Except, Storage Review hasn't even reviewed the Seagate 750 GB drive. I think once the number of reviews started falling, companies stopped sending SR samples for free before release (seeing it as a more limited-audience site,) so SR has been purchasing drives; which, since its ad revenue is falling, it can't afford to keep doing.
Actually, Storage Review is dying. It's only had two individual reviews this calendar year, plus one 'roundup' and one 'recap' review (as opposed to 12 reviews last year, and down from 56! in 2001.) I'm a big SR fan (at least, I used to be,) but it seems to have gone from a business to a hobby for the creator. You just can't rely on SR to provide timely reviews any more.
As for the notion that they have already reviewed all of these drives? They haven't. Not even in the 'roundup' review.
Has it really been 10 years since I was in college? Wow.
I remember the day the N64 came out, my roommates and I rented one (and Mario,) and played Mario non-stop until we finished it. Different roommates would take over as others had to go to classes. But we finally finished it. Four days later. We played through the night, a few of us even skipping a class or two. That game was played for about 96 hours straight. It was cool.
What are you talking about? Opera hasn't always been free. Don't you remember when Apple came out with Safari, Opera threatened to take their ball and go home over it? (Since they were charging, and they accused Apple of the same noncompetitive practices everyone else yelled at Microsoft about.) If you check the/. archives, you can see the story from last September announcing that Opera was going free. Before that, they charged $40.
And they STILL charge for 'embedded' web browsers. (Ones for cell phones, etc.) Although some cell phone companies pay for it to be included.
Jeez. I read the article, and somehow missed that it loses energy as it moves in the direction of thrust. That does explain why it makes a good 'hover' engine. But then it would still lose power as you climb. (Unless you plan on 'flying' within a few feet of the surface the whole time.)
As for good ways to create forward thrust from electricity? Electric motors driving ducted fan props. See NASA's Pathfinder. (Which isn't ducted.) Ducted fans work best at lower speeds, so if you wanted a jet-speed craft, it wouldn't be good. But for cars and other 'slow' vehicles, it would work great.
My guess is that this system requires one heck of an energy input...
Yes, according to the article, 700 W of input produces 88 mN of force. From a 9 Kg device. This compares to 700 W of input producing 70 mN of force for a 94 Kg device, the ion engine in NASA's Deep Space 1 craft. It also has the benefit of not using any fuel (unlike ion engines,) so as long as you can get electrical energy (solar panels, anyone?) you can keep going.
(For comparison, 88 mN (milli Newtons) of force is approximately enough to lift three U.S. quarters (approx 9 grams at standard force of gravity, a U.S. quarter havin a mass of 2.5 g.) This isn't counting the weight of the device itself. I wonder how much of the mass of the device is due to the microwave generator, and if you can scale up the force per power faster than the mass of the device goes up? (As in, would a 1400 W microwave generator double the force output, without doubling the mass of the device?)
I find the part of the article talking about wingless airplanes, using these devices as sort of 'antigravity' devices, but using conventional thrust engines for forward thrust...
Uh, what? Why not keep the wings, and use one of these as the primary rearward thrust device? You need less thrust to keep a winged aircraft in the air than you do for keeping a device up off the ground. As evidenced by the Harrier 'jump jet', and the fact that a Boeing 747 has a maximum takeoff weight of 412 tonnes, yet has less than 1000 kN of thrust (224k pounds of force vs. 910k pounds of weight.) For a ratio of less than 1:4. A 'direct lift' device would need a greater than 1:1 just to get off the ground, PLUS the forward momentum thrust. The only way this could make sense is if it were more economical to produce these 'relativity drive' devices with sufficient power to lift the fuselage cheaper than the cost of wings.
As for the actual math behind it? Well, I read the actual explanation document. My advanced math is a little rusty, but it looked fine to me. (Then again, so do lots of 'trick' math problems...)
Bah, who used that newfangled GX model? I much preferred the SX model with some software upgrades (like Metakernel.) Also good were the earlier models like the 42S and 15S. Sadly, I sold or lost my older models, and now only have a 32SII and a 49G. I might go for the recently released 50GX, though, as it looks like a decent successor to the 48SX, but these days I don't have much need for that much power. My 32SII tends to be plenty. Even its limited programming is sufficient.
Jamie is all about total, complete, and utter control. Thinking first and then acting. Adam is about acting first and then thinking.
They forgot a few words in the Adam segment. The quote SHOULD be:
Jamie is all about total, complete, and utter control. Thinking first and then acting. Adam is about acting first, talking second, and then, maybe, thinking.
While the actual linked article is offline, if you go to the PI's Business Section page, you can see it listed in their 'most read' listing on the right. (A summary is also still present on their RSS feed.)
I signed up the first day it was possible (before the list actually took effect.)
Then, the first day the list was in effect, I got a telemarketing call. Oh, did I have fun ripping that guy a new one.:-D
Haven't gotten a call since. (I did get one that said he was calling for someone else, and when I said that person wasn't at this number, I immediately hung up, so I didn't see if he was trying to pull the "oh, then let me tell you..." trick.) I haven't gotten any of the sales-call-posting-as-a-"survey" calls, but I have heard about them. (I have gotten 'legitimate' surveys, and said not to bother calling me about them any more.)
Which would be a good thing for security-sensitive documents. If the person didn't get to it, then there's little risk of someone doing something wrong with it. (Of course, if someone has truly malicious intent, they'll just photocopy it on permanent paper; this would just cut down on someone getting a hold of it when they shouldn't have, then coming up with malicious intent later.)
Either a Logitech diNovo desktop, which has a separate keypad (unfortunately, it comes with a righty mouse,) or a Happy Hacker keyboard plus a notebook-style external keypad.
In Windows and Mac OS X, let the system decide. Windows likes to swap things out to keep physical memory free, so having some swap will in fact make the system less crash prone (since you won't suddenly run out of memory.) Just let the OS decide, it will enlarge and shrink as it sees fit, and you don't have to worry about it.
In OS X, you can't really control it anyway (unless you dig into the BSD roots.) So leave it alone.
In Linux, I generally recommend swap area equal to the time-tested 2.5x system memory. Unless you KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt that it will be a 'light use' system, then go with swap equal to main system memory.)
The only time I ever set swap to zero is on a hard-drive-space-lacking notebook computer that has plenty of memory. (A rare occurrence.) Although I do have a testbed machine running now with 4 GB of main RAM and an ancient 4.3 GB hard drive, so it's running with no swap. (Awaiting a new hard drive at the moment to turn it into a production machine, so it's just stress testing itself with the old hard drive.)
'Updates' which has every conceivable update file for Windows 98, Me, and XP, and 'Utilities' which has: PortableApps.com's list of Apps. (Most notably Firefox.) Hijack This The installers for AVG Free, Ad-Aware, and Spybot. The latest update files for the above three, plus Norton and McAfee. (For those without functioning internet access due to their infection.)
I also have the SP2 update CD, MS' 'February 2004 Update CD' which has updates for 98, Me, 2000, and XP as of that date (good mostly because it has IE6 installer on it that will fix just about any IE6 broken-ness.) And a CD with updates for every Mac OS 9.0 and later.
Plus an 'Ultimate Boot CD', Norton System Works' "Symantec Recovery Disc", a nice Live Windows CD that has some useful utilities on it (and has network access for which I can run Portable FIrefox off the above mentioned thumb drive, and the install folders for every version of Windows from 95 on up. (NOT including 'setup.exe', though. They are only for customers' computers that don't have an intact \Windows\Options\Cabs or \i386 folder, and can't find their original disc.)
The minimum acceptable punishment for Apple is: firing.
The maximum reasonable punishment for Apple is: firing.
There is no middle ground. The fact that they did it means firing. Period. It's like being caught with drugs and 'pleading' to misdemeanor 'possession of a controlled substance' where the only punishment the law allows is 30 days in jail. That's the minimum. That's what you get. Yet there are people getting caught and going through a trial that get the exact same punishment. That's just the way the system goes.
Besides, were any employees caught, and *DIDN'T* come clean? If so, what punishment did they receive? If none didn't come clean, then these guys have no basis for comparison.
Sorry, I still have no sympathy for them. When I worked for Intel, I never violated my NDA, nor did I seek out NDA-ed info/property outside of work. (Which would have been the equivalent of what these guys did. They didn't directly violate their own NDA, they participated in violation a separate Apple NDA, that they weren't even subject to.) And if I *HAD* gone and violated a separate NDA, I wouldn't have gone bragging about it at work. I worked in the server division. We had SOME information about upcoming CPUs, but only the bare minimums (the same as all other server vendors,) if I had gone and learned info about the (then still heavily NDA-ed) Itanium processor, I wouldn't have gone on about it at work. Or take a Microsoft example: If I was a random MS employee, and I downloaded a copy of Vista before that public beta had been released, I wouldn't go blabbing about it at work. That's just asking for trouble.
Sorry, this line of reasoning just doesn't work. "Oh, yeah officer, I murdered him. But I just came clean about it, so can I go home now?"
(I know, I know, not the same thing. But still, they violated their employer's intellectual property, wether they came clean about it or not, they deserve to get fired.)
Why? Intel says they will likely be releasing their quad-core chips this year. (Both Xeon and 'Core Extreme'. I wonder if they'll call it the Core 2 Extreme still, or if they'll go for Core 2 Quad?)
I currently use 'Virtue Desktop' on my Mac OS X system. It is ALMOST as good as Spaces, minus the Exposé-like effect of showing all of your desktops at once. The closest it has is an overlay that shows the relation of your desktops, and what programs are running in each (with a 'shadow box' showing the size of any open apps.) But you can't drag-and-drop rearrange apps between desktops, nor can you as easily switch desktops. As it is, you use Control-Shift-Arrow to switch desktops (they are in a grid that you can rearrange,) and Shift-Tab to show the 'desktop manager'. It both preserves your dock, and swaps desktops when you switch apps to go to the 'proper' desktop for that app. (Unfortunately, it means it automatically swaps desktops when an app steals focus.)
The fun thing is if you have a tit or light-sensor PowerMac or MacBook Pro, you can download a hack that lets you use either of those sensors to trigger desktop switching. So, for example, I have two desktops, one for my Mac OS apps, one for running Parallels in full screen. By simply waving my hand over the light sensor, I switch from Mac OS to Windows. (The app is called either 'SmackBook' or 'ShadowBook', depending if you want the tilt or light sensor version.)
Discovering the joy that was a 'plotter', that produced nice smooth output, rather than the pixelated crap that came out of dot matrix printers. Found an HP letter-size plotter used really cheap, and bought it. Started printing out my homework on that, rather than on the dot matrix. The handwriting-style font that was included with Windows 3.0 worked very well for this. Plotting out my homework on notebook paper, with a blue pen, the teacher just thought I had perfect handwriting.:-D (Although, it did take about half an hour to plot out a single page....)
My high school also had early internet access, thanks to a donation of a 'mini-supercomputer' from a local supercomputer company (Sequent,) and dial-up access provided by a local college during my senior year. This computer had a whopping 32 386 processors, (which makes it marginally slower than my current cell phone,) and our connection used a quad-linked 9600 baud (effective ~38kbps) SLIP connection. It even ran X. Too bad the web browser wasn't invented until after I graduated... I had to wait another two years before the internet became 'public', and a friend and I convinced the local ISP to install SLIP software so we could try out this 'Mosaic' thingy... (On OS/2 of course. We wouldn't be caught dead running Windows.)
Then there was when (this same) friend would spend every night dialed up at 14.4kbps to a BBS in Finland so he could download install disks for this 'Linux' thing... One disk a night. Man, he had a big phone bill that month.
Slashdot Mirror
Where, if you try to run an activation with an 'invalid' code, it just doesn't let you on the system any more?
Except, Storage Review hasn't even reviewed the Seagate 750 GB drive. I think once the number of reviews started falling, companies stopped sending SR samples for free before release (seeing it as a more limited-audience site,) so SR has been purchasing drives; which, since its ad revenue is falling, it can't afford to keep doing.
Actually, Storage Review is dying. It's only had two individual reviews this calendar year, plus one 'roundup' and one 'recap' review (as opposed to 12 reviews last year, and down from 56! in 2001.) I'm a big SR fan (at least, I used to be,) but it seems to have gone from a business to a hobby for the creator. You just can't rely on SR to provide timely reviews any more.
As for the notion that they have already reviewed all of these drives? They haven't. Not even in the 'roundup' review.
Has it really been 10 years since I was in college? Wow.
I remember the day the N64 came out, my roommates and I rented one (and Mario,) and played Mario non-stop until we finished it. Different roommates would take over as others had to go to classes. But we finally finished it. Four days later. We played through the night, a few of us even skipping a class or two. That game was played for about 96 hours straight. It was cool.
Hopefully Wii can bring back that feeling.
And they STILL charge for 'embedded' web browsers. (Ones for cell phones, etc.) Although some cell phone companies pay for it to be included.
Jeez. I read the article, and somehow missed that it loses energy as it moves in the direction of thrust. That does explain why it makes a good 'hover' engine. But then it would still lose power as you climb. (Unless you plan on 'flying' within a few feet of the surface the whole time.)
As for good ways to create forward thrust from electricity? Electric motors driving ducted fan props. See NASA's Pathfinder. (Which isn't ducted.) Ducted fans work best at lower speeds, so if you wanted a jet-speed craft, it wouldn't be good. But for cars and other 'slow' vehicles, it would work great.
Yes, according to the article, 700 W of input produces 88 mN of force. From a 9 Kg device. This compares to 700 W of input producing 70 mN of force for a 94 Kg device, the ion engine in NASA's Deep Space 1 craft. It also has the benefit of not using any fuel (unlike ion engines,) so as long as you can get electrical energy (solar panels, anyone?) you can keep going.
(For comparison, 88 mN (milli Newtons) of force is approximately enough to lift three U.S. quarters (approx 9 grams at standard force of gravity, a U.S. quarter havin a mass of 2.5 g.) This isn't counting the weight of the device itself. I wonder how much of the mass of the device is due to the microwave generator, and if you can scale up the force per power faster than the mass of the device goes up? (As in, would a 1400 W microwave generator double the force output, without doubling the mass of the device?)
I find the part of the article talking about wingless airplanes, using these devices as sort of 'antigravity' devices, but using conventional thrust engines for forward thrust...
Uh, what? Why not keep the wings, and use one of these as the primary rearward thrust device? You need less thrust to keep a winged aircraft in the air than you do for keeping a device up off the ground. As evidenced by the Harrier 'jump jet', and the fact that a Boeing 747 has a maximum takeoff weight of 412 tonnes, yet has less than 1000 kN of thrust (224k pounds of force vs. 910k pounds of weight.) For a ratio of less than 1:4. A 'direct lift' device would need a greater than 1:1 just to get off the ground, PLUS the forward momentum thrust. The only way this could make sense is if it were more economical to produce these 'relativity drive' devices with sufficient power to lift the fuselage cheaper than the cost of wings.
As for the actual math behind it? Well, I read the actual explanation document. My advanced math is a little rusty, but it looked fine to me. (Then again, so do lots of 'trick' math problems...)
A real geek does his taxes in hex! (A professor of mine in college admitted that he actually did...)
The United Devices client has it at 50% by default, and is easier to configure.
Bah, who used that newfangled GX model? I much preferred the SX model with some software upgrades (like Metakernel.) Also good were the earlier models like the 42S and 15S. Sadly, I sold or lost my older models, and now only have a 32SII and a 49G. I might go for the recently released 50GX, though, as it looks like a decent successor to the 48SX, but these days I don't have much need for that much power. My 32SII tends to be plenty. Even its limited programming is sufficient.
They forgot a few words in the Adam segment. The quote SHOULD be:
This post is humor.
While the actual linked article is offline, if you go to the PI's Business Section page, you can see it listed in their 'most read' listing on the right. (A summary is also still present on their RSS feed.)
I signed up the first day it was possible (before the list actually took effect.)
:-D
Then, the first day the list was in effect, I got a telemarketing call. Oh, did I have fun ripping that guy a new one.
Haven't gotten a call since. (I did get one that said he was calling for someone else, and when I said that person wasn't at this number, I immediately hung up, so I didn't see if he was trying to pull the "oh, then let me tell you..." trick.) I haven't gotten any of the sales-call-posting-as-a-"survey" calls, but I have heard about them. (I have gotten 'legitimate' surveys, and said not to bother calling me about them any more.)
Which would be a good thing for security-sensitive documents. If the person didn't get to it, then there's little risk of someone doing something wrong with it. (Of course, if someone has truly malicious intent, they'll just photocopy it on permanent paper; this would just cut down on someone getting a hold of it when they shouldn't have, then coming up with malicious intent later.)
There is a solution to the keypad on the right...
Either a Logitech diNovo desktop, which has a separate keypad (unfortunately, it comes with a righty mouse,) or a Happy Hacker keyboard plus a notebook-style external keypad.
It's not even the LANDER, just the orbital vehicle.
In Windows and Mac OS X, let the system decide. Windows likes to swap things out to keep physical memory free, so having some swap will in fact make the system less crash prone (since you won't suddenly run out of memory.) Just let the OS decide, it will enlarge and shrink as it sees fit, and you don't have to worry about it.
In OS X, you can't really control it anyway (unless you dig into the BSD roots.) So leave it alone.
In Linux, I generally recommend swap area equal to the time-tested 2.5x system memory. Unless you KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt that it will be a 'light use' system, then go with swap equal to main system memory.)
The only time I ever set swap to zero is on a hard-drive-space-lacking notebook computer that has plenty of memory. (A rare occurrence.) Although I do have a testbed machine running now with 4 GB of main RAM and an ancient 4.3 GB hard drive, so it's running with no swap. (Awaiting a new hard drive at the moment to turn it into a production machine, so it's just stress testing itself with the old hard drive.)
'Updates' which has every conceivable update file for Windows 98, Me, and XP, and 'Utilities' which has:
PortableApps.com's list of Apps. (Most notably Firefox.)
Hijack This
The installers for AVG Free, Ad-Aware, and Spybot.
The latest update files for the above three, plus Norton and McAfee. (For those without functioning internet access due to their infection.)
I also have the SP2 update CD, MS' 'February 2004 Update CD' which has updates for 98, Me, 2000, and XP as of that date (good mostly because it has IE6 installer on it that will fix just about any IE6 broken-ness.) And a CD with updates for every Mac OS 9.0 and later.
Plus an 'Ultimate Boot CD', Norton System Works' "Symantec Recovery Disc", a nice Live Windows CD that has some useful utilities on it (and has network access for which I can run Portable FIrefox off the above mentioned thumb drive, and the install folders for every version of Windows from 95 on up. (NOT including 'setup.exe', though. They are only for customers' computers that don't have an intact \Windows\Options\Cabs or \i386 folder, and can't find their original disc.)
The point is...
The minimum acceptable punishment for Apple is: firing.
The maximum reasonable punishment for Apple is: firing.
There is no middle ground. The fact that they did it means firing. Period. It's like being caught with drugs and 'pleading' to misdemeanor 'possession of a controlled substance' where the only punishment the law allows is 30 days in jail. That's the minimum. That's what you get. Yet there are people getting caught and going through a trial that get the exact same punishment. That's just the way the system goes.
Besides, were any employees caught, and *DIDN'T* come clean? If so, what punishment did they receive? If none didn't come clean, then these guys have no basis for comparison.
Sorry, I still have no sympathy for them. When I worked for Intel, I never violated my NDA, nor did I seek out NDA-ed info/property outside of work. (Which would have been the equivalent of what these guys did. They didn't directly violate their own NDA, they participated in violation a separate Apple NDA, that they weren't even subject to.) And if I *HAD* gone and violated a separate NDA, I wouldn't have gone bragging about it at work. I worked in the server division. We had SOME information about upcoming CPUs, but only the bare minimums (the same as all other server vendors,) if I had gone and learned info about the (then still heavily NDA-ed) Itanium processor, I wouldn't have gone on about it at work. Or take a Microsoft example: If I was a random MS employee, and I downloaded a copy of Vista before that public beta had been released, I wouldn't go blabbing about it at work. That's just asking for trouble.
Sorry, this line of reasoning just doesn't work. "Oh, yeah officer, I murdered him. But I just came clean about it, so can I go home now?"
(I know, I know, not the same thing. But still, they violated their employer's intellectual property, wether they came clean about it or not, they deserve to get fired.)
McDonalds style.
Why? Intel says they will likely be releasing their quad-core chips this year. (Both Xeon and 'Core Extreme'. I wonder if they'll call it the Core 2 Extreme still, or if they'll go for Core 2 Quad?)
heh. Oops. That's a heck of a typo, eh?
I currently use 'Virtue Desktop' on my Mac OS X system. It is ALMOST as good as Spaces, minus the Exposé-like effect of showing all of your desktops at once. The closest it has is an overlay that shows the relation of your desktops, and what programs are running in each (with a 'shadow box' showing the size of any open apps.) But you can't drag-and-drop rearrange apps between desktops, nor can you as easily switch desktops. As it is, you use Control-Shift-Arrow to switch desktops (they are in a grid that you can rearrange,) and Shift-Tab to show the 'desktop manager'. It both preserves your dock, and swaps desktops when you switch apps to go to the 'proper' desktop for that app. (Unfortunately, it means it automatically swaps desktops when an app steals focus.)
The fun thing is if you have a tit or light-sensor PowerMac or MacBook Pro, you can download a hack that lets you use either of those sensors to trigger desktop switching. So, for example, I have two desktops, one for my Mac OS apps, one for running Parallels in full screen. By simply waving my hand over the light sensor, I switch from Mac OS to Windows. (The app is called either 'SmackBook' or 'ShadowBook', depending if you want the tilt or light sensor version.)
Discovering the joy that was a 'plotter', that produced nice smooth output, rather than the pixelated crap that came out of dot matrix printers. Found an HP letter-size plotter used really cheap, and bought it. Started printing out my homework on that, rather than on the dot matrix. The handwriting-style font that was included with Windows 3.0 worked very well for this. Plotting out my homework on notebook paper, with a blue pen, the teacher just thought I had perfect handwriting. :-D (Although, it did take about half an hour to plot out a single page....)
My high school also had early internet access, thanks to a donation of a 'mini-supercomputer' from a local supercomputer company (Sequent,) and dial-up access provided by a local college during my senior year. This computer had a whopping 32 386 processors, (which makes it marginally slower than my current cell phone,) and our connection used a quad-linked 9600 baud (effective ~38kbps) SLIP connection. It even ran X. Too bad the web browser wasn't invented until after I graduated... I had to wait another two years before the internet became 'public', and a friend and I convinced the local ISP to install SLIP software so we could try out this 'Mosaic' thingy... (On OS/2 of course. We wouldn't be caught dead running Windows.)
Then there was when (this same) friend would spend every night dialed up at 14.4kbps to a BBS in Finland so he could download install disks for this 'Linux' thing... One disk a night. Man, he had a big phone bill that month.