I imagine it would also mean that any life that evolved there would evolve an eye that would be capable of seeing a broader spectrum of light as well, though, so the plants wouldn't look black to them
Water vapor in air is our primary limitation, not solar spectrum. Look at the electronics guys who try to transmit data thru the air using light... Aside from any safety concerns, they all seem to converge on red wavelengths. The atmosphere is a pretty good attenuator above UV and below red. At "long" distances its a pretty poor blue conductor due to scattering.
I would predict animals in a desert should have a wider eye spectral response than marine animals.
The one that looks at the average American's filthy TV screens, of course.
I wasn't trying to satirize the average American household cleanliness, but satire the folks that think blueray is useful under normal viewing conditions to normal people. The type that hits the screen with windex before watching a video, sure. The kind that organizes viewing time around the relative position of sun, window, and screen, sure. Everyone else... no.
Ever discover a good side road that works to get around traffic? A friend and I who carpooled found one. One day a radio station started a segment where people could call in with traffic tips. Someone glowing described this wonderful detour. The next day it was as stalled and backed up as the highway. Years later I went that way again, still as screwed up. I suspect this sort of thing to happen with various other kind of favorite spots.
Works both ways. There is a truly major interstate highway project in my area, biggest in a couple decades, maybe the biggest project since the interstate was built decades ago. The conventional wisdom is the interstate will therefore be a parking lot during rush hour, so take any possible non-interstate route home, avoid the interstate at all costs, its the inter-apocalypse, etc. The actual result is the interstate is a ghost town and I get home about 5 to 10 minutes earlier than normal now, even though the road is all screwed up.
You should call in to the same radio show crying about how the alt route is a clogged dirt road to nowhere, until no one uses it anymore.
At least its not sold to editors / directors / etc. If it were, you'd literally have mathematically formulaic programs.
One interesting problem might be finding test subjects... Everyone knows via tv tropes etc that the idea target market victim is a.... and before you had a device to plug them into, they had to just talk about it. Now they have a device to plug them into, so instead of talking about it, they're going to start raiding mental institutions etc in order to hook up their ideal target audience. Creating all kinds of interesting ethical concerns, as they will be taking advantage of lower functioning people.
It may even make it into marketing, COPS TV (is that still on?) might be edited based on the measured emotional response of test audience cops this week vs criminals next week. That's novel enough that I might even watch TV again.
Two, most movies are now shot in a style that looks like someone let a cat piss on the celluloid. Seriously, who the fuck wants to pop in the Battlestar Galactica Blu-Ray and see film grain and shitty lighting in hi-def!?
BSG the TV series was the devils right hand man of "shakey cam" to the point that I couldn't stand to watch it, yet you're complaining about poor lighting...
Many people don't want to spend thousands to re-buy their entire movie collection at a higher price.
You'd save a lot of money not re-buying stuff you probably don't watch. In fact, since I rarely if ever watch a movie more than once (I'm not a toddler, after all) I don't bother buying physical disks.
I've heard of people with thousands of disks... But I've never heard of people re-watching thousands of disks.
but it is still the case that DVD is absolutely ubiquitous, while Blue-ray cannot be assumed.
Thru the magic of streaming and mythtv the only place my kids watch old fashioned physical disks is in the car. Can you even buy a blueray player for a car? For less than a kilobuck?
I suspect most people aren't that bothered by picture quality.
Have you ever looked carefully at the average american TV screen? Not brand new, but after its been covered with a thick patina of household dust, yellow condensed tobacco smoke, maybe some embedded pet hair? Dried on biological fluids (I'm thinking dog spit and spilled drinks here, although I suppose/.ers have applied other liquids)? Especially in the static-y CRT era?
Thats just "basic" hygine which is none the less beyond the median of the population as seen on peopleofwalmart.com. How many TVs mounted over fireplaces covered with soot? Or the interior decorator of the house requires it "just so" which unfortunately puts half the screen in direct sunlight and the other in shadow?
The "average american" could not care less about picture quality as a technical item. The "keep up with the joneses" crowd does so when buying giant TVs and perhaps disk players, because those come in big cardboard boxes, but you can't conspicuously consume by buying a cheap little disk at the bottom of the shopping bag, so they don't.
Its very much like trying to sell "high def" audio to a nation of 128K mp3 players and earbud listeners.
Now that you mention it, the one that chopped my hand up (didn't quite need stitches) was a laptop drive from the early 00s. Also found glass platters in double-digit-gig high RPM (for their era, anyway) SCA SCSIs.
For obvious reasons I don't try to pry stuck platters out anymore, so I don't know the ratios on modern drives.
I'm pretty sure they mean pressure not force, since I honestly doubt that a 2.5 'ton' of force is needed to punch through a hard disk
No they almost certainly mean force. Shop presses are sold by force. 1000 psi hydraulic tubing, fittings, pump, and o-rings vs some diameter (area is what actually matters) ram equals X tons. The shop press manufacturer has no idea what shape die you'll install. If its a wedge, I guess the area is theoretically zero at the point and the pressure is infinite. More likely limited by the compression strength of the metal in the die.
Here's a Harbor Freight Chinese 20 ton press, less than $300 delivered.
Chinese presses used to be famous for shipping with cast iron plates instead of steel plates. People die or are horribly wounded when the cast iron inevitably shatters. So be careful and/or buy or make your own steel plates. Another thing to look out for is Chinese "1000 psi" fittings and hoses might not actually survive 1000 psi when brand new, much less after years of abuse. So buying a press 10 times bigger than you think you need is not all that bad of an idea, assuming you can afford it.
I've given the platters to my girl fiend as purse mirrors. I also keep one in my car for when people have their high beams on behind me. Not sure why, but the surface is a near perfect mirror. And since it's not really deformable (brittle, not elastic) the image is always near perfect. Minus the hole in the center.
If you can toss them correctly they also fly rather well, requires you to snap the wrist.
I just don't see how this destroys 'everything'. A small hole like than in only a portion of the disk will still leave quite a bit of data.
There is a certain cutoff year where most of the pre-whatever drives are aluminum platter and the post-whatever drives are glass platter. Everyone whom does what we do, eventually has the "shattering" experience of discovering their first glass platter hard drive. And being precision ground surfaces they can't be prestressed like car windows, they leave some very nasty sharp jagged chunks of glass. Keep the 1st aid kit handy...
The large old aluminum ones (think 5.25 or bigger) also rang with a clang you cannot believe if dropped on a tile floor. Deafening, almost. Don't try with the glass platters.
Could someone comment on hard drive manufacturing?
In some areas of mass production, there exists precisely one manufacturing plant in the world, located in mainland China. Then, worldwide, fifty (no exaggeration) importing and marketing companies order microscopically different batches of the same model, slap a localized sticker on it, and pretend it's theirs. An example I'm well aware of is the small metal lathe market specifically the 7x14 and its much bigger brothers. Its always comical to watch people whom don't know anything about the manufacturing situation argue how their importer's model is oh so superior to another importer's model, not knowing they're basically the same. Like arguing the build quality at one Toyota dealership is orders of magnitude better than another Toyota dealership, as if each dealership has their own assembly line in the back room.
Are hard drives like that, where one big ole factory in China makes ALL of them and Seagate / Samsung / WD / Hitachi just slap stickers on them and watch the/.ers argue over which is "better"?
Yes yes I know that in 1965 the only mfgr was IBM in the USA, who cares I'm talking about current production...
You have to be logged into a google service, click on a link in the search results, go back, then just that link will have the "Block" button. It took me a few tries before it worked for me.
You that bit at the start of the HHGTTG? About the plans available for review in a vault in the basement on a planet circling another star or something like that? Yeah thats what I'm thinking. At least its not in Klingon.
So what's your site?... What have you got to lose?
Zakkie links to http://www.carfolio.com/ on his/. profile page. I'm personally completely uninterested in the topic, but it looks like a real site as opposed to a content farm.
He's probably worried about losing his anonymity, knowing that/. is the most likely place on the net to have us all check his whois and reverse DNS records just for fun, etc.
regurgitating their mass of serf and/or script generated sludge
And people wonder why I got rid of my facebook account. Oh wait you were talking about link farmers, sorry. And no, all of my "friends" were not link farmers, they just wrote that poorly.
Interesting.. I did not realize that feature was available, because it is not shown to me in my results. There is no "block" option next to the "cached" and "similar" as seen in the blog posts etc. I do see in my search options that I can manually block up to 500 domains from search results. Nothing weird here, just a normal google account and a normal firefox with no unusual addons/extensions.
Maybe that option only appears for certain "special" domain names, or "special" searches?
Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to just block all robot traffic to expertsexchange, ehow, and the like? Or even more trivial, allow users individual profiles to block specific user selectable domains?
My brother always played Panzer General with the Germans. He said they had better weapons. Nice excuse. You better keep and eye on him...
He just didn't like micromanaging. The relevant stat is something like the Germans blew up 10 shermans for every tiger we blew up. The bummer for the Germans is we built more than 11 shermans for every tiger they built. Ooops.
A fake tank "game" is one USA tank platoon vs one German tank platoon and the only difference is the little flags on the tanks. A realistic one, like Steel Panthers is micromanaging 10 or so US tanks as 1 German tank snipes up most of the US tanks.
Arguably by the end of the war, the guys with the best tanks were the Russians, not US or Ger. Everyone remembers the US had the best aircraft. Not so much memory of our tanks, because they in fact pretty much sucked.
The other aspect is in the Modern Crusades or WW3 or whatever you call the last decade or so of military adventuring in the middle east, the US vs islam has been a good analogy for Ger vs USA circa WWII at least solely WRT to logistics tail. Our vehicles can crush ten of theirs in 1 on 1 combat... The problem is they emplace 11 IEDs for each of our vehicles... hmm.
Why not run nuclear reactors in a nitrogen heavy/oxygen-light atmosphere all the time?
Explosions + nuclear cores do not mix well. Surely some genius might have recognized this.
Nitrogen atmosphere kills too many people; even highly trained and prepared individuals under normal conditions. NASA ground crew, etc.
Crazy as it might sound, even this late in the game, running in a pure N2 atmosphere for 40 years would have killed way more people than are gonna die from this event.
I wonder WTF their contingency plan is if a big tsunami hits now...
4th biggest earthquakes in recorded history don't happen often. However, our regular scheduled hurricane season is rapidly approaching. Now that light at the end of the tunnel is not really avoidable.
Allowing the buildings to explode and damage the systems used to keep the buildings from exploding more is a pretty major fuckup in the realm of reliability engineering.
Its also a management failure. Everyone knows once zirconium heats up around water you get H2. But no one wants to be the management guy who pulls the trigger and says trash the roof with a wrecking ball or whatever. So, everyone just sit around until it blows up, that way it'll be an act of god instead of management deciding to crack the building.
what pclminion said. also: "this graphing can be scripted and scheduled."
The best part is not just tail ending "a graph" at the end of a script, but automating thousands of graphs at various resolutions, high, medium, and thumbnail, and then creating the index page that clicks thru. And send emails of "noteworthy" graphs to certain personnel. Add and remove graphs as they appear in the data set, all automatically. I would imagine my little couple minute script would take months to do manually in Excel, one graph at a time.. But my script runs daily...
Excel is, unfortunately, our corporate standard database management system, not a usable graphing solution.
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine it would also mean that any life that evolved there would evolve an eye that would be capable of seeing a broader spectrum of light as well, though, so the plants wouldn't look black to them
Water vapor in air is our primary limitation, not solar spectrum. Look at the electronics guys who try to transmit data thru the air using light... Aside from any safety concerns, they all seem to converge on red wavelengths. The atmosphere is a pretty good attenuator above UV and below red. At "long" distances its a pretty poor blue conductor due to scattering.
I would predict animals in a desert should have a wider eye spectral response than marine animals.
I wonder what stereotype you fall into?
The one that looks at the average American's filthy TV screens, of course.
I wasn't trying to satirize the average American household cleanliness, but satire the folks that think blueray is useful under normal viewing conditions to normal people. The type that hits the screen with windex before watching a video, sure. The kind that organizes viewing time around the relative position of sun, window, and screen, sure. Everyone else... no.
Ever discover a good side road that works to get around traffic? A friend and I who carpooled found one. One day a radio station started a segment where people could call in with traffic tips. Someone glowing described this wonderful detour. The next day it was as stalled and backed up as the highway. Years later I went that way again, still as screwed up. I suspect this sort of thing to happen with various other kind of favorite spots.
Works both ways. There is a truly major interstate highway project in my area, biggest in a couple decades, maybe the biggest project since the interstate was built decades ago. The conventional wisdom is the interstate will therefore be a parking lot during rush hour, so take any possible non-interstate route home, avoid the interstate at all costs, its the inter-apocalypse, etc. The actual result is the interstate is a ghost town and I get home about 5 to 10 minutes earlier than normal now, even though the road is all screwed up.
You should call in to the same radio show crying about how the alt route is a clogged dirt road to nowhere, until no one uses it anymore.
The sheep will follow their orders...
Another "look at the bright side post"
The collected data is then sold to marketers
At least its not sold to editors / directors / etc. If it were, you'd literally have mathematically formulaic programs.
One interesting problem might be finding test subjects... Everyone knows via tv tropes etc that the idea target market victim is a .... and before you had a device to plug them into, they had to just talk about it. Now they have a device to plug them into, so instead of talking about it, they're going to start raiding mental institutions etc in order to hook up their ideal target audience. Creating all kinds of interesting ethical concerns, as they will be taking advantage of lower functioning people.
It may even make it into marketing, COPS TV (is that still on?) might be edited based on the measured emotional response of test audience cops this week vs criminals next week. That's novel enough that I might even watch TV again.
This might sell in the home.
I'm thinking ... semi-adaptive real time multi-view pr0n.
Three ... whatevers ... pan across the screen. The one that gave the ... highest response controls the chapter the DVD player skips to ...
Or movie on demand instead of old fashioned physical media.
Even non-pr0n apps could exist, like watching ads on the TV guide channel automatically selecting the 'best" one.
The "DVD games" industry might go for this, a "truth or dare" game or "think your way thru the mystery".
Two, most movies are now shot in a style that looks like someone let a cat piss on the celluloid. Seriously, who the fuck wants to pop in the Battlestar Galactica Blu-Ray and see film grain and shitty lighting in hi-def!?
BSG the TV series was the devils right hand man of "shakey cam" to the point that I couldn't stand to watch it, yet you're complaining about poor lighting...
Many people don't want to spend thousands to re-buy their entire movie collection at a higher price.
You'd save a lot of money not re-buying stuff you probably don't watch. In fact, since I rarely if ever watch a movie more than once (I'm not a toddler, after all) I don't bother buying physical disks.
I've heard of people with thousands of disks... But I've never heard of people re-watching thousands of disks.
but it is still the case that DVD is absolutely ubiquitous, while Blue-ray cannot be assumed.
Thru the magic of streaming and mythtv the only place my kids watch old fashioned physical disks is in the car. Can you even buy a blueray player for a car? For less than a kilobuck?
I suspect most people aren't that bothered by picture quality.
Have you ever looked carefully at the average american TV screen? Not brand new, but after its been covered with a thick patina of household dust, yellow condensed tobacco smoke, maybe some embedded pet hair? Dried on biological fluids (I'm thinking dog spit and spilled drinks here, although I suppose /.ers have applied other liquids)? Especially in the static-y CRT era?
Thats just "basic" hygine which is none the less beyond the median of the population as seen on peopleofwalmart.com. How many TVs mounted over fireplaces covered with soot? Or the interior decorator of the house requires it "just so" which unfortunately puts half the screen in direct sunlight and the other in shadow?
The "average american" could not care less about picture quality as a technical item. The "keep up with the joneses" crowd does so when buying giant TVs and perhaps disk players, because those come in big cardboard boxes, but you can't conspicuously consume by buying a cheap little disk at the bottom of the shopping bag, so they don't.
Its very much like trying to sell "high def" audio to a nation of 128K mp3 players and earbud listeners.
Now that you mention it, the one that chopped my hand up (didn't quite need stitches) was a laptop drive from the early 00s. Also found glass platters in double-digit-gig high RPM (for their era, anyway) SCA SCSIs.
For obvious reasons I don't try to pry stuck platters out anymore, so I don't know the ratios on modern drives.
I'm pretty sure they mean pressure not force, since I honestly doubt that a 2.5 'ton' of force is needed to punch through a hard disk
No they almost certainly mean force. Shop presses are sold by force. 1000 psi hydraulic tubing, fittings, pump, and o-rings vs some diameter (area is what actually matters) ram equals X tons. The shop press manufacturer has no idea what shape die you'll install. If its a wedge, I guess the area is theoretically zero at the point and the pressure is infinite. More likely limited by the compression strength of the metal in the die.
Here's a Harbor Freight Chinese 20 ton press, less than $300 delivered.
http://www.harborfreight.com/20-ton-shop-press-32879.html
Chinese presses used to be famous for shipping with cast iron plates instead of steel plates. People die or are horribly wounded when the cast iron inevitably shatters. So be careful and/or buy or make your own steel plates. Another thing to look out for is Chinese "1000 psi" fittings and hoses might not actually survive 1000 psi when brand new, much less after years of abuse. So buying a press 10 times bigger than you think you need is not all that bad of an idea, assuming you can afford it.
I've given the platters to my girl fiend as purse mirrors. I also keep one in my car for when people have their high beams on behind me. Not sure why, but the surface is a near perfect mirror. And since it's not really deformable (brittle, not elastic) the image is always near perfect. Minus the hole in the center.
If you can toss them correctly they also fly rather well, requires you to snap the wrist.
I just don't see how this destroys 'everything'. A small hole like than in only a portion of the disk will still leave quite a bit of data.
There is a certain cutoff year where most of the pre-whatever drives are aluminum platter and the post-whatever drives are glass platter. Everyone whom does what we do, eventually has the "shattering" experience of discovering their first glass platter hard drive. And being precision ground surfaces they can't be prestressed like car windows, they leave some very nasty sharp jagged chunks of glass. Keep the 1st aid kit handy...
The large old aluminum ones (think 5.25 or bigger) also rang with a clang you cannot believe if dropped on a tile floor. Deafening, almost. Don't try with the glass platters.
Could someone comment on hard drive manufacturing?
In some areas of mass production, there exists precisely one manufacturing plant in the world, located in mainland China. Then, worldwide, fifty (no exaggeration) importing and marketing companies order microscopically different batches of the same model, slap a localized sticker on it, and pretend it's theirs. An example I'm well aware of is the small metal lathe market specifically the 7x14 and its much bigger brothers. Its always comical to watch people whom don't know anything about the manufacturing situation argue how their importer's model is oh so superior to another importer's model, not knowing they're basically the same. Like arguing the build quality at one Toyota dealership is orders of magnitude better than another Toyota dealership, as if each dealership has their own assembly line in the back room.
Are hard drives like that, where one big ole factory in China makes ALL of them and Seagate / Samsung / WD / Hitachi just slap stickers on them and watch the /.ers argue over which is "better"?
Yes yes I know that in 1965 the only mfgr was IBM in the USA, who cares I'm talking about current production...
You have to be logged into a google service, click on a link in the search results, go back, then just that link will have the "Block" button. It took me a few tries before it worked for me.
You that bit at the start of the HHGTTG? About the plans available for review in a vault in the basement on a planet circling another star or something like that? Yeah thats what I'm thinking. At least its not in Klingon.
So what's your site? ... What have you got to lose?
Zakkie links to http://www.carfolio.com/ on his /. profile page. I'm personally completely uninterested in the topic, but it looks like a real site as opposed to a content farm.
He's probably worried about losing his anonymity, knowing that /. is the most likely place on the net to have us all check his whois and reverse DNS records just for fun, etc.
regurgitating their mass of serf and/or script generated sludge
And people wonder why I got rid of my facebook account. Oh wait you were talking about link farmers, sorry. And no, all of my "friends" were not link farmers, they just wrote that poorly.
Interesting.. I did not realize that feature was available, because it is not shown to me in my results. There is no "block" option next to the "cached" and "similar" as seen in the blog posts etc. I do see in my search options that I can manually block up to 500 domains from search results. Nothing weird here, just a normal google account and a normal firefox with no unusual addons/extensions.
Maybe that option only appears for certain "special" domain names, or "special" searches?
Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to just block all robot traffic to expertsexchange, ehow, and the like? Or even more trivial, allow users individual profiles to block specific user selectable domains?
If Sugar is bad for you, then howcome it's food?
Compare to alcohol, an excellent source of easily digestible calories in the short term, and also liver cancer.
My brother always played Panzer General with the Germans. He said they had better weapons. Nice excuse. You better keep and eye on him...
He just didn't like micromanaging. The relevant stat is something like the Germans blew up 10 shermans for every tiger we blew up. The bummer for the Germans is we built more than 11 shermans for every tiger they built. Ooops.
A fake tank "game" is one USA tank platoon vs one German tank platoon and the only difference is the little flags on the tanks. A realistic one, like Steel Panthers is micromanaging 10 or so US tanks as 1 German tank snipes up most of the US tanks.
Arguably by the end of the war, the guys with the best tanks were the Russians, not US or Ger. Everyone remembers the US had the best aircraft. Not so much memory of our tanks, because they in fact pretty much sucked.
The other aspect is in the Modern Crusades or WW3 or whatever you call the last decade or so of military adventuring in the middle east, the US vs islam has been a good analogy for Ger vs USA circa WWII at least solely WRT to logistics tail. Our vehicles can crush ten of theirs in 1 on 1 combat... The problem is they emplace 11 IEDs for each of our vehicles... hmm.
Why not run nuclear reactors in a nitrogen heavy/oxygen-light atmosphere all the time?
Explosions + nuclear cores do not mix well. Surely some genius might have recognized this.
Nitrogen atmosphere kills too many people; even highly trained and prepared individuals under normal conditions. NASA ground crew, etc.
Crazy as it might sound, even this late in the game, running in a pure N2 atmosphere for 40 years would have killed way more people than are gonna die from this event.
I wonder WTF their contingency plan is if a big tsunami hits now ...
4th biggest earthquakes in recorded history don't happen often. However, our regular scheduled hurricane season is rapidly approaching. Now that light at the end of the tunnel is not really avoidable.
Allowing the buildings to explode and damage the systems used to keep the buildings from exploding more is a pretty major fuckup in the realm of reliability engineering.
Its also a management failure. Everyone knows once zirconium heats up around water you get H2. But no one wants to be the management guy who pulls the trigger and says trash the roof with a wrecking ball or whatever. So, everyone just sit around until it blows up, that way it'll be an act of god instead of management deciding to crack the building.
Not that it would help (much).
what pclminion said. also: "this graphing can be scripted and scheduled."
The best part is not just tail ending "a graph" at the end of a script, but automating thousands of graphs at various resolutions, high, medium, and thumbnail, and then creating the index page that clicks thru. And send emails of "noteworthy" graphs to certain personnel. Add and remove graphs as they appear in the data set, all automatically. I would imagine my little couple minute script would take months to do manually in Excel, one graph at a time.. But my script runs daily...
Excel is, unfortunately, our corporate standard database management system, not a usable graphing solution.
How much are they paying you guys to keep putting these Packt reviews up?
I donno, he advocates for python when everyone else would use perl, and I'm sure the python guys are not paying for that...