Conserving calories is easy - other mammals do this at will (bats are really amazing - going down to nearly stopping their metabolism during the winter - with frost and icicles hanging from them even). BUT, even bats need to wake up every now and then to hydrate. My point? None really, I've had a few beers. But I'd say it would be much easier to build an interface between a man and a machine to keep the man asleep for 3 years, than it would to modify humans to be completely self-sustaining for this long a period.
How will these ever last as long as their electronic counterparts? If they are mechanical, they have moving parts, and moving parts wear out *much more quickly* than electronics without moving parts.
The funny (sad) thing is I had a science teacher in the 7th grade (1985?) who said the exact same thing "and the x-rays from the bomb allowed people to see their bones".
We were talking about the made-for-TV movie "The Day After". For you young 'uns this was a movie about nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The movie did actually depict, during the nuclear flash, being able to see the skeletons of people. Complete and utter bullshit.
When the bomb went off, you could actually see the bones in your hands from all the X-rays that were emitted from the bomb.
How exactly does this work? When have human eyes been capable of seeing the x-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum? Or, is there some grain of truth in this, in terms of the visible light being so intense that it's possible to see vague impression of bones within your hand? I suspect the latter.
It wouldn't be too hard to study this, hook someone up to headphones, blindfold them, and play them identical excerpts from a CD and then MP3 and make them guess which was which; or just say which was "better quality."
Be very careful setting up this test - acoustic studies have shown that people tend to choose the louder of two choices as being the one with "better" quality. You must match the sound level exactly to get a fair comparison.
I think the next "duh" security step for non-techies is to close up ports on their router, or if they don't have one (god forbid) on their ZoneAlarm installations.
What's needed for most folks beyond e-mail (25 and 110), web (80 and 443), and dns (53)?
Here's my router's log tonight. Log at all the 3127 hits. There's also a 3128 hit in there, surely a variant trying to side step someone closing a single port.
Monday, February 09, 2004 12:50:06 PM Unrecognized access from 68.94.18.241:3677 to TCP port 3127 Monday, February 09, 2004 12:50:09 PM Unrecognized access from 68.94.18.241:3677 to TCP port 3127 Monday, February 09, 2004 12:50:15 PM Unrecognized access from 68.94.18.241:3677 to TCP port 3127 Monday, February 09, 2004 12:55:13 PM Unrecognized access from 4.47.238.39:2458 to TCP port 445 Monday, February 09, 2004 12:55:16 PM Unrecognized access from 4.47.238.39:2458 to TCP port 445 Monday, February 09, 2004 12:55:24 PM Unrecognized access from 4.47.238.39:2458 to TCP port 445 Monday, February 09, 2004 12:57:56 PM Unrecognized access from 212.0.203.24:1031 to UDP port 137 Monday, February 09, 2004 12:58:12 PM Unrecognized access from 67.3.162.172:1945 to TCP port 3127 Monday, February 09, 2004 12:58:15 PM Unrecognized access from 67.3.162.172:1945 to TCP port 3127 Monday, February 09, 2004 12:58:21 PM Unrecognized access from 67.3.162.172:1945 to TCP port 3127 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:13:40 PM Unrecognized access from 151.199.43.246:1314 to UDP port 137 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:16:44 PM Unrecognized access from 200.174.67.136:4059 to TCP port 3127 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:16:47 PM Unrecognized access from 200.174.67.136:4059 to TCP port 3127 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:18:18 PM Unrecognized access from 81.7.107.247:3070 to TCP port 3127 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:18:21 PM Unrecognized access from 81.7.107.247:3070 to TCP port 3127 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:18:26 PM Unrecognized access from 81.7.107.247:3374 to TCP port 3128 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:18:34 PM Unrecognized access from 81.7.107.247:3691 to TCP port 1080 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:18:37 PM Unrecognized access from 81.7.107.247:3691 to TCP port 1080 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:21:41 PM Unrecognized access from 61.223.128.16:3169 to TCP port 445 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:21:44 PM Unrecognized access from 61.223.128.16:3169 to TCP port 445 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:21:50 PM Unrecognized access from 61.223.128.16:3169 to TCP port 445 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:24:28 PM Unrecognized access from 81.219.64.138:46674 to TCP port 1214 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:24:31 PM Unrecognized access from 81.219.64.138:46674 to TCP port 1214 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:24:37 PM Unrecognized access from 81.219.64.138:46674 to TCP port 1214 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:27:37 PM Unrecognized access from 151.199.40.13:1634 to TCP port 445 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:27:40 PM Unrecognized access from 151.199.40.13:1634 to TCP port 445 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:27:46 PM Unrecognized access from 151.199.40.13:1634 to TCP port 445 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:28:16 PM Unrecognized access from 80.2.66.105:3994 to TCP port 3127 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:28:19 PM Unrecognized access from 80.2.66.105:3994 to TCP port 3127 Monday, February 09, 2004 1:28:25 PM Unrecognized access from 80.2.66.105:3994 to TCP port 3127
...is that there will be population explosions of other animals and plants. For example, the deer population in the United States is much higher now than it was 200 years ago. Eradication of predators by the colonists.
I like this site because it reviews all kinds of PC silencing stuff, not just heatsinks/fans. Seems to be modeled on the popular www.storagereview.com site.
Has reviews of...
DIY Systems
Prebuilt Systems
Cases & Damping
Power Supplies
Cooling
Fans & Controls
Storage
Here's a working URL, maybe because it's load balanced.
Here's the conclusion:
Large, fast, quiet-if only the guarantee were longer
Even if the DiamondMax Plus 300 GB isn't nimble enough to take on the faster-spinning flagships from Western Digital and Maxtor, its overall performance is respectable for a 5,400 rpm drive. Above all, the excellent data transfer rates are certainly welcome.
Only the longer seek times resulting from the low turn rate and the lower I/O performance mean this disk makes little sense for demanding users running it under permanent load or as a system drive. That said, the hard drive is not designed to do this. After all, anyone able to cough up the princely sum of around $411 will no doubt have their own operating system hard drive that also spins quicker. A 7,200 rpm 80 GB hard drive with 8 MB of cache will currently set you back little more than $106.
In view of its large storage capacity, the guarantee of just one year is dubious, since even in two years, 300 GB should still be big enough to save it from the scrap heap. Even if guarantees of several years are reserved for the top 7,200 rpm models, a two-year warranty would at least reduce the vendor's risk of having to honor a guarantee of two years. Ultimately, equipment purchases should not only be a question of numbers, but should involve a fair degree of trust, too.
However, it is curretly part of a promotion, which means that if you go for the kit now, the card will be included.
From the Aug 1995 Wired (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.08/thompson. html)
Consider the music retailing system as it exists today. You go into a store, purchase a disc, take it home, play it, and put it on a shelf. It's no different from the way people bought records 70 years ago.
Now imagine something slightly more convenient: a music database on a computer, cross-indexed by artist, date, and song title. Imagine that when you click on a song, you hear it immediately, straight from your hard drive to your stereo.
There's only one snag in this scenario: Digitized music eats a huge amount of disk space. The sounds on just one CD require 600 to 700 Mbytes of storage. So Thompson looked for a way to compress music and conserve space.
But Thompson found the answer right next door to his workspace at Bell Labs. "The acoustic research department here has been doing pure research on and off since the '20s," he says. "That was when Western Electric used to do the soundtracks for movies. They told me they had a good algorithm for compressing music. I looked at what they had, and -"
He shakes his head ruefully. "They're acoustics people, not computer people. They were using Fortran. Original, monstrous Fortran. I reduced the algorithm's size by a factor of five and sped it up by a factor of hundreds and then started encoding music with it."
Most of the original research work was done by Jim Johnston, under the guidance of Joe Hall and Jont Allen, two other Bell Labs scientists.
Johnston freely admits that his early efforts were less than elegant. "It took me two years to develop the basic algorithm;
I was hacking it 95 ways because I was working in the dark. Then the Fortran was translated into C language, 5,000 lines became 26,000 lines - and Ken Thompson came along and assassinated the whole mess."
Collaborating with a young programmer named Sean Dorward, Thompson rewrote the code - it still performed the same task, but it ran in real time. In other words, the decompression program no longer took an hour or more to unlock two minutes of music; it could keep pace with the music, running in the background while the music played. Without this development, the system would have been unmarketable.
Sitting at his workstation under the watchful eyes of the pink plastic flamingos, Thompson turns back to his video monitor and clicks the mouse button. The crooning of the Everly Brothers lapses into silence. He scrolls through a huge list of songs, clicks on another at random, and something by Enya starts to play.
The original CD has been compressed and stowed on a massive storage system in the next room - a stack of 50 12-inch laser-discs able to hold a total of 300 Gbytes.
But the song could have been stored just as easily on the hard drive of a laptop - using Thompson's system, it has been compressed to less than 8 percent of its original size. (A Sony MiniDisc compresses music to 20 percent of its original size.) Nevertheless, the sound is still fresh and clean, indistinguishable from the original.
Similar product ($12 or $36) already available...
on
TiVo For Radio?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Before moving out of the lovely SF Bay area couple of years ago, I wanted to capture the local jazz station (KCSM) from my FM receiver to my PC.
I found a product called Total Recorder (www.highcriteria.com) - which has a scheduling feature (so I could capture the Jazz Oasis every evening at 7pm).
Besides recording anything that can be played on your computer, I also captured some Internet radio streams, such as www.live365.com, which were otherwise un-capturable. Nice to rip 11 hours of Internet radio to a CD and play it in the car.
BTW - Radio Shack sells an RCA to stereo plug convertor for converting left/right audio plugs to a single line in port on your PC.
...because you can pick up old SGI systems on E-bay very cheaply. Anyone new to UNIX can pick up an Indy for $50-$100, and their a great introduction to UNIX, with their cool cases and graphics capabilities (admittedly dated now).
Just do a search on E-bay for "sgi indy" or "sgi indigo" - own a piece of UNIX computing history.
Disclaimer: No I am not an E-bay seller, but I did pick up an Iris, Indy, Indigo, and Indigo^2 in the past few months, and the highest I paid was I believe $70 for the Indigo^2.
I heard that jet engines actually utilize (i.e. burn) the hydrogen in water vapor that comes through the intake. Any aviation experts out there care to confirm?
I also heard cars get a little horsepower boost from intake of highly humidified air?
Slashdot Mirror
Me thinks we are in the middle of another one...
Conserving calories is easy - other mammals do this at will (bats are really amazing - going down to nearly stopping their metabolism during the winter - with frost and icicles hanging from them even). BUT, even bats need to wake up every now and then to hydrate. My point? None really, I've had a few beers. But I'd say it would be much easier to build an interface between a man and a machine to keep the man asleep for 3 years, than it would to modify humans to be completely self-sustaining for this long a period.
How will these ever last as long as their electronic counterparts? If they are mechanical, they have moving parts, and moving parts wear out *much more quickly* than electronics without moving parts.
How about Sirius or XM Satellite Radio?
This quote from Bob Metcalfe, of Ethernet fame.
The funny (sad) thing is I had a science teacher in the 7th grade (1985?) who said the exact same thing "and the x-rays from the bomb allowed people to see their bones".
We were talking about the made-for-TV movie "The Day After". For you young 'uns this was a movie about nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The movie did actually depict, during the nuclear flash, being able to see the skeletons of people. Complete and utter bullshit.
When the bomb went off, you could actually see the bones in your hands from all the X-rays that were emitted from the bomb.
How exactly does this work? When have human eyes been capable of seeing the x-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum? Or, is there some grain of truth in this, in terms of the visible light being so intense that it's possible to see vague impression of bones within your hand? I suspect the latter.
It wouldn't be too hard to study this, hook someone up to headphones, blindfold them, and play them identical excerpts from a CD and then MP3 and make them guess which was which; or just say which was "better quality."
Be very careful setting up this test - acoustic studies have shown that people tend to choose the louder of two choices as being the one with "better" quality. You must match the sound level exactly to get a fair comparison.
I think the next "duh" security step for non-techies is to close up ports on their router, or if they don't have one (god forbid) on their ZoneAlarm installations.
What's needed for most folks beyond e-mail (25 and 110), web (80 and 443), and dns (53)?
Here's my router's log tonight. Log at all the 3127 hits. There's also a 3128 hit in there, surely a variant trying to side step someone closing a single port.
Monday, February 09, 2004 12:50:06 PM Unrecognized access from 68.94.18.241:3677 to TCP port 3127
Monday, February 09, 2004 12:50:09 PM Unrecognized access from 68.94.18.241:3677 to TCP port 3127
Monday, February 09, 2004 12:50:15 PM Unrecognized access from 68.94.18.241:3677 to TCP port 3127
Monday, February 09, 2004 12:55:13 PM Unrecognized access from 4.47.238.39:2458 to TCP port 445
Monday, February 09, 2004 12:55:16 PM Unrecognized access from 4.47.238.39:2458 to TCP port 445
Monday, February 09, 2004 12:55:24 PM Unrecognized access from 4.47.238.39:2458 to TCP port 445
Monday, February 09, 2004 12:57:56 PM Unrecognized access from 212.0.203.24:1031 to UDP port 137
Monday, February 09, 2004 12:58:12 PM Unrecognized access from 67.3.162.172:1945 to TCP port 3127
Monday, February 09, 2004 12:58:15 PM Unrecognized access from 67.3.162.172:1945 to TCP port 3127
Monday, February 09, 2004 12:58:21 PM Unrecognized access from 67.3.162.172:1945 to TCP port 3127
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:13:40 PM Unrecognized access from 151.199.43.246:1314 to UDP port 137
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:16:44 PM Unrecognized access from 200.174.67.136:4059 to TCP port 3127
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:16:47 PM Unrecognized access from 200.174.67.136:4059 to TCP port 3127
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:18:18 PM Unrecognized access from 81.7.107.247:3070 to TCP port 3127
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:18:21 PM Unrecognized access from 81.7.107.247:3070 to TCP port 3127
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:18:26 PM Unrecognized access from 81.7.107.247:3374 to TCP port 3128
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:18:34 PM Unrecognized access from 81.7.107.247:3691 to TCP port 1080
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:18:37 PM Unrecognized access from 81.7.107.247:3691 to TCP port 1080
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:21:41 PM Unrecognized access from 61.223.128.16:3169 to TCP port 445
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:21:44 PM Unrecognized access from 61.223.128.16:3169 to TCP port 445
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:21:50 PM Unrecognized access from 61.223.128.16:3169 to TCP port 445
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:24:28 PM Unrecognized access from 81.219.64.138:46674 to TCP port 1214
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:24:31 PM Unrecognized access from 81.219.64.138:46674 to TCP port 1214
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:24:37 PM Unrecognized access from 81.219.64.138:46674 to TCP port 1214
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:27:37 PM Unrecognized access from 151.199.40.13:1634 to TCP port 445
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:27:40 PM Unrecognized access from 151.199.40.13:1634 to TCP port 445
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:27:46 PM Unrecognized access from 151.199.40.13:1634 to TCP port 445
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:28:16 PM Unrecognized access from 80.2.66.105:3994 to TCP port 3127
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:28:19 PM Unrecognized access from 80.2.66.105:3994 to TCP port 3127
Monday, February 09, 2004 1:28:25 PM Unrecognized access from 80.2.66.105:3994 to TCP port 3127
Ah, but what if it's a DDOS attack?
Where each attack is from a different host? With 1024 hosts each attacking one port, 1 of those hosts will succeed.
Harder, but not foolproof.
Still a good idea though, "honey ports".
When I read "invade a country for dubious reasons" my subconscious read "invade a country for Dubya's reasons"
Hmmm.
I'm worth about 150 0-7 year olds.
Come on Lego, don't throw the baby (Technic & Mindstorms) out with the bath water (Bionicle, Harry Potter, et al).
...is that there will be population explosions of other animals and plants. For example, the deer population in the United States is much higher now than it was 200 years ago. Eradication of predators by the colonists.
I like this site because it reviews all kinds of PC silencing stuff, not just heatsinks/fans. Seems to be modeled on the popular www.storagereview.com site.
Has reviews of...
DIY Systems
Prebuilt Systems
Cases & Damping
Power Supplies
Cooling
Fans & Controls
Storage
Any moderators out there? This is the most informative post I've read in a while.
Here's a working URL, maybe because it's load balanced.
Here's the conclusion: Large, fast, quiet-if only the guarantee were longer Even if the DiamondMax Plus 300 GB isn't nimble enough to take on the faster-spinning flagships from Western Digital and Maxtor, its overall performance is respectable for a 5,400 rpm drive. Above all, the excellent data transfer rates are certainly welcome. Only the longer seek times resulting from the low turn rate and the lower I/O performance mean this disk makes little sense for demanding users running it under permanent load or as a system drive. That said, the hard drive is not designed to do this. After all, anyone able to cough up the princely sum of around $411 will no doubt have their own operating system hard drive that also spins quicker. A 7,200 rpm 80 GB hard drive with 8 MB of cache will currently set you back little more than $106. In view of its large storage capacity, the guarantee of just one year is dubious, since even in two years, 300 GB should still be big enough to save it from the scrap heap. Even if guarantees of several years are reserved for the top 7,200 rpm models, a two-year warranty would at least reduce the vendor's risk of having to honor a guarantee of two years. Ultimately, equipment purchases should not only be a question of numbers, but should involve a fair degree of trust, too. However, it is curretly part of a promotion, which means that if you go for the kit now, the card will be included.
Oy, my html skillz are pitiful... www.ataconnect.org/
(http://www.ataconnect.org/ is a nice looking site, and it still seems to be up as of 10am)
"the Global Earthquake Satellite System (GESS)"
If I want money from Congress to deploy a constellation of satellites to detect earthquakes, would calling it GESS be my first choice?
From the Aug 1995 Wired (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.08/thompson. html)
Consider the music retailing system as it exists today. You go into a store, purchase a disc, take it home, play it, and put it on a shelf. It's no different from the way people bought records 70 years ago.
Now imagine something slightly more convenient: a music database on a computer, cross-indexed by artist, date, and song title. Imagine that when you click on a song, you hear it immediately, straight from your hard drive to your stereo.
There's only one snag in this scenario: Digitized music eats a huge amount of disk space. The sounds on just one CD require 600 to 700 Mbytes of storage. So Thompson looked for a way to compress music and conserve space.
But Thompson found the answer right next door to his workspace at Bell Labs. "The acoustic research department here has been doing pure research on and off since the '20s," he says. "That was when Western Electric used to do the soundtracks for movies. They told me they had a good algorithm for compressing music. I looked at what they had, and -"
He shakes his head ruefully. "They're acoustics people, not computer people. They were using Fortran. Original, monstrous Fortran. I reduced the algorithm's size by a factor of five and sped it up by a factor of hundreds and then started encoding music with it."
Most of the original research work was done by Jim Johnston, under the guidance of Joe Hall and Jont Allen, two other Bell Labs scientists.
Johnston freely admits that his early efforts were less than elegant. "It took me two years to develop the basic algorithm;
I was hacking it 95 ways because I was working in the dark. Then the Fortran was translated into C language, 5,000 lines became 26,000 lines - and Ken Thompson came along and assassinated the whole mess."
Collaborating with a young programmer named Sean Dorward, Thompson rewrote the code - it still performed the same task, but it ran in real time. In other words, the decompression program no longer took an hour or more to unlock two minutes of music; it could keep pace with the music, running in the background while the music played. Without this development, the system would have been unmarketable.
Sitting at his workstation under the watchful eyes of the pink plastic flamingos, Thompson turns back to his video monitor and clicks the mouse button. The crooning of the Everly Brothers lapses into silence. He scrolls through a huge list of songs, clicks on another at random, and something by Enya starts to play.
The original CD has been compressed and stowed on a massive storage system in the next room - a stack of 50 12-inch laser-discs able to hold a total of 300 Gbytes.
But the song could have been stored just as easily on the hard drive of a laptop - using Thompson's system, it has been compressed to less than 8 percent of its original size. (A Sony MiniDisc compresses music to 20 percent of its original size.) Nevertheless, the sound is still fresh and clean, indistinguishable from the original.
Before moving out of the lovely SF Bay area couple of years ago, I wanted to capture the local jazz station (KCSM) from my FM receiver to my PC.
I found a product called Total Recorder (www.highcriteria.com) - which has a scheduling feature (so I could capture the Jazz Oasis every evening at 7pm).
Besides recording anything that can be played on your computer, I also captured some Internet radio streams, such as www.live365.com, which were otherwise un-capturable. Nice to rip 11 hours of Internet radio to a CD and play it in the car.
BTW - Radio Shack sells an RCA to stereo plug convertor for converting left/right audio plugs to a single line in port on your PC.
...because you can pick up old SGI systems on E-bay very cheaply. Anyone new to UNIX can pick up an Indy for $50-$100, and their a great introduction to UNIX, with their cool cases and graphics capabilities (admittedly dated now).
Just do a search on E-bay for "sgi indy" or "sgi indigo" - own a piece of UNIX computing history.
Disclaimer: No I am not an E-bay seller, but I did pick up an Iris, Indy, Indigo, and Indigo^2 in the past few months, and the highest I paid was I believe $70 for the Indigo^2.
I moderated you to flamebait - because, well, Pintos are flamebait (and so is IE)
http://www.bootdisk.com has a bunch of boot disks. Always good for finding out what's on disks if the OS has barfed.
I heard that jet engines actually utilize (i.e. burn) the hydrogen in water vapor that comes through the intake. Any aviation experts out there care to confirm?
I also heard cars get a little horsepower boost from intake of highly humidified air?
Experts, please confirm or deny.