The OP was talking about a separate 12V system for the house for all the low-power devices that usually come with their own "wall wart" power supply or run on low voltages. Cellphone chargers, WLAN routers, DVD players, all that stuff.
That's good as long as all the manufactures agree on what is at ground potential. Anything that connects to something else with a signal wire with a grounded shield will have to use the same ground reference. Otherwise shorts, ground loops, and noise pickup become problems as it is common to see in cheap car stereo stuff. Idealy the signal ground should be isolated from the power return connections just like in the 120 volt stuff. Much 12 volt stuff does not isolate the signal from the power source.
Is it worth lobbying for a industrial AC/DC rectifier in each house at the meter.
No. Do the math. From the post it looks like you are advocating a 12 volt system for the house. Right now a 20 amp breaker feeds a 12 AWG wire just fine and you can plug in a 1500 watt hair dryer in the bathroom which is maybe 40 feet from the meter. At full load, the voltage at the outlet may drop a couple volts so you are talking 12 amps current at 2 volts in the wire or 24 watts lost in the entire length of wire.
Now the 12 volt version. From 120 volt to 12 volt at the same wattage (Volts * Amps for a resistive load) you will now need to draw 120 amps instead of 12 for the blow dryer for the same 1500 watts. If you were dumb enough to try using the same 12 AWG wire the 2 volt drop is now 20 volts. OOPS.. We seem to be short 8 volts in the negative direction to get 120 Amps to the bathroom outlet at zero volts. Lets see if it were possible the 20 volt drop in the wire at 120 amps would be 2400 watts of heat in the 40 feet of wire. Can you say HOT!. Maybe we need a larger wire size. Maybe a size big enough to handle the original voltage drop of a couple volts. Our original setup at 120 volts has less than 2% voltage drop. At 12 Volts we now have a little under 20% voltage drop. Hmm we need to go to even bigger wire to reduce the voltage drop to less than.2 volts in 40 feet.
You do the math. Find a copper wire table and find out what AWG wire is required to handle 120 Amps with only.2 volts drop. Don't forget the current in a 40 foot length travels both ways on 2 conductors, so figure it for 80 feet.
When you are done with the math you will understand why we use 120 volts and some countries use 240 volts. You may get electricuted in an accident, but you don't need welding cable for your hair dryer.
My 1KW inverter in my car uses Welding cable for leads and the length is kept to under 3 feet total to keep the voltage drop within limits.
A one-time friend of the family did this in a shop he owned. He figured he'd switch it, operate for a week on, week off, so the bill would be low, but not too low.
Rewireing a meterbase often with aluminum wires is a great way to form high resistance points in the wire. Can you say house fire?
Essentially, I use the power utility as my batteries - during sunny days I generate much more electricity than I use and the excess goes into the grid, and then I use power from the grid on rainy winter days and during nighttime.
Have you considered replacing one of your inverters with one from Outback Systems to fee your critical load (bath, hall, bedroom lights, freezer, fridge, computer, & TV?
For a couple grand more, in the case of some good inverters that are designed for it (such as some of the Xantrex models), you can add a box with a relay, a phase-difference monitor, and a subsidiary "brain" board (or get an inverter with the function built in). (Actually the box in question usually also has the line monitoring circuit and combines with inverters that are otherwise stand-alone non-grid-tie.) That box will disconnect the inverter-and-keepalive-lodds from the line and let it keep going during an outage, then tell it to drift phase until it matches and hook it back up once the grid is back and has stabilized. --
I do have a Windows XP desktop and I have had significantly fewer problems with it than my debian box in lab or my zenwalk laptop
Do you have the time to troll the forums to find the solution to fix my wife's XP box? She doesn't want to lose her email again by doing the reformat/reinstall everyting again thing.
List of problems I haven't been able to figure out and gave up trying.. I have photocopy software on the machine. It worked fine until I tried to edit a photo. This loaded the 30 day trial of the bundled photo editor. Now anytime I try to use the photocopier, the twain driver brings up the 30 day trial software instead of printing the result. Any ideas. Removing the hijacking software simply brings up the Windows is unable to find... Application. Shall I search for it.
At least once a day, we have to reboot, because clicking on a username to log in brings up the password box, but no cursor. Have to reboot to enter the password. Any ideas on how to fix?
The Ubuntu box on the other hand had one glitch in the entire time I had it that prevented going to SU in Gnome. A quick look at Google brought up the solution and a short edit of the hosts file fixed it.
Windows can be fixed by wiping and starting over. Ubuntu can be fixed.
"Windows Media Player cannot play this DVD because there is a problem with digital copy protection between your DVD drive, decoder and video card. Try installing an updated driver for your video card."
Wow, now Windows is having the same problems playing commercial DVD's as Linux. It's about time they caught up to Linux.
Do they have to change the way CD burning works with every new version? Is there a reasonable explanation why CD burning programs always end up broken?
They should take Ubuntu's example and bundle a working CD burner with the OS.
I upgraded to Ubuntu and I found it was pretty much a waste of time worring about old application that didn't work. The ones that came included work fine.
The only tweaking needed was to load some codecs and Flash.
Oh, good news... Flash 9 is now out in the stable version for Linux!:-)
Why buy an OS and scrounge trying to find what applications you have to buy new improved versions of applications. Get an OS with most of the applications included. It's great on the budget.
As an added bonus, I don't worry about entering a reduced functionality mode if something goes wrong or I upgrade hardware.
Are we just arranging for the bear to eat our friend?
For some it already has. My first e-mail account has been over-run and devoured. When I got over 15 minutes a day wasted deleting spam, and I went on vacation for a couple weeks, I couldn't bear the thought of the time it would take to delete the junk. I stopped checking my mail in October.
How comes everyone tries to fight spam by breaking infrastructure?
Because spam has broken the infrastructure. A working broken solution is better than a fully broken solution.
I now use my work e-mail and nothing else. Mail from outside lands in the junk folder as low priority stuff to be sifted later.
My home private e-mail hasn't been checked since October. It's been hammered to the point of being useless. I've gone to reach me by pager, phone, or business radio.
I no longer spend 20 minutes a day sorting spam. My mailbox is 12 years old. It's on way too many spam lists. The backlog is so deep, I don't bother looking.
Some people are looking for a working solution to the tidal wave of spam. Some get a new address every 6-12 months. Others have gone to IM. Some have given up private ISP provided mail entirely.
I mean, I spent about $1,000 on a decent sound system, why would I do that just to listen to sound quality matched by a $50 ghetto blaster?
Good point. For most modern music 128K bitrate is just fine as even the CD's are comptessed to the point of distortion and clipping just to sound loud. Those CD's have no headroom decent S/N ratio, or dynamic range. They are not hurt by a low bitrate.
I have a pair of Yamaha NS-1000 speakers and a pair of Acoustic Research AR3's. I know I'm dating myself here, but I have more invested in quality high fidelity speakers than most people have in their entire sound system. I agree that a buck a track for a low bitrate file just doesn't cut it.
For the first time, flagging sales of online music tracks are beginning to make the big recording companies consider the wisdom of selling music without 'rights management' technologies attached. The article notes that this is a step the recording industry vowed 'never to take'.
Wow, a cluestick is finaly showing up. The reports of only 22 purchased tracks per iPod sold is showing that consumers are voting down DRM with their pocketbooks in a big way. Wow, we finaly got enough votes in to be noticed.
A few bands jumping ship to go to a non-DRM music site is probably the biggest clue stick they got. If they don't have a monopoly on the artists, they have no control. These are desprate times for the labels. Bare Naked Ladies has gone to e-music. Some of the newer TSB stuff is not on RIAA cartel labels. (Too bad the Wizards of Winter track is in a RIAA cartel album. It's the reason I haven't bought it yet.)
The RIAA cartel labels have to make a big move fast before this leak grows and takes down the ship. They are busy trying to patch the P-P hole with a product that doesn't sell well because it is mostly useless to most people.
Maybe soon I can buy tracks in MP3 that I can play besides some obscure indi stuff on e-music.
Remember, I have rejected DRM music tracks and stuck with the most universal standard in the world. MP3's play on my flash player, all my computers, my DVD player (as MP3 CD) and in my car.
No other format is that compatible in my mixed environment. The incompatible DRM formats has kept me out of online music stores. Now if they will do something about the price fixing at a high price. Even better would be to fix the "for private home use only" restrictions so I can also legaly do one of the Christmas Light Shows, or play a ripped CD with a wedding slide show at a wedding reception, and post the video without breaking a bunch of license clauses in the process.
They have no simple way to use CD's in any public performance such as a public light show, a public wedding slide show, or DJ'ing the reception dance as an amature DJ. All these public performances are prohibited by the Private Home use clause.
I would have bought lots of music if I could have actualy used it. It was too restricted to be of much use in todays world. DRM was just icing on the cake making the expensive product even less useful.
sorry to be correcting you, but MS Office still does cost a few hundred bucks, and second, last time I checked, Star/Open Office is under Sun Microsystems, not Novell
I wish I had nice mod points to give you for that one. I haven't used StarOffice in several years. I just dug out the box. You are right. It is Sun Microsystems StarOffice Version 5.2. The price is still on the box. I paid 34.99 for it and it came with a home site license.
Too boot, out of the box it runs on Windows, Solaris, and Linux. On the back of the box it lists it's features next to MS Office 2000 Standard Edition. Both have a Word Processor, Spread Sheet, Presentation, E-mail, and web support. In addition StarOffice has a drawing application, Database, Integrated Desktop, Value Pricing, and free upgrades.
For home use, there was no longer any need for a high priced office suite for each PC. It opens Windows documents just fine.
In Windows you can do something very similar, and log on to a command prompt as well.
True, but can you get the prompt and everything listed while Windows loads the graphical interface?
Windows gives you an hourglass. In Ubuntu, you can switch to a TTY port and watch X load like watching a DOS batch file run.
The graphical interface still loads, but you don't see it. You have to switch back to TTY7 to bring up the graphical login screen. TTY1-6 are all terminal screens. You can Ctl, Alt F1-6 to any of them and log in several users at the same time.
Show that to the TSA guy. Log in as Bob in TTY1, Fred on TTY2, TSA on TTY3, Guest on TTY4, and ask them which account they would like to examine. I doubt they would know enough about it to ask for Root or the GUI.
Why charge nearly 1000 dollars so they can all "upgrade" for a single house?
A simple site license would be fine. MS office was a couple hundred dollars a copy a few years ago. Novel's Star office was less than a hundred dollars and came with a home site license. Needless to say, I ran Star Office at home for a while until Open Office became better and replaced it.
In keeping the budget balanced and avoiding piracy, many people find alternatives with better terms. We have more than 1 PC. A single PC license is to be avoided if at all possible. This requirement alone has introduced me to Free Open Software as an affordable replacement to the by each PC a copy model.
The latest casualty is Light Factory. They went from a Registeration name model to a single PC locked registration. In the process, it broke the hot spare for a live performance. I upgraded to Freestyler in its place.
Is free software the only ones who get a SOHO network and a cheap site license?
There are a significant number of people who used pirate software through collage when they're broke, get used to them then when they're financially better off, start to buy the real thing. You'll start losing those sales if they start off with free software right from thr word go.
Good point. There are lots of academic copies of Photoshop Pro, MS Office, and such. I am older and didn't get these in school, so I am much more versed in The Gimp and Open Office. This is especialy true when the big anti-piracy business busting BSA started their heavy handed tactics. I very quickly fled to free alternative legit software and started avoiding those behind the BSA squad.
Much of my software is un-regestered. Registration is not required. It's more of a privacy issue than a piracy issue. Is it possible to register your copy of Ubuntu, Open Office, Abi Word, Gnome, Banshee, and the Gimp? I have not been asked to register any of it.
Sorry I generalized too much. I should have said some people buys iPods to use the iTunes store. The store does infulence some buying decisions. On the other hand, there are not many people who buy Zunes. Even fewer if any buy it because of the wonderful selection a great prices at the Zune store. I've heard reviewers bash the store due to the 4 registrations required to shop at the store and the store doesn't take dollars, but uses something called Zune Points to obscure how much the music really costs.
One fact that is an issue with many iPod users are they are young enough to not have a credit card. They fill their iPod from their CD collection, their friends CD collection, and songs from peer to peer. They can't shop at the iTunes store with an exception of a gift card. The largest demographic of iPod owners can't buy iTunes with small pocket change. Picking up a $50 gift card is just too big of a chunk of change.
The other thing I have heard is Sony and another label is severely restricting the songs that can be squirted.
The reviewers laugh at it. I haven't heard comments from end users who use the store. I haven't heard of anybody who bought the Zune to use the store.
and the first thing to pop up on the screen was a black screen with a small white bar blinking in the top right.
On a Ubuntu machine, hit Ctl, Alt, F1 while it is booting. Then show the guard. When the login prompt comes up, log in as a restricted user. Let the guard search it. Most are clueless at a command prompt.
He went on to ask me if there was any childporn / incriminating material on it. I said that no, but that there could be my girlfriend naked on there.
Before traveling, transfer them to the laptop and from there, burn them on a CD and put it with your CD player. Hidden in plain site goes a long way. Most of the time they will not take the time to see if all your CD's are music or data CD's.
About twice a month. I've never been asked to boot up the laptop.
I have an older laptop. When asked to boot up the laptop, I pull out the power supply and ask where to plug it in. Most checkpoints are short of free outlets, especialy near the exam table.
I have skipped a power it up situation a few times simply because my battery life is measured in seconds.
Great! it is incompatible with all my computers. Good thing I didn't buy one.
On the other hand, my cheap Coby flash player is comptatible with everything I have except my antique Windows 95 laptop. It doesn't have USB. I keep it because it has a built in MIDI port. It is my piano tutor.
The Coby is compatible with Win 2K, Linux (Ubuntu), and Windows 98 SE as well as my workplace XP box.
It looks like the new MS standard is incompatibility.
Out of all the 30GB hard-disks bought last year, 10.2 percent bought for the purpose was Zune to be used as an external hard disk,
Check the reviews and hacks. It takes a registrey hack to use it as an external hard drive. There are much better choices for players that double as USB drives. The Creative Zen has a partitioning option to set aside part of the disk for use as a USB drive with no registery hacks needed. The 80 Gig Zen is not that much more expensive than the 30 Gig Zune.
If you did get a Zune to use as a USB drive, here is some info on the hack.
I have a hard time believing this - with even 10% market share, I think I'd have seen one "in the wild" by now.
With all the ribbing, who would admit to having one? If I got one for Christmas, I would stick it in my pocket and keep it there. I might pick up a nice pair of white headphones to go with it.
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The OP was talking about a separate 12V system for the house for all the low-power devices that usually come with their own "wall wart" power supply or run on low voltages. Cellphone chargers, WLAN routers, DVD players, all that stuff.
That's good as long as all the manufactures agree on what is at ground potential. Anything that connects to something else with a signal wire with a grounded shield will have to use the same ground reference. Otherwise shorts, ground loops, and noise pickup become problems as it is common to see in cheap car stereo stuff. Idealy the signal ground should be isolated from the power return connections just like in the 120 volt stuff. Much 12 volt stuff does not isolate the signal from the power source.
Is it worth lobbying for a industrial AC/DC rectifier in each house at the meter.
.2 volts in 40 feet.
.2 volts drop. Don't forget the current in a 40 foot length travels both ways on 2 conductors, so figure it for 80 feet.
No. Do the math. From the post it looks like you are advocating a 12 volt system for the house. Right now a 20 amp breaker feeds a 12 AWG wire just fine and you can plug in a 1500 watt hair dryer in the bathroom which is maybe 40 feet from the meter. At full load, the voltage at the outlet may drop a couple volts so you are talking 12 amps current at 2 volts in the wire or 24 watts lost in the entire length of wire.
Now the 12 volt version. From 120 volt to 12 volt at the same wattage (Volts * Amps for a resistive load) you will now need to draw 120 amps instead of 12 for the blow dryer for the same 1500 watts. If you were dumb enough to try using the same 12 AWG wire the 2 volt drop is now 20 volts. OOPS.. We seem to be short 8 volts in the negative direction to get 120 Amps to the bathroom outlet at zero volts. Lets see if it were possible the 20 volt drop in the wire at 120 amps would be 2400 watts of heat in the 40 feet of wire. Can you say HOT!. Maybe we need a larger wire size. Maybe a size big enough to handle the original voltage drop of a couple volts. Our original setup at 120 volts has less than 2% voltage drop. At 12 Volts we now have a little under 20% voltage drop. Hmm we need to go to even bigger wire to reduce the voltage drop to less than
You do the math. Find a copper wire table and find out what AWG wire is required to handle 120 Amps with only
When you are done with the math you will understand why we use 120 volts and some countries use 240 volts. You may get electricuted in an accident, but you don't need welding cable for your hair dryer.
My 1KW inverter in my car uses Welding cable for leads and the length is kept to under 3 feet total to keep the voltage drop within limits.
A one-time friend of the family did this in a shop he owned. He figured he'd switch it, operate for a week on, week off, so the bill would be low, but not too low.
Rewireing a meterbase often with aluminum wires is a great way to form high resistance points in the wire. Can you say house fire?
Essentially, I use the power utility as my batteries - during sunny days I generate much more electricity than I use and the excess goes into the grid, and then I use power from the grid on rainy winter days and during nighttime.
e rter-folder/outbackGVFX3648.html
Have you considered replacing one of your inverters with one from Outback Systems to fee your critical load (bath, hall, bedroom lights, freezer, fridge, computer, & TV?
They have a very nice grid tie system using batteries which is power outage proof.
http://www.wholesalesolar.com/products.folder/inv
For a couple grand more, in the case of some good inverters that are designed for it (such as some of the Xantrex models), you can add a box with a relay, a phase-difference monitor, and a subsidiary "brain" board (or get an inverter with the function built in). (Actually the box in question usually also has the line monitoring circuit and combines with inverters that are otherwise stand-alone non-grid-tie.) That box will disconnect the inverter-and-keepalive-lodds from the line and let it keep going during an outage, then tell it to drift phase until it matches and hook it back up once the grid is back and has stabilized.
e rter-folder/outbackGVFX3648.html
--
Outback systems has this down to an artform in a very robust package.
http://www.wholesalesolar.com/products.folder/inv
This one has the advantage of both a battery system which operates at night in an outage, and power company gridtie.
Most gridtie systems do not use batteries. they use the power company as a battery. Batteryless systems are prone to power outages.
I do have a Windows XP desktop and I have had significantly fewer problems with it than my debian box in lab or my zenwalk laptop
... Application. Shall I search for it.
Do you have the time to troll the forums to find the solution to fix my wife's XP box? She doesn't want to lose her email again by doing the reformat/reinstall everyting again thing.
List of problems I haven't been able to figure out and gave up trying..
I have photocopy software on the machine. It worked fine until I tried to edit a photo. This loaded the 30 day trial of the bundled photo editor. Now anytime I try to use the photocopier, the twain driver brings up the 30 day trial software instead of printing the result. Any ideas. Removing the hijacking software simply brings up the Windows is unable to find
At least once a day, we have to reboot, because clicking on a username to log in brings up the password box, but no cursor. Have to reboot to enter the password. Any ideas on how to fix?
The Ubuntu box on the other hand had one glitch in the entire time I had it that prevented going to SU in Gnome. A quick look at Google brought up the solution and a short edit of the hosts file fixed it.
Windows can be fixed by wiping and starting over. Ubuntu can be fixed.
"Windows Media Player cannot play this DVD because there is a problem with digital copy protection between your DVD drive, decoder and video card. Try installing an updated driver for your video card."
Wow, now Windows is having the same problems playing commercial DVD's as Linux. It's about time they caught up to Linux.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
Do they have to change the way CD burning works with every new version? Is there a reasonable explanation why CD burning programs always end up broken?
:-)
They should take Ubuntu's example and bundle a working CD burner with the OS.
I upgraded to Ubuntu and I found it was pretty much a waste of time worring about old application that didn't work. The ones that came included work fine.
The only tweaking needed was to load some codecs and Flash.
Oh, good news... Flash 9 is now out in the stable version for Linux!
Why buy an OS and scrounge trying to find what applications you have to buy new improved versions of applications. Get an OS with most of the applications included. It's great on the budget.
As an added bonus, I don't worry about entering a reduced functionality mode if something goes wrong or I upgrade hardware.
Are we just arranging for the bear to eat our friend?
For some it already has. My first e-mail account has been over-run and devoured. When I got over 15 minutes a day wasted deleting spam, and I went on vacation for a couple weeks, I couldn't bear the thought of the time it would take to delete the junk. I stopped checking my mail in October.
How comes everyone tries to fight spam by breaking infrastructure?
Because spam has broken the infrastructure. A working broken solution is better than a fully broken solution.
I now use my work e-mail and nothing else. Mail from outside lands in the junk folder as low priority stuff to be sifted later.
My home private e-mail hasn't been checked since October. It's been hammered to the point of being useless. I've gone to reach me by pager, phone, or business radio.
I no longer spend 20 minutes a day sorting spam. My mailbox is 12 years old. It's on way too many spam lists. The backlog is so deep, I don't bother looking.
Some people are looking for a working solution to the tidal wave of spam. Some get a new address every 6-12 months. Others have gone to IM. Some have given up private ISP provided mail entirely.
I mean, I spent about $1,000 on a decent sound system, why would I do that just to listen to sound quality matched by a $50 ghetto blaster?
Good point. For most modern music 128K bitrate is just fine as even the CD's are comptessed to the point of distortion and clipping just to sound loud. Those CD's have no headroom decent S/N ratio, or dynamic range. They are not hurt by a low bitrate.
I have a pair of Yamaha NS-1000 speakers and a pair of Acoustic Research AR3's. I know I'm dating myself here, but I have more invested in quality high fidelity speakers than most people have in their entire sound system. I agree that a buck a track for a low bitrate file just doesn't cut it.
What's a crime is the way they have distorted the sound on CD's to increase the average volume at the expense of dynamic range and signal to noise ratio. Distortion is high on these recordings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
http://georgegraham.com/compress.html
http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicrange.h
For the first time, flagging sales of online music tracks are beginning to make the big recording companies consider the wisdom of selling music without 'rights management' technologies attached. The article notes that this is a step the recording industry vowed 'never to take'.
Wow, a cluestick is finaly showing up. The reports of only 22 purchased tracks per iPod sold is showing that consumers are voting down DRM with their pocketbooks in a big way. Wow, we finaly got enough votes in to be noticed.
A few bands jumping ship to go to a non-DRM music site is probably the biggest clue stick they got. If they don't have a monopoly on the artists, they have no control. These are desprate times for the labels. Bare Naked Ladies has gone to e-music. Some of the newer TSB stuff is not on RIAA cartel labels. (Too bad the Wizards of Winter track is in a RIAA cartel album. It's the reason I haven't bought it yet.)
The RIAA cartel labels have to make a big move fast before this leak grows and takes down the ship. They are busy trying to patch the P-P hole with a product that doesn't sell well because it is mostly useless to most people.
Maybe soon I can buy tracks in MP3 that I can play besides some obscure indi stuff on e-music.
Remember, I have rejected DRM music tracks and stuck with the most universal standard in the world. MP3's play on my flash player, all my computers, my DVD player (as MP3 CD) and in my car.
No other format is that compatible in my mixed environment. The incompatible DRM formats has kept me out of online music stores. Now if they will do something about the price fixing at a high price. Even better would be to fix the "for private home use only" restrictions so I can also legaly do one of the Christmas Light Shows, or play a ripped CD with a wedding slide show at a wedding reception, and post the video without breaking a bunch of license clauses in the process.
They have no simple way to use CD's in any public performance such as a public light show, a public wedding slide show, or DJ'ing the reception dance as an amature DJ. All these public performances are prohibited by the Private Home use clause.
I would have bought lots of music if I could have actualy used it. It was too restricted to be of much use in todays world. DRM was just icing on the cake making the expensive product even less useful.
sorry to be correcting you, but MS Office still does cost a few hundred bucks, and second, last time I checked, Star/Open Office is under Sun Microsystems, not Novell
I wish I had nice mod points to give you for that one. I haven't used StarOffice in several years. I just dug out the box. You are right. It is Sun Microsystems StarOffice Version 5.2. The price is still on the box. I paid 34.99 for it and it came with a home site license.
Too boot, out of the box it runs on Windows, Solaris, and Linux. On the back of the box it lists it's features next to MS Office 2000 Standard Edition. Both have a Word Processor, Spread Sheet, Presentation, E-mail, and web support. In addition StarOffice has a drawing application, Database, Integrated Desktop, Value Pricing, and free upgrades.
For home use, there was no longer any need for a high priced office suite for each PC. It opens Windows documents just fine.
In Windows you can do something very similar, and log on to a command prompt as well.
True, but can you get the prompt and everything listed while Windows loads the graphical interface?
Windows gives you an hourglass. In Ubuntu, you can switch to a TTY port and watch X load like watching a DOS batch file run.
The graphical interface still loads, but you don't see it. You have to switch back to TTY7 to bring up the graphical login screen. TTY1-6 are all terminal screens. You can Ctl, Alt F1-6 to any of them and log in several users at the same time.
Show that to the TSA guy. Log in as Bob in TTY1, Fred on TTY2, TSA on TTY3, Guest on TTY4, and ask them which account they would like to examine. I doubt they would know enough about it to ask for Root or the GUI.
Why charge nearly 1000 dollars so they can all "upgrade" for a single house?
A simple site license would be fine. MS office was a couple hundred dollars a copy a few years ago. Novel's Star office was less than a hundred dollars and came with a home site license. Needless to say, I ran Star Office at home for a while until Open Office became better and replaced it.
In keeping the budget balanced and avoiding piracy, many people find alternatives with better terms. We have more than 1 PC. A single PC license is to be avoided if at all possible. This requirement alone has introduced me to Free Open Software as an affordable replacement to the by each PC a copy model.
The latest casualty is Light Factory. They went from a Registeration name model to a single PC locked registration. In the process, it broke the hot spare for a live performance. I upgraded to Freestyler in its place.
Is free software the only ones who get a SOHO network and a cheap site license?
There are a significant number of people who used pirate software through collage when they're broke, get used to them then when they're financially better off, start to buy the real thing. You'll start losing those sales if they start off with free software right from thr word go.
Good point. There are lots of academic copies of Photoshop Pro, MS Office, and such. I am older and didn't get these in school, so I am much more versed in The Gimp and Open Office. This is especialy true when the big anti-piracy business busting BSA started their heavy handed tactics. I very quickly fled to free alternative legit software and started avoiding those behind the BSA squad.
Much of my software is un-regestered. Registration is not required. It's more of a privacy issue than a piracy issue. Is it possible to register your copy of Ubuntu, Open Office, Abi Word, Gnome, Banshee, and the Gimp? I have not been asked to register any of it.
I disagree. According to this graph:
Sorry I generalized too much. I should have said some people buys iPods to use the iTunes store. The store does infulence some buying decisions. On the other hand, there are not many people who buy Zunes. Even fewer if any buy it because of the wonderful selection a great prices at the Zune store. I've heard reviewers bash the store due to the 4 registrations required to shop at the store and the store doesn't take dollars, but uses something called Zune Points to obscure how much the music really costs.
One fact that is an issue with many iPod users are they are young enough to not have a credit card. They fill their iPod from their CD collection, their friends CD collection, and songs from peer to peer. They can't shop at the iTunes store with an exception of a gift card. The largest demographic of iPod owners can't buy iTunes with small pocket change. Picking up a $50 gift card is just too big of a chunk of change.
The other thing I have heard is Sony and another label is severely restricting the songs that can be squirted.
The reviewers laugh at it. I haven't heard comments from end users who use the store. I haven't heard of anybody who bought the Zune to use the store.
On Thursday Microsoft announced a $550 million San Antonio project, only to have Google confirm plans for a $600 million site in North Carolina.
It looks like it's time to invest in IBM, Red Hat, Maxtor, and Intel. They may sell a lot of hardware and software.
and the first thing to pop up on the screen was a black screen with a small white bar blinking in the top right.
On a Ubuntu machine, hit Ctl, Alt, F1 while it is booting. Then show the guard. When the login prompt comes up, log in as a restricted user. Let the guard search it. Most are clueless at a command prompt.
He went on to ask me if there was any childporn / incriminating material on it. I said that no, but that there could be my girlfriend naked on there.
Before traveling, transfer them to the laptop and from there, burn them on a CD and put it with your CD player. Hidden in plain site goes a long way. Most of the time they will not take the time to see if all your CD's are music or data CD's.
About twice a month. I've never been asked to boot up the laptop.
I have an older laptop. When asked to boot up the laptop, I pull out the power supply and ask where to plug it in. Most checkpoints are short of free outlets, especialy near the exam table.
I have skipped a power it up situation a few times simply because my battery life is measured in seconds.
Barring some unforseen weakness in AES, this is now data that nobody but me will ever see (unless I do something silly like forget to unmount it).
At home, the alarm drops power to the UPS which initiates a shutdown. Unexpected visitors while I am away auto lock sensitive data if I forget.
Zune only can connect to Windows XP PCs,
Great! it is incompatible with all my computers. Good thing I didn't buy one.
On the other hand, my cheap Coby flash player is comptatible with everything I have except my antique Windows 95 laptop. It doesn't have USB. I keep it because it has a built in MIDI port. It is my piano tutor.
The Coby is compatible with Win 2K, Linux (Ubuntu), and Windows 98 SE as well as my workplace XP box.
It looks like the new MS standard is incompatibility.
Out of all the 30GB hard-disks bought last year, 10.2 percent bought for the purpose was Zune to be used as an external hard disk,
- hack-splained/
Check the reviews and hacks. It takes a registrey hack to use it as an external hard drive. There are much better choices for players that double as USB drives. The Creative Zen has a partitioning option to set aside part of the disk for use as a USB drive with no registery hacks needed. The 80 Gig Zen is not that much more expensive than the 30 Gig Zune.
If you did get a Zune to use as a USB drive, here is some info on the hack.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/11/24/zune-usb-drive
I have a hard time believing this - with even 10% market share, I think I'd have seen one "in the wild" by now.
With all the ribbing, who would admit to having one? If I got one for Christmas, I would stick it in my pocket and keep it there. I might pick up a nice pair of white headphones to go with it.