I wish I was joking... The green tint is a feature of the DVD!?!
Guess things were working better than I expected. The disk seems OK when I use a normal DVD player, but the colors are not the same when I run it through my hollywood+ card/mini-itx box.... I have been banging my head against the wall when it looks like my TV/DVD may be auto-correcting this tint all along.
/me bangs head against the wall and starts mumbling about 'normals' and picking a poor reference CD
Are you kidding me? I've been building a computer based mpeg player and using my Matrix CD as the test. Here I thought something was horked up with my rig...
I have not tried that yet - but that is what I figured.... there was a huge thread over at hardocp's [h]ot deals form about this remote.
If it has a serial port, I figure I can make it work (grin). My intention is to use linux w/vidiolan and a hollywood+ decoder on a 533mhz fanless mini-itx board. The IR receiver is just a small bit of PBC - I'm ditching the hocky puck plastic shell.
The worst part about IDE RAID was I told by brother-in-law about it. RAID 0 was fine on my KT7, and I made the mistake of showing him a fast system at the time. Sure enough, he goes out and picks up a box at a local shop, puts his business on it, and wipes out file/drive/array/etc. Walking him though an important BIOS update was NOT the thing to show him.
This thanksgiving he told me how the RAID 0/1 just did not work - amazingly, he lost a drive again, and the mirrored stuff. Lets just say I never mentioned to the three other family members who have on-board RAID capabilities that it is anything other than an ATA/100 controller...
I picked up a creative labs remote unit for about $11 after shipping. It is serial - which was what I was after. Now if I could only find where my little one left the remote! (grin)
Measured by features Windows is pretty cheap. And expect the price of Windows to start to decline as PCs drop further in price.
I'm not saying they don't pack a lot into windows, but all of the OS's out there have heavily evolved over the past decade. Not only have most of the no-brainer apps, utilities, and features been folded into commercial distros like Solaris and the MacOS. Almost every Linux distro is bursting with extra features. Problem is, people expect it... but not for the cost of all the parts.
Now follow the price. A solid 'commodity' machine - 1.3ghz CPU, 128M RAM, 20G HDD - several magnitudes more powerful than the x86 box running oracle a few years back - can be had for about $200 new. (not server grade hardware or gaming, but for Mom...) Looking at generics with HomeXP, add $100 to the price. A third of the cost is licenses. Add in another $150-250 for an OEM version of office and the hardware starts to become a rounding error...
Retail version of windows is about $300 and office is like another $500. That is your $800 computer. Fortunately, OpenOffice, Mozilla, and Linux are to the point where I can set my Mom up with a box to do 'surfing', 'e-mail', and letter writing... I got a strong feeling that as Microsoft succeeds in eliminating casual pirating, they are going to be in for a rude shock when they meet my joe-sixpack brood and try to pull cash from _their_ wallet - subscription or otherwise....
Funny this thread should pop up... I just pulled out my trusty Matrox Millennium PCI video card to while doing the post turkey day PC support work that happens on every major holiday.
Anyhow, the Matrox stuff was rock solid for business apps. Had a mystique, then millennium, added a rainbow runner, then a G400 Marvel and a RT2000 at work. Yup, an early adopter... the trusting kind...
The Marvel is what really what blew my faith in Matrox. Spent $300 when that was a serious amount of cash for a PC video card, found out there were no win2k or nt capture drivers... Dropped a box back to win98se and waited for the glorious 'over 2g' files and a bit more stability. Years pass, they release a new version of the card (the G450 without hardware acceleration) before a win2k driver was released. Finally, they delivered something. They turned the win2k version into nothing more than a TV tuner card! No capture.
Insult to injury, Matrox offered to give me $50 off a G450 if I bought it direct - not even enough to let them compete with other vendors selling the retail box with the 'rebate'.
The RT2000 was ok once it worked, the RT2500 much more forgiving.... but the trust is gone for me. (not including my trusty millennium card, that is...)
I'm not sure what the point is - here in Minnesota you pay Use tax when you buy it out of state. If you bought it over the net or used a postcard, buy over $770 of hardware as an individual you (should) pay Use tax...
I'm sure every state is different - thus the proposal. But as a customer, now I need to know if the other state is charging taxes, what the rate is so I can get credit, blah... It just puts the burden right back on my sholders.
No security? Heck, I saw at least five guys with machine guns when I borrowed it. I'm just trying to scan a page a day for the Project Gutenberg, and well, it is taking a lot longer than I thought. Those calculus thingies don't OCR well at all....
I thought it was for sufficiently high values of one (grin)...
My bride, a math major, is especially unsympathetic to my plight. Just the timing - CNN ran the Dodge(?) commercial, I got smacked, saw the post and tried for support here (and was justifiably mocked again)...
I've never heard a SACD player, so no comments on how great or lousy the sound might be, but this pounds home what some marketing folks really want....
SACD = AMAZING, assigning something
rather than...
SACD == AMAZING, something is equivalent.
I growl every time I see the "drive=love" commercials, and my wife tells me to get over it. Guess drive.equals(love) just does not have the same warm fuzzy feeling, and technically if you make the assignment, I guess equality would be true.
I know you care, however... right? Hello? (slinking away from my soap box)
Which is clearer? D. E. Knuth, The art of computer programming. Vol. 2, Seminumerical algorithms, third ed., Addison-Wesley Series in Computer Science and Information Processing. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1997. or: (xml I'm not encoding)
To the computer? The XML... My sax parser can understand one, allowing me to map every bit of info into a program without (much) hassle. The other, I have to write a parser to take the chunks of information and stuff it into my widget.
I use to think the same way... until I was converting cobol copybooks into C struts and/or Java. Bandwidth is cheap compared to my time, and lord knows I left some really ugly code (three companies ago) for someone to figure out why the hell I'm grabbing a few characters which map to something important in the HL7 spec.
How could we possibly place more trust in voting systems simply because they are electronic? All this would require is a single person with a single clue somewhere along the data chain to manipulate the results.
I love the spaceball's quote - evil will triumph because good is dumb. Not sure about where you voted, but I watched some people really struggle with setting up a folding table this morning and trying to write a sequence of numbers on card stock. The risk of a computer based fraud is nothing compared to what hand counting errors would be. Cheating the system is always possible but malice can be prosecuted, stupidity and mistakes...
One of the most frighting discoveries was jury duty - finding out what a jury of 'peers' really is. God help the underfunded innocent.
Now is the time for everyone who complains about congress and laws like this to go out and vote.
Not sure about your state, but my options suck. I'll still go out and vote for the lesser evil, but still, lets not kid anyone here. Until they can't take payola from soft money (or whatever they call it), they really don't care what I want once they are in office.
I agree Sun needs to keep development focused on improving their technologies. J2EE and NET's version of Web Services really need to play transparently with each other. Other than having a generic VM, the rest of.NET strikes me as the same ubiquitous marketing fluff when Microsoft named everything ActiveX...
On the other hand, if you throw a wrench into their marketing machine with a lawsuit, why not? From a strategic standpoint this is a good move for the legal department - assuming the development and marketing efforts are not ablated.
Like you, few things make me shudder like ASP.NET...
As far as playing DVD's... take a look at http://videolan.net/. They have windows, solaris, bsd, linux, and a few other platforms covered. Try it, and if you like what you see in windows it will be the same deal with SuSe.
So I think we are in agreement that the fan should be able to handle the variable heat/rpm issues. However, the mainboard does need to monitor the fan to make sure it is still alive. The mainboard should know the state of its temperature - be that CPU, chipset, or anything else in its domain - and do something about it if it hits critical levels. When the KT7-RAID board noticed the fan was not spinning, it powers down the system.
Some stuff might be able to survive passive cooling by throttling back (ala Intel's P4) - but the $38 duron might cook itself if the software was not watching to see there was active cooling as well as a comfortable operating temperatures. The temp can really jumps up fast, so the check for active cooling is just another safety net.. I concur that the fan should be able to take a stab at how fast it should run - crank up to 11 if its toasty, throttle back if it is idle. I mentioned I swapped out his heatsink and fan... did that with a Thermaltake Volcano 7 for $13.50. From the add...
This new cooler from Thermaltake uses a temperature sensing 80mm fan that changes its speed based on the temperature. When the surrounding air is cool, it spins slowly to keep noise down. If the air warms up, the fan spins faster to keep the CPU cool.
Since you already have the fan RPM and the CPU temp (from the mainboard or CPU itself) already, it lets you try to do a bit more optimization than guessing based on a sensor stuck to the side of the CPU. (Not that the mainboard sensor is anywhere even close to accurate). Anyhow -- original poster's solution.... If I was using a software solution to control fan RPM's - and I don't - I would want them to go full blast if something hork the programs.
Why should the CPU or any other computing circuitry even be bothered with monitoring the fan?
Cat hair... Really!
My brother brought his PC over because it would shut down shortly after posting. I powered it up - did not hear a fan, and realized the motherboard's BIOS was shutting down the machine because the fan was not spinning. Saved the duron's life! I poked around a bit and found the CPU fan was wound up with cat hair. Power supply was in pretty tough shape too.
I cleaned stuff off, put on a better heat sink and fan, and sent him back to feed his counter strike addition.
That said, the media that came with the kit and the three other blanks I ordered that were DVD+RW would not read in the drives that mattered. Same end game. The media worked fine with the new pioneer drive, btw, so I blame the burner at this point.
Don't get sucked in by a low priced HP DVD i100 burner. I picked one up to create ghost images for our SE's demo laptops. With the latest bios, drivers, etc - I've found two DVD-ROM's that will actually read a burned CD. Unfortunately, that does not include any of the IBM think pads, Dell latitudes, or any other Dell workstation in our shop.
For $99, HP will 'update' the drive to make it work with DVD-R's. That is another stinky issue since they advertised it worked with the -R media, but I'm OK with DVD-RW media if it actually was readable by anything I picked it up for. The box said it ran under Win2K server - it does, but only as a DVD-ROM. The burning software only 'works' with Win2K workstation and below. Customer Service was less than helpful.
Rather than spend the $99 and hope - We picked up a Pioneer unit (not the one in this review, but don't remember the number) and have had no problems. Fool me once...
Slashdot Mirror
Guess things were working better than I expected. The disk seems OK when I use a normal DVD player, but the colors are not the same when I run it through my hollywood+ card/mini-itx box.... I have been banging my head against the wall when it looks like my TV/DVD may be auto-correcting this tint all along.
/me bangs head against the wall and starts mumbling about 'normals' and picking a poor reference CD
WB for the faulty green tint on The Matrix DVD?
Are you kidding me? I've been building a computer based mpeg player and using my Matrix CD as the test. Here I thought something was horked up with my rig...
(argh)
I have not tried that yet - but that is what I figured.... there was a huge thread over at hardocp's [h]ot deals form about this remote.
If it has a serial port, I figure I can make it work (grin). My intention is to use linux w/vidiolan and a hollywood+ decoder on a 533mhz fanless mini-itx board. The IR receiver is just a small bit of PBC - I'm ditching the hocky puck plastic shell.
The worst part about IDE RAID was I told by brother-in-law about it. RAID 0 was fine on my KT7, and I made the mistake of showing him a fast system at the time. Sure enough, he goes out and picks up a box at a local shop, puts his business on it, and wipes out file/drive/array/etc. Walking him though an important BIOS update was NOT the thing to show him.
This thanksgiving he told me how the RAID 0/1 just did not work - amazingly, he lost a drive again, and the mirrored stuff. Lets just say I never mentioned to the three other family members who have on-board RAID capabilities that it is anything other than an ATA/100 controller...
I picked up a creative labs remote unit for about $11 after shipping. It is serial - which was what I was after. Now if I could only find where my little one left the remote! (grin)
Measured by features Windows is pretty cheap. And expect the price of Windows to start to decline as PCs drop further in price.
I'm not saying they don't pack a lot into windows, but all of the OS's out there have heavily evolved over the past decade. Not only have most of the no-brainer apps, utilities, and features been folded into commercial distros like Solaris and the MacOS. Almost every Linux distro is bursting with extra features. Problem is, people expect it... but not for the cost of all the parts.
Now follow the price. A solid 'commodity' machine - 1.3ghz CPU, 128M RAM, 20G HDD - several magnitudes more powerful than the x86 box running oracle a few years back - can be had for about $200 new. (not server grade hardware or gaming, but for Mom...) Looking at generics with HomeXP, add $100 to the price. A third of the cost is licenses. Add in another $150-250 for an OEM version of office and the hardware starts to become a rounding error...
Retail version of windows is about $300 and office is like another $500. That is your $800 computer. Fortunately, OpenOffice, Mozilla, and Linux are to the point where I can set my Mom up with a box to do 'surfing', 'e-mail', and letter writing... I got a strong feeling that as Microsoft succeeds in eliminating casual pirating, they are going to be in for a rude shock when they meet my joe-sixpack brood and try to pull cash from _their_ wallet - subscription or otherwise....
Funny this thread should pop up... I just pulled out my trusty Matrox Millennium PCI video card to while doing the post turkey day PC support work that happens on every major holiday.
Anyhow, the Matrox stuff was rock solid for business apps. Had a mystique, then millennium, added a rainbow runner, then a G400 Marvel and a RT2000 at work. Yup, an early adopter... the trusting kind...
The Marvel is what really what blew my faith in Matrox. Spent $300 when that was a serious amount of cash for a PC video card, found out there were no win2k or nt capture drivers... Dropped a box back to win98se and waited for the glorious 'over 2g' files and a bit more stability. Years pass, they release a new version of the card (the G450 without hardware acceleration) before a win2k driver was released. Finally, they delivered something. They turned the win2k version into nothing more than a TV tuner card! No capture.
Insult to injury, Matrox offered to give me $50 off a G450 if I bought it direct - not even enough to let them compete with other vendors selling the retail box with the 'rebate'.
The RT2000 was ok once it worked, the RT2500 much more forgiving.... but the trust is gone for me. (not including my trusty millennium card, that is...)
The building codes in most states in the US require a window large enough to be used as a fire escape in EVERY bedroom.
Bedroom? Why would the builder move out of his parents basement?
I'm not sure what the point is - here in Minnesota you pay Use tax when you buy it out of state. If you bought it over the net or used a postcard, buy over $770 of hardware as an individual you (should) pay Use tax...
I'm sure every state is different - thus the proposal. But as a customer, now I need to know if the other state is charging taxes, what the rate is so I can get credit, blah... It just puts the burden right back on my sholders.
No security? Heck, I saw at least five guys with machine guns when I borrowed it. I'm just trying to scan a page a day for the Project Gutenberg, and well, it is taking a lot longer than I thought. Those calculus thingies don't OCR well at all....
Which means that 1+1=3 would be just as valid
I thought it was for sufficiently high values of one (grin)...
My bride, a math major, is especially unsympathetic to my plight. Just the timing - CNN ran the Dodge(?) commercial, I got smacked, saw the post and tried for support here (and was justifiably mocked again)...
I've never heard a SACD player, so no comments on how great or lousy the sound might be, but this pounds home what some marketing folks really want....
SACD = AMAZING, assigning something
rather than...
SACD == AMAZING, something is equivalent.
I growl every time I see the "drive=love" commercials, and my wife tells me to get over it. Guess drive.equals(love) just does not have the same warm fuzzy feeling, and technically if you make the assignment, I guess equality would be true.
I know you care, however... right? Hello? (slinking away from my soap box)
Which is clearer?
D. E. Knuth, The art of computer programming. Vol. 2, Seminumerical algorithms, third ed., Addison-Wesley Series in Computer Science and Information Processing. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1997.
or:
(xml I'm not encoding)
To the computer? The XML... My sax parser can understand one, allowing me to map every bit of info into a program without (much) hassle. The other, I have to write a parser to take the chunks of information and stuff it into my widget.
I use to think the same way... until I was converting cobol copybooks into C struts and/or Java. Bandwidth is cheap compared to my time, and lord knows I left some really ugly code (three companies ago) for someone to figure out why the hell I'm grabbing a few characters which map to something important in the HL7 spec.
is it only me, or has anyone noticed over the years that "tree" discussions always come up near christmass time???
Chould we call this the Linus Christmass Tree phenomenom?
Considering the week, I suspect more of a 'great pumpkin' phenomenon.
How could we possibly place more trust in voting systems simply because they are electronic? All this would require is a single person with a single clue somewhere along the data chain to manipulate the results.
I love the spaceball's quote - evil will triumph because good is dumb. Not sure about where you voted, but I watched some people really struggle with setting up a folding table this morning and trying to write a sequence of numbers on card stock. The risk of a computer based fraud is nothing compared to what hand counting errors would be. Cheating the system is always possible but malice can be prosecuted, stupidity and mistakes...
One of the most frighting discoveries was jury duty - finding out what a jury of 'peers' really is. God help the underfunded innocent.
That's like asking "can God add 1 and 1 and get 3".
What is wrong with that?... 1+1 can equal 3 for sufficiently high values of 1. That is a fundamental cornerstone of groveling for partial credit..
Now is the time for everyone who complains about congress and laws like this to go out and vote.
Not sure about your state, but my options suck. I'll still go out and vote for the lesser evil, but still, lets not kid anyone here. Until they can't take payola from soft money (or whatever they call it), they really don't care what I want once they are in office.
I agree Sun needs to keep development focused on improving their technologies. J2EE and NET's version of Web Services really need to play transparently with each other. Other than having a generic VM, the rest of .NET strikes me as the same ubiquitous marketing fluff when Microsoft named everything ActiveX...
On the other hand, if you throw a wrench into their marketing machine with a lawsuit, why not? From a strategic standpoint this is a good move for the legal department - assuming the development and marketing efforts are not ablated.
Like you, few things make me shudder like ASP.NET...
"!seineew era sreenigne VTetamitlU"
As far as playing DVD's... take a look at http://videolan.net/. They have windows, solaris, bsd, linux, and a few other platforms covered. Try it, and if you like what you see in windows it will be the same deal with SuSe.
You know, the big red or blue screen that says something about public viewing, FBI, punishment, fine, jail...
No worries... looks like the DVD rippers and encoders skip that track automagically.
(kidding)
Some stuff might be able to survive passive cooling by throttling back (ala Intel's P4) - but the $38 duron might cook itself if the software was not watching to see there was active cooling as well as a comfortable operating temperatures. The temp can really jumps up fast, so the check for active cooling is just another safety net.. I concur that the fan should be able to take a stab at how fast it should run - crank up to 11 if its toasty, throttle back if it is idle. I mentioned I swapped out his heatsink and fan... did that with a Thermaltake Volcano 7 for $13.50. From the add...
Since you already have the fan RPM and the CPU temp (from the mainboard or CPU itself) already, it lets you try to do a bit more optimization than guessing based on a sensor stuck to the side of the CPU. (Not that the mainboard sensor is anywhere even close to accurate). Anyhow -- original poster's solution.... If I was using a software solution to control fan RPM's - and I don't - I would want them to go full blast if something hork the programs.
Why should the CPU or any other computing circuitry even be bothered with monitoring the fan?
Cat hair... Really!
My brother brought his PC over because it would shut down shortly after posting. I powered it up - did not hear a fan, and realized the motherboard's BIOS was shutting down the machine because the fan was not spinning. Saved the duron's life! I poked around a bit and found the CPU fan was wound up with cat hair. Power supply was in pretty tough shape too.
I cleaned stuff off, put on a better heat sink and fan, and sent him back to feed his counter strike addition.
You are right, of course... DVD+RW, not DVD-R...
That said, the media that came with the kit and the three other blanks I ordered that were DVD+RW would not read in the drives that mattered. Same end game. The media worked fine with the new pioneer drive, btw, so I blame the burner at this point.
is only to serve as a warning to others.
Don't get sucked in by a low priced HP DVD i100 burner. I picked one up to create ghost images for our SE's demo laptops. With the latest bios, drivers, etc - I've found two DVD-ROM's that will actually read a burned CD. Unfortunately, that does not include any of the IBM think pads, Dell latitudes, or any other Dell workstation in our shop.
For $99, HP will 'update' the drive to make it work with DVD-R's. That is another stinky issue since they advertised it worked with the -R media, but I'm OK with DVD-RW media if it actually was readable by anything I picked it up for. The box said it ran under Win2K server - it does, but only as a DVD-ROM. The burning software only 'works' with Win2K workstation and below. Customer Service was less than helpful.
Rather than spend the $99 and hope - We picked up a Pioneer unit (not the one in this review, but don't remember the number) and have had no problems. Fool me once...