If you don't need real hands, you can buy inexpensive Android tablets for $25. Or buy a $300 tablet with a cracked digitizer for $30 (make sure the display is fine) and stick it in screensaver mode. (You can use a bluetooth mouse to operate it.)
Oh, don't do this if you're married and the clock is for one of the "good" rooms. B-)
How much iron is there in cobalt-chrome alloys sputtered onto an aluminum platter? There's more iron in screws than the recording media. Iron oxide hasn't been used since the last century (1980s). The only major iron-containing component of any drive made in the last 10 years is the stainless steel cover.
It took me a while to get the hang of the weird Portal angles. But my kids had no trouble at 5 years old—it was just natural for them to do Portal Jumps and rotations. Hey, that's how the universe works, isn't it? ``Dad! Make me a portal to the fridge!''
Some of the most powerful FM radio transmitters get to 100kW
The Sutro Tower (San Francisco) has a couple of stations transmitting at 5MW. See this chart. Sutro is by no means the "most powerful" tower, either, at only 24MW ERP.
I was traveling to a camp site last year when my phone died (overheated). No maps at the gas stations. No maps at the convenience stores. The locals I asked didn't know anywhere outside their town. In the end, I kludged my micro SIM card into a backup phone (regular SIM slot) and found my way. Keep a backup phone! (With downloaded maps!) Paper maps don't exist any more.
Where I am (California) we have several severed streets where stuff was put in the middle. (The Brokaw Roads have an airport runway, the Conference Drives have a large pit quarry, the Chanticleer Avenues have a freeway.) You'd have a long journey if you went to the wrong side.... We also have a city where the main street is 41st Avenue, just for good measure.
You probably won't break anything shorting D+/D- to Vbus or Gnd, but <0.3V signals SE0 reset on USB, and the voltage thresholds are set at 0.3V and 2.8V relative to Gnd. Ethernet permits common mode voltages of +/-20V and 40kHz (802.3 section 12.5.3.2.5).
Another interesting cable technology is MIDI, which was designed to connect instruments are are intentionally ungrounded. They use current signalling designed to directly drive opto-isolators!
It's a shame that USB went with Vbus/Gnd rather than V+/V-. The latter would allow the negative side to drift away from ground (which is typically kept on the shield in a zero-current path). They had to devote a small section to voltage drops it in the latest spec (3.6.10.1 in USB_PS_R2_0 V1.1: bottom line is 375mV of Gnd rise and 625mV of Vbus drop).
The Ethernet guys realized this would be a problem so they made their signals transformer isolated. But USB is designed for short runs and cheap interfaces, not 100m runs across different electrical grids.
Note, however, that this case was not related to the ground potential at all. Vbus and Gnd were reversed, exceeding the Vgnd_drop limit by over 9V (2400%), or possibly 40V (>10000%) if the device had managed to negotiate the new voltage limits before it died.
Maybe someone should petition the sysfs guys to have a "00erasable" file as the first dirent in the UEFI space: the variables can only be removed if that file exists. Hopefully "rm *" will remove that file first, making the rest unerasable.
As long as you maintain the ability to crash your currency, you can sustain your debt [in that currency]. A lot of EU countries have ceded their currency to the Euro.
Yup. I got a Skylake 100 Series board in August. Only in November did the BIOS make the system stable at last. That was about the 6th version I'd flashed. Ugh. I'd had many filesystem errors/RAID1 mis-matches due to lock-ups!
Well, the IRS says the EIN was revoked (for non-filing of the 990) on May 15 2012. The Letter of Determination on X.org's site shows standing on May 17 2012 (and still current).)
Guidestar is often slow at finding 990s. If The Foundation filed its first return as the new 170(b)(1)(A)(vi) in Feb 2014 (extensions after first FY?) it may still be working its way through the system.
Still, the revocation is unusual, and cause for a second look.
I'll add a couple more things I miss (lost going from Kubuntu 14.10 to 15.10):
* Window titles on the side. I have a widescreen laptop, and having the window title bar on the side (rather than the top) of my windows was surprisingly useful. (I couldn't find an equivalent to the "bespin" widescreen theme. I'd do it myself if I could find a working theme editor, but after searching for an hour, I couldn't find a coherent description on how to theme Plasma5/Qt. The Bespin source code is a big horrible mess that I didn't want to port.)
* PDF preview in Dolphin file browser. An essential feature when you have hundreds of disparate PDF documents. It was apparently a Qt bug, and I hope it's fixed by now.
The spec only says "approximately uniform". The code generated approximately uniform numbers, for some value of approximate, so it wasn't broken per se.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't need real hands, you can buy inexpensive Android tablets for $25. Or buy a $300 tablet with a cracked digitizer for $30 (make sure the display is fine) and stick it in screensaver mode. (You can use a bluetooth mouse to operate it.)
Oh, don't do this if you're married and the clock is for one of the "good" rooms. B-)
How much iron is there in cobalt-chrome alloys sputtered onto an aluminum platter? There's more iron in screws than the recording media. Iron oxide hasn't been used since the last century (1980s). The only major iron-containing component of any drive made in the last 10 years is the stainless steel cover.
Given that it costs about 1.7 cents to make a penny, you can claim back the losses on your taxes. Bingo!
Quarters are supposedly over 91% copper. The 75/25 alloy is just for the "silver" cladding. 5 tons of copper at today's price is worth about $22k.
See, e.g., this explanation. Octopodes is apparently British English.
It took me a while to get the hang of the weird Portal angles. But my kids had no trouble at 5 years old—it was just natural for them to do Portal Jumps and rotations. Hey, that's how the universe works, isn't it? ``Dad! Make me a portal to the fridge!''
Some of the most powerful FM radio transmitters get to 100kW
The Sutro Tower (San Francisco) has a couple of stations transmitting at 5MW. See this chart. Sutro is by no means the "most powerful" tower, either, at only 24MW ERP.
A few years ago, drives were about 40,000 tracks per inch. Each head costs about $2. Any more questions?
For anyone who's seen the original Erlang "movie", it's well worth watching the parent's OTP video. I pity the foo' who doesn't guffaw.
"CSI: Cyber" is the best comedy on TV at the moment. Just send %random_deranged_guy to the hospital and he'll find the rogue Smart TV!
I was traveling to a camp site last year when my phone died (overheated). No maps at the gas stations. No maps at the convenience stores. The locals I asked didn't know anywhere outside their town. In the end, I kludged my micro SIM card into a backup phone (regular SIM slot) and found my way. Keep a backup phone! (With downloaded maps!) Paper maps don't exist any more.
Where I am (California) we have several severed streets where stuff was put in the middle. (The Brokaw Roads have an airport runway, the Conference Drives have a large pit quarry, the Chanticleer Avenues have a freeway.) You'd have a long journey if you went to the wrong side.... We also have a city where the main street is 41st Avenue, just for good measure.
In Europe, there's really very little "language" on road signs. Precisely because there are so many languages. Here are some examples.
You probably won't break anything shorting D+/D- to Vbus or Gnd, but <0.3V signals SE0 reset on USB, and the voltage thresholds are set at 0.3V and 2.8V relative to Gnd. Ethernet permits common mode voltages of +/-20V and 40kHz (802.3 section 12.5.3.2.5).
Another interesting cable technology is MIDI, which was designed to connect instruments are are intentionally ungrounded. They use current signalling designed to directly drive opto-isolators!
It's a shame that USB went with Vbus/Gnd rather than V+/V-. The latter would allow the negative side to drift away from ground (which is typically kept on the shield in a zero-current path). They had to devote a small section to voltage drops it in the latest spec (3.6.10.1 in USB_PS_R2_0 V1.1: bottom line is 375mV of Gnd rise and 625mV of Vbus drop).
The Ethernet guys realized this would be a problem so they made their signals transformer isolated. But USB is designed for short runs and cheap interfaces, not 100m runs across different electrical grids.
Note, however, that this case was not related to the ground potential at all. Vbus and Gnd were reversed, exceeding the Vgnd_drop limit by over 9V (2400%), or possibly 40V (>10000%) if the device had managed to negotiate the new voltage limits before it died.
Maybe someone should petition the sysfs guys to have a "00erasable" file as the first dirent in the UEFI space: the variables can only be removed if that file exists. Hopefully "rm *" will remove that file first, making the rest unerasable.
XGA = not as good as XXXGA.
We're all living on the outside of a giant spaceship. Except for a few people who live underground.
As long as you maintain the ability to crash your currency, you can sustain your debt [in that currency]. A lot of EU countries have ceded their currency to the Euro.
Yup. I got a Skylake 100 Series board in August. Only in November did the BIOS make the system stable at last. That was about the 6th version I'd flashed. Ugh. I'd had many filesystem errors/RAID1 mis-matches due to lock-ups!
Well, the IRS says the EIN was revoked (for non-filing of the 990) on May 15 2012. The Letter of Determination on X.org's site shows standing on May 17 2012 (and still current).)
Guidestar is often slow at finding 990s. If The Foundation filed its first return as the new 170(b)(1)(A)(vi) in Feb 2014 (extensions after first FY?) it may still be working its way through the system.
Still, the revocation is unusual, and cause for a second look.
I'll add a couple more things I miss (lost going from Kubuntu 14.10 to 15.10):
The spec only says "approximately uniform". The code generated approximately uniform numbers, for some value of approximate, so it wasn't broken per se.
I recommend the one-folder-per-file mbox idea. Beats MailDir handily.
Spinning rust (particulate iron oxide) hard disk drives were obsolete by the early 1990s—about 40MB was the cut-off for that disk technology.