. Personally I think MLK would be disappointed that minority voters only felt compelled to stand up and have their votes counted because the candidate was of a minority race
Listen to the man's own words.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
No doubt Dr. King would be proud of the accomplishment, but a little disgusted at the same time that it was Obama's skin color that many found attractive enough to deem him worthy of the Presidency of the United States of America as opposed to his political experience or qualifications for the job.
Microsoft doesn't support 32 64-bit upgrades, only fresh installs. There will be those folks (I suspect a few million) on 32-bit Vista that would be forced into reinstalling without a 32-bit Windows 7.
Any operating system that "burps" while copying files isn't ready for prime time. Period. And yet Microsoft insists, even after a service pack, that Vista is good to go.
I can't see myself using an operating system that fails at such as basic level.
This is beta quality software at best. Microsoft knows it. That's why Windows 7 is coming and soon.
Mine ran dual 300 Celerons overclocked to 504 MHz for *years* with only the slightest of hitches: at power on after being off for a few hours, I'd have to hold the power button in for 4 seconds to turn it off, then immediately hit the power again. It would run indefinitely after that.
That was truly an amazing product for several reasons. First, Celerons weren't supposed to run in an MP configuration. Second, the main engineer for that board, who went by the Westernized name of "Rocky", was 18 years old when he did the work. Third, understand that at this time the fastest PII processors were 450 MHz. Essentially the machine in question was the first gigahertz (504 x 2) box that I'd ever seen.
Why in the hell do we not have these simple Q&As from our government more often? I learned more in the past 10 minutes than I would on CNN/MSNBC (Fox teaches you a lot, most of it wrong) over an entire week.
Because the traditional media, which has been the channel of educating the public on public affairs, generally lacks expertise in every field except journalism. In other words, those that tell us what's going on most likely are unqualified and/or unwilling to digest and regurgitate that which they've been told to the masses with any accuracy and/or detail whatsoever.
You doubt this? The next time you read/see/listen to a mainstream news source about a subject that (1) has any complexity to it at all and (2) about which you consider yourself to be knowledgeable, ask yourself the following question: Was that information correct? Your answer should then beg the broader question: Since I now have identified a news report as being wrong/misleading/grossly inaccurate, is anything these talking heads/ink purveyors spew forth accurate?
Have you never heard of OnStar? That fits exactly what you describe - a perceived additional sense of security and safety by having a corporate entity (or a law enforcement or other governmental agency with or without a warrant) track your every move and even listen in on your conversations remotely. The courts have sided with disallowing OnStar's use for listening in on conversations inside the vehicle, but all it will take is one judge and that's out the window. OnStar's just one more good reason not to purchase a GM vehicle.
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." --attributed to Benjamin Franklin
Blackberry won't turn over some API or something to allow Verizon to enable this. That's about the fourth different reason I've heard as to why the GPS is disabled in the 8830, but the first to point the finger at RIM. First, I was told by someone at Verizon that only the 911 service used the GPS. Well, I had to explain to the customer service rep that the technology she was referencing was A-GPS, not true GPS like the Verizon marketing literature and the RIM website stated is in the 8830. The second person I spoke with a few days later swore that the GPS worked. The third person, being somewhat cautious as to what was said over the phone, gave me the impression that because VZNavigator, Verizon's turn-by-turn navigation service, has not yet been ported to run on the Blackberry and/or Verizon had not yet worked out a deal with Telenav, that they disabled the GPS until then as to protect another revenue stream, even though Verizon didn't remove Blackberry Maps from the phone beforehand. Also, Google Maps for the Blackberry will work with the GPS too, were it working... (Hint: get a Bluetooth GPS, use one or the other of these apps, and don't waste the money with Verizon when and if they come out with a navigation "pay-per-trip").
It seems as if none of the major carriers are willing to embrace the Blackberry line fully. Verizon, for instance, not only disabled the GPS, but also removed the OBEX Bluetooth profile (for one thing, you can't exchange phone books with in-car phone systems) and locked the SIM slot to work with Vodafone only - all measures I'm sure in some way in Verizon's corporate consciousness make sense to their bottom line. From the users' perspective, however, our bottom line is somewhat different. Some of us purchased the Blackberry 8830 precisely because we were told that it had a functional GPS. Some of the purchases were driven by the fact that this is much more of a business tool than a BREW-enabled plaything ("Get It Now"? Get real...) And some of us were convinced that this would truly be a world phone but came to find out that it's Vodafone's world or nothing (unless we want to cough up the balance of the full retail price for the phone, fill out some paperwork, and wait patiently for the SIM unlock code). One of my destinations, Costa Rica (where, by the way, I was told that the 8830 would work just fine), has a state-run monopoly whose name is not Vodafone. Unless I want to cough up another US$250 or so, I'm once again without phone while on international travel.
So, no, I don't really believe that AT&T crippled the Blackberry to make the iPhone look better. I believe they crippled the Blackberry because they're no more in touch with their users and their needs than any of the other major carriers and they're just after another buck and haven't figured out
Now that corn is being used so heavily for the production of ethanol in the US for use as an alternative to petroleum products, maybe now we can get our soft drink manufacturers to switch back to good old cane sugar and end this obesity epidemic once and for all! Looks like our buddy "Big Oil" has solved our health care crisis in America...
Seriously, I've seen substantial health benefits myself by cutting out corn syrup products from my own diet (30 pounds of weight loss, plus lowered blood sugar and LDL as a result of eliminating corn syrup and actually exercising something other than my typing fingers and mouse hand...)
Having returned from Costa Rica a month or so ago, and having sampled the local soft drinks (made with indigenously produced cane sugar), I can tell you definitively that they taste much better than their US counterparts. Coca-Cola, for instance, tasted much like I remembered "old" Coke tasting, not this Coke Classic crap they pushed off on us to shut us up about New Coke in the mid-80's. Pretty slick of Coca Cola to cut us over to pure garbage just long enough to not lose a lot of market share but erase the memory of how Coke should taste, and then play the hero role and bring us back what we believed to be our beloved beverage, all the while cutting over to high-fructose corn syrup. And you thought politicians were underhanded...
Add to that fact that the embedded implementations are written by the phone vendor, significantly decreasing the risk. The apps on smartphones, such as a Blackberry, WiMP-based phones, etc., aren't always by the vendor of the phone. My Blackberry, for example, has Google Mail/Talk/Search/Maps, and some other third-party apps on it, a lot of which run on top of J2ME. You still have to have a certain level of trust of third-party apps, especially when they're unsigned (RIM will sign an app for $100 IIRC).
Microsoft caught off-guard? Far from it. This is precisely the reason Microsoft cut the deal with Novell. Linux rears its ugly head in territory that Microsoft believes is rightfully theirs (like pre-installed desktops as is the case with this Dell deal) and Microsoft responds with their "blessed" Linux counter, SUSE. Bottom line: Microsoft maintains control, even over Dell...
Make no mistake. Microsoft has purchased themselves a play in the Linux market. And they'll leverage it anywhere they can to maximize their revenues. And the Linux community will suffer as a result.
200,000 mg = 200 grams, the weight of just more than half a can of soda pop. Mercury is 13.54 times denser than water. 200g/13.54 = 14.77 centiliters of mercury, about half a liquid ounce in total volume. In the grand scheme of tens of thousands of gallons of captured liquid runoff in a typical landfill, that's literally a drop in the bucket, and a tiny one at that. And this mercury has to become methylated to become bioavailable. It is likely that some of this will go through this process. And it's likely some will not.
And if your landfill has problems containing their liquids, whose bacterial content alone is far, far more potentially devastating than your potential mercury problem, your local environmental protection agency will shut them down until it's addressed. Fines are steep for this sort of mismanagement.
Is this mercury a problem? Maybe. But let's not let big, scary numbers like "200,000" incite fear where there should be none. And let's not "point source" this problem either. Do you have any idea of how much less coal is likely to be burned using these bulbs? I'd say that the mercury emissions from the coal burned to provide electricity for an equivalent amount of light from older incandescent light bulbs eclipse the mercury that could potentially escape from these bulbs. It's got to be a fair amount of the 48 tons or so that the USEPA claims coal fired plants in the US alone emit each year.
This is yet another case of TANSTAAFL - "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch".
Their allowing you to use a CD key from a previous OS version to do a fresh install of the new was somewhat of a kindness on their part. And this, my friends, illustrates clearly the issue at hand - that Microsoft is perceived as being benevolent in their business practices when in fact they're spinning a PR and support disaster into successful brainwashing of the masses that they, Microsoft, actually have the customers' best interests at heart.
yum is slow. But I can live with that. The big issue surrounding RPM is the lack of a "suggested" packages dependency class like the.deb format has. So much of the dependency hell that I've faced has to do with certain distros (ahem, Fedora Core, cough) throwing the kitchen sink in with little to no regard to the consequences thereof. However, these distros have little choice in the matter. Since rpm dependencies are an all-or-nothing affair, the distro has to bundle a lot of distantly related packages together; therefore, you're stuck installing packages for which you may have no use and then have to resort to turning things off via chkconfig to lessen memory impact and/or security footprint. As examples, many machines I install Fedora Core on will never print. However, try getting rid of cups and its gaggle of dependencies. It's not pretty. Network services such as avahi and the like are equally troublesome to get rid of and/or deactivate. And there are a multitude of others. And I'm tired of tying up network bandwidth to update packages I'll never use.
I'm left wondering if there is a single advantage to using rpm over.deb. I don't see one. Choice is good, but maybe it's time to let rpm die and consider consolidation around.deb.
I know this sounds bad, potentially losing census data and all, but as a recipient of several of the computers used in the 2000 census (essentially hand-me-downs when they were done with the census to other Department of Commerce offices), there wasn't any personally identifiable information on the machines when we got. No laptops were in our transfer, but the desktops and servers were clean. We were asked to make sure that the hard drives had been wiped. All of the ones that came to us were.
I'm willing to bet that the number of "lost" machines is really much lower than the report stated. I just looked at our inventory and changes we submitted over the last couple of years (dead machines especially that need to be removed from inventory) haven't been made in the master lists yet. I'd chalk this up to carelessness with the inventory database more than carelessness about actual machine loss. After all, we're talking about 5-7 year old laptops. Who's really using those old boxes anyway?
I just went through patching 4 databases with CPUApril2006 earlier this week. It took a few service requests to Oracle to get some of the error messages that were generated as part of the process identified as benign, and I've still got one relatively minor outstanding issue, but it went with relatively little fanfare. I'll be applying the same patchset to a 10gR2 forms and reports standalone instance soon and expect little trouble.
Yes, Oracle's slow on releasing patches sometimes. But their support programs are reasonably good. Their support engineers usually understand their products pretty well. And I've yet to install a patch from Oracle that required me to back it out because it broke something badly. Microsoft products, on the other hand...
Playboy mirroring FC has been a serious problem for some of us federal FC users. Imagine having to explain to those cleaning out your desk and processing your exit paperwork that you were just updating your computer!
Good thing that at my site I am the computer security manager. Since I'd have to sign-off on my own termination, I'm still good to go! Others may not be so lucky...
This positioning on the part of BS/Verizon/other money-grubbing ISPs has to be put down like a rabid dog. If they insist on milking not only their customers of the ~$30-60/month charge for their DSL service, but the sites that service their customers through their already-paid-for service, then I must insist on them choosing from whom they wish to derive their revenues - us, their paying ISP customers, or them, those Internet destinations that "us" wish to visit.
Any company that threatens to fracture the Internet as we know it doesn't deserve my dollars. How about yours?
Enough with the Christian bashing. Nothing in the article stated that the men that beat this professor were Christian. You're making an assumption here that's not in evidence of the facts. Strictly speaking, Christianity's ethics and morals would preclude them from participating in such an activity. I would clearly consider these individual(s) actions as wrong.
Why is it that every ethnocentric/religious/sexually-oriented/whatever else group in the world these days is treated with respect except Christians? We're easy targets, sure, and it's not unexpected. After all, 6000 of us were covered in pitch and set on fire to light Roman streets in one fell swoop under Emperor Nero. Why should we expect any different treatment now?
But it is tiresome that we're the exception to the tolerance set forth by the vapid wave of political correctness that is current day culture.
A couple of other oddities with this particular camera (US version HDR-FX1). In HDV (1080i) mode, MEGS encoding and output take about 1/2 second. It's not much, but it takes a bit of work to sync any external audio (which you might have since this camera has no XLR jack) with the video. Note that the "pro" version of this camera, the Z1, doesn't have the delay and has an XLR jack for a mere grand or so more. Second, don't press the "expanded focus" button when running video out (don't know about during recording, as we record off-camera on a Sony DV-CAM deck). Pressing this button will cause a momentary glitch as it switches on and off five seconds later.
Overall, it's a great camera. Image quality is outstanding, even projected onto a sixteen foot screen. For the money, it's hard to beat, just not perfect.
Both nVidia and ATI have much to lose if their driver code gets out. Their specific hardware and software optimizations, relatively easily gleaned from the driver source, would be as gold in their competition's hands. Also, they've both been caught cheating by optimizing for specific benchmarks/games to boost their framerates in order to boost their bottom lines. When the difference in selling your new top-of-the-line video card for $500 US versus being in second place and your top card only able to command ~$350 or so, there's a lot of money on the line. And with the six month product cycle that we've seen for the last few years, there's a lot of money to be made or lost.
Don't buy the hype. I had two of these supposedly indestructible keyboards, and it didn't take but one stick of dynamite to turn them into little piles of silicon(e).
Seriously, I killed two of these keyboards. Don't really know how, either. Groups of the keys just quit working. One of the keyboards like this was rolled up and stuffed into a "to go" box for field work. The other lived in my home with light use (kids liked the key feel - silly kids). You could certainly wash it - put it through the kitchen sink routine a couple of times, but it just quits working properly in fairly short order.
That's all for now. Have to go spray my HIDs with Lysol...
Been running Hoary dist-upgraded from Warty on my Toshiba Satellite for about 3 months or so. Never had any problems with any of the hardware. Most (98%+) of the updates went without any drama too.
The main reason I went from Warty to Hoary was the Synaptic touchpad support in Warty was lacking. It's been fine with Hoary.
Slashdot Mirror
. Personally I think MLK would be disappointed that minority voters only felt compelled to stand up and have their votes counted because the candidate was of a minority race
Listen to the man's own words.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
No doubt Dr. King would be proud of the accomplishment, but a little disgusted at the same time that it was Obama's skin color that many found attractive enough to deem him worthy of the Presidency of the United States of America as opposed to his political experience or qualifications for the job.
Microsoft doesn't support 32 64-bit upgrades, only fresh installs. There will be those folks (I suspect a few million) on 32-bit Vista that would be forced into reinstalling without a 32-bit Windows 7.
Any operating system that "burps" while copying files isn't ready for prime time. Period. And yet Microsoft insists, even after a service pack, that Vista is good to go.
I can't see myself using an operating system that fails at such as basic level.
This is beta quality software at best. Microsoft knows it. That's why Windows 7 is coming and soon.
Mine ran dual 300 Celerons overclocked to 504 MHz for *years* with only the slightest of hitches: at power on after being off for a few hours, I'd have to hold the power button in for 4 seconds to turn it off, then immediately hit the power again. It would run indefinitely after that.
That was truly an amazing product for several reasons. First, Celerons weren't supposed to run in an MP configuration. Second, the main engineer for that board, who went by the Westernized name of "Rocky", was 18 years old when he did the work. Third, understand that at this time the fastest PII processors were 450 MHz. Essentially the machine in question was the first gigahertz (504 x 2) box that I'd ever seen.
Why in the hell do we not have these simple Q&As from our government more often? I learned more in the past 10 minutes than I would on CNN/MSNBC (Fox teaches you a lot, most of it wrong) over an entire week.
Because the traditional media, which has been the channel of educating the public on public affairs, generally lacks expertise in every field except journalism. In other words, those that tell us what's going on most likely are unqualified and/or unwilling to digest and regurgitate that which they've been told to the masses with any accuracy and/or detail whatsoever.
You doubt this? The next time you read/see/listen to a mainstream news source about a subject that (1) has any complexity to it at all and (2) about which you consider yourself to be knowledgeable, ask yourself the following question: Was that information correct? Your answer should then beg the broader question: Since I now have identified a news report as being wrong/misleading/grossly inaccurate, is anything these talking heads/ink purveyors spew forth accurate?
IC what you did there...
Have you never heard of OnStar? That fits exactly what you describe - a perceived additional sense of security and safety by having a corporate entity (or a law enforcement or other governmental agency with or without a warrant) track your every move and even listen in on your conversations remotely. The courts have sided with disallowing OnStar's use for listening in on conversations inside the vehicle, but all it will take is one judge and that's out the window. OnStar's just one more good reason not to purchase a GM vehicle.
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." --attributed to Benjamin Franklin
It seems as if none of the major carriers are willing to embrace the Blackberry line fully. Verizon, for instance, not only disabled the GPS, but also removed the OBEX Bluetooth profile (for one thing, you can't exchange phone books with in-car phone systems) and locked the SIM slot to work with Vodafone only - all measures I'm sure in some way in Verizon's corporate consciousness make sense to their bottom line. From the users' perspective, however, our bottom line is somewhat different. Some of us purchased the Blackberry 8830 precisely because we were told that it had a functional GPS. Some of the purchases were driven by the fact that this is much more of a business tool than a BREW-enabled plaything ("Get It Now"? Get real...) And some of us were convinced that this would truly be a world phone but came to find out that it's Vodafone's world or nothing (unless we want to cough up the balance of the full retail price for the phone, fill out some paperwork, and wait patiently for the SIM unlock code). One of my destinations, Costa Rica (where, by the way, I was told that the 8830 would work just fine), has a state-run monopoly whose name is not Vodafone. Unless I want to cough up another US$250 or so, I'm once again without phone while on international travel.
So, no, I don't really believe that AT&T crippled the Blackberry to make the iPhone look better. I believe they crippled the Blackberry because they're no more in touch with their users and their needs than any of the other major carriers and they're just after another buck and haven't figured out
Now that corn is being used so heavily for the production of ethanol in the US for use as an alternative to petroleum products, maybe now we can get our soft drink manufacturers to switch back to good old cane sugar and end this obesity epidemic once and for all! Looks like our buddy "Big Oil" has solved our health care crisis in America...
Seriously, I've seen substantial health benefits myself by cutting out corn syrup products from my own diet (30 pounds of weight loss, plus lowered blood sugar and LDL as a result of eliminating corn syrup and actually exercising something other than my typing fingers and mouse hand...)
Having returned from Costa Rica a month or so ago, and having sampled the local soft drinks (made with indigenously produced cane sugar), I can tell you definitively that they taste much better than their US counterparts. Coca-Cola, for instance, tasted much like I remembered "old" Coke tasting, not this Coke Classic crap they pushed off on us to shut us up about New Coke in the mid-80's. Pretty slick of Coca Cola to cut us over to pure garbage just long enough to not lose a lot of market share but erase the memory of how Coke should taste, and then play the hero role and bring us back what we believed to be our beloved beverage, all the while cutting over to high-fructose corn syrup. And you thought politicians were underhanded...
Microsoft caught off-guard? Far from it. This is precisely the reason Microsoft cut the deal with Novell. Linux rears its ugly head in territory that Microsoft believes is rightfully theirs (like pre-installed desktops as is the case with this Dell deal) and Microsoft responds with their "blessed" Linux counter, SUSE. Bottom line: Microsoft maintains control, even over Dell...
Make no mistake. Microsoft has purchased themselves a play in the Linux market. And they'll leverage it anywhere they can to maximize their revenues. And the Linux community will suffer as a result.
200,000 mg = 200 grams, the weight of just more than half a can of soda pop. Mercury is 13.54 times denser than water. 200g/13.54 = 14.77 centiliters of mercury, about half a liquid ounce in total volume. In the grand scheme of tens of thousands of gallons of captured liquid runoff in a typical landfill, that's literally a drop in the bucket, and a tiny one at that. And this mercury has to become methylated to become bioavailable. It is likely that some of this will go through this process. And it's likely some will not.
And if your landfill has problems containing their liquids, whose bacterial content alone is far, far more potentially devastating than your potential mercury problem, your local environmental protection agency will shut them down until it's addressed. Fines are steep for this sort of mismanagement.
Is this mercury a problem? Maybe. But let's not let big, scary numbers like "200,000" incite fear where there should be none. And let's not "point source" this problem either. Do you have any idea of how much less coal is likely to be burned using these bulbs? I'd say that the mercury emissions from the coal burned to provide electricity for an equivalent amount of light from older incandescent light bulbs eclipse the mercury that could potentially escape from these bulbs. It's got to be a fair amount of the 48 tons or so that the USEPA claims coal fired plants in the US alone emit each year.
This is yet another case of TANSTAAFL - "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch".
The problem with your idea is that you're post smells like 5 green triangles too! As do a lot of other posts on /. Like this one.
yum is slow. But I can live with that. The big issue surrounding RPM is the lack of a "suggested" packages dependency class like the .deb format has. So much of the dependency hell that I've faced has to do with certain distros (ahem, Fedora Core, cough) throwing the kitchen sink in with little to no regard to the consequences thereof. However, these distros have little choice in the matter. Since rpm dependencies are an all-or-nothing affair, the distro has to bundle a lot of distantly related packages together; therefore, you're stuck installing packages for which you may have no use and then have to resort to turning things off via chkconfig to lessen memory impact and/or security footprint. As examples, many machines I install Fedora Core on will never print. However, try getting rid of cups and its gaggle of dependencies. It's not pretty. Network services such as avahi and the like are equally troublesome to get rid of and/or deactivate. And there are a multitude of others. And I'm tired of tying up network bandwidth to update packages I'll never use.
.deb. I don't see one. Choice is good, but maybe it's time to let rpm die and consider consolidation around .deb.
I'm left wondering if there is a single advantage to using rpm over
I know this sounds bad, potentially losing census data and all, but as a recipient of several of the computers used in the 2000 census (essentially hand-me-downs when they were done with the census to other Department of Commerce offices), there wasn't any personally identifiable information on the machines when we got. No laptops were in our transfer, but the desktops and servers were clean. We were asked to make sure that the hard drives had been wiped. All of the ones that came to us were.
I'm willing to bet that the number of "lost" machines is really much lower than the report stated. I just looked at our inventory and changes we submitted over the last couple of years (dead machines especially that need to be removed from inventory) haven't been made in the master lists yet. I'd chalk this up to carelessness with the inventory database more than carelessness about actual machine loss. After all, we're talking about 5-7 year old laptops. Who's really using those old boxes anyway?
I just went through patching 4 databases with CPUApril2006 earlier this week. It took a few service requests to Oracle to get some of the error messages that were generated as part of the process identified as benign, and I've still got one relatively minor outstanding issue, but it went with relatively little fanfare. I'll be applying the same patchset to a 10gR2 forms and reports standalone instance soon and expect little trouble.
Yes, Oracle's slow on releasing patches sometimes. But their support programs are reasonably good. Their support engineers usually understand their products pretty well. And I've yet to install a patch from Oracle that required me to back it out because it broke something badly. Microsoft products, on the other hand...
Playboy mirroring FC has been a serious problem for some of us federal FC users. Imagine having to explain to those cleaning out your desk and processing your exit paperwork that you were just updating your computer!
Good thing that at my site I am the computer security manager. Since I'd have to sign-off on my own termination, I'm still good to go! Others may not be so lucky...
This positioning on the part of BS/Verizon/other money-grubbing ISPs has to be put down like a rabid dog. If they insist on milking not only their customers of the ~$30-60/month charge for their DSL service, but the sites that service their customers through their already-paid-for service, then I must insist on them choosing from whom they wish to derive their revenues - us, their paying ISP customers, or them, those Internet destinations that "us" wish to visit.
Any company that threatens to fracture the Internet as we know it doesn't deserve my dollars. How about yours?
Enough with the Christian bashing. Nothing in the article stated that the men that beat this professor were Christian. You're making an assumption here that's not in evidence of the facts. Strictly speaking, Christianity's ethics and morals would preclude them from participating in such an activity. I would clearly consider these individual(s) actions as wrong.
Why is it that every ethnocentric/religious/sexually-oriented/whatever else group in the world these days is treated with respect except Christians? We're easy targets, sure, and it's not unexpected. After all, 6000 of us were covered in pitch and set on fire to light Roman streets in one fell swoop under Emperor Nero. Why should we expect any different treatment now?
But it is tiresome that we're the exception to the tolerance set forth by the vapid wave of political correctness that is current day culture.
A couple of other oddities with this particular camera (US version HDR-FX1). In HDV (1080i) mode, MEGS encoding and output take about 1/2 second. It's not much, but it takes a bit of work to sync any external audio (which you might have since this camera has no XLR jack) with the video. Note that the "pro" version of this camera, the Z1, doesn't have the delay and has an XLR jack for a mere grand or so more. Second, don't press the "expanded focus" button when running video out (don't know about during recording, as we record off-camera on a Sony DV-CAM deck). Pressing this button will cause a momentary glitch as it switches on and off five seconds later.
Overall, it's a great camera. Image quality is outstanding, even projected onto a sixteen foot screen. For the money, it's hard to beat, just not perfect.
Both nVidia and ATI have much to lose if their driver code gets out. Their specific hardware and software optimizations, relatively easily gleaned from the driver source, would be as gold in their competition's hands. Also, they've both been caught cheating by optimizing for specific benchmarks/games to boost their framerates in order to boost their bottom lines. When the difference in selling your new top-of-the-line video card for $500 US versus being in second place and your top card only able to command ~$350 or so, there's a lot of money on the line. And with the six month product cycle that we've seen for the last few years, there's a lot of money to be made or lost.
Don't buy the hype. I had two of these supposedly indestructible keyboards, and it didn't take but one stick of dynamite to turn them into little piles of silicon(e).
Seriously, I killed two of these keyboards. Don't really know how, either. Groups of the keys just quit working. One of the keyboards like this was rolled up and stuffed into a "to go" box for field work. The other lived in my home with light use (kids liked the key feel - silly kids). You could certainly wash it - put it through the kitchen sink routine a couple of times, but it just quits working properly in fairly short order.
That's all for now. Have to go spray my HIDs with Lysol...
Let's go over this week's list of problems:
1) HP scanner software - as administrator, works fine. As user, press a button on the scanner and the software can't find the scanner (!).
2) Norton Systemworks - as administrator, updates just fine. As user, can't run updates.
3) Turbotax. Same as Systemworks.
And that's just this week!
Been running Hoary dist-upgraded from Warty on my Toshiba Satellite for about 3 months or so. Never had any problems with any of the hardware. Most (98%+) of the updates went without any drama too.
The main reason I went from Warty to Hoary was the Synaptic touchpad support in Warty was lacking. It's been fine with Hoary.