D'oh! Three minutes of googling while I composed the post, and nothing. As soon as I hit submit, I came across the telecom digest intro FAQ that explains it.
Right you are! Maybe it's the chlorine ions that do most of the corroding, then? Chemistry never was my strong suit, but you might be right, it could be the stuff of legend. It's been repeated often enough I didn't question it.
The origin of the 48 volt number is that it was convenient, and now it just sneaks under the 50-volt "low voltage" cutoff in the NEC, which I think was written with telcos in mind. The glorious thing about this is that you don't need licensed electricians to do power wiring in a central office.
And the reason it's negative with respect to ground goes all the way back to the telegraph system: Western Union initially ran bipolar lines and noticed that the positive ones corroded much faster. Sodium ions (from dissolved salt) are negative, and thus repelled from lines that're also negative. The whole phone system was built with positive ground because of this, and it's saved incalculable maintenance costs. It does tend to mess with people's heads the first time, if they're used to negative ground systems, but you get over it quickly. (A number of traditions use blue for "hot" and black for ground/return, to help escape your "red equals positive" association.)
DC power as used by telcos is also always redundant. There's an A-side and a B-side for everything, and the cables are sized so that the entire load can run from just one side. This leads to some very fat copper, which is cheap compared to downtime. You don't achieve five-nines reliability with a system that contains single points of failure!
Now, about rack-mounting: This was also invented by the telcos, originally in a very wide (40-inch?) format, for the panelboards and Strowger switches. Some of the old crossbar equipment is still in those huge racks, but the 23-inch width is infinitely more common now. All telco equipment is mid-mounted, with the ears approximately in the center of gravity on the shelf, so the force on the screws is shear. There's no torsion on the mounting flange unless you step on the front or back of the shelf. Cooling is always convective bottom-to-top, or occasionally front-to-back with fans. This leads to a "cool" front aisle and a "warm" back aisle between alternating rows of equipment.
Now, the pro audio industry borrowed the rackmount idea fairly early on, but they were mostly mounting control panels and mixers, which are very shallow, so flush-mounting made sense. They also changed the every-inch Western Electric mounting holes to an alternating-spaces "EIA" standard, and narrowed the rack from 23 to 19 inches.
Somewhere along the line, an absolute idiot decided that computers should be rackmounted, but they should be 19 inches wide, flush-mounted, and use EIA hole patterns. I'm sure this has something to do with mainframe legacy getting perverted by peecee people. The current mishmosh of mounting standards (19" vs 23", two-post versus four-post, flush versus mid, inch versus RU, front-cable versus rear-cable) is what every datacenter tech deals with on a daily basis. Throw overhead racks versus raised-floor cabling into the mix, and you've got a recipe for frustration!
If you're familiar with the concept of "blade servers", where common components are separate from processor resources in the shelf, congratulations. Telco hardware has been built like this since the invention of the circuit board. Actually, the concept of replacable plug-in units goes back before that, but it got vastly easier with printed wiring boards and card-edge connectors in the sixties. Most of the "good ideas" in serious computing circles are actually century-old ideas in the telco industry. Spend a week shadowing a central office tech before you design a datacenter, please!
Also consider: If your datacenter is already built for DC, throw some solar photovoltaic panels on the roof. Inverters are a large part of most PV systems' expense, and you can skip that part. Why not start offsetting your grid demand now?
Also also: Edison was flat-out wrong about DC. The modern switching power supplies that make DC transmission lines practical didn't exist in his day. Besides, long-distance power transmission is an entirely other discussion.
Comcast agreed to provide internet access to their users for a monthly fee, which technically means that comcast will forward traffic from their users towards the rest of the internet and vica versa.
EXACTLY the problem. We don't currently have, that I know, a legal definition of "internet access".
There's a good rant about the increasing trend of providing crippled "interweb" access and falsely branding it "internet" access.
If we had a good definition, which excluded the shit Comcast is pulling, then we could bring suit for breach of contract, fraud, false advertising, and so on. Until then, consumers need to vote with their dollars, and we all know, sheeple get the services they deserve.
Broadband over powerlines is the technical equivalent of putting waterwheels in everyone's houses and sending power over the water system. It's really not good at that.
At the frequencies where BPL runs, powerlines act as antennae and radiate the signal all over the place. Since the transmission lines are so lossy to RF signals, they have to be transmitted into the lines at very high power, which is wasteful and messy.
Since the power companies already have high point mountings and straight-line easements, they're ideally situated to deploy a real wireless mesh, using deliberate RF emissions instead of accidental ones. Such a mesh would be much more stable and capacious.
It's just an accident of politics and regulations that it's advantageous for them to do the technically worst thing.
Mod parent poster up! And not just for disability reasons.
Last time I was in an art lab, one student was chipping away at a stone statue, and stone chips were flying everywhere. A few bits of sand got into the keyboard and were making it hard to type. A blast from the air compressor didn't dislodge them, so I sluiced the keyboard under the faucet a few times, and whacked the corner of the machine on the sink to get the water out. It worked great, but just try that with your Dell. I dare you. (Gratuitous linkage: Fans of Toughbooks can find more info on the fledgling Toughbook Wiki.)
I like being able to use my laptop in the rain, or not worry if it falls into a snowdrift while I'm walking back to a site. Perhaps some of your students value the same traits. Perhaps some of them already own capable machines which don't happen to be Dell or Apple. Locking the students into a specific brand or brands is not cool.
It's been working for my mom for several years. They open the door, rifle through the junk, take some change or the walkman, and leave. No repair bill. When she locks the doors, they punch the locks, take some change and the walkman, and it costs $600 to have the doors repaired and new locks installed.
It sucks when a teacher shoots down a student who's right about something cool. I didn't know the words for "elliptical orbit" in the second grade, but I knew that Pluto was closer to the sun than Neptune, at least for the next decade or two, and that something about the way it moved was "lopsided".
Of course, the teacher was quite certain that we'd just been served Nine Pizzas and any deviation from that order was heresy. When a trip to the encyclopedia proved otherwise, it convinced her that I was out to undermine her authority in the classroom. I meant no such malice, and was totally unprepared for the mental onslaught that followed. Unwittingly picking that fight brought more abuse than I, as a second-grader, was prepared to handle. When I think of all the things that went wrong in my educational career, that's the flake that started the avalanche.
To the parent's parent's girlfriend: If they had an anti-gravity room, why would they need a space station to study the effects of microgravity?
Figures I wouldn't see this story 'til it was off the front page...
I use a touchscreen-enabled laptop and have first-hand (ha!) experience with what happens when you touch it in multiple places: It averages the touches, and the cursor ends up somewhere in between them. This makes for some fun line-drawing in a paint program, but mostly it's just confusing when it happens accidentally.
I have a feeling that a lot of the problems with touch-screen voting machines happen when people rest a palm or other fingers on the screen before pushing with their finger to indicate their choice. The screen ignores the light touches until a firm one comes in, at which time all the touches are averaged and Pat Buchanan gets a vote.
Seems to me, screens capable of sanely handling multiple touches would be able to avoid this problem.
When I found out the music in SC2 was MOD files, I found a ripper on my local BBS and promptly extracted the music. That was in June of 1994, and the files have followed me from drive to drive, filesystem to filesystem, with their timestamps intact. I still love listening to that music, having burned bits of it to CD for the car, and all of it still enjoying a place in my Winamp playlst.
Occasionally when a discussion of game storylines crops up, I'll pitch in a few kind paragraphs for Star Control 2. The conversation archives on The Pages of Now and Forever still relate the same compelling story, and I still remember my horror when I initially learned of the Kohr-Ah's plight. The most convincing villain is one you feel sympathy for, and they had that going, for sure.
A few weeks ago, I downloaded the most recent build of The Ur-Quan Masters. The first build I tried a year or so ago wouldn't start up, but this version ran flawlessly. The music was perfect, the graphics were just as I remembered them, and the interface took a little getting used to but then felt very comfortable.
So why did the game bore me? I played for probably half an hour, and couldn't seem to get interested. It's not that I knew the ending -- I played the game through 3 or 4 times back when it was new, and it didn't seem any less fun the second time around. I haven't been much for games in the last few years, and I'm still struggling to figure out why.
Sounds perfectly on-topic to me... I'm reading some of the documents now and it seems like they're working on solving exactly my problem. It'll take some more research about the group to be sure, but so far I like what these folks are up to. I just hope the downmodder gets metamoderated into extinction...
Even spookier, the Bluetooth spec already defines an Intercom Profile for cases like this. Some headsets already support pairing to each other for use as short-range walkie talkies, such as a motorcycle driver and rider communicating between their helmets.
The trouble is, it doesn't seem widely implemented, because there's not much profit motive to do so. If there were a widely-publicized project that used these capabilities, it might spur manufacturers into supporting the odd little features...
More bulk storage only solves half the problem. As the volume of email and document archives grows, organizing and searching them becomes more interesting than just storing them.
Personally, I'm facing a minor storage crisis with a 15-gig music tree, a 20-gig photos tree, and dozens of gigs of other useful stuff that I only need on an occasional basis.
When I offload the camera, the files go to the laptop. To avoid duplicating files, the most recent few weeks worth of photos should always be on the laptop. But anything older should move off, to free up space on the drive. I'd like to keep as much of my music in both places as possible, but I need a way to replicate file moves, metadata changes, and deletions so the same bad rips and inaccurate tags don't persist after I fix them once.
There are a set of notes files, mileage logs, and other small files which I'd like to synchronize between the desktop and laptop. However, there's a possibility of both copies changing simultaneously (or at least between syncs), so I'd need a way to reconcile changes.
These little dilemmas have me wasting a lot of space until I resolve them. Stale data and useless files are all over the place, and I don't have the notes I need when I need them. It sounds like I might be able to do most of this with rsync, but the notes files, CVS maybe?
Has anyone tackled these issues before in a useful way, perhaps a sensible-storage-organization HOWTO? More space is not the issue right now, I need more sense.
Amen. My pair of Pro-35s has served me well for many years. The sound is adequate for casual listening, and the open-air design is more appropriate than blocking out the world. They're fairly light, reasonably durable, and very comfortable. Find 'em on sale for $20 more often than not.
If you want to make a statement, get a pair of bluetooth headphones. Pair them and a regular bt headset to your computer. Velcro the headset to the wall of your cubicle with a sign saying "intercom". Set the computer to pipe music to the headphones until the intercom button is pushed.:)
Populous II taught me about reproduction, the relationship of people to their god, and landscaping! The Incredible Machine was a 100% accurate physics simulation, including trampolines that impart energy to objects that strike them. Space Quest taught me plenty about security, resourcefulness, and the capacity of my pockets. Oh, and not to disrespect janitors.
Before that, SimCity taught me that even with infinite money, running a successful city is still hard. There's nothing like a 20-lane highway to ease your troubles!
Maybe The Sims is a better representation of interpersonal relationships than Strip Poker. If you get that joke, god, you're old.:)
Is all the good educational software older?
on
All Aboard the Nerd Boat
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I suppose DrugWars was more about economics than applied chemistry, unfortunately. If there'd been a meth-cooking section to the game, maybe we'd feel differently about it.:)
Anyone remember Rocky's Boots? I played it on the Apple II, and I'm not aware of an updated version. It was essentially a logic game, building machines from sensors, logic gates, and actuators. Think Mindstorms minus the physical Lego. It was a blast for a little kid to play, and taught some valuable concepts much earlier than I might've otherwise encountered them. But I haven't seen anything like it in years.
The question is a good one: Where have all the good educational titles gone? Perhaps now that violent games have proven they own the market, there's less appetite for trying something new and educational. Anyone?
Re:Put the OS on embedded non-volitile memory alre
on
Always on Laptops
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· Score: 1
The Zenith MiniSPORT laptops had the same thing: DOS in ROM, and the HMA could be hardware-assigned as EMS, battery-backed RAMdisk, or a mix of both. I never noticed a speed problem, it was snappy no matter what. Software at the time didn't generally count on having a hard drive at all, so C: being read-only wasn't a big deal.
Next time I need to invade your domain without a warrant, I'll tell you it's to protect minorities. Without any paperwork or oversight, how would you know otherwise?
Kudos to the Slashdot editors for working some description into the blurb. I'm so tired of posts trumpeting some grand new project with a nonsense name, that maybe 2% of the readership will care about. Maybe the rest of us would care, but we can't be bothered to look up a new project name every time some dimwit creates a Sourceforge account.
When I found out the music in SC2 was MOD files, I found a ripper on my local BBS and promptly extracted the music. That was in June of 1994, and the files have followed me from drive to drive, filesystem to filesystem, with their timestamps intact. I still love listening to that music, having burned bits of it to CD for the car, and all of it still enjoying a place in my Winamp playlst.
Occasionally when a discussion of game storylines crops up, I'll pitch in a few kind paragraphs for Star Control 2. The conversation archives on The Pages of Now and Forever still relate the same compelling story, and I still remember my horror when I initially learned of the Kohr-Ah's plight. The most convincing villain is one you feel sympathy for, and they had that going, for sure.
A few weeks ago, I downloaded the most recent build of The Ur-Quan Masters. The first build I tried a year or so ago wouldn't start up, but this version ran flawlessly. The music was perfect, the graphics were just as I remembered them, and the interface took a little getting used to but then felt very comfortable.
So why did the game bore me? I played for probably half an hour, and couldn't seem to get interested. It's not that I knew the ending -- I played the game through 3 or 4 times back when it was new, and it didn't seem any less fun the second time around. I haven't been much for games in the last few years, and I'm still struggling to figure out why.
I picked the example I did because the Tremor decoder was working, and an internal testing version of the HipZip firmware was leaked, long before the product was abandoned. It wasn't leaked widely enough, unfortunately.
Check out the users' forum for the Creative Labs Wireless Music System if you want to read a litany of unfixed bugs that never should've appeared in a shipping product anyway.
I say we rake 'em both over the coals! Are ya with me?
Can you honestly suggest that a shorter Ethernet link will consume less power than a longer one? Sure, there's a tiny difference in cable resistance. But the transmitting end is putting the same amount of energy into it either way, since it doesn't know the difference. Any that doesn't turn into heat in the cable will turn into heat in the receiving chipset. Hence, the same power draw.
You *may* have an argument on very long fiber links. If you can get away with a short-reach transceivers instead of long-haul, you might save a watt or two. But again, if it's the same equipment at either end, the cable length doesn't matter, because any energy that doesn't succumb to cable attenuation just gets dissipated in the receiver. Or in some cases, in an optical attenuator pad just before the receiver, used to weaken a very strong signal so it doesn't destroy a sensitive receiver.
In both cases, the energy actually transmitted through the cable is so infitesimal, resistive losses are negligible and they don't matter anyway, because the energy that makes it through isn't used by the receiver, it's interpreted, then dissipated.
Tell me again how using CAT6 cable on a 10Mb/s link is inefficient? Financially yes, the cable's expensive, but electrically, the signal doesn't care. Neither cable is going to heat up more than the other one.
That being said,
Power cables are another matter entirely! Since they carry lots of current, resistive losses, even in adequate power cables, are measurable and significant. Particularly in 48v DC environments, as compared to 120v or 240v AC systems. To offset this, the power conductors in DC distribution plants are usually appallingly thick. Still, with a thermal infrared viewer, you can find "warm spots" in your power system. Fuses and breakers will always be a little warmer than the cables that feed them, out of necessity. But your power cables should be as short and thick as possible, within reason.
I say within reason because you're still only looking at a few dozen watts throughout the entire datacenter being lost to resistance in power cables. Rewiring the mess to use shorter cables will cost you more in labor and downtime than it's worth, but designing it right from the ground up might be worthwhile. In the meantime, just turn off the lights when you're not using them.
The rule to follow would be "if it produces measurable heat, it's something to look at". Network cables don't. Power cables, power supplies, processors, chipsets, drives, and memory do.
I've been saying this for years, any outfit that already has a DC infrastructure should be installing photovoltaics on the roof. In a traditional PV installation, inverters and output wiring are a big part of the expense, but if that work is already done, the payoff period is a lot shorter.
Plus, in the event of a grid failure, your generator doesn't have to work quite as hard, which translates to slightly longer runtimes on the same fuel tank.
The available solar resource depends largely on latitude and weather patterns, though. Do some research and talk with the PR and marketing people about advertising your facility as "greener". If I were in the market for colo services, I'd lean slightly towards an enviro-conscious outfit, especially if they had a clue about reliability.
You could just as easily cut the trace leading to the chip, or slip a bit of mylar film between the pins of a PLCC socket. As another poster pointed out, if it only affects 0.5% of the PC-owning population, it's not a fix for a grand pandemic-scale malware problem.
This needs to be beaten into the hardware makers' heads: Make the thing write-protected by default, or you'll have some incredible problems down the line.
Slashdot Mirror
D'oh! Three minutes of googling while I composed the post, and nothing. As soon as I hit submit, I came across the telecom digest intro FAQ that explains it.
Right you are! Maybe it's the chlorine ions that do most of the corroding, then? Chemistry never was my strong suit, but you might be right, it could be the stuff of legend. It's been repeated often enough I didn't question it.
The origin of the 48 volt number is that it was convenient, and now it just sneaks under the 50-volt "low voltage" cutoff in the NEC, which I think was written with telcos in mind. The glorious thing about this is that you don't need licensed electricians to do power wiring in a central office.
And the reason it's negative with respect to ground goes all the way back to the telegraph system: Western Union initially ran bipolar lines and noticed that the positive ones corroded much faster. Sodium ions (from dissolved salt) are negative, and thus repelled from lines that're also negative. The whole phone system was built with positive ground because of this, and it's saved incalculable maintenance costs. It does tend to mess with people's heads the first time, if they're used to negative ground systems, but you get over it quickly. (A number of traditions use blue for "hot" and black for ground/return, to help escape your "red equals positive" association.)
DC power as used by telcos is also always redundant. There's an A-side and a B-side for everything, and the cables are sized so that the entire load can run from just one side. This leads to some very fat copper, which is cheap compared to downtime. You don't achieve five-nines reliability with a system that contains single points of failure!
Now, about rack-mounting: This was also invented by the telcos, originally in a very wide (40-inch?) format, for the panelboards and Strowger switches. Some of the old crossbar equipment is still in those huge racks, but the 23-inch width is infinitely more common now. All telco equipment is mid-mounted, with the ears approximately in the center of gravity on the shelf, so the force on the screws is shear. There's no torsion on the mounting flange unless you step on the front or back of the shelf. Cooling is always convective bottom-to-top, or occasionally front-to-back with fans. This leads to a "cool" front aisle and a "warm" back aisle between alternating rows of equipment.
Now, the pro audio industry borrowed the rackmount idea fairly early on, but they were mostly mounting control panels and mixers, which are very shallow, so flush-mounting made sense. They also changed the every-inch Western Electric mounting holes to an alternating-spaces "EIA" standard, and narrowed the rack from 23 to 19 inches.
Somewhere along the line, an absolute idiot decided that computers should be rackmounted, but they should be 19 inches wide, flush-mounted, and use EIA hole patterns. I'm sure this has something to do with mainframe legacy getting perverted by peecee people. The current mishmosh of mounting standards (19" vs 23", two-post versus four-post, flush versus mid, inch versus RU, front-cable versus rear-cable) is what every datacenter tech deals with on a daily basis. Throw overhead racks versus raised-floor cabling into the mix, and you've got a recipe for frustration!
If you're familiar with the concept of "blade servers", where common components are separate from processor resources in the shelf, congratulations. Telco hardware has been built like this since the invention of the circuit board. Actually, the concept of replacable plug-in units goes back before that, but it got vastly easier with printed wiring boards and card-edge connectors in the sixties. Most of the "good ideas" in serious computing circles are actually century-old ideas in the telco industry. Spend a week shadowing a central office tech before you design a datacenter, please!
Also consider: If your datacenter is already built for DC, throw some solar photovoltaic panels on the roof. Inverters are a large part of most PV systems' expense, and you can skip that part. Why not start offsetting your grid demand now?
Also also: Edison was flat-out wrong about DC. The modern switching power supplies that make DC transmission lines practical didn't exist in his day. Besides, long-distance power transmission is an entirely other discussion.
There's a good rant about the increasing trend of providing crippled "interweb" access and falsely branding it "internet" access.
If we had a good definition, which excluded the shit Comcast is pulling, then we could bring suit for breach of contract, fraud, false advertising, and so on. Until then, consumers need to vote with their dollars, and we all know, sheeple get the services they deserve.
Broadband over powerlines is the technical equivalent of putting waterwheels in everyone's houses and sending power over the water system. It's really not good at that.
At the frequencies where BPL runs, powerlines act as antennae and radiate the signal all over the place. Since the transmission lines are so lossy to RF signals, they have to be transmitted into the lines at very high power, which is wasteful and messy.
Since the power companies already have high point mountings and straight-line easements, they're ideally situated to deploy a real wireless mesh, using deliberate RF emissions instead of accidental ones. Such a mesh would be much more stable and capacious.
It's just an accident of politics and regulations that it's advantageous for them to do the technically worst thing.
Mod parent poster up! And not just for disability reasons.
Last time I was in an art lab, one student was chipping away at a stone statue, and stone chips were flying everywhere. A few bits of sand got into the keyboard and were making it hard to type. A blast from the air compressor didn't dislodge them, so I sluiced the keyboard under the faucet a few times, and whacked the corner of the machine on the sink to get the water out. It worked great, but just try that with your Dell. I dare you. (Gratuitous linkage: Fans of Toughbooks can find more info on the fledgling Toughbook Wiki.)
I like being able to use my laptop in the rain, or not worry if it falls into a snowdrift while I'm walking back to a site. Perhaps some of your students value the same traits. Perhaps some of them already own capable machines which don't happen to be Dell or Apple. Locking the students into a specific brand or brands is not cool.
It's been working for my mom for several years. They open the door, rifle through the junk, take some change or the walkman, and leave. No repair bill. When she locks the doors, they punch the locks, take some change and the walkman, and it costs $600 to have the doors repaired and new locks installed.
It sucks when a teacher shoots down a student who's right about something cool. I didn't know the words for "elliptical orbit" in the second grade, but I knew that Pluto was closer to the sun than Neptune, at least for the next decade or two, and that something about the way it moved was "lopsided".
Of course, the teacher was quite certain that we'd just been served Nine Pizzas and any deviation from that order was heresy. When a trip to the encyclopedia proved otherwise, it convinced her that I was out to undermine her authority in the classroom. I meant no such malice, and was totally unprepared for the mental onslaught that followed. Unwittingly picking that fight brought more abuse than I, as a second-grader, was prepared to handle. When I think of all the things that went wrong in my educational career, that's the flake that started the avalanche.
To the parent's parent's girlfriend: If they had an anti-gravity room, why would they need a space station to study the effects of microgravity?
Figures I wouldn't see this story 'til it was off the front page...
I use a touchscreen-enabled laptop and have first-hand (ha!) experience with what happens when you touch it in multiple places: It averages the touches, and the cursor ends up somewhere in between them. This makes for some fun line-drawing in a paint program, but mostly it's just confusing when it happens accidentally.
I have a feeling that a lot of the problems with touch-screen voting machines happen when people rest a palm or other fingers on the screen before pushing with their finger to indicate their choice. The screen ignores the light touches until a firm one comes in, at which time all the touches are averaged and Pat Buchanan gets a vote.
Seems to me, screens capable of sanely handling multiple touches would be able to avoid this problem.
(This is an exact repost of something I wrote back in January.)
When I found out the music in SC2 was MOD files, I found a ripper on my local BBS and promptly extracted the music. That was in June of 1994, and the files have followed me from drive to drive, filesystem to filesystem, with their timestamps intact. I still love listening to that music, having burned bits of it to CD for the car, and all of it still enjoying a place in my Winamp playlst.
Occasionally when a discussion of game storylines crops up, I'll pitch in a few kind paragraphs for Star Control 2. The conversation archives on The Pages of Now and Forever still relate the same compelling story, and I still remember my horror when I initially learned of the Kohr-Ah's plight. The most convincing villain is one you feel sympathy for, and they had that going, for sure.
A few weeks ago, I downloaded the most recent build of The Ur-Quan Masters. The first build I tried a year or so ago wouldn't start up, but this version ran flawlessly. The music was perfect, the graphics were just as I remembered them, and the interface took a little getting used to but then felt very comfortable.
So why did the game bore me? I played for probably half an hour, and couldn't seem to get interested. It's not that I knew the ending -- I played the game through 3 or 4 times back when it was new, and it didn't seem any less fun the second time around. I haven't been much for games in the last few years, and I'm still struggling to figure out why.
Sounds perfectly on-topic to me... I'm reading some of the documents now and it seems like they're working on solving exactly my problem. It'll take some more research about the group to be sure, but so far I like what these folks are up to. I just hope the downmodder gets metamoderated into extinction...
Even spookier, the Bluetooth spec already defines an Intercom Profile for cases like this. Some headsets already support pairing to each other for use as short-range walkie talkies, such as a motorcycle driver and rider communicating between their helmets.
The trouble is, it doesn't seem widely implemented, because there's not much profit motive to do so. If there were a widely-publicized project that used these capabilities, it might spur manufacturers into supporting the odd little features...
More bulk storage only solves half the problem. As the volume of email and document archives grows, organizing and searching them becomes more interesting than just storing them.
Personally, I'm facing a minor storage crisis with a 15-gig music tree, a 20-gig photos tree, and dozens of gigs of other useful stuff that I only need on an occasional basis.
When I offload the camera, the files go to the laptop. To avoid duplicating files, the most recent few weeks worth of photos should always be on the laptop. But anything older should move off, to free up space on the drive. I'd like to keep as much of my music in both places as possible, but I need a way to replicate file moves, metadata changes, and deletions so the same bad rips and inaccurate tags don't persist after I fix them once.
There are a set of notes files, mileage logs, and other small files which I'd like to synchronize between the desktop and laptop. However, there's a possibility of both copies changing simultaneously (or at least between syncs), so I'd need a way to reconcile changes.
These little dilemmas have me wasting a lot of space until I resolve them. Stale data and useless files are all over the place, and I don't have the notes I need when I need them. It sounds like I might be able to do most of this with rsync, but the notes files, CVS maybe?
Has anyone tackled these issues before in a useful way, perhaps a sensible-storage-organization HOWTO? More space is not the issue right now, I need more sense.
Amen. My pair of Pro-35s has served me well for many years. The sound is adequate for casual listening, and the open-air design is more appropriate than blocking out the world. They're fairly light, reasonably durable, and very comfortable. Find 'em on sale for $20 more often than not.
:)
If you want to make a statement, get a pair of bluetooth headphones. Pair them and a regular bt headset to your computer. Velcro the headset to the wall of your cubicle with a sign saying "intercom". Set the computer to pipe music to the headphones until the intercom button is pushed.
Populous II taught me about reproduction, the relationship of people to their god, and landscaping! The Incredible Machine was a 100% accurate physics simulation, including trampolines that impart energy to objects that strike them. Space Quest taught me plenty about security, resourcefulness, and the capacity of my pockets. Oh, and not to disrespect janitors.
:)
Before that, SimCity taught me that even with infinite money, running a successful city is still hard. There's nothing like a 20-lane highway to ease your troubles!
Maybe The Sims is a better representation of interpersonal relationships than Strip Poker. If you get that joke, god, you're old.
I suppose DrugWars was more about economics than applied chemistry, unfortunately. If there'd been a meth-cooking section to the game, maybe we'd feel differently about it. :)
Anyone remember Rocky's Boots? I played it on the Apple II, and I'm not aware of an updated version. It was essentially a logic game, building machines from sensors, logic gates, and actuators. Think Mindstorms minus the physical Lego. It was a blast for a little kid to play, and taught some valuable concepts much earlier than I might've otherwise encountered them. But I haven't seen anything like it in years.
The question is a good one: Where have all the good educational titles gone? Perhaps now that violent games have proven they own the market, there's less appetite for trying something new and educational. Anyone?
The Zenith MiniSPORT laptops had the same thing: DOS in ROM, and the HMA could be hardware-assigned as EMS, battery-backed RAMdisk, or a mix of both. I never noticed a speed problem, it was snappy no matter what. Software at the time didn't generally count on having a hard drive at all, so C: being read-only wasn't a big deal.
I'm curious how this works with mobile homes / RVs. Is the cab a vehicle, and the rest a residence? Or is there no private place in an RV?
Next time I need to invade your domain without a warrant, I'll tell you it's to protect minorities. Without any paperwork or oversight, how would you know otherwise?
Kudos to the Slashdot editors for working some description into the blurb. I'm so tired of posts trumpeting some grand new project with a nonsense name, that maybe 2% of the readership will care about. Maybe the rest of us would care, but we can't be bothered to look up a new project name every time some dimwit creates a Sourceforge account.
When I found out the music in SC2 was MOD files, I found a ripper on my local BBS and promptly extracted the music. That was in June of 1994, and the files have followed me from drive to drive, filesystem to filesystem, with their timestamps intact. I still love listening to that music, having burned bits of it to CD for the car, and all of it still enjoying a place in my Winamp playlst.
Occasionally when a discussion of game storylines crops up, I'll pitch in a few kind paragraphs for Star Control 2. The conversation archives on The Pages of Now and Forever still relate the same compelling story, and I still remember my horror when I initially learned of the Kohr-Ah's plight. The most convincing villain is one you feel sympathy for, and they had that going, for sure.
A few weeks ago, I downloaded the most recent build of The Ur-Quan Masters. The first build I tried a year or so ago wouldn't start up, but this version ran flawlessly. The music was perfect, the graphics were just as I remembered them, and the interface took a little getting used to but then felt very comfortable.
So why did the game bore me? I played for probably half an hour, and couldn't seem to get interested. It's not that I knew the ending -- I played the game through 3 or 4 times back when it was new, and it didn't seem any less fun the second time around. I haven't been much for games in the last few years, and I'm still struggling to figure out why.
I picked the example I did because the Tremor decoder was working, and an internal testing version of the HipZip firmware was leaked, long before the product was abandoned. It wasn't leaked widely enough, unfortunately.
Check out the users' forum for the Creative Labs Wireless Music System if you want to read a litany of unfixed bugs that never should've appeared in a shipping product anyway.
I say we rake 'em both over the coals! Are ya with me?
Can you honestly suggest that a shorter Ethernet link will consume less power than a longer one? Sure, there's a tiny difference in cable resistance. But the transmitting end is putting the same amount of energy into it either way, since it doesn't know the difference. Any that doesn't turn into heat in the cable will turn into heat in the receiving chipset. Hence, the same power draw.
You *may* have an argument on very long fiber links. If you can get away with a short-reach transceivers instead of long-haul, you might save a watt or two. But again, if it's the same equipment at either end, the cable length doesn't matter, because any energy that doesn't succumb to cable attenuation just gets dissipated in the receiver. Or in some cases, in an optical attenuator pad just before the receiver, used to weaken a very strong signal so it doesn't destroy a sensitive receiver.
In both cases, the energy actually transmitted through the cable is so infitesimal, resistive losses are negligible and they don't matter anyway, because the energy that makes it through isn't used by the receiver, it's interpreted, then dissipated.
Tell me again how using CAT6 cable on a 10Mb/s link is inefficient? Financially yes, the cable's expensive, but electrically, the signal doesn't care. Neither cable is going to heat up more than the other one.
That being said,
Power cables are another matter entirely! Since they carry lots of current, resistive losses, even in adequate power cables, are measurable and significant. Particularly in 48v DC environments, as compared to 120v or 240v AC systems. To offset this, the power conductors in DC distribution plants are usually appallingly thick. Still, with a thermal infrared viewer, you can find "warm spots" in your power system. Fuses and breakers will always be a little warmer than the cables that feed them, out of necessity. But your power cables should be as short and thick as possible, within reason.
I say within reason because you're still only looking at a few dozen watts throughout the entire datacenter being lost to resistance in power cables. Rewiring the mess to use shorter cables will cost you more in labor and downtime than it's worth, but designing it right from the ground up might be worthwhile. In the meantime, just turn off the lights when you're not using them.
The rule to follow would be "if it produces measurable heat, it's something to look at". Network cables don't. Power cables, power supplies, processors, chipsets, drives, and memory do.
I've been saying this for years, any outfit that already has a DC infrastructure should be installing photovoltaics on the roof. In a traditional PV installation, inverters and output wiring are a big part of the expense, but if that work is already done, the payoff period is a lot shorter.
Plus, in the event of a grid failure, your generator doesn't have to work quite as hard, which translates to slightly longer runtimes on the same fuel tank.
The available solar resource depends largely on latitude and weather patterns, though. Do some research and talk with the PR and marketing people about advertising your facility as "greener". If I were in the market for colo services, I'd lean slightly towards an enviro-conscious outfit, especially if they had a clue about reliability.
You could just as easily cut the trace leading to the chip, or slip a bit of mylar film between the pins of a PLCC socket. As another poster pointed out, if it only affects 0.5% of the PC-owning population, it's not a fix for a grand pandemic-scale malware problem.
This needs to be beaten into the hardware makers' heads: Make the thing write-protected by default, or you'll have some incredible problems down the line.