One place I worked required a department to budget to buy their own computers. But, they were also required to put in their budget 2 1/2 times the purchase price. This was to cover the costs of maintenance for the life of the system. That money is what paid part of the tech support budget.
It helped keep departments aware of the true cost of the machines they wanted to buy.
That's all great and everything, but the skills of an "old school technician" you mention just aren't that relevant in working with modern PCs. How much soldering and wire-wrap are going to be done at someone's home, fixing their PC?
I've done a lot of work building and repairing computers, and I don't recall ever seeing anything wire-wrapped. And few parts have single transistors - the only one I can think of is the power supply.
Soldering's an important skill, but even that doesn't get used much. I've soldered several wires for connecting fans and such. I once even diagnosed a power supply and re-soldered the caps that were loose.
But all-in-all, the economics of todays computers just don't call much for wire-wraping, designing with transistors, and troubleshooting to the component level on a circuit board.
At $30 an hour, and a huge task load, how much time should I spend trying to diagnose and repair a $15 network card? Once I determine it's that card, I can check to make sure it has a clean slot and traces and reseat it. If it still doesn't work, I toss it and put in another one. Doing any more than that is a waste of time and money.
While I don't call myself a "technician", I've accepted the title of "computer technician" when it was given to me. And frankly, it doesn't matter much what they call me. Either I can do the job or I can't. If I can't, and I cannot arrange to get it done, they'll get someone else, and call me "unemployed".
"Repair" might mean that the computer won't boot up at all, and this person has their doctoral dissertation nearly complete on it. Of course, they haven't made any backups... It would easily be worth $800 to recover that data and get the computer up and running again.
For me, when it comes to working on people's computers, I basically tell them it will cost them $50/hour. But also that I have an "hourly" cost for certain jobs. From start to finish, installing windows and all their software may take more than 5 or 6 hours. But a lot of that is just waiting. So, for that job, I'll tell them it will be about 2 to 2 1/2 hours of billed time.
The curator said that "five hundred people" before me had asked the same question, and that he had never been able to figure out the answer.
Maybe 500 people isn't that many...
But it seems to me that one purpose of a museum is to help people learn. If that many people want to know why they just don't use wipers, maybe it would be a good idea to put up some kind of poster not only stating the problem (panels will only work for 3 months because of the dust), they could also list some of the solutions they considered, and why they won't work.
It makes NASA sound dumb to simply state it only only work for 3 months because of dust. That's what you'll see in the news. Since they're publicly funded, they need to make sure they look as smart as they are, and worthy of the investment of tax dollars!
Sounds like you could do a mushroom-noodle stirfry that wouldn't be too bad. Or course, there aren't too many permutations with 3 ingredients - just in the methods of cooking...
you could make a "salad" with crunched up ramen (I'm assuming you're using dry?) and sliced mushrooms, and use the hoisin sauce as a dressing.
Or you could crush the ramen, remove the mushroom stems, and mush it up with some hoisin sauce, and stuff this into the mushrooms and bake them. (a little butter will help).
YOu could make traditional ramen, add sliced mushrooms and flavor with hoisin sauce.
Or put it all a blender add water and ice, and make a mushroom, hoisin, ramen shake. Mmmmmm...
The way it works (I believe!) is that once you've done your search, all of the search result hyperlinks go through a redirect on google.com.
That is how Yahoo! seems to work, but not Google. For example, if I search for "Slashdot" on Google, I get this as the first link (right-click, copy link location): "http://slashdot.org/"
in Yahoo!, I get: "http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=slashdot/v =2/SID =e/l=WS1/R=1/H=0/MI=other/*-http://rdre1.yahoo.com/click?u=http://www.slashdot.org/&y=028A85020D5FD4 C2&i=482&c=8540&q=02%5ESSHPM%5BL7ls~lw%7Bpk6&e=utf -8&r=0&d=wow-en-us&n=E9D45H3DU8S41MO9&s=1306&t=&m= 4038FB5A&x=01914BFE9E6908BB"
When Yahoo! started doing that is when I stopped using Yahoo.
From looking at these results, I don't think Google really has any idea what links I selected.
It's a PC user's nightmare: You're almost done with a lengthy e-mail, or about to finish a report at the office, and the computer crashes for no apparent reason. It tries to restart but never quite finishes booting. Then it crashes again. And again.
Gee... that sounds a lot like the last worm to hit my mom's Dell Laptop running Windows XP.
How do they know it's not the result of terrorist action? Perhaps there are some acutely stupid terrorists, and this is the first strike against keyless entry...in a very small area of the world...which nobody really noticed. Maybe they're just stupid terrorists
Or maybe they are smart terrorists performing a "proof of concept" test as part of something bigger. They've tested this part of their plan, and have some results. Either it's time to move on to the next phase or re-work this first part.
Of course, they can't prove that it wasn't terrorism activity. It's not possible to prove a negative - you can't prove the non-existance of God, the Easter Bunny, or terrorist activty in this incident.
Of course, I, for one, am tired of all the color-code alerts and "the event was not terror related"... which gets me onto another rant. "Terror" may be the result of an act of "terrorism" done by a "terrorist". All too often, the stupid people in the media shorten it to just "terror".
And while I'm at it, those f*ckers who end sentences with preposit... ooooh cheesy poofs! Gotta go!
but why not go the whole nine yards? Put everything you need on a USB drive and boot from there!
If you're talking about those little USB-flash memory things like the Sandisk Mini-Cruzer, that might only work for a while. I've read that these things can wear out after so many writes. You'd be okay for booting, I imagine, but you'd want to avoid having any swap-space set up on the device.
Don't forget that some of that coal is made of carbon-14, rather than carbon-12. So in burning tons of coal, one is, indeed, releasing radioactive particles into the air. That's not to mention other stuff in the coal (though I doubt there would be much uranium) that might be radioactive or otherwise harmful.
It would be interesting to compare amounts of uncontained/released radioactive waste that gets into the environment from both processes.
To help stop sniffers, the knock sequence can be based on a one-time pad, so it changes every time. In addition to that, there could be random ports that are ignored, adding noise to the sniffed data.
I was fairly lucky. I got an LG VX4400 before I new it was so well-supported by BitPim. With that, and a $20 cable from Radio Shack, (get the one for the VX-10 - it has a serial adapter in the USB that works with Linux, the VX4400 cable does not), I'm able to upload any.MID file to my phone to use as a ring tone.
The only trouble was finding a nice midi tone that I liked. I created a file that was just 8 beeps in a row. It's very distinctive, yet simple.
I still hate a lot of the crap on my phone, like the "get it now" garbage. I'd love to remap that to "address book" or something like that.
Plus, I'm damn irriated that my phone says "GPS" in big letters on the back, but I have little control over it and can't get any data from it. What a crock of sh*t. Oh yeah... and why can't I terminate a call when I'm on a hands-free set without opening the phone up? That GPS label would make a great button for answer/hang-up.
Actually, you can write Farsi or Arabic left to right, just like you can write English from the right to left. It's just harder because you're writing the letters in the opposite direction you normally read them.
In any case, it's great to see these more difficult langauges and scripts being handled by the non-Microsoft world of software.
In the US, most city/county governments have an office that keeps track of local recycling companies. I'd look there to see if they can point you in the right direction.
They take all kinds of computer equipment. They refurbish what they can and recycle the rest with "responsible vendors" - meaning places that don't just ship it off to China.
Drop-offs are free, except for monitors, which cost $10 because of the difficulty in handling all the metals and toxic materials in monitors.
People can also volunteer there in their different programs and get "free" computers for their work.
You're probably right, but one shouldn't jump to conclusions.
75 years is a good deal of time to build up wisdom, but by that time, most people's mental faculties aren't as sharp as they should be. He may be suffering from some kind of dimentia or alzheimers, etc. At 75 he fell for a scam that at 55 he might have seen right through.
The problem is that unlike with physical ailments, you can't just look at someone and see that they're suffering from dimentia.
Of course, he also may have been a greedy bastard.
It sucks that one can spend an entire lifetime building wealth only to lose it in the end. It sucks to spend a lifetime acquiring knowledge and wisdom only to lose it in the end. And it sucks to spend a lifetime devoting your life to a god that probably doesn't exist, only to lose it in the end.
Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything that you can't stop them from doing. And if you ask to see Catch-22, the law says they don't have to show it to you. What law? Catch-22, of course.
This sounds a lot like the reasoning used to detain terrorism suspects and witnesses using secret evidence.
That's what frosts my ass! I have teh VX4400B, and it proudly has a big "GPS" logo on it. Even in a diagnostic mode, I cannot get it to give me my location.
That space on surface of the phone could have been used for a button that answer/terminate calls without opening the thing up.
People have hacked the phone's directory structure: http://bitpim.sourceforge.net/, but I'll be thrilled when someone has hacked the actual OS to re-program buttons, enable GPS for my use, or disable it all-together.
My guess is the system doesn't actually target individual cars, but gets an aggregate reading from the traffic in general. It may be able to determine that the strength of the signal for 95.5 is twice that of 101.7, so it does twice as many ads for the 95.5 market demographic.
With that in mind, you could probably build a small transmitter that you could drop nearby the thing and force it into thinking it has a majority of punk-rock or oldies listeners.
Do you have much experience with anything like Serius radio or XM? I'm strongly considering it - I would be willing to pay $11/month for commerical free music.
More on the topic of these billboards, it wouldn't take much to make fake transmitters that could fake them out. One could set their transmitter for the oldies station, and the darn things would only ever show X-lax, Metamucil, and AARP commercials!
Slashdot Mirror
One place I worked required a department to budget to buy their own computers. But, they were also required to put in their budget 2 1/2 times the purchase price. This was to cover the costs of maintenance for the life of the system. That money is what paid part of the tech support budget.
It helped keep departments aware of the true cost of the machines they wanted to buy.
That's all great and everything, but the skills of an "old school technician" you mention just aren't that relevant in working with modern PCs. How much soldering and wire-wrap are going to be done at someone's home, fixing their PC?
I've done a lot of work building and repairing computers, and I don't recall ever seeing anything wire-wrapped. And few parts have single transistors - the only one I can think of is the power supply.
Soldering's an important skill, but even that doesn't get used much. I've soldered several wires for connecting fans and such. I once even diagnosed a power supply and re-soldered the caps that were loose.
But all-in-all, the economics of todays computers just don't call much for wire-wraping, designing with transistors, and troubleshooting to the component level on a circuit board.
At $30 an hour, and a huge task load, how much time should I spend trying to diagnose and repair a $15 network card? Once I determine it's that card, I can check to make sure it has a clean slot and traces and reseat it. If it still doesn't work, I toss it and put in another one. Doing any more than that is a waste of time and money.
While I don't call myself a "technician", I've accepted the title of "computer technician" when it was given to me. And frankly, it doesn't matter much what they call me. Either I can do the job or I can't. If I can't, and I cannot arrange to get it done, they'll get someone else, and call me "unemployed".
It also depends on what "repair" is.
"Repair" might mean that the computer won't boot up at all, and this person has their doctoral dissertation nearly complete on it. Of course, they haven't made any backups... It would easily be worth $800 to recover that data and get the computer up and running again.
For me, when it comes to working on people's computers, I basically tell them it will cost them $50/hour. But also that I have an "hourly" cost for certain jobs. From start to finish, installing windows and all their software may take more than 5 or 6 hours. But a lot of that is just waiting. So, for that job, I'll tell them it will be about 2 to 2 1/2 hours of billed time.
The curator said that "five hundred people" before me had asked the same question, and that he had never been able to figure out the answer.
Maybe 500 people isn't that many...
But it seems to me that one purpose of a museum is to help people learn. If that many people want to know why they just don't use wipers, maybe it would be a good idea to put up some kind of poster not only stating the problem (panels will only work for 3 months because of the dust), they could also list some of the solutions they considered, and why they won't work.
It makes NASA sound dumb to simply state it only only work for 3 months because of dust. That's what you'll see in the news. Since they're publicly funded, they need to make sure they look as smart as they are, and worthy of the investment of tax dollars!
We may be paranoid, but that doesn't mean everyone else is out to get us!
Now, I gotta go... there's a car parked out in front of my house and I think they're spying on me...
Now, totally off topic... are LCD monitors as prone to tempest attacks as traditional CRTs?
My god, all of those recipies take longer than five minutes to prepare.
I'll bet you could do the blender one in under 5 minutes. Of course, it's the grossest sounding one!
Sounds like you could do a mushroom-noodle stirfry that wouldn't be too bad. Or course, there aren't too many permutations with 3 ingredients - just in the methods of cooking...
you could make a "salad" with crunched up ramen (I'm assuming you're using dry?) and sliced mushrooms, and use the hoisin sauce as a dressing.
Or you could crush the ramen, remove the mushroom stems, and mush it up with some hoisin sauce, and stuff this into the mushrooms and bake them. (a little butter will help).
YOu could make traditional ramen, add sliced mushrooms and flavor with hoisin sauce.
Or put it all a blender add water and ice, and make a mushroom, hoisin, ramen shake. Mmmmmm...
The way it works (I believe!) is that once you've done your search, all of the search result hyperlinks go through a redirect on google.com.
v =2/SID =e/l=WS1/R=1/H=0/MI=other/*-http://rdre1.yahoo.com /click?u=http://www.slashdot.org/&y=028A85020D5FD4 C2&i=482&c=8540&q=02%5ESSHPM%5BL7ls~lw%7Bpk6&e=utf -8&r=0&d=wow-en-us&n=E9D45H3DU8S41MO9&s=1306&t=&m= 4038FB5A&x=01914BFE9E6908BB"
That is how Yahoo! seems to work, but not Google. For example, if I search for "Slashdot" on Google, I get this as the first link (right-click, copy link location):
"http://slashdot.org/"
in Yahoo!, I get:
"http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=slashdot/
When Yahoo! started doing that is when I stopped using Yahoo.
From looking at these results, I don't think Google really has any idea what links I selected.
It's a PC user's nightmare: You're almost done with a lengthy e-mail, or about to finish a report at the office, and the computer crashes for no apparent reason. It tries to restart but never quite finishes booting. Then it crashes again. And again.
Gee... that sounds a lot like the last worm to hit my mom's Dell Laptop running Windows XP.
How do they know it's not the result of terrorist action? Perhaps there are some acutely stupid terrorists, and this is the first strike against keyless entry...in a very small area of the world...which nobody really noticed. Maybe they're just stupid terrorists
Or maybe they are smart terrorists performing a "proof of concept" test as part of something bigger. They've tested this part of their plan, and have some results. Either it's time to move on to the next phase or re-work this first part.
Of course, they can't prove that it wasn't terrorism activity. It's not possible to prove a negative - you can't prove the non-existance of God, the Easter Bunny, or terrorist activty in this incident.
Of course, I, for one, am tired of all the color-code alerts and "the event was not terror related"... which gets me onto another rant. "Terror" may be the result of an act of "terrorism" done by a "terrorist". All too often, the stupid people in the media shorten it to just "terror".
And while I'm at it, those f*ckers who end sentences with preposit... ooooh cheesy poofs! Gotta go!
They BOTH found it? Maybe the rovers are just leaking some of their antifreeze?
but why not go the whole nine yards? Put everything you need on a USB drive and boot from there!
If you're talking about those little USB-flash memory things like the Sandisk Mini-Cruzer, that might only work for a while. I've read that these things can wear out after so many writes. You'd be okay for booting, I imagine, but you'd want to avoid having any swap-space set up on the device.
Don't forget that some of that coal is made of carbon-14, rather than carbon-12. So in burning tons of coal, one is, indeed, releasing radioactive particles into the air. That's not to mention other stuff in the coal (though I doubt there would be much uranium) that might be radioactive or otherwise harmful.
It would be interesting to compare amounts of uncontained/released radioactive waste that gets into the environment from both processes.
To help stop sniffers, the knock sequence can be based on a one-time pad, so it changes every time. In addition to that, there could be random ports that are ignored, adding noise to the sniffed data.
I was fairly lucky. I got an LG VX4400 before I new it was so well-supported by BitPim. With that, and a $20 cable from Radio Shack, (get the one for the VX-10 - it has a serial adapter in the USB that works with Linux, the VX4400 cable does not), I'm able to upload any .MID file to my phone to use as a ring tone.
The only trouble was finding a nice midi tone that I liked. I created a file that was just 8 beeps in a row. It's very distinctive, yet simple.
I still hate a lot of the crap on my phone, like the "get it now" garbage. I'd love to remap that to "address book" or something like that.
Plus, I'm damn irriated that my phone says "GPS" in big letters on the back, but I have little control over it and can't get any data from it. What a crock of sh*t. Oh yeah... and why can't I terminate a call when I'm on a hands-free set without opening the phone up? That GPS label would make a great button for answer/hang-up.
But, all-in-all, it's been a decent phone.
Actually, you can write Farsi or Arabic left to right, just like you can write English from the right to left. It's just harder because you're writing the letters in the opposite direction you normally read them.
In any case, it's great to see these more difficult langauges and scripts being handled by the non-Microsoft world of software.
In the US, most city/county governments have an office that keeps track of local recycling companies. I'd look there to see if they can point you in the right direction.
In Portland, OR, there is Freegeek: www.freegeek.org.
They take all kinds of computer equipment. They refurbish what they can and recycle the rest with "responsible vendors" - meaning places that don't just ship it off to China.
Drop-offs are free, except for monitors, which cost $10 because of the difficulty in handling all the metals and toxic materials in monitors.
People can also volunteer there in their different programs and get "free" computers for their work.
You're probably right, but one shouldn't jump to conclusions.
75 years is a good deal of time to build up wisdom, but by that time, most people's mental faculties aren't as sharp as they should be. He may be suffering from some kind of dimentia or alzheimers, etc. At 75 he fell for a scam that at 55 he might have seen right through.
The problem is that unlike with physical ailments, you can't just look at someone and see that they're suffering from dimentia.
Of course, he also may have been a greedy bastard.
It sucks that one can spend an entire lifetime building wealth only to lose it in the end.
It sucks to spend a lifetime acquiring knowledge and wisdom only to lose it in the end.
And it sucks to spend a lifetime devoting your life to a god that probably doesn't exist, only to lose it in the end.
Merry Christmas!
All I know about Bush is I had a job when Clinton was president.
Come on, Al! Give it up already!
Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything that you can't stop them from doing. And if you ask to see Catch-22, the law says they don't have to show it to you. What law? Catch-22, of course.
This sounds a lot like the reasoning used to detain terrorism suspects and witnesses using secret evidence.
That's what frosts my ass! I have teh VX4400B, and it proudly has a big "GPS" logo on it. Even in a diagnostic mode, I cannot get it to give me my location.
That space on surface of the phone could have been used for a button that answer/terminate calls without opening the thing up.
People have hacked the phone's directory structure:
http://bitpim.sourceforge.net/, but I'll be thrilled when someone has hacked the actual OS to re-program buttons, enable GPS for my use, or disable it all-together.
My guess is the system doesn't actually target individual cars, but gets an aggregate reading from the traffic in general. It may be able to determine that the strength of the signal for 95.5 is twice that of 101.7, so it does twice as many ads for the 95.5 market demographic.
With that in mind, you could probably build a small transmitter that you could drop nearby the thing and force it into thinking it has a majority of punk-rock or oldies listeners.
Do you have much experience with anything like Serius radio or XM? I'm strongly considering it - I would be willing to pay $11/month for commerical free music.
More on the topic of these billboards, it wouldn't take much to make fake transmitters that could fake them out. One could set their transmitter for the oldies station, and the darn things would only ever show X-lax, Metamucil, and AARP commercials!
You give the moderators too much credit.