That's because they got in a rut of inventing the "gadget of the week" for every episode and that, in my opinion, is one of the weakest parts of TNG.
When faced with some horrible challenge or new enemy, they would suddenly whip out -no, not a penis- but some new gadget that they suddenly invented just that second, which happened to be EXACTLY the gadget they needed! Wouldn't you know it had been sitting here all along!?
Once, OK. Twice, eh. But over and over and over? Suuure.
The A-Team did similar things but sort of got by because at least they attempted to show the team MAKING the device. TNG just opened a damn box as if they ordered it via UPS.
Worse, having come up with supergadget of the week, they use it and throw it away never to be seen again. It's a sign of weak writers stuck for a fancy, flashy gimmick, and weak producers who allow or promote this sort of thing.
As for the super-enemies who could wipe out the Federation just as soon as sneeze, well, yeah, there are too many of them too and funny how they don't seem to fight with each other much less even know about each other. With as many super-powerful races running around (considering how many they find), you'd think these superraces would eventually go to war against each other.
Might make for an interesting story -perhaps they have done this, I'm not as big on ST lore as some- and reduce the superrace overpopulation a bit.
Not that I want to give Berman ANY ideas. Firing his butt should be step one, IMO.
Sirius has been ignoring certain less sexy aspects that drives growth in this medium.
Sirius is losing the car partnership race. Folks that buy new cars have something like a 30-50% conversion rate for whatever ships in the cars. That is becoming, increasingly, XM.
What about the OTHER rate? The rate at which people fail to renew their XM contracts? Sure, they'll take the free 90 days of service with a new car, and maybe even sign up for a year, but a lot of people feel like the polish wears off the apple around the 100 day mark. If they haven't converted those free months to paid months by then, it's not going to happen.
New sub counts are great news. But the losses are also very high. These are the dark numbers neither XM or Sirius want talk about: how many people bail out after tasting the honey. Satellite radio is not the crack some people think it is.
True for the N64, negligible for the GameCube. The reason the proprietary format for the N64 was expensive was because cartridges are just plain expensive. Optical media, nah. Make the disc a little smaller, change the format a bit. That wasn't anything but a minor change to the production facility. If it did cost more for the developers, it's doubtful it was by much. It was CERTAINLY nowhere near the difference between producing a CD and producing a catridge.
Don't forget, the reason N stayed with ROM carts for so long (and still has for the handhelds) is that Nintendo OWNS the ROM factories. They make the things for themselves and for third-parties and pocketed huge profits from making game carts.
They could have jumped to optical with the N64 but they had too much money invested in ROM factories. Jumping to optical would have been a huge writeoff. It's only the handhelds that have mitigated the issue.
Now they've gone optical but again it's their own format that they alone make. Anyone who wants to do a GC game is stuck dealing with Nintendo for manufacture and Nintendo can set the prices and keep the profits. That's probably more important to Nintendo than preventing piracy. They do not want to support a format that anyone else can make.
Contrast with Sony and MS where the two companies reserve the right to approve the games but the third-parties can have the discs made anywhere and it's really just a common DVD anyway. Cheap and easy to make.
It may not SOUND like a big deal but these kinds of things can matter a lot to developers when there is only X amount of profit to be made on each game. If it looks like a chunk of that will get sucked out just having the special discs made, well, you tell me where you're gonna focus on making games.
I have long expected Samsung to jump in with MS for the Xbox program if not buy out MS's share. The MTV special was LOADED with Samsung ads. The two companies are apparently already living together.
Why? Microsoft wants to beat PS3 and Samsung just wants Sony dead. Worse for Sony, Samsung is on a tear and actually has the products to do it, in vertical markets both dominated by Sony and in markets Sony can't touch. What crumbs Samsung leaves behind, LG is happy to grab. Sony is under huge pressure they simply have not felt in years.
For MS, Samsung brings the manufacturing skills that would come in handy for making consoles.
Right now, making Sony miserable is Samsung job #1 and if they can throw a few billion at videogames and give Sony a massive headache, they'll do it. In a flash.
So I speculate they will either go in with MS as coproducers on Xbox360 or the third Xbox will be made by Samsung and powered by MS.
The problem with broadcast is that someone else gets to choose what you listen to. Oh you think you choose because you have 30 stations to pick from, but that's not many and damn little variety.
So then there's satellite radio but there are still only SO many channels and almost none of them are actual broadcast stations, which is where I find many of the shows I like.
What if I want to listen to a radio station from another city? What if I want to listen to an LA new/talk station while traveling in Atlanta? Or vice versa?
Both cities have huge numbers of ClearChannel stations playing the same formats (shocker, I know!) but the STATIONS and what they cover are distinctly different. Thankfully, the LA station has a streaming feed. I want to be able to hear THAT in my car in Atlanta. If not that station, then I want to pick from another or another or another. I don't want to be restricted to what's on the local dial.
I think WiMax-enabled car receivers are going to be the answer or at least that's my killer app for WiMax.
I can't !@#$%^ find the article now, but I read one Xbo360 piece which claimed -claimed- that MS was saying there would be 200 (two HUNDRED) games available by the end of 2005, so basically 200 launch titles.
LMAO
Impossible. There aren't THAT many different kinds of games, the developers are still working on getting dev kits much less learning how to make games with them, there aren't that many games in the pipeline, and even if there were, releasing 200 of them would drain out every game for years.
What if the answer is backward compatibility? Even if they manage to do it, there aren't 200 Xbox I games still in production. I don't know where the hell they're gonna get 200 games between now and the end of the year. I just don't see it.
Wait. They didn't say they'd be GOOD games. Mother Truckers 2, here we come!
It's the price between $300 - $400 with some games on launch day (of which, if history is a judge from the PS2, Xbox 1, and Gamecube launch, one of those games is worth having, and 6 months afterwards the other "killer apps" show up), or having a good library including the all important Halo 1 and 2.
Not sure if there's much of an effect, as-such. I have worked with some printing systems where circuit boards were submerged in mineral oil. Being dunked in oil -contaminated with ink, no less- was the normal state for those machines. They ran fine but I suppose they were purpose-built for that.
Heat is not going to be an issue. The oil tends to stay at room temp and it disperses heat pretty well. I suppose he could put in a passive heat exchanger or connect up a pump and run the oil through a transmission cooler with a fan blowing on it. But that's probably total overkill. Take the heat output of a CPU and divide it by the mass of oil and the average oil temp is not going to go up that much.
He should not need to change the oil because it doesn't "go bad" or wear out. All it's doing is conducting heat. There might be some evaporation over time and the oil may get dirty if he uses dirty PC parts or leaves the lid open to room dust or something. There are oil filter kits for this if absolutely needed. It's just a recirculating pump and an oil filter like a car might use. No big deal.
3. Robotic servicing is expected to cost $1.4B for dev, launch, and operation through splashdown.
Splashdown?
My understanding was that the robot would either stay with the Hubble (although the mass would probably mess up the telescope's gyros) or it would be simply dumped overboard and eventually burn up.
Preliminary robot designs have all been spindly. I doubt any part of it would survive to actually splashdown and there's no need to recover the thing intact. Just make another one later.
I can't vouch for those rumors but I remember hearing whispers about strange "solid state optical computer memory devices" back in 70's. It was simply some strange technology rather than something recovered from a UFO or anywhere else.
Did these optical devices exist or was it just a rumor? I don't know. But it seems strange that anyone would come up with that concept out of thin air when we had barely begun to work with desktop computers of the era.
Apple IIs were considered powerful at the time. Holographic or Optical memory devices would have been beyond comprehension.
So why was anyone talking about optical instead of something equally outlandish like SOI or 70mm fabs? All of those things are equally sci-fi to somebody in 1978. Why pin it down to ONE kind of technology?
It only seems odd to me now because we ARE moving toward optical computers. It will be years before we have practical working optical computers but the stuff is on the way. Rumor becomes fact given enough time.
Ah well, time to put my tinfoil hat back on.
Human beings are capable of amazing things. I think it does a diservice to their talents and ingenuity if we assume innovations are due to borrowed alien technology rather than hard work.
On the other hand, if we do have over technology to play with, I hope to hell we are disecting it. I just hope it's more useful than just making Half Life 2 run faster.
Do you have a fan handy? Any sort of window fan or table fan will do, or even one of those 80mm computer fans.
Power it up and aim the air at your face. You should feel a cooling effect, maybe even a lot of cooling if it's a strong fan. Move the fan away a little. Distance decreases the effect but it's probably still noticable, right?
Now turn the fan around. No effect at all at a distance. Move it closer. Still nothing. You're going to have to put your face right up next to the fan to feel anything and even then, it won't be very strong compared to the air coming out the other side.
Bigger fans do have more of a suction effect and it also depends on the design. Vacuum cleaners obviously have quite a bit of intake power, but they also have substantial blower exhaust output.
And what of CPU fans? CPU fans can get away with suction because they are sitting right on top of the heatsink. But, I have to say I have never owned such a CPU cooler. All of mine have blown air down upon the heatsink.
Yeah. LOL. It's not the PCB that gets hot anyway, at least not on my drives.
The heat is in the disc, the drive motor, and related surfaces. Some of them can get quite hot. I still have some (working!) giant SCSI bricks that get hot enough to burn flesh.
Full height 5.25 drives that would burn fingers and break your foot too, if you dropped it. I think it weighs close to 10 pounds. It'd probably still work after the fall but it only holds 1 gig or something. Not worth a bother.
Anyway, I cool my drives with a 120v turbine fan that blows sideways across the whole drive. The air cools the disc side and the PCB side. Works great. Doesn't tax the system PSU.
Cinematech is not"just game trailers for upcoming games" as you said.
It's cutscenes, FMV, trailers, and whatever else from old games, new games, upcoming games, etc. Mostly cutscenes and intros. Not many trailers.
That's not to say any of it is actually GOOD, because damn little of it IS good. It's just that it's not merely trailers for upcoming games. Nitpicking.
Yes, Arena is the show where you watch other people play games. Arena is a microcosm of what's wrong with G4: anyone who plays video games or computer games would most likely prefer to PLAY the games themselves rather than watch SOMEBODY ELSE play the games.
If they have time or the desire to sit there and watch other people play, either they're too broke to buy games (great advertising demo: the poor and broke!) or they lost the TV remote and can't change the channel, OR they're stuck in a hospital bed with broken limbs and can't change the channel.
I deliberately configured my office so I cannot see the TV when I am working at my computer. I used to leave Tech TV on just as background noise all day long. Can't do that with G4 because it's too boring. Instead I tend to leave the Science channel (whoo! Slightly better than G4 anyway), NWI (bye), or my DVD player screensaver running.
There's the cold of space and there's the hot of space. Most spacecraft don't spend their time pointing in ONE direction so the ships have to built with some expectation that exposed parts will face heat and cold.
Anything exposed to the sun is going to get very hot indeed. That'd be bad for a bare CPU.
Anything exposed to the night side (or the side where the sun ain't) is going to be cold but a CPU is still going to need a heat sink to effectively remove the heat. Empty space is not a particularly good conductor of thermal energy (i.e. heat).
Most exotic space-approved processors are not powerful enough to need the exotic cooling we need here on the ground. Your P4 or AMD64 flies here. But not in space.
Here's a thought: if WE launch spacecraft using fairly obsolete technology because it usually works, what does that say about any alien technology we might someday run across? It is logical to think whatever we encounter might be their version of "obsolete but reliable" tech.
Therefore, if we actually DO have captured UFOs, perhaps whatever makes them tick -while exotic and exciting to us- is not nearly the most advanced technology the aliens might have. Perhaps the common antigrav UFOs are no more advanced the average junker WWII-era Jeep. Good for some off-road kicking around but nothing special compared to a modern off-road vehicle.
Military analogy: the common UFOs are the Air Force Cub trainers. They keep the F-35s and the aircraft carriers at home.
First read the book when I was about 11 years old.
Loved it, especially that bit about the Babelfish
But it wasn't until years later that I realized what the hell a "Zebra crossing" was. I thought it had to do with the animal, you see, and that sort of made the punchline a puzzle rather than a payoff.
I know I will get kharmonized to hell for saying this but I think the books would have been slightly funnier for American readers if they had Americanized some of the gags.
Back up the 300 to another 300. Pure data backup, not RAID.
How is this better than RAID? RAID duplicates data in real time. If you lose/delete/corrupt a file, there's no real backup. A dodgy raid controller can also hose everything. Backing up to another drive maintains a second copy of the data. Odds are you will not lose both the main and backup drives at the same time.
How is it worse than RAID? It's not real time so daily or even hourly backups are required, but even a slightly old backup is better than losing everything.
I clone my drives on a weekly basis and apply incremental backups on the other 6 days. Each system has a pair of identical drives. One backs up to the other. When I used 80GB drives, each system had a pair of 80s. Now I prefer to use pairs of 160s or 300s.
Recently had one system lose one 80 out of a pair. In this case the backup drive rather than the primary was the failed drive. Had it been the other way around, I still would not have lost much data.
Yeah, but you're only going to be pissed for a couple seconds.
On October 12, 1992, A general aviation aircraft (small plane) N111JC crashed on the street next to me while I was driving along down the road. One moment there's a big shadow over the car (semi must be passing me, said I), then a tail number flashes by the car (uh oh, that's NOT good, said I), then the road and everything was suddenly on fire.
The plane hit a couple utility poles which ripped open the fuel tanks, then the plane tumbled on down the road for a few hundred yard, bumped into a bridge abutment and basically exploded. Those who survived the crash were badly burned. One or two of them later died at the hospital.
After seeing that, I don't particularly want to survive such a crash. I don't want to be HALFWAY burned to death.
Accident report for the curious: http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20001211X 15803&key=1
Pan two clicks to the right and there's another plane just passing over the building where I work.
This is normal: the planes are usually so low over our building that we can see people in the windows and read the tail number.
Yes, we CAN hear the planes inside the building. No, triple-insulated windows aren't enough. The sound still comes through the roof. You just get used to it after a while.
It's only going to bother me that one time when I hear something really loud and look up in time to see a big orange ball of fire coming at me. Ooopsie, missed approach. No go-around.
Poor G4! Bet the're all pissed Microsoft snubbed G4, the only actual video games channel that nobody watches, to instead debut their new toy on what used to be an important music channel but is now some mutant thing nobody really cares about.
G4 would have been perfect for this debut. But MS had to go and point out what everyone knew: video game TV is stupid. Bye bye G4.
But still, it would have been smarter to debut this on QVC. Huge audience ready to preorder, huge boost to QVCs image, etc.
Still, if I pay cash - why should I wait for a check in the mail? Cashing a check isn't cheap for people who don't have checking accounts, not everyone does have one too. Hell, they discourage the use of checks as it is.
Many stores don't do cash refunds because they don't want to keep large amounts of cash on hand just in case somebody needs a refund. Cash is too tempting for robbery or sticky fingers.
You can pay for large items in cash, sure, but if it's over a certain amount (varies by store policy) most or all of your money goes straight into the store safe rather than the register cash drawer. They probably couldn't refund a large cash purchase even if you hadn't yet left the store.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because they got in a rut of inventing the "gadget of the week" for every episode and that, in my opinion, is one of the weakest parts of TNG.
When faced with some horrible challenge or new enemy, they would suddenly whip out -no, not a penis- but some new gadget that they suddenly invented just that second, which happened to be EXACTLY the gadget they needed! Wouldn't you know it had been sitting here all along!?
Once, OK. Twice, eh. But over and over and over? Suuure.
The A-Team did similar things but sort of got by because at least they attempted to show the team MAKING the device. TNG just opened a damn box as if they ordered it via UPS.
Worse, having come up with supergadget of the week, they use it and throw it away never to be seen again. It's a sign of weak writers stuck for a fancy, flashy gimmick, and weak producers who allow or promote this sort of thing.
As for the super-enemies who could wipe out the Federation just as soon as sneeze, well, yeah, there are too many of them too and funny how they don't seem to fight with each other much less even know about each other. With as many super-powerful races running around (considering how many they find), you'd think these superraces would eventually go to war against each other.
Might make for an interesting story -perhaps they have done this, I'm not as big on ST lore as some- and reduce the superrace overpopulation a bit.
Not that I want to give Berman ANY ideas. Firing his butt should be step one, IMO.
Sure, the PC is $69 although upgrading it to be decent adds at least another $30, but the SINGLE shipping option is $50 flat-rate.
So your $69 PC nearly doubles in cost.
Is this a joke?
Sirius is losing the car partnership race. Folks that buy new cars have something like a 30-50% conversion rate for whatever ships in the cars. That is becoming, increasingly, XM.
What about the OTHER rate? The rate at which people fail to renew their XM contracts? Sure, they'll take the free 90 days of service with a new car, and maybe even sign up for a year, but a lot of people feel like the polish wears off the apple around the 100 day mark. If they haven't converted those free months to paid months by then, it's not going to happen.
New sub counts are great news. But the losses are also very high. These are the dark numbers neither XM or Sirius want talk about: how many people bail out after tasting the honey. Satellite radio is not the crack some people think it is.
In other news, Carnegie suddenly vanished in a huge flash. The diamond lab was destroyed along with all hands.
A press release faxed by DeBeers the day before the sudden disappearence denied all knowledge of the incident.
Seriously, you can bet DeBeers is considering all options including dirty tricks to keep their monopoly. Anything like this is a threat to them.
This thing looks big, bigger than Xbox 1 or 360. And I mean size, not market. MSN has a picture of Ken Kutaragi holding the PS3.
o s/050516/050516_playstation_hmed.hsmall.jpg
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Phot
What happened to that fluff about the Xbox's biggest problem in Japan was that it's too big?
Was size the real issue or was it simply unpatriotic to buy American?
PS: the controller looks terrible. I hope it's a lot more ergonomic than it looks.
Don't forget, the reason N stayed with ROM carts for so long (and still has for the handhelds) is that Nintendo OWNS the ROM factories. They make the things for themselves and for third-parties and pocketed huge profits from making game carts.
They could have jumped to optical with the N64 but they had too much money invested in ROM factories. Jumping to optical would have been a huge writeoff. It's only the handhelds that have mitigated the issue.
Now they've gone optical but again it's their own format that they alone make. Anyone who wants to do a GC game is stuck dealing with Nintendo for manufacture and Nintendo can set the prices and keep the profits. That's probably more important to Nintendo than preventing piracy. They do not want to support a format that anyone else can make.
Contrast with Sony and MS where the two companies reserve the right to approve the games but the third-parties can have the discs made anywhere and it's really just a common DVD anyway. Cheap and easy to make.
It may not SOUND like a big deal but these kinds of things can matter a lot to developers when there is only X amount of profit to be made on each game. If it looks like a chunk of that will get sucked out just having the special discs made, well, you tell me where you're gonna focus on making games.
There's a fourth wildcard: Samsung.
:)
I have long expected Samsung to jump in with MS for the Xbox program if not buy out MS's share. The MTV special was LOADED with Samsung ads. The two companies are apparently already living together.
Why? Microsoft wants to beat PS3 and Samsung just wants Sony dead. Worse for Sony, Samsung is on a tear and actually has the products to do it, in vertical markets both dominated by Sony and in markets Sony can't touch. What crumbs Samsung leaves behind, LG is happy to grab. Sony is under huge pressure they simply have not felt in years.
For MS, Samsung brings the manufacturing skills that would come in handy for making consoles.
Right now, making Sony miserable is Samsung job #1 and if they can throw a few billion at videogames and give Sony a massive headache, they'll do it. In a flash.
So I speculate they will either go in with MS as coproducers on Xbox360 or the third Xbox will be made by Samsung and powered by MS.
If it happens, I was scoop credit.
The problem with broadcast is that someone else gets to choose what you listen to. Oh you think you choose because you have 30 stations to pick from, but that's not many and damn little variety.
So then there's satellite radio but there are still only SO many channels and almost none of them are actual broadcast stations, which is where I find many of the shows I like.
What if I want to listen to a radio station from another city? What if I want to listen to an LA new/talk station while traveling in Atlanta? Or vice versa?
Both cities have huge numbers of ClearChannel stations playing the same formats (shocker, I know!) but the STATIONS and what they cover are distinctly different. Thankfully, the LA station has a streaming feed. I want to be able to hear THAT in my car in Atlanta. If not that station, then I want to pick from another or another or another. I don't want to be restricted to what's on the local dial.
I think WiMax-enabled car receivers are going to be the answer or at least that's my killer app for WiMax.
I can't !@#$%^ find the article now, but I read one Xbo360 piece which claimed -claimed- that MS was saying there would be 200 (two HUNDRED) games available by the end of 2005, so basically 200 launch titles.
LMAO
Impossible. There aren't THAT many different kinds of games, the developers are still working on getting dev kits much less learning how to make games with them, there aren't that many games in the pipeline, and even if there were, releasing 200 of them would drain out every game for years.
What if the answer is backward compatibility? Even if they manage to do it, there aren't 200 Xbox I games still in production. I don't know where the hell they're gonna get 200 games between now and the end of the year. I just don't see it.
Wait. They didn't say they'd be GOOD games. Mother Truckers 2, here we come!
It's the price between $300 - $400 with some games on launch day (of which, if history is a judge from the PS2, Xbox 1, and Gamecube launch, one of those games is worth having, and 6 months afterwards the other "killer apps" show up), or having a good library including the all important Halo 1 and 2.
Affected? Well, I never! HMPH! /joke
Not sure if there's much of an effect, as-such. I have worked with some printing systems where circuit boards were submerged in mineral oil. Being dunked in oil -contaminated with ink, no less- was the normal state for those machines. They ran fine but I suppose they were purpose-built for that.
Heat is not going to be an issue. The oil tends to stay at room temp and it disperses heat pretty well. I suppose he could put in a passive heat exchanger or connect up a pump and run the oil through a transmission cooler with a fan blowing on it. But that's probably total overkill. Take the heat output of a CPU and divide it by the mass of oil and the average oil temp is not going to go up that much.
He should not need to change the oil because it doesn't "go bad" or wear out. All it's doing is conducting heat. There might be some evaporation over time and the oil may get dirty if he uses dirty PC parts or leaves the lid open to room dust or something. There are oil filter kits for this if absolutely needed. It's just a recirculating pump and an oil filter like a car might use. No big deal.
I'd take the Wink drink or the Japanese singing duo ANY day.
Shoko Aida can cook for me. Any time.
Then Apple can license the Jyushin Lygar theme song -Hey Apple, I have it on CD; call me. $$$
Anyways, Lygar has an attack called LygarSlash so it's only a small jump to LygarSlashdot.
Splashdown?
My understanding was that the robot would either stay with the Hubble (although the mass would probably mess up the telescope's gyros) or it would be simply dumped overboard and eventually burn up.
Preliminary robot designs have all been spindly. I doubt any part of it would survive to actually splashdown and there's no need to recover the thing intact. Just make another one later.
I can't vouch for those rumors but I remember hearing whispers about strange "solid state optical computer memory devices" back in 70's. It was simply some strange technology rather than something recovered from a UFO or anywhere else.
Did these optical devices exist or was it just a rumor? I don't know. But it seems strange that anyone would come up with that concept out of thin air when we had barely begun to work with desktop computers of the era.
Apple IIs were considered powerful at the time. Holographic or Optical memory devices would have been beyond comprehension.
So why was anyone talking about optical instead of something equally outlandish like SOI or 70mm fabs? All of those things are equally sci-fi to somebody in 1978. Why pin it down to ONE kind of technology?
It only seems odd to me now because we ARE moving toward optical computers. It will be years before we have practical working optical computers but the stuff is on the way. Rumor becomes fact given enough time.
Ah well, time to put my tinfoil hat back on.
Human beings are capable of amazing things. I think it does a diservice to their talents and ingenuity if we assume innovations are due to borrowed alien technology rather than hard work.
On the other hand, if we do have over technology to play with, I hope to hell we are disecting it. I just hope it's more useful than just making Half Life 2 run faster.
Sure.
Do you have a fan handy? Any sort of window fan or table fan will do, or even one of those 80mm computer fans.
Power it up and aim the air at your face. You should feel a cooling effect, maybe even a lot of cooling if it's a strong fan. Move the fan away a little. Distance decreases the effect but it's probably still noticable, right?
Now turn the fan around. No effect at all at a distance. Move it closer. Still nothing. You're going to have to put your face right up next to the fan to feel anything and even then, it won't be very strong compared to the air coming out the other side.
Bigger fans do have more of a suction effect and it also depends on the design. Vacuum cleaners obviously have quite a bit of intake power, but they also have substantial blower exhaust output.
And what of CPU fans? CPU fans can get away with suction because they are sitting right on top of the heatsink. But, I have to say I have never owned such a CPU cooler. All of mine have blown air down upon the heatsink.
Yeah. LOL. It's not the PCB that gets hot anyway, at least not on my drives.
The heat is in the disc, the drive motor, and related surfaces. Some of them can get quite hot. I still have some (working!) giant SCSI bricks that get hot enough to burn flesh.
Full height 5.25 drives that would burn fingers and break your foot too, if you dropped it. I think it weighs close to 10 pounds. It'd probably still work after the fall but it only holds 1 gig or something. Not worth a bother.
Anyway, I cool my drives with a 120v turbine fan that blows sideways across the whole drive. The air cools the disc side and the PCB side. Works great. Doesn't tax the system PSU.
It's cutscenes, FMV, trailers, and whatever else from old games, new games, upcoming games, etc. Mostly cutscenes and intros. Not many trailers.
That's not to say any of it is actually GOOD, because damn little of it IS good. It's just that it's not merely trailers for upcoming games. Nitpicking.
Yes, Arena is the show where you watch other people play games. Arena is a microcosm of what's wrong with G4: anyone who plays video games or computer games would most likely prefer to PLAY the games themselves rather than watch SOMEBODY ELSE play the games.
If they have time or the desire to sit there and watch other people play, either they're too broke to buy games (great advertising demo: the poor and broke!) or they lost the TV remote and can't change the channel, OR they're stuck in a hospital bed with broken limbs and can't change the channel.
I deliberately configured my office so I cannot see the TV when I am working at my computer. I used to leave Tech TV on just as background noise all day long. Can't do that with G4 because it's too boring. Instead I tend to leave the Science channel (whoo! Slightly better than G4 anyway), NWI (bye), or my DVD player screensaver running.
There's the cold of space and there's the hot of space. Most spacecraft don't spend their time pointing in ONE direction so the ships have to built with some expectation that exposed parts will face heat and cold.
Anything exposed to the sun is going to get very hot indeed. That'd be bad for a bare CPU.
Anything exposed to the night side (or the side where the sun ain't) is going to be cold but a CPU is still going to need a heat sink to effectively remove the heat. Empty space is not a particularly good conductor of thermal energy (i.e. heat).
Most exotic space-approved processors are not powerful enough to need the exotic cooling we need here on the ground. Your P4 or AMD64 flies here. But not in space.
Here's a thought: if WE launch spacecraft using fairly obsolete technology because it usually works, what does that say about any alien technology we might someday run across? It is logical to think whatever we encounter might be their version of "obsolete but reliable" tech.
Therefore, if we actually DO have captured UFOs, perhaps whatever makes them tick -while exotic and exciting to us- is not nearly the most advanced technology the aliens might have. Perhaps the common antigrav UFOs are no more advanced the average junker WWII-era Jeep. Good for some off-road kicking around but nothing special compared to a modern off-road vehicle.
Military analogy: the common UFOs are the Air Force Cub trainers. They keep the F-35s and the aircraft carriers at home.
Flame away.
First read the book when I was about 11 years old.
Loved it, especially that bit about the Babelfish
But it wasn't until years later that I realized what the hell a "Zebra crossing" was. I thought it had to do with the animal, you see, and that sort of made the punchline a puzzle rather than a payoff.
I know I will get kharmonized to hell for saying this but I think the books would have been slightly funnier for American readers if they had Americanized some of the gags.
Change Zebra Crossing to Crosswalk. MUCH better.
Back up the 300 to another 300. Pure data backup, not RAID.
How is this better than RAID? RAID duplicates data in real time. If you lose/delete/corrupt a file, there's no real backup. A dodgy raid controller can also hose everything. Backing up to another drive maintains a second copy of the data. Odds are you will not lose both the main and backup drives at the same time.
How is it worse than RAID? It's not real time so daily or even hourly backups are required, but even a slightly old backup is better than losing everything.
I clone my drives on a weekly basis and apply incremental backups on the other 6 days. Each system has a pair of identical drives. One backs up to the other. When I used 80GB drives, each system had a pair of 80s. Now I prefer to use pairs of 160s or 300s.
Recently had one system lose one 80 out of a pair. In this case the backup drive rather than the primary was the failed drive. Had it been the other way around, I still would not have lost much data.
Yeah, but you're only going to be pissed for a couple seconds.
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On October 12, 1992, A general aviation aircraft (small plane) N111JC crashed on the street next to me while I was driving along down the road. One moment there's a big shadow over the car (semi must be passing me, said I), then a tail number flashes by the car (uh oh, that's NOT good, said I), then the road and everything was suddenly on fire.
The plane hit a couple utility poles which ripped open the fuel tanks, then the plane tumbled on down the road for a few hundred yard, bumped into a bridge abutment and basically exploded. Those who survived the crash were badly burned. One or two of them later died at the hospital.
After seeing that, I don't particularly want to survive such a crash. I don't want to be HALFWAY burned to death.
Accident report for the curious: http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20001211
Pan two clicks to the right and there's another plane just passing over the building where I work.
This is normal: the planes are usually so low over our building that we can see people in the windows and read the tail number.
Yes, we CAN hear the planes inside the building. No, triple-insulated windows aren't enough. The sound still comes through the roof. You just get used to it after a while.
It's only going to bother me that one time when I hear something really loud and look up in time to see a big orange ball of fire coming at me. Ooopsie, missed approach. No go-around.
Poor G4! Bet the're all pissed Microsoft snubbed G4, the only actual video games channel that nobody watches, to instead debut their new toy on what used to be an important music channel but is now some mutant thing nobody really cares about.
G4 would have been perfect for this debut. But MS had to go and point out what everyone knew: video game TV is stupid. Bye bye G4.
But still, it would have been smarter to debut this on QVC. Huge audience ready to preorder, huge boost to QVCs image, etc.
Many stores don't do cash refunds because they don't want to keep large amounts of cash on hand just in case somebody needs a refund. Cash is too tempting for robbery or sticky fingers.
You can pay for large items in cash, sure, but if it's over a certain amount (varies by store policy) most or all of your money goes straight into the store safe rather than the register cash drawer. They probably couldn't refund a large cash purchase even if you hadn't yet left the store.
Wish Sarah Elizabeth Sladen had done some posing.
God, I carried such a torch for her when I was 13. Sigh.