So you still can't get the files to non-iPod audio devices
See above. I have an iPod now, but before that, I was playing iTMS downloads on a Palm Tungsten T (with AeroPlayer).
(The funny bit is that I don't think I've bought anything from iTMS since I bought my iPod. My most recent purchases were from these guys. 192-kbps AAC is nice.)
and if you hose your computer and reinstall and in the process appear to hose you iTunes account those DRM'd files on your backup cds might be worthless.
Wrong again. When you get your computer running again and iTunes installed, you authorize it and it starts playing your downloads. Even if you've used up all of your authorizations (you get five, IIRC), there's still a fix. You can free up all of your authorizations (including the one sitting on the hard drive that had a headcrash last week) and start over.
Processor: 65C02 processor running at 1-4 MHz, the fastest of any Apple II.
Are you sure that wasn't a IIc Plus? That was the model that ran at 4 MHz (it basically had the equivalent of a ZipChip built-in). The IIc ran at 1 MHz, just like the II/II Plus/IIe.
Does anyone know of a good PCMCIA TV Tuner card that is Linux compatible? I have been looking for one for a while and can't seem to find any.
By "PCMCIA," you meant "CardBus," right? PCMCIA (more properly known as PC Card) is too slow for frame grabbers; it's basically ISA in a smaller form.
Finding a CardBus video-capture card that works right under Windows is a big enough problem, let alone under Linux. The one I tried (a Kworld something-or-other that Fry's sells) had major problems doing clean captures at anything near maximum resolution. ADS sells a similar (identical?) card, and it behaved the same way. About the only non-PCI capture device I've run across that works reasonably well (under both Windows and Linux, BTW) is the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2. It has the same hardware inside as their PCI capture devices, but instead of a PCI interface to the computer, it has a USB 2.0 interface.
Of course, you can share the recordings with Winblows boxes via Samba. There's even a script included to make human-friendly filenames for the shows.
There's also a shell extension that looks up filenames in the MythTV database and makes show metadata available to Explorer in the details view. It's part of DSMyth (which also includes DirectShow filters for the MPEG-4 recordings MythTV can create, but I don't use that part of it since all of my captures are MPEG-2).
Taqqiya is not as innocent a concept as you want to believe. Go here; you might learn something. If you want to just bend over, grab your ankles, and be a good little dhimmi, that's your choice...but it should at least be an informed choice.
They aren't. At least the Muslim Council Of Great Britain hasn't been silent about it. In fact when I heard their spokesman on the radio he was spitting feathers he was so angry about the demonstrators in London.
Those remarks would've been made to placate the "kufr" (that's what the Mohammedans call everybody who doesn't believe as they do). I wouldn't be at all surprised if he's singing an entirely different tune down at the local mosque. Try googling for "taqqiya" sometime; you'll find what you come across quite informative.
If they start defacing websites for just a cartoon, imagine what they will do if it was a offending movie/act: take whole servers and backbones down? Oh the horror.
We already know whatMohammedans do when someone makes a film that hurts their poor widdle feewings. Fscking savages.
Palm is already working a new version of Palm OS with Linux as the kernel, effectively creating their own "OS X" story.
I don't see that as being a very good idea. Linux (the kernel) is a fast-moving target with constantly changing abilities, features, and APIs. (No comment on the moving ABIs.) For something like a new Palm OS, Palm really needs a stable base that won't require them to redo a lot of work, or suddenly and unexpectedly shift directions because of a major kernel change.
Linux has worked well enough for TiVo (to name just one prominent example). Just because a device runs Linux doesn't mean you'll be forever building new kernels for it. Linux 2.6.15 (or whatever) isn't going to change by itself; if you build a product around it, there's no reason why you couldn't still be running it a few years from now, even with updated versions of your software. (The main reason to upgrade the kernel at this point would be to gain support for newer hardware, which wouldn't be an issue with an embedded system or a PDA.)
The only cell phones that got anywhere near 2W output were the old "bag phones" and other non-handheld models (up to 3W was permitted from them because the antenna wasn't next to your head). Even on AMPS, handheld phone output maxed out at 600 mW. Power outputs with the various digital systems is even lower (an older-model GSM phone I used a few years ago listed a maximum output power of only 125 mW). Using cell phones to cook an egg would be about as effective as the weak-ass "fire" that took over an hour to cook a dozen scrambled eggs on my first camping trip when I was a kid. (It'd probably be about as appetizing, too. Orange scrambled eggs, anyone?:-P )
I never got why digital cameras, when plugged in over USB, wouldn't function as webcams
Some (cheap...really cheap) digital cameras can do this. Unfortunately, they tend to be about as good at capturing video as they are at capturing still images--IOW, not good at all. The cameras I've tried out in this mode were plagued with low framerates and smeared motion.
What kind of CPU do you think they'd need to encode 11 video streams into MPEG-4 at the same time?
The analog inputs have hardware-based MPEG-2 encoders on them (didn't know they had those for PCI Express, but), and the HD inputs just capture the already-encoded MPEG-2 stream. You can just dump all of those streams to disk as-is, so why would you want to recompress to MPEG-4?
I personally still have an AMD 1Ghz Thunderbird still ticking. I don't use it much because I have my AMD64 system, but it runs like the day I got it.
A machine like that makes a great home web/mail server. Mine got pressed into that type of service when the P!!! dually I had been using went tango-uniform. (The dually was a pair of 500-MHz Katmais on an N440BX. Some power-regulation components on the motherboard literally burned up.)
The Athlon's on a Biostar M7MIA, which is one of the few Socket A motherboards that still had an ISA slot. I bought it about five years ago. It's been running alfter.us for about two years now. It still runs fairly well, but now that there's a way to run Gentoo on the Linksys NSLU2, I might switch to that at some point.
I know I could replace my TV tuner with a Hauppauge 150 (dual tuners, hardware based encoding, etc) but that leave HDTV unaddressed
It's the PVR-500 that has the dual tuners, not the PVR-150.
For HD, run a FireWire cable from your HD cable box to your computer. You should be able to get at least the local HD channels this way. In Las Vegas, I'm getting not just local channels, but most of the other digital-cable channels as well (except non-broadcast HD and pay-TV channels, mostly). If your computer doesn't already support FireWire, a card will set you back maybe $20 or $30.
Sound card? Is he using on board sound? Does it support hardware mixing, if not, what kind of software mixing is he using. Does he have a digital connection to his receiver for ac3 passthrough, and pcm output?
Getting S/PDIF out working reliably on nForce-chipset boards tends to be iffy. I had it working OK on the nForce2-based board I was using previously for MythTV, but a desire to capture and play HD from my cable box led me to upgrade the system. It now has an nForce4-based board, and the latest stable ALSA definitely has issues with it. I ended up buying a USB-to-S/PDIF converter, which ended up being about as close to plug-and-play as you're going to get on Linux.
More information on the video card. He says it supports multiple HD standards, but says it only has a composite and s-video output (i'm assuming in addition to the dvi/vga,) but no component out. How is he gonna output HD then?
DVI (maybe through an inexpensive DVI-to-HDMI adapter) or VGA. If your HD monitor supports neither, there are VGA-to-component adapters available. (I use DVI.)
Choice of case for something thats pleasing to the eye, and silent to the ear. Not a big problem if it's tucked away. But usually these things are in the living/family rooms alongside the entertainment center.
TFA says it's one of MSI's SFF boxen. Most of them aren't too offensive to look at, but they tend to be a bit thin on expansion options. I'm using an Antec Overture, which will hold an ATX motherboard and is fairly quiet (one temperature-controlled 92mm exhaust fan and rubber mounts for the hard drives).
Beyond that, I'll agree that the article was definitely short on details. It's the kind of subject on which you could easily put together a multi-page writeup (multiple pages filled with text and pictures, not a Tom's Hardware-style "multi-page" where you get a paragraph or two along with each page full of ads).
Why even bother with FM when you can carry around several GB worth of your favorite digital music?
To hear the news, check the weather, listen to talk radio (I'm not a huge fan, but some of it is worth listening to and you can call in to let yourself be heard)
Talk radio is mostly AM, not FM. An FM-only radio is about as useful as tits on a mule if you mostly listen to talk radio.
As for music, I have a better selection on my iPod than most radio stations will play.
I guess I'm not alone in thinking that a bluetooth enabled ipod (or other music player) would rock.
Bluetooth is only good for about 700 kbps (give or take a bit). That's OK for syncing my phone to my computer (where there usually isn't much that's changed since the last sync), but filling up my 60-GB iPod over a 700-kbps connection would take nearly eight days.
I'm pretty sure iTunes has a mechanism to "delicense" a computer that you no longer want regestered to you. However, the delicensing is done from the computer you want delicensed. This means if the computer crashes/breaks unexpectedly you could be out of luck.
If you have authorized five computers, a button labeled "Deauthorize All" will appear in your Account Information screen. This button will deauthorize all computers associated with your account. You can then reauthorize up to 5 computers. Note: You can only use this feature once a year.
Sounds like a rehash of the old SoftStrip concept, only now it works with the now-ubiquitous flatbed scanner instead of a special reader device.
(Hmm...some issues of Nibble had their programs included in SoftStrip format as well as printed source listings. I wonder if anybody ever came up with a program that'd read SoftStrip data from a scanned image.)
Can't use exotic stuff like ext2/3 because it would need a driver to work with Windows (does such a driver even exist, and is it free or cheaper to license?)
It works fairly well, too. The only snag I've seen so far is that ext2/ext3 partitions aren't automatically mounted/unmounted. For fixed storage, this is OK. For removable storage, though, if you disconnect a partition while it's still mounted, your computer will bluescreen.
(The ext2 IFS installs an app in the Control Panel for controlling what partitions get mounted where. Ideally, better integration with Windows would let you just fire up diskmgmt.msc and manage ext2/ext3 partitions the same way you handle FAT and NTFS partitions.)
I've used it on several computers at home and at work, and performance is acceptable. It's not as fast as NTFS, but the ext2 IFS under Windows is faster at reading ext3 filesystems under Windows than Captive NTFS is at reading NTFS partitions under Linux. (Linux's built-in NTFS support is much faster than Captive NTFS (and also works on more than just x86 Linux), but it's read-only for most purposes.) For a dual-boot system, I'd recommend shrinking your NTFS partitions to the minimum needed to hold Windows and its apps, and then use ext3 for the rest of your storage.
Turbo-Jet (same turbo jet power as turbo-prop, but little or no "bypass" air. The main purpose of the intake fan is now to pressurize air at intake for combustion with jet fuel. Thrust comes from) can provide substantial power at high velocites. TurboJets are the big muscular loud as hell engines used on fighter planes.
Turbojet engines don't have any fans, so there is no bypass at all. They only have compressors and turbines. Probably the only aircraft the Air Force still flies with turbojets are T-38s and (maybe) some KC-135s that haven't yet been retrofitted with turbofans. (I thought the B-52 was still flying on turbojets, but this page and this page say otherwise...you learn something new every day.)
Turbofan engines have been used in fighters for at least the past 40 years. Fighters don't get the same high-bypass engines that you'll see on an airliner due to size constraints, but turbofan engines with smaller fans go back in fighters to at least the F-111, if not earlier. Current fighters powered by turbofans include the F-15, F-16, F-22, and F-117. The F119 engine used in the F-22 is even capable of supercruise.
Slashdot Mirror
My cell phone is my GPS nav system, you insensitive clod!
Why would you want that no-talent assclown wasting space on your iPod?
True, but this does.
See above. I have an iPod now, but before that, I was playing iTMS downloads on a Palm Tungsten T (with AeroPlayer).
(The funny bit is that I don't think I've bought anything from iTMS since I bought my iPod. My most recent purchases were from these guys. 192-kbps AAC is nice.)
Wrong again. When you get your computer running again and iTunes installed, you authorize it and it starts playing your downloads. Even if you've used up all of your authorizations (you get five, IIRC), there's still a fix. You can free up all of your authorizations (including the one sitting on the hard drive that had a headcrash last week) and start over.
Are you sure that wasn't a IIc Plus? That was the model that ran at 4 MHz (it basically had the equivalent of a ZipChip built-in). The IIc ran at 1 MHz, just like the II/II Plus/IIe.
By "PCMCIA," you meant "CardBus," right? PCMCIA (more properly known as PC Card) is too slow for frame grabbers; it's basically ISA in a smaller form.
Finding a CardBus video-capture card that works right under Windows is a big enough problem, let alone under Linux. The one I tried (a Kworld something-or-other that Fry's sells) had major problems doing clean captures at anything near maximum resolution. ADS sells a similar (identical?) card, and it behaved the same way. About the only non-PCI capture device I've run across that works reasonably well (under both Windows and Linux, BTW) is the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2. It has the same hardware inside as their PCI capture devices, but instead of a PCI interface to the computer, it has a USB 2.0 interface.
There's also a shell extension that looks up filenames in the MythTV database and makes show metadata available to Explorer in the details view. It's part of DSMyth (which also includes DirectShow filters for the MPEG-4 recordings MythTV can create, but I don't use that part of it since all of my captures are MPEG-2).
Taqqiya is not as innocent a concept as you want to believe. Go here; you might learn something. If you want to just bend over, grab your ankles, and be a good little dhimmi, that's your choice...but it should at least be an informed choice.
Those remarks would've been made to placate the "kufr" (that's what the Mohammedans call everybody who doesn't believe as they do). I wouldn't be at all surprised if he's singing an entirely different tune down at the local mosque. Try googling for "taqqiya" sometime; you'll find what you come across quite informative.
We already know what Mohammedans do when someone makes a film that hurts their poor widdle feewings. Fscking savages.
Linux has worked well enough for TiVo (to name just one prominent example). Just because a device runs Linux doesn't mean you'll be forever building new kernels for it. Linux 2.6.15 (or whatever) isn't going to change by itself; if you build a product around it, there's no reason why you couldn't still be running it a few years from now, even with updated versions of your software. (The main reason to upgrade the kernel at this point would be to gain support for newer hardware, which wouldn't be an issue with an embedded system or a PDA.)
The only cell phones that got anywhere near 2W output were the old "bag phones" and other non-handheld models (up to 3W was permitted from them because the antenna wasn't next to your head). Even on AMPS, handheld phone output maxed out at 600 mW. Power outputs with the various digital systems is even lower (an older-model GSM phone I used a few years ago listed a maximum output power of only 125 mW). Using cell phones to cook an egg would be about as effective as the weak-ass "fire" that took over an hour to cook a dozen scrambled eggs on my first camping trip when I was a kid. (It'd probably be about as appetizing, too. Orange scrambled eggs, anyone? :-P )
Some (cheap...really cheap) digital cameras can do this. Unfortunately, they tend to be about as good at capturing video as they are at capturing still images--IOW, not good at all. The cameras I've tried out in this mode were plagued with low framerates and smeared motion.
The analog inputs have hardware-based MPEG-2 encoders on them (didn't know they had those for PCI Express, but), and the HD inputs just capture the already-encoded MPEG-2 stream. You can just dump all of those streams to disk as-is, so why would you want to recompress to MPEG-4?
A machine like that makes a great home web/mail server. Mine got pressed into that type of service when the P!!! dually I had been using went tango-uniform. (The dually was a pair of 500-MHz Katmais on an N440BX. Some power-regulation components on the motherboard literally burned up.)
The Athlon's on a Biostar M7MIA, which is one of the few Socket A motherboards that still had an ISA slot. I bought it about five years ago. It's been running alfter.us for about two years now. It still runs fairly well, but now that there's a way to run Gentoo on the Linksys NSLU2, I might switch to that at some point.
We have an early contender for Understatement of the Year right here, folks.
Getting S/PDIF out working reliably on nForce-chipset boards tends to be iffy. I had it working OK on the nForce2-based board I was using previously for MythTV, but a desire to capture and play HD from my cable box led me to upgrade the system. It now has an nForce4-based board, and the latest stable ALSA definitely has issues with it. I ended up buying a USB-to-S/PDIF converter, which ended up being about as close to plug-and-play as you're going to get on Linux.
DVI (maybe through an inexpensive DVI-to-HDMI adapter) or VGA. If your HD monitor supports neither, there are VGA-to-component adapters available. (I use DVI.)
TFA says it's one of MSI's SFF boxen. Most of them aren't too offensive to look at, but they tend to be a bit thin on expansion options. I'm using an Antec Overture, which will hold an ATX motherboard and is fairly quiet (one temperature-controlled 92mm exhaust fan and rubber mounts for the hard drives).
Beyond that, I'll agree that the article was definitely short on details. It's the kind of subject on which you could easily put together a multi-page writeup (multiple pages filled with text and pictures, not a Tom's Hardware-style "multi-page" where you get a paragraph or two along with each page full of ads).
Talk radio is mostly AM, not FM. An FM-only radio is about as useful as tits on a mule if you mostly listen to talk radio.
As for music, I have a better selection on my iPod than most radio stations will play.
Bluetooth is only good for about 700 kbps (give or take a bit). That's OK for syncing my phone to my computer (where there usually isn't much that's changed since the last sync), but filling up my 60-GB iPod over a 700-kbps connection would take nearly eight days.
How do I deauthorize all of my computers?
If you have authorized five computers, a button labeled "Deauthorize All" will appear in your Account Information screen. This button will deauthorize all computers associated with your account. You can then reauthorize up to 5 computers. Note: You can only use this feature once a year.
Sounds like a rehash of the old SoftStrip concept, only now it works with the now-ubiquitous flatbed scanner instead of a special reader device.
(Hmm...some issues of Nibble had their programs included in SoftStrip format as well as printed source listings. I wonder if anybody ever came up with a program that'd read SoftStrip data from a scanned image.)
Fish finder? I think Ted Kennedy is the only driver who'd need one of those in his car.
My inbox would disagree with you on that...or it would, if I didn't have anti-spam software circular-filing most of the inbound worms.
Yes to both questions.
It works fairly well, too. The only snag I've seen so far is that ext2/ext3 partitions aren't automatically mounted/unmounted. For fixed storage, this is OK. For removable storage, though, if you disconnect a partition while it's still mounted, your computer will bluescreen.
(The ext2 IFS installs an app in the Control Panel for controlling what partitions get mounted where. Ideally, better integration with Windows would let you just fire up diskmgmt.msc and manage ext2/ext3 partitions the same way you handle FAT and NTFS partitions.)
I've used it on several computers at home and at work, and performance is acceptable. It's not as fast as NTFS, but the ext2 IFS under Windows is faster at reading ext3 filesystems under Windows than Captive NTFS is at reading NTFS partitions under Linux. (Linux's built-in NTFS support is much faster than Captive NTFS (and also works on more than just x86 Linux), but it's read-only for most purposes.) For a dual-boot system, I'd recommend shrinking your NTFS partitions to the minimum needed to hold Windows and its apps, and then use ext3 for the rest of your storage.
Turbojet engines don't have any fans, so there is no bypass at all. They only have compressors and turbines. Probably the only aircraft the Air Force still flies with turbojets are T-38s and (maybe) some KC-135s that haven't yet been retrofitted with turbofans. (I thought the B-52 was still flying on turbojets, but this page and this page say otherwise...you learn something new every day.)
Turbofan engines have been used in fighters for at least the past 40 years. Fighters don't get the same high-bypass engines that you'll see on an airliner due to size constraints, but turbofan engines with smaller fans go back in fighters to at least the F-111, if not earlier. Current fighters powered by turbofans include the F-15, F-16, F-22, and F-117. The F119 engine used in the F-22 is even capable of supercruise.