I ran 8 for a year and put up with all of the usability crap, but they lost me when my hard drive died and I found out how crappy the built-in backup software is. The damn thing doesn't save a disk image, nor have a similar way to recover from a completely dead disk. If I have to reinstall from scratch, it sure as hell wasn't going to be 8 again. So now I'm back to 7 and its sane backup program.

It's not like the early version of Vista, though. It's more like a late Vista service release.

I think this probably indicates that they bite off too much in each release. It's actually a common problem when companies try to abandon an incremental development cycle and get a little ambitious.

NTFS supports arbitrary metadata "streams", analogous to xattrs on unix. Windows and applications simply don't make use of them very much.

Also, Microsoft did introduce a new filesystem: ReFS. It is sort-of analogous to zfs or btrfs, but not very well supported in Windows 8 at the moment and not as feature-complete. Still, they seem to be ahead of Apple which is still using HFS.

Install iTunes somewhere, sign up for an account (you can do so without providing a credit card number), and download the album. Apple has been selling music DRM free for the last several years, so it's just standard AAC. Once you have it, remove your account, delete iTunes, and add the music to whatever music program you prefer to use.

Unless, of course, you live in Canada, where copying music from a friend is still perfectly legal.

Yaz

Except this is pretty much exactly how the system was setup.

In "releasing" the album, Apple pretty much just added a database entry for every user on iTunes to say that they had already purchased the album. It was then supposed to[0] show up in your iTunes library as "in the cloud", with an option to download it.

Nobody was forced to download the album. The only way you'd download it without needing to do so specifically is if you had previously turned on the option to automatically download all new iTunes purchases (which defaults to off). And the only way you'd have to worry about using cellular data for this is if you had the option to download iTunes Music purchases over mobile enabled as well (otherwise, it would wait until you're on WiFi). So yeah -- this is completely a tempest in a teapot from people who don't like U2 seeing a free album available for download showing up in their libraries.

Hopefully Apple have learned their lesson. It was a publicity stunt, and while it upset some people, here we are talking about it. I don't think it went off the way they were hoping it would, and hopefully they've learned some lessons in the process.

[0] - Here in Canada at least, it appears the setup for this album didn't work for a very large number of users. I know in my case, the U2 album did not show up on my iPad as it was supposed to, nor did it show up in any of my iTunes libraries. And I do have the auto-download option enabled. In order to get the album, I had to go into iTunes and find the section that shows all your existing purchases, and then select the "Not on This Device" list, and only then could I download the album. And looking at the album reviews on iTunes Canada, it seems that I was hardly the only person to experience this -- nearly every review when I last checked last night was form people trying to figure out how to get their "free" album. I haven't seen this level of complaints outside of Canada, so I'm assuming either a) something screwed up with the iTunes Canada edition of the album's launch, or b) iTunes Canada did something different in order to not run afoul of some legislation (although I can't for the life of me guess what legislation that might be). This situation seems to have been lost in the noise of everyone else complaining about getting a free album, so I haven't heard much commentary on the situation.

Yaz

I think the plant metaphor he was looking for was: "and the Maples formed a union, and demanded equal rights; the Oaks are just too lofty, we will make them give us light". Not a story that ended well.

I'm ashamed to admit it took me 20 years to make the connection between "Maples" and "Canadian band".

Ah, got you. Still needs appreciable power, but being a continuous load, that's not a major issue. The water makers on board are RO too, feeding and washing a couple of hundred (very) sweaty bodies. But for big fresh water requirements (hundreds of cu. m. ) we bring in non-potable water on one of the flotilla boats.

That's another good idea, though you wouldn't be able to take advantage of clones and such so that the backup's data would be invalid once the resilver started until it was finished... If I went that route, I'd make sure I had completed a scrub before connecting the backup drives.

You don't need a reader though, you just need some patient geeks. Because the media is human-readable, it's just a matter of effort to recover the data. If the military really did back up a synopsis of modern science and engineering, one could imagine a future monastery full of monks patiently transcribing the works to scrolls for wider distribution. Of course, one could also imagine them mindlessly transcribing the pattern of dots with no clue as to the meaning of the holy tape, but that's people for you.

And, last comment here: you have confirmed that you have not abandoned your incorrect (and actually quite ludicrous) version of heat transfer, which violates the Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law on its very face.

That was all I needed. I am now done. Have a nice day. You can have the last word all you like; it won't make you any more correct.

And no, I don't have to ask myself that, because it doesn't happen.

I have already found the solution to a reasonable degree of precision. Your solution, as stated (approximately 241 degrees F for the central heat source) does not check out, even using your own equations.

That is neither correct, or an answer to my question.

No. Not right. Since the chamber walls are COOLER than the heat source, radiative power from the chamber walls is not absorbed by the heat source. Because the only power transfer taking place here is heat transfer, which is a function of (emissivity) * (S-B constant) * (Ta^4 - Tb^4).

You DO know what a minus sign is, yes?

Since emissivity doesn't change the input required to heat source to achieve 150F is constant, regardless of where it comes from. But as long as the walls of the chamber are cooler than the source, NONE of the power comes from the chamber walls, because of that minus sign in the equation above. Nothing has changed in that respect, and that's what the Stefan-Boltzmann law requires.

The only time that changes is if the walls are at an equal temperature, in which case heat transfer is 0 and you can begin to use "ambient" temperature as input. You are still supplying the same input power, you are just supplying it a different way.

If the chamber walls were hotter than the central source, then heat transfer would be in the other direction (because the sign of the solution to the equation above changes), and only THEN are you getting net heat transfer TO the central sphere.

And BOTH of those situations are a violation of Spencer's conditions.

But wait. I take that back. Before I declare that I am done and go away, I just want to ask you: do you still maintain that after the enclosing passive sphere is inserted, the central heat source raises in temperature to approximately 241 degrees F? You haven't said anything about that in a while, so I'm just checking.

Nonsense. It would take power to bring the chamber walls up to 150F (338.71K). How else do you expect them to get to that temperature? Where are you getting that power from? This is so utterly obvious that I honestly don't believe you don't get it.

You could, but we haven't. Regardless, it still remains the same. Power output at that temperature remains constant because P = (emissivity) * (S-B constant) * T^4 says it has to.

The only thing you are doing is ADDING energy to the system by putting it in an ambient environment of 150F. That's not irrelevant at all, because if you're at thermal equilibrium, there is no heat transfer. Since this is all about heat transfer, how could it be irrelevant?

I have finally concluded that you are just a very good troll. I honestly -- and I mean that: honestly -- don't believe you could be this stupid and possess a degree in physics.

The ONLY time the power output changes is if you change the temperature. You can do that by making the walls HOTTER than the "heat source", thereby causing a net heat transfer TO it from the walls, OR you can input more electrical power to the heat source, thereby making it hotter, but that would be a violation of the conditions Spencer stipulated.

That's not our disagreement at all. Not even frigging close. Of course it wouldn't need a separate heat source if its environment were maintained at 150 degrees. I just got done saying that. But it still does have power input. It' just that it comes from the environment in this case rather than an electrical element.

Because its radiant output power remains constant according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law. All you have done is raise the environment's output power to match, and raised the input to that environment enough to achieve that temperature. Big deal. That takes energy of its own, and proves exactly nothing. You haven't proved that it needs no power, you just changed the source of that power. And used up even more power in the process, because the environment is larger than the central sphere.

You're just wrong about how this works. And not just a little bit wrong, but completely out there in lala-land wrong.

And you have made it perfectly obvious that I am wasting my time talking to you. You are either crazy, or stupid, or a very talented troll. Based on my experience, I vote for that last one, but I think that necessarily implies a little bit of the first, too.

So we're done. I'm going to write this up as it stands here. I don't need anything else, and you've made it very clear that anything else would be further waste of my time. You refuse to change your tune, so fine. I'll just write it up that way. Don't worry: I am going to include your exact words.