Because graphics cards are used for many other things besides driving monitors. Think off-screen rendering (done by any modern OS behind your back), scientific calculations, etc.
I agree that the card you mention had an issue. But the main problem is that die temperature sensing is such a simple thing to so. Power chips (switchers, regulators, bridges) that sometimes sell for $0.10 apiece can have die temperature sensors and can turn themselves off to cool down. Why the heck graphics chip makers don't put temperature-controlled power management (clock scaling, unit cycling) is beyond me. It's not like it's rocket science. If you know your engineering, you should even be able to have a controller with adaptive coefficients, that will learn the thermal mass(es) and thermal sinks attached to the chip and be able to maintain a constant peak temperature to avoid thermally induced cyclic stresses.
I guess I was misunderstood. I only claimed that if all you're after is archival storage with rare need for access, you may as well keep the original hardware. Perhaps after running it for a bit to shake through infant mortality. I still claim that there should be no problems storing hard drives, in controlled conditions, for many decades, and having them work just fine when periodically powered up. I do agree with you that technology will eventually fail. Just that if you do it right, the life expectancy of storage technology even from two decades ago can easily surpass that of us and our children.
I don't see how upgrading from XP to Vista/Win 7 is a "major undertaking". The only problems I'd expect are related to specific customizations in a given deployment, and to old applications. It is a slightly bigger undertaking when you have a mixed environment with Samba-based domain server(s) and Windows clients, but even then a very part time admin like myself could figure it out in about a day (with some gnashing of teeth).
PS. Forget Win 7 with RHEL 5's Samba: you have to get newest samba instead.
It's trivial to spoof caller ID in the U.S. Heck, at work our ISDN provider gladly accepts any 10 digit calling party number we feel like providing them. This is the prime reason why you DON'T want to enable pin-less calling from your "home" number, when using calling card services.
Pin-less calling means that the calling card system uses caller ID to bypass the pin. At one point I made a bet with a friend, that I can pick any popular calling card access number, random 10k numbers from a 1M+ metro area area code, and I'll hit at least one number whose owner enabled pin-less calling. I set it to auto-detect and log based on how quickly after the language got selected the silence detector kicked in -- the announcements differ in length between "please enter pin number" and "you have... x hours... y minutes available". I hit three pin-less numbers in 10k tries. And I didn't cheat -- I selected a "nominal" area code that wasn't a big immigrant population center. The test took a couple days using idle lines.
Heck, he could get better S/N ratio by using same AD620 as a preamp and acquiring the AC signal via a sound card. You can then do lock-in detection in software, trivially enough. Think software radios.
I'm not familiar with WoW -- do you have to buy everything from free-market sources? Or are there some "state sponsored" stores where perhaps prices are fixed and demand doesn't affect them? I presume some rare items that are unavailable in "state" stores could get prices inflated by influx of cheated cash or goods, but are those important to gameplay? How many items a semi-serious WoW player buys from others?
LOL. BSA is routinely doing raids all over the place. Although they only average just below 2 raids a day in the US, so that may not be "much" you'd think. They are quite (in)famous in Europe, AFAIK.
Science is, simply put, a method of looking at the world around us that leads to some predictive abilities -- in the end you need to be able to come up with some numbers that can be checked out. The "theory" that God created universe and all that isn't: there is nothing to be gained from knowing that God created the universe. It gives us zero insight into what's going on around us. It may give us mental comfort, but that's no science, that's just our humanity.
A scientific theory, by definition, leads to something that can be checked, and that allows us to predict certain things. Alas, there is a lot of so-called science practiced in disguise of real science, a sham really -- for example most of sociology is just taking lots of measurements, but they don't have any decent hypotheses coming out and as a discipline they fail to predict much of anything.
Many dongle-protected systems do a dongle check on startup only. The trivial way to go around that is to fire up the software in a dedicated VM, then take a snapshot after it starts up, and you're done -- just roll it back to re-start the application. Heck, some CAD systems start so slowly that re-starting say a 2GB VM is faster!
I don't know the details, but GE's decision could have been hardware-based -- the software simply came with good hardware, and that was why it got used. It's silly that they didn't simply chose to reverse-engineer the heck out of those UPS systems, and come up with their own software for them. It'd be way cheaper at this point. Suppose you get 3 good engineers on such a project, at total cost (benefits and all) of $200k/year. Assume they'd be done within a year. That's $0.6M -- pretty cheap, IOW.
At this point, GE/PMI spent more money in legal expenses and fines than it'd cost them to reverse engineer the damn UPS devices and have their own software/firmware written for them. This isn't rocket science. Some managers at GE should be sternly reprimanded for not doing a cost/benefit analysis and not getting a couple engineers on a project to keep the UPSes going with their own, in-house software.
Software houses are using a shared front company for that, just like motion picture studios and music labels do. The BSA does it for MS, just like ?IAA does it for media moguls.
The weirdest part of Blizzard's attitude here is that it relates to games, for crying out loud. A game cheat is like, say, a hopscotch pattern drawn such that it makes it easier for a kid to jump through it. Say a kid finds it particularly easy to jump forwards/backwards a little bit farther than sideways, and draws the pattern stretched out in one direction. If other kids disagree, they can just not play with the "cheat" anymore. Making a bigger fuss out of it would seem rather silly. But that's precisely what Blizzard does: making a big fuss out of playground cheaters. That makes Blizzard's legal arm the playground retards IMHO. Things are getting blown way out of proportion recently.
The problem with removable media drives like ZIP drives or tape drives is that they often have rubber/polymer coated parts (belts or capstans) that disintegrate over time and there's little that you can do about it. They require regular servicing to keep them operating -- you have to open them once per decade or two. Otherwise they too are forever-lasting devices. Sometimes you can fashion an upgrade part from a better material.
As for "nothing will be able to read it": I don't think we're anywhere near that for PIDE drives -- the PIDE/SATA-to-USB adapters are plenty and cheap, and USB has been available for well over a decade now.
The drive I referred to had the ST-506 interface, and the easiest way to read it is with a two chip dongle that has ST-506 on one end, and serial-via-USB on another. If I had more time, I'd do a full-blown storage class device implementation, but all I care is to be able to dump the whole drive's contents.
But the underlying mechanisms are the same. As long as stiction won't seize things up, you're good. An unused drive experiences no wear, only lubricant migration and perhaps some creep in the bearings. Both get slowed down by keeping it cool. It's of course imperative that the atmosphere is dry, otherwise condensation may cause things to corrode or stick together.
Make a setup where you can run the drive in a gas-tight enclosure. Purge it for a couple hours with dry nitrogen or somesuch. Then close the outlet valve, bring up the pressure a bit, close the inlet valve, and you're done. A pressure gage will help to make sure there are no leaks. The initial overpressure should be such that when it's cooled down you get down to say 1200 mbar. You don't want a negative pressure at it'll tend to suck moisture in should there be any leaks. Put into a refrigerator.
About the only thing I'd worry about is controller flash losing data over time -- you may want to save the flash contents first, and ensure you have a jig to re-flash it later. Typically it can be done with a custom bed of nails, just like they do at the factory -- so no need to remove the flash from the board. If you do some reading, such a jig can be had for a few hundred USD -- you have to design a custom PCB or two of course, and need to machine a fixture for it. But it's all within an amateurs reach these days.
Adding to benefits of OS X 10.5: a lot of good open source is available from MacPorts. Heck, MacPorts still doesn't run a lot of things under Snow Leopard (wxWindows, native gimp,...). So your results with MacPorts under OS X 10.5 running on G5 may well be better than with 10.6 running on Intel hardware!
I don't have direct experience with PPC, but I've had decent results with Fedora on my Intel iMac. The only problem in the very beginning was lack of support from the Nvidia driver for the native screen resolution of the built-in LCD panel. That got fixed later. Apart from the inconvenience of having to keep up with binary Nvidia drivers, it ran like a champ. Used it to get through Doom 3 and Quake 4. Fedora supports PPC, and AFAIK should run on anything that would run OS X.
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Because graphics cards are used for many other things besides driving monitors. Think off-screen rendering (done by any modern OS behind your back), scientific calculations, etc.
I agree that the card you mention had an issue. But the main problem is that die temperature sensing is such a simple thing to so. Power chips (switchers, regulators, bridges) that sometimes sell for $0.10 apiece can have die temperature sensors and can turn themselves off to cool down. Why the heck graphics chip makers don't put temperature-controlled power management (clock scaling, unit cycling) is beyond me. It's not like it's rocket science. If you know your engineering, you should even be able to have a controller with adaptive coefficients, that will learn the thermal mass(es) and thermal sinks attached to the chip and be able to maintain a constant peak temperature to avoid thermally induced cyclic stresses.
I guess I was misunderstood. I only claimed that if all you're after is archival storage with rare need for access, you may as well keep the original hardware. Perhaps after running it for a bit to shake through infant mortality. I still claim that there should be no problems storing hard drives, in controlled conditions, for many decades, and having them work just fine when periodically powered up. I do agree with you that technology will eventually fail. Just that if you do it right, the life expectancy of storage technology even from two decades ago can easily surpass that of us and our children.
That's Randall for you. There are more comics like that of his -- at least for me.
I don't see how upgrading from XP to Vista/Win 7 is a "major undertaking". The only problems I'd expect are related to specific customizations in a given deployment, and to old applications. It is a slightly bigger undertaking when you have a mixed environment with Samba-based domain server(s) and Windows clients, but even then a very part time admin like myself could figure it out in about a day (with some gnashing of teeth).
PS. Forget Win 7 with RHEL 5's Samba: you have to get newest samba instead.
Reloading part of the page is fine, it's just that the dolt has no clue as to how to make it interoperate with the back button.
It's trivial to spoof caller ID in the U.S. Heck, at work our ISDN provider gladly accepts any 10 digit calling party number we feel like providing them. This is the prime reason why you DON'T want to enable pin-less calling from your "home" number, when using calling card services.
Pin-less calling means that the calling card system uses caller ID to bypass the pin. At one point I made a bet with a friend, that I can pick any popular calling card access number, random 10k numbers from a 1M+ metro area area code, and I'll hit at least one number whose owner enabled pin-less calling. I set it to auto-detect and log based on how quickly after the language got selected the silence detector kicked in -- the announcements differ in length between "please enter pin number" and "you have ... x hours ... y minutes available". I hit three pin-less numbers in 10k tries. And I didn't cheat -- I selected a "nominal" area code that wasn't a big immigrant population center. The test took a couple days using idle lines.
My point was that you don't have to do that, precisely ;)
Heck, he could get better S/N ratio by using same AD620 as a preamp and acquiring the AC signal via a sound card. You can then do lock-in detection in software, trivially enough. Think software radios.
Thanks, that was very informative.
I'm not familiar with WoW -- do you have to buy everything from free-market sources? Or are there some "state sponsored" stores where perhaps prices are fixed and demand doesn't affect them? I presume some rare items that are unavailable in "state" stores could get prices inflated by influx of cheated cash or goods, but are those important to gameplay? How many items a semi-serious WoW player buys from others?
LOL. BSA is routinely doing raids all over the place. Although they only average just below 2 raids a day in the US, so that may not be "much" you'd think. They are quite (in)famous in Europe, AFAIK.
Blizzard's money stream comes from addicts IMHO. Those won't care about cheats, I'd think?
Science is, simply put, a method of looking at the world around us that leads to some predictive abilities -- in the end you need to be able to come up with some numbers that can be checked out. The "theory" that God created universe and all that isn't: there is nothing to be gained from knowing that God created the universe. It gives us zero insight into what's going on around us. It may give us mental comfort, but that's no science, that's just our humanity.
A scientific theory, by definition, leads to something that can be checked, and that allows us to predict certain things. Alas, there is a lot of so-called science practiced in disguise of real science, a sham really -- for example most of sociology is just taking lots of measurements, but they don't have any decent hypotheses coming out and as a discipline they fail to predict much of anything.
Many dongle-protected systems do a dongle check on startup only. The trivial way to go around that is to fire up the software in a dedicated VM, then take a snapshot after it starts up, and you're done -- just roll it back to re-start the application. Heck, some CAD systems start so slowly that re-starting say a 2GB VM is faster!
I don't know the details, but GE's decision could have been hardware-based -- the software simply came with good hardware, and that was why it got used. It's silly that they didn't simply chose to reverse-engineer the heck out of those UPS systems, and come up with their own software for them. It'd be way cheaper at this point. Suppose you get 3 good engineers on such a project, at total cost (benefits and all) of $200k/year. Assume they'd be done within a year. That's $0.6M -- pretty cheap, IOW.
At this point, GE/PMI spent more money in legal expenses and fines than it'd cost them to reverse engineer the damn UPS devices and have their own software/firmware written for them. This isn't rocket science. Some managers at GE should be sternly reprimanded for not doing a cost/benefit analysis and not getting a couple engineers on a project to keep the UPSes going with their own, in-house software.
Software houses are using a shared front company for that, just like motion picture studios and music labels do. The BSA does it for MS, just like ?IAA does it for media moguls.
The weirdest part of Blizzard's attitude here is that it relates to games, for crying out loud. A game cheat is like, say, a hopscotch pattern drawn such that it makes it easier for a kid to jump through it. Say a kid finds it particularly easy to jump forwards/backwards a little bit farther than sideways, and draws the pattern stretched out in one direction. If other kids disagree, they can just not play with the "cheat" anymore. Making a bigger fuss out of it would seem rather silly. But that's precisely what Blizzard does: making a big fuss out of playground cheaters. That makes Blizzard's legal arm the playground retards IMHO. Things are getting blown way out of proportion recently.
This!! Someone please mod it up.
Unabated curiosity. Plus I can shove it in the face of anyone who has fantastic claims about unreliable old technology ;)
The problem with removable media drives like ZIP drives or tape drives is that they often have rubber/polymer coated parts (belts or capstans) that disintegrate over time and there's little that you can do about it. They require regular servicing to keep them operating -- you have to open them once per decade or two. Otherwise they too are forever-lasting devices. Sometimes you can fashion an upgrade part from a better material.
As for "nothing will be able to read it": I don't think we're anywhere near that for PIDE drives -- the PIDE/SATA-to-USB adapters are plenty and cheap, and USB has been available for well over a decade now.
The drive I referred to had the ST-506 interface, and the easiest way to read it is with a two chip dongle that has ST-506 on one end, and serial-via-USB on another. If I had more time, I'd do a full-blown storage class device implementation, but all I care is to be able to dump the whole drive's contents.
But the underlying mechanisms are the same. As long as stiction won't seize things up, you're good. An unused drive experiences no wear, only lubricant migration and perhaps some creep in the bearings. Both get slowed down by keeping it cool. It's of course imperative that the atmosphere is dry, otherwise condensation may cause things to corrode or stick together.
Make a setup where you can run the drive in a gas-tight enclosure. Purge it for a couple hours with dry nitrogen or somesuch. Then close the outlet valve, bring up the pressure a bit, close the inlet valve, and you're done. A pressure gage will help to make sure there are no leaks. The initial overpressure should be such that when it's cooled down you get down to say 1200 mbar. You don't want a negative pressure at it'll tend to suck moisture in should there be any leaks. Put into a refrigerator.
About the only thing I'd worry about is controller flash losing data over time -- you may want to save the flash contents first, and ensure you have a jig to re-flash it later. Typically it can be done with a custom bed of nails, just like they do at the factory -- so no need to remove the flash from the board. If you do some reading, such a jig can be had for a few hundred USD -- you have to design a custom PCB or two of course, and need to machine a fixture for it. But it's all within an amateurs reach these days.
Adding to benefits of OS X 10.5: a lot of good open source is available from MacPorts. Heck, MacPorts still doesn't run a lot of things under Snow Leopard (wxWindows, native gimp, ...). So your results with MacPorts under OS X 10.5 running on G5 may well be better than with 10.6 running on Intel hardware!
I don't have direct experience with PPC, but I've had decent results with Fedora on my Intel iMac. The only problem in the very beginning was lack of support from the Nvidia driver for the native screen resolution of the built-in LCD panel. That got fixed later. Apart from the inconvenience of having to keep up with binary Nvidia drivers, it ran like a champ. Used it to get through Doom 3 and Quake 4. Fedora supports PPC, and AFAIK should run on anything that would run OS X.