Out on the manufacturing end, a server being down really does mean people sitting around waiting for it to come back up so they can do their jobs. We've got three people working full time just entering the parts list and build instructions for new boards we're going to build into the database - if it's off-line, they are twiddling their thumbs. Purchasers might work off their printouts for a while, but pretty soon they are going to need the database to see what parts have to be ordered. And if it's down for more than a few hours, the production line itself will grind to a halt, for lack of the printouts to start a new job.
Now, this is a server on an _internal_ net, quite safe from internet hackers and e-mail viruses. If it crashes for more than a few minutes, it's because corporate management was too cheap to buy redundant hardware, or to arrange an alternate connection from the plants to the server at HQ for when a backhoe hits the T1 trunk. But every time the Windows NT (or 2000) OS on the server takes a dump, we have dozens of people getting an extra coffee break, and that adds up.
Re:we all know what a disaster Freon was... try ag
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Microsoft Freon
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· Score: 2
It's also interesting to note that, after it was essentially banned in the U.S., Freon was one of the most smuggled substances into the country.
I don't know about that, but back in 1995 we paid $5,000 for one barrel of freon to run a solvent cleaner for electronic circuit boards until the FDA finally approved the water-wash process. What's funny is that this plant had never had a solvent cleaner in the 11 years it was running before we picked up that damned medical equipment contract...
Re:we all know what a disaster Freon was... try ag
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Microsoft Freon
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The process that happens inside a refrigeration system is based on physics. It does not matter which gas.
It definitely does matter. Freon isn't just a gas in a refrigerator; it liquefies when it is compressed and gives up heat to the outside air, then evaporates _quickly_ when the pressure is released in the cooling coils. This takes the right variation of the boiling point with pressure. To get just the right physical characteristics in Freon, they tried substituting various numbers of flourine and chlorine atoms for hydrogen atoms in hydrocarbons. And as a bonus, it turns out that Freon is non-poisonous, non-corrosive, and coexists quite well with compressor lubricants.
Nothing else works quite as well. Water and alcohol have too high boiling points (and might be bad for the pipes and bearings too). CO2 requires a quite high pressure to liquefy. Ammonia is as toxic as cyanide. R134a (similar to Freon but with only carbon, hydrogen, and flourine atoms) is not quite as good at lubricating or at refrigerating.
By the way, refrigeration was responsible for only a tiny percentage of the chloroflourocarbons released into the environment. Refrigerators that leak coolant are defective! Spray cans were another tiny percentage. Most of the release was industrial cleaning systems - Freon and similar substances being great solvents that dry quickly, and pose no danger to the workers as long as there's enough ventilation to keep oxygen in the room. Generally these systems would try to recycle the Freon, but it kept leaking out around both ends of the conveyor belt.
I've long suspected that MS marketing had been infiltrated by Linux and Mac fanatics. That it still sells just proves how damned little these fanatics understand about users and corporate purchasing decisions...
OTOH, maybe MS has a large secret slushfund to hire people to post utterly over-the-top pro-Linux messages and make the real Linuxers look like idiots. And to write Linux how-to's that take you through a dozen typed commands when most distros have a simple GUI program to do the same thing in 3 mouse clicks.
Re:I think that M$ has Missed the Point
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Microsoft Freon
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· Score: 2
some slave labour camp in taiwan......
Taiwan doesn't have slave labor camps. Taiwan is (compared to most Asian countries) free and democratic. If they want slave labor, they've got to get an agent in Hong Kong to contract to get the work done on the mainland.
The recording companies got together and decided not to [produce] some older CDs so that the newer one wouldn't be competing against them for price.
I'm a little surprised by this ruling, since companies discontinue a cheaper older model so they can sell more of the new model all the time. E.g., DOS, Win 3.1, 95, 98, & NT. So if the fact that two companies (out of several major and many minor players in the market) agreed together to discontinue the old CD's makes it illegal, what does it mean when one company that has been legally determined to be a monopoly does the same thing?
No, that would only be the case if there were a billion working computers that might be replaced in the next 6 years.
But then Gartner is also expecting PC's to finally get out into the rest of the world. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to get to the real data, just their short announcement... As fast as the PC market has been growing in the last few years, I'd expect at least 1/3 of all the PC's to still be in use somewhere, and most of those will be replaced TWICE by 2008. That doesn't leave a whole lot out of the two billion for exponential growth of PC's in the less wealthy countries.
So it seems to me that either they're misquoting Gartner (entirely possible), or Gartner's estimate is actually rather on the pessimistic side. Of course, it's entirely possible that it's accurate - it's getting harder and harder to find real reasons to keep on replacing PC's all the time, and I think to reach much wider of a market PC's must become cheaper in third world countries and easier to use for Americans. (And maybe the third-world market is going to consist of our discarded 100-233MHz machines running Linux, which will suck for PC manufacturers and MS...)
Actually, microwaves will induce currents into anything that is conductive, so it will either absorb microwaves or reflect them. Metals mostly reflect (because their electrical resistance is low), otherwise all you'd need was a plain ceramic crucible.
I agree, I hope he was doing this naked-hands bit to show off the insulating properties of the ceramic wool, and not as his regular practice. I'd certainly use tongs, and a fireproof mat underneath.
How does a post that hasn't been moderated get moderated down as "overrated"? I've had the experience of rating a post at + 1 ("funny", IIRC), clicking the Moderate button, and seeing it actually get moderated -1 "overrated". I'm sure the little rating window was correct before I scrolled down to the bottom to fing the moderate button, so seems like there might be a bug in the code.
so if the metal doesn't heat up, ummmm.... how does it melt???
The inner layers of the mold (including the cup holding the metal stock) contain carbon fibers and ferrite granules, which absorb the microwave and warm up. From there, the heat has to get into the metal by conduction.
Explanation: microwaves are oscillating electrical and magnetic fields, with a wavelength of a few inches. When these hit a good conductor (the metal stock or the walls of the microwave chamber), current flows just under the surface of the metal, generating electromagnetic fields that cancel the incoming microwaves and transmit them back. In other words, the metal reflects the microwaves, and only a tiny percentage of the heat is absorbed by electrical resistance. So you can't melt silver by just putting it in an invisible-to-microwave ceramic crucible and nuking; you need something that absorbs microwaves instead of reflecting. (Food, water, and poodles are all conductive but too high resistance to reflect microwaves well, so they are good absorbers, but make terrible crucibles. 8-) Reid also tried graphite crucibles, but while graphite is higher resistance than metal, it is still not enough resistance for good absorption.
By mixing carbon fiber into ceramics, Reid made a crucible absorb microwaves, but it wouldn't get hot enough - either the carbon fiber isn't a good enough absorber, or it's resistance changes as it heats up until it isn't effective anymore. So he went for another absorbtion mechanism: under the right circumstances the magnetic field of a magnetic material will oscillate in response to an impinging field. This basically requires the atoms to rotate back and forth, and heat is generated in the process. The magnetic field of the material lags behind the impinging field (called "hysteresis"); plotting the impinging and internal field on X and Y axes, the internal field traces out a rough quadrangle instead of a line and the area enclosed = lost energy = heat.
The magnetic ferrite granules Reid used were not good enough absorbers by themselves; I suspect that the material is too magnetically "hard" so it wasn't responding to the microwaves at room temperature. But a layer of carbon fiber/ceramic warmed up the granules, probably making them "softer", and then they absorbed microwaves quite well. Reid found that the maximum temperature was 1100C, enough to melt cast iron, but not steel. (Excessive carbon makes cast iron lower melting but brittle.) He says the ferrite "fluxes" at this temperature - I think that means it melts. At any rate, all magnetic materials will lose their magetism at some temperature.
So it gets hot enough for jewelry work, and maybe a few other things. (See the article for the practical details of building and insulating the crucible/mold.) Could it get hotter with different materials? You need something that remains a good absorber at high temperatures. Maybe a composite of platinum resistance wire alloy fibers in ceramic?
why do people continue to compare nowadays linux (or IRIX, Solaris, *BSD) etc... to things like Win98, which is _over 4 years_ old by now
Maybe because lots of people are still using Win98 - for economic reasons, because of a need to support old software needed to access critical data, or because considering microsoft's track record so far we tend to assume that in a few years it will be discovered that XP has even worse holes... Or people just don't like WPA, and assume that it's a future revenue enhancement tool - in a few years when MS has a replacement for XP on the market, their site for XP WPA might suddenly have all sorts of problems until people start giving up and buying a new OS when their systems crash and have to be reloaded.
I agree, comparing Win98 to server OS's like BSD isn't fair - there should be two separate comparisons, desktop to desktop and server to server. I gather that in server software, Win2K isn't bad in comparison to other commercial server products, but the OSS products (Linux and BSD) are far better. So Microsoft's bellyaching about OSS being insecure is proven wrong. (And if Linux has improved that much in the last 4 years, it's another indication that when security becomes important, open source can improve much faster than closed.)
As for comparing desktop to desktop, it's hard to arrange a comparison that everyone would agree is fair. First off, you don't exactly have competing desktop OS's - you have MS which writes desktop OS's and tries to upgrade them to run servers later, and you've got everything else (since Mac OS 9), which are *nix server OS's downgraded to run a desktop. It's something for MS to whine about when they lose. Anyhow, MS's latest desktop (XP Home) might have acquired a good sequence randomizer to plug this one hole, but the default installation apparently opens up a lot of others. I wonder how many other utterly brain-dead decisions like allowing Plug-n-Play to work across the network are not yet revealed...
I would attribute the failure of the design in the civilian aviation sphere to the lack of windows and the unconventional appearance.
Lack of windows was probably a big thing in the 1950's - if you spent a small fortune on getting up into the air, you wanted to _see_ something. Nowadays, most people have seen everything from the air before, half of them will pull the shade across the window immediately.
The unconventional appearance is a big deal also - in 1950 it was hard enough to persuade people it was safe to fly on an airplane at all even if it looked a lot like the almost-indestructible B17. This may be a little easier now - if they'll pay extra to fly on the weird-looking Concorde, maybe they'll accept something even weirder. Or maybe considering all the panic about terrorism, people would look at that big glob and think it was harder to knock it out of the air, by contrast with 747's that look like they can easily snap in half or lose a wing...
So, what happens if 1000 of these dummy sites pop up? Is Ford supposed to simply and quietly edit its script each time someone comes up with another stupid trick?
1) Reject anything coming from a site whose URL contains the strings "fuck" or "suck". There are many ways to evade that, like thinking of a non-obscene synonym, but most people with enough imagination have real work to do... (This might be a good thing to add to any business web site setup, BTW.)
2) Don't worry about what you might do about a thousand of anything until you've got more than one.
3) It's always easier to ask politely than to file a lawsuit, and sometimes it works. And asking politely carries far less risk of inspiring a thousand more people to carry out various anonymous attacks.;-)
I've been an atheist ever since I was 7 years old and my mother sent me to a Bible class. Whoa, Santa Claus is make-believe, but people actually believe this crap?
Eisenhower was still president and I was reciting the pledge every morning. "One nation under God" never bothered me - but then, I'm not sure how old I was when I figured out that the next word wasn't "invisible"...;-)
Microsoft is taking the stance that the only way to do it is to have a centralized authority, hardware encryption, and trusted systems. The problem with this is that it must be closed source. Wrong. Since you send the same programs to everyone, you have to assume that eventually all weaknesses in them will be found and exploited. To maintain a secure system, you must depend not on obscurity in the methods, but on keys, which are secrets that are different for different people, and which are changed frequently.
The problem is that properly handling keys becomes a vast PITA. Each person has to get their own set of keys and distribute the public part of them to everyone they deal with. Then you've got to periodically change your keys and re-distribute the public keys. And somehow the recipients have to verify the new keys really came from you. It's such a PITA that pretty soon 90% of users are taking shortcuts that will open their system up.
For an example - in a venue where people were much more professional and security conscious than the average user - in WWII, the Germans had a coding machine, Enigma, that was almost but not quite unbreakable with the technology of that time. Cracking it did take long enough that if the entire Wermacht had stuck to the proper procedures, codes would have been changed before they were cracked and any messages we did finally decode would have been far out of date. Where the process was controlled by anal Prussian officers, (the Army especially) it really was that hard to crack the code. But many of the Luftwaffe and Nazi operators fell into bad habits, so they were cracked easily. Then the codebreakers would look for messages that were passed to and re-transmitted by other departments, and used those known messages as a wedge to crack the other departmental codes. We couldn't prevent surprises entirely, since all codes would be changed in preparation for operations like the Battle of the Bulge, but most of the time we had a lot better idea of what the Germans were planning than they had of our plans.
Starting with the beginnings of the industrial age, where women and children were being forced to work in terrible conditions, as opposed to the wonderful conditions on medieval farms, where since most peasants couldn't afford an ox they'd hitch their wife to the plow, medical care was unavailable to the poor (90% of the population) and downright hazardous to the rich, the population was kept in balance by starvation if plague and warfare didn't kill enough, and even the upper classes ate so poorly as to average almost a foot shorter than today.
the average work day has not decreased at all (and increased in a lot of professions. It depends on how you count all the "work" time I spend on/.;-)
developing countries that can get more money from selling their crops as cattle feed in the US. Really? I thought most third-world farmers couldn't afford to ship their crops to the ports or the cities (whether for sale locally as food, or to ship overseas) - maybe because most of the foreign aid went into Swiss bank accounts rather than things like roadbuilding, or tractors and fertilizer to make the food farms more efficient. Or their government pressures them to grow cash crops for export (to get more hard money for those Swiss bank accounts) rather than food. Agricultural subsidies in most first-world countries do screw their own consumer/taxpayers as well as third world farmers, but the bigger problem is with the third world governments.
in the past 30 years or so, [Diagnoses] of stress-related mental illness has increased by something like 500%. Maybe now doctors call it "mental illness", where 30 years ago they'd just say "take a vacation". Unfortunately, that doesn't mean they are better at diagnosing mental illness, but rather that they've better learned how to phrase it so as to get the medical insurance to pay. And to whatever extent there is a real increase in stress: It may be hard for you kids to believe this, but 30 years ago the industrialized countries were already fully industrialized and had been for 50-100 years. Maybe "Republicanization" is causing increased stress to US workers, or maybe it's that 4-6 months a year we work just to pay the goddammed taxes, but if stress was due to industrialization, it would have peaked long ago.
And do you think medieval peasants, Roman slaves, Egyptian peasants in 3,000 BC, or any other lower classes in the old days were free from stress? No, they _died_ instead of just getting a little squirrelly.
the two-income family is so common that it has become difficult to be one-income anymore. (1) It's quite possible to raise a family on a single moderate income. Mennonites do it all the time. They just don't buy toys, fashionable clothes, prepared foods, etc. And, because my wife can't hold a job for more than a week before she starts telling the boss how to run it, I raised two children on my one paycheck - and for the first 8 years, it was the tiny paycheck of an enlisted serviceman. Just don't think you've got to buy everything they show you on TV.
2) A pre-industrial farmwife worked much, much harder than a modern working mother. Yes, I know it's hard to get home from 9 or 10 hours of work, toss dinner in the microwave, run the vacuum around the floor, get the kids ready for bed, and toss the clothes in the washing machine. Try cooking food from scratch on a wood fire, washing those clothes by hand. and cleaning the carpets by taking them out to the clothesline and beating them. If you can't afford to hire help, you'll soon be happy to go back to a dirt floor and greatly lower your expectations of personal cleanliness - even if you don't have anything better to do all day.
(3) You don't know how the average one-income family lived in the 1920's. You only see the top 10%. For the rest, no refrigerator, no car, electricity and running water optional, and generally the wife was working outside the house too as much as childbearing and care allowed.
working one day a week and making enough money to support themselves and their families. Scale your lifestyle back to that of Abraham Lincoln's parents, and it ought to be possible. If not, it's because of the ridiculous tax burden we have allowed our local, state, and federal governments to impose. I do know people who support themselves on less than 1 day a week work, but they get their wages in untaxed cash and the cardboard crates they live in have so far escaped the notice of the tax assessors...
Never believe the headline
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Is Linux Dead?
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· Score: 2
The MSNBC headline "So whatever happened to Linux?" _could_ be read to imply Linux is among the missing-in-action, or it could be read quite differently. Anyway, the article itself is pretty well-balanced and accurate about the big picture: Linux is doing quite well in the server market, not so well on the desktop, but there's hope even there. (It also gets a lot of details wrong - but news services always do...)
The slashdot headline & first sentence are utterly inaccurate - the article definitely doesn't say Linux is dead or failed.
So I guess I have to let you in on a secret I learned when I was about 10 years old - headlines are written by dolts who didn't read the whole article. Even if they had, the headline is too short for accuracy, and even if the whole story would fit in 5 words they'll still go for catchy over accurate. If you want to find out what's happening, read the whole article. If you want distorted, oversimplified, and often just plain wrong slogans written by marketdroids, just read the headlines - or listen to the TV news, it's about the same thing.
and what part of "there's more money in selling them than in fixing them" don't you understand?
There is competition here - the article does say that GM publishes its data. If the result is that GM sells more cars, they'll make more money than the competitors, even if they lose the repair business. And if their sales increase enough, their repair business will probably do well anyhow...
The truth is, no one lawyer could accurately answer every question that might arise from this either. Figure out whether your concern is copyright, patent, or NDA/non-competition agreements, and get a lawyer expert in that particular field.
But it isn't too stupid to first ask whether the issue is even close enough that it's necessary to blow a big chunk of cash on a lawyer. Some/.ers do have that much experience
at what point does 'drawing on experience' cross the line and invade others IP?
IANAL, but if the IP in question is a copyright, a ground-up build should keep you in the clear - unless someone's memory is so good he's just re-typing the same code as at his old employer. That's pretty unlikely - if he's anything like the rest of us, he'll have enough things he thinks he can do better the second time around that it will come out substantially different.
If it's patented, watch out. You can infringe a patent just by independently discovering a similar approach to the problem.
Finally, the former employers may think the stuff your new employee learned is a "trade secret" that belongs to them. This can be a problem only if the guy signed an NDA or "non-competition" agreement, but a lot of companies do slip that in among all the insurance forms on the first day at work... State laws limit the length of time and breadth of coverage allowed in these agreements, but each state is different, so get a lawyer expert in the employment laws of the state(s) involved.
maybe buy a car from all those car companies who willingly make their codes available for anybody?
Exactly.
Find a good independent repair shop. Get to know the guy in charge and ask him about repairability before buying any car. It's not just the codes (and the real situation for most makes is not nearly as bad as that article suggests), but also things like spark plugs positioned so they have to pull the engine or cut a hole in the fender to change them... Things like this can make thousands of dollars difference over the life of a car.
And if you change your mind about buying a car because of unpublished codes or any other maintainability issue, please write a letter to the dealer and the president of the auto company expressing your displeasure. Auto companies choose to save $5.00 per car by some shortcut that will eventually cost every owner $500 in repair shop costs because they think we won't find out about it. Let them know they're wrong.
And if the pressure to keep the diagnostic codes secret comes from the dealers, so their repair shop doesn't have to compete - they don't make nearly as much on repairs as on selling cars, so let them think they're losing sales, and they'll reverse the pressure real fast.
No, if I had mod points I'd be modding it up - "funny".
A 300 cubit or approximately 450 foot ship is pretty big (not quite as big as the Navy supply ship my son is serving on, but still big). There were reasons wooden ships were not often made that large - even the best shipwrights with the strongest woods have trouble achieving enough structural strength to withstand wave action beyond about 300 feet length, the ship becomes too hard to maneuver with sails or oars, it's too big for most old-time harbors, and you can't drag it up on the beach to scrape barnacles and re-stuff the seams. Noah wouldn't have had to worry about the last two, but he was no boatwright, and for his first large construction to have held together in the rough waters of a flood would have been indeed miraculous. Managing to keep control of it sufficiently to not get the bottom ripped out as flood waters dragged it across submerged forests and rocks would have been another miracle. Getting the animals there would have been another...
If I was inclined to believe in this at all, I could probably swallow those three miracles. The big problem is that it would have been utterly impossible for that one ship to have carried all the species of bacteria in the world. (Mark Twain first noticed this little discrepancy, over a century ago.)
Slashdot Mirror
Out on the manufacturing end, a server being down really does mean people sitting around waiting for it to come back up so they can do their jobs. We've got three people working full time just entering the parts list and build instructions for new boards we're going to build into the database - if it's off-line, they are twiddling their thumbs. Purchasers might work off their printouts for a while, but pretty soon they are going to need the database to see what parts have to be ordered. And if it's down for more than a few hours, the production line itself will grind to a halt, for lack of the printouts to start a new job.
Now, this is a server on an _internal_ net, quite safe from internet hackers and e-mail viruses. If it crashes for more than a few minutes, it's because corporate management was too cheap to buy redundant hardware, or to arrange an alternate connection from the plants to the server at HQ for when a backhoe hits the T1 trunk. But every time the Windows NT (or 2000) OS on the server takes a dump, we have dozens of people getting an extra coffee break, and that adds up.
It's also interesting to note that, after it was essentially banned in the U.S., Freon was one of the most smuggled substances into the country.
I don't know about that, but back in 1995 we paid $5,000 for one barrel of freon to run a solvent cleaner for electronic circuit boards until the FDA finally approved the water-wash process. What's funny is that this plant had never had a solvent cleaner in the 11 years it was running before we picked up that damned medical equipment contract...
The process that happens inside a refrigeration system is based on physics. It does not matter which gas.
It definitely does matter. Freon isn't just a gas in a refrigerator; it liquefies when it is compressed and gives up heat to the outside air, then evaporates _quickly_ when the pressure is released in the cooling coils. This takes the right variation of the boiling point with pressure. To get just the right physical characteristics in Freon, they tried substituting various numbers of flourine and chlorine atoms for hydrogen atoms in hydrocarbons. And as a bonus, it turns out that Freon is non-poisonous, non-corrosive, and coexists quite well with compressor lubricants.
Nothing else works quite as well. Water and alcohol have too high boiling points (and might be bad for the pipes and bearings too). CO2 requires a quite high pressure to liquefy. Ammonia is as toxic as cyanide. R134a (similar to Freon but with only carbon, hydrogen, and flourine atoms) is not quite as good at lubricating or at refrigerating.
By the way, refrigeration was responsible for only a tiny percentage of the chloroflourocarbons released into the environment. Refrigerators that leak coolant are defective! Spray cans were another tiny percentage. Most of the release was industrial cleaning systems - Freon and similar substances being great solvents that dry quickly, and pose no danger to the workers as long as there's enough ventilation to keep oxygen in the room. Generally these systems would try to recycle the Freon, but it kept leaking out around both ends of the conveyor belt.
I've long suspected that MS marketing had been infiltrated by Linux and Mac fanatics. That it still sells just proves how damned little these fanatics understand about users and corporate purchasing decisions...
OTOH, maybe MS has a large secret slushfund to hire people to post utterly over-the-top pro-Linux messages and make the real Linuxers look like idiots. And to write Linux how-to's that take you through a dozen typed commands when most distros have a simple GUI program to do the same thing in 3 mouse clicks.
some slave labour camp in taiwan......
Taiwan doesn't have slave labor camps. Taiwan is (compared to most Asian countries) free and democratic. If they want slave labor, they've got to get an agent in Hong Kong to contract to get the work done on the mainland.
I'm a little surprised by this ruling, since companies discontinue a cheaper older model so they can sell more of the new model all the time. E.g., DOS, Win 3.1, 95, 98, & NT. So if the fact that two companies (out of several major and many minor players in the market) agreed together to discontinue the old CD's makes it illegal, what does it mean when one company that has been legally determined to be a monopoly does the same thing?
No, that would only be the case if there were a billion working computers that might be replaced in the next 6 years.
But then Gartner is also expecting PC's to finally get out into the rest of the world. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to get to the real data, just their short announcement... As fast as the PC market has been growing in the last few years, I'd expect at least 1/3 of all the PC's to still be in use somewhere, and most of those will be replaced TWICE by 2008. That doesn't leave a whole lot out of the two billion for exponential growth of PC's in the less wealthy countries.
So it seems to me that either they're misquoting Gartner (entirely possible), or Gartner's estimate is actually rather on the pessimistic side. Of course, it's entirely possible that it's accurate - it's getting harder and harder to find real reasons to keep on replacing PC's all the time, and I think to reach much wider of a market PC's must become cheaper in third world countries and easier to use for Americans. (And maybe the third-world market is going to consist of our discarded 100-233MHz machines running Linux, which will suck for PC manufacturers and MS...)
this figure is set to double by as early as 2008.
Doesn't this suggest that, on the average, people aren't going to be replacing their computers any sooner than every six years?
Actually, microwaves will induce currents into anything that is conductive, so it will either absorb microwaves or reflect them. Metals mostly reflect (because their electrical resistance is low), otherwise all you'd need was a plain ceramic crucible.
I agree, I hope he was doing this naked-hands bit to show off the insulating properties of the ceramic wool, and not as his regular practice. I'd certainly use tongs, and a fireproof mat underneath.
How does a post that hasn't been moderated get moderated down as "overrated"?
I've had the experience of rating a post at + 1 ("funny", IIRC), clicking the Moderate button, and seeing it actually get moderated -1 "overrated". I'm sure the little rating window was correct before I scrolled down to the bottom to fing the moderate button, so seems like there might be a bug in the code.
so if the metal doesn't heat up, ummmm.... how does it melt???
The inner layers of the mold (including the cup holding the metal stock) contain carbon fibers and ferrite granules, which absorb the microwave and warm up. From there, the heat has to get into the metal by conduction.
Explanation: microwaves are oscillating electrical and magnetic fields, with a wavelength of a few inches. When these hit a good conductor (the metal stock or the walls of the microwave chamber), current flows just under the surface of the metal, generating electromagnetic fields that cancel the incoming microwaves and transmit them back. In other words, the metal reflects the microwaves, and only a tiny percentage of the heat is absorbed by electrical resistance. So you can't melt silver by just putting it in an invisible-to-microwave ceramic crucible and nuking; you need something that absorbs microwaves instead of reflecting. (Food, water, and poodles are all conductive but too high resistance to reflect microwaves well, so they are good absorbers, but make terrible crucibles. 8-) Reid also tried graphite crucibles, but while graphite is higher resistance than metal, it is still not enough resistance for good absorption.
By mixing carbon fiber into ceramics, Reid made a crucible absorb microwaves, but it wouldn't get hot enough - either the carbon fiber isn't a good enough absorber, or it's resistance changes as it heats up until it isn't effective anymore. So he went for another absorbtion mechanism: under the right circumstances the magnetic field of a magnetic material will oscillate in response to an impinging field. This basically requires the atoms to rotate back and forth, and heat is generated in the process. The magnetic field of the material lags behind the impinging field (called "hysteresis"); plotting the impinging and internal field on X and Y axes, the internal field traces out a rough quadrangle instead of a line and the area enclosed = lost energy = heat.
The magnetic ferrite granules Reid used were not good enough absorbers by themselves; I suspect that the material is too magnetically "hard" so it wasn't responding to the microwaves at room temperature. But a layer of carbon fiber/ceramic warmed up the granules, probably making them "softer", and then they absorbed microwaves quite well. Reid found that the maximum temperature was 1100C, enough to melt cast iron, but not steel. (Excessive carbon makes cast iron lower melting but brittle.) He says the ferrite "fluxes" at this temperature - I think that means it melts. At any rate, all magnetic materials will lose their magetism at some temperature.
So it gets hot enough for jewelry work, and maybe a few other things. (See the article for the practical details of building and insulating the crucible/mold.) Could it get hotter with different materials? You need something that remains a good absorber at high temperatures. Maybe a composite of platinum resistance wire alloy fibers in ceramic?
Hey, I'm a circumcised heathen!
why do people continue to compare nowadays linux (or IRIX, Solaris, *BSD) etc... to things like Win98, which is _over 4 years_ old by now
Maybe because lots of people are still using Win98 - for economic reasons, because of a need to support old software needed to access critical data, or because considering microsoft's track record so far we tend to assume that in a few years it will be discovered that XP has even worse holes... Or people just don't like WPA, and assume that it's a future revenue enhancement tool - in a few years when MS has a replacement for XP on the market, their site for XP WPA might suddenly have all sorts of problems until people start giving up and buying a new OS when their systems crash and have to be reloaded.
I agree, comparing Win98 to server OS's like BSD isn't fair - there should be two separate comparisons, desktop to desktop and server to server. I gather that in server software, Win2K isn't bad in comparison to other commercial server products, but the OSS products (Linux and BSD) are far better. So Microsoft's bellyaching about OSS being insecure is proven wrong. (And if Linux has improved that much in the last 4 years, it's another indication that when security becomes important, open source can improve much faster than closed.)
As for comparing desktop to desktop, it's hard to arrange a comparison that everyone would agree is fair. First off, you don't exactly have competing desktop OS's - you have MS which writes desktop OS's and tries to upgrade them to run servers later, and you've got everything else (since Mac OS 9), which are *nix server OS's downgraded to run a desktop. It's something for MS to whine about when they lose. Anyhow, MS's latest desktop (XP Home) might have acquired a good sequence randomizer to plug this one hole, but the default installation apparently opens up a lot of others. I wonder how many other utterly brain-dead decisions like allowing Plug-n-Play to work across the network are not yet revealed...
I would attribute the failure of the design in the civilian aviation sphere to the lack of windows and the unconventional appearance.
Lack of windows was probably a big thing in the 1950's - if you spent a small fortune on getting up into the air, you wanted to _see_ something. Nowadays, most people have seen everything from the air before, half of them will pull the shade across the window immediately.
The unconventional appearance is a big deal also - in 1950 it was hard enough to persuade people it was safe to fly on an airplane at all even if it looked a lot like the almost-indestructible B17. This may be a little easier now - if they'll pay extra to fly on the weird-looking Concorde, maybe they'll accept something even weirder. Or maybe considering all the panic about terrorism, people would look at that big glob and think it was harder to knock it out of the air, by contrast with 747's that look like they can easily snap in half or lose a wing...
So, what happens if 1000 of these dummy sites pop up? Is Ford supposed to simply and quietly edit its script each time someone comes up with another stupid trick?
;-)
1) Reject anything coming from a site whose URL contains the strings "fuck" or "suck". There are many ways to evade that, like thinking of a non-obscene synonym, but most people with enough imagination have real work to do... (This might be a good thing to add to any business web site setup, BTW.)
2) Don't worry about what you might do about a thousand of anything until you've got more than one.
3) It's always easier to ask politely than to file a lawsuit, and sometimes it works. And asking politely carries far less risk of inspiring a thousand more people to carry out various anonymous attacks.
I've been an atheist ever since I was 7 years old and my mother sent me to a Bible class. Whoa, Santa Claus is make-believe, but people actually believe this crap?
;-)
Eisenhower was still president and I was reciting the pledge every morning. "One nation under God" never bothered me - but then, I'm not sure how old I was when I figured out that the next word wasn't "invisible"...
Microsoft is taking the stance that the only way to do it is to have a centralized authority, hardware encryption, and trusted systems. The problem with this is that it must be closed source. Wrong. Since you send the same programs to everyone, you have to assume that eventually all weaknesses in them will be found and exploited. To maintain a secure system, you must depend not on obscurity in the methods, but on keys, which are secrets that are different for different people, and which are changed frequently.
The problem is that properly handling keys becomes a vast PITA. Each person has to get their own set of keys and distribute the public part of them to everyone they deal with. Then you've got to periodically change your keys and re-distribute the public keys. And somehow the recipients have to verify the new keys really came from you. It's such a PITA that pretty soon 90% of users are taking shortcuts that will open their system up.
For an example - in a venue where people were much more professional and security conscious than the average user - in WWII, the Germans had a coding machine, Enigma, that was almost but not quite unbreakable with the technology of that time. Cracking it did take long enough that if the entire Wermacht had stuck to the proper procedures, codes would have been changed before they were cracked and any messages we did finally decode would have been far out of date. Where the process was controlled by anal Prussian officers, (the Army especially) it really was that hard to crack the code. But many of the Luftwaffe and Nazi operators fell into bad habits, so they were cracked easily. Then the codebreakers would look for messages that were passed to and re-transmitted by other departments, and used those known messages as a wedge to crack the other departmental codes. We couldn't prevent surprises entirely, since all codes would be changed in preparation for operations like the Battle of the Bulge, but most of the time we had a lot better idea of what the Germans were planning than they had of our plans.
Starting with the beginnings of the industrial age, where women and children were being forced to work in terrible conditions, as opposed to the wonderful conditions on medieval farms, where since most peasants couldn't afford an ox they'd hitch their wife to the plow, medical care was unavailable to the poor (90% of the population) and downright hazardous to the rich, the population was kept in balance by starvation if plague and warfare didn't kill enough, and even the upper classes ate so poorly as to average almost a foot shorter than today.
/. ;-)
the average work day has not decreased at all (and increased in a lot of professions. It depends on how you count all the "work" time I spend on
developing countries that can get more money from selling their crops as cattle feed in the US. Really? I thought most third-world farmers couldn't afford to ship their crops to the ports or the cities (whether for sale locally as food, or to ship overseas) - maybe because most of the foreign aid went into Swiss bank accounts rather than things like roadbuilding, or tractors and fertilizer to make the food farms more efficient. Or their government pressures them to grow cash crops for export (to get more hard money for those Swiss bank accounts) rather than food. Agricultural subsidies in most first-world countries do screw their own consumer/taxpayers as well as third world farmers, but the bigger problem is with the third world governments.
in the past 30 years or so, [Diagnoses] of stress-related mental illness has increased by something like 500%. Maybe now doctors call it "mental illness", where 30 years ago they'd just say "take a vacation". Unfortunately, that doesn't mean they are better at diagnosing mental illness, but rather that they've better learned how to phrase it so as to get the medical insurance to pay. And to whatever extent there is a real increase in stress: It may be hard for you kids to believe this, but 30 years ago the industrialized countries were already fully industrialized and had been for 50-100 years. Maybe "Republicanization" is causing increased stress to US workers, or maybe it's that 4-6 months a year we work just to pay the goddammed taxes, but if stress was due to industrialization, it would have peaked long ago.
And do you think medieval peasants, Roman slaves, Egyptian peasants in 3,000 BC, or any other lower classes in the old days were free from stress? No, they _died_ instead of just getting a little squirrelly.
the two-income family is so common that it has become difficult to be one-income anymore. (1) It's quite possible to raise a family on a single moderate income. Mennonites do it all the time. They just don't buy toys, fashionable clothes, prepared foods, etc. And, because my wife can't hold a job for more than a week before she starts telling the boss how to run it, I raised two children on my one paycheck - and for the first 8 years, it was the tiny paycheck of an enlisted serviceman. Just don't think you've got to buy everything they show you on TV.
2) A pre-industrial farmwife worked much, much harder than a modern working mother. Yes, I know it's hard to get home from 9 or 10 hours of work, toss dinner in the microwave, run the vacuum around the floor, get the kids ready for bed, and toss the clothes in the washing machine. Try cooking food from scratch on a wood fire, washing those clothes by hand. and cleaning the carpets by taking them out to the clothesline and beating them. If you can't afford to hire help, you'll soon be happy to go back to a dirt floor and greatly lower your expectations of personal cleanliness - even if you don't have anything better to do all day.
(3) You don't know how the average one-income family lived in the 1920's. You only see the top 10%. For the rest, no refrigerator, no car, electricity and running water optional, and generally the wife was working outside the house too as much as childbearing and care allowed.
working one day a week and making enough money to support themselves and their families. Scale your lifestyle back to that of Abraham Lincoln's parents, and it ought to be possible. If not, it's because of the ridiculous tax burden we have allowed our local, state, and federal governments to impose. I do know people who support themselves on less than 1 day a week work, but they get their wages in untaxed cash and the cardboard crates they live in have so far escaped the notice of the tax assessors...
The MSNBC headline "So whatever happened to Linux?" _could_ be read to imply Linux is among the missing-in-action, or it could be read quite differently. Anyway, the article itself is pretty well-balanced and accurate about the big picture: Linux is doing quite well in the server market, not so well on the desktop, but there's hope even there. (It also gets a lot of details wrong - but news services always do...)
The slashdot headline & first sentence are utterly inaccurate - the article definitely doesn't say Linux is dead or failed.
So I guess I have to let you in on a secret I learned when I was about 10 years old - headlines are written by dolts who didn't read the whole article. Even if they had, the headline is too short for accuracy, and even if the whole story would fit in 5 words they'll still go for catchy over accurate. If you want to find out what's happening, read the whole article. If you want distorted, oversimplified, and often just plain wrong slogans written by marketdroids, just read the headlines - or listen to the TV news, it's about the same thing.
and what part of "there's more money in selling them than in fixing them" don't you understand?
There is competition here - the article does say that GM publishes its data. If the result is that GM sells more cars, they'll make more money than the competitors, even if they lose the repair business. And if their sales increase enough, their repair business will probably do well anyhow...
The truth is, no one lawyer could accurately answer every question that might arise from this either. Figure out whether your concern is copyright, patent, or NDA/non-competition agreements, and get a lawyer expert in that particular field.
/.ers do have that much experience
But it isn't too stupid to first ask whether the issue is even close enough that it's necessary to blow a big chunk of cash on a lawyer. Some
at what point does 'drawing on experience' cross the line and invade others IP?
IANAL, but if the IP in question is a copyright, a ground-up build should keep you in the clear - unless someone's memory is so good he's just re-typing the same code as at his old employer. That's pretty unlikely - if he's anything like the rest of us, he'll have enough things he thinks he can do better the second time around that it will come out substantially different.
If it's patented, watch out. You can infringe a patent just by independently discovering a similar approach to the problem.
Finally, the former employers may think the stuff your new employee learned is a "trade secret" that belongs to them. This can be a problem only if the guy signed an NDA or "non-competition" agreement, but a lot of companies do slip that in among all the insurance forms on the first day at work... State laws limit the length of time and breadth of coverage allowed in these agreements, but each state is different, so get a lawyer expert in the employment laws of the state(s) involved.
maybe buy a car from all those car companies who willingly make their codes available for anybody?
Exactly.
Find a good independent repair shop. Get to know the guy in charge and ask him about repairability before buying any car. It's not just the codes (and the real situation for most makes is not nearly as bad as that article suggests), but also things like spark plugs positioned so they have to pull the engine or cut a hole in the fender to change them... Things like this can make thousands of dollars difference over the life of a car.
And if you change your mind about buying a car because of unpublished codes or any other maintainability issue, please write a letter to the dealer and the president of the auto company expressing your displeasure. Auto companies choose to save $5.00 per car by some shortcut that will eventually cost every owner $500 in repair shop costs because they think we won't find out about it. Let them know they're wrong.
And if the pressure to keep the diagnostic codes secret comes from the dealers, so their repair shop doesn't have to compete - they don't make nearly as much on repairs as on selling cars, so let them think they're losing sales, and they'll reverse the pressure real fast.
I'll get modded down by the atheists
No, if I had mod points I'd be modding it up - "funny".
A 300 cubit or approximately 450 foot ship is pretty big (not quite as big as the Navy supply ship my son is serving on, but still big). There were reasons wooden ships were not often made that large - even the best shipwrights with the strongest woods have trouble achieving enough structural strength to withstand wave action beyond about 300 feet length, the ship becomes too hard to maneuver with sails or oars, it's too big for most old-time harbors, and you can't drag it up on the beach to scrape barnacles and re-stuff the seams. Noah wouldn't have had to worry about the last two, but he was no boatwright, and for his first large construction to have held together in the rough waters of a flood would have been indeed miraculous. Managing to keep control of it sufficiently to not get the bottom ripped out as flood waters dragged it across submerged forests and rocks would have been another miracle. Getting the animals there would have been another...
If I was inclined to believe in this at all, I could probably swallow those three miracles. The big problem is that it would have been utterly impossible for that one ship to have carried all the species of bacteria in the world. (Mark Twain first noticed this little discrepancy, over a century ago.)