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Comment Re:Or put another way... (Score 5, Insightful) 398

Targeted ads have mostly missed the mark by a mile.

I tell advertisers to be present when I search for your product and be competitive. Flooding me with ads for a product just after I have made my purchase is futile. How many cases of toner do they think I want to buy after I bought a year's supply?

Your best advertising is by having an easy to navigate website with real content. If I am troubleshooting a laptop and need to find the hidden latch holding the keyboard in, brands that bury the info are not brands I would buy for myself.

When selecting lighting equipment for my church, I only bought equipment with operator and programming info readily available so we could see how it would be useful.

When selecting an ocilioscope, searching for minimum requirements often reveals additional features that used to cost lots of dollars for the propritory value added software. I am done with batteries not included features. Only products with fully functioning features are ever considered. Been down that road before. Bought a scope with a communications module. The software to simply transfer the screen shot to the PC was bundled in a mathlab type application for 1/2 the price of the scope as an option. That is a super fast way to loose sales. If a scope has a communications module, it should work without additonal purchase for basic functions such as a screen capture.

Too little info is often the reason for lost sales. Cripple ware hardware is useless.

Be clear in your sepecs. My old inkjet died and needed a replacement. Carts were specified for about 700 pages at 10% page coverage.
The salesman wanted to upgrade me to the printer that would do 900 pages per cart. Checked online. Cart was almost double the cost and the 900 pages was at 5% page coverage. In short the ink was almost 4X the cost. Salesman didn't bother to tell me the apples and oranges in page coverage. He probably didn't know. I did inform him and got another brand.

Consumers have noticed the cost of operation of many items such as Ink Jet printers and have opted for lower TCO options such as Laser printers instead, or using the cell phone and not printing at all. If you go though an $80 set of cartridges a month, it is very much noitced and use is evaluated.

Comment Re:USB usually means you have physic access to the (Score 1) 229

120 V into the NIC does very little. NIC's are transformer coupled and the transformers couple very little low frequency. Most NIC magnetics provide about 1,500 Volts isolation. This provides protection from lightning induced surges. If you apply 120V on one pair of wires in the NIC, you simply burn out the transformer, but the power does not cross any further.

Caveot, POE has some DC coupling and could be damaged by excessive voltage. Most PC NIC's do not have POE.

Comment Why (Score 1) 80

Why are insane amounts of passwords permitted? Why are wrong attemp timers missing? Why are instant resubmissions permitted?

Dictionary attacks would not be feasable if the 1st incorrect attempt required a 60 second delay for a 2nd attempt, 120 seconds for the 2nd attempt, 240 for the 3rd attempt, etc. 64 attempts would be beyond my lifetime. Dictionalry attacks on my password would not be possible in my lifetime on my account, but a honest typo would be a minor delay for the legimitate user.

Multiple fails on multiple accounts should add an IP block against the hacking domain.

Carpet bomb attacks should be nearly impossible.

Comment Re:Well, goodbye passenger car diesel! (Score 1) 420

When runtime is limited, and there are few of them in relation to the overall mix of engines, their overall contribution is minimal.

What you are requesting has less impact than a typical logging trash pile burn, which is very high in particulates, and permitted on occasion.

Backyard burning in the city is pretty much prohibited for trash as this would be too many too often.

If every home had a diesel standby generator and they all ran weekly or monthly, then I could see an issue.

Comment Re:Maybe (Score 1) 420

I've wondered if the issue also is involving US gasoline pickup trucks.

This last week while in creep and go traffic, there were 3 times I had the very distinct odor of raw gas while behind a pickup truck. Anybody else notice the high hydrocarbon odor? I won't mention the make and model, but it was too often to consider it as just one badly tuned pickup, and it was the same make each time.

Comment Re:See (Score 1) 111

I find sometimes it is best to make it blow up to get it fixed.

Sometimes a bug is managed and annoys a lot of people.

Remember the fake PC support scam from a year ago? The calls have pretty much stopped once it became game on to call them and abuse them in a virtual PC and post the results online.

If this remains unfixed, there should be some way to bait it to overload the workers responding and never sending money.

How many users can a gambling website support who have no credit cards? Join and try to get technical support because your ficticious credit card isn't working. Overload them, then it will get fixed.

Comment Developers, Developers, Developers (Score 1) 308

Unfortunately Windows 10 will be constrained by the limited memory and speed on the Pi.

So to quote someone about Developers, Developers, Developers, All the apps are already built for Raspberian that can't currently run on Windows on the Pi.

I bought a couple of the SBC to run Falcon Pi Player and run a small version of Asterisk for my SIP home office phone system. I don't know how either could possibly run under the overhead of Windows 10.

This is only two examples of the many wonderful things being done on the Pi without Windows.

Want to see what a Pi can do without Windows 10? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... One of the greatest animated light displays last year had the sequence and music played on a Pi. Great timing, no glitches, no crashes. Why mess it up trying to run this under Windows.

Comment Re:Detecting employees (Score 1) 279

Detecting an employee cam is not really all that difficult if done from the booth. Due to the geometry of the projected image on the screen, keystone distortion gives a combination of projection angle and viewer angle. Modern digital projectors have keystone correction. Old film projectors simply had aperture plates. Here is the difference.

An aperture plate is inserted into the projector to mask the sides and top and bottom of the projection beam to fit the screen. It provided no keystone correction. If a monitor test grid were projected, it would have keystone distortion with the lines narrow at the top due to the above audience projection angle. This applied to all 35mm and 70mm film projection. In short throw theatres, some barrel distortion is also introduced.

In digital projection, keystone distortion can be adjusted out by setting up the projector with a test pattern to make the geometry correct even with off axis projection.

No consumer phone that I know of has keystone correction for off axis correction of a film projected onto a flat screen. This will reveal the camera location when compared to the original projected image.

Most modern films are Digital, especially blockbusters. This means in most cases the projector has been professionally aligned to the screen with Keystone correction. With this knowledge, any keystone distortion and barrel distortion would be from the angle and distance of the camera from the flat projection surface. Shots taken from above the audience are taken from the projection booth.

With watermarking, a stray dot, blip, extra few frames between scenes, or other subtle alterations can identify which movie screen showed which film at what time. From there forensics can identify the general location in the theatre the cam was deployed. It's easy enough to identify a booth recording from the keystone.

Comment Old and died I think PICK AT (Score 1) 429

I remember running into a PICK AT system for a database application server quite a few years ago. Making a back up of the OS was difficult due to the non standard format. Found very little info on it at the time which made life difficult to service the system. It ran on a PC AT in the time of DOS.

Wikipedia on PICK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment Re:Blind test. (Score 5, Interesting) 588

Some cell tower companies and ham radio operators moving into elite neighbourhoods with high lawyer representation often will pre build the expansion and not install the equipment to collect baseline data and use the new complaints and lawsuits as baseline of the pre existing conditions. It's hard to make a case against the new cell tower or ham radio operator when the court case reveals to the plaintiffs the only operating device is the obstruction beacon.

Later when the equipment arrives and is installed, the community is not informed. Only then can the real cases be identified. Most of the time, the numbers are in the 0's.

If you put up a tower in a nice neighbourhood, make it look nice. Leave it unpowered for a few months. Reduce power on nearby towers to make marginal areas worse. Offer better signal by upgrades to nearby towers. Switch on the new tower to cover the poor coverage areas. Result, more even signal coverage with fewer towers running high power to reach into dead zones.

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