Sorry, I should have been clearer so you wouldn't berate me. I want my case mods to look cool so solutions that involve unattractive materials are out. The reason for using screening is so that you can have a clear viewport in the case and see through the screen. If I were just adding shielding to the inside of a case that wouldn't be seen I could use aluminum foil tape. Other screening materials would work like brass or stainless steel but they're not easy to find either.
I've been to all the hardware stores in the area, including the ones with the old guy who wears a feed-store hat and smells like fertilizer. Nobody has anything except aluminum screen in rolls. I can get very small brass screen in tiny sheets but the mesh is too small and they're not big enough to cover the side of a case anyway.
So hey, does anyone know where I can find copper screening in small quantities?
I've had these concerns as well but haven't been able to find a good source of copper mesh in small quantities. This site sells some nice-looking mesh but their minimum order is $75 which works out to 20-25 square feet depending on the mesh size. I checked the local craft stores (Michael's, Jo Ann) and they don't stock it.
Re:License to print money
on
The Last Comdex?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Why is Comdex failing?
* The Internet. A decade ago the computer print media (mostly Ziff and IDG) controlled the flow of information to computer users. To a great extent, Comdex was a big schmooze fest between press and vendors to get products covered. Ziff and IDG alone each sent hundreds of people. Today people can go out on the Internet and get their computer info from just about anywhere--even Slashdot. Traditional computer pubs are dying left and right because they aren't the critical resource they used to be. They're not sending armies to cover the show, so the vendors see less reason to go.
* Market consolidation. There used to be lots of big players in the software market: Microsoft, Lotus, Borland, IBM, Computer Associates, etc. All of them would get big booths on the main show floor and compete to see who could grab the most attention. Nowadays it's pretty much Microsoft. The same is happening with hardware, it's down to a handful of major players. A good chunk of the HW market is still locally built white boxes and they don't need to go to Comdex to build brand recognition. The vendors that remain tend to be the Tiawanese motherboard makers who can't afford a big booth.
* Change in focus. COMDEX is an abbreviation for COMputer Dealer EXposition. It was originally set up so computer dealers could hook up with computer and component makers. Over the years that changed since there are just a handful of computer chains and product buyers for those chains. They tried appealing to an IT audience and emphasized the conference program in an effort to keep the size up, but it's only been marginally successful because there are often more cost-effective ways for companies to get this info.
* The consumerization of computers (aka, "Dude, you're getting a Dell"). Another case of eliminating the middleman. Companies like Dell sell directly to consumers, they don't need to go to Comdex and haven't done so the last few years. The major vendors handle corporate accounts via one-on-one visits and don't need the excuse of Comdex for that.
* They DROVE people away. As few as four or five years ago, Comdex was still a must-do for a lot of the PC industry. But you knew you were being screwed. Hotel rooms were $320 in the LV Hilton back then, and the cab line in front of the hotel was an hour long. When it got that bad, people realized it wasn't an effective way to do business. When people and companies started skipping Comdex the last couple of years and the world didn't end, it just proved that Comdex wasn't essential.
Maybe a few years ago that was true, but LV has brought a lot of new hotel rooms online. I made reservations last Saturday and got the Riviera for $68. I should have waited, I just checked and now you can get plenty of hotels for less than $50 a night all during Comdex! Stardust $29, Riviera $35, Stratosphere $39, Circus Circus $39, Harrah's $49, Excalibur $49.
>> The only loophole is if there is an ongoing investigation
I would like to point out that ongoinginvestigation.com is still available for registration. Imagine the business you'll get in California! Certainly it will be worth a few bucks a month to a company's reputation to hire you to keep the investigation ongoing.
Opera does put the word "Opera" in the userAgent string, but it's at the end so that the standard browser sniffers generally identify it as IE.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows XP) Opera 6.0 [en]
But you're right, most sites are currently misidentifying Opera and calling it IE. That will happen until they update their code to deal with this new quirk.
This market cannot be as big as they think it is. Yes, maybe Boeing, GM, and a few dozen other companies could use it. Most companies don't need that much computing power. So do large margins make up for the small market? I don't know.
I'd also think that many big companies have built specialized hardware platforms for doing their testing. It might be cheaper to expand or upgrade their current platform than to dump it all for metered service.
The utility analogy is an interesting one. I believe that some big consumers of electric power in the manufacturing sector actually find it cheaper to provide some or most of their power in-house. For example, a lumber mill might burn sawdust and scrap wood to drive a generator. What if the same thing happens here? If IBM is looking at the total computing market, they may be only able to get a small fraction of it. Big companies may only want to farm out the small fraction of work they can't handle with in-house systems.
Dan sez: "Mainstream journalists are generalists, for the most part. At most big newspapers, reporters frequently change beats. This is done for freshness of approach, and to avoid common problems (such as getting too close to sources) that can affect fairness. The downside, of course, is a lack of depth at times."
Perhaps not only a lack of depth, but a focus on the commonalities of all news stories like the personalities. That problem seemed particularly bad during the bubble. There was a lot of focus on Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Bezos and the others when perhaps they should have scrutinized the viability of the company's businesses and products. Instead, most "news outlets" became a direct conduit for company PR and analyst disinformation.
When the govt (or a union or industry cartel) sets rules about non-essential operations of a business, it limits the market in ways that usually mean higher prices, lower quality, fewer choices, or all of the above.
>> meals and perks got skimpier
Perfect example of how the market appropriately reacts to consumer demands. If customers prefer lower prices over crappy food then they can choose the airlines that offer price over perks. Would you prefer to have the govt regulate the rules on serving meals aboard planes?
>> There is no impetus to innovate when you're milking your customers dry.
Airlines are suffering a triple-whammy of their own stupid management, unrealistic demands from their unions, and post 9/11 traffic drops. Well run companies like Southwest are making money but most others aren't.
If anything, airlines are still suffering under the "regulation" of their unions that won't face reality about the condition of the industry. Congress approved a $20 billion bailout for the airline industry last year but most airlines haven't been able to claim their money because one prerequisite was to cut costs and the unions won't let them.
Actually, the normally progressive state of Oregon has already done something like this. They charge more to register a hybrid or electric car with the thought that they don't use enough gas to pay their "fair share" of taxes. This is particularly odd because Oregon also has a tax credit for hybrids. One hand giveth...
http://www.centraloregonian.com/PCOOpinion13.htm l
The Motorola 68000 was a lot better than the Intel 8086, and Beta was better than VHS. A concept is often better than reality. AUTOnomy is cool but it has to build its own infrastructure rather than leverage the current one. That's always a steep hill to climb.
>> Toyota's plan will add more weight, bulk, and complexity to the car, while simultaneously reducing acceleration, handling, and passenger space.
You haven't seen a Prius, have you? The engine is smaller, simpler, and lighter because it is assisted by electric motors and doesn't need high revs so it can stay in the sweet part of its power curve. There is no transmission, only a soup-can-sized planetary gearset that combines the motor and engine power. If the engine is running at a higher speed than needed to drive the wheels, the electric motor just runs backwards to act as a generator and make sure the final drive speed to the wheels is what you want.
As far as interior space, that's just a function of the platform you use with the powertrain. Even so, sit inside a Prius and tell me it doesn't have more room than the average compact car, especially headroom.
You found out wrong. The Prius battery is warranteed for 8 years or 100,000 miles. If the warranty covers it for that long, the actual lifetime is likely to be longer than that.
If you're talking about UI or systems programming code I would agree, but the majority of "business logic" code should move over pretty painlessly. The point for these folks is that they want to deploy existing apps on the web (sometimes integrating multiple apps in the process) and they don't feel like retraining their staff in Java and rewriting every line of code in Java. I didn't make up that Cobol example.
A standard will at least give the Mono folks something to point to if Microsoft decides to move the goalposts with later changes to C# or the CLR. We need an open-source implementation of this because Microsoft has the right idea.
The C# versus Java debate is a red herring that's most interesting to language bigots. There's a more important difference between the philosophies. Sun wants the world to write all its code in Pure Java, abandoning the non-Sun environments they currently have. This is a great idea for full software programmer employment, we can spend all our time rewriting the world's code in Java. Not.
Microsoft wants to let people to migrate the stuff they have slaved over for the past 25 or so years into a shiny new Common Language Runtime environment. Yes, there is a new C# language, but the front end can be other languages as well. With minimal changes, a business can take the core of a Cobol program that has proven itself over the past 10 years, recompile it with a Cobol compiler that generates CLR, and drop it down into a new distributed environment. They can write the web interface to that Cobol core in any language they want, including C#, VB, Javascript, Fortran, or even Java (J++) if that's what their current programming staff is trained to use.
For a moment, ignore the language bigotry and disregard whether Microsoft might implement this in some way that will hurt their competitors. Which approach seems to be the most logical to you? Rewrite all the world's code or reuse what you can?
I need to squeeze down some C code to fit into an embedded system. I can't tell you much about it, for example the processor type, what compiler I'm using, how much of the code is libraries and how much is our own code, or how far over the limit we are.
I think the problem can be solved by inlining functions. Yes, inlining. Even though this generally increases code size, I think it's the solution in this case. You don't have enough information to argue about this, so trust me. Just give me a solution. Can you write me a Perl program, for example? I told you that the word you are looking for is "inline". Is there anything else you need to know?
Read the article. Sony already has a competing product that doesn't strip our fair use rights. HP probably pressured Microsoft on this point pretty heavily. If it comes down to a contest over what the well-funded geek buys for the holidays, HP knew that Sony would win. I'm sure that MS still wants to kiss up to Hollywood, but they can't ignore their customer and they didn't want to take the blame for poor sales if they held firm.
Mod this guy up. I'll add my experience with both TiVo and UltimateTV.
We've had TiVo for almost a year and would never give it up. A neighbor saw mine and decided to get an UltimateTV for his satellite. He's hooked on his DVR as well. The 30% of people who found it too complex will take the time to learn it when they see their nerdy neighbors enjoying DVRs.
It's impossible to explain how much these boxes will change your TV habits. Before I got one I thought of it like a more convenient VCR but that sells it really short. The TiVo ads lamely talk about "pausing live TV" but I rarely watch live TV anymore except for sporting events. By fast forwarding and skipping commercials I can watch a show in half the time. Plus, the TiVo learns what you like and will record similar shows if you want. (Finally, spyware that works for me!)
Both of us upgraded the drives ourselves using info on the Internet. For TiVo I had to download a bunch of tools and create a Linux boot CD, then follow multi-step instructions to copy the image from the old drive to the new by temporarily hanging both drives on a PC. His Ultimate TV was a breeze by comparison. He puts the new BARE DRIVE into the box and turned it on. The ROM boot loader sees that the drive needs initializing, does that, and goes through setup. That's the way it should work.
If you plan to use any of these features effectively on Windows you'll need to upgrade to Windows.NET Server. Windows 2000 can't distinguish between virtual and physical processors, so if the BIOS doesn't set up a two (real) CPU system the right way it will end up ignorning the second physical processor. My source:
Here's a cynical view. Every year, minority parties and candidates dredge up lost causes on nearly every controversial issue that they hope will improve the odds in upcoming elections. By being on the losing side they say "I'm sticking up for you" to those particular interests without really risking anything.
When a long-shot bill actually does get a chance due to exceptional circumstances, such as campaign reform after Enron, the process is slowly and noisily debated for the benefit of cameras. Often nothing comes of it, but each politician will swear they wanted to make something happen. If a bill actually passes, it is watered down enough to provide a symbolic victory without actually affecting the way business is done.
I think we're much more likely to have our rights protected by the courts than by Congress. Once those rights under current laws are reaffirmed, it will be politically difficult for Congress to pass new laws taking them away.
I have a paper from Hendrik Schon here that says they're shaped like tiny little cheddar cheese goldfish. Who would you believe, USA Today or Bell Labs?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I should have been clearer so you wouldn't berate me. I want my case mods to look cool so solutions that involve unattractive materials are out. The reason for using screening is so that you can have a clear viewport in the case and see through the screen. If I were just adding shielding to the inside of a case that wouldn't be seen I could use aluminum foil tape. Other screening materials would work like brass or stainless steel but they're not easy to find either.
I've been to all the hardware stores in the area, including the ones with the old guy who wears a feed-store hat and smells like fertilizer. Nobody has anything except aluminum screen in rolls. I can get very small brass screen in tiny sheets but the mesh is too small and they're not big enough to cover the side of a case anyway.
So hey, does anyone know where I can find copper screening in small quantities?
Here, here, and here. There may be others but that was my quick search of Slashdot. Several good DIY solutions in there.
I've had these concerns as well but haven't been able to find a good source of copper mesh in small quantities. This site sells some nice-looking mesh but their minimum order is $75 which works out to 20-25 square feet depending on the mesh size. I checked the local craft stores (Michael's, Jo Ann) and they don't stock it.
Why is Comdex failing?
* The Internet. A decade ago the computer print media (mostly Ziff and IDG) controlled the flow of information to computer users. To a great extent, Comdex was a big schmooze fest between press and vendors to get products covered. Ziff and IDG alone each sent hundreds of people. Today people can go out on the Internet and get their computer info from just about anywhere--even Slashdot. Traditional computer pubs are dying left and right because they aren't the critical resource they used to be. They're not sending armies to cover the show, so the vendors see less reason to go.
* Market consolidation. There used to be lots of big players in the software market: Microsoft, Lotus, Borland, IBM, Computer Associates, etc. All of them would get big booths on the main show floor and compete to see who could grab the most attention. Nowadays it's pretty much Microsoft. The same is happening with hardware, it's down to a handful of major players. A good chunk of the HW market is still locally built white boxes and they don't need to go to Comdex to build brand recognition. The vendors that remain tend to be the Tiawanese motherboard makers who can't afford a big booth.
* Change in focus. COMDEX is an abbreviation for COMputer Dealer EXposition. It was originally set up so computer dealers could hook up with computer and component makers. Over the years that changed since there are just a handful of computer chains and product buyers for those chains. They tried appealing to an IT audience and emphasized the conference program in an effort to keep the size up, but it's only been marginally successful because there are often more cost-effective ways for companies to get this info.
* The consumerization of computers (aka, "Dude, you're getting a Dell"). Another case of eliminating the middleman. Companies like Dell sell directly to consumers, they don't need to go to Comdex and haven't done so the last few years. The major vendors handle corporate accounts via one-on-one visits and don't need the excuse of Comdex for that.
* They DROVE people away. As few as four or five years ago, Comdex was still a must-do for a lot of the PC industry. But you knew you were being screwed. Hotel rooms were $320 in the LV Hilton back then, and the cab line in front of the hotel was an hour long. When it got that bad, people realized it wasn't an effective way to do business. When people and companies started skipping Comdex the last couple of years and the world didn't end, it just proved that Comdex wasn't essential.
Heh... you think renting out the entire McCormick Place (Chicago) for a week is cheap?
Wow, no wonder they lost money. They rented a convention hall in Chicago for a convention in Las Vegas!
Maybe a few years ago that was true, but LV has brought a lot of new hotel rooms online. I made reservations last Saturday and got the Riviera for $68. I should have waited, I just checked and now you can get plenty of hotels for less than $50 a night all during Comdex! Stardust $29, Riviera $35, Stratosphere $39, Circus Circus $39, Harrah's $49, Excalibur $49.
Even at the machine code level, IEEE floating point is the mother of all leaky abstractions for real numbers.
>> The only loophole is if there is an ongoing investigation
I would like to point out that ongoinginvestigation.com is still available for registration. Imagine the business you'll get in California! Certainly it will be worth a few bucks a month to a company's reputation to hire you to keep the investigation ongoing.
Opera does put the word "Opera" in the userAgent string, but it's at the end so that the standard browser sniffers generally identify it as IE.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows XP) Opera 6.0 [en]
But you're right, most sites are currently misidentifying Opera and calling it IE. That will happen until they update their code to deal with this new quirk.
If you are disabled or have a preference for the keyboard, you should know that Opera doesn't support tabindex or accesskey . That isn't mentioned in their accessibility pages though. These features have been defined since HTML 4.0 BTW.
This market cannot be as big as they think it is. Yes, maybe Boeing, GM, and a few dozen other companies could use it. Most companies don't need that much computing power. So do large margins make up for the small market? I don't know.
I'd also think that many big companies have built specialized hardware platforms for doing their testing. It might be cheaper to expand or upgrade their current platform than to dump it all for metered service.
The utility analogy is an interesting one. I believe that some big consumers of electric power in the manufacturing sector actually find it cheaper to provide some or most of their power in-house. For example, a lumber mill might burn sawdust and scrap wood to drive a generator. What if the same thing happens here? If IBM is looking at the total computing market, they may be only able to get a small fraction of it. Big companies may only want to farm out the small fraction of work they can't handle with in-house systems.
>> IBM is proposing both the low-cost, low-reliability server rooms
:-)
My web hosting company can provide one of those, I can't believe I'm ahead of the curve for once. I'd send you a link but the server is down.
Dan sez: "Mainstream journalists are generalists, for the most part. At most big newspapers, reporters frequently change beats. This is done for freshness of approach, and to avoid common problems (such as getting too close to sources) that can affect fairness. The downside, of course, is a lack of depth at times."
Perhaps not only a lack of depth, but a focus on the commonalities of all news stories like the personalities. That problem seemed particularly bad during the bubble. There was a lot of focus on Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Bezos and the others when perhaps they should have scrutinized the viability of the company's businesses and products. Instead, most "news outlets" became a direct conduit for company PR and analyst disinformation.
When the govt (or a union or industry cartel) sets rules about non-essential operations of a business, it limits the market in ways that usually mean higher prices, lower quality, fewer choices, or all of the above.
>> meals and perks got skimpier
Perfect example of how the market appropriately reacts to consumer demands. If customers prefer lower prices over crappy food then they can choose the airlines that offer price over perks. Would you prefer to have the govt regulate the rules on serving meals aboard planes?
>> There is no impetus to innovate when you're milking your customers dry.
Airlines are suffering a triple-whammy of their own stupid management, unrealistic demands from their unions, and post 9/11 traffic drops. Well run companies like Southwest are making money but most others aren't.
If anything, airlines are still suffering under the "regulation" of their unions that won't face reality about the condition of the industry. Congress approved a $20 billion bailout for the airline industry last year but most airlines haven't been able to claim their money because one prerequisite was to cut costs and the unions won't let them.
Actually, the normally progressive state of Oregon has already done something like this. They charge more to register a hybrid or electric car with the thought that they don't use enough gas to pay their "fair share" of taxes. This is particularly odd because Oregon also has a tax credit for hybrids. One hand giveth...
m l
http://www.centraloregonian.com/PCOOpinion13.ht
The Motorola 68000 was a lot better than the Intel 8086, and Beta was better than VHS. A concept is often better than reality. AUTOnomy is cool but it has to build its own infrastructure rather than leverage the current one. That's always a steep hill to climb.
>> Toyota's plan will add more weight, bulk, and complexity to the car, while simultaneously reducing acceleration, handling, and passenger space.
You haven't seen a Prius, have you? The engine is smaller, simpler, and lighter because it is assisted by electric motors and doesn't need high revs so it can stay in the sweet part of its power curve. There is no transmission, only a soup-can-sized planetary gearset that combines the motor and engine power. If the engine is running at a higher speed than needed to drive the wheels, the electric motor just runs backwards to act as a generator and make sure the final drive speed to the wheels is what you want.
As far as interior space, that's just a function of the platform you use with the powertrain. Even so, sit inside a Prius and tell me it doesn't have more room than the average compact car, especially headroom.
You found out wrong. The Prius battery is warranteed for 8 years or 100,000 miles. If the warranty covers it for that long, the actual lifetime is likely to be longer than that.
If you're talking about UI or systems programming code I would agree, but the majority of "business logic" code should move over pretty painlessly. The point for these folks is that they want to deploy existing apps on the web (sometimes integrating multiple apps in the process) and they don't feel like retraining their staff in Java and rewriting every line of code in Java. I didn't make up that Cobol example.
A standard will at least give the Mono folks something to point to if Microsoft decides to move the goalposts with later changes to C# or the CLR. We need an open-source implementation of this because Microsoft has the right idea.
The C# versus Java debate is a red herring that's most interesting to language bigots. There's a more important difference between the philosophies. Sun wants the world to write all its code in Pure Java, abandoning the non-Sun environments they currently have. This is a great idea for full software programmer employment, we can spend all our time rewriting the world's code in Java. Not.
Microsoft wants to let people to migrate the stuff they have slaved over for the past 25 or so years into a shiny new Common Language Runtime environment. Yes, there is a new C# language, but the front end can be other languages as well. With minimal changes, a business can take the core of a Cobol program that has proven itself over the past 10 years, recompile it with a Cobol compiler that generates CLR, and drop it down into a new distributed environment. They can write the web interface to that Cobol core in any language they want, including C#, VB, Javascript, Fortran, or even Java (J++) if that's what their current programming staff is trained to use.
For a moment, ignore the language bigotry and disregard whether Microsoft might implement this in some way that will hurt their competitors. Which approach seems to be the most logical to you? Rewrite all the world's code or reuse what you can?
I need to squeeze down some C code to fit into an embedded system. I can't tell you much about it, for example the processor type, what compiler I'm using, how much of the code is libraries and how much is our own code, or how far over the limit we are.
I think the problem can be solved by inlining functions. Yes, inlining. Even though this generally increases code size, I think it's the solution in this case. You don't have enough information to argue about this, so trust me. Just give me a solution. Can you write me a Perl program, for example? I told you that the word you are looking for is "inline". Is there anything else you need to know?
Read the article. Sony already has a competing product that doesn't strip our fair use rights. HP probably pressured Microsoft on this point pretty heavily. If it comes down to a contest over what the well-funded geek buys for the holidays, HP knew that Sony would win. I'm sure that MS still wants to kiss up to Hollywood, but they can't ignore their customer and they didn't want to take the blame for poor sales if they held firm.
Mod this guy up. I'll add my experience with both TiVo and UltimateTV.
We've had TiVo for almost a year and would never give it up. A neighbor saw mine and decided to get an UltimateTV for his satellite. He's hooked on his DVR as well. The 30% of people who found it too complex will take the time to learn it when they see their nerdy neighbors enjoying DVRs.
It's impossible to explain how much these boxes will change your TV habits. Before I got one I thought of it like a more convenient VCR but that sells it really short. The TiVo ads lamely talk about "pausing live TV" but I rarely watch live TV anymore except for sporting events. By fast forwarding and skipping commercials I can watch a show in half the time. Plus, the TiVo learns what you like and will record similar shows if you want. (Finally, spyware that works for me!)
Both of us upgraded the drives ourselves using info on the Internet. For TiVo I had to download a bunch of tools and create a Linux boot CD, then follow multi-step instructions to copy the image from the old drive to the new by temporarily hanging both drives on a PC. His Ultimate TV was a breeze by comparison. He puts the new BARE DRIVE into the box and turned it on. The ROM boot loader sees that the drive needs initializing, does that, and goes through setup. That's the way it should work.
If you plan to use any of these features effectively on Windows you'll need to upgrade to Windows.NET Server. Windows 2000 can't distinguish between virtual and physical processors, so if the BIOS doesn't set up a two (real) CPU system the right way it will end up ignorning the second physical processor. My source:
. doc
www.microsoft.com/windows2000/docs/hyperthreading
Here's a cynical view. Every year, minority parties and candidates dredge up lost causes on nearly every controversial issue that they hope will improve the odds in upcoming elections. By being on the losing side they say "I'm sticking up for you" to those particular interests without really risking anything.
When a long-shot bill actually does get a chance due to exceptional circumstances, such as campaign reform after Enron, the process is slowly and noisily debated for the benefit of cameras. Often nothing comes of it, but each politician will swear they wanted to make something happen. If a bill actually passes, it is watered down enough to provide a symbolic victory without actually affecting the way business is done.
I think we're much more likely to have our rights protected by the courts than by Congress. Once those rights under current laws are reaffirmed, it will be politically difficult for Congress to pass new laws taking them away.
I have a paper from Hendrik Schon here that says they're shaped like tiny little cheddar cheese goldfish. Who would you believe, USA Today or Bell Labs?