Posts by Tom 21 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2007
...That it was the kids who said they were acting out scenes from the game. I can imagine just how the scene unfolded at the police station...
"Why did you do this, son?"
"Erm... Err... The game made me do it!"
"Ah hah! Well! We won't bother with assault charges. It's Rockstar's fault!"
My cheap-as-chips Chav-brand/Ripspeed car stereo has an SD card slot for playing MP3s... It's not Micro-SD, but with the help of the adaptor that came with my Micro-SD card it is. So you don't even have to go high end to get such a luxury.
I actually think SD is small enough as it is, anyway.
Personally I welcome the idea of MP3/Video players with upgradable storage. Upgradeable batteries would be nice too. I like the idea that I could extend the life of my devices with such upgrades. It's one of the reasons that I still haven't bought (and probably won't ever buy) an IPod. That and an overwhelming dislike for ITunes.
The thing to do is put the USB stick back in your friend's computer and copy the file off it to see how it does. And try copying the same files back on to the USB stick from your laptop. Then try the same thing with a different USB stick. It's possible that the USB stick is to blame, rather than your laptop.
Once you've established if it is your laptop or the USB stick that is to blame, then you cam start to try and find the problem. Make sure you have the latest drivers for your USB host controller and chipset. Updating your BIOS can't hurt either. There are some laptops that come with aditional drivers to enable USB 2.0, but default to USB 1.1, so that's worth investigating.
It would help if you mentioned the make and model of your laptop, what operating system you're using, what patches you have applied that might be of relevance, and what you've done to try and fix the problem already.
Of course, it is possible that you just have a s*** laptop :-)
I like the idea, I really do. But I don't really like the idea of dragging a 200 amp capable cable behind a high-ish power vacuum cleaner. There is no reason to generate at 12v instead of 100-200v. It just makes no sense.
Everything you own already has the step down transformer in it, or in the power adaptor if it needs one. There's lots of problems with transferring low voltage / high current power, even over the comparatively short distance of a house. For one: voltage drop from one side of the house to another would probably be enough to make TTL based electronics become a little unpredictable. Not to mention the fact that having main cables in your walls carrying anything up to about 500 amps is hardly safe, and would be incredibly expensive and impractical to implement on any sort of scale.
There’s a reason leccy is carried across the country at 40Kv. Low voltage / high current is just plain inefficient.
Given that it's 1TB RAIDed across two disks, I can only assume they're configured in RAID-0 (The zero stands for how much data you can get back if one of the disks fails, I believe). In my experience, 2.5'' drives seem to have a higher failure rate than 3.5'' drives as it is. Never mind doubling that chance of failure with RAID-0.
It's cute and all that, but I wouldn't trust it with anything but the most trivial data. And even then I'd be cautious!
Good to hear :-)
Owning a laptop that will only write DVD+R discs, I have noticed that they seem to be harder to find in shops than DVD-R discs. I'm convinced it's because the people in charge of ordering stock see the minus as a dash (like in CD-R) and don't think there could be an alternative.
Ah well. One format war over, several hundred left to go.
I'd be interested to see how such a system would effect legitimate uses of copyrighted material.
I see no way that it could distinguish between a member of a band sending an mp3 of their own work to a friend or fellow band member (surely a legitimate use of copyrighted material), and someone else sending the same mp3 to a few friends, illegally.
There's lots of other situations that such a system could cause problems with, I'm sure.
...How people can go out of their way to make life difficult for others trying to do a good turn.
Even if what OLPC have done is wrong, surely they could be cut at least a little slack because they're trying to make a difference to children in places like Nigeria.
It all boils down to greed as far as I'm concerned.
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