My roommate does the same in his Optima actually, I just picked SD because it seems to be the common choice among OEMs for nav storage these days and in my experience is more durable than USB drives.

I've killed a few USB drives in the course of normal use where while I've heard of them I've never seem an actual dead SD card. I'd expect the actual internal memory to be similar, so I can only imagine the difference comes from the physical form and possibly simpler interface.

And the hundreds of thousands of Chrysler MyGig systems with ordinary 2.5" laptop hard disks contained within are failing in massive quantities, right? Or any number of other manufacturers offering hard disk based storage in their entertainment system. Or the thousands of custom-built in car PCs rigged up by enthusiasts, until recently often equipped with full desktop disks for capacity reasons.

FYI, the "freezer trick" is a common way to coax some last remaining life out of a hard drive that won't spin up. They seem to like the cold, since one that doesn't work at room temperature in my experience has about a 20% chance of coming back to life if frozen. More than once I've rescued data with a USB cord running out from my minifridge.

Or we'll skip the hard drive altogether, SSDs are well under $1/GB for non-performance applications (which media storage in a vehicle certainly fits within). Since when did they care about vibration or the sort of temperatures cars are tested for? Hell, for the role a SD slot would be more than sufficient. Then not only is it practically indestructible media but it's entirely user swappable, allowing easier loading of content and trivial upgrades down the line.

Anyone who's used MyFord Touch or Cadillac Cue for more than a few minutes knows that the idea of these systems being heavily tested is laughable anyways. Supposedly old Sync was nicer and I haven't had any problems with Kia's Sync-derived UVO system, but I haven't used any of the others to really compare.

I can't agree. More times than I can count I've had a question about a local business which I've tried to find an answer to on their web site, something like what their hours are or often restaurant menus, but searching their name only results in a listing on one of the many useless yellow pages type sites. Many of my customers are small one or two person businesses, they'll tell me their email address and it's some random @aol or @hotmail which was clearly their personal account long before the business. It's entirely unprofessional these days to have absolutely zero internet presence and puts them in a position of having an uphill battle for me to respect them as a business.

It's not rocket science to have a domain with email and a basic web site. It's trivial to get a domain and the absolute minimum level of hosting required for such things, why people consider it acceptable to not do this I can't understand.

I had one of those too, the Timex DataLink series. It depended on the CRT flickering to perform a one-way sync of basic PIM data. This of course didn't work on LCDs or systems like NT where the level of control over the display Timex needed was unavailable, so they also had a serial-based gizmo that flashed a LED to do the same job.

I got mine in 1998 or so and used it as a watch until the plastic body of the watch fell apart some time in 2004. The PIM function hadn't been usable to me for a few years as I'd switched to NT in XP form when it came out, but I'd had a Palm m100 since 2001 so that wasn't really a big deal.

I'd like a modern take on the smart watch, even after getting the Palm I liked having a basic info set available wherever I went. A good "home screen" could put a lot of useful information at a glance without needing to pull your device out of your pocket. Calendar, incoming messages, caller ID, etc. I could see being very useful. Give it an e-paper display for massive battery life and I'm interested.

That depends on what you answer when asked what type of a network you're on. Public puts the firewall in to lockdown mode, Home and Work are pretty much identical and allow normal local network traffic.

If they're directly internet connected and answered correctly they should be blocking most traffic, but directly connecting a machine to the internet these days is rare due to the general demand for wireless and multiple devices.

Blocking ping outright is pretty dumb overall, IMO. It removes a useful diagnostic tool while only blocking threats from 1996 that have been fixed on anything you should ever consider connecting to the internet. If a machine is still vulnerable to ping-of-death type things, it is trash and should be discarded immediately (as well as finding those responsible for it and beating them severely for leaving that crap around).

Sorry, but the appropriate speed for the road depends on how the road is built, not whether a kindergartner happens to live alongside it.

People automatically tend to drive at a reasonable speed for the road, not the limit. With this in mind, the MUTCD (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Design, or the big book put out by the Federal Highway Administration that defines the majority the things we see as part of the road system) states that speed limits should be set to an 85th percentile average of how fast people drive anyways. Not all states use the federal MUTCD officially outside of interstate highways, but in general those states' own variant quotes the feds on the main bits. Basically what this means is that by the guidelines that should be used in most areas if the majority of people are speeding on your road it doesn't mean they're in the wrong, it means the speed limit is wrong and needs to be raised.

Just because someone is going fast doesn't mean they're putting others' lives at risk either, get off your high horse.

If you really want people to slow down, look in to traffic calming measures and try to get your responsible government entities interested. The idea is that you rework the road to make it seem less suitable for speed. Narrowing lanes, median islands, tricks with the lines, etc. They cost money, but they're the only way to do it right since they'll actually result in a slowdown 24/7 rather than only when cops are around.

The problem with that approach as the sole approach (as they've done here) is that you can only do so much to the underlying architecture without having to basically be undoing the work that a compiler is doing to get the binary in the first place. When you can build for the actual architecture rather than a frontend ISA you can optimize much better for the actual CPU rather than for the theoretical x86 CPU its pretending to be.

Isn't this sort of what Transmeta did years ago anyways? VLIW backend with a "code morphing" frontend that makes it expose an x86 ISA (and theoretically any others, I recall a demo that involved Java bytecode). If you need to run multiple instruction sets on the same machine it's great, but coding right to the CPU will always be more efficient.

As the hovertext on the comic says, if you're gaming on WiFi you only have yourself to blame.

We can actually use up to 1500 watts. Technician licensees like myself are limited to 200 watts on the small chunks we're allowed to touch below 50 MHz and even the Extras are limited to 100 watts on the 60 meter band, but everything else including all of our overlap with ISM bands is full power.

Of course we're only supposed to use the minimum necessary power to establish communications, so outside of contests you really shouldn't be running at that sort of power level. I'd also be concerned for my safety being near a 1500w transmitter in that band, considering that's basically a description of a modern microwave oven.

Ham operator and armchair lawyer here.

Part 15.5 basically says that unlicensed radio operation is a best-effort thing. If the spectrum you want to use is already taken up to a point that it makes it unusable for you, too bad, you have no right to complain. Where allowed, unlicensed operation is the lowest possible priority. A licensed user can shut you down if you interfere with them, but if someone moves in next door to you with an old cordless phone or crappy microwave which knocks out your WiFi when in use you just have to deal with it.

In general the FCC's priority goes like this:

1. Military
2. Licensed Government
3. Licensed Commercial
4. Licensed Amateur
0. Unlicensed

The military pretty much gets what they want, then below that if there's a conflict between licensed parties where both have privileges on a band it tends to go in the order listed. Unlicensed users are then left to fight amongst themselves over the scraps.

Ah yes, the hard candy shell/soft creamy filling school of thought on security. Do you allow BYOD in any way? Are company laptops used on public or home networks? Are you *sure* there aren't any vulnerabilities in services you may expose to the world? How secure is your company WiFi? Are there any exposed network ports in public areas which may have a new device sitting near them? What happens when the next $plugin 0-day hits the web?

There are more than enough ways for malware or an attacker to get behind the one firewall most networks have. Delaying internal updates because "the firewalls will protect me" is moronic if there are security implications. Of course if it's a bugfix for something you consider unimportant that's another matter, but vulnerabilities in anything network-accessible should be considered critical unless it can be made completely inaccessible to untrusted machines.

Entirely correct, but nowhere did your parent post mention using RAID as a data backup. The word backup was used in the context of backup hardware, as in a cold spare.

No, this was very recent. http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git;a=commit;h=743aa456c1834f76982af44e8b71d1a0b2a82e21

Sure, most distros compile for 486 or Pentium and above these days, but the kernel itself could still be built for 386 until just over a month ago.

You didn't say you liked BB/RIM, but you were responding to someone dissing their product as if it didn't deserve to be considered lesser.

I provided a huge reason why they are objectively inferior, the mandatory use of RIM's network for mobile data access. This isn't a religious issue, it's them doing something positively idiotic which I believe should make anyone who values reliability in a mobile device stay far away.

This "feature" provides two things, push messaging and a sort of VPN-ish link back to a "trusted" network (in that you're forced to trust RIM's network if you use a Blackberry). The first seems to be handled quite well by all the other mobile device platforms without running any other traffic through, and the second can be done on every other platform with a normal VPN service of any kind. Neither require running all traffic through at all times though. The user/administrator can choose to do that if they want, but if their VPN is unavailable they're not stuck with a useless device.

Everyone deserves a fair chance to start, but when a company has a history of doing bad things it's not wrong to dislike them and have low expectations for their future products.

I want competition, I just want it to be somebody other than RIM. Palm should have done better and HP should have handled them better. WebOS was actually interesting and the hardware was pretty nice if slightly underspecced.

I honestly would like to know how you can take seriously as a mobile device vendor a company that thinks it's a good idea to route all mobile data traffic through their servers? The outages Blackberries have had are impossible on any of the other platforms, they're just not that tightly tied to the mothership. My Android and iOS devices depend on nothing more to get to the internet then any other device on the network. I haven't used WinMo since 6 but I know it hasn't changed because Microsoft isn't that fucking stupid.

The structure of the Blackberry system made sense when they first came out as PIMs on slow mobile data networks, but in the world of 3G and WiFi it's an obsolete point of failure which has failed many times. Sure, keep it around for devices that are too old to update for the times, but the fact that devices trying to compete as real full-featured smartphones still use it is absolute insanity.

With that history, they'd have to wow me to a mindboggling level to recover. So far I have yet to see anything even remotely special. Had the Playbook's software not been so gimped initially it may have been a real option in the tablet world, but they managed to bungle that too.

Other than the all-touch models, Blackberries remain excellent mobile e-mail and PIM devices (again other than the idiotic network mandate) but they are terrible smartphones. The touch models are just disappointing all over.