The PS3 isn't particularly quick about going from the off-state to starting a new Blu-Ray title that it hasn't seen before, either. (Or at least neither of mine have ever been.)
The first cap lived for about 5 years of being on 24/7, and likely died so "quickly" due to heat (it was at the very top of the PSU board, which had its own little poorly-vented housing inside the display). The replacement is rated at 105C instead of (IIRC) 85C, which is a fairly substantial difference, and Nichicon is not generally known for producing junk. If it lasts 7 years instead of 5, it's a win. (I'll let you know in another half-decade how it's working.)
I don't think my local Radio Shack store is all that special -- it's just just a typical corporate-owned place, of the same type that has been in a lot of malls and similar places for a decade and a half (or whenever it was that they switched almost completely over to being a cell phone vendor, after their brief stint at trying to be a toy store).
I also buy little 1:1 audio transformers from there, quite on purpose, even to the point of ordering them from radioshack.com. They perform very well for what they are, and behave consistently (and always have -- they've never, ever changed). I use them for everything from driving long balanced lines (sometimes tens of miles) to isolating telephone circuitry from audio circuitry. For these applications, I don't care much what it costs, since I'm just reselling them anyway, but even at ~$4 each they sure seem like a good deal. I just wish the pigtails were a little heavier so I could use them with telco-oriented IDC connections instead of crimping or soldering...
I have seen a few rather awesome "Radio Shack" stores, but they've all been Radio Shack dealers -- not a segment of the usual corporate entity.
And I rather like their silver solder, which I've been using for at least 20 years where it seems appropriate. It's pretty close to being eutectic, which usually makes for better joints than non-eutectic solder does when doing hand-held work, and the flux is adequate.
To be sure, a lot of their stuff is crap: Their house brand "tuner cleaner" eats plastic pots and should be removed from the shelves, and their "contact cleaner" doesn't seem to do anything at all to metal contacts. But they've also been selling Deoxit DN5 there for awhile, too, which does work, and I simply can't buy that stuff from brick-and-mortar retail from anywhere but Radio Shack.
A lot of what people complain about simply isn't all that true: A few years ago I discovered that I needed a handful of 600 Ohm resistors in the field. The local Radio Shack had some, packed in small quantities for way too much money, but they also had a large assortment of 500 or 600 pieces of various values for about $9 (with more quantity of more common ones, and fewer of more odd values).
With that $9 resistor kit, I solved the problem that I had that day, and have been able to come up with whatever else I've needed ever since. It has paid for itself several times.
YMMV, but in the corner of Ohio that I travel and work in, Radio Shack is about the best I can do. (I've also been known to buy basic parts from local TV repair places and audio shops, if that's handy (it seldom is), but the price for a few resistors or small caps at such locations is either several dollars (ala Radio Shack) or free (not worth the time for them to deal with the paperwork of a sale)).
For the longest time, as a kid, we had a gas meter in our house. It was just at the bottom of the basement steps.
The dude responsible for reading this meter had a key to the door by the steps. He'd just let himself in, announce "Gas Man" to whoever might be in earshot, read the the meter, and lock up afterward. This usually happened very early in the morning, before the sun was up: It might as well have been 3 AM, since everyone was usually still asleep anyway.
It never was a problem. But then, I grew up in a nice neighborhood, and we never bothered to lock the doors on the house (except, somewhat ironically, the side door that the gas man used).
If someone would like to help themselves in and out of my house in order to give me free heat and fast Intarwebs, instead to tally up how much to charge me money for heat, I'm all for it. It sounds like a much better bargain than my previous forays with non-paying housemates. I'll even make sure there's good coffee and cold beer for them if I know when they're showing up.
Meanwhile, flooding: It's not so hard to keep equipment safe from artificial floods. Just keep it out of the basement to eliminate the presence of standing water, and use appropriately-rated NEMA enclosures. (Or, you know: Just never locate it adjacent to plumbing.)
Break-ins? Between alarms and security fasteners, this sounds like a big "meh" to me: There's always another house down the block with just as much household crap that doesn't have any alarms at all. From the perspective of a common thief, the data center in my spare bedroom full of specialized and difficult-to-sell hardware is not an ideal target.
I use high-bitrate MP3 so that I never, ever have to re-encode anything to begin with: It quite simply already plays everywhere, on every bit of audio kit that I have, from my cars to my living room to the various widgets I carry in my pocket. FLAC, on the other hand, only plays natively on my PC(s) and my Android phone, and is something I'd need to convert to some other format in order to use.
It's not about space, as storage is plentiful and cheap. And it's not about quality, as LAME @320kbps is quite awesome. For me, at least, it's about convenience: It's hard enough to keep a large and well-organized library of music without having to tailor portions of it for select devices.
It took about an hour, including a trip to buy a capacitor.
And I can't buy a decent 19" LCD with an hour of my time, nor can I trade an hour of my time to motivate someone else to fix a broken one on my behalf. It was, according to your theory, time well-spent.
But moreover, I enjoy that sort of work. I think I'd grow tired of it in a hurry if I were repairing electronics for 40 hours a week, but I don't. Instead, it's a perfectly pleasurable way to kill some time every now and then, get something tangibly beneficial as a result, and maybe learn something along the way.
Do you amortize all of your hobbies? I sure don't. That's why they're "hobbies."
If all of my free time were suddenly worth $50 per hour, I'd also go outside immediately, and tear out my garden, and pay someone else to ferry fruits and vegetables back from the market for me so that I wouldn't even have to spend any of my precious free time dealing with such minutia as food.
But life just ain't like that. So, yeah: I fix stuff when I can. And I grow stuff, even though it's generally cheaper to buy tomatoes and peppers at the store. It's called "free time" for a reason.
The cap I bought from the "let me sell you a cell phone store" is low-ESR and has a higher temperature rating than the one it replaced. It also is, accordingly, just a bit larger (but there happened to be plenty of room for it).
I had alluded to that earlier when I declared that it was better, but apparently you felt I was unqualified to make such a statement.
Just because Radio Shack is overpriced does not mean that it is always both overpriced and junk. In particular, I detect nothing at all wrong with their electrolytic capacitors, aside from high prices and limited selection.
If I wanted to pay more for shipping than I did for RS markup and wait a few days to get things put back together, I very likely would have ordered exactly the same Nichicon part from Mouser or Digikey as I bought from Radio Shack.
Lightning "protection" is always engineered into projects of this scale, whatever type of project it may be. Much of it consists of good and pervasive grounding (which should be easy on a train, almost by default), along with transient voltage suppression (which generally relies on good grounding). Sometimes, more active elements are used (lightning rods, which is a whole school of practice unto itself).
But, you know: Shit happens.
As we say in the RF world: Lightning goes where it wants to.
Good luck. Please let us know when you've got something.
But stereo? Come on, man... There's a whole world of perfectly awesome stereo preamps out there right now, for cheap.
For instance: I've got a Yamaha C-2 which has got to be 30 years old which is all-discrete, has never been modified or repaired (other than cleaning and lubricating the switches), and it's a joy to listen to. It is built about as solidly and carefully as anything ever was. It was free. It lacks a remote, and it's not programmable in any fashion, but meh.:)
What I want is a surround preamp which doesn't cost multi-$k, or have a bunch of amplifier circuitry that I don't want to be using anyway. If you can build something with even the paltry featureset of a $300 Sherwood receiver, but with good analog electronics and without built-in amplifiers, that'd be awesome. (And if you could afford to sell it for $5-600, people might even line up for it.)
CCFL backlight tubes (like your set has) are replaceable. It's not generally a very fun process as it takes some time to do, but it is do-able.
We've replaced a few in the shop, mostly on laptops, but the concept is exactly the same as size scales up.
The most common failure I see on LCDs these days, is electrolytic capacitors. I fixed dodgy a 19" Viewsonic LCD a month or so ago at home by replacing a visibly swollen cap with a $2 Nichicon from Radio Shack. (Yep, I got ripped off on the part, but it's so cheap that it really doesn't matter, was cash-and-carry, and the new part is better enough than the old one that it's unlikely to fail that way again.)
The hardest part, in both cases, is just the basic disassembly and reassembly. And these things are generally far easier to take apart than, say, an iPod...
Whether it's worth it or not to fix (or have fixed) your LCD when it fails is up to you. But back to the topic of TFA: If/when you decide that it's had enough, do the landfill a favor and at least try to give it away on Craigslist or something first.
I mean: If it dies tomorrow, I (for one) would love to try to rescue it for a bedroom TV, or a wall-mounted PC display, or something cheap to occasionally hang up by the pool. And even though I suck at component-level troubleshooting, I'd have a crack at fixing it.
I see folks with headphones from time to time, sure. But I see way, way more folks without. One might even take this simple observation and make the bold statement that, normally, people aren't wearing headphones.
I also saw folks with headphones on during the 80s and 90s from time to time, too, and it wasn't "the norm" then, either.
*shrug*
Meanwhile: A commercial radio station normally does so much dynamic compression on their own that that even wildly dynamic classics become just as dull and lifeless as the latest tripe from Nickelback. Whether the recorded material is purposefully compressed or not has vanishingly little to do with how the end result sounds in a typical modern broadcast environment.
This isn't a very new concept, either. The FCC places strict limits on modulation, and in order to stay in compliance with them, hard limiting is used for FM broadcast, and always has. Modern techniques are much fancier and complex due mostly to advances in DSP technology...but those advancements are far too often used to just squeeze even more perceived loudness out of a given amount of modulation.
It takes a rare combinations of sane management, good (read: minimalist) engineering practices, and skilled DJs who understand the material, know how to listen with their ears and watch output levels with their eyes to create a smooth mix that never runs into limiting.
So, as a practical matter: Completely uncompressed broadcast FM radio doesn't generally exist, and never really has.
Being able to access your collection from multiple devices from anywhere with an internet connection is the major draw of Subsonic. I'm still trying it out and deciding if it's awesome or just kinda cool, but so far I'm liking not having to upload everything to the cloud first.
Such listeners should just change the dynamics themselves, then: The correct point at which to apply dynamic range compression to compensate for a noisy listening environment is within the playback chain for that particular environment.
It's not so hard. My first portable MP3 player had the ability to apply dynamic compression. My not-so-special Pioneer stereos have this ability as well. So does my Droid. So does even the lowly factory CD player in a 1993 Ford van. And my PC. (I'd go on, but why?)
One can always add more compression/limiting ("loudness"), but once applied it's impossible to take away.
Meanwhile, listening environments haven't changed substantially since the first confluence of the walkman, the portable radio ("boombox"), the home hi-fi, and the car stereo: People still listen variously on headphones, or with barely-adequate portable speakers, or in their home on a properly set-up system, or on ruddy computer speakers (not dissimilar from the discount "rack systems" of yesteryear), or in noisy car, with the same variety of background noise that has always existed when listening to recorded music.
All that has really changed in the past 30 years that it's currently very easy to carry a vast amount of high-quality music in a very portable and readily-retrievable fashion, which was previously impossible. I submit that this improved portability has nothing to do with the dynamic content of that music.
The cameras in question are typically on the cars, not in them.
Around here, they are specifically mounted on the trunk lid, and are very conspicuous indeed. They could be disabled very quickly indeed with a good ball-peen hammer, or a sharp knife.
I sincerely doubt that Netflix pays the normal rate at the USPS. I don't think we have any idea if there's been "little change" in their prices for postage, or big changes, or whether those changes are positive or negative.
My local mail dude looks more like a Netflix delivery person than a letter carrier these days. Every time I see him, he's walking around with a big armload of red Netflix mailers, and I'm sure my neighborhood isn't unique in this regard: I'd not be surprised if Netflix sends more first-class mail than anyone else, just as they also use more bandwidth than any other singular entity.
This level of utilization is certain to gain them some bargaining room.
To further support my notion that we have no idea what Netflix pays in postage: Netflix is still opening more distribution facilities. A year or two, my DVDs started coming from Toledo instead of Columbus.
The Columbus facility already provided consistent next-day transit to pretty darn near all of Ohio, and those places not 1 day away already also had a closer DC, so the Toledo build-out certainly wasn't to provide more timely deliveries (which were already excellent).
Instead, the only reason to have added a Toledo facility is to further reduce the burden of their postage (which is likely based on distance traveled).
It's a minor point, I guess, but I think it's an important one since it might help explain the massive increase in subscription costs.
I try to avoid hardware RAID at all costs (the Linux md driver is just fine for my purposes, is free of hardware dependencies, and can probably also have its volumes read with *BSD with a bit of massaging if needed. Besides, CPU and IO time is cheap for what I do, so there's no performance hit for doing it in software.).
So. If I wanted a hardware RAID solution for some reason (perhaps for improved OS independence and/or less CPU and IO overhead), why would I not want one from Xyratex?
I've got a USB 3.5" floppy drive that I bought about six years ago. I've only used it a few times, but it's a glorious little thing when it's needed.
I've also got a couple of 5.25" drives (both low and high density, which is important due to the difference in head sizes), but those are available (and cheap!) too.
I've got a box full of QIC-80 and DDS tapes, both of which (AFAICT) are abandoned standards. I don't have a drive for either of them anymore, but that's not really a problem: If I ever wanted to try to read one, Ebay has a working drive.
Now, sure: If I buy used hardware, there's a chance that it doesn't work. So what? Buy several pieces of it. At about $25-50 each, it's not a big deal. (And if your old data isn't worth $100-200, it's probably not worth reading anyway...)
So, I guess my point is that my removable media from 20 years ago should be very readable indeed, if bit-rot hasn't gotten to it first. And then, after performing the restores and the format-shift to something modern, re-sell the drive(s). (You'll recoup at least part of your investment, and help someone else out. Ebay can be an excellent rental program.)
Probably the most important thing, I think, when choosing a medium for long-term storage is this: Buy whatever it is that is both good, and that is compatible with whatever everyone else is buying, and avoid obvious cheese. This ensures that the hardware will still be available in a decade or two, and avoids cheesy things like LS-120, MD Data, and Floptical that never were very good and would be a bear to deal with in the present.
Hot roofs help snow melt. Snow melting helps roofs not collapse from the weight.
On the other hand, unevenly hot roofs + snow can cause ice dams to form, which can cause a host of other problems. Keeping the whole thing very cold (ala painted white) should help with this.
And, further: Attics are often very easy and very inexpensive to insulate very thoroughly. So, it shouldn't matter (much) what the temperature of the attic is when this is done.
Unless there is something else that is meritorious about white roofs, then it seems like it's all just tradeoffs to me. Nothing here is persuading me to make a point of painting my galvanized standing seam roof any color other than what it already is, nor is it helping me to decide what color of coating to select when the zinc starts to wear thin in another couple of decades.
I don't know how your household works, but in mine my wife and I compete for desktop PC geek points amongst ourselves and our friends, and neither of us are teenaged boys.
And...phones? Seriously? If I'm interested in performance for whatever task I'm doing, I probably also am interested in a display larger than my hand (along with a real keyboard, and a real mouse, and real accessories).
I don't game on my phone much, because when I'm out and about, I'm simply not bored much. Whether working or driving or walking through the forest, I've almost always got better things to do than sit in solitude away from home and play a game: There's always things and people to see and do, even when I'm out of town.
My "old" Motorola Droid generally does just fine (except sometimes I wish it had more RAM). (Oh, and interestingly, RAM is the last thing folks seem to brag about in the phone market. It's all about gee-whiz 3D displays, multi-core CPUs, and video chips to accelerate the 3D games that generally don't even exist.)
Meanwhile: In the evening when I'm bored at home, I've got a desktop and an extremely comfortable chair.
And it's always been about performance and cost: Even in the best of economies, people don't generally throw around money like fools. Only fairly recently has heat (and therefore power consumption) been even a moderate concern in a home environment, but that may have more to do with the TDP of CPUs and GPUs going through the roof compared to 15 years ago than anything else.
Heh. I'm running a 1.83GHz Intel Pentium-M on my daily-use laptop. Its performance is absolutely satisfactory, as well, and it just turned 7 years old.
I had the option, recently, of buying a new battery for that machine or buying a new battery for a very similar, just-a-bit-newer Core Duo laptop that I also have (with a far-lesser display), or buying something completely different.
I elected to buy a battery for the old Pentium-M machine: It still does what I want, still feels quick compared to far-faster machines, and works just great for the stuff that actually earns me money.
But I don't mix multi-track audio on it, edit video, or do Serious Computations with it at all anymore (I did all of those when it was new). The hardest work it sees these days is probably when I watch Youtube videos and porn while torrenting the hell out of the hotel's bandwidth when I'm on the road, and it keeps up with that without a fight.
I don't see how sound effects can't be done on a GPU, either. But until that rewrite happens (which it ought to -- it makes too much sense), we'll be still CPU bound for audio tasks.
(Are we discussing today, tomorrow, or the mysterious future?)
It's no different than the hype behind the Athlon. Or behind Cyrix/IBM's low-cost 6x86MX. Or AMD's then-fast 40MHz 386 clones in both SX and DX variants. Or even the NEC V20.
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The PS3 isn't particularly quick about going from the off-state to starting a new Blu-Ray title that it hasn't seen before, either. (Or at least neither of mine have ever been.)
The first cap lived for about 5 years of being on 24/7, and likely died so "quickly" due to heat (it was at the very top of the PSU board, which had its own little poorly-vented housing inside the display). The replacement is rated at 105C instead of (IIRC) 85C, which is a fairly substantial difference, and Nichicon is not generally known for producing junk. If it lasts 7 years instead of 5, it's a win. (I'll let you know in another half-decade how it's working.)
I don't think my local Radio Shack store is all that special -- it's just just a typical corporate-owned place, of the same type that has been in a lot of malls and similar places for a decade and a half (or whenever it was that they switched almost completely over to being a cell phone vendor, after their brief stint at trying to be a toy store).
I also buy little 1:1 audio transformers from there, quite on purpose, even to the point of ordering them from radioshack.com. They perform very well for what they are, and behave consistently (and always have -- they've never, ever changed). I use them for everything from driving long balanced lines (sometimes tens of miles) to isolating telephone circuitry from audio circuitry. For these applications, I don't care much what it costs, since I'm just reselling them anyway, but even at ~$4 each they sure seem like a good deal. I just wish the pigtails were a little heavier so I could use them with telco-oriented IDC connections instead of crimping or soldering...
I have seen a few rather awesome "Radio Shack" stores, but they've all been Radio Shack dealers -- not a segment of the usual corporate entity.
And I rather like their silver solder, which I've been using for at least 20 years where it seems appropriate. It's pretty close to being eutectic, which usually makes for better joints than non-eutectic solder does when doing hand-held work, and the flux is adequate.
To be sure, a lot of their stuff is crap: Their house brand "tuner cleaner" eats plastic pots and should be removed from the shelves, and their "contact cleaner" doesn't seem to do anything at all to metal contacts. But they've also been selling Deoxit DN5 there for awhile, too, which does work, and I simply can't buy that stuff from brick-and-mortar retail from anywhere but Radio Shack.
A lot of what people complain about simply isn't all that true: A few years ago I discovered that I needed a handful of 600 Ohm resistors in the field. The local Radio Shack had some, packed in small quantities for way too much money, but they also had a large assortment of 500 or 600 pieces of various values for about $9 (with more quantity of more common ones, and fewer of more odd values).
With that $9 resistor kit, I solved the problem that I had that day, and have been able to come up with whatever else I've needed ever since. It has paid for itself several times.
YMMV, but in the corner of Ohio that I travel and work in, Radio Shack is about the best I can do. (I've also been known to buy basic parts from local TV repair places and audio shops, if that's handy (it seldom is), but the price for a few resistors or small caps at such locations is either several dollars (ala Radio Shack) or free (not worth the time for them to deal with the paperwork of a sale)).
For the longest time, as a kid, we had a gas meter in our house. It was just at the bottom of the basement steps.
The dude responsible for reading this meter had a key to the door by the steps. He'd just let himself in, announce "Gas Man" to whoever might be in earshot, read the the meter, and lock up afterward. This usually happened very early in the morning, before the sun was up: It might as well have been 3 AM, since everyone was usually still asleep anyway.
It never was a problem. But then, I grew up in a nice neighborhood, and we never bothered to lock the doors on the house (except, somewhat ironically, the side door that the gas man used).
If someone would like to help themselves in and out of my house in order to give me free heat and fast Intarwebs, instead to tally up how much to charge me money for heat, I'm all for it. It sounds like a much better bargain than my previous forays with non-paying housemates. I'll even make sure there's good coffee and cold beer for them if I know when they're showing up.
Meanwhile, flooding: It's not so hard to keep equipment safe from artificial floods. Just keep it out of the basement to eliminate the presence of standing water, and use appropriately-rated NEMA enclosures. (Or, you know: Just never locate it adjacent to plumbing.)
Break-ins? Between alarms and security fasteners, this sounds like a big "meh" to me: There's always another house down the block with just as much household crap that doesn't have any alarms at all. From the perspective of a common thief, the data center in my spare bedroom full of specialized and difficult-to-sell hardware is not an ideal target.
Yes. Always.
I use high-bitrate MP3 so that I never, ever have to re-encode anything to begin with: It quite simply already plays everywhere, on every bit of audio kit that I have, from my cars to my living room to the various widgets I carry in my pocket. FLAC, on the other hand, only plays natively on my PC(s) and my Android phone, and is something I'd need to convert to some other format in order to use.
It's not about space, as storage is plentiful and cheap. And it's not about quality, as LAME @320kbps is quite awesome. For me, at least, it's about convenience: It's hard enough to keep a large and well-organized library of music without having to tailor portions of it for select devices.
It took about an hour, including a trip to buy a capacitor.
And I can't buy a decent 19" LCD with an hour of my time, nor can I trade an hour of my time to motivate someone else to fix a broken one on my behalf. It was, according to your theory, time well-spent.
But moreover, I enjoy that sort of work. I think I'd grow tired of it in a hurry if I were repairing electronics for 40 hours a week, but I don't. Instead, it's a perfectly pleasurable way to kill some time every now and then, get something tangibly beneficial as a result, and maybe learn something along the way.
Do you amortize all of your hobbies? I sure don't. That's why they're "hobbies."
If all of my free time were suddenly worth $50 per hour, I'd also go outside immediately, and tear out my garden, and pay someone else to ferry fruits and vegetables back from the market for me so that I wouldn't even have to spend any of my precious free time dealing with such minutia as food.
But life just ain't like that. So, yeah: I fix stuff when I can. And I grow stuff, even though it's generally cheaper to buy tomatoes and peppers at the store. It's called "free time" for a reason.
Thanks for all the verbiage.
The cap I bought from the "let me sell you a cell phone store" is low-ESR and has a higher temperature rating than the one it replaced. It also is, accordingly, just a bit larger (but there happened to be plenty of room for it).
I had alluded to that earlier when I declared that it was better, but apparently you felt I was unqualified to make such a statement.
Just because Radio Shack is overpriced does not mean that it is always both overpriced and junk. In particular, I detect nothing at all wrong with their electrolytic capacitors, aside from high prices and limited selection.
If I wanted to pay more for shipping than I did for RS markup and wait a few days to get things put back together, I very likely would have ordered exactly the same Nichicon part from Mouser or Digikey as I bought from Radio Shack.
(What were you going on about, again?)
Did you mean Pascals?
Indeed. Let's have it.
Lightning "protection" is always engineered into projects of this scale, whatever type of project it may be. Much of it consists of good and pervasive grounding (which should be easy on a train, almost by default), along with transient voltage suppression (which generally relies on good grounding). Sometimes, more active elements are used (lightning rods, which is a whole school of practice unto itself).
But, you know: Shit happens.
As we say in the RF world: Lightning goes where it wants to.
Good luck. Please let us know when you've got something.
But stereo? Come on, man... There's a whole world of perfectly awesome stereo preamps out there right now, for cheap.
For instance: I've got a Yamaha C-2 which has got to be 30 years old which is all-discrete, has never been modified or repaired (other than cleaning and lubricating the switches), and it's a joy to listen to. It is built about as solidly and carefully as anything ever was. It was free. It lacks a remote, and it's not programmable in any fashion, but meh. :)
What I want is a surround preamp which doesn't cost multi-$k, or have a bunch of amplifier circuitry that I don't want to be using anyway. If you can build something with even the paltry featureset of a $300 Sherwood receiver, but with good analog electronics and without built-in amplifiers, that'd be awesome. (And if you could afford to sell it for $5-600, people might even line up for it.)
CCFL backlight tubes (like your set has) are replaceable. It's not generally a very fun process as it takes some time to do, but it is do-able.
We've replaced a few in the shop, mostly on laptops, but the concept is exactly the same as size scales up.
The most common failure I see on LCDs these days, is electrolytic capacitors. I fixed dodgy a 19" Viewsonic LCD a month or so ago at home by replacing a visibly swollen cap with a $2 Nichicon from Radio Shack. (Yep, I got ripped off on the part, but it's so cheap that it really doesn't matter, was cash-and-carry, and the new part is better enough than the old one that it's unlikely to fail that way again.)
The hardest part, in both cases, is just the basic disassembly and reassembly. And these things are generally far easier to take apart than, say, an iPod...
Whether it's worth it or not to fix (or have fixed) your LCD when it fails is up to you. But back to the topic of TFA: If/when you decide that it's had enough, do the landfill a favor and at least try to give it away on Craigslist or something first.
I mean: If it dies tomorrow, I (for one) would love to try to rescue it for a bedroom TV, or a wall-mounted PC display, or something cheap to occasionally hang up by the pool. And even though I suck at component-level troubleshooting, I'd have a crack at fixing it.
The norm? Really?
Strange place, this "norm" of yours.
I see folks with headphones from time to time, sure. But I see way, way more folks without. One might even take this simple observation and make the bold statement that, normally, people aren't wearing headphones.
I also saw folks with headphones on during the 80s and 90s from time to time, too, and it wasn't "the norm" then, either.
*shrug*
Meanwhile: A commercial radio station normally does so much dynamic compression on their own that that even wildly dynamic classics become just as dull and lifeless as the latest tripe from Nickelback. Whether the recorded material is purposefully compressed or not has vanishingly little to do with how the end result sounds in a typical modern broadcast environment.
This isn't a very new concept, either. The FCC places strict limits on modulation, and in order to stay in compliance with them, hard limiting is used for FM broadcast, and always has. Modern techniques are much fancier and complex due mostly to advances in DSP technology...but those advancements are far too often used to just squeeze even more perceived loudness out of a given amount of modulation.
It takes a rare combinations of sane management, good (read: minimalist) engineering practices, and skilled DJs who understand the material, know how to listen with their ears and watch output levels with their eyes to create a smooth mix that never runs into limiting.
So, as a practical matter: Completely uncompressed broadcast FM radio doesn't generally exist, and never really has.
There. Fixed that for you.
Such listeners should just change the dynamics themselves, then: The correct point at which to apply dynamic range compression to compensate for a noisy listening environment is within the playback chain for that particular environment.
It's not so hard. My first portable MP3 player had the ability to apply dynamic compression. My not-so-special Pioneer stereos have this ability as well. So does my Droid. So does even the lowly factory CD player in a 1993 Ford van. And my PC. (I'd go on, but why?)
One can always add more compression/limiting ("loudness"), but once applied it's impossible to take away.
Meanwhile, listening environments haven't changed substantially since the first confluence of the walkman, the portable radio ("boombox"), the home hi-fi, and the car stereo: People still listen variously on headphones, or with barely-adequate portable speakers, or in their home on a properly set-up system, or on ruddy computer speakers (not dissimilar from the discount "rack systems" of yesteryear), or in noisy car, with the same variety of background noise that has always existed when listening to recorded music.
All that has really changed in the past 30 years that it's currently very easy to carry a vast amount of high-quality music in a very portable and readily-retrievable fashion, which was previously impossible. I submit that this improved portability has nothing to do with the dynamic content of that music.
The cameras in question are typically on the cars, not in them.
Around here, they are specifically mounted on the trunk lid, and are very conspicuous indeed. They could be disabled very quickly indeed with a good ball-peen hammer, or a sharp knife.
I'm just sayin'.
"About $1?" Based on...what?
I sincerely doubt that Netflix pays the normal rate at the USPS. I don't think we have any idea if there's been "little change" in their prices for postage, or big changes, or whether those changes are positive or negative.
My local mail dude looks more like a Netflix delivery person than a letter carrier these days. Every time I see him, he's walking around with a big armload of red Netflix mailers, and I'm sure my neighborhood isn't unique in this regard: I'd not be surprised if Netflix sends more first-class mail than anyone else, just as they also use more bandwidth than any other singular entity.
This level of utilization is certain to gain them some bargaining room.
To further support my notion that we have no idea what Netflix pays in postage: Netflix is still opening more distribution facilities. A year or two, my DVDs started coming from Toledo instead of Columbus.
The Columbus facility already provided consistent next-day transit to pretty darn near all of Ohio, and those places not 1 day away already also had a closer DC, so the Toledo build-out certainly wasn't to provide more timely deliveries (which were already excellent).
Instead, the only reason to have added a Toledo facility is to further reduce the burden of their postage (which is likely based on distance traveled).
It's a minor point, I guess, but I think it's an important one since it might help explain the massive increase in subscription costs.
Why?
I try to avoid hardware RAID at all costs (the Linux md driver is just fine for my purposes, is free of hardware dependencies, and can probably also have its volumes read with *BSD with a bit of massaging if needed. Besides, CPU and IO time is cheap for what I do, so there's no performance hit for doing it in software.).
So. If I wanted a hardware RAID solution for some reason (perhaps for improved OS independence and/or less CPU and IO overhead), why would I not want one from Xyratex?
Media doesn't age as fast as you think.
I've got a USB 3.5" floppy drive that I bought about six years ago. I've only used it a few times, but it's a glorious little thing when it's needed.
I've also got a couple of 5.25" drives (both low and high density, which is important due to the difference in head sizes), but those are available (and cheap!) too.
I've got a box full of QIC-80 and DDS tapes, both of which (AFAICT) are abandoned standards. I don't have a drive for either of them anymore, but that's not really a problem: If I ever wanted to try to read one, Ebay has a working drive.
Now, sure: If I buy used hardware, there's a chance that it doesn't work. So what? Buy several pieces of it. At about $25-50 each, it's not a big deal. (And if your old data isn't worth $100-200, it's probably not worth reading anyway...)
So, I guess my point is that my removable media from 20 years ago should be very readable indeed, if bit-rot hasn't gotten to it first. And then, after performing the restores and the format-shift to something modern, re-sell the drive(s). (You'll recoup at least part of your investment, and help someone else out. Ebay can be an excellent rental program.)
Probably the most important thing, I think, when choosing a medium for long-term storage is this: Buy whatever it is that is both good, and that is compatible with whatever everyone else is buying, and avoid obvious cheese. This ensures that the hardware will still be available in a decade or two, and avoids cheesy things like LS-120, MD Data, and Floptical that never were very good and would be a bear to deal with in the present.
Hot roofs help snow melt. Snow melting helps roofs not collapse from the weight.
On the other hand, unevenly hot roofs + snow can cause ice dams to form, which can cause a host of other problems. Keeping the whole thing very cold (ala painted white) should help with this.
And, further: Attics are often very easy and very inexpensive to insulate very thoroughly. So, it shouldn't matter (much) what the temperature of the attic is when this is done.
Unless there is something else that is meritorious about white roofs, then it seems like it's all just tradeoffs to me. Nothing here is persuading me to make a point of painting my galvanized standing seam roof any color other than what it already is, nor is it helping me to decide what color of coating to select when the zinc starts to wear thin in another couple of decades.
I don't know how your household works, but in mine my wife and I compete for desktop PC geek points amongst ourselves and our friends, and neither of us are teenaged boys.
And...phones? Seriously? If I'm interested in performance for whatever task I'm doing, I probably also am interested in a display larger than my hand (along with a real keyboard, and a real mouse, and real accessories).
I don't game on my phone much, because when I'm out and about, I'm simply not bored much. Whether working or driving or walking through the forest, I've almost always got better things to do than sit in solitude away from home and play a game: There's always things and people to see and do, even when I'm out of town.
My "old" Motorola Droid generally does just fine (except sometimes I wish it had more RAM). (Oh, and interestingly, RAM is the last thing folks seem to brag about in the phone market. It's all about gee-whiz 3D displays, multi-core CPUs, and video chips to accelerate the 3D games that generally don't even exist.)
Meanwhile: In the evening when I'm bored at home, I've got a desktop and an extremely comfortable chair.
And it's always been about performance and cost: Even in the best of economies, people don't generally throw around money like fools. Only fairly recently has heat (and therefore power consumption) been even a moderate concern in a home environment, but that may have more to do with the TDP of CPUs and GPUs going through the roof compared to 15 years ago than anything else.
*shrug*
Heh. I'm running a 1.83GHz Intel Pentium-M on my daily-use laptop. Its performance is absolutely satisfactory, as well, and it just turned 7 years old.
I had the option, recently, of buying a new battery for that machine or buying a new battery for a very similar, just-a-bit-newer Core Duo laptop that I also have (with a far-lesser display), or buying something completely different.
I elected to buy a battery for the old Pentium-M machine: It still does what I want, still feels quick compared to far-faster machines, and works just great for the stuff that actually earns me money.
But I don't mix multi-track audio on it, edit video, or do Serious Computations with it at all anymore (I did all of those when it was new). The hardest work it sees these days is probably when I watch Youtube videos and porn while torrenting the hell out of the hotel's bandwidth when I'm on the road, and it keeps up with that without a fight.
I don't see how sound effects can't be done on a GPU, either. But until that rewrite happens (which it ought to -- it makes too much sense), we'll be still CPU bound for audio tasks.
(Are we discussing today, tomorrow, or the mysterious future?)
It's no different than the hype behind the Athlon. Or behind Cyrix/IBM's low-cost 6x86MX. Or AMD's then-fast 40MHz 386 clones in both SX and DX variants. Or even the NEC V20.
Competition is good.