On the upside though, Gateway more or less uses the standard form factors, with perhaps some ductwork in an attempt to get away with only one fan installed. That's a bit better than the Dells of the time, which were highly non-standard and were a pain in the ass to work on (as home machines go - the business machines were still highly non-standard but a lot easier to work on). Overall, once you replace the barely adequate power supply, those machines weren't too bad.
Yes, I know that. But having to image the drive to something else so I can wipe it, then restore the image gets bothersome after a while. Naturally, the SSD is the boot drive, and Intel's erase utility is of course for Windows, so there's the extra fun step of having to remove the drive from the PC and using another PC (that runs Windows and has a spare SATA port) to actually do the wipe. I found it easier to just restore the image to a standard HDD then move on.
Most PC cases are designed to be a RF shield. That's they come with those pop-off metal plates covering up the empty drive bays, metal covers for empty expansion slots, and the metal fingers along the openings of the removable panels. Or why the plastic cases from the likes of Dell and HP generally have a metal layer on the inside.
The DIY crowd really doesn't care about those things though, which is why you'll find those plexiglass cases, or cheap cases that omit many of the things above. But you won't find a CE sticker on cases like that.
If you assume a circular orbit, and the mass of the planet is negligible compared to the star, then there is only one radius (and tangential velocity) that'll satisfy those conditions given an orbital period.
I actually can believe it. I had first generation Intel X25-M in a Vista system (no trim support in Vista, and the 1st generation Intel drives don't do trim anyway). The drive started having stuttering issues, and would actually get a lot worse when the drive was almost full (less than 1.5GB of space free). I could actually tell when it was time to empty the recycle bin based upon how slow the system was running. It was definitely like the drive was affected by how much free space was left in the filesystem, with the drive really starting to choke when free space was below 1%. The only way that made any sense (in the absence of trim) is if the drive firmware somehow knew about the file system as it went about its internal business, and a file system with a very low amount of free space hindered the ability of the drive to do this. I ended up rejecting that idea, and replaced the drive assuming it was bad (or simply not ready for primetime without trim support), but now I wonder if the drive really could understand the file system...
Lots of people sadly. Heck, it wasn't that long ago that people would unwisely carry around the only copy of their termpaper on a floppy disk. If you think USB thumbdrives have issues...
That's a funny point you make there. Apple likes to cut off support for their older machines on a regular basis. With Lion coming out, all the PPC machines running OSX 10.5 will no longer receive updates, and anything slower than a Core 2 Duo will be stuck running the last release. Chances are when 10.8 comes out in couple of years, that 4-year-old MacBook Pro will have its support cut off too. So as of now, if your Mac is older than about 5 years, you're S.O.L.
Meanwhile, Microsoft still supports XP, an OS from 2001, for another 3 years. That means you can run a supported OS from Microsoft on any PC from about 1998 on. Granted, you'll only get 3 years, but that's about all that Apple plans on supporting their current OS for. Vista runs quite well actually on some crappy 2.6 GHz P4 Dell I retrieved from a dumpster about a year ago. That's a PC from about 2003. I even get the Aero eye candy, despite the dated FX 5200 GPU. I would guess it would also run Windows 7 too if I tried. Windows 7 64-bit runs nicely on my 4-year-old Lenovo, though that isn't too surprising as its still more powerful than the netbook segment, and only lags slightly behind the hilariously overpriced Mac Mini.
I have a first generation X25-M and performance definitely degrades over time. Maybe the G2 drives with Trim fair better, but on my drive the stuttering eventually got so bad I just went back to using a hard disk.
I find it amazing that Macs are so expensive, that people on eBay will pay $920 for a 4-year-old scratch and dent special. You could buy a new PC laptop for that kind of money that would smoke the Mac. Or settle for a similar era PC for a fraction of the cost.
Given it was probably an iMac, replacing a CPU fan may not have been an easy task. It's not like a PC where you can just pop the side off the case and drop in a $15 generic fan and be on your way.
Well, Netscape 4 had the advantage of not taking down the OS with it back in the days of Windows 95/98 when it crashed. To me at least, that was significant enough to keep me off of IE4. I've actually never used IE as my primary browser. After I gave up on Netscape (when I finally got fed up with how bad the 4.7x series was), I switched to Opera and stayed there since.
Stuxnet was created by some very determined people aiming at a very specific target. I'm sure they would have found a way in, no matter what OS they were running.
Is it because the light fixtures with dimmers use different bulbs? Better quality incandescents (better seal, better filament, etc.) can last a lot longer than the cheap bulbs. Most people seem to assume all bulbs are the same and buy whatever is cheapest, but oftentimes with the specialty bulbs the cheap and nasty solution doesn't exist so you're forced into purchasing a higher quality bulb.
What do you normally use for heat? I'm up north too, and I have natural gas for heat. Natural gas is significantly cheaper than using resistive electric heaters to heat my place, so CFLs still save me money in the winter. Granted, the difference is less than in the summer where waste heat from lighting would have to removed via the A/C, but the savings are still there. If you can actually save money by heating your house with light bulbs, maybe you should invest in a good heat pump? The savings would be substantial.
There were the relatively short-lived Sockets 754 and 939 before AMD went to AM2. Luckily for me, I jumped from Socket A straight to AM3, bypassing that nonsense.
On the other hand, Intel has had some relatively long lived sockets, like LGA775 which lasted from the later P4's up through the end of the Core 2's. That's about 4 years worth (and technically it's not dead yet as some of the Pentium Dual-Core chips are still in production). However, it's all kind of moot when they don't provide BIOS updates for their older boards to support the newer chips.
Well, you actually have two more chances after this one if you really want to see a Shuttle launch. It's the last launch for Discovery, but Atlantis and Endeavor each have one more flight scheduled for later this year before the fleet is retired.
Google search is broken in the sense that it returns results not for what I searched for, but what it thinks I wanted to search for. That mostly means words that are spelled similar to my search (but have nothing to do with it otherwise), or results that contain only some or none of the terms I searched for. Now, I don't mind Google suggesting alternative searches based upon words I might have misspelled, but I prefer the actual results match the actual search terms I typed in. Yes, I know I can force it by using '+' in front of the terms, but lately I've been using other search engines that behave like what I expect without trickery.
The silly thing about stereo TOSLINKs is that as far as I can tell there are zero stereo receivers on the market that have digital inputs. That's right. None. All the stereo receivers are strictly analog-only. Then you have these TVs now that don't include an analog output for sound (except maybe a headphone jack), just the TOSLINK. So you're stuck with buying a surround receiver just to listen to stereo sources on your 2-speaker set up, or adding in some kind of converter to the mix. *bangs head on table*
So far I haven't had to deal with this, as I kept my 5.1 receiver back when I decided a few years back that surround sound is more trouble than its worth, but it's starting to act up and I've been rather disappointed in the selection of possible replacements.
As someone else who's played around with magnetic force microscopes, recovering data off of a disk would be extremely time consuming. As the parent mentioned, you're talking several minutes to capture an image that's maybe 100 square micrometers (10x10 um). A floppy disk has several million square micrometers of surface area to image per side - you're literally talking centuries to read a disk this way.
The other problem is resolution. I haven't seen a microscope yet that can see the bits on a modern hard drive. If you want to see bits, you're generally imaging a floppy disk, or an old MFM/RLL hard drive. Zip disks also work well.
Of course, it could still be the wrong tool for the job. A $100k magnetic force microscope may take centuries to read a diskette, but a cheap $15 floppy drive can do it in about a minute.
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On the upside though, Gateway more or less uses the standard form factors, with perhaps some ductwork in an attempt to get away with only one fan installed. That's a bit better than the Dells of the time, which were highly non-standard and were a pain in the ass to work on (as home machines go - the business machines were still highly non-standard but a lot easier to work on). Overall, once you replace the barely adequate power supply, those machines weren't too bad.
Yes, I know that. But having to image the drive to something else so I can wipe it, then restore the image gets bothersome after a while. Naturally, the SSD is the boot drive, and Intel's erase utility is of course for Windows, so there's the extra fun step of having to remove the drive from the PC and using another PC (that runs Windows and has a spare SATA port) to actually do the wipe. I found it easier to just restore the image to a standard HDD then move on.
Most PC cases are designed to be a RF shield. That's they come with those pop-off metal plates covering up the empty drive bays, metal covers for empty expansion slots, and the metal fingers along the openings of the removable panels. Or why the plastic cases from the likes of Dell and HP generally have a metal layer on the inside.
The DIY crowd really doesn't care about those things though, which is why you'll find those plexiglass cases, or cheap cases that omit many of the things above. But you won't find a CE sticker on cases like that.
If you assume a circular orbit, and the mass of the planet is negligible compared to the star, then there is only one radius (and tangential velocity) that'll satisfy those conditions given an orbital period.
The main problem with the Mac server is that the hardware available from Apple is a joke and you can't run OS X server (legally) on anything else.
I actually can believe it. I had first generation Intel X25-M in a Vista system (no trim support in Vista, and the 1st generation Intel drives don't do trim anyway). The drive started having stuttering issues, and would actually get a lot worse when the drive was almost full (less than 1.5GB of space free). I could actually tell when it was time to empty the recycle bin based upon how slow the system was running. It was definitely like the drive was affected by how much free space was left in the filesystem, with the drive really starting to choke when free space was below 1%. The only way that made any sense (in the absence of trim) is if the drive firmware somehow knew about the file system as it went about its internal business, and a file system with a very low amount of free space hindered the ability of the drive to do this. I ended up rejecting that idea, and replaced the drive assuming it was bad (or simply not ready for primetime without trim support), but now I wonder if the drive really could understand the file system...
Lots of people sadly. Heck, it wasn't that long ago that people would unwisely carry around the only copy of their termpaper on a floppy disk. If you think USB thumbdrives have issues...
That's a funny point you make there. Apple likes to cut off support for their older machines on a regular basis. With Lion coming out, all the PPC machines running OSX 10.5 will no longer receive updates, and anything slower than a Core 2 Duo will be stuck running the last release. Chances are when 10.8 comes out in couple of years, that 4-year-old MacBook Pro will have its support cut off too. So as of now, if your Mac is older than about 5 years, you're S.O.L.
Meanwhile, Microsoft still supports XP, an OS from 2001, for another 3 years. That means you can run a supported OS from Microsoft on any PC from about 1998 on. Granted, you'll only get 3 years, but that's about all that Apple plans on supporting their current OS for. Vista runs quite well actually on some crappy 2.6 GHz P4 Dell I retrieved from a dumpster about a year ago. That's a PC from about 2003. I even get the Aero eye candy, despite the dated FX 5200 GPU. I would guess it would also run Windows 7 too if I tried. Windows 7 64-bit runs nicely on my 4-year-old Lenovo, though that isn't too surprising as its still more powerful than the netbook segment, and only lags slightly behind the hilariously overpriced Mac Mini.
I have a first generation X25-M and performance definitely degrades over time. Maybe the G2 drives with Trim fair better, but on my drive the stuttering eventually got so bad I just went back to using a hard disk.
I find it amazing that Macs are so expensive, that people on eBay will pay $920 for a 4-year-old scratch and dent special. You could buy a new PC laptop for that kind of money that would smoke the Mac. Or settle for a similar era PC for a fraction of the cost.
Probably because Apple power bricks are notoriously shoddy and prone to failure? But while they are new, they are kind of nifty.
Given it was probably an iMac, replacing a CPU fan may not have been an easy task. It's not like a PC where you can just pop the side off the case and drop in a $15 generic fan and be on your way.
I wouldn't say so. The difference between a 1994 computer and a 1999 computer is significant.
Well, Netscape 4 had the advantage of not taking down the OS with it back in the days of Windows 95/98 when it crashed. To me at least, that was significant enough to keep me off of IE4. I've actually never used IE as my primary browser. After I gave up on Netscape (when I finally got fed up with how bad the 4.7x series was), I switched to Opera and stayed there since.
Stuxnet was created by some very determined people aiming at a very specific target. I'm sure they would have found a way in, no matter what OS they were running.
Typically you'd buy long life bulbs for fixtures where it's inconvenient to replace them, like high ceilings and such.
Is it because the light fixtures with dimmers use different bulbs? Better quality incandescents (better seal, better filament, etc.) can last a lot longer than the cheap bulbs. Most people seem to assume all bulbs are the same and buy whatever is cheapest, but oftentimes with the specialty bulbs the cheap and nasty solution doesn't exist so you're forced into purchasing a higher quality bulb.
What do you normally use for heat? I'm up north too, and I have natural gas for heat. Natural gas is significantly cheaper than using resistive electric heaters to heat my place, so CFLs still save me money in the winter. Granted, the difference is less than in the summer where waste heat from lighting would have to removed via the A/C, but the savings are still there. If you can actually save money by heating your house with light bulbs, maybe you should invest in a good heat pump? The savings would be substantial.
There were the relatively short-lived Sockets 754 and 939 before AMD went to AM2. Luckily for me, I jumped from Socket A straight to AM3, bypassing that nonsense.
On the other hand, Intel has had some relatively long lived sockets, like LGA775 which lasted from the later P4's up through the end of the Core 2's. That's about 4 years worth (and technically it's not dead yet as some of the Pentium Dual-Core chips are still in production). However, it's all kind of moot when they don't provide BIOS updates for their older boards to support the newer chips.
Well, you actually have two more chances after this one if you really want to see a Shuttle launch. It's the last launch for Discovery, but Atlantis and Endeavor each have one more flight scheduled for later this year before the fleet is retired.
Google search is broken in the sense that it returns results not for what I searched for, but what it thinks I wanted to search for. That mostly means words that are spelled similar to my search (but have nothing to do with it otherwise), or results that contain only some or none of the terms I searched for. Now, I don't mind Google suggesting alternative searches based upon words I might have misspelled, but I prefer the actual results match the actual search terms I typed in. Yes, I know I can force it by using '+' in front of the terms, but lately I've been using other search engines that behave like what I expect without trickery.
The silly thing about stereo TOSLINKs is that as far as I can tell there are zero stereo receivers on the market that have digital inputs. That's right. None. All the stereo receivers are strictly analog-only. Then you have these TVs now that don't include an analog output for sound (except maybe a headphone jack), just the TOSLINK. So you're stuck with buying a surround receiver just to listen to stereo sources on your 2-speaker set up, or adding in some kind of converter to the mix. *bangs head on table*
So far I haven't had to deal with this, as I kept my 5.1 receiver back when I decided a few years back that surround sound is more trouble than its worth, but it's starting to act up and I've been rather disappointed in the selection of possible replacements.
As someone else who's played around with magnetic force microscopes, recovering data off of a disk would be extremely time consuming. As the parent mentioned, you're talking several minutes to capture an image that's maybe 100 square micrometers (10x10 um). A floppy disk has several million square micrometers of surface area to image per side - you're literally talking centuries to read a disk this way.
The other problem is resolution. I haven't seen a microscope yet that can see the bits on a modern hard drive. If you want to see bits, you're generally imaging a floppy disk, or an old MFM/RLL hard drive. Zip disks also work well.
Of course, it could still be the wrong tool for the job. A $100k magnetic force microscope may take centuries to read a diskette, but a cheap $15 floppy drive can do it in about a minute.
I have. My experience is that it has never worked right and it's more trouble than it's worth. That's why I didn't bring it up.
Maybe he's referring to the Atom?