Personally, I'm still amazed that, in a nation so plentiful, owing so much of its good fortune to the diversity and quantity of people who just sort of showed up on a boat, so many people have a problem with free immigration.
Absurd and ironic come to mind, but the word which I think best describes this blighted mindset is "disappointing."
Yep. Desk height is oft-overlooked. And it's not exactly a new problem; just one that has been recently ignored.
At work, I found an old, steel typing desk with a laminate top. It's ugly, and it's just barely big enough, but it puts my laptop at about the right height for my arms once I prop up the back of the machine with a couple of CD jewel cases.
I've solved the problem at home by using a fancy keyboard drawer. It clamps the keyboard into a platform which lets it change elevation, tilt, turn, and slide in and out. Solid steel, so it is particularly stable.
Works fantastic.
I haven't seen any for sale in a decade or more, unfortunately, and it was rather expensive way back then. The current trend seems to be to include a mouse platform with the drawer, and I'm guessing that the tilt mechanism didn't agree with that concept very well...
I think the next desk I buy will simply have adjustable legs.
It is important to note, at this point, that McDonald's (around here, at least) has started installing the cream and sugar into the coffee cup themselves. There is therefore not much reason to remove the lid anymore, except (quite ironically) to let the scalding brown liquid cool down a little quicker.
Requiring me to properly dispose of something I received in the mail, unordered, is also not something that a sender can do.
For that matter, requiring people to do anything at all, ever, is pretty much a non-starter unless you're collecting taxes, serving a warrant, or issuing a summons.
It costs me money to get rid of trash, and it takes time for me to throw it away. (Yes, yes. Not very bloody much money, and not very much time. But an infinite multiple of zero, nonetheless.)
Imagine, if you will: Suppose I send you a package in the mail. It has a label on the outside with several paragraphs of terms and conditions, followed by "If you don't agree to these terms, you must properly dispose of this package immediately or face a fine of up to $250,000 and 5 years in jail."
If [insert RIAA member here] notices that I am a program director at a radio station and sends me a promo CD in the mail with my name on it, then it's mine. I can listen to it, sell it, throw it out, give it away, copy it to my iPod, dupe it for the car stereo, and set it on fire. About the only thing I can't legally do is give a copy to a third party (in violation of copyright law).
Merely receiving something in the mail does not obligate me to do anything that the sender asks. If the sender wants it returned, that's fine; they can want it all week and it'll still never happen.
I mean, imagine it if you will, AC: Suppose I sent you a CD with a label on it which said "Please return to avoid a $250,000 fine, 5 years in jail, or both." Worse, suppose such a CD gets lost in the mail.
Either way, you don't have to do a thing. Were things any other way, we'd see huge numbers of positively ugly scams circulating the USPS, where by inaction alone, simple homeowners would be victimized by their own fucking mail.
(I'm sure that one of Slashdot's resident lawyers can come up with some fancy polysyllabic Latin verbiage to exactly describe this non-problem, but for now you'll all have to grasp this concept without it having any specific title.)
I think the most obvious danger would be someone taking a knife to the skin to break into the car and hotwire it.
All that does is save a thief from looking around for a brick.
And, having slashed the bodywork apart, they'll still have to climb through/between the structural members of the car, which will remain metal.
And, THEN, they'll have the chore of hotwiring a BMW, which is easily among the most nontrivial cars to do that with.[1]
Honestly, I think brick-through-the-window is a faster method.
[1]: I spent several days reading schematics and researching the topic on Google, trying to learn how to hotwire my own 1995 BMW 325i without replacing or adding any substantial parts, in an attempt to install a remote start as cheaply and simply as possible. And while I do consider myself somewhat talented in the art, I failed miserably.
Ended up needing to buy a spare BMW key (which requires two trips to the dealer, along with the car's registration and matching photo ID).
This key now sits in a box inside of the dashboard, with a coil of wire wrapped around it to act as an antenna, and with the metal shaft of the key (the business end) cut off and discarded. A relay, controlled by the remote start box, switches between the new (additional) coil and the one which is at the ignition switch. This allows the remote starter to satisfy the car's electronic controls -- each key has a unique, RFID-esque element in it, and the car will only run if the correct key is in the ignition.
There are replacement chips for the car's ECM available which can remove this functionality (called EWS), but you've got to get under the hood to do it and the chips themselves are model-specific.
But even then, there's the trick lock cylinder on the ignition switch which freewheels if the tumblers don't get set right, so it resists conventional lock picking and screwdriver attacks very well. Plus the usual gamut of mechanical and electrical interlocks, like: Can't shift from park without key switched on. Can't shift from park without brake pedal depressed. Can't turn steering wheel with key switched off. And so on. Some of these are more interdependent than usual: You can't activate brake pedal shift interlock without having car switched on, because (somewhat atypically) the brake lights don't work without the ignition switch turned on. And on top of all that, it is also possible to set up the car so that it is necessary to enter a code number into the computer in the dashboard before the car will run, such that even physical possession of a valid key won't necessarily enable stealing a BMW without additional (nontrivial) work.
Yadda, yadda, yadda. You're getting the point. Merely having access to the inside of a 13-year-old BMW does not mean that it's suddenly easy to steal; I can't imagine what tricks they'd come up with for a fabric car if it were ever to hit production.
(I was going to moderate in this thread, but decided to post instead. Would someone please bump up this comment?)
It takes a lot of energy to spin up a flywheel so that it has a useful amount of energy for acceleration, sure - nothing is free. OP's point is that it takes less energy to use a flywheel for acceleration than batteries, and that the flywheel can weigh less.
It's all about efficiency, and for that, flywheel wins. At least in theory.
Meanwhile, over here in reality, these discussions cleverly ignore the fact that nobody has a car with flywheel storage on the market, while electric hybrids with battery storage have been relatively available and affordable for years.
Thank you for taking the time to delineate those fine points. I agree with nearly all of them.
In fact, a little over a week ago, I bought a lovely 550-series 52" Samsung LCD. The PS3 looks fantastic on it now that the monoprice HDMI cables have shown up. It's connected to a not-shabby audio system comprised of some fun and/or vintage stuff from Rotel, Ashly, and Heil, and a unique subwoofer of my own design that I really should get around to seeing about patenting some day.
My point was strictly about money. The assertion that it is cheaper to for friends to watch rented movies in a personal home theater than it is for those friends to go out to a movie is one that I just don't follow -- personally, I've got a fair bit of cash wrapped around some of the items in my living room (ala "home theater" in 2008-speak).
I never expect this stuff to pay for itself. They're TOYS, dammit, not investments.
It's a lot cheaper for 5-10 of my friends to chip in for a rental DVD than for each of us to pay for movie tickets these days.
I'm not too good at math, so help me out: How many times does this have to happen before your home theater (including original purchase, time/money for installation and periodic setup, wear and tear, preventative maintenance, taxes, loss of use of part of your house, and popcorn) begins to pay for itself?
Just curious. Because it seems to me that until you've reached that point, you've saved nothing.
CDs use forward error correction which is supposed to be able to accommodate a scratch of up to 1mm width, by design. It wouldn't make a lick of difference which side the scratch were on, as long as there are no delamination or oxidation issues in the event of a label-side scratch. If it's less than 1mm, the error is totally correctable. All bets are off when there are multiple scratches near eachother, as from sandpaper.
I'm guessing they didn't do the sandwich thing on CDs because it's almost certainly a lot cheaper to spray some lacquer on one side of one disc at atmospheric pressure, than to try to glue two discs together under a vacuum. DVDs kind of fell into a sandwich configuration by default, since the format was intended to be double-sided from the beginning.
It takes about 3 minutes of my time (including scribbling a label on the disc with a Sharpie) to dupe a DVD. It takes the computer between 20 minutes and a couple of hours, depending on a few things like quality options and the condition of the source material.
Note the distinction between human time and machine time. I don't need to sit and babysit the computer while it rips a DVD, nor (with the abundance of cheap RAM and CPU power these days) does it interrupt my other computer activities.
It goes like this:
1. Decide to dupe a DVD. 2. Insert DVD. 3. Load DVD Shrink. 4. Wait for DVD Shrink to get done with its first-pass analysis (I can do other things during this time, but if I'm being impatient it takes about 2 minutes to finish this step). 5. Remove Spanish, French, and other non-English content 6. Remove noise from menus (!). 6a (optional). Tweak compression ratios to shrink the trailers and credits more, and the main movie less. 7. Push the go button 8. Label and insert blank DVD into other drive. 9. Return in an hour or so to find one freshly-burned DVD.
Blu-ray is more scratch-resistant than DVDs. There is a hard coating covering the important side of the disc, which is designed to resist scratching better than the polycarbonate plastic that the discs themselves (Blu-ray, DVD, and CD) are made of.
I believe that you are being truthful and that your problems are real (but that may just be an indication that Adolf's Third Law is in effect), however:
I work at a small shop with about 40 Dell computers (none of them server hardware, alas). These range from Optiplexes to Precisions to Inspirons to Dimensions to whatever-the-fuck they've got on sale for $300 this week. We've never had to call Dell support. Not once. Nadda. Nit. Zilch. Other than feeding them more RAM periodically and replacing a couple of fans and power supplies, the same machines that were running when I joined the company 4 years ago are still humming away just fine.
Now: I have called Dell Support a couple of times, personally, for an Inspiron 6000 that I own, whose power supply got left in the path of a flood (read: was in a river for three days), and whose display bezel broke at the hinge a few months later (after 3 good years of hard use). They sent parts for all of those things, including a new LCD panel, without any real effort on my part to persuade them to do so. (The machine does have an extended warranty; as expensive as the computer was back then, having protection against being drop-kicked into a busy street seemed like a good idea, and it has paid for itself.)
Speaking as a flood victim (not Katrina, but I did experience 7 floods in the past year) who just spent a huge sum of money (which I do not have) to get the fuck away from water, let me just say that NO homeowners policy in the US covers floods. It is plain in the verbiage of the policy. If you don't believe me, go have a look at your own insurance declarations.
Also, speaking as a practical person with an engineering mindset: living below or near sea level, right next to an ocean which is prone to hurricanes. without flood insurance is fucking stupid.
That said: Floods have exactly nothing to do with burglaries.
And so, insurance is cheap. It really does tend to pay for itself if/when you are stolen from, as long as you have reasonable documentation to show your loss. And unlike cameras, attack dogs (real or virtual), and shotguns, insurance will generally go a long way toward replacing your stuff. Cameras can be foiled (wear a mask, or just a low-brimmed cap), dogs can be easily bribed/killed, and shotgun-wielding home owners can be disarmed. Insurance helps picks up this slack.
I read that as "I found this picture of something similar (but totally fucking different), and need to concoct a difficult-to-grok sentence in order to get it past the Firehose."
People are always more likely to post negative opinions than praise, simply because if they were perfectly happy with a product they'd not have anything at all to complain about.
And, perhaps strangely, the better and more popular an item is, the more people who will crawl out of the woodwork to shout about what an abomination it is...
Verizon, for one, is known to have special firmware in many of their phones, with various things turned on, off, added, removed, or broken. This doesn't mean they "make their own phones," but it's a more severe issue than carrier lock by itself.
My statements are true. If you do not understand them, then please ask for clarification. If you'd like to refute them, feel free to use your anecdotal evidence to do so.
But all you're doing is waving your hands around and talking about "various big boys," as if mere the notion of it growing in popularity obviously means that it is better, while insinuating that the total concept of dissipating waste heat into air is impossible to grasp without actually experiencing a water cooling rig first.
But rather than converse or debate, I do suspect that you're just mad because you think I pissed in your oatmeal. Whatever dude - enjoy your hobby. It's not personal.
I'm an American and I have cheesewire[1], you insensitive clod!
[1]: Not much of it, really -- only about 5 inches worth. But it took years to find those few inches[2] of cheese wire, tensioned across a proper cheese cutter. [2]: Reading my own post here, with portrayal of a profound lack of cheese wire in America seems only to reinforce the notion that your post is not sensitive toward the needs and abilities of American emos, you insensitive clod!
Ok, you've got a brain, so you should also know this:
Given a water cooled rig and an air cooled rig which operate at the same efficiency (in terms of Watts dissipated per Watt of cooling power), water cooling and air cooling perform just about identically as long as things remain inside of the case.
Move the water cooling system's radiator outside of the case, and things start to slant toward water cooling.
Observations:
1. They're equal in cooling capacity, but the air-cooled system is simpler and has fewer single points of failure (and is not wet). 2. Nobody ever seems to put the radiator outside of the box in mass-produced PC-based systems.
Conclusion:
Water cooling is a sham. Bigger/more efficient heatsinks, cooled by air, would bring a more substantial improvement in the quest for quiet, reliable, or rugged computers, than does the current crop of water cooling arrangements.
Slashdot Mirror
Define "never."
Personally, I'm still amazed that, in a nation so plentiful, owing so much of its good fortune to the diversity and quantity of people who just sort of showed up on a boat, so many people have a problem with free immigration.
Absurd and ironic come to mind, but the word which I think best describes this blighted mindset is "disappointing."
Yep. Desk height is oft-overlooked. And it's not exactly a new problem; just one that has been recently ignored.
At work, I found an old, steel typing desk with a laminate top. It's ugly, and it's just barely big enough, but it puts my laptop at about the right height for my arms once I prop up the back of the machine with a couple of CD jewel cases.
I've solved the problem at home by using a fancy keyboard drawer. It clamps the keyboard into a platform which lets it change elevation, tilt, turn, and slide in and out. Solid steel, so it is particularly stable.
Works fantastic.
I haven't seen any for sale in a decade or more, unfortunately, and it was rather expensive way back then. The current trend seems to be to include a mouse platform with the drawer, and I'm guessing that the tilt mechanism didn't agree with that concept very well...
I think the next desk I buy will simply have adjustable legs.
It is important to note, at this point, that McDonald's (around here, at least) has started installing the cream and sugar into the coffee cup themselves. There is therefore not much reason to remove the lid anymore, except (quite ironically) to let the scalding brown liquid cool down a little quicker.
Allow me to be the first to say: It's about fucking time.
Nope.
Requiring me to properly dispose of something I received in the mail, unordered, is also not something that a sender can do.
For that matter, requiring people to do anything at all, ever, is pretty much a non-starter unless you're collecting taxes, serving a warrant, or issuing a summons.
It costs me money to get rid of trash, and it takes time for me to throw it away. (Yes, yes. Not very bloody much money, and not very much time. But an infinite multiple of zero, nonetheless.)
Imagine, if you will: Suppose I send you a package in the mail. It has a label on the outside with several paragraphs of terms and conditions, followed by "If you don't agree to these terms, you must properly dispose of this package immediately or face a fine of up to $250,000 and 5 years in jail."
Hazardous waste disposal just got a lot easier...
Maybe.
Here's the thing:
If [insert RIAA member here] notices that I am a program director at a radio station and sends me a promo CD in the mail with my name on it, then it's mine. I can listen to it, sell it, throw it out, give it away, copy it to my iPod, dupe it for the car stereo, and set it on fire. About the only thing I can't legally do is give a copy to a third party (in violation of copyright law).
Merely receiving something in the mail does not obligate me to do anything that the sender asks. If the sender wants it returned, that's fine; they can want it all week and it'll still never happen.
I mean, imagine it if you will, AC: Suppose I sent you a CD with a label on it which said "Please return to avoid a $250,000 fine, 5 years in jail, or both." Worse, suppose such a CD gets lost in the mail.
Either way, you don't have to do a thing. Were things any other way, we'd see huge numbers of positively ugly scams circulating the USPS, where by inaction alone, simple homeowners would be victimized by their own fucking mail.
(I'm sure that one of Slashdot's resident lawyers can come up with some fancy polysyllabic Latin verbiage to exactly describe this non-problem, but for now you'll all have to grasp this concept without it having any specific title.)
Allow me to be the first here to say: It's about fucking time.
I think the most obvious danger would be someone taking a knife to the skin to break into the car and hotwire it.
All that does is save a thief from looking around for a brick.
And, having slashed the bodywork apart, they'll still have to climb through/between the structural members of the car, which will remain metal.
And, THEN, they'll have the chore of hotwiring a BMW, which is easily among the most nontrivial cars to do that with.[1]
Honestly, I think brick-through-the-window is a faster method.
[1]: I spent several days reading schematics and researching the topic on Google, trying to learn how to hotwire my own 1995 BMW 325i without replacing or adding any substantial parts, in an attempt to install a remote start as cheaply and simply as possible. And while I do consider myself somewhat talented in the art, I failed miserably.
Ended up needing to buy a spare BMW key (which requires two trips to the dealer, along with the car's registration and matching photo ID).
This key now sits in a box inside of the dashboard, with a coil of wire wrapped around it to act as an antenna, and with the metal shaft of the key (the business end) cut off and discarded. A relay, controlled by the remote start box, switches between the new (additional) coil and the one which is at the ignition switch. This allows the remote starter to satisfy the car's electronic controls -- each key has a unique, RFID-esque element in it, and the car will only run if the correct key is in the ignition.
There are replacement chips for the car's ECM available which can remove this functionality (called EWS), but you've got to get under the hood to do it and the chips themselves are model-specific.
But even then, there's the trick lock cylinder on the ignition switch which freewheels if the tumblers don't get set right, so it resists conventional lock picking and screwdriver attacks very well. Plus the usual gamut of mechanical and electrical interlocks, like: Can't shift from park without key switched on. Can't shift from park without brake pedal depressed. Can't turn steering wheel with key switched off. And so on. Some of these are more interdependent than usual: You can't activate brake pedal shift interlock without having car switched on, because (somewhat atypically) the brake lights don't work without the ignition switch turned on. And on top of all that, it is also possible to set up the car so that it is necessary to enter a code number into the computer in the dashboard before the car will run, such that even physical possession of a valid key won't necessarily enable stealing a BMW without additional (nontrivial) work.
Yadda, yadda, yadda. You're getting the point. Merely having access to the inside of a 13-year-old BMW does not mean that it's suddenly easy to steal; I can't imagine what tricks they'd come up with for a fabric car if it were ever to hit production.
(I was going to moderate in this thread, but decided to post instead. Would someone please bump up this comment?)
It takes a lot of energy to spin up a flywheel so that it has a useful amount of energy for acceleration, sure - nothing is free. OP's point is that it takes less energy to use a flywheel for acceleration than batteries, and that the flywheel can weigh less.
It's all about efficiency, and for that, flywheel wins. At least in theory.
Meanwhile, over here in reality, these discussions cleverly ignore the fact that nobody has a car with flywheel storage on the market, while electric hybrids with battery storage have been relatively available and affordable for years.
Thank you for taking the time to delineate those fine points. I agree with nearly all of them.
In fact, a little over a week ago, I bought a lovely 550-series 52" Samsung LCD. The PS3 looks fantastic on it now that the monoprice HDMI cables have shown up. It's connected to a not-shabby audio system comprised of some fun and/or vintage stuff from Rotel, Ashly, and Heil, and a unique subwoofer of my own design that I really should get around to seeing about patenting some day.
My point was strictly about money. The assertion that it is cheaper to for friends to watch rented movies in a personal home theater than it is for those friends to go out to a movie is one that I just don't follow -- personally, I've got a fair bit of cash wrapped around some of the items in my living room (ala "home theater" in 2008-speak).
I never expect this stuff to pay for itself. They're TOYS, dammit, not investments.
It's a lot cheaper for 5-10 of my friends to chip in for a rental DVD than for each of us to pay for movie tickets these days.
I'm not too good at math, so help me out: How many times does this have to happen before your home theater (including original purchase, time/money for installation and periodic setup, wear and tear, preventative maintenance, taxes, loss of use of part of your house, and popcorn) begins to pay for itself?
Just curious. Because it seems to me that until you've reached that point, you've saved nothing.
CDs use forward error correction which is supposed to be able to accommodate a scratch of up to 1mm width, by design. It wouldn't make a lick of difference which side the scratch were on, as long as there are no delamination or oxidation issues in the event of a label-side scratch. If it's less than 1mm, the error is totally correctable. All bets are off when there are multiple scratches near eachother, as from sandpaper.
I'm guessing they didn't do the sandwich thing on CDs because it's almost certainly a lot cheaper to spray some lacquer on one side of one disc at atmospheric pressure, than to try to glue two discs together under a vacuum. DVDs kind of fell into a sandwich configuration by default, since the format was intended to be double-sided from the beginning.
1 hour to pirate a DVD?
Sheeeit.
It takes about 3 minutes of my time (including scribbling a label on the disc with a Sharpie) to dupe a DVD. It takes the computer between 20 minutes and a couple of hours, depending on a few things like quality options and the condition of the source material.
Note the distinction between human time and machine time. I don't need to sit and babysit the computer while it rips a DVD, nor (with the abundance of cheap RAM and CPU power these days) does it interrupt my other computer activities.
It goes like this:
1. Decide to dupe a DVD.
2. Insert DVD.
3. Load DVD Shrink.
4. Wait for DVD Shrink to get done with its first-pass analysis (I can do other things during this time, but if I'm being impatient it takes about 2 minutes to finish this step).
5. Remove Spanish, French, and other non-English content
6. Remove noise from menus (!).
6a (optional). Tweak compression ratios to shrink the trailers and credits more, and the main movie less.
7. Push the go button
8. Label and insert blank DVD into other drive.
9. Return in an hour or so to find one freshly-burned DVD.
No problem. And certainly not an hour, either.
Blu-ray is more scratch-resistant than DVDs. There is a hard coating covering the important side of the disc, which is designed to resist scratching better than the polycarbonate plastic that the discs themselves (Blu-ray, DVD, and CD) are made of.
FYI, FWIW, etc.
I believe that you are being truthful and that your problems are real (but that may just be an indication that Adolf's Third Law is in effect), however:
I work at a small shop with about 40 Dell computers (none of them server hardware, alas). These range from Optiplexes to Precisions to Inspirons to Dimensions to whatever-the-fuck they've got on sale for $300 this week. We've never had to call Dell support. Not once. Nadda. Nit. Zilch. Other than feeding them more RAM periodically and replacing a couple of fans and power supplies, the same machines that were running when I joined the company 4 years ago are still humming away just fine.
Now: I have called Dell Support a couple of times, personally, for an Inspiron 6000 that I own, whose power supply got left in the path of a flood (read: was in a river for three days), and whose display bezel broke at the hinge a few months later (after 3 good years of hard use). They sent parts for all of those things, including a new LCD panel, without any real effort on my part to persuade them to do so. (The machine does have an extended warranty; as expensive as the computer was back then, having protection against being drop-kicked into a busy street seemed like a good idea, and it has paid for itself.)
Yeah. Sure.
Speaking as a flood victim (not Katrina, but I did experience 7 floods in the past year) who just spent a huge sum of money (which I do not have) to get the fuck away from water, let me just say that NO homeowners policy in the US covers floods. It is plain in the verbiage of the policy. If you don't believe me, go have a look at your own insurance declarations.
Also, speaking as a practical person with an engineering mindset: living below or near sea level, right next to an ocean which is prone to hurricanes. without flood insurance is fucking stupid.
That said: Floods have exactly nothing to do with burglaries.
And so, insurance is cheap. It really does tend to pay for itself if/when you are stolen from, as long as you have reasonable documentation to show your loss. And unlike cameras, attack dogs (real or virtual), and shotguns, insurance will generally go a long way toward replacing your stuff. Cameras can be foiled (wear a mask, or just a low-brimmed cap), dogs can be easily bribed/killed, and shotgun-wielding home owners can be disarmed. Insurance helps picks up this slack.
I read that as "I found this picture of something similar (but totally fucking different), and need to concoct a difficult-to-grok sentence in order to get it past the Firehose."
Ah, yes. Adolf's Third Law in action yet again: Western Digital sucks.
People are always more likely to post negative opinions than praise, simply because if they were perfectly happy with a product they'd not have anything at all to complain about.
And, perhaps strangely, the better and more popular an item is, the more people who will crawl out of the woodwork to shout about what an abomination it is...
Verizon, for one, is known to have special firmware in many of their phones, with various things turned on, off, added, removed, or broken. This doesn't mean they "make their own phones," but it's a more severe issue than carrier lock by itself.
My statements are true. If you do not understand them, then please ask for clarification. If you'd like to refute them, feel free to use your anecdotal evidence to do so.
But all you're doing is waving your hands around and talking about "various big boys," as if mere the notion of it growing in popularity obviously means that it is better, while insinuating that the total concept of dissipating waste heat into air is impossible to grasp without actually experiencing a water cooling rig first.
But rather than converse or debate, I do suspect that you're just mad because you think I pissed in your oatmeal. Whatever dude - enjoy your hobby. It's not personal.
I'm an American and I have cheesewire[1], you insensitive clod!
[1]: Not much of it, really -- only about 5 inches worth. But it took years to find those few inches[2] of cheese wire, tensioned across a proper cheese cutter.
[2]: Reading my own post here, with portrayal of a profound lack of cheese wire in America seems only to reinforce the notion that your post is not sensitive toward the needs and abilities of American emos, you insensitive clod!
No, I have not.
Would the basic rules of thermodynamics change if I had?
I think we're all seriously discounting the possibility that the raid array consisted of no fewer than 41 0.1TB drives.
Ok, you've got a brain, so you should also know this:
Given a water cooled rig and an air cooled rig which operate at the same efficiency (in terms of Watts dissipated per Watt of cooling power), water cooling and air cooling perform just about identically as long as things remain inside of the case.
Move the water cooling system's radiator outside of the case, and things start to slant toward water cooling.
Observations:
1. They're equal in cooling capacity, but the air-cooled system is simpler and has fewer single points of failure (and is not wet).
2. Nobody ever seems to put the radiator outside of the box in mass-produced PC-based systems.
Conclusion:
Water cooling is a sham. Bigger/more efficient heatsinks, cooled by air, would bring a more substantial improvement in the quest for quiet, reliable, or rugged computers, than does the current crop of water cooling arrangements.