For the past 5 years or so I've been buying nothing but off-brand generic equipment, the cheapest the internet will offer me. It rarely comes with documentation (and when it does, it's never coherent english), but goddamn it, everything works, and I never get outright screwed. Failures are no more common than they were with name brand parts.
Buy commodity grade gear and if it's mission-critical, keep spares on hand - it's still cheaper than name-brand parts without spares, and you never get these nasty surprises.
Pull-A-Part is an extremely popular self-service franchised junkyard with locations nationwide. There's probably one in your area.
They park cars in neat rows, you sign a waiver and pay an entry fee (usually $1), bring your own tools, and take what you need in a wheelbarrow. At the exit, they charge a flat fee for each part type (i.e. any automatic transmission, $40, any 4 cylinder engine, $50, any radiator $20). Cars are kept in the rows for a set number of weeks, then the row gets hauled to the crusher, regardless of what is or isn't left.
It's always amazing what you see in the cars. Most of them come from towing auctions, so it's a mixture of abandoned vehicles, police seizures, and insurance totals. Cars with parking tickets still stuck to the windshield. They still have gloveboxes crammed full of personal stuff, cigarette packs in the console, tools in the trunk, blankets and jackets in the back seats.
The 5mph bumper dates back to the first US government-mandated crash tests in the 1970's. Basically, bumpers were required to withstand a 5mph impact, with only cosmetic damage to the bumper or car.
The industry, and consumers, hated them at the time. Previously, bumpers were largely cosmetic, and provided no real protection. Adding 5mph bumpers to cars not originally designed for them resulted in massive, ugly, heavy bumpers kludged on. Under industry pressure, the requirement was rolled back to 2.5 mph in '82, although they're still called 5mph bumpers by most. On most modern cars, the actual 5mph bumper is hidden behind a cosmetic plastic fascia.
she's just shifting the emissions to a power plant, which may end up being worse than burning fuel in her car
You're mistaken here, for the simple fact that internal combustion engines are horribly inefficient. You're lucky to get 20% efficiency out any car engine, most of the energy in the gasoline/diesel/ethanol is given off as waste heat.
Electric motors run closer to 90% efficiency, and most of our fossil-fuel power plants are pushing 40% efficiency now; some new natural-gas plants are even hitting 60%.
(Almost) All P2P systems will prefer high bandwidth and/or low-latency peers. These tend to be the ones that are local.
I am a heavy Bittorrent user in Seattle, USA, and I think you're wrong. I have noticed that the fastest and most reliable peers/seeds tend to be European or Asian, even when I'm downloading American TV shows or the Presidential debates.
Possibly because their residential connections aren't limited to 128kbps upload.
I see so many bad experiences on here that I just have to chime in with my own personal experience.
I filed the forms, got my 2 coupons, and bought the cheapest 2 boxes I could find, at an online store for $43 each, shipped.
I live in metropolitan Seattle, ground floor of a 2 story building in a hilly area, and my TV antenna is an unamplified Radioshack bunny-ear antenna, sitting on the windowsill.
Without tweaking the antenna direction, I get all 6 channels that were relatively snow-free on analog, with a drastic improvement in picture quality. With the help of the on-screen signal strength meter, I can adjust the antenna to pull in the 2 other channels which had heavy snow on analog, now completely snow-free. And I now have on-screen TV listings!
I also get 2 spanish-language channels which I never noticed before.
All the UHF stations which were unwatchable before, are still unwatchable.
2 problems I have found: The proximity of the antenna to my CRT TV really matters. It seems like the TV causes a lot of interference, If I get the antenna with a yard or so of the TV, the picture goes away very quickly. On analog, I don't recall having this trouble.
The other issue is that if I leave my converter box powered on for over 48 hours (i.e. if I don't turn the box off when I turn the TV off), it loses signal on it's own, apparently from overheating. The Artec box I have is the cheapest box I know of, and the case has no vent holes. Simply remembering to turn the box off when I turn the TV off keeps everything happy, although it means that the program-guide takes a few seconds to update when I turn it back on.
That right there is government business. That should not be on a personal account, able to be erased forever on her whims, rather than stored securely on a government machine in compliance with FOIA.
From what I've seen of it, he wasn't expecting to actually gain access, he was just dicking around, and so he didn't expect that he would need to take precautions.
Does anyone know if the crack is carrying a trojan? The fact that it is setting off virus scanners tells me that it might
I see this all the time. Many modern antiviruses give a false positive on a lot of cracks, usually flagging them as suspicious unknown trojan-like things. Seems to me that when you create a program that meddles with another, pre-existing program in subtle, suspicious ways, modern antivirus software is instantly skeptical.
Usually cracks that are ACTUALLY trojaned are discovered very quickly and disappear from wherever they are hosted before they spread very far, and people tend not to swap them. Trojaned cracks are actually very rare in the wild as a result.
We could make a 45mpg car that has decent numbers back in the 80's, but we can't make anything comparable now? Bullshit
Back in the 80's, we were building 50hp 4cyl cars, 100hp 6cyl cars, and 150hp V-8s.
Today, manufacturers are building 150hp 4cyl cars, 250hp 6cyl cars, and 450hp V-8s.
The American consumer today will not accept the same kind of performance they did in the 80's; don't you remember how heavily the 55hp Geo Metro was mocked before GM discontinued it? Manufacturers are not willing to risk cutting back engine sizes, now that people have become used to driving 100-150hp compacts over the past decade.
Rarely more than 200 MB - but to patch a fresh 1.0 install to a current version is at least 4 gigs. If you're using their online installer instead of the discs, you'll be pulling down almost 10 gigs over BT.
But still, that's just two dvd isos, just a drop in the ocean of traffic. There are Bluray images flying around that dwarf it.
I don't know much about wages in the US, but it's fair to assume that 5 janitors would have done the job at a lower price.
I work in the service industry in Seattle. Last year I made $14,000 before tax. You could probably hire at least 30 full time janitors for $600,000 a year.
As a Seattle resident, I can say that there are no public toilets here. There weren't any before these were installed, and now that they're gone, there are again none.
We like to ignore the problem, and that's why the alleys smell like piss.
Seattle provides free food to homeless people in several places daily, and during the cold winter months the city allows people to sleep in City Hall. However, all the significant social service programs are controlled by the DSHS, a state department. Washington is by no means a high-tax state, does not have a state income tax, and has vast rural areas that just don't care about social services.
As a result, in order to get help from the government here, you have to do one of the following a) be 62 or older b) have children who will starve without it c) be in danger of imminent death d) go to jail
Being crazy, homeless, covered in your own urine, hooked on crack, and crazy does not qualify you.
Basically the social services available to a homeless person or a drug addict in Seattle is just barely enough to keep them breathing. The city doesn't have the resources to take care of them, and the state is unwilling to spend money on what they see as "Seattle's problem".
They really need to [...] use a good, transparent virtualization scheme for backwards compatability.
Yes, THIS. Running legacy apps in a virtualized 2k/xp environment so they can get a clean start without worrying about backwards compatibility and all the bullshit that comes with it. Hardware is plenty powerful enough to do it, these days.
Since when is "circumventing copy protection" wrong?
In the USA, we have this law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Circumventing copy protection is a crime, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. There are a handful of exceptions to this law, but none of them apply here.
I wonder if he will be hired back with back pay. A different article I read about this said that he had no interest in ever working for or having any dealings with this company ever again.
I am a delivery driver in Seattle, where cyclists have full rights on BOTH the road AND the sidewalk.
The vast majority of cyclists in this city have no regard for basic traffic laws, lane markings, traffic lights, or even one-way streets (and forget about the helmet law).
I'm really really tired of slamming on my brakes because some cyclist doesn't feel the need to respect a red light, or signal a lane change.
And just because it won't hurt me if they run into me, doesn't make me feel any better about having to dodge them.
Cyclists who obey the rules of the road are no problem. The rest of them give us heart attacks and you a bad name.
the WRK having a 33.30% adherence to code style and the others being 77-83%. That meshes with my experience working on corporate code, where over time coding styles change on more of a whim whereas in an open source project, it's more important to keep a common look to the code for maintainability. (That's important for corporate code too - it's just that there's usually no-one assigned to care about that). The fact that this is just a//small chunk// of the Windows kernel makes this even more scary; I imagine the same level of inconsistency is present through the entire mess
Business package ADSL or Cable never comes with a SLA and rarely comes with any other uptime agreement.
For your extra money compared to a residential plan you usually get
1) More upload bandwidth, usually 768kbps instead of the typical 256kbps
2) A TOS that doesn't explicitly disallow "running a server" and other such nonsense (Residential package TOS is usually incredibly restrictive, you're probably violating it right now and you don't even know it.)
During downtime I am commonly told by my boss to "CLEAN SOMETHING".
If every thing's clean (which it usually is during downtime), new and inventive cleaning tasks can be found. Like scrubbing the inside of the oven chimney.
Do you have any example of literature from Apple that says their DVD players were approved by the DVD Forum?
You may not use the DVD logo if your product doesn't meet the standards, and Apple probably did use the logo. You may recall the legal battle a while ago to pull the Compact Disc logo off of certain copy protected audio discs, this is the same situation with different parties.
As I recall, some of the nonstandard CDs got stuck in Macs as well.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why I don't buy name brand.
For the past 5 years or so I've been buying nothing but off-brand generic equipment, the cheapest the internet will offer me. It rarely comes with documentation (and when it does, it's never coherent english), but goddamn it, everything works, and I never get outright screwed. Failures are no more common than they were with name brand parts.
Buy commodity grade gear and if it's mission-critical, keep spares on hand - it's still cheaper than name-brand parts without spares, and you never get these nasty surprises.
Pull-A-Part is an extremely popular self-service franchised junkyard with locations nationwide. There's probably one in your area.
They park cars in neat rows, you sign a waiver and pay an entry fee (usually $1), bring your own tools, and take what you need in a wheelbarrow. At the exit, they charge a flat fee for each part type (i.e. any automatic transmission, $40, any 4 cylinder engine, $50, any radiator $20). Cars are kept in the rows for a set number of weeks, then the row gets hauled to the crusher, regardless of what is or isn't left.
It's always amazing what you see in the cars. Most of them come from towing auctions, so it's a mixture of abandoned vehicles, police seizures, and insurance totals. Cars with parking tickets still stuck to the windshield. They still have gloveboxes crammed full of personal stuff, cigarette packs in the console, tools in the trunk, blankets and jackets in the back seats.
what's a 5mph bumper? i'm not really a car guy.
The 5mph bumper dates back to the first US government-mandated crash tests in the 1970's. Basically, bumpers were required to withstand a 5mph impact, with only cosmetic damage to the bumper or car.
The industry, and consumers, hated them at the time. Previously, bumpers were largely cosmetic, and provided no real protection. Adding 5mph bumpers to cars not originally designed for them resulted in massive, ugly, heavy bumpers kludged on. Under industry pressure, the requirement was rolled back to 2.5 mph in '82, although they're still called 5mph bumpers by most. On most modern cars, the actual 5mph bumper is hidden behind a cosmetic plastic fascia.
she's just shifting the emissions to a power plant, which may end up being worse than burning fuel in her car
You're mistaken here, for the simple fact that internal combustion engines are horribly inefficient. You're lucky to get 20% efficiency out any car engine, most of the energy in the gasoline/diesel/ethanol is given off as waste heat.
Electric motors run closer to 90% efficiency, and most of our fossil-fuel power plants are pushing 40% efficiency now; some new natural-gas plants are even hitting 60%.
That's a big difference.
(Almost) All P2P systems will prefer high bandwidth and/or low-latency peers. These tend to be the ones that are local.
I am a heavy Bittorrent user in Seattle, USA, and I think you're wrong. I have noticed that the fastest and most reliable peers/seeds tend to be European or Asian, even when I'm downloading American TV shows or the Presidential debates.
Possibly because their residential connections aren't limited to 128kbps upload.
I see so many bad experiences on here that I just have to chime in with my own personal experience.
I filed the forms, got my 2 coupons, and bought the cheapest 2 boxes I could find, at an online store for $43 each, shipped.
I live in metropolitan Seattle, ground floor of a 2 story building in a hilly area, and my TV antenna is an unamplified Radioshack bunny-ear antenna, sitting on the windowsill.
Without tweaking the antenna direction, I get all 6 channels that were relatively snow-free on analog, with a drastic improvement in picture quality. With the help of the on-screen signal strength meter, I can adjust the antenna to pull in the 2 other channels which had heavy snow on analog, now completely snow-free. And I now have on-screen TV listings!
I also get 2 spanish-language channels which I never noticed before.
All the UHF stations which were unwatchable before, are still unwatchable.
2 problems I have found: The proximity of the antenna to my CRT TV really matters. It seems like the TV causes a lot of interference, If I get the antenna with a yard or so of the TV, the picture goes away very quickly. On analog, I don't recall having this trouble.
The other issue is that if I leave my converter box powered on for over 48 hours (i.e. if I don't turn the box off when I turn the TV off), it loses signal on it's own, apparently from overheating. The Artec box I have is the cheapest box I know of, and the case has no vent holes. Simply remembering to turn the box off when I turn the TV off keeps everything happy, although it means that the program-guide takes a few seconds to update when I turn it back on.
some clerical stuff from when she was governor.
That right there is government business. That should not be on a personal account, able to be erased forever on her whims, rather than stored securely on a government machine in compliance with FOIA.
From what I've seen of it, he wasn't expecting to actually gain access, he was just dicking around, and so he didn't expect that he would need to take precautions.
Does anyone know if the crack is carrying a trojan? The fact that it is setting off virus scanners tells me that it might
I see this all the time. Many modern antiviruses give a false positive on a lot of cracks, usually flagging them as suspicious unknown trojan-like things. Seems to me that when you create a program that meddles with another, pre-existing program in subtle, suspicious ways, modern antivirus software is instantly skeptical.
Usually cracks that are ACTUALLY trojaned are discovered very quickly and disappear from wherever they are hosted before they spread very far, and people tend not to swap them. Trojaned cracks are actually very rare in the wild as a result.
We could make a 45mpg car that has decent numbers back in the 80's, but we can't make anything comparable now? Bullshit
Back in the 80's, we were building 50hp 4cyl cars, 100hp 6cyl cars, and 150hp V-8s.
Today, manufacturers are building 150hp 4cyl cars, 250hp 6cyl cars, and 450hp V-8s.
The American consumer today will not accept the same kind of performance they did in the 80's; don't you remember how heavily the 55hp Geo Metro was mocked before GM discontinued it? Manufacturers are not willing to risk cutting back engine sizes, now that people have become used to driving 100-150hp compacts over the past decade.
How large is a WOW patch?
Rarely more than 200 MB - but to patch a fresh 1.0 install to a current version is at least 4 gigs. If you're using their online installer instead of the discs, you'll be pulling down almost 10 gigs over BT.
But still, that's just two dvd isos, just a drop in the ocean of traffic. There are Bluray images flying around that dwarf it.
I don't know much about wages in the US, but it's fair to assume that 5 janitors would have done the job at a lower price.
I work in the service industry in Seattle. Last year I made $14,000 before tax. You could probably hire at least 30 full time janitors for $600,000 a year.
As a Seattle resident, I can say that there are no public toilets here. There weren't any before these were installed, and now that they're gone, there are again none.
We like to ignore the problem, and that's why the alleys smell like piss.
Seattle provides free food to homeless people in several places daily, and during the cold winter months the city allows people to sleep in City Hall. However, all the significant social service programs are controlled by the DSHS, a state department. Washington is by no means a high-tax state, does not have a state income tax, and has vast rural areas that just don't care about social services.
As a result, in order to get help from the government here, you have to do one of the following
a) be 62 or older
b) have children who will starve without it
c) be in danger of imminent death
d) go to jail
Being crazy, homeless, covered in your own urine, hooked on crack, and crazy does not qualify you.
Basically the social services available to a homeless person or a drug addict in Seattle is just barely enough to keep them breathing. The city doesn't have the resources to take care of them, and the state is unwilling to spend money on what they see as "Seattle's problem".
From TFA:
Davenport did his development on a personal system at home
. It also notes that he requested training to do the work as part of his job at the Air Force, and was denied.
In essence, they told him not to do it at work, so he did it at home, and then they lay claim to it anyway.
VIA has not used "CentaurHauls" for quite some time.
Modern VIA processors have "VIA VIA VIA" as their Vendor string.
They really need to [...] use a good, transparent virtualization scheme for backwards compatability.
Yes, THIS. Running legacy apps in a virtualized 2k/xp environment so they can get a clean start without worrying about backwards compatibility and all the bullshit that comes with it. Hardware is plenty powerful enough to do it, these days.
Since when is "circumventing copy protection" wrong?
In the USA, we have this law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Circumventing copy protection is a crime, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. There are a handful of exceptions to this law, but none of them apply here.
He will, however, be suing them.
I have to speak up here.
I am a delivery driver in Seattle, where cyclists have full rights on BOTH the road AND the sidewalk.
The vast majority of cyclists in this city have no regard for basic traffic laws, lane markings, traffic lights, or even one-way streets (and forget about the helmet law).
I'm really really tired of slamming on my brakes because some cyclist doesn't feel the need to respect a red light, or signal a lane change.
And just because it won't hurt me if they run into me, doesn't make me feel any better about having to dodge them.
Cyclists who obey the rules of the road are no problem. The rest of them give us heart attacks and you a bad name.
I don't understand why Bush wants Congress to give them immunity so badly.
He's the President of the United States. He can just pardon them. And knowing this country, the political fallout would be minimal.
Business package ADSL or Cable never comes with a SLA and rarely comes with any other uptime agreement.
For your extra money compared to a residential plan you usually get
1) More upload bandwidth, usually 768kbps instead of the typical 256kbps
2) A TOS that doesn't explicitly disallow "running a server" and other such nonsense (Residential package TOS is usually incredibly restrictive, you're probably violating it right now and you don't even know it.)
3) A static IP.
During downtime I am commonly told by my boss to "CLEAN SOMETHING".
If every thing's clean (which it usually is during downtime), new and inventive cleaning tasks can be found. Like scrubbing the inside of the oven chimney.
Of course, I deliver pizza for a living.
You may not use the DVD logo if your product doesn't meet the standards, and Apple probably did use the logo. You may recall the legal battle a while ago to pull the Compact Disc logo off of certain copy protected audio discs, this is the same situation with different parties.
As I recall, some of the nonstandard CDs got stuck in Macs as well.