We have some that are 3-4 years old, and they just keep going and going. It seems to depend a lot on the brand - some of them are just cheaply made and burn out relatively quickly. Maybe one a year burns out, but I still have a bunch more that are sitting in a closet waiting to be installed.
We do have 2 LED bulbs in the house. One is over the stairs where a CFL just doesn't work well (typically you flip on the lights and go down the stairs - the light never gets a chance to reach full brightness, so it felt like you were going down stairs in the dark. The LED bulb comes on at full brightness with perhaps only a 1 second delay).
There is one other place where long-life bulbs really shine - if you have really tall ceilings, changing a bulb is a huge pain in the rear.
The only way they would allow downloads of their free podcasts was through iTunes. But I don't have any Apple products, and I didn't want to install iTunes.
The security holes in XP start to really worry me. You can put an uptodate Linux on an old box and be quite safe.
I picked up an older Dell Xeon box from eBay about a year ago. As time goes on, I have upgraded with more memory, faster CPU (with quad-core chips), larger hard drive, 64-bit OS. But it is still insanely fast for what I am doing with it.
It isn't so much that users are expecting more from the apps, but that application vendors bloat their software as time goes on so that newer versions really only run on newer and faster hardware. I won't point fingers too much - there are many offenders here.
And on top of that, the industry is using more Java which is as slow as snot. The attitude seems to be that if it runs slow, then throw some more iron at it.
I remember my first Linux box - i486 at about 90MHz. Those were the days..
That wasn't from the same test - it was from a test for 4th graders. But if you need a calculator for that problem (esp given the multiple choice answers), you probably didn't do well in math.
I guess the thing that bugs me about this story is that this administrator concluded that since he was a successful paper-pusher and didn't need to know that stuff, the problem was that the math test was too hard. I would suggest that you give the same test to a set of scientists and engineers and see how they do before one can draw that conclusion.
That's probably the next step. Using a WiFi network and a packet sniffer, one ought to be able to see what traffic is generated.
I have an HTC Amaze from T-Mobile, and so far I haven't found any signs of a HTCIQ app. I suppose they could have renamed it, or maybe it isn't present. I will try the logcat thing later to see..
I found MTW to be rather schizophrenic when I used it - probably because there were 3 different authors trying to write a single book, and there seemed to be differences in style as you go from one chapter to the next.
The first time I went through the subject I found it difficult to comprehend some of the concepts. It was later that I was taking solid-state physics where we were doing a lot of work in K-space that it became clearer what they meant by MTW.
Understanding how tensors work really does help a lot, but if general relativity is the first exposure to the subject, it might be a little harder. A more common everyday example would be stress and strain tensors that are used to describe how objects are deformed under pressure. Again, my studies of solid state physics helped me here in that I ended up dealing with non-uniform solids.
If you are interested in heating during the winter, a heat pump uses far less electricity for most people. Using a server is like using electric baseboard heaters, except you might happen to get some useful computing power out of the thing. I don't have any need for any servers that are up 24x7 at home - I shut down my machines when not in use.
And in the summer, the servers throw off all kinds of heat that the AC system would need to eliminate.
If MS weren't porking up their software so much, you wouldn't need so much horsepower in the first place, and you wouldn't have all of that excess heat.
We have quite a few machines in the server room, and we have constant problems keeping the room cool. But ultimately many of the boxes really don't need that much CPU power - they have a fairly simple job that they need to do. We have speculated about using an old laptop on AC power for some of the jobs that don't require a lot of CPU and don't require a lot of disk space.
These servers sound like they would work quite a bit better for this purpose however..
Good point - there are numerous apps out there that can do this. I happened to have a copy, but any tool that can backup call logs and text messages would really do the job.
In a way I agree. I guess the unspoken point of the article is to say how common and how good the firmwares are becoming - that it is less and less bleeding edge all the time..
Exactly. The Cliq update to 2.1 was so painful to Moto, that they decided to leave the Dext (non-US name for Cliq) at 1.5 "for the best experience". Part of the problem I think is that Moto did an excessive amount of customization which made future updates more painful.
It isn't just Moto however. When you get a phone, the manufacturer really isn't guaranteeing anything with regard to updates of any kind. You might get them, you might not. But the carrier makes you sign up for a 2-year agreement, and lack of updates isn't a valid reason to break the contract.
I ultimately end up using a sort of password vault that has one master password, and inside of the vault are the passwords for the individual sites. But to me this is still just a band-aid approach. Fundamentally the username/password paradigm is flawed, but nobody has come up with a universal replacement. Or there are replacements, but everyone in the world would need to go out and buy some bit of hardware, which is essentially a deal-breaker...
I too have a Cliq, and I got tired of the overall sluggishness and instability of the thing. Yeah, I could have gone out and gotten a new phone, but I still have 8 months to go on the contract, and I would have to buy my way out. The installation of Cyanogenmod was kind of an experiment to see if I could make the thing more tolerable. Worst case, I brick the thing and go out and get something else.
The only thing time consuming for me was to back things up ahead of time. Using different forms of backups that most people have never even thought of. Including
a) First use Sprite Backup (a paid app) to backup things like text messages and so forth. b) Back up all of my contacts out of MotoBlur, and then import them into Google. I would never buy another Moto phone again, so I would have needed to do this anyways.. c) Use "Astro" to back up all apps installed on the phone. d) Root the phone. Cyanogenmod instructions for my phone were pretty clear, and this was easy. e) Then back up the recovery partition. Basically use the "dd" command to back up the partition to the SD card. f) Install custom recovery code "ClockworkMod". g) Use the custom recovery to again back up the phone - this backs up the MotoBlur version of software currently running. h) Download and install the new ROM. There were a couple of other important steps I needed to do as well - flushing caches to make sure things are stable. The Cyanogenmod instructions were pretty clear as to what needed to be done in which order.
After that, I was done. And it was like a new phone. Quite responsive, and it seems quite stable.
Exactly. Instead of crashing after having exhausted the address space that a 32-bit process is limited to, it could keep on going and bring the whole system down.
Have you been able to program the thing so that it empties itself after the cats are done? It would be especially nice if it could empty itself wirelessly - perhaps sending the "contents" to the inbox of some poor unsuspecting soul on AOL.
If it were the case that the majority of consumers were running Linux, then the people writing this junk would be targeting Linux instead of Windows. All systems have vulnerabilities of one form or another.
These days most of the infections arise from people opening virus-laden attachments and through social engineering (getting people to click on something popped up from an infected website).
I fear you are right - that it will get worse. And in some ways I wonder if this will be the death of the internet - that the spam and malware will have so soiled the nest that it would be largely unusuable for many people.
but in my accounts it still comes in as a flood. Some of it is clearly malware coming in - others are questionable scans plus the usual Nigerian nonsense.
It was over 10 years ago when I got my first infection - on a Linux box, of all things. Back then, the distros didn't have automatic updates with security patches, and consumer-grade firewalls weren't available yet...
In this case it might be true that only Windows PCs are vulnerable, but you can't assume that Linux/Mac is completely safe..
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We have some that are 3-4 years old, and they just keep going and going. It seems to depend a lot on the brand - some of them are just cheaply made and burn out relatively quickly. Maybe one a year burns out, but I still have a bunch more that are sitting in a closet waiting to be installed.
We do have 2 LED bulbs in the house. One is over the stairs where a CFL just doesn't work well (typically you flip on the lights and go down the stairs - the light never gets a chance to reach full brightness, so it felt like you were going down stairs in the dark. The LED bulb comes on at full brightness with perhaps only a 1 second delay).
There is one other place where long-life bulbs really shine - if you have really tall ceilings, changing a bulb is a huge pain in the rear.
The only way they would allow downloads of their free podcasts was through iTunes. But I don't have any Apple products, and I didn't want to install iTunes.
The security holes in XP start to really worry me. You can put an uptodate Linux on an old box and be quite safe.
I picked up an older Dell Xeon box from eBay about a year ago. As time goes on, I have upgraded with more memory, faster CPU (with quad-core chips), larger hard drive, 64-bit OS. But it is still insanely fast for what I am doing with it.
It isn't so much that users are expecting more from the apps, but that application vendors bloat their software as time goes on so that newer versions really only run on newer and faster hardware. I won't point fingers too much - there are many offenders here.
And on top of that, the industry is using more Java which is as slow as snot. The attitude seems to be that if it runs slow, then throw some more iron at it.
I remember my first Linux box - i486 at about 90MHz. Those were the days..
That wasn't from the same test - it was from a test for 4th graders. But if you need a calculator for that problem (esp given the multiple choice answers), you probably didn't do well in math.
I guess the thing that bugs me about this story is that this administrator concluded that since he was a successful paper-pusher and didn't need to know that stuff, the problem was that the math test was too hard. I would suggest that you give the same test to a set of scientists and engineers and see how they do before one can draw that conclusion.
That's probably the next step. Using a WiFi network and a packet sniffer, one ought to be able to see what traffic is generated.
I have an HTC Amaze from T-Mobile, and so far I haven't found any signs of a HTCIQ app. I suppose they could have renamed it, or maybe it isn't present. I will try the logcat thing later to see..
I found MTW to be rather schizophrenic when I used it - probably because there were 3 different authors trying to write a single book, and there seemed to be differences in style as you go from one chapter to the next.
The first time I went through the subject I found it difficult to comprehend some of the concepts. It was later that I was taking solid-state physics where we were doing a lot of work in K-space that it became clearer what they meant by MTW.
Understanding how tensors work really does help a lot, but if general relativity is the first exposure to the subject, it might be a little harder. A more common everyday example would be stress and strain tensors that are used to describe how objects are deformed under pressure. Again, my studies of solid state physics helped me here in that I ended up dealing with non-uniform solids.
If you are interested in heating during the winter, a heat pump uses far less electricity for most people. Using a server is like using electric baseboard heaters, except you might happen to get some useful computing power out of the thing. I don't have any need for any servers that are up 24x7 at home - I shut down my machines when not in use.
And in the summer, the servers throw off all kinds of heat that the AC system would need to eliminate.
If MS weren't porking up their software so much, you wouldn't need so much horsepower in the first place, and you wouldn't have all of that excess heat.
We have quite a few machines in the server room, and we have constant problems keeping the room cool. But ultimately many of the boxes really don't need that much CPU power - they have a fairly simple job that they need to do. We have speculated about using an old laptop on AC power for some of the jobs that don't require a lot of CPU and don't require a lot of disk space.
These servers sound like they would work quite a bit better for this purpose however..
It really won't cost that much because you can sell your furnace.
Good point - there are numerous apps out there that can do this. I happened to have a copy, but any tool that can backup call logs and text messages would really do the job.
In a way I agree. I guess the unspoken point of the article is to say how common and how good the firmwares are becoming - that it is less and less bleeding edge all the time..
Exactly. The Cliq update to 2.1 was so painful to Moto, that they decided to leave the Dext (non-US name for Cliq) at 1.5 "for the best experience". Part of the problem I think is that Moto did an excessive amount of customization which made future updates more painful.
It isn't just Moto however. When you get a phone, the manufacturer really isn't guaranteeing anything with regard to updates of any kind. You might get them, you might not. But the carrier makes you sign up for a 2-year agreement, and lack of updates isn't a valid reason to break the contract.
The Cyanogenmod source tree is open and can be browsed and downloaded..
The vault that I use can generate random passwords.
One can export the contents of the vault into a file that you could keep on a flash drive if you wish. That would be your "backup".
I ultimately end up using a sort of password vault that has one master password, and inside of the vault are the passwords for the individual sites. But to me this is still just a band-aid approach. Fundamentally the username/password paradigm is flawed, but nobody has come up with a universal replacement. Or there are replacements, but everyone in the world would need to go out and buy some bit of hardware, which is essentially a deal-breaker...
I too have a Cliq, and I got tired of the overall sluggishness and instability of the thing. Yeah, I could have gone out and gotten a new phone, but I still have 8 months to go on the contract, and I would have to buy my way out. The installation of Cyanogenmod was kind of an experiment to see if I could make the thing more tolerable. Worst case, I brick the thing and go out and get something else.
The only thing time consuming for me was to back things up ahead of time. Using different forms of backups that most people have never even thought of. Including
a) First use Sprite Backup (a paid app) to backup things like text messages and so forth.
b) Back up all of my contacts out of MotoBlur, and then import them into Google. I would never buy another Moto phone again, so I would have needed to do this anyways..
c) Use "Astro" to back up all apps installed on the phone.
d) Root the phone. Cyanogenmod instructions for my phone were pretty clear, and this was easy.
e) Then back up the recovery partition. Basically use the "dd" command to back up the partition to the SD card.
f) Install custom recovery code "ClockworkMod".
g) Use the custom recovery to again back up the phone - this backs up the MotoBlur version of software currently running.
h) Download and install the new ROM. There were a couple of other important steps I needed to do as well - flushing caches to make sure things are stable. The Cyanogenmod instructions were pretty clear as to what needed to be done in which order.
After that, I was done. And it was like a new phone. Quite responsive, and it seems quite stable.
Exactly. Instead of crashing after having exhausted the address space that a 32-bit process is limited to, it could keep on going and bring the whole system down.
Have you been able to program the thing so that it empties itself after the cats are done? It would be especially nice if it could empty itself wirelessly - perhaps sending the "contents" to the inbox of some poor unsuspecting soul on AOL.
Maybe they shouldn't allow people on aircraft. Too dangerous.
If it were the case that the majority of consumers were running Linux, then the people writing this junk would be targeting Linux instead of Windows. All systems have vulnerabilities of one form or another.
These days most of the infections arise from people opening virus-laden attachments and through social engineering (getting people to click on something popped up from an infected website).
I fear you are right - that it will get worse. And in some ways I wonder if this will be the death of the internet - that the spam and malware will have so soiled the nest that it would be largely unusuable for many people.
but in my accounts it still comes in as a flood. Some of it is clearly malware coming in - others are questionable scans plus the usual Nigerian nonsense.
It was over 10 years ago when I got my first infection - on a Linux box, of all things. Back then, the distros didn't have automatic updates with security patches, and consumer-grade firewalls weren't available yet...
In this case it might be true that only Windows PCs are vulnerable, but you can't assume that Linux/Mac is completely safe..
Yeah, but lots of people do disable UAC. They see it as an annoyance, and they don't see the value.
I hear that Firefox 6 will be out next Tuesday..