Well, it comes from the same rule that says 2+2=5 for large values of 2.
In 1984, they kept trying to get Winston to believe that 2+2=5, if it suited the Party's purposes to make that assertion. We now have the RIAA trying to get us to believe that 156=421, if it suits the RIAA's purposes to make that assertion. Coincidence?
When you have a week's worth of (for instance) Deep Space Nine eps ripped from your TiVo that you want to burn to SVCD, being done with the job in 15 minutes (not counting the encoding time...just burning time) instead of an hour would be nice. That's where faster burners are useful.
A friend of mine said he got a 52x burner, and he burned a full CD in 20 seconds.
It wasn't a full CD if it took only 20 seconds...hell, it takes longer than that just to start and stop the burn process. My 48x burner takes 2:40 or so to fill an 80-minute CD; a 52x burner might shave a few seconds off of that, but it's not going to be the huge speed boost you imply.
You know, I don't mind paying a couple additional fees if it means I can get program updates, etc. trhough the web rather than a phone line.
Add a TurboNet to your Series 1 TiVo (or one of the compatible USB Ethernet dongles to your Series 2), set up a DHCP server on your LAN, and change the dialing prefix (#,401 IIRC). Your TiVo will start grabbing its updates over whatever Internet access is on your LAN. TiVo doesn't know any differently since it doesn't maintain its own dial-up POPs. In fact, in addition to saving yourself some money if you ditch your POTS line, you'll also save TiVo some money by not using dial-up access.
You can also add TivoWeb to a Series 1 to add HTTP-based control of your TiVo. Open an SSH tunnel to your TiVo (something like ssh -L 80:tivo:80 -N -f me@myhome.org && mozilla http://localhost/) and you have secure access to your TiVo from anywhere. There are no fees associated with this, either.
In the UK they have, and believe the most cost-effective was said to be radio advertising.
There may be something to that. I filter website ads and I've skipped TV ads for the past decade (first with VCRs, now with a TiVo). I let a large number of radio ads through, though...the only ones that consistently get me to change stations or switch off the radio are ads for Jap cars and other ads that I've previously determined (by my highly subjective standards:-) ) to be annoying (ads for a certain prescription drug whose name begins with N and that emphasize the pill's color come to mind as an example). If I had to quantify it, I let maybe 50-75% of radio ads through, vs. less than 5% of TV ads (occasionally, I'll skip back to an ad if what little of it I normally see looked interesting or funny) and less than 1% of website ads.
You are aware that ECS is basically PC Chips under a different name, right? Eww...
Keep in mind that one of the reasons they're so cheap is that they use desktop components. The parts cost less, but they use more power. There goes your battery life, if you plan on going cordless. (Never mind that you can't even really do that with these machines anyway, since the battery's in a brick outside the computer...another losing idea.)
Only theoretically...in practice, my understanding is that FireWire is still faster (delivers something closer to its maximum speed) and still doesn't bog down your computer as much. (Think about it...Apple designed FireWire to work properly, while Intel designed USB to drive demand for faster and faster processors.)
My suggestion: check out the usb removable drive trays. This way, you can hot swap/back up w/o powering down.
FireWire would be better in this capacity...it's faster, it doesn't bog down your computer, and the controllers only run about $40 or so (though if all backups will be done through one computer, you can get by with just one card). USB's OK for low-to-medium-speed devices, but it's not up to handling high-speed devices such as hard drives.
And just how many tons of paper are you going to need to reliably back up a terabyte in dots and dashes?
If you were actually going to produce some kind of machine-readable dead-tree backup, it's more likely that you'd produce a type of 2D barcode that could be scanned back in and read. Assuming an 8x10" grid at 200 dpi (the remaining area can be used for alignment and checksumming), you could get about 390K per page (single-sided...you could also double that by making it a "flippy," and you wouldn't need a notch-cutter:-) ). You're still looking at a little over 5 tons for 1 TB, but it's an improvement. 200 dpi should be well within the abilities of currently-available laser printers and scanners. If you wanted to try 300 dpi, you'd more than double your capacity and get about 879K per page (single-sided).
I think every reasonable American knows that the founding fathers designed the second amendment to allow all Americans access to personal firearms. Muzzle loaded, smoothbore, single shot flintlocks.
You neglected to mention that those were the most technologically-advanced firearms available at the time the Constitution was written. They were the very same weapons an invading army would've used. The intent of the Founding Fathers was not that people could only keep the equivalent of cap-guns, but that the right of the people to keep militarily-useful weapons (among others) was not to be infringed.
I would consider the NRA's possition extreme because they are unwilling to compromise.
As one gunmaker says in its ads, "in a world of compromise, some don't." Would you compromise your free-speech rights (say, the ability to write whatever software you want) in order to improve some group's security (such as the MediaMafia)? I didn't think so.
With the sniper stuff in Washington D.C. they were talking about taking 'barrel prints' of guns out of the factory, and the NRA opposed. Why, because they thought it was one step closer to taking the guns away!
That was a factor (and an important one), but there's also the consideration that so-called "ballistic fingerprinting" is nearly completely useless for tracking a gun from its manufacture to its possible use in a crime. Ordinary wear and tear will change the breech and barrel over time...and if a criminal wanted to accelerate the process somewhat, a few minutes with a Swiss file would make even more drastic changes.
There is NOTHING in the 2nd amendment about the right to bear arms.
What part of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" do you not understand? The bit about a well-regulated militia is 18th-century-speak for ordinary people who were expected to make themselves proficient in the use of firearms. It does not, as Sarah Brady and her minions insist, refer to the National Guard. In any case, the validity of the Second Amendment does not hinge on the usefulness of armed citizenry to national defense (though that happens to be a nice bonus). Just as the government shall not tell you, as a (presumably) law-abiding citizen, what you can say or with whom you can associate, it shall not interfere with your right to keep and bear arms. If you choose to not exercise that right, fine. Just don't presume that what's fine for you should be good enough for the rest of us.
I guess it's not quite parallel though, is it. But, you have loading, firing, and cooling all running simultaniously.
It's pipelined...w00t!:-) Out-of-order execution isn't a problem, but a jam or a misfire could result in a pipeline stall (or worse, if you're not so lucky...).
802.11 is FREE, all you need to do is buy a lousy wireless NIC and an AP. After that you get 10mbps, instead of crappy unreliable 1.5mbps from your cable/telco.
Um...where, exactly, is your Internet access coming from in this allegedly simple scheme? 10 Mbps between your friends is worth bugger-all if nobody has some other connection outside your clique...and unless you're spending big $$$, you're not going to get your mp3z @ 10 Mbps.
That said, I suppose you could use it to enable sharing of a broadband connection...ten people going in on one 1536/512 cable-modem connection would yield faster access at a lower cost per user than if they all paid for their own 512/128 connections.
In Central New York (upstate, not the city), Time Warner Cable is offering a combination Digital Reciever/PVR....Does anyone know more about this unit? Is the software crap? Is it smart like Tivo, recording things you might like?
People who've posted about them in alt.video.ptv.tivo have been underwhelmed. The interface is sluggish (like many digital-cable boxes) and somewhat unrefined, and people have reported numerous bugs and glitches. At this point, you wouldn't want to trade your TiVo in for one.
I know that when I visit my parents in Miami, and use their shitty digital cable receiver box, I get big ads and huge banners which obscure the picture on the television. If my parents didn't live where the HOA frowned upon it, I'd tell them to get DirecTV.
If they're in a condo or townhome, they can put up a dish as long as it doesn't attach to common property. If they have a south-facing porch or balcony, you can attach the dish to the guard rail. Several people where I live have various mini-dishes installed. (If they don't have a view to the satellite, they're stuck.) If they're in a home, they can put up a dish on their property. If the HOA gives them grief, they can tell the HOA to go fsck themselves...several years ago, the FCC decreed that HOAs, CC&Rs, etc. can't be used to keep people from putting up antennas and dishes for TV-reception purposes.
cable company kiosks - Do you mean those kiosks which stand in the middle of the street? They usually are very crippled in their interface. you can't even run ping. I dunno. Maybe you might be able to exploit them.
If they're running IE (or a browser built on the IE engine), all you need is some useful binaries squirreled away on a webserver to do whatever you want with their computer. Security settings are almost always such that you can run untrusted EXEs. At Comdex, I ran PuTTY off of my home webserver so I could check my mail. There's no reason I couldn't have stashed some malware ahead of time and run that.
(Mozilla, OTOH, won't let you do that. It'll prompt you to save the file someplace. If "Run...", "Command Prompt", and IE are removed from the Start menu and Windows-R is trapped (it's a keyboard shortcut for Start|Run...), good luck getting your downloaded file to run...assuming that you can find a directory that'll let you save your file. (One college lab had "Run..." and "Command Prompt" removed from its machines, but opening IE and giving c:\winnt\system32\cmd.exe as the URL gave me a command prompt.))
Maintenance? I wash and wax the Valiant and Dart. I check and change their fluids. When something breaks, I fix it.
You must not live in state that snows. Or not drive in snow. Most vehciles of that vintage have rust cancer in the east coast.
You must've missed the bit where the OP said he lives in Canada. I somehow doubt that he's unfamiliar with snow.:-)
As for "rust cancer," most of that comes from poor maintenance. I suspect that hosing down a car that's just been driven through streets that are deiced with salt would go a long way toward keeping rust away. If, OTOH, it's sand that's getting put on the roads, you don't have nearly as much of a problem. A couple of winters in Germany didn't harm what ended up becoming my first car...between regular trips to the car wash in the winter and the Germans' use of sand instead of salt on their roads, no rust developed that could be attributed to slushy roads.
Slashdot Mirror
If you didn't see CEO bobble heads on the shelf at Wal-Mart the last time you were there, it qualifies as "rare."
In 1984, they kept trying to get Winston to believe that 2+2=5, if it suited the Party's purposes to make that assertion. We now have the RIAA trying to get us to believe that 156=421, if it suits the RIAA's purposes to make that assertion. Coincidence?
No. France surrendered preemptively to the Brits.
When you have a week's worth of (for instance) Deep Space Nine eps ripped from your TiVo that you want to burn to SVCD, being done with the job in 15 minutes (not counting the encoding time...just burning time) instead of an hour would be nice. That's where faster burners are useful.
It burns faster toward the outside of the CD. Near the hub, the most you'll get will be 16x or so.
It wasn't a full CD if it took only 20 seconds...hell, it takes longer than that just to start and stop the burn process. My 48x burner takes 2:40 or so to fill an 80-minute CD; a 52x burner might shave a few seconds off of that, but it's not going to be the huge speed boost you imply.
There are plenty of mailing lists (and a newsgroup, too) that cover those topics. They're more usable than most web fora anyway.
I heard on the radio the other day that the merger between Hughes (DirecTV) and Echostar (Dish Network) has been called off.
Add a TurboNet to your Series 1 TiVo (or one of the compatible USB Ethernet dongles to your Series 2), set up a DHCP server on your LAN, and change the dialing prefix (#,401 IIRC). Your TiVo will start grabbing its updates over whatever Internet access is on your LAN. TiVo doesn't know any differently since it doesn't maintain its own dial-up POPs. In fact, in addition to saving yourself some money if you ditch your POTS line, you'll also save TiVo some money by not using dial-up access.
You can also add TivoWeb to a Series 1 to add HTTP-based control of your TiVo. Open an SSH tunnel to your TiVo (something like ssh -L 80:tivo:80 -N -f me@myhome.org && mozilla http://localhost/) and you have secure access to your TiVo from anywhere. There are no fees associated with this, either.
There may be something to that. I filter website ads and I've skipped TV ads for the past decade (first with VCRs, now with a TiVo). I let a large number of radio ads through, though...the only ones that consistently get me to change stations or switch off the radio are ads for Jap cars and other ads that I've previously determined (by my highly subjective standards :-) ) to be annoying (ads for a certain prescription drug whose name begins with N and that emphasize the pill's color come to mind as an example). If I had to quantify it, I let maybe 50-75% of radio ads through, vs. less than 5% of TV ads (occasionally, I'll skip back to an ad if what little of it I normally see looked interesting or funny) and less than 1% of website ads.
The Almighty Buck. That's what cheapened construction in computers & consumer electronics is all about.
You are aware that ECS is basically PC Chips under a different name, right? Eww...
Keep in mind that one of the reasons they're so cheap is that they use desktop components. The parts cost less, but they use more power. There goes your battery life, if you plan on going cordless. (Never mind that you can't even really do that with these machines anyway, since the battery's in a brick outside the computer...another losing idea.)
Only theoretically...in practice, my understanding is that FireWire is still faster (delivers something closer to its maximum speed) and still doesn't bog down your computer as much. (Think about it...Apple designed FireWire to work properly, while Intel designed USB to drive demand for faster and faster processors.)
FireWire would be better in this capacity...it's faster, it doesn't bog down your computer, and the controllers only run about $40 or so (though if all backups will be done through one computer, you can get by with just one card). USB's OK for low-to-medium-speed devices, but it's not up to handling high-speed devices such as hard drives.
If you were actually going to produce some kind of machine-readable dead-tree backup, it's more likely that you'd produce a type of 2D barcode that could be scanned back in and read. Assuming an 8x10" grid at 200 dpi (the remaining area can be used for alignment and checksumming), you could get about 390K per page (single-sided...you could also double that by making it a "flippy," and you wouldn't need a notch-cutter :-) ). You're still looking at a little over 5 tons for 1 TB, but it's an improvement. 200 dpi should be well within the abilities of currently-available laser printers and scanners. If you wanted to try 300 dpi, you'd more than double your capacity and get about 879K per page (single-sided).
You neglected to mention that those were the most technologically-advanced firearms available at the time the Constitution was written. They were the very same weapons an invading army would've used. The intent of the Founding Fathers was not that people could only keep the equivalent of cap-guns, but that the right of the people to keep militarily-useful weapons (among others) was not to be infringed.
As one gunmaker says in its ads, "in a world of compromise, some don't." Would you compromise your free-speech rights (say, the ability to write whatever software you want) in order to improve some group's security (such as the Media Mafia)? I didn't think so.
That was a factor (and an important one), but there's also the consideration that so-called "ballistic fingerprinting" is nearly completely useless for tracking a gun from its manufacture to its possible use in a crime. Ordinary wear and tear will change the breech and barrel over time...and if a criminal wanted to accelerate the process somewhat, a few minutes with a Swiss file would make even more drastic changes.
Here's a couple of links for you to chew on. :-)
What part of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" do you not understand? The bit about a well-regulated militia is 18th-century-speak for ordinary people who were expected to make themselves proficient in the use of firearms. It does not, as Sarah Brady and her minions insist, refer to the National Guard. In any case, the validity of the Second Amendment does not hinge on the usefulness of armed citizenry to national defense (though that happens to be a nice bonus). Just as the government shall not tell you, as a (presumably) law-abiding citizen, what you can say or with whom you can associate, it shall not interfere with your right to keep and bear arms. If you choose to not exercise that right, fine. Just don't presume that what's fine for you should be good enough for the rest of us.
It's pipelined...w00t! :-) Out-of-order execution isn't a problem, but a jam or a misfire could result in a pipeline stall (or worse, if you're not so lucky...).
Um...where, exactly, is your Internet access coming from in this allegedly simple scheme? 10 Mbps between your friends is worth bugger-all if nobody has some other connection outside your clique...and unless you're spending big $$$, you're not going to get your mp3z @ 10 Mbps.
That said, I suppose you could use it to enable sharing of a broadband connection...ten people going in on one 1536/512 cable-modem connection would yield faster access at a lower cost per user than if they all paid for their own 512/128 connections.
People who've posted about them in alt.video.ptv.tivo have been underwhelmed. The interface is sluggish (like many digital-cable boxes) and somewhat unrefined, and people have reported numerous bugs and glitches. At this point, you wouldn't want to trade your TiVo in for one.
If they're in a condo or townhome, they can put up a dish as long as it doesn't attach to common property. If they have a south-facing porch or balcony, you can attach the dish to the guard rail. Several people where I live have various mini-dishes installed. (If they don't have a view to the satellite, they're stuck.) If they're in a home, they can put up a dish on their property. If the HOA gives them grief, they can tell the HOA to go fsck themselves...several years ago, the FCC decreed that HOAs, CC&Rs, etc. can't be used to keep people from putting up antennas and dishes for TV-reception purposes.
If they're running IE (or a browser built on the IE engine), all you need is some useful binaries squirreled away on a webserver to do whatever you want with their computer. Security settings are almost always such that you can run untrusted EXEs. At Comdex, I ran PuTTY off of my home webserver so I could check my mail. There's no reason I couldn't have stashed some malware ahead of time and run that.
(Mozilla, OTOH, won't let you do that. It'll prompt you to save the file someplace. If "Run...", "Command Prompt", and IE are removed from the Start menu and Windows-R is trapped (it's a keyboard shortcut for Start|Run...), good luck getting your downloaded file to run...assuming that you can find a directory that'll let you save your file. (One college lab had "Run..." and "Command Prompt" removed from its machines, but opening IE and giving c:\winnt\system32\cmd.exe as the URL gave me a command prompt.))
You must've missed the bit where the OP said he lives in Canada. I somehow doubt that he's unfamiliar with snow. :-)
As for "rust cancer," most of that comes from poor maintenance. I suspect that hosing down a car that's just been driven through streets that are deiced with salt would go a long way toward keeping rust away. If, OTOH, it's sand that's getting put on the roads, you don't have nearly as much of a problem. A couple of winters in Germany didn't harm what ended up becoming my first car...between regular trips to the car wash in the winter and the Germans' use of sand instead of salt on their roads, no rust developed that could be attributed to slushy roads.