As several other/.'ers have already mentioned, the main issue with building a Linux-based PVR/DVR/HTPC/whatever you want to call it - is: "the wife factor." In other words, the system MUST operate like most other consumer electronics - you turn it on and it *just works*. Maybe it's not 100% flawless, but it better be pretty damn close.
For this reason, I had settled on a Windows XP install with a Hauppauge PVR-250 a while back on my old computer. The main problems I have had to date with it:
The EPG guide from Zap2It is all messed up. It doesn't update each week at 3am like it's supposed to do, and the channels are flung all over the place and not in any apparent order.
The hardware is too slow for GB-PVR. This software is pretty cool and works well enough, except on outdated hardware like mine. The menus are extraordinarily sluggish, sometimes with pauses of a couple minutes while the system "gets back up to speed" after sitting dormant for a while. (And this is a software issue, definitely not the hardware coming out of "sleep" mode or anything like that.)
Admittedly, I need some new hardware. When I do get around to installing a faster motherboard, proc, and memory I am going to install Linux anyways. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the Linux solutions out there are still too much in their infancy to pass "the wife factor" right now. My wife can't use the current system because it's too sluggish and doesn't *just work* 100% of the time. (It doesn't work at all if I don't manually update the channel listings once a week which can take 20-30 minutes!)
My main point is: if you plan on building a Linux-based HTPC make sure that you have some pretty decent spare parts laying around, because if you don't it's probably just a lot more worth your time and money to go buy a top-of-the-line Tivo right now.
I'm gonna go pick this one up ASAP! I've been looking for something readable, yet fully useable in light of how much I gained in the desire to learn more of mathematics and physics from Brian Green's The Elegant Universe. Unfortunately, I haven't come across anything nearly as beautifully written as Brian Greene's work yet. This book review makes this book sound downright fun for the nerd in me!
"A math genius with no social skills has no hope of getting anything!"
Well it's true because you have to deal with PEOPLE to get what you want out of life. Even for the simple things like getting a mortgage, not getting screwed purchasing a car, or most simplistic of all: having friends.
Then again, the mathematically more intelligent person is more likely to not get into the many stupid stupid situations that the less gifted are prone too. Same goes for physics, law, medicine, etc. For instance, the soccer moms who talk on the cell phone in their huge-ass SUV while sipping on their Starbucks drink with the radio blastin' are far more likely to violate the laws of physics with their automobile which can quite easily get them killed.
Unfortunately, in the one case you have a choice: do I drink, and then drive or not?
In the other case, oftentimes it is: OH SHIT! Another brand new virus got released that the virus scanning program isn't aware of, or that Microsoft hasn't patched yet, and now I've got it!
So this whole analogy about drunk driving is retarded. Do you blame sick people for getting sick? In the case of smoking 2 packs a day and getting lung cancer, sure. But breast cancer patients? influenza outbreaks? the flu??? NO!
Well, I'm with you to some extent on the "no human nervous system running around in any other type of animal" stance on this issue, but I disagree about our brain making us unique and different from other animals. In other words: I don't believe we have any truly unique body parts - it's our souls that make us different, and this topic points directly at this very thing.
We sit here debating the ethical, moral dilemma of implanting human body parts in sheep, and yet we can't see that of the ENTIRE animal kingdom on this ENTIRE planet, we're the only ones who sit around debating the moral and ethical dilemmas around us. My dog: he just humps the cats to show 'em who is boss. He doesn't care if it causes them trauma or has the potential to create a new dog/cat species (they're all spayed or neutered anyways so that'd never happen). He just feels like humping and does it. In fact, because I've never stimulated him differently (with treats) to NOT hump the cats, he has zero incentive to act otherwise.
OK, so what about dolphins, or turtles, or snakes, or birds? Are they capable of rationality despite their inability to directly communicate with us? I don't think this is so. All animals act the way they do to directly benefit the survival of themselves and/or their immediate "family" members. This is instinctual, but not always rational. Some animal acts appear in many ways to be "rational", but in reality are instinctual at the core. I can't think of any examples offhand, but I do believe this to be so.
So, while a sheep may get a human brain, a human spinal cord, and even human hands - the fact remains that it's a sheep. Where a human gets their "rationality" or soul from, and WHEN we get that part of us as humans which cannot be measured or contained even within a physical body is everyone's best guess. But I believe it does exist. After all, if it didn't, why are we all trudging through jobs we don't always enjoy (neigh, sometimes HATE), putting up with annoying relatives, and generally doing a lot of things that we neither HAVE to do, nor NEED to do if we were truly "animals." Instinctually there are many many things I would actually like to do to others, AND that I know WOULD truly benefit my own survival (as well as society's) in both the short and long runs, but which are specifically forbidden both by social norms and the law. So I believe it to be quite evident that our humanity is very much more than just the sum of our body parts and their interactions as part of our physical "being."
'the entire Microsoft.com site has been migrated, and we serve 30 million unique visitors every day.'
So Microsoft is serving every person in the entire world within a mere 233.333 days? (7 billion divided by 30 million equals 233.333)
I hate that silly "unique visitors" statistic that companies with a web presence love to throw around. Who gives a flying F if you've had 30 million "unique visitors" because your servers are being bombarded with faked TCP header info by spammers every damn day?!
I'm finishing up my Computer Engineering Technology degree right now - be done in a year. CET is like training idiots how to use software and hardware to make stuff. So it's nothing all that theoretical - more hands on. Now, if I wanted to be a professor/scientist/researcher this would suck. But I know myself well enough now that I know I'd make for a lousy "nerd" in the true sense of the word. I get along too well with others, can work in a multitude of different technical/business related jobs, and basically wouldn't conform well to the typical "programmer" in academia. So having this hands on experience with both the software and the hardware is good for me - it may not be for you though.
What I appreciate about the hardware is knowing HOW the software is causing the hardware to do it's thing. Yes, I've learned about transistors, yes I've learned about IC chips, and yes I've learned about circuit design, but I don't really care about all that stuff as much. What's useful about knowing the basics of all of it though is being able to relate that to software design, and how, when, and why you would want to use certain software programming techniques over others given the hardware limitations you have.
In the end, don't worry too much about your undergrad degree - that just opens a bunch of doors in the computer industry for you because you "have a degree." A Masters or Doctorate is what makes you more valuable to an employer on a purely "what degree do you have?" basis.
Well, good point, but I've seen small businesses that deal with other small (but important for their segment of the market) businesses that were requesting certain Excel "applications" for a price because they were useful to them. For many enterprise projects I would agree: Excel SUCKS as an application "platform." But just think of all the "small businesses" within a large company. Even a midsized company like mine LOVES to pass Excel documents to and from VP's and lower level grunts with tons of very valuable information. VHS may never beat BetaMax in quality, but in ease of use and availability VHS will forever win the war over which videotape standard is "best."
BTW, when you write up as many business reports as I do, Excel becomes invaluable for two reasons: It's quick and easy to make a pretty graph for your boss to ooohh! and aaaaahh! over, and PivotTables and Charts *just work*. Try doing this in Access, C++, or Java and the intersection of these needs + the time to implement solutions to them goes up exponentially.
"While the energy created was too small to harness cheap fusion power, the technique could have potential uses in medicine, spacecraft propulsion, the oil drilling industry and homeland security, said Seth Putterman, a physicist at the University of California at Los Angeles."
And why is it that every new American invention these days has a "potential use" in homeland security? There must be plenty of money wasting away in that crappy program right now if every single scientist talks about it whenever they release new findings. I'm off to begin building my CompuMegaInterCorpHomelandSecurity company now... (I figure with a name like that, how can the VC's NOT trust me with googleplexes of money?!!)
Indeed. In fact, he's not even concerned about the SLOWEST component of the entire system: the hard drive! Get a custom-built 20,000 RPM hard drive and the entire system moves faster. Get that 2GB of memory cached on board the CPU chip die and the system moves faster. He just wants to throw money at a poor solution to his computing "needs" to compensate for his less than l337 computer hacking skills. He should just resort to having num-chuck skills and be happy.
Points well taken, but I think the meaning of Mann's comment at the end that you quoted was meant to be broader than the context of their mall outing. In other words, let's say he was accused of mugging someone in the parking lot, but he has photographic evidence of his own, which when matched with the surveillance cameras from two different store locations - i.e. The Gap camera, and the parking lot camera - could prove that he was indeed more likely to be at The Gap than in the parking lot when the mugging occurred. The idea is that when accused with the parking lot cam data, he could counter with his own photos from The Gap, and then when they pulled The Gap cam data they would see that he was indeed at The Gap. Without his photo evidence at The Gap he's relying on "Big Brother" to be providing ALL of the evidence which might or might not happen.
Granted, all of this is mostly philosophical in nature and USUALLY wouldn't be a problem in day-to-day life, but there is always that 0.01% chance that such a thing WOULD happen to you. Nevertheless, the dude seems like a privacy elitist to the extreme - and a major geek.
It's suprising that the article didn't even mention that keyboards exist like this one would eliminate the "difficult to sterilize" problem since the entire keyboard CAN be dipped in a cleaning solution without any adverse affects to the keyboard components.
But as with any rule: it was made to be broken. And as my soon to be lawyer wife says: The law doesn't make sense! That's why there are lawyers; to argue for YOUR SIDE of the law - ESPECIALLY when the law doesn't make sense for you.
I don't believe that for a second. My wife will soon BE an attorney, and the guy she is currently working for will not be moving to Word anytime soon. My wife already has WP 11 on her laptop and also refuses to use Word or MS products because of how quickly she gets frustrated using them. She needs to worry about wording and formatting her briefs properly, not hassle with the lack of options or lack of a view into the engine that's generating the Word document that she's working on which is why she wanted and paid for WP 11 over Word.
Also, there is a free Word document converter and viewer available from Microsoft's website. I got my wife using this to move things back and forth between WP because Ohio requires electronic documents to be in.doc format now.:( So it is quite possible for law firms to get away with using non-MS software in their everyday business. The problem is that too many lawyers and/or lawyers' IT departments think they know it all, but they don't, and hence they never realized how easy it is to convert files back and forth to whatever format you need them to be in for clients, the courts, etc.
BTW, Ohio is populated by a vast majority of idiots, so don't blame me for the bad drivers in Columbus or the marriage amendment.
So true. In fact, before I started leasing cars I had a used Eagle Talon Tsi. (turbo AWD - so lots of moving parts and problems while I had it) I took it back to the dealership twice for some extended warranty repairs - they always sucked and had HORRIBLE service. Took it one time to the shop I will always go back to for car repairs now:
The car kept killing batteries. After two batteries and two strandings at friend's houses due to dead batteries I knew it wasn't the alternator or battery problems. Took it to this car shop and told them all about how it still wasn't holding a charge for more than a few months at a time. (They had already tried to fix the problem in the past) One of their technicians after checking every electrical connection noticed that the dome light was acting funny when he opened and closed the door. (I had never even noticed it) Turned out that there was a short in the dome light, which after fixing it caused my car to be cured of that problem! (Did I mention the shop only charged me for the parts since they didn't fix the real problem the first time - THAT is service!)
MCSE's and ITT Tech. "technicians" will always be the car dealership repair shops and uncle freddie's car fixit shops - unless they're only getting the certification to impress some higher-up idiot. The true "IT Repair People" will continue to be those of us who have a passion for knowing all we can about a tool - and how to fix it when it gets broken.
>> I recently had to pay $500 to get my furnace fixed, when the whole thing was probably only worth a few grand.
> A furnance is pretty important during the cold season. And, depending on what type, you have to do it right or else it becomes a health hazzard. A computer, to most people, isn't that important.
Oh really? Tell that to my wife when the home network is "down", she gets a virus that keeps programs from functioning properly, or my all-time favorite: when her HDD started clacking and ultimately died right before I could get all of the 3 yrs worth of Law School documents that she had backed up. Trust me, I may not be getting paid for it, but I've DEFINITELY put in over $1000 worth of work to minimize her worries... and if she had never married me she would've paid for it I think.
I completely agree. You would think the way some of these people are talking that electrons are "happier" in a Monster cable than any other copper wire. Ridiculous!
Remember, everyone, the physics dude above was right. Electrons are electrons are electrons. And electrons do not "move" along or through the cable. They're transferring electromagnetic energy through the wire acting as a medium for an abundance of electrons that do not normally exist on that wire. So, like the physics dude said, the cable connection and wire quality matter most.
Everyone that supports this "Monster cable is _better_ than Walmart brand" are also "testing" their hypothesis in their home theater systems. That is neither a controlled or statistically significant benchmarking process. Are these people changing the orientation of the cable each time they switch it around to see which one works better? Probably. What is the measuring instrument? Usually their ears and eyes which DO NOT in any way have the accuity and precision to measure the minute differences that they keep talking about.
It's also not fair to say "well it looked better with Monster brand than with brand X!" - that assumes that you have perfect specimens from each brand. - Totally impossible! Yes, perhaps Monster brand has higher quality controls in place in their manufacturing process, and hence there are fewer defects in their cables on average, but that doesn't mean that the cable is better, just that Monster's manufacturing process might be better than most.
The ever-popular "solution to a problem that doesn't exist." Seriously, why would anyone be wasting time on figuring out how to communicate with aliens when we have NO PROOF that they even exist yet. Let's try spending a little more time figuring out how to stop killing each other first, k?
I get so annoyed with my wife for always forgetting to turn the TV off after turning off the stereo and other A/V equipment because I can hear it, even from a couple of rooms away. I also notice the 60Hz flicker in computer CRT screens, but 75Hz+ is fine. My eyes actually get really tired when trying to use a 60Hz monitor.
I actually think this phenomenon has to do with brain power and raw brain ability for intelligence. I remember my wife mentioning that she read somewhere that if a cat is prone to watching TV, it's slightly retarded because to a normal cat the frequency of images appearing on the TV is too slow - hence it usually ignores it as "motion" since to the cat it's just a picture hanging on the wall that changes too slowly to be considered interesting I guess. Interestingly, we have two cats in our house. I've caught the dumber one looking at the TV every once in a while. I measure dumbness in our cats based on how well they respond when their name is called, whether they are capable of informing me when they need food, how "sneaky" they are when trying to jump on the counter, etc. One of them is good at all of that, the other is definitely NOT. The stupid one just lets our dog pester her to death and starts crying when he's getting too rambunctious, the smart one knows where to "escape to."
I'll have to try that whole "mute the TV" to act as sonar thing sometime though and see if it works for me.
Better yet Daimou (or whatever the dude's nick is), contact the EFF if you're in the US. You've done enough damage to yourself as it is. It would be best to stop talking about it and get your ass protected now rather than later.
And I thought Slashdot "editors" had poor grammar skills! Damn. I guess they're starting to farm the technical report writing and gaming reviews to India now too!
Oh c'mon! This is about the most absurd bitching and whining about Google I have ever seen! Who CARES! There's a hundred reasons why they might have tagged some keyword indicators on to the title of this page in their cache... perhaps for the purposes of retrieving a highly searched for item from CACHE more quickly?!!?! Duh.
/.'ers who had.com type IT jobs will tell you that you are an idiot for leaving 'cause they've been flat broke before and know how much it sucked./.'ers who did not have.com type IT jobs, like me, will tell you that if the job sucks; LEAVE!
Slashdot Mirror
For this reason, I had settled on a Windows XP install with a Hauppauge PVR-250 a while back on my old computer. The main problems I have had to date with it:
Admittedly, I need some new hardware. When I do get around to installing a faster motherboard, proc, and memory I am going to install Linux anyways. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the Linux solutions out there are still too much in their infancy to pass "the wife factor" right now. My wife can't use the current system because it's too sluggish and doesn't *just work* 100% of the time. (It doesn't work at all if I don't manually update the channel listings once a week which can take 20-30 minutes!)
My main point is: if you plan on building a Linux-based HTPC make sure that you have some pretty decent spare parts laying around, because if you don't it's probably just a lot more worth your time and money to go buy a top-of-the-line Tivo right now.
I'm gonna go pick this one up ASAP! I've been looking for something readable, yet fully useable in light of how much I gained in the desire to learn more of mathematics and physics from Brian Green's The Elegant Universe. Unfortunately, I haven't come across anything nearly as beautifully written as Brian Greene's work yet. This book review makes this book sound downright fun for the nerd in me!
Well it's true because you have to deal with PEOPLE to get what you want out of life. Even for the simple things like getting a mortgage, not getting screwed purchasing a car, or most simplistic of all: having friends.
Then again, the mathematically more intelligent person is more likely to not get into the many stupid stupid situations that the less gifted are prone too. Same goes for physics, law, medicine, etc. For instance, the soccer moms who talk on the cell phone in their huge-ass SUV while sipping on their Starbucks drink with the radio blastin' are far more likely to violate the laws of physics with their automobile which can quite easily get them killed.
I coallated all the dupes into one!
Unfortunately, in the one case you have a choice: do I drink, and then drive or not?
In the other case, oftentimes it is: OH SHIT! Another brand new virus got released that the virus scanning program isn't aware of, or that Microsoft hasn't patched yet, and now I've got it!
So this whole analogy about drunk driving is retarded. Do you blame sick people for getting sick? In the case of smoking 2 packs a day and getting lung cancer, sure. But breast cancer patients? influenza outbreaks? the flu??? NO!
Well, I'm with you to some extent on the "no human nervous system running around in any other type of animal" stance on this issue, but I disagree about our brain making us unique and different from other animals. In other words: I don't believe we have any truly unique body parts - it's our souls that make us different, and this topic points directly at this very thing.
We sit here debating the ethical, moral dilemma of implanting human body parts in sheep, and yet we can't see that of the ENTIRE animal kingdom on this ENTIRE planet, we're the only ones who sit around debating the moral and ethical dilemmas around us. My dog: he just humps the cats to show 'em who is boss. He doesn't care if it causes them trauma or has the potential to create a new dog/cat species (they're all spayed or neutered anyways so that'd never happen). He just feels like humping and does it. In fact, because I've never stimulated him differently (with treats) to NOT hump the cats, he has zero incentive to act otherwise.
OK, so what about dolphins, or turtles, or snakes, or birds? Are they capable of rationality despite their inability to directly communicate with us? I don't think this is so. All animals act the way they do to directly benefit the survival of themselves and/or their immediate "family" members. This is instinctual, but not always rational. Some animal acts appear in many ways to be "rational", but in reality are instinctual at the core. I can't think of any examples offhand, but I do believe this to be so.
So, while a sheep may get a human brain, a human spinal cord, and even human hands - the fact remains that it's a sheep. Where a human gets their "rationality" or soul from, and WHEN we get that part of us as humans which cannot be measured or contained even within a physical body is everyone's best guess. But I believe it does exist. After all, if it didn't, why are we all trudging through jobs we don't always enjoy (neigh, sometimes HATE), putting up with annoying relatives, and generally doing a lot of things that we neither HAVE to do, nor NEED to do if we were truly "animals." Instinctually there are many many things I would actually like to do to others, AND that I know WOULD truly benefit my own survival (as well as society's) in both the short and long runs, but which are specifically forbidden both by social norms and the law. So I believe it to be quite evident that our humanity is very much more than just the sum of our body parts and their interactions as part of our physical "being."
So Microsoft is serving every person in the entire world within a mere 233.333 days? (7 billion divided by 30 million equals 233.333)
I hate that silly "unique visitors" statistic that companies with a web presence love to throw around. Who gives a flying F if you've had 30 million "unique visitors" because your servers are being bombarded with faked TCP header info by spammers every damn day?!
What I appreciate about the hardware is knowing HOW the software is causing the hardware to do it's thing. Yes, I've learned about transistors, yes I've learned about IC chips, and yes I've learned about circuit design, but I don't really care about all that stuff as much. What's useful about knowing the basics of all of it though is being able to relate that to software design, and how, when, and why you would want to use certain software programming techniques over others given the hardware limitations you have.
In the end, don't worry too much about your undergrad degree - that just opens a bunch of doors in the computer industry for you because you "have a degree." A Masters or Doctorate is what makes you more valuable to an employer on a purely "what degree do you have?" basis.
Well, good point, but I've seen small businesses that deal with other small (but important for their segment of the market) businesses that were requesting certain Excel "applications" for a price because they were useful to them. For many enterprise projects I would agree: Excel SUCKS as an application "platform." But just think of all the "small businesses" within a large company. Even a midsized company like mine LOVES to pass Excel documents to and from VP's and lower level grunts with tons of very valuable information. VHS may never beat BetaMax in quality, but in ease of use and availability VHS will forever win the war over which videotape standard is "best."
BTW, when you write up as many business reports as I do, Excel becomes invaluable for two reasons: It's quick and easy to make a pretty graph for your boss to ooohh! and aaaaahh! over, and PivotTables and Charts *just work*. Try doing this in Access, C++, or Java and the intersection of these needs + the time to implement solutions to them goes up exponentially.
All part of the scam, my friend. All part of the scam. ;) (Don't tell the VC's!!!)
And why is it that every new American invention these days has a "potential use" in homeland security? There must be plenty of money wasting away in that crappy program right now if every single scientist talks about it whenever they release new findings. I'm off to begin building my CompuMegaInterCorpHomelandSecurity company now... (I figure with a name like that, how can the VC's NOT trust me with googleplexes of money?!!)
Indeed. In fact, he's not even concerned about the SLOWEST component of the entire system: the hard drive! Get a custom-built 20,000 RPM hard drive and the entire system moves faster. Get that 2GB of memory cached on board the CPU chip die and the system moves faster. He just wants to throw money at a poor solution to his computing "needs" to compensate for his less than l337 computer hacking skills. He should just resort to having num-chuck skills and be happy.
Points well taken, but I think the meaning of Mann's comment at the end that you quoted was meant to be broader than the context of their mall outing. In other words, let's say he was accused of mugging someone in the parking lot, but he has photographic evidence of his own, which when matched with the surveillance cameras from two different store locations - i.e. The Gap camera, and the parking lot camera - could prove that he was indeed more likely to be at The Gap than in the parking lot when the mugging occurred. The idea is that when accused with the parking lot cam data, he could counter with his own photos from The Gap, and then when they pulled The Gap cam data they would see that he was indeed at The Gap. Without his photo evidence at The Gap he's relying on "Big Brother" to be providing ALL of the evidence which might or might not happen.
Granted, all of this is mostly philosophical in nature and USUALLY wouldn't be a problem in day-to-day life, but there is always that 0.01% chance that such a thing WOULD happen to you. Nevertheless, the dude seems like a privacy elitist to the extreme - and a major geek.
It's suprising that the article didn't even mention that keyboards exist like this one would eliminate the "difficult to sterilize" problem since the entire keyboard CAN be dipped in a cleaning solution without any adverse affects to the keyboard components.
But as with any rule: it was made to be broken. And as my soon to be lawyer wife says: The law doesn't make sense! That's why there are lawyers; to argue for YOUR SIDE of the law - ESPECIALLY when the law doesn't make sense for you.
I don't believe that for a second. My wife will soon BE an attorney, and the guy she is currently working for will not be moving to Word anytime soon. My wife already has WP 11 on her laptop and also refuses to use Word or MS products because of how quickly she gets frustrated using them. She needs to worry about wording and formatting her briefs properly, not hassle with the lack of options or lack of a view into the engine that's generating the Word document that she's working on which is why she wanted and paid for WP 11 over Word.
.doc format now. :( So it is quite possible for law firms to get away with using non-MS software in their everyday business. The problem is that too many lawyers and/or lawyers' IT departments think they know it all, but they don't, and hence they never realized how easy it is to convert files back and forth to whatever format you need them to be in for clients, the courts, etc.
Also, there is a free Word document converter and viewer available from Microsoft's website. I got my wife using this to move things back and forth between WP because Ohio requires electronic documents to be in
BTW, Ohio is populated by a vast majority of idiots, so don't blame me for the bad drivers in Columbus or the marriage amendment.
So true. In fact, before I started leasing cars I had a used Eagle Talon Tsi. (turbo AWD - so lots of moving parts and problems while I had it) I took it back to the dealership twice for some extended warranty repairs - they always sucked and had HORRIBLE service. Took it one time to the shop I will always go back to for car repairs now:
The car kept killing batteries. After two batteries and two strandings at friend's houses due to dead batteries I knew it wasn't the alternator or battery problems. Took it to this car shop and told them all about how it still wasn't holding a charge for more than a few months at a time. (They had already tried to fix the problem in the past) One of their technicians after checking every electrical connection noticed that the dome light was acting funny when he opened and closed the door. (I had never even noticed it) Turned out that there was a short in the dome light, which after fixing it caused my car to be cured of that problem! (Did I mention the shop only charged me for the parts since they didn't fix the real problem the first time - THAT is service!)
MCSE's and ITT Tech. "technicians" will always be the car dealership repair shops and uncle freddie's car fixit shops - unless they're only getting the certification to impress some higher-up idiot. The true "IT Repair People" will continue to be those of us who have a passion for knowing all we can about a tool - and how to fix it when it gets broken.
>> I recently had to pay $500 to get my furnace fixed, when the whole thing was probably only worth a few grand.
> A furnance is pretty important during the cold season. And, depending on what type, you have to do it right or else it becomes a health hazzard. A computer, to most people, isn't that important.
Oh really? Tell that to my wife when the home network is "down", she gets a virus that keeps programs from functioning properly, or my all-time favorite: when her HDD started clacking and ultimately died right before I could get all of the 3 yrs worth of Law School documents that she had backed up. Trust me, I may not be getting paid for it, but I've DEFINITELY put in over $1000 worth of work to minimize her worries... and if she had never married me she would've paid for it I think.
I completely agree. You would think the way some of these people are talking that electrons are "happier" in a Monster cable than any other copper wire. Ridiculous!
Remember, everyone, the physics dude above was right. Electrons are electrons are electrons. And electrons do not "move" along or through the cable. They're transferring electromagnetic energy through the wire acting as a medium for an abundance of electrons that do not normally exist on that wire. So, like the physics dude said, the cable connection and wire quality matter most.
Everyone that supports this "Monster cable is _better_ than Walmart brand" are also "testing" their hypothesis in their home theater systems. That is neither a controlled or statistically significant benchmarking process. Are these people changing the orientation of the cable each time they switch it around to see which one works better? Probably. What is the measuring instrument? Usually their ears and eyes which DO NOT in any way have the accuity and precision to measure the minute differences that they keep talking about.
It's also not fair to say "well it looked better with Monster brand than with brand X!" - that assumes that you have perfect specimens from each brand. - Totally impossible! Yes, perhaps Monster brand has higher quality controls in place in their manufacturing process, and hence there are fewer defects in their cables on average, but that doesn't mean that the cable is better, just that Monster's manufacturing process might be better than most.
The ever-popular "solution to a problem that doesn't exist." Seriously, why would anyone be wasting time on figuring out how to communicate with aliens when we have NO PROOF that they even exist yet. Let's try spending a little more time figuring out how to stop killing each other first, k?
I get so annoyed with my wife for always forgetting to turn the TV off after turning off the stereo and other A/V equipment because I can hear it, even from a couple of rooms away. I also notice the 60Hz flicker in computer CRT screens, but 75Hz+ is fine. My eyes actually get really tired when trying to use a 60Hz monitor.
I actually think this phenomenon has to do with brain power and raw brain ability for intelligence. I remember my wife mentioning that she read somewhere that if a cat is prone to watching TV, it's slightly retarded because to a normal cat the frequency of images appearing on the TV is too slow - hence it usually ignores it as "motion" since to the cat it's just a picture hanging on the wall that changes too slowly to be considered interesting I guess. Interestingly, we have two cats in our house. I've caught the dumber one looking at the TV every once in a while. I measure dumbness in our cats based on how well they respond when their name is called, whether they are capable of informing me when they need food, how "sneaky" they are when trying to jump on the counter, etc. One of them is good at all of that, the other is definitely NOT. The stupid one just lets our dog pester her to death and starts crying when he's getting too rambunctious, the smart one knows where to "escape to."
I'll have to try that whole "mute the TV" to act as sonar thing sometime though and see if it works for me.
Better yet Daimou (or whatever the dude's nick is), contact the EFF if you're in the US. You've done enough damage to yourself as it is. It would be best to stop talking about it and get your ass protected now rather than later.
And I thought Slashdot "editors" had poor grammar skills! Damn. I guess they're starting to farm the technical report writing and gaming reviews to India now too!
Oh c'mon! This is about the most absurd bitching and whining about Google I have ever seen! Who CARES! There's a hundred reasons why they might have tagged some keyword indicators on to the title of this page in their cache... perhaps for the purposes of retrieving a highly searched for item from CACHE more quickly?!!?! Duh.
/.'ers who had .com type IT jobs will tell you that you are an idiot for leaving 'cause they've been flat broke before and know how much it sucked. /.'ers who did not have .com type IT jobs, like me, will tell you that if the job sucks; LEAVE!
So leave already. LOL.