It's also amazing that some people seem to think that technology automatically rules out safety.
What's dubious is what exactly caused this incident to happen. The most plausible explanation proposed in this thread was a mechanical fault with a gas lever getting physically stuck. Assuming that, the number of failures in the software or electronics of the system has dropped to zero. The second plausible explanation proposed was that the guy just wanted a fun ride and faked the fault.
I can appreciate your experiences as a rescue worker, but are you really saying that airbags should never have been invented because they pose a danger after an accident has occurred? What about ABS brakes? That 50 year old lady who has driven 30 years without incidents and then one slippery evening in fall she sees a deer only a few yards ahead. She hits the brakes in panic and turns the wheel to steer clear of the unfortunate creature. If her car has ABS, she'll stand a good chance of avoiding the animal. If not, she'll never even have a chance as she won't have time to remember to pump the brake pedal like she may have been taught some long time ago.
Now you'll be quick to point out that that's not the way it should be since she should know how to drive the car she has, but realistically speaking, how many people could actually follow the correct method of braking in a situation like that? You? Me? Tommi Mäkinen? Perhaps, but at least as many couldn't. Your problem with statistics is that you only use yourself as the sample.
I claim that ABS brakes have saved numerous lives and caused the loss of none to small fraction of those saved. I do not have statistics to back it up, but that's only because I didn't bother to look for any and you'd just discredit them anyway because after all, they are statistics and statistics never provide any useful information.
They do, when used correctly. Of course you can lie with "statistics" all you want by comparing weapons that haven't been used since WW2 to the leading cause of road fatalities or by similarly claiming that a Lada is faster than a Ferrari through scientific testing (well, we didn't have keys to the Ferrari). The fallacy lies in the assumption that if you can just provide one example of bad statistics, then all statistics must be bad.
In the end, it is my belief that technology has brought many more positive things to automobile safety than it has caused issues. Not counting the automobiles themselves of course.
I'll finish by giving you a tip for your counter argument:
The techonology in question here, cruise control, wasn't developed with safety in mind, it was developed for the sole convenience of the driver. You can go from there and point out how all the entertainment technology in cars hasn't saved any lives but has distracted enough drivers to rack up the body count severely.
"Its amazing how people seem to thing that technology == safety."
It's interesting to hear comments like that, especially when sparked by a single instance of failure which, I should add, happened under very dubious circumstances.
Perhaps you'd like to return to the times when there were no electronics in cars? Oops, there go your ABS brakes, ESP, Airbags, systems monitoring and a great big bunch of other safety-enhancing systems.
Granted, it can be argued that more technology makes people more reckless because they think their cars will protect them, but I dare to claim that when you count the lives/limbs saved by technology in cars and then subtract deaths/injuries caused by electronics faults in cars, you'll end up with a very big positive integer.
Split them. Data to a RAID array and the media to boxes in the garage/basement/wherever.
Seriously, I know some people appreciate the CD covers and such, but if the media industry suits weren't such retards (in the literal sense: unwilling to move forward) and actually innovated on the possibilities of new technology instead of trying to fight it, we could already have a good standard and great commercial implementations for the entertainment system of the future.
What I'm talking about is a system where you can buy music, movies and books either directly as downloads or on physical disks which would be automatically ripped to a terabyte array and shared throughout the house. You could watch any movie on any TV/projector, you could stream any music to any sound systems in the house, including the kids' boomboxes, and you could read any book you wanted on any of your cheap 50 gram e-ink e-book readers, wirelessly.
Considering how much your average mid-to-high income Joe Anybody is willing to spend on a flat-screen or a HiFi set, the cost could be well in the affordable range if only SOMEBODY wasn't so bent up on making sure no-one ever copies bits off their shiny plastic discs.
I only meant to reply with the first line. I apologise. (Damn you RIAA for making me rant!)
Yep. That's no way to get ahead in life. It really is a shame they weren't more headstrong. After all this, none of them will probably ever be a head of a major corporation....
Okay, that'll do.
Re:Horrid Requirements
on
Portable Storage?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Look, Ask Slashdot is meant as a forum where one person can raise an interesting question that gets a variety of answers in the form of different opinions from different people who have expertise in different areas. This benefits the entire slashdot community by offering a good range of solutions for everybody's needs.
Had the original asker asked a very specific question about portable storage just for his needs, he probably would have gotten a bunch of answers suggesting one and the same thing and no-one else would have got anything out of the entire discussion. Now we have the opportunity to discuss different portable storage solutions where each and every slashdotter can find a solution that fits his/her needs instead of just the needs of the person who asked the original question.
Athlon 64 3400+ or equivalent processor 512 MB of RAM Radeon X800 or equivalent video card
Seriously though, if the game works on a P90, then one could expect even the poorest of poor to afford a computer to run it since even much faster machines are practically given away everywhere all the time.
Nah. The drives spin up as soon as they get power, which they will all get at the same time, when the 12V line goes up. The delay you speak of can be adjusted to give old drives enough time to spin up and then initialize before the BIOS declares them dead. It does not define when the drive will start its motor.
That's true, and when using two batteries at the same time, you often get a longer battery life than if you used those two batteries one at a time, swapping after one dies.
I still have a Dell CPt-S that once gave me six hours of battery life on two batteries, watching divx movies and browsing the web over WLAN. Replacing one of the batteries with a DVD-drive resulted in the remaining (fully charged) battery to heat up quite a bit during playback and crap out after about 90 minutes.
Of course, spinning the DVD drive does consume remarkably more power too, but if that load was spread out evenly over two batteries, it would have lasted quite a bit longer than 2*90 minutes due to lower (and therefore more efficient) current draw per battery.
There are so many wrongs in this world already that it's inevitable some of them end up against each other every once in a while.
It's like in DooM where some of the zombiedudes end up shooting at and killing each other, but in the end it's still you who has to wipe out the rest of the evil.
It's too bad that we seem to be playing this world on the Nightmare skill level and having all those evils respawning faster than we can waste them.
I actually did the same thing with a laptop that had a Nokia C020 WLAN card in it. The card didn't become "embedded", the antenna part extending outside the laptop case was just tilted about 50 degrees up from its original horizontal position. It still works fine and looks fun in my (also functioning) laptop's pcmcia-slot. Besides, I can now keep it in the top slot and still fit a fat-ended card (such as the Nokia C110) in the bottom slot. =)
and it worked fine, but safe mode does not appear to work (you are supposed to be able to kill files in the game, but not actually on your hard drive.) maybe i should send them an email.
Right after you get your e-mail client reinstalled?
Granted, the whole 'e' thing is getting old. I still think that its use is warranted here since afterall, it reads e-books.
I also agree that it's not very creative, but think it's a good thing. I've just about had it with some of these overly creative names for products/companies that don't describe them in any way. LIBRIe says that it's book and it's 'e'. 'nuff said.
(No reply needed. It's a matter of opinion and I do see and respect your viewpoint.)
Libri is latin and means a book. Frankly, I think LIBRIe is a great name that actually appeals to bookworms unlike for instance the name Rocketbook which appeals to.. well.. nobody. More importantly, LIBRIe appeals to bookworms *around the globe* since in almost every literate country the word libri is instantly associated with literature, whether they are taught latin in schools or not. Those who read nothing but their tv-guides won't make this association so easily, but then again, they are not in the target audience anyway.
Get yourself a bluetooth headset and you'll realize the usefulness of voice-dialing. I barely even dig up my phone from the pocket to dial anymore since it's so easy to just key the headset, speak the name and talk.
THAT being said, I don't think I'd be too interested to talk to my browser. Why would I say "back" or "close window" when I can just flick my wrist and be done with the action (don't bother joking, too easy) before I can even open my mouth.
On the OTHER hand (the third hand?)... If I could say "Yo Opera! Open slashdot, somethingawful, userfriendly and dilbert archive, tile the comics nicely, scroll me through the juiciest stories on slashdot and brew me a fricken' cup of tea!" it might be worth it. Then again, if that was possible, instead of speaking all that out loud every morning, I'd just make it into a script or macro and assign a mouse gesture to it.
Bah.
(insert random phrase indicating an alternate point of view here) this could make us geeks surpass the current level of public humiliation. Yes, instead of typing in URLs with a dinky cell phone keyboard, we could talk to our Opera-equipped smartphones in the public.
Lovely!
Someone please whack me in the head or I'll never stop rambling...
This is a bit off topic, but since we're on the topic of DVD-audio, I might raise this issue.
If I understood this story correctly, AAC was chosen as the lossy method for storing portable versions of the music on a DVD-A disc.
The actual multichannel, high-fidelity audio on DVD-audio is stored either uncompressed, or losslessly compressed with Meridian Lossless Packing, MLP.
So far the only DVD-Audio playback solution for PC I have seen is WinDVD (ech) combined with Creative Audigy2 (yuch). Some sources say it's some exclusive marketing thingy, others say that the Audigy2 has hardware decompression for MLP or something.
I have an Envy24HT based sound card which is capable of playing back the 24bit/192kHz/2ch and 24bit/96kHz/5(.1)ch hi-fi audio streams specified in the DVD-Audio specification. It's just that I'm not aware of any software that would let me play back such disks on my PC in any operating system.
Does anyone have any interesting information regarding the state of software MLP decoding? Perhaps a good idea for an open source project, no?
Then again, I have yet to see an actual DVD-Audio disc...
So you mean that the system would capture my vocal signals and transmit them to a similar device in someone else's throat and then that person would spontaneously blurt out whatever I quietly mumbled? Yeah, that would be cool!;)
Re:Forget them
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Better arrogant than stupid, you idiot ame^H^H^H^H earthling!
Just because the 9500 includes WiFi support doesn't mean it can route calls through it.
You probably didn't mean it that way either, but I figured I'd mention it in case somebody thinks you did.
I think with the 12 drives in raid5 he meant 10x400GB for 4 TB effective storage, 1x400GB for parity and as he mentioned, one extra drive for hot-swap in case one of the disks dies.
His only mistake was accidentally typing GB instead of TB.
Don't be so sure. It's obviously big enough to contain an actual human being who drives the thing around all day.
Oh, by the way, this thing is already equipped for movies: If, in a movie, it just "happened" to go rampant and start killing people and taking negligible damage from the gunships and tanks that attack it, the day can only be saved by our smart and brave hero (preferably a 15-year girl in school uniform) who finds the Big Red Button (3.5 MB) behind its neck. (also faintly visible in the small photo linked in parent post)
Slashdot Mirror
It's also amazing that some people seem to think that technology automatically rules out safety.
What's dubious is what exactly caused this incident to happen. The most plausible explanation proposed in this thread was a mechanical fault with a gas lever getting physically stuck. Assuming that, the number of failures in the software or electronics of the system has dropped to zero.
The second plausible explanation proposed was that the guy just wanted a fun ride and faked the fault.
I can appreciate your experiences as a rescue worker, but are you really saying that airbags should never have been invented because they pose a danger after an accident has occurred? What about ABS brakes? That 50 year old lady who has driven 30 years without incidents and then one slippery evening in fall she sees a deer only a few yards ahead. She hits the brakes in panic and turns the wheel to steer clear of the unfortunate creature. If her car has ABS, she'll stand a good chance of avoiding the animal. If not, she'll never even have a chance as she won't have time to remember to pump the brake pedal like she may have been taught some long time ago.
Now you'll be quick to point out that that's not the way it should be since she should know how to drive the car she has, but realistically speaking, how many people could actually follow the correct method of braking in a situation like that? You? Me? Tommi Mäkinen? Perhaps, but at least as many couldn't. Your problem with statistics is that you only use yourself as the sample.
I claim that ABS brakes have saved numerous lives and caused the loss of none to small fraction of those saved. I do not have statistics to back it up, but that's only because I didn't bother to look for any and you'd just discredit them anyway because after all, they are statistics and statistics never provide any useful information.
They do, when used correctly. Of course you can lie with "statistics" all you want by comparing weapons that haven't been used since WW2 to the leading cause of road fatalities or by similarly claiming that a Lada is faster than a Ferrari through scientific testing (well, we didn't have keys to the Ferrari). The fallacy lies in the assumption that if you can just provide one example of bad statistics, then all statistics must be bad.
In the end, it is my belief that technology has brought many more positive things to automobile safety than it has caused issues. Not counting the automobiles themselves of course.
I'll finish by giving you a tip for your counter argument:
The techonology in question here, cruise control, wasn't developed with safety in mind, it was developed for the sole convenience of the driver. You can go from there and point out how all the entertainment technology in cars hasn't saved any lives but has distracted enough drivers to rack up the body count severely.
"Its amazing how people seem to thing that technology == safety."
It's interesting to hear comments like that, especially when sparked by a single instance of failure which, I should add, happened under very dubious circumstances.
Perhaps you'd like to return to the times when there were no electronics in cars? Oops, there go your ABS brakes, ESP, Airbags, systems monitoring and a great big bunch of other safety-enhancing systems.
Granted, it can be argued that more technology makes people more reckless because they think their cars will protect them, but I dare to claim that when you count the lives/limbs saved by technology in cars and then subtract deaths/injuries caused by electronics faults in cars, you'll end up with a very big positive integer.
Split them. Data to a RAID array and the media to boxes in the garage/basement/wherever.
Seriously, I know some people appreciate the CD covers and such, but if the media industry suits weren't such retards (in the literal sense: unwilling to move forward) and actually innovated on the possibilities of new technology instead of trying to fight it, we could already have a good standard and great commercial implementations for the entertainment system of the future.
What I'm talking about is a system where you can buy music, movies and books either directly as downloads or on physical disks which would be automatically ripped to a terabyte array and shared throughout the house. You could watch any movie on any TV/projector, you could stream any music to any sound systems in the house, including the kids' boomboxes, and you could read any book you wanted on any of your cheap 50 gram e-ink e-book readers, wirelessly.
Considering how much your average mid-to-high income Joe Anybody is willing to spend on a flat-screen or a HiFi set, the cost could be well in the affordable range if only SOMEBODY wasn't so bent up on making sure no-one ever copies bits off their shiny plastic discs.
I only meant to reply with the first line. I apologise. (Damn you RIAA for making me rant!)
Mailinator vs. Governator
Lawsuits are the swords of the modern day.
Yep. That's no way to get ahead in life. ...
It really is a shame they weren't more headstrong.
After all this, none of them will probably ever be a head of a major corporation.
Okay, that'll do.
Look, Ask Slashdot is meant as a forum where one person can raise an interesting question that gets a variety of answers in the form of different opinions from different people who have expertise in different areas. This benefits the entire slashdot community by offering a good range of solutions for everybody's needs.
Had the original asker asked a very specific question about portable storage just for his needs, he probably would have gotten a bunch of answers suggesting one and the same thing and no-one else would have got anything out of the entire discussion. Now we have the opportunity to discuss different portable storage solutions where each and every slashdotter can find a solution that fits his/her needs instead of just the needs of the person who asked the original question.
That's what Ask Slashdot is about.
Minimum System requirements:
Athlon 64 3400+ or equivalent processor
512 MB of RAM
Radeon X800 or equivalent video card
Seriously though, if the game works on a P90, then one could expect even the poorest of poor to afford a computer to run it since even much faster machines are practically given away everywhere all the time.
Nah. The drives spin up as soon as they get power, which they will all get at the same time, when the 12V line goes up.
The delay you speak of can be adjusted to give old drives enough time to spin up and then initialize before the BIOS declares them dead. It does not define when the drive will start its motor.
That's true, and when using two batteries at the same time, you often get a longer battery life than if you used those two batteries one at a time, swapping after one dies.
I still have a Dell CPt-S that once gave me six hours of battery life on two batteries, watching divx movies and browsing the web over WLAN. Replacing one of the batteries with a DVD-drive resulted in the remaining (fully charged) battery to heat up quite a bit during playback and crap out after about 90 minutes.
Of course, spinning the DVD drive does consume remarkably more power too, but if that load was spread out evenly over two batteries, it would have lasted quite a bit longer than 2*90 minutes due to lower (and therefore more efficient) current draw per battery.
There are so many wrongs in this world already that it's inevitable some of them end up against each other every once in a while.
It's like in DooM where some of the zombiedudes end up shooting at and killing each other, but in the end it's still you who has to wipe out the rest of the evil.
It's too bad that we seem to be playing this world on the Nightmare skill level and having all those evils respawning faster than we can waste them.
I actually did the same thing with a laptop that had a Nokia C020 WLAN card in it. The card didn't become "embedded", the antenna part extending outside the laptop case was just tilted about 50 degrees up from its original horizontal position. It still works fine and looks fun in my (also functioning) laptop's pcmcia-slot. Besides, I can now keep it in the top slot and still fit a fat-ended card (such as the Nokia C110) in the bottom slot. =)
Oh come on now, you don't need dual athlons and Radeon X800 for a media PC. Those are excellent specs for a divx/dvd/mp3 decoding machine.
Sheesh... It's not like you're going to play the latest and greatest 3d games on it or anything!
Oh, wait...
and it worked fine, but safe mode does not appear to work (you are supposed to be able to kill files in the game, but not actually on your hard drive.) maybe i should send them an email.
Right after you get your e-mail client reinstalled?
now what am I supposed to do with 10 gallons of tar and a sack of feathers?
Visit Lindon, Utah.
Granted, the whole 'e' thing is getting old. I still think that its use is warranted here since afterall, it reads e-books.
I also agree that it's not very creative, but think it's a good thing. I've just about had it with some of these overly creative names for products/companies that don't describe them in any way. LIBRIe says that it's book and it's 'e'. 'nuff said.
(No reply needed. It's a matter of opinion and I do see and respect your viewpoint.)
Hello! You must be American!
Libri is latin and means a book. Frankly, I think LIBRIe is a great name that actually appeals to bookworms unlike for instance the name Rocketbook which appeals to.. well.. nobody. More importantly, LIBRIe appeals to bookworms *around the globe* since in almost every literate country the word libri is instantly associated with literature, whether they are taught latin in schools or not. Those who read nothing but their tv-guides won't make this association so easily, but then again, they are not in the target audience anyway.
I like LIBRIe and I don't think I'm alone.
Get yourself a bluetooth headset and you'll realize the usefulness of voice-dialing. I barely even dig up my phone from the pocket to dial anymore since it's so easy to just key the headset, speak the name and talk.
THAT being said, I don't think I'd be too interested to talk to my browser. Why would I say "back" or "close window" when I can just flick my wrist and be done with the action (don't bother joking, too easy) before I can even open my mouth.
On the OTHER hand (the third hand?)... If I could say "Yo Opera! Open slashdot, somethingawful, userfriendly and dilbert archive, tile the comics nicely, scroll me through the juiciest stories on slashdot and brew me a fricken' cup of tea!" it might be worth it. Then again, if that was possible, instead of speaking all that out loud every morning, I'd just make it into a script or macro and assign a mouse gesture to it.
Bah.
(insert random phrase indicating an alternate point of view here) this could make us geeks surpass the current level of public humiliation. Yes, instead of typing in URLs with a dinky cell phone keyboard, we could talk to our Opera-equipped smartphones in the public.
Lovely!
Someone please whack me in the head or I'll never stop rambling...
This is a bit off topic, but since we're on the topic of DVD-audio, I might raise this issue.
If I understood this story correctly, AAC was chosen as the lossy method for storing portable versions of the music on a DVD-A disc.
The actual multichannel, high-fidelity audio on DVD-audio is stored either uncompressed, or losslessly compressed with Meridian Lossless Packing, MLP.
So far the only DVD-Audio playback solution for PC I have seen is WinDVD (ech) combined with Creative Audigy2 (yuch). Some sources say it's some exclusive marketing thingy, others say that the Audigy2 has hardware decompression for MLP or something.
I have an Envy24HT based sound card which is capable of playing back the 24bit/192kHz/2ch and 24bit/96kHz/5(.1)ch hi-fi audio streams specified in the DVD-Audio specification. It's just that I'm not aware of any software that would let me play back such disks on my PC in any operating system.
Does anyone have any interesting information regarding the state of software MLP decoding? Perhaps a good idea for an open source project, no?
Then again, I have yet to see an actual DVD-Audio disc...
So you mean that the system would capture my vocal signals and transmit them to a similar device in someone else's throat and then that person would spontaneously blurt out whatever I quietly mumbled? ;)
Yeah, that would be cool!
Better arrogant than stupid, you idiot ame^H^H^H^H earthling!
Just because the 9500 includes WiFi support doesn't mean it can route calls through it.
You probably didn't mean it that way either, but I figured I'd mention it in case somebody thinks you did.
I think with the 12 drives in raid5 he meant 10x400GB for 4 TB effective storage, 1x400GB for parity and as he mentioned, one extra drive for hot-swap in case one of the disks dies.
His only mistake was accidentally typing GB instead of TB.
And since we're on the topic of storage, one of those peripherals could certainly be this.
Don't be so sure. It's obviously big enough to contain an actual human being who drives the thing around all day.
Oh, by the way, this thing is already equipped for movies: If, in a movie, it just "happened" to go rampant and start killing people and taking negligible damage from the gunships and tanks that attack it, the day can only be saved by our smart and brave hero (preferably a 15-year girl in school uniform) who finds the Big Red Button (3.5 MB) behind its neck. (also faintly visible in the small photo linked in parent post)