From the article: tests by Japanese manufacturers that indicate the capacitor's lifetimes are half or less of the 4000 hours of continuous ripple current they are rated for.
For those who can't do the math, this is 166.66 days of normal continous operation, less than six months. If these caps are really rated for 6 months of use, then early failure is the least of our problems.
Given the obvious willingness of the e-mail spammer to lie, mis-represent who they are, and falsify their e-mail, I don't consider op-out a viable way to deal with spam. An opt-out list will only serve to provide a list of valid e-mail addresses to those intent on getting their crap through no matter what.
There seems no need for an op-out list. There is already a federal law that prohibits spamming fax machines, and it has been enforced. My state even has an anti-spam e-mail law, but you can't get the lazy government employees in the consumer protection department to enforce it. What we really need is to recognize that spam wastes/(steals) a lot of money in time and resources in many ways and to pass laws against unsloicited spam without making people publish their e-mail addresses that they don't want spammed.
An ISP who passes tens of millions pieces of unwanted messages each day for penis pills and pr0n and "make money fast" and "I need your help to sneak 14 gazillion US dollars out of my country" shouldn't be spared delivery of only the 1% who are willing to sign up on an opt-out list, they should be spared all of this bullshit by the strength of an anti-spam law that is enforced.
Enforcement should be a snap too. Put a nice dead-or-alive bounty on the spammers heads and watch how fast they are tracked down and put out of action. The lazy bastards at the consumer protection department wouldn't have to lift a finger.
A national do-not-e-mail list might be nice icing on the cake; it would be great to have that too, once there was already an enforced law on spamming me, so the someone couldn't claim they had a business ralationship that didn't really exist (like when Microsoft sells them all of the Passport information). But it's not the right answer as a first step against spam. I'm even disgusted that/. would discuss and promote it; this in some ways gives ligitimacy to the lying "click here to opt out" crap common in lots of spam. We need to "opt out" the spammers, not our own private e-mail addresses.
Some/. readers seem to be missing this, but this is not a debate on if it's right to take someone's content and post it elsewhere. (To me it's clearly not without their permission, but that's not the issue here at all so lets not even pretend that it is by debating it.) The issue is "is it legal / proper/ ligitimate to write software that is capable of looking at the output of a website,
by any means - including examining the HTML returned or by capturing the computer screen itself and analizing that? Of course it is. Such software in no way pirates a website owner's content, it just gives me additional tools for keeping current with the content of those pages. There are plenty of legitimate uses (the Streetmap reference was perfectly on target for this, just to give one). That someone might abuse such a tool and pirate content is hardly the issue, if it were every C compiler would also be at fault. People need to stand up against cranks like btek's Kate Sutton who think they can bully everyone else in the world. Simon Batistoni should have never even tried to be reasonable with her, and he should make his tool available again and sue her and her company for the slander she has done to him in the main perl5 bug queue.
Even if he had provided a tool to make a copy of a map, which he did not, there is nothing at all wrong with making and supplying others with that tool. It's how the tool is used that is the issue, and a tool that has legitimate useful uses can never be allowed to be the target of such a complaint or suit.
If human eyes can read it, someone can write software to parse it.
Thats what I tell my clients who try to "encrypt" things in this silly manner. I've written packages that defeat those silly "enter the word contained in the image" tests, I've written packages that defeat silly anti-automation scripts.
It's really not hard.
Can something that recognizes text in an image be written? Sure. It's just a form of OCR. Can you write one that's able to look at any generic
webpage, a mix of text and images, and
do what is being asked of a human? I don't believe you can, and it seems a pretty high expectation of any software for the current state of AI. A targeted program for one website I might believe, but such tests for a human are certainly valid protection against web crawling 'bots.
Which is not to say I in any way agree that screen scraping software in any way is a violation of a website owner's rights. It's not.
This article, and most of the user comments, seem to completely ignore some common uses(needs) for the floppy that is not replaced by a USB device.
Many people send data (through the mail or by other means) on a floppy. I don't mind sending someone a floppy or giving someone a copy of something I wrote on a disk that cost me pennies, but I'm certainly not going to be sending a USB device as I would a floppy. Sure, you can burn a CDR, but they don't mail quite as easily as a 3 and 1/2 inch floppy. Maybe e-mailing files is reducing this need, but it's still there.
I'm still (this year) getting hardware that includes the software drivers on floppy, and in one case there isn't even a webpage to get an update from. That, plus applications that insist on making a floppy disk for BIOS flashing or similar updates, give me the impression that removal of the floppy drive is premature. Taking it away now will still leave too many people in need of it.
Yes, I know there are USB to RS-232 converters. However, those are far from being drop-in replacements for a real
COM port for the simple reason that a lot of software designed to talk to COM ports doesn't understand how to use
the emulated COM-over-USB drivers.
AMEN! I also have a GPS and A UPS that need the serial ports (as well as parallel port printers). I also need the serial port for my X-10 power line AC controler interface, for my ham radio packet radio interface, and for my PROM Programer. And again, the software will simply not recognize a connection through a USB adapter. Dropping legacy ports will do a lot to dumb down the home PC; still good for playing the latest 3D enhanced 120 fsp version of Pong on a 512 meg video card, but useless for anyone interested in doing something inovative and useful that involves connecting it to something in the real world.
I've checked for them in just about every local store, including Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City, Staples, OfficeMax and more. If I can't buy them then they don't exist. If I have to give some unknown enity on the Internet my credit card number and expiration date, and hope they show up, they don't exist. If I have to pay more in shipping that the cost of the discs, then they don't exist. By the way, I have a 48x24x48x CDRW drive and 24x CDRW media doesn't exist either.
I've seen way too many comments here claiming that efficency doesn't matter any more because hardware is cheap or that bloated code is easier to maintain than optimized code or some other lame excuse because people just don't want to take the time to understand the hardware they are writing on. Sadly, I've seen this trend happening for the last 20 years, and it's not just Microsoft (although a lot of it is Microsoft).
First bad case of it I saw was when a Fortran compiler that ran in 64 K of memoory on it's last release suddenly took over 1 meg of memory on a Data General computer. I called the lead programmer and asked why this had happened. He said to me that now that they had all of the address space of the new machines to work with they moved some resources around so things wern't as cramped. They really hadn't added any features. I tried to explain to him how the hardware he was programming on worked - yes, the new MV systems had a large address space; but if you crossed the 1 meg boundry every single address hit you made had to go through two page tables, at a very significant speed penality. And there was simply no reason that the less than 64k program should have crossed that 1 meg boundry. Sadly, I don't think the lead compiler programmer I was talking to ever understood the hardware enough to understand what I was telling him. The new hardware was fast, but would have been even faster if a lot of it's power wasn't wasted needlessly by ignorance.
It's similarly amazing that I have a faster computer, by orders of magnitude, next to my desk than the system that timeshared my entire university when I was in school. But thanks to Gates bloat, many tasks take much much longer than they should. And Windows disproves aby claim of stability or maintanability. The sloppy programming pratices of Gates bloat make it likely that my system may crash before I ever get this posted (lost one post yesterday that way). Hell, I could write a viable OS in less space than just the space taken by the dead orphan code that never gets execuited in Windows. And it's security problems, a year after Bill declaired an emphasis on cleaning up obvious problems like buffer overruns, makes it pretty clear to me that bloat isn't better.
Final thought:
I still remember helping Tom Hunter cary his South West (SWTP) computer system into our computer club meeting with 8 terminals (mostly TTYs). He had 4K of memory in there and 8 serial I/O cards. And when he booted it up, each of 8 users could select a game from a menu and play against the computer on that 4K system and some simple assembly code.
And it didn't crash.
Amen to this. I love the 3d eye candy look of the new game technology, but no games have any interesting of different gameplay any more. And my game buying has fit the same pattern as yours. The sad thing is, there doesn't have to be a conflict; the new hardware would really make interesting concepts like showed up in Crystal Castles, Marble Madness or Rode Runner's Rescue look and play fantastic, but instead we just get another karatte game and another first person shooter and yet another driving game.
The fascinating thing to me is that an army medic in the early 90's would have what he calls the same thing they had a century ago
when medics in 'nam in the '60's had this spray on stuff and I had it in my first-aid kit in the '70's. How technology like this manages to get lost and vanish amazes me, and that lesser technology (bandages impregnated with the clotting agent) shows up later and our government makes a fuss over it and likely spends a lot of tax dollars on it as if it was something new.
I would imagine it has fairly limited civillian uses. Most people don't find themselves in need to stop massive bleeding
at a moment's notice. Combine that with what was probably a high price tag, and you're left with mostly government,
industrial and paramedic customers instead of something on the shelf of your local Walgreens.
Take this with a grain of salt, I'm just guessing.
Well, you are just guessing. I don't think the can I got was all that expensive, just a few dollars at the time. But more importantly, if the stuff was or is still available, then why would a bandage with a clotting agent in it be such a big deal? The spray on clotting agent has much greater use in emergency, there certainly are situations where the bandage pictured (or even a somewhat larger one) would not do the job, but a spray on clotting agent would. So maybe there is some reason why I can't buy it off the shelf at Walgreens, but that hardly explains why CNN is making a fuss over a lesser technology, or why I can't even find references to Topostat in a google search (all hits point to mapmaking, not a medical agent). This is certainly something the army and EMS people should have access to, even if Walgreens doesn't want to let me use it to save my own life.
The question remains, why is this a lost technology?
Back in the 70's a friend, who had been an army medic in the 60's, told me about a spray on clotting agent called, if I remember right, Topostat. It could stop bleeding and save lives by spraying on a bleeding wound and forming an instant scab. He even tracked some down from a civilian medical supply house and I got a can from him. It worked.
Why is this apparently a lost technology? I couldn't even find mention of it in a google search.
Here's the problem: Hollywood is suing to keep this DVD player off the market. The major studios and the Directors Guild of America are essentially saying that,
when you buy a DVD, you must watch it exactly the way it was created--or not watch
it at all.
I could almost agree with this, if only these bastard hypoccrites would stick to this principle when the same movie is shown on TV. There they are quite satisfied to let the networks chop the movie to hell, removing not only critical to the story parts, but also things a lot more tame than things that were shown on "Three's Company" decades ago.
(I still remember with disgust that CBS cut two Teri Garr lines from Young Frankenstien - "Thank You" and "Here?, Now?" . The studios let them and likely outright helped them.) If a movie can be censored based on some network idiot's whim and then broadcast to others, then you certainly should have the right to censor your own copy in the privacy of your own home.
AOL Time-Warner (who own and run Warner Music) advertise Road Runner with their ads that flat out tell people to go on the Internet and download popular music. Sony (parent of Sony Music) makes MP3 players and puts on the package the statement that you should go on the Internet and download music for the device (guess you would have to since Sony Music is one of the big players trying to cripple music on CD's you actually buy from legitimately being transfered to MP3s for fair use).
Make sense to me that Ashcroft would go after the little guy who does what the music industry tells him to do, rather than the music industry that is known to be stealing money both from consumers by illegal unfail trade practices and from artists. After all, the little guy will not pay off Ashcroft.
I would guess that the album retail (about $15 per album) is based on a 100% markup, so that these 906.6 million albums are sold at
wholesale for about $7.50 apiece
I can assure you that the cost to the wholesalers is much less than $7.50 for the average single disc CD "album".
if the numbers here seem high, particularly when you compute how many ram chips are on a single waffer and so how much resources they claim are used for each waffer, take some comfort in knowing that 92% of all statistics are made up, including this one.
But GM is just an abbreviation for General Motors, so I guess we're back to F winning:)
And Ford is short for Ford Motor Company. So what? Typing GM would have got the point across, particularly when the poster listed GM, Fiat... and then said Kia was the winner.
why bother getting some stupid transmitter and looking at your damn tires when i can just read the license plate?
Because it's much simpler to embed a sensor in the road and track everyone who drives by it than it is to accurtely aim several cameras and read all license plates (and try to optically recognize all the numbers accurately) in all weather conditions in all light conditions (day and night), particularly when several cars might drive past the area at the same time.
If your post is intended to suggest that there would be easier ways for big brother to track everyone and greatly invade your privacy, then you'll need to come up with something better than "just read the license plate". To me it looks like the new world order has come up with something better, and is busy putting it in place.
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For those who can't do the math, this is 166.66 days of normal continous operation, less than six months. If these caps are really rated for 6 months of use, then early failure is the least of our problems.
There seems no need for an op-out list. There is already a federal law that prohibits spamming fax machines, and it has been enforced. My state even has an anti-spam e-mail law, but you can't get the lazy government employees in the consumer protection department to enforce it. What we really need is to recognize that spam wastes/(steals) a lot of money in time and resources in many ways and to pass laws against unsloicited spam without making people publish their e-mail addresses that they don't want spammed.
An ISP who passes tens of millions pieces of unwanted messages each day for penis pills and pr0n and "make money fast" and "I need your help to sneak 14 gazillion US dollars out of my country" shouldn't be spared delivery of only the 1% who are willing to sign up on an opt-out list, they should be spared all of this bullshit by the strength of an anti-spam law that is enforced.
Enforcement should be a snap too. Put a nice dead-or-alive bounty on the spammers heads and watch how fast they are tracked down and put out of action. The lazy bastards at the consumer protection department wouldn't have to lift a finger.
A national do-not-e-mail list might be nice icing on the cake; it would be great to have that too, once there was already an enforced law on spamming me, so the someone couldn't claim they had a business ralationship that didn't really exist (like when Microsoft sells them all of the Passport information). But it's not the right answer as a first step against spam. I'm even disgusted that /. would discuss and promote it; this in some ways gives ligitimacy to the lying "click here to opt out" crap common in lots of spam. We need to "opt out" the spammers, not our own private e-mail addresses.
Even if he had provided a tool to make a copy of a map, which he did not, there is nothing at all wrong with making and supplying others with that tool. It's how the tool is used that is the issue, and a tool that has legitimate useful uses can never be allowed to be the target of such a complaint or suit.
Thats what I tell my clients who try to "encrypt" things in this silly manner. I've written packages that defeat those silly "enter the word contained in the image" tests, I've written packages that defeat silly anti-automation scripts.
It's really not hard.
Can something that recognizes text in an image be written? Sure. It's just a form of OCR. Can you write one that's able to look at any generic webpage, a mix of text and images, and do what is being asked of a human? I don't believe you can, and it seems a pretty high expectation of any software for the current state of AI. A targeted program for one website I might believe, but such tests for a human are certainly valid protection against web crawling 'bots.
Which is not to say I in any way agree that screen scraping software in any way is a violation of a website owner's rights. It's not.
And you would attribute that MSDN sends a different but also broken file than MNS as yet another typo?
We're not talking the 3% solution you buy at Walgreen's here, he needs 100% or nearly 100% peroxide.
I'm still (this year) getting hardware that includes the software drivers on floppy, and in one case there isn't even a webpage to get an update from. That, plus applications that insist on making a floppy disk for BIOS flashing or similar updates, give me the impression that removal of the floppy drive is premature. Taking it away now will still leave too many people in need of it.
RS-232 COM Ports:
-Garmin eTrex Venture
-TI-Graph Link calculator interface
-UPS management port
-Nokia 6190 GSM phone
Yes, I know there are USB to RS-232 converters. However, those are far from being drop-in replacements for a real COM port for the simple reason that a lot of software designed to talk to COM ports doesn't understand how to use the emulated COM-over-USB drivers.
AMEN! I also have a GPS and A UPS that need the serial ports (as well as parallel port printers). I also need the serial port for my X-10 power line AC controler interface, for my ham radio packet radio interface, and for my PROM Programer. And again, the software will simply not recognize a connection through a USB adapter. Dropping legacy ports will do a lot to dumb down the home PC; still good for playing the latest 3D enhanced 120 fsp version of Pong on a 512 meg video card, but useless for anyone interested in doing something inovative and useful that involves connecting it to something in the real world.
I've checked for them in just about every local store, including Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City, Staples, OfficeMax and more. If I can't buy them then they don't exist. If I have to give some unknown enity on the Internet my credit card number and expiration date, and hope they show up, they don't exist. If I have to pay more in shipping that the cost of the discs, then they don't exist. By the way, I have a 48x24x48x CDRW drive and 24x CDRW media doesn't exist either.
First bad case of it I saw was when a Fortran compiler that ran in 64 K of memoory on it's last release suddenly took over 1 meg of memory on a Data General computer. I called the lead programmer and asked why this had happened. He said to me that now that they had all of the address space of the new machines to work with they moved some resources around so things wern't as cramped. They really hadn't added any features. I tried to explain to him how the hardware he was programming on worked - yes, the new MV systems had a large address space; but if you crossed the 1 meg boundry every single address hit you made had to go through two page tables, at a very significant speed penality. And there was simply no reason that the less than 64k program should have crossed that 1 meg boundry. Sadly, I don't think the lead compiler programmer I was talking to ever understood the hardware enough to understand what I was telling him. The new hardware was fast, but would have been even faster if a lot of it's power wasn't wasted needlessly by ignorance.
It's similarly amazing that I have a faster computer, by orders of magnitude, next to my desk than the system that timeshared my entire university when I was in school. But thanks to Gates bloat, many tasks take much much longer than they should. And Windows disproves aby claim of stability or maintanability. The sloppy programming pratices of Gates bloat make it likely that my system may crash before I ever get this posted (lost one post yesterday that way). Hell, I could write a viable OS in less space than just the space taken by the dead orphan code that never gets execuited in Windows. And it's security problems, a year after Bill declaired an emphasis on cleaning up obvious problems like buffer overruns, makes it pretty clear to me that bloat isn't better.
Final thought:
I still remember helping Tom Hunter cary his South West (SWTP) computer system into our computer club meeting with 8 terminals (mostly TTYs). He had 4K of memory in there and 8 serial I/O cards. And when he booted it up, each of 8 users could select a game from a menu and play against the computer on that 4K system and some simple assembly code. And it didn't crash.
Amen to this. I love the 3d eye candy look of the new game technology, but no games have any interesting of different gameplay any more. And my game buying has fit the same pattern as yours. The sad thing is, there doesn't have to be a conflict; the new hardware would really make interesting concepts like showed up in Crystal Castles, Marble Madness or Rode Runner's Rescue look and play fantastic, but instead we just get another karatte game and another first person shooter and yet another driving game.
The fascinating thing to me is that an army medic in the early 90's would have what he calls the same thing they had a century ago when medics in 'nam in the '60's had this spray on stuff and I had it in my first-aid kit in the '70's. How technology like this manages to get lost and vanish amazes me, and that lesser technology (bandages impregnated with the clotting agent) shows up later and our government makes a fuss over it and likely spends a lot of tax dollars on it as if it was something new.
Take this with a grain of salt, I'm just guessing.
Well, you are just guessing. I don't think the can I got was all that expensive, just a few dollars at the time. But more importantly, if the stuff was or is still available, then why would a bandage with a clotting agent in it be such a big deal? The spray on clotting agent has much greater use in emergency, there certainly are situations where the bandage pictured (or even a somewhat larger one) would not do the job, but a spray on clotting agent would. So maybe there is some reason why I can't buy it off the shelf at Walgreens, but that hardly explains why CNN is making a fuss over a lesser technology, or why I can't even find references to Topostat in a google search (all hits point to mapmaking, not a medical agent). This is certainly something the army and EMS people should have access to, even if Walgreens doesn't want to let me use it to save my own life.
The question remains, why is this a lost technology?
Why is this apparently a lost technology? I couldn't even find mention of it in a google search.
I could almost agree with this, if only these bastard hypoccrites would stick to this principle when the same movie is shown on TV. There they are quite satisfied to let the networks chop the movie to hell, removing not only critical to the story parts, but also things a lot more tame than things that were shown on "Three's Company" decades ago. (I still remember with disgust that CBS cut two Teri Garr lines from Young Frankenstien - "Thank You" and "Here?, Now?" . The studios let them and likely outright helped them.) If a movie can be censored based on some network idiot's whim and then broadcast to others, then you certainly should have the right to censor your own copy in the privacy of your own home.
Make sense to me that Ashcroft would go after the little guy who does what the music industry tells him to do, rather than the music industry that is known to be stealing money both from consumers by illegal unfail trade practices and from artists. After all, the little guy will not pay off Ashcroft.
Someone doesn't understand the notation system.
I never watch it. I did tune in for that XXX rated one they advertised about seven years ago, but I didn't find anything even mildly erotic about it.
I can assure you that the cost to the wholesalers is much less than $7.50 for the average single disc CD "album".
if the numbers here seem high, particularly when you compute how many ram chips are on a single waffer and so how much resources they claim are used for each waffer, take some comfort in knowing that 92% of all statistics are made up, including this one.
And Ford is short for Ford Motor Company. So what? Typing GM would have got the point across, particularly when the poster listed GM, Fiat ... and then said Kia was the winner.
Oh, wait, I have the winner: Kia! ;-)
Oh, wait, the winner is GM.
Because it's much simpler to embed a sensor in the road and track everyone who drives by it than it is to accurtely aim several cameras and read all license plates (and try to optically recognize all the numbers accurately) in all weather conditions in all light conditions (day and night), particularly when several cars might drive past the area at the same time.
If your post is intended to suggest that there would be easier ways for big brother to track everyone and greatly invade your privacy, then you'll need to come up with something better than "just read the license plate". To me it looks like the new world order has come up with something better, and is busy putting it in place.
I want my garage door, my mp3 player, and my whirlpool to know when I pull around the corner.
Perhaps more importantly, I want...
Plenty of ways to do this without having to install an identifier in your tire that can be read by anyone wherever your car goes.
funny, as a consumer who actually buys the tires, I don't remember ever asking for this.