This device is all about the IO/second.. a 12 TB SAN cant come close..
If your looking to run a blast/darwin query on 50k files to find the closest match to an unknown dna sequence Either you need to recode a bunch of software to use sql, or you snag a piece of hardware that gives database level performance. 80gigs at $2400.00 is a bloody bargain.
The device is also 10x faster in bandwidth than a normal drive which is comparable to a san, but not such a power hog.
So really the tradeoff rocks for small files. It doesn't have a controller interface latency so its really quick. It should mask a good chunk of hard drive based lag.
ncredible and grand news if it's on target, and doesn't dissolve into vapor.
Cue the Media Copying Discussions.
(Someone fast on their math: How long would that take to copy a new 0.90 Terabyte drive?)
Current USB ~= 60 MB/Sec Theoretical
USB3 ~= 600 MB/Sec Theoretical max,
1000 sec ->600 G *1.5 == 1500 sec for 900 G
1500 Sec/(3600 Sec/hour) um 25 minutes
In real USB drives run about 25-28 MB/sec under half the theoretical rate. 500 mins ~ 8+ hours
Modern Hard Drives can pull 60-75 MB/sec sustained. 250 mins- 200 mins (respectively) or 3 to 4.5 hours.. (plus a nice fudge factor, as the inside tracks have a slower transfer rate)
OK, exactly how far up your ass did you have to reach to pull that one out?
See, we have this thing called "The First Law of Thermodynamics." At the molecular scale, water molecules don't just decide to break up and go their own way willy-nilly, not the least because both elements involved (hydrogen and oxygen) really don't like being alone (the two hydrogen atoms can go off on their own merry way as a diatomic molecule, but the oxygen will be lonely). Breaking molecular bonds in water takes energy, otherwise cracking water to produce hydrogen would be more cost-effective than cracking methanol (the carbon atoms have a more independent personality and are better able to get over any rejection issues it might have).
Beyond that, even if the energy to crack an individual water molecule were as trivially small as you believe, the energy would have to come from somewhere. Cracking water is endothermic, but so is making it (oxygen atoms, at least, need to be pried apart against their will first, assuming they're not in some kinky threeway), but even if one of those two reactions was exothermic, the energy required to do one act must necessarily equal the energy released by the other, meaning a net change in energy, and a net change in the number of water molecules, of zero.
The real reasons we don't use water are:
Corrosiveness (which you already covered)
Compressibility (there is no such thing as an incompressible substance, but liquids are more susceptible than solids)
Thermal expansion (something else solids are less susceptible to)
Last, but not least: evaporation
"So it is essentially impossible to get 1000 cm^3 of "pure" water."
the PH of "pure" water is 10 exp -7
that means that under normal conditions there is one ten millionth concentration of hydronium molecules. H3O+
this number increases with temperature.
protons jump in water fantastically well. This is why you can acidify standing water much faster than a dye will propagate.
Come on it not like its the end of the world people!!!
Storm
Workarounds...
on
PCI Compliance
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Regularly monitor and test networks
10. Monitor and track all access to network resources and cardholder data
11. Regularly test security systems and processes
These two stand out as the most costly. Are they things you SHOULD do? Yes. Can you reasonably mark either of these as 100% compliant at any time? Maybe, but this isn't going to be pretty, or cheap...
Lets look at #10 first. What does "all access to network resources" define out to be? These days EVERYTHING is a network resource, and not all of them are within the admin's control. Take the iPhone for example. Is the PCI-compliant admin supposed to certify that every iPhone on the company's network cannot be accessed by others, thereby turning it into a 'network resource'? How do I, as an admin, track that Joe and Jim transfered files peer-to-peer style between their phones? I assume that we have to then ban all these devices?
It is _possible_ to comply with 'all access to network resources', but this is costly.
Cardholder data, on the other hand, can be limited and is perfectly reasonable as a requirement.
For #11, does 'regular' imply frequent as well? Does that compound with 'all network resources'? If so, this is a HUGE time sink. It could also be done, but this has a cost attached as well.
The network admin would then consider the COMPANY'S NETWORK to be an OPEN Network, and treated as such.. The network admin would consider the PCI network to be the server and the endpoints, where firewalls would need to remain in place, and appropriate measures taken to ensure that the OPEN network is unable to decrypt the data transmissions. So basically the all access to network resources becomes more survivable, making the #11 much easier to handle as well.
You can have dependency problems is you just use RPM's however there are tools such as "app-get" and "yum" that reduce this issue to virtually zero although you do have to be careful of the repos you pick since they have to work with each other. Were people run into issues is having to many enabled repos.
To have all repos enabled and accepting all is just plain silly since you are going to have issues. What I do is to activate one repo at a time in a preferred order with the primary repo first. I never do an installation or an update without checking what I am getting and I will only answer "yes" when I am satisfied.
I agree that yum is great... for the dependency issues that it is dealing with it really does a fantastic job..
That being said yum is fixing issues that need to be fixed at at a much higher level...
Most of the applications need to be ditching the dependencies.... The pieces and parts that are needed to get a program running are a nightmare..
If you need software that isn't covered in your repo , the installs get really ugly really fast, after a couple dozen oddball packages try and fight out a dependency war, you finally cave in and remove some programs, installing them on another box, (or a chroot jail).
Anyway, applications need to be well defined, where they aren't installing jack in the rest of the system.. Where the libraries they need, don't mingle with the rest of the system libraries. Where all the dependencies can be removed without harming any other app on the system..
What I'm proposing has space issues, no doubt, and some memory overhead. If we are to go forward in a meaningful way, we need to smash the complexity of the multi tentacled applications, down to the system calls and the display calls.. where the removal of the application is as simple as rm -rf./apps/myCruftyInstall and then removing the shortcut from the desktop.
They will remember that movies came in the mail when they were kids. And consider it quaint.
Photo scrapbooks will be digital, with printouts being kitschy..
Most people will max out around a terabyte of music.. because its more than they will ever get around top listening to.
This will be a small chunk on their thumb drives.
The old Colbert reports will have references too obscure to follow.
South Park will be mainstream wholesome viewing... While some new show comes along to violate our sense of morality.
Mass Transit will still seem to be a pipe-dream for the US..
People will still be procrastinating the 2038 audits..
Nice list.. its nice to see a good counter for the quantifiers..
I've found that the quantifiables are number of Servers, number of users, number of update requests, and number of unexpected downtimes..
If the company is providing the right support the number of unexpected downtimes gets close to zero..
The real crux is.. WHAT is uptime worth... it varies from company to company.. for google and microsoft the number is amazing.. for billsmitherspersonalwebpage downtime might be less noticed.
Still Having metrics that seem evil might just shut up the bean counter.
The authors agreed that a single PCR wasnt enough, so they went with a hindIII digestion and an agarose gel run, to make sure that the pieces were all the right size, and nopt some funky recombination.
They also managed a few southern blots to further ensure their results. AND they did 1300 Random Sequences (with luck a sequence can be read to 1000ish base pairs..), and IT ALL MATCHED.... 1.09 million base pairs all fit right...
So my point is that they did the work, made sure it was bulletproof, got accepted into a major journal. And sure they dont know the whole story of whats going on, but it doesnt matter, they DID IT, a full Genome transplant, with proper methods used to ensure its validity..
I agree on the Botnet thing.... I there isnt a good way to handle it. However setting untrusted email to 5 minutes of cpu time will limit botnets to 288 emails/day which distributed among the populace isnt too shabby. Oh the botnet machines would also be slowing to a crawl, and using 100% cpu power all the time, so they would be more likely to be repaired.. So it isnt bulletproof, just a tad more resistant if it goes mainstream
since this is an addition the regular smtp gets through, but it gets tagged as "unfiltered" so it could be subjected to more through spam filtering. So the friends could still send normal email, but it would be "tagged" for the email client to be able to differentiate it from the "negotiated"... How the email client decides to display or classify the difference is outside my scope...
Ok IM2000 has some nice ideas, but I think that spammers would love it.. only the subject info needs to be sent, so they can increase their effective bandwith.. since most people just nuke subject lines anyway, it has some advantages for the spammer... but its a total replacement for smtp, so its tough to gain a foothold.
I think Its about time to just code it myself...
An upgraded email system..
step one,,, add a new incoming port for email.
the incoming port will receive a request for "spam bypass", with or without credentials.
it will reply with a number of bits that will need to be solved..
The sender will then either send a negative followed by the message (dropped into the spam folder)
Or the sender will request the workload, where it solves X bits of a DES decryption.
Then sends the message encrypted to the destination, the destination will then accept the email as legitimate.
The advantage is that email will take seconds to minutes to pass a filter, with credentials being able to reduce the workload for more trusted senders.
IP filtering could be used to adjust the workload, depending on senders ip.
The regular email would still come through the normal port, but just listed as unfiltered.. allowing a transition to a new email system.
The big problem with hand washing is that it removes the good bacteria from your hands. This normal infection that is all over your skin keeps you protected from newcomers (i.e. pathogens). So the whole concept of restroom/ sanitize/ dry hands/ tough pathogen laden bathroom door handle,, is a sketchy bargain at best. Sure since most people are healthy they aren't passing pathogens onto door handles. Unless I'm about to handle food or eat I wipe my hands across my forehead after drying to re-infect my hands with non-pathogenic germs. Plus your hands soak up a bit of the excess oils to prevent chapping. The non-pathogens eat loose particles on your skin, leaving any newcoming pathogens with a scarce supply of usable nutrients.
Wow your on fantasy island..... One, there is nothing degrading about arts/humanities, I know theatre majors with really fantastic memories (memorized the codon table in 12 minutes, took me a good 45 and it was in my major).
Two 'Science' isn't opinion. Its like a big jigsaw puzzle, we try out pieces (hypotheses) and if enough connections are made that aren't screwing up something else we call it a theory and leave it be, until someone finds a reason that the theory isn't a valid piece of the puzzle.. Once a theorem is pretty well connected in the puzzle we treat it as fact. ATP as a energy currency in the cell isn't an opinion. Glycolysis isn't an opinion. It is a theory, an obscenely well tested theory that any reasonable scientist treats as an undeniable fact.
I am sure glad that your grammar and spelling have improved, because I would have a tough time understanding anything less coherent.
Somehow the amount of math that is taught in grade school is a joke. Every year, repeat what was learned in the previous three years and tack on something new. In fifth grade we were being taught to borrow the digits in subtraction, again. Somehow we tolerate the education system to be so slow with math that calculus is something that waits for college. That Algebra is the final math step needed to graduate high school. This is nutz. People dont seem to have a grasp of how to do simple math, Converting Watts to HP or cubic inches to liters, simple conversational stuff seems intractable to a large swath of the population. Explaining megapixels and resolution requires a level of dumbing down that shouldnt need to happen. People wonder why a normal peice of paper cant be folded in half more than 11 times without trying it, and still dont understand whats special about 11, given that 8 seems intractable.
There is a bunch of math out there that isnt all that hard, but isnt taught to kids. Graph Theory, Topology, Probability and statistics, even some linear algebra isnt too horrible.
The lack of math education is as crippling to our youth as learning only one language. And just as inexcusable.
The whole point is that a high end coder can do way more than a regular shmoe coder. who can do a whole lot more than a novice...
developing code that can do something simple like print 0..1999 excluding numbers not divisible by 5 or 2 and excluding any number divisible by 3. a novice might screw up some of the semantics and wind up including 15 in the printout, the high end and the regular should be able to code it in under a cup of cofee.
on a harder task.. calculate all primes under 32 bits and populate a vector with the results. A novice is going to have code that is slow as sin. O(n^2) (2^64 ops)
a regular shmoe coder will manage to find a few tricks that will make the process a bit faster. O(n * sqrt n) (around 2^48 ops)
A high end coder can pull off an O(n) result (less than 2^32 ops)
They might all pull it off in the same time but high end coding makes all the difference in performance.
Some programmers are paid correctly, but quite a few are overpaid for their lack of skill, and some are underpaid for a brutal level of skill. And some uber-hackers just produce at regular hacker levels because they can get away with it.
yes someone needs to build the manphone, a brick of a device that is hardened enough to be hit to deep middle filed with a baseball bat, while not losing signal. With battery power for a 3 day weekend of fishing in remote parts of Montana, where the tower is a ways away. Automatic replies to texts and voicemails saying that the service is unwanted and will not be used. It would keep a few reminders on hand such as the wifes B-day and anniversary (which it prompts for at purchase time). The ringtone is a bear growl no options. The recent calls list would automatically change any womans name to Todd except for the wife and mom, no need to help a snooping wife
I still get weird clicks when my XP box plays mp3s.
My iMac (core2duo 3gb-ram) gets a bit flaky when it gets busy, and it will lag a bit when asked to move things around.
When I completely blasted my Be and it still manages to keep the mp3 from sounding like garbage.
It was freaky smooth to deal with.. I still think of the Bebox when thing get weird.. Shame that it got killed the way it did.
The nice part about college is the ability to find a niche skillset. While learning java and vb are nice skills, your fighting a mob of better qualified people for every job out there.. College gives you some extras that you can pick up that keep the mob size down to a minimum.
Learn some obscure systems really well, jcl schedulers and cobol programmers still make some real cash. note: This might not be for you.
Learn some non computer skills, Bioinformatics and Molecular modelling are really hot fields right now, and probably wont slow down soon..
When you have open ended assignments, make them relevant to the field you want to enter.
A friend of mine wasted most of his college days building MUD's he really worked to build some challenging adventures and quests.. And though his GPA tanked he was hired by Ultima because the interviewer had played in his MUD.
Cultivate friends at college, they will pull you kicking and screaming into jobs that are right up your field.
Show enough enthusiasm and Profs will find awesome opportunities for you.
Get something you enjoy
Science is about asking questions that havent been suitable answered for your purposes yet. IE how can we losslessly edit lossy image formats. Or how can we optimize the new database once we have installed solid state drives? Or how do we prevent a lockup with this new 128 core chip with 5 dedicated lock bits..
Engineering is about building things once you understand the concept behind them. So building a jpg viewer/writer isnt science anymore, it was back circa 1980. Dont get me wrong, building one in without libraries is a mess but could be done. Or building a DES encryption box, it isnt easy, but its not science anymore. its engineering, and we need a bunch of good software engineers because they are realy hard to find.
Most coders dont really fall into the engineer category, unless they are design pattern zealots, or have a robust methodology fro producing code, they are just using logic and application. This is where most of the really cool toys get built, this is where 99.8% of the absurd buggy code comes from. Most Computer Scientists dont Engineer their experiments, IE buggy test code. Without these people we dont really value software engineers. Without Computer Science, Software Engineers are stuck using the same tools over and over.
ablative=mirrored surface that stays mirrored after a few layers are burned off. Yup mirrors burn with enough power. sure there are other types of ablative armor but this would be the logical choice..
If the materials Technology is there I would go with a metal/diamond/metal/diamond////// composite, as diamond layers can transmit light and heat to prevent localized heating, and the metals can transmit heat to both layers as they're heated.
11 miles per second = 660 miles per minute = 39,600 miles per hour..
High end pulse lasers have down to femtosecond dwell times, presumably a microsecond pulse laser could manage some damage.
Even so, a good ablative material could reduce laser effectiveness by a substantial margain.
Having done some tech support over the phone a decade ago, I know that some things can actually be done over the phone. ISP support for one isnt too bad if you have a decent technician. The problem is that they dont pay the price for a technician, so they force a script down the throats of the support personel, and caos ensues.
Your best bet is to call tech support BEFORE YOU BUY... call the line, wait a few minutes on hold, if they dont pick up with a real person in a timely fasion, skip the purchase.... your not being treated right. If the voice on the other end is hard to understand, skip it again... if they pause when you ask a reasonable question like "I have a pixel in the middle of my screen that is always red, is that normal" run like mad..
Unless you have no need for warranty work or tech support check the support out, your paying for it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why you use the GPS function first. Plus they arent stranded, just slow as sin..
If your looking to run a blast/darwin query on 50k files to find the closest match to an unknown dna sequence Either you need to recode a bunch of software to use sql, or you snag a piece of hardware that gives database level performance. 80gigs at $2400.00 is a bloody bargain.
The device is also 10x faster in bandwidth than a normal drive which is comparable to a san, but not such a power hog.
So really the tradeoff rocks for small files. It doesn't have a controller interface latency so its really quick. It should mask a good chunk of hard drive based lag.
Storm
USB3 ~= 600 MB/Sec Theoretical max,
1000 sec ->600 G *1.5 == 1500 sec for 900 G
1500 Sec/(3600 Sec/hour) um 25 minutes
In real USB drives run about 25-28 MB/sec under half the theoretical rate. 500 mins ~ 8+ hours
Modern Hard Drives can pull 60-75 MB/sec sustained. 250 mins- 200 mins (respectively) or 3 to 4.5 hours.. (plus a nice fudge factor, as the inside tracks have a slower transfer rate)
Storm
that means that under normal conditions there is one ten millionth concentration of hydronium molecules. H3O+
this number increases with temperature.
protons jump in water fantastically well. This is why you can acidify standing water much faster than a dye will propagate.
Storm
Come on it not like its the end of the world people!!!
Storm
Storm
That being said yum is fixing issues that need to be fixed at at a much higher level... Most of the applications need to be ditching the dependencies.... The pieces and parts that are needed to get a program running are a nightmare..
If you need software that isn't covered in your repo , the installs get really ugly really fast, after a couple dozen oddball packages try and fight out a dependency war, you finally cave in and remove some programs, installing them on another box, (or a chroot jail).
Anyway, applications need to be well defined, where they aren't installing jack in the rest of the system.. Where the libraries they need, don't mingle with the rest of the system libraries. Where all the dependencies can be removed without harming any other app on the system..
What I'm proposing has space issues, no doubt, and some memory overhead. If we are to go forward in a meaningful way, we need to smash the complexity of the multi tentacled applications, down to the system calls and the display calls.. where the removal of the application is as simple as rm -rf ./apps/myCruftyInstall and then removing the shortcut from the desktop.
Storm
Photo scrapbooks will be digital, with printouts being kitschy..
Most people will max out around a terabyte of music.. because its more than they will ever get around top listening to. This will be a small chunk on their thumb drives.
The old Colbert reports will have references too obscure to follow.
South Park will be mainstream wholesome viewing... While some new show comes along to violate our sense of morality.
Mass Transit will still seem to be a pipe-dream for the US..
People will still be procrastinating the 2038 audits..
Storm
I've found that the quantifiables are number of Servers, number of users, number of update requests, and number of unexpected downtimes..
If the company is providing the right support the number of unexpected downtimes gets close to zero..
The real crux is.. WHAT is uptime worth... it varies from company to company.. for google and microsoft the number is amazing.. for billsmitherspersonalwebpage downtime might be less noticed.
Still Having metrics that seem evil might just shut up the bean counter.
Storm
The authors agreed that a single PCR wasnt enough, so they went with a hindIII digestion and an agarose gel run, to make sure that the pieces were all the right size, and nopt some funky recombination. They also managed a few southern blots to further ensure their results. AND they did 1300 Random Sequences (with luck a sequence can be read to 1000ish base pairs..), and IT ALL MATCHED.... 1.09 million base pairs all fit right...
So my point is that they did the work, made sure it was bulletproof, got accepted into a major journal. And sure they dont know the whole story of whats going on, but it doesnt matter, they DID IT, a full Genome transplant, with proper methods used to ensure its validity..
Storm
since this is an addition the regular smtp gets through, but it gets tagged as "unfiltered" so it could be subjected to more through spam filtering. So the friends could still send normal email, but it would be "tagged" for the email client to be able to differentiate it from the "negotiated"... How the email client decides to display or classify the difference is outside my scope...
Ok IM2000 has some nice ideas, but I think that spammers would love it.. only the subject info needs to be sent, so they can increase their effective bandwith.. since most people just nuke subject lines anyway, it has some advantages for the spammer... but its a total replacement for smtp, so its tough to gain a foothold.
step one,,, add a new incoming port for email.
the incoming port will receive a request for "spam bypass", with or without credentials.
it will reply with a number of bits that will need to be solved..
The sender will then either send a negative followed by the message (dropped into the spam folder)
Or the sender will request the workload, where it solves X bits of a DES decryption.
Then sends the message encrypted to the destination, the destination will then accept the email as legitimate.
The advantage is that email will take seconds to minutes to pass a filter, with credentials being able to reduce the workload for more trusted senders.
IP filtering could be used to adjust the workload, depending on senders ip. The regular email would still come through the normal port, but just listed as unfiltered.. allowing a transition to a new email system.
Storm
Storm
Two 'Science' isn't opinion. Its like a big jigsaw puzzle, we try out pieces (hypotheses) and if enough connections are made that aren't screwing up something else we call it a theory and leave it be, until someone finds a reason that the theory isn't a valid piece of the puzzle.. Once a theorem is pretty well connected in the puzzle we treat it as fact. ATP as a energy currency in the cell isn't an opinion. Glycolysis isn't an opinion. It is a theory, an obscenely well tested theory that any reasonable scientist treats as an undeniable fact.
I am sure glad that your grammar and spelling have improved, because I would have a tough time understanding anything less coherent.
Storm
There is a bunch of math out there that isnt all that hard, but isnt taught to kids. Graph Theory, Topology, Probability and statistics, even some linear algebra isnt too horrible.
The lack of math education is as crippling to our youth as learning only one language. And just as inexcusable.
Storm
um your on slashdot...... where monkey posts are the norm.
developing code that can do something simple like print 0..1999 excluding numbers not divisible by 5 or 2 and excluding any number divisible by 3.
a novice might screw up some of the semantics and wind up including 15 in the printout,
the high end and the regular should be able to code it in under a cup of cofee.
on a harder task.. calculate all primes under 32 bits and populate a vector with the results.
A novice is going to have code that is slow as sin. O(n^2) (2^64 ops)
a regular shmoe coder will manage to find a few tricks that will make the process a bit faster. O(n * sqrt n) (around 2^48 ops)
A high end coder can pull off an O(n) result (less than 2^32 ops)
They might all pull it off in the same time but high end coding makes all the difference in performance.
Some programmers are paid correctly, but quite a few are overpaid for their lack of skill, and some are underpaid for a brutal level of skill. And some uber-hackers just produce at regular hacker levels because they can get away with it.
Storm
Anyway, with a good sysadmin, all the other stuff can be managed to some degree.. just not as pretty. unless you share admin aesthetics.
Wearing the admin hat is easy, wearing it well is a total pain in the rear.
Noticing a master is the trick
Anyway, thank you slashdot admins for a rock solid site.
Storm
Storm
I still get weird clicks when my XP box plays mp3s. My iMac (core2duo 3gb-ram) gets a bit flaky when it gets busy, and it will lag a bit when asked to move things around.
When I completely blasted my Be and it still manages to keep the mp3 from sounding like garbage. It was freaky smooth to deal with.. I still think of the Bebox when thing get weird.. Shame that it got killed the way it did.
Storm
Learn some obscure systems really well, jcl schedulers and cobol programmers still make some real cash. note: This might not be for you.
Learn some non computer skills, Bioinformatics and Molecular modelling are really hot fields right now, and probably wont slow down soon.. When you have open ended assignments, make them relevant to the field you want to enter. A friend of mine wasted most of his college days building MUD's he really worked to build some challenging adventures and quests.. And though his GPA tanked he was hired by Ultima because the interviewer had played in his MUD. Cultivate friends at college, they will pull you kicking and screaming into jobs that are right up your field. Show enough enthusiasm and Profs will find awesome opportunities for you. Get something you enjoy
Engineering is about building things once you understand the concept behind them. So building a jpg viewer/writer isnt science anymore, it was back circa 1980. Dont get me wrong, building one in without libraries is a mess but could be done. Or building a DES encryption box, it isnt easy, but its not science anymore. its engineering, and we need a bunch of good software engineers because they are realy hard to find.
Most coders dont really fall into the engineer category, unless they are design pattern zealots, or have a robust methodology fro producing code, they are just using logic and application. This is where most of the really cool toys get built, this is where 99.8% of the absurd buggy code comes from. Most Computer Scientists dont Engineer their experiments, IE buggy test code. Without these people we dont really value software engineers. Without Computer Science, Software Engineers are stuck using the same tools over and over.
Storm
ablative=mirrored surface that stays mirrored after a few layers are burned off. Yup mirrors burn with enough power. sure there are other types of ablative armor but this would be the logical choice.. If the materials Technology is there I would go with a metal/diamond/metal/diamond////// composite, as diamond layers can transmit light and heat to prevent localized heating, and the metals can transmit heat to both layers as they're heated.
High end pulse lasers have down to femtosecond dwell times, presumably a microsecond pulse laser could manage some damage. Even so, a good ablative material could reduce laser effectiveness by a substantial margain.
Storm
Having done some tech support over the phone a decade ago, I know that some things can actually be done over the phone. ISP support for one isnt too bad if you have a decent technician. The problem is that they dont pay the price for a technician, so they force a script down the throats of the support personel, and caos ensues.
Your best bet is to call tech support BEFORE YOU BUY... call the line, wait a few minutes on hold, if they dont pick up with a real person in a timely fasion, skip the purchase.... your not being treated right. If the voice on the other end is hard to understand, skip it again... if they pause when you ask a reasonable question like "I have a pixel in the middle of my screen that is always red, is that normal" run like mad..
Unless you have no need for warranty work or tech support check the support out, your paying for it.
Storm