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Comment: Re:Man, am I old ... (Score 1) 173

by tibit (#48631269) Attached to: Backblaze's 6 TB Hard Drive Face-Off

Of course no one is gonna sort through this, because it won't be necessary. This is raw data. The stuff that goes into iPhoto is a small fraction of it. The library sits there because I can still afford to pay for the hard drives :)

The funniest thing is that such amount of data is surprisingly not hard to generate. All that my wife does is depress the shutter and chase the kids here and there. She isn't a professional, but she did notice that she can capture some unique and serendipitous pics that way. Yeah, 99.99% of them are trash, but without them the 0.01% wouldn't even be possible. She loves the newfangled absurdly fast SD cards, of course. She *hates* slow cameras.


by tibit (#48618873) Attached to: Backblaze's 6 TB Hard Drive Face-Off

Those aren't iPhone JPEGs, but ~20 Mpixel RAW files, and there are thousands of them each month - closer to 10k, really. These days it's really easy to generate vast numbers of pictures when you have a good camera. When she shoots kids, it's 10 shots per second, often until the buffer fills up after 50-60 shots. I'd say she takes on average 300 shots per day. It really doesn't take very long to have that many. If the camera was any faster, it'd have been more I'm afraid :)

Comment: Re:Joke? They're real! (Score 0) 100

by tibit (#48612679) Attached to: The Joker Behind the Signetics 25120 Write-Only Memory Chip Hoax

You confuse EPROM, PROM and ROM. A mask-programmed ROM cannot be erased without destroying it. UV light will do nothing to a ROM. A PROM uses cells with electrically-destructible fuses or cells with stored electrical charge - it is electrically programmed, not mask-programmed. UV light will do nothing to a fuse-based PROM, but will erase the charge-based PROM. The charge-based PROMs are also called OTP EPROM (one time programmable, but not eraseable, so a misnomer). The addition of a quartz window turns a non-eraseable charge-based PROM into an EPROM, where E stands for eraseable. Finally, with addition of erase circuitry, an EPROM becomes an EEPROM where it can be electrically erased. Most EEPROMs can still be erased with UV light, if you were to access the bare die - although some EEPROMs shield the data-storing capacitors to protect the data from reverse-engineering/tampering. Such high-integrity parts won't erase in presence of UV, even if you de-encapsulated the chips.

Comment: Most batteries have cell management done wrong (Score 1) 143

by tibit (#48549927) Attached to: Using Discarded Laptop Batteries To Power Lights

Unfortunately, most multi-cell batteries do cell management wrong and are unable to isolate dead cells. A typical "dead" battery has one bad cell, with other cells having more than another lifetime of reasonable performance ahead of them. Most laptop and power tool batteries will work completely satisfactorily if you merely break up the cells and apply proper cell and charge management that is able to extract charge from and impart charge to each cell independent of other cells.

Most "dead" batteries that people throw away are good - except for one cell.

Comment: Re:Here's an idea for him (Score 1) 201

by tibit (#48549831) Attached to: James Watson's Nobel Medal Sells For $4.1 Million

the best known account of her, from a professional colleague says stuff like this

Well, if you insist on picking up such bits, then it's your problem. The book is available online and you can certainly see for yourself what Watson wrote. His account of Rosy is mostly factual. The fact is that she was as stubborn and hard to deal with as she was brilliant. Her work was recognized by Watson in spite of his objectified view of women. Again, I find no problem with such descriptions since they are factual if not very productive. If you don't like such facts, too bad.

The Double Helix was written I think shortly after Rosie had passed away, in the 1960's. That book gives her all the recognition that's called for, I think, and is, again, fairly factual as to what was going on. If people decide not to read a short, first-person account of how the structure of DNA was found, it's their own problem. Nobody's hiding Rosie's memory from anyone. People just decide to ignore it.

Comment: Re:Here's an idea for him (Score 1) 201

by tibit (#48549765) Attached to: James Watson's Nobel Medal Sells For $4.1 Million

I think that the hullaballoo about Rosie Franklin is really getting out of hand. Fucking Watson himself wrote in The Double Helix:

In 1958, Rosalind Franklin died at the early age of thirty-seven. Since my initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal (as recorded in the early pages of this book), were often wrong, I want to say something here about her achievements. The X-ray work she did at King's is increasingly regarded as superb. The sorting out of the A and B forms, by itself, would have made her reputation; even better was her 1952 demonstration, using Patterson superposition methods, that the phosphate groups must be on the outside of the DNA molecule. Later, when she moved to Bemal's lab, she took up work on tobacco mosaic virus and quickly extended our qualitative ideas about helical construction into a precise quantitative picture, definitely establishing the essential helical parameters and locating the ribonucleic chain halfway out from the central axis.

Because I was then teaching in the States, I did not see her as often as did Francis, to whom she frequently came for advice or when she had done something very pretty, to be sure he agreed with her reasoning. By then all traces of our early bickering were forgotten, and we both came to appreciate greatly her personal honesty and generosity, realizing years too late the struggles that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a scientific world which often regards women as mere diversions from serious thinking. Rosalind's exemplary courage and integrity were apparent to all when, knowing she was mortally ill, she did not complain but continued working on a high level until a few weeks before her death.

Yes, he wrote it back in 1968. So lets just stop with the "poor forgotten Rosie". I mean Watson himself mentioned her often in his book, and wrote those paragraphs (amongs others) about her. Yes, she was right and she was a good experimentalist. Nobody forgot about her, expect idiots who don't read books. Double Helix is less than a 100 pages long, and is an easy read. How much simpler could it be to read about it all from a first-hand account? Anyone who has anything but the most passing interest in the history of determination of DNA's structure would have heard about her! It's in fact hard to miss her.

For everyone who doesn't know what's going on with R.F. these days: full-retard pseudo-feminists got a hold of her and are using her memory for their own devices. Fuck them.

Comment: Re:The fact remains... (Score 1) 323

by tibit (#48525175) Attached to: DOOM 3DO Source Released On Github

> the depletion of eggs is the showstopper

That line is repeated over and over but it's IMHO very much misleading. There are hundreds of thousands of eggs available at the time the first period rolls over. It's not as if they just disappear at a ratio of roughly a thousand eggs lost per every ovulation. Nothing gets depleted, AFAIK. A woman simply doesn't ovulate as often, and eventually she doesn't ovulate at all. Plenty of eggs are still there, IIRC.
