I'm a firefighter and I've seen these guys work. They sent someone out to test our 75 foot ladder -- and the guy spent two days with magnets, iron dust, and a damn magnifying glass going over every single inch of the metal -- he found half a dozen micro stress cracks, marked them, and we were able to have them welded and re-checked.
But why was NASA spend any money on this at all? They already have lots of really nice pictures from orbit pretty much any time they want them. The project, while fun, doesn't do anything new, doesn't do it any more accurately or in any greater detail. It doesn't have implications for new future launch platforms or any other new kind of science. If the balloon had be smaller and had climbed less high, he'd have been little more than a peeping tom using a camera on a kite or balloon to see into neighbors yards.
I think it's awesome that the guy was successful and had a great bit of fun with it. I hope he teaches his kids to think on their own as well. I think it's a bit pathetic that NASA would care, and is more likely true that someone from NASA cared rather than the organization as a whole.
Either that, or someone with a security role just wanted to make sure the kid wasn't developing his own rockets -- which, now that I think about it, is pretty likely.
Not just any smoke. You're referring to the "Mysterious Blue Smoke" (MBS) that imbues all electronic wizardry with its magical properties.
I've explained to many of my neighbors that often, once you let the MBS out of your gear it can be very difficult and expensive to ever make them operate again. It can be done, but it requires a high level soldering guild member, some odd looking parts -- often identifiable only by those who can read the arcane stripe patterns by which they are known. In addition, incantations, a chicken, a bowl, and a sharp knife may be necessary.
First - I should say I'm not an expert on everything that can be done with the newer logical volume management tools in the Linux distros...I used them rarely.
That said, this isn't quite the same thing as most people can accomplish with Linux on a SATA drive even with the LVM. You can, so far as I know, specify which blocks, numerically, to use for a partition. There is not (again, to the best of my knowledge) a direct mapping from that block order to the actual tracks and sectors on the physical platter. There is mapping that happens between the drive and the controller (which is on the drive on all modern sata and pata drives) and there is mapping between the system bios and the controller (to account for limitations in the original head/cylinder counts available on the original AT drive specs). I don't know how much effort is made by the drive manufacturers to match what they report as sector order to physical location given that seek times have gotten so low over the years.
I don't think specifying the block choice used on an sata drive does anything even close to what I was describing.
Some operating systems have volume management tools that do let you get a great deal more specific about where data is written. Normally, I'm a Linux or Wintel guy, but I have managed some AIX boxes a few times and from setting up a large one once I recall that it's logical volume manager allowed you to create volumes on the SCSI drive systems that were very specific about how and what part of the drive was used. You could specific, for example, that a particular volume use only the outer tracks (or inner or middle I suppose) of the drives -- in addition to a great many options for raid striping and transaction logs and so on.
The idea is that the outer edges of the platters travel faster under the read/write heads than the inner and so performed differently. Also, you could keep the head from having to jump around as much by keeping all the data that tended to be used at the same time on the same tracks -- reducing your average seek time when reading randomly from that pool of data.
In practice, I think this mattered a great deal more when us old guys were dealing with 80+ millisecond random seek times on 5 1/4" wide full height (what would now be considered two bays) drives -- or larger disk-pack based drives (aka washing machines) with the massive physical movement necessary for those read/write heads.
Today, I think the admin is better focused on distributing the data load better across different drives/arrays to even the load out and also focused on reducing overall disk i/o in creating database schema and applications. Focusing on very fine details like this is likely to have only marginal benefit next to those key areas --- but I can't presume to know for sure what this project has in mind.
The very moment a sufficiently peer reviewed and accredited study shows that the herbs in question have an actual quantifiable benefit, it is no longer "Herbal Medicine" or "Alternative Medicine" it is simply "Medicine" and would therefore be covered under the health coverage in all major modern industrialized nations except the US, which it would depend on what kind of an insurance plan you can afford.
I have three kids and a wife, and over the years we've talked a lot about what would happen if she lost her corporate benefits. Would I be able to keep running my business? I used to think no, I'd need to go take a corporate cube dweller job for the healthcare and for the "stability" --
but here's the thing -- The stability is a myth at this point, and health coverage co-pays and employee buy in are getting more and more expensive.
If my consulting and project work gets slow, it gets slow. It picks up or I alter my focus a bit. In the corporate world, it's all or nothing. One day a manager decides you're too expensive and can be replaced by some very good talent in India or Singapore -- who will eventually fail, not because of talent but because the US based project managers aren't able to write good specs and you've been making up for that locally for decades. Next thing you know, you're gone. Now you' have no health care anyway, plus no income, plus no prospects but to start over looking.
I looked at the cost, and decided that it'd be smarter to pay the $15k+ per year for coverage than to go captive again unless I had a crazy golden-parachute in my contract (which is unlikely as hell).
...while I totally sympathize with you, and without trying speak for anyone else -- I've wished for at least the option of a dockable interface since first trying Gimp. I've tried switching to it a few times, and I understand that it's quite capable of doing everything I need from such a package -- but I just personally can't get used to its interface while at the same time learning its features. My frustration level reaches the point where I just give up and get what I need to get done in Photoshop or an old copy of Paint Shop Pro -- even though I think Gimp is faster and more effective in many respects.
If this were available to you in that state, you could consent to the disconnect. If yes/no is possible, presumably so other form of code may be as well -- slow, but possible.
Like you, this state is more horrifying to me than death - so ability to say "yes" to a "pull the plug?" question (with the unavoidable "Are you sure?" dialog box) -- would be welcome.
Nope, not a coach -- though I have been and would never tell someone else's kids to behave that way of course (if you're coaching, you represent the sport and the team and parents -- not just your own ideas). I am a father of three girls though, and at age 42 I started taking karate classes with two of them.
I've you've had martial arts training enough to do that effectively, you'll probably kill someone if you do. That might be over doing things a bit. Also, if you've had the training and have the confidence to do that, you're probably not a target for bullying.
Agreed -- heat kills batteries, hard drives, and capacitors in computer equipment. He should elevate the machine or use a laptop cooling pad of some kind for sure. Blowing out the dust with some canned air (carefully) every once in a while helps too -- or if your geek cred is high enough, strip the machine down and clean it out from the inside. The dust that coats heat sinks is a killer.
If you wanted to play the odds on best possible result -- he should use it tll it hits about 45% and then plug the laptop in and remove the battery, putting it on the shelf until he needs it.
The problems with that are
1. There's no battery in the machine, and it's really easy to pull the cord out the back of a laptop -- and its not really much of a laptop without a battery, is it?
2. The battery won't store charge indefinitely, so he's got to plug it in once in a while and make sure to keep that charge up around 40-50%
3. When he does need the battery, it hasn't got much charge in it so he's got to plan an hour or two ahead of time.
To me, I'd go with the "just use the damn thing" approach, and after a year or two just buy another hundred dollar battery.
For what it's worth, these guys were extremely helpful to me when I looked into this stuff and I've found them good to deal with (http://www.atbatt.com/). They also donate large numbers of 9v batteries to fire departments to give to people with smoke detectors, so I consider that worth some karma points.
This is one of those things that's really hard to pin down.
LiON batteries -- what's used in most laptops and netbooks now -- have different kind of failures and limits from the older NiCD and so on. Aside from the catastrophic failures that made the news, what happens with LiON is that there are a limited number of charge cycles per cell no matter what you do. The cells generally go around 300 charge cycles before their capacity drops to about half. The controller in the batteries (which prevents them from just bursting in flames all the time) senses this and reports it back to the os.
The result is that when you upgrade the machine, you've already had it a long while and you're not far from that day when suddenly you notice your capacity has dropped to about half and you'd better replace the battery. Your cruising along at 60% then a minute later you're getting the warning that you're out of battery -- one or more cells is no good anymore.
To test this, you'd have to buy a new battery first and then compare life cycles.
btw: Lots of theories about how to make them last longer -- most of the actual experts say to try to keep it at around 40% if you're going to store it and not use it, otherwise just use the machine. The controller won't allow it to overcharge an they have no "memory" per se.
The best thing to do with a grade school bully (assuming I'm talking to someone the same age) is to hit them in mouth. Hard. You well then either get hit back a couple of times -- which will hurt, but not be tragic -- or not. In either case, the bully will find someone else to pick on. Learning that getting beat up on the playground isn't the end of the world can itself be incredibly freeing -- and usually leads to it never happening again.
I have no patience for bullies -- but I have even less patience for helicopter parents who replay their own sad lives as victims through their kids and insist the world be made into a padded safety zone where nobody says mean things or looses at tag any more.
If I ignore the encoding issues and assume some mix of frequency and amplitude shifts or whatever to get that kind of bandwidth, I can go along with the idea that a well placed optical transmitter could bounce light around the room enough to do this -- but what about the return signal from the workstation or device? That would hardly be placed in an optimal location.
Further, consider that wireless is most useful for mobile and transient devices -- laptops, sure; but what about cell phones, pda's, sensors, and all manner of other wireless things. These are frequently -- even usually -- not placed in direct visual sight.
Frankly, I see this technology as potentially useful in long distance settings between stationary platforms (particularly in space) but not so much for day to day campus or home-office use.
If I'm not mistaken, making a joke about having something illegal to a TSA agent at the airport can result in large fines and even jail time. In this case, the TSA agent made a "joke" that represented a serious threat to the safety, freedom, long term career and life outcome of a 22 year old girl while in a position of authority and power. Jail time seems frankly appropriate to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a firefighter and I've seen these guys work. They sent someone out to test our 75 foot ladder -- and the guy spent two days with magnets, iron dust, and a damn magnifying glass going over every single inch of the metal -- he found half a dozen micro stress cracks, marked them, and we were able to have them welded and re-checked.
But why was NASA spend any money on this at all? They already have lots of really nice pictures from orbit pretty much any time they want them. The project, while fun, doesn't do anything new, doesn't do it any more accurately or in any greater detail. It doesn't have implications for new future launch platforms or any other new kind of science. If the balloon had be smaller and had climbed less high, he'd have been little more than a peeping tom using a camera on a kite or balloon to see into neighbors yards.
I think it's awesome that the guy was successful and had a great bit of fun with it. I hope he teaches his kids to think on their own as well. I think it's a bit pathetic that NASA would care, and is more likely true that someone from NASA cared rather than the organization as a whole.
Either that, or someone with a security role just wanted to make sure the kid wasn't developing his own rockets -- which, now that I think about it, is pretty likely.
Not just any smoke. You're referring to the "Mysterious Blue Smoke" (MBS) that imbues all electronic wizardry with its magical properties.
I've explained to many of my neighbors that often, once you let the MBS out of your gear it can be very difficult and expensive to ever make them operate again. It can be done, but it requires a high level soldering guild member, some odd looking parts -- often identifiable only by those who can read the arcane stripe patterns by which they are known. In addition, incantations, a chicken, a bowl, and a sharp knife may be necessary.
There's always Prof Brian Cox -- at least he's funny as hell.
First - I should say I'm not an expert on everything that can be done with the newer logical volume management tools in the Linux distros...I used them rarely.
That said, this isn't quite the same thing as most people can accomplish with Linux on a SATA drive even with the LVM. You can, so far as I know, specify which blocks, numerically, to use for a partition. There is not (again, to the best of my knowledge) a direct mapping from that block order to the actual tracks and sectors on the physical platter. There is mapping that happens between the drive and the controller (which is on the drive on all modern sata and pata drives) and there is mapping between the system bios and the controller (to account for limitations in the original head/cylinder counts available on the original AT drive specs). I don't know how much effort is made by the drive manufacturers to match what they report as sector order to physical location given that seek times have gotten so low over the years.
I don't think specifying the block choice used on an sata drive does anything even close to what I was describing.
Some operating systems have volume management tools that do let you get a great deal more specific about where data is written. Normally, I'm a Linux or Wintel guy, but I have managed some AIX boxes a few times and from setting up a large one once I recall that it's logical volume manager allowed you to create volumes on the SCSI drive systems that were very specific about how and what part of the drive was used. You could specific, for example, that a particular volume use only the outer tracks (or inner or middle I suppose) of the drives -- in addition to a great many options for raid striping and transaction logs and so on.
The idea is that the outer edges of the platters travel faster under the read/write heads than the inner and so performed differently. Also, you could keep the head from having to jump around as much by keeping all the data that tended to be used at the same time on the same tracks -- reducing your average seek time when reading randomly from that pool of data.
In practice, I think this mattered a great deal more when us old guys were dealing with 80+ millisecond random seek times on 5 1/4" wide full height (what would now be considered two bays) drives -- or larger disk-pack based drives (aka washing machines) with the massive physical movement necessary for those read/write heads.
Today, I think the admin is better focused on distributing the data load better across different drives/arrays to even the load out and also focused on reducing overall disk i/o in creating database schema and applications. Focusing on very fine details like this is likely to have only marginal benefit next to those key areas --- but I can't presume to know for sure what this project has in mind.
The very moment a sufficiently peer reviewed and accredited study shows that the herbs in question have an actual quantifiable benefit, it is no longer "Herbal Medicine" or "Alternative Medicine" it is simply "Medicine" and would therefore be covered under the health coverage in all major modern industrialized nations except the US, which it would depend on what kind of an insurance plan you can afford.
I have three kids and a wife, and over the years we've talked a lot about what would happen if she lost her corporate benefits. Would I be able to keep running my business? I used to think no, I'd need to go take a corporate cube dweller job for the healthcare and for the "stability" --
but here's the thing -- The stability is a myth at this point, and health coverage co-pays and employee buy in are getting more and more expensive.
If my consulting and project work gets slow, it gets slow. It picks up or I alter my focus a bit. In the corporate world, it's all or nothing. One day a manager decides you're too expensive and can be replaced by some very good talent in India or Singapore -- who will eventually fail, not because of talent but because the US based project managers aren't able to write good specs and you've been making up for that locally for decades. Next thing you know, you're gone. Now you' have no health care anyway, plus no income, plus no prospects but to start over looking.
I looked at the cost, and decided that it'd be smarter to pay the $15k+ per year for coverage than to go captive again unless I had a crazy golden-parachute in my contract (which is unlikely as hell).
That explains so much about the data I get back from the data entry people.
11 pounds net weight or less of lithium batteries is a LOT of batteries. You'd need 7-10 typical laptop batteries to meet that quota.
Fantastic! You actually did create a car metaphore, and one that actually seems to make sense.
Bravo!
...while I totally sympathize with you, and without trying speak for anyone else -- I've wished for at least the option of a dockable interface since first trying Gimp. I've tried switching to it a few times, and I understand that it's quite capable of doing everything I need from such a package -- but I just personally can't get used to its interface while at the same time learning its features. My frustration level reaches the point where I just give up and get what I need to get done in Photoshop or an old copy of Paint Shop Pro -- even though I think Gimp is faster and more effective in many respects.
Please, someone come up with an automotive explanation, Quick!
If this were available to you in that state, you could consent to the disconnect. If yes/no is possible, presumably so other form of code may be as well -- slow, but possible.
Like you, this state is more horrifying to me than death - so ability to say "yes" to a "pull the plug?" question (with the unavoidable "Are you sure?" dialog box) -- would be welcome.
In 2007 there was a whole movement toward hybrid drives -- it went nowhere.
Nope, not a coach -- though I have been and would never tell someone else's kids to behave that way of course (if you're coaching, you represent the sport and the team and parents -- not just your own ideas). I am a father of three girls though, and at age 42 I started taking karate classes with two of them.
I've you've had martial arts training enough to do that effectively, you'll probably kill someone if you do. That might be over doing things a bit. Also, if you've had the training and have the confidence to do that, you're probably not a target for bullying.
Agreed -- heat kills batteries, hard drives, and capacitors in computer equipment. He should elevate the machine or use a laptop cooling pad of some kind for sure. Blowing out the dust with some canned air (carefully) every once in a while helps too -- or if your geek cred is high enough, strip the machine down and clean it out from the inside. The dust that coats heat sinks is a killer.
If you wanted to play the odds on best possible result -- he should use it tll it hits about 45% and then plug the laptop in and remove the battery, putting it on the shelf until he needs it.
The problems with that are
1. There's no battery in the machine, and it's really easy to pull the cord out the back of a laptop -- and its not really much of a laptop without a battery, is it?
2. The battery won't store charge indefinitely, so he's got to plug it in once in a while and make sure to keep that charge up around 40-50%
3. When he does need the battery, it hasn't got much charge in it so he's got to plan an hour or two ahead of time.
To me, I'd go with the "just use the damn thing" approach, and after a year or two just buy another hundred dollar battery.
For what it's worth, these guys were extremely helpful to me when I looked into this stuff and I've found them good to deal with (http://www.atbatt.com/). They also donate large numbers of 9v batteries to fire departments to give to people with smoke detectors, so I consider that worth some karma points.
This is one of those things that's really hard to pin down.
LiON batteries -- what's used in most laptops and netbooks now -- have different kind of failures and limits from the older NiCD and so on. Aside from the catastrophic failures that made the news, what happens with LiON is that there are a limited number of charge cycles per cell no matter what you do. The cells generally go around 300 charge cycles before their capacity drops to about half. The controller in the batteries (which prevents them from just bursting in flames all the time) senses this and reports it back to the os.
The result is that when you upgrade the machine, you've already had it a long while and you're not far from that day when suddenly you notice your capacity has dropped to about half and you'd better replace the battery. Your cruising along at 60% then a minute later you're getting the warning that you're out of battery -- one or more cells is no good anymore.
To test this, you'd have to buy a new battery first and then compare life cycles.
btw: Lots of theories about how to make them last longer -- most of the actual experts say to try to keep it at around 40% if you're going to store it and not use it, otherwise just use the machine. The controller won't allow it to overcharge an they have no "memory" per se.
Bullies are cowards. All of them.
The best thing to do with a grade school bully (assuming I'm talking to someone the same age) is to hit them in mouth. Hard. You well then either get hit back a couple of times -- which will hurt, but not be tragic -- or not. In either case, the bully will find someone else to pick on. Learning that getting beat up on the playground isn't the end of the world can itself be incredibly freeing -- and usually leads to it never happening again.
I have no patience for bullies -- but I have even less patience for helicopter parents who replay their own sad lives as victims through their kids and insist the world be made into a padded safety zone where nobody says mean things or looses at tag any more.
If I ignore the encoding issues and assume some mix of frequency and amplitude shifts or whatever to get that kind of bandwidth, I can go along with the idea that a well placed optical transmitter could bounce light around the room enough to do this -- but what about the return signal from the workstation or device? That would hardly be placed in an optimal location.
Further, consider that wireless is most useful for mobile and transient devices -- laptops, sure; but what about cell phones, pda's, sensors, and all manner of other wireless things. These are frequently -- even usually -- not placed in direct visual sight.
Frankly, I see this technology as potentially useful in long distance settings between stationary platforms (particularly in space) but not so much for day to day campus or home-office use.
If I'm not mistaken, making a joke about having something illegal to a TSA agent at the airport can result in large fines and even jail time. In this case, the TSA agent made a "joke" that represented a serious threat to the safety, freedom, long term career and life outcome of a 22 year old girl while in a position of authority and power. Jail time seems frankly appropriate to me.
I'm sure you'll find plenty of results if you search for things that get more stiff the more they're blown on.
So what you're saying is "Space is big. Really big...."