Any decent power supply shouldn't have these problems.
If a power supply gets hot enough to fail under normal conditions, it's not a very efficient or well-designed power supply.
Modern switching power supplies should be able to function at temperature extremes without failing. Power supplies are mature technology; there's really no excuse for this.
Maybe MS should have gone with a well known high quality PSU maker like ASTEC for this.
We have about twenty FC3 workstations where I work. Nearly all of them used to be FC2 workstations which were upgraded to FC3.
I had to update the yum configuration, but yum update worked fine afterwards. There were some exceptions (mailman was installed on one box, and the configuration broke, but it was easily fixed.)
I think the issue is that each of us uses the systems differently, installs different custom software, and has different skills for fixing issues. A relatively minor yum problem for me might be a major one for someone who isn't really experienced with Linux.
Hopefully the FC3 -> FC4 transition will be smooth. We always run the N-1 release because it usually has most of the bugs worked out by the time N is released.
Unfortunately, "better communications infrastructure" is usually lacking in rural areas. DSL is almost nonexistant unless you happen to live right next to a central office, and cable is also lacking.
The only way to get high speed net in rural areas is usually satellite, which has unbearable latency, or running a dedicated line, which is ridiculously expensive.
I wonder how tech companies are solving this problem; telecommuting from a rural area will simply suck without a good connection.
Actually, the big hitters today typically use IBM mainframe technology. Machines so fault-tolerant that they can lose CPU and memory cards and keep right on running, and end up with uptimes measured in years.
Sun equipment is a bad joke compred to IBM iron. Some banks and big firms have been using the same software for decades; once you get something debugged to the point that it never crashes, and your needs don't vary too much (finance is a pretty well-understood field), you just want it to work. Period.
It used to be common years ago, though. My family had a Panasonic TV that would INSTANTLY display a picture when powered on. No warmup time! If you looked through the vent slots when it was off, you could see the CRT cathode heaters glowing very softly. They glowed dimmer than they did when the TV was on, but they stayed warm enough for an instant image.
The TV had a "vacation" switch on the back that acted as an on/off switch for this feature. When in "vacation" mode, the TV would take about 30 seconds to warm up! I guess older tubes had more thermally massive heaters, and had extreme warmup times, which is why the TVs had this "warm standby" state. New cathodes warm up quickly enough that it's no longer a problem.
I see this sort of thing at the flea market all the time. Huge crates of "DYNACELL" batteries, for instance, that look EXACTLY like duracells except for the letters URA being changed to YNA. They're incredibly cheap, but they're old-fashioned zinc-carbon batteries with maybe less than half the life of an actual alkaline.
The fact that I only see this in flea markets makes me think it's in a legal grey area... they're not calling themselves DURACELL but are making the product look so similar it might deceive people with bad eyesight or something...
A bit off-topic, but I figured it'd be interesting in this thread. I once came across a BP station that had a $24 credit card limit. This is a ridiculously low limit with gas at nearly $3 a gallon, so I asked the manager and he said that it is a credit card company requirement and that he "couldn't do anything about it".
Which was total bullshit because the BP down the street had the normal, much higher limit (which has never affected me).
Needless to say, that station has lost all my future business because of their stupidity, even though they're usually a couple cents less expensive than the other BP!
1981? Try 1976-77. That's when the Apple II came out, and the Apple II is what really pushed Apple into its success.
In 1981 the company was trying to kill the Apple II line with its ill-conceived Apple III. The Apple III was a dismal failure, and only Apple II sales kept the company alive during that time.
>Florida Power and lights SUCKS 8 days without power and counting!
No, they rule. I saw them working in heavy rain to get my feeder back on. It came back later that night. They could have easily postponed the job until the next day, but they did it.
They have a lot of work on their plate; relax, they'll get to you.
Back then cameras didn't have auto-white balance; you had to shoot a picture of a white card and press the "white balance" button... Or mess with knobs while looking at the output signal. I bet whoever shot that video didn't do that.
The problem was exaggerated by the fact that most cameras had black & white viewfinders, so you didn't know you had a problem until you watched the final tape. Whoops!
Also, most cameras back then used pickup tubes, NOT CCDs; they had all kinds of odd artifacts whose absence we take for granted today.
Isn't fraud already illegal? How is using phishing to perform the crime any different?
There doesn't need to be a new law against every method of committing a crime. For instance, do we need a new law specifically forbidding the use of explosives to break into a bank vault? Of course not! Breaking into a bank vault is already illegal; it doesn't matter how you do it.
Yeah.. when you gotta choose between having grocery money or reading a stupid PDF, you know someone's a bit greedy. }:)
Has anyone actually paid up to read it? I'm curious as to what kind of copy protection a $180 PDF file has. If not, post it somewhere anonymously so we can all read it. I'm sure it'll piss the author off something fierce, but if he's that greedy, he deserves it....
I love 3.5 miles from work. I'd consider riding a bicycle to work, but there's some problems:
A) Bad weather. In Miami, afternoon rain storms are common. Sure, you can choose to take the bike or the car in the morning, but what about when you're coming home from work? Whoops! Car is at home...
B) Riding to work in work clothes means they get all sweaty and stinky on the way there. There is no place to take a shower at work, so even if I do change, I'd still not smell very good throughout the day. This becomes a bigger problem during the summer heat.
C) Laziness. Sure, this sounds like a cop-out, but sometimes you just feel really crappy and want to get home as fast as possible. Having to pedal all the way home when you're in this mood sucks. I've been there!
How can this be enforced? It's not like they can't have a staff-only screening (which is a good idea ANYWAY, to make sure the print isn't defective and that all the splicing has been done properly) and simply NOT TELL Lucasfilm!
Besides, the staff at a theater is insignificant compared to the number of people who see the movie just on opening night! It's like a drop in the bucket.
Tell me.. Why does Hexus, and so many other sites, divide the articles into so many small pages?
This review is 26 pages! That's at least 26 pageviews to read the whole thing for each user. Multiply that by slash dot and... Well, let's just say the server is KO'ed.
Instead, why not have several reviews on each page? Just doubling the size of each page halves the number of page loads needed for each user. This applies for news sites and such too. I don't get why they split the articles into three or four pages, when you could easily have one big page to scroll through. Less pages also means readers will be less annoyed having to click and wait for the next page when the server is bogged down.
I dunno, I doubt it'll be impossible to read a CD even in 90 years.
Even today, you can find places to convert old 8mm home movies into a more modern format.
CD-ROM drives are resilient devices; I'm sure millions of them will survive in working condition for many decades. Some will eventually be owned by data conversion services that will do this for you.
You can still readily find equipment to play 78RPM records, reel-to-reel tape, 9track computer tapes, TK50, and other dead formats. It may be difficult, but not impossible to recover your old data in 50-100 years.
Whether the CD media will hold up that long is another story. Polycarbonate is pretty stable, but we're talking a long time during which an accident could happen. An accident that merely tears or crumples paper can destroy a CD!
Anyone know what ReplayTV is doing when it comes to all this? We always hear about TiVo.. but I've played with ReplayTV boxes and they seem to be the same thing but with less restrictions (30 second skip, etc.)
Bank cards tend to use high-coercivity strips because you tend to keep them a lot longer and they get exposed to the elements a lot more.
Hotel key cards tend to be low-coercivity because they're rewritten often and the writers for them are cheaper.
Coercivity is basically how strong a magnetic field is needed to magnetize something; varying coercivity is the reason you can easily erase a 720K floppy disk with a bar magnet but it won't even phase a 1.44MB floppy or a zip disk.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, another case of trying to use legislation to solve a social non-problem. Good luck.
-Z
Any decent power supply shouldn't have these problems.
If a power supply gets hot enough to fail under normal conditions, it's not a very efficient or well-designed power supply.
Modern switching power supplies should be able to function at temperature extremes without failing. Power supplies are mature technology; there's really no excuse for this.
Maybe MS should have gone with a well known high quality PSU maker like ASTEC for this.
-Z
Funny, I had the opposite experience.
We have about twenty FC3 workstations where I work. Nearly all of them used to be FC2 workstations which were upgraded to FC3.
I had to update the yum configuration, but yum update worked fine afterwards. There were some exceptions (mailman was installed on one box, and the configuration broke, but it was easily fixed.)
I think the issue is that each of us uses the systems differently, installs different custom software, and has different skills for fixing issues. A relatively minor yum problem for me might be a major one for someone who isn't really experienced with Linux.
Hopefully the FC3 -> FC4 transition will be smooth. We always run the N-1 release because it usually has most of the bugs worked out by the time N is released.
-Z
It doesn't take much to generate hundreds of Gs of shock.
A three-foot drop onto a hard surface can do it easily. Banging it against your desk accidentally can do it as well.
Hundreds of Gs sounds like "a lot", but in the context of collisions between hard objects, it's very easy to get there.
-Z
Unfortunately, "better communications infrastructure" is usually lacking in rural areas. DSL is almost nonexistant unless you happen to live right next to a central office, and cable is also lacking.
The only way to get high speed net in rural areas is usually satellite, which has unbearable latency, or running a dedicated line, which is ridiculously expensive.
I wonder how tech companies are solving this problem; telecommuting from a rural area will simply suck without a good connection.
-Z
Actually, the big hitters today typically use IBM mainframe technology. Machines so fault-tolerant that they can lose CPU and memory cards and keep right on running, and end up with uptimes measured in years.
Sun equipment is a bad joke compred to IBM iron. Some banks and big firms have been using the same software for decades; once you get something debugged to the point that it never crashes, and your needs don't vary too much (finance is a pretty well-understood field), you just want it to work. Period.
-Z
I don't believe modern TVs do this.
It used to be common years ago, though. My family had a Panasonic TV that would INSTANTLY display a picture when powered on. No warmup time! If you looked through the vent slots when it was off, you could see the CRT cathode heaters glowing very softly. They glowed dimmer than they did when the TV was on, but they stayed warm enough for an instant image.
The TV had a "vacation" switch on the back that acted as an on/off switch for this feature. When in "vacation" mode, the TV would take about 30 seconds to warm up! I guess older tubes had more thermally massive heaters, and had extreme warmup times, which is why the TVs had this "warm standby" state. New cathodes warm up quickly enough that it's no longer a problem.
-Z
I see this sort of thing at the flea market all the time. Huge crates of "DYNACELL" batteries, for instance, that look EXACTLY like duracells except for the letters URA being changed to YNA. They're incredibly cheap, but they're old-fashioned zinc-carbon batteries with maybe less than half the life of an actual alkaline.
The fact that I only see this in flea markets makes me think it's in a legal grey area... they're not calling themselves DURACELL but are making the product look so similar it might deceive people with bad eyesight or something...
-Z
Of course they allow non-Catholics at Catholic schools. What better way to add more sheep to the flock?
The brainwashing that goes on in those schools can be scary sometimes.
-Z
A bit off-topic, but I figured it'd be interesting in this thread. I once came across a BP station that had a $24 credit card limit. This is a ridiculously low limit with gas at nearly $3 a gallon, so I asked the manager and he said that it is a credit card company requirement and that he "couldn't do anything about it".
Which was total bullshit because the BP down the street had the normal, much higher limit (which has never affected me).
Needless to say, that station has lost all my future business because of their stupidity, even though they're usually a couple cents less expensive than the other BP!
-Z
1981? Try 1976-77. That's when the Apple II came out, and the Apple II is what really pushed Apple into its success.
In 1981 the company was trying to kill the Apple II line with its ill-conceived Apple III. The Apple III was a dismal failure, and only Apple II sales kept the company alive during that time.
-Z
You don't want to be in the room at all when the halon system goes off. That's why there's an alarm and a 60 second delay.
If the floor tiles don't getcha, suffocation will.
-Z
>Florida Power and lights SUCKS 8 days without power and counting!
No, they rule. I saw them working in heavy rain to get my feeder back on. It came back later that night. They could have easily postponed the job until the next day, but they did it.
They have a lot of work on their plate; relax, they'll get to you.
-Z
So get an older 20GB iPod. There's likely to be a lot on the market now cheap due to everyone upgrading to the new video ones.
-Z
Doesn't compressing to DD 5.1 add some latency, which can be very annoying when playing games?
Also, receivers sometimes add a tiny bit of latency when decoding DD 5.1, though not very much in my experience....
-Z
Back then cameras didn't have auto-white balance; you had to shoot a picture of a white card and press the "white balance" button... Or mess with knobs while looking at the output signal. I bet whoever shot that video didn't do that.
The problem was exaggerated by the fact that most cameras had black & white viewfinders, so you didn't know you had a problem until you watched the final tape. Whoops!
Also, most cameras back then used pickup tubes, NOT CCDs; they had all kinds of odd artifacts whose absence we take for granted today.
-Z
Isn't fraud already illegal? How is using phishing to perform the crime any different?
There doesn't need to be a new law against every method of committing a crime. For instance, do we need a new law specifically forbidding the use of explosives to break into a bank vault? Of course not! Breaking into a bank vault is already illegal; it doesn't matter how you do it.
-Z
Yeah.. when you gotta choose between having grocery money or reading a stupid PDF, you know someone's a bit greedy. }:)
Has anyone actually paid up to read it? I'm curious as to what kind of copy protection a $180 PDF file has. If not, post it somewhere anonymously so we can all read it. I'm sure it'll piss the author off something fierce, but if he's that greedy, he deserves it....
-Z
I love 3.5 miles from work. I'd consider riding a bicycle to work, but there's some problems:
A) Bad weather. In Miami, afternoon rain storms are common. Sure, you can choose to take the bike or the car in the morning, but what about when you're coming home from work? Whoops! Car is at home...
B) Riding to work in work clothes means they get all sweaty and stinky on the way there. There is no place to take a shower at work, so even if I do change, I'd still not smell very good throughout the day. This becomes a bigger problem during the summer heat.
C) Laziness. Sure, this sounds like a cop-out, but sometimes you just feel really crappy and want to get home as fast as possible. Having to pedal all the way home when you're in this mood sucks. I've been there!
-Z
How can this be enforced? It's not like they can't have a staff-only screening (which is a good idea ANYWAY, to make sure the print isn't defective and that all the splicing has been done properly) and simply NOT TELL Lucasfilm!
Besides, the staff at a theater is insignificant compared to the number of people who see the movie just on opening night! It's like a drop in the bucket.
-Z
Bzzt. Wrong.
You see, it only takes ONE person to crack the protection and distribute the file in an unprotected format, and then the genie is out of the bottle.
If Windows won't play unprotected music, I'll run Linux. Oh waaaaaaait, I already run Linux; I haven't owned a Windows box since 2003.
Nice try!
-Z
Tell me.. Why does Hexus, and so many other sites, divide the articles into so many small pages?
This review is 26 pages! That's at least 26 pageviews to read the whole thing for each user. Multiply that by slash dot and... Well, let's just say the server is KO'ed.
Instead, why not have several reviews on each page? Just doubling the size of each page halves the number of page loads needed for each user. This applies for news sites and such too. I don't get why they split the articles into three or four pages, when you could easily have one big page to scroll through. Less pages also means readers will be less annoyed having to click and wait for the next page when the server is bogged down.
-Z
I dunno, I doubt it'll be impossible to read a CD even in 90 years.
Even today, you can find places to convert old 8mm home movies into a more modern format.
CD-ROM drives are resilient devices; I'm sure millions of them will survive in working condition for many decades. Some will eventually be owned by data conversion services that will do this for you.
You can still readily find equipment to play 78RPM records, reel-to-reel tape, 9track computer tapes, TK50, and other dead formats. It may be difficult, but not impossible to recover your old data in 50-100 years.
Whether the CD media will hold up that long is another story. Polycarbonate is pretty stable, but we're talking a long time during which an accident could happen. An accident that merely tears or crumples paper can destroy a CD!
-Z
Anyone know what ReplayTV is doing when it comes to all this? We always hear about TiVo.. but I've played with ReplayTV boxes and they seem to be the same thing but with less restrictions (30 second skip, etc.)
How come TiVo gets all the attention?
Low versus high-coercivity strips.
Bank cards tend to use high-coercivity strips because you tend to keep them a lot longer and they get exposed to the elements a lot more.
Hotel key cards tend to be low-coercivity because they're rewritten often and the writers for them are cheaper.
Coercivity is basically how strong a magnetic field is needed to magnetize something; varying coercivity is the reason you can easily erase a 720K floppy disk with a bar magnet but it won't even phase a 1.44MB floppy or a zip disk.
-Z