That's ONE company specializing in selling "custom"[1] batteries to end users. They're actually manufactured by God-knows-who in some far-eastern sweatshop, just like almost everything else small and toxic that we buy these days.
No matter. $5 says that the Archos battery is not anything of any remarkable uniqueness, anyway. The greatest involvement Archos had in the design of this battery was the shape and color of the plastic shell that it comes in[1]. Otherwise, it's just an off-the-shelf part from a catalog, much like the LCD, hard drive, microswitches, DSP, and other comprising hardware. Like these other generic parts, this particular battery is probably used in a number of different products.
Another $5 says that they (Archos) switch suppliers for all of these parts depending on who's got them cheapest today, and/or phase of moon.
Alas, it might not be very easy for you or I to locate a good overseas source of such a battery. Which is why we pay an importer $69[2] to do it for us and write up instructions. If your time is worth something, it's probably a good deal. Otherwise, there's bound to be cheaper suppliers (and methods) if you're willing to look for them.
1: Do you really think a small company is going to tool up a factory and start making specialized lithium batteries for their miniscule market? Niet.
2: Of course this costs more than a few 2300mAH AA NiMH cells. It's also more convenient[3][4].
3: You do realize that lithium batteries are lighter and more space-efficient than NiMH AAs, don't you? This translates directly to extra space in your pocket.
4: And don't say "but I can carry several 2300mAH AA NiMH battery sets and have several times as much runtime!" Who cares? If I'm removed from my usual surroundings long enough that I'm afraid my batteries will die, I'll just plug it in while I sleep. (You do SLEEP, don't you?) This means I'll have to have charging gear, which consumes space, but then so do AAs. If you really want to save space, standardize on USB as a charging system for all of your gear[2]. Plug it into the wall, or the car, or even the laptop (if you want to borrow some juice from another big-honkin' Li-ion battery). Do the same with your phone, or anything else that can charge from 5 volts. 2 cables and 2 adapters instead of at least 4 combination units and a USB cable to accomplish the same. USB is, dreadfully, not going away anytime soon - one might as well use it for something.
Why throw it away when the batteries wear out? Just buy new ones. Lithium batteries aren't terribly rare these days. The replacement process looks at least as simple as swapping screw-secured AA's on my 3-year-old kid's toys.
Your argument is flawed, probably to the point of being completely void.
Wal-Mart, the only specific retailer you've mentioned, has a very nice system for sampling CDs in every one of the stores that I've seen; far better than anything else I've ever used.
It's really quite simple. You just wander up to one-of-many listening stations with a random CD and put on the provided headphones. A conveniently-located barcode reader scans the UPC of the CD in question. After a very brief pause, music flows forth. You can listen to selected tracks in their entirety, or (I suppose) complete discs. It sounds quite nice, in my experience, free of any discernable MP3-esque faults.
Imagine that - the world's largest retailer, allowing customers to listen to music before they purchase it. And they've been doing it for -years-, long before Napster made "MP3" a dinnertable word.
Your argument thus invalidated, I'll move along to my own anecdotes while we see if Taco is willing to create a new mod category of -1, Treason:
I was sampling music from such places as cdnow (now gone), online, with Realaudio, before MPEG II Layer 3 audio existed.
Back then, I'd find potentially-interesting obscure music, listen cdnow's samples, write down the catalog number, and head down to the local music store to order it. It was the cheapest way I could get music, as I'd save paying for shipping from cdnow. I'd (usually) get my hands on the music faster than waiting for the USPS, too, and the jewel cases were never smashed.
Now, I find potentially-interesting music, and begin digging for high-bitrate oggs with winmx or giFT. It costs nothing to procure[1], and I get my hands on it immediately. If I'm feeling really energetic, I'll burn it to an audio CD for a dime. And if I feel like playing legit, I'll use a "music" CD-R with royalties pre-paid for an extra couple of pennies. It doesn't get much cheaper than this.
So much for try-before-you-buy, eh?
[1]: I still buy music on CD, on occasion. But generally, only from smaller, less common groups and labels that I want to hear more of in the future. Whether it affects their pocketbook or just their meager sales statistics. It's all I can do to encourage them (and their RIAA underwriters) to produce more music that I like.
Warning: I'm very biased. I earn my living working with this stuff, and if none of it sells, I don't get to eat. Caveat emptor, et cetera. That said, I'm attempting to post as a technically-inclined, completely satisfied user. I prefer leaving the sales BS to the sales guys who specialize in BS.
Altigen phone systems will do the tricks that you're after quite nicely. All of them. Automatically. And keep an account of all activity on a user-by-user basis.
Pick up the phone in the office, and just start dialing normally. Automagic least-cost routing will keep your bills to a minimum by using VOIP between offices and grabbing phone lines in remote locations as needed.
Or dial up the phone system remotely, from a cell phone, say. Log in (#, extension number, PIN), hit #, and bing: dial out to wherever you feel like, and things get routed as cheaply as possible.
There are, of course, restrictions available to this functionality, on a user-by-user basis. You can selectively allow individuals to be able to make a toll (as in: billed by the minute) call without affecting the switch's ability to route free calls to random local numbers overseas.
Voice quality ranges from G.711 (64kbps uLaw; same as ISDN) to G.723 (5.3kbps compressed- roughly equivilent to a very good digital cell phone connection). The jitter buffer for VOIP trunks adjusts itself dynamically, in order to keep delay as low as possible. Overall latency is barely perceptible, as you've experienced with your Cisco gear, but you're still at the mercy of the public internet.
You asked for a tip. You've got one. Any questions, drop me an email.
At home, I've got normal consumer-grade (Time Warner; somewhere around 3mbps/384kbps, $50) cable. The service is dead-solid reliable, and the IP address has never changed.
Oh, sure - it *might*. But dynamic DNS services are easy to set up, and free.
And if you insist on running BIND yourself, there's ways of doing that, too, without bothering your registrar every time you hop IPs or costing you a cent.
Once you've got the DNS issues resolved, the rest (SMTP, HTTP, whatever) is cake.
(If this all seems too "hard" or "unreliable" or "hackish," please feel free to contribute $50/mo to your existing ISP for a static address. Thank you.)
I've got a circa 1992 AT&T 3170 notebook in the bedroom, running Slackware 8 quite merrily.
The supertwist display has very nice contrast and is easy to see in all lighting (sunlight!) and at wide angles. The CPU is a 386SL/25, with sizeable cache and an on-chip memory controller: it's surprisingly fast. I lucked across an 8-megabyte Kingston memory upgrade for it (for a total of 12), and a new keyboard, and threw in a 2-gigabyte Hitachi drive that I had laying around.
An IBM PCMCIA combo ethernet/modem adapter from the same era keeps it connected to the world at about 300kB per second.
It has never, ever crashed or otherwise misbehaved in the couple of years its been with me, making it a very good machine indeed.
At work, I've got an HP Laserjet "Series II" on my desk, with a 1986 date code. It -just works-, producing beautiful, crisp 300dpi output, at a rate of about 30 seconds per page. Some day, I'll shop Ebay for a postscript cartridge for it and see if I can improve print speed (currently, the machine has no vector capabilities to speak of, and Ghostscript doesn't care for the printer's built-in bitmap fonts).
Like most problems, this one has a social fix. Call the phone company, patiently explain your situation, and politely ask for a new phone number (if by then they don't offer the suggestion themselves). They probably won't charge you a dime.
You might be too antisocial to handle making a phone call to the only people who can actually solve your problem. In that event, there's a couple of rational ways of living with it:
Invest a few dollars in a voice/fax switch; install in an appropriately out-of-the-way location. Connect your telephones to the "phone" jack, and nothing to the "fax" jack.
Or find an old, external SupraFAXModem which supports Silent Answer. Program its default NVRAM registry appropriately to answer only fax calls. Connect it to any available phone jack. It will tie up the line for a few seconds, realize there's no PC connected after the handshake, and then drop carrier. No computer or rewiring required.
I fondly recall the days when the first step needed to use a personal computer was to insert a disk and then turn it on. If you were good, you could fit the software and the requisite OS parts all on one disk, and still have a bit of room left over for your own data.
Of course, I also remember how a bad floppy disk would ruin my day, usually due to slight, unintentional mishandling.
Sometime later, I got a 10MHz XT with a 20-megabyte drive, and I've never looked back.
Booting from removable media? Feh. We've got partition tables for a reason. FIPS/e2fsutils+LILO/grub works fine, and if it makes you squeemish or you've got NTFS[1] to fret over, good ol' Partition Magic has been making the multi-boot process easy for a number of years.
Let's stop dreaming in reverse, shall we?
Thanks.
[1]: Lack of mention of ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, HPFS, and all hellish incarnations of UFS intentional.
I can't decide if you're trolling, or if you're actually serious.
Whatever the case, your argument is nonsensical. It appears to be based on the notion that Apple (music) didn't jump fast enough for your liking, in filing suit against Apple (computer).
Would your feelings of alienation really be all that different if this lawsuit happened a year ago?
Ten years ago?
What if it happened 22 years ago? These two companies have been bickering for a really long time.
If you're really going to live life while letting the agenda of a corporation dictate what music you enjoy, I'd like to submit that you're a couple of decades late with your boycott.
I've been using a small roll-away toolbox for PC parts, for years.
Being steel, static electricity problems are negated. It's easy to stack cards/RAM/drives/case hardware neatly in the drawers (with, or without ESB bags).
And with wheels, it's easy to store the whole kit in out-of-the-way spots.
When one gets 35mm prints from a throwaway camera, the film isn't discarded. It is processed and returned to the customer. Any scraps which are generated as a part of the processing are recycled in the name of silver reclamation.
The camera body is re-used. The batteries are re-used until spent. The metal film can is recycled, or sometimes re-used. Any plastic film containers are re-used.
Paper scraps (from between frames) are recycled.
About the only thing which isn't recycled is spent chemistry. But it is heavily filtered before disposal, also in the name of silver reclamation. The plastic bottles that it comes in are recycled.
Waste products from conventional photography, therefore, include smashed disposable cameras and some chemicals.
With disposable digital cameras and associated printing, much of the same stuff can be recycled. And smashed cameras will still find their way to the landfill.
And you're not getting away from the chemical mess, only relocating it. Making dye-sub consumables requires chemicals, just like any other modern manufacturing process.
And in my experience, roll-fed dye-sub printers generate more waste paper than photographic printers. The consumables are always changed at the same time, and there's almost always a little extra paper or a little extra ribbon left over when one runs out.
Having run Mozilla 1.4 for some time, I notice a few things that it offers for free:
Threaded replies
Highly functional spam filtering
Automagic contact-gathering
Automatically-created "views" for each contact? Just click "Sender," and things sort based on who sent it. Else, just enter some text into the "Subject or Sender contains" bar for some fast, arbitrary filtering. More complicated "views"? Use the "View" dropdown.
Why would in the world would I want to pay money for this stuff?
I used to the the engineer of a now defunct online radio service in the US (epointradio.com), way back in 2000-2001, and worked in various studio enviroments before that.
We streamed 24 and 56k MP3 and it sounded great. The secret to making it sound good was simplicity, just as with good home audio.
I used very little signal processing on the music end of things; arguably, none at all. I simply selected a sound card with very pleasant input clipping characteristics (read: free emergency limiting) and accurate digital loopback (for the controlroom monitors), followed by 1 bit of software gain reduction (to preclude the listeners' sound cards from reacting inconsistantly to the sometimes-peaked audio). The resultant bits were fed to LAME, with very carefully-selected parameters, and presented to the world.
Of course, we used REAL, COHERENT DJs instead of a mindless automatron playlist-spewer. It's non-trivial to select music sets which maintain consistancy, but by no means difficult. Even the "creative people" seemed to do a good job at it, and were able to handle manual gain management justfine with the live feedback they got from their 'phones or a pair of NS-10s.
Automatic gain control is useful for uncontrollable situations. I used some rather complicated compression, limiting, gating, and sidechain filtering for the mics during the talking parts of the program in order to keep things quiet and consistant. But even then, it was as little processing as I could get away with. I was faced with between 6 and 12 shifty people in a room full of live mics, any (or all) of whom might start talking at any time. I don't have that many hands.
On the other hand, modern music is generally already compressed and Fletcher-Munsenized to hell and back in the mastering process. It doesn't need any more "help." And that which still contains some element of dynamic content, such as Tool's Lateralus, uses it so artistically that it would be sinful to throw any of it away.
An engineer (or likely, several of them) spent hours, days, or weeks tweaking -that- -one- song to perfection. By homogenizing it with your ill-concieved one-size-fits-all processing, you've not only destroyed their work, but done a disservice to your listeners.
Compression was introduced to radio as a counter to road noise and static - admirable goals. Sometime later, it was used to keep levels somewhat consistant for lazy DJs, and kicked the processing up a notch. More recently, some marketing fucktard decided that it could be used to better compete with nearby stations, even to the point of modulating over them, and we ended up with the wall of multiband-limited pile of compressed shit that we get when we turn on the radio now.
These issues do not exist in the world of Internet broadcasting, where instead of static we get nearly limitless dynamic range. People listen to unprocessed music all the time at their PC, and are accustomed to hearing it that way, dynamic and timbral nuances intact.
And, unlike the stereo in your car, here the listener has control. If they want homogenized pre-processed shit, they can download (or merely enable) a plugin for it. Realplayer can do this, WMP can do this, along with Winamp and XMMS.
Why fuck it up in advance when they've got such a diverse array of tools to make things sound more to their liking right at their fingertips, if that's what they're after?
If you want consistancy, strive to make it sound the same from your stream as it does from the MP3 that they've got on their hard drive, put an ounce of effort into the mix, and keep your monitor setup appropriate to your audience.
This ensures that the puritans are happy because the chain is clean. The QSound users are happy because their settings don't need tweaked to accomidate the pre-process massage. And the "what's a soundcard?" people are happy, because it's still consistant with the noise they're used to hearing from their PC.
I used to use a nice SMC-branded rackmount 10/100 "switching hub." Fan-cooled, 12 ports, looked and felt solid. Recently, it met its fate: it's internal power supply caught fire (!).
So, I needed a replacement. And I'm broke. So I found a cheap (less than $30) 8-port 10/100 switch, branded Hawking Technology and made by who-knows-who. It works as well as any other cheap switch, which is to say: just fine for me here at home.
It ran quite hot while sitting horizontally on a shelf. My newly-discovered fear for warm networking gear told me to fix that.
So, I hung it vertically from the side of the same shelf, using the wall-mount holes on the back and some cable ties. The 8 RJ45 jacks on the bottom allow plenty of air to go past/through them, which escapes out of the small vent near the top of the unit.
It's not quite cool to the touch, but the surface of it is now within "just-barely-warm" range. Which I consider quite good enough.
Passive convection cooling and is underappreciated in the electronics design world by apparently everyone but audio companies and Apple Computer. It wouldn't be hard, at all, to make this thing cool itself acceptably in the horizontal position, but nobody took the time.
You're right: Unbalanced ("single-ended") line-level audio turns to muck with long cable runs. You can eliminate this (-and- grounding problems) by using balanced connections. Pro equipment is usually equipped with balanced IO, and is priced accordingly. You can also use transformers to, well, transform single-ended connections into balanced connections. Or build a box with a bunch of appropriate op-amps, and use that as a balanced line driver.
You don't need to use shielded wire if things are balanced, but it generally helps. If you do use shielded lines, make sure that it's grounded only on one end. You'll get the noise/EMI/RFI avoidance of balanced signals over twisted-pair shielded cables, while also completely eliminating any potential for ground loops (hum).
After that, it's cake. Thousand-foot runs of appropriately low-capacitance wire suddenly becomes realistic, and workable. Regardless of what you read in the Hi-Fi press about magical wire, balanced audio signals just aren't that hard to work with.
Speaker-level signals fair better, but are subject to very real voltage drop as cable lengths increase. The effects of this can be minimized, again, by using transformers. Common distributed PA systems (think shopping mall/theme-park music, and insanely long cables) operate at 70V, with step-down transformers at each speaker, to minimize the effects of long wire. You can also use heavier cable (there's always bigger speaker wire) and no transformers, but not without problems (installation difficulty, cost).
I'm confused by your comments about preamp/amplifier control. If you've got seperate sound card outputs for each zone and you're already committed to writing some software, why not just handle the volume control digitally?
I suppose there's only so much attenuation you can do with the 16-bit DACs common on consumer soundcards before you start running out of bits. But realistically, you're probably going to end up with something more pro-spec anyway to conveniently get the number of outputs that you require. These days, it's almost impossible to find a multichannel pro card without 24-bit DACs, which is way more than enough dynamic range for any household (or, indeed, professional) purpose.
If you really want software-controlled preamp/amplifier gear, check out Xantech's offerings. It doesn't take much glue to talk to their stuff with RS-232 or some other convenient method. I've personally had good experience with their 6x8 preamps and 12-channel amplifiers, and I imagine that the rest of their gear is of similar grade. You might also be interested in some of their waterproof keypads, for places like the patio, or the bathtub (!), or anywhere else that you don't need or want a funky custom LCD remote but do desire music.
I work for one of the most successful full-line Motorola two-way radio dealers in the US. As it happens, parts of the company also work closely with Nextel service agents.
The dirt from the chiefs who create my payroll say this: Motorola wants a cell phone network, and starts making noises about creating one. Regulatory bodies get outwardly twitchy about it. Nextel is born.
I'd rather believe my well-informed rumors than your polished-and-pretty SEC garbage, AC.
Ah, I think that this one handy-talky is probably not much for anyone to worry about.
AFAICT, most old Radio Shack radios are Motorola products, cleverly branded Realistic or Radio Shack or Optimus or whatever.
Meanwhile: Nextel is Motorola's own creation. Aside from creating the company itself, Motorola also makes all of the head-end equipment, phones, and whatever else they might need to go about business.
Nextel exists merely as an avenue for Motorola to have its own, tightly-controlled cellular telephone network without pissing too much in any particular government body's Wheaties.
Editors: Motorola, of all the potential targets for legal nonsense with these trademarks, is the last company on Earth with a reason to care.
(Next week on Slashback: Motorola sues itself; wins and loses)
Building codes, sanitation codes, automobile safety requirements, and other government works regulate many aspects of a number of different industries in many countries.
In most cases, people seem to think that it's a Good Thing, even though it is the consumer who ultimately has to pay for it all. In exchange, they get a reasonable assurance that any work being done to their property by an outside party is going to be proper and safe, that the food brought out by a waiter is not festering with botulism, and that their car's seatbelts won't break upon impact.
See? Good stuff. Now rewind a bit to the phrase "government works" (also, try not to laugh at the incidental joke those words form...), and then tell me where to find some that pertain to OSS.
Where's the Gub'ment specs for LDAP? Or Rock Ridge? Or XviD?
I mean. Am I supposed to accept IETF drafts as "official"? What about RFCs?
Are the rumblings on the MusicBrainz mailing list sufficient to force Microsoft to support that, in addition to WMP's existing, functional, and paid-for Gracenote CDDB services? What about other random musings and code snippets?
If Linus says it is good, must Bill&Ballmer concur?
I'd love to take some of Microsoft's money and put it toward a good use, but not on such terms as these. Without an official government body designing, blessing, and documenting open standards, the whole concept reeks of the same sort of maggot-ridden pork fat stench that fills the halls of Senator Hatch's office.
Since the house in your hypothetical example was the actual conveyor for piracy, perhaps it should be destroyed instead?
I mean. Cable theft is serious. And folks would lose their house anyway, if we actually had room to lock them up in prison like the criminals they are.
So why not get it done and over with? Just outlaw the sale of any coaxial cables by anyone but AOL/Time Warner. It's a no-brainer. Make them incindiary for automated destruction, and RFID-equipped to track black market distribution.
Punishment like this, once privatized, will revolutionize justice. And, it'll free up thousands of cells in which to house the really menacing criminals, like dope smokers and people who drive too fast.
Of course, someone might get killed once their household wiring erupts in flame, but that's no big deal, really:
When someone fucks up shareholder profit, they deserve to die. It's just bid'ness; you understand.
Essentially, what you're saying is this: As hard drives fill up, things become more likely to be written in fragments. (Nature? What nature?)
However, I'm in no position to assume that a 3 gig drive is more likely to be full than a 30 gig drive. More than anything else, this is dependant on the user.
Therefore, about all we might be able to theorize is:
Some users are prone to fragmentation, while others have a tendancy to be contiguous. Which should be obvious after spending more than a few hours associating with other people.;)
You're right - bigger drives are faster. But your example is, quite simply, misguided and false.
Fragmentation, the basis of your wild assertion, has nothing to do with overall capacity. It has everything to do with the type of filesystem used, and the size of a block of data to be written and the relative amount of free space.
Seek time is the same, roughly speaking, between big and small. It's still just a platter (or a stack of them) of about 3 inches in diameter, generally spinning at 5400RPM.
The heads on a given drive may be able to accelerate faster than those of another, which while leading to lower seek times, has nothing to do with the amount of data on the drive.
Now then:
Increased density will increase throughput. Bigger drives are generally denser drives, which means that the bits fly past the head at a greater rate for a given spindle speed. Increased density will not reduce average access times.
Think now, post later. Mods: Please put the crackpipe down. Thanks.
Re:110VAC outlets available today
on
42-Volt Autos
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· Score: 1
And how are electronic braking systems advantagous?
Is it really -that- hard for you to step on the brake pedal?
Would you really like to isolate yourself from the road even more than you already are? A vast array of information is currently relayed through the brake pedal, which, when read by a calibrated foot, is extremely useful in difficult driving situations and problem diagnosis.
Electronic brakes offer no such feedback. And even if you implement the feedback, with servos and accelerometers and computers and what-have-you, what have you accomplished?
Seems to me that it's just reinventing the wheel. Except that this wheel, even though it looks and acts just like the old wheel, is more expensive and has more potential points of failure.
I suppose you do get to rid yourself of that nasty diuretic brake fluid, but so what? If you're doing frequent-enough triple-digit stops to be worried about boiling your car's brake fluid, you should be just as afraid of overheating your electric brakes.
Electric brakes make sense when you have an electric car, with direct-driven wheels. In this case, you end up with easy regenerative braking, and -fewer- points of failure. In any dinosaur-powered automotive use, I have a hard time understanding the point of them (except perhaps for trailer brakes, current systems for which seem to run justfine from 12VDC, thankyouverymuch).
But maybe I'm just biased. The every-day movement of the rear suspension on my car eventually broke an ABS wire, which caused several problems: Not only was it a bitch to troubleshoot, it was a safety issue (sometimes the ABS computer turned itself off, which was fine, and sometimes it stayed on and seriously inhibited the car's ability to stop). Had it been a hydraulic brake line instead, it'd have been easy to spot the problem. And of course, at 129k miles, those rubber brake lines are still working marvelously.
Would you care to expound upon the prophetic advantages of fly-by-wire electronic braking systems?
I don't claim to know much about PVR "projects," hence the questions.
But I do know a fair bit about video. The MythTV screenshots on their page are fuzzy in all the wrong ways, lacking any clear delineation between scanlines, which was almost certainly not how the NTSC source material appeared.
On the other hand, my DirecTiVo does not suffer from these issues; scanlines are clear and precise. The fact that you seem to think that it's normal for things to appear blurry shows how little experience you have in video projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Naah. You've got it all wrong.
That's ONE company specializing in selling "custom"[1] batteries to end users. They're actually manufactured by God-knows-who in some far-eastern sweatshop, just like almost everything else small and toxic that we buy these days.
No matter. $5 says that the Archos battery is not anything of any remarkable uniqueness, anyway. The greatest involvement Archos had in the design of this battery was the shape and color of the plastic shell that it comes in[1]. Otherwise, it's just an off-the-shelf part from a catalog, much like the LCD, hard drive, microswitches, DSP, and other comprising hardware. Like these other generic parts, this particular battery is probably used in a number of different products.
Another $5 says that they (Archos) switch suppliers for all of these parts depending on who's got them cheapest today, and/or phase of moon.
Alas, it might not be very easy for you or I to locate a good overseas source of such a battery. Which is why we pay an importer $69[2] to do it for us and write up instructions. If your time is worth something, it's probably a good deal. Otherwise, there's bound to be cheaper suppliers (and methods) if you're willing to look for them.
1: Do you really think a small company is going to tool up a factory and start making specialized lithium batteries for their miniscule market? Niet.
2: Of course this costs more than a few 2300mAH AA NiMH cells. It's also more convenient[3][4].
3: You do realize that lithium batteries are lighter and more space-efficient than NiMH AAs, don't you? This translates directly to extra space in your pocket.
4: And don't say "but I can carry several 2300mAH AA NiMH battery sets and have several times as much runtime!" Who cares? If I'm removed from my usual surroundings long enough that I'm afraid my batteries will die, I'll just plug it in while I sleep. (You do SLEEP, don't you?) This means I'll have to have charging gear, which consumes space, but then so do AAs. If you really want to save space, standardize on USB as a charging system for all of your gear[2]. Plug it into the wall, or the car, or even the laptop (if you want to borrow some juice from another big-honkin' Li-ion battery). Do the same with your phone, or anything else that can charge from 5 volts. 2 cables and 2 adapters instead of at least 4 combination units and a USB cable to accomplish the same.
USB is, dreadfully, not going away anytime soon - one might as well use it for something.
Why throw it away when the batteries wear out? Just buy new ones. Lithium batteries aren't terribly rare these days. The replacement process looks at least as simple as swapping screw-secured AA's on my 3-year-old kid's toys.
Your argument is flawed, probably to the point of being completely void.
Wal-Mart, the only specific retailer you've mentioned, has a very nice system for sampling CDs in every one of the stores that I've seen; far better than anything else I've ever used.
It's really quite simple. You just wander up to one-of-many listening stations with a random CD and put on the provided headphones. A conveniently-located barcode reader scans the UPC of the CD in question. After a very brief pause, music flows forth. You can listen to selected tracks in their entirety, or (I suppose) complete discs. It sounds quite nice, in my experience, free of any discernable MP3-esque faults.
Imagine that - the world's largest retailer, allowing customers to listen to music before they purchase it. And they've been doing it for -years-, long before Napster made "MP3" a dinnertable word.
Your argument thus invalidated, I'll move along to my own anecdotes while we see if Taco is willing to create a new mod category of -1, Treason:
I was sampling music from such places as cdnow (now gone), online, with Realaudio, before MPEG II Layer 3 audio existed.
Back then, I'd find potentially-interesting obscure music, listen cdnow's samples, write down the catalog number, and head down to the local music store to order it. It was the cheapest way I could get music, as I'd save paying for shipping from cdnow. I'd (usually) get my hands on the music faster than waiting for the USPS, too, and the jewel cases were never smashed.
Now, I find potentially-interesting music, and begin digging for high-bitrate oggs with winmx or giFT. It costs nothing to procure[1], and I get my hands on it immediately. If I'm feeling really energetic, I'll burn it to an audio CD for a dime. And if I feel like playing legit, I'll use a "music" CD-R with royalties pre-paid for an extra couple of pennies. It doesn't get much cheaper than this.
So much for try-before-you-buy, eh?
[1]: I still buy music on CD, on occasion. But generally, only from smaller, less common groups and labels that I want to hear more of in the future. Whether it affects their pocketbook or just their meager sales statistics. It's all I can do to encourage them (and their RIAA underwriters) to produce more music that I like.
Warning: I'm very biased. I earn my living working with this stuff, and if none of it sells, I don't get to eat. Caveat emptor, et cetera. That said, I'm attempting to post as a technically-inclined, completely satisfied user. I prefer leaving the sales BS to the sales guys who specialize in BS.
Altigen phone systems will do the tricks that you're after quite nicely. All of them. Automatically. And keep an account of all activity on a user-by-user basis.
Pick up the phone in the office, and just start dialing normally. Automagic least-cost routing will keep your bills to a minimum by using VOIP between offices and grabbing phone lines in remote locations as needed.
Or dial up the phone system remotely, from a cell phone, say. Log in (#, extension number, PIN), hit #, and bing: dial out to wherever you feel like, and things get routed as cheaply as possible.
There are, of course, restrictions available to this functionality, on a user-by-user basis. You can selectively allow individuals to be able to make a toll (as in: billed by the minute) call without affecting the switch's ability to route free calls to random local numbers overseas.
Voice quality ranges from G.711 (64kbps uLaw; same as ISDN) to G.723 (5.3kbps compressed- roughly equivilent to a very good digital cell phone connection). The jitter buffer for VOIP trunks adjusts itself dynamically, in order to keep delay as low as possible. Overall latency is barely perceptible, as you've experienced with your Cisco gear, but you're still at the mercy of the public internet.
You asked for a tip. You've got one. Any questions, drop me an email.
At home, I've got normal consumer-grade (Time Warner; somewhere around 3mbps/384kbps, $50) cable. The service is dead-solid reliable, and the IP address has never changed.
Oh, sure - it *might*. But dynamic DNS services are easy to set up, and free.
And if you insist on running BIND yourself, there's ways of doing that, too, without bothering your registrar every time you hop IPs or costing you a cent.
Once you've got the DNS issues resolved, the rest (SMTP, HTTP, whatever) is cake.
(If this all seems too "hard" or "unreliable" or "hackish," please feel free to contribute $50/mo to your existing ISP for a static address. Thank you.)
I've got a circa 1992 AT&T 3170 notebook in the bedroom, running Slackware 8 quite merrily.
The supertwist display has very nice contrast and is easy to see in all lighting (sunlight!) and at wide angles. The CPU is a 386SL/25, with sizeable cache and an on-chip memory controller: it's surprisingly fast. I lucked across an 8-megabyte Kingston memory upgrade for it (for a total of 12), and a new keyboard, and threw in a 2-gigabyte Hitachi drive that I had laying around.
An IBM PCMCIA combo ethernet/modem adapter from the same era keeps it connected to the world at about 300kB per second.
It has never, ever crashed or otherwise misbehaved in the couple of years its been with me, making it a very good machine indeed.
At work, I've got an HP Laserjet "Series II" on my desk, with a 1986 date code. It -just works-, producing beautiful, crisp 300dpi output, at a rate of about 30 seconds per page. Some day, I'll shop Ebay for a postscript cartridge for it and see if I can improve print speed (currently, the machine has no vector capabilities to speak of, and Ghostscript doesn't care for the printer's built-in bitmap fonts).
Like most problems, this one has a social fix. Call the phone company, patiently explain your situation, and politely ask for a new phone number (if by then they don't offer the suggestion themselves). They probably won't charge you a dime.
You might be too antisocial to handle making a phone call to the only people who can actually solve your problem. In that event, there's a couple of rational ways of living with it:
Invest a few dollars in a voice/fax switch; install in an appropriately out-of-the-way location. Connect your telephones to the "phone" jack, and nothing to the "fax" jack.
Or find an old, external SupraFAXModem which supports Silent Answer. Program its default NVRAM registry appropriately to answer only fax calls. Connect it to any available phone jack. It will tie up the line for a few seconds, realize there's no PC connected after the handshake, and then drop carrier. No computer or rewiring required.
At what point did the standard answer on Slashdot become "sue the bastards"? I sense a double standard.
It's just a fucking telephone.
Yes.
I fondly recall the days when the first step needed to use a personal computer was to insert a disk and then turn it on. If you were good, you could fit the software and the requisite OS parts all on one disk, and still have a bit of room left over for your own data.
Of course, I also remember how a bad floppy disk would ruin my day, usually due to slight, unintentional mishandling.
Sometime later, I got a 10MHz XT with a 20-megabyte drive, and I've never looked back.
Booting from removable media? Feh. We've got partition tables for a reason. FIPS/e2fsutils+LILO/grub works fine, and if it makes you squeemish or you've got NTFS[1] to fret over, good ol' Partition Magic has been making the multi-boot process easy for a number of years.
Let's stop dreaming in reverse, shall we?
Thanks.
[1]: Lack of mention of ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, HPFS, and all hellish incarnations of UFS intentional.
I can't decide if you're trolling, or if you're actually serious.
Whatever the case, your argument is nonsensical. It appears to be based on the notion that Apple (music) didn't jump fast enough for your liking, in filing suit against Apple (computer).
Would your feelings of alienation really be all that different if this lawsuit happened a year ago?
Ten years ago?
What if it happened 22 years ago? These two companies have been bickering for a really long time.
If you're really going to live life while letting the agenda of a corporation dictate what music you enjoy, I'd like to submit that you're a couple of decades late with your boycott.
I remember the days leading up to the original Pentium unveiling (and naming), more than a decade ago.
Anyone who was anyone has ads in Computer Shopper, proclaiming their 80486 ("P4") systems to be "P5 Upgradable".
Why are we going backwards?
Them's megagrams, son.
Talk about a ton of RAM.
I've been using a small roll-away toolbox for PC parts, for years.
Being steel, static electricity problems are negated. It's easy to stack cards/RAM/drives/case hardware neatly in the drawers (with, or without ESB bags).
And with wheels, it's easy to store the whole kit in out-of-the-way spots.
What planet do you live on?
When one gets 35mm prints from a throwaway camera, the film isn't discarded. It is processed and returned to the customer. Any scraps which are generated as a part of the processing are recycled in the name of silver reclamation.
The camera body is re-used. The batteries are re-used until spent. The metal film can is recycled, or sometimes re-used. Any plastic film containers are re-used.
Paper scraps (from between frames) are recycled.
About the only thing which isn't recycled is spent chemistry. But it is heavily filtered before disposal, also in the name of silver reclamation. The plastic bottles that it comes in are recycled.
Waste products from conventional photography, therefore, include smashed disposable cameras and some chemicals.
With disposable digital cameras and associated printing, much of the same stuff can be recycled. And smashed cameras will still find their way to the landfill.
And you're not getting away from the chemical mess, only relocating it. Making dye-sub consumables requires chemicals, just like any other modern manufacturing process.
And in my experience, roll-fed dye-sub printers generate more waste paper than photographic printers. The consumables are always changed at the same time, and there's almost always a little extra paper or a little extra ribbon left over when one runs out.
Threaded replies
Highly functional spam filtering
Automagic contact-gathering
Automatically-created "views" for each contact? Just click "Sender," and things sort based on who sent it. Else, just enter some text into the "Subject or Sender contains" bar for some fast, arbitrary filtering. More complicated "views"? Use the "View" dropdown.
Why would in the world would I want to pay money for this stuff?
I used to the the engineer of a now defunct online radio service in the US (epointradio.com), way back in 2000-2001, and worked in various studio enviroments before that.
We streamed 24 and 56k MP3 and it sounded great. The secret to making it sound good was simplicity, just as with good home audio.
I used very little signal processing on the music end of things; arguably, none at all. I simply selected a sound card with very pleasant input clipping characteristics (read: free emergency limiting) and accurate digital loopback (for the controlroom monitors), followed by 1 bit of software gain reduction (to preclude the listeners' sound cards from reacting inconsistantly to the sometimes-peaked audio). The resultant bits were fed to LAME, with very carefully-selected parameters, and presented to the world.
Of course, we used REAL, COHERENT DJs instead of a mindless automatron playlist-spewer. It's non-trivial to select music sets which maintain consistancy, but by no means difficult. Even the "creative people" seemed to do a good job at it, and were able to handle manual gain management justfine with the live feedback they got from their 'phones or a pair of NS-10s.
Automatic gain control is useful for uncontrollable situations. I used some rather complicated compression, limiting, gating, and sidechain filtering for the mics during the talking parts of the program in order to keep things quiet and consistant. But even then, it was as little processing as I could get away with. I was faced with between 6 and 12 shifty people in a room full of live mics, any (or all) of whom might start talking at any time. I don't have that many hands.
On the other hand, modern music is generally already compressed and Fletcher-Munsenized to hell and back in the mastering process. It doesn't need any more "help." And that which still contains some element of dynamic content, such as Tool's Lateralus, uses it so artistically that it would be sinful to throw any of it away.
An engineer (or likely, several of them) spent hours, days, or weeks tweaking -that- -one- song to perfection. By homogenizing it with your ill-concieved one-size-fits-all processing, you've not only destroyed their work, but done a disservice to your listeners.
Compression was introduced to radio as a counter to road noise and static - admirable goals. Sometime later, it was used to keep levels somewhat consistant for lazy DJs, and kicked the processing up a notch. More recently, some marketing fucktard decided that it could be used to better compete with nearby stations, even to the point of modulating over them, and we ended up with the wall of multiband-limited pile of compressed shit that we get when we turn on the radio now.
These issues do not exist in the world of Internet broadcasting, where instead of static we get nearly limitless dynamic range. People listen to unprocessed music all the time at their PC, and are accustomed to hearing it that way, dynamic and timbral nuances intact.
And, unlike the stereo in your car, here the listener has control. If they want homogenized pre-processed shit, they can download (or merely enable) a plugin for it. Realplayer can do this, WMP can do this, along with Winamp and XMMS.
Why fuck it up in advance when they've got such a diverse array of tools to make things sound more to their liking right at their fingertips, if that's what they're after?
If you want consistancy, strive to make it sound the same from your stream as it does from the MP3 that they've got on their hard drive, put an ounce of effort into the mix, and keep your monitor setup appropriate to your audience.
This ensures that the puritans are happy because the chain is clean. The QSound users are happy because their settings don't need tweaked to accomidate the pre-process massage. And the "what's a soundcard?" people are happy, because it's still consistant with the noise they're used to hearing from their PC.
How do you improve on personal choice?
I'll second that.
I used to use a nice SMC-branded rackmount 10/100 "switching hub." Fan-cooled, 12 ports, looked and felt solid. Recently, it met its fate: it's internal power supply caught fire (!).
So, I needed a replacement. And I'm broke. So I found a cheap (less than $30) 8-port 10/100 switch, branded Hawking Technology and made by who-knows-who. It works as well as any other cheap switch, which is to say: just fine for me here at home.
It ran quite hot while sitting horizontally on a shelf. My newly-discovered fear for warm networking gear told me to fix that.
So, I hung it vertically from the side of the same shelf, using the wall-mount holes on the back and some cable ties. The 8 RJ45 jacks on the bottom allow plenty of air to go past/through them, which escapes out of the small vent near the top of the unit.
It's not quite cool to the touch, but the surface of it is now within "just-barely-warm" range. Which I consider quite good enough.
Passive convection cooling and is underappreciated in the electronics design world by apparently everyone but audio companies and Apple Computer. It wouldn't be hard, at all, to make this thing cool itself acceptably in the horizontal position, but nobody took the time.
You're right: Unbalanced ("single-ended") line-level audio turns to muck with long cable runs. You can eliminate this (-and- grounding problems) by using balanced connections. Pro equipment is usually equipped with balanced IO, and is priced accordingly. You can also use transformers to, well, transform single-ended connections into balanced connections. Or build a box with a bunch of appropriate op-amps, and use that as a balanced line driver.
You don't need to use shielded wire if things are balanced, but it generally helps. If you do use shielded lines, make sure that it's grounded only on one end. You'll get the noise/EMI/RFI avoidance of balanced signals over twisted-pair shielded cables, while also completely eliminating any potential for ground loops (hum).
After that, it's cake. Thousand-foot runs of appropriately low-capacitance wire suddenly becomes realistic, and workable. Regardless of what you read in the Hi-Fi press about magical wire, balanced audio signals just aren't that hard to work with.
Speaker-level signals fair better, but are subject to very real voltage drop as cable lengths increase. The effects of this can be minimized, again, by using transformers. Common distributed PA systems (think shopping mall/theme-park music, and insanely long cables) operate at 70V, with step-down transformers at each speaker, to minimize the effects of long wire. You can also use heavier cable (there's always bigger speaker wire) and no transformers, but not without problems (installation difficulty, cost).
I'm confused by your comments about preamp/amplifier control. If you've got seperate sound card outputs for each zone and you're already committed to writing some software, why not just handle the volume control digitally?
I suppose there's only so much attenuation you can do with the 16-bit DACs common on consumer soundcards before you start running out of bits. But realistically, you're probably going to end up with something more pro-spec anyway to conveniently get the number of outputs that you require. These days, it's almost impossible to find a multichannel pro card without 24-bit DACs, which is way more than enough dynamic range for any household (or, indeed, professional) purpose.
If you really want software-controlled preamp/amplifier gear, check out Xantech's offerings. It doesn't take much glue to talk to their stuff with RS-232 or some other convenient method. I've personally had good experience with their 6x8 preamps and 12-channel amplifiers, and I imagine that the rest of their gear is of similar grade. You might also be interested in some of their waterproof keypads, for places like the patio, or the bathtub (!), or anywhere else that you don't need or want a funky custom LCD remote but do desire music.
I hope this was helpful.
*sigh*
I believe that you think you're right.
I work for one of the most successful full-line Motorola two-way radio dealers in the US. As it happens, parts of the company also work closely with Nextel service agents.
The dirt from the chiefs who create my payroll say this: Motorola wants a cell phone network, and starts making noises about creating one. Regulatory bodies get outwardly twitchy about it. Nextel is born.
I'd rather believe my well-informed rumors than your polished-and-pretty SEC garbage, AC.
Thanks, though, for the opinion.
Ah, I think that this one handy-talky is probably not much for anyone to worry about.
AFAICT, most old Radio Shack radios are Motorola products, cleverly branded Realistic or Radio Shack or Optimus or whatever.
Meanwhile: Nextel is Motorola's own creation. Aside from creating the company itself, Motorola also makes all of the head-end equipment, phones, and whatever else they might need to go about business.
Nextel exists merely as an avenue for Motorola to have its own, tightly-controlled cellular telephone network without pissing too much in any particular government body's Wheaties.
Editors: Motorola, of all the potential targets for legal nonsense with these trademarks, is the last company on Earth with a reason to care.
(Next week on Slashback: Motorola sues itself; wins and loses)
Yep.
Building codes, sanitation codes, automobile safety requirements, and other government works regulate many aspects of a number of different industries in many countries.
In most cases, people seem to think that it's a Good Thing, even though it is the consumer who ultimately has to pay for it all. In exchange, they get a reasonable assurance that any work being done to their property by an outside party is going to be proper and safe, that the food brought out by a waiter is not festering with botulism, and that their car's seatbelts won't break upon impact.
See? Good stuff. Now rewind a bit to the phrase "government works" (also, try not to laugh at the incidental joke those words form...), and then tell me where to find some that pertain to OSS.
Where's the Gub'ment specs for LDAP? Or Rock Ridge? Or XviD?
I mean. Am I supposed to accept IETF drafts as "official"? What about RFCs?
Are the rumblings on the MusicBrainz mailing list sufficient to force Microsoft to support that, in addition to WMP's existing, functional, and paid-for Gracenote CDDB services? What about other random musings and code snippets?
If Linus says it is good, must Bill&Ballmer concur?
I'd love to take some of Microsoft's money and put it toward a good use, but not on such terms as these. Without an official government body designing, blessing, and documenting open standards, the whole concept reeks of the same sort of maggot-ridden pork fat stench that fills the halls of Senator Hatch's office.
I want no part of that.
More to the point:
Since the house in your hypothetical example was the actual conveyor for piracy, perhaps it should be destroyed instead?
I mean. Cable theft is serious. And folks would lose their house anyway, if we actually had room to lock them up in prison like the criminals they are.
So why not get it done and over with? Just outlaw the sale of any coaxial cables by anyone but AOL/Time Warner. It's a no-brainer. Make them incindiary for automated destruction, and RFID-equipped to track black market distribution.
Punishment like this, once privatized, will revolutionize justice. And, it'll free up thousands of cells in which to house the really menacing criminals, like dope smokers and people who drive too fast.
Of course, someone might get killed once their household wiring erupts in flame, but that's no big deal, really:
When someone fucks up shareholder profit, they deserve to die. It's just bid'ness; you understand.
Perhaps.
;)
Essentially, what you're saying is this: As hard drives fill up, things become more likely to be written in fragments. (Nature? What nature?)
However, I'm in no position to assume that a 3 gig drive is more likely to be full than a 30 gig drive. More than anything else, this is dependant on the user.
Therefore, about all we might be able to theorize is:
Some users are prone to fragmentation, while others have a tendancy to be contiguous. Which should be obvious after spending more than a few hours associating with other people.
You're right - bigger drives are faster. But your example is, quite simply, misguided and false.
Fragmentation, the basis of your wild assertion, has nothing to do with overall capacity. It has everything to do with the type of filesystem used, and the size of a block of data to be written and the relative amount of free space.
Seek time is the same, roughly speaking, between big and small. It's still just a platter (or a stack of them) of about 3 inches in diameter, generally spinning at 5400RPM.
The heads on a given drive may be able to accelerate faster than those of another, which while leading to lower seek times, has nothing to do with the amount of data on the drive.
Now then:
Increased density will increase throughput. Bigger drives are generally denser drives, which means that the bits fly past the head at a greater rate for a given spindle speed. Increased density will not reduce average access times.
Think now, post later. Mods: Please put the crackpipe down. Thanks.
And how are electronic braking systems advantagous?
Is it really -that- hard for you to step on the brake pedal?
Would you really like to isolate yourself from the road even more than you already are? A vast array of information is currently relayed through the brake pedal, which, when read by a calibrated foot, is extremely useful in difficult driving situations and problem diagnosis.
Electronic brakes offer no such feedback. And even if you implement the feedback, with servos and accelerometers and computers and what-have-you, what have you accomplished?
Seems to me that it's just reinventing the wheel. Except that this wheel, even though it looks and acts just like the old wheel, is more expensive and has more potential points of failure.
I suppose you do get to rid yourself of that nasty diuretic brake fluid, but so what? If you're doing frequent-enough triple-digit stops to be worried about boiling your car's brake fluid, you should be just as afraid of overheating your electric brakes.
Electric brakes make sense when you have an electric car, with direct-driven wheels. In this case, you end up with easy regenerative braking, and -fewer- points of failure. In any dinosaur-powered automotive use, I have a hard time understanding the point of them (except perhaps for trailer brakes, current systems for which seem to run justfine from 12VDC, thankyouverymuch).
But maybe I'm just biased. The every-day movement of the rear suspension on my car eventually broke an ABS wire, which caused several problems: Not only was it a bitch to troubleshoot, it was a safety issue (sometimes the ABS computer turned itself off, which was fine, and sometimes it stayed on and seriously inhibited the car's ability to stop). Had it been a hydraulic brake line instead, it'd have been easy to spot the problem. And of course, at 129k miles, those rubber brake lines are still working marvelously.
Would you care to expound upon the prophetic advantages of fly-by-wire electronic braking systems?
I don't claim to know much about PVR "projects," hence the questions.
But I do know a fair bit about video. The MythTV screenshots on their page are fuzzy in all the wrong ways, lacking any clear delineation between scanlines, which was almost certainly not how the NTSC source material appeared.
On the other hand, my DirecTiVo does not suffer from these issues; scanlines are clear and precise. The fact that you seem to think that it's normal for things to appear blurry shows how little experience you have in video projects.