Maybe if you don't write the data to disk and then read it back out... plus there's simply propogation delays involved in the rather large number of circuits between you and the source and the transmission w/ all of its overhead.
I know that with TiVo (which does it all in hardware, but has the disk write/read) there's roughly a 1.5 second delay. It gets real fun to use menu screens from a STB.
Inform them that unless they can show a contract, with your signature, that binds you to that agreement, you will consider any termination a breach of contract and will pursue it as such.
Oh, you're right sir. In fact, we have no signed contract with you whatsoever. We'll simply terminate your service immediately.
And that's exactly what will happen. It is SOP nowadays to put in a clause stating that the terms of any signed contract can change with minimal notice and that merely continuing to use the service is acceptance of those changes. After all, if you don't like the terms, don't use the service.
And yes, those terms will be held up in court (and have been before) as long as they're reasonable and (here's the key) non-arbitrary.
That said, if they can't provide hard numbers then they're not arbitrary. If users can't track the numbers on a regular basis then it's unreasonable to try and behold the users to it.
Read the webpage. It's based off Dutch engineer and educator Kees Boeke Powers of Ten idea, which was later turned into a film by Charles and Ray Eames. You probably saw the film in grade school (in the US at least) or at some science/tech museum. It's a pretty popular piece.
And yes, I thought the same thing. Until I read the webpage.
Well my work desktop runs at around 60 decibels from ~2 feet away. Yes, that's loud. And it's an Intel P3 system from IBM. I want a new desktop PC purely because it's so damn loud... I don't actually need more CPU, memory, or disk.
My home PCs are all AMD, all with the stock fan/hs. The stock AMD fan/hs isn't incredibly noisy, but it certainly isn't the quietest thing out there. The loudest system is really quite bad -- but it's because of a very loud PS fan and several case fans. I'll eventually take some steps to quiet it down, because it is ungodly loud (at least to me).
If you really want to reduce system noise, then check out Silent PC Review. They do some real testing of sound levels and give some pretty solid advice on how to quiet PCs.
So Tivo has patented the idea of recording television using a) a bunch of video codecs they didn't invent, b) a bunch of commodity hardware they didn't invent, and c) the brilliant invention of rewind, fast-forward and get this... pause.
Yeah, and those lame ass Wright brothers patented an airplane. I mean they just used a bunch of commodity materials (wood, metal, canvas), the brilliant inventions of chain drive, internal combustion motors, and, get this... a rail.
Ok, they developed wing warping and maybe a better propeller design. But they got patents for a lot more than that!
might affect similar (but non-identical) implementations
So, would you care to detail the manners in which the DishPlayer is different from TiVo? In regards to the patent that is. There certainly are differences... but they're not the ones covered by the patent.
I do think it is despicible. Software is copyrightable, not patentable.
They didn't patent their software. They patented their method. This is wholly within patent law -- it's what patent law was designed for!
Nobody else had done anything like TiVo at the time. Was it similar to other technologies? Sure. Was it a novel idea of how to apply technology in a new manner to solve a problem? Yes. Is it a non-trivial problem? Yes (if you don't think so, then I challenge you to do trick play on live TV streams and keep the audio and video synch'd -- no skipping back only to the last I-frame either).
Is the patent specific? Yup. In fact, you can get around the patent in a number of ways -- the easiest being changing the recording format.
Because NUMA and RCU were developed by Sequent for Dynix, which was licensed under the SysV UNIX license from AT&T. That's the license that SCO now owns and claims IBM violated (as well as some of the stuff regarding Project Monterey, but that's even more ambiguous than this).
The point is that, according to SCO, IBM doesn't own full rights on the IP. SCO claims that they are derivative works of SysV and, as such, it owns some rights regarding them.
Are they right? Hell if I know. Hell if anyone knows. It's going to come down to what a judge decides.
IBM's version of the SysV contract has an appendix that says "but anything IBM invents, IBM still owns."
Yes, but that appendix doesn't cover Sequent, which covers NUMA and a couple other technologies that SCO is whining about.
You're right though -- they're in flail mode. I have to wonder what the hell is going on between the lawyers and the execs. Some of the claims made by the lawyers make it look like there was no real work done by their staff -- that they simply took the execs' word at face value. That's a great way to make yourself look like a fool in front of the judge and have whatever valid points you may have discounted beforehand.
I'm sticking with the 5 year estimate. It's not even scheduled to go to trial until a year from now. The fishing being done by SCO is a fairly standard legal tactic... and it's equally standard to have it dismissed out of hand. Their reluctance to show evidence isn't too surprising, but the degree to which they have taken that reluctance is. We'll see.
Corporate execs cannot just call their broker and say "buy!" or "sell!" when it comes to companies that they have insider knowledge on. You must file SEC forms months or years in advance, and there are time periods before routine announcements (10Q/10K) where you are prohibited from selling stock. Nobody has accused anyone at SCO of violating these rules. If you can, then go to the SEC.
As for Daryl, he has a mere fraction of his stock options. Go read the contract -- it's spelled out quite clearly in their 10Q/K statements. They didn't make a profit last quarter, so that resets the clock on the 100k (or 150k? I don't recall anymore) options that he would get for 4 profitable quarters. Oh, and even if he was awarded them -- guess what? He still can't sell them for 1-2 years under SEC and SCO regulations. The rest of his shares vest over a 4 year time frame.
If he wants to pump and dump then he's in an awfully bad position to do so -- he'll need to keep it going for 5-6 years in order to sell everything. Even though I expect the lawsuit to take 5+ years, the winds will be blowing for or against SCO well before the end. I still don't get why SCO took this course (other than the obvious cornered rat reason), but it isn't to pump and dump.
On the other hand, there are some very interesting money and stock manipulations happening with Canopy. If you want to look for someone doing questionable things, look there... not at SCO's execs themselves.
Everyone's forgotten what SCO is actually suing IBM for. It's not copyright violation. It's not patent violations. It's a contract violation.
The crux of the matter, as I understand it, is that SCO is claiming that the SystemV contract specifies that they retain control over everything developed for SysV Unix -- regardless of who actually does the development. If you want to kick this back into copyright law (which is likely to become relevant), then they're saying that whatever you made is a derivative work. Even though you may license the SysV code it doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with derivative works.
There's a shitload of smokescreening going on, and SCO has made some really amazingly stupid claims (mostly their execs, not their lawyers, although the lawyers have made some stupid claims as well), but it really does get back to this -- is SCO's read on the contract the proper one? It's not a cut and dried answer. The contracts are very old, have passed through many hands, and have several court cases associated with them. The wording isn't clear either.
Personally, I still think SCO's smoking a big crack rock -- their interpretation of the contract is overly broad and utterly insane. But IANAL.
A coworker (ok... technically my boss) asked me yesterday when I expected the lawsuit to be resolved. I immediately replied 5-10 years.
Anyone who thinks that this is going to be finished before then is smoking one right along with SCO.
When I say _silent_ (not just almost silent), I mean that it won't need a CPU fan, no power source fan and that it would be based around a 1GB compact flash card. I would quite like a decent (not great) graphics card. And a 1 gig ethernet port.
You can get by without a CPU fan (see Via as others state). Good luck on the no PSU fan. And basing it on a CF card? With a 1 Gb ethernet port? Why? The card can't possibly keep up to the port (particularly for writes, which is another issue -- if you put any kind of swap space on the card it'll be destroyed in no time).
If you want a good site for quiet PC stuff, check out Silent PC Review. There's a wide variety of posters there, from aiming at truely silent, low-end computing to quiet, high-end systems.
As for speed/money, read AnandTech's review. It's either the Athlon64 3000+ or P4 2.8C, depending on task.
Instead of buying obnoxious alarm clocks and waking up your neighbors, why don't you just try sleeping like a normal person?
This was my first reaction too... going to sleep "when you feel tired" is a losing game. Of course you sleep later and later -- you're probably going to bed later (or going to bed at random times as your body desperately tries to figure out a schedule, which means you're varying sleep amounts by as much as 4 hours a night on a regular basis).
Look, I'm a narcoleptic. I know about sleeping. Don't take caffeine after ~5 pm (chocolate is usually ok, just stay off the caffeinated beverages). Don't take catnaps in that time either (a 15 minute nap may be all you need to get REM sleep in -- it's all I need at times -- and you won't be sleepy for hours afterwards). And keep your sleep pattern as regular as possible. Even though I'm a narcoleptic I'll sleep 7 hours and then be awake. If I vary things then I pay for it -- usually by not being able to sleep until 3-4 am the next night.
Oh, and to address the original poster -- get a regular, loud alarm clock. Position it so that you must walk to turn it off. If you find that you are getting out of bed, turning the alarm off, and getting back into bed, without remembering doing so, then you need to see a doctor. They'll probably refer you to a sleep clinic. Go. I know if I had when I was in high school I wouldn't have slept through every class from 7th grade until I graduated college (not every day, but at least once in every course). I'm on medication now which helps, but it doesn't do it all. I still need a fairly regular sleep schedule.
... is found at AVS Forums. Although, to be fair, you may want to try Remote Central for this as well. AVS Forum posters would refer you to there pretty quickly anyway.
All of that said, probably the best remote control is out of your price range -- the MX-500 (or the MX-700, which I have and prefer) is about $100 (the 700 is about $170). It's a button remote w/ a small LCD screen that can be programmed with text entries of what the related LCD buttons do. Most of the remote control buttons are marked though. I've had several universal remotes (Marantz RC-1000, Pronto TSU-1000, and MX-700) and the MX series is by far the best. The MX-700's center joystick is a bit wonky (which my wife dislikes), but it's not bad. I've heard that the MX-500 and MX-800 joystick is better.
For your price range, your best bet is a JP1 compatible remote. I'm not familiar with the range of remotes available, so look at either of the above sites, or the JP1 Home Page.
Or are you implying that your drive to work requires more mental capacity than my buddy piloting an apache. Where he has a whole eye devoted to a computer screen.
Yeah, and he can stare THROUGH that computer screen and focus both eyes on the terrain in front of him. Better yet, he has one eye on the terrain the entire time.
When you're looking at your laptop, exactly how many eyes do you have on the road?
I don't care that you can multitask. Whoop de do. You cannot, physically, look in two different directions at once. You are not a gecko. And you're driving a multi-thousand pound vehicle that's moving at some velocity (if you're stopped then I really don't give a crap what you're doing, as long as it's not impedeing traffic). It's a bloody weapon when used improperly.
Look, if all you're doing is using mapquest to guide you then that's probably not a huge deal. Odds are you're not staring at the screen for any longer then you'd stare at printed directions. You are not the problem. The problem is all the utter dipshits out there that think that reading the news, some blog, watching a movie, or playing a game while driving is acceptable. It isn't.
They already do. Both nVidia and ATI have high end and low end chipsets, and they're very price competitive. They also segment them for sub-$100, sub-$200, and high-end (for which the price limit keeps going up).
not for hundreds of FPS that no one uses (because they're over humam eyes limits)
I'm sorry you have such poor eyesight. Have you considered seeing a doctor about it? I doubt they can do anything though -- it's probably neurological. Did you stare into the sun as a child?
I wish people would quit spouting out the crap about "above human eye limits". There is no such thing. We don't know what the maximum frame rate that the eye can see is. Don't go talking about movies or TV -- they're not the same. All video capture methods (be it film or digital) capture motion blur, which our brains happily interpret when shown at a somewhat adequate frame rate. But that doesn't help a bit for somethings -- like fast pans (move the camera horizontally). Throw in some vertical definition (like, oh say, a white picket fence) and you'll wind up with a headache because what comes out on video does not look good. It's doubtful that it even looks like a white picket fence.
Games don't render motion blur (3Dfx was working on this when they went tits up, but nobody has revived the work -- it wasn't well received at the time either). They render individual frames with static content. You CAN tell the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps. You can tell the difference between 60 fps and 120 fps too.
And, of course, this doesn't address the minor issue that what the card is rendering still isn't photorealistic. Or truely 3D. When we get to ~300 fps of photorealistic 3D holograms then we can start talking about where to go next.
Hey, go check out the benchmarks for the high end cards on HL2 or people's impressions of Doom3. IIRC, none of the cards were breaking 60 fps in HL2 at 1024x768. And those weren't even in intense firefights.
Not for a refi, no, but starting a new mortgage is different. Think about it -- for a refi the lender is not assuming any additional liability (you may be shifting the liability from one lender to another, but that's minor; the original lendor vetted you already), while for a new mortgage you're essentially an unknown quantity. The requirement for back records may only be needed for a first home purchase -- I don't know. I do know that when I bought my house (first and current) that I had to produce 9 months of statements for every account I had. The lender wants to be sure that whatever downpayment you have is actually your money, and that your debt:income ratio is really what it appears to be. Sudden influxes of cash (which may be a loan or gift) are looked upon poorly, and that's mostly what they're checking for.
Oh, I agree -- it'd be cool. But I wouldn't expect it to occur without a good bit of cooperation from both the BIOS makers and the MB makers. It was allegedly integrated into the OpenBIOS project, which is a good place for a start.
Do not dispose of all bills (and by that I presume you mean anything related to your financial life) after 3 months.
Retirement plan annual summaries should be kept forever. Ditto for annual mortgage summaries (once you've verified they're correct). Anything related to fraud should be kept forever as well -- and I do mean forever. Most bills/statements can be shredded immediately or after a short period, but realize that if you ever want to get a significant loan (like, oh say, a mortgage) they may ask for the statements from the last 6-12 months on all your accounts. Sure, you can call all your creditors and bankers and ask for statements, but they're likely to charge you for them. After all, they already sent you one for free.
Wills, insurance statements, etc. should be kept as long as they're valid.
As for US tax returns -- they can only initiate an audit based on the last 7 years of returns, but once an audit starts it can go back as far as you've paid taxes. You have two choices here -- keep your returns for a long, long time in order to fight the IRS or destroy them after a short (~3 years) period and just pay whatever the hell they want you to. There's plenty of people who will advise you to go either way.
I've recently gone through doing all of this and was going to post some links, but damned if I can find them now. And googling for this kind of thing always returns bad results... usually related to bills about record sharing, corporate standards, etc.
A "Windows 95/98 boot disk" is nothing but a DOS boot disk. If you don't have DOS or Windows, then just get FreeDOS, an open source version of DOS. It'll work just fine for a boot disk for ROM flashing. There's even a single diskette "distro" that you can download (although, frankly, you don't need anything more than kernel.sys and command.com as best I can tell). They even have a FAQ on this. And two manufacturers (MSI and ASUS) ship it with their utilities.
Good luck finding anyone who will provide a linux flash utility. There are a few manufacturers who will read the BIOS off a floppy disk (Gigabyte), a few that provide DOS or Windows flash utilities, but there's no software that I know of to do Linux flashes, nor is there any support in the kernel to do so (google for it -- there was some work on/dev/bios, but as best I can tell it's a deeply outdated hack now).
It's not "allegience to MS", as much as you might wish your little conspiracy theory to be true. It's called simplicity. Under DOS you don't have to worry about any other process interrupting the BIOS flashing. If another program was to do so, while the BIOS was being overwritten, and happened to need a BIOS call to a location that wasn't shadowed then all hell could break loose. DOS is freaking simple in this way (and before anyone says anything about TSRs -- it's recomended that you not have any loaded).
Quite frankly this is a lame Ask Slashdot. If the original asker had bothered doing any research on the subject they would've discovered a multitude of perfectly legal options available.
Good information... I didn't realize that the sat being put up in January was a spot beam. It does, however, have vastly more capacity than the existing sats and, as I understand it, could have enough capacity to beam all existing locals-in-locals via HD if DirecTV wanted. I doubt they will do so of course, but they have stated that some of its capacity will be used for HDTV. Shrug.
just because you see it in CES Innovations does not mean it's coming out anytime soon
Of course not. The 2003 winner was the Dish 921, which has just finally become available. That said, all indications are that the HD DirecTiVo will indeed be out in Q1, with leaks from the beta, press releases from DirecTV and TiVo (mostly 10Q statements), and semi-public viewings of the unit all coinciding. It may be late Q1, but hope springs eternal. And, of course, I'm still suspecting sometime in Q2 realistically.
BTW, the Dish 921 only has one OTA tuner, while the HD TiVo has two. That, along with the vastly superior TiVo software, is a good reason to pass on the Dish offering.
Oh... and the first HD DVR isn't a TiVo. It's a Zenith. Very limited recording capability, even more limited software, but they were the first ones out. For $1200 or so. OTA only.
i.e., are these affected by the broadcast flag stuff?
Since it has ATSC tuners it should be affected by the broadcast flag. I don't know what the effect would be. The flag is only supposed to be used for PPV and special events anyway. Any broadcaster found absuing the flag is going to get raked over the coals by the public. That said, you're not going to find anything that doesn't obey the broadcast flag -- it's not like you can import a tuner made for some area that doesn't use the flag. The North American area is the only one utilizing ATSC.
Will it provide component video outputs and an optical audio output such I can watch those programs on the HDTV I bought three years ago?
Yes. The HD DirecTiVos will have the current outputs (composite, svideo, digital audio) as well as component and HDMI (a superset of DVI, so DVI connectors will work).
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if you don't write the data to disk and then read it back out... plus there's simply propogation delays involved in the rather large number of circuits between you and the source and the transmission w/ all of its overhead.
I know that with TiVo (which does it all in hardware, but has the disk write/read) there's roughly a 1.5 second delay. It gets real fun to use menu screens from a STB.
And don't mind a second or two of lag between controller input and response.
Inform them that unless they can show a contract, with your signature, that binds you to that agreement, you will consider any termination a breach of contract and will pursue it as such.
Oh, you're right sir. In fact, we have no signed contract with you whatsoever. We'll simply terminate your service immediately.
And that's exactly what will happen. It is SOP nowadays to put in a clause stating that the terms of any signed contract can change with minimal notice and that merely continuing to use the service is acceptance of those changes. After all, if you don't like the terms, don't use the service.
And yes, those terms will be held up in court (and have been before) as long as they're reasonable and (here's the key) non-arbitrary.
That said, if they can't provide hard numbers then they're not arbitrary. If users can't track the numbers on a regular basis then it's unreasonable to try and behold the users to it.
I'm sure I've seen it before
Read the webpage. It's based off Dutch engineer and educator Kees Boeke Powers of Ten idea, which was later turned into a film by Charles and Ray Eames. You probably saw the film in grade school (in the US at least) or at some science/tech museum. It's a pretty popular piece.
And yes, I thought the same thing. Until I read the webpage.
Well my work desktop runs at around 60 decibels from ~2 feet away. Yes, that's loud. And it's an Intel P3 system from IBM. I want a new desktop PC purely because it's so damn loud... I don't actually need more CPU, memory, or disk.
My home PCs are all AMD, all with the stock fan/hs. The stock AMD fan/hs isn't incredibly noisy, but it certainly isn't the quietest thing out there. The loudest system is really quite bad -- but it's because of a very loud PS fan and several case fans. I'll eventually take some steps to quiet it down, because it is ungodly loud (at least to me).
If you really want to reduce system noise, then check out Silent PC Review. They do some real testing of sound levels and give some pretty solid advice on how to quiet PCs.
So Tivo has patented the idea of recording television using a) a bunch of video codecs they didn't invent, b) a bunch of commodity hardware they didn't invent, and c) the brilliant invention of rewind, fast-forward and get this... pause.
Yeah, and those lame ass Wright brothers patented an airplane. I mean they just used a bunch of commodity materials (wood, metal, canvas), the brilliant inventions of chain drive, internal combustion motors, and, get this... a rail.
Ok, they developed wing warping and maybe a better propeller design. But they got patents for a lot more than that!
might affect similar (but non-identical) implementations
So, would you care to detail the manners in which the DishPlayer is different from TiVo? In regards to the patent that is. There certainly are differences... but they're not the ones covered by the patent.
I do think it is despicible. Software is copyrightable, not patentable.
They didn't patent their software. They patented their method. This is wholly within patent law -- it's what patent law was designed for!
Nobody else had done anything like TiVo at the time. Was it similar to other technologies? Sure. Was it a novel idea of how to apply technology in a new manner to solve a problem? Yes. Is it a non-trivial problem? Yes (if you don't think so, then I challenge you to do trick play on live TV streams and keep the audio and video synch'd -- no skipping back only to the last I-frame either).
Is the patent specific? Yup. In fact, you can get around the patent in a number of ways -- the easiest being changing the recording format.
Because NUMA and RCU were developed by Sequent for Dynix, which was licensed under the SysV UNIX license from AT&T. That's the license that SCO now owns and claims IBM violated (as well as some of the stuff regarding Project Monterey, but that's even more ambiguous than this).
The point is that, according to SCO, IBM doesn't own full rights on the IP. SCO claims that they are derivative works of SysV and, as such, it owns some rights regarding them.
Are they right? Hell if I know. Hell if anyone knows. It's going to come down to what a judge decides.
because IBM didn't want to purchase code of possibly dubious origin
Doubtful, since IBM turned around and purchased a license from MS to make PC-DOS.
IBM outsourced it because they were doing the PC on the cheap.
IBM's version of the SysV contract has an appendix that says "but anything IBM invents, IBM still owns."
Yes, but that appendix doesn't cover Sequent, which covers NUMA and a couple other technologies that SCO is whining about.
You're right though -- they're in flail mode. I have to wonder what the hell is going on between the lawyers and the execs. Some of the claims made by the lawyers make it look like there was no real work done by their staff -- that they simply took the execs' word at face value. That's a great way to make yourself look like a fool in front of the judge and have whatever valid points you may have discounted beforehand.
I'm sticking with the 5 year estimate. It's not even scheduled to go to trial until a year from now. The fishing being done by SCO is a fairly standard legal tactic... and it's equally standard to have it dismissed out of hand. Their reluctance to show evidence isn't too surprising, but the degree to which they have taken that reluctance is. We'll see.
It's not a bloody pump and dump scheme.
Gods I'm tired of hearing this.
Corporate execs cannot just call their broker and say "buy!" or "sell!" when it comes to companies that they have insider knowledge on. You must file SEC forms months or years in advance, and there are time periods before routine announcements (10Q/10K) where you are prohibited from selling stock. Nobody has accused anyone at SCO of violating these rules. If you can, then go to the SEC.
As for Daryl, he has a mere fraction of his stock options. Go read the contract -- it's spelled out quite clearly in their 10Q/K statements. They didn't make a profit last quarter, so that resets the clock on the 100k (or 150k? I don't recall anymore) options that he would get for 4 profitable quarters. Oh, and even if he was awarded them -- guess what? He still can't sell them for 1-2 years under SEC and SCO regulations. The rest of his shares vest over a 4 year time frame.
If he wants to pump and dump then he's in an awfully bad position to do so -- he'll need to keep it going for 5-6 years in order to sell everything. Even though I expect the lawsuit to take 5+ years, the winds will be blowing for or against SCO well before the end. I still don't get why SCO took this course (other than the obvious cornered rat reason), but it isn't to pump and dump.
On the other hand, there are some very interesting money and stock manipulations happening with Canopy. If you want to look for someone doing questionable things, look there... not at SCO's execs themselves.
Everyone's forgotten what SCO is actually suing IBM for. It's not copyright violation. It's not patent violations. It's a contract violation.
The crux of the matter, as I understand it, is that SCO is claiming that the SystemV contract specifies that they retain control over everything developed for SysV Unix -- regardless of who actually does the development. If you want to kick this back into copyright law (which is likely to become relevant), then they're saying that whatever you made is a derivative work. Even though you may license the SysV code it doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with derivative works.
There's a shitload of smokescreening going on, and SCO has made some really amazingly stupid claims (mostly their execs, not their lawyers, although the lawyers have made some stupid claims as well), but it really does get back to this -- is SCO's read on the contract the proper one? It's not a cut and dried answer. The contracts are very old, have passed through many hands, and have several court cases associated with them. The wording isn't clear either.
Personally, I still think SCO's smoking a big crack rock -- their interpretation of the contract is overly broad and utterly insane. But IANAL.
A coworker (ok... technically my boss) asked me yesterday when I expected the lawsuit to be resolved. I immediately replied 5-10 years.
Anyone who thinks that this is going to be finished before then is smoking one right along with SCO.
When I say _silent_ (not just almost silent), I mean that it won't need a CPU fan, no power source fan and that it would be based around a 1GB compact flash card. I would quite like a decent (not great) graphics card. And a 1 gig ethernet port.
You can get by without a CPU fan (see Via as others state). Good luck on the no PSU fan. And basing it on a CF card? With a 1 Gb ethernet port? Why? The card can't possibly keep up to the port (particularly for writes, which is another issue -- if you put any kind of swap space on the card it'll be destroyed in no time).
If you want a good site for quiet PC stuff, check out Silent PC Review. There's a wide variety of posters there, from aiming at truely silent, low-end computing to quiet, high-end systems.
As for speed/money, read AnandTech's review. It's either the Athlon64 3000+ or P4 2.8C, depending on task.
Instead of buying obnoxious alarm clocks and waking up your neighbors, why don't you just try sleeping like a normal person?
This was my first reaction too... going to sleep "when you feel tired" is a losing game. Of course you sleep later and later -- you're probably going to bed later (or going to bed at random times as your body desperately tries to figure out a schedule, which means you're varying sleep amounts by as much as 4 hours a night on a regular basis).
Look, I'm a narcoleptic. I know about sleeping. Don't take caffeine after ~5 pm (chocolate is usually ok, just stay off the caffeinated beverages). Don't take catnaps in that time either (a 15 minute nap may be all you need to get REM sleep in -- it's all I need at times -- and you won't be sleepy for hours afterwards). And keep your sleep pattern as regular as possible. Even though I'm a narcoleptic I'll sleep 7 hours and then be awake. If I vary things then I pay for it -- usually by not being able to sleep until 3-4 am the next night.
Oh, and to address the original poster -- get a regular, loud alarm clock. Position it so that you must walk to turn it off. If you find that you are getting out of bed, turning the alarm off, and getting back into bed, without remembering doing so, then you need to see a doctor. They'll probably refer you to a sleep clinic. Go. I know if I had when I was in high school I wouldn't have slept through every class from 7th grade until I graduated college (not every day, but at least once in every course). I'm on medication now which helps, but it doesn't do it all. I still need a fairly regular sleep schedule.
... is found at AVS Forums. Although, to be fair, you may want to try Remote Central for this as well. AVS Forum posters would refer you to there pretty quickly anyway.
All of that said, probably the best remote control is out of your price range -- the MX-500 (or the MX-700, which I have and prefer) is about $100 (the 700 is about $170). It's a button remote w/ a small LCD screen that can be programmed with text entries of what the related LCD buttons do. Most of the remote control buttons are marked though. I've had several universal remotes (Marantz RC-1000, Pronto TSU-1000, and MX-700) and the MX series is by far the best. The MX-700's center joystick is a bit wonky (which my wife dislikes), but it's not bad. I've heard that the MX-500 and MX-800 joystick is better.
For your price range, your best bet is a JP1 compatible remote. I'm not familiar with the range of remotes available, so look at either of the above sites, or the JP1 Home Page.
Or are you implying that your drive to work requires more mental capacity than my buddy piloting an apache. Where he has a whole eye devoted to a computer screen.
Yeah, and he can stare THROUGH that computer screen and focus both eyes on the terrain in front of him. Better yet, he has one eye on the terrain the entire time.
When you're looking at your laptop, exactly how many eyes do you have on the road?
I don't care that you can multitask. Whoop de do. You cannot, physically, look in two different directions at once. You are not a gecko. And you're driving a multi-thousand pound vehicle that's moving at some velocity (if you're stopped then I really don't give a crap what you're doing, as long as it's not impedeing traffic). It's a bloody weapon when used improperly.
Look, if all you're doing is using mapquest to guide you then that's probably not a huge deal. Odds are you're not staring at the screen for any longer then you'd stare at printed directions. You are not the problem. The problem is all the utter dipshits out there that think that reading the news, some blog, watching a movie, or playing a game while driving is acceptable. It isn't.
When will VGA board makers will compete by price
They already do. Both nVidia and ATI have high end and low end chipsets, and they're very price competitive. They also segment them for sub-$100, sub-$200, and high-end (for which the price limit keeps going up).
not for hundreds of FPS that no one uses (because they're over humam eyes limits)
I'm sorry you have such poor eyesight. Have you considered seeing a doctor about it? I doubt they can do anything though -- it's probably neurological. Did you stare into the sun as a child?
I wish people would quit spouting out the crap about "above human eye limits". There is no such thing. We don't know what the maximum frame rate that the eye can see is. Don't go talking about movies or TV -- they're not the same. All video capture methods (be it film or digital) capture motion blur, which our brains happily interpret when shown at a somewhat adequate frame rate. But that doesn't help a bit for somethings -- like fast pans (move the camera horizontally). Throw in some vertical definition (like, oh say, a white picket fence) and you'll wind up with a headache because what comes out on video does not look good. It's doubtful that it even looks like a white picket fence.
Games don't render motion blur (3Dfx was working on this when they went tits up, but nobody has revived the work -- it wasn't well received at the time either). They render individual frames with static content. You CAN tell the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps. You can tell the difference between 60 fps and 120 fps too.
And, of course, this doesn't address the minor issue that what the card is rendering still isn't photorealistic. Or truely 3D. When we get to ~300 fps of photorealistic 3D holograms then we can start talking about where to go next.
Hey, go check out the benchmarks for the high end cards on HL2 or people's impressions of Doom3. IIRC, none of the cards were breaking 60 fps in HL2 at 1024x768. And those weren't even in intense firefights.
Care to show a recent main page /. article that praised Linux while bashing BSD at the same time?
Sorry, while the tool is interesting, the article is flamebait. You can be proud of your work without being childish.
a pregnant nun
Which is another way to "depenguinate".
Yes, I did just watch Blues Brothers a couple nights ago.
Not for a refi, no, but starting a new mortgage is different. Think about it -- for a refi the lender is not assuming any additional liability (you may be shifting the liability from one lender to another, but that's minor; the original lendor vetted you already), while for a new mortgage you're essentially an unknown quantity. The requirement for back records may only be needed for a first home purchase -- I don't know. I do know that when I bought my house (first and current) that I had to produce 9 months of statements for every account I had. The lender wants to be sure that whatever downpayment you have is actually your money, and that your debt:income ratio is really what it appears to be. Sudden influxes of cash (which may be a loan or gift) are looked upon poorly, and that's mostly what they're checking for.
Oh, I agree -- it'd be cool. But I wouldn't expect it to occur without a good bit of cooperation from both the BIOS makers and the MB makers. It was allegedly integrated into the OpenBIOS project, which is a good place for a start.
Aieeee! No!
Do not dispose of all bills (and by that I presume you mean anything related to your financial life) after 3 months.
Retirement plan annual summaries should be kept forever. Ditto for annual mortgage summaries (once you've verified they're correct). Anything related to fraud should be kept forever as well -- and I do mean forever. Most bills/statements can be shredded immediately or after a short period, but realize that if you ever want to get a significant loan (like, oh say, a mortgage) they may ask for the statements from the last 6-12 months on all your accounts. Sure, you can call all your creditors and bankers and ask for statements, but they're likely to charge you for them. After all, they already sent you one for free.
Wills, insurance statements, etc. should be kept as long as they're valid.
As for US tax returns -- they can only initiate an audit based on the last 7 years of returns, but once an audit starts it can go back as far as you've paid taxes. You have two choices here -- keep your returns for a long, long time in order to fight the IRS or destroy them after a short (~3 years) period and just pay whatever the hell they want you to. There's plenty of people who will advise you to go either way.
I've recently gone through doing all of this and was going to post some links, but damned if I can find them now. And googling for this kind of thing always returns bad results... usually related to bills about record sharing, corporate standards, etc.
Oh please.
/dev/bios, but as best I can tell it's a deeply outdated hack now).
A "Windows 95/98 boot disk" is nothing but a DOS boot disk. If you don't have DOS or Windows, then just get FreeDOS, an open source version of DOS. It'll work just fine for a boot disk for ROM flashing. There's even a single diskette "distro" that you can download (although, frankly, you don't need anything more than kernel.sys and command.com as best I can tell). They even have a FAQ on this. And two manufacturers (MSI and ASUS) ship it with their utilities.
Good luck finding anyone who will provide a linux flash utility. There are a few manufacturers who will read the BIOS off a floppy disk (Gigabyte), a few that provide DOS or Windows flash utilities, but there's no software that I know of to do Linux flashes, nor is there any support in the kernel to do so (google for it -- there was some work on
It's not "allegience to MS", as much as you might wish your little conspiracy theory to be true. It's called simplicity. Under DOS you don't have to worry about any other process interrupting the BIOS flashing. If another program was to do so, while the BIOS was being overwritten, and happened to need a BIOS call to a location that wasn't shadowed then all hell could break loose. DOS is freaking simple in this way (and before anyone says anything about TSRs -- it's recomended that you not have any loaded).
Quite frankly this is a lame Ask Slashdot. If the original asker had bothered doing any research on the subject they would've discovered a multitude of perfectly legal options available.
Good information... I didn't realize that the sat being put up in January was a spot beam. It does, however, have vastly more capacity than the existing sats and, as I understand it, could have enough capacity to beam all existing locals-in-locals via HD if DirecTV wanted. I doubt they will do so of course, but they have stated that some of its capacity will be used for HDTV. Shrug.
just because you see it in CES Innovations does not mean it's coming out anytime soon
Of course not. The 2003 winner was the Dish 921, which has just finally become available. That said, all indications are that the HD DirecTiVo will indeed be out in Q1, with leaks from the beta, press releases from DirecTV and TiVo (mostly 10Q statements), and semi-public viewings of the unit all coinciding. It may be late Q1, but hope springs eternal. And, of course, I'm still suspecting sometime in Q2 realistically.
BTW, the Dish 921 only has one OTA tuner, while the HD TiVo has two. That, along with the vastly superior TiVo software, is a good reason to pass on the Dish offering.
Oh... and the first HD DVR isn't a TiVo. It's a Zenith. Very limited recording capability, even more limited software, but they were the first ones out. For $1200 or so. OTA only.
i.e., are these affected by the broadcast flag stuff?
Since it has ATSC tuners it should be affected by the broadcast flag. I don't know what the effect would be. The flag is only supposed to be used for PPV and special events anyway. Any broadcaster found absuing the flag is going to get raked over the coals by the public. That said, you're not going to find anything that doesn't obey the broadcast flag -- it's not like you can import a tuner made for some area that doesn't use the flag. The North American area is the only one utilizing ATSC.
Will it provide component video outputs and an optical audio output such I can watch those programs on the HDTV I bought three years ago?
Yes. The HD DirecTiVos will have the current outputs (composite, svideo, digital audio) as well as component and HDMI (a superset of DVI, so DVI connectors will work).