Few years back a 20GB drive I salvaged from an old dead Thinkpad stopped working. No whirring sound, nothing...the green light on the USB enclosure stayed on.
There was no important data, but I thought "this is the chance to learn how to salvage a hard drive".
I did the freezer option. I had already used the freezer to kill ants in sugar and bugs in rice. Froze the drive overnight, took it out and immediately connected and waited for whirring sound. No sound. The drive is dead.
Gave the drive couple of almighty whacks. Still no sound. No life at all.
I threw it in the dust bin.
The next day I tried to connect a camera. The SD card on the camera failed to be identified on Windoze and Linux.
I tried another USB cable. And the camera connected fine.
It took me a few seconds to remember the old hard drive. Took it out of the trash, wiped it clean and connected.
The drive works perfectly fine even today. But it still got the smell of decomposed tea leaves.
India is a land of anachronisms and the government and courts are in the 20th century or before.
For example: I have a huge problem in mailing a DVD / CD to a non-Indian address. The post office (like Indian Railways, India Post is very good - I came to this conclusion after using postal systems in US, Canada, UK, Japan and China) refuses to accept a DVD / CD even if detailed declarations are given. I have asked the relevant authorities "show me where it says a DVD cannot be mailed" and they fail!
But such rules are not uniform across the country and we can use the "don't ask don't tell" policy - lie to the post office clerk the shipment is is only documents and they have no problem in accepting. They forget the simple fact that in this century anyone can upload or download any sensitive data rather than mailing a DVD.
Indian courts are an equal mix of liberal and conservative.
Liberal as far as social attitudes are concerned. For example: the recent ruling by Delhi High Court decriminalizing LGBT relations which was actually a Victorian era rule imposed by British modeled on the super conservative Christian attitudes. And who are the British now...innocent nature documentary hosts!!!
Conservative as far as big business is concerned...frequently we have rulings which favor big business over environment and social issues. Environmental issues are also waylaid by well intentioned good Samaritans like Greenpeace India when they target issues like "diesel fuel use in cell phone tower generators" - as if this country has no other pressing issue.
Indian courts do not understand Internet. What they understand is the narrow perspective as explained by misguided (and evil) anti piracy advocates of Indian cinema and media industry - the Indian versions of MPAA and RIAA.
What Indian needs is a home grown EFF - Electronic Frontier Foundation with proper funding and committed personnel. Else the situation will get worse.
The entire flagship HTC One line has similar problems.
I bought one of the very first HTC One V's in our market three months back - in fact my first Android phone/ smart phone as I was waiting for the technology to become a bit mature and the software / hardware to be polished.
I have ABSOLUTELY NO problems with WiFi. There is a "death grip" issue for HTC One X, but that is not a "chip set" or software / hardware / device driver issue.
And I have been following xda forums and HTC One forums and I cannot find any serious issue with WiFi being discussed. So you are seriously misinformed - at least about HTC One Series.
I feel bad for people there who have to pay bribes to buy a train ticket (which is everyone), and I feel worse when they come here and think they have to do the same.
There are a lot of issues with India, but buying train tickets is not one of them.
Indian Railway runs irctc.co.in - the portal for buying tickets. It is as good or bad as any system anywhere in the world. I have been using the portal for buying tickets for the last 12 years, as recently as May 22, 2012. I do not know how or where one has to pay a bribe.
If you do not have online access/credit/debit cards, you can go to a booking center and book a ticket. There are touts or middlemen who will book your ticket for a fee if you do not want to stand in the queue, but thats not corruption.
Please verify before you make blanket statements. If you met Indians from India who paid a bribe in buying a train ticket, I sympathize with them. They have been taken for a ride...apparently not a train ride.
AGNI means fire in many Indian languages. The word also refers to the god of fire "Agni". Slashdot description "Named after Hindu God of fire Agni" - is misleading and insinuates some type of religious weaponry. It is like saying Saree is a Hindu dress...Saree is an Indian dress.
Hinduism is more of a way of life than a religion. And India has the largest number of Muslims after Indonesia. The 2% of Christians will be more than 20 million - much more than many European nations. This plurality one should not forget.
In fact the chief scientist of AGNI mission - Tessy Thomas - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessy_Thomas - is from my state Kerala. She is a Christian and she named her son Tejas - a Hindu name. I am a Christian, but my name is Hindu.
Try to understand the complexity...generalizing a complex country is the basic mistake Western journalists make about India.
Many commentators will mention tape drives for high volume/capacity data storage. My experience tells me not to trust tapes or tape drives.
Unless you have humidity controlled and air conditioned storage facility tapes are a bad idea. Still tapes fail. Specifications change. LTO 4 becomes LTO 5 and so on. They are notoriously prone to slightest jerks or shocks.
The best, cheapest option I found is the RAID 2 external SATA hard drives of 2TB from Western Digital. Keep two of these units...you have 4 hard drives with your data. That's how I store DPX files (each file is around 9MB, 24 files per second) from my feature film projects.
I go through multiple editions of Google News every morning. It has replaced newspapers to a large extent.
Google News always defaults to "Personalized Settings" especially if you are logged into a Google account. And this type of "Personification" is counter productive and not needed. None of us wants an algorithm to determine what news we should see. We do not need this type of "filtering". The counter argument would be Google filters only subject headings - "Business", "Sports" and so on, not the actual news articles. But I doubt.
The solution is to use a browser which has no Google account information / cookies logged in. Its still a pain.
Wikileaks should win the Nobel. It will make the prize more relevant to our times.
If there is an online campaign/voting to select the Nobel peace prize then Wikileaks got a great chance.
But Wikileaks is not going to win.
Like Maradona winning the most number of votes for the player of the century and FIFA selecting Pele as a safer choice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA_Player_of_the_Century
A simpler explanation for Paul Haggis out of the closet...it seems Paul Haggis used Scientology and the connections they provide to advance his career in Hollywood all these years. Looks like he does not need the group anymore. Now he is 'Paul Haggis'!!!
I am from India. I have to differ from your world view. I travel between India, US and a bit of China. The idea of Americans as lazy, self-entitled, undereducated, science-illiterate is lazy generalization. The same can be said of any community.
The idea of America still remains. This country still attracts the best of the talent across the world (even if getting a visa is a pain in the back for anyone out of G7.) This is the only country where you become an 'American' the moment you are in the political borders. And the political system more or less works (compared to the rest of the world.)
What can cause a decline to US is the assault on the American middle class...I hope the plutocrats are not so stupid as to kill the golden goose.
You can bring up your child in China or India or anywhere else. Nothing wrong with that. Your child should be fine if you give him/her the right values. But I can see you made sure your child is an American citizen.
USPS is a world class organization. Nonsensical privatization or selling off, or unnecessary opening up will kill one of the best institutions of USA.
I have used Postal Services in USA, Japan, Canada, India, UK and many other countries. The level of service and professionalism of USPS is world class.
SMS is completely dead to me, all my friends with twitter I can tweet in seconds, it's a fucking incredibly powerful and clever communications tool, once you learn it, you'll love it.
SMS might be dead to you. And I am guessing you are in USA where a text message will cost anywhere between 5 to 20 cents. But for a majority of the world which is not you, SMS is THE form of communication other than a voice call. I pay less than one cent per SMS. And I sent SMS to any cell phone, whether it is a smart phone or not.
Twitter has its use. SMS has its place.
You remind me of someone who claimed cinema will be dead when television was introduced.
I think Wikileaks should get Nobel Peace Prize.
But...we need to separate Wikileaks from Assange. The messenger is not more important than the message.
No one is going to prison for being good or evil or inhumane or anarchist or conservative or liberal...but for the mistakes they did. Or for the mistakes which were leaked.
And Assange was stupid. He should have controlled his Wiki.
Wikileaks should disown Assange and find a new messenger. If not, I do not see any hope for Wikileaks.
I use a Sony Ebook reader for many years. I will gladly buy a new one if it can run Android/TABLET features. E-ink displays are more comfortable than any backlit display.
Meanwhile waiting for a DUAL SIM Android phone...
India is on a slippery slope to authoritarianism...there is a call for a strong state from many influential sections. They want a 'world-standard anti-terrorism plan'. But everyone forgets a world standard anti terrorism plan is putting band aid on a wound and not asking how the wound happened.
...after a few years of testing out many items. For easy traveling, your items should be flat and thin.
1. Thinkpad X series (had to wait 3 years for the price to drop around USD1200 after rebate/coupon), a bag where you can fit the laptop on its side (easy to carry around) and a PCMCIA modem card (many Asian countries you will get net access through cellphone service providers)
2. Canon TX1
3. Any quad band cellphone with an FM receiver and a bit of memory for storing any music
4. A small LED torch
5. Earplugs
6. flat/thin LED book light, a flat Swiss army card etc.
All the above will fit in a thin laptop bag (Wilson has nice leather laptop bags - and they look like normal bags) and will not weigh more than 3.5 to 4 pounds.
They don't know how or why their bible was put together the way it was, or their quran, or whatever 'sacred' book they happen to believe in.
Overtly simplifying the content to make it palatable is a problem cultures and societies face at different periods of growth. Creationism and Intelligent Design gives a story which you can digest or even get entertained - but its always a "story".
VEDAS and UPANISHADS had the same problem and historians refer to the period such dilution happened as the dark ages of Indian Philosophy. For example: ASWAMEDHA - a ritual involving an untied horse and capturing the land the horse runs into is a simplification of the original concept. If you read RIGVEDA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda) you can deduce that the "horse" in ASWAMEDHA is not the animal, but a symbolic representation of "light and knowledge".
These are cyclical - the destroyers of Intelligent Design and Creationism will come from within and it will take time.
We are seeing now the effects of years of effort by the forces of corruption. The people who are supposed to be leading our country are ignorant and mentally weak, and don't even hire smart people.
Every country gets (or elects) the government they deserve.
Isn't a director's responsibility to convey exactly what he (she) wants to say?
In a "studio project" with million dollar budgets, the only objective is revenue recovery. What the "Director wants to say" does not matter. But look at any acclaimed non-mainstream film - much lesser budgets and more chances for the "project" to become a film, not a movie.
Isn't movie-making mostly about suspending belief?
For movies, yes. For films, no. The best fiction is always real.
Isn't this all make believe (not including documentaries, etc.)?
Slashdot Mirror
Few years back a 20GB drive I salvaged from an old dead Thinkpad stopped working. No whirring sound, nothing...the green light on the USB enclosure stayed on.
There was no important data, but I thought "this is the chance to learn how to salvage a hard drive".
I did the freezer option. I had already used the freezer to kill ants in sugar and bugs in rice. Froze the drive overnight, took it out and immediately connected and waited for whirring sound. No sound. The drive is dead.
Gave the drive couple of almighty whacks. Still no sound. No life at all.
I threw it in the dust bin.
The next day I tried to connect a camera. The SD card on the camera failed to be identified on Windoze and Linux.
I tried another USB cable. And the camera connected fine.
It took me a few seconds to remember the old hard drive. Took it out of the trash, wiped it clean and connected.
The drive works perfectly fine even today. But it still got the smell of decomposed tea leaves.
If this post is not an advertisement for an upcoming film, I do not know what else it is!!!
Most of the slashvertisements are posted by Soulskill...is it a real person or some algorithm running on a Windows ME PC?
Utter nonsense.
Switzerland is a tiny country. You can compare Switzerland to Maryland, not the whole of US.
If a healthy immune system developed through exposure of playing in dirt is the key for a bright future, then Indian kids are going to rule the world.
Anyways, I welcome all our future dirty overlords!!!
India is a land of anachronisms and the government and courts are in the 20th century or before.
For example: I have a huge problem in mailing a DVD / CD to a non-Indian address. The post office (like Indian Railways, India Post is very good - I came to this conclusion after using postal systems in US, Canada, UK, Japan and China) refuses to accept a DVD / CD even if detailed declarations are given. I have asked the relevant authorities "show me where it says a DVD cannot be mailed" and they fail!
But such rules are not uniform across the country and we can use the "don't ask don't tell" policy - lie to the post office clerk the shipment is is only documents and they have no problem in accepting. They forget the simple fact that in this century anyone can upload or download any sensitive data rather than mailing a DVD.
Indian courts are an equal mix of liberal and conservative.
Liberal as far as social attitudes are concerned. For example: the recent ruling by Delhi High Court decriminalizing LGBT relations which was actually a Victorian era rule imposed by British modeled on the super conservative Christian attitudes. And who are the British now...innocent nature documentary hosts!!!
Conservative as far as big business is concerned...frequently we have rulings which favor big business over environment and social issues. Environmental issues are also waylaid by well intentioned good Samaritans like Greenpeace India when they target issues like "diesel fuel use in cell phone tower generators" - as if this country has no other pressing issue.
Indian courts do not understand Internet. What they understand is the narrow perspective as explained by misguided (and evil) anti piracy advocates of Indian cinema and media industry - the Indian versions of MPAA and RIAA.
What Indian needs is a home grown EFF - Electronic Frontier Foundation with proper funding and committed personnel. Else the situation will get worse.
The entire flagship HTC One line has similar problems.
I bought one of the very first HTC One V's in our market three months back - in fact my first Android phone/ smart phone as I was waiting for the technology to become a bit mature and the software / hardware to be polished.
I have ABSOLUTELY NO problems with WiFi. There is a "death grip" issue for HTC One X, but that is not a "chip set" or software / hardware / device driver issue.
And I have been following xda forums and HTC One forums and I cannot find any serious issue with WiFi being discussed. So you are seriously misinformed - at least about HTC One Series.
HTC One V is also a very good phone.
I feel bad for people there who have to pay bribes to buy a train ticket (which is everyone), and I feel worse when they come here and think they have to do the same .
There are a lot of issues with India, but buying train tickets is not one of them.
Indian Railway runs irctc.co.in - the portal for buying tickets. It is as good or bad as any system anywhere in the world. I have been using the portal for buying tickets for the last 12 years, as recently as May 22, 2012. I do not know how or where one has to pay a bribe.
If you do not have online access/credit/debit cards, you can go to a booking center and book a ticket. There are touts or middlemen who will book your ticket for a fee if you do not want to stand in the queue, but thats not corruption.
Please verify before you make blanket statements. If you met Indians from India who paid a bribe in buying a train ticket, I sympathize with them. They have been taken for a ride...apparently not a train ride.
AGNI means fire in many Indian languages. The word also refers to the god of fire "Agni". Slashdot description "Named after Hindu God of fire Agni" - is misleading and insinuates some type of religious weaponry. It is like saying Saree is a Hindu dress...Saree is an Indian dress.
Hinduism is more of a way of life than a religion. And India has the largest number of Muslims after Indonesia. The 2% of Christians will be more than 20 million - much more than many European nations. This plurality one should not forget.
In fact the chief scientist of AGNI mission - Tessy Thomas - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessy_Thomas - is from my state Kerala. She is a Christian and she named her son Tejas - a Hindu name. I am a Christian, but my name is Hindu.
Try to understand the complexity...generalizing a complex country is the basic mistake Western journalists make about India.
Many commentators will mention tape drives for high volume/capacity data storage. My experience tells me not to trust tapes or tape drives.
Unless you have humidity controlled and air conditioned storage facility tapes are a bad idea. Still tapes fail. Specifications change. LTO 4 becomes LTO 5 and so on. They are notoriously prone to slightest jerks or shocks.
The best, cheapest option I found is the RAID 2 external SATA hard drives of 2TB from Western Digital. Keep two of these units...you have 4 hard drives with your data. That's how I store DPX files (each file is around 9MB, 24 files per second) from my feature film projects.
I go through multiple editions of Google News every morning. It has replaced newspapers to a large extent.
Google News always defaults to "Personalized Settings" especially if you are logged into a Google account. And this type of "Personification" is counter productive and not needed. None of us wants an algorithm to determine what news we should see. We do not need this type of "filtering". The counter argument would be Google filters only subject headings - "Business", "Sports" and so on, not the actual news articles. But I doubt.
The solution is to use a browser which has no Google account information / cookies logged in. Its still a pain.
Wikileaks should win the Nobel. It will make the prize more relevant to our times.
If there is an online campaign/voting to select the Nobel peace prize then Wikileaks got a great chance.
But Wikileaks is not going to win.
Like Maradona winning the most number of votes for the player of the century and FIFA selecting Pele as a safer choice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA_Player_of_the_Century
A simpler explanation for Paul Haggis out of the closet...it seems Paul Haggis used Scientology and the connections they provide to advance his career in Hollywood all these years. Looks like he does not need the group anymore. Now he is 'Paul Haggis'!!!
I am from India. I have to differ from your world view. I travel between India, US and a bit of China. The idea of Americans as lazy, self-entitled, undereducated, science-illiterate is lazy generalization. The same can be said of any community.
The idea of America still remains. This country still attracts the best of the talent across the world (even if getting a visa is a pain in the back for anyone out of G7.) This is the only country where you become an 'American' the moment you are in the political borders. And the political system more or less works (compared to the rest of the world.)
What can cause a decline to US is the assault on the American middle class...I hope the plutocrats are not so stupid as to kill the golden goose.
You can bring up your child in China or India or anywhere else. Nothing wrong with that. Your child should be fine if you give him/her the right values. But I can see you made sure your child is an American citizen.
USPS is a world class organization. Nonsensical privatization or selling off, or unnecessary opening up will kill one of the best institutions of USA. I have used Postal Services in USA, Japan, Canada, India, UK and many other countries. The level of service and professionalism of USPS is world class.
SMS is completely dead to me, all my friends with twitter I can tweet in seconds, it's a fucking incredibly powerful and clever communications tool, once you learn it, you'll love it.
SMS might be dead to you. And I am guessing you are in USA where a text message will cost anywhere between 5 to 20 cents. But for a majority of the world which is not you, SMS is THE form of communication other than a voice call. I pay less than one cent per SMS. And I sent SMS to any cell phone, whether it is a smart phone or not.
Twitter has its use. SMS has its place.
You remind me of someone who claimed cinema will be dead when television was introduced.
This was the jackass Gore took as the VP candidate! Good that Gore lost...what a colossal error of judgement!!
I think Wikileaks should get Nobel Peace Prize.
But...we need to separate Wikileaks from Assange. The messenger is not more important than the message.
No one is going to prison for being good or evil or inhumane or anarchist or conservative or liberal...but for the mistakes they did. Or for the mistakes which were leaked.
And Assange was stupid. He should have controlled his Wiki.
Wikileaks should disown Assange and find a new messenger. If not, I do not see any hope for Wikileaks.
I use a Sony Ebook reader for many years. I will gladly buy a new one if it can run Android/TABLET features. E-ink displays are more comfortable than any backlit display. Meanwhile waiting for a DUAL SIM Android phone...
Wikileaks should get Nobel Prize for Peace.
Nobel prize winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore quipped..."whatever you think of India is true, and its opposite."
Here is an interesting take from a Bombayite.
India is on a slippery slope to authoritarianism...there is a call for a strong state from many influential sections. They want a 'world-standard anti-terrorism plan'. But everyone forgets a world standard anti terrorism plan is putting band aid on a wound and not asking how the wound happened.
Many of us does not remember the last time we had an emergency - decalared by Indira Gandhi and what it meant for civil liberties or even the idea of a democracy.
Making it hard to get a Cell Phone is another band aid. Its not going to work.
Me curious on rural India reacting to the massacre in Bombay...will national security overwhelm other genuine and pressing concerns?
Ravindranath Tagore remarked - "whatever you think of India is true, and its opposite". So lets wait and watch.
...after a few years of testing out many items. For easy traveling, your items should be flat and thin. 1. Thinkpad X series (had to wait 3 years for the price to drop around USD1200 after rebate/coupon), a bag where you can fit the laptop on its side (easy to carry around) and a PCMCIA modem card (many Asian countries you will get net access through cellphone service providers) 2. Canon TX1 3. Any quad band cellphone with an FM receiver and a bit of memory for storing any music 4. A small LED torch 5. Earplugs 6. flat/thin LED book light, a flat Swiss army card etc. All the above will fit in a thin laptop bag (Wilson has nice leather laptop bags - and they look like normal bags) and will not weigh more than 3.5 to 4 pounds.
They don't know how or why their bible was put together the way it was, or their quran, or whatever 'sacred' book they happen to believe in.
Overtly simplifying the content to make it palatable is a problem cultures and societies face at different periods of growth. Creationism and Intelligent Design gives a story which you can digest or even get entertained - but its always a "story".
VEDAS and UPANISHADS had the same problem and historians refer to the period such dilution happened as the dark ages of Indian Philosophy. For example: ASWAMEDHA - a ritual involving an untied horse and capturing the land the horse runs into is a simplification of the original concept. If you read RIGVEDA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda) you can deduce that the "horse" in ASWAMEDHA is not the animal, but a symbolic representation of "light and knowledge".
These are cyclical - the destroyers of Intelligent Design and Creationism will come from within and it will take time.
We are seeing now the effects of years of effort by the forces of corruption. The people who are supposed to be leading our country are ignorant and mentally weak, and don't even hire smart people.
Every country gets (or elects) the government they deserve.
Isn't a director's responsibility to convey exactly what he (she) wants to say?
In a "studio project" with million dollar budgets, the only objective is revenue recovery. What the "Director wants to say" does not matter. But look at any acclaimed non-mainstream film - much lesser budgets and more chances for the "project" to become a film, not a movie.
Isn't movie-making mostly about suspending belief?
For movies, yes. For films, no. The best fiction is always real.
Isn't this all make believe (not including documentaries, etc.)?
Yes.
It is Gandhi, not Ghandi. Mahatma Gandhi on Wikipedia
Gandhi was asked - 'what do you think of western civilization?'
His reply - 'its a good idea'.