This whole thing is a big "who cares" in my book. Sure, it's fun to watch video of CPU's blowing smoke. But get serious. My car can't run long without water in the radiator, either, though it'd be possible to build one that would.
The solution is simple: Don't do that.
I don't see how the heatsink could fall off a TBird unless it wasn't properly installed in the first place. Damn, I can barely get them off when I try; you'd have to drop the machine off a building or something to jar it that hard.
Well, you can get a camera that's basically a reloadable version of a disposable camera for about $10, and then save several bucks on each roll as opposed to buying just film. They're good for a lot of rolls, which is probably years and years, since the average person without a dedicated camera probably doesn't burn more than a couple of rolls a year. Yet disposable film cameras still sell. Beats me why.
I personally don't see why disposables have that big of a market. To me there are only a few uses for disposables:
1-You are going somewhere where you want to take pictures but a normal camera might be damaged or lost (hang gliding, parachuting, etc).
2-You need a specialty camera (underwater, 3D, panorama, etc) for one time use.
3-You forgot your camera before leaving on a trip.
4-You're dirt poor and can't afford even a $10 camera.
Personally I never turn in the disposable cameras either; I take the film out and keep the AA battery and flash unit inside, then turn in the film for processing. I actually have reloaded disposables, though they make it hard.
Yes, the space shuttle uses hydrogen. LIQUID hydrogen. It *is* a very energy dense material. It is also vastly harder to handle and more dangerous (WITHOUT being ignited) than any petroleum based fuel. LH will kill you by freezing you to death in seconds if a large amount of it spills on you. Also it is very expensive to keep; it turns to liquid at 4K, requires lots of equipment and energy to keep it cool while in storage, whereas jet fuel just sits in a tank.
My point in saying that hydrogen in a tank won't explode is this. If you have a tank of hydrogen in a car accident, for example, and it's leaking, NO AIR or other oxygen is going into the tank. Therefore, the tank itself can not explode. What CAN happen is that the hydrogen that's leaking out can catch fire. However, the hydrogen that leaks out before the ignition takes place is gone, it goes straight up. Compare that to leaking gasoline, which if ignited lights up the car, you, the grass for 100 feet around, the storm sewers, the fire trucks, and anything else the gas has seeped into.
In all, a leaking gasoline tank is very much more dangerous than a leaking hydrogen tank.
Also, leaking hydrogen into air is NOWHERE NEAR "the best cutting torch you can imagine." Hydrogen mixed with oxygen is pretty hot, true, but H mixed with air isn't. I've set off hydrogen/air mixtures a lot, and it just kind of goes "whoomp" even in fairly large, contained amounts (I'm talking volumes of 10 cubic meters or so).
As far as the hindenburg reference, I realize that as far as the disaster itself goes, it's a technicality. However, that one event is brought up every time someone mentions using hydrogen as fuel, and the event didn't even happen because of hydrogen. Certainly, the hydrogen on board burned, but the source of the fire was that the skin of the craft was cotton cloth impregnated with rubber cement and aluminum powder. This is practically explosive. The Hindenburg would have burned up very fast even had it been filled with helium, though it may not have went up in a few seconds.
All I'm saying is that I'm tired of people writing off hydrogen as a fuel source because a ship with hydrogen on board once caught fire. The same can be said of any fuel source. Hell, planes have been blown in half when their fuel tanks explode, killing way more people than died on the Hindenburg, but we still use jet fuel.
In the end, yes, had this plane been burning hydrogen as its fuel, the towers would not have collapsed. However, you can't build a practical and servicable jetliner that burns hydrogen; liquid hydrogen is the only form dense enough, and it's too difficult and expensive to handle.
Point one: don't bring up the Hindenburg unless you know what you're talking about. The Hindenburg disaster was NOT initiated by a hydrogen explosion, it was improper maintenance and a highly flammable skin. In reality hydrogen *is* safer than liquid fuels. Think about it, if you were trapped in a wrecked car, would you rather have hydrogen leaking 10 feet from your head, or gasoline? Keep in mind that pure hydrogen in a tank can not explode, there's no oxygen. I'll take hydrogen any day.
Point two: Hydrogen is NOWHERE NEAR dense enough to use as an airliner fuel. You'd need all the room in the entire ship including the cabin taken up with hydrogen tanks, and then some, in order to fly cross country.
Then there's the 1% of people who put audio CDs in their CD-ROM drives. Some of those people are actually listening to them at work using their $2000 computer instead of a $50 CD player.
Not at all. There are MANY MANY people working in corporations that listen to music in their CDROM drives. We have 600 people here, and I bet 200 are listening to music in their CDROM drives any given day. They probably spend more time listening to music on their computer than any other place, and this system will stop them.
I'm sure my company is not unique; I think there are MILLIONS of people who listen to music on CDROM drives, and do NOT rip their songs.
This technology is not really about protection, it's about providing the RIAA with a legal weapon.
In the article, he says it's not going to stop anyone that's determined to break it, it's designed for the person who is not a thief. Then he says some other stuff about the DMCA, and fair use.
If their system allows the song to get on a computer, then it won't be a week before the tools to convert those files are readily available, just as DeCSS is now.
So, they know their technology will be broken, they're just trying to be a pain in the ass for people who are not trying to break the law, and a big legal mallet for those that are (allowing the RIAA to take people to court because they broke a protection scheme, therefore they are felons).
that I put in time helping build houses with Habitat for Humanity. There are people who need problems solved and don't have the skill or time or money to buy the software to do it themselves. If it's a problem that I need solved as well, then I can help them with very little effort on my own part.
ESR and others have observed that most really successful OS projects bloom out of the author's own needs, and he decides to share the solution, either out of generosity or ego gratification or both. Either way, everyone benefits.
Some people took compact discs and converted them to MP3's, then posted them to the internet. Therefore, the recording companies owe the artists for every MP3 posted on the internet!
Absolutely, if the person is up to it. I started with Slackware installed from floppies back I don't even know when, years ago.
I use RedHat on some machines that have weird hardware, because they're just machines that I need to get going and I don't use them that much, and RedHat autodetects the hardware and runs. I use Slackware on all my personal machines. I don't trust binary distros at all, I always compile my own, so Slackware is where it's at for me!
Sure, it's not for everyone. But IMHO, Linux is not for everyone. I like Linux as much as most people, but there have been times when people have asked me about "that Linux thing" and I (knowing something about the person) say "I think you'd better stick to Windows."
Disclaimer; I'm an amateur astronomer and a member of the Int'l Dark Sky Association.
The thing that drives the light pollution activists most nuts is that this is nearly all waste. The majority of lights, and nearly all of the lights that you see in situations like this, are badly designed lighting fixtures that spill much (sometimes more than half) of their light uselessly into the sky. People put in lights to illuminate buildings and roadways, then they use crappy fixtures that send more light into your eyes than onto the intended target.
Bad lighting is sometimes worse than no lighting at all. I've certainly driven down roads where I could see better after I get out of the lighted street area, because of the glare from the lights directly in my eyes. I've also seen really bad flood lamp security lighting where a robber could walk right up to the house and not be seen, because again, the lamps are glaring in your eyes so bad you can't see in the shadows.
It's this kind of thing that gets me going. That, and people that are so scared of the boogeyman that they have to have several thousand watts of lights on their property up all night long.
That's not a good deal. I've been buying Imations for $10 a spindle (50). Of course, that's after rebate. Last month I got a spindle of 50 Maxells for NEGATIVE $3 (after rebate). I'd be more than happy to have that price tripled.
No good, it's not hot swap. Also no good unless I outfit every computer I need to put data onto with a socket for this thing, and am willing to reboot it every time I want to do so.
Hey, I just downloaded a nifty Star Wars fan movie; it's about 100 megs. I'll send you a hard drive with it on ! Not too likely.
permanent email addresses is that they must be jealously guarded. I have four main email addresses; the one at work, which I give to work contacts, my main email address, which I use in general, a hotmail account, which I give to people that I know damn well will spam me, and a fourth, which is a redirector email that goes to my general account. The redirector is a permanent email address that I have through a club that I belong to.
It's basically a lifetime email address. I ONLY give it to friends that have a clue and won't use it to send me internet greeting cards, or "email this story to a friend" from a newspaper, or whatever. If it ever hits a spam database, I'm doomed for life.
Well, it's not really a problem with the cells, it's either the battery pack or the charging system. LiIon cells WILL catch fire if they are overcharged. The battery pack will have sensors inside to detect the temperature and internal pressure of the batteries. The charger should respond to this and stop charging when the cells are full.
It's entirely possible that this particular proprietary battery pack is defective (overcharges the cells in it) and catches fire, without there being anything wrong with the cells themselves. Catching fire is a known problem with LiIon, which is why you will never see raw LiIon cells for sale to consumers. They are supposed to be assembled into sealed packs with safety circuitry built-in.
IOW, there's nothing wrong with the CELLS in this pack, there's something wrong with the design of the pack or the charger it plugs into.
Agreed. I have a 500 Celeron that is way faster than I need. The only time I wish it was faster is when I'm doing DivX encoding, then I could finish more than one movie a day.
Other than that I could be running a 233 and I probably would never know the difference.
Yes, gamers want the fastest. But damn, if you're into it to the point where you are getting the lastest damn CPU every year, gaming is a pretty expensive hobby.
By the way, it's kind of taking advantage of the system, but if you just want one for running out of gas in the desert, do what I do. Buy a deactivated phone at a garage sale for $5 and put it under the seat. 911 always works even on deactivated phones.
You're missing the point. Some of us don't ever need to be that accessible. Why buy a phone and never turn it on?
I also don't need a cellphone. I'm kind of a gadget freak, so I kind of WANT one, and I've been thinking about one for the last couple of years, but in all that time I've wanted a phone and wasn't near one anyway exactly once, and that was just for something stupid. From listening to people use them, I think people yak on the damn things just to justify having bought them.
I personally like being out of communications. People are bugging me all the damn time for one thing or another, you'd have to pay me a lot to make them be able to bug me when I'm finally alone in my car or shopping.
The only people that run out of gas are either careless or too poor or stupid to keep enough gas in their car. At least half of breakdowns are also a result of careless maintenance (I'm being generous here) or being too poor to keep the car in shape.
I'll get a cell phone when the phone companies admits (or the FCC forces a tariff) that airtime is cheaper than pulling and maintaining copper, and rolls the airtime into the flat rate like they do with the copper to your house. In fact they should stop maintaining copper and put battery backed digital cell transceivers on your house.
Um, it sounds to me like that particular article is supporting the memory effect as much as anything.
Also their testing was with extremely high-end batteries, like aerospace batteries. The effect is much more pronounced when you start using $1.50 cells from Costco.
Go with NiMH; much superior technology. NiCad is dead.
Soon they will allow our home appliances to diagnose their own malfunctions, and will even call and order their own replacement parts before they fail.
God, how many times have you seen this?
The problem is, nothing is built in this way anymore. When was the last time you had anything fixed. Stuff isn't built to fix anymore. You can't even order replacement parts for most stuff; I called customer service the other day for an appliance I have that's broken, and they practically laughed at me when I said I wanted to buy some parts. When you can get them they cost more than a new unit.
I seem to remember that Weird Al has to get permission to do things like the star wars version of American Pie, but does not to do things like Fat.
He doesn't HAVE to get permission. He DOES because he's a nice guy that doesn't want to offend the original artist.
There was a rather long segment in the Behind The Music show on him last year that went into the story behind Coolio not giving permission to spoof Gangster Paradise, but someone told Al that he HAD given permission. Al apologized several times, and said he would not have done it had he known.
However, even though it was known that Coolio didn't like it before the song (Amish Paradise) was released, they went ahead because they had already gone through the effort and money to produce it, and Coolio's permission is not needed
As the article states, this scheme will make most CD-ROM drives unable to play the discs IN AUDIO MODE. One exec is quoted as being sorry that all those people he sees on airplanes listening to legitimate CD's on their laptops are going to get burned by this.
The Hindenberg didn't blow up because of hydrogen, it blew up because it was coated in a mixture of a petroleum-distillate based glue and aluminum powder; practically explosive. This was ignited due to sparking between a couple of adjacent panels with a missing or improperly connected grounding strap (current theories, anyway).
If you were pinned in a wrecked car, would you rather have a hydrogen tank hissing 10 feet away, the hydrogen immediately going straight up and away from most likely sources of ignition, or a gasoline tank leaking, creating a huge pool all around the vehicle, soaking into every bit of fabric, practically searching for a source of ignition? Even if it doesn't blow up it causes a toxic waste cleanup.
There are hydrogen filling stations in several locations in Michigan, one that I know of at a Meijer's (large supermarket) in Wixom (an hour out of Detroit towards Lansing)
Slashdot Mirror
This whole thing is a big "who cares" in my book. Sure, it's fun to watch video of CPU's blowing smoke. But get serious. My car can't run long without water in the radiator, either, though it'd be possible to build one that would.
The solution is simple: Don't do that.
I don't see how the heatsink could fall off a TBird unless it wasn't properly installed in the first place. Damn, I can barely get them off when I try; you'd have to drop the machine off a building or something to jar it that hard.
They're just trying to make it harder to write letters to Microsoft Customer Support.
Well, you can get a camera that's basically a reloadable version of a disposable camera for about $10, and then save several bucks on each roll as opposed to buying just film. They're good for a lot of rolls, which is probably years and years, since the average person without a dedicated camera probably doesn't burn more than a couple of rolls a year. Yet disposable film cameras still sell. Beats me why.
I personally don't see why disposables have that big of a market. To me there are only a few uses for disposables:
1-You are going somewhere where you want to take pictures but a normal camera might be damaged or lost (hang gliding, parachuting, etc).
2-You need a specialty camera (underwater, 3D, panorama, etc) for one time use.
3-You forgot your camera before leaving on a trip.
4-You're dirt poor and can't afford even a $10 camera.
Personally I never turn in the disposable cameras either; I take the film out and keep the AA battery and flash unit inside, then turn in the film for processing. I actually have reloaded disposables, though they make it hard.
OK, to take on a few points.
Yes, the space shuttle uses hydrogen. LIQUID hydrogen. It *is* a very energy dense material. It is also vastly harder to handle and more dangerous (WITHOUT being ignited) than any petroleum based fuel. LH will kill you by freezing you to death in seconds if a large amount of it spills on you. Also it is very expensive to keep; it turns to liquid at 4K, requires lots of equipment and energy to keep it cool while in storage, whereas jet fuel just sits in a tank.
My point in saying that hydrogen in a tank won't explode is this. If you have a tank of hydrogen in a car accident, for example, and it's leaking, NO AIR or other oxygen is going into the tank. Therefore, the tank itself can not explode. What CAN happen is that the hydrogen that's leaking out can catch fire. However, the hydrogen that leaks out before the ignition takes place is gone, it goes straight up. Compare that to leaking gasoline, which if ignited lights up the car, you, the grass for 100 feet around, the storm sewers, the fire trucks, and anything else the gas has seeped into.
In all, a leaking gasoline tank is very much more dangerous than a leaking hydrogen tank.
Also, leaking hydrogen into air is NOWHERE NEAR "the best cutting torch you can imagine." Hydrogen mixed with oxygen is pretty hot, true, but H mixed with air isn't. I've set off hydrogen/air mixtures a lot, and it just kind of goes "whoomp" even in fairly large, contained amounts (I'm talking volumes of 10 cubic meters or so).
As far as the hindenburg reference, I realize that as far as the disaster itself goes, it's a technicality. However, that one event is brought up every time someone mentions using hydrogen as fuel, and the event didn't even happen because of hydrogen. Certainly, the hydrogen on board burned, but the source of the fire was that the skin of the craft was cotton cloth impregnated with rubber cement and aluminum powder. This is practically explosive. The Hindenburg would have burned up very fast even had it been filled with helium, though it may not have went up in a few seconds.
All I'm saying is that I'm tired of people writing off hydrogen as a fuel source because a ship with hydrogen on board once caught fire. The same can be said of any fuel source. Hell, planes have been blown in half when their fuel tanks explode, killing way more people than died on the Hindenburg, but we still use jet fuel.
In the end, yes, had this plane been burning hydrogen as its fuel, the towers would not have collapsed. However, you can't build a practical and servicable jetliner that burns hydrogen; liquid hydrogen is the only form dense enough, and it's too difficult and expensive to handle.
Point one: don't bring up the Hindenburg unless you know what you're talking about. The Hindenburg disaster was NOT initiated by a hydrogen explosion, it was improper maintenance and a highly flammable skin. In reality hydrogen *is* safer than liquid fuels. Think about it, if you were trapped in a wrecked car, would you rather have hydrogen leaking 10 feet from your head, or gasoline? Keep in mind that pure hydrogen in a tank can not explode, there's no oxygen. I'll take hydrogen any day.
Point two: Hydrogen is NOWHERE NEAR dense enough to use as an airliner fuel. You'd need all the room in the entire ship including the cabin taken up with hydrogen tanks, and then some, in order to fly cross country.
Not at all. There are MANY MANY people working in corporations that listen to music in their CDROM drives. We have 600 people here, and I bet 200 are listening to music in their CDROM drives any given day. They probably spend more time listening to music on their computer than any other place, and this system will stop them.
I'm sure my company is not unique; I think there are MILLIONS of people who listen to music on CDROM drives, and do NOT rip their songs.
This technology is not really about protection, it's about providing the RIAA with a legal weapon.
In the article, he says it's not going to stop anyone that's determined to break it, it's designed for the person who is not a thief. Then he says some other stuff about the DMCA, and fair use.
If their system allows the song to get on a computer, then it won't be a week before the tools to convert those files are readily available, just as DeCSS is now.
So, they know their technology will be broken, they're just trying to be a pain in the ass for people who are not trying to break the law, and a big legal mallet for those that are (allowing the RIAA to take people to court because they broke a protection scheme, therefore they are felons).
I don't see him as a cop. I like cops.
that I put in time helping build houses with Habitat for Humanity. There are people who need problems solved and don't have the skill or time or money to buy the software to do it themselves. If it's a problem that I need solved as well, then I can help them with very little effort on my own part.
ESR and others have observed that most really successful OS projects bloom out of the author's own needs, and he decides to share the solution, either out of generosity or ego gratification or both. Either way, everyone benefits.
Some people took compact discs and converted them to MP3's, then posted them to the internet. Therefore, the recording companies owe the artists for every MP3 posted on the internet!
I use RedHat on some machines that have weird hardware, because they're just machines that I need to get going and I don't use them that much, and RedHat autodetects the hardware and runs. I use Slackware on all my personal machines. I don't trust binary distros at all, I always compile my own, so Slackware is where it's at for me!
Sure, it's not for everyone. But IMHO, Linux is not for everyone. I like Linux as much as most people, but there have been times when people have asked me about "that Linux thing" and I (knowing something about the person) say "I think you'd better stick to Windows."
Disclaimer; I'm an amateur astronomer and a member of the Int'l Dark Sky Association. The thing that drives the light pollution activists most nuts is that this is nearly all waste. The majority of lights, and nearly all of the lights that you see in situations like this, are badly designed lighting fixtures that spill much (sometimes more than half) of their light uselessly into the sky. People put in lights to illuminate buildings and roadways, then they use crappy fixtures that send more light into your eyes than onto the intended target. Bad lighting is sometimes worse than no lighting at all. I've certainly driven down roads where I could see better after I get out of the lighted street area, because of the glare from the lights directly in my eyes. I've also seen really bad flood lamp security lighting where a robber could walk right up to the house and not be seen, because again, the lamps are glaring in your eyes so bad you can't see in the shadows. It's this kind of thing that gets me going. That, and people that are so scared of the boogeyman that they have to have several thousand watts of lights on their property up all night long.
That's not a good deal. I've been buying Imations for $10 a spindle (50). Of course, that's after rebate. Last month I got a spindle of 50 Maxells for NEGATIVE $3 (after rebate). I'd be more than happy to have that price tripled.
No good, it's not hot swap. Also no good unless I outfit every computer I need to put data onto with a socket for this thing, and am willing to reboot it every time I want to do so.
Hey, I just downloaded a nifty Star Wars fan movie; it's about 100 megs. I'll send you a hard drive with it on ! Not too likely.
It's basically a lifetime email address. I ONLY give it to friends that have a clue and won't use it to send me internet greeting cards, or "email this story to a friend" from a newspaper, or whatever. If it ever hits a spam database, I'm doomed for life.
Well, it's not really a problem with the cells, it's either the battery pack or the charging system. LiIon cells WILL catch fire if they are overcharged. The battery pack will have sensors inside to detect the temperature and internal pressure of the batteries. The charger should respond to this and stop charging when the cells are full. It's entirely possible that this particular proprietary battery pack is defective (overcharges the cells in it) and catches fire, without there being anything wrong with the cells themselves. Catching fire is a known problem with LiIon, which is why you will never see raw LiIon cells for sale to consumers. They are supposed to be assembled into sealed packs with safety circuitry built-in. IOW, there's nothing wrong with the CELLS in this pack, there's something wrong with the design of the pack or the charger it plugs into.
Agreed. I have a 500 Celeron that is way faster than I need. The only time I wish it was faster is when I'm doing DivX encoding, then I could finish more than one movie a day.
Other than that I could be running a 233 and I probably would never know the difference.
Yes, gamers want the fastest. But damn, if you're into it to the point where you are getting the lastest damn CPU every year, gaming is a pretty expensive hobby.
By the way, it's kind of taking advantage of the system, but if you just want one for running out of gas in the desert, do what I do. Buy a deactivated phone at a garage sale for $5 and put it under the seat. 911 always works even on deactivated phones.
You're missing the point. Some of us don't ever need to be that accessible. Why buy a phone and never turn it on?
I also don't need a cellphone. I'm kind of a gadget freak, so I kind of WANT one, and I've been thinking about one for the last couple of years, but in all that time I've wanted a phone and wasn't near one anyway exactly once, and that was just for something stupid. From listening to people use them, I think people yak on the damn things just to justify having bought them.
I personally like being out of communications. People are bugging me all the damn time for one thing or another, you'd have to pay me a lot to make them be able to bug me when I'm finally alone in my car or shopping.
The only people that run out of gas are either careless or too poor or stupid to keep enough gas in their car. At least half of breakdowns are also a result of careless maintenance (I'm being generous here) or being too poor to keep the car in shape.
I'll get a cell phone when the phone companies admits (or the FCC forces a tariff) that airtime is cheaper than pulling and maintaining copper, and rolls the airtime into the flat rate like they do with the copper to your house. In fact they should stop maintaining copper and put battery backed digital cell transceivers on your house.
Um, it sounds to me like that particular article is supporting the memory effect as much as anything.
Also their testing was with extremely high-end batteries, like aerospace batteries. The effect is much more pronounced when you start using $1.50 cells from Costco.
Go with NiMH; much superior technology. NiCad is dead.
Soon they will allow our home appliances to diagnose their own malfunctions, and will even call and order their own replacement parts before they fail.
God, how many times have you seen this?
The problem is, nothing is built in this way anymore. When was the last time you had anything fixed. Stuff isn't built to fix anymore. You can't even order replacement parts for most stuff; I called customer service the other day for an appliance I have that's broken, and they practically laughed at me when I said I wanted to buy some parts. When you can get them they cost more than a new unit.
end rant
He doesn't HAVE to get permission. He DOES because he's a nice guy that doesn't want to offend the original artist.
There was a rather long segment in the Behind The Music show on him last year that went into the story behind Coolio not giving permission to spoof Gangster Paradise, but someone told Al that he HAD given permission. Al apologized several times, and said he would not have done it had he known.
However, even though it was known that Coolio didn't like it before the song (Amish Paradise) was released, they went ahead because they had already gone through the effort and money to produce it, and Coolio's permission is not needed
As the article states, this scheme will make most CD-ROM drives unable to play the discs IN AUDIO MODE. One exec is quoted as being sorry that all those people he sees on airplanes listening to legitimate CD's on their laptops are going to get burned by this.
Also, it only needs to get ripped once and then put on freenet or usenet, and it's all over for that album.
Looks word-for-word identical to the MSNBC article.