Joe can also buy a used replacement (he is replacing a used phone with a used phone);
Price of the used phone will only be slightly more the the "insurance" would have been with the original phone. After a couple of phones (or other electronics, Joe will come out ahead by not purchasing the insurance).
As much as I'm not a fan of the carriers or manufacturers, I don't see the issue here. All the carriers and most manufacturers offer extended warranties (not a good deal, but protect you against surprise expenses).
I guess they could add the warranty cost into the original price or manufacturers could compete on length of warranties. (Some auto manufacturers compete by offering longer warranties, and with SSD you can buy drives with 1, 3 or 5 year warranties at different prices.)
Did anyone else think the tracks looked like the slot car racing tracks. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_car) I can just imagine some kids running the controllers to see how fast they can take the corners.
The idea isn't new... there are science fiction books with moving walking ways. Isaac Asimov, in the novel The Caves of Steel (1954) and its sequels in the Robot series, uses similar enormous underground cities with a similar sidewalk system. The period described is about the year 3,000.
Many computers from more than 20 (or 30, or 40) years ago had memory protection. Even some of the PDP-8 with it's 12 bit words had memory protection and could run effective cloud computer (aka, timesharing) back in 1973. Lots of other machines of that era including the PDP-11 had memory protection. In addition, many of the mainframes had memory protection and would run VMs in their own memory space (VM370, and I think some of the 360). You could even run VMs in VMs down 10 levels deep.
This technology has been available for dogs & cats for years. Most dogs and outdoor cats are "microchipped" so the local ACO (animal control officer) or shelter can identify the owner. I've even seen it used with fish and other marine animals at the aquarium.
Not a terrible idea (perhaps as an option). I've always thought that a sealed phone would be desirable. It would be much easier to water- and dust proof and maybe more reliable (fewer connections). Could get a much higher waterproof rating (definitely for swimming and maybe sport diving). Not sure how well bluetooth works underwater.
Charging, headphones and data sync could all be wireless. (And does anyone ever use data sync).
Maybe not for everyone, but it would seem like a way for a second-tier Android manufacturer to differentiate themselves.
If you are going to be in a country for more than 2 weeks or so, this is a bad deal... for these travelers, it's much less expensive to go thru the hassle of getting a local SIM and number....
But for the majority of travelers, this is a pretty good service... for a week trip or so, it's under $100. Worth it for the convenience of keeping your number and not dealing with putting in a SIM.
I'm not sure why this made it to./, as VZ has offered it since last summer. Maybe now that most carriers offer international day rates, there will be some competition.
For VZ, in Canada it's $2/day (although may be included in monthly rate depending on your plan).
Not exactly kindness, but way less expensive than the old "surprise you" rates.
It doesn't seem unreasonable for a corporation or the head of a major corporation to have staff helping them with managing their personal & corporate image. Assuming that the dozen people do other things in addition to facebook posts, it seems pretty reasonable. Posting might might need to be cleared by legal and (shockingly) even proofread for typos.
In other surprising news, politicians and executives don't write all their own speeches and have staff to pick up their laundry.
The failure mode of fridges is generally much simpler. Most over temp conditions are due either to power loss (in which case your temperature monitoring and/or internet is out), catastrophic failure (in which case it's pretty obvious) or someone leaving the door open. For the last 20 years or so, fridges have had audible alarms when the door is open for more than a minute or two -- which pretty much solves the problem for a COG of about $10.
On the other hand, I really would like a bar code scanner on the fridge so when I use up an item, I can just scan it and have it added to my grocery list/order. (I guess I could use a phone for this instead.)
I struggle with what my fridge really has to say to me. Perhaps there are a few appliances that are smart and have interesting things to say, but the fridge isn't high on the list. Alarm systems, maybe, but for alarms 24x7 reliability is critical and the IOT folks haven't been particularly successful at demonstrating this. Maybe a thermostat, but except for vacation houses it's hard to see the benefit of being able to remotely control/monitor temperature.
It's always a problem with pro-bono clients or favors for friends client. If it was a top-paying client, they might have pulled out all the stops to prevent the attack.Every pro-bono and service provider (whether lawyer, ad agency, programmer, etc.) understands the dynamics. Full-freight clients come first and the top two or three clients come even before them. Discounted, best-efforts, pro-bono and clients of friends come below.
Hopefully, the relationship is described and understood in advance.
At least on my generation of Prius hybrid (and probably others), the ScC (state of charge) is "inaccurately" reported on the user display. When it shows all bars, the traction battery is charged to 80% and when it shows "empty" it's really at 20%. By managing user's expectations they think the battery fully charged or fully empty.
By carefully managing the SoC, Toyota (and others) are able to guarantee the battery for 10 years. (Slightly different as the traction battery is not a LION battery, but same theory.)
And the battery is replaceable, but rather expensive (in absolute dollars, but not as a percent of the overall "device" cost.)
You probably need to recreate the sandbox each time (or at least at some frequency) because you can't tell if the sandbox has been corrupted by the malicious code. Trying to bypass the accounts & authentication just punches more holes in the OS.
It's not an easy problem, especially if you are concerned about speed.
It would be better if they sold data by the GB, rather than a fixed amount by the month. I agree that people who use more data should pay more, but once you buy a GB of data there should not be a time limit on when you can use it.
With the "by the month" model, the provider gets the breakage at the end of the month -- if you buy 10GB and only use 8GB, then you've paid for 2GB that you have used. However, if you go over the 10GB, then you pay for everything you use.
A fairer model is the electric or gas company where you pay a fixed fee for the physical wires or pipes and then a per KWHr or BTU variable cost.
For the car analogy: it's like if you buy 20 gallons of gas on Monday you have to use it up by the end of week. Any gas left over you have to return to the company. If you use more than 20 gallons you have to buy it at 5x the normal price.
The caps trick consumers into thinking the per GB cost is low... but only if you use up the entire amount. In the example above, if it's $50 for 10GB, and you only use 8, then your cost per GB isn't the advertised $5, but is $6.25/GB.
I think this is a sibling to the halting problem". I think that there have been any number of "almost" unbreakable encryption, but as long as you want your encryption to be un-encryptable there's a problem here.
Perhaps we should just ban encryption that can be unencrypted.
There are lots of systems that were designed around embedded PDP-8s and PDP-11s. And given the numbers of Digital VAX sold and specialized software it would not be very surprising if some of these systems are still be used. There were probably over 1.5 million of these machines sold (about 300,000 PDP-8s, 700,000 PDP-11s, 500,000 VAX machines), so there's probably some happily humming away.
I'm sure the same is true for some earlier IBM 360/370, but they had a better upgrade path and were more expensive to start with. Most of those machines got replaced when they came off lease or the parts availability expired. But probably some of the software from the early 360's is still be used.
Those were the days when machines were rock solid (and weighed about as much). Unlike today, when electronics are designed to be replaced every two years or so.
Multi r/w heads aren't a new concept. Some of the really old drives had them, and in fact the very original magnetic recording "disks" had a r/w head per track. I think in the trade off of more heads versus faster spinning, faster spinning won out.
I seems that there should be a market for more platters, in a slightly different form factor.
You might take a look at appriver secure tide (https://www.appriver.com/services/spam-and-virus-protection/) email filtering. It's SaaS email filtering that you put in front of your smtp server. It has reasonably good controls and does a better than average job. It's reasonably priced.We use it and have been happy with the filtering quality, price and support.
Barracuda networks also sells a SaaS spam filtering service, haven't used it, but have heard good things about it.
The technology already sort of exists. There are cargo planes that can lift up the nose or tail, and then have freight containers loaded. This gets around the air frame structural problem that some have noted.
I envisioned a "passenger" module that would be slid out once the plane landed, and a "pre-loaded" (with passengers) module would be slid in. This avoids the unload/clean/load time of turning around a plane. If it takes 20 minutes to turn-around a plane (which is pretty fast), the module approach could cut it to 5.
The logical extension, would be to equip the modules with wheels, so the plane could exchange "passenger compartments" without coming to a full stop and use in-flight refueling to keep the planes in the air.
If your goal is to make things simple, this isn't the answer. You're going to end up with lots of "sort of works together" software, all of which will need patching and will occasionally just stop working.
For not many dollars, and a lot less time investment you can use something like logmein remote which will give you nearly always reliable, and secure remote access to the machines. You can even set it up so no one needs to be at the remote machines for you to log in. As long as the machine is booted, you'll be set.
I've used logmein (paid) and it's nearly flawless.
As for monitoring all the URLs your son accesses, you could probably set up a proxy server on the local machine that emails you the URLs daily. But the option of routing the traffic back to your machine via a VPN is just a solution looking for a problem. If^h^hwhen something goes down, you'll be busy rebooting ever bit of hardware along the way.
Good (or just practical) engineers remember... keep it simple stupid.
One issue I've seen mostly with laptops (although also with desktops in dusty environments), is that the fans get clogged with dust, grit and hairs that cause the machines to overheat and then the CPU goes into thermal slowdown mode. So from a cold start after installing the OS the machine is cool, after a couple of hours of installing updates the machine has reached a toasty temperature and the CPU throttles down. Looks like it's the OS, but it's really the hardware.
Look at the event log in admin tools and see if you are getting CPU throttle notifications.
Hard to clean the fan on most laptops, and may not be worth the time on many old desktops.
Our 5 year old Dell Optiplexes still give reasonable performance with the initial hardware configuration 4/8 GB RAM, 7200 RPM drives, 100/1000 ethernet. They've had all the MS patches applied over the years. Only software installed on them in Office 2010, Adobe writer & antivirus.
I'm guessing that the problem lies with some of the applications, and more likely antivirus.
Slashdot Mirror
News for geeks... helpful if someone included the IP ranges so for those who desire to do so, the NK ranges could be blocked.
Joe can also buy a used replacement (he is replacing a used phone with a used phone);
Price of the used phone will only be slightly more the the "insurance" would have been with the original phone. After a couple of phones (or other electronics, Joe will come out ahead by not purchasing the insurance).
As much as I'm not a fan of the carriers or manufacturers, I don't see the issue here. All the carriers and most manufacturers offer extended warranties (not a good deal, but protect you against surprise expenses).
I guess they could add the warranty cost into the original price or manufacturers could compete on length of warranties. (Some auto manufacturers compete by offering longer warranties, and with SSD you can buy drives with 1, 3 or 5 year warranties at different prices.)
Did anyone else think the tracks looked like the slot car racing tracks. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_car) I can just imagine some kids running the controllers to see how fast they can take the corners.
The idea isn't new... there are science fiction books with moving walking ways. Isaac Asimov, in the novel The Caves of Steel (1954) and its sequels in the Robot series, uses similar enormous underground cities with a similar sidewalk system. The period described is about the year 3,000.
I guess we only have about 1000 years to wait....
Started with Fortran IV and migrated to APL. Then switched to Basic. Picked up PDP-8 Assembler along the way.
Now you kids get off my lawn.
Memory protection is not a new invention...
Many computers from more than 20 (or 30, or 40) years ago had memory protection. Even some of the PDP-8 with it's 12 bit words had memory protection and could run effective cloud computer (aka, timesharing) back in 1973. Lots of other machines of that era including the PDP-11 had memory protection. In addition, many of the mainframes had memory protection and would run VMs in their own memory space (VM370, and I think some of the 360). You could even run VMs in VMs down 10 levels deep.
Now you kids get off my lawn.
This technology has been available for dogs & cats for years. Most dogs and outdoor cats are "microchipped" so the local ACO (animal control officer) or shelter can identify the owner. I've even seen it used with fish and other marine animals at the aquarium.
Not a new technology, and well proven.
Whether it's a good idea is another question.
I thought "The Cloud" was just another term for someone else's computer.
Back in my day, we called it timesharing. Long life TSS/8, TSO and Multics (and their friends).
Now you kids get off my lawn.
Not a terrible idea (perhaps as an option). I've always thought that a sealed phone would be desirable. It would be much easier to water- and dust proof and maybe more reliable (fewer connections). Could get a much higher waterproof rating (definitely for swimming and maybe sport diving). Not sure how well bluetooth works underwater.
Charging, headphones and data sync could all be wireless. (And does anyone ever use data sync).
Maybe not for everyone, but it would seem like a way for a second-tier Android manufacturer to differentiate themselves.
I'm a consistent listener to Slates podcasts.. usually while at the gym or walking the dog. Particular favorites are:
Slate Political Gabfest (informed, interesting political discussion about three topics)
Slate Cultural Gabfest
Slate The Gist
Slate Money
Also listen to Wait Wait from NPR
If you are going to be in a country for more than 2 weeks or so, this is a bad deal... for these travelers, it's much less expensive to go thru the hassle of getting a local SIM and number....
But for the majority of travelers, this is a pretty good service... for a week trip or so, it's under $100. Worth it for the convenience of keeping your number and not dealing with putting in a SIM.
I'm not sure why this made it to ./, as VZ has offered it since last summer. Maybe now that most carriers offer international day rates, there will be some competition.
For VZ, in Canada it's $2/day (although may be included in monthly rate depending on your plan).
Not exactly kindness, but way less expensive than the old "surprise you" rates.
It doesn't seem unreasonable for a corporation or the head of a major corporation to have staff helping them with managing their personal & corporate image. Assuming that the dozen people do other things in addition to facebook posts, it seems pretty reasonable. Posting might might need to be cleared by legal and (shockingly) even proofread for typos.
In other surprising news, politicians and executives don't write all their own speeches and have staff to pick up their laundry.
Ctrl-alt-del is really there to lock your screen, log in, change password, change user and maybe start the task manager.
Oh wait, you're not on domain-joined machine?
The failure mode of fridges is generally much simpler. Most over temp conditions are due either to power loss (in which case your temperature monitoring and/or internet is out), catastrophic failure (in which case it's pretty obvious) or someone leaving the door open. For the last 20 years or so, fridges have had audible alarms when the door is open for more than a minute or two -- which pretty much solves the problem for a COG of about $10.
On the other hand, I really would like a bar code scanner on the fridge so when I use up an item, I can just scan it and have it added to my grocery list/order. (I guess I could use a phone for this instead.)
I struggle with what my fridge really has to say to me. Perhaps there are a few appliances that are smart and have interesting things to say, but the fridge isn't high on the list. Alarm systems, maybe, but for alarms 24x7 reliability is critical and the IOT folks haven't been particularly successful at demonstrating this. Maybe a thermostat, but except for vacation houses it's hard to see the benefit of being able to remotely control/monitor temperature.
It's always a problem with pro-bono clients or favors for friends client. If it was a top-paying client, they might have pulled out all the stops to prevent the attack.Every pro-bono and service provider (whether lawyer, ad agency, programmer, etc.) understands the dynamics. Full-freight clients come first and the top two or three clients come even before them. Discounted, best-efforts, pro-bono and clients of friends come below.
Hopefully, the relationship is described and understood in advance.
At least on my generation of Prius hybrid (and probably others), the ScC (state of charge) is "inaccurately" reported on the user display. When it shows all bars, the traction battery is charged to 80% and when it shows "empty" it's really at 20%. By managing user's expectations they think the battery fully charged or fully empty.
By carefully managing the SoC, Toyota (and others) are able to guarantee the battery for 10 years. (Slightly different as the traction battery is not a LION battery, but same theory.)
And the battery is replaceable, but rather expensive (in absolute dollars, but not as a percent of the overall "device" cost.)
You probably need to recreate the sandbox each time (or at least at some frequency) because you can't tell if the sandbox has been corrupted by the malicious code. Trying to bypass the accounts & authentication just punches more holes in the OS.
It's not an easy problem, especially if you are concerned about speed.
It would be better if they sold data by the GB, rather than a fixed amount by the month. I agree that people who use more data should pay more, but once you buy a GB of data there should not be a time limit on when you can use it.
With the "by the month" model, the provider gets the breakage at the end of the month -- if you buy 10GB and only use 8GB, then you've paid for 2GB that you have used. However, if you go over the 10GB, then you pay for everything you use.
A fairer model is the electric or gas company where you pay a fixed fee for the physical wires or pipes and then a per KWHr or BTU variable cost.
For the car analogy: it's like if you buy 20 gallons of gas on Monday you have to use it up by the end of week. Any gas left over you have to return to the company. If you use more than 20 gallons you have to buy it at 5x the normal price.
The caps trick consumers into thinking the per GB cost is low... but only if you use up the entire amount. In the example above, if it's $50 for 10GB, and you only use 8, then your cost per GB isn't the advertised $5, but is $6.25/GB.
I think this is a sibling to the halting problem". I think that there have been any number of "almost" unbreakable encryption, but as long as you want your encryption to be un-encryptable there's a problem here.
Perhaps we should just ban encryption that can be unencrypted.
There are lots of systems that were designed around embedded PDP-8s and PDP-11s. And given the numbers of Digital VAX sold and specialized software it would not be very surprising if some of these systems are still be used. There were probably over 1.5 million of these machines sold (about 300,000 PDP-8s, 700,000 PDP-11s, 500,000 VAX machines), so there's probably some happily humming away.
I'm sure the same is true for some earlier IBM 360/370, but they had a better upgrade path and were more expensive to start with. Most of those machines got replaced when they came off lease or the parts availability expired. But probably some of the software from the early 360's is still be used.
Those were the days when machines were rock solid (and weighed about as much). Unlike today, when electronics are designed to be replaced every two years or so.
Multi r/w heads aren't a new concept. Some of the really old drives had them, and in fact the very original magnetic recording "disks" had a r/w head per track. I think in the trade off of more heads versus faster spinning, faster spinning won out.
I seems that there should be a market for more platters, in a slightly different form factor.
You might take a look at appriver secure tide (https://www.appriver.com/services/spam-and-virus-protection/) email filtering. It's SaaS email filtering that you put in front of your smtp server. It has reasonably good controls and does a better than average job. It's reasonably priced.We use it and have been happy with the filtering quality, price and support.
Barracuda networks also sells a SaaS spam filtering service, haven't used it, but have heard good things about it.
The technology already sort of exists. There are cargo planes that can lift up the nose or tail, and then have freight containers loaded. This gets around the air frame structural problem that some have noted.
I envisioned a "passenger" module that would be slid out once the plane landed, and a "pre-loaded" (with passengers) module would be slid in. This avoids the unload/clean/load time of turning around a plane. If it takes 20 minutes to turn-around a plane (which is pretty fast), the module approach could cut it to 5.
The logical extension, would be to equip the modules with wheels, so the plane could exchange "passenger compartments" without coming to a full stop and use in-flight refueling to keep the planes in the air.
If your goal is to make things simple, this isn't the answer. You're going to end up with lots of "sort of works together" software, all of which will need patching and will occasionally just stop working.
For not many dollars, and a lot less time investment you can use something like logmein remote which will give you nearly always reliable, and secure remote access to the machines. You can even set it up so no one needs to be at the remote machines for you to log in. As long as the machine is booted, you'll be set.
I've used logmein (paid) and it's nearly flawless.
As for monitoring all the URLs your son accesses, you could probably set up a proxy server on the local machine that emails you the URLs daily. But the option of routing the traffic back to your machine via a VPN is just a solution looking for a problem. If^h^hwhen something goes down, you'll be busy rebooting ever bit of hardware along the way.
Good (or just practical) engineers remember... keep it simple stupid.
One issue I've seen mostly with laptops (although also with desktops in dusty environments), is that the fans get clogged with dust, grit and hairs that cause the machines to overheat and then the CPU goes into thermal slowdown mode. So from a cold start after installing the OS the machine is cool, after a couple of hours of installing updates the machine has reached a toasty temperature and the CPU throttles down. Looks like it's the OS, but it's really the hardware.
Look at the event log in admin tools and see if you are getting CPU throttle notifications.
Hard to clean the fan on most laptops, and may not be worth the time on many old desktops.
Our 5 year old Dell Optiplexes still give reasonable performance with the initial hardware configuration 4/8 GB RAM, 7200 RPM drives, 100/1000 ethernet. They've had all the MS patches applied over the years. Only software installed on them in Office 2010, Adobe writer & antivirus.
I'm guessing that the problem lies with some of the applications, and more likely antivirus.