I understand the use-case of replacing the carburetor with fuel-injection, and computer-controlled fuel injection allows you to optimize the performance of the engine for a variety of cases that are only measurable with electronic (i.e. computer) sensors.
But what's the use-case for replacing the camshaft. It's got a monkey-stupid job, lifting and dropping poppet valves. It performs that job perfectly because it's dead-simple. It's directly connected to the crankshaft, so it operates for as long as the engine is turning. It's got a dead-easy task, of lifting and dropping lightweight valves, so it contributes virtually no parasitic drag to the engine, and because of the simplicity of the design, (it's a rod with bumps on it) it lasts FOREVER. Whoever heard of replacing a camshaft?
The reason why nobody's moved to electronic valve control is that the camshaft is in the Dieter Rams design hall of fame. It's great design: It's not part of the problem, so don't change it.
You're approaching this all wrong, thinking you need a storage medium that's heat-resistant, when we don't even know if such a thing exists. (At least for consumer media, like disks and tape and hard drives.) And the answer is much simpler:
Get a safety deposit box at your bank, make a copy of everything in your safe and put it in the safety deposit box. Your bank is EXTREMELY resistant to fires at your home.
It's incomprehensible to me that there are this many people on/. using online services to pay their taxes. Why on Earth would you pay those fees?
I download the 1040 (whatever flavor I need to, it's been changing over the years) in PDF format, fill it out, print it, and mail it to the IRS. I live in New York State, and they allow free e-file this year, so I do that for my state taxes. In previous years that wasn't available, so it was again a filled out PDF, mailed to the appropriate agency, just like the Feds.
The notion that I would pay a DIME over the absolute minimum to file my taxes is insane to me. I will pay money for the right to pay more money?!? Are you kidding me? The 1040's aren't that hard to figure out, and any questions can be answered using Google inside of 5 minutes.
Total time I spent filing my taxes this year: 93 minutes.
Total money I spent filing my taxes this year: $0.49 (For the Forever Stamp)
It's absolutely possible to screw up that badly. All you'd need to do to electrocute someone through a USB charger would be short the wires that go from mains power to the 5V lead. And that's really easy to accomplish by accident if you're using a linear voltage regulator (wasteful - which means lots of HEAT) and you're not getting the required clearances between your high-voltage and low-voltage traces. Heat melts the solder, which shorts the connection, which gives you the shock.
It doesn't matter in the slightest that "the cables aren't generally thick enough to carry enough 220V current". For one thing, there ain't no such thing as 220V current. 220V is voltage. Current is measured in amps. Secondly, the rating on the cable simply means they'll get hot and melt. But if the phone was on the woman's ear the moment the short occurred, there's plenty of time to electrocute her before the cables degraded. Shortly thereafter I'm sure the charging cable got hot and melted, breaking the circuit. Which would have been cold comfort to the woman's corpse.
There's a larger issue than just "people don't change formats for picture quality," though I _do_ agree with that:
Picture quality isn't a compelling argument for most consumers because:
a) It's a fairly minor improvment - I'm sure some moron's going to waste our time blathering about resolution, but the truth is: Doubling the resolution of a 240 line VHS with DVD represents a vastly more important improvement than (somewhat less than) doubling the the resolution of a 480 line DVD with a 720p Blue-ray. 1080 is more, sure; But you're still just throwing pixels at a picture that already looks pretty damn good.
b) A nontrivial fraction of consumers can't tell the difference anyway - You need a large HDTV set to be able to see a difference. What distance do people watch movies at? 12, perhaps 15 feet? At that distance all formats are indistinguishable on sets smaller than 50':
Ultimately, Blu-ray is going to go the way of Laser-disc because it's an answer to a question that nobody ever asked.
Oh, and also because of porn. Between Sony discomfiture releasing porn on Blu-ray, and the porn industry's reluctance to get into bed with Blu-ray (ho, ho), porn's not driving Blu-ray adoption. (A lot of porn stars have to get work done before they'll appear on Blu-ray - Think the HDTV scene from 30 Rock.)
For Blu-ray to succeed it would have to be the first new media to succeed without porn since the Guttenberg Bible.
What a steaming pile of schlock. First it takes me 4 minutes to just access marvel.com. Finding a comic, (any comic,) I might be interested in seeing takes another 10 minutes. Then flash-player popup window malfunctions after the first page, (something about mysql_db_connect throwing an exception - They're clearly getting lagged into oblivion,) leaving me staring at a blank screen with a stupid look on my face, wondering how I'm going to get the last 20 minutes of my life back. Oh, and it forced me to register with marvel.com.
Pass
String theory can accomodate any observation, because it's a Chimera: Just dicker with the dimensions and any empirical inconsistencies evaporate like a fart in the wind. Add or subtract a dimension, change the way the "strings" curl around all the phantom dimensions, and nearly any conclusion is possible. That's why string theory is unable to make a single falsifiable prediction: It makes lots of them, and then when they turn out to be false, the theorists just twist the strings in a different direction.
Basically, I think you have to price your content based upon how much effort it would take to break it open. Let's assume I value my time and effort at $60/hour. Let's also assume I'm able to buy a song on iTunes for ~$1 or steal, err, share it on Limewire. If it takes me more than 60 seconds of extra time to locate and download the song, well, shit: Might as well just buy the thing.
Obviously, it's not possible to directly calculate how much people value their time. But whatever that number is, (at least in the consumers' heads,) that's where the sweet spot for pricing unprotected content is. I would guess that Apple probably did that math themselves, which was (one of) the reasons they prices songs at $0.99 a pop.
Of course, the other reason is probably that pricing it less would make it impossible for them to get the record companies in bed with them: Any less and iTunes could leech away from CD sales.
I do a fair amount of development, and I like using:
Apache
Jakarta Tomcat
JBoss
MySQL
I'd like to say I also use Linux, but my company doesn't care for it as much as Windows, so I'm usually stuck putting this stuff on Win2k3, which isn't really a bad option - Of the security holes in Windows, half are in IIS, half are in SQL Server. The other half are in the OS itself. (Gotta love Yogi!)
I don't like to do alot of client-side scripting in the web pages, but when I do, I stick to JavaScript and Applets. The nice thing about this setup is that you only need to learn 1 & 1/2 languages, (SQL counts as 1/2.) JBoss handles scalability with EJB's, and Tomcat handles the rest of your business logic.
It should also be noted that paying for some of the non-open alternatives to these platforms is just silly - Yeah, you can use WebSphere or WebLogic for your App. Server parts, but you're STILL using Tomcat, you're just not paying for it! Under the hood, they're both just using Tomcat, under the auspices of the Apache Software License. (More liberal than the GPL, the ASL permits you to rip off their code, and not even include the source, provided you just ADMIT to it!)
As for an IDE, I'm sorry I can't help you. I use emacs, (well, TextPad in MS Windows,) as my IDE. Frankly, IDE's are for p#$$!3$.
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I understand the use-case of replacing the carburetor with fuel-injection, and computer-controlled fuel injection allows you to optimize the performance of the engine for a variety of cases that are only measurable with electronic (i.e. computer) sensors. But what's the use-case for replacing the camshaft. It's got a monkey-stupid job, lifting and dropping poppet valves. It performs that job perfectly because it's dead-simple. It's directly connected to the crankshaft, so it operates for as long as the engine is turning. It's got a dead-easy task, of lifting and dropping lightweight valves, so it contributes virtually no parasitic drag to the engine, and because of the simplicity of the design, (it's a rod with bumps on it) it lasts FOREVER. Whoever heard of replacing a camshaft? The reason why nobody's moved to electronic valve control is that the camshaft is in the Dieter Rams design hall of fame. It's great design: It's not part of the problem, so don't change it.
You're approaching this all wrong, thinking you need a storage medium that's heat-resistant, when we don't even know if such a thing exists. (At least for consumer media, like disks and tape and hard drives.) And the answer is much simpler: Get a safety deposit box at your bank, make a copy of everything in your safe and put it in the safety deposit box. Your bank is EXTREMELY resistant to fires at your home.
It's incomprehensible to me that there are this many people on /. using online services to pay their taxes. Why on Earth would you pay those fees?
I download the 1040 (whatever flavor I need to, it's been changing over the years) in PDF format, fill it out, print it, and mail it to the IRS. I live in New York State, and they allow free e-file this year, so I do that for my state taxes. In previous years that wasn't available, so it was again a filled out PDF, mailed to the appropriate agency, just like the Feds.
The notion that I would pay a DIME over the absolute minimum to file my taxes is insane to me. I will pay money for the right to pay more money?!? Are you kidding me? The 1040's aren't that hard to figure out, and any questions can be answered using Google inside of 5 minutes.
Hellzyeah. I *am* a developer, and you get more done with a half-dozen regular expressions than you usually do in any IDE.
This is what the teardown of a genuine Apple charger looks like. http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown-quality.html Say what you will about Apple - They made a really really nice product here. It ain't easy engineering 110VAC to 5VDC in 2 cubic inches...
It's absolutely possible to screw up that badly. All you'd need to do to electrocute someone through a USB charger would be short the wires that go from mains power to the 5V lead. And that's really easy to accomplish by accident if you're using a linear voltage regulator (wasteful - which means lots of HEAT) and you're not getting the required clearances between your high-voltage and low-voltage traces. Heat melts the solder, which shorts the connection, which gives you the shock. It doesn't matter in the slightest that "the cables aren't generally thick enough to carry enough 220V current". For one thing, there ain't no such thing as 220V current. 220V is voltage. Current is measured in amps. Secondly, the rating on the cable simply means they'll get hot and melt. But if the phone was on the woman's ear the moment the short occurred, there's plenty of time to electrocute her before the cables degraded. Shortly thereafter I'm sure the charging cable got hot and melted, breaking the circuit. Which would have been cold comfort to the woman's corpse.
Boot linux off removable media and then run the following command:
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 \
do \
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda \
done
Wherefore art thou, Zoolander phone?
There's a larger issue than just "people don't change formats for picture quality," though I _do_ agree with that:
Picture quality isn't a compelling argument for most consumers because:
a) It's a fairly minor improvment - I'm sure some moron's going to waste our time blathering about resolution, but the truth is: Doubling the resolution of a 240 line VHS with DVD represents a vastly more important improvement than (somewhat less than) doubling the the resolution of a 480 line DVD with a 720p Blue-ray. 1080 is more, sure; But you're still just throwing pixels at a picture that already looks pretty damn good.
b) A nontrivial fraction of consumers can't tell the difference anyway - You need a large HDTV set to be able to see a difference. What distance do people watch movies at? 12, perhaps 15 feet? At that distance all formats are indistinguishable on sets smaller than 50':
http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html
Ultimately, Blu-ray is going to go the way of Laser-disc because it's an answer to a question that nobody ever asked.
Oh, and also because of porn. Between Sony discomfiture releasing porn on Blu-ray, and the porn industry's reluctance to get into bed with Blu-ray (ho, ho), porn's not driving Blu-ray adoption. (A lot of porn stars have to get work done before they'll appear on Blu-ray - Think the HDTV scene from 30 Rock.)
For Blu-ray to succeed it would have to be the first new media to succeed without porn since the Guttenberg Bible.
...what I've said for years: IDE's are for p#$$!@s.
What a steaming pile of schlock. First it takes me 4 minutes to just access marvel.com. Finding a comic, (any comic,) I might be interested in seeing takes another 10 minutes. Then flash-player popup window malfunctions after the first page, (something about mysql_db_connect throwing an exception - They're clearly getting lagged into oblivion,) leaving me staring at a blank screen with a stupid look on my face, wondering how I'm going to get the last 20 minutes of my life back. Oh, and it forced me to register with marvel.com. Pass
String theory can accomodate any observation, because it's a Chimera: Just dicker with the dimensions and any empirical inconsistencies evaporate like a fart in the wind. Add or subtract a dimension, change the way the "strings" curl around all the phantom dimensions, and nearly any conclusion is possible. That's why string theory is unable to make a single falsifiable prediction: It makes lots of them, and then when they turn out to be false, the theorists just twist the strings in a different direction.
Basically, I think you have to price your content based upon how much effort it would take to break it open. Let's assume I value my time and effort at $60/hour. Let's also assume I'm able to buy a song on iTunes for ~$1 or steal, err, share it on Limewire. If it takes me more than 60 seconds of extra time to locate and download the song, well, shit: Might as well just buy the thing. Obviously, it's not possible to directly calculate how much people value their time. But whatever that number is, (at least in the consumers' heads,) that's where the sweet spot for pricing unprotected content is. I would guess that Apple probably did that math themselves, which was (one of) the reasons they prices songs at $0.99 a pop. Of course, the other reason is probably that pricing it less would make it impossible for them to get the record companies in bed with them: Any less and iTunes could leech away from CD sales.
I do a fair amount of development, and I like using:
Apache
Jakarta Tomcat
JBoss
MySQL
I'd like to say I also use Linux, but my company doesn't care for it as much as Windows, so I'm usually stuck putting this stuff on Win2k3, which isn't really a bad option - Of the security holes in Windows, half are in IIS, half are in SQL Server. The other half are in the OS itself. (Gotta love Yogi!)
I don't like to do alot of client-side scripting in the web pages, but when I do, I stick to JavaScript and Applets. The nice thing about this setup is that you only need to learn 1 & 1/2 languages, (SQL counts as 1/2.) JBoss handles scalability with EJB's, and Tomcat handles the rest of your business logic.
It should also be noted that paying for some of the non-open alternatives to these platforms is just silly - Yeah, you can use WebSphere or WebLogic for your App. Server parts, but you're STILL using Tomcat, you're just not paying for it! Under the hood, they're both just using Tomcat, under the auspices of the Apache Software License. (More liberal than the GPL, the ASL permits you to rip off their code, and not even include the source, provided you just ADMIT to it!)
As for an IDE, I'm sorry I can't help you. I use emacs, (well, TextPad in MS Windows,) as my IDE. Frankly, IDE's are for p#$$!3$.