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First, you need a clean room, so make sure the garage door is closed before you begin. Move those old lawnmower parts off the bench. Disassemble the sealed unit and carefully wash all parts with paint thinners. Bend the read/write heads out of the way, and then disassemble the platter stack.
VERY CAREFULLY buff the platter surfaces with the #4/0 steel wool. This will remove any existing data, level out any surface defects, and help to redistribute the magnetic media and fill in those pesky "bad sectors" that most drives have.
Reassemble the platter stack, and using a .015" feeler gauge, bend the read/write heads back to the platter surface, using the feeler gauge to set the gap. This is slightly higher gap than the factory uses, but it reduces the chance of head collisions with any flotsam you neglected to remove.
Give the heads and platters a good shot of WD-40 and reassemble the unit. If your drive has a filter, replace it with a clean section of gauze pad.
All that's left is to low level and DOS format the drive, and you're back in business. I haven't tried this myself, but my friend's wife's sister-in-law's husband knows a technician that does it all the time.
For those of you who haven't guessed, the above is a joke. Don't try it at home. However, the following is NOT a joke. Sometimes, it really works.
If your hard drive hums but doesn't make the right clicking noises as it builds up to proper speed, it may mean that one of the chips on the controller fried due to heat. Place the drive in a plastic bag which can be sealed (those zipper lock freezer bags do great). The bage is to prevent frost from forming on the drive. Put the drive in the freezer for an hour or so. Take the drive out of the freezer (and the bag) and connect it to the PC. You may find that it will operate as long as it is cold. This will give you the opportunity to back up what was on it.
Philips is working with blue lasers which have the potential to increase CD storage 50 times over the red lasers being used currently. They have a quarter-sized CD which can hold a gigabyte of information and are continuing efforts to make it hold even more. If this device can be successfully intergrated into digital cameras and MP3 players, it might replace the media cards currently in use.
EBay announced that it has agreed to acquire PayPal, Inc. The acquisition, which is subject to various stockholder, government and regulatory approvals, is expected to close around year-end 2002. eBay will acquire all of the outstanding shares of PayPal in a tax-free, stock-for-stock transaction. Based on eBay's stock price on July 5, 2002, the acquisition is valued at $1.5 billion. The calculation of the final purchase price may vary significantly from these estimates.
I wonder if ebay plans on charging back the transaction if the move isn't as profitable as they expected. Under Paypal's "buyer-seller" protection plan, seller has no protection from "quality of goods" complaints. If Paypal can't prove that they shipped the stock to the confirmed address ebay gets to keep the stock and their money.
Every so often you read about a large company crushing a smaller one for no other reason than just because they can. This appears to be the case here. A man with the last name of Nissan started a computer company back when Nissan Motors was known as Datsun. He copyrighted the name Nissancomputers and bought the web site. Now Nissan Motors wants him to change his company name because they claim that folks will be confused between Nissancomputers and Nissan Motors. Though he has won most of his cases, they are continued to harrass him in the courts with the knowledge that he can't match the millions they can spend in litigation. Maybe he should change his last name to Nissanmotors and sue them for using his name. It doesn't seem to matter who had it first.
condensed from a NY Times article
July 11, 2002 - A Knee Surgery for Arthritis Is Called Sham By GINA KOLATA
A popular operation for arthritis of the knee worked no better than a sham procedure in which patients were sedated while surgeons pretended to operate, researchers are reporting today. The operation — arthroscopic surgery for the pain and stiffness caused by osteoarthritis — is done on at least 225,000 middle-age and older Americans each year at a cost of more than a billion dollars to Medicare, the Department of Veterans Affairs and private insurers. It involves making three small incisions in the knee; inserting an arthroscope, a thin instrument that allows surgeons to see the joint; and then flushing debris from the knee or shaving rough areas of cartilage from the joint and then flushing it.
In the study, to be published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, investigators at the Houston Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Baylor College of Medicine report that while patients often said they felt better after the surgery, their improvement was just wishful thinking. Tests of knee functions revealed that the operation had not helped, and those who got the placebo surgery reported feeling just as good as those who had had the real operation.
"Here we are doing all this surgery on people and it's all a sham," said Dr. Baruch Brody, an ethicist at Baylor who helped design the study. The study dealt only with arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis, not with other common knee operations.
After learning of the results, Anthony J. Principi, the secretary of veterans affairs, said yesterday that the study would "change the practice of orthopedic medicine in the United States."
But Veterans Affairs Department officials stopped short of saying they would no longer pay for the surgery. Medicare and private insurers typically review such studies before deciding whether to change their reimbursement practices.
The 180 participants in the study were randomly assigned to have the operation or to have placebo surgery in which surgeons simply made cuts in their knees so the patients would not know if they had the surgery. After they recovered from the procedures, most patients said their knee pain had improved, and they continued to say they were better for the two years that the researchers followed their progress.
In a telephone interview this week, Dr. Felson, a professor of medicine and a rheumatologist by training, praised the research but said it remained to be seen whether doctors and patients would abandon the procedure.
"There's a pretty good-sized industry out there that is performing this surgery," Dr. Felton said. "It constitutes a good part of the livelihood of some orthopedic surgeons. That is a reality."
ODP (Dmoz) is a human-edited directory and not a spidering search engine. The Open Directory supplies site information to the core directory services for the Web's largest and most popular search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others.
Directories only rank sites through the little bit of information provided in your listing. Eventually, if/when you do get an ODP listing, changes to your site's pages will have no effect on your rankings in ODP and its partner sites. After you submit, sit tight for about a month. If you are not getting listed, the editor of your category is way behind on his or her reviews, and perhaps is not even checking to see if they have any new sites to add.
It is also possible that the editor doesn't believe that your site should actually go in the category you chose and therefore is just ignoring it (or worse - trashing it!). It's possible that the category you chose might be too broad, or it might not be the best possible category. Also, the editor may feel that the title and/or description you provided don't conform to ODP editorial guidelines, and he or she doesn't feel like taking the time to edit it. Over time, editing the titles and descriptions can add up to a lot of work for a volunteer with many site submissions.
There's really no way to know the exact reason for your site's not getting listed, and unfortunately, the editors rarely let you know. Try to see if you can find a different category that also applies to your site, and submit to that one. Be sure to drill down to the deepest, most specific category possible. Change your description to look like others in your category and try to emulate those ones. Don't try to get keywords represented in your title, but simply use your company name. For those of you who are listed in Yahoo!, you might try using their title and description, as ODP would probably agree with one that the Yahoo! editors liked.
Finally, send an email to the editor of the category you submitted to. Explain your situation to them and ask them (politely) if there's anything else you need to do in order to get listed. Show them examples of other sites that are in the same category which are similar to yours, and explain why your site would make a great addition to that category.
Ultimately, try posting a message at the new ODP forum: http://resource-zone.com/ubbthreads.php. They may be able to give you some tips (or even prod your editor into action!).
Warning: There's a new virus on the loose that's worse than anything I've seen before! It gets in through the power line, riding on the powerline 60 Hz subcarrier. It works by changing the serial port pinouts, and by reversing the direction one's disks spin. Over 300,000 systems have been hit by it here in Murphy, West Dakota alone! And that's just in the last 12 minutes.
It attacks DOS, Unix, TOPS-20, Apple-II, VMS, MVS, Multics, Mac, RSX-11, ITS, TRS-80, and VHS systems.
To prevent the spread of the worm:
1) Don't use the powerline.
2) Don't use batteries either, since there are rumors that this virus has invaded most major battery plants and is infecting the positive poles of the batteries. (You might try hooking up just the negative pole.)
3) Don't upload or download files.
4) Don't store files on floppy disks or hard disks.
5) Don't read messages. Not even this one!
6) Don't use serial ports, modems, or phone lines.
7) Don't use keyboards, screens, or printers.
8) Don't use switches, CPUs, memories, microprocessors, or mainframes.
9) Don't use electric lights, electric or gas heat or air conditioning, running water, writing, fire, clothing or the wheel.
I'm sure if we are all careful to follow these 9 easy steps, this virus can be eradicated, and the precious electronic fluids of our computers can be kept pure.
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