His cars probably get better mileage then most SUVs on the road, and the check engine light does not come on every 2 weeks needing another trip to the dealer (coworkers volvo wagon).
They're old enough that they don't even have a "Check Engine" light. My '77 Cutlass Supreme Brougham is the same way. As for mileage, I'm fairly sure my dad's '01 Tahoe gets better mileage (20something hwy. vs. 16-17 for my Olds with similar-sized V8s in both...Vortec 5300 vs. Rocket 350). OTOH, it could use a bit of work to get things running better, and the '70s models were about the worst for mileage...the changes mandated by "clean air" laws threw mileage into the sh*tter for a few years. Earlier vehicles delivered more power and better mileage, but someone concluded that the nitrogen oxides thrown out the tailpipe of a lean-running, high-compression engine were a Bad Thing.
Pretty soon they ought to be doing comparisons involving Linux too, not just Mac and Windows. Kino is beginning to seriously kick ass. It's now adequate for all my home video purposes (transferring camcorder video, editing and titling, making SVCDs).
I've considered giving Linux a shot at video editing, but haven't found an MPEG-2 encoder yet (which would be needed for making SVCDs). I've tried getting TMPGEnc working under Wine, but have been less than successful. A quick check of the Kino website indicates some level of MPEG-2 support...any ideas as to how it compares to TMPGEnc for speed and quality?
Avisynth has also been useful for various NLE and filtering tasks...is something similar available for Linux?
People doing video editing on x86 will have to use Windows. There simply isn't any kind of video editing software available for Linux that is even remotely affordable. And the ones that are available for Windows are crap.
You must have a different definition of "crap" than most people. I've found VirtualDub and Avisynth to be pretty decent. Avisynth, in particular, offers some fairly nifty editing capabilities...one script I've written for it takes two AVIs and overlays them on a third AVI. (It's designed to mimic the appearance of a Win2K desktop running some video-telephony software I wrote...a conversation is captured with the software and converted to a pair of AVIs.) More frequently, I use it to cut the ads out of TV shows captured by my TiVo or my All-In-Wonder and to do inverse 3:2 pulldown. The script then gets loaded into TMPGEnc for compression to SVCD.
I pity the people stuck with PCs to do their video editing. I've tried it on my Pentium III before, and it is slow as all hell. Pity, too, but you really do get what you pay for.
Unless you're willing to pay through the nose for a pair of the fastest Xeons, you don't want Intel processors for video editing/encoding. OTOH, the dual Athlon MP 2100+ I have at home hauls ass...over 30 fps for two-pass XviD encoding and somewhere around 6 fps for two-pass VBR MPEG-2 encoding with TMPGEnc at its highest-quality settings. The processors and motherboard were under $700 (it was an upgrade from a single 1.0-GHz Athlon) a few months ago; you could more than likely get something even faster for less money now.
I already had cable-modem service at home for Internet access, so the marginal cost of hosting alfter.us myself is zero. It would work over a dynamically-allocated address (dyndns.org makes that possible), but I'm spending the extra $10/month for a static IP.
(If you're in Las Vegas and considering something similar, the residential-grade service from Cox (the one that uses the cheap cable modems you find in stores) most likely won't work. If Cox issued you a Com21 cable modem (which costs a bit under $300 if you want to buy one), you're getting their business-grade service and can pretty much do what you want (though you'll need a static IP to run an SMTP server). The strange part is that the last time I checked, there's no difference in cost between the two types of service.)
We do something similar with the cable-modem connection at work. For a low-to-medium-traffic site, there's no reason to not use your existing broadband connection. Having your servers onsite makes keeping an eye on them much easier.
On top of that I'm sort of locked out of PVRs (unless the cable company provides it) because of the proprietary nature of the digital cable network, which is exactly what it looks like Sony is trying to solve.
TiVos will control many digital cable boxes in the same way that they'll control analog cable boxes. Mine takes S-video and audio from a Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 2100, and it uses infrared to change channels. The only time I've run into problems is when Cox sends out a firmware update to the box...it shuts off when it's done, and the TiVo won't turn it back on. There are fixes for that problem (one involves using the switched power outlet on the back of the cable box to hit the "power" button on a cheap remote control when the box is switched off); I just haven't gotten around to building one yet.
Of course, what Sony is announcing is a CATV box, *not* a cable modem. Most cable systems force you to rent a cable box...
Only if you want pay-TV channels and/or pay-per-view. Since everything else on an analog-cable network is sent in-the-clear, if you're only interested in keeping up with South Park and Iron Chef, you can run the cable straight from the wall into your TV/VCR/TiVo/etc. I did that for years until I saw something on digital cable that I wanted.
Re:Stopped for walking
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 2
Yorkshire accent, what's that anyway
You might try getting a copy of this Monty Python sketch...
Uhhh... [User points at Ford, Chevy, just about every american made car...]
Quit yer trolling. Around here, I see many more older American cars on the streets than older imports. I usually run across another '77 Cutlass once or twice a week...and that's just one model from one year. Most of 'em are putting less crap into the air than the typical riced-out Civic or Corolla that's less than half as old, too, and they'll keep on going long after your average ricer has fallen apart at the side of the road. Maybe you don't mind sending your money to Tokyo every five or ten years, but I expect my vehicles to last longer than that...and I'd rather support our economy than someone else's.
Now I can listen to AC/DC on my PalmOS device's crappy little speaker...
The Tungsten T has a headphone jack. That way, when you're stuck next to some Olde Pfarte on a transcontinental flight, Granny won't keel over and assume room temperature when you start playing "Back in Black."
Sounds much better than having to deal with Real
on
Ogg/Vorbis on Palm OS
·
· Score: 2
Right around Comdex-time, Palm and Real made an announcement to the effect that RealPlayer would be coming to Palm OS in the near future. I was somewhat dreading installing this in order to add MP3 support. Once AeroPlayer gets MP3 support (supposed to happen RSN), it'll be a welcome alternative to letting Real 0wn j00.
(Ogg zealots can shut up right now...I have >10GB of MP3s on hand, and I'm not reripping/reencoding them.)
Technical Contact:
Wennberg, Johan johan.wennberg@swipnet.se
Tanneforsv 17
Stockholm, Enskede S-122 47
SE
888 888 888 888
If that last line is supposed to be his phone number, isn't the obviously bogus number some sort of violation of whatever rules DNS runs under? The last time I bought a domain name, the signup form made a big stink about making sure that all of the contact info was valid. Maybe we can get whoever issued anti-leech.com to take it back.:-)
Sure apple gives it a new name and calls it superdrive and overcharges you.
The name overloading is also a potential source of confusion..."SuperDrive" originally referred to the 3.5" high-density floppy drive (1.4 MB vs. 800K) that Apple started shipping in the early 90s IIRC. The same thing happened with AppleWorks...the copy of AppleWorks I have isn't a relabeled ClarisWorks. It was derived from III EZ Pieces (an integrated-software package for the Apple III) and runs on the Apple II.
Arithmetic according to C: float x = 3.14159; int y = 1/2 * x; Value of y? zero.
Well, duh.
Considering that (int)1/(int)2==0, y should equal zero. int y=0.5*x would produce the expected result (with a compiler warning about the lossage that you'll get going from double to int). It also eliminates a division operation.
As long as you know the precedence rules and the way that values are typed (constants are treated as integers unless there's a fractional part or unless they're cast as floats), the way C handles math makes plenty of sense.
Lots of people I know use AOL, even if the know how to use the computer. Mostly because of convenience (lots of access points when you travel).
MaGlobe has plenty of PoPs, and you only pay for the time that you're dialed in. If your primary net access is through some sort of broadband (cable, xDSL, etc.), prepaid dial-up makes more sense than shelling out $20+ per month for conventional dial-up access.
Since AOHell acquired Time Warner, I've cut out everything distributed under the combined company's name. CNN, TBS, etc. are deselected from "channels I watch" on my TiVo. (CNN already was, anyway...who needs CNN when you have Fox News Channel? Besides, Ted Turner is evil.) I don't watch their movies anymore (could be painful when the Matrix sequel comes along, but I haven't missed anything else). I don't click the links to CNN, Time, etc. that get posted here and elsewhere. They could go out of business tomorrow and it wouldn't affect anything that I read or watch.
(If the two companies decide to split up in the future (as has been rumored), I'd reconsider. Until then, AOHell isn't getting any of my money. They're worse than Microsoft...at least Microsoft doesn't have a stranglehold on the media.)
...unless you behind a proxy that uses windows authentication.
Sounds like you need to replace your proxy server.
(I speak from experience when I say that MS Proxy Server blows goats...you can pretty much forget about connecting non-Win32 boxen to the Internet through it. Get Squid up and running; it's available for Win32 and will run alongside Proxy Server if necessary. Better yet, replace your NT or Win2K firewall (Windows boxen don't belong directly on the Internet anyway) with a Linux box running Squid and ipmasq...you can install it on that 486 that's been gathering dust for the past few years. It plays nicely with everything...Win32, MacOS, Linux, BSD, whatever.)
The only annoyance I have is web "developers" using ALT tags instead of or not in addition to TITLE tags for tooltip information on images. It's not that tough to include them both, people!
Better yet, Mozilla ought to use the text in the ALT attribute. At least in the context of an IMG element, the TITLE attribute is redundant. Since ALT is required for IMG elements anyway, why would you use <img width=80 height=60 src="foo.png" alt="foo" title="foo"> when <img width=80 height=60 src="foo.png" alt="foo"> conveys the same information?
(I was wondering where the tooltips for the icons at the top of every/. page had gone. Mozilla must be the only browser that doesn't render ALT attributes as tooltips.)
but no one is using radio shack discrete electronics to make missle guidance systems anymore.
...probably because their parts selection has gone in the crapper. What used to take a sizable percentage of floor space is now condensed down to a metal box that takes only a few square feet. Instead of being an electronics geek's hangout, the modern Radio Shack bears more resemblance to Best Buy or Circuit City, only with worse selection, higher prices, and an even more clueless staff. "You've got questions...we've got blank stares."
Fry's needs to hurry up and finish its Las Vegas store (215 and Las Vegas Blvd., if you're curious). Once it's open, I'll never need to enter a local Radio Shack ever again.:-)
I suspect formatting floppies under Windows uses teh BIOS. Even on a 2ghz Pentium machine this can utilise nearly all the processor...
It does that if you're still using Win9x. I'm formatting a floppy on a Win2K box right now, and CPU usage is fluctuating between zero and 9% (probably to keep the formatting dialog and task manager windows updated).
For those folks using a Microsoft OS, there's a little proggie called eDexter. Basically, it works in conjunction with a nice HOSTS file, and sets up a teeny-tiny server at 127.0.0.1 - it fills all HTTP requests to localhost with a 1x1 transparent GIF, or an image or your own choosing.
If you're running Linux, khttpd is perfect for serving up the 1x1 transparent PNGs, null scripts, etc. that are used by ad filters such as the one described here.
(I haven't updated the block list as often since switching to Mozilla, though...Mozilla does a good job killing pop-ups, and most banner ads reside on relatively few servers.)
if someone can infer the radio station you have tuned in, trust me: you're going to need more than rf shielding. more like a club to whack whoever's in your back seat listening along. there's no passive way to do this at all.
Guess again. You can pick up the local-oscillator signal from a superheterodyne receiver (that's everything from the 50-year-old tube radio on my kitchen shelf to the transistor radio you had as a kid to the digitally-tuned radio in your car, your Walkman, etc.) and deduce the frequency to which it is tuned. The local oscillator (a type of variable-frequency oscillator) is mixed with everything that's on the antenna. A tuning circuit then picks off one signal whose frequency is the difference between the local-oscillator frequency and the transmitting frequency of the station you've selected. Since the local oscillator isn't an intentional transmitting source, the output level is very low...but it is present and ought to be detectable with sufficiently sensitive equipment. The presence of a few dozen radios on the same frequency would help it out a bit, too.
If you want to defeat this type of system, you'd want a radio that doesn't use a local oscillator. Good luck finding a TRF or crystal-set head unit for your car.:-)
(As an experiment, take two AM radios and put them next to each other. Tune one to a station somewhere on the upper half of the dial. Tune the other to a frequency 455 kHz lower. The local oscillator of the second radio swamps out the station tuned in on the first radio, so the station should fade away and be replaced with silence. You could also try doing the same thing with FM, but tune the two radios 10.7 MHz apart. 455 kHz is the standard intermediate frequency (IF) for medium-wave AM, while 10.7 MHz is the standard intermediate frequency for FM.)
We got along just fine as a nation without most of those for over 100 years (sales tax is a state/local issue). I don't see how the government's involvement has done anything other than drive down quality and create a dependency among some on an ever-expanding government that robs the rest of us of our freedoms. (This is especially true of education. Which do you suppose is worse for society: no education or a sh*tty education in which kids are indoctrinated with the "values" of the nanny state and not taught to think for themselves? They can't add two and two and they can't construct a grammatically-correct sentence with properly-spelled words, but they sure do feel good about themselves, don't they? Besides, we already have historical proof that a lack of public education does not imply a population of drooling ignoramuses.)
The only alternatives to a progressive tax are
A) A regressive tax, where you tax the poor a greater percentage of their income, or
Like the Social Security tax, which is only on the first $90k or so of your income? (Never mind that if you or I tried to start something like Social Security, we'd be shut down for operating an illegal pyramid scheme. You'd do just as well for yourself if you responded to the make-money-fast spams in your inbox.)
B) a flat tax, where someone who makes $15,000 is left with $12,000 and someone who makes $15 million is left with $12 million.
You neglected to mention that the flat-tax proposals that have been floated so far usually include a fairly sizable exemption for the first $15k or so of income...they're not truly flat. Your hypothetical $15k earner would pay $0 under most proposals, while your $15M earner would pay a little bit less than $3M.
It's worth mentioning that a dollar circulating in the private economy is more productive than a dollar in the government's grubby fingers. In the private sector, it bounces around between employers and employees. It can also be invested in the growth of a business. The government also engages in some of this activity, but it tends to be less efficient in its use of money.
Just because you can say 'Hey! The communists did that!' doesn't make it inherently bad. Might I suggest -1 Troll to parent?
Sounds like the typical debating style of a left-winger...since you have no ideas of your own, you instead attempt to silence those who do. Where's this "tolerance" for diverse opinions I keep hearing about?
They're supposed to pay a higher percentage; that's what makes it a progressive tax system. The whole point is to support (at some very basic level) all of society, requiring more support from those who are more capable of providing it.
That sounds suspiciously like "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." I'm fairly sure the economic system espoused by the individual who made that statement has been thoroughly discredited by now. At the very least, it was rejected by the voters earlier this month (in most places, anyway).
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They're old enough that they don't even have a "Check Engine" light. My '77 Cutlass Supreme Brougham is the same way. As for mileage, I'm fairly sure my dad's '01 Tahoe gets better mileage (20something hwy. vs. 16-17 for my Olds with similar-sized V8s in both...Vortec 5300 vs. Rocket 350). OTOH, it could use a bit of work to get things running better, and the '70s models were about the worst for mileage...the changes mandated by "clean air" laws threw mileage into the sh*tter for a few years. Earlier vehicles delivered more power and better mileage, but someone concluded that the nitrogen oxides thrown out the tailpipe of a lean-running, high-compression engine were a Bad Thing.
I've considered giving Linux a shot at video editing, but haven't found an MPEG-2 encoder yet (which would be needed for making SVCDs). I've tried getting TMPGEnc working under Wine, but have been less than successful. A quick check of the Kino website indicates some level of MPEG-2 support...any ideas as to how it compares to TMPGEnc for speed and quality?
Avisynth has also been useful for various NLE and filtering tasks...is something similar available for Linux?
You must have a different definition of "crap" than most people. I've found VirtualDub and Avisynth to be pretty decent. Avisynth, in particular, offers some fairly nifty editing capabilities...one script I've written for it takes two AVIs and overlays them on a third AVI. (It's designed to mimic the appearance of a Win2K desktop running some video-telephony software I wrote...a conversation is captured with the software and converted to a pair of AVIs.) More frequently, I use it to cut the ads out of TV shows captured by my TiVo or my All-In-Wonder and to do inverse 3:2 pulldown. The script then gets loaded into TMPGEnc for compression to SVCD.
Unless you're willing to pay through the nose for a pair of the fastest Xeons, you don't want Intel processors for video editing/encoding. OTOH, the dual Athlon MP 2100+ I have at home hauls ass...over 30 fps for two-pass XviD encoding and somewhere around 6 fps for two-pass VBR MPEG-2 encoding with TMPGEnc at its highest-quality settings. The processors and motherboard were under $700 (it was an upgrade from a single 1.0-GHz Athlon) a few months ago; you could more than likely get something even faster for less money now.
(If you're in Las Vegas and considering something similar, the residential-grade service from Cox (the one that uses the cheap cable modems you find in stores) most likely won't work. If Cox issued you a Com21 cable modem (which costs a bit under $300 if you want to buy one), you're getting their business-grade service and can pretty much do what you want (though you'll need a static IP to run an SMTP server). The strange part is that the last time I checked, there's no difference in cost between the two types of service.)
We do something similar with the cable-modem connection at work. For a low-to-medium-traffic site, there's no reason to not use your existing broadband connection. Having your servers onsite makes keeping an eye on them much easier.
Only if you want pay-TV channels and/or pay-per-view. Since everything else on an analog-cable network is sent in-the-clear, if you're only interested in keeping up with South Park and Iron Chef, you can run the cable straight from the wall into your TV/VCR/TiVo/etc. I did that for years until I saw something on digital cable that I wanted.
You might try getting a copy of this Monty Python sketch...
Quit yer trolling. Around here, I see many more older American cars on the streets than older imports. I usually run across another '77 Cutlass once or twice a week...and that's just one model from one year. Most of 'em are putting less crap into the air than the typical riced-out Civic or Corolla that's less than half as old, too, and they'll keep on going long after your average ricer has fallen apart at the side of the road. Maybe you don't mind sending your money to Tokyo every five or ten years, but I expect my vehicles to last longer than that...and I'd rather support our economy than someone else's.
The Tungsten T has a headphone jack. That way, when you're stuck next to some Olde Pfarte on a transcontinental flight, Granny won't keel over and assume room temperature when you start playing "Back in Black."
(Ogg zealots can shut up right now...I have >10GB of MP3s on hand, and I'm not reripping/reencoding them.)
If that last line is supposed to be his phone number, isn't the obviously bogus number some sort of violation of whatever rules DNS runs under? The last time I bought a domain name, the signup form made a big stink about making sure that all of the contact info was valid. Maybe we can get whoever issued anti-leech.com to take it back. :-)
The name overloading is also a potential source of confusion..."SuperDrive" originally referred to the 3.5" high-density floppy drive (1.4 MB vs. 800K) that Apple started shipping in the early 90s IIRC. The same thing happened with AppleWorks...the copy of AppleWorks I have isn't a relabeled ClarisWorks. It was derived from III EZ Pieces (an integrated-software package for the Apple III) and runs on the Apple II.
Considering that (int)1/(int)2==0, y should equal zero. int y=0.5*x would produce the expected result (with a compiler warning about the lossage that you'll get going from double to int). It also eliminates a division operation.
As long as you know the precedence rules and the way that values are typed (constants are treated as integers unless there's a fractional part or unless they're cast as floats), the way C handles math makes plenty of sense.
MaGlobe has plenty of PoPs, and you only pay for the time that you're dialed in. If your primary net access is through some sort of broadband (cable, xDSL, etc.), prepaid dial-up makes more sense than shelling out $20+ per month for conventional dial-up access.
(If the two companies decide to split up in the future (as has been rumored), I'd reconsider. Until then, AOHell isn't getting any of my money. They're worse than Microsoft...at least Microsoft doesn't have a stranglehold on the media.)
Sounds like you need to replace your proxy server.
(I speak from experience when I say that MS Proxy Server blows goats...you can pretty much forget about connecting non-Win32 boxen to the Internet through it. Get Squid up and running; it's available for Win32 and will run alongside Proxy Server if necessary. Better yet, replace your NT or Win2K firewall (Windows boxen don't belong directly on the Internet anyway) with a Linux box running Squid and ipmasq...you can install it on that 486 that's been gathering dust for the past few years. It plays nicely with everything...Win32, MacOS, Linux, BSD, whatever.)
Better yet, Mozilla ought to use the text in the ALT attribute. At least in the context of an IMG element, the TITLE attribute is redundant. Since ALT is required for IMG elements anyway, why would you use <img width=80 height=60 src="foo.png" alt="foo" title="foo"> when <img width=80 height=60 src="foo.png" alt="foo"> conveys the same information?
(I was wondering where the tooltips for the icons at the top of every /. page had gone. Mozilla must be the only browser that doesn't render ALT attributes as tooltips.)
Fry's needs to hurry up and finish its Las Vegas store (215 and Las Vegas Blvd., if you're curious). Once it's open, I'll never need to enter a local Radio Shack ever again. :-)
It does that if you're still using Win9x. I'm formatting a floppy on a Win2K box right now, and CPU usage is fluctuating between zero and 9% (probably to keep the formatting dialog and task manager windows updated).
If you're running Linux, khttpd is perfect for serving up the 1x1 transparent PNGs, null scripts, etc. that are used by ad filters such as the one described here.
(I haven't updated the block list as often since switching to Mozilla, though...Mozilla does a good job killing pop-ups, and most banner ads reside on relatively few servers.)
Guess again. You can pick up the local-oscillator signal from a superheterodyne receiver (that's everything from the 50-year-old tube radio on my kitchen shelf to the transistor radio you had as a kid to the digitally-tuned radio in your car, your Walkman, etc.) and deduce the frequency to which it is tuned. The local oscillator (a type of variable-frequency oscillator) is mixed with everything that's on the antenna. A tuning circuit then picks off one signal whose frequency is the difference between the local-oscillator frequency and the transmitting frequency of the station you've selected. Since the local oscillator isn't an intentional transmitting source, the output level is very low...but it is present and ought to be detectable with sufficiently sensitive equipment. The presence of a few dozen radios on the same frequency would help it out a bit, too.
If you want to defeat this type of system, you'd want a radio that doesn't use a local oscillator. Good luck finding a TRF or crystal-set head unit for your car. :-)
(As an experiment, take two AM radios and put them next to each other. Tune one to a station somewhere on the upper half of the dial. Tune the other to a frequency 455 kHz lower. The local oscillator of the second radio swamps out the station tuned in on the first radio, so the station should fade away and be replaced with silence. You could also try doing the same thing with FM, but tune the two radios 10.7 MHz apart. 455 kHz is the standard intermediate frequency (IF) for medium-wave AM, while 10.7 MHz is the standard intermediate frequency for FM.)
We got along just fine as a nation without most of those for over 100 years (sales tax is a state/local issue). I don't see how the government's involvement has done anything other than drive down quality and create a dependency among some on an ever-expanding government that robs the rest of us of our freedoms. (This is especially true of education. Which do you suppose is worse for society: no education or a sh*tty education in which kids are indoctrinated with the "values" of the nanny state and not taught to think for themselves? They can't add two and two and they can't construct a grammatically-correct sentence with properly-spelled words, but they sure do feel good about themselves, don't they? Besides, we already have historical proof that a lack of public education does not imply a population of drooling ignoramuses.)
Like the Social Security tax, which is only on the first $90k or so of your income? (Never mind that if you or I tried to start something like Social Security, we'd be shut down for operating an illegal pyramid scheme. You'd do just as well for yourself if you responded to the make-money-fast spams in your inbox.)
You neglected to mention that the flat-tax proposals that have been floated so far usually include a fairly sizable exemption for the first $15k or so of income...they're not truly flat. Your hypothetical $15k earner would pay $0 under most proposals, while your $15M earner would pay a little bit less than $3M.
It's worth mentioning that a dollar circulating in the private economy is more productive than a dollar in the government's grubby fingers. In the private sector, it bounces around between employers and employees. It can also be invested in the growth of a business. The government also engages in some of this activity, but it tends to be less efficient in its use of money.
Sounds like the typical debating style of a left-winger...since you have no ideas of your own, you instead attempt to silence those who do. Where's this "tolerance" for diverse opinions I keep hearing about?
That sounds suspiciously like "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." I'm fairly sure the economic system espoused by the individual who made that statement has been thoroughly discredited by now. At the very least, it was rejected by the voters earlier this month (in most places, anyway).
If you have a Palm, this would be cheaper than what's likely to become the next Evercrack...