However, I wouldn't jump too high right now. I think we are just changing the game, not winning it. Here's an example [link to Symantec info on a new trojan] of what spammers are doing now.
No, that's great. It's wonderful that spammers are resorting to writing worms and trojans.
Why?
Because instead of civil action and various legal gray areas with sending spam, these bastards will have the FBI kick in their door one night and arrest them. No cute little civil proceedings attempting to discover whether or not they have a "free speech" right to fill *my* mailbox with *their* crap.
Personally, I hope they get pistol-whipped at the same time.
SUBJ: Not currently experiencing your concern. (Score:4, Informative)
I have received over 100 messages in the last 24 hours. Less than a dozen made it through to me.
Maybe I missed something...
How did this get modded up?
How is this "not... your concern"?
Even with Earthlink filtering stuff that isn't whitelisted for you, the filters must receive the spam before they can test it and discard it as such.
In other words, it still costs your ISP bandwidth. Which, in the end, costs you money.
So, unless I *completely* missed your point somehow, until the spam itself stops, it will continue to cost you money.
And if there are as many suckers out there as the cited article implies, spammers will keep trying to get whitelisted. Which means that their messages are still received, eating bandwidth and hard disk space.
The problem will only end when everyone is on a whitelisting mail server AND end user stupidity has been wiped out.
Thanks for writing a reply that I was to tired to... do... *sigh*
My pleasure.
I get so tired of "audiophiles" who use terms like "textured" to describe the sound of equipment.
Audio equipment should be a straight wire with gain. That is scientifically measurable; anything else is just a cop-out from wanna-bes who are too lazy to learn math.
Just wanted to say I love balanced vs. unbalanced cables and I was wondering if you had any experience with using CAT5 as a cheap substitute. I've been hearing great things about it from the sidelines.
No, I haven't tried it, but it seems to me that it should work. I'll try it sometime.
And a really neat connector that doesn't pull loose when you move around. And you can bend them. Zow!
Well, I think I'd try soldering the wire into a couple of XLR connectors. First step would be to check the impedance of a UTP pair and see if a matching transformer would be required. If so, then cost and transformer losses and distortion would have to be calculated and assessed versus the cost of an equivalent length of good balanced line cable.
It seems like a great idea considering the cables are rated to reliably transfer modulated data at 350MHz and up for 100 meters, and that's the cheap, $1@foot stuff.
Yup. But digital data isn't as picky as analog. After all, the receiving device merely needs to understand the message; with analog, the message must be as clean and clear as possible.
The other thing is that UTP clearly carries data modulated into RF signals of some sort, but I've never seen the actual specifications of the data sent down the piece of cable, and I've never been interested enough to hook my 'scope up to it.:)
I suspect it depends on how strong a signal you plan on running through your Cat5. Last I heard, Ethernet cards drew a lot less power than 50W.
Heheh...
Obviously, using CAT5 as balanced audio would be for line or microphone level. There's no point in running mic level unless that's what the source is. Line level is 1V p~p into 600 ohms imedance = Vrms / Z = ( 1 / sqrt(2))/ 600 = 1 / (600*sqrt(2)) = ~ 1.2mA at full signal...
Nah, not a problem. [grin]
Of course, you could run a lot of power through CAT5 if the voltage is high enough to keep voltage drop (and therefore conductor heating) down - this is the same reason why power transmission lines always run at high voltages. The limiting factor in running a lot of power through CAT5 would be the dielectric strength of the insulation between opposing strands. I'd try it experimentally, but I'd never use CAT5 for anything other than small-signal stuff. (ie. milliwatts range.)
but the reason they don't back things up with numbers is that in audio, numbers lie. A lot.
I trust cold, hard numbers - carefully applied - much less than subjective and unreliable human hearing.
A 5W tube system may be louder than a 50W transistor system.
Sure, if the 5W tube system is better impedance matched and into a more efficient corner-loaded infinite baffle speaker.
Consider also that perception of audio intensity is logarithmic. To double the volume requires 4x the power - and that's at the cones of the speakers! 50W will not actually sound that much louder than 5W, even with all other things being the same.
A speaker with.002% signal distortion might easily introduce its own distortion due to cheap magnets or poorly engineered cones and not include that, even though the stat says "Total Harmonic Distortion."
If the speaker's distortion figure doesn't include non-linearities caused by the magnets, cones, surrounds or other parts of the unit, I would suggest that this is something you should take up with the Federal Trade Commission.
Even a stat like "Frequency response: 20 Hz - 22 kHz" is useless if the amplification device is not perfectly linear, and no device is.
This is why reputable audio equipment will include a +/-xdB figure in the frequency response claim.
Likewise, most professional audio amplifiers (ie. Crown, QSC, EV, etc.) will cite THD ratings along with the wattage, as in "750W RMS into 8 ohms with 0.2% THD".
Thus, the auditioning of gear on a "well trained ear" is essential to any audio review.
The auditioning of gear is only to check for correct connection, elimination of factory duds, and sheer enjoyment of the music for which you purchased the system.
And this quote is not even that strange; in fact it's just using different language to explain what we want to hear. Dynamics were impressive means that there was a big difference between loud and soft sounds, usually a sign that the device is delivering sound as accurately as possible.
The technical term is called "dynamic range", and it's mathematically described as the difference between the amplifier's noise floor and maximum wattage rating.
imaging was nuanced and detailed, "imaging" is the combination of stereo seperation combined with balanced delivery of all types of sound (eg, bass doesn't linger and treble doesn't disappear),
Stereo separation is measured in dB attenuation, typically by driving one channel with a 1V p~p 1kHz sinewave and measuring the "leaked" signal from the other channel.
Bass doesn't linger if the amplifier has good frequency response, since bass is a low frequency component and requires much less amplifier bandwidth than the 20kHz ratings of most amplifiers.
Treble doesn't disappear if the amplifier is capable of performing +/- x dB from 20Hz to 20kHz, ie. x is some acceptable number (generally under 1dB). In other words, if the amplifier has sufficient frequency response.
and detailed imaging means you can hear sounds move from left to center to right accurately. Nuanced imaging means there isn't a sudden skip as a sound movees from left to right, or from one note to another.
Which means, in other words, that both amplifier channels are well separated and have the same performance characteristics (measurable by science, you know, science, that evil black mathy-type stuff that got man to the moon and gets people heart transplants).
frequency extremes sounded extended and natural means that low bass and high treble signals are transmitted and not cut off because "you won't hear it any way," and that it also isn't needlessly boosted.
Again, see the definition of the term "frequency response". I believe the *numbers* will allay all your fears.
In short, this unit is going to deliver a clean signal to your headphones or receiver, and that's exactly what you want from an audio device.
In other words, for playback to speakers (as oppos
I have three IBM (1391401) keyboards which I am banging away on a daily basis.
Yeah, that would be the PS/2 click-key super-mega-tactile keyboard. They were supposed to feel like Selectrics, but they're not as precise. Got a couple of those, too.
My favorite two keyboards are the Compaq Deskpro/286 and the Compaq OEM keyboards, 1997 or so vintage. The Deskpro/286 keyboard is a thing of sheer beauty - looks and feels a lot like a DEC VT-100 keyboard, but somehow looks even older. Smooth and soft on your hands, but with a nice tactile feel that the VT-100 never had.
I still have a big pile of my old flip-top desktop cases. They're great - desktop cases fit easier onto racks, and with a flip-top, maintenance is a breeze.
One in particular is a 1983 vintage Toronto Datacomm Turbo XT which serves as a database server. Under the hood is a (cheap) AT-profile Pentium II motherboard. The original power supply, conservatively rated for 100W or so, happily runs the PII, a pair of 3.5" hard disk drives and a network card.
Of course, I had to add a Seagate ST-225 with the full-height bezel to make the look complete...
You'd think that Microsoft would have better places than Slashdot to blow advertising bucks - I can't imagine their return on investment would be very high.
Glad to see a few people understand the point. The first few replies were... Well, anyway, it is slashdot.
Tell me about it. The KDE Developers have dismissed www.glowingplate.com/dissent as a FUD campaign, rather than a simple venting of user frustration.
Until that changes, we're still gonna be stuck buying Dells pre-loaded with Windows XP. [sigh]
BTW, you can keep your B R/B blocks, I'd rather have a Hemi.
So would I! Unless someone is willing to trade me my B and RB motors for a Hemi block... (first one for offer: 1976 thinwall casting lightweight 400 block. Weighs less than a Slant-6 block, easy stroke to 475 cubic inches!) Also got a 1970 440-4bbl, complete, good compression and oil pressure, kicking around the garage.
I'd get it one piece at a time, and it wouldn't cost me a dime.
That is such a kick-ass song, any car guy can relate. Another good one is Pinkard and Bowden's Guns Made America Great. I think it's supposed to be comedy, but when I play it really loud in my old pickup truck, it keeps the silly little Honda cars far away.
if you use micro$hit winblows ur probably a FAG and like to have sex wit hMENS BUTTS!!!!1
It's interesting to note that a lot of Linux was written by European developers. Europeans tend to be more accepting of gay and lesbian people than North Americans.
Linux won't make it to the desktop because the mindset of the average linux user would be 'set up a different account'. This is not acceptable to most people.
You can't explain this. It's exactly the same problem that I have whenever I mention a flaw with KDE. "Well, if the users don't like it, they can just hack the source and recompile!" This year, I had to explain to someone who had been using Windows since 1993 - with lots of formal training provided to federal government employees - that the different rectangles full of stuff were different windows.
Now, admittedly, that's profoundly stupid, so I'll consider a case only slightly more capable: the MCS"E". (Note that Microsoft calls them engineers, but unless they know the pain of 4 years of vector calculus, they are most decidedly NOT engineers.) What percentage of MCS"E"s have sufficient brain cells to even wrap their heads around what a compiler is, let alone to hack source? My bet, based on the MCS"E"s I've known (and fired over the years) is somewhere less than 50%.
So where's Joe Sixpack in this picture, as he's told to recompile half of KDE because of x? Popping the old Windows XP CD into the drive and rebooting the computer, is my bet.
I'd get it one piece at a time,
And it wouldn't cost me a dime.
You'll know it's me
When I come through your town
I'm gonna ride around in style
I'm gonna drive everybody wild
'cause i'll have the only one
There is around.
Yeah Red Rider, this is the Cottonmouth in the psycho-billy Cadillac...
The mail program works well, as does the newsreader. The browser displays just about every page out there quite nicely. Multiple user support is good and it is quite easy to lock it down/configure it as needed, a very important feature for a family application (at least for some).
For sure Mozilla as the browser; even if you don't care about IE's erosion of HTML and HTTP standards, you should care about IE's poor security.
But for e-mail, I like Eudora. I really like Eudora. It handles dozens of identities, has good filters, seems to be pretty robust. And it's got a great spell-checker, a Mood Watch system which adds little chili peppers and warns you if you've accidentally mistyped fsck. And Eudora is very sarcastic. (Free version: "If you register, we'll erect a giant statue of you at our corporate headquarters*. *-offer void on the planet Earth.") As with all mail clients, make sure that HTML e-mail viewing is turned off to avoid spammers using bugs on you.
That is only the case if you are running an ancient, brain dead copy of the original (Matt's Script Archive) formmail.pl. But you'd be a retard for doing that and deserve everything you get. Modern formmail scripts do not allow spam through.
Looking through my server's logs, I get a lot of attempts to hijack formmail.pl and spam through it, which is a neat trick since I don't even have formmail.pl.
So I started looking around, and found a great little script which automatically reports the attempt to the spammer's ISP.
Someone will have to supply the hardware of the future to these new Linux users. There will be plenty of businesses who will cater to the non MS users of the world, and if you think Asia and India, someday they may outnumber the Windows users.
Yeah, that's true. There will always be someone selling motherboards with real non-Billified BIOS.
But, given Microsoft's security track record, should we even be worried? X-box was designed with a lot less attention to retaining backward compatibility than a motherboard will require by the very nature of the PC market. That backward compatibility gives one attack vectors to break the BIOS and get their computer back, and yet even without those loopholes, X-box can run Linux. I predict that it will be less than 2 weeks after their release before some 15-year-old has put up an exploit that allows you to boot *your* computer with the operating system *you* choose.
Tesla can play a good version of Signs, and Getting Better, but to my knowledge, never invented anything that'll change mankind forever.
Are you kidding?
Tesla invented alternating current while strumming a guitar. The shape and resonance of a Tesla coil were inspired by holding a guitar near a stack of amplifiers!
This is a great rant, because it is very true. Linux will never be more than a geek's OS unless it becomes less of one. This is perfectly fine if the community wants for the OS to never enter the Joe Home User install base.
Hey, can I add your reply to my www.glowingplate.com/dissent page?
They should't use linux. Every adaptation is painfull. WIndows 9x/2k/XP was a pain in the ass
for me to use even from the first time. Does the name "Windows Explorer" means anyting to you ?
Explore what on windows ? the buttons ?
I think you're confusing "learning curve" with "usability".
No one can realistically be expected to sit down with a new operating system and know how to use it right away, that's a given. That time spent wondering where the hell the C: drive went is part of the learning curve.
But even when you're familiar with Linux/KDE, for example, you don't have the same usability as Windows because cut and paste doesn't even work properly across all applications, to say nothing of the other issues.
Anyone who says that windows(tm) is a easy and
intuitive interface is an idiot who has never
done anything in windows except playing games and
typing letters in whatever editor he wants.
No. Windows is intuitive because you know what's going to be under the File menu in *all* applications. There's a basic (and probably informal) standard set for where you will find the menu options you need. All the windows in Windows look the same - except for weird ones like ATI's horrible Multi Media Center and Quicktime, both of which place form over function.
Windows is intuitive because you know that you can copy text from Novell's GroupWise mail client and paste it into a Word document. A user can't take that functionality for granted in Linux and because it fails to work for no apparent reason (as far as the user is concerned) which is counterintuitive.
Having said that, Windows also does allow you to do such exotic things as dropping a video file into a Power Point presentation, which is quite a challenge under Linux and is a feature frequently used around my office by, to paraphrase you and adjust the grammar, "idiots who have never
done anything in windows except playing games and
typing letters in whatever editor they want".
Some people are used with the annoyances of
windows and they won't complain because for
them is normal for an application to crash,
I have applications crash a lot more frequently in Linux than in Windows. However, I have the operating system itself crash a lot more frequently in Windows than in Linux. Neither one is satisfactory.
However, Linux applications crash a lot more frequently than Windows or its applications. The net effect is that while the Linux kernel is rock-solid and stable, the user still spends more down time because KMail silently dies or the OpenOffice window just locks up.
As far as the end user is concerned, the machine is broken and it's Linux' fault. They don't know the difference, or care.
is normal to have to press a predefined, ugly
button to make a menu appear.
In Linux, it is normal to have to search for the provided button because it is in a different place in every single distribution, application and build. Joe Average doesn't even know how to turn on big fonts in Windows XP, he ain't gonna be able to figure out how to change a button to his liking.
Configurability is only of interest to the power user.
Some windows
managers are years (12 years fvwm) old and
you still can't find in Gnome or Kde a decent
functionality. They are windows on linux:
same look and feel same interface, same
memory hog, same crashes, same idiot user base.
Except that we have splits in the application base to serve different window managers. Some apps work very well and have lots of features (for example, I like Gnumeric a lot), but they don't integrate well with other apps like OpenOffice. I can make Quattro Pro play with Word a hell of a lot better than I can make Gnumeric play with the OpenOffice's word processor. And they look and feel a lot more alike, which, like it or not, reduces the volume of (expensive) support desk calls coming in from end users.
Why would any open source developer want to do this? Unless someone thinks there is money to be made from developing open source software (ie someone wanting to sell linux computers at Wallmart) that is suitable for technically inept parents, I can't see many developers going to great lengths so that it becomes fool-proof.
If the open-source developer in question would like to see an end to the Windows monopoly on the desktops of the proles, then he or she will have to do it.
Admittedly, this doesn't make for the fun or cool programming challenges which fuel most open-source developers; it's the boring housekeeping.
But I see reason for hope. Knoppix in particular is as close to a foolproof Linux distribution as I've seen so far, and with luck others will take that lead and build on it. Of course, the applications and KDE itself still need work...
I Don't think its a 'dilemma' because the open source / free software developers will never standardize the GUI interfaces - precisely because people have come to like particulars of their given environment, or want the flexibility to change.
In a sense, precisely the flexibility and diversity of console applications and daemons which makes *nix ideally suited to server duty, is exactly what makes its mass-adoption on the desktop difficult.
On one hand, it's great that there might be 50 different ways to implement cut-and-paste functionality, but the end user doesn't care as long as he can cut something from one application (say, OpenOffice) and paste it into another (say, Gnumeric). On my Linux workstation, that's tough.
Never mind the lack of OLE support. Stuff that Windows users take for granted - Windows Media Player embedding in a PowerPoint presentation - has been around since Office 95, and yet I've never been able to get xine or mplayer to launch from an Impress presentation.
These are the hurdles which will need actual in-stone standards to overcome, and some of them will probably require work right down to the very architecture of the window manager in order to implement.
And we have to overcome them, in order to make Linux a viable alternative operating system for any casual user who does more than read e-mail.
I have a rant on the subject. It's a bit dated now, but trying to work as a "regular" user in Linux - without writing shell scripts or firing up gcc - I can't get done what I need to get done. We don't need more eye candy or stuff like that. We need decent apps that don't feel like the works in progress they admittedly are and don't silently close if you run out of disk space. We need volunteer UI designers to walk into offices and seniors homes to find out how we can make a more user-friendly and consistent UI without alienating the power user.
And we need to support at least every UI feature of Windows 2000 and its central apps. Let's think about it - in a field which moves as fast as IT, I'm suggesting we should use the OLE capabilities and consistency of a three-year-old product as a role model. Why? Because there are still things which Windows 95 users can do in three mouseclicks that would require firing up gcc.
Like it or not, every end user is going to compare KDE/Gnome/whatever to their experience with Windows. They don't care that the Linux kernel never crashes if the KDE crash handler is popping up every 5 minutes or if applications lack features they require.
Think of the end user with every single line of code that you write. Take a picture of a technically inept parent or aunt and stick it on the side of your monitor to remind yourself.
Not really. All I have to do is modify a single byte of each of my mp3s (that's not hard given even the simplest perl script), and there, none of my MD5s will match.
Yeah... I think what I'm going to do is create a script to change the ID3 tags, since that will not require a recompress.
We have to be careful about this sort of stuff. I can imagine a whole bunch of people writing scripts to decode and then re-encode their MP3 collections. With the generational losses of each encode/decode cycle, that would really reduce the sound quality of the new MP3s.
Solution? Command-prompt program capable of changing ID3 and Vorbis tags, since those don't require a recompress. I think I'll automatically append a random number from 0-9 onto the end of one of the tags.
Of course, new hashes will mean that swarm and resume features won't work too well in Kazaa and other apps. For the most part, however, audio files are small, so the damage to the peer-to-peer community should be minimal.
Even further: most mp3 encoders aren't deterministic from what I understand... not in a general sense at least. I'm pretty sure the output of 2 different codecs on the same input file will yield ever so slightly different results...
Also would depend on the libraries installed on the machines. The biggest ones are the math libraries, whether in *nix or Windows. The codecs do a hell of a lot of Fourier transforms, which becomes a lot of Really Big Math, all of which is performed to arbitrary precision. Let's say one version of a library comes up with 0.34534543341 and another version of the same library comes up with 0.34534543342, then the hash would probably be completely different... Or processor rounding - different steppings of a processor on an otherwise identical system might have different results...
geezus, i re-read your stuff on electric cars. my god man, those things haven't been true since the 70s.
What things?
Electric cars need to be charged. Unlike what you said in a previous post, hybrid cars are not electric; hybrid technology is merely a way of incrementally increasing the gas mileage provided by a fossil-fuel powered engine. The energy which runs a hybrid car comes from the gasoline you pump into the tank; the energy which runs an electric car comes from the coal or nuclear power plant which powers your wall socket.
Lots of things have changed since the 1970s (before you were born, judging from your apparent knowledge and exceedingly good grammar), but the laws of physics haven't. Batteries store electrical energy in chemical form. The more electrical energy you have per unit volume, the more chemical energy you have per unit volume. More chemical energy = stronger acids, greater electronegativities, greater electron affinities = more nasty toxic chemicals. Tear apart the Li-ion battery in a Honda Civic hybrid and rub the lithium in your face if you don't believe me.
this level of misinformation is why Bush keeps getting elected and enviromentalists have such a bad rap.
Bush wasn't elected by the people, he's only president because of an arcane mechanism (Electoral College) and Ralph Nader splitting the Democratic vote. Personally, I despise and detest Bush only slightly less than I hate Nader, but I'm comforted to know that slightly more reasonable people like Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld are actually running the country.
I'm guessing that you're in high school. I would bet money that you have no scientific or engineering education whatsoever. Your parents are baby-boomers, and you've grown up never wanting anything; with your Gen-Y idealism, you're going to defy all the laws of the universe to make the world a better place.
If I'm wrong, you'll be able to answer a very simple question to prove it. This question is fair game in some high school classes and is a mandatory part of the curriculum for *all* college or university science, medicine, economics, math or engineering courses. So now, good sir, I challenge you to demonstrate any scientific education: What is d/dx of e^(2x)?
i love how you completely disallow for any technology improvements in batteries while getting completely behind the advances that would allow you to keep driving your muscle car.
Well, unless the laws of physics change, batteries will only become more potentially lethal as they pack greater energy densities.
As for driving my musclecar, yeah. I love cars. I'm sure, with my qualifications, that I would be better suited to be hot-rodding electric or hybrid cars than conventional cars. But I don't, not because electric cars can't be quick, but because they're not the best technology for the task at hand.
Similarly, musclecar guys aren't especially concerned about gasoline. If all I wanted was performance and power, I'd be jumping up and down looking forward to the mass-adoption of hydrogen as a fuel. If hydrogen were offered as an automotive fuel, it wouldn't take long before some company was out there making retrofit kits to run your old musclecar on hydrogen instead of gasoline - hydrogen is a *much* better fuel than gasoline, producing tens of times more power per cubic inch of engine displacement.
Why don't I like hydrogen, then? Because it seeps through cast iron tanks, and burns so hot that you can't see it. Its flashpoint is very low. Its heat output is unparalleled. It would be an extremely dangerous substance to carry around in pressurized tanks on a car. And it still has to come from somewhere; it takes the same energy to break water down as you get from burning hyrdrogen in oxygen, so the net effect is that it's simply an extremely dangerous energy storage device.
that is so self-serving.
No. Being brainwashed by your upbringing into believing that all environmentalists are good or even know what they're talking about, and then convincing yourself that you're A Good Person because you recycle your shopping bags while your gas lawnmower needs an air filter and a spark plug, now that's self-serving.
Re:Physics of Shorted Batteries.
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Flaming Cellphones
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
i think using gasoline means our continued dependence on fossil fuels. if batteries are dangerous in an accident, then we must find a way to make them safe, not use it as an excuse to keep burning gas.
Except that when you start talking about the generation and distribution systems required to charge all the batteries in electric cars, the combined inefficiencies are greater than those of gasoline powered cars... never mind the safety.
What fuel are you going to burn to generate the electricity to charge all those electric cars? Forget wind and solar, they're not practical yet and possibly never will be.
Think of what will happen when 10 million Los Angeles commuters plug in their electric cars each night...
if you don't like electricity as a solution, how about offering a positive alternative? instead of waiting around to laugh at people if your worse case scenario comes true.
Actually, I won't be laughing if my electric bill goes up to $0.75 per kWh because demand from charging electric cars out-strips supply, nor will I be laughing when I get sprayed with the electrolyte from the ruptured batteries of an electric car which hits me.
We do have a solution which is far more practical and safe, but which is either ignored or maligned by environmentalists. Grow genetically-engineered corn and process it to produce methanol (alcohol). It's a liquid fuel (easier to contain than gases and therefore safer, also can be handled with existing infrastructure) which will require little work to retrofit existing cars to use. While the corn is growing it would strip x mols of CO2 from the atmosphere and when the fuel is burned it would produce x mols of CO2, so there would be no net increase in CO2. And alcohol is a great fuel for internal combustion engines. It's cleaner than gasoline in terms of other pollutants, producing only some NOx (inherently unstable in our atmosphere) at the temperatures and pressures inside an engine's cylinders. Oil companies embrace it - let's face it, they don't care what they're pumping as long as they make a profit on it.
Why don't we have it? Well, for one thing, you have all the people running around freaking out about genetically modified plants. The other problem is the same left-wing zealots who want electric cars (without looking at the problem of the power requirements) start jumping up and down screaming that "you can't feed cars while there are children starving in Somalia!". (Sexual restraint is the solution to that one, and I ain't talking about leather fetishists.)
hey, he's running IIS guys.
I am? That's news to me! Someone must have broken my house, upgraded my webserver's hardware and then installed Windows on it! I'd call the police, but if the hardware is nice, I'll just quietly format the drive and stick OpenBSD on it.
i guess that explains it. you think gasoline is dangerous, try running Windows!
Tell me about it. At the height of Code Red, I was getting about 3000 hits per day from infected Windows webservers.
Now if the computers hadn't been running windows and they would have crashed anyway and wouldnt have been able to execute it. Oh wait they were running windows. I guess windows(and any crashable OS) only crashes during important data writing.
Linux X applications by and large aren't as stable as Windows shareware (ie. KMail silently dies when the disk is full, etc.). The Linux kernel *is* crashable - try hot-swapping an ISA card in an old clunker. [grin]
As for worms, well, once on my KDE box, I clicked on a virus while I was showing off Linux to a friend. "Look at how immune I am to e-mail virii... [click-click]... Oh shit... Look at how well Windows applications are supported!"
Red Hat 7.3, shipping with Windows binaries associated to Wine. Yup, I got my Linux box infected with a Windows e-mail virus. Dangerous default file associations are not a problem exclusive to Windows, and it's only a matter of popularity before e-mail virii are being written to exploit bugs in Linux apps.
Adobe cars with Fuel Cells
on
Flaming Cellphones
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Any practical electric car will use fuel cells anyway, so told who so?
And the fuel cells do what with fuel? Provide a large power supply with little internal resistance, as is required to run the large loads of electric motors to drive the wheels. What do *you* think will happen when the wires or bus bars between the fuel cells and anything else get crimped during a car accident?
Never mind that fuel cells run on combustible fuel which must be brought into close proximity to the soon-to-be-glowing-red-hot output terminals of the car accident fuel cell. At least in conventional cars, the only statistically significant source of fuel ignition is sparking from randomly bent metal scraping on asphalt. Of course, you'll still have that, too - unless your fuel cell car is an Adobe. (Old SNL reference, all you Gen-Y types won't get it.)
Of course, this means that fuel cells will actually be practical. Given the notorious sensitivity of their osmotic membranes the sort of fuel contamination which passes right through most filtration devices, I can't imagine that you'll be filling your car up off too many gas station tanks.
Physics of Shorted Batteries.
on
Flaming Cellphones
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· Score: 3, Informative
The mechanism for the exploding cell-phone batteries is most likely the same mechanism for exploding car batteries. Namely, electricity can cause the oxygen and hydrogen in water to dissociate. When this happens, if they hydrogen and oxygen mixture cannot escape, the pressure and the stored energy in the gases builds up. Eventually, there is a spark, or a pop (and then maybe a spark) which causes the battery to explode and then the hydrogen/oxygen mixture burns.
I think you're overcomplicating things.
Take a piece of wire. Wrap it in plastic. Use it to short out a freshly-charged Ni-Cd, NiMH, lead-acid or Li-ion battery. Flames.
Any power source - battery, power supply, whatever - capable of good current can heat a piece of wire enough to cause ignition. Think of the wires in your toaster.
This is not like the old carbon-zinc Eveready "cat of 9 lives" batteries you'd short out when you were a kid. These actually have lots of stored energy and very little internal resistance to limit the short circuit current.
The problem now is that modern battery technology which gives us long cellphone and PDA charge times also means that we're carrying around a lot of chemical energy in our pockets, and any failure which results in a short circuit across the batteries will generate a lot of heat and potentially ignite plastic housings.
Never mind that as you increase the energy density of a battery, you must - by the very nature of electrochemical cells - be increasing the reactiveness (ie. toxicity and danger) of the chemicals used to make the battery.
If you think this is fun, just wait until we have electric cars! Think gasoline is nasty stuff? (I can't wait to say, "I told you so!".)
Slashdot Mirror
However, I wouldn't jump too high right now. I think we are just changing the game, not winning it. Here's an example [link to Symantec info on a new trojan] of what spammers are doing now.
No, that's great. It's wonderful that spammers are resorting to writing worms and trojans.
Why?
Because instead of civil action and various legal gray areas with sending spam, these bastards will have the FBI kick in their door one night and arrest them. No cute little civil proceedings attempting to discover whether or not they have a "free speech" right to fill *my* mailbox with *their* crap.
Personally, I hope they get pistol-whipped at the same time.
SUBJ: Not currently experiencing your concern. (Score:4, Informative)
I have received over 100 messages in the last 24 hours. Less than a dozen made it through to me.
Maybe I missed something...
How did this get modded up?
How is this "not... your concern"?
Even with Earthlink filtering stuff that isn't whitelisted for you, the filters must receive the spam before they can test it and discard it as such.
In other words, it still costs your ISP bandwidth. Which, in the end, costs you money.
So, unless I *completely* missed your point somehow, until the spam itself stops, it will continue to cost you money.
And if there are as many suckers out there as the cited article implies, spammers will keep trying to get whitelisted. Which means that their messages are still received, eating bandwidth and hard disk space.
The problem will only end when everyone is on a whitelisting mail server AND end user stupidity has been wiped out.
Thanks for writing a reply that I was to tired to... do
My pleasure.
I get so tired of "audiophiles" who use terms like "textured" to describe the sound of equipment.
Audio equipment should be a straight wire with gain. That is scientifically measurable; anything else is just a cop-out from wanna-bes who are too lazy to learn math.
Just wanted to say I love balanced vs. unbalanced cables and I was wondering if you had any experience with using CAT5 as a cheap substitute. I've been hearing great things about it from the sidelines.No, I haven't tried it, but it seems to me that it should work. I'll try it sometime.
And a really neat connector that doesn't pull loose when you move around. And you can bend them. Zow!Well, I think I'd try soldering the wire into a couple of XLR connectors. First step would be to check the impedance of a UTP pair and see if a matching transformer would be required. If so, then cost and transformer losses and distortion would have to be calculated and assessed versus the cost of an equivalent length of good balanced line cable.
It seems like a great idea considering the cables are rated to reliably transfer modulated data at 350MHz and up for 100 meters, and that's the cheap, $1@foot stuff.Yup. But digital data isn't as picky as analog. After all, the receiving device merely needs to understand the message; with analog, the message must be as clean and clear as possible.
The other thing is that UTP clearly carries data modulated into RF signals of some sort, but I've never seen the actual specifications of the data sent down the piece of cable, and I've never been interested enough to hook my 'scope up to it. :)
I suspect it depends on how strong a signal you plan on running through your Cat5. Last I heard, Ethernet cards drew a lot less power than 50W.
Heheh...
Obviously, using CAT5 as balanced audio would be for line or microphone level. There's no point in running mic level unless that's what the source is. Line level is 1V p~p into 600 ohms imedance = Vrms / Z = ( 1 / sqrt(2))/ 600 = 1 / (600*sqrt(2)) = ~ 1.2mA at full signal...
Nah, not a problem. [grin]
Of course, you could run a lot of power through CAT5 if the voltage is high enough to keep voltage drop (and therefore conductor heating) down - this is the same reason why power transmission lines always run at high voltages. The limiting factor in running a lot of power through CAT5 would be the dielectric strength of the insulation between opposing strands. I'd try it experimentally, but I'd never use CAT5 for anything other than small-signal stuff. (ie. milliwatts range.)
but the reason they don't back things up with numbers is that in audio, numbers lie. A lot.
I trust cold, hard numbers - carefully applied - much less than subjective and unreliable human hearing.
A 5W tube system may be louder than a 50W transistor system.
Sure, if the 5W tube system is better impedance matched and into a more efficient corner-loaded infinite baffle speaker.
Consider also that perception of audio intensity is logarithmic. To double the volume requires 4x the power - and that's at the cones of the speakers! 50W will not actually sound that much louder than 5W, even with all other things being the same.
A speaker with .002% signal distortion might easily introduce its own distortion due to cheap magnets or poorly engineered cones and not include that, even though the stat says "Total Harmonic Distortion."
If the speaker's distortion figure doesn't include non-linearities caused by the magnets, cones, surrounds or other parts of the unit, I would suggest that this is something you should take up with the Federal Trade Commission.
Even a stat like "Frequency response: 20 Hz - 22 kHz" is useless if the amplification device is not perfectly linear, and no device is.
This is why reputable audio equipment will include a +/-xdB figure in the frequency response claim.
Likewise, most professional audio amplifiers (ie. Crown, QSC, EV, etc.) will cite THD ratings along with the wattage, as in "750W RMS into 8 ohms with 0.2% THD".
Thus, the auditioning of gear on a "well trained ear" is essential to any audio review.
The auditioning of gear is only to check for correct connection, elimination of factory duds, and sheer enjoyment of the music for which you purchased the system.
And this quote is not even that strange; in fact it's just using different language to explain what we want to hear. Dynamics were impressive means that there was a big difference between loud and soft sounds, usually a sign that the device is delivering sound as accurately as possible.
The technical term is called "dynamic range", and it's mathematically described as the difference between the amplifier's noise floor and maximum wattage rating.
imaging was nuanced and detailed, "imaging" is the combination of stereo seperation combined with balanced delivery of all types of sound (eg, bass doesn't linger and treble doesn't disappear),
Stereo separation is measured in dB attenuation, typically by driving one channel with a 1V p~p 1kHz sinewave and measuring the "leaked" signal from the other channel.
Bass doesn't linger if the amplifier has good frequency response, since bass is a low frequency component and requires much less amplifier bandwidth than the 20kHz ratings of most amplifiers.
Treble doesn't disappear if the amplifier is capable of performing +/- x dB from 20Hz to 20kHz, ie. x is some acceptable number (generally under 1dB). In other words, if the amplifier has sufficient frequency response.
and detailed imaging means you can hear sounds move from left to center to right accurately. Nuanced imaging means there isn't a sudden skip as a sound movees from left to right, or from one note to another.
Which means, in other words, that both amplifier channels are well separated and have the same performance characteristics (measurable by science, you know, science, that evil black mathy-type stuff that got man to the moon and gets people heart transplants).
frequency extremes sounded extended and natural means that low bass and high treble signals are transmitted and not cut off because "you won't hear it any way," and that it also isn't needlessly boosted.
Again, see the definition of the term "frequency response". I believe the *numbers* will allay all your fears.
In short, this unit is going to deliver a clean signal to your headphones or receiver, and that's exactly what you want from an audio device.
In other words, for playback to speakers (as oppos
I have three IBM (1391401) keyboards which I am banging away on a daily basis.
Yeah, that would be the PS/2 click-key super-mega-tactile keyboard. They were supposed to feel like Selectrics, but they're not as precise. Got a couple of those, too.
My favorite two keyboards are the Compaq Deskpro/286 and the Compaq OEM keyboards, 1997 or so vintage. The Deskpro/286 keyboard is a thing of sheer beauty - looks and feels a lot like a DEC VT-100 keyboard, but somehow looks even older. Smooth and soft on your hands, but with a nice tactile feel that the VT-100 never had.
I still have a big pile of my old flip-top desktop cases. They're great - desktop cases fit easier onto racks, and with a flip-top, maintenance is a breeze.
One in particular is a 1983 vintage Toronto Datacomm Turbo XT which serves as a database server. Under the hood is a (cheap) AT-profile Pentium II motherboard. The original power supply, conservatively rated for 100W or so, happily runs the PII, a pair of 3.5" hard disk drives and a network card.
Of course, I had to add a Seagate ST-225 with the full-height bezel to make the look complete...
You'd think that Microsoft would have better places than Slashdot to blow advertising bucks - I can't imagine their return on investment would be very high.
After all, this must be embarrassing.
Glad to see a few people understand the point. The first few replies were... Well, anyway, it is slashdot.
Tell me about it. The KDE Developers have dismissed www.glowingplate.com/dissent as a FUD campaign, rather than a simple venting of user frustration.
Until that changes, we're still gonna be stuck buying Dells pre-loaded with Windows XP. [sigh]
BTW, you can keep your B R/B blocks, I'd rather have a Hemi.So would I! Unless someone is willing to trade me my B and RB motors for a Hemi block... (first one for offer: 1976 thinwall casting lightweight 400 block. Weighs less than a Slant-6 block, easy stroke to 475 cubic inches!) Also got a 1970 440-4bbl, complete, good compression and oil pressure, kicking around the garage.
I'd get it one piece at a time, and it wouldn't cost me a dime.That is such a kick-ass song, any car guy can relate. Another good one is Pinkard and Bowden's Guns Made America Great. I think it's supposed to be comedy, but when I play it really loud in my old pickup truck, it keeps the silly little Honda cars far away.
if you use micro$hit winblows ur probably a FAG and like to have sex wit hMENS BUTTS!!!!1
It's interesting to note that a lot of Linux was written by European developers. Europeans tend to be more accepting of gay and lesbian people than North Americans.
Linux won't make it to the desktop because the mindset of the average linux user would be 'set up a different account'. This is not acceptable to most people.
You can't explain this. It's exactly the same problem that I have whenever I mention a flaw with KDE. "Well, if the users don't like it, they can just hack the source and recompile!" This year, I had to explain to someone who had been using Windows since 1993 - with lots of formal training provided to federal government employees - that the different rectangles full of stuff were different windows.
Now, admittedly, that's profoundly stupid, so I'll consider a case only slightly more capable: the MCS"E". (Note that Microsoft calls them engineers, but unless they know the pain of 4 years of vector calculus, they are most decidedly NOT engineers.) What percentage of MCS"E"s have sufficient brain cells to even wrap their heads around what a compiler is, let alone to hack source? My bet, based on the MCS"E"s I've known (and fired over the years) is somewhere less than 50%.
So where's Joe Sixpack in this picture, as he's told to recompile half of KDE because of x? Popping the old Windows XP CD into the drive and rebooting the computer, is my bet.
I'd get it one piece at a time,
And it wouldn't cost me a dime.
You'll know it's me
When I come through your town
I'm gonna ride around in style
I'm gonna drive everybody wild
'cause i'll have the only one
There is around.
Yeah Red Rider, this is the Cottonmouth in the psycho-billy Cadillac...
The mail program works well, as does the newsreader. The browser displays just about every page out there quite nicely. Multiple user support is good and it is quite easy to lock it down/configure it as needed, a very important feature for a family application (at least for some).
For sure Mozilla as the browser; even if you don't care about IE's erosion of HTML and HTTP standards, you should care about IE's poor security.
But for e-mail, I like Eudora. I really like Eudora. It handles dozens of identities, has good filters, seems to be pretty robust. And it's got a great spell-checker, a Mood Watch system which adds little chili peppers and warns you if you've accidentally mistyped fsck. And Eudora is very sarcastic. (Free version: "If you register, we'll erect a giant statue of you at our corporate headquarters*. *-offer void on the planet Earth.") As with all mail clients, make sure that HTML e-mail viewing is turned off to avoid spammers using bugs on you.
Bugs? [img src="http://www.spammer.com/image.jpg?recipient=yo uremail@address.com"]
Other Windows essentials: Kazaa Lite, ThumbsPlus, PuTTY (SSH/Telnet client), WinAMP 2 with Ogg plug-in.
That is only the case if you are running an ancient, brain dead copy of the original (Matt's Script Archive) formmail.pl. But you'd be a retard for doing that and deserve everything you get. Modern formmail scripts do not allow spam through.
Looking through my server's logs, I get a lot of attempts to hijack formmail.pl and spam through it, which is a neat trick since I don't even have formmail.pl.
So I started looking around, and found a great little script which automatically reports the attempt to the spammer's ISP.
I haven't installed it yet, but it looks really great: http://home-port.net/fmreport/
Someone will have to supply the hardware of the future to these new Linux users. There will be plenty of businesses who will cater to the non MS users of the world, and if you think Asia and India, someday they may outnumber the Windows users.
Yeah, that's true. There will always be someone selling motherboards with real non-Billified BIOS.
But, given Microsoft's security track record, should we even be worried? X-box was designed with a lot less attention to retaining backward compatibility than a motherboard will require by the very nature of the PC market. That backward compatibility gives one attack vectors to break the BIOS and get their computer back, and yet even without those loopholes, X-box can run Linux. I predict that it will be less than 2 weeks after their release before some 15-year-old has put up an exploit that allows you to boot *your* computer with the operating system *you* choose.
Tesla can play a good version of Signs, and Getting Better, but to my knowledge, never invented anything that'll change mankind forever.
Are you kidding?
Tesla invented alternating current while strumming a guitar. The shape and resonance of a Tesla coil were inspired by holding a guitar near a stack of amplifiers!
Tesla was cool.
This is a great rant, because it is very true. Linux will never be more than a geek's OS unless it becomes less of one. This is perfectly fine if the community wants for the OS to never enter the Joe Home User install base.
Hey, can I add your reply to my www.glowingplate.com/dissent page?
Thanks.
They should't use linux. Every adaptation is painfull. WIndows 9x/2k/XP was a pain in the ass for me to use even from the first time. Does the name "Windows Explorer" means anyting to you ? Explore what on windows ? the buttons ?
I think you're confusing "learning curve" with "usability".
No one can realistically be expected to sit down with a new operating system and know how to use it right away, that's a given. That time spent wondering where the hell the C: drive went is part of the learning curve.
But even when you're familiar with Linux/KDE, for example, you don't have the same usability as Windows because cut and paste doesn't even work properly across all applications, to say nothing of the other issues.
Anyone who says that windows(tm) is a easy and intuitive interface is an idiot who has never done anything in windows except playing games and typing letters in whatever editor he wants.No. Windows is intuitive because you know what's going to be under the File menu in *all* applications. There's a basic (and probably informal) standard set for where you will find the menu options you need. All the windows in Windows look the same - except for weird ones like ATI's horrible Multi Media Center and Quicktime, both of which place form over function.
Windows is intuitive because you know that you can copy text from Novell's GroupWise mail client and paste it into a Word document. A user can't take that functionality for granted in Linux and because it fails to work for no apparent reason (as far as the user is concerned) which is counterintuitive.
Having said that, Windows also does allow you to do such exotic things as dropping a video file into a Power Point presentation, which is quite a challenge under Linux and is a feature frequently used around my office by, to paraphrase you and adjust the grammar, "idiots who have never done anything in windows except playing games and typing letters in whatever editor they want".
Some people are used with the annoyances of windows and they won't complain because for them is normal for an application to crash,I have applications crash a lot more frequently in Linux than in Windows. However, I have the operating system itself crash a lot more frequently in Windows than in Linux. Neither one is satisfactory.
However, Linux applications crash a lot more frequently than Windows or its applications. The net effect is that while the Linux kernel is rock-solid and stable, the user still spends more down time because KMail silently dies or the OpenOffice window just locks up.
As far as the end user is concerned, the machine is broken and it's Linux' fault. They don't know the difference, or care.
is normal to have to press a predefined, ugly button to make a menu appear.In Linux, it is normal to have to search for the provided button because it is in a different place in every single distribution, application and build. Joe Average doesn't even know how to turn on big fonts in Windows XP, he ain't gonna be able to figure out how to change a button to his liking.
Configurability is only of interest to the power user.
Some windows managers are years (12 years fvwm) old and you still can't find in Gnome or Kde a decent functionality. They are windows on linux: same look and feel same interface, same memory hog, same crashes, same idiot user base.Except that we have splits in the application base to serve different window managers. Some apps work very well and have lots of features (for example, I like Gnumeric a lot), but they don't integrate well with other apps like OpenOffice. I can make Quattro Pro play with Word a hell of a lot better than I can make Gnumeric play with the OpenOffice's word processor. And they look and feel a lot more alike, which, like it or not, reduces the volume of (expensive) support desk calls coming in from end users.
Why would any open source developer want to do this? Unless someone thinks there is money to be made from developing open source software (ie someone wanting to sell linux computers at Wallmart) that is suitable for technically inept parents, I can't see many developers going to great lengths so that it becomes fool-proof.
If the open-source developer in question would like to see an end to the Windows monopoly on the desktops of the proles, then he or she will have to do it.
Admittedly, this doesn't make for the fun or cool programming challenges which fuel most open-source developers; it's the boring housekeeping.
But I see reason for hope. Knoppix in particular is as close to a foolproof Linux distribution as I've seen so far, and with luck others will take that lead and build on it. Of course, the applications and KDE itself still need work...
I Don't think its a 'dilemma' because the open source / free software developers will never standardize the GUI interfaces - precisely because people have come to like particulars of their given environment, or want the flexibility to change.
In a sense, precisely the flexibility and diversity of console applications and daemons which makes *nix ideally suited to server duty, is exactly what makes its mass-adoption on the desktop difficult.
On one hand, it's great that there might be 50 different ways to implement cut-and-paste functionality, but the end user doesn't care as long as he can cut something from one application (say, OpenOffice) and paste it into another (say, Gnumeric). On my Linux workstation, that's tough.
Never mind the lack of OLE support. Stuff that Windows users take for granted - Windows Media Player embedding in a PowerPoint presentation - has been around since Office 95, and yet I've never been able to get xine or mplayer to launch from an Impress presentation.
These are the hurdles which will need actual in-stone standards to overcome, and some of them will probably require work right down to the very architecture of the window manager in order to implement.
And we have to overcome them, in order to make Linux a viable alternative operating system for any casual user who does more than read e-mail.
I have a rant on the subject. It's a bit dated now, but trying to work as a "regular" user in Linux - without writing shell scripts or firing up gcc - I can't get done what I need to get done. We don't need more eye candy or stuff like that. We need decent apps that don't feel like the works in progress they admittedly are and don't silently close if you run out of disk space. We need volunteer UI designers to walk into offices and seniors homes to find out how we can make a more user-friendly and consistent UI without alienating the power user.
And we need to support at least every UI feature of Windows 2000 and its central apps. Let's think about it - in a field which moves as fast as IT, I'm suggesting we should use the OLE capabilities and consistency of a three-year-old product as a role model. Why? Because there are still things which Windows 95 users can do in three mouseclicks that would require firing up gcc.
Like it or not, every end user is going to compare KDE/Gnome/whatever to their experience with Windows. They don't care that the Linux kernel never crashes if the KDE crash handler is popping up every 5 minutes or if applications lack features they require.
Think of the end user with every single line of code that you write. Take a picture of a technically inept parent or aunt and stick it on the side of your monitor to remind yourself.
Not really. All I have to do is modify a single byte of each of my mp3s (that's not hard given even the simplest perl script), and there, none of my MD5s will match.
Yeah... I think what I'm going to do is create a script to change the ID3 tags, since that will not require a recompress.
We have to be careful about this sort of stuff. I can imagine a whole bunch of people writing scripts to decode and then re-encode their MP3 collections. With the generational losses of each encode/decode cycle, that would really reduce the sound quality of the new MP3s.
Solution? Command-prompt program capable of changing ID3 and Vorbis tags, since those don't require a recompress. I think I'll automatically append a random number from 0-9 onto the end of one of the tags.
Of course, new hashes will mean that swarm and resume features won't work too well in Kazaa and other apps. For the most part, however, audio files are small, so the damage to the peer-to-peer community should be minimal.
Even further: most mp3 encoders aren't deterministic from what I understand... not in a general sense at least. I'm pretty sure the output of 2 different codecs on the same input file will yield ever so slightly different results...Also would depend on the libraries installed on the machines. The biggest ones are the math libraries, whether in *nix or Windows. The codecs do a hell of a lot of Fourier transforms, which becomes a lot of Really Big Math, all of which is performed to arbitrary precision. Let's say one version of a library comes up with 0.34534543341 and another version of the same library comes up with 0.34534543342, then the hash would probably be completely different... Or processor rounding - different steppings of a processor on an otherwise identical system might have different results...
geezus, i re-read your stuff on electric cars. my god man, those things haven't been true since the 70s.
What things?
- Electric cars need to be charged. Unlike what you said in a previous post, hybrid cars are not electric; hybrid technology is merely a way of incrementally increasing the gas mileage provided by a fossil-fuel powered engine. The energy which runs a hybrid car comes from the gasoline you pump into the tank; the energy which runs an electric car comes from the coal or nuclear power plant which powers your wall socket.
- Lots of things have changed since the 1970s (before you were born, judging from your apparent knowledge and exceedingly good grammar), but the laws of physics haven't. Batteries store electrical energy in chemical form. The more electrical energy you have per unit volume, the more chemical energy you have per unit volume. More chemical energy = stronger acids, greater electronegativities, greater electron affinities = more nasty toxic chemicals. Tear apart the Li-ion battery in a Honda Civic hybrid and rub the lithium in your face if you don't believe me.
this level of misinformation is why Bush keeps getting elected and enviromentalists have such a bad rap.Bush wasn't elected by the people, he's only president because of an arcane mechanism (Electoral College) and Ralph Nader splitting the Democratic vote. Personally, I despise and detest Bush only slightly less than I hate Nader, but I'm comforted to know that slightly more reasonable people like Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld are actually running the country.
I'm guessing that you're in high school. I would bet money that you have no scientific or engineering education whatsoever. Your parents are baby-boomers, and you've grown up never wanting anything; with your Gen-Y idealism, you're going to defy all the laws of the universe to make the world a better place.
If I'm wrong, you'll be able to answer a very simple question to prove it. This question is fair game in some high school classes and is a mandatory part of the curriculum for *all* college or university science, medicine, economics, math or engineering courses. So now, good sir, I challenge you to demonstrate any scientific education: What is d/dx of e^(2x)?
i love how you completely disallow for any technology improvements in batteries while getting completely behind the advances that would allow you to keep driving your muscle car.Well, unless the laws of physics change, batteries will only become more potentially lethal as they pack greater energy densities.
As for driving my musclecar, yeah. I love cars. I'm sure, with my qualifications, that I would be better suited to be hot-rodding electric or hybrid cars than conventional cars. But I don't, not because electric cars can't be quick, but because they're not the best technology for the task at hand.
Similarly, musclecar guys aren't especially concerned about gasoline. If all I wanted was performance and power, I'd be jumping up and down looking forward to the mass-adoption of hydrogen as a fuel. If hydrogen were offered as an automotive fuel, it wouldn't take long before some company was out there making retrofit kits to run your old musclecar on hydrogen instead of gasoline - hydrogen is a *much* better fuel than gasoline, producing tens of times more power per cubic inch of engine displacement.
Why don't I like hydrogen, then? Because it seeps through cast iron tanks, and burns so hot that you can't see it. Its flashpoint is very low. Its heat output is unparalleled. It would be an extremely dangerous substance to carry around in pressurized tanks on a car. And it still has to come from somewhere; it takes the same energy to break water down as you get from burning hyrdrogen in oxygen, so the net effect is that it's simply an extremely dangerous energy storage device.
that is so self-serving.No. Being brainwashed by your upbringing into believing that all environmentalists are good or even know what they're talking about, and then convincing yourself that you're A Good Person because you recycle your shopping bags while your gas lawnmower needs an air filter and a spark plug, now that's self-serving.
i think using gasoline means our continued dependence on fossil fuels. if batteries are dangerous in an accident, then we must find a way to make them safe, not use it as an excuse to keep burning gas.
Except that when you start talking about the generation and distribution systems required to charge all the batteries in electric cars, the combined inefficiencies are greater than those of gasoline powered cars... never mind the safety.
What fuel are you going to burn to generate the electricity to charge all those electric cars? Forget wind and solar, they're not practical yet and possibly never will be.
Think of what will happen when 10 million Los Angeles commuters plug in their electric cars each night...
if you don't like electricity as a solution, how about offering a positive alternative? instead of waiting around to laugh at people if your worse case scenario comes true.Actually, I won't be laughing if my electric bill goes up to $0.75 per kWh because demand from charging electric cars out-strips supply, nor will I be laughing when I get sprayed with the electrolyte from the ruptured batteries of an electric car which hits me.
We do have a solution which is far more practical and safe, but which is either ignored or maligned by environmentalists. Grow genetically-engineered corn and process it to produce methanol (alcohol). It's a liquid fuel (easier to contain than gases and therefore safer, also can be handled with existing infrastructure) which will require little work to retrofit existing cars to use. While the corn is growing it would strip x mols of CO2 from the atmosphere and when the fuel is burned it would produce x mols of CO2, so there would be no net increase in CO2. And alcohol is a great fuel for internal combustion engines. It's cleaner than gasoline in terms of other pollutants, producing only some NOx (inherently unstable in our atmosphere) at the temperatures and pressures inside an engine's cylinders. Oil companies embrace it - let's face it, they don't care what they're pumping as long as they make a profit on it.
Why don't we have it? Well, for one thing, you have all the people running around freaking out about genetically modified plants. The other problem is the same left-wing zealots who want electric cars (without looking at the problem of the power requirements) start jumping up and down screaming that "you can't feed cars while there are children starving in Somalia!". (Sexual restraint is the solution to that one, and I ain't talking about leather fetishists.)
hey, he's running IIS guys.I am? That's news to me! Someone must have broken my house, upgraded my webserver's hardware and then installed Windows on it! I'd call the police, but if the hardware is nice, I'll just quietly format the drive and stick OpenBSD on it.
i guess that explains it. you think gasoline is dangerous, try running Windows!Tell me about it. At the height of Code Red, I was getting about 3000 hits per day from infected Windows webservers.
Wha? With Toonces as my co-pilot, what could possibly go wrong?
Ugh. Yeah. I'd forgotten about that particular nightmare. That was horrible.
Now if the computers hadn't been running windows and they would have crashed anyway and wouldnt have been able to execute it. Oh wait they were running windows. I guess windows(and any crashable OS) only crashes during important data writing.
Linux X applications by and large aren't as stable as Windows shareware (ie. KMail silently dies when the disk is full, etc.). The Linux kernel *is* crashable - try hot-swapping an ISA card in an old clunker. [grin]
As for worms, well, once on my KDE box, I clicked on a virus while I was showing off Linux to a friend. "Look at how immune I am to e-mail virii... [click-click]... Oh shit... Look at how well Windows applications are supported!"
Red Hat 7.3, shipping with Windows binaries associated to Wine. Yup, I got my Linux box infected with a Windows e-mail virus. Dangerous default file associations are not a problem exclusive to Windows, and it's only a matter of popularity before e-mail virii are being written to exploit bugs in Linux apps.
Any practical electric car will use fuel cells anyway, so told who so?
And the fuel cells do what with fuel? Provide a large power supply with little internal resistance, as is required to run the large loads of electric motors to drive the wheels. What do *you* think will happen when the wires or bus bars between the fuel cells and anything else get crimped during a car accident?
Never mind that fuel cells run on combustible fuel which must be brought into close proximity to the soon-to-be-glowing-red-hot output terminals of the car accident fuel cell. At least in conventional cars, the only statistically significant source of fuel ignition is sparking from randomly bent metal scraping on asphalt. Of course, you'll still have that, too - unless your fuel cell car is an Adobe. (Old SNL reference, all you Gen-Y types won't get it.)
Of course, this means that fuel cells will actually be practical. Given the notorious sensitivity of their osmotic membranes the sort of fuel contamination which passes right through most filtration devices, I can't imagine that you'll be filling your car up off too many gas station tanks.
The mechanism for the exploding cell-phone batteries is most likely the same mechanism for exploding car batteries. Namely, electricity can cause the oxygen and hydrogen in water to dissociate. When this happens, if they hydrogen and oxygen mixture cannot escape, the pressure and the stored energy in the gases builds up. Eventually, there is a spark, or a pop (and then maybe a spark) which causes the battery to explode and then the hydrogen/oxygen mixture burns.
I think you're overcomplicating things.
Take a piece of wire. Wrap it in plastic. Use it to short out a freshly-charged Ni-Cd, NiMH, lead-acid or Li-ion battery. Flames.
Any power source - battery, power supply, whatever - capable of good current can heat a piece of wire enough to cause ignition. Think of the wires in your toaster.
This is not like the old carbon-zinc Eveready "cat of 9 lives" batteries you'd short out when you were a kid. These actually have lots of stored energy and very little internal resistance to limit the short circuit current.
The problem now is that modern battery technology which gives us long cellphone and PDA charge times also means that we're carrying around a lot of chemical energy in our pockets, and any failure which results in a short circuit across the batteries will generate a lot of heat and potentially ignite plastic housings.
Never mind that as you increase the energy density of a battery, you must - by the very nature of electrochemical cells - be increasing the reactiveness (ie. toxicity and danger) of the chemicals used to make the battery.
If you think this is fun, just wait until we have electric cars! Think gasoline is nasty stuff? (I can't wait to say, "I told you so!".)