I would guess that this is a method for creating what is effectively a wrapper for the DVD driver, perhaps more correctly a shim. This means that it appears to be a DVD drive to the OS, and a DVD player program to the drive. This method can be employed to any hardware device - even embedded DRM methods.
Now that you've put it that way, it's not even really a new idea (except for applying it to a DVD-ROM drive). Total Recorder has done basically the same thing with soundcards for a long time. It lets you save the audio from crippleware such as RealPlayer and Windows Media Player.
I've found the FM broadcast solutions for getting sound into your car stereo are very bad. I've tried a couple of low-end (~$20) solutions, such as the "SoundFeeder" or whatever, and have always ended up throwing them away.
I snagged an iRock 300W to feed audio from my Rio Volt into my truck's stereo. My only (minor) complaint is that it'll only run off of battery power, but that's solved with the use of NiMH or rechargeable-alkaline AAAs. As long as you pick an empty frequency for it, you're not going to hear static until you crank the volume up to near-ear-splitting levels.
why USB ?
because firewire you have to pay apple for every device you ship (unless your sony who apple love)
You say that as if 25 per port will make or break FireWire...the manufacturer of a FireWire device probably pays more than that for the connector. (While it's probably not the least expensive source for manufacturer-quantity buying, the cheapest price I found at DigiKey for board-mountable FireWire connectors was $1.152 each for quantities >=100.)
USB is a standard that is Open and backwards compatable and people love that because it works with all your old hardware
...unless your old hardware isn't USB. I'm a little bit pissed that the notebook I recently bought has no serial or PS/2 ports...that means you have to fork over extra $$$ to plug in a keyboard, mouse, or serial device (like a modem or the HotSync cradle for my Palm III). Besides, the last time I checked, the FireWire drivers in Linux are as open-source as the rest of the kernel. (After loading the kernel from a floppy, I booted SuSE 8.something from a FireWire HD. That'd be a nice solution for moving your Linux setup between computers...the only thing missing is the ability to boot from a FireWire (or USB, for that matter) device, which is a matter of BIOS support.)
And it transfers with USB 2.0, which is both faster than the iPod's FireWire, and is also more commonly available on the PC platform.
Neither are particularly common, except on the newest machines. FWIW, I had a FireWire hard drive and a FireWire webcam before I had anything USB...and the newest Mac I own (the only Mac I own, actually) is a Quadra 610, so that can't be the reason. As for the assertion that USB 2.0 is faster than FireWire, do you have any proof? On paper, USB 2.0 is supposed to be faster. Given the way USB works (CPU controls everything) vs. the way FireWire works (more intelligence in the controller), though, I doubt that USB 2.0 ever comes close to its stated maximum transfer speed.
Also, I wonder if anyone is actually going to spend the large sum of money needed to max this out when the 320GB drives are available.
YES, for the same reason people pay 250 dollars more for a P4 2.8 over a P4 2.53mhz. proc.
IMHO, 1.2TB would be better located on a file server or workstation than in a TiVo. With Ethernet or wireless networking added to a TiVo, you can always offload stuff you want to archive to somewhere else on the network. Edit, reencode, and burn to SVCD, and you can play an ad-free show in your DVD player. If the drives in your TiVo go tango-uniform one day, your SVCDs will still play just fine.
(I'd like to upgrade from TiVoNET to TurboNET sometime, though...even with the TiVo's fairly slow processor, the move to Fast Ethernet is still supposed to be good for a 2-3x speed increase. That'd be more useful to me than more storage. I already have 100GB in mine, and even with everything recorded at best quality, I'm not cramped for space. At most, I might stick another 100-120GB hard drive in.)
Seriously, I've heard 1ghz AMDs clank on OfficeXP and XP Home.
XP Home sucks ass on nearly everything you throw at it. Someone here at work still has it on his P4 notebook (he's not ready to nuke it because he's not sure if the jog wheel (it's a Sony) will work under Win2K), and even after turning off most of the chrome, it's still sluggish...even if all you do is click outside the Start menu to close it. The first thing I did with my notebook when I bought it was boot up a Linux CD to identify the hardware (/proc/pci), then pop in the Win2K install CD and nuke XP off of it. It's much more responsive than the aforementioned P4 notebook...and this one's a slower-clocked Athlon XP with SDRAM (non-DDR).
what Microsoft really needs is a/home directory like UNIX.
Something like c:\Documents and Settings, you mean? Not every app knows it's there, though most programs that try to save to My Documents will get redirected into that directory. (And what is with/. not accepting and other character entities?)
I have played on an AMD 1800 with 2 GB of ram a pair of 40Gig harddrives, striping ide array, G4 w/128MB of DDR. I had to max the resolution to slow it down in Unreal Tournament, just to live longer than 10 seconds. The first time I ever thought a machine was fast enough. But who can afford it?
An Athlon XP 1800 setup isn't expensive at all...$70 for the processor, $50 for the motherboard, $45 for 256 MB (or $100 for 512). Those are the low end of what's on Pricewatch, but buying from reputable dealers shouldn't cost too much more. That's quite a bit cheaper than what I put into a dual Athlon MP 2100 at home (about $650 for the motherboard and processors...already had the memory and other stuff).
(2 GB of RAM, BTW, is insane...if you're not serving up databases to dozens/hundreds of users at a time, why would you need that much? I wouldn't need it for the video editing & encoding I do, and I strongly doubt that mere games would use more than a mere fraction of it. Striped hard drives are nice, though...as long as you're aware that RAID-0 really isn't RAID (there's nothing redundant about RAID-0) and take the appropriate precautions.)
The Aztek was so bad dealers were putting them behind their lots to keep them out of sight. It makes you wonder how a vehicle universally regarded as disguisting made it through to production.
The really scary part is that people are buying them...I've seen more than a few of them around town. The Avalanche is selling in even greater numbers, even though it looks like a ricer on steroids. All I've ever bought is GM (currently have a '77 Cutlass Supreme and an '02 S10), but the Aztek and the Avalanche make you wonder what the designers were smoking.
You say that like its some sort of bad thing. Its a freaking free service what's to complain about?
I strongly doubt that. It's more likely that the 10-20 cents extra per gallon is added in.
Why would you want to pump your own gas? Trust me when its either 95F or 25F you sure as hell don't want to be standing outside.
95's nothing...get back to me when your temperatures hit 115. As for 25, it almost never gets that cold here. Given a choice, I'd rather pump my own gas than risk having some minimum-wage flunky spill gas all over the paint on my truck. Besides, I usually check the oil and other fluids while the gas is pumping, and I definitely wouldn't want the aforementioned minimum-wage flunky nosing around under the hood.
Of course the really low budget approach would be to get an LC and run MKLinux. Perhaps go upscale and get a 6100.
I have heard tell of MK gotten running on SE30s and I've seen it on later IIcis so clearly one could build a dual-boot MacOS/*nix box for about $50 if one really had nothing better to do or a truly tiny budget.
I've had both Debian and NetBSD running on my Quadra 610. They work in command-line mode, but they're sluggish as hell. I don't remember Linux being that slow on 486 systems...then again, the bus speed on a 68040 is half of the processor speed (vs. full speed for a 486DX).
(No, neither memory nor disk should be a bottleneck...I've maxed out the RAM at 68 megs and have a 1GB 5400-rpm hard drive installed. There is no L2 cache installed...nothing used has shown up and new cache modules cost >2x what I paid for the machine. I suspect L2 cache would speed it up considerably, but I can't justify the expense.)
I actually saw these with an ECS K7S5A. I think those boards are really neat but their QA SUCKS.
ECS has always been no more than one step above PC Chips...IIRC, they bought PC Chips a while back. We had a couple of P!!! servers at work that were built around ECS motherboards. (Don't blame me...they were purchased before I got there.) Both boards failed. One was replaced by the builder with another board of the same model and has worked OK since. When the other system started flaking out (when Linux starts acting funny, it's more than likely a hardware problem), I replaced the motherboard and processor with an MSI motherboard and a Duron...never a problem since. (At least that incident gave me an excuse to blow Redh*t off of that box and build LFS on it instead...also freed up lots of disk space because the moron who installed Redh*t on it gave about 10 GB of a 20-GB drive to/var.)
Are you sure that it is not your power supply? I have had "stinky computer" a few times before, and have noticed that it was the power supply burning in. It went away the more that I had it on.
If a power supply starts to smell, something in it is threatening to overheat. Replace it now, before it decides to kick the bucket and take the rest of the computer with it.
I didn't claim that there's any difference between the typical closed-source EULA and the typical open-source license WRT merchantability, fitness for purpose, etc. I was debunking the analogy made here to a car sold with a warranty vs. a car sold as-is, since both the closed-source and open-source products are offered as-is. The car with the warranty typically costs more, but you expect to pay more because it has the warranty. With closed-source software, your money doesn't buy you a comparable level of protection.
The only difference I see is that Microsoft can use a shift key, whereas RMS has a stuck CAPS LOCK.
Read my post again...the section of MS's EULA that I quoted was originally all-uppercase. I fixed it so that it was mixed-case. I also didn't insert <br> tags after each line (as you did), so that it'd wrap properly.
A few years back me and my buddy were tryin tape some gnarly moves up at squaw. I KNOW the battery was fully charged on the camcorder, and was working fine in the cabin.
The moment we hit the slopes it started to act real funny, suddenly turn off for no reason. It wasn't just limited to the camcorder either, my diskman was having difficulties too.
If you took it out of a padded bag that had recently been inside someplace, there's a chance some condensation might've caused the camcorder to act up. The elevated humidity of the warmer environment condensed on exposure to cold air. To keep from chewing up the tape and the heads, it'll shut off and refuse to start up until it's had a chance to clear up. As for the CD player, maybe the pickup lens fogged up for the same reason.
.. and has anyone else been completely screwed by the htmlization of email leading to 'unrecognized tags' being dropped.
It's their fault for using software that uses an HTML rendering engine to display email.:-P Then again, I've always used ":-)" and variants of it. I think I saw "<g>" only on GEnie...thought it ("<g>", that is) was ghey, so I didn't use it.
This is an excellent point. At least with proprietary software, with enough money you can FORCE a company that you bought software from to fix it. It happens all of the time with big companies... Problem with IIS? Well, a call from any grunt at IBM will get 'em moving. Problem with Apache? Nobody has any obligation whatsoever to fix it.
That's great...if you happen to be IBM. If you're Joe Schmuckboy, Microsoft is as likely to tell you to FOAD as it is to fix the problem. If they tell you to FOAD, what are you going to do about it? Aside from not buying their stuff ever again, what can you do about it?
Would you rather spend a little extra and get a car with a warranty, or a car "as is"?
You must never have seen the EULA associated with nearly every closed-source product. You get no warranty WRT the software's proper functionality or fitness for purpose. Don't believe me? Here's the relevant section of the EULA associated with downloads from Windows Update (edited into mixed-case):
Disclaimer of warranties. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Microsoft and its suppliers provide to you the OS Components, and any (if any) support services related to the OS Components ("Support Services") as is and with all faults; and Microsoft and its suppliers hereby disclaim with respect to the OS Components and Support Services all warranties and conditions, whether express, implied or statutory, including, but not limited to, any (if any) warranties, duties or conditions of or related to: merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, lack of viruses, accuracy or completeness of responses, results, workmanlike effort and lack of negligence. Also there is no warranty, duty or condition of title, quiet enjoyment, quiet possession, correspondence to description or non-infringement. The entire risk arising out of use or performance of the OS Components and any Support Services remains with you.
Exclusion of incidental, consequential and certain other damages. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, in no event shall Microsoft or its suppliers be liable for any special, incidental, indirect, punitive or consequential damages whatsoever (including, but not limited to, damages for: loss of profits, loss of confidential or other information, business interruption, personal injury, loss of privacy, failure to meet any duty (including of good faith or of reasonable care), negligence, and any other pecuniary or other loss whatsoever) arising out of or in any way related to the use of or inability to use the OS Components or the Support Services, or the provision of or failure to provide Support Services, or otherwise under or in connection with any provision of this Supplemental EULA, even if Microsoft or any supplier has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
Limitation of liability and remedies. Notwithstanding any damages that you might incur for any reason whatsoever (including, without limitation, all damages referenced above and all direct or general damages), the entire liability of Microsoft and any of its suppliers under any provision of this Supplemental EULA and your exclusive remedy for all of the foregoing shall be limited to actual damages incurred by you based on reasonable reliance up to the greater of the amount actually paid by you for the OS Components or U.S.$5.00. The foregoing limitations, exclusions and disclaimers shall apply to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, even if any remedy fails its essential purpose.
It seems pretty clear that you have no recourse if the updates made available manage to FUBAR your system (as Win2K SP3 did to several of my computers). Please explain how this is any different from the situation you face with open-source software, other than that open source doesn't tie you to the software vendor for support.
Correspondingly, you will find on every AMD CPU since the 486 days the text "Designed for Microsoft Windows" and a Windows logo, in order to reassure the buyer that even though they are not buying an Intel CPU, their computer is fully compatible with Industry-standard Microsoft software.
FWIW, that went out with the K6-III at the latest. None of the Athlons or Durons I've installed have had the Windows logo on them in any manner--not printed, not engraved.
Do the Sears Diehard batteries still have a lifetime guarantee?
AFAIK, no car battery carries a lifetime warranty anymore. The longest I've seen lately has been 7 years or so. You can get brake pads & shoes with lifetime warranties...given that they're known to wear out after a few years, you have to wonder why they still do that.
(The last lifetime-warranty battery I can recall was one my father bought at Kmart for his '73 Cutlass back in '76 or '77. Each time the battery conks out, he takes it in and gets another one free--no prorating or anything. It's been through several batteries over the past 25 years and will probably go through a few more in the years to come.)
Go to a restaurant in Europe, and the portions are about a third of what they would be in America.
That's because the food is so expensive. When I've travelled to Europe, I was appalled at how expensive everything was. Drinks were particularly expensive. In one place, it was like $8 for a small glass of coke!
I spent two years each in England and Germany in the mid-80s, and I don't recall eating out as being outrageously expensive. I suspect prices would be higher in the big cities (London, Paris, etc.), but the same is true here in the States (NYC, San Francisco, etc.). Elsewhere, pricing tended to be more reasonable. Europeans are ripped off in a number of ways (confiscatory tax rates, $5/gallon gasoline, expensive housing), but I don't think food was one of them.
Given the author's recommendation of FrontPage (ugh) as well as designing for a particular display resolution (resolution should be irrelevant), I'd think that throws the authoritativeness of the entire page into question.
It worked in all the current browsers a year ago.
but with IE 6 and the new netscape coming out - you would *THINK* there would be backwards compatability.
If you had written to the standards instead of just hacking something together until it worked in IE/NS $CURRENTVERSION, odds are pretty good that you wouldn't have this problem now.
I feel that there should be no additional charge for digital cable if they are going to shove advertisements down my throat every time I change the channel. I'll be switching back to satellite when my trial movie package expires.
Sounds like you need a TiVo. The guide that Cox uses with its digital-cable boxes isn't ad-infested, but navigation through it is still sluggish and show titles are often abbreviated to something that doesn't always make sense. The guide information that TiVo provides is more complete and can be browsed more rapidly.
...and if yours isn't magnetized, you can rub it against the speaker magnet (if it's the type where the magnetic material isn't fully enclosed in metal) a few times to get at least a weak magnetization on it. It'll hold a screw long enough to get it into place.
Back when I was digging into computers on an almost-daily basis, I found a Leatherman to be useful. It replaces half of the tools on your list, and you can carry it with you all the time.
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Now that you've put it that way, it's not even really a new idea (except for applying it to a DVD-ROM drive). Total Recorder has done basically the same thing with soundcards for a long time. It lets you save the audio from crippleware such as RealPlayer and Windows Media Player.
I snagged an iRock 300W to feed audio from my Rio Volt into my truck's stereo. My only (minor) complaint is that it'll only run off of battery power, but that's solved with the use of NiMH or rechargeable-alkaline AAAs. As long as you pick an empty frequency for it, you're not going to hear static until you crank the volume up to near-ear-splitting levels.
You say that as if 25 per port will make or break FireWire...the manufacturer of a FireWire device probably pays more than that for the connector. (While it's probably not the least expensive source for manufacturer-quantity buying, the cheapest price I found at DigiKey for board-mountable FireWire connectors was $1.152 each for quantities >=100.)
Neither are particularly common, except on the newest machines. FWIW, I had a FireWire hard drive and a FireWire webcam before I had anything USB...and the newest Mac I own (the only Mac I own, actually) is a Quadra 610, so that can't be the reason. As for the assertion that USB 2.0 is faster than FireWire, do you have any proof? On paper, USB 2.0 is supposed to be faster. Given the way USB works (CPU controls everything) vs. the way FireWire works (more intelligence in the controller), though, I doubt that USB 2.0 ever comes close to its stated maximum transfer speed.
IMHO, 1.2TB would be better located on a file server or workstation than in a TiVo. With Ethernet or wireless networking added to a TiVo, you can always offload stuff you want to archive to somewhere else on the network. Edit, reencode, and burn to SVCD, and you can play an ad-free show in your DVD player. If the drives in your TiVo go tango-uniform one day, your SVCDs will still play just fine.
(I'd like to upgrade from TiVoNET to TurboNET sometime, though...even with the TiVo's fairly slow processor, the move to Fast Ethernet is still supposed to be good for a 2-3x speed increase. That'd be more useful to me than more storage. I already have 100GB in mine, and even with everything recorded at best quality, I'm not cramped for space. At most, I might stick another 100-120GB hard drive in.)
TCH...is that anything like LDS?
XP Home sucks ass on nearly everything you throw at it. Someone here at work still has it on his P4 notebook (he's not ready to nuke it because he's not sure if the jog wheel (it's a Sony) will work under Win2K), and even after turning off most of the chrome, it's still sluggish...even if all you do is click outside the Start menu to close it. The first thing I did with my notebook when I bought it was boot up a Linux CD to identify the hardware (/proc/pci), then pop in the Win2K install CD and nuke XP off of it. It's much more responsive than the aforementioned P4 notebook...and this one's a slower-clocked Athlon XP with SDRAM (non-DDR).
Something like c:\Documents and Settings, you mean? Not every app knows it's there, though most programs that try to save to My Documents will get redirected into that directory. (And what is with /. not accepting and other character entities?)
An Athlon XP 1800 setup isn't expensive at all...$70 for the processor, $50 for the motherboard, $45 for 256 MB (or $100 for 512). Those are the low end of what's on Pricewatch, but buying from reputable dealers shouldn't cost too much more. That's quite a bit cheaper than what I put into a dual Athlon MP 2100 at home (about $650 for the motherboard and processors...already had the memory and other stuff).
(2 GB of RAM, BTW, is insane...if you're not serving up databases to dozens/hundreds of users at a time, why would you need that much? I wouldn't need it for the video editing & encoding I do, and I strongly doubt that mere games would use more than a mere fraction of it. Striped hard drives are nice, though...as long as you're aware that RAID-0 really isn't RAID (there's nothing redundant about RAID-0) and take the appropriate precautions.)
The really scary part is that people are buying them...I've seen more than a few of them around town. The Avalanche is selling in even greater numbers, even though it looks like a ricer on steroids. All I've ever bought is GM (currently have a '77 Cutlass Supreme and an '02 S10), but the Aztek and the Avalanche make you wonder what the designers were smoking.
I strongly doubt that. It's more likely that the 10-20 cents extra per gallon is added in.
95's nothing...get back to me when your temperatures hit 115. As for 25, it almost never gets that cold here. Given a choice, I'd rather pump my own gas than risk having some minimum-wage flunky spill gas all over the paint on my truck. Besides, I usually check the oil and other fluids while the gas is pumping, and I definitely wouldn't want the aforementioned minimum-wage flunky nosing around under the hood.
I've had both Debian and NetBSD running on my Quadra 610. They work in command-line mode, but they're sluggish as hell. I don't remember Linux being that slow on 486 systems...then again, the bus speed on a 68040 is half of the processor speed (vs. full speed for a 486DX).
(No, neither memory nor disk should be a bottleneck...I've maxed out the RAM at 68 megs and have a 1GB 5400-rpm hard drive installed. There is no L2 cache installed...nothing used has shown up and new cache modules cost >2x what I paid for the machine. I suspect L2 cache would speed it up considerably, but I can't justify the expense.)
ECS has always been no more than one step above PC Chips...IIRC, they bought PC Chips a while back. We had a couple of P!!! servers at work that were built around ECS motherboards. (Don't blame me...they were purchased before I got there.) Both boards failed. One was replaced by the builder with another board of the same model and has worked OK since. When the other system started flaking out (when Linux starts acting funny, it's more than likely a hardware problem), I replaced the motherboard and processor with an MSI motherboard and a Duron...never a problem since. (At least that incident gave me an excuse to blow Redh*t off of that box and build LFS on it instead...also freed up lots of disk space because the moron who installed Redh*t on it gave about 10 GB of a 20-GB drive to /var.)
If a power supply starts to smell, something in it is threatening to overheat. Replace it now, before it decides to kick the bucket and take the rest of the computer with it.
Read my post again...the section of MS's EULA that I quoted was originally all-uppercase. I fixed it so that it was mixed-case. I also didn't insert <br> tags after each line (as you did), so that it'd wrap properly.
If you took it out of a padded bag that had recently been inside someplace, there's a chance some condensation might've caused the camcorder to act up. The elevated humidity of the warmer environment condensed on exposure to cold air. To keep from chewing up the tape and the heads, it'll shut off and refuse to start up until it's had a chance to clear up. As for the CD player, maybe the pickup lens fogged up for the same reason.
It's their fault for using software that uses an HTML rendering engine to display email. :-P Then again, I've always used ":-)" and variants of it. I think I saw "<g>" only on GEnie...thought it ("<g>", that is) was ghey, so I didn't use it.
That's great...if you happen to be IBM. If you're Joe Schmuckboy, Microsoft is as likely to tell you to FOAD as it is to fix the problem. If they tell you to FOAD, what are you going to do about it? Aside from not buying their stuff ever again, what can you do about it?
You must never have seen the EULA associated with nearly every closed-source product. You get no warranty WRT the software's proper functionality or fitness for purpose. Don't believe me? Here's the relevant section of the EULA associated with downloads from Windows Update (edited into mixed-case):
It seems pretty clear that you have no recourse if the updates made available manage to FUBAR your system (as Win2K SP3 did to several of my computers). Please explain how this is any different from the situation you face with open-source software, other than that open source doesn't tie you to the software vendor for support.
FWIW, that went out with the K6-III at the latest. None of the Athlons or Durons I've installed have had the Windows logo on them in any manner--not printed, not engraved.
AFAIK, no car battery carries a lifetime warranty anymore. The longest I've seen lately has been 7 years or so. You can get brake pads & shoes with lifetime warranties...given that they're known to wear out after a few years, you have to wonder why they still do that.
(The last lifetime-warranty battery I can recall was one my father bought at Kmart for his '73 Cutlass back in '76 or '77. Each time the battery conks out, he takes it in and gets another one free--no prorating or anything. It's been through several batteries over the past 25 years and will probably go through a few more in the years to come.)
I spent two years each in England and Germany in the mid-80s, and I don't recall eating out as being outrageously expensive. I suspect prices would be higher in the big cities (London, Paris, etc.), but the same is true here in the States (NYC, San Francisco, etc.). Elsewhere, pricing tended to be more reasonable. Europeans are ripped off in a number of ways (confiscatory tax rates, $5/gallon gasoline, expensive housing), but I don't think food was one of them.
Given the author's recommendation of FrontPage (ugh) as well as designing for a particular display resolution (resolution should be irrelevant), I'd think that throws the authoritativeness of the entire page into question.
If you had written to the standards instead of just hacking something together until it worked in IE/NS $CURRENTVERSION, odds are pretty good that you wouldn't have this problem now.
Sounds like you need a TiVo. The guide that Cox uses with its digital-cable boxes isn't ad-infested, but navigation through it is still sluggish and show titles are often abbreviated to something that doesn't always make sense. The guide information that TiVo provides is more complete and can be browsed more rapidly.
Back when I was digging into computers on an almost-daily basis, I found a Leatherman to be useful. It replaces half of the tools on your list, and you can carry it with you all the time.