I blew a cap on my (brand name, Hiper) power supply a couple of weeks ago. I may have been pushing the upper limits of its operational envelope, but I didn't put it under enough load to kill it. It was just a year old.
I've seen more raised caps on modern motherboards than I'd like to admit. I'm starting to wonder if three years is just the lifetime of modern caps, or if I'm just exposed to more equipment that has failed due to popped caps.
I have heard that something like 70% of electronic equipment failure can be traced directly to bad power, so it would explain the trend I've seen. Oddly enough, I don't think I've seen any Dell motherboards that are under the three year mark with these troubles. Perhaps it was just a bad batch of motherboards. I have seen this on a Tiger mobo, and a few bioStar, too. But not on Asus, IIRC. I don't deal with hardware much, (I see all the dead stuff 'cause I'm always the last ditch effort to fix it... yeah, bring it to the code monkey if no one else can fix it!) can anyone who deals with it on a regular basis confirm or deny my suspicions?
Exactly. First rule to security: if a hacker (cracker for those of you who are purists) has physical access to your equipment, it's no longer yours. Unfortunately for the guys pushing DRM, they can't deliver their product without giving you physical access to it at some point. So long as you wait downstream of the decryption, you can capture it.
It also doesn't help that in order to decrypt it for you, they have to also give you the keys. Granted, they hide them, but they seriously underestimate the resourcefulness of geeks.
Show of hands; who here has every hacked together a makeshift something or other by interfacing random parts lying around the house to accomplish something when you didn't have the correct part? I'm fairly sure everyone here knows what I'm talking about. *Looks over at the DIY UPS made of a bench power supply, two car battery chargers, two Radio Shack bridge rectifiers, and an AGM marine battery, sitting on the floor* Well, it's an ugly hack, but it works. And, that's the point.
You've mentioned ATAoE, but have you thought about throwing LVM over top of a bunch of them and serving them over iscsi using Iscsi Enterprise Target? You could use Microsoft free iscsi initiator or one of the many Linux implementations.
I just happen to be wearing my Hexdrix shirt today. He had potential to mature into an even better musician had he not died at such a young age, IMHO. He knew the things that couldn't be 'taught'.
I have several years of traditional music education under my belt and I'm a simply lousy (and then some) musician. No natural rhythm, and I could never improv. at all. I'm also slightly tone deaf to certain ranges of the register. However, programming is my natural talent. I 'learned' more about it from messing around and gut instinct than I really do in class. Then there's system/network administration; I can learn it and do it with a bit of effort, but I'm neither simply lousy or gifted at it.
I think this is how most people are. You either are gifted and only get much better with time, manage to be sufficient, or are lousy regardless of effort. It seems that musicians who are naturally gifted are relatively rare and (if they don't get in to jazz, where talent goes on to play and never get recognition) stand out amongst the rest quickly.
Hydrogen production isn't up, but it is the most abundant resource in the universe. It also burns completely clean, leaving pure water as its exhaust. I think that if we could get the efficiency of solar panels up a good bit, we'll have all the energy we need for electrolysis to harvest H2.
The real problem is transportation, distribution, and storage (picture a 20 car pile up with the excitement of compressed hydrogen tanks mixed in) of a pressurized flammable gas, and all that entails. I've heard stories of CO2 canisters for soda systems getting the nozzle snapped off, turning them in to missiles that take out a concrete wall or two before coming to a stop. I don't know if it's true, but I could imagine 3000 PSI of gas being exhausted through a small opening in a metal container within a matter of a few seconds enough to put the thing to flight. Come to think of it, I'm fairly sure it's law in the US that those containers have to be chained to keep them from falling over when they're pressurized.
What's wrong with that? You maintain the outside interfaces and translate them to your own system without breaking programs that run on top of X. It's basically a wrapper.
I actually had a little blurb about that at the end of my post, but I deleted it for brevity. Now that I'm caffeinated, I'll put in a thought on it.
The only way that you could replace X is by wedging in a layer that has the same API calls and translating them under the hood. Unfortunately, programs will probably break due to assumptions about the semantics of X and things will be lost in the translation. It's not that there is anything wrong with X in and of itself, but it fulfilled a need for a certain time and place and was modified over time to do things that it wasn't designed for (double frame buffering and DRI, anyone?). It's kind of like a quick script that I wrote for backups years ago that was supposed to be a quick hack. Unfortunately it was put in to production and continually modified as our network grew. Now, it was designed well and has rolled with the punches, but it's starting to get ugly as it has to handle more things that were never within the scope it was intended for. The problem is that it works, and starting from scratch has marginal benefits.
The
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook has a great section on X if you have a good sense of humor. The book is free online as a PDF and has some real gems of insightful thought disguised as scathing criticism done with tongue placed firmly in cheek. That paper "Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System" looks great, I'll have to read it in its entirety tonight after work.
Better yet; make a point by doing this to your elected official who voted this garbage in. Make sure it's publicized enough that they can't not raid said officials office. Then watch as the infighting starts between opposing parties when they realize how much this could be used to strike at an opposing party member.
Right. Sufficient quantities. It's not like we have enough people here to bring servers to a crawl or anything. Granted not everyone here is an American, but a good number are.
For better or worse, we (the Communities) are stuck with the X windowing system. However, I wish that we could cut ties and run from X in all its forms. It's such a backwards and ugly protocol... unfortunately, it's Good Enough.
Didn't you get the memo? The CVS hasn't been touched lately because it's been deprecated. We switched over to SVN three weeks ago, and you still don't have a single commit. Would you please stop camping on the CVS and start merging to the SVN... and what's this about you being pregnant?
Yeah, that's the one. For some odd reason it makes more sense to me that the last extension should be honored, not the first. I'm too used to tarred gzips where the final extension (we'll disregard magic numbers for the moment) is the significant one.
Just wondering, have tried Eclipse lately? Depending on your needs, you can get a fairly fast and slim Eclipse distro with all your needed plugins. 3.3 is much 'prettier' (streamlined, although it is still slightly ugly. Netbeans wins IMHO for best looking IDE - there's a great plugin for beautiful skins... I think it's for a presentation mode or something, but it's beautiful) than previous Eclipses, and it performs only slightly slower than Netbeans. I haven't used Intelli J, so I can't compare it.
For me, though, the functionality and flexibility of the plugin ecosystem trumps speed and aesthetics. Even if it's slightly slower, I'm faster because across platforms, languages and computers, I've got the same environment. You can zip the folder and carry it around on a USB drive and run it anywhere you have Java (pretty much everywhere these days). At any rate, to each his own.
If you haven't tried Eclipse in the 3.3 version, I'd encourage you to give it another shot if the chance presents itself and you have the time to fiddle with setting it up for your own preferences. I've written Java in vi over ssh, on pspad, scite, Netbeans, JBuilder, and on the back of napkins; it's all about making use of what you have available and having what you prefer when you can.
You know... the whole String library in C/C++ has drove me nuts. I took AP C++ (the last year it was C++, it's Java now) and used Borland Turbo C++ in all its 16 bit glory. There were two prerequisite programming classes before you could take AP C++. The first year in intro C++, we used mostly char arrays for enforcing pointers and arrays and such, but we were introduced to string.h. In advanced C++, we used string.h. In AP, we used apstring.h. Then, I get to college and we're using the standard namespace string. I think somewhere in there was a strings.h, even. Then I stumble across the boost libraries. Oh, yeah, and then the win32 API lpzStr or whatever Hungarian notation it had.
To be completely honest, I found string.h the most usable of all the libraries. It was straight forward and you knew you were holding live dynamite in your hand. If you went outside the bounds, you blew your leg off. It was a simple indexable array and after I use more and more libraries with NIH syndrome, I really miss the simplicity of a simple string.h. I even find myself constantly doing a myString.c_str() cast constantly when I use C++ these days because it's the only thing that's really compatible with everything else, for sure. I'm so sick of string libraries and pre-parsing before I can parse. OK, sorry for that rant, but it's been brewing for a while now. And I'll save up my VB6 variant rant for another day.
I've heard of 'Telia' over on the other side of the pond (USian here), are they related to Telewest at all? I mean, is Telewest the distribution company for Telia's backbone, or are the similar beginning names just coincidence? I know in the US it's somewhat common for a parent and child company to have names that start off with the same three or four letters to denote ownership.
I'm not sure I follow... but I think you might be on to something insightful here. Would you mind hashing this out a bit more; I am somewhat ignorant on the subject at hand (I'll admit it, I've never read F451...).
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, I don't think she's a slashdot reader... He did say that she programs VBA.
*/
Sorry, I couldn't stand to see an unclosed comment... It was driving me nuts.
True, but it is the greatest flamebait article ever! It kind of brings a little tear of joy to my eye.
Yeah, as long as you're certain the slashdot crowd is dependable, honest and therefore trustworthy...
We are. Just ask us!I blew a cap on my (brand name, Hiper) power supply a couple of weeks ago. I may have been pushing the upper limits of its operational envelope, but I didn't put it under enough load to kill it. It was just a year old.
I've seen more raised caps on modern motherboards than I'd like to admit. I'm starting to wonder if three years is just the lifetime of modern caps, or if I'm just exposed to more equipment that has failed due to popped caps.
I have heard that something like 70% of electronic equipment failure can be traced directly to bad power, so it would explain the trend I've seen. Oddly enough, I don't think I've seen any Dell motherboards that are under the three year mark with these troubles. Perhaps it was just a bad batch of motherboards. I have seen this on a Tiger mobo, and a few bioStar, too. But not on Asus, IIRC. I don't deal with hardware much, (I see all the dead stuff 'cause I'm always the last ditch effort to fix it... yeah, bring it to the code monkey if no one else can fix it!) can anyone who deals with it on a regular basis confirm or deny my suspicions?
Exactly. First rule to security: if a hacker (cracker for those of you who are purists) has physical access to your equipment, it's no longer yours. Unfortunately for the guys pushing DRM, they can't deliver their product without giving you physical access to it at some point. So long as you wait downstream of the decryption, you can capture it.
It also doesn't help that in order to decrypt it for you, they have to also give you the keys. Granted, they hide them, but they seriously underestimate the resourcefulness of geeks.
Show of hands; who here has every hacked together a makeshift something or other by interfacing random parts lying around the house to accomplish something when you didn't have the correct part? I'm fairly sure everyone here knows what I'm talking about. *Looks over at the DIY UPS made of a bench power supply, two car battery chargers, two Radio Shack bridge rectifiers, and an AGM marine battery, sitting on the floor* Well, it's an ugly hack, but it works. And, that's the point.
You've mentioned ATAoE, but have you thought about throwing LVM over top of a bunch of them and serving them over iscsi using Iscsi Enterprise Target? You could use Microsoft free iscsi initiator or one of the many Linux implementations.
I just happen to be wearing my Hexdrix shirt today. He had potential to mature into an even better musician had he not died at such a young age, IMHO. He knew the things that couldn't be 'taught'.
I have several years of traditional music education under my belt and I'm a simply lousy (and then some) musician. No natural rhythm, and I could never improv. at all. I'm also slightly tone deaf to certain ranges of the register. However, programming is my natural talent. I 'learned' more about it from messing around and gut instinct than I really do in class. Then there's system/network administration; I can learn it and do it with a bit of effort, but I'm neither simply lousy or gifted at it.
I think this is how most people are. You either are gifted and only get much better with time, manage to be sufficient, or are lousy regardless of effort. It seems that musicians who are naturally gifted are relatively rare and (if they don't get in to jazz, where talent goes on to play and never get recognition) stand out amongst the rest quickly.
So, what do you do to get to work during winter?
Hydrogen production isn't up, but it is the most abundant resource in the universe. It also burns completely clean, leaving pure water as its exhaust. I think that if we could get the efficiency of solar panels up a good bit, we'll have all the energy we need for electrolysis to harvest H2.
The real problem is transportation, distribution, and storage (picture a 20 car pile up with the excitement of compressed hydrogen tanks mixed in) of a pressurized flammable gas, and all that entails. I've heard stories of CO2 canisters for soda systems getting the nozzle snapped off, turning them in to missiles that take out a concrete wall or two before coming to a stop. I don't know if it's true, but I could imagine 3000 PSI of gas being exhausted through a small opening in a metal container within a matter of a few seconds enough to put the thing to flight. Come to think of it, I'm fairly sure it's law in the US that those containers have to be chained to keep them from falling over when they're pressurized.
Yeah, but they're trying to make it up on sheer volume :)
What's wrong with that? You maintain the outside interfaces and translate them to your own system without breaking programs that run on top of X. It's basically a wrapper.
I actually had a little blurb about that at the end of my post, but I deleted it for brevity. Now that I'm caffeinated, I'll put in a thought on it.
The only way that you could replace X is by wedging in a layer that has the same API calls and translating them under the hood. Unfortunately, programs will probably break due to assumptions about the semantics of X and things will be lost in the translation. It's not that there is anything wrong with X in and of itself, but it fulfilled a need for a certain time and place and was modified over time to do things that it wasn't designed for (double frame buffering and DRI, anyone?). It's kind of like a quick script that I wrote for backups years ago that was supposed to be a quick hack. Unfortunately it was put in to production and continually modified as our network grew. Now, it was designed well and has rolled with the punches, but it's starting to get ugly as it has to handle more things that were never within the scope it was intended for. The problem is that it works, and starting from scratch has marginal benefits.
The The UNIX-HATERS Handbook has a great section on X if you have a good sense of humor. The book is free online as a PDF and has some real gems of insightful thought disguised as scathing criticism done with tongue placed firmly in cheek. That paper "Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System" looks great, I'll have to read it in its entirety tonight after work.
Better yet; make a point by doing this to your elected official who voted this garbage in. Make sure it's publicized enough that they can't not raid said officials office. Then watch as the infighting starts between opposing parties when they realize how much this could be used to strike at an opposing party member.
Right. Sufficient quantities. It's not like we have enough people here to bring servers to a crawl or anything. Granted not everyone here is an American, but a good number are.
Sure, but first they'll have to pry it from my cold, dead, hands.
For better or worse, we (the Communities) are stuck with the X windowing system. However, I wish that we could cut ties and run from X in all its forms. It's such a backwards and ugly protocol... unfortunately, it's Good Enough.
Mostly the time we spend posting on Slashdot.
Didn't you get the memo?
The CVS hasn't been touched lately because it's been deprecated. We switched over to SVN three weeks ago, and you still don't have a single commit. Would you please stop camping on the CVS and start merging to the SVN... and what's this about you being pregnant?
Yeah, that's the one. For some odd reason it makes more sense to me that the last extension should be honored, not the first. I'm too used to tarred gzips where the final extension (we'll disregard magic numbers for the moment) is the significant one.
Just wondering, have tried Eclipse lately? Depending on your needs, you can get a fairly fast and slim Eclipse distro with all your needed plugins. 3.3 is much 'prettier' (streamlined, although it is still slightly ugly. Netbeans wins IMHO for best looking IDE - there's a great plugin for beautiful skins... I think it's for a presentation mode or something, but it's beautiful) than previous Eclipses, and it performs only slightly slower than Netbeans. I haven't used Intelli J, so I can't compare it.
For me, though, the functionality and flexibility of the plugin ecosystem trumps speed and aesthetics. Even if it's slightly slower, I'm faster because across platforms, languages and computers, I've got the same environment. You can zip the folder and carry it around on a USB drive and run it anywhere you have Java (pretty much everywhere these days). At any rate, to each his own.
If you haven't tried Eclipse in the 3.3 version, I'd encourage you to give it another shot if the chance presents itself and you have the time to fiddle with setting it up for your own preferences. I've written Java in vi over ssh, on pspad, scite, Netbeans, JBuilder, and on the back of napkins; it's all about making use of what you have available and having what you prefer when you can.
You know... the whole String library in C/C++ has drove me nuts. I took AP C++ (the last year it was C++, it's Java now) and used Borland Turbo C++ in all its 16 bit glory. There were two prerequisite programming classes before you could take AP C++. The first year in intro C++, we used mostly char arrays for enforcing pointers and arrays and such, but we were introduced to string.h. In advanced C++, we used string.h. In AP, we used apstring.h. Then, I get to college and we're using the standard namespace string. I think somewhere in there was a strings.h, even. Then I stumble across the boost libraries. Oh, yeah, and then the win32 API lpzStr or whatever Hungarian notation it had.
To be completely honest, I found string.h the most usable of all the libraries. It was straight forward and you knew you were holding live dynamite in your hand. If you went outside the bounds, you blew your leg off. It was a simple indexable array and after I use more and more libraries with NIH syndrome, I really miss the simplicity of a simple string.h. I even find myself constantly doing a myString.c_str() cast constantly when I use C++ these days because it's the only thing that's really compatible with everything else, for sure. I'm so sick of string libraries and pre-parsing before I can parse. OK, sorry for that rant, but it's been brewing for a while now. And I'll save up my VB6 variant rant for another day.
I've heard of 'Telia' over on the other side of the pond (USian here), are they related to Telewest at all? I mean, is Telewest the distribution company for Telia's backbone, or are the similar beginning names just coincidence? I know in the US it's somewhat common for a parent and child company to have names that start off with the same three or four letters to denote ownership.
I'm not sure I follow... but I think you might be on to something insightful here. Would you mind hashing this out a bit more; I am somewhat ignorant on the subject at hand (I'll admit it, I've never read F451...).