3. You're not allowed to use phones on airplanes because of paranoid ignoramuses and the insightful people who realize how bad it could get when people in a flying bomb know what's going on (and how annoying cell phones are).
Or, just possibly it's because: 1. GSM phones are known to emit strong pulses of RF that interfere with nearby electronics (audio amplifiers, televisions, speakerphones, etc). 2. Airplanes contain quite a few important electronic systems for navigation, communication, flight control, etc. 3. Considering the number of passengers who are carried by airplanes each year, even something with a one-in-a-million chance of causing a problem would be a very bad thing.
Um... have we managed to find a place to store nuclear waste? Have we uncovered an unlimited trove of radioactive material?
Sort of. You start by re-using the "spent" fuel (with a combination of breeder reactors, and reactors like CANDU that don't require enrichment of the U-235). This greatly reduces the amount of waste that needs to be stored, and also reduces the need to dig for new uranium.
For the radioactive waste that is left over, the storage place is "underground" (for example in old uranium mines). Or you can use the depleted-uranium trick of calling it "ammunition" instead of "radioactive waste", then disposing of it (at high velocity) in someone else's country.
I never quite understood the appeal of e-gold. "When civilization breaks down, I'll have a handy supply of GOLD... in an offshore vault, guaranteed by electronic certificates".
Who ever said that e-gold was intended to survive the breakdown of civilization? It was intended to be used *within* a civilization to purchase goods, pay for services, etc. It's not a place to keep your life's savings, particularly as they charge a percentage of your balance as a storage fee (like "negative interest").
Not to diminish the difficulty of getting something as complex as Phoenix onto the surface of Mars, but seriously how tricky is it to deliver a rasp on a short schedule? I can drive to the nearest Home Depot in about 10 minutes.
According to a program I saw on the Discovery channel, the tool bit itself was actually purchased from a regular hardware store.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that IPv6 adresses are not a superset of IPv4 ones. That means, that absolutely no current internet site is reachable by IPv6.
IPv4 addresses are mapped into the::FFFF:a.b.c.d range.
You can't connect to an IPv4-only server from an IPv6-only client because it is a different network protocol and there is no way to fit an IPv6 address into the IPv4 source-address field. However a client with both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address can connect to either type of server.
Dare I ask if it will be available or usable in Canada? Yes. You'll have to order it from the US and pay customs fees etc., but it's a GSM phone and will work here. I'm currently using my GTA01 with a Fido Prepaid account. Make sure that you order the North American model (850/1800/1900) rather than the European (900/1800/1900) one.
headphone only mono. i.e. only one side works Are you sure about that one? The speakers in the device went from stereo (GTA01) to mono, but I never heard about a similar issue with the headphone audio. Do you have one of the production models or an earlier prototype? Is your headphone using the correct 4-pin plug?
no bluetooth headset support No support in the current software, but AFAIK the necessary hardware is there.
For me the killer feature is the openness of the platform (datasheets for almost all of the modules, the ability to completely brick it and then restore with JTAG, etc). I'll forgive a lot of flaws in order to support that philosophy.
Why not just use/dev/random and stop the stupid games with reinventing the wheel? Probably because the rate at which it dribbles out random bits is too slow for most real-world applications (unless you happen to have it hooked up to a hardware RNG).
In any case, it seems clear that these drives are actually 5400rpm, not some variable speed between 7200rpm and 5400rpm. I have written a small program to measure a drive's RPM - http://members.shaw.ca/mmontour/rpmtest.c. It confirms that my 1TB Western Digital GP drive is running at 5400 RPM.
You want to be very precise and point out that plutonium-238 (not -239, the weapons material) is used solely as a heat source, to drive in effect a reverse Peltier-junction electrical source. I was talking about the fission reactors (U-235 fuel) used in the RORSATs, not plutonium-238 RTGs. See this link for more information.
To my knowledge, there are no nuclear reactors on satellites, only radioactive materials that are used as a power source. Maybe true for stuff that's being launched today, but nuclear reactors have definitely been used on satellites. Some of the reactor cores are still up there, but others have crashed (including one that hit northern Canada in 1978).
It sounds like the drive alters its rotational speed based on the usage. That's exactly what WD's marketing department wants you to think, and the previous text on their website implied that even more strongly than what's currently there. They now concede that the rotational speed only varies *between models* in the "Green Power" line, and multiple tests (including my own) have shown that the rotational speed of the 1TB model is at or very near to 5400 rpm.
These drives (at least the 1TB model that I have) do not support the ATA Advanced Power Management feature set, and return an I/O error to "hdparm -B 255". I have confirmed with WD customer support that it is not possible to turn off "Intellipark" (the load/unload feature).
A kludge that does seem to work is to write a program that reads a sector from the disk every few seconds so that it never becomes idle, but of course that approach has its own drawbacks. It should be possible to move this kludge into the Linux I/O schedulers (so that it would send extra reads if and only if no real I/O had been requested in the last X seconds) but I haven't had time to look into this more closely.
You need to be root or use sudo. True, but irrelevant (the command was run as root, or else it would have given a "Permission denied" rather than an "Input/output error"). The command is being sent to the drive but the drive doesn't like it:
ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 ata2.00: cmd ef/85:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0
res 51/04:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 Emask 0x1 (device error)
I see a similar issue with my new WD10EACS (1 TB Western Digital "Green Power") desktop drive:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 582 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 180 180 000 Old_age Always - 62848
I don't know the drive's rating for Load_Cycle_Count, but the scaled SMART attribute has gone down from 181 yesterday to 180 today so it does seem to be burning through its allocated cycles quite rapidly.
Interestingly, this drive does not appear to support the "hdparm -B 255" command:
mythtv:~# hdparm -B 255/dev/sda/dev/sda:
setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD failed: Input/output error
"hdparm -I" lists "Power Management feature set" and "Automatic Acoustic Management feature set", but not "Advanced Power Management feature set".
The system is running Debian Etch with a 2.6.23 kernel, and I'm using hdparm version 7.7. I am not using any "laptop mode" settings (at least, none that I can see).
There's no such thing as a Pentium 4 Celeron! Pentium 4, or Celeron, but not both... "Pentium 4 Celeron" looks perfectly valid to me, even if it's not an Intel-approved label. "Celeron" (like "Xeon") is a modifier, not a specific type of processor. It's relative to whatever Intel happens to be shipping as its "main" product at that time. For example, according to Wikipedia the first Celeron was a 266 or 300 MHz Pentium-II (Deschutes) with no cache.
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3. You're not allowed to use phones on airplanes because of paranoid ignoramuses and the insightful people who realize how bad it could get when people in a flying bomb know what's going on (and how annoying cell phones are).
Or, just possibly it's because:
1. GSM phones are known to emit strong pulses of RF that interfere with nearby electronics (audio amplifiers, televisions, speakerphones, etc).
2. Airplanes contain quite a few important electronic systems for navigation, communication, flight control, etc.
3. Considering the number of passengers who are carried by airplanes each year, even something with a one-in-a-million chance of causing a problem would be a very bad thing.
Um... have we managed to find a place to store nuclear waste? Have we uncovered an unlimited trove of radioactive material?
Sort of. You start by re-using the "spent" fuel (with a combination of breeder reactors, and reactors like CANDU that don't require enrichment of the U-235). This greatly reduces the amount of waste that needs to be stored, and also reduces the need to dig for new uranium.
For the radioactive waste that is left over, the storage place is "underground" (for example in old uranium mines). Or you can use the depleted-uranium trick of calling it "ammunition" instead of "radioactive waste", then disposing of it (at high velocity) in someone else's country.
I never quite understood the appeal of e-gold.
"When civilization breaks down, I'll have a handy supply of GOLD... in an offshore vault, guaranteed by electronic certificates".
Who ever said that e-gold was intended to survive the breakdown of civilization? It was intended to be used *within* a civilization to purchase goods, pay for services, etc. It's not a place to keep your life's savings, particularly as they charge a percentage of your balance as a storage fee (like "negative interest").
Get with some of your local ham radio geeks.
For example, http://www.bcwarn.net/bcwarn-wiki/
Not to diminish the difficulty of getting something as complex as Phoenix onto the surface of Mars, but seriously how tricky is it to deliver a rasp on a short schedule? I can drive to the nearest Home Depot in about 10 minutes.
According to a program I saw on the Discovery channel, the tool bit itself was actually purchased from a regular hardware store.
How come they write like retards?
Because English is not their native language (many of the Openmoko people are in .tw or .de).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that IPv6 adresses are not a superset of IPv4 ones.
That means, that absolutely no current internet site is reachable by IPv6.
IPv4 addresses are mapped into the ::FFFF:a.b.c.d range.
You can't connect to an IPv4-only server from an IPv6-only client because it is a different network protocol and there is no way to fit an IPv6 address into the IPv4 source-address field. However a client with both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address can connect to either type of server.
Yes, that connector is to attach an external GPS antenna. I haven't tried it but it should work.
For me the killer feature is the openness of the platform (datasheets for almost all of the modules, the ability to completely brick it and then restore with JTAG, etc). I'll forgive a lot of flaws in order to support that philosophy.
I'm waiting for somebody to put a Chumby into one of those plush Weighted Companion Cubes that Valve was selling.
That's not a cyclotron. That's a cyclotron.</dundee>
RFC 2606 (dated June 1999) solves this problem by defining reserved domains such as "example.com" (for use in documentation) and:
".invalid" is intended for use in online construction of domain
names that are sure to be invalid and which it is obvious at a
glance are invalid.
These drives (at least the 1TB model that I have) do not support the ATA Advanced Power Management feature set, and return an I/O error to "hdparm -B 255". I have confirmed with WD customer support that it is not possible to turn off "Intellipark" (the load/unload feature).
A kludge that does seem to work is to write a program that reads a sector from the disk every few seconds so that it never becomes idle, but of course that approach has its own drawbacks. It should be possible to move this kludge into the Linux I/O schedulers (so that it would send extra reads if and only if no real I/O had been requested in the last X seconds) but I haven't had time to look into this more closely.
ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
ata2.00: cmd ef/85:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0
res 51/04:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 Emask 0x1 (device error)
I see a similar issue with my new WD10EACS (1 TB Western Digital "Green Power") desktop drive:
/dev/sda /dev/sda:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 582
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 180 180 000 Old_age Always - 62848
I don't know the drive's rating for Load_Cycle_Count, but the scaled SMART attribute has gone down from 181 yesterday to 180 today so it does seem to be burning through its allocated cycles quite rapidly.
Interestingly, this drive does not appear to support the "hdparm -B 255" command:
mythtv:~# hdparm -B 255
setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD failed: Input/output error
"hdparm -I" lists "Power Management feature set" and "Automatic Acoustic Management feature set", but not "Advanced Power Management feature set".
The system is running Debian Etch with a 2.6.23 kernel, and I'm using hdparm version 7.7. I am not using any "laptop mode" settings (at least, none that I can see).