I can't speak for HDTV, but I bought a SD box to improve our reception. We were getting crap because the rooftop antenna is crap so I bought the SD STB for less than replacing the antenna, plugged in a $4 arial and we now get crystal clear pictures.
I guess it depends on a few factors, but we went from snow on some channels and ghosting on others with consistantly inconsistant audio to total clarity. Well worth it.
Weird that this question about where the downconverters are keeps popping up. I live in Australia and my local supermarket keeps them at the end of the cleaning products aisle. $A60 = ~$US40 something.
If someone wants to burn 40W incandescent for whatever reason, instead of 40W CFL, why should they have to pay TWELVE TIMES AS MUCH (given the relative lifespans of the two technologies) for one over the other? You can't tell me that's fair.
I don't know the relative energy costs per unit of manufacture for the two technologies, it may be that these newer globes will be cheap enough per unit to manufacture, but if it did work out that incandescents cost twelve times as much over their entire lifetime including manufacture, it would be completely reasonable to tax them twelve times as much.
If you argue against banning incandescents _and_ taxing them, it suggests that either you are naive enough to think everyone will stop using them out of the goodness of their hearts, or you are entirely selfish and have little regard for your country or the future of your society.
Incandescant globes are an inefficient 19th century technology and are known to be an unecessary drain on the worlds electricity production at a time when our energy production appears to be having dangerous effects on weather patterns. If it is better for people to stop using them, how is that achieved if not through either a ban or taxes?
A ban disadvantages people who have a ligitimate need to use them, such as photographers, or creates loopholes and unfair exceptions. Taxes create a disencentive to buy and run them and puts money back into society through the government, through tax cuts elsewhere or incentives for major works to build clean energy generators, for example.
In the long run you get the benefit, as does your state or your country. Crying foul about taxes like the one proposed by the GP shows a distinct lack of a social conscience and actually appears incredibly unpatriotic. To take an extreme view, it suggests you would prefer to do away with government as a check on capitalism, to go the anarcho-capitalist route, which if you really think about it, legitimises terrorism as an instrument of political power. So quit whining about taxes.
As for the tech in TFA, brilliant (pun intended). It looks like it'll still be less efficient than CFL, but it's a step forward and makes applications that require incandescants more efficient. It creates a good argument for a tax on energy to my mind.
No, I mean forwards 25. I mean that crossing from the West of the Western Hemisphere to the East of the Eastern Hemisphere jumps forward 25 hours. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it, because this is slashdot and admitting one has made a mistake is just not done.;-)
I need volunteers for a new project called "Grapplets"
I envisage a 700MB package containing dock "Grapplets", or GNU Crapplets, for things like connecting to AOL, etc. the first priority is a special replacement for the panel on your desktop of choice (of course it will have to work equally well with Gnome, KDE, XFCE) that displays special sponsored messages about the latest benefits of some peice of proprietary software.
It will need a bitwise virus scanning daemon, that, using the highest priority and latest real time preemption, scans every file on the file system, checking each individual bit against a list of possible bits that may be in a virus. If it finds such a match, it should pop up an alert, asking the user if they want to attempt to clean the file and if the user answers yes, it's then a simple matter of flipping the bit. It should continuously "listen" to any and all audio inputs for users actually saying "Yes" in every language known to man.
I'd also like to see a replacement of apt, dpkg, et al, that it when you try to remove the grapplets package from the system runs rm -fR/
Obviously, I can't offer money, just the kudos of working on free software that will make a difference to the entire community. Of course it will be released under v3 of the GPL.
Israel isn't the best or safest nation out there but it is my peoples homeland and our colective dream for over a millenium.
I wonder if that is true... it may be, but it's unlikely if you are descended from European Jews.
Modern Isreal was founded by Zionists from Europe who interpreted the bit about God giving Isreal to Abraham's sons as meaning anyone whose religion is Judaeism has a claim to Isreal. What has been forgotten, perhaps deliberately, is that the Zionist from Europe, who were involved in terrorist activity toward a state of Isreal well before the rise of Hitler, are not descendents of Abraham. They are more recent converts to Judaeism who before they converted lived in central Asia and worshipped penises.
These are the people who founded modern Isreal. These are the people who the current Christian right in the US are backing (hehe). These people have an ancient conflict with Persia (now Iran).
Sorry to say it, but if you too are descended from Eurasian Jews, chances are that that land was never your homeland, and the collective dream is a myth.
I know, I know, it looks like trolling, but honest, I'm sick of all this "We have a right to the holy land" crap from folks that got displaced from their true homeland for picking fights all the time and still haven't learned the lesson.
Probably because Iran has openly stated its desire to wipe Israel off the map should it ever have the means to do so.
Didn't the US make a similar threat against the North Vietnamese? Something about "bomb them back to the stone age?"
So Iran making threats against a country founded by terrorists, who repeatedly ignored international law, has occupied and continues to occupy land which is recognised as belonging to it's neighbour states and who recently undertook a massive aerial bombardment of civilians in the name of fighting terrorism, Iran threatening them justifies their classification as a rougue state and the imposition of sanctions and possible millitary action?
How was the US right to actually go to war with the North Vietnamese over an ideological difference? To fight against and threaten with utter destruction an army who in the 1940s had rescued and protected US marines from the Japanese? To attempt to destroy a former ally who posed no threat to the United States because they launched an attack on French colonialism and fought for self determination?
Like the GP and GGP says, get some credibility first.
It really takes serious denial to think that consumers would prefer to wait for them to broadcast the content over their channels, when it can be obtained immediately, on-demand, in HD without commercials for free.
What? Who would break the law downloading the latest "Americas Most Incredibly Stupid Psychic Wildlife Cops Behaving Badly In A Queer Make-Over With The Fattest Loser", when they could wait five years to see it hosted by Sandra Sully? I mean really...
Struth, you've never left the farm. If you go to one of those big cities like Tumbarumba, they have the toilets inside the buildings, and once you've done your business, you pull this chain hanging off a tank on the wall, and bloody water comes out and washes it away. No hole in the ground for these fancy city folks.
I doubt they're going to preinstall any free distros. I think they will preinstall RHEL WS and SLED. They probably don't want to eat the support costs.
It would be nice to see Canonical step in to support Ubuntu desktops. I'm assuming here that the RHEL and SLED taxes will replace the MS tax and if Canonical came up with an OEM support package at a fixed cost to Dell, I think it could be very competive and attractive.
The advantage of offering a distro with the reputation of being "easy" is fairly obvious and with the inclusion of CNR, commercial software could be easily installed. Under the bonnet, there's the Debian heritage of stability (yeah I know Ubuntu is from "unstable", the stable releases are still... stable.:-?) and the niceness of apt.
Then again, the cynic in me thinks there's a chance Dell will provide broken desktop installs, or at least systems that require more experience on the part of the user, just to shut people up while not effecting the relationship with MS. (I'm not saying RHEL or SLED are inherently complicated or broken BTW, just that MS is pretty intrenched in some circles)
I think the "international date line" thing is spurious - the problem was more likely going from W to E, not today to yesterday.
Ummmm, maybe I'm missing what you mean, but crossing the date line from West to East jumps you forward 25 hours.
It's most certainly not today to yesterday, It's today to tommorrow, or if you cross the line at around midnight, it's today to the day after tommorrow. I don't think the international date line thing is spurious, if you cross it from West to East, you jump forward quite a way.
All that said, I find it absolutely incredible that, so soon after the big kerfuffle around Y2K, any time critical software is not developed to take these scenarios into account. Completely ridiculous.
Then again. maybe the official line is that the crashes were caused by the date line, but the real reason was Vista's DRM features wreaking havoc with the nav systems. You only believe they don't use Vista on these things because that's what they want you to believe. Think about it, what other OS would these brillant minds put in an "Aero"-plane?
The law exists to protect its citizens. If someone from another country stole 50 million dollars from me, I sure as hell epxect my government to track his punk ass down and put him in a US prison no matter where he lived.
Does that mean you support the US sending CIA agents to Europe to face trial for kidnapping? How enlightened.
No, the Egyptians struct the first blow. The Greeks did a fair bit of damage too.
Sure, that was before either religion existed, but they did, but these wars were based on empire building as much as religion. The fact is that as a whole, the history of Islam shows far more tolerance of other religions than Christianity. There are _still_ missionaries travelling the world "saving" savages for fucks sake!
I understand that this view will not be popular here, because this is a US based site, most Americans are Christian and the current propaganda demonises Islam, but hey, karma is action and gotsta do it.
Attacks in Europe have generally been planned by disgruntled individuals without any government support but with a few friends around them just as meaninglessly disgruntled as them.
That's a good point. A lot of these terrorist groups are funded by foreign governments. Most of these governments have been colonised and abused over their histories, used as pawns the cold war and earlier conflicts. It's not surprising then that they are sympathetic to terrorist causes.
It's also worth noting that the US has funded terrorist groups, called "freedom fighters" if you're on their side, in conflicts when it has suited the ambitions or ideology of the US administration of the time. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and for clarity I'm definitely referring to the current US administration as "the goose".
The only way to be secure against terror is to destroy it at its roots -- and that means seriously debilitating the governments that are paying for it.
Destroying the source of funding for those groups is near impossible and it fails to destroy the ideology that is the true root of terrorism, and if anything it reinforces it. To destroy the real root of the problem in a physical and partisan sense would effectively be genocide because it involves killing the belief in an idea.
In the first part of the 20th century the major terrorist ideology was zionism. What happened to the nation that used the genocide option? It wasn't fatal, but I'm sure that if they really thought it through, even the hardest line neo-cons wouldn't want that to happen to their country.
To follow the example of Christ on this issue is a far more potent method. Offer love. Make an attempt to understand the root of the problem from the others perspective and take steps to end the suffering. Treating this as a war that must be met with force creates a target and you gives violence a focus. Treating it as a wound that must be healed removes the cause and the desire of these people to blow themselves and others up.
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound all hippy trippy there, and it is important to remember compassion can be hard, as long as compassion is the true basis of action.
How can GWB possibly hold any delusion that he is Christian for fucks sake!?!
Muslim armies were plenty keen on invading the Christian and pagan states around them from the 7th century on, slaughtering the pagans and placing high taxation on the rest. Hard to blame the United States when we're only seeing the latest evolution of a trend dating back over a thousand years before the U.S. existed.
The way I understand it, Christians (as in the people who identify with the label 'Christian' without strictly following the teachings of Christ) have been the most bloodthirsty religious group ever to exist. Muslim societies in the in Europe and the Middle East where for the most part secular and peaceful. There schools of theology encouraged the reading the Bible and Tora and the first Muslims were a mixture of Jews, Christians and Pagans. They only really got sectarian after they were attacked by Christians, who were involved in campaigns to kill any group who didn't join them. "If you're not with us, you're against us" is a philosophy with a proud Christian heritage.
Remember that Christians have a long history of burning other Christian groups who didn't follow their particular brand of Christianity and that most of the surviving Churches around today are descended from the most violent and criminal groups in modern terms. That is how they survived. Islam survived by rising to the challenge.
The only real way to have a universal format is for the world to only use one distribution, because really, packaging is the most major part of a distribution's job.
Hmmmm. Maybe the whole world should just use Vista. Monoculture is obviously better.
Is it going to reduce greenhouse gasses? Well, not so much.
Except that CH4 is far worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Burning methane, especially in a system that cools the exhaust to capture liquid water, is actually better than releasing it into the atmosphere as is. "When averaged over 100 years each kg of CH4 warms the Earth 23 times as much as the same mass of CO2" - wikipedia.
Given the rate that polar ice is already melting, the sooner this technology is used commercially, the better.
"The Mono Project announced that it has developed a Visual Basic compiler that will enable software developers who use Microsoft Visual Basic to run their applications on any platform that supports Mono, such as Linux, without any code modifications."
The concept of "Royalty" is a history-encompassing scam where brigand families who murdered and backstabbed their way to political dominance, then established the fiction that they were fundamentally superior by the grace of genetics and edict of God, and used that fiction to claim right to subjugate and torture their "subjects" when not embroiling them in self-enriching wars. They are not better than anyone else, worse in fact because they lived high on the hog on the lie that they were better. The history of most "royal" families should make being a member a mark of shame, not something to be elevated.
Oh right, I get it now. The corrupt republic is so pure compared to those evil monarchs.
Out of curiosity, do you also call the star spangled banner a disgusting symbol of a violent history? What does that symbol represent to people in Vietnam, Latin America or Iraq? If the philosohy that that symbol represents to the rest of the world is "do it our way or die", how could you possibly respect it? Can you reconcile this with the attitude that "They are not Americans so they are less human, they have less right to choose their destiny"?
US patriots will mod this Troll, but I can't help responding when this sort of hypocritical drivel has been modded up.
Would be wonderful if for example some of the poorest sub-Saharan countries could make use of all their free solar energy to improve their quality of life and maybe even have energy exports as an income generator...
That's why Australia doesn't experiment with solar technology on any meaningful scale.
Solar energy in Australia is seen as competition to coal and Australia is a huge energy exporter in the form of coal and to a lesser extent uranium. Governments don't want to upset the status quo and businesses don't want to invest in the competition.
Slashdot Mirror
But what if a package depends on "uninstall.exe"? *ducks*
I can't speak for HDTV, but I bought a SD box to improve our reception. We were getting crap because the rooftop antenna is crap so I bought the SD STB for less than replacing the antenna, plugged in a $4 arial and we now get crystal clear pictures.
I guess it depends on a few factors, but we went from snow on some channels and ghosting on others with consistantly inconsistant audio to total clarity. Well worth it.
Weird that this question about where the downconverters are keeps popping up. I live in Australia and my local supermarket keeps them at the end of the cleaning products aisle. $A60 = ~$US40 something.
I don't know the relative energy costs per unit of manufacture for the two technologies, it may be that these newer globes will be cheap enough per unit to manufacture, but if it did work out that incandescents cost twelve times as much over their entire lifetime including manufacture, it would be completely reasonable to tax them twelve times as much.
If you argue against banning incandescents _and_ taxing them, it suggests that either you are naive enough to think everyone will stop using them out of the goodness of their hearts, or you are entirely selfish and have little regard for your country or the future of your society.
Incandescant globes are an inefficient 19th century technology and are known to be an unecessary drain on the worlds electricity production at a time when our energy production appears to be having dangerous effects on weather patterns. If it is better for people to stop using them, how is that achieved if not through either a ban or taxes?
A ban disadvantages people who have a ligitimate need to use them, such as photographers, or creates loopholes and unfair exceptions. Taxes create a disencentive to buy and run them and puts money back into society through the government, through tax cuts elsewhere or incentives for major works to build clean energy generators, for example.
In the long run you get the benefit, as does your state or your country. Crying foul about taxes like the one proposed by the GP shows a distinct lack of a social conscience and actually appears incredibly unpatriotic. To take an extreme view, it suggests you would prefer to do away with government as a check on capitalism, to go the anarcho-capitalist route, which if you really think about it, legitimises terrorism as an instrument of political power. So quit whining about taxes.
As for the tech in TFA, brilliant (pun intended). It looks like it'll still be less efficient than CFL, but it's a step forward and makes applications that require incandescants more efficient. It creates a good argument for a tax on energy to my mind.
No, I mean forwards 25. I mean that crossing from the West of the Western Hemisphere to the East of the Eastern Hemisphere jumps forward 25 hours. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it, because this is slashdot and admitting one has made a mistake is just not done. ;-)
I need volunteers for a new project called "Grapplets"
I envisage a 700MB package containing dock "Grapplets", or GNU Crapplets, for things like connecting to AOL, etc. the first priority is a special replacement for the panel on your desktop of choice (of course it will have to work equally well with Gnome, KDE, XFCE) that displays special sponsored messages about the latest benefits of some peice of proprietary software.
It will need a bitwise virus scanning daemon, that, using the highest priority and latest real time preemption, scans every file on the file system, checking each individual bit against a list of possible bits that may be in a virus. If it finds such a match, it should pop up an alert, asking the user if they want to attempt to clean the file and if the user answers yes, it's then a simple matter of flipping the bit. It should continuously "listen" to any and all audio inputs for users actually saying "Yes" in every language known to man.
I'd also like to see a replacement of apt, dpkg, et al, that it when you try to remove the grapplets package from the system runs rm -fR /
Obviously, I can't offer money, just the kudos of working on free software that will make a difference to the entire community. Of course it will be released under v3 of the GPL.
I wonder if that is true... it may be, but it's unlikely if you are descended from European Jews.
Modern Isreal was founded by Zionists from Europe who interpreted the bit about God giving Isreal to Abraham's sons as meaning anyone whose religion is Judaeism has a claim to Isreal. What has been forgotten, perhaps deliberately, is that the Zionist from Europe, who were involved in terrorist activity toward a state of Isreal well before the rise of Hitler, are not descendents of Abraham. They are more recent converts to Judaeism who before they converted lived in central Asia and worshipped penises.
These are the people who founded modern Isreal. These are the people who the current Christian right in the US are backing (hehe). These people have an ancient conflict with Persia (now Iran).
Sorry to say it, but if you too are descended from Eurasian Jews, chances are that that land was never your homeland, and the collective dream is a myth.
I know, I know, it looks like trolling, but honest, I'm sick of all this "We have a right to the holy land" crap from folks that got displaced from their true homeland for picking fights all the time and still haven't learned the lesson.
Didn't the US make a similar threat against the North Vietnamese? Something about "bomb them back to the stone age?"
So Iran making threats against a country founded by terrorists, who repeatedly ignored international law, has occupied and continues to occupy land which is recognised as belonging to it's neighbour states and who recently undertook a massive aerial bombardment of civilians in the name of fighting terrorism, Iran threatening them justifies their classification as a rougue state and the imposition of sanctions and possible millitary action?
How was the US right to actually go to war with the North Vietnamese over an ideological difference? To fight against and threaten with utter destruction an army who in the 1940s had rescued and protected US marines from the Japanese? To attempt to destroy a former ally who posed no threat to the United States because they launched an attack on French colonialism and fought for self determination?
Like the GP and GGP says, get some credibility first.
What? Who would break the law downloading the latest "Americas Most Incredibly Stupid Psychic Wildlife Cops Behaving Badly In A Queer Make-Over With The Fattest Loser", when they could wait five years to see it hosted by Sandra Sully? I mean really...
Struth, you've never left the farm. If you go to one of those big cities like Tumbarumba, they have the toilets inside the buildings, and once you've done your business, you pull this chain hanging off a tank on the wall, and bloody water comes out and washes it away. No hole in the ground for these fancy city folks.
It would be nice to see Canonical step in to support Ubuntu desktops. I'm assuming here that the RHEL and SLED taxes will replace the MS tax and if Canonical came up with an OEM support package at a fixed cost to Dell, I think it could be very competive and attractive.
The advantage of offering a distro with the reputation of being "easy" is fairly obvious and with the inclusion of CNR, commercial software could be easily installed. Under the bonnet, there's the Debian heritage of stability (yeah I know Ubuntu is from "unstable", the stable releases are still... stable. :-?) and the niceness of apt.
Then again, the cynic in me thinks there's a chance Dell will provide broken desktop installs, or at least systems that require more experience on the part of the user, just to shut people up while not effecting the relationship with MS. (I'm not saying RHEL or SLED are inherently complicated or broken BTW, just that MS is pretty intrenched in some circles)
Ummmm, maybe I'm missing what you mean, but crossing the date line from West to East jumps you forward 25 hours.
It's most certainly not today to yesterday, It's today to tommorrow, or if you cross the line at around midnight, it's today to the day after tommorrow. I don't think the international date line thing is spurious, if you cross it from West to East, you jump forward quite a way.
All that said, I find it absolutely incredible that, so soon after the big kerfuffle around Y2K, any time critical software is not developed to take these scenarios into account. Completely ridiculous.
Then again. maybe the official line is that the crashes were caused by the date line, but the real reason was Vista's DRM features wreaking havoc with the nav systems. You only believe they don't use Vista on these things because that's what they want you to believe. Think about it, what other OS would these brillant minds put in an "Aero"-plane?
Ridiculous
Does that mean you support the US sending CIA agents to Europe to face trial for kidnapping? How enlightened.
No they didn't. They really didn't.
This is so obviously a set up. Liu was planted by the Chinese government to assist in the three steps to dominion of the deep...
Step 1: Trick the United States into removing sonar from their subs and replacing it with sensors imitating the lateral lines of fish.
Step 2: Build Chinese submarines with emourmous mouths and "Hyper Active Sonars" that mimmicks the sonar of the dolphins.
Step 3: Use said H.A.S. to stun the US submarines so they are easier to catch and eat, just as Dolphins do to fish.
No, the Egyptians struct the first blow. The Greeks did a fair bit of damage too.
Sure, that was before either religion existed, but they did, but these wars were based on empire building as much as religion. The fact is that as a whole, the history of Islam shows far more tolerance of other religions than Christianity. There are _still_ missionaries travelling the world "saving" savages for fucks sake!
I understand that this view will not be popular here, because this is a US based site, most Americans are Christian and the current propaganda demonises Islam, but hey, karma is action and gotsta do it.
That's a good point. A lot of these terrorist groups are funded by foreign governments. Most of these governments have been colonised and abused over their histories, used as pawns the cold war and earlier conflicts. It's not surprising then that they are sympathetic to terrorist causes.
It's also worth noting that the US has funded terrorist groups, called "freedom fighters" if you're on their side, in conflicts when it has suited the ambitions or ideology of the US administration of the time. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and for clarity I'm definitely referring to the current US administration as "the goose".
Destroying the source of funding for those groups is near impossible and it fails to destroy the ideology that is the true root of terrorism, and if anything it reinforces it. To destroy the real root of the problem in a physical and partisan sense would effectively be genocide because it involves killing the belief in an idea.
In the first part of the 20th century the major terrorist ideology was zionism. What happened to the nation that used the genocide option? It wasn't fatal, but I'm sure that if they really thought it through, even the hardest line neo-cons wouldn't want that to happen to their country.
To follow the example of Christ on this issue is a far more potent method. Offer love. Make an attempt to understand the root of the problem from the others perspective and take steps to end the suffering. Treating this as a war that must be met with force creates a target and you gives violence a focus. Treating it as a wound that must be healed removes the cause and the desire of these people to blow themselves and others up.
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound all hippy trippy there, and it is important to remember compassion can be hard, as long as compassion is the true basis of action.
How can GWB possibly hold any delusion that he is Christian for fucks sake!?!
The way I understand it, Christians (as in the people who identify with the label 'Christian' without strictly following the teachings of Christ) have been the most bloodthirsty religious group ever to exist. Muslim societies in the in Europe and the Middle East where for the most part secular and peaceful. There schools of theology encouraged the reading the Bible and Tora and the first Muslims were a mixture of Jews, Christians and Pagans. They only really got sectarian after they were attacked by Christians, who were involved in campaigns to kill any group who didn't join them. "If you're not with us, you're against us" is a philosophy with a proud Christian heritage.
Remember that Christians have a long history of burning other Christian groups who didn't follow their particular brand of Christianity and that most of the surviving Churches around today are descended from the most violent and criminal groups in modern terms. That is how they survived. Islam survived by rising to the challenge.
Hmmmm. Maybe the whole world should just use Vista. Monoculture is obviously better.
Except that CH4 is far worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Burning methane, especially in a system that cools the exhaust to capture liquid water, is actually better than releasing it into the atmosphere as is. "When averaged over 100 years each kg of CH4 warms the Earth 23 times as much as the same mass of CO2" - wikipedia.
Given the rate that polar ice is already melting, the sooner this technology is used commercially, the better.
That does it. I'm switching back to AmigaOS
Yeah the song is called 'Ironic' and it isn't actually ironic. It's kind of ironic isn't it. Oh yeah, you wouldn't get it :-P
Oh right, I get it now. The corrupt republic is so pure compared to those evil monarchs.
Out of curiosity, do you also call the star spangled banner a disgusting symbol of a violent history? What does that symbol represent to people in Vietnam, Latin America or Iraq? If the philosohy that that symbol represents to the rest of the world is "do it our way or die", how could you possibly respect it? Can you reconcile this with the attitude that "They are not Americans so they are less human, they have less right to choose their destiny"?
US patriots will mod this Troll, but I can't help responding when this sort of hypocritical drivel has been modded up.
That's why Australia doesn't experiment with solar technology on any meaningful scale.
Solar energy in Australia is seen as competition to coal and Australia is a huge energy exporter in the form of coal and to a lesser extent uranium. Governments don't want to upset the status quo and businesses don't want to invest in the competition.
Excellent point that