as the original parts and continued to be shipped to customers at least 4 years after they started selling new PCs with those parts and a least a year or two after warranties expired. Worse for people that didn't have warranty coverage and paid hundreds of dollars for a replacement motherboard. It's bad enough when you get your replacement part for "free" and it works worse than what you had before, it's even worse when you pay hundreds of dollars for a replacement part that doesn't work properly.
Another problem is that a board with a failed capacitor may well appear to be fine most of the time and the failure isn't always especially obvious. It's perfectly possible that a faulty board will "pass" and wind up being supplied as a replacement. This might be the explanation for replacements which turned out worst than whatever they replaced.
GM released certain models where the stepper motors for the odometers where bunk. they quickly came in for repair and were fixed no questions asked... the only problem was that they were fixed with the same defective part because GM couldn't get good motors built fast enough. the thought was to fix them make the customer happy and then fix them again with good parts when they broke again.
:)
Hope they didn't do anything really daft like give both the good and bad parts the same part number
Number of advisories is not the problem. It's how quickly the issues were fixed.
It's also important how exploitable the issue is in the real world and what the likely consequences are of an exploit actually are.
I'd worry about how long a known exploit remains open for before I'd worry about how many exploits they've had in the past. In this regard both MS and Apple have very bad records.
Also with proprietary software you only have one source of a possible fix. Which may take a long time or wind up bundled with "enhancements" for marketing/political reasons.
Well, I've been an advocate of replacing coal power with nuclear power for quite some time, but even I'll admit that NG generally results in less than half the CO2 emissions for the energy production, and relative to a reactor is far cheaper to build.
It would be possible to build a power plant which was multi fuel or even convert an existing one to a different fuel. Steam turbines don't care what the source of heat to produce the steam is.
Batteries have been a stumbling block for EVs ever since EVs were invented in the late 1800s.
At about the same time that internal combustion engine vehicles were invented...
It has not been for want of investment that batteries haven't managed to store more than a 50th the amount of energy that's in gasoline.
It's also easier and quicker to refill a tank with liquid than it is to recharge a battery.
But if the MPAA is correct, the people aren't apathetic, they are simply doing what they believe is right.
Consider also that the MPAA has been caught "pirating" both movies and software. There are only interested in protecting their "intellectual property". Quite possibly some of what they claim as "theirs" actually isn't...
California is totally into green technology lately. I've got a great idea for them. Normal non-powered license plates. Once created they use no energy and produce no emissions.
And are unlikely to cause problems if someone wants to take their car/truck out of California (or even out of the US).
Secondly, there are NO SITUATIONS in which that trade-off is acceptable. NONE. There is no such thing as, "We will abuse the rights of some, just a little bit, but it will work out net positive".
AFAIK there's no historical example of this ever having happened.
On top of this you often get "anti-terrorism" laws used against people who are self evidently not terrorists, not used against actual terrorists, even turn out to be useless/redundant when it actually comes to dealing with terrorism.
I say we need to invert these things: the drinking age should be 16, the driving age 21. People should learn how to drink from their parents, and that includes how to drink at restaurants and bars, and teenagers should not be driving cars.
Having a driving age higher than the the drinking age also means that you can identify people who have problems drinking responsibly before letting them loose with a highly dangerous machine in public.
Destruction, yes. Retention? No. Obviously governements will say "But phone companies hold the same information". The big difference is that the reason telcos hold that information is not to give so much help to Big Brother but rather be able to send bills and collect money.
The billing is also between telcos as well as between them and customers. Thus a single call may end up contributing to several bills.
In the same way that lending libraries keep records of who has borrowed what so that they can chase overdue borrowers in order to either get their property back or get payment. Not so that "Big Brother" can find out what people are reading, watching or listening to.
Mod parent up, MADD has pretty much achieved their stated goals and have switched focus to prohibition.
Anyone who believes that's a good idea must be MAD...
The author must have missed his history lesson explaining that family names only became popular in Western European culture when governments started tabulating people. In a rural village everyone knows that Jack the butcher is different from Jack the baker.
Hence Butcher, Baker, Smith, Brewer, Tanner, Farmer, etc became "family names".
*Even if the system did a conversion to a latin representation of an asian name most people can't pronounce them because they are based on different sound primitives.
Such a "translation" can easily be one to many, dependent on various factors.
Which is why Asians tend to adopt westernised versions of their real names.
Or they adopt a regular English, German, French, Spanish, etc name to be known by.
They have family names, they are just not consistent across generations. Which is largely not an issue for a computer based system.
But might well be an issue for the humans using the system. Including those who program it in the first place.
This is reasonable, and is already in practice through what is called "distributed generation". It is the generation that is provided by rooftop solar panels, backyard wind turbines, sewage/landfill gas turbines and similar small generators.
IIRC sewage systems are more likely to use spark ignition engines. Since they need both heat and electricity, it being easier to get this using a modified car engine than from the fast moving exhaust of a gas turbine. It's also possible to extract methane from a landfill and put it into the same distribution system as "natural gas".
No, they can't. Aluminum smelters are near hydroelectric dams for a reason: enormous amounts of consistent, inexpensive energy. Wind generators can not provide this.
You can't easily stop or slowdown a smelt in the middle of performing it, we are dealing with enormous amounts of energy and molten metal salts. If there are huge inconsistencies in the power then the process can be very inefficient and possibly even dangerous.
Lost of power means that salts and metal might well change from liquid to solid, which could shut the whole process down.
The better answer is nuclear.
Or geothermal.
There are tons of designs for small-scale nuclear power generators,
e.g. as used to power ships.
they can easily be built close to the site of power consumption, many of the designs are low-maintenence,
Whereas wind power is high maintanance.
Compared to producing the equivalent power with coal or natural gas, the distributed wind option is more difficult and expensive. One major reason is that it's harder to operate because the output of wind generators is not constant, consistent or controllable. That means you also need "back-up" generation powered by traditional fuels on standby and expensive power electronic control devices to correct the power factor on line-commutated turbines.
These "back-up" generating systems are unlikely to be operating at their most efficient. Even when "idle" a steam turbine driven system still consumes fuel to keep the steam hot. (Regardless of if the heat source is combustion or nuclear fission).
There is also the issue of having many more assets out in the field that require annual maintenance and skilled labor.
In order to be useful a wind turbine has to be subject to all weather conditions. To get to do the maintanance is going to require all sorts of vehicles. AFAIK there are no electric full size helicoptors.
At my small office workplace we are down to one remaining Windows 2000 computer, majority XP, no Vista, and one Windows 7. It was a pain to convert our roaming desktops from 2k/XP style to Vista/7 style (samba server).
The "preexec" as well as the "%m" subsitution could be useful in a mixed environment. To be honest I've no idea how people running Windows servers manage without half the things you can do with Samba, ISC DHCP server, etc.
personally really like Windows 7 though it of course comes with the assortment of upgrading pains and things that make you slap your forehead and say "WHY?!" -- example, out of the box Windows 7 runs a maintenance task that deletes broken shortcuts. Unfortunately for whatever reason it believes shortcuts to documents and programs on our network shares are broken, and so they repeatedly disappeared until we figured that out.
IMHO Windows has always tended to run unnecessary services. e.g. What is the point of running "Wireless Zero Config" when no applicable hardware is present?
Why can't I pin a network share/document/application to the start bar?
I wasn't aware you could do this in any version of Windows. Even with "mapped drives"? (Who's smart idea was it to put settings to stop Windows moaning about running executables from network drives under "Internet Settings" too!)
Windows hasn't really changed THAT much,
The whole "User Profile" structure has changed radically between XP and Vista/7. After having been stable for over a decade. Similarly the interface to MS Office was recently radically changed.
certainly not as much as moving to another OS and set of applications would.
Windows dosn't include applications. Unlike, for example, a Linux distribution which comes with a huge number of applications. Some of which are quite general purpose, others of which are very special purpose. But all managed through the same mechanism as the core OS.
do you really imagine a Fortune 500 company can just 'migrate off Win XP' incurring only "training costs"? Every end-user, desktop support tech, and server admin will need exhaustive retraining, plus many, many new applications will need to be evaluated to replace all those handy applications they've used for years...
The software isn't going to magically install itself, in zero time, either.
Microsoft also likes to blur the distinction between OS and applications. Most notably MS Office "updating" sections of the OS. I recall a situation where a scanner would fail due to a DLL change made by an MS Office install. Yet replacing the original DLL caused no problems to Office. Whereas with just about any other platform the idea of an application messing up a hardware driver would be laughable.
Dont need "equilivant" Wine recently is far more stable.
It's possible to have wine configured per app. Which can work out better than running certain combinations of apps nativly on Windows.
Windows is entrenched because of the massively unthinkable amounts of in-house, custom software that can't/won't be rewritten for another os.
In this context "another OS" may include a different version of Windows. Worst case senarion is if such software appears to operate under Vista/7 initially only to fail in some strange way weeks/months/years later.
Is why many publishers would be happy to close all libraries if it were politically viable.
Or at very least have a "pay for lend" system similar to audio and video recordings for books.
If lending libraries didn't predate copyright they probably couldn't be invented under current copyright laws. That would be all libraries, including "video rentals", which are libraries operated as a business.
The government of the United States was never supposed to be the top heavy behemoth it is today. At the time our nation was formed, the states of our federation were intended to be much more autonomous - for exactly the reasons outlined in the article.
That was with only 13 states too. Indeed the original USA was smaller, both in terms of area and population, than some individual states now.
You are also right that even the police don't know the laws which they enforce. An example of the later involves several instances of police here in TN enforcing non-existent gun laws.
Like there are not enough real laws being broken... There's also something seriously wrong if this kind of thing happens frequently.
But if you're like most people and show up with nothing (this actually happened in many cases I witnessed while waiting to be called), then you can't expect to win against someone who shows up prepared.
If your opponent shows up with nothing (or dosn't show up at all) you don't need to be very prepared to beat them. Which may well mean that lawyers representing corporates in such courts typically show up with the bare minimum to win an uncontested case.