Well, that explains how many grains of salt to take your opinion with. You want true HD at ludicrous brightness, and you want the progress of technology to halt until you've amortized your purchase cost. Which, most likely, shouldn't be more than that of a decent 19" monitor, right? What was that about sh!t and the cable modem again?
I've also seriously considered the X1, after reading the projectorcentral reviews. What screen size are you projecting on? How does it compare to a 65" HDTV in terms of contrast and pixelation? Most importantly, do DVDs look good on it?
Wow, that looks good. I will give it a try. There's just too many packages on Sourceforge, no way to be aware of all of them.
One thing I like about my setup is that it consists of about 10 lines of script. I can set it up on a virgin machine in no time at all. OTOH it's pretty spartan. It emails me the zip output, which typically consists of the added/changed files, but that's about it. This BackupPC package looks pretty nice and comprehensive.
Well, XP can make sharing difficult, particularly when policies come into play. The easiest thing is to just mount//host/c$ as Administrator (or equivalent) on that local machine. This works even if policies disable sharing and doesn't rely on any shares being set up on that machine. In a home environment it shouldn't matter too much that you have those plain text passwords sitting in a shell script. Just make sure only root has access to it.
Set up a Linux machine as a backup master with a large hard drive, they're cheaper than most tape drives or DVD drives nowadays. A script mounts Samba shares to each of the machines on the network in turn and zips up specific folders recursively in update mode (-ru) to a file on the backup server. Set up a cron job to execute this script at midnight or whatever.
For example, you would set up this "spider" script to crawl all your Windows machines, mount//WindowsHost/c$ to/mnt/backup (or set up custom shares on all machines), and zip up the "/My Documents" folder plus any other ones you keep stuff in.
While very low-tech, this approach has the advantage that the backup archive is a plain zip file that you can browse and extract individual files from with tons of tools on just about any platform. Plus, after the initial archive creation (which takes a while for large directory structures), updates are very quick.
Mirror the backup to two different drives if you're paranoid. Two 120GB drives run less than $200 and provide quite a bit of home-level data safety. Get a couple of hard drive sleds so you can swap the drives out at any moment, and you're set.
Because, when Gary asked him for the last time to open the game, he replied: "I'm sorry, Gary, I'm afraid I can't do that." For some odd reason the chief scientist went nuts and spontaneously disassembled BB on the spot.
That's funny, my experience is quite the opposite. In the US companies seem much more oriented towards the functional aspects of your experience and credentials, not really caring about those parts that don't directly benefit them. In Germany OTOH they worship your degree even if it's in an ulreated field, and people insist on being called "doctor" even out of context.
They've sold out all the way, the site has gone all commercial. I stopped frequenting them regularly when they started reviewing movies and games. It seems most of their "serious" hardware and new tech articles hang around forever without any updates.
> I'm thinking of one right now where God has shut down > part of the world in order to make minor adjustments > to it so that history flows correctly, but one of the > people in it hasn't been shut down along with the rest > of them [...] > I thought it would eventually be made into a film
Well, it's an idea that seems to have been used in Dark City, though not by God.
You could consider the Zenith Cruisepad, which is a pen-based thin-client tablet from 1995. You can buy them individually for $27 or 100 at a time for $1500. They use Citrix metaframe technology to display a remote computer's screen on the LCD. It works just like remote desktop because it IS remote desktop. I believe they can be made to work with Windows Terminal Services in W2K Server. Alternatively, since you're talking hardware anyway, you could hack them and add your own software into the flash, using the wireless network just for lightweight communications. They use Proxim RangeLAN 2 wireless technology. I've even managed to get them talking to my Proxim HRF card with the (original ancient DOS-based) terminal server running inside Windows XP Pro on a Dell notebook. Only happened once and after a lot of fiddling, and I never had the patience to find out again what exactly I did that time, but it obviously DOES work.
Anyway, just another (cheap) choice. I've got two of these and find them quite interesting.
> consumer packages out there like 3D Home Architect > from Broderbund, [...] I've heard that the graphics > and navigation are less than spectacular
True, especially for older versions. Newer ones are quite good, though. Still, for a quick-n-dirty layout you could do worse than spend $10 on 3D Home Architect Deluxe 3.0 at Wal-Mart. It takes a lot of the drudgery of drawing walls and structures out of using a package like AutoCAD, where making radical design changes can be pretty expensive (time-wise). Plus it can export to DXF, if you want to keep working with a more "serious" tool (I just tried it, and my house plan loads fine in AutoCAD 2004, and all the object entities were preserved). It's got a definite Windows 3.1 interface, but for $10 it does quite a lot. I'm completely renovating an 1890s house and am using it for laying out new floorplans and playing what-if, and it works just fine.
I also have two Volts (90 and 150), and while they work quite well with MP3 CDs (esp. after flashing with the iRiver f/w), they're very temperamental with Audio CDs. Which I find strange, I would expect a dinky little gadget like that to choke on a file system sooner than on an established CD format that's been around for twenty years. Still, since you can get the 150 for $35 now, they're still worth the money. Of course, the Riot I got for $130 will also hopefully be worth the money:-)
...that an organization named after a famous European inventor would choose to focus solely on American accomplishments. Also ironic is that the sole non-American achievement on the list--the Smartcard, with two token paragraphs devoid of much detail--is also the least important concerning money in America. Of course, the thing with any Greatest-Of lists is that you can define the criteria and historic cut-off points to your own choosing.
The glorious achievements on this list can nevertheless not negate the fact that banking in the US sucks more than in most of the industrialized world. In what other country do financial transactions rely on glorified IOU's--hand-signed checks--to the extent that they do in this country? What other country is so far behind in the acceptance of electronic transactions, such as direct deposit and debit, inter-bank transfers, etc? I guess when things suck so bad, it's always soothing to look back in history.
apt is a godsend, but unfortunately the RPM repositories are much less extensive. There are tons of packages you can't apt-get, or are not the latest version, etc. I'm sure that will change with time, but right now that's the way it is.
The OP was talking about interchangeable phones, something currently only GSM provides. Part of Sprint's and other proprietary networks' strategy is platform lock-in; even if someone licensed the exact same technology as Sprint (as some very well may have) you can be certain that Sprint would NOT interoperate their phones with them, other than on a roaming agreement level. While T-Mobile might have poorer coverage in some areas at the moment (which is what I was talking about regarding poor service), their trend is to improve this. With time their coverage will equal or surpass the proprietary ones, while those proprietary phones won't at the same time become less proprietary. IOW, switch to a GSM carrier if you want to send a message that you don't care for proprietary phones.
> I am really tired of the fact that so many phones > are tied to providers/network types.
If you want to do something about that, switch to T-Mobile or any other GSM provider in your area. Even in case their service currently is worse, at least you're being proacive.
Then you would also know that embedded micros outnumber desktop CPUs by orders of magnitude. And many of those are produced both in Japan and Europe, IOW outside the US. And most of the memory is not designed let alone produced here. So in fact the US has pretty much only desktop CPU gloating rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that explains how many grains of salt to take your opinion with. You want true HD at ludicrous brightness, and you want the progress of technology to halt until you've amortized your purchase cost. Which, most likely, shouldn't be more than that of a decent 19" monitor, right? What was that about sh!t and the cable modem again?
I've also seriously considered the X1, after reading the projectorcentral reviews. What screen size are you projecting on? How does it compare to a 65" HDTV in terms of contrast and pixelation? Most importantly, do DVDs look good on it?
Wow, that looks good. I will give it a try. There's just too many packages on Sourceforge, no way to be aware of all of them.
One thing I like about my setup is that it consists of about 10 lines of script. I can set it up on a virgin machine in no time at all. OTOH it's pretty spartan. It emails me the zip output, which typically consists of the added/changed files, but that's about it. This BackupPC package looks pretty nice and comprehensive.
> he seems to like to take cheap shots at Republicans for no
> other reason than the fact that they are Republicans!
Does one need any other reason? After all, I kick the dog just because it's there.
Try prepending the Windows host name to the user id, just like a domain name (host\userid).
> I'm still figuring out XP's permissions
//host/c$ as Administrator (or equivalent) on that local machine. This works even if policies disable sharing and doesn't rely on any shares being set up on that machine. In a home environment it shouldn't matter too much that you have those plain text passwords sitting in a shell script. Just make sure only root has access to it.
Well, XP can make sharing difficult, particularly when policies come into play. The easiest thing is to just mount
Set up a Linux machine as a backup master with a large hard drive, they're cheaper than most tape drives or DVD drives nowadays. A script mounts Samba shares to each of the machines on the network in turn and zips up specific folders recursively in update mode (-ru) to a file on the backup server. Set up a cron job to execute this script at midnight or whatever.
//WindowsHost/c$ to /mnt/backup (or set up custom shares on all machines), and zip up the "/My Documents" folder plus any other ones you keep stuff in.
For example, you would set up this "spider" script to crawl all your Windows machines, mount
While very low-tech, this approach has the advantage that the backup archive is a plain zip file that you can browse and extract individual files from with tons of tools on just about any platform. Plus, after the initial archive creation (which takes a while for large directory structures), updates are very quick.
Mirror the backup to two different drives if you're paranoid. Two 120GB drives run less than $200 and provide quite a bit of home-level data safety. Get a couple of hard drive sleds so you can swap the drives out at any moment, and you're set.
I weep for those that modded this "Insightful". Sniff!
> Anyone know why Deep Blue was disassembled?
Because, when Gary asked him for the last time to open the game, he replied:
"I'm sorry, Gary, I'm afraid I can't do that." For some odd reason the chief scientist went nuts and spontaneously disassembled BB on the spot.
That's funny, my experience is quite the opposite. In the US companies seem much more oriented towards the functional aspects of your experience and credentials, not really caring about those parts that don't directly benefit them. In Germany OTOH they worship your degree even if it's in an ulreated field, and people insist on being called "doctor" even out of context.
They've sold out all the way, the site has gone all commercial. I stopped frequenting them regularly when they started reviewing movies and games. It seems most of their "serious" hardware and new tech articles hang around forever without any updates.
And please no emotional bullshit, yes? Let's just admire the craftsmanship, for crying out loud.
> I'm thinking of one right now where God has shut down
> part of the world in order to make minor adjustments
> to it so that history flows correctly, but one of the
> people in it hasn't been shut down along with the rest
> of them [...]
> I thought it would eventually be made into a film
Well, it's an idea that seems to have been used in Dark City, though not by God.
You could consider the Zenith Cruisepad, which is a pen-based thin-client tablet from 1995. You can buy them individually for $27 or 100 at a time for $1500. They use Citrix metaframe technology to display a remote computer's screen on the LCD. It works just like remote desktop because it IS remote desktop. I believe they can be made to work with Windows Terminal Services in W2K Server. Alternatively, since you're talking hardware anyway, you could hack them and add your own software into the flash, using the wireless network just for lightweight communications. They use Proxim RangeLAN 2 wireless technology. I've even managed to get them talking to my Proxim HRF card with the (original ancient DOS-based) terminal server running inside Windows XP Pro on a Dell notebook. Only happened once and after a lot of fiddling, and I never had the patience to find out again what exactly I did that time, but it obviously DOES work.
Anyway, just another (cheap) choice. I've got two of these and find them quite interesting.
> consumer packages out there like 3D Home Architect
> from Broderbund, [...] I've heard that the graphics
> and navigation are less than spectacular
True, especially for older versions. Newer ones are quite good, though. Still, for a quick-n-dirty layout you could do worse than spend $10 on 3D Home Architect Deluxe 3.0 at Wal-Mart. It takes a lot of the drudgery of drawing walls and structures out of using a package like AutoCAD, where making radical design changes can be pretty expensive (time-wise). Plus it can export to DXF, if you want to keep working with a more "serious" tool (I just tried it, and my house plan loads fine in AutoCAD 2004, and all the object entities were preserved). It's got a definite Windows 3.1 interface, but for $10 it does quite a lot. I'm completely renovating an 1890s house and am using it for laying out new floorplans and playing what-if, and it works just fine.
I also have two Volts (90 and 150), and while they work quite well with MP3 CDs (esp. after flashing with the iRiver f/w), they're very temperamental with Audio CDs. Which I find strange, I would expect a dinky little gadget like that to choke on a file system sooner than on an established CD format that's been around for twenty years. Still, since you can get the 150 for $35 now, they're still worth the money. Of course, the Riot I got for $130 will also hopefully be worth the money :-)
Wish you guys hadn't abandoned the Riot. It had some shortcomings, but a nice UI and some other nice details.
...that an organization named after a famous European inventor would choose to focus solely on American accomplishments. Also ironic is that the sole non-American achievement on the list--the Smartcard, with two token paragraphs devoid of much detail--is also the least important concerning money in America. Of course, the thing with any Greatest-Of lists is that you can define the criteria and historic cut-off points to your own choosing.
The glorious achievements on this list can nevertheless not negate the fact that banking in the US sucks more than in most of the industrialized world. In what other country do financial transactions rely on glorified IOU's--hand-signed checks--to the extent that they do in this country? What other country is so far behind in the acceptance of electronic transactions, such as direct deposit and debit, inter-bank transfers, etc? I guess when things suck so bad, it's always soothing to look back in history.
Without a paid subscription?
> up2date is slow, only really for paying customers.
And limited to one account per IP, right? Which with NAT is pretty limiting.
apt is a godsend, but unfortunately the RPM repositories are much less extensive. There are tons of packages you can't apt-get, or are not the latest version, etc. I'm sure that will change with time, but right now that's the way it is.
> If you just have friends over frequently, and
> have each one donate a dollar to your "bulb fund"...
you will leave a bad taste in their mouth and won't have said friends for much longer. Jeez, do you also charge for the chips-n-dip?
> how is accepting worse service being proactive
The OP was talking about interchangeable phones, something currently only GSM provides. Part of Sprint's and other proprietary networks' strategy is platform lock-in; even if someone licensed the exact same technology as Sprint (as some very well may have) you can be certain that Sprint would NOT interoperate their phones with them, other than on a roaming agreement level. While T-Mobile might have poorer coverage in some areas at the moment (which is what I was talking about regarding poor service), their trend is to improve this. With time their coverage will equal or surpass the proprietary ones, while those proprietary phones won't at the same time become less proprietary. IOW, switch to a GSM carrier if you want to send a message that you don't care for proprietary phones.
> I am really tired of the fact that so many phones
> are tied to providers/network types.
If you want to do something about that, switch to T-Mobile or any other GSM provider in your area. Even in case their service currently is worse, at least you're being proacive.
> I design embedded systems for a living
Then you would also know that embedded micros outnumber desktop CPUs by orders of magnitude. And many of those are produced both in Japan and Europe, IOW outside the US. And most of the memory is not designed let alone produced here. So in fact the US has pretty much only desktop CPU gloating rights.