The circuit cuts the water supply when the coffee reaches the desired strength. I skimmed the pages to find that one tidbit in the first place, because I wanted to see how he regulated coffee strength. It's pretty simple: a partial feedback loop... kinda.
I'm pretty sure that I didn't see anything about pouring more/b> water over the grinds, and you didn't quote or point to anything that suggested this.
I know it's not what you're talking about, but it sounds like that time travelling episode of "The Tick."
They couldn't find the cavelady, who invented the wheel, to send her back to her own time. The next day's headline was: "Cavewoman Sues for Back-Royalites on the Wheel."
A lot of people pointed out the AIDS blanket and similar endeavours.
When I first read it I was instantly reminded of the work done by the OTIS project, which has been around pretty much forever. I especially like the Gridcosm project, but Hygrid is pretty damn cool, too.
Great. You've got me logged into the site, which I haven't looked at in about 5 years.
When I first decided to try SuSE, that's what I thought. That's in fact why I tried it. I had tried Red Hat and Debian, and both were lacking *something* that I couldn't actually put my finger on.
I later learned the somewhat full history:
- They packaged a German SLS
- They moved to German Slackware
- They hired Florian LaRoche, who had a distro called Jurix, which used tgz for packages
- They made a new distro from, essentially, scratch and decided to use RPM for the package format but still supported tgz (they do to this day). Interestingly enough, this new, "SuSE" distro (first version: 4.2) had quite a resemblance, in some respects, to HPUX. I found this out when a couple of HPUX guys were hired at my work and took to SuSE like fish to water.
Nowadays, SuSE also supports deb and apt as well. There were a couple of threads on the suse-linux-e list about going totally deb, but I doubt that will happen, especially where RPM is required for the LSB.
Another interesting tidbit: The first version of YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) was 0.42. The installer for 7.2 has an easter egg as a tribute to the late Douglas Adams.
To get back to the Slackware thing... Yes, a lot of SuSE users are ex-Slackware freaks, myself included, that hated Red Hat. Nowadays though, more people convert from Red Hat
It doesn't mention SuSE either, who have been striving for compliance. Starting with 7.1 (I think) the distro has been compliant to whatever state the LSB was in. The next release (7.3 or 8.0) will, in all likelihood, be compliant to LSB 1.0.
As for Red Hat, I don't know. They've been pretty divergent on a lot of things. They put init scripts in/etc, for example./etc is for configuration files only. In SuSE, init script are in/sbin/init.d and there is a symlink in/etc if you install the 'eazy' package (that way, you have a simple choice).
They also place commands in pre/post-(un)install scripts that are not available on all distributions.
One big thing that freaks me out about the use of RPM is the naming in the 'provides' and 'requires' fields. One package may 'require', say, python-gtk, while only 'pygtk' is provided. The right software is there, but naming is a PITA.
Re:Been waiting for Linux Dist to Do this...
on
FreeBSD on DVD
·
· Score: 2
Longer than that actually. I remember there was a DVD version of 6.4 and I think 6.3 was available on DVD as well. Unfortunately, they were separate boxes so you could only get one or the other. I believe 7.0 started including both, but I'm not sure because I skipped that one. I generally buy every 2nd release of whatever distro I'm using.
The DVD rocks though. Switching disks can get annoying and now that it's 7 disks It's getting pretty crazy.
Luckily, my laptop has a DVD drive so I can quickly set up an ad hoc network and do an NFS install.
Interestingly enough, I just bought a bunch of new Loki games and it appears that the CDROM drive on my desktop is on the way out. I'm getting read errors like crazy. I bought that drive in 1995 for the sole purpose of installing Slackware without having to insert 60-something floppy disks. Now I think I'm going to buy a DVD drive for a similar reason...
I'm finding that kind of funny. I wonder what new drive I'll be buying in 6 years when SuSE grows to 7 DVDs and has to include some newer format...
The Internet to me, at first, was news, ftp, and telnet. I spent an inordinate amount of time in 'nn' every day reading sci.electronics, alt.hackers (that was a very fun newsgroup about *real* hacking), and host of others.
When I first saw the 'web' I thought, "this is crap, random words are linked to various things and it doesn't seem to make sense. Back to the newsgroups with me." I realise now that it was just my initial sampling that was total crap, but I kept up with the newsgroups anyway.
I'm totally sad about the state of USENET over the past few years, and this just makes it all worse.
However, for that long time I spent thriving on the USENET, I'll have to thank Jim Ellis. He indirectly helped me find out about Linux, electronics, hardware hacking, etc. Things I do professionally these days.
I think it's a somewhat appropriate time for an:
ObHack (I'm sorry if it's not a very good one. Good hacks, that are not your employer's intellectual property, seem to decrease to almost nothingness when you're no longer a poor student): We had this hub where a heatsink had broken off inside. I grabbed some solid wire and threaded it through the fins and through holes in the circuit board. Through a fair bit of messing around I made sure that it will *never* come out of place again. Ok, that was bad, so I'll add another simple one: Never underestimate the power of a hot glue gun. It allows you to easily provide strain relief for wires that you've soldered onto a PCB and I've also used it to make prototypes of various sensors. If you want to take it apart, and x-acto knife does the trick very easily.
If you are expecting a success message, however, and don't recieve one, then the lack of a message indicates failure
Traditionally, in UNIX environments, the lack of a message indicates success. If it worked, why bother me about it?
This is important because I've seen *lot's* of people panic when they get success messages.
Pretend you know nothing of IRQs, IO ports, and hex numbers. If you saw a screen full of them you wouldn't know if it was good or bad. An important part of useability is not confusing the user, because they get very worried when they see something confusing.
In fact, I often demonstrate how cool Linux PCMCIA support is by grabbing a random card (often one from the demonstratee), plugging it into my laptop, plugging in the network cable, and browsing to sites.
I even did it with a WaveLAN card once. It was the first time I plugged a 802.11 card into my laptop ever.
No messages, no popups, no "insert a stupid disk because I'm going to reboot the machine 3 times."
Interestingly enough, I have a tiny Windows partition on my laptop, but I never use it. Windows will lock up hard on boot if my NIC (3c575CT) is inserted. No biggie, Windows is useless to me and my solution was found through a SuSE DVD.
I really like that idea. Before I went 100% Linux and StarOffice, I used SmartSuite, which I *really* liked. The tabs in WordPro were a beautiful usability feature, among a lot of other things.
Nowadays I prefer LyX, but we've standardised on StarOffice at work (the marketroids still use MS Office, but you know how it is) but if SS were multi-platform, I'm sure a number of companies like mine would at least try it out. We did try out Applix but it was lacking in intuitiveness.
Check out the forums on sun.com. A *lot* of people are having major troubles, such as total crashing. SysRq keys won't work either.
According to Sun, they currently do not support running it under Linux 2.4, despite the fact that it runs happily on my 2.4.5 box here.
Just after I posted that message, I got a gut feeling and found that the problem was with certain XFree86 4 drivers. There is an environment variable you can set so that Star Office avoids certain X operations.
That will certainly make half of the developers at work happy, as they won't have to downgrade to 6.2... A horrible thought.
I still hate the broken PHP and the ridiculously old Python (I have a feeling that they did that so they wouldn't have to update their Python tools)
Every piece of Linux software (free or proprietary) runs without major issues on RedHat.
I guess you've never tried to run Star Office on Red Hat 7.1, or any PHP apps for that matter, or anything that requires Python > 1.5.2 (a ridiculously old version).
I'm pretty sure Caldera at least tested one of the most sought after Linux apps on their distribution where Red Hat apparently didn't.
I'm not defending Caldera's per-seat licensing but I can understand where they add value: Webmin, desktop support, Novell integration (a big one I must say), etc.
Mainly, however, I'm constantly annoyed by mindless Red Hat flag-waving. Not all of us use Red Hat and not all of us develop or test for it. There's a lot of software out there that runs far better on Debian, Slackware and SuSE, which are all more sanely put together (IMO). I don't use Caldera either, in case you were wondering.
Ok, then buy an Entertainment Anywhere from X-10. I bought my brother one for Christmas and he uses is constantly, but mostly for MP3. Now he wants another one so he doesn't have to move it between the room with the computer and the room with the DVD player, etc.
The signal quality is really good, but it sometimes take a little time getting the right orientation of the antennas. It's really worth it though and it's surprisingly cheap.
The remote that comes with it is really good, too. It's similar to the MouseRemote which I have, and love.
It's really a pretty cool solution and you can authenticate to almost anything: LDAP, RADIUS, even SMB.
Of course, there's still the problem of centralised control. What I would really like to see is a PGP or PGP-like solution where the user has control over their private key and each site grabs the public key when they sign up (with this, a signing up process could be transparent to the user). That way, you get the common authentication method and there's no need to store complete data about you anywhere but on your computer. Imagine getting a popup: "Whatever site has requested the following information:...." Each piece could be accompanied by a checkbox so the user can accept/deny specific pieces of information.
This is probably doable such that it will easily integrate into current systems, too.
Of course, I could be totally wrong, and I'd expect someone to point that out.:-)*
If you said no to both questions, they don't have to give a single line of source.
Besides, who said they changed the kernel? Any software they developed without GPL code is theirs to distribute in whatever way they damn well please.
These attitudes of "hey you used Linux! You gotta give it away for free!" are the ones Microsoft are using against Linux.
Here we are trying to debunk that FUD and people like you are yelling and screaming, supporting Microsoft's imposed view, without even a basic understanding of the GPL.
While you did make me laugh, I'd have to point out that your argument makes as much sense as saying:
A standard for Internet-based content! Grandma can now access information simply by typing:
telnet www.yahoo.com 80
...
GET/index.html
...
and so on and so forth.
Making a low-level standard allows many different high-level interfaces to act similarly, allowing greater choice in interface and the ability to make your own, guaranteed that it will all happily work together.
Any moderator who mods this down as offtopic needs to take reading comprehension again. Read the joke again, relate to the virus "industry," and repeat, if necessary.
The other posts are very good. The biggest power draining devices are the ones that emit the most heat.
I'll add some more information.
When you feel those wall-warts, they are usually very hot. The reason for this is inefficiency. The cheaper a power supply is, the more inefficient it will be, in general. The reason for this requires some explanation of how power supplies work.
First, you'll usually have a transformer. They are notoriously inefficient because of how they work. They are basically two coils with differing numbers of turns next to each other. The input/output ratio is related to the ratio of turns. Basically, power is applied to the primary coil, which has a resistance. The secondary coil actually generates power from the EM field emitted by the primary. It doesn't take a genius to realise that most of the power applied to the primary is lost in the air.
So off the secondary you will have an AC voltage lower than what you put in (here in NA it's 120V RMS). You have to convert that to DC somehow. Usually it's a bridge recifier, which will drop the voltage by about 1.4V (from peak-to-peak, not RMS) for it's own operation IIRC. This isn't something to be worried about, however. Bridge rectification is the most efficient type of rectification I've ever seen. It basically takes the negative parts of the AC waves and makes them positive.
So now we almost have DC. There's one more piece. The voltage is still bumpy. Draw a sine wave and imagine taking the negative part and inverting it on the positive side. Our devices need clean, flat DC, especially if the circuit is frequency dependent, like radios, sound cards, hard drive buses, etc.
The last piece is the regulator. These are quite complex so I'll only briefly describe what they do. You want a voltage of, say, 5VDC. You get a 5V regulator, say an LM7805. Your input voltage must be, at it's lowest point, 2.3 volts higher than your intended output for it to work correctly. This means that you'll have to put in at least 8V to be somewhat comfortable. 9-12V is quite common and 40V is the maximum. The higher the voltage you put into it and the more current the load draws from it, the harder that little guy works on regulating it. Many regulators require heat sinks to dissipate all of that heat.
Oh, but wait, how complex is your average wall-wart. I've rarely seen the correct voltage come out of one. Try measuring the ouput of a Nintendo wall wart sometime. They rarely have "real" regulators in them, often a couple of transistors. At work there's a "3V" wall-wart that outputs 6V. It blew a set-top box that required 3V. We have some Elastic DSL modems that use real 5V regulated wall-warts (I was impressed). If your device says 5V or less on it, you'd better be damned sure that's what you put into it because it's highly likely that it's expecting real regulated DC on the input, or else it would have said 9V and had a regulator inside the device. See why that voltage is so popular, now? You could also put 40V into it, but I doubt the heatsink chosen for 9V-to-5V would provide proper temperature dissipation for 40V-to-5V. I don't recommend plugging a 16V into your 9v device, either.
Finally, after all of that, your device is powered, but you've wasted a lot of energy getting there. Is there a better way?
Of course, the expensive option! The good news: you're already using it. That power supply in your computer is a switching power supply. These are much more efficient but a lot more complex. Generally, they often have much more intelligence.
There's a good book at Radio Shack on power supplies that explains all this, including how to build them. There's a section on switching power supplies as well.
I've posted here before, showing my disdain for wall warts. What came out of it was a project. Basically, the plan is to eliminate wall warts altogether and distribute power to various devices from one "power server" similarly to how it's done inside your computer. The main difference is that that devices actually request the voltage they want. You will also be able to use it on almost any existing device.
Ok, that went on a little long, but, as you can see, I'm sort of passionate about the topic.
Aha. So the solution is simple. Add an entry in the "User Agent" section of your Konq config for supercables.com.
On that note, a site just went up for info on sites that don't work in Linux browsers. Check it out at http://penguinfriendly.org/. It's pretty light right now because it only just went up.
Next time they say that they need someone to blame, make them read the EULAs they agreed to. There is not a chance in hell they are going to be able to blame Microsoft. It's the same thing with free/open source software, but at least they can take any problems into their own hands as the source is available.
Besides, you have much more choice in the support you get for Linux. If MS doesn't want to help you (likely), tough shit. If your Linux support provider doesn't want to help you, go to another one.
Slashdot Mirror
The circuit cuts the water supply when the coffee reaches the desired strength. I skimmed the pages to find that one tidbit in the first place, because I wanted to see how he regulated coffee strength. It's pretty simple: a partial feedback loop... kinda.
I'm pretty sure that I didn't see anything about pouring more/b> water over the grinds, and you didn't quote or point to anything that suggested this.
I probably should have mentioned that Brian Tobin is the Premier of Newfoundland...
Note to moderators: I already removed my bonus for this totally offtopic post. Go moderate something cool up.
1) Newfoundland is not part of the Maritimes
2) Neither Maritimers nor Newfoundlanders say 'eh'
3) In joking about Jean, it's more humorous to suggest a water gun filled with pepper spray (or Inuit carvings...)
I know it's not what you're talking about, but it sounds like that time travelling episode of "The Tick."
They couldn't find the cavelady, who invented the wheel, to send her back to her own time. The next day's headline was: "Cavewoman Sues for Back-Royalites on the Wheel."
A lot of people pointed out the AIDS blanket and similar endeavours.
When I first read it I was instantly reminded of the work done by the OTIS project, which has been around pretty much forever. I especially like the Gridcosm project, but Hygrid is pretty damn cool, too.
Great. You've got me logged into the site, which I haven't looked at in about 5 years.
There goes my day...
When I first decided to try SuSE, that's what I thought. That's in fact why I tried it. I had tried Red Hat and Debian, and both were lacking *something* that I couldn't actually put my finger on.
I later learned the somewhat full history:
- They packaged a German SLS
- They moved to German Slackware
- They hired Florian LaRoche, who had a distro called Jurix, which used tgz for packages
- They made a new distro from, essentially, scratch and decided to use RPM for the package format but still supported tgz (they do to this day). Interestingly enough, this new, "SuSE" distro (first version: 4.2) had quite a resemblance, in some respects, to HPUX. I found this out when a couple of HPUX guys were hired at my work and took to SuSE like fish to water.
Nowadays, SuSE also supports deb and apt as well. There were a couple of threads on the suse-linux-e list about going totally deb, but I doubt that will happen, especially where RPM is required for the LSB.
Another interesting tidbit: The first version of YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) was 0.42. The installer for 7.2 has an easter egg as a tribute to the late Douglas Adams.
To get back to the Slackware thing... Yes, a lot of SuSE users are ex-Slackware freaks, myself included, that hated Red Hat. Nowadays though, more people convert from Red Hat
It doesn't mention SuSE either, who have been striving for compliance. Starting with 7.1 (I think) the distro has been compliant to whatever state the LSB was in. The next release (7.3 or 8.0) will, in all likelihood, be compliant to LSB 1.0.
/etc, for example. /etc is for configuration files only. In SuSE, init script are in /sbin/init.d and there is a symlink in /etc if you install the 'eazy' package (that way, you have a simple choice).
As for Red Hat, I don't know. They've been pretty divergent on a lot of things. They put init scripts in
They also place commands in pre/post-(un)install scripts that are not available on all distributions.
One big thing that freaks me out about the use of RPM is the naming in the 'provides' and 'requires' fields. One package may 'require', say, python-gtk, while only 'pygtk' is provided. The right software is there, but naming is a PITA.
Longer than that actually. I remember there was a DVD version of 6.4 and I think 6.3 was available on DVD as well. Unfortunately, they were separate boxes so you could only get one or the other. I believe 7.0 started including both, but I'm not sure because I skipped that one. I generally buy every 2nd release of whatever distro I'm using.
The DVD rocks though. Switching disks can get annoying and now that it's 7 disks It's getting pretty crazy.
Luckily, my laptop has a DVD drive so I can quickly set up an ad hoc network and do an NFS install.
Interestingly enough, I just bought a bunch of new Loki games and it appears that the CDROM drive on my desktop is on the way out. I'm getting read errors like crazy. I bought that drive in 1995 for the sole purpose of installing Slackware without having to insert 60-something floppy disks. Now I think I'm going to buy a DVD drive for a similar reason...
I'm finding that kind of funny. I wonder what new drive I'll be buying in 6 years when SuSE grows to 7 DVDs and has to include some newer format...
The Internet to me, at first, was news, ftp, and telnet. I spent an inordinate amount of time in 'nn' every day reading sci.electronics, alt.hackers (that was a very fun newsgroup about *real* hacking), and host of others.
When I first saw the 'web' I thought, "this is crap, random words are linked to various things and it doesn't seem to make sense. Back to the newsgroups with me." I realise now that it was just my initial sampling that was total crap, but I kept up with the newsgroups anyway.
I'm totally sad about the state of USENET over the past few years, and this just makes it all worse.
However, for that long time I spent thriving on the USENET, I'll have to thank Jim Ellis. He indirectly helped me find out about Linux, electronics, hardware hacking, etc. Things I do professionally these days.
I think it's a somewhat appropriate time for an:
ObHack (I'm sorry if it's not a very good one. Good hacks, that are not your employer's intellectual property, seem to decrease to almost nothingness when you're no longer a poor student): We had this hub where a heatsink had broken off inside. I grabbed some solid wire and threaded it through the fins and through holes in the circuit board. Through a fair bit of messing around I made sure that it will *never* come out of place again. Ok, that was bad, so I'll add another simple one: Never underestimate the power of a hot glue gun. It allows you to easily provide strain relief for wires that you've soldered onto a PCB and I've also used it to make prototypes of various sensors. If you want to take it apart, and x-acto knife does the trick very easily.
Sigh.
Traditionally, in UNIX environments, the lack of a message indicates success. If it worked, why bother me about it?
This is important because I've seen *lot's* of people panic when they get success messages.
Pretend you know nothing of IRQs, IO ports, and hex numbers. If you saw a screen full of them you wouldn't know if it was good or bad. An important part of useability is not confusing the user, because they get very worried when they see something confusing.
Funny, it worked fine when I used it.
In fact, I often demonstrate how cool Linux PCMCIA support is by grabbing a random card (often one from the demonstratee), plugging it into my laptop, plugging in the network cable, and browsing to sites.
I even did it with a WaveLAN card once. It was the first time I plugged a 802.11 card into my laptop ever.
No messages, no popups, no "insert a stupid disk because I'm going to reboot the machine 3 times."
Interestingly enough, I have a tiny Windows partition on my laptop, but I never use it. Windows will lock up hard on boot if my NIC (3c575CT) is inserted. No biggie, Windows is useless to me and my solution was found through a SuSE DVD.
I really like that idea. Before I went 100% Linux and StarOffice, I used SmartSuite, which I *really* liked. The tabs in WordPro were a beautiful usability feature, among a lot of other things.
Nowadays I prefer LyX, but we've standardised on StarOffice at work (the marketroids still use MS Office, but you know how it is) but if SS were multi-platform, I'm sure a number of companies like mine would at least try it out. We did try out Applix but it was lacking in intuitiveness.
That's not all. It has mouse support. You can click links (hehheh) and the right-click menu works as you would expect.
The mouse won't work in all terminals, though. I've used it in Eterm and the KDE 2 Konsole, which has a full-screen mode, too.
I haven't tried it in the GNOME console but I couldn't use my mouse in mc under it, so I doubt it.
Check out the forums on sun.com. A *lot* of people are having major troubles, such as total crashing. SysRq keys won't work either.
According to Sun, they currently do not support running it under Linux 2.4, despite the fact that it runs happily on my 2.4.5 box here.
Just after I posted that message, I got a gut feeling and found that the problem was with certain XFree86 4 drivers. There is an environment variable you can set so that Star Office avoids certain X operations.
That will certainly make half of the developers at work happy, as they won't have to downgrade to 6.2... A horrible thought.
I still hate the broken PHP and the ridiculously old Python (I have a feeling that they did that so they wouldn't have to update their Python tools)
I guess you've never tried to run Star Office on Red Hat 7.1, or any PHP apps for that matter, or anything that requires Python > 1.5.2 (a ridiculously old version).
I'm pretty sure Caldera at least tested one of the most sought after Linux apps on their distribution where Red Hat apparently didn't.
I'm not defending Caldera's per-seat licensing but I can understand where they add value: Webmin, desktop support, Novell integration (a big one I must say), etc.
Mainly, however, I'm constantly annoyed by mindless Red Hat flag-waving. Not all of us use Red Hat and not all of us develop or test for it. There's a lot of software out there that runs far better on Debian, Slackware and SuSE, which are all more sanely put together (IMO). I don't use Caldera either, in case you were wondering.
Ok, then buy an Entertainment Anywhere from X-10. I bought my brother one for Christmas and he uses is constantly, but mostly for MP3. Now he wants another one so he doesn't have to move it between the room with the computer and the room with the DVD player, etc.
The signal quality is really good, but it sometimes take a little time getting the right orientation of the antennas. It's really worth it though and it's surprisingly cheap.
The remote that comes with it is really good, too. It's similar to the MouseRemote which I have, and love.
PAM, Pluggable Authentication Modules.
:-)*
Note that it is not solely for logging your UNIX box. Check out http://pam.sourceforge.net/mod_auth_pam/ for an Apache module.
It's really a pretty cool solution and you can authenticate to almost anything: LDAP, RADIUS, even SMB.
Of course, there's still the problem of centralised control. What I would really like to see is a PGP or PGP-like solution where the user has control over their private key and each site grabs the public key when they sign up (with this, a signing up process could be transparent to the user). That way, you get the common authentication method and there's no need to store complete data about you anywhere but on your computer. Imagine getting a popup: "Whatever site has requested the following information:...." Each piece could be accompanied by a checkbox so the user can accept/deny specific pieces of information.
This is probably doable such that it will easily integrate into current systems, too.
Of course, I could be totally wrong, and I'd expect someone to point that out.
Did you buy it?
Did they give the binaries to you?
If you said no to both questions, they don't have to give a single line of source.
Besides, who said they changed the kernel? Any software they developed without GPL code is theirs to distribute in whatever way they damn well please.
These attitudes of "hey you used Linux! You gotta give it away for free!" are the ones Microsoft are using against Linux.
Here we are trying to debunk that FUD and people like you are yelling and screaming, supporting Microsoft's imposed view, without even a basic understanding of the GPL.
While you did make me laugh, I'd have to point out that your argument makes as much sense as saying:
/index.html
A standard for Internet-based content! Grandma can now access information simply by typing:
telnet www.yahoo.com 80
...
GET
...
and so on and so forth.
Making a low-level standard allows many different high-level interfaces to act similarly, allowing greater choice in interface and the ability to make your own, guaranteed that it will all happily work together.
Any moderator who mods this down as offtopic needs to take reading comprehension again. Read the joke again, relate to the virus "industry," and repeat, if necessary.
I think it's damn funny, myself.
Our old testing guru was "Dark Lord of Testing." At his new job it's "Dark Lord of Wireless Gateway Design."
Our head of development has a sign on his door: "Head Geek."
Don't forget his work on MadTV. He was my favourite guy on that show.
The Slashdot guy's running reference to him as "the 7Up guy" bugged the hell out of me, too.
I also don't trust Mr. Slashdot's reviews either. I'll probably drag my GF to it and I'll probably enjoy the hell out of it.
The other posts are very good. The biggest power draining devices are the ones that emit the most heat.
I'll add some more information.
When you feel those wall-warts, they are usually very hot. The reason for this is inefficiency. The cheaper a power supply is, the more inefficient it will be, in general. The reason for this requires some explanation of how power supplies work.
First, you'll usually have a transformer. They are notoriously inefficient because of how they work. They are basically two coils with differing numbers of turns next to each other. The input/output ratio is related to the ratio of turns. Basically, power is applied to the primary coil, which has a resistance. The secondary coil actually generates power from the EM field emitted by the primary. It doesn't take a genius to realise that most of the power applied to the primary is lost in the air.
So off the secondary you will have an AC voltage lower than what you put in (here in NA it's 120V RMS). You have to convert that to DC somehow. Usually it's a bridge recifier, which will drop the voltage by about 1.4V (from peak-to-peak, not RMS) for it's own operation IIRC. This isn't something to be worried about, however. Bridge rectification is the most efficient type of rectification I've ever seen. It basically takes the negative parts of the AC waves and makes them positive.
So now we almost have DC. There's one more piece. The voltage is still bumpy. Draw a sine wave and imagine taking the negative part and inverting it on the positive side. Our devices need clean, flat DC, especially if the circuit is frequency dependent, like radios, sound cards, hard drive buses, etc.
The last piece is the regulator. These are quite complex so I'll only briefly describe what they do. You want a voltage of, say, 5VDC. You get a 5V regulator, say an LM7805. Your input voltage must be, at it's lowest point, 2.3 volts higher than your intended output for it to work correctly. This means that you'll have to put in at least 8V to be somewhat comfortable. 9-12V is quite common and 40V is the maximum. The higher the voltage you put into it and the more current the load draws from it, the harder that little guy works on regulating it. Many regulators require heat sinks to dissipate all of that heat.
Oh, but wait, how complex is your average wall-wart. I've rarely seen the correct voltage come out of one. Try measuring the ouput of a Nintendo wall wart sometime. They rarely have "real" regulators in them, often a couple of transistors. At work there's a "3V" wall-wart that outputs 6V. It blew a set-top box that required 3V. We have some Elastic DSL modems that use real 5V regulated wall-warts (I was impressed). If your device says 5V or less on it, you'd better be damned sure that's what you put into it because it's highly likely that it's expecting real regulated DC on the input, or else it would have said 9V and had a regulator inside the device. See why that voltage is so popular, now? You could also put 40V into it, but I doubt the heatsink chosen for 9V-to-5V would provide proper temperature dissipation for 40V-to-5V. I don't recommend plugging a 16V into your 9v device, either.
Finally, after all of that, your device is powered, but you've wasted a lot of energy getting there. Is there a better way?
Of course, the expensive option! The good news: you're already using it. That power supply in your computer is a switching power supply. These are much more efficient but a lot more complex. Generally, they often have much more intelligence.
There's a good book at Radio Shack on power supplies that explains all this, including how to build them. There's a section on switching power supplies as well.
I've posted here before, showing my disdain for wall warts. What came out of it was a project. Basically, the plan is to eliminate wall warts altogether and distribute power to various devices from one "power server" similarly to how it's done inside your computer. The main difference is that that devices actually request the voltage they want. You will also be able to use it on almost any existing device.
Ok, that went on a little long, but, as you can see, I'm sort of passionate about the topic.
Aha. So the solution is simple. Add an entry in the "User Agent" section of your Konq config for supercables.com.
On that note, a site just went up for info on sites that don't work in Linux browsers. Check it out at http://penguinfriendly.org/. It's pretty light right now because it only just went up.
Huge fallacy.
Next time they say that they need someone to blame, make them read the EULAs they agreed to. There is not a chance in hell they are going to be able to blame Microsoft. It's the same thing with free/open source software, but at least they can take any problems into their own hands as the source is available.
Besides, you have much more choice in the support you get for Linux. If MS doesn't want to help you (likely), tough shit. If your Linux support provider doesn't want to help you, go to another one.