Is "The Kid" related to Iggy

Dan, fascinating story, I might give them a holler.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus21475
Loading thread data ...

Chuckle!

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing! ;-)

Harold

Reply to
Harold & Susan Vordos

Bainbridge Island is not a great place for an observatory. Too many cloudy days. But a lot of talented people there. They also built a planetarium that is useable regardlesls of the weather.

Dan

Reply to
dcaster

I read somewhere, that due to light and air pollution, it is harder and harder to find good places for observatories.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus30848

formatting link

The grinder is running as of last night, and purrs like a 70 year old kitten :)

Reply to
Pete C.

I'm checking out a used hard drive that runs like a watch---

TICK, TICK, TICK and occasional ALARMing noises.

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Jim, you know better than to buy a 'Timex hard drive'! :(

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

"When they start tick'n, your wallet takes a lick'n!"

Quite often, the drive can no longer read the boot sector, and keeps trying to recalibrate the head positioner.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

formatting link

Very nice, I still have to fire up the Monarch

Reply to
Ignoramus30848

S.M.A.R.T shows a large seek error count, though they still work. I keep using them until the Reallocated Sector Count rises or heat slows them down excessively.

HD Tune (free) is a good drive health test program, though it can't report the status of USB drives.

formatting link

This lacks the tests but can read S.M.A.R.T from a USB drive.

formatting link

jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

That's been true since the 1950s, Ig. I used to live an hour away (35mi as the crow flies) from Palomar Mountain and, over the years, there were lots of gripes from the crews (and people who knew them) up at the telescope. As Escondido and Pauma Valley grew, light pollution became more noticeable.

Since the 1970s, cities have attempted to mitigate their upward shining lights with redesigned street lights, but paranoid citizens just blast unrestrained light (in 500W chunks) all over their yards. They think it keeps their home safe. Instead, it allows the criminals to see everything. Morons. I'm glad I'm not bothered by light at night because far too many of my neighbors over the years have left porch or yard lights on at night, usually large and expensive-to-run floods.

A whole lot of industrial lighting (such as that found at refineries) has been redesigned since about then, too, but big cities (bright lights in Vegas, NYC, Tokyo, etc.) just blow the skies away with their brightness.

The Hubble/Spitzer/Kebler and other space telescopes really made headway against the vagaries of atmosphere and reflected light.

I'm still pissed every time I see thousands of watts of unrestrained light blasting out at night, imagining how frustrating that must be to real astronomers.

Reply to
Larry Jaques

How much worse is that in the morning than waking up to Coyote Ugly? I've only met one double bagger in my life. (That's where you put a bag over her head when taking her to bed, and putting another one on yourself, JUST in case hers comes off.)

Reply to
Larry Jaques

I saw one of those "How the hell do they do this Monster construction" show s a while back. They were installing a new sign in Times Square, NY. The pr oject included installing an additional 4,000 Amp service, just for the sig ns on this building. I can't imagine a bigger waste. Really sick.

Reply to
rangerssuck

I'm with you. My home isn't too bad, but when we were out in the driveway the other night looking at Saturn and some Messier objects, I went around and asked the neighbors within reach if they'd turn off their outside lights. They all did, and it reduced the glare a lot. No street lights out here. Couldn't do anything about the southern horizon with Round Rock and Austin beyond the ridge. Light pollution pretty much blotted out everything below about 30 deg. elevation. There are some good dark sky sites not too far to the west. Must pack up and get out there some day.

Pete Keillor

Reply to
Pete Keillor

I just recently got a batch (60) of the 146 GB FC-AL interfaced drives. I have a direct application for about half of them.

Unfortunately, they were from an IBM RAID setup, and had been formatted with 520 byte sectors, instead of the standard 512 byte ones.

I've dealt with converting 36 GB and 73 GB ones with the same problems, but these are fighting me all the way home.

I've been bouncing back and forth between Sun's Solaris 10 and Ubuntu linux trying different tools to try to get them working. No luck so far, though I have six converted to 512 byte sectors, they won't accept a label, because the bad block tables are gone.

It would really be nice to have them usable, to replace the 36GB and 73GB drives in various software RAID arrays.

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

I tried to avoid the urge to gnaw off an arm after waking up in the morning---did that by being selective when I was between wives. #2, the current Mrs., has been a real gem. A definite keeper. 36 years this month.

Harold

Reply to
Harold & Susan Vordos

When I called drive support asking how to reset the P-list, to reclaim spare sectors on the huge G-list, they said it could only be done on their custom hardware, because of the embedded servo tracks I couldn't access.

formatting link
"Although data operations are automatically redirected to uncorrupted sectors, the G-list table does reduce drive access speed and it may become necessary to replace the drive."

I think the drive slows down because the replacement sectors are on different tracks so accessing them requires a head seek.

However the reformat that's part of installing Windows made a Reallocated Sector Count of several hundred thousand disappear, and the bad section no longer slows down in the HD Tune read speed benchmark tests.

Radio Shack dumped their IOMega Prestige 1T USB drives recently for $33.97. I found out why after buying one, they are Advanced Format with 4k sectors and neither XP nor Win7 32bit would read it. But 7 x64 could, and once it had been cracked open so could the others. jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Slow learner, wot?

Congrats, 'Arry.

Reply to
Larry Jaques

[ ... ]

O.K. THe P-list must be what the Hitachi manual for the drives describes as "skip"s. Each sector has information to move to the next

*good* sector, skipping over the intermediate bad ones.

The "G-list" is probably what Sun reserves two cylinders at the end of the drive for -- a pool of spare sectors to use as needed to replace sectors which go bad over time.

There's no way that I can use the Windows format to fix this, however. the only systems which I Have with the FC-AL drive slots are equipped with UltraSPARC CPUs, which Windows has no idea what to do with. :-(

I guess that if I got a PCI card which was a host adaptor for the FC-AL drives, (Fibre Channel -- Arbitrated List) and the proper drivers, I could use a Windows box -- after converting a spare drive bay (two slots) out of a damaged Sun Blade 1000 to hold the drives). I may have to do that. Which flavor of Windows was this?

USB isn't much use in the RAID arrays where I want to use these drives.

Thanks, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

Your problem is way above my pay grade. I fell (or was pushed) into some SCSI once but wiggled out as qiuckly as I could.

IIRC it was Windows 2000. The MS CheckDisk utility with the /r switch may be as good.

When I was using Sun workstations the IT department wouldn't let me play around inside them, the fear in their eyes revealed that they knew too well what I could do. jsw the usurperuser

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.