I think you are mistaken. WAV and AIFF are both compressed data formats.
Nope. AIFF encodes uncompressed audio samples only. There is a second format, AIFF-C that can contain either uncompressed samples or data from a variety of different compression formats.
WAVE format is comparable to AIFF-C, in that it can contain various types of sound data. But I think it's fair to say the vast majority of WAVE files are uncompressed.
Or you can get two and stick them in a RAID array and get 600GB of 10800 effective RPM goodness.
While the maximum sustained contiguous transfer speed would be double, the access time would not be any less. Pick an arbitrary block. It's on one drive or the other. You still have to wait for that block to rotate around under the head.
RAID is nice, but it doesn't change the laws of physics, even if William Shatner asks it to.:)
Telemarketing will become a very lucrative business for companies that can afford to call from Canada, where the DNCR is toothless, or from Mexico, or other "offshore" locations.
What I don't get is exactly why you think the DNCR is such a bad idea. You damn "socialists and facists" and paint this as a body shot to personal responsibility.
Personal responsibility? Are you trying to tell me telemarketers have personal responsibility?
Actually, the list gives telemarketers an opportunity to exhibit their responsibility: a good, cheap list of people who have asked not to be called. What could be better! They'll stop bothering us of their own accord!
As far as those who would "prey on old people" by scamming them... this will do nothing to stop it. Just as gun control does nothing to stop criminals from having guns, or encryption export control stops other countries and criminal organiations from having encryption.
The reason is simple: Law breakers break laws.
Whoah! So we shouldn't have any laws?
If the "old people" sign up for DNC registries, the FTC will have more tools to work with at getting those bad guys preying on old people.
There are now "anti-slamming" laws that protect consumers against that practice, and sure enough it has become less of a problem.
Gun control does make it harder for criminals to obtain guns. Not impossible, no, but 15 year olds can't walk into Target and buy a semi-automatic. That's at least something. (I would ban all handguns, myself.)
Obviously, you and I have very different opinions about the role of government. You think the phone companies should be able to profit from the problem of unwanted telemarketing by selling you blocking services. I think the government should stop the problem at its source.
I'm hoping they'll be able to do the same thing with spam...
Data for up to five area codes will be available for free. Beyond that, there is an annual fee of $25 per area code of data, with a maximum annual fee of $7,375 for the entire U.S. database.
That's so much less than a penny per phone number that you don't get any sympathy at all.
If you're a national telemarketer, you pay your $7,375.00 and download the 122MB compressed file annually. I don't think this is a large fee or burden compared to the actual costs of the telecommunications equipment, not to mention your staff.
On the other hand, the amount of lost revenue from the diminished "audience" for your calls has got to hurt. Cry me a river.:)
I found a 1997 Texas law that mandates proper Caller ID identification. But individual state laws are harder to enforce...
The federal law that accomplishes the same thing will take effect next year. From the FTC's page:
Requires caller ID transmission. Beginning January 29, 2004, telemarketers must transmit their telephone number and if possible, their name, to your caller ID service. This will protect your privacy, increase accountability on the telemarketer's part, and help in law enforcement efforts.
That should help. Vigilant anti-marketers should notice any blocked Caller ID, and switch into feigned-interested-consumer mode to gather enough information from the company to report them.
By the way, what's wrong with their SSL certificate? It looks like it's supposed to be a Verisign-issued certificate, but it's coming up as "issued by an unknown entity".
Much of the volts and amps are dispersed to ground.
Uh... A Watt dissipated is a Watt dissipated. If a stovetop were a dead short, it wouldn't produce much heat. (or another way of looking at it: the rest of wiring in your house would produce just as much heat as it would)
A stovetop is a resistive load, which absorbs electrical energy and releases it as heat.
The power consumed by a cpu, measured in Watts, is the electrical energy absorbed by its electrical resistance, rereleased as heat.
No difference. Nothing "disbersed to ground" any differently.
V=IR might have different values, but power doesn't care, since it's based only on P=IV.
After all, why would they call the OS "Mac OS X 10.3" if the X really meant ten?
Well, it is pronounced "Mac Oh Ess Ten, version ten dot three".
"Mac OS X" is the product name, separate from the version number. Just like Windows 95 and Windows 98 each had multiple versions, released in years other than '95 and '98.
But it is obviously connected to the version number, and you can tell that Apple is trying hard to preserve the decimal number 10 -- once they get to 10.9 there's going to be some gnashing of teeth as they figure out what to do next to preserve product identity.
(The funniest consequence of all of this is that their first release of an "OS X" product was "Mac OS X Server", which was later renamed "Mac OS X Server 1.0" -- and then once the new version came out, it was "Mac OS X Server 10.0".)
Before the reset buttons on Macs, Apple II machines (the//c, the ][e, ][+ and//) had a reset button seated on a hefty spring, and would only take effect if you held down the Apple button (nowadays known as the Command key).
This only applied to the original Apple II and II+. In the earliest versions of those machines, the reset key was the same as any other key, and very easy to hit by mistake. My old II+ has the rubber washer installed under that keycap to make the key very hard to press. In later II+ revisions they changed to requiring control-reset. All later Apple II models use control-reset.
The keyboard itself underwent some changes, both by users and by Apple. The original RESET key was in the upper right-hand corner of the keyboard. The problem with that key was that it had the same feel as the keys around it, making it possible to accidentally hit RESET and lose the entire program that was being so carefully entered. One user modification was to pop off the RESET keycap and put a rubber washer under it, making it necessary to apply more pressure than usual to do a RESET. Apple fixed this twice, once by replacing the spring under the keycap with a stiffer one, and finally by making it necessary to press the CTRL key and the RESET together to make a RESET cycle happen. The keyboards that had the CTRL-RESET feature made it user selectable via a small slide switch just inside the case (some people didn't want to have to press the CTRL key to do a RESET).
Were you ever subjected to fields strong enough that you felt any biological effects?
Over in another thread I researched a little bit on the known bio-effects of static magnetic fields. I'd be curious to hear first-hand from someone who might have experienced them.
You write: While considered a "pilot" operation, it does generate 20 MW of power, supplying the electrical needs for 4500 customers.
Where on earth do you arrive at that 20MW figure?
Remember that "Watts" are not the same as "Watt-hours". (The first is power, the second is energy.)
From the Annapolis site you referenced: It employs the largest straight-flow turbine in the world to generate more than 30 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, enough for 4500 homes.
30 gigaWatt-hours / hours-per-year = 3.4 megaWatts average continuous. Divide that by 4500 homes, and you allow about 760 Watts per home. I guess that's a fair average -- but of course peak demand is much higher. (A single hair dryer draws 1500 Watts)
But compare to your larger-size power plant, operating at upwards of 1000MW, which would power well over a million homes!
On to the deep-sea generators, the New Scientist artical says: The European Commission estimates the currents around the UK, for example, could produce 48-terrawatt hours of electricity per year.
48e12 Wh / hours-per-year = about 5500MW, about the same as 6 large power plants, providing power for 7 million homes. That is a lot of power!
BUT, it's spread out around the whole of the UK. And if each tidal mill only generates 300kW, you'd need about 18 million of them to harness it all, assuming it's all actually harnessable.
Who can afford to build 18 million of these things? And all the cabling infrastructure?
And what's the ecological impact of all those running under water?
I don't think the economics work out. For us to actually make progress, we need to find cheaper energy, not more expensive.
By contrast, magnetic fields have a very measurable effect on the body. Your blood is composed of about 7-28 umol/L, or if I did the math right, about 1 mg/L. Take a magnet and rub it near a vein sometime. If the field is strong enough, you get reorientation of the red blood cells, and eventually clumping of those cells. In sufficiently concentrated doses, the health effects could be significant.
That's false. Red blood cells do not clump in the presense of magnetic fields.
There have been studies on the phosphene effect, where strong magnetic pulses cause subjects to percieve brief visual images.
Lawrence Livermore National Labs has a page on the harmful effects of very strong magnetic fields, upwards of 40,000 Gauss -- but such fields are rarely encountered. Typical MRI magnetic fields, by comparison, are typically between 5,000 and 20,000 guass. But even in very high static magnetic fields, the effects are temporary.
The big danger is for people with implanted metal, like pace makers or surgical clips.
Your typical hand-held magnet, even a strong one, produces a field on the order of 4,000 Gauss. Not harmful.
The fields produced by any kind of transmitters mentioned in the article would be tens or hundreds of Gauss -- too weak to move a paperclip.
(The earth's magnetic field is about 0.5 Gauss, for comparison)
On the other hand, the LLNL page mentions that magnetic fields equal to the strength of the Earth's can disrupt circadian rhythm! And it has been proven that birds are sensitive to the Earth's field... so even small magnetic fields can have a measurable biological effect.
Actually I'm relatively sure Google simply downloads the zone file every once in a while, so it wouldn't affect them. Thats why it takes Google longer to get a site's new IP than the rest of the world.
And they're downloading the zone file from where now? It's not publically available, you know...
And what do you mean it takes Google longer to get a site's new IP? How would you know? All we see is how often Google updates their index, which has nothing to do with speedy DNS.
No, the only way to truly counteract this would be to get your local caching DNS server to intercept these bogus replies and replace them with the nonexistent-domain error.
Slashdot Mirror
The link doesn't work!
- Peter
74 minutes of uncompressed audio at CD quality should take 650MB of space.
Actually, uncompressed CD audio is very close to 10MB/min, so that should be 740MB.
4 Bytes per stereo sample, 44100 samples/sec * 74 minutes = 783,216,000 Bytes, or 747MB.
(I refuse to use this mebibyte business. Bah. Silliness.)
You'll notice, of course, that CD-ROMs contain less data than audio CDs, because of the extra error correction they include.
- Peter
I think you are mistaken. WAV and AIFF are both compressed data formats.
Nope. AIFF encodes uncompressed audio samples only. There is a second format, AIFF-C that can contain either uncompressed samples or data from a variety of different compression formats.
WAVE format is comparable to AIFF-C, in that it can contain various types of sound data. But I think it's fair to say the vast majority of WAVE files are uncompressed.
- Peter
Stock. Price.
Except that they're privately owned.
- Peter
I went to the site with Safari and it gave me a javascript warning! Sheesh. Please. Safari has javascript. What are they looking for?
Wait for the page to load, maybe? Before the whole page loads, the script doesn't execute. The site is under heavy load, so you have to be patient.
Then it played its cheesy flash intro and stopped.
I'd love to see the pictures, but they have to get rid of the M$ bloatware.
Uhm, dude, Microsoft-bashing is fun, but neither javascript nor Flash are Microsoft technologies. You're blaming them why exactly?
- Peter
insanely high bitrate like 1024b/s. That's 97 days.
1.024kbps is insanely high? That'd be 9.3 years at that rate.
(yah, typo. sure. what's a factor of a thousand between friends)
- Peter
Or you can get two and stick them in a RAID array and get 600GB of 10800 effective RPM goodness.
:)
While the maximum sustained contiguous transfer speed would be double, the access time would not be any less. Pick an arbitrary block. It's on one drive or the other. You still have to wait for that block to rotate around under the head.
RAID is nice, but it doesn't change the laws of physics, even if William Shatner asks it to.
- Peter
Telemarketing will become a very lucrative business for companies that can afford to call from Canada, where the DNCR is toothless, or from Mexico, or other "offshore" locations.
... this will do nothing to stop it. Just as gun control does nothing to stop criminals from having guns, or encryption export control stops other countries and criminal organiations from having encryption.
Toothless? No, the DNCR still applies to overseas calls.
What I don't get is exactly why you think the DNCR is such a bad idea. You damn "socialists and facists" and paint this as a body shot to personal responsibility.
Personal responsibility? Are you trying to tell me telemarketers have personal responsibility?
Actually, the list gives telemarketers an opportunity to exhibit their responsibility: a good, cheap list of people who have asked not to be called. What could be better! They'll stop bothering us of their own accord!
As far as those who would "prey on old people" by scamming them
The reason is simple: Law breakers break laws.
Whoah! So we shouldn't have any laws?
If the "old people" sign up for DNC registries, the FTC will have more tools to work with at getting those bad guys preying on old people.
There are now "anti-slamming" laws that protect consumers against that practice, and sure enough it has become less of a problem.
Gun control does make it harder for criminals to obtain guns. Not impossible, no, but 15 year olds can't walk into Target and buy a semi-automatic. That's at least something. (I would ban all handguns, myself.)
Obviously, you and I have very different opinions about the role of government. You think the phone companies should be able to profit from the problem of unwanted telemarketing by selling you blocking services. I think the government should stop the problem at its source.
I'm hoping they'll be able to do the same thing with spam...
- Peter
I noticed too...seems to be something with Mozilla's Root CAs, because IE has no problem with it. IE also recently had an update to it's Root CA list.
Currently ALL of my browsers refuse to acknowledge the Root CA for donotcall.gov. Running on OS X, that's Safari 1.0, IE 5.2.2, Mozilla 1.1...
So they must be using a brand new Root CA that hasn't been incorporated in any but the most recent browsers. That seems silly.
- Peter
and the cost is staggering
:)
Oh, WAAAAAAAAAH! Poor telemarketers.
From FTC's info page: (my emphasis added)
How much does it cost to access the registry?
Data for up to five area codes will be available for free. Beyond that, there is an annual fee of $25 per area code of data, with a maximum annual fee of $7,375 for the entire U.S. database.
That's so much less than a penny per phone number that you don't get any sympathy at all.
If you're a national telemarketer, you pay your $7,375.00 and download the 122MB compressed file annually. I don't think this is a large fee or burden compared to the actual costs of the telecommunications equipment, not to mention your staff.
On the other hand, the amount of lost revenue from the diminished "audience" for your calls has got to hurt. Cry me a river.
- Peter
NOTE: Seems like only Mozilla will work when submitting a complaint. At least, that was my experience.
:(
Looks to be a problem with their site certificate, and it's not just IE that caughs on it.
- Peter
I found a 1997 Texas law that mandates proper Caller ID identification. But individual state laws are harder to enforce...
The federal law that accomplishes the same thing will take effect next year. From the FTC's page:
Requires caller ID transmission.
Beginning January 29, 2004, telemarketers must transmit their telephone number and if possible, their name, to your caller ID service. This will protect your privacy, increase accountability on the telemarketer's part, and help in law enforcement efforts.
That should help. Vigilant anti-marketers should notice any blocked Caller ID, and switch into feigned-interested-consumer mode to gather enough information from the company to report them.
- Peter
For our html-challenged posters, that should be a link to the Do Not Call Registry complaint form.
By the way, what's wrong with their SSL certificate? It looks like it's supposed to be a Verisign-issued certificate, but it's coming up as "issued by an unknown entity".
- Peter
Didn't you hear? The voters decided to recall Tuesdays and Wednesdays, to be replaced soon by weekday-elects Nothumpday and Humpday.
- Peter
Much of the volts and amps are dispersed to ground.
Uh... A Watt dissipated is a Watt dissipated. If a stovetop were a dead short, it wouldn't produce much heat. (or another way of looking at it: the rest of wiring in your house would produce just as much heat as it would)
A stovetop is a resistive load, which absorbs electrical energy and releases it as heat.
The power consumed by a cpu, measured in Watts, is the electrical energy absorbed by its electrical resistance, rereleased as heat.
No difference. Nothing "disbersed to ground" any differently.
V=IR might have different values, but power doesn't care, since it's based only on P=IV.
- Peter
After all, why would they call the OS "Mac OS X 10.3" if the X really meant ten?
Well, it is pronounced "Mac Oh Ess Ten, version ten dot three".
"Mac OS X" is the product name, separate from the version number. Just like Windows 95 and Windows 98 each had multiple versions, released in years other than '95 and '98.
But it is obviously connected to the version number, and you can tell that Apple is trying hard to preserve the decimal number 10 -- once they get to 10.9 there's going to be some gnashing of teeth as they figure out what to do next to preserve product identity.
(The funniest consequence of all of this is that their first release of an "OS X" product was "Mac OS X Server", which was later renamed "Mac OS X Server 1.0" -- and then once the new version came out, it was "Mac OS X Server 10.0".)
- Peter
its not too difficult for people to read the post and type it in a new tab.
/.'s formatting filter, which adds in spaces to any string of non-whitespace characters that's too long.
4 6292>
Except for
Like this: <http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=81151&cid=71
See that beautiful space?
That's I guess the biggest argument for making direct links.
- Peter
Instead of flames, how about information?
It really is very easy, and makes your post more useful to the
- Peter
This only applied to the original Apple II and II+. In the earliest versions of those machines, the reset key was the same as any other key, and very easy to hit by mistake. My old II+ has the rubber washer installed under that keycap to make the key very hard to press. In later II+ revisions they changed to requiring control-reset. All later Apple II models use control-reset.
From http://apple2history.org/history/ah06.html:
- Peter
Were you ever subjected to fields strong enough that you felt any biological effects?
Over in another thread I researched a little bit on the known bio-effects of static magnetic fields. I'd be curious to hear first-hand from someone who might have experienced them.
- Peter
We're looking for alternate link layers, not new applications...
So someone needs to implement IP over sex.
STDs already use it to transmit their "data"...
- Peter
You write:
While considered a "pilot" operation, it does generate 20 MW of power, supplying the electrical needs for 4500 customers.
Where on earth do you arrive at that 20MW figure?
Remember that "Watts" are not the same as "Watt-hours". (The first is power, the second is energy.)
From the Annapolis site you referenced:
It employs the largest straight-flow turbine in the world to generate more than 30 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, enough for 4500 homes.
30 gigaWatt-hours / hours-per-year = 3.4 megaWatts average continuous. Divide that by 4500 homes, and you allow about 760 Watts per home. I guess that's a fair average -- but of course peak demand is much higher. (A single hair dryer draws 1500 Watts)
But compare to your larger-size power plant, operating at upwards of 1000MW, which would power well over a million homes!
On to the deep-sea generators, the New Scientist artical says:
The European Commission estimates the currents around the UK, for example, could produce 48-terrawatt hours of electricity per year.
48e12 Wh / hours-per-year = about 5500MW, about the same as 6 large power plants, providing power for 7 million homes. That is a lot of power!
BUT, it's spread out around the whole of the UK. And if each tidal mill only generates 300kW, you'd need about 18 million of them to harness it all, assuming it's all actually harnessable.
Who can afford to build 18 million of these things? And all the cabling infrastructure?
And what's the ecological impact of all those running under water?
I don't think the economics work out. For us to actually make progress, we need to find cheaper energy, not more expensive.
- Peter
By contrast, magnetic fields have a very measurable effect on the body. Your blood is composed of about 7-28 umol/L, or if I did the math right, about 1 mg/L. Take a magnet and rub it near a vein sometime. If the field is strong enough, you get reorientation of the red blood cells, and eventually clumping of those cells. In sufficiently concentrated doses, the health effects could be significant.
That's false. Red blood cells do not clump in the presense of magnetic fields.
There have been studies on the phosphene effect, where strong magnetic pulses cause subjects to percieve brief visual images.
Lawrence Livermore National Labs has a page on the harmful effects of very strong magnetic fields, upwards of 40,000 Gauss -- but such fields are rarely encountered. Typical MRI magnetic fields, by comparison, are typically between 5,000 and 20,000 guass. But even in very high static magnetic fields, the effects are temporary.
The big danger is for people with implanted metal, like pace makers or surgical clips.
Now, I did find a study on red blood cells in very strong magnetic fields that does suggest that they reorient, even in fields as low as 10,000 Gauss. No mention of clumping.
Your typical hand-held magnet, even a strong one, produces a field on the order of 4,000 Gauss. Not harmful.
The fields produced by any kind of transmitters mentioned in the article would be tens or hundreds of Gauss -- too weak to move a paperclip.
(The earth's magnetic field is about 0.5 Gauss, for comparison)
On the other hand, the LLNL page mentions that magnetic fields equal to the strength of the Earth's can disrupt circadian rhythm! And it has been proven that birds are sensitive to the Earth's field... so even small magnetic fields can have a measurable biological effect.
But FEAR FEAR FEAR is not warranted.
- Peter
Actually I'm relatively sure Google simply downloads the zone file every once in a while, so it wouldn't affect them. Thats why it takes Google longer to get a site's new IP than the rest of the world.
And they're downloading the zone file from where now? It's not publically available, you know...
And what do you mean it takes Google longer to get a site's new IP? How would you know? All we see is how often Google updates their index, which has nothing to do with speedy DNS.
- Peter
would sticking that IP in our hosts file work?
Nope. Hosts files map name->IP, not vice versa.
No, the only way to truly counteract this would be to get your local caching DNS server to intercept these bogus replies and replace them with the nonexistent-domain error.
- Peter