There's even a difference between touchpads on different PCs. I now have a Dell with both touchpad and trackpoint. I really don't like the touchpad, and use the trackpoint all the time.
Previously, I had a compaq, and quite liked the touchpad on that. Shame the rest of the computer was crap.
And save what, maybe $3? hmmm, newegg.com... laptop 8x DVD-ROM drives, $56 for OEM. Same thing in a combo drive, $66. So that's a MAXIMUM $10 difference, and that's assuming that Apple doesn't close that gap a bit by buying more than ONE, and that it doesn't cost them and every retailer all the way up and down the chain any extra for stocking two different kinds of equipment.
Those were the only two that really caused trouble for me, but they didn't crash it. They hung the tab they were on, but I just closed the tab and went on browsing in the others.
This assumes that Bill Gates is rich because he's a programming genius. That's not at all true. He's rich because he is a ruthless businessman, a shrewd negotiator, and takes no prisoners.
That's not making money, that's "not losing money".
Exercise: Let's spin you off as a separate company. How long do you keep getting paychecks? What's your revenue stream? Don't have one? Then you're not MAKING money.
You are a SERVICE, and an EXPENSE. Certainly it's a necessary one, but if it weren't, you'd be on the street in a second.
I just downloaded and ran his test suite against Firefox 1.0PR. Everything looks fine to me. No crashes. I also ran it against his CGI and the "die" gallery in the tarball. No problems, though it did stop for a few seconds a few times.
Now, he does mention that sometimes the crashes are due to memory exhaustion. I've got the suite running right now on another tab of the browser I'm typing in, and the memory usage is going up, but only very slowly; I think it's due to the logging in the JavaScript console that's happening due to the bad JavaScript that's running over there. After 15 minutes of constant reloading, it's up from 39 to 44 megs. So maybe if you reloaded bad JavaScript constantly for a couple of days, you might eventually run out of memory. Certainly if there's a memory leak, it should be fixed, but IMHO that's not a security hole, while crashing indicates the possibility of one.
Might as well, too, since the $140 OEM version isn't legal unless you buy it with the hardware to make the PC (IE not legal to buy and install on an existing machine).
If they perfect these things, I'd use one as my normal monitor. I have no particular love of having a big ass thing on my desk (even an LCD). If it covers the same apparent field of view, I'd go for it.
Combined with a folding keyboard, this could help portable computers get a lot smaller too.
Odds are it draws a lot less power than a full size LCD panel; should help portable PC power consumption as well; I think the LCD is one of the major power hogs.
...and that depends on your frame of reference. Going from 1000kph to zero is speeding up in as many frames of reference as it is slowing down, just not in ours.
This is true. I remember talking with my dad once when I was a kid. He was my hero, a very moral person yet I never heard him judge anyone else. I was asking him if he would ever steal anything, or some such question; I can't remember, I was something like 8 years old at the time.
He told me that he would not steal for himself, but if his family were starving, he would do what he had to. But at the same time, he'd be trying to keep track of who he'd stolen from, so if he ever got the opportunity, he could pay them back.
I tended to believe him, because he had been in WWII and was in some bad places, where he was cut from supply lines and had to live off the land in winter; he had gone hungry for days at a time in the past, and had to eat animal feed at one point.
If that's true, some people's price is so high, it's COMPLETELY impossible to pay it. I personally would not kill any person, even a bum, even if I had a guarantee that I'd never be discovered, even if the price was "anything you want, you can own the world and 6 billion people can be your slaves."
If you move to other crimes or immoralities, my price might be significantly lower, but there are things I will not do for any conceivable amount of reward.
Windows reliability problems fall into two categories these days: 1-People still running Win9x, or repeating tales from those days 2-People who are infected with viruses/worms/spyware
OK, maybe 3-people with bad drivers or crappy hardware.
If you're not in these categories, odds are you have a stable windows machine.
I run Windows 2000 and XP on 4 machines, and none of them go down unless I shut them down. One is used for Windows development at work, one is my wife and kid's internet/game machine, one is a laptop (not heavily used, but the kids play games on it some), one does a fair chunk of video editing and encoding. I regularly have uptimes in the range of 6 to 8 weeks, generally shutting down only for vacations or upgrades.
Well, that's what "by wire" means. It means that all control of a system is over control wires, and if that control system fails, you have no control at all. In actual ABS systems, even with the system in, even if badly malfunctioning, the driver still has a great deal of control, just nowhere near as much as if it were off or working properly.
If you're driving properly and safely, a properly working ABS system never actually kicks in. I've had it in all my cars for nearly 10 years, and I think I've felt it activate maybe twice, and those were not in dangerous situations, just a hidden patch of black ice approaching a stop sign with no cars coming.
I don't know what to think about this. You are correct, from a statistical point of view.
However, it's also probably true that many such systems are correcting for and possibly even encouraging more dangerous behavior. Drivers may be getting into really seriously bad situations because the computer is saving their asses every 5 seconds.
It seems to me that if the traction control is kicking in, you're driving too fast or using too much power for the situation. When driving higher powered vehicles on snow, I usually use a higher gear than usual to reduce the torque delivered to the wheels. I also keep the speed down; there's no damn excuse for going more than about 30 on snow, and that's in wide open country.
Turning the key off was not preferred as it locks the steering wheel on most cars causing a loss of control.
Not on my cars, but maybe on some. I have 97 and 2000 Fords. When in gear and on the road, you can rotate the key to the "ignition off" position, but not beyond. To get to "wheel lock" you must:
- Depress the brake pedal to allow: - Shift into Park
THEN you can rotate the key to the "wheel lock" position.
I'm sure there were some cars built in the early 80's or before that would let you put the key into wheel lock position while driving, but I don't think anything recent will.
Anything recent should also have a rev limiter so that neutral/clutch won't blow the engine (though if the engine's not sound, redlining it for a minute or so while you coast down might wreck it anyway).
ABS is essentially brake-by-wire. If the black box decides it doesn't want pressure at the slave cylinders, the driver is just along for the ride.
Not true at all. ABS is exactly like normal brakes, with an extra system added to allow the computer to PARTIALLY and INTERMITTENLY relieve pressure to one or more wheels.
You may mean that if the system malfunctions and starts trying to relieve pressure on all 4 wheels, you lose braking. You will have reduced functionality but you will still have some brakes.
It certainly isn't brake-by-wire in the traditional sense. That would imply that the brakes are completely inert until a signal passes through the computer and it initiates the braking system action. That's completely untrue and would not be allowed on the roads. If you've ever had your head under a hood on an ABS car, you'll see exactly the same systems as on any car built in the last 30+ years, with one small addition, which you could cut the wires to and still have perfectly functional but non-ABS brakes.
I think even the rear-steer steer-by-wire systems are still mechanical up front. And the degree of travel in the back is pretty limited. So if the system wigged out and whacked the rear steering full to one side, you'd be dog-tracking pretty badly but I bet you could still drive around just fine.
She didn't have a shift lever to downshift or put into neutral, or a key to turn off?
Carbon buildup on the throttle body is pretty common, but you usually get a lot of warning; a slightly sticky (usually sticks closed) throttle for several months/years before it gets that bad.
WHA??!! Is this really the case on this car? That's got to be illegal in many countries. The whole purpose of an emergency brake is to allow for some stopping power in... an *emergency*. That's why they're fully mechanical, and on a completely separate path to the brake system than the normal hydraulic brakes (at least, for cars designed and bought by SANE people).
Having drive-by-wire "emergency" brakes is like having an emergency exit that you have to go through the normal exit to get to.
Yes, turning off the key is the best option. This guy didn't have that option.
What do you mean, downshifting wouldn't work because the throttle is stuck? Does for me. OK, some cars won't let you downshift if your engine is above a certain RPM (though some do). I have a word for that situation: Neutral. Sure, engine goes boom (or maybe not; most cruise controls WILL disengage if the engine redlines; depends on how f'd the cruise was). But in any case at least you're not ploughing into busses or bridges or something.
Ever try to stop a car with them? Ain't gonna happen. They're rear wheel only, and even if you do manage to put them on hard (requires a LOT of force), you'll just lose control of the vehicle.
Once, when I was about eight years old, I was in the car with my grandma when the brakes went out. She didn't know what to do. I said "shift down" (automatic transmission) - she did, and we coasted to a stop shortly thereafter.
It's amazing to me that this guy had the presence of mind to call on a phone, but for an HOUR didn't think of downshifting.
Probably he, like most other drivers, is only concerned about going FASTER, not slower.
Have you taken a poll? Pretty much everyone I know uses some IM service. I've asked on the email list and at group parties. I found about 10% that used IM, but didn't use it all the time.
No, I don't use IM. I've tried, and the simple fact is that most of my friends don't use it, so there's no reason for me to keep it going.
If you aren't sitting at a computer all the time, email is better. I check my mail from home, from work, from other people's computers, from library computers, kiosks on vacation, etc.
I can imagine if I was using IM, at a friend's house I'm visiting on vacation:
me: Can I check my ICQ? friend: what? me: My IM messages. ICQ. friend: I guess. me: I just need to install this piece of software on your computer first... friend: Get bent.
Really? So if I want to be contacted, I have to sit around, logged into my machine, 24/7? Do I run 3 or 4 different IM clients because the systems don't interact? Does it work with cellphones? Blackberries?
I'm on an active mailing list of about 400 people, about 75 to 200 emails a day, and as far as I know about 10 of them have IM, and of those 10 there are people on each of several incompatible systems.
If you can get Microsoft, AOL, ICQ, IRC, and whoever else to transparently transport everyone else's messages, and to provide some kind of buffer for when people are offline to hold the message until they log back in again (let's call this, oh, say, a "Mailbox") then you might have a contender.
Of course, you will also have just re-invented email.
Transparently proxy web access. Log access to the norton AV update site, just a timestamp and an IP. Then you have a log of IP addresses and whether they have Norton installed, and the last time they updated.
If they don't update every two weeks, then trigger the transparent proxy so that any access to anything other than the Norton update page and the local page for downloading NAV displays a static page that says "Your access is blocked until you update your AV software." Give them a download link to grab their copy from.
It seems to me that you have a perfectly legitimate right to restrict access to a commons only to people who have taken steps to not be a threat to others in that area. You can require people to get immunized before going on a trip where they'll be in close contact with other people, so it seems you can require people to immunize their computers before you let them use YOUR equipment to put them in close proximity to other people's equipment.
How long will it be before a bunch of students sue a university to recoup cleanup costs because the university did not exercise due diligence in maintaining a clean network, when doing so is clearly technically feasible.
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There's even a difference between touchpads on different PCs. I now have a Dell with both touchpad and trackpoint. I really don't like the touchpad, and use the trackpoint all the time.
Previously, I had a compaq, and quite liked the touchpad on that. Shame the rest of the computer was crap.
And save what, maybe $3?
hmmm, newegg.com... laptop 8x DVD-ROM drives, $56 for OEM. Same thing in a combo drive, $66. So that's a MAXIMUM $10 difference, and that's assuming that Apple doesn't close that gap a bit by buying more than ONE, and that it doesn't cost them and every retailer all the way up and down the chain any extra for stocking two different kinds of equipment.
Those were the only two that really caused trouble for me, but they didn't crash it. They hung the tab they were on, but I just closed the tab and went on browsing in the others.
This assumes that Bill Gates is rich because he's a programming genius. That's not at all true. He's rich because he is a ruthless businessman, a shrewd negotiator, and takes no prisoners.
That's not making money, that's "not losing money".
Exercise: Let's spin you off as a separate company. How long do you keep getting paychecks? What's your revenue stream? Don't have one? Then you're not MAKING money.
You are a SERVICE, and an EXPENSE. Certainly it's a necessary one, but if it weren't, you'd be on the street in a second.
I just downloaded and ran his test suite against Firefox 1.0PR.
Everything looks fine to me. No crashes. I also ran it against his CGI and the "die" gallery in the tarball. No problems, though it did stop for a few seconds a few times.
Now, he does mention that sometimes the crashes are due to memory exhaustion. I've got the suite running right now on another tab of the browser I'm typing in, and the memory usage is going up, but only very slowly; I think it's due to the logging in the JavaScript console that's happening due to the bad JavaScript that's running over there. After 15 minutes of constant reloading, it's up from 39 to 44 megs. So maybe if you reloaded bad JavaScript constantly for a couple of days, you might eventually run out of memory. Certainly if there's a memory leak, it should be fixed, but IMHO that's not a security hole, while crashing indicates the possibility of one.
Might as well, too, since the $140 OEM version isn't legal unless you buy it with the hardware to make the PC (IE not legal to buy and install on an existing machine).
If they perfect these things, I'd use one as my normal monitor. I have no particular love of having a big ass thing on my desk (even an LCD). If it covers the same apparent field of view, I'd go for it.
Combined with a folding keyboard, this could help portable computers get a lot smaller too.
Odds are it draws a lot less power than a full size LCD panel; should help portable PC power consumption as well; I think the LCD is one of the major power hogs.
...and that depends on your frame of reference. Going from 1000kph to zero is speeding up in as many frames of reference as it is slowing down, just not in ours.
This is true. I remember talking with my dad once when I was a kid. He was my hero, a very moral person yet I never heard him judge anyone else. I was asking him if he would ever steal anything, or some such question; I can't remember, I was something like 8 years old at the time.
He told me that he would not steal for himself, but if his family were starving, he would do what he had to. But at the same time, he'd be trying to keep track of who he'd stolen from, so if he ever got the opportunity, he could pay them back.
I tended to believe him, because he had been in WWII and was in some bad places, where he was cut from supply lines and had to live off the land in winter; he had gone hungry for days at a time in the past, and had to eat animal feed at one point.
If that's true, some people's price is so high, it's COMPLETELY impossible to pay it. I personally would not kill any person, even a bum, even if I had a guarantee that I'd never be discovered, even if the price was "anything you want, you can own the world and 6 billion people can be your slaves."
If you move to other crimes or immoralities, my price might be significantly lower, but there are things I will not do for any conceivable amount of reward.
Windows reliability problems fall into two categories these days:
1-People still running Win9x, or repeating tales from those days
2-People who are infected with viruses/worms/spyware
OK, maybe 3-people with bad drivers or crappy hardware.
If you're not in these categories, odds are you have a stable windows machine.
I run Windows 2000 and XP on 4 machines, and none of them go down unless I shut them down. One is used for Windows development at work, one is my wife and kid's internet/game machine, one is a laptop (not heavily used, but the kids play games on it some), one does a fair chunk of video editing and encoding. I regularly have uptimes in the range of 6 to 8 weeks, generally shutting down only for vacations or upgrades.
Well, that's what "by wire" means. It means that all control of a system is over control wires, and if that control system fails, you have no control at all.
In actual ABS systems, even with the system in, even if badly malfunctioning, the driver still has a great deal of control, just nowhere near as much as if it were off or working properly.
If you're driving properly and safely, a properly working ABS system never actually kicks in. I've had it in all my cars for nearly 10 years, and I think I've felt it activate maybe twice, and those were not in dangerous situations, just a hidden patch of black ice approaching a stop sign with no cars coming.
I don't know what to think about this. You are correct, from a statistical point of view.
However, it's also probably true that many such systems are correcting for and possibly even encouraging more dangerous behavior. Drivers may be getting into really seriously bad situations because the computer is saving their asses every 5 seconds.
It seems to me that if the traction control is kicking in, you're driving too fast or using too much power for the situation. When driving higher powered vehicles on snow, I usually use a higher gear than usual to reduce the torque delivered to the wheels. I also keep the speed down; there's no damn excuse for going more than about 30 on snow, and that's in wide open country.
Turning the key off was not preferred as it locks the steering wheel on most cars causing a loss of control.
Not on my cars, but maybe on some. I have 97 and 2000 Fords. When in gear and on the road, you can rotate the key to the "ignition off" position, but not beyond. To get to "wheel lock" you must:
- Depress the brake pedal to allow:
- Shift into Park
THEN you can rotate the key to the "wheel lock" position.
I'm sure there were some cars built in the early 80's or before that would let you put the key into wheel lock position while driving, but I don't think anything recent will.
Anything recent should also have a rev limiter so that neutral/clutch won't blow the engine (though if the engine's not sound, redlining it for a minute or so while you coast down might wreck it anyway).
ABS is essentially brake-by-wire. If the black box decides it doesn't want pressure at the slave cylinders, the driver is just along for the ride.
Not true at all. ABS is exactly like normal brakes, with an extra system added to allow the computer to PARTIALLY and INTERMITTENLY relieve pressure to one or more wheels.
You may mean that if the system malfunctions and starts trying to relieve pressure on all 4 wheels, you lose braking. You will have reduced functionality but you will still have some brakes.
It certainly isn't brake-by-wire in the traditional sense. That would imply that the brakes are completely inert until a signal passes through the computer and it initiates the braking system action. That's completely untrue and would not be allowed on the roads. If you've ever had your head under a hood on an ABS car, you'll see exactly the same systems as on any car built in the last 30+ years, with one small addition, which you could cut the wires to and still have perfectly functional but non-ABS brakes.
I think even the rear-steer steer-by-wire systems are still mechanical up front. And the degree of travel in the back is pretty limited. So if the system wigged out and whacked the rear steering full to one side, you'd be dog-tracking pretty badly but I bet you could still drive around just fine.
She didn't have a shift lever to downshift or put into neutral, or a key to turn off?
Carbon buildup on the throttle body is pretty common, but you usually get a lot of warning; a slightly sticky (usually sticks closed) throttle for several months/years before it gets that bad.
His emergency brake was also electronic
... an *emergency*. That's why they're fully mechanical, and on a completely separate path to the brake system than the normal hydraulic brakes (at least, for cars designed and bought by SANE people).
WHA??!! Is this really the case on this car? That's got to be illegal in many countries. The whole purpose of an emergency brake is to allow for some stopping power in
Having drive-by-wire "emergency" brakes is like having an emergency exit that you have to go through the normal exit to get to.
Yes, turning off the key is the best option. This guy didn't have that option.
What do you mean, downshifting wouldn't work because the throttle is stuck? Does for me. OK, some cars won't let you downshift if your engine is above a certain RPM (though some do). I have a word for that situation: Neutral. Sure, engine goes boom (or maybe not; most cruise controls WILL disengage if the engine redlines; depends on how f'd the cruise was). But in any case at least you're not ploughing into busses or bridges or something.
Ever try to stop a car with them? Ain't gonna happen. They're rear wheel only, and even if you do manage to put them on hard (requires a LOT of force), you'll just lose control of the vehicle.
Once, when I was about eight years old, I was in the car with my grandma when the brakes went out. She didn't know what to do. I said "shift down" (automatic transmission) - she did, and we coasted to a stop shortly thereafter.
It's amazing to me that this guy had the presence of mind to call on a phone, but for an HOUR didn't think of downshifting.
Probably he, like most other drivers, is only concerned about going FASTER, not slower.
Have you taken a poll? Pretty much everyone I know uses some IM service.
I've asked on the email list and at group parties. I found about 10% that used IM, but didn't use it all the time.
No, I don't use IM. I've tried, and the simple fact is that most of my friends don't use it, so there's no reason for me to keep it going.
If you aren't sitting at a computer all the time, email is better. I check my mail from home, from work, from other people's computers, from library computers, kiosks on vacation, etc.
I can imagine if I was using IM, at a friend's house I'm visiting on vacation:
me: Can I check my ICQ?
friend: what?
me: My IM messages. ICQ.
friend: I guess.
me: I just need to install this piece of software on your computer first...
friend: Get bent.
Really? So if I want to be contacted, I have to sit around, logged into my machine, 24/7? Do I run 3 or 4 different IM clients because the systems don't interact? Does it work with cellphones? Blackberries?
I'm on an active mailing list of about 400 people, about 75 to 200 emails a day, and as far as I know about 10 of them have IM, and of those 10 there are people on each of several incompatible systems.
If you can get Microsoft, AOL, ICQ, IRC, and whoever else to transparently transport everyone else's messages, and to provide some kind of buffer for when people are offline to hold the message until they log back in again (let's call this, oh, say, a "Mailbox") then you might have a contender.
Of course, you will also have just re-invented email.
Transparently proxy web access. Log access to the norton AV update site, just a timestamp and an IP. Then you have a log of IP addresses and whether they have Norton installed, and the last time they updated.
If they don't update every two weeks, then trigger the transparent proxy so that any access to anything other than the Norton update page and the local page for downloading NAV displays a static page that says "Your access is blocked until you update your AV software." Give them a download link to grab their copy from.
It seems to me that you have a perfectly legitimate right to restrict access to a commons only to people who have taken steps to not be a threat to others in that area. You can require people to get immunized before going on a trip where they'll be in close contact with other people, so it seems you can require people to immunize their computers before you let them use YOUR equipment to put them in close proximity to other people's equipment.
How long will it be before a bunch of students sue a university to recoup cleanup costs because the university did not exercise due diligence in maintaining a clean network, when doing so is clearly technically feasible.
Anybody who modded that funny apparently doesn't know what's going on.