Re:Then how is the production funded?
on
P2P and TV
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· Score: 1
It is really hard to find a legit DVD these days without non-skippable commercials before the movie.
xine ignores PUOs. I have MythTV set to call it to play DVDs.
Before that, I used an Apex AD-600A to play DVDs. Three button presses on the remote (PBC OFF twice, followed by MENU) would take you straight to the main menu of any DVD.
OEMs would never purchase an IE-less Windows either, primarily because it would be incompatibile with nearly every modern Windows application (both MS and 3rd party).
nLite lets you build a Win2K/XP install disk without IE. Apps that depend on the IE engine (including the default shell, explorer.exe) still work because the needed components aren't removed. iexplore.exe (which wraps those components into a browser app) is what gets taken out.
A b0rked app that insists on firing up IE to display some HTML instead of using the default browser (whatever that happens to be) might run into problems on a box without IE, but that sounds more like a problem with the app than a problem with the system configuration.
The only way in your explanation that Windows would move from hda4 to hda1 is if you deleted the first 3 partions and then moved the Windows partition to the beginning of the drive and recreated the rest. Plus most often you never see a hda4 but instead a hda5 etc as they are logical partitions.
Point is that you would never see these results if all you do is resize, the whole partition numbers changing would only happen if you resized and created partitions in between.
It happened to me recently on my notebook, when I wanted to experiment with an XP install CD created with nLite. After backing up my current install with Ghost and dd'ing c:\bootsect.lnx to a floppy, I booted the CD, deleted the Windows partition (but left the Linux partitions alone), and tried to create a new partition for Windows (I wanted a clean install). Despite having only three primary partitions (one short of the maximum), the XP installer wouldn't create a new partition. I then figured I'd boot Linux (using the aforementioned boot floppy) and use its fdisk to create an NTFS partition. When it booted up, though, none of the Linux partitions were where they should've been. A bit of trial and error got it to boot to single-user mode, where I could use fdisk to see what Windows had changed so I could update/etc/fstab and do a normal boot.
I'll admit that's more than just a resize, but deleting and recreating one partition (in the same size as the original) while leaving the others alone shouldn't have shifted partition numbers around. It doesn't when you use Linux fdisk; why doesn't Windows' partitioning utilities behave the same way?
Note: You can't convert DRMed files you purchased to mp3 in iTunes...
I have a directory of iTunes Music Store downloads on my server at home that says otherwise. Using just iTunes itself, you can burn.m4p files to CD, rip the CD, and encode to whatever format you want. iTunes combines ripping and encoding in one step, with the option to encode to AAC, MP3, or Apple Lossless. You can also rip to WAV if you want to use an external enecoder to do Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, or whatever. With Hymn, you can get rid of the DRM to get.m4a files that can directly be transcoded to another format if necessary.
I used to transcode my downloads to Ogg Vorbis for playback on a Palm with AeroPlayer, but I probably won't be doing that as much now that I have an iPod. Getting rid of the DRM on iTMS downloads is still useful, though, as the unprotected files can be played and tagged by third-party apps (mplayer and xine don't like.m4p files).
Most modern Linux distributions' install programs will automatically put your Window's partition into the boot loader so it is a menu option when booting.
Given Windows' propensity for fscking with the MBR seemingly at will and for being somewhat twitchy when another OS changes things around, you might be better off having your Linux setup leave the MBR alone. Have your Linux bootloader write itself to a floppy, dd the first block of the floppy to a file, and move that file someplace where Windows can see it. A one-line change to c:\boot.ini will add an option to the NT bootloader to hand control to the Linux bootloader. My dual-boot systems are set up that way.
For a dual-boot system, GRUB might be a better choice than LILO. If you change the partition table on your HD within Windows, the order of partitions in the table might change. Let's say that/dev/hda4 is your Windows partition,/dev/hda1 is/,/dev/hda2 is/boot, and/dev/hda3 is swap. If you resize the Windows partition (with PartitionMagic, for instance), you might find that the resized Windows partition is now/dev/hda1 and/,/boot, and swap have moved to/dev/hda2, 3, and 4. With GRUB, you'll be able to edit the kernel options at boot time so you can at least boot to single-user mode. Once you're there, editing/etc/fstab and rebooting will get your Linux system working again. Doing the same with LILO installed would most likely involve booting Linux from a CD...if you don't have a boot CD with you, you're SOL.
I've always wondered why printers don't seem to come with emergency stops, even if in software.
The Lexmark Optra Color 40 (an old PostScript-compatible inkjet that got blown out dirt-cheap because they never sold it properly) on my desk has a button that'll kill the current print job (eating the remainder of it as it arrives if it's not all in the buffer). It's not a big red button (it's actually a small blue one that looks like the form-feed button), but it gets the job done.
Someone else already mentioned that some Brother printers have a job-cancel button.
An old rule of thumb of mine used to be "don't buy the extended warranty--it's a scam". After my experience with a broken Fuji digicam--which was under warranty, but took two months to fix a seemingly minor problem--I think I'll be getting those from now on (instant replacement et al.).
For a device with moving parts, they can be an OK deal. I've already had an Epson inkjet printer sent out to service with a clogged printhead. It was still within the factory-warranty period, but there's a fair chance it could need another printhead (or two) before the extended warranty runs out. (I ordinarily wouldn't have bought an Epson because of the head-clogging problems I've run into with them in the past, but this printer (a Stylus Photo R200) is one of the few that prints on DVDs and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.)
Your average camcorder is even more complex (mechanically speaking) than a printer, and it's something that's likely to get bounced around, mishandled, etc. in the course of normal use.
For something without moving parts (like a stereo or a TV), the average extended warranty ends up becoming just more free money for the retailer. If it works for a month or two, it'll probably work damn near forever.
A large, distributed flock of Apple IIs. There are still a lot of them out there, and Apple did say they would be "forever."
...and lest you think there's no such thing as distributed computing on Apple IIs, have a look at the AppleCrate. There are even a couple of MP3s (here and here) that were sampled from a multi-voice synthesizer running on the system, which is basically a stack of IIe motherboards tied together with minimal added logic.
Thwarting body-scanning technology would be simple, he argues. Because of concerns about radiation, body scanners are designed not to penetrate the skin. All that's needed is someone heavily overweight to go through the system, he said. I won't quote him directly on the details; suffice it to say he posits that a weapon or explosives pack could be tucked into flabby body folds that won't be penetrated by the scanner.
Looks like Michael Moore might have a future as a homicide bomber...oh wait, he already did that.:-)
Re:Integrated pointing stick-keyboard not reviewed
on
Top Mice Compared
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· Score: 1
I would like to recommend an IBM keyboard, but it turns out they're apparently quite hard to find a picture of.
[Cuba] has a better health care system than the USA
Riiight.
"[T]hose who say that Cubans are receiving great healthcare thanks to Castro, don't know what they are talking about." Go have a look. I dare you.
Castro is the President, not a dictator. Cuba has a parliament, and *gasp*, a constitution.
Yeah, and the last time he was "elected," what percentage of the "vote" did he get? 100%? 99.99%? Don't confuse a dictator's faux republicanism with the real deal.
You complain about the average Cuban living in poverty but you miss the following - ALL Cubans have access to government-issued food, education, and medical care. That's EVERYBODY, from the chauffer who drives Castro around to a dentist in Havana to a farmer in la Isla de Juventud.
Socialism does a pretty good job of making everybody equal, all right.
When I was at school in Britain, every morning we said a prayer to God.
40 years or so ago, our Supreme Court misinterpreted the Constitution in order to ban prayer (or more recently, anything even vaguely religious) in public schools. Private schools can still do whatever they want in this regard, but public-school valedictorians risk landing in hot water with school administrators merely for acknowledging their beliefs before the assembled graduates.
When I was younger and poorer, I ran through a series of ancient Mercedes sedans. ** SNIP **
I would have occasional power steering failures, generally caused by the fluid leaking out of the pump. When this happened, there was no problem controlling the car at speed, but it was an absolute beast to get out of parking spaces.
Generally, front-wheel drive cars have significantly heavier steering than rear wheel drive cars,
True, but it's not so much heavier that it's uncontrollable. I borrowed my grandparents' '85 Ninety Eight (first year that model was wrong-wheel-drive) a couple of years or so ago while I was back east. It hadn't been driven in a while, and the serpentine belt snapped on me while I was on the freeway. Even with no power steering (since the belt was gone), it wasn't that big a deal to get it over to the side of the road.
do not turn off the ignition until the car is stopped if you do that you loose your power steering and brakes
Losing power steering isn't a big deal. You can still steer; it'll just be more difficult (unless it's a really small RWD vehicle that didn't need power steering anyway).
Power brakes shouldn't go out right away, as there's usually a vacuum canister that'll keep vacuum-operated items (such as the brake booster) working for a short time after the engine is shut off. Even without vacuum, power brakes will still work; as with power steering, they'll be more difficult (you'll just about have to stand on the brakes).
Think about it for a bit. If cars became undriveable the second the engine conked out, there would be far more accidents than we already have.
Go get a wifi card. Most any one will do. People still pay for broadband?
Without some form of net access feeding it, your wireless access point is about as useful as a paperweight. Without an access point or router, your wireless card is similarly useless.
TFA shows a picture of an Apple IIe, not an Apple II.
In another bit of weirdness with their pic, I don't know of anybody who ever kept a DuoDisk off to the side. It was designed so that you could sandwich it between the computer and the monitor.
Well, K6 weren't very good chips either, much cheaper that intel's but with much less perfs too.
"Much less?" Bullsh*t. You might want to qualify your statement a bit better than that. "Gamer d00dz" bitched about the FPU speed (and maybe they had a bit of a point there), but for everything else that you might have done with a computer at the time, they kept up well enough. With the exclusion of FP, they ran at about the same speed (give or take a bit) as a similarly-clocked PII.
FWIW, some of Cyrix's older stuff wasn't too bad, either, for what it was. I had a 120-MHz 5x86 that was about an even match to a 90-MHz Pentium, but the board & processor cost about $300 less. When you're making $7/hr or so at Best Buy (as I was at the time), $300 is not an insignificant amount of money. There might've been more of a speed difference between their later processors and Intel's later processors, but I upgraded the 5x86 to a K6 and have used AMD almost exclusively since then.
Slashdot takes a lot of articles and stories from a large number of websites, the editors check them for errors and ensure quality. In theory at least.;)
Every time there's an article on mobile phones on Slashdot, there's some smug little luddite like yourself posts: why isn't a phone just a phone and a word processor just a typewriter? Why does it need a hard drive?
The question I've not seen asked yet is this:
What happens when you drop it?
Hard drives typically don't like being dropped. Cell phones, being handheld devices, stand a good chance of getting dropped. I fumblefingered my Ericsson T610 within 24 hours of getting it. It has a ding in the case where it hit the pavement, but it still works. A few years ago, I had a Motorola i1000 fly out the passenger window onto a freeway overpass. I parked my car, walked out onto the overpass, and retrieved the phone. It was a little bit scratched up, but it still worked. Will you be able to say the same for a hard-drive-equipped cell phone after it slipped and fell?
Flash storage density is up to at least 4 GB now. (That's the largest CompactFlash card (not a Microdrive) I've seen at Fry's; there might well be something even larger on the market already.) That would be a better match for a cell phone than a hard drive. Flash doesn't suffer head crashes when it's dropped.
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xine ignores PUOs. I have MythTV set to call it to play DVDs.
Before that, I used an Apex AD-600A to play DVDs. Three button presses on the remote (PBC OFF twice, followed by MENU) would take you straight to the main menu of any DVD.
nLite lets you build a Win2K/XP install disk without IE. Apps that depend on the IE engine (including the default shell, explorer.exe) still work because the needed components aren't removed. iexplore.exe (which wraps those components into a browser app) is what gets taken out.
A b0rked app that insists on firing up IE to display some HTML instead of using the default browser (whatever that happens to be) might run into problems on a box without IE, but that sounds more like a problem with the app than a problem with the system configuration.
It's gonna take a sh*tload of paper to print it all out so the PHB can read it, though...or has his Etch-a-Sketch been suitably upgraded yet?
It happened to me recently on my notebook, when I wanted to experiment with an XP install CD created with nLite. After backing up my current install with Ghost and dd'ing c:\bootsect.lnx to a floppy, I booted the CD, deleted the Windows partition (but left the Linux partitions alone), and tried to create a new partition for Windows (I wanted a clean install). Despite having only three primary partitions (one short of the maximum), the XP installer wouldn't create a new partition. I then figured I'd boot Linux (using the aforementioned boot floppy) and use its fdisk to create an NTFS partition. When it booted up, though, none of the Linux partitions were where they should've been. A bit of trial and error got it to boot to single-user mode, where I could use fdisk to see what Windows had changed so I could update /etc/fstab and do a normal boot.
I'll admit that's more than just a resize, but deleting and recreating one partition (in the same size as the original) while leaving the others alone shouldn't have shifted partition numbers around. It doesn't when you use Linux fdisk; why doesn't Windows' partitioning utilities behave the same way?
I have a directory of iTunes Music Store downloads on my server at home that says otherwise. Using just iTunes itself, you can burn .m4p files to CD, rip the CD, and encode to whatever format you want. iTunes combines ripping and encoding in one step, with the option to encode to AAC, MP3, or Apple Lossless. You can also rip to WAV if you want to use an external enecoder to do Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, or whatever. With Hymn, you can get rid of the DRM to get .m4a files that can directly be transcoded to another format if necessary.
I used to transcode my downloads to Ogg Vorbis for playback on a Palm with AeroPlayer, but I probably won't be doing that as much now that I have an iPod. Getting rid of the DRM on iTMS downloads is still useful, though, as the unprotected files can be played and tagged by third-party apps (mplayer and xine don't like .m4p files).
Given Windows' propensity for fscking with the MBR seemingly at will and for being somewhat twitchy when another OS changes things around, you might be better off having your Linux setup leave the MBR alone. Have your Linux bootloader write itself to a floppy, dd the first block of the floppy to a file, and move that file someplace where Windows can see it. A one-line change to c:\boot.ini will add an option to the NT bootloader to hand control to the Linux bootloader. My dual-boot systems are set up that way.
For a dual-boot system, GRUB might be a better choice than LILO. If you change the partition table on your HD within Windows, the order of partitions in the table might change. Let's say that /dev/hda4 is your Windows partition, /dev/hda1 is /, /dev/hda2 is /boot, and /dev/hda3 is swap. If you resize the Windows partition (with PartitionMagic, for instance), you might find that the resized Windows partition is now /dev/hda1 and /, /boot, and swap have moved to /dev/hda2, 3, and 4. With GRUB, you'll be able to edit the kernel options at boot time so you can at least boot to single-user mode. Once you're there, editing /etc/fstab and rebooting will get your Linux system working again. Doing the same with LILO installed would most likely involve booting Linux from a CD...if you don't have a boot CD with you, you're SOL.
The Lexmark Optra Color 40 (an old PostScript-compatible inkjet that got blown out dirt-cheap because they never sold it properly) on my desk has a button that'll kill the current print job (eating the remainder of it as it arrives if it's not all in the buffer). It's not a big red button (it's actually a small blue one that looks like the form-feed button), but it gets the job done.
Someone else already mentioned that some Brother printers have a job-cancel button.
For a device with moving parts, they can be an OK deal. I've already had an Epson inkjet printer sent out to service with a clogged printhead. It was still within the factory-warranty period, but there's a fair chance it could need another printhead (or two) before the extended warranty runs out. (I ordinarily wouldn't have bought an Epson because of the head-clogging problems I've run into with them in the past, but this printer (a Stylus Photo R200) is one of the few that prints on DVDs and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.)
Your average camcorder is even more complex (mechanically speaking) than a printer, and it's something that's likely to get bounced around, mishandled, etc. in the course of normal use.
For something without moving parts (like a stereo or a TV), the average extended warranty ends up becoming just more free money for the retailer. If it works for a month or two, it'll probably work damn near forever.
Looks like Michael Moore might have a future as a homicide bomber...oh wait, he already did that. :-)
Huh? I found that in maybe two seconds.
I'll second the recommendation, though. I have two of 'em at work. Clicky is good.
Riiight. "[T]hose who say that Cubans are receiving great healthcare thanks to Castro, don't know what they are talking about." Go have a look. I dare you.
Yeah, and the last time he was "elected," what percentage of the "vote" did he get? 100%? 99.99%? Don't confuse a dictator's faux republicanism with the real deal.
Socialism does a pretty good job of making everybody equal, all right.
Equally miserable.
40 years or so ago, our Supreme Court misinterpreted the Constitution in order to ban prayer (or more recently, anything even vaguely religious) in public schools. Private schools can still do whatever they want in this regard, but public-school valedictorians risk landing in hot water with school administrators merely for acknowledging their beliefs before the assembled graduates.
True, but it's not so much heavier that it's uncontrollable. I borrowed my grandparents' '85 Ninety Eight (first year that model was wrong-wheel-drive) a couple of years or so ago while I was back east. It hadn't been driven in a while, and the serpentine belt snapped on me while I was on the freeway. Even with no power steering (since the belt was gone), it wasn't that big a deal to get it over to the side of the road.
Think about it for a bit. If cars became undriveable the second the engine conked out, there would be far more accidents than we already have.
Without some form of net access feeding it, your wireless access point is about as useful as a paperweight. Without an access point or router, your wireless card is similarly useless.
In another bit of weirdness with their pic, I don't know of anybody who ever kept a DuoDisk off to the side. It was designed so that you could sandwich it between the computer and the monitor.
"Much less?" Bullsh*t. You might want to qualify your statement a bit better than that. "Gamer d00dz" bitched about the FPU speed (and maybe they had a bit of a point there), but for everything else that you might have done with a computer at the time, they kept up well enough. With the exclusion of FP, they ran at about the same speed (give or take a bit) as a similarly-clocked PII.
FWIW, some of Cyrix's older stuff wasn't too bad, either, for what it was. I had a 120-MHz 5x86 that was about an even match to a 90-MHz Pentium, but the board & processor cost about $300 less. When you're making $7/hr or so at Best Buy (as I was at the time), $300 is not an insignificant amount of money. There might've been more of a speed difference between their later processors and Intel's later processors, but I upgraded the 5x86 to a K6 and have used AMD almost exclusively since then.
You're new here, aren't you? :-)
"Tu-144" would be more exact.
That's why you should abbreviate it as \., not as /.. The slash leans to the left. :-P
The question I've not seen asked yet is this:
What happens when you drop it?
Hard drives typically don't like being dropped. Cell phones, being handheld devices, stand a good chance of getting dropped. I fumblefingered my Ericsson T610 within 24 hours of getting it. It has a ding in the case where it hit the pavement, but it still works. A few years ago, I had a Motorola i1000 fly out the passenger window onto a freeway overpass. I parked my car, walked out onto the overpass, and retrieved the phone. It was a little bit scratched up, but it still worked. Will you be able to say the same for a hard-drive-equipped cell phone after it slipped and fell?
Flash storage density is up to at least 4 GB now. (That's the largest CompactFlash card (not a Microdrive) I've seen at Fry's; there might well be something even larger on the market already.) That would be a better match for a cell phone than a hard drive. Flash doesn't suffer head crashes when it's dropped.