TI don't know how much of a capacitance is in a standard CRT setup, if it is low enough, you should be able to exctract the brightness of each sub-pixel, recreating the picture entirely
The capacitance is pretty high... high enough to give a decent shock, but low enough that the voltage would vary with "overall scene brightness" I guess I'm saying the time constant, as a rough guess, is/was about a tenth of a second.
CRTs are/were always cathode modulated not anode modulated. That said, and/. culture being what it is, someone will find an obscure 1955 soviet military radar that anode modulated, in fact I'm kinda looking forward to it.
(I presume that it is intentionally adultered with poison, like most other industrial forms of ethanol, but I must say I've never tried to drink the stuff.)
Isopropyl is not a "brand name" of ethanol, and all by itself, IS a tolerably good denaturant for ethanol. I don't know if its a legal denaturant, but it would work pretty well in that role. You'll get horrifically sick (and possibly die) if you drink (or inhale) more than about a tablespoon of it. Strongly not recommended. Chemisty and toxicology are not binary sciences where one side is herbal and earth mother goddess alternative medicine pure and light, and the other is industrial and pure evil, despite the best efforts of the marketing people. I get really worried when I hear people talking about isopropyl being "safe". Compared to methanol, or benzene, oh heck yes. Compared to ethanol or tapwater, no, just heck no. Its a weak poison all by itself, even when 100% pure. Less than a shotglass worth all over your skin or inhaled in your lungs on an occasional basis is almost certainly OK... washing your hands in it 40 hours a week or breathing noticable fumes 40 hours a week is probably getting very close to the "call OSHA before you die" range.
isopropyl alcohol... and often joke that the contents of the bottle is likely 100%, but that it rapidly drops to 99% after opening
According to the Wikipedia, distillation alone cannot increase the purity of alcohol beyond 95.6%. Everclear itself is only 95% pure.
Be careful with wikipedia. You can get specific answers but usually not general field wide information. There is no such thing as "the alcohol" or an "alcohol atom". Its also not a trademark or a process or a treatment. Any organic compound where the most active functional group is a -OH group is gonna colloquially be called a "alcohol". That doesn't mean they're all the same or they all are safe to drink or they all get you drunk, for that matter. Isopropyl is not a "brand name" of ethanol, its a completely different organic compound which happens to have the same functional group as ethanol. Standard/. computer analogy is I have a "USB-equipped desktop computer" on my desk at home; it could be a mac or a PC; no difference, right? Standard/. car analogy is the mere presence of a trailer hitch doesn't mean its a towing rated vehicle; my wife's prius has an aftermarket hitch, ideal for hitch mounted bicycle rack, with a "tow rating" of something laughable like 250 pounds. The azeotrope for isoproyl is more like 88% pure, not 99% random guess not 95% like ethanol. Your buddies don't know that isopropyl will suck up about 10% of its weight in water, pulling it right out of the air if necessary. That makes it a great "gas line cleaner" in a car. This is actually kinda important if you're trying to protect something from corrosion, isopropyl is not "magic" like acetone, the water dissolved in it can cause corrosion or water damage. On the other hand, the huge quantity of water tends to make it much less flammable, if your coworkers were dumb enough to use acetone they'd most likely find a way to set themselves on fire. Another example is storing sodium metal or potassium metal under oils is a fairly intelligent idea, but storing them under isopropyl would be really stupid because "rapidly" that iso will be contaminated with 10% water by pulling it out of the air if necessary and the Na or K is gonna go boom. In the lab, we could manufacture 100% iso or ethanol by pouring the water azeotrope over some crushed sodium, the sodium eats the water, gives off some heat, hopefully not enough to go boil or go boom... So.. an opened and sloppily stored bottle of iso is difficult set on fire because its 10% water, but a sealed 100% pure bottle will burn just about as well as any other solvent, which also might be a very exciting workplace lesson...
I can't be the only "ex" chemistry nerd on/., can I?
Note that chemists have real recording spectrophotometers, not just monitor calibration gadgets.
Oh, be quiet and just enjoy nerding out for once in your life already.
Some of us nerd out by pointing out our superiority, thank you very much!
The nerding out bit is he could get dramatically better results using an even more ridiculously expensive tool, if he wanted to.
The standard/. car analogy is you can measure the even-ness of the gap between the door and body using a kids 75 cent wooden ruler to maybe as much as 2 sig figs, but a machinist could loan you a $250 digital dial caliper to get at around 3 sig figs, maybe 4.
I'm surprised no chemist out there has run this exact experiment... I know I'd be tempted if I was still in that field and had access to the proper gear...
Note that chemists have real recording spectrophotometers, not just monitor calibration gadgets. I spent way too long in my youth, if I recall correctly, classifying iron ore samples using one. Its a fairly elegant technique because accurate ultra wide range light sensors have been old stuff for decades. It seems like I took an entire 200 level quantitative chemical analysis chemistry class where all we did was F around with a spectrophotometer in different ways.
If I recall correctly, the infrared ones were the cats meow before NMR got "cheap" for classifying organic compounds.
Have two TVs on at the same time viewing different programs.
The crypto equivalent of xoring the same passphrase on two known plaintexts. Not gonna work.
Its like saying a fourier transform can detect two individual sine waves, but not a combination of sine waves. not how it works. In fact it's great at that.
" biggest single draw of electricity most people have. "
citation needed. I would doubt it pulls more power then my electric stove. or furnace.
I've seen those studies, and it is true if you live a nearly amish lifestyle w/ respect to other electronic devices. Perhaps in a small dorm room? If you exclude everything that can compete, what you want to win usually wins by virtue of being last standing. Also cherry pick the oldest, most wasteful DVR that has ever been deployed in at least quantity 1 to at least one home on the planet. I haven't been able to follow the money to figure out what they are trying to do, maybe they own patents on saving DVR power and are trying to sic the greenies on them to get them to buy patent licensing...
People like putting AV gear in closets / closed door boxes in their living room. Supposedly people watch TV for 8 hours a day or some nonsense, which means it reaches steady state temperatures every day. Think logically... if the DVR drew 1 KW, then the first day the owner watched TV it would set the "entertainment console" on fire. Therefore you can guess that it must draw less than, say, 100 watts, so as to remain below liquefaction temperature.
I think the key in the article is "standard TV set" by which they mean a CRT. A CRT varies its HT current draw by scene brightness, and its quite visibly obvious when troubleshooting. Heck even a cheapie consumer grade wattmeter could probably detect it. On/. a CRT is probably not considered a "standard TV" anymore, but out in the real world, deployed CRTs on the ground showing shiney pictures probably still outnumber all other deployed and working technologies, at least for a few more years...
On the other hand, the florescent backlight in my piece of junk basement LCD TV is constant power draw, no matter if the LCD pixels let light thru or not. The LCD pixels themselves draw about the same no matter scene brightness. Anyone who's ever done anything with embedded systems knows this... the LCD display itself is usually rated around a milliamp, most of which is wasted in the control ckts, and the backlight usually draws a good fraction of an amp. Even allowing for much higher current draw for fast moving scenes and higher contrast, I'm betting the backlight still wins for power draw.
No all you need to screw up their signature is "about equal to a TV".
Now insert the stereotypical/. complaint from coasties that they can easily afford a $1200K house on their $50K salary the only problem being the 15 cent per KWh draw of their 200 watt TV will surely bankrupt them. Happens every "electricity consumption"/. article. Close on the heels of the "The average american watches TV 8 hours per day, works 16 hours per day, sleeps 8 hours per day, and commutes in their vehicle at 5 MPH on the freeway for 4 hours per day loving every minute of it while hating electric cars, so this will bankrupt them" comment.
I'll take it you've never heard of Wake-on-LAN. Third-party services such as LogMeIn actually can turn on remote machines as long as there is another computer on the network with LogMeIn installed. That doesn't even require an IP address. It's a packet addressed to the MAC of the NIC (which is why the originating packet needs to be on the same network).
Yeah but thats cheating. You need an extra box and a WOL compatible switch, right? If I'm allowed to cheat and have stuff other than the as advertised VNC, then I can just specify a robot arm poised to punch the power switch. Or default the bios to always power up on restoral of AC and hook up to innumerable remote rebooter products and home automation products.
I have noticed over the years that the concept of a power switch has been removed. The only thing my cable settop box does when its "off" is output a black screen. The giant office printer at work merely shuts off the LCD backlight when its switched off. Its all about making the greenies think they're saving KWH while not actually doing anything.
Figure out why they're borked. Sometimes happens because the old tapes shed/spray oxide all over the inside of the VCR. In that case, there are voodoo solutions to "fix" shedding oxide, but pretty much your best bet is heave all the stuff in the trash and forget about it, unless you have an incredibly high tolerance for frustration and lots of spare time and money. Another popular failure mode is the grease in the convoluted tape path sticks / dries out / gets covered in dust, in which case an ex-vcr repair tech (who would probably be about 60 now, I'd guess) might be able to fix it for very cheap, or you could buy a new VCR from walmart (still sold!) and the tapes would probably be viewable.
Are there any pro-places that don't charge an arm and a leg to copy off VHS to DVD or bluray?
No, no there are not. Even in the cheap olden days when that wasn't an exotic "data recovery service" but just a guy amortizing the cost of a VCR, a stand alone DVD recorder, and a cable between them, they still asked for too much money. The financially ideal time to roll the data from tape to DVD was probably "about a decade ago" not tomorrow. Of course the copier guys were legendary for using the worlds cheapest burnable disks to maximize profits, so the DVDs would probably already be failing / failed now...
I know this has been discussed before, but it really begs the question of how to preserve digital data for long periods of time. Stone tablets last for thousands of years; paper for hundreds (or more, if in climate-controlled storage). What have we got for (large amounts of) digital data?
Don't think you have any idea what "begging the question" means other than improperly using it as verbal filling material. Sorry, nothing personal, just had to be said.
Boring monthly / weekly/. topic. Short answer is to copy it to new media yearly and keep all the old copies in storage as "backups of backups", and at that annual copy time, verify the contents of the backups if you can.
Stone tablets do NOT last thousands of years... its just the tiny fraction that survived happen to be that old. Ditto the paper, the 99.99% of acid bleached paperbacks have already decayed to dust, so the only old books left are the archival material, archival ink, archival binding, archival storage books... I'm sure in 1000 years people will be using floppy disks as an example of technology that is readable forever, because the 5 remaining disks in the world will still be readable, so...
Clean and align the drive first, before you screw up any (more) disks.
To give an analogy that kids now a days can easily understand, its like trying to insert an old fashioned flash drive into a USB port full of peanut butter. It might work, it might even work most of the time, but it'll work better if its clean.
Due to the digital capture effect or whatever, you might only need one dB more signal or one dB less noise to go from a sector having a read error somewhere every time you read it, to having an errorless read.
If you have way more time and/or money than you know what to do with, you break out the oscilloscope and align the drive to that individual disk/track. Yes this takes a lot of time and gear, but if you really gotta do it... Basically you align to best SNR on that individual disk rather than to an alignment disk. If the drive that wrote the disk was technically out of alignment, this will save you. If the drive that originally wrote the disk was in perfect alignment, then this is a waste of time.
At the very least, clean the freaking drive. Using kimwipes and undenatured pure ethanol on the heads. You drink some ethanol as a toast to the computing gods after success or failure, doesn't matter which, either way you're doing a shot or its bad luck and the next disk will shed its oxide for sure. Everclear is supposedly pure enough to clean drive heads, and supposedly its drinkable. All I remember from my only experience with everclear was yelling some lines from a cartoon and throwing up, and there are disks I have not been able to recover, so take my cleaning solvent suggestion with a grain of salt. Kimwipes are hard to explain and may no longer be manufactured, but they used to be like a dustless, lintless fabric q-tip, at least in concept, sorta. I don't mean they were like a q-tip in that they were of a certain dia, length, and color, but more the general idea of a perfect cleaning fabric at the end of a non-conductive stick.
video games like World of Warcraft are the true future of cyberspace
The artsy craftsy types have been tying to ram that idea down our throats for generations, always with a promise that with just slightly better technology we'll all virtually drive to and then virtually walk around in a 3-d rendered virtual bookstore to find our books using our eyes as our "grep" command and then wait in line in a virtual 3-d line for a virtual 3-d emo slacker teen cashier to ring us up on a virtual 3-d cash register, which we'll pay using digital cash rendered as virtual 3-d gold coins by manually moving those simulated virtual coins out of our virtual 3-d rendered pockets and handing them to the emo slacker teen cashier kid who virtually places the virtual coins in the virtual cash register, one at a time.
Um, no, tried all that, the future way to buy books is amazon.com. Nobody wants that artsy craftsy B.S. Nobody. Makes for a nice story, thats about it.
...single player game that you actually own may be on it's way out driven by clueless teens as demographics shift.
Speaking of demographic shift, in the US inflation adjusted income at the median has been dropping steadily for about two generations and shows no signs of improving. Meanwhile the price of things needed (as opposed to luxuries) has been climbing steadily thru natural resource depletion and printing press operations, so the cost of housing, food, transportation, all that has and will increase. So the median masses of the population have less free cash every year, and probably always will. And the plan for a blockbuster new game is to grab a large slice of that steadily shrinking pie.
Yeah, what could go wrong with wanting a bigger slice of a shrinking pie? Good luck MMO operators, you'll need it.
Would it be possible that a vulnerability allowed normal bios patching to be blocked too? Meaning that the hardware could be more or less irreversibly compromised... Sounds like a brilliant stroke of stupid.
They make money off every bricked / overheated / burned out MB / CPU. Stupid for anyone to buy, brilliant for them to try and sell.
Heck they could even write the windows worm themselves to cause maximum damage... set fan speed to lowest, set CPU voltage to maximum, set CPU speed to max, disable thermal throttling... insta-profit!!!!!
Before I VNC in to power up the box, I need DHCP running so I have an IP address to connect to. No problemo, I'll just power up the box to get a DHCP address before I power up the box to power up the box. Its turtles all the way down.
What I'm worried about is:
1) Its not going to be "open standard VNC" but some weird kluge that operates strictly on layer 2 and requires "special" probably windows only software, that at least doesn't require ip to work.
2) Or, to have the VNC interface not interfere with the "real" LAN card, it'll have two interfaces, either via VLAN which will invariably be messed up, or two phy interfaces, which will invariably be swapped and double my buildout costs. Or the extreme hackery of the lan port means it'll be one version of windows only hardware, never to be used on a different version of windows or linux or anything else; a "win-lancard".
3) To protect me from the latest windows worm that locks people out of their bios using this tech, my ISP will "save me" by blocking all standard port VNC traffic and any traffic analysis VNC traffic on alternate ports. Thanks guys, for removing VNC from the list of usable software. I feel so much better now.
4) Many non-technical users are going to get scammed by brightly flashing internet ads advertising security and safety at a cost for this. Right next to the equally snake oil "your computer is broadcasting your ip address" ads.
Extreme latency, on the order of 10x to 100x, for short tasks. I can unlock my ipod touch, mash the mail app, check for mail, and lock it back up in less than 1/10th the time it takes a big ole laptop to wake up from sleep and probably a 1/100th the time it takes a corporate issued laptop dripping with scripts and scanners to boot.
Same thing for checking calendar, to do list, even very light web browsing (click on radar, look at radar to see how close rain is, all done).
If your time is worth money, you can't afford to use a laptop, even if an ipad cost 10 times as much.
For "sit at the CAD drafting station for 8 continuous hours" sessions, then start and stop latency don't matter. For the rest of the world, there's the ipad, ipod touch, etc.
The rat analogy breaks down, since it's not really better for them to be breeding rats, than, say, digging deeper to find underground breeding colonies in sewers or something.
This whole situation always reminds me of the UniSys RATS game on the BTOS operating system, on big green minicomputers in the late 80s early 90s, where the "easiest" way to get the high score was to camp on the rat generating colony deep within the maze, rather than sniping individual rats while running the corridors.
from MySQL to PG. It was easy. You should do it too.
OK I call forth the combined wisdom of/. to advise me how to do this.
There's gotta be the perfect wiki / website / script / blog / checklist / incantation / whatever for this, right?
I am completely uninterested in migrating databases at the level of "SELECT name, phonenumber FROM t_phonebook WHERE name=vlm;". I think I can handle that by myself, thanks.
I am worried about my replication system, my vast collection of weird indexes and their possible expanding obesity on the NAS, my triggers which are mostly used as a transparent logging system, and frankly most worried that little gotchas that probably exist that I couldn't possibly know about in advance. Maybe VARCHAR doesn't exist or it explodes on PG, maybe my favorite hashing functions don't exist inside PG, I donno that is the whole point.
I can't (easily) migrate a couple tables at a time from mysql to pg because that would make joins difficult to impossible across the two DBMS, correct? And I have a true relational database system, required for consistency (the codd normal forms and all that)
I am not worried at the point that I must hire a consultant and stay at work all weekend rolling it. But I am worried enough to "buy a book" or study a website for awhile, and maybe think about rolling to PG.
Obviously I'm not the first or only to consider this.
So, if my physical wallet isn't going anywhere because I still need it for all the cards, cash and stuff I need to carry that I can't put on my phone, and I still need actual cards for merchants who don't have the right tech at their registers, what exactly does Google Wallet do for me? I can't think of a time when I'd have my phone and wouldn't have my wallet on me, so it's not convenience.
/. has one of these posts roughly twice a week. I had the same opinion about two weeks ago and I've since come up with a couple "real" apps where I could possibly "pay with my phone"
1) Vending machines. Prices locally have skyrocketed up to about $1 per item, which explains the sudden shocking popularity of $1 coins, because the machines give them out as change for $5 bills, etc. Also a single coin equals a bag of M&Ms or whatever your chosen poison is. Junk food, stamps, contraception, whatever. Theoretically reducing cash handling would lower the price; more likely it'll just be more profit for the owner.
2) Pay toilets. Thankfully illegal in the civilized area where I live, but I've heard they exist. I could see low-rent areas installing them for residents. I have been in dumpy Chicago skyscrapers where they have a "bathroom attendant" who takes tips to keep the place clean, which aside from being really creepy, would probably be a good place to use a non-contact payment system to leave a tip, although I'd have to carry my wallet and ID card to get past the security theater anyway.
3) Rental micropayments. I don't know if the service is "micropayment compatible" or "automation compatible" but one interesting way to enforce security keys is to open the electrically locked apartment building door or parking garage using a one cent micropayment. Presumably the financial nature of the transaction means it would be securely logged. Idiots love inconvenience because good security is inconvenient, therefore anything inconvenient must be good security. I suppose it would pay for wear and tear too, after opening and closing a hundred thousand times, you probably need a new apartment garage door, and its only fair that the guy who used it the most, pays for it... Similar for 50 cent coin operated laundry machines, etc.
I feel no requirement to carry my wallet inside a hotel, resort, home, apartment building, or dorm, but I am required to carry my electronic leash, and there are some payment opportunities in those areas.
I am a upper middle class white guy living in a pretty good area, I am told repeatedly that "non-white people" must carry their wallets with ID cards any time they leave private property to reduce the damage of harassment from the police, even just walking around in their backyard, etc. I think this limits the appeal of this service. For example, I held my nose against the advertising and purchased a Virgin Mobile pay as I go phone, and at least from the advertising, sounds like I'm the only customer of theirs who would be able to safely leave home without govt issued ID cards. So I'm thinking virgin mobile is not going to even bother offering this on their phones, or at least not try to advertise it.
we should start preparing for how to cope with the effects.
Most insightful post to/. ever. Climate doesn't change only because of some displacement of catholic guilt that we're all evil, or only because most american's have white skin, or because we don't hire enough motivational climate change speakers to make us feel guilty.
Climate changes, because thats what it does over time. Doesn't matter a whole heck of a lot if its natural or artificial, it would be wise to prepare for it. And the best way to prepare is not to deindustrialize, destroy our economy, and go all Pol Pot on our population.
I'm going to take the wild guess that turning our country into another Japan is likely to result in a better human outcome than turning our country into another Somalia.
Slashdot Mirror
TI don't know how much of a capacitance is in a standard CRT setup, if it is low enough, you should be able to exctract the brightness of each sub-pixel, recreating the picture entirely
The capacitance is pretty high... high enough to give a decent shock, but low enough that the voltage would vary with "overall scene brightness" I guess I'm saying the time constant, as a rough guess, is/was about a tenth of a second.
CRTs are/were always cathode modulated not anode modulated. That said, and /. culture being what it is, someone will find an obscure 1955 soviet military radar that anode modulated, in fact I'm kinda looking forward to it.
(I presume that it is intentionally adultered with poison, like most other industrial forms of ethanol, but I must say I've never tried to drink the stuff.)
Isopropyl is not a "brand name" of ethanol, and all by itself, IS a tolerably good denaturant for ethanol. I don't know if its a legal denaturant, but it would work pretty well in that role. You'll get horrifically sick (and possibly die) if you drink (or inhale) more than about a tablespoon of it. Strongly not recommended. Chemisty and toxicology are not binary sciences where one side is herbal and earth mother goddess alternative medicine pure and light, and the other is industrial and pure evil, despite the best efforts of the marketing people. I get really worried when I hear people talking about isopropyl being "safe". Compared to methanol, or benzene, oh heck yes. Compared to ethanol or tapwater, no, just heck no. Its a weak poison all by itself, even when 100% pure. Less than a shotglass worth all over your skin or inhaled in your lungs on an occasional basis is almost certainly OK... washing your hands in it 40 hours a week or breathing noticable fumes 40 hours a week is probably getting very close to the "call OSHA before you die" range.
isopropyl alcohol... and often joke that the contents of the bottle is likely 100%, but that it rapidly drops to 99% after opening
According to the Wikipedia, distillation alone cannot increase the purity of alcohol beyond 95.6%. Everclear itself is only 95% pure.
Be careful with wikipedia. You can get specific answers but usually not general field wide information. There is no such thing as "the alcohol" or an "alcohol atom". Its also not a trademark or a process or a treatment. Any organic compound where the most active functional group is a -OH group is gonna colloquially be called a "alcohol". That doesn't mean they're all the same or they all are safe to drink or they all get you drunk, for that matter. Isopropyl is not a "brand name" of ethanol, its a completely different organic compound which happens to have the same functional group as ethanol. Standard /. computer analogy is I have a "USB-equipped desktop computer" on my desk at home; it could be a mac or a PC; no difference, right? Standard /. car analogy is the mere presence of a trailer hitch doesn't mean its a towing rated vehicle; my wife's prius has an aftermarket hitch, ideal for hitch mounted bicycle rack, with a "tow rating" of something laughable like 250 pounds. The azeotrope for isoproyl is more like 88% pure, not 99% random guess not 95% like ethanol. Your buddies don't know that isopropyl will suck up about 10% of its weight in water, pulling it right out of the air if necessary. That makes it a great "gas line cleaner" in a car. This is actually kinda important if you're trying to protect something from corrosion, isopropyl is not "magic" like acetone, the water dissolved in it can cause corrosion or water damage. On the other hand, the huge quantity of water tends to make it much less flammable, if your coworkers were dumb enough to use acetone they'd most likely find a way to set themselves on fire. Another example is storing sodium metal or potassium metal under oils is a fairly intelligent idea, but storing them under isopropyl would be really stupid because "rapidly" that iso will be contaminated with 10% water by pulling it out of the air if necessary and the Na or K is gonna go boom. In the lab, we could manufacture 100% iso or ethanol by pouring the water azeotrope over some crushed sodium, the sodium eats the water, gives off some heat, hopefully not enough to go boil or go boom... So.. an opened and sloppily stored bottle of iso is difficult set on fire because its 10% water, but a sealed 100% pure bottle will burn just about as well as any other solvent, which also might be a very exciting workplace lesson...
I can't be the only "ex" chemistry nerd on /., can I?
Note that chemists have real recording spectrophotometers, not just monitor calibration gadgets.
Oh, be quiet and just enjoy nerding out for once in your life already.
Some of us nerd out by pointing out our superiority, thank you very much!
The nerding out bit is he could get dramatically better results using an even more ridiculously expensive tool, if he wanted to.
The standard /. car analogy is you can measure the even-ness of the gap between the door and body using a kids 75 cent wooden ruler to maybe as much as 2 sig figs, but a machinist could loan you a $250 digital dial caliper to get at around 3 sig figs, maybe 4.
I'm surprised no chemist out there has run this exact experiment... I know I'd be tempted if I was still in that field and had access to the proper gear...
Note that chemists have real recording spectrophotometers, not just monitor calibration gadgets. I spent way too long in my youth, if I recall correctly, classifying iron ore samples using one. Its a fairly elegant technique because accurate ultra wide range light sensors have been old stuff for decades. It seems like I took an entire 200 level quantitative chemical analysis chemistry class where all we did was F around with a spectrophotometer in different ways.
If I recall correctly, the infrared ones were the cats meow before NMR got "cheap" for classifying organic compounds.
Have two TVs on at the same time viewing different programs.
The crypto equivalent of xoring the same passphrase on two known plaintexts. Not gonna work.
Its like saying a fourier transform can detect two individual sine waves, but not a combination of sine waves. not how it works. In fact it's great at that.
" biggest single draw of electricity most people have. "
citation needed. I would doubt it pulls more power then my electric stove. or furnace.
I've seen those studies, and it is true if you live a nearly amish lifestyle w/ respect to other electronic devices. Perhaps in a small dorm room? If you exclude everything that can compete, what you want to win usually wins by virtue of being last standing. Also cherry pick the oldest, most wasteful DVR that has ever been deployed in at least quantity 1 to at least one home on the planet. I haven't been able to follow the money to figure out what they are trying to do, maybe they own patents on saving DVR power and are trying to sic the greenies on them to get them to buy patent licensing...
People like putting AV gear in closets / closed door boxes in their living room. Supposedly people watch TV for 8 hours a day or some nonsense, which means it reaches steady state temperatures every day. Think logically... if the DVR drew 1 KW, then the first day the owner watched TV it would set the "entertainment console" on fire. Therefore you can guess that it must draw less than, say, 100 watts, so as to remain below liquefaction temperature.
I think the key in the article is "standard TV set" by which they mean a CRT. A CRT varies its HT current draw by scene brightness, and its quite visibly obvious when troubleshooting. Heck even a cheapie consumer grade wattmeter could probably detect it. On /. a CRT is probably not considered a "standard TV" anymore, but out in the real world, deployed CRTs on the ground showing shiney pictures probably still outnumber all other deployed and working technologies, at least for a few more years...
On the other hand, the florescent backlight in my piece of junk basement LCD TV is constant power draw, no matter if the LCD pixels let light thru or not. The LCD pixels themselves draw about the same no matter scene brightness. Anyone who's ever done anything with embedded systems knows this... the LCD display itself is usually rated around a milliamp, most of which is wasted in the control ckts, and the backlight usually draws a good fraction of an amp. Even allowing for much higher current draw for fast moving scenes and higher contrast, I'm betting the backlight still wins for power draw.
No all you need to screw up their signature is "about equal to a TV".
Now insert the stereotypical /. complaint from coasties that they can easily afford a $1200K house on their $50K salary the only problem being the 15 cent per KWh draw of their 200 watt TV will surely bankrupt them. Happens every "electricity consumption" /. article. Close on the heels of the "The average american watches TV 8 hours per day, works 16 hours per day, sleeps 8 hours per day, and commutes in their vehicle at 5 MPH on the freeway for 4 hours per day loving every minute of it while hating electric cars, so this will bankrupt them" comment.
I'll take it you've never heard of Wake-on-LAN. Third-party services such as LogMeIn actually can turn on remote machines as long as there is another computer on the network with LogMeIn installed. That doesn't even require an IP address. It's a packet addressed to the MAC of the NIC (which is why the originating packet needs to be on the same network).
Yeah but thats cheating. You need an extra box and a WOL compatible switch, right? If I'm allowed to cheat and have stuff other than the as advertised VNC, then I can just specify a robot arm poised to punch the power switch. Or default the bios to always power up on restoral of AC and hook up to innumerable remote rebooter products and home automation products.
I have noticed over the years that the concept of a power switch has been removed. The only thing my cable settop box does when its "off" is output a black screen. The giant office printer at work merely shuts off the LCD backlight when its switched off. Its all about making the greenies think they're saving KWH while not actually doing anything.
Yeah, and see how many websites built in the last eight or nine years work without Javascript... Hell, for real security, go back to using Gopher!
A good first order approximation is any website that is even vaguely attempting to be ADA compliant probably works fine without javascript.
Run with "noscript" for awhile, maybe a couple years, and you'll come to agree.
That's using the fake low inflation rates, and lots of hedonics, like substituting ground mystery meat for tenderloin steak.
Anyway, the players seemed borked right now...
Figure out why they're borked. Sometimes happens because the old tapes shed/spray oxide all over the inside of the VCR. In that case, there are voodoo solutions to "fix" shedding oxide, but pretty much your best bet is heave all the stuff in the trash and forget about it, unless you have an incredibly high tolerance for frustration and lots of spare time and money. Another popular failure mode is the grease in the convoluted tape path sticks / dries out / gets covered in dust, in which case an ex-vcr repair tech (who would probably be about 60 now, I'd guess) might be able to fix it for very cheap, or you could buy a new VCR from walmart (still sold!) and the tapes would probably be viewable.
Are there any pro-places that don't charge an arm and a leg to copy off VHS to DVD or bluray?
No, no there are not. Even in the cheap olden days when that wasn't an exotic "data recovery service" but just a guy amortizing the cost of a VCR, a stand alone DVD recorder, and a cable between them, they still asked for too much money. The financially ideal time to roll the data from tape to DVD was probably "about a decade ago" not tomorrow. Of course the copier guys were legendary for using the worlds cheapest burnable disks to maximize profits, so the DVDs would probably already be failing / failed now...
I know this has been discussed before, but it really begs the question of how to preserve digital data for long periods of time. Stone tablets last for thousands of years; paper for hundreds (or more, if in climate-controlled storage). What have we got for (large amounts of) digital data?
Don't think you have any idea what "begging the question" means other than improperly using it as verbal filling material. Sorry, nothing personal, just had to be said.
Boring monthly / weekly /. topic. Short answer is to copy it to new media yearly and keep all the old copies in storage as "backups of backups", and at that annual copy time, verify the contents of the backups if you can.
Stone tablets do NOT last thousands of years... its just the tiny fraction that survived happen to be that old. Ditto the paper, the 99.99% of acid bleached paperbacks have already decayed to dust, so the only old books left are the archival material, archival ink, archival binding, archival storage books... I'm sure in 1000 years people will be using floppy disks as an example of technology that is readable forever, because the 5 remaining disks in the world will still be readable, so...
Clean and align the drive first, before you screw up any (more) disks.
To give an analogy that kids now a days can easily understand, its like trying to insert an old fashioned flash drive into a USB port full of peanut butter. It might work, it might even work most of the time, but it'll work better if its clean.
Due to the digital capture effect or whatever, you might only need one dB more signal or one dB less noise to go from a sector having a read error somewhere every time you read it, to having an errorless read.
If you have way more time and/or money than you know what to do with, you break out the oscilloscope and align the drive to that individual disk/track. Yes this takes a lot of time and gear, but if you really gotta do it... Basically you align to best SNR on that individual disk rather than to an alignment disk. If the drive that wrote the disk was technically out of alignment, this will save you. If the drive that originally wrote the disk was in perfect alignment, then this is a waste of time.
At the very least, clean the freaking drive. Using kimwipes and undenatured pure ethanol on the heads. You drink some ethanol as a toast to the computing gods after success or failure, doesn't matter which, either way you're doing a shot or its bad luck and the next disk will shed its oxide for sure. Everclear is supposedly pure enough to clean drive heads, and supposedly its drinkable. All I remember from my only experience with everclear was yelling some lines from a cartoon and throwing up, and there are disks I have not been able to recover, so take my cleaning solvent suggestion with a grain of salt. Kimwipes are hard to explain and may no longer be manufactured, but they used to be like a dustless, lintless fabric q-tip, at least in concept, sorta. I don't mean they were like a q-tip in that they were of a certain dia, length, and color, but more the general idea of a perfect cleaning fabric at the end of a non-conductive stick.
Funnily enough, postgres does actually support foreign tables with mysql as a backend.
This could work... then I could gradually move them over into native tables... interesting.... I think I'm developing a plan here...
video games like World of Warcraft are the true future of cyberspace
The artsy craftsy types have been tying to ram that idea down our throats for generations, always with a promise that with just slightly better technology we'll all virtually drive to and then virtually walk around in a 3-d rendered virtual bookstore to find our books using our eyes as our "grep" command and then wait in line in a virtual 3-d line for a virtual 3-d emo slacker teen cashier to ring us up on a virtual 3-d cash register, which we'll pay using digital cash rendered as virtual 3-d gold coins by manually moving those simulated virtual coins out of our virtual 3-d rendered pockets and handing them to the emo slacker teen cashier kid who virtually places the virtual coins in the virtual cash register, one at a time.
Um, no, tried all that, the future way to buy books is amazon.com. Nobody wants that artsy craftsy B.S. Nobody. Makes for a nice story, thats about it.
...single player game that you actually own may be on it's way out driven by clueless teens as demographics shift.
Speaking of demographic shift, in the US inflation adjusted income at the median has been dropping steadily for about two generations and shows no signs of improving. Meanwhile the price of things needed (as opposed to luxuries) has been climbing steadily thru natural resource depletion and printing press operations, so the cost of housing, food, transportation, all that has and will increase. So the median masses of the population have less free cash every year, and probably always will. And the plan for a blockbuster new game is to grab a large slice of that steadily shrinking pie.
Yeah, what could go wrong with wanting a bigger slice of a shrinking pie? Good luck MMO operators, you'll need it.
Would it be possible that a vulnerability allowed normal bios patching to be blocked too? Meaning that the hardware could be more or less irreversibly compromised... Sounds like a brilliant stroke of stupid.
They make money off every bricked / overheated / burned out MB / CPU. Stupid for anyone to buy, brilliant for them to try and sell.
Heck they could even write the windows worm themselves to cause maximum damage... set fan speed to lowest, set CPU voltage to maximum, set CPU speed to max, disable thermal throttling... insta-profit!!!!!
Using VNC, one can now ... power up,
Before I VNC in to power up the box, I need DHCP running so I have an IP address to connect to. No problemo, I'll just power up the box to get a DHCP address before I power up the box to power up the box. Its turtles all the way down.
What I'm worried about is:
1) Its not going to be "open standard VNC" but some weird kluge that operates strictly on layer 2 and requires "special" probably windows only software, that at least doesn't require ip to work.
2) Or, to have the VNC interface not interfere with the "real" LAN card, it'll have two interfaces, either via VLAN which will invariably be messed up, or two phy interfaces, which will invariably be swapped and double my buildout costs. Or the extreme hackery of the lan port means it'll be one version of windows only hardware, never to be used on a different version of windows or linux or anything else; a "win-lancard".
3) To protect me from the latest windows worm that locks people out of their bios using this tech, my ISP will "save me" by blocking all standard port VNC traffic and any traffic analysis VNC traffic on alternate ports. Thanks guys, for removing VNC from the list of usable software. I feel so much better now.
4) Many non-technical users are going to get scammed by brightly flashing internet ads advertising security and safety at a cost for this. Right next to the equally snake oil "your computer is broadcasting your ip address" ads.
Exactly. Why can't they just use cheap laptops?
Extreme latency, on the order of 10x to 100x, for short tasks. I can unlock my ipod touch, mash the mail app, check for mail, and lock it back up in less than 1/10th the time it takes a big ole laptop to wake up from sleep and probably a 1/100th the time it takes a corporate issued laptop dripping with scripts and scanners to boot.
Same thing for checking calendar, to do list, even very light web browsing (click on radar, look at radar to see how close rain is, all done).
If your time is worth money, you can't afford to use a laptop, even if an ipad cost 10 times as much.
For "sit at the CAD drafting station for 8 continuous hours" sessions, then start and stop latency don't matter. For the rest of the world, there's the ipad, ipod touch, etc.
The rat analogy breaks down, since it's not really better for them to be breeding rats, than, say, digging deeper to find underground breeding colonies in sewers or something.
This whole situation always reminds me of the UniSys RATS game on the BTOS operating system, on big green minicomputers in the late 80s early 90s, where the "easiest" way to get the high score was to camp on the rat generating colony deep within the maze, rather than sniping individual rats while running the corridors.
from MySQL to PG. It was easy. You should do it too.
OK I call forth the combined wisdom of /. to advise me how to do this.
There's gotta be the perfect wiki / website / script / blog / checklist / incantation / whatever for this, right?
I am completely uninterested in migrating databases at the level of "SELECT name, phonenumber FROM t_phonebook WHERE name=vlm;". I think I can handle that by myself, thanks.
I am worried about my replication system, my vast collection of weird indexes and their possible expanding obesity on the NAS, my triggers which are mostly used as a transparent logging system, and frankly most worried that little gotchas that probably exist that I couldn't possibly know about in advance. Maybe VARCHAR doesn't exist or it explodes on PG, maybe my favorite hashing functions don't exist inside PG, I donno that is the whole point.
I can't (easily) migrate a couple tables at a time from mysql to pg because that would make joins difficult to impossible across the two DBMS, correct? And I have a true relational database system, required for consistency (the codd normal forms and all that)
I am not worried at the point that I must hire a consultant and stay at work all weekend rolling it. But I am worried enough to "buy a book" or study a website for awhile, and maybe think about rolling to PG.
Obviously I'm not the first or only to consider this.
So, if my physical wallet isn't going anywhere because I still need it for all the cards, cash and stuff I need to carry that I can't put on my phone, and I still need actual cards for merchants who don't have the right tech at their registers, what exactly does Google Wallet do for me? I can't think of a time when I'd have my phone and wouldn't have my wallet on me, so it's not convenience.
/. has one of these posts roughly twice a week. I had the same opinion about two weeks ago and I've since come up with a couple "real" apps where I could possibly "pay with my phone"
1) Vending machines. Prices locally have skyrocketed up to about $1 per item, which explains the sudden shocking popularity of $1 coins, because the machines give them out as change for $5 bills, etc. Also a single coin equals a bag of M&Ms or whatever your chosen poison is. Junk food, stamps, contraception, whatever. Theoretically reducing cash handling would lower the price; more likely it'll just be more profit for the owner.
2) Pay toilets. Thankfully illegal in the civilized area where I live, but I've heard they exist. I could see low-rent areas installing them for residents. I have been in dumpy Chicago skyscrapers where they have a "bathroom attendant" who takes tips to keep the place clean, which aside from being really creepy, would probably be a good place to use a non-contact payment system to leave a tip, although I'd have to carry my wallet and ID card to get past the security theater anyway.
3) Rental micropayments. I don't know if the service is "micropayment compatible" or "automation compatible" but one interesting way to enforce security keys is to open the electrically locked apartment building door or parking garage using a one cent micropayment. Presumably the financial nature of the transaction means it would be securely logged. Idiots love inconvenience because good security is inconvenient, therefore anything inconvenient must be good security. I suppose it would pay for wear and tear too, after opening and closing a hundred thousand times, you probably need a new apartment garage door, and its only fair that the guy who used it the most, pays for it... Similar for 50 cent coin operated laundry machines, etc.
I feel no requirement to carry my wallet inside a hotel, resort, home, apartment building, or dorm, but I am required to carry my electronic leash, and there are some payment opportunities in those areas.
I am a upper middle class white guy living in a pretty good area, I am told repeatedly that "non-white people" must carry their wallets with ID cards any time they leave private property to reduce the damage of harassment from the police, even just walking around in their backyard, etc. I think this limits the appeal of this service. For example, I held my nose against the advertising and purchased a Virgin Mobile pay as I go phone, and at least from the advertising, sounds like I'm the only customer of theirs who would be able to safely leave home without govt issued ID cards. So I'm thinking virgin mobile is not going to even bother offering this on their phones, or at least not try to advertise it.
we should start preparing for how to cope with the effects.
Most insightful post to /. ever. Climate doesn't change only because of some displacement of catholic guilt that we're all evil, or only because most american's have white skin, or because we don't hire enough motivational climate change speakers to make us feel guilty.
Climate changes, because thats what it does over time. Doesn't matter a whole heck of a lot if its natural or artificial, it would be wise to prepare for it. And the best way to prepare is not to deindustrialize, destroy our economy, and go all Pol Pot on our population.
I'm going to take the wild guess that turning our country into another Japan is likely to result in a better human outcome than turning our country into another Somalia.
Libertarians tend to be anti-corporate and would advocate for individuals suing those corporations for polluting their property.
Strictly speaking, wouldn't anti-corporate mean piercing the corporate veil and suing the execs directly?