The engine (1.5l - 4 cylinder) is a bit noisy (though not underpowered) under hard acceleration.
The switch between gas and electric is nearly undetectable when driving - the only indicators that it's switched from electric to gas are a very subtle engine vibration (and of course, extra added power). It's very seamless - no jolt or anything.
Lots of owners need to watch the status display to know when the engine changes operating modes. It does stutter a bit when the gas engine shuts off, however I'm told that's for environmental emission reasons (it keeps firing the plugs for a few seconds after the gas is cut-off to ensure complete combustion of the gas in the cylinders)
On flat stretches it will lose speed about the same as a regular car without your foot on the gas because of the regenerative brake system trying to create power for the battery. If you press your foot on the pedal slightly (lightly enough to not use battery power, but still cancel the regenerative system), it will feel like you're rolling in neutral as if you have your foot on a clutch in a regular manual-transmission vehicle.
The Prius uses a continually variable transmission, so there aren't fixed gear-ratios. The CVT uses a planetary-drive system with three interlocking geared mechanisms that can smoothly ramp-up from 0 to top speed of about 105mph without any gear changes.
There's a good explanation of how it works if you go to the "howstuffworks.com" website and look-up hybrids or CVTs.
Ah yes, but there are certain style-guides which have been established for years by all major operating systems. They're what users are used to, and wanting to be different because the GIMP authors think they've made a better choice just isn't a good enough reason. There has to be an overwhelmingly good reason to force people to learn a new interface, and so far, nobody has come-up with that reason in a satisfactory way.
As an example, have a look at Lotus Notes.
An email/database/whateveryouwanttocallit software package that intentionally or not breaks almost every windows style-guide because the authors thought "they knew better" and programmed it "their way". And because of that, the program is widely recognised by nearly everyone who has used it as an unusable piece of crap, regardless about how anything under the hood might work.
I havn't tried GIMP, so I don't know if it falls into that category or not, but if the UI was designed to function in the same method as common Windows or Mac graphics applications (read Photoshop or PSP), I doubt people would complain. Like it or not, that's GIMP's competition and they need to recognise that they need to make it easier for people to move to their product, not harder. If that means replicating a recogniseable interface, then by all means, do it!
Before anyone flames away on me, you might want to take a moment and stop and consider what I said.
Infact, I don't at all think that Linux and Linux applications themselves are what's holding back public acceptance, I think it's programmers and designers who havn't decided on a single "everyone needs to stick to it!" GUI style guide for the operating system as a whole.
Heck, I'm to blame myself, I HATE writing GUIs with a passion, but I love coding the guts where you can have fun optimizing code. GUIs are a chore that nobody likes. Unfortunately, they're also what the user utilizes and what they evaluate your program based-on.
Which is why it's not a great idea to make your home theatre your "leave the TV on while you do other stuff" room.
I have my X1 for watching movies and playing (big) games on, however when I just want to watch the news, or regular TV, I have a small 27" screen that I switch the input to.
Works great and saves the bulb!
Of course, the X1 bulb is rated at 4,000 hours, and only costs around $250-300 as I recall, so it's not too terrible. It should last me around 6 or 7 years with the amount that I use it, by which point I'll definately have something newer anyway:)
I also purchased an X1 after reading the reviews on AVS forums. There's a reason that it's so highly thought-of on that site - it is very good value for the money with an excellent picture.
I did notice rainbows for the first couple of weeks when I used it, however I've had it for 2 months now and I very, very rarely notice them anymore. I suppose given enough exposure, I "tuned them out" subconciously like traffic noise, air conditioner hum, etc.
I'm very happy with mine! There's nothing like watching a movie on a really big screen with a good sound system cranked. I couldn't see myself going with a huge, heavy rear-projection set. Front Projectors (FP) are easily portable, easy to install, and provide a good picture for the price.
Do not skimp on the screen however - the projector is only half of the equation. You can make your own screen quite easily (also instructions on AVSF).
The other consideration with FPs is that you need a fairly dark room to get the best picture. If you have a lot of light entering the room that you can't control, there's no way of getting true blacks, and you'd probably be better-off going with a rear projector.
Well, beats having a huge keyboard with a seperate key for every character:)
Although the other way to do it would be to have a keyboard with kanji radicals and enter them to build the character you want to create.
You can set most operating systems to do the kana/kanji conversion for you. You enter the characters using phonetic romanized spelling and the OS converts to the japanese equivilent, first to kana characters, then to a kanji character, or selection of kanji characters for the user to select from.
A bit offtopic, but here's a (very) early Japanese typewriter. I don't imagine people running it could manage many words-per-minute.
http://www.officemuseum.com/Japanese_typewriter_ de tail.JPG
Neodymium-iron-boron magnets are also extremely brittle. You need to be very careful when removing them (especially flat magnets from inside HD assemblies), or they'll snap/fracture. The chrome plating usually flakes-off quite easily too (some people dip them in that rubberizing stuff from the hardware store to protect them.)
You can also buy them from www.wondermagnets.com fairly cheap (I got a bunch a few years back and have them all over the place).
Here's a short link to the goodies:
http://tinyurl.com/cm6s
Some of their BIG magnets are very dangerous and need to be handled with gloves on - put two of the big #72s together and they'll crush your fingers flat. Another website (I forgot the link) also has even more powerful magnets - over 40,000 Gauss (owch).
Microsoft's biggest failure is that they keep using the legacy code they've created.
Even though I don't particularly like OS-X, Apple had the right idea migrating their platform to a solid OS to replace the crap that was OS-9 and below. That said, things like Apple's refusal to provide simple UI enhancements (can we say 2nd mouse button standard, as has been on PCs since around the mid-90s?).
If MS was really smart, they'd be working on a unix-based backup plan as well. However I don't think they're going to do that. Eventually, it will catch up with them.
Well said! The amount of "epenis" bickering that surrounds videocards is legendary, but the fact of the matter for me is that I buy what's fastest with best quality at any given time (assuming relatively stable drivers of course). Of course, price does figure into it as well. I'm not going to pay a huge premium for a card unless it's significantly better than the competition. A few extra percent on a benchmark simply won't open my wallet more.
Had a NVidia GEForce2 when it was at the top of the pile a few years ago, picked up an ATI 9700Pro when it was released. May go back to Nvidia, may stay with ATI (shrug).
In the longrun, all of us consumers benefit from some healthy competition. Granted, as a Canuck, I'm happy to see ATI do well - but they also earned it. At the time when the 9700Pro was released, ATI blew Nvidia out of the water. Nvidia had grown a tad complacent, and they paid for it.
Now we'll see what happens with Nvidia having a fast new card and ATI about to release their new offering in a few more weeks.
Well, there are uses for running a virtual machine ala Virtual PC or VMWare.
You can take your downloaded keygen or whatever and run it completely seperated "in a bottle" so to speak, so you can use it without any fear that it will wreak havok on you. Disable networking support, COM ports, and any shared access to harddisks and you're safe.
Well, I'm also planning on going gigabit, and the idea behind it is that I want to stop buying multiple large harddrives for all of my various PCs, and set up a really big RAID fileserver in the closet that connects to all of my machines.
All of the media, MP3s, video files, etc all on the big server (in the 2+tb range), and gigabit it all over the condo.
When that's set up, if I need to add more storage, I can just plug another server into the switch and drop more HDs into it. Should also keep the noise level in the PCs down as I can just go with a single HD in each machine, and watercool everything.
That's the plan anyway... Just need to buy lots of HDs and a nice big SATA RAID controller to stick in the closet... And do some wiring.
I've (perhaps unsurprisingly) been buying CDs and DVDs from Japan.
I probably havn't spent more than around $100 on domestic releases in the last decade or so - I don't even bother downloading them.
Just doesn't interest me.
On the other hand, I've spent thousands getting CDs and DVDs imported. So the RIAA can go cry as much as they want - I'm not interested in their product and I'm not buying it regardless.
I don't get it - back in the days (thankfully long ago), when I worked in retail and got paid by the hour, I kept track of my hours on a calendar at home.
I made sure I got paid for every hour I worked - if a manager had screwed with the timesheets or underpaid me, I would've been screaming bloody murder and going to the media and the courts.
Wonder if "whistleblower" legislation would cover people who blow the cover off payroll scams in their workplace...
As an aside, even with all the bad companies around there ARE good ones. One non-unionized industrial shop I know about has a owner/manager that takes their entire staff on an all-expenses (except gambling) paid trip to Vegas every year as a "thank you" for work done.
The unions have never even got a foothold in that shop because the managers and the owners treat their employees right.
And as soon as the media got word that the original voice actors were on-strike and got replaced, viewers would stop watching the show immediately... Regardless of how the replacement voices sounded.
Fox has exactly two choices. Pay them what they want, or cancel the show.
It isn't April 1st until it's 00:00:01 PST. No other timezone is relevant;). Putting out your April 1st joke before that renders it stupid and unfunny.
Well, I have a couple layers of security on the webserver as well.
First off, the IDS - which just keeps tabs on what's going on. It'll auto-block requests that it knows are problematic, but let everything else through.
Secondly, the webserver itself is set to reject all direct IP-connections (ie: http://123.123.123.12). Anyone who tries a direct connect by IP gets an error message, and apache has that configured to have no access to anything - no CGI, no directories, nada. Just a single index.html file.
This catches almost everything else that gets through - No automated script-kiddy hack attempts use a real domain name when trying to break into a webserver with a regular HTTP request overflow, etc.
To actually get a webpage, you need to use a browser that supports HTTP/1.1 and includes the HTTP Host header with the request. This isn't really much of a problem these days - all modern browsers support it.
Netlimiter is good for running on an individual machine (I run it myself to prevent my mailserver and HTTPD from eating all my upstream), however there are better windows solutions for gateways.
http://bandwidthcontroller.com/
Is a fairly decent gateway traffic shaper - not quite as configurable as linux solutions, but fairly easy to set up and you can limit by a number of options, port, protocol, etc.
Free trial version to so you can see if it works for you. $50 to buy.
Slashdot Mirror
Ya, I'll second that thought on the trailer. Not a hint of movie footage, just the age-old, and much parodied "text on a black background".
I was pretty underwhelmed as well.
N.
The engine (1.5l - 4 cylinder) is a bit noisy (though not underpowered) under hard acceleration.
The switch between gas and electric is nearly undetectable when driving - the only indicators that it's switched from electric to gas are a very subtle engine vibration (and of course, extra added power). It's very seamless - no jolt or anything.
Lots of owners need to watch the status display to know when the engine changes operating modes. It does stutter a bit when the gas engine shuts off, however I'm told that's for environmental emission reasons (it keeps firing the plugs for a few seconds after the gas is cut-off to ensure complete combustion of the gas in the cylinders)
On flat stretches it will lose speed about the same as a regular car without your foot on the gas because of the regenerative brake system trying to create power for the battery. If you press your foot on the pedal slightly (lightly enough to not use battery power, but still cancel the regenerative system), it will feel like you're rolling in neutral as if you have your foot on a clutch in a regular manual-transmission vehicle.
The Prius uses a continually variable transmission, so there aren't fixed gear-ratios. The CVT uses a planetary-drive system with three interlocking geared mechanisms that can smoothly ramp-up from 0 to top speed of about 105mph without any gear changes.
There's a good explanation of how it works if you go to the "howstuffworks.com" website and look-up hybrids or CVTs.
N.
You're probably not using the (one?) CD key that they blacklisted.
I sure as hell hope not. As an '04 Prius owner, there's nothing sweeter while driving than the sound of silence...
N.
Strange, I have none of those problems with my 9700 Pro. I just download the new drivers, doubleclick to install, reboot and they're fine.
It's worth noting that I did a clean install on my system when I switched from Nvidia to ATI.
One thing you absolutely DO NOT want is nvidia leftovers when you install ATI drivers. That may account for the problems you are having.
Certainly don't need to reboot in VGA mode or uninstall old drivers these days if everything is installed properly.
N.
Ah yes, but there are certain style-guides which have been established for years by all major operating systems. They're what users are used to, and wanting to be different because the GIMP authors think they've made a better choice just isn't a good enough reason. There has to be an overwhelmingly good reason to force people to learn a new interface, and so far, nobody has come-up with that reason in a satisfactory way.
As an example, have a look at Lotus Notes.
An email/database/whateveryouwanttocallit software package that intentionally or not breaks almost every windows style-guide because the authors thought "they knew better" and programmed it "their way". And because of that, the program is widely recognised by nearly everyone who has used it as an unusable piece of crap, regardless about how anything under the hood might work.
I havn't tried GIMP, so I don't know if it falls into that category or not, but if the UI was designed to function in the same method as common Windows or Mac graphics applications (read Photoshop or PSP), I doubt people would complain. Like it or not, that's GIMP's competition and they need to recognise that they need to make it easier for people to move to their product, not harder. If that means replicating a recogniseable interface, then by all means, do it!
Before anyone flames away on me, you might want to take a moment and stop and consider what I said.
Infact, I don't at all think that Linux and Linux applications themselves are what's holding back public acceptance, I think it's programmers and designers who havn't decided on a single "everyone needs to stick to it!" GUI style guide for the operating system as a whole.
Heck, I'm to blame myself, I HATE writing GUIs with a passion, but I love coding the guts where you can have fun optimizing code. GUIs are a chore that nobody likes. Unfortunately, they're also what the user utilizes and what they evaluate your program based-on.
N.
Which is why it's not a great idea to make your home theatre your "leave the TV on while you do other stuff" room.
:)
I have my X1 for watching movies and playing (big) games on, however when I just want to watch the news, or regular TV, I have a small 27" screen that I switch the input to.
Works great and saves the bulb!
Of course, the X1 bulb is rated at 4,000 hours, and only costs around $250-300 as I recall, so it's not too terrible. It should last me around 6 or 7 years with the amount that I use it, by which point I'll definately have something newer anyway
N.
I also purchased an X1 after reading the reviews on AVS forums. There's a reason that it's so highly thought-of on that site - it is very good value for the money with an excellent picture.
I did notice rainbows for the first couple of weeks when I used it, however I've had it for 2 months now and I very, very rarely notice them anymore. I suppose given enough exposure, I "tuned them out" subconciously like traffic noise, air conditioner hum, etc.
I'm very happy with mine! There's nothing like watching a movie on a really big screen with a good sound system cranked. I couldn't see myself going with a huge, heavy rear-projection set. Front Projectors (FP) are easily portable, easy to install, and provide a good picture for the price.
Do not skimp on the screen however - the projector is only half of the equation. You can make your own screen quite easily (also instructions on AVSF).
The other consideration with FPs is that you need a fairly dark room to get the best picture. If you have a lot of light entering the room that you can't control, there's no way of getting true blacks, and you'd probably be better-off going with a rear projector.
N.
Well, beats having a huge keyboard with a seperate key for every character :)
_ de tail.JPG
Although the other way to do it would be to have a keyboard with kanji radicals and enter them to build the character you want to create.
You can set most operating systems to do the kana/kanji conversion for you. You enter the characters using phonetic romanized spelling and the OS converts to the japanese equivilent, first to kana characters, then to a kanji character, or selection of kanji characters for the user to select from.
A bit offtopic, but here's a (very) early Japanese typewriter. I don't imagine people running it could manage many words-per-minute.
http://www.officemuseum.com/Japanese_typewriter
N.
Neodymium-iron-boron magnets are also extremely brittle. You need to be very careful when removing them (especially flat magnets from inside HD assemblies), or they'll snap/fracture. The chrome plating usually flakes-off quite easily too (some people dip them in that rubberizing stuff from the hardware store to protect them.)
You can also buy them from www.wondermagnets.com fairly cheap (I got a bunch a few years back and have them all over the place).
Here's a short link to the goodies:
http://tinyurl.com/cm6s
Some of their BIG magnets are very dangerous and need to be handled with gloves on - put two of the big #72s together and they'll crush your fingers flat. Another website (I forgot the link) also has even more powerful magnets - over 40,000 Gauss (owch).
N.
That is, counter to Steve Job's software "philosophy" (he doesn't like it).
But then again, I don't even own a Mac, so it really makes no difference to me.
N.
Sorry, I don't mean the OS "supports" a second mouse. As I said, a STANDARD two-button mouse.
How many Mac desktops SHIP with a 2-button mouse? How many Mac laptops have a trackpad with 2 buttons?
N.
Microsoft's biggest failure is that they keep using the legacy code they've created.
Even though I don't particularly like OS-X, Apple had the right idea migrating their platform to a solid OS to replace the crap that was OS-9 and below. That said, things like Apple's refusal to provide simple UI enhancements (can we say 2nd mouse button standard, as has been on PCs since around the mid-90s?).
If MS was really smart, they'd be working on a unix-based backup plan as well. However I don't think they're going to do that. Eventually, it will catch up with them.
Well said! The amount of "epenis" bickering that surrounds videocards is legendary, but the fact of the matter for me is that I buy what's fastest with best quality at any given time (assuming relatively stable drivers of course). Of course, price does figure into it as well. I'm not going to pay a huge premium for a card unless it's significantly better than the competition. A few extra percent on a benchmark simply won't open my wallet more.
Had a NVidia GEForce2 when it was at the top of the pile a few years ago, picked up an ATI 9700Pro when it was released. May go back to Nvidia, may stay with ATI (shrug).
In the longrun, all of us consumers benefit from some healthy competition. Granted, as a Canuck, I'm happy to see ATI do well - but they also earned it. At the time when the 9700Pro was released, ATI blew Nvidia out of the water. Nvidia had grown a tad complacent, and they paid for it.
Now we'll see what happens with Nvidia having a fast new card and ATI about to release their new offering in a few more weeks.
N.
Well, there are uses for running a virtual machine ala Virtual PC or VMWare.
You can take your downloaded keygen or whatever and run it completely seperated "in a bottle" so to speak, so you can use it without any fear that it will wreak havok on you. Disable networking support, COM ports, and any shared access to harddisks and you're safe.
Very handy.
N.
Well, I'm also planning on going gigabit, and the idea behind it is that I want to stop buying multiple large harddrives for all of my various PCs, and set up a really big RAID fileserver in the closet that connects to all of my machines.
All of the media, MP3s, video files, etc all on the big server (in the 2+tb range), and gigabit it all over the condo.
When that's set up, if I need to add more storage, I can just plug another server into the switch and drop more HDs into it. Should also keep the noise level in the PCs down as I can just go with a single HD in each machine, and watercool everything.
That's the plan anyway... Just need to buy lots of HDs and a nice big SATA RAID controller to stick in the closet... And do some wiring.
N.
Bingo, station wagon look. Ick.
Wood floors, good. Wood cabinets in kitchen good. Wood furniture good.
Wood + technology = bad.
I've (perhaps unsurprisingly) been buying CDs and DVDs from Japan.
I probably havn't spent more than around $100 on domestic releases in the last decade or so - I don't even bother downloading them.
Just doesn't interest me.
On the other hand, I've spent thousands getting CDs and DVDs imported. So the RIAA can go cry as much as they want - I'm not interested in their product and I'm not buying it regardless.
N.
"Good reference" being something along the lines of:
"Does an excellent job of training foreign replacement workers when about to be terminated - highly recommended! - until replaceable...".
I think you might be better-off without it...
N.
POPFile... Kills. Spam. Dead.
Current accuracy is 99.12% over 8,000 messages. It misses maybe one spam a month, if that.
Most of the errors occured on the first week of training it. Now it's almost entirely flawless.
Highly recommended!
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/
N.
I don't get it - back in the days (thankfully long ago), when I worked in retail and got paid by the hour, I kept track of my hours on a calendar at home.
I made sure I got paid for every hour I worked - if a manager had screwed with the timesheets or underpaid me, I would've been screaming bloody murder and going to the media and the courts.
Wonder if "whistleblower" legislation would cover people who blow the cover off payroll scams in their workplace...
As an aside, even with all the bad companies around there ARE good ones. One non-unionized industrial shop I know about has a owner/manager that takes their entire staff on an all-expenses (except gambling) paid trip to Vegas every year as a "thank you" for work done.
The unions have never even got a foothold in that shop because the managers and the owners treat their employees right.
If only more employers would clue-in...
N.
And as soon as the media got word that the original voice actors were on-strike and got replaced, viewers would stop watching the show immediately... Regardless of how the replacement voices sounded.
Fox has exactly two choices. Pay them what they want, or cancel the show.
N.
It isn't April 1st until it's 00:00:01 PST. No other timezone is relevant ;). Putting out your April 1st joke before that renders it stupid and unfunny.
Of course, I may be biased!
N.
Well, I have a couple layers of security on the webserver as well.
First off, the IDS - which just keeps tabs on what's going on. It'll auto-block requests that it knows are problematic, but let everything else through.
Secondly, the webserver itself is set to reject all direct IP-connections (ie: http://123.123.123.12). Anyone who tries a direct connect by IP gets an error message, and apache has that configured to have no access to anything - no CGI, no directories, nada. Just a single index.html file.
This catches almost everything else that gets through - No automated script-kiddy hack attempts use a real domain name when trying to break into a webserver with a regular HTTP request overflow, etc.
To actually get a webpage, you need to use a browser that supports HTTP/1.1 and includes the HTTP Host header with the request. This isn't really much of a problem these days - all modern browsers support it.
N.
Netlimiter is good for running on an individual machine (I run it myself to prevent my mailserver and HTTPD from eating all my upstream), however there are better windows solutions for gateways.
http://bandwidthcontroller.com/
Is a fairly decent gateway traffic shaper - not quite as configurable as linux solutions, but fairly easy to set up and you can limit by a number of options, port, protocol, etc.
Free trial version to so you can see if it works for you. $50 to buy.
N.