the lowered warranties are not a sign of dropped quality. It's foolish to think that. My big Western Digital hasn't seen so much as one problem, and I don't expect it to for many years
Really? Strange that the beancounters from *all* the major HD makers seem to think otherwise. Otherwise at least *one* of them would simply stick to three year warranty and VERY LOUDLY publicise the fact.
They've all done the sums and if it's more cost effective to manufacture (slightly) defective parts with a reduced warranty, well, they're right onto it.
All I want is a drive bigger than 40GB that'll actually *last* 5 years. Is that so hard? Apparently yes. I've got 80MB drives that are thirteen years old and still get run 8hrs a day. I don't think I'll ever see that of the new, 1 year warranty drives.
Of course I'd take it, I'd just make sure that in my will it says something like: "Oh yeah, everyone, you know, er, it might be a good idea to like, be elsewhere than the US in 500 years time. I've left $500M in a high interest account to help defray moving costs. Thanks for that ATM card!"
I use bogofilter to filter things out. It's not too bad, I have it setup on my IMAP server so a folder called "missed-junk" in my IMAP tree is checked every hour, and emails in there are added to the spam database.
The wordy, "conversation-like" spam is starting to slip through a bit, but the 10 or so bits of spam gets dropped to one or two, which is a good improvement. The only real reason I keep the 4000-odd spam messages around is to train new versions of bogofilter with.
Does anyone recall the low-level format utility that used to be built into hard drive controller ROMS?
All we need now is some script kiddie to figure out the address of the "ZAP" routine in the Phoenix BIOS to jmp to, then the next outlook virus will cause hell. Change one instruction anywhere in your system's software (I guess boot sector is as good as any, before protected mode) to jump to that point, and all is lost.
Why bother with your own devious erase code, when Phoenix thoughtfully provides one for you?
er, but then you'd need a tcp/ip stack... (of sorts) and knowledge of your network, such as gateway addresses and your own IP, which could be fixed or dynamic via DHCP. And what do you ping? A fixed IP? A resolveable domain name? Fixed IP's are unlikely. Resolveable domain names require DNS, another thing that needs to be found out before you can ping your server.
And god forbid if you don't actually *have* always-on internet dangling of the end of your network cable. What about people with cable modems with PPPoE? Authenticated proxy servers? Dial-up users?
So yes, you could probably do something like this at boot if you cobble enough bits'n'pieces of software into your boot ROM - Phoenix has , it seems. But it'd probably only work in a fixed, known , stable environment. As mentioned before, possibly useful for corporations, not useful for the average home user.
Just sounds like something else to go wrong to me. And go wrong catastrophically too.
I can tell you how much I've paid for spam delivery: My "Junk Mail" Maildir folder is 42788 kbytes - it contains 4439 messages, dating back to 22/08/2001. Data on my permanent modem connection via Tel$tra is 15c / Megabyte.
So it's cost me a total of $6.41, over the past two years or so.
4439 emails in 22 or so months is 200 per month. Seeing as my email address is a business address, I'd like it to be available to people, so ordinary "keep your email secret" advice is not really good. And as we all know, once you get those one or two bits of spam a month, it's only a matter of time before the deluge begins and you're getting "HOT TEEN FARM ANIMAL RAPE SEX!" and the like delivered daily.
If you're interested in the hazards of software in the real world check out the risks forum. They take submissions from people about faults and errors in software (and related meatware) that put lives at risk.A weekly digest can be found here.
It's a good read, especially browsing through the archives. eg:
"A woman drowned during a flood when the elevator she was riding in incorrectly sensed a fire alarm and went to the ground floor which was underwater."
"Three people killed when a computer glitch caused a 16-inch pipeline to rupture, dumping 237,000 gallons of petrol."
and so on. Makes you a little paranoid. Now I know why indemnity insurance is so high these days.
Most wind tunnels can only generate hypersonic airflows for a very brief period of time, somthing like pointing a cannon (minus cannonball, of course) into a tube containg your model and firing it off. You get a very brief burst of air and that's it. So whilst you can measure shock waves etc from the leading edges, you can't really simulate a long dose of atmospheric heating.
He's got a lathe. - Insert former in lathe. - Wind on a few turns - Turn on lathe at *low* speed. - Guide the wire onto the former.
Even at 60rpm, thats only about 12 minutes.
Safety notes:
- Keep fingers out of moving parts.
- Prolly a good idea to wear gloves, so you don't spool 100m of copper wire through your bare hands.
- Keep well out of the way of the lathe, low rpm = high torque, enough to wrap you round the chuck like liquorice.
- Don't try this at home kids!
Hmm, your sums seem to be a little out. 1000 amps at 12 volts is 12,000W = about 10-11000W at 120Volts (with the help of an inverter and its losses)
Besides, to help with the resistive losses, you'd probably go for 24V alternators. Common pulley driven ones are good for 100A.. you can get gear-driven oil cooled ones that do 200A no sweat.
So, 200A X 24V = 4800W. If your inverter is efficient enough (say, 90%) you've got 4300W... plus 500W of heat to dissipate.
To put that in perspective is enough power to simultaneously run:
A fridge (300w)
A chest freezer (300w)
Moderate size TV + Stereo (400-600W)
A buncha lights (eg 5x30W fluro's)
For the hell of it,a fairly decent room Airconditioner (2000W)
Your leet PC + accessories. ( less then 600W... if you don't have a laser printer)
With all that, you'll have enough left over to occasionally put the (electric) kettle on (1200w) for a cuppa.
Who knows? Probably not. I vaguely remember a Choice magazine article on them showing no statistically provable difference. Wait, maybe that was the EMP type ones.
Some of those ads are a bit worrying - "Drive pests away by creating a unbearable ultrasonic field plus an annoying EMP in your house wiring!"
I think that having anything in your house that causes discomfort to animals that are *still* genetically fairly close to humans is probably a bad thing. Doubly so for the EMP ones. After all, a lot of human trials start out on the humble lab rat.
I wouldn't be convinced until there was a long term and scientifically rigorous study on continuous exposure to humans (oh, and the pests you're trying to drive off too!).
How hard would it have been to do a slow roll before leaving the ISS, have those guys take some shots of the belly of Columbia, then have some of the guys at Houston do a visual check of the thermal shiedling
Er, they didn't go to the ISS, they were in a completely different orbit. But still , you'd think *someone* coulda suited up and had a look. Even if they couldn't repair it, they could have then had a chance to say goodbye to their family before trying a (now known to be suicidal) reentry.
To try and fix your car analogy it's like getting your mechanics to swap your car with another, and while transferring your personal effects, they find a whole bunch of loose paper in the back of the car with child porn on it.
Computer repair people often *need* to see everything.
I'll give you a real-world example: Your PC stops working. I find that windows 98 is scrambled. I say, "Hmm,better back everything up here before I toast it and start again" In the process of backing up, I notice that your 40GB drive is nearly full, but "C:\My Documents" only has 5MB of documents in it. I check "C:\program files"... hmmm just office (and office is not *yet* 35GB). Where the hell is all this space going? I'd better find it, because If I blow away your 38GB of thesis data , you're going to be pissed.
So, now I'm poking around your PC going "Where the hell does this guy store all his data?"
So eventually I find your data, in C:\windows\options\cabs\Porn. While copying the files to a safe place, I see lots of "lolita" type filenames. What to do? If I've copied it to a spare drive of mine, whilst I erase and fix yours, *I've* got child porn on *my* drive now. What If there's a raid just after I finish reformatting your drive? "Honest Officer, It's *my* drive, but it's that guys data" is a hard one to pull off.
Apart from the usual software armor that gets put in place, how about something like another (smallish) boot partition that holds a compressed image of the filesystem as originally installed? When you boot to that partition, all it does is dd (via bzip) a copy to your other partition and reboot. Use a bootloader menu of "Re-Install System" or something, and a few dire warnings and a password before it begins of course..
Then you could have a complete re-install in about 20 minutes or so.
Or maybe just whack something like that on a cd, as long as your PC's are reasonably consistent hardware wise.
The average person knows what a "First World " country is (technologically speaking). Reliable food and water supplies, good standard of living , low mortality rate.
The average person also knows what a "Third World" country is. Unreliable (or non-existant) food and water supplies, crap standard of living, high mortality.
What I was attempting to imply by my use of "Second World" was a country with technological expertise in between the two.
Yes I am aware of the "offical" (anal) meaning of the terms, but I thought I'd do my bit to tweak the vocabulary a little bit. Especially seeing that, as you pointed out, there *is* no Second world left anymore, we may as well use the terms for something else.
And I think the proper "Second world" standards of living were (by most accounts) still pretty poor for the day.
father: no my son, but we will get to search the internet for information on food and food-like products.
I know you were just being glib, but let me amend that for you:
"but we will get to search the internet for ways to stop our crops from dying off, so we can eat tomorrow."
Of course, you could put in other lifestyle improving search terms, like say, how to build a sewage treatment plant so your village doesn't dump raw turds in the river that you drink from, or using all that pig/chicken/cow shit around the place to make enough methane for a small generating plant. Or even how to construct a nice cheap house that'll hold up to cyclonic winds and monsoon rain.
Living in a modern country, and going to a even a second-world country (never mind a third world one) is a real eye-opener - things that I've said:
(This is when I was staying in a town of about 300,000. Picture a small idyllic fishing village, then cram 25,000 people and cars into it)
"What're all those tanks on the roof for?" "Oh, the tap water's just bore water - it's not really fit to drink. We get the drinking water trucked in."
"Damn! What's that stink?" "Dead cow in the open drain outside the window there, see?"
"How long will the power be off for?" "Oh , two or three hours... it normally comes back on around 10."
"Howdy'a get a line out here? I need to ring home" "I'll book you a call, the guys at the exchange will ring us back when it's hooked up. There's only 15 lines out of town."
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the lowered warranties are not a sign of dropped quality. It's foolish to think that. My big Western Digital hasn't seen so much as one problem, and I don't expect it to for many years
Really? Strange that the beancounters from *all* the major HD makers seem to think otherwise. Otherwise at least *one* of them would simply stick to three year warranty and VERY LOUDLY publicise the fact.
They've all done the sums and if it's more cost effective to manufacture (slightly) defective parts with a reduced warranty, well, they're right onto it.
All I want is a drive bigger than 40GB that'll actually *last* 5 years. Is that so hard? Apparently yes. I've got 80MB drives that are thirteen years old and still get run 8hrs a day. I don't think I'll ever see that of the new, 1 year warranty drives.
side note - it's also displaying icon images and colored titles on the 'light' mode that I use.
Sure sticks out when everything else is plain text
Most of the proximity cards are powered by the RF field that is used to interrogate it.
Still , a button would be nice. Even just a 'squeeze point' (eg squeeze the card whilst waving over reader) would be handy.
Then we could also have the obligatory "Squeeze the last cent out of my card jokes"
pixel resolution of 2.75 meters ... that's not too shabby, either.
maybe we could get GreenPeace out there to try and catch it ;-)
Of course I'd take it, I'd just make sure that in my will it says something like:
"Oh yeah, everyone, you know, er, it might be a good idea to like, be elsewhere than the US in 500 years time. I've left $500M in a high interest account to help defray moving costs. Thanks for that ATM card!"
I use bogofilter to filter things out. It's not too bad, I have it setup on my IMAP server so a folder called "missed-junk" in my IMAP tree is checked every hour, and emails in there are added to the spam database.
The wordy, "conversation-like" spam is starting to slip through a bit, but the 10 or so bits of spam gets dropped to one or two, which is a good improvement. The only real reason I keep the 4000-odd spam messages around is to train new versions of bogofilter with.
Does anyone recall the low-level format utility that used to be built into hard drive controller ROMS?
All we need now is some script kiddie to figure out the address of the "ZAP" routine in the Phoenix BIOS to jmp to, then the next outlook virus will cause hell. Change one instruction anywhere in your system's software (I guess boot sector is as good as any, before protected mode) to jump to that point, and all is lost.
Why bother with your own devious erase code, when Phoenix thoughtfully provides one for you?
er, but then you'd need a tcp/ip stack... (of sorts) and knowledge of your network, such as gateway addresses and your own IP, which could be fixed or dynamic via DHCP. And what do you ping? A fixed IP? A resolveable domain name? Fixed IP's are unlikely. Resolveable domain names require DNS, another thing that needs to be found out before you can ping your server.
And god forbid if you don't actually *have* always-on internet dangling of the end of your network cable. What about people with cable modems with PPPoE? Authenticated proxy servers? Dial-up users?
So yes, you could probably do something like this at boot if you cobble enough bits'n'pieces of software into your boot ROM - Phoenix has , it seems. But it'd probably only work in a fixed, known , stable environment. As mentioned before, possibly useful for corporations, not useful for the average home user.
Just sounds like something else to go wrong to me. And go wrong catastrophically too.
How much do you pay for email?
:
I can tell you how much I've paid for spam delivery
My "Junk Mail" Maildir folder is 42788 kbytes - it contains 4439 messages, dating back to 22/08/2001.
Data on my permanent modem connection via Tel$tra is 15c / Megabyte.
So it's cost me a total of $6.41, over the past two years or so.
4439 emails in 22 or so months is 200 per month. Seeing as my email address is a business address, I'd like it to be available to people, so ordinary "keep your email secret" advice is not really good. And as we all know, once you get those one or two bits of spam a month, it's only a matter of time before the deluge begins and you're getting "HOT TEEN FARM ANIMAL RAPE SEX!" and the like delivered daily.
If you're interested in the hazards of software in the real world check out the risks forum.
They take submissions from people about faults and errors in software (and related meatware) that put lives at risk.A weekly digest can be found here.
It's a good read, especially browsing through the archives. eg:
"A woman drowned during a flood when the elevator she was riding in incorrectly sensed a fire alarm and went to the ground floor which was underwater."
"Three people killed when a computer glitch caused a 16-inch pipeline to rupture, dumping 237,000 gallons of petrol."
and so on. Makes you a little paranoid. Now I know why indemnity insurance is so high these days.
for a lie detector that should be great fun at parties.
Yeah, I can just see the party now:
"Hey baby , just let me strap this on your chest..."
*SLAP*
Most wind tunnels can only generate hypersonic airflows for a very brief period of time, somthing like pointing a cannon (minus cannonball, of course) into a tube containg your model and firing it off. You get a very brief burst of air and that's it. So whilst you can measure shock waves etc from the leading edges, you can't really simulate a long dose of atmospheric heating.
Where have you been?
(Austin powers voice)
Floppies aren't floppy anymore, they're *hard*, baby. YEAH BABY! YEAH!
That's what epoxy glue is for.
A good coating of Araldite over the coil in it's final position and it'd be fine.
He's got a lathe.
:
- Insert former in lathe.
- Wind on a few turns
- Turn on lathe at *low* speed.
- Guide the wire onto the former.
Even at 60rpm, thats only about 12 minutes.
Safety notes
- Keep fingers out of moving parts.
- Prolly a good idea to wear gloves, so you don't spool 100m of copper wire through your bare hands.
- Keep well out of the way of the lathe, low rpm = high torque, enough to wrap you round the chuck like liquorice.
- Don't try this at home kids!
Hmm, your sums seem to be a little out. 1000 amps at 12 volts is 12,000W = about 10-11000W at 120Volts (with the help of an inverter and its losses)
... plus 500W of heat to dissipate.
: ,a fairly decent room Airconditioner (2000W)
Besides, to help with the resistive losses, you'd probably go for 24V alternators. Common pulley driven ones are good for 100A.. you can get gear-driven oil cooled ones that do 200A no sweat.
So, 200A X 24V = 4800W. If your inverter is efficient enough (say, 90%) you've got 4300W
To put that in perspective is enough power to simultaneously run
A fridge (300w)
A chest freezer (300w)
Moderate size TV + Stereo (400-600W)
A buncha lights (eg 5x30W fluro's)
For the hell of it
Your leet PC + accessories. ( less then 600W... if you don't have a laser printer)
With all that, you'll have enough left over to occasionally put the (electric) kettle on (1200w) for a cuppa.
And that's *one* 24V 200A alternator.
Who knows? Probably not. I vaguely remember a Choice magazine article on them showing no statistically provable difference. Wait, maybe that was the EMP type ones.
Some of those ads are a bit worrying - "Drive pests away by creating a unbearable ultrasonic field plus an annoying EMP in your house wiring!"
I think that having anything in your house that causes discomfort to animals that are *still* genetically fairly close to humans is probably a bad thing. Doubly so for the EMP ones. After all, a lot of human trials start out on the humble lab rat.
I wouldn't be convinced until there was a long term and scientifically rigorous study on continuous exposure to humans (oh, and the pests you're trying to drive off too!).
Far out man, pass the intel musical bong.
I knew those guys were on something.
How hard would it have been to do a slow roll before leaving the ISS, have those guys take some shots of the belly of Columbia, then have some of the guys at Houston do a visual check of the thermal shiedling
Er, they didn't go to the ISS, they were in a completely different orbit. But still , you'd think *someone* coulda suited up and had a look.
Even if they couldn't repair it, they could have then had a chance to say goodbye to their family before trying a (now known to be suicidal) reentry.
Your analogy is still a little flawed.
: ,better back everything up here before I toast it and start again" In the process of backing up, I notice that your 40GB drive is nearly full, but "C:\My Documents" only has 5MB of documents in it. ... hmmm just office (and office is not *yet* 35GB). Where the hell is all this space going? I'd better find it, because If I blow away your 38GB of thesis data , you're going to be pissed.
To try and fix your car analogy it's like getting your mechanics to swap your car with another, and while transferring your personal effects, they find a whole bunch of loose paper in the back of the car with child porn on it.
Computer repair people often *need* to see everything.
I'll give you a real-world example
Your PC stops working. I find that windows 98 is scrambled. I say, "Hmm
I check "C:\program files"
So, now I'm poking around your PC going "Where the hell does this guy store all his data?"
So eventually I find your data, in C:\windows\options\cabs\Porn. While copying the files to a safe place, I see lots of "lolita" type filenames. What to do? If I've copied it to a spare drive of mine, whilst I erase and fix yours, *I've* got child porn on *my* drive now.
What If there's a raid just after I finish reformatting your drive? "Honest Officer, It's *my* drive, but it's that guys data" is a hard one to pull off.
Good too see! Pass your info onto the wine dev team, they've being trying to get explorer running well in wine for about 3 years now.
;-)
Of course, you could be just talking shit.
(Looking forward to your patches though
Apart from the usual software armor that gets put in place, how about something like another (smallish) boot partition that holds a compressed image of the filesystem as originally installed? When you boot to that partition, all it does is dd (via bzip) a copy to your other partition and reboot. Use a bootloader menu of "Re-Install System" or something, and a few dire warnings and a password before it begins of course..
Then you could have a complete re-install in about 20 minutes or so.
Or maybe just whack something like that on a cd, as long as your PC's are reasonably consistent hardware wise.
Sigh. Let me put it to you this way:
The average person knows what a "First World " country is (technologically speaking). Reliable food and water supplies, good standard of living , low mortality rate.
The average person also knows what a "Third World" country is. Unreliable (or non-existant) food and water supplies, crap standard of living, high mortality.
What I was attempting to imply by my use of "Second World" was a country with technological expertise in between the two.
Yes I am aware of the "offical" (anal) meaning of the terms, but I thought I'd do my bit to tweak the vocabulary a little bit. Especially seeing that, as you pointed out, there *is* no Second world left anymore, we may as well use the terms for something else.
And I think the proper "Second world" standards of living were (by most accounts) still pretty poor for the day.
father: no my son, but we will get to search the internet for information on food and food-like products.
I know you were just being glib, but let me amend that for you:
"but we will get to search the internet for ways to stop our crops from dying off, so we can eat tomorrow."
Of course, you could put in other lifestyle improving search terms, like say, how to build a sewage treatment plant so your village doesn't dump raw turds in the river that you drink from, or using all that pig/chicken/cow shit around the place to make enough methane for a small generating plant. Or even how to construct a nice cheap house that'll hold up to cyclonic winds and monsoon rain.
Living in a modern country, and going to a even a second-world country (never mind a third world one) is a real eye-opener - things that I've said:
(This is when I was staying in a town of about 300,000. Picture a small idyllic fishing village, then cram 25,000 people and cars into it)
"What're all those tanks on the roof for?"
"Oh, the tap water's just bore water - it's not really fit to drink. We get the drinking water trucked in."
"Damn! What's that stink?"
"Dead cow in the open drain outside the window there, see?"
"How long will the power be off for?"
"Oh , two or three hours... it normally comes back on around 10."
"Howdy'a get a line out here? I need to ring home"
"I'll book you a call, the guys at the exchange will ring us back when it's hooked up. There's only 15 lines out of town."