Perhaps so - there's plenty of other companies making X10 protocol compatible devices - but X10.com is indeed the same company that did those annoying pop-ups.
Their web site is a testament of all that's wrong with Web Design in the world, however, you're not buying their web site, you're buying their switches and outlets and those work fine.
You know, that annoying company that bombarded the late 90's with ads about their X10 "Spy Camera" system?
Well, the same company now makes all sorts of neat wireless and wired gadgets for automating your house. You can get replacement switches and outlets, or add-on ones (that plug into existing outlets) and can be controlled by their own wireless panels or by a computer interface. I know they have software for Windows but something might be available on Linux.
Basically with the X10 system you could potentially control every outlet, switch, and light with a single interface, as well as any low-voltage system (garage doors, etc) you want. You can also wire up sensors to windows and doors in order to trigger events such as turning on a light, sounding an alarm, or via the computer sending an e-mail or making a phone call.
Cool stuff, and when I buy a house I'm going to run the full gamut with these things. The nice thing is that the individual outlets and such aren't overly expensive so you could start with just a few and expand your system over time.
And the silly thing is, they probably have brand new printers all over the place, too.
At this place, a pharmaceutical company, we have over 800 servers. Many of them are VM's but we have a lot of brand new stuff. Yet two of the arguably most important machines in the organization are 8 years old..
That's what happens when tech decisions aren't made by technical people. Or, at the very least, consulted with.
Here's something scary - I'm doing a contract for a company right now and I find out that their two primary file servers - which were once part of clusters until their counterpart nodes failed and were never fixed - are Pentium III 1.4Ghz machines.
Now, a 1.4Ghz Pentium III is actually pretty cutting edge for the P3 - I think that was as fast as they ever got. But there's only one CPU in each of these file servers which serve out about 10TB each (via iSCSI) to 2,000 employees as home drives, main file storage, etc.
And they wonder why the performance sucks. I'm surprised they run as well as they do!
But.. bigger capacity drives are heavier and require more electricity! Two 1TB disks will draw 2x more than two 500GB disks!
Kidding aside, I think the big myth these days is that hard drives use a lot of power. They use a few watts when they spin up, but when they're just sitting there doing nothing they consume very little electricity, and when they're working hard they can use DOUBLE - and double of very little is still very little.
I have a file server machine with 13 drives in it - all but one is is a 750GB Seagate 7200RPM disk. I have a kill-a-watt and I plugged it in to see the power draw. I don't recall the numbers off the top of my head but basically all the drives spinning only added about 40% to the total power requirement, and when they were all busy (doing a RAID resync or something) they use about 60%. Considering the machine is a dual-core Opteron clone machine with 4GB RAM and nothing more special than that, I was very surprised. (The machine does have a hardware RAID card in it, which uses its fair share of power.. but still.)
These huge honkin' 2TB disks and such are even lower powered because they tend to spin a bit slower and many of them have special considerations for power management, further reducing the power needs. A 5900RPM 2TB disk can have similar performance to a 500GB 7200RPM disk because of the data density, and when put into a multi-disk array can perform very well for applications not requiring bleeding-edge performance (which is actually most everything..)
Absolutely. Because records are so easily obtainable now, practically every job above burger flipper requires a background check.
The justice system needs to take measures to protect people from unreasonable punishment, and more and more that means a Scarlett letter called a felony conviction.
Perhaps there's some types of crimes where offenders tend to repeat (sexual crimes, etc) but the vast majority are drug crimes. (I used to work at a correctional institution and could look up statistics and demographics.) And, the majority of those people were users, and got in over their heads.
Now they'll have felony convictions for the rest of their lives. I can't exactly blame some of these people for falling back into their old habbits when you can't even become a cashier at many major retailers without a background check. You start to think - what the hell am I busting my ass for?
I don't really believe in prison for the majority of reasons people end up there, and especially not for drug charges. They might not be victimless crimes in the case of dealers but they're non-violent crimes and there needs to be a better way of getting these people on the level besides locking them up in these god forsaken places.
Whatever dude. I quite clearly have been bullied, and very badly. In fact, one girl, when I was in middle school, was suspended for it. It was anot a good two years.
Eventually, I decided not to give a shit, and by sophomore year in high school I was having a pretty damned good time. I was a pretty well liked person in my school by the time I graduated; at the very least, I was known by everyone, good or bad.
I used to poke terrible fun at this kid on my school bus when I was a sophomore. We were absolutely ruthless. He took it, and never said a word. Eventually, I met him on a local BBS; didn't realize it was him. Discovered we were on the same bus, and we became friends and remain very good friends to this day. That was 16 years ago. He's married, has a newborn, is a director in the company he's in and makes $120K.
So I guess before you assume you know something about someone, think about it a bit.
For the rest of your post, go fuck yourself you arrogant pig fucker.
I don't believe in the death penalty either - I don't feel as though we have the right to kill people any more than those people did. That, and the fact that death is too final for an imperfect courts system, we just shouldn't be killing people.
Believe me - I have no sympathy for a 16 year old girl. 16 year old girls can be the most vindictive, evil little people out there. But I'm compassionate enough to realize that this person won't always BE an evil 16 year old girl (probably) and I don't feel as though she should be marred for life because of it. It IS disproportionate.
How many kids do you think actually "don't recover" from being bullied? There were kids in my school that got totally fucking shafted by everyone, and I've seen them 10 years later and they're just fine. Married, kids, etc.
So you think we should seek out and jail/fine/convict all bullies? We've all been a bully some time in our lives..
Did you actually mention columbine? Let's bring things back to reality. Bring it in a little. Really, do you think convicting a few bullies is going to make that kind of kid - the kind that shoots people in a school- any different?
Or are you saying the columbine shooters were the victims?
Again, I agree there should be punishment for extreme bullying. But I don't think a 16 year old kid should pay for the rest of their lives for it.
Well, nothing is worse than perhaps a felony conviction =)
In some cases, if you're lucky, you can have the charges dropped/resolved without conviction and then petition to have them sealed by the court maybe 6 months or a year later. That assumes this was your first offense. Then, the charges will NOT show up on a background check, and can only come back if you commit another crime of similar type where someone (the DA) petitions the court to re-open the records to show a pattern or something.
Perhaps, but not necessarily. Because the police made such a big deal about it, who knows. Since the police are there to catch people after they've done illegal things, instead of stopping crimes or protecting people, they'll push for the maximum possible sentence.
It depends on the DA and ultimately the judge. Being 16 is a hell of a lot better than being 17 when it comes to these things.
More likely, if convicted (or plead out, which is probably likely) she'll have this on the record and as long as she doesn't fuck up again in a few years she can petition the courts to have that particular charge or conviction sealed.
I never said anything about free expression, and I've mentioned a few times now that she SHOULD be punished. It's wrong. But a felony conviction? Give me a fucking break. She's 16, not 30.
Suspend her from school! Send her to summer school! Whack her with a misdemeanor and community service!
Instead, you'd rather send her to jail, make her pay $10,000, and have a felony convicion?
Let me tell you, I had my share of bullies picking on me in school, particularly middle school or freshman of High School. I fucking hated it, and it could be bad sometimes. I don't want them to have convictions on their records for things they did when they were 15. I'm friends with some of them now!
I realize things have changed somewhat with the Internet and stuff like that, but c'mon, don't be a cold bastard shithead.
Deterrence doesn't work with kids. Not like it does with adults. Kids don't think about the weight of the consequences like adults do. It's not an excuse by any stretch but you should take it into account when writing law - which historically it has been.
And I don't know why you can't be sympathetic to both? I mean, I think pot should be legal but by the same token, those kids do get caught with an illegal substance - no matter how stupid it is for it to be illegal.
But is that the world you want to live in? Where we hand out felony convictions to teenage girls because they're spreading rumors against each other online?
Yes, kids are old enough to know right and wrong, but it's proven time and time again that they also don't think enough about consequences. That's why so many of the dangerous sports like BMX biking, dirt bike MotoGP and such are dominated by kids these days. They don't think about how much they could ruin their lives with a single error.
She shouldn't be let off the hook - but I don't agree with the ridiculously harsh felony status of the law.
I agree with you that this is no laughing matter. It's libel, and defamation of character. And, I DO agree that this girl should be punished if this went on ruthlessly for months.
But a felony conviction for a kid? She'll live with that on her criminal record for the rest of her life and she'll have a hard time getting good work..
The punishment doesn't even matter. If she has a felony conviction she's fucked.
Almost every company out there now does background checks. While most of them claim "This won't necessarily disqualify you from this position" it most certainly will.
It's a scarlet letter that keeps people that made some mistakes in their lives down. I have a few friends that are really decent people that made some stupid mistakes when they were 19/20/21 and such, and now 10 years later they still can't get work at a lot of places. Basically, they did what a lot of kids did, but they got caught..
Sure, and I never really liked the Sidekick because of the reasons you cite. However, it was also pretty cool that when I took a picture on the thing, it would automatically show up on the T-Mobile web site in moments and I could save it to my PC or e-mail it or whatever.
The technology isn't inherently bad. Yes, there was a major f'ckup but the cool thing about the Sidekick is that you can lose it, get a new one, and bam, everything is synced back to your phone like nothing happened. The bad part is that the phone is so locked down and controlled that doing anything not blessed by Danger you can't do. You can't even put music on it (at least I couldn't at the time. You could pay $3 for a 10 second low quality ring tone though.)
I've seen a few. Someone at a place I did some small work for had one of the new Zune HD's. Nice little machine, cool interface, real smooth. Really high resolution screen. It's a music player, not a PDA, and it works very well for that purpose. It can also play HD movies and you can hook it up to an HDTV and play HD video from it.
I don't know if Apple "hates" their customers, but they do tend to ignore them.
Take almost any other product out there today (any electronic product.) You buy it, and you enjoy it. The manufacturer releases updates to the software and you get new features and bug fixes. They let you control many aspects of the device operation. Sweet! More bang for the buck, and more people will want to buy the product for the new feature.
Apple, on the other hand, releases a product. Say, the iPod. They MIGHT fix bugs, eventually. Or not. They give you a few selectable options and NEVER, EVER add features. To get new features, you have to buy iPod 2.0 and throw away the old one.
I have an iPod 160GB Classic and the only reason I got it was because it's the only portable player with that kind of capacity. Once I can get one of those new fancy Zunes with over 120GB capacity I'll use that. Have you seen the new Zune HD? It's a really cool device. Considering I don't buy music online, and I only have MP3's in my library, I can use any player.
Well, the data isn't the only value. The service itself will be working a full capacity soon, albeit light on people's stuff.
The entire system, and the fact that you need that system to use the Sidekick, has value even after this mess. Many people will simply add their stuff back to their phones, begrudgingly. It's like if you lost your phone if you had almost ANY other type of cell phone.
In fact, now that this happened, you can probably be secure now knowing that Microsoft will never let this happen again. It will be a topic in every single weekly meeting, staff meeting, and director meeting in the company for a long time. "Are the backups working now? Is the off-site system working?"
Yea, I agree that tapes are fairly reliable. I mean, at least as reliable as any other type of backup medium. And, the newer LTO and SDLT drives are less susceptible to broken leaders and such.
However, they can be fragile, and it's necessary to test backups at least once a year, and remove old tapes from rotation every so often depending on what kind of work load they are under. One of the biggest mistakes small companies make here is using the same tapes for years and never replacing the tape drive itself. I've seen drives in use that are 15 years old..
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps so - there's plenty of other companies making X10 protocol compatible devices - but X10.com is indeed the same company that did those annoying pop-ups.
Their web site is a testament of all that's wrong with Web Design in the world, however, you're not buying their web site, you're buying their switches and outlets and those work fine.
You know, that annoying company that bombarded the late 90's with ads about their X10 "Spy Camera" system?
Well, the same company now makes all sorts of neat wireless and wired gadgets for automating your house. You can get replacement switches and outlets, or add-on ones (that plug into existing outlets) and can be controlled by their own wireless panels or by a computer interface. I know they have software for Windows but something might be available on Linux.
Basically with the X10 system you could potentially control every outlet, switch, and light with a single interface, as well as any low-voltage system (garage doors, etc) you want. You can also wire up sensors to windows and doors in order to trigger events such as turning on a light, sounding an alarm, or via the computer sending an e-mail or making a phone call.
Cool stuff, and when I buy a house I'm going to run the full gamut with these things. The nice thing is that the individual outlets and such aren't overly expensive so you could start with just a few and expand your system over time.
And the silly thing is, they probably have brand new printers all over the place, too.
At this place, a pharmaceutical company, we have over 800 servers. Many of them are VM's but we have a lot of brand new stuff. Yet two of the arguably most important machines in the organization are 8 years old..
That's what happens when tech decisions aren't made by technical people. Or, at the very least, consulted with.
Here's something scary - I'm doing a contract for a company right now and I find out that their two primary file servers - which were once part of clusters until their counterpart nodes failed and were never fixed - are Pentium III 1.4Ghz machines.
Now, a 1.4Ghz Pentium III is actually pretty cutting edge for the P3 - I think that was as fast as they ever got. But there's only one CPU in each of these file servers which serve out about 10TB each (via iSCSI) to 2,000 employees as home drives, main file storage, etc.
And they wonder why the performance sucks. I'm surprised they run as well as they do!
But.. bigger capacity drives are heavier and require more electricity! Two 1TB disks will draw 2x more than two 500GB disks!
Kidding aside, I think the big myth these days is that hard drives use a lot of power. They use a few watts when they spin up, but when they're just sitting there doing nothing they consume very little electricity, and when they're working hard they can use DOUBLE - and double of very little is still very little.
I have a file server machine with 13 drives in it - all but one is is a 750GB Seagate 7200RPM disk. I have a kill-a-watt and I plugged it in to see the power draw. I don't recall the numbers off the top of my head but basically all the drives spinning only added about 40% to the total power requirement, and when they were all busy (doing a RAID resync or something) they use about 60%. Considering the machine is a dual-core Opteron clone machine with 4GB RAM and nothing more special than that, I was very surprised. (The machine does have a hardware RAID card in it, which uses its fair share of power.. but still.)
These huge honkin' 2TB disks and such are even lower powered because they tend to spin a bit slower and many of them have special considerations for power management, further reducing the power needs. A 5900RPM 2TB disk can have similar performance to a 500GB 7200RPM disk because of the data density, and when put into a multi-disk array can perform very well for applications not requiring bleeding-edge performance (which is actually most everything..)
Absolutely. Because records are so easily obtainable now, practically every job above burger flipper requires a background check.
The justice system needs to take measures to protect people from unreasonable punishment, and more and more that means a Scarlett letter called a felony conviction.
Perhaps there's some types of crimes where offenders tend to repeat (sexual crimes, etc) but the vast majority are drug crimes. (I used to work at a correctional institution and could look up statistics and demographics.) And, the majority of those people were users, and got in over their heads.
Now they'll have felony convictions for the rest of their lives. I can't exactly blame some of these people for falling back into their old habbits when you can't even become a cashier at many major retailers without a background check. You start to think - what the hell am I busting my ass for?
I don't really believe in prison for the majority of reasons people end up there, and especially not for drug charges. They might not be victimless crimes in the case of dealers but they're non-violent crimes and there needs to be a better way of getting these people on the level besides locking them up in these god forsaken places.
Whatever dude. I quite clearly have been bullied, and very badly. In fact, one girl, when I was in middle school, was suspended for it. It was anot a good two years.
Eventually, I decided not to give a shit, and by sophomore year in high school I was having a pretty damned good time. I was a pretty well liked person in my school by the time I graduated; at the very least, I was known by everyone, good or bad.
I used to poke terrible fun at this kid on my school bus when I was a sophomore. We were absolutely ruthless. He took it, and never said a word. Eventually, I met him on a local BBS; didn't realize it was him. Discovered we were on the same bus, and we became friends and remain very good friends to this day. That was 16 years ago. He's married, has a newborn, is a director in the company he's in and makes $120K.
So I guess before you assume you know something about someone, think about it a bit.
For the rest of your post, go fuck yourself you arrogant pig fucker.
I don't believe in the death penalty either - I don't feel as though we have the right to kill people any more than those people did. That, and the fact that death is too final for an imperfect courts system, we just shouldn't be killing people.
Believe me - I have no sympathy for a 16 year old girl. 16 year old girls can be the most vindictive, evil little people out there. But I'm compassionate enough to realize that this person won't always BE an evil 16 year old girl (probably) and I don't feel as though she should be marred for life because of it. It IS disproportionate.
Woah, who damaged you, dude?
How many kids do you think actually "don't recover" from being bullied? There were kids in my school that got totally fucking shafted by everyone, and I've seen them 10 years later and they're just fine. Married, kids, etc.
So you think we should seek out and jail/fine/convict all bullies? We've all been a bully some time in our lives..
Did you actually mention columbine? Let's bring things back to reality. Bring it in a little. Really, do you think convicting a few bullies is going to make that kind of kid - the kind that shoots people in a school- any different?
Or are you saying the columbine shooters were the victims?
Again, I agree there should be punishment for extreme bullying. But I don't think a 16 year old kid should pay for the rest of their lives for it.
Well, nothing is worse than perhaps a felony conviction =)
In some cases, if you're lucky, you can have the charges dropped/resolved without conviction and then petition to have them sealed by the court maybe 6 months or a year later. That assumes this was your first offense. Then, the charges will NOT show up on a background check, and can only come back if you commit another crime of similar type where someone (the DA) petitions the court to re-open the records to show a pattern or something.
Perhaps, but not necessarily. Because the police made such a big deal about it, who knows. Since the police are there to catch people after they've done illegal things, instead of stopping crimes or protecting people, they'll push for the maximum possible sentence.
It depends on the DA and ultimately the judge. Being 16 is a hell of a lot better than being 17 when it comes to these things.
More likely, if convicted (or plead out, which is probably likely) she'll have this on the record and as long as she doesn't fuck up again in a few years she can petition the courts to have that particular charge or conviction sealed.
I never said anything about free expression, and I've mentioned a few times now that she SHOULD be punished. It's wrong. But a felony conviction? Give me a fucking break. She's 16, not 30.
Yea, but it was a 16 year old girl doing it!
Suspend her from school! Send her to summer school! Whack her with a misdemeanor and community service!
Instead, you'd rather send her to jail, make her pay $10,000, and have a felony convicion?
Let me tell you, I had my share of bullies picking on me in school, particularly middle school or freshman of High School. I fucking hated it, and it could be bad sometimes. I don't want them to have convictions on their records for things they did when they were 15. I'm friends with some of them now!
I realize things have changed somewhat with the Internet and stuff like that, but c'mon, don't be a cold bastard shithead.
And what really sucks is that CHARGES show up on background checks - even if they were dismissed or not yet processed in court.
It's bullshit.
Deterrence doesn't work with kids. Not like it does with adults. Kids don't think about the weight of the consequences like adults do. It's not an excuse by any stretch but you should take it into account when writing law - which historically it has been.
And I don't know why you can't be sympathetic to both? I mean, I think pot should be legal but by the same token, those kids do get caught with an illegal substance - no matter how stupid it is for it to be illegal.
But is that the world you want to live in? Where we hand out felony convictions to teenage girls because they're spreading rumors against each other online?
Yes, kids are old enough to know right and wrong, but it's proven time and time again that they also don't think enough about consequences. That's why so many of the dangerous sports like BMX biking, dirt bike MotoGP and such are dominated by kids these days. They don't think about how much they could ruin their lives with a single error.
She shouldn't be let off the hook - but I don't agree with the ridiculously harsh felony status of the law.
I agree with you that this is no laughing matter. It's libel, and defamation of character. And, I DO agree that this girl should be punished if this went on ruthlessly for months.
But a felony conviction for a kid? She'll live with that on her criminal record for the rest of her life and she'll have a hard time getting good work..
The punishment doesn't even matter. If she has a felony conviction she's fucked.
Almost every company out there now does background checks. While most of them claim "This won't necessarily disqualify you from this position" it most certainly will.
It's a scarlet letter that keeps people that made some mistakes in their lives down. I have a few friends that are really decent people that made some stupid mistakes when they were 19/20/21 and such, and now 10 years later they still can't get work at a lot of places. Basically, they did what a lot of kids did, but they got caught..
Sure, and I never really liked the Sidekick because of the reasons you cite. However, it was also pretty cool that when I took a picture on the thing, it would automatically show up on the T-Mobile web site in moments and I could save it to my PC or e-mail it or whatever.
The technology isn't inherently bad. Yes, there was a major f'ckup but the cool thing about the Sidekick is that you can lose it, get a new one, and bam, everything is synced back to your phone like nothing happened. The bad part is that the phone is so locked down and controlled that doing anything not blessed by Danger you can't do. You can't even put music on it (at least I couldn't at the time. You could pay $3 for a 10 second low quality ring tone though.)
Besides Apple continuously locking down the device to prevent home brew software and such, what features have been added?
Being as this is the first Touch I'd expect maybe a COUPLE features, but I'm sure the list is very short.
I've seen a few. Someone at a place I did some small work for had one of the new Zune HD's. Nice little machine, cool interface, real smooth. Really high resolution screen. It's a music player, not a PDA, and it works very well for that purpose. It can also play HD movies and you can hook it up to an HDTV and play HD video from it.
I don't know if Apple "hates" their customers, but they do tend to ignore them.
Take almost any other product out there today (any electronic product.) You buy it, and you enjoy it. The manufacturer releases updates to the software and you get new features and bug fixes. They let you control many aspects of the device operation. Sweet! More bang for the buck, and more people will want to buy the product for the new feature.
Apple, on the other hand, releases a product. Say, the iPod. They MIGHT fix bugs, eventually. Or not. They give you a few selectable options and NEVER, EVER add features. To get new features, you have to buy iPod 2.0 and throw away the old one.
I have an iPod 160GB Classic and the only reason I got it was because it's the only portable player with that kind of capacity. Once I can get one of those new fancy Zunes with over 120GB capacity I'll use that. Have you seen the new Zune HD? It's a really cool device. Considering I don't buy music online, and I only have MP3's in my library, I can use any player.
Bring back VideoDisc!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc
Well, the data isn't the only value. The service itself will be working a full capacity soon, albeit light on people's stuff.
The entire system, and the fact that you need that system to use the Sidekick, has value even after this mess. Many people will simply add their stuff back to their phones, begrudgingly. It's like if you lost your phone if you had almost ANY other type of cell phone.
In fact, now that this happened, you can probably be secure now knowing that Microsoft will never let this happen again. It will be a topic in every single weekly meeting, staff meeting, and director meeting in the company for a long time. "Are the backups working now? Is the off-site system working?"
Yea, I agree that tapes are fairly reliable. I mean, at least as reliable as any other type of backup medium. And, the newer LTO and SDLT drives are less susceptible to broken leaders and such.
However, they can be fragile, and it's necessary to test backups at least once a year, and remove old tapes from rotation every so often depending on what kind of work load they are under. One of the biggest mistakes small companies make here is using the same tapes for years and never replacing the tape drive itself. I've seen drives in use that are 15 years old..