I know that drives are sold which are labeled as "refurbished", and I assume that they aren't fresh off the assembly line but were actually returns.
But a label on them saying "refurbished" only proves that someone slapped a label on them, and is no assurance that anyone actually tested the drive to see if anything was wrong and fixed it if there was anything wrong.
Maybe it's a canny strategy. Seagate drives are slightly cheaper because they are significantly less reliable, but tend to fail within the warranty period so they can return them for a referb that has at least been fully tested and maybe lasts another year or two.
Can you point me towards any sort of documentation that this actually happens?
What's even harder is finding out which AV receivers upconvert composite to S-Video and both of those to component.
Although my original rant was more centered on adapters for using SATA drives on IDE controllers and being able to see the brand of the chipset.
But yeah, just about anything where a quick peek at the back will answer most of your questions about I/O and type of power supply will mostly mean pictures where they try to impress you with how pretty it is from the front, just as pictures that let you evaluate how useable the room inside a PC case is going to be are far fewer in number to the ones that show how well the LED glow emanates.
Apparently marketing despises potential customers performing any kind of technical analysis to see if the product is what we really want.
I dont think a gallon of gas is over 30 bucks over there... and if it was, why havent you guys revolted yet? Hell I dont like 4 bucks a gallon
Of course not. They sell it by metric units of volume priced in currencies other than the US dollar in order to prevent anyone from being able to directly compare it to the prices we pay.
It used to bother me, Amazon and the like causing the gradual downfall of physical stores, but for a large part, there is precious little differentiation. Whatever gadget I am interested in is often sealed in hard plastic so there's no way to interact with it, to do anything, really, besides look at it and read the specs, which I could do at Amazon (and there are customer reviews). I used to buy higher priced gear at brick and mortar stores because there was usually someone knowledgeable who could answer detailed questions, but that doesn't seem to be true anymore either. I suspect there will be a time when stores will only be for impulse purposes, and even for that we may go the direction they're going in Japan, where practically anything can be purchased from a vending machine.
Except that if you have that tightly sealed package in your hands you can look at it as closely as need be, examining it from all angles, even with a magnifying glass if you had the foresight to bring one with you to the store, whereas online half the time when you click the picture you get a separate screen where the picture is perhaps marginally larger at best and none of the shots are of the back which is what you really need to see.
I once went to an interview where the interviewer was on vacation. When she contacted me later, I told her that I was no longer interested in working for her company. That was a bit of an understatement, I would not have worked for them under any circumstances I could imagine.
On vacation as in you showed up and she didn't, or as in she combined being wherever the interview took place with being in that area on vacation, in effect, getting some of her company's work done while and in spite of being on vacation?
Well you have the problem of charter schools being perceived by many as the spiritual descendents of segregation academies to partially account for the role reversal, as well as the hope of some that the charter school will be just private enough that they can force all the little children to pray to Jesus.
...to be involved in charter schools as there are people involved, some more laudable than others.
But I don't see much upside for public schools.
Years ago Lester Maddox said that if you want better prison systems you need better prisoners.
Naturally everyone had a cow, but he had a point.
If charter schools bleed off all of the kids from homes where learning and education are prized, whose parents are going to be involved, and all that's left in the public school are the kids rounded up by the truancy officer, it's not going to go well.
Why haven't you got rid of that BEFSR41, it's basically a BEFW11S4 without the wireless. the WRT54 can take it's place!
I've got second WRT54 in bridge mode myself, via DD-WRT.
As far as I know, the wired connections on the 41 and the 54 are the same speed, by which I mean actual speed, not just the 10/100 thing.
In the same room as the cable modem I have 2 to 4 PCs, depending, and at least 4 TiVos, as well as a couple of Buffalo Link Stations, which means I need lots of RJ-45 jacks tied together and connected to the cable modem, so I've got 2 BEFSR41s and 2 WRT54Gs (one with wireless turned off) daisy-chained, and when I get around to replacing the Linksys firmware on a 54g2, I'll set it for wireless bridge and put it in the main room with another PC and the rest of the TiVos, and take the 54g that's in there now and add it to the modem room stack.
I don't have any TiVos newer than S3s and S3 HDs, and they're on analog cable, but I'm successfully using a flashed 54G in wireless bridge mode to let the main room TiVos communicate with a stock 54G that's daisy-chanied to the cable modem by way of a BFSR41, both of which have all available ports used by other TiVos.
I give everything that doesn't leave the house a fixed IP address and use old CPU cooling fans installed internally in all that Linksys stuff and it works pretty well.
BTW, just out of curiosity, as somebody who has never had the need to install OpenWRT, DD-WRT, or Tomato on a router, what features do folks use that necessitate doing so?
I don't know enough about networking and routers to take advantage of probably most of what the replacement firmwares offer, but I picked up an already flashed 54G and activated "wireless bridge mode" (which the stock Linksys firmware doesn't offer), and it sits in the main room near the TV and allows some of my TiVos and one of my "TiVo overflow" PCs to use the wired part to talk to each other and the wireless part to communicate back to the stock 54G which is connected to the not-wireless but in the same stackable case BFSR41 router that connects to my cable modem.
And I discovered that adding a small fan internally, like a 486 or Pentium 100 heat sink fan, helps the reliability of Linksys routers quite a great deal.
Just to be picky, The Sentinel is the short story, and 2001: A Space Odyssey is his novelization of the movie that took the story as its launching point.
Slashdot Mirror
"In my area the electric, gas, cable, internet, and telephone utilities are private. "
Does your state have a utilities commission?
Perhaps I could persuade you to choose the one that involves fewer variables.
But first they had to use up the old stock.
"Bitcoin is an Internet-wide distributed ledger."
With that one sentence I finally understand what Bitcoin is.
I'm still a little fuzzy about the how they're brought into existence part, but the "it's a new medium of exchange" bit is now perfectly clear.
...didn't critique that writeup of the Byzantine Generals problem way back when.
Yeah, the labels weren't big enough to cover over that big "C" shape in the top cover that were a dead giveaway as to the drive's origins.
That's not really an answer.
I know that drives are sold which are labeled as "refurbished", and I assume that they aren't fresh off the assembly line but were actually returns.
But a label on them saying "refurbished" only proves that someone slapped a label on them, and is no assurance that anyone actually tested the drive to see if anything was wrong and fixed it if there was anything wrong.
I mean documentation that refurbished drives are fully tested.
Or for that matter, actually refurbished.
Maybe it's a canny strategy. Seagate drives are slightly cheaper because they are significantly less reliable, but tend to fail within the warranty period so they can return them for a referb that has at least been fully tested and maybe lasts another year or two.
Can you point me towards any sort of documentation that this actually happens?
They bought maxtor. The evil was contagious.
Too young to remember the Conner acquisition?
What's even harder is finding out which AV receivers upconvert composite to S-Video and both of those to component.
Although my original rant was more centered on adapters for using SATA drives on IDE controllers and being able to see the brand of the chipset.
But yeah, just about anything where a quick peek at the back will answer most of your questions about I/O and type of power supply will mostly mean pictures where they try to impress you with how pretty it is from the front, just as pictures that let you evaluate how useable the room inside a PC case is going to be are far fewer in number to the ones that show how well the LED glow emanates.
Apparently marketing despises potential customers performing any kind of technical analysis to see if the product is what we really want.
I dont think a gallon of gas is over 30 bucks over there... and if it was, why havent you guys revolted yet? Hell I dont like 4 bucks a gallon
Of course not. They sell it by metric units of volume priced in currencies other than the US dollar in order to prevent anyone from being able to directly compare it to the prices we pay.
Actually, girls and boys (at least heterosexual ones) have the same promiscuity rates.
The OP is talking about masturbation not "promiscuity" - unless you are in the Bible Belt where they are the same thing.
Actually down here promiscuity is when your genitals aren't faithful to only one hand.
It used to bother me, Amazon and the like causing the gradual downfall of physical stores, but for a large part, there is precious little differentiation. Whatever gadget I am interested in is often sealed in hard plastic so there's no way to interact with it, to do anything, really, besides look at it and read the specs, which I could do at Amazon (and there are customer reviews). I used to buy higher priced gear at brick and mortar stores because there was usually someone knowledgeable who could answer detailed questions, but that doesn't seem to be true anymore either. I suspect there will be a time when stores will only be for impulse purposes, and even for that we may go the direction they're going in Japan, where practically anything can be purchased from a vending machine.
Except that if you have that tightly sealed package in your hands you can look at it as closely as need be, examining it from all angles, even with a magnifying glass if you had the foresight to bring one with you to the store, whereas online half the time when you click the picture you get a separate screen where the picture is perhaps marginally larger at best and none of the shots are of the back which is what you really need to see.
I once went to an interview where the interviewer was on vacation. When she contacted me later, I told her that I was no longer interested in working for her company. That was a bit of an understatement, I would not have worked for them under any circumstances I could imagine.
On vacation as in you showed up and she didn't, or as in she combined being wherever the interview took place with being in that area on vacation, in effect, getting some of her company's work done while and in spite of being on vacation?
What did they do before Microsoft came along?
ATMs were around in the early '70s when Gates was running something called Traf-o-data, what did they run on then?
Well you have the problem of charter schools being perceived by many as the spiritual descendents of segregation academies to partially account for the role reversal, as well as the hope of some that the charter school will be just private enough that they can force all the little children to pray to Jesus.
...to be involved in charter schools as there are people involved, some more laudable than others.
But I don't see much upside for public schools.
Years ago Lester Maddox said that if you want better prison systems you need better prisoners.
Naturally everyone had a cow, but he had a point.
If charter schools bleed off all of the kids from homes where learning and education are prized, whose parents are going to be involved, and all that's left in the public school are the kids rounded up by the truancy officer, it's not going to go well.
This will only work on a few people. When I google myself, William Douglas, I get a pile of hits and none of them are for me.
Well I really am "Mr Anonymous Coward", so it's much worse for me.
I told Noel he should give his kid a normal first name, but no, he had to be cute about it.
Why haven't you got rid of that BEFSR41, it's basically a BEFW11S4 without the wireless. the WRT54 can take it's place!
I've got second WRT54 in bridge mode myself, via DD-WRT.
As far as I know, the wired connections on the 41 and the 54 are the same speed, by which I mean actual speed, not just the 10/100 thing.
In the same room as the cable modem I have 2 to 4 PCs, depending, and at least 4 TiVos, as well as a couple of Buffalo Link Stations, which means I need lots of RJ-45 jacks tied together and connected to the cable modem, so I've got 2 BEFSR41s and 2 WRT54Gs (one with wireless turned off) daisy-chained, and when I get around to replacing the Linksys firmware on a 54g2, I'll set it for wireless bridge and put it in the main room with another PC and the rest of the TiVos, and take the 54g that's in there now and add it to the modem room stack.
Got all of them cheap off of Craigslist.
I don't have any TiVos newer than S3s and S3 HDs, and they're on analog cable, but I'm successfully using a flashed 54G in wireless bridge mode to let the main room TiVos communicate with a stock 54G that's daisy-chanied to the cable modem by way of a BFSR41, both of which have all available ports used by other TiVos.
I give everything that doesn't leave the house a fixed IP address and use old CPU cooling fans installed internally in all that Linksys stuff and it works pretty well.
...
BTW, just out of curiosity, as somebody who has never had the need to install OpenWRT, DD-WRT, or Tomato on a router, what features do folks use that necessitate doing so?
I don't know enough about networking and routers to take advantage of probably most of what the replacement firmwares offer, but I picked up an already flashed 54G and activated "wireless bridge mode" (which the stock Linksys firmware doesn't offer), and it sits in the main room near the TV and allows some of my TiVos and one of my "TiVo overflow" PCs to use the wired part to talk to each other and the wireless part to communicate back to the stock 54G which is connected to the not-wireless but in the same stackable case BFSR41 router that connects to my cable modem.
And I discovered that adding a small fan internally, like a 486 or Pentium 100 heat sink fan, helps the reliability of Linksys routers quite a great deal.
Rise and Fall is tough sledding and it might help if you start it armed with considerable respect for the author by first reading his "Berlin Diary".
Just to be picky, The Sentinel is the short story, and 2001: A Space Odyssey is his novelization of the movie that took the story as its launching point.
...as well as anything not too heavy by Stephen King.
Except The Colorado Kid.
Admire the "noir" cover, and then move on to something else in which to actually invest time.