I'm going to do what I do best and stick my neck out: who really cares about WinFS anyway ? Since when does the average joe give a crap about how stuff works ? People care about getting their work done, and not losing all their data to a blue screen. How that gets accomplished under the hood is none of their concern.
A file system is a file system is a file system. Those who need something special, well they probably don't run Vista.
Until they build the DRM functionality right into every single processor in the system, there will be breaches. Right now, even hardware DRM is just a little chip twiddling keys and decrypting content on the way to its destination. You can tap into the decrypted stream, or even fool the DRM chip into decoding stuff it shouldn't.
The one thing chip manufacturers understand (but content producers don't want to hear), DRM is not going to be well received by the end user. That's why Intel doesn't have on-chip (de)scramblers and so-called "trusted" paths in their consumer CPUs. The day a Pentium chip tells me I can't play that movie I rented, is the day I smash that fucker with a 20lb sledge and buy its unencumbered chinese cousin. They know this, which is why DRM is still just a software kludge.
You mean, like, Citrix Metaframe ? That crap we've been using for a decade ?
Yeah.
It's nothing special, it's just an inverted model of desktop management. If, instead, we had a more respectable method for controlling client machines, this kind of remote app filth would be completely unnecessary.
Dedicated servers for each field office is out of the question, due to the price gouging of our outsourcing partner.
Gee that's an easy one, lose the price gouging outsourcing "partner". It sounds like he's the problem.
Seriously, local servers sound like the way to go for you, usually the only way to go, because North American bandwidth is still shite in the 21st century.
That's precisely why we're stuck with these ridiculous contracts and horrible broadband speeds. Anything more and you'll see a lot more people switching over to IPTV. It's already happening with VOIP on a massive scale.
Me, I lived sans-cable-TV before moving in with the lady. I still don't watch anything but late-night garbage to put me to sleep. I can get all I care about from DVDs and the internet.
Now if these telecoms could get beaten over the head with a billion cluesticks, maybe they could specialize into die-hard internet providers. FUCK TV, FUCK PHONES, give me one monster IP pipe and run everything through that. Go ahead and sell me a VOIP handset, an IPTV set-top box, an iTunes-style music, movie and tv-show store... I'll gladly give my money to the telecoms if only they would grow and adapt to today's digital lifestyle. I have ZERO interest in funding the past. It's a pretty fucking sad state of affairs when France is ahead of us on the technology curve - France for fuck sakes!
Right now the pipe is artificially small, and has been for over a decade. In 1998 I remember having 3mbit symmetrical DSL for less than what I pay now for what is effectively half-duplex cable. Back in 98, my LAN was 10mbit, the internet was 30% of my line speed - today I'm nearing the end of gigabit's usable lifespan, waiting for the monkeys-that-be to crank out 100gbit ASAP (skip 10gig, too little too late). I'd probably be relatively happy with even just 30mbit symmetrical. I mean, I already have a fat 100mbit pipe on a server in Europe for not much more than my total cable bill here in Canada. It's not a dedicated line, but I really don't mind slowing to 40-50mbit during peak hours. Why can't we have that kind of juice over here, on what is supposed to be a wealthy continent ?
Lay down the goddamned fiber already. It will have to be done at some point, might as well do it now and lease me a chunk of it every month. Weak networking infrastructure is leaving us in the past.
If someone punches me in the face, not only do I smash my beer glass into their eyes, but I follow that up by fucking either their wife/gf/mother, whichever one's hottest.
If someone pulls a knife on me, I run them partway through a wood chipper, but spare everything above the waist, then drag their torso halfway across the country, towed behind my car over gravel roads. Then I fuck their mother. To death.
I know this is Japan, but hey: "Your tax dollars at work"
Now some american is going to try shooting 4th of July crap fireworks off the back of a shuttle, and devote 3 billion dollars to research the right kind of fuse.
Maybe I'm too skeptical, but I feel space research could take a back seat while we fix the many problems we already have on THIS planet.
I haven't really been paying attention to Perl 6 development, largely because it's not here yet, and I have more pressing things in front of me.
That said, I took a look at this Parrot thing, which was news to me, and it sounds pretty darn decent. A quick perusal of the FAQ was enough to convince me these guys know what they're doing.
Perl: it's a handy tool. I'm not obsessed with it, but I like it. If Perl 6 allows me to do things quicker and/or easier, then I'll like it too. One thing to keep in mind is that people already know Perl. It's a heck of a lot easier to learn a few new features and constructs, than to migrate over to a whole new language. I don't do Ruby nor Python (yet), and I'm not so easily wowed by glorified build scripts like Rails. Perl just might be the one for me.
Wanna laugh ? I have a MS Intellimouse Explorer that overheats:) It wigs out after 15-20 minutes. Mind you, I had it for four years before it started acting up. Something to do with the little logic chip in there that just isn't happy anymore. I replaced it with another Intellimouse Explorer.
Yah, MS is evil, but there just aren't that many mice out there for big long hands. Logitech ? Moo. I find their G5/G7 and MX Revolution mice feel cheap. I want a mouse with good weight distribution, some kind of physical feedback to help with accuracy. I really miss the old Razer Boomslang for that. It was a brittle piece of shite, but the gaming ergonomics were just right.
When a large portion of citizens are worried/afraid of their government, that means the government has failed.
These people were (back in the day) supposed to be acting as proxies - a manageable group of elected individuals serving on behalf of their community / district. If that's not what they're doing, then why are they on our payroll ? Anyone paid by our taxes is on "our" payroll.
PS. I'm Canadian, but the same concepts theoretically apply to the USA. The fact that things have been left out of control for so long just makes it harder to recover.
I S3-sleep my desktop every night unless it's running a job, which is very rare. That's what servers are for.
The biggest thing for typical office machines is to enable the OS' power management / throttling. The average desk monkey doesn't sustain the CPU activity much at all, and the CPU is often dominating the power consumption. Gaming systems are a different affair with their monster video cards, but we're talking about standard $300 Dell slabs here.
Case in point: my gaming rig chugs ~500w doing basic desktop junk, ~700w while gaming... it idles no lower than 350w even with power savings on max. About 1/2 of that is my overclocked CPU, another 50-60w just to keep the video cards fed (a pathetic effort from NVidia!), another 100w for the MB and Ram, and a half-dozen hard drives spinning idly.
The plain-jane PC next to it, which I leave on 24/7, uses 75w idle, 100w peak. That's the one I remote into when I need stuff, and it acts as my household server for just about everything (email, media, automation, watchdog etc).
Before tweaking its power usage, that low-impact PC was drawing 300w steady. All I did was clock the CPU down a bit, drop in a non-gaming video card, and enable every power saving feature on the board and in the OS. These are things that anyone can do on an office machine (except the underclocking). A 66% reduction is HUGE!
Here's what I have to say to bloggers and WGA writers : stop whining or get a real job.
This may seem hypocritical as I am a blogger myself (just as a hobby / public disservice). What good could a blogger union possibly bring to the world ? What are they going to do, threaten Google with strikes ? Google doesn't give a flying fuck. They pay (or don't pay) their Adsense dues and that's the end of it. If you want more money, go back to your day job at Best Buy.
And how exactly do they plan on charging their dues ? Are they going to try and tax non-union bloggers too ? Are they going to kidnap and murder naysayers, then blame it on the Jewish community ?
Oh wait, did I offend a whole swath of lower humans there ? My bad. It's just that with any sufficiently large group of people with significant financial interests, corruption is inevitable. Bloggers are fine as they currently are, they already hold up together quite well through conventional networking. They don't need a formal union to smear its foul excrement all over the blogosphere.
Social networks only use the contact importing feature to jump-start new users. Once the initial batch is out, most new links are added through mutual friends. It wouldn't be a huge loss to get rid of the Hotmail import and just expect people to manually add 3-4 friends at first, or search for them by name.
Microsoft needs to be reminded they're not indispensable in this world. The internet existed for a long time without any MS input, and I personally don't use much of what they offer - none of the "Live" services except for MSN Messenger, and I could easily coax most of my contacts to switch over to something else.
The same way one acquires any other server: colocate, or lease a dedicated box somewhere.
The hard part is researching international laws to figure out where you want that server to be. Even worse is that laws change, especially those dealing with copyright affairs and other online bullshit.
It's a lot of effort, but obviously there is a benefit for some people.
And that's precisely how I helped myself finish Starscape - I froze my resources at 100% so I could build/research anything.
Starscape was fun, but I got real sick of it on the last level where it either exceeded my skill level, or things just got stupidly difficult for no good reason.
There's a nifty little tool called "Cheat Engine" that makes it relatively easy to enhance many games.
Actually there is some degree on inflation on rare items. If an epic drops only once per day, but an ever-increasing number of players want to buy it, the price skyrockets.
Also (and this is why I quit WoW), the younger and dumber the players, the sloppier their concept of value is, leading to exaggerated price swings (both ways). Seriously, if WoW were 18+, or even 16+, I probably would still be playing it instead of LoTRO. The stupid kids are what drove me away, it was like a grade-school courtyard pissing match every tardmas when kids would get a WoW subscription as a present.
There's only so much wealth in the world. Wealth is not "created", it merely exchanges hands. Sure, the dollar amount increases, that's called inflation. We don't have more resources just because some redneck is selling more weapons, or some trendy douche is making thinner laptops. They have more and we have less - the net result is zero. Not zero dollars, zero global gain.
That's exactly my stance. I'll wait for the torrent. The wife saw it yesterday and she's been raving about it, but I personally think J.J. Abrams is full of yeast. So he worked on Lost and Alias - financially successful, but plot-wise it's formulaic suspense-wanking. Any half-breed can throw an infinite number of "convenient" characters and plot devices at a story and stretch it out until Duke Nukem Forever comes out.
Me, anything that's hyped as much as this, I stay away. Marketing has too often been used as a substitute for actual content, so anyone who willingly dishes out this trendy marketing, by association, is telling me the content is kinda weak. Sometimes I'm wrong, but most of the time I'm right.
This article is even less coherent than a Family Guy episode.
Why the hell are they comparing MapReduce to a DBMS ? I mean, there are some terribly misguided DBMS'es out there (Oracle!), but MapReduce is a distributed computing paradigm.
Saying MapReduce is a crappy DBMS is like saying the Macbook Thin is a crappy pogo stick.
Just living in Canada, next to these guys, is enough to cast fear in our lives. I got no problem with the russians, the saudis, the czech, and all the other folks sharing the air in this country, but don't ever tell anyone you're American unless you like spit in your food.
That Canada-US border is a 5000km-long liability, one we can't be bothered to guard because frankly, we're far more civilized than that. The day one of your fundamentalist political leaders decides to come after our resources, shit's going to get buckwild!
lol offshore Martin. That guy was bad news long before he ever read his first budget on the air. It takes one hell of a freak to just stand there emotion-less, while being accused of the greatest swindle our country has seen.
I certainly don't agree with the jew-bashing, but as a Canadian (and a megalomaniacal psychopath), I too was relatively pleased the day the towers fell. That very morning, I thought "it's about time someone made the US Government their bitch". I foolishly hoped for humility, that someone at the white house would stop and think "We've been pissing the world off for far too long, and this is the price we pay for a century of antisocial behavior". Instead what happened was "Goddamnit I hate these arabs, Me & My Daddy are gonna kill em all!".
Despite the idiocy of the Bush administration, I still think, for all the lives lost that day and in the ensuing cockfight, there is some good to come out of it, with a lot more on the way. It divided people, forced them to think about what had been done and step outside of their comfort bubble. Bobby Fischer was a wacko for hating Judaism and its followers, but I think he was right in saying the world trade center was a welcome tragedy.
If internal wires are such a common cause of ground faults, why not line the inside of the shell with an isolator ? Wouldn't that eliminate any risk of a short ?
I'm the kind of guy who overdesigns everything (an idealist!:) so when I build gadgets that have even a remote risk of shorting, I slather them with silicone or shrink tubing. I've "upgraded" various audio devices this way after experiencing a few unpleasantries with my car stereo. Unsurprisingly, my ground issues were gone and my amps were pounding at their finest, at the cost of slightly worse heat dissipation (no biggie).
Something tells me there's a squirrely german scientist who's dying to tell me about surface capacitance and other elusive properties commonly used to sell overpriced speaker cables, but seriously though: is there a downside to overzealous insulation ? If so many horribly-made devices are just a cold weld away from zapping someone, maybe we should teach these asian slave laborers how to build a safer drill.
Even more fun are sketchy old apartment buildings. I once lived in a low-rise where the plumbing was grounded somewhere unwise, the hydro went elsewhere, but the best part was my patio door frame. I soon learned a few rules of survival:
1. touching any appliance at the same time as the kitchen sink = ~80 volts 2. touching the patio frame and the mini-fridge = ~50 volts 3. shorting the patio frame to the balcony railing = enough juice to power a few lights and a small computer:)
People initially thought I was crazy, talking about electricity in the kitchen sink. When I created a functioning power circuit on my balcony with alligator clips and set up a magically powered outdoor office, well let's just say people were stumped. The novelty factor wore off.
So when the jerk landlord came around with yet another rent increase, I was all too happy to have his "electrician" brother escorted by an electrical inspector to tear him a new asshole.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to do what I do best and stick my neck out: who really cares about WinFS anyway ? Since when does the average joe give a crap about how stuff works ? People care about getting their work done, and not losing all their data to a blue screen. How that gets accomplished under the hood is none of their concern.
A file system is a file system is a file system. Those who need something special, well they probably don't run Vista.
Until they build the DRM functionality right into every single processor in the system, there will be breaches. Right now, even hardware DRM is just a little chip twiddling keys and decrypting content on the way to its destination. You can tap into the decrypted stream, or even fool the DRM chip into decoding stuff it shouldn't.
The one thing chip manufacturers understand (but content producers don't want to hear), DRM is not going to be well received by the end user. That's why Intel doesn't have on-chip (de)scramblers and so-called "trusted" paths in their consumer CPUs. The day a Pentium chip tells me I can't play that movie I rented, is the day I smash that fucker with a 20lb sledge and buy its unencumbered chinese cousin. They know this, which is why DRM is still just a software kludge.
You mean, like, Citrix Metaframe ? That crap we've been using for a decade ?
Yeah.
It's nothing special, it's just an inverted model of desktop management. If, instead, we had a more respectable method for controlling client machines, this kind of remote app filth would be completely unnecessary.
Dedicated servers for each field office is out of the question, due to the price gouging of our outsourcing partner.
Gee that's an easy one, lose the price gouging outsourcing "partner". It sounds like he's the problem.
Seriously, local servers sound like the way to go for you, usually the only way to go, because North American bandwidth is still shite in the 21st century.
That's precisely why we're stuck with these ridiculous contracts and horrible broadband speeds. Anything more and you'll see a lot more people switching over to IPTV. It's already happening with VOIP on a massive scale.
Me, I lived sans-cable-TV before moving in with the lady. I still don't watch anything but late-night garbage to put me to sleep. I can get all I care about from DVDs and the internet.
Now if these telecoms could get beaten over the head with a billion cluesticks, maybe they could specialize into die-hard internet providers. FUCK TV, FUCK PHONES, give me one monster IP pipe and run everything through that. Go ahead and sell me a VOIP handset, an IPTV set-top box, an iTunes-style music, movie and tv-show store... I'll gladly give my money to the telecoms if only they would grow and adapt to today's digital lifestyle. I have ZERO interest in funding the past. It's a pretty fucking sad state of affairs when France is ahead of us on the technology curve - France for fuck sakes!
Not really.
Right now the pipe is artificially small, and has been for over a decade. In 1998 I remember having 3mbit symmetrical DSL for less than what I pay now for what is effectively half-duplex cable. Back in 98, my LAN was 10mbit, the internet was 30% of my line speed - today I'm nearing the end of gigabit's usable lifespan, waiting for the monkeys-that-be to crank out 100gbit ASAP (skip 10gig, too little too late). I'd probably be relatively happy with even just 30mbit symmetrical. I mean, I already have a fat 100mbit pipe on a server in Europe for not much more than my total cable bill here in Canada. It's not a dedicated line, but I really don't mind slowing to 40-50mbit during peak hours. Why can't we have that kind of juice over here, on what is supposed to be a wealthy continent ?
Lay down the goddamned fiber already. It will have to be done at some point, might as well do it now and lease me a chunk of it every month. Weak networking infrastructure is leaving us in the past.
No no no, you've got it all wrong.
:)
If someone punches me in the face, not only do I smash my beer glass into their eyes, but I follow that up by fucking either their wife/gf/mother, whichever one's hottest.
If someone pulls a knife on me, I run them partway through a wood chipper, but spare everything above the waist, then drag their torso halfway across the country, towed behind my car over gravel roads. Then I fuck their mother. To death.
Oh ya, don't mess with the French!
I know this is Japan, but hey: "Your tax dollars at work"
Now some american is going to try shooting 4th of July crap fireworks off the back of a shuttle, and devote 3 billion dollars to research the right kind of fuse.
Maybe I'm too skeptical, but I feel space research could take a back seat while we fix the many problems we already have on THIS planet.
I haven't really been paying attention to Perl 6 development, largely because it's not here yet, and I have more pressing things in front of me.
That said, I took a look at this Parrot thing, which was news to me, and it sounds pretty darn decent. A quick perusal of the FAQ was enough to convince me these guys know what they're doing.
Perl: it's a handy tool. I'm not obsessed with it, but I like it. If Perl 6 allows me to do things quicker and/or easier, then I'll like it too. One thing to keep in mind is that people already know Perl. It's a heck of a lot easier to learn a few new features and constructs, than to migrate over to a whole new language. I don't do Ruby nor Python (yet), and I'm not so easily wowed by glorified build scripts like Rails. Perl just might be the one for me.
Wanna laugh ? I have a MS Intellimouse Explorer that overheats :) It wigs out after 15-20 minutes. Mind you, I had it for four years before it started acting up. Something to do with the little logic chip in there that just isn't happy anymore. I replaced it with another Intellimouse Explorer.
Yah, MS is evil, but there just aren't that many mice out there for big long hands. Logitech ? Moo. I find their G5/G7 and MX Revolution mice feel cheap. I want a mouse with good weight distribution, some kind of physical feedback to help with accuracy. I really miss the old Razer Boomslang for that. It was a brittle piece of shite, but the gaming ergonomics were just right.
When a large portion of citizens are worried/afraid of their government, that means the government has failed.
These people were (back in the day) supposed to be acting as proxies - a manageable group of elected individuals serving on behalf of their community / district. If that's not what they're doing, then why are they on our payroll ? Anyone paid by our taxes is on "our" payroll.
PS. I'm Canadian, but the same concepts theoretically apply to the USA. The fact that things have been left out of control for so long just makes it harder to recover.
I S3-sleep my desktop every night unless it's running a job, which is very rare. That's what servers are for.
The biggest thing for typical office machines is to enable the OS' power management / throttling. The average desk monkey doesn't sustain the CPU activity much at all, and the CPU is often dominating the power consumption. Gaming systems are a different affair with their monster video cards, but we're talking about standard $300 Dell slabs here.
Case in point: my gaming rig chugs ~500w doing basic desktop junk, ~700w while gaming... it idles no lower than 350w even with power savings on max. About 1/2 of that is my overclocked CPU, another 50-60w just to keep the video cards fed (a pathetic effort from NVidia!), another 100w for the MB and Ram, and a half-dozen hard drives spinning idly.
The plain-jane PC next to it, which I leave on 24/7, uses 75w idle, 100w peak. That's the one I remote into when I need stuff, and it acts as my household server for just about everything (email, media, automation, watchdog etc).
Before tweaking its power usage, that low-impact PC was drawing 300w steady. All I did was clock the CPU down a bit, drop in a non-gaming video card, and enable every power saving feature on the board and in the OS. These are things that anyone can do on an office machine (except the underclocking). A 66% reduction is HUGE!
Here's what I have to say to bloggers and WGA writers : stop whining or get a real job.
This may seem hypocritical as I am a blogger myself (just as a hobby / public disservice). What good could a blogger union possibly bring to the world ? What are they going to do, threaten Google with strikes ? Google doesn't give a flying fuck. They pay (or don't pay) their Adsense dues and that's the end of it. If you want more money, go back to your day job at Best Buy.
And how exactly do they plan on charging their dues ? Are they going to try and tax non-union bloggers too ? Are they going to kidnap and murder naysayers, then blame it on the Jewish community ?
Oh wait, did I offend a whole swath of lower humans there ? My bad. It's just that with any sufficiently large group of people with significant financial interests, corruption is inevitable. Bloggers are fine as they currently are, they already hold up together quite well through conventional networking. They don't need a formal union to smear its foul excrement all over the blogosphere.
I propose the one-finger solution.
Social networks only use the contact importing feature to jump-start new users. Once the initial batch is out, most new links are added through mutual friends. It wouldn't be a huge loss to get rid of the Hotmail import and just expect people to manually add 3-4 friends at first, or search for them by name.
Microsoft needs to be reminded they're not indispensable in this world. The internet existed for a long time without any MS input, and I personally don't use much of what they offer - none of the "Live" services except for MSN Messenger, and I could easily coax most of my contacts to switch over to something else.
The same way one acquires any other server: colocate, or lease a dedicated box somewhere.
The hard part is researching international laws to figure out where you want that server to be. Even worse is that laws change, especially those dealing with copyright affairs and other online bullshit.
It's a lot of effort, but obviously there is a benefit for some people.
And that's precisely how I helped myself finish Starscape - I froze my resources at 100% so I could build/research anything.
Starscape was fun, but I got real sick of it on the last level where it either exceeded my skill level, or things just got stupidly difficult for no good reason.
There's a nifty little tool called "Cheat Engine" that makes it relatively easy to enhance many games.
Actually there is some degree on inflation on rare items. If an epic drops only once per day, but an ever-increasing number of players want to buy it, the price skyrockets.
Also (and this is why I quit WoW), the younger and dumber the players, the sloppier their concept of value is, leading to exaggerated price swings (both ways). Seriously, if WoW were 18+, or even 16+, I probably would still be playing it instead of LoTRO. The stupid kids are what drove me away, it was like a grade-school courtyard pissing match every tardmas when kids would get a WoW subscription as a present.
That's precisely why it's flawed.
There's only so much wealth in the world. Wealth is not "created", it merely exchanges hands. Sure, the dollar amount increases, that's called inflation. We don't have more resources just because some redneck is selling more weapons, or some trendy douche is making thinner laptops. They have more and we have less - the net result is zero. Not zero dollars, zero global gain.
That's exactly my stance. I'll wait for the torrent. The wife saw it yesterday and she's been raving about it, but I personally think J.J. Abrams is full of yeast. So he worked on Lost and Alias - financially successful, but plot-wise it's formulaic suspense-wanking. Any half-breed can throw an infinite number of "convenient" characters and plot devices at a story and stretch it out until Duke Nukem Forever comes out.
Me, anything that's hyped as much as this, I stay away. Marketing has too often been used as a substitute for actual content, so anyone who willingly dishes out this trendy marketing, by association, is telling me the content is kinda weak. Sometimes I'm wrong, but most of the time I'm right.
This article is even less coherent than a Family Guy episode.
Why the hell are they comparing MapReduce to a DBMS ? I mean, there are some terribly misguided DBMS'es out there (Oracle!), but MapReduce is a distributed computing paradigm.
Saying MapReduce is a crappy DBMS is like saying the Macbook Thin is a crappy pogo stick.
I think they've already succeeded.
Just living in Canada, next to these guys, is enough to cast fear in our lives. I got no problem with the russians, the saudis, the czech, and all the other folks sharing the air in this country, but don't ever tell anyone you're American unless you like spit in your food.
That Canada-US border is a 5000km-long liability, one we can't be bothered to guard because frankly, we're far more civilized than that. The day one of your fundamentalist political leaders decides to come after our resources, shit's going to get buckwild!
lol offshore Martin. That guy was bad news long before he ever read his first budget on the air. It takes one hell of a freak to just stand there emotion-less, while being accused of the greatest swindle our country has seen.
(extends neck)
I certainly don't agree with the jew-bashing, but as a Canadian (and a megalomaniacal psychopath), I too was relatively pleased the day the towers fell. That very morning, I thought "it's about time someone made the US Government their bitch". I foolishly hoped for humility, that someone at the white house would stop and think "We've been pissing the world off for far too long, and this is the price we pay for a century of antisocial behavior". Instead what happened was "Goddamnit I hate these arabs, Me & My Daddy are gonna kill em all!".
Despite the idiocy of the Bush administration, I still think, for all the lives lost that day and in the ensuing cockfight, there is some good to come out of it, with a lot more on the way. It divided people, forced them to think about what had been done and step outside of their comfort bubble. Bobby Fischer was a wacko for hating Judaism and its followers, but I think he was right in saying the world trade center was a welcome tragedy.
If internal wires are such a common cause of ground faults, why not line the inside of the shell with an isolator ? Wouldn't that eliminate any risk of a short ?
:) so when I build gadgets that have even a remote risk of shorting, I slather them with silicone or shrink tubing. I've "upgraded" various audio devices this way after experiencing a few unpleasantries with my car stereo. Unsurprisingly, my ground issues were gone and my amps were pounding at their finest, at the cost of slightly worse heat dissipation (no biggie).
I'm the kind of guy who overdesigns everything (an idealist!
Something tells me there's a squirrely german scientist who's dying to tell me about surface capacitance and other elusive properties commonly used to sell overpriced speaker cables, but seriously though: is there a downside to overzealous insulation ? If so many horribly-made devices are just a cold weld away from zapping someone, maybe we should teach these asian slave laborers how to build a safer drill.
Even more fun are sketchy old apartment buildings. I once lived in a low-rise where the plumbing was grounded somewhere unwise, the hydro went elsewhere, but the best part was my patio door frame. I soon learned a few rules of survival:
:)
1. touching any appliance at the same time as the kitchen sink = ~80 volts
2. touching the patio frame and the mini-fridge = ~50 volts
3. shorting the patio frame to the balcony railing = enough juice to power a few lights and a small computer
People initially thought I was crazy, talking about electricity in the kitchen sink. When I created a functioning power circuit on my balcony with alligator clips and set up a magically powered outdoor office, well let's just say people were stumped. The novelty factor wore off.
So when the jerk landlord came around with yet another rent increase, I was all too happy to have his "electrician" brother escorted by an electrical inspector to tear him a new asshole.