is considerable and I'm delighted to have a chance to share my own experiences on the topic in a way that might clarify some of the issues brought up by the article.
Although we often think of motherboards as the thing that holds the CPU, in fact monitors also have motherboards and even your power supply has a little motherboard in it.
One thing these motherboards or printed circuit boards all have in common is that they generally have all kinds of goodies like capacitors and transistors on one side and a bunch of solder holding them on from the back side.
By heating the back side of a printed circuit board with the component side facing down, it is quite possible and practical to remove many valuable and toxic components without damaging them because of the delightful fact that heat tends to rise rather than sink, so by heating the back of the board, you can save all those great little toys. This activity in itself can be quite entertaining. I like to call it "el bueno pinata" because the parts fall to the ground with a delightful clatter like the candy from a pinata with severed entrails.
I must confess that when I started playing "el bueno pinata" as a youngster, I did, in fact, use a propane torch which generated generous amounts of rather toxic smelling smoke. As this is both a cheap and effective technique for getting started in "el bueno pinata," it is probably what the report was referring to.
But let's not just jump to the conclusion that this means it's wrong to try and recycle components that have previously been soldered to a PCB. It just indicates that these people are hesitant about going about it the right way because they haven't seen enough profits yet. But don't worry. There's plenty of room for profits in the recycled electronics market and as the profits grow, the recycling techniques will become more sophisticated as mine have.
I no longer use a propane torch when I play "el bueno pinata" because there were simply too many complaints about the smell and the smoke etc. So, I tried a few different techniques. I tried using a clothes iron, but I found that it wasn't hot enough. Eventually I rigged up a custom device very similar to an iron, but with a greater heat output and I now use that to slowly and smokelessly desolder old TVs, monitors and power supplies. These are generally where the fun is at for my interests so far. But even if you don't want to get into tesla coils and all that nerd stuff, you can at least blow up the capacitors for fun and give the transistors to someone who enjoys such toys.
Once you clean the components off a circuit board, there's not much left and putting it in a landfill doesn't seem to be such a crime although I'm sure they could be further recycled for the metal sandwiched within the board. Either way, the mass is greatly reduced and many valuable parts that are usually for the most part in working condition can be used as is.
In the case of a monitor, all you're left with is a bunch of plastic and the tube itself which certainly should be recycled professionally as it has lots of valuable goodies within. Stripping it to that point though, is certainly worth doing if you care about the recycling and are interested in learning a bit about electronics.
As for power supplies, after you strip out the transformers, capacitors, transistors there's nothing left.
In fact, motherboards may be the most useless pieces of the whole PC for the average PC enthusiast while ironically being the only piece that most people care to deal with because of the warnings on all the fun stuff about "Dangerous Whoo Hoo Inside" It's a pity that the industry assumes everyone should stay and idiot instead of trying to educate the public about how they could safely repurpose some of those parts.
But that's what's cool about Slashdot. It makes up for where the PC industry left to its own devices fumbles the play.
Anyway, couldn't rant like this without at least one reference and that would have to be Sam's Repair FAQs. If you've never checked them out, then I highly recommend them.
For those of you with old hardware laying around, especially burnt our monitors and power supplies, I invite you, moreover I grant you permission to play "el bueno pinata"
I wondered the same thing, but I'll add this bit of trivia which may partly explain things.
Here in Taiwan I bought cable modem access from a Giga broadband which is indeed affiliated with Gigabyte motherboards. Anyway, this cable modem venture was largely funded --I heard 40%-- by MS. And it seemed the "value" that MS had added was propietary drivers for the Surfboard cable modems. We ended up having to run our Linux stuff behind a windows proxy. But even if MS is planning the same game in Canada, I'm sure all those clever Canadians will hack something up.
Personally I think the main reason Microsoft doesn't compete with Macromedia is largely because they are already one and the same company from a management perspective.
They'll devote a few people to Mac stuff now and then --you know throw a bone to the Mac people-- but for a company that started out Mac, their efforts are pretty lame especially when you get into the top of their higher level tools like Director and Authorware. It's pathetic that Authorware has become almost totally MS Windows(TM) focused to the point that you have to do your design work in Windows even if you're going to build your project with a Mac runtime if you plan on using one of the more recent versions of the product.
From what I've gotten off their corporate news server, that's the way THEY like it. They take a rather dismissive view of Mac in their Director/Authorware discussion groups and boy don't you even mention Linux unless you want to get all these communist stereotypes laid on ya. I wouldn't hold my breath for innovation from Macromedia on the Mac despite the similarity in the names and the former association that was implied by that connection.
The only solution is a decent icon/flow control development package for Linux, but we're still a long way from that. Until then, Macromedia is the solution to Microsoft's problems, not Mac's or Linux's.
Oh shit!
The third line after the quote before the hyphen was supposed to be edited out. Sucks to make an editing error when you're criticizing somebody's language research. Damn.
The article made a big deal about the changes in a language over a 500 year period, but it was presented in a very misleading context and I'm willing to suggest that the "researcher" is little more than a wannabee sensationalist journalist and not a real language researcher at all.
I quote:
she speculated. "After 500 years, English will have changed so much on Earth and so much, and completely independently, on the spaceship that they will be mutually unintelligible
Nice try. English is a handy example to use as it's one of the youngest languages on the planet. Seeing how there was scarcely any written English prior to 500 years ago, it's hardly surprising that the English of 500 years ago is unintelligible to modern speakers although this is only partially intelligible to modern speakers --there was no significant body of written English 500 years ago!
We might notice that as the printing press spread, the language homogenized signficantly and deviations were dramatically pared down by the development of these mysterious indeces known as dictionaries.
To further illustrate this point, let's take a look at the language of the country I live in --Taiwan. Here in Taiwan, we use traditional Chinese in our daily communication. This is the identical language to the original written Chinese script which goes back 8000 years and is perfectly intelligible to modern Taiwanese readers.
As to whether the accents, pronunciations, tastes and styles may change over time --certainly they do-- but it's nowhere near as dramatic as the article tried to make it sound and the example of English was highly misleading.
Shit, just have the notes put into a multimedia format with Macromedia(TM). We can put in all kinds of cool illustrations the prof could never properly display in class with Flash(TM) animations and an on-line glossary, easy indexing and navigation and a search feature so students can quickly review materials they've covered earlier but not can't recall clearly in the context of later chapers. We'll have Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) to cut down on cheating and we'll use visual and audio clues in the test questions to give everyone a chance to show off their special abilities.
I actually love doing educational media, I just wish Macromedia would consent to a Linux runtime. It's a serious question I'm asking. What's the hold up? The hold up is nobody has figured out how it's going to be paid for. But the classroom as it exists today is seriously archaic. Schools should be more like big libraries/cafes with lots of media equipment for individually tailored coursework and more on-campus housing and legalized drugs and a whole lot more acceptance of casual sexuality. Profs would still exist, but they'd be like counselors and spend a lot more time having sex with their students and less time trying to hide it. I think everybody will be happier once we get some real reforms going. The parents, hey they can go back to school too!
Is this AhFoo dude fucking around? Well, remember that the original western schools were all about queer older dudes fucking young boys and telling them about the ways of the world and math and how to argue with a lisp. You can dislike it, but you're arguing against the evidence to dispute it. We could do something back to the roots like that, but with a hetero twist! Americanize the Greek tradition with lots of digitized coursework and a true liberal agenda.
And as for legalizing drugs on campuses, well Harvard had to close down when they ran out of beer in the early years. Students wouldn't attend if they weren't buzzed. Makes sense to me. Let's bring the fun back to education. then we can justify having everyone work in education when nano makes all the conventional industries obsolete.
I burned out my first pair of four speed SCSI almost three years ago. I've gone from 8X to 12X to 16X to 20X to 24X and I understand I'll be looking at 40X coming down the pipe soon.
As for the original poster, just get two 20 speed IDEs with the no burn feature and plenty of RAM and you can easily crank out 500 a week just popping in disks whenever you happen to have the time. And I don't know about your neighborhood, but these folks saying it's ONLY two bucks for a "pro" service are insane. I've seen discs that come back from these places on orders of over ten thousand and guess what, they use CDRs too, duh! They may be silver, but you can look at the disk and clearly see they're burnt, not stamped. Silver CDRs are old hat. You can get red and purple and orange ones too. There's no way I pay more than 15Cents for silver blanks in quantities of 100 and I've had zero coasters in the last two years in which I've burnt at least three thousand CDs. Two bucks! What, are you some kinda wise guy? Get the fuck outta here. Anybody who would write that clearly doesn't no shit about running a small time media operation. Yeah, so this guy said cost isn't the biggest concern, so that means he should throw away the money to sharks who will do the "intensive labor" of swappping CDs for ten or twenty times the price of the media? Give me a break. And silkscreening, try a sticker for an exra penny a piece for a grand total of 16Cents for a product that looks identical to a "pro" job. if you want decent silkscreening from those mofos, they charge you an arm and a leg and I've shopped those suckers many times before I gave up and did it myself.
Now, there's just no reason not to. With any of the new IDE's, if you do happen to have some buffer underrruns it won't matter because all the new IDEs are BURN PROOF. 4X SCSI, jeez check out what's on the market before making a suggestion like that.
Amen bro. . .
Why should the people using Gnutella/BearShare/Mopheus/Kazza care? Even back in the earliest Gnutella days there were people bragging about doing 100s of gigs a day. Were they going to make a loto of noise, no way. Experimental purposes, eh hem etc etc. But for most people, it probably wasn't quite like that, but they wouldn't have complained about it even if they just downloaded a couple tunes now and then, now would they? What's to complain about? The experience of hearing a song you're wanting to hear is hardly something that makes you want to complain, quite the opposite.
These days, I'd assume a few gigs a day is common for many DSL/Cable Kazaa users. Who's going to raise a fuss while they're in the process of building a massive media library on CDRs that cost pennies per disc. Once it gets to the point that several million users have collected say a thousand CD-Rs filled with MP3s and MPEGs, the only way to prevent the further sharing of that data will be by dramatically altering the nature of the net and that's a topic that's just too big to be decided by relatively small players like the movie and recording industries.
Besides, apathy is the scariest offense of all --the faceless enemy from within. Why fuss when you're on the winning side?
If thousands of CD-Rs per household sounds like an exaggeration, then keep this in mind --the Japanese are beginning production of 40X CD-Rs with lasers with an expected lifetime of a thousand write hours. So, next year when you buy your 40X CD-R to replace your dead 8X because blank DVD-R discs are still too pricey you'll be able to reasonably expect to write 40,000CDs with that thing! This is a consumer grade product. Couple that with a DSL line and Morpheus and video cards with built in VTR features and the war is basically over. IP holders better stop broadcasting those re-runs right now if they plan to hold onto their precious shows.
The media people have already done their damage in the optical media market. I just saw some story on ZDNet that mentioned how the movie industry executives themselves, according to their own internal documents, assumed that DVD-R was going to hit in the summer of 1998 and because of that fear they went balls to the wall on lawyer fees to stop it.
So far they've done an incredible job. But, DVD is the only battle they made even slight headway and the war takes place on dozens of fronts that are just too big for entertainment industries to control. Certainly DSL and cable scare the RIAA and MPAA, but thier concerns have to take a back seat to telecoms. The free market economy is a jungle and the biggest get their way. Electronic entertainment is a big market, but it's not the biggest and it can't hope to control telecoms and semiconductors and all the parts of the industrial and service economies that are affected by these two centers of the networked PC world.
So, who should fuss about this but lawyers getting paid to do so. I think the EFF does valuable work, but I'm not surprised that end users don't fuss about P2P. After all, we are borg, those lawyers and EFF people were assimilated long ago. They're allowed to play their roles in this game, but it's not really appropriate to question us, the collective, directly. That's bad acting and nobody's going to download their stories in the future if they are bad actors.
How about installing an electronic ozone system? They're supposed to be quite efficient and don't require much maintenance as they're basically just a fancy neon tube that the water passes by. I understand they've been required in many european countries since the seventies.
Jon Katz IS the heart of the NET!
on
Heart of the Net
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· Score: 1
It's obvious isn't it? Over 500 posts and counting. I'm jealous. Nobody every flames me, I just get trashed in metamod.
Ahfoo here.
Look Bob, in the future let's try and accentuate the positives rather than focusing on negatives. As the president of one of the biggest Linux desktop distros, this is a poor message to be offering people. MS's advantage is mostly just about good marketing and this kind of leadership from a Linux company is only helping their case. Who cares if there are problems on the desktop, you've got to be a cheerleader buddy. Everybody has problems for chrisakes. Don't take out your emotions in public like this. Grow up man.
You obviously are missing the whole point which is that MS got where they are by being nothing but a bunch of cheerleaders. We got the spirit, yes we do. We got the spirit . . . but what the fuck happened to Bob?
Their desktop is nothing special. A file manager, a web browser, so what? And here you are supposed to be a leader and you're pissing on people's hopes and those people are supporting you. Think about it. Take a frickin' jacuzzi buddy and think aobut what you're doin'.
How about Goldwave if you're going to go with cheap windows stuff. I think it's thirty bucks if you register.
I'll just pitch-in in on the low end side of things here because I have audiophiles in my own family and I just have to speak up when I hear this stuff about how you've just GOT to spend gobs of money.
I do voice recordings at home and they sound just as good as what we used to get from a studio and we use nothing but the way far extreme cheapest stuff. I'm talking generic on-board sound chips and $30 200watt karaoke special amps that have basically the same form factor as car stereo amps. You can have three of those and plenty of speakers and mics for less than two hundred bucks brand new from an electronics store.
Despite using nothing but the cheapest of the cheap, we get awesome voice recordings straight to disk that we used to pay bucks for in the studio and they made us pay extra for a CD instead of tape. Screw those guys. The real trick has already been mentioned several times and that's the part about amping the mic. This tip took me forever to figure out --ie which patch cords to use and what went where-- but once I got it going, boy was I impressed. Excellent range and a full sound just like we used to expect from the studio, but the cost is less than a few hundred bucks for the works and it doubles as my home stereo so the cost is insignificant. Yeah, even a five dollar mic, sounds great, once it's got some power on it. The real question becomes, how does your voice sound?
And as for having the rad monitors. Well, jeez this is almost as bad as the ignorance about amping the mic. But since we're assuming the poster is truly just getting started, I'll just say what the audiophiles out there will assume is too obvious to mention and that is: you can split the output from the sound card just using patch cords with Y splitters into multiple amps. So, now that you've split your bass, midrange and highs into appropriate homemade cabinets with appropriate cheapo crossovers you're in for some sweet low distortion high powered sound. I'm telling you getting the simple stuff all straightened out first --ie, how to wire amps in and out of a PC intelligently-- is certainly worth doing first. If you get all your existing/cheapo stuff setup right and you're still not satisfied then go ahead and start upgrading. But I wouldn't rush out and start asking opinions on audiophile newsgroups till I at least tried to get as far as I could with what I had. You might find you've already got everything you need, you just haven't hooked it up in the best way.
Personally, I managed to convince a rather picky customer of ours who insisted we had to do our voice recordings in the studio. I let him choose two copies of the same recording, one done in the studio and one done at my house. Sure enough, he chose mine because I simply had a cleaner, more dynamic sound than this studio was offering and I don't even use sound blaster cards for chrisakes! What do I look like, Santa Claus? I got more important things to spend my money on heh heh heh.
Talking about cheap, I make my bass enclosures out of cement mixed up with newspapers. I shit you not. Sounds awesome. These babies will outweigh a box made of particle board anyday and they're seamless so there's no distortion even when you're beating the hell out of the woofers. These enclosures are so solid, the woofers will tear themselves apart before they'll make the box shake. I confess I made them partly to screw with my uncle who sells Home Theater systems for a hundred grand a pop, but the sound of cement kicks ass all over wood anyday.
I don't think the appropriate limits would be apparent until I'd conducted some experiments and had some results to work with.
However, I think my PCs already act as memory enhancement devices and I'm certainly willing to add more capacity as it develops. I think I calculated that using current compression, a terrabyte of 640X480Mpeg video could store 30 years of my life if I wore a camera all the time. That would be a heck of a memory enhancement. I'm all for it.
The problem is the laws that many law a-biting countries make in such abundance such as prohibition, censorship, luxury taxes etc. all suck.
I'm not advocating total lawlessness and freedom to commit violent crimes, but I think people tend to become arrogant and pig-headed about the righteousness of all the laws on the books --Sir.
I got the same thing other posters had about someone else is using your username. Hmm. Sounds a bit odd that so many people ran into the same problem.
I did find a windows.ra capture tool that does seem to work. How fun, now if they'd just let us download them as divx or asf it would be like p2p, but more organized.
Well you may have paid your friend a buck to make a CDR, or you might have made a deal with some kid in a back alley, but you didn't buy it in a shop. I've lived in Taipei for ten years and I haven't seen pirated stuff in shops in Taiwan in the last six of seven. Hong Kong and lots of other places sure, but not Taiwan.
Well, I'm in Taiwan and MBILIAL. (my brother in-law is a lawyer) Outsiders are often surprised at how hog tied the government is around here now that we're oh so democratic and all that.
The government here doesn't just arbitrarily get to do things like they used to do when I first moved here back in the good ol' days with marshal law when the cops marched down the streets goosestepping their finest nazi style in sets of four with machine guns on the shoulder. Boy, those were the days to be a foreigner, all the locals lived in fear so expats could do as they pleased like they still do in Cambodia.
Oh how things have changed. Now, it's all about laws and following them to the letter with no special priveledges for anybody buy lawyers. Apparently this is legal according to Taiwan law. The law may get changed quick, but don't expect anything too drastic till then. This is a law abiding country --unfortunately.
Yeah, the FP was right on track (oddly), the "researchers" in that article have their heads up their asses if they think that blending of humans from different continents represents the END of evolution. How absurd.
Besides, plain ol' fucking is boring in evolutionary terms compared to what we're going to be seeing with biotech and nanotech manipulations of living tisses. Evolution is a crap shoot, the real fun is just getting started.
I didn't say it wasn't crackable, what I said was it wasn't practical to crack it and one of the reasons was that in the process of gathering the data to make a stab at a crack --the sample encrypted keys-- you were forced to log-in and thus leave a trail. That doesn't mean it was difficult to crack the encryption per se, it just meant there was added risk of discovery for the cracker. Forcing a user to log-in to get key samples is an easy thing to do. You just put all the authentication work on the server side and don't allow the client to have the keys. The client doesn't have the keys at all so it's useless in and of itself. It's like torturing a prisoner that doesn't know the info you're after. The data still exists, but you have to log into the server to get it and the log-in part means there is a log file and for most crackers, particularly students just trying to be cool but not wanting to get busted, this is something they don't want to get involved in. Thus, it's not practical to crack it. That's not the same as impossible in a strict scientific sense, but it's close enough from a vendor's perspective.
Furthermore, the keys were one-time use disposable keys. This means that even if a cracked password were invented, it would only work for a single usage. Are you starting to see how this is not practical to crack? It's not the same thing as uncrackable, but it's workable from a retailer's point of view.
The only real problem with this technique is that it means each user will have to log in everytime they use the software and the customers voted no with their dollars so it was irrelevant and now you don't even need to crack it because there's no protection on it at all. End of story. It was cracked by a general disinterest in products that require log-ins for use --the old social engineering technique. Worked too. So, I guess you're right in a way, it was cracked after all, but it had nothing to do with some swarthy dark hero type on the internet taking up the challenge like a valiant knight. It's more complicated than that in the real world.
Actually for a small app it's easy to make something unlikely to get cracked if you're using net activation and there's a million ways to do damage control, but I agree with the masses that it's pointless and I sell my own commercial windows multimedia CDs for a living.
I sell my CD with a book and make my measly living off the book. It aint much in the end, but it keeps me in the game. We had an uncrackable and yes fuck all ya'll it was uncrackable for all practical purposes copy protection, but nobody would pay. So, we dropped it. I'm sure it was never cracked though. People way overestimate how hard it is to make things tamper proof. There are such things as secrets, but you've got to have a market willing to pay for secrets to make it worth having a secret. If people won't pay, it's totally irrelevant from a business perspective how secure your strategy is.
Things worked out kinda cool for me though because it keeps ambitious small timers like I was in the early 90s from getting into the game now because there's all the overhead of the books that I wouldn't have been able to get funding for if I hadn't been able to make a deal with the devil --I mean my publisher-- when things still looked so cherry. The hardest part is that although I complain about my share being so small for all the work I did, my publisher thinks he's getting screwed too. It's bad news all around. In '98 he thought he was gonna retire off my work. In the end it turned out that he sold his book/CD sets for less than he used to sell just his plain books and now he owes me royalties for the CD despite the fact he's actually making less money on each sale. Like I said, it's pathetic amounts of money for me, but from his side it's a total loser proposition that he's paying for with profits from healthier more traditional parts of his business and wondering how it could have turned out this way.
So my point is simply that I was the major copy protection/encryption cheerleader and I convinced everybody including myself that we were unstoppable with the right technological solution, but in the end if you're in business the market decides your fate. You don't get anywhere fighting your customers.
I was just going through these five old ones I had saved up. They're full of goodies. I'm using the step down transformers from the old ones directly as 12V halogen light power supplies. Yeah, I know I could just buy them cheap --indeed I just bought some nice solid ones today for a buck fifty a piece-- but I can never have enough halogen lights as I use them for heat in this freezing room. Works great and lots of cool shadows too. Just buy the bare bulbs and make fixtures out of juice cans and wire hangers. Looks cherry and it's basically free if you have enough old power supplies or can buy cheap transformers.
And of course you can grab the capacitors and transistors and the fans while you're at it. I saw a recipe for a big 50Amp 12V DC power supply using a whole bunch of transistors you can find in a typical ATX power supply, but you'll need about a dozen and you'll need to test them to see which ones are which. But, save 'em up and pretty soon you'll be the DC power meister.
Once you've got oodles of 12V power around the house you can have all kinds of fun with dead computer guts as well as car electronics and you don't necesarily even need to use circuit boards. Just playing with little hard drive motors and fans and the various mechanical pieces can lead to all kinds of bizarre contraptions, especially if you've got a taste for bad lounge decor. Spinning halogen disco ball monstrosity? It's easily within your reach and it's groovy baby.
Why?
Pussy.
Face it, the best way to get your computer skillz is to actually sit down and get busy. The best way to spend your college days is in classes that are 80% pussy, especially if you're a nerd. Why make it hard on yourself, life is short.
I started college thinking biotech was the way to go, then I saw my classmates and I realized that something had gone terribly wrong. Sure I was more interested in the tech curriculum, but spending my early twenties with that crowd simply didn't jibe with my childhood fantasies of what the university was going to be all about.
After taking a few electives in the English Department the choice was clear. Who cares what you get your BA in anyway? You can always go back and get your MA or PhD in a technical field. And if you want to work with computers all your employers are going to care about is that you know how to get results. You can figure that out on your own.
No, actually none of it's interesting and that's why the eds say they're bored with it. It is lame to get all bent out of shape over this petty crap.
You can get all kinds of EDITED personal information on anybody using their address or phone number at the public library for fuck sake. So what?
Collecting lists of web sites that some computer MIGHT have visited and all the forms that SOMEBODY filled out with
Name: X
Address: X
E-Mail: X@X.COM
is a waste of time at best. That's just crap and whoever collects that data is throwing away money storing a bunch of crap because they can't think of a real business plan.
These "services" disappear when they find out nobody will pay for their useless data and then you can buy their equipment on E-bay when they go into Chapter 11.
Making a big fuss about them just gives them the impression that they've actually got something of value. Ignore them and they'll most certainly disappear.
People who get excited thinking everyone is watching their every move are suffering from an inflated sense of self importance. Besides, if THEY are watching you and it is making you excited, then they'll be much more intrigued if you pretend like you don't care. Either way, it's best just to ignore the small stuff.
If you're using Windows, then forget connecton sharing and get winproxy
That way you can use your windows box to serve your Linux desktops. I know, that's bass ackward, but I think it's rather cool that it works. You can even use it as a Samba replacement if you run an FTP server on the Windows box.
I had to go this way when I got stuck with an ISP that had a super double secret Windows only PPoE script --MS was a major shareholder in this company. Anyway, when I figured out this cool little backdoor I was very impressed. It also made me realize that this is the easy way for teachers in school districts with district regulated Windows only networks to still bring a few Linux boxes in to let the kids play with and see that it does actually work. Pass the word if you know any teacher types.
Well now, that's not necessarily the case. I'm just putting my third long block into my '79 Celica and it's in freakin' primo condition. Well, except the rust --and the interior.
Slashdot Mirror
is considerable and I'm delighted to have a chance to share my own experiences on the topic in a way that might clarify some of the issues brought up by the article.
Although we often think of motherboards as the thing that holds the CPU, in fact monitors also have motherboards and even your power supply has a little motherboard in it.
One thing these motherboards or printed circuit boards all have in common is that they generally have all kinds of goodies like capacitors and transistors on one side and a bunch of solder holding them on from the back side.
By heating the back side of a printed circuit board with the component side facing down, it is quite possible and practical to remove many valuable and toxic components without damaging them because of the delightful fact that heat tends to rise rather than sink, so by heating the back of the board, you can save all those great little toys. This activity in itself can be quite entertaining. I like to call it "el bueno pinata" because the parts fall to the ground with a delightful clatter like the candy from a pinata with severed entrails.
I must confess that when I started playing "el bueno pinata" as a youngster, I did, in fact, use a propane torch which generated generous amounts of rather toxic smelling smoke. As this is both a cheap and effective technique for getting started in "el bueno pinata," it is probably what the report was referring to.
But let's not just jump to the conclusion that this means it's wrong to try and recycle components that have previously been soldered to a PCB. It just indicates that these people are hesitant about going about it the right way because they haven't seen enough profits yet. But don't worry. There's plenty of room for profits in the recycled electronics market and as the profits grow, the recycling techniques will become more sophisticated as mine have.
I no longer use a propane torch when I play "el bueno pinata" because there were simply too many complaints about the smell and the smoke etc. So, I tried a few different techniques. I tried using a clothes iron, but I found that it wasn't hot enough. Eventually I rigged up a custom device very similar to an iron, but with a greater heat output and I now use that to slowly and smokelessly desolder old TVs, monitors and power supplies. These are generally where the fun is at for my interests so far. But even if you don't want to get into tesla coils and all that nerd stuff, you can at least blow up the capacitors for fun and give the transistors to someone who enjoys such toys.
Once you clean the components off a circuit board, there's not much left and putting it in a landfill doesn't seem to be such a crime although I'm sure they could be further recycled for the metal sandwiched within the board. Either way, the mass is greatly reduced and many valuable parts that are usually for the most part in working condition can be used as is.
In the case of a monitor, all you're left with is a bunch of plastic and the tube itself which certainly should be recycled professionally as it has lots of valuable goodies within. Stripping it to that point though, is certainly worth doing if you care about the recycling and are interested in learning a bit about electronics.
As for power supplies, after you strip out the transformers, capacitors, transistors there's nothing left.
In fact, motherboards may be the most useless pieces of the whole PC for the average PC enthusiast while ironically being the only piece that most people care to deal with because of the warnings on all the fun stuff about "Dangerous Whoo Hoo Inside" It's a pity that the industry assumes everyone should stay and idiot instead of trying to educate the public about how they could safely repurpose some of those parts.
But that's what's cool about Slashdot. It makes up for where the PC industry left to its own devices fumbles the play.
Anyway, couldn't rant like this without at least one reference and that would have to be Sam's Repair FAQs. If you've never checked them out, then I highly recommend them.
For those of you with old hardware laying around, especially burnt our monitors and power supplies, I invite you, moreover I grant you permission to play "el bueno pinata"
I wondered the same thing, but I'll add this bit of trivia which may partly explain things.
Here in Taiwan I bought cable modem access from a Giga broadband which is indeed affiliated with Gigabyte motherboards. Anyway, this cable modem venture was largely funded --I heard 40%-- by MS. And it seemed the "value" that MS had added was propietary drivers for the Surfboard cable modems. We ended up having to run our Linux stuff behind a windows proxy. But even if MS is planning the same game in Canada, I'm sure all those clever Canadians will hack something up.
Personally I think the main reason Microsoft doesn't compete with Macromedia is largely because they are already one and the same company from a management perspective.
They'll devote a few people to Mac stuff now and then --you know throw a bone to the Mac people-- but for a company that started out Mac, their efforts are pretty lame especially when you get into the top of their higher level tools like Director and Authorware. It's pathetic that Authorware has become almost totally MS Windows(TM) focused to the point that you have to do your design work in Windows even if you're going to build your project with a Mac runtime if you plan on using one of the more recent versions of the product.
From what I've gotten off their corporate news server, that's the way THEY like it. They take a rather dismissive view of Mac in their Director/Authorware discussion groups and boy don't you even mention Linux unless you want to get all these communist stereotypes laid on ya. I wouldn't hold my breath for innovation from Macromedia on the Mac despite the similarity in the names and the former association that was implied by that connection.
The only solution is a decent icon/flow control development package for Linux, but we're still a long way from that. Until then, Macromedia is the solution to Microsoft's problems, not Mac's or Linux's.
Oh shit!
The third line after the quote before the hyphen was supposed to be edited out. Sucks to make an editing error when you're criticizing somebody's language research. Damn.
The article made a big deal about the changes in a language over a 500 year period, but it was presented in a very misleading context and I'm willing to suggest that the "researcher" is little more than a wannabee sensationalist journalist and not a real language researcher at all.
I quote:
she speculated. "After 500 years, English will have changed so much on Earth and so much, and completely independently, on the spaceship that they will be mutually unintelligible
Nice try. English is a handy example to use as it's one of the youngest languages on the planet. Seeing how there was scarcely any written English prior to 500 years ago, it's hardly surprising that the English of 500 years ago is unintelligible to modern speakers although this is only partially intelligible to modern speakers --there was no significant body of written English 500 years ago!
We might notice that as the printing press spread, the language homogenized signficantly and deviations were dramatically pared down by the development of these mysterious indeces known as dictionaries.
To further illustrate this point, let's take a look at the language of the country I live in --Taiwan. Here in Taiwan, we use traditional Chinese in our daily communication. This is the identical language to the original written Chinese script which goes back 8000 years and is perfectly intelligible to modern Taiwanese readers.
As to whether the accents, pronunciations, tastes and styles may change over time --certainly they do-- but it's nowhere near as dramatic as the article tried to make it sound and the example of English was highly misleading.
Shit, just have the notes put into a multimedia format with Macromedia(TM). We can put in all kinds of cool illustrations the prof could never properly display in class with Flash(TM) animations and an on-line glossary, easy indexing and navigation and a search feature so students can quickly review materials they've covered earlier but not can't recall clearly in the context of later chapers. We'll have Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) to cut down on cheating and we'll use visual and audio clues in the test questions to give everyone a chance to show off their special abilities.
I actually love doing educational media, I just wish Macromedia would consent to a Linux runtime. It's a serious question I'm asking. What's the hold up? The hold up is nobody has figured out how it's going to be paid for. But the classroom as it exists today is seriously archaic. Schools should be more like big libraries/cafes with lots of media equipment for individually tailored coursework and more on-campus housing and legalized drugs and a whole lot more acceptance of casual sexuality. Profs would still exist, but they'd be like counselors and spend a lot more time having sex with their students and less time trying to hide it. I think everybody will be happier once we get some real reforms going. The parents, hey they can go back to school too!
Is this AhFoo dude fucking around? Well, remember that the original western schools were all about queer older dudes fucking young boys and telling them about the ways of the world and math and how to argue with a lisp. You can dislike it, but you're arguing against the evidence to dispute it. We could do something back to the roots like that, but with a hetero twist! Americanize the Greek tradition with lots of digitized coursework and a true liberal agenda.
And as for legalizing drugs on campuses, well Harvard had to close down when they ran out of beer in the early years. Students wouldn't attend if they weren't buzzed. Makes sense to me. Let's bring the fun back to education. then we can justify having everyone work in education when nano makes all the conventional industries obsolete.
I burned out my first pair of four speed SCSI almost three years ago. I've gone from 8X to 12X to 16X to 20X to 24X and I understand I'll be looking at 40X coming down the pipe soon.
As for the original poster, just get two 20 speed IDEs with the no burn feature and plenty of RAM and you can easily crank out 500 a week just popping in disks whenever you happen to have the time. And I don't know about your neighborhood, but these folks saying it's ONLY two bucks for a "pro" service are insane. I've seen discs that come back from these places on orders of over ten thousand and guess what, they use CDRs too, duh! They may be silver, but you can look at the disk and clearly see they're burnt, not stamped. Silver CDRs are old hat. You can get red and purple and orange ones too. There's no way I pay more than 15Cents for silver blanks in quantities of 100 and I've had zero coasters in the last two years in which I've burnt at least three thousand CDs. Two bucks! What, are you some kinda wise guy? Get the fuck outta here. Anybody who would write that clearly doesn't no shit about running a small time media operation. Yeah, so this guy said cost isn't the biggest concern, so that means he should throw away the money to sharks who will do the "intensive labor" of swappping CDs for ten or twenty times the price of the media? Give me a break. And silkscreening, try a sticker for an exra penny a piece for a grand total of 16Cents for a product that looks identical to a "pro" job. if you want decent silkscreening from those mofos, they charge you an arm and a leg and I've shopped those suckers many times before I gave up and did it myself.
Now, there's just no reason not to. With any of the new IDE's, if you do happen to have some buffer underrruns it won't matter because all the new IDEs are BURN PROOF. 4X SCSI, jeez check out what's on the market before making a suggestion like that.
Amen bro. . .
Why should the people using Gnutella/BearShare/Mopheus/Kazza care? Even back in the earliest Gnutella days there were people bragging about doing 100s of gigs a day. Were they going to make a loto of noise, no way. Experimental purposes, eh hem etc etc. But for most people, it probably wasn't quite like that, but they wouldn't have complained about it even if they just downloaded a couple tunes now and then, now would they? What's to complain about? The experience of hearing a song you're wanting to hear is hardly something that makes you want to complain, quite the opposite.
These days, I'd assume a few gigs a day is common for many DSL/Cable Kazaa users. Who's going to raise a fuss while they're in the process of building a massive media library on CDRs that cost pennies per disc. Once it gets to the point that several million users have collected say a thousand CD-Rs filled with MP3s and MPEGs, the only way to prevent the further sharing of that data will be by dramatically altering the nature of the net and that's a topic that's just too big to be decided by relatively small players like the movie and recording industries.
Besides, apathy is the scariest offense of all --the faceless enemy from within. Why fuss when you're on the winning side?
If thousands of CD-Rs per household sounds like an exaggeration, then keep this in mind --the Japanese are beginning production of 40X CD-Rs with lasers with an expected lifetime of a thousand write hours. So, next year when you buy your 40X CD-R to replace your dead 8X because blank DVD-R discs are still too pricey you'll be able to reasonably expect to write 40,000CDs with that thing! This is a consumer grade product. Couple that with a DSL line and Morpheus and video cards with built in VTR features and the war is basically over. IP holders better stop broadcasting those re-runs right now if they plan to hold onto their precious shows.
The media people have already done their damage in the optical media market. I just saw some story on ZDNet that mentioned how the movie industry executives themselves, according to their own internal documents, assumed that DVD-R was going to hit in the summer of 1998 and because of that fear they went balls to the wall on lawyer fees to stop it.
So far they've done an incredible job. But, DVD is the only battle they made even slight headway and the war takes place on dozens of fronts that are just too big for entertainment industries to control. Certainly DSL and cable scare the RIAA and MPAA, but thier concerns have to take a back seat to telecoms. The free market economy is a jungle and the biggest get their way. Electronic entertainment is a big market, but it's not the biggest and it can't hope to control telecoms and semiconductors and all the parts of the industrial and service economies that are affected by these two centers of the networked PC world.
So, who should fuss about this but lawyers getting paid to do so. I think the EFF does valuable work, but I'm not surprised that end users don't fuss about P2P. After all, we are borg, those lawyers and EFF people were assimilated long ago. They're allowed to play their roles in this game, but it's not really appropriate to question us, the collective, directly. That's bad acting and nobody's going to download their stories in the future if they are bad actors.
How about installing an electronic ozone system? They're supposed to be quite efficient and don't require much maintenance as they're basically just a fancy neon tube that the water passes by. I understand they've been required in many european countries since the seventies.
It's obvious isn't it? Over 500 posts and counting. I'm jealous. Nobody every flames me, I just get trashed in metamod.
Ahfoo here.
Look Bob, in the future let's try and accentuate the positives rather than focusing on negatives. As the president of one of the biggest Linux desktop distros, this is a poor message to be offering people. MS's advantage is mostly just about good marketing and this kind of leadership from a Linux company is only helping their case. Who cares if there are problems on the desktop, you've got to be a cheerleader buddy. Everybody has problems for chrisakes. Don't take out your emotions in public like this. Grow up man.
You obviously are missing the whole point which is that MS got where they are by being nothing but a bunch of cheerleaders. We got the spirit, yes we do. We got the spirit . . . but what the fuck happened to Bob?
Their desktop is nothing special. A file manager, a web browser, so what? And here you are supposed to be a leader and you're pissing on people's hopes and those people are supporting you. Think about it. Take a frickin' jacuzzi buddy and think aobut what you're doin'.
How about Goldwave if you're going to go with cheap windows stuff. I think it's thirty bucks if you register.
I'll just pitch-in in on the low end side of things here because I have audiophiles in my own family and I just have to speak up when I hear this stuff about how you've just GOT to spend gobs of money.
I do voice recordings at home and they sound just as good as what we used to get from a studio and we use nothing but the way far extreme cheapest stuff. I'm talking generic on-board sound chips and $30 200watt karaoke special amps that have basically the same form factor as car stereo amps. You can have three of those and plenty of speakers and mics for less than two hundred bucks brand new from an electronics store.
Despite using nothing but the cheapest of the cheap, we get awesome voice recordings straight to disk that we used to pay bucks for in the studio and they made us pay extra for a CD instead of tape. Screw those guys. The real trick has already been mentioned several times and that's the part about amping the mic. This tip took me forever to figure out --ie which patch cords to use and what went where-- but once I got it going, boy was I impressed. Excellent range and a full sound just like we used to expect from the studio, but the cost is less than a few hundred bucks for the works and it doubles as my home stereo so the cost is insignificant. Yeah, even a five dollar mic, sounds great, once it's got some power on it. The real question becomes, how does your voice sound?
And as for having the rad monitors. Well, jeez this is almost as bad as the ignorance about amping the mic. But since we're assuming the poster is truly just getting started, I'll just say what the audiophiles out there will assume is too obvious to mention and that is: you can split the output from the sound card just using patch cords with Y splitters into multiple amps. So, now that you've split your bass, midrange and highs into appropriate homemade cabinets with appropriate cheapo crossovers you're in for some sweet low distortion high powered sound. I'm telling you getting the simple stuff all straightened out first --ie, how to wire amps in and out of a PC intelligently-- is certainly worth doing first. If you get all your existing/cheapo stuff setup right and you're still not satisfied then go ahead and start upgrading. But I wouldn't rush out and start asking opinions on audiophile newsgroups till I at least tried to get as far as I could with what I had. You might find you've already got everything you need, you just haven't hooked it up in the best way.
Personally, I managed to convince a rather picky customer of ours who insisted we had to do our voice recordings in the studio. I let him choose two copies of the same recording, one done in the studio and one done at my house. Sure enough, he chose mine because I simply had a cleaner, more dynamic sound than this studio was offering and I don't even use sound blaster cards for chrisakes! What do I look like, Santa Claus? I got more important things to spend my money on heh heh heh.
Talking about cheap, I make my bass enclosures out of cement mixed up with newspapers. I shit you not. Sounds awesome. These babies will outweigh a box made of particle board anyday and they're seamless so there's no distortion even when you're beating the hell out of the woofers. These enclosures are so solid, the woofers will tear themselves apart before they'll make the box shake. I confess I made them partly to screw with my uncle who sells Home Theater systems for a hundred grand a pop, but the sound of cement kicks ass all over wood anyday.
I don't think the appropriate limits would be apparent until I'd conducted some experiments and had some results to work with.
However, I think my PCs already act as memory enhancement devices and I'm certainly willing to add more capacity as it develops. I think I calculated that using current compression, a terrabyte of 640X480Mpeg video could store 30 years of my life if I wore a camera all the time. That would be a heck of a memory enhancement. I'm all for it.
The problem is the laws that many law a-biting countries make in such abundance such as prohibition, censorship, luxury taxes etc. all suck.
I'm not advocating total lawlessness and freedom to commit violent crimes, but I think people tend to become arrogant and pig-headed about the righteousness of all the laws on the books --Sir.
I got the same thing other posters had about someone else is using your username. Hmm. Sounds a bit odd that so many people ran into the same problem.
.ra capture tool that does seem to work. How fun, now if they'd just let us download them as divx or asf it would be like p2p, but more organized.
I did find a windows
Well you may have paid your friend a buck to make a CDR, or you might have made a deal with some kid in a back alley, but you didn't buy it in a shop. I've lived in Taipei for ten years and I haven't seen pirated stuff in shops in Taiwan in the last six of seven. Hong Kong and lots of other places sure, but not Taiwan.
Well, I'm in Taiwan and MBILIAL. (my brother in-law is a lawyer) Outsiders are often surprised at how hog tied the government is around here now that we're oh so democratic and all that.
The government here doesn't just arbitrarily get to do things like they used to do when I first moved here back in the good ol' days with marshal law when the cops marched down the streets goosestepping their finest nazi style in sets of four with machine guns on the shoulder. Boy, those were the days to be a foreigner, all the locals lived in fear so expats could do as they pleased like they still do in Cambodia.
Oh how things have changed. Now, it's all about laws and following them to the letter with no special priveledges for anybody buy lawyers. Apparently this is legal according to Taiwan law. The law may get changed quick, but don't expect anything too drastic till then. This is a law abiding country --unfortunately.
Yeah, the FP was right on track (oddly), the "researchers" in that article have their heads up their asses if they think that blending of humans from different continents represents the END of evolution. How absurd.
Besides, plain ol' fucking is boring in evolutionary terms compared to what we're going to be seeing with biotech and nanotech manipulations of living tisses. Evolution is a crap shoot, the real fun is just getting started.
I didn't say it wasn't crackable, what I said was it wasn't practical to crack it and one of the reasons was that in the process of gathering the data to make a stab at a crack --the sample encrypted keys-- you were forced to log-in and thus leave a trail. That doesn't mean it was difficult to crack the encryption per se, it just meant there was added risk of discovery for the cracker. Forcing a user to log-in to get key samples is an easy thing to do. You just put all the authentication work on the server side and don't allow the client to have the keys. The client doesn't have the keys at all so it's useless in and of itself. It's like torturing a prisoner that doesn't know the info you're after. The data still exists, but you have to log into the server to get it and the log-in part means there is a log file and for most crackers, particularly students just trying to be cool but not wanting to get busted, this is something they don't want to get involved in. Thus, it's not practical to crack it. That's not the same as impossible in a strict scientific sense, but it's close enough from a vendor's perspective.
Furthermore, the keys were one-time use disposable keys. This means that even if a cracked password were invented, it would only work for a single usage. Are you starting to see how this is not practical to crack? It's not the same thing as uncrackable, but it's workable from a retailer's point of view.
The only real problem with this technique is that it means each user will have to log in everytime they use the software and the customers voted no with their dollars so it was irrelevant and now you don't even need to crack it because there's no protection on it at all. End of story. It was cracked by a general disinterest in products that require log-ins for use --the old social engineering technique. Worked too. So, I guess you're right in a way, it was cracked after all, but it had nothing to do with some swarthy dark hero type on the internet taking up the challenge like a valiant knight. It's more complicated than that in the real world.
Actually for a small app it's easy to make something unlikely to get cracked if you're using net activation and there's a million ways to do damage control, but I agree with the masses that it's pointless and I sell my own commercial windows multimedia CDs for a living.
I sell my CD with a book and make my measly living off the book. It aint much in the end, but it keeps me in the game. We had an uncrackable and yes fuck all ya'll it was uncrackable for all practical purposes copy protection, but nobody would pay. So, we dropped it. I'm sure it was never cracked though. People way overestimate how hard it is to make things tamper proof. There are such things as secrets, but you've got to have a market willing to pay for secrets to make it worth having a secret. If people won't pay, it's totally irrelevant from a business perspective how secure your strategy is.
Things worked out kinda cool for me though because it keeps ambitious small timers like I was in the early 90s from getting into the game now because there's all the overhead of the books that I wouldn't have been able to get funding for if I hadn't been able to make a deal with the devil --I mean my publisher-- when things still looked so cherry. The hardest part is that although I complain about my share being so small for all the work I did, my publisher thinks he's getting screwed too. It's bad news all around. In '98 he thought he was gonna retire off my work. In the end it turned out that he sold his book/CD sets for less than he used to sell just his plain books and now he owes me royalties for the CD despite the fact he's actually making less money on each sale. Like I said, it's pathetic amounts of money for me, but from his side it's a total loser proposition that he's paying for with profits from healthier more traditional parts of his business and wondering how it could have turned out this way.
So my point is simply that I was the major copy protection/encryption cheerleader and I convinced everybody including myself that we were unstoppable with the right technological solution, but in the end if you're in business the market decides your fate. You don't get anywhere fighting your customers.
I was just going through these five old ones I had saved up. They're full of goodies. I'm using the step down transformers from the old ones directly as 12V halogen light power supplies. Yeah, I know I could just buy them cheap --indeed I just bought some nice solid ones today for a buck fifty a piece-- but I can never have enough halogen lights as I use them for heat in this freezing room. Works great and lots of cool shadows too. Just buy the bare bulbs and make fixtures out of juice cans and wire hangers. Looks cherry and it's basically free if you have enough old power supplies or can buy cheap transformers.
And of course you can grab the capacitors and transistors and the fans while you're at it. I saw a recipe for a big 50Amp 12V DC power supply using a whole bunch of transistors you can find in a typical ATX power supply, but you'll need about a dozen and you'll need to test them to see which ones are which. But, save 'em up and pretty soon you'll be the DC power meister.
Once you've got oodles of 12V power around the house you can have all kinds of fun with dead computer guts as well as car electronics and you don't necesarily even need to use circuit boards. Just playing with little hard drive motors and fans and the various mechanical pieces can lead to all kinds of bizarre contraptions, especially if you've got a taste for bad lounge decor. Spinning halogen disco ball monstrosity? It's easily within your reach and it's groovy baby.
Why?
Pussy.
Face it, the best way to get your computer skillz is to actually sit down and get busy. The best way to spend your college days is in classes that are 80% pussy, especially if you're a nerd. Why make it hard on yourself, life is short.
I started college thinking biotech was the way to go, then I saw my classmates and I realized that something had gone terribly wrong. Sure I was more interested in the tech curriculum, but spending my early twenties with that crowd simply didn't jibe with my childhood fantasies of what the university was going to be all about.
After taking a few electives in the English Department the choice was clear. Who cares what you get your BA in anyway? You can always go back and get your MA or PhD in a technical field. And if you want to work with computers all your employers are going to care about is that you know how to get results. You can figure that out on your own.
No, actually none of it's interesting and that's why the eds say they're bored with it. It is lame to get all bent out of shape over this petty crap.
You can get all kinds of EDITED personal information on anybody using their address or phone number at the public library for fuck sake. So what?
Collecting lists of web sites that some computer MIGHT have visited and all the forms that SOMEBODY filled out with
Name: X
Address: X
E-Mail: X@X.COM
is a waste of time at best. That's just crap and whoever collects that data is throwing away money storing a bunch of crap because they can't think of a real business plan.
These "services" disappear when they find out nobody will pay for their useless data and then you can buy their equipment on E-bay when they go into Chapter 11.
Making a big fuss about them just gives them the impression that they've actually got something of value. Ignore them and they'll most certainly disappear.
People who get excited thinking everyone is watching their every move are suffering from an inflated sense of self importance. Besides, if THEY are watching you and it is making you excited, then they'll be much more intrigued if you pretend like you don't care. Either way, it's best just to ignore the small stuff.
If you're using Windows, then forget connecton sharing and get winproxy
That way you can use your windows box to serve your Linux desktops. I know, that's bass ackward, but I think it's rather cool that it works. You can even use it as a Samba replacement if you run an FTP server on the Windows box.
I had to go this way when I got stuck with an ISP that had a super double secret Windows only PPoE script --MS was a major shareholder in this company. Anyway, when I figured out this cool little backdoor I was very impressed. It also made me realize that this is the easy way for teachers in school districts with district regulated Windows only networks to still bring a few Linux boxes in to let the kids play with and see that it does actually work. Pass the word if you know any teacher types.
Well now, that's not necessarily the case. I'm just putting my third long block into my '79 Celica and it's in freakin' primo condition. Well, except the rust --and the interior.