The rotating headlights on the Citroen DS are hardly a new feature - the concept was present on the far more attractive Tucker 48, amongst many other features before their time.
As another poster said: You get what you pay for. Meanwhile, your TV is burnt.
Runco rear-projection sets, for example, use neutral grey bars on each side, to help equalize burn-in across the width of the screen.
I'm pretty sure Extron makes a box that does the same thing, with justabout any monitor.
With any monitor, make sure you're not operating your next set in Torch Mode. That's usually how they're set up out of the box - it's a sick, cold war-like race to look brighter (and bluer) than everything else in the showroom. Simple to test, and fix: Pause a DVD during a very bright scene. Turn down the contrast control (sometimes labeled "picture"), until you notice the brightest subjects becoming a bit less so.
Your picture is now somewhat darker than it was before. This is a Good Thing(tm).
Resume watching the DVD. You'll notice an additional spectrum of detail and shades of grey that your TV couldn't display before, and everything from the power supply to the CRT(s) will last longer. Now, go do the same to your computer monitor, and keep it around for a few more years, too.
For more do-it-yourself action, buy/borrow/rent the Video Essentials DVD. You'll be enlightened.
Other fun stuff:
Pay an ISF-certified shop to use a color analyzer to calibrate your set to standard. It's not very expensive, and generally makes what was once a pretty decent TV into something approaching the view from a window.
It's usually cheaper and better to calibrate things properly, than to spend more money on a what the salesgeek/price tag indicates is a "better" model.
I picked up an incredibly cheap 19" Sanyo TV at Christmas time, for the bedroom. After a bit of basic work, using a calibrated Sony as a reference, I've got it displaying a more accurate picture than anything you'll find displayed on a store shelf. Big hint: The service menu is your friend, and all current TVs have one hidden somewhere in their firmware.
What troubles me about video card reviews in recent years is that they harp on at length about the ins-and-outs of antialiasing, and framerates, and memory bus bandwidth, but apparently nobody bothers to look at the picture on the fucking monitor.
It used to be different. In the early-mid 90s, PC rags far and wide would rate video cards primarily on how good they looked. This is mostly dependant on the analog signal path of a specific card, and not tied to a given chipset - things would (and still do) vary widely between different implementations of the same chip. I'm talking about horizontal sharpness (limited bandwidth), image distortion (bad topology), contrast compression (shitty amps) and ghosting (poor termination), to name a few.
The physics haven't changed since then, and indeed have become more difficult. Resolutions and refresh rates keep pushing upward, and this makes the analog stage proportionately trickier to design properly. Designing an analog circuit for signals ranging anywhere from DC to 400MHz (a pretty common RAMDAC spec, lately) is quite non-trivial.
Despite this growing problem, even Tom's Hardware doesn't bother to tell you (subjectively, or otherwise) just how good, or bad the picture is on a given card/monitor combination. The closest they come is a note at the end of a Ti4600 review which states that all of the tested cards looked a bit fuzzy on their Eizo monitor, relative to whatever it is that they normally use with it (which they unhelpfully do not identify).
This German page has some very nice multichannel 'scope plots generated by the RGB output of a plethora of different cards, but offers no subjective interpretation of what they look like on-screen, as far as my English-trained eyes can see.
Even the most hardcore of gamers probably spend most of their time in front of the PC reading text and looking at porn. Are there any reviewers left in the world who actually make a point of evaluating image quality?
Here's my stab at it:
I've got a Voodoo3 3500TV. Works great in X, all features except vidcap working perfectly. Image quality at 1600x1200x75Hz is remarkably good, free of ghosting and pretty sharp on a 4-year-old 19" CTX VL950, though it could be slightly sharper. In terms of speed, it's about as fast with X as it is with XP, and handles all but the latest shoot-em-ups quite playably. The included 5/8"-thick, 6' snake makes for handy connections to the card's well-stocked array of inputs and outputs.
Its 3.3-volt AGP interface presents an insurmountable hurdle for modern use, however, when one is looking to buy an nForce2-based motherboard (none of which have 3.3V AGP sockets).
Thus, it needs replaced.
If anyone has any anecdotes on the fidelity of a current video card, please submit them below. Specifically, I'm looking at ATI-branded Radeon 9000 Pro or Radeon 8500, or who-knows-what-brand GF4 Ti4200. Preferably, the reviews will be more from the perspective of a graphic artist, instead of a gamer, and be based on what things look like at high resolution and refresh rates.
But at this point, I'll gladly listen to anyone's opinion about visual quality, even if it involves a Happy Mountain Computing Xabre400, plugged into a 15-year-old, fixed-frequency Sun display, and is written by a twitching 9-year-old crackhead who once lost eight teeth to an unfortunate hockey incident.
Anyone have some light to shed on the subject?
[I'll leave my tirade about the absolute dearth of modern CRT monitor reviews for another day.]
I prefer to have power ratings expressed in terms of horsepower.
I once helped a musician-friend of mine assemble a custom bass guitar rig. It included a decent Ampeg tube preamp, Biamp active crossover, and an Ashly power amp, all bolted neatly into an SKB rack. Speakers included a pair of small 2-ways from Community and one of Eminence's larger drivers mounted in a particularly stout, hardwood box. Everything was low-gloss black, and looking quite sharp.
We get it all built and put together, and he plays it for a good long time with a smile on his face before asking "So, how much power do you suppose this thing has, anyway?"
I paused for a moment to do some quick math, and then said: "About 1.2 horsepower, continuous duty." He seemed puzzled with that answer, and then gave the E string a good tug. The lights dimmed, the windows rattled, and something fell off of a shelf across the room. He never asked that question again.
That was almost 10 years ago. Last I heard, he was touring with a band, and actually making a bit of money doing it. Still uses the same 1.2HP bass amp, which I expect to be durable enough to last justabout forever under any sort of use.
You'll still be able to plug in whatever sort of NIC you feel like into your PCMCIA/USB/FireWire/whatever port, if you don't like the included intel offering.
Of course it'll hurt the competitors. Waah. That's what competing is all about. For all we know, it'll turn into an AMD/VIA/SiS integration game, which doesn't sound all bad given the application (de-facto proprietary, inherently fragile, finicky laptops).
But, history seems to indicate that things will turn out just fine, whatever the outcome. Sometime in the 90s, it became apparent that all general-purpose PCs were shipping with modems and sound cards of varying levels of integration.
Did this affect the third-party market? Certainly. Several companies left the market or disappeared completely, while product offerings of those who remained became a bit less diverse. This was particularly apparent after things dead-ended with v.90 and 16-bit stereo sound, killing the upgrade cycle for most people.
Yet at the same time, I see such things as modems and sound cards being increasingly available. In the early 90s, if I wanted to buy a modem locally, I had to go to the neighborhood boxbuilder between 9AM and 5PM, Monday through Friday, and pay a premium for this "convenience."
Nowadays, I can just head over to Wal-Mart or another department store, at any time on any day except Christmas, and buy all the modems, sound cards, and other periphery I care for, at prices on-par with discount-whore mailorder shops.
To me, this seems like a vast improvement. I see no reason why the same trends would not follow broad acceptance of wireless protocols.
'sides, Orinoco, Cisco, Linksys and D-Link aren't going anywhere. There's an ongoing need for wired network products which is not soon to wane (if ever), and someone is going to have to keep busy building access point hardware for all these 802.11b-equipped laptops.
My girlfriend's car has some sort of suspension problem. I haven't found what it is because I haven't looked, but I hear it clunking somewhere near the right-front wheel sometimes on bumps and ABS stops on snow. It started sometime after she pinwheeled off the road, through a shallow ditch, and into someone's front yard, some months ago.
I just tell her to ignore it. After all, I don't have a garage, let alone equipment and supplies to repair it. There's a good chance that it's just something rather benign, like a sway-bar mount, anyhow. Besides, the car drives just fine - it's just got some new noises.
OTOH, there's also a chance that it's a ball joint or other critical, non-redundant component. A part which has catastrophic failure modes that include loss of power, braking, and steering, and present an opportunity for a screaming, cartwheeling death.
But, like I said: Since I don't know for sure that it's something important, I'll just assume that it's not and hope things turn out OK for her and our 2-year-old.
It won't make much difference. Out of sight, out of mind - it's a Zen thing. Everyone really is better off by not looking at it and identifying the problem - ignorance is blissful like that.
[Translation for the sarcasm-impaired: If the combination of a crew of bloody astronauts (already proven to be some of the most capable people in existance) and a multinational fleet of fucking rocket scientists can't figure out a way to hang 10 long enough to fix what was probably the spaceflight analog of my girlfriend's simple automotive suspension problem, I'll eat my hat.
But first, they need to be able to identify potential difficulties; this microsat gizmo might be just the ticket to avoid doing a spacewalk equivilent of the terrestrial walkaround that everyone's supposed to do before they get in their car and start driving.
They go over everything with a magnifying glass, fine-tooth comb, and sliderule before liftoff. How much would it really cost to give a cursory look at stuff before re-entry, especially when potential problems are already known to exist?
Worse case is that it's really, really unfixable and they end up ditching the shuttle by burning it up over the Pacific, but that's really no big deal - simple money will build more of them. Things might get cramped, but I'd bet there's enough room and food on ISS for a few extra bodies to get cozy and play blackjack for a couple of weeks as the Russians figure out how to caravan the extra heads back home, and we scratch our collective asses, wondering why we didn't send a couple of tubes of JB Weld along on the last mission.]
I guess I don't care enough about karma to avoid being snide:
Piss off, flagrant manager-type. Go back to your 8.3 ".htm" world and leave me be.
The original question involved education. I like education. I'm willing to expend a little effort to help people educate others, whatever the field.
Your question involves money. I like money. I'm willing to expend quite a bit of effort to help people make money, if I'm in on a share of it.
If you want help with serving sales pitches and intracontinental AV meetings full of hot air, where your only interest is making money, hire someone skilled and knowledgeable to do the work for you. You'll find no aid from me, or quite likely anyone else, for free.
I care not to line your pockets whilst I wander about trying to figure out how I'm going to eat next week.
First, the obvious: If you're happy with what you've got, why not multiply it by 2? Toss another similar machine on the network, and operate it just as you have been the first one.
Of course, this costs money, both short and long term, as boxes aren't free and hardware problems become twice as likely to pop up. But, given your background in ATC, I doubt such juggling would be much burden.;)
You could always run two instances of Winamp on the same machine, with the primary difficulty being the ability to instruct each to record from a different card. Winamp is really not built for this sort of work, so it may be trivial, or nearly insurmountable - I've not tried.
Multiple soundcards are nowhere near as much of a problem with Linux as they are with Windows. Use ALSA as a sound driver, which will merrily provide excellent support for as many cards as you can physically squeeze into the machine. The stock kernel drivers work nearly as well, as does paid-for OSS from 4front. FreeBSD's stock drivers would also suffice nicely, if you want to avoid Linux.
It doesn't matter that LiveICE doesn't support more than one card - just run two copies of it, each with different configs, one for each stream. The worst-case scenario is that the device names (ie,/dev/dsp) are hard-coded, in which case you can just compile two different LiveICE binaries. You've got the source, and it really is trivial to replace/dev/dsp with a more appropriate identifier.
IceCast, the server-side component of *NIX MP3 streaming, will gladly support multiple streams out-of-the-box, so that's not an issue.
Whatever you do, though, go ahead and increase the bit-depth from 8- to 16-bit. Running with 16-bit costs you nothing, and increases dynamic range and overall fidelity. Whether or not it matters given the sort of audio you're encoding is not relevent; everything is going to end up as 16-bit anyway, whether by action of your local MP3 encoder or the player on the other end, irrespective of what it begins as. The MP3 format itself is bit-depth agnostic.
I can't say that I'm familiar with this "power brick" problem that you speak of, having never seen one.
I've got an old HP scanner here, myself, model IIcx. It accepts 120VAC from a standard IEC connector on the back, located beside the 50-pin Centronics SCSI connector and terminator. This big, legal-size monster weighs an easy 25 or 30 pounds. The servos inside of it produce a whine that is not dissimilar to a Formula 1 engine, and visibly shake the bench it lives on from the torque produced.
It makes decent scans by default, and positively beautiful ones once properly calibrated to the output device.
Powered up continuously for almost a decade and seeing occasional use over the same period, I expect it to keep going more-or-less indefinately. This is due in no small part to the fact that good OSS drivers exist and that SCSI just refuses to die - there's little chance of it being outmodded anytime soon - but also because of the iron content.
Next time you buy a $100 box of plastic and genuine Chinese air labeled "HP Scanner", expecting it to last forever, remember this: They don't make 'em like they used to, kid. Meanwhile, you might want to reexamine your use of the word "old."
I remember the Panasonic interface on the SB Pro - I've still got a Panasonic drive around here, somewhere. I once entertained the notion of putting a couple of Soundblaster cards in one machine, with 4 Panasonic drives tied to each, because I'd found a pile of them for $5/ea and already had the sound cards. Alas, running across an external Nakamichi 7-disc SCSI changer (blessedly) killed that idea.
As long as we're being thorough, I remembered another early 16-bit card: The Ensoniq Soundscape. Same EMU 8k synth as an AWE, and no facilities for extra RAM. But the built-in samples were vastly superior to the cruft shipping with CL products, and the analog section was cleaner. The one I've got here has support for a plethora of proprietary CD-ROM interfaces, including Goldstar. (I've never seen a Goldstar CD-ROM.) I recall that it was somewhat a pain to learn how to upload the microcode required to make the DSP function, at all, under Linux.
The EMU 8000 also included a 48KHz, 5V SP/DIF output. This was accessible as a 2-pin header on AWE cards, and hackable onto Soundscapes. In either case, it'd provide better sound quality than a GUS by using an external DAC. EMU was reknowned for their musical synths at the time (many using the 8k), but that magic tended to get lost in the ubiquity of horrific analog sections of sound cards back then.
And let's not forget the garbage that ESS OEM'd throughout the years. On second thought, scratch that - it's better forgotten.
I remember Adlib cards - cheesy Yamaha FM synthesis on an ISA card. No PCM capabilities. A reasonable tool for the budding musician, perhaps, but largely useless for gaming (except for the soundtrack, and Atari-esque bleeps and squawks). I didn't remember of it included MIDI or a game port. You couldn't even play mods with the thing...
So, along comes Creative Labs with the Soundblaster 1.0. It's got the same cheesy Yamaha synth chip that was responsible for all of the Adlib's output, plus their own (slightly better/different, and stereo) CMS synth chip, and PCM recording and playback, along with a MIDI UART and game port. All of this gear could be used concurrently.
It wasn't just Adlib-compatible, it was the same thing, plus a lot of genuinely useful features and a different software suite.
Sometime later, CL introduced the Soundblaster 1.5, which was the same card sans CMS synth (a socket for which remained on the board). This thrust the world back into the realm of monophonic PC sound for awhile, but nobody seemed to notice. I listened to many months of mods with an SB 1.5 back in '92, on a 386SX/16 that could just barely cope.
A bit after that, the arrival of the SB Pro brought stereo back, across the board, along with better PCM.
And then began the whole SB16/AWE32/64, GUS, PAS16 debacle...
What world are you living in? Last I checked, a P3 500 was encroaching upon the realm of realtime software MPEG compression at fair quality. And you want to use one of these for each stream?
Insanity.
I'll hazard a guess that such a "low-end" machine would have no trouble managing 16 MPEG streams, if you can find some way to plug all the hardware in.
I mean, this isn't rocket science: Video enters tuner card. Tuner card handles MPEG compression, and produces something less than a 10mbps bitstream. Multiply by 16, and we're up to - wow - something less than 20 megabytes per second.
Even once one includes requisite disk-shuffling, 40 megabytes per second of IO on a machine dedicated to the task is not a very demanding situation.
But it's not easy or cheap to squeeze more than 6 PCI cards into commodity hardware. So, we're probably limited to 6 tuners per box, which amounts to something less than 15 megabytes per second of IO.
I've got a P133 here which has no trouble pushing a paltry 15 megabytes per second around on the PCI bus. And, though I haven't checked, I can't imagine it having much difficulty achieving those rates alongside the overhead of software RAID (which is probably quite desirous for this application).
Therefore, I submit that nearly any PC hardware still available for purchase today will easily sustain the throughput required to service as many MPEG encoders as will physically fit inside the machine. I welcome corrections to my submission.
You really, really don't want standardized car stereos. Yeah, having some form of externally-accessible general-purpose input would be nice. Beyond that, however, and you might as well wish for one-size-fits-all tires, spark plugs, and crankshafts. None of that is going to happen until people begin to desire (and indeed, purchase) one-size-fits-all cars.
But you mentioned your difficulty finding instructions, in any case. I've not worked on a Honda, which might even be a bit easier given its DIN-sized dash opening, but things seem to look about like this across the board:
In my car (1996 Chevy Beretta), stereo installation is a snap.
1) Remove the trim ring that surrounds the stereo and heater controls. It slips off with gentle prying from a screwdriver, or even a butter knife.
2) Remove the four small bolts holding the stereo to the dashboard.
3) Slide out factory Delco stereo; disconnect wiring harness and antenna.
Done.
Now, for the installation:
GM, and most other car companies, keep the same stereo wiring harness, unchanged, for years, and try keep it the same across their entire range of vehicles. Which is to say that it's -at least- as standard as many things computer; witness the CompactFlash/Smartmedia/SD/MMC/XD/Memory Stick or DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW/-RAM debacles. Many companies make kits to make the wiring a breeze.
But for whatever reason, they (and Chrysler) use a differently-sized opening than everyone else. No big thing, really - I'm familiar enough with 3.5-5.25" adapter trays for HDD installation, and 2.5" adapters for laptop drives. Many companies make kits to make this adaptation a breeze.
So. Here's the drill:
1) Procure a stereo, appropriate mounting kit, and a wiring harness. These will be available locally, and are generally no big deal to find.
2) Wire the harness to the stereo. Last time I did this, the colors of the Metra harness matched my Blaupunkt stereo, and it only took a few minutes - seems fairly standard to me. In any event, the wires are clearly marked, and you just connect together the ones which match.
3) Insert the (DIN standard) metal sleeve included with the Blau stereo into the (DIN standard) mounting kit, and bend the appropriate tabs back to hold it in place. These are motions you should've learned as a toddler, while putting together figures cut from the back of cereal boxes.
4) Insert kit, sleeve attached, into dash opening. Bolt down kit using the same screws, in the same locations, as previously held in the factory radio.
5) Plug wiring harness and antenna into new stereo.
6) Slide stereo into sleeve. It will click into place once properly seated.
7) Turn key to accessory position and listen to some music.
It's all pretty self-explanatory when you've got the parts in front of you. And if you order your wares from a place like Crutchfield, they send along detailed instructions, written in English, which include lots of pretty pictures. But if this still seems too complicated, perhaps you really shouldn't be doing it yourself and should invest in the services of your local shop, where there are (gasp!) people employed specifically to do this sort of work.
Dumb terminals are indeed quite cheap, but what you're proposing is a general-purpose computer, with all the requisite bits that a computer needs, except for a conventional hard drive. Instead, it would be equipped with a still-nonexistant removable medium that only holds 5 gigabytes (admittedly, plenty for most office purposes) at greater cost than just tossing a hard drive in there.
Fast forward a bit: We just tossed two buildings-worth of hard drives, to implement a more expensive system which makes no difference to the daily work that Dan, Jane, and Sally do at their desks, except that they've now got to guard their storage system from pilferage by casual passers-by.
All so that jet-set Joe can do some work on the left coast periodically, without each office springing for a copy of Illustrator.
Buy Joe a laptop. He might even get some work done on the plane. If Joe's kid trashes the company laptop at a LAN party, that sounds like it'd be Joe's problem to solve. Just as it would be if Joe's kid reconfigured the company car after a keg party.
What about "I ran out of space, Dad, so I borrowed that disk you carry in your briefcase. Naah, it didn't have much room, either, so I nuked it. Yeah, it's got the last four seasons of the Simpsons on it now..."
It's really not a bad form factor. Since they propose to have a PCMCIA "reader" / "drive", you'll be able to pop this into an inexpensive, completely passive (read: PCB, two connectors, and a bit of plastic) 3.5" PCMCIA/IDE adapter on your desktop machine.
And then, slide the contraption out, and carry it over to a friend's house. Once there, you'll be able to insert the same drive into his laptop, hot, and use it as a local peripheral. Or use the USB adapter that they've got sitting around for their digital camera.
But your ID idea is rather disconcerting. Why would I want to carry expensive media around with me as a "network key?" Why would I, as an admin, want to allow my users to run programs on my machines which they carry back and forth to work? Why would I want to use expensive, easily-lost media to store programs, when the box I'm working on (or the servers it is connected to) already has plenty of space for them?
I thought we finally grew out of using removable storage for programs sometime in the late 80s. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Existant USB memory "keys" already fit ID purposes, along with common smartcards, and magstripes. None of these are popular today for general computing (perhaps because a username/password combo is easier, better, and simpler?), but they all do the ID thing just as well as this new vapor-gizmo, for less money.
1) Use low heat and good solder. 63/37 lead/tin content. I like Kester, because it's consistant. YMMV. Don't use 63/27, or your card will be 10% slower.
2) A large tip can be filed down to a small one. Sometimes they're copper, sometimes they're iron. Either is soft enough to be easily worked, but copper can get rather flimsy if filed down too small; be careful with it.
3) Avoid acid flux like you find at the hardware store. Acid flux is for plumbing projects, where it's actually desirous to have a bit of metal eaten away to get a clean surface to accept solder. With SMD work, a little bit of metal disappearing can mean that -all- of it disappearing. Water-soluable flux is available, and works fine. Look for it if you have any intent on cleaning the board once you're done with it. Otherwise, rosin flux is fine, but can be difficult to clean in a world without CFCs.
4) There is no 4)
5) Work slow. Double-check what you've done, and then check it again.
6) Ground yourself. Ground your work area, if conductive. Avoid working on surfaces capable of holding a static charge, which could discharge through the part you're working on into your grounded body. Wooden benches are good for this. Failing that, a disposable pie pan, aluminum foil, or other metallic kitchen object would probably be fine.
7) If you have not done much soldering, you wouldn't have read this far. Thus, I suggest that you not undertake any project involving surface-mount components, and get back to wasting time on Slashdot in between gaming sessions of humanly indiscernable framerate on your Radeon 9500. You'll thank me later.
I'm vaguely familiar with lirc, having first looked into it to see if anyone had recorded the output of my Carver cd player's remote, which I'd lost. (Nobody had, but a chance search on Ebay came through with an identical remote several years later, so I stopped looking.)
I used to make money programming Crestron control systems, so I'm fairly well-versed about IR control.
Thing is, that Kenwood tuner has no infrared capability, nor any externally-accessible control circuitry. It is rather braindead, as is.
I considered Mindstorms just because I thought it'd be fun to build and watch, and the parts could be easily recycled into something different. But it was too expensive to pursue at the time, thus I left it locked on NPR.
I'd almost decided to use a few relays connected to a parallel port and wired into the unit's front panel, but I moved into an apartment with terrible reception before that got very far off the ground. It'd have been a pretty trivial hack, though.
I'm now doing research on building a Yagi antenna, tuned right between the three stations I want to listen to (all of which are in the same direction and close to eachother on the dial - yay).
Once I figure out an aesthetic (or at least interesting-looking) way to hang it without driving screws into the ceiling I'll probably start recording radio again.
That is, if I can figure out how to tune the impedance using a folded dipole driven element...:-/
AFAICT, Mozilla (win32, at least) loadtimes are about the same with or without extra cruft like the mail reader.
In fact, about the only difference I've noticed is the amount of disk space consumed and featureset provided.
So, then, a bit of quick math:
I've got a 30gig drive that I purchased two years ago for about $120, or $4/gigabyte. If MacOS X Mozilla consumes 38 megabytes fully installed, as some posts here seem to indicate, it then costs a total of about 15 cents to install, while Chimera costs about half that, from what I can tell.
This being the case:
[/me flips a coin out of his pocket]
Here's a dime, kid. Get yourself a better browser.
I remember when Yahoo! was an accidentally-complete list of links, well before people grok'd the term "search engine". This was sometime before DEC decided to fund AltaVista as a showcase for their Alpha platform, thus ousting Webcrawler from "THE search engine" position.
I remember Mosaic being "the" web browser, though I preferred Lynx once I discovered it, because it was faster.
Wordperfect was OK, after the PC's rise to near-ubiquity and the death of Wordstar alongside everything else, but I also remember using something called Displaywriter on an IBM box based around a pair of 8" floppy drives.
What makes me think the same thing won't happen to Google is simple: They're steadfastedly focused on being low-bullshit, nobody does a better job of returning good results, and most importantly: My grandmother uses it.
Re:The only thing keeping me back (warning: woes)
on
FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 Now Ready
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· Score: 3, Informative
I feel like I'm stating the obvious, but:
Why are you still running token ring?
Cat5 is way cheap. Even good 10/100 ethernet adapters are less than $20. Hubs, switches, and other connection hardware sells for approximately one dime per dozen. And the drivers, generally speaking, don't suck; I've been throwing random ethernet adapters at both Linux and FreeBSD for years, and have never had a driver issue. (YMMV.)
Over at compgeeks.com, a week or two ago, I noticed they were selling a kit with crimpers, strippers, a bag of ends, and a 1000' box of Cat5 for ~$45.
At these prices, which I realize are non-zero, you can probably afford to pull extra pairs for telephone or video at the same time. There's no shortage of applications which directly use Cat5, and baluns are available for most of the rest (probably token ring, too).
This makes for good infrastructure for the home, and would probably help quite a bit with resale value.
And yet, I'm sure you know all of this already. So I'll ask again, because I'm really quite curious: Why are you still running token ring? If it's that cool, I might want to look into it myself...
If you really want to run FreeBSD and the driver support is too horrible to use (due to the problems you state), just set up a Linux box to route IP between the two networks. This'll give you infinite time to transition the rest of the network (or not), while remaining OS-agnostic and allowing you to plug in any of the myraid of Ethernet-equipped devices available today. Minimum hardware required: Two ethernet adapters, one crossover cable. Total investment of less than $10, if you don't mind buying used hardware and are willing to do some legwork.
PC Power and Cooling, in the early/mid 90's, made a full-sized AT power supply with an internal battery backup. For those who don't know: AT supplies are -big-, and usually mostly full of air. This one was full of lead-acid gel cells, instead.
You'll see these at hamfests and such occasionally, and they're painted black, so are relatively easy to spot.
IIRC, they were good for somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes of runtime.
Just like the electric water heater in my apartment. Except, that's operating at much higher pressure and double the voltage of this project. Can you imagine the failure mode?
For that matter, my apartment has electronic, pushbutton water at each fixture. It's all operated by a box of valves, solenoids and copper pipes under the kitchen sink, which is - you guessed it - plugged into a 120VAC outlet. Shocking, isn't it?
My fridge, during the defrost cycle, drips water down the inside of the back wall of the fresh food compartment, by design. This water is seeking the lowest point it can find, which is - you guessed it - rather close to the machine's electric motor. Can you imagine what would happen if...
What about the electric fuel pump that's inside my car's gas tank (and quite likely yours, as well)? Can you imagine the failure mode? Nevermind that the fuel lines operate at high pressure, and connect to an engine. From what I understand, such engines operate by exploding a mixture of air and fuel. Oh, and I guess they're stuffed full of electronics these days (some operating at ~100KV), and it's all water-cooled. The horror!
Now then, a few of the catastrophic failure modes of a funky water-cooled PSU for those suffering from severe logical ineptitude (see: "neo-luddite"):
1) Clean water starts spraying everywhere. Something in the PSU gets upset at this. Output voltages get funky. Mainboard shuts itself down. PSU blows fuses, shuts down. Water pump eventually runs dry, and may or may not destroy itself because of this. Root cause: Should've used de-ionized water (read: Does Not Conduct) and learned how to solder. Solution: Remove case, replace anything with convex/exploded capacitors or obvious burns, allow the rest to dry before testing and using. This costs money, as does a failure in a water heater, fridge, or automotive engine. Deal with it.
2) Low water pressure, and/or high water temperature. PSU shuts down. Root cause: Should've used a pump rated for continuous duty, and/or learned how to solder. Solution: Fix your plumbing, and power back up.
3) You didn't insulate things properly, and zot yourself while plugging your sound card into your guitar amp. Root cause: Musicians never mix well with fluids of any sort, especially when electricity is involved. Solution: Replace musician, as needed.
Now, for the fun experiments you kids can try at home: You'll need a heavy-duty extension cord, a clean non-conductive container, and some distilled water. For increased safety, use a cord with a built-in fuse of appropriate rating, and a GFCI-equipped outlet.
Fill the container with distilled water. Dry your hands (they're salty, thus conductive with water), and plug the extension cord into a fused outlet. Drop the other end into the container. Which of the following is most likely to occur:
a) Smoke, fire, lights flashing madly on-and-off, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria
or...
b) Nothing at all
That's right, kids: Nothing happens. You just dropped an electrical cord into a body of water, and absolutely nothing happened. Zip, zilch, nada, nit.
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The rotating headlights on the Citroen DS are hardly a new feature - the concept was present on the far more attractive Tucker 48, amongst many other features before their time.
As another poster said: You get what you pay for. Meanwhile, your TV is burnt.
Runco rear-projection sets, for example, use neutral grey bars on each side, to help equalize burn-in across the width of the screen.
I'm pretty sure Extron makes a box that does the same thing, with justabout any monitor.
With any monitor, make sure you're not operating your next set in Torch Mode. That's usually how they're set up out of the box - it's a sick, cold war-like race to look brighter (and bluer) than everything else in the showroom. Simple to test, and fix: Pause a DVD during a very bright scene. Turn down the contrast control (sometimes labeled "picture"), until you notice the brightest subjects becoming a bit less so.
Your picture is now somewhat darker than it was before. This is a Good Thing(tm).
Resume watching the DVD. You'll notice an additional spectrum of detail and shades of grey that your TV couldn't display before, and everything from the power supply to the CRT(s) will last longer. Now, go do the same to your computer monitor, and keep it around for a few more years, too.
For more do-it-yourself action, buy/borrow/rent the Video Essentials DVD. You'll be enlightened.
Other fun stuff:
Pay an ISF-certified shop to use a color analyzer to calibrate your set to standard. It's not very expensive, and generally makes what was once a pretty decent TV into something approaching the view from a window.
It's usually cheaper and better to calibrate things properly, than to spend more money on a what the salesgeek/price tag indicates is a "better" model.
I picked up an incredibly cheap 19" Sanyo TV at Christmas time, for the bedroom. After a bit of basic work, using a calibrated Sony as a reference, I've got it displaying a more accurate picture than anything you'll find displayed on a store shelf. Big hint: The service menu is your friend, and all current TVs have one hidden somewhere in their firmware.
What troubles me about video card reviews in recent years is that they harp on at length about the ins-and-outs of antialiasing, and framerates, and memory bus bandwidth, but apparently nobody bothers to look at the picture on the fucking monitor.
It used to be different. In the early-mid 90s, PC rags far and wide would rate video cards primarily on how good they looked. This is mostly dependant on the analog signal path of a specific card, and not tied to a given chipset - things would (and still do) vary widely between different implementations of the same chip. I'm talking about horizontal sharpness (limited bandwidth), image distortion (bad topology), contrast compression (shitty amps) and ghosting (poor termination), to name a few.
The physics haven't changed since then, and indeed have become more difficult. Resolutions and refresh rates keep pushing upward, and this makes the analog stage proportionately trickier to design properly. Designing an analog circuit for signals ranging anywhere from DC to 400MHz (a pretty common RAMDAC spec, lately) is quite non-trivial.
Despite this growing problem, even Tom's Hardware doesn't bother to tell you (subjectively, or otherwise) just how good, or bad the picture is on a given card/monitor combination. The closest they come is a note at the end of a Ti4600 review which states that all of the tested cards looked a bit fuzzy on their Eizo monitor, relative to whatever it is that they normally use with it (which they unhelpfully do not identify).
This German page has some very nice multichannel 'scope plots generated by the RGB output of a plethora of different cards, but offers no subjective interpretation of what they look like on-screen, as far as my English-trained eyes can see.
Even the most hardcore of gamers probably spend most of their time in front of the PC reading text and looking at porn. Are there any reviewers left in the world who actually make a point of evaluating image quality?
Here's my stab at it:
I've got a Voodoo3 3500TV. Works great in X, all features except vidcap working perfectly. Image quality at 1600x1200x75Hz is remarkably good, free of ghosting and pretty sharp on a 4-year-old 19" CTX VL950, though it could be slightly sharper. In terms of speed, it's about as fast with X as it is with XP, and handles all but the latest shoot-em-ups quite playably. The included 5/8"-thick, 6' snake makes for handy connections to the card's well-stocked array of inputs and outputs.
Its 3.3-volt AGP interface presents an insurmountable hurdle for modern use, however, when one is looking to buy an nForce2-based motherboard (none of which have 3.3V AGP sockets).
Thus, it needs replaced.
If anyone has any anecdotes on the fidelity of a current video card, please submit them below. Specifically, I'm looking at ATI-branded Radeon 9000 Pro or Radeon 8500, or who-knows-what-brand GF4 Ti4200. Preferably, the reviews will be more from the perspective of a graphic artist, instead of a gamer, and be based on what things look like at high resolution and refresh rates.
But at this point, I'll gladly listen to anyone's opinion about visual quality, even if it involves a Happy Mountain Computing Xabre400, plugged into a 15-year-old, fixed-frequency Sun display, and is written by a twitching 9-year-old crackhead who once lost eight teeth to an unfortunate hockey incident.
Anyone have some light to shed on the subject?
[I'll leave my tirade about the absolute dearth of modern CRT monitor reviews for another day.]
What are some examples of such a splendid, flash-specific filesystem?
I prefer to have power ratings expressed in terms of horsepower.
I once helped a musician-friend of mine assemble a custom bass guitar rig. It included a decent Ampeg tube preamp, Biamp active crossover, and an Ashly power amp, all bolted neatly into an SKB rack. Speakers included a pair of small 2-ways from Community and one of Eminence's larger drivers mounted in a particularly stout, hardwood box. Everything was low-gloss black, and looking quite sharp.
We get it all built and put together, and he plays it for a good long time with a smile on his face before asking "So, how much power do you suppose this thing has, anyway?"
I paused for a moment to do some quick math, and then said: "About 1.2 horsepower, continuous duty." He seemed puzzled with that answer, and then gave the E string a good tug. The lights dimmed, the windows rattled, and something fell off of a shelf across the room. He never asked that question again.
That was almost 10 years ago. Last I heard, he was touring with a band, and actually making a bit of money doing it. Still uses the same 1.2HP bass amp, which I expect to be durable enough to last justabout forever under any sort of use.
You mean, like Knoppix?
Boots and runs from a single CD. Autoconfigs justabout all current hardware, sets up networking, and starts up an accelerated X server.
Just add games. [Note, however, that the system includes a number of titles by default...]
Eh?
You'll still be able to plug in whatever sort of NIC you feel like into your PCMCIA/USB/FireWire/whatever port, if you don't like the included intel offering.
Of course it'll hurt the competitors. Waah. That's what competing is all about. For all we know, it'll turn into an AMD/VIA/SiS integration game, which doesn't sound all bad given the application (de-facto proprietary, inherently fragile, finicky laptops).
But, history seems to indicate that things will turn out just fine, whatever the outcome. Sometime in the 90s, it became apparent that all general-purpose PCs were shipping with modems and sound cards of varying levels of integration.
Did this affect the third-party market? Certainly. Several companies left the market or disappeared completely, while product offerings of those who remained became a bit less diverse. This was particularly apparent after things dead-ended with v.90 and 16-bit stereo sound, killing the upgrade cycle for most people.
Yet at the same time, I see such things as modems and sound cards being increasingly available. In the early 90s, if I wanted to buy a modem locally, I had to go to the neighborhood boxbuilder between 9AM and 5PM, Monday through Friday, and pay a premium for this "convenience."
Nowadays, I can just head over to Wal-Mart or another department store, at any time on any day except Christmas, and buy all the modems, sound cards, and other periphery I care for, at prices on-par with discount-whore mailorder shops.
To me, this seems like a vast improvement. I see no reason why the same trends would not follow broad acceptance of wireless protocols.
'sides, Orinoco, Cisco, Linksys and D-Link aren't going anywhere. There's an ongoing need for wired network products which is not soon to wane (if ever), and someone is going to have to keep busy building access point hardware for all these 802.11b-equipped laptops.
My girlfriend's car has some sort of suspension problem. I haven't found what it is because I haven't looked, but I hear it clunking somewhere near the right-front wheel sometimes on bumps and ABS stops on snow. It started sometime after she pinwheeled off the road, through a shallow ditch, and into someone's front yard, some months ago.
I just tell her to ignore it. After all, I don't have a garage, let alone equipment and supplies to repair it. There's a good chance that it's just something rather benign, like a sway-bar mount, anyhow. Besides, the car drives just fine - it's just got some new noises.
OTOH, there's also a chance that it's a ball joint or other critical, non-redundant component. A part which has catastrophic failure modes that include loss of power, braking, and steering, and present an opportunity for a screaming, cartwheeling death.
But, like I said: Since I don't know for sure that it's something important, I'll just assume that it's not and hope things turn out OK for her and our 2-year-old.
It won't make much difference. Out of sight, out of mind - it's a Zen thing. Everyone really is better off by not looking at it and identifying the problem - ignorance is blissful like that.
[Translation for the sarcasm-impaired: If the combination of a crew of bloody astronauts (already proven to be some of the most capable people in existance) and a multinational fleet of fucking rocket scientists can't figure out a way to hang 10 long enough to fix what was probably the spaceflight analog of my girlfriend's simple automotive suspension problem, I'll eat my hat.
But first, they need to be able to identify potential difficulties; this microsat gizmo might be just the ticket to avoid doing a spacewalk equivilent of the terrestrial walkaround that everyone's supposed to do before they get in their car and start driving.
They go over everything with a magnifying glass, fine-tooth comb, and sliderule before liftoff. How much would it really cost to give a cursory look at stuff before re-entry, especially when potential problems are already known to exist?
Worse case is that it's really, really unfixable and they end up ditching the shuttle by burning it up over the Pacific, but that's really no big deal - simple money will build more of them. Things might get cramped, but I'd bet there's enough room and food on ISS for a few extra bodies to get cozy and play blackjack for a couple of weeks as the Russians figure out how to caravan the extra heads back home, and we scratch our collective asses, wondering why we didn't send a couple of tubes of JB Weld along on the last mission.]
Could've been moreso, I guess. Though the relatively low user number should've given it away immediately, before ever getting so far as the text.
*shrug*
At least I felt better having written that. Countercorporate rants are good for the soul.
I guess I don't care enough about karma to avoid being snide:
Piss off, flagrant manager-type. Go back to your 8.3 ".htm" world and leave me be.
The original question involved education. I like education. I'm willing to expend a little effort to help people educate others, whatever the field.
Your question involves money. I like money. I'm willing to expend quite a bit of effort to help people make money, if I'm in on a share of it.
If you want help with serving sales pitches and intracontinental AV meetings full of hot air, where your only interest is making money, hire someone skilled and knowledgeable to do the work for you. You'll find no aid from me, or quite likely anyone else, for free.
I care not to line your pockets whilst I wander about trying to figure out how I'm going to eat next week.
Good day, sir.
First, the obvious: If you're happy with what you've got, why not multiply it by 2? Toss another similar machine on the network, and operate it just as you have been the first one.
;)
/dev/dsp) are hard-coded, in which case you can just compile two different LiveICE binaries. You've got the source, and it really is trivial to replace /dev/dsp with a more appropriate identifier.
Of course, this costs money, both short and long term, as boxes aren't free and hardware problems become twice as likely to pop up. But, given your background in ATC, I doubt such juggling would be much burden.
You could always run two instances of Winamp on the same machine, with the primary difficulty being the ability to instruct each to record from a different card. Winamp is really not built for this sort of work, so it may be trivial, or nearly insurmountable - I've not tried.
Multiple soundcards are nowhere near as much of a problem with Linux as they are with Windows. Use ALSA as a sound driver, which will merrily provide excellent support for as many cards as you can physically squeeze into the machine. The stock kernel drivers work nearly as well, as does paid-for OSS from 4front. FreeBSD's stock drivers would also suffice nicely, if you want to avoid Linux.
It doesn't matter that LiveICE doesn't support more than one card - just run two copies of it, each with different configs, one for each stream. The worst-case scenario is that the device names (ie,
IceCast, the server-side component of *NIX MP3 streaming, will gladly support multiple streams out-of-the-box, so that's not an issue.
Whatever you do, though, go ahead and increase the bit-depth from 8- to 16-bit. Running with 16-bit costs you nothing, and increases dynamic range and overall fidelity. Whether or not it matters given the sort of audio you're encoding is not relevent; everything is going to end up as 16-bit anyway, whether by action of your local MP3 encoder or the player on the other end, irrespective of what it begins as. The MP3 format itself is bit-depth agnostic.
Good luck.
I can't say that I'm familiar with this "power brick" problem that you speak of, having never seen one.
I've got an old HP scanner here, myself, model IIcx. It accepts 120VAC from a standard IEC connector on the back, located beside the 50-pin Centronics SCSI connector and terminator. This big, legal-size monster weighs an easy 25 or 30 pounds. The servos inside of it produce a whine that is not dissimilar to a Formula 1 engine, and visibly shake the bench it lives on from the torque produced.
It makes decent scans by default, and positively beautiful ones once properly calibrated to the output device.
Powered up continuously for almost a decade and seeing occasional use over the same period, I expect it to keep going more-or-less indefinately. This is due in no small part to the fact that good OSS drivers exist and that SCSI just refuses to die - there's little chance of it being outmodded anytime soon - but also because of the iron content.
Next time you buy a $100 box of plastic and genuine Chinese air labeled "HP Scanner", expecting it to last forever, remember this: They don't make 'em like they used to, kid. Meanwhile, you might want to reexamine your use of the word "old."
Good luck with your riceburner.
Indeed.
I remember the Panasonic interface on the SB Pro - I've still got a Panasonic drive around here, somewhere. I once entertained the notion of putting a couple of Soundblaster cards in one machine, with 4 Panasonic drives tied to each, because I'd found a pile of them for $5/ea and already had the sound cards. Alas, running across an external Nakamichi 7-disc SCSI changer (blessedly) killed that idea.
As long as we're being thorough, I remembered another early 16-bit card: The Ensoniq Soundscape. Same EMU 8k synth as an AWE, and no facilities for extra RAM. But the built-in samples were vastly superior to the cruft shipping with CL products, and the analog section was cleaner. The one I've got here has support for a plethora of proprietary CD-ROM interfaces, including Goldstar. (I've never seen a Goldstar CD-ROM.) I recall that it was somewhat a pain to learn how to upload the microcode required to make the DSP function, at all, under Linux.
The EMU 8000 also included a 48KHz, 5V SP/DIF output. This was accessible as a 2-pin header on AWE cards, and hackable onto Soundscapes. In either case, it'd provide better sound quality than a GUS by using an external DAC. EMU was reknowned for their musical synths at the time (many using the 8k), but that magic tended to get lost in the ubiquity of horrific analog sections of sound cards back then.
And let's not forget the garbage that ESS OEM'd throughout the years. On second thought, scratch that - it's better forgotten.
You remember strangely.
I remember Adlib cards - cheesy Yamaha FM synthesis on an ISA card. No PCM capabilities. A reasonable tool for the budding musician, perhaps, but largely useless for gaming (except for the soundtrack, and Atari-esque bleeps and squawks). I didn't remember of it included MIDI or a game port. You couldn't even play mods with the thing...
So, along comes Creative Labs with the Soundblaster 1.0. It's got the same cheesy Yamaha synth chip that was responsible for all of the Adlib's output, plus their own (slightly better/different, and stereo) CMS synth chip, and PCM recording and playback, along with a MIDI UART and game port. All of this gear could be used concurrently.
It wasn't just Adlib-compatible, it was the same thing, plus a lot of genuinely useful features and a different software suite.
Sometime later, CL introduced the Soundblaster 1.5, which was the same card sans CMS synth (a socket for which remained on the board). This thrust the world back into the realm of monophonic PC sound for awhile, but nobody seemed to notice. I listened to many months of mods with an SB 1.5 back in '92, on a 386SX/16 that could just barely cope.
A bit after that, the arrival of the SB Pro brought stereo back, across the board, along with better PCM.
And then began the whole SB16/AWE32/64, GUS, PAS16 debacle...
What world are you living in? Last I checked, a P3 500 was encroaching upon the realm of realtime software MPEG compression at fair quality. And you want to use one of these for each stream?
Insanity.
I'll hazard a guess that such a "low-end" machine would have no trouble managing 16 MPEG streams, if you can find some way to plug all the hardware in.
I mean, this isn't rocket science: Video enters tuner card. Tuner card handles MPEG compression, and produces something less than a 10mbps bitstream. Multiply by 16, and we're up to - wow - something less than 20 megabytes per second.
Even once one includes requisite disk-shuffling, 40 megabytes per second of IO on a machine dedicated to the task is not a very demanding situation.
But it's not easy or cheap to squeeze more than 6 PCI cards into commodity hardware. So, we're probably limited to 6 tuners per box, which amounts to something less than 15 megabytes per second of IO.
I've got a P133 here which has no trouble pushing a paltry 15 megabytes per second around on the PCI bus. And, though I haven't checked, I can't imagine it having much difficulty achieving those rates alongside the overhead of software RAID (which is probably quite desirous for this application).
Therefore, I submit that nearly any PC hardware still available for purchase today will easily sustain the throughput required to service as many MPEG encoders as will physically fit inside the machine. I welcome corrections to my submission.
You really, really don't want standardized car stereos. Yeah, having some form of externally-accessible general-purpose input would be nice. Beyond that, however, and you might as well wish for one-size-fits-all tires, spark plugs, and crankshafts. None of that is going to happen until people begin to desire (and indeed, purchase) one-size-fits-all cars.
But you mentioned your difficulty finding instructions, in any case. I've not worked on a Honda, which might even be a bit easier given its DIN-sized dash opening, but things seem to look about like this across the board:
In my car (1996 Chevy Beretta), stereo installation is a snap.
1) Remove the trim ring that surrounds the stereo and heater controls. It slips off with gentle prying from a screwdriver, or even a butter knife.
2) Remove the four small bolts holding the stereo to the dashboard.
3) Slide out factory Delco stereo; disconnect wiring harness and antenna.
Done.
Now, for the installation:
GM, and most other car companies, keep the same stereo wiring harness, unchanged, for years, and try keep it the same across their entire range of vehicles. Which is to say that it's -at least- as standard as many things computer; witness the CompactFlash/Smartmedia/SD/MMC/XD/Memory Stick or DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW/-RAM debacles. Many companies make kits to make the wiring a breeze.
But for whatever reason, they (and Chrysler) use a differently-sized opening than everyone else. No big thing, really - I'm familiar enough with 3.5-5.25" adapter trays for HDD installation, and 2.5" adapters for laptop drives. Many companies make kits to make this adaptation a breeze.
So. Here's the drill:
1) Procure a stereo, appropriate mounting kit, and a wiring harness. These will be available locally, and are generally no big deal to find.
2) Wire the harness to the stereo. Last time I did this, the colors of the Metra harness matched my Blaupunkt stereo, and it only took a few minutes - seems fairly standard to me. In any event, the wires are clearly marked, and you just connect together the ones which match.
3) Insert the (DIN standard) metal sleeve included with the Blau stereo into the (DIN standard) mounting kit, and bend the appropriate tabs back to hold it in place. These are motions you should've learned as a toddler, while putting together figures cut from the back of cereal boxes.
4) Insert kit, sleeve attached, into dash opening. Bolt down kit using the same screws, in the same locations, as previously held in the factory radio.
5) Plug wiring harness and antenna into new stereo.
6) Slide stereo into sleeve. It will click into place once properly seated.
7) Turn key to accessory position and listen to some music.
It's all pretty self-explanatory when you've got the parts in front of you. And if you order your wares from a place like Crutchfield, they send along detailed instructions, written in English, which include lots of pretty pictures. But if this still seems too complicated, perhaps you really shouldn't be doing it yourself and should invest in the services of your local shop, where there are (gasp!) people employed specifically to do this sort of work.
Dumb terminals are indeed quite cheap, but what you're proposing is a general-purpose computer, with all the requisite bits that a computer needs, except for a conventional hard drive. Instead, it would be equipped with a still-nonexistant removable medium that only holds 5 gigabytes (admittedly, plenty for most office purposes) at greater cost than just tossing a hard drive in there.
Fast forward a bit: We just tossed two buildings-worth of hard drives, to implement a more expensive system which makes no difference to the daily work that Dan, Jane, and Sally do at their desks, except that they've now got to guard their storage system from pilferage by casual passers-by.
All so that jet-set Joe can do some work on the left coast periodically, without each office springing for a copy of Illustrator.
Buy Joe a laptop. He might even get some work done on the plane. If Joe's kid trashes the company laptop at a LAN party, that sounds like it'd be Joe's problem to solve. Just as it would be if Joe's kid reconfigured the company car after a keg party.
What about "I ran out of space, Dad, so I borrowed that disk you carry in your briefcase. Naah, it didn't have much room, either, so I nuked it. Yeah, it's got the last four seasons of the Simpsons on it now..."
PCMCIA storage is already ATA-compliant.
It's really not a bad form factor. Since they propose to have a PCMCIA "reader" / "drive", you'll be able to pop this into an inexpensive, completely passive (read: PCB, two connectors, and a bit of plastic) 3.5" PCMCIA/IDE adapter on your desktop machine.
And then, slide the contraption out, and carry it over to a friend's house. Once there, you'll be able to insert the same drive into his laptop, hot, and use it as a local peripheral. Or use the USB adapter that they've got sitting around for their digital camera.
But your ID idea is rather disconcerting. Why would I want to carry expensive media around with me as a "network key?" Why would I, as an admin, want to allow my users to run programs on my machines which they carry back and forth to work? Why would I want to use expensive, easily-lost media to store programs, when the box I'm working on (or the servers it is connected to) already has plenty of space for them?
I thought we finally grew out of using removable storage for programs sometime in the late 80s. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Existant USB memory "keys" already fit ID purposes, along with common smartcards, and magstripes. None of these are popular today for general computing (perhaps because a username/password combo is easier, better, and simpler?), but they all do the ID thing just as well as this new vapor-gizmo, for less money.
1) Use low heat and good solder. 63/37 lead/tin content. I like Kester, because it's consistant. YMMV. Don't use 63/27, or your card will be 10% slower.
2) A large tip can be filed down to a small one. Sometimes they're copper, sometimes they're iron. Either is soft enough to be easily worked, but copper can get rather flimsy if filed down too small; be careful with it.
3) Avoid acid flux like you find at the hardware store. Acid flux is for plumbing projects, where it's actually desirous to have a bit of metal eaten away to get a clean surface to accept solder. With SMD work, a little bit of metal disappearing can mean that -all- of it disappearing. Water-soluable flux is available, and works fine. Look for it if you have any intent on cleaning the board once you're done with it. Otherwise, rosin flux is fine, but can be difficult to clean in a world without CFCs.
4) There is no 4)
5) Work slow. Double-check what you've done, and then check it again.
6) Ground yourself. Ground your work area, if conductive. Avoid working on surfaces capable of holding a static charge, which could discharge through the part you're working on into your grounded body. Wooden benches are good for this. Failing that, a disposable pie pan, aluminum foil, or other metallic kitchen object would probably be fine.
7) If you have not done much soldering, you wouldn't have read this far. Thus, I suggest that you not undertake any project involving surface-mount components, and get back to wasting time on Slashdot in between gaming sessions of humanly indiscernable framerate on your Radeon 9500. You'll thank me later.
Good information.
:-/
I'm vaguely familiar with lirc, having first looked into it to see if anyone had recorded the output of my Carver cd player's remote, which I'd lost. (Nobody had, but a chance search on Ebay came through with an identical remote several years later, so I stopped looking.)
I used to make money programming Crestron control systems, so I'm fairly well-versed about IR control.
Thing is, that Kenwood tuner has no infrared capability, nor any externally-accessible control circuitry. It is rather braindead, as is.
I considered Mindstorms just because I thought it'd be fun to build and watch, and the parts could be easily recycled into something different.
But it was too expensive to pursue at the time, thus I left it locked on NPR.
I'd almost decided to use a few relays connected to a parallel port and wired into the unit's front panel, but I moved into an apartment with terrible reception before that got very far off the ground. It'd have been a pretty trivial hack, though.
I'm now doing research on building a Yagi antenna, tuned right between the three stations I want to listen to (all of which are in the same direction and close to eachother on the dial - yay).
Once I figure out an aesthetic (or at least interesting-looking) way to hang it without driving screws into the ceiling I'll probably start recording radio again.
That is, if I can figure out how to tune the impedance using a folded dipole driven element...
AFAICT, Mozilla (win32, at least) loadtimes are about the same with or without extra cruft like the mail reader.
In fact, about the only difference I've noticed is the amount of disk space consumed and featureset provided.
So, then, a bit of quick math:
I've got a 30gig drive that I purchased two years ago for about $120, or $4/gigabyte. If MacOS X Mozilla consumes 38 megabytes fully installed, as some posts here seem to indicate, it then costs a total of about 15 cents to install, while Chimera costs about half that, from what I can tell.
This being the case:
[/me flips a coin out of his pocket]
Here's a dime, kid. Get yourself a better browser.
You remember strangely.
I remember when Yahoo! was an accidentally-complete list of links, well before people grok'd the term "search engine". This was sometime before DEC decided to fund AltaVista as a showcase for their Alpha platform, thus ousting Webcrawler from "THE search engine" position.
I remember Mosaic being "the" web browser, though I preferred Lynx once I discovered it, because it was faster.
Wordperfect was OK, after the PC's rise to near-ubiquity and the death of Wordstar alongside everything else, but I also remember using something called Displaywriter on an IBM box based around a pair of 8" floppy drives.
What makes me think the same thing won't happen to Google is simple: They're steadfastedly focused on being low-bullshit, nobody does a better job of returning good results, and most importantly: My grandmother uses it.
I feel like I'm stating the obvious, but:
Why are you still running token ring?
Cat5 is way cheap. Even good 10/100 ethernet adapters are less than $20. Hubs, switches, and other connection hardware sells for approximately one dime per dozen. And the drivers, generally speaking, don't suck; I've been throwing random ethernet adapters at both Linux and FreeBSD for years, and have never had a driver issue. (YMMV.)
Over at compgeeks.com, a week or two ago, I noticed they were selling a kit with crimpers, strippers, a bag of ends, and a 1000' box of Cat5 for ~$45.
At these prices, which I realize are non-zero, you can probably afford to pull extra pairs for telephone or video at the same time. There's no shortage of applications which directly use Cat5, and baluns are available for most of the rest (probably token ring, too).
This makes for good infrastructure for the home, and would probably help quite a bit with resale value.
And yet, I'm sure you know all of this already. So I'll ask again, because I'm really quite curious: Why are you still running token ring? If it's that cool, I might want to look into it myself...
If you really want to run FreeBSD and the driver support is too horrible to use (due to the problems you state), just set up a Linux box to route IP between the two networks. This'll give you infinite time to transition the rest of the network (or not), while remaining OS-agnostic and allowing you to plug in any of the myraid of Ethernet-equipped devices available today. Minimum hardware required: Two ethernet adapters, one crossover cable. Total investment of less than $10, if you don't mind buying used hardware and are willing to do some legwork.
PC Power and Cooling, in the early/mid 90's, made a full-sized AT power supply with an internal battery backup. For those who don't know: AT supplies are -big-, and usually mostly full of air. This one was full of lead-acid gel cells, instead.
You'll see these at hamfests and such occasionally, and they're painted black, so are relatively easy to spot.
IIRC, they were good for somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes of runtime.
Right.
Just like the electric water heater in my apartment. Except, that's operating at much higher pressure and double the voltage of this project. Can you imagine the failure mode?
For that matter, my apartment has electronic, pushbutton water at each fixture. It's all operated by a box of valves, solenoids and copper pipes under the kitchen sink, which is - you guessed it - plugged into a 120VAC outlet. Shocking, isn't it?
My fridge, during the defrost cycle, drips water down the inside of the back wall of the fresh food compartment, by design. This water is seeking the lowest point it can find, which is - you guessed it - rather close to the machine's electric motor. Can you imagine what would happen if...
What about the electric fuel pump that's inside my car's gas tank (and quite likely yours, as well)? Can you imagine the failure mode? Nevermind that the fuel lines operate at high pressure, and connect to an engine. From what I understand, such engines operate by exploding a mixture of air and fuel. Oh, and I guess they're stuffed full of electronics these days (some operating at ~100KV), and it's all water-cooled. The horror!
Now then, a few of the catastrophic failure modes of a funky water-cooled PSU for those suffering from severe logical ineptitude (see: "neo-luddite"):
1) Clean water starts spraying everywhere. Something in the PSU gets upset at this. Output voltages get funky. Mainboard shuts itself down. PSU blows fuses, shuts down. Water pump eventually runs dry, and may or may not destroy itself because of this. Root cause: Should've used de-ionized water (read: Does Not Conduct) and learned how to solder. Solution: Remove case, replace anything with convex/exploded capacitors or obvious burns, allow the rest to dry before testing and using. This costs money, as does a failure in a water heater, fridge, or automotive engine. Deal with it.
2) Low water pressure, and/or high water temperature. PSU shuts down. Root cause: Should've used a pump rated for continuous duty, and/or learned how to solder. Solution: Fix your plumbing, and power back up.
3) You didn't insulate things properly, and zot yourself while plugging your sound card into your guitar amp. Root cause: Musicians never mix well with fluids of any sort, especially when electricity is involved. Solution: Replace musician, as needed.
Now, for the fun experiments you kids can try at home: You'll need a heavy-duty extension cord, a clean non-conductive container, and some distilled water. For increased safety, use a cord with a built-in fuse of appropriate rating, and a GFCI-equipped outlet.
Fill the container with distilled water. Dry your hands (they're salty, thus conductive with water), and plug the extension cord into a fused outlet. Drop the other end into the container. Which of the following is most likely to occur:
a) Smoke, fire, lights flashing madly on-and-off, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria
or...
b) Nothing at all
That's right, kids: Nothing happens. You just dropped an electrical cord into a body of water, and absolutely nothing happened. Zip, zilch, nada, nit.
Learn from this.