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X-Rays Of A TiBook's Interior
A reader writes: "A fine application of expensive medical equipment: producing neat desktop pictures by taking an x-ray of the guts of a PowerBook G4. Guy Mullins has the details." The actual photos are on a separate site.
>Don't xrays wipe drives?
;-)
Nope, but they can ruin your photo film.
Of course, if your hard drives were subjected to a really *powerful* x-ray source, they'd melt.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Generally yes, though some are using prizmatic cell shapes but they are more costly than the good ol' cylindrical cell. If you go with a non standard cell size or shape it costs more per unit due to lack of volume. The standard cell sizes are also available from many different manufacturers. That means you have second and third sources available in case your manufacturer of choice fails to meet your demand for some reason.
TiGutz in Blue
;p
TiGutz plain
The 3m and 9m files will half to wait for later
Sexy stuff.
Computational Madness in a round package.
No. X-Rays are just light. If it caused a problem, you wouldn't be able to take your computer on a plane. Nothing in a computer is affected by x-rays.
I once had to obtain a new battery for P75 laptop and that battery could not be had from anywhere. However, the cells were in Batteries Plus' catalog and they were able to rebuild the battery for me.
I used to work as a technician for a firm that rented environmental instrumentation and we recelled batteries all of the time. It is a common practice for more than just laptops.
And of course a 9V battery is also just 6 cells underneath the outer covering. Your car battery is 6 cells but it is a lead-acid battery which produces ~2V per cell whereas normal batteries (AAA, AA, C, D) use a dry cell which produces ~1.5V. NiCad cells are ~1.2V.
Actually its an urban legend that air port xrays will do this. Its the conveyor belts that these things run on that does the demagnitization. Nothing to do with the xray.
These things use electric motors to pull them, which create electromagnets (errr...the electromagnets create the motor). Even so, you'd have to have media almost directly on the belt over top the motor for a while before it came close to damaging anything. A laptop is going to be more isolated because of the casing (yeah yeah, I know most of them are plastic anymore). And still, its been several years since airports had any of these where the strength was strong enough to damage anything.
For the most part, they let folks go with these because of this urban legend to keep the lines moving. Until I got the real scoop on these things, I'd have my powerbook waiting ready to go so I could show them its running and they let me go. Fuck, what if I had molded symtex (or however you spell it) into the second battery port. I'm paranoid as it is...I WANT these guys to stop everyone and run the sucker through the xrays - though in their defense, the xrays also do bomb material sniffing and occasionally they will not only ask to see your machine running, but they will ask for a wipe - they take an alcohol wipe and run a gas chromatography on it right there in seconds. Good job security dudes!
Which tends to make me think the medical ones are a wee bit more powerful.
It's not the power, per se, it's that a medical imager is capable of dispersing X-rays over a much wider range of area, some of which are going to irradiate the operator.
The X-ray machines in an airport are shielded (ever notice the heavy looking rubber skirts that your bags go through on either end?), and the x-rays are directed at a very narrow section of the conveyor belt.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Further inspection reveals that airports actually use two different strength scanners. Checked luggage goes through a high-intensity scanner, such as an Invision Technologies CTX baggage scanner. This scanner starts with a low power beam, but can send a focused beam (1cm containing 100-300 milliRoentgens) on suspicious areas if closer analysis is required. The focused beam is actually a Computed Tomography scan, of the type that takes 5000milliRoentgens to do to one's head, so it's still less powerful than the medical version.
According to FAA Regulation 108.17
But you'll note that airports all tell you it's safe to let your film and camera go through the carry-on luggage x-ray. That's because they expose your luggage to less than 1 milliRoentgen. If they can't see what they need, they still have Explosive and Narcotic Detection Systems, and manual searches available.So you see, I wasn't throwing numbers around. I was making factual statements, you useless troll.