Yes, Liquid Cooling is, if you'll pardon the expression, cool, but it has GOT to be fairly fragile.
Forget about putting it in your car's back seat and driving to a LAN party -- imagine boxing it up and packing it as luggage or shipping it UPS to a gaming convention? You'd certainly have to drain it, pack it very carefully, unpack it with similar care, check for anything loose with a fine-toothed comb, fill it back up (with the special "magic liquid" no doubt), bleed it (I guess), inspect for leaks, and fix anything that's broken with any tools you may have onhand inside a hotel ballroom.
No thanks.
I Think I've save $3000 and build a nice gaming SFF (small form factor) system that, though aircooled and "only" 80% as fast as this liquid-cooled mess, will survive repeated trips on an airplane, either as baggage or checked in as a carry-on bag.
Oh, wait. I did. Now off to the Aces High 2004 Convention!
Though these days I earn my keep writing for a pair of computer magazines, I did for a spell try my hand at fiction. I wrote a short story entitled "One Person's Junk" in 1992 that covers just this very subject.
Some Googling turns up not only the original source (http://www.intertext.com/v2n4/junk.html) but many, many mirrors, much to my surprise. Here's one: http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk/~mwatkins/isoc/ernst.htm
Anyway, should you feel like a little light reading, check these out.
Again, with the Apple II's. There was one night where I was upgrading a//e to an Enhanced//e, which involved replacing three rom chips (each the size of a large postage stamp - as those were the days) and the 6502 CPU with a 65C02. In fact this is the same machine I have today.
Well, I was a little drunk that night, and I wound up, due to carelesness, inserting two of the ROM chips and the CPU BACKWARDS on the motherboard, and powered the system up.
No beep. No drive activity. No nothing but a sinking feeling. I actually powered it up 4 or 5 times before going to bed and sleeping it off.
I was pretty concerned the next day when I looked at my handiwork, but, as is the theme with this article, setting the chips in correctly resulted in everything being fine -- even the new CPU.
I think computer can survive a lot more than the general population thinks...
I worked my way through college doing tech support for Beagle Bros. If you recognize the reference, then you are a TRUE SLASHDOTTER in my humble opinion.
Anyway, if you had a steady hand and didn't cross the pins, you could insert or remove a disk drive card with the power still on. We used Slot 6, but I'm sure it would have worked in any slot.
Needless to say, if our local Apple dealer knew we did this, it surely would have voided any warranty.;-)
And you know what? That Apple//e I did that in in 1988 *still* works just fine, and it used to be on 24/7 for 3 *years* for a while there. Let's see Dell top THAT!
I would expect PCs to be at least as fault-tolerant.
I have spent more time than I care to think about reading all of this (including all the sites and forum postings I can fine), and it seems so cut and dried to me that I have been wondering why the police haven't acted yet.
If all this were staged, that would explain it.
Good thing/. put the link to the story here. I didn't really want the spies at IS at work to see me searching for the terms "Erect Monkey" to get the details...
Wired had a great article last year (which I can't find - dammit) regarding this very subject. They explained how the hardware folks at Sony(i.e., the people who would make an iPod clone) were forbidden to make such a device from the higher-ups at Sony, who were protecting their movie and record business, because OBVIOUSLY (eyes rolling here) if you sell hardware that plays MP3s, you're promoting stolen music, which takes away money from Sony Records.
Only a moment's thought should reveal that this must be true. Skimming the linked article doesn't reveal any such connection. Sigh.
All the music players Sony releases use their weird compression method which requires converting MP3s to their own format. Think about why this is, and consider how much money Sony makes selling music and movies.
DishNetwork has been selling and/or leasing what it calls PVR's (personal video recorders) for two years now. The one set-top box integrates the whole record-to-hard-drive-from-the-program-guide since day one, including Pay-Per-View and the movie channels.
There is only one quality mode, and it is indistinguishable from "live" digital satelite TV. I've NEVER encountered a program I couldn't time-shift. Oh, and there's a 30-second commercial skip button that works out of the box on the remote.
So why exactly is this development for cable TV "news"?
Its for nimrods like you with wonton disregard for my data that Ghost was invented. Every few weeks (or days, sometimes) I Ghost my machines to another drive (or CD rom in some cases, or now USB external drives) just because some idiot in IS decides that my data is less important than his/her rules.
I can't tell you how many times being able to roll back a "fix" has saved my fat from the fire.
And I'm not talking about when a security patch gets installed that actually works seamlessly. When I don't know about IS updates, I'm happy, because I'm still working. I'm talking about those Monday mornings when you boot up your machine and it crashes every time you try to print, or click the Start button, or move the mouse. Yup, some IS genuis didn't bother to reboot the system and check to make sure things worked AS THEY FOUND IT before moving on to the next PC to "update". I've had co-workers lose months of work because the IS "solution" to a crashing PC after an update was to reformat and reinstall. Fucking brilliant!
As for Rogue OS'es, in my experience, the average IS person isn't skilled enough to recognize one if it bit them in the rear. If they did and they reformatted my drive without asking, well, not only would I have a Ghost image to get right back where I was, but there'd be a quite a few angry calls, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Forget about putting it in your car's back seat and driving to a LAN party -- imagine boxing it up and packing it as luggage or shipping it UPS to a gaming convention? You'd certainly have to drain it, pack it very carefully, unpack it with similar care, check for anything loose with a fine-toothed comb, fill it back up (with the special "magic liquid" no doubt), bleed it (I guess), inspect for leaks, and fix anything that's broken with any tools you may have onhand inside a hotel ballroom.
No thanks.
I Think I've save $3000 and build a nice gaming SFF (small form factor) system that, though aircooled and "only" 80% as fast as this liquid-cooled mess, will survive repeated trips on an airplane, either as baggage or checked in as a carry-on bag.
Oh, wait. I did. Now off to the Aces High 2004 Convention!
Some Googling turns up not only the original source (http://www.intertext.com/v2n4/junk.html) but many, many mirrors, much to my surprise. Here's one: http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk/~mwatkins/isoc/ernst.htm
Anyway, should you feel like a little light reading, check these out.
Well, I was a little drunk that night, and I wound up, due to carelesness, inserting two of the ROM chips and the CPU BACKWARDS on the motherboard, and powered the system up.
No beep. No drive activity. No nothing but a sinking feeling. I actually powered it up 4 or 5 times before going to bed and sleeping it off.
I was pretty concerned the next day when I looked at my handiwork, but, as is the theme with this article, setting the chips in correctly resulted in everything being fine -- even the new CPU.
I think computer can survive a lot more than the general population thinks...
Anyway, if you had a steady hand and didn't cross the pins, you could insert or remove a disk drive card with the power still on. We used Slot 6, but I'm sure it would have worked in any slot.
Needless to say, if our local Apple dealer knew we did this, it surely would have voided any warranty. ;-)
And you know what? That Apple //e I did that in in 1988 *still* works just fine, and it used to be on 24/7 for 3 *years* for a while there. Let's see Dell top THAT!
I would expect PCs to be at least as fault-tolerant.
I have spent more time than I care to think about reading all of this (including all the sites and forum postings I can fine), and it seems so cut and dried to me that I have been wondering why the police haven't acted yet. If all this were staged, that would explain it.
Good thing /. put the link to the story here. I didn't really want the spies at IS at work to see me searching for the terms "Erect Monkey" to get the details...
Only a moment's thought should reveal that this must be true. Skimming the linked article doesn't reveal any such connection. Sigh.
All the music players Sony releases use their weird compression method which requires converting MP3s to their own format. Think about why this is, and consider how much money Sony makes selling music and movies.
DishNetwork has been selling and/or leasing what it calls PVR's (personal video recorders) for two years now. The one set-top box integrates the whole record-to-hard-drive-from-the-program-guide since day one, including Pay-Per-View and the movie channels.
There is only one quality mode, and it is indistinguishable from "live" digital satelite TV. I've NEVER encountered a program I couldn't time-shift. Oh, and there's a 30-second commercial skip button that works out of the box on the remote.
So why exactly is this development for cable TV "news"?
Months of work refers to settings and tools in a production environment that took months to stabilize. Projects get archived in Notes and such.
These days *I* am the backup routine around our department for environments. Ghost to USB drives, burn them to CDs.
IS has no backup routines at all anymore. Apparently they were taking up too much server space! Why the hell is it there then?!
Formatted with extreme prejudice, eh?
Its for nimrods like you with wonton disregard for my data that Ghost was invented. Every few weeks (or days, sometimes) I Ghost my machines to another drive (or CD rom in some cases, or now USB external drives) just because some idiot in IS decides that my data is less important than his/her rules.
I can't tell you how many times being able to roll back a "fix" has saved my fat from the fire.
And I'm not talking about when a security patch gets installed that actually works seamlessly. When I don't know about IS updates, I'm happy, because I'm still working. I'm talking about those Monday mornings when you boot up your machine and it crashes every time you try to print, or click the Start button, or move the mouse. Yup, some IS genuis didn't bother to reboot the system and check to make sure things worked AS THEY FOUND IT before moving on to the next PC to "update". I've had co-workers lose months of work because the IS "solution" to a crashing PC after an update was to reformat and reinstall. Fucking brilliant!
As for Rogue OS'es, in my experience, the average IS person isn't skilled enough to recognize one if it bit them in the rear. If they did and they reformatted my drive without asking, well, not only would I have a Ghost image to get right back where I was, but there'd be a quite a few angry calls, I think.