I am no car genius, but doesn't brake fluid get compressed by the master cylinder down the brake lines causing the calipers to compress against the rotors causing the car to stop. With low or no brake fluid your brakes would not work, but it's not going to stop your wheels from moving unless your calipers are dragging on the rotors. Low power steering fluid could cause some oddities regarding steering, vibration & funky noises.
...at a park, at a restaurant, in front of a movie theatre(not in please!), on vacation, on a train, near a plane, on a boat, cleaning a moat, eating a root beer float, talking to the pope... bahh...
Turn off the TV & don't watch PG-13+ movies with her around. There's not as much violent/sexual media as you think and it actually is very controllable.
However she's not free from it completely as while playing in the flowers a hawk can come down and snatch a field mouse and eat it up or a cat might get hit by a car someday. Then there's always the classic "two dogs mating in the front lawn of your neighbors house" to bring up the birds and bees. Anyways there's quite a bit of violence and sex in nature. Probably not as much as in a few hours of primetime TV, but still it's there to some extent.
Also note that in yee olde times women were almost sold off into marriage or married by 13/14, couldn't vote and had restricted freedoms. So as far as being better off and having more innocence, I think your daughter is definitely better off in modern times.
Most power companies have complete control & no competition in their area. There is no way anyone can function in most typical societies without electricity. There should be restrictions put in place to prevent all the energy companies from laughing while running to the bank. If you think gas prices are hurting people, then just think if we also raise their electricity bill %25 - %50. But maybe this is a wake-up call for people to start reducing usage and the power hogging products they buy. At the same time though it'd be helpful if companies out there really started investing and marketing these products better.
The article does not mention how many companies the FCC asked. It only mentions how many they had hoped would sign-up and how many did. So I wouldn't say it's such a good turn out.
I don't know what computer you're running, but my Core2 running @ 2Ghz(speedstep) idles around 134W. When I run my 8800GT full bore and my CPU ramps to 3Ghz I suck up about 212W.
I would find it surprising if your commodity office PC used more than 100watts @ %100 CPU. The gap between idle & full speed probably isn't that much either as a lot of computers are not setup to use SpeedStep or Cool N' Quiet by default.
I don't think it's fair to put the blame on the individuals necessarily. While it's true that the money could possibly be better spent building infrastructure, you also have to admit that infrastructure is not an easy or cheap thing to build. How much does it cost for a month of airtime on a cell phone vs wiring a whole city with electricity or building an functional sewage, sanitation & drinking system. The fact is, it would take much much more money and many more people working together to make it happen. When you're living day to day, a lifeline to the outside world which can provide resources to obtain drinkable water, food, etc... may feel more pressing than trying to get you and your neighbors and possibly an entire town to pool together their meager funds to try to build a infrastructure. This is even harder when you have a continent that is in such turmoil as Africa.
There have been thousands of models of cell phones out there and they vary by manufacturer. The Motorola V60 has many many different incarnations(V60c,V60t,V60g,V60v,V60i,V60x,V60p & V60s). Do you really expect a news article to list everyone make/model of every phone ever made and tell you if it's analog or not? Terribly silly notion. The V60 is a digital phone. The phone will only be affected based on what services your mother's carrier is offering. As the article states some carriers are phasing out TDMA coverage. However the V60 came in CDMA & GSM formats as well. So it really depends on what service your mother is using. If it's Sprint then probably nothing to worry about as CDMA isn't going anywhere. If she's got T-Mobile it's probably GSM, which is fine as well. If it's AT&T then it could be TDMA(which they are phasing out in many areas, but it depends so call) or GSM.
Really the only person who can really figure it out is you yourself by calling the carrier or you can just wait for the day that it stops working:)!
I think a lot of this "gameplay is what truly matters" stuff is partly caused by "You make do with what you have" syndrome & some rose colored glasses. If the latest and greatest was an 8-bit NES was all that was available you'd make do. It may just be that since you grew up with these games & are comfortable with them they have a warm place in your heart. Of course even when the NES was out people were talking about the graphics and there was even a drive back then for better graphics. Go to the kids house who has an Atari 2600, then go to the kids house who has a NES. Who's house will kids most likely want to visit? Same for NES vs SNES/Genesis...etc.
In regards to what an earlier commenter stated about people not caring if they're watching something on a 12" black & white TV so long as it's good, I would disagree to some extent. Show the same show on an HDTV & your experience does become more enjoyable since you're not squinting at the screen and you can be drawn in by the life like colors. The advent of color brought forth new ways of bringing the audience into the film. Imagine if a plot point has a blue light that flashes from a distant ship, you can have the user see for themselves the light is blue instead of having some actor yell "It's the blue light! Horah!".
This "storyline/gameplay trumps all" card was played back when film was just getting sound too. It makes people sound almost like old codgers, "Darn film don't need no sound, so long as the stories good!". While I agree that good graphics don't make a good game, I find it hard to settle in or immerse myself into some of the games of yonder past due in part because of the dated graphics. The disparity in just 10 years with games is much greater than you'll experience in film. If someone released a game today with 8-bit graphics and tried to retail it people would call them lazy. The time when you could light up 4 green pixels and call it a blob are over(except for nostalgic replay services like Virtual Console or Xbox Arcade).
As for raytracing, I am not so sure it's the answer. We've been hearing about raytracing being right around the corner for many years now. I still think rasterization & current hardware has a lot further it can go before raytracing catches up. Perhaps in a decades time we'll have raytracing accelerators or 128core CPUs which can handle it all.:)
It's a well known fact that an odd number of cores leads to unbalanced usage patterns, which in turn cause the processor to break free of it's socketed sanctuary and wreak havoc on your inner computer componentity goodness.
But you then have the problem with many databases being much larger than the 48GB listed or even the 384GB. Even if you could buy it today it's probably not very cost effective. Adding more ram or working on better caching solutions may prove to be more valuable. Also it's good to note that while flash meory does have faster seeks they are around 500ns - 1ms. That's quicker than a HDD sure, but it's still exponentially slower than DRAM. see However, this will probably be the wave of the future once we start seeing prices come down and the limits of magnetic storage reached. But with SSDs you'll always have magnetic storage which is going to be exponentially cheaper probably for the next decade or so. Just when the price/performance advantage becomes worthwhile will we really see these take over.
I worked for a 411 provider that contracted to wireless and telcos. One of the callers was an old lady with dementia it seemed who'd call and ask about the time a couple times a day. Wouldn't need a number or anything else, just the current time. Of course it cost her like $1.25 per call but someone was paying her bill I guess.
Understaffing! That there is the solution. Let's understaff so we can continually miss deadlines and contribute to employee burnout. True that if you're under the gun and have heaps of work for to do with your boss beating the drums behind you, people may get more work done. However, stress will go up and you'll get more turnover.
I also like your magical fairytale statistic you came up with: "About 5% understaffing is ideal. Do 5% overstaffing and everything drops 10%", when did these metrics come out? Isn't the definition of understaffing to not have enough people staffed to complete the assigned task? If you have 5% understaffing, that could mean that 5% worth of work is not getting done. It doesn't guarantee anyone will pick up the slack, it may mean you'll miss deadlines by 5%, it may means you'll drop 5% of your calls, it may means the quality of work will be 5% less than normal, it may also mean that your employees suck it in and do 5% more work but that's not a guaranteed. Also if a few of your employees call in sick or quit you could see your narrow 5% margin slip to 10% - 20% understaffed(if say you have a 20 person team), which would be a disaster.
Do they really have that infrastructure in place? New spectrum = new radios, new plans, new training, new... a lot of stuff. What they do have is some off the shelf billing software, poorly trained customer service reps & experience in screwing people over. Google would have to make major investments in building towers & hiring techs, reps... Yeah it would be a big undertaking, but if anyone could handle it Google probably could. AT&T & other companies have proven, even if they have decades in the business that doesn't mean they're any good at it(in a customer sense).
Yes, but the display can physically create that many colors at any instant. With dithering a display has to switch between the lesser color set rapidly to give the impression that there are more colors. The facts are with a 6bit display the most "true-colors" you could ever display at one instant is 262,144.
I agree that it's deceptive to tell customer's that their display will show "millions" of colors, when actually it's using dithering which can produce artifacts & flickering. Though Apple isn't the only one to do this, every 6-bit panel maker advertises their panels as being able to display "millions & millions". Sometimes you can tell it's a 6-bit display by them listing 16.2 Million colors instead of 16.7 Million, while others blatantly lie & say they can do 16.7 Million.
I still don't get why you're so appalled over the use of the phrase "identity theft". While true that companies messing up like TJX is just plain dumb & stupid. I don't think it's their business model to fumble consumer data. It's going to cost them a lot of money to clean up this mess. Regardless they may have neglected to protect their customers data properly, but the certainly didn't give the OK for someone break in and steal it. This is the same with you leaving your door unlocked at night, just because it's unlocked doesn't mean it gives someone the right to break in and steal all your stuff, even if you should know better to lock your door. Also as I posted above identity thieves do not always get their information from corporate entities. Either they scam it from their victim or snoop it out from their garbage or by other means.
As for companies verifying who you are before you purchase, I am wondering what your suggestion is as to how they go about this? As was stated SSNs, drivers license numbers & credit card numbers were all stolen. If someone has your drivers license, SSN & CC# you're pretty much screwed. I don't see how a company could protect themselves or the victim unless the victim is proactive in keeping an eye on what purchases are showing up on their credit card statement(many do not).
You may be surprised at how many customers whine at any inconvenience, even for their own good. Start questioning Bob Smith about his card and he's going to get huffy at the inconvenience of having to pull out some photo ID or answer some security questions or get upset over the "accusation" of being a thief. "Well, I am Bob Smith, I know who I am.". Yeah, OK. I do customer service over the phone. We require the last 4 of the CC# we have on file to verify people calling in are who they are. We let people know that we'll need the last 4 numbers while they're listening to the hold music. But I still get numerous customers who don't have it ready & then get upset that they really are going to have to get their wallet out & read those last 4 digits off as hard as that is to do.
Also it's not only a consumer issue. While there is a data mine to be had with insecure commercial operations, there's quite a bit that can be had at insecure or stupid personal locations. A person can have their ID stolen from their own insecure network connection, or from not logging out of their MySpace account on a public computer. Also plain old non technological ways as well, such as throwing bank statements or sensitive info into a garbage bin w/o shredding it. So no, it's not just about "lazy corporate fuckwits".
The only problem is that this rarely works on public servers and a lot of people vote "No" by default, just to get rid of the prompt. So you can have some idiot TK'er or another idiot crashing vehicles on purpose, but no one's going to get enough votes to really get anything done about it. It takes a majority vote & on a bigger public server getting 2/3rds vote is hard.
I dunno, but it seems this is only an issue on T-Mobile branded phones. I have a Motorola V360 which never worked with Opera Mini with the stock firmware. Once I flashed it over to a different firmware it allowed Opera acess to the network. I don't see how they can actively block 3rd party apps, but allow the built in WAP browsers(atleast on a network level, firmware they can, but you can flash the firmware).
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Pfft, Cat VI is faster, just make sure you like the interface...
Download the punkbuster service manually and see if that helps. Worked for Call of Duty 4. http://www.evenbalance.com/index.php?page=pbsvcfaq.php
I am no car genius, but doesn't brake fluid get compressed by the master cylinder down the brake lines causing the calipers to compress against the rotors causing the car to stop. With low or no brake fluid your brakes would not work, but it's not going to stop your wheels from moving unless your calipers are dragging on the rotors. Low power steering fluid could cause some oddities regarding steering, vibration & funky noises.
I'd hope the Eee PC is RoHS compliant =|.
...at a park, at a restaurant, in front of a movie theatre(not in please!), on vacation, on a train, near a plane, on a boat, cleaning a moat, eating a root beer float, talking to the pope... bahh...
...or you could go to eBay if you really want one. There are plenty of homeless CueCats looking for owners...
However she's not free from it completely as while playing in the flowers a hawk can come down and snatch a field mouse and eat it up or a cat might get hit by a car someday. Then there's always the classic "two dogs mating in the front lawn of your neighbors house" to bring up the birds and bees. Anyways there's quite a bit of violence and sex in nature. Probably not as much as in a few hours of primetime TV, but still it's there to some extent. Also note that in yee olde times women were almost sold off into marriage or married by 13/14, couldn't vote and had restricted freedoms. So as far as being better off and having more innocence, I think your daughter is definitely better off in modern times.
Most power companies have complete control & no competition in their area. There is no way anyone can function in most typical societies without electricity. There should be restrictions put in place to prevent all the energy companies from laughing while running to the bank. If you think gas prices are hurting people, then just think if we also raise their electricity bill %25 - %50. But maybe this is a wake-up call for people to start reducing usage and the power hogging products they buy. At the same time though it'd be helpful if companies out there really started investing and marketing these products better.
The article does not mention how many companies the FCC asked. It only mentions how many they had hoped would sign-up and how many did. So I wouldn't say it's such a good turn out.
I don't know what computer you're running, but my Core2 running @ 2Ghz(speedstep) idles around 134W. When I run my 8800GT full bore and my CPU ramps to 3Ghz I suck up about 212W. I would find it surprising if your commodity office PC used more than 100watts @ %100 CPU. The gap between idle & full speed probably isn't that much either as a lot of computers are not setup to use SpeedStep or Cool N' Quiet by default.
I don't think it's fair to put the blame on the individuals necessarily. While it's true that the money could possibly be better spent building infrastructure, you also have to admit that infrastructure is not an easy or cheap thing to build. How much does it cost for a month of airtime on a cell phone vs wiring a whole city with electricity or building an functional sewage, sanitation & drinking system. The fact is, it would take much much more money and many more people working together to make it happen. When you're living day to day, a lifeline to the outside world which can provide resources to obtain drinkable water, food, etc... may feel more pressing than trying to get you and your neighbors and possibly an entire town to pool together their meager funds to try to build a infrastructure. This is even harder when you have a continent that is in such turmoil as Africa.
There have been thousands of models of cell phones out there and they vary by manufacturer. The Motorola V60 has many many different incarnations(V60c,V60t,V60g,V60v,V60i,V60x,V60p & V60s). Do you really expect a news article to list everyone make/model of every phone ever made and tell you if it's analog or not? Terribly silly notion. The V60 is a digital phone. The phone will only be affected based on what services your mother's carrier is offering. As the article states some carriers are phasing out TDMA coverage. However the V60 came in CDMA & GSM formats as well. So it really depends on what service your mother is using. If it's Sprint then probably nothing to worry about as CDMA isn't going anywhere. If she's got T-Mobile it's probably GSM, which is fine as well. If it's AT&T then it could be TDMA(which they are phasing out in many areas, but it depends so call) or GSM. Really the only person who can really figure it out is you yourself by calling the carrier or you can just wait for the day that it stops working :)!
I think a lot of this "gameplay is what truly matters" stuff is partly caused by "You make do with what you have" syndrome & some rose colored glasses. If the latest and greatest was an 8-bit NES was all that was available you'd make do. It may just be that since you grew up with these games & are comfortable with them they have a warm place in your heart. Of course even when the NES was out people were talking about the graphics and there was even a drive back then for better graphics. Go to the kids house who has an Atari 2600, then go to the kids house who has a NES. Who's house will kids most likely want to visit? Same for NES vs SNES/Genesis...etc.
:)
In regards to what an earlier commenter stated about people not caring if they're watching something on a 12" black & white TV so long as it's good, I would disagree to some extent. Show the same show on an HDTV & your experience does become more enjoyable since you're not squinting at the screen and you can be drawn in by the life like colors. The advent of color brought forth new ways of bringing the audience into the film. Imagine if a plot point has a blue light that flashes from a distant ship, you can have the user see for themselves the light is blue instead of having some actor yell "It's the blue light! Horah!".
This "storyline/gameplay trumps all" card was played back when film was just getting sound too. It makes people sound almost like old codgers, "Darn film don't need no sound, so long as the stories good!". While I agree that good graphics don't make a good game, I find it hard to settle in or immerse myself into some of the games of yonder past due in part because of the dated graphics. The disparity in just 10 years with games is much greater than you'll experience in film. If someone released a game today with 8-bit graphics and tried to retail it people would call them lazy. The time when you could light up 4 green pixels and call it a blob are over(except for nostalgic replay services like Virtual Console or Xbox Arcade).
As for raytracing, I am not so sure it's the answer. We've been hearing about raytracing being right around the corner for many years now. I still think rasterization & current hardware has a lot further it can go before raytracing catches up. Perhaps in a decades time we'll have raytracing accelerators or 128core CPUs which can handle it all.
It's a well known fact that an odd number of cores leads to unbalanced usage patterns, which in turn cause the processor to break free of it's socketed sanctuary and wreak havoc on your inner computer componentity goodness.
Well yes, but then you have the problem of how much these things cost. They are still a bit out of the range of cost effectiveness.
But you then have the problem with many databases being much larger than the 48GB listed or even the 384GB. Even if you could buy it today it's probably not very cost effective. Adding more ram or working on better caching solutions may prove to be more valuable. Also it's good to note that while flash meory does have faster seeks they are around 500ns - 1ms. That's quicker than a HDD sure, but it's still exponentially slower than DRAM. see However, this will probably be the wave of the future once we start seeing prices come down and the limits of magnetic storage reached. But with SSDs you'll always have magnetic storage which is going to be exponentially cheaper probably for the next decade or so. Just when the price/performance advantage becomes worthwhile will we really see these take over.
I worked for a 411 provider that contracted to wireless and telcos. One of the callers was an old lady with dementia it seemed who'd call and ask about the time a couple times a day. Wouldn't need a number or anything else, just the current time. Of course it cost her like $1.25 per call but someone was paying her bill I guess.
Understaffing! That there is the solution. Let's understaff so we can continually miss deadlines and contribute to employee burnout. True that if you're under the gun and have heaps of work for to do with your boss beating the drums behind you, people may get more work done. However, stress will go up and you'll get more turnover. I also like your magical fairytale statistic you came up with: "About 5% understaffing is ideal. Do 5% overstaffing and everything drops 10%", when did these metrics come out? Isn't the definition of understaffing to not have enough people staffed to complete the assigned task? If you have 5% understaffing, that could mean that 5% worth of work is not getting done. It doesn't guarantee anyone will pick up the slack, it may mean you'll miss deadlines by 5%, it may means you'll drop 5% of your calls, it may means the quality of work will be 5% less than normal, it may also mean that your employees suck it in and do 5% more work but that's not a guaranteed. Also if a few of your employees call in sick or quit you could see your narrow 5% margin slip to 10% - 20% understaffed(if say you have a 20 person team), which would be a disaster.
Do they really have that infrastructure in place? New spectrum = new radios, new plans, new training, new... a lot of stuff. What they do have is some off the shelf billing software, poorly trained customer service reps & experience in screwing people over. Google would have to make major investments in building towers & hiring techs, reps... Yeah it would be a big undertaking, but if anyone could handle it Google probably could. AT&T & other companies have proven, even if they have decades in the business that doesn't mean they're any good at it(in a customer sense).
It's a new product. Google Paparazzi(TM). "Where you're famous even if you don't want to be!"
Yes, but the display can physically create that many colors at any instant. With dithering a display has to switch between the lesser color set rapidly to give the impression that there are more colors. The facts are with a 6bit display the most "true-colors" you could ever display at one instant is 262,144. I agree that it's deceptive to tell customer's that their display will show "millions" of colors, when actually it's using dithering which can produce artifacts & flickering. Though Apple isn't the only one to do this, every 6-bit panel maker advertises their panels as being able to display "millions & millions". Sometimes you can tell it's a 6-bit display by them listing 16.2 Million colors instead of 16.7 Million, while others blatantly lie & say they can do 16.7 Million.
I still don't get why you're so appalled over the use of the phrase "identity theft". While true that companies messing up like TJX is just plain dumb & stupid. I don't think it's their business model to fumble consumer data. It's going to cost them a lot of money to clean up this mess. Regardless they may have neglected to protect their customers data properly, but the certainly didn't give the OK for someone break in and steal it. This is the same with you leaving your door unlocked at night, just because it's unlocked doesn't mean it gives someone the right to break in and steal all your stuff, even if you should know better to lock your door. Also as I posted above identity thieves do not always get their information from corporate entities. Either they scam it from their victim or snoop it out from their garbage or by other means.
As for companies verifying who you are before you purchase, I am wondering what your suggestion is as to how they go about this? As was stated SSNs, drivers license numbers & credit card numbers were all stolen. If someone has your drivers license, SSN & CC# you're pretty much screwed. I don't see how a company could protect themselves or the victim unless the victim is proactive in keeping an eye on what purchases are showing up on their credit card statement(many do not).
You may be surprised at how many customers whine at any inconvenience, even for their own good. Start questioning Bob Smith about his card and he's going to get huffy at the inconvenience of having to pull out some photo ID or answer some security questions or get upset over the "accusation" of being a thief. "Well, I am Bob Smith, I know who I am.". Yeah, OK. I do customer service over the phone. We require the last 4 of the CC# we have on file to verify people calling in are who they are. We let people know that we'll need the last 4 numbers while they're listening to the hold music. But I still get numerous customers who don't have it ready & then get upset that they really are going to have to get their wallet out & read those last 4 digits off as hard as that is to do. Also it's not only a consumer issue. While there is a data mine to be had with insecure commercial operations, there's quite a bit that can be had at insecure or stupid personal locations. A person can have their ID stolen from their own insecure network connection, or from not logging out of their MySpace account on a public computer. Also plain old non technological ways as well, such as throwing bank statements or sensitive info into a garbage bin w/o shredding it. So no, it's not just about "lazy corporate fuckwits".
The only problem is that this rarely works on public servers and a lot of people vote "No" by default, just to get rid of the prompt. So you can have some idiot TK'er or another idiot crashing vehicles on purpose, but no one's going to get enough votes to really get anything done about it. It takes a majority vote & on a bigger public server getting 2/3rds vote is hard.
I dunno, but it seems this is only an issue on T-Mobile branded phones. I have a Motorola V360 which never worked with Opera Mini with the stock firmware. Once I flashed it over to a different firmware it allowed Opera acess to the network. I don't see how they can actively block 3rd party apps, but allow the built in WAP browsers(atleast on a network level, firmware they can, but you can flash the firmware).