So, essentially, it could be like a banner click-thru deal and by us calling, the spammer is making mega-bling.
Not really. Why? Because like any product or service, if what you deliver (in this case, callers) is worthless (in this case, geeks looking to ask if their fridge is running), customers walk.
When all the customers have walked, you go out of business.
know, some people want their cell phone to just be a cell phone. To those people, I suggest a second hand phone.
Mmm, no. The problem is that while there are plenty of super-basic cell-phones, they're cheaply built and lack even the slightest intelligence in their design. Meanwhile there are supercomputer phones with switch-watch construction and design.
There's no real middleground, and the low-end of the market is showing zero innovation. All I really wanted was a phone with a good phonebook(ie, could handle more than 1 # for someone) and bluetooth. I did finally find one- Siemens S56, but it's been less than a picnic. For example, it makes a hugely annoying set of tones, very loudly, while it "connects", but regular audio is whisper-quiet even cranked up all the way. WTF? For this, I paid over $100. Absurd.
At least it's better than the Nokia phone I had...god, that thing had a UI that was about as intelligible as ancient sumerian, read underwater, backwards.
Grantsdale just around the corner [....] improved wireless support
Will someone please tell me what the hell a chipset has to do with wireless? It's bad enough when Intel bullshits through their teeth about the whole Centrino thing(namely that you've gotta have a special CPU to take advantage of wireless), but it's even worse when analysts and reporters start actually perpetuating the same crap. Wireless is slow enough that you don't need anything even remotely special to "take full advantage"; 33mhz PCI is plenty damn fast enough to handle 8MB/sec or so.
This harks back to the MMX bunny-suit guys claiming that MMX/P2 make the internet work better/faster...
I like what some counrties do -- for fines, they use a percentage of that persons earnings or total wealth (i forget which) and calculate the fine based on that
How about seizing all the stock that you purchased, for starters? If it happens more than once, you get barred from owning any more stock? If I get caught speeding too many times, my license gets taken away...
Billy's just doing what his corporation does- paying fines as a cost of doing business, because they're so trivial.
A great place to get a good pirce on power tools, but their handtools both mechanical and woodworking are of horrible quality.
Yes and no; they're a mixed bag. They have a light-weight, aluminum, low-profile jack which is very popular among racers and driving school participants because it's decently built and very cheap; less than a quarter of the cost of most other "racing" jacks. I saw the edge of the jack plate on one chip off, but the vehicle's jack point wasn't centered on the plate. They're also self-bleeding but need to be kept level or they stop self-bleeding. Someone I know bought a mini sheet metal brake and it was damn near worthless.
Sears will replace about any tool even if it's from doing something stupid with em
No, they'll replace any hand-tool. I, and most other serious tool users I know, have managed to regularly break Craftsman tools. There's a reason they need to have the free replacement policy; their stuff doesn't stand up to abuse. A friend who worked at a mountain bike shop said that they had a bag full of Craftsman tools ready to go back to the store after 2-3 months. Craftsman builds the worst shit for power tools and lawn equipment- we've had a Lawn Boy that lasted 15+ years, and not a single Craftsman mower(we've had 3-4) last more than 3-5. Our current one needed extensive rebuilding internally; bent connecting rod, among other problems.
I once used a SnapOn ratchet and socket to break frozen wheel lugs, and didn't have the slightest problem. I was doing so with a 7-foot extension pipe (something you're never supposed to do with a ratchet, but the owner of the ratchet said "don't worry about it. It'll take it") and pulling at least 100lb on the end. That's 700 ft-lb, a shitload of torque. They cost a fortune, but you damn well get what you pay for.
I cracked a Craftsman socket in two trying to break free some wheel lugs and I was using a 2-foot extension...pathetic.
but I have issues with articles which are sponsored by the item being reviewed
You just described 99.5% of the "hardware review" sites. If it's not freebies, it's "we'd like it back but we won't ever call to find out why you never returned it". If not that, it's "if you don't say something nice about product X, you won't get to review anything from us again".
My favorite are the sites which claim they "return everything they review". Says who? Like they wouldn't lie about it. Like the manufacturers wouldn't lie about it. Maybe they're just getting paid cash instead. Every single site also sells advertisements for everything they review; why, look at these guys...there's an ad for the keyboard from one of the billion useless-PC-mods stores right there on the same page.
Magazines aren't any different. I once spoke to a gent who makes automotive software, and a certain car magazine said they'd put him in the "editor's gadgets pick", if he bought 10,000 reprints (and they turned out to be hideously expensive per-page) AND he had to take out a 6 issue advertisement contract. They got him coming, staying, and going.
I remember hearing about the Apple TiBook 17" having a keyboard which glowed different colours for various alerts.
I'm typing on one right now, and the only color it does is white. It's one(or two, I can't remember) LEDs connected to the keyboard via fiber optics. The LEDs are on the right side, either under or next to the keyboard.
Brightness is controlled by software that polls two ambient light sensors under the speaker grilles; it doesn't even come on unless it gets fairly dark. You "train" the display and keyboard backlights over time; it learns what ambient light level equals what adjustment. The backlight actually can make the letters/numbers the same "brightness" as light reflected off the keyboard, making them essentially disappear, which is a little odd.
The keyboard backlighting is great for planes, dark meeting rooms, etc...but beyond that it's a novelty. The automatic screen backlight adjustment is actually much more useful. If you get tired of it you can even set it back to manual...
Ok, obviously this is your first (does the Dr. Evil quotes thing) "review", so here's a tip or two.
change first-person pronouns to third person pronouns in the marketing drivel you received from the manufacturer which you have cut+pasted into your "review".
Spell-check your article so you don't do moronic things like mis-spell "bright". Don't forget proper punctuation. Both will help you appear to be more than just the 2 16-year-olds you are.
you don't need to "thank" the manufacturer. They're plenty happy that you wrote a glowing(if badly spelled) review and will let you keep the keyboard.
Invent something, anything, to complain about, no matter how trivial, to give the paper-thin illusion of impartialness.
I would suspect that the only reason this got posted was because ThinkGeek sells the same keyboard, or one very close to it- I know because they heavily advertise it here on slashdot. It is pathetic that this was considered front-page news.
Aside from that- god, these knock-offs suck compared to Apple's. I have a powerbook 17", and the backlit keyboard only glows around through letters/numbers/symbols(a teeny bit leaks from between the keys). From what I recall it's either one or two LEDs with fiber optics to distribute the light evenly. Works perfectly, and it even sets its own brightness level...none of these knock-offs even have a brightness adjustment.
...assuming 200W per server, which is probably low, but probably compensates for 79,000 being most likely an overestimate. However, that doesn't even begin to account for the energy used to keep the stuff cool.
Anyone know how many trees per second that would be? Conversion to clubbed-baby-seals-per-sec optional.
never-been-rooted claims getting sillier
on
OpenBSD 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 3, Funny
We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of eight years with only a single remote hole in the default install.
Prediction for OpenBSD 6.0 announcement:
"We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of 15 years with only a single remote hole on a 986, executed from a windows system over a local network by a person under the age of 18. On tuesday. During a full moon. At low tide."
this is like shooting fish in a barrel
on
Robosaurus
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I for one welcome our...our....siiiiiigh.
This is too easy. Just takes all the fun out of it. Aw hell...no it doesn't.
I for one welcome our giant, fire-breathing meccha dinosaur overlords!
There's some interesting tidbits on what it takes to be an industry analyst as well
Anyone who has read more than 2-3 reports from the "big boys" like Gartner can easily answer that one. Not much, save zero morals/integrity.
I worked for a company which dealt exclusively with whitepapers written by the big analyst houses. The reports were widely known to be staggeringly poor, often blatantly wrong. It was hardly surprising that they were a royal pain in the ass to deal with on a technical level; getting them to use FTP to upload their content was nearly impossible. IT industry experts who can't figure out FTP. Special.
I've seen numerous comments here on/., on stories about both pro and anti linux analyst reports, talking about how much of a joke these companies are. Most of the analyst groups do huge amounts of "commissioned analysis", which is then passed off as being legitimate, unbiased analysis- when it is nothing of the sort.
Analyst groups have turned into little more than for-hire technical marketing (the computer industry's version of "military intelligence") who spew out documents just technical enough to impress/confuse the top brass.
The article seems to be making the argument that a smaller format sensor won't be as sensitive as a larger sensor, but I'm not sure I buy this.
Well, it's fact. The larger the surface area of each cell, the better signal to noise ratio you will get. CMOS yields better quality than CCD, as well- although the margin has dropped as CCD sensors and the electronics behind them have improved faster(due to everyone and their grandmother working with CCDR sensors) than CMOS.
This phenomenon can be seen clearly in both the non-CMOS 14 megapixel Kodak 14n, or the Sony F828, which has a VERY tiny 8 megapixel CCD sensor. Both are horrendously noisy at their lowest ISO settings.
My Canon 10D has better noise characteristics at about 400 ISO than my Canon G1 had at 50 ISO, and 400 is about the limit I feel is appropriate for an 8x10. For images resized to 800x600 for, say, large images linked off a website, ISO 800 or 1600 still yields pretty decent images.
The example he gives of buckets of water is flawed, since falling rain isn't *focused* like light is. Light entering a lens is just being focused on a smaller area. Sure the area is smaller, but it's also brighter.
Light is focused, but it's also made up of particles. Further, the smaller the sensor, the smaller the lens. The smaller the lens, the less light is gathered.
Smaller sensors also require much more precise optics and focusing systems(or smaller apertures, limiting light input even further). Tiny sensors are also very prone to flare.
How about reporting for ISPs? Say, daily reports grouped by netblock owner in an easily parsed format? Set it up so ISPs can sign up for them. ISP doesn't sign up? Shucks, they must be supporting viruses and whatnot.
While backbone providers love 'em because they get paid for every byte...worms are the scourge of DSL/cablemodem companies, because they don't get paid by the byte, and worms eat into their margins. So you'd think they would have a vested interest in taking care of the problem.
Of course, if they were competent, they'd be running IDS systems that would examine a portion of traffic looking for worm activity, automatically shutting off any systems...
Perhaps we should put together some more data points and extrapolate if this has been the trend since the iPod mini release.
Apple has consistently failed to meet ship dates and demand, mostly around the time they moved manufacturing from Ireland to Asia; quality also nose-dived with nearly every model having some sort of quirk or another. Sometimes it's due to manufacturing problems, but usually, it's a simple matter of failing to deliver products on time. In most companies, that gets people fired. At Apple, it's par for the course to keep customers waiting weeks for orders to get filled, or longer. Apple was also famous for loosing orders- your order simply got dropped from the system, which of course meant you lost your place in the queue.
Steve Jobs announces something, says it will be "shipping" or in stores by a certain date- usually at least a month out. The press and experienced mac heads quietly chuckle to themselves. On that date, a few systems do in fact show up at a few dealers, and a few people get their order status changed to "shipping".
At least half of the time there are "unexpected delays". About half of the time there are manufacturing or quality control problems(as is the case with the iPod mini). Nearly all of the time, it's weeks- or over a month- before the initial orders have been filled. Even orders after demand has quieted down can take forever, because most everything is shipped on-demand from Asia; my powerbook took a week to arrive, despite being shipped 2 or 3 day air; 2 or 3 day air means "2 or 3 days after it gets put on a plane, shipped from asia, sits in chicago for 2-3 days waiting for customs, hopefully clears customs OK, and then gets back into Fedex/UPS's system again". Nowhere, of course, is this disclosed to customers.
Smart Apple customers have learned to wait until Apple starts meeting demand anyway, because by that time, Apple has usually sorted out any serious defects- or at least you know of them.
I know you're joking, but parking lots and roads are responsible for altering weather patterns and causing local climate changes. Birds have even adapted to following highways because of the thermals they generate...
"-read the changelog notes to see if any of the numerous changes classified as "incompatible" affected me or my users".
because it's an ugly, lumbering dinosaur
on
Postfix 2.1 Released
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I've been running sendmail 4ever - sure it's complicated as hell - and a bit of a resource hog at times..but it freaking works and is rock solid over more years of production use than any other MTA ever will be in our lifetimes.
On a Axil 320(110mhz, I think? I forget which sparc chip) running Solaris w/320MB of ram and one single SCSI drive, on a Mailman list with about 2,000 subscribers and 100 posts a day, we went from delivery times of an hour+(and load averages well over 4) to under 5 minutes(and load averages between.5 and 2).
Proponents of Sendmail will say "oh, it just needs to be tuned properly".
Nope, sorry. Proper software doesn't need tuning to do its job. Ever notice that the only proponents of the "it just needs someone who knows how to tune it" model are...well...the limited number of people who know how to tune it, and are fast finding themselves out of jobs?
and will this produce enough to increase the percent of ethanol in gas from 10% to 50% or more?
No, because 99% of the world's vehicles would destroy themselves within an hour of running such a high concentration of ethanol. Rubber seals and hoses in the system simply can't tolerate that much ethanol(I believe they'd swell). Moving components like fuel pumps rely on the gasoline for lubrication; too high an ethanol percentage, and they'd rip themselves to shreds.
It would be economically unfeasible to replace all the components- you'd literally have to replace the entire fuel system, including pump, lines, regulators, check valves, and injectors.
Red Vs. Blue was great. For about the first 'season'. There were a lot of cute inside jokes about Halo, like the limitless amount of ammo, and some amusing stuff about capture the flag in general("You asked for it? Why didn't we try that?")
However, they then promptly ran out of material. It has now degenerated into a lot of homosexual potty humor(you know, the kind that homophobes make? An entire episode consists of them playing with the android's, um..."switch") and so on. Much of the episodes are just so far out to lunch plot-wise it's like watching a bunch of frat boys trying to do their own version of Whose Line Is It Anyway (which is no great surprise, reading the blog and looking at the author photos. They all seem perpetually stoned). Any clever new ideas have been so severely beaten to death they've long since ceased to be funny.
Basically- it was great because the early episodes were well written and had purpose. Now, however, the plot sucks. Machinima is a nice way to do animation, but it's not even remotely impressive on its own; not even slightly. Watching some poorly written script that consists mostly of a bunch of identical halo characters talking to each other(and these conversations go on for a half episode sometimes!) is downright boring, and I've gone from a huge fan to "oh, they released a new ep? Hmm, well, I guess I'll download it".
Instead of just leaving it to their 15 minutes of fame and wandering off to do something else with their lives, or moving on to a new game (there are plenty, after all- imagine what they could do with GTA:VC!), they're just churning out the same stuff, ep after ep.
And find such fingerprints would be more than sufficient probable cause to issue a search warrant, where (if the suspect is in fact guilty) admissible evidence can be found.
Um, no. If the search warrant was issued based on invalid evidence, the product of the search can be thrown out.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing they were referring to themselves, not google.
Not really. Why? Because like any product or service, if what you deliver (in this case, callers) is worthless (in this case, geeks looking to ask if their fridge is running), customers walk.
When all the customers have walked, you go out of business.
Mmm, no. The problem is that while there are plenty of super-basic cell-phones, they're cheaply built and lack even the slightest intelligence in their design. Meanwhile there are supercomputer phones with switch-watch construction and design.
There's no real middleground, and the low-end of the market is showing zero innovation. All I really wanted was a phone with a good phonebook(ie, could handle more than 1 # for someone) and bluetooth. I did finally find one- Siemens S56, but it's been less than a picnic. For example, it makes a hugely annoying set of tones, very loudly, while it "connects", but regular audio is whisper-quiet even cranked up all the way. WTF? For this, I paid over $100. Absurd.
At least it's better than the Nokia phone I had...god, that thing had a UI that was about as intelligible as ancient sumerian, read underwater, backwards.
Will someone please tell me what the hell a chipset has to do with wireless? It's bad enough when Intel bullshits through their teeth about the whole Centrino thing(namely that you've gotta have a special CPU to take advantage of wireless), but it's even worse when analysts and reporters start actually perpetuating the same crap. Wireless is slow enough that you don't need anything even remotely special to "take full advantage"; 33mhz PCI is plenty damn fast enough to handle 8MB/sec or so.
This harks back to the MMX bunny-suit guys claiming that MMX/P2 make the internet work better/faster...
That's the best you could come up with? Yeesh. I've read it 4 times and I still don't get it.
How about "from the quick-put-the-dilithium-crystals-back-in-klingons- approaching dept" or "quick-find-the-hamster-the-lights-are-going-dim dept"?
Please feel free to reply with better department lines. Or an explanation about what the hell this whole bike/bike lock thing is about...
How about seizing all the stock that you purchased, for starters? If it happens more than once, you get barred from owning any more stock? If I get caught speeding too many times, my license gets taken away...
Billy's just doing what his corporation does- paying fines as a cost of doing business, because they're so trivial.
Yes and no; they're a mixed bag. They have a light-weight, aluminum, low-profile jack which is very popular among racers and driving school participants because it's decently built and very cheap; less than a quarter of the cost of most other "racing" jacks. I saw the edge of the jack plate on one chip off, but the vehicle's jack point wasn't centered on the plate. They're also self-bleeding but need to be kept level or they stop self-bleeding. Someone I know bought a mini sheet metal brake and it was damn near worthless.
Sears will replace about any tool even if it's from doing something stupid with em
No, they'll replace any hand-tool. I, and most other serious tool users I know, have managed to regularly break Craftsman tools. There's a reason they need to have the free replacement policy; their stuff doesn't stand up to abuse. A friend who worked at a mountain bike shop said that they had a bag full of Craftsman tools ready to go back to the store after 2-3 months. Craftsman builds the worst shit for power tools and lawn equipment- we've had a Lawn Boy that lasted 15+ years, and not a single Craftsman mower(we've had 3-4) last more than 3-5. Our current one needed extensive rebuilding internally; bent connecting rod, among other problems.
I once used a SnapOn ratchet and socket to break frozen wheel lugs, and didn't have the slightest problem. I was doing so with a 7-foot extension pipe (something you're never supposed to do with a ratchet, but the owner of the ratchet said "don't worry about it. It'll take it") and pulling at least 100lb on the end. That's 700 ft-lb, a shitload of torque. They cost a fortune, but you damn well get what you pay for.
I cracked a Craftsman socket in two trying to break free some wheel lugs and I was using a 2-foot extension...pathetic.
You just described 99.5% of the "hardware review" sites. If it's not freebies, it's "we'd like it back but we won't ever call to find out why you never returned it". If not that, it's "if you don't say something nice about product X, you won't get to review anything from us again".
My favorite are the sites which claim they "return everything they review". Says who? Like they wouldn't lie about it. Like the manufacturers wouldn't lie about it. Maybe they're just getting paid cash instead. Every single site also sells advertisements for everything they review; why, look at these guys...there's an ad for the keyboard from one of the billion useless-PC-mods stores right there on the same page.
Magazines aren't any different. I once spoke to a gent who makes automotive software, and a certain car magazine said they'd put him in the "editor's gadgets pick", if he bought 10,000 reprints (and they turned out to be hideously expensive per-page) AND he had to take out a 6 issue advertisement contract. They got him coming, staying, and going.
I'm typing on one right now, and the only color it does is white. It's one(or two, I can't remember) LEDs connected to the keyboard via fiber optics. The LEDs are on the right side, either under or next to the keyboard.
Brightness is controlled by software that polls two ambient light sensors under the speaker grilles; it doesn't even come on unless it gets fairly dark. You "train" the display and keyboard backlights over time; it learns what ambient light level equals what adjustment. The backlight actually can make the letters/numbers the same "brightness" as light reflected off the keyboard, making them essentially disappear, which is a little odd.
The keyboard backlighting is great for planes, dark meeting rooms, etc...but beyond that it's a novelty. The automatic screen backlight adjustment is actually much more useful. If you get tired of it you can even set it back to manual...
Ok, obviously this is your first (does the Dr. Evil quotes thing) "review", so here's a tip or two.
I would suspect that the only reason this got posted was because ThinkGeek sells the same keyboard, or one very close to it- I know because they heavily advertise it here on slashdot. It is pathetic that this was considered front-page news.
Aside from that- god, these knock-offs suck compared to Apple's. I have a powerbook 17", and the backlit keyboard only glows around through letters/numbers/symbols(a teeny bit leaks from between the keys). From what I recall it's either one or two LEDs with fiber optics to distribute the light evenly. Works perfectly, and it even sets its own brightness level...none of these knock-offs even have a brightness adjustment.
...assuming 200W per server, which is probably low, but probably compensates for 79,000 being most likely an overestimate. However, that doesn't even begin to account for the energy used to keep the stuff cool.
Anyone know how many trees per second that would be? Conversion to clubbed-baby-seals-per-sec optional.
Prediction for OpenBSD 6.0 announcement:
"We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of 15 years with only a single remote hole on a 986, executed from a windows system over a local network by a person under the age of 18. On tuesday. During a full moon. At low tide."
I for one welcome our...our....siiiiiigh.
This is too easy. Just takes all the fun out of it. Aw hell...no it doesn't.
I for one welcome our giant, fire-breathing meccha dinosaur overlords!
It actually makes me wonder(even as someone who has enjoyed the occasional ST episode) what the hell this is doing on the front page.
That and how pathetic our current moderators are that you could get moderated "insightful".
Anyone who has read more than 2-3 reports from the "big boys" like Gartner can easily answer that one. Not much, save zero morals/integrity.
I worked for a company which dealt exclusively with whitepapers written by the big analyst houses. The reports were widely known to be staggeringly poor, often blatantly wrong. It was hardly surprising that they were a royal pain in the ass to deal with on a technical level; getting them to use FTP to upload their content was nearly impossible. IT industry experts who can't figure out FTP. Special.
I've seen numerous comments here on /., on stories about both pro and anti linux analyst reports, talking about how much of a joke these companies are. Most of the analyst groups do huge amounts of "commissioned analysis", which is then passed off as being legitimate, unbiased analysis- when it is nothing of the sort.
Analyst groups have turned into little more than for-hire technical marketing (the computer industry's version of "military intelligence") who spew out documents just technical enough to impress/confuse the top brass.
Well, it's fact. The larger the surface area of each cell, the better signal to noise ratio you will get. CMOS yields better quality than CCD, as well- although the margin has dropped as CCD sensors and the electronics behind them have improved faster(due to everyone and their grandmother working with CCDR sensors) than CMOS.
This phenomenon can be seen clearly in both the non-CMOS 14 megapixel Kodak 14n, or the Sony F828, which has a VERY tiny 8 megapixel CCD sensor. Both are horrendously noisy at their lowest ISO settings.
My Canon 10D has better noise characteristics at about 400 ISO than my Canon G1 had at 50 ISO, and 400 is about the limit I feel is appropriate for an 8x10. For images resized to 800x600 for, say, large images linked off a website, ISO 800 or 1600 still yields pretty decent images. The example he gives of buckets of water is flawed, since falling rain isn't *focused* like light is. Light entering a lens is just being focused on a smaller area. Sure the area is smaller, but it's also brighter.
Light is focused, but it's also made up of particles. Further, the smaller the sensor, the smaller the lens. The smaller the lens, the less light is gathered.
Smaller sensors also require much more precise optics and focusing systems(or smaller apertures, limiting light input even further). Tiny sensors are also very prone to flare.
How about reporting for ISPs? Say, daily reports grouped by netblock owner in an easily parsed format? Set it up so ISPs can sign up for them. ISP doesn't sign up? Shucks, they must be supporting viruses and whatnot.
While backbone providers love 'em because they get paid for every byte...worms are the scourge of DSL/cablemodem companies, because they don't get paid by the byte, and worms eat into their margins. So you'd think they would have a vested interest in taking care of the problem.
Of course, if they were competent, they'd be running IDS systems that would examine a portion of traffic looking for worm activity, automatically shutting off any systems...
How exactly does that work? :-)
Apple has consistently failed to meet ship dates and demand, mostly around the time they moved manufacturing from Ireland to Asia; quality also nose-dived with nearly every model having some sort of quirk or another. Sometimes it's due to manufacturing problems, but usually, it's a simple matter of failing to deliver products on time. In most companies, that gets people fired. At Apple, it's par for the course to keep customers waiting weeks for orders to get filled, or longer. Apple was also famous for loosing orders- your order simply got dropped from the system, which of course meant you lost your place in the queue.
Steve Jobs announces something, says it will be "shipping" or in stores by a certain date- usually at least a month out. The press and experienced mac heads quietly chuckle to themselves. On that date, a few systems do in fact show up at a few dealers, and a few people get their order status changed to "shipping".
At least half of the time there are "unexpected delays". About half of the time there are manufacturing or quality control problems(as is the case with the iPod mini). Nearly all of the time, it's weeks- or over a month- before the initial orders have been filled. Even orders after demand has quieted down can take forever, because most everything is shipped on-demand from Asia; my powerbook took a week to arrive, despite being shipped 2 or 3 day air; 2 or 3 day air means "2 or 3 days after it gets put on a plane, shipped from asia, sits in chicago for 2-3 days waiting for customs, hopefully clears customs OK, and then gets back into Fedex/UPS's system again". Nowhere, of course, is this disclosed to customers.
Smart Apple customers have learned to wait until Apple starts meeting demand anyway, because by that time, Apple has usually sorted out any serious defects- or at least you know of them.
I know you're joking, but parking lots and roads are responsible for altering weather patterns and causing local climate changes. Birds have even adapted to following highways because of the thermals they generate...
Nowhere did I see:
"-read the changelog notes to see if any of the numerous changes classified as "incompatible" affected me or my users".
I've been running sendmail 4ever - sure it's complicated as hell - and a bit of a resource hog at times..but it freaking works and is rock solid over more years of production use than any other MTA ever will be in our lifetimes.
On a Axil 320(110mhz, I think? I forget which sparc chip) running Solaris w/320MB of ram and one single SCSI drive, on a Mailman list with about 2,000 subscribers and 100 posts a day, we went from delivery times of an hour+(and load averages well over 4) to under 5 minutes(and load averages between .5 and 2).
Proponents of Sendmail will say "oh, it just needs to be tuned properly".
Nope, sorry. Proper software doesn't need tuning to do its job. Ever notice that the only proponents of the "it just needs someone who knows how to tune it" model are...well...the limited number of people who know how to tune it, and are fast finding themselves out of jobs?
No, because 99% of the world's vehicles would destroy themselves within an hour of running such a high concentration of ethanol. Rubber seals and hoses in the system simply can't tolerate that much ethanol(I believe they'd swell). Moving components like fuel pumps rely on the gasoline for lubrication; too high an ethanol percentage, and they'd rip themselves to shreds.
It would be economically unfeasible to replace all the components- you'd literally have to replace the entire fuel system, including pump, lines, regulators, check valves, and injectors.
Red Vs. Blue was great. For about the first 'season'. There were a lot of cute inside jokes about Halo, like the limitless amount of ammo, and some amusing stuff about capture the flag in general("You asked for it? Why didn't we try that?")
However, they then promptly ran out of material. It has now degenerated into a lot of homosexual potty humor(you know, the kind that homophobes make? An entire episode consists of them playing with the android's, um..."switch") and so on. Much of the episodes are just so far out to lunch plot-wise it's like watching a bunch of frat boys trying to do their own version of Whose Line Is It Anyway (which is no great surprise, reading the blog and looking at the author photos. They all seem perpetually stoned). Any clever new ideas have been so severely beaten to death they've long since ceased to be funny.
Basically- it was great because the early episodes were well written and had purpose. Now, however, the plot sucks. Machinima is a nice way to do animation, but it's not even remotely impressive on its own; not even slightly. Watching some poorly written script that consists mostly of a bunch of identical halo characters talking to each other(and these conversations go on for a half episode sometimes!) is downright boring, and I've gone from a huge fan to "oh, they released a new ep? Hmm, well, I guess I'll download it".
Instead of just leaving it to their 15 minutes of fame and wandering off to do something else with their lives, or moving on to a new game (there are plenty, after all- imagine what they could do with GTA:VC!), they're just churning out the same stuff, ep after ep.
Um, no. If the search warrant was issued based on invalid evidence, the product of the search can be thrown out.