There is an Avant brand keyboard that is supposed to be the modern successor to the Northgate and IBM keyboards:
http://www.cvtinc.com/products/keyboards/menu.ht m
If you want a particular kind of quality, be prepared to pay for it, the base 104 key model is $150, the 116 key model is $200. I've paid as much for the computer I am using right now.
Apparently these are reprogrammable and you can rearrange and macro program the keys any way you like.
I really don't know if I like this kind of keyboard anyway. Back when these were standard I always felt they were too stiff and clunky. With membrane keyboards I don't have to press as hard, or so it seems to me.
With a hope-based mind, life becomes a painful grind of must-have this or that. Better just to sit with what is.
There are extremes, I don't think that is hope, that's either materialism or greed. I don't necessarily agree being perfectly content is better than materialism. For one, being perfectly content doesn't exactly move things along, there is a balance.
Have you tried Pinnacle's PCTV? I basically want to make sure that whatever card I get is Bt8x8 compatible so dScaler (www.dscaler.com) will work with it, and it has S-video. The package said it had PVR software but I didn't read it thoughroughly.
I agree on that, the problem is that most forms of tape in current use are basically rust on plastic, and is almost certain to decay quicker than optical media, regardless of what is recorded on the tape and the domain.
If the ones and zeros are uncompressed then I would suggest digital storage rather than analogue, but that is incredibly prohibitive given the bandwidth invovled.
I have far more hope of my analog film archives outlasting me than I do of my CDs and DVDs of being readable in 20 years.
No one really has any idea how long optical media lasts, but how are 20 year old CDs holding up? The format is nearing a little over that old now. I've never really had a CD deteriorate on me, but my oldest ones are about ten years old now.
LDs hold up pretty well, provided they are well manufactured and aren't stored in a hot, humid place, but I think the same holds true for film.
Even with catastrophic failure, a blowout on a car at 80mph is probably still safer than loosing any critical part on an airplane, the only thing that might save you on an airplane is you might hope to glide, but several hundred miles per hour vs. 80 doesn't compare well.
I will grant that aviation is more risky all things considered, the main reason flying is saver than driving _is_ because of the regulations, better training, pre-flight checks and so on. I bet if driver's training and vehicle inspections were as rigourous, automobiles may prove to be statistically safer. One problem is lax attitudes, in the US, I don't think there are many states that require much of an inspection on licence renewal or anything like that, often just a emissions test, if there is an inspection, probably not as thoughrough as I have read about for European inspections.
In my opinion, the thing that makes autos most dangerous is sloppy driving. I think in the US about 40,000 people die a year because of impaired / intoxicated driving, I don't think catastrophic failure even remotely approaches that.
The problem with lifetime service is that my impression is that it is just for the lifetime of that device, if the device dies, one cannot transfer that service, can they?
Another concern is if TiVo (or Replay) goes belly up, will the PVR still function or become yet another door stop? That is a bet that some people don't really seem to realize they might be making, particularly with the warning signs in this industry. So lifetime just might mean live of the company or life of the device, whichever dies sooner.
Normally I prefer dedicated set-top boxes because of their quality of integration, but I think for this, particularly the costs and potential perils involved, I'll just get a TV card with PVR-like software. I have already built a functioning HTPC, maybe it's time to add on, a $50 addition vs. maybe $500 seems like an easy choice, given that much of the latter is redundant to a computer.
One of the two allow you to use the thing without buying a service, I forget which.
What you can do is buy a TV capture card, a video card with TV out and make your own HTPC/PVR. There's software on the 'net and also TV capture cards that include it for free. It's supposed to be pretty easy to do, and you don't need to juggle tapes.
Speaking of which, I really didn't mind juggling tapes as I do try to keep some shows long term or until it is out on DVD.
I am not totally sure what you are saying, but I am interested. My email address is in the header of my posts, though anti-spam obfuscated, please email me.
All these prices given are a bit high. In single unit quantities, the VFDs with Hitachi LCD interface are $80 at Digikey. Add a circuit board, and $5 worth of parts to make convert it into a serial unit.
I think the Hitachi interface version can be bought in volume at $40-$50
I did think of using VFDs as a computer display, but I agree, the board size on the units are prohibitive. I think you can get away with one drive bay if you used the two line version.
I own a box of the more basic versions of that unit, basically the raw unit that takes the Hitachi LCD signaling, which is pretty much the standard for character based LCD displays. Programming a PIC to do serial port interfacing is really trivial, IMO easier than writing a PC program in Linux or Windows to send it relevant data.
As for HTPC, I think the hardest part would be to find a way to access the DVD software's internal variables (time count, etc.) to display them.
Concerning brightness, if I am right, these units have four brigthness settings, off, low, medium and high. A lot of electronics gear put a VFD behind a tinting panel to knock the brightness a bit, and my Pioneer reciever even autodims the display after a few minites of no user adjustments, such as volume dial or selecting a new input. It goes to full brigtness when you are using the buttons and controls, but dims after you are done.
Well, the differences are enough such that while they operate on similar princibles, they are called by different terminologies. I don't think people would understand what you meant if you used the two terms interchangeably.
Then again, "flat screen" can be misunderstood as there are CRT type displays that have no curve on the screen, but aren't slim like an LCD panel.
I've noticed a lot of hardware sites are like that. In one way it is understandable as they do have a lot of images, but it's not really that comparable when one considers the relative screen area.
I think I had come across one site where every few paragraphs was an ad paragraph using the same font and layout as the article, that was annoying.
I do wonder if there are going to be further collapses in the internet ad market. A problem I see is that to get more money, or possibly to retain income, more ads have to be sold. The problem is that users fed up with ads will gradually either block them or quit using ad-heavy sites. The problem is that if advertisers find that ads aren't so effective, the value of ads will go down, and stupid web site administrators might try to compensate by running even more ads.
Holding car drivers to the same standards as aircraft is such a huge leap that the paperwork generated by it could likely employ everyone in America.
With aircraft it is necessary, um because one can't just land at any time, it is far more trivial to stop at the side of the road.
I don't think the standards for small aircraft are truly prohibitive (I seem to remember about five minutes), but drivers are probably too lazy to do a proper job of it anyway.
Whatever your manufacturer says, nearly all NTSC TV sets struggle to display more than 350 or so lines of resolution across,
For broadcast, 350 or so is about all you can get on NTSC. Where it makes a difference with DVD, more recent game systems and some digital cable / satellite systems.
My 27" Wega - an interlaced NTSC set - gets about 500 lines of resolution pretty easily. I fine-tuned it pretty well. It was pretty nice outside the box, but out of the box performance is always shortchanging yourself if you can spend a few minutes with an AVIA DVD. I took it a step further by going into service mode to tweak it even more against the appropriate test frames.
Those prices must be really new, like within the past couple months, prices have been going down pretty quickly. I really don't know if I'd trust Daewoo myself, I would rather trust NEC, Panasonic or Pioneer plasmas simply because they have a longer track record with this technology.
I liked the Daewoo (is that what is was?) at Costco...certainly superior to any projection set. Is it perfect? Nope. But physically its very nice, and like I said, its way better than the projection TV's.
Front or rear projection? You really aren't being specific in your claims.
With front projection, it's not hard to get a higher resolution projection set that beats a plasma on resolution - at a lower cost.
If you are basing it on store displays, store displays aren't even calibrated - something that CRTs need before being critiqued on quality. Plasmas can't go out of focus because of the fixed pixel structure, so the need for calibration is a bit less - but they still need to be color checked.
I don't like rear projection sets (typically three color tubes inside a big box) because of the high directionality of the screen lens. I do like front projection because of the flexibility, and the five to twenty pound weight is a heck of a lot easier to move and hang than eighty to a hundred.
In general, the only parameter that plasmas are consistently better than front projection is with lighting - because plasmas are emmissive on a black background, they can be used with higher lighting.
Either way, I prefer my XGA FP over a 42" plasma - it is a bit higher resolution, cost me half as much and I get a 160" screen.
You seem to overestimate the cost and underestimate the brightness of front projection.
You also completely omitted DLP - Display Light Processing by Texas Instruments, which now gets contrast ratios that rival CRTs. They are available in front and rear projections.
As for resolution, a 42" plasma is about 865x480 (WVGA), and cost between $4000 to $6000, whereas a projector of comparable resolution can be had for $1500. A 50" plasma runs about $10000-$13000 and those resolve about 1280x720, which is WXGA. One can get several WXGA video projectors costing from $3000 to over $10000.
You don't seem to think that the available projection brightness rating is a lot but it is pretty good and has been improving for quite some time. I think 1000 lumens it would be about as much brightness as said 42" plasma sets put out, and you can adjust the projected image size. The difference is that because projectors rely on reflected rather than emitted light to show an image on a screen, emitted light makes a difference in how the screen looks. Reflected light systems wash out a little easier because the base screen is white rather than black.
A 16X DVD-ROM would spin at the same speed as a 48X CD-ROM and would transfer 21.13 MBps (megabytes per second). This would take about 3.7 minutes to fill a 4.7 GB disk.
In reality, I am guessing that the RPM limitations would take hold on the inner tracks. Like with 48x CD writers, where lead-in, lead-out and RPM limits prevent a faster write, I think it would be more realistic to expect six or seven minute burns. That is still pretty fast though.
Astronomers and cosmologists use the term "metal" as a shorthand for anything other than hydrogen and helium.
Why am I not surprised?
Heck, I think physics and chemistry has two opposing views on electron charge flow, and electrical engineering holds that both are true. It's pretty frustrating to deal with this sort of crap.
Interesting category: "CD-Rs and CD-RWs (100 megabytes or more in capacity"
Are there any of these with less than 100MB capacity? 8cm CDs are around 150MB
The thing I question about the page is that it appears to not have been updated since late spring, specifically, I see no update since 2002 March 31, the amounts listed are proposed and the page has no indication saying that it has been enacted.
I really haven't seen the anime makes it to Cartoon Network these days, but, IMO, the USA cartoons of late simply don't look good to me. The Tenchi, BeBop and Outlaw Star on CN looks better to me than most of anything else I've seen on there, except for the cartoon classics, I suppose. The recent USA stuff sometimes makes Simpsons look like high art. YuGiOh and some other anime does look like crap.
BTW, I do like Simpsons, Futurama and did like the one episode of Invader Zim that I caught, I guess the last two are on CN.
I guess animation in general is just crap, but I don't mind so much as I can and do pick and choose what I watch.
As for animation vs. drawing style, I guess I prefer good drawing style animated not so well than a simpler drawing style animated well.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I probably should have said "Stood there peeing", but bad American grammar rules allows me to say "I sat there peeing".
Um, that ignores the choice of "their" instead of "there". Those two words have a very different meaning.
There is an Avant brand keyboard that is supposed to be the modern successor to the Northgate and IBM keyboards:
t m
http://www.cvtinc.com/products/keyboards/menu.h
If you want a particular kind of quality, be prepared to pay for it, the base 104 key model is $150, the 116 key model is $200. I've paid as much for the computer I am using right now.
Apparently these are reprogrammable and you can rearrange and macro program the keys any way you like.
I really don't know if I like this kind of keyboard anyway. Back when these were standard I always felt they were too stiff and clunky. With membrane keyboards I don't have to press as hard, or so it seems to me.
With a hope-based mind, life becomes a painful grind of must-have this or that. Better just to sit with what is.
There are extremes, I don't think that is hope, that's either materialism or greed. I don't necessarily agree being perfectly content is better than materialism. For one, being perfectly content doesn't exactly move things along, there is a balance.
Have you tried Pinnacle's PCTV? I basically want to make sure that whatever card I get is Bt8x8 compatible so dScaler (www.dscaler.com) will work with it, and it has S-video. The package said it had PVR software but I didn't read it thoughroughly.
I agree on that, the problem is that most forms of tape in current use are basically rust on plastic, and is almost certain to decay quicker than optical media, regardless of what is recorded on the tape and the domain.
If the ones and zeros are uncompressed then I would suggest digital storage rather than analogue, but that is incredibly prohibitive given the bandwidth invovled.
I have far more hope of my analog film archives outlasting me than I do of my CDs and DVDs of being readable in 20 years.
No one really has any idea how long optical media lasts, but how are 20 year old CDs holding up? The format is nearing a little over that old now. I've never really had a CD deteriorate on me, but my oldest ones are about ten years old now.
LDs hold up pretty well, provided they are well manufactured and aren't stored in a hot, humid place, but I think the same holds true for film.
Even with catastrophic failure, a blowout on a car at 80mph is probably still safer than loosing any critical part on an airplane, the only thing that might save you on an airplane is you might hope to glide, but several hundred miles per hour vs. 80 doesn't compare well.
I will grant that aviation is more risky all things considered, the main reason flying is saver than driving _is_ because of the regulations, better training, pre-flight checks and so on. I bet if driver's training and vehicle inspections were as rigourous, automobiles may prove to be statistically safer. One problem is lax attitudes, in the US, I don't think there are many states that require much of an inspection on licence renewal or anything like that, often just a emissions test, if there is an inspection, probably not as thoughrough as I have read about for European inspections.
In my opinion, the thing that makes autos most dangerous is sloppy driving. I think in the US about 40,000 people die a year because of impaired / intoxicated driving, I don't think catastrophic failure even remotely approaches that.
Pay the lifetime fee one time, then.
My concerns are twofold.
The problem with lifetime service is that my impression is that it is just for the lifetime of that device, if the device dies, one cannot transfer that service, can they?
Another concern is if TiVo (or Replay) goes belly up, will the PVR still function or become yet another door stop? That is a bet that some people don't really seem to realize they might be making, particularly with the warning signs in this industry. So lifetime just might mean live of the company or life of the device, whichever dies sooner.
Normally I prefer dedicated set-top boxes because of their quality of integration, but I think for this, particularly the costs and potential perils involved, I'll just get a TV card with PVR-like software. I have already built a functioning HTPC, maybe it's time to add on, a $50 addition vs. maybe $500 seems like an easy choice, given that much of the latter is redundant to a computer.
One of the two allow you to use the thing without buying a service, I forget which.
What you can do is buy a TV capture card, a video card with TV out and make your own HTPC/PVR. There's software on the 'net and also TV capture cards that include it for free. It's supposed to be pretty easy to do, and you don't need to juggle tapes.
Speaking of which, I really didn't mind juggling tapes as I do try to keep some shows long term or until it is out on DVD.
I am not totally sure what you are saying, but I am interested. My email address is in the header of my posts, though anti-spam obfuscated, please email me.
All these prices given are a bit high. In single unit quantities, the VFDs with Hitachi LCD interface are $80 at Digikey. Add a circuit board, and $5 worth of parts to make convert it into a serial unit.
I think the Hitachi interface version can be bought in volume at $40-$50
I did think of using VFDs as a computer display, but I agree, the board size on the units are prohibitive. I think you can get away with one drive bay if you used the two line version.
I own a box of the more basic versions of that unit, basically the raw unit that takes the Hitachi LCD signaling, which is pretty much the standard for character based LCD displays. Programming a PIC to do serial port interfacing is really trivial, IMO easier than writing a PC program in Linux or Windows to send it relevant data.
As for HTPC, I think the hardest part would be to find a way to access the DVD software's internal variables (time count, etc.) to display them.
Concerning brightness, if I am right, these units have four brigthness settings, off, low, medium and high. A lot of electronics gear put a VFD behind a tinting panel to knock the brightness a bit, and my Pioneer reciever even autodims the display after a few minites of no user adjustments, such as volume dial or selecting a new input. It goes to full brigtness when you are using the buttons and controls, but dims after you are done.
Well, the differences are enough such that while they operate on similar princibles, they are called by different terminologies. I don't think people would understand what you meant if you used the two terms interchangeably.
Then again, "flat screen" can be misunderstood as there are CRT type displays that have no curve on the screen, but aren't slim like an LCD panel.
I've noticed a lot of hardware sites are like that. In one way it is understandable as they do have a lot of images, but it's not really that comparable when one considers the relative screen area.
I think I had come across one site where every few paragraphs was an ad paragraph using the same font and layout as the article, that was annoying.
I do wonder if there are going to be further collapses in the internet ad market. A problem I see is that to get more money, or possibly to retain income, more ads have to be sold. The problem is that users fed up with ads will gradually either block them or quit using ad-heavy sites. The problem is that if advertisers find that ads aren't so effective, the value of ads will go down, and stupid web site administrators might try to compensate by running even more ads.
Holding car drivers to the same standards as aircraft is such a huge leap that the paperwork generated by it could likely employ everyone in America.
With aircraft it is necessary, um because one can't just land at any time, it is far more trivial to stop at the side of the road.
I don't think the standards for small aircraft are truly prohibitive (I seem to remember about five minutes), but drivers are probably too lazy to do a proper job of it anyway.
Whatever your manufacturer says, nearly all NTSC TV sets struggle to display more than 350 or so lines of resolution across,
For broadcast, 350 or so is about all you can get on NTSC. Where it makes a difference with DVD, more recent game systems and some digital cable / satellite systems.
My 27" Wega - an interlaced NTSC set - gets about 500 lines of resolution pretty easily. I fine-tuned it pretty well. It was pretty nice outside the box, but out of the box performance is always shortchanging yourself if you can spend a few minutes with an AVIA DVD. I took it a step further by going into service mode to tweak it even more against the appropriate test frames.
No, the cost is $3000-$3300
Those prices must be really new, like within the past couple months, prices have been going down pretty quickly. I really don't know if I'd trust Daewoo myself, I would rather trust NEC, Panasonic or Pioneer plasmas simply because they have a longer track record with this technology.
I liked the Daewoo (is that what is was?) at Costco...certainly superior to any projection set. Is it perfect? Nope. But physically its very nice, and like I said, its way better than the projection TV's.
Front or rear projection? You really aren't being specific in your claims.
With front projection, it's not hard to get a higher resolution projection set that beats a plasma on resolution - at a lower cost.
If you are basing it on store displays, store displays aren't even calibrated - something that CRTs need before being critiqued on quality. Plasmas can't go out of focus because of the fixed pixel structure, so the need for calibration is a bit less - but they still need to be color checked.
I don't like rear projection sets (typically three color tubes inside a big box) because of the high directionality of the screen lens. I do like front projection because of the flexibility, and the five to twenty pound weight is a heck of a lot easier to move and hang than eighty to a hundred.
In general, the only parameter that plasmas are consistently better than front projection is with lighting - because plasmas are emmissive on a black background, they can be used with higher lighting.
Either way, I prefer my XGA FP over a 42" plasma - it is a bit higher resolution, cost me half as much and I get a 160" screen.
You seem to overestimate the cost and underestimate the brightness of front projection.
You also completely omitted DLP - Display Light Processing by Texas Instruments, which now gets contrast ratios that rival CRTs. They are available in front and rear projections.
As for resolution, a 42" plasma is about 865x480 (WVGA), and cost between $4000 to $6000, whereas a projector of comparable resolution can be had for $1500. A 50" plasma runs about $10000-$13000 and those resolve about 1280x720, which is WXGA. One can get several WXGA video projectors costing from $3000 to over $10000.
You don't seem to think that the available projection brightness rating is a lot but it is pretty good and has been improving for quite some time. I think 1000 lumens it would be about as much brightness as said 42" plasma sets put out, and you can adjust the projected image size. The difference is that because projectors rely on reflected rather than emitted light to show an image on a screen, emitted light makes a difference in how the screen looks. Reflected light systems wash out a little easier because the base screen is white rather than black.
A 16X DVD-ROM would spin at the same speed as a 48X CD-ROM and would transfer 21.13 MBps (megabytes per second). This would take about 3.7 minutes to fill a 4.7 GB disk.
In reality, I am guessing that the RPM limitations would take hold on the inner tracks. Like with 48x CD writers, where lead-in, lead-out and RPM limits prevent a faster write, I think it would be more realistic to expect six or seven minute burns. That is still pretty fast though.
Astronomers and cosmologists use the term "metal" as a shorthand for anything other than hydrogen and helium.
Why am I not surprised?
Heck, I think physics and chemistry has two opposing views on electron charge flow, and electrical engineering holds that both are true. It's pretty frustrating to deal with this sort of crap.
As for an offician name for Earth's companion, how about Luna? That's what I thought it was to a number of scientists.
Are CD-Rs really taxed 21c CDN?
Interesting category:
"CD-Rs and CD-RWs (100 megabytes or more in capacity"
Are there any of these with less than 100MB capacity? 8cm CDs are around 150MB
The thing I question about the page is that it appears to not have been updated since late spring, specifically, I see no update since 2002 March 31, the amounts listed are proposed and the page has no indication saying that it has been enacted.
Doh! I shouldn't post when tired. Correct it to:
"I would attribute it to the post lacking organization and not having paragraphs or whitespace."
I would attribute it the post lacking organization and not having paragraphs or whitespace.
I really haven't seen the anime makes it to Cartoon Network these days, but, IMO, the USA cartoons of late simply don't look good to me. The Tenchi, BeBop and Outlaw Star on CN looks better to me than most of anything else I've seen on there, except for the cartoon classics, I suppose. The recent USA stuff sometimes makes Simpsons look like high art. YuGiOh and some other anime does look like crap.
BTW, I do like Simpsons, Futurama and did like the one episode of Invader Zim that I caught, I guess the last two are on CN.
I guess animation in general is just crap, but I don't mind so much as I can and do pick and choose what I watch.
As for animation vs. drawing style, I guess I prefer good drawing style animated not so well than a simpler drawing style animated well.