Re: Beware mystery cable runs
Just to piggy-back on this one ... They do make what purports to be direct burial network cables. My advice? Always run them in properly installed conduit anyways. Trust me on this.
26717 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
I landed a contract to install two big, garage sized, Memorex tape backup robots at a large number-crunching outfit once. Before I bid on the job, the VP of operations gave me the grand tour. He was proud of all his redundancy. He had two power lines coming in to two separate rooms, with a motor-generator, a large battery consisting of dozens of telco-style lead-acid batteries, a generator, and monitoring systems for each room-full of gear. The 48 Volts was switched by a box at the corner where the two rooms met, brought into the main building via a 5" conduit, where it was switched to two separate computer rooms. Even the links between outlying offices were redundant T-1 and T-3 lines. There was a third "data center" that was dark, to be used for spares "just in case". It was designed to provide non-stop operations, and it did a pretty good job of it. Even the Halon had built-in redundancy.
Until a semi-truck carrying some of my Memorex kit backing into the receiving dock went off course & cut the 5" conduit. The security cameras caught the sparks quite nicely :-)
Two weeks after installing the tape robots, I had a proposal for a more geographically diverse version of the same thing on the VP's desk. I didn't land that contract, alas.
"an exciting symbiosis of human and AI 'investigators'"?
No, it is not. Symbiosis refers to two forms of life living together. It's right there in the word, if you look. Last time I checked, computers, even those running AI systems, were not a form of life no matter how hard you squint at them, and regardless of marketing hype.
All this is is another tool at the disposal of the researchers.
Amazon will eventually shut down the service, and then nothing like this will ever happen again!
Of course when that time comes, you'll have to purchase a new doorbell ...
May I interest you in this new model in advance, so you have no loss of service? It consists of a through-door striker and your choice of chime or bell. It is guaranteed to work for life, with no false positives, no loss of service, and no downtime, and no batteries, ever! Available in Black, Chrome, Brushed Nickle, and Antiqued Bronze. Wood Tone, Harvest Gold and Avocado Green[0] available on special order only for an extra $25.00. Just $99.95 +shipping and handling. Easy installation, requires no more than a drill, two bits, and a screwdriver.
[0] Hey. there are still people out there buying shag carpeting, just catering to the market.
"does this mean it's processing it's data off the premises?"
Of course. Why would one install a simple circuit consisting of three pieces of wire, a buzzer, a power source and a button when one can use a computer that has to be networked to a massive bank of servers halfway around the world and requires a cell phone to properly use?
I mean, really! It's obvious, innit?
Yeah, because as everybody knows the British Military is looking to get into busting civilians for drugs. It's just like that. How could I have ever missed it.
On the other hand, if this things serves a warrant in the middle of the night and the moron in the house starts shooting, the cop back at headquarters won't have to shoot back to defend himself after getting hit in the leg, nor will his compadres have to provide covering fire ... Maybe it IS a good thing for civilian use.
The battlefield will sound like a billion invading hornets, striking fear into the very hearts of the enemy ... until the enemy switches on the electronic countermeasures and turns it up to 100,000W of transmit power. Then the silence will be deafening ... followed by the sound of $BIGNUM of drones hitting the ground.
You are not even wrong, Jan 0.
Punt gun muzzle velocity was usually lower than that of a modern shotgun (blackpowder and poor wadding were the major factors). However, they were typically loaded with the very same #4 buck that I used in the above example. Lower velocity means lower energy on target equals less penetration. Punt guns were not devastating because of power, they were devastating because of sheer volume of shot, typically firing a pound of shot (~2160 pellets) per load ... and sometimes five or more hunters would fire into a flock simultaneously.
I have taken many duck, from all angles. The direction the ducks are flying makes absolutely no difference to penetration.
I have rarely shot a duck "in the back" .... a duck's back is on top when they are flying, and I am on the ground. Can't hit what I can't see. Not that it makes any difference to me, or the duck. Why would you think otherwise? Anthropomorphizing? Do you think food somehow magically materializes wrapped in plastic in the back room at Tesco/Safeway?
"Wouldn't a drone mounted .22 have better penetration?"
Sure, but that's not the whole story.
#4 buckshot, with a diameter of 0.24", has a velocity of around 1300fps (mild 12 gauge loads), vs. a .22 at around 1200fps. The .22 weighs in at around 40gr, the #4 buck at 20.6gr. Doing the math, the .22 has around 40% more energy on target (at short distances) ... combine that with stability in flight and projectile shape, and the .22 has the edge.
However, given a single shot there are a lot more chances of hitting the target multiple times with the shotgun.The shotgun fires around 27 projectiles, all hitting an area under 1 foot in diameter (depending on choke and possibly with a few fliers). And even with it's much lower energy, it's still powerful enough for each pellet to do major organ damage. There is a reason they call it buckshot ... it's not for hunting mice!
Note: I'm assuming typical "home defense" distances in the above, which seems reasonable given the topic under discussion. Likewise the #4x27 shot, which is a good all 'round load for this kind of thing.
But just think of all the money they have saved by not purchasing software and the machines to run it on! What's a few missed orders here & there? And of course we save money by not fielding complaints! Maybe we should do away with the "support@" email address, it's a money-sink ...
Your Accountants listening to Their Marketing is running down the economy. Seriously, think about it ... How many Billions of dollars has Microsoft-induced downtime cost corporations world-wide in the last year? The last five years? The last decade? Two decades?
And how much would your company have saved in downtime alone (after re-training costs & etc.) had you switched to BSD & Linux twenty years ago?
"you need permission to cut one (they are engraved 'Security Key')."
So what? Take it to your local locksmith and tell 'em your Wife/daughter needs a copy. He'll be happy to cut you a key because it's YOUR security that's at issue, nobody else's. That's if he even bothers to comment on the label in the first place, which he probably won't.
I have eight keys that are similarly labeled. My Wife has a copy of all of them, the foreman has copies of half of them, and the field hands all have a copy of two of them.
You can buy one new (if empty) for roughly the same price, and kit it out any way you like. A friend of mine has a couple of them (bought at scrap prices[0]), one he uses for spare parts storage on track days, one he uses for all his drone kit, and another one in his nursery greenhouse for the little bits & bobs that he uses when starting seedlings, transplanting, rooting cuttings, and that kind of thing.
[0] Alan Steel & Supply in Redwood City in his case, call the scrap yard(s) near your local airport and see if you get lucky.
"Is "communist" some new USAism for commuting?"
I have never heard the term used that way here on the Left Coast, but I suspect they mean public transportation. The Right Coast has a rather poor sense of humo(u)r at the best of times.
"why would visitors wish to leave the Garden State in such a hurry?"
You've obviously never been there. To give you an idea of how bad that part of the world actually is, most New Jerseyites actually think Florida is a nice place to vacation.
... we've been using FR to monitor fire fighting aircraft. It's kind of handy to know when a DC10 is going to buzz proceedings at 200 feet when loading already skittish critters into trailers ... The outage was more than mildly annoying, but radios picked up most of the slack.
"The cloud compute giant said people who want to have their data deleted from the system will be able to do so."
Does Amazon include the vast tape silo that holds the system's backups in that deletion promise? The only reason that I ask is because nobody with a clue includes "the backups" when talking about "the system" ... Backups are always inviolate and inviolable, and only touched when "the system" fails. They are certainly never deleted off-schedule. and especially never on the whim of an outsider.
"The identification method is opt-in"
Unless you actually want to get the sale price, in which case it's mandatory.
"It promises that the palm prints are never held on the in-store device"
Then how do they get into the network to be sent to "the cloud"?
"and are encrypted"
Home-grown encryption? Is it proprietary, or can I audit the code?
"and processed in the cloud."
Because as we all know, "the cloud" is completely safe and has never been compromised in any way.
"Or 'burglarized' as Americans obscurely seem to insist on."
Presumably you'd prefer the Frenchified "burglarised" ... or perhaps you're in favo(u)r of the broad bawdlerization of English vernacular in general, in which case good fucking luck communicating effectively with anyone in the modern English speaking world.
Clearly, Sir, you are absolutely correct. Despite being in widespread use since at least the 1970s, the phrase "my bad" has no place in the English Language. Here's a list of 500 of the posts made to ElReg containing the phrase during the last decade plus, obviously they all need downvoting posthaste! I assume you will get right on it.
During the meanwhile, we must figure out exactly where the English Language must be frozen in time in order to appease you ... I assume that would have to be prior to the works of one William Shakespeare, who wrote in Sonnet 112:
Your love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o'er-green my bad, my good allow?
Ah, well. All the world's a stage, and everyone a critic ... WAIT! The word "critic" was a new term in 1590s English, so I guess that's right out, too ... Mea Culpa. (Presumably I can use the Latin version of "my bad" without fear of your wrath?)
Whitespace doesn't matter, haven't you heard? (Unless you use some perverse programming language or other, of course. Or Whitespace, which is a fun teaching tool.)
There was a lot of code-swapping between Berkeley and AT&T until AT&T's lawyers noticed that UNIX might be a money maker.
The IBM/Interactive Systems Corporation kludge included IX/370 and PC/IX (which were odd-ball variations on the theme, to say the least) and AIX Version 1 (which was BSD and SysVR1 & 2 based and ran only on the RT PC) ... All later versions of AIX were pure IBM. And showed it.
There was no System IV ... there was no System I or System II, either.
If your pigs are flaming, you're cooking them too fast. Low and slow is the way to go.
Did I ever post my favorite recipe for elephant stew in this forum?