Ramsey Electroniccs is probably the best-known vendor of consumable FM transmitters, with power levels ranging from a fraction of a Watt (good for broadcasting MP3 to your boombox out on the patio), to 500W.
The local college station here broadcasts with effective radiated power of 150W, from a not-so-big tower on top of a 3-store campus building. I can recieve it quite well within a 10-15 mile radius with the radio in my car, and understandably-well for a few miles past that. I consider this pretty good.
Whatever anyone does who might be considering pirate radio, I can only suggest this: be considerate to your neighbors. Nothing will draw the attention of the FCC and corporate lawyers faster than stepping all over a commercial broadcast, overmodulation of your signal (you need a stiff, brick-wall limiter in-line before the transmitter, set up by someone with a clue), or distortion of your broadcast.
The latter troublespot, distortion, is likely to be physically dangerous to others: There's aviation bands at about 2x FM broadcast frequencies, and any malformed waveforms (harmonics) eminating from your antenna will show up in exactly this spot. This Is Bad. If you kill a the pilot of a Cessna because you feel like broadcating "good music" to the masses during bad weather, I hope you rot in jail for the rest of your life.
That all said, you really want to at least borrow someone well-versed in radio broadcast to help with the setup and calibration of your transmitter rig. As long as you're considerate of others, you may be just fine, broadcasting away for free...until, of course, a knock at the door signals the end of the party.;)
In the same article, Cringley tells us that he will also be releasing MP3 and ogg of the audio portion of the finished programs, in concert with the video.
I expect it would be trivial to download the files and burn it onto a CD.
Usually, the correct way to view local, high-quality sources (DVD, Laserdisc, C-band, and sometimes DBS) is with the sharpness control at absolute minimum.
Try it sometime. After you get past the initial "evrything looks so blurry" feelings, you'll find that only those things which are supposed to be blurry actually are, and that all objects which should be sharp and in-focus are spectacularly portrayed. You'll also be able to see small details, like the small variations in a grey sweatshirt, which were previously invisible.
The reason behind this? The sharpness control is literally just like the treble knob on your stereo. It is a resonant filter which boosts high-frequency information. For sources like VHS (and cassette tape, to keep with the stereo analogy) which are often lacking in higher frequencies, it can help to turn it up a bit.
For everything else, it's just not needed. It is not a perfect system - turn it up, and sharp lines get resonant patterns following them. You'll see this a lot during, say, football games - the thin, dark shadow on the right side of the blinding white uniform is a product of a resonant filter. With a good source, that filter is the sharpness control. Turn it all the way down, and you'll not be losing information, but only removing a filter from the signal path, and you'll be one step closer to seeing what the producer sees in the ABC truck at the stadium.
That all said, the picture/contrast control is just like the volume knob on your stereo. If you twist the knob on your stereo all the way up, things will sound pretty bad, because there is obviously only so much it can do. Same with the analog electronics in your TV - believe it or not, there's actually shades of grey in, for instance, the Headline News banner, but you'll never see them with the picture control cranked.
Setting both of these to sane, appropriate levels will markedly increase the video fidelity of your TV.
If anyone's interested in more, ask Google about it, or look into the doings of the Imaging Science Foundation.
Google does this.
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Accurate OCR?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why not ask Google how they do it?
They've got a number of image-based paper catalogs online and searchable, and thus OCR'd.
Talk about varied formatting. It seems to be reasonably accurate, and I'm sure that the pocess is pretty streamlined -- everything else they do seems to be...
They were also late to the CD-R party, waiting until media was less than $5/ea, and drives fell down to the few-hundred-bucks range.
If history is any indication, this is about the right time for them to move in on the market.
[an FYI: I paid >$400 for an 8x SCSI Plextor CD-R within the same week that it actually started shipping. It has made thousands of discs in the few years that I've had it, and doesn't mind being kept busy at near 100% duty for days at a time. I doubt I'll ever need to buy another CD-R drive.]
It's bad for humanity. Was it not spelled out in sufficient detail in my analogy? Allow me to rephrase: Having to support two completely independant standards is expensive on all levels, be it OpenGL/DirectX, mythical Ford SUV-fuel/regular gasoline, Firewire/USB 2.0, compactflash/smartmedia/memorystick/SD, DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW, Syquest/Bernoulli/iomega, or what have you. In the end, you and I pay for these varied corporate games.
It is particularly disgusting when there's a very fine, open standard available very nearly for free. (AFAIK, all but the "OpenGL" trademark is free to implement - witness Mesa, which itself is and was probably suitable for inclusion in Windows.)
I guess my original point was not at all about companies buying other companies to acheive a goal, but about competing standards which serve to create no percieved benefit. To keep this in context, DirectX was born at a time when OpenGL was not only ubiquitous, but functional and good.
For examples of when adoption of a single, ubiquitous, and open standard works in favour of consumers (and damn the corporations), I'd like to point out Roland's MIDI, ethernet, RS-232, ATAPI, gasoline, naptha lighter fluid, use of compatible broadcast standards in US and Canada, CCITT v.22, the Hayes AT command set, and driving left-handed vehicles on right-handed roads throughout North America.
That it may be more profitable in the short term for a single corporation to deviate from this superior way of doing things does not aid the thickness of my pocketbook in the long term, nor make available to me a more useful, competitive alternative.
If in doubt, ask BMW how much it costs them to make left- and right-hand-drive versions of their exportable vehicles, and then ask them who pays for that expense.
That it was convenient for Microsoft to buy DirectX in a neatly-folded package does not make it less expensive to support than any other pointless additional standard, all of which suck.
It's people like *this*, ladies and gentlemen, who give the Slashdot crowd the elitist snob look. Why can't people ask good questions? What is wrong with asking even a 'non-obvious' question? Good questions help people think. Sometimes people don't like regurgitating here the same prose as they do ten times a day in real life for the rest of the hapless masses too lazy to search Google themselves.
If you don't have a good question, just don't post it! Why must you insist that we help you change the batteries in your lawnmower to keep your green wife happy? Unless you're going to let a line form from the front sidewalk to the back bedroom of your house, while handing out condoms and alochol by the door, I'd like to suggest that we don't care what your wife thinks about your lawnmower.
Such questions are not Slashdot material, but merely evidence that overpaid people are still largely inept at most matters of life.
In the breakroom at work, the TV continually blasts CNN and there are at least two different newspapers scattered around the tables.
I read the newspapers - usually, all of them. I stare blindly at Connie Chung as she goes on another heart-felt tirade against x with a sorry, pathetic half-smile on her face.
But that's really just to kill time while smoking a cigarette and downing a Dew during a union break. Given the choice, I'd rather be reading Salon.
I never feel like I learn anything from the AP stories carried in the paper. They're continually filled with strange, misleading errors and missing information, or (perhaps worse) dumbed-down numbers.
I never feel like I get anything from CNN these days, as they nowseem to carry everything but news. I find myself squinting at the ticker at the bottom of the screen, trying to decipher from their broken half-sentance synopsis whether or not anything important is happening in the world, and usually failing.
At home, the only thing I ever watch is the History Channel, TLC, and Discovery. The latter two have seen better days, much as CNN and MTV (I do remember, long ago, that MTV did play music), while the history channel remains largely OK with the exception of their exceptionally inane game shows.
I do like auto racing, but I can't get Speed from Time Warner without paying a king's ransom on top of the already high bill for a digital box and a new service tier.
Of course, these somewhat desirous networks all kick over to informercials during my prime viewing hours, which greatly inhibits my ability to watch them.
That all said, were it not for my 2-year-old's healthy addiction to Spongebob, I'd have dropped cable TV a long time ago. I still may - I've been considering programming the TiVo at my parents' house to keep a few fresh episodes of her favorite shows, and dumping them to VHS on an as-needed asis.
As far as the newspaper, I don't care much about it. The local news rag carries all of their own stories on-line for free, in a much easier-to-follow format. For other stuff, there's Salon[1].
1: Slashdot omitted due to lack of news, and a dearth of stuff that matters.
In what way is Direct3D better than OpenGL? Is it providing a more streamlined interface to the hardware? Is it easier to program? That it is merely different?
Tell me, is it more cost effective for companies to write for one API, or two of them?
Halflife works with Direct3D just dandy. And OpenGL. And Glide. (Thankfully, people's dependancy on Glide has subsided with time.)
I will not presume that such efforts are without cost.
And hardware vendors? They are expected to support Direct3D and OpenGL, and are ridiculed if either implementation is not flawless.
In the current graphics world where driver performance is just as critical as hardware performance, is it even possible that having two standards which must be supported is something consumers should be paying for?
I suspect not.
So. Suppose that Ford is looking for a new engine and fuel system for their upcoming SUV, which they need to have meet some ugly EPA emission requirements, yet still have sufficient power that it can outpace a sparrow.
Suppose that Citroen has the parts, people, and experience to make it happen, and nobody else (particularly Ford) does. Suppose also that a vehicle based on such a system will require special fuel which is only available at one gas station in the entire world, which happens to be located 13.7 miles outside of Omaha, Nebraska.
Despite this inconvenience, Ford decides to buy Citroen and use their new engine. They do, after all, need to do -something-, as none of their own designs will meet EPA requirements, and they never did make much profit on more sane vehicles.
Obviously, there's going to be some very unhappy Ford fans, dealers, and people who just need a truck - any truck. Which of the following reactions will people portray? Choose any which apply.
a) Ford sucks
b) What do you mean that Chevy can't sell light trucks anymore, because Ford picked up all of the requisite patents along with Citroen?
c) I don't want to drive anything made in France, of all places.
d) I'm sorry, Mr. Davis, but we don't carry any of the new Fords. Yes, sir, I realize that you are able to pay in cash. Sir, yes, we can order one for you - BUT you'll never be able to buy any more fuel for it this far east. Say again? Oh, due to IP, sir.
e) I'm calling my Senator. This EPA stuff is nonsense.
f) Wait a second. Last week you raised the price of gas because Iraq nuked Kuwait into nonexistance, and now you're doubling it again to fund a new distribution network to supply fuel for the new line of Ford trucks? I can't believe this! I know you make a lot of money selling gas to Ford owners, but right now you can't even buy one! It's absurd, the price-gouging you people do! I'll never drive a truck, why should I help pay for one?
Yep, I know it's not quite the same ballpark. It is, however, the same game. Competing 3D graphics standards vs. competing fuel standards.
Each standard has a non-zero cost associated with its implementation, on all levels. And those costs are paid directly by same people who simply don't fucking care about graphics standards, as long as their new Dell can play UT. These are the same people who don't fucking care what the EPA has to say or what Ford needs to do to keep them happy, as long as they've got a truck to pull their camper with. These are broke college kids who are having now to decide whether to eat ramen twice a week instead of take-out or vastly decrease the number of trips they take back home to screw their old girlfriend(s), because video games/graphics hardware/gasoline is too expensive.
And there you have it, plain as day. Pimps everywhere depend on OpenGL as a solitary standard in order to maintain their libido and nutritional intake. One might even go as far as to surmise that open, ubiquitous standards have a direct and positive impact on the genetic pool, through promotion of cross-breeding amongst disparate scholarly sorts.
It is thus clear that, despite whatever steps Microsoft may have felt were needed, DirectX is bad for humanity.
I thought that included with recent versions of XFree86 was a magic platform-independant driver model, with the idea that the same binary drivers would work on multiple operating systems as long as they shared a common type of CPU (x86).
Seriously, why should they be able to stop people?
If I buy some commercial software that happens to undisclosed GPL'd mplayer code, surely the authors of mplayer don't think they're missing out on their rights? I'm not even a 'potential' mplayer user, so they're not even losing a pretend. ..
You get my point, I hope.
Financially speaking, they -are- due royalties for the use (even in small part) of their work. Sometimes, these royalties can be quite affordably tiny, almost a token jesture. Other times they can be hideously enormous.
Or should Sigma Designs or whoever the latest GPL-violating proprietary software vendor be permitted to use bits and pieces of GPL'd mplayer code, on the basis that they didn't steal much, and that their customers aren't mplayer users anyway?
Copyright is copyright, and he who holds the rights makes the rules, with obvious exceptions for fair use. Some people write under GPL, others LGPL, while others pick the BSD or Artistic licenses.
Most copyrighted materials are licensed under a "you may make no use of this material except as specifically defined by the laws of Congress, and even then, we'll sue you if you try." But, such draconian terms don't change the scope of copyright protection, and of compensation for rightsholders.
If you're so worried about such things, why not have a block heater installed on your engine?
Just plug it in when you park for the night. When you start it in the morning, things are already nice and warm - just turn the key and start it up.
It also reduces/eliminates the time it takes to warm up the coolant enough to produce heat inside the cabin in the wintertime.
And it won't kill your car battery. The last thing I need on a -30F morning, as I'm trying to start the car before I get out and begin laboriously clearing ice and snow from the roof, windows, and hood, is for the car to do me the favor of automatically removing some of the battery's preciously-limited current reserve to push some oil/sludge around, before I even get a chance to start it.
Yep, I turn the radio off and avoid the rear defroster, too, on such days until I'm sure that the car is going to live unaided.
(and before you say anything: the car currently has 123,000 hard miles on it, and continues to run strong with minimal maintenance, free any problems with any portion of the drivetrain. If it causes some small amount of harm for the few seconds before the important parts warm up enough to function, I guess I don't care much.)
You don't need GPS to get local traffic forecasts. You only need radio stations (particularly all of Clear Channel) to start broadcasting RDS streams which take advantage of the system's features, and a radio that knows how to listen to them - modern, mid-range-and-up Blaupunkt units work fine.
Just tell the radio that you want to hear the weather, or the news, or traffic, or whatever. When such a program as you desire is being broadcast, the radio will automagically switch frequencies for the duration, and then resume doing whatever it was doing before.
This exists now - and the end-user hardware is increasingly in place by default. All it needs to work is a network of radio stations that actually fucking use it.
Other nice things about RDS: In the mountains, the radio will flip-flop between self-discovered simucast frequencies as dictated by receiving conditions, keeping the signal strong. It'll seek out a "Rock" station, or a "Classical" statioon, or "Country" or "Top 40" or whatever you ask, upon command - useful when travelling in unfamiliar areas. It will also identify the format of any RDS-compatible station it is tuned to, so you can have an idea of what 103.5FM plays even if you've never heard it before and they're on a commercial break.
It all goes back to letting you keep your eyes on the road, and can serve well to automate most of the things people do with their radio.
Including setting the clock by itself.:)
Re:Minor omission - get a in-line fuse
on
Portable Hubs?
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· Score: 2
I did fail to mention a fuse. You are correct as to their importance - justabout any battery is capable of supplying relatively dangerous amounts of current, and having one's backpack catch fire would probably be somewhat less than fun.
The diode is another good idea, as long as there's a fuse between it and the battery.
I have a pretty nice 2.4GHz Uniden cordless phone here, which I somehow managed to reverse the battery polarity on. The smell of burnt components was instantaneous.
Upon further investigation, it had a diode across the battery, but no fuse. The first thing that happened was that it blackened the diode, and then vaporized the PCB which connected it. As the latter occured, any potential that the diode had for saving the device was quickly eliminated, as the other traces from the battery remained intact.
Let's break this one down point-by-point, shall we?
This power costs money.
Patches for free software are themselves free.
The administrator would have to download the sources, apply the patch, and - most importantly - configure the build so that the proper things get built and other bits get left out.
Yes, yes. Just as the administrator would have to download the hotfix/servicepack/upgrade/whatever, apply it, and - most importantly - install and configure it so that nothing breaks. And nevermind that bit about inclusion/disinclusion of proper/improper things, as it's impossible in this world of proprietarity.
Getting a live server back takes more than just typing./configure.
Yep. And, frequently, upgrades and patches don't happen with instant perfection with other systems, either.
And I hope I'm not being too altruistic by saying this, but "make world" does roll off the fingers with incredible ease, does it not?
IOW, you need a smarter and therefore more expensive administrator to actually enjoy this power.
In a perfect world, you would be correct, but I just don't see it that way. Back here on Earth, software is written by humans who make mistakes. Were this not the case, this discussion wouldn't be happening in the first place. Patches, upgrades, hacks, and workarounds are not immune from causing new problems, irrespective of the employer of their warm-blooded origin.
IOW, Microsoft doesn't write software. People write software. Is this really such a surprise?
Even megacorps, with their many paid sets of eyeballs, are neither infallible nor unable to make things difficult - by accident or oversight - for the common man who just wants to get things done:
I dare anyone here of average intelligence and a reasonable (not extreme - that'd be more expensive) familiarity with Windows who feels that they'd be deserving of no more nor less than average pay as a sysadmin to try to install eXceed 7.1 on an SP3 Win2K Advanced Server box with terminal services enabled. Use of Google and other outside static reference material is permitted. For the purposes of this exam, no interactive technical assistance will be available (because it'd be more expensive). You'll have one hour to finish this task. Good luck.
I am very grateful for all the open source software I've ever used, but I must point out that this turnaround time usually doesn't include what a responsible commercial outfit would call QA.
Companies like Redhat and SuSE exist primarily to provide QA. If you don't want to trust some modest unpaid hacker's open-source idea of a fix, wait for the official RPM and leave your system vulnerable to a live worm until it arrives, just like you would if you were waiting for a fix from Microsoft (which might not happen until the next major release of the operating system, if ever).
At least with OSS, you've got choices. You wait around for the official patch while hoping that nothing bad happens in the meantime, or play virtual whac-a-mole chasing bugs while wishing that you had quad Xeons, just so you could make gcc compile faster. Either way, holes get plugged, with varying levels of expertise and wait-time required.
The other side of the coin is not without its options, either, I suppose, but they're not quite as pretty: You will either accept whatever you are given/forced to purchase after waiting around with your thumb in your ass for it to be released, or bury your head in the sand and learn to live with a system which resembles a chunk of rat-chewed swiss cheese.
I think I know which side I prefer. Are you sure that you do?
This is not rocket science....
on
Portable Hubs?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Nearly any cheap hub you can find today will be running on 5VDC internally.
Even expensive hubs, like the (older) 10/100 Kingston rackmount that I have here runs at 5VDC internally, despite its direct connection to 120VAC. Even the fan is 5VDC. (and, yes, that did take some time to find a replacement for, but the bearings in the new Sunon are doing justfine, thanks.)
The wall-wart they come with will deliver a stiff 5 volts, or 7.5 volts, or 12 volts, or whatever. First thing that happens inside of the hub is that it goes through a regulator to bring things down to 5VDC, and this regulator cares not about what the voltage is (within reasonable limits), as long as it is >=5VDC.
[note: some hubs may have low-voltage AC power supplies. avoid these unless you feel like modding them to bypass the internal AC -> DC conversion.]
So. What you need is a way to get 5 volts in a portable fashion. Something like this keyboard power tap would make a smooth way to do it.
All you'd need, given the above, is a durable-looking portable hub and a length of wire with appropriate connectors. You've already got the former, and RadioShack will provide the latter. Or, just cut and splice your existing wire into the adapter. There's a thousand ways to go about it, and they're all sensical and easy.
If you suspect that your laptop won't supply sufficient power from its keyboard port to power a hub, as some posters have suggested might be a problem, look to Ebay for an all-in-one kit labeled as a "USB Cell Phone Charger."
USB supplies - you guessed it - 5VDC. Current is spec'd to be something like 500 milliamps, or 2.5 Watts, so you might get pinched if your hub is inefficient about its power draw. (If in doubt, have one of your technologically-inclined LAN-buddy friends measure it.)
If you feel like it, grab one of those USB cables you've got in a drawer, and hack it into a power supply for a hub.
I've got a tiny 4-port 10baseT Netgear hub here with what I'd like to say is the same connector as my Nokia cell phone, FWIW. They've probably also got 6- or 8-port versions that are the same. (it's also small, lightweight, and made of steel - great for throwing into a backpack.)
Else, run it from its own battery supply. Feed it with 6 D cells in series, and it'll outlive any laptop which happens to be connected.
Other people have suggested sources for seriously low-power ethernet hubs, so I'll skip that research.
Just don't make the project any harder than it needs to be. You've probably, between you and a few friends, already got everything you need to make it work.
But these same databases are what allows me, the typical mechanically-inclined consumer, to keep bringing back a set of brake pads and rotors every six months or so. This allows me to drive at stupid-fast speeds without having to worry that the brakes might not have enough friction material left to handle yet another triple-digit-to-zero stop, increasing the survival rate of the human species by an order of magnitude, I'm sure.
Therefore, such databases are good for humanity.
Also works with water pumps and thermostats, which for some reason are fundamentally troublesome on my vehicle. I get new ones every year or so, for free.
Also works with spark plugs, wires, alternators, and a whole lot of other consumable (and not-so-consumable) items.
And dig this: I don't need a receipt. I just show up and buy parts. When I'm done replacing them, hours, days, weeks, or months later, I just take them back in the same box and get refunded.
Many times, the same part is made in the same place, with the same tools, but sold under different names with different warranties. I usually pick the long warranty.
And, besides, it's nowhere near as scary as what collection agencies will do to you. These are just fucking car parts, the same quality of which is available down the street from a completely different retailer for about the same amount of money if things get too weird at a particular shop.
And dig this, as well: The parts store I generally go to tracks by phone number, name, and address. It seems to be a pretty fool-proof way to go about things, unless an enemy of yours is walking around pretending to be you. And if that's happening, you've got more things to worry about than such annoyances as a weak car battery. [as an aside: the database has some sort of UNIX-like backend, controlled by plain dumb terminals, which is inarguably a boon for the human race. I can't imagine how tedious the process would be if it relied on a series of look, see, click, wait, type, look, see, click, wait repetitions under Windows.]
The one I'm familiar with is near Mount Cory, Ohio, and is situated in the middle of a corn field (or is it soybeans, this year?). It consists of a man-made hill, twenty-or-so feet tall, with a couple of small buildings on top. The tower itself is as other posters have described - not terribly tall (less than 200 feet), with an incredibly wide base. Giant feedhorns flow gracefully from it. I'm told by people who've been into it that the space below ground is much more expansive.
High-tension transmission lines live nearby to supply power. It has its own substation.
It would be a very poor choice as a location from which to which to distribute massive amounts of bandwidth.
For one thing, a wireless ISP set up their NOC in an abandoned local telco building about a quarter-mile down the road from there. They constructed a rather monstrous, more modern-looking tower. I'd estimate height at 600' - it positively dwarfs the AT&T relay station.
For another thing, it must have made more sense to build new, than buy the little relay station, or lease tower space, or whatever. Else, they wouldn't have done it. And if a couple-hundred feet would've been OK for this ruler-flat Ohio landscape, I doubt they'd have gone as far up as they did.
And ironically, I had a conversation that went something like this when I had the comwavz installers at my house, not long after service rollout:
Him: So, the DS-3 should be up Real Soon Now, after AT&T gets their head screwed on straight. For now, all we have is a T1.
Me: Well, that's fine. What's the holdup on the DS-3?
Him: I guess they can't figure out how to sell it to us via microwave.
Me: This is the same AT&T with the relay station right over there [/me points], right?
Him: Yeah. Strange, huh?
It's -hard- to get bandwidth out in the sticks, even if you've got a cold war microwave relay within spitting distance. I doubt things would improve much by owning one or two instead of just being near one.
If you're really paranoid, use photographic lens cleaning pads. I'm thinking of a disposable sort sold by a company named "Pec-Pad," something similar to which should be available at any real camera store for not much money.
They soak up dust by themselves, dry. They're non-abrasive on any surface you're likely to care about cleaning. Photographers with multi-$k, delicately-coated lenses use them. And you toss them when you're finished with them.
And because photographic supplies are generally expensive, I use lens cleaning solution that's intended for eyewear. It's a generic thing, sold under the name of whatever department store I happen to be at when I realize that I need some, and usually found near the pharmacy. It's made specifically to not muck up the coatings and materials of optical eyewear, which are not dissimilar from those coatings and materials used in computer displays.
It also does a better job of removing nicotine haze than anything else I've used, ever - including Windex, Simple Green, isopropyl alcohol, an ammonia+water mix, and acetone. (I also use it on the inside of my car windows...)
Honestly, though, just avoid using paper towels. You wouldn't drag a rough-cut 2x4 across your LCD display, and so should not rub it with an even more abrasive towel made from wood. I usually use a soft cotton cloth from the kitchen. Things don't get scratched, and they're easy to wash.
The type of cleaning agent you use doesn't really matter. Most (not all!) displays use coatings which are made to withstand alcohol, ammonia, and all the other strange stuff found in Windex.
Spray a bit of cleaning stuff onto the cloth, and then proceed to clean the display with it. Don't bother spraying chemicals directly onto the screen, as it really doesn't take much soap/solvent to get rid of fingergrease.
Wipe the stuff all over the display, paying attention to the sides and corners, where dust will tend to be pushed by your actions. Use slight very slight pressure, as if you were washing a Rolls Royce.
Switch to a dry cloth (or a dry portion of the same cloth), and wipe until dry (or the rainbow patterns disappear). This prevents streaking from whatever residue might be left behind - and there will always be some.
And to the above twit who posted saying that the materials used in LCD displays are pourous, I hope you die. If the display were pourous, the LCD would evaporate long before any cleaning would be required, especially if the weather was warm, much as the pourous skin of the aforepictured former living thing has permitted much of her internal fluid to disappear into the atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean something like this?
Magnetic RAM died a long time ago, friend, to a much more economical solution dubbed the "semiconductor."
Ramsey Electroniccs is probably the best-known vendor of consumable FM transmitters, with power levels ranging from a fraction of a Watt (good for broadcasting MP3 to your boombox out on the patio), to 500W.
;)
The local college station here broadcasts with effective radiated power of 150W, from a not-so-big tower on top of a 3-store campus building. I can recieve it quite well within a 10-15 mile radius with the radio in my car, and understandably-well for a few miles past that. I consider this pretty good.
Whatever anyone does who might be considering pirate radio, I can only suggest this: be considerate to your neighbors. Nothing will draw the attention of the FCC and corporate lawyers faster than stepping all over a commercial broadcast, overmodulation of your signal (you need a stiff, brick-wall limiter in-line before the transmitter, set up by someone with a clue), or distortion of your broadcast.
The latter troublespot, distortion, is likely to be physically dangerous to others: There's aviation bands at about 2x FM broadcast frequencies, and any malformed waveforms (harmonics) eminating from your antenna will show up in exactly this spot. This Is Bad. If you kill a the pilot of a Cessna because you feel like broadcating "good music" to the masses during bad weather, I hope you rot in jail for the rest of your life.
That all said, you really want to at least borrow someone well-versed in radio broadcast to help with the setup and calibration of your transmitter rig. As long as you're considerate of others, you may be just fine, broadcasting away for free...until, of course, a knock at the door signals the end of the party.
Would someone please mod the parent up. It is tactful, informationful, and topicful.
Thanks.
In the same article, Cringley tells us that he will also be releasing MP3 and ogg of the audio portion of the finished programs, in concert with the video.
I expect it would be trivial to download the files and burn it onto a CD.
Strange.
On all of my *nix boxen, all that would happen is that the offending process would die.
Or, are you running as root?
Bad user!
Usually, the correct way to view local, high-quality sources (DVD, Laserdisc, C-band, and sometimes DBS) is with the sharpness control at absolute minimum.
Try it sometime. After you get past the initial "evrything looks so blurry" feelings, you'll find that only those things which are supposed to be blurry actually are, and that all objects which should be sharp and in-focus are spectacularly portrayed. You'll also be able to see small details, like the small variations in a grey sweatshirt, which were previously invisible.
The reason behind this? The sharpness control is literally just like the treble knob on your stereo. It is a resonant filter which boosts high-frequency information. For sources like VHS (and cassette tape, to keep with the stereo analogy) which are often lacking in higher frequencies, it can help to turn it up a bit.
For everything else, it's just not needed. It is not a perfect system - turn it up, and sharp lines get resonant patterns following them. You'll see this a lot during, say, football games - the thin, dark shadow on the right side of the blinding white uniform is a product of a resonant filter. With a good source, that filter is the sharpness control. Turn it all the way down, and you'll not be losing information, but only removing a filter from the signal path, and you'll be one step closer to seeing what the producer sees in the ABC truck at the stadium.
That all said, the picture/contrast control is just like the volume knob on your stereo. If you twist the knob on your stereo all the way up, things will sound pretty bad, because there is obviously only so much it can do. Same with the analog electronics in your TV - believe it or not, there's actually shades of grey in, for instance, the Headline News banner, but you'll never see them with the picture control cranked.
Setting both of these to sane, appropriate levels will markedly increase the video fidelity of your TV.
If anyone's interested in more, ask Google about it, or look into the doings of the Imaging Science Foundation.
Why not ask Google how they do it?
They've got a number of image-based paper catalogs online and searchable, and thus OCR'd.
Talk about varied formatting. It seems to be reasonably accurate, and I'm sure that the pocess is pretty streamlined -- everything else they do seems to be...
Here is an example.
According to this document, AGX-type fuses are direcctly interchangable with 8AG-type fuses.
8A, 250V 8AG fuses made by Littelfuse, Inc. may be found here. $0.274 ea, minimum quantity of 5. 2,655 in stock.
NEXT!
*shrug*
They were also late to the CD-R party, waiting until media was less than $5/ea, and drives fell down to the few-hundred-bucks range.
If history is any indication, this is about the right time for them to move in on the market.
[an FYI: I paid >$400 for an 8x SCSI Plextor CD-R within the same week that it actually started shipping. It has made thousands of discs in the few years that I've had it, and doesn't mind being kept busy at near 100% duty for days at a time. I doubt I'll ever need to buy another CD-R drive.]
It's bad for humanity. Was it not spelled out in sufficient detail in my analogy? Allow me to rephrase: Having to support two completely independant standards is expensive on all levels, be it OpenGL/DirectX, mythical Ford SUV-fuel/regular gasoline, Firewire/USB 2.0, compactflash/smartmedia/memorystick/SD, DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW, Syquest/Bernoulli/iomega, or what have you. In the end, you and I pay for these varied corporate games.
It is particularly disgusting when there's a very fine, open standard available very nearly for free. (AFAIK, all but the "OpenGL" trademark is free to implement - witness Mesa, which itself is and was probably suitable for inclusion in Windows.)
I guess my original point was not at all about companies buying other companies to acheive a goal, but about competing standards which serve to create no percieved benefit. To keep this in context, DirectX was born at a time when OpenGL was not only ubiquitous, but functional and good.
For examples of when adoption of a single, ubiquitous, and open standard works in favour of consumers (and damn the corporations), I'd like to point out Roland's MIDI, ethernet, RS-232, ATAPI, gasoline, naptha lighter fluid, use of compatible broadcast standards in US and Canada, CCITT v.22, the Hayes AT command set, and driving left-handed vehicles on right-handed roads throughout North America.
That it may be more profitable in the short term for a single corporation to deviate from this superior way of doing things does not aid the thickness of my pocketbook in the long term, nor make available to me a more useful, competitive alternative.
If in doubt, ask BMW how much it costs them to make left- and right-hand-drive versions of their exportable vehicles, and then ask them who pays for that expense.
That it was convenient for Microsoft to buy DirectX in a neatly-folded package does not make it less expensive to support than any other pointless additional standard, all of which suck.
It's people like *this*, ladies and gentlemen, who give the Slashdot crowd the elitist snob look. Why can't people ask good questions? What is wrong with asking even a 'non-obvious' question? Good questions help people think. Sometimes people don't like regurgitating here the same prose as they do ten times a day in real life for the rest of the hapless masses too lazy to search Google themselves.
If you don't have a good question, just don't post it! Why must you insist that we help you change the batteries in your lawnmower to keep your green wife happy? Unless you're going to let a line form from the front sidewalk to the back bedroom of your house, while handing out condoms and alochol by the door, I'd like to suggest that we don't care what your wife thinks about your lawnmower.
Such questions are not Slashdot material, but merely evidence that overpaid people are still largely inept at most matters of life.
In the breakroom at work, the TV continually blasts CNN and there are at least two different newspapers scattered around the tables.
I read the newspapers - usually, all of them. I stare blindly at Connie Chung as she goes on another heart-felt tirade against x with a sorry, pathetic half-smile on her face.
But that's really just to kill time while smoking a cigarette and downing a Dew during a union break. Given the choice, I'd rather be reading Salon.
I never feel like I learn anything from the AP stories carried in the paper. They're continually filled with strange, misleading errors and missing information, or (perhaps worse) dumbed-down numbers.
I never feel like I get anything from CNN these days, as they nowseem to carry everything but news. I find myself squinting at the ticker at the bottom of the screen, trying to decipher from their broken half-sentance synopsis whether or not anything important is happening in the world, and usually failing.
At home, the only thing I ever watch is the History Channel, TLC, and Discovery. The latter two have seen better days, much as CNN and MTV (I do remember, long ago, that MTV did play music), while the history channel remains largely OK with the exception of their exceptionally inane game shows.
I do like auto racing, but I can't get Speed from Time Warner without paying a king's ransom on top of the already high bill for a digital box and a new service tier.
Of course, these somewhat desirous networks all kick over to informercials during my prime viewing hours, which greatly inhibits my ability to watch them.
That all said, were it not for my 2-year-old's healthy addiction to Spongebob, I'd have dropped cable TV a long time ago. I still may - I've been considering programming the TiVo at my parents' house to keep a few fresh episodes of her favorite shows, and dumping them to VHS on an as-needed asis.
As far as the newspaper, I don't care much about it. The local news rag carries all of their own stories on-line for free, in a much easier-to-follow format. For other stuff, there's Salon[1].
1: Slashdot omitted due to lack of news, and a dearth of stuff that matters.
In what way is Direct3D better than OpenGL? Is it providing a more streamlined interface to the hardware? Is it easier to program? That it is merely different?
Tell me, is it more cost effective for companies to write for one API, or two of them?
Halflife works with Direct3D just dandy. And OpenGL. And Glide. (Thankfully, people's dependancy on Glide has subsided with time.)
I will not presume that such efforts are without cost.
And hardware vendors? They are expected to support Direct3D and OpenGL, and are ridiculed if either implementation is not flawless.
In the current graphics world where driver performance is just as critical as hardware performance, is it even possible that having two standards which must be supported is something consumers should be paying for?
I suspect not.
So. Suppose that Ford is looking for a new engine and fuel system for their upcoming SUV, which they need to have meet some ugly EPA emission requirements, yet still have sufficient power that it can outpace a sparrow.
Suppose that Citroen has the parts, people, and experience to make it happen, and nobody else (particularly Ford) does. Suppose also that a vehicle based on such a system will require special fuel which is only available at one gas station in the entire world, which happens to be located 13.7 miles outside of Omaha, Nebraska.
Despite this inconvenience, Ford decides to buy Citroen and use their new engine. They do, after all, need to do -something-, as none of their own designs will meet EPA requirements, and they never did make much profit on more sane vehicles.
Obviously, there's going to be some very unhappy Ford fans, dealers, and people who just need a truck - any truck. Which of the following reactions will people portray? Choose any which apply.
a) Ford sucks
b) What do you mean that Chevy can't sell light trucks anymore, because Ford picked up all of the requisite patents along with Citroen?
c) I don't want to drive anything made in France, of all places.
d) I'm sorry, Mr. Davis, but we don't carry any of the new Fords. Yes, sir, I realize that you are able to pay in cash. Sir, yes, we can order one for you - BUT you'll never be able to buy any more fuel for it this far east. Say again? Oh, due to IP, sir.
e) I'm calling my Senator. This EPA stuff is nonsense.
f) Wait a second. Last week you raised the price of gas because Iraq nuked Kuwait into nonexistance, and now you're doubling it again to fund a new distribution network to supply fuel for the new line of Ford trucks? I can't believe this! I know you make a lot of money selling gas to Ford owners, but right now you can't even buy one! It's absurd, the price-gouging you people do! I'll never drive a truck, why should I help pay for one?
Yep, I know it's not quite the same ballpark. It is, however, the same game. Competing 3D graphics standards vs. competing fuel standards.
Each standard has a non-zero cost associated with its implementation, on all levels. And those costs are paid directly by same people who simply don't fucking care about graphics standards, as long as their new Dell can play UT. These are the same people who don't fucking care what the EPA has to say or what Ford needs to do to keep them happy, as long as they've got a truck to pull their camper with. These are broke college kids who are having now to decide whether to eat ramen twice a week instead of take-out or vastly decrease the number of trips they take back home to screw their old girlfriend(s), because video games/graphics hardware/gasoline is too expensive.
And there you have it, plain as day. Pimps everywhere depend on OpenGL as a solitary standard in order to maintain their libido and nutritional intake. One might even go as far as to surmise that open, ubiquitous standards have a direct and positive impact on the genetic pool, through promotion of cross-breeding amongst disparate scholarly sorts.
It is thus clear that, despite whatever steps Microsoft may have felt were needed, DirectX is bad for humanity.
I thought that included with recent versions of XFree86 was a magic platform-independant driver model, with the idea that the same binary drivers would work on multiple operating systems as long as they shared a common type of CPU (x86).
Is this no longer the case?
Seriously, why should they be able to stop people?
.
If I buy some commercial software that happens to undisclosed GPL'd mplayer code, surely the authors of mplayer don't think they're missing out on their rights? I'm not even a 'potential' mplayer user, so they're not even losing a pretend. .
You get my point, I hope.
Financially speaking, they -are- due royalties for the use (even in small part) of their work. Sometimes, these royalties can be quite affordably tiny, almost a token jesture. Other times they can be hideously enormous.
Or should Sigma Designs or whoever the latest GPL-violating proprietary software vendor be permitted to use bits and pieces of GPL'd mplayer code, on the basis that they didn't steal much, and that their customers aren't mplayer users anyway?
Copyright is copyright, and he who holds the rights makes the rules, with obvious exceptions for fair use. Some people write under GPL, others LGPL, while others pick the BSD or Artistic licenses.
Most copyrighted materials are licensed under a "you may make no use of this material except as specifically defined by the laws of Congress, and even then, we'll sue you if you try." But, such draconian terms don't change the scope of copyright protection, and of compensation for rightsholders.
If you're so worried about such things, why not have a block heater installed on your engine?
Just plug it in when you park for the night. When you start it in the morning, things are already nice and warm - just turn the key and start it up.
It also reduces/eliminates the time it takes to warm up the coolant enough to produce heat inside the cabin in the wintertime.
And it won't kill your car battery. The last thing I need on a -30F morning, as I'm trying to start the car before I get out and begin laboriously clearing ice and snow from the roof, windows, and hood, is for the car to do me the favor of automatically removing some of the battery's preciously-limited current reserve to push some oil/sludge around, before I even get a chance to start it.
Yep, I turn the radio off and avoid the rear defroster, too, on such days until I'm sure that the car is going to live unaided.
(and before you say anything: the car currently has 123,000 hard miles on it, and continues to run strong with minimal maintenance, free any problems with any portion of the drivetrain. If it causes some small amount of harm for the few seconds before the important parts warm up enough to function, I guess I don't care much.)
You don't need GPS to get local traffic forecasts. You only need radio stations (particularly all of Clear Channel) to start broadcasting RDS streams which take advantage of the system's features, and a radio that knows how to listen to them - modern, mid-range-and-up Blaupunkt units work fine.
:)
Just tell the radio that you want to hear the weather, or the news, or traffic, or whatever. When such a program as you desire is being broadcast, the radio will automagically switch frequencies for the duration, and then resume doing whatever it was doing before.
This exists now - and the end-user hardware is increasingly in place by default. All it needs to work is a network of radio stations that actually fucking use it.
Other nice things about RDS: In the mountains, the radio will flip-flop between self-discovered simucast frequencies as dictated by receiving conditions, keeping the signal strong. It'll seek out a "Rock" station, or a "Classical" statioon, or "Country" or "Top 40" or whatever you ask, upon command - useful when travelling in unfamiliar areas. It will also identify the format of any RDS-compatible station it is tuned to, so you can have an idea of what 103.5FM plays even if you've never heard it before and they're on a commercial break.
It all goes back to letting you keep your eyes on the road, and can serve well to automate most of the things people do with their radio.
Including setting the clock by itself.
I did fail to mention a fuse. You are correct as to their importance - justabout any battery is capable of supplying relatively dangerous amounts of current, and having one's backpack catch fire would probably be somewhat less than fun.
The diode is another good idea, as long as there's a fuse between it and the battery.
I have a pretty nice 2.4GHz Uniden cordless phone here, which I somehow managed to reverse the battery polarity on. The smell of burnt components was instantaneous.
Upon further investigation, it had a diode across the battery, but no fuse. The first thing that happened was that it blackened the diode, and then vaporized the PCB which connected it. As the latter occured, any potential that the diode had for saving the device was quickly eliminated, as the other traces from the battery remained intact.
Talk about bad engineering...
Let's break this one down point-by-point, shall we?
./configure.
This power costs money.
Patches for free software are themselves free.
The administrator would have to download the sources, apply the patch, and - most importantly - configure the build so that the proper things get built and other bits get left out.
Yes, yes. Just as the administrator would have to download the hotfix/servicepack/upgrade/whatever, apply it, and - most importantly - install and configure it so that nothing breaks. And nevermind that bit about inclusion/disinclusion of proper/improper things, as it's impossible in this world of proprietarity.
Getting a live server back takes more than just typing
Yep. And, frequently, upgrades and patches don't happen with instant perfection with other systems, either.
And I hope I'm not being too altruistic by saying this, but "make world" does roll off the fingers with incredible ease, does it not?
IOW, you need a smarter and therefore more expensive administrator to actually enjoy this power.
In a perfect world, you would be correct, but I just don't see it that way. Back here on Earth, software is written by humans who make mistakes. Were this not the case, this discussion wouldn't be happening in the first place. Patches, upgrades, hacks, and workarounds are not immune from causing new problems, irrespective of the employer of their warm-blooded origin.
IOW, Microsoft doesn't write software. People write software. Is this really such a surprise?
Even megacorps, with their many paid sets of eyeballs, are neither infallible nor unable to make things difficult - by accident or oversight - for the common man who just wants to get things done:
I dare anyone here of average intelligence and a reasonable (not extreme - that'd be more expensive) familiarity with Windows who feels that they'd be deserving of no more nor less than average pay as a sysadmin to try to install eXceed 7.1 on an SP3 Win2K Advanced Server box with terminal services enabled. Use of Google and other outside static reference material is permitted. For the purposes of this exam, no interactive technical assistance will be available (because it'd be more expensive). You'll have one hour to finish this task. Good luck.
I am very grateful for all the open source software I've ever used, but I must point out that this turnaround time usually doesn't include what a responsible commercial outfit would call QA.
Companies like Redhat and SuSE exist primarily to provide QA. If you don't want to trust some modest unpaid hacker's open-source idea of a fix, wait for the official RPM and leave your system vulnerable to a live worm until it arrives, just like you would if you were waiting for a fix from Microsoft (which might not happen until the next major release of the operating system, if ever).
At least with OSS, you've got choices. You wait around for the official patch while hoping that nothing bad happens in the meantime, or play virtual whac-a-mole chasing bugs while wishing that you had quad Xeons, just so you could make gcc compile faster. Either way, holes get plugged, with varying levels of expertise and wait-time required.
The other side of the coin is not without its options, either, I suppose, but they're not quite as pretty: You will either accept whatever you are given/forced to purchase after waiting around with your thumb in your ass for it to be released, or bury your head in the sand and learn to live with a system which resembles a chunk of rat-chewed swiss cheese.
I think I know which side I prefer. Are you sure that you do?
Nearly any cheap hub you can find today will be running on 5VDC internally.
Even expensive hubs, like the (older) 10/100 Kingston rackmount that I have here runs at 5VDC internally, despite its direct connection to 120VAC. Even the fan is 5VDC. (and, yes, that did take some time to find a replacement for, but the bearings in the new Sunon are doing justfine, thanks.)
The wall-wart they come with will deliver a stiff 5 volts, or 7.5 volts, or 12 volts, or whatever. First thing that happens inside of the hub is that it goes through a regulator to bring things down to 5VDC, and this regulator cares not about what the voltage is (within reasonable limits), as long as it is >=5VDC.
[note: some hubs may have low-voltage AC power supplies. avoid these unless you feel like modding them to bypass the internal AC -> DC conversion.]
So. What you need is a way to get 5 volts in a portable fashion. Something like this keyboard power tap would make a smooth way to do it.
All you'd need, given the above, is a durable-looking portable hub and a length of wire with appropriate connectors. You've already got the former, and RadioShack will provide the latter. Or, just cut and splice your existing wire into the adapter. There's a thousand ways to go about it, and they're all sensical and easy.
If you suspect that your laptop won't supply sufficient power from its keyboard port to power a hub, as some posters have suggested might be a problem, look to Ebay for an all-in-one kit labeled as a "USB Cell Phone Charger."
USB supplies - you guessed it - 5VDC. Current is spec'd to be something like 500 milliamps, or 2.5 Watts, so you might get pinched if your hub is inefficient about its power draw. (If in doubt, have one of your technologically-inclined LAN-buddy friends measure it.)
If you feel like it, grab one of those USB cables you've got in a drawer, and hack it into a power supply for a hub.
I've got a tiny 4-port 10baseT Netgear hub here with what I'd like to say is the same connector as my Nokia cell phone, FWIW. They've probably also got 6- or 8-port versions that are the same. (it's also small, lightweight, and made of steel - great for throwing into a backpack.)
Else, run it from its own battery supply. Feed it with 6 D cells in series, and it'll outlive any laptop which happens to be connected.
Other people have suggested sources for seriously low-power ethernet hubs, so I'll skip that research.
Just don't make the project any harder than it needs to be. You've probably, between you and a few friends, already got everything you need to make it work.
True.
But these same databases are what allows me, the typical mechanically-inclined consumer, to keep bringing back a set of brake pads and rotors every six months or so. This allows me to drive at stupid-fast speeds without having to worry that the brakes might not have enough friction material left to handle yet another triple-digit-to-zero stop, increasing the survival rate of the human species by an order of magnitude, I'm sure.
Therefore, such databases are good for humanity.
Also works with water pumps and thermostats, which for some reason are fundamentally troublesome on my vehicle. I get new ones every year or so, for free.
Also works with spark plugs, wires, alternators, and a whole lot of other consumable (and not-so-consumable) items.
And dig this: I don't need a receipt. I just show up and buy parts. When I'm done replacing them, hours, days, weeks, or months later, I just take them back in the same box and get refunded.
Many times, the same part is made in the same place, with the same tools, but sold under different names with different warranties. I usually pick the long warranty.
And, besides, it's nowhere near as scary as what collection agencies will do to you. These are just fucking car parts, the same quality of which is available down the street from a completely different retailer for about the same amount of money if things get too weird at a particular shop.
And dig this, as well: The parts store I generally go to tracks by phone number, name, and address. It seems to be a pretty fool-proof way to go about things, unless an enemy of yours is walking around pretending to be you. And if that's happening, you've got more things to worry about than such annoyances as a weak car battery. [as an aside: the database has some sort of UNIX-like backend, controlled by plain dumb terminals, which is inarguably a boon for the human race. I can't imagine how tedious the process would be if it relied on a series of look, see, click, wait, type, look, see, click, wait repetitions under Windows.]
What does this fine example of antiparagraphical prose have to do with microwave relay towers?
I'm a bit lost as to what point you might be attempting to make. Please clarify.
These things aren't in cities, for the most part.
The one I'm familiar with is near Mount Cory, Ohio, and is situated in the middle of a corn field (or is it soybeans, this year?). It consists of a man-made hill, twenty-or-so feet tall, with a couple of small buildings on top. The tower itself is as other posters have described - not terribly tall (less than 200 feet), with an incredibly wide base. Giant feedhorns flow gracefully from it. I'm told by people who've been into it that the space below ground is much more expansive.
High-tension transmission lines live nearby to supply power. It has its own substation.
It would be a very poor choice as a location from which to which to distribute massive amounts of bandwidth.
For one thing, a wireless ISP set up their NOC in an abandoned local telco building about a quarter-mile down the road from there. They constructed a rather monstrous, more modern-looking tower. I'd estimate height at 600' - it positively dwarfs the AT&T relay station.
For another thing, it must have made more sense to build new, than buy the little relay station, or lease tower space, or whatever. Else, they wouldn't have done it. And if a couple-hundred feet would've been OK for this ruler-flat Ohio landscape, I doubt they'd have gone as far up as they did.
And ironically, I had a conversation that went something like this when I had the comwavz installers at my house, not long after service rollout:
Him: So, the DS-3 should be up Real Soon Now, after AT&T gets their head screwed on straight. For now, all we have is a T1.
Me: Well, that's fine. What's the holdup on the DS-3?
Him: I guess they can't figure out how to sell it to us via microwave.
Me: This is the same AT&T with the relay station right over there [/me points], right?
Him: Yeah. Strange, huh?
It's -hard- to get bandwidth out in the sticks, even if you've got a cold war microwave relay within spitting distance. I doubt things would improve much by owning one or two instead of just being near one.
'tis only karma.
If you're really paranoid, use photographic lens cleaning pads. I'm thinking of a disposable sort sold by a company named "Pec-Pad," something similar to which should be available at any real camera store for not much money.
They soak up dust by themselves, dry. They're non-abrasive on any surface you're likely to care about cleaning. Photographers with multi-$k, delicately-coated lenses use them. And you toss them when you're finished with them.
And because photographic supplies are generally expensive, I use lens cleaning solution that's intended for eyewear. It's a generic thing, sold under the name of whatever department store I happen to be at when I realize that I need some, and usually found near the pharmacy. It's made specifically to not muck up the coatings and materials of optical eyewear, which are not dissimilar from those coatings and materials used in computer displays.
It also does a better job of removing nicotine haze than anything else I've used, ever - including Windex, Simple Green, isopropyl alcohol, an ammonia+water mix, and acetone. (I also use it on the inside of my car windows...)
Honestly, though, just avoid using paper towels. You wouldn't drag a rough-cut 2x4 across your LCD display, and so should not rub it with an even more abrasive towel made from wood. I usually use a soft cotton cloth from the kitchen. Things don't get scratched, and they're easy to wash.
The type of cleaning agent you use doesn't really matter. Most (not all!) displays use coatings which are made to withstand alcohol, ammonia, and all the other strange stuff found in Windex.
Spray a bit of cleaning stuff onto the cloth, and then proceed to clean the display with it. Don't bother spraying chemicals directly onto the screen, as it really doesn't take much soap/solvent to get rid of fingergrease.
Wipe the stuff all over the display, paying attention to the sides and corners, where dust will tend to be pushed by your actions. Use slight very slight pressure, as if you were washing a Rolls Royce.
Switch to a dry cloth (or a dry portion of the same cloth), and wipe until dry (or the rainbow patterns disappear). This prevents streaking from whatever residue might be left behind - and there will always be some.
And to the above twit who posted saying that the materials used in LCD displays are pourous, I hope you die. If the display were pourous, the LCD would evaporate long before any cleaning would be required, especially if the weather was warm, much as the pourous skin of the aforepictured former living thing has permitted much of her internal fluid to disappear into the atmosphere.