Just so you know, Windows XP Home Edition is currently selling for $89.99 (plus shipping) on NewEgg.
XP Home is so crippled as to be nearly useless. Its user-management capabilities are pathetic, and it doesn't play nicely on networks. Not only does it disallow logging into a domain, but sharing your files is pretty much all-or-nothing--either your hard drive is locked down and inaccessible, or it's open wider than Mr. Goatse.cx. Maybe it's OK for your grandparents who only have a dial-up connection so they can read email, but as soon as you try to do anything interesting, you start running up against XP Home's artificial limitations.
don't play well with common home automation systems
You can modify X10 light switches (which are normally incandescent-only) so they'll work with fluorescent lights. As long as you don't try to dim fluorescents, they'll work OK...some of mine are six years old now and still working OK. (This isn't the best writeup I've seen on the subject, but it's a start.)
It is only in the recent industrial era that paper has become cheap enough to use to wipe yourself. And in most of asia a handspray mounted to the wall adjacent to the toilet is the only hygenic *tool* you will find in most toilets. There is paper provided in hotels and some offices just for the consideration of Westerners and their wierd wasteful defecation rituals. Note: you have all heard of the practice of never touching someone with your left hand in Asian/Arab cultures. Well guess why? Some folks in that region do find it repulsive that people eat with the same hand they wipe their a** with.
Is it our fault that they refuse to move into at least the 20th century? T.P. is cheap and reliable. Unlike these fancy electronic seats described in TFA, there's nothing in T.P. to break. It's certainly cleaner than wiping with your bare hand...I don't care who you are, that's just disgusting.
Given the wonderful cultural practices of certain of the groups you enumerated (killing rape victims for the "crime" of having been raped, killing people who've come to the realization that the dominant "religion" in their neck of the woods is a crock of shit, strapping explosives onto people and sending them into schools, restaurants, and public transit, flying airplanes into skyscrapers, etc.), I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that their toilet habits are likewise stuck in the 7th century.
Besides, the last thing I'd want when taking a dump is for the damn seat to...um...crap out on me.
...and the iPod is among those. The interface isn't as intuitive as the one Apple provides, though, and Rockbox appears to ignore control inputs from my car stereo (I have this installed in one of my cars).
A bunch of solar panels stuck on the roof of an electric car and hooked up to the battery to recharge would be great- more so for California, Arizona, and similar regions than places like Washington state, of course.
Solar panels produce relatively little power, relative to the surface area they need. Consider this 100W panel as an example (specs, including dimensions, here). It needs over nine square feet to produce a bit more than 1/8 horsepower.
A battery pack that can deliver an average load of just 50 hp for four hours will have a capacity somewhere around 150 kWh. It'd take a 100W solar panel nearly seven weeks of continuous sunlight to recharge that battery pack. Unless you live in the northern reaches of Alaska, you're not going to ever get 24-hour sunlight, so you'll want to double or triple that time estimate. Basically, you're never going to get enough power out of solar panels on an electric vehicle for them to be worth the added expense.
Amarok gets its cover art from Amazon.com, but I could be totally on crack there.
I guess I should've been more specific. My music is already tagged with cover art. When you use Amarok to transfer music to your iPod, does the cover art show up when you play the transferred music on your iPod? That's what iTunes does that gtkpod doesn't do.
The only functionality that you listed that Amarok is missing is buying music - a pretty nonvital and trivial to implement feature. I
How about cover art in ID3 tags (and the equivalent in AAC files)? If I upload music through iTunes, the cover art is visible when it plays (I have an iPod photo). If I use gtkpod, it isn't. Does Amarok handle cover art? That's the one thing that keeps me using iTunes. (That, and its management of podcasts, but I suspect I could find alternatives for that if I looked around a bit.)
You're the guy all the neocons love --- you accept all their BS and then some. I bet you're just itching to have the draft brought back so more poor souls can die for Halliburton.
Last time I checked, it was barking moonbats like Charlie Rangel (D-NY) who were jonesing for the return of the draft. Thanks for playing, though.
Well, to clarify, I think its rather reactionary to want to spend ridiculous amounts of money so you can avoid having to buy toothpaste and shampoo at your destination.
Besides, there's this thing you might've heard of called checked baggage that'll have no problem taking those kinds of things. If it's longer than a weekend trip, you're probably using it already. Hell, I've even shipped a case of beer that way (carefully packed, with each bottle bubble-wrapped) without problems, and I don't see that option going away anytime in the near future.
Then again, we can't let mere logic get in the way of the moonbats' BDS-afflicted rants, can we?
Hmm...let's compare it to the IMAP server I run for myself on a virtual server:
Convenient email backup
A daily cron job, running rsync on my Mac mini, takes care of that. (The virtual server is on the other side of the country and the Mac mini is at home, so there's even a few thousand miles of geographic separation.)
access from anywhere
Got that, with either IMAP (IMAPS, to be more precise) or SSH. Mutt through pssh works better for me on my phone than Palm's broken email app (it doesn't work with subfolders).
combined chats and emails
I don't care about chat...it's an even bigger time waster than email.
labels
Procmail sorts my mailing-list traffic into folders: homebrew stuff here, Olds stuff there, MythTV stuff over there...
an excellent spam filter
A combination of some RBLs and bogofilter works pretty well for me.
and the best email interface (IMO) (I prefer it over thunderbird...)
At least you qualified it with "IMO." That it defaults to top-posting (and worse, offers no option to turn off this misbehavior) makes it terminally broken, IMNSHO. Why should I have to shuffle around the order of the original message and my reply every fscking time I create a reply? Thunderbird defaults to inline/bottom-posting, which is the One True Way to write email (top-posting brokenness is a click away, if you must pretend to be an Outlook-using dweeb for some reason).
There's really a place in Germany called Rammstein?
The band took its name from Ramstein AB, which is one of our larger overseas bases. There are (or were) more Americans in the Kaiserslautern area than anywhere else outside the United States...when I was in high school there (go Raiders!) in the late '80s, there were maybe 50000 or so of us over there. There was a nasty crash at the Flugtag (the base's annual air show) in 1988 that the band's pyromaniac members thought provided some spiffy visuals...an Italian jet dropped out of the sky after a mid-air collision and plowed into the crowd. 70 were killed and another 347 were badly injured.
No, the voltage on telephone wires is more like 90v with a high resistance.
The guy you're replying to was referring to -48VDC power supplies for telco rack equipment, which is NOT low-current stuff.
Stick a voltmeter across tip and ring. If the line is on-hook, you'll see 48V DC. If someone calls, 90V AC will be superimposed on it to run the ringer. Take the line off-hook and the voltage goes down to somewhere around 6V DC.
But anyway, Bluetooth (1.1) isn't fast enough for EVDO, it's barely fast enough for EDGE.
Bluetooth is good for about 700 kbps. From the speed test shown in TFA (~500 kbps down, ~100 kbps up), it should be fast enough.
Bluetooth DUN also works with Linux. TFA says nothing about whether this USB wireless-data thingy works with Linux; the safest assumption would be that it doesn't.
I buy my GSM phones unlocked so I can use data over Bluetooth. Verizon/Sprint customers don't generally have this option.
Then again, Sprint doesn't cripple its phones to begin with. Bluetooth DUN has worked on my Treo 650 since the day I bought it.
It always amazes me when people on a self-admitted geek news forum complain about high-tech gadgets having more features.
It's the UN*X philosophy in action. Instead of one device that tries to do everything (and usually ends up doing them in a half-assed manner), the preference is that it do only one or two things, but do them well. The iPod is a music player (and, more recently, video player). It doesn't try to do other things; instead, it concentrates on doing its one or two functions better than the competition.
The thing is that unlike the Windows' MBR, grub can actually be configured to run the other OS if the user wants. Most distros autodetect and add the appropriate configs, so that there's zero effort needed.
Both of my work machines dual-boot, and it's the NT bootloader that comes up first. I've never bothered figuring out how to go from GRUB into WinXP; instead, I just install GRUB to a boot sector, dd it from the boot sector to a file, and copy that file into the Windows partition. A one-line change to boot.ini tells the NT bootloader to hand off to GRUB. This page describes it in more detail (using LILO, but GRUB isn't much different).
Slashdot Mirror
XP Home is so crippled as to be nearly useless. Its user-management capabilities are pathetic, and it doesn't play nicely on networks. Not only does it disallow logging into a domain, but sharing your files is pretty much all-or-nothing--either your hard drive is locked down and inaccessible, or it's open wider than Mr. Goatse.cx. Maybe it's OK for your grandparents who only have a dial-up connection so they can read email, but as soon as you try to do anything interesting, you start running up against XP Home's artificial limitations.
You can modify X10 light switches (which are normally incandescent-only) so they'll work with fluorescent lights. As long as you don't try to dim fluorescents, they'll work OK...some of mine are six years old now and still working OK. (This isn't the best writeup I've seen on the subject, but it's a start.)
Bill Gates as a Borg was a ripoff from a cover of Boardwatch magazine (May 1996, according to this page).
Is it our fault that they refuse to move into at least the 20th century? T.P. is cheap and reliable. Unlike these fancy electronic seats described in TFA, there's nothing in T.P. to break. It's certainly cleaner than wiping with your bare hand...I don't care who you are, that's just disgusting.
Given the wonderful cultural practices of certain of the groups you enumerated (killing rape victims for the "crime" of having been raped, killing people who've come to the realization that the dominant "religion" in their neck of the woods is a crock of shit, strapping explosives onto people and sending them into schools, restaurants, and public transit, flying airplanes into skyscrapers, etc.), I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that their toilet habits are likewise stuck in the 7th century.
Besides, the last thing I'd want when taking a dump is for the damn seat to...um...crap out on me.
Solar panels produce relatively little power, relative to the surface area they need. Consider this 100W panel as an example (specs, including dimensions, here). It needs over nine square feet to produce a bit more than 1/8 horsepower.
A battery pack that can deliver an average load of just 50 hp for four hours will have a capacity somewhere around 150 kWh. It'd take a 100W solar panel nearly seven weeks of continuous sunlight to recharge that battery pack. Unless you live in the northern reaches of Alaska, you're not going to ever get 24-hour sunlight, so you'll want to double or triple that time estimate. Basically, you're never going to get enough power out of solar panels on an electric vehicle for them to be worth the added expense.
You must be new here. :-| It happens all too often.
Cool...I'll have to look into that, as running iTunes in a VM has certain drawbacks that a native app would fix.
I guess I should've been more specific. My music is already tagged with cover art. When you use Amarok to transfer music to your iPod, does the cover art show up when you play the transferred music on your iPod? That's what iTunes does that gtkpod doesn't do.
How about cover art in ID3 tags (and the equivalent in AAC files)? If I upload music through iTunes, the cover art is visible when it plays (I have an iPod photo). If I use gtkpod, it isn't. Does Amarok handle cover art? That's the one thing that keeps me using iTunes. (That, and its management of podcasts, but I suspect I could find alternatives for that if I looked around a bit.)
Last time I checked, it was barking moonbats like Charlie Rangel (D-NY) who were jonesing for the return of the draft. Thanks for playing, though.
If everyone else decides to jump off a cliff, I expect you to be right there with them.
Because it disrupts the flow of conversation!
Besides, there's this thing you might've heard of called checked baggage that'll have no problem taking those kinds of things. If it's longer than a weekend trip, you're probably using it already. Hell, I've even shipped a case of beer that way (carefully packed, with each bottle bubble-wrapped) without problems, and I don't see that option going away anytime in the near future.
Then again, we can't let mere logic get in the way of the moonbats' BDS-afflicted rants, can we?
A daily cron job, running rsync on my Mac mini, takes care of that. (The virtual server is on the other side of the country and the Mac mini is at home, so there's even a few thousand miles of geographic separation.)
Got that, with either IMAP (IMAPS, to be more precise) or SSH. Mutt through pssh works better for me on my phone than Palm's broken email app (it doesn't work with subfolders).
I don't care about chat...it's an even bigger time waster than email.
Procmail sorts my mailing-list traffic into folders: homebrew stuff here, Olds stuff there, MythTV stuff over there...
A combination of some RBLs and bogofilter works pretty well for me.
At least you qualified it with "IMO." That it defaults to top-posting (and worse, offers no option to turn off this misbehavior) makes it terminally broken, IMNSHO. Why should I have to shuffle around the order of the original message and my reply every fscking time I create a reply? Thunderbird defaults to inline/bottom-posting, which is the One True Way to write email (top-posting brokenness is a click away, if you must pretend to be an Outlook-using dweeb for some reason).
The band took its name from Ramstein AB, which is one of our larger overseas bases. There are (or were) more Americans in the Kaiserslautern area than anywhere else outside the United States...when I was in high school there (go Raiders!) in the late '80s, there were maybe 50000 or so of us over there. There was a nasty crash at the Flugtag (the base's annual air show) in 1988 that the band's pyromaniac members thought provided some spiffy visuals...an Italian jet dropped out of the sky after a mid-air collision and plowed into the crowd. 70 were killed and another 347 were badly injured.
Stick a voltmeter across tip and ring. If the line is on-hook, you'll see 48V DC. If someone calls, 90V AC will be superimposed on it to run the ringer. Take the line off-hook and the voltage goes down to somewhere around 6V DC.
When the batteries in this mouse need a charge, you use the (included) USB cable to recharge. You could bring spares if you want, but why bother?
http://windowsupdate.62nds.com/
It works with Firefox to find what updates you need, then downloads them (from Microsoft's servers) and installs them.
You even get a choice between single-color and old-school six-color stickers like the ones that came with my IIe back in the day. :-)
Bluetooth is good for about 700 kbps. From the speed test shown in TFA (~500 kbps down, ~100 kbps up), it should be fast enough.
Bluetooth DUN also works with Linux. TFA says nothing about whether this USB wireless-data thingy works with Linux; the safest assumption would be that it doesn't.
Then again, Sprint doesn't cripple its phones to begin with. Bluetooth DUN has worked on my Treo 650 since the day I bought it.
Even at 1/6 g, a tunnel slab (now weighing 833 lbs. instead of 2.5 tons) falling on your moon buggy will ruin your day.
It's the UN*X philosophy in action. Instead of one device that tries to do everything (and usually ends up doing them in a half-assed manner), the preference is that it do only one or two things, but do them well. The iPod is a music player (and, more recently, video player). It doesn't try to do other things; instead, it concentrates on doing its one or two functions better than the competition.
Both of my work machines dual-boot, and it's the NT bootloader that comes up first. I've never bothered figuring out how to go from GRUB into WinXP; instead, I just install GRUB to a boot sector, dd it from the boot sector to a file, and copy that file into the Windows partition. A one-line change to boot.ini tells the NT bootloader to hand off to GRUB. This page describes it in more detail (using LILO, but GRUB isn't much different).
Who let Glenn Reynolds in here?