There are a LOT of crap MP3 encoders and decoders.
Stuff that deals with Other Formats (Ogg, FLAC, AAC, ALAC) tends to not be as crap, just for the simple reason that they are going to the trouble of making something better than lowest-common-denominator.
Yeah, I think you're not going to be alone. I guess if I want a Wii I'd better just order one and wait in the queue, store stock just won't happen now.
Not for porn, though, I've got dozens of ways of showing porn all around the house. Well, 4 or 5 anyway.
The difference being, Bell Canada actually did open the plant. And used that as justification for shoving PPPoE down everyone's throat. (And then set their network to drop ICMP MUST FRAGMENT packets.)
I have never seen a cable internet reseller in a Roger's area, but there's lots of DSL resellers in Bell's area.
And it's not like Bell's wires are free to the DSL resellers, the CRTC directive just requires that everyone be able to lease space and bandwidth in the appropriate places. Once the line is going, it's better for Bell--no customer support calls.
Even though it's all the same technology, resellers can still compete for options and policies: my provider offers a static IP, uses a buy-your-own-modem instead of forced-rental program, and doesn't have a (broken and/or slow) transparent proxy on port 80 or have port 25 blocked. Their policy on viruses is, "if your computer is susceptible to viruses, you should do something to protect it."
Not for everyone, but there's other DSL resellers who are.
What kind of broken software are you using on UNIX that creates files with X turned on by default? Outside of the link-editor (ld), everything else creates files with X cleared (and everything except explicit chmod runs all bits through your umask).
The only time I see gratuitously-executable files on UNIX is when they have been put there from archive files created on Windows or via Windows file sharing of some sort (Samba, commercial SMB, PC-NFS, AFS, DFS...). Which is where Windows FILE_EXECUTE defaulting ON is turning up again. (Or Samba's mapping of the 3 "X" bits to hidden, system, and archive because "Windows doesn't use the X bit".)
Never underestimate the security impact of poorly-chosen defaults.
You're noticing a dramatic difference between HDMI and component on your system? You're component input has problems; I've got a Panasonic Viera 32" LCD and there's no visible difference between HDMI and component, except that component is _MUCH_ faster to switch sources with. (And component never blanks out the video on the PS3 or drops the audio on the satellite PVR.) Mind you, that's basically a 720p native screen, I don't have anything that'll display 1080p.
HDMI is much more convenient than component, but like a good-quality VGA set compared to a DVI set; well, digital isn't everything. If only there was a little box you could get that would prevent HDCP handshake from being attempted, and have it just work like plain ol' DVI. If HDMI didn't have that copy-protection crap in it, I'd want everything on HDMI just for keeping the cabling nice and tidy. (I've always had problems with copy protection interfering with playback; monitors that get messed up by MacroVision in the days of VHS were just the start. Fortunately, my first VCR didn't care about MacroVision....)
Apple didn't copy the sudo mechanism. They copied sudo itself, shipped it with the operating system, and used it from the GUI.
So changing/etc/sudoers can affect the GUI. This can be important, because the default behavior is to cache credentials for 5 minutes, which can leave your system exposed to the next thing that wants Administrator privs. Changing the cache timeout to 0 fixes that, nicely.
Yup; and the main reason I want to see this DRM stuff gone from HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, and DVD is to keep the copy protection stuff off the wires between my player, my AV receiver, and my TV. MacroVision drives some of my NTSC displays batty. HDCP doesn't just fail with PlayStation 3 and Westinghouse TVs. Get that crap off the wires, it's not a problem that should have to be solved, and I don't want to deal with the defects it injects into media playback. (At least the PS3 looks fine over component video.)
And, to compete with commercial over-the-air radio, we now also have the two digital satellite radio companies plus an uncounted number of Internet streaming radio channels. The latter providing an amazing diversity of content (and quality).
Both choices also provide a running display of current artist and song title, something traditional FM is lacking. (There is some sort of data channel on FM now, but I've never seen the stations around here put anything other than their station name out over it. That's the one thing I really don't care about....)
I did, once, phone a radio station and ask what song just played, but they didn't tell me the right one, so I've never bothered again. (It was a station that liked to tell you what they were going to play, so if you just turned on and liked the song, you'd never know what it was.)
I suspect what you are seeing is caused by ground-loop in the neutral return of the electrical outlet.
Some modern switchmode PSUs do not have the load isolated from line via a transformer, which would effectively block any current from leaking from the load to the line--you'd just wind up with whichever side was connected at the same absolute potential. (Standard isolation transformer behavior.)
A PSU which uses neutral for "0V" reference, instead of letting the load float isolated from line, is a shock hazard. On a loaded neutral line, you can measure a voltage in the 10-20V range between neutral and ground. It depends on the current returning down that neutral, the size of the wire, and its length between the outlet and wherever your electrical neutral is tied back to ground. (At the farthest, the step-down transformer service your house or apartment.)
Try a continuity test between one of those screws and the neutral pin on the power supply--that's the wider one.
This is a very dangerous way to obtain chassis ground. It is much better to have the low-voltage load isolated. If you have neutral connected to chassis, you have several potential problems:
- Shock hazard between "chassis ground" (wide pin on the plug) "real ground" (U pin on the plug).
- Ground-loop current between the laptop and any peripherals which use "real ground" for chassis ground.
- Much, much larger shock hazard from hot/neutral reversed outlets or extension cords. Sure, they aren't _supposed_ to be hot/neutral reversed, but do you really want to electrocute yourself?
I've gotten bad shocks from equipment using A/C line neutral for chassis ground. (There's usually a current-limiting resistor or something, which is why that's a shock and not an electrocution.) We had computers at high school with neutral-connected chassis, and the ARCnet cable shield was connected to the metal cabinets on the computers. Disconnecting a particular node from that network gave me a shock--it was plugged in to a socket with hot/neutral reversed. (Which was also bringing down the whole network because of the ground loop, it was too much current for the network interface.)
Same thing happened with my parent's VCR when I disconnected the cable running to it in the basement to re-route the co-ax lines in a tider way. It was also hot/neutral reversed, and had the CATV shield connected to chassis, connected to what should have been neutral. The rest of the cable system was connected to real earth ground.
So, UL and CSA may let people get away with this kind of power supply design, but it's a BAD IDEA. Use an isolating transformer (so the chassis will float), or use a 3-prong adapter (so the chassis will be same-as-ground).
It's OK, if you get those e-mails from On*Star that give you the self-diagnosis reports from your car, it's got everything in there you'd ever want to be able to access the account. Name, address, VIN, all the good stuff. All in the clear. At the least, you should have enough to get them to believe your car is stolen.
My mom's immediate reaction was, "I don't want this in my e-mail, what if someone finds it? Why are they sending all this, and not just the report for the car?"
It's the square of the clock speed; it comes from some math in second- or third-year Electrical Engineering.
It has an awful lot to do with line capacitance and inductance; you've basically got to "fill up" the line before you can see the signal change at the other end. (Be it at chip-level or network-cable-level.)
Which is why narrower fab processes and low-voltage differential signaling is so important in high-speed circuits; all those watts are heat that has to be dissipated. Narrower CMOS gates take fewer electrons to charge up. And by also reducing the voltage needed to see the signal change, you can reduce the impact of that clock speed increase.
But that also means the old, slower speeds with modern signaling could be run on nearly no power. Which we do; that's how the iPod and cellphones get smaller and runs longer each year. (Dropping analog support on a 'phone helps a lot, too.)
Resistive electric is not that bad, as long as you don't let the heat pump guys play.
In Toronto, Ontario, Canada, my effective electric rate is $0.10/kWh. The advertised rate is $0.055/kWh, but there's a 'transmission fee' or something that adds another 5 cents or so onto that.
My effective natural gas rate is around $0.05/kWh. Takes a bit of converting to go from m^3 to kWh, but the numbers are easy enough to find. That's including the per-m^3 transport charge.
My furnace is crap, an older pilot-started unit that takes combustion air from inside the house. That makes it 70% efficient at best--I shut the pilot off in the warm seasons, so that loss isn't happening. Which makes it about $0.07/kWh, because I only care about kWh that heat the house. It might be closer to 0.08 or 0.09, given the hot water heater blows heat up the chimney to burn gas, too. And it's really a crap furnace.
Sure, it's nearly 30%-50% more expensive to heat with resistive electric. But, on a 60W lightbulb, that really does come out to a wash in areas where you need heat a good part of the year. If I save 10 cents on electricity, I need to spend about 7 cents on gas instead.
That's where the lifespan of a CFL works against it.
I've got half a dozen old magnetic and low-frequency electronic ballast CFLs; for utility lighting (which is where I'm using them), they're fine. But for the price of one of those 6, I could replace all of them with modern high-frequency electronic ballast lamps that are brighter, start instantly, and so on.
But the old ones have a lot of life left in them....
I finally did give up on the magnetic ballasts for the basement workshop; trying to do woodwork and paint under a humming and flickering light isn't nice. And, I have more light for less watts (according to Kill-A-Watt) and unity power factor. And they work when cold (I don't put a lot of heat into the basement).
Though, I did find that the old magnetic ballasts for F34T12 Wattmiser tubes were more efficient than I thought: 75 watts in for 64 rated watts of light, power factor of 0.90 - 0.95. After a 5-minute warm-up period, though. The F32T8 lamps hit their steady-state power use (60W, PF 0.99-1.00) in less than a minute.
IIRC you could rig up a floppy drive, so long as you were willing to solder 20 pins next to the sound chip.
People who actually needed one went with the much easier plug-a-USB-cable-in solution. At the time, an LS-120 that could read and write regular floppies was only a few dollars more than the early USB floppy drives, so people without big network pipes wound up with something that was useful for system backup, too.
The rest of us got cheezy SCSI-II USB bridges to plug in our SyQuest and tape drives....
I believe you're referring to the Private Copying provision of the Copyright Act. That section does apply only to audio recordings. (It is worth noting that the law does not join the blank media levy with the private copying provision. That may have been the deal to get it passed, but it is not written in to the statute.)
However, Canadian Federal court has a tendency to view similar things as being permitted if a law permits one of them and does not explicitly prohibit the others.
To that end, compare the difference in how video recordings were sold when the law was passed (1985, amended in several subsequent years). Video tapes were sold at retail for $120 to $150; after a half year or more, they might be available for "sell-through" at more consumer-friendly prices like $30/tape. You found them in specialty video stores, mostly as rentals--owning a pre-recorded movie wasn't common. Very different from how LPs, cassettes, and CDs were sold, all which came out on ready-for-retail price schedules.
Today, DVDs hit the new-release shelf between $20 and $30; they're the same shape as audio CDs, as well as the same ballpark price. They're sold at the drug store and grocery by the checkout stands. I can't think of a single music store when doesn't have at least some DVD movies around, too.
So, I'd be willing to argue--in court--that the industry deciding to sell video recordings the way audio recordings implies that the same private-use copying privileges apply. I'm not sure that would win, but I think it would be a worthy attempt.
Though I don't think it is reasonable to read that as including permission to camcord a movie presentation; of course, without "intent to distribute", you wind up with a trivial amount of 'harm' and no compensation to make the case worth going to court.
Which is why they want to criminalize it, so they can get high-value statutory damages.
Hope they fail; that's the sort of thing that would get abused much too easily, like that DMCA the Americans have.
So I've got a decent LCD TV with HDMI, and a satellite box with HDMI, and a DVD player that upconverts to HDMI, and the [prize] PS3 is supposed to be on its way with HDMI....
And they're all going to go through a remote-controlled component video switch I've got on order. (Currently, I'm using a manual switchbox.) I'm "opting out" of this HDCP game, I don't like the rules, and I don't want to play.
Any Blu-Ray disc I try and which doesn't play on component will go back as "defective" or "unfit for sale." The media companies want to pull these stunts on consumers, they need our co-operation for it to work. So don't play along, stay analog.
You know what? Y-Pr-Pb looks pretty damn good. Don't think you can get 1080p on it, but the Viera screen is only 768 vertical, so that doesn't matter (to me) anyways. Flat panel monitor pictures aren't "drawn" like CRTs anyway; the incoming signal is decoded to a framebuffer for driving the display.
And HDMI switches cost too much, are hard to find with digital audio switching, and I don't feel like replacing my (otherwise excellent) AV receiver because Hollywood says so.
For anyone considering a similar solution: Compare the bandwidth of co-axial digital audio and composite video (the orange RCA plug and the yellow RCA plug). They're pretty close, right? Check out the voltage and cable impedance; they're the same. What's that mean? Any AV selector switch with composite video AND component (or S) video can switch co-ax digital audio via the composite video channel. (Well, simpler ones where it doesn't try to convert composite to S or component, or put up on-screen menus or whatever.) That means there are, readily and inexpensively available, switch-boxes that don't _claim_ to have digital audio switching, but which actually work really well. I used a $30 box from Radio Shack that did S-video, composite, and left+right audio to switch S-video, digital audio, and left+right audio. (Not all laserdiscs have digital audio tracks... yeah, that makes me feel old. And the "multiroom" feature on my receiver only works with analog audio. _That_ will get me to upgrade. Hollywood get stuffed.)
The HP Admin utility for Mac OS System 7 that came with my LaserJet 4M had a panel for changing all the display messages. Sadly, the changes didn't survive a power-cycle on the printer, so "FEED ME" and "INSERT COIN" didn't last.
It could also 'speak' the LaserWriter status from any attached HP printer through the Mac's speech synth software. Cute... for about 10 seconds. "Status... prawcessing jaaawb. Status... printing. Status... prawcessing jaaawb... Status... printing."
I had (what turned out to just be) a bad chest cold a couple of years back. Not sure if I should go in to work or take more time off, I headed up to the local walk-in clinic.
The doctor took a look, and said, "Yup, you've got a viral infection there, it'll take time, but nothing to worry about...".
Without me saying anything, he started in on, "Now I can't give you antibiotics for this...."
Where I interrupted and said, "Yeah, you said it's viral, right?"
He was startled. He said nearly everyone who comes in wants a pill to make it better right now. I said I just wanted to know if it was OK to go to work or if I should stay home.
He said the contagious part was over; that the time I probably should have stayed home was before I developed major symptoms....
He did give me a prescription for some very nice Robitussin cough syrup with Codeine in it, to help sleep though the night. That's good stuff.
So, dealing with an endless stream of lusers means you wind up treating everyone as a luser until you know better. Faster that way.
Microsoft is big enough to say, "NO, your terms are unacceptable," and get listened to.
No-one else in the software industry has that power. Apple doesn't have enough market, Linux can't even begin to follow those DRM rules and remain open-source. Solaris and AIX and other big UNIXes don't have any home entertainment market share. BSD is dying....
I guess Microsoft is so used to clicking "I Accept" on all those pop-up dialogs that they went a little too far.
Before going nuts with fancy server-priced hard drives, why not try cooling the things? Check the SMART data for the disk and see what the operating temperature is; try and keep it 35 degC or lower (parameter 194). (I don't have any citations for that; I just have drives that keep working, year after year, running around 30-35 degC.)
Nothing kills a disk faster than overheating. And it doesn't matter what the warranty is; all a warranty gets you is a replacement. You still have to deal with replacing the dead disk and waiting for the mirror or parity rebuild.
(Let's put the "inexpensive" back in "redundant array of inexpensive disks".)
That may or may not be true for XHTML. But for HTML form elements, it isn't. You can have multiple form elements with the same name. On form submission, all ACTIVE elements have their corresponding values submitted; they're simply repeated if there are several. You can decode this as you see fit; most environments give you an array. (In the case of a submit-button element, it is active if it is the one that was clicked to submit the form.)
To make things better, IE submits the element content, not the value, for a BUTTON TYPE="SUBMIT", so you can't fix it that way, either. Oh yeah, it also submits ALL such BUTTONs, not just the one that was clicked. (I'm currently fixing that server-side, so anyone forging MSIE user-agent strings gets the same ugly crap that IE users get.)
I don't know if that last one is fixed in IE7, we're not allowed to install it at work (not even on test machines) because it breaks all our doesn't-work-with-Firefox-either internal sites.
On my Amiga 2000, with a GVP 68030 accelerator board in it, I always had flaky SCSI issues. Find with just an HDD, but stick a tape drive out back, and wonky.
Then one day, for a different machine and a different reason, I bought a pair of "active" SCSI terminators (pull-to-2.5V) for the internal and external connectors. I tried them out on the Amiga before getting ready to install them on the Linux server I really bought them for. Using them instead of the "passive" (pull-to-5V) terminators built-in to the drives made a world of difference, even with questionable hardware borrowed from work.
After that, I ditched all the passive terminators I had and went active everywhere. Not only did things work a lot better, but there were pretty green lights on them to tell me when there was TERMPWR on the bus.
Surprisingly, every now and then,
incompetent installers are found, and all their work gets inspected.
Makes you wonder how many people get blown off by the help desk when they complain about signal quality when there really is a systemic installation problem in the area.
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There are a LOT of crap MP3 encoders and decoders.
Stuff that deals with Other Formats (Ogg, FLAC, AAC, ALAC) tends to not be as crap, just for the simple reason that they are going to the trouble of making something better than lowest-common-denominator.
Yeah, I think you're not going to be alone. I guess if I want a Wii I'd better just order one and wait in the queue, store stock just won't happen now.
Not for porn, though, I've got dozens of ways of showing porn all around the house. Well, 4 or 5 anyway.
The difference being, Bell Canada actually did open the plant. And used that as justification for shoving PPPoE down everyone's throat. (And then set their network to drop ICMP MUST FRAGMENT packets.)
I have never seen a cable internet reseller in a Roger's area, but there's lots of DSL resellers in Bell's area.
And it's not like Bell's wires are free to the DSL resellers, the CRTC directive just requires that everyone be able to lease space and bandwidth in the appropriate places. Once the line is going, it's better for Bell--no customer support calls.
Even though it's all the same technology, resellers can still compete for options and policies: my provider offers a static IP, uses a buy-your-own-modem instead of forced-rental program, and doesn't have a (broken and/or slow) transparent proxy on port 80 or have port 25 blocked. Their policy on viruses is, "if your computer is susceptible to viruses, you should do something to protect it."
Not for everyone, but there's other DSL resellers who are.
REmote Technical Assistance Information Network? That's an interesting thing to say on a contract.
And thanks for bringing back the horrid memories of IBM's customer problem tracking system. *gibber*
Uhhhh....
What kind of broken software are you using on UNIX that creates files with X turned on by default? Outside of the link-editor (ld), everything else creates files with X cleared (and everything except explicit chmod runs all bits through your umask).
The only time I see gratuitously-executable files on UNIX is when they have been put there from archive files created on Windows or via Windows file sharing of some sort (Samba, commercial SMB, PC-NFS, AFS, DFS...). Which is where Windows FILE_EXECUTE defaulting ON is turning up again. (Or Samba's mapping of the 3 "X" bits to hidden, system, and archive because "Windows doesn't use the X bit".)
Never underestimate the security impact of poorly-chosen defaults.
You're noticing a dramatic difference between HDMI and component on your system? You're component input has problems; I've got a Panasonic Viera 32" LCD and there's no visible difference between HDMI and component, except that component is _MUCH_ faster to switch sources with. (And component never blanks out the video on the PS3 or drops the audio on the satellite PVR.) Mind you, that's basically a 720p native screen, I don't have anything that'll display 1080p.
HDMI is much more convenient than component, but like a good-quality VGA set compared to a DVI set; well, digital isn't everything. If only there was a little box you could get that would prevent HDCP handshake from being attempted, and have it just work like plain ol' DVI. If HDMI didn't have that copy-protection crap in it, I'd want everything on HDMI just for keeping the cabling nice and tidy. (I've always had problems with copy protection interfering with playback; monitors that get messed up by MacroVision in the days of VHS were just the start. Fortunately, my first VCR didn't care about MacroVision....)
Apple didn't copy the sudo mechanism. They copied sudo itself, shipped it with the operating system, and used it from the GUI.
So changing /etc/sudoers can affect the GUI. This can be important, because the default behavior is to cache credentials for 5 minutes, which can leave your system exposed to the next thing that wants Administrator privs. Changing the cache timeout to 0 fixes that, nicely.
Yup; and the main reason I want to see this DRM stuff gone from HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, and DVD is to keep the copy protection stuff off the wires between my player, my AV receiver, and my TV. MacroVision drives some of my NTSC displays batty. HDCP doesn't just fail with PlayStation 3 and Westinghouse TVs. Get that crap off the wires, it's not a problem that should have to be solved, and I don't want to deal with the defects it injects into media playback. (At least the PS3 looks fine over component video.)
And, to compete with commercial over-the-air radio, we now also have the two digital satellite radio companies plus an uncounted number of Internet streaming radio channels. The latter providing an amazing diversity of content (and quality).
Both choices also provide a running display of current artist and song title, something traditional FM is lacking. (There is some sort of data channel on FM now, but I've never seen the stations around here put anything other than their station name out over it. That's the one thing I really don't care about....)
I did, once, phone a radio station and ask what song just played, but they didn't tell me the right one, so I've never bothered again. (It was a station that liked to tell you what they were going to play, so if you just turned on and liked the song, you'd never know what it was.)
I suspect what you are seeing is caused by ground-loop in the neutral return of the electrical outlet.
Some modern switchmode PSUs do not have the load isolated from line via a transformer, which would effectively block any current from leaking from the load to the line--you'd just wind up with whichever side was connected at the same absolute potential. (Standard isolation transformer behavior.)
A PSU which uses neutral for "0V" reference, instead of letting the load float isolated from line, is a shock hazard. On a loaded neutral line, you can measure a voltage in the 10-20V range between neutral and ground. It depends on the current returning down that neutral, the size of the wire, and its length between the outlet and wherever your electrical neutral is tied back to ground. (At the farthest, the step-down transformer service your house or apartment.)
Try a continuity test between one of those screws and the neutral pin on the power supply--that's the wider one.
This is a very dangerous way to obtain chassis ground. It is much better to have the low-voltage load isolated. If you have neutral connected to chassis, you have several potential problems:
- Shock hazard between "chassis ground" (wide pin on the plug) "real ground" (U pin on the plug).
- Ground-loop current between the laptop and any peripherals which use "real ground" for chassis ground.
- Much, much larger shock hazard from hot/neutral reversed outlets or extension cords. Sure, they aren't _supposed_ to be hot/neutral reversed, but do you really want to electrocute yourself?
I've gotten bad shocks from equipment using A/C line neutral for chassis ground. (There's usually a current-limiting resistor or something, which is why that's a shock and not an electrocution.) We had computers at high school with neutral-connected chassis, and the ARCnet cable shield was connected to the metal cabinets on the computers. Disconnecting a particular node from that network gave me a shock--it was plugged in to a socket with hot/neutral reversed. (Which was also bringing down the whole network because of the ground loop, it was too much current for the network interface.)
Same thing happened with my parent's VCR when I disconnected the cable running to it in the basement to re-route the co-ax lines in a tider way. It was also hot/neutral reversed, and had the CATV shield connected to chassis, connected to what should have been neutral. The rest of the cable system was connected to real earth ground.
So, UL and CSA may let people get away with this kind of power supply design, but it's a BAD IDEA. Use an isolating transformer (so the chassis will float), or use a 3-prong adapter (so the chassis will be same-as-ground).
It's OK, if you get those e-mails from On*Star that give you the self-diagnosis reports from your car, it's got everything in there you'd ever want to be able to access the account. Name, address, VIN, all the good stuff. All in the clear. At the least, you should have enough to get them to believe your car is stolen.
My mom's immediate reaction was, "I don't want this in my e-mail, what if someone finds it? Why are they sending all this, and not just the report for the car?"
It's the square of the clock speed; it comes from some math in second- or third-year Electrical Engineering.
It has an awful lot to do with line capacitance and inductance; you've basically got to "fill up" the line before you can see the signal change at the other end. (Be it at chip-level or network-cable-level.)
Which is why narrower fab processes and low-voltage differential signaling is so important in high-speed circuits; all those watts are heat that has to be dissipated. Narrower CMOS gates take fewer electrons to charge up. And by also reducing the voltage needed to see the signal change, you can reduce the impact of that clock speed increase.
But that also means the old, slower speeds with modern signaling could be run on nearly no power. Which we do; that's how the iPod and cellphones get smaller and runs longer each year. (Dropping analog support on a 'phone helps a lot, too.)
Resistive electric is not that bad, as long as you don't let the heat pump guys play.
In Toronto, Ontario, Canada, my effective electric rate is $0.10/kWh. The advertised rate is $0.055/kWh, but there's a 'transmission fee' or something that adds another 5 cents or so onto that.
My effective natural gas rate is around $0.05/kWh. Takes a bit of converting to go from m^3 to kWh, but the numbers are easy enough to find. That's including the per-m^3 transport charge.
My furnace is crap, an older pilot-started unit that takes combustion air from inside the house. That makes it 70% efficient at best--I shut the pilot off in the warm seasons, so that loss isn't happening. Which makes it about $0.07/kWh, because I only care about kWh that heat the house. It might be closer to 0.08 or 0.09, given the hot water heater blows heat up the chimney to burn gas, too. And it's really a crap furnace.
Sure, it's nearly 30%-50% more expensive to heat with resistive electric. But, on a 60W lightbulb, that really does come out to a wash in areas where you need heat a good part of the year. If I save 10 cents on electricity, I need to spend about 7 cents on gas instead.
That's where the lifespan of a CFL works against it.
I've got half a dozen old magnetic and low-frequency electronic ballast CFLs; for utility lighting (which is where I'm using them), they're fine. But for the price of one of those 6, I could replace all of them with modern high-frequency electronic ballast lamps that are brighter, start instantly, and so on.
But the old ones have a lot of life left in them....
I finally did give up on the magnetic ballasts for the basement workshop; trying to do woodwork and paint under a humming and flickering light isn't nice. And, I have more light for less watts (according to Kill-A-Watt) and unity power factor. And they work when cold (I don't put a lot of heat into the basement).
Though, I did find that the old magnetic ballasts for F34T12 Wattmiser tubes were more efficient than I thought: 75 watts in for 64 rated watts of light, power factor of 0.90 - 0.95. After a 5-minute warm-up period, though. The F32T8 lamps hit their steady-state power use (60W, PF 0.99-1.00) in less than a minute.
People who actually needed one went with the much easier plug-a-USB-cable-in solution. At the time, an LS-120 that could read and write regular floppies was only a few dollars more than the early USB floppy drives, so people without big network pipes wound up with something that was useful for system backup, too.
The rest of us got cheezy SCSI-II USB bridges to plug in our SyQuest and tape drives....
I believe you're referring to the Private Copying provision of the Copyright Act. That section does apply only to audio recordings. (It is worth noting that the law does not join the blank media levy with the private copying provision. That may have been the deal to get it passed, but it is not written in to the statute.)
However, Canadian Federal court has a tendency to view similar things as being permitted if a law permits one of them and does not explicitly prohibit the others.
To that end, compare the difference in how video recordings were sold when the law was passed (1985, amended in several subsequent years). Video tapes were sold at retail for $120 to $150; after a half year or more, they might be available for "sell-through" at more consumer-friendly prices like $30/tape. You found them in specialty video stores, mostly as rentals--owning a pre-recorded movie wasn't common. Very different from how LPs, cassettes, and CDs were sold, all which came out on ready-for-retail price schedules.
Today, DVDs hit the new-release shelf between $20 and $30; they're the same shape as audio CDs, as well as the same ballpark price. They're sold at the drug store and grocery by the checkout stands. I can't think of a single music store when doesn't have at least some DVD movies around, too.
So, I'd be willing to argue--in court--that the industry deciding to sell video recordings the way audio recordings implies that the same private-use copying privileges apply. I'm not sure that would win, but I think it would be a worthy attempt.
Though I don't think it is reasonable to read that as including permission to camcord a movie presentation; of course, without "intent to distribute", you wind up with a trivial amount of 'harm' and no compensation to make the case worth going to court.
Which is why they want to criminalize it, so they can get high-value statutory damages.
Hope they fail; that's the sort of thing that would get abused much too easily, like that DMCA the Americans have.
So you've figured out the key reason for the DST changes this year.
They'll have to change it back in a couple of years so everyone can work on the software updates and testing some more.
So I've got a decent LCD TV with HDMI, and a satellite box with HDMI, and a DVD player that upconverts to HDMI, and the [prize] PS3 is supposed to be on its way with HDMI....
And they're all going to go through a remote-controlled component video switch I've got on order. (Currently, I'm using a manual switchbox.) I'm "opting out" of this HDCP game, I don't like the rules, and I don't want to play.
Any Blu-Ray disc I try and which doesn't play on component will go back as "defective" or "unfit for sale." The media companies want to pull these stunts on consumers, they need our co-operation for it to work. So don't play along, stay analog.
You know what? Y-Pr-Pb looks pretty damn good. Don't think you can get 1080p on it, but the Viera screen is only 768 vertical, so that doesn't matter (to me) anyways. Flat panel monitor pictures aren't "drawn" like CRTs anyway; the incoming signal is decoded to a framebuffer for driving the display.
And HDMI switches cost too much, are hard to find with digital audio switching, and I don't feel like replacing my (otherwise excellent) AV receiver because Hollywood says so.
For anyone considering a similar solution: Compare the bandwidth of co-axial digital audio and composite video (the orange RCA plug and the yellow RCA plug). They're pretty close, right? Check out the voltage and cable impedance; they're the same. What's that mean? Any AV selector switch with composite video AND component (or S) video can switch co-ax digital audio via the composite video channel. (Well, simpler ones where it doesn't try to convert composite to S or component, or put up on-screen menus or whatever.) That means there are, readily and inexpensively available, switch-boxes that don't _claim_ to have digital audio switching, but which actually work really well. I used a $30 box from Radio Shack that did S-video, composite, and left+right audio to switch S-video, digital audio, and left+right audio. (Not all laserdiscs have digital audio tracks... yeah, that makes me feel old. And the "multiroom" feature on my receiver only works with analog audio. _That_ will get me to upgrade. Hollywood get stuffed.)
Hacking?
The HP Admin utility for Mac OS System 7 that came with my LaserJet 4M had a panel for changing all the display messages. Sadly, the changes didn't survive a power-cycle on the printer, so "FEED ME" and "INSERT COIN" didn't last.
It could also 'speak' the LaserWriter status from any attached HP printer through the Mac's speech synth software. Cute... for about 10 seconds. "Status... prawcessing jaaawb. Status... printing. Status... prawcessing jaaawb... Status... printing."
Some doctors, anyway.
I had (what turned out to just be) a bad chest cold a couple of years back. Not sure if I should go in to work or take more time off, I headed up to the local walk-in clinic.
The doctor took a look, and said, "Yup, you've got a viral infection there, it'll take time, but nothing to worry about...".
Without me saying anything, he started in on, "Now I can't give you antibiotics for this...."
Where I interrupted and said, "Yeah, you said it's viral, right?"
He was startled. He said nearly everyone who comes in wants a pill to make it better right now. I said I just wanted to know if it was OK to go to work or if I should stay home.
He said the contagious part was over; that the time I probably should have stayed home was before I developed major symptoms....
He did give me a prescription for some very nice Robitussin cough syrup with Codeine in it, to help sleep though the night. That's good stuff.
So, dealing with an endless stream of lusers means you wind up treating everyone as a luser until you know better. Faster that way.
Microsoft is big enough to say, "NO, your terms are unacceptable," and get listened to.
No-one else in the software industry has that power. Apple doesn't have enough market, Linux can't even begin to follow those DRM rules and remain open-source. Solaris and AIX and other big UNIXes don't have any home entertainment market share. BSD is dying....
I guess Microsoft is so used to clicking "I Accept" on all those pop-up dialogs that they went a little too far.
Before going nuts with fancy server-priced hard drives, why not try cooling the things? Check the SMART data for the disk and see what the operating temperature is; try and keep it 35 degC or lower (parameter 194). (I don't have any citations for that; I just have drives that keep working, year after year, running around 30-35 degC.)
Nothing kills a disk faster than overheating. And it doesn't matter what the warranty is; all a warranty gets you is a replacement. You still have to deal with replacing the dead disk and waiting for the mirror or parity rebuild.
(Let's put the "inexpensive" back in "redundant array of inexpensive disks".)
That may or may not be true for XHTML. But for HTML form elements, it isn't. You can have multiple form elements with the same name. On form submission, all ACTIVE elements have their corresponding values submitted; they're simply repeated if there are several. You can decode this as you see fit; most environments give you an array. (In the case of a submit-button element, it is active if it is the one that was clicked to submit the form.)
To make things better, IE submits the element content, not the value, for a BUTTON TYPE="SUBMIT", so you can't fix it that way, either. Oh yeah, it also submits ALL such BUTTONs, not just the one that was clicked. (I'm currently fixing that server-side, so anyone forging MSIE user-agent strings gets the same ugly crap that IE users get.)
I don't know if that last one is fixed in IE7, we're not allowed to install it at work (not even on test machines) because it breaks all our doesn't-work-with-Firefox-either internal sites.
On my Amiga 2000, with a GVP 68030 accelerator board in it, I always had flaky SCSI issues. Find with just an HDD, but stick a tape drive out back, and wonky.
Then one day, for a different machine and a different reason, I bought a pair of "active" SCSI terminators (pull-to-2.5V) for the internal and external connectors. I tried them out on the Amiga before getting ready to install them on the Linux server I really bought them for. Using them instead of the "passive" (pull-to-5V) terminators built-in to the drives made a world of difference, even with questionable hardware borrowed from work.
After that, I ditched all the passive terminators I had and went active everywhere. Not only did things work a lot better, but there were pretty green lights on them to tell me when there was TERMPWR on the bus.
Gotta have pretty green lights around.
Surprisingly, every now and then, incompetent installers are found, and all their work gets inspected.
Makes you wonder how many people get blown off by the help desk when they complain about signal quality when there really is a systemic installation problem in the area.