"...business travelers crammed into 10-square-meter cabins."
They make it seem like 10 square metres is very little.
I did the math, and it came out to about 110 square feet. That's not just little, it's tiny. I currently have about 6x that space at home, and that's getting to be a bit small now. I suppose it'd be OK for its intended purpose, but even 3x the space would be too small to live in (been there, done that).
In English, we call that an eighth inch audio connector.
An 1/8" jack is what's on your old man's "HiFi" from the 60s or 70s. iPods, PDAs, portable CD players, and other portable audio devices typically use a 3.5mm jack for the headphones, which is much smaller.
I thought USB didn't charge an iPod, only Firewire did.
It depends on the iPod. Mine (a 60GB iPod photo) can charge on either USB or FireWire. The oldest iPods can only charge on FireWire because they use a FireWire jack instead of a dock connector. My understanding of some of the newer iPods, OTOH, is that they can only charge on USB.
The weird bit, though, is that the cigarette-lighter-to-USB adapter I already had for some other devices won't work to power my iPod. I had to buy a different one made for iPod use (distinguishable from the others because it's white instead of black). I don't know what's different about this other adapter that it works when the other one doesn't, as I'd think both of them would just contain a 5V regulator and a USB jack.
Finding one that works right can be a bit of a challenge. Most of the USB video-capture devices I've run across deinterlace everything they capture, which makes it impossible to do inverse 3:2 pulldown before burning to DVD. Some of them are video-only, which leaves you capturing the audio with your soundcard. That can lead to nasty A/V sync problems unless you use something like Virtual VCR to correct for the sync problems.
So far, the only USB capture box I'd recommend (for whatever that's worth) is the Hauppauge WinTV-PVRUSB2. It's a bit more bulky than most (an issue if you plan to haul it around with your notebook), but it captures video and audio and compresses to MPEG-2. There's even a Linux driver for it. The capture hardware is the same as what you would get in their PCI MPEG-capture boards (like the WinTV-PVR150), which is pretty good.
Oh, and by the way, I have a copy of O'Reilly's 'Knoppix Hacks' on my desk somewhere. I think there is a recipe in that book to remove or replace the administrator password of a Windows machine using Knoppix.
It gets even easier than that. Just grab this, put it on a floppy or CD-R, boot it, and follow the prompts. IIRC, the current version works with everything up to at least WinXP SP2. It'll unlock any account and clear the password; after that, you can boot normally and set whatever password you want.
After three failures in five months, I had it replaced with a same-size Western Digital. I don't recall if I still have that drive someplace or if I sold it at some point, but I never had any trouble with it.
With that many failures that quickly, I suspect you had a bad or inadequate PSU. The WD drive may simply have drawn a bit less power or been a bit more tolerant of dirty power.
If that were the case, I'd think the other drives I'd had in the same computer (now that I remember, the "800MB Quantum" was really an 850MB Conner, and I had a 120MB Seagate before that (an ancient half-height model at that)) would've had problems. If three drives from Maxtor all puked within a short time of each other but three drives from other manufacturers ran for years and years both before and after, I'd think it's safe to say the fault was with the Maxtor drives.
(Also keep in mind this was back in '96 or '97. Computer parts were sufficiently expensive that you tended not to see anything like the ultra-cheap junk power supplies that get flogged by resellers today for $20 or so.)
I will back you up on that, I am personally in charge of near a thousand computers on our network. The worst luck I have is with maxtors by far. We had a series of external drives that burned themselves out after a short period, with a light load.
A few years back, I bought a 5.1GB Maxtor to replace the 800MB drive (I think it was a Quantum) that I had been using at the time. It ran for about a month before it puked.
I took it back to Best Buy and got it swapped out. After another month, that drive failed.
I took that drive back and got a third one. This time, I got about three months (w00t...not!) out of it before it went south.
After three failures in five months, I had it replaced with a same-size Western Digital. I don't recall if I still have that drive someplace or if I sold it at some point, but I never had any trouble with it.
Combine that with some more recent failures of larger Maxtors (bought one because I needed it now and nothing else was available, and another was in a prebuilt computer). There's no way in hell I'm trusting anything important (or even just interesting) to a Maxtor.
Lately, I've been buying Seagate drives because of their 5-year warranty, vs. 3 years for Hitachi and 1 year for Western Digital (speaking of IDE drives only...everybody offers 5-year warranties on SCSI drives AFAIK). Hopefully they're buying Maxtor just to take it off the market permanently. If they are, good riddance to flaky hard drives. If not, I hope there'll be an easy way to tell the real Seagate drives apart from the Maxtor-relabeled-as-Seagate drives.
Wonderful...just effin' wonderful. Instead of even making an attempt at a rebuttal, some chickenshit moderator decides to wield the Mighty Club of -1, Flamebait.
<voice style="james-t-kirk">
I'm laughing at the superior intellect. </voice>
Judging by how the summary was presented, it was submitted to troll us up into a frenzy about the evil DMCA. If, for example, it mentioned the part where the drives had 77 pirated video games, you could argue I was wrong.
Zonk's getting to be as bad as michael and JonKatz ever were...maybe even worse. More and more of the articles he posts resemble propaganda pieces more than hard news.
Op-ed pieces aren't bad, as long as they're presented as such. Hell, the op-ed page is usually the part of the newspaper I read first. Opinion pieces passed off as news, OTOH, shouldn't be tolerated from any source.
It's a propaganda mouthpiece for the jihadists of the world. Every time some Islamofascist swine slices someone's head off, you can count on al-Jazeera to broadcast the snuff video far and wide.
it is interesting to hear viewpoints from "the other side."
When "the other side"'s goal in life is our total annihilation, there is no use in paying heed to its propaganda mouthpieces. Islam offers just two options for those of us who don't believe as they do: convert or die. That is all you need to know, and you would do well to keep it in mind.
Imagine for a second that satellite radio existed back during WWII. Google News carrying al-Jazeera is no different than if XM or Sirius had carried Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose.
The data charges on Cell phones are stupid high. They charge you per byte, plus minutes while online.
Sounds like you need to switch carriers. Sprint charges a flat $15 per month for unlimited data (the speed is approximately that of ISDN, but with higher latency). Get a phone with Bluetooth (like a Treo 650) and you can use the connection with your computer without any additional software or cables.
I just switched a week or so ago, and reasonably-cheap data service was one of the things I wanted. Buying the same phone with service through Cingular or EarthLink would've been cheaper up-front, but the combined cost of voice and unlimited-data plans would've been up around $70-$80. Instead, I'm paying $45, which is just a little more than I was paying T-Mobile for voice-only service. (200 minutes per month is more than I'll ever use.)
I use a Mac and love it, but I am concerned about this development, as there are few websites (including my bank) which don't work with Safari (and my bank's web pages don't load correctly on Firefox).
If your bank's IT staff is so incompetent that it can't figure out how to make a standards-compliant webpage, then why would you trust them to not screw up more critical systems that could have an effect on the security of your accounts? I think you need to start looking for another bank.
I don't know why so many people like New Egg? Must people really buy everything from the same source?
I find myself picking out the very best parts for my computer from a wide variety of online stores with Pricewatch as the central hub.
You probably end up losing to extra shipping charges more than you're saving by ordering every component from a different source.
Most of the Pricewatch bottom-feeders also insist on shipping only to your billing address, which is a pain in the ass when you have a job that keeps you away from home when the brown truck pulls up. Newegg doesn't give me any grief when I want an order shipped to my office instead (whether it's for work or for personal use).
muslim extremists, christian fundamentalists.. in fact there's little difference
Yeah, those Christian fundies are hacking off people's heads all over the place, and blowing themselves up inside crowded buses, schools, and bars because the rest of us don't believe exactly as they do.
how about a linux install on the usb drive, or a liveCD, then you are free of whatever pathetic
Windows things have been turned off, unless it happened in BIOS.
Good luck getting that to work when the front-panel USB connectors (if present) are unplugged from the motherboard and the back-panel connectors are taped over.
In housing throw away those mad airconditioners and build your houses in a sensible way. We have in Germany houses, they are experimental, which need no airconditioning in summer and no heating in winter
Houses (and cars, while we're at it) over there have never had A/C. (Been there, done that.) It's easy to do without it when your temperatures rarely go much above 80. I'd like to see you try doing without A/C in Las Vegas or Phoenix, where you can spend weeks (maybe even a month or more) in mid-summer above 110, and easily two or three months above 100. It was still warm enough (70s) at Thanksgiving that we ate outside.
Some browsers support IRIs, basically Unicode in ASCII. So the actual URI is still ASCII but any program aware of IRIs will present them as Unicode.
That may work for the part of the URL that follows the domain name, but the domain name contained within the URL is ASCII-only because DNS doesn't respond too well to non-ASCII names.
With only 26 available they should fetch a hefty price and be accessible to only the wealthy. Great.
Damn... I knew I should have picked up Chinese as my second language
Only the 26 letters of the English alphabet are usable in domain names AFAIK. Letters from foreign alphabets (and ideographs from languages that use those, such as Chinese) are invalid characters.
Yes, there are MANY PCs that come preinstalled with Windows, or are MS OEMs, but there have been PCs sold as complete systems without MS being installed. (Didn't WalMart try this a couple years back?)
Not just Wal-Mart...the lowest-end box that Fry's keeps on hand for $200 or so (occasionally as low as $100) has Linux preloaded (Lindows^H^H^H^Hspire, specifically) on it. There's a certain other company you might've heard of that tends to ship its computers with something other than Windows preinstalled.
Slashdot Mirror
I did the math, and it came out to about 110 square feet. That's not just little, it's tiny. I currently have about 6x that space at home, and that's getting to be a bit small now. I suppose it'd be OK for its intended purpose, but even 3x the space would be too small to live in (been there, done that).
An 1/8" jack is what's on your old man's "HiFi" from the 60s or 70s. iPods, PDAs, portable CD players, and other portable audio devices typically use a 3.5mm jack for the headphones, which is much smaller.
It depends on the iPod. Mine (a 60GB iPod photo) can charge on either USB or FireWire. The oldest iPods can only charge on FireWire because they use a FireWire jack instead of a dock connector. My understanding of some of the newer iPods, OTOH, is that they can only charge on USB.
The weird bit, though, is that the cigarette-lighter-to-USB adapter I already had for some other devices won't work to power my iPod. I had to buy a different one made for iPod use (distinguishable from the others because it's white instead of black). I don't know what's different about this other adapter that it works when the other one doesn't, as I'd think both of them would just contain a 5V regulator and a USB jack.
Finding one that works right can be a bit of a challenge. Most of the USB video-capture devices I've run across deinterlace everything they capture, which makes it impossible to do inverse 3:2 pulldown before burning to DVD. Some of them are video-only, which leaves you capturing the audio with your soundcard. That can lead to nasty A/V sync problems unless you use something like Virtual VCR to correct for the sync problems.
So far, the only USB capture box I'd recommend (for whatever that's worth) is the Hauppauge WinTV-PVRUSB2. It's a bit more bulky than most (an issue if you plan to haul it around with your notebook), but it captures video and audio and compresses to MPEG-2. There's even a Linux driver for it. The capture hardware is the same as what you would get in their PCI MPEG-capture boards (like the WinTV-PVR150), which is pretty good.
It gets even easier than that. Just grab this, put it on a floppy or CD-R, boot it, and follow the prompts. IIRC, the current version works with everything up to at least WinXP SP2. It'll unlock any account and clear the password; after that, you can boot normally and set whatever password you want.
If that were the case, I'd think the other drives I'd had in the same computer (now that I remember, the "800MB Quantum" was really an 850MB Conner, and I had a 120MB Seagate before that (an ancient half-height model at that)) would've had problems. If three drives from Maxtor all puked within a short time of each other but three drives from other manufacturers ran for years and years both before and after, I'd think it's safe to say the fault was with the Maxtor drives.
(Also keep in mind this was back in '96 or '97. Computer parts were sufficiently expensive that you tended not to see anything like the ultra-cheap junk power supplies that get flogged by resellers today for $20 or so.)
A few years back, I bought a 5.1GB Maxtor to replace the 800MB drive (I think it was a Quantum) that I had been using at the time. It ran for about a month before it puked.
I took it back to Best Buy and got it swapped out. After another month, that drive failed.
I took that drive back and got a third one. This time, I got about three months (w00t...not!) out of it before it went south.
After three failures in five months, I had it replaced with a same-size Western Digital. I don't recall if I still have that drive someplace or if I sold it at some point, but I never had any trouble with it.
Combine that with some more recent failures of larger Maxtors (bought one because I needed it now and nothing else was available, and another was in a prebuilt computer). There's no way in hell I'm trusting anything important (or even just interesting) to a Maxtor.
Lately, I've been buying Seagate drives because of their 5-year warranty, vs. 3 years for Hitachi and 1 year for Western Digital (speaking of IDE drives only...everybody offers 5-year warranties on SCSI drives AFAIK). Hopefully they're buying Maxtor just to take it off the market permanently. If they are, good riddance to flaky hard drives. If not, I hope there'll be an easy way to tell the real Seagate drives apart from the Maxtor-relabeled-as-Seagate drives.
<voice style="james-t-kirk">
I'm laughing at the superior intellect.
</voice>
Not.
Zonk's getting to be as bad as michael and JonKatz ever were...maybe even worse. More and more of the articles he posts resemble propaganda pieces more than hard news.
Op-ed pieces aren't bad, as long as they're presented as such. Hell, the op-ed page is usually the part of the newspaper I read first. Opinion pieces passed off as news, OTOH, shouldn't be tolerated from any source.
It's a propaganda mouthpiece for the jihadists of the world. Every time some Islamofascist swine slices someone's head off, you can count on al-Jazeera to broadcast the snuff video far and wide.
Consider, too, this example of what passes for "news" at al-Jazeera that I pulled off of Google News just seconds ago.
When "the other side"'s goal in life is our total annihilation, there is no use in paying heed to its propaganda mouthpieces. Islam offers just two options for those of us who don't believe as they do: convert or die. That is all you need to know, and you would do well to keep it in mind.
Imagine for a second that satellite radio existed back during WWII. Google News carrying al-Jazeera is no different than if XM or Sirius had carried Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose.
That concept went out the door when Google News started passing off the likes of Indymedia and al-Jazeera as news sources.
Sounds like you need to switch carriers. Sprint charges a flat $15 per month for unlimited data (the speed is approximately that of ISDN, but with higher latency). Get a phone with Bluetooth (like a Treo 650) and you can use the connection with your computer without any additional software or cables.
I just switched a week or so ago, and reasonably-cheap data service was one of the things I wanted. Buying the same phone with service through Cingular or EarthLink would've been cheaper up-front, but the combined cost of voice and unlimited-data plans would've been up around $70-$80. Instead, I'm paying $45, which is just a little more than I was paying T-Mobile for voice-only service. (200 minutes per month is more than I'll ever use.)
If your bank's IT staff is so incompetent that it can't figure out how to make a standards-compliant webpage, then why would you trust them to not screw up more critical systems that could have an effect on the security of your accounts? I think you need to start looking for another bank.
You probably end up losing to extra shipping charges more than you're saving by ordering every component from a different source.
Most of the Pricewatch bottom-feeders also insist on shipping only to your billing address, which is a pain in the ass when you have a job that keeps you away from home when the brown truck pulls up. Newegg doesn't give me any grief when I want an order shipped to my office instead (whether it's for work or for personal use).
Your MiniDisc/Memory Stick/$RANDOM_SONY-ONLY_STORAGE audio player would've been rootkitted?
With a subject line like that, you really should've linked here. Looks like they agree with Linus, too.
Yeah, those Christian fundies are hacking off people's heads all over the place, and blowing themselves up inside crowded buses, schools, and bars because the rest of us don't believe exactly as they do.
Idiot.
The Brits do. They made a verb of it, too: to "hoover" the carpet is to vacuum it.
Among neo-Nazis, "88" is a codeword for "Heil Hitler" (H is the 8th letter in the alphabet).
Good luck getting that to work when the front-panel USB connectors (if present) are unplugged from the motherboard and the back-panel connectors are taped over.
Houses (and cars, while we're at it) over there have never had A/C. (Been there, done that.) It's easy to do without it when your temperatures rarely go much above 80. I'd like to see you try doing without A/C in Las Vegas or Phoenix, where you can spend weeks (maybe even a month or more) in mid-summer above 110, and easily two or three months above 100. It was still warm enough (70s) at Thanksgiving that we ate outside.
Leaving their staplers alone will keep the office from burning down.
That may work for the part of the URL that follows the domain name, but the domain name contained within the URL is ASCII-only because DNS doesn't respond too well to non-ASCII names.
Only the 26 letters of the English alphabet are usable in domain names AFAIK. Letters from foreign alphabets (and ideographs from languages that use those, such as Chinese) are invalid characters.
Not just Wal-Mart...the lowest-end box that Fry's keeps on hand for $200 or so (occasionally as low as $100) has Linux preloaded (Lindows^H^H^H^Hspire, specifically) on it. There's a certain other company you might've heard of that tends to ship its computers with something other than Windows preinstalled.