<TheGoogleExperience> "Hey, here's a new great idea we formed a focus group to come up with and we think you'll just love it"
*clicks "Switch back temporarily" *
"Hey, we noticed you clicked "Switch back temporarily" Will you tell us why?"
*Fills out survey why I don't like the new gmail layout, why the new interface is clunky or impossible to use due to menu items being filed away places you'd never think to look, why the interface now takes twice as long to load, why I don't want to add a G+ account, why I want to remove the g+ account that I didn't know would be added by clicking continue and needing to transfer it to another account in order to remove it but needing to wait two weeks for the privilege of doing so, youtube being permalinked to my gmail account, the new compose, the youtube comments being attached to G+ for no reason at all, my youtube logging out when I log out of gmail, G+, etc*
*Swtich back temporarily gets removed and you get stuck with whatever you didn't like*
*Reads google groups post about the 'new feature becoming standard for everyone' noting the 150,000 dislikes and 37 likes
*Tries greasemonkey scripts that reconfigure the pages on the fly to what they should have been in the first place noted and advertised in said google groups post 1/2 way down the list*
*Switches to HTML/compatibility/mobile view only mode by whatever means necessary to gain functionaries lost until they change or disable that too*
*Reads follow up post from google about how happy they are with the changes no one wanted or requested* </TheGoogleExperience>
So at least I've got my simple functional slashdot back for the moment, but if this keeps on being troweled over I'll simply find another site to obsessively check likely written by another unhappy former slashdot reader for other unhappy former slashdot readers.
Not at all! heck the most analog paths are usually the most exploitable (man writing a copy of another written piece).
The point I was trying to make wasn't that an analog path isn't manipulatable but the fact that with a linear analog path that this kind of unintentional pattern replacement type of manipulation occurring differently though differing documents wouldn't have occurred or really even been possible.
I figured that people here could read in between the lines correctly though; An error in my judgement!
To bust out the old Louisville slugger though, this particular device saved space by taking one or more 'samples' of the document scanned and through some comparative algorithm reused these samples to aid in compression of the file. Probably due to this failing or performing a 99% match on a sample that might have been sampled before or multiple times depending on the circumstances ended up making the incorrect decision on what sample to use where. Thus the document 'copied' in this way is an entirely different piece of work than the one that went in. There is little chance of this happening with an analog signal path because of the linearity... what is there is what is there, not what is here someplace is put somewhere else multiple times in the same document.
Back when I saw the first scanner based copiers roll out I'd thought we see something similar to this happen. Whenever you eliminate the analog signal path it becomes much easier to corrupt the thing in unnoticeable ways, even unintentionally! It's clearly the way to go, because of how much complexity it removes, but as soon as you start storing data on a medium and read it back you start having these problems, it only gets worse as you try and conserve that storage medium with compression or other tricks/hacks. It's just a fact of life in the digital age: the tradeoffs are still better than the previous way of doing things. (Well that is unless your name was "Mr. Buttle" and the ministry of information drilled a hole in your ceiling).
I am just really glad to see that Xerox is taking the initiative, working with closely with the person who found the problem, and opening it's doors to others who want to help out. It's all too often that a big company has a big obvious problem with a product and not only doesn't admit there's a problem, but refuses to help or work with those experiencing them.
I hate ribbons, they create about three times more headaches than they solve. I don't care if Grandma will be able to use autocad easier, every time a new ribbon shows up it makes my life a living cluttered hell.
This rig I type from has an Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe Wifi motherboard.... It also has a Radeon 6870, 4gb ddr2 1066 and a PhenomII 1075T hex core.
It didn't start out that way. I bought this motherboard in either November or December 2007, and it started out life with a Phenom 9500 and a Radeon 3870.
I upgraded it to a PhenomII 805 when I snagged one for $79, and much later a PhenomII 1075T. The graphics card got an upgrade to the 4870 when it came out and most recently the 6870. The ram started out as 4GB of DDR2 800 but I later upgraded it to 4GB of DDR2 1066 which I got for $35
The Corsair 520 watt power supply, Antec case, Seagate 750GB hdd, modified cooler master heatsink/fan, and heck even the OS install are all original to this computer with the motherboard.
For the last CPU upgrade I literally updated my bios, shut my computer down, popped the heatsink off, blew it out and cleaned the bottom, popped the old chip out, put the new chip in with a nice layer of ceramique, put my heatsink on, pushed my power button and I was done.
All my old CPU's, graphics cards, and ram ended upgrading computers of my friends and relatives.
Thank you AMD and Asus for putting so much support into your products, especially since I like having my full spec gaming computer without dishing out $1200 each year. The $200 investment in my motherboard has lasted me far longer than I would have imagined.
Actually the turbo button was for decreasing performance so your "old" applications could run as they intended....
Just marketing got a hold of it and just like the old fridge sized IBM tape drives back in the day that were going to be designed with a "Idle" light instead were granted with a "Ready" light (remember IBM's were never..IDLE!), the "make the machine go slower button so your old stuff runs" became "Push this button and when the light comes on you're running the computer faster than if it wasn't on!"
I went through the numbers myself... they don't seem to add up very well as TFA would lead you to believe...
let's first blab about something totally unrelated---
Someone buys a Yugo and does a lot of modifications to it, another buys a stock low-mid range performance car-so something like this: "How much money have you spent total on your car?" Yugo boy: I spent $5,000 to buy my car, and $16,000 in modifications Stock boy: I spent $21,000 to buy my car.
"What kind of gas mileage do you get? (in MPG)" Yugo boy: I used to get 34MPG before I modified it, now I get 18, and I can only use high octane Stock boy: I get 18MPG on regular 87 octane
"Compare your cars speed on a generic track with straight aways and turns, be courteous if you can" Yugo boy: Stock boy's car is faster than mine in turns, but my car out-accelerates him in straightaways. Stock boy: Yugo's car is faster than mine in straightaways when it's not broken down at the side of the road or if his engine doesn't hiccup, I have the edge in braking and turning.
"How do your cars do for everyday driving?" Yugo boy: I've removed the power steering for wright and power, the ride is loud, bouncy, and stiff, but that just means I can feel and hear the road better, and if I am at a drive-through or a stop light for an excessive amount of time it might overheat. Stock boy: I have a comfortable quiet ride with no issues, and my car is easy to drive.
"What do you do when things go wrong?" Yugo boy: I have to fix it myself, buying any parts that broke. Stock boy: My car is fully under warranty, and I can have almost any part that broke replaced for free, as long as it wasn't directly my fault.
"What options do you have to make your cars faster?" Yugo boy: I am maxed out, all I could do is lessen the weight more and buy a different engine, both are extremely expensive to do Stock boy: There are an array of bolt-ons, computer re-programmers, and other easy modifications I can do to this car to make it faster, quite a few of them don't even void the warranty.
so relating this to computer parts... setting up 2 rigs almost the same (full atx name brand mobo with at least 2 pcie slots, radeon 5770 graphics, corsair 650watt psu, cooler master case, blu-ray reader, a dvd burner, a 1tb 7200rpm hdd), one with a core i7 920 and 3gb ddr3 1600 ram in tri channel ($1052 with a stock heatsink) and the other with a "new" core i7 875K and 4gb of ddr3 1600 in dual channel ($1062 with an aftermarket heatsink), the "modified yugo" ends up being more expensive than the stock mid range car... For me it's a no brainer, and this isn't even factoring AMD into the equation...
When we look at AMD it ends up being $670 for all the support products (same specs used, full atx brand name mobo with at least 2 pcie slots, radeon 5770 graphics, corsair 650watt psu, cooler master case, blu-ray reader, a dvd burner, a 1tb 7200rpm hdd), 4gb ddr3 1600 in dual channel, which leaves you quite a bit of money to spend on the CPU and heatsink you want, and there are a nice amount of options from $50-$310 depending on the amount of tinkering you want to do to get the performance you are looking for. (which correlates to a price range of $720-$980 without the heatsink. So depending on the level of AMD tinkering you would want to do you could have $72-$82 differential for the high end AMD chip to spend on cooling/whatnot or if you look at the low end you could have up to $332-$342 differential between those intel options to spend on cooling/whatnot... (so you could do a nice heatsink fan/low level water setup with the high end cpu, or an all-out phase change setup with one of the bargain bin AMD chips)
So my opinion before this was announced and after it was is still the same... if you go intel, socket 1366 is the way to go, if you want a cheap capable rig, AMD has a lot to offer. Some drastic price cutting could change my opinions though!
Just as long as all you want is 96+ (and possibly a few 95's thrown in) I've had an older serial based scantool.net ELMSCAN 5 kicking around since 2003. One of the reasons I was excited when netbooks first hit was that I could buy one just to use with it just to use with it. I paid $120 for the tool back in the day, and it was well worth it then, but I think the newer usb elmscans are only going for like $60... The free software is limited, but will give you just about everything you need and is still much more.. if you need anything more, I've been really happy with the scanmaster xl software, which although not free, gives you a bunch of functionality that you don't even see in $900+ scan tools.. As far as linux based software for the elm327
if you want cheaper, there are schematics online somewhere you can use and I think there's somewhere you can pick up an ELM327 chip, you should be looking at somewhere around $25 in parts+ your time to put it together. Stay with a reputable manufacturer and/or reseller though, as the multiple clones on ebay are usually somehow made incorrectly (Sadly), even though it's such a simple design....
When it is raining, it is because he is sad. He once knew a call was a wrong number, even though the person on the other end wouldn't admit it. If a monument was built in his honor, Mt. Rushmore would close, due to poor attendance. His bear hugs are actually hugs he gives to bears. His computer password Is unbreakable by anyone, even those who can read it- He is- The most interesting man in the world
Sometimes they get it right in at least one regard though (like in Dirty Harry our hero only shot 5 shots in the ending gun fight leaving 1 left for the end)
Seriously though, Hollywood isn't serious enough about this, if it were real life, the password would be clearly labeled on a post-it note stuck to the monitor of the offending computer.
I just installed a wrt160nl with the new dd-wrt last week for a client of mine, happy with it thus far.. seems to get better range than a wrt54gl (with legal US stock dd-wrt settings and stock hardware/antennas) too as a bonus, stable thus far but time will tell if it was built well and if it's wall wart can survive constant use.
Whenever I play an mmo I'll buy a time card if I can, IRL if possible, through a reputable online site if it's not, and I also make it a point to remove my cc info from sites I buy stuff from as soon as a transaction I requested is finished. I don't use any online store or site that doesn't give me the option to remove my info...
you'd think they would have some kind of safeguard on the system before the transactions are sent to the cc companies, like if they just had someone verify a total each day before they send the billing through, they might have noticed that 15-25 times the expected amount for that day would have been a little fishy and they could have taken care of the issue internally, but that's not how anyone operates these days =(
I feel for all the people who had their bank accounts turned upside down on them, when many are doing well enough to keep the lights on and their fridges stocked... after all, many people I personally know play these sorts of games to escape the reality that we are leaving each day.. (I don't care what others say, but that little bit of sanity is worth $15 a month to many people). Way too many people and gamers alike live day to day, with account balances well below what some were charged in this case..
I've been trying to get into that bbs all yesterday..... I finally dug up my 2400bps modem, a wyse terminal, and almost all the cabling I needed (I seem to have misplaced my null modem!)... The DUN in my cell phone does not like that server, and I can't find any of my usb-> serial adapters, and all my appropriate gear is buried!
Good job mentioning the Therac-25, you can read my comments on it that are somewhere else in this thread.. but I need to just point out that your "gas pedal" analogy would be correct if we were talking about a diesel or a directly injected engine, but since we are talking about a port injected (that's before the intake valves in the cylinder head) gasoline engine, the "gas" pedal's function is to limit the air that comes into the engine, and the computer detects the air that comes into the engine c(using throttle position and/or air pressure and/or air mass sensor) and adds fuel to compensate for it. In a carburetor, the throttle plate did a similar thing, it limited the amount of air coming into the engine, it was the carburetor's job to be able to add proportionate amounts of fuel to the air that came in to give the intended effect... in this way fuel injection is actually way more simple, because the computer can compensate by just changing the pulse width of the injector, a carburetor had to rely on different air pressures (vacuum) created at or near the throttle plate to add gas via "circuits" that were cast in the metal (and could be clogged up easily), and each "circuit" handled a different condition the engine might be in at any time (for an example cruising needs different fuel mixtures as opposed to a hard acceleration, as opposed to highway speed passing acceleration.)
I'm with you on this one. Especially considering how alike automotive computers and old computers were. (It wasn't that long ago that most automotive computers still used some form of 6800 chip at it's core). Back when "Fly by wire" for automobiles was a new thing, quite a few people and engineers alike wanted some sort of fallback or mechanical interlock to avoid this kind of issue (for an example the brake having an extra mechanism for closing the throttle mechanically), but this of course defeated the whole industries purpose of drive by wire, which was to get rid of the bulky mechanisms and make it so they could place the throttle body wherever they wanted despite weird positioning, which would make it cheaper in the long run... The prius has a different reason for needing drive by wire, and that stems from it's planetary gearset power "split" system, in which torque management is very important so you don't break anything and so you get the right movement to the right pieces.... When I saw the first reports of what happened back a while ago, my first thought was not the floor mats, but the potentiometer in the accelerator pedal, and if that checked out, then a possible "race" condition that existed because of either defective software or some deficiency of the hardware they failed to recognize and program around....
This sounds very like the same types of problems the famed old "Therac 25" experienced: A hardware safety/interlock replaced by a software one, the software failing because of some reason (it might not be coded wrong, but the hardware might interpret it wrong under certain conditions), and death resulting because an important piece of the device malfunctioned. It gets to be scarier when you think that it's not a long stretch to make cars transmissions without any fallback, ignition systems that are only state indicators to the computer, unable to do anything should that input be ignored, leaving you with an out of control drivetrain and powertrain without any way to safely power it down.
"During the first six months of the year, state Department of Transportation workers faced 101 significant IT outages totaling 4,677 hours: an average of more than 46 hours per outage. One took 360 hours to fix."
wait, 4,677 hours? how could that be? There were 181 days in the first 6 months of this year, that's only 4,344 hours.. there was more downtime on the system than days in it's operational life! (did someone/0 here?)
Outsourced, no thanks... I think I'd rather dig up a Univac I to do work on, at least it would be more reliable
Innovation in faster page loading never ceases to amaze me.. I mean back in the day, Netscape was lightning fast compared to other browsers, and if I dig up an old build of of navigator I find it unbearably slow compared to firefox, or other new browsers out, not to mention surprisingly unstable. I am happy because this kind of thing is what spurs competition on and leaves us without stale old browsers, even though I am not a chrome user myself, the effects of it are already being felt and features added onto our browsers of preference. Go Google!
Slashdot Mirror
At least it's not like Google:
<TheGoogleExperience>
"Hey, here's a new great idea we formed a focus group to come up with and we think you'll just love it"
*clicks "Switch back temporarily" *
"Hey, we noticed you clicked "Switch back temporarily" Will you tell us why?"
*Fills out survey why I don't like the new gmail layout, why the new interface is clunky or impossible to use due to menu items being filed away places you'd never think to look, why the interface now takes twice as long to load, why I don't want to add a G+ account, why I want to remove the g+ account that I didn't know would be added by clicking continue and needing to transfer it to another account in order to remove it but needing to wait two weeks for the privilege of doing so, youtube being permalinked to my gmail account, the new compose, the youtube comments being attached to G+ for no reason at all, my youtube logging out when I log out of gmail, G+, etc*
*Swtich back temporarily gets removed and you get stuck with whatever you didn't like*
*Reads google groups post about the 'new feature becoming standard for everyone' noting the 150,000 dislikes and 37 likes
*Tries greasemonkey scripts that reconfigure the pages on the fly to what they should have been in the first place noted and advertised in said google groups post 1/2 way down the list*
*Switches to HTML/compatibility/mobile view only mode by whatever means necessary to gain functionaries lost until they change or disable that too*
*Reads follow up post from google about how happy they are with the changes no one wanted or requested*
</TheGoogleExperience>
So at least I've got my simple functional slashdot back for the moment, but if this keeps on being troweled over I'll simply find another site to obsessively check likely written by another unhappy former slashdot reader for other unhappy former slashdot readers.
Not at all! heck the most analog paths are usually the most exploitable (man writing a copy of another written piece).
The point I was trying to make wasn't that an analog path isn't manipulatable but the fact that with a linear analog path that this kind of unintentional pattern replacement type of manipulation occurring differently though differing documents wouldn't have occurred or really even been possible.
I figured that people here could read in between the lines correctly though; An error in my judgement!
To bust out the old Louisville slugger though, this particular device saved space by taking one or more 'samples' of the document scanned and through some comparative algorithm reused these samples to aid in compression of the file. Probably due to this failing or performing a 99% match on a sample that might have been sampled before or multiple times depending on the circumstances ended up making the incorrect decision on what sample to use where. Thus the document 'copied' in this way is an entirely different piece of work than the one that went in. There is little chance of this happening with an analog signal path because of the linearity... what is there is what is there, not what is here someplace is put somewhere else multiple times in the same document.
Back when I saw the first scanner based copiers roll out I'd thought we see something similar to this happen. Whenever you eliminate the analog signal path it becomes much easier to corrupt the thing in unnoticeable ways, even unintentionally! It's clearly the way to go, because of how much complexity it removes, but as soon as you start storing data on a medium and read it back you start having these problems, it only gets worse as you try and conserve that storage medium with compression or other tricks/hacks. It's just a fact of life in the digital age: the tradeoffs are still better than the previous way of doing things. (Well that is unless your name was "Mr. Buttle" and the ministry of information drilled a hole in your ceiling).
I am just really glad to see that Xerox is taking the initiative, working with closely with the person who found the problem, and opening it's doors to others who want to help out. It's all too often that a big company has a big obvious problem with a product and not only doesn't admit there's a problem, but refuses to help or work with those experiencing them.
I hate ribbons, they create about three times more headaches than they solve.
I don't care if Grandma will be able to use autocad easier, every time a new ribbon shows up it makes my life a living cluttered hell.
This rig I type from has an Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe Wifi motherboard....
It also has a Radeon 6870, 4gb ddr2 1066 and a PhenomII 1075T hex core.
It didn't start out that way. I bought this motherboard in either November or December 2007, and it started out life with a Phenom 9500 and a Radeon 3870.
I upgraded it to a PhenomII 805 when I snagged one for $79, and much later a PhenomII 1075T.
The graphics card got an upgrade to the 4870 when it came out and most recently the 6870.
The ram started out as 4GB of DDR2 800 but I later upgraded it to 4GB of DDR2 1066 which I got for $35
The Corsair 520 watt power supply, Antec case, Seagate 750GB hdd, modified cooler master heatsink/fan, and heck even the OS install are all original to this computer with the motherboard.
For the last CPU upgrade I literally updated my bios, shut my computer down, popped the heatsink off, blew it out and cleaned the bottom, popped the old chip out, put the new chip in with a nice layer of ceramique, put my heatsink on, pushed my power button and I was done.
All my old CPU's, graphics cards, and ram ended upgrading computers of my friends and relatives.
Thank you AMD and Asus for putting so much support into your products, especially since I like having my full spec gaming computer without dishing out $1200 each year. The $200 investment in my motherboard has lasted me far longer than I would have imagined.
Actually the turbo button was for decreasing performance so your "old" applications could run as they intended....
Just marketing got a hold of it and just like the old fridge sized IBM tape drives back in the day that were going to be designed with a "Idle" light instead were granted with a "Ready" light (remember IBM's were never..IDLE!), the "make the machine go slower button so your old stuff runs" became "Push this button and when the light comes on you're running the computer faster than if it wasn't on!"
I went through the numbers myself... they don't seem to add up very well as TFA would lead you to believe...
let's first blab about something totally unrelated---
Someone buys a Yugo and does a lot of modifications to it, another buys a stock low-mid range performance car-so something like this:
"How much money have you spent total on your car?"
Yugo boy: I spent $5,000 to buy my car, and $16,000 in modifications
Stock boy: I spent $21,000 to buy my car.
"What kind of gas mileage do you get? (in MPG)"
Yugo boy: I used to get 34MPG before I modified it, now I get 18, and I can only use high octane
Stock boy: I get 18MPG on regular 87 octane
"Compare your cars speed on a generic track with straight aways and turns, be courteous if you can"
Yugo boy: Stock boy's car is faster than mine in turns, but my car out-accelerates him in straightaways.
Stock boy: Yugo's car is faster than mine in straightaways when it's not broken down at the side of the road or if his engine doesn't hiccup, I have the edge in braking and turning.
"How do your cars do for everyday driving?"
Yugo boy: I've removed the power steering for wright and power, the ride is loud, bouncy, and stiff, but that just means I can feel and hear the road better, and if I am at a drive-through or a stop light for an excessive amount of time it might overheat.
Stock boy: I have a comfortable quiet ride with no issues, and my car is easy to drive.
"What do you do when things go wrong?"
Yugo boy: I have to fix it myself, buying any parts that broke.
Stock boy: My car is fully under warranty, and I can have almost any part that broke replaced for free, as long as it wasn't directly my fault.
"What options do you have to make your cars faster?"
Yugo boy: I am maxed out, all I could do is lessen the weight more and buy a different engine, both are extremely expensive to do
Stock boy: There are an array of bolt-ons, computer re-programmers, and other easy modifications I can do to this car to make it faster, quite a few of them don't even void the warranty.
so relating this to computer parts...
setting up 2 rigs almost the same (full atx name brand mobo with at least 2 pcie slots, radeon 5770 graphics, corsair 650watt psu, cooler master case, blu-ray reader, a dvd burner, a 1tb 7200rpm hdd), one with a core i7 920 and 3gb ddr3 1600 ram in tri channel ($1052 with a stock heatsink) and the other with a "new" core i7 875K and 4gb of ddr3 1600 in dual channel ($1062 with an aftermarket heatsink), the "modified yugo" ends up being more expensive than the stock mid range car... For me it's a no brainer, and this isn't even factoring AMD into the equation...
When we look at AMD it ends up being $670 for all the support products (same specs used, full atx brand name mobo with at least 2 pcie slots, radeon 5770 graphics, corsair 650watt psu, cooler master case, blu-ray reader, a dvd burner, a 1tb 7200rpm hdd), 4gb ddr3 1600 in dual channel, which leaves you quite a bit of money to spend on the CPU and heatsink you want, and there are a nice amount of options from $50-$310 depending on the amount of tinkering you want to do to get the performance you are looking for. (which correlates to a price range of $720-$980 without the heatsink.
So depending on the level of AMD tinkering you would want to do you could have $72-$82 differential for the high end AMD chip to spend on cooling/whatnot or if you look at the low end you could have up to $332-$342 differential between those intel options to spend on cooling/whatnot... (so you could do a nice heatsink fan/low level water setup with the high end cpu, or an all-out phase change setup with one of the bargain bin AMD chips)
So my opinion before this was announced and after it was is still the same... if you go intel, socket 1366 is the way to go, if you want a cheap capable rig, AMD has a lot to offer.
Some drastic price cutting could change my opinions though!
Just as long as all you want is 96+ (and possibly a few 95's thrown in) I've had an older serial based scantool.net ELMSCAN 5 kicking around since 2003. One of the reasons I was excited when netbooks first hit was that I could buy one just to use with it just to use with it. I paid $120 for the tool back in the day, and it was well worth it then, but I think the newer usb elmscans are only going for like $60... The free software is limited, but will give you just about everything you need and is still much more.. if you need anything more, I've been really happy with the scanmaster xl software, which although not free, gives you a bunch of functionality that you don't even see in $900+ scan tools.. As far as linux based software for the elm327
if you want cheaper, there are schematics online somewhere you can use and I think there's somewhere you can pick up an ELM327 chip, you should be looking at somewhere around $25 in parts+ your time to put it together. Stay with a reputable manufacturer and/or reseller though, as the multiple clones on ebay are usually somehow made incorrectly (Sadly), even though it's such a simple design....
good luck!
When it is raining, it is because he is sad.
He once knew a call was a wrong number, even though the person on the other end wouldn't admit it.
If a monument was built in his honor, Mt. Rushmore would close, due to poor attendance.
His bear hugs are actually hugs he gives to bears.
His computer password Is unbreakable by anyone, even those who can read it-
He is-
The most interesting man in the world
etc...
Sometimes they get it right in at least one regard though (like in Dirty Harry our hero only shot 5 shots in the ending gun fight leaving 1 left for the end)
that's because they blow up better than your standard 1u and 4u servers when things go wrong ;)
1. Left long enough, a computer becomes intelligent
-Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?
I can't see page 4 myself, keeps kicking back to page 1...
The Hollywood GUI installed on the server probably isn't helping things.
haha!
Seriously though, Hollywood isn't serious enough about this, if it were real life, the password would be clearly labeled on a post-it note stuck to the monitor of the offending computer.
I'm convinced it's this whole "web 2.0" junk,
Taking 1 page of information and making you click 20,000 times to view it all
They might change that after they get a gander of what their server room looks like now. ;)
I just installed a wrt160nl with the new dd-wrt last week for a client of mine, happy with it thus far.. seems to get better range than a wrt54gl (with legal US stock dd-wrt settings and stock hardware/antennas) too as a bonus, stable thus far but time will tell if it was built well and if it's wall wart can survive constant use.
Whenever I play an mmo I'll buy a time card if I can, IRL if possible, through a reputable online site if it's not, and I also make it a point to remove my cc info from sites I buy stuff from as soon as a transaction I requested is finished. I don't use any online store or site that doesn't give me the option to remove my info...
you'd think they would have some kind of safeguard on the system before the transactions are sent to the cc companies, like if they just had someone verify a total each day before they send the billing through, they might have noticed that 15-25 times the expected amount for that day would have been a little fishy and they could have taken care of the issue internally, but that's not how anyone operates these days =(
I feel for all the people who had their bank accounts turned upside down on them, when many are doing well enough to keep the lights on and their fridges stocked... after all, many people I personally know play these sorts of games to escape the reality that we are leaving each day.. (I don't care what others say, but that little bit of sanity is worth $15 a month to many people).
Way too many people and gamers alike live day to day, with account balances well below what some were charged in this case..
I've been trying to get into that bbs all yesterday..... I finally dug up my 2400bps modem, a wyse terminal, and almost all the cabling I needed (I seem to have misplaced my null modem!)... The DUN in my cell phone does not like that server, and I can't find any of my usb-> serial adapters, and all my appropriate gear is buried!
Good job mentioning the Therac-25, you can read my comments on it that are somewhere else in this thread..
but I need to just point out that your "gas pedal" analogy would be correct if we were talking about a diesel or a directly injected engine, but since we are talking about a port injected (that's before the intake valves in the cylinder head) gasoline engine, the "gas" pedal's function is to limit the air that comes into the engine, and the computer detects the air that comes into the engine c(using throttle position and/or air pressure and/or air mass sensor) and adds fuel to compensate for it. In a carburetor, the throttle plate did a similar thing, it limited the amount of air coming into the engine, it was the carburetor's job to be able to add proportionate amounts of fuel to the air that came in to give the intended effect... in this way fuel injection is actually way more simple, because the computer can compensate by just changing the pulse width of the injector, a carburetor had to rely on different air pressures (vacuum) created at or near the throttle plate to add gas via "circuits" that were cast in the metal (and could be clogged up easily), and each "circuit" handled a different condition the engine might be in at any time (for an example cruising needs different fuel mixtures as opposed to a hard acceleration, as opposed to highway speed passing acceleration.)
I'm with you on this one. Especially considering how alike automotive computers and old computers were. (It wasn't that long ago that most automotive computers still used some form of 6800 chip at it's core).
Back when "Fly by wire" for automobiles was a new thing, quite a few people and engineers alike wanted some sort of fallback or mechanical interlock to avoid this kind of issue (for an example the brake having an extra mechanism for closing the throttle mechanically), but this of course defeated the whole industries purpose of drive by wire, which was to get rid of the bulky mechanisms and make it so they could place the throttle body wherever they wanted despite weird positioning, which would make it cheaper in the long run... The prius has a different reason for needing drive by wire, and that stems from it's planetary gearset power "split" system, in which torque management is very important so you don't break anything and so you get the right movement to the right pieces.... When I saw the first reports of what happened back a while ago, my first thought was not the floor mats, but the potentiometer in the accelerator pedal, and if that checked out, then a possible "race" condition that existed because of either defective software or some deficiency of the hardware they failed to recognize and program around....
This sounds very like the same types of problems the famed old "Therac 25" experienced: A hardware safety/interlock replaced by a software one, the software failing because of some reason (it might not be coded wrong, but the hardware might interpret it wrong under certain conditions), and death resulting because an important piece of the device malfunctioned. It gets to be scarier when you think that it's not a long stretch to make cars transmissions without any fallback, ignition systems that are only state indicators to the computer, unable to do anything should that input be ignored, leaving you with an out of control drivetrain and powertrain without any way to safely power it down.
Anyone else notice this? -> Mikael Ricknäs (IDG News Service) 07/12/2009 07:53:00
"During the first six months of the year, state Department of Transportation workers faced 101 significant IT outages totaling 4,677 hours: an average of more than 46 hours per outage. One took 360 hours to fix."
wait, 4,677 hours? how could that be? There were 181 days in the first 6 months of this year, that's only 4,344 hours.. there was more downtime on the system than days in it's operational life! (did someone /0 here?)
Outsourced, no thanks... I think I'd rather dig up a Univac I to do work on, at least it would be more reliable
Innovation in faster page loading never ceases to amaze me.. I mean back in the day, Netscape was lightning fast compared to other browsers, and if I dig up an old build of of navigator I find it unbearably slow compared to firefox, or other new browsers out, not to mention surprisingly unstable.
I am happy because this kind of thing is what spurs competition on and leaves us without stale old browsers, even though I am not a chrome user myself, the effects of it are already being felt and features added onto our browsers of preference. Go Google!
Nasa, Take off your management hat and put on your engineering hat.