Since you are AC, and I don't feel like I am correcting anyone by name in public, I'd like to comment on something that you typed, but you by far are not an isolated case. This is a paradigm dreamed up by some marketing "think outside the box" type that annoys the hell out of me.
"In short, most people who shop at CVS are middle-aged nutcase mothers who have nothing better to do than argue with me for 30 minutes on an expired 30 cent coupon she feels she's entitled to use."
There is another topic currently being discussed on Slashdot regarding
Customer Service.
That lady may have good reason to argue with you over a 30 cent coupon. Apparently CVS has been paying you enough you don't have to worry about every cent. Your customer obviously is having financial problems.
CVS was apparently willing to give her the benefit of the coupon at one time, why not now? Why is CVS forcing her to prostitute herself to you over thirty cents? Could it be the people who dream up all these games to play with their customers to be so well paid they have no idea that other people may not be so fortunate as to have such a well-paying career?
Personally, I would not have argued with her so much and gave her the benefit of the coupon, and personally taken it on myself to put it up the chain of how much frustration and anger amongst your customers ( as YOU see the Customer, not THEM!!! ) they are causing by coupon trickery.
Game Playing by Businesses ranks very high on my pet peeves of dealing with Business... and is also the number one reason I check Wal Mart for anything I need first. Yes, I will plug Wal Mart as they are one of the few businesses that don't make me feel like a nut for shopping there. You know, the old "I'm sorry, Sir, you don't have Our Club Card... the stated price is only for insiders - and you are not one... for you its ten dollars more" kinda shit. In my case, the Club Card was the quickest way to coax me out of their business and into Wal Mart.
It has been my observation that Club Cards are for businesses who have graduated beyond providing a service or product for their customer base and are now in the business of collecting marketing and demographic data. I do not go to a marketing analysis firm to buy a garden hose or a loaf of bread.
So services like spyware and virus removal don't really have to be complete, they just have to remove the signs a person can see.
That business paradigm is raging in all services, and it bugs the shit out of me.
Things are getting so sophisticated these days, and I have to find people I can trust to do things right, as all of us here know there is a helluva lot of critical support structure that holds the image in place, fixing the image is more than spackling and painting a termite ridden house on the verge of collapse.
My latest personal experience involves a nationwide chain of car lube and tune shops.
I presently have some construction going on at my house, thats got my work area all messed up, or I would have done this myself simply to avoid involving anyone else in my affairs.
I have a smog inspection coming up, and its always been prudent for me to use my oscilloscope to set my dwell and idle speed, timing light to adjust timing, then hook my infrared spectrum analyzer up to my auto exhaust and tune the carburetor's rich/lean screw for minimal HC and CO emission spectra ( actually not minimal, up a bit because NOx emissions start going up as HC approaches minimal, but I do not have UV spectral analysis suitable for seeing the NOx spectra ).
I saw this coupon in the paper, $24.95 for a "tune-up" with bullet points for replacing spark plugs, adjusting carburetor, set timimg, as well as all the customary glances... "inspect belts, hoses, etc... ". You know, so it makes it look like they are doing a lot of work for $24.95.
So, instead of trying to rearrange everything from concrete construction to auto maint at my house, I take my car in for an oil change and "tune-up".
For the oil change, I was kinda diaappointed - the removal went fine, but for the oil replacement, the tech poured an unknown fluid from a container, then filled it from a barrel of oil, and proceeded to pour that into my car. The fluid appeared to be spent oil, but I really don't know what it was. I would have at least liked to have inspected the previous fluid personally for particle contamination. What had me worried a bit is the unknown fluid did not look like new oil.
The thing that irritated me the most though was that the shop claimed they had performed a "tune up" to my face, when I watched the whole time and at no time did I ever see them verify proper carburetor rich/lean, nor use a timing light to set timing, nor see them use a simple meter on the coil to verify dwell. Getting those adjustments properly done was the whole point of my taking the car to someone who apparently specializes in the "lube and TUNE" business!!!
The Customer Service part though was good, the guy behind the desk informed me that his mechanics had years of experience and knew their trade, and was very attentive toward my concerns about not using the proper tools, having the mechanic personally tell me what my timing was and idle RPM was. Well, I am not gonna fuss all that much over idle RPM, because I know musicians that will tell me immediately if a musical instrument is out of whack, but it is completely beyond my comprehension on how dwell and timing can be verified without proper instrumentation, and it is a stretch of my imagination to consider the "sound" of the engine to be indicative of its rich/lean adjustment - when I never saw him even touch the carb screws.
I think most people would have been very pleased... I see this as one of the burdens of knowledge - that you KNOW how things are supposed to work and the ramifications of doing things improperly - and these are often very much at odds with what things APPEAR to be.
Its a very hard concept for me to swallow, to give the customer what he WANTS, not what he NEEDS. I always considered it my duty as a professional to arrange things my customer hired me to do in such a manner as to optimize his benefit to the best of my ability. That paradigm often does not wor
Microsoft reserves the right to terminate this license grant if you sue Microsoft or any of Microsoft's affiliates for patent infringement over claims relating to reading or writing of files that comply with the Office Schemas.
We are dealing with a business. And Government. Has anyone known these guys to change stuff after they get what they want, always being sure to keep the "fuckees" below a critical power level and mass so that they can't get enough public uproar to upset their apple cart?
Very restrictive laws are in place. I don't like going into a dungeon only trusting either a business or the Government won't lock the door, trapping me inside.
We are dealing with a Government today that seems to have no qualms over forcibly evicting people from their own bought and paid for homes because somebody else wanted their land.
I'd feel a helluva lot more comfortable if anything that's called a 'standard', was - by definition - public domain. Otherwise, call it what it is - a proprietary protocol subject to license.
Pipe threads are standard - anyone can make a fixture that's compatible with everyone's plumbing. Microsoft technology is still proprietary if Congress rules they own it, regardless of any intent of the day to 'share'.
Thanks for pointing out the Barents Sea being so far North thing.
Sorry I replied so late.. yes, it actually took that long for your reply to "sink in". I must be getting really dense, and quite embarassed about the ignorance of geography I expressed in my post, as your reply was crystal clear once I got my act straight. Thanks for pointing it out.
I now owe you two valuable lessons you taught me...
(1) Barents sea is about as North as you can get... irregardless of my ignorance of where I thought it was...
(2) I should better review my knowledge for correctness before posting, so I don't have to write apologies like this.
They may have been looking for a particular point on Earth to launch from so they could inject into a particular orbit easily, as well as use the Earth's rotation to their best advantage.
Remember, the closer to the equator you get, the faster you are moving.
And they may wanna launch so that if there is a failure, the debris will scatter over a relatively harmless ares.
I understand these are the main reasons we in the USA like to launch from Cape Canaveral ( Kennedy ) in the State of Florids. It is on the southernmost land mass of USA, as well as the launch direction will be to the East so as to take advantage of the rotation of the Earth, which also means that if we do have a launch failure, or need to dispose of spent boosters, they drop relatively harmlessly over the Atlantic Ocean.
We even have our "Sea Launch" stuff where we haul the rockets off to an equatorial locale to get the best launch window for inserting birds in orbit. A little fuel spent positioning ourself at the best spot saves a lot of fuel spent accelerating the rocket - as in a rocket, you have to spend fuel accelerating fuel you have to burn... and after all that fuel is burned, not much energy actually got used accelerating the cargo.
Still worth every penny... even if your scenerio plays out exactly as you forecast.
We need to know what we are dealing with. And how much of it.
This wouldn't be the first time a sensory exploration was sacrificed to get the data.
I often learn more from a failure than I did from a success.
With a success, I usually only verify what I already knew...mostly a comforting reassuring nod from God ( if you are so inclined ) to let me know I had it right... but on a failure, I am usually made painfully aware I had some terrible misconceptions.
Well, if they really wanna bring it back ( say, you are trying to man this thing and want your men back ), you will have to use the gravitational well of some planet to use as a "slingshot" to send you back inward toward the sun.
The inertia you accumulated during your voyage would be thus transferred to the planet you chose to slingshot off of, much like you transfer inertia between balls during a game of pool.
Yes, that is the thing about navigation with solar sails... your thrust vector is outward... always outward.
Linux is more than an an Operating System, as is Windows. Its a language of system calls and processes upon which applications rely to communicate things which are to be done.
English, French, Spansish, all the other human languages... we also rely on them to communicate things to be done.
I don't see Linux going away any more than I see English going away. It, like English, may change from year to year, to reflect the the current usage of the day. But to obliterate years of legacy usage, nah...
What I do see though, is proprietary controlled systems disapearing as they become spoken by the few that pay to use them, while everyone else does the functional equivalent for free.
But they ( like COBOL ) will be around for a long time as some are highly ingrained in the infrastructure of the corporation which built using it. Look at the problem we have in the US with the English and Metric measurement systems!!! It is so ingrained over here we stubbornly hold onto feet and pounds despite the rest of the world possessing a much more elegant system! Quick- how many inches in a mile? How many centimeters in a kilometer?
Now imagine the Metric System was free to use for all, but we had to track royalty payments to use the English system... would us stubborn Americans finally give it up then? Or would we insist that the rest of the world use it if they were gonna do business with us? Does the threat of us not doing business with them if they don't comply with our demands hold much strength if year after year, we slip further and further into international debt?
Yes, I feel strongly that the basic operating system for all machines will be commoditized, much like generic foods.
I would venture to say that the Operating System of the future will be some standardized machine interface that allows one to communicate with a machine in much the way English ( or other language ) allows us to communicate to another human. I don't think cost will even be mentioned.... as it will be just part of the basic educattion of both Man and Machine. I don't think one would even think of it being a sellable concept any more than paying to use any other language!
However, this paradigm hinges on whether the United States Government continues to pass law to penalize anyone trying to participate in the "free enterprise system" by trying to compete in the market by doing the same thing others are doing... and trying to do better for less.
Well, if it can't be done here in the States anymore, it can always be done overseas... and just re-imported. Just don't expect the jobless Americans to put much down on the 1040 forms. And while they legislate things that keep us little guys in the courtrooms instead of the labs, Congress also needs to consider new ways of paying for their war toys.
I noted the article mentioned the time where one would understand intimately in both hardware and software exactly what the machine was doing.
When I was doing work at the time, yes, I loved my simple machine and asssembler. I coded the thing, and I knew the exact how and why of everything.
Just like building a brick barbeque... I knew exactly what I was gonna get before I ever lay a brick.
When I run my instructions, that's all the machine is doing... exactly what I told it to, and if it didn't, get out the logic analyzer and find out why.
There were no if, ands, or butts about it. Laws of physics, not probability, dictated the thing WOULD do exactly as instructed.
Yes, I still use my DOS machines, C compiler, assembler, and have transferred a lot of my efforts to things like the PIC processors and Atmel AVR parts. Yes, yesterday's technology is still alive... in embedded processors.
You can buy a ( less than ) five dollar part which is basically your old IMSAI 8080, memory, processor, ports, and all , in a chip that runs years on a small battery. The simple technology is NOT dead by a long shot! This technology still runs things like electric blanket controllers, cooking aids, toys, and other simple gizmos.
I am right at home in a lab with an old machine... but I do prefer at least a '386 because of its memory architecture if I am gonna be working with any substantially sized data sets, but even an 8086 along with TASM is fine by me for most experiment control.
And as far as those old formats are concerned, you know I can still read those old 5 1/4" floppies on my Pentiums! I have also read those old 9-track tapes - you just have to find the old drives and construct the appropriate interface - I usually use a printer port, albeit some things required two ports for a minimal-hardware to build implementation.
I have noted this paradigm since I loaded my first antiviral products for Win95.
My system slowed to a crawl. I do a lot of CAD design, and the responsiveness of my system is very important to me, as I do a lot of independent work and I am working on my own time, not paid by the hour like a lot of corporate stuff.
So, I nixed the constant scanning, as well as the routes viruses routinely come in ( javascript, Microsoft Outlook, unverified but suspected plug-ins such as RealPlayer, etc. ).
Yes, I still run ZoneLabs firewall which lets me know if some site I hit upon is likely to be hostile by the relentless torrent of port connection attempts some unleash on me. Or if I hit upon business sites which require me to enable JavaScript or use some proprietary technology for them, I regard them with the same distrust they may regard to me if I asked them to leave the till of their cash register open, don a blindfold, and trust me not to rummage through their cash. I am fully aware they are asking me to open channels which are used for viral counduits into my machine.
I do like to run integrity monitors from time to time to see if any of my core files have changed, as I still run old DOS/WIN95 installations, and it is simple enough to lock down a few core files and processes, as WIN95 was coded in a day where acceptance of new technology was highly dependent upon understanding of how it worked.
All of my debugging tools (SoftICE, WDASM, IDA ) work great with the old code - if I have any rough edges with anything, its easy enough to open up and fix. Thats something I flat can not do with today's technologies, whose security lays in keeping people like me ignorant of the inner workings of critical computational infrastructures so that someone else can produce code I can neither alter or verify its true intents. My own take is the later code is made mostly for corporations who settle disputes with negotiators and litigation, not a debugger.
If people only knew how their stuff worked, we would not need antivirals.
But then, IP protection would not be possible either.
As a people, we must decide which is more important to our survival - seeing to it our needs are met by fully comprehending how our stuff works, or seeing to it that others have a right to keep the rest of ignorant, and trust them to "do the right thing".
We are heading down a slippery slope these days.
You think the DOS attacks against servers are bad? Just wait for the next wave of viruses which are not designed to snoop, but to alter the machine just enough so its hyper-security software detects the hiccup and uses its full authority to deny obeyance to its own legal rightful owners...
I see the day coming when some huge corporation gets locked out of its own database by some trivial little data manipulator function over some expiring authorization code embedded by some little no-name contractor several years ago... The database is locked. Strong hardware security locks prevent bypass. The contractor died. How do you handle a problem like this through legal means? Sue God to have Him resurrect the dead programmer so he can reauthorize the code?
Or, as one old wise man told me, "Trust, but verify".
Reading that employment ad highly reinforces my attitude on typical businessmen, who look "beyond reality" into ever and ever increasing "productivity" through management pressure to do everything faster.
I noted how the ad stressed meeting deadlines - not doing things right.
I don't reply to ads like that.
I know its a clueless PHB on the other side who has taken all sorts of management courses on "the management of human performance", and often has no idea we actually need time to reflect on what we are doing.
Ads like that do not appeal at all to people like me. I am the type that has a 4.0 GPA, yet won't take but 10 units or so, because I insist on taking my time and doing it right. Some may call me a laggard. Others may call me an artist. I am not rich, but I sleep well. I even used to work in aerospace until it became executized. I did not like being forced to overlook the details, as experience has long shown me that overlooking the small stuff will always come back to bite you. Its the old "for want of a nail, the shoe was lost" thing...and it still holds true. Design errors are by far the most expensive error a company can make - and wise ones avoid design errors at all costs.
You think I will ever forget that one little bit of loose foam has damn near killed our space program?
Its long been my observation that a shopkeeper and a mountain climber may have completely different criteria for evaluating the value of a rope.
I consider myself a mountain climber.
I also know the shopkeeper's interest involves trying to sell me the rope with the most markup.
A mountain climber knows that its best to stay clear of certain shops. Although they may be well executized, their rope is no good.
You would probably immensely enjoy the science fiction short-story "Sail 25" by Jack Vance. Its a good hour read at the library.
Its about a training voyage with six cadets and a instructor who thorougly trains his cadets by making the voyage a living nightmare of failures, as well as making sure they make it on their own ( as he's already seen to it the radio does not work, and he's let it be known very clear to the cadets he expects to die in space - the ship is theirs to navigate using the forces of nature at their command, and he's not lifitng a finger to help.).
Jack seems to have his physics pretty accurate -
I have re-read that story often. It would make a helluva movie.
We now have a system where it doesn't take a big investment to make a perfect impression. Just about anybody with any machine can easily produce web content that is at least equal to, and in many cases, far superior to what corporate entities can do ( as corporate entities are likely to use canned authoring solutions that are a thinly veiled coercion to force the public to use an OS which is compatible with them. ) Exact replicas of corporate logos are made with a click of the mouse. Redirection can be used to make connections to one entity look like another...
And worse upon worse, the growing enforcement of computer ignorance in the name of DRM, where the consumer is forced to rely on the honesty of the code vendor, not their own cognition of his work. Its like being asked to sign legal documents written in a language only the lawyer - by means of IP law - is allowed to understand. When we give up the right to understand what we are doing, well... as one guy noted... hilarity ensues.
Its not the system thats fubar. Computers are really quite simple things that always do exactly what they are told to do. ( barring hardware malfunction, of course )... The problem is us! We are the ones who stand by idly while special interest groups go off forming special cliques and coin languages of their own so we can't understand them.
Its kinda funny how businessmen here in Southern California can come down hard on a bunch of Mexican immigrants for using their native language in the workplace, because their communications cannot be understood by the boss... yet these same bosses readily install extremely critical computational infrastructures without having the foggiest idea how they work!!!
I don't see the problem as being computers or the internet, any more than I see fire being a problem when it comes to destroying homes... Both of these are examples of very powerful paradigms which can be very hazardous if their properties are ignored, but extremely beneficial to those who have the intelligence to understand what they are dealing with and how to use it accordingly.
This virus crap will go away when we learn the risks of being ignorant of what we feed our computers, just as many of the risks of fire are eliminated when we understand the chemistry of combustion... and know not to do things like pour gasoline around gas water heaters and the like. As long as we ignore the hazards of allowing ourselver to be ignorant of the instructions we allow others to feed our machines, we might as well be opening bottles of unknown content in the presence of our water heaters... you are gonna go boom occasionally until you learn not to do that.
Yeh, with my luck, the earth would decide to crack under the bay, intersecting the tunnel... with the water subsequently flowing down the crack, into the breached tunnel, and setting up a "mini-tsunami" in the submerged subway system by means of the inertial energy stored in thousands of tons of water moving with substantial velocity as it filled the tubes.
I know these thinge were planned and engineered. I am an engineer, so I feel I know as well as anyone else that things don't always go as planned. Due diligence tilts the odds in our favor, but there is always the laws of probability that come back and bite us sometimes when we least expect it.
From what I could see, such a scenario is not likely at all, and my own analysis suggests I would be far more likely to meet my demise in a car accident driving surface routes than riding the subway. I think my fear is more founded on the idea that in a car, I have at least some control over my car, whereas in the subway, I felt once in the thing, I had no control whatsoever - and everything would play out the same no matter what I could do in the event of a freak of nature like that. Now why can't I get such an irrational fear of something like the drive shaft connection to the car transmission failing and having the driveshaft drop onto the freeway at freeway speeds? It is possible for such a thing to happen, but not probable. Such an unlikely event could easily result in some spectacular ( and highly fatal ) car gymnastics.
I get the idea you are an engineer too and probably have the same mindset as I where I feel I can do anything if I know how it works and can control it. As long as I know exactly how it works - I feel pretty damm safe... when I do not know how it works, I am skittery as a cat in a strange dark alley. I don't think anyone knows exactly how earthquakes pick where they are gonna hit yet. Neither do I think we can ever know. It boils down to statistics. And that is what scares me.
When I lived up in the Bay Area / San Francisco, my pet fear was the BART subway that went under the bay . I was afraid that if the integrity of the tunnel ever got breached, the trains would lose electricity and stop, while the tunnels flooded with water.
Nightmares and bad movies are made of stuff like this.
I know its poor form to reply to one's own reply...
This post presented a vexing moderation problem to me.
Thing number 1: Refrozen presented a very informative on-topic link.
Thing number 2: Refrozen also stated nothing wrong with ADWARE, which to me is a very inflammatory troll.
I consider ANY intrusion and placing of stuff in my machine as malicious mischief, much as I would view anyone coming onto my property and leaving painted ads... aa well as a theft of my time to witness ad and time required to remove it.
Whether they flip bits or leave paint, they have still altered my property - and stolen my time.
No way can I condone adware like this - I think about all of us here consider it at least malicious mischief.
Although I have a modpoint, I'd rather post in defense of my parent, who is presently modded 'Troll', and give up any moderation power I have in this thread.
He gave us an informative link to another company doing the same thing... paying webmasters to place adware.
Check out his link and see. Its a disgusting concept. But its out there.
I believe Refrozen deserves better than being slapped with negative moderation for presenting the link to us.
The draughtsman may find it in his fancy to state in his drawing to drill a hole of dia 0.109375 inches.
But you look in your drill index and all the drill diameters you have are in fractional inches...
So, do you reach for your dial calipers and start measuring for the closest fit? Do you pick up the phone to your jobber and ask him to bring you a drill bit of that size?
Or, do you recognize it as a 7/64 inch bit, chuck it and go?
You know, I see this and I see a damn nice welder!
I'm already beginning to think of yet more ways of getting dissimilar materials to bond with each other in such a manner they are gonna STAY that way until they are melted for recycle.
What is sparking this off is that I was contracted in the past for recommendations for POS terminals for use in major department stores, and they asked for any advice I had for embedded OS in the terminals. They had Microsoft in mind.
I strongly advocated they use a Linux distribution, even though it was probably gonna take longer to develop the first prototypes. The problem as I saw it was not how fast we could get the first production installed in retail chains, but how we would handle expansion over time.
We need to offer instant replication of technology so that all the POS in the entire chain work identically, so the people can freely move anywhere in the chain and transfer 100% of the computer skills learned anywhere in the organization to any other place.
Also, when the chain grows, I will need to spawn off new POS systems that work identically to what they already have, so that all the clerks and salespeople hit the ground running. Trying to learn a new OS with customers in line is very frustrating to personnel and customers alike.
I showed them the WIN98 notices of discontinuation, as well as speculating if they had a bunch of embedded OS requiring the use of WIN98, do they look forward to all the time to retrain everyone? Or if they wanted to bring a new store online, how easy would it be to spawn off new terminals that worked exactly like the ones the cashiers and clerks had been using for the last five years? Sure, technically, easy, but what about copyright issues? Are we just opening ourselves up to litigation if we try to do things the easy way?
Don't get me wrong, I think Microsoft OS is fine for the mom and pop store that has no expansion plans and just wants an operable POS , now!... its the large chains with thousands of stores that need to be careful not to step in legal bear traps.
When dealing with these high-volume chains running product through on razor-thin margins of everyday low pricing, even just slight inefficiencies can hinder one chain enough to allow a competitor to start taking market share.
These guys have grown beyond having to ask dad for the car keys.
We took a tour through one of the stores and I pointed out all the other infrastructure, some of which was decades old, and asked if it needed to be replaced just because it was old... you know, electrical distribution panels, plumbing, main structural support girders, etc. I also asked them if they would consider putting in store lighting which used bulbs only one company made, and they had power to stop making those bulbs at any time, and worse, use IP law to keep anybody else from making them.
It just takes a certain mentality to freely give up your options to accept "lock-in", kinda like a cat may give up its life for one morsel of food in a cat trap.
Its been my observation that the people who are most likely to see things the way I do would also be people who have a personal interest in the long term success of the program. Those who get paid the same whether or not the thing works usually wanna farm it out to the lowest bidder and let the legal department haggle over the details.
I have a book of science fiction short stories containing the story "Sail 25" by Jack Vance.
It's about the training of six space cadets aboard a solar-sail powered vessel. However, the instructor - ol' Henry Belt - sees to it that everything that can go wrong DOES go wrong! To make matters worse, he's drunk and tells 'em he thoroughly expects to die in space - so the cadets are basically on their own if they ever want to see home again. What they thought was just an interplanetary jant to Mars and back turns out to take them coursing through the solar system, as they face problems of computer failures, energies, gravitation, dwindling food and air supplies, velocity problems... the worst nightmares any space man could imagine.
It looks to me Jack had really done his homework as he did a beautiful technical analysis of the forces and energies involved.
I was unable to find the text of his story on the net, but Here's a link to a brief synopsis of the book. Its out of print from what I can tell, so you would probably have to check the library or used bookstores for a copy...
Its a fascinating read if you are doing any research in solar sails.
Personally, I am quite impressed with what they are trying to do here in California.
Yes, a disposal fee on the stuff that requires special handling to dispose of.
With the money earmarked to fund companies such as Waste Management, which runs recycling centers such as the one on Blue Gum and LaPalma in Anaheim.
The residents bring whatever it is that they wanna get rid of there, they accept it, sort it all out, and even have an area there for people to shop over stuff others brought in to see if there is anything there they want. If so, they are free to take it. Kinda like a "free store", where you can get things like soap, paint, bug spray, lawn chemicals, auto lube, whatever. If you want whatever's there, just take it. They call it the "stop and swap" or something like that. Its just a big covered patio like structure with shelves stocked with usables others brought in for recycle.
Last time I went, I arrived with my car loaded with old nicads, gel cells, a five gallon container of some industrial paint solvent which I tried to use, but had some terrible reactions to, and a few paint cans full of I don't know what ( wasn't paint!)... and left with enough soaps and lawn chemicals to last me a year.
I figured whatever my tax money went to support that operation was repaid many times over by the efficiency of getting unwanted materials back into the hands of someone else who wanted them - as well as guaranteeing that the nasty stuff went through appropriate disposal channels - not into the general landfill which would eventually leach out into our drinking water.
Just one thing though - I would like to see politicians stand up for us and require that any legislation that requires the replacement of existing technology ( like forced obsolence of our older analog TV sets, or cars ) would require the ones backing the legislation to pick up the tab for replacing the older stuff with whatever it is they are gonna replace it with. Note use of the word 'required', as I have nothing against anyone offering an improved technology, its just when they force me not to use perfectly operational stuff I already have that I feel the ones benefitting from forcing me to change should bear my costs of changing.
It makes sense for Sony to discontinue production and try to urge abandonment of CRT technology in consumer products.
LCD panels can be constructed to use exclusively digital info, effectively closing "the analog hole" for protecting video information.
As long as the CRT is around, I have about 50 volts of strong RGB analog signals which must appear at the cathodes of the CRT in order for the thing to display an image at all... as well as having beautifully timed horizontal and vertical sync pulses, easily tapped with an automotive "spark plug pickup" inductive clip, at the deflection yoke. Having this available, plus a few video op-amps and monostables for signal shaping and line-driving, I can reconstitute quite pristine RGB from anything that can be seen on the screen... completely stripped of DRM!
Securing the video stream would effectively make it possible to encrypt the video all the way from storage device to the display screen, nowhere would it be tappable in the open. With the magic of the super-complex ASIC technologies, just the expense of making your own ASIC decoder would be cost prohibitive for short-runs, and easy to catch and prosecute if anybody tried to make runs where the economies of scale would finally kick in.
So, yes, I do expect the media companies to try like the dickens to obsolete any older analog technologies that lets people like us tap the data stream directly... as technologies for recording analog streams are well advanced... er, well, advanced enough to make passable copies.
It may be ten to twenty years before they can completely phase out the older technologies, but their control of our behaviour depends on them asserting their influence. And they will.
Mini-Rant:
Ordinarily, I would not care if someone protected their property by locking it up... but in the case of something as critical to our livelihood as our computer/communication infrastructure, it scares me immensely. If I never knew the innards of how the PlayStation ran, it does not matter to me. But my computer is quickly becoming an integral part of my existence. And its in my best interests to know how to fix it if it is ailing.
Its a survival thing. I am not interested in growing my own food, but I am very interested in knowing I could if I had to, and not be dependent as a caged cat on someone else to feed me.
I fear the day when draconian DRM measures are in full force, then the virus gets let loose which makes all machines think they are in violation of their DRM and suddenly lock everyone out. It would be much more inconvenient for me than, say, locking myself out of my own house - when I know if I had to, I could break a window and get back in. Its like locking a safe with my life savings in it - then finding there is no way to get the thing open again.
In engineering school, they always stressed upon us to consider "failsafe" design schemes because things inevitably fail - and when they do, you want to minimize the collateral damage. I feel we are giving up a tremendous resilence of our computing systems robustness - for a song. Literally!
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There is another topic currently being discussed on Slashdot regarding Customer Service .
That lady may have good reason to argue with you over a 30 cent coupon. Apparently CVS has been paying you enough you don't have to worry about every cent. Your customer obviously is having financial problems.
CVS was apparently willing to give her the benefit of the coupon at one time, why not now? Why is CVS forcing her to prostitute herself to you over thirty cents? Could it be the people who dream up all these games to play with their customers to be so well paid they have no idea that other people may not be so fortunate as to have such a well-paying career?
Personally, I would not have argued with her so much and gave her the benefit of the coupon, and personally taken it on myself to put it up the chain of how much frustration and anger amongst your customers ( as YOU see the Customer, not THEM!!! ) they are causing by coupon trickery.
Game Playing by Businesses ranks very high on my pet peeves of dealing with Business... and is also the number one reason I check Wal Mart for anything I need first. Yes, I will plug Wal Mart as they are one of the few businesses that don't make me feel like a nut for shopping there. You know, the old "I'm sorry, Sir, you don't have Our Club Card... the stated price is only for insiders - and you are not one... for you its ten dollars more" kinda shit. In my case, the Club Card was the quickest way to coax me out of their business and into Wal Mart.
It has been my observation that Club Cards are for businesses who have graduated beyond providing a service or product for their customer base and are now in the business of collecting marketing and demographic data. I do not go to a marketing analysis firm to buy a garden hose or a loaf of bread.
That business paradigm is raging in all services, and it bugs the shit out of me.
Things are getting so sophisticated these days, and I have to find people I can trust to do things right, as all of us here know there is a helluva lot of critical support structure that holds the image in place, fixing the image is more than spackling and painting a termite ridden house on the verge of collapse.
My latest personal experience involves a nationwide chain of car lube and tune shops.
I presently have some construction going on at my house, thats got my work area all messed up, or I would have done this myself simply to avoid involving anyone else in my affairs.
I have a smog inspection coming up, and its always been prudent for me to use my oscilloscope to set my dwell and idle speed, timing light to adjust timing, then hook my infrared spectrum analyzer up to my auto exhaust and tune the carburetor's rich/lean screw for minimal HC and CO emission spectra ( actually not minimal, up a bit because NOx emissions start going up as HC approaches minimal, but I do not have UV spectral analysis suitable for seeing the NOx spectra ).
I saw this coupon in the paper, $24.95 for a "tune-up" with bullet points for replacing spark plugs, adjusting carburetor, set timimg, as well as all the customary glances... "inspect belts, hoses, etc... ". You know, so it makes it look like they are doing a lot of work for $24.95.
So, instead of trying to rearrange everything from concrete construction to auto maint at my house, I take my car in for an oil change and "tune-up".
For the oil change, I was kinda diaappointed - the removal went fine, but for the oil replacement, the tech poured an unknown fluid from a container, then filled it from a barrel of oil, and proceeded to pour that into my car. The fluid appeared to be spent oil, but I really don't know what it was. I would have at least liked to have inspected the previous fluid personally for particle contamination. What had me worried a bit is the unknown fluid did not look like new oil.
The thing that irritated me the most though was that the shop claimed they had performed a "tune up" to my face, when I watched the whole time and at no time did I ever see them verify proper carburetor rich/lean, nor use a timing light to set timing, nor see them use a simple meter on the coil to verify dwell. Getting those adjustments properly done was the whole point of my taking the car to someone who apparently specializes in the "lube and TUNE" business!!!
The Customer Service part though was good, the guy behind the desk informed me that his mechanics had years of experience and knew their trade, and was very attentive toward my concerns about not using the proper tools, having the mechanic personally tell me what my timing was and idle RPM was. Well, I am not gonna fuss all that much over idle RPM, because I know musicians that will tell me immediately if a musical instrument is out of whack, but it is completely beyond my comprehension on how dwell and timing can be verified without proper instrumentation, and it is a stretch of my imagination to consider the "sound" of the engine to be indicative of its rich/lean adjustment - when I never saw him even touch the carb screws.
I think most people would have been very pleased... I see this as one of the burdens of knowledge - that you KNOW how things are supposed to work and the ramifications of doing things improperly - and these are often very much at odds with what things APPEAR to be.
Its a very hard concept for me to swallow, to give the customer what he WANTS, not what he NEEDS. I always considered it my duty as a professional to arrange things my customer hired me to do in such a manner as to optimize his benefit to the best of my ability. That paradigm often does not wor
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We are dealing with a business. And Government. Has anyone known these guys to change stuff after they get what they want, always being sure to keep the "fuckees" below a critical power level and mass so that they can't get enough public uproar to upset their apple cart?
Very restrictive laws are in place. I don't like going into a dungeon only trusting either a business or the Government won't lock the door, trapping me inside.
We are dealing with a Government today that seems to have no qualms over forcibly evicting people from their own bought and paid for homes because somebody else wanted their land.
I'd feel a helluva lot more comfortable if anything that's called a 'standard', was - by definition - public domain. Otherwise, call it what it is - a proprietary protocol subject to license.
Pipe threads are standard - anyone can make a fixture that's compatible with everyone's plumbing. Microsoft technology is still proprietary if Congress rules they own it, regardless of any intent of the day to 'share'.
As long as the snake is alive, it may bite.
Thanks for pointing out the Barents Sea being so far North thing.
Sorry I replied so late.. yes, it actually took that long for your reply to "sink in". I must be getting really dense, and quite embarassed about the ignorance of geography I expressed in my post, as your reply was crystal clear once I got my act straight. Thanks for pointing it out.
I now owe you two valuable lessons you taught me...
(1) Barents sea is about as North as you can get... irregardless of my ignorance of where I thought it was...
(2) I should better review my knowledge for correctness before posting, so I don't have to write apologies like this.
Remember, the closer to the equator you get, the faster you are moving.
And they may wanna launch so that if there is a failure, the debris will scatter over a relatively harmless ares.
I understand these are the main reasons we in the USA like to launch from Cape Canaveral ( Kennedy ) in the State of Florids. It is on the southernmost land mass of USA, as well as the launch direction will be to the East so as to take advantage of the rotation of the Earth, which also means that if we do have a launch failure, or need to dispose of spent boosters, they drop relatively harmlessly over the Atlantic Ocean.
We even have our "Sea Launch" stuff where we haul the rockets off to an equatorial locale to get the best launch window for inserting birds in orbit. A little fuel spent positioning ourself at the best spot saves a lot of fuel spent accelerating the rocket - as in a rocket, you have to spend fuel accelerating fuel you have to burn... and after all that fuel is burned, not much energy actually got used accelerating the cargo.
We need to know what we are dealing with. And how much of it.
This wouldn't be the first time a sensory exploration was sacrificed to get the data.
I often learn more from a failure than I did from a success.
With a success, I usually only verify what I already knew...mostly a comforting reassuring nod from God ( if you are so inclined ) to let me know I had it right... but on a failure, I am usually made painfully aware I had some terrible misconceptions.
The inertia you accumulated during your voyage would be thus transferred to the planet you chose to slingshot off of, much like you transfer inertia between balls during a game of pool.
Yes, that is the thing about navigation with solar sails... your thrust vector is outward... always outward.
English, French, Spansish, all the other human languages... we also rely on them to communicate things to be done.
I don't see Linux going away any more than I see English going away. It, like English, may change from year to year, to reflect the the current usage of the day. But to obliterate years of legacy usage, nah...
What I do see though, is proprietary controlled systems disapearing as they become spoken by the few that pay to use them, while everyone else does the functional equivalent for free.
But they ( like COBOL ) will be around for a long time as some are highly ingrained in the infrastructure of the corporation which built using it. Look at the problem we have in the US with the English and Metric measurement systems!!! It is so ingrained over here we stubbornly hold onto feet and pounds despite the rest of the world possessing a much more elegant system! Quick- how many inches in a mile? How many centimeters in a kilometer?
Now imagine the Metric System was free to use for all, but we had to track royalty payments to use the English system... would us stubborn Americans finally give it up then? Or would we insist that the rest of the world use it if they were gonna do business with us? Does the threat of us not doing business with them if they don't comply with our demands hold much strength if year after year, we slip further and further into international debt?
Yes, I feel strongly that the basic operating system for all machines will be commoditized, much like generic foods.
I would venture to say that the Operating System of the future will be some standardized machine interface that allows one to communicate with a machine in much the way English ( or other language ) allows us to communicate to another human. I don't think cost will even be mentioned.... as it will be just part of the basic educattion of both Man and Machine. I don't think one would even think of it being a sellable concept any more than paying to use any other language!
However, this paradigm hinges on whether the United States Government continues to pass law to penalize anyone trying to participate in the "free enterprise system" by trying to compete in the market by doing the same thing others are doing... and trying to do better for less.
Well, if it can't be done here in the States anymore, it can always be done overseas... and just re-imported. Just don't expect the jobless Americans to put much down on the 1040 forms. And while they legislate things that keep us little guys in the courtrooms instead of the labs, Congress also needs to consider new ways of paying for their war toys.
When I was doing work at the time, yes, I loved my simple machine and asssembler. I coded the thing, and I knew the exact how and why of everything.
Just like building a brick barbeque... I knew exactly what I was gonna get before I ever lay a brick.
When I run my instructions, that's all the machine is doing... exactly what I told it to, and if it didn't, get out the logic analyzer and find out why.
There were no if, ands, or butts about it. Laws of physics, not probability, dictated the thing WOULD do exactly as instructed.
Yes, I still use my DOS machines, C compiler, assembler, and have transferred a lot of my efforts to things like the PIC processors and Atmel AVR parts. Yes, yesterday's technology is still alive... in embedded processors.
You can buy a ( less than ) five dollar part which is basically your old IMSAI 8080, memory, processor, ports, and all , in a chip that runs years on a small battery. The simple technology is NOT dead by a long shot! This technology still runs things like electric blanket controllers, cooking aids, toys, and other simple gizmos.
I am right at home in a lab with an old machine... but I do prefer at least a '386 because of its memory architecture if I am gonna be working with any substantially sized data sets, but even an 8086 along with TASM is fine by me for most experiment control.
And as far as those old formats are concerned, you know I can still read those old 5 1/4" floppies on my Pentiums! I have also read those old 9-track tapes - you just have to find the old drives and construct the appropriate interface - I usually use a printer port, albeit some things required two ports for a minimal-hardware to build implementation.
My system slowed to a crawl. I do a lot of CAD design, and the responsiveness of my system is very important to me, as I do a lot of independent work and I am working on my own time, not paid by the hour like a lot of corporate stuff.
So, I nixed the constant scanning, as well as the routes viruses routinely come in ( javascript, Microsoft Outlook, unverified but suspected plug-ins such as RealPlayer, etc. ). Yes, I still run ZoneLabs firewall which lets me know if some site I hit upon is likely to be hostile by the relentless torrent of port connection attempts some unleash on me. Or if I hit upon business sites which require me to enable JavaScript or use some proprietary technology for them, I regard them with the same distrust they may regard to me if I asked them to leave the till of their cash register open, don a blindfold, and trust me not to rummage through their cash. I am fully aware they are asking me to open channels which are used for viral counduits into my machine.
I do like to run integrity monitors from time to time to see if any of my core files have changed, as I still run old DOS/WIN95 installations, and it is simple enough to lock down a few core files and processes, as WIN95 was coded in a day where acceptance of new technology was highly dependent upon understanding of how it worked.
All of my debugging tools (SoftICE, WDASM, IDA ) work great with the old code - if I have any rough edges with anything, its easy enough to open up and fix. Thats something I flat can not do with today's technologies, whose security lays in keeping people like me ignorant of the inner workings of critical computational infrastructures so that someone else can produce code I can neither alter or verify its true intents. My own take is the later code is made mostly for corporations who settle disputes with negotiators and litigation, not a debugger.
If people only knew how their stuff worked, we would not need antivirals.
But then, IP protection would not be possible either.
As a people, we must decide which is more important to our survival - seeing to it our needs are met by fully comprehending how our stuff works, or seeing to it that others have a right to keep the rest of ignorant, and trust them to "do the right thing".
We are heading down a slippery slope these days.
You think the DOS attacks against servers are bad? Just wait for the next wave of viruses which are not designed to snoop, but to alter the machine just enough so its hyper-security software detects the hiccup and uses its full authority to deny obeyance to its own legal rightful owners...
I see the day coming when some huge corporation gets locked out of its own database by some trivial little data manipulator function over some expiring authorization code embedded by some little no-name contractor several years ago... The database is locked. Strong hardware security locks prevent bypass. The contractor died. How do you handle a problem like this through legal means? Sue God to have Him resurrect the dead programmer so he can reauthorize the code?
Or, as one old wise man told me, "Trust, but verify".
Reading that employment ad highly reinforces my attitude on typical businessmen, who look "beyond reality" into ever and ever increasing "productivity" through management pressure to do everything faster.
I noted how the ad stressed meeting deadlines - not doing things right.
I don't reply to ads like that.
I know its a clueless PHB on the other side who has taken all sorts of management courses on "the management of human performance", and often has no idea we actually need time to reflect on what we are doing.
Ads like that do not appeal at all to people like me. I am the type that has a 4.0 GPA, yet won't take but 10 units or so, because I insist on taking my time and doing it right. Some may call me a laggard. Others may call me an artist. I am not rich, but I sleep well. I even used to work in aerospace until it became executized. I did not like being forced to overlook the details, as experience has long shown me that overlooking the small stuff will always come back to bite you. Its the old "for want of a nail, the shoe was lost" thing...and it still holds true. Design errors are by far the most expensive error a company can make - and wise ones avoid design errors at all costs.
You think I will ever forget that one little bit of loose foam has damn near killed our space program?
Its long been my observation that a shopkeeper and a mountain climber may have completely different criteria for evaluating the value of a rope.
I consider myself a mountain climber.
I also know the shopkeeper's interest involves trying to sell me the rope with the most markup.
A mountain climber knows that its best to stay clear of certain shops. Although they may be well executized, their rope is no good.
Its about a training voyage with six cadets and a instructor who thorougly trains his cadets by making the voyage a living nightmare of failures, as well as making sure they make it on their own ( as he's already seen to it the radio does not work, and he's let it be known very clear to the cadets he expects to die in space - the ship is theirs to navigate using the forces of nature at their command, and he's not lifitng a finger to help.).
Jack seems to have his physics pretty accurate -
I have re-read that story often. It would make a helluva movie.
We now have a system where it doesn't take a big investment to make a perfect impression. Just about anybody with any machine can easily produce web content that is at least equal to, and in many cases, far superior to what corporate entities can do ( as corporate entities are likely to use canned authoring solutions that are a thinly veiled coercion to force the public to use an OS which is compatible with them. ) Exact replicas of corporate logos are made with a click of the mouse. Redirection can be used to make connections to one entity look like another...
And worse upon worse, the growing enforcement of computer ignorance in the name of DRM, where the consumer is forced to rely on the honesty of the code vendor, not their own cognition of his work. Its like being asked to sign legal documents written in a language only the lawyer - by means of IP law - is allowed to understand. When we give up the right to understand what we are doing, well... as one guy noted... hilarity ensues.
Its not the system thats fubar. Computers are really quite simple things that always do exactly what they are told to do. ( barring hardware malfunction, of course )... The problem is us! We are the ones who stand by idly while special interest groups go off forming special cliques and coin languages of their own so we can't understand them.
Its kinda funny how businessmen here in Southern California can come down hard on a bunch of Mexican immigrants for using their native language in the workplace, because their communications cannot be understood by the boss... yet these same bosses readily install extremely critical computational infrastructures without having the foggiest idea how they work!!!
I don't see the problem as being computers or the internet, any more than I see fire being a problem when it comes to destroying homes... Both of these are examples of very powerful paradigms which can be very hazardous if their properties are ignored, but extremely beneficial to those who have the intelligence to understand what they are dealing with and how to use it accordingly.
This virus crap will go away when we learn the risks of being ignorant of what we feed our computers, just as many of the risks of fire are eliminated when we understand the chemistry of combustion... and know not to do things like pour gasoline around gas water heaters and the like. As long as we ignore the hazards of allowing ourselver to be ignorant of the instructions we allow others to feed our machines, we might as well be opening bottles of unknown content in the presence of our water heaters... you are gonna go boom occasionally until you learn not to do that.
I know these thinge were planned and engineered. I am an engineer, so I feel I know as well as anyone else that things don't always go as planned. Due diligence tilts the odds in our favor, but there is always the laws of probability that come back and bite us sometimes when we least expect it.
From what I could see, such a scenario is not likely at all, and my own analysis suggests I would be far more likely to meet my demise in a car accident driving surface routes than riding the subway. I think my fear is more founded on the idea that in a car, I have at least some control over my car, whereas in the subway, I felt once in the thing, I had no control whatsoever - and everything would play out the same no matter what I could do in the event of a freak of nature like that. Now why can't I get such an irrational fear of something like the drive shaft connection to the car transmission failing and having the driveshaft drop onto the freeway at freeway speeds? It is possible for such a thing to happen, but not probable. Such an unlikely event could easily result in some spectacular ( and highly fatal ) car gymnastics.
I get the idea you are an engineer too and probably have the same mindset as I where I feel I can do anything if I know how it works and can control it. As long as I know exactly how it works - I feel pretty damm safe... when I do not know how it works, I am skittery as a cat in a strange dark alley. I don't think anyone knows exactly how earthquakes pick where they are gonna hit yet. Neither do I think we can ever know. It boils down to statistics. And that is what scares me.
Nightmares and bad movies are made of stuff like this.
This post presented a vexing moderation problem to me.
Thing number 1: Refrozen presented a very informative on-topic link.
Thing number 2: Refrozen also stated nothing wrong with ADWARE, which to me is a very inflammatory troll.
I consider ANY intrusion and placing of stuff in my machine as malicious mischief, much as I would view anyone coming onto my property and leaving painted ads... aa well as a theft of my time to witness ad and time required to remove it.
Whether they flip bits or leave paint, they have still altered my property - and stolen my time.
No way can I condone adware like this - I think about all of us here consider it at least malicious mischief.
So how do you moderate an informative flamebait?
He gave us an informative link to another company doing the same thing... paying webmasters to place adware.
Check out his link and see. Its a disgusting concept. But its out there.
I believe Refrozen deserves better than being slapped with negative moderation for presenting the link to us.
I am looking to preserve the life of an old 3-tube bigscreen TV and those RGB outputs look ripe for the video feeds of the 3 CRT's in my set.
( My feeling: Why replace the whole shebang when I can just replace the tuner? )
Thanks for any advice...
Anubi
The draughtsman may find it in his fancy to state in his drawing to drill a hole of dia 0.109375 inches.
But you look in your drill index and all the drill diameters you have are in fractional inches...
So, do you reach for your dial calipers and start measuring for the closest fit? Do you pick up the phone to your jobber and ask him to bring you a drill bit of that size?
Or, do you recognize it as a 7/64 inch bit, chuck it and go?
I'm already beginning to think of yet more ways of getting dissimilar materials to bond with each other in such a manner they are gonna STAY that way until they are melted for recycle.
What is sparking this off is that I was contracted in the past for recommendations for POS terminals for use in major department stores, and they asked for any advice I had for embedded OS in the terminals. They had Microsoft in mind.
I strongly advocated they use a Linux distribution, even though it was probably gonna take longer to develop the first prototypes. The problem as I saw it was not how fast we could get the first production installed in retail chains, but how we would handle expansion over time.
We need to offer instant replication of technology so that all the POS in the entire chain work identically, so the people can freely move anywhere in the chain and transfer 100% of the computer skills learned anywhere in the organization to any other place.
Also, when the chain grows, I will need to spawn off new POS systems that work identically to what they already have, so that all the clerks and salespeople hit the ground running. Trying to learn a new OS with customers in line is very frustrating to personnel and customers alike.
I showed them the WIN98 notices of discontinuation, as well as speculating if they had a bunch of embedded OS requiring the use of WIN98, do they look forward to all the time to retrain everyone? Or if they wanted to bring a new store online, how easy would it be to spawn off new terminals that worked exactly like the ones the cashiers and clerks had been using for the last five years? Sure, technically, easy, but what about copyright issues? Are we just opening ourselves up to litigation if we try to do things the easy way?
Don't get me wrong, I think Microsoft OS is fine for the mom and pop store that has no expansion plans and just wants an operable POS , now!... its the large chains with thousands of stores that need to be careful not to step in legal bear traps.
When dealing with these high-volume chains running product through on razor-thin margins of everyday low pricing, even just slight inefficiencies can hinder one chain enough to allow a competitor to start taking market share.
These guys have grown beyond having to ask dad for the car keys.
We took a tour through one of the stores and I pointed out all the other infrastructure, some of which was decades old, and asked if it needed to be replaced just because it was old... you know, electrical distribution panels, plumbing, main structural support girders, etc. I also asked them if they would consider putting in store lighting which used bulbs only one company made, and they had power to stop making those bulbs at any time, and worse, use IP law to keep anybody else from making them.
It just takes a certain mentality to freely give up your options to accept "lock-in", kinda like a cat may give up its life for one morsel of food in a cat trap.
Its been my observation that the people who are most likely to see things the way I do would also be people who have a personal interest in the long term success of the program. Those who get paid the same whether or not the thing works usually wanna farm it out to the lowest bidder and let the legal department haggle over the details.
It's about the training of six space cadets aboard a solar-sail powered vessel. However, the instructor - ol' Henry Belt - sees to it that everything that can go wrong DOES go wrong! To make matters worse, he's drunk and tells 'em he thoroughly expects to die in space - so the cadets are basically on their own if they ever want to see home again. What they thought was just an interplanetary jant to Mars and back turns out to take them coursing through the solar system, as they face problems of computer failures, energies, gravitation, dwindling food and air supplies, velocity problems... the worst nightmares any space man could imagine.
It looks to me Jack had really done his homework as he did a beautiful technical analysis of the forces and energies involved.
I was unable to find the text of his story on the net, but Here's a link to a brief synopsis of the book. Its out of print from what I can tell, so you would probably have to check the library or used bookstores for a copy...
Its a fascinating read if you are doing any research in solar sails.
Then stopped making replacement parts for consumables in order to force us to buy a new car.
Would we sit still for it? Or DEMAND Congress pass law that removes all patent and copyright protections from all unsupported intellectual property?
If those bastids we have in there now don't see it this way, its time we got some people in there who do!
Yes.. this is flamebait... but its exactly how I feel about this issue.
Yes, a disposal fee on the stuff that requires special handling to dispose of.
With the money earmarked to fund companies such as Waste Management, which runs recycling centers such as the one on Blue Gum and LaPalma in Anaheim.
The residents bring whatever it is that they wanna get rid of there, they accept it, sort it all out, and even have an area there for people to shop over stuff others brought in to see if there is anything there they want. If so, they are free to take it. Kinda like a "free store", where you can get things like soap, paint, bug spray, lawn chemicals, auto lube, whatever. If you want whatever's there, just take it. They call it the "stop and swap" or something like that. Its just a big covered patio like structure with shelves stocked with usables others brought in for recycle.
Last time I went, I arrived with my car loaded with old nicads, gel cells, a five gallon container of some industrial paint solvent which I tried to use, but had some terrible reactions to, and a few paint cans full of I don't know what ( wasn't paint!)... and left with enough soaps and lawn chemicals to last me a year.
I figured whatever my tax money went to support that operation was repaid many times over by the efficiency of getting unwanted materials back into the hands of someone else who wanted them - as well as guaranteeing that the nasty stuff went through appropriate disposal channels - not into the general landfill which would eventually leach out into our drinking water.
Just one thing though - I would like to see politicians stand up for us and require that any legislation that requires the replacement of existing technology ( like forced obsolence of our older analog TV sets, or cars ) would require the ones backing the legislation to pick up the tab for replacing the older stuff with whatever it is they are gonna replace it with. Note use of the word 'required', as I have nothing against anyone offering an improved technology, its just when they force me not to use perfectly operational stuff I already have that I feel the ones benefitting from forcing me to change should bear my costs of changing.
LCD panels can be constructed to use exclusively digital info, effectively closing "the analog hole" for protecting video information.
As long as the CRT is around, I have about 50 volts of strong RGB analog signals which must appear at the cathodes of the CRT in order for the thing to display an image at all... as well as having beautifully timed horizontal and vertical sync pulses, easily tapped with an automotive "spark plug pickup" inductive clip, at the deflection yoke. Having this available, plus a few video op-amps and monostables for signal shaping and line-driving, I can reconstitute quite pristine RGB from anything that can be seen on the screen... completely stripped of DRM!
Securing the video stream would effectively make it possible to encrypt the video all the way from storage device to the display screen, nowhere would it be tappable in the open. With the magic of the super-complex ASIC technologies, just the expense of making your own ASIC decoder would be cost prohibitive for short-runs, and easy to catch and prosecute if anybody tried to make runs where the economies of scale would finally kick in.
So, yes, I do expect the media companies to try like the dickens to obsolete any older analog technologies that lets people like us tap the data stream directly... as technologies for recording analog streams are well advanced... er, well, advanced enough to make passable copies.
It may be ten to twenty years before they can completely phase out the older technologies, but their control of our behaviour depends on them asserting their influence. And they will.
Mini-Rant:
Ordinarily, I would not care if someone protected their property by locking it up... but in the case of something as critical to our livelihood as our computer/communication infrastructure, it scares me immensely. If I never knew the innards of how the PlayStation ran, it does not matter to me. But my computer is quickly becoming an integral part of my existence. And its in my best interests to know how to fix it if it is ailing.
Its a survival thing. I am not interested in growing my own food, but I am very interested in knowing I could if I had to, and not be dependent as a caged cat on someone else to feed me.
I fear the day when draconian DRM measures are in full force, then the virus gets let loose which makes all machines think they are in violation of their DRM and suddenly lock everyone out. It would be much more inconvenient for me than, say, locking myself out of my own house - when I know if I had to, I could break a window and get back in. Its like locking a safe with my life savings in it - then finding there is no way to get the thing open again.
In engineering school, they always stressed upon us to consider "failsafe" design schemes because things inevitably fail - and when they do, you want to minimize the collateral damage. I feel we are giving up a tremendous resilence of our computing systems robustness - for a song. Literally!