And notice that those plastic panels come off with the twist of a few thumb screws, on 90% of modern cars. Underneath these panels, (surprise!) is an easy to work on, clean, efficient, modern engine, with very few wires (busses are a Good Thing) and no vacuum lines (computers are a Good Thing). This makes the engine compartment really, really, really simple to figure out. It is incredibly easy to fix almost any "backyard mechanic" problem on a well engineered modern car. I have replaced fuel rails, injectors, spark plugs, throttle bodies, intake manifolds, exhaust manifolds, accessories, radiator, heads, etc. on many kinds of newer cars (1990s-2000s) and it is easy. I used to have a 1982 Volvo 245 GLT. Talk about a pain in the arse to repair.
I got my bachelor's degree in English, Linguistics and CS. My senior thesis in English was intentionally written in plain, easy to understand US English. I received many, many compliments for the readability and understandability of my work from my thesis committee. The professors on my committee (a US News top-10 English Literature program) hate "postmodern" critical techniques. My father is an art professor at the same school. He detests this (as someone posted earlier) masturbatory writing style. I have a feeling PoMoLitCrit will be short lived. It is not taken seriously by anyone in the humanities who does not have something to hide academically. Please do not make the error of using a few academically dishonest, mistakenly tenured morons to judge the whole lot of us.
In response to your request for info on whether complete deregulation sucks or does not suck, I would refer you to the following story, and let you make up your own mind.
I bought cable modem service from TCI @Home before TCI went bankrupt and got bought by AT&T. TCI as a company sucked, and their "tier one" customer support was biotch-y and rude. Towards the end, when @Home was on the rocks, I spent three and a half hours on the phone arguing with this girl that she needed to take my credit card number so she could pull up my account info and get my bill paid so they could turn my service back on. I had been paying automatically by credit card, but their computer hosed out my info three months earlier, so my bill was three months overdue. She absolutely refused to take any of the following as proof of my identity for the purposes of paying my bill:
Credit Card #
SSN
Phone #
Address
Name
Mother's maiden name
Signing my soul over to her in blood
Finally I got fed up and asked to speak to her supervisor. She insisted that there was no one in the company higher up the ladder than her in terms of customer support. Finally I just hung up and called back, and got another, only marginally less infuriating rep. Then, @Home's assets (as well as TCI's) were sold to AT&T, and things got slightly better. Then AT&T was forced to offload some of it's smaller markets, because they owned way too much of the cable infrastructure for the FCC's liking. So my local cable service was sold to Mediacom, and they actually have a local office. This is good for service, as long as you know to avoid a couple of reps whose names I will not divulge here. So, sometimes 'total' deregulation sucks enormous wookiee, and sometimes it only sucks ewok.
To get a (new) job, certs come in real handy, too. Some employers (prospective or otherwise) may not care about how long you've done something, or if you've been in the field forever, but if you have the cred to "prove it."
This is a great example of the worst sort of management-propagated absurd hiring practices. This sort of thing ensures that the lowest common denominator ("Yippee! I took a class at community college and got my MCSE!") continue to be hired over the more talented people in the field who just don't give a fcuk and/or would feel violated paying Microsoft $6,000 to take a test which gives you a certification that is essentially an advertisement for Microsoft products. I'd rather hire an uncertified wrench monkey and/or crazy perl coder over a moron who thinks he or she is "tha bomb" because someone showed them how to use multimode console.
You must be seeing things- the smallest drive they sell is a 160MB drive for $50. That's ultra-expensive by today's standards, but how common are 160MB or 230MB SCSI-1 drives for use with Quadra 950s? These are pretty much antiques at this point. They do sell 10GB drives for $300, which is insane, but with modern day macs, you should be buying your IDE drives from PC vendors anyways.
I wake up every morning and thank the universe that I have an IT job in academia. I get to sit around from 8:00-5:00 at my desk, in my _own_ office with my nice linux boxes and my Dell server rack, write PHP and play with barcode scanners and RFid tags all day, manage the servers, put out fires, etc. All this, in my khakis (because they're comfortable) in the winter or my shorts in the summer and a t-shirt all year round. Everyone else dresses in "business casual" anyways, because they're faculty. They pretty much expect me to be wearing a t-shirt and Birkenstocks. No one is ever going to fire me because I basically have the professional/scientific equivalent of tenure. I get 16 hours a month of vacation time and 12 hours of sick, am more or less shielded from the rigors of an unstable economy, and get a guaranteed 3-5% raise each year. Then I drive home in my Accord EX V6 and again thank the universe for our excellent system of institutions of higher learning.
I'm about 75 lbs. overweight. Something happened to me today to make me want to shed that 75 lbs. For the most part, I'm in excellent health, can run, lift a hell of a lot more than most of you so-called "healthy" people and my blood pressure is low. But this morning, when I sat down on the couch and bent over to tie my shoes, I got a horrendous shock of pain in my back. That extra 75 lbs up front is starting to take a toll on my spinal cord.
This actually isn't a four year college, it's a two-year community college. I work at the University of Iowa in IT, and last year, this guy Paustian who is the head of the DMACC west campus came to our new media day (attendance mandatory) to spew at us about how cool his iPaq-required campus was. We all pretty much laughed at him, because he sounded like a marketing guy for Mircosoft and Compaq. At the U of I, we have an enormous federal deposit library, with hundreds of millions of volumes. There's no substitute for stacks.
I have Sirius through my Kenwood head unit. The sound quality on the talk and news channels was somewhat strange to begin with, but either Sirius has upped the data rate on some of their stations, or I'm just getting used to it, because I can't tell the difference in sonic quality between Sirius and a good FM station any more. The only channels that seemed to have weird artifacts were the talk channels, anyways. I'd assume they had those set to low data rates to begin with, because they thought they could get away with it, but people complained so they upped the bandwidth. I have also had excellent reception in my area (Iowa) with interstate overpasses hardly ever interrupting the signal. Since the satellites actually move, and there is more than one over head most of the time, I usually get signals from a good angle even if something is obscuring the view directly over the car. I mostly use Sirius for NPR, PRI and BBC reception, because most american radio stations play nothing but mindless pap (Clear Channel being the worst offender, IMHO)
I think the tech world is at a distinct PR disadvantage here. RIAA, et al, have done a good job of equating the two. How can the debate be turned around, putting them on the defensive side of things: "This is not about theft, it's about your outdated, draconian licensing scheme designed to limit user empowerment?"
one way to go about this would be to hire a bunch of lobbyists. Senator Disney was obviously bought by content industry lobbyists. Why can't the tech industry buy some congressmen to oppose the SSSCA? I don't see this so much as a PR problem as much as a who's got who in who's pocket problem.
FFXI multiplayer should be pretty nice, and since it will be on all three consoles, who cares about "killer apps." They all pretty much share games nowadays, except for a few exclusive licenses. I have an Xbox and a PS2, and I like them both fine, for different reasons (DOA3 and FFX)
Get Irvin Kershner to direct episode III. The man is a genius. Just look at Ep. 5 and Robocop 2. Ep. 3 is supposed to be bad-assed and dark as hell. IMHO, it should be so violent as to deserve an R-rating in order to justify the sappiness of Ep. 1.
For $200, just get a Koolance PC2-C case. Cools perfectly, huge capacity, pre-assembled solution. I got one a month ago, and it is wonderful. Plus, it comes in a very nice-looking case, with a space for the tank, radiator, fans, etc very nicely planned out. Plus, they offer hard drive and video chipset coolers as add-ons that you can simply put in-line.
So, you want to hack your honda's computer?
Try Apex'i
Actually, you can just bypass it, and do all sorts of fun stuff like control your VTEC lobes, throw a turbo on there and control wastegates, do custom ignition. The best thing is, a grease monkey with some computer experience can easily do this. All you need to do is find someone with a dyno who will let you use it.
HyperCard was a hyperlink-based programming environment developed by bill atkinson and the original mac team. It's programming language was based on natural languaged, called HyperTalk. It allowed you to make constructs like:
"if the value of checkBoxOne on Card 3 is set to true, then set the card to MyCard and set the value of checkBoxOne on Card 3 to false." EXTREMELY easy to learn how to program on. This is what they should teach kids to use in school. Oh, well, I supposed Apple has moved away from supporting the education environment, now that Dell and Compaq and MS have forcefully taken over that arena.
Think about all the CPU time IBM had to devote, and all the research on the part of scientists to come up with the perceptual encoding and other technologies involved in creating that codec. That wasn't free CPU time and those salaries didn't magically appear. IBM owns that codec, and should be protected by patent law.
So, yeah, there were cows born around Chernobyl with six legs and things of that sort, and we knew about this right after the accident, with practically the first litters of animals born in the area. Doesn't it stand to reason that what applies to farm animals will probably apply to humans, when it comes to radioisotope-base mutagens? What I really want to know is- Are my kids going to be mutants because I stared at a 19" monitor in a cubicle all day for fifteen years?
The same thing that applies to prestone applies to your CPU cooler. In other words, you wouldn't run 100% ethylene glycol in your radiator, because it has a low specific heat, at least, lower than water. A good balance is 50/50 water/glycol. I would think that a system, like the ones on ocmod.com, which use water and aluminum blocks and radiators, would be much better at cooling, especially with a peltier device, than what these guys were doing (essentially unscientifically) when they dunked their boards in mineral oil cooled (rather sketchily) with condensation-nightmare windowmount A/C units. As Ungrounded Lightning hints, a fluorocarbon-based solution (R-134a?) would be best. I think Methylene Chloride even works, although It's a known carcinogen, but at least it's liquid at room temp and higher!
Looks like a lot of the stuff that went bad was in some way fan-related. Too many fans are almost as bad as not enough. If you get enough suction going, you'll end up pulling air through any available orifice, say, a floppy drive slot. And that will tend to make the slot (floppy drive, in this case) go bad as well. Those "disk coolers" are infamous for doing that. If you are going to be sucking a lot of air, best to leave some card slots open for the air to enter/exit through.
On another note, the thing about a lot of fans is that, unless they're very expensive, they won't last. Their bearings are cheap and will give out in a year or so. Also, I won't say anything about Western Digital that would get me in trouble, other than that I've seen about six WD Caviars go bad, from 340MB-10GB.
I just set up a QuickTime Streaming Server 3 preview install on an OS X public beta machine, and have had great luck with it so far for intranet streaming. Plus, it's FREE. check it out.
-Nick
Well, here's what I've got, and I think it is really an excellent system for under $2500:
27" Panasonic PanaBlack vertically flat TV
Sony STR-DE815 Dolby Digital/DTS 5.1 ch AV receiver
Hughes Dolby Digital DSS receiver
Toshiba DVD player w/Dolby Digital and DTS optical out
TiVo
B&W 8" 3-way speakers *4 with titanium dome tweeters, B&W center channel. IMHO, the center channel is the most important speaker because it is what provides about 80% of your total sound output. It is worth investing a little more in this.
Slashdot Mirror
And notice that those plastic panels come off with the twist of a few thumb screws, on 90% of modern cars. Underneath these panels, (surprise!) is an easy to work on, clean, efficient, modern engine, with very few wires (busses are a Good Thing) and no vacuum lines (computers are a Good Thing). This makes the engine compartment really, really, really simple to figure out. It is incredibly easy to fix almost any "backyard mechanic" problem on a well engineered modern car. I have replaced fuel rails, injectors, spark plugs, throttle bodies, intake manifolds, exhaust manifolds, accessories, radiator, heads, etc. on many kinds of newer cars (1990s-2000s) and it is easy. I used to have a 1982 Volvo 245 GLT. Talk about a pain in the arse to repair.
I got my bachelor's degree in English, Linguistics and CS. My senior thesis in English was intentionally written in plain, easy to understand US English. I received many, many compliments for the readability and understandability of my work from my thesis committee. The professors on my committee (a US News top-10 English Literature program) hate "postmodern" critical techniques. My father is an art professor at the same school. He detests this (as someone posted earlier) masturbatory writing style. I have a feeling PoMoLitCrit will be short lived. It is not taken seriously by anyone in the humanities who does not have something to hide academically. Please do not make the error of using a few academically dishonest, mistakenly tenured morons to judge the whole lot of us.
I bought cable modem service from TCI @Home before TCI went bankrupt and got bought by AT&T. TCI as a company sucked, and their "tier one" customer support was biotch-y and rude. Towards the end, when @Home was on the rocks, I spent three and a half hours on the phone arguing with this girl that she needed to take my credit card number so she could pull up my account info and get my bill paid so they could turn my service back on. I had been paying automatically by credit card, but their computer hosed out my info three months earlier, so my bill was three months overdue. She absolutely refused to take any of the following as proof of my identity for the purposes of paying my bill:
Credit Card #
SSN
Phone #
Address
Name
Mother's maiden name
Signing my soul over to her in blood
Finally I got fed up and asked to speak to her supervisor. She insisted that there was no one in the company higher up the ladder than her in terms of customer support. Finally I just hung up and called back, and got another, only marginally less infuriating rep. Then, @Home's assets (as well as TCI's) were sold to AT&T, and things got slightly better. Then AT&T was forced to offload some of it's smaller markets, because they owned way too much of the cable infrastructure for the FCC's liking. So my local cable service was sold to Mediacom, and they actually have a local office. This is good for service, as long as you know to avoid a couple of reps whose names I will not divulge here. So, sometimes 'total' deregulation sucks enormous wookiee, and sometimes it only sucks ewok.
To get a (new) job, certs come in real handy, too. Some employers (prospective or otherwise) may not care about how long you've done something, or if you've been in the field forever, but if you have the cred to "prove it."
This is a great example of the worst sort of management-propagated absurd hiring practices. This sort of thing ensures that the lowest common denominator ("Yippee! I took a class at community college and got my MCSE!") continue to be hired over the more talented people in the field who just don't give a fcuk and/or would feel violated paying Microsoft $6,000 to take a test which gives you a certification that is essentially an advertisement for Microsoft products. I'd rather hire an uncertified wrench monkey and/or crazy perl coder over a moron who thinks he or she is "tha bomb" because someone showed them how to use multimode console.
You must be seeing things- the smallest drive they sell is a 160MB drive for $50. That's ultra-expensive by today's standards, but how common are 160MB or 230MB SCSI-1 drives for use with Quadra 950s? These are pretty much antiques at this point. They do sell 10GB drives for $300, which is insane, but with modern day macs, you should be buying your IDE drives from PC vendors anyways.
You can buy refurb'ed Mac motherboards from Shreve Systems in Shreveport, LA. They are a really good source to start with.
I wake up every morning and thank the universe that I have an IT job in academia. I get to sit around from 8:00-5:00 at my desk, in my _own_ office with my nice linux boxes and my Dell server rack, write PHP and play with barcode scanners and RFid tags all day, manage the servers, put out fires, etc. All this, in my khakis (because they're comfortable) in the winter or my shorts in the summer and a t-shirt all year round. Everyone else dresses in "business casual" anyways, because they're faculty. They pretty much expect me to be wearing a t-shirt and Birkenstocks. No one is ever going to fire me because I basically have the professional/scientific equivalent of tenure. I get 16 hours a month of vacation time and 12 hours of sick, am more or less shielded from the rigors of an unstable economy, and get a guaranteed 3-5% raise each year. Then I drive home in my Accord EX V6 and again thank the universe for our excellent system of institutions of higher learning.
I'm about 75 lbs. overweight. Something happened to me today to make me want to shed that 75 lbs. For the most part, I'm in excellent health, can run, lift a hell of a lot more than most of you so-called "healthy" people and my blood pressure is low. But this morning, when I sat down on the couch and bent over to tie my shoes, I got a horrendous shock of pain in my back. That extra 75 lbs up front is starting to take a toll on my spinal cord.
This actually isn't a four year college, it's a two-year community college. I work at the University of Iowa in IT, and last year, this guy Paustian who is the head of the DMACC west campus came to our new media day (attendance mandatory) to spew at us about how cool his iPaq-required campus was. We all pretty much laughed at him, because he sounded like a marketing guy for Mircosoft and Compaq. At the U of I, we have an enormous federal deposit library, with hundreds of millions of volumes. There's no substitute for stacks.
I have Sirius through my Kenwood head unit. The sound quality on the talk and news channels was somewhat strange to begin with, but either Sirius has upped the data rate on some of their stations, or I'm just getting used to it, because I can't tell the difference in sonic quality between Sirius and a good FM station any more. The only channels that seemed to have weird artifacts were the talk channels, anyways. I'd assume they had those set to low data rates to begin with, because they thought they could get away with it, but people complained so they upped the bandwidth. I have also had excellent reception in my area (Iowa) with interstate overpasses hardly ever interrupting the signal. Since the satellites actually move, and there is more than one over head most of the time, I usually get signals from a good angle even if something is obscuring the view directly over the car. I mostly use Sirius for NPR, PRI and BBC reception, because most american radio stations play nothing but mindless pap (Clear Channel being the worst offender, IMHO)
Wolfgang Petersen also did Das Boot, one of the best war movies of all time. (IMHO) This could be a spectacular film under his direction.
one way to go about this would be to hire a bunch of lobbyists. Senator Disney was obviously bought by content industry lobbyists. Why can't the tech industry buy some congressmen to oppose the SSSCA? I don't see this so much as a PR problem as much as a who's got who in who's pocket problem.
FFXI multiplayer should be pretty nice, and since it will be on all three consoles, who cares about "killer apps." They all pretty much share games nowadays, except for a few exclusive licenses. I have an Xbox and a PS2, and I like them both fine, for different reasons (DOA3 and FFX)
Get Irvin Kershner to direct episode III. The man is a genius. Just look at Ep. 5 and Robocop 2. Ep. 3 is supposed to be bad-assed and dark as hell. IMHO, it should be so violent as to deserve an R-rating in order to justify the sappiness of Ep. 1.
For $200, just get a Koolance PC2-C case. Cools perfectly, huge capacity, pre-assembled solution. I got one a month ago, and it is wonderful. Plus, it comes in a very nice-looking case, with a space for the tank, radiator, fans, etc very nicely planned out. Plus, they offer hard drive and video chipset coolers as add-ons that you can simply put in-line.
So, you want to hack your honda's computer? Try Apex'i Actually, you can just bypass it, and do all sorts of fun stuff like control your VTEC lobes, throw a turbo on there and control wastegates, do custom ignition. The best thing is, a grease monkey with some computer experience can easily do this. All you need to do is find someone with a dyno who will let you use it.
HyperCard was a hyperlink-based programming environment developed by bill atkinson and the original mac team. It's programming language was based on natural languaged, called HyperTalk. It allowed you to make constructs like:
"if the value of checkBoxOne on Card 3 is set to true, then set the card to MyCard and set the value of checkBoxOne on Card 3 to false." EXTREMELY easy to learn how to program on. This is what they should teach kids to use in school. Oh, well, I supposed Apple has moved away from supporting the education environment, now that Dell and Compaq and MS have forcefully taken over that arena.
"ARE YUO A l33t haX0r?"
Whoops... I meant AT&T ;-)
Think about all the CPU time IBM had to devote, and all the research on the part of scientists to come up with the perceptual encoding and other technologies involved in creating that codec. That wasn't free CPU time and those salaries didn't magically appear. IBM owns that codec, and should be protected by patent law.
So, yeah, there were cows born around Chernobyl with six legs and things of that sort, and we knew about this right after the accident, with practically the first litters of animals born in the area. Doesn't it stand to reason that what applies to farm animals will probably apply to humans, when it comes to radioisotope-base mutagens? What I really want to know is- Are my kids going to be mutants because I stared at a 19" monitor in a cubicle all day for fifteen years?
The same thing that applies to prestone applies to your CPU cooler. In other words, you wouldn't run 100% ethylene glycol in your radiator, because it has a low specific heat, at least, lower than water. A good balance is 50/50 water/glycol. I would think that a system, like the ones on ocmod.com, which use water and aluminum blocks and radiators, would be much better at cooling, especially with a peltier device, than what these guys were doing (essentially unscientifically) when they dunked their boards in mineral oil cooled (rather sketchily) with condensation-nightmare windowmount A/C units. As Ungrounded Lightning hints, a fluorocarbon-based solution (R-134a?) would be best. I think Methylene Chloride even works, although It's a known carcinogen, but at least it's liquid at room temp and higher!
Looks like a lot of the stuff that went bad was in some way fan-related. Too many fans are almost as bad as not enough. If you get enough suction going, you'll end up pulling air through any available orifice, say, a floppy drive slot. And that will tend to make the slot (floppy drive, in this case) go bad as well. Those "disk coolers" are infamous for doing that. If you are going to be sucking a lot of air, best to leave some card slots open for the air to enter/exit through. On another note, the thing about a lot of fans is that, unless they're very expensive, they won't last. Their bearings are cheap and will give out in a year or so. Also, I won't say anything about Western Digital that would get me in trouble, other than that I've seen about six WD Caviars go bad, from 340MB-10GB.
I just set up a QuickTime Streaming Server 3 preview install on an OS X public beta machine, and have had great luck with it so far for intranet streaming. Plus, it's FREE. check it out. -Nick
27" Panasonic PanaBlack vertically flat TV
Sony STR-DE815 Dolby Digital/DTS 5.1 ch AV receiver
Hughes Dolby Digital DSS receiver
Toshiba DVD player w/Dolby Digital and DTS optical out
TiVo
B&W 8" 3-way speakers *4 with titanium dome tweeters, B&W center channel.
IMHO, the center channel is the most important speaker because it is what provides about 80% of your total sound output. It is worth investing a little more in this.