yup, he's a douchebag alright! the sooner those pesky open source advocates stop destroying perfectly good business models, the better off we'll all be!
But with wear leveling, writes are spread across the drive, so you're not going to re-write the same place 100,000 times.
So let's say you have a 32GB Flash drive, and you can rewrite each byte 100,000 times. If the wear leveling is perfect, then that means that you can write 32GB * 100,000 = 32 x 10^9 * 100 * 10^3 = 3200 * 10^12 bytes (or 3200 TB) to the drive before you've overwritten each byte 100,000 times.
Assuming you can write 20MB/second continuously, you get 3200 * 10^12 / 20 * 10^6 = 160 * 10^6 (160 million) seconds to write all of that data.
So....if your computer was writing to the drive 24 hours a day, it would last over 5 years before every byte failed.
Granted, the wear leveling won't be perfect, and you'd slowly lose space as cells failed (not sure if 100,000 is mean number of writes before failure or minimum number of writes before failure), but most people aren't writing to their drive continuously 24 hours a day (much *much* less than that), so my numbers are conservative.
Obviously the article was meant to be tongue-in-cheek (though it would be nice if the editors had tagged it as such). Intuitively, if this were possible, you'd expect your hand and head to be uncomfortably hot after holding the phone during an extended conversation.
But, I figured I'd take a stab at doing the math to see if it's plausible. It's been quite a while since I've taken Physics, so someone else can (and I'm sure will) check my work:
So let's figure 50g for the egg after I pick out the pieces of broken eggshell.
I'll start at room temperature 70 degF (21 degC), and I want to raise to 145 degF (62 degC), so let's say I want to raise the temp of the egg by 40 degC.
This is where I make a bit of a leap, these calculations will assume that the egg is 100% water, obviously that's not the case, but it's probably a reasonable approximation.
50 g of water raised 40 degC takes 50 * 40 = 2000 calories (scientific calories, not dietary).
A calorie is 4.19 Joules, so that's 8380 J.
The article says it takes 3 minutes to cook an egg. A Watt is one J/sec, so 8380 J / 180 seconds = 46 Watts.
So, it would take 46 watts over 3 minutes to fully cook an egg to 145 degF. And that's assuming that
the power is 100% absorbed by the egg. Since the article suggests placing the phones near (but not touching) the egg cup, most of the radiated energy will not
be absorbed by the egg (if it were, the phones would drop the call and be unable to find a signal)
I think (but am not certain) that a typical handheld cell phone will put out around 600mW of power max, so if you immersed your 2 phones in the egg to get maximum RF absorption, you'd be ready to eat your egg after only 114 minutes. Better charge your battery first.
It's only a "Petabox" in name, not capacity. (unless by "box" they mean a 20'x8'x8' shipping container)
From the linked site:
* High density-- 100 Terabytes per rack
* Colocation friendly-- requires our own rack to get 100TB/rack, or 50TB in a standard rack
So even with the special Internet Archive racks, you'd need 10 of the racks to get a Petabyte.
Though it seems that capricorn-tech has improved on the capacity since the Internet Archive page was written, advertising up to 80 TB per standard rack, so you could get by with just 6.25 racks for a full Petabyte of storage if you had those new higher capacity nodes in the special racks.
Other interesting specs: 900 lbs per standard 19" x 80" high (42U) rack, 80W/node, 3.2 KW/rack, 40KW for an entire Petabyte.
Those things don't run on ammonia AFAIK, and never have.
...
I'd like to know where that howstuffworks site managed to translate the ammonia systems... into something used in an RV
After you straighten out the guys at howstuffworks.com, maybe you can tell the guys that sell and service the RV fridges that they have it all wrong. Who knows how many they've ruined by servicing them with Ammonia!
Maybe instead of using solar energy to make electricity, then converting that electricity to mechanical compression, you could use an ammonia type refrigeration unit -- like the type you see in RV's that are powered by propane.
They use heat to separate ammonia+water, condense the ammonia, then use the evaporating ammonia for cooling as it is absorbed back into the water solution:
http://home.howstuffworks.com/refrigerator5.htm
Not sure if this would be any more efficient than solar cells + batteries, plus you'd either need a large quantity of ammonia to give you long periods of cooling even after the sun goes down, or you'd need a large thermal mass to store heat (or rather to remove heat and store "cool").
I checked their site, and found a Domain Names & Related Services contact number (888-642-9675), and gave it a try.
Unfortunately, the rep that answered the phone was unable to help, he said that he works for Network Solutions, and can only help with domain registration issues, and that the Verisign parent company runs the root nameservers. He was unable to give me a contact number for Verisign. However, you may want to try calling this number yourself to see if maybe a different rep has the contact number for Verisign.
I did a whois on the verisign.com domain, and came up with the main contact number for Verisign: 650-961-7500, but it's been ringing for the past 5 minutes, with no answer. One would think that they would have an automated voice-response system on their main number, so I think that they are being innudated with calls.
I've seen the "It's stupid to put Braille on Drive up ATM's" topic rehashed several times in this thread.
Think about it -- a visually impaired person is not going to drive himself to the ATM, right? So how is he going to get there? Perhaps a Taxi? Should he have to rely on the Taxi driver to retrieve his money from the ATM? Or should he sit at home and wait for a trusted friend to take him so the bank doesn't have to pay the extra $20 for Braille signage on its $20,000 ATM machine? Or maybe he should have to make the walk to to a walk-up ATM with proper signage? Afterall, he's disabled so he should have to walk like the rest of us, right?
And for those that wonder what good the Braille does in the first place if a person can't read the screen: most of the ATM's for a particular bank use the same UI (and they publish guidebooks to document it), but the formfactor differs from machine to machine, so it's nice to have labels for the card slot, depository slot, etc. Check here
for some Braille ATM sign samples.
Seems like all it would take to break this encryption would be some GPS test equipment.
Just hook the tester to the decryption unit, and voila, you can make the decryption unit think it's anywhere in the world.
Is enough of the GPS protocol published to make it feasible to create GPS simulator equipment from scratch or is the signal encrypted in such a way to make it too difficult (i.e. if some foreign government can't legally buy a GPS simulator, how hard is it to make one?). Is it even possible for the commercial simulators to really emumlate the satellites, or can the GPS unit tell the difference between a test signal and a real satellite?
Re:It'd be nice to know the application...
on
Digitizing VGA?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You didn't mention what hardware you're running on, but if it's PC type hardware, there's already a plug-in card that does what you want:
It's not cheap at $715, but doing your own customer hardware is not that cheap either.
This may even be a solution to the original poster's original question -- this card is supposed to send text and graphics over the LAN/modem connection, so perhaps there's some way to capture that data.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because -1 Douchebag wasn't an option.
yup, he's a douchebag alright! the sooner those pesky open source advocates stop destroying perfectly good business models, the better off we'll all be!
Vive la Microsoft!
But with wear leveling, writes are spread across the drive, so you're not going to re-write the same place 100,000 times.
So let's say you have a 32GB Flash drive, and you can rewrite each byte 100,000 times. If the wear leveling is perfect, then that means that you can write 32GB * 100,000 = 32 x 10^9 * 100 * 10^3 = 3200 * 10^12 bytes (or 3200 TB) to the drive before you've overwritten each byte 100,000 times.
Assuming you can write 20MB/second continuously, you get 3200 * 10^12 / 20 * 10^6 = 160 * 10^6 (160 million) seconds to write all of that data.
160 million seconds / 3600 seconds/hour = 44444 hours / 24 hours/day = 1851 days.
So....if your computer was writing to the drive 24 hours a day, it would last over 5 years before every byte failed.
Granted, the wear leveling won't be perfect, and you'd slowly lose space as cells failed (not sure if 100,000 is mean number of writes before failure or minimum number of writes before failure), but most people aren't writing to their drive continuously 24 hours a day (much *much* less than that), so my numbers are conservative.
But, I figured I'd take a stab at doing the math to see if it's plausible. It's been quite a while since I've taken Physics, so someone else can (and I'm sure will) check my work:
An average egg weighs 58g, and is 90% edible
So let's figure 50g for the egg after I pick out the pieces of broken eggshell.
I'll start at room temperature 70 degF (21 degC), and I want to raise to 145 degF (62 degC), so let's say I want to raise the temp of the egg by 40 degC.
This is where I make a bit of a leap, these calculations will assume that the egg is 100% water, obviously that's not the case, but it's probably a reasonable approximation.
50 g of water raised 40 degC takes 50 * 40 = 2000 calories (scientific calories, not dietary).
A calorie is 4.19 Joules, so that's 8380 J.
The article says it takes 3 minutes to cook an egg. A Watt is one J/sec, so 8380 J / 180 seconds = 46 Watts.
So, it would take 46 watts over 3 minutes to fully cook an egg to 145 degF. And that's assuming that the power is 100% absorbed by the egg. Since the article suggests placing the phones near (but not touching) the egg cup, most of the radiated energy will not be absorbed by the egg (if it were, the phones would drop the call and be unable to find a signal)
I think (but am not certain) that a typical handheld cell phone will put out around 600mW of power max, so if you immersed your 2 phones in the egg to get maximum RF absorption, you'd be ready to eat your egg after only 114 minutes. Better charge your battery first.
From the linked site:
* High density-- 100 Terabytes per rack
* Colocation friendly-- requires our own rack to get 100TB/rack, or 50TB in a standard rack
So even with the special Internet Archive racks, you'd need 10 of the racks to get a Petabyte.
Though it seems that capricorn-tech has improved on the capacity since the Internet Archive page was written, advertising up to 80 TB per standard rack, so you could get by with just 6.25 racks for a full Petabyte of storage if you had those new higher capacity nodes in the special racks.
Other interesting specs: 900 lbs per standard 19" x 80" high (42U) rack, 80W/node, 3.2 KW/rack, 40KW for an entire Petabyte.
I only see one significant digit in "10 cubic yards".
WhatRU smoking?
Those things don't run on ammonia AFAIK, and never have.
...
I'd like to know where that howstuffworks site managed to translate the ammonia systems... into something used in an RV
After you straighten out the guys at howstuffworks.com, maybe you can tell the guys that sell and service the RV fridges that they have it all wrong. Who knows how many they've ruined by servicing them with Ammonia!
rvmobile.com
rvrefrig.com
bryantrv.com
gasrefrigeration.net
Maybe instead of using solar energy to make electricity, then converting that electricity to mechanical compression, you could use an ammonia type refrigeration unit -- like the type you see in RV's that are powered by propane.
They use heat to separate ammonia+water, condense the ammonia, then use the evaporating ammonia for cooling as it is absorbed back into the water solution:
http://home.howstuffworks.com/refrigerator5.htm
Not sure if this would be any more efficient than solar cells + batteries, plus you'd either need a large quantity of ammonia to give you long periods of cooling even after the sun goes down, or you'd need a large thermal mass to store heat (or rather to remove heat and store "cool").
Unfortunately, the rep that answered the phone was unable to help, he said that he works for Network Solutions, and can only help with domain registration issues, and that the Verisign parent company runs the root nameservers. He was unable to give me a contact number for Verisign. However, you may want to try calling this number yourself to see if maybe a different rep has the contact number for Verisign.
I did a whois on the verisign.com domain, and came up with the main contact number for Verisign: 650-961-7500, but it's been ringing for the past 5 minutes, with no answer. One would think that they would have an automated voice-response system on their main number, so I think that they are being innudated with calls.
Think about it -- a visually impaired person is not going to drive himself to the ATM, right? So how is he going to get there? Perhaps a Taxi? Should he have to rely on the Taxi driver to retrieve his money from the ATM? Or should he sit at home and wait for a trusted friend to take him so the bank doesn't have to pay the extra $20 for Braille signage on its $20,000 ATM machine? Or maybe he should have to make the walk to to a walk-up ATM with proper signage? Afterall, he's disabled so he should have to walk like the rest of us, right?
And for those that wonder what good the Braille does in the first place if a person can't read the screen: most of the ATM's for a particular bank use the same UI (and they publish guidebooks to document it), but the formfactor differs from machine to machine, so it's nice to have labels for the card slot, depository slot, etc. Check here for some Braille ATM sign samples.
Just hook the tester to the decryption unit, and voila, you can make the decryption unit think it's anywhere in the world.
Is enough of the GPS protocol published to make it feasible to create GPS simulator equipment from scratch or is the signal encrypted in such a way to make it too difficult (i.e. if some foreign government can't legally buy a GPS simulator, how hard is it to make one?). Is it even possible for the commercial simulators to really emumlate the satellites, or can the GPS unit tell the difference between a test signal and a real satellite?
You didn't mention what hardware you're running on, but if it's PC type hardware, there's already a plug-in card that does what you want:
7
http://www.dakota-us.com/us/overview.cfm?prodID=3
It's not cheap at $715, but doing your own customer hardware is not that cheap either.
This may even be a solution to the original poster's original question -- this card is supposed to send text and graphics over the LAN/modem connection, so perhaps there's some way to capture that data.