PC Power & Cooling, back in the day, used to have a full-sized AT power supply with a built-in battery backup. We had one at work, around 1996 or so. You could kick the mains cord out of the back, and the computer never noticed.
Neat idea, I suppose, but nobody cared enough about it to buy enough for it to stay alive.
There's still lots of ways to access stuff online via email.
FTP by mail, web browsing by mail, so on, so forth. It will take some experimentation to find out which (if any) of these services are able to avoid using MIME attachments and just uuencode files into the body of the message. And then, it's still a quick Perl hack away for you or a geekier friend to produce a filter turns MIME attachments into inlined uuencode...
I used to do this a long time ago, with (of all things) dial-up WWIVnet. Send a carefully-prepared email, wait a few days, get the data you've asked for. I imagine it's probably a great deal quicker than that these days.
If the file is signed and verified and whatnot, and I want to post it to The Pirate Bay, why in the fuck would I send personally-identifiable cryptographic information along with it?
Security envelopes like that only work if everyone plays the game, and that's just not going to happen. I'd strip the MP3s (or AACs, here, as in iTunes) down to their musical data and send them on their way.
For that matter, I'd strip everything identifiable even if I didn't plan on redistributing the files: It's supposed to be music, not a fucking paper trail.
Sure - a CRT is heavy, and it contains a lot of lead -- the front face (which is thick enough to withstand the near-perfect vacuum inside), at least, is made of leaded glass. It's a radiation shield to keep people from glowing in the dark after they've used the computer.
But, you see, they're not recovering any lead from the CRT itself, which would be a very difficult task indeed. They're only recovering it from the circuit boards which support the CRT. Specifically, they're melting the solder off of the boards.
Which, I must say, isn't very bloody much lead. If you've seen the inside of a modern (or low-end) CRT monitor, you'd understand that there just aren't many circuit boards in there.
And, sure: Fancier or older monitors tend to have more components inside, and therefore more solder. A decade and a half ago, I had a (fancy, old, heavy) 15" Viewsonic 5e which had circuit boards covering the entirety of both sides and the bottom of the monitor chassis, all stuffed full of components, but even then there was certainly far less than a pound of lead solder in use. (I'd dig up a reference, but everyone here should be familiar with raw solder and printed circuit boards to understand my point.)
I'm not arguing that unsafe recycling of CRT monitors does not represent a hazard. I'm simply trying to state the hazard for what it is, instead of fearmongering with lies about the quantities involved.
Your argument is successful in that I'm actually beginning to believe you.
Thank you for your continued and instructive rebuttals.
That said, I welcome the day when database systems are more resilient to failure. Perhaps the rise of SSDs, with their increasingly fast access times, will allow future database systems to eliminate some of the performance considerations which are currently in place to deal with the slowness of disks, and enable transaction-level safety from sudden and unforeseen crashes.
What crazy moon world do you live in where people only ever play music on one device?
I've got an RCA DVD player in the bedroom which plays MP3, but not AAC. My Rio Volt plays MP3 CDs and OGG CDs, but not AACs. One car does have an AAC-capable player, the other car does not.
Both mine and my wife's iPods support AAC, and so does the PS3, but our son's solid-state Creative player does not.
And so on, and so forth. The only thing these players all have in common is that if you give them an MP3 with reasonably not-broken ID3 tags, it generally will play it just fine. I can't do this with OGG, or FLAC, or AAC. It's hard enough to try to keep a good, organized music library online, without having to fuck with format incompatibilities on top of it.
Reliable systems are built to withstand problems. A database which crashes hard because of a kernel bug or a hardware failure, or (gasp!) an inopportune snapshot is a broken database.
That I accept that most or all databases are broken in this fashion, and that there are good and simple methods to work around this problem (for the purpose of backing them up) does not somehow make them less broken.
In that case, please allow me to submit that the database is broken.
Snapshots are a frozen moment in time. Failing, under any circumstances, to be able to recover a working database from a snapshot, is the same as failing to recover a working database after hardware or power failure or an obscure kernel bug crashes the system.
Yank on it sometime (in a big, open parking lot with lots of room). If you've never done this before, you'll be amazed at how little stopping power it offers before the rear wheels lock up, and how difficult it is to modulate it so that the rear wheels begin rotating again.
Now, try to turn with the rear wheels locked up. You'll look like a rally racer with your sideways driving antics, but that's not very likely to prevent an accident in a surprise traffic situation.
I consider myself a skilled driver. I understand, and use, threshold braking, weight transfer, and other little nuances that most are oblivious to. Nevertheless, I wasted a pair of new front tires once in dry weather when I executed a panic stop without ABS at about 60mph. Front wheels locked, stayed that way for a bit, and by the time I'd gotten around to modulating the brakes the tires had a nice set of flat spots burned into them.
Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud is the noise of the flat spots hitting pavement afterward.
Even in Ohio, we're allowed to run studded tires from November 1 to April 15. I'm looking at buying either two or four of them when the Blizzaks wear out on my 325i.
I don't think studs will help much in fresh, deep snow, at least on this car. The problem there seems to be more related to ground clearance than traction -- the undercarriage seems to float on top of the snow, and the tires don't have enough weight on top of them to grab anything meaningful. (I've considered mounting some sort of plow blade to the front, and/or installing rubber wedges in the coil springs to prop up the suspension, but generally I'm pretty happy to stay home when there's 8" of snow on the ground...)
On hard pack or ice, though, studs can't be beat. They're noisy, sure, and they tear up roads, but they work great and don't fail suddenly like chains or cables do.
Just about any problem is easy, given sufficient funding.
Our own backup solution at work (we don't have much data, and daily is plenty frequent enough) uses 2.5" Seagate IDE drives in (I kid you not) $6.00 Rosewill USB 2.0 external enclosures. Why? Well, it turns out that it works. I tested it, and tested it, and tested it some more.
Not a problem yet. Daily incrementals take a few minutes; weekly bare-metal backups take a few minutes more. At least one complete and recent backup set is always off site, and at least two are on site. Worst case should be that no more than 24 hours of data is lost, unless a backup drive fails too, in which case we're back 48 hours...which is good enough for what we're doing. At least, restores only take a few minutes to complete, and should work on any hardware which is reasonably similar to the ML330 server we're using (which we also keep a spare of).
It wasn't exactly cheap, since I got paid hourly to test, retest, fuck with it, devise problems, try to break it, so on, so forth, but it works brilliantly.
But as far as the boss is concerned, it WAS easy -- all he had to do was approve the plan and write the checks.
For the past few years, I've used a Logitech V270 Bluetooth mouse with my laptop. It's just awesome -- fast enough to avoid getting confused in games, accurate enough that I don't get angry with it when using Photoshop, small enough that it fits into the laptop bag easily, large enough that it's easy to use, and the batteries last long enough that they go for about six months. And it was cheap: About $30, IIRC.
Other neat tricks: The mouse will operate just fine on a single AA battery. There's room for two, of course, but it only needs one. And range is awesome; something like 40 feet between a V270 and the Dell Bluetooth adapter built into my Inspiron 6000. No software needed, it just acts like a regular Bluetooth mouse with whatever OS you use.
Downsides: Apparently it is too good of a product; Logitech has discontinued it.
In the early days of television and radio, the above is exactly how regular advertising was done.
You mean for less than a minute or so, after each hour-long program? Because that's about all of the third-party "advertising" I ever see on PBS. Common television ads, these days, take up a third of the program slot. PBS ads are more like 1/60th.
The machine came with XP Pro. I ran it that way for a year or two, and installed Vista Business a few weeks after it was released.
It's as fair a comparison as any.
It works fine. Suspending and resuming works more reliably than it ever did with XP. And Vista's firewall (which works differently for different wireless SSIDs -- perfect for a portable machine that pops up on various random networks) and start menu are vastly superior -- superior enough that, for me, it's worth any extra pain involved. Which, really, there isn't any of. (At least, once Readyboost is turned off.)
blowjobs for people with overly-stressed lifestyles
Speaking as someone who has been married for what sometimes increasingly seems like too long, allow me to say: Stress was far more manageable when blowjobs were more frequent.
YMMV, but in my experience, you don't miss it 'til it's gone.
Am I the only one who noticed that they forgot to use the green-screen chroma-key on the Zboard? I mean, for fuck's sake: The hard part is already done. All they would have had to do is take the stock photo, and turn everything green transparent.
In fact, this makes me wonder: Since they didn't take their own photos, did they even actually touch any of the keyboards in question? Or did they just take a look at the press kit and write about what they figured the keyboard ought to be like?
I tend to think it's like the "Do I need an FPU" question in the days of the 80286, 80386SX, and 80486SX.
The answer is, obviously: Of course you do, if it makes what you'd like to be doing any faster than it might be without a FPU.
That said: Vista works fine, on my almost-4-year-old laptop, with a not-so-special ATI X300 graphics chip and its not-so-spectacular-these-days 1.83GHz Pentium-M. Just fucking fine. With Aero. With only two gigs ($30?) of RAM. I like the prettiness, just as I do with Compiz on my Ubuntu machine.
Of course, Vista works better on my SLI nVidia 9800GT, Q6600 desktop box, for sure. But not so much that I really prefer one over the other for anything but games.
Agreed, absolutely. And nevermind the whole slew of odd, specialty, limited-run, or hand-built cars which use Ford, GM, BMW, Honda, VW, or whoever else's engine, or just about any professional race car.
There's nothing wrong with any of this: If I own an engine, I can use it for whatever I want. I can even build something around it, and (gasp!) sell it.
Likewise, if I own a copy of OS X, I can use it for whatever I want. I can even build something around it, and (gasp!) sell it.
At this point, I think it's worth mentioning the following:
If men went around saying: "I don't know what I'd do without mine" when someone mentioned the word "penis," it seems likely to me that some woman somewhere would find something insulting to say in retort.
Photos taken with infrared film won't be described in a camera shop as being "black and white," but simply IR. The shades presented are related to the object's reflectivity at infrared, not with visible (white) light. X-ray photos aren't black and white, either - the shades grey in an x-ray photo have nothing at all to do with the color of the objects being x-rayed.
Black and white film, along with black and white TV, are both obviously different from these -- they both work with white light.
And this, boys and girls, is why we don't buy Apple products.
Or anything else proprietary, for that matter. Especially for desktops. (Laptops get a bit of exception here, on the basis that they're all finicky little pricks by default.)
Were it a parts-built desktop PC with after-warranty bad caps (raise your hand if you haven't seen an Athlon XP box with bad caps), it'd have been fairly easy and inexpensive to replace the motherboard with something different of newer design.
Alas, the 20" iMac G5 (which sounds like a rather nice computer) rots. And since all available boards for it seem to have the same design fault, nobody will ever fix it.
Slashdot Mirror
PC Power & Cooling, back in the day, used to have a full-sized AT power supply with a built-in battery backup. We had one at work, around 1996 or so. You could kick the mains cord out of the back, and the computer never noticed.
Neat idea, I suppose, but nobody cared enough about it to buy enough for it to stay alive.
There's still lots of ways to access stuff online via email.
FTP by mail, web browsing by mail, so on, so forth. It will take some experimentation to find out which (if any) of these services are able to avoid using MIME attachments and just uuencode files into the body of the message. And then, it's still a quick Perl hack away for you or a geekier friend to produce a filter turns MIME attachments into inlined uuencode...
I used to do this a long time ago, with (of all things) dial-up WWIVnet. Send a carefully-prepared email, wait a few days, get the data you've asked for. I imagine it's probably a great deal quicker than that these days.
Oh. You and your vagina are excused, m'lady. Apologies for any interruption in your rant.
Pardon me for playing Captain Obvious here, but:
If the file is signed and verified and whatnot, and I want to post it to The Pirate Bay, why in the fuck would I send personally-identifiable cryptographic information along with it?
Security envelopes like that only work if everyone plays the game, and that's just not going to happen. I'd strip the MP3s (or AACs, here, as in iTunes) down to their musical data and send them on their way.
For that matter, I'd strip everything identifiable even if I didn't plan on redistributing the files: It's supposed to be music, not a fucking paper trail.
Sure - a CRT is heavy, and it contains a lot of lead -- the front face (which is thick enough to withstand the near-perfect vacuum inside), at least, is made of leaded glass. It's a radiation shield to keep people from glowing in the dark after they've used the computer.
But, you see, they're not recovering any lead from the CRT itself, which would be a very difficult task indeed. They're only recovering it from the circuit boards which support the CRT. Specifically, they're melting the solder off of the boards.
Which, I must say, isn't very bloody much lead. If you've seen the inside of a modern (or low-end) CRT monitor, you'd understand that there just aren't many circuit boards in there.
And, sure: Fancier or older monitors tend to have more components inside, and therefore more solder. A decade and a half ago, I had a (fancy, old, heavy) 15" Viewsonic 5e which had circuit boards covering the entirety of both sides and the bottom of the monitor chassis, all stuffed full of components, but even then there was certainly far less than a pound of lead solder in use. (I'd dig up a reference, but everyone here should be familiar with raw solder and printed circuit boards to understand my point.)
I'm not arguing that unsafe recycling of CRT monitors does not represent a hazard. I'm simply trying to state the hazard for what it is, instead of fearmongering with lies about the quantities involved.
For fuck's sake: With the price of lead being what it is, if there really were 7 pounds of it recoverable lead in a CRT monitor, we would not have this problem in China. We'd have it right here in the States, with scrappers profitably burning the lead out of monitors right in their own back yards for a rate of $3.50-21.00 per display.
Interesting points.
Your argument is successful in that I'm actually beginning to believe you.
Thank you for your continued and instructive rebuttals.
That said, I welcome the day when database systems are more resilient to failure. Perhaps the rise of SSDs, with their increasingly fast access times, will allow future database systems to eliminate some of the performance considerations which are currently in place to deal with the slowness of disks, and enable transaction-level safety from sudden and unforeseen crashes.
At least, I can hope.
What crazy moon world do you live in where people only ever play music on one device?
I've got an RCA DVD player in the bedroom which plays MP3, but not AAC. My Rio Volt plays MP3 CDs and OGG CDs, but not AACs. One car does have an AAC-capable player, the other car does not.
Both mine and my wife's iPods support AAC, and so does the PS3, but our son's solid-state Creative player does not.
And so on, and so forth. The only thing these players all have in common is that if you give them an MP3 with reasonably not-broken ID3 tags, it generally will play it just fine. I can't do this with OGG, or FLAC, or AAC. It's hard enough to try to keep a good, organized music library online, without having to fuck with format incompatibilities on top of it.
It is broken.
Things really should not be so fragile.
Reliable systems are built to withstand problems. A database which crashes hard because of a kernel bug or a hardware failure, or (gasp!) an inopportune snapshot is a broken database.
That I accept that most or all databases are broken in this fashion, and that there are good and simple methods to work around this problem (for the purpose of backing them up) does not somehow make them less broken.
In that case, please allow me to submit that the database is broken.
Snapshots are a frozen moment in time. Failing, under any circumstances, to be able to recover a working database from a snapshot, is the same as failing to recover a working database after hardware or power failure or an obscure kernel bug crashes the system.
Things should not be so fragile.
Yeah, sure. You can stop with the hand brake.
Slowly. With mediocre control.
Yank on it sometime (in a big, open parking lot with lots of room). If you've never done this before, you'll be amazed at how little stopping power it offers before the rear wheels lock up, and how difficult it is to modulate it so that the rear wheels begin rotating again.
Now, try to turn with the rear wheels locked up. You'll look like a rally racer with your sideways driving antics, but that's not very likely to prevent an accident in a surprise traffic situation.
ABS also saves money.
I consider myself a skilled driver. I understand, and use, threshold braking, weight transfer, and other little nuances that most are oblivious to. Nevertheless, I wasted a pair of new front tires once in dry weather when I executed a panic stop without ABS at about 60mph. Front wheels locked, stayed that way for a bit, and by the time I'd gotten around to modulating the brakes the tires had a nice set of flat spots burned into them.
Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud is the noise of the flat spots hitting pavement afterward.
This doesn't happen with ABS.
Illegal in parts of Canada?
Even in Ohio, we're allowed to run studded tires from November 1 to April 15. I'm looking at buying either two or four of them when the Blizzaks wear out on my 325i.
I don't think studs will help much in fresh, deep snow, at least on this car. The problem there seems to be more related to ground clearance than traction -- the undercarriage seems to float on top of the snow, and the tires don't have enough weight on top of them to grab anything meaningful. (I've considered mounting some sort of plow blade to the front, and/or installing rubber wedges in the coil springs to prop up the suspension, but generally I'm pretty happy to stay home when there's 8" of snow on the ground...)
On hard pack or ice, though, studs can't be beat. They're noisy, sure, and they tear up roads, but they work great and don't fail suddenly like chains or cables do.
Can't these problems generally solved with snapshots (in FreeBSD and Linux LVM lingo) or shadow copies (in Windows parlance)?
Just about any problem is easy, given sufficient funding.
Our own backup solution at work (we don't have much data, and daily is plenty frequent enough) uses 2.5" Seagate IDE drives in (I kid you not) $6.00 Rosewill USB 2.0 external enclosures. Why? Well, it turns out that it works. I tested it, and tested it, and tested it some more.
Not a problem yet. Daily incrementals take a few minutes; weekly bare-metal backups take a few minutes more. At least one complete and recent backup set is always off site, and at least two are on site. Worst case should be that no more than 24 hours of data is lost, unless a backup drive fails too, in which case we're back 48 hours...which is good enough for what we're doing. At least, restores only take a few minutes to complete, and should work on any hardware which is reasonably similar to the ML330 server we're using (which we also keep a spare of).
It wasn't exactly cheap, since I got paid hourly to test, retest, fuck with it, devise problems, try to break it, so on, so forth, but it works brilliantly.
But as far as the boss is concerned, it WAS easy -- all he had to do was approve the plan and write the checks.
Here's a Bluetooth mouse review for you, then:
For the past few years, I've used a Logitech V270 Bluetooth mouse with my laptop. It's just awesome -- fast enough to avoid getting confused in games, accurate enough that I don't get angry with it when using Photoshop, small enough that it fits into the laptop bag easily, large enough that it's easy to use, and the batteries last long enough that they go for about six months. And it was cheap: About $30, IIRC.
Other neat tricks: The mouse will operate just fine on a single AA battery. There's room for two, of course, but it only needs one. And range is awesome; something like 40 feet between a V270 and the Dell Bluetooth adapter built into my Inspiron 6000. No software needed, it just acts like a regular Bluetooth mouse with whatever OS you use.
Downsides: Apparently it is too good of a product; Logitech has discontinued it.
In the early days of television and radio, the above is exactly how regular advertising was done.
You mean for less than a minute or so, after each hour-long program? Because that's about all of the third-party "advertising" I ever see on PBS. Common television ads, these days, take up a third of the program slot. PBS ads are more like 1/60th.
I like 'em just fine.
The machine came with XP Pro. I ran it that way for a year or two, and installed Vista Business a few weeks after it was released.
It's as fair a comparison as any.
It works fine. Suspending and resuming works more reliably than it ever did with XP. And Vista's firewall (which works differently for different wireless SSIDs -- perfect for a portable machine that pops up on various random networks) and start menu are vastly superior -- superior enough that, for me, it's worth any extra pain involved. Which, really, there isn't any of. (At least, once Readyboost is turned off.)
blowjobs for people with overly-stressed lifestyles
Speaking as someone who has been married for what sometimes increasingly seems like too long, allow me to say: Stress was far more manageable when blowjobs were more frequent.
YMMV, but in my experience, you don't miss it 'til it's gone.
Am I the only one who noticed that they forgot to use the green-screen chroma-key on the Zboard? I mean, for fuck's sake: The hard part is already done. All they would have had to do is take the stock photo, and turn everything green transparent.
In fact, this makes me wonder: Since they didn't take their own photos, did they even actually touch any of the keyboards in question? Or did they just take a look at the press kit and write about what they figured the keyboard ought to be like?
Whatever, kids.
I tend to think it's like the "Do I need an FPU" question in the days of the 80286, 80386SX, and 80486SX.
The answer is, obviously: Of course you do, if it makes what you'd like to be doing any faster than it might be without a FPU.
That said: Vista works fine, on my almost-4-year-old laptop, with a not-so-special ATI X300 graphics chip and its not-so-spectacular-these-days 1.83GHz Pentium-M. Just fucking fine. With Aero. With only two gigs ($30?) of RAM. I like the prettiness, just as I do with Compiz on my Ubuntu machine.
Of course, Vista works better on my SLI nVidia 9800GT, Q6600 desktop box, for sure. But not so much that I really prefer one over the other for anything but games.
So what?
So your contribution, then, is noise.
But this noise does not affect the signal, which is still there. It's just harder to find.
Nobody ever said mining a mountain of data like this would be a trivial task.
Agreed, absolutely. And nevermind the whole slew of odd, specialty, limited-run, or hand-built cars which use Ford, GM, BMW, Honda, VW, or whoever else's engine, or just about any professional race car.
There's nothing wrong with any of this: If I own an engine, I can use it for whatever I want. I can even build something around it, and (gasp!) sell it.
Likewise, if I own a copy of OS X, I can use it for whatever I want. I can even build something around it, and (gasp!) sell it.
At this point, I think it's worth mentioning the following:
If men went around saying: "I don't know what I'd do without mine" when someone mentioned the word "penis," it seems likely to me that some woman somewhere would find something insulting to say in retort.
Therefore, this all sounds like fair play to me.
*shrug*
Depends on the film.
Photos taken with infrared film won't be described in a camera shop as being "black and white," but simply IR. The shades presented are related to the object's reflectivity at infrared, not with visible (white) light. X-ray photos aren't black and white, either - the shades grey in an x-ray photo have nothing at all to do with the color of the objects being x-rayed.
Black and white film, along with black and white TV, are both obviously different from these -- they both work with white light.
And this, boys and girls, is why we don't buy Apple products.
Or anything else proprietary, for that matter. Especially for desktops. (Laptops get a bit of exception here, on the basis that they're all finicky little pricks by default.)
Were it a parts-built desktop PC with after-warranty bad caps (raise your hand if you haven't seen an Athlon XP box with bad caps), it'd have been fairly easy and inexpensive to replace the motherboard with something different of newer design.
Alas, the 20" iMac G5 (which sounds like a rather nice computer) rots. And since all available boards for it seem to have the same design fault, nobody will ever fix it.
Fun.