Is it really the keyboard that causes carpal tunnel syndrome? I've been going with a regular keyboard since my first computer (~10 years), and I'm just fine.
Maybe some people are just more prone to carpal tunnel than others. Maybe it's just really bad typing habits (or not, because I think mine are horrible;).
I've logged close to 20 years behind keyboards of varying quality (from IBM Model Ms on down to the membrane "keyboards" on Atari 400s) and haven't ever run into any problems. I suspect an "ergo-nazi" would think my home setup is atrocious (a wooden desk that's probably twice as old as I am, with the keyboard in a pull-out pencil tray and the mouse on a pull-out writing board above the drawers, with a couple more computers and their keyboards up on the desk), but it's worked for me since 1985. (Before that, my 99/4A lived on a TV tray.:-) ) I took a typing class in '87 or so, but I think the main thing I got from that was faster typing. I don't think it's made me any more or less susceptible to the injuries that some people claim.
Try switching from Mandrake to SuSE without pulling out a few hairs relearning where all the init scripts are kept and how the system is configured and maintained.
Going from SuSE to LFS wasn't as bad as you might think. The main difference that I can recall is that the scripts that control various services live in/sbin/init.d on a SuSE box, but/etc/init.d on an LFS box.
The biggest difficulty is dealing with the automated config software that most distros use. I can usually set up most things on a SuSE box through YaST, but I haven't figured out whatever config utilities are used by the one Redh*t box at work that I haven't nuked yet. (Then again, I ran SuSE at home for a couple of years. I ran Slackware before that, and SLS before that. I've never installed Redh*t or had to deal with it prior to my current job.) I'd still rather tweak the different config files manually for the few apps that need adjustment, though; it's usually easier to dial in the exact setup you want that way. That's why most of the Linux machines I control run LFS now (the only exceptions are the aforementioned Redh*t box and an ancient 486 print server that was set up with Slackware because I didn't want to wait for that slug to build LFS).
Hmmm. I remember the days before the web became popular and there were so few people on usenet groups that you generally did just trust them.
I remember sending real cash through the mail to someone in the states and they sent me a tape in return. Never even crossed my mind that anyone on usenet could be dishonest, as I read so many of their postings that I just trusted them.
I used to do a fair bit of trading through comp.sys.apple2.marketplace and misc.forsale.computers. I'd characterize it as having had about the same risk level as eBay...you were more likely to run into goods damaged in transit than to come across an out-and-out crook. (Not that the crooks didn't exist...tried buying a 16-meg SIMM from someone who ended up fleecing a small group of people. $350 would've been a good price at the time (early '96)...looking back, it was probably too good. Chris Dawson, if you're reading this, you're a punk.:-P)
PayPal's not the only payment option...hell, depending on the seller, it might not even be available for a particular item. eBay has its own payment system and there are several others. (Of course, you could also cut a check or buy a money order...but the delay involved in sending them through the mail makes them somewhat less popular than they used to be.)
FWIW, I've never had any trouble in my dealings with PayPal. Then again, you hear people bitch about IBM Deskstar 75GXPs or Easy CD Creator all the time, and I've never had any trouble with those either (couldn't get ECDC working on WinXP, but v4.05 runs fine on Win2K as long as your drive is old enough...it works with the Lite-On 12x at home, but not the Lite-On 32x at work).
Just b/c I had to pay $310 this week to replace my alternator, doesn't mean that part costs GM even half as much to make.
Was it gold-plated or something? The last time I replaced an alternator, it couldn't have cost more than $40...it was probably a little less than that.
According to the article, the maximum power output of the car's fuel cell is 55kW, which is much more than the peak consumption of most homes (That is 500 Amps @ 110V).
Obviously, this could not be used for all home energy, as some devices (like refrigerators) run while the householder is not home, but it would let many people reduce their dependency on fixed electricity grids.
If you have it charge a rack of batteries with some of that excess power, you'd be able to keep the fridge, the A/C, and your personal Beowulf cluster grinding away while you're out and about.
"The car broke down once, as the team approached the Nevada border on the first day. Water got into a connector that had to be replaced, which cost the team about a day of traveling time. The team also replaced two belts, four fuel filters and a plastic bottle that contains cooling water."
That's funny...I'd swear the star up front had three points, not five. Get back under your bridge, troll.
I know someone whose brand-new Xterra spent a fair chunk of its first month in the shop (three trips to fix a transmission problem) and who's also run into assorted problems with other imports he's owned...considering that the Xterra replaced a Pathfinder that also caused no end of problems, I really have to wonder why he didn't just save himself lots of trouble and get a Blazer instead. My parents have had one of those for 14 years and close to 200k miles, and it's never needed anything more than oil changes and other periodic maintenance.
The quicker it get's adopted, the faster progress will be made in the power of these cars.
55 kW is not enough for me. My car has about 154 kW and that is not even enough.
Indeed. 74 hp (55 kW, as you put it) is about what you'd get out of a Chevette. Back when I had a Chevette, it got the job done, but it didn't exactly set any speed records. 206 hp is fairly decent, though...I get a little more than that (220 hp) out of my S10, and it has no trouble getting up to speed or staying there.
Some more intellegent states have removed the daytime speed limit on interstate straightaways.
IIRC, the only state that did that was Montana, and it only lasted for a year or two. Driving in Nevada, Arizona, and California, the highest speed limit I've seen is 75 and I've not seen any road with no posted speed limit. (Having no speed limit doesn't do much good for a state's speeding-ticket revenue. They've gotten themselves addicted to the extra money and don't want to give it up.)
Few people are going to buy the Civic HEV or the Insight. In 2-3 years, GM will probably have as many hybrid electric city buses as Honda has sold subcompact hybrids. I believe GM's estimates were that converting one large city to hybrid buses would save more fuel and reduce emissions more than *thousands* of Honda subcompacts. Why?
Because the buses are much larger (need the boost in fuel economy more), and run much more often (Hours on end, as opposed to a Honda owner commuting 15-60 minutes each way to work and running errands around town.)
...not to mention that most buses are considerably dirtier than most cars. Every time a diesel-powered bus accelerates from a stop, it throws off a cloud of thick black smoke. When you consider how frequently these buses stop (not just for traffic lights, but also between lights to pick up and drop off passengers), they're pumping much more crud into the air than you do in your daily commute. The only time most cars and light trucks even come close to that level of pollution is if they're driven hard and poorly maintained.
Have you seen a DVD lately? They have unskippable crap brfore you get to a menu, and unskipable copyright warnings.
An Apex AD600A (and maybe other Apex models as well) will take you right past that crud 95% of the time. Hit PBC OFF twice, then hit DVD DIGEST. This also works with RCE DVDs that don't like your region-free ROMs.
I wonder, if it could be demonstrated that expanding welfare would decrease crime and societal friction (and result in lower taxes because of reduced need for spending on law enforcement), would you allow your pocketbook to vote for expanding welfare?
Considering that all of the available evidence to date points to the opposite conclusion...no.
maybe some of the reason it takes so long to get anywhere in the US is that everyone drives so slow!
Point taken, especially when you get anywhere near a concentration of old farts (basically, anyplace with "Sun City" in the name). It wasn't like this in most places before 1974, though.
Whether at 75 or 95+, though, it's still a long haul from point A to point B most of the time (4.5 hours to LA, 6 hours to Phoenix, etc.). (That one-day drive from England to Germany in my original post was in a Chevette that didn't want to be pushed much past 65, BTW.)
it wouldn't be that hard to record the stream on a network level. As I understand it, you can rig squid to cache realplayer
Yes, this would work, but it would be kind of like using a sledgehammer to swat a mosquito..
A better solution is epoxy, which I used on Movie88 with great success.
I told FlashGet to download through Muffin, a Java-based HTTP proxy. Set Muffin to rewrite the user-agent string as "RMA/1.0 (compatible; RealMedia)" and you should be good to go. Set RealPlayer to use Muffin as an HTTP proxy so you can get the URL to feed to FlashGet.
I think what he meant was have the movie of DVD, and route the output of the DVD player (analog) to a capture card in the PC. Then, stream the analog signal (comrpessed in real time and sent out digitally on the internet...) in a 'live broadcast' kind of way, as opposed to storing the encoded version on the PC and playing that on demand.
The reason to do that is that it requires less server power, if my understanding is correct.
You're kidding, right? Far more compute power would be needed to encode live video and stream it than would be needed to simply stream some video that's already in compressed form on your hard drive. Besides, under that situation, if 100 people want to watch $MOVIE, you would end up encoding it 100 times—and probably at lower quality than if you spent the time to encode it once and buffered it for playback on request.
Besides, why would you capture the output from a DVD player when you can easily (and quickly) rip the DVD and reencode from the MPEG-2 data on it?
The only time live encoding makes sense is if your source material is live...whether it's a news site, a cam girl site, or whatever, live is the only option you have. If your source material is prerecorded and you want to stream it, it makes sense to encode it once and put the already-encoded video up for streaming or download.
I'll have to check it out and give it a try.. Theres some newer movies recently released I'd like to take a look at.
I still have some downloads from when they were at movie88.com (they used HTTP streaming with Apache, not RTSP streaming with RealServer, so capturing the streams was trivial). They're typically encoded at 320x240, and their DVD rips were usually open-captioned (English voice, English captions...that makes a whole lot of sense). If it's something you can't get any other way, it might be worth archiving. Otherwise, keep looking.
Nobody making more than 70k a year should be able to vote. Especially you.
FWIW, I make somewhat less than that (not that what I make is any of your business or anyone else's). Thanks for playing, though. When's the last time you got a job from a poor person? (Wait a sec...you probably still live with your parents because you've been unable or unwilling to get or keep a job, so it doesn't make sense to ask you that question. At best, you're mooching off your shack-up girlfriend until she gets the good sense to drop you like a bad habit.)
BTW, we fought a little war a couple hundred years ago over, among other things, taxation without representation. Pray that your vision doesn't become reality, unless you want to see another little war pop up.
By the way, I'd be money that you're guilty of at least on felony. Most people are.
You keep telling yourself that...are you sure you're not engaged in a little projection? Not everybody lives your undoubtedly hedonistic lifestyle.
you don't seem to realise that MPEG2 over OMDF is a EUROPEAN standard too. Europe is both physically and economically larger than the USA and we have a larger population, too. What's the USA's excuse for not implementing GSM? Europe didn't semm to have too many problems...
When your phone networks are government-owned monopolies, it's much easier to impose a single standard than when you have three or four companies competing for market share. FWIW, the cellular industry managed to settle on AMPS as the analog standard sometime in the early-to-mid-'80s. By the time digital technologies came along, the carriers decided to adopt competing technologies (GSM is one of them) to attempt to stake out competitive advantages. The fact that most of the United States isn't anywhere near as densely populated as Europe also doesn't help things here (BTW, if you added up the EU countries, they don't cover anywhere near the land area covered by the US. You can easily drive from England to Germany in a day, going through France, Belgium, and Luxembourg to get there (been there, done that). It'd take me a day just to get from Las Vegas to Reno...and that's just one state out of 50.)
I dont know of a single person, anywhere, that owns a digital television.
You do now. I bought one last month, and so did a friend of mine. Another friend bought his last year; he kind of opened the flood gates for us. I watched the SuperBowl in January, 2001, in HD at another friend's place. He's our early adopter.
I'm not sure where you live or what kind of friends you have, but HDTV is more common than you realize.
It all depends on where you are and what's available locally. I know someone with a HD-capable monitor (60" widescreen Toshiba), but he hasn't bothered getting a HD receiver to go with it. There's only one HD broadcaster in town ATM, and while I'm sure that JAG in HD is nice, it's not thousands-of-dollars nice. The widescreen capability ends up only getting used with DVDs. As for me, I have a 27" Akai (the one with a widescreen mode that squishes the vertical scan) that plays anamorphic DVDs at full resolution and cost less than $400. It works well enough for me.
Nobody need buy a region restricted player any more.
In the UK I understand this is commonplace, but I don't think that's the case in the USA.
They're not as easy to find ("region-free" isn't something you'll see on the shelf tag), but you can find DVD players that are either (1) region-free out of the box or (2) can be upgraded by various means to be region-free (some are as simple as burning a CD-R with updated firmware). Your grandma probably won't know where to look for region-free DVD players, but she probably doesn't have non-R1 DVDs anyway. (I don't either, but I reserve the right to get my DVDs wherever I want. Jack Valenti can go fsck himself in the neck, and his minions can do the same.)
You've probably heard the argument before: as computers become cheaper, the cost of Microsoft products is going to become a considerable part of the cost of the computer.
"Is going to become"? It already is...consider this cost breakdown I posted over the weekend. For my hypothetical low-end machine (which isn't even as low-end as you can go), Win2K accounts for more than a fifth of the system cost. It's the most expensive item in the list. If you leave the monitor out of the list and consider just the computer and what goes into it, 27.3% of the cost is for Win2K. (You could get Win98, WinMe, or XP Home for less, but Win98's a bit long in the tooth and WinMe and XP (any version) blow chunks.)
"I agree that there may not be many gopher links that look like gopher links, but what stops the malicious from disquising their gopher links to look like regular hrefs?"
<a href="gopher://hostile-link" on mouseover status.text="http://www.friendlysite.com" return true>click here!</a>
Mozilla has a fix for that...under "Advanced: Scripts & Windows" in preferences, uncheck "allow webpages to change status bar text." It's also handy for getting rid of the annoying scrolling text that some sites like to put in the status bar. I want to know that a link goes where I want it to go and not to goatse.cx or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
It was Whitewater, not OJ.
I've logged close to 20 years behind keyboards of varying quality (from IBM Model Ms on down to the membrane "keyboards" on Atari 400s) and haven't ever run into any problems. I suspect an "ergo-nazi" would think my home setup is atrocious (a wooden desk that's probably twice as old as I am, with the keyboard in a pull-out pencil tray and the mouse on a pull-out writing board above the drawers, with a couple more computers and their keyboards up on the desk), but it's worked for me since 1985. (Before that, my 99/4A lived on a TV tray. :-) ) I took a typing class in '87 or so, but I think the main thing I got from that was faster typing. I don't think it's made me any more or less susceptible to the injuries that some people claim.
Going from SuSE to LFS wasn't as bad as you might think. The main difference that I can recall is that the scripts that control various services live in /sbin/init.d on a SuSE box, but /etc/init.d on an LFS box.
The biggest difficulty is dealing with the automated config software that most distros use. I can usually set up most things on a SuSE box through YaST, but I haven't figured out whatever config utilities are used by the one Redh*t box at work that I haven't nuked yet. (Then again, I ran SuSE at home for a couple of years. I ran Slackware before that, and SLS before that. I've never installed Redh*t or had to deal with it prior to my current job.) I'd still rather tweak the different config files manually for the few apps that need adjustment, though; it's usually easier to dial in the exact setup you want that way. That's why most of the Linux machines I control run LFS now (the only exceptions are the aforementioned Redh*t box and an ancient 486 print server that was set up with Slackware because I didn't want to wait for that slug to build LFS).
I used to do a fair bit of trading through comp.sys.apple2.marketplace and misc.forsale.computers. I'd characterize it as having had about the same risk level as eBay...you were more likely to run into goods damaged in transit than to come across an out-and-out crook. (Not that the crooks didn't exist...tried buying a 16-meg SIMM from someone who ended up fleecing a small group of people. $350 would've been a good price at the time (early '96)...looking back, it was probably too good. Chris Dawson, if you're reading this, you're a punk. :-P)
PayPal's not the only payment option...hell, depending on the seller, it might not even be available for a particular item. eBay has its own payment system and there are several others. (Of course, you could also cut a check or buy a money order...but the delay involved in sending them through the mail makes them somewhat less popular than they used to be.)
FWIW, I've never had any trouble in my dealings with PayPal. Then again, you hear people bitch about IBM Deskstar 75GXPs or Easy CD Creator all the time, and I've never had any trouble with those either (couldn't get ECDC working on WinXP, but v4.05 runs fine on Win2K as long as your drive is old enough...it works with the Lite-On 12x at home, but not the Lite-On 32x at work).
Was it gold-plated or something? The last time I replaced an alternator, it couldn't have cost more than $40...it was probably a little less than that.
You'd need to find a hacker with a wife before that can happen...
If you have it charge a rack of batteries with some of that excess power, you'd be able to keep the fridge, the A/C, and your personal Beowulf cluster grinding away while you're out and about.
That's funny...I'd swear the star up front had three points, not five. Get back under your bridge, troll.
I know someone whose brand-new Xterra spent a fair chunk of its first month in the shop (three trips to fix a transmission problem) and who's also run into assorted problems with other imports he's owned...considering that the Xterra replaced a Pathfinder that also caused no end of problems, I really have to wonder why he didn't just save himself lots of trouble and get a Blazer instead. My parents have had one of those for 14 years and close to 200k miles, and it's never needed anything more than oil changes and other periodic maintenance.
Indeed. 74 hp (55 kW, as you put it) is about what you'd get out of a Chevette. Back when I had a Chevette, it got the job done, but it didn't exactly set any speed records. 206 hp is fairly decent, though...I get a little more than that (220 hp) out of my S10, and it has no trouble getting up to speed or staying there.
IIRC, the only state that did that was Montana, and it only lasted for a year or two. Driving in Nevada, Arizona, and California, the highest speed limit I've seen is 75 and I've not seen any road with no posted speed limit. (Having no speed limit doesn't do much good for a state's speeding-ticket revenue. They've gotten themselves addicted to the extra money and don't want to give it up.)
Damn crack-whore moderators are completely uncultured...
An Apex AD600A (and maybe other Apex models as well) will take you right past that crud 95% of the time. Hit PBC OFF twice, then hit DVD DIGEST. This also works with RCE DVDs that don't like your region-free ROMs.
Considering that all of the available evidence to date points to the opposite conclusion...no.
Point taken, especially when you get anywhere near a concentration of old farts (basically, anyplace with "Sun City" in the name). It wasn't like this in most places before 1974, though.
Whether at 75 or 95+, though, it's still a long haul from point A to point B most of the time (4.5 hours to LA, 6 hours to Phoenix, etc.). (That one-day drive from England to Germany in my original post was in a Chevette that didn't want to be pushed much past 65, BTW.)
I told FlashGet to download through Muffin, a Java-based HTTP proxy. Set Muffin to rewrite the user-agent string as "RMA/1.0 (compatible; RealMedia)" and you should be good to go. Set RealPlayer to use Muffin as an HTTP proxy so you can get the URL to feed to FlashGet.
You're kidding, right? Far more compute power would be needed to encode live video and stream it than would be needed to simply stream some video that's already in compressed form on your hard drive. Besides, under that situation, if 100 people want to watch $MOVIE, you would end up encoding it 100 times—and probably at lower quality than if you spent the time to encode it once and buffered it for playback on request.
Besides, why would you capture the output from a DVD player when you can easily (and quickly) rip the DVD and reencode from the MPEG-2 data on it?
The only time live encoding makes sense is if your source material is live...whether it's a news site, a cam girl site, or whatever, live is the only option you have. If your source material is prerecorded and you want to stream it, it makes sense to encode it once and put the already-encoded video up for streaming or download.
I still have some downloads from when they were at movie88.com (they used HTTP streaming with Apache, not RTSP streaming with RealServer, so capturing the streams was trivial). They're typically encoded at 320x240, and their DVD rips were usually open-captioned (English voice, English captions...that makes a whole lot of sense). If it's something you can't get any other way, it might be worth archiving. Otherwise, keep looking.
FWIW, I make somewhat less than that (not that what I make is any of your business or anyone else's). Thanks for playing, though. When's the last time you got a job from a poor person? (Wait a sec...you probably still live with your parents because you've been unable or unwilling to get or keep a job, so it doesn't make sense to ask you that question. At best, you're mooching off your shack-up girlfriend until she gets the good sense to drop you like a bad habit.)
BTW, we fought a little war a couple hundred years ago over, among other things, taxation without representation. Pray that your vision doesn't become reality, unless you want to see another little war pop up.
You keep telling yourself that...are you sure you're not engaged in a little projection? Not everybody lives your undoubtedly hedonistic lifestyle.
When your phone networks are government-owned monopolies, it's much easier to impose a single standard than when you have three or four companies competing for market share. FWIW, the cellular industry managed to settle on AMPS as the analog standard sometime in the early-to-mid-'80s. By the time digital technologies came along, the carriers decided to adopt competing technologies (GSM is one of them) to attempt to stake out competitive advantages. The fact that most of the United States isn't anywhere near as densely populated as Europe also doesn't help things here (BTW, if you added up the EU countries, they don't cover anywhere near the land area covered by the US. You can easily drive from England to Germany in a day, going through France, Belgium, and Luxembourg to get there (been there, done that). It'd take me a day just to get from Las Vegas to Reno...and that's just one state out of 50.)
It all depends on where you are and what's available locally. I know someone with a HD-capable monitor (60" widescreen Toshiba), but he hasn't bothered getting a HD receiver to go with it. There's only one HD broadcaster in town ATM, and while I'm sure that JAG in HD is nice, it's not thousands-of-dollars nice. The widescreen capability ends up only getting used with DVDs. As for me, I have a 27" Akai (the one with a widescreen mode that squishes the vertical scan) that plays anamorphic DVDs at full resolution and cost less than $400. It works well enough for me.
They're not as easy to find ("region-free" isn't something you'll see on the shelf tag), but you can find DVD players that are either (1) region-free out of the box or (2) can be upgraded by various means to be region-free (some are as simple as burning a CD-R with updated firmware). Your grandma probably won't know where to look for region-free DVD players, but she probably doesn't have non-R1 DVDs anyway. (I don't either, but I reserve the right to get my DVDs wherever I want. Jack Valenti can go fsck himself in the neck, and his minions can do the same.)
"Is going to become"? It already is...consider this cost breakdown I posted over the weekend. For my hypothetical low-end machine (which isn't even as low-end as you can go), Win2K accounts for more than a fifth of the system cost. It's the most expensive item in the list. If you leave the monitor out of the list and consider just the computer and what goes into it, 27.3% of the cost is for Win2K. (You could get Win98, WinMe, or XP Home for less, but Win98's a bit long in the tooth and WinMe and XP (any version) blow chunks.)
Mozilla has a fix for that...under "Advanced: Scripts & Windows" in preferences, uncheck "allow webpages to change status bar text." It's also handy for getting rid of the annoying scrolling text that some sites like to put in the status bar. I want to know that a link goes where I want it to go and not to goatse.cx or whatever.