Lots of car manufacturers have built in "Check engine" codes that go off at a certain milage plus some random number. (My car included.)
Huh? Extraordinary claims (and this qualifies) require extraordinary proof. The only time the SES light in my S10 switched on was when the valve body in the transmission puked itself. I drove it to the dealer (in 2nd and 3rd gears only), they fixed it the same day under warranty (had about 3500 miles on it at this point), and the SES light has stayed off ever since (now at ~60500 miles and counting).
If it became known that any manufacturer was pulling crap like what you're accusing them of doing, don't you think they'd have found themselves with at least a little bit of a sales problem by now?
OBD information should be COMPLETELY open and readily available to owners. And that dosn't mean I go down to the dealer where they can tell me what the car is saying or that I have to maintain a yearly subscription to some service. I want direct access to the information from the car with no intermediaries. When I buy a new car it should come with a CD with access software and dongles for connecting it to my laptop/computer/palm pilot etc. Or perhaps wireless/Blue Tooth. In otherwords the access to this information should be via standard interfaces to common equipment.
Google is your friend. There are already tons of OBD-II readers on the market, several of which are fairly inexpensive for what they do. (A couple of interesting models are here and here. The second one even has several Linux-based programs that work with it.)
It's one thing that only 116 shows are listed, but consider the fact that Aaron Sorkin, Joss Whedon, J.J Abrams and any number of other television big shots have no pages whatsoever. Individual credits are just as important to a television database as episode listings, airdates, summaries, etc., and if those guys don't even have pages of their own yet, I don't like the odds of smaller tv writers who only have one or two episodes to their credit ever being included. And unfortunately that's a necessity for a database like this, and also unlikely ever to be included in a pure wiki.
It seems to me that a relatively minor alteration could handle that. Provide a way to tag things like names and titles, so that instead of writing "William Shatner" in the content for a page, you'd write something like "<actor>William Shatner</actor>", or "<episode series='Star Trek'>City on the Edge of Forever</episode>" instead of "City on the Edge of Forever" (or whatever kind of tag format a wiki would use). Every once in a while, a robot scans the people-edited parts of the wiki to automatically assemble filmographies from the actor tags, episode lists from the episode tags, etc. Links to these auto-generated pages are then served up in the people-edited areas, so that "<actor>William Shatner</actor>" is sent out as "<a href='/Actors/William%20Shatner/'>William Shatner</a>", and that page would then have links to pages on Star Trek (as an entire series and/or as its episodes) and whatever else has been entered. If someone then comes along and adds other Star Trek episodes (or adds another series, like T.J. Hooker), the relevant filmography/episdode list/etc. pages would be updated automatically. The auto-generated pages would also need an editable area (for things like biographical info for actors), but that should be trivial to implement.
Heck, with numbers like that it seems like Linux could run circles around XP Pro for audio/video apps such as streaming, recording, and playback!"
You say that like it's a hard mark to hit.
Indeed. I can record two shows and play one without the machine breaking a sweat, and it's just an Athlon XP. Others are doing the same with even less-powerful processors.
One of my questions is why have not these been adapted for use in automobile A/C - despite the fact that they are inefficient, it seems, the clean nature, and the fact that they would need little maintenane.
Back in the day, they hung one of these on a side window for cooling. From the description, it sounds like it was a miniature swamp cooler, using ram air from forward motion instead of a blower. I suspect a car wouldn't normally go fast enough for ram air to build up enough pressure for a vortex cooler to operate properly.
BTW, I think that history has been kind to Wilhelm Reich's observation in 1950 that Communism was largely played out in the world. This is why nobody cares about you calling the ACLU "communist" as that is irrelevant today.
Perhaps you've heard of Venezuelan thugocrat Hugo Chavez. Want to guess who his new best friend is? Fidel Castro. Communism should be dead and buried, but it isn't.
If the ACLU was actually doing that, I wouldn't have much of a complaint. When they started defending those who would bring about the end to liberty and freedom for everybody, they gave up any claim to being a legitimate civil-rights organization.
Who should make the determination of whose liberties are protected?
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. Forces that are inimical to the continuation of civilized society must be given no quarter, whether we're talking about terrorism, kiddie porn, or whatever (and yes, the ACLU has defended both terrorism and kiddie porn (among other things), which is what makes them not just worthless, but dangerous).
I thought that defending American liberty was fundamentally American.
If the ACLU was actually doing that, I wouldn't have much of a complaint. When they started defending those who would bring about the end to liberty and freedom for everybody, they gave up any claim to being a legitimate civil-rights organization.
(I'm not so sure their claim was ever that strong. It'd be nice if they took on a few 2nd Amendment cases, for instance, but I think we'll see the devil ice-skating to work before that happens.)
...is giving me 6.7kbyte/s..no, 5.4...no...5.1 and falling.
With a download manager pulling in 4 chunks at once, I was getting around 17 kbps a few minutes ago. I switched to the torrent someone else posted earlier. It's now maxing out my T1.:-)
Well, your mileage may vary. After 4-8 hours on a green screen, your eyes green receptors get real whacked out for a while, anything white will look pink, very pink! Try it!
Not to mention the super-low refresh rate they had.
Tends to give some people bad headaches.
I never noticed either of those problems with the Apple Monitor II green-screen I used with my IIe. Maybe you'd burn in your eyes (along with the tube) if you had the brightness cranked way too high, but it didn't happen at normal levels. I used to look into that monitor for hours at a time while coding, punching in programs, writing papers, or whatever, and never noticed that pink effect.
As for the refresh rate, most monochrome displays had long-persistence phosphors. Flicker was much less noticeable with one of these driven at 60 Hz than with a color monitor or TV driven at the same 60 Hz.
After Ivan, Anheuser-Busch drove down the streets handing out bottles with their logo so none of this suprises me.
If they were beer bottles that had been filled with water instead (likely), this shouldn't be a surprise. They'd most likely have a logo molded into the glass; this is fairly common for breweries of any considerable size. What more would you expect of them? That they'd keep a stash of plain bottles on hand for emergency distribution? That they'd grind the logos off (which would only make them even more visible anyway), or go to the trouble of somehow obscuring them? Give me a fscking break. A company tries to do what it can to be useful with whatever it has on hand, and all some people can do is find something petty to bitch about.
Wow! My %43@#0=_W223qk@34a!A ver 2.0 is SO much cooler than yours!
That's %43@#0=_W223qk@34a!A® to you, not %43@#0=_W223qk@34a!A. Thanks for your attention.
Wile E. Coyote III
Sr. VP of Plungers and Duct Tape
Acme Widget Co., Inc.
Makers of the %43@#0=_W223qk@34a!A® and other fine products for capturing high-velocity highway-running avians
This is, just maby, a stab at a *server* or it will be required for the next high end Nvidia card.
You were kidding with that server comment, right? Right?
As others have said already, if you need anywhere near that much power in a server, you should be looking at redundant power supplies. I'm putting together some boxes right now with sixteen 400GB SATA drives, a hot-swap backplane, and a 650W redundant power supply. The power supply is basically three 350W supplies that slot into a housing that ties them all together. It can deliver full rated power with just two of the supplies running, but it can do the same with three supplies without having to run them balls-out. That's what you want in a server, not some shiny overcompensation for certain inadequacies.
You are spot on with your assessment of transit frequency - people would rather wait 50 minutes or more in their car in gridlock than 25 at a bus stop, and that's hard math to change unless you can get the bus wait down below 10 or 15 minutes.
50 minutes in air-conditioned comfort vs. 25 minutes sucking in exhaust fumes and baking in 100+-degree heat isn't a hard decision to make, for most people.
(That assumes, of course, that you're stuck in some hellhole like LA. I live in Las Vegas. My 17-mile commute (roughly speaking, from the far northeast corner of town to a little bit south of the airport) takes about 30 minutes each way if I drive it, but would be closer to 90-120 minutes by bus.)
Windows, which is really a great OS, gets such a bad rap because it's expected to run with every piece of hardware out there flawlessly. No one stops to think that it's a miracle that it runs as well as it does on so many systems.
How, then, do you explain Linux? It runs on an even wider variety of hardware (not just x86 and AMD64, but PowerPC, ARM, SPARC, and a bunch of others), and it doesn't have nearly as much trouble running on that wide variety of systems.
(Yes, you were probably referring to peripherals, but even here it's almost scary how much stuff works. There's not much hardware I've bought that's a paperweight under Linux...maybe some webcams and such, but that's about it.)
This weekend, they're $17 at the Fry's in Las Vegas (and maybe elsewhere). I just got back from there a few minutes ago...picked up two to play with, since they're that cheap.
I used to work for a guy who used a variant of that technique to get rid of groundhogs. He kept sticks of sodium stored safely in a bucket of kerosene. When the critters got too pesky, he would fish out a couple of sticks and stuff them down the groundhog hole. He's then grab the hose and fill the hole from about 20' away.
With that approach to getting rid of burrowing varmints, he sounds like he might be related to Carl Spackler.
Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. Mayor: What do you mean, biblical? Ray: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor... real Wrath-of-God-type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Venkman: Rivers and seas boiling! Egon: 40 years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes. Winston: The dead rising from the grave! Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together... mass hysteria!
I'm in the US. I use T-mobile, and get 500 text messages for an extra $3 a month. I use it mainly to keep in touch with the S.O., simple little stuff like "omw" for "on my way" etc -- information that would take longer to communicate using a voice call.
How do you figure it'd take longer to bang out a message through ten keys than to dial a number, say "I'm heading home," and hang up? Hell, even Morse code is faster than sending a text message (with skilled operators in both instances).
I'm on a plan with some outrageous number of included minutes (either 600 or 1000; I don't remember which) per month, and I usually don't come anywhere close to using all of it, so it's faster and cheaper to look up someone's phone number in the directory and call. The only thing for which I've found text messaging useful is to have a computer send me a message when a server's on fire or something like that. If there weren't gateways between email and text messaging, the latter would be about as useful to me as tits on a mule.
When nearly every player you have supports this format, how is this a problem? The only player I have that doesn't handle AAC is an old Rio Volt SP90. My Palm, my iPod, and all of my computers (the reasonably-modern ones, anyway, running a mix of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X...my Apple IIs and such don't count) play AAC without difficulty.
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There are two possible answers to this FAQ:
Huh? Extraordinary claims (and this qualifies) require extraordinary proof. The only time the SES light in my S10 switched on was when the valve body in the transmission puked itself. I drove it to the dealer (in 2nd and 3rd gears only), they fixed it the same day under warranty (had about 3500 miles on it at this point), and the SES light has stayed off ever since (now at ~60500 miles and counting).
If it became known that any manufacturer was pulling crap like what you're accusing them of doing, don't you think they'd have found themselves with at least a little bit of a sales problem by now?
Google is your friend. There are already tons of OBD-II readers on the market, several of which are fairly inexpensive for what they do. (A couple of interesting models are here and here. The second one even has several Linux-based programs that work with it.)
It seems to me that a relatively minor alteration could handle that. Provide a way to tag things like names and titles, so that instead of writing "William Shatner" in the content for a page, you'd write something like "<actor>William Shatner</actor>", or "<episode series='Star Trek'>City on the Edge of Forever</episode>" instead of "City on the Edge of Forever" (or whatever kind of tag format a wiki would use). Every once in a while, a robot scans the people-edited parts of the wiki to automatically assemble filmographies from the actor tags, episode lists from the episode tags, etc. Links to these auto-generated pages are then served up in the people-edited areas, so that "<actor>William Shatner</actor>" is sent out as "<a href='/Actors/William%20Shatner/'>William Shatner</a>", and that page would then have links to pages on Star Trek (as an entire series and/or as its episodes) and whatever else has been entered. If someone then comes along and adds other Star Trek episodes (or adds another series, like T.J. Hooker), the relevant filmography/episdode list/etc. pages would be updated automatically. The auto-generated pages would also need an editable area (for things like biographical info for actors), but that should be trivial to implement.
Indeed. I can record two shows and play one without the machine breaking a sweat, and it's just an Athlon XP. Others are doing the same with even less-powerful processors.
You can keep it. Mayo is nasty sh*t.
"Now, if you will not show us the Grail, we shall take your castle by force!"
Back in the day, they hung one of these on a side window for cooling. From the description, it sounds like it was a miniature swamp cooler, using ram air from forward motion instead of a blower. I suspect a car wouldn't normally go fast enough for ram air to build up enough pressure for a vortex cooler to operate properly.
Perhaps you've heard of Venezuelan thugocrat Hugo Chavez. Want to guess who his new best friend is? Fidel Castro. Communism should be dead and buried, but it isn't.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. Forces that are inimical to the continuation of civilized society must be given no quarter, whether we're talking about terrorism, kiddie porn, or whatever (and yes, the ACLU has defended both terrorism and kiddie porn (among other things), which is what makes them not just worthless, but dangerous).
If the ACLU was actually doing that, I wouldn't have much of a complaint. When they started defending those who would bring about the end to liberty and freedom for everybody, they gave up any claim to being a legitimate civil-rights organization.
(I'm not so sure their claim was ever that strong. It'd be nice if they took on a few 2nd Amendment cases, for instance, but I think we'll see the devil ice-skating to work before that happens.)
With a download manager pulling in 4 chunks at once, I was getting around 17 kbps a few minutes ago. I switched to the torrent someone else posted earlier. It's now maxing out my T1. :-)
I never noticed either of those problems with the Apple Monitor II green-screen I used with my IIe. Maybe you'd burn in your eyes (along with the tube) if you had the brightness cranked way too high, but it didn't happen at normal levels. I used to look into that monitor for hours at a time while coding, punching in programs, writing papers, or whatever, and never noticed that pink effect.
As for the refresh rate, most monochrome displays had long-persistence phosphors. Flicker was much less noticeable with one of these driven at 60 Hz than with a color monitor or TV driven at the same 60 Hz.
If they were beer bottles that had been filled with water instead (likely), this shouldn't be a surprise. They'd most likely have a logo molded into the glass; this is fairly common for breweries of any considerable size. What more would you expect of them? That they'd keep a stash of plain bottles on hand for emergency distribution? That they'd grind the logos off (which would only make them even more visible anyway), or go to the trouble of somehow obscuring them? Give me a fscking break. A company tries to do what it can to be useful with whatever it has on hand, and all some people can do is find something petty to bitch about.
GM killed off Olds last year, so that won't be happening anytime soon.
That's %43@#0=_W223qk@34a!A® to you, not %43@#0=_W223qk@34a!A. Thanks for your attention.
Wile E. Coyote III
Sr. VP of Plungers and Duct Tape
Acme Widget Co., Inc.
Makers of the %43@#0=_W223qk@34a!A® and other fine products for capturing high-velocity highway-running avians
You were kidding with that server comment, right? Right?
As others have said already, if you need anywhere near that much power in a server, you should be looking at redundant power supplies. I'm putting together some boxes right now with sixteen 400GB SATA drives, a hot-swap backplane, and a 650W redundant power supply. The power supply is basically three 350W supplies that slot into a housing that ties them all together. It can deliver full rated power with just two of the supplies running, but it can do the same with three supplies without having to run them balls-out. That's what you want in a server, not some shiny overcompensation for certain inadequacies.
50 minutes in air-conditioned comfort vs. 25 minutes sucking in exhaust fumes and baking in 100+-degree heat isn't a hard decision to make, for most people.
(That assumes, of course, that you're stuck in some hellhole like LA. I live in Las Vegas. My 17-mile commute (roughly speaking, from the far northeast corner of town to a little bit south of the airport) takes about 30 minutes each way if I drive it, but would be closer to 90-120 minutes by bus.)
How, then, do you explain Linux? It runs on an even wider variety of hardware (not just x86 and AMD64, but PowerPC, ARM, SPARC, and a bunch of others), and it doesn't have nearly as much trouble running on that wide variety of systems.
(Yes, you were probably referring to peripherals, but even here it's almost scary how much stuff works. There's not much hardware I've bought that's a paperweight under Linux...maybe some webcams and such, but that's about it.)
This weekend, they're $17 at the Fry's in Las Vegas (and maybe elsewhere). I just got back from there a few minutes ago...picked up two to play with, since they're that cheap.
With that approach to getting rid of burrowing varmints, he sounds like he might be related to Carl Spackler.
It was a cut-and-paste from here. It's been a while since I've seen the movie, so I'm kinda fuzzy on who said what.
Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, biblical?
Ray: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor... real Wrath-of-God-type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies.
Venkman: Rivers and seas boiling!
Egon: 40 years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes.
Winston: The dead rising from the grave!
Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together... mass hysteria!
How do you figure it'd take longer to bang out a message through ten keys than to dial a number, say "I'm heading home," and hang up? Hell, even Morse code is faster than sending a text message (with skilled operators in both instances).
I'm on a plan with some outrageous number of included minutes (either 600 or 1000; I don't remember which) per month, and I usually don't come anywhere close to using all of it, so it's faster and cheaper to look up someone's phone number in the directory and call. The only thing for which I've found text messaging useful is to have a computer send me a message when a server's on fire or something like that. If there weren't gateways between email and text messaging, the latter would be about as useful to me as tits on a mule.
When nearly every player you have supports this format, how is this a problem? The only player I have that doesn't handle AAC is an old Rio Volt SP90. My Palm, my iPod, and all of my computers (the reasonably-modern ones, anyway, running a mix of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X...my Apple IIs and such don't count) play AAC without difficulty.