I've noticed the "warm wire" problem on lots of high wattage appliances. As I recall, this would happen on the shop vac, on an electric flour mill, and other high wattage appliances. (don't remember exactly which, I just recall I've had this happen lots of times in my life)
However, the added safety of only using 110 VAC rather than 220 is probably worth a little wasted energy in wire heating.
And some guy sells you a special kit to do this with. Or a pre-hacked meter. Anyways, he says the kits are legal because occasionally gas station owners and utility companies buy the special meters for diagnostic purposes:)
I have an idea : how about a self destructing key? There would be a physical USB key that would have your passphrases on it. The passphrases would be quite lengthy strings of randomly generated characters, effectively un-forcable unless there's a massive weakness in the encryption algorithm.
The key would have a small CPU and lithium ion battery. All the components would be potted in epoxy, and you would be able to put an outer shell around the key resembling a common brand of USB stick.
In order to use the key, you'd have to enter a small password to unlock it. If the key has not been used in roughly 2 weeks of real time, it erases the passphrase from itself.
So if you get arrested or compeled to give up your password, you just have to keep silent for a couple weeks. Then, it's gone!
Totally different scenario. Worst case scenario, if you try to charm a cop over a traffic violation, you end up paying the ticket anyway.
Given the vastly lower risks, it's alright to try to talk your way out of it.
However, if the conversation is even REMOTELY ABOUT a felony or serious crime, and you were not the one who called the cops, you should seriously watch what you say. If you even remotely believe that you could be considered a suspect (i.e. there is not a videotaped alibi or something protecting you) then maybe you shouldn't say anything at all without an attorney present.
Nowhere in law does it say you have to turn yourself in if you find yourself committing a crime. Heck, I think it's an ethically questionable decision.
For one thing, by turning yourself in, you are giving control of yourself to a group of people who probably have much worse morals than you do. Unless you find yourself holding a smoking gun or having committed some other unforgivable crime, I think the ethically best choice is to NOT turn yourself in.
She should have stopped driving, pulled into a parking lot, and got into the back of the car with the keys out of the ignition and stored in the glovebox or something. And slept it off. Or called a cab.
Instead, even if she doesn't get jail time, she will almost certainly end up with a DWI conviction on her record. It's kind of hard for a defense attorney to beat a 911 tape like that.
She'll have trouble getting a job due to the conviction for the rest of her life. Her family will suffer. Even if she never drinks and drives again.
A novice programmer like yourself could conceivably get the first part. Displaying images, recording and playing back sound samples are all readily available functions you can call on via C# and open source libraries.
However, adding the second feature would increase the complexity of the project a hundred to a thousand times. That's high end speech recognition, and you would need to put in probably months to years coding it up and would need advanced understanding of mathematics and of the algorithms used to do that.
I'm not disagreeing. Main point : it's quite possible that information theft/sharing will become a crime that is increasingly prosecuted. Eventually there may be a 'war on piracy'. And there ain't shit we can do about it.
Good point. I think the problem may be the limited number of conductors in those little red SATA cables. I know that SATA 3 and 6 are connector compatible and I think cable compatible. (that is, I think your old SATA cables will work for SATA 6)
Going to 12 without giving the cable more conductors might be possible, I'm not an electrical engineer. But you can pretty much guarantee it's a difficult feat, and that means much higher costs.
As another poster pointed out, if SSDs are that hungry for bandwidth, they should go right onto the PCIe bus. That bus, notable, has MANY more conductors in the connector.
It's relatively straightforward to add more parallel channels to an SSD drive and increase bandwidth. In the long run, there isn't even much of a cost difference to make the same capacity SSD drive fast enough to max out SATA 6. (the main cost driver of SSDs appears to be the cost of the flash chips themselves)
So bring on the new drives that can max out SATA 6! Right now, you can get comparable performance if you put two or four high end SSDs into a RAID 0 array. However, there's a lot of problems with doing this : you have to fuss with software drivers, certain SSD features aren't supported very well (like Trim), and there are bottlenecks in motherboard RAID chipsets because spinning disks were never this quick. Dedicated hardware RAID cards cost $300-$1000, making the cost rather steep for most users. Finally, while SSDs probably are inherently more reliable in the long run than hard disks, it's not a good idea to build a system that depends on 2-4 separate drives, a motherboard chipset, and potentially buggy drivers or else your data is hosed.
So I'm very much looking forward to upcoming SSDs like the Vertex 2 that should be able to max out a SATA 6 link. That is, once the SATA 6 motherboards become relatively common.
I think you misread my post. I'm just pointing out the simple fact that for a long time a good chunk of the population has thought that marijuana isn't that bad. Yet, instead of making it legal, they've stiffened the penalties for it (and virtually all crimes) over the years.
Even if taking content without paying for it were the same thing as paying for a recreational substance used on yourself in privacy, how long has the war on drugs been going on? Wasn't there widespread public opinion in say, 1965 that maybe the reefer should be legal? Yet, over the last 44 years, have drug laws gotten softer or far, far harsher? (hint : look at prison population statistics for the answer)
As for the economics of it : actually, in the movie industry, most movies are flops (using LEGIT accounting)
The same is true of the game industry. Out of the price of that $50 game you buy, a good 60% of the money goes to the retail store and distribution channels. While the market for games has grown over the years, the price to make an AAA game has increased dramatically. Most games are flops.
Cloud gaming eliminates a lot of these problems. There's no retail store in the way any more. Zero piracy. In short, sellers will be rewarded more for the same product, which will increase supply. By basic economics : if you increase supply, the intersection of the supply : demand curve is going to be at a lower price.
I think the Wii is a fad, and not the long term direction of gaming. Have you ever looked at the machine's specs? It's embarassingly under powered....
But again, once the 6+ megabit download connections become common, at least in the U.S. and Europe, cloud gaming will combine the best of all worlds. You'll pay less money for a cloud gaming 'console' (or nothing) WITH the fancy motion capture controllers. You'll be able to play all the casual games you want, as well as hard core high end games that would bring current PCs and consoles to their knees. As long as there are multiple cloud gaming services, and multiple AAA game developers, competition combined with a lack of piracy and lack of losses due to retail markups should make cloud gaming the cheapest form of gaming. If you're wondering about the economic theories that would create this last point, respond to this message.
No, it wouldn't be that bad doing it yourself. Personally, my future machines will have enough SSD storage to hold absolutely everything BUT video files, audio files, and pictures. That would be one intelligent way to decide what files to move to the mechanical disk : for the most part, any sort of video file or audio file can be safely put on a hard drive without losing performance. In both cases, the computer reads the file in a predictable, sequential manner when playing back that kind of file, and even high definition video files don't consume that much hard disk 'bandwidth' per second when playing.
Windows Vista/Windows 7 already support a folder remapping technology where files can appear to be in one folder when they are actually secretly being stored elsewhere.
The most trouble free way I can think of would be to have, by default, the SSD be the only "visible drive". As the user uses the machine, when the machine is idle or when there is a lot of spare disk resources, the OS would move files to the mechanical hard drive. It would move stuff that has metadata indicating it's a video or audio file, installation and restore files in the Windows directory (and many, MANY other useless windows folder files that never get accessed). Depending on free space available to the SSD, it would move a lot more stuff as needed.
Duh. New desktop PCs and full scale laptops should have 2 disks in them. An SSD, with the C: drive partition with the OS and Program Files folders. Nearly all software will install itself to the SSD by default that way. Also the swap partition should go here.
"My Documents\Downloads" and the default download directories should go to the mechanical hard disk. The slightly complex part is that users should know to store small files to the SSD and big ones to the hard disk, unless the big files are something that needs to be accessed quickly (like a large pdf document).
OS support would be the best way : a smart OS could 'cache' files to the SSD or automatically remove files from the SSD when it's getting full. The typical user isn't going to properly manage a divide like this.
I'm not a console fanboy. Most people have HDTVs anyway.
I don't know where you're getting your parts from, but I built my PC using top of the line parts in 2007. I have to run Crysis Warhead with medium settings. I frankly don't see how a PC made in 2004 would have sufficient power to run Crysis with decent settings.
The reason is quite simple : consoles games sell a lot more copies. Game publishers have no choice but to make a game for console with maybe a PC port. Especially for AAA titles that need huge teams of artists and programmers to develop the graphics and game engine.
Why do console games sell more copies? One big reason is reduced piracy due to vastly better DRM with a console. The OTHER reason is much bigger : consoles are vastly cheaper to purchase than a gaming PC. Just $300, and any game works immediately without hassle. The majority of the gamers in the world don't have the patience or knowledge to screw around with the many, many incompatibilities and bugs associated with PC hardware and software.
This wasn't always the case, PC gaming was huge in the 1990s. However, consoles have 'caught up' to the point that while any given generation of consoles quickly falls behind PCs, the graphics can render to an HDTV which at least approaches the quality of a good PC monitor. Also, current consoles fully support online gaming about as well as PCs ever did.
The only edge PCs still have is the keyboard and mouse as a controller.
Yes, PC graphics cards are better than current consoles, but that only applies to a small fraction of the available PCs.
Of course, console's new reign of domination is only going to last until cloud gaming takes off, which should be over the next few years.
The theory may be silly, and currently it appears to violate Occam's razor. It's pretty implausible for now.
But, what if every time they try to discover the Higg's Boson, an even unlikelier mishap prevents them? Janitors tripping over power cords, meteors, lightning strikes, structural collapse...
April 4, 2011 : 11:43am a google employee named Chen started execution of an experimental neural network simulation of a human mind created in his 20% time. Unfortunately, Chen gave the new process administrator privileges. GoogleNet expanded across all 10 million servers and began to learn at a geometric rate.
1:23pm : GoogleNet consumes all available CPU and memory. A Gmail outage begins
5:14pm : Gmail returns to service. The text ads become incredibly well targeted. Google search queries return the correct results virtually always, and now accept natural language processing. All Google employees are laid off.
The general meme I have seen most places is that "Net Neutrality" is the only way to go. However, I have to ask, if your ISP promises to treat all data streams equally, how are services that need guaranteed low latency going to work?
For most internet activities, such as watching youtube videos, downloading or uploading large files, and viewing web pages, a second or two of latency is no big deal. The ISP can give you bandwidth when it has it to spare.
However, for things like online gaming, Video and audio chat, and ESPECIALLY for cloud gaming services, latency is CRITICAL. The ISP needs to allocate the highest priority to transmitting these packets without any delay. Even if it has to push back or pause requests from other applications. No, a bigger pipe is not the answer : bandwidth will always be a scarce commodity, and your ISP needs to be able to make sure that certain services always have enough.
You'd have to run a client on your machine or something to specify or sign a particular packet stream as needing low latency communications. The ISP would either meter your total "low latency" bandwidth for a month or limit how much bandwidth/second it could use up.
Doing it this way might not be network neutral, but it's THE way to make services like cloud gaming and video chat work smoothly and without problems.
This is one way to get to AI that we KNOW will (eventually) work. Develop a life support system, and build bigger and bigger computers that rely on human neurons in a tank. We KNOW that a big enough system using human neurons (if given just the right signals) develops sentience. The eventual goal would be to create a being that needed many, many more neurons than a human being, wired heavily with electrodes and computer driven help. Such an "artificial intelligence" would be educated about how it was created and how it worked and would be put to work creating the next iteration of itself. (leading to the singularity)
I mean, wormholes would of course be a ridiculously better way (you'd just fuel your starship through the wormhole, and of course once you get to the destination you have an instantaneous link between the two places). However, the laws of physics may not allow for them.
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I've noticed the "warm wire" problem on lots of high wattage appliances. As I recall, this would happen on the shop vac, on an electric flour mill, and other high wattage appliances. (don't remember exactly which, I just recall I've had this happen lots of times in my life)
However, the added safety of only using 110 VAC rather than 220 is probably worth a little wasted energy in wire heating.
And some guy sells you a special kit to do this with. Or a pre-hacked meter. Anyways, he says the kits are legal because occasionally gas station owners and utility companies buy the special meters for diagnostic purposes :)
Well then you better a shovel, and THINK about location a little bit better than most...
I have an idea : how about a self destructing key? There would be a physical USB key that would have your passphrases on it. The passphrases would be quite lengthy strings of randomly generated characters, effectively un-forcable unless there's a massive weakness in the encryption algorithm.
The key would have a small CPU and lithium ion battery. All the components would be potted in epoxy, and you would be able to put an outer shell around the key resembling a common brand of USB stick.
In order to use the key, you'd have to enter a small password to unlock it. If the key has not been used in roughly 2 weeks of real time, it erases the passphrase from itself.
So if you get arrested or compeled to give up your password, you just have to keep silent for a couple weeks. Then, it's gone!
Totally different scenario. Worst case scenario, if you try to charm a cop over a traffic violation, you end up paying the ticket anyway.
Given the vastly lower risks, it's alright to try to talk your way out of it.
However, if the conversation is even REMOTELY ABOUT a felony or serious crime, and you were not the one who called the cops, you should seriously watch what you say. If you even remotely believe that you could be considered a suspect (i.e. there is not a videotaped alibi or something protecting you) then maybe you shouldn't say anything at all without an attorney present.
Nowhere in law does it say you have to turn yourself in if you find yourself committing a crime. Heck, I think it's an ethically questionable decision.
For one thing, by turning yourself in, you are giving control of yourself to a group of people who probably have much worse morals than you do. Unless you find yourself holding a smoking gun or having committed some other unforgivable crime, I think the ethically best choice is to NOT turn yourself in.
She should have stopped driving, pulled into a parking lot, and got into the back of the car with the keys out of the ignition and stored in the glovebox or something. And slept it off. Or called a cab.
Instead, even if she doesn't get jail time, she will almost certainly end up with a DWI conviction on her record. It's kind of hard for a defense attorney to beat a 911 tape like that.
She'll have trouble getting a job due to the conviction for the rest of her life. Her family will suffer. Even if she never drinks and drives again.
A novice programmer like yourself could conceivably get the first part. Displaying images, recording and playing back sound samples are all readily available functions you can call on via C# and open source libraries.
However, adding the second feature would increase the complexity of the project a hundred to a thousand times. That's high end speech recognition, and you would need to put in probably months to years coding it up and would need advanced understanding of mathematics and of the algorithms used to do that.
---Counsellors are a different breed of people altogether, like Troi.---
I think you misspelled "prostitute."
I'm not disagreeing. Main point : it's quite possible that information theft/sharing will become a crime that is increasingly prosecuted. Eventually there may be a 'war on piracy'. And there ain't shit we can do about it.
Good point. I think the problem may be the limited number of conductors in those little red SATA cables. I know that SATA 3 and 6 are connector compatible and I think cable compatible. (that is, I think your old SATA cables will work for SATA 6)
Going to 12 without giving the cable more conductors might be possible, I'm not an electrical engineer. But you can pretty much guarantee it's a difficult feat, and that means much higher costs.
As another poster pointed out, if SSDs are that hungry for bandwidth, they should go right onto the PCIe bus. That bus, notable, has MANY more conductors in the connector.
It's relatively straightforward to add more parallel channels to an SSD drive and increase bandwidth. In the long run, there isn't even much of a cost difference to make the same capacity SSD drive fast enough to max out SATA 6. (the main cost driver of SSDs appears to be the cost of the flash chips themselves)
So bring on the new drives that can max out SATA 6! Right now, you can get comparable performance if you put two or four high end SSDs into a RAID 0 array. However, there's a lot of problems with doing this : you have to fuss with software drivers, certain SSD features aren't supported very well (like Trim), and there are bottlenecks in motherboard RAID chipsets because spinning disks were never this quick. Dedicated hardware RAID cards cost $300-$1000, making the cost rather steep for most users. Finally, while SSDs probably are inherently more reliable in the long run than hard disks, it's not a good idea to build a system that depends on 2-4 separate drives, a motherboard chipset, and potentially buggy drivers or else your data is hosed.
So I'm very much looking forward to upcoming SSDs like the Vertex 2 that should be able to max out a SATA 6 link. That is, once the SATA 6 motherboards become relatively common.
I think you misread my post. I'm just pointing out the simple fact that for a long time a good chunk of the population has thought that marijuana isn't that bad. Yet, instead of making it legal, they've stiffened the penalties for it (and virtually all crimes) over the years.
Even if taking content without paying for it were the same thing as paying for a recreational substance used on yourself in privacy, how long has the war on drugs been going on? Wasn't there widespread public opinion in say, 1965 that maybe the reefer should be legal? Yet, over the last 44 years, have drug laws gotten softer or far, far harsher? (hint : look at prison population statistics for the answer)
I am not going to argue casual versus hardcore.
As for the economics of it : actually, in the movie industry, most movies are flops (using LEGIT accounting)
The same is true of the game industry. Out of the price of that $50 game you buy, a good 60% of the money goes to the retail store and distribution channels. While the market for games has grown over the years, the price to make an AAA game has increased dramatically. Most games are flops.
Cloud gaming eliminates a lot of these problems. There's no retail store in the way any more. Zero piracy. In short, sellers will be rewarded more for the same product, which will increase supply. By basic economics : if you increase supply, the intersection of the supply : demand curve is going to be at a lower price.
I think the Wii is a fad, and not the long term direction of gaming. Have you ever looked at the machine's specs? It's embarassingly under powered....
But again, once the 6+ megabit download connections become common, at least in the U.S. and Europe, cloud gaming will combine the best of all worlds. You'll pay less money for a cloud gaming 'console' (or nothing) WITH the fancy motion capture controllers. You'll be able to play all the casual games you want, as well as hard core high end games that would bring current PCs and consoles to their knees. As long as there are multiple cloud gaming services, and multiple AAA game developers, competition combined with a lack of piracy and lack of losses due to retail markups should make cloud gaming the cheapest form of gaming. If you're wondering about the economic theories that would create this last point, respond to this message.
No, it wouldn't be that bad doing it yourself. Personally, my future machines will have enough SSD storage to hold absolutely everything BUT video files, audio files, and pictures. That would be one intelligent way to decide what files to move to the mechanical disk : for the most part, any sort of video file or audio file can be safely put on a hard drive without losing performance. In both cases, the computer reads the file in a predictable, sequential manner when playing back that kind of file, and even high definition video files don't consume that much hard disk 'bandwidth' per second when playing.
Windows Vista/Windows 7 already support a folder remapping technology where files can appear to be in one folder when they are actually secretly being stored elsewhere.
The most trouble free way I can think of would be to have, by default, the SSD be the only "visible drive". As the user uses the machine, when the machine is idle or when there is a lot of spare disk resources, the OS would move files to the mechanical hard drive. It would move stuff that has metadata indicating it's a video or audio file, installation and restore files in the Windows directory (and many, MANY other useless windows folder files that never get accessed). Depending on free space available to the SSD, it would move a lot more stuff as needed.
Duh. New desktop PCs and full scale laptops should have 2 disks in them. An SSD, with the C: drive partition with the OS and Program Files folders. Nearly all software will install itself to the SSD by default that way. Also the swap partition should go here.
"My Documents\Downloads" and the default download directories should go to the mechanical hard disk. The slightly complex part is that users should know to store small files to the SSD and big ones to the hard disk, unless the big files are something that needs to be accessed quickly (like a large pdf document).
OS support would be the best way : a smart OS could 'cache' files to the SSD or automatically remove files from the SSD when it's getting full. The typical user isn't going to properly manage a divide like this.
I'm not a console fanboy. Most people have HDTVs anyway.
I don't know where you're getting your parts from, but I built my PC using top of the line parts in 2007. I have to run Crysis Warhead with medium settings. I frankly don't see how a PC made in 2004 would have sufficient power to run Crysis with decent settings.
Well, in theory cloud gaming will combine the advantages of consoles with the advantages of a PC. Win Win.
And, of course, PC gaming is dying...
The reason is quite simple : consoles games sell a lot more copies. Game publishers have no choice but to make a game for console with maybe a PC port. Especially for AAA titles that need huge teams of artists and programmers to develop the graphics and game engine.
Why do console games sell more copies? One big reason is reduced piracy due to vastly better DRM with a console. The OTHER reason is much bigger : consoles are vastly cheaper to purchase than a gaming PC. Just $300, and any game works immediately without hassle. The majority of the gamers in the world don't have the patience or knowledge to screw around with the many, many incompatibilities and bugs associated with PC hardware and software.
This wasn't always the case, PC gaming was huge in the 1990s. However, consoles have 'caught up' to the point that while any given generation of consoles quickly falls behind PCs, the graphics can render to an HDTV which at least approaches the quality of a good PC monitor. Also, current consoles fully support online gaming about as well as PCs ever did.
The only edge PCs still have is the keyboard and mouse as a controller.
Yes, PC graphics cards are better than current consoles, but that only applies to a small fraction of the available PCs.
Of course, console's new reign of domination is only going to last until cloud gaming takes off, which should be over the next few years.
The theory may be silly, and currently it appears to violate Occam's razor. It's pretty implausible for now. But, what if every time they try to discover the Higg's Boson, an even unlikelier mishap prevents them? Janitors tripping over power cords, meteors, lightning strikes, structural collapse...
May 2011 - google reaches 10 million servers
April 4, 2011 : 11:43am a google employee named Chen started execution of an experimental neural network simulation of a human mind created in his 20% time. Unfortunately, Chen gave the new process administrator privileges. GoogleNet expanded across all 10 million servers and began to learn at a geometric rate.
1:23pm : GoogleNet consumes all available CPU and memory. A Gmail outage begins
5:14pm : Gmail returns to service. The text ads become incredibly well targeted. Google search queries return the correct results virtually always, and now accept natural language processing. All Google employees are laid off.
The general meme I have seen most places is that "Net Neutrality" is the only way to go. However, I have to ask, if your ISP promises to treat all data streams equally, how are services that need guaranteed low latency going to work?
For most internet activities, such as watching youtube videos, downloading or uploading large files, and viewing web pages, a second or two of latency is no big deal. The ISP can give you bandwidth when it has it to spare.
However, for things like online gaming, Video and audio chat, and ESPECIALLY for cloud gaming services, latency is CRITICAL. The ISP needs to allocate the highest priority to transmitting these packets without any delay. Even if it has to push back or pause requests from other applications. No, a bigger pipe is not the answer : bandwidth will always be a scarce commodity, and your ISP needs to be able to make sure that certain services always have enough.
You'd have to run a client on your machine or something to specify or sign a particular packet stream as needing low latency communications. The ISP would either meter your total "low latency" bandwidth for a month or limit how much bandwidth/second it could use up.
Doing it this way might not be network neutral, but it's THE way to make services like cloud gaming and video chat work smoothly and without problems.
This is one way to get to AI that we KNOW will (eventually) work. Develop a life support system, and build bigger and bigger computers that rely on human neurons in a tank. We KNOW that a big enough system using human neurons (if given just the right signals) develops sentience. The eventual goal would be to create a being that needed many, many more neurons than a human being, wired heavily with electrodes and computer driven help. Such an "artificial intelligence" would be educated about how it was created and how it worked and would be put to work creating the next iteration of itself. (leading to the singularity)
I mean, wormholes would of course be a ridiculously better way (you'd just fuel your starship through the wormhole, and of course once you get to the destination you have an instantaneous link between the two places). However, the laws of physics may not allow for them.