As a musician, I WANT to be able to "color" my music with amplification, distortion, effects boxes, etc. That's why tube amps are most popular with guitar players, bassists, and other amplied-instrument types. They're after a particular sound, and those old tube amps seem to do a much better job of producing it than a "cold" digital processor.
However, as a listener, I want to hear what the musician did to the signal, not what my equipment is doing to it. The goal of an audiophile OUGHT to be "perfect reproduction". In that case, the LAST thing I want is distortion or coloring.
Finally, the goal of the recording process is always to accurately record the original sound - and that should include the gentle distortion from the Fender tube amp, or the phasing sounds from the wah-wah pedal, or the pulsing beat of the Leslie rotary speaker, etc.
I see the geek reaction to water cooling as very similar to the hobbyist reaction to everything useful in recent history. Let me elaborate.
Think back about 100 years to the start of aviation. The really dedicated aeronauts built their own planes - in fact, the Wright brothers were basically hobbyists compared to Mr. Langley, who was well-financed, especially by the government. What was the reaction among the hobbyist crowd to mass-produced planes?
Think back about 120 years to the start of the practical automobile. The really dedicated enthusiasts built their own cars. What was the reaction among that crowd to the Model T? "Junk. Never sell well. Impractical." Let's take that one a step further. "Computer controlled ignition and fuel injection systems? Preposterous. How can I tweak it?" Well, where are we today? When's the last time you drove a car with real points or a carburetor?
Think back about 50 years to the early days of home audio. The really dedicated geeks built their own systems - remember the Heathkit stuff (or am I too old for this crowd)? Build your own TV, you could. Same thing for stereos, etc. What was the typical audiophile reaction to the idea of a mass-produced stereo? "It'll be junk. Never work. Sounds lousy. No control over the details." Sorry to mess with that world view, but walk into any WalMart and you can take home a stereo system that sounds far better than many of those hobbyist's systems, and costs about 1/10 as much.
Think back about 20 years to when PCs were solely the domain of either the goverment/high-end research facilities, or hobbyists. What was the reaction to mass-produced PCs? Remember IBM's reaction to Bill Gates? Even more to the point, how about the hobbyist reaction to Bill Gates?
What I'm getting at is this: the folks who do the most whining and complaining about anything going mainstream is the hobbyist crowd. Why? I believe it's because the hobbyist perceives it as a threat to his control over his hobby. It's inconceivable to him that something could be mainstreamed successfully. Certainly, here on/. we have a crowd of 98% hobbyist, do-it-yourself types who keep a close eye on technology and how the guts work.
Okay, but what's the reality of the situation? Simply put, does your grandma care how her PC works, if she even uses one? No, she simply cares that she can turn it on, use it, and turn it off again. The chance that she'll EVER see the guts of a home PC approaches zero. Same thing with a stereo, or a car, or a plane. Most non-geeks not only don't KNOW how most things work, they emphatically don't WANT to know.
So I see water cooling the same way. It WILL work, it WILL be accepted, and it WILL be part of many systems soon, regardless of how many hobbyists think it's a mistake. Because OUR desire for control over the innards of the PC is completely irrelevant to the mass market. PCs are simply not built for us anymore - they are built for Joe Sixpack and your grandma.
As proof of this, take the average notebook PC. They're accepted widely, but almost completely impossible to upgrade, or hack, or tweak. Well, water cooling is going the same way. The manufacturers don't care if water cooling is good for the computer hobbyist, as long as they can make it work in a mainstream, sealed-box PC. And that's where the average home PC is headed - a sealed PC that is effectively non-upgradable.
Walk into a department store someday soon, with a small foil pouch full of RFID tags stripped from popular and expensive items that you own and kept the receipts... maybe a few expensive watches, a couple fancy consumer electronics, etc... wander around the store for a half hour, hanging out near those shelves... being certain to handle some of those items suspiciously and having your picture taken by closed-caption cameras... take the tags out of the pouch... then walk out without going thru the registers.
WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP the alarm sounds... you get arrested and searched for shoplifting... and upon proving that the tags are from objects you own and purchased, and with the help of the ACLJ or ACLU, you sue the store for false arrest and negligent use of their new fancy technology...
*Smirk*...
Even if you don't win any money, such tactics would certainly help push the careful use of RFID deactivation. Civil disobedience is likely to be a big problem for RFID promoters and marketers.
Incidentally, someone made an interesting observation about un-deactivated RFID tags in consumer mechandise... it would be very convenient for the above-average mugger to be able to stand on a street corner at night, with a little scanner, and know exactly what you have that he might want to steal.
"Hey, slick... the dude walkin' dis way has $120 in cash, three VISA cards, a Rolex, Air Jordan shoes, a Blackberry pager and a Kyocera phone... good target!.... here, cover me..."
"Yo, dude, into the alley, empty the pockets, and hand over the Rolex and phone - don't tell me you don't have it, sucker......
A bit later:
"Nah, skip her, she only has $20 and a Timex... nope, skip him, he's got a Glock 45..."
Come to think of it, I can see a market for fake tags... I'd buy a few from pepper spray, a sizeable handgun, maybe a folding knife...
>I can just see the next evolution in this will be to add rfid tags >to the change they give you to track where you spend it.
You're behind the times. The EU has already proposed adding RFIDs to large banknotes. http://www.silicon.com/news/500018/1/4 316.html A quote from the article: "RFID [radio frequency identification] tags also have the ability of recording information such as details of the transactions the paper note has been involved in. It would, therefore, also prevent money-laundering, make it possible to track illegal transactions and even prevent kidnappers demanding unmarked bills..."
You can bet that disabling THOSE tags would be a criminal offense.
>the store can update the chip the moment you walk out of the store, >to contain the excat time, location and idendity of the buyer
Not according to most of the information currently available about RFIDs. Most of them are merely a passive device that can only actively transmit its serial number, and only its serial number. What's done with that serial number is up to the system that queries it, and it could certainly tie together the purchaser's information and the RFID serial numbers of goods purchased, but that's merely database magic, not RFID technology.
Actually it's much more likely that the FedEx card in the parent post has active data storage, than any run-of-the-mill grain-of-sand RFID.
The RFIDs envisioned to be used for tagging goods are as simple as possible, to make them as cheap as possible. At least at this time, nobody's proposing what I'd call "smart" RFIDs for marketable goods.
On the other hand, RFID manufacturers are implementing (at least in some chips) the ability to self-deactivate - something of a self-destruct code. But that does not require any storage memory, just the ability to short out a circuit on command.
So while this is POSSIBLE, nobody is proposing it at this time. This post seems to be a bit hyper-conspiracy-theory oriented.
> Who, among home users, just buys the cheapest PSU they can find with enough power? Or is it just me?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I *HOPE* it's just you.
For the last YEAR I've been fighting all kinds of system instability, basically ever since I upgraded to a high-speed Athlon motherboard. I naturally thought it was mobo related. I was having crashes about every 10 minutes of heavy dual-drive activity (any time I was copying large files from CD-to-drive, or drive-to-drive, and it happened in both DOS and from Windows, so I was certain it wasn't software-related. I was also having boot problems - about half the time, on power-up, nothing would happen - requiring a power cycle. I did enough other tests to prove to myself it wasn't memory related, etc. Migrating to WinXP helped (Win98 was a nightmare) but it didn't stop. Backup was a breath-holding nightmare, since it was disk-drive related.
The worst part was that since it was disk-related, the crashes occurred a few times when a FAT-table write was occuring, and twice I had to rebuild my system. Thank God for recent backups. Finally I bought a new mobo, kept the same processor, and things improved instantly - at least, so I thought.
I should also mention that I'd lost two hard drives in the last couple years - to no-kidding hardware failure. Strange that both were with this same case... too bad it wasn't just chance.
After a few weeks of relative calm, with my new mobo, I thought I had the problem licked, except the startup problems (no big deal, since I leave the system running 24/7). Everything looked stable. Hurray! But then WinXP locked up again, in the middle of a drive write, and I lost everything AGAIN. Thank God for recent backups AGAIN. (Lesson learned... buy an external USB hard drive, and USE IT daily... even with a XCOPY32 c:*.* d:/e/d batch file if you're too cheap to buy backup software.)
Thanks to Slashdot, thus, for the article a few days ago about power supply ratings. It got me thinking, and as I started doing some research, discovered that many of the problems (unexplained crashes, hardware failures, startup problems, etc.) could be directly related to a cheap or underrated PSU. The core of my problem was the upgrade. The two-year old case with the 250W or 300W power supply may have been fine for my Pentium 2, but putting a hot, hungry Athlon into the same case was a real minefield. As I researched I ran into many comments about this very problem - the Athlon, and just as much the fastest Intel chips, are very power-hungry, and when combined with disk-head motors, the power draw can be just enough to spike the processor or memory at a critical time.
After much shopping research, I just today forked over $90 for an Antec TruePower 430 at my local shop, not a bad price for the service and no shipping charges. I selected this unit on its independent rail power for each voltage, plus its temp-controlled case-fan plugs, and although I haven't installed it yet to prove it's the fix I want, I'm completely confident it'll do the trick.
I'm hopeful that this $90 upgrade will prevent the hundreds of hours of hardware repairs, drive swaps, and software reinstallation I've suffered over the last year or two. It's a small price to pay, given my hourly wage.
Go and do thou likewise.
NASA Langley does research with RC planes
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TAM 5 Has landed
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· Score: 1
I worked for a summer internship at NASA Langley in Hampton, VA, and had the pleasure of assisting their chief radio-control builder in constructing and flying a couple remote-controlled model planes they use for research. Contrary to the huge prices in the parent post, NASA got a lot of value for very little money. We basically used off-the-shelf RC equipment, hand-built the planes just like hobbyists do it, and flew them very much like hobbyists do it.
The main differences from traditional RC hobbyists were the onboard telemetry system, and the means of getting some of these models launched.
One of the primary programs in which I participated involved the use of a sailplane model. Rather than launching from a big slingshot, like most hobbyists, we modified an Eagle-style RC trainer with a mount to carry the sailplane, and we literally flew the stacked planes up to altitude using the powered model for thrust, then did an inflight separation (somewhat like Enterprise shuttle coming off the top of a 747 during very early shuttle program tests).
Also, the NASA folks had a pretty interesting telemetry (remote data collection) setup, which reversed the conventional use of a stock RC radio. The transmitter was mounted in the airplane, and the control sticks taken apart and hooked up to various sensors, and the receiver was on the ground, with the servos hooked up to pens on paper rolls. That way, whenever the onboard sensors moved, the pens also moved. A poor-man's remote sensing system, for just a few hundred dollars!
The results of this work have shown up in many places - from sailplane wing design to general-aviation stall prevention devices to high-visibility X-plane programs.
Granted, in 1989 when I did this work, autonomous flight was rare, and we did all this work by piloted remote control, but my point is that it was done for just hundreds of dollars per model, not multiple thousands. Yes, the government sometimes DOES save money.
The shape of the pyramids is fine - IF you're trying to pick up a signal from the center of the earth... the entire angled shape of the horn is designed to focus the inbound radiation smoothly towards the center (peak) of the pyramid shape, where a little tiny antenna actually receives the radiation. Somehow I doubt you can pick up much RF thru 3000 miles of rock. And it's awful hard to beam-steer with a multi-trillion-pound pile of stacked rocks.
I read thru every decently-moderated posting above, hoping SOMEONE would make this comment, but noooooo.... the privacy gang took over. Anyway...
It seems like every time this comes up, someone complains about the way the cable companies, media companies, etc. are just looking for an excuse to squash PVRs. (I own an UltimateTV unit, but the TiVo is the same...) I don't think I've watched a commercial during a delayed playback in the last year, unless I was just too busy getting a soda to grab the remote. That's gotta worry the content providers.
So the REAL danger I see here is that the content providers will prove to themselves the reality of what's going on in PVR-land, and finally have a real excuse to push even harder for DRM and locking out the fast-forward and skip buttons. Okay, I'm already frustrated enough that I can't skip that stupid FBI warning at the front of a DVD, so the LAST thing I want is someone telling me I can't use the fast-forward button right this moment, because there's a paid Budweiser advertisement on, and by God I WILL have to watch it because Anheiser-Busch PAID for me to watch it. Even though I don't drink beer.
So where are all the DRM versus PVR nuts? SOMEONE chip in here... tell me I'm not all alone...
After very vocally bailing out from TurboTax this year (several phone calls to express my displeasure, and informing them I'd think about coming back when they removed DRM), I chose TaxCut as the next best thing based on many writeups and reviews of various other products. I use the Home & Business version, to handle my home business Schedule C.
I'm sorry to report that when it comes to usability and user interface, TurboTax has TaxCut licked, no matter how you look at it. Just a short list: - Installation and "automatic" update was fairly painful, in that the state form didn't integrate well and it took a couple cycles thru before everything was working right. - One feature actually took a tech support call to H&R Block, and manually editing a setting file, to get working right. - the TaxCut interview was a marginal copy of TurboTax's rather slick, and easily readable version. - The error check complained about things that were not errors, just things that were legitimately missing from various paperwork I had (it apparently wanted me to make up an address to satisfy it, although the W2 had no information where it THOUGHT there should be some - sorry, I'm not going to fudge info like that for the IRS!) - Every time I saved and came back later after digging up some additional documentation, to even GET BACK to the "ready to file" screen I had to run thru about 30 mouse clicks to questions I'd already answered, and put up with the return error check all over again (including several "errors" that were NOT errors). - The help functions stunk. There was no real context-sensitive help for tax questions; in TurboTax when you ask for help, you get specific details about that topic or line of the form from numerous documents. In TaxCut you only got help for the entire form, and have to read thru the help to find the relevant portions. None of the help documents were really keyed to the specific line of the tax form. - Working with the actual forms was non-intuitive, and I was uncertain what would happen at some points - would this form be added, or could I just look at it to see what's there... etc. - Many more irritations.
Just to be less biased, I should mention that there were a few things I liked better. For example, it was easier to get thru some interview areas where multiple questions could be answered at once, versus TurboTax's rather nitnoid one-thing-at-a-time interview. Despite the install/update/fix the install frustrations, the installation was faster and seemed to leave less crud on my disk. Also, many of the interview questions did a better job of explaining what the question really meant, and a couple times, I changed my answer from previous years because I finally understood the real thrust of the tax form's question. Still, these were small sparks in an otherwise frustrating experience.
As a result, it's going to be a very difficult decision next year. I want (badly want) to spank Intuit for this almost unforgivable fiasco, and really want them to suffer for a couple years because of this. They need to focus on a good product. But on the flip side, they DO already have a good product that by almost all accounts is years ahead of the competition. And furthermore, I want to reward them for listening to (and better yet, acting on) the complaints.
So "what to do, what to do..." - do I stay mad at them, or forgive and move on?
I'm almost hoping that Intuit pulls some stunt again this winter, like trying to sneak in something a bit less obvious but still too DRM-ish, or that H&R Block does add some DRM to TaxCut, to help make my decision for me.
A few salient details should convince you this is as close to an April Fools joke as it's possible to get on April 2. If it hadn't been posted on DefenseReview I'd have completely ignored this.
The polonium source is always hot, whether or not it is being used. The article states that "while the weapon is in a storage mode, in essence the system produces 104KW of heat energy." Imagine a bin of these replacement cartridges - it could run a small town. And when in use, each burst (of which you can fire 170 per minute) has an internal energy dissipation of 16.4KW. No kidding. You'd need several inches of shuttle thermal tile just to hold this thing.
The article states "Currently Polonium-210 is only produced in microgram quantities for research purposes at facilities such as Oak Ridge National Laboratory." Yep, THAT'S likely to change soon.
It specs a recoil force of 90 (yep, NINETY) pounds in the forward direction - enough to rip it out of the hands of a soldier. And it claims to be able to sustain 170 bursts per minute, at 0.35s per burst. That's about 59.5 seconds per minute, yanking at 90 lb on a soldier. No human could handle this thing for long.
The article states "Stavatti has not previously, nor is currently involved in an effort to develop a qualified small arm weapon system..." like this one. Yep, that makes it likely this could ever work.
Finally, the article is full of spelling and grammar errors.
Just in case you missed the pun, it's a carbon dioxide / nitrogen gas laser - hence the term "vaporware"...
BTW, their web page about this thing is here: http://www.stavatti.com/armament_systems.ht ml
A couple years ago I pulled open an office computer (that was fully operational) to scarf some parts, I think the hard drive and video card. Much to my surprise, I found a ribbon-style serial jumper cable from the motherboard to the back panel had the ground wire completely melted off - as far as I could tell the cable had been installed backwards at the motherboard end, and the power line had shorted to case ground. The entire edge of the cable looked like someone had held a match along its edge and was blackened, curled and melted.
As I said, amazingly enough, the computer was operational when I opened the case.
Possible "Spiritual" Relationship Too
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Soundless Music?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Think of all those high-church folks who maintain that "rock is a tool of the devil."
Okay, hang in there, and don't mod me down YET...
My father for years has preferred a high-church style worship service, where the newer, "pop" elements such as drums and bass guitar are shunned. He has maintained that certain types of music themselves are capable of creating a purely emotional response, independent of the actual spiritual qualities of the music. For this reason, he feels it's dangerous to emphasize rock-style worship services, because there might be confusion or conflict between the emotional push of the music and the individual's ability to freely approach his God on his own terms, without someone else kicking at his subconcious.
The spiritual aspects of this aside, I believe this article lends some credence to that viewpoint.
(I rather LIKE the bass and drums, and I personally feel that I often NEED a kick in the rear, so to speak, to get me paying attention to the spiritual. So it's okay with me to use infrasound to get my attention...)
Before anyone asks, IAAAE (yes, I am an aerospace engineer).
Ground effect does not apply to this type of aircraft.
For an airplane, "ground effect" is the term applied to the tendency of a wing to exhibit increased aerodynamic efficiency (basically more lift and less drag) when it's within roughly a half-wingspan of the ground. It's caused, at least in layman's terms, by a cushion of air forming beneath the wing and the ground, and by the reduction of a drag-inducing wingtip vortex.
This vehicle has no horizontal wing flying thru the air. So we can eliminate the obvious cushion of air.
Now, a helicopter demonstrates ground effect for the same basic reason as an airplane, within half a rotor-disc-diameter or so of the ground, and also because for a hovering vehicle, the downwash tends to bounce back up again to provide a additional cushion.
Here's a primer on helo ground effect. As you can see, the ground effect is largely produced by the ground limiting development of a tip vortex.
Just for completeness, we can also address ground effect for a hovering jet, like the Harrier Jump Jet. In that case, the downwash bouncing up certainly provides a cushion, and the Harrier has strakes under the fuselage designed exclusively to capture that cushion of air and enhance it - kind of like a hovercraft. But for a hovering jet, you have an additional problem - the exhaust gases also tend to get reingested by the engine, lowering the engine efficiency. One of the most vexing problems for the Harrier, and also for the newer Joint Strike Fighter designs, is "hot gas reingestion". In fact, if you hover these aircraft pointing downwind, you can snuff out the engine due to lack of oxygen. (This issue is probably not a big problem for the high-bypass arrangement of the SoloTrek, where very little exhaust gas is produced.)
Now to address this vehicle. The lift is provided by ducted fans. Therefore there is no tip vortex, because the duct prevents one from forming. In fact, the duct itself provides the same effect as ground effect, by eliminating the efficiency loss due to the vortex. The only relevant part of the "ground effect" here is therefore the bouncing cushion of air. But the fans on this vehicle are mounted so high above the ground (about 7 feet), and the total thrust is so low, that a fairly minimal ground effect cushion can be developed. In fact, in the pictures on Ebay, at least one of the photos shows the thing high enough up (the fans are at least 12 feet off the ground) that any ground effect that might exist would be almost totally eliminated.
So it's extremely unlikely that this vehicle's performance would change significantly with climbing away from the ground.
"Consumers should bear some responsibility for their actions rather than putting even more laws on the books."
And if you think back, to when you actually had to PAY ATTENTION to who was fixing your car, because Uncle Sam was not involved in the decision, you probably got much better service for your dollar, and knew a lot more about the work.
For years I took my car to a shop far from home, because they did good work, knew me personally, even occasionally let me use their tools to do a job myself, etc. I selected them based on reputation, and service, and their record with me personally. Not some license on the wall. And just as importantly, when they started screwing up my car every time it went there, I stopped going. Despite the license on the wall.
We Americans are a lazy bunch. Hey, the gu'mmint says they're licensed, must be okay. Here, Joe, fix my car. I trust you because Uncle Sam does too.
Back in 'the day' when the consumer had to actually pay attention, I'll wager the service was a lot better. Sure there were ripoff artists, and bad stuff happened, but those shops didn't stay around for long.
Just so, today, I'd bet that the overall service is better on computers, BECAUSE there is no regulation.
One way to shut these things down is to get the guys doing the scamming.
Okay, now that I've done the "Mr. Obvious Man" imiatation, let me pontificate a bit.
It's one thing to try and track down the web site author, which can be tough at best, but when you've got a real point of contact who's insisting on USING the fake web site, and it's a fairly sure bet he's part of the scam, you've got a much simpler target. Ebay certainly would go after this guy, and the French authorities may also very well be interested in nailing him.
Unlike the web site creators, it may actually be fairly easy for Ebay to get hold of this guy, when they can prove criminal intent and have good reason to release the details to authorities. At the least, they can use YOUR help to set up a sting - supply you with the funds, follow thru the transaction, observe the scam unfold, and then go get the guy where he lives.
Stop laughing... there might be some future here
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Massive Two Towers Battle
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· Score: 3, Interesting
After I stopped laughing at the parent post, I had to ask myself *when*, not *if*, this actually might be the way movie theaters work.
After all, if you can really generate a scene completely in software, it probably takes a LOT fewer bytes to describe it than the raw imagery. How big was the entire source material for Final Fantasy? I'd bet it was a LOT smaller than a fully-digital movie at full theater resolution.
Taken to its logical conclusion, I wonder how far away the day will be when a "movie" as delivered to the studio is actually merely the script, along with a bunch of texture files, character maps, landscape grids, MIDI files, etc., essentially a huge.WAD file. I can easily see the day when a photorealistic movie could be generated solely by the computer.
To karma whore for a second, too, it's interesting to note that if the movie theater rendering system that drove this method were sufficiently more advanced than the average user's home PC, it would make it completely impossible to pirate a digital movie on a 1-for-1 basis - you'd only be able to capture the rendered film, and have a much larger digital file to handle. What a bonus for the movie industry that could be.
A final thought about this idea. Assuming that the hardware in each theater were not identical, and even if they were, it's entirely likely that each time the film were projected (hence rendered then projected), it would be slightly different. Hmmm.
... to copy a movie or CD, but they just don't care the same. For one thing, you don't siphon gas from you neighbor's tank because you know your neighbor, and you know he'll get hugely torqued off at you, and maybe call the cops, if he finds out. After all, every car now sold has some form of anti-siphon fuel neck, because PEOPLE DO SIPHON GAS. For another, it's messy and smelly and you can simply get gas cheap enough at the corner store without getting your neighbor headed your way with a baseball bat or tire iron.
No, I think folks know it's stealing in the same way they also know that going 65 in a 55 zone is breaking the law. "It's okay, everyone does it." "I'm not hurting anyone (at least that I know and care about)." "It's cheap and painless." "Nobody will ever know." "Nobody will bother me for doing this, so I can do it with impunity."
This doesn't make it right, it just makes it common.
See my.sig below for my thoughts on right and wrong, and you'll understand my viewpoint on theft of intellectual property.
After thinking about my post above... Seems like it would be much easier to just take a decent digital camcorder and fly down the coast at a moderate rate of speed. Better continuous coverage, much much faster, and if the real purpose IS to look for breakwaters or illegal rockpiles, certainly a digital camcorder image would work for that.
I wonder if there isn't some other motive here, requiring high-res images.
(Like getting free publicity on Slashdot for using exclusively non-MS technology for a cool task, perhaps.....? Naaaaahhhh....)
It would be way cool to have a panoramic photo of the entire California coastline (or at least a significant chunk of it) from stitching all those photos together. Set it up as a movie, perhaps, offering a sort of virtual fly-by of the coastline.
Drive cooling is wonderful. IF you like noise. I bought one of the half-height drive cover fan units - three small fans side by side that blow over the drive. Sounded really neat at the store. Sounded like a leaf blower when I installed it.
I leave my PC on full-time. I set the drives to sleep after a half hour or so. So they tend to cool down to ambient when I'm away from the machine. I didn't see any reason to cool a cool drive, and have to listen to it full time.
So I built a temperature sensitive circuit to try and limit the noise. I figured that as the drive heated up, I could spool up the fans accordingly, and keep it quiet longer. There were two problems, one fixable, the other not. The fixable problem was that I pulled the supply voltage from the drive power connectors, but my circuit was not voltage regulated - so as the processor load increased (yep, cpu cycle load), the fan speed changed. I could tell how busy the CPU was by listening to the fan pitch. A simple voltage regulator might fix that, although I'm surprised the voltage changes that much. The unfixable problem was that the drive heats up so rapidly (maybe one minute from idle/cool to spinning/hot) that essentially as soon as I sat down and got the modem dialed up it was howling away.
So I'm not exactly thrilled with the idea of air-cooled drives. Maybe a high-volume low speed fan for the entire case, vented near the drive, would work better. But the simplest solution is probably to stop mounting the drive at the TOP of the case, where the heat accumulates, and instead put it at the bottom.
I've had two drive failures in the last couple years on my home PC. Both were Maxtor drives. Both had 3-year warranties. Both failed in the last six months of the warranty. Both times, Maxtor replaced the drive with an identical unit. You cannot expect the warranty cycle to provide you with a new, faster, bigger drive. They don't do that. So I see this change (as a previous poster suggested) as primarily a way to reduce their stock of outdated drives. Why should they want to keep a stock of 10Gb drives around when all they make now are 40 and 80s?
One other consideration. WE are pushing THEM for bigger storage, smaller form factor, faster drives. To make this happen, they have to make design compromises. You can only fit so many bits so tightly together. Seems to me that over time, the failure rate will tend to increase for this reason alone, regardless of the quality of the units.
I believe the analysis above by another poster was correct - although it was marked "Funny" - it's the overclockers, or at least the hacker types - who probably experience the highest failure rates, as they push more and more hot equipment in to a small space. I had cooling issues with my drives and would not be surprised to find it was a contribution to the failures. Anyone with military or indudustrial experience in the Reliability field will tell you there's a direct correlation between heat and failure rates. Just a few degrees of temperature rise can double the component failure rate.
One last thought... as prices fall, maybe our response should be "RAID". Pay the same net price, get redundancy.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sounds better" OUGHT to depend on the purpose.
As a musician, I WANT to be able to "color" my music with amplification, distortion, effects boxes, etc. That's why tube amps are most popular with guitar players, bassists, and other amplied-instrument types. They're after a particular sound, and those old tube amps seem to do a much better job of producing it than a "cold" digital processor.
However, as a listener, I want to hear what the musician did to the signal, not what my equipment is doing to it. The goal of an audiophile OUGHT to be "perfect reproduction". In that case, the LAST thing I want is distortion or coloring.
Finally, the goal of the recording process is always to accurately record the original sound - and that should include the gentle distortion from the Fender tube amp, or the phasing sounds from the wah-wah pedal, or the pulsing beat of the Leslie rotary speaker, etc.
Well said, well said.
/. we have a crowd of 98% hobbyist, do-it-yourself types who keep a close eye on technology and how the guts work.
I see the geek reaction to water cooling as very similar to the hobbyist reaction to everything useful in recent history. Let me elaborate.
Think back about 100 years to the start of aviation. The really dedicated aeronauts built their own planes - in fact, the Wright brothers were basically hobbyists compared to Mr. Langley, who was well-financed, especially by the government. What was the reaction among the hobbyist crowd to mass-produced planes?
Think back about 120 years to the start of the practical automobile. The really dedicated enthusiasts built their own cars. What was the reaction among that crowd to the Model T? "Junk. Never sell well. Impractical." Let's take that one a step further. "Computer controlled ignition and fuel injection systems? Preposterous. How can I tweak it?" Well, where are we today? When's the last time you drove a car with real points or a carburetor?
Think back about 50 years to the early days of home audio. The really dedicated geeks built their own systems - remember the Heathkit stuff (or am I too old for this crowd)? Build your own TV, you could. Same thing for stereos, etc. What was the typical audiophile reaction to the idea of a mass-produced stereo? "It'll be junk. Never work. Sounds lousy. No control over the details." Sorry to mess with that world view, but walk into any WalMart and you can take home a stereo system that sounds far better than many of those hobbyist's systems, and costs about 1/10 as much.
Think back about 20 years to when PCs were solely the domain of either the goverment/high-end research facilities, or hobbyists. What was the reaction to mass-produced PCs? Remember IBM's reaction to Bill Gates? Even more to the point, how about the hobbyist reaction to Bill Gates?
What I'm getting at is this: the folks who do the most whining and complaining about anything going mainstream is the hobbyist crowd. Why? I believe it's because the hobbyist perceives it as a threat to his control over his hobby. It's inconceivable to him that something could be mainstreamed successfully. Certainly, here on
Okay, but what's the reality of the situation? Simply put, does your grandma care how her PC works, if she even uses one? No, she simply cares that she can turn it on, use it, and turn it off again. The chance that she'll EVER see the guts of a home PC approaches zero. Same thing with a stereo, or a car, or a plane. Most non-geeks not only don't KNOW how most things work, they emphatically don't WANT to know.
So I see water cooling the same way. It WILL work, it WILL be accepted, and it WILL be part of many systems soon, regardless of how many hobbyists think it's a mistake. Because OUR desire for control over the innards of the PC is completely irrelevant to the mass market. PCs are simply not built for us anymore - they are built for Joe Sixpack and your grandma.
As proof of this, take the average notebook PC. They're accepted widely, but almost completely impossible to upgrade, or hack, or tweak. Well, water cooling is going the same way. The manufacturers don't care if water cooling is good for the computer hobbyist, as long as they can make it work in a mainstream, sealed-box PC. And that's where the average home PC is headed - a sealed PC that is effectively non-upgradable.
Imagine the fun...
Walk into a department store someday soon, with a small foil pouch full of RFID tags stripped from popular and expensive items that you own and kept the receipts... maybe a few expensive watches, a couple fancy consumer electronics, etc... wander around the store for a half hour, hanging out near those shelves... being certain to handle some of those items suspiciously and having your picture taken by closed-caption cameras... take the tags out of the pouch... then walk out without going thru the registers.
WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP the alarm sounds... you get arrested and searched for shoplifting... and upon proving that the tags are from objects you own and purchased, and with the help of the ACLJ or ACLU, you sue the store for false arrest and negligent use of their new fancy technology...
*Smirk*...
Even if you don't win any money, such tactics would certainly help push the careful use of RFID deactivation. Civil disobedience is likely to be a big problem for RFID promoters and marketers.
Incidentally, someone made an interesting observation about un-deactivated RFID tags in consumer mechandise... it would be very convenient for the above-average mugger to be able to stand on a street corner at night, with a little scanner, and know exactly what you have that he might want to steal.
"Hey, slick... the dude walkin' dis way has $120 in cash, three VISA cards, a Rolex, Air Jordan shoes, a Blackberry pager and a Kyocera phone... good target!.... here, cover me..."
"Yo, dude, into the alley, empty the pockets, and hand over the Rolex and phone - don't tell me you don't have it, sucker......
A bit later:
"Nah, skip her, she only has $20 and a Timex... nope, skip him, he's got a Glock 45..."
Come to think of it, I can see a market for fake tags... I'd buy a few from pepper spray, a sizeable handgun, maybe a folding knife...
>I can just see the next evolution in this will be to add rfid tags
4 316.html
>to the change they give you to track where you spend it.
You're behind the times. The EU has already proposed adding RFIDs to large banknotes.
http://www.silicon.com/news/500018/1/
A quote from the article: "RFID [radio frequency identification] tags also have the ability of recording information such as details of the transactions the paper note has been involved in. It would, therefore, also prevent money-laundering, make it possible to track illegal transactions and even prevent kidnappers demanding unmarked bills..."
You can bet that disabling THOSE tags would be a criminal offense.
>the store can update the chip the moment you walk out of the store,
>to contain the excat time, location and idendity of the buyer
Not according to most of the information currently available about RFIDs. Most of them are merely a passive device that can only actively transmit its serial number, and only its serial number. What's done with that serial number is up to the system that queries it, and it could certainly tie together the purchaser's information and the RFID serial numbers of goods purchased, but that's merely database magic, not RFID technology.
Actually it's much more likely that the FedEx card in the parent post has active data storage, than any run-of-the-mill grain-of-sand RFID.
The RFIDs envisioned to be used for tagging goods are as simple as possible, to make them as cheap as possible. At least at this time, nobody's proposing what I'd call "smart" RFIDs for marketable goods.
On the other hand, RFID manufacturers are implementing (at least in some chips) the ability to self-deactivate - something of a self-destruct code. But that does not require any storage memory, just the ability to short out a circuit on command.
So while this is POSSIBLE, nobody is proposing it at this time. This post seems to be a bit hyper-conspiracy-theory oriented.
> Who, among home users, just buys the cheapest PSU they can find with enough power? Or is it just me?
/e /d batch file if you're too cheap to buy backup software.)
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I *HOPE* it's just you.
For the last YEAR I've been fighting all kinds of system instability, basically ever since I upgraded to a high-speed Athlon motherboard. I naturally thought it was mobo related. I was having crashes about every 10 minutes of heavy dual-drive activity (any time I was copying large files from CD-to-drive, or drive-to-drive, and it happened in both DOS and from Windows, so I was certain it wasn't software-related. I was also having boot problems - about half the time, on power-up, nothing would happen - requiring a power cycle. I did enough other tests to prove to myself it wasn't memory related, etc. Migrating to WinXP helped (Win98 was a nightmare) but it didn't stop. Backup was a breath-holding nightmare, since it was disk-drive related.
The worst part was that since it was disk-related, the crashes occurred a few times when a FAT-table write was occuring, and twice I had to rebuild my system. Thank God for recent backups. Finally I bought a new mobo, kept the same processor, and things improved instantly - at least, so I thought.
I should also mention that I'd lost two hard drives in the last couple years - to no-kidding hardware failure. Strange that both were with this same case... too bad it wasn't just chance.
After a few weeks of relative calm, with my new mobo, I thought I had the problem licked, except the startup problems (no big deal, since I leave the system running 24/7). Everything looked stable. Hurray! But then WinXP locked up again, in the middle of a drive write, and I lost everything AGAIN. Thank God for recent backups AGAIN. (Lesson learned... buy an external USB hard drive, and USE IT daily... even with a XCOPY32 c:*.* d:
Thanks to Slashdot, thus, for the article a few days ago about power supply ratings. It got me thinking, and as I started doing some research, discovered that many of the problems (unexplained crashes, hardware failures, startup problems, etc.) could be directly related to a cheap or underrated PSU. The core of my problem was the upgrade. The two-year old case with the 250W or 300W power supply may have been fine for my Pentium 2, but putting a hot, hungry Athlon into the same case was a real minefield. As I researched I ran into many comments about this very problem - the Athlon, and just as much the fastest Intel chips, are very power-hungry, and when combined with disk-head motors, the power draw can be just enough to spike the processor or memory at a critical time.
After much shopping research, I just today forked over $90 for an Antec TruePower 430 at my local shop, not a bad price for the service and no shipping charges. I selected this unit on its independent rail power for each voltage, plus its temp-controlled case-fan plugs, and although I haven't installed it yet to prove it's the fix I want, I'm completely confident it'll do the trick.
I'm hopeful that this $90 upgrade will prevent the hundreds of hours of hardware repairs, drive swaps, and software reinstallation I've suffered over the last year or two. It's a small price to pay, given my hourly wage.
Go and do thou likewise.
The main differences from traditional RC hobbyists were the onboard telemetry system, and the means of getting some of these models launched.
One of the primary programs in which I participated involved the use of a sailplane model. Rather than launching from a big slingshot, like most hobbyists, we modified an Eagle-style RC trainer with a mount to carry the sailplane, and we literally flew the stacked planes up to altitude using the powered model for thrust, then did an inflight separation (somewhat like Enterprise shuttle coming off the top of a 747 during very early shuttle program tests).
Also, the NASA folks had a pretty interesting telemetry (remote data collection) setup, which reversed the conventional use of a stock RC radio. The transmitter was mounted in the airplane, and the control sticks taken apart and hooked up to various sensors, and the receiver was on the ground, with the servos hooked up to pens on paper rolls. That way, whenever the onboard sensors moved, the pens also moved. A poor-man's remote sensing system, for just a few hundred dollars!
The results of this work have shown up in many places - from sailplane wing design to general-aviation stall prevention devices to high-visibility X-plane programs.
Granted, in 1989 when I did this work, autonomous flight was rare, and we did all this work by piloted remote control, but my point is that it was done for just hundreds of dollars per model, not multiple thousands. Yes, the government sometimes DOES save money.
The shape of the pyramids is fine - IF you're trying to pick up a signal from the center of the earth... the entire angled shape of the horn is designed to focus the inbound radiation smoothly towards the center (peak) of the pyramid shape, where a little tiny antenna actually receives the radiation. Somehow I doubt you can pick up much RF thru 3000 miles of rock. And it's awful hard to beam-steer with a multi-trillion-pound pile of stacked rocks.
when I started noticing how MANY times I saw the word "goggle" misspelled as "google"....
Wake up people, there's more to life than the web...
*grin*
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005LE6 P/ref%3Ded%5Fsoc%5F%5F1%5F1/202-9856137-4642241
If not, maybe it should come with a coupon for a checkup at Pearle Vision...
I read thru every decently-moderated posting above, hoping SOMEONE would make this comment, but noooooo.... the privacy gang took over. Anyway...
It seems like every time this comes up, someone complains about the way the cable companies, media companies, etc. are just looking for an excuse to squash PVRs. (I own an UltimateTV unit, but the TiVo is the same...) I don't think I've watched a commercial during a delayed playback in the last year, unless I was just too busy getting a soda to grab the remote. That's gotta worry the content providers.
So the REAL danger I see here is that the content providers will prove to themselves the reality of what's going on in PVR-land, and finally have a real excuse to push even harder for DRM and locking out the fast-forward and skip buttons. Okay, I'm already frustrated enough that I can't skip that stupid FBI warning at the front of a DVD, so the LAST thing I want is someone telling me I can't use the fast-forward button right this moment, because there's a paid Budweiser advertisement on, and by God I WILL have to watch it because Anheiser-Busch PAID for me to watch it. Even though I don't drink beer.
So where are all the DRM versus PVR nuts? SOMEONE chip in here... tell me I'm not all alone...
After very vocally bailing out from TurboTax this year (several phone calls to express my displeasure, and informing them I'd think about coming back when they removed DRM), I chose TaxCut as the next best thing based on many writeups and reviews of various other products. I use the Home & Business version, to handle my home business Schedule C.
I'm sorry to report that when it comes to usability and user interface, TurboTax has TaxCut licked, no matter how you look at it. Just a short list:
- Installation and "automatic" update was fairly painful, in that the state form didn't integrate well and it took a couple cycles thru before everything was working right.
- One feature actually took a tech support call to H&R Block, and manually editing a setting file, to get working right.
- the TaxCut interview was a marginal copy of TurboTax's rather slick, and easily readable version.
- The error check complained about things that were not errors, just things that were legitimately missing from various paperwork I had (it apparently wanted me to make up an address to satisfy it, although the W2 had no information where it THOUGHT there should be some - sorry, I'm not going to fudge info like that for the IRS!)
- Every time I saved and came back later after digging up some additional documentation, to even GET BACK to the "ready to file" screen I had to run thru about 30 mouse clicks to questions I'd already answered, and put up with the return error check all over again (including several "errors" that were NOT errors).
- The help functions stunk. There was no real context-sensitive help for tax questions; in TurboTax when you ask for help, you get specific details about that topic or line of the form from numerous documents. In TaxCut you only got help for the entire form, and have to read thru the help to find the relevant portions. None of the help documents were really keyed to the specific line of the tax form.
- Working with the actual forms was non-intuitive, and I was uncertain what would happen at some points - would this form be added, or could I just look at it to see what's there... etc.
- Many more irritations.
Just to be less biased, I should mention that there were a few things I liked better. For example, it was easier to get thru some interview areas where multiple questions could be answered at once, versus TurboTax's rather nitnoid one-thing-at-a-time interview. Despite the install/update/fix the install frustrations, the installation was faster and seemed to leave less crud on my disk. Also, many of the interview questions did a better job of explaining what the question really meant, and a couple times, I changed my answer from previous years because I finally understood the real thrust of the tax form's question. Still, these were small sparks in an otherwise frustrating experience.
As a result, it's going to be a very difficult decision next year. I want (badly want) to spank Intuit for this almost unforgivable fiasco, and really want them to suffer for a couple years because of this. They need to focus on a good product. But on the flip side, they DO already have a good product that by almost all accounts is years ahead of the competition. And furthermore, I want to reward them for listening to (and better yet, acting on) the complaints.
So "what to do, what to do..." - do I stay mad at them, or forgive and move on?
I'm almost hoping that Intuit pulls some stunt again this winter, like trying to sneak in something a bit less obvious but still too DRM-ish, or that H&R Block does add some DRM to TaxCut, to help make my decision for me.
A few salient details should convince you this is as close to an April Fools joke as it's possible to get on April 2. If it hadn't been posted on DefenseReview I'd have completely ignored this.
..." like this one. Yep, that makes it likely this could ever work.
t ml
The polonium source is always hot, whether or not it is being used. The article states that "while the weapon is in a storage mode, in essence the system produces 104KW of heat energy." Imagine a bin of these replacement cartridges - it could run a small town. And when in use, each burst (of which you can fire 170 per minute) has an internal energy dissipation of 16.4KW. No kidding. You'd need several inches of shuttle thermal tile just to hold this thing.
The article states "Currently Polonium-210 is only produced in microgram quantities for research purposes at facilities such as Oak Ridge National Laboratory." Yep, THAT'S likely to change soon.
It specs a recoil force of 90 (yep, NINETY) pounds in the forward direction - enough to rip it out of the hands of a soldier. And it claims to be able to sustain 170 bursts per minute, at 0.35s per burst. That's about 59.5 seconds per minute, yanking at 90 lb on a soldier. No human could handle this thing for long.
The article states "Stavatti has not previously, nor is currently involved in an effort to develop a qualified small arm weapon system
Finally, the article is full of spelling and grammar errors.
Just in case you missed the pun, it's a carbon dioxide / nitrogen gas laser - hence the term "vaporware"...
BTW, their web page about this thing is here:
http://www.stavatti.com/armament_systems.h
I think Defense Review got hoaxed.
A couple years ago I pulled open an office computer (that was fully operational) to scarf some parts, I think the hard drive and video card. Much to my surprise, I found a ribbon-style serial jumper cable from the motherboard to the back panel had the ground wire completely melted off - as far as I could tell the cable had been installed backwards at the motherboard end, and the power line had shorted to case ground. The entire edge of the cable looked like someone had held a match along its edge and was blackened, curled and melted.
As I said, amazingly enough, the computer was operational when I opened the case.
Think of all those high-church folks who maintain that "rock is a tool of the devil."
Okay, hang in there, and don't mod me down YET...
My father for years has preferred a high-church style worship service, where the newer, "pop" elements such as drums and bass guitar are shunned. He has maintained that certain types of music themselves are capable of creating a purely emotional response, independent of the actual spiritual qualities of the music. For this reason, he feels it's dangerous to emphasize rock-style worship services, because there might be confusion or conflict between the emotional push of the music and the individual's ability to freely approach his God on his own terms, without someone else kicking at his subconcious.
The spiritual aspects of this aside, I believe this article lends some credence to that viewpoint.
(I rather LIKE the bass and drums, and I personally feel that I often NEED a kick in the rear, so to speak, to get me paying attention to the spiritual. So it's okay with me to use infrasound to get my attention...)
Ground effect does not apply to this type of aircraft.
For an airplane, "ground effect" is the term applied to the tendency of a wing to exhibit increased aerodynamic efficiency (basically more lift and less drag) when it's within roughly a half-wingspan of the ground. It's caused, at least in layman's terms, by a cushion of air forming beneath the wing and the ground, and by the reduction of a drag-inducing wingtip vortex.
This vehicle has no horizontal wing flying thru the air. So we can eliminate the obvious cushion of air.
Now, a helicopter demonstrates ground effect for the same basic reason as an airplane, within half a rotor-disc-diameter or so of the ground, and also because for a hovering vehicle, the downwash tends to bounce back up again to provide a additional cushion. Here's a primer on helo ground effect. As you can see, the ground effect is largely produced by the ground limiting development of a tip vortex.
Just for completeness, we can also address ground effect for a hovering jet, like the Harrier Jump Jet. In that case, the downwash bouncing up certainly provides a cushion, and the Harrier has strakes under the fuselage designed exclusively to capture that cushion of air and enhance it - kind of like a hovercraft. But for a hovering jet, you have an additional problem - the exhaust gases also tend to get reingested by the engine, lowering the engine efficiency. One of the most vexing problems for the Harrier, and also for the newer Joint Strike Fighter designs, is "hot gas reingestion". In fact, if you hover these aircraft pointing downwind, you can snuff out the engine due to lack of oxygen. (This issue is probably not a big problem for the high-bypass arrangement of the SoloTrek, where very little exhaust gas is produced.)
Now to address this vehicle. The lift is provided by ducted fans. Therefore there is no tip vortex, because the duct prevents one from forming. In fact, the duct itself provides the same effect as ground effect, by eliminating the efficiency loss due to the vortex. The only relevant part of the "ground effect" here is therefore the bouncing cushion of air. But the fans on this vehicle are mounted so high above the ground (about 7 feet), and the total thrust is so low, that a fairly minimal ground effect cushion can be developed. In fact, in the pictures on Ebay, at least one of the photos shows the thing high enough up (the fans are at least 12 feet off the ground) that any ground effect that might exist would be almost totally eliminated.
So it's extremely unlikely that this vehicle's performance would change significantly with climbing away from the ground.
And if you think back, to when you actually had to PAY ATTENTION to who was fixing your car, because Uncle Sam was not involved in the decision, you probably got much better service for your dollar, and knew a lot more about the work.
For years I took my car to a shop far from home, because they did good work, knew me personally, even occasionally let me use their tools to do a job myself, etc. I selected them based on reputation, and service, and their record with me personally. Not some license on the wall. And just as importantly, when they started screwing up my car every time it went there, I stopped going. Despite the license on the wall.
We Americans are a lazy bunch. Hey, the gu'mmint says they're licensed, must be okay. Here, Joe, fix my car. I trust you because Uncle Sam does too.
Back in 'the day' when the consumer had to actually pay attention, I'll wager the service was a lot better. Sure there were ripoff artists, and bad stuff happened, but those shops didn't stay around for long.
Just so, today, I'd bet that the overall service is better on computers, BECAUSE there is no regulation.
One way to shut these things down is to get the guys doing the scamming.
Okay, now that I've done the "Mr. Obvious Man" imiatation, let me pontificate a bit.
It's one thing to try and track down the web site author, which can be tough at best, but when you've got a real point of contact who's insisting on USING the fake web site, and it's a fairly sure bet he's part of the scam, you've got a much simpler target. Ebay certainly would go after this guy, and the French authorities may also very well be interested in nailing him.
Unlike the web site creators, it may actually be fairly easy for Ebay to get hold of this guy, when they can prove criminal intent and have good reason to release the details to authorities. At the least, they can use YOUR help to set up a sting - supply you with the funds, follow thru the transaction, observe the scam unfold, and then go get the guy where he lives.
After I stopped laughing at the parent post, I had to ask myself *when*, not *if*, this actually might be the way movie theaters work.
.WAD file. I can easily see the day when a photorealistic movie could be generated solely by the computer.
After all, if you can really generate a scene completely in software, it probably takes a LOT fewer bytes to describe it than the raw imagery. How big was the entire source material for Final Fantasy? I'd bet it was a LOT smaller than a fully-digital movie at full theater resolution.
Taken to its logical conclusion, I wonder how far away the day will be when a "movie" as delivered to the studio is actually merely the script, along with a bunch of texture files, character maps, landscape grids, MIDI files, etc., essentially a huge
To karma whore for a second, too, it's interesting to note that if the movie theater rendering system that drove this method were sufficiently more advanced than the average user's home PC, it would make it completely impossible to pirate a digital movie on a 1-for-1 basis - you'd only be able to capture the rendered film, and have a much larger digital file to handle. What a bonus for the movie industry that could be.
A final thought about this idea. Assuming that the hardware in each theater were not identical, and even if they were, it's entirely likely that each time the film were projected (hence rendered then projected), it would be slightly different. Hmmm.
... to copy a movie or CD, but they just don't care the same. For one thing, you don't siphon gas from you neighbor's tank because you know your neighbor, and you know he'll get hugely torqued off at you, and maybe call the cops, if he finds out. After all, every car now sold has some form of anti-siphon fuel neck, because PEOPLE DO SIPHON GAS. For another, it's messy and smelly and you can simply get gas cheap enough at the corner store without getting your neighbor headed your way with a baseball bat or tire iron.
.sig below for my thoughts on right and wrong, and you'll understand my viewpoint on theft of intellectual property.
No, I think folks know it's stealing in the same way they also know that going 65 in a 55 zone is breaking the law. "It's okay, everyone does it." "I'm not hurting anyone (at least that I know and care about)." "It's cheap and painless." "Nobody will ever know." "Nobody will bother me for doing this, so I can do it with impunity."
This doesn't make it right, it just makes it common.
See my
After thinking about my post above... Seems like it would be much easier to just take a decent digital camcorder and fly down the coast at a moderate rate of speed. Better continuous coverage, much much faster, and if the real purpose IS to look for breakwaters or illegal rockpiles, certainly a digital camcorder image would work for that.
I wonder if there isn't some other motive here, requiring high-res images.
(Like getting free publicity on Slashdot for using exclusively non-MS technology for a cool task, perhaps.....? Naaaaahhhh....)
It would be way cool to have a panoramic photo of the entire California coastline (or at least a significant chunk of it) from stitching all those photos together. Set it up as a movie, perhaps, offering a sort of virtual fly-by of the coastline.
Drive cooling is wonderful. IF you like noise. I bought one of the half-height drive cover fan units - three small fans side by side that blow over the drive. Sounded really neat at the store. Sounded like a leaf blower when I installed it.
I leave my PC on full-time. I set the drives to sleep after a half hour or so. So they tend to cool down to ambient when I'm away from the machine. I didn't see any reason to cool a cool drive, and have to listen to it full time.
So I built a temperature sensitive circuit to try and limit the noise. I figured that as the drive heated up, I could spool up the fans accordingly, and keep it quiet longer. There were two problems, one fixable, the other not. The fixable problem was that I pulled the supply voltage from the drive power connectors, but my circuit was not voltage regulated - so as the processor load increased (yep, cpu cycle load), the fan speed changed. I could tell how busy the CPU was by listening to the fan pitch. A simple voltage regulator might fix that, although I'm surprised the voltage changes that much. The unfixable problem was that the drive heats up so rapidly (maybe one minute from idle/cool to spinning/hot) that essentially as soon as I sat down and got the modem dialed up it was howling away.
So I'm not exactly thrilled with the idea of air-cooled drives. Maybe a high-volume low speed fan for the entire case, vented near the drive, would work better. But the simplest solution is probably to stop mounting the drive at the TOP of the case, where the heat accumulates, and instead put it at the bottom.
I've had two drive failures in the last couple years on my home PC. Both were Maxtor drives. Both had 3-year warranties. Both failed in the last six months of the warranty. Both times, Maxtor replaced the drive with an identical unit. You cannot expect the warranty cycle to provide you with a new, faster, bigger drive. They don't do that. So I see this change (as a previous poster suggested) as primarily a way to reduce their stock of outdated drives. Why should they want to keep a stock of 10Gb drives around when all they make now are 40 and 80s?
One other consideration. WE are pushing THEM for bigger storage, smaller form factor, faster drives. To make this happen, they have to make design compromises. You can only fit so many bits so tightly together. Seems to me that over time, the failure rate will tend to increase for this reason alone, regardless of the quality of the units.
I believe the analysis above by another poster was correct - although it was marked "Funny" - it's the overclockers, or at least the hacker types - who probably experience the highest failure rates, as they push more and more hot equipment in to a small space. I had cooling issues with my drives and would not be surprised to find it was a contribution to the failures. Anyone with military or indudustrial experience in the Reliability field will tell you there's a direct correlation between heat and failure rates. Just a few degrees of temperature rise can double the component failure rate.
One last thought... as prices fall, maybe our response should be "RAID". Pay the same net price, get redundancy.