If police radar is on the "out of band" frequencies the phone is supposed to reject/be filtered-shielded against, then adding the ability to detect that radar would mean added cost and complexity in the design and manufacture of these phones. If their phones are more expensive than other brands, the company's profitability is at risk and that means the jobs of the designers are at risk. I don't think you could get all of the designers to agree to risk their careers to put in a radar detector that has about as much range as a megaphone, but since you can make a detector that good with a capacitor and an op-amp, there's probably a semiconductor junction in there somewhere acting as an antenna.
That's assuming that these phones really are doing this in the first place.
"...how about a way to make IDE cables impossible to plug in upside-down?"
There are already 2 ways, but cost shaving does in both of them. One way is using shrouded headers (the part with the pins). The shroud has a notch in the middle on the odd number pin side (1,3,...39) and the Insulation Displacement Connector crimped onto the cable is supposed to have a corresponding "bump". But headers without shrouds are cheaper. The other way involves the absence of pin 20. It isn't there on the header and the corresponding hole on the plug body is filled up, but that adds at least one more step to the manufacturing process, which adds cost.
At least it's not as bad as those 10 pin headers for serial ports. Some of them have pins 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 in one of the rows and pins 6, 7, 8, 9, and the never used 10 in the other row, whereas others have the odd number pins on one row and the even number pins on the other row. This means that when the 9 or 10 conductor ribbon cable gets to the DB-9 or DB-25 connector at the other end there are two choices of how to wire it and the one that was right for your old motherboard or controller card may not be right for the new one. I've even got an old Zeos 486 board where the Com 1 header is set up one way and the Com 2 header is set up the other, so that it isn't even consistent right there on the board.
Actually it's in the world of analog audio where signal degradation (or more accurately the avoidance of it) is of utmost importance. If you want to worry about it in IDE cables then take each line and the ground line next to it and turn them into twisted pairs but don't expect tobe able to get away with a whole lot more length than the flat cables. Get a hold of a Mouser or Digi-Key catalog and you'll find that you can buy prefab ribbon cable manufactured round instead of flat except for a place every so often where it flattens out for installation of connectors. You might even be able to get it shielded or unshielded.
"The great thing about Exchange is that the mail stays on the server"
The nice thing about Netscape 3's mail client was that I could tell it to leave the mail on the server and it would, regardless of whatever server my ISP was running. I'm currently (for the moment)using Outlook 97 and it removes my mail from the server without giving me any choice in the matter, which makes my ability to use some other computer to access my e-mail account via a webmail-type interface pretty much useless. Somehow MS always seems to know which features I want and makes them impossible to implement while providing everything that I don't want.
The proper expression is "You've got another thing coming". I realize that "have got" ain't necessarily grammatical, but this is vernacular we're dealing with here.One of the troubles with people not being well and widely read is that when something new or a new variation on something old comes along, they don't have the proper context in which to place it, and if they mis-hear it, they perpetuate the inaccuracy. For example, "buck naked" (although strictly speaking it should be "nekkid") has, over the past 10 to 20 years, become misunderstood to be "butt naked".
"...if ATT or whoever spent the money to lay the lines..."
The only reason that they spent the money to do so was that they could rest assured that the govenment(s) involved wouldn't let any other company run competing lines in the same physical and geographic areas.
They don't have a legal right-of-way across provate property, the local government does and the government grants a franchise allowing the electric company or phone company or cable company to run their wires along the government's right-of-way.
This franchise granting is done partly because the company receiving the franchise pays a periodic franchise fee to the local government granting the franchise (unlike broadcasters who just feed the FCC some bs about "operating in the public interest"), partly because the logistics of only having one cable company or phone company digging up everybody's yards is a lot more manageable than letting 37 different companies go at it, and partly because the local government is run by someone whose brother-in-law has a chunk of stock in the company getting the franchise.
As for the notion that that a cable company has a 1st Ammendment right concerning the content carried over their wires, that's just nuts. That's like saying that the phone company has a 1st Ammendment right to control the content of telephone converstations
"Buying another copy was necessary to prove they weren't guilty."
Boy, what a great racket! Pick on small companies that probably misfiled their COA or whatever (or had it thrown out by a cleaning crew that had no idea it was anything important), and make them pay twice for the same product! Wonder if you could do the same thing to organizations (commercial, municipal, whatever) that are big enough that you could almost guarantee that there's a lost license somewhere? Oh wait, they are doing that.
Yeah, they're still selling games in boxes that say Lucas Arts all over the outside and only after you buy it and open it do you find the piece of paper that says that they no longer support it. At least the McMillan versions of Red Hat actually had "McMillan" in small print somewhere on the outside of the box.
I'm not sure if you meant to say CD (as in Compact Disc) or not, some people have reported sucess in saving warped ones by heating them in a slow oven, but I've found the top of the monitor a good place to cook old IDE hard drives.
About half a day (do it near a smoke detector and halon fire extinguisher if you leave 'em there overnight, just to be on the safe side), and they can sometimes be gotten working long enough to dump the contents to something newer, bigger, and further away from the Electronic Device Retirement Home, i.e., landfill. (insert Red Dwarf reference here)
Then, rather than actually putting them in the landfill, you can break out that ten year old pirated PC Technician floppy and low-level format the drive, and make the mistake of using it again, unless, of course, it's too far gone for that or so bad off that cooking it on the monitor didn't help, in which case you put it somewhere to save until needed, 'cause you can keep it for twenty years, but the day after you throw it away, you'll find a use for it.
If the points have gone up or down, it's been moderated.
Some moderators feel justified in calling a logged in poster's default +1 overrated if they don't think much of the comment.
And others don't care if it's justified or deserved or not, they just like to revel in their moment of power and laugh at the people who get stirred up.
I've gotten a little carried away on eBay myself in the heat of the moment but I thought one going for 5 grand was ridiculous!--and then I saw this one!
I'm not holding my breath waiting for the consummation of that deal, though. The seller (who *might* actually have a PS2 to sell and *might* actually not disappear with the money instead of shipping the goods) only has a rating of 3 (which could be from buying inexpensive stuff 3 different times on eBay, rather than from being a seller who makes buyers happy) and the buyer has no feedback (a zero).
Wouldn't it be sweet if some guy with no intention of or ability to deliver as advertised waits around in vain for 15 thou from somebody without 15 extra pennies?
There used to be 3 levels of Commercial Radio-Telephone License. To work at a radio station as the person who took the meter readings on the transmitter, kept the transmitter log, and adjusted the power as necessary, as well as turning the transmitter on or off, required a 3rd with a Broadcast Endorsement. In order to work on CBs and other 2-way radios, you needed a 2nd-Class Ticket, which involved all the tests for the 3rd plus additional electronics questions. To be the Chief Engineer for a TV or radio station, or just to do what a 3rd did, but on an AM station with a directional antenna array, you had to have a 1st Class License, which involved even more electronics questions.
I only had a 3rd but encountered people with 1st Class Tickets you wouldn't trust to change a lightbulb.. Turns out there were schools that taught you how to pass the test without having to bother with understanding any of it. If you didn't pass, they put you through the course again at no extra charge until you did, but only after "debriefing" you to learn what the current questions were so that they could teach the answers to be memorized.
There's a lot in the computer biz that doesn't feel new to me at all.
Usually they want someone who's 20 years old with 30 years experience, willing to work 80 hours a week for the equivalent of 40 hours at miniumum wage, and on a contract that lets the employer dump 'em any time for any reason with about 20 seconds notice, but binds them to a non-compete clause.
Slashdot Mirror
If their phones are more expensive than other brands, the company's profitability is at risk and that means the jobs of the designers are at risk.
I don't think you could get all of the designers to agree to risk their careers to put in a radar detector that has about as much range as a megaphone, but since you can make a detector that good with a capacitor and an op-amp, there's probably a semiconductor junction in there somewhere acting as an antenna.
That's assuming that these phones really are doing this in the first place.
There are already 2 ways, but cost shaving does in both of them. One way is using shrouded headers (the part with the pins). The shroud has a notch in the middle on the odd number pin side (1,3,...39) and the Insulation Displacement Connector crimped onto the cable is supposed to have a corresponding "bump". But headers without shrouds are cheaper. The other way involves the absence of pin 20. It isn't there on the header and the corresponding hole on the plug body is filled up, but that adds at least one more step to the manufacturing process, which adds cost.
At least it's not as bad as those 10 pin headers for serial ports. Some of them have pins 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 in one of the rows and pins 6, 7, 8, 9, and the never used 10 in the other row, whereas others have the odd number pins on one row and the even number pins on the other row. This means that when the 9 or 10 conductor ribbon cable gets to the DB-9 or DB-25 connector at the other end there are two choices of how to wire it and the one that was right for your old motherboard or controller card may not be right for the new one. I've even got an old Zeos 486 board where the Com 1 header is set up one way and the Com 2 header is set up the other, so that it isn't even consistent right there on the board.
Actually it's in the world of analog audio where signal degradation (or more accurately the avoidance of it) is of utmost importance.
If you want to worry about it in IDE cables then take each line and the ground line next to it and turn them into twisted pairs but don't expect tobe able to get away with a whole lot more length than the flat cables.
Get a hold of a Mouser or Digi-Key catalog and you'll find that you can buy prefab ribbon cable manufactured round instead of flat except for a place every so often where it flattens out for installation of connectors. You might even be able to get it shielded or unshielded.
The nice thing about Netscape 3's mail client was that I could tell it to leave the mail on the server and it would, regardless of whatever server my ISP was running. I'm currently (for the moment)using Outlook 97 and it removes my mail from the server without giving me any choice in the matter, which makes my ability to use some other computer to access my e-mail account via a webmail-type interface pretty much useless. Somehow MS always seems to know which features I want and makes them impossible to implement while providing everything that I don't want.
More the result of lack of design than design. Kinda like when a church PA system picks up some "good buddy"'s CB radio.
The proper expression is "You've got another thing coming". I realize that "have got" ain't necessarily grammatical, but this is vernacular we're dealing with here.One of the troubles with people not being well and widely read is that when something new or a new variation on something old comes along, they don't have the proper context in which to place it, and if they mis-hear it, they perpetuate the inaccuracy. For example, "buck naked" (although strictly speaking it should be "nekkid") has, over the past 10 to 20 years, become misunderstood to be "butt naked".
In order to accomodate the need for the obligatory three-letter-acronym, it is now known as bipedal transfer mode, i.e BTP.
Yeah, which means he/she is old enough to get the joke in the next line.
The only reason that they spent the money to do so was that they could rest assured that the govenment(s) involved wouldn't let any other company run competing lines in the same physical and geographic areas.
This franchise granting is done partly because the company receiving the franchise pays a periodic franchise fee to the local government granting the franchise (unlike broadcasters who just feed the FCC some bs about "operating in the public interest"), partly because the logistics of only having one cable company or phone company digging up everybody's yards is a lot more manageable than letting 37 different companies go at it, and partly because the local government is run by someone whose brother-in-law has a chunk of stock in the company getting the franchise.
As for the notion that that a cable company has a 1st Ammendment right concerning the content carried over their wires, that's just nuts. That's like saying that the phone company has a 1st Ammendment right to control the content of telephone converstations
Seriously, if it's going to a good home I'll try to be content with that.
Or did they bury it in "Ask Slashdot" to try to keep it grown-ups only? (grown-up in behavior, not according to the calendar)
I think there are a few people around here who've heard of Linux but I don't know if they've heard of Slashdot.
Could this possibly be just a case of making sure the CD is set as 'master' and the hard drive is set as 'slave'?
You threw away hardware?!?
Boy, what a great racket! Pick on small companies that probably misfiled their COA or whatever (or had it thrown out by a cleaning crew that had no idea it was anything important), and make them pay twice for the same product! Wonder if you could do the same thing to organizations (commercial, municipal, whatever) that are big enough that you could almost guarantee that there's a lost license somewhere? Oh wait, they are doing that.
Yeah, they're still selling games in boxes that say Lucas Arts all over the outside and only after you buy it and open it do you find the piece of paper that says that they no longer support it. At least the McMillan versions of Red Hat actually had "McMillan" in small print somewhere on the outside of the box.
About half a day (do it near a smoke detector and halon fire extinguisher if you leave 'em there overnight, just to be on the safe side), and they can sometimes be gotten working long enough to dump the contents to something newer, bigger, and further away from the Electronic Device Retirement Home, i.e., landfill. (insert Red Dwarf reference here)
Then, rather than actually putting them in the landfill, you can break out that ten year old pirated PC Technician floppy and low-level format the drive, and make the mistake of using it again, unless, of course, it's too far gone for that or so bad off that cooking it on the monitor didn't help, in which case you put it somewhere to save until needed, 'cause you can keep it for twenty years, but the day after you throw it away, you'll find a use for it.
Sigh, the future just ain't what it used to be.
Some moderators feel justified in calling a logged in poster's default +1 overrated if they don't think much of the comment.
And others don't care if it's justified or deserved or not, they just like to revel in their moment of power and laugh at the people who get stirred up.
I'm not holding my breath waiting for the consummation of that deal, though. The seller (who *might* actually have a PS2 to sell and *might* actually not disappear with the money instead of shipping the goods) only has a rating of 3 (which could be from buying inexpensive stuff 3 different times on eBay, rather than from being a seller who makes buyers happy) and the buyer has no feedback (a zero).
Wouldn't it be sweet if some guy with no intention of or ability to deliver as advertised waits around in vain for 15 thou from somebody without 15 extra pennies?
Is that groovy old thing an Osbourne or Kaypro clone? (I'm having '70s Popular Electronics flashbacks)
To work at a radio station as the person who took the meter readings on the transmitter, kept the transmitter log, and adjusted the power as necessary, as well as turning the transmitter on or off, required a 3rd with a Broadcast Endorsement.
In order to work on CBs and other 2-way radios, you needed a 2nd-Class Ticket, which involved all the tests for the 3rd plus additional electronics questions.
To be the Chief Engineer for a TV or radio station, or just to do what a 3rd did, but on an AM station with a directional antenna array, you had to have a 1st Class License, which involved even more electronics questions.
I only had a 3rd but encountered people with 1st Class Tickets you wouldn't trust to change a lightbulb..
Turns out there were schools that taught you how to pass the test without having to bother with understanding any of it.
If you didn't pass, they put you through the course again at no extra charge until you did, but only after "debriefing" you to learn what the current questions were so that they could teach the answers to be memorized.
There's a lot in the computer biz that doesn't feel new to me at all.
And just like any other industry there are some cases where the skilled do the work and the skilled at office politics get the big bucks.
Usually they want someone who's 20 years old with 30 years experience, willing to work 80 hours a week for the equivalent of 40 hours at miniumum wage, and on a contract that lets the employer dump 'em any time for any reason with about 20 seconds notice, but binds them to a non-compete clause.