If you manually install updates by going to windowsupdate.com, it is entirely possible (though it takes about half a dozen clicks per patch) to download the patches for later use.
After a normal update run, you might check c:\WUTemp and see if the updates that were just installed are still there. I don't recall if Win2K behaves that way, but I think WinXP does. Using WindizUpdate instead of Windows Update will also save patches (useful when you have clean WinWhatever installs on different hardware and need to patch both, as you download only once).
If you are otherwise heating the house, the added heat of incandescants reduce the heating load of the other heating system.
OTOH, incandescents increase the load on your A/C the rest of the time. In warmer parts of the world (like just about anywhere in the southwest), that would be a much bigger loss than the gain you would see in the winter.
I tried a 4-pack of "nVision Soft White" bulbs from Home Depot and paid $4 (on special from the regular price of $8). The bulbs give off a color of light much closer to incandescent bulbs, which I prefer. These bulbs come on instantly with no delay or flicker, but are dimmer at first than the "Bright Effects" brand from Lowe's. After about 30 seconds, they are at full brightness.
Around here, Nevada Power is subsidizing CF lights pretty heavily, so you can get the aforementioned lights dirt-cheap. I just moved into a new condo, and replaced the half-dozen globe lightbulbs in each bathroom with CFs. Six-packs of 40W-equivalent CFs were $4 each IIRC. They don't have the plastic globes that the bulbs I used in the old condo have, but it cost somewhere around $25 to light up just one bathroom with those. For that price difference, I'll do without the globes (they were clear, so the coils on the bulb inside were still visible).
Bathroom lighting power requirements got knocked down from 240-300W per room (don't remember if the original bulbs were 40W or 60W each) to 60W (6x10W for the 40W-equivalent CF). That's nothing to sneeze at.
60W- and 100W-equivalent lights are going into the other fixtures as I get around to them. I've been using CFs (and some of their predecessors, like the circular lights with electronic ballast) for probably 12 years or so. In addition to using less power to start with, they produce less waste heat for the A/C to suck out (which is a little bit of extra savings).
I even purchased a single "bright light" and "broad daylight" CFL from Home Depot in the nVision brand. Those are much more bright and give off a (to me, more artificial looking) white light.
I have one of those in a lamp that I need to replace. Even with the lampshade in place, it still looks harsh. The other CFs I have produce a spectrum comparable to the incandescents they replace (you can confirm that by twiddling with the color-balance settings on your digital camera).
Depends on the culture, photo booths are prevalent in France (think plot of Amelie).
They're at many malls and train/subway stations. They seem to be the standard format
for (self-supplied!) pictures for IDs.
How often do you need to supply your own photo for something like that? The only time I recall having to do that was for my passport, and you can do that with your own camera as long as the result meets certain technical requirements. IIRC, passports are good for at least ten years. For your driver's license, the DMV has its own photo equipment. Ditto for the registrar's office and your student ID, if you're still in college.
Me too, that's why I purchased Chatter mail on my treo. Best $40 I've spent on software, ever.
I gave it a shot for a month. It works OK as a mail reader and for creating a new message, but it insists on creating replies in top-posting style and I can't find a way to change that misfeature. It doesn't even quote the original message properly (with ">" before each line), so creating a properly-formatted reply to someone else's mail is a major pain. I ended up going back to running Mutt on my mail server over an SSH connection (pssh kicks ass, and is free-as-in-speech).
Is there some option that I'm missing? (There is an option in Chatter that is supposed to properly format quotes, but it doesn't work.)
I heard a while back they were using devices to detect some of the transformers or whatever in a TV.
The horizontal-deflection circuit in a CRT-based TV produces a sawtooth-shaped wave at 15.75 kHz (NTSC) and/or 15.625 kHz (PAL). This gets pumped into the horizontal deflection coil, which makes a poor-to-fair antenna for radiating this signal.
It'd take a fairly big antenna to pick it up, so you could also listen for the TV-tuner IF (intermediate frequency), which should be a few tens of MHz (probably 38.9 MHz, from the sources I could find). There won't be a coil hanging off it to radiate it far, but I'd think a directional antenna pointed at a TV from a couple hundred feet away could pick up enough usable signal for a scanner to pick up.
Wonder if they can track LCD / Plasma TVs...
Not to avoid fees or anything....
They don't scan the screen in the same way, but they still have a tuner that spits out an IF signal inside them. Even if you don't actually use the tuner in your TV (I don't), you have a tuner in your other equipment (VCR, cable box, TiVo, TV-tuner card in a MythTV box, etc.) if you watch broadcast or cable TV. (Satellite TV is another matter, but it's obvious from the outside if you use that.)
I would rather be able to see when the element is on than risk my 2yo son burning his hand on one that looks like it's cool but isn't.
Assuming that he's tall enough to reach the burners in the first place, he should only make that mistake once. I think it's safe to say of all of us that we've "been there, done that," and we didn't turn out any worse for it.
You may have been facetious (I don't know), but you're not far from the truth (derived from source data here). The top 1% pay more than a third (34%) of the taxes, the top 5% pay a bit more than half (54%) of the taxes, and the top 50% pay nearly all (96%) of the taxes.
The Slashbots were about due for their Two Minutes Hate, though, and they tend to not let such insignificant things as facts get in their way.
I could run ProMash under Wine, but it has a problem with table formatting (columns of text in (for instance) the hop schedule don't line up properly) that I've not been able to fix. Icons on some buttons (like the refractometer calculation buttons) often are drawn as black blobs, too. I've ended up running it in Win2K under VMware (along with HCCP, which doesn't work at all with Wine), but if there's a way to fix the cosmetic glitches I'm having with it, I'm all ears. With that fixed and HCCP replaced with something Linux-native and less buggy (it's sufficiently buggy that the BJCP won't accept its XML output anymore, and you have to be careful how you add data so that it doesn't get confused), there'd be no reason to keep the Win2K VM on my notebook anymore.
You come home to find your living room carpet on fire, and your 5 year old with a box of matches in his hand. After a lot of frantic screaming, yelling, and putting the fire out, you ask your child what he was thinking.
He will just sit there, look at you, shrug, and say "I don't know".
Humm, interesting thought. So you think that using two cards in tandem would be more reliable than using one hybrid (analog+digital) card?
It's not so much that as that there is no card that does both, AFAIK. The A180 can capture NTSC on its composite and S-video inputs, but (1) it won't compress it (many HD capture cards use dumb-framegrabber chips like the SAA7134 and Bt878 as little more than PCI-to-GPIO interfaces, and hook up the composite and S-video inputs just because they're there), (2) it can't capture NTSC from the tuner, and (3) it can't capture HD while it's busy capturing NTSC.
I had heard a lot of noise about problems in v4l when you have more than one card (see the comments in the thread right above yours), so I hadn't really been looking at that angle at all.
I've heard similar stories of problems mixing capture devices in one system (here and elsewhere) before. Most of the problems have involved getting the pcHDTV cards to play nicely with other cards, IIRC. The only tricky (just slightly) thing I had to figure out with my setup was keeping the order in which capture devices are enumerated, and adding something like add below saa7134-dvb ivtv to/etc/modules.conf takes care of that.
It's somewhat ironic to me that there is better support (apparently) for some Windows-centric TV tuner cards (AverMedia, Hauppage), than for the ones made by pcHDTV specifically for Linux. I'm not sure what the lesson there is. I feel sorta bad for the pcHDTV folks, because from reading their forums I get the impression that they're really trying to do the right thing and support Linux well, and I'd love to support them financially, but it seems like providing in-house drivers for a community-developed application stack is a losing game: I wonder if they would be better not developing any drivers at all, and just releasing technical specs and letting the community do the driver development in sync with the backend.
More heads working on a problem, combined with more affordable hardware that more people can test, could be expected to produce better results more rapidly. It's getting to where just about anybody can throw together some chips and build a board. Since there aren't that many different chips that go into the different boards out there, it makes more sense to try to reuse other people's work on drivers than to try to reinvent the wheel. (Note, for instance, that while every slightly different Bt8x8-based framegrabber card needs a different Windows driver, nearly all of them work with the same bt8x8 driver under Linux. The amount of tweaking needed to get a new device working, if any, is often minimal.)
I want something that can do ATSC, Clear QAM, and NTSC Analog cable, so that I can plug it into my Comcast line and get all my current (unencrypted) analog channels, plus whatever they're broadcasting in the clear via QAM, and I'd like it to do ATSC in case I decide to ditch cable in the future. I haven't found any hardware that seems sure to do that.
There's not one card I know about that does all of that acceptably, but I'd recommend the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR150 for NTSC (it offers hardware MPEG-2 encoding) and the Avermedia AverTVHD MCE A180 for ATSC (broadcast or cable). The PVR500 is tempting with its dual tuners and encoders, but the tuners on mine do a crappy job of pulling channels in the mid-40s (the worst is 45, which around here is SciFi:-( ).
Getting both of them working isn't all that difficult anymore. Make sure you're running the latest Linux kernel (2.6.18), as that will include support for the A180. Support for the PVR150 is provided by ivtv 0.8.1.
Infact, when stacked up next to a nice progressive DVD those HD channels aren't that hot anyways. Even when not compared to good DVD's in a side by side comparison those HD channels aren't that impressive.
Maybe if you're watching downrezzed HD from the RF output of your cable box through a balun and into the 300-ohm VHF input on the 19" TV your parents bought 30 years ago (the one whose tuners make a loud clunking noise as you turn the knob to change channels), it's not that impressive. Even on my 30" LCD, though, the difference between HD and non-HD is like night and day.
You miss my point. If you're properly staffed, then when a customer comes in, you move towards him, greet him, establish needs, present solutions, overcome objections, close, and add-on product/services. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
Not everyone wants to be pounced on by the salesdroids the instant he walks in to a store. I know I don't. Nine times out of ten, I'd rather be left alone, as I probably know more about the product than the salesdroid. If I have questions, I'll ask. Until then, back off.
(Yes, I've worked retail. Telling the difference between someone who's just "kicking tires," someone who knows his way around, and someone who genuinely needs help isn't that difficult. Treating everyone as if they're in the latter group is only going to piss off the first two if they keep getting pestered by the staff.)
Even better, I'd like somebody like Michael Moore to entrap an executive into a candid, on-camera attempt to open one of his own company's packages using only the everyday household appliances to hand.
Better yet, we could entrap the Michigan Manatee in a clamshell package. Finding a machine that could handle his considerable weight and girth could be tricky, though...
If you're (speaking of "you" in the generic sense) going to put forth extraordinary claims, the onus is on you to back up those claims with data. Rather than tell people to google for it, you should already have your bullet points lined up in response. Ideally, the post which spawned this thread would've contained its proof.
Telling people to "just google it" smacks of intellectual laziness. It raises suspicions with regard to the veracity of the claim.
I didn't realize your pickup was representative of the average vehicle in 1981. Guess what: it's not. First of all, that company was known as Datsun in 1981 so unless you're in some country other than the USA (that apparently uses MPG instead of km/l) I call BS. Second, the gas version got about 25-30 highway so I doubt you got an entire 10 MPG more on the diesel.
I don't know that his numbers are all that unreasonable. It would've had a tiny little 4-banger, of about the same size that you'd find in a VW TDI Golf or Jetta that gets 45-50 mpg (or more). Even larger diesels offer substantial improvements over gas engines of similar size. For something in about the same timeframe as the OP, consider the Chevy 6.2L truck-diesel V8. In 1982, it delivered fuel economy in the low-to-mid-20s, in a package that was at least twice as heavy and that offered much more hauling capacity as the OP's truck. On another page, a poster describes an Olds 350 diesel tweaked to deliver ~34 mpg, though in stock form mid-20s would've been more typical (compare that to the mid-teens that the gas Olds 350 in my Cutlass Supreme delivers). If you can get 30+ mpg from a diesel V8, 40 mpg from a 4-cylinder engine with maybe a third of the displacement doesn't sound unreasonable.
I've found that cash has a magical property that burns a hole in my pocket, where as plastic (I use only debit) pretty much sits there and I don't spend nearly as much.
Here's another advantage for plastic: If your wallet with a credit card or two gets lost or stolen, you call it in and get replacement cards sent to you in a few days. You're liable for no more than $50 in bad charges; with some banks, you're not liable for anything. OTOH, if your wallet with a few hundred dollars (or more) in cash is lost or stolen and not recovered, you're frakked.
What I want to know is, where is this gas station, where blind people are lining up to pay $5 in cash to get gas for their car? I don't want to be ANYWHERE near where blind people are driving!!!!
How else are they supposed to get to the drive-thru ATM with Braille instructions?:-)
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I'm pretty sure I-40 doesn't go anywhere near Hell. You'll need to pick another road.
After a normal update run, you might check c:\WUTemp and see if the updates that were just installed are still there. I don't recall if Win2K behaves that way, but I think WinXP does. Using WindizUpdate instead of Windows Update will also save patches (useful when you have clean WinWhatever installs on different hardware and need to patch both, as you download only once).
OTOH, incandescents increase the load on your A/C the rest of the time. In warmer parts of the world (like just about anywhere in the southwest), that would be a much bigger loss than the gain you would see in the winter.
Around here, Nevada Power is subsidizing CF lights pretty heavily, so you can get the aforementioned lights dirt-cheap. I just moved into a new condo, and replaced the half-dozen globe lightbulbs in each bathroom with CFs. Six-packs of 40W-equivalent CFs were $4 each IIRC. They don't have the plastic globes that the bulbs I used in the old condo have, but it cost somewhere around $25 to light up just one bathroom with those. For that price difference, I'll do without the globes (they were clear, so the coils on the bulb inside were still visible).
Bathroom lighting power requirements got knocked down from 240-300W per room (don't remember if the original bulbs were 40W or 60W each) to 60W (6x10W for the 40W-equivalent CF). That's nothing to sneeze at.
60W- and 100W-equivalent lights are going into the other fixtures as I get around to them. I've been using CFs (and some of their predecessors, like the circular lights with electronic ballast) for probably 12 years or so. In addition to using less power to start with, they produce less waste heat for the A/C to suck out (which is a little bit of extra savings).
I have one of those in a lamp that I need to replace. Even with the lampshade in place, it still looks harsh. The other CFs I have produce a spectrum comparable to the incandescents they replace (you can confirm that by twiddling with the color-balance settings on your digital camera).
How often do you need to supply your own photo for something like that? The only time I recall having to do that was for my passport, and you can do that with your own camera as long as the result meets certain technical requirements. IIRC, passports are good for at least ten years. For your driver's license, the DMV has its own photo equipment. Ditto for the registrar's office and your student ID, if you're still in college.
I gave it a shot for a month. It works OK as a mail reader and for creating a new message, but it insists on creating replies in top-posting style and I can't find a way to change that misfeature. It doesn't even quote the original message properly (with ">" before each line), so creating a properly-formatted reply to someone else's mail is a major pain. I ended up going back to running Mutt on my mail server over an SSH connection (pssh kicks ass, and is free-as-in-speech).
Is there some option that I'm missing? (There is an option in Chatter that is supposed to properly format quotes, but it doesn't work.)
The horizontal-deflection circuit in a CRT-based TV produces a sawtooth-shaped wave at 15.75 kHz (NTSC) and/or 15.625 kHz (PAL). This gets pumped into the horizontal deflection coil, which makes a poor-to-fair antenna for radiating this signal.
It'd take a fairly big antenna to pick it up, so you could also listen for the TV-tuner IF (intermediate frequency), which should be a few tens of MHz (probably 38.9 MHz, from the sources I could find). There won't be a coil hanging off it to radiate it far, but I'd think a directional antenna pointed at a TV from a couple hundred feet away could pick up enough usable signal for a scanner to pick up.
They don't scan the screen in the same way, but they still have a tuner that spits out an IF signal inside them. Even if you don't actually use the tuner in your TV (I don't), you have a tuner in your other equipment (VCR, cable box, TiVo, TV-tuner card in a MythTV box, etc.) if you watch broadcast or cable TV. (Satellite TV is another matter, but it's obvious from the outside if you use that.)
Assuming that he's tall enough to reach the burners in the first place, he should only make that mistake once. I think it's safe to say of all of us that we've "been there, done that," and we didn't turn out any worse for it.
The others have already answered, but they forgot to tell you to turn in your geek card on the way out...so I'm doing that.
You may have been facetious (I don't know), but you're not far from the truth (derived from source data here). The top 1% pay more than a third (34%) of the taxes, the top 5% pay a bit more than half (54%) of the taxes, and the top 50% pay nearly all (96%) of the taxes.
The Slashbots were about due for their Two Minutes Hate, though, and they tend to not let such insignificant things as facts get in their way.
I could run ProMash under Wine, but it has a problem with table formatting (columns of text in (for instance) the hop schedule don't line up properly) that I've not been able to fix. Icons on some buttons (like the refractometer calculation buttons) often are drawn as black blobs, too. I've ended up running it in Win2K under VMware (along with HCCP, which doesn't work at all with Wine), but if there's a way to fix the cosmetic glitches I'm having with it, I'm all ears. With that fixed and HCCP replaced with something Linux-native and less buggy (it's sufficiently buggy that the BJCP won't accept its XML output anymore, and you have to be careful how you add data so that it doesn't get confused), there'd be no reason to keep the Win2K VM on my notebook anymore.
There's a phrase for that: Brain Damage.
It's not so much that as that there is no card that does both, AFAIK. The A180 can capture NTSC on its composite and S-video inputs, but (1) it won't compress it (many HD capture cards use dumb-framegrabber chips like the SAA7134 and Bt878 as little more than PCI-to-GPIO interfaces, and hook up the composite and S-video inputs just because they're there), (2) it can't capture NTSC from the tuner, and (3) it can't capture HD while it's busy capturing NTSC.
I've heard similar stories of problems mixing capture devices in one system (here and elsewhere) before. Most of the problems have involved getting the pcHDTV cards to play nicely with other cards, IIRC. The only tricky (just slightly) thing I had to figure out with my setup was keeping the order in which capture devices are enumerated, and adding something like add below saa7134-dvb ivtv to /etc/modules.conf takes care of that.
More heads working on a problem, combined with more affordable hardware that more people can test, could be expected to produce better results more rapidly. It's getting to where just about anybody can throw together some chips and build a board. Since there aren't that many different chips that go into the different boards out there, it makes more sense to try to reuse other people's work on drivers than to try to reinvent the wheel. (Note, for instance, that while every slightly different Bt8x8-based framegrabber card needs a different Windows driver, nearly all of them work with the same bt8x8 driver under Linux. The amount of tweaking needed to get a new device working, if any, is often minimal.)
There's not one card I know about that does all of that acceptably, but I'd recommend the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR150 for NTSC (it offers hardware MPEG-2 encoding) and the Avermedia AverTVHD MCE A180 for ATSC (broadcast or cable). The PVR500 is tempting with its dual tuners and encoders, but the tuners on mine do a crappy job of pulling channels in the mid-40s (the worst is 45, which around here is SciFi :-( ).
Getting both of them working isn't all that difficult anymore. Make sure you're running the latest Linux kernel (2.6.18), as that will include support for the A180. Support for the PVR150 is provided by ivtv 0.8.1.
Maybe if you're watching downrezzed HD from the RF output of your cable box through a balun and into the 300-ohm VHF input on the 19" TV your parents bought 30 years ago (the one whose tuners make a loud clunking noise as you turn the knob to change channels), it's not that impressive. Even on my 30" LCD, though, the difference between HD and non-HD is like night and day.
Not everyone wants to be pounced on by the salesdroids the instant he walks in to a store. I know I don't. Nine times out of ten, I'd rather be left alone, as I probably know more about the product than the salesdroid. If I have questions, I'll ask. Until then, back off.
(Yes, I've worked retail. Telling the difference between someone who's just "kicking tires," someone who knows his way around, and someone who genuinely needs help isn't that difficult. Treating everyone as if they're in the latter group is only going to piss off the first two if they keep getting pestered by the staff.)
Better yet, we could entrap the Michigan Manatee in a clamshell package. Finding a machine that could handle his considerable weight and girth could be tricky, though...
Project much? If you want to find an America-hater, I suggest you look in the mirror.
Telling people to "just google it" smacks of intellectual laziness. It raises suspicions with regard to the veracity of the claim.
Smug Alert!
I don't know that his numbers are all that unreasonable. It would've had a tiny little 4-banger, of about the same size that you'd find in a VW TDI Golf or Jetta that gets 45-50 mpg (or more). Even larger diesels offer substantial improvements over gas engines of similar size. For something in about the same timeframe as the OP, consider the Chevy 6.2L truck-diesel V8. In 1982, it delivered fuel economy in the low-to-mid-20s, in a package that was at least twice as heavy and that offered much more hauling capacity as the OP's truck. On another page, a poster describes an Olds 350 diesel tweaked to deliver ~34 mpg, though in stock form mid-20s would've been more typical (compare that to the mid-teens that the gas Olds 350 in my Cutlass Supreme delivers). If you can get 30+ mpg from a diesel V8, 40 mpg from a 4-cylinder engine with maybe a third of the displacement doesn't sound unreasonable.
So why, then, are you holding back from us?
Here's another advantage for plastic: If your wallet with a credit card or two gets lost or stolen, you call it in and get replacement cards sent to you in a few days. You're liable for no more than $50 in bad charges; with some banks, you're not liable for anything. OTOH, if your wallet with a few hundred dollars (or more) in cash is lost or stolen and not recovered, you're frakked.
How else are they supposed to get to the drive-thru ATM with Braille instructions? :-)