vile8 - Slashdot User

Comment: without hacking hardware? (Score 1) 578

by vile8 on Wednesday March 03 2010, @10:15AM (#31345794) Attached to: Write Bits Directly Onto a Hard Drive Platter?

No idea what your trying to do... art, fast file system, error recovery, special new virus etc... but I'd start in one of two places. If you are trying to write your own filesystem because everyone else is "doing it wrong" then check out Oracles "unbreakable" installation.... a bit dated and I don't know if they still do it this way, but the gist is you mount the drives with "rawfs" and they have their own file system stack that runs on top. Pretty effective way to trim down the layers of stuff before reads and writes and speed up raw access. .... again, depends on your implementation if this would be useful to you. If you actually want to write ones and zeros I'd check the source for fdisk and see what its doing.... might be a gem there since it clearly is aware of geometry and has some access to writing in places you normally wouldn't. Good luck!

Brain Surgery Linked To Sensation of Spirituality 380

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 11 2010, @04:30PM
from the applied-psychology dept.

the3stars writes "'Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas. This raises a number of interesting issues about spirituality, among them whether or not people can be born with a strong propensity towards spirituality and also whether it can be acquired through head trauma." One critic's quoted response: "It's important to recognize that the whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items."

Once in a blue moon-> 1

Submitted by vile8 on Thursday December 31 2009, @10:32AM

vile8 writes "The saying "once in a blue moon" is a reference to the rare celestial event of having 2 full moons in a given month. Normally there is 1 moon per month, and every 2.9 years there is a blue moon. Tonight we share not just the beginning of a nicely divisible new year, we also share the far more rare circumstance of it being a blue moon new year. Fitting end and hopefully a positive beginning to a remarkable new year. The last blue moon new year happened 19 years ago in 1990 and the next one won't come about until 2028."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Car's Battery (Score 1) 520

by vile8 on Wednesday September 10 2008, @10:31AM (#24947401) Attached to: Environmental Cost of Hybrids' Battery Recycling?

So if the batteries in the prius are 330V at 6.5 amps, it sounds like it could run my house pretty well... So instead of recycling it, perhaps it should end up in my backyard shack plugged up to hydro/solar/wind power to charge it and get me off the grid? 200 bucks seems pretty incredibly cheap for a power supply of this magnitude. Or does it lose its juice too fast?