I keep seeing the same few points over and over again here, so here are a few statements:
- 48X media is now the standard. It is not expensive. I paid $2.99 after rebate for my last spindle of 50 48x certified Fuji media. All the media on my shelf right now is 48x certified and I haven't paid more than $8 per 100 for any of them.
- The "studies" that show CDs exploding at high speed are not relevant here. The exploding at 100x is 100x actual spin rate, not 100x data rate. The 52x referred to in this article is absolute max data rate at the outer edge of the platter. At the inner edge, the tracks are 1.75" diameter or 5.5" circumference. At the outer edge 4.75" dia or 14.9" circ. In order to have a 52X IPS rate at the outside, the drive only has to spin at an actual 52*5.5/14.9 = 19X spin rate. The discs are not going to explode. Besides, if they were going to explode in the writer, they'd explode in the 52X readers that have been common for a long time, too.
- Burning at high speeds doesn't make coasters unless there's something wrong with your equipment. I have a combination of 24X and 32X burners, and I burn hundreds of discs a month, and only produce a coaster when I screw something up, typically going hundreds of discs between coasters.
So go on eBay and buy a carousel autofeeder from a dot.bomb selloff. A guy at work bought one for $100 (though shipping cost $75 or so). Apparently there are a lot of these for sale up there. 100 disc feed, run by serial port. A quick perl script and you're off to the races.
I have a QPS drive (made by Sanyo) that I've had for about 2 years, but it's had very heavy use, burning probably 3000 discs in that time, and it's still running fine. We have a bank of Plextor 8X recorders at work in the data conversions room that have burned something on the order of 15 discs a day for several years. Admittedly, these were replacements for crap-o Teac recorders; we had 15 of them and ALL of them failed between 1 and 6 months after the warranty expired.
Then something is wrong. The drive is maybe in PIO mode rather than DMA. I burn at 16X all the time, through the network from a samba share on a 350 MHz box running Linux to a P4 laptop. If I'm burning from local I burn at 24 or 32X with no trouble. At work we have a 700 MHz machine with twin 32X burners running under Nero; the 700 has NO trouble feeding both drives without underrunning if burning from local hard drive, and this is all IDE equipment.
Also you need a drive with buffer underrun protection; not always needed but if you do have a cron job kick in and cause you to underrun, at least it doesn't wreck the disc, it just takes an extra minute to burn.
Dude, you're doing something wrong. I burn at 32X all the time and it's been hundreds of discs since I've burned a coaster. I burn at least 2 or 3 discs a day, sometimes as many as 30 or 40 if I'm doing duping runs.
I used to burn lots of coasters until I gave up on crap quality blanks. I just buy Imations and Fujis when they're on sale for like $3 for 50 after rebate, and haven't had a problem since.
When I was buying the $4 for 200 unbranded crap at Office Clone, yeah, I was throwing away 10 out of 50, even burning at 8x.
I'm using a Sanyo OEM burner and a Teac laptop burner (which is only 24X) and a JVC 32X at work. The Sanyo was cheap and works as well as any recorder I've ever used.
Always buy a drive with buffer underrun protection. If you're burning under Windows, make sure the drive is running in DMA mode, not PIO, or you'll have about 300 underruns burning a disc over 8X. Also beware; Windows sometimes SAYS it's in DMA mode but really it's in PIO; check Google for registry tweaks to fix it.
What are you talking about? I've been buying name brands on sale (typically $6 to $8 per 100 after rebate) and they've all been 48X certified for quite a while now. I didn't personally think that 8 cents a disc was a "ghastly price."
I don't know what the upper limit of an IDE drive is these days (i.e. what can the ATAPI bus handle)
Currently the large disk standard is "BigDrive" by maxtor. It can handle up to 128 petabytes (1 pB = 2^50 bytes) so that's 128*1024 = 131072 terabytes.
You should be good for a few months.
The more immediate problem is that 32 bit OS's only can typically handle 2 terabytes due to 2^32 * sectors; of course that limitation can be avoided by using different filesystems.
So cable companies despise PVRs. I expect theater owners in the '40's and '50's despised television, horse tack manufacturers despised automobiles, RIAA despises MP3s, etc, etc. They can hate it and sue manufacturers all they want. In the end it won't stop anything. It's been said a million times on Slashdot, so here's one more: spend your time developing new markets instead of hating them.
I wonder how much the lack of spam hitting business email accounts is because companies install spam filters? Our company throws all inbound email through spamassassin, and it works great.
I read the article, and it doesn't say how this is different from existing heat pipes. My Dell Inspiron 8200 uses a heat pipe to move heat from the CPU to a radiator in the back. The Shuttle lunchbox machines use heat pipes to get heat to a large heatsink in the back. You've been able to buy heat pipes to speed cooking the thanksgiving turkey for years.
What's the difference between them and this? They talk about technology but to those of us who don't know the specifics of *traditional* heat pipe manufacture, it means nothing.
I watched Mind Meld a few weeks ago. It's available on DVD, you could probably rent it. It's Shatner and Nimoy talking about their lives in Star Trek. Many of these questions are answered or hinted at in the show. I enjoyed it.
HE didn't say it was funny. He told a story. It was moderated to funny.
Alternative fuels at filling stations
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I live in the Ann Arbor area, and several stations I normally go to have LNG (Liquified Natural Gas). There's a hydrogen pump listed in the UCS web site but it turns out that it's at the Chrysler proving grounds and not accessible to the public. I think there's a hydrogen pump at a gas station about 40 miles north/east of here but I've never gone to check it out.
Of course, we're in the midst of liberal city AND very near Motown, so it's not too surprising this stuff is around here. However, it does show that there's willingness to put in the pumps if there's demand. The LNG station is at a Meijer's (large supermarket/we sell everything chain).
They keep the current design because NASA's budget has been slashed to the point where the engineers are practically cleaning their own toilets. THEY have known for many years that the shuttle isn't very good, but in light of congress cutting their budget constantly, I think they didn't want to go to them and say "OK, can we have 25 billion to start researc on the replacement for the Shuttle?
They are finally doing something more than talk about replacing it but the existing shuttles are going to have to last a long time yet.
How is the monetary value placed on the lost bandwidth?
The only SENSIBLE way that I can think of is to figure out what their peak speed is, how long they've had the service, and calculate by the $/kbps they're paying for now.
If I were so charged, I'd want them to limit it to the time that they could prove I was using an uncapped modem, not the whole time I'd had the service.
So if you were paying $50 a month for 512Kbps and you were getting 10mbps, and had the service for a year, they MIGHT be able to make a case for $50*19*12=$11400.
But anyone with any knowledge knows that there's NO WAY they were burning the whole 10mbps for the whole 12 months; if they were and weren't noticed, their ops are complete morons.
Personally I have records of my cable modem bandwidth usage, metered every 5 minutes, going back to when the modem was installed, in either graphical or tabular format (/proc/net/dev and a few perl scripts & cron). It also tracks when the connection was down, and I've used the info to get my cable company to prorate down my bill if the connection was down for more than a few hours in a month.
As for the database, that sounds like it would be an enormous amount of work to keep up
It would be self-limiting. Once you started on this project, you wouldn't be able to do more than a set amount per day, or it would take too long to enter into the database.
Monday - went to swell party after dinner, but had to leave at 10PM so I'd have time to enter into my database what a good time I was having before I left.
In the end, only people with no life would have time to put in their life.
I could actually refute all the assertions my ex-wife used to make
Any male who gathers evidence preemptively to use against a female (unless she's an adversary) is just digging his own grave. Just roll over like you're supposed to; you'll be happier. You can know you're right all you want, just don't try to prove it.
I think they're being overly pessimistic here. A 250GB drive is already $300. Expecting only a 4x increase in GB/$ in 5 years is certainly pessimistic. I'd expect it in 2 years, max.
I don't even own a DVD-R drive yet (Santa's coming though) and already it's looking small.
The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC.
Yes, it's called BEING HUMAN. Through the years, pain fades from memory, the irritating things that lost loved ones did are forgotten, fun times seem more fun than they really were, memory of past loves becomes mellow and sweet, most of us geeks almost totally forget high school, etc.
So how is this bad? We want to remember every idiotic thing that ever happened to us WHY?
I want to do this about as much as I want to live forever. It sounds to me like the work of a group of people obsessed with mortality.
Also, if XP isn't stable, there's something else wrong. I'm running two XP installs, and my wife/kids 10/5 yr old) run Windows 2000 (my headless servers are all Linux).
In my experience, when the kids Win98 / Win2000 boxes get flaky, it's because they've been loading all kinds of crap from Cartoon Network or wherever. Spy Kids goofy crap that has mechanical bugs creeping out from under windows, crazy screensavers, spyware, you name it. If I clear that crap off the machine gets stable again.
I did have to tell the kids "Sorry, that game just isn't going to run anymore" for a few games that they used to play under Win98, when we moved to W2K.
I wouldn't mind moving them to Linux either, but I realized that I'd spend all my time getting Linux to emulate Windows, and that seems kind of silly; they're already running Windows, Linux + Wine isn't going to be any more stable than Windows 2000, which I've seen make 3 month uptimes before. Why should I put a bunch of my time into building them a system that, with a lot of work, they'll be able to use almost as well as what they already have?
I don't think so. From the general appearance of things on the front page of Slashdot, you can only really reach one of two conclusions:
either... 1) There's an editorial rule to quote submissions exactly as submitted without making corrections or... 2) The editors don't know squat about grammar.
Yes, the whole sentence seemed to have been written by a barely literate person. I had to read it a couple of times and mentally put the comma back in, and look at the article for context to see if the apostrophe was right. It would be nice if you could trust the sentence to be correct, but in fact you can't, and have to read the article to see if it says what the sentence seems to imply. "That's not writing, that's typing."
Slashdot Mirror
Please read my "clues for the clueless" post.
I keep seeing the same few points over and over again here, so here are a few statements:
- 48X media is now the standard. It is not expensive. I paid $2.99 after rebate for my last spindle of 50 48x certified Fuji media. All the media on my shelf right now is 48x certified and I haven't paid more than $8 per 100 for any of them.
- The "studies" that show CDs exploding at high speed are not relevant here. The exploding at 100x is 100x actual spin rate, not 100x data rate. The 52x referred to in this article is absolute max data rate at the outer edge of the platter. At the inner edge, the tracks are 1.75" diameter or 5.5" circumference. At the outer edge 4.75" dia or 14.9" circ. In order to have a 52X IPS rate at the outside, the drive only has to spin at an actual 52*5.5/14.9 = 19X spin rate. The discs are not going to explode. Besides, if they were going to explode in the writer, they'd explode in the 52X readers that have been common for a long time, too.
- Burning at high speeds doesn't make coasters unless there's something wrong with your equipment. I have a combination of 24X and 32X burners, and I burn hundreds of discs a month, and only produce a coaster when I screw something up, typically going hundreds of discs between coasters.
So go on eBay and buy a carousel autofeeder from a dot.bomb selloff. A guy at work bought one for $100 (though shipping cost $75 or so). Apparently there are a lot of these for sale up there. 100 disc feed, run by serial port. A quick perl script and you're off to the races.
I have a QPS drive (made by Sanyo) that I've had for about 2 years, but it's had very heavy use, burning probably 3000 discs in that time, and it's still running fine.
We have a bank of Plextor 8X recorders at work in the data conversions room that have burned something on the order of 15 discs a day for several years. Admittedly, these were replacements for crap-o Teac recorders; we had 15 of them and ALL of them failed between 1 and 6 months after the warranty expired.
Then something is wrong. The drive is maybe in PIO mode rather than DMA. I burn at 16X all the time, through the network from a samba share on a 350 MHz box running Linux to a P4 laptop. If I'm burning from local I burn at 24 or 32X with no trouble. At work we have a 700 MHz machine with twin 32X burners running under Nero; the 700 has NO trouble feeding both drives without underrunning if burning from local hard drive, and this is all IDE equipment.
Also you need a drive with buffer underrun protection; not always needed but if you do have a cron job kick in and cause you to underrun, at least it doesn't wreck the disc, it just takes an extra minute to burn.
Dude, you're doing something wrong. I burn at 32X all the time and it's been hundreds of discs since I've burned a coaster. I burn at least 2 or 3 discs a day, sometimes as many as 30 or 40 if I'm doing duping runs.
I used to burn lots of coasters until I gave up on crap quality blanks. I just buy Imations and Fujis when they're on sale for like $3 for 50 after rebate, and haven't had a problem since.
When I was buying the $4 for 200 unbranded crap at Office Clone, yeah, I was throwing away 10 out of 50, even burning at 8x.
I'm using a Sanyo OEM burner and a Teac laptop burner (which is only 24X) and a JVC 32X at work. The Sanyo was cheap and works as well as any recorder I've ever used.
Always buy a drive with buffer underrun protection. If you're burning under Windows, make sure the drive is running in DMA mode, not PIO, or you'll have about 300 underruns burning a disc over 8X. Also beware; Windows sometimes SAYS it's in DMA mode but really it's in PIO; check Google for registry tweaks to fix it.
What are you talking about? I've been buying name brands on sale (typically $6 to $8 per 100 after rebate) and they've all been 48X certified for quite a while now. I didn't personally think that 8 cents a disc was a "ghastly price."
Sell it on E-bay to someone who wants it.
Two problems with this:
1 - not legal. The EULA specifically says it's legally bound to the hardware it was bought with
2 - not fixing the problem of bad software by making the manufacturer take it back, but just exacerbating it by passing it on to someone else.
I don't know what the upper limit of an IDE drive is these days (i.e. what can the ATAPI bus handle)
Currently the large disk standard is "BigDrive" by maxtor. It can handle up to 128 petabytes (1 pB = 2^50 bytes) so that's 128*1024 = 131072 terabytes.
You should be good for a few months.
The more immediate problem is that 32 bit OS's only can typically handle 2 terabytes due to 2^32 * sectors; of course that limitation can be avoided by using different filesystems.
So cable companies despise PVRs. I expect theater owners in the '40's and '50's despised television, horse tack manufacturers despised automobiles, RIAA despises MP3s, etc, etc.
They can hate it and sue manufacturers all they want. In the end it won't stop anything. It's been said a million times on Slashdot, so here's one more: spend your time developing new markets instead of hating them.
I wonder how much the lack of spam hitting business email accounts is because companies install spam filters? Our company throws all inbound email through spamassassin, and it works great.
um, what about cell phones? What does that have to do with this? Last I checked, cell phones do not give off ionizing radiation.
I read the article, and it doesn't say how this is different from existing heat pipes. My Dell Inspiron 8200 uses a heat pipe to move heat from the CPU to a radiator in the back. The Shuttle lunchbox machines use heat pipes to get heat to a large heatsink in the back. You've been able to buy heat pipes to speed cooking the thanksgiving turkey for years.
What's the difference between them and this? They talk about technology but to those of us who don't know the specifics of *traditional* heat pipe manufacture, it means nothing.
I watched Mind Meld a few weeks ago. It's available on DVD, you could probably rent it. It's Shatner and Nimoy talking about their lives in Star Trek. Many of these questions are answered or hinted at in the show. I enjoyed it.
HE didn't say it was funny. He told a story. It was moderated to funny.
I live in the Ann Arbor area, and several stations I normally go to have LNG (Liquified Natural Gas). There's a hydrogen pump listed in the UCS web site but it turns out that it's at the Chrysler proving grounds and not accessible to the public. I think there's a hydrogen pump at a gas station about 40 miles north/east of here but I've never gone to check it out.
Of course, we're in the midst of liberal city AND very near Motown, so it's not too surprising this stuff is around here. However, it does show that there's willingness to put in the pumps if there's demand. The LNG station is at a Meijer's (large supermarket/we sell everything chain).
They keep the current design because NASA's budget has been slashed to the point where the engineers are practically cleaning their own toilets. THEY have known for many years that the shuttle isn't very good, but in light of congress cutting their budget constantly, I think they didn't want to go to them and say "OK, can we have 25 billion to start researc on the replacement for the Shuttle?
They are finally doing something more than talk about replacing it but the existing shuttles are going to have to last a long time yet.
How is the monetary value placed on the lost bandwidth?
The only SENSIBLE way that I can think of is to figure out what their peak speed is, how long they've had the service, and calculate by the $/kbps they're paying for now.
If I were so charged, I'd want them to limit it to the time that they could prove I was using an uncapped modem, not the whole time I'd had the service.
So if you were paying $50 a month for 512Kbps and you were getting 10mbps, and had the service for a year, they MIGHT be able to make a case for $50*19*12=$11400.
But anyone with any knowledge knows that there's NO WAY they were burning the whole 10mbps for the whole 12 months; if they were and weren't noticed, their ops are complete morons.
Personally I have records of my cable modem bandwidth usage, metered every 5 minutes, going back to when the modem was installed, in either graphical or tabular format (/proc/net/dev and a few perl scripts & cron). It also tracks when the connection was down, and I've used the info to get my cable company to prorate down my bill if the connection was down for more than a few hours in a month.
As for the database, that sounds like it would be an enormous amount of work to keep up
It would be self-limiting. Once you started on this project, you wouldn't be able to do more than a set amount per day, or it would take too long to enter into the database.
Monday - went to swell party after dinner, but had to leave at 10PM so I'd have time to enter into my database what a good time I was having before I left.
In the end, only people with no life would have time to put in their life.
I could actually refute all the assertions my ex-wife used to make
Any male who gathers evidence preemptively to use against a female (unless she's an adversary) is just digging his own grave. Just roll over like you're supposed to; you'll be happier. You can know you're right all you want, just don't try to prove it.
I think they're being overly pessimistic here. A 250GB drive is already $300. Expecting only a 4x increase in GB/$ in 5 years is certainly pessimistic. I'd expect it in 2 years, max.
I don't even own a DVD-R drive yet (Santa's coming though) and already it's looking small.
The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC.
Yes, it's called BEING HUMAN. Through the years, pain fades from memory, the irritating things that lost loved ones did are forgotten, fun times seem more fun than they really were, memory of past loves becomes mellow and sweet, most of us geeks almost totally forget high school, etc.
So how is this bad? We want to remember every idiotic thing that ever happened to us WHY?
I want to do this about as much as I want to live forever. It sounds to me like the work of a group of people obsessed with mortality.
they USED to run just fine under Windows98
So run Windows98.
Also, if XP isn't stable, there's something else wrong. I'm running two XP installs, and my wife/kids 10/5 yr old) run Windows 2000 (my headless servers are all Linux).
In my experience, when the kids Win98 / Win2000 boxes get flaky, it's because they've been loading all kinds of crap from Cartoon Network or wherever. Spy Kids goofy crap that has mechanical bugs creeping out from under windows, crazy screensavers, spyware, you name it. If I clear that crap off the machine gets stable again.
I did have to tell the kids "Sorry, that game just isn't going to run anymore" for a few games that they used to play under Win98, when we moved to W2K.
I wouldn't mind moving them to Linux either, but I realized that I'd spend all my time getting Linux to emulate Windows, and that seems kind of silly; they're already running Windows, Linux + Wine isn't going to be any more stable than Windows 2000, which I've seen make 3 month uptimes before. Why should I put a bunch of my time into building them a system that, with a lot of work, they'll be able to use almost as well as what they already have?
I don't think so. From the general appearance of things on the front page of Slashdot, you can only really reach one of two conclusions:
either...
1) There's an editorial rule to quote submissions exactly as submitted without making corrections
or...
2) The editors don't know squat about grammar.
It seems more like the former to me, really.
Yes, the whole sentence seemed to have been written by a barely literate person. I had to read it a couple of times and mentally put the comma back in, and look at the article for context to see if the apostrophe was right. It would be nice if you could trust the sentence to be correct, but in fact you can't, and have to read the article to see if it says what the sentence seems to imply.
"That's not writing, that's typing."