The breather hole description was a bit misleading I apologize. Frankly, the drives I tried had no real breather holes to speak of. The first was a quantum fireball that had a foam rubber type gasket around the lid. It became apparent quickly that oil was seeping through and it died within the day.
The next was a Maxtor white label that seemed to have a resin seal around the cap and no breather opening to be found elsewhere. I even pulled the controller board off to make sure it wasn't hidden under there. That's the one that lasted a month. Turns out it had an air channel under a brushed aluminum looking decal that blended perfectly with the body of the drive. The oil ate the adhesive and it allowed the oil in there.
My last attempt was when I first commissioned the pugetsystems type fish tank rig. I took my seagate 300GB drives, pulled the boards off and traced with superglue around the edges of all the sealer decals on the body - there were something like 8 to 12 on each drive. You'll usually see something similar on the side of drives next to the platter, probably used for calibration of the heads after assembly. They were under the board as well. Those made it a day or 2.
If I try it again, I'm going to put epoxy over all of them and around the cap to be safe. It's not really a question of letting it breathe, it's keeping that damned oil out;)
I can't say I'm certain there are no critical silicone components, but I can say with fair certainty there are critical rubber and plastic ones. Of course, for all I know the plugs in the electrolytic caps *are* silicone rubber.
I'm sure a manufacturer will start a line of boards specifically for mineral oil submersion, with epoxy over the rubber end of caps and such.
I thought about this a little more and I think I should put this into perspective a little bit.
The first machine I submerged was done in a plastic tub and covered with 5 gallons of Tractor Oil (no, really) that I bought at the wal-mart for $20. It smelled, it was fairly viscous and it definitely leeched plasticizers and crawled up the interior of cables. I ended up with a small puddle of oil under my optical mouse. Wireless worked okay through it though. I tried submerging hard drives after covering the breather holes - I figured if I was keeping them in a fairly narrow temp range they shouldn't need to equalize. Unfortunately none were sealed sufficiently and all eventually died, though one did make it a month before it flooded.
The next machine was a recreation of the Puget Systems submerged machine. I went with light mineral oil from the local feed and tack store but was seriously considering silicon oil in it's place. Light mineral oil was going for about $17 a gallon, was less viscous than the first oil I used, didn't stink and hasn't effected the components as quickly. I can't find it now but I recall silicon oil being somewhere around $100 a gallon. If I had the money to spare I would have gone that route. Looking online the best price I can find for appropriate Fluorinert is around $1,000 a gallon.
So for 5 gallons of submerged cooling you're looking at $20-$5,000. When you consider the effect it'll have on components, it's probably worth it to use the $500 fill of silicon oil over the $100 fill of mineral oil.
It is important to keep in mind that light mineral oil like that, while not as bad as other choices, will leech plasticizers out of insulators. The power supply wiring on my machine very quickly became stiff and brittle and it dissolved the soft rubber that was holding the fan assembly to the processor's heat sink. Not sure if it will have any long term effect on the plugs of the electrolytic caps on the board but I wouldn't be surprised.
If you can afford to split the difference between mineral oil and florinert (perfluorocarbon), you might consider a low viscosity silicon oil. That should bu much nicer to natural rubber compounds and plastic insulators.
From my experience with submersion cooling in mineral oil, if your connectors are submerged they will wick oil up the interior through capillary action. If you build a system similar to that made by Puget Systems it probably won't be a problem, provided you leave some head space at the top of the case. When I built a system similar to theirs I made a short socket extension for the power cord so it didn't have to go under the fluid. everything else was able to stay above the surface of the oil.
If you submerge your video cards and intend to use the fans as impellers, make sure they can start turning against the resistance of the fluid. All my fans worked when submerged except the video cards.
The fact that people will pay $30 to have this crap removed should be telling you something.
It tells them that, unless they're making less than $30 from software vendors to put that stuff on the machines, it's gonna stay around. And if they are making less than that, they can mark up a "Clean" version by $29.99 and call it a day.
Everyone within about 500 feet of the DSLAM can have a 24MBit connection... on ADSL2+ or VDSL... and that's provided there is enough bandwidth to support that usage from everyone. Don't delude yourself into thinking that the telcos can't and don't oversell the bandwidth behind the DSLAM.
Sure, when cable Co's stared offering high-speed internet the bandwidth available to neighborhoods may have been limited enough to cause issues, but they've been ramping up for years. Especially in areas that aren't run by jackasses like Comcast.
It got stupid for me when I saw a tag that warned about a normal indoor mains voltage extension cord containing chemicals known to cause cancer and recommended washing your hands after handling it.
I can attest to that having worked tech support lines.
I've also helped my friend's father troubleshoot a non-working USB device that had been slid onto the pins in his DB9 serial port. Had a surprisingly similar feel to inserting it in an actual USB port.
Project Orion would get around this problem by using thousands of little charges, detonated close to the reflector - and it would still take years to accelerate.
An Orion style propulsion system is capable of getting a craft from earth to Pluto and back inside a year. If we're talking about speeding up, slowing down and then repeating after turning around, we're only talking about a few months to accelerate 100+ tons of spacecraft to it's cruising speed. Now I'm sure the math is different when dealing with a planet-killer sized asteroid, but the normal orion system is not accelerating for years.
It bears mentioning that we don't need to stop or reverse a planet-killer sized mass, just push it off course for direct impact. Depending on how far out you're able to intercept it, you can get away with a very small push.
And there is something to be said for blowing one into small pieces. Even if it's hitting us with the same total energy, having it dissipate in the atmosphere as those small pieces vaporize seems preferable to having several hundred or thousand tons of mass vaporize seawater or throw up a nuclear winter style plume of dust on impact with the surface.
if you don't like the terms of the game, don't buy it. Nobody forces you to buy video games.
That's certainly a reasonable stance, but what about people like me who agreed to the terms of sale for a game and got a product that simply wouldn't work because of their copy protection?
When Half-Life 2 came out, I went and bought a brick and mortar DVD copy for the guide and t-shirt. The DVD had safedisc copy protection that had some incompatability with my DVD drive. Launching HL2.exe, it would show up in task manager, ramp up its memory usage and then silently close.
I spent days going through chat, email and phone support with vivendi, even going so far as to go back to fry's electronics and exchange my DVD for a new one. Still no luck.
For me it wasn't a question of cracking the game to make it do something I wanted it to do, it was cracking it to make it do the single thing I bought it to do. I wasn't the only one. They pushed a disc check removal patch down through steam soon after that.
Excellent point, I'll keep that in mind for the next time this rears it's head.
So few people realize that increasing transistor count without decreasing their size is going to drive up the costs through raw materials while decreasing size alone will drive it up through lower yields and more costly manufacturing processes.
The apparently exponential increase in clock speed we've seen has been more an after effect allowed by the smaller interconnect distances and lower switching voltages that are required at these ever increasing densities. It's easy to see how most people, who have been marketed their chips based on clock speed, get the impression that this trend was confined to that measure alone.
I'd be very interested to see some of the other factors examined against cost and density like clock speed, heat output, and operational throughput.
all Moore's Law was ever about was the number of components in an IC. Not speed, not cost, not even size.
Moore's "law" was actually a measure of size and cost, not necessarily the number of components.
The initial write-up had time separated plots of cost against component density. Each was roughly parabolic, and the low point of each, which represented the lowest cost transistor density, roughly doubled over each 18-24 months.
A my room mate actually has an Intel t-shirt with a picture of that plot on the front.
It shouldn't be too hard to defeat this without resorting to a tinfoil hat.
With radio and audio/pressure waves being used, you can effectively cancel out either or both to mitigate the effects, though I would imagine that locally blocking the incident RF near your body would probably be easier.
Small radio transceiver on your body, preferably near your head, picks up the RF they use to create the pressure waves and transmits a smiliar signal 180deg out of phase.
When you abbreviate all the words in a phrase to their first letters and combine them into something that isn't a word, I think the term for it is 'initialism'
I run a web server, mailserver, and numerous other hobby services here, so I had the "business grade DSL", which is 936/1536. (divide kbps by 9 for a good guestimate in kb/sec, so 100 up, 170 down) DSL always provides me with that speed, it never fluctuates so I get every penny I pay for. I also pay a bit extra for a block of 8 (5 usable) static IP addresses which my services require.
By comparison, the cable offers many more tiers of service, and I opted for again the "business class" service. This I was told was 2k/20k. When he brought the modem I ran a speed test. The installer scoffed at those numbers (about 1.7/15k) and told me "You never really get 2/20, that's the theoretical maximum, just like DSL" at which point I had to show him what DSL really gives you.
Working in DSL and having cable at home, my situation is reversed.
I have a 12mbit cable connection that sustains 13+mbit from servers that can handle it, even during peak hours.
There's really no special difference between DSL and cable these days. Sure it was (and still is in some markets) common for cable providers to oversell the bandwidth available in a given area. But there is nothing to prevent a DSL provider from doing the same.
The conditions of the line at your home would make the biggest difference as to weather you'll get the peak bandwidth advertised for your DSL all the time. If you have good enough signal to sustain 1.5mbit all the time you're fine, but that won't necessarily stop the phone company from selling the same package to someone further down the loop where they can't get that rate.
So really, there is no guaranteed bandwidth, be it DSL or cable. The management policies of the providers involved and the quality of last mile connection will make much more difference than the tech being used.
Hotbrick makes a very good load-balancing soho router. They're a bit pricey but they seem to work quite well for exactly what you're describing. Take a look on ebay for their LB series.
I do have to second the suggestion of using Cable+DSL rather than DSL+DSL. Most places where there are multiple DSL providers, they're both operating from the same physical infrastructure with one reselling the service of the other. It's certainly better than one by itself, though.
I coworker of mine went to college in Missouri, and during his time there he witnessed a professor attempt to organize a student rally against a new reactor that was to be built in another city.
While watching them go back and forth about it, he quietly interjected with something along the lines of "Why drive that far to protest when there's a reactor on campus?"
It took a few minutes, but he eventually convinced the professor that there was in fact a reactor on campus and housed in a building near the football field, weather he believed it or not.
The clincher, the name of the schools football field? "Reactor Field"
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The breather hole description was a bit misleading I apologize. Frankly, the drives I tried had no real breather holes to speak of. The first was a quantum fireball that had a foam rubber type gasket around the lid. It became apparent quickly that oil was seeping through and it died within the day.
The next was a Maxtor white label that seemed to have a resin seal around the cap and no breather opening to be found elsewhere. I even pulled the controller board off to make sure it wasn't hidden under there. That's the one that lasted a month. Turns out it had an air channel under a brushed aluminum looking decal that blended perfectly with the body of the drive. The oil ate the adhesive and it allowed the oil in there.
My last attempt was when I first commissioned the pugetsystems type fish tank rig. I took my seagate 300GB drives, pulled the boards off and traced with superglue around the edges of all the sealer decals on the body - there were something like 8 to 12 on each drive. You'll usually see something similar on the side of drives next to the platter, probably used for calibration of the heads after assembly. They were under the board as well. Those made it a day or 2.
If I try it again, I'm going to put epoxy over all of them and around the cap to be safe. It's not really a question of letting it breathe, it's keeping that damned oil out ;)
I can't say I'm certain there are no critical silicone components, but I can say with fair certainty there are critical rubber and plastic ones. Of course, for all I know the plugs in the electrolytic caps *are* silicone rubber.
I'm sure a manufacturer will start a line of boards specifically for mineral oil submersion, with epoxy over the rubber end of caps and such.
I thought about this a little more and I think I should put this into perspective a little bit.
The first machine I submerged was done in a plastic tub and covered with 5 gallons of Tractor Oil (no, really) that I bought at the wal-mart for $20. It smelled, it was fairly viscous and it definitely leeched plasticizers and crawled up the interior of cables. I ended up with a small puddle of oil under my optical mouse. Wireless worked okay through it though. I tried submerging hard drives after covering the breather holes - I figured if I was keeping them in a fairly narrow temp range they shouldn't need to equalize. Unfortunately none were sealed sufficiently and all eventually died, though one did make it a month before it flooded.
The next machine was a recreation of the Puget Systems submerged machine. I went with light mineral oil from the local feed and tack store but was seriously considering silicon oil in it's place. Light mineral oil was going for about $17 a gallon, was less viscous than the first oil I used, didn't stink and hasn't effected the components as quickly. I can't find it now but I recall silicon oil being somewhere around $100 a gallon. If I had the money to spare I would have gone that route. Looking online the best price I can find for appropriate Fluorinert is around $1,000 a gallon.
So for 5 gallons of submerged cooling you're looking at $20-$5,000. When you consider the effect it'll have on components, it's probably worth it to use the $500 fill of silicon oil over the $100 fill of mineral oil.
It is important to keep in mind that light mineral oil like that, while not as bad as other choices, will leech plasticizers out of insulators. The power supply wiring on my machine very quickly became stiff and brittle and it dissolved the soft rubber that was holding the fan assembly to the processor's heat sink. Not sure if it will have any long term effect on the plugs of the electrolytic caps on the board but I wouldn't be surprised.
If you can afford to split the difference between mineral oil and florinert (perfluorocarbon), you might consider a low viscosity silicon oil. That should bu much nicer to natural rubber compounds and plastic insulators.
From my experience with submersion cooling in mineral oil, if your connectors are submerged they will wick oil up the interior through capillary action. If you build a system similar to that made by Puget Systems it probably won't be a problem, provided you leave some head space at the top of the case. When I built a system similar to theirs I made a short socket extension for the power cord so it didn't have to go under the fluid. everything else was able to stay above the surface of the oil.
If you submerge your video cards and intend to use the fans as impellers, make sure they can start turning against the resistance of the fluid. All my fans worked when submerged except the video cards.
It tells them that, unless they're making less than $30 from software vendors to put that stuff on the machines, it's gonna stay around. And if they are making less than that, they can mark up a "Clean" version by $29.99 and call it a day.
That didn't work too well for Chernobyl.
Everyone within about 500 feet of the DSLAM can have a 24MBit connection... on ADSL2+ or VDSL... and that's provided there is enough bandwidth to support that usage from everyone. Don't delude yourself into thinking that the telcos can't and don't oversell the bandwidth behind the DSLAM.
Sure, when cable Co's stared offering high-speed internet the bandwidth available to neighborhoods may have been limited enough to cause issues, but they've been ramping up for years. Especially in areas that aren't run by jackasses like Comcast.
The screen of my Samsung phone won't turn off when it's plugged in. I have to charge it face down or in another room.
Where is NewYorkCountryLawyer when you need him?
I'd like to get a shot glass with the warning on it.
I'd imagine what most people drink from shot glasses is a lot more harmful that most of the things that get these signs posted.
It got stupid for me when I saw a tag that warned about a normal indoor mains voltage extension cord containing chemicals known to cause cancer and recommended washing your hands after handling it.
There's due diligence and there's absurdity.
I can attest to that having worked tech support lines.
I've also helped my friend's father troubleshoot a non-working USB device that had been slid onto the pins in his DB9 serial port. Had a surprisingly similar feel to inserting it in an actual USB port.
It's a 10L pour for $40.
$20 per day rental of a 10L vacuum flash if you don't have your own, $50 for the week.
In Arizona I've bought 10+ pounds of dry ice and they didn't even ask for ID as they knew I was of age.
You can get Liquid Nitrogen poured in an approved vacuum container at welding shops around town as well.
Once they figure out a way to use environmentalists as fuel in nuclear reactors, they *will* solve everything ;)
An Orion style propulsion system is capable of getting a craft from earth to Pluto and back inside a year. If we're talking about speeding up, slowing down and then repeating after turning around, we're only talking about a few months to accelerate 100+ tons of spacecraft to it's cruising speed. Now I'm sure the math is different when dealing with a planet-killer sized asteroid, but the normal orion system is not accelerating for years.
It bears mentioning that we don't need to stop or reverse a planet-killer sized mass, just push it off course for direct impact. Depending on how far out you're able to intercept it, you can get away with a very small push.
And there is something to be said for blowing one into small pieces. Even if it's hitting us with the same total energy, having it dissipate in the atmosphere as those small pieces vaporize seems preferable to having several hundred or thousand tons of mass vaporize seawater or throw up a nuclear winter style plume of dust on impact with the surface.
That's certainly a reasonable stance, but what about people like me who agreed to the terms of sale for a game and got a product that simply wouldn't work because of their copy protection?
When Half-Life 2 came out, I went and bought a brick and mortar DVD copy for the guide and t-shirt. The DVD had safedisc copy protection that had some incompatability with my DVD drive. Launching HL2.exe, it would show up in task manager, ramp up its memory usage and then silently close.
I spent days going through chat, email and phone support with vivendi, even going so far as to go back to fry's electronics and exchange my DVD for a new one. Still no luck.
For me it wasn't a question of cracking the game to make it do something I wanted it to do, it was cracking it to make it do the single thing I bought it to do. I wasn't the only one. They pushed a disc check removal patch down through steam soon after that.
Excellent point, I'll keep that in mind for the next time this rears it's head.
So few people realize that increasing transistor count without decreasing their size is going to drive up the costs through raw materials while decreasing size alone will drive it up through lower yields and more costly manufacturing processes.
The apparently exponential increase in clock speed we've seen has been more an after effect allowed by the smaller interconnect distances and lower switching voltages that are required at these ever increasing densities. It's easy to see how most people, who have been marketed their chips based on clock speed, get the impression that this trend was confined to that measure alone.
I'd be very interested to see some of the other factors examined against cost and density like clock speed, heat output, and operational throughput.
Moore's "law" was actually a measure of size and cost, not necessarily the number of components.
The initial write-up had time separated plots of cost against component density. Each was roughly parabolic, and the low point of each, which represented the lowest cost transistor density, roughly doubled over each 18-24 months.
A my room mate actually has an Intel t-shirt with a picture of that plot on the front.
It shouldn't be too hard to defeat this without resorting to a tinfoil hat.
With radio and audio/pressure waves being used, you can effectively cancel out either or both to mitigate the effects, though I would imagine that locally blocking the incident RF near your body would probably be easier.
Small radio transceiver on your body, preferably near your head, picks up the RF they use to create the pressure waves and transmits a smiliar signal 180deg out of phase.
When you abbreviate all the words in a phrase to their first letters and combine them into something that isn't a word, I think the term for it is 'initialism'
Working in DSL and having cable at home, my situation is reversed.
I have a 12mbit cable connection that sustains 13+mbit from servers that can handle it, even during peak hours.
There's really no special difference between DSL and cable these days. Sure it was (and still is in some markets) common for cable providers to oversell the bandwidth available in a given area. But there is nothing to prevent a DSL provider from doing the same.
The conditions of the line at your home would make the biggest difference as to weather you'll get the peak bandwidth advertised for your DSL all the time. If you have good enough signal to sustain 1.5mbit all the time you're fine, but that won't necessarily stop the phone company from selling the same package to someone further down the loop where they can't get that rate.
So really, there is no guaranteed bandwidth, be it DSL or cable. The management policies of the providers involved and the quality of last mile connection will make much more difference than the tech being used.
Hotbrick makes a very good load-balancing soho router. They're a bit pricey but they seem to work quite well for exactly what you're describing. Take a look on ebay for their LB series.
I do have to second the suggestion of using Cable+DSL rather than DSL+DSL. Most places where there are multiple DSL providers, they're both operating from the same physical infrastructure with one reselling the service of the other. It's certainly better than one by itself, though.
I coworker of mine went to college in Missouri, and during his time there he witnessed a professor attempt to organize a student rally against a new reactor that was to be built in another city.
While watching them go back and forth about it, he quietly interjected with something along the lines of "Why drive that far to protest when there's a reactor on campus?"
It took a few minutes, but he eventually convinced the professor that there was in fact a reactor on campus and housed in a building near the football field, weather he believed it or not.
The clincher, the name of the schools football field? "Reactor Field"