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Stop buying off eBay. I've bought about 10 Maxtor and Seagate IDE HDs for personal use in the past 5 years, and I've had 0 failures. I know that's pretty lucky (and I do keep carefuly backups), but come on, 60% failure right out of the box? Who dropped the box before you tried them?

Of course now that I've said that, 60% of my drives will probably die in the next few days :).

Jason
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I'll take that bet...but since you choose the algorithms, I choose the architectures, and I choose a base-line PIC microcontroller. It has a 2-level deep hardware stack, Let's see your recursive javascript code run on that.

Jason
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I use assembly every day to program embedded controllers. There are compilers for them, but I often use controllers with a few hundred instruction words of storage space and a few dozen bytes of ram. Compilers just aren't efficient enough.

Jason

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Based on a binary floating-point number and switching system, it had all the attributes of today's computers, such as a control block, a memory, and a calculator. But it didn't have the ability to store the program in the memory together with the data because the memory was too small.

Modern computers don't necessarily have the program memory in the same space as the data memory. Machines using the Von Neumann architechture, such as a PC have a shared memory space. The newer Harvard architechture has separate program and data spaces.

There are many advantages to separating them. The main one is that you can concurrently fetch the data for the current instruction and the next instruction word from the two separate memory busses, effectively doubling your throughput. Also, you're going to want your memory to be a multiple of 8 bits wide, but there is no reason your instruction word should have this restriction.

Jason
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I've turned remote control cars in to various forms of robots; line following, sumo, etc.

It costs a fraction of the price of buying comparable parts from a normal supplier, and a lot of the mechanical work is done for you. Jason
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Do what I do, and read the "old news" section instead of the front page.

That's a neat trick since this is still the most recent article and you've managed to post a comment on it long before it got to the old news section.

Jason
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If Deutsch's books were written in the same style as that article, I don't think it's fair to credit Deutsch. The article is almost impossible to understand, and I'm very familiar with the experiment, it's written in such a condescending tone and with a high noise to signal ratio, it's difficult to distill out what it's trying to say.

Also, it pretends to be a home parallel universe test in the introduction, but in the meat of the article, it just dismisses the key point with no, this can't be done in your dining room, so it's hardly a home test at all.

Basically, this article takes an elegant concept in quantum physics, and presents it in an needlessly complex way without even truly explaining what is going on. It also pretends to be explaining how to do the key part of the experiment at home and then glosses over the fact that it's skipping that.

I'm surprised poking holes through paper with a pin even works, even for a pin hole camera, people use aluminum foil for the hole so it can be smaller and more precise.

Using a hole though isn't even the best way to do the experiment. It will cause difraction to occur in 2 dimensions, it is a lot easier to observe what's going on if it happens in 1 dimension. In high school, we blackened a microscope slide with smoke from a candle, then made 2 parallel scratches by taping 2 flat razor blades together and drawing them across the blackened glass. It gave nice perfectly paralell slits a known distance apart (the thickness of the blade).

Again this just demonstrated the first part, not the part Deutsch claims proves parallel universes exist.

Jason
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This is a very old experiment, and a well-known phenomenon. It was even one of the answers on slashdot's poll for favourite physics experiment (and my personal favourite).

Even the idea that it is proof of parallel universes is not original. Michael Crichton made that claim in his book Timeline. It's an excellent book (despite the horrible movie loosely based on it), but it is fiction.

Jason
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I have had many a customer tell me that NO ONE has ever opened their computer (including them) - I open it up and there are screws missing, the magnetic sheild has fingerprints on it, etc etc.

Interesting, because I bought my Wallstreet brand new, it never had been opened by anyone (including me), until I opened it a few months ago to replace the sound board. There were no missing screws, but there were fingerprints on the shield over the CPU.

I have enough pc and notebook repair experience that I don't allow "service providers" to touch my computer; they're primarily concerned with speed, not quality. I've seen machines come back from "authorized" service centers with stripped or missing screws and even broken plastic parts; the hinge cluth and upper case plastic on the Wallstreet, are a pain to take off for example, it's quite common for things like that to get broken at the service center.

Of course the service tech doesn't say anything, leaves the broken part in, and even charges full price. I hate taking my computers in for repair under warranty, I would prefer to just get the replacement part and install it myself, but of course they won't allow that.

If I've added an upgrade to my notebook, why should I lose the warranty when an unrelated part fails due to a manufacturing or design defect within the warranty period?

Jason
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The only difficulty I had was keeping track of all the screws.

I took apart my wallstreet to fix the faulty power connector on the sound card (it's a common defect, apple's design flaw). My solution to keeping track of the screws was to use my digital camera and take lots of pictures. Usually I'd place the screws beside the laptop in the same relative positions they belong in.

Also, I found This site very useful as a disassembly guide. The site posted is hardly a great new idea.

Jason
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If you did anything with those drives (load a program, just leave it powered of, etc), the heads would fall out of alignment. It was fairly simple regular maintainence to realign the drive. The motor even had that sticker for the stobe freeze effect under 60Hz fluorescent lighting.

Jason
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Maybe they're join rambus and threaten to sue everyone using DDR memory.

Jason
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The subject says it all (at least to any Candians reading this).

Jason
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I bought a Visor Deluxe primarily as an ebook reader in early 2001. It did the job quite well.

About a month ago, I replaced it with a Palm Tungsten E, and it is just amazing for ebooks. The colour 320x320 screen gives very crisp easy to read text in any lighting conditions. The Tungsten also has 32 meg to store books, the 8 meg on the Visor was too limiting.

The only drawback is that the Tungsten has a built in battery that's only good for 1-2 days, so if it runs out of power of I forget to charge it, I can't use it until I get back to the computer to recharge it. The visor takes AAA's and I have a few sets of NiMH one that last about 2 weeks. By carrying a spare set, I never ran out of power, and I always had 1 set in the charger.

I read about 2 novels/week on these PDAs. Jason
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Sounds good to me. Last time I checked, starbucks WiFi access on a monthly basis was more expensive than my broadband, and for shorter lengths of time it's even worse. $10 for 1 day of access. The 10 cents/minute plan sounds good until you read the fine print and see it's a 1 hour minimum charge; so it's $6 just to check your email.

Jason
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According to The Canadian Institute for Health Information, in 2003, Canada spent a total of $121 Billion CDN on health care (this is the cost the government pays for the universal health system). With a population of ~30 million, that's $4,000 CDN/person.

For your family of 4, that's $16,000 CDN/year or $12,000 US at a 30% exchange rate. That works out to $1,000 US/month Canada is paying and your $400 health insurance is a lot better than my $1000 health care.

Jason
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For what Canada spends per year on health care, they could get health insurance in the US for every citizen that is far superior to the canadian healthcare system.

Canada spends about $5000/person on health care; I see ads on Vancouver TV bragging that BC spends more on health care than the next 10 largest provincial ministries combined. $3000US/year buys good health insurance in the states.

Jason
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It will probably sell better than non-DRM hardware because of the way it can be marketed. It allows you to play DRM content that you can't play on non-DRM'd hardware. That sounds like a positive feature if you don't know the details.

Jason
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Would you take the script of a play or a movie, run it through tts and then say it was even a passable substitute for the original?

There's a huge difference between a play/movie script and book. A script is lines that are meant to be performed by different people and acted out. There is no description of what's actually happenening because it is to be done visually in the background.

With a book, everything is in the text. I read a few books a week, and I've tried audiobooks a couple of times. I just find it impossible to visualize what's going one when someone else is doing the reading. I get a lot more out of the book if I read it myself. OTOH, I'd much rather see a movie than read the screenplay.

Jason
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The title of the movie has yet to be released

Based on the last 2 titles, my guess would be Night of the Living Sith

Jason
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I'd be all for having something like this *if* it reduced prices. Oh well, it was a good idea anyway.

That's the catch right there. It will probably raise prices to offset the cost of the machine and pay full price for the software.

That's what happened with ATM's (at least in Canada). They were introduced as a cost saving device, but the machines initially were so expensive that the banks charged a per transaction fee to use them. Then when people got used to the fee and the price came down on the ATMs, they introduced a larger fee to access a live teller.

Jason
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The article lists a lot of nokia models including the 3650 which is a minor improvement on the 5100 series, but it doesn't mention the 5100 as being replaced. I have a 5165 on an AT&T plan in Seattle (one of the affected areas).

Jason
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Which is why I refill :)

I paid $40 for 12 ounces of ink that's specifically meant for my model. It's good ink; I can't tell the difference between the same photo printed on a cartridge I've refilled 3 times vs on a brand new cartridge). $40/12 ounces = $3.33/ounces or 1/20th the price of ink in the cartridge. Last time I bought fountain pen ink, it was $6 for a 2 ounce bottle at staples, so the refill ink I bought is in the same price range as bulk pen ink.

Jason
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But if you refill the cartridge, you're better off with the low yield model because it's cheaper and it has the same heads, so as long as you don't let it run out of ink, you'll get just as much life out of it for half the price.

I have an HP Photosmart 7350 printer, it takes a C6657a cartridge which costs $35. Cheaper HP printers take a c8728a cartridge which is $20. What HP doesn't tell you is that the two cartridges are exactly identical except that the 28a has 8ml of ink while the 57a has 17ml. When I refill, the 28, it even takes about 17ml, so for a $15 savings all I lose is half of my first fill.

Jason
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This is a positive point from Microsoft's point of view. Your 10 year old computer is now completely useless for sending email, so you must now buy a brand new computer, complete with a new Windows license (you don't think they'll let you use linux to run their protocol, do you? :) )

Jason
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It was the parent poster who set those conditions. If he can quit his $100,000/year he hates to take a $20,000k job he loves, how is that different financially from keeping the $100k job and saving 80%. You'd lose some in taxes, so you wouldn't be saving quite 80%, but the general idea is the same.

Jason
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If that were the choice, I'd rather hate my job for 5 years making $100k/year, put $80k each year in the bank and then quit my job and pay myself $20k each year for the next 25 years out of the saved money to do what I want ;).

Jason
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Decent cable is at least $40/month these days or about $500/year. If a season on DVD averages out to $50 per show, you can buy 10 shows/year on DVD before it becomes more expensive. So it sounds like a good idea

The way they get you though is the delay before it comes out on DVD. You're right, it would be a great business model as you described it.

Jason
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You didn't realize you had to be on drugs to buy a Dell when they had the "Dude, you're getting a Dell" campaign? Not even when the Dell Dude got busted for drugs?

Jason
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Assuming all your information is right, I still look at it this way:

For $750M, you can have the newer better telescope, or for a mere 1/3rd more, you can have the newer telescope and Hubble.

At the very least, Hubble can take some of the load from whatever new telescope they build so the waiting times won't be as long.

Jason
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Even if Hubble is replaced by a newer and better telescope, the demand for time on the instrument is so great that both telescopes can still be put to very good use. Even as the second best telescope, Hubble's usefulness far outweighs the cost to do the service mission.

Regardless, we should not even be thinking of scrapping Hubble until something better is up there.

Jason
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When I was taking Real-Time programming we discussed car code. The prof said it has a 7 year development cycle and takes about 2 developer hours per assembly instruction to write, test, and debug the code.

I don't see a hacked code being anywhere near as reliable. Even if it makes the changes you want, your car might end up stalling as often as windows crashes.

Jason
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In thorey, yes, in practice, that's not how it works out.

At least at the bank it was "sign this form or you can't bank with us". The form basically said they could give all your financial data to their affiliate companies so they could harass you to open other accounts. They insist it's directly related because they can't offer you a chequing account without asking you to take out a mortgage.

While I was taking the IT law course, I tried to sign up for web access to my TD bank account. I had to sign a waiver that said I'd read their terms of service, but they didn't include the ToS, so I asked about it. The account manager looked at me like I was nuts, but I insisted. It took her about 10 minutes to find it and then I sat there and read it. There is a clause in it that if my money disappears totally through their fault (like an employee stealing it), they are not liable. I refused to sign and I showed the ToS to my law prof. He said the clause probably wouldn't hold up in court but it would cost so much to fight it that it wouldn't be worth it.

Somehow, I don't see them backing down on their PIPEDA waivers either and it will be so difficult to fight it that it's impractical. Have you dealt with the Government of Canada? It's nearly impossible to do anything.

Jason
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This is exactly where the law falls apart.

You have to sign the document giving the dentist consent to use your data how he wants or he won't work on your teeth.

I've run into the same thing with banks a couple of years ago when PIPEDA first applied to them.

So far, PIPEDA seems to give you a choice of protecting your data OR dealing with businesses.

Jason
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Just because the person who wrote the blurb only heard about PIPEDA this week doesn't mean it's newly enacted.

When I took an IT law course in 1999 we talked about PIPEDA and it came into effect in stages starting in 2000, first affecting government, then banks, then large companies, and so on until it applies to all companies.

Jason
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As soon as you pay by some method other than cash, they tie the card to your real information. Swapping the cards around is so common that they're quite good at sorting it out as soon as you pay with plastic again on your newly traded card.

Jason
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Another side effect of this is if the user has submitted a form, google will resubmit the same form with the same data, creating a duplicate record. The web designer has to have extra code to prevent that.

Jason
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Any version of XP a consumer can legally get is already crippled beyond use. It has a huge bug called "product activation" which means you can not reinstall the product you supposedly bought without Microsoft's permission. This renders the product completely useless because you won't be able to re-install it in 5 or 10 years to access old data, or if somehow newer MS code is even worse.

Why is some other version with an insignificant additional crippiling newsworthy?

Jason
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Crimes committed in anger and passion rarely get the death penalty. It has to have other factors to warrant capital punishment (like if it happened while committing another crime, if it was especially brutal, if it was a serial crime, etc.

Jason
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They don't need jurisdiction over the servers, just over the people using them.

Jason
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The same way liquid is a different state of matter. It's really just a hot solid.

Jason
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That sounds exactly like my experience with an 86 Olds Regency 98. They also shopped around for cheap parts and replaced the Olds engine with a cheap Buick engine.

Less than 1 month after the warranty expired, the Transmission completely died and had to be rebuilt. I got the same sort of response that after warranty, they don't car if the car melts down. They wouldn't even appologize for it.

Then at 128,000km, the timing gear (which was made of plastic) threw off all its teeth and the flying timing chain did a lot of other damage too. The engine had to be completely rebuilt. Every time I got an oil change in the 130,000km's, they warned me that if I hadn't had the engine rebuilt recently I'd have to soon. Apparently nearly every single one of those cars had the engine self destruct withing a few thousand kms of 130k.

Now it's still on the road, on it second engine, 3rd transmission, 4th starter motor, 3rd alternator, 2nd fuel pump, etc...The last original part to go was the muffler :).

Jason
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My current watch is my Casio Databank I got in elementray school in 1988. I've worn that watch every day for the past 16 years and it's still working perfectly. It's one of the metal models.

Jason

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If the fluorescent tube didn't flicker, then why does it cause a beat freqency with a monitor when the monitor set to 60Hz (in North America)?

An LED is a diode, so you don't need an additional one to build a half wave rectifier.

Jason
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Wihtout a rectifier it is off 50% of the time.

With a full wave recrifier, it will be off for tiny amount of time between pulses; almost certainly faster than the LED can turn off, and it will be on fully twice as much. Also, the human eye can't detect a 120Hz flicker, the limit is around 48Hz.

If it bothers you, spend the 10 cents to add a filter cap :).

Jason
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A standard fluorescent bulb flickers at 60 Hz.

With 4 diodes (at a few cents each) you can build a full wave rectifier that will let you connect an LED to AC power without flicker.

Jason
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Maybe you're a good person to talk to about this then. Why don't any apple notebooks have a PCMCIA or PC Card slot? I would have bought an iBook g4 when they came out in November except for that one issue.

It seems like their primary goal is to force me to buy a $100 airport card instead of a $20 WiFi card (the very attitude that made me switch from an Apple IIe to an IBM AT clone in the 80's). I've seen older powerbooks with PC Card slots so I was very surprised to find out they don't have them anymore. The side effects now are I can't use my CF->PCMCIA adaptor to back up my digital camera pictures and I can't use my PCMCIA floppy drive. I'm also concerned about future problems; I can get a USB port card for PCMCIA for a notebook that doesn't have USB. There will be new ports that come along in the future and I'll probably lose out on them.

Don't take this as mac bashing; I really want that iBook; it's just frustrating that it lacks such a critical feature.

As far as the PC brands: the best possible choice is not to get a brand. Usually you end up with a brand name on the box and the cheapest no-name crap they can find inside (and it's almost always proprietary so you can't upgrade and repairs are expensive). You should hand pick every component that goes into the computer (and that's where brand names come in). Then if you know how, assemble it yourself, or if you don't pay the store to do it for you; it will still be cheaper and better than any brand name PC.

Jason
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Yes, but Dell must be doing something right. I'm going to buy my first mac in the next few weeks, so I've been talking to a friend who's a big mac user. He commented that if he was buying a PC, he knows the first stop is Dell. When I commented that's the worst possible choice his eyes just glazed like I didn't know what I was talking about because obviously the best PCs come from Dell.

Jason
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Internet's favorite Honda "Cog" commercial won't air due to the high prices for a 2-minute spot.

I often see the same annoying 30 second ad 6 times in a 30 minute show, sometimes twice in a single break.

A single 2 minute ad once during the show would be a lot more effective than the same ad 6 times, and since it's less total time, it would probably be cheaper too.

Jason
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Of course not. If a $500 iPod is disposable, a $100 one certainly is.

What really annoys me is I can't carry a spare battery with me to swap if it dies when I'm out. I'll have to wait until I can recharge the battery before I can use the iPod again.

Jason
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