There seems to be a common assumption, even here on Slashdot, that your money is somehow safer if you don't entrust it to a third party (such as a bill payment service). A few months ago, I was talking about check fraud with someone who doesn't do any online banking at all. I asked him if he writes checks, and he said "Only to the electric company!"
I don't know about you guys, but I haven't audited my electric company's processes lately. Anybody here know the name of the person at NStar/ConEd/etc that opens the mail? Anybody sure if the mail is even opened by an employee, or if it's contracted out to a vendor of theirs? Do they even do the data entry locally, or do they throw it in a scanner and have the data entry done offshore, like radiology labs do?
I don't see any reason to think that writing a physical check to the electric company is any less secure than doing it online, where I have a reasonable assumption that at least it's not going to go through human hands for payment processing. (Unless, of course, that online payment becomes a laser check, which then is subject to all the same vulnerabilities.)
Summary: I think you generally have no way of knowing if your payment method is secure or not. I just assume it probably is, and that I have legal recourse if I'm wrong.
This sounds interesting, but after reading the FAQ, I'm confused.
I can pay most of my bills via either push (from the bank), if they're a consistent amount, or pull (from the vendor) if they're not. The trouble is that some bills change every month, but the vendor doesn't have an EFT option.
It sounds like Paytrust is designed to handle that - by receiving my bills for me - but that I still have to affirmatively pay each bill. Is the idea just that a few clicks is easier than opening letters? Which, admittedly, it is. But I'd really like to say "Pay the water bill automatically as long as it doesn't exceed $X". Can Paytrust, or anyone else, do that?
Good.. I thought it was just me. And I'm definitely NOT a hardware guy. But I can't see, from his description of the PCN, how switching from high-lead to tin solder could be seen as a response to, well, anything except "let's use less lead".
I know that 63/37 has a lower melting point than 60/40, and a "sharper" one (no pasty phase), which is why I use it for audio repairs and cabling; I'm a klutz, and anything that makes my solder joints more stable is good. But I can't imagine that this matters as much on SMT, where your components are fixed in place.
That said... a quick Google shows that there are all sorts of considerations in what solder to use for PCB solder bumps: not just temperature, but the metals involved in the leads, and the PCB traces, and a bunch of other stuff that involves knowing more about electronics and metallurgy than my "the batteries go this way" brain can handle. So there may well be some stability advantages to eutectic solder for NVidia's solder bumps.
Anyone here actually know this stuff? I've got an 8800GT in my Mac Pro, which definitely runs hotter than your average PC...
So which do you think is the deciding difference today - better compression algorithms, or faster CPUs? I've been amazed to realize how much of my "conventional wisdom" was based on the assumption that "lots of CPU is slower than lots of disk". I grew up believing that compressed data would always be slower than, but smaller than, raw data; it was a tradeoff of space vs. time. RAMDoubler let you run larger programs, but at a huge performance hit - usually, IIRC, worse than just using virtual memory and letting it swap.
But nowadays, databases that use compression are significantly faster than those that don't, because the time it takes to decompress is LESS than the time it would take to read the raw data. It's gone from a tradeoff to a win-win.
I was under the impression that memory bandwidth was nowhere near that tipping point, but if it is, well, cool.
So for the rest of you its only Yellow, but if your flying, its Orange!
Well, duh. The sky is blue, and when you're flying, you're closer to the sky. yellow + blue = orange.
[For you armchair optical physicists: I'm talking about color mixing at high altitude. Your classroom yellow + blue = brown doesn't work up there, because of sunspots.]
Aw, man, now you made me feel bad for being snarky!
In short: A good review should focus on what makes the "item under review" different from some other item that I might buy instead. Yes, it's sometimes good to give a slight introduction to the topic, in case the reader is a novice in the field, and you have some expertise. But that's not the main goal; the goal is to let me answer the question, "Why buy this book, and not that other book?" I already know what a book looks like; Every piece of information in the review should be something relevant, distinguishing and useful for decision-making. Every sentence should be able to withstand a "So what?" test.
If you'd asked me to copy-edit the review, I'd give you these notes:
* The opening paragraph gives me some context for what CSS is; great. Then it talks about the "Ultimate" title, and spends a few sentences on that. Do you really think they meant it literally? More important, does it matter to me if it's the ultimate book, or merely a good book? Still, if you want to question the title, you'd better make sure you have the answer. I'd rather see a few words that tell me what type of CSS book it is, or whether it was good overall, or what. These seem like news teasers: "Will the earth end tomorrow? Stay tuned to find out."
* Next paragraph: table of contents. Why is it necessary (the paragraph, not the table)? Are there CSS reference books without one? Do I care how many pages it is?
* General rule: Show, don't tell. In a review, that means skip the sentences like "I'd like to discuss those first, from front to back." We know you'd like to discuss them; you're writing a review. We know you want to discuss them first, because this is the first paragraph. We can assume you're either discussing them from front to back, or in an order that we don't care about. If you were saying "I'd like to discuss these in reverse alphabetical order, and here's why, then the sentence adds something; it explains why you're going to do the unexpected. Otherwise, it feels like filler.
I do it all the time. In fact, the previous sentence started out as "Otherwise, it feels like filler; it's the written equivalent of 'umm... so...' while you think of the next sentence." Then I went back and read it, and realized the whole phrase was simply repeating "it feels like filler". It's all about editing. Remember the "FRESH FISH FOR SALE TODAY" story.
* Next paragraph: tells me a bit how the book is laid out. I suppose it could be handy to know that, but I can't particularly think of why. (I also skip the apparently-mandatory introductory section of these books, where they tell you what each chapter will contain, like a second table of contents, in paragraph form. I've never figured out who it is that says, "I wish I could have the table of contents read to me like a story.") If you think it is useful somehow, then figure out who wants to know that information before buying the book, and what they want to know it for. The last sentence, about prose vs. background color and highlighting, seems superfluous either way.
* Reference chapter layout: Graphic design, by definition, doesn't translate well to prose. You're giving a prose description of a graphic layout, and despite re-reading it, I still can't picture what the page looks like. If I could, I wouldn't be sure why I cared. What I really want to know is: Is the layout helpful? Annoying? Is it any better than other CSS books? Does it use some clever techniques to make the information easier to find? Otherwise, why do I want to know before I buy?
Likewise, the compatibility information is useful, but you don't have to be as complete as you were. (And I can't understand the difference between "There is also a list of browser support for the item in IE6+, FF1+, Saf 1.3+ and Op9.2+" and "The second grid shows compatibility for"... I think you'd be better-served by saying "For each property, the book gives an example and a chart of compatible bro
Maybe it started with the whole idea of "unboxing photos"; I'm not sure. But an awful lot of reviews seem to fall in the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" bucket: True, but not useful.
This book is published on milled wood fibers, commonly called "paper"; it's a pleasant shade of cream, perhaps a bit brighter than ivory, yet darker than a Rubbermaid white spatula used for comparison. The pages are rectangular, measuring 7.23" x 5.05", with a sharp edge reminiscent of a good Martin-Yale trimmer. (For reference, I have published a picture of an average rectangle below.) The book was published on a 1200dpi offset press, with the plates generated directly from digital content.
Graphically, the book is similar to those we've become used to in the past few centuries. An incremental integer graces the bottom outside corner of every page, allowing one to turn directly to a specific page, if one is able to remember, or otherwise determine, the page number. A so-called "Table of Contents" (or TOC as it's known in the industry) allows you to jump directly to the beginning of a chapter, in conjunctioned with the aforementioned "page number" feature. Additionally, the name of each chapter is printed in italicized lettering opposite each page number, which allows you to remember what chapter you're reading, if you should happen to forget.
So, if it seals the device, how does it know what openings have to be there?
I don't think this is what they're proposing, but you could plug "dummy plugs" into all the openings, then apply the coating, cut around the base of the plugs, and remove them. You'd have a little bit of leakage where you cut (you've peeled a little bit away), but you'd be more waterproof than before.
There's an interesting world of spray-on and even roll-on coatings out there, especially if you have access to a paint booth or a strong sprayer system. When you buy electronics that are covered with peel-off blue plastic, guess what? That's a coating. Ditto for new glass windows, cars, etc.
I once had cats that couldn't deal with plastic litterbox liners, but I was tired of scrubbing the litterbox clean. So I got some Stripaway 5140 coating from General Chem, and I'd roll it onto the litter box. Once every few weeks, I'd peel off the coating, mess and all, toss it in the trash, and apply a new coat. It wasn't a perfect system, and (between multiple coats, and drying with fans, and taping off the litterbox's locking tabs) was probably more work than just sitting down and cleaning it - but it sure felt all industrial-like.
Ditto for water-resistant jackets, tents, etc. As a Boy Scout I learned that you should never touch the inside of a tent when it's raining; that changes the surface tension of the water (or some such thing) and the rain will start leaking in where you touched it. I've seen the same thing on modern Patagonia jackets, especially as the coatings wear off.
That makes perfect sense. And I suspect it also helps explain the lack of damage to the equipment that was on balanced power; I bet the Equitech balances hot against ground, and doesn't touch neutral at all. Or something like that. (I'm a software guy.) Thanks!
Is there any way to protect against common-mode spikes? Do some other surge protectors offer that?
Oh, that's the part I forgot - we did test the ground quality, and it wasn't transmitter-quality, but it was better-than-average for a residence - IIRC, we'd buried some deep copper rods for it, since the recording studio would need a solid ground. (I wish I could remember the actual numbers.) So that wasn't it either...
I'm not convinced that whole-house protection helps much either. A few years ago, there was some event during a thunderstorm - we never quite figured out what - that fried two TiVo modems, a garage door opener (the circuit board was visibly burned and light bulb shattered), a few Wirsbo hot-water thermostats (not even connected to the mains power, just low-voltage from the boiler), a few Vantage whole-house dimmer modules, an intercom, and a printer.
The house was, at the time, "protected" with two Cutler-Hammer CHSP suppressors (MOV). After the incident, their "protection working fine" LED was still lit! The only room with no damage was my recording studio, which had Equitech balanced-power panels; the ginormous-hunk-of-iron transformer probably saved me there. The power company had no reports of direct lightning strikes, other than one hit that took out a transformer (and since my power didn't go out, I apparently wasn't on that circuit).
I recall doing some reading about lightning arrestors, ground grids, and such, and eventually came to the conclusion that it (a) surge suppressors are fairly useless, because they don't always present the quickest path to ground, and (b) it would be 10x cheaper to let stuff die and replace it than to set up a proper lightning protection system.
Just to add more unsourced "I seem to remember" goodness...
I seem to remember reading an article in the 1980s - right around the time caller ID was introduced - that explained how the phone companies would rotate the standard 96V ring signal - 2 seconds on, 4 seconds off - among three groups of phone lines (vaguely akin to three-phase power), so that in any given two-second period, only one-third of the "ringing" phones were physically ringing. This reduces their power requirements.
Presumably the ringback tone doesn't have those strenuous high-voltage requirements. We had multiple phone lines in our house - a rarity, in those days - and I don't think it ever *was* in sync. So I think it's not that they intentionally made the ringback out of sync; they just never bothered to do anything that would put it IN sync.
I was about to theorize that ringback was generated by your outcalling switch, and not the incalling switch that generated ring voltage, but I remember that different local exchanges used to have different ringback tones, so that kills that theory.
Actually, Yahoo did innovate still: they introduced Yahoo Groups
IIRC, most of the eyeballs came from eGroups, which they bought and merged into Yahoo Groups. (and eGroups itself was a merger of eGroups and OneList.)
When Yahoo! took over, the groups gradually became less useful; the worst was interstitial ads, which would show up every once in a while when you clicked on a message. Given that the search function could only search N messages at a time, this made groups fairly useless. You'd try to search for a phrase, see "0 matches in messages 13000-14000", click "Next" to try to continue the search in 12000-13000, and get an ad instead. Luckily, around the same time, Google Groups was launched, and anyone who wanted a usable mailing list moved there.
Yahoo Answers
Often amusing, but I can't say I've ever seen an insightful answer there. Asking Yahoo Answers is like asking a group of teenagers at the park.
Flicker
Again: Bought, not innovated.
I think Yahoo's biggest innovation was their shopping system. Long before amazon.com expanded to be a generic shopping cart, you could search Yahoo, easily find the product you wanted, and use your stored shipping/billing info to buy it with a few clicks. Sadly, after a few years, they screwed up search, drove merchants away with fees, and quickly became useless.
Copper prices are now high enough that it's worth trying to steal. Here in Boston, at least once a month there's a story about someone killed trying to steal copper from power lines that turn out to be, y'know, active.
Construction sites now have to be locked up tightly. It's not just the tools that get stolen; it's the pipes and the wire spools.
I assume this will get worse as copper gets scarcer and, thus, more expensive.
The OP mentions plumbing, but I'm not sure that plastic is a viable alternative yet. I've built a few houses, and always used copper, at least for the main plumbing. I remember in the 1990s, the industry tried using PVC, but had problems of some kind, and went back to copper. Today, you can use PEX or Hep2O flexible tubing for heating, but I don't know if it's approved for drinking yet - and we probably don't know its long term stability. Copper is still the gold standard (sorry!) for plumbing.
(Side rant: When copper pipes freeze, you can use an arc welder to heat them back up. You can't do that with PEX, since it's plastic, not metal. So if it gets too cold, your heat stops working... which means the air can't warm up enough to melt the ice... shampoo, rinse, repeat. Make sure your PEX is in a well-insulated wall.)
If your wrists aren't parallel to the keyboard and completely relaxed, you most likely don't.
And what's the only way for your wrists to be parallel to the keys and completely relaxed? For the keys to slope on each side. Like an ergonomic keyboard. Like the GP said.
while those who play piano, cello, guitar, violin or anything else that requires accuracy, dexterity and speed for 12 hours a day have no complaints, suffer no epidemic of carpal tunnel injuries, nor show interest in theories of how deviating from established technique would improve things.
As an erstwhile Berklee student, I can tell you that you're absolutely incorrect. Repetitive strain injuries are one of the most common reasons that students have to drop out; it's rare to take a five-minute walk without seeing a wrist splint. One of the most important techniques to learn, for any instrument, is how to use (and carry!) that instrument most efficiently, with the least effort and strain.
the height of desktops is mostly to blame
The height of desktops is pretty much standardized around 29-30". You're not supposed to put a keyboard on the desktop. You put a keyboard tray under the desktop.
Laptops, of course, screw all that up, and I'm sure the popularity of MacBooks is sending a whole bunch of ergonomic designers into fits.
I got WarpSpeed for my T|X and the screen whine went away. If it's a universal hardware problem, how is there a software fix for it?
OK, now I'm way out of my area of knowledge, but: I'd guess it's something like "the standard clock speed makes component #57 resonate", and increasing the clock speed moves the frequency out of the range that makes that piece resonate. Or something.
I know that when I briefly had a first-generation MacBook Pro, with its signature high-pitched squeal, there was some software that changed some internal parameter, and made the squeal less prominent. Interestingly, increasing that parameter made the squeal lower in pitch. You could never get it to go away, but you could move it to a less-annoying pitch.
Not knowing how your tinnitus acts, maybe WarpSpeed moved the squeal to a frequency that doesn't irritate it as much.
I think all flat-screen backlights squeal - well, at least the non-LED ones. I am not a hardware guy, by any means, but I think the backlights are the rough equivalent of fluorescent lights, and the squeal is the rough equivalent of the ballast.
I had this problem with an LCD monitor for a recording studio. Luckily, the vendor (Wide USA) was marketing that display for medical uses, so they were eager to exchange it for me, no charge. If it were a consumer monitor, I'm sure I'd have been SOL. They don't make the glass themselves, so they may not have much control over the noise factor, other than by pushing back to their vendor. I got the impression that it's a common lot-to-lot variation, just as some transformers will hum on noisy power and some won't.
Come to think of it, every backlit digital watch I've had squealed too - at least since the introduction of Indiglo-style backlights. I think the older ones didn't.
Decisive? Yes I am. I have to be in my job and in daily life.
I guess we're just different. I mean, I'm not indecisive, but... well, sorta. Maybe not indecisive, exactly, more like.. well, yes, indecisive. Usually. Not always.
I'm very sure I can't accept it. Having studied various martial arts for the past 30 years, I can tell you with certainty that I can engage in action the instant I decide
I, too, am manly and decisive, with lightning-fast reflexes.
Slashdot Mirror
There seems to be a common assumption, even here on Slashdot, that your money is somehow safer if you don't entrust it to a third party (such as a bill payment service). A few months ago, I was talking about check fraud with someone who doesn't do any online banking at all. I asked him if he writes checks, and he said "Only to the electric company!"
I don't know about you guys, but I haven't audited my electric company's processes lately. Anybody here know the name of the person at NStar/ConEd/etc that opens the mail? Anybody sure if the mail is even opened by an employee, or if it's contracted out to a vendor of theirs? Do they even do the data entry locally, or do they throw it in a scanner and have the data entry done offshore, like radiology labs do?
I don't see any reason to think that writing a physical check to the electric company is any less secure than doing it online, where I have a reasonable assumption that at least it's not going to go through human hands for payment processing. (Unless, of course, that online payment becomes a laser check, which then is subject to all the same vulnerabilities.)
Summary: I think you generally have no way of knowing if your payment method is secure or not. I just assume it probably is, and that I have legal recourse if I'm wrong.
This sounds interesting, but after reading the FAQ, I'm confused.
I can pay most of my bills via either push (from the bank), if they're a consistent amount, or pull (from the vendor) if they're not. The trouble is that some bills change every month, but the vendor doesn't have an EFT option.
It sounds like Paytrust is designed to handle that - by receiving my bills for me - but that I still have to affirmatively pay each bill. Is the idea just that a few clicks is easier than opening letters? Which, admittedly, it is. But I'd really like to say "Pay the water bill automatically as long as it doesn't exceed $X". Can Paytrust, or anyone else, do that?
Good.. I thought it was just me. And I'm definitely NOT a hardware guy. But I can't see, from his description of the PCN, how switching from high-lead to tin solder could be seen as a response to, well, anything except "let's use less lead".
I know that 63/37 has a lower melting point than 60/40, and a "sharper" one (no pasty phase), which is why I use it for audio repairs and cabling; I'm a klutz, and anything that makes my solder joints more stable is good. But I can't imagine that this matters as much on SMT, where your components are fixed in place.
That said... a quick Google shows that there are all sorts of considerations in what solder to use for PCB solder bumps: not just temperature, but the metals involved in the leads, and the PCB traces, and a bunch of other stuff that involves knowing more about electronics and metallurgy than my "the batteries go this way" brain can handle. So there may well be some stability advantages to eutectic solder for NVidia's solder bumps.
Anyone here actually know this stuff? I've got an 8800GT in my Mac Pro, which definitely runs hotter than your average PC...
So which do you think is the deciding difference today - better compression algorithms, or faster CPUs? I've been amazed to realize how much of my "conventional wisdom" was based on the assumption that "lots of CPU is slower than lots of disk". I grew up believing that compressed data would always be slower than, but smaller than, raw data; it was a tradeoff of space vs. time. RAMDoubler let you run larger programs, but at a huge performance hit - usually, IIRC, worse than just using virtual memory and letting it swap.
But nowadays, databases that use compression are significantly faster than those that don't, because the time it takes to decompress is LESS than the time it would take to read the raw data. It's gone from a tradeoff to a win-win.
I was under the impression that memory bandwidth was nowhere near that tipping point, but if it is, well, cool.
Well, duh. The sky is blue, and when you're flying, you're closer to the sky. yellow + blue = orange.
[For you armchair optical physicists: I'm talking about color mixing at high altitude. Your classroom yellow + blue = brown doesn't work up there, because of sunspots.]
Thus my brilliant scheme: I will increase my median speed, by paying for my neighbors to get faster connections!
Muahaha! Muahahaha! Mua... ::ahem:: muh...
Aw, man, now you made me feel bad for being snarky!
In short: A good review should focus on what makes the "item under review" different from some other item that I might buy instead. Yes, it's sometimes good to give a slight introduction to the topic, in case the reader is a novice in the field, and you have some expertise. But that's not the main goal; the goal is to let me answer the question, "Why buy this book, and not that other book?" I already know what a book looks like; Every piece of information in the review should be something relevant, distinguishing and useful for decision-making. Every sentence should be able to withstand a "So what?" test.
If you'd asked me to copy-edit the review, I'd give you these notes:
* The opening paragraph gives me some context for what CSS is; great. Then it talks about the "Ultimate" title, and spends a few sentences on that. Do you really think they meant it literally? More important, does it matter to me if it's the ultimate book, or merely a good book? Still, if you want to question the title, you'd better make sure you have the answer. I'd rather see a few words that tell me what type of CSS book it is, or whether it was good overall, or what. These seem like news teasers: "Will the earth end tomorrow? Stay tuned to find out."
* Next paragraph: table of contents. Why is it necessary (the paragraph, not the table)? Are there CSS reference books without one? Do I care how many pages it is?
* General rule: Show, don't tell. In a review, that means skip the sentences like "I'd like to discuss those first, from front to back." We know you'd like to discuss them; you're writing a review. We know you want to discuss them first, because this is the first paragraph. We can assume you're either discussing them from front to back, or in an order that we don't care about. If you were saying "I'd like to discuss these in reverse alphabetical order, and here's why, then the sentence adds something; it explains why you're going to do the unexpected. Otherwise, it feels like filler.
I do it all the time. In fact, the previous sentence started out as "Otherwise, it feels like filler; it's the written equivalent of 'umm... so...' while you think of the next sentence." Then I went back and read it, and realized the whole phrase was simply repeating "it feels like filler". It's all about editing. Remember the "FRESH FISH FOR SALE TODAY" story.
* Next paragraph: tells me a bit how the book is laid out. I suppose it could be handy to know that, but I can't particularly think of why. (I also skip the apparently-mandatory introductory section of these books, where they tell you what each chapter will contain, like a second table of contents, in paragraph form. I've never figured out who it is that says, "I wish I could have the table of contents read to me like a story.") If you think it is useful somehow, then figure out who wants to know that information before buying the book, and what they want to know it for. The last sentence, about prose vs. background color and highlighting, seems superfluous either way.
* Reference chapter layout: Graphic design, by definition, doesn't translate well to prose. You're giving a prose description of a graphic layout, and despite re-reading it, I still can't picture what the page looks like. If I could, I wouldn't be sure why I cared. What I really want to know is: Is the layout helpful? Annoying? Is it any better than other CSS books? Does it use some clever techniques to make the information easier to find? Otherwise, why do I want to know before I buy?
Likewise, the compatibility information is useful, but you don't have to be as complete as you were. (And I can't understand the difference between "There is also a list of browser support for the item in IE6+, FF1+, Saf 1.3+ and Op9.2+" and "The second grid shows compatibility for"... I think you'd be better-served by saying "For each property, the book gives an example and a chart of compatible bro
Maybe it started with the whole idea of "unboxing photos"; I'm not sure. But an awful lot of reviews seem to fall in the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" bucket: True, but not useful.
This book is published on milled wood fibers, commonly called "paper"; it's a pleasant shade of cream, perhaps a bit brighter than ivory, yet darker than a Rubbermaid white spatula used for comparison. The pages are rectangular, measuring 7.23" x 5.05", with a sharp edge reminiscent of a good Martin-Yale trimmer. (For reference, I have published a picture of an average rectangle below.) The book was published on a 1200dpi offset press, with the plates generated directly from digital content.
Graphically, the book is similar to those we've become used to in the past few centuries. An incremental integer graces the bottom outside corner of every page, allowing one to turn directly to a specific page, if one is able to remember, or otherwise determine, the page number. A so-called "Table of Contents" (or TOC as it's known in the industry) allows you to jump directly to the beginning of a chapter, in conjunctioned with the aforementioned "page number" feature. Additionally, the name of each chapter is printed in italicized lettering opposite each page number, which allows you to remember what chapter you're reading, if you should happen to forget.
Etc...
I guess you missed comment #35:
Robert Accettura wins that bug.
I don't think this is what they're proposing, but you could plug "dummy plugs" into all the openings, then apply the coating, cut around the base of the plugs, and remove them. You'd have a little bit of leakage where you cut (you've peeled a little bit away), but you'd be more waterproof than before.
There's an interesting world of spray-on and even roll-on coatings out there, especially if you have access to a paint booth or a strong sprayer system. When you buy electronics that are covered with peel-off blue plastic, guess what? That's a coating. Ditto for new glass windows, cars, etc.
I once had cats that couldn't deal with plastic litterbox liners, but I was tired of scrubbing the litterbox clean. So I got some Stripaway 5140 coating from General Chem, and I'd roll it onto the litter box. Once every few weeks, I'd peel off the coating, mess and all, toss it in the trash, and apply a new coat. It wasn't a perfect system, and (between multiple coats, and drying with fans, and taping off the litterbox's locking tabs) was probably more work than just sitting down and cleaning it - but it sure felt all industrial-like.
Ditto for water-resistant jackets, tents, etc. As a Boy Scout I learned that you should never touch the inside of a tent when it's raining; that changes the surface tension of the water (or some such thing) and the rain will start leaking in where you touched it. I've seen the same thing on modern Patagonia jackets, especially as the coatings wear off.
That makes perfect sense. And I suspect it also helps explain the lack of damage to the equipment that was on balanced power; I bet the Equitech balances hot against ground, and doesn't touch neutral at all. Or something like that. (I'm a software guy.) Thanks!
Is there any way to protect against common-mode spikes? Do some other surge protectors offer that?
Oh, that's the part I forgot - we did test the ground quality, and it wasn't transmitter-quality, but it was better-than-average for a residence - IIRC, we'd buried some deep copper rods for it, since the recording studio would need a solid ground. (I wish I could remember the actual numbers.) So that wasn't it either...
I'm not convinced that whole-house protection helps much either. A few years ago, there was some event during a thunderstorm - we never quite figured out what - that fried two TiVo modems, a garage door opener (the circuit board was visibly burned and light bulb shattered), a few Wirsbo hot-water thermostats (not even connected to the mains power, just low-voltage from the boiler), a few Vantage whole-house dimmer modules, an intercom, and a printer.
The house was, at the time, "protected" with two Cutler-Hammer CHSP suppressors (MOV). After the incident, their "protection working fine" LED was still lit! The only room with no damage was my recording studio, which had Equitech balanced-power panels; the ginormous-hunk-of-iron transformer probably saved me there. The power company had no reports of direct lightning strikes, other than one hit that took out a transformer (and since my power didn't go out, I apparently wasn't on that circuit).
I recall doing some reading about lightning arrestors, ground grids, and such, and eventually came to the conclusion that it (a) surge suppressors are fairly useless, because they don't always present the quickest path to ground, and (b) it would be 10x cheaper to let stuff die and replace it than to set up a proper lightning protection system.
If SMPTE develops the 3D standard, won't it end up being 2.997-drop-frame-D instead?
Just to add more unsourced "I seem to remember" goodness...
I seem to remember reading an article in the 1980s - right around the time caller ID was introduced - that explained how the phone companies would rotate the standard 96V ring signal - 2 seconds on, 4 seconds off - among three groups of phone lines (vaguely akin to three-phase power), so that in any given two-second period, only one-third of the "ringing" phones were physically ringing. This reduces their power requirements.
Presumably the ringback tone doesn't have those strenuous high-voltage requirements. We had multiple phone lines in our house - a rarity, in those days - and I don't think it ever *was* in sync. So I think it's not that they intentionally made the ringback out of sync; they just never bothered to do anything that would put it IN sync.
I was about to theorize that ringback was generated by your outcalling switch, and not the incalling switch that generated ring voltage, but I remember that different local exchanges used to have different ringback tones, so that kills that theory.
So now, instead of paying to download a video that you have to play with their buggy, proprietary, could-disappear-someday player...
You pay to stream the video from their could-disappear-someday web site, with no ability to keep a local copy at all?
IIRC, most of the eyeballs came from eGroups, which they bought and merged into Yahoo Groups. (and eGroups itself was a merger of eGroups and OneList.)
When Yahoo! took over, the groups gradually became less useful; the worst was interstitial ads, which would show up every once in a while when you clicked on a message. Given that the search function could only search N messages at a time, this made groups fairly useless. You'd try to search for a phrase, see "0 matches in messages 13000-14000", click "Next" to try to continue the search in 12000-13000, and get an ad instead. Luckily, around the same time, Google Groups was launched, and anyone who wanted a usable mailing list moved there.
Often amusing, but I can't say I've ever seen an insightful answer there. Asking Yahoo Answers is like asking a group of teenagers at the park.
Again: Bought, not innovated.
I think Yahoo's biggest innovation was their shopping system. Long before amazon.com expanded to be a generic shopping cart, you could search Yahoo, easily find the product you wanted, and use your stored shipping/billing info to buy it with a few clicks. Sadly, after a few years, they screwed up search, drove merchants away with fees, and quickly became useless.
Copper prices are now high enough that it's worth trying to steal. Here in Boston, at least once a month there's a story about someone killed trying to steal copper from power lines that turn out to be, y'know, active.
Construction sites now have to be locked up tightly. It's not just the tools that get stolen; it's the pipes and the wire spools.
I assume this will get worse as copper gets scarcer and, thus, more expensive.
The OP mentions plumbing, but I'm not sure that plastic is a viable alternative yet. I've built a few houses, and always used copper, at least for the main plumbing. I remember in the 1990s, the industry tried using PVC, but had problems of some kind, and went back to copper. Today, you can use PEX or Hep2O flexible tubing for heating, but I don't know if it's approved for drinking yet - and we probably don't know its long term stability. Copper is still the gold standard (sorry!) for plumbing.
(Side rant: When copper pipes freeze, you can use an arc welder to heat them back up. You can't do that with PEX, since it's plastic, not metal. So if it gets too cold, your heat stops working... which means the air can't warm up enough to melt the ice... shampoo, rinse, repeat. Make sure your PEX is in a well-insulated wall.)
And what's the only way for your wrists to be parallel to the keys and completely relaxed? For the keys to slope on each side. Like an ergonomic keyboard. Like the GP said.
As an erstwhile Berklee student, I can tell you that you're absolutely incorrect. Repetitive strain injuries are one of the most common reasons that students have to drop out; it's rare to take a five-minute walk without seeing a wrist splint. One of the most important techniques to learn, for any instrument, is how to use (and carry!) that instrument most efficiently, with the least effort and strain.
The height of desktops is pretty much standardized around 29-30". You're not supposed to put a keyboard on the desktop. You put a keyboard tray under the desktop.
Laptops, of course, screw all that up, and I'm sure the popularity of MacBooks is sending a whole bunch of ergonomic designers into fits.
OK, now I'm way out of my area of knowledge, but: I'd guess it's something like "the standard clock speed makes component #57 resonate", and increasing the clock speed moves the frequency out of the range that makes that piece resonate. Or something.
I know that when I briefly had a first-generation MacBook Pro, with its signature high-pitched squeal, there was some software that changed some internal parameter, and made the squeal less prominent. Interestingly, increasing that parameter made the squeal lower in pitch. You could never get it to go away, but you could move it to a less-annoying pitch.
Not knowing how your tinnitus acts, maybe WarpSpeed moved the squeal to a frequency that doesn't irritate it as much.
I think all flat-screen backlights squeal - well, at least the non-LED ones. I am not a hardware guy, by any means, but I think the backlights are the rough equivalent of fluorescent lights, and the squeal is the rough equivalent of the ballast.
I had this problem with an LCD monitor for a recording studio. Luckily, the vendor (Wide USA) was marketing that display for medical uses, so they were eager to exchange it for me, no charge. If it were a consumer monitor, I'm sure I'd have been SOL. They don't make the glass themselves, so they may not have much control over the noise factor, other than by pushing back to their vendor. I got the impression that it's a common lot-to-lot variation, just as some transformers will hum on noisy power and some won't.
Come to think of it, every backlit digital watch I've had squealed too - at least since the introduction of Indiglo-style backlights. I think the older ones didn't.
I guess we're just different. I mean, I'm not indecisive, but... well, sorta. Maybe not indecisive, exactly, more like.. well, yes, indecisive. Usually. Not always.
Mostly, though.
I, too, am manly and decisive, with lightning-fast reflexes.
So programmers will be dying younger, because they don't get enough sunlight.
And there will be fewer to begin with, because 20% fewer students are pursuing IT-related degrees.
Yet demand is going up. Therefore: More money for those intrepid few of us who survive!