was getting between 8 and 12kB/s on transfers. Try doing any kind of work with those speeds.
Dude, what the heck are you doing? I know I'm showing my age, but we had 1200 baud dialups and had no trouble getting "work" done.
What gets done on campus networks these days that requires more speed than that? I guess if you were saving MS Word docs on a network share, that'd get old.
I remember video card companies cheating on benchmarks 10 or more years ago. This was when PCI was the latest thing on the block, and was competing with VESA-local bus. They wrote drivers specifically to detect when they were being called by the PC-Magazine benchmark program, and they'd do some stuff like just returning from every other call, since the prog was just calling the same thing 10000 times.
Don Lancaster used to make a HUGE deal about writing stuff in Postscript. He used to have programs in _Byte_ magazine all the time that did number crunching, fractal calculations, etc, in Postscript on a printer and then printed out the results.
OK, so now instead of just grabbing and mugging/groping/raping, the criminal will want to be sure to have a hunk of pipe to crack your skull first so you can't activate your shock system.
It's unlikely that this thing will actually incapacitate in any way, since it isn't a taser. I really suspect that if a rapist gets shocked by one of these things, it's just going to piss him off, and he'll just body-slam the victim to the ground and start kicking the shit out of her. THEN do whatever he was going to do in the first place.
Like most every other thing the fear-mongers are peddling, this thing will almost certainly wind up being a feel-good measure, nothing more.
You're mostly right. There were certainly MFM/RLL drives with voice coil actuators. The really cheap ones (IE: most on the market at the time) used stepper motors. But I had several with voice coils. I even had some full height 5.25" drives with voice coil actuation; they had several large, strong magnets in them. When they moved those 14 heads around in a mere 40ms (!) rapidly, the table would shake. The drive I remember best of that type was the Seagate ST4096, an 80MB full-height 5.25" drive, weighed 3kg I bet.
But mostly at the time, if you found a drive that had voice coil head motion, it was a higher performance drive like SCSI or ESDI, not MFM/RLL.
But what the heck, it's not the only thing wrong with this article. Stuff like this is the sort of thing I do with my 8 year old kids, and would expect it out of a 6th grade science fair, though I would hope that the kids would be able to build a more efficient unit than this guy does.
There will be something done eventually. At some point, spammers will be using their relays so heavily that all of their bandwidth will get destroyed by spam, and their ISP will cut them off for sourcing so much spam, which is almost certainly in violation of their TOS.
It'll be hard for anyone to argue for continuing to keep the relays open if it means they can't have an internet connection at all.
"I've fallen and I can't get up" Seriously; the health monitoring industry isn't that small. What if you could implant a device in your alzheimers patient grandfather, so he couldn't forget to put it on, and you could always find him if he wandered away, and an instant 911 call went out if he started having an irregular heartbeat, crazy blood pressure, etc.
I think this thing has some SERIOUSLY good potential uses. But as typical on slashdot, every technology is only seen in the most paranoid possible way. Hey, it's a good idea to think of how new technologies can be abused, but get real; the mere existance of this technology does not immediately create a police state in which everyone can be forced to have the chip implanted. It's society that decides whether such a thing can happen to law-abiding citizens (and yes, who is defined as "law-abiding").
Technology is neither good nor bad, nor does it promote good or bad behavior. It may enable a behavior but it does not, on its own, immediately cause a police state or any other societal change, unless and until society is ready to change.
Non-law-abiding citizens already have this, it's called a radio collar.
I don't think he meant "could be copied exactly" when he said it could be hijacked.
On a windows box, install Total Recorder, play with whatever software they provided. TR will intercept the data on its way to the sound card and store it to your hard drive as a WAV file (or optionally compress using the OGG/MP3/codec/quality of your choice). I use this method to record Real Audio radio programs as MP3s.
There are software solutions for Linux as well but it's been a few years since I used them. "vsound" I think.
I find the USPS to be extremely inexpensive and reliable. They have never lost a letter or package of mine.
UPS has. I have only used FedEx on a couple of occasions, so have no basis for comparison. Every damaged package I've ever gotten came via UPS; some was literally run over by a truck; they had tire tracks on the boxes. This has happened to me twice. UPS forklifted a telescope on me once. I've never seen anything that was properly packaged get damaged by USPS.
USPS is also amazingly fast. For reasonably local mail (within 200 miles or so) if I drop it in the mailbox today, the person will ALWAYS have it tomorrow. Long distance stuff can take a long time, up to a week or a little bit more, but that's to be expected; they MUST run hub/spoke distribution to be able to provide service for the piddling amount they charge.
I don't believe that a private company could do any better than USPS does. USPS is, after all, essentially a private company anyway. I believe that if you compare similar (and similarly priced) services from USPS and a private carrier, you'll see at least as good service from USPS.
I would think you wouldn't want to be near porcelain at a time like that
What porcelain? The toilet? Bathtubs have historically been made of iron, with a porcelain or enamel cover. Nowadays most are made from fiberglass.
Bathtubs, particularly old standalones, are seriously heavy, and due to the shape of the clawfoot variety, resist the wind picking them up.
Every paranoid should have a clawfoot tub in their house. besides tornado protection, they make a pretty good bullet shield if the black helicopter guys start to riddle your house with automatic weapons fire:-)
Yes, after years and years of screaming and grassroots campaigns by hundreds of thousands of people. I just don't think there's going to be that big of an uproar when they pass an anti-spam bill with an exclusion for political parties, since most people aren't getting 10 emails a day from political parties.
They don't have to be government jobs. They could outsource their helpdesk. If they're going to pay $500 per desktop, they're better off paying that $500 to an outside contractor to provide help for that user, rather than pay $500 to Microsoft for an Office license. The outside contractor and his employees are all taxpayers.
Besides, I don't buy the retraining issue completely. I switched from MS Office to OpenOffice.org, and it took me about 5 minutes to figure out where stuff was.
What's the problem with that? They're designed to run there. If it's actually unstable, then it's up to AMD to replace, if you're using the default heatsink and fan.
If you just want it to run cooler, then why is 105 OK? Why not mount some stacked peltiers and go for 50F? It's gotta be better, right?
Wait, lemme guess- that "narrowly-defined" definition of "spammer" will not include internet service providers advertising their services, nor companies the ISPs have paid to spam their subscribers?
It also won't limit political parties from sending mass unsolicited emails. For obvious reasons, you'll never get legislation that in any way inconveniences political parties. Look how difficult it is to get campaign finance reform through; they will NEVER get campaign anti-spam bills through.
Of course there's a solution. Don't make standard editions anymore, and release the special edition on the normal release date. I don't know who's buying these standard editions. Rental places, I guess. I don't know ANYONE who bought the standard edition of FotR. OK, one guy did, but only because he didn't know the special was coming out, and he was trying to sell it for a month before he finally unloaded it for something like $5.
I've only been a Netflix subscriber for about 8 weeks now. I'm turning 20 movies a month.
I went through and copied all my amazon/deep discount dvd/buy.com wish lists to my Netflix rental queue, and started free-associating movies I might be interested in watching. My queue got to about 160 movies.
I immediately moved all "long wait / very long wait" movies to the top of the queue. I have actually gotten two of the 12 that are up there already. I'm betting that I'll get them all eventually; it'll take me a good year or so to burn through all the stuff I want to get.
For me, Netflix is the "stuff I kinda want to watch, but not enough to buy it" place. I still buy about 4 to 6 DVDs a month. The stuff I'm getting from Netflix is stuff that has been in my wish lists in various places for literally years, and I probably never would have bought it. So if there's a movie that I never wind up getting, I'm not going to cry about it.
Admittedly, my patience for entertainment is unusual; I have no problem waiting a year for a movie to come out on DVD, and I usually wait until all 3 books of a trilogy are out before I buy them. Most folks want stuff faster than that.
Maybe I'm just too new of a user (in my 2nd month).
I am turning 20 movies a month, and I'm getting stuff off the top of my list all the time. Of course, I'm renting bizarre, non-mainstream stuff like old Kurosawa films, John Wayne movies, 3 year old Disney films for the kids, etc. When I push something like an out-of-print bond film to the top, it can be 2 or 3 cycles before I'll get it. But it says "long wait" so I'm not holding my breath for it anyway.
Also, I don't really care what they ship me as long as it's something off the top 20 or so films on my list (my queue is standing at 160 discs right now).
No, they're not. I have a DVD recorder, and I have a 100 pack of Lead Data DVD-R blanks at home that I'm about 1/2 of the way through, which I paid 60 cents each for (the price has gone up a touch since then).
Either they're DVDs, or I've discovered some way to get 4.3 GB onto a CD blank.
I usually buy from www.allmediaoutlet.com
I don't even know where the hell you'd go to spend $10 on a blank. You can buy name brand discs one at a time at CompUSA for about $7. In quantity 50, Maxell DVD+R's are $2 each at Best Buy.
They can't specify the selling price; that's illegal. However, they can refuse to supply you with any more merchandise if you don't take their suggestion. It's a subtle point but I'm pretty sure that's how it goes.
I think it mainly applies to "advertised" price. This is why you see some sites that say "click 'buy' to see our low price" - at that point they're not advertising, you've stated an interest in buying and you're just "negotiating."
It takes several months to take full effect but it works. I sent mine in a few years ago. We get NO junk mail. NONE. In fact, at work we were talking about the advantages of churning credit card balances between cards, and when someone said "Just get a card on one of the half dozen offers you get in the mail every day" I realized I hadn't seen one in a LONG time. Like, about a year. I used to get at least a dozen a week. Several others verified that the mailbox spammers haven't let up, so the opt-out must be working.
Thanks. ESDI is what I was thinking of. I had a 512M ESDI drive at one time. It was a 5.25" full height drive, pretty damn expensive, I think about $3500, probably by Fujitsu, and it shook the table when it did a seek.
Yeah, I was in a clone shop when the "plug an MFM into an RLL controller" thing was going around. It was a REALLY bad idea. The other clone shop in town was pulling this kind of crap. He was selling ST251's plugged into RLL controllers as "60MB hard drives" - people would come to us when their data was degrading for the 5th time in 3 months.
The other guy would just say "Gee, too bad, that just happens" and reformat/reinstall and send them on their way. After 3 to 5 times doing this, they'd finally come to us. We'd look inside and say "He sold you a 40MB drive in an invalid configuration and told you it was a 60MB drive. It's going to just keep failing. We can replace the controller for $150 and you'll have a RELIABLE 40MB drive."
The guy always swore we were full of shit and even threatened to sue us, even when we gave the users copies of the tech manuals for the drives and controllers specifically stating that they were not compatible with one another.
Even with RLL rated drives, I found RLL to be a really bad idea. Anyone who's complaining about reliability problems on today's drives never tried to use a Seagate consumer-grade MFM or RLL drive back in the day. I'd have LOVED to have gotten a whole year without a data fault.
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Dude, what the heck are you doing? I know I'm showing my age, but we had 1200 baud dialups and had no trouble getting "work" done.
What gets done on campus networks these days that requires more speed than that? I guess if you were saving MS Word docs on a network share, that'd get old.
I never listened to music much at school, and I'd have been irritated to get charged $20 a term for a service I never used.
I thought that university-supplied music was called "radio."
I remember video card companies cheating on benchmarks 10 or more years ago. This was when PCI was the latest thing on the block, and was competing with VESA-local bus. They wrote drivers specifically to detect when they were being called by the PC-Magazine benchmark program, and they'd do some stuff like just returning from every other call, since the prog was just calling the same thing 10000 times.
Don Lancaster used to make a HUGE deal about writing stuff in Postscript. He used to have programs in _Byte_ magazine all the time that did number crunching, fractal calculations, etc, in Postscript on a printer and then printed out the results.
OK, so now instead of just grabbing and mugging/groping/raping, the criminal will want to be sure to have a hunk of pipe to crack your skull first so you can't activate your shock system.
It's unlikely that this thing will actually incapacitate in any way, since it isn't a taser. I really suspect that if a rapist gets shocked by one of these things, it's just going to piss him off, and he'll just body-slam the victim to the ground and start kicking the shit out of her. THEN do whatever he was going to do in the first place.
Like most every other thing the fear-mongers are peddling, this thing will almost certainly wind up being a feel-good measure, nothing more.
You're mostly right. There were certainly MFM/RLL drives with voice coil actuators. The really cheap ones (IE: most on the market at the time) used stepper motors. But I had several with voice coils. I even had some full height 5.25" drives with voice coil actuation; they had several large, strong magnets in them. When they moved those 14 heads around in a mere 40ms (!) rapidly, the table would shake. The drive I remember best of that type was the Seagate ST4096, an 80MB full-height 5.25" drive, weighed 3kg I bet.
But mostly at the time, if you found a drive that had voice coil head motion, it was a higher performance drive like SCSI or ESDI, not MFM/RLL.
But what the heck, it's not the only thing wrong with this article. Stuff like this is the sort of thing I do with my 8 year old kids, and would expect it out of a 6th grade science fair, though I would hope that the kids would be able to build a more efficient unit than this guy does.
There will be something done eventually. At some point, spammers will be using their relays so heavily that all of their bandwidth will get destroyed by spam, and their ISP will cut them off for sourcing so much spam, which is almost certainly in violation of their TOS.
It'll be hard for anyone to argue for continuing to keep the relays open if it means they can't have an internet connection at all.
"I've fallen and I can't get up"
Seriously; the health monitoring industry isn't that small. What if you could implant a device in your alzheimers patient grandfather, so he couldn't forget to put it on, and you could always find him if he wandered away, and an instant 911 call went out if he started having an irregular heartbeat, crazy blood pressure, etc.
I think this thing has some SERIOUSLY good potential uses. But as typical on slashdot, every technology is only seen in the most paranoid possible way. Hey, it's a good idea to think of how new technologies can be abused, but get real; the mere existance of this technology does not immediately create a police state in which everyone can be forced to have the chip implanted. It's society that decides whether such a thing can happen to law-abiding citizens (and yes, who is defined as "law-abiding").
Technology is neither good nor bad, nor does it promote good or bad behavior. It may enable a behavior but it does not, on its own, immediately cause a police state or any other societal change, unless and until society is ready to change.
Non-law-abiding citizens already have this, it's called a radio collar.
I don't think he meant "could be copied exactly" when he said it could be hijacked.
On a windows box, install Total Recorder, play with whatever software they provided. TR will intercept the data on its way to the sound card and store it to your hard drive as a WAV file (or optionally compress using the OGG/MP3/codec/quality of your choice). I use this method to record Real Audio radio programs as MP3s.
There are software solutions for Linux as well but it's been a few years since I used them. "vsound" I think.
I find the USPS to be extremely inexpensive and reliable. They have never lost a letter or package of mine.
UPS has. I have only used FedEx on a couple of occasions, so have no basis for comparison. Every damaged package I've ever gotten came via UPS; some was literally run over by a truck; they had tire tracks on the boxes. This has happened to me twice. UPS forklifted a telescope on me once. I've never seen anything that was properly packaged get damaged by USPS.
USPS is also amazingly fast. For reasonably local mail (within 200 miles or so) if I drop it in the mailbox today, the person will ALWAYS have it tomorrow. Long distance stuff can take a long time, up to a week or a little bit more, but that's to be expected; they MUST run hub/spoke distribution to be able to provide service for the piddling amount they charge.
I don't believe that a private company could do any better than USPS does. USPS is, after all, essentially a private company anyway. I believe that if you compare similar (and similarly priced) services from USPS and a private carrier, you'll see at least as good service from USPS.
I would think you wouldn't want to be near porcelain at a time like that
:-)
What porcelain? The toilet? Bathtubs have historically been made of iron, with a porcelain or enamel cover. Nowadays most are made from fiberglass.
Bathtubs, particularly old standalones, are seriously heavy, and due to the shape of the clawfoot variety, resist the wind picking them up.
Every paranoid should have a clawfoot tub in their house. besides tornado protection, they make a pretty good bullet shield if the black helicopter guys start to riddle your house with automatic weapons fire
Yes, after years and years of screaming and grassroots campaigns by hundreds of thousands of people.
I just don't think there's going to be that big of an uproar when they pass an anti-spam bill with an exclusion for political parties, since most people aren't getting 10 emails a day from political parties.
They don't have to be government jobs. They could outsource their helpdesk. If they're going to pay $500 per desktop, they're better off paying that $500 to an outside contractor to provide help for that user, rather than pay $500 to Microsoft for an Office license. The outside contractor and his employees are all taxpayers.
Besides, I don't buy the retraining issue completely. I switched from MS Office to OpenOffice.org, and it took me about 5 minutes to figure out where stuff was.
What's the problem with that? They're designed to run there. If it's actually unstable, then it's up to AMD to replace, if you're using the default heatsink and fan.
If you just want it to run cooler, then why is 105 OK? Why not mount some stacked peltiers and go for 50F? It's gotta be better, right?
Wait, lemme guess- that "narrowly-defined" definition of "spammer" will not include internet service providers advertising their services, nor companies the ISPs have paid to spam their subscribers?
It also won't limit political parties from sending mass unsolicited emails. For obvious reasons, you'll never get legislation that in any way inconveniences political parties. Look how difficult it is to get campaign finance reform through; they will NEVER get campaign anti-spam bills through.
Well, the poster is "bcrowell" - I found them in a couple of seconds by typing "physics crowell" into google.
Of course there's a solution. Don't make standard editions anymore, and release the special edition on the normal release date.
I don't know who's buying these standard editions. Rental places, I guess. I don't know ANYONE who bought the standard edition of FotR. OK, one guy did, but only because he didn't know the special was coming out, and he was trying to sell it for a month before he finally unloaded it for something like $5.
I've only been a Netflix subscriber for about 8 weeks now. I'm turning 20 movies a month.
I went through and copied all my amazon/deep discount dvd/buy.com wish lists to my Netflix rental queue, and started free-associating movies I might be interested in watching. My queue got to about 160 movies.
I immediately moved all "long wait / very long wait" movies to the top of the queue. I have actually gotten two of the 12 that are up there already. I'm betting that I'll get them all eventually; it'll take me a good year or so to burn through all the stuff I want to get.
For me, Netflix is the "stuff I kinda want to watch, but not enough to buy it" place. I still buy about 4 to 6 DVDs a month. The stuff I'm getting from Netflix is stuff that has been in my wish lists in various places for literally years, and I probably never would have bought it. So if there's a movie that I never wind up getting, I'm not going to cry about it.
Admittedly, my patience for entertainment is unusual; I have no problem waiting a year for a movie to come out on DVD, and I usually wait until all 3 books of a trilogy are out before I buy them. Most folks want stuff faster than that.
Maybe I'm just too new of a user (in my 2nd month).
I am turning 20 movies a month, and I'm getting stuff off the top of my list all the time. Of course, I'm renting bizarre, non-mainstream stuff like old Kurosawa films, John Wayne movies, 3 year old Disney films for the kids, etc. When I push something like an out-of-print bond film to the top, it can be 2 or 3 cycles before I'll get it. But it says "long wait" so I'm not holding my breath for it anyway.
Also, I don't really care what they ship me as long as it's something off the top 20 or so films on my list (my queue is standing at 160 discs right now).
Hell, totalitarian regimes benefit from the easy availability of light pickup trucks that can be used as assault vehicles. Better stop making them.
I bet Craftsman tools are sometimes used in making pipe bombs. Better stop making wrenches, and for that matter, pipe. It's enabling technology.
This is just another step by technophobes to try to slow down stuff they don't understand. It's really starting to bug me.
No, they're not. I have a DVD recorder, and I have a 100 pack of Lead Data DVD-R blanks at home that I'm about 1/2 of the way through, which I paid 60 cents each for (the price has gone up a touch since then).
Either they're DVDs, or I've discovered some way to get 4.3 GB onto a CD blank.
I usually buy from www.allmediaoutlet.com
I don't even know where the hell you'd go to spend $10 on a blank. You can buy name brand discs one at a time at CompUSA for about $7. In quantity 50, Maxell DVD+R's are $2 each at Best Buy.
They can't specify the selling price; that's illegal. However, they can refuse to supply you with any more merchandise if you don't take their suggestion. It's a subtle point but I'm pretty sure that's how it goes.
I think it mainly applies to "advertised" price. This is why you see some sites that say "click 'buy' to see our low price" - at that point they're not advertising, you've stated an interest in buying and you're just "negotiating."
It takes several months to take full effect but it works. I sent mine in a few years ago. We get NO junk mail. NONE. In fact, at work we were talking about the advantages of churning credit card balances between cards, and when someone said "Just get a card on one of the half dozen offers you get in the mail every day" I realized I hadn't seen one in a LONG time. Like, about a year. I used to get at least a dozen a week. Several others verified that the mailbox spammers haven't let up, so the opt-out must be working.
I think the student named in the suit was adminstrating the indexing server. That makes him the primary facilitator.
Thanks. ESDI is what I was thinking of. I had a 512M ESDI drive at one time. It was a 5.25" full height drive, pretty damn expensive, I think about $3500, probably by Fujitsu, and it shook the table when it did a seek.
Yeah, I was in a clone shop when the "plug an MFM into an RLL controller" thing was going around. It was a REALLY bad idea. The other clone shop in town was pulling this kind of crap. He was selling ST251's plugged into RLL controllers as "60MB hard drives" - people would come to us when their data was degrading for the 5th time in 3 months.
The other guy would just say "Gee, too bad, that just happens" and reformat/reinstall and send them on their way. After 3 to 5 times doing this, they'd finally come to us. We'd look inside and say "He sold you a 40MB drive in an invalid configuration and told you it was a 60MB drive. It's going to just keep failing. We can replace the controller for $150 and you'll have a RELIABLE 40MB drive."
The guy always swore we were full of shit and even threatened to sue us, even when we gave the users copies of the tech manuals for the drives and controllers specifically stating that they were not compatible with one another.
Even with RLL rated drives, I found RLL to be a really bad idea. Anyone who's complaining about reliability problems on today's drives never tried to use a Seagate consumer-grade MFM or RLL drive back in the day. I'd have LOVED to have gotten a whole year without a data fault.