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How the hell do you remanufacture a PN junction!!?

With the same smelter used to create that wafer. A fact mysteriously absent from environmentalist doctrine, since they're too stupid (or scientifically ignorant) to realize that it had to be made, and manufacturing costs were incurred. They're uncircumcised, therefore they're idiots: ignore them.

Save the planet. Forget the bullshit of the ignorant and flush your toilet with gray water: http://www.glowingplate.com/ecology

I cannot, in recorded history, tell you of an incident where gravity has failed to keep a liquid in a container.

In consumer installations, this will rarely happen. Think about it! How many of your customers will whine, "it's too complicated!" if you were to pass them a door seal and a Philips screwdriver for their front-load washing machine.

Five years! Wow! That's almost 1/10th the age of my washing machine, a 1954 Maytag which trusts in gravity to retain the water!

The sole and singual benefit of a front-loader is that they're stackable. That's it.

Less water consumption = less cleanliness. Go take a university-level chemistry course or two. Make careful notes of such concepts as solubility concepts. Remember that it's not the detergent or the agitation which dissolves the dirt, it's the universal solvent which does it.

Note also that I don't believe in waste, it's just that I'm not sufficiently ignorant to tow the party line. Want to save water? Here's how, including pictures of my own washer and installation.

I dunno. I'm not sufficiently ignorant to overload any washing machine, rather it be a real one or a eurotrash front-loader.

Oh boy...

Along those lines, did you know that the PC LOAD LETTER error can be changed on most LaserJet II/III models? Maybe like "OUT OF LETTER" or "FEED ME A4". I still encounter these things in offices, and I still see one of the most cryptic error messages ever written. Exact proof of your statement: sensible defaults are essential, most people never figured out how to set the clocks on the VCRs; there's no way they can handle something like customizing a menu.

Years ago, I wrote a big long rant on why Linux isn't ready for the desktop; the GUI for virtually everything in Linux sucks. "Designed by geeks, for geeks" works great for admin-type stuff, but absolutely not at all for Joe Sixpack or PHB's e-mail client.

My original rant, only slightly appended over the years.

Until the Open Source community actively recruits user interface experts, we will never get Linux out of the server closet.

Or he could learn to drink alone, like the rest of us who have homes and mortgages and no lives.

(Oh God, help me, know any cute Jewish boys? Send them to this site.)

Uhhh... no. File associations are based on extensions. It's probable that you've forgotten to turn off the Explorer "feature" of hiding extensions for known filetypes. This way, you get sexygirls.jpg.exe which appears as sexygirls.jpg, or xxx.zip.scr which appears as xxx.zip. Most people are ignorant enough to leave that "feature" enabled as per Microsoft's negligent default; furthermore, most users who are pseudo-capable with computers will click on it with the flawed reasoning that, "Well, it's a JPEG, so it can't be a virus".

Furthermore, years ago I ranted on my website that it was *very* possible to run Windows e-mail viruses, etc. under Wine. So easy that, with Red Hat 7.2's default associations which launch Wine to run DOS/Windows apps, I accidentally infected my Wine directory while demonstrating Linux freedom from virii... "Moving right along, you can see how well Linux can emulate Windows well enough to run many programs..."

Off-topic, but posting near the top in the hopes of a response.

Does this torrent work? I've only played with BitTorrent just a little bit, but I wanted to download a TV movie that I missed and this was the only place I've found it. No dilution of copyright is intended; just wish to "borrow the VHS cassette from a friend who recorded it".

Well within tolerance. Most old radios (AA5, transformer-operated, whatever) were built with +/-20% tolerances on all components. Compounded tolerance is therefore about 20%. The only issue is that rural power would often be lower - say 100V RMS though supposed to be 110V - and to avoid warranty issues, the radios would be designed to run down at lower voltages.

Having paid my university tuition in electrical engineering by restoring old radios and TVs, I can assure you that most old radios will work (and most 1940s-1960s TV sets will produce a picture) when they're on a variac down as low as 70 volts. But remember to reform the capacitors properly - I drive 'em up to 140V and leave 'em there for a couple of hours. Never had a line voltage, capacitor shorting or tube life issue even with my solid 120V RMS service. Worst thing was a little audio distortion and white clipping at 140V RMS.

Lawrence Wade, BOFH

www.glowingplate.com

Great! You have 1,000 machines to do this on. Get to work. (Ahh, yes. GUIs are *renowned* for their scriptability!)

Agreed. And the process control, from the GUI, is actually leaps and bounds better than in Linux. If I have anything in X eat the processor, my recourse is to log in by telnet, hit top, and kill the errant process. Joe Sixpack can figure out Windows three-fingered salute, but what if he doesn't have another computer to telnet in from? (Of course, I could just kill X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, but then I'd also lose everything I was working on in the non-hung processes.) At least in Windows NT/2K/XP, I can just bring up the task manager and kill it.

(KDE and Gnome need a key combination to immediately renice the process eating the most CPU time and then bringing up their own version of Task Manager.)

I agree. But the desktop is what Windows is inherently good at; servers and Big Iron is what Unix is inherently good at. Use the best tool for the job. Like Linux is not a good desktop operating system YET , Windows is not a good server, cluster or mainframe OS yet.

The difference is, of course, that I believe Linux will - one day - be an excellent desktop operating system, whereas limitations inherent in the underlying Windows concepts will prevent it from ever amounting to anything substantial in that arena. Sell your Microsoft shares.

KDE is nice, and I like it. For one thing, they seem to push the standard "look and feel" to developers very well, so you generally can fire up a new program and know exactly where everything is. Default installs are usually pleasant and functional, and reskinning it is a snap. But it has many problems:

• The combination of KDE/X makes an Athlon 800 unusably slow as even an e-mail and MP3-playing drone. By contrast, even bloated and fat Windows XP runs happily on a PII-266 for the same tasks. Note that this is a very big problem - just about all intelligent people that I've met will try out a new operating system on their old machine before installing it on their xGHz main computer.
• Not all apps will have been written specifically for KDE, and no one seems to be able to agree on standards for things like Copy and Paste.
• OLE. Can I make a "PowerPoint"-style presentation which embeds and plays a video in *anything* on Unix, KDE or not? I can do it very easily in Office 95 on Windows 95. That's 9 years ago, boys and girls!
• KDE's help system is horrible, lacking any information on how to configure the underlying operating system. Windows XP's is marginal at best, but still leaps and bounds ahead of KDE's.
• One "Home" button in every default install of Konqueror that I've ever seen. One "Home" button works great in Windows file/web browser - there's no concept of /home/$username in Windows. But really doesn't work well at all in a Unix environment where Home can be /home/ or www.yahoo.com.
• KDE is only as good as its applications. Many of them are no better than bad Windows shareware, with few poorly-implemented features and lots of silent crashes and bombs.

These all limit its usefulness as a desktop, and generally serve to reinforce Windows position, since there's no credible desktop alternative on the x86 platform... yet.

I've ranted about this before.

Part of the reason they still have +90% market share is that they actually sit ordinary users down in focus groups and ask them what they do and don't like. They have expert graphic designers (not 14-year-old kids with home-drawn anime posters on the walls) design icons and the general cosmetic details. The applications software pool is large and, for the most part, more stable than its free counterparts.

As a desktop operating system, the best thing that Linux currently has going for it is its stability. Of course, that won't stop KMail from segfaulting instead of dying gracefully when it runs out of disk space or any number of other user annoyances.

My father had precisely the same reaction with that message from a LaserJet II that I gave him a few years ago. I'm pretty sure that's exactly the message.

I don't understand why it's such a confusing message, but I also wouldn't have phrased it the same way. It's one of the most classic examples of the reason why engineers and developers should never be allowed to design user interfaces. (When they do, you end up with stuff like xine.)

Given a fixed number of display characters (14, IIRC), why not alternate - "OUT OF PAPER" with "LETTER - TOP" or "LETTER - BOTTOM" or "LEGAL - TRAY". I'm sure it would have been only slightly more expensive to do - a couple of extra lines of software, would have reduced tech support calls, and would have been useful even up to a III/IIID with the second (bottom) tray. Even easier would have just been "OUT OF LETTER", "OUT OF LEGAL", in situations with plain letter in the top cassette and letterhead in the bottom, I'd hope that whoever had put the paper in it originally could also figure out that there should have been letter-sized paper in both cassettes.

How 'bout the LaserJet I? I think "out of paper" was a 21 error.

No recession here? Hahahahaha!

Okay, maybe there wasn't a recession in the strictest sense, but I can assure you...

Personally, I'll go stateside in a second as soon as George Dubya is out of office. He's even more draconian than the Canadian government "protecting" us from unpleasant things and "erosion of Canadian culture".

An engine is really just an air pump except it operates in reverse.

There are two kinds of pump. Positive displacement, and non-positive displacement.

A turbine engine - like a jet engine or a gas turbine - is not a positive displacement pump. As a result, not all of the expanding gases serve to drive the impeller (which eventually drives the wheels). Continuing the pump analogy, this would be equivalent to a centrifugal pump (think of centrifugal water pumps found in major appliances and "biscuit blowers" you can get for your computer) or a conventional axial fan (ship's propeller, cute little fan that keeps your computer's power supply from cooking).

A piston or vaned pump is positive displacement - the slip past the piston rings or vanes is minimal. A conventional reciprocating car engine is equivalent to a piston pump like you'd find in an air compressor, while a Wankel is more like a vaned pump like you'd find in industrial machinery and any place where you have to pump a fluid against a head (large rise). (My grey water toilet uses a Wolfcraft drill pump, which is a kind of vane pump.)

Gas turbines lose due to slip through the turbine. Also, I don't think most people are too keen on having super-hot exhaust gases. (One of the most recent turbine cars was the Chrysler Turbine car; it was an experimental car abandoned in the early 1960s because there was no way to make the gas mileage even remotely reasonable. There is precisely one still in operating condition, and I saw it driving on the show grounds at a car show - sounds like a vacuum cleaner! *HOT* blast as it drives slowly past.)

Wankel rotaries are beautiful, but by the time anyone had figured out how to make end seals for the rotors, emissions laws had demanded better control of combustion chamber shape. That was nearly impossible to do with a rotary motor, given that the combustion chamber's shape is dictated by the need to contact the end seals. I'd love to see how Mazda did it in the new RX-8.

For sure! I'm assuming that since they don't own their own computers, they're probably not too capable with them. They're not likely to break Windows 2000 (which is slightly more secure than Windows 98). Of course, they still can break it if they want to.

Go with Eudora for e-mail. It plays well in multiple-user systems, and there's a free edition with spyware-free advertising. I've been using Eudora for years on all my Windows boxes, and I wish they'd come up with a Linux version. I love it all the way down to the sarcastic user interface:

"Eudora got tired of waiting for the server to respond"

"Register your copy of Eudora and we'll erect a giant statue of you on the lawn of our corporate headquarters - (offer void on the planet Earth)"

"There has been an error transferring your mail. I said: PASS <shhhh! Don't tell anyone.> and then the POP server ($ACCOUNT@$SERVER) said: ERR [AUTH] Password supplied for blah is incorrect."

BLAH BLAH BLAH button to view message headers.

"Your message to $ADDRESS regarding $SUBJECT is the sort of thing that might get your keyboard washed out with soap, if you get my drift. You might consider toning it down."

Oh, and unlike Mozilla's mail client, this thing actually has a real (underlining, passive) spell-checker instead of one that bonks you in the face over and over and over for every word it doesn't know. Mozilla's spell checker is, like, so 1994. KMail fixed that over a year ago!

Oh yeah, I agree; sometimes it *does* take a lot of reading to get your head around something. And other times, you just need to follow through examples until you learn the method because the textbook describes the proof so poorly.

Note also that in my engineering program, our focus wasn't on proofs or theory. It was about practical applications of higher math. The whole idea is that math is a tool for us. Our tests and exams were "Solve this", "Integrate that", "Find the radius of convergence of this series". It was possible to do 100% of the problems on a test correctly, and as such, get an A+. Which is only fair; I don't consider that to be grade inflation. This is not an English Literature class or something else which is only qualitatively correct or incorrect.

I have a collection of Calculus books - over a dozen now, old textbooks from used bookstores. My personal favorite is the 1910 gem, Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus Thompson. Of course, it wasn't helpful beyond Calculus I, but I still refer to it when I've forgotten how to integrate something. It's helpful to have a bunch of different textbooks explaining the same thing; sooner or later you'll find an explanation which just makes things drop into place.

But if you still can't get it, you have to be honest with yourself and ask yourself how much of your homework you've really been doing.

You also have to consider the possibility of attention deficit disorder (ADD). I *couldn't* do math until I got it delt with; now I love math, and there are about 100 other facets of my life which have been improved as a result of diagnosis and treatment. (I think ADD is a different evolutionary behavior rather than a "disorder" as it's called. ADD helps me with a lot of things, coming up with creative and different ways of solving problems. But it does make some aspects of life in today's world tough. I take my Ritalin only when I need to focus.)

But the most important thing is that, in the immortal words of Bernie Perrier (a great high school calculus teacher), "Math is not a spectator sport". You *have to* do the homework. It's that simple.

Oh yeah, I agree; sometimes it *does* take a lot of reading to get your head around something. And other times, you just need to follow through examples until you learn the method because the textbook describes the proof so poorly.

Note also that in my engineering program, our focus wasn't on proofs or theory. It was about practical applications of higher math. The whole idea is that math is a tool for us. Our tests and exams were "Solve this", "Integrate that", "Find the radius of convergence of this series". It was possible to do 100% of the problems on a test correctly, and as such, get an A+. Which is only fair; I don't consider that to be grade inflation. This is not an English Literature class or something else which is only qualitatively correct or incorrect.

I have a collection of Calculus books - over a dozen now, old textbooks from used bookstores. My personal favorite is the 1910 gem, Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus Thompson. Of course, it wasn't helpful beyond Calculus I, but I still refer to it when I've forgotten how to integrate something. It's helpful to have a bunch of different textbooks explaining the same thing; sooner or later you'll find an explanation which just makes things drop into place.

But if you still can't get it, you have to be honest with yourself and ask yourself how much of your homework you've really been doing.

You also have to consider the possibility of attention deficit disorder (ADD). I *couldn't* do math until I got it delt with; now I love math, and there are about 100 other facets of my life which have been improved as a result of diagnosis and treatment. (I think ADD is a different evolutionary behavior rather than a "disorder" as it's called. ADD helps me with a lot of things, coming up with creative and different ways of solving problems. But it does make some aspects of life in today's world tough. I take my Ritalin only when I need to focus.)

But the most important thing is that, in the immortal words of Bernie Perrier (a great high school calculus teacher), "Math is not a spectator sport". You *have to* do the homework. It's that simple.

I wouldn't bother. For one thing, a spray-on product is likely to be rather ineffective - sure, it could be a textured clearcoat, but the texture is only going to trap road dirt and make your license plate filthy all the time.

The other thing is that around here (Ontario, Canada), it's illegal to have anything on your license plate. Cops ignore dealer frames and clear plastic license plate covers, but if you go with anything else, they're likely to nail you.

Another thing is that photo radar units (in Ontario experience) tended to be installed in high-traffic areas because that's where they'd catch the most violators. Because they're high-traffic areas, they're also precisely the places where you shouldn't be driving like an idiot. I like to stretch those throttle return springs, too - but the time and place to do it is in an *empty* piece of freeway where there's no traffic. No traffic generally means a quiet enough area that a photo radar unit wouldn't be financially viable or would be subject to vandalism. My personal record is getting my 1976 big-block Dodge Ram up to 120 MPH - it got a little scary so I didn't push it further, the aerodynamics of the vehicle are such that the back end was getting light. And the only person I was risking was myself.

The other thing I'd remind you is that the speedometer in your car is really not a very accurate gauge - generally +/- 10% anyway. Then, you get the optional wheel package on your new car, and you'll have bigger wheels with the same speedometer - probably no difference in the speedometer pickup gear (VSS) or software in the ECM, and you'd be going ($whatever_percent_the_circumference_of_your_tires _are_bigger_than_speedometer_design)*($speedometer _reading).

A friend of mine is a cop, and he told me the rules: they don't pull you over if you're within 20% of the speed limit. 120km/h in a 100km/h zone will be ignored, unless you're driving like an asshole (changing lanes constantly, tailgating, staying in the passing lane when not passing, etc.).

I have never in my life been nailed for speeding or any other moving violation. Cops are reasonable, and if you're playing safe, they don't care.

Vehicles I've had (as a testament to how quickly I've travelled):

• 1973 Plymouth Duster 340-4bbl, ex drag race car which I returned to the street (had to reinstall taillights, wipers, exhaust system, etc.), 12.5 seconds on the quarter mile on street tires, did wheelies on slicks.
• 1980 Chevrolet Chevette with Buick 3.8L V6, 12.8 seconds on the 1/4 mile, used to twist the structure hard enough that the doors would pop open.
• 1968 Plymouth Valiant Signet 2-door sedan, 440CID (7.2L) big-block V8 - not as quick as the Duster only because it wasn't as wildly built
• 1976 Dodge Ram Heavy-Half with towing package (3.93 gears in rear) and 400CID (6.6L) big-block V8 - stomping on the gas causes the glove box door to pop open, smokes the tires on the 1-2 and 2-3 shifts.

Fast cars I've driven extensively (in order of potential for speeding tickets):

• 1967 Plymouth GTX, 426 Hemi, 4-speed
• 1987 Buick Grand National
• 1975 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme with built Olds Rocket 350
• 1995 Chevrolet Impala SS

Like I say, don't worry about the photo radar. You'll only find it installed in places where you shouldn't be driving like an asshole.

"Respond to all spam mails!"

Do that, and I will personally hunt you down and do something nasty to you, like make you sit in a IRC room full of AOL users for a few hours...

Seriously, though. I get about 5-10 spam messages a day (without filtering, even), and about 40-50 bounces\replies from people because some asshat is sending out spam with my address.

As for recursively visiting URLs, I'll agree to that :) I personally use a script from glowingplate.com. (Don't kill his site!) Here's the script:

#!/bin/bash

OUR_PID=$$
renice 19 $OUR_PID

COUNT=0
while [ $COUNT -lt 2000 ]; do

lynx -dump -useragent="By sending e-mail to my domain, you agreed to the published Terms of Service of my privately owned domains and servers, including the stipulation that all spam would result in your webserver log being filled with garbage. If you don't like it, don't send e-mail to my domains. If you don't want me to visit your website, don't solicit my visit by sending me unsolicited e-mail, because EACH unsolicited e-mail will result in your server logs being filled with this junk. You do not have a First Amendment right to waste my bandwidth, electricity, CPU time or hard disk drive space with your crap, characteristically illiterate or otherwise. Furthermore, I pray to The Lord Satan below that you get colorectal cancer and die a slow, horribly painful and undignified death." $1?YOU_FILL_MY_MAILBOX_WITH_UNSOLICITED_CRAP_AND_W E_WILL_DO_THE_SAME_TO_YOUR_WEBLOGS

let COUNT=COUNT+1
echo $COUNT
done

I just run that a couple times for each e-mail I receive. The messages have slowly tapered off...

That's right. I used to have a DeLorean (rare, 1983 model, note the fuel fill door on the hood) and still have a driver's side gull wing door kicking around my garage. Lemme tell you, they're already a pain in the ass to work on - the engine is in the back and there are the little "sail windows" which give it the rough profile of a hatchback when it isn't. I can't imagine how it is to try to get at the motor with all the BTTF props on it!

Anyway, I read a lot about DeLorean. Here's the problem. DeLorean was a former Pontiac executive, and one of the creators of the Pontiac GTO.

Angered with GM, he wrote a scathing book, "On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors" in which he detailed how the first Chevy Vega tore itself in half after only 8 miles on the test track.

(The Vega and its twin the Pontiac (dis)Astre, was the predecessor to the Chevette, produced from 1971-1977, and is probably the single worst car ever made by Detroit - still not so bad compared to lots of early Japanese and Eastern European cars, though... Renault Beep-Beep Dauphine!)

DeLorean decided to make his own personal luxury car, the ethical luxury car. Stainless steel body that would never rust, best of the best materials (yeah, as a former DeLorean owner, tell me how to fix dents in the stainless steel!). By the time he'd arranged for the production (factory in Ireland for the tax breaks), it was 1981.

When the Guigaro (same styling house that did most VW, Hyundai, Audi) styled the DeLorean, it was the mid-1970s. Such a simple rectangular, clean car was unheard of.

In 1978 Ford introduced the Ford Fairmont and Mercury Zephyr, also the restyled "Fox-body" Mustang. GM introduced the super-square Impala about this time - all of these are things that we associate with 1980s cars, versus the rounded and skirted shapes of 1970s cars. All of a sudden, the DeLorean's simple clean angular body wasn't so cutting-edge.

In 1981, inflation was rampant, and the economy was doing poorly. Chrysler was on the verge of bankruptcy. When you factor in inflation, gasoline was more expensive then than it is now. People were not in the mood to buy luxury cars; people were buying Chevettes and Ford Escorts and Plymouth Reliants. DeLorean's nascent car company launched at the wrong time.

By 1983, he was running out of money. The cars were already looking dated as the simple early 1980s angular shape was giving way to the "Aerobird" shapes of the new 1984 Thunderbird, Cougar and Tempo, all premiering in the 1983 car show circuit. There was no money to restyle and retool, and DeLorean started to look for other ways of keeping the company afloat, at least for a little while.

The car had been produced with massive subsidies from the (North/South - can't remember which) Irish government. When the company finally folded (with a little over 2,000 DeLorean DMC-12 sports cars produced), the government destroyed all the stamping dies and tooling to ensure that no more DeLoreans would ever be made.

This is typical of the sorts of problems I rant about in my page dedicated to the reasons why Linux isn't ready for the desktop yet.

What OO needs to have is, in the drop down file menu, "Save as Word file", and then pop up a box asking for selection of the filename and five buttons: "Recipient is using Word 95", "Recipient is using Word 97", "Recipient is using Word 2000", "Recipient is using Word XP", "Don't know what version of Word the Recipient is using". At the bottom of the box, another button, smaller: "If the document won't be edited by the recipient, please consider clicking here to send as Adobe Acrobat PDF."

The loss of information warning should include, at the very least, the word "formatting" - as in, "Warning: saving in this file type will result in some loss of formatting information." Better still, though, would be "You've asked OO to save the document in a file type which might not support all the features of this document. Your text and graphics will all be saved, but it might not be laid out quite as you intended. Are you sure you wish to continue?"

Developers need to remember to think in terms of the lowest common denominator.

By the time you need a car with silly little lights on it to get laid, you're too pathetic to be allowed to procreate.

I used to enjoy taking those guys out at traffic lights. They'd be sitting there at the traffic light, girlfriend in the passenger seat, and I'd pull up in a 1980 Chevette with a hood scoop on it. The hood scoop got them really riled up, they'd think I was a poseur (like they are) with a "tuned" Chevette that they could easily blow away. What they didn't know was that there was a Buick 3.8L V6 stuffed under the hood and that the Chevette was pulling 12.8s on the 1/4 mile.

Heheheh...

By the time you need a car with silly little lights on it to get laid, you're too pathetic to be allowed to procreate.

I used to enjoy taking those guys out at traffic lights. They'd be sitting there at the traffic light, girlfriend in the passenger seat, and I'd pull up in a 1980 Chevette with a hood scoop on it. The hood scoop got them really riled up, they'd think I was a poseur (like they are) with a "tuned" Chevette that they could easily blow away. What they didn't know was that there was a Buick 3.8L V6 stuffed under the hood and that the Chevette was pulling 12.8s on the 1/4 mile.

Heheheh...

I read somewhere that 80% of the water use in California was for agricultural irrigation - so it seems to me that if environmentalists wish to preach about conservation, they've got bigger priorities than the average consumer.

Quoted from article: They argue that many water shortages could simply be solved by better conservation of existing supplies.

I agree. Couple of things - in coastal areas, do you really need to shower in fresh water? With most new construction around here using plastic hoses instead of copper piping, the biggest residential cost would be an incremental one to install a second (stainless steel) hot water heater. Besides, salt water showers and baths are really nice - or maybe salt water is just a novelty to me because I live inland. Installing the head-end pumping stations, water mains, etc would be a horrendous task, but many cities are already faced with the task of digging up their streets and replacing century-old water mains.

I see the primary uses of this water being the shower/tub and refilling the toilet.

Of course, if you're handy and want to save a few bucks, *anyone* can install a gray-water system like mine. Reusing the washing machine's water saves me $200/year and gives satisfying soapsuds when I'm doing Number One.

Yup... But the supply of so many other derelict older machines is such that you wouldn't go to that trouble. I've got over a dozen Pentium I machines kicking around the house unused; if the power supply blows in one of them, I'll just grab useful things (memory, CD-ROM drives that actually read CD-RW discs, etc) and pitch the carcass. I think most people wouldn't even go to that trouble.

The longer we can make a product's life cycle last, the longer people hold onto it, the less of a throwaway item a computer becomes. I'd love to see computers become more of a "durable good."

I agree completely, but the trend (sad as it is) is in the opposite direction.

My washing machine is a 1954 Maytag - you can see a corner of it at my gray water toilet's page. It had been in storage for a little while, and during that time mice damaged the motor and a few other parts. I pulled the washer apart to clean out mouse feces and found that there was no appreciable wear to the gears in the transmission or any other part of it - and that's after 49 years of cleaning dirty underwear! So I spent about $250 on new gaskets, seals, bearings, hoses, transmission oil, etc. and rebuilt it. It's ready for another 50 years. Of course, for $250, I could have bought a new washing machine, but you can't convince me that a new washing machine would last 10 years let alone 50. Major appliances are now a disposable commodity.

Same thing with cars. My '76 Dodge Ram pickup truck is overbuilt - everything on it was designed to survive abuse and to last. It's also easy to fix - I pulled the engine out of an old Ram (not mine) in about 2 hours. In contrast, my sister has a new Silverado - I can flex the front fenders with moderate thumb pressure, and it would take hours to clear the hoses and wiring off that motor before yanking it! As a result, the Silverado's fenders will rust through faster when the paint gets scratched, dent easier, and since there's so much crap added to the truck (power windows, etc), it just becomes a nightmare to work on. When it fails, you junk it. Meantime, I'm rebuilding a Slant-6 (25MPG highway with my 4-speed overdrive manual transmission) to drop under the hood of my Ram - it may be a little heavier on gasoline and emissions than a modern truck, but if you do the math to calculate how much coal it takes for the steel mill to melt a shredded car, all of a sudden keeping that well-maintained old vehicle on the road is the best environmental course of action. (I'd daily-drive a car but I need a truck about once a week; it's cheaper to pay the gas to drive the truck all week than it is to insure and sticker a second vehicle - that's something environmentalists should address!)

Don't even get me started on Honda Civics; they're the automotive equivalent of a Bic lighter - absolutely perfectly reliable and perfectly disposable.

VCRs are the same. You can buy the $59 model, or you can buy the $200 model thinking that it will be better built and last longer. Nope... you're just paying for software which enables more features on the same flimsy mechanism.

I blame CAD, scientific calculators and finite element analysis for this. Used to be that you'd only be able to carry two or three significant figures when you were working with sliderules - so you'd round up forces and round down material strengths. The compound effect of this rounding was that things were a lot better built than they needed to be - hence, they survived real-world abuse better and lasted longer. The pair of jeans caught under the agitator didn't strip the gears out of the transmission, and sitting on the hood at the drive-in movie didn't dent it. Of course, CAD, FEA and scientific calculators allow yo

Yeah... if you have an efficient furnace.

I'm currently in Ottawa, Canada - either the coldest or second coldest world capital. I'm renting, 'cause there ain't no way in hell that I plan on living here permanently. And the house I'm renting has a 35-year-old oil furnace.

Estimating its efficiency at 70%, I did some calculations based on my best oil quote. I looked up the BTUs of heat per gallon of heating oil, and compared it to the BTUs of heat per kWh of electricity. Since electricity here was fixed at 4.3 cents/kWh (up to 4.7 cents/kWh as of April 1), it was cheaper to heat by electricity. The situation would have been different if I were using a newer oil or gas furnace.

Remember, all electricity consumed inside the house, in one way or another, heats the house - the exceptions being the small amounts of light, sound and RF energy which escape. My roommates loved it - "Go ahead, leave the lights on, but close the blinds first!"

Therefore, I heated my house with electricity. I'd been planning on running a stack of Pentium-I class machines doing SETI@Home work units - at least the energy gets used for something productive on its way to becoming heat - but didn't have time to build the rack to hold all these machines, nor to duct them into the cold air return on the furnace. So instead I picked up a few $20 ceramic heaters and threw them into a big steel box ducted to the furnace and controlled by the thermostat. My electric bill from January to March was $425 - and that includes heating, lighting, the dryer, etc. - very impressively low!

Very true. Most people who think electric cars are a good idea, simply don't understand anything about electrical generation and distribution systems (like, how many coal and nuclear plants are gonna have to be built when 10,000,000 Los Angeles commuters start plugging in their electric cars every night?). It was even rampant in my electrical engineering courses in university!

In Eastern Ontario, given our proximity to Quebec, I'd assume that most of our energy is imported from their hydroelectric dams. But either way, my rationale is cost. Generally, saving money is the most powerful incentive to cut use of resources.

I have ADD (not ADHD, not hyperactive, just short attention span) and there's a lot of anectodal evidence that it may be genetic - ie. a child is diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, one of the parents reads the screening test and recognizes it in him/her self. Certainly ADD/ADHD might provide an evolutionary advantage which is mostly stifled in today's modern world - consider creativity.

People with ADD/ADHD-type behaviors tend to "collect" each other, snowballing, because we naturally keep each other from being bored. And most of the people I know with ADD/ADHD behaviors like to watch a lot of television for its constant effortless stimulation.

So let's go on the assumption, for the moment, that ADD/ADHD is genetic in nature: one or both of the parents may have it. And the other assumption that people with ADD/ADHD like to watch television. It's not a big leap for us to guess, then, that maybe these parents knew that they liked TV and so let the kids watch a lot of TV.

If this is the case, then lots of TV in childhood is more likely symptomatic of the parents' ADD/ADHD behaviors, and symptomatic of the child's greater chances of developing these behaviors.

This also explains people like me. I wasn't allowed to watch much TV at all as a child; neither one of my parents were big fans of TV, finding other forms of stimulation. But both of my parents show most of the symptoms of ADD.

Uhhh... Okay. Credentials: Former professional video technician (at the SkyDome in Toronto) before being hired to design radar video systems for Litton. Also an avid collector and restorer of early television sets.

In the 1950s, AC power was not universal, especially in rural areas (note the sustained popularity of the "All American Five" AC/DC table radio at that time). Lots of places had DC, and lots of cities had 25Hz power well into the late 1950s. Nor was it necessarily going to be in sync from one town to the next, so you couldn't guarantee that the 60Hz powerline hum could be synchronized with the TV station's 60Hz vertical signal. In other words, you couldn't be guaranteed that the hum was going to happen in the vertical blanking interval (that black bar you see rolling when the vertical hold control is set wrong).

I suspect that the vertical was chosen to be at 60Hz more because the large current draw of the vertical output tube driving the deflection yoke would then be more likely to occur during the charge cycle of the set's filter capacitors, allowing smaller capacitors to be used (cheaper). This of course being a time when electrolytic filter capacitors (in fact, all small parts) were still hand made.

Even more importantly, you should remember that most early TV sets (until the advent of selenium rectifiers in about 1955) had full-wave rectifiers, generally using a 5U4 or similar tube. A full-wave rectifier folds the negative half of the sinewave up to the positive side, which effectively doubles the frequency to 120Hz.

Either way, if the set is operating correctly, regardless of color standard, you will not see any powerline artifacts or ripple. It's when the horizontal system starts to come out of resonance that the biggest current draw happens in the set. Your horizontal output tube (transistor) consumes the most power of any part of the set; if a typical 1950s DuMont or Admiral has a cathode current of 120mA (at ~300V) and you misadjust the horizontal hold, that current will spike to over double that. That will load down the set's power supply, discharge the filter capacitors more, and you might start to hear 120Hz (full wave rectifier at 60Hz) hum in the set's speaker.

IIRC, the original B&W broadcast was at 60 frames/second, but there was some technical reason they had to slightly shift it in order to add the color subcarrier.

Yup. The original NTSC standard was 30FPS; when the 3.58MHz sinewave which carries color was added, the bandwidth of the signal had to be increased. (The original was 3.5MHz bandwidth for the image; reducing the frame rate slightly was sufficient to keep the bandwidth inside the original spectrum and didn't screw up many of the existing TV sets.)

Old B&W TVs were the worst with this noise distortion because they weren't designed to try to prevent it.

Note that the NTSC color TV standard was adopted in 1953, though not implemented until 50 years ago today. Every TV set built since then has known about the new frame rate the sets would have to handle. I actively collect and restore early TV sets, and I only have a few which predate this - they're rate.

Again, you don't get powerline beat in the picture unless something is wrong with the set's filter capacitors.

If you're getting a beat in the picture which, on a blank raster, moves in time with the vertical hold control, then you've got a problem where the vertical is either consuming too much current, or a

I meant to reply here rather than my post in the previous parent, I clicked on the link and brainfarted about the subject.

My toilet costs me about $200/year to flush (based on number of flushes per day counted for a typical week, and the size of the toilet's tank). So I built a system to refill it using water from my washing machine.

I did also consider using the water from the shower, but in practice, the water from the washing machine provides enough water to keep the storage barrel full.

Whether you have one or several toilets, the number of flushes per day is probably proportional to the number of people in the house. Since the laundry usage is also proportional to the number of people in the house, the water barrel is likely to remain full, but I'm sure there'd be no harm in dropping a pipe off the clean-out port at the bottom of the bathtub/shower U-trap, putting in another U-trap to serve as a vapor barrier, and draining that into the barrel. A couple of barrels should probably also be paralleled for a high-volume multiple toilet installation, but if you store too much water, it will start to grow (stinky) algae.

I tried paralleling barrels, but in practice, I didn't need to - just two people in my house. It'd be very easy to do, just a hose connecting fittings near the bottoms of each barrel, and they'll reach an equilibrium even if it's several minutes after the washing machine has finished a drain cycle.

As for what's wrong with gray water toilets, I don't know. I know it's against building codes here, but I don't know why. My system, not being a permanent installation or requiring any modification to the existing plumbing, skirts the rules about building codes.

I have yet to find a single disadvantage to my gray water system.

The temperature controller is an *excellent* idea, I think I'll take a look at incorporating it into my house.

Here's my little (non-computerized) ecological project: a gray water toilet which recycles water from my washing machine.

Actually, I've seen a lot of EEs do the same thing, with no more understanding than the basic voltage drop analysis. You have to keep in mind that an engineering degree confers exactly the *opposite* thing to the practical knowledge required in the real world. Those people who make good engineers already got their practical knowledge from playing with Lego and hacking their bicycle.

You see, the reason why a D cell is bigger than a C cell is bigger than a AA cell is bigger than a AAA cell despite all putting out ~1.5V is because of current capacity. A modern D cell will put out 1.5V into a 1A load for many (~15) hours, while a modern AAA cell will put out 1.5V into a 1A load for around an hour and ten minutes.

Trivia question: why is there AA, AAA, C and D but no A or B? Answer: The A battery was a big 1.5V lantern battery used to heat the filaments in radios before rectifier tubes were practical to allow the radio to be plugged in to a regular outlet, and the B battery was a 30V, 45V or 90V battery used to provide the plate voltages for the tubes in these radios. The B battery stuck around until the early transistor radios of the late 1950s replaced all the tube portables. You can actually still buy both battery types but generally only through big electronic parts suppliers.

(Quoting Duracell's alkaline battery data sheets, difficult to link directly to the PDF so click on "Technical Bulletin" and scroll to page 9/13, D cell 15Ah (15,000mAh) and AAA cell 1.15Ah (1,150mAh).)

Go to Radio Shack and buy a multimeter. Stick it in current mode, and measure the current consumed by the iPod. Then look up the mAh (milliamp-hour) ratings for the type of battery you wish to use - NiMH, Energizer Lithium, Duracells, whatever. Do not mix battery types (brands, chemistries, etc), ages (new batteries and old batteries should never be put together in series), or sizes (AA, 9V, D-cells, etc.) because you will have some discharge faster than others, sometimes to the point of actually trying to "recharge" the weakest cells off the strongest cells.

Figure out which battery size you need to use based on whatever you consider to be an acceptable battery life for long trips, and use it. Of course, there will be design trade-offs in order to achieve a reasonable size - shorter battery life or bigger and heavier batteries - some compromise will probably have to be reached. If all you care about is battery life, for example, just stick the iPod directly across a car battery.

Get appropriate sized battery holders at Radio Shack or any number of electronic parts places - MCM Electronics, All Electronics, Digikey, Newark, Electrosonic, etc. Connect them in series and build them into a plastic or aluminum box, properly secured and screwed down. Use heat shrink tubing instead of electrical tape for all connections, and use a grommet (those little plastic things where the power cord enters your kettle or toaster or whatever) to prevent the wires getting frayed.

And, most importantly, once you know the current the iPod consumes, multiply that number by two and buy a fuse with that rating. Put it in a holder in the battery box - that way, if the power cord to the iPod gets caught and damaged, or if the iPod fails catastrophically - there won't be a fire.

No, no! The driver works *perfectly*, it's just that it requires correct entry of hardware parameters in one of the assembly language sources! Yeesh! Don't blame the hard-working open-source developer for your MCSE-like lack of computer knowledge!

Seriously, though, I'm so glad to see ESR ranting about the state of userland GUI stuff. I've been doing it for a while, but it's often dismissed as a FUD campaign by people who don't like what I'm saying.

The power supply fan would do very little, since it drives so little air. Most throttle bodies and carburetors are rated in the hundreds of CFM, most small fans like that are rated in the dozens of CFM. If anything, it would reduce the engine's peak power.

At partial throttle, the fan will drive a small amount of extra air into the engine meaning that the throttle won't have to be open as far for a given amount of power.

At wide open throttle, the engine's vacuum would massively outstrip the fan's flow, and the engine would end up dragging the fan. The energy required to spin the fan would be coming from the fast-moving air trying to enter the engine. The restriction and turbulence caused by the fan would reduce the volumne of air drawn into the motor, and therefore reduce the peak wide-open-throttle power.

People who do stuff like this - and, in fact, try to "tune" a Honda or other silly front wheel drive car - almost universally know nothing about cars, then try to take on Mustangs and Camaros which are, by virtue of large displacement V8 engines and rear wheel drive, far more suited to the task of stoplight confrontations.

If the guy were serious, he'd install a very high volume fan. Vacuum cleaner fans have been used as "electric superchargers" but require 120V in your car. Turbochargers and superchargers are far more reliable.

If he were really serious, he'd yank out that cute little 4 cylinder engine and transaxle and sell them. Then he'd cut out the rear suspension, weld perches onto his roll cage to attach the leaf springs or ladder bars. He'd stuff in a nice differential and rear axle (probably a Ford 9"), and stick a big V8 and automatic transmission driving the rear wheels. Personally, I'd stuff a big block Mopar V8 in there, but an early 1980s Buick 3.8L V6 would keep a Civic street drivable, getting over 25MPG and turning reliable low 12-second 1/4 mile times.

If he did that, then he would have a serious car for stoplight confrontations.

Hacking cars? Check this out, it's my buddy's 1986 Chevette. He cut off the back end of the car and welded on the tailfins of a 1956 Dodge Custom Royal. Together, we built a Chevette Targa... it had started out to be a hard-top convertible, but we never finished it.

Me? I do engine swaps. Then I go drag racing.

The power supply fan would do very little, since it drives so little air. Most throttle bodies and carburetors are rated in the hundreds of CFM, most small fans like that are rated in the dozens of CFM. If anything, it would reduce the engine's peak power.

At partial throttle, the fan will drive a small amount of extra air into the engine meaning that the throttle won't have to be open as far for a given amount of power.

At wide open throttle, the engine's vacuum would massively outstrip the fan's flow, and the engine would end up dragging the fan. The energy required to spin the fan would be coming from the fast-moving air trying to enter the engine. The restriction and turbulence caused by the fan would reduce the volumne of air drawn into the motor, and therefore reduce the peak wide-open-throttle power.

People who do stuff like this - and, in fact, try to "tune" a Honda or other silly front wheel drive car - almost universally know nothing about cars, then try to take on Mustangs and Camaros which are, by virtue of large displacement V8 engines and rear wheel drive, far more suited to the task of stoplight confrontations.

If the guy were serious, he'd install a very high volume fan. Vacuum cleaner fans have been used as "electric superchargers" but require 120V in your car. Turbochargers and superchargers are far more reliable.

If he were really serious, he'd yank out that cute little 4 cylinder engine and transaxle and sell them. Then he'd cut out the rear suspension, weld perches onto his roll cage to attach the leaf springs or ladder bars. He'd stuff in a nice differential and rear axle (probably a Ford 9"), and stick a big V8 and automatic transmission driving the rear wheels. Personally, I'd stuff a big block Mopar V8 in there, but an early 1980s Buick 3.8L V6 would keep a Civic street drivable, getting over 25MPG and turning reliable low 12-second 1/4 mile times.

If he did that, then he would have a serious car for stoplight confrontations.

Hacking cars? Check this out, it's my buddy's 1986 Chevette. He cut off the back end of the car and welded on the tailfins of a 1956 Dodge Custom Royal. Together, we built a Chevette Targa... it had started out to be a hard-top convertible, but we never finished it.

Me? I do engine swaps. Then I go drag racing.

The power supply fan would do very little, since it drives so little air. Most throttle bodies and carburetors are rated in the hundreds of CFM, most small fans like that are rated in the dozens of CFM. If anything, it would reduce the engine's peak power.

At partial throttle, the fan will drive a small amount of extra air into the engine meaning that the throttle won't have to be open as far for a given amount of power.

At wide open throttle, the engine's vacuum would massively outstrip the fan's flow, and the engine would end up dragging the fan. The energy required to spin the fan would be coming from the fast-moving air trying to enter the engine. The restriction and turbulence caused by the fan would reduce the volumne of air drawn into the motor, and therefore reduce the peak wide-open-throttle power.

People who do stuff like this - and, in fact, try to "tune" a Honda or other silly front wheel drive car - almost universally know nothing about cars, then try to take on Mustangs and Camaros which are, by virtue of large displacement V8 engines and rear wheel drive, far more suited to the task of stoplight confrontations.

If the guy were serious, he'd install a very high volume fan. Vacuum cleaner fans have been used as "electric superchargers" but require 120V in your car. Turbochargers and superchargers are far more reliable.

If he were really serious, he'd yank out that cute little 4 cylinder engine and transaxle and sell them. Then he'd cut out the rear suspension, weld perches onto his roll cage to attach the leaf springs or ladder bars. He'd stuff in a nice differential and rear axle (probably a Ford 9"), and stick a big V8 and automatic transmission driving the rear wheels. Personally, I'd stuff a big block Mopar V8 in there, but an early 1980s Buick 3.8L V6 would keep a Civic street drivable, getting over 25MPG and turning reliable low 12-second 1/4 mile times.

If he did that, then he would have a serious car for stoplight confrontations.

Hacking cars? Check this out, it's my buddy's 1986 Chevette. He cut off the back end of the car and welded on the tailfins of a 1956 Dodge Custom Royal. Together, we built a Chevette Targa... it had started out to be a hard-top convertible, but we never finished it.

Me? I do engine swaps. Then I go drag racing.

The power supply fan would do very little, since it drives so little air. Most throttle bodies and carburetors are rated in the hundreds of CFM, most small fans like that are rated in the dozens of CFM. If anything, it would reduce the engine's peak power.

At partial throttle, the fan will drive a small amount of extra air into the engine meaning that the throttle won't have to be open as far for a given amount of power.

At wide open throttle, the engine's vacuum would massively outstrip the fan's flow, and the engine would end up dragging the fan. The energy required to spin the fan would be coming from the fast-moving air trying to enter the engine. The restriction and turbulence caused by the fan would reduce the volumne of air drawn into the motor, and therefore reduce the peak wide-open-throttle power.

People who do stuff like this - and, in fact, try to "tune" a Honda or other silly front wheel drive car - almost universally know nothing about cars, then try to take on Mustangs and Camaros which are, by virtue of large displacement V8 engines and rear wheel drive, far more suited to the task of stoplight confrontations.

If the guy were serious, he'd install a very high volume fan. Vacuum cleaner fans have been used as "electric superchargers" but require 120V in your car. Turbochargers and superchargers are far more reliable.

If he were really serious, he'd yank out that cute little 4 cylinder engine and transaxle and sell them. Then he'd cut out the rear suspension, weld perches onto his roll cage to attach the leaf springs or ladder bars. He'd stuff in a nice differential and rear axle (probably a Ford 9"), and stick a big V8 and automatic transmission driving the rear wheels. Personally, I'd stuff a big block Mopar V8 in there, but an early 1980s Buick 3.8L V6 would keep a Civic street drivable, getting over 25MPG and turning reliable low 12-second 1/4 mile times.

If he did that, then he would have a serious car for stoplight confrontations.

Hacking cars? Check this out, it's my buddy's 1986 Chevette. He cut off the back end of the car and welded on the tailfins of a 1956 Dodge Custom Royal. Together, we built a Chevette Targa... it had started out to be a hard-top convertible, but we never finished it.

Me? I do engine swaps. Then I go drag racing.

I loved the dinosaur splash screen, too. But I couldn't show those releases of Mozilla to my boss (a government manager type - think of Lumbergh in Office Space) - because it made Mozilla look like it was designed and built by 16-year-old virgins with anime posters on their walls.

Now, with that dinosaur splash screen, can I honestly deploy Mozilla onto the desktops of dozens of judges, business CEOs, and lawyers who make >$5,000,000 a year? They won't take it seriously and will therefore resist it. At least the drab orange box looks like some sort of corporate logo that they'd see if they went for a drive around the suburbs of Palo Alto - it lends credibility.

Think of people like Frasier Crane - he's a caricature of the middle-aged successful man, the sort of person who makes big purchasing decisions based on tastefulness rather than functionality. "I don't care if you say that I'll get e-mail viruses! I'm *not* going to stare at KMail all day! They don't even have a real spellchecker!"

(NB. The lack of a real spellchecker was fixed in KDE 3.2.)

This is the same sort of problem we have *everywhere* with open source, shareware and free software from Linux to Mozilla, and including things like AVI Preview (comes with Kazaa Lite) - tacky and stupid user interfaces lacking the same features as the Microsoft equivalent we're trying to replace.

I've ranted about this a lot over the years.

I loved the dinosaur splash screen, too. But I couldn't show those releases of Mozilla to my boss (a government manager type - think of Lumbergh in Office Space) - because it made Mozilla look like it was designed and built by 16-year-old virgins with anime posters on their walls.

Now, with that dinosaur splash screen, can I honestly deploy Mozilla onto the desktops of dozens of judges, business CEOs, and lawyers who make >$5,000,000 a year? They won't take it seriously and will therefore resist it. At least the drab orange box looks like some sort of corporate logo that they'd see if they went for a drive around the suburbs of Palo Alto - it lends credibility.

Think of people like Frasier Crane - he's a caricature of the middle-aged successful man, the sort of person who makes big purchasing decisions based on tastefulness rather than functionality. "I don't care if you say that I'll get e-mail viruses! I'm *not* going to stare at KMail all day! They don't even have a real spellchecker!"

(NB. The lack of a real spellchecker was fixed in KDE 3.2.)

This is the same sort of problem we have *everywhere* with open source, shareware and free software from Linux to Mozilla, and including things like AVI Preview (comes with Kazaa Lite) - tacky and stupid user interfaces lacking the same features as the Microsoft equivalent we're trying to replace.

I've ranted about this a lot over the years.

I was irritated by all the crumbs in my toaster. It was really starting to look gross.

Then, one night, I had a dream about sticking my toaster into the dishwasher.

In the light of day, it didn't seem so silly. After all, the dishwasher merely sprays hot water.

Now, the toaster can take heat - that's what it's designed to do.

The water was something else. The cord and plug are sealed, and even if they weren't, they'd be fine when they dried out. The nichrome heating elements are very corrosion-resistant, and the mica sheet which supports the nichrome isn't water soluble.

I was worried about the release mechanism. A close look revealed a solenoid, made of about 10 turns of fairly thick enamelled copper wire. When the bimetallic switch warps at the end of the toasting, the contacts open and the full load of the heating element is placed across the solenoid, causing it to release. Worst case, if the dishwasher were to take all the enamel off the solenoid, the toaster wouldn't release, and I'd rewind the solenoid with some old wire kicking around.

Then, detergent - it's quite corrosive and its deposits might be conductive. I decided to skip it, since crumbs are, by and large, going to disappear simply from the water spray.

So into the dishwasher it went, bottom rack. I tied the cord to the rack so it wouldn't get sucked into the pump. Full cycle, pots and pans mode, in my 1970 Maytag WU600.

A sidenote. The WU600 was Maytag's first automatic dishwasher. It has a 1/2hp motor direct driving a two stage centrifugal pump. It will take fried eggs off a poorly-seasoned cast iron frying pan, and it's extraordinarily loud. When it's running, it sounds like the world is coming to an end. When it's draining, the house rumbles like a freight train loaded with lead blocks is speeding by.

(A sidenote)^2. A quiet dishwasher is not a good thing. Since you cannot predict the shapes of the dishes people will stuff into it, nor can you predict *how* they'll stuff dishes into it, you cannot predict the flow of water after it leaves the spray arms. Therefore, you cannot predict the noise the water will make. To counter the noise, you could use insulation for a broad-spectrum white-noise deadening approach - but the dishwasher has to fit in a standard size hole, and 6" of sound deadening all around would massively eat into the dishwasher's capacity for dishes. The other option is to make the water leave the spray arms with less velocity - which will inherently reduce the cleaning power of the dishwasher. Shopping Tactic: Buy the loudest dishwasher you can find, it's the only one which won't require pre-rinsing your dishes.

Waited until the cycle was done. Opened the door, waited for the fog to clear off my glasses, and surveyed the damage... damage to the crumbs, that is. My toaster looked brand new. Even the carmelized brown stains at the edges of the slots were gone.

So, I let the toaster dry for a few hours, clicked down the handle, and plugged it in - briefly. There was a crackle and some smoke. And again... more crackle, more smoke. Seems that water would get between the layers of mica and would boil off when the nichrome heated up. The smoke was coming from fine bits of crumbs which had become wedged between the nichrome elements and the mica. Quick bit of power - more heat, more steam, more smoke, small crackle. Gently, gently tapping it on and off until there was no more crackling sound as water esca

How about a 1980 Chevette with a Buick 3.8L V6 stuffed under the hood. Been there, done that: 12.8 seconds on the quarter mile and completely drivable. Nothing that you can't do with a MIG welder and a Sawzall.

Never got around to building the motor to Buick Grand National specs - turbocharger was no problem to fit in, but I couldn't find any place to put the intercooler.

Hot Rod magazine outdid me in the April 2000 issue, though - Cadillac 500 CID V8 in a Chevette (this picture is from another car, not the one in their 20-page spread). That's 8.3L, bigger than any factory engine in a Corvette, let alone Chevette. Biggest production automobile engine in the smallest and lightest production front-engine RWD body.

It's all about power to weight ratio...

For sure! The design is a little less "optimized" by finite element analysis than a typical Japanese car. Ever notice how a domestic car always feels heavier and more solid than a comparable Japanese model?

I blame scientific calculators, CAD and finite element analysis for the whole feeling of "they don't build 'em like they used to".

With a sliderule, you could only work to three or four significant figures. Every calculation, you'd have to round up forces and round down material strengths. As a result, your final design was always stronger and heavier than it "needed" to be.

With scientific calculators which hold 12+ sig figs in memory - CAD, Matlab, etc. even more - the design can be optimized more. Finite element analysis allows the design to be broken into millions of almost infinitely small points and the forces on each one of those points can be analyzed in minutes or hours with a computer, a job which would have taken years with a sliderule. Armed with this knowledge, the manufacturer can use (thinner, cheaper) 22 gauge sheetmetal instead of the 20 gauge you would have chosen with sliderule calculations. The net effect is that the car/washing machine/VCR/whatever is cheaper to manufacture and cheaper to ship. If it's a car, this also translates into better acceleration and better gas mileage.

But the problem is that the thinner sheetmetal and other heavily-optimized parts makes the design less forgiving of the real-world crap which occurs. A pair of jeans gets stuck under the washing machine's agitator. A videocassette gets jammed angrily into the VCR by a couple of kids who've just argued about what to watch. A guy takes his car to Home Depot and instructs the guy to put 600lbs of fertilizer bags into the trunk.

Real world abuse is not considered in the optimization process. And as a result, the machine breaks.

Now, before everyone floods me about how "my truck has been around for 40 years," let me pre-emptively defend myself: 1) trucks are a little bit different still,

Less so. Full-frame American-made rear-wheel-drive cars (like the Caprice Classic and the Crown Vic) are made of box-section steel frames while pickups are generally C-channel steel frames with comparable gauge steel. The drivetrains are generally exactly the same. Real SUVs (like the Durango/Grand Cherokee, Blazer, Explorer, etc. in contrast to the silly little toys like the RAV-4 and the CR-V) are built similarly. In fact, the only reason I'd buy an SUV is because they don't make the Caprice Classic anymore.

Having said that, if you take a wander through a wrecking yard, you might want to start looking at the cars there carefully. Take a very close look at the cars which don't have obvious accident damage - ie. the cars which were worn out. Wander around and note who built the car, the mileage and the year. Some of each will have had better owners than others. But if you take an average, you'll start to see a pattern emerging.

Whatever it is, they don't build 'em like they used to. A new VCR may sell for $59, and you might be tempted to buy the $200 model from the same brand, reasoning that it will last longer. Flip open the cassette door and point the MAG light in there before you buy it. Typically, it'll use the same mechanism as its cheaper cousin - you're spending the $141 extra for software which enables a few more features.

Washing machines? Mine's a 1954 Maytag. When the spin bearing in the bottom finally let go after 49 years of cleaning dirty underwear, I took apart the transmission to see if it was worth rebuilding. There was no appreciable wear to any of the gear surfaces, etc. So I spent a couple of hundred bucks on bearings, gaskets, hoses and seals. Most of them were perfectly fine when I swapped 'em. I could have spent $147 on the Roper

I FAILED IT!

Today I was taking a final exam. We ran out of time and many of us were still taking the test. My teacher gruffly took my test and exclaimed, "YOU FAIL IT"! We all were taken aback by his manner. After that he said, "You must be new here! I, for one, welcome our failing student overlords." and then he showed us his Goatse and left us mortified. He laughed and walked away saying, "In Soviet Russia, Student fails YOU"!

One of my classmates, an especially sick fuck, shouted, "Wow! Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those things"!

In related news, I just heard some sad news on talk radio - anus stretcher, Goatse was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details yet. I'm sure we'll all miss him, even if you weren't a fan of his work there's no denying his contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.

1. Take class over next semester (I wonder what the SCO licensing fees are for one of these?)
2. ???
3. Profit!

By the way, BSD is dying...you insensitive clod...

Oh well, at least we have little more Natalie Portman a little more (& then less) of that white outfit on Natalie Portman

Check out this website: Natalie Portman, Unofficial Site

His ass is here, dickhead.

personally, I think we won't know how good (or bad) they'll be until they're more widespread.

It's really a shame that you had to trash that machine, it sounds really nice.

Texas Instruments used to build computers like that, even for domestic use. Remember the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A? The $99 console that you could buy a K-Mart? They were built like tanks, too.

Most impressive was the TI-99/4A PES (Peripheral Expansion System). It was a big steel box housing a power supply, a backplane, and a Shugart 5.25" single-side single-density disk drive - 90K per floppy!

TI made a fundamental mistake in their assumptions about computer-buying consumers. They assumed that consumers were idiots who weren't interested in doing more than playing games, writing BASIC programs, and balancing the checkbook. Consequently, TI didn't release the Assembly programming kit ("Editor/Assembler") until almost too late, and tried to keep all the details of the very weird, very minicomputerish hardware secret.

Part of the assumption was that, if Joe Consumer installs hardware, he's going to do it wrong. So they made it impossible to install the hardware wrong. All the accessory cards for the PES included on-board ROM chips with drivers; the machine had true plug-and-play capabilities. And because Joe Consumer is apt to try to put a square peg into a round hole, they made it impossible to install the cards incorrectly without using power tools.

How? They housed all the cards in cast aluminum cases.

Oh, I just found another sample. Ugh... more sequences and series; I hated that stuff.

This is true. But I don't think that's the primary application of cellphone jammers.

Yeah, well, Beethoven's Fifth, being played through a crappy 2" piezoelectric disk speaker as the ringtone on some Nokia in a movie theater. That's the best reason for jamming that I can come up with. (Why custom ring tones? Don't people know those things sound as stupid as coffee can mufflers on Honda Civics?)

I have had cellphones with work, and was glad to get rid of them when I did. I have no interest in being on an electronic leash, forced to be accountable to someone - somewhere. Or standing in the line-up at Wal*Mart, the ring and promptly following, "Hey, it's me. Whatcha doing? Wanna come over?" (Who is "me"? If I slept with this person, it must not have been very memorable.)

In short, I *hate* cellphones.

Quoting from article: including universities which use the technology to stop students from diddling away on phones during lectures.

Hey, if the student diddles quietly, it's his funeral when his GPA drops and he gets kicked out of school.

Cellphones with integrated digital cameras might have their place, though. I know a university student whose math professor puts excellent and comprehensive notes on the blackboard. So he started to bring a digital camera and a small tripod to class, and takes pictures of each blackboard full of material. He sent me a sample a while ago. An integrated camera/phone would never run out of available internal memory. Personally, copying the notes down would help me remember the material, but whatever works for him... there's a certain style of practical problem solving skill at work there: he's a second-year engineering student; I think I'll have to hire him when he's done. :)

You'd think that Microsoft would have better places than Slashdot to blow advertising bucks - I can't imagine their return on investment would be very high.

After all, this must be embarrassing.

Tell me about it. The KDE Developers have dismissed www.glowingplate.com/dissent as a FUD campaign, rather than a simple venting of user frustration.

Until that changes, we're still gonna be stuck buying Dells pre-loaded with Windows XP. [sigh]

So would I! Unless someone is willing to trade me my B and RB motors for a Hemi block... (first one for offer: 1976 thinwall casting lightweight 400 block. Weighs less than a Slant-6 block, easy stroke to 475 cubic inches!) Also got a 1970 440-4bbl, complete, good compression and oil pressure, kicking around the garage.

That is such a kick-ass song, any car guy can relate. Another good one is Pinkard and Bowden's Guns Made America Great. I think it's supposed to be comedy, but when I play it really loud in my old pickup truck, it keeps the silly little Honda cars far away.

In a sense, precisely the flexibility and diversity of console applications and daemons which makes *nix ideally suited to server duty, is exactly what makes its mass-adoption on the desktop difficult.

On one hand, it's great that there might be 50 different ways to implement cut-and-paste functionality, but the end user doesn't care as long as he can cut something from one application (say, OpenOffice) and paste it into another (say, Gnumeric). On my Linux workstation, that's tough.

Never mind the lack of OLE support. Stuff that Windows users take for granted - Windows Media Player embedding in a PowerPoint presentation - has been around since Office 95, and yet I've never been able to get xine or mplayer to launch from an Impress presentation.

These are the hurdles which will need actual in-stone standards to overcome, and some of them will probably require work right down to the very architecture of the window manager in order to implement.

And we have to overcome them, in order to make Linux a viable alternative operating system for any casual user who does more than read e-mail.

I have a rant on the subject. It's a bit dated now, but trying to work as a "regular" user in Linux - without writing shell scripts or firing up gcc - I can't get done what I need to get done. We don't need more eye candy or stuff like that. We need decent apps that don't feel like the works in progress they admittedly are and don't silently close if you run out of disk space. We need volunteer UI designers to walk into offices and seniors homes to find out how we can make a more user-friendly and consistent UI without alienating the power user.

And we need to support at least every UI feature of Windows 2000 and its central apps. Let's think about it - in a field which moves as fast as IT, I'm suggesting we should use the OLE capabilities and consistency of a three-year-old product as a role model. Why? Because there are still things which Windows 95 users can do in three mouseclicks that would require firing up gcc.

Like it or not, every end user is going to compare KDE/Gnome/whatever to their experience with Windows. They don't care that the Linux kernel never crashes if the KDE crash handler is popping up every 5 minutes or if applications lack features they require.

Think of the end user with every single line of code that you write. Take a picture of a technically inept parent or aunt and stick it on the side of your monitor to remind yourself.

5V can kill.

I doubt it. Unless of course you try to hold a wrench across it, in which case you'll get burned but not electrocuted.

Get out Ohm's law: V=IR.

Yer skin has a pretty high resistance (5-50 KOhms). Combine that with 110/220 V and you get something on the order of 10-50 mA. This is dangerous, particularly if it goes through yer heart, and if sustained will cook (burn) the tissues of your body, which is also bad. For a fun experiment (or an emergency hot-dog cooker), take a raw hot dog and stick 10-14ga wires about 1/2 inch (stripped, of course!) into each end. Put the 110 V supply across these wires and see how long it takes to cook a weiner. About 60 seconds is my recollection. (For a US "frankfurter" which is 1/2 inch in diameter. Obviously the much more massive brautwurst & such common in the EC would take much longer. Or maybe not, as you might also be dealing with a 220V supply.)

5 V / 5 KOhms = 1 mA which is harmless. You _might_ feel something if you wet your hands and put them across the 5V 600A supply. Go grab the terminals of your (12 Volt, 200 A) car battery, and see if you can feel anything.

A steel wrench OTOH has a resistance of about 0.001 Ohm. Combine this with 5 V and you get the full current capability of the power supply. 600 Amps might not make a wrench actually explode, but it _will_ make a scary noise and do some serious fusion damage to both the wrench and the points where it comes into contact with the power bus. If you manage to rest it across the bus, so that it will stay (you will NOT want to hold it), and your PS is really good for 600A, _something_ will melt or catch fire. (Hopefully that will be one of the fist-sized fuses, but you never know for sure....)

Last week I was working on my dad's computer. I had the power on, and was feeling all the chips to see if any were untowardly hot. The OM asked if I should be sticking my hands in there with the power on. He cut his teeth on electronics which used Edison valves for active devices, which had plate voltages up into the hundreds of volts. You did NOT touch such circutry when it was hot. My reply was that there wasn't anything more than 12 Volts in the whole box and most of it was at 5 Volts. This seemed to satisfied him, probably because he's used to thinking in terms of 1A power supplies, and hadn't the slightest fsckin' clue that the PS of his computer is capable of 60 A - at five Volts.

Absolutely, 100%. Nobody is born with the ability to take a triple scalar product or multiply two matrices (both happening in your video card when you're playing Doom!). As a great Calculus teacher once announced to his class through a thick French Canadian accent, "Math is not a spectator sport." (Actually, it came out as "Matt ees not a spectator sport.")

Having said that, Calculus is my favorite kind of math. It's incredibly elegant and probably the most useful advanced math, as it touches everything you do. Consider your car. If you calculate your speed using a watch and the odometer, you have an idea how fast you were going, but your speedometer is actually showing you the value of the derivative at any instantaneous time. Your speedometer shows the rate of change of position (distance travelled) at any instantaneous time. That's calculus.

Don't be afraid. "Calculus" (besides being a formal term for tartar the dentist scrapes off your teeth) means small stones in Latin... small stones as used for counting.

Two *great* books on the subject:

• Sylvanus P. Thompson's 1910 classic Calculus Made Easy is still in print and remains as relevent as ever. It's funny ("To Deliver you from the Preliminary Terrors" is the title of the first chapter) and it's full of interesting tidbits. (Do you know where the time units of minutes and seconds got their names?) Hit Amazon.com or Bibliofind to get a copy.
• Applied Calculus - an Intuitive Approach is great, too. Faber, Freedman and Kaplan. Starts with First Principles and takes you to fairly advanced integration in an easy-to-read format.

Remember: Do the problems, succeed. Don't do the problems, fail. It's that simple.