That's funny, last I checked, ISPs were happy to sell off any amount of customer data for a buck. Let me guess, they're upset because the government only offered them fifty cents?
Well, naturally, they're a business, and businesses exist to make money. This should not come as a surprise. It's basic math... if (money received) > (money spent + damage to customer relations) then they do it. If not, they fight it.
The bigger problem seems to be when an ISP decides to automate and streamline the process rather than fight for their customer rights. This alters the equation so that "money spent" is almost eliminated, and then they're faced with deciding "How much is it worth to sell out our customer's good will?" Since many ISPs have a monopoly in their area, bad P.R. doesn't count for much, and they do it, what are you going to do, go back to dialup? It's a new revenue stream, so why wouldn't they? They're looking at this as a new way to make money, like any good business would.
I like it more when they don't automate it so completely, and submit a bill for ~$35 for each customer on the list. And when the first list they get has 100,000 IP addresses on it, it hits the fan, and splatters around. But in many markets this is arguably the "high road, the road less traveled" not "the road to greater profit". So we don't see it much.
Can't you make cleaning her mess low-priority and get to it after a week or so, leaving her unable to do her job in that time?
Besides being a good way to get chewed out/disciplined/fired, BofH-style IT isn't very ethical.
And if you still want to take the selfish approach, think about it... an office secretary with a macro virus loose on her machine, imagine how fast that would propagate around the office? turn one headache into many?
And in a recent version of office I saw someone receive a word document with macros in it. "DO NOT allow macros to run". She did anyway. Why? Because in their infinite wisdom, it won't ALLOW you to open the document with macros disabled - they give you two options, (1) open it with macros enabled, or (2) don't open it. Brilliant.
I have YET to run into a user that will listen to me when I tell them to never open those, call me and I will clean them. "But I HAD to have that document right now!" and they open it anyway. And then I have a mess to clean up. Thank you so much MS, create a problem, then implement a solution in a way that the average user will be unwilling to use.
Making mistakes due to lack of foresight, ok I can kinda get that. But then compounding the problem with just plain bad decisions is much harder to forgive.
Writing a macro language for your anything that has the ability to silently add/edit the macros in other unrelated documents is just nine kinds of stupid.
You can see the camera do take cuts before it jumps most times. Either it's chargin' its laser and they cut for time, or it's got other issues. (it may take awhile to say, charge a compressed spring piston)
Another possible angle is it may only be able to set up for the jump if it's right-side-up, and we never see it flipping itself over, so if it found itself upside-down, it could be in trouble?
But those jumps are quite impressive. I got the impression though that it could only do one height of jump, like when you see it jump off the top of the building. I was expecting a short hop to get it off the edge, but it cranks way back and catapults way up and off. So it seems to have a ways to go, development-wise.
Anyone else find it ironic that the FBI, of all organizations, (perhaps besides the NSA) is whining about losing to people hacking into our privacy? Isn't that what they do for a living? Not just to "the other people", but to our own citizens all the same nowadays?
They're grousing over a problem that they're part of...
I've had my share of managers, and have had several that were either power/ego tripping or were insecure, and refused to listen to anything anyone had to say. "I'm the manager here, just DO it" style of management. Seems to be more common with men than women. I'm not saying that women are more likely to change course on something or reconsider than men, just saying they give the opportunity more often.
In many cases, the manager wasn't hired to RUN operations, they were hired to MANAGE it, in which case they are not expected to know as much about how things work and how subtle changes interact with each other at the other end of the production line. GOOD managers listen to their employees, identify the ones that really know what's going on, and aren't afraid of listening to concerns. This just happens to be a trait that I see more often in women managers than men.
They do get the benefit from being able to ask their employees "WHY are you buying this instead of OUR product?" (which they are probably also getting a discount on) This is a valuable opportunity to discover what part of the market their product isn't properly capturing, instead of listening to the "we are perfect!" line from marketing and development.
The downside of this is that you have a P.R. problem when the press relishes in doing stories about how many of your own employees prefer the competition.
But this isn't about "personal preference" so much because (as many have already pointed out) this is about purchases on the company dime, for use in-house. In that case it takes on a slightly different tact of showing that the management really DOES believe that their product is superior in all respects. A responsible manager makes purchasing decisions based on bang-for-the-buck, at least where purchasing dollars matter. (which, admittedly, for MS may not matter) They get their employees the right tools for the job, even if the competition happens to sell a tool that does the job better than their own brand, assuming the price is right. Naturally in-house purchase of own brand costs less, but that doesn't guarantee it to always be the best choice. Managers telling their employees they can't buy what they believe is the most effective tool, due to personal bias, is just plain bad management. Most department managers can only excel when they allow job performance to override politics.
Does anyone think that the bean counters at Apple use Numbers to do all their spreadsheets? heh... of course many do, they all have it freely available, but many use Excel because its the better spreadsheet. Excel has numbers whupped good. They use the right tool for the job, even if it's a competing brand. And it enables them to do their jobs more effectively. And though I don't know for certain, I'd be willing to bet they've asked their employees on more than one occasion what they could do to improve Numbers to make it a stronger option against Excel.
it's essentially impossible to prove "bad faith" on something like this without a "smoking gun" like an email mentioning how they're just going to take a shortcut or something.
IMHO, the whole concept of "it's ok to do something illegal as long as you had good intentions" is not something that should work for the law, ever. It rarely helps the citizen. ("good samaritan" laws being the only common exception)
The whole point of having legal requirements is to force them to make sure they have their ducks in a row before exercising their powers. Once you say "well it's OK if you violate someone's rights, as long as it was an honest mistake", it opens a huge barn door to abuse. Laws should always be slanted in favor of the accused, to lower the incidence of abuse and mistaken application.
It is usually much more effective to take that one piece and replace that one function or module with a little bit of code you wrote in C or C++ rather than rewriting your entire system in a faster language, because for most of what you're doing, the speed of the language is irrelevant.'"
I have a lot of experience in code optimization, and I would dispute this generalization. "often" is a lot more realistic than "usually". The most common thing I see is where one particular segment of an operation is coded by someone that doesn't understand their O's and is doing something like multilevel lookup loops instead of a hash table. Fundamental mistakes in algorithm choice are the biggest "HERE is the biggest problem" issues I find.
Once you're past the stupid implementation mistakes, it goes just slightly in favor of "it's a little bit of everything" land. Something running significantly slower in one language than another often boils down to the coder not understanding how to make things scale in the chosen language. I can make C move slower than BASIC if I want to. Sometimes it's just knowing how the compiler is going to react to your structures. Little things like "roll up the loops when coding in VB" can produce an order or two of magnitude in speed improvement, and if you don't realize this you may think you're comparing identical implementations when you're not. "this language sucks!" often translates into "I don't know how to do it so it runs fast!"
My last project was reduced from 23 hrs per run to 21 minutes by a small but complex change in implementation. From there, getting it down to 4 minutes required a LOT of little changes all over the place, to nickel-and-dime it down. I'll trade you my "guy that knows how to recode it in C" for your "guy that knows how to code, and REALLY knows his compiler" any day.
to come up with a nice comparison involving mob protection rackets. truly is a repulsive business practice, right up there with patent trolls and ambulance chasers.
ike cake, that has always been a lie. Along with the embedded fingerprint that is supposedly able to trace a copy back to a specific machine.
No, this is very real in color photocopiers and color laser printers. They tend to place a copy of their serial number at regular intervals on color printouts, in such a faint yellow that it's impossible for the human eye to see. This makes any color printout traceable to the machine that printed it. Commonly in use by law enforcement for tracking things like death threats, ransom notes, etc.
Google for "hidden yellow serial number" and find lots of information from reputable sources. First hit I glanced at just now is from PC World. Good quote from there, Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins. "It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says.
No tinfoil hat necessary, this one's for real. Last time I looked this up I ran across a technician that works at one of those in R&D telling how every one of their color copiers has a dedicated board inline in the image processing chain whose only job is to "insert" the serial number into the image stream before it goes to the imager.
Maybe Bush was out to lunch which is not surprising
Consider other people his age in that year. 2/3 of them didn't USE email. Many of us had parent that were that age at that time and know what it's like dealing with "old people that refuse to move out of the stone age".
It would not surprise me in the least to hear that Bush1 (or Bush2 for that matter) never opened email, ever, and got his information on dead tree and in meetings. "Email's down? is that bad?"
I can't believe any capacitor takes that amount of time to charge. This isn't like a flash camera that is "pumping" a high voltage capacitor up to a few hundred volts from a pair of AA (1.5volt) batteries that have a slow discharge current. Setups like this have a big gas powered generator in the back of the truck, cranking out thousands of watts of power.
Capacitors themselves are certainly not the limit, they're specifically known and used for their ability to charge and specifically to discharge extremely rapidly. (like in the above mentioned camera)
Unless I hear otherwise, I'm chalking this up to "blatantly retarded design". Any capacitor that takes a decent genny 12 hrs to charge will have a building built around it.
You could brick the ECU, but the car would still be repairable by any authorized repair facility.
But then again your definition doesn't work for commonly accepted bricking. When my computer crashes during a firmware flash, it's bricked. I can't fix it. But if I send it in to a repair facility, they can reflash it, change the eprom, or simply replace the motherboard. So you wouldn't consider that "bricked"?
I think you may be confusing "bricked" with "totaled"? As in, (uneconomically) unrepairable by anyone?
The word "bricking" is used for electronic devices which can't be fixed by taking them apart. With a car you'd just change the ECU or whatever.
I think most people would consider replacing a car's internal module to be "taking apart".
A more general description of "bricking" would be "requiring service not normally intended to be performed by the average user".
"service" broadens the scope to include things like replacing internal modules, electrical repair, reflashing firmware, reseating an internal cable, pressing an internal reset button, doing something under the "warranty void if removed" sticker, accessing an option in a hidden menu, etc. But not to include steps specifically considered "normal user maintenance" like changing the air filer or topping off the wiper fluid or "regular scheduled maintenance" such as rotating tires or changing sparkplugs. (where we start to get into a grey area, regular maintenance overseen by the average user, by a professional)
Your definition of "average user" appears to be overly-broad. The average user doesn't troubleshoot and replace an ECU on their own.
no, really. no, not like that. I was just running this firmware update and now there's a note on the dash telling me there was a problem and I need to restart my car? but when I turn the key it won't start anymore?
That's, correct, the device is using both electrical and thermal energy input to generate light output.
Unless someone's made a very big breakthrough, you cannot get energy from heat. Not by itself. Otherwise we'd have generators you can drop into a fire and get say, electricity from. Or just stick the generator in a room and let it "suck the heat out", that'd make a marvelous air conditioner, that actually produced power. I think if that was even remotely possible we'd see those for sale by now.
What you can do is extract energy from a difference in heat. Too many examples to mention, but a sterling engine and a peltier are probably the best examples.
On an atomic scale, thermal energy is like kinetic energy, since heat is vibration. A ball flying through space has energy, but you can't just suck it out. You have to intract it with something with a different vector. In the interaction, you can extract energy from the system. It's the same with heat - you can only extract energy when interacting it with something of a different temperature.
Or you could compare it with magnets. You can't "get energy" from a magnet. But you CAN get energy out of the system of a magnet interacting with another magnet or ferrous metal etc.
So there's no way for this LED to "get energy from heat". I wonder if they are heating it up by powering it normally (below unity), and then dropping it way down in power, and changing some of that heat back into power while cooling the LED down closer to room temperature? Considering the absurdly low power levels they're using to test it, it would not surprise me if there was some recovery of electrical energy from the cooling process. But they didn't say what they did to the LED immediately before the test.
Usually when someone is claiming above unity, there's additional input of energy somewhere else that's not immediately obvious. Just a matter of careful examination of the circumstances and comparison of the pre- and post-test conditions.
Check here for some ideas on how to spot this subtle input of energy. Look specifically at the "Rubber Band Heat Engine" for an example that may apply here with these LEDs.
Slashdot Mirror
time to make another disposable gmail account huh?
(reading the fine print..) "but you may not be able to drive at the maximum speed depending on the laws in your country"
"I cry foul! You promised me I could drive this car at 100mph! None of the roads in my area allow that speed! Liars! I want money!"
sad. Brain. You have one. Use it. I'm not your Captain Obvious.
Well, naturally, they're a business, and businesses exist to make money. This should not come as a surprise. It's basic math... if (money received) > (money spent + damage to customer relations) then they do it. If not, they fight it.
The bigger problem seems to be when an ISP decides to automate and streamline the process rather than fight for their customer rights. This alters the equation so that "money spent" is almost eliminated, and then they're faced with deciding "How much is it worth to sell out our customer's good will?" Since many ISPs have a monopoly in their area, bad P.R. doesn't count for much, and they do it, what are you going to do, go back to dialup? It's a new revenue stream, so why wouldn't they? They're looking at this as a new way to make money, like any good business would.
I like it more when they don't automate it so completely, and submit a bill for ~$35 for each customer on the list. And when the first list they get has 100,000 IP addresses on it, it hits the fan, and splatters around. But in many markets this is arguably the "high road, the road less traveled" not "the road to greater profit". So we don't see it much.
Besides being a good way to get chewed out/disciplined/fired, BofH-style IT isn't very ethical.
And if you still want to take the selfish approach, think about it... an office secretary with a macro virus loose on her machine, imagine how fast that would propagate around the office? turn one headache into many?
And in a recent version of office I saw someone receive a word document with macros in it. "DO NOT allow macros to run". She did anyway. Why? Because in their infinite wisdom, it won't ALLOW you to open the document with macros disabled - they give you two options, (1) open it with macros enabled, or (2) don't open it. Brilliant.
I have YET to run into a user that will listen to me when I tell them to never open those, call me and I will clean them. "But I HAD to have that document right now!" and they open it anyway. And then I have a mess to clean up. Thank you so much MS, create a problem, then implement a solution in a way that the average user will be unwilling to use.
Making mistakes due to lack of foresight, ok I can kinda get that. But then compounding the problem with just plain bad decisions is much harder to forgive.
Writing a macro language for your anything that has the ability to silently add/edit the macros in other unrelated documents is just nine kinds of stupid.
They're just grumpy because others are cutting in on their action. If anyone's going to be violating your right to privacy, it's going to be them!
You can see the camera do take cuts before it jumps most times. Either it's chargin' its laser and they cut for time, or it's got other issues. (it may take awhile to say, charge a compressed spring piston)
Another possible angle is it may only be able to set up for the jump if it's right-side-up, and we never see it flipping itself over, so if it found itself upside-down, it could be in trouble?
But those jumps are quite impressive. I got the impression though that it could only do one height of jump, like when you see it jump off the top of the building. I was expecting a short hop to get it off the edge, but it cranks way back and catapults way up and off. So it seems to have a ways to go, development-wise.
Anyone else find it ironic that the FBI, of all organizations, (perhaps besides the NSA) is whining about losing to people hacking into our privacy? Isn't that what they do for a living? Not just to "the other people", but to our own citizens all the same nowadays?
They're grousing over a problem that they're part of...
the "silent majority" is too silent. none of this will change until the "silent majority" turns into the "pissed off majority"
isn't this a violation of the (grossly over-broad) DMCA, in "bypassing a protective measure"?
I mean, technically, aren't they hacking it and selling an exploit?
It would be refreshin to see that law used to protect some of the public for once.
I've had my share of managers, and have had several that were either power/ego tripping or were insecure, and refused to listen to anything anyone had to say. "I'm the manager here, just DO it" style of management. Seems to be more common with men than women. I'm not saying that women are more likely to change course on something or reconsider than men, just saying they give the opportunity more often.
In many cases, the manager wasn't hired to RUN operations, they were hired to MANAGE it, in which case they are not expected to know as much about how things work and how subtle changes interact with each other at the other end of the production line. GOOD managers listen to their employees, identify the ones that really know what's going on, and aren't afraid of listening to concerns. This just happens to be a trait that I see more often in women managers than men.
they also don't like being hashed...
They do get the benefit from being able to ask their employees "WHY are you buying this instead of OUR product?" (which they are probably also getting a discount on) This is a valuable opportunity to discover what part of the market their product isn't properly capturing, instead of listening to the "we are perfect!" line from marketing and development.
The downside of this is that you have a P.R. problem when the press relishes in doing stories about how many of your own employees prefer the competition.
But this isn't about "personal preference" so much because (as many have already pointed out) this is about purchases on the company dime, for use in-house. In that case it takes on a slightly different tact of showing that the management really DOES believe that their product is superior in all respects. A responsible manager makes purchasing decisions based on bang-for-the-buck, at least where purchasing dollars matter. (which, admittedly, for MS may not matter) They get their employees the right tools for the job, even if the competition happens to sell a tool that does the job better than their own brand, assuming the price is right. Naturally in-house purchase of own brand costs less, but that doesn't guarantee it to always be the best choice. Managers telling their employees they can't buy what they believe is the most effective tool, due to personal bias, is just plain bad management. Most department managers can only excel when they allow job performance to override politics.
Does anyone think that the bean counters at Apple use Numbers to do all their spreadsheets? heh... of course many do, they all have it freely available, but many use Excel because its the better spreadsheet. Excel has numbers whupped good. They use the right tool for the job, even if it's a competing brand. And it enables them to do their jobs more effectively. And though I don't know for certain, I'd be willing to bet they've asked their employees on more than one occasion what they could do to improve Numbers to make it a stronger option against Excel.
it's essentially impossible to prove "bad faith" on something like this without a "smoking gun" like an email mentioning how they're just going to take a shortcut or something.
IMHO, the whole concept of "it's ok to do something illegal as long as you had good intentions" is not something that should work for the law, ever. It rarely helps the citizen. ("good samaritan" laws being the only common exception)
The whole point of having legal requirements is to force them to make sure they have their ducks in a row before exercising their powers. Once you say "well it's OK if you violate someone's rights, as long as it was an honest mistake", it opens a huge barn door to abuse. Laws should always be slanted in favor of the accused, to lower the incidence of abuse and mistaken application.
I have a lot of experience in code optimization, and I would dispute this generalization. "often" is a lot more realistic than "usually". The most common thing I see is where one particular segment of an operation is coded by someone that doesn't understand their O's and is doing something like multilevel lookup loops instead of a hash table. Fundamental mistakes in algorithm choice are the biggest "HERE is the biggest problem" issues I find.
Once you're past the stupid implementation mistakes, it goes just slightly in favor of "it's a little bit of everything" land. Something running significantly slower in one language than another often boils down to the coder not understanding how to make things scale in the chosen language. I can make C move slower than BASIC if I want to. Sometimes it's just knowing how the compiler is going to react to your structures. Little things like "roll up the loops when coding in VB" can produce an order or two of magnitude in speed improvement, and if you don't realize this you may think you're comparing identical implementations when you're not. "this language sucks!" often translates into "I don't know how to do it so it runs fast!"
My last project was reduced from 23 hrs per run to 21 minutes by a small but complex change in implementation. From there, getting it down to 4 minutes required a LOT of little changes all over the place, to nickel-and-dime it down. I'll trade you my "guy that knows how to recode it in C" for your "guy that knows how to code, and REALLY knows his compiler" any day.
to come up with a nice comparison involving mob protection rackets. truly is a repulsive business practice, right up there with patent trolls and ambulance chasers.
No, this is very real in color photocopiers and color laser printers. They tend to place a copy of their serial number at regular intervals on color printouts, in such a faint yellow that it's impossible for the human eye to see. This makes any color printout traceable to the machine that printed it. Commonly in use by law enforcement for tracking things like death threats, ransom notes, etc.
Google for "hidden yellow serial number" and find lots of information from reputable sources. First hit I glanced at just now is from PC World. Good quote from there, Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins. "It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says.
No tinfoil hat necessary, this one's for real. Last time I looked this up I ran across a technician that works at one of those in R&D telling how every one of their color copiers has a dedicated board inline in the image processing chain whose only job is to "insert" the serial number into the image stream before it goes to the imager.
Consider other people his age in that year. 2/3 of them didn't USE email. Many of us had parent that were that age at that time and know what it's like dealing with "old people that refuse to move out of the stone age".
It would not surprise me in the least to hear that Bush1 (or Bush2 for that matter) never opened email, ever, and got his information on dead tree and in meetings. "Email's down? is that bad?"
I can't believe any capacitor takes that amount of time to charge. This isn't like a flash camera that is "pumping" a high voltage capacitor up to a few hundred volts from a pair of AA (1.5volt) batteries that have a slow discharge current. Setups like this have a big gas powered generator in the back of the truck, cranking out thousands of watts of power.
Capacitors themselves are certainly not the limit, they're specifically known and used for their ability to charge and specifically to discharge extremely rapidly. (like in the above mentioned camera)
Unless I hear otherwise, I'm chalking this up to "blatantly retarded design". Any capacitor that takes a decent genny 12 hrs to charge will have a building built around it.
But then again your definition doesn't work for commonly accepted bricking. When my computer crashes during a firmware flash, it's bricked. I can't fix it. But if I send it in to a repair facility, they can reflash it, change the eprom, or simply replace the motherboard. So you wouldn't consider that "bricked"?
I think you may be confusing "bricked" with "totaled"? As in, (uneconomically) unrepairable by anyone?
I think most people would consider replacing a car's internal module to be "taking apart".
A more general description of "bricking" would be "requiring service not normally intended to be performed by the average user".
"service" broadens the scope to include things like replacing internal modules, electrical repair, reflashing firmware, reseating an internal cable, pressing an internal reset button, doing something under the "warranty void if removed" sticker, accessing an option in a hidden menu, etc. But not to include steps specifically considered "normal user maintenance" like changing the air filer or topping off the wiper fluid or "regular scheduled maintenance" such as rotating tires or changing sparkplugs. (where we start to get into a grey area, regular maintenance overseen by the average user, by a professional)
Your definition of "average user" appears to be overly-broad. The average user doesn't troubleshoot and replace an ECU on their own.
I consider myself lucky to have never bricked anything with a firmware update before. But can you just imagine bricking your CAR?
no, really. no, not like that. I was just running this firmware update and now there's a note on the dash telling me there was a problem and I need to restart my car? but when I turn the key it won't start anymore?
Unless someone's made a very big breakthrough, you cannot get energy from heat. Not by itself. Otherwise we'd have generators you can drop into a fire and get say, electricity from. Or just stick the generator in a room and let it "suck the heat out", that'd make a marvelous air conditioner, that actually produced power. I think if that was even remotely possible we'd see those for sale by now.
What you can do is extract energy from a difference in heat. Too many examples to mention, but a sterling engine and a peltier are probably the best examples.
On an atomic scale, thermal energy is like kinetic energy, since heat is vibration. A ball flying through space has energy, but you can't just suck it out. You have to intract it with something with a different vector. In the interaction, you can extract energy from the system. It's the same with heat - you can only extract energy when interacting it with something of a different temperature.
Or you could compare it with magnets. You can't "get energy" from a magnet. But you CAN get energy out of the system of a magnet interacting with another magnet or ferrous metal etc.
So there's no way for this LED to "get energy from heat". I wonder if they are heating it up by powering it normally (below unity), and then dropping it way down in power, and changing some of that heat back into power while cooling the LED down closer to room temperature? Considering the absurdly low power levels they're using to test it, it would not surprise me if there was some recovery of electrical energy from the cooling process. But they didn't say what they did to the LED immediately before the test.
Usually when someone is claiming above unity, there's additional input of energy somewhere else that's not immediately obvious. Just a matter of careful examination of the circumstances and comparison of the pre- and post-test conditions.
Check here for some ideas on how to spot this subtle input of energy. Look specifically at the "Rubber Band Heat Engine" for an example that may apply here with these LEDs.