And for everyone one of these I have ten devices that consume power when they are set to OFF when in fact the consumer really intends for the device to be OFF as in no power no nothing.
I have three LED clocks in my kitchen. I have two LED clocks visible from my one Television and three clocks from my second Television. And my TV consumes power all week long so that when I do turn it on I get a picture in 1 second and not 5 seconds. My Nintendo WII has had the LEDs lit up for weeks now and I've not turned it one once.
Every single power charging transformer (phone, notebook, drill) consumes power after I unplug the phone/notebook from it. This can add up to a lot more than the AC when you consider 24x7 power consumption. This is the biggest problem a lot of families have when they attempt to go off-grid.
I can't find it but I thought I heard that 15% of a household power can be from LED's and passive fast-on electronics that no one needs 24x7
I don't think there will be that much interest in smart appliances like they describe. I think this is a technological path to consider, but it will be over ruled by the fact that we, as a planet, are running out of per capita energy.
We may be able to create a lot of energy, but the per capita demand worldwide is growing such that Americans (who consume more energy per capita) will experience a severe energy shortage and as such, the focus will not be on more appliances that are smart and therefore have a passive load on the household grid, but focus on appliances that actually stop using all electricity when you turn them off. Many don't these days because of the hot start design features.
For the rest of this decade the US will experience energy shortages in terms of higher gasoline prices, higher heating gas prices, and higher electricity prices (and summer shortages). This will force us to reconsider a lot of the appliances that we already have and re-prioritize what we want in future appliances.
the transmitter isn't a box, it's a chipset that is hardwired (soldered) to the motherboard. Hardly something they can swap out
The wiring harness to the vehicles have changed in the last 7-10 years, so there are fundamental incompatabiities with the hardware. Similar to trying to plug a EIDE hard drive into a SCSI bay. You are assuming that they haven't made any modifications to the wiring harness in all that time.
On the contrary, I believe the wiring harness will be the fastest changing, non-visual, part of vehicles for the next 20 years. What they say and whom they say it to will grow exponentially as vehicles start to come of age in the electronics and telecommunications age.
Thank you. For a minute there I couldn't believe that this guy was actually thinking when he turned off the ringer that he wasn't actively telling the towers his whereabouts. It's pretty amazing what people think they know ans what they actually do know.
There's a lot I don't know. But I'm more familiar with OnStar than all but a few on this website. And I'm very familiar with just what is going to be happening between now and February 18, 2008. I also know that there are a lot of people trying to sue GM for building a cellular technology into their vehicle at a time when GM had no knowledge that said technology was going to be depricated.
I can't wait to see the law suits the come up when we run out of gasoline and all those cars, boats, lawn mowers suffer a resale value decline because the planet ran out of viable fossil fuel. I suppose that will be GM's fault as well. As for me, I'm driving diesel and getting bio-diesel when I can find it.
I would love to hear from you just how you can act as if the phone is off and yet still receive a phone call?
When the phone moves between cell segments, it has to inform the cellular network what segment to send the page out on. Since you are going to act as if you are off, there is no communication about where you and hence you get no calls.
Either you have a pretty stupid phone app, a software off button, or something that even the cell companies aren't aware of.
Yeah, I've heard about this. But I never actually read the article. This guy reminds me of the Duck and Cover fifties of government FUD. Pretty sensational.
The notion that everyone is listening in on your vehicle is kind of a stretch there. I think OnStar is considerably more secure than Windows and that's not been an issue for most people.
I don't think that's really the case. AFAIK the rural carriers will probably keep analog around if it's makes sense to do so.
It's just that the high density areas are suffering because Analog is still around. There's a lot more digital channels that they could run in the cities if they could remove the analog equipment. So they have a lot of incentive to remove Analog.
But I'm not aware that anyone is making them do it. They are just permitting it and some companies are choosing to ack on it in early 2008.
I wonder if GSM is better than CDMA or not. I haven't been able to find anything decisive about this.
At one point there was a lot of talk about how GSM was insecure and everyone could hack it. But that was maybe 8 years ago. Considering that every other country does GSM it seems to me that GSM might just have an advantage that CDMA carriers aren't telling us about.
When you consider the economics of the number of digital channels you can carry in an analog band and the amount of physical hardware space it's a no brainer.
Well... It's $200 a year for OnStar. I pay $100 a month for my cell phone, $90 a month for cable TV, $15 a month for TiVO, $15 a month for NetFlix. The question of paying about the same price for OnStar is as relevant as people who choose to purchase these other services. Suit yourself?
As for the airbag calling issue -- There have been a few cases where the unit doesn't fare too well -- but that's generally an accident of such severe nature that fatality is usually result regardless. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but is fairly safe to say that the OnStar hardware is more likely to make a call than your cell phone, even if you are able to use it and find it. Things get tossed around a lot in an accident -- personal experience.
Here we go again ladies and ladies. Strap on your aluminum boxers and hide in the basement. Mega-Corp is coming to get you again!!!
I'm so tired of hearing about all this ignorant spew about how evil all this technology is. So I'll just recap what's already been posted a hundred times about OnStar.
It won't make you sterile.
It won't put banner ads on the top of your windshield while you are driving.
It can unlock your car if you want to.
It won't call the mothership and tell Big Brother were you are.
It will call OnStar as a 911 Emergency Service call if you activate your airbag via tree or some other appropriate activity (and have OnStar service).
Once it is deactivated by Onstar (or you can rip it out of the car if you want) it cannot do any of the following:
Call the mothership and tell Big Brother where you are. (Trick question -- it didn't before)
unlock your doors.
Cause you to go sterile -- that's your own problem. (Again, a trick question)
It will let you quietly die in a serious accident because it doesn't work anymore.
In fact, if you know anything about cellular telephony -- it will not register or accept pages after deactivation.
Despite all of these facts being repeated over and over I know that only 0.0001% of the aluminum boxer fan club will take any heed of this information. So kudo's to the one person who thinks.
Now, even though I work at GM/OnStar I should probably state that my opinions are statements are not necessarily a reflection of the opinions of GM/Onstar and as such GM/OnStar can not be held liable for anything I say, real or imagined, factual or fantasy.
So -- I can call you a jerk and get away with it. But I'm only going to call you a jerk after to slam me for working at GM/OnStar and that I'm obviously lying to keep the capitalistic pig corporations afloat despite all the evil things they do to babies and little furry animals. I only say this because I know someone will do just that in the next ten minutes. It happens every time.
Unfortunately, those who run around screaming such falsehoods do more damage for the cause of privacy and personal empowerment than they know -- for they appear as jerks and makes everyone else who says anything about privacy that much easier to dismiss.
I would agree. I think at this point we would be better off if we didn't try to come up with some far fetched hack and just started warning everyone to stay off the Seagates.
Which kind of sucks for me, I am in the market for a new server and was interested in the Seagate products because they have done very well in the past. But I can't afford to buy 5 drives for my server to find out that they sort of kind of mostly work some of the time. I'm well that past that era of crappy hardware support for Linux -- that's so RedHat 5.0.
I can't imagine why anyone in their right mind would do anything to allow the worlds most insecure operating system to gain access of any kind to their hardware. Might as well pin a hundred dollar bill to your ass and yell, "Victim Here!"
Yeah, it's about friggin' time the boner released his code.
I was looking for a mail server and ended up steering away from qmail for the simple reason that is really wasn't supported any more. You can argue that there is an active website where people have provided hundreds of patches. But the fact that you have to patch the source code dozens of times to get anything that even half safe in this age of email was a sick joke. That's unsupported. Source code dates back to the previous century with specific provisions preventing you from doing anything with it.
Of course now he's made things more confusing because qmail might actually get updated to something that doesn't completely suck and give postfix something to compare itself to. But for me, postfix is the mail server to use going forward. It's supported and the developer isn't a pompous ass.
I recall that once he did an interview and someone asked what his philosophy on life was. This answer was, "Don't be an ass."
I regret to say, seems to me that CmdrTaco has forgotten the philosophy that set Slashdot apart from the rest of the community. And this is the first and only time I've ever said anything contrary to Slashdot. I've really liked it.
But the post was a bit of a bust. I must recognize that the only mechanism mentioned in the Internet but I am hard pressed to conclude that this mean the US Government is going the way of the Great Chinese Firewall.
I've been saying this for about five years. This is pretty much a So Nineties article.
The FBI, at least the pre-Bush FBI, required a search warrant to tap into the GPS signaling that phones and OnStar provides. So as a work around they employed the cellular companies to provide them with regristration information on the cell and node that your phone has recently passed into/out of as you travel. This won't give the resolutions to 10 feet, but they certainly know when you are one the move and where you are going. It makes building out your social network rather trivial.
And the best part about this is that they never need to actually touch the phone. The phone provides all the information that they need without violating the legal definition of privacy.
If you want your where abouts unknown, turn off your phone while you go to your local neighborhood crack house. Even Bin Laden knows this much.
Unable to experience anything that might be considered even vaguely incorrect, we are unable to accurate respond to real world issues in mature manners. We are left with role models of Television shows where everything has to be either Over the Top or Whatever.
Really? I just picked up Windows XP last month at work. One of the largest fortune 100 companies on the planet. I guess they are an "every other release" company.
Slashdot Mirror
And for everyone one of these I have ten devices that consume power when they are set to OFF when in fact the consumer really intends for the device to be OFF as in no power no nothing.
I have three LED clocks in my kitchen. I have two LED clocks visible from my one Television and three clocks from my second Television. And my TV consumes power all week long so that when I do turn it on I get a picture in 1 second and not 5 seconds. My Nintendo WII has had the LEDs lit up for weeks now and I've not turned it one once.
Every single power charging transformer (phone, notebook, drill) consumes power after I unplug the phone/notebook from it. This can add up to a lot more than the AC when you consider 24x7 power consumption. This is the biggest problem a lot of families have when they attempt to go off-grid.
I can't find it but I thought I heard that 15% of a household power can be from LED's and passive fast-on electronics that no one needs 24x7
I don't think there will be that much interest in smart appliances like they describe. I think this is a technological path to consider, but it will be over ruled by the fact that we, as a planet, are running out of per capita energy.
We may be able to create a lot of energy, but the per capita demand worldwide is growing such that Americans (who consume more energy per capita) will experience a severe energy shortage and as such, the focus will not be on more appliances that are smart and therefore have a passive load on the household grid, but focus on appliances that actually stop using all electricity when you turn them off. Many don't these days because of the hot start design features.
For the rest of this decade the US will experience energy shortages in terms of higher gasoline prices, higher heating gas prices, and higher electricity prices (and summer shortages). This will force us to reconsider a lot of the appliances that we already have and re-prioritize what we want in future appliances.
You missed several points.
It's not Delco.
the transmitter isn't a box, it's a chipset that is hardwired (soldered) to the motherboard. Hardly something they can swap out
The wiring harness to the vehicles have changed in the last 7-10 years, so there are fundamental incompatabiities with the hardware. Similar to trying to plug a EIDE hard drive into a SCSI bay. You are assuming that they haven't made any modifications to the wiring harness in all that time.
On the contrary, I believe the wiring harness will be the fastest changing, non-visual, part of vehicles for the next 20 years. What they say and whom they say it to will grow exponentially as vehicles start to come of age in the electronics and telecommunications age.
Thank you. For a minute there I couldn't believe that this guy was actually thinking when he turned off the ringer that he wasn't actively telling the towers his whereabouts. It's pretty amazing what people think they know ans what they actually do know.
There's a lot I don't know. But I'm more familiar with OnStar than all but a few on this website. And I'm very familiar with just what is going to be happening between now and February 18, 2008. I also know that there are a lot of people trying to sue GM for building a cellular technology into their vehicle at a time when GM had no knowledge that said technology was going to be depricated.
I can't wait to see the law suits the come up when we run out of gasoline and all those cars, boats, lawn mowers suffer a resale value decline because the planet ran out of viable fossil fuel. I suppose that will be GM's fault as well. As for me, I'm driving diesel and getting bio-diesel when I can find it.
With the weakening of the US dollar, you should be getting a considerable discount!!
I would love to hear from you just how you can act as if the phone is off and yet still receive a phone call?
When the phone moves between cell segments, it has to inform the cellular network what segment to send the page out on. Since you are going to act as if you are off, there is no communication about where you and hence you get no calls.
Either you have a pretty stupid phone app, a software off button, or something that even the cell companies aren't aware of.
Yeah, I've heard about this. But I never actually read the article. This guy reminds me of the Duck and Cover fifties of government FUD. Pretty sensational.
The notion that everyone is listening in on your vehicle is kind of a stretch there. I think OnStar is considerably more secure than Windows and that's not been an issue for most people.
Where do you think I got it from?
I don't think that's really the case. AFAIK the rural carriers will probably keep analog around if it's makes sense to do so.
It's just that the high density areas are suffering because Analog is still around. There's a lot more digital channels that they could run in the cities if they could remove the analog equipment. So they have a lot of incentive to remove Analog.
But I'm not aware that anyone is making them do it. They are just permitting it and some companies are choosing to ack on it in early 2008.
Pick up brick.
Throw it at the window.
Problem solved.
Well, if you are actually a customer then you might mention it to them. Otherwise I'm not sure that they'll here you.
I wonder if GSM is better than CDMA or not. I haven't been able to find anything decisive about this.
At one point there was a lot of talk about how GSM was insecure and everyone could hack it. But that was maybe 8 years ago. Considering that every other country does GSM it seems to me that GSM might just have an advantage that CDMA carriers aren't telling us about.
When you consider the economics of the number of digital channels you can carry in an analog band and the amount of physical hardware space it's a no brainer.
Well... It's $200 a year for OnStar. I pay $100 a month for my cell phone, $90 a month for cable TV, $15 a month for TiVO, $15 a month for NetFlix. The question of paying about the same price for OnStar is as relevant as people who choose to purchase these other services. Suit yourself?
As for the airbag calling issue -- There have been a few cases where the unit doesn't fare too well -- but that's generally an accident of such severe nature that fatality is usually result regardless. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but is fairly safe to say that the OnStar hardware is more likely to make a call than your cell phone, even if you are able to use it and find it. Things get tossed around a lot in an accident -- personal experience.
I thought the one year cost was $200. $400 must be something special. Are you sure?
Here we go again ladies and ladies. Strap on your aluminum boxers and hide in the basement. Mega-Corp is coming to get you again!!!
I'm so tired of hearing about all this ignorant spew about how evil all this technology is. So I'll just recap what's already been posted a hundred times about OnStar.
Despite all of these facts being repeated over and over I know that only 0.0001% of the aluminum boxer fan club will take any heed of this information. So kudo's to the one person who thinks.
Now, even though I work at GM/OnStar I should probably state that my opinions are statements are not necessarily a reflection of the opinions of GM/Onstar and as such GM/OnStar can not be held liable for anything I say, real or imagined, factual or fantasy.
So -- I can call you a jerk and get away with it. But I'm only going to call you a jerk after to slam me for working at GM/OnStar and that I'm obviously lying to keep the capitalistic pig corporations afloat despite all the evil things they do to babies and little furry animals. I only say this because I know someone will do just that in the next ten minutes. It happens every time.
Unfortunately, those who run around screaming such falsehoods do more damage for the cause of privacy and personal empowerment than they know -- for they appear as jerks and makes everyone else who says anything about privacy that much easier to dismiss.
I would agree. I think at this point we would be better off if we didn't try to come up with some far fetched hack and just started warning everyone to stay off the Seagates.
Which kind of sucks for me, I am in the market for a new server and was interested in the Seagate products because they have done very well in the past. But I can't afford to buy 5 drives for my server to find out that they sort of kind of mostly work some of the time. I'm well that past that era of crappy hardware support for Linux -- that's so RedHat 5.0.
Don't buy Seagate.
Exactly what I was thinking!!!
I can't imagine why anyone in their right mind would do anything to allow the worlds most insecure operating system to gain access of any kind to their hardware. Might as well pin a hundred dollar bill to your ass and yell, "Victim Here!"
Yeah, it's about friggin' time the boner released his code.
I was looking for a mail server and ended up steering away from qmail for the simple reason that is really wasn't supported any more. You can argue that there is an active website where people have provided hundreds of patches. But the fact that you have to patch the source code dozens of times to get anything that even half safe in this age of email was a sick joke. That's unsupported. Source code dates back to the previous century with specific provisions preventing you from doing anything with it.
Of course now he's made things more confusing because qmail might actually get updated to something that doesn't completely suck and give postfix something to compare itself to. But for me, postfix is the mail server to use going forward. It's supported and the developer isn't a pompous ass.
Regarding CmdrTaco.
I recall that once he did an interview and someone asked what his philosophy on life was. This answer was, "Don't be an ass."
I regret to say, seems to me that CmdrTaco has forgotten the philosophy that set Slashdot apart from the rest of the community. And this is the first and only time I've ever said anything contrary to Slashdot. I've really liked it.
But the post was a bit of a bust. I must recognize that the only mechanism mentioned in the Internet but I am hard pressed to conclude that this mean the US Government is going the way of the Great Chinese Firewall.
I would tend to agree. This kind of a patent would seem to promote a death spiral of service and therefore sales.
I've been saying this for about five years. This is pretty much a So Nineties article.
The FBI, at least the pre-Bush FBI, required a search warrant to tap into the GPS signaling that phones and OnStar provides. So as a work around they employed the cellular companies to provide them with regristration information on the cell and node that your phone has recently passed into/out of as you travel. This won't give the resolutions to 10 feet, but they certainly know when you are one the move and where you are going. It makes building out your social network rather trivial.
And the best part about this is that they never need to actually touch the phone. The phone provides all the information that they need without violating the legal definition of privacy.
If you want your where abouts unknown, turn off your phone while you go to your local neighborhood crack house. Even Bin Laden knows this much.
We are raising a nation of sissies.
Unable to experience anything that might be considered even vaguely incorrect, we are unable to accurate respond to real world issues in mature manners. We are left with role models of Television shows where everything has to be either Over the Top or Whatever.
Really? I just picked up Windows XP last month at work. One of the largest fortune 100 companies on the planet. I guess they are an "every other release" company.
Damn! I hadn't thought of that. Now I can rejected by even more pretty girls than I have already.
Maybe I'll just get a nice dog and take him for a walk.