IDE cables (100 & 133) ARE available in rounded braided cables. Braiding the cable, when done correctly, cancels out most of the crosstalk that is the reason for that extra shielding. SCSI round cables are braided for much the same reason.
You've really got to go into detail on how you do this marvel of modern science. Remember there are a LOT of single men and college students on slashdot.
Don't you know? Haven't you seen the banners? Through the mastery of BannerAdTech (r) I will now forever associate ThinkGeek, SourceForge, and Megatokyo with Slashdot. . . JOIN US. . .
"Working in an institute that is heavily involved in modern forms of AI I can assure you that the number of crashing/dying planes will be immense" Um. . are you smoking crack? I know for a FACT (having a roomie that's a pilot) that commercial autopilots can handle damn near the ENTIRE flight as is. In fact there is an article in this months Scientific American (or is it Discovery?) detailing the work. I suggest you read the article (and do a bit of research) before commenting on it. These are not AI's. They've got very very little to do with a true AI.
Now, I'm a driver currently (of my many many careers). I drive. I don't need distractions. I definately don't need a cell phone on my route. I don't have a cell phone, hell I don't even have an answering machine. If I want to get ahold of someone I turn on the phone and call them. Now I do have ADSL and a PDA (which yes is a too that very much is indespensible to route mapping) but I think "always on" access is a bit much. "It's almost like free counceling." . . . well I don't know about that. If you really want to whine your problems to me that's fine. Just expect to be slapped, told to suck it up, and hit repeatedly about the head and shoulders with a cluebat.
Yes it is just a f**king stupid ass way of saying "phone or etc (pda, blackberry msgr, etc.) that you can send text and other msgs with while moblie". I'm guessing under the broad catagory of PCD my aluminum "cluebat" would also be a PCD as I reguarly reach out and touch people with it.
I like to shoot things too. I'm also good at being a YesMan, making espresso drinks, and I'm willing to compromise all morals for employment (up to and including homicide with a reduced sentence). The whole "programming, developing, directing" thing is a little weak but I'm sure my mad "killing anything that moves" skillz make up for that.
Well I hate to disagree but I've actually HAD experience DJ'n both with vinyl (crappy ass gemini hand me downs admittedly) and with some tweaked mp3 & similar rigs. While 128 IS fairly acceptable for club/party/etc, you have to understand by the time it GETS to the floor it's been routed through GOD knows how many jury rigged XLR cables and half assed patch bays. Your "decent" encoded signal will pick up noise like Armani picks up cat hair and end up sounding like the south side of 64kbps. I hate to say it but from having played at a number of venues (one of which gave me the joy of actually MAKING and laying my own cables bless their souls) that unless you're dealing with a pristine route from DJ booth to said speakers, you're gonna get noise. And noise loves a low quality signal. It's like they're drinking buddies or something. As for "mixing" and similar, I think the real skill of a DJ is indeed as the article stated "reading" the crowd and playing what they want to hear. It's well and good to scratch and master mixing beats and transitions but if you're not picking the right tracks in the first place it's just a waste of skill (impressive skill that I envy and lust for the spare time to develop). . . . - end psychotic 6am rant-
Ferrous based magnetic tapes last FOREVER!
on
Digital Dark Ages?
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
20 years from now we go back through our tape archive. . .
only to find that nothing plays the format anymore (tapes? what's a tape? Is that like a holocube?). . .
and the tapes are physically falling apart with age. . .
and that even the tapes that we CAN play, no one can interpret due to a radical shift in computing technology. . .
So yes. . . like all long term backups those tapes will SURE last as long as we need them. . .
Is anyone else reminded of that whole "Forever Archive" fiasco involving laser discs made in the mid 80's in the UK? The players become obsolete, the discs started falling apart, and no one could locate a working player to transfer the data by the time they realized the extent of the problem last year. Anyone have a link?
Re:A sad commentary on our society
on
Project Eden
·
· Score: 1
Yes that's a fine idea. Let's start a bit of genocide while we are at it. After all who cares about the "burgeoning population of ignorant, third-world slash-and-burn farmers". We in the safely developed world have absolutely no influence on their course of development. Projects such as "Eden" are often undertaken for direct monetary gain (as in the investors intend to at least in part either make up the money they have paid in or find some tax benifit or similar in such an investment). Money is the root and solution of many problems. Make local forests worth substantial income "as-is" and suddenly no one WANTS the trees cut down. Make endangered animals worth money directly to the villages around them, and suddenly no one helps poachers (who wants to help someone kill your next 12 years income?). If you feel so strongly about this, why don't you sell your terminal and use the money to buy some land, I'm sure you could find very reasonable prices if you looked hard enough. Because that's what it comes down to. Most people need to eat and more than that, feel the need to prosper. Give them an environment in which preserving the environment can help them prosper and you can ensure it will be protected. I personally invest in companies that do just that. What have you done today?
Because the real reason we all have multiple boxes at home is because one computer setup or another will be inheriently more efficient at a given game than another. Thus a reasonable (to my mind) excuse for why my house is littered with redhat, tinylinux, w2k, and 98 boxes. I suppose it would work even better if most of them were running at the same time. . . .
cassette tape -.75 to 1.98 depending on tape composition/packaging.
cd -.10 to 1.15 depending on composition/packaging. BUT most of the production run CD's I've seen around aroun a quarter each. (remember kiddies your initial expense at making the master goes down and down with every identical one you stamp out with it)
While I know the vast majority of broadband packages I've used either don't have a cap, or simply have a "per gb" fee after a cap is reached, I have the sinking suspicion that my current provider (1.2mb DSL) puts "heavy" users on a cycle that gradually decreases bandwidth with total amount used. In talking to others in my area with a similar file sharing setup, as we approach 2-3gb of data per week, our speeds slow to a trickle (only to mysteriously appear at 12am monday). Could this be the implementation of an unoffical soft limit? Could similar tactics be in place already with many other providers across the US with most users not aware of it? The "gradual" drop in bandwidth is the scary part though. Until I talked to friends and realized the relationship between amount downloaded and speed, I didn't see anything other that occasional "traffic jams" down the line. Now my paranoia has kicked in. . . .
Ok, we all agree that microturbines are a great idea yes?
and getting them from concept model to "actual 10 watt field unit" is gonna present a lot of challenges that probably haven't even been thought of.
But really what we're talking about is a compact source of relatively efficient power right?
Sort of like the frictionless flywheels I heard so much talk about around 15 years ago.
You know, the ones we have in every house and car right now.
Or go a bit further back to the "nuclear batteries" or similar technologies.
I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm just saying I'm not holding my breath.
Ok, maybe everyone else on slashdot has a full clean room. I mean, it could be a possibility. But when I hear phrases like "focusing light on a single transistor" and "Wentworth Labs MP-901 manual probing station" I tend not to think of simple or easy to do. I'm not saying you couldn't hack one, I'm just asking what % of criminals are going to have access to a "manual probing station"?
OK. I help maintain a lab that is full of AMD's of various flavors. Now take a large heavy heat sink. Be a cheap ass admin and make sure everything is secured with inexpensive plastic bolts and cooled with cheap sleave bearing fans. Remember kids, even though these are going to get daily use from students and be suspended in an odd manner there's no reason to buy anything other than the cheap clips that came with the heat sinks. It's not terribly uncommon for someone to accidentally (yeah right) wack or move a machine with enough violence to weaken the clips holding the heatsink on. (ok I'm assuming that's what does it and we don't have an active army of super intel powered gremlins on premises). Heatsink slowly pulls away from CPU, eventually seperates one day, tada, rapid failure. Also the fans can fail. Either way, within a few minutes (or seconds if it's actually the heat sink and not just the fan) you have nice crispy chips. It doesn't happen very often, but take a lab of 40 computers x18 hours a day x freshmen and you've got a nice equation for failure.
ouch
really really really bad idea.
even a laptop hard drive can (internally) climb WELL above ambient temps.
mix in a cooled substrated with moist air and what do you get?
CONDENSATION.
and a single bead of dew is enough to royally ruin your HD's day.
The little membrane for the HD to breath is not watertight and does not filter out moisture in the form of humidity.
Now maybe this changed in the year since I first read about this. But I really doubt it.
I seem to recall a recent batch of a very lightweight carbon based foam that was VERY effective at conducting heat. Perhaps such a substance could be used as a solid "heat pipe" to a larger area of same such substance on the back of the notebook screen (to avoid that "hotlap" syndrom all of us that use P4's know too well). I know there are probably major challenges to such a system, but I have it working (in principle at least) in my heat storage in my solar greenhouse. Heat conduction does not have to be liquid. I am sure there are a few esoteric solids out there with the correct mix of performance and price. I know liquid cooling is both efficient and cheap, but I have serious doubts about the longevity of such systems in practical use. Laptops and portables of all kinds take more abuse than Bill Gates at a Linux Convention. I shudder at the thought of my pride and joy springing a "leak" on a business trip and ruining my day AND my data. Just my 2 cents.
"The government contends that computer code is not speech and hence is not subject to First Amendment protections," he wrote. "The court disagrees. Computer software is expression that is protected by the copyright laws and is therefore 'speech' at some level, speech that is protected at some level by the First Amendment."
It was my understanding (perhaps incorrectly) that one of the major premises in past cases and in pushing foward the DMCA is that code/programming was NOT protected under the 1st. While it apparently does not have bearing on THIS case, what would this ruling do to future cases that hinge on that arguement?
Hell I helped build one. And while there is a LOT of noise cancellation and "echo reduction" software on the market (Cool Edit Pro has a few nice plug ins) the sound quality after applying such a filter could at best be called "fair". Unfortunately your best solution is to find a high quality mic with a bit of noise cacellation (and the higher end ones can be "tuned" with a hardware equilizer) and just suck it up and BUY THE FOAM. I know it's ugly. I know it's a pain in the ass. I know it's only effective if the studio is designed well, but nothing that I have personally seen (well under 40k that is) beats the stuff. Acoustic dampening foam is your cheapest option that will still maintain audio quality to a reasonable degree.
yes because guns are the evil ones. .
actually, not being pro or con either way I'd say guns are just a more convenient way of killing larger numbers at once.
you over regulate them or ban them outright and people don't get less violent, they just get creative. I've been in some areas pre/post ban and well, I didn't see homicides drop. Maybe someone has some nice statistics that do show a drop but I haven't seen anythign like that.
Now in my day, we didn't use any "sissy" guns, we bludgeoned our enemies to death with our lunchboxes. . .
10,000 per every 100cc is the rate I saw on the article. But even at 100 per cc that's still a lot of stem cells. So even with the total costs you're talking about a nice bank of totally rejection proof stem cells at under 20k. That's almost 1/10 of the price I've seen quoted as a "reasonable estimate" in the last few articles.
"attention Kmart shoppers, stem cells kits are now on blue light special!"
Slashdot Mirror
IDE cables (100 & 133) ARE available in rounded braided cables. Braiding the cable, when done correctly, cancels out most of the crosstalk that is the reason for that extra shielding. SCSI round cables are braided for much the same reason.
You've really got to go into detail on how you do this marvel of modern science. Remember there are a LOT of single men and college students on slashdot.
Don't you know? Haven't you seen the banners? Through the mastery of BannerAdTech (r) I will now forever associate ThinkGeek, SourceForge, and Megatokyo with Slashdot. . . JOIN US. . .
"Working in an institute that is heavily involved in modern forms of AI I can assure you that the number of crashing /dying planes will be immense" Um. . are you smoking crack? I know for a FACT (having a roomie that's a pilot) that commercial autopilots can handle damn near the ENTIRE flight as is. In fact there is an article in this months Scientific American (or is it Discovery?) detailing the work. I suggest you read the article (and do a bit of research) before commenting on it. These are not AI's. They've got very very little to do with a true AI.
Now, I'm a driver currently (of my many many careers). I drive. I don't need distractions. I definately don't need a cell phone on my route. I don't have a cell phone, hell I don't even have an answering machine. If I want to get ahold of someone I turn on the phone and call them. Now I do have ADSL and a PDA (which yes is a too that very much is indespensible to route mapping) but I think "always on" access is a bit much. "It's almost like free counceling." . . . well I don't know about that. If you really want to whine your problems to me that's fine. Just expect to be slapped, told to suck it up, and hit repeatedly about the head and shoulders with a cluebat.
Yes it is just a f**king stupid ass way of saying "phone or etc (pda, blackberry msgr, etc.) that you can send text and other msgs with while moblie". I'm guessing under the broad catagory of PCD my aluminum "cluebat" would also be a PCD as I reguarly reach out and touch people with it.
Too late Looks like we already killed them. Hey Taco can we get an RIAA linked story every hour or so for the next few days? . . .
I like to shoot things too. I'm also good at being a YesMan, making espresso drinks, and I'm willing to compromise all morals for employment (up to and including homicide with a reduced sentence). The whole "programming, developing, directing" thing is a little weak but I'm sure my mad "killing anything that moves" skillz make up for that.
Well I hate to disagree but I've actually HAD experience DJ'n both with vinyl (crappy ass gemini hand me downs admittedly) and with some tweaked mp3 & similar rigs. While 128 IS fairly acceptable for club/party/etc, you have to understand by the time it GETS to the floor it's been routed through GOD knows how many jury rigged XLR cables and half assed patch bays. Your "decent" encoded signal will pick up noise like Armani picks up cat hair and end up sounding like the south side of 64kbps. I hate to say it but from having played at a number of venues (one of which gave me the joy of actually MAKING and laying my own cables bless their souls) that unless you're dealing with a pristine route from DJ booth to said speakers, you're gonna get noise. And noise loves a low quality signal. It's like they're drinking buddies or something. As for "mixing" and similar, I think the real skill of a DJ is indeed as the article stated "reading" the crowd and playing what they want to hear. It's well and good to scratch and master mixing beats and transitions but if you're not picking the right tracks in the first place it's just a waste of skill (impressive skill that I envy and lust for the spare time to develop). . . . - end psychotic 6am rant-
20 years from now we go back through our tape archive. . . only to find that nothing plays the format anymore (tapes? what's a tape? Is that like a holocube?). . . and the tapes are physically falling apart with age. . . and that even the tapes that we CAN play, no one can interpret due to a radical shift in computing technology. . . So yes. . . like all long term backups those tapes will SURE last as long as we need them. . .
Is anyone else reminded of that whole "Forever Archive" fiasco involving laser discs made in the mid 80's in the UK? The players become obsolete, the discs started falling apart, and no one could locate a working player to transfer the data by the time they realized the extent of the problem last year. Anyone have a link?
Yes that's a fine idea. Let's start a bit of genocide while we are at it. After all who cares about the "burgeoning population of ignorant, third-world slash-and-burn farmers". We in the safely developed world have absolutely no influence on their course of development. Projects such as "Eden" are often undertaken for direct monetary gain (as in the investors intend to at least in part either make up the money they have paid in or find some tax benifit or similar in such an investment). Money is the root and solution of many problems. Make local forests worth substantial income "as-is" and suddenly no one WANTS the trees cut down. Make endangered animals worth money directly to the villages around them, and suddenly no one helps poachers (who wants to help someone kill your next 12 years income?). If you feel so strongly about this, why don't you sell your terminal and use the money to buy some land, I'm sure you could find very reasonable prices if you looked hard enough. Because that's what it comes down to. Most people need to eat and more than that, feel the need to prosper. Give them an environment in which preserving the environment can help them prosper and you can ensure it will be protected. I personally invest in companies that do just that. What have you done today?
Because the real reason we all have multiple boxes at home is because one computer setup or another will be inheriently more efficient at a given game than another. Thus a reasonable (to my mind) excuse for why my house is littered with redhat, tinylinux, w2k, and 98 boxes. I suppose it would work even better if most of them were running at the same time. . . .
cassette tape - .75 to 1.98 depending on tape composition/packaging.
cd - .10 to 1.15 depending on composition/packaging. BUT most of the production run CD's I've seen around aroun a quarter each. (remember kiddies your initial expense at making the master goes down and down with every identical one you stamp out with it)
While I know the vast majority of broadband packages I've used either don't have a cap, or simply have a "per gb" fee after a cap is reached, I have the sinking suspicion that my current provider (1.2mb DSL) puts "heavy" users on a cycle that gradually decreases bandwidth with total amount used. In talking to others in my area with a similar file sharing setup, as we approach 2-3gb of data per week, our speeds slow to a trickle (only to mysteriously appear at 12am monday). Could this be the implementation of an unoffical soft limit? Could similar tactics be in place already with many other providers across the US with most users not aware of it? The "gradual" drop in bandwidth is the scary part though. Until I talked to friends and realized the relationship between amount downloaded and speed, I didn't see anything other that occasional "traffic jams" down the line. Now my paranoia has kicked in. . . .
Ok, we all agree that microturbines are a great idea yes? and getting them from concept model to "actual 10 watt field unit" is gonna present a lot of challenges that probably haven't even been thought of. But really what we're talking about is a compact source of relatively efficient power right? Sort of like the frictionless flywheels I heard so much talk about around 15 years ago. You know, the ones we have in every house and car right now. Or go a bit further back to the "nuclear batteries" or similar technologies. I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm just saying I'm not holding my breath.
Ok, maybe everyone else on slashdot has a full clean room. I mean, it could be a possibility. But when I hear phrases like "focusing light on a single transistor" and "Wentworth Labs MP-901 manual probing station" I tend not to think of simple or easy to do. I'm not saying you couldn't hack one, I'm just asking what % of criminals are going to have access to a "manual probing station"?
OK. I help maintain a lab that is full of AMD's of various flavors. Now take a large heavy heat sink. Be a cheap ass admin and make sure everything is secured with inexpensive plastic bolts and cooled with cheap sleave bearing fans. Remember kids, even though these are going to get daily use from students and be suspended in an odd manner there's no reason to buy anything other than the cheap clips that came with the heat sinks. It's not terribly uncommon for someone to accidentally (yeah right) wack or move a machine with enough violence to weaken the clips holding the heatsink on. (ok I'm assuming that's what does it and we don't have an active army of super intel powered gremlins on premises). Heatsink slowly pulls away from CPU, eventually seperates one day, tada, rapid failure. Also the fans can fail. Either way, within a few minutes (or seconds if it's actually the heat sink and not just the fan) you have nice crispy chips. It doesn't happen very often, but take a lab of 40 computers x18 hours a day x freshmen and you've got a nice equation for failure.
That's nothing new. I've been toasting processors for years now. All you need is any AMD chip, a failed heat sink, and 30 seconds of Half Life.
ouch really really really bad idea. even a laptop hard drive can (internally) climb WELL above ambient temps. mix in a cooled substrated with moist air and what do you get? CONDENSATION. and a single bead of dew is enough to royally ruin your HD's day. The little membrane for the HD to breath is not watertight and does not filter out moisture in the form of humidity. Now maybe this changed in the year since I first read about this. But I really doubt it.
I seem to recall a recent batch of a very lightweight carbon based foam that was VERY effective at conducting heat. Perhaps such a substance could be used as a solid "heat pipe" to a larger area of same such substance on the back of the notebook screen (to avoid that "hotlap" syndrom all of us that use P4's know too well). I know there are probably major challenges to such a system, but I have it working (in principle at least) in my heat storage in my solar greenhouse. Heat conduction does not have to be liquid. I am sure there are a few esoteric solids out there with the correct mix of performance and price. I know liquid cooling is both efficient and cheap, but I have serious doubts about the longevity of such systems in practical use. Laptops and portables of all kinds take more abuse than Bill Gates at a Linux Convention. I shudder at the thought of my pride and joy springing a "leak" on a business trip and ruining my day AND my data. Just my 2 cents.
"The government contends that computer code is not speech and hence is not subject to First Amendment protections," he wrote. "The court disagrees. Computer software is expression that is protected by the copyright laws and is therefore 'speech' at some level, speech that is protected at some level by the First Amendment." It was my understanding (perhaps incorrectly) that one of the major premises in past cases and in pushing foward the DMCA is that code/programming was NOT protected under the 1st. While it apparently does not have bearing on THIS case, what would this ruling do to future cases that hinge on that arguement?
Hell I helped build one. And while there is a LOT of noise cancellation and "echo reduction" software on the market (Cool Edit Pro has a few nice plug ins) the sound quality after applying such a filter could at best be called "fair". Unfortunately your best solution is to find a high quality mic with a bit of noise cacellation (and the higher end ones can be "tuned" with a hardware equilizer) and just suck it up and BUY THE FOAM. I know it's ugly. I know it's a pain in the ass. I know it's only effective if the studio is designed well, but nothing that I have personally seen (well under 40k that is) beats the stuff. Acoustic dampening foam is your cheapest option that will still maintain audio quality to a reasonable degree.
yes because guns are the evil ones. . actually, not being pro or con either way I'd say guns are just a more convenient way of killing larger numbers at once. you over regulate them or ban them outright and people don't get less violent, they just get creative. I've been in some areas pre/post ban and well, I didn't see homicides drop. Maybe someone has some nice statistics that do show a drop but I haven't seen anythign like that. Now in my day, we didn't use any "sissy" guns, we bludgeoned our enemies to death with our lunchboxes. . .
10,000 per every 100cc is the rate I saw on the article. But even at 100 per cc that's still a lot of stem cells. So even with the total costs you're talking about a nice bank of totally rejection proof stem cells at under 20k. That's almost 1/10 of the price I've seen quoted as a "reasonable estimate" in the last few articles. "attention Kmart shoppers, stem cells kits are now on blue light special!"