This sounds a lot like the Outlook 2007 discussion on Vista (and some reports on XP). Vista has "advanced memory management" and Outlook "continually asks for RAM, as long as some is available". The result? Outlook allocates ~700M, according to the Task Manager process list, while the Physical Memory free (on a 3G system) reports 6% free. Closing Outlook brings the ram free percentage up to %60. Some MS MVP said just what you said "The RAM is available, so Outlook uses it and the program responds faster, that's a good thing", completely disregarding the fact that the computer is near unresponsive to everything else. A program should never take RAM "because it's available", it should take it "because it's needed". Using over 2G of RAM to open 3 emails is absurd, using 1G for texture and sound data is more reasonable.
MS has a very nasty habit of making its software defaults benefit MS rather than any particular user, even when a cursory installer examination of the user's machine would suggest different settings.
MS wants things to be oh-so-shiny! Many of us prefer our systems to run oh-so-fast. As a rule, I never select MS's "recommended" or default options when adding, or changing, or updating software. When you consider that spyware such as WGA stuff gets installed by default in MS updates, I don't think I'm being too paranoid.
RAM is very, very cheap now, less than £10 a gigabyte. I configure my software to use lots of RAM, because I prefer a fast computer to one with lots of free memory.
I just bought a cheapo system (a little over $425 USD) that came with 4G of reasonably fast RAM...plenty for any version of Linux I am aware of, and almost enough for Winblows XP, Vista, and probably 7; given that previews suggest Win7 makes WinVista look like the pile 'o crap that it is.
Kiss hard drives goodbye, folks! Within a very few years, even storage will be entirely solid state.
Getting back to the point; software utilities such as "chkdsk" to diagnose and repair HD problems will be replaced by RAM checking solutions.
I [heart] your attitude "problem"!!!
When I buy a license to listen to or view some work on distributable media or a download from the 'Net, I expect to have permanent access to it, regardless of evolutionary changes in IT.
Historically, golden-eared audiophiles would take their brand new 12" albums and record them to reel-to-reel media and listen to them from that source, thus keeping the original media (vinyl) from wearing out very quickly through repeated use. I'm not sure if you qualify as golden eared, but I am an audiophile and I was listening to some of my favorite albums I bought in vinyl format from copies I made with my SOTA Wollensak cassette deck back in the 1970s.
I doubt it's what you're thinking of, but the Feynman Lectures on Physics assumes very little starting knowledge, and covers quite a bit, including some pretty meaty material. The audio lectures a very nice to have, as well.
Mod the above posted up plz! Feynman was a true wizard at science and communicating to the scientifically inclined/curious layperson. If one reads the Feynman Lectures on Physics first, a lot of more difficult works by Einstein, Heisenberg, etc. become much less of a challenge.
>Use occam's razor and go with the simplest explanation: People pirate because they want free shit and it's easier in some cases than going to the store.
>
>If you've ever seen the breakdown of law & order (Iraq right after invasion, New Orleans after Hurrican Katrina, LA after the riots, false Craiglist ads), you should know a >lot of people are freeloading scavengers as soon as they don't think their actions have any consequences.
>
>Do you think the internet, especially, which promotes the feeling of such an environment is immune from that? I don't think the explanation is complex at all.
If I had mod privs ATM, the above post would score +6.:-) The fact that the writer is at least as typing impaired as I am doesn't hurt.:-) I wanna see a Hurrican't!
I've had this thought for a while now, but now's an appropriate time to say it: Will there be a day when a British tourist visits America and remarks that our cameras must be hidden really well, because they can't see them at all!
If you think we don't already have far too many surveillance cameras in the U.S., just look for red-light cams around many intersections with traffic lights, the security cams that clutter the ceiling inside and the roof outside any Wal-Mart store. Then think about the many government cams in many U.S. cities. Finally, think about the cams you aren't supposed to see (they tend to be smaller and are in fact well hidden/disguised, or larger with really powerful telescopic lenses, IR capabilities, etc.
Starting around 1994, when the Web was just getting started, the number of Web cams that were mounted outside or behind a high window in many University buildings skyrocketed.
Let's not forget that most modern cellphones have cams built in. Think of what the people who live in buildings in big cities actually do with the telescopes they often have in their apartments. *SNICKER* Now think of how much easier it is for them to make permanent records of what they're watching through windows in another building a few blocks away?
So yeah, the number of surveillance cams used by various levels of Brit government is very high on a per capita basis, but I don't think the People's State of America will lag behind for very long if Dear Messiah's crowd has their way and converts the U.S.A. into the Obamination.
Anyone interested in this topic should pay special attention to the field of study known as "Law and Economics" and also Google the term "liability tax".
GooberToo makes some very good points. The last plane I flew was owned by an automotive repair instructor at a community college (read: not rich). Gentrification is a term used to label the process whereby rich folks raise the price of living in old domiciles on what is now increasingly valuable real estate. When taxes force the less wealthy to leave, the wealthy take the space over.
There is a similar reason for the pressure to shut down small airports (Meigs Field in Chicago, anyone?), and to force aircraft owners to buy expensive new ELTs that work on a different frequency. It is the equivalent of gentrification. The airspace, air control time/effort, and radio frequencies in question are highly desirable and the big kids are doing their best to shove the little kids out of the park.
As any of my many far left-liberal friends can tell you, I'm a Libertarian (large and small "l" apply), and have absolutely nothing against those who become wealthy. I just don't like bullies.
Just recently, there was a show about it on the Science Channel.
Did the show explain how the new system can prevent the car behind you from rear-ending your shiny Volvo? TFA doesn't. And while it's great that these concept cars can auto-brake, the guy on your tail isn't necessarily driving another Volvo.
I'm one of those people who long considered Volvo owners to be timid and likely to be obsessed with their car's safety because they were such lousy drivers. In reality, if one wants a REALLY SAFE CAR one should buy a Mercedes.
But, times change and my opinion of Volvo has gone up, now that they make some reasonably high performance production cars that are probably a lot of fun to drive. (The last Volvo I drove was 740 Turbo Wagon which I found to be rather boring compared to the Jeep-Eagle Talon TSi AWD I was driving at the time.) The 2007 Volvo S60 R was a car I considered when I was shopping for a new car in 2007.
Still, cars that try to do any driving for me at speed seem like a bad idea. In fact, I don't even like air-bags, because I figure if one blows up in my face during an accident at freeway speeds, it would cause me to lose any change of controlling the vehicle. You don't see airbags in race cars, just very nice seat belt systems.
About the only advance in active safety equipment I like is ABS (unless one considers AWD a safety feature -- I like that too.)
Still, I suppose the safety nazi and soccer mommy crowds would love to force everyone to have cars that won't exceed posted speed limits, won't allow high-G turns, brake and/or steer at the slightest hint of an impending collision and at all stop lights.
I guess (if I'm reading your response right) your complaint is that this gives you fewer physical stores in which to shop. This is true. But it begs the question, why would you want to go there in the first place?
I go to brick and mortar retail stores for the following main reasons:
1) The products I am looking for are not readily available at competitive prices via the 'Net in a timely fashion, e.g. I decide I want to cook a good steak on the grill after work and realize I'm out of charcoal and New York Strip Steaks.
2) I want to actually examine/test a product that is on display in a store -- if I like it and it is available for 'Net vendors, I'll go online to make my purchase. Read: I tend to shop where I can learn more about what I am thinking of buying, but intend to actually purchase the thing from whatever reputable vendor offers the best overall deal (cost of shipping, handling, processing, taxes, etc., as well as reputation for customer service factor in for me).
3) I have an established relationship with one or more of the staff at the store. A lot of stores won't let you call in and put some heavily discounted, popular item that is in their current sales flyer on hold so you can pick it up a few hours or even a couple of days later. For those with friends on the inside, exceptions to such rules are often made. Likewise, it is nice to be able to call someone you know in a local store the day before a sale is going to be announced in their next flyer and ask him/her, "Are there any bargains I might be interested in starting tomorrow?" At most electronics stores I know of, the employees have access to the sales flyers a day or two before an advertised sale starts. Since a lot of stores have just enough of the seriously discounted items in stock to avoid being nailed for bait-and-switch tactics, it is nice to get early warning of good deals and maybe have said item(s) set aside with one's name on them. Preferential treatment is worth a little extra $$$ at times.
Another way to get a head crash, is to pick up or put down the drive while it is spun up and the heads are seeking. It doesn't take much to exceed the Max G rating of an operating drive.
I've put a lot of holes in non-spinning hard drives, but I'd really like to use a long outdoor extension cord and run it out to the berm at a private shooting range (read: back yard of any one of several farmers I know) and plug in a hard drive with an old computer power supply set as far aside from it on the berm as the cables will allow, then perforate the spun up drive with a.223 Rem caliber rifle (an AR-15 or Mini-14, for example). I really want to find someone with access to an extremely high frame rate camera so I can capture the event and play it back in slow motion. It would be especially cool if I could find an otherwise non-functional 15,000RPM drive that would spin up as a target. I just have to wonder what a 55gr.223 cal. bullet (military ball, not JHP, since the idea is to make a nice neat little hole in the drive) traveling at around 3500fps hitting the very edge of a 15,000rpm platter which is moving at about 147+fps inside a small 3.5" drive case would look like in slow motion, and what the inside of the drive would look like afterward.
Some HD platters must be made out of different materials than others. One non-spinning drive I put a few.223 cal. holes in started smoking even though it was not connected to any power supply. Another contained nothing but dust and the aluminum hub where there should have been platters when I opened it up after hitting it off center over the platter area a couple-three times. Very strange.
There are some advantages to being a system or network administrator in a University computing environment, as one can obtain lots of scrap computer parts (drives, monitors, even complete systems destined for the trash) rather easily. Several friends of mine seemed quite happy to have
a well-ventilated HD on display in their campus offices or homes.
that's not a good idea, it probably doesn't conduct heat properly.
Remember, you don't have to wrap the entire lenth of the drive in whatever you use to acoustically isolated it from the drive bay. Even a couple of 1cm or 2cm wide strips of pipe insulation, cartpet, or whatever else you have handy that you find makes for good acoustic insulation can be fastened around the drive like belts and as long as they are thick enough to keep the drive from sliding around, they will provide plenty of access for the airflow inside the computer case to cool most hard drives I've encountered.
It is the high-performance, high-capacity drives that run very hot which generally need to have plenty of thermal (metal to metal or metal to thermal conducting acoustic insulator to metal) contact with the drive bay because simple air cooling over the small surface area of the drive case alone is insufficient.
There are fans made especially for cooling hard drives. They generally fit into a drive bay above or below the drive to be cooled (I'd prefer above since the heat from the drive rises and the top of the drive typically gets hotter than the bottom unless the circuit board on the bottom happens to generate a lot of heat.
Back when Comdex conventions were still a big deal, I recall seeing some really nice acoustic isolation enclosures for dot matrix printers (still required for certain situations where carbon paper type copies are necessary so that human entries, especially signatures, are identical on every copy when the form is filled out and signed) and loud tower or mini-tower machines that couldn't be placed in a server room but had to be next to someone's desk.
These enclosures were typically much larger than the printer or computer they contained, but they could use big quiet fans that created a veritable windstorm around a computer inside. Printers generally don't require much cooling and a lot of fast moving air probably tends cause feed jams as the paper is blown around -- I don't recall seeing big, powerful fans on the acoustic enclosures used for dot matrix (or daisy wheel) printers, but small yet quiet ones were common.
TFA claims that the gel would transfer the heat to the aluminum enclosure where it could radiate away, but I'm not so sure of that. Doesn't it store the heat more than transfer it?
Sure it does, but it has to dissipate that heat somewhere and thus transfers it to the drive bay which transfers it to the computer case. If the gel packs were good thermal insulators rather than (the) good thermal conductors as the original poster claimed the ones he uses are, what you say would be true. I've never tried using gel packs to silence a hard drive, but I know I would not use the plush carpet method I described earlier on any drive that tended to run more than a little warm.
I might wrap the bottom and sides of a hot running hard drive in plush carpet, leaving the top of the drive case exposed to the airflow in the case to dissipate the heat from the drive (which will tend to rise, as I'm sure you recall). That way the drive is still held snugly and more quietly in place but can be adequately cooled. Since I don't often move my desktops/towers/mini-towers around much, I don't feel the need to actually screw the HDs into their bays as long as they are reasonably firmly in place.
Generally, people who can hear the high-pitched whine of a TV or the whine of transformers can also hear hard drives whine and find all the whining noise annoying. People going deaf won't know what the hell I am talking about.
I'm old enough to have adult children (I don't) but when I was a child I could easily hear the flyback transformers in many TVs. I recall visiting the Science and Industry Museum in Chicago where they had a booth that tested the range of audio frequencies one's hearing spanned. Mine exceeded 22KHz at the high end. Now, I can still hear the occasional flyback transformer on old CRTs in TVs, but I'm positive I've lost the ability to hear any sound above 20KHz and more likely even as low as 18KHz.
When you mention people going deaf, it is important to understand that most people lose their ability to hear high frequency sounds much faster than they do sounds between say, 100Hz and 4KHz (IRRC). The fundamental frequencies and their harmonics that make the speech of both the typical male or female human voice more clear fit within that range, so a lot of people can be quite deaf at frequencies over 4KHz and not really notice or care about it unless they are very into music, bird song, etc.
That is why, on occasion, I've had to tell elderly clients that one of their old hard drives was whining a bit too loudly and was probably going to fail sooner rather than later. They couldn't hear a 5.4KHz whine, much less any sound at 7.2KHz+.
Another problem I've noticed when working with older clients is that since they don't hear a lot of the noise a computer makes, they don't realize when a case or power supply cooling fan is going bad or has failed completely. The lack of certain sounds from a computer can be as important as the presence of others.
Embedding in gel looked like a pretty bad idea.
Hard drives get pretty hot, and high temperatures will shorten their lifespan.
That's a very good point. The trick I've used to quiet ordinary 5400RPM or 7200RPM IDE and EIDE drives by wrapping them in plush carpet would be bad for a drive that tends to run hot and the carpet will not conduct the heat away from the drive to the case.
Some of the Miniscribe and Microscience SCSI drives I've had in the past ran *VERY*hot...I mean hot enough that they were uncomfortable to hold for very long while or just after they'd been busy for awhile. IRRC, it was the pair of old (brand new and state-of-the-art at the time) 9GB 10,000RPM Miniscribe drives I had in one machine that died of head crashes due to heat death. An engineer I had reason to believe told me that in order to cram 10GB of capacity onto what was then a very fast SCSI drive, Miniscribe had to use platters that were so large that their edges were almost rubbing the inside of the drive case. Apparently, Miniscribe didn't take thermal expansion into consideration and one many of these drives the platters would expand enough that their edges scrapped against the inside of the drive case, creating a fine dust which would eventually find its way between the heads and the platter surfaces, causing a head crash.
While I can't verify that explanation, it fits what I observed. One of the pair of drives was mounted directly over the other and it was from that drive I heard the distinct sounds and noticed the erratic drive performance that precede a lot of head crashes. The at drive died first in a very noisy way (I'd been making frequent made backups of both since I first heard the strange whining sounds), followed a couple of weeks later by the drive below it. The lower drive exhibited the same failure mode but died rather suddenly, unlike the upper drive which went though noisy death throes for many weeks.
That stands to reason as the lower drive's waste heat was rising and thus increasing the temperature of the drive above it. The upper drive was used as a "data" drive while the lower one held the WinNT OS and all the software programs.
I suppose the problem was partly my fault because I did nothing special to keep the drives cool since I had no idea they tended to run so much hotter than the lower performance drives I'd been using up to that point. Adding an extra case fan or even just a better case fan and separating the drives by an open bay might have kept them running for a long time instead of about a year or so.
I can say one thing for sure: the sound of a 10,000RPM head crash is truly annoying, almost agonizing, especially when combined with the noise from another one that is imminent.
That might work to prevent the funnel from vibrating but I'd also consider carefully applying a thin bead of (non-conducting) silicone seal; the kind that one can peal off a smooth hard surface with a screwdriver or a knife very easily. I would use high-quality electrical tape before I'd use duct tape because the latter usually leaves behind a bunch of sticky adhesive if you need to remove it for some reason, as does some cheap electrical tape.
I've never owned a Dull computer (most, but not all, of them are grossly overprices pieces of crap, IMHO) but have administered many dozens of them over the years and I do not like the way the ductwork (funnel) is set up on a lot of them.
The loose rubber grommets which attach my drives serve the same purpose. The screw inserts directly through, but it only has enough turns to keep the disk from falling out.
I can't remember which case it is, but it should be difficult to spot from would be myth box builders.
As someone pointed out above, it is the direct metal to metal connection from the noisy drive to the case that transfers most of the sound and the case often works as sort of an acoustic amplifier, much the way the horn on an old gramophone does, especially if some part of the case (usually one of the side panels) resonates at some (sub)harmonic of the frequency at which one of the drives is vibrating.
In the past, I've actually solved drive vibration noise problems by the simple expedient of taking a 3.5" HD and wrapping it in enough plush carpet remnants to that it will fit snugly into a 5.25" drive bay. This will also muffle the whine of spinning disks and moving heads to some extent -- usually a lot, in my experience.
If you look at many (most?) hard drives you will see a little hole with what looks like a filter of some sort beneath it. It is there for a reason, namely pressure changes due to weather or relocation of the drive from one altitude to another. When attempting to stifle hard drive noise, you do not want to seal this venturi by covering it with tape or a gel pack attached tighly enough to prevent the drive from "breathing"; a horrible analogy, I know, but the only better one I can think of is that the drive uses that heavily filtered venturi to equalize its internal air pressure to that of its environment much the way your ears pop (especially if you yawn) when the pressure in an airplane, tram, cable car, elevator, etc. changes significantly as you move up or down.
Cooling fans, especially if you use a lot of them instead of more esoteric means of preventing CPUs, GPUs, and high-performance HDs from overheating, tend to make a lot of noise. Most stock cooling fans are really cheap and don't have terribly great bearings or advanced blade designs. It is often worth it to pay more for high end fans which are designed to move air efficiently (which implies more silently, if you think about it -- the energy wasted making a lot of noise is wasted energy). Blowing the dust off the fan blades every few months will make the fans quieter, too.
Mr. Wizard
(not an acoustic engineer, but can fake it:-)
Here are the results from the same machine running Ubuntu 8.04 with all current OS updates for that release. (Both the Windows Xp x64 and Ubuntu 8.04 tests using the JavaScript benchmark were done with Firefox 3.03, although my Winblows installation of Firefox has a lot more addons and the OS itself has a lot more crap running in the background.
So Ubuntu 8.04 with all the current patches is about 0.431 seconds faster on the benchmark in question (5.468s for Ubuntu Linux versus 5.431s) for Winblows.
I've been on the road for over a week now and hadn't updated my Ubuntu Linux installation for over a month so there were 108 patches pending when I booted up with Ubuntu. It was way cool having to reboot the system just once for all the system and application patches to take effect. Get behind by a Windows XP Service Pack or two and a few more recent critical and non-critical updates and you can expect to have to reboot several times, and then you're likely to find more updates are available to update the updated installation. That is one thing that really sucks about windows compared to Linux which only seems to require a reboot when the kernel is changed.
I'm rather pleased to say that I am now able to completely dump Windows XP x64 (and every other Windows OS installation on my various machines) and get by doing everything I really need or want to do using Ubuntu Linux, Open Office, Wine (for playing WoW...hmmmm, I need to see if Chessmaster X runs with Wine instead of Winblows), and various other Linux-based equivalents for the Winblows apps that don't have Linux releases as Firefox does.
None of my clients is likely to switch to Linux anytime soon due to the steep learning curve. The fact is that they probably wouldn't be paying me to help with Winblows OS and app issues if they knew enough about computers to be comfortable using Linux. A lot of them are extremely used to software I suspect won't run under Linux with Wine.
I could be wrong about that because I haven't tried running programs such as Excel, Word, WordPerfect, IE (for Outlook Express), etc. that are MS products with Wine in a Linux environment. If anyone can tell me if those MS apps can be run with Wine, I'd like to know, because I suspect they'd run faster.
These are the results I got on a XP Pro x64 ( box with an Athlon 3000+ CPU running at its rated (not overclocked) 2Ghz speed with 2GB of 333MHz(?)RAM, and a couple of 7200RPM HDs (a Maxtor 6Y250P0 and an ST350063) that I assembled in March of 2004 (over 4.5 years ago). I have tweaked the OS installation a bit, trimming it down and changing a lot of MS's idiotic default settings.
These are the results I get running the test you mentioned above:
I wonder if it is the 64-bit edition of XP Pro that makes my older machine about twice as fast as the 4 year old Dell running Ubuntu 8.10 that you benchmarked? It could be the extra GB of RAM, I suppose, but I tend to doubt that would affect small JavaScript benchmarks to such an extent. I dual boot this machine with Ubuntu 8.04 as the other OS, so I'll have to give that a try and post a follow up to my own message.
[Damn! First/. complains that there are too many "junk" characters in this post so by trial and error (Help was no help at all) I figure out that the long strings of "-"'s and "="'s in the table had to be replaced with much shorter dividers. Now/. is whining about the message having too few characters per line (26.3) before I added this comment. I really am curious as to how current versions of various flavors of Linux, especially Ubuntu, compare to XP Pro x64 Edition on similar machines.]
Not sure why we have the non-story about it outperforming Vista though...
My thought exactly. Well, almost. My first thought was that a snail towing a 65-ton truck might outperform Vista, but I'm very polite.;-)
The snail would beat Vista even if it took a few bio or snack breaks at truck stops along the way. Vista would probably crash before getting very far from the starting line.
"If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it,' [a NASA spokesman] said."
Why the hell not? If I find it first... it's mine.
Obviously, you have a clear understanding of at least some Toddler Property Law:
Property Law As Viewed By A Toddler
1. If I like it, it's mine.
2. If it's in my hand, it's mine.
3. If I can take it from you, it's mine.
4. If I had it a little while ago, it's mine.
5. If it's mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
6. If I'm doing or building something, all the pieces are mine.
7. If it looks like it's mine, it's mine.
8. If I saw it first, it's mine.
9. If I can see it, it's mine.
10. If I think it's mine, it's mine.
11. If I want it, it's mine.
12. If I "need it, it's mine (yes, I know the difference between "want" and "need"!).
13. If I say it's mine, it's mine.
14. If you don't stop me from playing with it, it's mine.
15. If you tell me I can play with it, it's mine.
16. If it will upset me too much when you take it away from me, it's mine.
17. If I (think I) can play with it better than you can, it's mine.
18. If I play with it long enough, it's mine.
19. If you are playing with something and you put it down, it's mine.
20. If it's broken, it's yours (no wait, all the pieces are mine).
Not to mention impossible with current linear accelerator tech. First of all, I believe linear accelerators work with subatomic particles as projectiles, so I suspect he was thinking of a rail gun, which requires that the projectile be largely metallic, I believe and (AFAIK) we have none that will propel a 40lb. turkey (frozen or not) at a mere 100MPH. I know the US military has been fooling around with rail guns for years:
. The projectile it fires is made of tungsten and weighs about 3.5Kg IRRC, but it moves out at over Mach 7.
I've heard/read a lot of variations on the frozen turkey (often it is described as being a frozen chicken and usually the Brits are claimed to have mimicked the test from what US aircraft manufacturers use to test what happens when an airplane suffers a bird strike while not realizing that the projectile bird was not frozen.
This article about the urban legend and the snippets of truth behind it is one of the best I've seen. Note that the launcher uses compressed air to hurl the bird, much the same way that Hollyweird SFX guys use compressed air powered devices to flip cars all over the place in action movies.
A large one might dent your car in the extremely improbable case that one should hit it.
TFA says the largest piece could be about 40 pounds and hit at 100 mph. That wouldn't dent your car, it would totally destroy it.
Not necessarily. Think about it. There are numerous cases where race cars and even ordinary automobiles have hit other cars, solid objects such as barriers, buildings, telephone poles, etc. at high speed (over 100MPH in some cases) and the driver walked away relatively unscathed.
If the 17.5KG object strikes a car's engine block or back seat area (especially a glancing blow) and doesn't hit the driver directly, it is unlikely to kill the driver upon impact. If it hits the gas tank and happens to cause the gasoline vapor to ignite or hits anywhere and causes the driver to loose control of the vehicle and crash into something else, it might well prove fatal, but in every case case I can think of, I'm fairly sure there would be enough of the driver left in the wreckage to identify him//her. We are not talking about the same object moving at two or three thousand kilometers per hour as a large meteorite (small meteor? -- I don't know where the dividing line is) does if it manages to avoid burning up before hitting Earth.
A hard line drive in a game of professional baseball -- the ball masses 0.145Kg and can end up moving about 177Kph (according to 108 Stitches -- doesn't usually harm any opposing player in the field who is lucky enough to catch it in his glove. That 17.5Kg piece of debris hitting a car at 160Kph is certainly not going to vaporize the car but will almost definitely do major damage if it hits with solid "body blow". That 17.5 hunk of ammonia tank will have approximately 121X the kinetic energy of the aforementioned baseball coming off a hard line drive, but a car's engine block is much stronger and more massive than a human hand protected by a think piece of leather at the end of a human arm.
I guess what I am saying is that if by "totally destroy" you mean "total it" from an insurance adjuster's point of view, I tend to agree if a direct hit is involved. If you mean "obliterate the car upon impact", then you are most certainly wrong.
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This sounds a lot like the Outlook 2007 discussion on Vista (and some reports on XP). Vista has "advanced memory management" and Outlook "continually asks for RAM, as long as some is available". The result? Outlook allocates ~700M, according to the Task Manager process list, while the Physical Memory free (on a 3G system) reports 6% free. Closing Outlook brings the ram free percentage up to %60. Some MS MVP said just what you said "The RAM is available, so Outlook uses it and the program responds faster, that's a good thing", completely disregarding the fact that the computer is near unresponsive to everything else. A program should never take RAM "because it's available", it should take it "because it's needed". Using over 2G of RAM to open 3 emails is absurd, using 1G for texture and sound data is more reasonable.
MS has a very nasty habit of making its software defaults benefit MS rather than any particular user, even when a cursory installer examination of the user's machine would suggest different settings.
MS wants things to be oh-so-shiny! Many of us prefer our systems to run oh-so-fast. As a rule, I never select MS's "recommended" or default options when adding, or changing, or updating software. When you consider that spyware such as WGA stuff gets installed by default in MS updates, I don't think I'm being too paranoid.
This obsession with memory usage is silly.
RAM is very, very cheap now, less than £10 a gigabyte. I configure my software to use lots of RAM, because I prefer a fast computer to one with lots of free memory.
I just bought a cheapo system (a little over $425 USD) that came with 4G of reasonably fast RAM...plenty for any version of Linux I am aware of, and almost enough for Winblows XP, Vista, and probably 7; given that previews suggest Win7 makes WinVista look like the pile 'o crap that it is.
Kiss hard drives goodbye, folks! Within a very few years, even storage will be entirely solid state.
Getting back to the point; software utilities such as "chkdsk" to diagnose and repair HD problems will be replaced by RAM checking solutions.
I [heart] your attitude "problem"!!! When I buy a license to listen to or view some work on distributable media or a download from the 'Net, I expect to have permanent access to it, regardless of evolutionary changes in IT. Historically, golden-eared audiophiles would take their brand new 12" albums and record them to reel-to-reel media and listen to them from that source, thus keeping the original media (vinyl) from wearing out very quickly through repeated use. I'm not sure if you qualify as golden eared, but I am an audiophile and I was listening to some of my favorite albums I bought in vinyl format from copies I made with my SOTA Wollensak cassette deck back in the 1970s.
I doubt it's what you're thinking of, but the Feynman Lectures on Physics assumes very little starting knowledge, and covers quite a bit, including some pretty meaty material. The audio lectures a very nice to have, as well.
Mod the above posted up plz! Feynman was a true wizard at science and communicating to the scientifically inclined/curious layperson. If one reads the Feynman Lectures on Physics first, a lot of more difficult works by Einstein, Heisenberg, etc. become much less of a challenge.
>Use occam's razor and go with the simplest explanation: People pirate because they want free shit and it's easier in some cases than going to the store. > >If you've ever seen the breakdown of law & order (Iraq right after invasion, New Orleans after Hurrican Katrina, LA after the riots, false Craiglist ads), you should know a >lot of people are freeloading scavengers as soon as they don't think their actions have any consequences. > >Do you think the internet, especially, which promotes the feeling of such an environment is immune from that? I don't think the explanation is complex at all.
:-) The fact that the writer is at least as typing impaired as I am doesn't hurt. :-) I wanna see a Hurrican't!
If I had mod privs ATM, the above post would score +6.
I've had this thought for a while now, but now's an appropriate time to say it: Will there be a day when a British tourist visits America and remarks that our cameras must be hidden really well, because they can't see them at all!
If you think we don't already have far too many surveillance cameras in the U.S., just look for red-light cams around many intersections with traffic lights, the security cams that clutter the ceiling inside and the roof outside any Wal-Mart store. Then think about the many government cams in many U.S. cities. Finally, think about the cams you aren't supposed to see (they tend to be smaller and are in fact well hidden/disguised, or larger with really powerful telescopic lenses, IR capabilities, etc.
Starting around 1994, when the Web was just getting started, the number of Web cams that were mounted outside or behind a high window in many University buildings skyrocketed.
Let's not forget that most modern cellphones have cams built in. Think of what the people who live in buildings in big cities actually do with the telescopes they often have in their apartments. *SNICKER* Now think of how much easier it is for them to make permanent records of what they're watching through windows in another building a few blocks away?
So yeah, the number of surveillance cams used by various levels of Brit government is very high on a per capita basis, but I don't think the People's State of America will lag behind for very long if Dear Messiah's crowd has their way and converts the U.S.A. into the Obamination.
Anyone interested in this topic should pay special attention to the field of study known as "Law and Economics" and also Google the term "liability tax".
Mod this up, please.
GooberToo makes some very good points. The last plane I flew was owned by an automotive repair instructor at a community college (read: not rich). Gentrification is a term used to label the process whereby rich folks raise the price of living in old domiciles on what is now increasingly valuable real estate. When taxes force the less wealthy to leave, the wealthy take the space over.
There is a similar reason for the pressure to shut down small airports (Meigs Field in Chicago, anyone?), and to force aircraft owners to buy expensive new ELTs that work on a different frequency. It is the equivalent of gentrification. The airspace, air control time/effort, and radio frequencies in question are highly desirable and the big kids are doing their best to shove the little kids out of the park.
As any of my many far left-liberal friends can tell you, I'm a Libertarian (large and small "l" apply), and have absolutely nothing against those who become wealthy. I just don't like bullies.
Just recently, there was a show about it on the Science Channel.
Did the show explain how the new system can prevent the car behind you from rear-ending your shiny Volvo? TFA doesn't. And while it's great that these concept cars can auto-brake, the guy on your tail isn't necessarily driving another Volvo.
I'm one of those people who long considered Volvo owners to be timid and likely to be obsessed with their car's safety because they were such lousy drivers. In reality, if one wants a REALLY SAFE CAR one should buy a Mercedes.
But, times change and my opinion of Volvo has gone up, now that they make some reasonably high performance production cars that are probably a lot of fun to drive. (The last Volvo I drove was 740 Turbo Wagon which I found to be rather boring compared to the Jeep-Eagle Talon TSi AWD I was driving at the time.) The 2007 Volvo S60 R was a car I considered when I was shopping for a new car in 2007.
Still, cars that try to do any driving for me at speed seem like a bad idea. In fact, I don't even like air-bags, because I figure if one blows up in my face during an accident at freeway speeds, it would cause me to lose any change of controlling the vehicle. You don't see airbags in race cars, just very nice seat belt systems.
About the only advance in active safety equipment I like is ABS (unless one considers AWD a safety feature -- I like that too.)
Still, I suppose the safety nazi and soccer mommy crowds would love to force everyone to have cars that won't exceed posted speed limits, won't allow high-G turns, brake and/or steer at the slightest hint of an impending collision and at all stop lights.
I guess (if I'm reading your response right) your complaint is that this gives you fewer physical stores in which to shop. This is true. But it begs the question, why would you want to go there in the first place?
I go to brick and mortar retail stores for the following main reasons:
1) The products I am looking for are not readily available at competitive prices via the 'Net in a timely fashion, e.g. I decide I want to cook a good steak on the grill after work and realize I'm out of charcoal and New York Strip Steaks.
2) I want to actually examine/test a product that is on display in a store -- if I like it and it is available for 'Net vendors, I'll go online to make my purchase. Read: I tend to shop where I can learn more about what I am thinking of buying, but intend to actually purchase the thing from whatever reputable vendor offers the best overall deal (cost of shipping, handling, processing, taxes, etc., as well as reputation for customer service factor in for me).
3) I have an established relationship with one or more of the staff at the store. A lot of stores won't let you call in and put some heavily discounted, popular item that is in their current sales flyer on hold so you can pick it up a few hours or even a couple of days later. For those with friends on the inside, exceptions to such rules are often made. Likewise, it is nice to be able to call someone you know in a local store the day before a sale is going to be announced in their next flyer and ask him/her, "Are there any bargains I might be interested in starting tomorrow?" At most electronics stores I know of, the employees have access to the sales flyers a day or two before an advertised sale starts. Since a lot of stores have just enough of the seriously discounted items in stock to avoid being nailed for bait-and-switch tactics, it is nice to get early warning of good deals and maybe have said item(s) set aside with one's name on them. Preferential treatment is worth a little extra $$$ at times.
Another way to get a head crash, is to pick up or put down the drive while it is spun up and the heads are seeking. It doesn't take much to exceed the Max G rating of an operating drive.
I've put a lot of holes in non-spinning hard drives, but I'd really like to use a long outdoor extension cord and run it out to the berm at a private shooting range (read: back yard of any one of several farmers I know) and plug in a hard drive with an old computer power supply set as far aside from it on the berm as the cables will allow, then perforate the spun up drive with a .223 Rem caliber rifle (an AR-15 or Mini-14, for example). I really want to find someone with access to an extremely high frame rate camera so I can capture the event and play it back in slow motion. It would be especially cool if I could find an otherwise non-functional 15,000RPM drive that would spin up as a target. I just have to wonder what a 55gr .223 cal. bullet (military ball, not JHP, since the idea is to make a nice neat little hole in the drive) traveling at around 3500fps hitting the very edge of a 15,000rpm platter which is moving at about 147+fps inside a small 3.5" drive case would look like in slow motion, and what the inside of the drive would look like afterward.
.223 cal. holes in started smoking even though it was not connected to any power supply. Another contained nothing but dust and the aluminum hub where there should have been platters when I opened it up after hitting it off center over the platter area a couple-three times. Very strange.
Some HD platters must be made out of different materials than others. One non-spinning drive I put a few
There are some advantages to being a system or network administrator in a University computing environment, as one can obtain lots of scrap computer parts (drives, monitors, even complete systems destined for the trash) rather easily. Several friends of mine seemed quite happy to have a well-ventilated HD on display in their campus offices or homes.
Gun
Yeah, that falls under pest control devices in my household budget.
that's not a good idea, it probably doesn't conduct heat properly.
Remember, you don't have to wrap the entire lenth of the drive in whatever you use to acoustically isolated it from the drive bay. Even a couple of 1cm or 2cm wide strips of pipe insulation, cartpet, or whatever else you have handy that you find makes for good acoustic insulation can be fastened around the drive like belts and as long as they are thick enough to keep the drive from sliding around, they will provide plenty of access for the airflow inside the computer case to cool most hard drives I've encountered.
It is the high-performance, high-capacity drives that run very hot which generally need to have plenty of thermal (metal to metal or metal to thermal conducting acoustic insulator to metal) contact with the drive bay because simple air cooling over the small surface area of the drive case alone is insufficient.
There are fans made especially for cooling hard drives. They generally fit into a drive bay above or below the drive to be cooled (I'd prefer above since the heat from the drive rises and the top of the drive typically gets hotter than the bottom unless the circuit board on the bottom happens to generate a lot of heat.
Back when Comdex conventions were still a big deal, I recall seeing some really nice acoustic isolation enclosures for dot matrix printers (still required for certain situations where carbon paper type copies are necessary so that human entries, especially signatures, are identical on every copy when the form is filled out and signed) and loud tower or mini-tower machines that couldn't be placed in a server room but had to be next to someone's desk.
These enclosures were typically much larger than the printer or computer they contained, but they could use big quiet fans that created a veritable windstorm around a computer inside. Printers generally don't require much cooling and a lot of fast moving air probably tends cause feed jams as the paper is blown around -- I don't recall seeing big, powerful fans on the acoustic enclosures used for dot matrix (or daisy wheel) printers, but small yet quiet ones were common.
TFA claims that the gel would transfer the heat to the aluminum enclosure where it could radiate away, but I'm not so sure of that. Doesn't it store the heat more than transfer it?
Sure it does, but it has to dissipate that heat somewhere and thus transfers it to the drive bay which transfers it to the computer case. If the gel packs were good thermal insulators rather than (the) good thermal conductors as the original poster claimed the ones he uses are, what you say would be true. I've never tried using gel packs to silence a hard drive, but I know I would not use the plush carpet method I described earlier on any drive that tended to run more than a little warm.
I might wrap the bottom and sides of a hot running hard drive in plush carpet, leaving the top of the drive case exposed to the airflow in the case to dissipate the heat from the drive (which will tend to rise, as I'm sure you recall). That way the drive is still held snugly and more quietly in place but can be adequately cooled. Since I don't often move my desktops/towers/mini-towers around much, I don't feel the need to actually screw the HDs into their bays as long as they are reasonably firmly in place.
Generally, people who can hear the high-pitched whine of a TV or the whine of transformers can also hear hard drives whine and find all the whining noise annoying. People going deaf won't know what the hell I am talking about.
I'm old enough to have adult children (I don't) but when I was a child I could easily hear the flyback transformers in many TVs. I recall visiting the Science and Industry Museum in Chicago where they had a booth that tested the range of audio frequencies one's hearing spanned. Mine exceeded 22KHz at the high end. Now, I can still hear the occasional flyback transformer on old CRTs in TVs, but I'm positive I've lost the ability to hear any sound above 20KHz and more likely even as low as 18KHz.
When you mention people going deaf, it is important to understand that most people lose their ability to hear high frequency sounds much faster than they do sounds between say, 100Hz and 4KHz (IRRC). The fundamental frequencies and their harmonics that make the speech of both the typical male or female human voice more clear fit within that range, so a lot of people can be quite deaf at frequencies over 4KHz and not really notice or care about it unless they are very into music, bird song, etc.
That is why, on occasion, I've had to tell elderly clients that one of their old hard drives was whining a bit too loudly and was probably going to fail sooner rather than later. They couldn't hear a 5.4KHz whine, much less any sound at 7.2KHz+.
Another problem I've noticed when working with older clients is that since they don't hear a lot of the noise a computer makes, they don't realize when a case or power supply cooling fan is going bad or has failed completely. The lack of certain sounds from a computer can be as important as the presence of others.
Embedding in gel looked like a pretty bad idea. Hard drives get pretty hot, and high temperatures will shorten their lifespan.
That's a very good point. The trick I've used to quiet ordinary 5400RPM or 7200RPM IDE and EIDE drives by wrapping them in plush carpet would be bad for a drive that tends to run hot and the carpet will not conduct the heat away from the drive to the case.
Some of the Miniscribe and Microscience SCSI drives I've had in the past ran *VERY*hot...I mean hot enough that they were uncomfortable to hold for very long while or just after they'd been busy for awhile. IRRC, it was the pair of old (brand new and state-of-the-art at the time) 9GB 10,000RPM Miniscribe drives I had in one machine that died of head crashes due to heat death. An engineer I had reason to believe told me that in order to cram 10GB of capacity onto what was then a very fast SCSI drive, Miniscribe had to use platters that were so large that their edges were almost rubbing the inside of the drive case. Apparently, Miniscribe didn't take thermal expansion into consideration and one many of these drives the platters would expand enough that their edges scrapped against the inside of the drive case, creating a fine dust which would eventually find its way between the heads and the platter surfaces, causing a head crash.
While I can't verify that explanation, it fits what I observed. One of the pair of drives was mounted directly over the other and it was from that drive I heard the distinct sounds and noticed the erratic drive performance that precede a lot of head crashes. The at drive died first in a very noisy way (I'd been making frequent made backups of both since I first heard the strange whining sounds), followed a couple of weeks later by the drive below it. The lower drive exhibited the same failure mode but died rather suddenly, unlike the upper drive which went though noisy death throes for many weeks.
That stands to reason as the lower drive's waste heat was rising and thus increasing the temperature of the drive above it. The upper drive was used as a "data" drive while the lower one held the WinNT OS and all the software programs.
I suppose the problem was partly my fault because I did nothing special to keep the drives cool since I had no idea they tended to run so much hotter than the lower performance drives I'd been using up to that point. Adding an extra case fan or even just a better case fan and separating the drives by an open bay might have kept them running for a long time instead of about a year or so.
I can say one thing for sure: the sound of a 10,000RPM head crash is truly annoying, almost agonizing, especially when combined with the noise from another one that is imminent.
duct tape!
That might work to prevent the funnel from vibrating but I'd also consider carefully applying a thin bead of (non-conducting) silicone seal; the kind that one can peal off a smooth hard surface with a screwdriver or a knife very easily. I would use high-quality electrical tape before I'd use duct tape because the latter usually leaves behind a bunch of sticky adhesive if you need to remove it for some reason, as does some cheap electrical tape.
I've never owned a Dull computer (most, but not all, of them are grossly overprices pieces of crap, IMHO) but have administered many dozens of them over the years and I do not like the way the ductwork (funnel) is set up on a lot of them.
The loose rubber grommets which attach my drives serve the same purpose. The screw inserts directly through, but it only has enough turns to keep the disk from falling out.
I can't remember which case it is, but it should be difficult to spot from would be myth box builders.
As someone pointed out above, it is the direct metal to metal connection from the noisy drive to the case that transfers most of the sound and the case often works as sort of an acoustic amplifier, much the way the horn on an old gramophone does, especially if some part of the case (usually one of the side panels) resonates at some (sub)harmonic of the frequency at which one of the drives is vibrating.
:-)
In the past, I've actually solved drive vibration noise problems by the simple expedient of taking a 3.5" HD and wrapping it in enough plush carpet remnants to that it will fit snugly into a 5.25" drive bay. This will also muffle the whine of spinning disks and moving heads to some extent -- usually a lot, in my experience.
If you look at many (most?) hard drives you will see a little hole with what looks like a filter of some sort beneath it. It is there for a reason, namely pressure changes due to weather or relocation of the drive from one altitude to another. When attempting to stifle hard drive noise, you do not want to seal this venturi by covering it with tape or a gel pack attached tighly enough to prevent the drive from "breathing"; a horrible analogy, I know, but the only better one I can think of is that the drive uses that heavily filtered venturi to equalize its internal air pressure to that of its environment much the way your ears pop (especially if you yawn) when the pressure in an airplane, tram, cable car, elevator, etc. changes significantly as you move up or down.
Cooling fans, especially if you use a lot of them instead of more esoteric means of preventing CPUs, GPUs, and high-performance HDs from overheating, tend to make a lot of noise. Most stock cooling fans are really cheap and don't have terribly great bearings or advanced blade designs. It is often worth it to pay more for high end fans which are designed to move air efficiently (which implies more silently, if you think about it -- the energy wasted making a lot of noise is wasted energy). Blowing the dust off the fan blades every few months will make the fans quieter, too.
Mr. Wizard (not an acoustic engineer, but can fake it
===
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
---
Total: 5037.2ms +/- 2.6%
---
3d: 620.8ms +/- 18.0%
cube: 245.2ms +/- 43.9%
morph: 202.2ms +/- 1.6%
raytrace: 173.4ms +/- 2.8%
access: 807.4ms +/- 5.0%
binary-trees: 73.4ms +/- 1.9%
fannkuch: 382.2ms +/- 6.0%
nbody: 207.8ms +/- 7.3%
nsieve: 144.0ms +/- 9.1%
bitops: 627.8ms +/- 3.4%
3bit-bits-in-byte: 116.8ms +/- 0.5%
bits-in-byte: 160.6ms +/- 7.9%
bitwise-and: 143.8ms +/- 6.0%
nsieve-bits: 206.6ms +/- 0.3%
controlflow: 61.2ms +/- 0.9%
recursive: 61.2ms +/- 0.9%
crypto: 305.4ms +/- 2.1%
aes: 129.8ms +/- 0.8%
md5: 86.6ms +/- 0.8%
sha1: 89.0ms +/- 7.1%
date: 453.0ms +/- 5.4%
format-tofte: 282.8ms +/- 8.1%
format-xparb: 170.2ms +/- 1.1%
math: 526.6ms +/- 1.7%
cordic: 225.8ms +/- 0.5%
partial-sums: 185.0ms +/- 5.9%
spectral-norm: 115.8ms +/- 3.2%
regexp: 400.8ms +/- 13.4%
dna: 400.8ms +/- 13.4%
string: 1234.2ms +/- 1.4%
base64: 141.6ms +/- 2.0%
fasta: 284.2ms +/- 1.6%
tagcloud: 232.2ms +/- 9.1%
unpack-code: 410.6ms +/- 7.0%
validate-input: 165.6ms +/- 5.8%
So Ubuntu 8.04 with all the current patches is about 0.431 seconds faster on the benchmark in question (5.468s for Ubuntu Linux versus 5.431s) for Winblows.
I've been on the road for over a week now and hadn't updated my Ubuntu Linux installation for over a month so there were 108 patches pending when I booted up with Ubuntu. It was way cool having to reboot the system just once for all the system and application patches to take effect. Get behind by a Windows XP Service Pack or two and a few more recent critical and non-critical updates and you can expect to have to reboot several times, and then you're likely to find more updates are available to update the updated installation. That is one thing that really sucks about windows compared to Linux which only seems to require a reboot when the kernel is changed.
I'm rather pleased to say that I am now able to completely dump Windows XP x64 (and every other Windows OS installation on my various machines) and get by doing everything I really need or want to do using Ubuntu Linux, Open Office, Wine (for playing WoW...hmmmm, I need to see if Chessmaster X runs with Wine instead of Winblows), and various other Linux-based equivalents for the Winblows apps that don't have Linux releases as Firefox does.
None of my clients is likely to switch to Linux anytime soon due to the steep learning curve. The fact is that they probably wouldn't be paying me to help with Winblows OS and app issues if they knew enough about computers to be comfortable using Linux. A lot of them are extremely used to software I suspect won't run under Linux with Wine.
I could be wrong about that because I haven't tried running programs such as Excel, Word, WordPerfect, IE (for Outlook Express), etc. that are MS products with Wine in a Linux environment. If anyone can tell me if those MS apps can be run with Wine, I'd like to know, because I suspect they'd run faster.
These are the results I get running the test you mentioned above:
===
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
---
Total: 5468.4ms +/- 0.4%
---
3d: 641.2ms +/- 0.6%
cube: 236.4ms +/- 0.5%
morph: 224.0ms +/- 1.2%
raytrace: 180.8ms +/- 2.5%
access: 924.0ms +/- 1.7%
binary-trees: 71.4ms +/- 1.0%
fannkuch: 443.4ms +/- 0.4%
nbody: 237.0ms +/- 4.7%
nsieve: 172.2ms +/- 2.9%
bitops: 837.4ms +/- 0.1%
3bit-bits-in-byte: 147.2ms +/- 0.4%
bits-in-byte: 222.4ms +/- 0.3%
bitwise-and: 194.6ms +/- 0.3%
nsieve-bits: 273.2ms +/- 0.4%
controlflow: 78.4ms +/- 0.9%
recursive: 78.4ms +/- 0.9%
crypto: 356.8ms +/- 0.6%
aes: 142.8ms +/- 0.7%
md5: 105.6ms +/- 0.6%
sha1: 108.4ms +/- 0.6%
date: 366.8ms +/- 1.5%
format-tofte: 232.6ms +/- 1.4%
format-xparb: 134.2ms +/- 1.9%
math: 658.0ms +/- 1.3%
cordic: 313.8ms +/- 0.4%
partial-sums: 207.0ms +/- 4.2%
spectral-norm: 137.2ms +/- 0.8%
regexp: 407.4ms +/- 3.0%
dna: 407.4ms +/- 3.0%
string: 1198.4ms +/- 1.3%
base64: 144.0ms +/- 2.1%
fasta: 268.2ms +/- 3.2%
tagcloud: 218.4ms +/- 2.4%
unpack-code: 408.8ms +/- 2.3%
validate-input: 159.0ms +/- 0.6%
I wonder if it is the 64-bit edition of XP Pro that makes my older machine about twice as fast as the 4 year old Dell running Ubuntu 8.10 that you benchmarked? It could be the extra GB of RAM, I suppose, but I tend to doubt that would affect small JavaScript benchmarks to such an extent. I dual boot this machine with Ubuntu 8.04 as the other OS, so I'll have to give that a try and post a follow up to my own message.
/. complains that there are too many "junk" characters in this post so by trial and error (Help was no help at all) I figure out that the long strings of "-"'s and "="'s in the table had to be replaced with much shorter dividers. Now /. is whining about the message having too few characters per line (26.3) before I added this comment. I really am curious as to how current versions of various flavors of Linux, especially Ubuntu, compare to XP Pro x64 Edition on similar machines.]
[Damn! First
Not sure why we have the non-story about it outperforming Vista though... My thought exactly. Well, almost. My first thought was that a snail towing a 65-ton truck might outperform Vista, but I'm very polite. ;-)
The snail would beat Vista even if it took a few bio or snack breaks at truck stops along the way. Vista would probably crash before getting very far from the starting line.
You forgot:
11. Debris hits Cowboy Neal on the head
Then, we can have a real poll.
There'd be an impressive implosion if it cracked that rather thick skull. Nature abhors a vacuum. :-)
*Ducking and running.*
"If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it,' [a NASA spokesman] said."
Why the hell not? If I find it first... it's mine.
Obviously, you have a clear understanding of at least some Toddler Property Law:
Property Law As Viewed By A Toddler
1. If I like it, it's mine.
2. If it's in my hand, it's mine.
3. If I can take it from you, it's mine.
4. If I had it a little while ago, it's mine.
5. If it's mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
6. If I'm doing or building something, all the pieces are mine.
7. If it looks like it's mine, it's mine.
8. If I saw it first, it's mine.
9. If I can see it, it's mine.
10. If I think it's mine, it's mine.
11. If I want it, it's mine.
12. If I "need it, it's mine (yes, I know the difference between "want" and "need"!).
13. If I say it's mine, it's mine.
14. If you don't stop me from playing with it, it's mine.
15. If you tell me I can play with it, it's mine.
16. If it will upset me too much when you take it away from me, it's mine.
17. If I (think I) can play with it better than you can, it's mine.
18. If I play with it long enough, it's mine.
19. If you are playing with something and you put it down, it's mine.
20. If it's broken, it's yours (no wait, all the pieces are mine).
That's an urban legend.
Not to mention impossible with current linear accelerator tech. First of all, I believe linear accelerators work with subatomic particles as projectiles, so I suspect he was thinking of a rail gun, which requires that the projectile be largely metallic, I believe and (AFAIK) we have none that will propel a 40lb. turkey (frozen or not) at a mere 100MPH. I know the US military has been fooling around with rail guns for years: . The projectile it fires is made of tungsten and weighs about 3.5Kg IRRC, but it moves out at over Mach 7.
I've heard/read a lot of variations on the frozen turkey (often it is described as being a frozen chicken and usually the Brits are claimed to have mimicked the test from what US aircraft manufacturers use to test what happens when an airplane suffers a bird strike while not realizing that the projectile bird was not frozen.
This article about the urban legend and the snippets of truth behind it is one of the best I've seen. Note that the launcher uses compressed air to hurl the bird, much the same way that Hollyweird SFX guys use compressed air powered devices to flip cars all over the place in action movies.
TFA says the largest piece could be about 40 pounds and hit at 100 mph. That wouldn't dent your car, it would totally destroy it.
Not necessarily. Think about it. There are numerous cases where race cars and even ordinary automobiles have hit other cars, solid objects such as barriers, buildings, telephone poles, etc. at high speed (over 100MPH in some cases) and the driver walked away relatively unscathed.
If the 17.5KG object strikes a car's engine block or back seat area (especially a glancing blow) and doesn't hit the driver directly, it is unlikely to kill the driver upon impact. If it hits the gas tank and happens to cause the gasoline vapor to ignite or hits anywhere and causes the driver to loose control of the vehicle and crash into something else, it might well prove fatal, but in every case case I can think of, I'm fairly sure there would be enough of the driver left in the wreckage to identify him//her. We are not talking about the same object moving at two or three thousand kilometers per hour as a large meteorite (small meteor? -- I don't know where the dividing line is) does if it manages to avoid burning up before hitting Earth.
A hard line drive in a game of professional baseball -- the ball masses 0.145Kg and can end up moving about 177Kph (according to 108 Stitches -- doesn't usually harm any opposing player in the field who is lucky enough to catch it in his glove. That 17.5Kg piece of debris hitting a car at 160Kph is certainly not going to vaporize the car but will almost definitely do major damage if it hits with solid "body blow". That 17.5 hunk of ammonia tank will have approximately 121X the kinetic energy of the aforementioned baseball coming off a hard line drive, but a car's engine block is much stronger and more massive than a human hand protected by a think piece of leather at the end of a human arm.
I guess what I am saying is that if by "totally destroy" you mean "total it" from an insurance adjuster's point of view, I tend to agree if a direct hit is involved. If you mean "obliterate the car upon impact", then you are most certainly wrong.
Sometimes you just have to do the math...