48VDC is nothing new in the IT world, because it's been around for most of the past century.
The reason 48VDC is so popular with some IT equipment is that IT equipment frequently shares rackspace with telco equipment, which has been using -48VDC since the beginning of time. with massive installed -48VDC plants and banks of batteries that would fill your average house, it only makes sense to power routers and switches with it. No additional UPS's required!
Telco -48VDC is one of the most reliable power sources in the world.
>The only benefit is a big screen and decent sound system
You don't even get this anymore, a lot of the time. For instance, when I saw Shrek 2, the right front audio channel was out. Completely dead. It was incredibly annoying. I don't even bother telling the staff anymore because 99.99% of the time they give me a funny look as if I'm being overly picky, or they don't know what I'm talking about.
Also, a lot of the times, the projector is ever-so-slightly out of focus.. Just enough to give you a headache as your eyes try to compensate while you watch the movie. Again, you don't dare tell the manager, because they'll mess with it and make it worse 75% of the time.
At least when you watch at home, you can fix any problems you run into, and if you have halfway decent equipment, the experience will surpass commercial movie theaters quite often.
Not to bash 35mm; a properly configured, calibrated movie theater projecting 35mm will totally blow away any home DVD setup every time... but the "properly configured, calibrated" part is extremely rare nowadays. {:(
I remember back when you'd buy hardware, it would come with DETAILED technical specs, even schematics, describing how it works, how to program it, and what each part was. These days it's like "NO YOU CAN'T HAVE THE SPECS YOU MIGHT VIOLATE OUR COPYRIGHT/PATENT/INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY CRAP".. Why did companies GET like this? I mean, if anything it was easier to copy the technology BACK THEN!
I still have the manual for my Epson LX-800 printer. In the back is a detailed programming guide, which explains exactly how to print different densities, how to control the firing of the pins, etc... All open, all available.
I still have the reference manual for my Apple II plus. Inside is a complete schematic of the system, along with assembler code for the entire ROM.
I really hate this new trend of "everything's a secret". Gahh, what a greedy, messed up world we live in.
Uhh, locking torque converters are common in all new cars.
My 2001 Honda Accord has one; you can actually feel it locking up; it feels like a subtle additional shift when you reach 40MPH or so and stop accelerating.
You can tell it's engaged, because if you depress the gas a little more, the RPM won't immediately jump, but rather it will rise linearly with your speed, since there's no fluid link (from the torque converter).
Try it on the highway; open the throttle a LITTLE more at highway speeds. The lockup can't handle too much torque, though, so if you press the gas too much further down, it will disengage the lockup and you'll see the tach spike up a bit.
These days, tracing a call is indeed trivial, in most cases. There are some situations where it's more difficult, like international calls, but it's still pretty easy.
The whole "tracing a call being difficult and taking a long time" thing comes from the days of mechanical switches. Back then, when a call was routed, all the connections were made mechanically. Only long distance calls were recorded for billing purposes, and even then it was done on a paper tape which was meant to be fed into a billing system, not hand-searched to trace calls.
The only way to trace a call back then was to go to each switch on the call path and find the mechanical connection that tells you what the next switch is. This required the cooperation of employees at each central office involved in the call, and it all had to be done before the call was terminated. Upon hangup, the entire mechanically connected circuit is torn down and all trace of it is lost forever.
That's where the concept of "tracing a call" comes from. It wasn't always automatic and fast as it is today.
Of course. You can't really make a battery out of non-volatile materials. The volatility is due to the energy that the chemicals store, which is released as electrical current when the battery is utilized.
Think back; pretty much every battery that has ever existed has had volatile materials in it. Earlier batteries had less volatile chemicals, but also stored less energy per unit weight. It goes with the territory of being a chemical power source.
Ever strap a large heat-sink to your forehead? This may sound silly, but it DOES feel really cool! Try it!
Of course, people might think you're odd if you're walking around on a hot day with a HSF going full blast on your forehead, but hey, it could be the new geek trend in hot climates!
Isn't it kind of silly to make the employees work on the plane? I mean, if an employee can catch up on work while on the flight, that's great... but to actually require them to do work is a bit over the top, especially since airplanes aren't really a comfortable working environment. (At least in my opinion)
But that's just it.. Firefox is cross platform, but looks familiar on the platform it's been ported to.
For instance, on Windows, Firefox has the familiar Win32 appearence. On Macintosh, Firefox has the Mac UI feel, including the single menubar on the top. On UNIX, it uses GTK, so it fits right in with most other UNIX apps.
You can be cross platform and incorporate certain OS features without alienating other users. For instance, with Mozilla, you're pretty certain that regardless of the platform you're on, the various browser plugins (like Preferential, Tab Browser Extensions, etc.) will work. If the browser used lots of very platform specific features, it would break things in this regard.
BECAUSE IT'S A CROSS PLATFORM FRICKIN' WEB BROWSER!
If you want platform specific features, you start seperate projects, like Camino (MacOSX).
Thing is, Firefox is already a great browser on all the platforms it's on, so there's really no need for platform specific versions. Cross platform rocks; no matter what machine you're on, there's your familiar app with all your settings easily ported between them.
I've always wondered why Windows systems ship with any open ports at all.
That's one of the things that impressed me about MacOS X; I nmapped a machine after a fresh install and ZERO ports were open. You have to specifically enable any services you want.
Don't forget people like me, who own decent HDTV capable sets, BUT haven't bought the set-top boxes because they are still priced outrageously.
An Off-The-Air *ONLY* (no DSS support) set top box is still over $300. I'm not going to spend that just to watch mediocre television programming at high resolution!
Hopefully the prices will come down soon, making it more worthwhile. I'd pay at most $200 for an OTA set top box, $300 for something with satellite support.
And that's only because I'm a geek; I'm sure most "normal" people wouldn't pay even $200 for a set top box to watch HDTV, unless they're really into HD sports or something.
I never understood why employers that hire people to do this type of work don't put STOOLS in front of the work stations. I mean, stools aren't exactly expensive, and employees can sit down and be comfortable doing their job.
Standing in one place for a long time is very bad for your feet and back. My mother used to work at a department store years ago and she was actually FORBIDDEN to sit down! What sort of evil is this? Would it be that hard to put stools behind the cash registers so employees could be comfortable?
I think if this sort of thing isn't against OSHA standards, it should be. Stools should be required for any employee that would otherwise have to stand in one place for hours.
As a sysadmin working for a university, I must concur. University jobs are the best!
Sure, there are times when it can get stressful, but the stress isn't CONSTANT like it is with jobs in the business world. Managers aren't constantly worrying about the bottom line, just providing the best environment possible for students and researchers.
There's also a lot more freedom to play with open-source technologies. For instance, our entire server base is Linux-based, and we even use a linux-based central virtual router, which has given us pretty much 99.999% up-time since we implemented it.
There's also a few perks, like lots of good looking women on campus all the time, being able to attend cool lectures and events (I was at the astronomy dept. star party last night, observing the solar system through a 12" reflecting telescope) and other random things.
If you can find a university IT job or research position, go for it. The atmosphere certainly beats the business world.
Don't use MPlayerOSX; it's not optimized well for PowerPC and is a major CPU hog.
Try VLC; it's MUCH faster. Whereas decoding a 640x480 DivX pegs my CPU on my Powerbook G4 with MPlayer, it only sucks down around 20% using VLC, with no noticeable loss in quality.
For instance, if you have a 6V voltage regulator fed by a 12V supply, and you're consuming one amp at the 6V output, your device is using 6 watts, and the voltage regulator is dissipating 6 watts as heat.
Not fun at all. Not only do you need a big heatsink on the voltage regulator, but half of the battery's energy is wasted making the room warm!
One theory I have as to why people speak so loud when using mobile phones is the microphone placement on a lot of them.
On many of the small non-flip phones, the microphone ends up being way up near the middle of your cheek, about four inches from your mouth. So even if it's a sensitive microphone, there is a certain psychological tendancy to speak loud since the mike is farther away.
Another problem with this design is the necessarily sensitive microphone picks up pretty much every ambient sound around you, so the caller can hear your environment and you also have to talk loudly to compete any noise in the vicinity.
The solution? Flip phones, which put the microphone right at your mouth like when using a conventional (non-wireless) phone. You can speak softly and know the microphone is picking you up, and it's much easier to reject ambient sounds.
Of course, the cheapest phones will never be the flip-designs, so we'll have people yelling for a while...
One problem with capacitors is that their voltage goes down linearly with discharge. This means that at half charge, the voltage has dropped considerably.
This means the device has to be able to to contend with a steadily falling voltage supply. A flashlight running on a few of these would get steadily dimmer from the very moment you switch it on.
This applies to all capacitors. Also, even 350F doesn't come close to the capacity of even and old-school NiCd D battery!
This makes me wonder how much NVidia got bribed to enforce this stuff.
I mean, why would a company like NV bother with this unless there was a financial incentive?
It seems rather silly, overall. Why would anyone want to copy a DVD to a VHS tape? It pretty much kills the picture quality and destroys any special features the DVD might have had. Especially when you can just copy the raw MPEG stream from the disc!
If you forget to clean it out, eventually enough crud will build up that it will ignite during the toasting process one morning. it's pretty amusing, even if it does cause your smoke detector to go off and ruins the current slice of bread. }:)
Historical tidbit: You couldn't type a [ on the Apple II keyboard. Yup! No [!!! Holy crap! You could, however, type a ]. How? Shift-M! Yet there was no ] over the M.
Some programming languages that required [ and ] had control key combinations to produce them in their editors, since they weren't on the keyboard. Other characters missing were {} (oh no, I can't write C!), the backslash, and lower case letters.
Fun system, it was. With limitations that almost sound like a joke today...
Considering the fact that MP3 compression is lossy and you can't get the original data back, how did they compare checksums? Of course the data is going to be different.
Well, I don't expect it to be as fast as Quake 3 Arena.. but not so slow that it's UNPLAYABLE at the LOWEST resolution (640x480) and the LOWEST quality settings for all the graphics options.
My machine is fast at most everything else, but UT2004 just drags on it. Why should I have to get a dual G5 just to play a game?
Slashdot Mirror
48VDC is nothing new in the IT world, because it's been around for most of the past century.
The reason 48VDC is so popular with some IT equipment is that IT equipment frequently shares rackspace with telco equipment, which has been using -48VDC since the beginning of time. with massive installed -48VDC plants and banks of batteries that would fill your average house, it only makes sense to power routers and switches with it. No additional UPS's required!
Telco -48VDC is one of the most reliable power sources in the world.
-Z
>The only benefit is a big screen and decent sound system
You don't even get this anymore, a lot of the time. For instance, when I saw Shrek 2, the right front audio channel was out. Completely dead. It was incredibly annoying. I don't even bother telling the staff anymore because 99.99% of the time they give me a funny look as if I'm being overly picky, or they don't know what I'm talking about.
Also, a lot of the times, the projector is ever-so-slightly out of focus.. Just enough to give you a headache as your eyes try to compensate while you watch the movie. Again, you don't dare tell the manager, because they'll mess with it and make it worse 75% of the time.
At least when you watch at home, you can fix any problems you run into, and if you have halfway decent equipment, the experience will surpass commercial movie theaters quite often.
Not to bash 35mm; a properly configured, calibrated movie theater projecting 35mm will totally blow away any home DVD setup every time... but the "properly configured, calibrated" part is extremely rare nowadays. {:(
-Z
I remember back when you'd buy hardware, it would come with DETAILED technical specs, even schematics, describing how it works, how to program it, and what each part was. These days it's like "NO YOU CAN'T HAVE THE SPECS YOU MIGHT VIOLATE OUR COPYRIGHT/PATENT/INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY CRAP".. Why did companies GET like this? I mean, if anything it was easier to copy the technology BACK THEN!
I still have the manual for my Epson LX-800 printer. In the back is a detailed programming guide, which explains exactly how to print different densities, how to control the firing of the pins, etc... All open, all available.
I still have the reference manual for my Apple II plus. Inside is a complete schematic of the system, along with assembler code for the entire ROM.
I really hate this new trend of "everything's a secret". Gahh, what a greedy, messed up world we live in.
-Z
Uhh, locking torque converters are common in all new cars.
My 2001 Honda Accord has one; you can actually feel it locking up; it feels like a subtle additional shift when you reach 40MPH or so and stop accelerating.
You can tell it's engaged, because if you depress the gas a little more, the RPM won't immediately jump, but rather it will rise linearly with your speed, since there's no fluid link (from the torque converter).
Try it on the highway; open the throttle a LITTLE more at highway speeds. The lockup can't handle too much torque, though, so if you press the gas too much further down, it will disengage the lockup and you'll see the tach spike up a bit.
-Z
The law has never stopped Microsoft before...
What makes you think it will now?
They're above the law. It's been proven time and time again. Unless our government grows some balls, MS will continue to stomp on them.
Funny how we can kick the asses of two middle eastern countries, but can't rope in an out of control company. Gotta love this country.
-Z
These days, tracing a call is indeed trivial, in most cases. There are some situations where it's more difficult, like international calls, but it's still pretty easy.
The whole "tracing a call being difficult and taking a long time" thing comes from the days of mechanical switches. Back then, when a call was routed, all the connections were made mechanically. Only long distance calls were recorded for billing purposes, and even then it was done on a paper tape which was meant to be fed into a billing system, not hand-searched to trace calls.
The only way to trace a call back then was to go to each switch on the call path and find the mechanical connection that tells you what the next switch is. This required the cooperation of employees at each central office involved in the call, and it all had to be done before the call was terminated. Upon hangup, the entire mechanically connected circuit is torn down and all trace of it is lost forever.
That's where the concept of "tracing a call" comes from. It wasn't always automatic and fast as it is today.
Of course. You can't really make a battery out of non-volatile materials. The volatility is due to the energy that the chemicals store, which is released as electrical current when the battery is utilized.
Think back; pretty much every battery that has ever existed has had volatile materials in it. Earlier batteries had less volatile chemicals, but also stored less energy per unit weight. It goes with the territory of being a chemical power source.
-Z
Ever strap a large heat-sink to your forehead? This may sound silly, but it DOES feel really cool! Try it!
Of course, people might think you're odd if you're walking around on a hot day with a HSF going full blast on your forehead, but hey, it could be the new geek trend in hot climates!
FOREHEAD HEAT SINKS!
-Z
Isn't it kind of silly to make the employees work on the plane? I mean, if an employee can catch up on work while on the flight, that's great... but to actually require them to do work is a bit over the top, especially since airplanes aren't really a comfortable working environment. (At least in my opinion)
-Z
But that's just it.. Firefox is cross platform, but looks familiar on the platform it's been ported to.
For instance, on Windows, Firefox has the familiar Win32 appearence. On Macintosh, Firefox has the Mac UI feel, including the single menubar on the top. On UNIX, it uses GTK, so it fits right in with most other UNIX apps.
You can be cross platform and incorporate certain OS features without alienating other users. For instance, with Mozilla, you're pretty certain that regardless of the platform you're on, the various browser plugins (like Preferential, Tab Browser Extensions, etc.) will work. If the browser used lots of very platform specific features, it would break things in this regard.
-Z
Actually, the reason is...
BECAUSE IT'S A CROSS PLATFORM FRICKIN' WEB BROWSER!
If you want platform specific features, you start seperate projects, like Camino (MacOSX).
Thing is, Firefox is already a great browser on all the platforms it's on, so there's really no need for platform specific versions. Cross platform rocks; no matter what machine you're on, there's your familiar app with all your settings easily ported between them.
All hail cross platform code!
-Z
I've always wondered why Windows systems ship with any open ports at all.
That's one of the things that impressed me about MacOS X; I nmapped a machine after a fresh install and ZERO ports were open. You have to specifically enable any services you want.
Why can't MS do this? It's really not that hard!
-Z
Don't forget people like me, who own decent HDTV capable sets, BUT haven't bought the set-top boxes because they are still priced outrageously.
An Off-The-Air *ONLY* (no DSS support) set top box is still over $300. I'm not going to spend that just to watch mediocre television programming at high resolution!
Hopefully the prices will come down soon, making it more worthwhile. I'd pay at most $200 for an OTA set top box, $300 for something with satellite support.
And that's only because I'm a geek; I'm sure most "normal" people wouldn't pay even $200 for a set top box to watch HDTV, unless they're really into HD sports or something.
-Z
I never understood why employers that hire people to do this type of work don't put STOOLS in front of the work stations. I mean, stools aren't exactly expensive, and employees can sit down and be comfortable doing their job.
Standing in one place for a long time is very bad for your feet and back. My mother used to work at a department store years ago and she was actually FORBIDDEN to sit down! What sort of evil is this? Would it be that hard to put stools behind the cash registers so employees could be comfortable?
I think if this sort of thing isn't against OSHA standards, it should be. Stools should be required for any employee that would otherwise have to stand in one place for hours.
-Z
Sure, there are times when it can get stressful, but the stress isn't CONSTANT like it is with jobs in the business world. Managers aren't constantly worrying about the bottom line, just providing the best environment possible for students and researchers.
There's also a lot more freedom to play with open-source technologies. For instance, our entire server base is Linux-based, and we even use a linux-based central virtual router, which has given us pretty much 99.999% up-time since we implemented it.
There's also a few perks, like lots of good looking women on campus all the time, being able to attend cool lectures and events (I was at the astronomy dept. star party last night, observing the solar system through a 12" reflecting telescope) and other random things.
If you can find a university IT job or research position, go for it. The atmosphere certainly beats the business world.
Don't use MPlayerOSX; it's not optimized well for PowerPC and is a major CPU hog.
Try VLC; it's MUCH faster. Whereas decoding a 640x480 DivX pegs my CPU on my Powerbook G4 with MPlayer, it only sucks down around 20% using VLC, with no noticeable loss in quality.
-Z
In order to carry the immense increasing volume of spam...
Voltage regulators waste a lot of power.
For instance, if you have a 6V voltage regulator fed by a 12V supply, and you're consuming one amp at the 6V output, your device is using 6 watts, and the voltage regulator is dissipating 6 watts as heat.
Not fun at all. Not only do you need a big heatsink on the voltage regulator, but half of the battery's energy is wasted making the room warm!
One theory I have as to why people speak so loud when using mobile phones is the microphone placement on a lot of them.
On many of the small non-flip phones, the microphone ends up being way up near the middle of your cheek, about four inches from your mouth. So even if it's a sensitive microphone, there is a certain psychological tendancy to speak loud since the mike is farther away.
Another problem with this design is the necessarily sensitive microphone picks up pretty much every ambient sound around you, so the caller can hear your environment and you also have to talk loudly to compete any noise in the vicinity.
The solution? Flip phones, which put the microphone right at your mouth like when using a conventional (non-wireless) phone. You can speak softly and know the microphone is picking you up, and it's much easier to reject ambient sounds.
Of course, the cheapest phones will never be the flip-designs, so we'll have people yelling for a while...
-Z
One problem with capacitors is that their voltage goes down linearly with discharge. This means that at half charge, the voltage has dropped considerably.
This means the device has to be able to to contend with a steadily falling voltage supply. A flashlight running on a few of these would get steadily dimmer from the very moment you switch it on.
This applies to all capacitors. Also, even 350F doesn't come close to the capacity of even and old-school NiCd D battery!
-Z
This makes me wonder how much NVidia got bribed to enforce this stuff.
I mean, why would a company like NV bother with this unless there was a financial incentive?
It seems rather silly, overall. Why would anyone want to copy a DVD to a VHS tape? It pretty much kills the picture quality and destroys any special features the DVD might have had. Especially when you can just copy the raw MPEG stream from the disc!
If you forget to clean it out, eventually enough crud will build up that it will ignite during the toasting process one morning. it's pretty amusing, even if it does cause your smoke detector to go off and ruins the current slice of bread. }:)
-Z
Historical tidbit: You couldn't type a [ on the Apple II keyboard. Yup! No [!!! Holy crap! You could, however, type a ]. How? Shift-M! Yet there was no ] over the M.
Some programming languages that required [ and ] had control key combinations to produce them in their editors, since they weren't on the keyboard. Other characters missing were {} (oh no, I can't write C!), the backslash, and lower case letters.
Fun system, it was. With limitations that almost sound like a joke today...
Considering the fact that MP3 compression is lossy and you can't get the original data back, how did they compare checksums? Of course the data is going to be different.
Sounds like BS to me. }:)
Well, I don't expect it to be as fast as Quake 3 Arena.. but not so slow that it's UNPLAYABLE at the LOWEST resolution (640x480) and the LOWEST quality settings for all the graphics options.
My machine is fast at most everything else, but UT2004 just drags on it. Why should I have to get a dual G5 just to play a game?