I have lots of questions, like, how can you extract the honey from the comb automatically? the normal way to do this is via centrifuge, and generally, you want to do that without the bees. also, bees are messy. They fill every nook and cranny with propolis, and build wherever there is space. By guess is the glass would fill up with extra comb and propolis making the hive a lot less elegant. Lastly...Smoking and then opening the hive into the home? That is crazy. Smoking bees calms them but it doesn't anesthetize them. They still fly around some, and they still don't like you messing with the comb after smoking.
Agreed. I've had my RT-N16 for about a year. It is great with DD-WRT (I guess it supports Tomato, but I haven't had a need to upgrade). I did have problems with mine overheating (not overclocked or anything), but some left over heatsink coolers from way-back and an ancient graphics-card cooling fan completely fixed the issue for me.
The RT-N16 seems to have some quality control issues, but for the price, there was nothing better when I bought mine. There may be better options now though.
I loved my RX-7s. I've owned 2 1st gen 13B RX-7s, 1st in high-school then a 2nd in college once the 1st gave up the ghost (mostly due to upstate NY winters). They were a pain in the ass in the winter, with the manual choke, and an engine that was really easy to flood, and they ate catalytic converters, but it was a very pretty car, and I still pine for mine occasionally.
I've been running lucid for a few days, and I think quality control has significantly slipped in Ubuntu. Yes they are only betas, but with only 2 weeks left before release, I have seen lots of bugs still remaining. Within a couple days I found that screen-saver crashes often, several apps can't properly auto-disable PulseAudio anymore and don't work without hacks, PHP 5.3.2 segfaults, themes didn't install fully on upgrade, and (of course) the memory leak which results in Lucid using up all the RAM in my system (yes I've submitted bugs (or found previously submitted tickets) on most of these already). Other things like Wine segfaults seem to be resolved by reinstalling, but overall this upgrade has not gone smoothly for me. I've been, overall, happy with (X)Ubuntu over the years, and like the 6 month cadence, but, in my opinion, they should really focus more on quality for their LTS release. I certainly wouldn't recommend an upgrade to 10.04 in its current state, though I plan to stick with Ubuntu personally. Generally, I consider Ubuntu to be a more user-friendly and more current Debian, which I like, but I guess I should learn not to be an early adopter if I care about stability.
I love MythTv, and have been using it for years and years, but it is absolutely not easy (though I have more obscure hardware, and have never used mythbuntu). I've also tried being a sysadmin for my friends' myth boxes....I would never wish that on anyone. The stability has always been the biggest issue. Random crashes are extroadinarily annoying. With Firewire, I found recording very unreliable, image quality is very dependant on the capture method. But I haven't seem anything that can support my High-Def recording with auto-commercial detection, and for that,I'm willing to stick with it.
I've heard that you can run 'Play On!' in a virtual-machine on windows to convert netflix to upnp streams (which can then be watched on Linux). I haven't tried it myself though. Certainly not ideal, but perhaps viable for those certain use models.
Also Blu-Ray is still really hard in Linux. I've considered a Windows MythTV frontend with a linux backend which might give me the flexibility I want, but I don't think there's a good integrated solution for that.
Microsoft's AV software is very good. It has low false-positives and generally scored quite well. If the same capability is free, I don't see a reason not to recommend its use. I certainly don't work for a-v comparatives, but they were around before Microsoft was in AV business, and their top rated software changes pretty freqeuntly. I'd call them reasonably unbiased, but judge for yourself.
On Linux, it isn't difficult to write cool plugins in C, which can do effects that are very difficult to do otherwise. On Windows, this is extremely challenging, because getting the build environment setup is a pain. This leaves one with their Scrpt-Fu (scheme)language for plugins. While I haven't been limited by its features, the lack of a decent debugger and manual makes programming in it extremely painful (though I program in scheme (well, one of it's derivatives) nearly every day).
In one case, I found a plugin someone else had written that would do exactly what I wanted. But of course it was in C (and the compiled version only available for Linux), so I had to port it to Script-Fu before I could use it, and it took forever to run (doing pixel-by-pixel operations is very slow in Script-Fu).
Had they chosen a standard scripting language like perl/python/whatever, all plugins could be cross-platform, and would be much easier to write/debug. And don't talk about Pygimp or it's siblings. I am not aware of a single one that works with GIMP 2.2 and has been ported to windows.
The windows port is to some extent a second-class citizen, which is too bad, IMHO.
This is why I use sneakemail for every registration I ever enter. Sneakemail is a (free) mail-forwarding service, that will generate an unlimited number of randomized email addresses, and forward them to 1 of 10 of your addresses. Every forwarded mail has a tag (specificed by you) attached to the subject for easy filtering. The 'From' addresses are mapped os that a responses from you gets sent to sneakemail (where it gets re-sent back to the recipient with the 'random' e-mail address (and all header information removed). In other words, sneamemail is a kind of anonimizer proxy for email.
I like this service because (a) I never have to give out my real email address, (b) I know which sites are giving away my email address, (c) I can disble, block, or delete an email address that is being used for spam, and (d) it makes it difficult for anyone to associate an email address to me (In the cases where I don't want to give my real name).
Admittedly, you can accomplish all of the above if you have your own domain name, and create addresses for every account (except that (d) becomes a bit harder, as it requires fake information in your domain registration).
This is superior to throw away email addresses, which only work for (a), and which if you ever need to receive email from them (say because you lost your password, or they use email as login) you need to remember the address somehow. I can always log into sneakemail and see a list of all the addresses I have, neatly categorized.
This is a poor example to quote. For instance did you know that Aspirin, Neoprxin Sodium (Aleve), and Ibuprofin (advil) all work using the same mechanism? The result is that mixing them does not have an additive effect (mostly whichever one hits the blood-stream first will take effect); however, acetaminophen (tylenol) works using a different mechnism, and can be combined with any of the above for a (somewhat) additive effect. In addition, drugs like Aleve have a self-limiting property. Taking more than ~500mg will have no effect (so you will likely notice a difference between 1 and 2 220mg tablets, but taking a 3rd won't relieve any more pain). I am not in the pharmaceutical industry, so don't take the above as gospel, but some time on Google should provide similar information.
I haven't looked at it recently (the last time was back when giFT first came out), but from what I remember, Kazaa does not hash the entrire file (probably because it takes too long to do). instead they hash sections of the file at specific points (something like 1k of data at 1k, 10k, 100k, 1M, 10M, etc offset)
I believe they were using a pretty simple XOR based algorithm for hashing. Anyhow, whether it is easy or not to break Kazaa's hashes, I don't know, but it is certainly not comparable to SHA (or even MD5) on the entire file.
Ok, call me clueless, I've never heard of social-bookmarking, but I faithfully clicked on the link, and it looks like a very cool idea. It could make it easy to find specialty sites. As someone else said, it's like a human-filtered google. But one thing seems to be missing....How do you search? I'd like to see a list of ALL availiable tags. Or search for tags associated with one of my bookmarks (to try to find similar sites) But I see no such capability. Do you need to login to use it? I looked at del.icio.us, and at least there it appears I may get additional functionality by registering, but I see no point in that. Why force me to register in order to search other people's bookmarks (assuming I need to)? Or is this is meant by 'cook up additional tools'? Forgive me, but the site layout is atrocious, and it really seems like there is very limited capability to me.
Oh well. Maybe I'm bitching about nothing. Id so, please show me.
The thing that really gets me is what heppens when Valve goes out of business, or gets bought out by some huge conglomerate who changes their direction? It has happened to huge numbers of game companies (my favorite being Black Isle, but even companies like Sierra exist in name only these days). Guess what. I can still play Fallout/Fallout 2 today. And in fact still do on occasion. Once Valve 'moves on' there is no way to play the $50 game I paid for (or in this case won't). This is why I find Steam so onerous.
Seeing as how Mr. Sinus is local to Austin, most people here will never have seen it. However, the comments here are relaly harsh. Did they rip off the concept? Yes. Did they rip off the name? Yes. But to claim that MST3K should have exclusive rights to poking fun at a movie is absurd. These guys pay hommage to MST3K in their intro, the show is somewhat interactive, has a decent comedy routine in the middle, and is certainly original (they do lots of movies the MST3K guys would never touch) While I lived in Austin, I saw every Mr. Sinus show, and they are generally hillarious (Red Dawn was one of my personal favorites, the Village People Special was probably the worst of the bunch). They started doing the show after MST3K was pulled from the air. The show is mostly for adults, as there is almost always adult humor and language (The Christmas Specials bring this to an extreme). They are a comedy troupe doing original work in a stylistic format. And it is pretty damn funny.
I have mostly accomplished this. It is a bit more difficult than you might expect, especially if you use the laptop for web-browsing/ssh/X (which is my use). My solution was a) install XFCE. I want firefox, and xfce is a very low-resource desktop (choose something else if you want, but I find XFCE fits the bill) b) use a 2.6 kernel (it has a very good laptop mode). Make sure to install the laptop-mode script (and a filesystem which supports noatime). Also hpdarm -S # is good for spinning down the drive after it's been accessed
c) mount/var/log as tmpfs (i don't have much ram in m system, and I need all I can for a filesystem cache) d) remove as many services as possible
Once firefox is up and running, this system barely ever accesses the harddrive. It is silent 95% of the time, and is fully functional for web-browsing and connecting to other systems. The hd turns on at 6am when cron-jobs run, and occasionally when using javascript webpages, and that is it. Doing an: echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/block_dump is very useful for determining which apps are writing to the hd and when.
The article doesn't talk about it, but apparently DVDR9 has poor set-top player compatibility, at least currently. Whether this can be fixed via firmware, better media, or not is still unknown. Sorry I don't have a link, but I think both cdrinfo and dvdplusrw.org have comments about it on their boards.
The article doesn't mention how much they gave, but the X-Prize was originally for $10mil, and that hasn't changed. I expect that the X-Prize foundation had that money set aside, otherwise noone would have taken the competition seriously. So now they have more money, but haven't increased the prize. It would appear it must have gone somewhere.
I bought one of these neat little power meters a while back, and went around measuring everything icould get my hands on.
My laptops use ~45 watts with the screen on, without the screen it is about 35 watts (one is a PII366, the other a PIII-1GHz, both have 12" screens)
My P4 systems all use about 150 watts (no monitor) in idle (not powerdown, drives spinning) state. The worst I could manage running benchmarks was around 200W. Monitors vary a lot. Mine run about 3w in sleep, about 20W active.
1kwHr/day = ~42 Watts always-on.
electricity here is about $0.07 kW/hr which means I pay $1 per month for each 20W always-on in my apt.
My laptops cost me about $2 each. My computers $7 each.
My SMC firewall uses 7W, and it costs much less to operate than the old Cyrix 166 that used to fill that task (besids which, it doesn't use much more electricity than the wireless router I had before, and also replaces that)
So I'm all for specialized products to fill my needs. Of course, I have a dedicated MythTV PVR box I built myself (which is one of those $7/month electricity expenditures), but I wanted the ability to do multiple simultaneous recordings, have a web-interface , and have multiple front-ends (all of which were not availiable on Tivo until recently, and which have premium costs attached). But it wasn't a cost decision. I just like to tinker.
Possibly consider one of the 'pro-sumers' instead
on
Digital 35mm SLRs?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm also in the market for a good digital camera. I've owned a canon S100 since it was first released, and it is a really great little camera.
I was nearly ready to buy the Canon 300D, but I don't have any Canon lenses (what lenses I do have are for an Olympus OM-2). After talking to friends, I decided that for what I need, a 'pro-sumer' would probably be a better fit. The Minolta A1 is probably the best availiable at the moment, but I plan to hold out and see how the Panasonic FZ-10 turns out (released in Japan today, US mid November). It'll be a 35-420mm 35mm equivalent, with a F2.8 Leica lens all the way through the range. Also has image stabilization, which should allow shooting at maximum zoom without a tripod. It is only a 4MP camera, but with a MSRP of $599, it is very tmepting.
With the 300D, I'd need to carry 2-3 lenses (need a range of 18mm-300mm for the Canon to get the equivalent range), and to get them at F2.8 with image-stabilization, that's easily $2k in lenses (and probably quite a bit more). For the money, the 300D is probably the best DSLR on the market, but the question is whether it is what you want.
I'll wait till the reviews come out for the FZ10 before I decide, but for the price, this is probably a better camera for me.
Info on the FZ10 (what is availiable so far at least) can be found here
There's not one camera for everyone, but you should think about what you need it for, decide what you are willing to spend, and decide how much paraphanelia you are willing to lug around before choosing to part with your $$$ (It probably helps if you have a load of Canon lenses already though).
Here is a different solution (from back in '99) using a conical mirror to focus a high-powered laser and ignite the air underneath it to generate propulsion. Perhaps not generally useful yet, but perhaps more generally applicable than charging solar-cells with a laser.
I've owned my Citizen Eco for about 1.5 years now, and am very happy with it. I wear mostly short-sleave shirts, but don't go out of my way to make sure it gets enough light, and it works great. I don't think it was exceptionally expensive, considering that it has pretty sophisticated electronics, and it is exceptionally well made (mine has a titanium shell, and a very durable crystal face). It was about 30% more expensive than a similar quality watch without the solar/liIon battery, and I doubt I'll ever recuperate that (watch batteries last 2-3 years, and are inexpensive to replace), but the watch is very nice, and it's always cool to watch the hands 'catch up' after the watch has been in the dark for a bit (the hands stop to conserve energy). Personally, I doubt this technology would have any impact on the price of the watch, as it really doesn't take much energy to keep it going, and i don't think a 3/4in^2 solar cell is a significant portion of the construction cost (assuming they want o keep similar profit margins)
I was thinking about this. It looks like they are shooting more for a rental market though. I'd be surprised if they can actually manufacture these things, create prints, and a CD, and still make money at $10.99, unless they get a significant number of reuses out of the camera (in which case it is proabbly cheaper for them than a disposable film camera) So I wonder if they'll require a deposit. It'd sure make them a lot less convenient, and reduce the market (no kids for instance). I guess that if they can manufacture the cameras for less than $11 each, they don't lose (since anyone who doesn't return it doesn't get prints/CD made). But I agree, it seems like it'd be a great by at $11 each for something that is much nicer than a $30 web-cam, assuming it can be modified...and I'm sure it can. It's very difficult to prevent reverse-engineering when you provide the hardware.
Re:Does Linux 2.6 permit decent video capture?
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Linux v2.6 Begins Testing
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, it is better, but not wonderful. I also have a cheapish bttv style card, and have run both 2.4 and 2.5.* and 2.5 drops fewer frames but I still lose quite a few, though certainly not in regular intervals. This happens using virtually any encoder (nuv, mpeg4) at anything over 480x480 (and my cpu is only at about 50% from the capture/encoding when doing 640x480 which is my normal recording setting). you may want to try the triton1=1 and vsfx=1 insmod options mentioned in: Documentation/video4linux/bttv/README.quirks
or increase the number of buffers (I use gbuffers=32)
(the dma thing is a big deal too, so better check hdparm)
These made my capture more stable, though it didn't do too much about the dropped frames). Also, 2.5+ includes the new 0.9 bttv drivers which support V4L2 and seem overall to perform better.
Good luck. And if you want a kick-ass PVR, here is my plug for www.mythtv.org:)
I'm very sad that you can't use a 2.4 kernel to do the install. Yes I'm aware that you can install it as a package, but without it being the boot kernel for the install disk, you can't format your root partition (or any others) as reiserfs easily.
You need to reboot to do that, and by then you at least have/etc,/var,/lib, and/bin installed, and you had to do it all from 2.2.20.
Yes I know there are ways around it (I went through this exact thing last year), but it isn't convenient to do.
I had heard rumors that there were going to be multiple kernels on the boot disc, but haven't seen anyhing else about it. If they did this, it solves my only gripe, and I'd love to see the link.
If you follow the Wine Developers/Users mailing lists, you'd know that Gavriel and others in his company are very active in helping users and developers solve problems as well as giving quite a bit of their code back to Wine. So yes, I'd say they are legit. Whether Wine is a good thing is a different question, but I think Transgaming has already shown their commitment to the Wine project as a whole.
Anyone who wants to know what testing is for should probably read (from Anthony Towns): this
The doc is somewhat out of date, and testing hasn't worked nearly as well as they had hoped for it's primary task (shortening the release cycle), but it certainly fills the need of having reasonably stable packages that are still up-to-date.
Basically the important parts are:
> * New "testing" distribution
> This is a (mostly finished) project that will allow us
> to test out distribution by making it "sludgey" rather
> than frozen: that is, a new distribution is added between
> stable and unstable, that is regularly and automatically
> updated with new packages from unstable when they've
> had a little testing and now new RC bugs.
...
> * Testing updates to frozen is suboptimal: updates go into
> incoming, wait there for a while, get added to frozen,
> we discover they introduce as many release critical bugs
> as they solve, rinse, repeat. The "wait for a while" part
> is particularly suboptimal, but without it, it's not really
> a freeze.
The current way we do things is basically to build a new package, hope it
works as advertised, and let people test it. If it doesn't work, we repeat
as many times as necessary, or eventually just throw the package out.
A better way to handle this, which I suspect everyone's just spontaneoulsy
reinvented as the read the above, is to try to keep around a previous
version of the package that was usable. That way if the new packages don't
work, we can just keep the old one rather than having to throw it out
entirely.
That, essentially, is the point of the "testing" distribution: to contain
a consistent set of the most recent "believed-to-be-reliable" packages.
So the main point of this is to create a distribution that, essentially,
doesn't have any release critical bugs [5] and can be kept that way
with much less effort on the part of the release manager. That should
have a pretty profound effect with regard to speeding up the freeze,...
Read the whole thing, though. And remember that it's a year old, and things have changed a lot since then.
Slashdot Mirror
I have lots of questions, like, how can you extract the honey from the comb automatically? the normal way to do this is via centrifuge, and generally, you want to do that without the bees. also, bees are messy. They fill every nook and cranny with propolis, and build wherever there is space. By guess is the glass would fill up with extra comb and propolis making the hive a lot less elegant. Lastly...Smoking and then opening the hive into the home? That is crazy. Smoking bees calms them but it doesn't anesthetize them. They still fly around some, and they still don't like you messing with the comb after smoking.
Agreed. I've had my RT-N16 for about a year. It is great with DD-WRT (I guess it supports Tomato, but I haven't had a need to upgrade). I did have problems with mine overheating (not overclocked or anything), but some left over heatsink coolers from way-back and an ancient graphics-card cooling fan completely fixed the issue for me.
The RT-N16 seems to have some quality control issues, but for the price, there was nothing better when I bought mine. There may be better options now though.
I loved my RX-7s. I've owned 2 1st gen 13B RX-7s, 1st in high-school then a 2nd in college once the 1st gave up the ghost (mostly due to upstate NY winters). They were a pain in the ass in the winter, with the manual choke, and an engine that was really easy to flood, and they ate catalytic converters, but it was a very pretty car, and I still pine for mine occasionally.
I've been running lucid for a few days, and I think quality control has significantly slipped in Ubuntu. Yes they are only betas, but with only 2 weeks left before release, I have seen lots of bugs still remaining. Within a couple days I found that screen-saver crashes often, several apps can't properly auto-disable PulseAudio anymore and don't work without hacks, PHP 5.3.2 segfaults, themes didn't install fully on upgrade, and (of course) the memory leak which results in Lucid using up all the RAM in my system (yes I've submitted bugs (or found previously submitted tickets) on most of these already). Other things like Wine segfaults seem to be resolved by reinstalling, but overall this upgrade has not gone smoothly for me. I've been, overall, happy with (X)Ubuntu over the years, and like the 6 month cadence, but, in my opinion, they should really focus more on quality for their LTS release. I certainly wouldn't recommend an upgrade to 10.04 in its current state, though I plan to stick with Ubuntu personally. Generally, I consider Ubuntu to be a more user-friendly and more current Debian, which I like, but I guess I should learn not to be an early adopter if I care about stability.
I love MythTv, and have been using it for years and years, but it is absolutely not easy (though I have more obscure hardware, and have never used mythbuntu). I've also tried being a sysadmin for my friends' myth boxes....I would never wish that on anyone. The stability has always been the biggest issue. Random crashes are extroadinarily annoying. With Firewire, I found recording very unreliable, image quality is very dependant on the capture method. But I haven't seem anything that can support my High-Def recording with auto-commercial detection, and for that,I'm willing to stick with it.
I've heard that you can run 'Play On!' in a virtual-machine on windows to convert netflix to upnp streams (which can then be watched on Linux). I haven't tried it myself though. Certainly not ideal, but perhaps viable for those certain use models.
Also Blu-Ray is still really hard in Linux. I've considered a Windows MythTV frontend with a linux backend which might give me the flexibility I want, but I don't think there's a good integrated solution for that.
According to a-v comparatives:
http://www.av-comparatives.org/comparativesreviews/corporate-reviews
Microsoft's AV software is very good. It has low false-positives and generally scored quite well. If the same capability is free, I don't see a reason not to recommend its use. I certainly don't work for a-v comparatives, but they were around before Microsoft was in AV business, and their top rated software changes pretty freqeuntly. I'd call them reasonably unbiased, but judge for yourself.
On Linux, it isn't difficult to write cool plugins in C, which can do effects that are very difficult to do otherwise. On Windows, this is extremely challenging, because getting the build environment setup is a pain. This leaves one with their Scrpt-Fu (scheme)language for plugins. While I haven't been limited by its features, the lack of a decent debugger and manual makes programming in it extremely painful (though I program in scheme (well, one of it's derivatives) nearly every day).
In one case, I found a plugin someone else had written that would do exactly what I wanted. But of course it was in C (and the compiled version only available for Linux), so I had to port it to Script-Fu before I could use it, and it took forever to run (doing pixel-by-pixel operations is very slow in Script-Fu).
Had they chosen a standard scripting language like perl/python/whatever, all plugins could be cross-platform, and would be much easier to write/debug. And don't talk about Pygimp or it's siblings. I am not aware of a single one that works with GIMP 2.2 and has been ported to windows.
The windows port is to some extent a second-class citizen, which is too bad, IMHO.
This is why I use sneakemail for every registration I ever enter. Sneakemail is a (free) mail-forwarding service, that will generate an unlimited number of randomized email addresses, and forward them to 1 of 10 of your addresses. Every forwarded mail has a tag (specificed by you) attached to the subject for easy filtering. The 'From' addresses are mapped os that a responses from you gets sent to sneakemail (where it gets re-sent back to the recipient with the 'random' e-mail address (and all header information removed). In other words, sneamemail is a kind of anonimizer proxy for email. I like this service because (a) I never have to give out my real email address, (b) I know which sites are giving away my email address, (c) I can disble, block, or delete an email address that is being used for spam, and (d) it makes it difficult for anyone to associate an email address to me (In the cases where I don't want to give my real name). Admittedly, you can accomplish all of the above if you have your own domain name, and create addresses for every account (except that (d) becomes a bit harder, as it requires fake information in your domain registration). This is superior to throw away email addresses, which only work for (a), and which if you ever need to receive email from them (say because you lost your password, or they use email as login) you need to remember the address somehow. I can always log into sneakemail and see a list of all the addresses I have, neatly categorized.
This is a poor example to quote. For instance did you know that Aspirin, Neoprxin Sodium (Aleve), and Ibuprofin (advil) all work using the same mechanism? The result is that mixing them does not have an additive effect (mostly whichever one hits the blood-stream first will take effect); however, acetaminophen (tylenol) works using a different mechnism, and can be combined with any of the above for a (somewhat) additive effect. In addition, drugs like Aleve have a self-limiting property. Taking more than ~500mg will have no effect (so you will likely notice a difference between 1 and 2 220mg tablets, but taking a 3rd won't relieve any more pain). I am not in the pharmaceutical industry, so don't take the above as gospel, but some time on Google should provide similar information.
I haven't looked at it recently (the last time was back when giFT first came out), but from what I remember, Kazaa does not hash the entrire file (probably because it takes too long to do). instead they hash sections of the file at specific points (something like 1k of data at 1k, 10k, 100k, 1M, 10M, etc offset)
I believe they were using a pretty simple XOR based algorithm for hashing. Anyhow, whether it is easy or not to break Kazaa's hashes, I don't know, but it is certainly not comparable to SHA (or even MD5) on the entire file.
Ok, call me clueless, I've never heard of social-bookmarking, but I faithfully clicked on the link, and it looks like a very cool idea. It could make it easy to find specialty sites. As someone else said, it's like a human-filtered google. But one thing seems to be missing....How do you search?
I'd like to see a list of ALL availiable tags. Or search for tags associated with one of my bookmarks (to try to find similar sites) But I see no such capability. Do you need to login to use it? I looked at del.icio.us, and at least there it appears I may get additional functionality by registering, but I see no point in that. Why force me to register in order to search other people's bookmarks (assuming I need to)?
Or is this is meant by 'cook up additional tools'? Forgive me, but the site layout is atrocious, and it really seems like there is very limited capability to me.
Oh well. Maybe I'm bitching about nothing. Id so, please show me.
The thing that really gets me is what heppens when Valve goes out of business, or gets bought out by some huge conglomerate who changes their direction? It has happened to huge numbers of game companies (my favorite being Black Isle, but even companies like Sierra exist in name only these days). Guess what. I can still play Fallout/Fallout 2 today. And in fact still do on occasion. Once Valve 'moves on' there is no way to play the $50 game I paid for (or in this case won't). This is why I find Steam so onerous.
Seeing as how Mr. Sinus is local to Austin, most people here will never have seen it. However, the comments here are relaly harsh. Did they rip off the concept? Yes. Did they rip off the name? Yes. But to claim that MST3K should have exclusive rights to poking fun at a movie is absurd. These guys pay hommage to MST3K in their intro, the show is somewhat interactive, has a decent comedy routine in the middle, and is certainly original (they do lots of movies the MST3K guys would never touch) While I lived in Austin, I saw every Mr. Sinus show, and they are generally hillarious (Red Dawn was one of my personal favorites, the Village People Special was probably the worst of the bunch). They started doing the show after MST3K was pulled from the air. The show is mostly for adults, as there is almost always adult humor and language (The Christmas Specials bring this to an extreme). They are a comedy troupe doing original work in a stylistic format. And it is pretty damn funny.
I have mostly accomplished this. It is a bit more difficult than you might expect, especially if you use the laptop for web-browsing/ssh/X (which is my use). My solution was
/var/log as tmpfs (i don't have much ram in m system, and I need all I can for a filesystem cache)
/proc/sys/vm/block_dump
a) install XFCE. I want firefox, and xfce is a very low-resource desktop (choose something else if you want, but I find XFCE fits the bill)
b) use a 2.6 kernel (it has a very good laptop mode). Make sure to install the laptop-mode script (and a filesystem which supports noatime). Also hpdarm -S # is good for spinning down the drive after it's been accessed
c) mount
d) remove as many services as possible
Once firefox is up and running, this system barely ever accesses the harddrive. It is silent 95% of the time, and is fully functional for web-browsing and connecting to other systems. The hd turns on at 6am when cron-jobs run, and occasionally when using javascript webpages, and that is it.
Doing an:
echo 1 >
is very useful for determining which apps are writing to the hd and when.
The article doesn't talk about it, but apparently DVDR9 has poor set-top player compatibility, at least currently. Whether this can be fixed via firmware, better media, or not is still unknown. Sorry I don't have a link, but I think both cdrinfo and dvdplusrw.org have comments about it on their boards.
The article doesn't mention how much they gave, but the X-Prize was originally for $10mil, and that hasn't changed. I expect that the X-Prize foundation had that money set aside, otherwise noone would have taken the competition seriously. So now they have more money, but haven't increased the prize. It would appear it must have gone somewhere.
I bought one of these neat little power meters a while back, and went around measuring everything icould get my hands on.
My laptops use ~45 watts with the screen on, without the screen it is about 35 watts (one is a PII366, the other a PIII-1GHz, both have 12" screens)
My P4 systems all use about 150 watts (no monitor) in idle (not powerdown, drives spinning) state. The worst I could manage running benchmarks was around 200W. Monitors vary a lot. Mine run about 3w in sleep, about 20W active.
1kwHr/day = ~42 Watts always-on.
electricity here is about $0.07 kW/hr which means I pay $1 per month for each 20W always-on in my apt.
My laptops cost me about $2 each. My computers $7 each.
My SMC firewall uses 7W, and it costs much less to operate than the old Cyrix 166 that used to fill that task (besids which, it doesn't use much more electricity than the wireless router I had before, and also replaces that)
So I'm all for specialized products to fill my needs. Of course, I have a dedicated MythTV PVR box I built myself (which is one of those $7/month electricity expenditures), but I wanted the ability to do multiple simultaneous recordings, have a web-interface , and have multiple front-ends (all of which were not availiable on Tivo until recently, and which have premium costs attached). But it wasn't a cost decision. I just like to tinker.
I was nearly ready to buy the Canon 300D, but I don't have any Canon lenses (what lenses I do have are for an Olympus OM-2). After talking to friends, I decided that for what I need, a 'pro-sumer' would probably be a better fit. The Minolta A1 is probably the best availiable at the moment, but I plan to hold out and see how the Panasonic FZ-10 turns out (released in Japan today, US mid November). It'll be a 35-420mm 35mm equivalent, with a F2.8 Leica lens all the way through the range. Also has image stabilization, which should allow shooting at maximum zoom without a tripod. It is only a 4MP camera, but with a MSRP of $599, it is very tmepting.
With the 300D, I'd need to carry 2-3 lenses (need a range of 18mm-300mm for the Canon to get the equivalent range), and to get them at F2.8 with image-stabilization, that's easily $2k in lenses (and probably quite a bit more). For the money, the 300D is probably the best DSLR on the market, but the question is whether it is what you want.
I'll wait till the reviews come out for the FZ10 before I decide, but for the price, this is probably a better camera for me.
Info on the FZ10 (what is availiable so far at least) can be found here
There's not one camera for everyone, but you should think about what you need it for, decide what you are willing to spend, and decide how much paraphanelia you are willing to lug around before choosing to part with your $$$ (It probably helps if you have a load of Canon lenses already though).
Here is a different solution (from back in '99) using a conical mirror to focus a high-powered laser and ignite the air underneath it to generate propulsion. Perhaps not generally useful yet, but perhaps more generally applicable than charging solar-cells with a laser.
I've owned my Citizen Eco for about 1.5 years now, and am very happy with it. I wear mostly short-sleave shirts, but don't go out of my way to make sure it gets enough light, and it works great. I don't think it was exceptionally expensive, considering that it has pretty sophisticated electronics, and it is exceptionally well made (mine has a titanium shell, and a very durable crystal face). It was about 30% more expensive than a similar quality watch without the solar/liIon battery, and I doubt I'll ever recuperate that (watch batteries last 2-3 years, and are inexpensive to replace), but the watch is very nice, and it's always cool to watch the hands 'catch up' after the watch has been in the dark for a bit (the hands stop to conserve energy). Personally, I doubt this technology would have any impact on the price of the watch, as it really doesn't take much energy to keep it going, and i don't think a 3/4in^2 solar cell is a significant portion of the construction cost (assuming they want o keep similar profit margins)
I was thinking about this. It looks like they are shooting more for a rental market though. I'd be surprised if they can actually manufacture these things, create prints, and a CD, and still make money at $10.99, unless they get a significant number of reuses out of the camera (in which case it is proabbly cheaper for them than a disposable film camera) So I wonder if they'll require a deposit. It'd sure make them a lot less convenient, and reduce the market (no kids for instance). I guess that if they can manufacture the cameras for less than $11 each, they don't lose (since anyone who doesn't return it doesn't get prints/CD made). But I agree, it seems like it'd be a great by at $11 each for something that is much nicer than a $30 web-cam, assuming it can be modified...and I'm sure it can. It's very difficult to prevent reverse-engineering when you provide the hardware.
Well, it is better, but not wonderful. I also have a cheapish bttv style card, and have run both 2.4 and 2.5.* and 2.5 drops fewer frames but I still lose quite a few, though certainly not in regular intervals. This happens using virtually any encoder (nuv, mpeg4) at anything over 480x480 (and my cpu is only at about 50% from the capture/encoding when doing 640x480 which is my normal recording setting). you may want to try the triton1=1 and vsfx=1 insmod options mentioned in:
:)
Documentation/video4linux/bttv/README.quirks
or increase the number of buffers (I use gbuffers=32)
(the dma thing is a big deal too, so better check hdparm)
These made my capture more stable, though it didn't do too much about the dropped frames). Also, 2.5+ includes the new 0.9 bttv drivers which support V4L2 and seem overall to perform better.
Good luck. And if you want a kick-ass PVR, here is my plug for www.mythtv.org
I'm very sad that you can't use a 2.4 kernel to do the install. Yes I'm aware that you can install it as a package, but without it being the boot kernel for the install disk, you can't format your root partition (or any others) as reiserfs easily. /etc,/var,/lib, and /bin installed, and you had to do it all from 2.2.20.
You need to reboot to do that, and by then you at least have
Yes I know there are ways around it (I went through this exact thing last year), but it isn't convenient to do.
I had heard rumors that there were going to be multiple kernels on the boot disc, but haven't seen anyhing else about it. If they did this, it solves my only gripe, and I'd love to see the link.
If you follow the Wine Developers/Users mailing lists, you'd know that Gavriel and others in his company are very active in helping users and developers solve problems as well as giving quite a bit of their code back to Wine. So yes, I'd say they are legit. Whether Wine is a good thing is a different question, but I think Transgaming has already shown their commitment to the Wine project as a whole.
Anyone who wants to know what testing is for should probably read (from Anthony Towns): this
The doc is somewhat out of date, and testing hasn't worked nearly as well as they had hoped for it's primary task (shortening the release cycle), but it certainly fills the need of having reasonably stable packages that are still up-to-date.
Basically the important parts are:
> * New "testing" distribution
> This is a (mostly finished) project that will allow us
> to test out distribution by making it "sludgey" rather
> than frozen: that is, a new distribution is added between
> stable and unstable, that is regularly and automatically
> updated with new packages from unstable when they've
> had a little testing and now new RC bugs.
...
> * Testing updates to frozen is suboptimal: updates go into
> incoming, wait there for a while, get added to frozen,
> we discover they introduce as many release critical bugs
> as they solve, rinse, repeat. The "wait for a while" part
> is particularly suboptimal, but without it, it's not really
> a freeze.
The current way we do things is basically to build a new package, hope it
works as advertised, and let people test it. If it doesn't work, we repeat
as many times as necessary, or eventually just throw the package out.
A better way to handle this, which I suspect everyone's just spontaneoulsy
reinvented as the read the above, is to try to keep around a previous
version of the package that was usable. That way if the new packages don't
work, we can just keep the old one rather than having to throw it out
entirely.
That, essentially, is the point of the "testing" distribution: to contain
a consistent set of the most recent "believed-to-be-reliable" packages.
So the main point of this is to create a distribution that, essentially,
doesn't have any release critical bugs [5] and can be kept that way
with much less effort on the part of the release manager. That should
have a pretty profound effect with regard to speeding up the freeze,...
Read the whole thing, though. And remember that it's a year old, and things have changed a lot since then.