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Don't hire, Wesley Carver! http://www.amazon.com/review/R3VO962Z99T6KZ

So surely this thing must be available from Amazon, or NewEgg, or Tiger Direct or from the manufacturer's own website like the Haupauge 1212 was when it was first released? What about those links?

Okay.

• Amazon
• Dell
• ATI doesn't have them for sale, but that's not surprising since ATI's actually trying to get out of the digital cable tuner market.
• Newegg doesn't sell CableCard tuners. Yet. As the market picks up with mulitple players (Hauppauge and Ceton for starters), I expect Newegg to start selling something.

We're currently in a chicken-and-egg situation. CableCard tuners have been available for the past couple of years, but CableLabs were being retarded and required a special BIOS in order for the tuners to work so only ATI bothered with the market. At CEDIA 2009, that changed and new manufacturers have decided to enter the market, but it takes time to develop, test, and manufacture a product. Ask this question again in March of 2010 and there should be several tuners available on the market.

I read his "More Sex is Safer Sex" and spent about half of it muttering "but you're ignoring a relevant factor...".

I see that the reviews at the Amazon page for that book:

http://www.amazon.com/More-Sex-Safer-Unconventional-Economics/dp/1416532226/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2 ...agree with my assessment. Give the first couple a quick skim before buying this one. Many of his arguments read like he started off with the intention of writing somethingn entertainingly contrarian and counter-intuitive, then assembled an argument to defend it. And, of course, a book author has the advantage of only taking on arguments that he himself allows in the book, gets to decide which factors of the problem are relevant, and so on.

I did pass the test the reviewer offers here: I had specific points at which I disagreed with his argument. But I didn't find that fun; it's no fun halting all agreement with an argument at step 4 and having to go on and read steps 5-9 while holding a little asterisk in your head that says "none of this matters because 4 is clearly wrong".

As an example, the heart of his "more sex is safer sex" argument used in the title is that overall risk is reduced if *certain* *people*, those with lower odds of having disease, have more sex. Then the people they have sex with are having safer sex than if with someone else. Alas, it rests on the contention that if the "safer" people have more sex, every act *displaces* another sexual interaction - the possibility that simply more sex will occur, the added interactions being safer, but *not* displacing a less-safe one, is not allowed for. Recommending that certain prudent people have more sex, while assuming that the amount of total sex in the world will remain a constant, is not, to my mind, a safe assumption. But it wasn't slashdot; all I could do was sit there, frustrated at my inability to argue with the book.

So I'll give this one a miss. Thanks anyway.

Here's a novel idea: She could try paying for music. (A radical idea, I know.)

You can buy DRM free MP3s from Amazon.com -- Yes, it works with linux.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/help/amd.html

Find what you want on youtube, then go buy it. (Isn't this what all the pro-pirates claim they do anyhow?)

If you're too poor to afford the 89 cents, you could have her dig through some indie music instead.

Fasting can help some people too, by resetting the taste buds to prefer vegetables instead of salty, sugary, and other extreme foods.
"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health & Happiness"
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
Comments:
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm

This has all happened before, and it will happen again.

Thing is, though: They're right.

If you haven't read "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes, you should. This book outlines how 40 years of bad science and personality cults in nutrition research has lead to a serious misunderstanding of the causes of heart disease and obesity.

At the very least you should read his eye-opening NY Times article, which pre-dated the book by a couple of years.

With some 1/4" to 3.5 mm adapters and 3.5 mm cable, you can run a signal to 4 PC speaker systems. The individual gain controls for each line out allow you to compensate for the specific loss in each line due to varying cable lengths.

If you buy the right speaker systems, they could also have local aux in jacks in case you want to listen to an ipod or something. You might want to check whether it replaces or is layered onto the main input, though.

Agreed. I have a Sonos system, it is nice and works, but really is really overpriced for what you get. It was revealed to me how stingy they were when I bought one of their controller units for $300 (which they now have upgraded) and it didn't even come with a docking station, no that was another $40. Just greedy bastards. I would instead look at a squeezebox or look into these.

The Apple upgrade for users with a currently installed copy of OSX Leopard.

If you have an Intel based mac that doesn't have Leopard installed, you can purchase The Box Set to install on your computerfor 169.99

You can also find The Box Set for 35 dollars cheaper on Amazon.com

Thus, Apple does sell full copies of Snow Leopard, which Psystar utilizes for their machines.

This book was great when it came out. Over a year ago. Strange to get such a late review of a book. Fortunately a lot of things are still accurate, and Drupal 6 has been the main release during this entire time, but sheesh. The contributed modules have improved a lot since then.

As far as Drupal itself goes, it's great. Yesterday my boss asked me to put together a secure site where a select group of people could discuss the upcoming budget cuts. The site needed to be attractive, secure, support single signon (integrating with our existing directory), restricted to one group of users, allow optional anonymity of posters (after authentication), and allow users to subscribe to threads.

Starting from scratch, I had it all done in an hour an twenty minutes with Drupal (plus the hidden author, subscriptions, pubcookie, pubcookie site access, secure pages, and views modules).

There seems to be a great deal of frustration and outright ignorance about how Drupal works in the postings above. If you want to be able to wield a complex weapon like Drupal, try the following resources.

For examples on how to create common types of sites using popular, well-supported modules: Using Drupal, O'Reilly

If you're a designer working with Drupal and want to understand how to work with it: Front End Drupal, Prentice Hall

If you're a coder and want to know how Drupal works internally: Pro Drupal Development, Apress

If you're not a book reader but like watching videos, pretty much anything put out by Lullabot

If you're not a coder or designer but a power user who has to deal with Drupal's admittedly byzantine administrative interface: Drupal 6 Content Administration

Sorry.

Customers Who Bought Related Items Also Bought

• The Berenstain Bears' Mad, Mad, Mad Toy

...

about 8 pages of children's literature in recommendations.

There's an amazing untold story there. I hope it stays that way.

Sorry.

The Panasonic KX-TG5776S allow you to upload an addressbook as a .csv file from your PC using a USB cable.

Do you believe that everyone interview for that book didn't exist ? Urban legend too ?

See:

SL785 on Amazon. It is the only cordless phone on the market that has some semi-smartphone features.

You can push .vcf cards to the phone via Bluetooth (I exported from Google, and pushed my entire contact list in one go). Alternately, you can use the optional software to sync a handset with Outlook via USB or Bluetooth.

Once one handset is updated, you can push the entire phonebook to any other handset.

The phones themselves are very pretty and well made, and work great as phones. They can also display photos, and you can use your own custom ringtones. The handsets can (or claim to) use Bluetooth headsets, too, but I've yet to have one work well (something off with the bluetooth radio in the handsets).

Very, very pricey compared to other phones, however.

It has bluetooth that you can used with a standard headset AND copy your contacts from your mobile. Pretty slick. Panasonic 2-Line DECT 6.0 Expandable Digital Cordless Answering System (KX-TG9381T) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002KF21FK/ref=oss_T15_product

That's it? The LCD on my MacBook Pro is 1680 x 1050 but graphics will drive a 1920 x 1200 external monitor.

You do realize I'm talking about before graphics drivers are installed, right? With the drivers, my card can support HD resolutions.

Duh, that's why I said "I updated hardware drivers for Windows but both Windows 95 and NT4 used my 1024 × 768 monitor out of the box." I did phrase it wrong though, I said my monitor was 1024 × 768 but it's 1600 x 1280. The graphics card drove the monitor at 1024 x 768 without updating the driver.

That said, I would kind of expect Apple software to support Apple hardware straight out of the box, that's kind of the point of running an OS only a handful of hardware combinations.

I can use a monitor from someone else. One of the monitors I was thinking of getting is the HP LP2475W which is 1920 x 1200 and has gotten some good reviews on Photo.net. If I could afford it I'd get a higher resolution monitor than that.

Falcon

I'd argue that mutually assured destruction is dumber than what we're seeing here.

You'd be wrong. There's some very sound game-theoretic reasons that MAD is a stable state for international relations. Certainly much more stable (especially if you like living under a free society) than the alternative of only one side having the Bomb -- and if you need a real-world example, just look at all the countries (e.g. Iran) which have nuclear-armed neighbors and want the increased security of MAD.

For that matter, you could read Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet (that's book 1 of 4), which among other things is basically about what happens under non-MAD conditions when there's a nuclear hegemon, and how other nations react to that reality. (If you're actually considering this and aren't a fantasy reader generally, you can probably just start with book 3.)

And, anyway, MAD so far has a 100% success rate of preventing nuclear war. In fact, a lot more people have died from asymmetric warfare from a non-nuclear-enabled player (e.g. US-al Qaeda relations) than from MAD...

I did not agree with the tiny 10-page article that barely had enough substance for 1 physical paper.

It's worse than that. I hate to spoil the ending for you but he comes to the conclusion that the British outlet is the greatest with a 10 out of 10 score. Why? Safety features. Features like shuttering and built in fuses. Both of which are optional on American outlets as well -- I'm sure -- as they are on outlets around the world. Maybe they're standard in the UK but they're optional in the US. I'd rather have the option than even more regulation. Also, the picture for the US is ungrounded. I'm beginning to think this article was written by someone who's never really cared to understand the diversity of plugs in countries other than his own (which I would never use in the US and very rarely see). Nationalistic garbage is about all this amounts to. Yawn.

"I'd rather have the option than even more regulation": how stereotypically American.

"Nationalistic garbage is about all this amounts to": pot vs kettle methinks.

I did not agree with the tiny 10-page article that barely had enough substance for 1 physical paper.

It's worse than that. I hate to spoil the ending for you but he comes to the conclusion that the British outlet is the greatest with a 10 out of 10 score. Why? Safety features. Features like shuttering and built in fuses. Both of which are optional on American outlets as well -- I'm sure -- as they are on outlets around the world. Maybe they're standard in the UK but they're optional in the US. I'd rather have the option than even more regulation. Also, the picture for the US is ungrounded. I'm beginning to think this article was written by someone who's never really cared to understand the diversity of plugs in countries other than his own (which I would never use in the US and very rarely see). Nationalistic garbage is about all this amounts to. Yawn.

*cough*
http://www.amazon.com/Glenn-Becks-Common-Sense-Control/dp/1439168571

Sounds like somthing from Snow Crash meets Jennifer Government.

Sounds like somthing from Snow Crash meets Jennifer Government.

ok fine

http://www.amazon.com/Mac-OS-Version-10-5-6-Leopard/dp/B000FK88JK

its 299 - still half of the quoted 600$

and a 5 pack is only 304.

You know what the difference is? About $291.99! (Or even $391.99.)

Just sayin': If you are outraged about what you get, when you get something that large for free, then you are obviously an egocentric ass, and I pity the people who try to give you gifts on Christmas.
Whether it's Linux or Windows or OS X does not matter at all. It would be just as wrong to be pissed about getting Windows 7 for free.

Perhaps if you each payed $291.99 for Ubuntu, to deliver an upgrade (that's what Win7 is), then you'd get something better.
Otherwise, just shut up or fix it yourselves!

What's next? Complaining about the low quality of your slaves? ^^

You know those science fiction books and how they paint the future as being very dim, well that future is already happening and this would give it a real big push.

Current trends point towards a grim future indeed, but even a more transformative view is likely to arrive only after one of several possible dark futures. (Those are just a couple of my favorites that seem plausible starting from where we are and what we know of human nature. Perhaps some combination. There's so much money to be made exploiting space that it's unthinkable that it won't happen, and soon, which is why I like Hardwired even if the hovercraft idea is silly.)

This is the Black Sea deluge hypothesis, originated by William Ryan and Walter Pitman. (Although they argued that the Black Sea already existed before the flood, but was signinficantly smaller.) Incidentally, Orson Scott Card wrote a story which postulates that the Flood legends started with a prehistoric flood which filled the modern-day Red Sea.

Have you read Winograd and Flores book "Understanding Computers and Cognition"? (yes, the same Winograd that was Larry Page's PhD advisor)

http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Computers-Cognition-Foundation-Design/dp/0201112973/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1

It is a really revolutionary book written in 1986 about how AI wouldn't ever be able to do all the things that were implicitly (and explicitly) promised. It relies in sound biological and philosophical arguments that show how foolish the present ideas are.

No I'm not saying we will never have intelligent machines. What I do say is that they are not going to be created by any of the current approaches.

Cue SPOOOKS from Charlie Stross' Halting State.

Having taken several courses on AI, I never found a contributor to the field that promised it to be the silver bullet

<cough>Ontologies: A Silver Bullet for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce</cough>

Having spent over ten years working professionally in the field, I've found this kind of thing to be all too common, especially among ambitious-but-talentless academics where grant applications are concerned, particularly where said grant applications contain the words "semantic" and "web" in close proximity - now that really is pure, undiluted snake oil. The semantic web community has received hundreds of millions of dollars/euros/pounds in funding and they've delivered nothing of any use. Zippo, zilch, zero. Compare this with enormous amounts of useful functionality delivered by the machine learning community. The difference is that machine learning is rigorous and can be really quite difficult, whereas the semantic web is based on the belief that 3-tuples are really neat.

Having taken several courses on AI, I never found a contributor to the field that promised it to be the silver bullet -- or even remotely comparable to the human mind.

Not today, after the "AI Winter". But when I went through Stanford CS in the 1980s, there were indeed faculty members proclaiming in print that strong AI was going to result from expert systems Real Soon Now. Feigenbaum was probably the worst offender. His 1984 book, The Fifth Generation (available for $0.01 through Amazon.com) is particularly embarrassing. Expert systems don't really do all that much. They're basically a way to encode troubleshooting books in a machine-processable way. What you put in is what you get out.

Machine learning, though, has made progress in recent years. There's now some decent theory underneath. Neural nets, simulated annealing, and similar ad-hoc algorithms have been subsumed into machine learning algorithms with solid statistics underneath. Strong AI remains a long way off.

Compute power doesn't seem to be the problem. Moravec's classic chart indicates that today, enough compute power to do a brain should only cost about $1 million. There are plenty of server farms with more compute power and far more storage than the human brain. A terabyte drive is now only $199, after all.

Have you read or even looked at any of the other books authorized by his estate? Take a look at the cover of "Isaac Asimov's Robot City" here. Look how the size of the word "Asimov" on the cover compared to the actual authors who wrote it.

I have no idea why this is such a big deal now - this was already done. Whole book series called "Isaac Asimov's Robots in Time". The series was quite clearly based on (and trying to expand) the stories with Asimov's robots. Positronic brains, three laws, and all.

If you read the books
about Bill Gates and Microsoft, there is little evidence that he was much
interested in technology. Remember, he initially didn't think the internet
would be important. Hard
Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire is interesting,
for example. .

Bullshit. I pulled "Hard Drive" off the shelf and the first several chapters are about Gates' obsession with computer programming.

Admittedly the "The Road Ahead" was some worthless crap for MBA fanboys.

The early Microsoft Basic was buggy and poorly documented. It ran under the CP/M operating system.

"... the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots."

The problem with managers who have little knowledge or interest in technology is that they are mostly blind to technology. The mentally blind cannot lead.

If you read the books about Bill Gates and Microsoft, there is little evidence that he was much interested in technology. Remember, he initially didn't think the internet would be important. Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire is interesting, for example. So is Barbarians Led by Bill Gates.

Read The Road Ahead by Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. There was little in the initial edition, at least, to suggest that Gates knew much about technology. The book was full of platitudes that any buzzword collector would know.

The early Microsoft Basic was buggy and poorly documented. It ran under the CP/M operating system.

"... the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots."

The problem with managers who have little knowledge or interest in technology is that they are mostly blind to technology. The mentally blind cannot lead.

If you read the books about Bill Gates and Microsoft, there is little evidence that he was much interested in technology. Remember, he initially didn't think the internet would be important. Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire is interesting, for example. So is Barbarians Led by Bill Gates.

Read The Road Ahead by Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. There was little in the initial edition, at least, to suggest that Gates knew much about technology. The book was full of platitudes that any buzzword collector would know.

Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Marcus Aurelius

Genghis Khan was also very much a geek when it comes to war.

Well, satellites with nuclear reactors haven't always managed to keep from releasing significant amounts of radiation onto earth. The concerns might be overblown, but as far as I can tell, most scientists do consider the problem of designing nuclear reactors for launch such that they won't leak radiation in a disaster a fairly significant one. It's even been cited (pp. 39-41) as a major motivator for research into fusion-powered spacecraft propulsion, since fusion can in principle achieve similar acceleration characteristics without having to worry about disaster-proofing a payload of radioactive material. (The downside is that we can build lots of fission-powered things today, practically, but not so for fusion-powered things.)

It may really be the case that the launch was 'frickin fantastic', but just having finished reading Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age I don't put a lot of faith in what the media gets wind of with regard to space technology. This stuff is really complicated, and the general public doesn't understand that test flights going awry is not necessarily a bad thing-- so officials often put a nice veneer on the results.

I hope it really was fantastic. A lot of people put a lot of time into this thing. But this thing is so politicized, I'm not holding my breath.

a script that fires up an instance on the moment your website is accessed, and shuts it down afterward

Except: "Each partial instance-hour consumed will be billed as a full hour." - from http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing

They don't support DVDs, but you can do hard drives (USB2/eSATA).

http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

What?

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/

# Web Edition: Up to 1 GB relational database = $9.99 / month
# Business Edition: Up to 10 GB relational database = $99.99 / month
# Bandwidth = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB

Web Edition Relational Database includes:

* Up to 1 GB of T-SQL based relational database
* Self-managed DB, auto high availability
* Best suited for Web application, Departmental custom apps.

Business Edition DB includes:

* Up to 10 GB of T-SQL based relational database
* Self-managed DB, auto high availability
* Additional features in the future like auto-partition, CLR, fanouts etc.
* Best suited for ISVs packaged LOB apps, Department custom apps

http://aws.amazon.com/rds/

# Small DB Instance: 1.7 GB memory, 1 ECU (1 virtual core with 1 ECU), 64-bit platform.
# Large DB Instance: 7.5 GB memory, 4 ECUs (2 virtual cores with 2 ECUs each), 64-bit platform
# Extra Large DB Instance: 15 GB of memory, 8 ECUs (4 virtual cores with 2 ECUs each), 64-bit platform
# Double Extra Large DB Instance: 34 GB of memory, 13 ECUs (4 virtual cores with 3,25 ECUs each), 64-bit platform
# Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance: 68 GB of memory, 26 ECUs (8 virtual cores with 3.25 ECUs each), 64-bit platform

(Price per hour)
Small DB Instance $0.11
Large DB Instance $0.44
Extra Large DB Instance $0.88
Double Extra Large DB Instance $1.55
Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance $3.10

Provisioned Database Storage

For each DB Instance class, Amazon RDS provides you the ability to select from 5 GB to 1 TB of associated storage capacity for your primary data set.

* $0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage
* $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests

Data Transfer In

* All Data Transfer $0.10 per GB

Data Transfer Out

* First 10 TB per Month $0.17 per GB
* Next 40 TB per Month $0.13 per GB
* Next 100TB per Month $0.11 per GB
* Over 150 TB per Month $0.10 per GB

Data transferred between two Amazon Web Services within the same region (e.g. between Amazon RDS US and Amazon EC2 US) is free of charge.

The minimum on Amazon is 5GB, so let's compare 10GB. For Amazon at 1 month, you're paying $0.10 * 10 = $1 for storage and your $81.84 is about right. Note that this $82.84 is not comparable to the "Web Edition" offering from Microsoft, as that's for 1GB of storage. The "Small DB Instance" offering from Amazon is for an instance, not for storage, which you pay for completely separately.

So this $82.84 figure is really only comparable to Microsoft's "Business Edition" offering at $99.99, both before bandwidth costs. Bandwidth costs apply to Azure too under a different pricing model. The data in cost is exactly the same and the data out cost is $0.02/GB more expensive for Amazon for the first 10 TB and cheaper after that. You do have to pay Amazon an additional $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests, though.

On the other hand, Amazon allows you to buy way more than 10GB of storage, different instances, and

see my reply before yours:

http://aws.amazon.com/rds/#pricing

Extra Large DB Instance 15 GB 8 ECUs $0.88 USD / hour

thats $642.4 / month

2,149,784,446 queries/ month @ $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests

thats another $214.9

data transfer is about 5-10mbit month between database and php/server @ First 10 TB per Month $0.17 per GB

thats another $800 or so

this amazon thing is an absolute ripoff

and so far i have had no downtime this year, compare that to the much publicized amazon downtimes ;)

With the two new types, their instance list looks like the McDonalds menu.

I'd like a Quadruple Extra Large with cheese please.

There are people that speak something that descends from the mayan language, correct. That doesn't help us much in deciphering the written version of the language in hieroglyphics.

Sure it does. Between that and the large number of inscriptions available, we have a reasonably good understanding of classical Mayan language. I'd recommend reading something like Michael Coe's Breaking the Mayan Code and ignoring the 2012 bullshit.

I'm not talking about just HFCS, although that's probably the most well-known example. There's something like four or five dozen different things created from corn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize#Chemicals_and_medicines is a start, though The Omnivore's Dilemma(Amazon link) goes into MUCH more detail.

Why not buy them from Canonical? You get 5 discs for about half the price Amazon is asking for 8.10.

It was well documented in "Undocumented Windows. There's also the Court's Finding of Facts in US v Microsoft, and, if that weren't clear enough, The letter (warning: PDF) from now-former MS Group Manager Dennis Adler submitted as evidence in Comes v Microsoft makes it clear that this behavior did not stop as it was supposed to with the consent decree (although it may have become more innocuous and innocent overall). Quoting from that last: "Why not just document the API's, preface the document with some HONEST history (yes, we did use undoc'd APIs, yes we now have a policy in place of not doing that -- a policy that was not in place previously [...]"

Maybe. Maybe they've stopped now. The fact is that they did do it, they continued to do it even after the consent decree forbade it, and there is no evidence that they've stopped (although there is evidence that it's no longer standard policy).

$$$$
I think Amazons use of DRM will help/was designed to break the overhead, where as Apples, and Sonys is clearly to prop up the failed models longer.
Amazon has a reasonable, we'll publish your book directly for a flat percentage, no matter what price you want ($.99 - $200) Very easy, very cost affective.
Granted Apple kinda sorta, stepped into this, but never gave the same efforts to independents. And never for the kinda price/format flexibility that amazon is going for with their Digital Text Platform
(also it doesn't hurt that amazons DRM is fairly easy to crack.)