I guess the implication of "inexpensive" is that if it were possible to buy a 1470 gb sun fibre-channel disk, it would cost well over 22 times as much as the 147 gb disk.
And, with the one big drive, you don't get any redundancy or hot spares.
As I read it, it's the paper, not the film, that's being discontinued. For the moment, at least, you should be fine.
It may be a good idea to do some experiments with "artier" brands of film, though. They will probably be produced for a very long time, catering to artists who won't shoot anything but B&W film.
I work with astronomers, who generate staggeringly large quantities of data. One of our groups is doing a survey of the sky, and they are now occupying 5 TB of space. The rest of the department is using a further 4-5 TB.
We have decided that it makes the most sense to buy just what we need. By the time we need more, the hardware is cheaper and easier to integrate. We've been using the Promise Ultratrak RAID boxes, which work out really well for us. We can get ~1TB of RAID 10 disk in one unit for ~$4000.
Now backups are the problem... ugh. The best price/performance/offsite capable solution we've found are firewire hard drives. We just bought 11 300 GB maxtor onetouch drives. They're pretty nice, but I hate having to split the data.
A friend of mine grew up on Guam, and he has interesting pig-catching stories. Apparently pigs like to eat pot out in the jungle, which makes them easy to catch.
They would keep the pigs in pens on the beach until they wanted to eat one. If the pigs got rowdy, they would put Frankie, a 2m monitor lizard in the pen to scare the shit out of the pigs.
Well, I don't know how many pictures we'll get, but the following calculation is enlightening.
I found all numbers from Google, so they are approximate. The order of magnitude should remain the same, though.
NASA budget: $15 billion Federal budget: $3350.779 billion
Percentage of NASA budget to the Federal budget:
0.447%
Half a percent.
So if we assume that you make $60k, and you have $4k of federal tax (wild-ass guess based on my much smaller salary), then you pay $17 a year for ALL of NASA.
I'd say that that's a pretty damn good deal, myself.
If you have a pepper mill that has a shaft that goes all the way through the cap, you can unscrew the nut that holds the assembly together and chuck the end of the shaft on a drill. Hold the body of the pepper mill and pull the trigger of the drill, and you have a metric shit ton of pepper.
Or you could buy a Magnum. Nothing outgrinds the Magnum.
I used to read CS when it was the huge tome of its heyday, as well. I did the same things that you did--shopping, calling the vendors, finding deals.
I think that the internet killed it. Why should you spend all that money to buy an ad in a magazine when you can set up an online store and actually sell stuff right from it?
I was saddened when CS started to lose its tradtitional shape and mass, but it's the way things go. There's no market for such a magazine anymore, so it dies. We still remember tidbits, though. I remember a Dirt Cheap Drives ad that had a 9 gig hard drive for the low, low price of $5000.
I can reccomend this approach. I have LED lamps front and rear, so the battery weight is not much of an issue. When I drive, I find cyclists who use these types of lamps to be very visible.
The front lamp is 3 blue-white LEDs powered by 3x aaa batteries, and the rear is a 5 red LED unit that takes 2x aaa.
I use them in flash mode to get the most attention. I've found that because they use so little power, I use them much more frequently than I did my incandescant lamps.
I live in one of, if not the, most heavily biked cities in the US. I've been hit by cars twice, both times on the campus of the university where I work, both times in fine weather, at ~17:15. The take home message is that drivers are not very careful, they don't pay attention, and they have no idea what the rules of the road are. Cyclists have to make every effort they can to be conspicuous, so that even the most distracted soccer mom in her behemoth SUV will notice you. And wear your helmet!
My wife and I tried the powers of 10 thing, but we managed to skip the first match, which is pretty easy. We were working on the 10 billion range, but I gave up and wrote a small perl script to brute force it. The answer 199981 is correct. There is a cluster of f(n)=n around that number.
It turns out that the perl script was much faster, but less fun. She was thinking that the answer would be a googol, but alas, it is not to be.
Sometimes, notably after the release of a major critical update, I have found that it actually takes less wallclock time to download the huge standalone than to get the tailored updates. I work at a large university, however, so I have quite a lot of bandwidth at my disposal.
I think that the big standalone installers are served from different machines than the ones that do the windowsupdate stuff, so even when the windowsupdate boxes are hammered, the other ones are doing relatively little.
I think, as others have mentioned, that he _should_ look like a new fangled Honda robot because he is, in the beginning of the books, a new fangled Sirius Cybernetics robot. I'm sure that as the story progresses he will become battered and decrepit.
Remember that he's supposed to have been designed by marketing dweebs.
I wasn't so sure that I liked the design at first, but I think that it's a pretty good go at what Marvin should look like. He'll look really, really pathetic when he needs to.
Yup they're fast. I have an LTO-1, which holds 100GB native.
One caveat, though. I found this one out recently. If a tape ever breaks in the drive, HP (I'm not sure about other manufacturers) says that they can't garauntee that the drive will continue to work. I think that they were bullshitting me, but they said that if the drive had been under warranty, they would have replaced the drive outright, no chance of fixing it. They didn't offer an option for me to pay for a repair. As far as I can tell, there's no way for the drive to have been damaged by the broken tape.
We ended up buying a whole new drive @ $2k, which sucks.
I'm drooling over the new AIT drives, but I need generation 3 right now. Damn astronomers with their terabytes of data.
I have real-world data to back that claim up. I have a Maxtor one-touch USB2/Firewire drive. Transferring a 20 gig file made from/dev/urandom went at ~13 MB/s on USB2, and ~18 MB/s on firewire. The target drive in both cases was IDE.
I was a bit surprised, because USB2 claims a higher bitrate.
I did something similar, but in my case, the arc actually ate a semicircle out of the case. It scared the hell out of me and I jumped straight up in the air. My coworkers were laughing their asses off while they pulled the power cord and reset the breakers.
Just a nitpick-- the drivers _do_ know the course--they're the ones who write the course notes. They get to drive the stages some time before the race.
That does not diminish the exceptional skill of the rally drivers. There are simply too many obstacles and sharp turns on the narrow roads for the driver to react unless he is reminded of what is approaching. It takes quite a bit of concentration to listen to the co-driver, who is 5-6 directions ahead of the driver, and still drive the car. On gravel/mud/snow. In the rain/sleet. At 200 km/h.
Speedvision's coverage of the WRC is excellent, as well. The announcer actually has the ability to shut the hell up for minutes at a time, so that we can listen to the driver/co-driver and the car. I've never seen any other coverage like that.
I will never understand why we USians as a whole would rather watch rednecks turn left than a rally. Our country is huge! We could have all kinds of rally conditions without leaving the continental US. It would be _so awesome_. But no, "NAASCOOORRR", as the parent so eloquently put it, is the huge motorsport.
I guess I'll have to continue to lust after the WRX for my American rally experience.
Come on, the LEDs faster than incandescents? Perhaps the quantum state required to fire off a LED is a bit faster than the time needed to heat those electrons off the tungsten wire, but I would be awfully suprised if that turns out to help avoiding accidents.
I think it's more useful than you realise. Watch the next time you're following a car with the taillight in the spoiler. Frequently, the light in the spoiler has LEDs, and the other taillights are incandescant. You can really tell the difference in illumination time between the LEDs and the incandescants.
Even if it's only a couple of milliseconds difference, it could change the severity of a collsion, or avoid one entirely.
If you have a hard drive voice coil magnet, you can test this yourself: The magnets are highly directional. If you put a screwdriver on the magnet face, it sticks like mad. If you put the screwdriver on the other face, the one covered by the mounting plate, the pull is significantly lower, and that's only 5mm away from the magnet.
Well, I would think that you would know when something interesting happened that day. You'd be able to seek to the general time of the event and save the nice images. If, on the other hand, you know you sat at your desk and read slashdot for 4 hours, it would be pretty easy to cut that out without looking at all of the data.
Even if you were just saving shots of hot chicks who walk by, you could scan at pretty high speed to get to the bits you want to keep.
I would think that a better interface would be a 30 minute to 1 hour fifo. If something cool happens, you can grab the last 5-10 minutes and go through it later.
I'm not coming from any real position of authority here, but I imagine that this law would only affect the recording's admissability in a court proceeding.
Look at the 'undercover reports' that TV shows do on insurance fraud--those people are filmed by civilians without informing all parties.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the implication of "inexpensive" is that if it were possible to buy a 1470 gb sun fibre-channel disk, it would cost well over 22 times as much as the 147 gb disk.
And, with the one big drive, you don't get any redundancy or hot spares.
Anyway, just a thought.
As I read it, it's the paper, not the film, that's being discontinued. For the moment, at least, you should be fine.
It may be a good idea to do some experiments with "artier" brands of film, though. They will probably be produced for a very long time, catering to artists who won't shoot anything but B&W film.
The IBM mo18b has a 2-d scroll button. The third button is positioned to be acutated with the thumb.
I found a couple on froogle, but it doesn't look like they're in production anymore.
I work with astronomers, who generate staggeringly large quantities of data. One of our groups is doing a survey of the sky, and they are now occupying 5 TB of space. The rest of the department is using a further 4-5 TB.
We have decided that it makes the most sense to buy just what we need. By the time we need more, the hardware is cheaper and easier to integrate. We've been using the Promise Ultratrak RAID boxes, which work out really well for us. We can get ~1TB of RAID 10 disk in one unit for ~$4000.
Now backups are the problem... ugh. The best price/performance/offsite capable solution we've found are firewire hard drives. We just bought 11 300 GB maxtor onetouch drives. They're pretty nice, but I hate having to split the data.
A friend of mine grew up on Guam, and he has interesting pig-catching stories. Apparently pigs like to eat pot out in the jungle, which makes them easy to catch.
They would keep the pigs in pens on the beach until they wanted to eat one. If the pigs got rowdy, they would put Frankie, a 2m monitor lizard in the pen to scare the shit out of the pigs.
Well, I don't know how many pictures we'll get, but the following calculation is enlightening.
I found all numbers from Google, so they are approximate. The order of magnitude should remain the same, though.
NASA budget: $15 billion
Federal budget: $3350.779 billion
Percentage of NASA budget to the Federal budget:
0.447%
Half a percent.
So if we assume that you make $60k, and you have $4k of federal tax (wild-ass guess based on my much smaller salary), then you pay $17 a year for ALL of NASA.
I'd say that that's a pretty damn good deal, myself.
If you have a pepper mill that has a shaft that goes all the way through the cap, you can unscrew the nut that holds the assembly together and chuck the end of the shaft on a drill. Hold the body of the pepper mill and pull the trigger of the drill, and you have a metric shit ton of pepper.
Or you could buy a Magnum. Nothing outgrinds the Magnum.
I used to read CS when it was the huge tome of its heyday, as well. I did the same things that you did--shopping, calling the vendors, finding deals.
I think that the internet killed it. Why should you spend all that money to buy an ad in a magazine when you can set up an online store and actually sell stuff right from it?
I was saddened when CS started to lose its tradtitional shape and mass, but it's the way things go. There's no market for such a magazine anymore, so it dies. We still remember tidbits, though. I remember a Dirt Cheap Drives ad that had a 9 gig hard drive for the low, low price of $5000.
I can reccomend this approach. I have LED lamps front and rear, so the battery weight is not much of an issue. When I drive, I find cyclists who use these types of lamps to be very visible.
The front lamp is 3 blue-white LEDs powered by 3x aaa batteries, and the rear is a 5 red LED unit that takes 2x aaa.
I use them in flash mode to get the most attention. I've found that because they use so little power, I use them much more frequently than I did my incandescant lamps.
I live in one of, if not the, most heavily biked cities in the US. I've been hit by cars twice, both times on the campus of the university where I work, both times in fine weather, at ~17:15. The take home message is that drivers are not very careful, they don't pay attention, and they have no idea what the rules of the road are. Cyclists have to make every effort they can to be conspicuous, so that even the most distracted soccer mom in her behemoth SUV will notice you. And wear your helmet!
er, no. The function f(x) returns the number of 1s that are used in counting _up to_ that number.
f(1)=1
f(10)=2
f(200000)=200000
I have one too. It says "Proud to be a Chemist" on the front.
I call it my Geek ID Card.
Mine has settled more than one argument, as well.
My wife and I tried the powers of 10 thing, but we managed to skip the first match, which is pretty easy. We were working on the 10 billion range, but I gave up and wrote a small perl script to brute force it. The answer 199981 is correct. There is a cluster of f(n)=n around that number.
It turns out that the perl script was much faster, but less fun. She was thinking that the answer would be a googol, but alas, it is not to be.
Sometimes, notably after the release of a major critical update, I have found that it actually takes less wallclock time to download the huge standalone than to get the tailored updates. I work at a large university, however, so I have quite a lot of bandwidth at my disposal.
I think that the big standalone installers are served from different machines than the ones that do the windowsupdate stuff, so even when the windowsupdate boxes are hammered, the other ones are doing relatively little.
I think, as others have mentioned, that he _should_ look like a new fangled Honda robot because he is, in the beginning of the books, a new fangled Sirius Cybernetics robot. I'm sure that as the story progresses he will become battered and decrepit.
Remember that he's supposed to have been designed by marketing dweebs.
I wasn't so sure that I liked the design at first, but I think that it's a pretty good go at what Marvin should look like. He'll look really, really pathetic when he needs to.
Yup they're fast. I have an LTO-1, which holds 100GB native.
One caveat, though. I found this one out recently. If a tape ever breaks in the drive, HP (I'm not sure about other manufacturers) says that they can't garauntee that the drive will continue to work. I think that they were bullshitting me, but they said that if the drive had been under warranty, they would have replaced the drive outright, no chance of fixing it. They didn't offer an option for me to pay for a repair. As far as I can tell, there's no way for the drive to have been damaged by the broken tape.
We ended up buying a whole new drive @ $2k, which sucks.
I'm drooling over the new AIT drives, but I need generation 3 right now. Damn astronomers with their terabytes of data.
I have real-world data to back that claim up. I have a Maxtor one-touch USB2/Firewire drive. Transferring a 20 gig file made from /dev/urandom went at ~13 MB/s on USB2, and ~18 MB/s on firewire. The target drive in both cases was IDE.
I was a bit surprised, because USB2 claims a higher bitrate.
I did something similar, but in my case, the arc actually ate a semicircle out of the case. It scared the hell out of me and I jumped straight up in the air. My coworkers were laughing their asses off while they pulled the power cord and reset the breakers.
Good times....
Just a nitpick-- the drivers _do_ know the course--they're the ones who write the course notes. They get to drive the stages some time before the race.
That does not diminish the exceptional skill of the rally drivers. There are simply too many obstacles and sharp turns on the narrow roads for the driver to react unless he is reminded of what is approaching. It takes quite a bit of concentration to listen to the co-driver, who is 5-6 directions ahead of the driver, and still drive the car. On gravel/mud/snow. In the rain/sleet. At 200 km/h.
Speedvision's coverage of the WRC is excellent, as well. The announcer actually has the ability to shut the hell up for minutes at a time, so that we can listen to the driver/co-driver and the car. I've never seen any other coverage like that.
I will never understand why we USians as a whole would rather watch rednecks turn left than a rally. Our country is huge! We could have all kinds of rally conditions without leaving the continental US. It would be _so awesome_. But no, "NAASCOOORRR", as the parent so eloquently put it, is the huge motorsport.
I guess I'll have to continue to lust after the WRX for my American rally experience.
Shit, he misspelled his own firm's name! On the first page, boies is misspelled "boise".
I would like to sic Leonard 'J' Crabs on them. That would be awesome.
Can someone tell me why DRLs would be illegal? Is it also illegal to turn on your headlights when it's sunny?
Come on, the LEDs faster than incandescents? Perhaps the quantum state required to fire off a LED is a bit faster than the time needed to heat those electrons off the tungsten wire, but I would be awfully suprised if that turns out to help avoiding accidents.
I think it's more useful than you realise. Watch the next time you're following a car with the taillight in the spoiler. Frequently, the light in the spoiler has LEDs, and the other taillights are incandescant. You can really tell the difference in illumination time between the LEDs and the incandescants.
Even if it's only a couple of milliseconds difference, it could change the severity of a collsion, or avoid one entirely.
If you have a hard drive voice coil magnet, you can test this yourself: The magnets are highly directional. If you put a screwdriver on the magnet face, it sticks like mad. If you put the screwdriver on the other face, the one covered by the mounting plate, the pull is significantly lower, and that's only 5mm away from the magnet.
Well, I would think that you would know when something interesting happened that day. You'd be able to seek to the general time of the event and save the nice images.
If, on the other hand, you know you sat at your desk and read slashdot for 4 hours, it would be pretty easy to cut that out without looking at all of the data.
Even if you were just saving shots of hot chicks who walk by, you could scan at pretty high speed to get to the bits you want to keep.
I would think that a better interface would be a 30 minute to 1 hour fifo. If something cool happens, you can grab the last 5-10 minutes and go through it later.
I'm not coming from any real position of authority here, but I imagine that this law would only affect the recording's admissability in a court proceeding.
Look at the 'undercover reports' that TV shows do on insurance fraud--those people are filmed by civilians without informing all parties.