This just sounds like a new form of bogarting to me. The whole idea of there ever being multiple channels in the first place was so that everybody would have a chance of finding a free one -- things like this go right against that idea.
If it isn't actually illegal, it's certainly anti-social. But then again, I don't use any wireless kit anyway..... I need to have a power cable, so I don't mind having a network cable as well.
Serial ATA connectors are horribly flimsy, since the "socket" goes into the "plug". I know because I recently ordered and commissioned a beautiful dual Xeon 2.8GHz server with two serial ATA drives. To get Linux onto it, I had to add an old-style parallel ATA drive just temporarily. When unplugging the extra drive, I accidentally snapped off the Serial ATA connector on one of the hot swap bays, and had to order a replacement connector PCB. At least it was a connector PCB and not the drive itself:-\
Ah. Actually I think I ran afoul of something like that while trying to set up KMail. I was attempt to send from a misconfigured identity, and stuff just stacked up in my outbox and nothing would get sent as long as it was there. I fixed it by fixing the bogus identity, but it's not obvious. Hopefully, a future version will incorporate a quick sanity-check on an identity whenever you try to switch to it, and offer a requester with options to bail out or fix it.
I can almost forgive the KDE developers this one, because I've been guilty of something similar a few times myself -- stripping down complex pieces of equipment when it was just a blown fuse all along, because I just expected that the user would have checked the fuses first when it went Pete Tong. In the same way, the KMail team probably wouldn't dream of anyone misconfiguring an identity in the first place.
At least we know that with Open Source, there is a sort of inverse Sod's Law at play: if a fault can be put right, it will be put right.
I think the suoeriority of MS Office will be seriously undermined when somebody releases a set of MS Office macros for exporting perfect OpenOffice.org or KOffice files {MS would add their own OO.o export over Ballmer's dead body, though OO.o import would be good for persuading Open Source users back}. Right now, the main -- even the only -- stumbling block against wider-spread adoption of OpenOffice.org is the imperfect file import. So thinking laterally, we can fix it at the other end {the MS Office macro language is better-documented than the save formats, and the OpenOffice.org and KOffice formats are well-documented}. In fact, KOffice will be moving towards OpenOffice.org file format compatibility in a future release.
On the server side, what I think is needed is for a few hardcore Linux-using organisations to release their own little in-house developed solutions to the wider community; where they will be mercilessly tweaked and improved, eventually to merge into something that will absolutely wipe the floor with Microsoft.
A link in another story mentioned the use of colour filters, and that gave me a brilliant idea.
How about if we have a whip-round, get every Slashdot reader to send in a few coppers, then and maybe we could afford to buy Ian Johnson some brown- or yellow-tinted sunglasses. These will admit less blue light than red or green, so Johnson's poor eyes will be spared.
It is obvious that Microsoft is terrified at the thought that all those donated PCs could be used for running Linux. Think about this; once someone has got used to using OpenOffice.org on Linux, they have no reason to spend money on Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office -- and that satisfied Open Source user is likely to spread the message to friends and relations. So if Microsoft can prevent people from installing Open Source, they will take a slight loss in order to do so. Just like a crack dealer giving free samples to kids -- the initial investment will pay a dividend when they have no option save to start coming back for more.....
So Microsoft is fighting back with a PR move and FUD spreading exercise. "Look," they are saying, "We are making it easy for you to stay legal." {Never mind that there's another, very easy way to make sure you stay legal and you might already be legal; see below}. I suppose they also want to prick a few consciences. In the past, they have turned a blind eye towards "casual copying" -- they'd rather you used a pirated copy of Word than OpenOffice. They'd still rather you paid for it, though, and this initiative looks like an attempt to catch flies with honey as opposed to vinegar.
There are two things wrong with the suggestion that a licence would not be valid if the equipment was passed onto another person. Firstly, the Microsoft EULA cannot prevent you from transferring your licence, because the law of the land says nobody can take away your right to do that. Secondly, the law of the land also says that you are innocent until proven guilty -- that is, that even if you have lost the original installation media, C. of A. or other proof of your licence, the onus would be on Microsoft to prove that you never had it in the first place.
But, of course, ignorance of your rights is good for Microsoft, and they are likely to be able to persuade at least some people to buy new licences to use software they were already licenced to use.
I see this as a step towards obliging software vendors to offer some sort of guarantee, and that IMHO is something that has been a long time coming. For too long, closed-source software vendors have hidden behind the words "No Warranty" and the confidentiality of their source code to avoid acknowledging bugs.
Open Source software should be perfectly capable of complying with this requirement, since the source code is the guarantee document (you can truthfully state that it will do whatever the source code says it will do, and if it doesn't then it's your equipment that is faulty).
Well I recently set up a Tyan Tiger dual Xeon mobo with software RAID. Had to use a 2.4 kernel, and took a little..... no..... a lot of mucking about..... trick is you hafta add a standard HDD temporarily, just to get a kernel with SATA support onto the thing. What chipset are you using? This one is an Intel ICH5R and the official Intel driver (which I couldn't get to work) is software RAID anyway, so I said sod it and used the normal kernel md drivers. I set up RAID1 for most of the partitions, but/boot is unRAIDed and/swap is just two separate swap partitions (if/swap goes down it's taking the system with it anyway so there's no point putting it on an md device).
If yours is an ICH5R, contact me separately and I'll explain the procedure.
How is this any different than, say, Mandrake Cooker or Debian SID? With either of these, you can just download the latest patched software straight from the Internet and burn it onto a CD -- and what's more, you can do it all in the comfort of your own home.
Why bother? Mains power is ubiquitous. Already they have managed to make switch-mode PSUs that can handle a wide enough range of voltages and frequencies to work pretty much anywhere in the world, and they even have interchangeable connectors to handle the different sockets encountered by cosmopolitan travellers.
For the amount of time I personally ever spend away from a power point, all appliances have a more than adequate battery life. Ditch the obsession with wireless and come to terms with power leads.
There are two reasons why any attempt at technological copy-prevention measures will never succeed:
It is not possible to determine accurately whether a song is being listened to or copied.
Once something has been copied, it can be re-saved in a form which does not include "copy prevention".
Every penny that ever has been, or ever will be, spent on technological copy-prevention measures is a penny wasted. Copy-prevention is best achieved in the social/economic domain: for instance, it'll cost you a hell of a lot more than the cover price to photocopy a newspaper, and it'll hardly be news by the time you finish anyway. The cost of copying a CD is much more than the cost of the blank media: there's the best part of a gig of hard disk space, ten minutes reading the original, unspecified time tracking down the original, eight minutes burning the copy {above about 8X speed, the risk of producing a beermat increases}, and many other factors. The fact that independent distribution is economically viable at all, demonstrates that there is an overhead somewhere that the record companies need to eliminate in order to remain competitive with the independents..... and I'm guessing it's not just paying the bands, although nobody wants to tell me just how much of the price of a CD goes to the only people whose contribution to its manufacture couldn't have been done by someone else.
Hey, maybe we shouldn't be trying to force anyone to compensate artists for their work. Let's just ditch the whole damn system and start again. Permit copying and sharing almost ad lib, but mandate fair attribution {i.e. if you perform a song, you must state truthfully who wrote it in the first place}, and forbid misrepresentation {i.e. if you say "50p from the sale of this CD goes to the band" and don't give the band 50p, then you go to prison for fraud}. Those who really love playing music will play it anyway, whether or not they get paid. Those who really love listening to it will contribute of their own free will, even if it's just buying a pint each for some band in a pub. The pseuds and the breadheads will be disappointed, but that's all.
Typical BASIC programmer, with your exclusive-OR symbol for raising to a power;-) Yes, in the cosh series, the cubed term happens to have a zero coefficient; I just slipped back into discussing the general case of a series expansion, where it might well get multiplied by something non-zero.
but I had a sudden nasty vision of some maths-hater with mod points attacking my post. warning: spoiler follows
When you expand it as a series you will see it contains only even powers. That should be obvious anyway from inspection, as the curve is symmetrical about the Y-axis {series with only odd powers exhibit first-order spin symmetry about the origin}. For x < 1, x**2 is smaller than x, x**3 is smaller still and x**4 is practically non-existent; so only the constant and squared terms are significant. Hence, the catenary approximates to a parabola for small x.
A catenary would look a lot like a parabola if you were considering only a narrow range of values of x. Expand the series for y = (e ** x) + (e ** (-x)) and you will see why this is so.
Re:Administration hasn't done anything bad
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 1
He's not standing for everyone. He preaches Christianity to everyone when he makes a speech, so he's not representing anyone apart from Christians.
And in exactly what way is this any different from the Taliban?
Theism of any kind should automatically disqualify anyone from office. If you want to believe in God, or aliens, or pixies, you should do so strictly in private, and certainly not from a position of power.
Think about it: Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and Jews all have different, and incompatible, ideas about the nature of God. At most one of these conflicting groups can be right, and at least they can all be wrong. But whether or not God exists, and whatever God is like, there are still certain things that will be right and wrong.
The USA likes to have the biggest guns, but gets all worried when someone else might have a weapon.
What is it that makes you imagine that non-Americans would be any more likely than Americans to ignore a worldwide ban on weapons research / deployment? What makes you imagine that non-Americans would be any more likely than Americans to use weapons of mass destruction if they had them?
Funnily enough, I have had thoughts about building a solar fridge..... my original design was to use a wide pipe with reflective lining, coming down from the roof, through the thermal insulation of the house and to the refrigerator. The reflective lining would make the whole thing behave like an oversized fibre optic; but hollow, so as to carry away the hot air from the condenser. If you are using heat to raise the pressure of the refrigerant as opposed to a mechanical compressor, you have more heat to dispose of, of course; but, since you didn't pay for it, it doesn't matter so much.
This isn't actually very different to the way an electric fridge or air conditioner works. The main difference is that in a fridge, the refrigerant is contained within a closed cycle; in this simple evaporative scheme it is lost to the surrounding air. Since it's only water, few people are likely to be bothered about that. That's why, if you have a CFC fridge and it's still working, there's no point getting rid of it..... the CFCs are sealed up nice and tight inside it, till you scrap it {there's not much you can actually do to get rid of unwanted CFCs, except leak them into the atmosphere when nobody's looking; which is almost certainly what will happen to the CFCs in your fridge, even if you don't put a chisel through the evaporator in a defrosting accident} and making a new one uses up more energy and resources than keeping an existing one going.
The idea that an evaporating liquid draws heat from its surroundings is nothing new.
Basically, the difference between a liquid and a gas is how much the molecules are vibrating: if the vibration is weak, the molecules' affinity for each other bonds them loosely together so they follow one another around, assuming the shape of a container but occupying a definite volume. If the vibration is stronger than that attractive force, then they just fly apart, occupying the whole of the container and exerting a pressure on it. Heating, of course, makes the molecules vibrate more strongly, which is why liquids turn into gases when heated.
If you try to force more molecules into a space, eventually they will be forced into colliding with one another often enough to form a liquid. This is what goes on in a cigarette lighter: there are just too many molecules to behave as a perfect gas, so some of them are forced together and behave as a liquid.
Pressure, volume and {absolute -- i.e. in Kelvins, 0C = 273.15K} temperature are related by the equation: P * V = n * R * T, where n = number of moles of gas and R is the Ideal Gas Constant. No gas is truly ideal, because the assumption is that the individual molecules have neither mass nor volume; however, the relationship holds reasonably well in real life, only deviating sharply around the point where liquefaction actually occurs.
A fridge or air conditioner has three main parts: the compressor, the condenser and the evaporator. The refrigerant gas is first compressed. Pressure goes up and volume goes down, so temperature also goes up. It is then pumped around some pipes at the back of the fridge {or in the outdoor part of the air conditioner; portable units don't have an outdoor section, so the condenser is cooled by blowing air over it and out of a window through a length of flexi-flue -- uncouple this and you've got yourself a de-humidifier} to allow it to cool down. Once the refrigerant has cooled to ambient temperature and become a liquid again, it is forced out by its own pressure through a tiny hole into a larger space {the evaporator - usually the outer jacket of the icemaking compartment of a fridge, or the coil of pipe in the indoor part of an air conditioner that gets covered with ice crystals}. Now the pressure is not sufficient to keep the refrigerant molecules together, so it becomes a gas again. Pressure goes down, volume goes up, so to satisfy the laws of physics, temperature must go down.
The compressor's intake draws the low-pressure refrigerant out of the evaporator and the whole thing starts again. {In an air con., the whole process has to be stopped every so often to allow the accumulated ice to melt off the surface of the evaporator. Plumbed-in units have a permanent drain, portable ones have a tank which needs emptying periodically. The meltwater is pure enough to be used anywhere demineralised water is required.}
You can also get a terracotta butter cooler which works on this principle: the inside of the tray and dome are salt-glazed, the outsides are unglazed. You soak the whole thing in water, which then evaporates slowly from the outer surface, keeping the butter usefully cold {not rock solid, but not runny either}.
Slashdot Mirror
This just sounds like a new form of bogarting to me. The whole idea of there ever being multiple channels in the first place was so that everybody would have a chance of finding a free one -- things like this go right against that idea.
..... I need to have a power cable, so I don't mind having a network cable as well.
If it isn't actually illegal, it's certainly anti-social. But then again, I don't use any wireless kit anyway
Serial ATA connectors are horribly flimsy, since the "socket" goes into the "plug". I know because I recently ordered and commissioned a beautiful dual Xeon 2.8GHz server with two serial ATA drives. To get Linux onto it, I had to add an old-style parallel ATA drive just temporarily. When unplugging the extra drive, I accidentally snapped off the Serial ATA connector on one of the hot swap bays, and had to order a replacement connector PCB. At least it was a connector PCB and not the drive itself :-\
Ah. Actually I think I ran afoul of something like that while trying to set up KMail. I was attempt to send from a misconfigured identity, and stuff just stacked up in my outbox and nothing would get sent as long as it was there. I fixed it by fixing the bogus identity, but it's not obvious. Hopefully, a future version will incorporate a quick sanity-check on an identity whenever you try to switch to it, and offer a requester with options to bail out or fix it.
I can almost forgive the KDE developers this one, because I've been guilty of something similar a few times myself -- stripping down complex pieces of equipment when it was just a blown fuse all along, because I just expected that the user would have checked the fuses first when it went Pete Tong. In the same way, the KMail team probably wouldn't dream of anyone misconfiguring an identity in the first place.
At least we know that with Open Source, there is a sort of inverse Sod's Law at play: if a fault can be put right, it will be put right.
Are you sure you have your exim server installed and configured correctly?
I think the suoeriority of MS Office will be seriously undermined when somebody releases a set of MS Office macros for exporting perfect OpenOffice.org or KOffice files {MS would add their own OO.o export over Ballmer's dead body, though OO.o import would be good for persuading Open Source users back}. Right now, the main -- even the only -- stumbling block against wider-spread adoption of OpenOffice.org is the imperfect file import. So thinking laterally, we can fix it at the other end {the MS Office macro language is better-documented than the save formats, and the OpenOffice.org and KOffice formats are well-documented}. In fact, KOffice will be moving towards OpenOffice.org file format compatibility in a future release.
On the server side, what I think is needed is for a few hardcore Linux-using organisations to release their own little in-house developed solutions to the wider community; where they will be mercilessly tweaked and improved, eventually to merge into something that will absolutely wipe the floor with Microsoft.
A link in another story mentioned the use of colour filters, and that gave me a brilliant idea.
How about if we have a whip-round, get every Slashdot reader to send in a few coppers, then and maybe we could afford to buy Ian Johnson some brown- or yellow-tinted sunglasses. These will admit less blue light than red or green, so Johnson's poor eyes will be spared.
It is obvious that Microsoft is terrified at the thought that all those donated PCs could be used for running Linux. Think about this; once someone has got used to using OpenOffice.org on Linux, they have no reason to spend money on Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office -- and that satisfied Open Source user is likely to spread the message to friends and relations. So if Microsoft can prevent people from installing Open Source, they will take a slight loss in order to do so. Just like a crack dealer giving free samples to kids -- the initial investment will pay a dividend when they have no option save to start coming back for more .....
So Microsoft is fighting back with a PR move and FUD spreading exercise. "Look," they are saying, "We are making it easy for you to stay legal." {Never mind that there's another, very easy way to make sure you stay legal and you might already be legal; see below}. I suppose they also want to prick a few consciences. In the past, they have turned a blind eye towards "casual copying" -- they'd rather you used a pirated copy of Word than OpenOffice. They'd still rather you paid for it, though, and this initiative looks like an attempt to catch flies with honey as opposed to vinegar.
There are two things wrong with the suggestion that a licence would not be valid if the equipment was passed onto another person. Firstly, the Microsoft EULA cannot prevent you from transferring your licence, because the law of the land says nobody can take away your right to do that. Secondly, the law of the land also says that you are innocent until proven guilty -- that is, that even if you have lost the original installation media, C. of A. or other proof of your licence, the onus would be on Microsoft to prove that you never had it in the first place.
But, of course, ignorance of your rights is good for Microsoft, and they are likely to be able to persuade at least some people to buy new licences to use software they were already licenced to use.
I see this as a step towards obliging software vendors to offer some sort of guarantee, and that IMHO is something that has been a long time coming. For too long, closed-source software vendors have hidden behind the words "No Warranty" and the confidentiality of their source code to avoid acknowledging bugs.
Open Source software should be perfectly capable of complying with this requirement, since the source code is the guarantee document (you can truthfully state that it will do whatever the source code says it will do, and if it doesn't then it's your equipment that is faulty).
Well I recently set up a Tyan Tiger dual Xeon mobo with software RAID. Had to use a 2.4 kernel, and took a little ..... no ..... a lot of mucking about ..... trick is you hafta add a standard HDD temporarily, just to get a kernel with SATA support onto the thing. What chipset are you using? This one is an Intel ICH5R and the official Intel driver (which I couldn't get to work) is software RAID anyway, so I said sod it and used the normal kernel md drivers. I set up RAID1 for most of the partitions, but /boot is unRAIDed and /swap is just two separate swap partitions (if /swap goes down it's taking the system with it anyway so there's no point putting it on an md device).
If yours is an ICH5R, contact me separately and I'll explain the procedure.
Can you run the X-box port of MAME on it?
OK, forget that ..... parent looks not to be American after all. Sorry. And I wasted a good line too.
In Britain, where driving with a hand-held phone is now illegal, most cars are fitted with five-speed manual transmissions.
Is whatever you have to say really more important than the safety of other road users?
TCPflow provides some very interesting stuff. It should be on your installation CDs; but if not, you can get it from here.
How is this any different than, say, Mandrake Cooker or Debian SID? With either of these, you can just download the latest patched software straight from the Internet and burn it onto a CD -- and what's more, you can do it all in the comfort of your own home.
Why bother? Mains power is ubiquitous. Already they have managed to make switch-mode PSUs that can handle a wide enough range of voltages and frequencies to work pretty much anywhere in the world, and they even have interchangeable connectors to handle the different sockets encountered by cosmopolitan travellers.
For the amount of time I personally ever spend away from a power point, all appliances have a more than adequate battery life. Ditch the obsession with wireless and come to terms with power leads.
- It is not possible to determine accurately whether a song is being listened to or copied.
- Once something has been copied, it can be re-saved in a form which does not include "copy prevention".
Every penny that ever has been, or ever will be, spent on technological copy-prevention measures is a penny wasted. Copy-prevention is best achieved in the social/economic domain: for instance, it'll cost you a hell of a lot more than the cover price to photocopy a newspaper, and it'll hardly be news by the time you finish anyway. The cost of copying a CD is much more than the cost of the blank media: there's the best part of a gig of hard disk space, ten minutes reading the original, unspecified time tracking down the original, eight minutes burning the copy {above about 8X speed, the risk of producing a beermat increases}, and many other factors. The fact that independent distribution is economically viable at all, demonstrates that there is an overhead somewhere that the record companies need to eliminate in order to remain competitive with the independentsHey, maybe we shouldn't be trying to force anyone to compensate artists for their work. Let's just ditch the whole damn system and start again. Permit copying and sharing almost ad lib, but mandate fair attribution {i.e. if you perform a song, you must state truthfully who wrote it in the first place}, and forbid misrepresentation {i.e. if you say "50p from the sale of this CD goes to the band" and don't give the band 50p, then you go to prison for fraud}. Those who really love playing music will play it anyway, whether or not they get paid. Those who really love listening to it will contribute of their own free will, even if it's just buying a pint each for some band in a pub. The pseuds and the breadheads will be disappointed, but that's all.
Typical BASIC programmer, with your exclusive-OR symbol for raising to a power ;-) Yes, in the cosh series, the cubed term happens to have a zero coefficient; I just slipped back into discussing the general case of a series expansion, where it might well get multiplied by something non-zero.
but I had a sudden nasty vision of some maths-hater with mod points attacking my post. warning: spoiler follows
When you expand it as a series you will see it contains only even powers. That should be obvious anyway from inspection, as the curve is symmetrical about the Y-axis {series with only odd powers exhibit first-order spin symmetry about the origin}. For x < 1, x**2 is smaller than x, x**3 is smaller still and x**4 is practically non-existent; so only the constant and squared terms are significant. Hence, the catenary approximates to a parabola for small x.
A catenary would look a lot like a parabola if you were considering only a narrow range of values of x. Expand the series for y = (e ** x) + (e ** (-x)) and you will see why this is so.
Theism of any kind should automatically disqualify anyone from office. If you want to believe in God, or aliens, or pixies, you should do so strictly in private, and certainly not from a position of power.
Think about it: Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and Jews all have different, and incompatible, ideas about the nature of God. At most one of these conflicting groups can be right, and at least they can all be wrong. But whether or not God exists, and whatever God is like, there are still certain things that will be right and wrong.
The USA likes to have the biggest guns, but gets all worried when someone else might have a weapon.
What is it that makes you imagine that non-Americans would be any more likely than Americans to ignore a worldwide ban on weapons research / deployment? What makes you imagine that non-Americans would be any more likely than Americans to use weapons of mass destruction if they had them?
Let's just say no weapons in space, full stop.
Funnily enough, I have had thoughts about building a solar fridge ..... my original design was to use a wide pipe with reflective lining, coming down from the roof, through the thermal insulation of the house and to the refrigerator. The reflective lining would make the whole thing behave like an oversized fibre optic; but hollow, so as to carry away the hot air from the condenser. If you are using heat to raise the pressure of the refrigerant as opposed to a mechanical compressor, you have more heat to dispose of, of course; but, since you didn't pay for it, it doesn't matter so much.
This isn't actually very different to the way an electric fridge or air conditioner works. The main difference is that in a fridge, the refrigerant is contained within a closed cycle; in this simple evaporative scheme it is lost to the surrounding air. Since it's only water, few people are likely to be bothered about that. That's why, if you have a CFC fridge and it's still working, there's no point getting rid of it ..... the CFCs are sealed up nice and tight inside it, till you scrap it {there's not much you can actually do to get rid of unwanted CFCs, except leak them into the atmosphere when nobody's looking; which is almost certainly what will happen to the CFCs in your fridge, even if you don't put a chisel through the evaporator in a defrosting accident} and making a new one uses up more energy and resources than keeping an existing one going.
The idea that an evaporating liquid draws heat from its surroundings is nothing new.
Basically, the difference between a liquid and a gas is how much the molecules are vibrating: if the vibration is weak, the molecules' affinity for each other bonds them loosely together so they follow one another around, assuming the shape of a container but occupying a definite volume. If the vibration is stronger than that attractive force, then they just fly apart, occupying the whole of the container and exerting a pressure on it. Heating, of course, makes the molecules vibrate more strongly, which is why liquids turn into gases when heated.
If you try to force more molecules into a space, eventually they will be forced into colliding with one another often enough to form a liquid. This is what goes on in a cigarette lighter: there are just too many molecules to behave as a perfect gas, so some of them are forced together and behave as a liquid.
Pressure, volume and {absolute -- i.e. in Kelvins, 0C = 273.15K} temperature are related by the equation: P * V = n * R * T, where n = number of moles of gas and R is the Ideal Gas Constant. No gas is truly ideal, because the assumption is that the individual molecules have neither mass nor volume; however, the relationship holds reasonably well in real life, only deviating sharply around the point where liquefaction actually occurs.
A fridge or air conditioner has three main parts: the compressor, the condenser and the evaporator. The refrigerant gas is first compressed. Pressure goes up and volume goes down, so temperature also goes up. It is then pumped around some pipes at the back of the fridge {or in the outdoor part of the air conditioner; portable units don't have an outdoor section, so the condenser is cooled by blowing air over it and out of a window through a length of flexi-flue -- uncouple this and you've got yourself a de-humidifier} to allow it to cool down. Once the refrigerant has cooled to ambient temperature and become a liquid again, it is forced out by its own pressure through a tiny hole into a larger space {the evaporator - usually the outer jacket of the icemaking compartment of a fridge, or the coil of pipe in the indoor part of an air conditioner that gets covered with ice crystals}. Now the pressure is not sufficient to keep the refrigerant molecules together, so it becomes a gas again. Pressure goes down, volume goes up, so to satisfy the laws of physics, temperature must go down.
The compressor's intake draws the low-pressure refrigerant out of the evaporator and the whole thing starts again. {In an air con., the whole process has to be stopped every so often to allow the accumulated ice to melt off the surface of the evaporator. Plumbed-in units have a permanent drain, portable ones have a tank which needs emptying periodically. The meltwater is pure enough to be used anywhere demineralised water is required.}
You can also get a terracotta butter cooler which works on this principle: the inside of the tray and dome are salt-glazed, the outsides are unglazed. You soak the whole thing in water, which then evaporates slowly from the outer surface, keeping the butter usefully cold {not rock solid, but not runny either}.