Search results

If cell phones no longer work I'll consider that a positive effect.

Speaking of systems going a long time, didn't Greg know someone who was still using something like an 8086 (and this was only a few years ago IIRC)?

Yep-still in service after all these years, and still fast enough for most of my day-to-day needs. This is the longest run I've ever had on the same system. And I've been using a 200 GB Maxtor as the boot drive from day 1. The drive already had I think 2 years on it when I installed it in...

I've been using the same system since June 2006. Thus far, I've never had anything except a CPU fail in all the machines I've owned. I tend to think my usage patterns are why. The biggest source of stress for electronic components is being turned on and off. Besides creating current surges...

http://cgi.ebay.com/2-PC-Li-Ion-3-0V-200mAh-Button-Cell-LIR2477-New-BuySAFE-/300552377991?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item45fa515687

AARP's stance against retesting elderly drivers is that it's "prejudicial". Instead, they might support periodic retesting of ALL drivers. This wouldn't be a bad idea in my opinion, but practically speaking it would be a nightmare. It's a shame more people aren't honest enough with themselves...

5 years today since my father passed away. Doesn't seem that long ago.

Unfortunately, it's basically going to come down to the same situation as Chernobyl-anyone involved in the cleanup/containment is going to go in knowing they're not going to survive long. IIRC a few thousand workers sacrificed themselves in this way ( 100,000 according to wikipedia )...

Intrinsically Safe Nuclear Reactor Designs On other news, the workers left the site, apparently because of high radiation levels. This is inching closer to a 7 than a 6 at this point.

Those pictures are haunting. Entire settlements wiped clean as if they've never existed. This just drives home the point that Earth does what it wants and we're all just tenants here.

The French are indeed experts on nuclear power, with nuclear plants generating 78% of the electricity produced in France. What the French and Japanese did was standardize on certain components to make nuclear power more cost effective. The US has a history of one-off designs. This is one...

I agree, SD. Watching the news coverage on CNN and elsewhere, it's almost like they're hoping for a meltdown, sprouting things like previous nuclear accidents have always gotten worse before they've gotten better. My educated guess here is we've had partial meltdown. I'd say the rods melted...

If this had been further south and hit Tokyo full force it would have been an unprecendented disaster. I'm amazed how far the tsunamis spread. There was even some flooding in NJ two nights ago (saw it on the news, I guessed it was related to the quake but they didn't say). This all drives...

I finally found a great, free, third party defragger called MyDefrag. Current version is 4.3.1. The program is completely customizable via scripts. It has several default scripts for both data disks and system disks which do a great job. I managed to defragment some volumes where Windows...

I tried but unfortunately my M/B is so old that any SATA drives can't be seen in native DOS mode.

The specs say it uses 5 watts maximum ( see manual, page 48 ). I would imagine it uses a lot less if the unit is turned off but left plugged in. Even at 5 watts, it would take at least a few days to drain a car battery. I'm surprised you can't enter addresses from a PC. My Legend HCx lets me...

Seriously, when you were out of work, you should have considered telling the bank you were having trouble meeting your mortgage payments even if you weren't. You might have had your loan modified to more favorable terms. You know the old saying-if you can't beat the system, you may as well...

:beer: Happy Birthday, Doug! :b-day:

Actually, I really don't go to those types of sites. There's still a remote chance of picking up a virus which could attack my drives even staying on legitimate sites.

If you want to place a monetary value on the "lost" space, it would be about 12.5 cents since I paid $99.99 for the drive. Certainly not worthwhile from a money perspective. In fact, I would imagine just using NTFS compression for my backup folders I would gain many times the lost space...

I'm anal about stuff like that. It's small in terms of percentage, yes. But I also remember the days when 2.5GB equalled a few good-sized hard drives. It also annoys me on another level-namely sloppy bookkeeping on the part of Windows. I might understand reserving some amount of space on a...

Regarding the wire gauge for the power LEDs, probably 18 gauge is fine. The controlling factor is more having the wire physically strong enough to pull through the attic without breaking. I'd say 18 gauge is good enough for that. 22 or even 24 gauge would handle the current just fine, but...

Well, no direct solutions to this but I hit upon an indirect one - use exFAT. Windows doesn't mysteriously mark space as in use when it isn't with exFAT. From what I'm gathering the only downsides are no built-in compression ( I wasn't planning to compress any folders anyhow ), and possibly...

Yes, you would need an independent wire for each LED, but you could mount the control board inside the chandelier. The ten wires would run to the control board. The only thing which needs to run outside the chandelier is the pair of wires supplying power. Everything inside the chandelier is...

Not a problem. You could just run a pair of wires from the low-voltage flicker control board to wherever you have the power supply. Total wires coming from the chandelier for both flicker and illumination would be four-all low-voltage.

You could do that. Perhaps put another set of LEDs next to the high-powered primary ones, and wire those to a small flicker control board which is placed inside the chandelier. You could probably also fit the power supply for this ( small 120 VAC to 5VDC or 12 VDC converter ) inside the...

Umm, yeah. The only issue with hollow tubes as opposed to solid rods is worse heat dissipation. I probably need to experiment a bit here to see how warm the LED would get. A tube with 1/8" walls might be good. We can mount the LED on a circular piece of aluminum ( or even a copper penny ) on...

No, shouldn't be an issue. The LED ballast is sending DC to the LEDs. There aren't an RF or other issues with DC. You can probably put the ballast a mile away from the chandelier without any problems. The only issue is for the wires to be heavy enough to carry the current without heating...

I'm surprised how bright the bottles look even with the sun lighting the room. BTW, I found a nice dimming ballast for this project which will make our lives worlds easier: http://www.newark.com/roal-electroni...ver/dp/69R7347 It works on a standard lamp dimmer. A little pricey but well worth...

I just saw this thread but it seems mubs beat me to it with the probable answer. Yes, what you describe seems to be exactly the case here. If you can open it up you might be able to correct the problem ( assuming you can find where the "neutral" wire is connected to the body). On another...

On a power output per kg of body weight measure humans are pretty pathethic as animals go. A leopard or cheetah running at full speed is likely developing upwards of 10 kW and weighs roughly the same as a human. Even a common housecat can run at up to 30 mph. More on human power output...

This actually applies to both humans and electric motors. An electric motor can typically output several times its continuous output for a very short time, and lesser multiples for longer durations. As for humans, I've more or less figured out my own output levels based on my speeds and the...

Thanks guys for the birthday wishes! Amazing how time flies. It seems it wasn't all that long ago I was 20 and now I'm two short of the big 5-0.

Ouch! $100K for a watch? I'd want it to take me backwards or forwards through time for that price.

That's exactly the problem. None of the technology roadmaps I've seen can get us much past 10 TB drives. And nearly all of them will increase the cost per drive, even though cost per GB will still drop due to increased areal density. Also, we're already experiencing reliability problems from...

The biggest difference between mechanical hard disks and mechanical watches is the fact that watches are fairly low-tech. One person and the right tools can grind gears, make springs, pretty much do the whole operation. The raw materials for this have many other uses, and will always be...

It actually does stop using that last 1/8%. I just found this out when the 150 GB NTFS partition on my boot drive was full. Chkdsk still said I had about 190MB free but Windows refused to write to the disk.

Yes, I know the proper spelling. I was just making a joke since I always see "brakes" mispelled as "breaks" all over the Internet. It's actually one of my pet peeves.

Bicycling under the influence is not explicitly illegal in New York. However, a drunk cyclist can be charged with reckless endangerment or public intoxication, just as a pedestrian can. All that said, I'm not sure I would bike drunk given how it affects both coordination and judgement. The...

Here's some interesting info on the subject TRIM is a brand-new ATA command that the OS will issue to the SSD when a certain request is made, such as Delete, Format or Discard. What it does is rather simple, but it's immensely helpful. When you either delete a file, or format the entire SSD...

Any zerofill software ought to be enough. Unlike magnetic disks, by their nature SSDs don't partially retain older data when sectors are overwritten. A cell is either a zero or a one. If you flip everything to zeroes, the old data will be completely gone beyond the ability of even the NSA to...

Translation: Hitachi sees magnetic storage as a dying technology and wants to sell off its disk division while they can still get something for it. In ten years time tops, magnetic disks will be as obsolete as CRTs are now.

Thanks Doug for the illustration. It neatly shows what time and I have been saying. Another thing I'm thinking here regarding the margins on gasoline also applies to hydrogen. Assuming the margins would be similar, then that's yet another nail in the coffin. I've seen a lot of gas stations...

I have all my hidden files visible in Explorer. Besides that, on the drive in question the only system folder is the restore folder, and that's empty. Anyway, it looks like I more or less figured out what's going on here. It seems when using the NTFS, Windows reserves roughly 1/8% of the...

Actually at about 300 miles range is probably a non-issue. 1000 miles would just by the icing on the cake. By the time most people drive 300 miles, they'll be stopping at least 30 minutes to eat/use the restroom. We'll certainly have 30 minute fast recharge at rest stops once enough people...

SD, it all depends upon how far you regularly travel. If most of your trips are within the range of the Leaf's battery, then it probably makes sense. You could just rent a gas car for the few times a year where range is an issue. On the other hand, if you regularly make trips exceeding the...

Yeah, water basically recycles in the ecosystem, so we never really "use it up". We can get all the fresh water we want from desalizing seawater, provided we have an energy source to do so. That's really the crux of the problem-we don't have an abundant enough source to start desalinating...

Well, I never said petrol was safer than hydrogen. In fact, if petrol were something brand new, I would guess we would be prohibited from using it in vehicles. That picture reminds me why I pretty much avoid car travel, and totally avoid plane travel. :eekers: Putting aside whether or not...

Is the 11TB array empty and freshly formatted? If so, then check the free space and used space. Now copy any file into the array, and delete it. After that either restore it, or empty the recycle bin. If your system is behaving like mine, then you'll suddenly see less free space. Since the...

Except that the deleted file here was only a few kB, and I suddenly lost 2.44GB of space after I either restored it, or emptied the recycle bin.