Fill a can with a little bit of water and set it over a flame until the water begins to boil. At this point most of the air has left the can and been replaced with water vapor. The can will not implode yet,
Of course! Chemical engineers build their own can crushers.
Do any of the other disciplines do this, that we can think of? Aerospace? Civil? Structural? Software?
It doesn't take very long to realize you're getting slashdotted if you're paying attention.
Yeah. First, you notice that kmail seems to be taking longer transferring mail than usual.
Then, you click on a webpage link, and your usually-quick DSL feels like dialup again.
The hard drive in your webserver is scratching so much, it's hard to think; it sounds like you're compiling a kernel and making a divx at the same time, but it's pages being served and visits being logged.
You fire up top and are greeted by a whole screen of httpd daemons and CGI.
Wow. Such level headedness in/. after the "jump from linux" article? You did a great job of putting the points out of course. I couldnt've put it better being a linux "pusher" while working for the enemy (over 100,000 and all we DO is microsoft servers).
Thanks! I hated writing it, but I just started banging out my frustrations on the keyboard. When I saw that it was going to be a masterpiece, I made the decision to forward it to Slashdot.
These problems are utterly trivial for the most part - couple of lines of code here, a new routine in the install script there - and I'd happily roll up the sleeves and dig out the source if I were beyond the "Hello, World" programming level.
Note that I'm not condemning problems without being willing to help; if I were capable of writing code, I would.
If we cant get the FIRST impression good to the future tech & management teams, then we're not going to have the door opened when we come knocking to sell linux. They'll be busy and they'll remember.
Absolutely.
My first experience with Linux was Red Hat 6.0. I figured that the most popular distro would be easiest for a newbie. On the 'Net, people were telling me that an x.0 release of Linux would be bad by Linux standards, but not as bad and buggy as, for example, the first release of Windows 95. Well, I had to support the first release of Windows 95; I know it well. It was leaps and bounds better in every user experience than Red Hat 6.0.
Had I been less determined, I would have quit. I almost did. The RH6.0 CD got thrown across the room in frustration, but I dug it out a couple of weeks later and tried again. It was probably my single worst computing experience; worse than Amiga WorkBench 1.0, Mac 1.0, Windows 95A. Hell, worse than learning the hard way, when you're 13 years old, why you need a null modem cable to connect your TeleType to your TI-99/4A.
Playing media shouldnt be so hard. I love codeweavers crutch and I love openoffice, but where is the spellcheck? Heck we had excellent spellchecks in the 80's!
Modern spellcheckers are absolutely essential. Period. If we're ever gonna get Linux on the desktop, that *has* to be addressed *quickly*. (Are you reading this, Mozilla development team? Kmail gang?)
If we don't have that, we don't have any credibility. Improving installer scripts can wait, most end users don't do that. But most end users do write e-mail and word processor documents; this cannot wait.
Playing media? yea xine is good, but to techie. I cant get my girlfriend to figure it out let alone my mother. If she (a doctor) cant figure it out then *something* is to much for the common person. You know? Why ADD features when you cant get MORE people to use it?
I applaud the Xine team for adding a playlist feature to Xine, it's a great innovation. Sometimes, you have an application where you just want neat videos playing on your monitor.
But how much work would it have taken to pop-up a Save Playlist As... window to allow you to save playlists for work (ie. endless repeating commercials for FIDS displays at airports, monday.playlist, tuesday.playlist, wednesday.playlist; arrivals.playlist, departures.playlist, etc.) Winamp has got it.
And while you're at it, click a box to make it repeat endlessly.
Speaking of Winamp, when I save an XMMS playlist and set up KDE to launch XMMS when I click on the playlist, XMMS doesn't play it. XMMS should see that it's being launched, check the file passed to it. If it's an audio file, load it and play it. If it's a playlist, load it as a playlist and play it. I suspect XMMS attempts to load the playlist like an audio file, finds it to be an invalid file format, and ignores it. Sure, it's pretty, but like Dan Aykroyd in the famous Super Bass-o-Matic 76 bit, it's Not Ready For Prime Time.
Get it easy to use THEN add garbage to it...
*Must* also have comparable features in all apps, and hopefully also some new ones. The features Windows users expect are required for credibility, the new features give "Gee-Whiz, $BLAH for Windows doesn't do that, that's cool!" and get the foot in the door.
sure it worked for M$, but guess what? They have the easy part already now... what do we have? Who cares --- no one wants to "waste" the time to figure it out...
Or has the time. Or wants to spend the time.
I like computers (obviously). But, even so, I *hate* sitting down in front of an unfamiliar operating system and trying to figure out how to get it to do what I need to do.
It must be so much worse for people who either don't like computers or are unfamiliar with the most fundamental basics.
Windows users are gonna have a tough enough time adapting as it is ("You're telling me there's no C: drive. What do you take me for, an idiot?") without giving them additional complexities and frustrations.
my two (additional) cents...
And good ones, too. I'm so glad to find like-minded people after a rant like that.
I love Linux and Unix. I love the Unix ideal of everything as a file, the security model and stability that can only come from miniaturizing a multiuser mainframe operating system to fit on my desktop. I love the development model and the available source code. And these features can only make it more appealing for enterprise desktop deployment, if we can get through the bull. I want to see Linux on the desktop. It's leaps and bounds above where it was a mere year ago. But we're not ready for mass-deployment yet.
End users will remember a poor first experience with Linux for years and years and years... and we'll only drive them right back to Microsoft.
Microsoft did not invent the fucking scroll mouse! I have an old mouse systems scroll mouse that I got at a computer fair selling old hardware a year before microsoft released their first scroll mouse. This is how ancient it was: it plugged into the serial port! It also could scroll every scroll bar without the applications support, including the horizontal ones.
That's really cool! I'm sorry; I'd read somewhere that it was one of the very few actual M$ innovations. I'd love to know the history even before that, if anyone knows it. (Google searches for "scroll wheel history", as you can imagine, primarily explain that the scroll wheel works on the brower history; it's like looking for information on a Sound power amplifier - yes, Sound is the brand name.)
I apologize for giving M$ credit where none is due.
20kA through 12 gauge wire without it instantly vapourizing? I don't think so...
Picoseconds. Believe it, I've seen magnetic can crushers fire. (I've also been allowed to play at length with a tesla coil excited by a junked 50kW AM radio transmitter, but that's another story.)
Calculate how many amps are flowing through that photoflash in the disposable camera in your hand when you press the button. The wiring is usually like 26 gauge, and it doesn't melt in that time.
isn't it cheaper to just buy caps insted of disposible cams
This place has a great supply of large high-voltage oil-filled capacitors salvaged from all sorts of stuff.
High voltage capacitors can be tough to get - Radio Shack doesn't stock many of them, and sometimes you have to buy them in bulk, which puts them out of range of most experimenters.
Microwave ovens are a great source of parts if you want to play with stuff like this, but it's worth noting that there's stuff inside microwave ovens which can kill you if you look at it the wrong way.
A full-wave rectifier made of microwave oven diodes, or a voltage doubler made with microwave oven diodes and capacitors, can be connected to an old microwave oven transformer for all sorts of fun, but can provide more voltage and current (ie. more power) than an electric chair. Be careful.
This sort of setup is great for charging up those 1uF 10kV oil-filled plastic capacitors (or doorknob capacitors) you might be able to scrounge up by looking in the right places. Oil filled caps are great because they tend to be self-healing. Blow a hole in the oil dielectric, and more just flows into place to fill it.
They're great for spot-welding.
Please don't do this if you don't known what you're doing, and I can't take responsibility for telling the wrong people stuff they can figure out from reading an electronics textbook.
Linux Dissent - Sorry, but it's true.
on
A Linux User Goes Back
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Here's the e-mail I sent to dude:
Hi,
Saw the mention on Slashdot.
While I agree and feel you're 100% right, I'm migrating from Windows 2000 to Linux.
The issues you raised are completely valid, but not being the average home user, they don't bother me that much, especially in the face of the headway Microsoft is making in its (assumed) goal of Internet domination.
I can't say that I blame you:
Any alternative operating system has to expect to be run on the hand-me-down boat anchor before being run on the user's main workstation. As someone who had a fscking UUCP e-mail address (I was on the 'net in 1988, boys and girls!), I was reasonably familiar with Unix. And yet, my first install of Red Hat 6.0 - only two years old - the problems started when I tried the install with a VGA monochrome monitor. The unselected options were the same color as the background. I thought the strength of Linux was frugality with old hardware and a good CLI? I won't get into the other problems, but you can imagine with an x.0 release. To be able to get the foot in the door, it should at least install easily on whatever piece of dogshit machine you throw it at. There are distros which run on a 386SX with 2 megs of RAM (http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/). Let's see that as the baseline to get a running kernel.
In Red Hat 7.1 - not that old - there's no support for my mouse's scroll wheel by default. I don't care the reason, scroll wheel mice have been popular since 1998. Four years is a lifetime in Internet time, even with a recession. Sure, scroll wheels are a Windows invention, but they're just about the only good idea to come out of Redmond, and to paraphrase Steve Earle, "Go on, take the idea and run". Microsoft owes a debt to everyone else in the computer field; we should adopt their few real innovations posthaste.
Xine is arguably the best multimedia player for *nix, but it doesn't have a repeat button, from what I can tell. I want an endless repeat just like Windows Media Player. Why? Who cares. I am the end user, and that's what the end user wants. If Media Player has it, it can't be that weird. At least create a list of all the features Windows programs have and strive to meet them. The most important additional feature, at this point, is running on a resilient operating system. Yes, it's nice that there are effectively billions of dollars of software development provided to me free of charge by volunteer efforts, but if all it has is compatibility with a stable operating system, it's not very useful. At this point, equivalent features are mere credibility.
Speaking of mere credibility... The (apparently but who knows anymore) predominant mail client, kmail, for the (apparently but who knows anymore) predominant GUI, KDE, doesn't include a spell checker like Outlook or Eudora (which I'm currently running under Wine) which underlines mistyped/misspelled words. I don't care about the technical reasons why it has not been implemented, or why kmail's spell checker sucks as much as it does. I have to manually invoke it like I did with DaVinci's spell checker back on a corporate LAN in 1996, and even then it doesn't have a decent vocabulary. WTF? (Why is "kmail" not equal to "kmail's"? I hate to think that my dictionary has to be so wasteful as to include a possessive and probably also a plural version of *every* noun! We'll not even get into why my e-mail client doesn't appear to even know its own name and flags it as an error, that's another story entirely; I know the answer but, like a point-and-drool end user, *simply don't care* to hear the excuse.)
KDE or Gnome? Fine, they're really only libraries and can coexist, but the division is counterintuitive, confusing, not relevant and off-putting to new users. For the most part, the differences between distros are the same. Sure, that's part of the strength, but it's also part of the weakness. Bicker privately. The user experience should be transparent to the squabbles. I'm sure someone at Microsoft says "Going gold, let's get it out the door", while someone else says "hold on, let's fix the bugs". KDE/Gnome holy wars should be as invisible to end users as Bill's DoublePlusGood Quality Control Department.
XMMS: kmail gives me the "You've Got New Mail" beep, and XMMS crashes. "Audio device is in use." For Christ's sake, I've installed it according to the docs and managed to keep my attention-deficit-disorder-inflicted brain idling for 15 minutes while it compiled; is this 2002 or 1991 all over again? (Hey, those years were both palindromes!)
Buggy boxed distros. At this point, the only real strength of Linux is stability. Security is a product of stability; if a program is stable, I feel somewhat more confident in assuming there are less/no buffer overflows waiting to be discovered and used. So why are distros turning to The Redmond Way and undermining the only 100% foolproof advantage Linux has in a world of 15 Klez booby-traps waiting nightly in your mailbox? Why do we have new x.0 distros of *anything* leaving the CD-ROM press with more root holes than IIS? I'll tolerate a few, but do we really need BIND running by default when Handsome Hubby The Bored Accountant picks up a box of $LAST_WEEK'S_VERSION of $WHATEVER Linux in the cashier display for $5.99 at $ELECTRONICS_RETAIL_CHAIN?
Mind-numbing slowness.... like, oh my God, how long will it take for KDE's file browser to show me the list of the 2,765 MP3s in my directory? As allegedly fat and slow as Windows 2000 is, it installs off only *one* pirated CD (not *three*, like most distros), and Explorer manages to pop up my MP3 collection a hell of a lot faster than when I boot in Linux. Note also that I didn't have the opportunity to compile Windows for this particular machine, yet I did for KDE. Why, despite KDE's advantage of optimization, is Windows Exploiter still faster? Everything stopped for three weeks when I opened the directory which contained my pr0n collection.
An application crashes. Nothing responds to mouseclicks. I've waited a few seconds and need to get back to work. My alternatives appear to be CTRL-ALT-BKSP (the "Three Fingered Salute", Finnish Edition (sorry, Linus)) or, from the other machine that I don't have as the typical home user, "telnet $HOST / $USERNAME / $PASSWORD / top / k -9 $PID_OF_APPARENTLY_CRASHED_PROGRAM". That's unacceptable. I want a window to pop up and say, "Hey, dunno what the heck happened here, but this program ain't responding to system messages no more. Wanna kill it? (Y/N)".
Some *nix users. Most will give you the shirt off your back to help you out and I appreciate those, but there's a distressing and non-trivial number who will mock nonconformity within an Anime/Star Trek environment. It's hard to imagine pure computer geeks being as cliquish and superficial as 14-year-old girls in a schoolyard, yet I know when I copy this to a comment form in Slashdot, I'll be modded down. It'd be much worse if I were trying to get my first Linux install running on Mom and Dad's computer and was being made fun of for asking if Linux will run on Dad's Pentium III-450.
Speaking of Mom and Dad's computer, we need advocacy and an installed user base of kids who can't necessarily afford their own machines. We need installation to be foolproof, as risk-free as possible, and easy to ensure a future userbase who will go to college, get jobs, and be in purchasing positions. We need a *great* initial user experience. We need focus groups going to senior citizens homes and getting feedback. But, as a starting point, we need the damned installers to check the hard disk for free space in a Windows partition, offer to automatically and safely resize it, and then install a (working/effective/safe) dual-boot system in such a fashion that any AOL-using blue-haired grandmother who drives to church every Sunday in her 1974 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and can't figure out why MediaPlay doesn't sell 8-Tracks anymore, can figure out the Window/Linux startup choice. That should be an absolute priority so that trying out Linux - on all major distos, whether contemplated and downloaded or an impulse "hey, what's this Linux thing in the news?" buy at Wal*Mart - involves as little risk to an end user as possible. "If there is any hope, it lies with the proles." - Winston Smith, 1984.
However, "We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty." - Edward R. Murrow.
Despite all these frustrations with Linux, I can't condone your actions. We're 99.98% to the finish line, and the threat of losing is too great. If the Internet is Microsoft's, we're all locked in to one supplier, one philosophy, one vision. One *architecture*. We're too vulnerable, anyone and everyone.
The next Klez, Code Red, or licensing agreement, 5 months or 5 years from now, could shut the Internet down.
AM I the only one baffled by this pointless story? What the hell does a red stapler have to do with anything?
To publicize their new product!
Bring new life to your aging stapler with Stapler 2002 Upgrade Edition! Adds new and vibrant features which enhance productivity!
Personal Edition: Package includes one wire wheel for use with your power drill and a can of red Tremclad.
Enterprise Edition*: Package includes glass bead for your sandblaster and a bottle of red DuPont Centari for your paint gun.
* Installation downtime may be reduced through the purchase of a Stapler Backup Kit, part #6661313, projected availability 2Q2003, which includes one black Swingline stapler preloaded with 100 standard office staples. Availability subject to change without notice. We reserve the right to change the color of the paint supplied.
> I get *hell* from customs for sneaking Mighty Taco [mightytaco.com] across the border Leave the baggie of pot out and they'll wave you right through.
I wish.
Young guy, dressed either in a shirt and tie or in jeans, white T-shirt and leather jacket, driving a 1976 Dodge Ram, often with big chunks of a cut-up Toyota in the back, going through customs:
USA: Nature of your visit? [gestures to glance through Canadian passport I'm holding on the steering wheel if he wants it] Welcome to the United States, Mr. $LASTNAME; hope you enjoy your visit. Might wanna avoid the Scajacquada Expressway, they're doin' construction and it's backed up.
Canada: Where do you live? [gestures to glance through Canadian passport I'm holding on the steering wheel if he wants it] Citizen of which country? [This question *after* looking through my passport.] What were you doing in the United States? How do you know these friends? Oh... the Interweb thing, and I'm supposed to believe that. Pull over to the side, get undressed, turn around and bend over. Lube for the body cavity search is available for only $13.95 plus GST.
Grrrr.... Nothing makes you feel better about living in one of the highest taxed countries in the world than being searched by customs and treated like a criminal every time you come home, while you're gladly welcomed by geniunely friendly customs people on the American side.
Only time I've ever had trouble with US customs was the week after that guy tried to take the ferry to Seattle with the trunkload of explosives. The guy passed a cursory mirror under the truck, then stopped with a surprised look on his face, staring into the mirror: "Shit, boy, is that a nine and quarter axle?" He waved me through.
could this be living proof of the evolutionary path that aquatic creatures took to make it to land many millions (billions) of years ago? looks like it to me:-) I love hearing about this.
The fish is a delicacy in Asian cooking; I've had them.
I get *hell* from customs for sneaking Mighty Taco across the border, and yet these nasty things are available in any large Asian community?
Something's not right there. How is it that these were allowed to be imported in the first place?
It's a sign of either an intellectual failure or starvation (I'll leave the intellectual failure with customs and starvation with my Chinese friends) that those things would be considered a delicacy, anyway.
However, given a choose of evils, I would prefer these DoS attacks rather then legislation. On the other hand, however, couldn't these DoS attacks be considered illegal, or hacking, or terrorist acts by already too broad US legislation???
I hadn't thought of that, but I suppose injecting stuff like that into the network is a form of denial of service attack.
It's interesting, also, that a company which has to know that it will incur the electronic wrath of computer geeks everywhere, is foolish to run such an insecure webserver:
www.overpeer.com appears to run IIS on Windows 2000. (I assume www.overpeer.com is theirs, but whois was inconclusive and there's a directory listing denied message up at their document root. Heh.)
Note that sk.com and therefore Overpeer both appear to operate out of third-world countries (Korea, China, whatever) and therefore are essentially immune to US-based prosecution for their network attacks, and, I'd imagine, immune to US protection from network attacks.
The world is divided into two categories. Those who "get it" and those who do not. Those who "get it" understand that everything has a pattern and all they have to do is play with the gadget and read the manual/documentation and understanding will come. Those who do not get it are akin to those who call us over to set the time on their VCR without even checking to see if they could do it themselves. Those who ask us 200 times how to copy/paste and cannot remember simply because their mindset is that computers are scary complex things that do not make sense. These people are not going to be helped by simplification. These people are not going to be helped by hand-holding.
These people are gonna be helped by Darwin!
They'll starve to death when there are no more bank tellers and they can't pay for their food because they can't figure out how to withdraw money!
They'll freeze when the gas company cuts off their power for not paying their bill online!
They'll run their cars into bridge columns because they're distracted trying to figure out how to turn off a rental car's air conditioning!
They won't be able to find a mate because they'll never leave the house for fear of missing a TV show that they can't videotape because the VCR is so horribly complicated!
It's a great thing, this quest. Someone needs to do it, and it's likely that Russia is the best candidate because they'll need financial help...
Well, there's the problem. I'm all for space exploration, because there are many intellectual, scientific and national pride benefits to this pursuit.
But this seems to me to be the nation-scale equivalent of buying a new E-Class on your credit card while you're still trying to get caught up with the electric bill (and gas bill, and rent, and food, and...).
I think Russians could be better served by spending this money on infrastructure to attract businesses and build employment for their people. Space exploration should probably be the realm of rich nations only. Once they've got their fiscal house in order, I'd love to see the Russians come out and play again.
perhaps we can hitch a ride. This could become the first world-uniting space mission. Other countries could become involved, perhaps the world will come closer to the realization that we're all neighbors.
I thought that's what the International Space Station was for?
Unless, of course, Microsoft 'donates' the system software. In that case...well, there's still China.
I can see the AP wire story now: "In other news, officials at Microsoft say that a kind of error known technically as a 'buffer overrun' was responsible for last year's launch of the manned mission to Mars becoming a manned mission to the sun. Mr. Gates himself blamed the problem on catering to obsolete open standards."
Functionally, it works as a lubricant fairly nicely. Also as a cleaner. It also kills ants, and, with a lighter held in front of it, is a fun party tool. It may not be the best at any of these, but it functions pretty well as a general purpose tool - I keep a small can in my toolbox, and usually have a large one around. For parties.
I agree with everything you've said except for *one* thing.
Don't use WD-40 as a lubricant. Use it as a penetrating oil, to free stuck and seized moving parts. But once they're unstuck, clean them thoroughly with carb cleaner or something similar, and then use a proper oil or grease to lubricate them.
Speaking from experience, WD-40 turns sticky with time. Small machines (ie. computer fans) will seize.
If you *have* to lubricate a disassembled computer fan, use ONE drop of the lightest machine oil you can find - the smallest SAE viscosity number.
However, dust in the air passing through the fan will magically be attracted to the bearings and trapped in the oil, where it will eventually seize the fan again.
Good computer fans have graphite-impregnated sleeve bearings. When the bearing ceases to be self-lubricating, the bearing is worn out and it's time to replace the fan.
Cheap computer fans (and those sold to people who don't know any better) use tiny little ball bearing assemblies. With outside bearing diameters of less than 1/8" in some cases, the balls are absolutely tiny, especially relative to any dust which might become trapped in them. The "ball bearing" fans are especially prone to failure, and should also be avoided, unless you're buying expensive ball-bearing fans for use in your clean room.
Replace the fans. If you have to take them apart to clean/lube them, they're finished, and will fail again soon.
Then I will beat them in the face with a camshaft.
causing the very chaos they seek. The looting and destruction will then ruin any message the real protesters were trying to communicate.
I'm not interested in any messages conveyed by people who have bachelors of arts and beads in their hair. Nor will I tolerate them creating traffic jams which cause me to be late for work, *or* in neo-communist bullshit politics being pedaled to a very gullible government. These are not useful or contributing members of society.
If they were any less useful, they'd be producers for the CBC or members of the Asper family.
Your sign would amount to yelling fire in a crowded theater.
Which only goes to prove my contention and assertion that they're savages and gives me a fool-proof way of letting them demonstrate it to the world.
Heaven forbid one might be *wise* as to learn a subject regarding the social fabric of women in culture, the hundreds of years of books and plays produced by the English language, and the study of how ancient peoples lived.
Oh, I'm sure its wonderfully useful and relevent education. How great it is to study and be adequately equipped for your future career as Circuit City salesman or a Gap merchandiser or a McCounter Girl.
Forgive me for being fed up with those who feel that people with BA's are in dire need of jobs.
Well, the ones *I* know all seem to be.
The dot-com boom didn't seem to call for anthropology majors.
I dont see any point for the violent protestors to be out in ottawa during this.
Neither do I.
After all, it's not *my fault* that they wasted four years and $xx,000 pursuing Bachelor of Arts degrees in such top-flight useful fields as Women's Studies, English Literature and Anthropology. Of course they can't get good jobs! Of course they feel left behind by civilization! They couldn't take science degrees. How can they be expected to integrate by parts when they can't even remember to shower every day?
I mean, if I were them, I'd be pissed off too, but only at myself.
I think I'll go protest the protest, carrying a big sign: "Get a job, you unwashed hippy losers."
I would waste you so fast, it would be almost a waste of my time. Not only could I beat you in the 1/4 mile, I could beat you in the turns, and in endurance. Just because you have a bigger engine, doesnt mean you are better in any way.
Your MacPherson struts make up for my handicap of a longer wheelbase and greater mass. You probably wouldn't outhandle and outsteer me as well as you think you would. Note that I'll take the bale of hay or the crushed Honda Accord out of the back before the event.
Four wheel disk brakes might be your advantage. Even if they're tiny and cute and motorcycle-sized. You might want to check www.rockauto.com, look up my truck, and see what my brakes are like. My rear drums are on the 9.25" axle. You should be able to look up my drum diameter and width from that. Unloaded, with modern tires, the truck stops quickly. I've driven a variety of performance cars (and I don't define a Honda Civic with tinted windows as a performance car). It doesn't stop as quickly as those, but it's *quite* respectable.
Rear-wheel-drive is my advantage. Ask yourself why legitimate performance cars of any era are universally rear-wheel-drive.
Displacement doesn't matter? Given that power is created by burning gasoline in air, and that the amount of gasoline you can burn stoichiometically is limited by how much air you can get into the motor, I'd think that increasing the displacement would be one of the most effective ways of increasing the power of an internal combustion engine. Maybe the laws of physics and chemistry apply differently wherever you are.
So, while you are still driving your pentacle of inefficiency, I will be near the finish line, WINNING!
Uh-huh.
Stoplight to stoplight confrontations are essentially what? Drag racing.
What do they drive on TNN's NHRA coverage? 4-cylinder front-wheel-drive smegmamobiles or large-displacement rear-wheel-drive long-wheelbase railcars? Hmmm... More like my truck than your car, isn't it?
The astute will even watch NHRA Today looking for those large V8s where the spark plug leads go through the valve covers. That's the legendary Chrysler Hemi. The Hemi and my 440 are rather close relatives, sharing most of the same geometries and many parts.
Your 2.3L motor probably shares most of its geometry with a minivan.
Of course it is. Elements look too small to be a 12AX7 or a 12AU7. I think it's a 12AT7.
Could actually be a twin tetrode, pentode or any number of amplifying tubes, but the 9-pin miniature base (instead of a compactron) was a dead giveaway.
The questions were entirely for the benefit of the child with the poor spelling and grammar.
The filament voltage of a 50B5 is very easy, since you didn't jump at that one. American tubes conform to a standard numbering system and the 50B5/50C5 (which did I choose again?) were some of the most common tubes, produced in the millions for "All American Five" (5-tube, series-filament, AC/DC-power, inexpensive and reliable) table radios. It's not a difficult, obscure or exceptional tube; in fact, probably one of the easiest. If you knew the twin triode, you already know the answer.
Come on. Analog VU meters and the tube exposed, combined with what looks to be a gold finish. Almost as ugly as a Marantz set.
Hey! At least there's solid engineering in the Marantz. This is just something shiny for the home-boyz who think a CD hanging from the rear-view mirror is a status symbol (or helps them avoid laser speed guns, something else I heard and gave me a much-needed laugh).
VU meters... what, the thing is a recorder, too? No? Then what do you need VU meters for?
Not that I think modern car stereos look good... give me those they made about 5-10 years ago: decent button layout, single color displays, and no frigging light-shows. *sighs*
Got two that I love. There's a Clarion double-shaft in my 1976 Dodge Ram. The thing is gorgeous - simple button layout, good digital tuner picks up WRVA in Richmond VA all the way from Toronto, Canada, good cassette deck, line inputs for when I finally get around to stuffing a low-end machine behind the seat as an MP3 player. And it drives the 6x9s in my doors hard enough that when I play Black Sabbath, all the little children in the Hondas get scared. (Generally not wise to eff around with a Black Sabbath fan who drives a 25-year-old pickup truck.)
(Pre dot-com meltdown fond memories: driving that truck through the financial district after work on a nice summer's day, stuck in a traffic jam, windows rolled down, stereo playing Paranoid loudly, my hand resting on the driver's side mirror, wind blowing up the sleeve into my Armani suit jacket. The non-sequitur was enough that guys in Mercedes, Porsches, Acuras, etc. did a double-take.:) )
The other one that I love is a 12-year-old Alpine pull-out CD player and matching cassette deck. I got them both out of cars I bought for parts and then junked along the way. I keep both under the driver's seat in my winter beater and pop in the one for the media I want to listen to. Nice tuners, well laid out controls, no blinkenlights for das dummkopfen.
But nothing sounds better than a tube system warming up much like a 2.3T revving up to 7Krpm yes they both make me weak in the knees
Feh. 2.3L. Talk to me when you can afford to gas up a real man's car.
440 cubic inches. Conventionally-aspirated Detroit iron. 7.2L of V8 power, and it propels my 4,000lb 1976 Dodge Ram down the 1/4 mile in 13.8 seconds. 12.8 seconds when I take the crushed Honda Accord out of the back.
2.3L. Sheesh. If I stomp on my gas pedal, I'll suck the block right out of your little front-wheel-drive wimpmobile and get it stuck in my air filter.
Well personally I think tubes do belong in the car radio. They have a much more richer and reboust sound to me and yes i can tell the difference
Sure you can. Absolutely. What's the cause of the richer and more robust sound?
Hey, as a self-proclaimed vacuum tube expert ready to tell me all about why tubes are so well suited to a vibration-prone environment, why don't you solve a lifelong mystery for me and tell me what the filament voltage of a 50C5 is?
Or regale the readers of Slashdot with a gripping explanation of how there's *one* tube in the car radio, but presumably it carries audio for left and right (two distinct) channels.
but the point must be taken lightly because like you said a car is a hunk of steal
Steal: take someone's property without their permission.
Steel: alloy of iron (ferrum) and carbon.
that just drowns any good sound system this coming from a audio and car freak
Yup. One of the pillars of a good sound system - and chief benefits of a tube preamplifier - is a low noise floor. That's kinda hard to achieve with tire noise, suspension noise, transmission noise, differential noise, wind noise and exhaust noise all conspiring to make your car a noisy place. At least 40dB in the quietest luxury car. In order to achieve signal to noise ratio of 100 (the S/N of a $200 CD player) inside your car, your stereo system would have to be somewhat louder than a Saturn V rocket at take-off. Do the math... if you can.
What is going to stop him from putting a "nuclear powered" sticker on his car in the first place? I mean, if the beaterz.com website taught us anything, it is stickers with cool names can compensate for lack of actual performance any day.
Oh my God, thank you, that site absolutely kicks ass.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Fill a can with a little bit of water and set it over a flame until the water begins to boil. At this point most of the air has left the can and been replaced with water vapor. The can will not implode yet,
Of course! Chemical engineers build their own can crushers.
Do any of the other disciplines do this, that we can think of? Aerospace? Civil? Structural? Software?
It doesn't take very long to realize you're getting slashdotted if you're paying attention.
Yeah. First, you notice that kmail seems to be taking longer transferring mail than usual.
Then, you click on a webpage link, and your usually-quick DSL feels like dialup again.
The hard drive in your webserver is scratching so much, it's hard to think; it sounds like you're compiling a kernel and making a divx at the same time, but it's pages being served and visits being logged.
You fire up top and are greeted by a whole screen of httpd daemons and CGI.
Congrats, you're being Slashdotted.
It's actually kind of fun.
Wow. Such level headedness in
Thanks! I hated writing it, but I just started banging out my frustrations on the keyboard. When I saw that it was going to be a masterpiece, I made the decision to forward it to Slashdot.
These problems are utterly trivial for the most part - couple of lines of code here, a new routine in the install script there - and I'd happily roll up the sleeves and dig out the source if I were beyond the "Hello, World" programming level.
Note that I'm not condemning problems without being willing to help; if I were capable of writing code, I would.
If we cant get the FIRST impression good to the future tech & management teams, then we're not going to have the door opened when we come knocking to sell linux. They'll be busy and they'll remember.Absolutely.
My first experience with Linux was Red Hat 6.0. I figured that the most popular distro would be easiest for a newbie. On the 'Net, people were telling me that an x.0 release of Linux would be bad by Linux standards, but not as bad and buggy as, for example, the first release of Windows 95. Well, I had to support the first release of Windows 95; I know it well. It was leaps and bounds better in every user experience than Red Hat 6.0.
Had I been less determined, I would have quit. I almost did. The RH6.0 CD got thrown across the room in frustration, but I dug it out a couple of weeks later and tried again. It was probably my single worst computing experience; worse than Amiga WorkBench 1.0, Mac 1.0, Windows 95A. Hell, worse than learning the hard way, when you're 13 years old, why you need a null modem cable to connect your TeleType to your TI-99/4A.
Playing media shouldnt be so hard. I love codeweavers crutch and I love openoffice, but where is the spellcheck? Heck we had excellent spellchecks in the 80's!Modern spellcheckers are absolutely essential. Period. If we're ever gonna get Linux on the desktop, that *has* to be addressed *quickly*. (Are you reading this, Mozilla development team? Kmail gang?)
If we don't have that, we don't have any credibility. Improving installer scripts can wait, most end users don't do that. But most end users do write e-mail and word processor documents; this cannot wait.
Playing media? yea xine is good, but to techie. I cant get my girlfriend to figure it out let alone my mother. If she (a doctor) cant figure it out then *something* is to much for the common person. You know? Why ADD features when you cant get MORE people to use it?I applaud the Xine team for adding a playlist feature to Xine, it's a great innovation. Sometimes, you have an application where you just want neat videos playing on your monitor.
But how much work would it have taken to pop-up a Save Playlist As... window to allow you to save playlists for work (ie. endless repeating commercials for FIDS displays at airports, monday.playlist, tuesday.playlist, wednesday.playlist; arrivals.playlist, departures.playlist, etc.) Winamp has got it.
And while you're at it, click a box to make it repeat endlessly.
Speaking of Winamp, when I save an XMMS playlist and set up KDE to launch XMMS when I click on the playlist, XMMS doesn't play it. XMMS should see that it's being launched, check the file passed to it. If it's an audio file, load it and play it. If it's a playlist, load it as a playlist and play it. I suspect XMMS attempts to load the playlist like an audio file, finds it to be an invalid file format, and ignores it. Sure, it's pretty, but like Dan Aykroyd in the famous Super Bass-o-Matic 76 bit, it's Not Ready For Prime Time.
Get it easy to use THEN add garbage to it...*Must* also have comparable features in all apps, and hopefully also some new ones. The features Windows users expect are required for credibility, the new features give "Gee-Whiz, $BLAH for Windows doesn't do that, that's cool!" and get the foot in the door.
sure it worked for M$, but guess what? They have the easy part already now... what do we have? Who cares --- no one wants to "waste" the time to figure it out...Or has the time. Or wants to spend the time.
I like computers (obviously). But, even so, I *hate* sitting down in front of an unfamiliar operating system and trying to figure out how to get it to do what I need to do.
It must be so much worse for people who either don't like computers or are unfamiliar with the most fundamental basics.
Windows users are gonna have a tough enough time adapting as it is ("You're telling me there's no C: drive. What do you take me for, an idiot?") without giving them additional complexities and frustrations.
my two (additional) cents...And good ones, too. I'm so glad to find like-minded people after a rant like that.
I love Linux and Unix. I love the Unix ideal of everything as a file, the security model and stability that can only come from miniaturizing a multiuser mainframe operating system to fit on my desktop. I love the development model and the available source code. And these features can only make it more appealing for enterprise desktop deployment, if we can get through the bull. I want to see Linux on the desktop. It's leaps and bounds above where it was a mere year ago. But we're not ready for mass-deployment yet.
End users will remember a poor first experience with Linux for years and years and years... and we'll only drive them right back to Microsoft.
Microsoft did not invent the fucking scroll mouse! I have an old mouse systems scroll mouse that I got at a computer fair selling old hardware a year before microsoft released their first scroll mouse. This is how ancient it was: it plugged into the serial port! It also could scroll every scroll bar without the applications support, including the horizontal ones.
That's really cool! I'm sorry; I'd read somewhere that it was one of the very few actual M$ innovations. I'd love to know the history even before that, if anyone knows it. (Google searches for "scroll wheel history", as you can imagine, primarily explain that the scroll wheel works on the brower history; it's like looking for information on a Sound power amplifier - yes, Sound is the brand name.)
I apologize for giving M$ credit where none is due.
20kA through 12 gauge wire without it instantly vapourizing? I don't think so...
Picoseconds. Believe it, I've seen magnetic can crushers fire. (I've also been allowed to play at length with a tesla coil excited by a junked 50kW AM radio transmitter, but that's another story.)
Calculate how many amps are flowing through that photoflash in the disposable camera in your hand when you press the button. The wiring is usually like 26 gauge, and it doesn't melt in that time.
isn't it cheaper to just buy caps insted of disposible cams
This place has a great supply of large high-voltage oil-filled capacitors salvaged from all sorts of stuff.
High voltage capacitors can be tough to get - Radio Shack doesn't stock many of them, and sometimes you have to buy them in bulk, which puts them out of range of most experimenters.
Microwave ovens are a great source of parts if you want to play with stuff like this, but it's worth noting that there's stuff inside microwave ovens which can kill you if you look at it the wrong way.
A full-wave rectifier made of microwave oven diodes, or a voltage doubler made with microwave oven diodes and capacitors, can be connected to an old microwave oven transformer for all sorts of fun, but can provide more voltage and current (ie. more power) than an electric chair. Be careful.
This sort of setup is great for charging up those 1uF 10kV oil-filled plastic capacitors (or doorknob capacitors) you might be able to scrounge up by looking in the right places. Oil filled caps are great because they tend to be self-healing. Blow a hole in the oil dielectric, and more just flows into place to fill it.
They're great for spot-welding.
Please don't do this if you don't known what you're doing, and I can't take responsibility for telling the wrong people stuff they can figure out from reading an electronics textbook.
Mechanical Engineers build can crushers with moving parts.
Electrical Engineers build can crushers with no moving parts.
However, whatever the discipline, no mad science lab is complete without a Furby Testing Program.
Here's the e-mail I sent to dude:
Hi,
Saw the mention on Slashdot.
While I agree and feel you're 100% right, I'm migrating from Windows 2000 to Linux.
The issues you raised are completely valid, but not being the average home user, they don't bother me that much, especially in the face of the headway Microsoft is making in its (assumed) goal of Internet domination.
I can't say that I blame you:
However, "We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty." - Edward R. Murrow.
Despite all these frustrations with Linux, I can't condone your actions. We're 99.98% to the finish line, and the threat of losing is too great. If the Internet is Microsoft's, we're all locked in to one supplier, one philosophy, one vision. One *architecture*. We're too vulnerable, anyone and everyone.
The next Klez, Code Red, or licensing agreement, 5 months or 5 years from now, could shut the Internet down.
AM I the only one baffled by this pointless story? What the hell does a red stapler have to do with anything?
To publicize their new product!
Bring new life to your aging stapler with Stapler 2002 Upgrade Edition! Adds new and vibrant features which enhance productivity!
Personal Edition: Package includes one wire wheel for use with your power drill and a can of red Tremclad.
Enterprise Edition*: Package includes glass bead for your sandblaster and a bottle of red DuPont Centari for your paint gun.
* Installation downtime may be reduced through the purchase of a Stapler Backup Kit, part #6661313, projected availability 2Q2003, which includes one black Swingline stapler preloaded with 100 standard office staples. Availability subject to change without notice. We reserve the right to change the color of the paint supplied.
> I get *hell* from customs for sneaking Mighty Taco [mightytaco.com] across the border
Leave the baggie of pot out and they'll wave you right through.
I wish.
Young guy, dressed either in a shirt and tie or in jeans, white T-shirt and leather jacket, driving a 1976 Dodge Ram, often with big chunks of a cut-up Toyota in the back, going through customs:
Grrrr.... Nothing makes you feel better about living in one of the highest taxed countries in the world than being searched by customs and treated like a criminal every time you come home, while you're gladly welcomed by geniunely friendly customs people on the American side.
Only time I've ever had trouble with US customs was the week after that guy tried to take the ferry to Seattle with the trunkload of explosives. The guy passed a cursory mirror under the truck, then stopped with a surprised look on his face, staring into the mirror: "Shit, boy, is that a nine and quarter axle?" He waved me through.
Sport Utility Test Vehicle pulled an ultralight trailer with a teeny boat on it.
[grin]
Did you see how tiny these silly things are?
If I had one of these things kicking around the garage, I'd probably accidentally end up using it as a tire chock for my 1976 Dodge Ram.
could this be living proof of the evolutionary path that aquatic creatures took to make it to land many millions (billions) of years ago? looks like it to me
The fish is a delicacy in Asian cooking; I've had them.
I get *hell* from customs for sneaking Mighty Taco across the border, and yet these nasty things are available in any large Asian community?
Something's not right there. How is it that these were allowed to be imported in the first place?
It's a sign of either an intellectual failure or starvation (I'll leave the intellectual failure with customs and starvation with my Chinese friends) that those things would be considered a delicacy, anyway.
However, given a choose of evils, I would prefer these DoS attacks rather then legislation. On the other hand, however, couldn't these DoS attacks be considered illegal, or hacking, or terrorist acts by already too broad US legislation???
I hadn't thought of that, but I suppose injecting stuff like that into the network is a form of denial of service attack.
It's interesting, also, that a company which has to know that it will incur the electronic wrath of computer geeks everywhere, is foolish to run such an insecure webserver:
www.sk.com appears to run IIS on Windows NT.
www.overpeer.com appears to run IIS on Windows 2000. (I assume www.overpeer.com is theirs, but whois was inconclusive and there's a directory listing denied message up at their document root. Heh.)
Note that sk.com and therefore Overpeer both appear to operate out of third-world countries (Korea, China, whatever) and therefore are essentially immune to US-based prosecution for their network attacks, and, I'd imagine, immune to US protection from network attacks.
They're idiots and won't last very long.
The world is divided into two categories. Those who "get it" and those who do not. Those who "get it" understand that everything has a pattern and all they have to do is play with the gadget and read the manual/documentation and understanding will come. Those who do not get it are akin to those who call us over to set the time on their VCR without even checking to see if they could do it themselves. Those who ask us 200 times how to copy/paste and cannot remember simply because their mindset is that computers are scary complex things that do not make sense.
These people are not going to be helped by simplification. These people are not going to be helped by hand-holding.
These people are gonna be helped by Darwin!
They'll starve to death when there are no more bank tellers and they can't pay for their food because they can't figure out how to withdraw money!
They'll freeze when the gas company cuts off their power for not paying their bill online!
They'll run their cars into bridge columns because they're distracted trying to figure out how to turn off a rental car's air conditioning!
They won't be able to find a mate because they'll never leave the house for fear of missing a TV show that they can't videotape because the VCR is so horribly complicated!
It's a great thing, this quest. Someone needs to do it, and it's likely that Russia is the best candidate because they'll need financial help...
Well, there's the problem. I'm all for space exploration, because there are many intellectual, scientific and national pride benefits to this pursuit.
But this seems to me to be the nation-scale equivalent of buying a new E-Class on your credit card while you're still trying to get caught up with the electric bill (and gas bill, and rent, and food, and...).
I think Russians could be better served by spending this money on infrastructure to attract businesses and build employment for their people. Space exploration should probably be the realm of rich nations only. Once they've got their fiscal house in order, I'd love to see the Russians come out and play again.
perhaps we can hitch a ride. This could become the first world-uniting space mission. Other countries could become involved, perhaps the world will come closer to the realization that we're all neighbors.I thought that's what the International Space Station was for?
Unless, of course, Microsoft 'donates' the system software. In that case...well, there's still China.I can see the AP wire story now: "In other news, officials at Microsoft say that a kind of error known technically as a 'buffer overrun' was responsible for last year's launch of the manned mission to Mars becoming a manned mission to the sun. Mr. Gates himself blamed the problem on catering to obsolete open standards."
Functionally, it works as a lubricant fairly nicely. Also as a cleaner. It also kills ants, and, with a lighter held in front of it, is a fun party tool. It may not be the best at any of these, but it functions pretty well as a general purpose tool - I keep a small can in my toolbox, and usually have a large one around. For parties.
I agree with everything you've said except for *one* thing.
Don't use WD-40 as a lubricant. Use it as a penetrating oil, to free stuck and seized moving parts. But once they're unstuck, clean them thoroughly with carb cleaner or something similar, and then use a proper oil or grease to lubricate them.
Speaking from experience, WD-40 turns sticky with time. Small machines (ie. computer fans) will seize.
If you *have* to lubricate a disassembled computer fan, use ONE drop of the lightest machine oil you can find - the smallest SAE viscosity number.
However, dust in the air passing through the fan will magically be attracted to the bearings and trapped in the oil, where it will eventually seize the fan again.
Good computer fans have graphite-impregnated sleeve bearings. When the bearing ceases to be self-lubricating, the bearing is worn out and it's time to replace the fan.
Cheap computer fans (and those sold to people who don't know any better) use tiny little ball bearing assemblies. With outside bearing diameters of less than 1/8" in some cases, the balls are absolutely tiny, especially relative to any dust which might become trapped in them. The "ball bearing" fans are especially prone to failure, and should also be avoided, unless you're buying expensive ball-bearing fans for use in your clean room.
Replace the fans. If you have to take them apart to clean/lube them, they're finished, and will fail again soon.
www.papstplc.com
and, manufacturer of the legendary Muffin Fan used everywhere from Cray computers to the Space Shuttle,
www.comairrotron.com
I don't believe in repairing cooling fans, and I don't believe in the cheap crap which washes ashore from Taiwan and infiltrates our computer cases.
Buy good fans. They'll outlast your computers, and you'll never need to do more than vacuum them.
Carrying such a sign will get them to attack you,
Then I will beat them in the face with a camshaft.
causing the very chaos they seek. The looting and destruction will then ruin any message the real protesters were trying to communicate.I'm not interested in any messages conveyed by people who have bachelors of arts and beads in their hair. Nor will I tolerate them creating traffic jams which cause me to be late for work, *or* in neo-communist bullshit politics being pedaled to a very gullible government. These are not useful or contributing members of society.
If they were any less useful, they'd be producers for the CBC or members of the Asper family.
Your sign would amount to yelling fire in a crowded theater.Which only goes to prove my contention and assertion that they're savages and gives me a fool-proof way of letting them demonstrate it to the world.
Now I'm going out. I'm pissed off. I need a beer.
Sure History and Human Studies may be entertaining and even worthwhile to learn about in, but getting an actual degree in them? Yeesh.
Heheh. For sure. Like, maybe after I'm retired and I've gotten bored of watching Wheel of Fortune.
Heaven forbid one might be *wise* as to learn a subject regarding the social fabric of women in culture, the hundreds of years of books and plays produced by the English language, and the study of how ancient peoples lived.
Oh, I'm sure its wonderfully useful and relevent education. How great it is to study and be adequately equipped for your future career as Circuit City salesman or a Gap merchandiser or a McCounter Girl.
Forgive me for being fed up with those who feel that people with BA's are in dire need of jobs.Well, the ones *I* know all seem to be.
The dot-com boom didn't seem to call for anthropology majors.
I dont see any point for the violent protestors to be out in ottawa during this.
Neither do I.
After all, it's not *my fault* that they wasted four years and $xx,000 pursuing Bachelor of Arts degrees in such top-flight useful fields as Women's Studies, English Literature and Anthropology. Of course they can't get good jobs! Of course they feel left behind by civilization! They couldn't take science degrees. How can they be expected to integrate by parts when they can't even remember to shower every day?
I mean, if I were them, I'd be pissed off too, but only at myself.
I think I'll go protest the protest, carrying a big sign: "Get a job, you unwashed hippy losers."
I would waste you so fast, it would be almost a waste of my time. Not only could I beat you in the 1/4 mile, I could beat you in the turns, and in endurance. Just because you have a bigger engine, doesnt mean you are better in any way.
Your MacPherson struts make up for my handicap of a longer wheelbase and greater mass. You probably wouldn't outhandle and outsteer me as well as you think you would. Note that I'll take the bale of hay or the crushed Honda Accord out of the back before the event.
Four wheel disk brakes might be your advantage. Even if they're tiny and cute and motorcycle-sized. You might want to check www.rockauto.com, look up my truck, and see what my brakes are like. My rear drums are on the 9.25" axle. You should be able to look up my drum diameter and width from that. Unloaded, with modern tires, the truck stops quickly. I've driven a variety of performance cars (and I don't define a Honda Civic with tinted windows as a performance car). It doesn't stop as quickly as those, but it's *quite* respectable.
Rear-wheel-drive is my advantage. Ask yourself why legitimate performance cars of any era are universally rear-wheel-drive.
Displacement doesn't matter? Given that power is created by burning gasoline in air, and that the amount of gasoline you can burn stoichiometically is limited by how much air you can get into the motor, I'd think that increasing the displacement would be one of the most effective ways of increasing the power of an internal combustion engine. Maybe the laws of physics and chemistry apply differently wherever you are.
So, while you are still driving your pentacle of inefficiency, I will be near the finish line, WINNING!Uh-huh.
Stoplight to stoplight confrontations are essentially what? Drag racing.
What do they drive on TNN's NHRA coverage? 4-cylinder front-wheel-drive smegmamobiles or large-displacement rear-wheel-drive long-wheelbase railcars? Hmmm... More like my truck than your car, isn't it?
The astute will even watch NHRA Today looking for those large V8s where the spark plug leads go through the valve covers. That's the legendary Chrysler Hemi. The Hemi and my 440 are rather close relatives, sharing most of the same geometries and many parts.
Your 2.3L motor probably shares most of its geometry with a minivan.
The tube is a twin triode.
Of course it is. Elements look too small to be a 12AX7 or a 12AU7. I think it's a 12AT7.
Could actually be a twin tetrode, pentode or any number of amplifying tubes, but the 9-pin miniature base (instead of a compactron) was a dead giveaway.
The questions were entirely for the benefit of the child with the poor spelling and grammar.
The filament voltage of a 50B5 is very easy, since you didn't jump at that one. American tubes conform to a standard numbering system and the 50B5/50C5 (which did I choose again?) were some of the most common tubes, produced in the millions for "All American Five" (5-tube, series-filament, AC/DC-power, inexpensive and reliable) table radios. It's not a difficult, obscure or exceptional tube; in fact, probably one of the easiest. If you knew the twin triode, you already know the answer.
Come on. Analog VU meters and the tube exposed, combined with what looks to be a gold finish. Almost as ugly as a Marantz set.
Hey! At least there's solid engineering in the Marantz. This is just something shiny for the home-boyz who think a CD hanging from the rear-view mirror is a status symbol (or helps them avoid laser speed guns, something else I heard and gave me a much-needed laugh).
VU meters... what, the thing is a recorder, too? No? Then what do you need VU meters for?
Not that I think modern car stereos look good... give me those they made about 5-10 years ago: decent button layout, single color displays, and no frigging light-shows. *sighs*Got two that I love. There's a Clarion double-shaft in my 1976 Dodge Ram. The thing is gorgeous - simple button layout, good digital tuner picks up WRVA in Richmond VA all the way from Toronto, Canada, good cassette deck, line inputs for when I finally get around to stuffing a low-end machine behind the seat as an MP3 player. And it drives the 6x9s in my doors hard enough that when I play Black Sabbath, all the little children in the Hondas get scared. (Generally not wise to eff around with a Black Sabbath fan who drives a 25-year-old pickup truck.)
(Pre dot-com meltdown fond memories: driving that truck through the financial district after work on a nice summer's day, stuck in a traffic jam, windows rolled down, stereo playing Paranoid loudly, my hand resting on the driver's side mirror, wind blowing up the sleeve into my Armani suit jacket. The non-sequitur was enough that guys in Mercedes, Porsches, Acuras, etc. did a double-take. :) )
The other one that I love is a 12-year-old Alpine pull-out CD player and matching cassette deck. I got them both out of cars I bought for parts and then junked along the way. I keep both under the driver's seat in my winter beater and pop in the one for the media I want to listen to. Nice tuners, well laid out controls, no blinkenlights for das dummkopfen.
But nothing sounds better than a tube system warming up much like a 2.3T revving up to 7Krpm yes they both make me weak in the knees
Feh. 2.3L. Talk to me when you can afford to gas up a real man's car.
440 cubic inches. Conventionally-aspirated Detroit iron. 7.2L of V8 power, and it propels my 4,000lb 1976 Dodge Ram down the 1/4 mile in 13.8 seconds. 12.8 seconds when I take the crushed Honda Accord out of the back.
2.3L. Sheesh. If I stomp on my gas pedal, I'll suck the block right out of your little front-wheel-drive wimpmobile and get it stuck in my air filter.
Well personally I think tubes do belong in the car radio. They have a much more richer and reboust sound to me and yes i can tell the differenceSure you can. Absolutely. What's the cause of the richer and more robust sound?
Hey, as a self-proclaimed vacuum tube expert ready to tell me all about why tubes are so well suited to a vibration-prone environment, why don't you solve a lifelong mystery for me and tell me what the filament voltage of a 50C5 is?
Or regale the readers of Slashdot with a gripping explanation of how there's *one* tube in the car radio, but presumably it carries audio for left and right (two distinct) channels.
but the point must be taken lightly because like you said a car is a hunk of steal- Steal: take someone's property without their permission.
- Steel: alloy of iron (ferrum) and carbon.
that just drowns any good sound system this coming from a audio and car freakYup. One of the pillars of a good sound system - and chief benefits of a tube preamplifier - is a low noise floor. That's kinda hard to achieve with tire noise, suspension noise, transmission noise, differential noise, wind noise and exhaust noise all conspiring to make your car a noisy place. At least 40dB in the quietest luxury car. In order to achieve signal to noise ratio of 100 (the S/N of a $200 CD player) inside your car, your stereo system would have to be somewhat louder than a Saturn V rocket at take-off. Do the math... if you can.
What is going to stop him from putting a "nuclear powered" sticker on his car in the first place? I mean, if the beaterz.com website taught us anything, it is stickers with cool names can compensate for lack of actual performance any day.
Oh my God, thank you, that site absolutely kicks ass. :)