When soldering, I'm far more worried about that nasty flux than any imaginary lead vapors. Lead boils at 1600'C or so... definitely higher than my iron's tip.
No, I'm pretty sure I've got the biggest dick on/. - dare you to prove me wrong;)
But seriously, what I'm saying is portables make a lot of sense for the average user because the baseline specs are quite sufficient for just about any common task. If anything, I'm moaning over the lack of a high-end laptop. I've looked at some fancy Sager notebooks a while back, which were huge, heavy and quite powerful, but there isn't enough movement in that segment.
I still don't see why they couldn't have a massive portable frame with at least quad-core support, 8gb ddr2 and four disks... I've seen tiny blade servers with those specs, dial the speed (and heat) down a bit, slap on a hinged LCD and a power brick. I'm not overly concerned about weight or battery life, I really just want a portable powerhouse that I can take to client meetings and plug in for a demo.
It's like those idiotic teenagers and their 400hp Honda Civics that never actually race professionally... except I actually benefit from my toy whenever I do video processing or launch a few dozen VM's for application testing and network simulation.
Or would you rather I add another dozen PCs to my apartment ? My wife would kill me, then she'd go looking for you!:)
Actually if there were reasonable options available to us, we'd probably pay up. The problem lies in the fact that the big ISPs don't want our business, else they would offer a "hacker" plan with either generous or unlimited caps and greater upload speed, and most importantly no throttling or filtering.
Seriously, offer me a raw pipe to the net with a/29 and I'll gladly pay $100 for the privilege. That's why I'm constantly shopping around for new ISPs that just might have a clue - sadly there are none in my area.
The very valid reason why mail servers don't always return a message when a mail address does not exist, is because this can be used to phish for existing usernames - when you don't get a bounce message, you know you've probably hit a valid username. (because for most systems, login/username = default mail alias) Spammers don't care about bounces, they deliver the message and move on. They don't linger around for a bounce, since that would require a valid return path, thus a trace back to the spammer's mail server.
I return bounces for all errors. If it's coming from a spammy host, there are other solutions far more effective and precise to reduce their volume. For one, Postfix drops the connection if several consecutive errors occur, and greylisting is a marvel against the common pump-and-dump spammers. There are a lot of small things that come together in the modern spam fighting arsenal, few of them require breaking the spec.
I understand the rationale for getting rid of lead in various products due to its toxicity, but is the amount of lead in solder really dangerous ? It seems like it would be such a small quantity, and perhaps more importantly it's sealed away in some plastic or steel enclosure... it's not like I go around licking motherboards all day long, and quite frankly if your kid wants to lick lead solder and you let him, brain damage might be an improvement!
Were the ranchers in the wrong for having firearms ? Hell no, that's business as usual when working with cattle. Is it an alien concept to most city slickers, because we've come to associate firearms with stupid goddamned thugs. You see a weapon in the city, you run (or start shooting first). You see a gun in the country, well there's a good chance it's just a tool like any other.
This divide between city and country is growing wider and deeper as technological advances continue to abstract urban living away from its primal foundations.
The argument these days is that a cheap portable is not much pricier than a cheap desktop, might as well get the portable. I hate to say it, but I have to agree... most people would be perfectly satisfied with a cheap laptop.
Me, I'm the opposite: I have no use for a laptop whatsoever. Not unless they make a dual-processor, 8gb ram Raid-5 laptop with dual NICs and gaming-class graphics. Overclockable too, while we're at it.
Until then, the closest thing I'll have to a laptop is a 40lb ATX cube with an LCD panel velcroed to the side.
If you had been paying attention at all, you'd understand the purpose of these "anti-tech techs" as you call them is explicitly to limit progress so the rich old fucktards can continue milking their obsolete business models until they retire or drop dead.
To many people, progress is a scary, dangerous thing. Money, on the other hand, is a sultry lover that drives their every passion. Us folks on slashdot may prefer cheap plentiful bandwidth over money, but we're a tiny little minority in the grand scheme of things. The average Joe doesn't understand technological evolution, and most certainly does not see where it is all headed... it is far easier for Joe to stay ignorant and pay up.
Harsh sound ? See now that's the one thing I never understood... how can a cable make the sound "harsher" ? I could see a poor (wrong gauge) cable affecting low frequencies, but what I call "harshness" is usually caused by hard-surfaced tweeters (as opposed to silk or paper cones).
The thing one must understand regarding "high end" stereo equipment, is the marketing aspect of it all. Once you pass a certain threshold, say $600 per component (or $3000 for a 5.1 system with receiver/amp), you step into the audiophile reality distortion field. Crossing that line means you've got money to burn, which is why audiophile gear starts out cheap and stretches to infinity dollars.
The reason your buddy's $11k stereo sounded like ass, is because it puts him in the "rich sucker" bracket. The components may have been selected by the sales person or manufacturer to sound a little off, solely to create demand for their $15k system. The term "upgrade" is heard every day in audio shops around the globe, and such upgrades tend to happen in small, granular steps. That's why speaker vendors don't have just one "perfect" set, they have a long list of products carefully plotted from cheap to obscene, and many shops will offer a trade-in program to help you climb that money ladder. It's all designed to part fools with their money while convincing them otherwise.
Anecdote: a while back I had a stereophile chum, but unfortunately he was dumber than dirt so our convos were rather bland, but he spent every last penny of his on stereo equipment, which fascinated me from a psychological perspective. I never actually liked his system, partly because his "listening room" was a small apartment living room...
Anyway, he started out small, spending about $300 on each speaker and $800 on the receiver. A few months later he had replaced his fronts with a more exotic pair, and continued over the following weeks to replace his other speakers until he had a full matching set. A year later, he had replaced his entire kit twice more, having sold his car to afford a $12000 system, always the same brand as his first cheap kit. Well it should come as no surprise that it sounded like ass to me. He still had sharp highs and horrible staging. Even he conceded there were improvements to be made, to come when his finances allowed it.
Over the course of three years, he probably spent close to $25k on audio gear, since he was selling the used gear at half-price or less. I then used my powers of geekiness to convince him to sell his last heap of junk to some naive schmuck, and took him shopping - online, that is. Shipping was a bitch, but all-told I had him spend about $7k on an assortment of drivers, enclosures, crossover components, soundproofing and related materials, and of course a fierce amp and receiver. I brought over my measuring equipment and taught him how to build speakers (to the best of his limited IQ). He was now free to tweak them according to his personal preferences.
He spent the next few months experimenting with different cones, crossover freqs, enclosure stuffing and a few other tricks I had shown him. Less than a year later, he had settled on his preferred setup, built a second kit out of the leftovers that wasn't half bad. I added some final touches, he sold off the extra system for $3k. Most importantly, he was absolutely in love with his home-made hi-fi sound and it only cost him about $4500 + a lot of fun time playing with it.
The lessons he learned can be applied to any speakers, much like I've been doing forever. Sometimes a commercial speaker might sound 95% good, but have a few annoying flaws. With a bit of elbow grease and know-how, those flaws can often be addressed with an afternoon and just a few bucks.
It's also pretty difficult to pull any sort of BS in the professional sector Really ? They're just as gullible as the next guy, for the most part. Many musicians hold an almost religious adherence to brands and product lines. They've been brainwashed by the "Pro costs 7x more" attitude that has hatched all these scam shops. Don't ask a sound engineer to tell you why he prefers Brand-X over Brand-Z, there are only two answers to that question: either he'll tell you that's all he's ever used and all he ever will, or he read a favorable review in "Sound on Sound Magazine", which is like saying he found human life on earth.
The truth is: very few people have the time, money and know-how to objectively compare products and sniff out the best ones. Adoration within the industry is mostly focused on money spent, i.e. the dude with a 25'000$ amp stack will get more oohs and aahs than the other guy with only a 9'000$ amp stack.
That's how you wind up with mixing engineers chopping up their perfectly fine $500 Sennheiser cans, to solder a $1500 headphone cable right onto the speaker leads. They should be shot.
That's actually a feature! It's audiophile-talk for "This shit is so advanced you can't even comprehend its futuristic grammar".
Seriously, cable vendors and cable fetishists need to be buried alive under a truckload of Monster interconnects. If you buy a cable and you can hear a difference with the rest, it's because you've got a bad cable. Audio doesn't go anywhere close to the high frequencies that are affected by line capacitance and the so-called skin-effect. As long as they've got enough bulk to support the current being driven, everything else is virtually identical.
Disclaimer: I'm biased, I'm a hardware nut and a sales person.
I say build (or buy) a nice quiet media PC to stick in your living room. Leave the "home server" as a server, and let a dedicated Myth box do the heavy lifting.
I've seen some crazies build fantastic media centers around those funky AMD 780G boards with the onboard ATI HD2400 and HDMI output. There's an NVidia equivalent as well, if you're religious like me.
If that's your killer app, you'll only end up killing the platform.
I wouldn't play a single-boot game. I haven't done that since the DOS days, and even back then I found it highly annoying. I have this ridiculously overpowered PC for a reason, and I very much enjoy firing up any random game in a few seconds, play however long I want, and quit back to the desktop so I can resume productivity. I often alt-tab out of games to poke at something else, or look up a game guide on the web.
That's because a lot of the people you meet and the stuff you read on the internet is wrong and/or stupid.
The reason a compressor can move 200 watts of heat for less than 200 watts of power, is because it's not battling that heat head-on, it's only moving it away from whatever it is you want to cool. The energy still has to go somewhere.
I have a hybrid water/peltier/vapor cooling system on my PC, it eats maybe 80 watts to dissipate upwards of 300 watts of heat. My CPU sits below ambient, but the exhaust is scalding hot. That's 300 watts of heat shooting out my PC's ass, and into my rather tropical living room. Then my household A/C takes that heat, and shoves it outside. The heat never gets eliminated, it's just dumped into something else's backyard.
XP and 95 are virtually identical to the layperson, because they don't even know what the kernel is or does. You and I know the XP kernel is totally unlike the 95 kernel (if we can call it as such), but everyone else just sees the same applications and UI idioms.
The thing that made Mac OS X such a head-turner is that they took an already decent OS (BSD), tweaked it up a bit, added some great usability features and intuitive interface elements, then slapped on the well-known Finder interface and made it look a bit nicer. It offered significant performance improvements, made the whole system more reliable and easier to use, and the eye candy made people want to show off their rig.
Vista only did the latter: they added eye candy. They worsened everything else, and now they want a ton of money for their shiny turd.
I've always found VoIP rather humorous, since you're taking a digital channel, and shoving voice through it - you know, like the reverse of a dial-up modem.
If you're dealing with sensitive stuff that you don't want eavesdropped, do it in a secure IM session or encrypted email. Talk is overrated!
As child, I could see that the continents of North and South America could plausibly fit up to Africa, yet my science teacher dismissed the idea that they were once joined. As we all now know, they were, in fact, once joined. You must be one mean Tetris champ!
Because sharing something for free is less despicable than charging money for something you do not own. I suspect there's also a bit of elitism/racism involved, as the people who are most often associated with retail piracy are either:
A. sketch pads on the street corner who are too worthless to get a real job
B. asian or middle-eastern immigrants who have little respect for copyright, and a lot of respect for easy money
C. ebay douchebags who should be KOS anyway
Retail piracy has a face and a visible cost. P2P is anonymous and "free", you just click a few thingies and out pops the ISO... no money changed hands, and you didn't enable some greedy little parasite. P2P downloading is virtually harmless (except to the inflated numbers of software peddlers, that is).
Do they not have Chinese malls in the States ? We have them here in Canada, and they're well known for having Hong Kong-style pirate-marts. You walk into a small store that kinda looks like a used record store, only it's full of counterfeit software for $5-10 a pop. They usually have a crapload of movies and music too.
Once in a while they get busted, declare bankruptcy and start anew with a different name and number. I hate to play the racial card, but somehow I think having an unfamiliar foreign name makes it easier for them to get away with it. Change the spelling a bit, or abbreviate it, and I doubt anyone with the government could connect the two - Qin Kwong becomes Jin Cheung, signs his new business license and is back on the money train.
I used to have a customer that bought *TONS* of blank discs at my shop, week after week. Then one day I was in chinatown having some fine-ass dinner when I walked by a "video club" where she worked. In fact, she owned the place, and her business model was to burn a shitload of movies and sell them. At first glance, it looked like all Chinese films, and even the legit Chinese stuff looks cheap and amateurish, so it doesn't draw attention, but in the back row she had all the latest telesyncs and camcorder rips. Now I'm no angel, but I was pretty sharply offended by this practice and banned her from my store. I frankly don't give a crap about piracy, I indirectly profit from it to some degree (else less people would buy my hardware/services), but when piracy IS the business, the software developer in me gets real angry, real quick.
Slashdot Mirror
Bookmarked, that site is so hilarious I almost want to email them to get a "Haha you gullible fool" response. Realhamster anyone ?
When soldering, I'm far more worried about that nasty flux than any imaginary lead vapors. Lead boils at 1600'C or so... definitely higher than my iron's tip.
No, I'm pretty sure I've got the biggest dick on /. - dare you to prove me wrong ;)
But seriously, what I'm saying is portables make a lot of sense for the average user because the baseline specs are quite sufficient for just about any common task. If anything, I'm moaning over the lack of a high-end laptop. I've looked at some fancy Sager notebooks a while back, which were huge, heavy and quite powerful, but there isn't enough movement in that segment.
I still don't see why they couldn't have a massive portable frame with at least quad-core support, 8gb ddr2 and four disks... I've seen tiny blade servers with those specs, dial the speed (and heat) down a bit, slap on a hinged LCD and a power brick. I'm not overly concerned about weight or battery life, I really just want a portable powerhouse that I can take to client meetings and plug in for a demo.
Need ? Who cares about need, it's about fun!
:)
It's like those idiotic teenagers and their 400hp Honda Civics that never actually race professionally... except I actually benefit from my toy whenever I do video processing or launch a few dozen VM's for application testing and network simulation.
Or would you rather I add another dozen PCs to my apartment ? My wife would kill me, then she'd go looking for you!
Actually if there were reasonable options available to us, we'd probably pay up. The problem lies in the fact that the big ISPs don't want our business, else they would offer a "hacker" plan with either generous or unlimited caps and greater upload speed, and most importantly no throttling or filtering.
/29 and I'll gladly pay $100 for the privilege. That's why I'm constantly shopping around for new ISPs that just might have a clue - sadly there are none in my area.
Seriously, offer me a raw pipe to the net with a
I return bounces for all errors. If it's coming from a spammy host, there are other solutions far more effective and precise to reduce their volume. For one, Postfix drops the connection if several consecutive errors occur, and greylisting is a marvel against the common pump-and-dump spammers. There are a lot of small things that come together in the modern spam fighting arsenal, few of them require breaking the spec.
I understand the rationale for getting rid of lead in various products due to its toxicity, but is the amount of lead in solder really dangerous ? It seems like it would be such a small quantity, and perhaps more importantly it's sealed away in some plastic or steel enclosure... it's not like I go around licking motherboards all day long, and quite frankly if your kid wants to lick lead solder and you let him, brain damage might be an improvement!
Were the ranchers in the wrong for having firearms ? Hell no, that's business as usual when working with cattle. Is it an alien concept to most city slickers, because we've come to associate firearms with stupid goddamned thugs. You see a weapon in the city, you run (or start shooting first). You see a gun in the country, well there's a good chance it's just a tool like any other.
This divide between city and country is growing wider and deeper as technological advances continue to abstract urban living away from its primal foundations.
The argument these days is that a cheap portable is not much pricier than a cheap desktop, might as well get the portable. I hate to say it, but I have to agree... most people would be perfectly satisfied with a cheap laptop.
Me, I'm the opposite: I have no use for a laptop whatsoever. Not unless they make a dual-processor, 8gb ram Raid-5 laptop with dual NICs and gaming-class graphics. Overclockable too, while we're at it.
Until then, the closest thing I'll have to a laptop is a 40lb ATX cube with an LCD panel velcroed to the side.
If you had been paying attention at all, you'd understand the purpose of these "anti-tech techs" as you call them is explicitly to limit progress so the rich old fucktards can continue milking their obsolete business models until they retire or drop dead.
To many people, progress is a scary, dangerous thing. Money, on the other hand, is a sultry lover that drives their every passion. Us folks on slashdot may prefer cheap plentiful bandwidth over money, but we're a tiny little minority in the grand scheme of things. The average Joe doesn't understand technological evolution, and most certainly does not see where it is all headed... it is far easier for Joe to stay ignorant and pay up.
Harsh sound ? See now that's the one thing I never understood... how can a cable make the sound "harsher" ? I could see a poor (wrong gauge) cable affecting low frequencies, but what I call "harshness" is usually caused by hard-surfaced tweeters (as opposed to silk or paper cones).
The thing one must understand regarding "high end" stereo equipment, is the marketing aspect of it all. Once you pass a certain threshold, say $600 per component (or $3000 for a 5.1 system with receiver/amp), you step into the audiophile reality distortion field. Crossing that line means you've got money to burn, which is why audiophile gear starts out cheap and stretches to infinity dollars.
The reason your buddy's $11k stereo sounded like ass, is because it puts him in the "rich sucker" bracket. The components may have been selected by the sales person or manufacturer to sound a little off, solely to create demand for their $15k system. The term "upgrade" is heard every day in audio shops around the globe, and such upgrades tend to happen in small, granular steps. That's why speaker vendors don't have just one "perfect" set, they have a long list of products carefully plotted from cheap to obscene, and many shops will offer a trade-in program to help you climb that money ladder. It's all designed to part fools with their money while convincing them otherwise.
Anecdote: a while back I had a stereophile chum, but unfortunately he was dumber than dirt so our convos were rather bland, but he spent every last penny of his on stereo equipment, which fascinated me from a psychological perspective. I never actually liked his system, partly because his "listening room" was a small apartment living room...
Anyway, he started out small, spending about $300 on each speaker and $800 on the receiver. A few months later he had replaced his fronts with a more exotic pair, and continued over the following weeks to replace his other speakers until he had a full matching set. A year later, he had replaced his entire kit twice more, having sold his car to afford a $12000 system, always the same brand as his first cheap kit. Well it should come as no surprise that it sounded like ass to me. He still had sharp highs and horrible staging. Even he conceded there were improvements to be made, to come when his finances allowed it.
Over the course of three years, he probably spent close to $25k on audio gear, since he was selling the used gear at half-price or less. I then used my powers of geekiness to convince him to sell his last heap of junk to some naive schmuck, and took him shopping - online, that is. Shipping was a bitch, but all-told I had him spend about $7k on an assortment of drivers, enclosures, crossover components, soundproofing and related materials, and of course a fierce amp and receiver. I brought over my measuring equipment and taught him how to build speakers (to the best of his limited IQ). He was now free to tweak them according to his personal preferences.
He spent the next few months experimenting with different cones, crossover freqs, enclosure stuffing and a few other tricks I had shown him. Less than a year later, he had settled on his preferred setup, built a second kit out of the leftovers that wasn't half bad. I added some final touches, he sold off the extra system for $3k. Most importantly, he was absolutely in love with his home-made hi-fi sound and it only cost him about $4500 + a lot of fun time playing with it.
The lessons he learned can be applied to any speakers, much like I've been doing forever. Sometimes a commercial speaker might sound 95% good, but have a few annoying flaws. With a bit of elbow grease and know-how, those flaws can often be addressed with an afternoon and just a few bucks.
What a nimbly worded troll! With such twisty dodging of the actual topic, I'm guessing you work in some legal field!
Jack Thompson, is that you ?
The truth is: very few people have the time, money and know-how to objectively compare products and sniff out the best ones. Adoration within the industry is mostly focused on money spent, i.e. the dude with a 25'000$ amp stack will get more oohs and aahs than the other guy with only a 9'000$ amp stack.
That's how you wind up with mixing engineers chopping up their perfectly fine $500 Sennheiser cans, to solder a $1500 headphone cable right onto the speaker leads. They should be shot.
That's actually a feature! It's audiophile-talk for "This shit is so advanced you can't even comprehend its futuristic grammar".
Seriously, cable vendors and cable fetishists need to be buried alive under a truckload of Monster interconnects. If you buy a cable and you can hear a difference with the rest, it's because you've got a bad cable. Audio doesn't go anywhere close to the high frequencies that are affected by line capacitance and the so-called skin-effect. As long as they've got enough bulk to support the current being driven, everything else is virtually identical.
Disclaimer: I'm biased, I'm a hardware nut and a sales person.
I say build (or buy) a nice quiet media PC to stick in your living room. Leave the "home server" as a server, and let a dedicated Myth box do the heavy lifting.
I've seen some crazies build fantastic media centers around those funky AMD 780G boards with the onboard ATI HD2400 and HDMI output. There's an NVidia equivalent as well, if you're religious like me.
If that's your killer app, you'll only end up killing the platform.
I wouldn't play a single-boot game. I haven't done that since the DOS days, and even back then I found it highly annoying. I have this ridiculously overpowered PC for a reason, and I very much enjoy firing up any random game in a few seconds, play however long I want, and quit back to the desktop so I can resume productivity. I often alt-tab out of games to poke at something else, or look up a game guide on the web.
That's because a lot of the people you meet and the stuff you read on the internet is wrong and/or stupid.
The reason a compressor can move 200 watts of heat for less than 200 watts of power, is because it's not battling that heat head-on, it's only moving it away from whatever it is you want to cool. The energy still has to go somewhere.
I have a hybrid water/peltier/vapor cooling system on my PC, it eats maybe 80 watts to dissipate upwards of 300 watts of heat. My CPU sits below ambient, but the exhaust is scalding hot. That's 300 watts of heat shooting out my PC's ass, and into my rather tropical living room. Then my household A/C takes that heat, and shoves it outside. The heat never gets eliminated, it's just dumped into something else's backyard.
XP and 95 are virtually identical to the layperson, because they don't even know what the kernel is or does. You and I know the XP kernel is totally unlike the 95 kernel (if we can call it as such), but everyone else just sees the same applications and UI idioms.
The thing that made Mac OS X such a head-turner is that they took an already decent OS (BSD), tweaked it up a bit, added some great usability features and intuitive interface elements, then slapped on the well-known Finder interface and made it look a bit nicer. It offered significant performance improvements, made the whole system more reliable and easier to use, and the eye candy made people want to show off their rig.
Vista only did the latter: they added eye candy. They worsened everything else, and now they want a ton of money for their shiny turd.
There's still phone banking... it's not like you'd be entirely locked out of your account.
Init a "black buffer", and sneakily smash it with something else via a rogue pointer or array overrun.
There are millions of ways to write nasty code in C, since C is just a thin veneer on top of assembler.
I'd use this on my own server, privately with a few friends perhaps... I wouldn't submit password info to a 3rd party repo, though.
Easier solution: don't use voice.
I've always found VoIP rather humorous, since you're taking a digital channel, and shoving voice through it - you know, like the reverse of a dial-up modem.
If you're dealing with sensitive stuff that you don't want eavesdropped, do it in a secure IM session or encrypted email. Talk is overrated!
Because sharing something for free is less despicable than charging money for something you do not own. I suspect there's also a bit of elitism/racism involved, as the people who are most often associated with retail piracy are either:
A. sketch pads on the street corner who are too worthless to get a real job
B. asian or middle-eastern immigrants who have little respect for copyright, and a lot of respect for easy money
C. ebay douchebags who should be KOS anyway
Retail piracy has a face and a visible cost. P2P is anonymous and "free", you just click a few thingies and out pops the ISO... no money changed hands, and you didn't enable some greedy little parasite. P2P downloading is virtually harmless (except to the inflated numbers of software peddlers, that is).
Do they not have Chinese malls in the States ? We have them here in Canada, and they're well known for having Hong Kong-style pirate-marts. You walk into a small store that kinda looks like a used record store, only it's full of counterfeit software for $5-10 a pop. They usually have a crapload of movies and music too.
Once in a while they get busted, declare bankruptcy and start anew with a different name and number. I hate to play the racial card, but somehow I think having an unfamiliar foreign name makes it easier for them to get away with it. Change the spelling a bit, or abbreviate it, and I doubt anyone with the government could connect the two - Qin Kwong becomes Jin Cheung, signs his new business license and is back on the money train.
I used to have a customer that bought *TONS* of blank discs at my shop, week after week. Then one day I was in chinatown having some fine-ass dinner when I walked by a "video club" where she worked. In fact, she owned the place, and her business model was to burn a shitload of movies and sell them. At first glance, it looked like all Chinese films, and even the legit Chinese stuff looks cheap and amateurish, so it doesn't draw attention, but in the back row she had all the latest telesyncs and camcorder rips. Now I'm no angel, but I was pretty sharply offended by this practice and banned her from my store. I frankly don't give a crap about piracy, I indirectly profit from it to some degree (else less people would buy my hardware/services), but when piracy IS the business, the software developer in me gets real angry, real quick.