That's interesting. Are you always swapping the cables around or something? Are you sure they just weren't cheap supplies to begin with? If modular supplies have problems with the contacts oxidizing, I would imagine the same thing would affect the ends of the connectors on standard power supplies.
I've actually done it. Our company makes instruments that are computer controlled, and since the computer (at the time) needed to do things like accept full-length cards, we find it easier to roll our own rather than deal with an OEM like Dell, IBM, etc. So I was in the position to try to CE certify a white-box PC for sale in Europe. The computer, without the data acquistion/control cards was nothing really special - a Pentium 4 CPU with some Intel-branded motherboard with 6 PCI slots in a roomy (but not very nice) case with a CD drive, 1 harddrive, a bunch of fans, and a higher wattage Antec power supply. Standard parts that I'm sure were available on Newegg. To make things short, the amount of interference from the computer was considerable and it did not pass.
I'm sure on some computers you've taken apart (likely OEM ones), you've noticed things like the EMI fingers (those little metal tab things that touch the panels you can remove from your computer case), metal shields in front of vents, extra grounding wires, and metal plates for the unused drive bays. Those are the type of features the computer is going to need to get the interference down enough to pass CE. Most home built PCs in the US lack those kind of features, and would never pass due to excessive interference. Likewise, the skeleton case in this article would never pass, or a case with a window or missing side panel either.
I think the most likely scenario would be a kind of "who has the guns makes the rules" kind of thing, where any group could claim a planet by just by putting a navy up in orbit and challenging anyone else who tries to land there. If they get established enough to be able to produce their navy locally, I would imagine it would be nearly impossible to take them on, given that you would have to bring your attack force to them from another star system. Unless space travel becomes fairly quick and easy, I don't see anything like a powerful federation (like in Star Trek) forming that would force people to follow any rules.
Re:blah the emporer has his new clothes on again.
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They could hop accross the border to China. I hear there are fields full of old 486s and Pentium IIs over there.
I'm surprised that you have so many legit unlisted calls. It used to be that caller ID support was rather spotty and wouldn't always show up for certain callers like out of state and rural areas, but nowadays I've found if the call doesn't have caller ID that means the caller is intentionally blocking it which means it's someone I don't want to talk to. I've had zero legit calls/calls that left a message without caller ID in the past 3 years or so.
You might want to look into Asterisk. It can do exactly that, including multiple mailboxes and more (in Asterisk's case, the password is simply the extension that rings your phone).
Convention in the computer industry was that 2^10 = kilo, 2^20 = mega, etc. Yes, this didn't agree with the SI prefixes, but at the time there wasn't any SI unit for data storage so by definition "kilobyte" didn't make any sense anyway if you're a truly anal-retentive type anyway.
The thing that pisses people off is that the harddrive manufacturers didn't switch over to be righteous or anything like people make them out to be, they did it to be intentionally misleading as to the storage capacity of their offerings. That's why people are annoyed by it.
Why even bother with DVDs? With a 1.5TB drive, you're paying about 8 cents per GB. That's dirt cheap. Why not pay 16 cents per GB, and put the data on two drives? It's so cheap that I'm not even bothering with the RAID1 or external drive question - I just pay 24 cents per GB and do both! I can't see why not.
Since all of the drive manufacturers use the same units and all of the units are consistent with the metric prefixes, why are you complaining?
So basically, the entire harddrive industry decides to go against convention in order to make their drives appear bigger than they are really are, and you don't expect people to get annoyed over it? Granted, it's been about 20 years since they made the switch, but still...
In my mind WD's rap goes back years - their 100MB-1GB drives were no more reliable than their more recent stuff. It actually amazes me that they manage to stay in business this long, though admittedly their Raptor line is quite good and does not seem to suffer from the same problems as their regular stuff.
It doesn't surprise me that you found their GP drives run cool. They're basically 5400RPM drives - WD couldn't manage to make a 7200RPM 1TB drive that was considered reliable even by their standards, so they let marketing rebrand them as low-power "Green" drives instead.
I just ordered three of them, and truthfully the throughput is not going to be too terribly important. I'm using them as a mass storage of media - music, videos, pictures, and the like. Two of them are going into the PC in RAID1, and the third is going into a USB/Firewire/eSata enclosure as the back up. Throughput is only going to matter in the first few days, as I anticipate the time needed to copy everything to the new drives, then to copy everything *again* to the external is going to take many hours, possibly even a day. But after that the demands on them are going to be pretty light, as most media doesn't require much throughput. I'm still planning on leaving the old 300GB drive in place as the OS/Programs/extra free space drive.
I've used a trackpad like that, and I don't know how people stand them. Always registering false clicks or not registering real clicks, and not to mention imprecise as hell when you lift your finger to do the tap. Click and drag is an exercise in frustration. You also lose the ability to press both buttons at once, which may or may not bother you depending on what programs you use. Just give me the two physical buttons, and I might consider it.
Try this: On Windows, in a non-admin account, try changing your IP from a static to DHCP address. On a Mac, one click: Apple menu>Locations>DHCP It still boggles my mind that on simple things like this, Windows still can't get it right or easy.
That hasn't been true for a long time, I seem to remember the old iBooks came with a 12" and a 14" option, and both used 1024x768 screens, so obviously not the same DPI. As far as I can tell, Apple just likes low resolution panels.
Try this: On Windows, in a non-admin account, try changing your IP from a static to DHCP address. On a Mac, one click: Apple menu>Locations>DHCP It still boggles my mind that on simple things like this, Windows still can't get it right or easy.
You've got to remember, that Windows is designed with business use in mind. I'm sure in most offices, the IT people don't want people switching on DHCP once they have gone to the trouble to put all the computers on a static IP, hence it makes sense the way Microsoft locked this away by default.
That's about the opposite of my anecdotal evidence. My Thinkpad has excellent wireless reception, and always connects quickly. Mac laptops on the other hand have some of the worst wireless performance of any brand, probably due to the metal cases and weird antenna locations (form over function strikes again!). It's funny to see the Mac people running around trying to pick up a connection while I'm enjoying excellent signal strength.
So, you're going to wait until viruses are running around in the wild before making sure you're protected? I suppose you also wait until it starts raining to fix a hole in the roof? There is nothing magical about Macs that makes them immune to malware.
A lot depends on humidity. In low humidity climates, or in places where it's warm enough that the air conditioner runs enough to effectively lower the humidity, then 78-80 degrees is quite comyfortable. The problem is when it's something like 83 and muggy outside. In that case the air conditioner doesn't have to run much to lower the indoor temperature to 80, so it's still humid and uncomfortable inside. The solution then is to lower the temperature to something like 72 to get the air conditioner to run more. The thing I don't get is in desert climates with 8% humidity, why they think they need to set the thermostat at something like 70 degrees when 80 would do.
Try turning down the brightness. Dimming a typical CCFL LCD screen can dramatically reduce the power consumption. It's in a basement, so you don't need the burn-your-eyeballs-out default brightness level anyway.
The problem with a physical off switch is now you can't use the remote to turn the TV on (or off, for that matter). It seems that most people prefer the ~1W constant draw in order to be able to turn the TV on from the couch.
I'm not speaking of planets younger than Earth, merely Earth's contempories. Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and life of some form has existed on it for most of that timespan. It wouldn't take much, only a few percent speed-up of the life-on-Earth timeline to put civilizations from Earth-like planets out there hundreds of millions years before we arrive on the scene. Saying there were civilizations like us 9 billion years in the past is a bit of a stretch as per the original poster, but 1 billion hardly is.
This is a fallacy. We're trying to count civilizations here, not civilizations consisting of life-as-we-know-it (polar bears in this case). If you instead expand "polar bears" to something more generic like "large mammals", you number of 8.75 billion actually pretty close to the number you'd count on Earth.
Even given the time needed for enough metals to accumulate, you still have had Earth-like planets existing in the galaxy for billions of years prior to humans showing up. It's entirely plausible that there have been many civilizations before us, even when discounting life-not-as-we-know-it.
I don't see why you couldn't have metals in a fairly young universe. Metals come mostly from supernovas, and supernovas come from the death of large stars, which have short lifetimes. I still say it would be possible for another civilization from an Earth-like planet to have had a billion+ year headstart on us.
Actually, that's a USB 3.5" floppy drive with an adaptor to fit in a 5.25" bay. I have yet to see an actual USB 5.25" floppy, which is kind of surprising as there is some demand for one. I've heard that you can build one as some USB 3.5" models are simply a USB to FDC bridge with a standard 3.5" floppy drive inside, but I haven't seen one working yet.
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That's interesting. Are you always swapping the cables around or something? Are you sure they just weren't cheap supplies to begin with? If modular supplies have problems with the contacts oxidizing, I would imagine the same thing would affect the ends of the connectors on standard power supplies.
I've actually done it. Our company makes instruments that are computer controlled, and since the computer (at the time) needed to do things like accept full-length cards, we find it easier to roll our own rather than deal with an OEM like Dell, IBM, etc. So I was in the position to try to CE certify a white-box PC for sale in Europe. The computer, without the data acquistion/control cards was nothing really special - a Pentium 4 CPU with some Intel-branded motherboard with 6 PCI slots in a roomy (but not very nice) case with a CD drive, 1 harddrive, a bunch of fans, and a higher wattage Antec power supply. Standard parts that I'm sure were available on Newegg. To make things short, the amount of interference from the computer was considerable and it did not pass.
I'm sure on some computers you've taken apart (likely OEM ones), you've noticed things like the EMI fingers (those little metal tab things that touch the panels you can remove from your computer case), metal shields in front of vents, extra grounding wires, and metal plates for the unused drive bays. Those are the type of features the computer is going to need to get the interference down enough to pass CE. Most home built PCs in the US lack those kind of features, and would never pass due to excessive interference. Likewise, the skeleton case in this article would never pass, or a case with a window or missing side panel either.
I think the most likely scenario would be a kind of "who has the guns makes the rules" kind of thing, where any group could claim a planet by just by putting a navy up in orbit and challenging anyone else who tries to land there. If they get established enough to be able to produce their navy locally, I would imagine it would be nearly impossible to take them on, given that you would have to bring your attack force to them from another star system. Unless space travel becomes fairly quick and easy, I don't see anything like a powerful federation (like in Star Trek) forming that would force people to follow any rules.
They could hop accross the border to China. I hear there are fields full of old 486s and Pentium IIs over there.
I'm surprised that you have so many legit unlisted calls. It used to be that caller ID support was rather spotty and wouldn't always show up for certain callers like out of state and rural areas, but nowadays I've found if the call doesn't have caller ID that means the caller is intentionally blocking it which means it's someone I don't want to talk to. I've had zero legit calls/calls that left a message without caller ID in the past 3 years or so.
You might want to look into Asterisk. It can do exactly that, including multiple mailboxes and more (in Asterisk's case, the password is simply the extension that rings your phone).
Good thing that Windows allows the administrator to change access to those settings through the group policy editor then for those who need it, right?
Convention in the computer industry was that 2^10 = kilo, 2^20 = mega, etc. Yes, this didn't agree with the SI prefixes, but at the time there wasn't any SI unit for data storage so by definition "kilobyte" didn't make any sense anyway if you're a truly anal-retentive type anyway.
The thing that pisses people off is that the harddrive manufacturers didn't switch over to be righteous or anything like people make them out to be, they did it to be intentionally misleading as to the storage capacity of their offerings. That's why people are annoyed by it.
Why even bother with DVDs? With a 1.5TB drive, you're paying about 8 cents per GB. That's dirt cheap. Why not pay 16 cents per GB, and put the data on two drives? It's so cheap that I'm not even bothering with the RAID1 or external drive question - I just pay 24 cents per GB and do both! I can't see why not.
Since all of the drive manufacturers use the same units and all of the units are consistent with the metric prefixes, why are you complaining?
So basically, the entire harddrive industry decides to go against convention in order to make their drives appear bigger than they are really are, and you don't expect people to get annoyed over it? Granted, it's been about 20 years since they made the switch, but still...
In my mind WD's rap goes back years - their 100MB-1GB drives were no more reliable than their more recent stuff. It actually amazes me that they manage to stay in business this long, though admittedly their Raptor line is quite good and does not seem to suffer from the same problems as their regular stuff.
It doesn't surprise me that you found their GP drives run cool. They're basically 5400RPM drives - WD couldn't manage to make a 7200RPM 1TB drive that was considered reliable even by their standards, so they let marketing rebrand them as low-power "Green" drives instead.
I just ordered three of them, and truthfully the throughput is not going to be too terribly important. I'm using them as a mass storage of media - music, videos, pictures, and the like. Two of them are going into the PC in RAID1, and the third is going into a USB/Firewire/eSata enclosure as the back up. Throughput is only going to matter in the first few days, as I anticipate the time needed to copy everything to the new drives, then to copy everything *again* to the external is going to take many hours, possibly even a day. But after that the demands on them are going to be pretty light, as most media doesn't require much throughput. I'm still planning on leaving the old 300GB drive in place as the OS/Programs/extra free space drive.
I've used a trackpad like that, and I don't know how people stand them. Always registering false clicks or not registering real clicks, and not to mention imprecise as hell when you lift your finger to do the tap. Click and drag is an exercise in frustration. You also lose the ability to press both buttons at once, which may or may not bother you depending on what programs you use. Just give me the two physical buttons, and I might consider it.
Try this: On Windows, in a non-admin account, try changing your IP from a static to DHCP address. On a Mac, one click: Apple menu>Locations>DHCP
It still boggles my mind that on simple things like this, Windows still can't get it right or easy.
That hasn't been true for a long time, I seem to remember the old iBooks came with a 12" and a 14" option, and both used 1024x768 screens, so obviously not the same DPI. As far as I can tell, Apple just likes low resolution panels.
Try this: On Windows, in a non-admin account, try changing your IP from a static to DHCP address. On a Mac, one click: Apple menu>Locations>DHCP
It still boggles my mind that on simple things like this, Windows still can't get it right or easy.
You've got to remember, that Windows is designed with business use in mind. I'm sure in most offices, the IT people don't want people switching on DHCP once they have gone to the trouble to put all the computers on a static IP, hence it makes sense the way Microsoft locked this away by default.
That's about the opposite of my anecdotal evidence. My Thinkpad has excellent wireless reception, and always connects quickly. Mac laptops on the other hand have some of the worst wireless performance of any brand, probably due to the metal cases and weird antenna locations (form over function strikes again!). It's funny to see the Mac people running around trying to pick up a connection while I'm enjoying excellent signal strength.
So, you're going to wait until viruses are running around in the wild before making sure you're protected? I suppose you also wait until it starts raining to fix a hole in the roof? There is nothing magical about Macs that makes them immune to malware.
A lot depends on humidity. In low humidity climates, or in places where it's warm enough that the air conditioner runs enough to effectively lower the humidity, then 78-80 degrees is quite comyfortable. The problem is when it's something like 83 and muggy outside. In that case the air conditioner doesn't have to run much to lower the indoor temperature to 80, so it's still humid and uncomfortable inside. The solution then is to lower the temperature to something like 72 to get the air conditioner to run more. The thing I don't get is in desert climates with 8% humidity, why they think they need to set the thermostat at something like 70 degrees when 80 would do.
Try turning down the brightness. Dimming a typical CCFL LCD screen can dramatically reduce the power consumption. It's in a basement, so you don't need the burn-your-eyeballs-out default brightness level anyway.
The problem with a physical off switch is now you can't use the remote to turn the TV on (or off, for that matter). It seems that most people prefer the ~1W constant draw in order to be able to turn the TV on from the couch.
I'm not speaking of planets younger than Earth, merely Earth's contempories. Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and life of some form has existed on it for most of that timespan. It wouldn't take much, only a few percent speed-up of the life-on-Earth timeline to put civilizations from Earth-like planets out there hundreds of millions years before we arrive on the scene. Saying there were civilizations like us 9 billion years in the past is a bit of a stretch as per the original poster, but 1 billion hardly is.
This is a fallacy. We're trying to count civilizations here, not civilizations consisting of life-as-we-know-it (polar bears in this case). If you instead expand "polar bears" to something more generic like "large mammals", you number of 8.75 billion actually pretty close to the number you'd count on Earth.
Even given the time needed for enough metals to accumulate, you still have had Earth-like planets existing in the galaxy for billions of years prior to humans showing up. It's entirely plausible that there have been many civilizations before us, even when discounting life-not-as-we-know-it.
I don't see why you couldn't have metals in a fairly young universe. Metals come mostly from supernovas, and supernovas come from the death of large stars, which have short lifetimes. I still say it would be possible for another civilization from an Earth-like planet to have had a billion+ year headstart on us.
Actually, that's a USB 3.5" floppy drive with an adaptor to fit in a 5.25" bay. I have yet to see an actual USB 5.25" floppy, which is kind of surprising as there is some demand for one. I've heard that you can build one as some USB 3.5" models are simply a USB to FDC bridge with a standard 3.5" floppy drive inside, but I haven't seen one working yet.