The cost of hosting the full official firmware on the web is basically nothing. The minimal firmware is definitely NOT a brick, as it doesn't require special tools to correct the bad firmware flash. It only requires that the customer download the official firmware, and reflash. Heck, the cost of hosting this file can easily be out weighed by the cost of dealing with customers who are calling because they have run into a bug in your firmware, and you don't have an mechanism to correct it. So, no, it does not add to maintenance costs in any but the most negligible ways, and in fact could save large amounts in both real costs and reputation if a serious bug ships with your equipment.
To say that a device booting into a recovery mode is that same as it being bricked is simply absurd.
The big benefit of fuel cells in residential use will be to make actually power generation useful. Net metering is only useful if few people do it. If too many people do it, it simply won't work, so it is great for now, but it is a stop gap measure. If we all had hydrogen burning fuel cells, we could use our solar panels and windmills to generate electricity. We could use that electricity to produce hydrogen, and store the hydrogen for use during the times that your power generation system is not producing electricity. This would mean that there would not be any cost or infrastructure to deal with delivering fuel.
If your current Marsha is unable to adapt to environments where Johns are also functioning, then it certainly makes sense to recycle the current Marsha, and get a new Marsha that is more compatible. While a flaw that makes your average Marsha inferior at a specific task would not normally be a reason to replace said unit, the inability for the particular Marsha, combined with the specific intentional act of generating incompatibilities into the Marsha John communication stream, indicates that there is a fundamental flaw in the Marsha that will resurface during other tasks. This flaw is of intentional design to create incompatibility when environments are not specifically designed for use by a Marsha. Given that there are Marshas available that do not exhibit this system wide flaw, one would be better served by putting the specific Marsha into the recycle bin so that someone else can deal with the futile job of trying to make this particular inferior Marsha compatible with a John.
Bricking devices via bad firmware is only caused by either bad design, or the company deciding they wanted to save a few dimes per unit. I don't know what ZyXEL sells their equipment for, but for them it may or may not have been the right choice not to produce robust hardware.
To make a device that is unbrickable via a firmware flash, the device simply has to have a minimal firmware in an extra ROM that is enough to boot the device into a flashable state, and a mechanism to make the device boot to the alternate firmware.
My child just turned three in March, so I am very familiar with potty training. OK, I admit it my kid is brilliant, but that only means he learns faster, not that your kid can't learn.
This argument is spurious at best. First of all, who gets up in the middle of the night, male or female, needing to shit? The only time that will ever happen is if you're sick. Not necessarily true, some people are very sensetive to what they eat at night. A little too much Mexican or Indian food, and they do end up getting up at night.
Secondly, women get up more in the middle of the night needing to piss. I have no idea why. My wife gets up to pee nearly every night, and I hardly ever do. Individual specific. Not gender specific.
Having sex makes you piss on the floor? This is news to me. I was having trouble sleeping, so I nailed my wife. I still couldn't sleep so here I am.
As an experiment, I just tried pissing. I had no difficulty aiming. I even turned the goddamn light on to verify.
Weird. Hey, I said it was NOT a valid excuse. I have heard the excuse more than once, and I agree... weird.
A perfect example of a man with no penis control. If you are pissing on the floor, you clearly don't know how to use your penis correctly. In your case, it may mean sitting down and stuffing it between your legs, but either way, if you can't aim your penis well enough to get the pee in the toilet, you obviously don't know how to use it correctly. Hopefully, you will become the butt of many jokes for the women around you, until you do learn to correctly use it.
"assuming, of course, that the Moon has something we want to export."
I'm thinking we want to export data on how well a space elevator works in practice without having to wait for the materials science for making it feasible on Earth.
This only is true if Marsha (A) is somehow inferior to John (B), as John clearly has no problem avoiding (Y), in your equation, A B. If that is the Case, A should be removed from the equation.
Wow, insisting that seat be down after someone is done is bad, but wanting to dictate how a person actually does the peeing... Wow, thats a whole new level of micromanagement...
You have made a mistake. You should let your kids fall into the toilet. It is not physically dangerous, is uncomfortable, and is completely in their control to fix. Unless they like to get their butts wet, which leaving the seat down won't stop, they will very quickly learn to check the seat before sitting. On the other hand, by leaving it down, you are teaching them now that down is the right way. For girls, this will lead them to believe that they have some inalianable right to have guys but the seat down for them, and for guys, it will lead them to believe that the expectation that they prep the toilet for other people is somehow reasonable. It might be easier in the short run, but you are creating problems for them later on down the road.
It seems that a good place to try something like this would be the moon. It's relatively close, it has no wind to complicate things, it's gravity is dramatically less, so we could probably build it with today's materials science, and it would make getting on and off the moon dramatically easier.
After all, if your goal is to swim the English Channel, you might want to try swimming across a pool first.
The argument happens because women are lazy. The idea that one person should prep the toilet for someone else on the off chance that the other person might be the next person you use it, is absolutly absurd.
This idea of men prepping the toilet for women stems from the same place as the idea that men should open doors for women. The idea is that women are inferior to men, and thus need to have even the most basic of tasks performed for them, combined with the idea that women are whores, and men must purchase sexual services from them by performing labor on their behalf.
Lets look at the two reasons women give for wanting men to prep the toilet for them that do not include them being inferior whores, as I don't particularly like to think of women that way.
1) Having the seat up looks bad.
Well, this is a matter of taste, but no rational person is going to say that having the seat up looks bad, but having the lid up does not. If your spouse is suggesting this, then you should be asking why she doesn't love and respect you enough to be honest with you. You should immediately suggest that she start seeing a marriage counselor with you, as any relationship based on that kind of disrespect and lies is in serious trouble, and really needs some help.
2) She keeps falling in.
This is really just another way of saying that she is inferior. I have known thousands of men. Not once have I heard a man complain about falling into a toilet. Now, given that men also sit on toilets, and even do it in the middle of the night when they are groggy, yet don't seem to have this problem of not knowing the state of a seat that they are going to sit naked on, conclude that it is a inferiority complaint.
I know that I don't like living in a society that treats women like inferior whores, so please stop doing it by preppeing toilet seats for them. Now in my household we put the lid down. This is because it looks better, but also has some other benefites. It keeps things from falling to the toilet. For those of you with pets, it will keep the pets out.
And even more importantly, many cities clean their sewer lines by running high pressure into the sewer lines to force out any blockages. If a blockage is stronger than the force necessary to force the sewage backup through your toilet, you can have quite a mess on your hands. This has happened to me only once thankfully, and because of our lid down household policy, the cleanup consisted of Lysol, and a wipe down of the lid and seat. If the lid had not been down, who knows where the feces from a thousand home would have ended up in our bathroom. I can only assume that many cities have the same policy concerning this as Santa Rosa, CA, which is that they will pay to have the bathroom cleaned IF you figure out why your bathroom smells like sewage. They have a policy of not notifying the residents when they will be doing their sewer line cleaning, and they do it in the late morning when most people are at work. The effort of putting the lid down is very little for the benefit of knowing that I am not brushing my teeth with the feces of 3000 neighbors.
Now, having ranted about the disrespectful nature of putting the seat down, let me rant about the other bathroom peeve I have that hopefully the ladies with cling onto... What the hell is going on with men pissing on the floor?!?!?!? I've heard all sorts of excuses. "I was tired", "I just had sex", "It just happens". Look, pissing on the floor of your home is what an animal does. None of those excuses are valid, and if by some freak of nature you have somehow pissed on the floor, have enough shame to hide it by cleaning it up before you leave the room. Pissing on the floor is no better than shitting your pants. Would you walk around work with a load in you pants? Then why would you piss on the floor of your home (or anywhere else for that matter) and leave it there?
Women, you have a tool that can solve this problem. Just remember, an
No, forming hypothesis is a part of science. If you jump right to Theory, then you are obviously adjusting data to match your theory, instead of the other way around.
Every universal disk to date must have some kind of driver. Just because Windows shipped with some of them does not change the fact that they did in fact have drivers. Also, they are not designed to work with existing products, as existing products do not go past 4 gig. The idea is that future products can use the old disks. This is fine because you could format the old media with the new file system when you went to use it in a new device.
I would agree with your recommendation, with one exception. If you have adequate clearance in your attic, don't run the conduit back to the server closet. It costs more, and makes running the wires harder. If you can get around in your attic, just run the conduit from the end point in the wall, up into the attic. Then you don't even need the string to pull the wire. you just drop it down the hole, and it comes out at the base plate, but trying to pull wires through 50 or 60 feet of tubing can be a challenge. This obviously does not apply if you don't have relatively easy attic access. It's always nice when spending less money makes a job better.
I don't see why the devices can't be whatever file format the spec designers choose. People are already used to getting driver disks with new hardware. Just make sure that the readers ship with a Windows 'driver' that installs the file system that has been standardized on by the designers. I would say that I have a harder time getting Windows users NOT to install the disks that come with new hardware than I have getting the too install. Heck, a lot of MP3 players won't even work without installing proprietary applications. Why can't this be the same. You can be sure that when every single Linux distro can access the memory cards right out of the box, that MS will be happy to include the file system into the next spin of Windows. They might even push it as a 'Windows Update'.
If they are trying to sell their product to businesses that might have to go back to 'forever' to retrieve data, there certainly is a good reason. I'm waiting for the first time a company gets sued for using MS Office by their shareholders because they lost a large lawsuit due to an inability to retrieve documents. Today, you can still get your hands on old copies of Word, and old copies of Windows that the old Word will run on. That might not always be the case. If someone needs to get some documents out of Word 1.0, they likely are hitting the piracy trail today. As things like software dialing home gets more and more prevalent, that might not be even possible 10 years from now. Storing corporate documents, that should be archived, in Word is simply irresponsible.
"Actually in the case of BP, they pretty much are the industry. I think you're trying a little too hard to stick to your "OMG TEH EVIL O1L!!1!!1!!" conspiracy."
If you go back and reread my post, you would see that I never claimed that there was a conspiracy. I simply pointed out that your argument was a falicy. That fact that you see 'conspiracy theorists' behind every tree, indicates that you might be parinoid and in fact be the very 'conspiracy theorists' that you accuse others of.
"How the hell does that apply here? In this case the oil companies ARE the other options popping up. They're the number one investors in this type of technology and they're delivering real world, usable solutions TODAY. It wouldn't be smart business to do otherwise--they know oil will eventually become infeasible and they want to be ahead of the game when that day comes."
It applies because it shows exactly how a company can be the primary provider of a product or service, and still be actively trying to stifling said product. I don't think there are very many people out there that would argue that the cable companies and telephone companies have actively promoted improvements to last mile bandwidth. The sole reason they started offering it was because if they did not, someone else would. If someone else got data lines to the home, this other entity could cut into the cable and telephone companies profits. To keep a new player from starting a data service, all they have to do is offer just enough to keep enough customers that the new player cannot stay in business.
This is the same tactic that BP could very likely be playing. All they have to do is make sure that they keep enough of the market that there isn't enough profit left over for a startup that wants to make a difference. Is that what they are doing? I couldn't tell you, as I said, I don't know the details of Shell Solar, or BP Solar.
Either way, your argument that the oil companies MUST be working in favor of Solar, just because they control the solar industry is simply wrong. It is a fallacy and it shows either a lack of understanding of how basic economics work, or an unwillingness to even consider that a corporation might not be looking out for your best interest.
Thank you... One of the things that originally drew me to reading Slashdot was that when someone would make an outlandish comment, someone else would 'run the numbers'. It's good to see that some traditions are not completely dead.
I don't know the details of Shell Solar or BP Solor, but their existence doesn't by itself show that the oil companies are not holding the industry back. Remember, the phone companies fight tooth and nail to keep high speed data lines out of the publics hands. It wasn't until other options started popping up that they got in the game. And we still see them trying to hold back the high speed data lines. Now they do it by offering just enough bandwidth to enough people that competition doesn't form.
Slashdot Mirror
The cost of hosting the full official firmware on the web is basically nothing. The minimal firmware is definitely NOT a brick, as it doesn't require special tools to correct the bad firmware flash. It only requires that the customer download the official firmware, and reflash. Heck, the cost of hosting this file can easily be out weighed by the cost of dealing with customers who are calling because they have run into a bug in your firmware, and you don't have an mechanism to correct it. So, no, it does not add to maintenance costs in any but the most negligible ways, and in fact could save large amounts in both real costs and reputation if a serious bug ships with your equipment.
To say that a device booting into a recovery mode is that same as it being bricked is simply absurd.
The big benefit of fuel cells in residential use will be to make actually power generation useful. Net metering is only useful if few people do it. If too many people do it, it simply won't work, so it is great for now, but it is a stop gap measure. If we all had hydrogen burning fuel cells, we could use our solar panels and windmills to generate electricity. We could use that electricity to produce hydrogen, and store the hydrogen for use during the times that your power generation system is not producing electricity. This would mean that there would not be any cost or infrastructure to deal with delivering fuel.
If your current Marsha is unable to adapt to environments where Johns are also functioning, then it certainly makes sense to recycle the current Marsha, and get a new Marsha that is more compatible. While a flaw that makes your average Marsha inferior at a specific task would not normally be a reason to replace said unit, the inability for the particular Marsha, combined with the specific intentional act of generating incompatibilities into the Marsha John communication stream, indicates that there is a fundamental flaw in the Marsha that will resurface during other tasks. This flaw is of intentional design to create incompatibility when environments are not specifically designed for use by a Marsha. Given that there are Marshas available that do not exhibit this system wide flaw, one would be better served by putting the specific Marsha into the recycle bin so that someone else can deal with the futile job of trying to make this particular inferior Marsha compatible with a John.
Bricking devices via bad firmware is only caused by either bad design, or the company deciding they wanted to save a few dimes per unit. I don't know what ZyXEL sells their equipment for, but for them it may or may not have been the right choice not to produce robust hardware.
To make a device that is unbrickable via a firmware flash, the device simply has to have a minimal firmware in an extra ROM that is enough to boot the device into a flashable state, and a mechanism to make the device boot to the alternate firmware.
My child just turned three in March, so I am very familiar with potty training. OK, I admit it my kid is brilliant, but that only means he learns faster, not that your kid can't learn.
Secondly, women get up more in the middle of the night needing to piss. I have no idea why. My wife gets up to pee nearly every night, and I hardly ever do. Individual specific. Not gender specific.
Having sex makes you piss on the floor? This is news to me. I was having trouble sleeping, so I nailed my wife. I still couldn't sleep so here I am. As an experiment, I just tried pissing. I had no difficulty aiming. I even turned the goddamn light on to verify. Weird. Hey, I said it was NOT a valid excuse. I have heard the excuse more than once, and I agree... weird.
"And, as I pointed out below, any patent that might have been possible would have expired about 40 years back."
Given that this is a Russian patent, Russia gets to decide when the patents expire.
A perfect example of a man with no penis control. If you are pissing on the floor, you clearly don't know how to use your penis correctly. In your case, it may mean sitting down and stuffing it between your legs, but either way, if you can't aim your penis well enough to get the pee in the toilet, you obviously don't know how to use it correctly. Hopefully, you will become the butt of many jokes for the women around you, until you do learn to correctly use it.
"assuming, of course, that the Moon has something we want to export."
I'm thinking we want to export data on how well a space elevator works in practice without having to wait for the materials science for making it feasible on Earth.
This only is true if Marsha (A) is somehow inferior to John (B), as John clearly has no problem avoiding (Y), in your equation, A B. If that is the Case, A should be removed from the equation.
Trust me... You really don't want to know how wrong you are...
Wow, insisting that seat be down after someone is done is bad, but wanting to dictate how a person actually does the peeing... Wow, thats a whole new level of micromanagement...
You have made a mistake. You should let your kids fall into the toilet. It is not physically dangerous, is uncomfortable, and is completely in their control to fix. Unless they like to get their butts wet, which leaving the seat down won't stop, they will very quickly learn to check the seat before sitting. On the other hand, by leaving it down, you are teaching them now that down is the right way. For girls, this will lead them to believe that they have some inalianable right to have guys but the seat down for them, and for guys, it will lead them to believe that the expectation that they prep the toilet for other people is somehow reasonable. It might be easier in the short run, but you are creating problems for them later on down the road.
It seems that a good place to try something like this would be the moon. It's relatively close, it has no wind to complicate things, it's gravity is dramatically less, so we could probably build it with today's materials science, and it would make getting on and off the moon dramatically easier.
After all, if your goal is to swim the English Channel, you might want to try swimming across a pool first.
The argument happens because women are lazy. The idea that one person should prep the toilet for someone else on the off chance that the other person might be the next person you use it, is absolutly absurd.
This idea of men prepping the toilet for women stems from the same place as the idea that men should open doors for women. The idea is that women are inferior to men, and thus need to have even the most basic of tasks performed for them, combined with the idea that women are whores, and men must purchase sexual services from them by performing labor on their behalf.
Lets look at the two reasons women give for wanting men to prep the toilet for them that do not include them being inferior whores, as I don't particularly like to think of women that way.
1) Having the seat up looks bad.
Well, this is a matter of taste, but no rational person is going to say that having the seat up looks bad, but having the lid up does not. If your spouse is suggesting this, then you should be asking why she doesn't love and respect you enough to be honest with you. You should immediately suggest that she start seeing a marriage counselor with you, as any relationship based on that kind of disrespect and lies is in serious trouble, and really needs some help.
2) She keeps falling in.
This is really just another way of saying that she is inferior. I have known thousands of men. Not once have I heard a man complain about falling into a toilet. Now, given that men also sit on toilets, and even do it in the middle of the night when they are groggy, yet don't seem to have this problem of not knowing the state of a seat that they are going to sit naked on, conclude that it is a inferiority complaint.
I know that I don't like living in a society that treats women like inferior whores, so please stop doing it by preppeing toilet seats for them. Now in my household we put the lid down. This is because it looks better, but also has some other benefites. It keeps things from falling to the toilet. For those of you with pets, it will keep the pets out.
And even more importantly, many cities clean their sewer lines by running high pressure into the sewer lines to force out any blockages. If a blockage is stronger than the force necessary to force the sewage backup through your toilet, you can have quite a mess on your hands. This has happened to me only once thankfully, and because of our lid down household policy, the cleanup consisted of Lysol, and a wipe down of the lid and seat. If the lid had not been down, who knows where the feces from a thousand home would have ended up in our bathroom. I can only assume that many cities have the same policy concerning this as Santa Rosa, CA, which is that they will pay to have the bathroom cleaned IF you figure out why your bathroom smells like sewage. They have a policy of not notifying the residents when they will be doing their sewer line cleaning, and they do it in the late morning when most people are at work. The effort of putting the lid down is very little for the benefit of knowing that I am not brushing my teeth with the feces of 3000 neighbors.
Now, having ranted about the disrespectful nature of putting the seat down, let me rant about the other bathroom peeve I have that hopefully the ladies with cling onto... What the hell is going on with men pissing on the floor?!?!?!? I've heard all sorts of excuses. "I was tired", "I just had sex", "It just happens". Look, pissing on the floor of your home is what an animal does. None of those excuses are valid, and if by some freak of nature you have somehow pissed on the floor, have enough shame to hide it by cleaning it up before you leave the room. Pissing on the floor is no better than shitting your pants. Would you walk around work with a load in you pants? Then why would you piss on the floor of your home (or anywhere else for that matter) and leave it there?
Women, you have a tool that can solve this problem. Just remember, an
No, forming hypothesis is a part of science. If you jump right to Theory, then you are obviously adjusting data to match your theory, instead of the other way around.
Yeah, and where is the theory that all of you and the universe itself is just a figment of my imagination!
Every universal disk to date must have some kind of driver. Just because Windows shipped with some of them does not change the fact that they did in fact have drivers. Also, they are not designed to work with existing products, as existing products do not go past 4 gig. The idea is that future products can use the old disks. This is fine because you could format the old media with the new file system when you went to use it in a new device.
Until you have 4 or 5 wires running through the thing...
I would agree with your recommendation, with one exception. If you have adequate clearance in your attic, don't run the conduit back to the server closet. It costs more, and makes running the wires harder. If you can get around in your attic, just run the conduit from the end point in the wall, up into the attic. Then you don't even need the string to pull the wire. you just drop it down the hole, and it comes out at the base plate, but trying to pull wires through 50 or 60 feet of tubing can be a challenge. This obviously does not apply if you don't have relatively easy attic access. It's always nice when spending less money makes a job better.
I don't see why the devices can't be whatever file format the spec designers choose. People are already used to getting driver disks with new hardware. Just make sure that the readers ship with a Windows 'driver' that installs the file system that has been standardized on by the designers. I would say that I have a harder time getting Windows users NOT to install the disks that come with new hardware than I have getting the too install. Heck, a lot of MP3 players won't even work without installing proprietary applications. Why can't this be the same. You can be sure that when every single Linux distro can access the memory cards right out of the box, that MS will be happy to include the file system into the next spin of Windows. They might even push it as a 'Windows Update'.
If they are trying to sell their product to businesses that might have to go back to 'forever' to retrieve data, there certainly is a good reason. I'm waiting for the first time a company gets sued for using MS Office by their shareholders because they lost a large lawsuit due to an inability to retrieve documents. Today, you can still get your hands on old copies of Word, and old copies of Windows that the old Word will run on. That might not always be the case. If someone needs to get some documents out of Word 1.0, they likely are hitting the piracy trail today. As things like software dialing home gets more and more prevalent, that might not be even possible 10 years from now. Storing corporate documents, that should be archived, in Word is simply irresponsible.
"Actually in the case of BP, they pretty much are the industry. I think you're trying a little too hard to stick to your "OMG TEH EVIL O1L!!1!!1!!" conspiracy."
If you go back and reread my post, you would see that I never claimed that there was a conspiracy. I simply pointed out that your argument was a falicy. That fact that you see 'conspiracy theorists' behind every tree, indicates that you might be parinoid and in fact be the very 'conspiracy theorists' that you accuse others of.
"How the hell does that apply here? In this case the oil companies ARE the other options popping up. They're the number one investors in this type of technology and they're delivering real world, usable solutions TODAY. It wouldn't be smart business to do otherwise--they know oil will eventually become infeasible and they want to be ahead of the game when that day comes."
It applies because it shows exactly how a company can be the primary provider of a product or service, and still be actively trying to stifling said product. I don't think there are very many people out there that would argue that the cable companies and telephone companies have actively promoted improvements to last mile bandwidth. The sole reason they started offering it was because if they did not, someone else would. If someone else got data lines to the home, this other entity could cut into the cable and telephone companies profits. To keep a new player from starting a data service, all they have to do is offer just enough to keep enough customers that the new player cannot stay in business.
This is the same tactic that BP could very likely be playing. All they have to do is make sure that they keep enough of the market that there isn't enough profit left over for a startup that wants to make a difference. Is that what they are doing? I couldn't tell you, as I said, I don't know the details of Shell Solar, or BP Solar.
Either way, your argument that the oil companies MUST be working in favor of Solar, just because they control the solar industry is simply wrong. It is a fallacy and it shows either a lack of understanding of how basic economics work, or an unwillingness to even consider that a corporation might not be looking out for your best interest.
Thank you... One of the things that originally drew me to reading Slashdot was that when someone would make an outlandish comment, someone else would 'run the numbers'. It's good to see that some traditions are not completely dead.
I don't know the details of Shell Solar or BP Solor, but their existence doesn't by itself show that the oil companies are not holding the industry back. Remember, the phone companies fight tooth and nail to keep high speed data lines out of the publics hands. It wasn't until other options started popping up that they got in the game. And we still see them trying to hold back the high speed data lines. Now they do it by offering just enough bandwidth to enough people that competition doesn't form.