My experience with floppies and cassettes is that it's pretty easy to make them completely unusable with a magnet to the point where they can't be re-formatted or re-recorded. Then again, the magnet I used was a pretty strong U-shaped one, and I didn't just put it 'in the vicinity' of the media, if you know what I mean;) Anyhow, we're talking about static magnetic fields here. A wireless power system needs to use an oscilating field, which is a different story. For the rotating platters of a HD, the static magnet in the head assembly indeed produces an oscillating field, but this magnet is shielded very well. And indeed, flipping only a few bits can ruin a lot. By the way, if magnetic fields are so harmless to hard disks, then where are all the YouTube videos of people waving strong magnets over their hard drives?;)
The fact that you're posting this as an AC and the impressive list of references really make me want to believe you. Maybe you've accidentally clicked the AC button while trying to paste a link to http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceed ings/sec96/full_papers/gutmann/
That paper talks about securely destroying data. There's a rather big difference between destroying every single bit on a hard disk in a way that it's impossible to recover, and causing a few tiny errors which force the user to run diagnostic tools all the time or send their disks to an expensive recovery center. Also, people will likely want to use their devices while charging them. Nothing is said about the effects of an oscillating magnetic field on read & write operations.
I have invented something which contains all kinds of polluting toxic chemicals, is empty at the most inconvenient times, takes quite a lot of time to recharge, has a proprietary form factor for many devices, hence is often expensive or hard to replace. I call them batteries too, what a coincidence!:p
I wouldn't hate batteries so much if each new gadget wouldn't be using its own proprietary battery with corresponding proprietary charger, or built-in battery which is nearly impossible to replace. I know AAA batteries have become unsuitable for many devices, but how hard can it be to make new standard small form factors for Li-ion batteries?
This question is not as silly as you think. Considering efficiency, nothing can beat a direct wired connection, but the question is how much losses this wireless method will induce (no pun intended). Assuming that the cable is well-dimensioned, a simple wired mains adaptor has only one point where losses occur, being the adaptor circuitry itself (there may be some additional regulation in the device itself, but this could be seen as part of the adaptor). A wireless system like this has 4 places where losses occur:
the driver circuitry for the coil (which turns mains power into a magnetic field),
the resistance of the coil itself,
the resistance of the receiver coil in the device,
the driver circuitry in the device (which generates clean power from the unclean induced current).
That't not everything, however. More losses could be caused by eddy currents in ferromagnetic objects in the vicinity of the pad (or in the devices themselves). You'll probably not want to place this kind of pad on an iron desk. The big question is of course how large each of all these losses are...
I guess the field will be of a quite low frequency, and AFAIK, it has been proven that low-frequency magnetic fields are harmless.
Next to my concerns about magnetic media (see post below), I have more concerns about the power consumption when there are no devices on the charge pad. My guess is that there will be an inevitable amount of idle power consumption, because there's no such thing as a zero-impedance coil (yet). Of course this could be fixed by turning off the pad when it doesn't detect any devices during a certain period, and periodically sending a pulse to check for new devices (or just an 'activate' button).
So then you have a 90Watt electromagnet on your desk. Has anyone wondered yet what will happen to hard disks/microdrives inside laptops and MP3 players?
I thought a similar conclusion was published in The Lancet years ago. It said that "one unit" a day for women and "two units" for men was beneficial for the life expectancy. I forgot what the definition of one "unit" was, so feel free to define it yourself;)
You could also read that phrase as "This thing must IMHO be incredibly cool because it's even cooler than MacOS". Which makes it a compliment instead of an attack.
Don't you know? You can die a horrible death while running an OS inside a virtual machine! It's like learning to fly a plane in a flight simulator, those things kill people!
A 128kbps MP3 isn't much use for anything, except playing music on crappy headphones while jogging or so, when there's enough background noise to mask the artefacts. Yet in many places people are replacing vintage sound systems with a PC stuffed with MP3's of questionable quality, like in pubs. Considering the fact that psychoacoustic compression artefacts become more audible when the volume is louder, it's as if the pub floor is covered with broken glass and the people are dancing in it on the rhythm of the music, but the average person doesn't care.
It's the same with images. The average person doesn't care if the images are full of blocks and squares, if whatever's in the image is recognizable. Just look at the movies that are posted everywhere, most of them are total crap. In this aspect, this sensor is just pearls before swine.
I wonder why I'm even wasting time on this.
A plane is a giant fragile balloon, made out of materials which are as light as possible while being strong enough to prevent it from breaking apart under normal conditions. This particular plane was freshly filled with kerosine and unlike most plane crashes, the pilot was not trying to reduce the speed to the minimum, on the contrary. Moreover, it was not trying to 'land' on a horizontal surface, but smashed straight into a vertical wall.
Now what happens if you smash a balloon filled with kerosine at a speed of mach 0.8 into a stone wall? Do you think there will be anything left which even remotely looks like a part of an airplane? Try smashing an egg against a wall with all your might and wonder where the familiar oval shape went.
Oh and FYI, this is also valid outside of America;)
Yeah, I live in Europe and most of these rules are distilled from mails with Europeans:)
These rules actually apply to old-fashioned snail mail too. But with e-mail it seems to have gotten worse, probably due to its less formal nature.
After years of internet usage, I have distilled 5 rules for an e-mail to be understandable for the average person.
Never ask more than 1 question in an e-mail. People will only answer either the first or the last question. If it's really necessary to ask multiple questions, make the mail look like a questionnaire (i.e. put all questions together, bulleted with numbers, with no text in between).
If you ask a question, always put it at the very end of the mail, and don't forget the question mark.
Never try to tell people more than 1 important thing in an e-mail.
Never try to tell people an important thing and ask an important question in the same e-mail. They will most likely only read the important thing and forget about the question, even if you follow rule 2.
Keep your e-mails so short that it's actually impossible to tell anything useful, but if you try to explain it properly it will be too long anyway to fit in the average person's attention span, and people will even understand less than from the too short mail.
Only if you really know your correspondent well, you can deviate from these rules.
Face it fanboys: your god has a virus. And even worse, you are so technically incompetent you don't even know what a virus is. You aren't qualified to be taking part in this discussion.
Face it trollboy: if you would have done some more effort to see how it works, you would see from your own quoted definitions that this is not a virus. A virus spreads between different computers without any user interaction. However, this thing is only able to send the fake JPEG file to other computers via a few IM programs. The users on those other computers still need to be online, accept the file, and open it themselves to 'install' it. Therefore it is a trojan. Only within the limits of a single computer it could be considered a virus, because it can copy itself automatically to other programs upon opening an infected one (provided that the user who opens it has enough privileges to modify programs).
JavaScript shouldn't be able to leak objects, no matter how retarded it is. I think this issue has been fixed on the trunk though.
Here's a nice counterexample. In fact, on my machine Firefox totally chokes on itself after letting this page run for about 10 minutes, before even being able to gobble up all memory:
http://elek2002.vtk.be/displayframe.html
This leak, or whatever it is, was already present in early versions of Netscape. It got fixed, but apparently it was reinvented in Firefox. Unless of course I'm doing something really wrong in this script, but I don't see what it could possibly be. Anyone who knows how to fix this would be really of much help. Otherwise I can only hope that this bug will ever be fixed.
The job title was computer. Say you go up to one of these math people and ask them what they do: "I'm a computer. I am one who computes. I compute the answers to complex formulas for use in various tables."
Hey kid! I'm a computer. Stop all the downloadin'! Help computer.
Fluorescent lamps are not really suitable for applications (think toilet room/stairwell lighting) where the light only needs to be on during a few minutes, and is turned on/off many times a day. Even with the better fluorescent bulbs that have their full output immediately, there's still the problem that they'll wear out much quicker when turned on and off many times. The rated lifetime is most often estimated on a typical usage pattern where the light is turned on and off only once or twice a day, and burns continuously during a few hours. For such applications, a simple incandescent bulb is perfect. You won't save much anyway by replacing it with something more energy-efficient, if the bulb only burns a few minutes a day. You might even end up spending more money because you have to replace these more expensive bulbs faster than expected.
It is the incandescent colour that is the wrong temperature, not the LEDs. Mid-day sun is nominally 5600K, and morning/evening higher. So why do you want to emulate candle-light?
Maybe because it looks cozy? I know many people who hate the typical fluorescent tube light because it's too harsh. When watching TV (or doing whatever) late at night, people don't want to have some bluish light shining in the background. It's as if you forgot to sleep and the first daylight is already shining through the curtains;)
Actually LEDs do produce heat, albeit the ratio of heat/light is much lower than with incandescent bulbs. The common LED is designed for a maximum current of 20 ~ 30mA, and at these currents the heat production is negligible. You can drive them at a higher current, but then the heat production becomes significant and can cause the LED to burn out (and at real high currents, the junction simply breaks down immediately). The more performant Luxeon LEDs are attached to a tiny heatsink and the high power ones (3W and 5W) require an additional heatsink to use them beyond 1W.
My experience with the media in this country (Belgium), is that they tended to bash Apple, even though many newspapers and magazines run on Macs. Face it: they have to write articles and make lay-outs on Macs all day long, and have a Mac overdose at the end of the day. My guess is that many of the reporters have Windows PCs at home, to take a break from the Mac environment they have to spend their working hours in. Not many people want to be reminded of their work all the time when they get home.
But after Apple had become cool because of the iPod, reporters tend to be more enthousiastic about other Apple products too, although Apple's non-iPod products still get little media coverage in this country. Apple's general image has simply changed, from "the company that makes weird computers that don't flow with the stream", to "the company that creates cool and stylish appliances". People who write newspapers don't want to fight the opinion of most people, they want to sell newspapers, therefore they follow this general image.
So I don't think there is any positive relation between the using of Macs by most writers and what they write about Macs. If there's any relation, it might more likely be negative. I believe the recent success of the company has a much more profound impact.
Indeed, this sounds like market speak for "We add some nice sounding junk to your audio, but it'll be nowhere near the undistorted CD audio.".
Under normal circumstances, there is no room to improve a 44kHz 16bit signal intended for end user audio (I'm not talking about mixing & stuff). Most humans can't hear above 16kHz (20 if you're lucky) and 44.1kHz can represent signals up to 22kHz. The only reason to use higher sampling frequencies, is to make the design of digital low-pass filters easier. 16bit is enough to represent a dynamic range of 90dB, which is far more than what you'll hear in the overcompressed crap that populates the charts today.
The only way to 'improve' the sound, is to modify it somehow, using some filters or effects. In other words, it will be distorted.
Maybe they found out what typical MP3 distortion sounds like, and invented a filter that undoes it. But this will also distort other sounds that accidentally have the same characteristic as MP3 distortion. Or maybe they just add some harmonics to the sound. Whatever it is, High Fidelity it isn't. Maybe that's why the name is 'X-Fi' and not 'Hi-Fi'...
I only block the 'annoying'* ads with Adblock, by using a regex that will most likely block any similar ads. I also have FlashBlock installed, so I can control which flash animations start running and which don't.
*: With 'annoying', I mean anything that distracts me from trying to use a webpage normally. A flashing and moving ad will always annoy, but a large static image next to an article, causing the text to be squeezed into a narrow column, is just as annoying. Also annoying are ads which somehow cause the rendering of the webpage to be delayed until they are loaded. If the ad server doesn't respond, I have to wait eternally until such paged load. Annoying is an understatement in this case.
However, I recently discovered a new kind of ad which is both incredibly annoying and harder to block. I call them 'pop-in-between ads', and you can see them on www.dilbert.com (if you try to go to Past Strips). It's a dedicated ad webpage which is shoved in your face when you click a link. Instead of going to the linked page, you first have to wait 5 seconds for a stupid ad to load, and then 10 more seconds for a redirect to the real page, unless you can find and click the tiny 'skip' button first. These stinkers are blockable with Adblock too, however. Just look at the address bar and add the domain name to Adblock. If you look in the Dilbert page source, you'll find a tiny script that tries to load a script from 'interclick.com' (the name says it all). The script uses a document.write with a pathetic attempt to mangle the written 'script' tag. But I assume Adblock just kills the entire script. Luckily the links don't break due to this, but just point you to the real page instantly.
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My experience with floppies and cassettes is that it's pretty easy to make them completely unusable with a magnet to the point where they can't be re-formatted or re-recorded. Then again, the magnet I used was a pretty strong U-shaped one, and I didn't just put it 'in the vicinity' of the media, if you know what I mean ;) ;)
Anyhow, we're talking about static magnetic fields here. A wireless power system needs to use an oscilating field, which is a different story. For the rotating platters of a HD, the static magnet in the head assembly indeed produces an oscillating field, but this magnet is shielded very well. And indeed, flipping only a few bits can ruin a lot. By the way, if magnetic fields are so harmless to hard disks, then where are all the YouTube videos of people waving strong magnets over their hard drives?
The fact that you're posting this as an AC and the impressive list of references really make me want to believe you. Maybe you've accidentally clicked the AC button while trying to paste a link to http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceed ings/sec96/full_papers/gutmann/
That paper talks about securely destroying data. There's a rather big difference between destroying every single bit on a hard disk in a way that it's impossible to recover, and causing a few tiny errors which force the user to run diagnostic tools all the time or send their disks to an expensive recovery center. Also, people will likely want to use their devices while charging them. Nothing is said about the effects of an oscillating magnetic field on read & write operations.
I have invented something which contains all kinds of polluting toxic chemicals, is empty at the most inconvenient times, takes quite a lot of time to recharge, has a proprietary form factor for many devices, hence is often expensive or hard to replace. I call them batteries too, what a coincidence! :p
I wouldn't hate batteries so much if each new gadget wouldn't be using its own proprietary battery with corresponding proprietary charger, or built-in battery which is nearly impossible to replace. I know AAA batteries have become unsuitable for many devices, but how hard can it be to make new standard small form factors for Li-ion batteries?
- the driver circuitry for the coil (which turns mains power into a magnetic field),
- the resistance of the coil itself,
- the resistance of the receiver coil in the device,
- the driver circuitry in the device (which generates clean power from the unclean induced current).
That't not everything, however. More losses could be caused by eddy currents in ferromagnetic objects in the vicinity of the pad (or in the devices themselves). You'll probably not want to place this kind of pad on an iron desk. The big question is of course how large each of all these losses are...I guess the field will be of a quite low frequency, and AFAIK, it has been proven that low-frequency magnetic fields are harmless.
Next to my concerns about magnetic media (see post below), I have more concerns about the power consumption when there are no devices on the charge pad. My guess is that there will be an inevitable amount of idle power consumption, because there's no such thing as a zero-impedance coil (yet). Of course this could be fixed by turning off the pad when it doesn't detect any devices during a certain period, and periodically sending a pulse to check for new devices (or just an 'activate' button).
So then you have a 90Watt electromagnet on your desk. Has anyone wondered yet what will happen to hard disks/microdrives inside laptops and MP3 players?
I thought a similar conclusion was published in The Lancet years ago. It said that "one unit" a day for women and "two units" for men was beneficial for the life expectancy. I forgot what the definition of one "unit" was, so feel free to define it yourself ;)
You could also read that phrase as "This thing must IMHO be incredibly cool because it's even cooler than MacOS". Which makes it a compliment instead of an attack.
A 128kbps MP3 isn't much use for anything, except playing music on crappy headphones while jogging or so, when there's enough background noise to mask the artefacts. Yet in many places people are replacing vintage sound systems with a PC stuffed with MP3's of questionable quality, like in pubs. Considering the fact that psychoacoustic compression artefacts become more audible when the volume is louder, it's as if the pub floor is covered with broken glass and the people are dancing in it on the rhythm of the music, but the average person doesn't care.
It's the same with images. The average person doesn't care if the images are full of blocks and squares, if whatever's in the image is recognizable. Just look at the movies that are posted everywhere, most of them are total crap. In this aspect, this sensor is just pearls before swine.
A plane is a giant fragile balloon, made out of materials which are as light as possible while being strong enough to prevent it from breaking apart under normal conditions. This particular plane was freshly filled with kerosine and unlike most plane crashes, the pilot was not trying to reduce the speed to the minimum, on the contrary. Moreover, it was not trying to 'land' on a horizontal surface, but smashed straight into a vertical wall.
Now what happens if you smash a balloon filled with kerosine at a speed of mach 0.8 into a stone wall? Do you think there will be anything left which even remotely looks like a part of an airplane? Try smashing an egg against a wall with all your might and wonder where the familiar oval shape went.
Two words: duct tape. Or, if you really want to be sure: hammer.
These rules actually apply to old-fashioned snail mail too. But with e-mail it seems to have gotten worse, probably due to its less formal nature.
- Never ask more than 1 question in an e-mail. People will only answer either the first or the last question. If it's really necessary to ask multiple questions, make the mail look like a questionnaire (i.e. put all questions together, bulleted with numbers, with no text in between).
- If you ask a question, always put it at the very end of the mail, and don't forget the question mark.
- Never try to tell people more than 1 important thing in an e-mail.
- Never try to tell people an important thing and ask an important question in the same e-mail. They will most likely only read the important thing and forget about the question, even if you follow rule 2.
- Keep your e-mails so short that it's actually impossible to tell anything useful, but if you try to explain it properly it will be too long anyway to fit in the average person's attention span, and people will even understand less than from the too short mail.
Only if you really know your correspondent well, you can deviate from these rules.Face it trollboy: if you would have done some more effort to see how it works, you would see from your own quoted definitions that this is not a virus. A virus spreads between different computers without any user interaction. However, this thing is only able to send the fake JPEG file to other computers via a few IM programs. The users on those other computers still need to be online, accept the file, and open it themselves to 'install' it. Therefore it is a trojan. Only within the limits of a single computer it could be considered a virus, because it can copy itself automatically to other programs upon opening an infected one (provided that the user who opens it has enough privileges to modify programs).
This leak, or whatever it is, was already present in early versions of Netscape. It got fixed, but apparently it was reinvented in Firefox. Unless of course I'm doing something really wrong in this script, but I don't see what it could possibly be. Anyone who knows how to fix this would be really of much help. Otherwise I can only hope that this bug will ever be fixed.
Now I understand where that came from.
Fluorescent lamps are not really suitable for applications (think toilet room/stairwell lighting) where the light only needs to be on during a few minutes, and is turned on/off many times a day. Even with the better fluorescent bulbs that have their full output immediately, there's still the problem that they'll wear out much quicker when turned on and off many times. The rated lifetime is most often estimated on a typical usage pattern where the light is turned on and off only once or twice a day, and burns continuously during a few hours. For such applications, a simple incandescent bulb is perfect. You won't save much anyway by replacing it with something more energy-efficient, if the bulb only burns a few minutes a day. You might even end up spending more money because you have to replace these more expensive bulbs faster than expected.
Actually LEDs do produce heat, albeit the ratio of heat/light is much lower than with incandescent bulbs. The common LED is designed for a maximum current of 20 ~ 30mA, and at these currents the heat production is negligible. You can drive them at a higher current, but then the heat production becomes significant and can cause the LED to burn out (and at real high currents, the junction simply breaks down immediately). The more performant Luxeon LEDs are attached to a tiny heatsink and the high power ones (3W and 5W) require an additional heatsink to use them beyond 1W.
My experience with the media in this country (Belgium), is that they tended to bash Apple, even though many newspapers and magazines run on Macs. Face it: they have to write articles and make lay-outs on Macs all day long, and have a Mac overdose at the end of the day. My guess is that many of the reporters have Windows PCs at home, to take a break from the Mac environment they have to spend their working hours in. Not many people want to be reminded of their work all the time when they get home.
But after Apple had become cool because of the iPod, reporters tend to be more enthousiastic about other Apple products too, although Apple's non-iPod products still get little media coverage in this country. Apple's general image has simply changed, from "the company that makes weird computers that don't flow with the stream", to "the company that creates cool and stylish appliances". People who write newspapers don't want to fight the opinion of most people, they want to sell newspapers, therefore they follow this general image.
So I don't think there is any positive relation between the using of Macs by most writers and what they write about Macs. If there's any relation, it might more likely be negative. I believe the recent success of the company has a much more profound impact.
Indeed, this sounds like market speak for "We add some nice sounding junk to your audio, but it'll be nowhere near the undistorted CD audio.".
Under normal circumstances, there is no room to improve a 44kHz 16bit signal intended for end user audio (I'm not talking about mixing & stuff). Most humans can't hear above 16kHz (20 if you're lucky) and 44.1kHz can represent signals up to 22kHz. The only reason to use higher sampling frequencies, is to make the design of digital low-pass filters easier. 16bit is enough to represent a dynamic range of 90dB, which is far more than what you'll hear in the overcompressed crap that populates the charts today.
The only way to 'improve' the sound, is to modify it somehow, using some filters or effects. In other words, it will be distorted.
Maybe they found out what typical MP3 distortion sounds like, and invented a filter that undoes it. But this will also distort other sounds that accidentally have the same characteristic as MP3 distortion. Or maybe they just add some harmonics to the sound. Whatever it is, High Fidelity it isn't. Maybe that's why the name is 'X-Fi' and not 'Hi-Fi'...
I only block the 'annoying'* ads with Adblock, by using a regex that will most likely block any similar ads. I also have FlashBlock installed, so I can control which flash animations start running and which don't.
*: With 'annoying', I mean anything that distracts me from trying to use a webpage normally. A flashing and moving ad will always annoy, but a large static image next to an article, causing the text to be squeezed into a narrow column, is just as annoying. Also annoying are ads which somehow cause the rendering of the webpage to be delayed until they are loaded. If the ad server doesn't respond, I have to wait eternally until such paged load. Annoying is an understatement in this case.
However, I recently discovered a new kind of ad which is both incredibly annoying and harder to block. I call them 'pop-in-between ads', and you can see them on www.dilbert.com (if you try to go to Past Strips). It's a dedicated ad webpage which is shoved in your face when you click a link. Instead of going to the linked page, you first have to wait 5 seconds for a stupid ad to load, and then 10 more seconds for a redirect to the real page, unless you can find and click the tiny 'skip' button first.
These stinkers are blockable with Adblock too, however. Just look at the address bar and add the domain name to Adblock. If you look in the Dilbert page source, you'll find a tiny script that tries to load a script from 'interclick.com' (the name says it all). The script uses a document.write with a pathetic attempt to mangle the written 'script' tag. But I assume Adblock just kills the entire script. Luckily the links don't break due to this, but just point you to the real page instantly.