Vinyl had limits. It also had very serious consequences when the limits were exceeded such as tracks hitting each other on the discs and needles skating across the surface of the disk.
The issues you describe are because of a crappy stylus, tonearm or turntable or because of a worn, damaged or abused record, and not because of an inherent problem with the format (other than the fact that the format lends itself to being easily damaged and abused).
My dad had (actually, still has) a record of some symphony playing Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture which concludes with a recording of a real civil war canon being shot. The deflection in the groves when the canon goes off was incredible and other groves in that area of the disk needed to be spaced out quite a bit to account for it. There was even a big warning label on the disk itself that you *had* to turn your volume down during that track or risk blowing your speakers. This album was apparently (in)famous for blowing a bunch of people's speakers. Anyway, my dad's turntable never had an issue tracking that disk or any other disk for that matter.
Yeah, at rates worse than bank loan rates (but not as bad as credit-card rates, mind you), if I've done my calculations correctly. Compared to the example of getting a $289 console and 2 $48 xbox live gold cards (PV = $384.52, or less if you buy the second card 12mths from now), paying $99 now and then a $15 monthly payment over 2 years works out to be an annual interest rate of ~12%.
This couldn't work (yet) I'm sure for various reasons (drive by wire has no control over steering), but it's only a matter of time, and once all the pieces are in place, an enterprising hacker should make it their first priority to implement: 1: As each car gets comprimised, randomly assign a "polarity" (+ or -) to the car. 2: Using onboard GPS, RFID, etc, detect when other comprimised cars are nearby 3: Profit! Uh, I mean watch as hilarity ensues as 1600kg magnets either attract or repulse each other at highway speeds...
Their called "klipschorn" speakers, you insensitive clod, and of course there isn't much loss as long as you use $7200 Pear Anjou speaker cables with proprietary hybrid geometry and ultra low electrical reactance... They're very danceable cables, don't you know, and totally worth the price.
I would think that eliminating glass reflections would reduce this problem. Don't birds fly into windows and glass buildings because they see the environment around them reflected in the glass and just don't know any better? Remove the reflection, and they would probably avoid the windows.
I wonder if the US fish & wildlife service will care about the increased number of humans walking into reflection-less glass doors however...
Possibly because the shock of the violent expansion that would result would possibly cause way more damage than there is already? Also, assuming nothing was damaged when all of that LN2 expanded back into gas, what do you think would happen to the pressure inside the RPV? I could imagine that the resulting pressure and large volume of gas would also displace the coolant, uncovering more of the rods and making things even worse, overall. For the last month, they've been fighting to reduce pressure and temperature inside of the vessel while keeping the coolant topped up (or filling it back up in some cases, because some had been lost).
Anyway, I haven't read the article but have been following what has been going on at the IAEA website, and I believe the procedure that they are following is pumping nitrogen gas into the containment vessel (which surrounds the reactor pressure vessel where the core and coolant are) to displace any air that might be there. I don't think they are proposing to pump nitrogen directly into the RPV.
I'd like to add that your computer failures were probably more due to shitty motherboard or graphics board design than they were to failing components (not that component failure can't happen, just that PCB assembly failures are more common. Also, many component failures can be traced back to poorly designed boards or systems (insufficient cooling, poor power regulation, etc)).
Taken as a whole, GPU+CPU is simpler and more robust than two separate components connected via an external bus. It does away with connectors, bus drivers (need something to drive those signals across connectors and inches of trace) , level shifters (external busses don't operate at the same voltage as core silicon), bridges (external busses are often shared by multiple devices) and all of the complexity, signal integrity issues and points of failure that these things introduce. GPU+CPU on one die means that P&R, timing closure, functional sims, gate sims, power sims, validation, QA, etc were all performed on them together, making the overall system much more robust. In the separate GPU/CPU case, each device is designed, built and validated separately (possibly by different companies) and then "wired together" (motherboard PCB + graphics card PCB) by one or more different companies (that always seem to be trying to find ways to undercut each other and to make their products cheaper and more fragile). As I see it, GPU+CPU on a single monolithic die, operating in a single voltage domain, will be a lot more robust than separate components could ever be (after any initial "kinks" in design & manufacturing are sorted out).
In general, it's taken the semiconductor industry 10-20 years to shrink a process by an order of magnitude (e.g. 1995=350nm, 2010=32nm). 11nm isn't really expected until 2022 (that's mass production, not just tech demos which are typically several years ahead). Presumably the 4nm process, which is perhaps still a couple of process sizes smaller than 11nm, would happen some time after that. There are still a lot of hurdles between producing a technology demo in a lab setting and the point where you've developed it sufficiently that products based on that technology can be designed. I suspect it will take a fairly long time before you're able to buy a CPU based on a 4nm process...
This is so obviously an attempted practical joke by the Russians. It's like the time my Dad told my uncle that break fluid makes a great car polish (Not! It does make a good paint stripper, though). You can imagine the laughs when my uncle fell for it. This is obviously the same thing, but on a slightly different scale... Oh those Russians and their sense of humour...
or if said hardware remains random in the presence of process, voltage or temperature variations (all of which affect the operation of "regular" flip-flops). It's one thing to "harness" the randomness of a register's metastability in the lab and quite another to do the same thing in mass-produced silicon...
London Dungeon is a waste of time and money. The 10 Worst London Tourist Attractions hits the nail on the head: "Boring, boring, boring and expensive!". Don't go there. The scariest thing there is price of admission (£13.95). Hit a pub instead.
Bullshit. If T-Mobile is supplying you with this phone and this service (i.e., you pay T-Mobile every month for the priviledge of using this service, do you not?), then why shouldn't they also be responsible for failures and outages? As a customer, I shouldn't need to care what they use as a back-end solution, and I certainly wouldn't accept "it's somebody else's screwup" as an excuse if something went wrong. The fact that the failure happened in some back-end service provider's network and not in the T-Mobile network itself doesn't matter. Presumably it was T-Mobil that chose this back end solution in the first place, and they (presumably) did the due diligence to make sure that their selection was up to their standards. If they fucked up their due diligence, or didn't do due diligence at all, then they are as much responsible for the failure as MS/Danger is. If they had done a better job picking their back-end provider, or at specifying the requirements of the system (i.e. specifying that a robust backup solution be used (and tested!) on all customer data), then this wouldn't have happened. In that regard, T-Mobile definitely could have prevented this issue.
[guy #1]: Looks like grandpa has wandered off again. Check the GeriatriFinder3000.com website to see where he's gone to. [guy #2]: Yeah, sure thing. [guy #2]: It looks like he's located off of 17th near bordello st. [guy #2]: I don't get why his locater dot is vibrating erratically on the screen like that, though. Strange. [guy #1]: Let me see that... [guy #2]: Say, isn't 17th & bordello right in the middle of the brothel district? [guy #1]: ?!?!! [guy #2]: I'm sure it's only coincidental...
Really? That's an obvious rip-off of the Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses. I can't wait until the inter-galactic lawyer hounds get wind of this...
Ask for a retainer. $600, $900 or whatever the original value of your laptop is. Ask for it in cash (not check or IOU) and say it's because the last time you lent somebody your laptop they dropped it/stole it/lost it, etc, and you were left on the line to replace it. Tell them you'll give them the money back as soon as the laptop is returned in good working order, as determined by you. If they just want to check email real quick right in front of you, tell them "OK, fine, I'll cut you a deal: $300 instead of $600, but no lower". Be adamant and don't ever cave in for anyone (don't accept any "I'll pay you if I break it, I swear" arguments). 90+% of people won't have the money on them, and most of the remainder will suddenly have to trust that you'll give them back the money when they return the laptop (and you've checked that it works properly), which they may be very hesitant to do. Unless your laptop is brand new, the amount of money they need to put into retainer is more than the cost of the laptop and so as long as your data has little or no value to them, they'll essentially be giving you more than what your laptop is worth, which is likely to discourage anyone from wanting to borrow it. Basically, you're sending the ball back into their court and asking that they trust you with a large sum of money. Most won't.
Also, as other have pointed out, set up a crippled guest account so that if somebody does take your offer, you aren't handing them all of your personal data.
Slashdot Mirror
Vinyl had limits. It also had very serious consequences when the limits were exceeded such as tracks hitting each other on the discs and needles skating across the surface of the disk.
The issues you describe are because of a crappy stylus, tonearm or turntable or because of a worn, damaged or abused record, and not because of an inherent problem with the format (other than the fact that the format lends itself to being easily damaged and abused).
My dad had (actually, still has) a record of some symphony playing Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture which concludes with a recording of a real civil war canon being shot. The deflection in the groves when the canon goes off was incredible and other groves in that area of the disk needed to be spaced out quite a bit to account for it. There was even a big warning label on the disk itself that you *had* to turn your volume down during that track or risk blowing your speakers. This album was apparently (in)famous for blowing a bunch of people's speakers. Anyway, my dad's turntable never had an issue tracking that disk or any other disk for that matter.
My area is completely white. That means I'm off the chart, right guys? Guys?
I guess the next thing to figure out is which way off the chart I am...
Yeah, at rates worse than bank loan rates (but not as bad as credit-card rates, mind you), if I've done my calculations correctly. Compared to the example of getting a $289 console and 2 $48 xbox live gold cards (PV = $384.52, or less if you buy the second card 12mths from now), paying $99 now and then a $15 monthly payment over 2 years works out to be an annual interest rate of ~12%.
PV=384.52 (baseline we're comparing to) - 99 (initial payment)
PMT=15/term
t=24
PV=PMT*t / (1+rate)^t (solve for rate)
rate = 0.00975/mth = 11.7%/yr
Not a terrible deal, if you're comparing it to carrying credit card debt, but you can certainly do better...
This couldn't work (yet) I'm sure for various reasons (drive by wire has no control over steering), but it's only a matter of time, and once all the pieces are in place, an enterprising hacker should make it their first priority to implement:
1: As each car gets comprimised, randomly assign a "polarity" (+ or -) to the car.
2: Using onboard GPS, RFID, etc, detect when other comprimised cars are nearby
3: Profit! Uh, I mean watch as hilarity ensues as 1600kg magnets either attract or repulse each other at highway speeds...
it's going to take a lot of high tech work to move the existing painting.
When in doubt: C4!
heh, heh...
Their called "klipschorn" speakers, you insensitive clod, and of course there isn't much loss as long as you use $7200 Pear Anjou speaker cables with proprietary hybrid geometry and ultra low electrical reactance... They're very danceable cables, don't you know, and totally worth the price.
*ducks*
Why not do both? Write encrypted random garbage to the hard disks. Everyone is happy!
I would think that eliminating glass reflections would reduce this problem. Don't birds fly into windows and glass buildings because they see the environment around them reflected in the glass and just don't know any better? Remove the reflection, and they would probably avoid the windows.
I wonder if the US fish & wildlife service will care about the increased number of humans walking into reflection-less glass doors however...
Possibly because the shock of the violent expansion that would result would possibly cause way more damage than there is already? Also, assuming nothing was damaged when all of that LN2 expanded back into gas, what do you think would happen to the pressure inside the RPV? I could imagine that the resulting pressure and large volume of gas would also displace the coolant, uncovering more of the rods and making things even worse, overall. For the last month, they've been fighting to reduce pressure and temperature inside of the vessel while keeping the coolant topped up (or filling it back up in some cases, because some had been lost).
Anyway, I haven't read the article but have been following what has been going on at the IAEA website, and I believe the procedure that they are following is pumping nitrogen gas into the containment vessel (which surrounds the reactor pressure vessel where the core and coolant are) to displace any air that might be there. I don't think they are proposing to pump nitrogen directly into the RPV.
Eww, I'm not touching that!
I don't care about all of the other changes, but taking xkcd out of the quick links box was going a step too far...
I almost feel sorry for them. Quick, somebody slap me...
I'd like to add that your computer failures were probably more due to shitty motherboard or graphics board design than they were to failing components (not that component failure can't happen, just that PCB assembly failures are more common. Also, many component failures can be traced back to poorly designed boards or systems (insufficient cooling, poor power regulation, etc)).
Taken as a whole, GPU+CPU is simpler and more robust than two separate components connected via an external bus. It does away with connectors, bus drivers (need something to drive those signals across connectors and inches of trace) , level shifters (external busses don't operate at the same voltage as core silicon), bridges (external busses are often shared by multiple devices) and all of the complexity, signal integrity issues and points of failure that these things introduce. GPU+CPU on one die means that P&R, timing closure, functional sims, gate sims, power sims, validation, QA, etc were all performed on them together, making the overall system much more robust. In the separate GPU/CPU case, each device is designed, built and validated separately (possibly by different companies) and then "wired together" (motherboard PCB + graphics card PCB) by one or more different companies (that always seem to be trying to find ways to undercut each other and to make their products cheaper and more fragile). As I see it, GPU+CPU on a single monolithic die, operating in a single voltage domain, will be a lot more robust than separate components could ever be (after any initial "kinks" in design & manufacturing are sorted out).
In general, it's taken the semiconductor industry 10-20 years to shrink a process by an order of magnitude (e.g. 1995=350nm, 2010=32nm). 11nm isn't really expected until 2022 (that's mass production, not just tech demos which are typically several years ahead). Presumably the 4nm process, which is perhaps still a couple of process sizes smaller than 11nm, would happen some time after that. There are still a lot of hurdles between producing a technology demo in a lab setting and the point where you've developed it sufficiently that products based on that technology can be designed. I suspect it will take a fairly long time before you're able to buy a CPU based on a 4nm process...
This is so obviously an attempted practical joke by the Russians. It's like the time my Dad told my uncle that break fluid makes a great car polish (Not! It does make a good paint stripper, though). You can imagine the laughs when my uncle fell for it. This is obviously the same thing, but on a slightly different scale... Oh those Russians and their sense of humour...
They should have titled the fan sticker: "Ceci n'est pas un fan" [1].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
or if said hardware remains random in the presence of process, voltage or temperature variations (all of which affect the operation of "regular" flip-flops). It's one thing to "harness" the randomness of a register's metastability in the lab and quite another to do the same thing in mass-produced silicon...
From TFA:
As the story goes, an array of nanowires embedded in the film recognizes your digits or pointed breath [...]
Except that I read "pointed breasts" ;-) [1]
Ah, how the mind has a way of making things up before you've had your first morning coffee...
[1] Presumably up to 16 of them. Now that's a party I'd like to be invited to (but probably never will)
London Dungeon is a waste of time and money. The 10 Worst London Tourist Attractions hits the nail on the head: "Boring, boring, boring and expensive!". Don't go there. The scariest thing there is price of admission (£13.95). Hit a pub instead.
Bullshit. If T-Mobile is supplying you with this phone and this service (i.e., you pay T-Mobile every month for the priviledge of using this service, do you not?), then why shouldn't they also be responsible for failures and outages? As a customer, I shouldn't need to care what they use as a back-end solution, and I certainly wouldn't accept "it's somebody else's screwup" as an excuse if something went wrong. The fact that the failure happened in some back-end service provider's network and not in the T-Mobile network itself doesn't matter. Presumably it was T-Mobil that chose this back end solution in the first place, and they (presumably) did the due diligence to make sure that their selection was up to their standards. If they fucked up their due diligence, or didn't do due diligence at all, then they are as much responsible for the failure as MS/Danger is. If they had done a better job picking their back-end provider, or at specifying the requirements of the system (i.e. specifying that a robust backup solution be used (and tested!) on all customer data), then this wouldn't have happened. In that regard, T-Mobile definitely could have prevented this issue.
Oh, that's brilliant! I'd want mine to have a pullstring, though. You know, like a chainsaw...
[guy #1]: Looks like grandpa has wandered off again. Check the GeriatriFinder3000.com website to see where he's gone to.
[guy #2]: Yeah, sure thing.
[guy #2]: It looks like he's located off of 17th near bordello st.
[guy #2]: I don't get why his locater dot is vibrating erratically on the screen like that, though. Strange.
[guy #1]: Let me see that...
[guy #2]: Say, isn't 17th & bordello right in the middle of the brothel district?
[guy #1]: ?!?!!
[guy #2]: I'm sure it's only coincidental...
Really? That's an obvious rip-off of the Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses. I can't wait until the inter-galactic lawyer hounds get wind of this...
Ask for a retainer. $600, $900 or whatever the original value of your laptop is. Ask for it in cash (not check or IOU) and say it's because the last time you lent somebody your laptop they dropped it/stole it/lost it, etc, and you were left on the line to replace it. Tell them you'll give them the money back as soon as the laptop is returned in good working order, as determined by you. If they just want to check email real quick right in front of you, tell them "OK, fine, I'll cut you a deal: $300 instead of $600, but no lower". Be adamant and don't ever cave in for anyone (don't accept any "I'll pay you if I break it, I swear" arguments).
90+% of people won't have the money on them, and most of the remainder will suddenly have to trust that you'll give them back the money when they return the laptop (and you've checked that it works properly), which they may be very hesitant to do. Unless your laptop is brand new, the amount of money they need to put into retainer is more than the cost of the laptop and so as long as your data has little or no value to them, they'll essentially be giving you more than what your laptop is worth, which is likely to discourage anyone from wanting to borrow it.
Basically, you're sending the ball back into their court and asking that they trust you with a large sum of money. Most won't.
Also, as other have pointed out, set up a crippled guest account so that if somebody does take your offer, you aren't handing them all of your personal data.