While we still appear to disagree (I think the test environment is most important, you think ambient temperature trumps all), the solution to both is simple:
Set the fan at 75%, using software. Measure it in an anechoic chamber at a standardized distance (.5 meters might be appropriate, because it's cheaper to build a smaller anechoic chamber than a larger anechoic chamber), with a reasonably-known configuration (a single video card on a normal-sized motherboard with passive cooling and no other add-on cards).
Or, perhaps the solution is complicated (since the above can be gamed by an AMD or an nVidia by specifying 75% to be particularly, and unusually, quiet):
Put the card in an anechoic chamber with a stable internal temperature, run it with a specified test (Furmark or Q3A or some Crysis demo or whatever), don't manipulate the fan speed in software, and then measure it at a known distance using a consistent technique.
In either case, describe the test arrangement used for the review. For every review, including any temperature data that can be gleaned. In this way, even if the noise measurements aren't directly comparable, they're at least understandable.
Phone call to encryption expert: "Yes, thank you Truecrypt. I will gleefully accept your money and publish an audit."
Next phone call to encryption expert: "Yes, thank you NSA. I will gleefully accept your money and write whatever you tell me to write in my published audit."
(Oh, encryption experts are immune to subterfuge, greed, bottomless debt, double-dipping, and generally being nafarious? I thought that they were just human like the rest of us!)
(And for the record, once one "independent" party accepts money from another party with a dog in the race, they cease being "independent" about the matter at-hand.)
Sound falls of at 6dB per doubling of distance. There's a world of difference between Joe's measurement at 3 inches from the card, and Sherli's measurement at 1M from the card.
And that's just -one- vector for process-induced measurement SNAFU.
Sure, ambient heat (or rather, the speed of the fan, which may or may not be directly related to ambient or any other temperature, depending on yet other test conditions) makes a profound difference. A bigger one? Nope, sorry. Not buying it.
(Oddly enough, the loudspeaker industry standardized on two very similar methods for measuring efficiency many decades ago: Put speaker in anechoic chamber. Put test apparatus one meter in front of speaker, on-axis Drive speaker with 2.83V, or one Watt, of pink noise. Document the result, expressing it as something like 91dB@1W/1M or 91dB@2.83V/1M depending on method. And look ma! Empirical, comparable, repeatable results!)
Noise measurements (all noise measurements, not just those related to PC hardware) are always suspect:
What is the ambient noise level?
What is the test environment? (Is it a well-isolated anechoic chamber, a common desk with a computer near the corner of the room, or is it on the deck of a boat, or on the back of a llama? It makes a huge difference.)
What is the distance between the rig under test and the measurement rig with the microphone?
Is this test rig calibrated? (To what standard?)
What are the properties of the noise? (if it is 57dBa at only 1.5kHz, it is very annoying to me. If it's 57dBa only at 25kHz, it is annoying only to my dog.)
Is the noise different in differing directions?
How do you know?
Did you measure it?
It's all important, lest the resultant number be absolutely unimportant.
Also: Meh. "This blue car sounds better than that other blue car!" is roughly as accurate as a non-descrip "noise measurement" of computer hardware.
Good stuff. I learned something (hydrogen is slippery).
For the record, I agree: It's a whole lot of risk for zero gain. If there is a use for a power plant at a data center (be it fuel cell or otherwise), it belongs somewhere nearby/down the street/whatever, not at the rack.
In any case, gas piping is never going to be as practical as power cords. You cannot bend it, coil it, join it easily
Hmm.
The rubber gas "piping" on my propane grill is pretty easy to use and connect. It coils nicely, and survives handling and use outside, unprotected from the sun/rain/snow/heat just fine.
Rubber not good enough? Armor it with braided strainless steel. Too easy to fray? Put another layer of rubber on the outside of the braid. (You use a rubber hose built like this every time you put gas in your car...some of these hoses survive many years of being dragged across rough, brush-finished concrete.)
Still not good enough for long distances? I've got a long-ish corrugated flexible stainless steel line running my natural gas range. Add easy-to-use fittings instead of (or in addition to) the pipe thread that I've got, and, yeah: It's an easy distribution method, whereby it could connect to a manifold that serves one or more racks with rubber hose.
And of course, there's always good old-fashioned black iron, and a myriad flexible of plastics that are good for all kinds of low-pressure gasses...
IMHO, distributing gaseous fuel has been a solved problem for a very, very long time.
The biggest problem will be the need for shutoff valves, since unlike electricity, the energy does leak out of the wall socket...but even the kids in my 7th grade science class were aware enough not to turn on the natural gas shutoffs along each wall (which were ostensibly for running desktop Bunsen burners, and always live such that flammable gas was just a quarter-turn away...), and modern fittings should make it a relative non-issue.
(I might be a bit cavalier about these things, since I grew up in a gas boom town where natural gas was once so plentiful that it was given away for free, and the distribution lines were just cast iron pipes alongside the road, laying on the ground: So the stories go, if one of these lines ever sprung a leak, the common practice was to set the leak aflame and forget about it.)
Which, incidentally, never really rolls off to zero within the range of frequencies being discussed.
Remember, I said that they do not have any particular "cutoff" frequency. I did not say that they were absolutely linear in all ways from DC to daylight.
(Disclaimer: I've been designing and implementing loudspeaker installations for some years. But if you really insist on teaching me something, by all means, give it a shot. Good luck!)
Feed a "subwoofer" a 19kHz sine wave. What comes out? Is it all reduced to heat? Go ahead and try, and you'll see: Sound comes out. Measurably. At 19kHz. (probably with a whole lot of nasty harmonics starting at 38kHz, and a great deal of heat compared to other frequencies, but that's not the point.)
Meanwhile, please define "practical."
If "practical" means sending low-speed data between two computers in close proximity at a frequency that is difficult or impossible for an adult to hear over normal ambient noise and/or tinnitus: Yes. Practical.
Common folks were unknowingly solving more difficult problems than this with 486 CPUs doing the heavy lifting for software-based modems in ~1995, using nothing but a DOS TSR for a driver. And other folks have been doing this with tubes, coils, and caps since the dawn of radio.
Moving data from A to B using sound is by no means any great technical challenge, given modern consumer audio hardware and a modern CPU.
You don't replace a backlight. Like the plasma, when an LCD gets old, you replace it with a much improved model.
Meh.
You throw-away folks. Really?
I expect more from Slashdot.
When my 52" Samsung A550 LCD developed power supply issues, I took it apart and, you know, FIXED IT. Cost? Two hours and less than $5, including travel time, parts and mileage at $.52/mile.
New, comparable TV at that time? About $1,400, plus at least a couple of hours to get it set up properly and the complete pain in the ass of actually buying a TV.
Because, I mean: I'm just tripping all over myself to figure out how to burn $1,398 to get something that works just as good as the thing I had yesterday, while either fighting with local sales nazis or scheduling a time for a freight delivery.
But go ahead! Throw it away. After all, one part is broken, therefore the whole thing must be trash.
Just do the world a favor and keep it shielded from rain while you list it for free on Craigslist, instead of just leaving it on the curb or paying someone to smash it and haul it off in a packer truck.
"OMG! The headlight burnt out on my car! I need to buy a new car!"
Both of these mean that you want to have a bit more flash capacity than you actually need, because either you don't know the final firmware size when you spec the device, or you might want to add some features later.
Using your own example, it might just be that 128 kilobyte flash chips are cheaper than 118 kilobyte flash chips.:)
1. What is the available free space for user code in a common UEFI machine's built-in flash?
2. What is the smallest microkernel that can do pass-through of all x86 (etc) commands, emulate an AC97 chip (or HD Audio chip), and yet still be capable of stealing some processor time for its own nefarious deeds?
If 1 > 2, then possible.
(And I'm betting: Possible. Remember, we used to be able to accomplish mountains of real, complicated work using a few tens of kilobytes of code...and I'm betting that the answer to 1 is measured in megabytes, not tens of kilobytes.)
News flash: Loudspeakers and microphones, being analog devices, do not (and cannot) have any particular "cutoff" frequency: They have their normal range in which they tend to (hopefully!) be somewhat linear, but can vibrate in response to electricity (or produce electricity in response to vibration) at much, much higher frequencies (with much, much reduced conversion efficiency).
Can my "extremely high end sound equipment" make noise at 80kHz? Yep. Can it make very much of it? Nope. Can it make enough to communicate with? You betcha.
Likewise, a ratty little speaker in a laptop: Can it make noise at 19kHz? Yep. Can it make very much of it? Nope. Can it make enough to communicate with? You betcha.
Will any adult raised in a modern society full of cars and vacuum cleaners and cooling fans and air conditioning and other noise notice this sound? Nope: That part of the ear is almost certainly gone by then.
(Would a dog hear it? Maybe. Would a baby? Probably. But that doesn't matter, because adults are neither dogs nor babies (although my wife might disagree about that)).
Would a computer with a crappy microphone hear 19kHz? Perhaps: Narrow-band FFT bandpass at around 19KHz, rectify, and then apply another bandpass at whatever the modulation rate is (5Hz? 20Hz? 200Hz? Whatever). End result: A bunch of low-frequency sinusoidal pulses, not dissimilar from whatever was sent by the laptop nearby, and with very little noise.
Or, instead of bastardized AM as above, one could use FSK. Or whatever. It's easy. People have been doing this stuff since before most of us were born.
Reading the comments here, it's like people have forgotten what old and well-understood technology a modem is, much less a radio, or even a telegraph......
Hmm...my Lenovo has audio-band "noise" on the built-in speakers that approximately corresponds to screen contents (i.e., a scrolling compile of gcc produces sounds not unlike that of a hard drive seek, except the machine has an SSD)...I should probably check this on a spectrum analyzer....
So do many different Dell laptops that I have here, using several different OEM Dell power supplies, and several different cheap (I mean less-than-$8, shipped, sort-of-cheap) Chinese power supplies, whenever there is more than one path to earth ground. They all behave the same way, even when all gear is plugged into the same grounded outlet, or when the venue is completely different.
In my case, the noise seems to correlate to any sort of CPU activity.
Lifting the ground at the power supply's AC connection (using an adapter, or just breaking the third leg off of the cord) fixes it. (Lifting all of the other earth grounds of any connected peripherals fixes it, too, but that can be harder to accomplish.)
So. Communicating between stock computers with power wires? Seems far-fetched because of all of the corner-cases involved (multiple computers sharing the same common, very minor ground fault?), but do-able: If the computer can be programmed to modulate this noise (and I'm certain that it can, given the nature of the noise), then it can transmit it. And if I can hear it, I most certainly can sample it using the sound card on the receiving end.
Can it be fast enough to be useful? You tell me: I wrote this message at only a few words per minute.
So, basically, you propose that the only people who should be eligible for public service are scholars and people who have an inherently limited understanding of the subject.
This means that I, as someone who has worked in communications for over a decade with a good working set of knowledge about many things both wired and wireless, would not be able to be appointed the task of running the FCC.
It also means that my neighbor, who is a substitute teacher, he'd be OK. So would my other neighbor, who runs a taco stand. Or a classy lawyer-sort who just "still doesn't understand how this Newtube thing works." Or someone who has made it their life's ambition to collect college degrees, but who cannot hold a job better than mopping floors: Certainly, a stellar candidate.
Or, for that matter: Oh, you've worked in law enforcement? No, you can't run a law enforcement agency!
Or: Hey, you built transformers for Siemens? No DOE appointment for you!
You know, I think your proposal is a great way to ensure that only the most clueless, willfully ignorant people (aka "politicians") get such appointments.
Screw it. It's just karma. You can take off your karma bonus if you want (as I have done on this comment), although that might lead to even more karma if it's a good comment and enough mods see it....(and so what if it does?)
Speaking for myself: I'm much more appreciative of folks who participate in the discussions they help create, than of the folks who hide in the shadows. It gives the discourse a feeling of being "grounded," somehow, especially with Ask Slashdot (which this isn't, but the point remains).
Also, I killfile/. email notifications from ACs. It's not so much that I mind ACs doing whatever it is that they're doing (they're given a neutral score in my preference settings), but it's difficult to converse with someone if they're an AC because it seems unlikely that they'll ever even notice my effort.
This means that I never see an AC reply to one of my comments unless I go looking for it, whereas I'm notified quickly if a registered user replies. (This, in a way, puts both me and the AC on equal turf, but it's a very sub-grade sort of turf.)
So, anyway, whore away. It seems like less of a fail than being intentionally non-whorish by posting as AC.:)
If your documents are small, just write them to DVD-R.
Appending the archive securely (ie, redundantly) and keeping it fresh is easy and doesn't require any multi-session failure modes:
Copy DVD-R to hard drive, install new documents into the directory structure on the hard drive, and then write the whole mess back to a new DVD-R. Verify the burn.
(Script all of this, if necessary.)
After that, shred the original*.
Next! (Unless I missed something about what "small documents" means.)
*: This seems wasteful, and it is, but have you ever knowingly dropped a quarter on the ground and not chased it? It's about the same problem.
Agreed: Caddies are good. Easy to handle, and protected by default. I wish, especially, that game consoles would adopt them (because game discs are expensive and essentially impossible to usefully duplicate), but that's not going to happen this generation.
Panasonic (aka Matsushita) tries hard to make disc-caddies stick at about every iteration: It was they who made the first CD-ROM drives that required caddies, back in the day, and they were chief proponents of DVD-RAM discs in caddies.
The latter of these is still commonly used for archiving purposes for voice logging recorders. (I'm unaware of any BD-based formats that use caddies as standard-fare.)
Maybe I'm just weird, but I don't think I'll ever understand dropping that kind of moolah on anything you can't eat, play, or fuck.
Um. LaserDiscs exist to be played.
That said, rare sometimes just happens. I own a few "rare" CDs. I bought them new, when they were still in their first pressing, for regular retail prices. They are special to me only because I like the music on them, not because they have any particular monetary value associated with them.
Normally the way I find out that they're "rare" is when I damage one through moving or use or neglect or somesuch thing and want to replace it, and find that all available copies are well over $100.
If it's not public as in "I can download the database from ftp.mozilla.org," then it's not public enough: I want/need a location services that can function without Internet connectivity.
Slashdot Mirror
While we still appear to disagree (I think the test environment is most important, you think ambient temperature trumps all), the solution to both is simple:
Set the fan at 75%, using software. Measure it in an anechoic chamber at a standardized distance (.5 meters might be appropriate, because it's cheaper to build a smaller anechoic chamber than a larger anechoic chamber), with a reasonably-known configuration (a single video card on a normal-sized motherboard with passive cooling and no other add-on cards).
Or, perhaps the solution is complicated (since the above can be gamed by an AMD or an nVidia by specifying 75% to be particularly, and unusually, quiet):
Put the card in an anechoic chamber with a stable internal temperature, run it with a specified test (Furmark or Q3A or some Crysis demo or whatever), don't manipulate the fan speed in software, and then measure it at a known distance using a consistent technique.
In either case, describe the test arrangement used for the review. For every review, including any temperature data that can be gleaned. In this way, even if the noise measurements aren't directly comparable, they're at least understandable.
Phone call to encryption expert: "Yes, thank you Truecrypt. I will gleefully accept your money and publish an audit."
Next phone call to encryption expert: "Yes, thank you NSA. I will gleefully accept your money and write whatever you tell me to write in my published audit."
(Oh, encryption experts are immune to subterfuge, greed, bottomless debt, double-dipping, and generally being nafarious? I thought that they were just human like the rest of us!)
(And for the record, once one "independent" party accepts money from another party with a dog in the race, they cease being "independent" about the matter at-hand.)
(See also: Whitewash.)
A bigger difference? How so?
Sound falls of at 6dB per doubling of distance. There's a world of difference between Joe's measurement at 3 inches from the card, and Sherli's measurement at 1M from the card.
And that's just -one- vector for process-induced measurement SNAFU.
Sure, ambient heat (or rather, the speed of the fan, which may or may not be directly related to ambient or any other temperature, depending on yet other test conditions) makes a profound difference. A bigger one? Nope, sorry. Not buying it.
(Oddly enough, the loudspeaker industry standardized on two very similar methods for measuring efficiency many decades ago: Put speaker in anechoic chamber. Put test apparatus one meter in front of speaker, on-axis Drive speaker with 2.83V, or one Watt, of pink noise. Document the result, expressing it as something like 91dB@1W/1M or 91dB@2.83V/1M depending on method. And look ma! Empirical, comparable, repeatable results!)
Noise measurements (all noise measurements, not just those related to PC hardware) are always suspect:
What is the ambient noise level?
What is the test environment? (Is it a well-isolated anechoic chamber, a common desk with a computer near the corner of the room, or is it on the deck of a boat, or on the back of a llama? It makes a huge difference.)
What is the distance between the rig under test and the measurement rig with the microphone?
Is this test rig calibrated? (To what standard?)
What are the properties of the noise? (if it is 57dBa at only 1.5kHz, it is very annoying to me. If it's 57dBa only at 25kHz, it is annoying only to my dog.)
Is the noise different in differing directions?
How do you know?
Did you measure it?
It's all important, lest the resultant number be absolutely unimportant.
Also: Meh. "This blue car sounds better than that other blue car!" is roughly as accurate as a non-descrip "noise measurement" of computer hardware.
Good stuff. I learned something (hydrogen is slippery).
For the record, I agree: It's a whole lot of risk for zero gain. If there is a use for a power plant at a data center (be it fuel cell or otherwise), it belongs somewhere nearby/down the street/whatever, not at the rack.
Hmm.
The rubber gas "piping" on my propane grill is pretty easy to use and connect. It coils nicely, and survives handling and use outside, unprotected from the sun/rain/snow/heat just fine.
Rubber not good enough? Armor it with braided strainless steel. Too easy to fray? Put another layer of rubber on the outside of the braid. (You use a rubber hose built like this every time you put gas in your car...some of these hoses survive many years of being dragged across rough, brush-finished concrete.)
Still not good enough for long distances? I've got a long-ish corrugated flexible stainless steel line running my natural gas range. Add easy-to-use fittings instead of (or in addition to) the pipe thread that I've got, and, yeah: It's an easy distribution method, whereby it could connect to a manifold that serves one or more racks with rubber hose.
And of course, there's always good old-fashioned black iron, and a myriad flexible of plastics that are good for all kinds of low-pressure gasses...
IMHO, distributing gaseous fuel has been a solved problem for a very, very long time.
The biggest problem will be the need for shutoff valves, since unlike electricity, the energy does leak out of the wall socket...but even the kids in my 7th grade science class were aware enough not to turn on the natural gas shutoffs along each wall (which were ostensibly for running desktop Bunsen burners, and always live such that flammable gas was just a quarter-turn away...), and modern fittings should make it a relative non-issue.
(I might be a bit cavalier about these things, since I grew up in a gas boom town where natural gas was once so plentiful that it was given away for free, and the distribution lines were just cast iron pipes alongside the road, laying on the ground: So the stories go, if one of these lines ever sprung a leak, the common practice was to set the leak aflame and forget about it.)
Which, incidentally, never really rolls off to zero within the range of frequencies being discussed.
Remember, I said that they do not have any particular "cutoff" frequency. I did not say that they were absolutely linear in all ways from DC to daylight.
(Disclaimer: I've been designing and implementing loudspeaker installations for some years. But if you really insist on teaching me something, by all means, give it a shot. Good luck!)
I think I realize that 76.9 million, plus any dividends, plus $1, is far less than the per-capita wage on a percentage basis of most plumbers.
That said, this statement is nonsensical:
Whatever it is you're going on about, I don't think it relates well to most plumbers. No bet.
No. Not maybe: Can. Does.
Feed a "subwoofer" a 19kHz sine wave. What comes out? Is it all reduced to heat? Go ahead and try, and you'll see: Sound comes out. Measurably. At 19kHz. (probably with a whole lot of nasty harmonics starting at 38kHz, and a great deal of heat compared to other frequencies, but that's not the point.)
Meanwhile, please define "practical."
If "practical" means sending low-speed data between two computers in close proximity at a frequency that is difficult or impossible for an adult to hear over normal ambient noise and/or tinnitus: Yes. Practical.
Common folks were unknowingly solving more difficult problems than this with 486 CPUs doing the heavy lifting for software-based modems in ~1995, using nothing but a DOS TSR for a driver. And other folks have been doing this with tubes, coils, and caps since the dawn of radio.
Moving data from A to B using sound is by no means any great technical challenge, given modern consumer audio hardware and a modern CPU.
Meh.
You throw-away folks. Really?
I expect more from Slashdot.
When my 52" Samsung A550 LCD developed power supply issues, I took it apart and, you know, FIXED IT. Cost? Two hours and less than $5, including travel time, parts and mileage at $.52/mile.
New, comparable TV at that time? About $1,400, plus at least a couple of hours to get it set up properly and the complete pain in the ass of actually buying a TV.
Because, I mean: I'm just tripping all over myself to figure out how to burn $1,398 to get something that works just as good as the thing I had yesterday, while either fighting with local sales nazis or scheduling a time for a freight delivery.
But go ahead! Throw it away. After all, one part is broken, therefore the whole thing must be trash.
Just do the world a favor and keep it shielded from rain while you list it for free on Craigslist, instead of just leaving it on the curb or paying someone to smash it and haul it off in a packer truck.
"OMG! The headlight burnt out on my car! I need to buy a new car!"
Your analogy is backwards.
Most plumbers don't work for, much less run, companies that have annual revenue measured in billions of dollars.
Indeed, I'd wager that most plumbers take home a far greater share (on a percentage basis) of the company's revenue than does Ellison.
One could draw from this the conclusion that Ellison is underpaid compared to most plumbers, but that would be absurd.
Hence, your analogy is useless.
Agreed. Interesting stuff.
Except:
Using your own example, it might just be that 128 kilobyte flash chips are cheaper than 118 kilobyte flash chips. :)
Can, does.
In both instances.
"Cannot" and "analog" don't go together very well.
Dude. I'm writing this at far less than 16 bytes per second.
Just sayin'.
Without drawing conclusions:
1. What is the available free space for user code in a common UEFI machine's built-in flash?
2. What is the smallest microkernel that can do pass-through of all x86 (etc) commands, emulate an AC97 chip (or HD Audio chip), and yet still be capable of stealing some processor time for its own nefarious deeds?
If 1 > 2, then possible.
(And I'm betting: Possible. Remember, we used to be able to accomplish mountains of real, complicated work using a few tens of kilobytes of code...and I'm betting that the answer to 1 is measured in megabytes, not tens of kilobytes.)
News flash: Loudspeakers and microphones, being analog devices, do not (and cannot) have any particular "cutoff" frequency: They have their normal range in which they tend to (hopefully!) be somewhat linear, but can vibrate in response to electricity (or produce electricity in response to vibration) at much, much higher frequencies (with much, much reduced conversion efficiency).
Can my "extremely high end sound equipment" make noise at 80kHz? Yep. Can it make very much of it? Nope. Can it make enough to communicate with? You betcha.
Likewise, a ratty little speaker in a laptop: Can it make noise at 19kHz? Yep. Can it make very much of it? Nope. Can it make enough to communicate with? You betcha.
Will any adult raised in a modern society full of cars and vacuum cleaners and cooling fans and air conditioning and other noise notice this sound? Nope: That part of the ear is almost certainly gone by then.
(Would a dog hear it? Maybe. Would a baby? Probably. But that doesn't matter, because adults are neither dogs nor babies (although my wife might disagree about that)).
Would a computer with a crappy microphone hear 19kHz? Perhaps: Narrow-band FFT bandpass at around 19KHz, rectify, and then apply another bandpass at whatever the modulation rate is (5Hz? 20Hz? 200Hz? Whatever). End result: A bunch of low-frequency sinusoidal pulses, not dissimilar from whatever was sent by the laptop nearby, and with very little noise.
Or, instead of bastardized AM as above, one could use FSK. Or whatever. It's easy. People have been doing this stuff since before most of us were born.
Reading the comments here, it's like people have forgotten what old and well-understood technology a modem is, much less a radio, or even a telegraph......
So do many different Dell laptops that I have here, using several different OEM Dell power supplies, and several different cheap (I mean less-than-$8, shipped, sort-of-cheap) Chinese power supplies, whenever there is more than one path to earth ground. They all behave the same way, even when all gear is plugged into the same grounded outlet, or when the venue is completely different.
In my case, the noise seems to correlate to any sort of CPU activity.
Lifting the ground at the power supply's AC connection (using an adapter, or just breaking the third leg off of the cord) fixes it. (Lifting all of the other earth grounds of any connected peripherals fixes it, too, but that can be harder to accomplish.)
So. Communicating between stock computers with power wires? Seems far-fetched because of all of the corner-cases involved (multiple computers sharing the same common, very minor ground fault?), but do-able: If the computer can be programmed to modulate this noise (and I'm certain that it can, given the nature of the noise), then it can transmit it. And if I can hear it, I most certainly can sample it using the sound card on the receiving end.
Can it be fast enough to be useful? You tell me: I wrote this message at only a few words per minute.
So, basically, you propose that the only people who should be eligible for public service are scholars and people who have an inherently limited understanding of the subject.
This means that I, as someone who has worked in communications for over a decade with a good working set of knowledge about many things both wired and wireless, would not be able to be appointed the task of running the FCC.
It also means that my neighbor, who is a substitute teacher, he'd be OK. So would my other neighbor, who runs a taco stand. Or a classy lawyer-sort who just "still doesn't understand how this Newtube thing works." Or someone who has made it their life's ambition to collect college degrees, but who cannot hold a job better than mopping floors: Certainly, a stellar candidate.
Or, for that matter: Oh, you've worked in law enforcement? No, you can't run a law enforcement agency!
Or: Hey, you built transformers for Siemens? No DOE appointment for you!
You know, I think your proposal is a great way to ensure that only the most clueless, willfully ignorant people (aka "politicians") get such appointments.
Screw it. It's just karma. You can take off your karma bonus if you want (as I have done on this comment), although that might lead to even more karma if it's a good comment and enough mods see it....(and so what if it does?)
Speaking for myself: I'm much more appreciative of folks who participate in the discussions they help create, than of the folks who hide in the shadows. It gives the discourse a feeling of being "grounded," somehow, especially with Ask Slashdot (which this isn't, but the point remains).
Also, I killfile /. email notifications from ACs. It's not so much that I mind ACs doing whatever it is that they're doing (they're given a neutral score in my preference settings), but it's difficult to converse with someone if they're an AC because it seems unlikely that they'll ever even notice my effort.
This means that I never see an AC reply to one of my comments unless I go looking for it, whereas I'm notified quickly if a registered user replies. (This, in a way, puts both me and the AC on equal turf, but it's a very sub-grade sort of turf.)
So, anyway, whore away. It seems like less of a fail than being intentionally non-whorish by posting as AC. :)
(IMHO, YMMV, FFS, et cetera.)
How fast does your $35 ASUS burn a 50GB BD blank?
If your documents are small, just write them to DVD-R.
Appending the archive securely (ie, redundantly) and keeping it fresh is easy and doesn't require any multi-session failure modes:
Copy DVD-R to hard drive, install new documents into the directory structure on the hard drive, and then write the whole mess back to a new DVD-R. Verify the burn.
(Script all of this, if necessary.)
After that, shred the original*.
Next! (Unless I missed something about what "small documents" means.)
*: This seems wasteful, and it is, but have you ever knowingly dropped a quarter on the ground and not chased it? It's about the same problem.
Agreed: Caddies are good. Easy to handle, and protected by default. I wish, especially, that game consoles would adopt them (because game discs are expensive and essentially impossible to usefully duplicate), but that's not going to happen this generation.
Panasonic (aka Matsushita) tries hard to make disc-caddies stick at about every iteration: It was they who made the first CD-ROM drives that required caddies, back in the day, and they were chief proponents of DVD-RAM discs in caddies.
The latter of these is still commonly used for archiving purposes for voice logging recorders. (I'm unaware of any BD-based formats that use caddies as standard-fare.)
Um. LaserDiscs exist to be played.
That said, rare sometimes just happens. I own a few "rare" CDs. I bought them new, when they were still in their first pressing, for regular retail prices. They are special to me only because I like the music on them, not because they have any particular monetary value associated with them.
Normally the way I find out that they're "rare" is when I damage one through moving or use or neglect or somesuch thing and want to replace it, and find that all available copies are well over $100.
Fuuuh.
But you identified yourself, anyway.
Fail?
If it's not public as in "I can download the database from ftp.mozilla.org," then it's not public enough: I want/need a location services that can function without Internet connectivity.