Batteries are batteries... battery technology has hardly advanced at all in just 4 short years...
I'm sure this thing is using regular lead-acid batteries. These are still pretty much the best for this sort of thing when you take into account power capacity, current flow and cost. When it comes right down to it, there really isn't that much difference from the batteries that people were using to start their cars 70 years ago. The technology is basically the same. The primary differences are tolerances and materials quality.
There probably never will be a "Breakthrough Leap" in battery technology. There are just too many limitations to the underlying technology. Sure, they keep improving, but they measure improvements in tenths of a percent, rather than something like "twice the storage".
That's one of the main reaons why people are going to Fuel Cells. There just aren't that many ways to keep improving batteries... you're getting close to the top.
The first part of the problem, is WDS isn't a standard. IEEE has only just now formed a study group to say nothing of a task force, so it could be years before they actually agree on an official standard. So unless all of your gear is from the same manufacturer, compatibility is a hit-or-miss affair.
The second part of the problem is exactly what I said before. The WDS specifications explicity states that you will lose half your bandwidth per WDS repeating hop. Just check the second page of that link you provided above.
It was slow by current standards, but far faster and more reliable than hand calculation. It could add or subtract a 50-bit number in a second, but the architecture allowed 29 parallel add/subtract unit. It produced useful statistical work. In and of Itself it wasn't error prone; the culprit was the burned-hole-in-paper method of storing data. It was only 1.5m by 0.91m by 0.91 m and weighed about 750 pounds.
One potential problem about repeaters that most people don't realize, is you can't just add a box and extend the range. There are tradeoffs. There are really only two ways these things work.
One method is the box receives the data on one channel and broadcasts it back out on another channel. This will run at full speed, but you'll end up with multiple channels on your network. This be an issue if you're moving from one access point to another. This also requires two separate receiver/transmitters.
The other method is to have the repeater rebroadcast the information on the same channel. This is the most common of the repeaters and is probably how Apple does it due to the cost. The problem with this method, is it cuts your throughput in half. The master transmits and then has to wait for the repeater to receive and retransmit it because there can only be one transmitter operating on a particular frequency at the same time. Your network drops from 54mbit to 27mbit max theoretical.
The best bet for extending range is probably to forgo the repeater and either raise the broadcast power of the hub or use better antennas.
Was there with some friends a few years ago. It was fun. Sail north for a couple hours, climb around the volcano for a few hours, and sail back. I've got tons of pictures of us climbing around the crater, sulpher pools, and factory ruins. They used to have factories built in it to process the sulphur, but after they were destroyed the third time, they never rebuilt.
It's actually fairly safe there. The volcano is quite well behaved. It throws out steam continuously, and only occasionally has hissy-fits where it throws out rocks the size of coffee-tables. Those come and go, so as long as you avoid it during particularily active times, you'll be fine.
Success requires making yard after yard of wire, and eventually mile after mile. The focus at the companies, at national laboratories and at many universities is on questions that call for a genius more like Edison than Einstein.
Uh, bullshit. If they don't understand how it works, they're never going to move this stuff beyond the applications possible at liquid nitrogen temps. I'm not selling that short -- it's neat, and has a number of industrial applications -- but we're not going to be making power lines, or even wiring our houses, with that kind of cooling.
I tend to disagree. Edison, arguably one of the greatest and most prolific inventors, wasn't really an scientific man and didn't understand how many of the things he discovered really worked. He was very persistent and intuitive in the way he would develop things. He'd just keep plugging away at different experiments till he found something that worked. Many famous inventions were an accidental discovery that worked without really understanding the underlying physics. Vulcanized Rubber, Penicillin, and even high-temperature superconductors themselves come immediately to mind. The majority of medicines and drugs were all developed this way. The first of the high-temperature semiconductors was found this way and was against everything known about semiconductors at the time. Many initial breakthrough discoveries were initially called impossible or impractical by conventional knowledge.
There is nothing to say there will even be superconductors at much higher temperatures anyway. What we really needed is an innovative thinker who can come up a unique way of using the existing superconductors we have. Perhaps an innovative refrigeration process to keep them cool in practical applications... Perhaps blending them with non-superconducting materials to make a semi-superconducting material with much higher strength and current carrying capacity? What about a way of encapsulating them in something like a nested Peltier Junction to keep the interior at superconducting temperatures? What about a way to incorporate the superconductors into the junction itself? There are many possibilities to experiment with. Even if you don't discover what you're looking for, there are lots of other things you might find.
It's easy to store and transport as a liquid. Good energy density too. Hydrogen is far harder and more dangerous to store and transport. The biggest problem is you have with Hydrogen is it has to be stored at very high pressure and/or low temperature to store as a liquid, or else converted to a more complex molecule such as methanol or alcohol. Propane is cheap, easy to mess with, and you can buy cheap tanks right off the shelf. Just look at all the propane grills, refrigerators and generators you can buy out there. Most could be built with Hydrogen, but they just wouldn't be practical.
Liquid Propane is lighter than water and propane vapor is heavier than air, so it will tend to seek low spots if it leaks. One gallon of liquid will evaporate to 270 cubic feet of propane vapor.
Propane will only burn if it's mixed with air at a 2.2% to 9.6% concentration. A high concentration will actually put a fire out. I proved that one day to some students of mine ( I'm a commercial hot-air balloon pilot ).
You have to respect propane, but it's actually quite safe to have around, all things considered.
Mini-itx motherboard in a portable enclosure, although I might switch it down to a Nano-itx now that they're becoming available.
250gig 3.5" hard drive instead of a 2.5 mainly cause they're half the price and hold twice the storage.
CD-RW
802.11g
FM audio transmitter
Small battery pack. It only needs to run everything for 10 minutes.
12-volt Power Supply
No screen; No keyboard
The idea of this is a portable storage / mp3 player. All controls are through it's Apache server, so I connect to it from a PDA or a laptop with a wireless card. It runs off 12 volts, so you can use it anywhere. As long as you can keep it within a few hundred feet of you you can use it.
The original idea was for an MP3 player for my truck that I didn't have to dedicated to it or physically install. All I have to do, is carry it out of the house and plug it into a cigarette lighter. The battery keeps it from having to reboot when I move it from outlet to outlet. a 15 volt wall-wart and my auto-cigarette lighter adapter has enough voltage to run it and keep the battery topped off. It broadcasts to a nearby FM receiver or can stream the audio, although sometimes I just connect to the MP3 library over Samba. It automatically synchronizes with my home network when it's in range.
When I'm at work, I just leave it in the truck and I've got enough range to connect to the FM headset and PDA I carry with me. When I'm at the gym, I park close to the building and queue up a long playlist before I leave it and the PDA in the truck. The best part of the whole thing is that it's inconspicuous. I don't have to leave an expensive looking gadget sitting in it all the time. I built it into a small, cheap looking plastic toolbox, so I can carry it anywhere without anybody paying any attention to it.
It keeps growing. I'm currently experimenting with adding moving-map GPS using a USB GPS receiver. My big problem there, is updating the display on the PDA properly. I'd also like to synchronize my email / contacts / calendar / notes / tasks to it. It's an easy way to transfer large files back-and-forth between work and home and wherever else I happen to need them.
I'm also considering with adding a second wireless adapter to it. The primary that controls it is highly secure and doesn't broadcast. The second one would be completely open and would scan for access-points. Partly so it could automatically connect to the net as I was driving around. Partly so I could use it as a gateway to the net from the PDA.
I'd really like to get it all down to something I could actually wear on my belt. I could already get away with a smaller version if I ditched the CD drive, went to an embedded motherboard, switched to a small HD, and added batteries. It this point, it wouldn't be as powerful and would be twice the price. Maybe in a couple years...
The new PVP and PDA combo device with docking station will be released before the end of 2004.
Which means it's just an engineering prototype. This could change significantly by the time it finally goes on sale. IF it ever actually goes on sale.
Personally, even though I own an Archos MP3 player I wouldn't consider buying one of these. It's gotta be more $$$ than their current devices, which are already up in the $600-900 range. It's very much a niche market for something like this that isn't really compatible with anything for that kind of money. If it was half the price, I might consider it.
I'm working on something sort of like this myself except I'm taking a different approach to it. My box has no screen or keyboard. It's a brick that sits in a backpack or my car or somewhere near me, and provides access to everything through a 802.11b connection with an Apache server. I control it from a small PDA with a wireless card and a browser. Portable data storage, mp3 server (did I mention it's got an FM transmitter built in?). The beauty of this method is that I can use bigger batteries and a bigger hard drive because it's not supposed to be handheld.
One myth about solar in most systems- you will NOT be the only one on your block w/ lights during an outage.
I sorta figured my lights wouldn't work anyway because when I needed them it would be dark out...
My vote goes for a Camera with a flash going off.
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Modernizing the Save Icon?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Because that is basically what you're doing with a save. You're taking a snapshot of whatever you are currently working on and saving an image of it at this point in time. It can even be used for a system backup because all it really is, is a snapshot of an entire computer at a particular time.
I would make the icon itself a picture of a camera with the flash going off. When you're viewing a listing of "snapshots" they could be little thumbnail pictures of the document made to look like a photograph with little white borders all the way around them. You could use "albums" to view all your snapshots. For versioning it's easy to visualize "this is the 4th picture I took of this project on thursday". You could have custom albums of "all the snapshots I took last week" or "all the snapshots of that document since I started working on it in May".
The photography analogy is easy to extend because everyone is familiar with it. A snapshot is whatever the photographer was looking at at the time they took the picture. You can make "duplicate copies of your prints" to give to other people. You can have additional copies of your prints made if you need more. You can save copies of your prints in photo albums and stored away for safe keeping. etc...
Oh, I really wanna see that. Can you imagine how much he'll have to crank his ass off when he gets slashdotted? On the other hand, we could build a great weight-loss / fitness regimen into something like this. You can KEEP your Herbalife.
It's still a "winprinter" class of machine. No on-board processing, no PCL or Postscript support. When Samsung stops updating the driver for this, your screwed. You also can't use it with an OS that they don't specifically support. They do support some Linux's, but nothing unusual.
I'd much rather spend my money on something standard like a good PCL or Postscript printer that I don't have to worry about. Sure, it costs more, but you can use them forever. I even keep an old HP LaserJet II sitting here for scratch printing because I've got a half-dozen refilled cartridges for it sitting on a shelf. On around 4000 pages a cartridge, I'll probably get another 10 years out of it unless something catastrophic happens to it that I can't fix. It's one of the pleasant side-effects of HP using an all-in-one replacement cartridge. I don't have to worry about it because it works with anything. On the other hand, it's slow and hot and only 300 dpi. On the other hand again, it's pretty much free.
But then at $90-180 for the ML-1710, it's pretty much disposable...
This can be a (very) temporary fix with a drive that's having problems with the electronics. Often if components are flaking out but haven't actually fried, they'll run when they're cold but die when they heat up. Get it cold and then power it up and work fast. You'll probably only have a few minutes at a time though. The same applies to motherboards, chips, and memory. To give you more time, you should probably set everything to as low speed and low voltage as you can get away with. I actually did this with a machine outdoors in 15 degree weather once. The machine had been crashing during boot and I couldn't get another machine to recognize the drive's data format ( it was a strange integrated controller on the motherboard ). Outside it booted and ran for two hours while I copied all the data over a long ethernet cable I'd ran out a window. Turned out to be the motherboard. After a replacement with something a little more generic and a reformat, I copied everything back to the drive and it was fine.
Granted this probably has nothing to do with your current drive problems. It sounds like it blew chunks with physical problems. Even if you could get it working again I'd bet you've got significant platter and/or head damage and any data you could get off it would have serious corruption issues. Scratching noises and loud thumps coming from hard drives are never good things.
I would consider this to be a last-resort. And an expensive one considering you're going to destroy another hard drive to attempt recovery of the bad one.
I've done just this before myself and had hit-or-miss luck with it. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. But this was 15-20 years ago. Dust was a problem, but if you did it in a really clean environment and were careful it would minimize the risk. I'd never try it with a modern hard drive unless I had some sort of clean-room with HEPA air filtration quality. Things are just too small now-a-days.
Data recovery companies do basically this with dead hard drives, but they've got the equipment to pull it off. Just by opening the drive itself, you could do enough damage to prevent them from getting anything off of it.
It may be irrelevant anyway. By the sound of the noises the drive was made, I would guess the damage has already been done.
I wouldn't either, personally. I don't need the money anyway.
But there are two types of people who might: people who really need the money; and the risk-taker adventerous types who sees it as a big game. They might even spend more money that they make doing it, just so they can prove that they can get do it and get away with it. Look at the cracker types who break into systems just to add to their list for bragging / prestige rights in that community.
US currency isn't printed on polyester, it's a 75% cotton, 25% linen mix. The paper comes from one particular company that keeps the process a closely guarded secret. Almost all the paper you buy in the store is wood-based. This is how those cheap counterfeit detector pens work. All they are is an iodine solution that changes color if it detects the starch in the wood-based paper.
There are lots of ways the counterfeiters get around this issue. Wash the ink off real notes ( like 1$ bills ) and print fake 20's on them. Use parchment type paper and "mess it up". Put it in the dryer for a while. Dirty it up. Fresh paper is easy to tell, but dirty is a lot harder. Most money starts lookin pretty crappy after it's been in circulation for a while.
Most cashiers don't have the time or inclination to examine every bill they're given. If you hand somebody 5 $20's at Best Buy to buy a couple of videogames, do you think the cashier is actually gonna scrutinize each bill one-by-one? When they have a line of 5 people backed up? Make the top and bottom $20s real ones, and put one or two fake ones in the middle, and 95% of the time they won't notice.
It's the stupid and/or greedy counterfeiters that get caught. If you understand how people think, you can do a lot to get away with it. Do one or two bills mixed in with real ones. Don't do a lot to the same people. Use smaller bills like 10's or 5's. Who even thinks about counterfeit versions of those? Learn what places use to detect counterfeits and tailor your bills to them. If a place uses the counterfeit detector pens, print your bills on non wood-based paper and your bills are automatically real because the counterfeit detector pens say they are. You know how easy it is to defeat them, but the average person has no idea and accepts their results on blind faith.
It's just another example of social engineering. You can get people do to or believe ridiculous things depending on how you present things.
I've worn hearing aids over the last 20 years or so, and I've come to the realization that sound and perception is a lot more than just what the ears hear. My hearing isn't that bad, but it's difficult to get along without them.
The first thing you have to realize, is it isn't just what your ears hear, it's the vibrations that you feel all over your body that affect your spatial perception. Think about it, if spatial perception was just the difference in sound arrival time between each ear there should be no way for you to tell whether a sound is coming from in front of your or behind you. Yet it's obvious when you close your eyes what direction it's coming from.
All sound is is air pressure changes. Your entire body is a hearing device. Your body can feel the sound waves hitting your front and back and can deduce direction pretty easily from that. Your skull makes a very good resonating cavity to collect and amplify these vibrations. Just go to a rave or live concert and feel the vibrations. One of the tests they always give me is bone conduction, where they put two transducers on my skull behind my ears. I can hear the sounds they produce almost as well as if it was audible coming through my ears.
I doubt the three transducers in each ear is worth the effect. I'd think it'd be much more successful if you had some sort of a band all the way around your head that would vibrate your skull from various directions. You need your ears for Clarity, to understand what you're hearing; but your skin and body can handle sound sensations. Even completely deaf people can sense sounds and directions through the vibrations.
I'd think true 5.1 is just unachievable through a simple pair of headphones, no matter how many in each ear. Granted it may still sound good, but still not as good as a good set of speakers and a subwoofer.
I was downloading this yesterday afternoon...
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Knoppix Tips and Tricks
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· Score: 5, Interesting
and didn't notice until I tried to use it this afternoon that I only got 50 meg of it. I then went to a different site and was downloading it at about 120K per second. Being the idiot that I am, I accidently got the German version. Going back to the site, I can only get 25K per second tops. The Slashdot effect at work.
Forget about building a special distro just for the 800 meg CD's out there. It's not really that much more space for something that's not "standard" in the first place. Why doesn't somebody go ahead and make a Knoppix-type distro for DVDs? Most newer machines have them and with 4.7 gig of storage space you can put pretty much everything on them. With one of these properly configured and a decent sized USB memory drive, this is all somebody really needs for a truly portable computing experience. You could fit Gnome and KDE as well as a good installer on them. Forget about making a "Live" version of a distro. With one DVD containing a live version of Linux as well as a full installation environment running on it, it's a true one-stop-shop.
Does anybody make a credit-card form factor DVD +/-R like they do with the CD-Rs? If you could fit a full Knoppix distro onto something that size that you can fit into your wallet, that'd be really useful. While CD's aren't all that big, they're inconvenient to carry around all the time "just-in-case".
It's really too bad that you can't burn a distro to a CR-RW or a DVD +/-RW and use the unused space as a worm drive of your configuration or data. You'd have to refresh the disc every so often as your available space would dwindle, but you could get around even needing a USB key-fob. Unfortunately the common disc-formats in use make this very difficult, but it's something to think about...d
The best, cheap way I ever found to organize servers and related gear were used food storage racks. They're usually stainless steel wire-type construction and come in a wide variety of sizes. Many are modular so you can set your own shelf height and many have locking wheels so you can move them around and lock them in place. They can be quite strong; I've wheeled coworkers around on them before. It's pretty easy to find places selling them because there are always restaurants starting up and going out of business. Look in the phone book for "Restaurant Supply".
I've got a couple of 4 foot wide by 6 foot tall racks at work. Bottom shelf contains computers, next shelf has a monitor, mouse, keyboard, next shelf has more computers, and the top shelf has power strips and switches. I set them up so one power cable and one ethernet cable come off the back corner so you can just wheel it wherever you need it and plug it in. All the cables are attached to the frame with plastic wire-ties so everything is kept neat. If you need to get to the back, you just swivel it around and there everything is.
Back when I had my own company, I ran all my servers off of a 6x6 rack that I had bought for $50 US. Money was tight, so I used all shapes and sizes of systems, mostly generic. I didn't need pricier rack mount units yet I still had portability and ease of access. I had up to eight servers, 3 monitors, hubs, and misc gear all over it.
At home, I've got a rack which holds three servers, a monitor/keyboard/mouse, a scanner, and two printers. Everything else in the house is wireless and talks to this unit. I paid $20 for the rack and wheels for it were another $5 US.
USB as well as FireWire are still a single set of wires. Unless you use some sort of USB router or multiple controllers, all the devices must share a finite amount of bandwidth based on the ratio of their speeds.
For example: A device running at 2mb speed that sends 500kb in a second uses a full 1/4 of the entire USB bandwidth. This automatically chops the 12mb down to 9mb, and the 480mb down to 360mb. A 12mb device that sends 6mb cuts it in half.
By the time you have a keyboard, mouse, joystick, mp3 player, external drive, and who knows what else sharing the USB connection, you have a lot of things competing for limited bandwidth with the slower devices taking an inordinate share of the pie. This is one of the reasons I like sticking to the old PS/2 style Mouse and keyboard connectors. Keep these usually slow devices from flooding the connection. Particularily the high-res mice.
And then when you consider the 2mb/12mb/480mb numbers are the absolute maximum theoretical numbers without overhead, you realize that you get nowhere near this kind of throughput in the first place. Things can get bogged down pretty quickly.
Personally, I run two separate USB adapters. The built-in USB on the motherboard and a separate PCI USB controller. I leave all the slow things like keyboard and mouse and joysticks on one controller. I put the things that need speed like a dvd burner or mp3 player on the other one and make sure I don't use them at the same time.
I don't know that I'd try to use commercial print heads at all, because these are precision devices designed with the idea that they have complete control over the print media - level and movement. You're dealing with devices that operate in terms of thousanths of an inch. I just don't think you're gonna get that level of precision from a custom built device and it would be reflected in the output. In particular, I wouldn't think Color would work very well.
It's fairly simple to build something providing the surface you're printing on is flat. You can build a sturdy 2-d frame to hold the printheads across a flat surface, it's the variable height stuff that is a problem. You could rig something up with sensors that could move the print-head up and down, but I wouldn't try it in anything other than unidirectional myself.
For something of this size, I think you'd be better off trying this with something old. Modern ones would kill you in trying to get the head to be just close enough and at just the right location along the surface.
Slashdot Mirror
Batteries are batteries... battery technology has hardly advanced at all in just 4 short years... I'm sure this thing is using regular lead-acid batteries. These are still pretty much the best for this sort of thing when you take into account power capacity, current flow and cost. When it comes right down to it, there really isn't that much difference from the batteries that people were using to start their cars 70 years ago. The technology is basically the same. The primary differences are tolerances and materials quality.
There probably never will be a "Breakthrough Leap" in battery technology. There are just too many limitations to the underlying technology. Sure, they keep improving, but they measure improvements in tenths of a percent, rather than something like "twice the storage".
That's one of the main reaons why people are going to Fuel Cells. There just aren't that many ways to keep improving batteries... you're getting close to the top.
I'm quite familiar with the WDS 'standard'.
The first part of the problem, is WDS isn't a standard. IEEE has only just now formed a study group to say nothing of a task force, so it could be years before they actually agree on an official standard. So unless all of your gear is from the same manufacturer, compatibility is a hit-or-miss affair.
The second part of the problem is exactly what I said before. The WDS specifications explicity states that you will lose half your bandwidth per WDS repeating hop. Just check the second page of that link you provided above.
It was slow by current standards, but far faster and more reliable than hand calculation. It could add or subtract a 50-bit number in a second, but the architecture allowed 29 parallel add/subtract unit. It produced useful statistical work. In and of Itself it wasn't error prone; the culprit was the burned-hole-in-paper method of storing data. It was only 1.5m by 0.91m by 0.91 m and weighed about 750 pounds.
One potential problem about repeaters that most people don't realize, is you can't just add a box and extend the range. There are tradeoffs. There are really only two ways these things work.
One method is the box receives the data on one channel and broadcasts it back out on another channel. This will run at full speed, but you'll end up with multiple channels on your network. This be an issue if you're moving from one access point to another. This also requires two separate receiver/transmitters.
The other method is to have the repeater rebroadcast the information on the same channel. This is the most common of the repeaters and is probably how Apple does it due to the cost. The problem with this method, is it cuts your throughput in half. The master transmits and then has to wait for the repeater to receive and retransmit it because there can only be one transmitter operating on a particular frequency at the same time. Your network drops from 54mbit to 27mbit max theoretical.
The best bet for extending range is probably to forgo the repeater and either raise the broadcast power of the hub or use better antennas.
Was there with some friends a few years ago. It was fun. Sail north for a couple hours, climb around the volcano for a few hours, and sail back. I've got tons of pictures of us climbing around the crater, sulpher pools, and factory ruins. They used to have factories built in it to process the sulphur, but after they were destroyed the third time, they never rebuilt.
It's actually fairly safe there. The volcano is quite well behaved. It throws out steam continuously, and only occasionally has hissy-fits where it throws out rocks the size of coffee-tables. Those come and go, so as long as you avoid it during particularily active times, you'll be fine.
I tend to disagree. Edison, arguably one of the greatest and most prolific inventors, wasn't really an scientific man and didn't understand how many of the things he discovered really worked. He was very persistent and intuitive in the way he would develop things. He'd just keep plugging away at different experiments till he found something that worked. Many famous inventions were an accidental discovery that worked without really understanding the underlying physics. Vulcanized Rubber, Penicillin, and even high-temperature superconductors themselves come immediately to mind. The majority of medicines and drugs were all developed this way. The first of the high-temperature semiconductors was found this way and was against everything known about semiconductors at the time. Many initial breakthrough discoveries were initially called impossible or impractical by conventional knowledge.
There is nothing to say there will even be superconductors at much higher temperatures anyway. What we really needed is an innovative thinker who can come up a unique way of using the existing superconductors we have. Perhaps an innovative refrigeration process to keep them cool in practical applications... Perhaps blending them with non-superconducting materials to make a semi-superconducting material with much higher strength and current carrying capacity? What about a way of encapsulating them in something like a nested Peltier Junction to keep the interior at superconducting temperatures? What about a way to incorporate the superconductors into the junction itself? There are many possibilities to experiment with. Even if you don't discover what you're looking for, there are lots of other things you might find.
It's easy to store and transport as a liquid. Good energy density too. Hydrogen is far harder and more dangerous to store and transport. The biggest problem is you have with Hydrogen is it has to be stored at very high pressure and/or low temperature to store as a liquid, or else converted to a more complex molecule such as methanol or alcohol. Propane is cheap, easy to mess with, and you can buy cheap tanks right off the shelf. Just look at all the propane grills, refrigerators and generators you can buy out there. Most could be built with Hydrogen, but they just wouldn't be practical.
Liquid Propane is lighter than water and propane vapor is heavier than air, so it will tend to seek low spots if it leaks. One gallon of liquid will evaporate to 270 cubic feet of propane vapor.
Propane will only burn if it's mixed with air at a 2.2% to 9.6% concentration. A high concentration will actually put a fire out. I proved that one day to some students of mine ( I'm a commercial hot-air balloon pilot ).
You have to respect propane, but it's actually quite safe to have around, all things considered.
Thinking you were getting free food but all that showed up were cans of spam....
/> ....
I've been in meatpacking plants before... <shudders
The really obnoxious thing about this post is that 5 years ago it would have been a completely legitimate proposition.
Mini-itx motherboard in a portable enclosure, although I might switch it down to a Nano-itx now that they're becoming available.
250gig 3.5" hard drive instead of a 2.5 mainly cause they're half the price and hold twice the storage.
CD-RW
802.11g
FM audio transmitter
Small battery pack. It only needs to run everything for 10 minutes.
12-volt Power Supply
No screen; No keyboard
The idea of this is a portable storage / mp3 player. All controls are through it's Apache server, so I connect to it from a PDA or a laptop with a wireless card. It runs off 12 volts, so you can use it anywhere. As long as you can keep it within a few hundred feet of you you can use it.
The original idea was for an MP3 player for my truck that I didn't have to dedicated to it or physically install. All I have to do, is carry it out of the house and plug it into a cigarette lighter. The battery keeps it from having to reboot when I move it from outlet to outlet. a 15 volt wall-wart and my auto-cigarette lighter adapter has enough voltage to run it and keep the battery topped off. It broadcasts to a nearby FM receiver or can stream the audio, although sometimes I just connect to the MP3 library over Samba. It automatically synchronizes with my home network when it's in range.
When I'm at work, I just leave it in the truck and I've got enough range to connect to the FM headset and PDA I carry with me. When I'm at the gym, I park close to the building and queue up a long playlist before I leave it and the PDA in the truck. The best part of the whole thing is that it's inconspicuous. I don't have to leave an expensive looking gadget sitting in it all the time. I built it into a small, cheap looking plastic toolbox, so I can carry it anywhere without anybody paying any attention to it.
It keeps growing. I'm currently experimenting with adding moving-map GPS using a USB GPS receiver. My big problem there, is updating the display on the PDA properly. I'd also like to synchronize my email / contacts / calendar / notes / tasks to it. It's an easy way to transfer large files back-and-forth between work and home and wherever else I happen to need them.
I'm also considering with adding a second wireless adapter to it. The primary that controls it is highly secure and doesn't broadcast. The second one would be completely open and would scan for access-points. Partly so it could automatically connect to the net as I was driving around. Partly so I could use it as a gateway to the net from the PDA.
I'd really like to get it all down to something I could actually wear on my belt. I could already get away with a smaller version if I ditched the CD drive, went to an embedded motherboard, switched to a small HD, and added batteries. It this point, it wouldn't be as powerful and would be twice the price. Maybe in a couple years...
Toys...
If you read the article it says:
The new PVP and PDA combo device with docking station will be released before the end of 2004.
Which means it's just an engineering prototype. This could change significantly by the time it finally goes on sale. IF it ever actually goes on sale.
Personally, even though I own an Archos MP3 player I wouldn't consider buying one of these. It's gotta be more $$$ than their current devices, which are already up in the $600-900 range. It's very much a niche market for something like this that isn't really compatible with anything for that kind of money. If it was half the price, I might consider it.
I'm working on something sort of like this myself except I'm taking a different approach to it. My box has no screen or keyboard. It's a brick that sits in a backpack or my car or somewhere near me, and provides access to everything through a 802.11b connection with an Apache server. I control it from a small PDA with a wireless card and a browser. Portable data storage, mp3 server (did I mention it's got an FM transmitter built in?). The beauty of this method is that I can use bigger batteries and a bigger hard drive because it's not supposed to be handheld.
One myth about solar in most systems- you will NOT be the only one on your block w/ lights during an outage.
I sorta figured my lights wouldn't work anyway because when I needed them it would be dark out...
Because that is basically what you're doing with a save. You're taking a snapshot of whatever you are currently working on and saving an image of it at this point in time. It can even be used for a system backup because all it really is, is a snapshot of an entire computer at a particular time.
I would make the icon itself a picture of a camera with the flash going off. When you're viewing a listing of "snapshots" they could be little thumbnail pictures of the document made to look like a photograph with little white borders all the way around them. You could use "albums" to view all your snapshots. For versioning it's easy to visualize "this is the 4th picture I took of this project on thursday". You could have custom albums of "all the snapshots I took last week" or "all the snapshots of that document since I started working on it in May".
The photography analogy is easy to extend because everyone is familiar with it. A snapshot is whatever the photographer was looking at at the time they took the picture. You can make "duplicate copies of your prints" to give to other people. You can have additional copies of your prints made if you need more. You can save copies of your prints in photo albums and stored away for safe keeping. etc...
It's called a Moped.
Or you could always settle for something even more radical and buy a bicycle.
Oh, I really wanna see that. Can you imagine how much he'll have to crank his ass off when he gets slashdotted? On the other hand, we could build a great weight-loss / fitness regimen into something like this. You can KEEP your Herbalife.
It's still a "winprinter" class of machine. No on-board processing, no PCL or Postscript support. When Samsung stops updating the driver for this, your screwed. You also can't use it with an OS that they don't specifically support. They do support some Linux's, but nothing unusual.
I'd much rather spend my money on something standard like a good PCL or Postscript printer that I don't have to worry about. Sure, it costs more, but you can use them forever. I even keep an old HP LaserJet II sitting here for scratch printing because I've got a half-dozen refilled cartridges for it sitting on a shelf. On around 4000 pages a cartridge, I'll probably get another 10 years out of it unless something catastrophic happens to it that I can't fix. It's one of the pleasant side-effects of HP using an all-in-one replacement cartridge. I don't have to worry about it because it works with anything. On the other hand, it's slow and hot and only 300 dpi. On the other hand again, it's pretty much free.
But then at $90-180 for the ML-1710, it's pretty much disposable...
This can be a (very) temporary fix with a drive that's having problems with the electronics. Often if components are flaking out but haven't actually fried, they'll run when they're cold but die when they heat up. Get it cold and then power it up and work fast. You'll probably only have a few minutes at a time though. The same applies to motherboards, chips, and memory. To give you more time, you should probably set everything to as low speed and low voltage as you can get away with. I actually did this with a machine outdoors in 15 degree weather once. The machine had been crashing during boot and I couldn't get another machine to recognize the drive's data format ( it was a strange integrated controller on the motherboard ). Outside it booted and ran for two hours while I copied all the data over a long ethernet cable I'd ran out a window. Turned out to be the motherboard. After a replacement with something a little more generic and a reformat, I copied everything back to the drive and it was fine.
Granted this probably has nothing to do with your current drive problems. It sounds like it blew chunks with physical problems. Even if you could get it working again I'd bet you've got significant platter and/or head damage and any data you could get off it would have serious corruption issues. Scratching noises and loud thumps coming from hard drives are never good things.
I would consider this to be a last-resort. And an expensive one considering you're going to destroy another hard drive to attempt recovery of the bad one.
I've done just this before myself and had hit-or-miss luck with it. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. But this was 15-20 years ago. Dust was a problem, but if you did it in a really clean environment and were careful it would minimize the risk. I'd never try it with a modern hard drive unless I had some sort of clean-room with HEPA air filtration quality. Things are just too small now-a-days.
Data recovery companies do basically this with dead hard drives, but they've got the equipment to pull it off. Just by opening the drive itself, you could do enough damage to prevent them from getting anything off of it.
It may be irrelevant anyway. By the sound of the noises the drive was made, I would guess the damage has already been done.
I wouldn't either, personally. I don't need the money anyway.
But there are two types of people who might: people who really need the money; and the risk-taker adventerous types who sees it as a big game. They might even spend more money that they make doing it, just so they can prove that they can get do it and get away with it. Look at the cracker types who break into systems just to add to their list for bragging / prestige rights in that community.
US currency isn't printed on polyester, it's a 75% cotton, 25% linen mix. The paper comes from one particular company that keeps the process a closely guarded secret. Almost all the paper you buy in the store is wood-based. This is how those cheap counterfeit detector pens work. All they are is an iodine solution that changes color if it detects the starch in the wood-based paper.
There are lots of ways the counterfeiters get around this issue. Wash the ink off real notes ( like 1$ bills ) and print fake 20's on them. Use parchment type paper and "mess it up". Put it in the dryer for a while. Dirty it up. Fresh paper is easy to tell, but dirty is a lot harder. Most money starts lookin pretty crappy after it's been in circulation for a while.
Most cashiers don't have the time or inclination to examine every bill they're given. If you hand somebody 5 $20's at Best Buy to buy a couple of videogames, do you think the cashier is actually gonna scrutinize each bill one-by-one? When they have a line of 5 people backed up? Make the top and bottom $20s real ones, and put one or two fake ones in the middle, and 95% of the time they won't notice.
It's the stupid and/or greedy counterfeiters that get caught. If you understand how people think, you can do a lot to get away with it. Do one or two bills mixed in with real ones. Don't do a lot to the same people. Use smaller bills like 10's or 5's. Who even thinks about counterfeit versions of those? Learn what places use to detect counterfeits and tailor your bills to them. If a place uses the counterfeit detector pens, print your bills on non wood-based paper and your bills are automatically real because the counterfeit detector pens say they are. You know how easy it is to defeat them, but the average person has no idea and accepts their results on blind faith.
It's just another example of social engineering. You can get people do to or believe ridiculous things depending on how you present things.
I've worn hearing aids over the last 20 years or so, and I've come to the realization that sound and perception is a lot more than just what the ears hear. My hearing isn't that bad, but it's difficult to get along without them.
The first thing you have to realize, is it isn't just what your ears hear, it's the vibrations that you feel all over your body that affect your spatial perception. Think about it, if spatial perception was just the difference in sound arrival time between each ear there should be no way for you to tell whether a sound is coming from in front of your or behind you. Yet it's obvious when you close your eyes what direction it's coming from.
All sound is is air pressure changes. Your entire body is a hearing device. Your body can feel the sound waves hitting your front and back and can deduce direction pretty easily from that. Your skull makes a very good resonating cavity to collect and amplify these vibrations. Just go to a rave or live concert and feel the vibrations. One of the tests they always give me is bone conduction, where they put two transducers on my skull behind my ears. I can hear the sounds they produce almost as well as if it was audible coming through my ears.
I doubt the three transducers in each ear is worth the effect. I'd think it'd be much more successful if you had some sort of a band all the way around your head that would vibrate your skull from various directions. You need your ears for Clarity, to understand what you're hearing; but your skin and body can handle sound sensations. Even completely deaf people can sense sounds and directions through the vibrations.
I'd think true 5.1 is just unachievable through a simple pair of headphones, no matter how many in each ear. Granted it may still sound good, but still not as good as a good set of speakers and a subwoofer.
and didn't notice until I tried to use it this afternoon that I only got 50 meg of it. I then went to a different site and was downloading it at about 120K per second. Being the idiot that I am, I accidently got the German version. Going back to the site, I can only get 25K per second tops. The Slashdot effect at work.
Forget about building a special distro just for the 800 meg CD's out there. It's not really that much more space for something that's not "standard" in the first place. Why doesn't somebody go ahead and make a Knoppix-type distro for DVDs? Most newer machines have them and with 4.7 gig of storage space you can put pretty much everything on them. With one of these properly configured and a decent sized USB memory drive, this is all somebody really needs for a truly portable computing experience. You could fit Gnome and KDE as well as a good installer on them. Forget about making a "Live" version of a distro. With one DVD containing a live version of Linux as well as a full installation environment running on it, it's a true one-stop-shop.
Does anybody make a credit-card form factor DVD +/-R like they do with the CD-Rs? If you could fit a full Knoppix distro onto something that size that you can fit into your wallet, that'd be really useful. While CD's aren't all that big, they're inconvenient to carry around all the time "just-in-case".
It's really too bad that you can't burn a distro to a CR-RW or a DVD +/-RW and use the unused space as a worm drive of your configuration or data. You'd have to refresh the disc every so often as your available space would dwindle, but you could get around even needing a USB key-fob. Unfortunately the common disc-formats in use make this very difficult, but it's something to think about...d
Simple. Just look in the history, favorites and bookmarks. That way you can be add the good sites yourself if he forgets to CC you on them.
The best, cheap way I ever found to organize servers and related gear were used food storage racks. They're usually stainless steel wire-type construction and come in a wide variety of sizes. Many are modular so you can set your own shelf height and many have locking wheels so you can move them around and lock them in place. They can be quite strong; I've wheeled coworkers around on them before. It's pretty easy to find places selling them because there are always restaurants starting up and going out of business. Look in the phone book for "Restaurant Supply".
I've got a couple of 4 foot wide by 6 foot tall racks at work. Bottom shelf contains computers, next shelf has a monitor, mouse, keyboard, next shelf has more computers, and the top shelf has power strips and switches. I set them up so one power cable and one ethernet cable come off the back corner so you can just wheel it wherever you need it and plug it in. All the cables are attached to the frame with plastic wire-ties so everything is kept neat. If you need to get to the back, you just swivel it around and there everything is.
Back when I had my own company, I ran all my servers off of a 6x6 rack that I had bought for $50 US. Money was tight, so I used all shapes and sizes of systems, mostly generic. I didn't need pricier rack mount units yet I still had portability and ease of access. I had up to eight servers, 3 monitors, hubs, and misc gear all over it.
At home, I've got a rack which holds three servers, a monitor/keyboard/mouse, a scanner, and two printers. Everything else in the house is wireless and talks to this unit. I paid $20 for the rack and wheels for it were another $5 US.
USB as well as FireWire are still a single set of wires. Unless you use some sort of USB router or multiple controllers, all the devices must share a finite amount of bandwidth based on the ratio of their speeds.
For example: A device running at 2mb speed that sends 500kb in a second uses a full 1/4 of the entire USB bandwidth. This automatically chops the 12mb down to 9mb, and the 480mb down to 360mb. A 12mb device that sends 6mb cuts it in half.
By the time you have a keyboard, mouse, joystick, mp3 player, external drive, and who knows what else sharing the USB connection, you have a lot of things competing for limited bandwidth with the slower devices taking an inordinate share of the pie. This is one of the reasons I like sticking to the old PS/2 style Mouse and keyboard connectors. Keep these usually slow devices from flooding the connection. Particularily the high-res mice.
And then when you consider the 2mb/12mb/480mb numbers are the absolute maximum theoretical numbers without overhead, you realize that you get nowhere near this kind of throughput in the first place. Things can get bogged down pretty quickly.
Personally, I run two separate USB adapters. The built-in USB on the motherboard and a separate PCI USB controller. I leave all the slow things like keyboard and mouse and joysticks on one controller. I put the things that need speed like a dvd burner or mp3 player on the other one and make sure I don't use them at the same time.
I don't know that I'd try to use commercial print heads at all, because these are precision devices designed with the idea that they have complete control over the print media - level and movement. You're dealing with devices that operate in terms of thousanths of an inch. I just don't think you're gonna get that level of precision from a custom built device and it would be reflected in the output. In particular, I wouldn't think Color would work very well.
It's fairly simple to build something providing the surface you're printing on is flat. You can build a sturdy 2-d frame to hold the printheads across a flat surface, it's the variable height stuff that is a problem. You could rig something up with sensors that could move the print-head up and down, but I wouldn't try it in anything other than unidirectional myself.
For something of this size, I think you'd be better off trying this with something old. Modern ones would kill you in trying to get the head to be just close enough and at just the right location along the surface.