We covered that at the high school level (neutrons = no charge). What did your physics class cover?
And neutrons != photons....Though it wasnt until college Emag (Phys5 or 6 I think) that I learned all the math behind the em wave functions (yes, light IS an electro-MAGNETIC field/wave) that make all this stuff happen.
Its called shorting. Options are just what their name implies, an option to buy or not buy stock at a pre-determined price (strike price). Its what drove many dot-com IPOs, and caused a bunch of the dot-com bust. Pre-IPO companies (companies not yet traded on the public market) use them to raise funds and gain employees and make their owners rich (or not). They are basically worthless peices of paper util (and if) the company goes public, at which time they represent real stock. You can usually buy out your options for real stock at any time, paying the strike price plus tax witholdings for any gain in value at the income tax rate, though if the company isnt public yet, you might as well have bought toilett paper (oblig Simpsons ref.) cause if they tank and never go public, your investment has no value.
Short selling on the other hand, relies on other people with shares of a company allowing you to "borrow" them to sell, and eventually buy-back, in the hopes that you sold high and can buy back low. There are lots of restrictions on shorting, and its not done nearly as much as normal trading, since you are basically betting on the loser.
Lowering the legal limit from.1 to.08 and further down to.06 or whatever DOES NOT SOLVE ANY PROBLEM. The difference in human beings with a BAC of.06 and.08 is impossible to distinguish and measure. All it does is increase government revenue and keep good people down.
This country needs to come to grips with is that Americans DRINK. Drinking is a part of our society and is not going away. The problem that everyone keeps overlooking is that there is no way to evaluate how intoxicated you are and if you are beyond the legal limit, there IS NO WAY TO GET HOME!
I have to fully agree with you there. Its a Think of the Children!!!1!1! response to terrible accidents caused by people that are almost always over the pre-existing limits. How many horrendous fatality accidents do you hear about on the evening new that say the driver had a BAC that was within legal limits? I cant remember any. You always hear about the ones where the BAC was well over the limit, sometimes at near fatal levels. Its those people that Should be taken away.
I tell you what, if I KNEW that I was at.09 right before I hopped into my car, I wouldn't drive. I would wait 15 minutes. But how the hell do I know that because there are no consumer devices that accurately tell me and there is nothing at drinking establishments that tell me. I went to a bar in Windsor, Ontario and was blown away by the greatest invention. They had a freakin 25 cent breathalyzer that told you exactly how drunk you were! That's BRILLIANT!
Actually, thereare a fewout there, but agreed, they generally are not very accurate. One in particular I got to play with at a party stopped working, and was giving obviously incorrect readings. It did succeed in turning itself into a game of "how high can I blow", and we managed to get it to register 2x the fatal limit, by taking a shot of golden grain and immediately blowing into the device.
Furthermore, if you live in a city with public transportation, you are fine. But what happens if you live in an urban area, where there is no reliable or cost effective transportation. I invite anyone to come to the Detroit Metro area and try and find a cab ride home. You are going to pay 30 - 50 dollars. Forget about the bus. Forget about the train.
Yes! I live in Atlanta, where transit is non-existant. If you dont have buddies to drive you home, you gotta take a cab, which will cost big$$ thanks to this thing called sprawl. Even in the cities that have good transit systems, alot of them shutdown at midnight, leaving people there also looking for a cab ride home. At least there are some charatable organizations that will drive you and your car home for you, if you remember to keep their number handy, and can tolerate the sometimes religous or "drinking is evil" preaching that some also offer as part of the deal.
Sure, if you live in downtown New York, this argument doesn't hold water. But how many drunk driving accidents do you have in New York? I wonder how much of that is due to the subway system? Hmm....
So what are doing with all the extra cash we get from persecuting people who had one beer too many? Certainly not building up our infrastructure to SOLVE THE PROBLEM.
But transit brings the poor and homeless people to our uppermiddleclass neighborhoods to steal our bigscreen tvs!!! We need more roads, BIGGER roads to funnel more drunk drivers through more police checkpoints so we can raise more funds for more roads and BIGGER roads so we can...!!!! </sarcasticrant>
Or, like how MANY sites are done, one IP, many VHOSTs, do they count that as 1, or does each VHOST count? You COULD install 100 servers with IIS to cover the load, but 1 apache install with 100 VHOSTs is easier and far cheaper. For that matter, if they ARE counting each host instead of IP, I could just start running a short script that visits every host in my wildcarded vHOSTs with their toolbar watching. Talk about skewing the results... 1/0
Its modded funny... but should be Informative. One of our datacenters had a bathroom located on the floor above. For fear of something overflowing and dripping into the racks, plastic was kept on standby. Notice I said "had a bathroom"... we finally worked out a deal with the building mgmt, now its more office space for us. Plastic sheets are a must. If for nothing else, the roof might leak, fire suppression might go off (now days replacing servers can be cheaper than refilling the "halon" tanks), some random pipe in the ceiling/floors above might break, or someone might decide to drive their car into the wall and make a new door. Having the plastic on standby is a good idea.
They re-use old cellphones, pagers, crackberries, etc, by repairing your old phone and then give them to charities. Non-working ones at the least have their batteries recycled. They also have kits available to setup colection stations at your work or elsewhere, and I have seen several collection stations setup that look like USPS mailboxes repainted. Ive sent a few phones their way in the past. Its better than just throwing them out or letting them sit around!
Why does it go across water at all? Why not stay where it was born and raised, rather than pursue questionable gains across the pond? Scientists are so busy wondering whether they can get a robot to walk across water, that they forget to question whether the robot should.
1. download FreeNAS
2. install to USB/CF drive (it needs ~32Mb)
3. configure * reboot on the USB/CF drive (or if your mobo cant boot to those, maybe a CD or spare HD)
4. ?
5. Profit!
So which do you prefer being - A system admin (follow IT) or a programmer (follow CS). They are not mutually exclusive. As a system admin I do a lot of programming. My boss in my last job favorite question was - "How can we automate this?". I like being a system admin myself - I get out of the cubicle more that way.
Actually, I would suggest CS or any of the fundamental Engineering degrees. I myself got a mechanial engineering degree, and while I thought of switching to CS I didnt. I took a couple of electives as higher-level CS courses though. As it turned out, the SysOps (Sys Adimins and DBAs and net security and other stuff) group I worked in consisted of 1 IT major. The others were all Mechanical Engineers, Electrical Engineers, a Biology major and one that I think was a communications major. The critical thinking and problem solving skills learned in engineering (and alot of other science based degrees) are the most important parts. The other skills can be learned rather quickly by playing with hardware and software at home, or even just browsing the internet to see how its done. As fast as things change in IT, getting a degree in it that teaches you specific software or specific methods of doing things stands a good chance of bein obsoleted by the time you graduate if you dont keep up in whats going on in the real world.
Automation is also key. What my specific position in the SysOps group was, was to build applications/scripts to make complex processes fully automated, or extremely simplified. I have since progressed into the IT/IS department and develop full-time now with more complex, critical operations software (ie: customer provisioning automation). Your degree should not limit you to what you do. A common saying is that very few people actually do what their degree was for. Just make sure the one you persue is worth your time as it will take several years of your life to complete, and teaches you something usefull in the real world.
Looks pretty great, but does it back stuff up in a neutral format?...
It will export data from your phonebook, calendar, notes, etc as csv, and you cant get much more generic/universal than that. The how-to also has some hints for sync'ing calendar with ical, google calendar, and a few others.
You know I'm not certain what the articles complaint really is. I have a Samsung SPH-i300 and all I have to do is drop it into the cradle and press the sync button. Everything gets backed up, and most corporate computers are likewise backed up.
Is that after installing the software for the phone? Was that software windoze only by chance? BitPim, being OSS, will run on most platforms, and explicitly claims Windows, Linux and OSX compatibility. The stuff for my phone required a "computer link" type kit (a usb cable and a craptastic CD of windoze only software) from Sprint for the low-low price of about $100. Seeing as you can buy the usb cable on ebay for about $10, using bitpim instead of purchasing overpriced crapy vendor software just made sense to me. Just because your phone sync's easily doesnt mean everyone else's does. Yes, some you can take out the sd card with all the data and just copy it off, some come with fancy software to backup your data (to a proprietary format sometimes, and only if you run Windoze, mac users are typically SOL), some come with nothing but a catalog of how much you can pay to get access to the other features, like connecting via USB. BitPim lets you download your phones stuff into CSV formats, and can also upload them in most cases, as well as ringtones, pictures, etc., and works great with my phone from my powerbook.
BitPim will gladly backup your phone. Its also free, open source, GPL software. Might not support All phones, but its support list is quite long. Works great with my old Sanyo 4900...
So far my main criteria is that it has an ATSC tuner, which basically limits it to the DVD recorders, which almost all (I think) support DivX. Determining ATSC vs NTSC tuners is quite a bit more challenging than you might think. Especially with the deadline fast approaching, Im extremely surprised at the number of players that only have NTSC tuners. At least most stores now flag them with warnings, but to add to the confusion, alot of them try to trick you by saying they have a "digital tuner". Well, duh, almost every NTSC device since the 90s has had a "digital tuner", as opposed to an analog dial or push-buttons that operate the analog tuner. One particular model sold at Target even goes so far as to have ATSC stamped on the display model, but not on the actual device, and ATSC is not listed as a feature, and it has the "Warning! this device only has an NTSC tuner and will not work after x" label taped to it. Had it not been for the open-box one sitting on the returned/discount pile obviously lacking ATSC, I might have been suckered into buying it.
Why do I require ATSC? Well, I dont feel like buying another TV yet (see my post, the GP of this one), and the cost of a stand-alone ATSC tuner is the same as the currently available DVD-R devices that have ATSC, and since my older dvd player overheats (yeh, could make coke-can heat sinks, but running it caseless is more fun, looks neater too), its time for a new one. I will probably end up making a MythTV box anyway, with HD tuner card and dvd drive and be done with it. I have enough spare hardware, including a Margi-DVD card for the output.
Bleh, OT but whatever. To make it Ontopic: the sony ones Ive seen suck, I havent seen a DVD/ATSC combo from them for less than $400, for which price I would rather just go to DVR/DVD.
Personally, I havent found anything of theirs that has interested me enough to purchase. Granted, I havent made many purchases of the type of products they make (electronics, music, movies mainly) anyway, but I am in the market for a new DVD player (current one was a cheap-o, and it now overheats and stops playing unless I take the case off). While looking around for such a thing with ATSC tuner, every time I get to the sony one the thoughts of what that company has done in the past come flooding back into my head, and I quickly move to the next one thats by a brand with a better reputation, and isnt nearly so over priced. The only thing I would consider purchasing from sony in the near future would be one of their grand wega TVs, few others make panels with as high a resolution in the size they do, and with the color depth and level of true black. Given that I dont watch enough TV or movies to warrant a new TV, Ill stick with the 27" crt one Ive had for 7 years now. I almost bought a panel because the TV died on me, but when I found the component that fried itself (noticed the burning electronics smell, took off the case and turned it on and off until I could follow the smell and smoke to the cracked Transistor-like vertical deflection booster), I got a replacement for $14, soldered it in, and got it up and running again, so Im good until the tube gives out on me.
Those CLEC providers will submit workorders with Verizon to reconnect them to the copper grid. Its the same as if a person elects for a CLEC provider in a new home without ever having had previous phone service. Verizon will come out and bury the lines if necessary, and install the SDU on the side of the home, and usually punch it down to activate the customer.
And then bill the CLEC for this "service". If they can get away with an arial run, you are lucky, as the digging adds time and lots of money to the bill. Every time we get rejects based on no facilities available to the prem, need customer build-out, its at least $500, digging runs into the thousands and generally causes that account to be canceled, further locking them to their old provider, since the cost goes directly to that customer. The ILECs have many dirty tricks up their sleeves to try to keep their customers locked in, the facilities game is not new, this is just a different twist to it. The FCC rule is that they are required to lease "available" idle facilities at the mandated bulk rate. They are already bad about declaring "no facilities available" for certain CO's, but then are magically able to turn a "special access" order around in a day (special access is just terminology for full-price on the circuit rather than bulk rate, and when caught at this game they get sued, quite successfully, but still a bita for CLECs). Now it seems they have decided they can go in an cause themselves to not have any available idle facilities by simply removing them. Seeing as the public originally paid for the lines they are specifically removing (last mile copper), this should be dealt with by the FCC. Too bad the FCC is in thier pocket.
Been around quite a bit longer than P2's, wiki says 1992, which sounds about right (386/486cpus are the oldest ones I saw on them). I went looking at them back in the day when I was thinking of making a portable mp3 player/in-dash computer, much like the one for sale at the time (for ~$1000 I think), which I forget the name of (had a vfd display panel on the front and a hard-drive to store the music, and ran linux I think). Kinda neat, they usually contain everything you need in a computer: keyboard/mouse inputs, usb, 10/100 ethernet, serial ports, SCSI, IDE, video, video-input, and a smallish flash drive. The pc-104 spec is also a bus, you just stack on add-on cards or other computers. There is even a pc-104 beowulf how-to that looks pretty neat, and is still smaller than some "SFF" computers.
First I check to make sure the nightly backups completed properly, *then* I go for coffee.
I generally dig through the netcool alerts first to make sure nothing died overnight that wasnt brought to my attention otherwise. Then I start reading through lesser critical alerts, cron spewage, and other emails from actual people to see if anything else funny happened/caught fire that I need to douse. But, while Im waiting for Entourage to actually load the emails (damn exchange server), I hit up the coffee pot and then check slashdot.
Doesnt virtually every OS and their command line interfaces allow that number to be changed?
So, what is the point here? Make it the default in your environment/build/whatever - and done deal!
This might pertain to things like certain versions of Solaris vi, which likes to coredump if your terminal is wider than 80. Really annoys my having to shrink my window every time I login to those older solaris boxen and try to edit a crontab or sudoers file and it dumps core (or prints an actual warning that my terminal is too wide!). Probably something easily fixed, like replacing the sun vi with gnu vi/vim, or putting in a fixed termcap file, but not worth the effort since Im not coding on those things. My coding IDE is a linux box with jed (if you can really call that an IDE).
Nowhere in the WSJ article does it say that Sprint counts transfers between departments as "calls" !!! I'd rather wish that people would refrain from posting inaccurate statements about articles linked to from/., especially in cases where the article is not publically accessible...
Not a wsj subscriber, so I couldn't rtfa, but it would not supprise me one bit that they do count each transfer as a seperate call. Having called in many times myself, I can state that their rep's must not be instructed on how to use their phone system, as I normally have to call in at least three times per incident before the monkey on the end of the line figures out the difference between transfer and hang-up: "hang on one second, Im transferring you to tech-support..... *click*...*dialtone*". Also given that when I get transferred around, each new person on the phone goes through the whole entire "who are you and why are you calling me?" routine, asking my name, number, password, mother's maiden name, first grade teacher's husband's dog's name, etc, along with the full description of why I am bothering them, before saying something like "ok, let me transfer you to someone else". Their different departments are also spread out across the US (maybe international too?). The last incident (while calling my fiance from the Dallas Airport between flights, she sternly asked why her caller ID showed my calling her from "Stacy's" phone, and when she called the number back it went to "Stacy's" sprint voicemail) I called into call centers in Alabama, south carolina, Tennessee (I think) and eventually landed in Tech-Support in Ohio. Took about 6 calls into sprint, about twice that in transfers and 2 "Techs" working the issue to finally get it resolved. One of the things that pisses me off even more about it is their first step in trouble shooting is to ask if you are calling from your mobile phone, and if you are, they want you to hang up and call back from another line, guaranteeing another 15minutes of hold time, waiding through the identification process and explaining the issue again, etc, IF YOU HAVE ANOTHER PHONE TO CALL FROM! Being in the airport, riding around the airtrain (whatever the tram is called there) I dont exactly carry a land line around on my back, kinda defeats the purpose of a cellphone. After explaining the idiocy of that request in regards to caller-id (if it worked fine in Atlanta, and somehow broke when I got into Dallas, I doubt its the phone. Most likely a regional issue with CNAM/LIDB or whatever internal system sprint uses for it) the tech gave me the codes to run the diags stating she would call back in 10 minutes to check. Having only 40 till the next flight, I called back in after no response 15 minutes later. The guy I eventually got in Ohio quickly resolved it without even asking for the diags run or anything. The other tech finally called back right before the "please turn off all electronic devices" notice went out over the intercom on the plane. Needless to say, I had alot of explaining to do to the fiance, though the guy in Ohio was kind enough to honor my request he leave her a voicemail explaining that it was sprint's big F'up....some techs are good, most are exactly what management terms them: "swivelchairs"
What I'm wondering is what the hell kind of truck you bought. I'm honestly curious. If you would have bought a real one stuff like that wouldn't happen.
Maybe I should have put a </sarcasm> tag at the end....
fwiw, I have a tacoma, which uses normal fittings to attach shocks, springs and everything else. As the subject I used stated, it was a "Bad" analogy, though somewhat fitting. The car dealers wont tell you how much it will cost to replace part X when it eventually wears out, unless you ask specifically. You could also go research it on your own. Typically though, some manditory repairs will cost a decent ammount as compared to the original price of the vehicle. Complaining about the iPhone's battery being seemingly costly to replace is like complaining that car repairs are expensive. DUH!
It also goes to reinforce my position of dont buy the first release of ANYTHING. Let them fix some bugs first
Yeh, I had my hopes up for a while after they announced the movie would be made... but it seems to have faded away and the last news I read about it didnt sound too promising.
Now movies (or series of movies) I would really like to see would be based on Ring World, or the Mars trilogy. Actually, take almost any of the Known Space stories and adapt it to a movie.
Wow, I figured you were way off with the desolder comment, then I looked up the dissection photos and sure enough they were stupid enough to solder the battery in! WTF were they thinking? Anyone who's owned a phone for more than a year knows you will eventually have to replace the battery, and with the drain that these things go through it's even more certain. Why they didn't use edge contacts like everyone else in the industry I can't even fathom.
I got my truck a few years back, and after driving it around off road and such, its time to replace the shocks. Every car owner knows that the shocks will have to be replaced eventually, and that some people like to replace theirs before going off roading and again when done, and that driving off road over bigger bumps and hauling heavy stuff wears them out faster, but the brand I bought decided to use special nuts that hold the shocks on tighter, so now Im going to have to go to a service center authorized by the manufacturer to get them replaced at a cost of about 10% the original price of the truck! Why didnt they tell me that the shocks used special nuts before I bought it??!?!? How can they charge me so F'n much to keep using my truck that I already bought?!!? Why cant they just use normal nuts and bolts like everyone else?
BLAH!
1. Do you expect a manufacturer to sit down with you and list line by line everything they did thats "Different" from other manufacturers? Every part they soldered in instead of clipped? How the case is heat-welded instead of screwed together? How the antenna is integrated and cant be replaced and has no way to attach an external one to it without serious modifications? How the software it runs has certain lockouts in place that allow and prevent certain features as they see fit? I bet if you ask about certain qualities, like "how hard is it to change the battery" they will gladly tell you before you buy it. Its not like they are holding a gun to your head forcing you to buy their product. If you dont like the design, dont buy it! If you are concerned about battery life, ASK, and if you dont like the answer, DONT BUY IT!
2. Phone batteries, like shocks on vehicles, tend to last quite a long time these days, as technology has increased their performance to that point. I have actually had my truck for 5 years now without needing to change its shocks, and have had my current cell phone for even longer and am still on the original battery, which can still go a few days without a recharge (not quite the week and a half it did when I first got it, but still).
3. Actually, I would much rather they just soldered my phone's battery in place and have a solid case around the whole phone rather than deal with its tendency to fall off, since the release lever is in a place that your finger tends to hit when pulling the phone out of your pocket, its quite annoying and led me to actually glue over the release. The iPhone was designed with that in mind, instead of having access panels that can fall off, create seams and lines and stuff in the case, they made it sleek and seamless, and knowing the battery will last years before needing replacement, they soldered it in place. I would rather have it soldered than risk a connector coming separated inside there with no easy access to just re-connect it. To de-solder and re-solder the two tabs would take less than a minute if you have any soldering experience.
4. Shocks, like batteries, are not cheap to begin with. This goes even more so for higher-end parts, like the Li-Ion batteries in the iphone, or special heavy-duty off-road shocks on trucks. 10% of the original cost is about right for higher-end OEM shocks (hell, the shock on my mountain bike is well over 30% of the total cost of the bike, and its not the most expensive one out there), including labor and everything, and 15% sounds reasonable to me for the cost of the battery replacement on the iphone, considering they could have just said "F you all, we wont replace any batteries, so when it dies, its dead!".
5. The iPhone is a little different from everything else in the industry, and is the main reason so many people are buying it. Comparing it to a plain old cell-phone just doesnt work.
Slashdot Mirror
And neutrons != photons....Though it wasnt until college Emag (Phys5 or 6 I think) that I learned all the math behind the em wave functions (yes, light IS an electro-MAGNETIC field/wave) that make all this stuff happen.
tm
Yes, it's called options.
BZZZT! WRONG! Try again
Its called shorting. Options are just what their name implies, an option to buy or not buy stock at a pre-determined price (strike price). Its what drove many dot-com IPOs, and caused a bunch of the dot-com bust. Pre-IPO companies (companies not yet traded on the public market) use them to raise funds and gain employees and make their owners rich (or not). They are basically worthless peices of paper util (and if) the company goes public, at which time they represent real stock. You can usually buy out your options for real stock at any time, paying the strike price plus tax witholdings for any gain in value at the income tax rate, though if the company isnt public yet, you might as well have bought toilett paper (oblig Simpsons ref.) cause if they tank and never go public, your investment has no value.
Short selling on the other hand, relies on other people with shares of a company allowing you to "borrow" them to sell, and eventually buy-back, in the hopes that you sold high and can buy back low. There are lots of restrictions on shorting, and its not done nearly as much as normal trading, since you are basically betting on the loser.
tm
...Lowering the legal limit from .1 to .08 and further down to .06 or whatever DOES NOT SOLVE ANY PROBLEM. The difference in human beings with a BAC of .06 and .08 is impossible to distinguish and measure. All it does is increase government revenue and keep good people down.
This country needs to come to grips with is that Americans DRINK. Drinking is a part of our society and is not going away. The problem that everyone keeps overlooking is that there is no way to evaluate how intoxicated you are and if you are beyond the legal limit, there IS NO WAY TO GET HOME!
I have to fully agree with you there. Its a Think of the Children!!!1!1! response to terrible accidents caused by people that are almost always over the pre-existing limits. How many horrendous fatality accidents do you hear about on the evening new that say the driver had a BAC that was within legal limits? I cant remember any. You always hear about the ones where the BAC was well over the limit, sometimes at near fatal levels. Its those people that Should be taken away.
I tell you what, if I KNEW that I was at .09 right before I hopped into my car, I wouldn't drive. I would wait 15 minutes. But how the hell do I know that because there are no consumer devices that accurately tell me and there is nothing at drinking establishments that tell me. I went to a bar in Windsor, Ontario and was blown away by the greatest invention. They had a freakin 25 cent breathalyzer that told you exactly how drunk you were! That's BRILLIANT!
Actually, there are a few out there, but agreed, they generally are not very accurate. One in particular I got to play with at a party stopped working, and was giving obviously incorrect readings. It did succeed in turning itself into a game of "how high can I blow", and we managed to get it to register 2x the fatal limit, by taking a shot of golden grain and immediately blowing into the device. Furthermore, if you live in a city with public transportation, you are fine. But what happens if you live in an urban area, where there is no reliable or cost effective transportation. I invite anyone to come to the Detroit Metro area and try and find a cab ride home. You are going to pay 30 - 50 dollars. Forget about the bus. Forget about the train. Yes! I live in Atlanta, where transit is non-existant. If you dont have buddies to drive you home, you gotta take a cab, which will cost big$$ thanks to this thing called sprawl. Even in the cities that have good transit systems, alot of them shutdown at midnight, leaving people there also looking for a cab ride home. At least there are some charatable organizations that will drive you and your car home for you, if you remember to keep their number handy, and can tolerate the sometimes religous or "drinking is evil" preaching that some also offer as part of the deal.Sure, if you live in downtown New York, this argument doesn't hold water. But how many drunk driving accidents do you have in New York? I wonder how much of that is due to the subway system? Hmm....
So what are doing with all the extra cash we get from persecuting people who had one beer too many? Certainly not building up our infrastructure to SOLVE THE PROBLEM.
But transit brings the poor and homeless people to our uppermiddleclass neighborhoods to steal our bigscreen tvs!!! We need more roads, BIGGER roads to funnel more drunk drivers through more police checkpoints so we can raise more funds for more roads and BIGGER roads so we can...!!!! </sarcasticrant>
T
T
dont get me started with slb's...
Must...resist... crude..joke...about.. her...slip.....and .. fair..use....
Tm
tm
They re-use old cellphones, pagers, crackberries, etc, by repairing your old phone and then give them to charities. Non-working ones at the least have their batteries recycled. They also have kits available to setup colection stations at your work or elsewhere, and I have seen several collection stations setup that look like USPS mailboxes repainted. Ive sent a few phones their way in the past. Its better than just throwing them out or letting them sit around!
Tm
Why does it go across water at all? Why not stay where it was born and raised, rather than pursue questionable gains across the pond? Scientists are so busy wondering whether they can get a robot to walk across water, that they forget to question whether the robot should.
Why did the robot cross the pond?
Tm
1. download FreeNAS
2. install to USB/CF drive (it needs ~32Mb)
3. configure * reboot on the USB/CF drive (or if your mobo cant boot to those, maybe a CD or spare HD)
4. ?
5. Profit!
Tm
Actually, I would suggest CS or any of the fundamental Engineering degrees. I myself got a mechanial engineering degree, and while I thought of switching to CS I didnt. I took a couple of electives as higher-level CS courses though. As it turned out, the SysOps (Sys Adimins and DBAs and net security and other stuff) group I worked in consisted of 1 IT major. The others were all Mechanical Engineers, Electrical Engineers, a Biology major and one that I think was a communications major. The critical thinking and problem solving skills learned in engineering (and alot of other science based degrees) are the most important parts. The other skills can be learned rather quickly by playing with hardware and software at home, or even just browsing the internet to see how its done. As fast as things change in IT, getting a degree in it that teaches you specific software or specific methods of doing things stands a good chance of bein obsoleted by the time you graduate if you dont keep up in whats going on in the real world.
Automation is also key. What my specific position in the SysOps group was, was to build applications/scripts to make complex processes fully automated, or extremely simplified. I have since progressed into the IT/IS department and develop full-time now with more complex, critical operations software (ie: customer provisioning automation). Your degree should not limit you to what you do. A common saying is that very few people actually do what their degree was for. Just make sure the one you persue is worth your time as it will take several years of your life to complete, and teaches you something usefull in the real world.
Tm
It will export data from your phonebook, calendar, notes, etc as csv, and you cant get much more generic/universal than that. The how-to also has some hints for sync'ing calendar with ical, google calendar, and a few others.
tm
Is that after installing the software for the phone? Was that software windoze only by chance? BitPim, being OSS, will run on most platforms, and explicitly claims Windows, Linux and OSX compatibility. The stuff for my phone required a "computer link" type kit (a usb cable and a craptastic CD of windoze only software) from Sprint for the low-low price of about $100. Seeing as you can buy the usb cable on ebay for about $10, using bitpim instead of purchasing overpriced crapy vendor software just made sense to me. Just because your phone sync's easily doesnt mean everyone else's does. Yes, some you can take out the sd card with all the data and just copy it off, some come with fancy software to backup your data (to a proprietary format sometimes, and only if you run Windoze, mac users are typically SOL), some come with nothing but a catalog of how much you can pay to get access to the other features, like connecting via USB. BitPim lets you download your phones stuff into CSV formats, and can also upload them in most cases, as well as ringtones, pictures, etc., and works great with my phone from my powerbook.
Tm
Tm
Why do I require ATSC? Well, I dont feel like buying another TV yet (see my post, the GP of this one), and the cost of a stand-alone ATSC tuner is the same as the currently available DVD-R devices that have ATSC, and since my older dvd player overheats (yeh, could make coke-can heat sinks, but running it caseless is more fun, looks neater too), its time for a new one. I will probably end up making a MythTV box anyway, with HD tuner card and dvd drive and be done with it. I have enough spare hardware, including a Margi-DVD card for the output.
Bleh, OT but whatever. To make it Ontopic: the sony ones Ive seen suck, I havent seen a DVD/ATSC combo from them for less than $400, for which price I would rather just go to DVR/DVD.
Tm
Tm
Now if we could just create the wikiality of the whole bush clan's impeachment proceedings....
tm
Tm
And then bill the CLEC for this "service". If they can get away with an arial run, you are lucky, as the digging adds time and lots of money to the bill. Every time we get rejects based on no facilities available to the prem, need customer build-out, its at least $500, digging runs into the thousands and generally causes that account to be canceled, further locking them to their old provider, since the cost goes directly to that customer. The ILECs have many dirty tricks up their sleeves to try to keep their customers locked in, the facilities game is not new, this is just a different twist to it. The FCC rule is that they are required to lease "available" idle facilities at the mandated bulk rate. They are already bad about declaring "no facilities available" for certain CO's, but then are magically able to turn a "special access" order around in a day (special access is just terminology for full-price on the circuit rather than bulk rate, and when caught at this game they get sued, quite successfully, but still a bita for CLECs). Now it seems they have decided they can go in an cause themselves to not have any available idle facilities by simply removing them. Seeing as the public originally paid for the lines they are specifically removing (last mile copper), this should be dealt with by the FCC. Too bad the FCC is in thier pocket.
Tm
tm
I generally dig through the netcool alerts first to make sure nothing died overnight that wasnt brought to my attention otherwise. Then I start reading through lesser critical alerts, cron spewage, and other emails from actual people to see if anything else funny happened/caught fire that I need to douse. But, while Im waiting for Entourage to actually load the emails (damn exchange server), I hit up the coffee pot and then check slashdot.
tm
Doesnt virtually every OS and their command line interfaces allow that number to be changed?
So, what is the point here? Make it the default in your environment/build/whatever - and done deal!This might pertain to things like certain versions of Solaris vi, which likes to coredump if your terminal is wider than 80. Really annoys my having to shrink my window every time I login to those older solaris boxen and try to edit a crontab or sudoers file and it dumps core (or prints an actual warning that my terminal is too wide!). Probably something easily fixed, like replacing the sun vi with gnu vi/vim, or putting in a fixed termcap file, but not worth the effort since Im not coding on those things. My coding IDE is a linux box with jed (if you can really call that an IDE).
Tm
Not a wsj subscriber, so I couldn't rtfa, but it would not supprise me one bit that they do count each transfer as a seperate call. Having called in many times myself, I can state that their rep's must not be instructed on how to use their phone system, as I normally have to call in at least three times per incident before the monkey on the end of the line figures out the difference between transfer and hang-up: "hang on one second, Im transferring you to tech-support..... *click*...*dialtone*". Also given that when I get transferred around, each new person on the phone goes through the whole entire "who are you and why are you calling me?" routine, asking my name, number, password, mother's maiden name, first grade teacher's husband's dog's name, etc, along with the full description of why I am bothering them, before saying something like "ok, let me transfer you to someone else". Their different departments are also spread out across the US (maybe international too?). The last incident (while calling my fiance from the Dallas Airport between flights, she sternly asked why her caller ID showed my calling her from "Stacy's" phone, and when she called the number back it went to "Stacy's" sprint voicemail) I called into call centers in Alabama, south carolina, Tennessee (I think) and eventually landed in Tech-Support in Ohio. Took about 6 calls into sprint, about twice that in transfers and 2 "Techs" working the issue to finally get it resolved. One of the things that pisses me off even more about it is their first step in trouble shooting is to ask if you are calling from your mobile phone, and if you are, they want you to hang up and call back from another line, guaranteeing another 15minutes of hold time, waiding through the identification process and explaining the issue again, etc, IF YOU HAVE ANOTHER PHONE TO CALL FROM! Being in the airport, riding around the airtrain (whatever the tram is called there) I dont exactly carry a land line around on my back, kinda defeats the purpose of a cellphone. After explaining the idiocy of that request in regards to caller-id (if it worked fine in Atlanta, and somehow broke when I got into Dallas, I doubt its the phone. Most likely a regional issue with CNAM/LIDB or whatever internal system sprint uses for it) the tech gave me the codes to run the diags stating she would call back in 10 minutes to check. Having only 40 till the next flight, I called back in after no response 15 minutes later. The guy I eventually got in Ohio quickly resolved it without even asking for the diags run or anything. The other tech finally called back right before the "please turn off all electronic devices" notice went out over the intercom on the plane. Needless to say, I had alot of explaining to do to the fiance, though the guy in Ohio was kind enough to honor my request he leave her a voicemail explaining that it was sprint's big F'up....some techs are good, most are exactly what management terms them: "swivelchairs"
tm
Maybe I should have put a </sarcasm> tag at the end....
fwiw, I have a tacoma, which uses normal fittings to attach shocks, springs and everything else. As the subject I used stated, it was a "Bad" analogy, though somewhat fitting. The car dealers wont tell you how much it will cost to replace part X when it eventually wears out, unless you ask specifically. You could also go research it on your own. Typically though, some manditory repairs will cost a decent ammount as compared to the original price of the vehicle. Complaining about the iPhone's battery being seemingly costly to replace is like complaining that car repairs are expensive. DUH!
It also goes to reinforce my position of dont buy the first release of ANYTHING. Let them fix some bugs first
tm
Now movies (or series of movies) I would really like to see would be based on Ring World, or the Mars trilogy. Actually, take almost any of the Known Space stories and adapt it to a movie.
Tm
I got my truck a few years back, and after driving it around off road and such, its time to replace the shocks. Every car owner knows that the shocks will have to be replaced eventually, and that some people like to replace theirs before going off roading and again when done, and that driving off road over bigger bumps and hauling heavy stuff wears them out faster, but the brand I bought decided to use special nuts that hold the shocks on tighter, so now Im going to have to go to a service center authorized by the manufacturer to get them replaced at a cost of about 10% the original price of the truck! Why didnt they tell me that the shocks used special nuts before I bought it??!?!? How can they charge me so F'n much to keep using my truck that I already bought?!!? Why cant they just use normal nuts and bolts like everyone else?
BLAH!
1. Do you expect a manufacturer to sit down with you and list line by line everything they did thats "Different" from other manufacturers? Every part they soldered in instead of clipped? How the case is heat-welded instead of screwed together? How the antenna is integrated and cant be replaced and has no way to attach an external one to it without serious modifications? How the software it runs has certain lockouts in place that allow and prevent certain features as they see fit? I bet if you ask about certain qualities, like "how hard is it to change the battery" they will gladly tell you before you buy it. Its not like they are holding a gun to your head forcing you to buy their product. If you dont like the design, dont buy it! If you are concerned about battery life, ASK, and if you dont like the answer, DONT BUY IT!
2. Phone batteries, like shocks on vehicles, tend to last quite a long time these days, as technology has increased their performance to that point. I have actually had my truck for 5 years now without needing to change its shocks, and have had my current cell phone for even longer and am still on the original battery, which can still go a few days without a recharge (not quite the week and a half it did when I first got it, but still). 3. Actually, I would much rather they just soldered my phone's battery in place and have a solid case around the whole phone rather than deal with its tendency to fall off, since the release lever is in a place that your finger tends to hit when pulling the phone out of your pocket, its quite annoying and led me to actually glue over the release. The iPhone was designed with that in mind, instead of having access panels that can fall off, create seams and lines and stuff in the case, they made it sleek and seamless, and knowing the battery will last years before needing replacement, they soldered it in place. I would rather have it soldered than risk a connector coming separated inside there with no easy access to just re-connect it. To de-solder and re-solder the two tabs would take less than a minute if you have any soldering experience.
4. Shocks, like batteries, are not cheap to begin with. This goes even more so for higher-end parts, like the Li-Ion batteries in the iphone, or special heavy-duty off-road shocks on trucks. 10% of the original cost is about right for higher-end OEM shocks (hell, the shock on my mountain bike is well over 30% of the total cost of the bike, and its not the most expensive one out there), including labor and everything, and 15% sounds reasonable to me for the cost of the battery replacement on the iphone, considering they could have just said "F you all, we wont replace any batteries, so when it dies, its dead!".
5. The iPhone is a little different from everything else in the industry, and is the main reason so many people are buying it. Comparing it to a plain old cell-phone just doesnt work.
Tm