It's not everyday that you get a phone call from a sleazy spammer. I was just filling out some forms and this random guy (apparently) from Miami, Florida calls me up. He asked about my BotBlock service, or rather how to override it. Turns out he wants to pay me "any amount you want" to make a software that can bypass the image-verification (CAPTCHA) used by TicketMaster. He told me his "competition" was overtaking him and he was willing to pay me $5,000 to make such an application. Best of all, if I was feeling lonely, he could send me a hot woman any time of the day. I politely told him, "I'm sorry Sir but I think I'll have to hang up now. Please do not call again."
I would have offered to do it for 60K, then immediately set to update bot blocker so that the program you sold would break as soon as they update to the new version. This way you can make 60K a pop per version from the spammer, and make money upgrading your Bot Blocker program.
While this may also be justified if you want to meassure noise levels (and if there is a concrete issue), having to worry about things you talk about on the street being recorded by the authorities certainly isn't something we should take lightly.
I could be mistaken, but I believe they got John Gotti by wiring up all of the parking meters on the streets he walked with bugs.
the use of microphones by police forces to pick up (gun) noise...
St Louis City already has a few of these up and operational for gun noise. They set them up in 3 different positions around hot spots to triangulate where the shot was fired from. It's mostly a deterrant to celebratory gunfire.
The difference is, now everyone is mobilized & knows about it. Which is far more profitable for congressmen as each of the lobbyist can contribute money under the dual threats of "protect my business model" and "protect my business model" from both sides. Works out well if you are a senator.
The fact that this might piss off the handful of voters who actually pay attention probably doesn't even enter into the equasion for most of them, sad to say.
I just watched my own state legislature give away the farm to SBC under a similar model. He who paid the most won, only 3 votes against. It's not like the bribes aren't mostly out in the open, it's just no one pays enough attention for it to matter to them.
How about spending the money to become LESS dependent on coal?
The power plant here burns a mixture of coal & used tires, but it also has the ability to quickly convert to gas and oil should those become cheaper.
I don't think the situation at my power plant is that different than what is going on in the rest of the country. We have a lot of coal, it is relatively cheap, fairly easy to handle, and scrubbers exist to catch a lot of the solid matter to cut down on the air pollution. I would rather be dependant upon coal, something we have a huge reserve of from domestic resources than something we have to import, or something with the potential to make a landmass the size of Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa combined unlivable in an accident.
When I build my own home I'll be looking into getting a corn stove for heat. Where I live you can buy feed corn cheaper than coal & get more energy out of it.
These numbers are fairly typical. I just picked one of the most popular drives in use (the 2MB version has a very similar power profile). This is for the WD800JB (and pretty identical to the WD800BB the most popular drive and popular size in use today): Power Consumption
I'm amazed at how much difference there is between Idle & Standby & Sleep.
but a lot of people happy with Windows 2000 who'll not upgrade unless forced to at the barrel of a gun because it's no worse than XP
You can pry my copy of Windows 2000 out of my cold dead hands...
The only temptation I have to ditch Windows 2000 comes from a lack of UPnP support that makes running certain applications behind my router much more difficult. I can sacrifice a machine and run a proxy server on it and put it in the DMZ, but it is unhandy. I've looked around for another fix for this problem, but couldn't find one.
I'm waiting for longhorn before I consider upgrading.
Ooooooh...nice shortcut key. I love keyboard commands, cause sifting though the buttons in windoes is so tedious. If the computer management had an embeded shortcut, that'd be even better.
Knowing these is kind of handy when you are dealing with XP users and you don't know whether they are running in classic or standard mode (or you are running several W2K boxes with a non-active KVM switch and it loses your mouse constantly). WindowsKey+R brings up the run dialog, from there you can run anything. Useful ones are: Control.msc (control panel), services.msc(services menu), compmgnt.msc (computer management which is what you wanted).
Though it doesn't have a keyboard shortcut built in for computer management, what you can do is create your own. Create a shortcut on the desktop to compmgnt.msc, and then assign it a hotkey in the area it says "Shotcut key" press control-alt and another key and it will set that key as your keyboard shortcut. This only works for desktop items as far as I know. I have ones set for Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera, and a few other monitor applications I run frequently. Just right click & go to properties on any shortcut on the desktop and add you own on the shortcut-key line. Saves a few clicks once you have it setup.
There are a few other hotkeys that are handy though: WindowsKey+M minimizes everything, WindowsKey+Shift+M restores that, WindowsKey+D takes you to the desktop (but doesn't seem to reverse itself with the shift key), WindowsKey+F brings up the find files screen. WindowsKey+E brings up Windows Explorer.
I thought this piece was rather tame to be honest, and the bit about PR companies telling the truth had me smiling & laughing. The largest users of PR Firms are not businesses, but the government itself, in particular the Defense Dept who had a PR budget that rivals the fortune 100 combined. That doesn't mean it's all bad or all untrue, a lot of it is true & a lot of it is true from a certain point of view, and a lot of it is simply repeat the lie often enough or pure astro.
I also found humor in the claim that the internet is largely free of PR-hits. Anyone who has checked out more than 5 hardware review sites ought to know that PR hits abound, esp in reviews for products. Blogs aren't immune, they will just use first person accounts of how XXX product changed their life or yadda "I noticed" type statements and roll out their own astroturf just like they do on web forums. Though to be fair, many online companies check out the forums for self-defense purposes & rumor control.
The most truthful part about the story was about trade publications. Ever read a copy of Eweek? They try to give those away because the content is junk.
I've read several of the trade magazines for PR companies, these folks not only celebrate the hits but celebrate when a big company pulls the wool over the publics eyes. I found them rather ethically challenged.
I used to do a lot of business with Fleishmen Hillard and a few smaller companies. Stacks & stacks of VNR's (Video News Releases) going out to every network, the majors get raw footage they can splice in, and the minors get a packaged story 100% complete or one they can do a voice over on with a script. Radio got their tapes as well. When you see a so called investigative report it may just be a VNR - one of the most effective PR campaigns I've ever seen was for the DEA, it aired on Dateline and the only work Dateline had to do was edit in their own actor in front of a blue screen for a few minutes. Nearly everything about it was phony & misleading, but they managed to get a major network to give them 2 weeks worth of promo for it and a full hour of airin primetime and without much of a hint that it wasn't produced by Dateline.
Though Hill & Knowltons PR campaign "Babies ripped from incubators in Kuwait" was pretty slick as well. Complete with staged congressional investigation.
Though this site is very far to the left it has a lot of interesting information about the PR industry http://www.prwatch.org/ it is worth a look if ou have
Of course, we have enough laws that should deal with this already without needing a new one, but oh well. Personally I believe that this is a case of only the lawless need fear the law.
Yes, but those of us who actually pay taxes will be paying for expensive prosecutions, incarceration, probation, appeals, and all kinds of other expenses that go along with breaking up families and yadda yadda for something that should be a civil offense.
Also, law enforcement and prosecutors will be busy with this instead of protecting us from actual crime.
Whether you break the law or not you still get a bill for this.
I've installed a lot of software that insists on putting something in startup. Network tools that want to put a menu in the systray, adobe software (like photoshop) that puts all this Adobe stuff in startup, and even a video encoder I have (a very nice one too) drops something in startup. Most of the media players do it, too.
It's not necessary, for the most part. While some applications have an option to turn these features on and off, most don't. It's silly.
You can fix most of them with Startup from Mike Lin, I like the stand-alone.exe version and just stick it on the desktop. It's nice and small so it's handy to put on a floppy or keychain-usb as well. http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml
Tyan Thunder K8WE: 2 independent x16 PCI-Express buses (40 lanes total), two independent GigE interfaces, PCI-X, PCI, SATA, SCSI, 1394, USB. Is there an Intel motherboard with comparable equipment?
Not until they come out with a new chipset. The current ones don't have enough lanes.
I looked at the K8WE and am still considering it. The only real downer with the K8WE is that you only get 1 PCI slot and it's wedged between the two PCI-E 16X slots, so you can't actually use it if you install two graphics cards. While PCI-X is somewhat backwards compatable, it only works with the 3.3v cards and not 5v PCI so you have to throw away older cards.
The internet is a hostile network, there are plenty of bad faith players with drive by installers. Do I have to install their stuff too? It IS advertising after all.
Is not installing Xupiter/Malware/Spyware from a drive by installer breaking the "social contract" too?
As soon as webmasters decided they were going to try to take away functionality from my equipment with javascript, I decided to fight back. Is not allowing them to disable functions on my computer breaking the social contract?
There are more annoying things than Flash ads though. To do ecommerce on the web you end up turning a few things on. One of the things I use Adblock for is removing LivePerson though there are other ways to remove this. Nothing worse than surfing a site to gain information about their product and having to deal with a box opening up with some pushy salesmen in the middle of it. If I want to contact them, or want them to contact me there are other less obnoxious means to do it. Is it breaking the social contract not to deal with a pushy salesperson intrupting what I am doing?
Neilson has connections to a few very high traffic sites and they either A)allow them to view the statistics on their logs, or B)allow them to put a 1x1 gif on their website for usage stats.
They also have a tool similar to Alexa that people (allegedly) voluntarily install and sends back data to them on what they viewed. It only works on IE as far as I know. The people that are selected to be preyed upon for their data have already participated in other marketing surveys so they know the demographics of the user.
I used to occasionally fill out surveys on transportation company satisfaction for another large polling company (which the only real benefit was they gave you access to the data on the polls you participated in). One day they asked me to take a survey on net use, I clicked the link and it took me to Neilson Netratings which tried (without my permission) to install their software.
I stopped dealing with the first company and the second. I thought it was pretty rude to be honest.
If you are seriously trying to recommend a USR 8054 I have a bone to pick with you. I own one of these, and lets just say my experience hasn't been stellar with anything other than WEP.
When I bought it it promised: WPA, WPA-PSK, 125Mbps wireless, and 256 bit WEP.
Reality? WPA did not exist, WPA-PSK also did not exist. Flash the firmware and WPA-PSK was broken severely and remains broken no matter how many beta firmware versions & no matter which standard firmware version they send me and the driver they ship for the 5416 is also broken for WPA-PSK so don't think it's a matter of using all USR equipment and not having problems. It didn't deliver 125Mbps, I had to update the firmware but after that it worked (though reality is it transfers in the mid 20's). WEP was also locked do that you could only enter a password with a mere 6 letters of the alphabet (eventually fixed in a later firmware update) and 256 bit WEP reset frequently or would hang on large file transfers.
Even with 1.67 firmware it *still* resets under heavy load (Limewire, BitTorrent, WinMX), no QoS, WPA-PSK still doesn't work. (It resets and wont reconnect, sometimes even after multiple reboots of both the computer and router it STILL wont connect). It's just flaky, works fine for an hour or so then it hangs up.
I had to RMA one of them, it stopped working suddenly and would only flash a couple blinky lights at me in amber.
It does have it's good points: It has excellent range, better than any other wirless router I've ever tried with stock antennas, but unless you want to use WEP only and be prepared for resets during P2P. Stable is not a word that can be applied to it.
If you deal with USR tech support for anything other than an RMA, they wont have solutions for you. They might give you the latest beta firmware to get you off of the phone, but it wont solve your problem. I'm not the only one who has experienced this, check out broadband reports and read the section dedicated to USR.
I have had more grief over this router than any other piece of electronic equipment I own. I'm stuck with it though, I own it, I can only pray that they finally get a firmware version for the router and card that actually works the way it is supposed to. I'm not holding my breath though. I'm on my 5th version of firmware for the router, and my 2nd driver pack for the 5416 PCI card.
Hitachi (ah, see, I remembered the brand) has succeeded in getting everyone to believe that they are on the cutting edge of hard drive technology. While that may or may not be true, the key point is that perception is being largely disseminated by a cartoon and not hard data or facts. Interesting.
Hop on over to Storage Review and get the facts. Yes, some of the Western Digital drives are a bit quicker and come out with newer stuff sooner. So they are technically usually #2 as far as bringing new features to the market. Hitachi is almost always either #2 or #1 in speed & seek in test, and usually #1 in low noise levels.
These drives used to be #1 in new technology, speed, and pretty much everything else back before the Deskstar fiasco on the 5 platter drives when IBM still ran the show. IBM sold it off to Hitachi but still retains 40% interest in it and probably shares brain power with them. The trend right now is Western Digital releases new stuff first, 1-3 months later the Hitachi version is out and it's quieter, equal or better in speed, and often cheaper. Every once in awhile Hitachi beats WD to the gate with bigger capacity but it doesn't happen very often. They are still in the top 2 in the field, and back when they were IBM's baby they were responsible for almost every major improvement in hard drive storage. The most important thing is that the end product is not just good, it's very good.
The areas where Hitachi shines are usually quietness, exceptional reliability, and speed per dollar. I've been happy with the purchases I've made from them & all 8MB cache drives carry a 3 year warranty.
They have some beautiful 7200 RPM drives that compared up against 10K Raptors are nearly a match for them. At least in IDE & SATA I've been happy with everything I've bought from them and have yet to have to RMA anything. They are almost completely silent, I have one other HD which is close in noise made by Samsung, but everything else is noticably louder.
I'm not so sure that people bling from birth will benefit from any such device. That part of their brain is not even developed, you can't just "plug in" some video feed and expect them to see, do you?
It doesn't do that much anyway. Picture if you will 50 dots that are either white or black with no contrast contol - IE: 100% white, 100% black. Now put these into a fairly wide field of vision.
It's sort of like viewing the world on an LCD at 1600X1200 resolution with only 50 pixels that work and they are spread out rather randomly, and the color control is off. 50 pixels is a "max" as well for this device, more likely they will end up with 30-40 of them that actually work.
This is not even remotely comparable to normal vision, and it's probably not even going to help them navigate. Being able to recognize someones face with it is highly optimistic.
It might lead to something better 40 years from now, but in it's present state I feel sorry for those having the proceedure done. High hopes and low outcome, and they wont just do it to a few people, they will do it to hundreds as the guinea pigs for this.
Trends like these are all over the place in advertising. There's an initial horrid reaction of the disgust and intolerance. And then, people just move on and get used to it. You become numb to the advertising...
Remember when previews were the first thing on a movie screen? Now...I watch advertising for local companies the entire time before the projector even starts. And then, I get about 5 minutes of movie-sized commercials before the previews. This is for a movie I've already paid $10 to go see.
My own situation is somewhat unique as the chronic pain I'm in makes going to the movies and siting in a theater seat for an hour & a half plus a truly painful experience even with morphine. I avoided the theater for almost 4 years because of it. When a movie finally interested me enough to endure that to see it, I got there on time and realized what a huge mistake that was. There were no less than 25 minutes of commercials (mostly for Pepsi products) and previews. Okay, 2 more shots of pain killer and I made it to the start of the movie. I've only been to the theater again once, and I purposely arrived 20 minutes late to miss all of that.
I'm wondering if that insideous advertising crept in gradually? The time before that I went there were maybe 5-7 minutes of previews and then the movie.
I'm told that at certain amusement parks they now have TV's in the lines displaying advertisements (I can't do that anymore, so this is second hand.)
What next? Giant TV's in restaurants to display advertisements while you eat?
Thanks for the concrete example. As someone else pointed out: - for the search imatix I see you at number one.
Look again, his site isn't the one with the nice Favicon, his site is the 2nd result, the one without it that actually has "Stategic Solutions For A Complex World!" on the front page. Even you, GoogleGuy, were fooled by the first result. So if you were fooled having intimate knowledge of the problem, how would someone without intimate knowledge of the problem fair?
In two weeks 90% of the remaining lawyers would discover that, excluded frivolous lawsuits, they don't have work anymore. Soon the number of practincing lawyers would fall back to manageable levels, say one for every rat in the sewers...
In NYC there are 12 rats for every person. 132,000,000 lawyers for the NYC population alone. If we include all of the rats in the rest of the US there would obviously be more rats than people. We would have to >gasp import lawyers just to get them to a manageable level.
iDownload Tech (Mark): iSearch is its own independant company that markets many affiliate programs. I believe they have removal instructions and an automatic removal tool on their FAQ page at isearch.com. You can also use this link: http://toolbar.isearch.com/uninstall/ I don't know any other info about their company or software.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not everyday that you get a phone call from a sleazy spammer. I was just filling out some forms and this random guy (apparently) from Miami, Florida calls me up. He asked about my BotBlock service, or rather how to override it. Turns out he wants to pay me "any amount you want" to make a software that can bypass the image-verification (CAPTCHA) used by TicketMaster. He told me his "competition" was overtaking him and he was willing to pay me $5,000 to make such an application. Best of all, if I was feeling lonely, he could send me a hot woman any time of the day. I politely told him, "I'm sorry Sir but I think I'll have to hang up now. Please do not call again."
I would have offered to do it for 60K, then immediately set to update bot blocker so that the program you sold would break as soon as they update to the new version. This way you can make 60K a pop per version from the spammer, and make money upgrading your Bot Blocker program.
Sounds like a pretty good business model to me.
While this may also be justified if you want to meassure noise levels (and if there is a concrete issue), having to worry about things you talk about on the street being recorded by the authorities certainly isn't something we should take lightly.
I could be mistaken, but I believe they got John Gotti by wiring up all of the parking meters on the streets he walked with bugs.
the use of microphones by police forces to pick up (gun) noise...
St Louis City already has a few of these up and operational for gun noise. They set them up in 3 different positions around hot spots to triangulate where the shot was fired from. It's mostly a deterrant to celebratory gunfire.
The difference is, now everyone is mobilized & knows about it. Which is far more profitable for congressmen as each of the lobbyist can contribute money under the dual threats of "protect my business model" and "protect my business model" from both sides. Works out well if you are a senator.
The fact that this might piss off the handful of voters who actually pay attention probably doesn't even enter into the equasion for most of them, sad to say.
I just watched my own state legislature give away the farm to SBC under a similar model. He who paid the most won, only 3 votes against. It's not like the bribes aren't mostly out in the open, it's just no one pays enough attention for it to matter to them.
Banning advertising of those they politically disagree with (such as gun, ammo, gun rights ...etc).
How about spending the money to become LESS dependent on coal?
The power plant here burns a mixture of coal & used tires, but it also has the ability to quickly convert to gas and oil should those become cheaper.
I don't think the situation at my power plant is that different than what is going on in the rest of the country. We have a lot of coal, it is relatively cheap, fairly easy to handle, and scrubbers exist to catch a lot of the solid matter to cut down on the air pollution. I would rather be dependant upon coal, something we have a huge reserve of from domestic resources than something we have to import, or something with the potential to make a landmass the size of Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa combined unlivable in an accident.
When I build my own home I'll be looking into getting a corn stove for heat. Where I live you can buy feed corn cheaper than coal & get more energy out of it.
These numbers are fairly typical. I just picked one of the most popular drives in use (the 2MB version has a very similar power profile). This is for the WD800JB (and pretty identical to the WD800BB the most popular drive and popular size in use today):
Power Consumption
I'm amazed at how much difference there is between Idle & Standby & Sleep.
That should be compmgmt.msc for computer management.
but a lot of people happy with Windows 2000 who'll not upgrade unless forced to at the barrel of a gun because it's no worse than XP
You can pry my copy of Windows 2000 out of my cold dead hands...
The only temptation I have to ditch Windows 2000 comes from a lack of UPnP support that makes running certain applications behind my router much more difficult. I can sacrifice a machine and run a proxy server on it and put it in the DMZ, but it is unhandy. I've looked around for another fix for this problem, but couldn't find one.
I'm waiting for longhorn before I consider upgrading.
Ooooooh...nice shortcut key. I love keyboard commands, cause sifting though the buttons in windoes is so tedious. If the computer management had an embeded shortcut, that'd be even better.
Knowing these is kind of handy when you are dealing with XP users and you don't know whether they are running in classic or standard mode (or you are running several W2K boxes with a non-active KVM switch and it loses your mouse constantly).
WindowsKey+R brings up the run dialog, from there you can run anything. Useful ones are: Control.msc (control panel), services.msc(services menu), compmgnt.msc (computer management which is what you wanted).
Though it doesn't have a keyboard shortcut built in for computer management, what you can do is create your own. Create a shortcut on the desktop to compmgnt.msc, and then assign it a hotkey in the area it says "Shotcut key" press control-alt and another key and it will set that key as your keyboard shortcut. This only works for desktop items as far as I know. I have ones set for Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera, and a few other monitor applications I run frequently. Just right click & go to properties on any shortcut on the desktop and add you own on the shortcut-key line. Saves a few clicks once you have it setup.
There are a few other hotkeys that are handy though: WindowsKey+M minimizes everything, WindowsKey+Shift+M restores that, WindowsKey+D takes you to the desktop (but doesn't seem to reverse itself with the shift key), WindowsKey+F brings up the find files screen. WindowsKey+E brings up Windows Explorer.
I thought this piece was rather tame to be honest, and the bit about PR companies telling the truth had me smiling & laughing. The largest users of PR Firms are not businesses, but the government itself, in particular the Defense Dept who had a PR budget that rivals the fortune 100 combined. That doesn't mean it's all bad or all untrue, a lot of it is true & a lot of it is true from a certain point of view, and a lot of it is simply repeat the lie often enough or pure astro.
I also found humor in the claim that the internet is largely free of PR-hits. Anyone who has checked out more than 5 hardware review sites ought to know that PR hits abound, esp in reviews for products. Blogs aren't immune, they will just use first person accounts of how XXX product changed their life or yadda "I noticed" type statements and roll out their own astroturf just like they do on web forums. Though to be fair, many online companies check out the forums for self-defense purposes & rumor control.
The most truthful part about the story was about trade publications. Ever read a copy of Eweek? They try to give those away because the content is junk.
I've read several of the trade magazines for PR companies, these folks not only celebrate the hits but celebrate when a big company pulls the wool over the publics eyes. I found them rather ethically challenged.
I used to do a lot of business with Fleishmen Hillard and a few smaller companies. Stacks & stacks of VNR's (Video News Releases) going out to every network, the majors get raw footage they can splice in, and the minors get a packaged story 100% complete or one they can do a voice over on with a script. Radio got their tapes as well. When you see a so called investigative report it may just be a VNR - one of the most effective PR campaigns I've ever seen was for the DEA, it aired on Dateline and the only work Dateline had to do was edit in their own actor in front of a blue screen for a few minutes. Nearly everything about it was phony & misleading, but they managed to get a major network to give them 2 weeks worth of promo for it and a full hour of airin primetime and without much of a hint that it wasn't produced by Dateline.
Though Hill & Knowltons PR campaign "Babies ripped from incubators in Kuwait" was pretty slick as well. Complete with staged congressional investigation.
Though this site is very far to the left it has a lot of interesting information about the PR industry http://www.prwatch.org/ it is worth a look if ou have
Of course, we have enough laws that should deal with this already without needing a new one, but oh well. Personally I believe that this is a case of only the lawless need fear the law.
Yes, but those of us who actually pay taxes will be paying for expensive prosecutions, incarceration, probation, appeals, and all kinds of other expenses that go along with breaking up families and yadda yadda for something that should be a civil offense.
Also, law enforcement and prosecutors will be busy with this instead of protecting us from actual crime.
Whether you break the law or not you still get a bill for this.
I've installed a lot of software that insists on putting something in startup. Network tools that want to put a menu in the systray, adobe software (like photoshop) that puts all this Adobe stuff in startup, and even a video encoder I have (a very nice one too) drops something in startup. Most of the media players do it, too.
It's not necessary, for the most part. While some applications have an option to turn these features on and off, most don't. It's silly.
You can fix most of them with Startup from Mike Lin, I like the stand-alone.exe version and just stick it on the desktop. It's nice and small so it's handy to put on a floppy or keychain-usb as well. http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml
Tyan Thunder K8WE: 2 independent x16 PCI-Express buses (40 lanes total), two independent GigE interfaces, PCI-X, PCI, SATA, SCSI, 1394, USB. Is there an Intel motherboard with comparable equipment?
Not until they come out with a new chipset. The current ones don't have enough lanes.
I looked at the K8WE and am still considering it. The only real downer with the K8WE is that you only get 1 PCI slot and it's wedged between the two PCI-E 16X slots, so you can't actually use it if you install two graphics cards. While PCI-X is somewhat backwards compatable, it only works with the 3.3v cards and not 5v PCI so you have to throw away older cards.
The internet is a hostile network, there are plenty of bad faith players with drive by installers. Do I have to install their stuff too? It IS advertising after all.
Is not installing Xupiter/Malware/Spyware from a drive by installer breaking the "social contract" too?
As soon as webmasters decided they were going to try to take away functionality from my equipment with javascript, I decided to fight back. Is not allowing them to disable functions on my computer breaking the social contract?
There are more annoying things than Flash ads though. To do ecommerce on the web you end up turning a few things on. One of the things I use Adblock for is removing LivePerson though there are other ways to remove this. Nothing worse than surfing a site to gain information about their product and having to deal with a box opening up with some pushy salesmen in the middle of it. If I want to contact them, or want them to contact me there are other less obnoxious means to do it. Is it breaking the social contract not to deal with a pushy salesperson intrupting what I am doing?
Neilson has connections to a few very high traffic sites and they either A)allow them to view the statistics on their logs, or B)allow them to put a 1x1 gif on their website for usage stats.
They also have a tool similar to Alexa that people (allegedly) voluntarily install and sends back data to them on what they viewed. It only works on IE as far as I know. The people that are selected to be preyed upon for their data have already participated in other marketing surveys so they know the demographics of the user.
I used to occasionally fill out surveys on transportation company satisfaction for another large polling company (which the only real benefit was they gave you access to the data on the polls you participated in). One day they asked me to take a survey on net use, I clicked the link and it took me to Neilson Netratings which tried (without my permission) to install their software.
I stopped dealing with the first company and the second. I thought it was pretty rude to be honest.
If you are seriously trying to recommend a USR 8054 I have a bone to pick with you. I own one of these, and lets just say my experience hasn't been stellar with anything other than WEP.
When I bought it it promised: WPA, WPA-PSK, 125Mbps wireless, and 256 bit WEP.
Reality? WPA did not exist, WPA-PSK also did not exist. Flash the firmware and WPA-PSK was broken severely and remains broken no matter how many beta firmware versions & no matter which standard firmware version they send me and the driver they ship for the 5416 is also broken for WPA-PSK so don't think it's a matter of using all USR equipment and not having problems. It didn't deliver 125Mbps, I had to update the firmware but after that it worked (though reality is it transfers in the mid 20's). WEP was also locked do that you could only enter a password with a mere 6 letters of the alphabet (eventually fixed in a later firmware update) and 256 bit WEP reset frequently or would hang on large file transfers.
Even with 1.67 firmware it *still* resets under heavy load (Limewire, BitTorrent, WinMX), no QoS, WPA-PSK still doesn't work. (It resets and wont reconnect, sometimes even after multiple reboots of both the computer and router it STILL wont connect). It's just flaky, works fine for an hour or so then it hangs up.
I had to RMA one of them, it stopped working suddenly and would only flash a couple blinky lights at me in amber.
It does have it's good points: It has excellent range, better than any other wirless router I've ever tried with stock antennas, but unless you want to use WEP only and be prepared for resets during P2P. Stable is not a word that can be applied to it.
If you deal with USR tech support for anything other than an RMA, they wont have solutions for you. They might give you the latest beta firmware to get you off of the phone, but it wont solve your problem. I'm not the only one who has experienced this, check out broadband reports and read the section dedicated to USR.
I have had more grief over this router than any other piece of electronic equipment I own. I'm stuck with it though, I own it, I can only pray that they finally get a firmware version for the router and card that actually works the way it is supposed to. I'm not holding my breath though. I'm on my 5th version of firmware for the router, and my 2nd driver pack for the 5416 PCI card.
Hitachi (ah, see, I remembered the brand) has succeeded in getting everyone to believe that they are on the cutting edge of hard drive technology. While that may or may not be true, the key point is that perception is being largely disseminated by a cartoon and not hard data or facts. Interesting.
Hop on over to Storage Review and get the facts. Yes, some of the Western Digital drives are a bit quicker and come out with newer stuff sooner. So they are technically usually #2 as far as bringing new features to the market. Hitachi is almost always either #2 or #1 in speed & seek in test, and usually #1 in low noise levels.
These drives used to be #1 in new technology, speed, and pretty much everything else back before the Deskstar fiasco on the 5 platter drives when IBM still ran the show. IBM sold it off to Hitachi but still retains 40% interest in it and probably shares brain power with them. The trend right now is Western Digital releases new stuff first, 1-3 months later the Hitachi version is out and it's quieter, equal or better in speed, and often cheaper. Every once in awhile Hitachi beats WD to the gate with bigger capacity but it doesn't happen very often. They are still in the top 2 in the field, and back when they were IBM's baby they were responsible for almost every major improvement in hard drive storage. The most important thing is that the end product is not just good, it's very good.
The areas where Hitachi shines are usually quietness, exceptional reliability, and speed per dollar. I've been happy with the purchases I've made from them & all 8MB cache drives carry a 3 year warranty.
They have some beautiful 7200 RPM drives that compared up against 10K Raptors are nearly a match for them. At least in IDE & SATA I've been happy with everything I've bought from them and have yet to have to RMA anything. They are almost completely silent, I have one other HD which is close in noise made by Samsung, but everything else is noticably louder.
I'm not so sure that people bling from birth will benefit from any such device. That part of their brain is not even developed, you can't just "plug in" some video feed and expect them to see, do you?
It doesn't do that much anyway. Picture if you will 50 dots that are either white or black with no contrast contol - IE: 100% white, 100% black. Now put these into a fairly wide field of vision.
It's sort of like viewing the world on an LCD at 1600X1200 resolution with only 50 pixels that work and they are spread out rather randomly, and the color control is off. 50 pixels is a "max" as well for this device, more likely they will end up with 30-40 of them that actually work.
This is not even remotely comparable to normal vision, and it's probably not even going to help them navigate. Being able to recognize someones face with it is highly optimistic.
It might lead to something better 40 years from now, but in it's present state I feel sorry for those having the proceedure done. High hopes and low outcome, and they wont just do it to a few people, they will do it to hundreds as the guinea pigs for this.
Trends like these are all over the place in advertising. There's an initial horrid reaction of the disgust and intolerance. And then, people just move on and get used to it. You become numb to the advertising...
Remember when previews were the first thing on a movie screen? Now...I watch advertising for local companies the entire time before the projector even starts. And then, I get about 5 minutes of movie-sized commercials before the previews. This is for a movie I've already paid $10 to go see.
My own situation is somewhat unique as the chronic pain I'm in makes going to the movies and siting in a theater seat for an hour & a half plus a truly painful experience even with morphine. I avoided the theater for almost 4 years because of it. When a movie finally interested me enough to endure that to see it, I got there on time and realized what a huge mistake that was. There were no less than 25 minutes of commercials (mostly for Pepsi products) and previews. Okay, 2 more shots of pain killer and I made it to the start of the movie. I've only been to the theater again once, and I purposely arrived 20 minutes late to miss all of that.
I'm wondering if that insideous advertising crept in gradually? The time before that I went there were maybe 5-7 minutes of previews and then the movie.
I'm told that at certain amusement parks they now have TV's in the lines displaying advertisements (I can't do that anymore, so this is second hand.)
What next? Giant TV's in restaurants to display advertisements while you eat?
Thanks for the concrete example. As someone else pointed out:
- for the search imatix I see you at number one.
Look again, his site isn't the one with the nice Favicon, his site is the 2nd result, the one without it that actually has "Stategic Solutions For A Complex World!" on the front page. Even you, GoogleGuy, were fooled by the first result. So if you were fooled having intimate knowledge of the problem, how would someone without intimate knowledge of the problem fair?
Or simply uninstall flash player, or only install it on browsers where you have enough control to make it behave like your want it to.
n dex.cfm?id=tn_14157
Uninstallers for Flash Player can be found here: http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/i
In two weeks 90% of the remaining lawyers would discover that, excluded frivolous lawsuits, they don't have work anymore. Soon the number of practincing lawyers would fall back to manageable levels, say one for every rat in the sewers...
:)
In NYC there are 12 rats for every person. 132,000,000 lawyers for the NYC population alone. If we include all of the rats in the rest of the US there would obviously be more rats than people. We would have to >gasp import lawyers just to get them to a manageable level.
Be careful what you wish for.
iDownload Tech (Mark): iSearch is its own independant company that markets many affiliate programs. I believe they have removal instructions and an automatic removal tool on their FAQ page at isearch.com. You can also use this link: http://toolbar.isearch.com/uninstall/ I don't know any other info about their company or software.
s ites&ref=
Considering they have links to Isearch's toolbar affiliate program on their site http://affiliate.idownload.com/external.php?page=
I highly doubt the verity of that.
Throughout too damnit. Wish there was an edit function for those times I don't see an error till I hit post.