Good god man, get rid of those Lacie Big Disks now! I just posted to another thread where someone had trouble with them. I've lost 2 500GB Big Disks this year and if you don't have backups you're hosed.
Try two or three of the Buffalo Terastations (No I don't work for them, just a satisfied customer). 4x400GB drives, RAID 5 gives me 1.2TB of usable space per box. The redundancy is nice, but don't forget to back up now and then:)
Yep, same thing happened to me. I had TWO 500GB Lacie "Big Disks" Both of mine are dead, in less than a year. Absolutely fucking worthless. Fortunately I had backups of all my stuff.
I've been using a Buffalo Terastation (4x400GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration) since they came out earlier this year. So far it's been an excellent experience, and I would highly recommend them. I may need to buy a second one before year's end to keep up with my storage needs.
Your point of the 20" monitor at 1280x1024 only serves to open another wound for me- Why they F**K can't we get desktop LCDs with higher resolution than that? Yes I know you can find a few 1600x1200 LCDs at the 20" size, but that is the best you can get. What about 2048x1536, or even higher? I don't want to resort to a CRT to get those resolutions, they make my head hurt no matter what the refresh rate.
My laptop has a 12" screen at 1400x1050 resolution, and it is perfectly readable. This little 12" screen I work on daily has a higher resolution than that 20" monster on your desk! When will companies get with the program and release high resolution desktop LCDs? (Yes, I could just use mutiple monitors. I have 3 on my desk right now. My vision of the 20" monitor above would be high enough resolution to replace FOUR 15-17" LCDs!)
/Rant mode off- sorry, not an attack on you, just frustrated with the industry...
Back to the device in question- Of course I'd love to see it at a higher resolution. There are PocketPCs and Zaurus handhelds that have 640x480 on a 3" screen, the OQO model 1 handtop has 800x480 on a 5" screen, and the Toshiba Libretto U100 has a 1280x768 7" widescreen. To do any useful reading/work with a handheld device it's going to have to reach 800x600.
If they get that in a 5" display (even Monochrome high res, like the original Macs!) I will be first in line to buy!
Um. You do know those things are user-servicable, right? I expect you drive all over town looking for a Full-Service gas station so you don't have to squeegee your own windshield as well?
Give the poor girl a break:) Hey, I'm a guy and work with electrical systems all the time (industrial). That doesn't mean I feel like coming home and getting dirty under the hood. Not to mention all kinds of funny crap happens to some vehicles when you change the battery out without keeping power on the electronics (Mercedes for example)...
Back on topic... Of course if I get stuck in a waiting room I prefer my GBA SP. Small enough to toss in a coat pocket, rugged and protected screen, lasts forever on a charge, and the games are a lot easier to pick up and put down on short notice.
Are the construction photos of the Death Star Subwoofer. He won't ship it due to size and weight so you need to be local to Reading, UK to pick it up. These photos betray enough of the design to build your own fully armed and operational battle station.
How is this offtopic? The grandparent poster made the joke about not saying "it", famous from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It (arghh! the word again!) was the Knights Who Say "Ni!" in that movie that hated the word.
I think the guy you want is rpiquepa. He's the real Roland Piquepaille. Check out the Hall of Fame. He's got 224 accepted submissions on Slashdot. Who knows if he does this sort of thing elsewhere too...
I can attest to that, as I do the same thing. But do it on a consulting or contract basis! That way you don't get bored with the same old plant/equipment/process. I started my own business about 8 years ago in industrial automation and systems integration, and it's the best thing I ever did. Things just keep getting busier for me every year!
Pardon my young age, but did viruses exist before the BASIC language ever came out?
Viruses have been around for a long time, and they certainly haven't always been coded in VB. In the good old days viruses were usually a handfull of bytes in size, possibly ranging up to several KB. Coded in hand written assembly language. They don't make 'em like they uesed to;)
What VB (and Windows, and the Internet) did was lower the barrier to entry. Instead of requiring intimate low-level hardware and software knowledge learned from years of reading books and trial/error, any fucktard can go out and download sample virus code, tweak it a bit and release it as his/her own.
And in 1980 they were positive we'd have intelligent computers in 20 years.
It's always 20 years.
Always.
That's a pretty bold statement, and probably a troll but I'll bite. In the 70s and 80s AI researchers really had no understanding of how the brain works, or how complex it was. Now some of the structures and chemical interactions are well known, with more being learned every day.
They had also severely underestimated the computational requirements to model "thought". Modern neural networks and expert systems are still as dumb as they were back then, because they are a dead end. What is really needed is a high speed, massively parallel computer to simulate every neuron, axon, dendrite, hormone in the brain, as well as to supply "sensory inputs" to it.
This project probably will not succeed, but it is a start in the right direction. Within 25 to 50 years, your average desktop PC will have enough processing power to accurately simulate a human brain. Shortly after that, computers will be able to think faster than humans.
What happens after that is guessing best left to the Sci-Fi authors.
Clever, but gloves would be acceptable to wear in any of the areas I mentioned. Just try wearing that mask in the airport, bank, or even the convenience store and see what happens. I can visualize enough of the outcome to insist you go first with that mask on any day other than Halloween:)
If some important information about you was leaked from a database, would you rather it be:
A) Your Social Security Number
B) Your fingerprint scans
C) Your Iris/Retina scans
D) Your picture (head only)
I'd *much* prefer them to take a picture of me than take my fingerprints. If you think you can walk down the street, go to the airport, a store, the post office, the bank or use an ATM without your face ending up recorded on some sort of analog or digital medium you're mistaken. Even the gym has a security camera at the door. If it's going to happen anyway, why not use it as an easy way to get into the gym?
Maybe I need to get my tinfoil hat adjusted, but I don't see the problem with photo identification methods.
That's starting to get on the right track. Here's what my gym does:
When you become a member they issue you a card with a short ID number (4 to 6 digits), and they use a webcam to take a snapshot of you for the customer database. When you go to the gym, you don't need the ID card at all- walk in, tell the person at the door your ID number. They punch the code into the computer and it pulls up your info including the picture, and one look at your face lets them know you are who you say you are.
Exploding Toads? Back in my day we had Exploding Whales. Well OK, it was only one whale, and they used a half-ton of dynamite, but it was still very impressive!
No, because a touch screen still only allows a single point of contact at a time, and more importantly- what the grandparent meant by "multiple pointers" is that each finger could act like a different mouse button. Using two hands, you would have the equivalent of a 10 button mouse and elicit different responses depending on what finger you used. Not to mention if you have those functions carefully mapped to complement each other you can have two independent cursors on screen, one for each hand.
Yeah, the price is a bit steep, but I was able to pre-order it during a special they had in January and February for $799.
As for what it will run, it's targeted toward PocketPC/CE applications. It will have a fully compatible version of Word, Excel, Internet Explorer and Outlook on it. There are a lot of third party apps being developed- MiniMo comes to mind, a CE version of Firefox. Also with it fully supporting the.NET framework it will be easy to port.NET apps to it.
I figure for big storage I can get myself one of those 5 or 10GB PC card hard drives, or a big compactflash card (1 to 4GB). Thumb drives would be good to transfer data back and forth with a desktop, but I wouldn't want one dangling off this while I was using it on my lap.
Perhaps you don't want something that runs Windows 2000/XP at all, but rather a simpler device. I'd suggest the ClioNXT. It's not available just yet, but should be soon (I've preordered one to tinker with). The ClioNXT runs CE.NET 4.2 Pro on a 10" 800x600 color screen, and has built Wifi along with PC card, compactflash, and SD card slots. It will come with the CE versions of all Microsoft apps, and of course you can develop your own.
From what I understand this device should run 8 to 12 hours on a battery charge. I think it could replace a standard laptop for many people.
I'm not so worried about the heads crashing as I am about spindle wear due to prolonged rotation at odd angles. I have a Tablet PC that gets a ton of use at 45 to 70 degree angles, and I have gone through several hard drives for it. They tend to get louder with various ticking and rattling sounds and eventually die. The same brand/capacity of drives seems to have no problem in my Thinkpad (which sits flat on the desk all day), only in the Tablet. Maybe it's just coincidence...
Any other Tablet PC users have hard disk failures like this? Is there a better explanation for why it happens?
I don't know of any official one, but I've been working on a.NET version of Driftnet- Yes, spare the jokes about MS and.NET:) -that works with the WinPcap library. It lacks quite a bit right now but it can sniff and detect JPEGs, and save them on your hard disk in a folder. It has a way of missing packets here and there right now, which makes it better with capturing small images. Larger images tend to be missing a packet or two when assembled which corrupts the image to various degrees depending on where the missing packet fit. Missing packets may be caused by my slow processor speed, still need to investigate it.
Once my line of paying customers dies down a bit I plan on fixing bugs, adding a nice realtime view GUI and releasing it...
Well, he can't legally own all 15 completed seasons of the Simpsons yet, as the studio has only released the first FIVE seasons on DVD. I'm assuming this is so they can charge the networks a premium for reruns, any shows from 1994 and newer are unavailable to consumers legally except as reruns on TV.
I also downloaded the 35GB 15 season torrent of the Simpsons, plus downloaded each episode from the current season as it was aired. I own the first 5 seasons on DVD, but I don't want to wait 5 to 10 years for them to release the rest so I can watch them (which is about how long it will be at the current release rate). I guess I'm still considered a criminal even though I'm ready, willing and able to buy all the rest of the DVDs. Wake up content owners, stop sitting on your properties and release them already!
To be perfectly honest I have never seen a Kraft "chocolate" product, but I have seen their "cheese" prducts (and as a kid I ate them, but now they make me gag).
Somewhat OT, but funny you should mention Kraft Cheese products. You would be correct to assume that the process and many ingredients would be unrecognizable to fine cheesemakers of the world. I can't go into detail (NDAs and such) but I have personally written the PLC, HMI, and database code that controls the entire cheese-making process at their largest North-American facility. If any of you get the chance to work in industrial automation/engineering, take it. There's a lot of fascinating stuff, particularly in food production.
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Good god man, get rid of those Lacie Big Disks now! I just posted to another thread where someone had trouble with them. I've lost 2 500GB Big Disks this year and if you don't have backups you're hosed.
:)
Try two or three of the Buffalo Terastations (No I don't work for them, just a satisfied customer). 4x400GB drives, RAID 5 gives me 1.2TB of usable space per box. The redundancy is nice, but don't forget to back up now and then
Yep, same thing happened to me. I had TWO 500GB Lacie "Big Disks" Both of mine are dead, in less than a year. Absolutely fucking worthless. Fortunately I had backups of all my stuff.
I've been using a Buffalo Terastation (4x400GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration) since they came out earlier this year. So far it's been an excellent experience, and I would highly recommend them. I may need to buy a second one before year's end to keep up with my storage needs.
No, 5" at 320x240 does not sound good to me.
/Rant mode off- sorry, not an attack on you, just frustrated with the industry...
Your point of the 20" monitor at 1280x1024 only serves to open another wound for me- Why they F**K can't we get desktop LCDs with higher resolution than that? Yes I know you can find a few 1600x1200 LCDs at the 20" size, but that is the best you can get. What about 2048x1536, or even higher? I don't want to resort to a CRT to get those resolutions, they make my head hurt no matter what the refresh rate.
My laptop has a 12" screen at 1400x1050 resolution, and it is perfectly readable. This little 12" screen I work on daily has a higher resolution than that 20" monster on your desk! When will companies get with the program and release high resolution desktop LCDs? (Yes, I could just use mutiple monitors. I have 3 on my desk right now. My vision of the 20" monitor above would be high enough resolution to replace FOUR 15-17" LCDs!)
Back to the device in question- Of course I'd love to see it at a higher resolution. There are PocketPCs and Zaurus handhelds that have 640x480 on a 3" screen, the OQO model 1 handtop has 800x480 on a 5" screen, and the Toshiba Libretto U100 has a 1280x768 7" widescreen. To do any useful reading/work with a handheld device it's going to have to reach 800x600. If they get that in a 5" display (even Monochrome high res, like the original Macs!) I will be first in line to buy!
Um. You do know those things are user-servicable, right? I expect you drive all over town looking for a Full-Service gas station so you don't have to squeegee your own windshield as well?
:) Hey, I'm a guy and work with electrical systems all the time (industrial). That doesn't mean I feel like coming home and getting dirty under the hood. Not to mention all kinds of funny crap happens to some vehicles when you change the battery out without keeping power on the electronics (Mercedes for example)...
Give the poor girl a break
Back on topic... Of course if I get stuck in a waiting room I prefer my GBA SP. Small enough to toss in a coat pocket, rugged and protected screen, lasts forever on a charge, and the games are a lot easier to pick up and put down on short notice.
I would rather not imagine it ;)
Data is more fun than Lor.
:)
Thank you
You can keep your theiving hands off my head, thank you very much. I am rather attached to it :)
Are the construction photos of the Death Star Subwoofer. He won't ship it due to size and weight so you need to be local to Reading, UK to pick it up. These photos betray enough of the design to build your own fully armed and operational battle station.
Nah, that's way too much effort. I'd just put an SEP Field around the mountain and tell everyone I'd moved it...
How is this offtopic? The grandparent poster made the joke about not saying "it", famous from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It (arghh! the word again!) was the Knights Who Say "Ni!" in that movie that hated the word.
I think the guy you want is rpiquepa. He's the real Roland Piquepaille. Check out the Hall of Fame. He's got 224 accepted submissions on Slashdot. Who knows if he does this sort of thing elsewhere too...
I can attest to that, as I do the same thing. But do it on a consulting or contract basis! That way you don't get bored with the same old plant/equipment/process. I started my own business about 8 years ago in industrial automation and systems integration, and it's the best thing I ever did. Things just keep getting busier for me every year!
Pardon my young age, but did viruses exist before the BASIC language ever came out?
;)
Viruses have been around for a long time, and they certainly haven't always been coded in VB. In the good old days viruses were usually a handfull of bytes in size, possibly ranging up to several KB. Coded in hand written assembly language. They don't make 'em like they uesed to
What VB (and Windows, and the Internet) did was lower the barrier to entry. Instead of requiring intimate low-level hardware and software knowledge learned from years of reading books and trial/error, any fucktard can go out and download sample virus code, tweak it a bit and release it as his/her own.
And in 1980 they were positive we'd have intelligent computers in 20 years.
It's always 20 years.
Always.
That's a pretty bold statement, and probably a troll but I'll bite. In the 70s and 80s AI researchers really had no understanding of how the brain works, or how complex it was. Now some of the structures and chemical interactions are well known, with more being learned every day.
They had also severely underestimated the computational requirements to model "thought". Modern neural networks and expert systems are still as dumb as they were back then, because they are a dead end. What is really needed is a high speed, massively parallel computer to simulate every neuron, axon, dendrite, hormone in the brain, as well as to supply "sensory inputs" to it.
This project probably will not succeed, but it is a start in the right direction. Within 25 to 50 years, your average desktop PC will have enough processing power to accurately simulate a human brain. Shortly after that, computers will be able to think faster than humans.
What happens after that is guessing best left to the Sci-Fi authors.
*cough* mask *cough*
:)
Clever, but gloves would be acceptable to wear in any of the areas I mentioned. Just try wearing that mask in the airport, bank, or even the convenience store and see what happens. I can visualize enough of the outcome to insist you go first with that mask on any day other than Halloween
If some important information about you was leaked from a database, would you rather it be:
A) Your Social Security Number
B) Your fingerprint scans
C) Your Iris/Retina scans
D) Your picture (head only)
I'd *much* prefer them to take a picture of me than take my fingerprints. If you think you can walk down the street, go to the airport, a store, the post office, the bank or use an ATM without your face ending up recorded on some sort of analog or digital medium you're mistaken. Even the gym has a security camera at the door. If it's going to happen anyway, why not use it as an easy way to get into the gym?
Maybe I need to get my tinfoil hat adjusted, but I don't see the problem with photo identification methods.
That's starting to get on the right track. Here's what my gym does:
When you become a member they issue you a card with a short ID number (4 to 6 digits), and they use a webcam to take a snapshot of you for the customer database. When you go to the gym, you don't need the ID card at all- walk in, tell the person at the door your ID number. They punch the code into the computer and it pulls up your info including the picture, and one look at your face lets them know you are who you say you are.
Exploding Toads? Back in my day we had Exploding Whales. Well OK, it was only one whale, and they used a half-ton of dynamite, but it was still very impressive!
No, because a touch screen still only allows a single point of contact at a time, and more importantly- what the grandparent meant by "multiple pointers" is that each finger could act like a different mouse button. Using two hands, you would have the equivalent of a 10 button mouse and elicit different responses depending on what finger you used. Not to mention if you have those functions carefully mapped to complement each other you can have two independent cursors on screen, one for each hand.
Yeah, the price is a bit steep, but I was able to pre-order it during a special they had in January and February for $799.
.NET framework it will be easy to port .NET apps to it.
As for what it will run, it's targeted toward PocketPC/CE applications. It will have a fully compatible version of Word, Excel, Internet Explorer and Outlook on it. There are a lot of third party apps being developed- MiniMo comes to mind, a CE version of Firefox. Also with it fully supporting the
I figure for big storage I can get myself one of those 5 or 10GB PC card hard drives, or a big compactflash card (1 to 4GB). Thumb drives would be good to transfer data back and forth with a desktop, but I wouldn't want one dangling off this while I was using it on my lap.
Perhaps you don't want something that runs Windows 2000/XP at all, but rather a simpler device. I'd suggest the ClioNXT. It's not available just yet, but should be soon (I've preordered one to tinker with). The ClioNXT runs CE.NET 4.2 Pro on a 10" 800x600 color screen, and has built Wifi along with PC card, compactflash, and SD card slots. It will come with the CE versions of all Microsoft apps, and of course you can develop your own.
From what I understand this device should run 8 to 12 hours on a battery charge. I think it could replace a standard laptop for many people.
I'm not so worried about the heads crashing as I am about spindle wear due to prolonged rotation at odd angles. I have a Tablet PC that gets a ton of use at 45 to 70 degree angles, and I have gone through several hard drives for it. They tend to get louder with various ticking and rattling sounds and eventually die. The same brand/capacity of drives seems to have no problem in my Thinkpad (which sits flat on the desk all day), only in the Tablet. Maybe it's just coincidence...
Any other Tablet PC users have hard disk failures like this? Is there a better explanation for why it happens?
I don't know of any official one, but I've been working on a .NET version of Driftnet- Yes, spare the jokes about MS and .NET :) -that works with the WinPcap library. It lacks quite a bit right now but it can sniff and detect JPEGs, and save them on your hard disk in a folder. It has a way of missing packets here and there right now, which makes it better with capturing small images. Larger images tend to be missing a packet or two when assembled which corrupts the image to various degrees depending on where the missing packet fit. Missing packets may be caused by my slow processor speed, still need to investigate it.
Once my line of paying customers dies down a bit I plan on fixing bugs, adding a nice realtime view GUI and releasing it...
Well, he can't legally own all 15 completed seasons of the Simpsons yet, as the studio has only released the first FIVE seasons on DVD. I'm assuming this is so they can charge the networks a premium for reruns, any shows from 1994 and newer are unavailable to consumers legally except as reruns on TV.
I also downloaded the 35GB 15 season torrent of the Simpsons, plus downloaded each episode from the current season as it was aired. I own the first 5 seasons on DVD, but I don't want to wait 5 to 10 years for them to release the rest so I can watch them (which is about how long it will be at the current release rate). I guess I'm still considered a criminal even though I'm ready, willing and able to buy all the rest of the DVDs. Wake up content owners, stop sitting on your properties and release them already!
To be perfectly honest I have never seen a Kraft "chocolate" product, but I have seen their "cheese" prducts (and as a kid I ate them, but now they make me gag).
Somewhat OT, but funny you should mention Kraft Cheese products. You would be correct to assume that the process and many ingredients would be unrecognizable to fine cheesemakers of the world. I can't go into detail (NDAs and such) but I have personally written the PLC, HMI, and database code that controls the entire cheese-making process at their largest North-American facility. If any of you get the chance to work in industrial automation/engineering, take it. There's a lot of fascinating stuff, particularly in food production.