Well, first note that successful installation does not necessarily mean that everything works. When I hear "successful installation", I take it to mean that the installation completed, and that the result could be booted. Nothing more.
Also note that Sony makes more than one kind of laptop with the Vaio name.
My Sony laptop, the Z1WA, installs FC2 correctly (see other post in this thread) but not everything works "out of the box". Firewire does, wireless chipset does not appear to. To get wireless to work will require one of two things: waiting for the Intel drive to mature, or buying the Linuxant driver wrapper program, which (sounds like it) allows linux to run Winows device drivers.
I just installed FC2 on my Vaio Z1WA laptop (Centrino chipset), and although it installed and ran correctly, it's going to take some effort to get everything working. For example, it tries to use APM instead of ACPI for power management, so I can't suspend it. It also doesn't appear to have correctly detected the Intel wireless chip. Obviously, I have some kernel patching and driver work to do. My research indicates that all of this can be made to work with linux, but I was hoping that FC2 had gone ahead and done some of that work for me. On the plus side, the graphical installer and X-Windows both work flawlessly with the 1400x1050 resolution display. Also, the battery level indicator appears to work correctly - so maybe the kernel has ACPI enabled, but not tweaked out properly.
Thanks, if not for your link, posted to a discussion forum website, I might not have been able to locate a forum where I could discuss Fedora Core 2
He said THAT forum had been helpful. THIS forum, on the other hand, is Slashdot. See the difference?
Re:Clifford Stoll's two books
on
The Flickering Mind
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I saw Stoll give a similar lecture at the Embedded Systems Conference a few years ago. A one-line summary of his thesis: Don't take computers out of the schools, but don't try to substitute them for real learning. Teach kids to use computers, but also teach them why computers work, how to program them, how to take them apart, how to build one, etc. I couldn't agree more.
Cliff Stoll is one hell of a good speaker. Bizarre too. He showed up at the ESC with two TV camera crews in tow, trying to interview him. He sat on stage before the talk, writing out his lecture notes on his hands. He had three or four milk-carton crates full of gadgets that he wanted to demonstrate, although I only recall one actually making it out of the box: a radar "speed gun" made out of an old coffee can and some electronics. He wandered all though the audience during his talk, at one point even coming out and taking over one of the TV cameras taping the talk. Although he had notes written all over his hand, he constantly seemed to diverge down new paths as they occurred to him. Oh yes, and then there was the four cartons of milk (or was it chocolate milk?) he drank during the talk. Very entertaining, and despite the apparent chaos of the lecture, he had the audience right in the palm of his hand when he wanted their attention... as at the end, when he talked about computers in schools.
If you ever get the chance to see this guy talk, don't miss it.
Am i the only one who find those rotating plates amusing?
Not at all. I think they're beautiful. I have a little display in my study of hard drive platters salvaged from failed hard drives. I take them out, polish them, and prop them up. Illuminate them with a halogen lamp in an ikea bookshelf module... looks pretty cool. My favorite is a 9-platter stack that came out of an old full-height drive.
Don't overestimate the value of your data. When you pass on, the only person who probably cares about your data will be dead.
Wrongo. Example:
When I was eight years old, my mother died. Many years later, I began to wonder what kind of a person my mother was. Oh, I have memories of her, but they are the memories of a child. I know little about what made her a full-dimensional person. What her politics were, for example. Or what kind of music she liked, etc.
My mother was a prolific letter-writer. She was from a fairly poor family, and considered a long-distance phone call a luxury to be reserved for birthdays and holidays. Consequently, she wrote many letters to her mother, even up until her last days. Unfortunately, few of her letters survived her. My sisters and I eventually found ten or twenty of them, but I would give anything if her mother and my father had kept more of the letters.
Yes, nobody will probably care about your extensive pr0n collection, or that flamefest you got sucked into on comp.windows.lusers, but much of the data that you consider to unimportant now might become priceless after you're gone... at least to the people who care about you.
So save your e-mail (not the SPAM). Keep backups of your weblogs. Hell, make hardcopies and save them in a notebook. These things say more about you than you might realize, and somebody might someday be glad you kept them.
Let me tackle the Columbus issue first, because it's not a good comparison. First, Columbus wasn't dealing with an environment nearly as hazardous as space. Space is very unforgiving, even more so than the open ocean. It can kill in a hurry, and doesn't easily forgive mistakes. We're also a society less tolerant of loss. Columbus probably expected to lose a certain percentage of his crew. We consider such things unacceptable. (When a loss happens, we stand down until we figure out why and how to prevent such losses in the future).
Second, Columbus was dealing with a much simpler vehicle. The Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria didn't have to carry their own atmospheric regeneration systems, for example. Their command and control systems were wetware. Their guidance and attitude systems were a rudder, a compass and an astrolabe. The station's systems are highly complex, and each system affects one or two others - turn on a computer, and the heat and power loads go up, for example.
Third, Columbus was working with a level of technology that was well known and understood. Sailing ships had been around for hundreds of years, and although they continued to change generation after generation, the rate of change was slow and the basic principles were very well understood. The space station, on the other hand, is an experimental vehicle. We're still very much in the learning phase of exploring and occupying space, and will be for (I believe) many generations to come. We have a whole lot to learn, and will make lots of mistakes along the way. What we hope to do - and I believe are accomplishing - is to learn a little bit more each day. Perhaps one day our level of understanding (and thus, the design of our stations and suits) will reach the point where an EVA is as simple as stepping out onto your front porch.
For now, though, an EVA is a complicated affair. I'll tell you what I've heard second and thirdhand about why it takes huge planning to do an EVA... the most obvious factor is that the crew member is operating in an extremely hostile environment, and obviously that means taking extra caution in planning any activity in that environment. The crew member can only be in that environment for a limited amount of time - limited by the consumables in the suit and by human factors. In other words, time becomes a resource that must be carefully managed - you need to know what you're going to be doing ahead of time. An EVA script accounts for every action taken - every grab and release of a handhold, every attach or detach of safety tethers, every bolt to be turned or lever to be moved. Little, if anything, is left to decide "on the fly."
Human factors effect an EVA: just moving around in a suit requires effort - flex and elbow or a finger and you're having to fight against the suit to move (air pressure stiffens the suit, which is why the operating pressure is a low 3 to 4 PSI). People who work EVA do lots of hand exercises with those "squeeze" exercisers to keep their hands in condition, and yet all the finger flexing still taxes an astronaut or cosmonaut's endurance. So efficiency becomes important - you want the crew member to be able to accomplish their task with a minimum of effort, and no wasted effort. Again, careful planning is required. The original poster was wondering why it takes two weeks to plan an EVA, but I'm told a two-week planning period is considered a "rush job", because they want to get it done while they have extra crew aboard to assist. An EVA typically is planned months in advance.
Well, now we have to point out that these really aren't circuit breakers at all, although they perform a similar function. It's a Remote Power Controller, RPC, and if they're like the RPCs used on the orbiter, they're solid state devices, and not thermally triggered. So the spark/fire hazard is not like what you have with the circuit breakers we have in our homes.
Since the original question was "why aren't these things easier to get to" my point was more that not everything can be easy to get to, so you have to pick and choose. Isolating safety hazards, as you point out, is a huge factor in such decisions. I think the original poster also lost sight of the fact that this EVA wasn't just to "reset the breaker" but to replace it.
If it was an imminent emergency, how short a time before they could get out there? Minetes, hours, days?
I asked a coworker who's a former Station flight controller and got you a better answer to this question. It would take hours at least. If the crew were to just don their suits and go outside the station, they would very quickly get extremely ill.
The reason is that the suits they use for EVA are pressurized at only 3-4 PSI, whereas the pressure in the ISS is maintained at 14.7 PSI. With the sudden drop in pressure, the crew would get decompression sickness - "the bends". The usual EVA procedure is for the crew member who's going out to breathe pure oxygen for several hours before the EVA. This flushes the nitrogen from their bloodstream and tissues and prevents decompression sickness.
I wonder why they would place the circuit breakers outside the space
station.
Well, there are only so many places inside where you can put stuff. Something has to go outside, so you put the stuff out there that should rarely, if ever, need servicing. The stuff that needs more frequent access goes inside. Circuit breakers are (speculating here) relatively simple, well-understood technology that you don't expect to have to replace. They should "just work".
If those ciruit breakers are like anything in my house, they
go out all the time.
Note that they're not going out to reset the breaker, but to replace it. The breaker can be monitored and reset remotely. In fact, the breaker was reset yesterday - probably from the ground - but it tripped open again. I believe the working theory is that the gyro's OK, but that the breaker is bad - tripping when it shouldn't. If this is true, then replacing the breaker will recover the gyro without having to replace it (a much more difficult affair).
Because you don't "just do" an EVA. Putting on a suit and going outside the station requires a lot of planning. You have to have the right time of the crew's daily cycle. You have to have the right ground personnel available to support the EVA. You have to schedule it for a time when you have sufficient TDRS (ground relay satellite) time available to cover the entire EVA. You maybe have to find a time when the station will be in the right attitude with respect to the Sun for the right amount of time, due to heating/cooling issues with the suit and perhaps (?) lighting issues with the area to be serviced. (And if the station has to be oriented a certain way, that might affect the amount of time the downlink antennas can be pointed in the general direction of the TDRS satellite.) Most importantly, the ground controllers have to draw up a complete step-by-step plan of the EVA, and the crew has to have time to study it. Take all that into account, and add the fact that the crew's every minute is planned days or weeks in advance, and you can see how it just takes some time to put together everything it takes to do an EVA. Going outside the vehicle is a risky activity. Extreme care is taken in its planning and execution, and rightly so. In a life-threatening emergency, like a sudden rapid depressurization, the plan probably calls for the crew to board the "rescue vehicle" (a Soyuz that stays docked at the station), undock, and deorbit.
(Disclaimer: I don't work in the ISS program, but I have a general - read: vague - idea of how EVA works in the shuttle program. Consider the above to be an educated guess - but correct in spirit.)
big fire/explosion/typhoon or some kinda shit at one of the
big plants in asia where dimm chips are made
Um, wasn't that ten or eleven YEARS ago? The fire at the resin plant in Japan that caused memory prices to shoot up (the resin is something used in the manufacture of memory chips)...
I always buy the minimum amount of memory offered when I buy a pre-built system. The OEMs want too much $/byte for pre-installed memory. The most cost effective way to get memory for a new system is to buy it from somebody like Crucial/Micron.
Are you kidding? Frats have two complete sets of secrets: the real secrets, and the secrets you "give away" for sex! Ask any girl hanging around the house if she knows the secret handshake. If you she shows you the "sex" secret, then you know she's been laid by a brother. (If she shows you the real handshake, then she's been laid by a brother who was too drunk to remember which was which.)
Yes, it is with iTunes, but definitely not on the iPod - at least not on the firmware for my second-generation model. The 3rd-gen pods have better features in their firmware, so it's possible they do have this feature.
here was a primitive device called the radio that had a shuffle feature that you couldn't turn off.
You couldn't turn the feature off, but you could turn the whole device off. This was critical during the disco years.
But that brings up a point that bothered me in the article: why is "shuffle" something preferred just by the MTV generation? Radio was a shuffle-mode device for many years prior to MTV, so why identify just the MTV kids as the prime movers behind shuffle? Sounds like a crock to me. I make up playlists - 70's, 80's, grunge, post-grunge, drool, etc., then listen to them in shuffle mode. It's like having my own little radio stations (with NO DISCO!).
Shuffle mode is one of my few gripes with the iPod. I make large playlists and like to listen to them in shuffle mode, but I always listen to my albums straight - no shuffle. However, I'm constantly forgetting what mode my iPod is in, and listening to the first few songs on an album in shuffle mode, or vice versa. I would really love it if Apple would update the firmware to track shuffle mode independently for playlists vs albums/artists. Or, even better, if it could track the shuffle preference of each playlist, album, or artist individually.
Also, hard drives use motors too (meaning magnetic fields), and you don't see them wiping themselves magnetically, usually they die of mechanical problems.
Furthermore, hard drives have some wonderfully powerful magnets in the stepper motor that moves the read/write head. In the disks I've taken apart, these are arc-shaped magnets situated in the corner of the enclosure. Never throw away an old hard drive - take it apart and harvest these little magnets. If nothing else, they're lots of fun to play with. Remarkably strong for their size.
Those don't seem right either. Looking at the pictures, the right dimensions would seem to be about 1.0 x 8.0 x 8.0 cm - roughly the same shape as an old SyQuest cartridge.
The last story about the non-upgradable HP 100i drive is over two years old! The article mentions a guy who bought his drive just a few months ago - but the HP 300i has been available since I bought mine in March 2003. The 300i is compatible with both +R and +RW - no upgrade needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, first note that successful installation does not necessarily mean that everything works. When I hear "successful installation", I take it to mean that the installation completed, and that the result could be booted. Nothing more.
Also note that Sony makes more than one kind of laptop with the Vaio name.
My Sony laptop, the Z1WA, installs FC2 correctly (see other post in this thread) but not everything works "out of the box". Firewire does, wireless chipset does not appear to. To get wireless to work will require one of two things: waiting for the Intel drive to mature, or buying the Linuxant driver wrapper program, which (sounds like it) allows linux to run Winows device drivers.
I just installed FC2 to my Sony Z1WA in a dual-boot config, and Grub can boot Windows XP with nary a problem.
I just installed FC2 on my Vaio Z1WA laptop (Centrino chipset), and although it installed and ran correctly, it's going to take some effort to get everything working. For example, it tries to use APM instead of ACPI for power management, so I can't suspend it. It also doesn't appear to have correctly detected the Intel wireless chip. Obviously, I have some kernel patching and driver work to do. My research indicates that all of this can be made to work with linux, but I was hoping that FC2 had gone ahead and done some of that work for me. On the plus side, the graphical installer and X-Windows both work flawlessly with the 1400x1050 resolution display. Also, the battery level indicator appears to work correctly - so maybe the kernel has ACPI enabled, but not tweaked out properly.
Thanks, if not for your link, posted to a discussion forum website, I might not have been able to locate a forum where I could discuss Fedora Core 2
He said THAT forum had been helpful. THIS forum, on the other hand, is Slashdot. See the difference?
I saw Stoll give a similar lecture at the Embedded Systems Conference a few years ago. A one-line summary of his thesis: Don't take computers out of the schools, but don't try to substitute them for real learning. Teach kids to use computers, but also teach them why computers work, how to program them, how to take them apart, how to build one, etc. I couldn't agree more.
Cliff Stoll is one hell of a good speaker. Bizarre too. He showed up at the ESC with two TV camera crews in tow, trying to interview him. He sat on stage before the talk, writing out his lecture notes on his hands. He had three or four milk-carton crates full of gadgets that he wanted to demonstrate, although I only recall one actually making it out of the box: a radar "speed gun" made out of an old coffee can and some electronics. He wandered all though the audience during his talk, at one point even coming out and taking over one of the TV cameras taping the talk. Although he had notes written all over his hand, he constantly seemed to diverge down new paths as they occurred to him. Oh yes, and then there was the four cartons of milk (or was it chocolate milk?) he drank during the talk. Very entertaining, and despite the apparent chaos of the lecture, he had the audience right in the palm of his hand when he wanted their attention... as at the end, when he talked about computers in schools.
If you ever get the chance to see this guy talk, don't miss it.
5. Magnets
If you keep nothing else, at least keep the magnets out of your hard drive. They're amazingly powerful for their size... wonderful toys!
Am i the only one who find those rotating plates amusing?
Not at all. I think they're beautiful. I have a little display in my study of hard drive platters salvaged from failed hard drives. I take them out, polish them, and prop them up. Illuminate them with a halogen lamp in an ikea bookshelf module... looks pretty cool. My favorite is a 9-platter stack that came out of an old full-height drive.
Don't overestimate the value of your data. When you pass on, the only person who probably cares about your data will be dead.
Wrongo. Example:
When I was eight years old, my mother died. Many years later, I began to wonder what kind of a person my mother was. Oh, I have memories of her, but they are the memories of a child. I know little about what made her a full-dimensional person. What her politics were, for example. Or what kind of music she liked, etc.
My mother was a prolific letter-writer. She was from a fairly poor family, and considered a long-distance phone call a luxury to be reserved for birthdays and holidays. Consequently, she wrote many letters to her mother, even up until her last days. Unfortunately, few of her letters survived her. My sisters and I eventually found ten or twenty of them, but I would give anything if her mother and my father had kept more of the letters.
Yes, nobody will probably care about your extensive pr0n collection, or that flamefest you got sucked into on comp.windows.lusers, but much of the data that you consider to unimportant now might become priceless after you're gone... at least to the people who care about you.
So save your e-mail (not the SPAM). Keep backups of your weblogs. Hell, make hardcopies and save them in a notebook. These things say more about you than you might realize, and somebody might someday be glad you kept them.
Let me tackle the Columbus issue first, because it's not a good comparison. First, Columbus wasn't dealing with an environment nearly as hazardous as space. Space is very unforgiving, even more so than the open ocean. It can kill in a hurry, and doesn't easily forgive mistakes. We're also a society less tolerant of loss. Columbus probably expected to lose a certain percentage of his crew. We consider such things unacceptable. (When a loss happens, we stand down until we figure out why and how to prevent such losses in the future).
Second, Columbus was dealing with a much simpler vehicle. The Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria didn't have to carry their own atmospheric regeneration systems, for example. Their command and control systems were wetware. Their guidance and attitude systems were a rudder, a compass and an astrolabe. The station's systems are highly complex, and each system affects one or two others - turn on a computer, and the heat and power loads go up, for example.
Third, Columbus was working with a level of technology that was well known and understood. Sailing ships had been around for hundreds of years, and although they continued to change generation after generation, the rate of change was slow and the basic principles were very well understood. The space station, on the other hand, is an experimental vehicle. We're still very much in the learning phase of exploring and occupying space, and will be for (I believe) many generations to come. We have a whole lot to learn, and will make lots of mistakes along the way. What we hope to do - and I believe are accomplishing - is to learn a little bit more each day. Perhaps one day our level of understanding (and thus, the design of our stations and suits) will reach the point where an EVA is as simple as stepping out onto your front porch.
For now, though, an EVA is a complicated affair. I'll tell you what I've heard second and thirdhand about why it takes huge planning to do an EVA... the most obvious factor is that the crew member is operating in an extremely hostile environment, and obviously that means taking extra caution in planning any activity in that environment. The crew member can only be in that environment for a limited amount of time - limited by the consumables in the suit and by human factors. In other words, time becomes a resource that must be carefully managed - you need to know what you're going to be doing ahead of time. An EVA script accounts for every action taken - every grab and release of a handhold, every attach or detach of safety tethers, every bolt to be turned or lever to be moved. Little, if anything, is left to decide "on the fly."
Human factors effect an EVA: just moving around in a suit requires effort - flex and elbow or a finger and you're having to fight against the suit to move (air pressure stiffens the suit, which is why the operating pressure is a low 3 to 4 PSI). People who work EVA do lots of hand exercises with those "squeeze" exercisers to keep their hands in condition, and yet all the finger flexing still taxes an astronaut or cosmonaut's endurance. So efficiency becomes important - you want the crew member to be able to accomplish their task with a minimum of effort, and no wasted effort. Again, careful planning is required. The original poster was wondering why it takes two weeks to plan an EVA, but I'm told a two-week planning period is considered a "rush job", because they want to get it done while they have extra crew aboard to assist. An EVA typically is planned months in advance.
Well, now we have to point out that these really aren't circuit breakers at all, although they perform a similar function. It's a Remote Power Controller, RPC, and if they're like the RPCs used on the orbiter, they're solid state devices, and not thermally triggered. So the spark/fire hazard is not like what you have with the circuit breakers we have in our homes.
Since the original question was "why aren't these things easier to get to" my point was more that not everything can be easy to get to, so you have to pick and choose. Isolating safety hazards, as you point out, is a huge factor in such decisions. I think the original poster also lost sight of the fact that this EVA wasn't just to "reset the breaker" but to replace it.
If it was an imminent emergency, how short a time before they could get out there? Minetes, hours, days?
I asked a coworker who's a former Station flight controller and got you a better answer to this question. It would take hours at least. If the crew were to just don their suits and go outside the station, they would very quickly get extremely ill.
The reason is that the suits they use for EVA are pressurized at only 3-4 PSI, whereas the pressure in the ISS is maintained at 14.7 PSI. With the sudden drop in pressure, the crew would get decompression sickness - "the bends". The usual EVA procedure is for the crew member who's going out to breathe pure oxygen for several hours before the EVA. This flushes the nitrogen from their bloodstream and tissues and prevents decompression sickness.
I wonder why they would place the circuit breakers outside the space
station.
Well, there are only so many places inside where you can put stuff. Something has to go outside, so you put the stuff out there that should rarely, if ever, need servicing. The stuff that needs more frequent access goes inside. Circuit breakers are (speculating here) relatively simple, well-understood technology that you don't expect to have to replace. They should "just work".
If those ciruit breakers are like anything in my house, they
go out all the time.
Note that they're not going out to reset the breaker, but to replace it. The breaker can be monitored and reset remotely. In fact, the breaker was reset yesterday - probably from the ground - but it tripped open again. I believe the working theory is that the gyro's OK, but that the breaker is bad - tripping when it shouldn't. If this is true, then replacing the breaker will recover the gyro without having to replace it (a much more difficult affair).
Because you don't "just do" an EVA. Putting on a suit and going outside the station requires a lot of planning. You have to have the right time of the crew's daily cycle. You have to have the right ground personnel available to support the EVA. You have to schedule it for a time when you have sufficient TDRS (ground relay satellite) time available to cover the entire EVA. You maybe have to find a time when the station will be in the right attitude with respect to the Sun for the right amount of time, due to heating/cooling issues with the suit and perhaps (?) lighting issues with the area to be serviced. (And if the station has to be oriented a certain way, that might affect the amount of time the downlink antennas can be pointed in the general direction of the TDRS satellite.) Most importantly, the ground controllers have to draw up a complete step-by-step plan of the EVA, and the crew has to have time to study it. Take all that into account, and add the fact that the crew's every minute is planned days or
weeks in advance, and you can see how it just takes some time to put together everything it takes to do an EVA. Going outside the vehicle is a risky activity. Extreme care is taken in its planning and execution, and rightly so.
In a life-threatening emergency, like a sudden rapid depressurization, the plan probably calls for the crew to board the "rescue vehicle" (a Soyuz that stays docked at the station), undock, and deorbit.
(Disclaimer: I don't work in the ISS program, but I have a general - read: vague - idea of how EVA works in the shuttle program. Consider the above to be an educated guess - but correct in spirit.)
1,$s/Diet Coke/beer/g
big fire/explosion/typhoon or some kinda shit at one of the
big plants in asia where dimm chips are made
Um, wasn't that ten or eleven YEARS ago? The fire at the resin plant in Japan that caused memory prices to shoot up (the resin is something used in the manufacture of memory chips)...
I always buy the minimum amount of memory offered when I buy a pre-built system. The OEMs want too much $/byte for pre-installed memory. The most cost effective way to get memory for a new system is to buy it from somebody like Crucial/Micron.
Are you kidding? Frats have two complete sets of secrets: the real secrets, and the secrets you "give away" for sex! Ask any girl hanging around the house if she knows the secret handshake. If you she shows you the "sex" secret, then you know she's been laid by a brother. (If she shows you the real handshake, then she's been laid by a brother who was too drunk to remember which was which.)
Yes, it is with iTunes, but definitely not on the iPod - at least not on the firmware for my second-generation model. The 3rd-gen pods have better features in their firmware, so it's possible they do have this feature.
This is the way their case ends
This is the way their case ends
This is the way their case ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
(OK, so SCO's not finished yet, but things do appear to be unraveling, and I just couldn't hold back Mr. Eliot.)
here was a primitive device called the radio that had a shuffle feature that you couldn't turn off.
You couldn't turn the feature off, but you could turn the whole device off. This was critical during the disco years.
But that brings up a point that bothered me in the article: why is "shuffle" something preferred just by the MTV generation? Radio was a shuffle-mode device for many years prior to MTV, so why identify just the MTV kids as the prime movers behind shuffle? Sounds like a crock to me. I make up playlists - 70's, 80's, grunge, post-grunge, drool, etc., then listen to them in shuffle mode. It's like having my own little radio stations (with NO DISCO!).
Shuffle mode is one of my few gripes with the iPod. I make large playlists and like to listen to them in shuffle mode, but I always listen to my albums straight - no shuffle. However, I'm constantly forgetting what mode my iPod is in, and listening to the first few songs on an album in shuffle mode, or vice versa. I would really love it if Apple would update the firmware to track shuffle mode independently for playlists vs albums/artists. Or, even better, if it could track the shuffle preference of each playlist, album, or artist individually.
Next week (April 19th - 25th 2004) is National TV Turn Off Week in the USA.
How can you say anything bad about TV, Marge? It gives so much and asks so little!
Also, hard drives use motors too (meaning magnetic fields), and you don't see them wiping themselves magnetically, usually they die of mechanical problems.
Furthermore, hard drives have some wonderfully powerful magnets in the stepper motor that moves the read/write head. In the disks I've taken apart, these are arc-shaped magnets situated in the corner of the enclosure. Never throw away an old hard drive - take it apart and harvest these little magnets. If nothing else, they're lots of fun to play with. Remarkably strong for their size.
10x8x8cm
Those don't seem right either. Looking at the pictures, the right dimensions would seem to be about 1.0 x 8.0 x 8.0 cm - roughly the same shape as an old SyQuest cartridge.
The last story about the non-upgradable HP 100i drive is over two years old! The article mentions a guy who bought his drive just a few months ago - but the HP 300i has been available since I bought mine in March 2003. The 300i is compatible with both +R and +RW - no upgrade needed.