Wow. This is exactly the keyboard I've been looking for. 87-key layout, switchable support for the alt/cmd key (for Mac or non-Mac use)... even the backlighting.
I just need to choose between the "Cherry MX Clear" and "Cherry MX Brown" switches. It's not cheap, but it's definitely what I want.
Exactly the same deal with me. No way I was going to tie my checking to them to become "verified", etc.
eBay completely lost my business, as a buyer AND seller, when they started making PayPal mandatory. (Or if not mandatory, very difficult to go without PayPal.)
I feel like I'm missing out a bit with the eBay thing. But then, I've probably saved at least a couple grand by not buying anything on eBay in a decade. Probably for the best...
I think the comparison is apt. Take your fancy jaugur and trying running it against a peroid chevy or ford with a good engine, perhaps with a motorhead who knows how to tune it with some work into.
You see fancy get out performed.
Until you encounter the first turn in the road.:-)
(I assume we're talking about E-Types here. Newer Jaguars were pretty lousy until well into the Ford era.)
"Luddites? Sorry, but simply having every piece of new tech only for the sake of it does not make you a nerd."
Smart phones are no longer new tech. They're at least in their second generation now (if you count smart phones such as blackberry and ancient WinCE phones as first gen, and the advent of the iPhone as second gen... debatable if enough has changed since then to say there's a third generation yet), and the baseline expectations for what features a smartphone offers are pretty well set.
There are good reasons not to get a smartphone, but to dismiss them as some kind of new fad is pretty weird.
No way of checking email, web, etc when on the go? I think a great many more nerds will no to that.
While I'll agree that it's a little dumb to spend too much time, money, or effort trying to turn a Mac mini into a speed demon...
People seem to be buying these things as fashion accessories rather than making a serious decision based on their computer needs.
As a what now? Speaking only for myself, I bought the Mac mini because:
I wanted a new Mac to replace my recently deceased 333MHz Powerbook G3
I wanted an inexpensive Mac
I wanted a quiet Mac
I don't have tons of room for a huge Mac
I want to share my monitor with my Linux PC.
Compared with my old PowerBook G3, the mini positively screams. It's way more than enough power for what I use it for (mostly web browsing, music playback, email, light software development, CD and data DVD burning). I readily concede that if I wanted to author DVD videos with any frequency, I'd probably appreciate a dual G5... but I don't.
I also own a 3GHz P4 Shuttle "cube" PC, running Linux. The Mini gets used the vast majority of the time; the PC is usually turned off. Frankly, I've run out of things to do with the PC, and am thinking of turning it into an overpowered MythTV backend. At least then I'll be using it.
But merely a fashion accessory, with no thought to its utility? No way!
Speaking as someone who's owned an ihp120 for nearly four months...
The UI and the joystick suck though, and the lack of gapless playback blows. There's also no on-the-fly playlisting function.
Generally speaking, the iPod's UI is superior, no doubt about that in my mind. Still, the joystick isn't all that bad. Mostly, the singe feature I wish the ihp-120 had most is the on the fly playlist function. Gapless playback would be nice.
And there's a serious bug which keeps the drive spinning at all times in many situations.
I've experienced this. It appears to happen when it's caching the current song (ie, HD read) and you fast forward while it's doing this. Then, the drive will stay spinning. An annoying bug to be sure, but in practice it really hasn't affected me much.
Sure it could do many of those in the future with a firmware upgrade, but it does none of those things today. And the firmware upgrade iRiver promised for May has been delayed.:-/
How do you even find out about FW release dates? I've never found one on the iriver site, but I may have been in the wrong place.
Still, the USB-STORAGE class and OGG support and long battery life are enough for me to keep the unit and wait out the firmware upgrades when they come, if ever...
Despite the few oddities about the iriver, I still recommend it, for the above reasons plus: it's cheaper, has more features (FM, built-in mic, stereo in/out, digital in/out) and NO DRM.
And really, the USB-STORAGE feature is key, if you ever plan on plugging it into more than one system and would rather not get locked into one platform. I've got: a Powerbook G3 dual booting MacOS 9 and YellowDog 3; an x86 PC running Debian; and at work a system running w2k. The seamless utility across all of those systems is great!
Anyway, I'm pretty darn happy with it. I'm listening to it now even as I type! If you don't want yours, send it to me, I'll find it a good home.;-)
FYI, Church organs go to 32 foot pipes. The good ones go one rank further to 64 feet.
32 foot pipes are the largest commonly found, and even then only on very large instruemts. A 64' pitched rank is exceedingly rare. The only instrument I'm aware of (in the US) with real 64' pipes is the one at the Atlantic City Convention Hall (website: http://www.acchos.org/ ).
The Washington National Cathedral, in DC, has a 64' pitched rank, but if I recall correctly it's electronic (using speakers), not with actual 64' long lengths of pipe.
Bear in mind, a 32' pitch C is already below 20Hz, well below what most people can hear. A 64' pitch is more of an impressive "special effect" than anything else.
Actually, if anyone else can cite another pipe organ with a 64' pitch (US or otherwise), I'd love to hear about it, so I could hear that monster!
Have things worked out for your installation? Everything you seek is there, but would require bumping up to unstable for 2.6 and the latest KDE (IIRC). That's why I suggested the mini.iso.
Ohhhh... That mini.iso is for Unstable. Definitely missed that distinction the first time around.
Well, I didn't get much farther with my attempt with starting from stable. I'll start over-- will try your suggested mini.iso and see what happens. Since it's a spare system and has absolutely no important data on it, I can afford to blast it away.
If you want a Debian-based distro that you can install by just clicking through the install wizard, definitely check out Libranet. Their installer will work on nearly any hardware and is well worth the price.
http://www.libranet.com/
I'm looking at Libranet right now. Claims to be 100% Debian compatable, which I take it means that once installed I can use apt, dselect etc to update it in the usual way.
This might be what I'm looking for. Thanks Mr. AC!
I'm no debian expert; Mandrake is my primary system, and my favorite; I have one partition devoted to a Knoppix hard-disk install. That was pretty easy, and hardware detection worked perfectly. That might be a good way to start, then you could copy over the XF86config to real debian.
Hmm, might be worth a try...
Interestingly, I've gotten X to work only when running xf86cfg. (ie, when using xf86cfg you're doing setup inside of a basic, probably unaccelerated X server.) Then, when I go to use the XF86Config generated by xf86cfg, nothing.
When I run xf86config to create the XF86Config file and try to run X from what results, I get even less. Some crap about "no usable screen configurations".
I do an lsmod and see neither nv.o nor nvidia.o in there. Try to find them on the system; find out I have to compile the driver. Try to build the nvidia driver the Debian way. Build system complains about different versions of gcc for module vs kernel. Fun.
Anyway, I'll play around with it some more and see how far I get. I haven't had to look for help installing Linux in years. Doesn't say much good about the Debian installation process as it is in 2004. In my opinion anyway.
Believe it or not, I had better luck trying to get Gentoo working a little less than a year ago. I even had a recent kernel and X and KDE worked fine on that try, no hacking involved.
People thought, "Well, if I`m leaving Redhat anyway, maybe this is a good time to try something else." The biggest "something else" to Redhat is Debian.
You've got it dead-on. That describes me perfectly. I've been using RedHat almost exclusively since RedHat 5.1.
So I'm trying Debian on a spare P3 600. Trouble is, the video card in it is an nvidia geforce 256. I simply cannot get X working. (I haven't had a problem configuring X with RedHat since 6.0, on a system with an intel i740 [iirc] graphics chipset...)
In fact, coming from the RedHat world, Debian is very confusing over all, X issues aside. I'm trying Debian because I hear how easy it is to upgrade. The whole "I installed Debian in the kernel 2.0 days; now I'm running 2.6 without re-install" thing. I want to run:
kernel 2.6
KDE 3.2
ext3 filesystem
Since this is a spare system, I'm OK with trying "testing" or even "unstable". Starting from "stable" woody, its been difficult to get anywhere. I'll spare the details, but I've specified using the "testing" branch, run the apt update/upgrade stuff, and I still can't tell at all how to go from 2.2->2.6, KDE 2.x->3.2, ext2->ext3. And still no X.
Maybe I'm completely spoiled by how easy RedHat has always made things, but... I'm about one more wasted days' effort away from ditching Debian and giving Fedora a try. Looks like Debian might be a bit more, ah, "configurable" than this particular geek has any need for...
Sorry about the rant... but if Debian were my first attempt at a Linux installation from running windows, I'd have given up days ago, when I couldn't find any "official Debian" install ISO to download... I want to get this system running but this is just too much hassle. Looks like I may be waiting for Fedora Core 2 after all...:(
Thanks for the corrections and a lot of info. You do know your organs;)
I got this comment off the back of the album and I am certainly no authority on pipe organs so I graciously stand corrected!
Banjo is my instrument - easier to carry around and tune;)
No problem... I don't know if I'd call it a correction though. I don't know the organ you referred to at all; maybe it's the biggest in some category or other. I should look it up. Anyway, "largest pipe organ" is a pretty weak thing to brag about. I'd be more concerned about whether it sounds good, the acoustics of the space, and whether organists find it to be good to play...
Double Bass is my instrument. (Hence "ContraB"-- short for ContraBass.) I agree on the "ease of tuning part".:)
By the way, is it true that the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor hits 16 Hz?
Depends on the instrument you play it on. Your church around the corner almost certainly doesn't have a pipe that can play that pitch. (Unless you live around the corner from Trinity National Cathedral in Washington DC.) So you can play Passacaglia and Fugue in Cm on that organ but never hit anything near that note.
In Bach's time, a typical pipe organ's lowest pitched stop was 16', a pitch around 30 Hz. Only an exceptionally large, unusual instrument of the period had a 32' pitch, which can hit 16 Hz. Certainly Bach wasn't composing with 32' ranks of pipes in mind. An organist can choose to play Bach with these stops, though he's taking some artistic license to do so. (Not that I mind, it sounds really neat!)
Deutche Grammophon did an album by Bach that was recorded on the world's biggest pipe organ - Organ of the Jaegersborg Church, Copenhagen.
Worlds' Biggest Pipe organ, eh? I doubt it.
But in fairness, many pipe organs claim to be the biggest, and probably many of them aren't lying. Depends on how you measure.
Most pipes? That's one way. Most stops? That's another way, and it's not necessarily the same as the most pipes. Biggest pipes? A very few instruments have pipes 64' long. Loudest? An instrument could have fewer pipes and stops but be much louder.
...and so on...
Then, you have the question of "largest" vs "largest fully functioning". You could have 500,000 pipes in an instrument, but if only 200,000 are in playable condition at one time, is it really the largest? The organ at the Atlantic City Convention Hall has this problem. They have two full time employees and can't keep up with maintenance, let alone fix all the broken bits.
Three exceedingly large pipe organs with, in my opinion, legit claims on "biggest", depending on how you measure:
The Atlantic City Convention Hall. One of the few instruments in the world with a 64' pitch. This an actual pipe, too, not electronically produced. Amazing how few people know about this instrument. http://www.acchos.org/
The West Point Chapel pipe organ claims to be the largest church pipe organ in the world: http://www.usma.edu/tour/CadetChapel.asp
The (former) Wanamaker Department Store organ in Philadelphia, PA has some claims to largest: http://www.wanamakerorgan.com/index1.html
I've been to plenty of local library sales and not only do most people simply ignore them, but less 10% of the books are sold.
My experience has been otherwise. My family has been involved in organization, setup, and cleanup of the local library's book sale for as long as I can remember. I'd have to say, as a sort of wild guess, that if "only" 70% of the books offered sell, we consider that a poor sale.
I don't see any reason for libraries to go through the enormous trouble of organizing a local sale just to keep a handful of patrons happy.
I can't speak for all libraries, but at mine, the book sale is entirely run by a volunteer group called the "Friends of the Library." The sale costs the library essentially nothing as far as money, time, or labor are concerned.
I thought I'd do a "me too" post here, since what you posted is virtually identical to what I would have said!
My family has also been heavily involved in "Friends of the Library" booksales for the library in the town I grew up in. 10% would be a gross under estimate there, too. Indeed, the sales are all run during normal library hours in a room that is vacant the rest of the time anyway. So as you point out, it costs the library almost nothing to do this.
Now, the volunteer efforts by the Friends to make these sales happen are a year round effort. So indeed, it is "enormous trouble" to organize a local sale, but it's done by people as a volunteer effort. They like doing it!
The sales actually make quite a bit of money. $10k in 2 days isn't uncommon.
What psycho builds a pipe organ that goes so low that you can't even hear the notes? Once you can't hear the note wouldn't you stop making any low notes/keys?
How far below human hearing range are these infrasound notes anyway?
Plenty of psychos build pipe organs whose fundamental pitch are too low to be heard.
Pipe organ pitches are notated in terms of the length of an open flue pipe that it would take to create a pitch. An 8' long pipe plays a "C", two octaves below middle C. A 16' pipe sounds three octaves below middle C. A 32' pipe sounds four octaves below. The note E on a 32' rank is about 21 Hz. So C, Db, D, Eb are all below what you can hear.
Many large organs come with these 32' pitches. Why? It adds an incredible dimension of power to the sound when you play the full organ. You feel the music, not just hear it. It adds to the visceral experience of hearing the music. The fact that you can't hear it actually is part of the point!
Also, to drastically over simplify, there are two kinds of pipes. Flue and Reed. Flue pipes play like a flute-- just the vibration of the air creates the pitch. Reed pipes use the beating of a reed to produce the sound. If you ever heard a 32' reed like a Bombarde play, it definitely makes an audible sound. All the overtones of the reed slowly banging away. Then you have that fundamental 32' pitch shaking the floor. Really neat stuff, actually.
A very small number of instruments in the world have a 64' pitch. The Washington National Cathedral has one. The Atlantic City Convention Hall has another. http://www.acchos.org/ for more info on that one.
It may not have great downtown business at the moment, but neither does Bethlehem, which I think is worse off.
Having gone to college in Bethlehem (Lehigh) and having spent a good deal of time in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area visiting friends, I can honestly say that the Wilkes-Barre area is far more depressed than Bethlehem.
The North side of the Lehigh is beautiful. The newly renovated Hotel Bethlehem. The Moravian College area (Main St.). Very few empty store fronts. (Wilkes-Barre can't claim that.) Beautiful historic sites. New development. A wondeful stock of well maintained older brick Victorian homes.
Though I can see how if you've only been to South Bethlehem, you might think otherwise. Still, even the South Side is improving. On a recent visit, I was amazed to see 3rd St (for those that know it) loaded with new stores, clean, and people shopping. (Bear in mind, this is happening even during a recession!) Bethlehem Steel closed 8 years ago. In its place on the old Bethlehem Steel property is the new high tech company incubation district. Hi-tech, biotech startups, fostered by below market rent and help from Lehigh. A new Rail intermodal terminal already functioning, providing replacement non-service-sector blue-collar jobs. A new natural gas power plant (more replacement jobs). A new hockey rink will soon be built by the Philladelphia Flyers. And the piece de resistance, the Smithsonian is planning on opening a large museum of industrial history around the old steel blast furnaces. Awesome!
In short, there's plenty of hope (and progress) in Bethlehem.
Go to Pittston, near W-B, and tell me about the empty lots, burned down buildings (just last week this huge downtown place went up) and vacant, decaying store fronts. The Wilkes-Barre area's number #1 employer is the government. #2 is Techneglas, which just layed off one of my engineer friends and who knows how many other workers. #3... the service industry (you know, minimum wage jobs like at CVS). So you have only one company bringing money -into- the W-B area, and they're having real difficulty.
On the plus side, the people are really really nice and real estate sure is cheap...
I dunno. Driving around the W-B area I get this feeling of hopelessness that I don't get in Bethlehem.
Now Allentown and Easton... feel free to dis those cities, because they aren't doing well like Bethlehem... Sorry about the rant. There's just no way you can say Wilkes-Barre is doing better than Bethlehem...
I don't know what "first" this Cape Cod spot claims, but Marconi's first trans-atlantic wireless radio transmission was in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada.
I visited the Cape Cod Marconi radio site late last spring. I recall it claimed to be Marconi's first American trans-Atlantic radio transmission.
It's true, there's not much to see at the Cape Cod site. The beach has eroded away what must be at least 100 feet. All that's left are two of the four concrete footings-- the Eastern two have been claimed by the sea. Too bad, but what can you do-- the Cape is just an enormous sand bar just waiting to get washed away!
At any rate, I looked it up, and the info is all here:
1995?!? Hate to break it to you, but you were not one of the "earlier schools" to do this... CMU had standard net connections circa 1990, MIT even earlier than that, I think. Of course, if you mean that Lehigh was one of the earlier liberal arts schools to get a clue, well, yah, ok then:-)
Well, sort of... Lehigh had low speed connectivity in every room well before ethernet was installed everywhere in '95. True, Lehigh wasn't among the very first to get wired for Ethernet, but I'd estimate it was among the first 40% to do. It's also an "Internet II" school, which most colleges are not part of.
And LU's a "liberal arts school"? Wha? The Arts & Sciences college at LU is only about 1/3 the university. And the Engineering college is also about 1/3 of the school. Heck, the athletic teams are "The Engineers". Some liberal arts school!
Have you been to vwvortex.com? The biggest VW forum. Some cool stuff there.
Yeah, I've checked it out; another VW driver pointed it out to me. I've picked up a few interesting tidbits of info there. But man, what a flame-fest, when they start arguing over 1.8T vs VR6... Jeeze...
Still loving my Jetta! Almost two years now. I think that this will be the first car I sell that I actually miss afterwords. (Though that's a couple years away.)
Nope. Actually, I can't thank you later. You just made my point (err, sorta) The 2002 Golf will specifically not be made available with the 150
HP or the 180 HP gas diesel.
Just to clarify, you meant "gas turbo" not "gas diesel"... because not even VW makes a 150HP diesel...
That is unless something has changed, but as of two weeks ago, official word was 2.0, turbodiesel, or nothing in
the five door Golf.
Check the forums linked from the page you listed. That will confirm my interpretation.
I stand corrected then! I guess they don't want the Golf to be anywhere near as fast as the GTI, which it might be if it came with 180HP. On the other hand, currently both the GTI and the Golf can come with the same 150HP 1.8T. So I dunno, I guess it's just arbitrary then, which would explain your frustration!
In that case, I guess that does suck for you. If you like hatchbacks and want 4 doors, unless you can order the GTI with four doors, you're out of luck.
Which is what you said in the first place.
D'oh!;)
I guess you have to decide which is more important, 4 doors+trunk w/ 1.8T or a 2 doors+hatchback w/ 1.8T! (I chose the Jetta, VR6...)
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Wow. This is exactly the keyboard I've been looking for. 87-key layout, switchable support for the alt/cmd key (for Mac or non-Mac use)... even the backlighting.
I just need to choose between the "Cherry MX Clear" and "Cherry MX Brown" switches. It's not cheap, but it's definitely what I want.
Thanks for pointing it out!
Agreed totally. I could almost have written your post, except for the part about scoring a nice old set of speakers from your friend's parents. ;-)
If you're not aware of audiokarma.org , you might find a welcome home on that forum...
Exactly the same deal with me. No way I was going to tie my checking to them to become "verified", etc.
eBay completely lost my business, as a buyer AND seller, when they started making PayPal mandatory. (Or if not mandatory, very difficult to go without PayPal.)
I feel like I'm missing out a bit with the eBay thing. But then, I've probably saved at least a couple grand by not buying anything on eBay in a decade. Probably for the best...
I think the comparison is apt. Take your fancy jaugur and trying running it against a peroid chevy or ford with a good engine, perhaps with a motorhead who knows how to tune it with some work into.
You see fancy get out performed.
Until you encounter the first turn in the road. :-)
(I assume we're talking about E-Types here. Newer Jaguars were pretty lousy until well into the Ford era.)
"Luddites? Sorry, but simply having every piece of new tech only for the sake of it does not make you a nerd."
Smart phones are no longer new tech. They're at least in their second generation now (if you count smart phones such as blackberry and ancient WinCE phones as first gen, and the advent of the iPhone as second gen... debatable if enough has changed since then to say there's a third generation yet), and the baseline expectations for what features a smartphone offers are pretty well set.
There are good reasons not to get a smartphone, but to dismiss them as some kind of new fad is pretty weird.
No way of checking email, web, etc when on the go? I think a great many more nerds will no to that.
People seem to be buying these things as fashion accessories rather than making a serious decision based on their computer needs.
As a what now? Speaking only for myself, I bought the Mac mini because:
- I wanted a new Mac to replace my recently deceased 333MHz Powerbook G3
- I wanted an inexpensive Mac
- I wanted a quiet Mac
- I don't have tons of room for a huge Mac
- I want to share my monitor with my Linux PC.
Compared with my old PowerBook G3, the mini positively screams. It's way more than enough power for what I use it for (mostly web browsing, music playback, email, light software development, CD and data DVD burning). I readily concede that if I wanted to author DVD videos with any frequency, I'd probably appreciate a dual G5... but I don't.I also own a 3GHz P4 Shuttle "cube" PC, running Linux. The Mini gets used the vast majority of the time; the PC is usually turned off. Frankly, I've run out of things to do with the PC, and am thinking of turning it into an overpowered MythTV backend. At least then I'll be using it.
But merely a fashion accessory, with no thought to its utility? No way!
But yesterday I got email from Apple saying they'd reduced the cost of my order to reflect this pricing change. Excellent!
Does anyone know if MacMall would reduce the price of a pending order like that? My guess is, no.
8X DVD writing (rather than 4x) is a pleasant surprise, too.
Thanks, Apple!
The UI and the joystick suck though, and the lack of gapless playback blows. There's also no on-the-fly playlisting function.
Generally speaking, the iPod's UI is superior, no doubt about that in my mind. Still, the joystick isn't all that bad. Mostly, the singe feature I wish the ihp-120 had most is the on the fly playlist function. Gapless playback would be nice.
And there's a serious bug which keeps the drive spinning at all times in many situations.
I've experienced this. It appears to happen when it's caching the current song (ie, HD read) and you fast forward while it's doing this. Then, the drive will stay spinning. An annoying bug to be sure, but in practice it really hasn't affected me much.
Sure it could do many of those in the future with a firmware upgrade, but it does none of those things today. And the firmware upgrade iRiver promised for May has been delayed. :-/
How do you even find out about FW release dates? I've never found one on the iriver site, but I may have been in the wrong place.
Still, the USB-STORAGE class and OGG support and long battery life are enough for me to keep the unit and wait out the firmware upgrades when they come, if ever...
Despite the few oddities about the iriver, I still recommend it, for the above reasons plus: it's cheaper, has more features (FM, built-in mic, stereo in/out, digital in/out) and NO DRM.
And really, the USB-STORAGE feature is key, if you ever plan on plugging it into more than one system and would rather not get locked into one platform. I've got: a Powerbook G3 dual booting MacOS 9 and YellowDog 3; an x86 PC running Debian; and at work a system running w2k. The seamless utility across all of those systems is great!
Anyway, I'm pretty darn happy with it. I'm listening to it now even as I type! If you don't want yours, send it to me, I'll find it a good home. ;-)
As does the iRiver.
32 foot pipes are the largest commonly found, and even then only on very large instruemts. A 64' pitched rank is exceedingly rare. The only instrument I'm aware of (in the US) with real 64' pipes is the one at the Atlantic City Convention Hall (website: http://www.acchos.org/ ).
The Washington National Cathedral, in DC, has a 64' pitched rank, but if I recall correctly it's electronic (using speakers), not with actual 64' long lengths of pipe.
Bear in mind, a 32' pitch C is already below 20Hz, well below what most people can hear. A 64' pitch is more of an impressive "special effect" than anything else.
Actually, if anyone else can cite another pipe organ with a 64' pitch (US or otherwise), I'd love to hear about it, so I could hear that monster!
Ohhhh... That mini.iso is for Unstable. Definitely missed that distinction the first time around.
Well, I didn't get much farther with my attempt with starting from stable. I'll start over-- will try your suggested mini.iso and see what happens. Since it's a spare system and has absolutely no important data on it, I can afford to blast it away.
Thanks! I really want this to work. :)
http://www.libranet.com/
I'm looking at Libranet right now. Claims to be 100% Debian compatable, which I take it means that once installed I can use apt, dselect etc to update it in the usual way.
This might be what I'm looking for. Thanks Mr. AC!
Hmm, might be worth a try...
Interestingly, I've gotten X to work only when running xf86cfg. (ie, when using xf86cfg you're doing setup inside of a basic, probably unaccelerated X server.) Then, when I go to use the XF86Config generated by xf86cfg, nothing.
When I run xf86config to create the XF86Config file and try to run X from what results, I get even less. Some crap about "no usable screen configurations".
I do an lsmod and see neither nv.o nor nvidia.o in there. Try to find them on the system; find out I have to compile the driver. Try to build the nvidia driver the Debian way. Build system complains about different versions of gcc for module vs kernel. Fun.
Anyway, I'll play around with it some more and see how far I get. I haven't had to look for help installing Linux in years. Doesn't say much good about the Debian installation process as it is in 2004. In my opinion anyway.
Believe it or not, I had better luck trying to get Gentoo working a little less than a year ago. I even had a recent kernel and X and KDE worked fine on that try, no hacking involved.
Anyway, thanks for the suggestion!
I never found that mini.iso; in the end I used the ISO I found called "LordSutch.com ISOLINUX mini-ISO image", here:
http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/
Anyway, thanks for pointing it out! It should definitely save someone else some confusion.
You've got it dead-on. That describes me perfectly. I've been using RedHat almost exclusively since RedHat 5.1.
So I'm trying Debian on a spare P3 600. Trouble is, the video card in it is an nvidia geforce 256. I simply cannot get X working. (I haven't had a problem configuring X with RedHat since 6.0, on a system with an intel i740 [iirc] graphics chipset...)
In fact, coming from the RedHat world, Debian is very confusing over all, X issues aside. I'm trying Debian because I hear how easy it is to upgrade. The whole "I installed Debian in the kernel 2.0 days; now I'm running 2.6 without re-install" thing. I want to run:
- kernel 2.6
- KDE 3.2
- ext3 filesystem
Since this is a spare system, I'm OK with trying "testing" or even "unstable". Starting from "stable" woody, its been difficult to get anywhere. I'll spare the details, but I've specified using the "testing" branch, run the apt update/upgrade stuff, and I still can't tell at all how to go from 2.2->2.6, KDE 2.x->3.2, ext2->ext3. And still no X.Maybe I'm completely spoiled by how easy RedHat has always made things, but... I'm about one more wasted days' effort away from ditching Debian and giving Fedora a try. Looks like Debian might be a bit more, ah, "configurable" than this particular geek has any need for...
Sorry about the rant... but if Debian were my first attempt at a Linux installation from running windows, I'd have given up days ago, when I couldn't find any "official Debian" install ISO to download... I want to get this system running but this is just too much hassle. Looks like I may be waiting for Fedora Core 2 after all... :(
I got this comment off the back of the album and I am certainly no authority on pipe organs so I graciously stand corrected!
Banjo is my instrument - easier to carry around and tune ;)
No problem... I don't know if I'd call it a correction though. I don't know the organ you referred to at all; maybe it's the biggest in some category or other. I should look it up. Anyway, "largest pipe organ" is a pretty weak thing to brag about. I'd be more concerned about whether it sounds good, the acoustics of the space, and whether organists find it to be good to play...
Double Bass is my instrument. (Hence "ContraB"-- short for ContraBass.) I agree on the "ease of tuning part". :)
Later,
--Thad
Depends on the instrument you play it on. Your church around the corner almost certainly doesn't have a pipe that can play that pitch. (Unless you live around the corner from Trinity National Cathedral in Washington DC.) So you can play Passacaglia and Fugue in Cm on that organ but never hit anything near that note.
In Bach's time, a typical pipe organ's lowest pitched stop was 16', a pitch around 30 Hz. Only an exceptionally large, unusual instrument of the period had a 32' pitch, which can hit 16 Hz. Certainly Bach wasn't composing with 32' ranks of pipes in mind. An organist can choose to play Bach with these stops, though he's taking some artistic license to do so. (Not that I mind, it sounds really neat!)
--Thad, who knows his organs! ;)
Worlds' Biggest Pipe organ, eh? I doubt it.
But in fairness, many pipe organs claim to be the biggest, and probably many of them aren't lying. Depends on how you measure.
Most pipes? That's one way. Most stops? That's another way, and it's not necessarily the same as the most pipes. Biggest pipes? A very few instruments have pipes 64' long. Loudest? An instrument could have fewer pipes and stops but be much louder.
Then, you have the question of "largest" vs "largest fully functioning". You could have 500,000 pipes in an instrument, but if only 200,000 are in playable condition at one time, is it really the largest? The organ at the Atlantic City Convention Hall has this problem. They have two full time employees and can't keep up with maintenance, let alone fix all the broken bits.
Three exceedingly large pipe organs with, in my opinion, legit claims on "biggest", depending on how you measure:
The Atlantic City Convention Hall. One of the few instruments in the world with a 64' pitch. This an actual pipe, too, not electronically produced. Amazing how few people know about this instrument. http://www.acchos.org/
The West Point Chapel pipe organ claims to be the largest church pipe organ in the world: http://www.usma.edu/tour/CadetChapel.asp
The (former) Wanamaker Department Store organ in Philadelphia, PA has some claims to largest: http://www.wanamakerorgan.com/index1.html
And that's all I gotta say about that!
--Thad, who knows his organs. ;)
My experience has been otherwise. My family has been involved in organization, setup, and cleanup of the local library's book sale for as long as I can remember. I'd have to say, as a sort of wild guess, that if "only" 70% of the books offered sell, we consider that a poor sale.
I don't see any reason for libraries to go through the enormous trouble of organizing a local sale just to keep a handful of patrons happy.
I can't speak for all libraries, but at mine, the book sale is entirely run by a volunteer group called the "Friends of the Library." The sale costs the library essentially nothing as far as money, time, or labor are concerned.
I thought I'd do a "me too" post here, since what you posted is virtually identical to what I would have said!
My family has also been heavily involved in "Friends of the Library" booksales for the library in the town I grew up in. 10% would be a gross under estimate there, too. Indeed, the sales are all run during normal library hours in a room that is vacant the rest of the time anyway. So as you point out, it costs the library almost nothing to do this.
Now, the volunteer efforts by the Friends to make these sales happen are a year round effort. So indeed, it is "enormous trouble" to organize a local sale, but it's done by people as a volunteer effort. They like doing it!
The sales actually make quite a bit of money. $10k in 2 days isn't uncommon.
How far below human hearing range are these infrasound notes anyway?
Plenty of psychos build pipe organs whose fundamental pitch are too low to be heard.
Pipe organ pitches are notated in terms of the length of an open flue pipe that it would take to create a pitch. An 8' long pipe plays a "C", two octaves below middle C. A 16' pipe sounds three octaves below middle C. A 32' pipe sounds four octaves below. The note E on a 32' rank is about 21 Hz. So C, Db, D, Eb are all below what you can hear.
Many large organs come with these 32' pitches. Why? It adds an incredible dimension of power to the sound when you play the full organ. You feel the music, not just hear it. It adds to the visceral experience of hearing the music. The fact that you can't hear it actually is part of the point!
Also, to drastically over simplify, there are two kinds of pipes. Flue and Reed. Flue pipes play like a flute-- just the vibration of the air creates the pitch. Reed pipes use the beating of a reed to produce the sound. If you ever heard a 32' reed like a Bombarde play, it definitely makes an audible sound. All the overtones of the reed slowly banging away. Then you have that fundamental 32' pitch shaking the floor. Really neat stuff, actually.
A very small number of instruments in the world have a 64' pitch. The Washington National Cathedral has one. The Atlantic City Convention Hall has another. http://www.acchos.org/ for more info on that one.
--Thad
Having gone to college in Bethlehem (Lehigh) and having spent a good deal of time in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area visiting friends, I can honestly say that the Wilkes-Barre area is far more depressed than Bethlehem.
The North side of the Lehigh is beautiful. The newly renovated Hotel Bethlehem. The Moravian College area (Main St.). Very few empty store fronts. (Wilkes-Barre can't claim that.) Beautiful historic sites. New development. A wondeful stock of well maintained older brick Victorian homes.
Though I can see how if you've only been to South Bethlehem, you might think otherwise. Still, even the South Side is improving. On a recent visit, I was amazed to see 3rd St (for those that know it) loaded with new stores, clean, and people shopping. (Bear in mind, this is happening even during a recession!) Bethlehem Steel closed 8 years ago. In its place on the old Bethlehem Steel property is the new high tech company incubation district. Hi-tech, biotech startups, fostered by below market rent and help from Lehigh. A new Rail intermodal terminal already functioning, providing replacement non-service-sector blue-collar jobs. A new natural gas power plant (more replacement jobs). A new hockey rink will soon be built by the Philladelphia Flyers. And the piece de resistance, the Smithsonian is planning on opening a large museum of industrial history around the old steel blast furnaces. Awesome!
In short, there's plenty of hope (and progress) in Bethlehem.
Go to Pittston, near W-B, and tell me about the empty lots, burned down buildings (just last week this huge downtown place went up) and vacant, decaying store fronts. The Wilkes-Barre area's number #1 employer is the government. #2 is Techneglas, which just layed off one of my engineer friends and who knows how many other workers. #3... the service industry (you know, minimum wage jobs like at CVS). So you have only one company bringing money -into- the W-B area, and they're having real difficulty.
On the plus side, the people are really really nice and real estate sure is cheap...
I dunno. Driving around the W-B area I get this feeling of hopelessness that I don't get in Bethlehem.
Now Allentown and Easton... feel free to dis those cities, because they aren't doing well like Bethlehem... Sorry about the rant. There's just no way you can say Wilkes-Barre is doing better than Bethlehem...
I visited the Cape Cod Marconi radio site late last spring. I recall it claimed to be Marconi's first American trans-Atlantic radio transmission.
It's true, there's not much to see at the Cape Cod site. The beach has eroded away what must be at least 100 feet. All that's left are two of the four concrete footings-- the Eastern two have been claimed by the sea. Too bad, but what can you do-- the Cape is just an enormous sand bar just waiting to get washed away!
At any rate, I looked it up, and the info is all here:
http://www.marconicalling.com/museum/html/objects/ photographs/objects-i=1006.161-t=1-n=0.html
And here's the National Park Service website:
http://www.nps.gov/caco/places/marconistation.html
--Thad
Well, sort of... Lehigh had low speed connectivity in every room well before ethernet was installed everywhere in '95. True, Lehigh wasn't among the very first to get wired for Ethernet, but I'd estimate it was among the first 40% to do. It's also an "Internet II" school, which most colleges are not part of.
And LU's a "liberal arts school"? Wha? The Arts & Sciences college at LU is only about 1/3 the university. And the Engineering college is also about 1/3 of the school. Heck, the athletic teams are "The Engineers". Some liberal arts school!
Go Lehigh!
--Thad '99 (same year as Hrunting...)
Yeah, I've checked it out; another VW driver pointed it out to me. I've picked up a few interesting tidbits of info there. But man, what a flame-fest, when they start arguing over 1.8T vs VR6... Jeeze...
Still loving my Jetta! Almost two years now. I think that this will be the first car I sell that I actually miss afterwords. (Though that's a couple years away.)
--Thad
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Just to clarify, you meant "gas turbo" not "gas diesel"... because not even VW makes a 150HP diesel...
That is unless something has changed, but as of two weeks ago, official word was 2.0, turbodiesel, or nothing in the five door Golf.
Check the forums linked from the page you listed. That will confirm my interpretation.
I stand corrected then! I guess they don't want the Golf to be anywhere near as fast as the GTI, which it might be if it came with 180HP. On the other hand, currently both the GTI and the Golf can come with the same 150HP 1.8T. So I dunno, I guess it's just arbitrary then, which would explain your frustration!
In that case, I guess that does suck for you. If you like hatchbacks and want 4 doors, unless you can order the GTI with four doors, you're out of luck.
Which is what you said in the first place.
D'oh! ;)
I guess you have to decide which is more important, 4 doors+trunk w/ 1.8T or a 2 doors+hatchback w/ 1.8T! (I chose the Jetta, VR6...)
--Thad
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