every buy a DVD these days and try and skip the trailers and adverts and crap?
"Try?" There is no trying involved...press a couple of keys and you're at the main menu, as long as your DVD player doesn't suck. (My current "DVD player" is my MythTV box. Before that, it was an Apex AD-600A.)
If you're going to roll your own DVR, why on earth would you build it around Windows? Do it right...put Linux and MythTV on it. You'll never have to worry about what dirty tricks Microsoft will pull next, and MythTV's built-in video editor imports commercial-flagging data with a single keypress. Tweak the edit points so they're where you want them, set a lossless-transcode job to do the edit (including frame-accurate HDTV-compatible MPEG-2 MP@HL editing), and you can knock the average recording's filesize down by a third without incurring the quality loss associated with reencoding.
I can't understand why people pay for stuff like this.
They pay for crapware like this for the same reason they pay for those crappy boxed "DVD copy" programs (that won't actually copy most DVDs) that won't do what DVD Decrypter & DVD Shrink do for free. They pay for crapware like this for the same reason they pay for Windows when Linux will usually do everything they want for free.
At, say, 120kv, your house circuit need only handle 20A (ie: 120kv by 0.02A is 20A at 120v.
120 kV tends to only get used for long-distance power transmission lines and such. It's stepped down to somewhere around 3-5 kV at the nearest substation, and stepped down again to 240V (with a center tap for all of your 120V stuff) where it enters your house. It's not likely that they'd step it back up at the "pole pig." If they could safely run 120 kV to your house, they could get rid of most of the substations.
TFA stated a capacity of 15 kWh. Charging that in 10 minutes means you're drawing 90 kW, which works to a current draw (@ 240 V) of 375 A. Most homes aren't wired to the grid to pull nearly that much current; for instance, my two-bedroom condo (with all-electric appliances) is connected through a 150-A main breaker. Even a larger home isn't likely to need much more than 200-A or 250-A service, and that's to power your whole house--A/C, water heater, stove, clothes dryer, and everything else. If you have some gas appliances instead of electric, your electric utility connection is likely to be lower-current-capable.
90 kW is a sh*tload of electric power to handle. If you have an electric stove, take a look at the plug it uses sometime. Next, consider that the stove probably pulls only about a tenth as much power (mine says 9.6 kW). What kind of connector would be needed to safely carry 90 kW? Keep in mind that it also will need to handle being connected and disconnected frequently...much more so than your stove, which will probably be plugged and unplugged only once in its lifetime.
Can you imagine the huge hit on performance that would be? Every memory access has to be accompanied by a decrypt, every memory write accompanied with an encrypt. It will set back PC performance by many years.
...and this would be different from any other Windows release how, exactly?
Junk faxing actually predates email spam, and we got laws prohibiting it quite a while ago.
...and a fat lot of good they did, too. I ended up setting up an old computer at work with a modem and mgetty to receive faxes, so that the numerous junk faxes at least wouldn't waste paper & ink.
(I see the "Global Worming" crowd has attacked...nice.)
Science is DRIVEN by consensus.
Bullshit. If a hundred scientists (or a thousand, or a hundred thousand) decided tomorrow on a consensus that the sun revolves around the earth, would that make it true? Of course not. Science is about the provable and repeatable. If I can formulate some experiment that proves some hypothesis, hand it over to J. Random Scientist and a few hundred of his closest friends, and they all get the same results (within some narrow margin of error), that's science. If I attach a lead weight by a string to a wheeled cart on a table, hang the weight over the end of the table (preferably running over a pulley to minimize friction), and observe that the cart accelerates at something fairly close to 9.8 m/s^2, that's science (high-school-physics-level science, admittedly). Conjecture based on limited and selective observation isn't.
Why do all of the temperature charts used by the "Global Wormers" start in the mid-19th century? Why do they never go back earlier than that, even when there are records that go further back that indicate that conditions were a fair bit warmer than they are today?
There's likely more "Global Worming" from all of the hot air spewed by agenda-driven "scientists" than from the sources they're alleging.
Finally, a quote to think about:
"Observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists--amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for 'harmony with nature'--there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon."
And wouldn't that apply to tivos, since most people get tivos from their cable company?
Cable companies rent out cable boxes with DVR functionality, but I've not heard of one that rents out DVRs built around TiVo's software. Calling a cable-company DVR a TiVo is like calling a Ford Pinto a Porsche 911.
like the ipod, you cannot move the music off of the player, only onto it.
You can retrieve music from an iPod. Copy everything under iPod_Control/Music to an empty directory (make sure hidden/system files are visible). The files will have odd names, but if you change settings in iTunes so that (1) it'll manage the directory structure of your music and (2) you point it at an empty directory, you can then drag-and-drop the stuff copied from your iPod into iTunes and let it rename/sort the files based on the stored metadata. (I'm sure there are better ways to do that job, but this method doesn't require additional software and is relatively simple.
I've wondered that for years. Or, maybe even better, put up a cantenna on a pole by the road and another at your house.
That might work if all you want is data. You'd need to get power to the AP, but since they usually pull no more than a few watts, a solar panel and a battery could work for that. For TV, though, you still need a cable run (unless you want to put something like a MythTV backend with some tuner cards out by the road, and then you'll need even more power to run that).
I know this from the experience of living in rural VT and writing to Comcast to ask specifically about getting cable, which is run to about 1 mile from my house. They wanted $64,000 to run the line (which is buried here, sadly) to my house.
I'll admit I could be talking out my *ss here, but is there any reason why you couldn't get a few boxes of RG-6, some couplers, and some weatherproof tape, dig a shallow trench (should be able to rent something motorized to do that job without killing yourself), and put the cable in yourself? If you leave the cable company with just a few tens of feet to cover from the road to the cable you put in, they should be able to connect you for a hell of a lot less than $64k. You're probably still looking at a few hundred dollars for materials, but that's still a couple orders of magnitude lower than $64k.
The problem is that all these cost saving measures are going to eliminate a huge number of jobs.
Considering how many of those jobs are currently filled by illegal aliens, I'm not so sure that their elimination would necessarily be a Bad Thing. Remove one of the incentives for them to come here, and maybe they'll decide to stay home instead.
I suspect the fit and finish would improve, too. Robots don't guzzle Tecate by the case and leave the empty cans inside the walls.
Is this a true beer? I don't know, but it's brewed by an extremely respected brewery and I can't wait to try the 750 mL bottle in my fridge.
I brought a bottle home from a recent trip and took it to a meeting of the local homebrew club last Friday. It got very favorable comments from everyone who tried it. As long as you don't go in expecting it to taste like anything you've had before, I don't think you'll be disappointed. I even think people who say they don't like beer might like it, but such a product is better off not wasted on them.:-)
How many Americans has BushCheneyRumsfeld's "quick little war" killed so far? More than 9/11.
It took nearly four years to get to this point. Bill Clinton's inaction and ineptitude in the years leading up to 9/11 got 3000 people killed in less than two hours. The two are hardly comparable.
"Scientific consensus" is the new "military intelligence." Science is not subject to consensus, especially the consensus of people who, by and large, are not specialists in the relevant fields and thus are often ill-informed on the matter at hand.
I don't know the exact circuit details but Commodore Amiga joysticks worked in a similar way, i.e. by timing the decay of a capacitor rather then using an a/d converter.
The joystick port on the Apple II uses a 555-compatible timer to dump a charge into an R/C network and count (with the host processor) how long it takes for the charge to run out. That's 30-year-old prior art.
That's odd. The HDTVs I looked at, and certainly the one I eventually bought, have either VGA or DVI-I sockets, so you can hook up a PC straight to it.
That may be the case, but not all VGA inputs take all the different resolutions you would expect. I got the cabling behind my parents' big-screen sorted out this past Christmas so they can actually watch HD on it for the first time in the four years they've had that TV. While reading the manual to figure out how to set up the inputs, I noticed that the VGA input only takes 640x480@60...odd, considering that it'll display 1080i on its component input (no DVI or HDMI here; it's too old). While that will work for DVD, it won't be so good for HDTV.
(Time Warner had previously sent out two installers, neither of whom could figure out how to connect one of their HD-compatible DVRs to the TV. One particularly clueless installer said that because nothing was color-coded, he couldn't figure it out. WTFSoF? The connectors on the TV, cables, and cable box were color-coded, not that that should make a difference. Was he color-blind? Dad had eventually gotten the TV working by running RG-6 coax from the cable box to the TV. You can laugh at driving an HD monitor with RF, but that was better than the barely-trained chimps from the cable company had managed to do.)
I'm not sure what you mean by "You can't put an effective muffler on a turbine engine." The turbine Chryslers back in the 60s had a waste-heat collection system on them that effectively muffled the turbine. In fact, the complaint from the testers was actually that they sounded like a vacuum cleaner.
They also suffered from sluggish acceleration, mostly as a result of driving the wheels directly from the engine. A turbine running at constant speed, powering an alternator which then powers one or more traction motors, wouldn't have that problem.
ISTR reading about a prototype or concept from Volvo several years ago (probably ten or more years ago, at this point) that had an alternator running at the same insanely high speed (tens of thousands of RPM) as a gas-turbine engine, so that a reduction gearbox (with its attendant losses) wasn't needed. I suspect the high cost of the materials needed to keep it from flying apart and becoming so much shrapnel kept it from going to production.
Think of a dentist who tells you never to scrape your teeth, especially with metal. You go in for a cleaning and they take out a metal hook and scrape your teeth.
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"Try?" There is no trying involved...press a couple of keys and you're at the main menu, as long as your DVD player doesn't suck. (My current "DVD player" is my MythTV box. Before that, it was an Apex AD-600A.)
That it's also free-as-in-speech is a nice bonus.
They pay for crapware like this for the same reason they pay for those crappy boxed "DVD copy" programs (that won't actually copy most DVDs) that won't do what DVD Decrypter & DVD Shrink do for free. They pay for crapware like this for the same reason they pay for Windows when Linux will usually do everything they want for free.
He doesn't live in the desert, either. Here, you're lucky to get 3 years out of a maintenance-free battery in a daily driver. Heat kills batteries.
120 kV tends to only get used for long-distance power transmission lines and such. It's stepped down to somewhere around 3-5 kV at the nearest substation, and stepped down again to 240V (with a center tap for all of your 120V stuff) where it enters your house. It's not likely that they'd step it back up at the "pole pig." If they could safely run 120 kV to your house, they could get rid of most of the substations.
TFA stated a capacity of 15 kWh. Charging that in 10 minutes means you're drawing 90 kW, which works to a current draw (@ 240 V) of 375 A. Most homes aren't wired to the grid to pull nearly that much current; for instance, my two-bedroom condo (with all-electric appliances) is connected through a 150-A main breaker. Even a larger home isn't likely to need much more than 200-A or 250-A service, and that's to power your whole house--A/C, water heater, stove, clothes dryer, and everything else. If you have some gas appliances instead of electric, your electric utility connection is likely to be lower-current-capable.
90 kW is a sh*tload of electric power to handle. If you have an electric stove, take a look at the plug it uses sometime. Next, consider that the stove probably pulls only about a tenth as much power (mine says 9.6 kW). What kind of connector would be needed to safely carry 90 kW? Keep in mind that it also will need to handle being connected and disconnected frequently...much more so than your stove, which will probably be plugged and unplugged only once in its lifetime.
Bullshit. If a hundred scientists (or a thousand, or a hundred thousand) decided tomorrow on a consensus that the sun revolves around the earth, would that make it true? Of course not. Science is about the provable and repeatable. If I can formulate some experiment that proves some hypothesis, hand it over to J. Random Scientist and a few hundred of his closest friends, and they all get the same results (within some narrow margin of error), that's science. If I attach a lead weight by a string to a wheeled cart on a table, hang the weight over the end of the table (preferably running over a pulley to minimize friction), and observe that the cart accelerates at something fairly close to 9.8 m/s^2, that's science (high-school-physics-level science, admittedly). Conjecture based on limited and selective observation isn't.
Why do all of the temperature charts used by the "Global Wormers" start in the mid-19th century? Why do they never go back earlier than that, even when there are records that go further back that indicate that conditions were a fair bit warmer than they are today?
There's likely more "Global Worming" from all of the hot air spewed by agenda-driven "scientists" than from the sources they're alleging.
Finally, a quote to think about:
"Observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists--amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for 'harmony with nature'--there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon."
DirecTV was using TiVo-based DVRs, but DirecTV != cable.
Cable companies rent out cable boxes with DVR functionality, but I've not heard of one that rents out DVRs built around TiVo's software. Calling a cable-company DVR a TiVo is like calling a Ford Pinto a Porsche 911.
That might work if all you want is data. You'd need to get power to the AP, but since they usually pull no more than a few watts, a solar panel and a battery could work for that. For TV, though, you still need a cable run (unless you want to put something like a MythTV backend with some tuner cards out by the road, and then you'll need even more power to run that).
I'll admit I could be talking out my *ss here, but is there any reason why you couldn't get a few boxes of RG-6, some couplers, and some weatherproof tape, dig a shallow trench (should be able to rent something motorized to do that job without killing yourself), and put the cable in yourself? If you leave the cable company with just a few tens of feet to cover from the road to the cable you put in, they should be able to connect you for a hell of a lot less than $64k. You're probably still looking at a few hundred dollars for materials, but that's still a couple orders of magnitude lower than $64k.
Considering how many of those jobs are currently filled by illegal aliens, I'm not so sure that their elimination would necessarily be a Bad Thing. Remove one of the incentives for them to come here, and maybe they'll decide to stay home instead.
I suspect the fit and finish would improve, too. Robots don't guzzle Tecate by the case and leave the empty cans inside the walls.
I brought a bottle home from a recent trip and took it to a meeting of the local homebrew club last Friday. It got very favorable comments from everyone who tried it. As long as you don't go in expecting it to taste like anything you've had before, I don't think you'll be disappointed. I even think people who say they don't like beer might like it, but such a product is better off not wasted on them. :-)
It took nearly four years to get to this point. Bill Clinton's inaction and ineptitude in the years leading up to 9/11 got 3000 people killed in less than two hours. The two are hardly comparable.
"Scientific consensus" is the new "military intelligence." Science is not subject to consensus, especially the consensus of people who, by and large, are not specialists in the relevant fields and thus are often ill-informed on the matter at hand.
The joystick port on the Apple II uses a 555-compatible timer to dump a charge into an R/C network and count (with the host processor) how long it takes for the charge to run out. That's 30-year-old prior art.
10/3/2 = 10/6 = 5/3 = 1.666666....
With Jabba the Hutt instead of Rosie O'Donnell? Oh, wait...
That may be the case, but not all VGA inputs take all the different resolutions you would expect. I got the cabling behind my parents' big-screen sorted out this past Christmas so they can actually watch HD on it for the first time in the four years they've had that TV. While reading the manual to figure out how to set up the inputs, I noticed that the VGA input only takes 640x480@60...odd, considering that it'll display 1080i on its component input (no DVI or HDMI here; it's too old). While that will work for DVD, it won't be so good for HDTV.
(Time Warner had previously sent out two installers, neither of whom could figure out how to connect one of their HD-compatible DVRs to the TV. One particularly clueless installer said that because nothing was color-coded, he couldn't figure it out. WTFSoF? The connectors on the TV, cables, and cable box were color-coded, not that that should make a difference. Was he color-blind? Dad had eventually gotten the TV working by running RG-6 coax from the cable box to the TV. You can laugh at driving an HD monitor with RF, but that was better than the barely-trained chimps from the cable company had managed to do.)
Are you sure about that?
You said your grandfather is using TurboTax. The retail box includes both Win32 and Mac OS X versions.
They also suffered from sluggish acceleration, mostly as a result of driving the wheels directly from the engine. A turbine running at constant speed, powering an alternator which then powers one or more traction motors, wouldn't have that problem.
ISTR reading about a prototype or concept from Volvo several years ago (probably ten or more years ago, at this point) that had an alternator running at the same insanely high speed (tens of thousands of RPM) as a gas-turbine engine, so that a reduction gearbox (with its attendant losses) wasn't needed. I suspect the high cost of the materials needed to keep it from flying apart and becoming so much shrapnel kept it from going to production.
Is Bill Cosby posting to /. under a pseudonym now?