What's crazy about using 2 gigs of RAM, when it only costs $40?
I've paid more than that to upgrade from 512k to 640k back when I had an XT. Factor for inflation, and 2 gigs is bloody goddamn giving-the-shit-away-as-party-favors fucking dirt cheap.
But the cost of this feature, by itself, is zero: It takes something which is doing nothing (free RAM), and does something with it (prefetching apps).
If the time comes that this RAM is useful for something different, the prefetched data is simply overwritten with whatever that different data is, which takes no more time than writing it into "free" RAM.
I mean: A computer with only half of its RAM in use is a computer with exactly twice as much memory as it needs. You might not be a CS geek, but you seem smart enough that maybe you've had an economics class or two, and can therefore appreciate the value of waste.
You can make a good argument for socialism on necessities like health care, education, road maintenance, etc., etc., but it makes a lot less sense when applied to luxuries. To categorize and treat them in the same way is a mistake.
I don't know where you come from, but in this part of the Unites States, regular office visits and knee surgery are luxuries.
I just thought I'd point that out. I'll let you decide what it means to the rest of your argument.
We're talking about running a redneck beer fridge from lamp cord without anything catching fire, not about sound engineering practices. (If we were, we'd be looking for less than 3% drop, which will require approximately an extension cord of approximately 14 AWG.)
So I'm not going to do any real math here, though I did refer to a couple of charts. (I am by no means an EE, but I do drink plenty of beer...)
In fact, the whole thing can be surmised as follows: If I can run a fridge from a short 20 AWG extension cord without anything catching on fire, then I can also do so with any greater length of 20 AWG wire.
The Frigidaire in my kitchen draws a stated 4.5 Amps. 200 (100x2) feet of 20 AWG cable has a resistance of about 2 Ohms, and a voltage drop at 120V of around 8 or 10 Volts. The extension cord itself will be dissipating about 50 Watts.
50 Watts, spread across 100 feet of poorly-insulated paired copper, shouldn't cause it to become anything more than just barely warm.
Therefore, it probably will work fine (ie: not catch fire).
Peak current (as the compressor starts) will, of course, be much higher than 4.5A, and accordingly so will the voltage drop. But this is only for an instant until things get moving, and shouldn't cause appreciable heating of the conductors.
So, as long as the compressor starts ticking, it'll be fine. And if it doesn't start for some reason, the compressor will overheat and shut itself down until it cools off (which only takes a few seconds, in my experience with stuck compressors).
[ObAnecdote: I'm remodeling a house. The existing electrical wiring and service is total shit, with a couple of 30 Amp fuses running 2200 square feet worth of 14 AWG cloth insulated wire. The fridge (which, of course, is only on-site to keep the beer cold) runs just fine when operating a 6" DeWalt die grinder on the same circuit under heavy load while cutting 4" schedule 40 iron pipes. I haven't measured the voltage, but all of the lights dim substantially and stay dimmed until the grinder stops, and nothing has caught fire yet.]
To tie this back into the context of warning labels: In any case, the redneck beer fridge is self-protecting and safe, and needs no warning label. Further, no such item as a 100' 20 AWG extension cord exists for sale in the US (because it would be unsafe given that one could plug a load of much greater than 4.5 amps into it -- see above about good engineering practices).
Therefore, any such cord would have to be constructed by the beer-drinking redneck himself, and wouldn't have warning labels anyway. The discussion is thus moot.
If you, and GP are right: The sooner the courts blow a hole in the GPL, the better, so that we can get on with the nasty business of moving on to something which cannot suffer in such a fashion.
But you forgot something: When a friend brings their PC/PSP/PS3/Wii/Xbox/iPhone/iPod over, and wants to use it with teh Intarwebs, go ahead and set it up and give them the passphrase and IP assignment, but make sure you destroy your friend before they leave.
You can't allow any chance of your uber-obscurity leaking outside, right? Eventually, you'll eliminate all of your friends, but that has the nice benefit of eliminating the potential leaks.
Naw, better to keep it simple. Don't run as root/admin. Set an unusual password (something other than your SO or child's name is adequate). Set a different, unusual, and lengthy, WAP passphrase. Use the strongest encryption you can with the devices on your network (AES, AES / TKIP, or just TKIP, in order of preference).
Done.
MAC filtering? Disabling DHCP? IP address range hide and seek?
Bullshit. All that does is make it harder for you and the people you trust to use the network. And if I, the creepy dude in the van across the street, get to a point where any of those stupid tricks will start to matter, they won't make any difference at all. If I'm clever enough to get past WAP, then I'm clever enough to clone a MAC address while sniffing past the rest of your security-through-obscurity features.
[And what's all that talk about serial ports? Are we still in 2008, or did we just jump back 10 years?]
Canopy is good for, at most, 14mbps per access point, shared among all the subscribers of that access point. They claim to have sold you 13mbps of that, which isn't always going to be possible on a sector consisting of more than one person.
Which is not to say that it's not plenty fast enough for your purposes. I just want you understand, from one 5-digit UID to another, that they're overselling the bandwidth of that wireless link the very moment that one of your neighbors signs up.
Which is pretty drastic, really. Even cable modems aren't oversold to that extent.
FWIW.
(Other than being slow and expensive, Canopy is pretty awesome. We've got a bunch of seemingly-bulletproof links between structures like grain elevators and water towers, several of which are 14 to 18 miles apart. Maintenance expense has been near zero for the 3 or 4 years we've used it.)
You sure about that, Son? It sounds to me like you've just described one of the more basic problems with the Internet, which has been solved since the 1960s.
It's bigger than that, of course, but I'd like to think that computers these days are clever enough to just, you know, figure it out. Who cares if it is efficient? It's not as if a bargain-basement Core2 machine has no cycles to spare for routing...
The only new problem with the totally-decentralized organization (organism?) is the allotment of addresses, of which there can only be so many.
But it seems that this problem, too, was solved long ago.
Toothbrushes? Gads. That's got to be the finest example of a solution looking for a problem to solve that I've seen in some time. It's not as if it's difficult or impossible to make a sealed vessel with electrical contacts on the outside (see: light bulb, vacuum tube), even if that vessel is plastic (see: LED, gel cell battery), and even if corrosion is an issue (see: brass, stainless steel).
I'd be nice, I suppose, to sync my [$random_device] and charge it without wires. You're right about that.
But then, the whole lack of security (which is proclaimed loudly as being a feature) seems a bit...unnerving. I don't want someone to be able to surreptitiously snag the contacts out of my phone, or the pictures from my camera, or the contents of my PDA just because they managed to get within 3cm of the device. I don't want someone to be able to initiate a connection for any of these things with my whizbang inductive laptop just because I've turned my head for a minute.
Just like I don't want an RFID chip in my credit card, even if it lets me "tap" instead of "swipe".
How will any of this be prevented without some manner of access control, like Bluetooth's pairing ritual?
I have several PCs (one desktop, one old laptop, one ancient laptop) which I've tried to eliminate moving parts from.
The desktop is a machine which I occasionally use through a KVM, which only exists to operate a Soundblaster Live card using (exceptionally fine) KX Audio Driver. This turns an old (and also exceptionally fine), quadraphonic Pioneer receiver into a exquisitely-tweaked biamplification setup for the computer room's audio, while being able to convert to a rather featureful bass guitar amplifier at the push of a button.
The hard drive is gone, its old-skool K6-2 heatsink/fan combo replaced by a huge heatsink from the high-dissipation Socket A days, and its power supply fan replaced with a slow-moving thermostatically-controlled job which should last for decades. Storage is a 2-gigabyte Transcend compact flash card, which seems to contain Windowx XP just fine. (2000 would have worked just as well, but I already had an extra XP license and felt that it might as well be doing something.)
The old laptop is a rather lousy Compaq P166. It sits on my wife's desk for the sole purpose letting her use Thottbot. Again, the hard drive is a 2-gig flash card. It runs some variation of Ubuntu, with Firefox, and that's it. The CPU fan is unmodified, but in this application it's never required to spin anyway.
The ancient laptop is what was once a very high-end (~$3,700) NCR/AT&T 386SLC box with a monochrome VGA screen. There's no floppy drive, no CD drive, and (at this point) no keyboard. Its power supply is a 12VDC wall wart soldered to battery terminals. The CMOS battery died ages ago. The top cover broke into little bits long ago, and has been replaced by a heavy stainless steel and aluminum fabrication bolted to the display hinges. It survived for two days under floodwater without any apparent harm other than a heavy layer of silt over entire motherboard (which it doesn't seem to mind at all). With a 512MB flash card in place of its hard drive, it does fine hanging on the wall displaying a backlit, NTP-synchronized clock. Its only remaining moving parts are the power switch and the contrast control.
At this point, it seems important to note that there is one thing that all of these machines have in common with eachother: They're PCs. They all some combination of expansion, visual output, or human input in order for them to work in their desired capacity. Even the aforementioned Frankenstein laptop needs a PS/2 port, in order to unwedge the BIOS at bootup because of its dead battery.
But a router? It doesn't need these things -- not even the battery. It's got 5 Ethernet ports, which is plenty for my house. They all share the same 100mbps pipe to the CPU, and are only individually addressable by configuring them for VLAN, which is way more than good enough for my cable modem connection at home. It configures just swell with SSH, so it needs no local display or keyboard. And with all that connectivity, it needs no expansion (though I did hack in a 256MB SD card for no particular reason).
And there's one thing it does which your scrap-built m0n0wall box is lacking: WiFi. The WRT54G includes a rather nice dual-diversity 802.11g radio by default, with real antenna connectors and good power output (in case I ever feel like blanketing a city block with WiFi).
I mean, if I were still using a PC as a router (as I did do for the decade between 1995 and 2005), I'd still have to buy an access point/hostap-supported NIC/wireless router in order to use my laptop on the couch.
As I see it, since the WRT54G does all of this stuff for $50, the situation can be looked at in one of two ways: Either the access point was free, or the router was free. Plus, I get to use all of the parts which didn't get used building a PC-based firewall for more interesting projects or spares.
So, let's review: A WRT54G is smaller (more room for real computers), cheaper, better, has lower power consumption (a few do
All of us self-respecting geeks realized, years ago, that it was far cheaper, easier, and better to run OpenWRT/DD-WRT/Alchemy on a WRT54G from Wal-Mart, than to maintain yet-another-fucking-PC at home.
It's a good gig: A Linux box with 5 Ethernet ports and a WiFi radio for ~$50.
Having zero moving parts and negligible power consumption is a big help, too.
All it does is save people from finding and inserting a cable.
But, chances are they'll need to find that cable ANYWAY when it comes tine to charge the device.
Right now, I plug my iPod|Cell phone|PDA|Camera into the USB port and...it does it. No messing with settings, no trying to get them to pair. Everything automatic (or at least as automatic as I can stand).
And, check this out (this is the best part): After it's done transferring, I can simply leave the device connected and...the battery recharges! It just does it. Automatically. By itself.
Finding a specially-equipped Sony Bravia TV onto which to place your specially-equipped Sony Cybershot camera sounds so much easier and cheaper than locating a video cable.
Really it does.
I'm not kidding.
At all.
Not even a little bit.
(Can't we just use documented, open standards like NTSC and DVI for this shit?)
A 15 year old's ears are not yet totally trashed from loud music, traffic, fan noise, driving, and industrial machines. IMHO, a well-spoken kid has a far better chance at having a valid opinion on sonic matters than any of the middle-aged twits which comprise the audiophile press.
Doesn't beer brewing use a non-trivial amount of space?
I mean, right now, the only real estate occupied by my love for beer is one corner of the refrigerator. If I expand much beyond that, the Spousal Acceptance Factor starts turning ugly.
But I do have a useless, small, heated, damp basement. Might this be usable for brewing beer?
Good stuff. I routinely use a similar adapter for data recovery on failing drives. The concept seems to work just fine.
The same Vantec unit is also available from Newegg, but far cheaper.
Or, if one is feeling adventurous and/or wants lots of these adapters without going going broke, there's always Ebay, via which I've always had fantastic good luck ordering insanely inexpensive electronics like this directly from Hong Kong.
So far, importing things from Hong Kong only takes about as long to get here (Ohio) as stuff does from California, and it's cheaper than UPS.
Hit the drives hard with a decent size hammer, a couple of times on each side, just so that anyone can plainly see that the drives are toast and totally useless as computer parts.
After the smashing, just toss 'em in a bucket. When the bucket fills up, take it down to your friendly neighborhood scrap yard. If you're lucky, they'll pay a "dirty aluminum" rate for it. If you're unlucky, they'll pay a miscellaneous scrap rate, which will be considerably lower (around a nickel per pound, here).
Or if you're really adventurous/thrifty, you can break them down into their different constituent metals (keep it simple and just sort into piles of aluminum, zinc, magnetic steel, and nonmagnetic stainless), which will maximize the amount of cash you'll be paid.
Honestly: Nobody wants to invest the time, effort, money, and energy into trying to scavenge data from a physically broken hard drive at the bottom of a scrap hopper without knowing, in advance, what is contained therein.
But if you're really paranoid, you can always yank the platters and melt them into little aluminum ingots first. It just doesn't seem worth the effort for household data . . .
In any event, you can be sure that the drives will, at some point, be recycled into something new.
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What's crazy about using 2 gigs of RAM, when it only costs $40?
I've paid more than that to upgrade from 512k to 640k back when I had an XT. Factor for inflation, and 2 gigs is bloody goddamn giving-the-shit-away-as-party-favors fucking dirt cheap.
Who cares, for fuck's sake?
But the cost of this feature, by itself, is zero: It takes something which is doing nothing (free RAM), and does something with it (prefetching apps).
If the time comes that this RAM is useful for something different, the prefetched data is simply overwritten with whatever that different data is, which takes no more time than writing it into "free" RAM.
I mean: A computer with only half of its RAM in use is a computer with exactly twice as much memory as it needs. You might not be a CS geek, but you seem smart enough that maybe you've had an economics class or two, and can therefore appreciate the value of waste.
Excellent. :)
You can make a good argument for socialism on necessities like health care, education, road maintenance, etc., etc., but it makes a lot less sense when applied to luxuries. To categorize and treat them in the same way is a mistake.
I don't know where you come from, but in this part of the Unites States, regular office visits and knee surgery are luxuries.
I just thought I'd point that out. I'll let you decide what it means to the rest of your argument.
Hogwash.
We're talking about running a redneck beer fridge from lamp cord without anything catching fire, not about sound engineering practices. (If we were, we'd be looking for less than 3% drop, which will require approximately an extension cord of approximately 14 AWG.)
So I'm not going to do any real math here, though I did refer to a couple of charts. (I am by no means an EE, but I do drink plenty of beer...)
In fact, the whole thing can be surmised as follows: If I can run a fridge from a short 20 AWG extension cord without anything catching on fire, then I can also do so with any greater length of 20 AWG wire.
The Frigidaire in my kitchen draws a stated 4.5 Amps. 200 (100x2) feet of 20 AWG cable has a resistance of about 2 Ohms, and a voltage drop at 120V of around 8 or 10 Volts. The extension cord itself will be dissipating about 50 Watts.
50 Watts, spread across 100 feet of poorly-insulated paired copper, shouldn't cause it to become anything more than just barely warm.
Therefore, it probably will work fine (ie: not catch fire).
Peak current (as the compressor starts) will, of course, be much higher than 4.5A, and accordingly so will the voltage drop. But this is only for an instant until things get moving, and shouldn't cause appreciable heating of the conductors.
So, as long as the compressor starts ticking, it'll be fine. And if it doesn't start for some reason, the compressor will overheat and shut itself down until it cools off (which only takes a few seconds, in my experience with stuck compressors).
[ObAnecdote: I'm remodeling a house. The existing electrical wiring and service is total shit, with a couple of 30 Amp fuses running 2200 square feet worth of 14 AWG cloth insulated wire. The fridge (which, of course, is only on-site to keep the beer cold) runs just fine when operating a 6" DeWalt die grinder on the same circuit under heavy load while cutting 4" schedule 40 iron pipes. I haven't measured the voltage, but all of the lights dim substantially and stay dimmed until the grinder stops, and nothing has caught fire yet.]
To tie this back into the context of warning labels: In any case, the redneck beer fridge is self-protecting and safe, and needs no warning label. Further, no such item as a 100' 20 AWG extension cord exists for sale in the US (because it would be unsafe given that one could plug a load of much greater than 4.5 amps into it -- see above about good engineering practices).
Therefore, any such cord would have to be constructed by the beer-drinking redneck himself, and wouldn't have warning labels anyway. The discussion is thus moot.
Ok.
If you, and GP are right: The sooner the courts blow a hole in the GPL, the better, so that we can get on with the nasty business of moving on to something which cannot suffer in such a fashion.
Good thing that the GPL isn't a contract, but just a license, then.
(If it were a contract, it'd have consideration, agreement between parties, acceptance, and all of the other things that valid contracts must have.)
After cleaning out your desk, don't forget to leave your copy of uudecode with the guard.
You're fired.
*sigh*
Would somebody now please put the cat back into the bag, again?
fap fap fap
Remember, kids: In America, downloading movies isn't illegal; uploading them is.
(I'd tell you all how (in a world of BitTorrent) this can be mad to work, but doing so would violate the First and Second Rules, respectively.)
Good advice.
But you forgot something: When a friend brings their PC/PSP/PS3/Wii/Xbox/iPhone/iPod over, and wants to use it with teh Intarwebs, go ahead and set it up and give them the passphrase and IP assignment, but make sure you destroy your friend before they leave.
You can't allow any chance of your uber-obscurity leaking outside, right? Eventually, you'll eliminate all of your friends, but that has the nice benefit of eliminating the potential leaks.
Naw, better to keep it simple. Don't run as root/admin. Set an unusual password (something other than your SO or child's name is adequate). Set a different, unusual, and lengthy, WAP passphrase. Use the strongest encryption you can with the devices on your network (AES, AES / TKIP, or just TKIP, in order of preference).
Done.
MAC filtering? Disabling DHCP? IP address range hide and seek?
Bullshit. All that does is make it harder for you and the people you trust to use the network. And if I, the creepy dude in the van across the street, get to a point where any of those stupid tricks will start to matter, they won't make any difference at all. If I'm clever enough to get past WAP, then I'm clever enough to clone a MAC address while sniffing past the rest of your security-through-obscurity features.
[And what's all that talk about serial ports? Are we still in 2008, or did we just jump back 10 years?]
You're being lied to.
Canopy is good for, at most, 14mbps per access point, shared among all the subscribers of that access point. They claim to have sold you 13mbps of that, which isn't always going to be possible on a sector consisting of more than one person.
Which is not to say that it's not plenty fast enough for your purposes. I just want you understand, from one 5-digit UID to another, that they're overselling the bandwidth of that wireless link the very moment that one of your neighbors signs up.
Which is pretty drastic, really. Even cable modems aren't oversold to that extent.
FWIW.
(Other than being slow and expensive, Canopy is pretty awesome. We've got a bunch of seemingly-bulletproof links between structures like grain elevators and water towers, several of which are 14 to 18 miles apart. Maintenance expense has been near zero for the 3 or 4 years we've used it.)
You sure about that, Son? It sounds to me like you've just described one of the more basic problems with the Internet, which has been solved since the 1960s.
It's bigger than that, of course, but I'd like to think that computers these days are clever enough to just, you know, figure it out. Who cares if it is efficient? It's not as if a bargain-basement Core2 machine has no cycles to spare for routing...
The only new problem with the totally-decentralized organization (organism?) is the allotment of addresses, of which there can only be so many.
But it seems that this problem, too, was solved long ago.
*yawn*
Ah, yes, inductive charging.
Good for pacemakers and stuff, I gather.
Toothbrushes? Gads. That's got to be the finest example of a solution looking for a problem to solve that I've seen in some time. It's not as if it's difficult or impossible to make a sealed vessel with electrical contacts on the outside (see: light bulb, vacuum tube), even if that vessel is plastic (see: LED, gel cell battery), and even if corrosion is an issue (see: brass, stainless steel).
I'd be nice, I suppose, to sync my [$random_device] and charge it without wires. You're right about that.
But then, the whole lack of security (which is proclaimed loudly as being a feature) seems a bit...unnerving. I don't want someone to be able to surreptitiously snag the contacts out of my phone, or the pictures from my camera, or the contents of my PDA just because they managed to get within 3cm of the device. I don't want someone to be able to initiate a connection for any of these things with my whizbang inductive laptop just because I've turned my head for a minute.
Just like I don't want an RFID chip in my credit card, even if it lets me "tap" instead of "swipe".
How will any of this be prevented without some manner of access control, like Bluetooth's pairing ritual?
You preach to the choir.
I have several PCs (one desktop, one old laptop, one ancient laptop) which I've tried to eliminate moving parts from.
The desktop is a machine which I occasionally use through a KVM, which only exists to operate a Soundblaster Live card using (exceptionally fine) KX Audio Driver. This turns an old (and also exceptionally fine), quadraphonic Pioneer receiver into a exquisitely-tweaked biamplification setup for the computer room's audio, while being able to convert to a rather featureful bass guitar amplifier at the push of a button.
The hard drive is gone, its old-skool K6-2 heatsink/fan combo replaced by a huge heatsink from the high-dissipation Socket A days, and its power supply fan replaced with a slow-moving thermostatically-controlled job which should last for decades. Storage is a 2-gigabyte Transcend compact flash card, which seems to contain Windowx XP just fine. (2000 would have worked just as well, but I already had an extra XP license and felt that it might as well be doing something.)
The old laptop is a rather lousy Compaq P166. It sits on my wife's desk for the sole purpose letting her use Thottbot. Again, the hard drive is a 2-gig flash card. It runs some variation of Ubuntu, with Firefox, and that's it. The CPU fan is unmodified, but in this application it's never required to spin anyway.
The ancient laptop is what was once a very high-end (~$3,700) NCR/AT&T 386SLC box with a monochrome VGA screen. There's no floppy drive, no CD drive, and (at this point) no keyboard. Its power supply is a 12VDC wall wart soldered to battery terminals. The CMOS battery died ages ago. The top cover broke into little bits long ago, and has been replaced by a heavy stainless steel and aluminum fabrication bolted to the display hinges. It survived for two days under floodwater without any apparent harm other than a heavy layer of silt over entire motherboard (which it doesn't seem to mind at all). With a 512MB flash card in place of its hard drive, it does fine hanging on the wall displaying a backlit, NTP-synchronized clock. Its only remaining moving parts are the power switch and the contrast control.
At this point, it seems important to note that there is one thing that all of these machines have in common with eachother: They're PCs. They all some combination of expansion, visual output, or human input in order for them to work in their desired capacity. Even the aforementioned Frankenstein laptop needs a PS/2 port, in order to unwedge the BIOS at bootup because of its dead battery.
But a router? It doesn't need these things -- not even the battery. It's got 5 Ethernet ports, which is plenty for my house. They all share the same 100mbps pipe to the CPU, and are only individually addressable by configuring them for VLAN, which is way more than good enough for my cable modem connection at home. It configures just swell with SSH, so it needs no local display or keyboard. And with all that connectivity, it needs no expansion (though I did hack in a 256MB SD card for no particular reason).
And there's one thing it does which your scrap-built m0n0wall box is lacking: WiFi. The WRT54G includes a rather nice dual-diversity 802.11g radio by default, with real antenna connectors and good power output (in case I ever feel like blanketing a city block with WiFi).
I mean, if I were still using a PC as a router (as I did do for the decade between 1995 and 2005), I'd still have to buy an access point/hostap-supported NIC/wireless router in order to use my laptop on the couch.
As I see it, since the WRT54G does all of this stuff for $50, the situation can be looked at in one of two ways: Either the access point was free, or the router was free. Plus, I get to use all of the parts which didn't get used building a PC-based firewall for more interesting projects or spares.
So, let's review: A WRT54G is smaller (more room for real computers), cheaper, better, has lower power consumption (a few do
All of us self-respecting geeks realized, years ago, that it was far cheaper, easier, and better to run OpenWRT/DD-WRT/Alchemy on a WRT54G from Wal-Mart, than to maintain yet-another-fucking-PC at home.
It's a good gig: A Linux box with 5 Ethernet ports and a WiFi radio for ~$50.
Having zero moving parts and negligible power consumption is a big help, too.
All it does is save people from finding and inserting a cable.
But, chances are they'll need to find that cable ANYWAY when it comes tine to charge the device.
Right now, I plug my iPod|Cell phone|PDA|Camera into the USB port and...it does it. No messing with settings, no trying to get them to pair. Everything automatic (or at least as automatic as I can stand).
And, check this out (this is the best part): After it's done transferring, I can simply leave the device connected and...the battery recharges! It just does it. Automatically. By itself.
One step.
Amazing, isn't it?
Finding a specially-equipped Sony Bravia TV onto which to place your specially-equipped Sony Cybershot camera sounds so much easier and cheaper than locating a video cable.
Really it does.
I'm not kidding.
At all.
Not even a little bit.
(Can't we just use documented, open standards like NTSC and DVI for this shit?)
It got you into a world in which SD clearly dominates, and is easily adaptable to your old CF gear by way of adapters.
Don't sweat it. Back in the day, you had a choice between SmartMedia and Compact Flash. You chose well.
Producing 23KHz sine waves at high amplitude is neither difficult nor expensive, and hasn't been for decades.
Why?
A 15 year old's ears are not yet totally trashed from loud music, traffic, fan noise, driving, and industrial machines. IMHO, a well-spoken kid has a far better chance at having a valid opinion on sonic matters than any of the middle-aged twits which comprise the audiophile press.
Doesn't beer brewing use a non-trivial amount of space?
I mean, right now, the only real estate occupied by my love for beer is one corner of the refrigerator. If I expand much beyond that, the Spousal Acceptance Factor starts turning ugly.
But I do have a useless, small, heated, damp basement. Might this be usable for brewing beer?
Good stuff. I routinely use a similar adapter for data recovery on failing drives. The concept seems to work just fine.
The same Vantec unit is also available from Newegg, but far cheaper.
Or, if one is feeling adventurous and/or wants lots of these adapters without going going broke, there's always Ebay, via which I've always had fantastic good luck ordering insanely inexpensive electronics like this directly from Hong Kong.
So far, importing things from Hong Kong only takes about as long to get here (Ohio) as stuff does from California, and it's cheaper than UPS.
How paranoid must one really be?
Hit the drives hard with a decent size hammer, a couple of times on each side, just so that anyone can plainly see that the drives are toast and totally useless as computer parts.
After the smashing, just toss 'em in a bucket. When the bucket fills up, take it down to your friendly neighborhood scrap yard. If you're lucky, they'll pay a "dirty aluminum" rate for it. If you're unlucky, they'll pay a miscellaneous scrap rate, which will be considerably lower (around a nickel per pound, here).
Or if you're really adventurous/thrifty, you can break them down into their different constituent metals (keep it simple and just sort into piles of aluminum, zinc, magnetic steel, and nonmagnetic stainless), which will maximize the amount of cash you'll be paid.
Honestly: Nobody wants to invest the time, effort, money, and energy into trying to scavenge data from a physically broken hard drive at the bottom of a scrap hopper without knowing, in advance, what is contained therein.
But if you're really paranoid, you can always yank the platters and melt them into little aluminum ingots first. It just doesn't seem worth the effort for household data . . .
In any event, you can be sure that the drives will, at some point, be recycled into something new.