Much more likely: systems that are compromised (such as in countries that are run mostly on bribes and personal pressure) where your personal info is recorded and transmitted to criminals, who then sell it to the highest bidder.
One obvious 'customer' would be gangs who wish to safely rob the empty homes of the travelling wealthy.
Another would be kidnapping/ransom scemes, which have at times been a serious risk to travellers overseas.
Alternate "security" plan: walk around looking for wallet-shaped "dead" areas, because after all, anyone who wraps their RFID-equipped passport in tinfoil (to foil reading from a distance by authorities or non-authorities) MUST be up to no good.
My property tax, while nominally 2% of the total property value, *actually* costs me the equivalent of 3.5 EXTRA monthly mortgage payments every year. How would you like to pay your rent 15.5 times every year, instead of just 12 times?? Not only that, but a lot of this tax goes to schools, libraries, and parks -- which renters tend to use more than property owners. Why don't renters have to pay their fair share here? They pay NOTHING, yet they still get to USE the infrastructure that PROPERTY tax pays for. I hereby suggest that all renters should have to pay a "renters tax" equivalent to the property tax charged for the building they occupy. Then maybe people won't be so hot to increase property taxes (bonds are not free money, ya know -- they're funded primarily by property tax increases).
Montana used to have an annual personal property tax. Everyone had to inventory everything they owned, and itemize it, apply a depreciation scale (which varied by the type of item) then pay -- IIRC it was something like 10% of the total value. Needless to say, the only effects were to 1) make everyone lie about their possessions as much as possible (and hope to avoid the random inspections), and 2) avoid buying *anything* new unless they had no choice. Not to mention impacting the poor most of all.
Re:Download Manager
on
Firefox Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I had no luck getting Mozilla (also with an annoying dl manager) and Getright (which I love) to play nice together either. However, I let Getright monitor the clipboard. So when I want to download something in Moz, I rightclick the link and pick "Copy Link Location", and most of the time Getright will pick it up, and I can then download it with Getright without any extra steps.
Worst case, I might have to open GR's status window and paste the URL as a new download.
I have the same problem with both Mozilla and Firefox -- on a P3-550 with 1GB of RAM, running Win98 (with no swapfile, since it never uses over 450mb no matter what all I have running). I gave up on Firefox entirely because it was even slower than Mozilla (plus I just don't like FF, too much has been removed that I actually use)... and you can time just about *everything* Moz does with, well, an hourglass. I've never seen *anything* render or save pages so slowly.
Conversely, NS and IE anyversion are slick and quick.
I've read that the problem is that they use XUL widgets, rather than using native Windows widgets. Not being a programmer, I have no way of confirming this. -- Um, are there any coders out there who'd have an interest in translating Moz to conventional widgetry?
Before the engine got rebuilt, my '78 Ford pickup was very sensitive to fuel quality; I could tell if there was water in the gas, or if the octane wasn't as-advertised (a common problem in SoCal) within a block of leaving the gas station. After the rebuild it lost sensitivity to water, but I can still tell when octane is higher or lower than the sign says.
I could also tell immediately if the gas being sold was actually of the brand on the sign. Used to be some brands were decidedly better than others, regardless of where I was in the western US. But in the mid-80s, this stopped, and after that it was more a matter of the individual station and who their supplier was (or how much they diluted their premium gas -- yes, some did that). And for the past decade, it's all been pretty much the same everywhere.
I have in my possession a computer that was killed by an incompetent tech (who has a fulltime shop, so can't be called an amateur).
The machine kept locking up after only a few minutes. The tech kept screwing with the system, and charged the owner plenty each time (I couldn't convince her that she was being ripped off, either), but the problem continued, and eventually the poor thing got to where it wouldn't boot at all.
In terminal frustration, she packed up the machine and mailed it to me. I cracked the case, and the problem was instantly obvious: the heatsink and CPU fan were one solid clot of cigarette residue, and the fan had been cooked to the point that its blades crumbled at a touch. The CPU had been so hot that the slot was warped (I had to use Vise-Grips to extract the CPU, I shit you not), the motherboard had scorch marks, and the smoke had gotten out of the adjacent onboard video circuitry. The wonder wasn't that it didn't work, but that it hadn't caught fire!!
Despite this abuse, the CPU (P3-500) came back to life, was used to upgrade one of my machines, and has been running 24/7 for over 3 years now, 100% reliably.
But the rest of the system was dumpster material.
All because some idiot either didn't know what he was doing, or was stringing along a sucker, or most likely, both.
I used to lose transformers (like for the ans.machine) regularly, to power spikes. I put them all on surge units, and haven't lost one since. Figuring that even a consumer-grade UPS gives as much protection as a decent surge unit, it's got to be better than nothing!!
A couple years ago someone ran a whole bunch of quality tests on various PSUs, and found that there was a direct correlation between the physical weight of the PSU, and how good it was: heavier was better, across the board.
This goes along with my own observation -- good PSUs are heavy, and they have *lots* of connectors with heavy-gauge wires. I've never seen one of that type die. However, I've seen plenty of wimpy-built models that died young (they just plain quit powering on, some after only a few days use), all light in weight, and with few and skinny-wired connectors.
As to other bad effects, I've read that poor PSUs generate microspikes that cause mini-headcrashes, hence random bad spots on otherwise-healthy HDs; also that they can cause memory errors thus instability.
Good PSUs are worth what you pay for 'em. Frex, the one in this box, quite expensive in its day, will be 11 years old in May, having served 24/7/365 most of those years, and it hasn't even been power-cycled in over 3 years. And nothing in this machine (now in its 3rd major incarnation) has ever failed, except for a 486 mainboard that was fried by a keyboard short, and a 5 yr old HD that died of a physical misadventure.
However... not all good PSUs are expensive. Some PSUs in certain cheap generic cases (RaidMax, and one no-name that I liked from the AT era) are actually quite good, but in those examples, the rest of the chassis is nice too (heavy gauge metal with rolled edges, lots of drive bays) -- IOW their manufacturer does not indulge in corner-cutting.
I grew up with two of those old Westclox -- from the 1950s if not before. And you're right, they'll just about raise the dead, whether the dead like it or not.:) But one does have to keep them out of arm's reach, or it's all too easy to reach out and give the clock a good grip just before it goes off, thus pushing in the alarm button and turning it off entirely! My mom was quite expert at doing so in her sleep.
Another thing that works well is a clock-radio. You get 10 minutes of radio to wake up by, then the world's most obnoxious ***BLAAAAAT!!!***. When I was a kid I had one that used tubes, and the radio took a full minute to warm up. Apparently I could hear the faint warm-up buzz in my sleep, because I always woke up before the radio actually came on. But I'm also a very light sleeper.
Come to think of it, the desire to avoid waking the rest of the household may well have contributed to an ability I still have today, of waking up before the alarm goes off.
I wouldn't be so sure... I recall getting an emergency call at 2.30am, where apparently I gave the panicked client good and specific advice for 20 minutes before I realised who I was talking to, or what I was giving advice about!!
But if I get enough sleep, I'm normally a morning person and wake just before sunrise year-round, no alarm required. When I do set the alarm "just to make sure", I nearly always wake up before it goes off anyway.
My oldest working IDE drive is a 20mb W.D. of 1991 vintage, still 100% perfect (tho it won't speak to any machine later than a 286). I've been told it's a collector's item, even tho it's not the oldest of its line (1989, IIRC). It served me faithfully for some years as the boot drive in my test rig, and I'd hate to reward its service with a trip to the dumpster!
Now, CGA monitors, those I'da cheerfully helped you cart to the trash! Tho I'm told they work nicely as the video for stuff like baby monitor cameras. And someone just dumped a bunch of 10Mbit and even 2Mbit NICs on me -- boy, some friend!:)
I should rephrase... I can still get most of my old Conners to boot if I reformat them, but they uniformly won't hold data for very long (never more than ~6 months, but sometimes no more than a few hours!) unless they are then used every day. The problem arises when they sit around doing nothing, as is the fate of most sub-10GB drives these days -- for whatever reason, some lose all data, and others merely lose the ability to boot. This is so consistent with Conner HDs of every age (I have 'em from 40mb thru 1.nGB) that I've concluded there is something fundamentally wrong with their HDs.
I've also heard that Conner HDs were in fact rebadged Samsungs (and Samsung home electronics have a distressingly consistent tendency to die one day out of warranty). To my understanding, Conner never actually *made* anything, but bought and rebadged stuff. (Those "Conner" tape drives of yesteryear are all either Irwin or Archive under the hood.)
I have a pile of WD HDs in the 300mb range that still work perfectly, that I can't bear to throw out but like yourself haven't quite figured out what to do with... remember when that was a MASSIVE amount of HD space??!!!
Windows itself doesn't care. I have the swapfile turned off on boxes with more RAM than they ever actually need, and it does help performance especially with WinME (which is terrible about getting bogged down in the swapfile).
What I do find bitch and whine about it are mainly Photoshop plugins, and graphics apps that do wireframe 3D. They'll "report a memory full condition" because they never look at actual available RAM, only at available swap space.
Side note: on my Win95 box, the most RAM I've ever seen it use under heavy multitasking is about 165mb. On my Win98, ME, and XP boxes, running the exact same apps, doing similar tasks, uses up to 450mb. Sure goes to show how much more overhead there is...
[blink] I know someone who has lately been fighting with a whole raft of 9GB Quantum SCSI HDs that "went bad" -- only to discover that the problem seemed to be the SCSI HA itself.
But after reading your post, it occurs to me to wonder if this line of HDs is somehow damaging the SCSI HA (could continuously dumping electrical noise do that?)
Those HDs would have been mostly from just before Quantum got out of the HD business, yes? (When I went searching for that model, they came up as being rebranded to Maxtor.) Remember Micropolis? When they went out of business, they dumped tons of 9GB SCSI HDs onto the market. Every single one I know of went bad within a year.
Let that be a warning to ya... don't buy mission-critical stuff from companies that are in the process of going out of business, and therefore have no reason to care if something needs warranty service.
Okay, here's my experience and observation (actually, it's mine plus several friends who also build and repair systems), covering IDE HDs in a wide variety of systems and working conditions:
-- W.D. have the longest, most reliable lifespan, and hold up best under 24/7 use. When they die, they usually give you *ample* warning, like weird noises or obvious bad sectors, and are likely to live a long time even after that; sick ones can usually be tricked into reviving long enough to extract your data. As a general rule, they run cooler and quieter than other drives, and usually much faster than their own operating spec, probably because they put less lag on the bus (they use fewer CPU cycles). -- Seagate (but not their rebadged Conners) are also okay but lifespan is generally not as good as W.D. (tho if it gets to the "gee, that's an old drive" age, is likely to live forever). Also, they tend to be noisy, run hot, and have more lag (high CPU cycle usage), so are slower than expected. -- Quantum, when they existed, tended to be fast, but ran rather hot for a year or two, then quit. -- IBM, I've only seen in old IBM machines, not really a good sample, but I do remember about the "Deathstar" line, and have heard of some of their glass-platter HDs where the platter broke in half under normal use. -- Maxtor have pretty good performance, but have by far the highest death rate, and give absolutely no warning when they die -- they just quit, and there is no getting them restarted. -- Conner, when they existed, were relatively slow, and while few died outright, many simply lose data if they sit around for a while, and after that are never reliable again. Same applies to those rebadged as Seagates.
I have a pile of salvaged HDs here, of various age and size. The vast majority of still-working HDs are W.D. Some are Seagates. A few are Quantums. The Conners have finally all died. And until last year, I'd *never* seen a working Maxtor HD in a salvaged box.
Conversely, the majority of HDs in my "dead" pile are Maxtors. Some are Quantums. A few are Seagates. Only one is a W.D., and it had suffered a physical misadventure.
[laughing] I never had Legos myself, so I always compare system building to TinkerToys:)
But you're right, it ain't rocket science. The first thing to remember is that the square peg more'n likely goes in the square hole. If you can get that far, 99% of the HowToBuildIt is taken care of.
"And don't be supprised if the CPU is surface mounted on the motherboard. 768 tiny solder points and a coat of epoxy to boot."
The OEMs will *love* that. Bye-bye owner-performed upgrades, hello full replacement purchase every time ANYTHING goes tits-up. And of course, who already owns the laptop and enterprise desktop market?? Yep.
As to "carrying a computer == presumption of guilt" -- Even after refitting and polishing our tinfoil hats, one might foresee TC-free computers as the next Prohibition:/
REAL point being that Card often makes no sense! The Alvin Maker books are prime examples. (As far as I got, anyway. By which point I was mightily sick of lugging around a golden anvil.)
But Bean is an utter sociopath, willing to use anyone or anything if he sees it as needful to his own survival. So if quoting the bible furthers this goal, Bean will quote from the bible. Which does not mean he converted, only that to him, the bible was a useful survival tool.
"And if I can whip out a microscope and read out my own key, then I'm damn well going to go into business doing so for everyone else so that they can have their master keys as well."
You may well have defined the next big underground scene.
Most simply, one would get a new machine, rip out the chip, send it off to be cracked, get it back with the crack, reinstall it (no doubt it will be soldered... tho I can see how integrating a critical transistor or whatever such that to remove the chip, you'd have to kill that component, would foil even the best hired soldering guns). Not so ideally, you'd sneak off to the nearest cracker's basement and hope no one saw you lugging your computer in and out.
Imagine a society where you could be halted for carrying a computer, because it would be assumed you were on your way to have its TC chip cracked.
I'll go off and wash my brain out with soap now...
Right on -- sometimes I want to smack Card upside the head for not knowing when to leave well enough alone!
You're exactly right about Ender vs Bean and Peter. And that is why I have good hopes that if Ender's Game is scripted akin to Troy, it will be about the people -- about how personality traits and flaws interact to create the mess we're in (and maybe how we get out of it, or don't as the case may be). Because that's precisely what Troy focused on -- character interactions.
Slashdot Mirror
Much more likely: systems that are compromised (such as in countries that are run mostly on bribes and personal pressure) where your personal info is recorded and transmitted to criminals, who then sell it to the highest bidder.
One obvious 'customer' would be gangs who wish to safely rob the empty homes of the travelling wealthy.
Another would be kidnapping/ransom scemes, which have at times been a serious risk to travellers overseas.
Don't just use my schemes; think up your own!
Alternate "security" plan: walk around looking for wallet-shaped "dead" areas, because after all, anyone who wraps their RFID-equipped passport in tinfoil (to foil reading from a distance by authorities or non-authorities) MUST be up to no good.
My property tax, while nominally 2% of the total property value, *actually* costs me the equivalent of 3.5 EXTRA monthly mortgage payments every year. How would you like to pay your rent 15.5 times every year, instead of just 12 times?? Not only that, but a lot of this tax goes to schools, libraries, and parks -- which renters tend to use more than property owners. Why don't renters have to pay their fair share here? They pay NOTHING, yet they still get to USE the infrastructure that PROPERTY tax pays for. I hereby suggest that all renters should have to pay a "renters tax" equivalent to the property tax charged for the building they occupy. Then maybe people won't be so hot to increase property taxes (bonds are not free money, ya know -- they're funded primarily by property tax increases).
Montana used to have an annual personal property tax. Everyone had to inventory everything they owned, and itemize it, apply a depreciation scale (which varied by the type of item) then pay -- IIRC it was something like 10% of the total value. Needless to say, the only effects were to 1) make everyone lie about their possessions as much as possible (and hope to avoid the random inspections), and 2) avoid buying *anything* new unless they had no choice. Not to mention impacting the poor most of all.
I had no luck getting Mozilla (also with an annoying dl manager) and Getright (which I love) to play nice together either. However, I let Getright monitor the clipboard. So when I want to download something in Moz, I rightclick the link and pick "Copy Link Location", and most of the time Getright will pick it up, and I can then download it with Getright without any extra steps.
Worst case, I might have to open GR's status window and paste the URL as a new download.
I have the same problem with both Mozilla and Firefox -- on a P3-550 with 1GB of RAM, running Win98 (with no swapfile, since it never uses over 450mb no matter what all I have running). I gave up on Firefox entirely because it was even slower than Mozilla (plus I just don't like FF, too much has been removed that I actually use) ... and you can time just about *everything* Moz does with, well, an hourglass. I've never seen *anything* render or save pages so slowly.
Conversely, NS and IE anyversion are slick and quick.
I've read that the problem is that they use XUL widgets, rather than using native Windows widgets. Not being a programmer, I have no way of confirming this. -- Um, are there any coders out there who'd have an interest in translating Moz to conventional widgetry?
Oh, a luggable :)
There were a number of species of luggables back then, all just about the right size to break your foot if you dropped it. Some even had TUBES!!
Before the engine got rebuilt, my '78 Ford pickup was very sensitive to fuel quality; I could tell if there was water in the gas, or if the octane wasn't as-advertised (a common problem in SoCal) within a block of leaving the gas station. After the rebuild it lost sensitivity to water, but I can still tell when octane is higher or lower than the sign says.
I could also tell immediately if the gas being sold was actually of the brand on the sign. Used to be some brands were decidedly better than others, regardless of where I was in the western US. But in the mid-80s, this stopped, and after that it was more a matter of the individual station and who their supplier was (or how much they diluted their premium gas -- yes, some did that). And for the past decade, it's all been pretty much the same everywhere.
I have in my possession a computer that was killed by an incompetent tech (who has a fulltime shop, so can't be called an amateur).
The machine kept locking up after only a few minutes. The tech kept screwing with the system, and charged the owner plenty each time (I couldn't convince her that she was being ripped off, either), but the problem continued, and eventually the poor thing got to where it wouldn't boot at all.
In terminal frustration, she packed up the machine and mailed it to me. I cracked the case, and the problem was instantly obvious: the heatsink and CPU fan were one solid clot of cigarette residue, and the fan had been cooked to the point that its blades crumbled at a touch. The CPU had been so hot that the slot was warped (I had to use Vise-Grips to extract the CPU, I shit you not), the motherboard had scorch marks, and the smoke had gotten out of the adjacent onboard video circuitry. The wonder wasn't that it didn't work, but that it hadn't caught fire!!
Despite this abuse, the CPU (P3-500) came back to life, was used to upgrade one of my machines, and has been running 24/7 for over 3 years now, 100% reliably.
But the rest of the system was dumpster material.
All because some idiot either didn't know what he was doing, or was stringing along a sucker, or most likely, both.
I used to lose transformers (like for the ans.machine) regularly, to power spikes. I put them all on surge units, and haven't lost one since. Figuring that even a consumer-grade UPS gives as much protection as a decent surge unit, it's got to be better than nothing!!
A couple years ago someone ran a whole bunch of quality tests on various PSUs, and found that there was a direct correlation between the physical weight of the PSU, and how good it was: heavier was better, across the board.
This goes along with my own observation -- good PSUs are heavy, and they have *lots* of connectors with heavy-gauge wires. I've never seen one of that type die. However, I've seen plenty of wimpy-built models that died young (they just plain quit powering on, some after only a few days use), all light in weight, and with few and skinny-wired connectors.
As to other bad effects, I've read that poor PSUs generate microspikes that cause mini-headcrashes, hence random bad spots on otherwise-healthy HDs; also that they can cause memory errors thus instability.
Good PSUs are worth what you pay for 'em. Frex, the one in this box, quite expensive in its day, will be 11 years old in May, having served 24/7/365 most of those years, and it hasn't even been power-cycled in over 3 years. And nothing in this machine (now in its 3rd major incarnation) has ever failed, except for a 486 mainboard that was fried by a keyboard short, and a 5 yr old HD that died of a physical misadventure.
However... not all good PSUs are expensive. Some PSUs in certain cheap generic cases (RaidMax, and one no-name that I liked from the AT era) are actually quite good, but in those examples, the rest of the chassis is nice too (heavy gauge metal with rolled edges, lots of drive bays) -- IOW their manufacturer does not indulge in corner-cutting.
I grew up with two of those old Westclox -- from the 1950s if not before. And you're right, they'll just about raise the dead, whether the dead like it or not. :) But one does have to keep them out of arm's reach, or it's all too easy to reach out and give the clock a good grip just before it goes off, thus pushing in the alarm button and turning it off entirely! My mom was quite expert at doing so in her sleep.
Another thing that works well is a clock-radio. You get 10 minutes of radio to wake up by, then the world's most obnoxious ***BLAAAAAT!!!***. When I was a kid I had one that used tubes, and the radio took a full minute to warm up. Apparently I could hear the faint warm-up buzz in my sleep, because I always woke up before the radio actually came on. But I'm also a very light sleeper.
Come to think of it, the desire to avoid waking the rest of the household may well have contributed to an ability I still have today, of waking up before the alarm goes off.
I wouldn't be so sure... I recall getting an emergency call at 2.30am, where apparently I gave the panicked client good and specific advice for 20 minutes before I realised who I was talking to, or what I was giving advice about!!
But if I get enough sleep, I'm normally a morning person and wake just before sunrise year-round, no alarm required. When I do set the alarm "just to make sure", I nearly always wake up before it goes off anyway.
My oldest working IDE drive is a 20mb W.D. of 1991 vintage, still 100% perfect (tho it won't speak to any machine later than a 286). I've been told it's a collector's item, even tho it's not the oldest of its line (1989, IIRC). It served me faithfully for some years as the boot drive in my test rig, and I'd hate to reward its service with a trip to the dumpster!
:)
Now, CGA monitors, those I'da cheerfully helped you cart to the trash! Tho I'm told they work nicely as the video for stuff like baby monitor cameras. And someone just dumped a bunch of 10Mbit and even 2Mbit NICs on me -- boy, some friend!
What's an SX-64??
I should rephrase... I can still get most of my old Conners to boot if I reformat them, but they uniformly won't hold data for very long (never more than ~6 months, but sometimes no more than a few hours!) unless they are then used every day. The problem arises when they sit around doing nothing, as is the fate of most sub-10GB drives these days -- for whatever reason, some lose all data, and others merely lose the ability to boot. This is so consistent with Conner HDs of every age (I have 'em from 40mb thru 1.nGB) that I've concluded there is something fundamentally wrong with their HDs.
I've also heard that Conner HDs were in fact rebadged Samsungs (and Samsung home electronics have a distressingly consistent tendency to die one day out of warranty). To my understanding, Conner never actually *made* anything, but bought and rebadged stuff. (Those "Conner" tape drives of yesteryear are all either Irwin or Archive under the hood.)
I have a pile of WD HDs in the 300mb range that still work perfectly, that I can't bear to throw out but like yourself haven't quite figured out what to do with... remember when that was a MASSIVE amount of HD space??!!!
Windows itself doesn't care. I have the swapfile turned off on boxes with more RAM than they ever actually need, and it does help performance especially with WinME (which is terrible about getting bogged down in the swapfile).
What I do find bitch and whine about it are mainly Photoshop plugins, and graphics apps that do wireframe 3D. They'll "report a memory full condition" because they never look at actual available RAM, only at available swap space.
Side note: on my Win95 box, the most RAM I've ever seen it use under heavy multitasking is about 165mb. On my Win98, ME, and XP boxes, running the exact same apps, doing similar tasks, uses up to 450mb. Sure goes to show how much more overhead there is...
[blink] I know someone who has lately been fighting with a whole raft of 9GB Quantum SCSI HDs that "went bad" -- only to discover that the problem seemed to be the SCSI HA itself.
But after reading your post, it occurs to me to wonder if this line of HDs is somehow damaging the SCSI HA (could continuously dumping electrical noise do that?)
Those HDs would have been mostly from just before Quantum got out of the HD business, yes? (When I went searching for that model, they came up as being rebranded to Maxtor.) Remember Micropolis? When they went out of business, they dumped tons of 9GB SCSI HDs onto the market. Every single one I know of went bad within a year.
Let that be a warning to ya... don't buy mission-critical stuff from companies that are in the process of going out of business, and therefore have no reason to care if something needs warranty service.
Okay, here's my experience and observation (actually, it's mine plus several friends who also build and repair systems), covering IDE HDs in a wide variety of systems and working conditions:
-- W.D. have the longest, most reliable lifespan, and hold up best under 24/7 use. When they die, they usually give you *ample* warning, like weird noises or obvious bad sectors, and are likely to live a long time even after that; sick ones can usually be tricked into reviving long enough to extract your data. As a general rule, they run cooler and quieter than other drives, and usually much faster than their own operating spec, probably because they put less lag on the bus (they use fewer CPU cycles).
-- Seagate (but not their rebadged Conners) are also okay but lifespan is generally not as good as W.D. (tho if it gets to the "gee, that's an old drive" age, is likely to live forever). Also, they tend to be noisy, run hot, and have more lag (high CPU cycle usage), so are slower than expected.
-- Quantum, when they existed, tended to be fast, but ran rather hot for a year or two, then quit.
-- IBM, I've only seen in old IBM machines, not really a good sample, but I do remember about the "Deathstar" line, and have heard of some of their glass-platter HDs where the platter broke in half under normal use.
-- Maxtor have pretty good performance, but have by far the highest death rate, and give absolutely no warning when they die -- they just quit, and there is no getting them restarted.
-- Conner, when they existed, were relatively slow, and while few died outright, many simply lose data if they sit around for a while, and after that are never reliable again. Same applies to those rebadged as Seagates.
I have a pile of salvaged HDs here, of various age and size. The vast majority of still-working HDs are W.D. Some are Seagates. A few are Quantums. The Conners have finally all died. And until last year, I'd *never* seen a working Maxtor HD in a salvaged box.
Conversely, the majority of HDs in my "dead" pile are Maxtors. Some are Quantums. A few are Seagates. Only one is a W.D., and it had suffered a physical misadventure.
[laughing] I never had Legos myself, so I always compare system building to TinkerToys :)
But you're right, it ain't rocket science. The first thing to remember is that the square peg more'n likely goes in the square hole. If you can get that far, 99% of the HowToBuildIt is taken care of.
"And don't be supprised if the CPU is surface mounted on the motherboard. 768 tiny solder points and a coat of epoxy to boot."
:/
The OEMs will *love* that. Bye-bye owner-performed upgrades, hello full replacement purchase every time ANYTHING goes tits-up. And of course, who already owns the laptop and enterprise desktop market?? Yep.
As to "carrying a computer == presumption of guilt" -- Even after refitting and polishing our tinfoil hats, one might foresee TC-free computers as the next Prohibition
REAL point being that Card often makes no sense! The Alvin Maker books are prime examples. (As far as I got, anyway. By which point I was mightily sick of lugging around a golden anvil.)
Let that be a lesson to aspiring writers: if something HAS to be shoehorned into a plot to make it workable -- it doesn't work.
Precisely. There are lots of other ways to phrase it, but that's the most succinct :)
But Bean is an utter sociopath, willing to use anyone or anything if he sees it as needful to his own survival. So if quoting the bible furthers this goal, Bean will quote from the bible. Which does not mean he converted, only that to him, the bible was a useful survival tool.
"And if I can whip out a microscope and read out my own key, then I'm damn well going to go into business doing so for everyone else so that they can have their master keys as well."
You may well have defined the next big underground scene.
Most simply, one would get a new machine, rip out the chip, send it off to be cracked, get it back with the crack, reinstall it (no doubt it will be soldered... tho I can see how integrating a critical transistor or whatever such that to remove the chip, you'd have to kill that component, would foil even the best hired soldering guns). Not so ideally, you'd sneak off to the nearest cracker's basement and hope no one saw you lugging your computer in and out.
Imagine a society where you could be halted for carrying a computer, because it would be assumed you were on your way to have its TC chip cracked.
I'll go off and wash my brain out with soap now...
Right on -- sometimes I want to smack Card upside the head for not knowing when to leave well enough alone!
You're exactly right about Ender vs Bean and Peter. And that is why I have good hopes that if Ender's Game is scripted akin to Troy, it will be about the people -- about how personality traits and flaws interact to create the mess we're in (and maybe how we get out of it, or don't as the case may be). Because that's precisely what Troy focused on -- character interactions.