While the oil is nice and non-conductive, it could hose the hard drive eventually. Hard drives aren't designed to be air-tight. Usually there's some sort of breather filter under the PCB, which allows air in and out. The oil will eventually soak through that, and then the heads will crash.
But until then, it's the niftiest (if ugliest) case mod out there, at least from a technical standpoint.
It's not about protection. It's about the structural stiffness needed to make the head-positioning servo system feasible/fast enough, and the incredible tolerances that must be achieved to make modern hard drives work.
Internal vibration is the main problem in hard drive design nowadays (speaking from experience), due to the ever-shrinking size of the data tracks on the disk. Modern drives are around 500,000 tracks per inch (radially), meaning a single data track is only 50nm wide! At that width, vibration is a killer. Making the baseplate out of plastic isn't going to reduce vibration as much as steel.
Tolerance-wise, the components are assembled with pretty extreme fits, which non-metal baseplates aren't going to allow.
That said, we used to have some drives at work with covers (just the piece of metal on the non-PCB side) made entirely from polycarbonate. They were really just for demonstration purposes, but they worked! A bit noisy, sure, but pretty nifty (the real covers are typically engineered to provide a lot of sound dampening). Really gives one an appreciation for how fast the components inside are moving when the head is seeking from track to track.
Not that I'm raising a fuss about a great leap forward in technology being copied. More power to MS if they're able to get it to work. It's just funny that Apple is shipping Tiger with this tech now (mostly working - see the Ars article for more details), while Vista will have it in a year.
Now, from what I've read, it seems that the requirements for Quartz 2D Extreme on a Mac include a fast GPU with 128MB of VRAM. It's entirely possible that those are the minimum specs, and 256MB would be preferred, making that part of the MS system requirements seem not quite so crazy.
I was curious how a robot built from R/C truck parts would climb stairs. What sort of actuators would an R/C truck have that could be used for that?
Looking at the article, however, shows that it's a six-wheel 'bot with oversized tires. Because the tires are big relative to the stairs (and are particularly grippy), it's able to climb the stairs. Not quite what I was looking for, but it gets the job done. Not really scalable, though.
Say a couple of your friends, A and B, have you on their buddy lists. A, who has three people on her buddy list, doesn't add much to your score. That's because she doesn't have as many people on her buddy list as does B, who has 16.
Actually, it's not how many people are on your friends' lists, but how many other people's lists they are on. Just because friend A has 16 people on their list doesn't mean they are on many people's lists.
You must have an interesting definition of 'cramped.' I've got a 15" PB, and the only keys that are smaller than regular are the arrow and function keys. Once I got used to the arrow keys, I don't feel that it's cramped at all.
In fact, the regular keys are not only full-sized, but the top surfaces are larger than any desktop keyboard that I've used. I find that I prefer the PB keyboard to my desktop PC's keyboard.
Not to be the typical Slashdot nay-sayer, but are these going to be 100% reliable? If not, who is to be responsible when the first crash happens? The manufacturers, who will then get sued.
Unless the liklihood of crashing is *awfully* small, no company is going to be willing to sell this for the typical commmuter.
Also according to the Yahoo article, they say that because of the superior compression of ATRAC3 over mp3 or AAC, the 20GB can hold 13,000 songs. Apple's website quotes the song capacity of the 40GB iPod at 10,000 songs.
13,000 songs for $399, vs 10,000 songs for $499 --> 'undercutting.' It's the higher compression, not just raw capacity.
Also, the 20GB iPod currently retails for the same $399. The article mentions that Sony hopes to acheive large price reductions in the coming months due to the volumes that come from utilizing the same drives across multiple product lines. The price of the 20GB iPod hasn't changed in awhile, so if Sony drops the price, they'll be undercutting based on capacity, too.
Of course, you'll still be stuck with ATRAC3, but that's another issue.
You both can be happy, at least in Windows. (ok, maybe not happy, being Winblows and all, but at least have your preferences implemented)
When I click delete, I want the file deleted, not moved somewhere to be found by a nosy roomate or something.
Right-click on the Recycle Bin, select 'Properties.' You'll see an option to not use the Recycle Bin, but delete files immediately.
Personally, the only thing I'd change about the trash can as it currently (and most commonly) exists is to be able to say exactly how much disk space I want stuff in the trash to take up before it automatically and permanantly wipes older stuff.
Again, right-click on the Recycle bin, select 'Properties.' You'll see a slider bar used to set the max size the Recycle Bin can take up on each drive.
The grateful dead have had midi/pickup hybrid guitars for years.
You're missing the point: the guitar isn't doing MIDI. Its signal out is entirely digital, as in, the difference between CDs and analog tapes. A major advantage is less noise in the system, regardless of which cables are used, and how long they are.
Ah, but there is a significant problem with this: since the SCSI drive was initially designed/manufactured to be more reliable and significantly faster, the cost of materials is going to be higher. This drive would not be competitive in either of the current markets.
The drive market is segmented as it is now for a good reason: customers who want fast, reliable drives don't want to half-ass it. They want the fastest, most reliable drives available. The ATA/SCSI Frankenstein drive wouldn't quite be fast enough to satisfy this market, due to limitations in the ATA interface.
On the other hand, the ATA drive market is, for the most part, concentrated on one single thing: make the drive as cheap as possible for its capacity. Speed isn't quite as much as a concern. This drive will be more expensive to produce (better components), and it won't cut it in the IDE market, where the profit margins are already razor-thin.
The biggest SCSI drives I've seen are just less than 150Gb but Maxtor makes a 250Gb ATA drive. Is there a technical reason why there isn't size parity?
Yes, there is one main reason why SCSI drives aren't available in the same densities as IDE drives: rotational speed. As you increase the speed that you're spinning those poor little disks at, you increase the amount of mechanical vibration in the system. This means that you can't pack the data tracks as close together, because the vibration is just too much to allow the servo sytem to follow the smaller tracks.
You'll notice this as you look at all the different RPM drives, not just SCSI vs. IDE. 5400rpm drives currently have the greatest areal density, followed by the 7200rpm. Then come the 10,000rpm drives, with the newest 15,000rpm drives having the least areal density.
One way the drive manufacturers deal with the vibration is to use smaller disks inside the drives. Smaller disks = less vibration, but less space to store the data. So, even less capacity.
I know the planet isn't a closed system, but this water has to go somewhere. It doesn't just zoom off into space. I think that those who claim know have no idea what they are talking about when there's a water shortage.
Ever heard the phrase, "Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink?" It's not simply finding water that is such a problem. Finding *clean* water is the problem. The water that you use daily may not disappear, but the water you flush down your toilet is now dirty, and not suitable for drinking, irrigation, making snow, etc. Hence the focus on reclaiming water from waste processes.
I once worked in a manufacturing plant for Proctor & Gamble, where they made paper towels and toilet paper. The paper-making process uses enormous amounts of water, and can be envorinmentally nasty (think bleaching process). The environmental team at this plant was very proud of their water-cleaning systems: the water that went back into the river was cleaner than the water they took out of it.
Phoenix: Not sufficiently faster to make up for the fact that I can't search google straight out of the address bar.
But you can. Ok, so maybe you don't like having the extra Google search bar next to your address bar, and you remove it. Big deal. Go to your normal address bar and type "google blah blah blah" to automatically search for "blah blah blah."
There's also:
goto blah - Go to Google's top result for blah
webster blah - Look up blah in the dictionary
quot blah - Get a current stock lookup for blah
All data goes through the PCI bus...and it's bandwidth is only 133MB/sec theoretical. So, what does 400/800/anything else greater than about 100MB/sec in a media interface get you? Not much!
64-bit PCI buses are being phased in, which have data rates of around 250MB/s.
Ever read the actual throughput specs on a drive? The media throughput is not much more than 40MB/sec!!! Read the data sheets, people!
For typical home use, the data being read is often cached in internal RAM on the drive. When this data is requested, the transfer speed is well above 40MB/s.
Add this all up and what do you get? Ripped off is about it!
What do you get? No more dealing with unwieldly ribbon cables. No more separate power cables. More efficient airflow inside your computer. Faster interface.
Aren't corresponding IDE and SCSI drives mechanically identical, with different electronic interfaces (which could account for the cost difference)?
Nope. Very, very different mechanically. Your typical IDE drive will spin at 5400rpm or 7200rpm for the nicer ones. That difference alone between the IDE drives requires slightly different sets of mechanics (different spindle motors, for instance).
Some numbers to back up my reasoning? Let's compare some basic stats on the various classes of drives. These are sample numbers that I got from various manufacturer's websites. They're more or less typical (within a few tenths of a millisecond) for each class.
5400rpm
Latency: 5.6ms
Seek Time: 12.0ms
Difference: 6.4ms
7200rpm
Latency: 4.2ms
Seek Time: 9.0ms
Difference: 4.8ms
10000prm
Latency: 3.0ms
Seek Time: 4.7ms
Difference: 1.7ms
15000rpm
Latency: 2.0ms
Seek Time: 3.6ms
Difference: 1.6ms
Latency, as used above, is defined as the time it takes for the disk to spin through half a turn. It's the average amount that the disk has to wait for the data to be in line with the head. A disk's average seek time cannot be faster than its latency.
So, if you look at the difference between the latency and the average seek time for each platform, you can see how hard the actuator is being driven. If a 5400rpm drive has a difference of 6.4ms, while a typical 10k drive has a difference of less than 2ms, it's pretty obvious that the mechanics are going to be radically different. For SCSI drives, the magnets get beefed up, the spindle motors get better bearings, etc.
Additionally, the major OEM customers that buy the SCSI drives have much more stringent standards for them than the ATA drives they also buy. If you're selling some schmoe a $1000 computer with a standard 1 year warranty, you really don't care if the drive lasts longer than one year. Meanwhile, if you're selling a company a $20k server, complete with a service agreement and such, you want those components to be as reliable as possible. You're going to give the manufacturer a much tougher set of standards (temperature, shock, etc) to meet before you OK their drives in your product.
To wrap this up, you asked if the main cost difference came from just the different electronics interface. No. It does contribute significantly to the cost of a drive, but if you grab a new ATA drive and a new SCSI drive from the same manufacturer and void your warranties by opening them up, you'll see very, very different sets of mechanics inside. The SCSI drive will have components inside that just don't exist in the ATA drive, let alone the ones that are made of higher quality materials.
One advantage of having publicly funded research facilities that do so much advanced, out-there research is that the scientists are pursuing things that they feel will make a difference, regardless of whether the fruits of the research will be lucrative. Of course, many of the things they develop can have some commercial application and make some money, but that's not the emphasis. (Of course, this also can produce an organization with a hugely bloated budget that may not be as efficient as we'd like with our tax dollars)
One worry that I have about when this publicly funded organization joins up with the commercial sector: Do they start to focus on projects that can be turned into viable products sooner? Does their research start getting directed towards the more potentially lucrative products, at the expense of the projects that could change the way we live for the better?
I'm glad to see that this initiative is being taken, partially for the cool stuff that I'll be able to buy as a result of it, and also because getting more for our tax-dollars always appeals to me. I just hope this doesn't go the way of some of the university research facilities that have deals with corporations, patents/other exclusive rights in return for funding.
When I first glanced at the headline, I thought it was about "flirting" with OSX. You know, like whipping out your TiBook at Starbucks, and slyly using it as a conversation piece to start talking with the cute chick sitting next to you.
At the moment it has World and U.S. sections. I think what it could really do with is different regional sections, which would be default to different regions URLs.
Google is a US-based company. This is a new service. In rolling out the service, they probably placed more emphasis on getting it out the door than on fully implementing non-US sections. Once they are able to gauge the popularity of this service, and their ability to make money on it, then I have no doubt that they'll expand this to include more than just US and World sections.
Like using a plane as a missle. Who would have thought it?
Yeah who would have thunk it? There are really too many people that actually think Bin Laden was the first person to think of this.
I suggest you go back and read "The Running Man," written by Stephen King under his Richard Bachman pseudonym in . Lovely part in there about flying an airliner into a skyscraper.
Also check out "Debt of Honor" by Tom Clancy. Boeing 737 (I believe) kamikazies into the Capitol Building.
Slashdot Mirror
At first, I thought that it was just horribly mis-typed, but the errors are all cases of lower-case "fi" missing. What gives?
Of course! That gives them the opportunity to show us that many more ads!
But until then, it's the niftiest (if ugliest) case mod out there, at least from a technical standpoint.
Internal vibration is the main problem in hard drive design nowadays (speaking from experience), due to the ever-shrinking size of the data tracks on the disk. Modern drives are around 500,000 tracks per inch (radially), meaning a single data track is only 50nm wide! At that width, vibration is a killer. Making the baseplate out of plastic isn't going to reduce vibration as much as steel.
Tolerance-wise, the components are assembled with pretty extreme fits, which non-metal baseplates aren't going to allow.
That said, we used to have some drives at work with covers (just the piece of metal on the non-PCB side) made entirely from polycarbonate. They were really just for demonstration purposes, but they worked! A bit noisy, sure, but pretty nifty (the real covers are typically engineered to provide a lot of sound dampening). Really gives one an appreciation for how fast the components inside are moving when the head is seeking from track to track.
You know, it's almost like I've seen this somewhere else.
Not that I'm raising a fuss about a great leap forward in technology being copied. More power to MS if they're able to get it to work. It's just funny that Apple is shipping Tiger with this tech now (mostly working - see the Ars article for more details), while Vista will have it in a year.
Now, from what I've read, it seems that the requirements for Quartz 2D Extreme on a Mac include a fast GPU with 128MB of VRAM. It's entirely possible that those are the minimum specs, and 256MB would be preferred, making that part of the MS system requirements seem not quite so crazy.
And make sure you listen to the clip of 'Hot Shot City,' as it's particularly good.
I was curious how a robot built from R/C truck parts would climb stairs. What sort of actuators would an R/C truck have that could be used for that?
Looking at the article, however, shows that it's a six-wheel 'bot with oversized tires. Because the tires are big relative to the stairs (and are particularly grippy), it's able to climb the stairs. Not quite what I was looking for, but it gets the job done. Not really scalable, though.
Props for the Frankenstein treatment, though.
Actually, it's not how many people are on your friends' lists, but how many other people's lists they are on. Just because friend A has 16 people on their list doesn't mean they are on many people's lists.
In fact, the regular keys are not only full-sized, but the top surfaces are larger than any desktop keyboard that I've used. I find that I prefer the PB keyboard to my desktop PC's keyboard.
Not to be the typical Slashdot nay-sayer, but are these going to be 100% reliable? If not, who is to be responsible when the first crash happens? The manufacturers, who will then get sued.
Unless the liklihood of crashing is *awfully* small, no company is going to be willing to sell this for the typical commmuter.
13,000 songs for $399, vs 10,000 songs for $499 --> 'undercutting.' It's the higher compression, not just raw capacity.
Also, the 20GB iPod currently retails for the same $399. The article mentions that Sony hopes to acheive large price reductions in the coming months due to the volumes that come from utilizing the same drives across multiple product lines. The price of the 20GB iPod hasn't changed in awhile, so if Sony drops the price, they'll be undercutting based on capacity, too.
Of course, you'll still be stuck with ATRAC3, but that's another issue.
When I click delete, I want the file deleted, not moved somewhere to be found by a nosy roomate or something.
Right-click on the Recycle Bin, select 'Properties.' You'll see an option to not use the Recycle Bin, but delete files immediately.
Personally, the only thing I'd change about the trash can as it currently (and most commonly) exists is to be able to say exactly how much disk space I want stuff in the trash to take up before it automatically and permanantly wipes older stuff.
Again, right-click on the Recycle bin, select 'Properties.' You'll see a slider bar used to set the max size the Recycle Bin can take up on each drive.
Ta-da!
You're missing the point: the guitar isn't doing MIDI. Its signal out is entirely digital, as in, the difference between CDs and analog tapes. A major advantage is less noise in the system, regardless of which cables are used, and how long they are.
The drive market is segmented as it is now for a good reason: customers who want fast, reliable drives don't want to half-ass it. They want the fastest, most reliable drives available. The ATA/SCSI Frankenstein drive wouldn't quite be fast enough to satisfy this market, due to limitations in the ATA interface.
On the other hand, the ATA drive market is, for the most part, concentrated on one single thing: make the drive as cheap as possible for its capacity. Speed isn't quite as much as a concern. This drive will be more expensive to produce (better components), and it won't cut it in the IDE market, where the profit margins are already razor-thin.
Yes, there is one main reason why SCSI drives aren't available in the same densities as IDE drives: rotational speed. As you increase the speed that you're spinning those poor little disks at, you increase the amount of mechanical vibration in the system. This means that you can't pack the data tracks as close together, because the vibration is just too much to allow the servo sytem to follow the smaller tracks.
You'll notice this as you look at all the different RPM drives, not just SCSI vs. IDE. 5400rpm drives currently have the greatest areal density, followed by the 7200rpm. Then come the 10,000rpm drives, with the newest 15,000rpm drives having the least areal density.
One way the drive manufacturers deal with the vibration is to use smaller disks inside the drives. Smaller disks = less vibration, but less space to store the data. So, even less capacity.
Ever heard the phrase, "Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink?" It's not simply finding water that is such a problem. Finding *clean* water is the problem. The water that you use daily may not disappear, but the water you flush down your toilet is now dirty, and not suitable for drinking, irrigation, making snow, etc. Hence the focus on reclaiming water from waste processes.
I once worked in a manufacturing plant for Proctor & Gamble, where they made paper towels and toilet paper. The paper-making process uses enormous amounts of water, and can be envorinmentally nasty (think bleaching process). The environmental team at this plant was very proud of their water-cleaning systems: the water that went back into the river was cleaner than the water they took out of it.
It's a poodle. Put it on delicate.
Your poodle is named "Incredible Hulk?"
oh, nevermind.
But you can. Ok, so maybe you don't like having the extra Google search bar next to your address bar, and you remove it. Big deal. Go to your normal address bar and type "google blah blah blah" to automatically search for "blah blah blah."
There's also:
Quite useful, I say.
64-bit PCI buses are being phased in, which have data rates of around 250MB/s.
Ever read the actual throughput specs on a drive? The media throughput is not much more than 40MB/sec!!! Read the data sheets, people!
For typical home use, the data being read is often cached in internal RAM on the drive. When this data is requested, the transfer speed is well above 40MB/s.
Add this all up and what do you get? Ripped off is about it!
What do you get? No more dealing with unwieldly ribbon cables. No more separate power cables. More efficient airflow inside your computer. Faster interface.
Nope. Very, very different mechanically. Your typical IDE drive will spin at 5400rpm or 7200rpm for the nicer ones. That difference alone between the IDE drives requires slightly different sets of mechanics (different spindle motors, for instance).
Some numbers to back up my reasoning? Let's compare some basic stats on the various classes of drives. These are sample numbers that I got from various manufacturer's websites. They're more or less typical (within a few tenths of a millisecond) for each class.
Seek Time: 12.0ms
Difference: 6.4ms
Seek Time: 9.0ms
Difference: 4.8ms
Seek Time: 4.7ms
Difference: 1.7ms
Seek Time: 3.6ms
Difference: 1.6ms
Latency, as used above, is defined as the time it takes for the disk to spin through half a turn. It's the average amount that the disk has to wait for the data to be in line with the head. A disk's average seek time cannot be faster than its latency.
So, if you look at the difference between the latency and the average seek time for each platform, you can see how hard the actuator is being driven. If a 5400rpm drive has a difference of 6.4ms, while a typical 10k drive has a difference of less than 2ms, it's pretty obvious that the mechanics are going to be radically different. For SCSI drives, the magnets get beefed up, the spindle motors get better bearings, etc.
Additionally, the major OEM customers that buy the SCSI drives have much more stringent standards for them than the ATA drives they also buy. If you're selling some schmoe a $1000 computer with a standard 1 year warranty, you really don't care if the drive lasts longer than one year. Meanwhile, if you're selling a company a $20k server, complete with a service agreement and such, you want those components to be as reliable as possible. You're going to give the manufacturer a much tougher set of standards (temperature, shock, etc) to meet before you OK their drives in your product.
To wrap this up, you asked if the main cost difference came from just the different electronics interface. No. It does contribute significantly to the cost of a drive, but if you grab a new ATA drive and a new SCSI drive from the same manufacturer and void your warranties by opening them up, you'll see very, very different sets of mechanics inside. The SCSI drive will have components inside that just don't exist in the ATA drive, let alone the ones that are made of higher quality materials.
One worry that I have about when this publicly funded organization joins up with the commercial sector: Do they start to focus on projects that can be turned into viable products sooner? Does their research start getting directed towards the more potentially lucrative products, at the expense of the projects that could change the way we live for the better?
I'm glad to see that this initiative is being taken, partially for the cool stuff that I'll be able to buy as a result of it, and also because getting more for our tax-dollars always appeals to me. I just hope this doesn't go the way of some of the university research facilities that have deals with corporations, patents/other exclusive rights in return for funding.
Maybe it's just me, though...
Google is a US-based company. This is a new service. In rolling out the service, they probably placed more emphasis on getting it out the door than on fully implementing non-US sections. Once they are able to gauge the popularity of this service, and their ability to make money on it, then I have no doubt that they'll expand this to include more than just US and World sections.
Yeah who would have thunk it? There are really too many people that actually think Bin Laden was the first person to think of this.
I suggest you go back and read "The Running Man," written by Stephen King under his Richard Bachman pseudonym in . Lovely part in there about flying an airliner into a skyscraper.
Also check out "Debt of Honor" by Tom Clancy. Boeing 737 (I believe) kamikazies into the Capitol Building.