And since radio is just a modulated electromagnetic signal, we should be able to pick up Rock 'n Roll on our teeth by exposing them to blue LEDs. It remains only to train our brains to understand this new sixth sense...
1. If the drive is no longer recognized by the controller then the circuitry on the board has been damaged. Replace the board from an identical drive and you may be able to access it again.
2. If your data is so sensitive that you can't risk sending it back then that risk is far more than the cost of the drive. Physically destroy it and buy some other brand to replace it.
3. Its doubtful that degaussers (as suggested elsewhere in the responses) would work. The platters are encases in relatively think metal which will block the field and if you've ever opened a dead drive then you know that the platters already resist the relatively powerful magenet used to control the drive heads.
4. Do your drives have enough airflow past them to keep them cool? 90% of cases from name-brand manufacturers do not. Dell, for example, is one of the worst offendors. If the drives are hot to the touch just after you power down the machine then the replacement drive is going to burn out too.
I certainly won't be buying any video that I can't store on a DVD (whether with or without additional processing) and play on my DVD player. That would be like buying music that I can't write to a CD and play in my car.
I retract my comment from the other day (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195649&cid=16 033548). The folks at Debian are still apparantly squabbling over how free is free enough.
In all but the largest unix/linux installations, managing the users in LDAP is an exercise in futility. When you're all done you have something that's still more difficult to manage than adduser/deluser on the individual machines. Worse, its now brittle: the LDAP server breaks and now every unix box in the system fails at every task that requires a UID to user mapping.
Far more useful is managing the users locally but authenticating them (i.e. checking their password) via LDAP. For example, in an enterprise you might want to piggyback the Windows Active Directory passwords or the IBM/Lotus Domino passwords. This turns out to be trivial to do via a PAM module but the LDAP connectors don't seem to exist. They all want to pull the crypt or MD5 password from LDAP and then compute it instead of binding against LDAP with the given credentials. Every time I want to do this I find myself having to write another PAM module like http://bill.herrin.us/freebies/notesldap.tar.gz
Debian's free-for-all discussions were making him intensely irritable
Seriously, if that's the only real problem in Debian-land these days then Debian is in really good shape. Two years ago they couldn't get a release out the door because of squabbles over how free was free enough.
Turning off the various helper apps (like flash) is pretty easy. A couple like Flash and PDF make general pains of themselves but even that's as easy as "go delete file X." If you want to turn off just the audio in flash, that's another matter... Flash would have to support it and Flash's authors don't believe that the user is king.
Mozilla Firefox is a counter-example to this argument. There are about a bazillion things you can change by entering "about:config" in the url bar. The vast majority can't be changed via the menus and thus don't clutter the UI. Yet they're readily available for anyone who does want to change them.
Of course there will always be some hard-core enthusiasts doing this stuff until the end of time
Not just some. Virtually all great artists of the last century fit this description whether in music, pictures or literature. When they can't make enough money from the art itself, they work elsewhere to make enough money to continue creating the art. Creating art is in their nature; they can't not do it.
While I wouldn't wish to see any artist short-changed, I stronly doubt that sucking the money out of the business would have a negative impact on the art's quality. And with the Internet as a distribution media, their fame wouldn't suffer either.
Why do folks still buy copies of Shakespeare's plays or Beethoven's symphonies? They aren't even protected by copyright let alone by DRM.
There is always a business to be made out of selling value, even if the content itself is free.
Besides, given a reasonable choice most people will be mostly honest most of the time. If they're able to buy music or a movie they want at a price they consider fair in the format they want most will choose to do so. Take the money where you can get it; don't worry about the rest. As for the rest of the folks, most of them wouldn't buy your music or movie if they couldn't copy it. Its not important to them; that's why they were willing to make do with a mere copy.
I ran in to this situation. The company made me the offer, we negotiated and I said yes. They handed me the contract to sign. I read it. The employment contract had some wording about helping them secure intellectual property rights following the end of my employment. It was badly worded: as spelled out it created an indefinate obligation to do work for free following employment. So I said, "Look, I see what you're getting at here but this is bad wording. We should tweak it a bit." They said, "No, everybody signs it."
Not everybody. I didn't. And a month later I got a much better job at a much better salary.
My advice to you is this: If you're not important enough that they're willing to negotiate the contract then you're not important enough and while you work there you'll never be important enough. Walk away. Its a bad deal.
Job seekers, what do you do when you find yourself trapped in a sophomore study group?
Walk away. An interview is a two-way street: they're evaluating your ability to do the job but you're also evaluating their ability to provide a worthwhile work environment. If they fail your test, walk away.
In the existing framework it would be trivial to set up a mechanism that allows buyers to report on expected types of misbehavior by sellers in a manner that can be processed automatically. It could be right there in the on the page after filing a negative comment: Not received? Seller claims out of stock? Check all that apply.
eBay hasn't set up such a system because they don't want to have to act on the data it produces.
Gee, I don't know, maybe by looking at the feedback for the powersellers who have fallen below the 99% positive mark and seeing how many of the complaints say, "Seller didn't have the item!"
1. July-August is the traditional dead-time for many kinds of sales, especially electronics. This year is no exception. Whining about slow sales in August is, well, stupid.
2. Things aren't selling as quickly because they aren't priced to sell quickly. Sellers have started to treat eBay like a storefront rather than an auction house. The starting bid and reserve prices reflect that and the sales pattern does too.
3. There are far too many 97% feedback powersellers. Old hands know better than to buy from such a seller but newbies get screwed. eBay policies should discourage the continued presence of folks who can't maintain a 1% or less complaint rate.
4. eBay is tolerating auctions where the seller does not actually have the product in question, may not be able to get it in a timely manner, and does not say so in the auction. This discourages buyers.
5. There has been a proliferation of "insane" sellers who don't bother to check the competition before posting an item on ebay. Take for example focus_technology. He has a Cisco 2509 listed for $450. 2509's have been selling for around $75. No 2509 has sold for more than $200 this year. Such behavior results in a lot of effectively invalid listings that clutter a potential buyer's view, discouraging them from continuing the search. eBay encourages this behavior by allowing sellers to relist an item cheaply or for free.
6. My personal pet peeve, they've tweaked paypal so that you have to go out through a bunch of "are you sures" if you want to pay by credit card instead of a bank draft. Its anti-customer.
that is partially the point of that third prong on the wall plug.
You're mistaken. The round third prong is strictly a safety device. Its actually tied at the breaker box to the same bus as the neutral (the long slot).
The problem with the original two-prong setup was that if a device is plugged in backwards or if the socket is wired backwards (a common mistake) then the metal chassis of whatever machine is plugged in may be shorted hot instead of neutral. The machine would work as normal but if you touch it while grounded you'd be electrocuted.
This was addressed by adding a third prong to which the metal chassis is attached. With this in place, an accidental reversal or short from hot to the chassis it pops the breaker instead of killing you.
Transistors are designed to behave within a specific range of voltages and switching speeds for a particular range of temperatures. Most COTS electronics are targeted for an ambient temperature around 72F and work best at that temperature. When temperature extremes are needed, the transistors are actually doped and constructed differently.
That having been said, there are some things you can consider:
1. Do the computers really need to be in the freezer? If there is a way to build it so that they're not in the freezer, do it.
2. Enclose the cases with no ventilation. At subzero ambient temperatures they'll lose enough heat through the chassis. Insulate until the internal temperature is reasonable but not so far that it'll retain too much heat.
3. Install an electric heating coil in the case to bring the temperature up if it drops too low.
4. Underclock everything on the system: the CPU, the PCI bus, etc. Stretching out the clock cycles should give you a greater tolerance to the change in how the transistors behave and lower than expected temperatures.
5. Don't forget to consider the impact of the heat load on the freezer. You said computers with an S. Each one is going to dump 200 watts or more of electric heat into the freezer 24/7. Does the freezer have enough excess capacity to handle that and still do its job?
The real reason the tool industry won't buy it is buried about 20 paragraphs in to the article:
Moreover, they say, Gass is asking for an 8 percent royalty on each saw sold
8% makes this guy a patent troll, trying to extort money from the saw manufacturers. If he was honest he'd license the patent for $1 per consumer saw and $10 per industrial saw, flat rate. In 10 years, even the cheap saws would have it in order to avoid the injury lawsuits.
Which is a pity really, because it sounds like the guy started with a really good idea that should be used.
The article suggests that the approximation error is undefined: for any particular number if could be plus or minus the least precision binary digit. Is that correct? Doesn't the approximation error follow the same rounding rules as everything else, so if the next digit would be a 0 it rounds down but if it would be a 1 it rounds up?
Anyway, this problem is not unique to computers. You can see rounding error in plain decimal math:
1/18 * 18 = 18/18 = 1/1 = 1
1/18 repeats infinitely in decimal, so we choose an arbitary point at which to round, say 4 decimal places.
As long as division is the most complex operation, the solution is not to convert the numbers to decimal in the first place. Maintain the number as a fraction until the very end.
Hire honest staff and treat them like human beings so they're not inclined to rip you off. If you catch someone ripping you off, press charges.
You can also create audit trails logging to multiple machines, each controlled by a different employee so that a conspiracy would be needed to avoid being caught. Reading and understanding those logs is, however, very expensive. Its also the kind of mind-numbing job that could leave an otherwise honest IT employee open to committing theft.
Slashdot Mirror
And since radio is just a modulated electromagnetic signal, we should be able to pick up Rock 'n Roll on our teeth by exposing them to blue LEDs. It remains only to train our brains to understand this new sixth sense...
1. If the drive is no longer recognized by the controller then the circuitry on the board has been damaged. Replace the board from an identical drive and you may be able to access it again.
2. If your data is so sensitive that you can't risk sending it back then that risk is far more than the cost of the drive. Physically destroy it and buy some other brand to replace it.
3. Its doubtful that degaussers (as suggested elsewhere in the responses) would work. The platters are encases in relatively think metal which will block the field and if you've ever opened a dead drive then you know that the platters already resist the relatively powerful magenet used to control the drive heads.
4. Do your drives have enough airflow past them to keep them cool? 90% of cases from name-brand manufacturers do not. Dell, for example, is one of the worst offendors. If the drives are hot to the touch just after you power down the machine then the replacement drive is going to burn out too.
I certainly won't be buying any video that I can't store on a DVD (whether with or without additional processing) and play on my DVD player. That would be like buying music that I can't write to a CD and play in my car.
I retract my comment from the other day (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195649&cid=16 033548). The folks at Debian are still apparantly squabbling over how free is free enough.
Meh. If Linux LDAP becomes widely accepted in the enterprise I'm sure I'll find the grace to be embarrassed. 'Till then there's a saying that fits:
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
In all but the largest unix/linux installations, managing the users in LDAP is an exercise in futility. When you're all done you have something that's still more difficult to manage than adduser/deluser on the individual machines. Worse, its now brittle: the LDAP server breaks and now every unix box in the system fails at every task that requires a UID to user mapping.
Far more useful is managing the users locally but authenticating them (i.e. checking their password) via LDAP. For example, in an enterprise you might want to piggyback the Windows Active Directory passwords or the IBM/Lotus Domino passwords. This turns out to be trivial to do via a PAM module but the LDAP connectors don't seem to exist. They all want to pull the crypt or MD5 password from LDAP and then compute it instead of binding against LDAP with the given credentials. Every time I want to do this I find myself having to write another PAM module like http://bill.herrin.us/freebies/notesldap.tar.gz
Debian's free-for-all discussions were making him intensely irritable
Seriously, if that's the only real problem in Debian-land these days then Debian is in really good shape. Two years ago they couldn't get a release out the door because of squabbles over how free was free enough.
Turning off the various helper apps (like flash) is pretty easy. A couple like Flash and PDF make general pains of themselves but even that's as easy as "go delete file X." If you want to turn off just the audio in flash, that's another matter... Flash would have to support it and Flash's authors don't believe that the user is king.
Mozilla Firefox is a counter-example to this argument. There are about a bazillion things you can change by entering "about:config" in the url bar. The vast majority can't be changed via the menus and thus don't clutter the UI. Yet they're readily available for anyone who does want to change them.
Here's the bottom line: If you have to ask the question, "Should the user be able to change this?" then the answer is: YES.
Of course there will always be some hard-core enthusiasts doing this stuff until the end of time
Not just some. Virtually all great artists of the last century fit this description whether in music, pictures or literature. When they can't make enough money from the art itself, they work elsewhere to make enough money to continue creating the art. Creating art is in their nature; they can't not do it.
While I wouldn't wish to see any artist short-changed, I stronly doubt that sucking the money out of the business would have a negative impact on the art's quality. And with the Internet as a distribution media, their fame wouldn't suffer either.
Why do folks still buy copies of Shakespeare's plays or Beethoven's symphonies? They aren't even protected by copyright let alone by DRM.
There is always a business to be made out of selling value, even if the content itself is free.
Besides, given a reasonable choice most people will be mostly honest most of the time. If they're able to buy music or a movie they want at a price they consider fair in the format they want most will choose to do so. Take the money where you can get it; don't worry about the rest. As for the rest of the folks, most of them wouldn't buy your music or movie if they couldn't copy it. Its not important to them; that's why they were willing to make do with a mere copy.
"Can you hear me now?" No, in fact it will stop your cell phone reception too.
I ran in to this situation. The company made me the offer, we negotiated and I said yes. They handed me the contract to sign. I read it. The employment contract had some wording about helping them secure intellectual property rights following the end of my employment. It was badly worded: as spelled out it created an indefinate obligation to do work for free following employment. So I said, "Look, I see what you're getting at here but this is bad wording. We should tweak it a bit." They said, "No, everybody signs it."
Not everybody. I didn't. And a month later I got a much better job at a much better salary.
My advice to you is this: If you're not important enough that they're willing to negotiate the contract then you're not important enough and while you work there you'll never be important enough. Walk away. Its a bad deal.
Job seekers, what do you do when you find yourself trapped in a sophomore study group?
Walk away. An interview is a two-way street: they're evaluating your ability to do the job but you're also evaluating their ability to provide a worthwhile work environment. If they fail your test, walk away.
Don't be obtuse.
In the existing framework it would be trivial to set up a mechanism that allows buyers to report on expected types of misbehavior by sellers in a manner that can be processed automatically. It could be right there in the on the page after filing a negative comment: Not received? Seller claims out of stock? Check all that apply.
eBay hasn't set up such a system because they don't want to have to act on the data it produces.
Gee, I don't know, maybe by looking at the feedback for the powersellers who have fallen below the 99% positive mark and seeing how many of the complaints say, "Seller didn't have the item!"
Some general thoughts on the issue:
1. July-August is the traditional dead-time for many kinds of sales, especially electronics. This year is no exception. Whining about slow sales in August is, well, stupid.
2. Things aren't selling as quickly because they aren't priced to sell quickly. Sellers have started to treat eBay like a storefront rather than an auction house. The starting bid and reserve prices reflect that and the sales pattern does too.
3. There are far too many 97% feedback powersellers. Old hands know better than to buy from such a seller but newbies get screwed. eBay policies should discourage the continued presence of folks who can't maintain a 1% or less complaint rate.
4. eBay is tolerating auctions where the seller does not actually have the product in question, may not be able to get it in a timely manner, and does not say so in the auction. This discourages buyers.
5. There has been a proliferation of "insane" sellers who don't bother to check the competition before posting an item on ebay. Take for example focus_technology. He has a Cisco 2509 listed for $450. 2509's have been selling for around $75. No 2509 has sold for more than $200 this year. Such behavior results in a lot of effectively invalid listings that clutter a potential buyer's view, discouraging them from continuing the search. eBay encourages this behavior by allowing sellers to relist an item cheaply or for free.
6. My personal pet peeve, they've tweaked paypal so that you have to go out through a bunch of "are you sures" if you want to pay by credit card instead of a bank draft. Its anti-customer.
that is partially the point of that third prong on the wall plug.
You're mistaken. The round third prong is strictly a safety device. Its actually tied at the breaker box to the same bus as the neutral (the long slot).
The problem with the original two-prong setup was that if a device is plugged in backwards or if the socket is wired backwards (a common mistake) then the metal chassis of whatever machine is plugged in may be shorted hot instead of neutral. The machine would work as normal but if you touch it while grounded you'd be electrocuted.
This was addressed by adding a third prong to which the metal chassis is attached. With this in place, an accidental reversal or short from hot to the chassis it pops the breaker instead of killing you.
Transistors are designed to behave within a specific range of voltages and switching speeds for a particular range of temperatures. Most COTS electronics are targeted for an ambient temperature around 72F and work best at that temperature. When temperature extremes are needed, the transistors are actually doped and constructed differently.
That having been said, there are some things you can consider:
1. Do the computers really need to be in the freezer? If there is a way to build it so that they're not in the freezer, do it.
2. Enclose the cases with no ventilation. At subzero ambient temperatures they'll lose enough heat through the chassis. Insulate until the internal temperature is reasonable but not so far that it'll retain too much heat.
3. Install an electric heating coil in the case to bring the temperature up if it drops too low.
4. Underclock everything on the system: the CPU, the PCI bus, etc. Stretching out the clock cycles should give you a greater tolerance to the change in how the transistors behave and lower than expected temperatures.
5. Don't forget to consider the impact of the heat load on the freezer. You said computers with an S. Each one is going to dump 200 watts or more of electric heat into the freezer 24/7. Does the freezer have enough excess capacity to handle that and still do its job?
Extremely low humidity is also a problem: you get static electricity which damages computers.
The target humidity is 50% RH. Same as for human beings.
The real reason the tool industry won't buy it is buried about 20 paragraphs in to the article:
Moreover, they say, Gass is asking for an 8 percent royalty on each saw sold
8% makes this guy a patent troll, trying to extort money from the saw manufacturers. If he was honest he'd license the patent for $1 per consumer saw and $10 per industrial saw, flat rate. In 10 years, even the cheap saws would have it in order to avoid the injury lawsuits.
Which is a pity really, because it sounds like the guy started with a really good idea that should be used.
The article suggests that the approximation error is undefined: for any particular number if could be plus or minus the least precision binary digit. Is that correct? Doesn't the approximation error follow the same rounding rules as everything else, so if the next digit would be a 0 it rounds down but if it would be a 1 it rounds up?
Anyway, this problem is not unique to computers. You can see rounding error in plain decimal math:
1/18 * 18 = 18/18 = 1/1 = 1
1/18 repeats infinitely in decimal, so we choose an arbitary point at which to round, say 4 decimal places.
0.05555(etc) rounds to 0.0556.
0.0556 * 18 = 1.0008, not 1.0000
That seems obvious, so lets try it another way:
(1/18 * 9) + (1/90 * 45) = 9/18 + 45/90 = 45/90 + 45/90 = 90/90 = 1/1 = 1
1/18 = 0.05555(etc) which rounds to 0.0556
1/90 = 0.01111(etc) which rounds to 0.0111
(0.0556 * 9) + (0.0111 * 45) = 0.5004 + 0.4995 = 0.9999 (neither 1.0008 nor 1.0000)
As long as division is the most complex operation, the solution is not to convert the numbers to decimal in the first place. Maintain the number as a fraction until the very end.
Hire honest staff and treat them like human beings so they're not inclined to rip you off. If you catch someone ripping you off, press charges.
You can also create audit trails logging to multiple machines, each controlled by a different employee so that a conspiracy would be needed to avoid being caught. Reading and understanding those logs is, however, very expensive. Its also the kind of mind-numbing job that could leave an otherwise honest IT employee open to committing theft.
But instant messaging doesn't deserve its bad reputation as a spoiler of syntax, suggests a new study from the University of Toronto.
I vaguely remember my English teachers telling me not to start sentences with "but." I think that may also be a run-on sentence.