CFLs in my house have died within a year: the ones installed in the bathroom and kitchen. They don't like the humidity and heat which is why I'm not surprised. The others have lasted since Feb 2007. Brands don't seem to matter.
I started with "Funway into Electronics" which was developed by Dick Smith Electronics http://search.dse.com.au/electronics/Funway%20Into%20Electronics - I'm not sure what equivalents are available in other countries though. Those prices are in AUD but a complete (Funway 1) kit will still be above your budget, though it will let you demonstrate 20 different circuits. By the time I was in high school I had done most of Funway 2 and some of Funway 3 - which are soldered PCBs.
100Mbps cards will short out the middle (phone) pair, rendering it useless. Here the main phone company often installs "RJ45" sockets for phone lines. At my old house someone once plugged a phone socket into the router and it stopped the phone from working. I'm not sure how gigabit switches and cards will handle this situation. The impedance of the line should be high enough to attenuate any high current anyway.
I remember from Engineering classes (10 years ago) reading a table of specifications with a column using the units "m^6". I can't remember much more details, and Google isn't helping. Wolfram Alpha gave me "1 meter^6 = 1 joule squared per pascal squared". I don't have those text books any more and it has been bugging me what the name of that column was!
I had the same experience with my laptop when it suffered a hard drive crash (dropping it will do that...). Reinstalling Windows XP took some days to get going fully with accelerated graphics, sound, wifi, etc. Ubuntu was up and running after only one reboot, along with wifi, synaptics mousepad, sound (inc keyboard volume controls) and basic accelerated graphics (some fiddling to get accelerated 3D though, but easier than getting it to work under Windows which required a failed install, rollback and reinstall of the drivers. And the manufacturer drivers for the wireless adapter wouldn't install so I had to do some detective work to get it to work with Windows; also needed to download drivers for sound, battery, etc)
As to the article, I thought almost all of the points are "being resolved" but understand some of them actually require people to agree on things, which does seem to go against the freedoms of the people who don't!
If the future is fully web-based then it won't matter which OS you use on the desktop, as long as it supports the browser that is supported by the web-based applications you want to use. It is becoming clear this is the direction many applications are going, and even Microsoft is fighting for market share. I remember reading about someone's idea of a "Firefox tablet PC" where Firefox is the shell, making the OS irrelevant. The logical OS choice would then be Linux or BSD based as the hardware will be mostly locked down, and the only software available would be web-based. It would turn the entire computing experience into something like using a PSP or other gaming device. I am not sure this is a good or a bad thing...
I get "I use MSN" (meaning their homepage) or "I use Google" (meaning their homepage). It's even hard for them to separate their own computer and the Internet - for example going over quota most people will be "shaped" to around 64kbps - they think their entire computer will be slowed down by that.
Turn up the speed a little bit in System Preferences. I only have a 20" iMac at work and the default tracking speed is too slow for me! The other thing is the side buttons are pretty much useless as it is too easy to bump them, even with experience. I have, however, mastered the left/middle/right clicking, and I do like the 3D scrolling. Workmates call it a "bar of soap" though...
Many ISPs already run transparent proxy servers for their own networks, I'd say this would continue, and be more important with ever faster connection speeds. (International capacity not keeping up. Even peering points like PIPE will have issues with 10 pairs of users able to max out two ISPs gigabit connections (at least in theory) and a lot of other infrastructure will need to be re-thunk)
I've seen their ads. The "whatchamadoozit" is the DSLAM that iiNet have installed in many exchanges. There's another ad where he's talking about "naked ADSL" where you convert your phone line to ULL and just use it for broadband and no voice.
At least FTTP might provide decent speeds and/or options for people stuck on a RIM (so no ADSL2) or pair gain (so 28kbps dialup is the fastest Internet you can get: I've been there...). I'm thinking of many suburbs that still can't get ADSL. They might have access to Telstra cable but that is quite expensive compared to other providers: $90/month for 25GB transfers (uploads plus downloads) vs my $70/month for 150GB downloads (uploaded uncounted and faster) at approximately the same download speed. With more competition in these areas you will see value go up.
Wouldn't it be easiest to just string it along the overhead power lines? Electricity companies already have fibre connecting their substations for monitoring and internal use so I'm sure they could add another one there. How long can a strand of fibre go without a repeater?
Or they will just bury it like they buried a lot of the copper: with a plough...
The "most popular" Australian ISP (Telstra Big Pond) charges 15c per MB over the limit, and their cheapest plan only includes 200MB of transfers (up plus down) before excess charges happen. On 256kbps ADSL it isn't too bad, but the same plan is available on 10Mbps cable so you could be up for thousands of dollars excess! There are plans that have 12 or 20GB transfers before 64kbps shaping instead of excess fees. (I put "most popular" in quotes as many of their customers don't like them and would leave if there were alternatives or if they knew about them)
Most ISPs use the "x GB then speed shaping" method. Most still have unmetered uploads.
One former ISP used "Flat rate" in that during busy times the highest downloaders got throttled down, which I thought was a great idea but it is no longer available. The highest we ever got was 80GB in a 30 day period and the net was slow but still usable in peak times. Off-peak times was still full speed.
I read in an electronics magazine that normal VHF/UHF antennas will "see" a large range of frequencies, but a digital antenna will only see the frequency ranges that are used by digital TV. The idea is then that the front-end amplifier of the digital TV's tuner will not be blasted with frequencies that are irrelevant to it, and gives more signal to the frequencies that are used. Analog TV uses a big chunk of spectrum and Digital TV uses less of it.
The ISBNs are the same but page counts are different. I was just looking around for a cheaper price. (Buying and shipping from Amazon will be around $45 for me (up to 32 days shipping!)) All prices in AUD.
I think you'll find that the case is that the "TV doesn't/remove/ the black bars from the signal". Digital is all 16:9 so the set-top box will letterbox the signal for a 4:3 TV. If the source is 4:3 then the TV station will "vertical letterbox" (pillar) to make it fit into 16:9, so the end effect is letterboxing on all four sides. I've seen ads that started as 16:9, then letterboxed into 4:3 then pillared into 16:9 and sent out and letterboxed again onto my TV! I have a then-top-of-the-line 63cm 100Hz CRT TV that supports 576p so the digital signals do look good, albeit with black bars.
There might be an option in your digital box to crop the signal to avoid some of these issues, but then you could miss out on the sides of a real 16:9 signal.
If it's a frost free or event cyclic-defrost fridge then you might have a ~200W heating element on the internal panels to stop the frost from forming. So your light bulb doesn't use much power compared.
I live in a very sunny area and getting solar cells installed soon. It will feed the grid when the cells are creating more power than the house is using (company buying back at about 3x the kW.hr rate). But if it detects an outage it will disconnect itself, so that it is not supplying power to a dead grid. I guess that is worth it for the reduction in bill, and with government rebates making everything free.:)
I guess I'm lucky where I live: the temperature never goes below freezing so heating is not important, and power outages are rare. In the last year there has been about 10 hours total without power, mostly just a few hours here and there in the middle of the night, according to my UPS monitor. *touch wood*
I live with a guy who loves Coke and hates Pepsi. Whenever he has to buy a drink from a Pepsi shop he ends up just getting bottled water instead, as he can't stand the Pepsi range. So Pepsi is not always ok!
(Someone above said Mountain Dew is make by Coke -- WTF?)
5km/hr? Here (Queensland) it's "one", with the slogan "Every k over is a killer". And they put speed traps where you are going down a hill where the speed limit changes from 70 to 60 on a big wide road... *grumble*
Slashdot Mirror
CFLs in my house have died within a year: the ones installed in the bathroom and kitchen. They don't like the humidity and heat which is why I'm not surprised. The others have lasted since Feb 2007. Brands don't seem to matter.
FWIW: (Quoted) The marquee, could have said anything "I'm a pimp and it's my birthday" for example or "parties over here" it could have said anything.
A "marquee" is a "large tent"; "marquee" meaning "sign" is an American English adaptation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquee
If you followed the link you'll see Funway 1 uses a solderless breadboard, plus some more information for the OP.
I started with "Funway into Electronics" which was developed by Dick Smith Electronics http://search.dse.com.au/electronics/Funway%20Into%20Electronics - I'm not sure what equivalents are available in other countries though. Those prices are in AUD but a complete (Funway 1) kit will still be above your budget, though it will let you demonstrate 20 different circuits. By the time I was in high school I had done most of Funway 2 and some of Funway 3 - which are soldered PCBs.
100Mbps cards will short out the middle (phone) pair, rendering it useless. Here the main phone company often installs "RJ45" sockets for phone lines. At my old house someone once plugged a phone socket into the router and it stopped the phone from working. I'm not sure how gigabit switches and cards will handle this situation. The impedance of the line should be high enough to attenuate any high current anyway.
I remember from Engineering classes (10 years ago) reading a table of specifications with a column using the units "m^6". I can't remember much more details, and Google isn't helping. Wolfram Alpha gave me "1 meter^6 = 1 joule squared per pascal squared". I don't have those text books any more and it has been bugging me what the name of that column was!
Don't most ISPs have transparent proxy servers these days? One of those would prevent any TCP foolery.
I had the same experience with my laptop when it suffered a hard drive crash (dropping it will do that...). Reinstalling Windows XP took some days to get going fully with accelerated graphics, sound, wifi, etc. Ubuntu was up and running after only one reboot, along with wifi, synaptics mousepad, sound (inc keyboard volume controls) and basic accelerated graphics (some fiddling to get accelerated 3D though, but easier than getting it to work under Windows which required a failed install, rollback and reinstall of the drivers. And the manufacturer drivers for the wireless adapter wouldn't install so I had to do some detective work to get it to work with Windows; also needed to download drivers for sound, battery, etc)
I'm surprised it's not slashdotted!
Server: ZX_Spectrum/1997 (Sinclair_BASIC)
As to the article, I thought almost all of the points are "being resolved" but understand some of them actually require people to agree on things, which does seem to go against the freedoms of the people who don't!
If the future is fully web-based then it won't matter which OS you use on the desktop, as long as it supports the browser that is supported by the web-based applications you want to use. It is becoming clear this is the direction many applications are going, and even Microsoft is fighting for market share. I remember reading about someone's idea of a "Firefox tablet PC" where Firefox is the shell, making the OS irrelevant. The logical OS choice would then be Linux or BSD based as the hardware will be mostly locked down, and the only software available would be web-based. It would turn the entire computing experience into something like using a PSP or other gaming device. I am not sure this is a good or a bad thing...
I get "I use MSN" (meaning their homepage) or "I use Google" (meaning their homepage). It's even hard for them to separate their own computer and the Internet - for example going over quota most people will be "shaped" to around 64kbps - they think their entire computer will be slowed down by that.
Turn up the speed a little bit in System Preferences. I only have a 20" iMac at work and the default tracking speed is too slow for me! The other thing is the side buttons are pretty much useless as it is too easy to bump them, even with experience. I have, however, mastered the left/middle/right clicking, and I do like the 3D scrolling. Workmates call it a "bar of soap" though...
Many ISPs already run transparent proxy servers for their own networks, I'd say this would continue, and be more important with ever faster connection speeds. (International capacity not keeping up. Even peering points like PIPE will have issues with 10 pairs of users able to max out two ISPs gigabit connections (at least in theory) and a lot of other infrastructure will need to be re-thunk)
I've seen their ads. The "whatchamadoozit" is the DSLAM that iiNet have installed in many exchanges. There's another ad where he's talking about "naked ADSL" where you convert your phone line to ULL and just use it for broadband and no voice.
At least FTTP might provide decent speeds and/or options for people stuck on a RIM (so no ADSL2) or pair gain (so 28kbps dialup is the fastest Internet you can get: I've been there...). I'm thinking of many suburbs that still can't get ADSL. They might have access to Telstra cable but that is quite expensive compared to other providers: $90/month for 25GB transfers (uploads plus downloads) vs my $70/month for 150GB downloads (uploaded uncounted and faster) at approximately the same download speed. With more competition in these areas you will see value go up.
Wouldn't it be easiest to just string it along the overhead power lines? Electricity companies already have fibre connecting their substations for monitoring and internal use so I'm sure they could add another one there. How long can a strand of fibre go without a repeater?
Or they will just bury it like they buried a lot of the copper: with a plough...
The "most popular" Australian ISP (Telstra Big Pond) charges 15c per MB over the limit, and their cheapest plan only includes 200MB of transfers (up plus down) before excess charges happen. On 256kbps ADSL it isn't too bad, but the same plan is available on 10Mbps cable so you could be up for thousands of dollars excess! There are plans that have 12 or 20GB transfers before 64kbps shaping instead of excess fees. (I put "most popular" in quotes as many of their customers don't like them and would leave if there were alternatives or if they knew about them)
Most ISPs use the "x GB then speed shaping" method. Most still have unmetered uploads.
One former ISP used "Flat rate" in that during busy times the highest downloaders got throttled down, which I thought was a great idea but it is no longer available. The highest we ever got was 80GB in a 30 day period and the net was slow but still usable in peak times. Off-peak times was still full speed.
I read in an electronics magazine that normal VHF/UHF antennas will "see" a large range of frequencies, but a digital antenna will only see the frequency ranges that are used by digital TV. The idea is then that the front-end amplifier of the digital TV's tuner will not be blasted with frequencies that are irrelevant to it, and gives more signal to the frequencies that are used. Analog TV uses a big chunk of spectrum and Digital TV uses less of it.
Does anyone know the difference between these two books?
http://www.fishpond.com.au/Books/Computers/Internet/Security/product_info/915276/?cf=3&rid=1774576082&i=1&keywords=0-596-00656-X
http://www.fishpond.com.au/Books/Computers/Internet/Security/product_info/3625450/?cf=3&rid=1774576082&i=3&keywords=0-596-00656-X
The ISBNs are the same but page counts are different. I was just looking around for a cheaper price. (Buying and shipping from Amazon will be around $45 for me (up to 32 days shipping!)) All prices in AUD.
I think you'll find that the case is that the "TV doesn't /remove/ the black bars from the signal". Digital is all 16:9 so the set-top box will letterbox the signal for a 4:3 TV. If the source is 4:3 then the TV station will "vertical letterbox" (pillar) to make it fit into 16:9, so the end effect is letterboxing on all four sides. I've seen ads that started as 16:9, then letterboxed into 4:3 then pillared into 16:9 and sent out and letterboxed again onto my TV! I have a then-top-of-the-line 63cm 100Hz CRT TV that supports 576p so the digital signals do look good, albeit with black bars.
There might be an option in your digital box to crop the signal to avoid some of these issues, but then you could miss out on the sides of a real 16:9 signal.
HULU doesn't work for 95% of the world, you insensitive clod.
If it's a frost free or event cyclic-defrost fridge then you might have a ~200W heating element on the internal panels to stop the frost from forming. So your light bulb doesn't use much power compared.
I live in a very sunny area and getting solar cells installed soon. It will feed the grid when the cells are creating more power than the house is using (company buying back at about 3x the kW.hr rate). But if it detects an outage it will disconnect itself, so that it is not supplying power to a dead grid. I guess that is worth it for the reduction in bill, and with government rebates making everything free. :)
I guess I'm lucky where I live: the temperature never goes below freezing so heating is not important, and power outages are rare. In the last year there has been about 10 hours total without power, mostly just a few hours here and there in the middle of the night, according to my UPS monitor. *touch wood*
I live with a guy who loves Coke and hates Pepsi. Whenever he has to buy a drink from a Pepsi shop he ends up just getting bottled water instead, as he can't stand the Pepsi range. So Pepsi is not always ok!
(Someone above said Mountain Dew is make by Coke -- WTF?)
5km/hr? Here (Queensland) it's "one", with the slogan "Every k over is a killer". And they put speed traps where you are going down a hill where the speed limit changes from 70 to 60 on a big wide road... *grumble*