There are two types of platters in hard disks, one is a metal disk coated with thin glass/plastic the other is glass. Bending the first causes the surface to craze you can then snap them after a few bends, these can then be melted along with the casing. Bending the glass ones causes them to shatter all over your workshop with small sharp fragments that you could be still finding months later.
For my latest batch of disks to melt I shook them up in a large plastic tub with some rocks and that separated the two types.
--- Please be aware, I don't melt drives to wipe the data from them that's just a side effect of the process. The cases of the drives seem to melt and cast very well and it sure beats trying to melt drinks cans.
http://tinyurl.com/FlowerpotFurnace/ ---
I believe a similar argument was used against the BBC when it first brought out Iplayer, the big difference however was it's use of a peer to peer arangement.
I wonder if such a standard would include the use of other materials. If we had steel lego in long thin beams 1 x 200 then interesting bridges could be made.
When managing some SQL databases on ship we found that using the query tools directly was better than trying to use a remote desktop tool. This was because it allowed you to build the query locally and then run it on the ship, you did not really mind if the query took a long time. However when we had a query that took a long time to run we had to remote in and run it there because we might loose the link before the query finished causing it to rollback.
About 15 years ago when I was managing stuff in DOS we had some remote links across the UK on modems/ISDN and so batch files were written and copied to the remote machine and executed by scheduling them to run a minute later using AT.
Given you are Windows based, perhaps you might want to look into Powershell, the initial learning curve is a bit steep but you can do a lot with it once you've got your head around it.
I'm not a big fan of the over-engineered phrase. It implies something is perhaps more robust and fault tolerant than it needs to be but it is used when something is overly complex rather than over-engineered.
Our office phrase for something that's overly complex is "he's re-factored the f*** out of it"
I think Great Programmers write reusable and extensible code, it only takes an average programmer to reuse code, I know because I am one.
I've seen this from the CMS perspective, there's plenty of them out there and plenty of them can be extended. Its when you start pushing them to the limits that you find which ones are really written to be re-usable and extensible and which ones have the component parts tightly coupled and when you start pulling on one thread (sorry for the pun) you get a whole spagetti of mess.
I forgot to mention, I also used an old PC powersupply to power the fan for the furnace, you just need to wire the sense lines together and you have a good 12A by 12v power supply.
You can recover quite a lot of metal from a PC, I've recently taken to melting the disk drives you need to strip off all the elctronics first or you'll have a lot of smoke.
Slashdot Mirror
The electronics may emit toxins so strip those out if you are thinking of burning the drives.
There are two types of platters in hard disks, one is a metal disk coated with thin glass/plastic the other is glass. Bending the first causes the surface to craze you can then snap them after a few bends, these can then be melted along with the casing. Bending the glass ones causes them to shatter all over your workshop with small sharp fragments that you could be still finding months later. For my latest batch of disks to melt I shook them up in a large plastic tub with some rocks and that separated the two types. --- Please be aware, I don't melt drives to wipe the data from them that's just a side effect of the process. The cases of the drives seem to melt and cast very well and it sure beats trying to melt drinks cans. http://tinyurl.com/FlowerpotFurnace/ ---
I believe a similar argument was used against the BBC when it first brought out Iplayer, the big difference however was it's use of a peer to peer arangement.
You should read about Igor Aleksander's WISARD project although you might be better off reading one of his papers rather than spending on a book http://www.iis.ee.ic.ac.uk/aleksander/publication.html
I wonder if such a standard would include the use of other materials. If we had steel lego in long thin beams 1 x 200 then interesting bridges could be made.
Perhaps you should carve the data into stone tablets in 3 different languages?
When managing some SQL databases on ship we found that using the query tools directly was better than trying to use a remote desktop tool. This was because it allowed you to build the query locally and then run it on the ship, you did not really mind if the query took a long time. However when we had a query that took a long time to run we had to remote in and run it there because we might loose the link before the query finished causing it to rollback. About 15 years ago when I was managing stuff in DOS we had some remote links across the UK on modems/ISDN and so batch files were written and copied to the remote machine and executed by scheduling them to run a minute later using AT. Given you are Windows based, perhaps you might want to look into Powershell, the initial learning curve is a bit steep but you can do a lot with it once you've got your head around it.
I'm not a big fan of the over-engineered phrase. It implies something is perhaps more robust and fault tolerant than it needs to be but it is used when something is overly complex rather than over-engineered. Our office phrase for something that's overly complex is "he's re-factored the f*** out of it"
I think Great Programmers write reusable and extensible code, it only takes an average programmer to reuse code, I know because I am one. I've seen this from the CMS perspective, there's plenty of them out there and plenty of them can be extended. Its when you start pushing them to the limits that you find which ones are really written to be re-usable and extensible and which ones have the component parts tightly coupled and when you start pulling on one thread (sorry for the pun) you get a whole spagetti of mess.
My friend tried to do this with some old 56k modems but they turned it away saying that they wanted newer technology
I forgot to mention, I also used an old PC powersupply to power the fan for the furnace, you just need to wire the sense lines together and you have a good 12A by 12v power supply.
You can recover quite a lot of metal from a PC, I've recently taken to melting the disk drives you need to strip off all the elctronics first or you'll have a lot of smoke.