Just riot. If they can do that in Paris, so can you in Washington.
Hello Yvanhoe, this is the U.S. government. Your post suggesting a riot in Washington has been logged by the NSA, and FBI agents are on their way. Please sit tight and relax. You will be charged with inciting a riot and if we decide we don't like the way you smell, you will also be charged with treason.
Exactly, and good point. Since you are happy with what you have now then there is no reason to change. You're unaffected by this issue.
No, I'm not happy with what I have now. I would very much like to watch the movies in 1080i when they are finally available. But I can't do that without spending another $2000 on a TV, even though there's no technical reason for it.
I wasn't too happy with Apple customer service either. I've got a Dual G4 tower here at work. It started making an ungodly grinding noise one day. I opened it up and saw that the 120mm fan under the power supply had broken and was banging against the grill.
I know it is out of warranty, so I tried to find a replacement fan for it [of course a normal 120mm fan won't fit it, and the plug is different]. Apple doesn't sell one to the public. They require to you bring the machine to an Apple store [or authorized service provider] to have them replace it. Ok fine, I called the Apple store and a couple of authorized places. They won't even tell me how much it will cost to replace that fan. They want me to unhook everything and drag it down to them to have their 'Apple guru' [that was the title they gave] look at it before they will tell me how much a F*CKING FAN COSTS?!?!?!
No, I'm glad it is a work computer. I will never buy an Apple if that's the kind of customer service I can expect.
So you're happy now with DVDs on your TV at 480 lines resolution, but wont be happy with a HD movie downgraded to 480 lines resolution on that same TV? I fail to see the difference - the quality is the same to you.
Well I already own a DVD player. But I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars on an HDDVD/BR player, plus $40-50 for a movie that should play at 1080i but will only play at 480p when I can pay $9.99 for the same movie to play at 480p. When I can play the movie in 1080i, I might consider paying for the hardware and the more expensive movies, but not a second sooner.
What boggles my mind is why anyone who bought these things thought they were going to get a full resolution digital picture out of an analog interface. Come on. It's obvious that wasn't going to work. Stop whining.
What does this have to do with them intentionally degrading the image? I'm perfectly happy to live with the slight difference in quality I might see due to my analog signal; but I am not going to put up with a media company degrading my picture quality because they think I might be a thief. I don't download movies. I buy the DVD's of movies I want to have at home. Although I rarely pay more than $10 for a DVD [with a few exceptions for movies I *MUST* have immediately], that doesn't make me a thief. I purchase them legally and they have no right to punish me as if I were stealing from them.
If their movie/hardware won't play at 1080i over a component input on my HDTV, I won't be paying any money for it. Maybe I'll just settle down with a good book instead. At least the publishers don't try to tell me I can only read the book with one eye closed.
Take random huge Linux user, e.g. a large bank that runs 70% of its servers on Linux and is migrating the other 30% as fast as it can. Now produce a patent with 17 claims. Now if large bank cannot disprove each and every one of these 17 claims, they must stop using Linux immediately, or pay whatever the patent holder asks. It is up to the defendant to break the patent claims.
Microsoft will not enforce their patents, if they have any that they think undercut Linux, not because there is any real defense (there is not) but because they will wait until Linux is well-enough established that the patent negotations will go smoothly.
Not only that, but if I were running a company and migrating to Linux, and MS decided to drop 17 patent claims on us to get us to stop using Linux, I would very quickly stop using Linux, and migrate right on over to Solaris or AIX or HP/UX or OSX...
You better believe there wouldn't be a snowballs chance in hell I'd ever use MS software again. Microsoft knows this, that is why they won't go after any companies who are using Linux. SCO hasn't learned that lesson yet apparently.
i dont think anyone outside of the geek communit cares about DRM. Most people dont mind. Most people dont even encounter the DVD DRM and dont even know about it.
That's the whole point. With the new protections in place, many people who have not had a problem up until now, will now have issues. Suddenly "average Joe" who bought an HDTV last year will realize that his 'hot new HD-DVD movies' don't look as good on his HDTV as they do on his buddy's [Rich John] HDTV even though average Joe's HDTV has no problem displaying 1080i video. Then he'll find out that his HDDVD's are being displayed at half resolution simply because the movie studio thinks he's going to steal the movie he just bought because he only has a component input.
I liken it to color TV's. Some old Color TV's don't have a coax [cable] input, they only have the two screws for an antenna. If the studios had suddenly told everyone that because they didn't have the new coax input they would be forced to watch TV in B&W, even though their TV displayed color just fine, the people who had purchased those TV's would have been pissed. This is the same thing really.
I especially think it's interesting that the main two entities involved in implementing this push to make people buy new TV's [for no real technical reason] are the very companies that stand to profit mightily by that new surge in HDTV purchases. [ie. Sony & Toshiba ]
I have an HDTV that only has component inputs. Only the most expensive TV's even had DVI inputs when I bought mine, and hdmi didn't exist yet. There isn't a chance in hell that I will be buying a BluRay or HD-DVD player until these companies are forced to ensure that all movies will display at the full resolution supported by the TV [1080i in my case] regardless of what connection is used. Until then I'll just have to keep getting DVD's from Netflix.
Sometimes, I seriously consider setting up some kind of VNC.
What's stopping you? I set up VNC on my parent's computer, and set them up with a dynamic dns so that I wouldn't even have to have them tell me their IP address. Works like a charm, and I can just get on a fix it in minutes instead of spending hours trying to walk them through it.
Although sometimes I just tell them "Christ mom, you've had this computer for 5 years. You've been using it to send emails for that entire time. Why haven't you learned to attach a file to an email yet. I KNOW you've sent out attachments before."
Argh! But the next time they buy a computer I'm telling them that if they get a Windows computer I will not provide any support for them. I will provide limited support if they get a Mac or Linux system. I'm sick of spending 2-3 hours cleaning up spyware, viruses and destabilizing utilities every time I visit them.
And yet we don't FSCKING care! If digg is do damned great, why are you here? Go back and play with the other digg idiots. Us Slashdot idiots don't want you here if the most constructive thing you can come up with is "We're already discussing it on digg". I'm sure it is being/has been discussed a lot of places online. Now we're discussing it on Slashdot. Get over it.
She's funny with certain things, too. She LOVES phones and remote controls. I tried to give her an old remote that we weren't using and she INSISTED on the universal remote we were using at the time. Nothing else was acceptable because she wanted the one we were using.
I think this is fairly normal. I haven't met a baby that didn't love remote controls, and they all want very much to be involved with whatever you are doing. My baby wants the remote we're using, and ignores the other remotes. She absolutely LOVES typing on the keyboard. I tried to give her her own keyboard. She wants nothing to do with it, but man she will work beyond the limits of her abilities to reach the keyboard I'm typing on!
Her favorite TV show is Jeopardy. Ever since she was about 5 months old, as soon as she hears the theme song, she will instantly drop whatever she is doing and yank her head towards the TV [much to the dismay of my wife's breast]. I figure it's because every day when we watch the show, we are both talking to the TV [giving answers]. She wants to be involved in something that we are so frequently interacting with.
I haven't figured out one thing though. She finally started crawling this week [I think her brain is progressing faster than her motor skills], and she constantly makes a bee-line for the PS2, which is currently on the bottom shelf of our stereo rack [not for long]. We don't use it very often so it has nothing to do with seeing us use it.
Will they allow to use those 100Mb to store files to be linked and served from free hosted pages in other servers?
Well thus far I have been able to upload pictures and link to them from offsite without any problems. Not sure if they will continue to allow that or not. I'm also not sure what kind of bandwidth restrictions they might place on it. I suppose I could post a largish pic to the next Fark photoshop contest and see how it does.
like telling you to put GRUB on your master boot record for dual boot, never mind that you're locked out of both OS's if it has the slightest error in running).
I've always had a problem with people complaining about the possibility of lilo or grub messing up any existing bootable OS's if something goes wrong. Yes it is a minor pain to go in and fix the boot loader so you can once again boot into all of your OS's. But the thing most people miss is that if you try to install Windows as a dual boot with another operating system it doesn't even *try* to play nice. It just overwrites the mbr and goes along its merry way without giving you even a clue as to what it is doing. [I'm not sure what OS/X would do]. That is supposed to be better? Why aren't people complaining about that? Linux was well established in the world by the time WinXP came out. Microsoft has no excuse for not supporting a dual boot.
Any comparison/review between the big 3 OS's needs to be based on the same usage patterns [ie. All of them from a blank machine through install to a single OS, or all of them and their support for dual-booting etc.]
Re:So how many options were cut?
on
Gnome 2.14 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have actually had a few discussions with the devs on IRC about it and the option philosophy is pretty dang ridiculous. Supposedly many options will confuse the user. Come on. These users are using Linux. They probably know what they are doing. And even to a newbie, an option on window behavior will not do any harm. Yes, the whole 'linux-on-the-desktop' camp will tell you that simplifying programs is a good thing, but radically cutting out options is not the way to do this.
I wonder if a good solution to this would be to have a global 'advanced user' flag which if set would allow the user to access the more advanced options. When not set [the default of course], it would only provide the super-simple, no-options-for-the-newbie preferences. They can even make this option accessible only to the command line to help prevent the newbies from accidentally activating the advanced settings.
Is this a reasonable compromise or will I just upset the Human Interface gods with such heresy?
Re:Some pronunciation for the newbies
on
Gnome 2.14 Released
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Strange [and totally offtopic], it just dawned on me that while I pronounce 'xine' as 'zeen', I pronounce 'gxine' as 'gee-ex-een'. I have no idea why.
Try Konsole instead. Not only does the text scroll faster and smoother, but the interface just feels better than Gnome Terminal.
Or better yet use a nice slim term like rxvt. I've found that no matter what desktop environment/window manager I'm using, rxvt always seems to work better than the native terminal. My current setup of XFCE4 [4.2.2] and rxvt [rxvt -fg black -bg green] works like a charm. I can't stand the xfce-terminal, or gnome-terminal or the WORST of the bunch, Konsole.
Although I don't use Gnome, I'm happy to hear of any performance improvements they pull off as I do use Nautilus for my Desktop icons and filemanager as well as gnome-volume-manager with XFCE. It works pretty well but any performance increase is certainly welcome.
Even worse is that recently we've gotten several mailings from one of our CC companies which included a check which said, "Pay to Wife's Name or Bearer". What sucked about it was that by cashing said check, you were agreeing to sign up for some credit protection scam where you are billed every month.
I was furious. What the heck were they thinking???
The what? I vaguely recall that being a problem in Win98, but I run Win2k here, and when an inactive application demands input, it stays right down in the taskbar where it belongs - all that happens is that the taskbar icon flashes to notify me. Surely this is the case in WinXP too? It would seem strange for Microsoft to introduce the correct behaviour in one version of Windows, only to take it out again in the next.
I have specifically had this problem in W2K3 server [and in WinXP]. The really sad part is that it was Microsoft's own programming [not a third party] that was the problem. After doing a Windows update [manually or the nightly automatic update] the machine often pops up a dialog asking if you would like to restart now or restart later. Well I had updated the server, but was NOT ready to reboot so I clicked "Restart Later". Well this dialog comes up every 2-3 minutes until you reboot. I was working on something else and as I went to click on something, the restart dialog popped up RIGHT as I clicked the mouse button. Of course it popped up with the "Restart Now" under the mouse button and proceeded to reboot.
Luckily no data was lost, but this is ***NOT*** something that needs to be happening in a server environment. And that's not even getting into the fact that it requires a reboot every month when the security updates come out. At least in Linux [I use Debian on servers] I only need to reboot if there is a major kernel security issue. Anything else only requires the service to be restarted.
DCT-6200 HDTV receiver w/firewire caputre from my cable company
Just as a warning, you might want to test this. I messed around with getting the HDTV signal from my 6200. It works ok, but only for the local broadcast stations. The other HD stations I have [INHD1/2 and Discovery HD] would not send a signal through the firewire. Something akin to a broadcast flag I suspect. I don't subscribe to any premium HD movie channels so I haven't tested them but I would imagine that they too may have a flag to stop it from being output through the firewire.
This is all with Comcast cable in the DFW area. Your cable company might work differently, but you might want to check it out.
There is [or was?] an arcade in San Jose, CA called Nickel City. As you would expect, the games take nickels instead of quarters. And along the back wall was a line of classic arcade games [Defender, Galaga, Pac Man etc] that was totally free.
In part it depends on what it's made of but it has to be designed of materials good under tension, I guess lose the tension and it behaves like string. The downward force on the middle would be greater than at the top so there would be tension at the top end. Consrevation of angular momentum suggests to me the top would move east as it fell but the tension would pull against this. Then there are wind effects. Does the anchoring at the base hold?
How hard would it be to build safeguards into this? Perhaps something along the lines of a failsafe system where if the counterweight ever broke free, the anchor would disconnect, and rockets at the top [or various locations along the length] could fire to lift the entire thing out of orbit. That is assuming of course that we had a system powerful enough to lift it [I hope so if we've got the tech to build it].
It wouldn't be pretty and lives would still probably be lost [poor schmucks caught halfway up when it went], but at least we wouldn't have a cable falling from orbit across the entire planet.
Just a thought anyway. I'm sure there are ways to make it 'safe' [where safe is some reasonable cost effective definition of safe for the companies building it of course.]
Slashdot Mirror
Just riot. If they can do that in Paris, so can you in Washington.
Hello Yvanhoe, this is the U.S. government. Your post suggesting a riot in Washington has been logged by the NSA, and FBI agents are on their way. Please sit tight and relax. You will be charged with inciting a riot and if we decide we don't like the way you smell, you will also be charged with treason.
Have a nice day.
Signed,
Government Goon
Exactly, and good point. Since you are happy with what you have now then there is no reason to change. You're unaffected by this issue.
No, I'm not happy with what I have now. I would very much like to watch the movies in 1080i when they are finally available. But I can't do that without spending another $2000 on a TV, even though there's no technical reason for it.
I wasn't too happy with Apple customer service either. I've got a Dual G4 tower here at work. It started making an ungodly grinding noise one day. I opened it up and saw that the 120mm fan under the power supply had broken and was banging against the grill.
I know it is out of warranty, so I tried to find a replacement fan for it [of course a normal 120mm fan won't fit it, and the plug is different]. Apple doesn't sell one to the public. They require to you bring the machine to an Apple store [or authorized service provider] to have them replace it. Ok fine, I called the Apple store and a couple of authorized places. They won't even tell me how much it will cost to replace that fan. They want me to unhook everything and drag it down to them to have their 'Apple guru' [that was the title they gave] look at it before they will tell me how much a F*CKING FAN COSTS?!?!?!
No, I'm glad it is a work computer. I will never buy an Apple if that's the kind of customer service I can expect.
So you're happy now with DVDs on your TV at 480 lines resolution, but wont be happy with a HD movie downgraded to 480 lines resolution on that same TV? I fail to see the difference - the quality is the same to you.
Well I already own a DVD player. But I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars on an HDDVD/BR player, plus $40-50 for a movie that should play at 1080i but will only play at 480p when I can pay $9.99 for the same movie to play at 480p. When I can play the movie in 1080i, I might consider paying for the hardware and the more expensive movies, but not a second sooner.
What boggles my mind is why anyone who bought these things thought they were going to get a full resolution digital picture out of an analog interface. Come on. It's obvious that wasn't going to work. Stop whining.
What does this have to do with them intentionally degrading the image? I'm perfectly happy to live with the slight difference in quality I might see due to my analog signal; but I am not going to put up with a media company degrading my picture quality because they think I might be a thief. I don't download movies. I buy the DVD's of movies I want to have at home. Although I rarely pay more than $10 for a DVD [with a few exceptions for movies I *MUST* have immediately], that doesn't make me a thief. I purchase them legally and they have no right to punish me as if I were stealing from them.
If their movie/hardware won't play at 1080i over a component input on my HDTV, I won't be paying any money for it. Maybe I'll just settle down with a good book instead. At least the publishers don't try to tell me I can only read the book with one eye closed.
Take random huge Linux user, e.g. a large bank that runs 70% of its servers on Linux and is migrating the other 30% as fast as it can. Now produce a patent with 17 claims. Now if large bank cannot disprove each and every one of these 17 claims, they must stop using Linux immediately, or pay whatever the patent holder asks. It is up to the defendant to break the patent claims.
Microsoft will not enforce their patents, if they have any that they think undercut Linux, not because there is any real defense (there is not) but because they will wait until Linux is well-enough established that the patent negotations will go smoothly.
Not only that, but if I were running a company and migrating to Linux, and MS decided to drop 17 patent claims on us to get us to stop using Linux, I would very quickly stop using Linux, and migrate right on over to Solaris or AIX or HP/UX or OSX...
You better believe there wouldn't be a snowballs chance in hell I'd ever use MS software again. Microsoft knows this, that is why they won't go after any companies who are using Linux. SCO hasn't learned that lesson yet apparently.
i dont think anyone outside of the geek communit cares about DRM. Most people dont mind. Most people dont even encounter the DVD DRM and dont even know about it.
That's the whole point. With the new protections in place, many people who have not had a problem up until now, will now have issues. Suddenly "average Joe" who bought an HDTV last year will realize that his 'hot new HD-DVD movies' don't look as good on his HDTV as they do on his buddy's [Rich John] HDTV even though average Joe's HDTV has no problem displaying 1080i video. Then he'll find out that his HDDVD's are being displayed at half resolution simply because the movie studio thinks he's going to steal the movie he just bought because he only has a component input.
I liken it to color TV's. Some old Color TV's don't have a coax [cable] input, they only have the two screws for an antenna. If the studios had suddenly told everyone that because they didn't have the new coax input they would be forced to watch TV in B&W, even though their TV displayed color just fine, the people who had purchased those TV's would have been pissed. This is the same thing really.
I especially think it's interesting that the main two entities involved in implementing this push to make people buy new TV's [for no real technical reason] are the very companies that stand to profit mightily by that new surge in HDTV purchases. [ie. Sony & Toshiba ]
I have an HDTV that only has component inputs. Only the most expensive TV's even had DVI inputs when I bought mine, and hdmi didn't exist yet. There isn't a chance in hell that I will be buying a BluRay or HD-DVD player until these companies are forced to ensure that all movies will display at the full resolution supported by the TV [1080i in my case] regardless of what connection is used. Until then I'll just have to keep getting DVD's from Netflix.
Anyone else noticed that he is missing a "d" on "please" in the very first sentence.
:)
Actually, I noticed that he fixed it. I guess he reads slashdot.
Thanks for the nick! lol
:)
Great, only 920,980 users have signed up since I got my account and I finally made an impression on one!
Sometimes, I seriously consider setting up some kind of VNC.
What's stopping you? I set up VNC on my parent's computer, and set them up with a dynamic dns so that I wouldn't even have to have them tell me their IP address. Works like a charm, and I can just get on a fix it in minutes instead of spending hours trying to walk them through it.
Although sometimes I just tell them "Christ mom, you've had this computer for 5 years. You've been using it to send emails for that entire time. Why haven't you learned to attach a file to an email yet. I KNOW you've sent out attachments before."
Argh! But the next time they buy a computer I'm telling them that if they get a Windows computer I will not provide any support for them. I will provide limited support if they get a Mac or Linux system. I'm sick of spending 2-3 hours cleaning up spyware, viruses and destabilizing utilities every time I visit them.
http://digg.com/software/60_Of_Windows_Vista_Code_ To_Be_Rewritten
And yet we don't FSCKING care! If digg is do damned great, why are you here? Go back and play with the other digg idiots. Us Slashdot idiots don't want you here if the most constructive thing you can come up with is "We're already discussing it on digg". I'm sure it is being/has been discussed a lot of places online. Now we're discussing it on Slashdot. Get over it.
Karma be damned!
She's funny with certain things, too. She LOVES phones and remote controls. I tried to give her an old remote that we weren't using and she INSISTED on the universal remote we were using at the time. Nothing else was acceptable because she wanted the one we were using.
I think this is fairly normal. I haven't met a baby that didn't love remote controls, and they all want very much to be involved with whatever you are doing. My baby wants the remote we're using, and ignores the other remotes. She absolutely LOVES typing on the keyboard. I tried to give her her own keyboard. She wants nothing to do with it, but man she will work beyond the limits of her abilities to reach the keyboard I'm typing on!
Her favorite TV show is Jeopardy. Ever since she was about 5 months old, as soon as she hears the theme song, she will instantly drop whatever she is doing and yank her head towards the TV [much to the dismay of my wife's breast]. I figure it's because every day when we watch the show, we are both talking to the TV [giving answers]. She wants to be involved in something that we are so frequently interacting with.
I haven't figured out one thing though. She finally started crawling this week [I think her brain is progressing faster than her motor skills], and she constantly makes a bee-line for the PS2, which is currently on the bottom shelf of our stereo rack [not for long]. We don't use it very often so it has nothing to do with seeing us use it.
Just in case that came across wrong, my baby's name is not "Bingo" :)
:)
She does however have her own blog. even though she's only 10 months old!
Geez they let anyone have one of those these days.
Babies have trouble vocalising, however, they don't have much trouble using sign-language.
Bingo, my baby has been able to sign 'milk' when she's hungry since she was 3 or 4 months old.
Will they allow to use those 100Mb to store files to be linked and served from free hosted pages in other servers?
Well thus far I have been able to upload pictures and link to them from offsite without any problems. Not sure if they will continue to allow that or not. I'm also not sure what kind of bandwidth restrictions they might place on it. I suppose I could post a largish pic to the next Fark photoshop contest and see how it does.
like telling you to put GRUB on your master boot record for dual boot, never mind that you're locked out of both OS's if it has the slightest error in running).
I've always had a problem with people complaining about the possibility of lilo or grub messing up any existing bootable OS's if something goes wrong. Yes it is a minor pain to go in and fix the boot loader so you can once again boot into all of your OS's. But the thing most people miss is that if you try to install Windows as a dual boot with another operating system it doesn't even *try* to play nice. It just overwrites the mbr and goes along its merry way without giving you even a clue as to what it is doing. [I'm not sure what OS/X would do]. That is supposed to be better? Why aren't people complaining about that? Linux was well established in the world by the time WinXP came out. Microsoft has no excuse for not supporting a dual boot.
Any comparison/review between the big 3 OS's needs to be based on the same usage patterns [ie. All of them from a blank machine through install to a single OS, or all of them and their support for dual-booting etc.]
I have actually had a few discussions with the devs on IRC about it and the option philosophy is pretty dang ridiculous.
Supposedly many options will confuse the user. Come on. These users are using Linux. They probably know what they are doing. And even to a newbie, an option on window behavior will not do any harm. Yes, the whole 'linux-on-the-desktop' camp will tell you that simplifying programs is a good thing, but radically cutting out options is not the way to do this.
I wonder if a good solution to this would be to have a global 'advanced user' flag which if set would allow the user to access the more advanced options. When not set [the default of course], it would only provide the super-simple, no-options-for-the-newbie preferences. They can even make this option accessible only to the command line to help prevent the newbies from accidentally activating the advanced settings.
Is this a reasonable compromise or will I just upset the Human Interface gods with such heresy?
Strange [and totally offtopic], it just dawned on me that while I pronounce 'xine' as 'zeen', I pronounce 'gxine' as 'gee-ex-een'. I have no idea why.
/me pipes in with: "No it's XFCE you want..."
Try Konsole instead. Not only does the text scroll faster and smoother, but the interface just feels better than Gnome Terminal.
Or better yet use a nice slim term like rxvt. I've found that no matter what desktop environment/window manager I'm using, rxvt always seems to work better than the native terminal. My current setup of XFCE4 [4.2.2] and rxvt [rxvt -fg black -bg green] works like a charm. I can't stand the xfce-terminal, or gnome-terminal or the WORST of the bunch, Konsole.
Although I don't use Gnome, I'm happy to hear of any performance improvements they pull off as I do use Nautilus for my Desktop icons and filemanager as well as gnome-volume-manager with XFCE. It works pretty well but any performance increase is certainly welcome.
Even worse is that recently we've gotten several mailings from one of our CC companies which included a check which said, "Pay to Wife's Name or Bearer". What sucked about it was that by cashing said check, you were agreeing to sign up for some credit protection scam where you are billed every month.
I was furious. What the heck were they thinking???
The what? I vaguely recall that being a problem in Win98, but I run Win2k here, and when an inactive application demands input, it stays right down in the taskbar where it belongs - all that happens is that the taskbar icon flashes to notify me. Surely this is the case in WinXP too? It would seem strange for Microsoft to introduce the correct behaviour in one version of Windows, only to take it out again in the next.
I have specifically had this problem in W2K3 server [and in WinXP]. The really sad part is that it was Microsoft's own programming [not a third party] that was the problem. After doing a Windows update [manually or the nightly automatic update] the machine often pops up a dialog asking if you would like to restart now or restart later. Well I had updated the server, but was NOT ready to reboot so I clicked "Restart Later". Well this dialog comes up every 2-3 minutes until you reboot. I was working on something else and as I went to click on something, the restart dialog popped up RIGHT as I clicked the mouse button. Of course it popped up with the "Restart Now" under the mouse button and proceeded to reboot.
Luckily no data was lost, but this is ***NOT*** something that needs to be happening in a server environment. And that's not even getting into the fact that it requires a reboot every month when the security updates come out. At least in Linux [I use Debian on servers] I only need to reboot if there is a major kernel security issue. Anything else only requires the service to be restarted.
DCT-6200 HDTV receiver w/firewire caputre from my cable company
Just as a warning, you might want to test this. I messed around with getting the HDTV signal from my 6200. It works ok, but only for the local broadcast stations. The other HD stations I have [INHD1/2 and Discovery HD] would not send a signal through the firewire. Something akin to a broadcast flag I suspect. I don't subscribe to any premium HD movie channels so I haven't tested them but I would imagine that they too may have a flag to stop it from being output through the firewire.
This is all with Comcast cable in the DFW area. Your cable company might work differently, but you might want to check it out.
Good luck!
There is [or was?] an arcade in San Jose, CA called Nickel City. As you would expect, the games take nickels instead of quarters. And along the back wall was a line of classic arcade games [Defender, Galaga, Pac Man etc] that was totally free.
:( ]
I miss that place [I'm in Tx now
In part it depends on what it's made of but it has to be designed of materials good under tension, I guess lose the tension and it behaves like string. The downward force on the middle would be greater than at the top so there would be tension at the top end.
Consrevation of angular momentum suggests to me the top would move east as it fell but the tension would pull against this.
Then there are wind effects. Does the anchoring at the base hold?
How hard would it be to build safeguards into this? Perhaps something along the lines of a failsafe system where if the counterweight ever broke free, the anchor would disconnect, and rockets at the top [or various locations along the length] could fire to lift the entire thing out of orbit. That is assuming of course that we had a system powerful enough to lift it [I hope so if we've got the tech to build it].
It wouldn't be pretty and lives would still probably be lost [poor schmucks caught halfway up when it went], but at least we wouldn't have a cable falling from orbit across the entire planet.
Just a thought anyway. I'm sure there are ways to make it 'safe' [where safe is some reasonable cost effective definition of safe for the companies building it of course.]