After going through 3 5.1GB Maxtors in as many months a few years ago, I've avoided Maxtor like the plague. There was one occasion since then where I needed a drive Right Now and all that was in stock was a 20GB Maxtor. That went tango-uniform in a month or two; the Seagate that replaced it is still running AFAIK. (The 5.1GB Western Digital that replaced the three dead Maxtors is also still going.)
For those of you who dislike the New York Times subscription requirement, here is a link to a google news search of related articles.
Since it's the New York Times we're talking about, and given recent events regarding the veracity of their reporting, maybe Slashdot should precede links to the Times with a disclaimer similar to the following (shamelessly ripped from the Truth Detector's website):
All facts and quotes appearing in the New York Times must be suspected of being made up, fabricated, altered or created entirely out of whole cloth.
The issue that caused me enough grief to return it was the fact that the burned DVD's could not give me the quality of images that I see in the commercial DVD's unless I was willing to put one hour of material on the disc. I was using Pinnacle Studio 8, the 8.51 SE version. When I burned two hours of video, the quality was very poor.
That sounds more like an issue with crappy encoding software than with the burner. I routinely put 2+ hours on a DVD with good results...the video is edited with Avisynth, encoded with TMPGEnc, and authored with DVDlab. I've even gone as far as 4 hours on a DVD and gotten OK results. (It won't be the absolute highest quality, but it's good enough for archiving Good Eats...12 episodes (with recipes) on one DVD.)
Now that the product is in a semi-usable state, has the decision been made to feature-freeze and to focus on quality control? Running the OSX client turns my iBook to mush. The linux client brings my dual AMD MP system to its knees.
The Win32 version seems to run well enough, at least. I started it while TMPGEnc was crunching some video, and TMPGEnc's performance wasn't negatively impacted. (This was on a 1.0-GHz Athlon, too, as the motherboard for my dual-Athlon box is being replaced. 38 hours to encode ~2 hours of DVD-quality video sucks...MSI needs to hurry up and ship me a replacement.:-| )
What drive did you use in your Apex? Mine has issues with certain dvds.
I would've used an old Panasonic 2x drive (came with a Creative Labs Dxr2 kit years ago), but couldn't find it when I needed it...so I used a BTC BDV316B. It plays DVDs (pressed, DVD-R, and DVD-RW) without problems, but SVCDs get cut short a little bit sooner than they should (the original loader cut them 2 seconds short, so I made them with that much black space at the end) and it keeps spinning at a high speed when playing audio CDs. It's mainly used for DVDs, though, so I'm not complaining much. The player takes longer to initialize before the display lights up and you can eject the tray; why it does that, I don't know. The front plate popped off easily, and the Apex's tray trim piece snapped into place with a little bit of trimming (not visible unless you know where to look). The drive is hot-glued into the chassis. Other than the front of the tray getting sucked in a little bit more (by maybe 2 mm) and not sticking out as much when it's ejected, you can't tell at first glance that it's been upgraded.
True, but, if there are people out there with DVD-R/W component recorders that can't do VBR, that means you, with your computer DVD-R/W drive may have to put up with them.
:-?
Put up with what? What bearing does someone else's hardware have on the capabilities of the equipment I'm using?
With all the copious storage space, backups have to go somewhere. And have you priced DVD-Rs? Aye yai yai.
A rewritable DVD that allows for deletion?
Sounds like you're describing DVD-RW. I back up my work files to DVD-RW every Friday...the disc gets erased and reburned with whatever's on the server.
It's the difference between using the drive as a computer storage disc and using a DVD-R/W component to record video.
Sounds like yet another reason to buy a DVD burner (that goes in your computer) instead of a DVD recorder (that plugs into your A/V stack). I'm fairly sure the topic at hand is DVD burners, though. (Just as I used a CD burner mainly to make SVCDs, the output from my DVD burner is more DVD-Video than DVD-ROM...source material for both is mostly ripped from my TiVo and reencoded to work with the destination format.)
It's also helpful that DVD burners only run $200-$300, while DVD recorders still run 2-3x that (or more).
If you know someone with a +/- burner, the best way to go would be to have him burn you one of each and see which one works with your player. If that's not an option, the info I've seen indicates that DVD-R works with more players than DVD+R, and the media are also cheaper (I've seen bulk 1x DVD-Rs down around 80 each). If your player won't handle DVD-Rs, odds are good it won't handle any other burnable DVD.
(I ended up replacing the loader in my Apex AD-600A because it wouldn't handle any burned DVDs. $35 and an RPC-1 firmware download took care of that. I use a Pioneer DVR-105 in a FireWire case; it gets shared between two computers at home and one at work.)
Under windows, there was an installer which told me BT was "successfully installed". Then I had to look for it and finally find it in "D:\Program Files". There, I found only "btdownloadgui.exe", and no matter what params I tried (after reading the command line options from the output of btdownloadheadless.py, couldn't manage to make it read one stupid.torrent file and download it.
After installing the client, the first.torrent link I clicked in Mozilla popped up BitTorrent. It asked for a download directory, ground away for a bit, and then started downloading. It was a bit slow at first, but it's running 15-20 kbps downstream (occasionally more) and 10-12 kbps upstream now.
The tricky part is finding.torrents. Once you have one, though, it works well enough.
Attacking minor figures inevitably makes you look small. Whether justified or not, Bush made a major error calling for a boycott of the Dixie Chicks, it made him look like a small minded bully. He should have laughed it off. A President with real class would have called them up and talked to them in person.
(Responding to trolls is usually a Bad Idea, but I can't allow this assertion to remain unchallenged.)
Get back under your bridge. Bush never called for a boycott of anybody. There are some talk-radio hosts (Sean Hannity comes to mind as an example) who have suggested that the Dixie Chicks' treachery ought not be rewarded in the marketplace, but the administration hasn't said much one way or the other about the subject. If you're going to mindlessly bash people, at least get your facts straight.
Except for my crash-happy HP notebook. Right now, I'm still blaming HP for that.
Mine works just fine...but then the first thing I did was nuke the hard drive and do a clean install of Win2K and my apps to get rid of whatever crap HP preloaded on it. Running with the vendor-preloaded software is asking for trouble.
(Years ago, someone had me look at his brand-new Compaq notebook because even though it had a relatively fast (for the time) processor, it was still dog-slow. After tracking down all the necessary drivers, I nuked it and did a clean Win98 install. That got it running like it should...the difference was like night and day.)
Check here...$15 for a barebones Socket 5 system, $4 for 64 megs of RAM, $1 for a 100-MHz Pentium. You can probably do better locally with prices for el-cheapo Realtek-based NICs (I bought some Intel 10/100 NICs from them a while back for $2 each, but they're not up on their website...they have 3Com 3C905s listed at $20 each). For a firewall, you don't really need a hard drive...but you probably have one gathering dust that you could put in there if you want. I'm fairly sure that's a good bit less than whatever an Xbox costs.
The "stripe" that is inserted into US bills is in a different place for each denomination.
It also has different printing. A $100 bill with a stripe that says "USA FIVE" on it ought to trigger a warning. Then again, just because a security measure is included in money doesn't guarantee that everyone will use it...
I think the proper answer is to highlight ethics in engineering again. I recall for Y2k, the Chinese supposedly had engineers riding on the planes at the stroke of midnight. Though maybe a bit harsh, such an act does bring the levity of the situation to people who often spend their time working on the product in an enclosed room.
Who wants to talk nowadays when you can just e-mail or im? duh...
That requires a keyboard to carry out with anything resembling efficiency, which I don't think anybody would want to do. Even the fold-up keyboards for Palms and such are a bit much to carry around. As for entering email in your phone, it's way too cumbersome when you have only 12 keys through which you enter 96 possible (ASCII) characters. Sending email through a phone is little more than a gimmick, and it will remain a gimmick until some means of input becomes available that is reasonably efficient and doesn't substantially increase bulk. (I suppose the units that integrate a Palm and a phone are a good bit of the way there, considering that they support Grafitti and a virtual keyboard...but how many of us have those?)
Under Dubya's tax cut plan, he'll probably owe around $2.95 for total taxes on his stock selloff. The top 2% pays almost nothing in taxes
You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. IRS data on the subject indicate that in 2000, the top 1% accounted for over 37% of income-tax revenue. The top 5% accounted for over 56% of revenue, the top 10% accounted for over 67%, the top 25% accounted for over 84%, and the upper half accounted for over 96%!
Class-warfare rhetoric tends to get uninformed people whipped into a frenzy more easily than statistics, though, which is why some people continue to use it...
Why even spend the $10? If you violate the terms of the EULA, the $10 you spent won't cover your ass. You might have well have just gone online with LimeWire and downloaded everything imaginable for free.
More and more, I'm getting the impression that you're safer running warez than if you do the "Right Thing." I picked up a CD at the last COMDEX for some OCR software (FineReader Pro 6) that had some interesting features. I tried it out, found that it'd do what I want, and forked over the $100 to keep it.
I figured the CD was just some sort of timebomb demo...no big deal, they've been around forever in the shareware market. However, the FineReader "try-before-you-buy" CD infects your computer with CDilla...the same malware that was at the heart of the recent TurboTax controversy. My computer usually goes just a few months between WinXX reinstalls, so the possibility of losing software that I had bought if Windows ate itself or the hard drive went tango-uniform wasn't too appealing.
The next time FineReader Pro 6 turned up in one of the alt.binaries.warez.* newsgroups, I snagged it. I now have a copy that I know can be reinstalled without hassle. I shouldn't have had to do this with software that I bought. It used to be that you paid for your software to avoid the viruses that supposedly often rode along with warez. Nowadays, though, it seems that with the malware that software vendors such as Abbyy and Intuit are slipping into their products, warez might now be the safer way to go. I somehow doubt this is the situation that they wanted, but that's what they've done.
Except I'm pretty sure you're going to be sending more than one bit per pixel. Last time I checked, you could print more than pure black and white with postscript
The printer can't do more than 1 bpp, though...for a given pixel, either it puts down ink/toner or it doesn't (unless you're talking about dye-sublimation printers). That's why you can get good results printing photos at 100-150 dpi. The rasterizer will convert continuous-tone images to halftone images...that's part of its job description. The chunk of memory that holds the printed pattern needs only 1 bpp for monochrome printing. Even if you're doing color printing, it'll need only 1 bpp for each of the 3, 4, or 6 colors that it can put on the paper.
You can transmit your own data format. Instead of transforming your data into "real" postscript, you send a set of postscript procedures that reproduce the behaviour of your graphic language. This was actually one of the primary requirements of postscript, something that could handle quickdraw (Apple's graphic language pre OS-X) reasonably well. DVI2PS does a similar trick.
Apple also wrote an Imagewriter emulator in PostScript...the intended purpose was to enable 8-bit Apple II software to print to LaserWriters. Imagewriter support was fairly widespread, but PostScript support was nowhere near as common (only program I ever used that generated PostScript was PublishIt!). (The IIGS and its OS were new enough that a native PostScript driver was provided.) I would guess that you could code some PostScript to handle other types of dot-matrix output, but IWEM is the only one I know of that was put to any widespread use.
Also you have to realise the bitmap of printing page is quite large: an uncompressed A4 page 300 DPI black/white bitmap is around 15MB
A4 must be a huge page size if a 300-dpi bitmap takes 15 megs. A standard letter-size page (8.5x11") needs barely more than 1 meg at 300 dpi, 1 bpp.
Unless, of course, you're targeting an embedded system such as a handheld game console or PDA, which has no rotating storage. Do PostScript printers have hard drives?
You could plug a SCSI hard drive into a LaserWriter; it was used (IIRC) mainly for font storage. Instead of having to send all of the fonts across the network (which at LocalTalk's 230.4 kbps could be slow), all of the fonts an office used regularly could be dumped onto the hard drive and retrieved by the printer as needed.
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After going through 3 5.1GB Maxtors in as many months a few years ago, I've avoided Maxtor like the plague. There was one occasion since then where I needed a drive Right Now and all that was in stock was a 20GB Maxtor. That went tango-uniform in a month or two; the Seagate that replaced it is still running AFAIK. (The 5.1GB Western Digital that replaced the three dead Maxtors is also still going.)
Since it's the New York Times we're talking about, and given recent events regarding the veracity of their reporting, maybe Slashdot should precede links to the Times with a disclaimer similar to the following (shamelessly ripped from the Truth Detector's website):
My understanding of the matter is that you should blame DirecTV for that...they didn't want to implement HMO on their system.
That sounds more like an issue with crappy encoding software than with the burner. I routinely put 2+ hours on a DVD with good results...the video is edited with Avisynth, encoded with TMPGEnc, and authored with DVDlab. I've even gone as far as 4 hours on a DVD and gotten OK results. (It won't be the absolute highest quality, but it's good enough for archiving Good Eats...12 episodes (with recipes) on one DVD.)
TyStudio hasn't failed me yet...it's getting to where I don't really worry about sync anymore.
The Win32 version seems to run well enough, at least. I started it while TMPGEnc was crunching some video, and TMPGEnc's performance wasn't negatively impacted. (This was on a 1.0-GHz Athlon, too, as the motherboard for my dual-Athlon box is being replaced. 38 hours to encode ~2 hours of DVD-quality video sucks...MSI needs to hurry up and ship me a replacement. :-| )
I would've used an old Panasonic 2x drive (came with a Creative Labs Dxr2 kit years ago), but couldn't find it when I needed it...so I used a BTC BDV316B. It plays DVDs (pressed, DVD-R, and DVD-RW) without problems, but SVCDs get cut short a little bit sooner than they should (the original loader cut them 2 seconds short, so I made them with that much black space at the end) and it keeps spinning at a high speed when playing audio CDs. It's mainly used for DVDs, though, so I'm not complaining much. The player takes longer to initialize before the display lights up and you can eject the tray; why it does that, I don't know. The front plate popped off easily, and the Apex's tray trim piece snapped into place with a little bit of trimming (not visible unless you know where to look). The drive is hot-glued into the chassis. Other than the front of the tray getting sucked in a little bit more (by maybe 2 mm) and not sticking out as much when it's ejected, you can't tell at first glance that it's been upgraded.
Put up with what? What bearing does someone else's hardware have on the capabilities of the equipment I'm using?
Sounds like you're describing DVD-RW. I back up my work files to DVD-RW every Friday...the disc gets erased and reburned with whatever's on the server.
Sounds like yet another reason to buy a DVD burner (that goes in your computer) instead of a DVD recorder (that plugs into your A/V stack). I'm fairly sure the topic at hand is DVD burners, though. (Just as I used a CD burner mainly to make SVCDs, the output from my DVD burner is more DVD-Video than DVD-ROM...source material for both is mostly ripped from my TiVo and reencoded to work with the destination format.)
It's also helpful that DVD burners only run $200-$300, while DVD recorders still run 2-3x that (or more).
Huh? WTF does the media type have to do with what types of data you can record to it? I have plenty of VBR MPEG-2 video that I've burned to DVD-R.
(I ended up replacing the loader in my Apex AD-600A because it wouldn't handle any burned DVDs. $35 and an RPC-1 firmware download took care of that. I use a Pioneer DVR-105 in a FireWire case; it gets shared between two computers at home and one at work.)
After installing the client, the first .torrent link I clicked in Mozilla popped up BitTorrent. It asked for a download directory, ground away for a bit, and then started downloading. It was a bit slow at first, but it's running 15-20 kbps downstream (occasionally more) and 10-12 kbps upstream now.
The tricky part is finding .torrents. Once you have one, though, it works well enough.
(Responding to trolls is usually a Bad Idea, but I can't allow this assertion to remain unchallenged.)
Get back under your bridge. Bush never called for a boycott of anybody. There are some talk-radio hosts (Sean Hannity comes to mind as an example) who have suggested that the Dixie Chicks' treachery ought not be rewarded in the marketplace, but the administration hasn't said much one way or the other about the subject. If you're going to mindlessly bash people, at least get your facts straight.
Mine works just fine...but then the first thing I did was nuke the hard drive and do a clean install of Win2K and my apps to get rid of whatever crap HP preloaded on it. Running with the vendor-preloaded software is asking for trouble.
(Years ago, someone had me look at his brand-new Compaq notebook because even though it had a relatively fast (for the time) processor, it was still dog-slow. After tracking down all the necessary drivers, I nuked it and did a clean Win98 install. That got it running like it should...the difference was like night and day.)
Check here...$15 for a barebones Socket 5 system, $4 for 64 megs of RAM, $1 for a 100-MHz Pentium. You can probably do better locally with prices for el-cheapo Realtek-based NICs (I bought some Intel 10/100 NICs from them a while back for $2 each, but they're not up on their website...they have 3Com 3C905s listed at $20 each). For a firewall, you don't really need a hard drive...but you probably have one gathering dust that you could put in there if you want. I'm fairly sure that's a good bit less than whatever an Xbox costs.
It also has different printing. A $100 bill with a stripe that says "USA FIVE" on it ought to trigger a warning. Then again, just because a security measure is included in money doesn't guarantee that everyone will use it...
s/levity/gravity/g, perhaps?
That requires a keyboard to carry out with anything resembling efficiency, which I don't think anybody would want to do. Even the fold-up keyboards for Palms and such are a bit much to carry around. As for entering email in your phone, it's way too cumbersome when you have only 12 keys through which you enter 96 possible (ASCII) characters. Sending email through a phone is little more than a gimmick, and it will remain a gimmick until some means of input becomes available that is reasonably efficient and doesn't substantially increase bulk. (I suppose the units that integrate a Palm and a phone are a good bit of the way there, considering that they support Grafitti and a virtual keyboard...but how many of us have those?)
You can turn in your Geek ID as you leave...and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. :-)
You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. IRS data on the subject indicate that in 2000, the top 1% accounted for over 37% of income-tax revenue. The top 5% accounted for over 56% of revenue, the top 10% accounted for over 67%, the top 25% accounted for over 84%, and the upper half accounted for over 96%!
Class-warfare rhetoric tends to get uninformed people whipped into a frenzy more easily than statistics, though, which is why some people continue to use it...
More and more, I'm getting the impression that you're safer running warez than if you do the "Right Thing." I picked up a CD at the last COMDEX for some OCR software (FineReader Pro 6) that had some interesting features. I tried it out, found that it'd do what I want, and forked over the $100 to keep it.
I figured the CD was just some sort of timebomb demo...no big deal, they've been around forever in the shareware market. However, the FineReader "try-before-you-buy" CD infects your computer with CDilla...the same malware that was at the heart of the recent TurboTax controversy. My computer usually goes just a few months between WinXX reinstalls, so the possibility of losing software that I had bought if Windows ate itself or the hard drive went tango-uniform wasn't too appealing.
The next time FineReader Pro 6 turned up in one of the alt.binaries.warez.* newsgroups, I snagged it. I now have a copy that I know can be reinstalled without hassle. I shouldn't have had to do this with software that I bought. It used to be that you paid for your software to avoid the viruses that supposedly often rode along with warez. Nowadays, though, it seems that with the malware that software vendors such as Abbyy and Intuit are slipping into their products, warez might now be the safer way to go. I somehow doubt this is the situation that they wanted, but that's what they've done.
The printer can't do more than 1 bpp, though...for a given pixel, either it puts down ink/toner or it doesn't (unless you're talking about dye-sublimation printers). That's why you can get good results printing photos at 100-150 dpi. The rasterizer will convert continuous-tone images to halftone images...that's part of its job description. The chunk of memory that holds the printed pattern needs only 1 bpp for monochrome printing. Even if you're doing color printing, it'll need only 1 bpp for each of the 3, 4, or 6 colors that it can put on the paper.
Apple also wrote an Imagewriter emulator in PostScript...the intended purpose was to enable 8-bit Apple II software to print to LaserWriters. Imagewriter support was fairly widespread, but PostScript support was nowhere near as common (only program I ever used that generated PostScript was PublishIt!). (The IIGS and its OS were new enough that a native PostScript driver was provided.) I would guess that you could code some PostScript to handle other types of dot-matrix output, but IWEM is the only one I know of that was put to any widespread use.
A4 must be a huge page size if a 300-dpi bitmap takes 15 megs. A standard letter-size page (8.5x11") needs barely more than 1 meg at 300 dpi, 1 bpp.
You could plug a SCSI hard drive into a LaserWriter; it was used (IIRC) mainly for font storage. Instead of having to send all of the fonts across the network (which at LocalTalk's 230.4 kbps could be slow), all of the fonts an office used regularly could be dumped onto the hard drive and retrieved by the printer as needed.