Like the iPods, the mechanics (structure) involved to make the battery as easy to remove as say, the macbook, would add a significant amount to the size of the unit. The battery latch on the macbook is roughly the size of a nickel. Would you like your ipod to be 1/8" thicker just to add a latch for the battery?
For apple, a BIG selling point is it's the thinnest thing going for anywhere near those specs. Adding a latch is NOT worth losing that bragging right.
Also you'd have to consider adding casing for the battery since its no longer considered always protected inside the shell of the computer, so that adds both size and weight. The iPod's internal battery has an "outer case" of foil, hardly suitable for consumer handling. And the connector needs to be something that can handle many hundreds of uses, not just a few. That connector again adds size and some weight. The external battery connectors that apple uses are actually pretty big, and I'd be willing to bet you can't find that much unused space in the Air.
And considering the claimed battery life, it almost erases the need to carry a spare battery.
My watch has a battery that I can't replace myself. I have to take it into the store for them to crack it open because it's a diver's watch and requires a special tool to unscrew the back cover. Does this bother me? no. I expect it. Your car needs the transmission serviced after so many miles, and that's not considered a user-maintenance thing either. There are many more examples. It's not like you throw it away when the battery goes out... Now THAT you would have room to complain about.
there are far more serious things to consider, like targetting. If you are strictly talking space, I don't even know if they've managed to figure out how fast Earth is moving through space. That's the big one with time travel too... ok lets say you CAN time travel. You'll do that exactly ONCE.;) Then you'll suck vacuum for a few minutes. Time travel without teleportation is useless even if possible. For all we know someone's already invented it. Other than "I can make things disappear forever" you'd be hard pressed to prove it.
The part that would worry me is the consciousness. Brings up questions like what happens when you die. Does your consciousness cease to exist? probably. So if they replicate you to teleport you, haven't they created a new (but identical at that moment) copy, and then destroy your consciousness? Would your new copy of your consciousness know anything had happened? unlikely.
If sometime in the future teleportation becomes possible, eventually everyone will be using it. By the time a child is old enough to ponder the above, they will have been teleported hundreds of times. At which point either you don't care anymore, or you don't believe your consciousness is destroyed by the teleportation. (since it would not be evident to the latest copy of you) Then you start getting into weirder things, like if someone teleports you, who has never been teleported before, against your will, could they be charged with murder? It's kinda absurd to think your consciousness somehow transfers with the teleportation.
I think this would escalate to a whole new level if you teleported someone and failed to erase the original, and the two got together and were told to argue it out who needs to live and who needs to die. They'd both have the same conscious train of thought and would probably both want to live and would both believe they were "the real one" etc.
I think the pencil sharpener is what they were trying to avoid. And weight. If you can use a ballpoint pen for two months, or a box of pencils, which is lighter? And the weight of the sharpener? OK a small hand one is a lot lighter than an electric. Then there's the other issue of particulate matter in the space stations. Dust is a big problem there, since it doesn't fall to the flat surfaces, you have to clean EVERYTHING. The occasional escaped shaving would actually cause problems. They try very hard to keep the place spotless because the maid doesn't visit very often.;) Also when you use the eraser on a pencil, you get those eraser crumbs, so you can't really even use that on a space station.
I recall reading for one of the shuttle missions, they calculated what each pound cost them to send up, and as a result, one of the female astronauts got her hair cut from long to short, and saved some several thousand dollars for that launch.
Also NASA's inventions tend to find their way into our lives. Take Velcro for example. I'm sure you're not unhappy that they developed THAT? Zero G pens are good for writing on things above you here on earth, though I personally don't need to do that very often.
Mirroring vs spanning is a case of available vram. (in all but a very small handful of cases) A few years back, if you have a pair of 1280x1024 displays and 2mb of vram, then you can't have spanning at millions of colors. You will have to knock down your colors or resolutions, or mirror. VRAM is limited by the video cards. Nowadays most displays have a ton more vram and have no problem spanning at full resolution and high color.
I don't understand why they don't have more of a "juice box" design. Put the drink in a flexible bag with a hole for the straw. There's no air in it, and air doesn't go in when you drink, it just collapses the bag until it's empty. No chasing globs of liquid with the straw. Seems too obvious for them to have overlooked, so why not?
They said they had some trouble determining the optimal movement of all the motors for maximum range. iirc, when trying to accelerate something, a 'whiplike" motion is preferred, similar to how a pitcher throws a fastball.
Unfortunately it almost always requires disassembling the drive, most of the battle is getting it out of the computer.
When a disc goes in, and the tray drops down to lock the hub, a gate drops in front of the slot to prevent you from trying to feed it another disk. You can SOMETIMES use a credit card size item to get the disk out without disassembly. You have to get it into the slot when the gate goes up, and quickly do one of two things. You need to assist the gate in lifting, thus providing additional force in pulling the disc off the hub lock. This is useful if the drive eject mechanism isn't strong enough to pull the disk off. OR you need to get up UNDER the disc and pry it up a bit, if it's trying to imitate a pringles potato chip. (in which case the guides have already pulled the sides of the disc all the way up as far as it will go, and the disc is deformed, and is just not letting go)
It's hard to do but I've seen it done a few times. I usually just take it apart but I've surprised myself with success a few times with that technique.
This advice is probably good for most slot load drives, not just the ones found in macs.
The other problem I've seen is where the felt on the slot is too stiff or there's a label or something on the disc, and it's causing the arm that pushes the disc out to strain and not get the disc shoved out. It will also reload. I see this about 1 in 15. In that case you can sometimes see the disc just start to peek out the slot and get sucked back in. If you see that, the hub is definitely releasing. At that point you need to grab the disc. If the disc isn't coming out far enough to say, get ahold of with a needle nose pliers, or you have trouble timing it, you can use the sharp point of a pocket knife blade to "spear" the top/bottom of the disc as it briefly peeks out. With the disc held, pull the power cord on the computer so the drive stops trying to pull it back in, and use the knife to work it out. If you catch it on the edge you may not even damage the disc.
yes, though for a consumer electronic, that's probably a really bad idea. I see a lot of older hardware before the 3rd prong era hit, where the center taps on the in/out were tied together.
I'll see if I can find some more authoritative answer for you. "Ground" only behaves as you expect it to because it's often used as a common. When lightning strikes, it's because there's a charge difference between the ground and the air. If there is no charge difference, electrons will not flow, they have to reason to. That's why they can drop off repairmen on high power lines to work on them via helicopter. In those cases though they do have to equalize the charge with a pole before he hops on the wire but it's not an ongoing issue like the buzz you get off a ground problem.
When ground is not common between two pieces of equipment, there is no return path, and no electrons flow. Most people's view of electricity is relative to their AC power outlets, which DO have a common ground. I have an isolation transformer in the basement, it's a simple 1:1 transformer. I can GRAB the power wires coming out the back (one at a time!) and nothing happens. Nothing, not even a light buzz. That's because the transformer isolates the outgoing lines from ground. This is an excellent lightning deterrent for my servers because lightning simply has no reason to go after my servers since they are isolated from what the lightning wants, to seek out ground.
All power tools have to pass UL, if it's tripping a GFI either it or the GFI is bad.
The power tools I was speaking of, are the type that have either failed, (loose internal wire usually) or are too old for that. Yes they're not supposed to do that.
Let me try to illustrate with water as an example. Water works a lot the same way as electricity. (that's where current got its name actually) Lets imagine water requires a pipe to flow in. As in, if you cut off the end of a water pipe with water in it, nothing comes out. It would behave the same as electricity. At the wall you have a pump that on one port pushes water and the other it pulls. Attach a single pipe and no water flows because the end just terminates, there is no return path. Put a water powered toy at the end of the wire and the toy does nothing. Run a second pipe from the toy and back to the outlet, and now the toy operates. The reason is the water cannot run through the toy no matter what the pressure (voltage) unless it has a return path since it can't just come flying out the other end of the toy and spray around the room. Electricity is the same way, it can't just spray out the end of the wire all over the room.
Water has to come from somewhere. And they provide you with a third port on the outlet to tap into the water reservoir. This is the ground. Now lets run a drip pan below our toy and run that to the common. As long as the toy doesn't leak, no water flows back to the outlet through the ground. Lets for the sake of argument say that around the toy the water can get to the drip pan if it springs a leak. This is why there is a metal shell around your power drill, that's the drip pan. Now lets say the toy springs a leak. (a frayed wire comes loose inside the drill and touches the outer case)
That's a ground fault. Water can now flow from the high pressure line to the ground, as well as the return. Depending on the size of the pipe, energy the toy requires, and size of the fault, this may be a little water or a lot of water. Same with the short in the drill.
This is actually working out well as an example.:) Anyway, the GFCI is a device in the outlet or in the cord to the toy that looks for water to be moving to ground. if it detects any, it slams the valves shut on the outlet because it knows some water is going someplace it shouldn't. It's possible to monitor the two ports on the outlet and compare them and make sure that exactly the same power is going in one as is going out the other, and of there's any difference, trip. Most do this, which is why they can protect you from completing to ground from the appliance by touching the ground of something ELSE that is common grounded, like your refrigerator. O
I've used a macbook pro and powerbook for some time, always with the two prong pack, and I have yet to get any tingle from the case. One thing that is being overlooked here is that the lack of a ground pin is not the cause. To get a buzz off the case there has to be an original path from the outlet to the computer, to allow your body to be the return path.
Many electronic power packs use "transformers", which use two isolated, closed loops to transform power, magnetically coupled. (to make a trade off of voltage for current, since laptops need 12v and the wall gives 120v) There is no path between the two, and you could start chewing on the power wires if you wanted to, (one at a time I would advise) without getting the slightest buzz.
The only way you could get a buzz off the case is if the case is grounded (via the 3rd pin) and that there is a ground fault in your area of the building (in which case you would get a buzz by sticking a paperclip into the ground pin on the outlet) OR if the pack was a more direct regulated power and was designed poorly. (like connecting the center tap off the 120v side with the center tap on the laptop side)
Devices experiencing a minor short that have a ground pin can cause equipment all over the building to buzz you. Attach a GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter) power strip and see if it trips where you are seeing the problem. It just might. I've seen cases where when I plugged in a certain power tool and revved it up, it would trip every GFCI outlet in the house. Same effect, caused by the power tool's bad (dangerous really) design.
I remove disks from drives here from time to time and I'd say you got VERY lucky, holding the machine upside down does provide an advantage, but it's so slight as to be amazing that it worked. The disk is too flexible and when the edges are lifted up, it does not release from the hub lock. Gravity can't be helping it very much...
Slot load drives have four important parts that are relevant to your question.
First, they have a track on the outside edges that keeps the disk centered as it's slid in, and prevents anything from touching the media area of the disk to scratch it. This track moves down once the disk is inserted, and pulls it down onto the hub ring where it locks onto the hub of the drive, leaving nothing else touching the disc.
Second there is a felt covered arm waiting just inside the slot to lightly pinch the disk to pull it in. The felt on the arm prevents scratching.
Third, when ejecting the disc, the track lifts back up, and is SUPPOSED to release the disk from the hub lock. Disks that flex too much will simply bend like a pringles chip until the drive gives up and reloads it. This is probably what's happening with these ecodisks, they are not rigid enough.
Fourth, when the disc is released from the hub, a cup shaped catch presses the disk out the slot for you to grab - it presses on the end of the disk and so can't scratch it.
The standard for disks includes a support nearer the hub ring that presses on the bottom of the disk more near the center of the media area, so that in addition to the disk being lifted from left and right edges by the track, it's also lifted from the areas closer to the middle of the disk. This would help an overly flexible disk to release from the hub lock. It also is prone to scratching the disk, which is probably part of the reason apple omitted it.
I get to extract business card CDs or those mini (2.5") disks from slot loaders about once a month, which I consider surprisingly infrequent.
Every rare now and again we also get in a drive that has a problem with a particular manufactured CD, usually because the hub diameter is juuuust a little too small and the slot loader can't release the disk from its hub lock when trying to eject it. (makes the drive strain, and then accept the disk back in, so it works but you can't get it out)
Apple does adhere to standards. Look at scsi, ATA, sata, bluetooth, usb, firewire, the list goes on and on. It's pretty rare to find a bit of hardware that is not fundamentally compatible with mac. The last time I heard of an example was when the new powermac g5's came out with their internal sata drives, that some large western digital drives did not work with them. Turned out to be a problem with WD not adhering to the standards in a way that most other manufacturers flubbed on and got away with, and so apple was one of the few that truly DID adhere to the SATA standard. WD has since fixed their firmware. (you don't dot your i or cross your t? ok we're not playing ball.)
We had problems with the kids punching out the grilles in the new emacs. And then later punching out the exposed cones. It took three emacs left with dual metal cavities in their front faces before they started locking the lab when no teacher was supervising it.
So if the government screws they are going to get a healthy beating in all papers, no matter of the party. Which will practically guarantee losing next election.
That, and with the two dominant parties in the USA garnering around what, 85% of the vote, if one of the leading candidate's parties screws the public as you say, they are left with only one viable alternative, which is unfortunate. (gets into a "lesser of the two evils" doesn't it?) People that would change their vote in sweden might not change their vote in the USA because of the low contrast level between the two big choices, and the feeling that they are "throwing their vote away" by voting for any party that trails by so far.
It doesn't take special permissions to put stuff in ~/Applications. It's not done by default, but some users do do it, and Finder supports it.
Actually it does. The/Applications folder is owned by root, and it is grouped to admin. Other has only read access. If you want to write to/Applications you have to be a member of admin, which is usually identical to the list of sudoers. Although probably 70% of accounts on macs are admins, (less than the 99% of windows...) not everyone is. If you are a parent and have kids, your kids are probably not admins on the computer so they can't break it. (at least can't break it for the rest of the family anyway)
The point being made was that yes, you are allowed to hose your account. No one should have any expectation that the system can protect you from yourself. You can just as quickly drag your Documents folder to the trash and empty it yourself as you can double click a script written to do just the same thing. The difference is you don't tank the entire machine, or cause problems for the other user accounts on the computer. By the definition you appear to be using, someone posting a text file with instructions on how to "optimize" your computer by dragging the contents of your home folder to the trash, could be considered malware.
The primary difference between this and most of the earlier windows malware is this is not a "drive-by download", where merely visiting the web page triggers a download and execute of code that can do damage. On a mac, if you DO click on something, you will get one or two warnings that you have downloaded an application and asking if you want to allow it. You get one warning when downloading the DMG, and another warning when trying to run any app inside the DMG once opened. The first warning has been around awhile, but the second one is new and goes something like "you are opening application xxx for the first time, which you have downloaded from the internet. Do you wish to continue?"
I don't personally think there is any way for the mac to remain anywhere near as free of 'malware' for even the near future. It's going to come up. I'll just be happy if it remains worm and virus free for the long term. And the way it's designed, there's a very good chance of that. It's the computer's job to block viruses and worms. It's the user's responsibility to avoid malware. (although it remains the computer's job to mitigate the damage caused by a user that chooses to run malware, and most importantly to protect the other users)
I have a fun screenshot of the Registry Cleaner web page, saying their software can fix problems in my registry which are causing all sorts of problems.
The first funny part is it desperately tries to look like an IE window with a close and cancel button etc which just clicks the download link, which is laughable since the browser is clearly firefox. Then next you notice the apple in the upper left of the screen...
a unique marketing model for 'manycore' processors
Nothing UNIQUE about this strategy. It's a model growing in popularity. Traditionally companies that wanted to capture several levels of market would make several models of a unit. Like buying a laptop with a better graphics chip or bus speed etc. This cost them more because they had to produce three different units which triples costs on some of their overheads. What this is doing is allowing them to produce one high end product, and configure it easily, post-production, to any of the three units they want to market. The same capabilities are present in all models, but features are disabled/crippled/nerfed in the less expensive models. This allows them to sell their product in the lower cost market without losing sales in their high end market, and without the additional expense of producing several different models.
It's a good idea for the manufacturer, but introduces the problem of what happens when the consumer figures out how to "enable" disabled features in their low end model? This always results in a little war of sorts, where the manufacturer takes steps to make de-nerfing difficult or impossible. It always aggravates the consumer to find out that after he conceded to buying the model that didn't do everything he wanted it to due to cost, CAN do it, it just refuses to. The consumer feels cheated that he payed for a gadget that CAN do what he wants it to, but can't take advantage of it.
Interestingly, it doesn't become a problem until the consumer realizes the product that they were obviously happy to pay the small amount for can do more than they bargained for. The producer would argue that you didn't pay what they were asking for those additional features and so you should not feel cheated, and that you agreed to the advertised feature set when you purchased the product.
The consumer then will try to modify the product to restore the disabled features, and can get upset if it's not possible or is made deliberately difficult.
As much as it causes aggravation in the consumer (that'd be ME) I think it's not a bad idea. What it all boils down to is you can't complain about a product being capable of performing beyond the advertised and accepted expectations at the time you purchased it. You agreed to buy it Just because it's done on purpose does not change the situation. If it CAN do more than advertised and claimed, and you can make it do that, good for you. If you can't, then too bad.
In the end, this DOES result in slightly higher cost for the low end model, because the cost of production (or development) of the low end product is higher than it would have been, if the company had only been making the low end model, and that money ends up in the pockets of the manufacturers who shave overhead on production. So from that point of view it's not a good thing for the consumer, but not for the reason they are seeing.
An intelligent flash controller could level the write field by using a table to look up blocks, and periodically shift the table offset so that writes were being distributed more evenly across the flash storage. Doesn't help much until you consider the very small percentage of space the page file occupies. It would take a long time for it to wear out the entire drive.
But this would do scarry things to the complexity of the controller chip. Though from what I've seen of the ZFS specs, it should be a piece 'o cake
High capacity drives are going to be expensive due to their very nature of early technology and gradual adoption rate.
I think they have that backwards. Lets try High capacity drives are going to have a gradual adpotion rate due to their very nature of being expensive due to their being early technology
There, that's better.
I'd have one now ("be an early adpopter") if they weren't so bloddy expensive.
so you'd leave your car out at the shopping mall with the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked, and when your car got stolen and someone tried to tell you that you were being irresponsible, you'd argue with them over it, because it was not even partly your fault?
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Like the iPods, the mechanics (structure) involved to make the battery as easy to remove as say, the macbook, would add a significant amount to the size of the unit. The battery latch on the macbook is roughly the size of a nickel. Would you like your ipod to be 1/8" thicker just to add a latch for the battery?
For apple, a BIG selling point is it's the thinnest thing going for anywhere near those specs. Adding a latch is NOT worth losing that bragging right.
Also you'd have to consider adding casing for the battery since its no longer considered always protected inside the shell of the computer, so that adds both size and weight. The iPod's internal battery has an "outer case" of foil, hardly suitable for consumer handling. And the connector needs to be something that can handle many hundreds of uses, not just a few. That connector again adds size and some weight. The external battery connectors that apple uses are actually pretty big, and I'd be willing to bet you can't find that much unused space in the Air.
And considering the claimed battery life, it almost erases the need to carry a spare battery.
My watch has a battery that I can't replace myself. I have to take it into the store for them to crack it open because it's a diver's watch and requires a special tool to unscrew the back cover. Does this bother me? no. I expect it. Your car needs the transmission serviced after so many miles, and that's not considered a user-maintenance thing either. There are many more examples. It's not like you throw it away when the battery goes out... Now THAT you would have room to complain about.
there are far more serious things to consider, like targetting. If you are strictly talking space, I don't even know if they've managed to figure out how fast Earth is moving through space. That's the big one with time travel too... ok lets say you CAN time travel. You'll do that exactly ONCE. ;) Then you'll suck vacuum for a few minutes. Time travel without teleportation is useless even if possible. For all we know someone's already invented it. Other than "I can make things disappear forever" you'd be hard pressed to prove it.
The part that would worry me is the consciousness. Brings up questions like what happens when you die. Does your consciousness cease to exist? probably. So if they replicate you to teleport you, haven't they created a new (but identical at that moment) copy, and then destroy your consciousness? Would your new copy of your consciousness know anything had happened? unlikely.
If sometime in the future teleportation becomes possible, eventually everyone will be using it. By the time a child is old enough to ponder the above, they will have been teleported hundreds of times. At which point either you don't care anymore, or you don't believe your consciousness is destroyed by the teleportation. (since it would not be evident to the latest copy of you) Then you start getting into weirder things, like if someone teleports you, who has never been teleported before, against your will, could they be charged with murder? It's kinda absurd to think your consciousness somehow transfers with the teleportation.
I think this would escalate to a whole new level if you teleported someone and failed to erase the original, and the two got together and were told to argue it out who needs to live and who needs to die. They'd both have the same conscious train of thought and would probably both want to live and would both believe they were "the real one" etc.
I think the pencil sharpener is what they were trying to avoid. And weight. If you can use a ballpoint pen for two months, or a box of pencils, which is lighter? And the weight of the sharpener? OK a small hand one is a lot lighter than an electric. Then there's the other issue of particulate matter in the space stations. Dust is a big problem there, since it doesn't fall to the flat surfaces, you have to clean EVERYTHING. The occasional escaped shaving would actually cause problems. They try very hard to keep the place spotless because the maid doesn't visit very often. ;) Also when you use the eraser on a pencil, you get those eraser crumbs, so you can't really even use that on a space station.
I recall reading for one of the shuttle missions, they calculated what each pound cost them to send up, and as a result, one of the female astronauts got her hair cut from long to short, and saved some several thousand dollars for that launch.
Also NASA's inventions tend to find their way into our lives. Take Velcro for example. I'm sure you're not unhappy that they developed THAT? Zero G pens are good for writing on things above you here on earth, though I personally don't need to do that very often.
Mirroring vs spanning is a case of available vram. (in all but a very small handful of cases) A few years back, if you have a pair of 1280x1024 displays and 2mb of vram, then you can't have spanning at millions of colors. You will have to knock down your colors or resolutions, or mirror. VRAM is limited by the video cards. Nowadays most displays have a ton more vram and have no problem spanning at full resolution and high color.
I don't understand why they don't have more of a "juice box" design. Put the drink in a flexible bag with a hole for the straw. There's no air in it, and air doesn't go in when you drink, it just collapses the bag until it's empty. No chasing globs of liquid with the straw. Seems too obvious for them to have overlooked, so why not?
They said they had some trouble determining the optimal movement of all the motors for maximum range. iirc, when trying to accelerate something, a 'whiplike" motion is preferred, similar to how a pitcher throws a fastball.
Unfortunately it almost always requires disassembling the drive, most of the battle is getting it out of the computer.
When a disc goes in, and the tray drops down to lock the hub, a gate drops in front of the slot to prevent you from trying to feed it another disk. You can SOMETIMES use a credit card size item to get the disk out without disassembly. You have to get it into the slot when the gate goes up, and quickly do one of two things. You need to assist the gate in lifting, thus providing additional force in pulling the disc off the hub lock. This is useful if the drive eject mechanism isn't strong enough to pull the disk off. OR you need to get up UNDER the disc and pry it up a bit, if it's trying to imitate a pringles potato chip. (in which case the guides have already pulled the sides of the disc all the way up as far as it will go, and the disc is deformed, and is just not letting go)
It's hard to do but I've seen it done a few times. I usually just take it apart but I've surprised myself with success a few times with that technique.
This advice is probably good for most slot load drives, not just the ones found in macs.
The other problem I've seen is where the felt on the slot is too stiff or there's a label or something on the disc, and it's causing the arm that pushes the disc out to strain and not get the disc shoved out. It will also reload. I see this about 1 in 15. In that case you can sometimes see the disc just start to peek out the slot and get sucked back in. If you see that, the hub is definitely releasing. At that point you need to grab the disc. If the disc isn't coming out far enough to say, get ahold of with a needle nose pliers, or you have trouble timing it, you can use the sharp point of a pocket knife blade to "spear" the top/bottom of the disc as it briefly peeks out. With the disc held, pull the power cord on the computer so the drive stops trying to pull it back in, and use the knife to work it out. If you catch it on the edge you may not even damage the disc.
yes, though for a consumer electronic, that's probably a really bad idea. I see a lot of older hardware before the 3rd prong era hit, where the center taps on the in/out were tied together.
I'll see if I can find some more authoritative answer for you. "Ground" only behaves as you expect it to because it's often used as a common. When lightning strikes, it's because there's a charge difference between the ground and the air. If there is no charge difference, electrons will not flow, they have to reason to. That's why they can drop off repairmen on high power lines to work on them via helicopter. In those cases though they do have to equalize the charge with a pole before he hops on the wire but it's not an ongoing issue like the buzz you get off a ground problem.
:) Anyway, the GFCI is a device in the outlet or in the cord to the toy that looks for water to be moving to ground. if it detects any, it slams the valves shut on the outlet because it knows some water is going someplace it shouldn't. It's possible to monitor the two ports on the outlet and compare them and make sure that exactly the same power is going in one as is going out the other, and of there's any difference, trip. Most do this, which is why they can protect you from completing to ground from the appliance by touching the ground of something ELSE that is common grounded, like your refrigerator. O
When ground is not common between two pieces of equipment, there is no return path, and no electrons flow. Most people's view of electricity is relative to their AC power outlets, which DO have a common ground. I have an isolation transformer in the basement, it's a simple 1:1 transformer. I can GRAB the power wires coming out the back (one at a time!) and nothing happens. Nothing, not even a light buzz. That's because the transformer isolates the outgoing lines from ground. This is an excellent lightning deterrent for my servers because lightning simply has no reason to go after my servers since they are isolated from what the lightning wants, to seek out ground.
All power tools have to pass UL, if it's tripping a GFI either it or the GFI is bad.
The power tools I was speaking of, are the type that have either failed, (loose internal wire usually) or are too old for that. Yes they're not supposed to do that.
Let me try to illustrate with water as an example. Water works a lot the same way as electricity. (that's where current got its name actually) Lets imagine water requires a pipe to flow in. As in, if you cut off the end of a water pipe with water in it, nothing comes out. It would behave the same as electricity. At the wall you have a pump that on one port pushes water and the other it pulls. Attach a single pipe and no water flows because the end just terminates, there is no return path. Put a water powered toy at the end of the wire and the toy does nothing. Run a second pipe from the toy and back to the outlet, and now the toy operates. The reason is the water cannot run through the toy no matter what the pressure (voltage) unless it has a return path since it can't just come flying out the other end of the toy and spray around the room. Electricity is the same way, it can't just spray out the end of the wire all over the room.
Water has to come from somewhere. And they provide you with a third port on the outlet to tap into the water reservoir. This is the ground. Now lets run a drip pan below our toy and run that to the common. As long as the toy doesn't leak, no water flows back to the outlet through the ground. Lets for the sake of argument say that around the toy the water can get to the drip pan if it springs a leak. This is why there is a metal shell around your power drill, that's the drip pan. Now lets say the toy springs a leak. (a frayed wire comes loose inside the drill and touches the outer case)
That's a ground fault. Water can now flow from the high pressure line to the ground, as well as the return. Depending on the size of the pipe, energy the toy requires, and size of the fault, this may be a little water or a lot of water. Same with the short in the drill.
This is actually working out well as an example.
I've used a macbook pro and powerbook for some time, always with the two prong pack, and I have yet to get any tingle from the case. One thing that is being overlooked here is that the lack of a ground pin is not the cause. To get a buzz off the case there has to be an original path from the outlet to the computer, to allow your body to be the return path.
Many electronic power packs use "transformers", which use two isolated, closed loops to transform power, magnetically coupled. (to make a trade off of voltage for current, since laptops need 12v and the wall gives 120v) There is no path between the two, and you could start chewing on the power wires if you wanted to, (one at a time I would advise) without getting the slightest buzz.
The only way you could get a buzz off the case is if the case is grounded (via the 3rd pin) and that there is a ground fault in your area of the building (in which case you would get a buzz by sticking a paperclip into the ground pin on the outlet) OR if the pack was a more direct regulated power and was designed poorly. (like connecting the center tap off the 120v side with the center tap on the laptop side)
Devices experiencing a minor short that have a ground pin can cause equipment all over the building to buzz you. Attach a GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter) power strip and see if it trips where you are seeing the problem. It just might. I've seen cases where when I plugged in a certain power tool and revved it up, it would trip every GFCI outlet in the house. Same effect, caused by the power tool's bad (dangerous really) design.
I remove disks from drives here from time to time and I'd say you got VERY lucky, holding the machine upside down does provide an advantage, but it's so slight as to be amazing that it worked. The disk is too flexible and when the edges are lifted up, it does not release from the hub lock. Gravity can't be helping it very much...
Slot load drives have four important parts that are relevant to your question.
First, they have a track on the outside edges that keeps the disk centered as it's slid in, and prevents anything from touching the media area of the disk to scratch it. This track moves down once the disk is inserted, and pulls it down onto the hub ring where it locks onto the hub of the drive, leaving nothing else touching the disc.
Second there is a felt covered arm waiting just inside the slot to lightly pinch the disk to pull it in. The felt on the arm prevents scratching.
Third, when ejecting the disc, the track lifts back up, and is SUPPOSED to release the disk from the hub lock. Disks that flex too much will simply bend like a pringles chip until the drive gives up and reloads it. This is probably what's happening with these ecodisks, they are not rigid enough.
Fourth, when the disc is released from the hub, a cup shaped catch presses the disk out the slot for you to grab - it presses on the end of the disk and so can't scratch it.
The standard for disks includes a support nearer the hub ring that presses on the bottom of the disk more near the center of the media area, so that in addition to the disk being lifted from left and right edges by the track, it's also lifted from the areas closer to the middle of the disk. This would help an overly flexible disk to release from the hub lock. It also is prone to scratching the disk, which is probably part of the reason apple omitted it.
I get to extract business card CDs or those mini (2.5") disks from slot loaders about once a month, which I consider surprisingly infrequent.
Every rare now and again we also get in a drive that has a problem with a particular manufactured CD, usually because the hub diameter is juuuust a little too small and the slot loader can't release the disk from its hub lock when trying to eject it. (makes the drive strain, and then accept the disk back in, so it works but you can't get it out)
Apple does adhere to standards. Look at scsi, ATA, sata, bluetooth, usb, firewire, the list goes on and on. It's pretty rare to find a bit of hardware that is not fundamentally compatible with mac. The last time I heard of an example was when the new powermac g5's came out with their internal sata drives, that some large western digital drives did not work with them. Turned out to be a problem with WD not adhering to the standards in a way that most other manufacturers flubbed on and got away with, and so apple was one of the few that truly DID adhere to the SATA standard. WD has since fixed their firmware. (you don't dot your i or cross your t? ok we're not playing ball.)
We had problems with the kids punching out the grilles in the new emacs. And then later punching out the exposed cones. It took three emacs left with dual metal cavities in their front faces before they started locking the lab when no teacher was supervising it.
So if the government screws they are going to get a healthy beating in all papers, no matter of the party. Which will practically guarantee losing next election.
That, and with the two dominant parties in the USA garnering around what, 85% of the vote, if one of the leading candidate's parties screws the public as you say, they are left with only one viable alternative, which is unfortunate. (gets into a "lesser of the two evils" doesn't it?) People that would change their vote in sweden might not change their vote in the USA because of the low contrast level between the two big choices, and the feeling that they are "throwing their vote away" by voting for any party that trails by so far.
Wow I think I invented TFA's idea of malware, I did this YEARS ago. Lets see if I can remember my leet skillz...
10 INIT A
wow, I can't believe I remembered that.
This is about the caliber of the "malware" on this site. Though I wonder if apple will react by pushing out their first clamav update?
It doesn't take special permissions to put stuff in ~/Applications. It's not done by default, but some users do do it, and Finder supports it.
/Applications folder is owned by root, and it is grouped to admin. Other has only read access. If you want to write to /Applications you have to be a member of admin, which is usually identical to the list of sudoers. Although probably 70% of accounts on macs are admins, (less than the 99% of windows...) not everyone is. If you are a parent and have kids, your kids are probably not admins on the computer so they can't break it. (at least can't break it for the rest of the family anyway)
Actually it does. The
The point being made was that yes, you are allowed to hose your account. No one should have any expectation that the system can protect you from yourself. You can just as quickly drag your Documents folder to the trash and empty it yourself as you can double click a script written to do just the same thing. The difference is you don't tank the entire machine, or cause problems for the other user accounts on the computer. By the definition you appear to be using, someone posting a text file with instructions on how to "optimize" your computer by dragging the contents of your home folder to the trash, could be considered malware.
The primary difference between this and most of the earlier windows malware is this is not a "drive-by download", where merely visiting the web page triggers a download and execute of code that can do damage. On a mac, if you DO click on something, you will get one or two warnings that you have downloaded an application and asking if you want to allow it. You get one warning when downloading the DMG, and another warning when trying to run any app inside the DMG once opened. The first warning has been around awhile, but the second one is new and goes something like "you are opening application xxx for the first time, which you have downloaded from the internet. Do you wish to continue?"
I don't personally think there is any way for the mac to remain anywhere near as free of 'malware' for even the near future. It's going to come up. I'll just be happy if it remains worm and virus free for the long term. And the way it's designed, there's a very good chance of that. It's the computer's job to block viruses and worms. It's the user's responsibility to avoid malware. (although it remains the computer's job to mitigate the damage caused by a user that chooses to run malware, and most importantly to protect the other users)
I have a fun screenshot of the Registry Cleaner web page, saying their software can fix problems in my registry which are causing all sorts of problems.
The first funny part is it desperately tries to look like an IE window with a close and cancel button etc which just clicks the download link, which is laughable since the browser is clearly firefox. Then next you notice the apple in the upper left of the screen...
I rather doubt a DMG can be executed on any computer... ;)
a unique marketing model for 'manycore' processors
Nothing UNIQUE about this strategy. It's a model growing in popularity. Traditionally companies that wanted to capture several levels of market would make several models of a unit. Like buying a laptop with a better graphics chip or bus speed etc. This cost them more because they had to produce three different units which triples costs on some of their overheads. What this is doing is allowing them to produce one high end product, and configure it easily, post-production, to any of the three units they want to market. The same capabilities are present in all models, but features are disabled/crippled/nerfed in the less expensive models. This allows them to sell their product in the lower cost market without losing sales in their high end market, and without the additional expense of producing several different models.
It's a good idea for the manufacturer, but introduces the problem of what happens when the consumer figures out how to "enable" disabled features in their low end model? This always results in a little war of sorts, where the manufacturer takes steps to make de-nerfing difficult or impossible. It always aggravates the consumer to find out that after he conceded to buying the model that didn't do everything he wanted it to due to cost, CAN do it, it just refuses to. The consumer feels cheated that he payed for a gadget that CAN do what he wants it to, but can't take advantage of it.
Interestingly, it doesn't become a problem until the consumer realizes the product that they were obviously happy to pay the small amount for can do more than they bargained for. The producer would argue that you didn't pay what they were asking for those additional features and so you should not feel cheated, and that you agreed to the advertised feature set when you purchased the product.
The consumer then will try to modify the product to restore the disabled features, and can get upset if it's not possible or is made deliberately difficult.
As much as it causes aggravation in the consumer (that'd be ME) I think it's not a bad idea. What it all boils down to is you can't complain about a product being capable of performing beyond the advertised and accepted expectations at the time you purchased it. You agreed to buy it Just because it's done on purpose does not change the situation. If it CAN do more than advertised and claimed, and you can make it do that, good for you. If you can't, then too bad.
In the end, this DOES result in slightly higher cost for the low end model, because the cost of production (or development) of the low end product is higher than it would have been, if the company had only been making the low end model, and that money ends up in the pockets of the manufacturers who shave overhead on production. So from that point of view it's not a good thing for the consumer, but not for the reason they are seeing.
An intelligent flash controller could level the write field by using a table to look up blocks, and periodically shift the table offset so that writes were being distributed more evenly across the flash storage. Doesn't help much until you consider the very small percentage of space the page file occupies. It would take a long time for it to wear out the entire drive.
But this would do scarry things to the complexity of the controller chip. Though from what I've seen of the ZFS specs, it should be a piece 'o cake
High capacity drives are going to be expensive due to their very nature of early technology and gradual adoption rate.
I think they have that backwards. Lets try High capacity drives are going to have a gradual adpotion rate due to their very nature of being expensive due to their being early technology
There, that's better.
I'd have one now ("be an early adpopter") if they weren't so bloddy expensive.
so you'd leave your car out at the shopping mall with the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked, and when your car got stolen and someone tried to tell you that you were being irresponsible, you'd argue with them over it, because it was not even partly your fault?