NASA didn't invent Teflon. Teflon was invented by a guy at DuPont in the 1930s. Neither did NASA invent Velcro (see my other post below). Where do you guys get these ideas? "Uh, it seems smart and useful and stuff, so NASA must've invented it."
And no, NASA wasn't the reason why electronics are so small either. You don't need a lot of computer power for space flights. The Shuttle uses 8086s, remember?
Velcro was patented in 1955. NASA was founded in 1958. NASA didn't invent everything. In fact, I can't think of anything they invented. Or wait, there was this ball pen that worked in zero g... Typically, space missions use rather old technology, because everything has to be tested so thoroughly that in the meantime the state of the art has advanced significantly.
[DVDs] Get handled more often, so there is more opportunity to drop them onto a surface. Who cares if it's ten times less likely to break when dropped, if it's a thousand times more likely to be dropped?
That's a valid point. As long as you leave the harddrive in place, that's true. But if you have it in a swap mount, things look different. The point is, a DVD is a plastic disc. A harddrive contains a lot of moving parts and sensitive electronics. The data on a DVD is burnt into a layer of dye. On a harddrive, the information is encoded as tiny magnetic fields, which decay over time.
[DVDs] Are also proprietary. Are you sure your DVD-R can read the DVD you burned on another company's DVD-R?
Almost every DVD drive or player you can buy right now can at least read DVD-Rs. Older ones probably too. I don't know about the other standards, but DVD-R seems to be the most agreed upon.
Data on a DVD-R can't be intentionally erased, or even modified. This isn't necessarily a good thing. Depends on how up-to-date you need your data to be, doesn't it?
Of course, depends on the type of data. To quote the original poster: "My company has a large file archive of documents and data that don't necessarily need to be stored on read/write media [...]"
Lastly, as to 20 year old harddrives being incompatible with today's, yes that is true. But you have no crystal ball, and you can't say that today's HDDs will be inaccessible in 20 years, nor can you be sure that CD and DVD will continue to be familiar formats.
There's very good reason to assume that. The DVD is not only a standard for computers, but also for consumer appliances, i.e. DVD players. As long as there are going to be DVD movies, there will be DVD-ROM drives. And probably even after that. Ever wondered why a DVD is the size of a CD? Because it allows the DVD drive to read CD-ROMs. I'd bet that 10 years from now you can still buy a drive that reads CD-ROMs. The same will be true for DVDs: drives will be backward compatible.
Besides, if the data is important enough to be kept around, chances are the hardware to access it will be too (or haven't you seen machine rooms that still use tape backups from X years ago?)
Well, tell that to the guys at the JPL: "For example, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is facing a crisis due to the huge libraries of data from space probes like Pioneer that are stored on aging seven-track tapes for which readers are no longer made."
(I believe there was a story about this on/., but I couldn't find it. The quote is from this article.
)
Any ISP employee, sysadmin or free email provider admin can already look at your data any time they please. And they do.
Yes, but it's illegal for them to do it. Everyone can already beat the living snot out of you any time they please, but do you want it to be legal for the cops?
Yeah, too bad most BIOSes have manufacturer-default master passwords, the lists of which you can find on the net. You can also invalidate the CMOS data with a five-line assembler program, and gone is your password. There are even more ways. Also, using a Keyghost on such a public computer, you could sniff the passwords of everyone logging in on that machine.
Bottom line: if the computer is physically accessible, it's easily crackable. At least have a login system using encrypted smart cards or something similar where users are required to have physical identification.
Heard of the Hindenburg disaster? The Hindenburg didn't explode. It just burned. Out of 96 people on board, only 36 died. How many people typically survive in airplane disasters, even ones where the jet goes up in flames while standing still on the ground? And those planes use jet fuel, which is more like diesel in its consistency. Hydrogen can only explode if it mixes with air. But that typically doesn't happen, the hydrogen burns before it can mix with enough air to form an explosive mixture. The problem with gasoline is that it flows all over the place. If a hydrogen tank is punctured, you only have the fire at that specific location. If a gasoline tank ruptures, it will set everything ablaze. So gasoline is much more dangerous than hydrogen.
... they tap all those ocean-floor fiber optic cables. How do they find the useful information within that gigantic stream of data? And what about steganography? Besides, real terrorists seem to prefer hand-written notes. OTOH, maybe they're not interested in the terrorists...
I really wanted to take your post seriously, that is until I read the word "audiophiles". Audiophiles, i.e. morons who buy pure silver speaker cables and special sound-improving lotions to bathe their CDs in (I'm not kidding) at horrendous prices can't possibly be taken seriously.
Back to the topic, yes, humans like the way tube amps sound, because they add a kind of distortion that makes the music sound "warm". On the other hand, Hi-Fi stands for High Fidelity, and tube amps aren't. If you want the music to sound like when it was recorded, get a decent solid state amp. If you want to shell out insane amounts of money for an inferior product, buy a tube amp and listen to it while you drive to work on your steam tractor.
Info on audio, amps (and how to build your own): Rod Elliott's Pages.
Where's the disadvantage? The Siemens DVB cards which VDR uses are great. First of all, there are high quality, well documented open source Linux drivers for them, and secondly, the TV-out quality beats any graphics card. It's even better than most standalone DVD players. If you have a Rev. 1.3 card, you even have RGB out. Not to mention that these cards have a hardware MPEG2-Decoder on board, so you can use a low-power CPU with a passive cooler.
What temperature extremes? You realize there is no atmosphere on the moon, do you? This means the only means of heat exchange between objects is by radiation. With one layer of tin foil, you have 99% insulation.
Building materials: the moon is rich in building materials, especially iron. You could process that with a solar oven. You can even extract oxygen from the moon's minerals. And once you have a permanent, nearly self-sufficient base (I think a time between supplies of one year is feasible), you can expand from there.
Oh, and let's not forget the possible scientific insights we could gain. If you think the Hubble's images are great, imagine how much better pictures a six times bigger moon-based telescope could produce. Furthermore, a radio telescope on the far side of the moon would be shielded from earth's radio interference that greatly hinders radio astronomy today.
Ah forget it, it's a stupid idea. Let's just sit on our asses and watch some more TV.
Set up a company-wide password policy. Make sure everyone knows it. When you ge h4x0red, you find out who was responsible and if the reason was a trivial password. Then you have the culprit beheaded and nobody will ever violate the password policy again.
Oh wait, forget about the last sentence, I'm still having problems translating Sun Tzu's advice to today's world.
But in contrast to the technologies mentioned in the article, small, direct-methanol fuel cells (e.g. for powering your notebook) are already being produced.
Finally, we're on our way to getting rid of this century-old technology of chemical batteries.
They've never been particularly keen on civil liberties, but they've been allies to the US forever [...]
Yeah, well, Turkey was Germany's ally both in WWI and WWII. And Hitler actually got hist inspiration from the Turkish genocide on the Armenians during/after WWI. I can't find the quote right now, but it was something along the lines of "no one will give a sh*t about the Jews because no one gave a sh*t about the Armenians".
The obvious explanation
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 1
Those people Mr. Katz has been talking to probably read/.
You can't generate "cold" out of thin air. If one side of this thing gets cold, the other one will get hot. From their website: "Cool Chips plc has devised "Cool Chips" which use electrons to carry heat from one side of a vacuum diode to the other." So you still have to get rid of the heat on the "cool chip", and the hot side will have to dissipate more heat than the cold side absorbs, because efficiency can never be 100%. This means it works like a peltier, just (probably) more efficient.
You've got to face it, SCSI is almost dead. SCSI harddrives aren't (much) faster than their ATA counterparts (the high-RPM SCSI drives have a lower latency, but this is insignificant for most applications), they are not more reliable (on the contrary), and they cost ten times as much. Other than harddrives, new SCSI products aren't being designed (apart from niche products maybe). The only real advantage of SCSI, being able to attach many harddrives to achieve high transfer rates, is gone with the advent of cheap professional ATA-RAID controllers like the Adaptec 2400. And Serial ATA will do dismiss the last remaining practical flaw of ATA, the cabling.
Kludgy systems persist, while the intelligent designs die. Betamax anyone? How many of you drive a car with a Wankel engine? This is the sorry fate of humanity.
Well... with an ATA 100 controller you meet the hardware requirements for LBA48. My Asus P4T has ATA-100 and supports LBA48. LBA48 is part of the ATAPI-6 standard, as is acoustic management, both of which almost all of the current ATA 100 controllers support. ATAPI-6 is not yet ANSI certified, but that has never kept people from using anything. ATAPI (AT Attachment Packet Interface) is actually a protocol to send SCSI-like commands over the (physical) IDE (now UltraDMA) interface, so it's mostly a software issue, except that you need a few extra registers in the controller for LBA48. UltraDMA is a physical interface that is much like IDE, but with improved error correction and using both the rising and falling edge of the signal to transfer data (like DDR). The faster UltraDMA modes then just have higher clockspeeds.
So UltraDMA==physical interface; ATAPI==Protocol.
It's all a big kludge, really. I can't believe SCSI is dying.
Uhm... Ultra ATA 100 (ATAPI-6) already supports 48 bit addressing, thus allowing for 144 PB (that's petabytes) disks. Furthermore, it is inadvisable to connect more than one hard drive to one ATA channel, because of the crappy interface design (only one disk can transfer at a time, DMA problems). So this is nice marketing blurb, but in reality it's pointless. HDDs won't get past the 100 MB/s until at least 3 years from now, and by then Serial ATA will already be ubiquitous. Conclusion: if ATA133 comes with your mainboard, fine, but don't pay extra for it if you've already got ATA100.
No. The wear occurs due to the oil flowing off the engine's parts and surfaces down into the oil pan/transaxle. The higher fuel consumption is because the engine is cold and the oil is stickier. If you turn off a warm engine and start it again within ten minutes, none of these effects occurs. Therefore, turning your engine off at a red light is advisable. The only part that will get stressed more than normally is the starter motor.
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And no, NASA wasn't the reason why electronics are so small either. You don't need a lot of computer power for space flights. The Shuttle uses 8086s, remember?
Velcro was patented in 1955. NASA was founded in 1958. NASA didn't invent everything. In fact, I can't think of anything they invented. Or wait, there was this ball pen that worked in zero g ... Typically, space missions use rather old technology, because everything has to be tested so thoroughly that in the meantime the state of the art has advanced significantly.
That's a valid point. As long as you leave the harddrive in place, that's true. But if you have it in a swap mount, things look different. The point is, a DVD is a plastic disc. A harddrive contains a lot of moving parts and sensitive electronics. The data on a DVD is burnt into a layer of dye. On a harddrive, the information is encoded as tiny magnetic fields, which decay over time.
[DVDs] Are also proprietary. Are you sure your DVD-R can read the DVD you burned on another company's DVD-R?
Almost every DVD drive or player you can buy right now can at least read DVD-Rs. Older ones probably too. I don't know about the other standards, but DVD-R seems to be the most agreed upon.
Data on a DVD-R can't be intentionally erased, or even modified. This isn't necessarily a good thing. Depends on how up-to-date you need your data to be, doesn't it?
Of course, depends on the type of data. To quote the original poster: "My company has a large file archive of documents and data that don't necessarily need to be stored on read/write media [...]"
Lastly, as to 20 year old harddrives being incompatible with today's, yes that is true. But you have no crystal ball, and you can't say that today's HDDs will be inaccessible in 20 years, nor can you be sure that CD and DVD will continue to be familiar formats.
There's very good reason to assume that. The DVD is not only a standard for computers, but also for consumer appliances, i.e. DVD players. As long as there are going to be DVD movies, there will be DVD-ROM drives. And probably even after that. Ever wondered why a DVD is the size of a CD? Because it allows the DVD drive to read CD-ROMs. I'd bet that 10 years from now you can still buy a drive that reads CD-ROMs. The same will be true for DVDs: drives will be backward compatible.
Besides, if the data is important enough to be kept around, chances are the hardware to access it will be too (or haven't you seen machine rooms that still use tape backups from X years ago?)
Well, tell that to the guys at the JPL: "For example, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is facing a crisis due to the huge libraries of data from space probes like Pioneer that are stored on aging seven-track tapes for which readers are no longer made."
(I believe there was a story about this on /., but I couldn't find it. The quote is from this article.
)
Yes, but it's illegal for them to do it. Everyone can already beat the living snot out of you any time they please, but do you want it to be legal for the cops?
But why not get the real thing instead, with a 32-bit preemptive multitasking OS?.
Bottom line: if the computer is physically accessible, it's easily crackable. At least have a login system using encrypted smart cards or something similar where users are required to have physical identification.
And a BIOS password is just a joke.
Uhhh, yes, they have an interest in it, and they seem to like it also.
Heard of the Hindenburg disaster? The Hindenburg didn't explode. It just burned. Out of 96 people on board, only 36 died. How many people typically survive in airplane disasters, even ones where the jet goes up in flames while standing still on the ground? And those planes use jet fuel, which is more like diesel in its consistency. Hydrogen can only explode if it mixes with air. But that typically doesn't happen, the hydrogen burns before it can mix with enough air to form an explosive mixture. The problem with gasoline is that it flows all over the place. If a hydrogen tank is punctured, you only have the fire at that specific location. If a gasoline tank ruptures, it will set everything ablaze. So gasoline is much more dangerous than hydrogen.
No, the passing of time is defined as the increase of entropy. You are making things up.
... they tap all those ocean-floor fiber optic cables. How do they find the useful information within that gigantic stream of data? And what about steganography? Besides, real terrorists seem to prefer hand-written notes. OTOH, maybe they're not interested in the terrorists ...
Back to the topic, yes, humans like the way tube amps sound, because they add a kind of distortion that makes the music sound "warm". On the other hand, Hi-Fi stands for High Fidelity, and tube amps aren't. If you want the music to sound like when it was recorded, get a decent solid state amp. If you want to shell out insane amounts of money for an inferior product, buy a tube amp and listen to it while you drive to work on your steam tractor. Info on audio, amps (and how to build your own): Rod Elliott's Pages.
Where's the disadvantage? The Siemens DVB cards which VDR uses are great. First of all, there are high quality, well documented open source Linux drivers for them, and secondly, the TV-out quality beats any graphics card. It's even better than most standalone DVD players. If you have a Rev. 1.3 card, you even have RGB out. Not to mention that these cards have a hardware MPEG2-Decoder on board, so you can use a low-power CPU with a passive cooler.
What temperature extremes? You realize there is no atmosphere on the moon, do you? This means the only means of heat exchange between objects is by radiation. With one layer of tin foil, you have 99% insulation.
Building materials: the moon is rich in building materials, especially iron. You could process that with a solar oven. You can even extract oxygen from the moon's minerals. And once you have a permanent, nearly self-sufficient base (I think a time between supplies of one year is feasible), you can expand from there.
Oh, and let's not forget the possible scientific insights we could gain. If you think the Hubble's images are great, imagine how much better pictures a six times bigger moon-based telescope could produce. Furthermore, a radio telescope on the far side of the moon would be shielded from earth's radio interference that greatly hinders radio astronomy today.
Ah forget it, it's a stupid idea. Let's just sit on our asses and watch some more TV.
Oh wait, forget about the last sentence, I'm still having problems translating Sun Tzu's advice to today's world.
Finally, we're on our way to getting rid of this century-old technology of chemical batteries.
Yeah, well, Turkey was Germany's ally both in WWI and WWII. And Hitler actually got hist inspiration from the Turkish genocide on the Armenians during/after WWI. I can't find the quote right now, but it was something along the lines of "no one will give a sh*t about the Jews because no one gave a sh*t about the Armenians".
Those people Mr. Katz has been talking to probably read /.
You can't generate "cold" out of thin air. If one side of this thing gets cold, the other one will get hot. From their website: "Cool Chips plc has devised "Cool Chips" which use electrons to carry heat from one side of a vacuum diode to the other." So you still have to get rid of the heat on the "cool chip", and the hot side will have to dissipate more heat than the cold side absorbs, because efficiency can never be 100%. This means it works like a peltier, just (probably) more efficient.
This would have been the appropriate moment for the old toss-the-smoke-grenade-and-scream-FIIIIRRRE prank.
Kludgy systems persist, while the intelligent designs die. Betamax anyone? How many of you drive a car with a Wankel engine? This is the sorry fate of humanity.
Extracting a 3DES key from an IBM 4758
Attacks on SRAMs and microcontrollers
So UltraDMA==physical interface; ATAPI==Protocol.
It's all a big kludge, really. I can't believe SCSI is dying.
Uhm ... Ultra ATA 100 (ATAPI-6) already supports 48 bit addressing, thus allowing for 144 PB (that's petabytes) disks. Furthermore, it is inadvisable to connect more than one hard drive to one ATA channel, because of the crappy interface design (only one disk can transfer at a time, DMA problems). So this is nice marketing blurb, but in reality it's pointless. HDDs won't get past the 100 MB/s until at least 3 years from now, and by then Serial ATA will already be ubiquitous. Conclusion: if ATA133 comes with your mainboard, fine, but don't pay extra for it if you've already got ATA100.
No. The wear occurs due to the oil flowing off the engine's parts and surfaces down into the oil pan/transaxle. The higher fuel consumption is because the engine is cold and the oil is stickier. If you turn off a warm engine and start it again within ten minutes, none of these effects occurs. Therefore, turning your engine off at a red light is advisable. The only part that will get stressed more than normally is the starter motor.