I've wished to stand inside a dome on the bottom of the ocean, watching sharks swim above.
Visit the Bahamas. I don't remember the exact location (visited on a cruise) where you take an elevator down to the seafloor and then you can watch the reef life and sharks. Contact a sales rep for the Norwegan Cruise Line. They may have a brochure. Been there, done that. I personaly prefer to take a sub. The ones in the Cayman Islands were great (before Ivan pitched one ashore).
I've got one more year [pbs.org] of use out of my old legacy TV's and rabbit ears.
Keep the TV but ditch the rabbit ears. Just because you can't get content off the air doesn't mean it's done for.
Using the signal off the air is the least we use the TV for. We have DVD, VHS, Sony PS, and Nintendo gamecube. When that doesn't do it for us, we also have an antenna.
The junk to content ratio has gotten pretty bad. If they pulled the plug on analog tomorrow, it would take me a week or so to even notice.
They won't release high quality content for fear of piracy.. There's not much of interest left.
making DVD backups for your presumably TV-addicted two year old
If you ever had a two year old that only wanted to watch the purple dino and other related titles, you would find the set in the kids room permits you to catch an episode of CSI or LA Law.
A one TV household with toddlers can be frustrating. Most of the time our TV is simply off. It's not worth the squabbles over the choice of content.
That's fine, but my old CTX 700 series doesn't have a USB port.
It's an old Pentium 200 Win 95 laptop. I don't want to toss it. I keep putting 95 back on it. I use it for GPS and MIDI and an ocasional lan party server. It has real serial, parallel, and joystick ports with a real MPU-401 interface. Many new laptops are missing these ports. Most missed is the MPU and real RS232 ports. Eventualy I want to use it for a riggers lighting console using Art-Lan drivers to use DMX over Ethernet.
Instead of USB, I perfer to use Ethernet for printer connections.
That's only part of it. The other is price. For those who just use it for getting the news and checking E-mail, $50 + per month is a little steep. The cable company has the trick of calling a extra fee a discount if you also have cable TV.
We have lots of ground to cover as you mentioned, but most of the population lives in cities. There are not that many people in the woods in Montana, in the deserts of Nevada and Utah, and in the plains of Oklahoma and Wyoming. Even in those states most of the population in clustered in cities that have broadband. Having a large country does not mean it's population is away from population centers.
All it really amounts to is if you are not subscribing to pay TV, they charge an extra chunk of change to provide broadband. Not everyone is buying it.
The phone company tries to do the same thing in many areas with DSL to combat the consumers fleeing all the tack on charges on POTS. It used to be cell phones were expensive. All the tack on fees on a landline have leveled the playing field. Now many people don't have a reason to keep a landline and landline subscriptions are down. (I think I heard about 20% of US households no longer have a landline, but use cell service as the primary phone.)
Between the two jacking up the price with all the fees for not also getting other services, I simply am priced out of broadband. I use broadband at work to get my latest distro and use dial-up at home simply because a year of broadband is about the same price as a new PC. One option many take to beat the high cost is wardriving. I'll deal with the e-mail speed and get the new PC or laser printer instead.
Slashdot works fine on dial-up. I load a page ahead of time in a new tab and continue reading in my current tab. Dial-up is fast enough. I can't read any faster.
Many countries have affordable broadband. In some cities the city can provide the entire city with broadband for almost an order of magnitude less per household than a connection here. Here the rollout is slowed by the desire to please the shareholders. Too many markets have too few choices permitting the monopoly pricing of broadband to replace income lost to Satelite TV and Cell Phones. These markets have slow growth.
Broadband is not priced for mass use in the USA yet. The providers are trying to cherry pick profitable consumers. Those willing to pay the price are those who tend to be heavy downloaders. The price keeps low bandwidth profitable users from signing up. Now the ISP's are trying to figure out how to make a high bandwidth user not be such an expensive user. I'm still waiting for them to price it for the low bandwidth users.
The prints created by a daisy wheel are as unique to the printer used as fingerprints to a person, if not more so.
And I have a box of daisywheels for it. Sometimes it breaks one. So, it's one printer that is easy to change fingerprints as needed. If the heat is on, keep the printer. Change the printwheel. Put the old one in the disposal. It no longer matches the ransom note.
when they were required to print a UPC barcode on the cover for the first time. They blew up the barcode and used it as the cover (with the small UPC barcode in the corner).
I don't remember the issue, but the one I remember is the one with Alfred on the cover pushing a lawnmower over the barcode cutting it to half height.
And of course it will have to work with their sound card, printer, and modem.
Games without sound and loss of internet are two big reasons it could be a showstopper. Try to find out what their hardware is and plan on providing a lot of support. Maybe if the initial contact is good, you could get some converts. If the initial exposure is not great, it could leave a lot of bad karma for Linux.
but.. Being in the browser allowing anyone anywhere on the planet to exploit your machine isn't the same level of exposure as a SMB exploit that is reachable only by those on your LAN. My vunerability ends at my router.
I don't have that many skilled hackers in my house to worry about.
If the LED-based lamps can be used with dimmers, they've got a market advantage (I was trying to find out when the site got slashdotted)
I did look this up before they got slashdoted. Due to the LED driver, they are not dimmable. I was looking into the possibility of using the colored ones for stage work. The colored ones put out more colored light than a white light with a filter.
Maybe the next gen will work with dimmers. Until then, I'll just have to work with LED panels and LED compatible DMX dimmers.
Any electricity the computer wasn't using would be made up for by the elctric heater.
Many times when I have to shoot buildings, I bring along a bunch of slave strobes. Hang them off the existing lights or place them in the fixtures. Take flash only photos if possible. Then your color tempurature correction needs only done once. To make your temprature corrections easy, use a grey card or a color checker card.
They can be found here; http://shop.store.yahoo.com/cinemasupplies/ graysca landc.html
They don't spend the extra few pennies to put in a few diodes (rectifier) to conver it all to DC, so the lights flicker.
Many of the lights use a capacitor to limit the current drawn by the string instead of a resistor. This current limited AC is then fed the string. A diode permits the capacitor to cycle back and not reverse bias the LED's. This is where the flicker comes from. They did not spend the extra to add a second diode and a filter capacitor to the 1/2 wave rectified AC fed to the string. It's easy to mold a diode and mylar capacitor in the plug of the string. It's harder to also include a second diode or bridge diode and filter capacitor to kill the ripple.
If you make your own supply to power your string, be aware the plug also includes fuses. Changing the plug will void the UL approval.
I would think the energy savings would pay for the LED bulbs in a matter of weeks.
I like your Canadian math. If one string has a 5 year payback in savings, than 100 strings has a bayback time in a matter of weeks...
More lights cost more money.. The payback time does not change here in the USA. The cost is fixed X the number of strings, unless you get a real good bulk discount on the lights.
LED christmas lights are a long term investment, but they are price competitive.
That's what I thought. However, here is my experiance. I bought some battery operated strings of 20 lights to put in the rear window of my car. I used them last year. I noticed one of the LED's started to dim after a couple weeks. This year I dug them out. I noticed only 3 bulbs are anywhere near original brightness. Most are just bright enought to let me know they are not completely dead. (I don't remember the brand, but Wal-Mart had them) It's hardly an investment.
I did pick up some Forever lights this year. They don't run on battery power which limits their use in the window of a car. (well they do with in inverter) I picked up the forever lights before I discovered my other lights died in the box. I'm hoping the Forever Lights don't meet the same fate as my battery strings.
Anybody else have any of the 20 LED battery strings from Wal-Mart? Are they working this year?
Due to my past experiance, I'm entering the LED lighting carefully until it becomes stable and reliable.
I've used it to my advantage. In the bedroom and in the living room, I use some that were designed to go into completly enclosed fixtures such as the globes on fan lights. They come on very slow. It's the perfect light where you don't want to be blasted by bright light first thing in the morning or after your movie. I also use them in the headboard light of the bed. They are dim enough to not blind you when you want to find the clock to check the time and they warm up bright enough to make an excelent reading light for reading a good book. They are very nice for that. In the kitchen over the sink, I use the ones that are instant on. Don't knock them just because your small sample doesn't fit all your needs. CF lighting is definately not one size fits all.
When I install them, I write the install date on the base with a sharpie. It gives me a good idea of the life. One of three in my stairwell fixture died. It was installed in 2001. It beats getting on a ladder in a stairwell once or more time per year.
BE cautious on how LED lamp assemblies are made. If they are made using the original manufactures encapsulation, they should be fine. However, if they use bare un-encapsulated LED's and then mold their own custom shape, beware. I bought some battery operated LED christmas lights last year. (I don't remember the brand) The string of 20 only has about 3 that light up anywhere near full brightness this year (it's not a battery problem). I think the resin or other LED poison has severly degraded the LED's. I'm not buying LED's with custom bulb shapes until it's a proven technology. So far, I've seen a very high infant mortality rate on christmas lights.
This year, I picked up some Forever lights. I'll see if they are still working next year before I buy more than a sample size. The blue strings are awsome. It's one of the very few bright blue strings manufactured. I hope they last.
Anybody run a trace route to the IP address 69.6.66.17? My pings are stopped at my ISP border. Routing information may give hints to the physical location.
they could lock it up in drm just as easy as microsoft could lock up wma
I couldn't agree more. The point missing in your statement is very important...
My files are currently DRM free and all my players both hardware and software won't go away instantly simply because somebody decides to flip the switch.
What will play your iTunes files when your single vendor player dies?
My files will still play in old versions of Windows Media player (MS vendor) my Panasonic CD MP3 player (Panasonic) my Pioneer car CD MP3 player (Pioneer) and the Daewoo DVD player (Daewoo)
If Apple pulls the plug on iTunes (bankrupt or MS takeover), will you be able to transcode your files into something open? Remember iTunes files have single vendor support. MP3 does not. MP3 does not have the ability to be switched off remotely. My old copy of CDeX, Winamp, or EZ CD creator would work fine on an old copy of WIN9x. What multi-vendor support do you have for Apple or MS format DRM? If the vendors switched off the auth servers and you needed to transfer your files, DRM breaks. MP3 and ogg still works.
MP3's will still work just like my old GIF photos are still copyable, viewable, and convertable even though the license holder pulled the plug. You won't be that lucky with single vendor DRM.
Using Ogg would be better than MP3, but currently support for the format is very limited and all my public domain content is in the MP3 format. Most of my photos taken with my camera are in the JPEG format. I won't take the transcoding loss converting to ogg and PNG until nessary. The important point is I can convert when nessary.
Actualy it's a new just made up format for exchange, like DRM is new and you want me to use it. Most places won't take it trade. Is that any diffrent than trying to sell one of your DRM tracks to someone else? Nobody will take it. It's not good for anything. You only accept it if you can use it, not if you may in the future sell it to someone else. I can legaly sell my old Styx, ELO, Pink Floyd, Charlie Daniels, Chicago, Aerosmith, Steve Miller band etc, LP's and CD's. Can you legaly sell your latest iTunes track?
CD's are legaly accepted in trade and work. Public Domain, and Creative Commons MP3's legaly can be passed on and work. DRM tracks break and don't work.
allow CD burning like Napster-lite. Then you can rip them back
Why spend the time, money, and format change loss?
I simply avoid DRM in the first place. Then I only need to burn the MP3 CD and not waste time, money and conversion degradation. You are spending more to get less. Since it's worth less, I'm willing to spend less for it because it requires additional investmet to use it. Because it may be a DMCA violation, I'm not even willing to buy the DRM stuff in the first place. If I don't have it, I won't bypass it, and won't face legal problems for circumventing it.
It's my choice to vote with my wallet. I'm not casting a vote for DRM. It has too many legal snares, costs aditional money to support, and is incompatible with my hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I've wished to stand inside a dome on the bottom of the ocean, watching sharks swim above.
Visit the Bahamas. I don't remember the exact location (visited on a cruise) where you take an elevator down to the seafloor and then you can watch the reef life and sharks. Contact a sales rep for the Norwegan Cruise Line. They may have a brochure. Been there, done that. I personaly prefer to take a sub. The ones in the Cayman Islands were great (before Ivan pitched one ashore).
I've got one more year [pbs.org] of use out of my old legacy TV's and rabbit ears.
Keep the TV but ditch the rabbit ears. Just because you can't get content off the air doesn't mean it's done for.
Using the signal off the air is the least we use the TV for. We have DVD, VHS, Sony PS, and Nintendo gamecube. When that doesn't do it for us, we also have an antenna.
The junk to content ratio has gotten pretty bad. If they pulled the plug on analog tomorrow, it would take me a week or so to even notice.
They won't release high quality content for fear of piracy.. There's not much of interest left.
making DVD backups for your presumably TV-addicted two year old
If you ever had a two year old that only wanted to watch the purple dino and other related titles, you would find the set in the kids room permits you to catch an episode of CSI or LA Law.
A one TV household with toddlers can be frustrating. Most of the time our TV is simply off. It's not worth the squabbles over the choice of content.
That's fine, but my old CTX 700 series doesn't have a USB port.
It's an old Pentium 200 Win 95 laptop. I don't want to toss it. I keep putting 95 back on it. I use it for GPS and MIDI and an ocasional lan party server. It has real serial, parallel, and joystick ports with a real MPU-401 interface. Many new laptops are missing these ports. Most missed is the MPU and real RS232 ports. Eventualy I want to use it for a riggers lighting console using Art-Lan drivers to use DMX over Ethernet.
Instead of USB, I perfer to use Ethernet for printer connections.
Sound card: not THAT hard - most everything is compatible
Unless you are doing a laptop..
I've tried 4 distro's. None work with my laptop. Just stuffing in a compatible sound card is not an option.
We've got a LOT of ground to cover.
That's only part of it. The other is price. For those who just use it for getting the news and checking E-mail, $50 + per month is a little steep. The cable company has the trick of calling a extra fee a discount if you also have cable TV.
We have lots of ground to cover as you mentioned, but most of the population lives in cities. There are not that many people in the woods in Montana, in the deserts of Nevada and Utah, and in the plains of Oklahoma and Wyoming. Even in those states most of the population in clustered in cities that have broadband. Having a large country does not mean it's population is away from population centers.
All it really amounts to is if you are not subscribing to pay TV, they charge an extra chunk of change to provide broadband. Not everyone is buying it.
The phone company tries to do the same thing in many areas with DSL to combat the consumers fleeing all the tack on charges on POTS. It used to be cell phones were expensive. All the tack on fees on a landline have leveled the playing field. Now many people don't have a reason to keep a landline and landline subscriptions are down. (I think I heard about 20% of US households no longer have a landline, but use cell service as the primary phone.)
Between the two jacking up the price with all the fees for not also getting other services, I simply am priced out of broadband. I use broadband at work to get my latest distro and use dial-up at home simply because a year of broadband is about the same price as a new PC. One option many take to beat the high cost is wardriving. I'll deal with the e-mail speed and get the new PC or laser printer instead.
Slashdot works fine on dial-up. I load a page ahead of time in a new tab and continue reading in my current tab. Dial-up is fast enough. I can't read any faster.
Many countries have affordable broadband. In some cities the city can provide the entire city with broadband for almost an order of magnitude less per household than a connection here. Here the rollout is slowed by the desire to please the shareholders. Too many markets have too few choices permitting the monopoly pricing of broadband to replace income lost to Satelite TV and Cell Phones. These markets have slow growth.
Broadband is not priced for mass use in the USA yet. The providers are trying to cherry pick profitable consumers. Those willing to pay the price are those who tend to be heavy downloaders. The price keeps low bandwidth profitable users from signing up. Now the ISP's are trying to figure out how to make a high bandwidth user not be such an expensive user. I'm still waiting for them to price it for the low bandwidth users.
The prints created by a daisy wheel are as unique to the printer used as fingerprints to a person, if not more so.
And I have a box of daisywheels for it. Sometimes it breaks one. So, it's one printer that is easy to change fingerprints as needed. If the heat is on, keep the printer. Change the printwheel. Put the old one in the disposal. It no longer matches the ransom note.
when they were required to print a UPC barcode on the cover for the first time. They blew up the barcode and used it as the cover (with the small UPC barcode in the corner).
I don't remember the issue, but the one I remember is the one with Alfred on the cover pushing a lawnmower over the barcode cutting it to half height.
And of course it will have to work with their sound card, printer, and modem.
Games without sound and loss of internet are two big reasons it could be a showstopper. Try to find out what their hardware is and plan on providing a lot of support. Maybe if the initial contact is good, you could get some converts. If the initial exposure is not great, it could leave a lot of bad karma for Linux.
True,
but.. Being in the browser allowing anyone anywhere on the planet to exploit your machine isn't the same level of exposure as a SMB exploit that is reachable only by those on your LAN. My vunerability ends at my router.
I don't have that many skilled hackers in my house to worry about.
Luxeon Star LEDs would seem like a better choice, but would get expensive quick
Before you invest in Luxeon Star LED's, recheck the life expectancy. They are not long life LED's.
If you need a point source of very bright light, they make sense, but for general lighting, there are more cost effective solutions.
If the LED-based lamps can be used with dimmers, they've got a market advantage (I was trying to find out when the site got slashdotted)
I did look this up before they got slashdoted. Due to the LED driver, they are not dimmable. I was looking into the possibility of using the colored ones for stage work. The colored ones put out more colored light than a white light with a filter.
Maybe the next gen will work with dimmers. Until then, I'll just have to work with LED panels and LED compatible DMX dimmers.
Any electricity the computer wasn't using would be made up for by the elctric heater.
/ graysca landc.html
Many times when I have to shoot buildings, I bring along a bunch of slave strobes. Hang them off the existing lights or place them in the fixtures. Take flash only photos if possible. Then your color tempurature correction needs only done once. To make your temprature corrections easy, use a grey card or a color checker card.
They can be found here;
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/cinemasupplies
Any electricity the computer wasn't using would be made up for by the elctric heater.
This is true if you are still using ineffecient resistive electric heat.
If you are using a more effecient source for heat such as a heat pump, than using the computer for heat is a reduction in heating effeciency.
They don't spend the extra few pennies to put in a few diodes (rectifier) to conver it all to DC, so the lights flicker.
Many of the lights use a capacitor to limit the current drawn by the string instead of a resistor. This current limited AC is then fed the string. A diode permits the capacitor to cycle back and not reverse bias the LED's. This is where the flicker comes from. They did not spend the extra to add a second diode and a filter capacitor to the 1/2 wave rectified AC fed to the string. It's easy to mold a diode and mylar capacitor in the plug of the string. It's harder to also include a second diode or bridge diode and filter capacitor to kill the ripple.
If you make your own supply to power your string, be aware the plug also includes fuses. Changing the plug will void the UL approval.
I would think the energy savings would pay for the LED bulbs in a matter of weeks.
I like your Canadian math. If one string has a 5 year payback in savings, than 100 strings has a bayback time in a matter of weeks...
More lights cost more money.. The payback time does not change here in the USA. The cost is fixed X the number of strings, unless you get a real good bulk discount on the lights.
LED christmas lights are a long term investment, but they are price competitive.
That's what I thought. However, here is my experiance. I bought some battery operated strings of 20 lights to put in the rear window of my car. I used them last year. I noticed one of the LED's started to dim after a couple weeks. This year I dug them out. I noticed only 3 bulbs are anywhere near original brightness. Most are just bright enought to let me know they are not completely dead. (I don't remember the brand, but Wal-Mart had them) It's hardly an investment.
I did pick up some Forever lights this year. They don't run on battery power which limits their use in the window of a car. (well they do with in inverter) I picked up the forever lights before I discovered my other lights died in the box. I'm hoping the Forever Lights don't meet the same fate as my battery strings.
Anybody else have any of the 20 LED battery strings from Wal-Mart? Are they working this year?
Due to my past experiance, I'm entering the LED lighting carefully until it becomes stable and reliable.
They take time to lit to full output.
I found this varies a lot between manufactures.
I've used it to my advantage. In the bedroom and in the living room, I use some that were designed to go into completly enclosed fixtures such as the globes on fan lights. They come on very slow. It's the perfect light where you don't want to be blasted by bright light first thing in the morning or after your movie. I also use them in the headboard light of the bed. They are dim enough to not blind you when you want to find the clock to check the time and they warm up bright enough to make an excelent reading light for reading a good book. They are very nice for that. In the kitchen over the sink, I use the ones that are instant on. Don't knock them just because your small sample doesn't fit all your needs. CF lighting is definately not one size fits all.
When I install them, I write the install date on the base with a sharpie. It gives me a good idea of the life. One of three in my stairwell fixture died. It was installed in 2001. It beats getting on a ladder in a stairwell once or more time per year.
BE cautious on how LED lamp assemblies are made. If they are made using the original manufactures encapsulation, they should be fine. However, if they use bare un-encapsulated LED's and then mold their own custom shape, beware. I bought some battery operated LED christmas lights last year. (I don't remember the brand) The string of 20 only has about 3 that light up anywhere near full brightness this year (it's not a battery problem). I think the resin or other LED poison has severly degraded the LED's. I'm not buying LED's with custom bulb shapes until it's a proven technology. So far, I've seen a very high infant mortality rate on christmas lights.
This year, I picked up some Forever lights. I'll see if they are still working next year before I buy more than a sample size. The blue strings are awsome. It's one of the very few bright blue strings manufactured. I hope they last.
For those not in the know...
In a flourescent light, UV from the arc hits a coating that converts it to visable.
In LED's, IR is doubled in frequency by a Q cell to make UV which then hits a coating to comvert it to visable.
Only the last step is the same. The first step is NOT the same.
These lights are not to be used in fully enclosed fixtures. That limits many of the outdoor uses including many poolside locations.
They are also not dimmable. This keeps them out of amature, and DJ and band applications where dimmable lighting is a requirement.
I'll wait for the prices to come down and the feature list to go up.
When they are compatable with dimmers and enclosed fixtures, let me know.
Slightly offtopic, but may be of interest to some slashdoters under the personal communications heading...
Free ringtones.
This includes some classic Pink Floyd tunes..
Anybody run a trace route to the IP address 69.6.66.17? My pings are stopped at my ISP border. Routing information may give hints to the physical location.
they could lock it up in drm just as easy as microsoft could lock up wma
I couldn't agree more. The point missing in your statement is very important...
My files are currently DRM free and all my players both hardware and software won't go away instantly simply because somebody decides to flip the switch.
What will play your iTunes files when your single vendor player dies?
My files will still play in old versions of Windows Media player (MS vendor) my Panasonic CD MP3 player (Panasonic) my Pioneer car CD MP3 player (Pioneer) and the Daewoo DVD player (Daewoo)
If Apple pulls the plug on iTunes (bankrupt or MS takeover), will you be able to transcode your files into something open? Remember iTunes files have single vendor support. MP3 does not. MP3 does not have the ability to be switched off remotely. My old copy of CDeX, Winamp, or EZ CD creator would work fine on an old copy of WIN9x.
What multi-vendor support do you have for Apple or MS format DRM? If the vendors switched off the auth servers and you needed to transfer your files, DRM breaks. MP3 and ogg still works.
MP3's will still work just like my old GIF photos are still copyable, viewable, and convertable even though the license holder pulled the plug. You won't be that lucky with single vendor DRM.
Using Ogg would be better than MP3, but currently support for the format is very limited and all my public domain content is in the MP3 format. Most of my photos taken with my camera are in the JPEG format. I won't take the transcoding loss converting to ogg and PNG until nessary. The important point is I can convert when nessary.
Actualy it's a new just made up format for exchange, like DRM is new and you want me to use it. Most places won't take it trade. Is that any diffrent than trying to sell one of your DRM tracks to someone else? Nobody will take it. It's not good for anything. You only accept it if you can use it, not if you may in the future sell it to someone else. I can legaly sell my old Styx, ELO, Pink Floyd, Charlie Daniels, Chicago, Aerosmith, Steve Miller band etc, LP's and CD's. Can you legaly sell your latest iTunes track?
CD's are legaly accepted in trade and work. Public Domain, and Creative Commons MP3's legaly can be passed on and work. DRM tracks break and don't work.
allow CD burning like Napster-lite. Then you can rip them back
Why spend the time, money, and format change loss?
I simply avoid DRM in the first place. Then I only need to burn the MP3 CD and not waste time, money and conversion degradation. You are spending more to get less. Since it's worth less, I'm willing to spend less for it because it requires additional investmet to use it. Because it may be a DMCA violation, I'm not even willing to buy the DRM stuff in the first place. If I don't have it, I won't bypass it, and won't face legal problems for circumventing it.
It's my choice to vote with my wallet. I'm not casting a vote for DRM. It has too many legal snares, costs aditional money to support, and is incompatible with my hardware.