Sucked ass performance wise, but good price per MB.
Where SSD score big is random IO, in real world use sequential IO performance is largely moot. Random IO dominates performance. SSD are orders of magnitude better performing on random IO, especially reads.
And I need a small, but fast drive for system files and programs/files that need high performance and a big but not necessarily fast drive for my movie collection. I said linear read because I would only need 40MB/s speed is if I was moving the files to another drive or writing them to tape. In which case I am reading/writing large files, so the drive does not need to have a lot of cache or RPMs. I also use one drive as external, connected via USB. USB2 can't do more than ~40MB/s anyway.
My small, but fast drive is a 15kRPM 36GB one. The others are regular 7200RPM IDE drives of varying capacity. They are formatted with either FAT32 or NTFS and use 32K (FA32) or 64K (NTFS) clusters.
Oh, and I use one 3.25" FH drive, it has a huge capacity of ~1GB and a fast read speed of ~2MB/s. It spins at 3600RPM and still is suitable for various small files.
That's what backups are for. You do make backups, right?
There's still the possibility of my tape drive failing and the hard drive failing before I get another tape drive. Also, if I use another hard drive for the backups, the bad PSU or motherboard can fry both of them at once, even if I only connect the backup drive during a backup.
This always seemed strange to me. When we looked for a house, we mostly looked at the location, the size of the yard, whether the house suited our needs and the price. We did not look at the neighbors lawns or lack thereof. Now we have a 2m high fence from the street and a ~1.5m high fence from the neighbors (the highest that the law allows without the consent of said neighbors).
Something as large and visible as a dead lawn makes it seem like the house is abandoned.
So what? It's not like they are selling the house or something.
The LCD thing pisses me off too. While I have a CRT monitor that is quite good, people usually advise me to buy a LCD and their argument is usually that then I could have two monitors. Yes, I could. One behind the other. It wouldn't do me any good though.
Now it will be the same thing with hard drives. In a way, it already is. I don't need the drive to be super fast, no. 30-40MB/s of linear read speed would be enough for most of my drives, but I have to buy 7200RPM drives with a lot of cache that do 100MB/s. How about a huge 5.25" Full Height drive with >10 platters that does 40MB/s and has 50ms full seek. The drive would probably be cheaper or more reliable because of the lower data density or it would have much more capacity than the regular 3.5" drives.
I don't trust flash based storage devices. If the power supply fails and sends +30V where 5V should have been the flash memory will be destroyed with all its contents. If this happens to a hard drive, I could at least bring it to a data recovery company (if the data is very valuable) or try to recover the data myself (if the data is not that valuable). It would probably only need a circuit board replacement. Oh, and flash memory has a limited number of write cycles.
Remember? I have one such drive (though somebody removed a chip from it before giving it to me). I still hope that one day I can buy a similar drive, replace the electronics on this one and bring this drive back to life.
How does your OS determine that it is a trojan and not a remote control app that you want to install? How does your OS determine that it is a spambot and not a regular IRC bot? How does your OS determine that it is a file stealing malware and not a filesharing app?
First time was when the clip holding the outer at the carbie fractured; the outer pushed forwards into the throttle arm and opened it all the way when I lifted my foot off the accelerator. The second was a worn and frayed inner; it jammed when I accelerated away from an intersection. Both happened on the same stretch of road, oddly enough.
And then you presumably shifted into neutral or low gear and/or stopped the engine and stopped the car. After opening the hood you saw a broken clip so you knew why it happened and what to do to fix your car.
You can also inspect the parts to see if they are in good shape (I doubt that the clip broke suddenly and did not have any marks of a fracture before).
The cars with the problem described in the article could not be stopped by turning off the engine (looks like the engine did not turn off) or stepping on the brakes.
It looks to me like it's easier to design a reliable mechanical system than it is designing reliable software. For example, we accept software bugs and patches as inevitable but a mechanical device usually does not need any patches until something wears out. If you buy a new record player it works right the first time, you do not need to update it or anything. If the record player has some bug, for example it would horribly scratch every 5th record played, you would probably send it to warranty or return it and demand your money back. On the other hand, software that crashes and needs to be constantly updated "is just how it is".
But would the malware really need root access? Couldn't the bot just copy itself to the users home directory and make the computer launch it on startup (~/.kde/Autostart IIRC on KDE)?
They probably have the transformer, because otherwise they would not be insulated from the mains and as such would be very dangerous.
Well, the only of getting relatively safe DC out of the outlet without using a transformer would be to use a half wave rectifier, which means that the other wire is connected straight to the circuit and is ultimately passed to the connector. If I plug it so that this wire is neutral, everything would be OK, but if I reversed the plug, I would get a live wire on the connector.
I sometimes build tube amplifiers. They, as you know, usually use 200-300V DC, so in theory I could save on an expensive 220V/220V transformer, however, talking to some people smarter than me led me to believe that this is impossible to do safely if the user is supposed to touch any metal parts of the device (for example a nixie clock that has insulated case and buttons).
I had two ideas, one was the half wave rectifier, which would probably only be safe if it used earth contact for power instead of neutral, which would be bad. I also had an idea of using relays and an earthed plug to basically select which wire was live and which was neutral. If a relay fails it would be bad.
And 'switched mode' is the sort of language this study would use. Such supplies are considered 'switching power supplies', not switched mode. Switching is the design mechanism, not a mode.
Sorry, English is not my native language. I must have remembered the term incorrectly. On the other hand, now that I googled it, Wikipedia lists both terms as acceptable ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply ).
As for transformerless power supplies, fuses and varistors would only protect the device, but not the user. Also, AFAIK switching power supplies are more efficient if they output a voltage similar to input voltage, so a 220V/5V power supply would be inefficient without a transformer, also it could very easily output 100V and fry the whatever device it is connected to.
A telltale sign of an energy-efficient device is the ballast, or transformer, that you see near the end of a power cord on a laptop computer, printer, or cell phone charger (although not all devices have them).
Ballast!=transformer. A transformer converts AC to a different voltage (it can step it up or down), while a ballast regulates the current and is mostly used with fluorescent lamps (the lamp needs higher voltage to ignite and a lower voltage to operate).
When plugged in, it's warm to the touch, an indication that it's tamping down current and throwing off transient pollution.
It is warm because it is not 100% efficient and converts some of the electricity to heat. Yes, switch mode power supplies do give out transients (unless they use PFC), but conventional linear power supplies do not and they still are warm (if not warmer - linear power supplies are less efficient).
Two of the worst creators of transient radiation: light dimmer switches and compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs). Transients are created when current is repeatedly interrupted. A CFL, for instance, saves energy by turning itself on and off repeatedly, as many as 100,000 times per second.
light dimmers - agreed. Also, old computer power supplies (made before PFC was required by law). CFLs - maybe, but not because "they turn themselves off". CFLs do not turn themselves off repeatedly, also, if they did it, it would not be to save power (the lamp could stay on all the time and be brighter, so the customer would buy a smaller lamp). The electronic ballast converts the frequency of the power from 50Hz to 20kHz so it can use a relatively small capacitor to limit the current to the lamp instead of a large inefficient inductor.
Also, almost every mains operated device has a transformer. Lamps and fans do not, also old AC/DC tube radios do not, but everything else does. Modern electronics need low voltage (3.3-12V) instead of 220V that is in the outlet. just because there is no power adaptor on the cord does not mean that the device does not have a transformer inside. Also, the electricity passes a few transformers on the way from the power plant to the outlet.
The authors don't realize any if not most laptop power supplies use direct conversion, the transformer is gone.
Even if the power supply is switched mode, like the most of them nowadays, there is still a transformer inside, but much smaller (because it operates at higher frequency). Without the transformer, your laptop would be directly connected to the outlet, so it would have 220V on its case, which would be somewhat unsafe.
Firstly, you don't know the actual RF-wattage as produced. It can be significantly above 1 watt. How about 100 watt?
Just put a similar antenna and you will have free electricity.
However, it would be stupid to place a directional antenna so most of the power goes through a building - if you put the antenna above the building you will need less power or you will be able to transmit the signal farther.
The thing is that even if I cannot understand the "LO VCO UNLOCK" message (LO Voltage Controlled Oscillator unlocked from some reference oscillator?) I could google it, call a friend who may know about it or call the company that made the device or program that is displaying this error. If I can't find the solution on google, I'll call somebody, tell them the message and hope that it makes sense to them.
If there is no error message, I'll try to describe the problem as accurately as I can, for example, talking about radio would be "I bought Leak Troughline Stereo, it works, that is I can receive stations, but it has low sensitivity (the tuning indicator does not close even if I connect the radio to my cable TV cable (which has FM radio in addition to analog and digital TV)), AFC does not work right (if I turn it on, the radio switches to a different station on a lower frequency or it just outputs noise) and I can receive the same station on two close frequencies (something like 100kHz apart, the radio has an analog dial so I can't tell the precise difference)". Even though I may not know why it is like this (that's why I am asking somebody else) I can say something more than "It does not work".
However, lusers usually tell me (as a friend/family tech support) "I did something, then the computer wrote something and now it does not work". In this case my response is usually "Well, then do something and it will work again, until you tell me what exactly happened, I won't be able to tell you what that 'something' is"
I can wait. Sometimes I even download the game (with crack) and have something else to do so I forget about the game for a month or more. It's never "Oh I can't wait for this game to be available for download so I am going to buy it", it's more like "Hmm, the crack is not available yet... I know, maybe I should check my downloaded games directory to see if there is any game that I haven't played yet, oh and, by the way, I should check if there are cracks available for the games I wanted to play earlier but couldn't".
out-of-game server browser - too bad that the server usually become full by the time the game starts.
community features - may be useful for some
store - did you know that the price of the games in Europe is the same as in the US, just with Euros instead of Dollars. Oh, and they lie about the prices too - they show the price without VAT, as if there was a way I could not pay the VAT.
automatic installation - too bad it's on only one harddrive. When I install games I downloaded using bittorrent I can install them on any hard drive that happens to have enough free space the the moment. No such luck with Steam.
automatic patching - "OK, let's play this game, oh wait, it needs to update first and the servers are busy"
Also: busy servers (I actually have downloaded the gcf files using bittorrent faster than Steam, in fact Steam did not even begin to download them; the need for internet connection (hmm, my connection is down, maybe I'll play some single player game, oh wait I can't).
My most reliable server is 3x Intel P3 Xeon 700MHz (and one empty slot) and 3GB (16GB max) PC100 RAM. It has triple redundant power supplies and 4 hard drives. It runs Win2k3 AD (backup DC), uTorrent and VmWare Server with two VMs running - Win2k3 and Win7 (so I can see the UI if I need to walk someone trough some settings, the UI is a bit different from XP version; also to try to make Win7 look like Win2k). It has enough speed for now, if it gets too slow, I can add one more CPU.
As it happens, many microwave communication systems do indeed modulate down into the ELF range through a number of different means and methods.
No. The point of using microwaves for communication is that you do not need a big antenna or a very powerful transmitter.
For example, AM radio uses quite low frequencies (less than 1MHz). 500kHz has a wavelength of 600m. A quarter wavelength antenna is quite efficient, so 600m/4=150m. You need a 150m long antenna to efficiently receive radiowaves at 500kHz. Transmitting is a bit different, but still uses huge antennas.
One of the reasons why cellphones use higher frequencies (1800-2100MHz) is that you do not need a huge antenna to transmit and receive efficiently.
What you probably wanted to say is that the microwaves are modulated by a low frequency data signal, but that does not extend the radiated spectrum down to 1Hz.
If the microwaves are amplitude modulated then you get a spectrum that starts at f0-x and ends at f0+x, f0 being the nominal frequency (2GHz or whatever), x being the frequency of the signal. So, as the signal frequency gets lower, the spectrum gets narrower.
FM is a bit different and has a wider spectrum, but is still does not go down to 1Hz because it would be very impractical (or even impossible) to build an antenna that radiates 2GHz and, say, 100kHz efficiently.
Oh, and RF does heat things up - just look at a microwave oven, but remember - the microwave may have ~500W power and the cellphone is lucky to even have 2W. To compare these power levels - try looking at a 2W lightbulb and then look at a 500W lightbulb from the same distance.
I use my call phone with an external bluetooth GPS (no internal one) receiver for navigation.
Still, the remote lock is probably convenient, as long as it is an extra feature instead of the only way to unlock the car. I know one car that does not have the regular locks on the door, instead you can only lock/unlock it with the remote control that is on the key. You still need the key to start the car. So, what can go wrong with this system?
1.Car battery dies (for any reason) or 2.The battery in the key dies or 3.The key gets wet and the water goes into the transmitter or 4.The receiver fails
and you have no way of getting into the car. While you could replace the battery on the key assuming you were near a shop that sells them, you will have problems if the car battery dies. How much would it cost to have a regular lock at least as backup.
Oh, an on this car, you can only open the trunk by pressing a button on the drivers side door. People usually open the trunk if they want to take things out or put things in it. To do those actions, you need to be near the trunk, so you can put the key in the lock and open it that way. This way is even less convenient - open driver side door, press the button, go to the trunk, open it. Oh, and the button does not always work when it's cold.
Another (older) car has both options of unlocking the door, but also has unnecessary complexity. To open the trunk, you need to unlock it with the key (or unlock by remote control with the rest of the car), press the button and then it actually unlocks and a handle slides out. So, if the battery dies, you won't be able to open the trunk, at least you will have problems. Oh, and the battery is conveniently placed in the trunk.
The more I read this, the more I want an old car which does not have so many points of failure. Those computers are interconnected using wires, wires oxidize and may sometimes fail. It looks like it would be a lot of fun trying to find the problem with a car, when some of the interconnecting links have partially failed (a few wires on a parallel bus, too much noise on a serial bus etc).
Also, those computers just make the car more complex without actually being of much use.
In your example, slamming on the brakes would stop any car, one that has the complex electronics and one that just brakes. Airbags have to be deployed by some collision sensor so some complexity will still be there. It's not much point in turning off the radio after you crashed (in what cases would that be useful?). HVAC should stop when the engine stops (if it is a serious crash then the engine will be stopped by the object that you crashed into; if it is not that serious then you will stop the engine or the engine will stall seeing that the car may be still in gear and stopped).
See? The huge number of processors in a car is just for the sake if complexity and higher repair costs.
I have an idea... how about making most of the critical systems in the car dependent on mechanics rather than software? It seems that it is easier to test the mechanical parts and it is also usually clearly visible if something has failed (bent, broken etc). So, leave fancy electronics for the audio system and navigation, use simple electronics or relays for things like turning signals and use mechanical parts for accelerator, brakes and steering. That could work, I mean it should be more reliable than the overly complex software doing nothing useful, just making the system more complex.
IIRC Aero uses the video card more, so it would mean shorter battery life. Also, I don;t need the different look, while I like XP look, I can live with 2000/2003 look.
I installed 7 on a virtual machine so I can try to find out how to change the look (because sooner or later I am going to need a new laptop). So far so good, I have the classic theme, the classic start menu ("Classic Shell" open source software), a normal toolbar on Windows Explorer, "up one level" button. I turned off SuperFetch and indexing (I search my computer rarely, so there is no point in that), I also turned off the "thumbnails as icons" option - I don;t need them, on my XP computer I have turned off the video thumbnail generation (regsvr32/u shmedia.dll).
Now I need to find out how to move the address bar below the menu and toolbar, how to make Windows Explorer display rows with less space between them ("Details" view) and how to remove the "Organize" toolbar.
It now is almost workable with a 700MHz CPU (that's the CPU of my VmWare Server, yes I know it is below the minimum requirement of 1GHz) and 1GB of RAM (uses 287MB with no additional software running, 238MB cached, 504MB free). It is still slower than Windows 2003 virtual machine that is running at the same time (host PC has 3 CPUs) with 384MB of RAM (223 used with Apache and MySQL running).
Win7 gives the experience index as 1.0 because of slow CPU and video card (both get 1), RAM gets 1.5 and hard drive gets 4.8
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There was a drive like that in the 90's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bigfoot_(hard_drive) [wikipedia.org]
Sucked ass performance wise, but good price per MB.
Where SSD score big is random IO, in real world use sequential IO performance is largely moot. Random IO dominates performance. SSD are orders of magnitude better performing on random IO, especially reads.
And I need a small, but fast drive for system files and programs/files that need high performance and a big but not necessarily fast drive for my movie collection. I said linear read because I would only need 40MB/s speed is if I was moving the files to another drive or writing them to tape. In which case I am reading/writing large files, so the drive does not need to have a lot of cache or RPMs. I also use one drive as external, connected via USB. USB2 can't do more than ~40MB/s anyway.
My small, but fast drive is a 15kRPM 36GB one. The others are regular 7200RPM IDE drives of varying capacity. They are formatted with either FAT32 or NTFS and use 32K (FA32) or 64K (NTFS) clusters.
Oh, and I use one 3.25" FH drive, it has a huge capacity of ~1GB and a fast read speed of ~2MB/s. It spins at 3600RPM and still is suitable for various small files.
That's what backups are for. You do make backups, right?
There's still the possibility of my tape drive failing and the hard drive failing before I get another tape drive. Also, if I use another hard drive for the backups, the bad PSU or motherboard can fry both of them at once, even if I only connect the backup drive during a backup.
This always seemed strange to me. When we looked for a house, we mostly looked at the location, the size of the yard, whether the house suited our needs and the price. We did not look at the neighbors lawns or lack thereof. Now we have a 2m high fence from the street and a ~1.5m high fence from the neighbors (the highest that the law allows without the consent of said neighbors).
Something as large and visible as a dead lawn makes it seem like the house is abandoned.
So what? It's not like they are selling the house or something.
P.S. I do not live in the US.
The LCD thing pisses me off too. While I have a CRT monitor that is quite good, people usually advise me to buy a LCD and their argument is usually that then I could have two monitors. Yes, I could. One behind the other. It wouldn't do me any good though.
Now it will be the same thing with hard drives. In a way, it already is. I don't need the drive to be super fast, no. 30-40MB/s of linear read speed would be enough for most of my drives, but I have to buy 7200RPM drives with a lot of cache that do 100MB/s. How about a huge 5.25" Full Height drive with >10 platters that does 40MB/s and has 50ms full seek. The drive would probably be cheaper or more reliable because of the lower data density or it would have much more capacity than the regular 3.5" drives.
I don't trust flash based storage devices. If the power supply fails and sends +30V where 5V should have been the flash memory will be destroyed with all its contents. If this happens to a hard drive, I could at least bring it to a data recovery company (if the data is very valuable) or try to recover the data myself (if the data is not that valuable). It would probably only need a circuit board replacement. Oh, and flash memory has a limited number of write cycles.
Remember? I have one such drive (though somebody removed a chip from it before giving it to me). I still hope that one day I can buy a similar drive, replace the electronics on this one and bring this drive back to life.
Wait, you can't get a trojan on your MacOS?
How does your OS determine that it is a trojan and not a remote control app that you want to install?
How does your OS determine that it is a spambot and not a regular IRC bot?
How does your OS determine that it is a file stealing malware and not a filesharing app?
First time was when the clip holding the outer at the carbie fractured; the outer pushed forwards into the throttle arm and opened it all the way when I lifted my foot off the accelerator. The second was a worn and frayed inner; it jammed when I accelerated away from an intersection. Both happened on the same stretch of road, oddly enough.
And then you presumably shifted into neutral or low gear and/or stopped the engine and stopped the car. After opening the hood you saw a broken clip so you knew why it happened and what to do to fix your car.
You can also inspect the parts to see if they are in good shape (I doubt that the clip broke suddenly and did not have any marks of a fracture before).
The cars with the problem described in the article could not be stopped by turning off the engine (looks like the engine did not turn off) or stepping on the brakes.
It looks to me like it's easier to design a reliable mechanical system than it is designing reliable software. For example, we accept software bugs and patches as inevitable but a mechanical device usually does not need any patches until something wears out. If you buy a new record player it works right the first time, you do not need to update it or anything. If the record player has some bug, for example it would horribly scratch every 5th record played, you would probably send it to warranty or return it and demand your money back. On the other hand, software that crashes and needs to be constantly updated "is just how it is".
But would the malware really need root access? Couldn't the bot just copy itself to the users home directory and make the computer launch it on startup (~/.kde/Autostart IIRC on KDE)?
Unless you are behind a NAT router without the required port forwarded. Or you use a firewall.
They probably have the transformer, because otherwise they would not be insulated from the mains and as such would be very dangerous.
Well, the only of getting relatively safe DC out of the outlet without using a transformer would be to use a half wave rectifier, which means that the other wire is connected straight to the circuit and is ultimately passed to the connector. If I plug it so that this wire is neutral, everything would be OK, but if I reversed the plug, I would get a live wire on the connector.
I sometimes build tube amplifiers. They, as you know, usually use 200-300V DC, so in theory I could save on an expensive 220V/220V transformer, however, talking to some people smarter than me led me to believe that this is impossible to do safely if the user is supposed to touch any metal parts of the device (for example a nixie clock that has insulated case and buttons).
I had two ideas, one was the half wave rectifier, which would probably only be safe if it used earth contact for power instead of neutral, which would be bad. I also had an idea of using relays and an earthed plug to basically select which wire was live and which was neutral. If a relay fails it would be bad.
And 'switched mode' is the sort of language this study would use. Such supplies are considered 'switching power supplies', not switched mode. Switching is the design mechanism, not a mode.
Sorry, English is not my native language. I must have remembered the term incorrectly. On the other hand, now that I googled it, Wikipedia lists both terms as acceptable ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply ).
As for transformerless power supplies, fuses and varistors would only protect the device, but not the user. Also, AFAIK switching power supplies are more efficient if they output a voltage similar to input voltage, so a 220V/5V power supply would be inefficient without a transformer, also it could very easily output 100V and fry the whatever device it is connected to.
Let's see...
A telltale sign of an energy-efficient device is the ballast, or transformer, that you see near the end of a power cord on a laptop computer, printer, or cell phone charger (although not all devices have them).
Ballast!=transformer. A transformer converts AC to a different voltage (it can step it up or down), while a ballast regulates the current and is mostly used with fluorescent lamps (the lamp needs higher voltage to ignite and a lower voltage to operate).
When plugged in, it's warm to the touch, an indication that it's tamping down current and throwing off transient pollution.
It is warm because it is not 100% efficient and converts some of the electricity to heat. Yes, switch mode power supplies do give out transients (unless they use PFC), but conventional linear power supplies do not and they still are warm (if not warmer - linear power supplies are less efficient).
Two of the worst creators of transient radiation: light dimmer switches and compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs). Transients are created when current is repeatedly interrupted. A CFL, for instance, saves energy by turning itself on and off repeatedly, as many as 100,000 times per second.
light dimmers - agreed. Also, old computer power supplies (made before PFC was required by law). CFLs - maybe, but not because "they turn themselves off". CFLs do not turn themselves off repeatedly, also, if they did it, it would not be to save power (the lamp could stay on all the time and be brighter, so the customer would buy a smaller lamp). The electronic ballast converts the frequency of the power from 50Hz to 20kHz so it can use a relatively small capacitor to limit the current to the lamp instead of a large inefficient inductor.
Also, almost every mains operated device has a transformer. Lamps and fans do not, also old AC/DC tube radios do not, but everything else does. Modern electronics need low voltage (3.3-12V) instead of 220V that is in the outlet. just because there is no power adaptor on the cord does not mean that the device does not have a transformer inside. Also, the electricity passes a few transformers on the way from the power plant to the outlet.
The authors don't realize any if not most laptop power supplies use direct conversion, the transformer is gone.
Even if the power supply is switched mode, like the most of them nowadays, there is still a transformer inside, but much smaller (because it operates at higher frequency). Without the transformer, your laptop would be directly connected to the outlet, so it would have 220V on its case, which would be somewhat unsafe.
Firstly, you don't know the actual RF-wattage as produced. It can be significantly above 1 watt. How about 100 watt?
Just put a similar antenna and you will have free electricity.
However, it would be stupid to place a directional antenna so most of the power goes through a building - if you put the antenna above the building you will need less power or you will be able to transmit the signal farther.
In any case, just get the RF levels measured.
The thing is that even if I cannot understand the "LO VCO UNLOCK" message (LO Voltage Controlled Oscillator unlocked from some reference oscillator?) I could google it, call a friend who may know about it or call the company that made the device or program that is displaying this error. If I can't find the solution on google, I'll call somebody, tell them the message and hope that it makes sense to them.
If there is no error message, I'll try to describe the problem as accurately as I can, for example, talking about radio would be "I bought Leak Troughline Stereo, it works, that is I can receive stations, but it has low sensitivity (the tuning indicator does not close even if I connect the radio to my cable TV cable (which has FM radio in addition to analog and digital TV)), AFC does not work right (if I turn it on, the radio switches to a different station on a lower frequency or it just outputs noise) and I can receive the same station on two close frequencies (something like 100kHz apart, the radio has an analog dial so I can't tell the precise difference)". Even though I may not know why it is like this (that's why I am asking somebody else) I can say something more than "It does not work".
However, lusers usually tell me (as a friend/family tech support) "I did something, then the computer wrote something and now it does not work". In this case my response is usually "Well, then do something and it will work again, until you tell me what exactly happened, I won't be able to tell you what that 'something' is"
I can wait. Sometimes I even download the game (with crack) and have something else to do so I forget about the game for a month or more. It's never "Oh I can't wait for this game to be available for download so I am going to buy it", it's more like "Hmm, the crack is not available yet... I know, maybe I should check my downloaded games directory to see if there is any game that I haven't played yet, oh and, by the way, I should check if there are cracks available for the games I wanted to play earlier but couldn't".
Let's see...
out-of-game server browser - too bad that the server usually become full by the time the game starts.
community features - may be useful for some
store - did you know that the price of the games in Europe is the same as in the US, just with Euros instead of Dollars. Oh, and they lie about the prices too - they show the price without VAT, as if there was a way I could not pay the VAT.
automatic installation - too bad it's on only one harddrive. When I install games I downloaded using bittorrent I can install them on any hard drive that happens to have enough free space the the moment. No such luck with Steam.
automatic patching - "OK, let's play this game, oh wait, it needs to update first and the servers are busy"
Also: busy servers (I actually have downloaded the gcf files using bittorrent faster than Steam, in fact Steam did not even begin to download them; the need for internet connection (hmm, my connection is down, maybe I'll play some single player game, oh wait I can't).
Slowpoke.
My most reliable server is 3x Intel P3 Xeon 700MHz (and one empty slot) and 3GB (16GB max) PC100 RAM. It has triple redundant power supplies and 4 hard drives. It runs Win2k3 AD (backup DC), uTorrent and VmWare Server with two VMs running - Win2k3 and Win7 (so I can see the UI if I need to walk someone trough some settings, the UI is a bit different from XP version; also to try to make Win7 look like Win2k). It has enough speed for now, if it gets too slow, I can add one more CPU.
As it happens, many microwave communication systems do indeed modulate down into the ELF range through a number of different means and methods.
No. The point of using microwaves for communication is that you do not need a big antenna or a very powerful transmitter.
For example, AM radio uses quite low frequencies (less than 1MHz). 500kHz has a wavelength of 600m. A quarter wavelength antenna is quite efficient, so 600m/4=150m. You need a 150m long antenna to efficiently receive radiowaves at 500kHz. Transmitting is a bit different, but still uses huge antennas.
One of the reasons why cellphones use higher frequencies (1800-2100MHz) is that you do not need a huge antenna to transmit and receive efficiently.
What you probably wanted to say is that the microwaves are modulated by a low frequency data signal, but that does not extend the radiated spectrum down to 1Hz.
If the microwaves are amplitude modulated then you get a spectrum that starts at f0-x and ends at f0+x, f0 being the nominal frequency (2GHz or whatever), x being the frequency of the signal. So, as the signal frequency gets lower, the spectrum gets narrower.
FM is a bit different and has a wider spectrum, but is still does not go down to 1Hz because it would be very impractical (or even impossible) to build an antenna that radiates 2GHz and, say, 100kHz efficiently.
Oh, and RF does heat things up - just look at a microwave oven, but remember - the microwave may have ~500W power and the cellphone is lucky to even have 2W. To compare these power levels - try looking at a 2W lightbulb and then look at a 500W lightbulb from the same distance.
For me it is hard to find a year that does not have a long (at least 35 minutes, the time it takes my UPS to discharge) power outage.
Yes, because if you drink from the public fountain, you do not buy bottled water and the bottled water companies lose money.
I use my call phone with an external bluetooth GPS (no internal one) receiver for navigation.
Still, the remote lock is probably convenient, as long as it is an extra feature instead of the only way to unlock the car. I know one car that does not have the regular locks on the door, instead you can only lock/unlock it with the remote control that is on the key. You still need the key to start the car. So, what can go wrong with this system?
1.Car battery dies (for any reason)
or
2.The battery in the key dies
or
3.The key gets wet and the water goes into the transmitter
or
4.The receiver fails
and you have no way of getting into the car. While you could replace the battery on the key assuming you were near a shop that sells them, you will have problems if the car battery dies. How much would it cost to have a regular lock at least as backup.
Oh, an on this car, you can only open the trunk by pressing a button on the drivers side door. People usually open the trunk if they want to take things out or put things in it. To do those actions, you need to be near the trunk, so you can put the key in the lock and open it that way. This way is even less convenient - open driver side door, press the button, go to the trunk, open it. Oh, and the button does not always work when it's cold.
Another (older) car has both options of unlocking the door, but also has unnecessary complexity. To open the trunk, you need to unlock it with the key (or unlock by remote control with the rest of the car), press the button and then it actually unlocks and a handle slides out. So, if the battery dies, you won't be able to open the trunk, at least you will have problems. Oh, and the battery is conveniently placed in the trunk.
The more I read this, the more I want an old car which does not have so many points of failure. Those computers are interconnected using wires, wires oxidize and may sometimes fail. It looks like it would be a lot of fun trying to find the problem with a car, when some of the interconnecting links have partially failed (a few wires on a parallel bus, too much noise on a serial bus etc).
Also, those computers just make the car more complex without actually being of much use.
In your example, slamming on the brakes would stop any car, one that has the complex electronics and one that just brakes. Airbags have to be deployed by some collision sensor so some complexity will still be there. It's not much point in turning off the radio after you crashed (in what cases would that be useful?). HVAC should stop when the engine stops (if it is a serious crash then the engine will be stopped by the object that you crashed into; if it is not that serious then you will stop the engine or the engine will stall seeing that the car may be still in gear and stopped).
See? The huge number of processors in a car is just for the sake if complexity and higher repair costs.
I have an idea... how about making most of the critical systems in the car dependent on mechanics rather than software? It seems that it is easier to test the mechanical parts and it is also usually clearly visible if something has failed (bent, broken etc). So, leave fancy electronics for the audio system and navigation, use simple electronics or relays for things like turning signals and use mechanical parts for accelerator, brakes and steering. That could work, I mean it should be more reliable than the overly complex software doing nothing useful, just making the system more complex.
Even if it is impossible to turn it off, a piece of black sticky tape on the lens should fix the problem.
IIRC Aero uses the video card more, so it would mean shorter battery life. Also, I don;t need the different look, while I like XP look, I can live with 2000/2003 look.
I installed 7 on a virtual machine so I can try to find out how to change the look (because sooner or later I am going to need a new laptop). So far so good, I have the classic theme, the classic start menu ("Classic Shell" open source software), a normal toolbar on Windows Explorer, "up one level" button. I turned off SuperFetch and indexing (I search my computer rarely, so there is no point in that), I also turned off the "thumbnails as icons" option - I don;t need them, on my XP computer I have turned off the video thumbnail generation (regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll).
Now I need to find out how to move the address bar below the menu and toolbar, how to make Windows Explorer display rows with less space between them ("Details" view) and how to remove the "Organize" toolbar.
It now is almost workable with a 700MHz CPU (that's the CPU of my VmWare Server, yes I know it is below the minimum requirement of 1GHz) and 1GB of RAM (uses 287MB with no additional software running, 238MB cached, 504MB free). It is still slower than Windows 2003 virtual machine that is running at the same time (host PC has 3 CPUs) with 384MB of RAM (223 used with Apache and MySQL running).
Win7 gives the experience index as 1.0 because of slow CPU and video card (both get 1), RAM gets 1.5 and hard drive gets 4.8