Category: Useless knowledge

Information you have no need for. Ever. Usually about me, but possibly about other trivial crap in the world.

Faulty equipment? DISH network happy to charge you for it again and again

(via The Consumerist)
Recently, John, a DISH network customer had problems with his satellite dish. Since he’d just had one dish replaced that had died after only 9 months, he felt he was entitled to a replacement. DISH network was only to happy to replace it – for a charge. Read his tale of woe:

“Greetings:

Well Memorial Day was going along swimmingly well until I decided to turn the tube on at 8:00 last night after putting my son to bed. When I turned on the TV it showed that the satellite signal was being acquired. No big deal, we had a lot of thunderstorms yesterday and I thought some may still be lurking. I Poked my head out the door and I could still see the sun setting so that wasn’t it. Time to call my friends at Dish Network…

. . .

…made arrangements to send me a “new” tuner FREE OF CHARGE (like they were doing me a favor) all I had to do was pay $14.95 for shipping. I called bullshit on that. I was more than a little irritated that I had to pay $24.95 when the receiver died in April and now they were asking me to pay $14.95 again for a piece of crap tuner that lasted a month. I then asked “Isn’t this under warranty?” No it isn’t, my warranty, when I signed up, was only for 90 days on the installation and on the original equipment. It doesn’t matter that it died a second time, the warranty expired in October…

. . .

So apparently their business model is lease crap equipment to customers, don’t stand behind it, make you jump through hoops to receive fair credit for using their services, and generally not give a shit if you cancel your subscription.

The full story is much better than this snip. Follow the above link for the details.

[tags]Dish Network, Customer service[/tags]

Sudoku

I’ve recently gotten hooked on Sudoku (like so many others, it seems). If you are into Sudoku, you should start visiting BrainBashers to get your daily dose. If the 6 available puzzles each day aren’t enough for you, then hit SuperSudoku for more (free account for 5 puzzles a day or full account for a one-time $9.70 charge for unlimited puzzles – join on their sign-up page).

If you are interested in Sudoku, but want to know more about the backstory/history of it, you should check out Wolfram’s write-up.

The Sudoku was published anonymously by Garns (1979), who created the puzzle at age 74, and then promptly relegated to obscurity. It became popular in Japan starting somewhere between 1984 and 1986 under the name “nanpure,” or Number Place. (Even today, in many Japanese publication, the puzzle is called Number Place, written in English.) The puzzle received a large amount of attention in the United States and Europe in 2005 after a regular Sudoku puzzle began appearing in the London Times. Sadly, Garns died in 1989 before getting a chance to see his creation as a worldwide phenomenon (Shortz 2005, cited in Pegg 2005).

If you still want more, you’ll have to search for it – I can’t possibly list all the good sources of games and information on the game.

I tried to include a Sudoku generator inline here, but it sadly made the rest of the site go away.  At least, it was sad for me.  So just use the above links, especially the Google search link, to find playable online versions.  And I’ll have to wish the possible extra traffic a bye-bye…   🙁

[tags]Sudoku, Suduku, Sodoko[/tags]

Typical consumer will kill their computer in 18 days?

(via The Consumerist)
Wired has an article in which they experiment with taking a newly purchased computer and acting like a typical consumer who has not had any guidance or instruction in dealing with spam, pr0n, and other frequent Intarweb occurances.  Note that this was done with the intention of seeing how quickly a system would become hopelessly unusable when used with a complete disregard for the consequences of one’s clicks.

What kind of idiot buys a computer and willingly – even eagerly – exposes it to all the malware and viruses he can? Me. I bought a Dell Dimension B110 ($468! Cheap!) and tried to kill it for more than two weeks. I clicked on every pop-up and downloaded the gnarliest porn, gambling, and hacker files I could find. It seems our Internet overlords are sterilizing spam. If I were to treat my body the way I treated this computer, I’d have yellow fever, bird flu, and Alzheimer’s. But the Dell? Eh. Somewhat the worse for wear.

. . .

Day 18: I take the Dell to Best Buy’s Geek Squad and tell a technician that I’m having a bit of trouble with it. Less than four hours later I get a call back from Carla. She declares it a total loss and advises wiping the hard drive and restoring it with system disks. “The tech ran a couple of virus scans,” she says. “One kept beeping so much that he had to just turn it off.” Ah, that’s the stuff.

[tags]Spam effects, Wired[/tags]

Sony says PS3 is a computer, not a console

In a further attempt to alienate customers, maintain an absurdly high price, and give Micro$oft a better lead in the next-gen console battle, Sony, through President and CEO Ken Kutaragi , has announced that the PlayStation 3 is a computer, not a console.

Kutaragi pointedly commented of the next-gen console, which is due to launch this November at dual price points of $499 and $599 in North America: “We don’t say it’s a game console (*laugh*) – PlayStation 3 is clearly a computer, unlike the PlayStations [released] so far.”

This, Sony says, leaves open the possibility of upgrades or additional configurations in the future.

. . . “I think it’s okay to release a [extended PS3] configuration every year”. It’s clear from the comments that Sony is indicating that it will be possible to upgrade hard drives and perhaps even other components easily.

The Sony CEO gave another example in the interview: “As PS3 is a computer… it also wants to evolve. We’ll want to upgrade the HDD size very soon – if new standards appear on the PC, we will want to support them. We may want the [Blu-ray] drive to [have a writable version upgrade].” He then tempered his comments: “Well, BD may not develop like that, though.” But extensibility is what Sony is stressing that you get for the price of a PS3, nonetheless.

I think Bill has the whole PS3 situation covered best of all the sites I follow.  That last link in particular has some pretty good discussion on the fiasco.

[tags]PS3, Playstation 3, Sony suicide[/tags]

Dungeons and Dragons online getting solo options?

(via Slashdot games)

It looks like DDO is trying to increase its numbers. Honestly, this one change might be enough to get me to try it. I’m all for teaming when playing online, given the option, but sometimes I just don’t have the time to dedicate to building and staying with a team. This change alone could open up DDO to people like me who don’t mind teaming, but don’t always have the time.

“Turbine has also adjusted the experience requirements for leveling up. The change heavily favors new players, cutting the necessary experience points to get to level two by half. However, the requirements for levels four and up will only be decreased by 10,000 points.”

And with this game not doing well, it’s even fairly affordable to hit EBGames/Gamestop or similar to pick up a copy. Hmmmm.

[tags]DDO, Dungeons and Dragons online, MMORPG[/tags]

Silly/Funny molecule names

Ohhhh, this is a looooonnnnngggggg page. Check out some of the silly names given to molecules by various scientists. Sometimes, the names are comical all by themselves. Sometimes, it takes reading the site’s commentary to get the laugh.  Here’s a tiny sample (there are so many covered, that this really is a pretty small sampling).

Draculin

Draculin is the anticoagulant factor in vampire bat saliva. It is a large glycoprotein made from a sequence of 411 amino acids, but I haven’t been able to find a picture of it yet.

DEAD

DEAD is actually the acronym for diethyl azodicarboxylate, which is an important reagent in the well-known Mitsunobu reaction which performs a stereospecific conversion of an alcohol to a primary amine. It’s quite a good acronym, as DEAD is an orange liquid that’s explosive, shock sensitive, light sensitive, toxic, a possible carcinogen or mutagen, and an eye, skin and respiratory irritant! A version of diethyl azodicarboxylate mixed with acid and triphenylphosphine has also been termed DEADCAT.

Fuchsite

Fuchsite is a mineral, and is the green form of Muscovite, KAl2(AlSi3O10)(F, OH)2. It is used as an ornamental stone, and apparently has perfect cleavage…

Erotic Acid

No, this isn’t the world’s best aphrodisiac. Its correct name is orotic acid, but it has been misspelt so often in the chemical literature that it is also known as erotic acid! Another name for it is vitamin B13. Apparently, if you add another carbon to it, it becomes homo-erotic acid…

[tags]Molecules, Chemistry[/tags]

How lasers are going to work for you

Another Modern Mechanix moment here on Blah, Blah, Blahg. I’ve gotten hooked on this site, and find great articles from days past that are interesting to me. This latest is a 1970 Popular Science article reproduced for your edification.

The light fantastic is no longer a scientific curiosity: It’s now being used for just about everything from moon measuring to tire checking

By C. P. GILMORE / PS Consulting Editor, Science

. . .

Modern use of lasers

Today, lasers are working for you in ways you may have never suspected. For example, they’re . . .

  • Guiding tunnel and trench diggers
  • Welding microcircuits
  • Drilling holes in rubber nipples for baby bottles
  • Spotting tire defects
  • Machining parts to ultra-fine tolerances
  • Helping predict earthquakes.

How lasers work

Naturally, this last line is followed by a write-up of how lasers actually work.  The explanation might have been fairly technical at the time, but now it seems a little primitive.  Or maybe I just know more about lasers than I realized.  Regardless, the article continues:

First lasers

The laser first appeared as a glint in the eyes of physicists Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow. In 1958 they wrote a paper saying that it should be possible to build a device in which photons, individual packages of light, could be used to stimulate excited molecules to give off yet more photons in step with the original ones. In 1960, physicist Theodore Maiman, then of Hughes, built one. Despite the high-powered physics that led up to its design, it was a deceptively simple device—a rectangular chunk of ruby surrounded by a bright photo-flash lamp. Every time the lamp flashed, its photons jiggled certain atoms in the ruby, causing them to give off photons and stimulate yet other atoms to radiate, just the way Schawlow and Townes said it would happen.

The new device was called a LASER—which stood for Light Amplification by Simulated Emission of Radiation. Since then, other investigators have made hundreds of liquids, solids, and gases lase, giving off hundreds of different wavelengths or colors of visible light, and hundreds of other wavelengths of invisible infrared and ultraviolet. Some generate power continuously, others in bursts or pulses.

Because laser light is coherent, it can be focused to an extremely small spot. The energy density of such a spot can be a billion watts per square centimeter or more—enough to vaporize any substance in existence.

Whoa.  That’s a lot of power in a single square centimeter.  I believe that’s even more concentrated death power than the Solar Death Ray!  After all this, there is a lot of information on potential practical uses for lasers – Military uses, highly accurate measurements, photo manipulation (particularly clearing up fuzzy images), and so on.  One of the most interesting to me is for large TVs.

Television. Another promising area: big-screen color TV. The current color TV tube has about reached its limit. And that three-color dot system doesn’t produce the sharpest pictures. A much better TV system could be built using three laser beams—red, blue, and green—projected on a screen. The screen could be any size—it could cover a living-room wall or the end of a theatre.

At least two such systems have been built. General Telephone and Electronics has demonstrated a four-foot-wide TV picture. And now, at Expo 70 in Japan, Hitachi has on display a system with a picture 9 by 12 feet. People who have seen it say the picture is more brilliant and lifelike than the one we see on regular color TV sets.

Ultimately, such wall-to-wall TV may be practical in our homes. But right now, there’s a problem. Most lasers are highly inefficient. The big-screen laser display in Japan uses three lasers, each putting out about 7 watts of power. But it takes 30 kilowatts to run the equipment—too much for use in the home.

They had me right up to 30 kilowatts.  I don’t think my wife would let me run  a 30 kilowatt TV in our house.  Of course, think of the reduction in heating costs for the winter when such a beast was running!  Anyway, I think this concept of large televisions in the home is worth pursuing.  Someday it might be nice to have a screen large enough to function as a home theatre…
Sadly, nowhere in the article is there any guidance on how to mount these technological wonders on the heads of frikkin’ sharks for offensive use – I really thought such an idea would have been covered under the military research section.  Although maybe that information is classified.

[tags]Modern Mechanix, Lasers, Frikkin’ Sharks[/tags]

The facts

This is just one of those posts intended to remind you of the facts.

  • Chuck Norris gave Mona Lisa that smile.
  • When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the Earth down.
  • Chuck Norris doesn’t read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.
  • Guns don’t kill people. Chuck Norris kills People.

[tags]Chuck Norris, Facts[/tags]

PC World’s 25 worst tech products

Thanks to a couple of cow-orkers who shared this with me. It’s so hard to pick a favorite, as there are so many disasterous products. Let’s try popping up this sample:

7. Microsoft Bob (1995)

No list of the worst of the worst would be complete without Windows’ idiot cousin, Bob. Designed as a “social” interface for Windows 3.1, Bob featured a living room filled with clickable objects, and a series of cartoon “helpers” like Chaos the Cat and Scuzz the Rat that walked you through a small suite of applications. Fortunately, Bob was soon buried in the avalanche of hype surrounding Windows 95, though some of the cartoons lived on to annoy users of Microsoft Office and Windows XP (Clippy the animated paper clip, anyone?).

Mostly, Bob raised more questions than it answered. Like, had anyone at Microsoft actually used Bob? Did they think anyone else would? And did they deliberately make Bob’s smiley face logo look like Bill Gates, or was that just an accident?

[tags]PC World, Tech disasters[/tags]