That's surprising considering how common they are. 911 was the original firewire 400 chipset. 922 is now in use with the fw800 chips mostly now. I don't know what they're using in the combination carriers. By now they should be making the triple (sata, fw, usb) boards with a single chip I'd expect.
"...evolution does not provide traits that are advantageous,..." Yes it does.
Possibly more correct to say that evolution continuously offers random features which may or may not be advantageous, and the features which are detrimental to its survival tend to be removed from the gene pool.
OP is correct in saying that evolution in itself doesn't provide anything specifically helpful. It does encourage traits that happen to be beneficial though. Evolution is not the process of trying improvements, that's what heterosexual reproduction is for. The purpose of evolution is to improve on the survival of the accidentally better designs.
There are an insane number of good examples, but I'll toss out a good one now. Sickle Cell Anemia. Sucks if you have it, has a variety of nasty side effects and no visible benefit. Except if you live in say, Nicaragua, and are exposed to malaria-bearing mosquitoes all the time. Something about the cell shape defies the virus, SCA sufferers are immune to malaria. So the SCA expression there is very very high because although it grants a disadvantage, it also grants an advantage. Interesting thing about SCA is you only need one gene to have immunity, and require both to get the nasty side effects. But it's advantageous enough to be kept.
There are a couple animals in the wild that birth several young at a time, and the siblings kill or eat each other until at the end of the rearing there's only one left. (the strongest) I think they were both birds iirc. Anyone happen to know what critters I'm thinking of?
4) As my wife says, playground close to a sewage works
That's usually the voters at work actually. Parks require large plots of land and are very expensive most places besides flood planes and near sewage treatment plants where property values are very low. And so that's where you find 95% of parks because no one would vote for a park if the price went up tenfold by a change of venue.
Ok, now for the cause and how to do it right: First of all, you need someone that he respects. This is essential, to be able to tell him anything that he will actually consider.
Someone that gets 95% of their daily entertainment by creating misery for others, you may find it very difficult or impossible to find someone that a person like that "respects", unless he admires their even greater ability to make others miserable. He has no respect for anyone, and that's part of the problem, but identifying part of the problem doesn't magically make it easy to fix. People that have zero respect for anyone outside their inner circle are very difficult to reason with, with respect to how they are treating those people.
Then that someone needs to create a positive motivating gradient. (Something that naturally gives the feeling of wanting to go there by yourself.) This starts by offering life-improving things. Things that are way better *in his eyes* than what he does right now.
Lets see... no work. no school. no bills. no rent. all-day-entertainment. How are you possibly going to offer him a better life? This is why the parents are the problem. They're already giving him utopia. You're right, he currently has no reason to change. But then again, he's got it more than good enough right now as he sees it.
Then you can add a short burst of negativity to get it going. But *only ONE time*. A bit like a zero point experience to start over. Who do you think will not go towards that way better "portal of salvation", when in that situation? Nobody
ok kicking him out on the street I agree was a little harsh, but letting him park himself in front of a computer all day eating pizza isn't going to solve the problem. As much as some slashdotters probably won't like this suggestion, I'd say the first thing on the list is take the computer away. Still allow its use, but in a highly restricted way, and use that as the reward for things like submitting job apps. Right now that computer is probably the only thing you can hold against him. See previous list, you can't force him to go to school, can't make him pay bills or rent if he doesn't have a job, and there's your entertainment. So that's pretty much the only angle left that he will listen to.
The short term effect is almost guaranteed to be his moving out on his own free will unfortunately. (though 100% considered "forced" in his mind)
There are a lot of specific examples of where you can't just dump in certain exemptions into your TOS and wash your hands of liability. I'm surprised this isn't one of them.
I don't see why it's legal in a generic sense to be able to surrender your rights to legal action as a TOS.
Reading TFA it shows that this kid doesn't go to school and doesn't have a job, he just spends his days and nights mooching off his mom and finding ways to entertain himself.
One of those cases I'd file under "parents enabling the problem". Kick him out on the street where he belongs, force him to get a job and spend some of his time doing something constructive, rather than 100% of his time spent on destructive self-entertainment. There are some cases where the parents bear a significant chunk of the responsibility for their kids' behavior, and this is definitely one of them.
ATARI- Asteroids. Eliminate all the boulders except one, and then take-on the UFO in a one-on-one gunfight.
I used to do that. You'd get a UFO about every 40 seconds wouldn't you? I could usually blow up UFOs for about 30 minutes straight before the UFO would fire a stray shot that would blow up the last little rock.
Archon: use a single powerful piece to kill all the AI's pieces except one. Return it to its home board position. Use the magic user to summon a creature and kill the AI's last piece withi it. (causing a win where your entire board was at its original start position, and the AI had not a single piece on the board)
Wings of Fury: blow up all the assets on the islands except one, and spend the next few hrs honing your skills at dogfighting torpedo planes. After a LOT of effort I was able to somewhat time the place an enemy plane would fall out of the sky when I finally smoked its engine. You could use them to take out bunkers.
Vague memories of Conan almost solving screens and spending an hour or two skilling respawns, building up pts or additional lives. Common activity in many games. If you threw your axe timed so it just nicked an enemy as it was about to turn around and return to you, you were guaranteed it would not be lost in the killing. (otherwise axes had about a 20% chance of not returning)
using the cheat code in wizardry to start the game with a pack of high level priests, and just pretty much nuke everything. (another common theme)
use the magic carpet bug in ultima to get unlimited magic carpets and use them like highways.
Montizuma's revenge: play it to the end where it restarts, and another level starts dark, all the way to where the first level you start at is dark.
Choplifter - manage to get a line of tanks all the way to the enemy's base. You can take it over just like you can take over the bases along the battlefield. (get some men in) If you do take it over, it will even shoot at the enemy helicopter and equipment he buys! (he will buy tanks so you need to keep those in check as they will take his base back) The enemy will never run out of helicopters though and a new one will spawn on the pad every 5 seconds, but see how long you can hold control of his base. Alternately, go to his base and see how long you can dodge missiles. I've had over a dozen missiles onscreen at once trying to hit me. Practically anything an "out of gas" missile hits will blow up, including tanks. Make a "superman", pick up men and drop them in a chunk when on the ground. Get 5 more and repeat right next to them. You can build a solid block of men about 2" long that will absolutely mow anything down, short of a tank or base. You can also airlift men into the perimeter of a base between its door and its gun, to work toward taking it over. (ever notice that sometimes a parartrooper's chute wouldn't open?)
Will the firmware in the drive be able to do this without understanding the filesystem?
Just off the top of my head I can see where the onboard controller would have a big advantage. If we simplify the case and say the drive uses 2k blocks and the file system can't be modified to use 2k blocks, (lame!) then the onboard controller should watch for situations where a cell (of four 512 byte blocks) is frequently being reflashed because a single one of the four is being changed. Then if it could take a look at history and determine that somewhere else are three more blocks that always are getting changed at the same time, it could remap them to all four use the same flash block, so next time save a file, something that the controller has no higher understanding of, it only has to reflash one block instead of 2 (or 3 or 4).
Of course ideally the OS could just be intelligent to be told the device uses 2k blocks instead of 512 byte which would make the above totally unnecessary.
I was wondering that too, surely there are a number of people all members of those groups. I'd expect people that are members of two or more to be members of most.
look at the activity lights on the whatever you have for networking equipment. If the activity lights go ape after the system comes up, and stays that way, back up what's safe and reload it.
Everyone here seems to think that the companies are going to react totally cut-and-dry with these things. That's not what they're for.
Last drowned laptop I worked on, the customer checked it in that "it just wouldn't turn on this morning". After taking it apart and seeing the streak of dried residue under the keyboard we called her back, "looks like something got spilled on it". She then admitted that yes it did get a drink spilled on it a few days ago, and we were able to discuss repair options from there on more honest terms.
Most customers KNOW they abused their product, and are just trying to sneak something through. If you call them on it, in MOST cases, they will immediately fess up and that's that. If someone argues with you, then you can cut them some slack and start looking into reasonable doubt on what you've found.
LONG time ago we received an ibook that would not turn on. It was checked in by a quadriplegic that had very little use of one HAND and I think used a stick to type. The ibook reeked of beer but we took it apart anyway and there were still drops of liquid inside that hadn't dried up yet. We kicked ideas around, how do we discuss THAT with this customer? How do we accuse him of spilling a beer? So he comes in the next day and we start to explain how it looks like beer was spilled in it, and IMMEDIATELY he replies "I'm going to KILL my roommate..." (his roommate was also his caretaker, and had borrowed the laptop the previous day, and returned it to him thereafter saying "it just quit working")
So I think this whole issue is totally overblown. If someone's being stubborn about your equipment claiming it was abused, if you discuss it with them they're likely to give you a lot of slack, knowing the sensors aren't infallible. These sensors are mainly to assist in finding the truth. People are a lot more likely to fess up to abuse if you have physical evidence. If they're unwilling to admit fault we try to stretch them as much benefit-of-the-doubt as we possibly can. But the percent of mail-in fraud is probably a lot higher, people find it a lot easier to ship it off to a repair center and cross their fingers they don't notice the Pepsi inside, rather than try to pawn it off to a repair center in person and try to make up an excuse. So I can see why the ship-it-in places are a lot more draconian on their sensors, the incidence of fraud is probably a great deal higher for them than the brick-and-mortar repair shops.
And addressing a separate issue that has come up repeatedly, (and that does, in such threads) YES, if you live in an environment with constant 95% humidity, the sensor IS going to turn red. Now RTFM and see it says that exceeds the design limits of the product. Now stop your complaining. You shouldn't buy something to be used in conditions that the manufacturer is telling you it won't survive. That's like buying a banana tree and planting it in Arizona and complaining that the plant was defective when it dies. Ya I suppose someone might still sell it to you, but still that's not THEIR problem, it's YOURS. Use your head. It's not the world's responsibility to protect you from your own lack of common sense. If idiots that live in Arizona keep ordering banana trees from me, I'm going to keep selling 'em to them, and not feel the slightest bit of remorse. A fool and his money, you know how that goes.
One thing often overlooked is what else is in the liquid. Most pop for example, contains a good deal of sugar. When the water dries out, assuming it doesn't get exposed to enough electricity to start corroding things, leaves behind all the syrup in the drink.
If that gets under keys, mouse buttons, etc, things start sticking. The effect grows progressively worse over the next several days. We replace a good dead of keyboards and trackpads for this reason. Not because it fried, but because it sticks. Most of you have seen what a sticky spot you get when you spill pop on a table and don't clean it up and it dries up. Same thing. Much worse when it's in a small gap where a weak spring action is relied on to return something to its home position.
I use firewire devices several times a day sometimes, from a wide variety of sources, and I haven't noticed any stability issues in quite a long time. Can you be more specific? (is it a specific brand of firewire chipset? I recall in the past there were some chipset-specific issues)
There are some people that run windows on their mbp (boot camp) more than the mac environment. Just as there will be some that go boot camp because they want/need to use windows a little bit, there will also be the other few that want/need to use mac a little bit, and for them, Mac OS X is the "guest OS". Same can be said of other OSs on the machine such as linux. I know one person that uses his mbp almost exclusively in linux. He's got the thing triple booting and can drop into mac os or windows when needed.
For those that need most of one and a little of another, It's arguably easier to osx/win on a macbook than on a pc(dell etc) laptop, so regardless of which is your 80 of the 80/20, the macbook is the path of least resistance. (tho certainly the more expensive option, possibly the higher quality, and maybe that's the issue here with seeing lower battery life?)
I don't know of any 10.4.11 major issues. 10.3.9 causes IMAP problems in mail though, I do remember that. Had to revert a system back to 10.3.8 after an SOP update blew up their email fetch.
What were the issues you ran into witih 10.4.11/10.3.9?
The reason why streaming music is taking over is because radio is crap.
Maybe I'm the exception here, but I listen to streaming music all day at work because radio reception stinks where I work. Fortunately the local station I like to listen to has an online stream.
For those of you wondering why green laser pointers exist, here is the short answer: take an infrared diode laser, use it to power another laser that is deep into the infrared. Use an optical nonlinear crystal to double the frequency and half the wavelength of that laser. You get 530nm light and profit from a complicated little device. The overall efficiency of this process, however, is something like 6 percent.
That should make most people immediately wonder why the brightest handheld laser pointers you can get currently are green. (ok some of the blue ones are pretty good too but green rules here generally)
The reason is the human eye is MUCH more sensitive to green than it is to red, especially the red that's approaching infrared that most handheld pointers use. So for 1/4 of the power you can 10x the visual impact.
Long ago I bought a special red laser pointer, it was red but it was shifted much farther away from IR than any of the common pointers of the day. At the time it was the only one you could see in daylight on say a wall. From what I've seen of modern laser pointers like the little keychain ones, they must all be using the higher freq (lower wavelength) now. Memory's really fuzzy at this point but iirc the common "dim" pointers ran at 550-560nm, and mine runs 535. Not a LOT of difference, and still looks like the same red, but runs 4x the visibility at 1/2 the power.
I believe green is the most sensitive color for most herbivores?
So while a mini might be economy to a Mac guy, to someone from the Windows world the Mini is anything BUT economy, because by the time you pay for all the extras you get with a Dell or HP you are looking at $800+.
Anyone that sees the mac mini as an economy standalone computer purchase is missing the entire point of the model.
It's meant to be a cheap way to convert someone from PC to mac. Use your existing PC display, keyboard, and mouse from the PC that just crapped out, or that has become so worm/spy/adware infested as to be useless.
PC users are used to paying less for their computer. So to get them more computer for less money, requires just replacing the computer, and keeping the peripherals. Otherwise some of them would never go for it. The last time they bought a computer it cost the same (because it came with all the peripherals) so it doesn't feel like they're having to pay more for the mac.
All one needs to wreak some serious EMP damage, he charges, is a sea-worthy steamer, $100,000 to buy a scud-missile launcher, and a crude nuclear weapon
I'd imagine a lot of Evil Plans have that one basic requirement.
1) run a seed box. Use another computer to do your torrenting, and when something finishes, let it ride until it gets deleted. Set the computer to auto start after power fail etc.
How would one justify the electric bill for that?
If your seed box is making a noticeable impact on your electric bill, either move to a civilized country or get a better machine. A seed box shouldn't add more than a buck a month to your electric bill.
3) upload your own torrents. 100% of your traffic on an upload is upload ratio. Just be sure you mind the site's rules.
I already dealt with that in this comment [slashdot.org]. Even if private trackers didn't have a policy of scene releases only, how would I create works that other tracker users want to download?
Sorry I can't help you with your creativity. Consider finding public works and making collections. Some sites allow this and users like someone saving them them time. You'd be amazed how popular picture collections of hot celebs are.
Avoid trawling old torrents for something you want or might want. Have some patience and see if someone else will upload a newer/better version that you can hop right on while it's new instead.
So once the torrent for a DVD nears its end of life, would you recommend that I wait years for the Blu-ray release?
Maybe someone will upload the director's cut, or a version with multiple audio tracks, additional content, higher bitrate encode (or perhaps raw, or vice-versa, not everyone wants to download 7gb of VOBs) There are many possibilities even for your specific example. If you downloaded VOBs because that's all that was available, then encode them down to MP4 and watch people with metered bandwidth flock to your swarm.
6) all the usual BT stuff... make sure your ports are mapped
A mapped port isn't worth much if no downloaders want to connect to it.
Actually, if you DON'T have a mapped port, and a leech that wants your seed isn't or can't map his port, that will prevent them from connecting from you. That's the point of "being clever". Seeders that aren't clever should expect a lot less traffic.
Make sure your port isn't being throttled by your ISP.
What can I do if both the local cable company and the local phone company throttle BitTorrent traffic even on a nonstandard (but constant) port? Is it common among users of private trackers to move their families to a town that has an ISP that doesn't throttle BitTorrent traffic?
You may have to go with a different provider, possibly a lower quality one, or you may just be SOL. Not every problem is fixable.
Try different BT clients that may perform better.
Which private trackers tend to ban. It's either recent Azureus or recent uTorrent or nothing.
Just pay attention to the rules. Very often they have an entire thread or faq devoted to this issue, and will get very specific about which versions of which clients they do and do not accept. It's common to see a whole string of posts on a given client, as new versions are either being banned or accepted as new versions are released and bugs crop up or get fixed.
You appear to be content to chew on sour grapes rather than try to fix your problem.
They have tried, through various schemes, to compete in this market and have come up bubkis.
I believe the reason for this is it's hard to compete in the low AND high end markets at the same time, at least under the same brand.
Dell tries to do this, but the world knows dell for cheap PCs.
Cisco/Linksys is my favorite example. They keep those two brand names very separate for a good reason. What IT dept would shop Linksys for their company firewall, and who would imagine they could afford/use a Cisco at home?
Apple is known for quality, longevity, and higher price. There's nothing to gain from them trying to get any sizable portion of the low-end market. The only reason they sell the mac mini is to get PC converts, not because they want a foot in the low end market.
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That's surprising considering how common they are. 911 was the original firewire 400 chipset. 922 is now in use with the fw800 chips mostly now. I don't know what they're using in the combination carriers. By now they should be making the triple (sata, fw, usb) boards with a single chip I'd expect.
"...evolution does not provide traits that are advantageous, ..."
Yes it does.
Possibly more correct to say that evolution continuously offers random features which may or may not be advantageous, and the features which are detrimental to its survival tend to be removed from the gene pool.
OP is correct in saying that evolution in itself doesn't provide anything specifically helpful. It does encourage traits that happen to be beneficial though. Evolution is not the process of trying improvements, that's what heterosexual reproduction is for. The purpose of evolution is to improve on the survival of the accidentally better designs.
There are an insane number of good examples, but I'll toss out a good one now. Sickle Cell Anemia. Sucks if you have it, has a variety of nasty side effects and no visible benefit. Except if you live in say, Nicaragua, and are exposed to malaria-bearing mosquitoes all the time. Something about the cell shape defies the virus, SCA sufferers are immune to malaria. So the SCA expression there is very very high because although it grants a disadvantage, it also grants an advantage. Interesting thing about SCA is you only need one gene to have immunity, and require both to get the nasty side effects. But it's advantageous enough to be kept.
There are a couple animals in the wild that birth several young at a time, and the siblings kill or eat each other until at the end of the rearing there's only one left. (the strongest) I think they were both birds iirc. Anyone happen to know what critters I'm thinking of?
4) As my wife says, playground close to a sewage works
That's usually the voters at work actually. Parks require large plots of land and are very expensive most places besides flood planes and near sewage treatment plants where property values are very low. And so that's where you find 95% of parks because no one would vote for a park if the price went up tenfold by a change of venue.
Ok, now for the cause and how to do it right:
First of all, you need someone that he respects. This is essential, to be able to tell him anything that he will actually consider.
Someone that gets 95% of their daily entertainment by creating misery for others, you may find it very difficult or impossible to find someone that a person like that "respects", unless he admires their even greater ability to make others miserable. He has no respect for anyone, and that's part of the problem, but identifying part of the problem doesn't magically make it easy to fix. People that have zero respect for anyone outside their inner circle are very difficult to reason with, with respect to how they are treating those people.
Then that someone needs to create a positive motivating gradient. (Something that naturally gives the feeling of wanting to go there by yourself.)
This starts by offering life-improving things. Things that are way better *in his eyes* than what he does right now.
Lets see... no work. no school. no bills. no rent. all-day-entertainment. How are you possibly going to offer him a better life? This is why the parents are the problem. They're already giving him utopia. You're right, he currently has no reason to change. But then again, he's got it more than good enough right now as he sees it.
Then you can add a short burst of negativity to get it going. But *only ONE time*. A bit like a zero point experience to start over.
Who do you think will not go towards that way better "portal of salvation", when in that situation? Nobody
ok kicking him out on the street I agree was a little harsh, but letting him park himself in front of a computer all day eating pizza isn't going to solve the problem. As much as some slashdotters probably won't like this suggestion, I'd say the first thing on the list is take the computer away. Still allow its use, but in a highly restricted way, and use that as the reward for things like submitting job apps. Right now that computer is probably the only thing you can hold against him. See previous list, you can't force him to go to school, can't make him pay bills or rent if he doesn't have a job, and there's your entertainment. So that's pretty much the only angle left that he will listen to.
The short term effect is almost guaranteed to be his moving out on his own free will unfortunately. (though 100% considered "forced" in his mind)
There are a lot of specific examples of where you can't just dump in certain exemptions into your TOS and wash your hands of liability. I'm surprised this isn't one of them.
I don't see why it's legal in a generic sense to be able to surrender your rights to legal action as a TOS.
Reading TFA it shows that this kid doesn't go to school and doesn't have a job, he just spends his days and nights mooching off his mom and finding ways to entertain himself.
One of those cases I'd file under "parents enabling the problem". Kick him out on the street where he belongs, force him to get a job and spend some of his time doing something constructive, rather than 100% of his time spent on destructive self-entertainment. There are some cases where the parents bear a significant chunk of the responsibility for their kids' behavior, and this is definitely one of them.
ATARI- Asteroids. Eliminate all the boulders except one, and then take-on the UFO in a one-on-one gunfight.
I used to do that. You'd get a UFO about every 40 seconds wouldn't you? I could usually blow up UFOs for about 30 minutes straight before the UFO would fire a stray shot that would blow up the last little rock.
Archon: use a single powerful piece to kill all the AI's pieces except one. Return it to its home board position. Use the magic user to summon a creature and kill the AI's last piece withi it. (causing a win where your entire board was at its original start position, and the AI had not a single piece on the board)
Wings of Fury: blow up all the assets on the islands except one, and spend the next few hrs honing your skills at dogfighting torpedo planes. After a LOT of effort I was able to somewhat time the place an enemy plane would fall out of the sky when I finally smoked its engine. You could use them to take out bunkers.
Vague memories of Conan almost solving screens and spending an hour or two skilling respawns, building up pts or additional lives. Common activity in many games. If you threw your axe timed so it just nicked an enemy as it was about to turn around and return to you, you were guaranteed it would not be lost in the killing. (otherwise axes had about a 20% chance of not returning)
using the cheat code in wizardry to start the game with a pack of high level priests, and just pretty much nuke everything. (another common theme)
use the magic carpet bug in ultima to get unlimited magic carpets and use them like highways.
Montizuma's revenge: play it to the end where it restarts, and another level starts dark, all the way to where the first level you start at is dark.
Choplifter - manage to get a line of tanks all the way to the enemy's base. You can take it over just like you can take over the bases along the battlefield. (get some men in) If you do take it over, it will even shoot at the enemy helicopter and equipment he buys! (he will buy tanks so you need to keep those in check as they will take his base back) The enemy will never run out of helicopters though and a new one will spawn on the pad every 5 seconds, but see how long you can hold control of his base. Alternately, go to his base and see how long you can dodge missiles. I've had over a dozen missiles onscreen at once trying to hit me. Practically anything an "out of gas" missile hits will blow up, including tanks. Make a "superman", pick up men and drop them in a chunk when on the ground. Get 5 more and repeat right next to them. You can build a solid block of men about 2" long that will absolutely mow anything down, short of a tank or base. You can also airlift men into the perimeter of a base between its door and its gun, to work toward taking it over. (ever notice that sometimes a parartrooper's chute wouldn't open?)
Ahh memory lane.
Will the firmware in the drive be able to do this without understanding the filesystem?
Just off the top of my head I can see where the onboard controller would have a big advantage. If we simplify the case and say the drive uses 2k blocks and the file system can't be modified to use 2k blocks, (lame!) then the onboard controller should watch for situations where a cell (of four 512 byte blocks) is frequently being reflashed because a single one of the four is being changed. Then if it could take a look at history and determine that somewhere else are three more blocks that always are getting changed at the same time, it could remap them to all four use the same flash block, so next time save a file, something that the controller has no higher understanding of, it only has to reflash one block instead of 2 (or 3 or 4).
Of course ideally the OS could just be intelligent to be told the device uses 2k blocks instead of 512 byte which would make the above totally unnecessary.
I was wondering that too, surely there are a number of people all members of those groups. I'd expect people that are members of two or more to be members of most.
look at the activity lights on the whatever you have for networking equipment. If the activity lights go ape after the system comes up, and stays that way, back up what's safe and reload it.
Everyone here seems to think that the companies are going to react totally cut-and-dry with these things. That's not what they're for.
Last drowned laptop I worked on, the customer checked it in that "it just wouldn't turn on this morning". After taking it apart and seeing the streak of dried residue under the keyboard we called her back, "looks like something got spilled on it". She then admitted that yes it did get a drink spilled on it a few days ago, and we were able to discuss repair options from there on more honest terms.
Most customers KNOW they abused their product, and are just trying to sneak something through. If you call them on it, in MOST cases, they will immediately fess up and that's that. If someone argues with you, then you can cut them some slack and start looking into reasonable doubt on what you've found.
LONG time ago we received an ibook that would not turn on. It was checked in by a quadriplegic that had very little use of one HAND and I think used a stick to type. The ibook reeked of beer but we took it apart anyway and there were still drops of liquid inside that hadn't dried up yet. We kicked ideas around, how do we discuss THAT with this customer? How do we accuse him of spilling a beer? So he comes in the next day and we start to explain how it looks like beer was spilled in it, and IMMEDIATELY he replies "I'm going to KILL my roommate..." (his roommate was also his caretaker, and had borrowed the laptop the previous day, and returned it to him thereafter saying "it just quit working")
So I think this whole issue is totally overblown. If someone's being stubborn about your equipment claiming it was abused, if you discuss it with them they're likely to give you a lot of slack, knowing the sensors aren't infallible. These sensors are mainly to assist in finding the truth. People are a lot more likely to fess up to abuse if you have physical evidence. If they're unwilling to admit fault we try to stretch them as much benefit-of-the-doubt as we possibly can. But the percent of mail-in fraud is probably a lot higher, people find it a lot easier to ship it off to a repair center and cross their fingers they don't notice the Pepsi inside, rather than try to pawn it off to a repair center in person and try to make up an excuse. So I can see why the ship-it-in places are a lot more draconian on their sensors, the incidence of fraud is probably a great deal higher for them than the brick-and-mortar repair shops.
And addressing a separate issue that has come up repeatedly, (and that does, in such threads) YES, if you live in an environment with constant 95% humidity, the sensor IS going to turn red. Now RTFM and see it says that exceeds the design limits of the product. Now stop your complaining. You shouldn't buy something to be used in conditions that the manufacturer is telling you it won't survive. That's like buying a banana tree and planting it in Arizona and complaining that the plant was defective when it dies. Ya I suppose someone might still sell it to you, but still that's not THEIR problem, it's YOURS. Use your head. It's not the world's responsibility to protect you from your own lack of common sense. If idiots that live in Arizona keep ordering banana trees from me, I'm going to keep selling 'em to them, and not feel the slightest bit of remorse. A fool and his money, you know how that goes.
One thing often overlooked is what else is in the liquid. Most pop for example, contains a good deal of sugar. When the water dries out, assuming it doesn't get exposed to enough electricity to start corroding things, leaves behind all the syrup in the drink.
If that gets under keys, mouse buttons, etc, things start sticking. The effect grows progressively worse over the next several days. We replace a good dead of keyboards and trackpads for this reason. Not because it fried, but because it sticks. Most of you have seen what a sticky spot you get when you spill pop on a table and don't clean it up and it dries up. Same thing. Much worse when it's in a small gap where a weak spring action is relied on to return something to its home position.
I use firewire devices several times a day sometimes, from a wide variety of sources, and I haven't noticed any stability issues in quite a long time. Can you be more specific? (is it a specific brand of firewire chipset? I recall in the past there were some chipset-specific issues)
There are some people that run windows on their mbp (boot camp) more than the mac environment. Just as there will be some that go boot camp because they want/need to use windows a little bit, there will also be the other few that want/need to use mac a little bit, and for them, Mac OS X is the "guest OS". Same can be said of other OSs on the machine such as linux. I know one person that uses his mbp almost exclusively in linux. He's got the thing triple booting and can drop into mac os or windows when needed.
For those that need most of one and a little of another, It's arguably easier to osx/win on a macbook than on a pc(dell etc) laptop, so regardless of which is your 80 of the 80/20, the macbook is the path of least resistance. (tho certainly the more expensive option, possibly the higher quality, and maybe that's the issue here with seeing lower battery life?)
I don't know of any 10.4.11 major issues. 10.3.9 causes IMAP problems in mail though, I do remember that. Had to revert a system back to 10.3.8 after an SOP update blew up their email fetch.
What were the issues you ran into witih 10.4.11/10.3.9?
but they've already got WIndows installed?
The reason why streaming music is taking over is because radio is crap.
Maybe I'm the exception here, but I listen to streaming music all day at work because radio reception stinks where I work. Fortunately the local station I like to listen to has an online stream.
You just need to learn more aboot the language before you visit.
For those of you wondering why green laser pointers exist, here is the short answer: take an infrared diode laser, use it to power another laser that is deep into the infrared. Use an optical nonlinear crystal to double the frequency and half the wavelength of that laser. You get 530nm light and profit from a complicated little device. The overall efficiency of this process, however, is something like 6 percent.
That should make most people immediately wonder why the brightest handheld laser pointers you can get currently are green. (ok some of the blue ones are pretty good too but green rules here generally)
The reason is the human eye is MUCH more sensitive to green than it is to red, especially the red that's approaching infrared that most handheld pointers use.
So for 1/4 of the power you can 10x the visual impact.
Long ago I bought a special red laser pointer, it was red but it was shifted much farther away from IR than any of the common pointers of the day. At the time it was the only one you could see in daylight on say a wall. From what I've seen of modern laser pointers like the little keychain ones, they must all be using the higher freq (lower wavelength) now. Memory's really fuzzy at this point but iirc the common "dim" pointers ran at 550-560nm, and mine runs 535. Not a LOT of difference, and still looks like the same red, but runs 4x the visibility at 1/2 the power.
I believe green is the most sensitive color for most herbivores?
Of those three I think I'd have to say Toyota/Lexus is about on par with Lynksys/Cisco. That's a good example.
So while a mini might be economy to a Mac guy, to someone from the Windows world the Mini is anything BUT economy, because by the time you pay for all the extras you get with a Dell or HP you are looking at $800+.
Anyone that sees the mac mini as an economy standalone computer purchase is missing the entire point of the model.
It's meant to be a cheap way to convert someone from PC to mac. Use your existing PC display, keyboard, and mouse from the PC that just crapped out, or that has become so worm/spy/adware infested as to be useless.
PC users are used to paying less for their computer. So to get them more computer for less money, requires just replacing the computer, and keeping the peripherals. Otherwise some of them would never go for it. The last time they bought a computer it cost the same (because it came with all the peripherals) so it doesn't feel like they're having to pay more for the mac.
All one needs to wreak some serious EMP damage, he charges, is a sea-worthy steamer, $100,000 to buy a scud-missile launcher, and a crude nuclear weapon
I'd imagine a lot of Evil Plans have that one basic requirement.
1) run a seed box. Use another computer to do your torrenting, and when something finishes, let it ride until it gets deleted. Set the computer to auto start after power fail etc.
How would one justify the electric bill for that?
If your seed box is making a noticeable impact on your electric bill, either move to a civilized country or get a better machine. A seed box shouldn't add more than a buck a month to your electric bill.
3) upload your own torrents. 100% of your traffic on an upload is upload ratio. Just be sure you mind the site's rules.
I already dealt with that in this comment [slashdot.org]. Even if private trackers didn't have a policy of scene releases only, how would I create works that other tracker users want to download?
Sorry I can't help you with your creativity. Consider finding public works and making collections. Some sites allow this and users like someone saving them them time. You'd be amazed how popular picture collections of hot celebs are.
Avoid trawling old torrents for something you want or might want. Have some patience and see if someone else will upload a newer/better version that you can hop right on while it's new instead.
So once the torrent for a DVD nears its end of life, would you recommend that I wait years for the Blu-ray release?
Maybe someone will upload the director's cut, or a version with multiple audio tracks, additional content, higher bitrate encode (or perhaps raw, or vice-versa, not everyone wants to download 7gb of VOBs) There are many possibilities even for your specific example. If you downloaded VOBs because that's all that was available, then encode them down to MP4 and watch people with metered bandwidth flock to your swarm.
6) all the usual BT stuff... make sure your ports are mapped
A mapped port isn't worth much if no downloaders want to connect to it.
Actually, if you DON'T have a mapped port, and a leech that wants your seed isn't or can't map his port, that will prevent them from connecting from you. That's the point of "being clever". Seeders that aren't clever should expect a lot less traffic.
Make sure your port isn't being throttled by your ISP.
What can I do if both the local cable company and the local phone company throttle BitTorrent traffic even on a nonstandard (but constant) port? Is it common among users of private trackers to move their families to a town that has an ISP that doesn't throttle BitTorrent traffic?
You may have to go with a different provider, possibly a lower quality one, or you may just be SOL. Not every problem is fixable.
Try different BT clients that may perform better.
Which private trackers tend to ban. It's either recent Azureus or recent uTorrent or nothing.
Just pay attention to the rules. Very often they have an entire thread or faq devoted to this issue, and will get very specific about which versions of which clients they do and do not accept. It's common to see a whole string of posts on a given client, as new versions are either being banned or accepted as new versions are released and bugs crop up or get fixed.
You appear to be content to chew on sour grapes rather than try to fix your problem.
They have tried, through various schemes, to compete in this market and have come up bubkis.
I believe the reason for this is it's hard to compete in the low AND high end markets at the same time, at least under the same brand.
Dell tries to do this, but the world knows dell for cheap PCs.
Cisco/Linksys is my favorite example. They keep those two brand names very separate for a good reason. What IT dept would shop Linksys for their company firewall, and who would imagine they could afford/use a Cisco at home?
Apple is known for quality, longevity, and higher price. There's nothing to gain from them trying to get any sizable portion of the low-end market. The only reason they sell the mac mini is to get PC converts, not because they want a foot in the low end market.