Up until recently, I have been using trusty 'ol IBM PS/2 keyboard. Its trusty mechanical feedback was great, not to mention nearly error-free when working properly. Also, when my high school chucked out its old computers, I was able to salvage about 15 to 20 of these beauties. Nearly all worked perfectly, and those that didn't were not to hard to fix with a solder iron and spare parts.
But recently, my wrists have begun to bother me (probably CTS setting in; and I'm nary 20 years old) and the old keyboards refused to work on my new rig (I probably could have modified one of them to work, but college really cuts out the free time). So I went to Wally Mart Computer Center and picked up this Logitech Navigator keyboard. This is by far one of the best keyboards I have used. Sure, those Mikeysoft Naturals are comfy, but they take up too much space and it is quite difficult to play Unreal Tournament with. The tactile sensation, while softer and not nearly as loud as the PS/2's, has a reassuring, yet subtle "crunch" to it. Not to mention, it has a scroll wheel built in (I use mine to switch apps, it is quite handy), and numerous other handy buttons. All the Ctrl functions are silkscreened on the front side of the keys for handy reference. And it was only $30.
The most unique feature, however, is the zero-tilt design. All of the keys are perfectly flat; normal keyboards "curve up" as you approach the number row, but all the keys on this keyboard are on the same plane, parallel to the desk. I have to say that it takes some getting used to, but in the end it is far more comfortable than a regular "tilted" keyboard. Now if only I can figure out how to get some of these extra buttons and stuff working in Linux.... damn semi-n00b skillz.
While I miss my PS/2's (they are still attached to my other boxes), I would have to say that I am quite impressed with the Navigator. Hopefully this thing will be as durable as the old PS/2's.
Great idea, but if you read the article, or most of it, it is not the metal that heats up, but rather the magnetite coatings on the ceramic mold. Now if you had rusty bolts, perhaps the oxide coating may heat up, but it wouldn't be nearly enough to alter the structure of the metal.
But it sure would be nice to get grade-8 bolts for the price of grade-5's...
The first thing that crosses my mind when I see the illustration on the page, is how the heck are they going to be able to keep the head floating just right over the media. Today's drives are nearly perfectly flat to keep an even boundry of air to fly the head. With the pillars dipicted in the illustration, the drive will drag air and create turbulence. Even if the valleys are somehow "filled" in with another material (probably with some sort of plasma vapor depostion process), it is quite possible that the surfaces will not match up quite right. And the filler cannot mess up the magnetic properties of the material, or else this process is nearly pointless.
Unless of course, they just sprinkle some Pixie Dust on it and magically make it work.
I assure you I was the first one calling. It was 3:00 in the morning in the rain, and I happened to be right behind the motorcycle when he slid around the turn and into the telephone pole, with a nice tib-fib fracture as a result. I called 911 as I went to help him (Eagle Scout Skillz), and it was at least 3 minutes before another vehicle drove by and stopped to assist.
No, that is not tuition, but in fact the sum of all the money I pay to Penn State every year. It may be somewhat inflated, but tution+room and board+books+other shit, it becomes close to that figure. And I'm a Computer Engineering Major, nothing to do with the horrid libral arts.
This is very true, in fact last year I witnessed a motorcycle accident in State College, Pa (location of my Alma Mater, PSU). When I called 911 to tell them of the accident, they did not ask me for my location, rather, she asked my to confirm if I was infact on East College avenue by the OfficeMax and the Supermarket.
Cell phone location is possible without GPS by timing the signal arrival between different towers. This is not nearly effective as GPS, but this time they hit it right on the head. Unfortunately, this non-GPS solution is much more expensive and less accurate than the GPS route, but nonetheless effective in semi-rural areas such as where I was.
I should have included this in my original post, but PopSci also has a good article about the E911 GPS service in their most recent issue. I thought I saw it on their site, but apparently it is not there.
Here is another feature which links to a website that can map out a route in Manhattan to avoid its 2400 or so security cameras watching your every move. If you happened to read the article, a link to this also appears to the right.
By now you would think I work for Popular Science. I have no job. I employ my University with a $24,000 per year salary.
The problem here may not be just getting car manufacturers to divulge engine codes, but rather the maker of the ECU itself. For instance, Bosch produces ECUs or other engine components for virtually every car maker. Last year, Bosch had over $23x10^9 in sales in the automotive sector alone. Since nearly all European manufacturers rely on the Motronic ECU for higher-end engine applications, I'm sure that many Engine Control and Error Codes are similar amongst many different models and manufacturers.
I'm not entirely sure about whether or not the problem is the manufacturers' reluctance to supply codes. Perhaps they have a contract or something with the supplier of the ECUs to keep things hush-hush. Not only do the manufacturers make out by requiring service at their garage with their advanced tools, but the ECU supplier stays safe from the competition by not having all the details of their system easily divulged.
If you took the time to read the article, you would notice that the drive burns at 44x, which is pretty darn close to the fastest cd burners (48x). Plus, this drive shouldn't cost much more than typical cd burners. Nobody will pay a $75 dollar premium in a market this saturated.
D-VHS has been around here in the U.S. for at least 3 years. I happen to own one of these puppies, and have been recording shows to D-VHS tape ever since I bought. However, as far as I know, my system does not support HDTV, only MPEG2 encoded NTSC video. Also, video quality degradation is very unlikely; I have movies and programs recorded over 2 and a half years ago on DVHS, and have yet to notice any degradation.
Since it is in fact raw digital information recorded on the tape, the type of degradation would most likely be dropped frames, motion artifacts, "mosquitos," and the like, rather than the typical problems of "regular" VHS such as snow, color saturation problems, and reduced definition.
Perhaps what this really meant by the article is that High Definition DVHS movies will be available. I have my doubts as to whether or not this will really have an impact on the mainstream video market (perhaps the upscale home theatre market will embrace it). $45 bucks for a video; however, is just rediculous.
If I remember my quantum mechanics correctly, no material is 100% reflective, especially one with a finite thickness. If the material is thin (not infinitely thick, as in a layer on a CD), thier exists a probability that some of the light will tunnel through the material. Also, the sensors in the pickup of the CD can sense very small changes in reflected beam intensity, so it is not entirely necessary to make sure that 50% of the beam is reflected. I'm sure any modern detector can accurately detect a fluxuation much smaller than 10% or less.
Sure, a terabyte on a single disk would be great, especially for large supercomputers like ASCII White or the new Linux supercomputer. But wouldn't this result in lowered overall memory throughput?
Let me explain. If I were to build a supercomputer with a 1TB storage array, I would probaby use 100 or so 10GB drives rather than ten 100 GB drives. Creating a RAID 0 array with 100 drives would probably be much faster than with 10 drives, even though the 100GB drives transfer data internally faster than thier 10GB counterparts (assuming the same RPM and number of platters). I realize the cost of supporting 100 disks as opposed to 10 is much greater, but you must make a tradeoff. Likewise, a single 1TB harddrive would not be as fast as ten 100GB drives.
Of course, if you are rich like IBM and most major universities (all they have to do is bump up tuition... again), you can just buy a bunch of the biggest drives available and make a super-fast, super-big array.
Popular Mechanics ran something to this effect sometime ago. It can be found online here.
I can just imagine it now, getting spam that reads: "Do you weigh over 200lbs? Well we have the solution for you! Loose over 4lbs INSTANTLY! Thats right, INSTANTLY! NO gimmicks, NO drugs, just pure science! Only $600,000! Act Now!"
Funny, I was actually going to include something to that effect in my original post, but I wanted to get some sleep and I couldn't remember any specific examples (I knew about expensive hammers and toilet seats, but not thier prices). Thanks for clearing this up!
Cost of Repairs vs. Relaunch vs. Reentry
on
NASA Satellite Stranded
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, NASA has 3 choices Re-entry, Retrieve and Relauch, or Repair.
The first choice, Re-entry, is just to give up on it (in otherwords, send it back into the atmosphere and hope it doens't hit anyone, or hit a target so we get free tacos). I doubt they will do this considering the astronomical (pun somewhat intended) amount of money they would have wasted on the whole thing.
Retrieve and Relaunch is probably unlikey too, because not only do they have to pay to send a shuttle up (although they can just do it on a regularly scheduled mission), but then they have to pay to launch it again. It would be pretty hard, IMHO, to snatch a sattilite, return it to earth, and relauch it without further damaging it. Plus, I'm sure it is more dangerous to land a shuttle with all that extra weight in the cargo area.
That leaves us with repair, the most reasonable option. Send up some guys on the next shuttle mission with Duct Tape (about $1.50 a roll, depending on store and brand). Voila! Problem solved!
Ok, well i hope you can follow that. I meant to submit as plain 'ol text.
Re:this reminds me of a trick for telemarketers
on
He Writes Back
·
· Score: 5, Funny
My method for dealing with telemarketers:
Is this Mr ?
Yup.
This is from corporation. We are calling to inform you of.
I let them talk to me for like a minute, then interupt:
Hey, I'm kind of in a hurry. I have this comedy routine tonight and I need to practice. Say, you want to hear a joke?
For some reason, most answer yes to this. I also try to be a little more smooth than that. Usually I bust out a few short jokes before leading up to this:
How many telemarketers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? 2. One to change the lightbulb and another to screw an old lady out of her life savings! Did you know telemarketers don't call other telemarketers? Yea, it's called professional courtesy.
I used to have a few more that I can't remember, ever since I switched to my cell phone and let the answering machine pick up my home calls, I haven't done this in a few years.
I know this is real stuff, I've seen it done before. The thing that scares my is if you read the page you see some stuff refering to "electrogravatics" stuff, i.e., pseudoscience. Can anyone really provide a reasonable explaination as to why we get this effect? I notice in the illustrations that the ground is shown as reference voltage (0V), while the craft is at 30kV. Isn't this just simply Coulombs Law at work?
Wow... I'm suprised nobody has though of this before. The design looks quite simple and is better than a traditional fan, much more so than just its looks.
The website shows here some of the interesting effects of moving the motor to the outside. The most important implication is that airflow is inceased near the perpendicular axis to the fan, ie., more air blows in the center of the fan than the traditional design allows. This helps out in heatsink designs in that it allows more air to cool the inner parts of the sink and thus cool it closer to the cpu core itself. The efficiency of the heatsink is now improved without a major redesign.
In the near future, I'm sure this technology will migrate to large fans for the case and powersupply, where its reduced noise will be appreciated.
Truely superb work. However, if you notice, red does not come through on the reconstructions. Perhaps this is something to do with his use of P22 phospors, or I missed some important detail.
So, what does this teach us? If you are doing anything illegal on your computer, and you do not want to be caught, stick with red text on a black background. Or, if you want full color on a good CRT, put a hood on it like those turn-of-the-century cameras. Imagine the look on your co-workers face (or friends at a LAN party) when you stick your head under the hood and go to work. Then listen to them laugh as you reach for your coffee and spill it all over the place because you can't see anything. Oh well.
The response time for a LED is on the order of 10^-9 seconds or less. In fact, many fiber-optic data transmittion systems use IR LEDs to transmit the data. I would not be suprised if you can read a 100MB/sec steam off of a standard green LED. Of course, you would need some fancy equiptment to do so.
I think a more reasonable data protection scheme is the Raging Cactuar Data Shield. If an attempt to copy a "protected" disc is made, a cactuar will appear and attack you with his "9,999 Needles" attack. You will quickly learn your lesson that when the record companies want more money, they will do anything to get it.
Well, that busy Enron exec should be rich enough to afford 2 IBM 1GB Microdrives ($360 each) to fit into the two PCMCIA slots. Of course, 2 Microdrives cost as much as the whole unit, so us poor folk can't have 2GB Linux webpads, at least for the time being.
Notice how I trailed off before I said that? I tried to indicate subversive sarcasm, but I guess it did not come off as such. If I meant "anyway" as a transitional word, I would have used it in the following paragraph.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, still quarter to five, and we killed em...
Google Cache
Up until recently, I have been using trusty 'ol IBM PS/2 keyboard. Its trusty mechanical feedback was great, not to mention nearly error-free when working properly. Also, when my high school chucked out its old computers, I was able to salvage about 15 to 20 of these beauties. Nearly all worked perfectly, and those that didn't were not to hard to fix with a solder iron and spare parts.
But recently, my wrists have begun to bother me (probably CTS setting in; and I'm nary 20 years old) and the old keyboards refused to work on my new rig (I probably could have modified one of them to work, but college really cuts out the free time). So I went to Wally Mart Computer Center and picked up this Logitech Navigator keyboard. This is by far one of the best keyboards I have used. Sure, those Mikeysoft Naturals are comfy, but they take up too much space and it is quite difficult to play Unreal Tournament with. The tactile sensation, while softer and not nearly as loud as the PS/2's, has a reassuring, yet subtle "crunch" to it. Not to mention, it has a scroll wheel built in (I use mine to switch apps, it is quite handy), and numerous other handy buttons. All the Ctrl functions are silkscreened on the front side of the keys for handy reference. And it was only $30.
The most unique feature, however, is the zero-tilt design. All of the keys are perfectly flat; normal keyboards "curve up" as you approach the number row, but all the keys on this keyboard are on the same plane, parallel to the desk. I have to say that it takes some getting used to, but in the end it is far more comfortable than a regular "tilted" keyboard. Now if only I can figure out how to get some of these extra buttons and stuff working in Linux.... damn semi-n00b skillz.
While I miss my PS/2's (they are still attached to my other boxes), I would have to say that I am quite impressed with the Navigator. Hopefully this thing will be as durable as the old PS/2's.
Great idea, but if you read the article, or most of it, it is not the metal that heats up, but rather the magnetite coatings on the ceramic mold. Now if you had rusty bolts, perhaps the oxide coating may heat up, but it wouldn't be nearly enough to alter the structure of the metal.
But it sure would be nice to get grade-8 bolts for the price of grade-5's...
The first thing that crosses my mind when I see the illustration on the page, is how the heck are they going to be able to keep the head floating just right over the media. Today's drives are nearly perfectly flat to keep an even boundry of air to fly the head. With the pillars dipicted in the illustration, the drive will drag air and create turbulence. Even if the valleys are somehow "filled" in with another material (probably with some sort of plasma vapor depostion process), it is quite possible that the surfaces will not match up quite right. And the filler cannot mess up the magnetic properties of the material, or else this process is nearly pointless.
Unless of course, they just sprinkle some Pixie Dust on it and magically make it work.
I assure you I was the first one calling. It was 3:00 in the morning in the rain, and I happened to be right behind the motorcycle when he slid around the turn and into the telephone pole, with a nice tib-fib fracture as a result. I called 911 as I went to help him (Eagle Scout Skillz), and it was at least 3 minutes before another vehicle drove by and stopped to assist.
No, that is not tuition, but in fact the sum of all the money I pay to Penn State every year. It may be somewhat inflated, but tution+room and board+books+other shit, it becomes close to that figure. And I'm a Computer Engineering Major, nothing to do with the horrid libral arts.
This is very true, in fact last year I witnessed a motorcycle accident in State College, Pa (location of my Alma Mater, PSU). When I called 911 to tell them of the accident, they did not ask me for my location, rather, she asked my to confirm if I was infact on East College avenue by the OfficeMax and the Supermarket.
Cell phone location is possible without GPS by timing the signal arrival between different towers. This is not nearly effective as GPS, but this time they hit it right on the head. Unfortunately, this non-GPS solution is much more expensive and less accurate than the GPS route, but nonetheless effective in semi-rural areas such as where I was.
Read about this technology here.
I should have included this in my original post, but PopSci also has a good article about the E911 GPS service in their most recent issue. I thought I saw it on their site, but apparently it is not there.
Here is another feature which links to a website that can map out a route in Manhattan to avoid its 2400 or so security cameras watching your every move. If you happened to read the article, a link to this also appears to the right.
By now you would think I work for Popular Science. I have no job. I employ my University with a $24,000 per year salary.
The problem here may not be just getting car manufacturers to divulge engine codes, but rather the maker of the ECU itself. For instance, Bosch produces ECUs or other engine components for virtually every car maker. Last year, Bosch had over $23x10^9 in sales in the automotive sector alone. Since nearly all European manufacturers rely on the Motronic ECU for higher-end engine applications, I'm sure that many Engine Control and Error Codes are similar amongst many different models and manufacturers.
I'm not entirely sure about whether or not the problem is the manufacturers' reluctance to supply codes. Perhaps they have a contract or something with the supplier of the ECUs to keep things hush-hush. Not only do the manufacturers make out by requiring service at their garage with their advanced tools, but the ECU supplier stays safe from the competition by not having all the details of their system easily divulged.
If you took the time to read the article, you would notice that the drive burns at 44x, which is pretty darn close to the fastest cd burners (48x). Plus, this drive shouldn't cost much more than typical cd burners. Nobody will pay a $75 dollar premium in a market this saturated.
D-VHS has been around here in the U.S. for at least 3 years. I happen to own one of these puppies, and have been recording shows to D-VHS tape ever since I bought. However, as far as I know, my system does not support HDTV, only MPEG2 encoded NTSC video. Also, video quality degradation is very unlikely; I have movies and programs recorded over 2 and a half years ago on DVHS, and have yet to notice any degradation.
Since it is in fact raw digital information recorded on the tape, the type of degradation would most likely be dropped frames, motion artifacts, "mosquitos," and the like, rather than the typical problems of "regular" VHS such as snow, color saturation problems, and reduced definition.
Perhaps what this really meant by the article is that High Definition DVHS movies will be available. I have my doubts as to whether or not this will really have an impact on the mainstream video market (perhaps the upscale home theatre market will embrace it). $45 bucks for a video; however, is just rediculous.
If I remember my quantum mechanics correctly, no material is 100% reflective, especially one with a finite thickness. If the material is thin (not infinitely thick, as in a layer on a CD), thier exists a probability that some of the light will tunnel through the material. Also, the sensors in the pickup of the CD can sense very small changes in reflected beam intensity, so it is not entirely necessary to make sure that 50% of the beam is reflected. I'm sure any modern detector can accurately detect a fluxuation much smaller than 10% or less.
Sure, a terabyte on a single disk would be great, especially for large supercomputers like ASCII White or the new Linux supercomputer. But wouldn't this result in lowered overall memory throughput?
Let me explain. If I were to build a supercomputer with a 1TB storage array, I would probaby use 100 or so 10GB drives rather than ten 100 GB drives. Creating a RAID 0 array with 100 drives would probably be much faster than with 10 drives, even though the 100GB drives transfer data internally faster than thier 10GB counterparts (assuming the same RPM and number of platters). I realize the cost of supporting 100 disks as opposed to 10 is much greater, but you must make a tradeoff. Likewise, a single 1TB harddrive would not be as fast as ten 100GB drives.
Of course, if you are rich like IBM and most major universities (all they have to do is bump up tuition... again), you can just buy a bunch of the biggest drives available and make a super-fast, super-big array.
Popular Mechanics ran something to this effect sometime ago. It can be found online here.
I can just imagine it now, getting spam that reads: "Do you weigh over 200lbs? Well we have the solution for you! Loose over 4lbs INSTANTLY! Thats right, INSTANTLY! NO gimmicks, NO drugs, just pure science! Only $600,000! Act Now!"
Funny, I was actually going to include something to that effect in my original post, but I wanted to get some sleep and I couldn't remember any specific examples (I knew about expensive hammers and toilet seats, but not thier prices). Thanks for clearing this up!
Well, NASA has 3 choices Re-entry, Retrieve and Relauch, or Repair.
The first choice, Re-entry, is just to give up on it (in otherwords, send it back into the atmosphere and hope it doens't hit anyone, or hit a target so we get free tacos). I doubt they will do this considering the astronomical (pun somewhat intended) amount of money they would have wasted on the whole thing.
Retrieve and Relaunch is probably unlikey too, because not only do they have to pay to send a shuttle up (although they can just do it on a regularly scheduled mission), but then they have to pay to launch it again. It would be pretty hard, IMHO, to snatch a sattilite, return it to earth, and relauch it without further damaging it. Plus, I'm sure it is more dangerous to land a shuttle with all that extra weight in the cargo area.
That leaves us with repair, the most reasonable option. Send up some guys on the next shuttle mission with Duct Tape (about $1.50 a roll, depending on store and brand). Voila! Problem solved!
Ok, well i hope you can follow that. I meant to submit as plain 'ol text.
My method for dealing with telemarketers:
.
Is this Mr ?
Yup.
This is from corporation. We are calling to inform you of
I let them talk to me for like a minute, then interupt:
Hey, I'm kind of in a hurry. I have this comedy routine tonight and I need to practice. Say, you want to hear a joke?
For some reason, most answer yes to this. I also try to be a little more smooth than that. Usually I bust out a few short jokes before leading up to this:
How many telemarketers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? 2. One to change the lightbulb and another to screw an old lady out of her life savings! Did you know telemarketers don't call other telemarketers? Yea, it's called professional courtesy.
I used to have a few more that I can't remember, ever since I switched to my cell phone and let the answering machine pick up my home calls, I haven't done this in a few years.
I know this is real stuff, I've seen it done before. The thing that scares my is if you read the page you see some stuff refering to "electrogravatics" stuff, i.e., pseudoscience. Can anyone really provide a reasonable explaination as to why we get this effect? I notice in the illustrations that the ground is shown as reference voltage (0V), while the craft is at 30kV. Isn't this just simply Coulombs Law at work?
Wow... I'm suprised nobody has though of this before. The design looks quite simple and is better than a traditional fan, much more so than just its looks.
The website shows here some of the interesting effects of moving the motor to the outside. The most important implication is that airflow is inceased near the perpendicular axis to the fan, ie., more air blows in the center of the fan than the traditional design allows. This helps out in heatsink designs in that it allows more air to cool the inner parts of the sink and thus cool it closer to the cpu core itself. The efficiency of the heatsink is now improved without a major redesign.
In the near future, I'm sure this technology will migrate to large fans for the case and powersupply, where its reduced noise will be appreciated.
Truely superb work. However, if you notice, red does not come through on the reconstructions. Perhaps this is something to do with his use of P22 phospors, or I missed some important detail.
So, what does this teach us? If you are doing anything illegal on your computer, and you do not want to be caught, stick with red text on a black background. Or, if you want full color on a good CRT, put a hood on it like those turn-of-the-century cameras. Imagine the look on your co-workers face (or friends at a LAN party) when you stick your head under the hood and go to work. Then listen to them laugh as you reach for your coffee and spill it all over the place because you can't see anything. Oh well.
The response time for a LED is on the order of 10^-9 seconds or less. In fact, many fiber-optic data transmittion systems use IR LEDs to transmit the data. I would not be suprised if you can read a 100MB/sec steam off of a standard green LED. Of course, you would need some fancy equiptment to do so.
I think a more reasonable data protection scheme is the Raging Cactuar Data Shield. If an attempt to copy a "protected" disc is made, a cactuar will appear and attack you with his "9,999 Needles" attack. You will quickly learn your lesson that when the record companies want more money, they will do anything to get it.
Well, that busy Enron exec should be rich enough to afford 2 IBM 1GB Microdrives ($360 each) to fit into the two PCMCIA slots. Of course, 2 Microdrives cost as much as the whole unit, so us poor folk can't have 2GB Linux webpads, at least for the time being.
Notice how I trailed off before I said that? I tried to indicate subversive sarcasm, but I guess it did not come off as such. If I meant "anyway" as a transitional word, I would have used it in the following paragraph.