Lame to reply to my own post and all, but a few words on sound cards as well (more for others than the askee).
Unbelievably, Crystal Media makes an under-$10-in-generic-form card that includes optical digital output. This "card" can also be found as the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz and on many current motherboards (e.g. Gigabyte GA7VAXP). This is not a bad thing for folks who like sound and have a receiver.
Philips Acoustic edge is also a solid product. Probably the best thing out for general use.
I'd shy away from true "audiophile" sound cards (M-audio, et al) - mostly they're made for musicians, not listeners.
Creative has technically solid products. I use them on my computers, combined with a Hoontech addin board for digital in and output support. Drivers are too much an issue for these cards, and linux support isn't so great when you get away from the analog connectors. Bad for a big company.
Those are really your choices in the mainstream right now, to mate with the receiver you sould buy.;)
First: Klisch aren't anything special. They're boomy and bass heavy. For some people, bass = good sound, but the rest of us know better.
Second: Logitech's current 2.1 and better speakers are very good. newegg.com has them for a decent price.
Third, and best: Spend $200 on a low-end home theater receiver. Something that does 5.1, ideally, and Pro-logic II if you can find it. This is a computer, and not being up to Denon or NAD standards is acceptable, I think, even for an audiophile. Then, hit your local large electronics store for a cheapie set of 5.1 speakers. Yamaha and KLH have sets in the $99 to $149 range. These speakers are on par with "decent" computer speakers and have the real advantage of being replaceable with something decent a bit later on.
Ebay and ubid are decent sources for inexpensive speakers.
I'm a little foggy going back that far but I'm pretty sure NT didn't add TCP/IP support until 3.5. It was a much better product than Windows for Workgroups, if you had a 12 - 16MB 486 machine to run it on.
SR depends on advertising to survive. If our community takes traffic away from SR, Eugene and Davin starve. We'd rather see SR flourish, and have our site continue with an identity distinct from SR's.
If our site takes traffic away from Slashdot, um, well, maybe Taco has to wait a few seconds before buying another Anime DVD.
We're funded by our own contributions - no ads, and our forums are backed up nightly in a distributed fashion to multiple, global locations (i.e. three of the founders with broadband ftp the database backup tarball "just in case" every night).
I *am* a Storagereview regular (I post there as Mercutio, the second non-admin user whose account was re-created after the crash).
The issue was *not* a disk crash, but the fact that SR's colocation facility wanted to charge $x more to run proper backups, and SR couldn't afford it. During a regular upgrade to either MySQL or phpBB (don't remember which), their DB got dumped on accident. Eugene, SR's admin, posted very early after the site came back up that he has a small stack of DDS and DAT drives sitting around his home that he would've loved to install, if only their ISP would've let them.
Incidently, Storage Review's self-reporting reliability database is back up and running now, if you'd like to participate, feel free, but I'm convinced that self-reported statistics are of fairly little value.
Also, a lot of SR's regulars, including myself, chose to create our own community, distinct from SR, in case Storage Review either shuts down or loses its database again. We can be found at Storage Forum. SR's general membership is not aware of our site - we don't advertise it there out of courtesy to SR's admins, but if you spent time on SR's forums and wonder where Tannin, Clocker, P5_133XL, JamesW, time and some of the other mainstays went, well, now you know.
Computer Shopper had *great* content in their black-and-white tech section, the part that more-or-less started with "The Hard Edge". Readers of that material could regularly depend on articles detailing changes in CPU architecture, memory technology, optical storage etc.
Kind of like what Tom's Hardware and anandtech do, only good.
The shopper was my guide to life while I was in high school. I managed to build enough decent PCs to afford a dual 486DX/2 machine when I went off to college, mostly financed through the fact that I could *always* find parts a few bucks cheaper if I just dug deep enough into the ads.
If you're listening on any kind of home theater equipment, the difference between CD and SACD or DVD-A is very easy to hear, particularly if you've got a full six channels. If you're listening on crappy headphones or computer speakers, it's less apparent.
You can get CDs to output in 5.1 - sort of - with Pro Logic II, but the difference between that and a true multichannel format is still night and day.
A lot of SACDs are stereo only, but even those are audibly better than CD.
I believe the ultimate goal of these "copy protected" formats will be to send an encrypted signal over ieee1394 - we're starting to see 1394 ports on high-dollar amps, anyway. Neither SACD nor DVD-A will output to a digital connector, although most *do* have those connectors for use with CDs. From what I've read, the equipment manufacturers are claiming that current digital outputs can't meet the badnwidth needs of the multichannel formats, hence the analog 5.1 (six cables) and presumably firewire connectors. This is a stupid thing, but I really want to see a multichannel format move forward, so I'm willing to accept it.
Re:Exellent!
on
Ghost for Unix
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's less of a big deal than it was, with the new version. Ghost 2003 makes several different bootdisks, including a LanMan client (which can be a PITA for modern NIC drivers) and, IIRC, FTP.
Ghost 2003 also handles local CD-R, USB, USB2 and Firewire disks, and can write an image file to a local NTFS disk, which is a neat trick for a DOS program.
The bigger challenge with the latest version of ghost is remembering where the hell you put the bootdisk you need, since you can't get all the features on the same disk (e.g. no LanMan client + USB2 support).
Ghost is what lets me do other things while I'm at work besides fix PCs.
I license ghost @ something like $11 a copy for all the PCs I'm in charge of, and given the time-savings, it paid for itself in about two weeks.
Still, this looks really good. I like free. I'll probably give it a try next week.
I work for a training company. I'm solely responsible for, at the moment, about 150 non-uniform beige boxes in five different locations. The company only has five full-time employees, but a horde of part-timers. I am the IT department. Just me. Everyone else teaches non-technical classes or has an administrative role. Maintaining 150 random beige boxes, mostly with super-cheap generic motherboards, is exactly as nightmarish as it sounds. Ghost helps a lot but can't fix everything.
I've gotten approval to purchase 60 PCs over the next month, but we're a small business and this is a decidedly large-scale endevour for us (I understand that the PCs we now have were purchased maybe three or four at a time, on a cash basis). I'm completely re-building our network infrastructure - putting in 802.11b and laptops for the full-timers, actual 100Mbit everywhere (and Cisco hardware for my classes), setting up a couple of file servers and dedicated internet access at the remote sites.
That's the plan, at least.
The down side of this is that I have no earthly idea how to properly evaluate financing options vs. leasing vs. paying for equipment outright, and since I've never personally done purchasing for anything NEAR that much equipment, I don't want to be subject to the whims of the salesdroids I'm going to be talking to in a couple of weeks.
To anyone who replies, I thank you very much for your thoughts.
I can copy DTS CDs. In fact, I have done so. I can even make my own with some specialized software and some decent mono recordings.
I think the main reasons the format hasn't caught on are that most CD players aren't connected to DTS-capable receivers and that DTS discs can be mistaken for normal CDs.
SACD and DVD-A players are both readily available. DVD-A can be found on middle-range DVD players from JVC and Panasonic, and on low-end players from Apex. SACD, AFAIK, is Sony-only, but many SACD players are also DVD-capable, so it's entirely possible that if you've bought a player in the last six months or so (I've had DVD-A for 18 months now), you got it without even noticing.
Audio quality from either source is a vast improvement over CD, particularly for those with 5.1 setups. Stereo quality is also noticeably better, particularly on SACDs.
SACD is a "ghost" format, in that it can be put on the same disc with crappy PCM audio. Cost can be about the same as normal CDs (I just saw a couple of Sony Classical CDs with SACD labels at Borders for $15), or substantially more. Usually there are "expensive" SACD discs next to the demo units in large stores. Almost every large electronics store seems to have an SACD demo unit and a few disks; it's a more attainable format.
SACD seems to have fewer multichannel discs, but more really great recordings (Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" etc) than DVD-A. Sony's music library really strong argument for the format.
DVD-A is really, really impressive. When people who don't like my music mention how utterly phenomenal a recording is, I've got to think it's a difference that is noticeable.
The down side to DVD-A is that it is universally more expensive than CD, with prices in line with DVD movies; Best Buy sells most of its DVD-A titles (racked with DVDs, not music) for $18 - $22, which is simply insane. Amazon.com does better, with prices more in line with normal CDs. Best Buy is the only retail chain I've been in with any selection of DVD-A titles, and the selection seems in general to be smaller than that of SACDs.
A friend of mine with a recording-studio background has explained that it's very easy to make an SACD from a multitrack analog master tape, 20 or 30 year old recording, so those will likely be the mainstay of SACD releases for some time.
Last year I did a turn as Bender. I painted a (plastic) garbage can silver and made some arms and legs with the stuff they make clothsdryer ventilation from. It worked and I got to tell people to bite my shiny metal ass.
This year I'm going as a Dirt Devil, a joke that I expect absolutely no one to get.
Buy a $30 radeon PCI that has hardware T&L. Use that for your T&L games and the V5500 for everything else.
I do the reverse. My game box has a voodoo4 PCI and a Radeon 9000 in it, so I can still play my favorite glide game, Mechwarrior 2.
3dfx was and still is a quality product, and there's no reason to get rid of your 3dfx hardware, regardless of what the "oooh! Shiny!" nvidia people tell you.
My boss had a "bring your kids to work so they can play with Kazaa on the multiplexed cable connection" day, and ran into exactly that problem.... of course, two hours later, the nine-year-old was doing direct searches for that stuff.
I live in Northwest Indiana, just across the state line from Chicago and... same deal. What I've heard from the cable techs who service my company's @work service is that nearly all of the Chicago region has the infrastructure in place to allow at least cable-based broadband to go live, but that AT&T has some kind of policies with profit margins for existing service areas before they start new ones. I don't know if that's true. I'd be supremely pissed if the thing that's keeping me from getting cable (presently I need two lines to achieve a 28.8-equivalent connection) is the fact that they haven't oversubscribed their service enough in, say, Oak Brook.
That's funny, I usually have mod points at least three times a month. Slashdot is my start page and I usually read two or three articles a day, but seldom post.
And every 10 days or so, I have to look for a way to blow my 5 mod points.
Like jdavidb said, you need to visit less often and post less often.
I don't do MUCH techwork any more, but unfortunately, I've never in my life actually been able to walk away from it.
99% of the time, the only thing needed, hardware-wise, is a #2 philips screwdriver. For safety and completeness, though, a set of "precision" screwdrivers and at least one smallish flathead are good, too. Lest I forget, the possibility of my patient saying "Compaq" on its chassis also merits my inclusion of #8 and #10 Torx, which are both hard to find.
Very thin needlenose pliers, and a thicker set for miscellaneous bending. A pair of tweezers. Dental mirror. Wire snips. Multimeter & oscilliscope (er, I keep that one in the car). Dusk mask and thin, wool painters gloves (screw static, I can touchtype in them and they keep my hands from getting cut). Bandages (in case my hands get cut) & neosporin. Canned air. Wrist strap in case my customer is paranoid or something. Sears 3.6V cordless screwdriver, if I'm working on several machines that day. 2.5" to 3.5" hard disk adaptor. Intel Pro/100 NIC 8GB 2.5" hard disk, filled w/ software installs & diagnostic packages. USB CD-RW 8x Parallel CD-ROM. An assortment of ribbon cables (IDE, 50-pin SCSI, floppy, serial etc). A collection of power splitters and adaptors Socket 7 HSF. Slot 1 HSF Slot A HSF 80mm case fan Floppy disk drive 14.4 USR external modem Some AA batteries Keyboards: 1 AT-style w/ PS2 adaptor, 1 USB Mice: 1 serial, 1 USB w/ PS2 adaptor A lighted magnifying glass Spray n' wash (in car) and spray-n-wash wipes Artic Silver Deodorant & clean shirt basically lint-free rags Crimper Velcro ties & plastic "zip" ties Cable tester 4-port switch Spool o' cable & some connectors Punch down tool. Known-good 14" monitor (in car, also) and matrox millenium PCI card. A wide assortment of RAM (presently: 2x72-pin 64MB FPM, 128MB PC100, 256MB PC2100, 64MB 72-pin SODIMM, 256MB 144pin SODIMM, 128MB PC800 RIMM + cRIMM) Lots of screws & spare jumpers Dremel tool
Add to that essentially a complete collection of every driver, operating system or software package I've installed more than once (about 70 CDs, I think), and you're basically set.
I carry everything around in a big, soft-sided tackle box.
Hardware that I choose to carry around is generally on the the basis of very wide support. You'd be hard pressed to find an OS that didn't know what to do with a Matrox Millenium, for example.
Last thing: Big bottles of tums and asprin. Not for the work, which is easy, but for the endless demands from people who realize that you know how to fix computers.
... except that those of us wanting those nonstandard , non-hip types of music aren't going to find a lot of it, either in record stores OR through filesharing services.
There is very little incentive for a record store to keep a stock of non-pop/non-hip titles. They sell for less money, and far fewer people buy them. Classical music/jazz/international music are taking space AWAY from the umpteen billion copies of whatever the hell you pop music people are listening to. The very few brick and mortar record shops I frequent keep the same inventory of classical titles, at least, from year to year. THAT's how low tunrover can be.
At the same time, when I jump on a filesharing service, I can't find anything more than the most basic catalog for those non-hip music styles ("Beethoven" returns 200 hits with Kazaa Lite, but if I do a search for something more unusual than that, I'm lucky to get any matches at all). These non-hip types of music, AFAIK, aren't being shared at all, except by oddballs. Personally, I maintain 57GB of classical music that I share through Fasttrack, as a favor to anyone who wants classical music. Maybe 10 people download something from me in a given day.
I think that a lot of fans of "non-hip" music have just gotten to the point where they don't even try to collect recordings any more. Why should they? Record stores basically shit on them and the alternative distribution systemss don't work very well for anything but Britny and dubs of live Grateful Dead concerts.
I'm screaming for something better. I listen to classical music and dammit, an orchestra is awesome in as many channels as possible, unlike, say, bass-heavy pop music.
Sony has a low-end SACD 5-disc changer for something like $150, if you don't need an on-board decoder (i.e., you have a receiver that has 5.1 inputs).
DVD-A has the supreme advantage of sounding better than CD even if you don't have a DVD-A player. Every DVD-A I've bought will play (if not the full 96kHz/192kHz tracks) in a regular DVD-ROM device.
Yes. In every version up to 5.something, which was the last time I tried to use it. On the plus side, Opera recovers fairly gracefully and doesn't hang your PC when it crashes, like some browsers I could mention, but just the same, I think I'd rather use a pre-4.0 version of netscape than ever bother with opera again.
I can't understand why anyone would pay for Opera.
95% of the time, it ends up being about three minutes at everything over 24X. If you're talking edge-to-edge 701MB slightly-overburned discs, you gain a real-life 10 or 15 seconds for every bump over 24X, so a 48X drive winds up being all of about 30 seconds faster in burning.
I just duped a whole bunch of 645MB discs on a pair of LiteOn 48x CD-R drives and Nero's timer, including LeadIn/LeadOut, hit 2:45 every single time.
Slashdot Mirror
Lame to reply to my own post and all, but a few words on sound cards as well (more for others than the askee).
;)
Unbelievably, Crystal Media makes an under-$10-in-generic-form card that includes optical digital output. This "card" can also be found as the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz and on many current motherboards (e.g. Gigabyte GA7VAXP). This is not a bad thing for folks who like sound and have a receiver.
Philips Acoustic edge is also a solid product. Probably the best thing out for general use.
I'd shy away from true "audiophile" sound cards (M-audio, et al) - mostly they're made for musicians, not listeners.
Creative has technically solid products. I use them on my computers, combined with a Hoontech addin board for digital in and output support. Drivers are too much an issue for these cards, and linux support isn't so great when you get away from the analog connectors. Bad for a big company.
Those are really your choices in the mainstream right now, to mate with the receiver you sould buy.
First: Klisch aren't anything special. They're boomy and bass heavy. For some people, bass = good sound, but the rest of us know better.
Second: Logitech's current 2.1 and better speakers are very good. newegg.com has them for a decent price.
Third, and best: Spend $200 on a low-end home theater receiver. Something that does 5.1, ideally, and Pro-logic II if you can find it. This is a computer, and not being up to Denon or NAD standards is acceptable, I think, even for an audiophile.
Then, hit your local large electronics store for a cheapie set of 5.1 speakers. Yamaha and KLH have sets in the $99 to $149 range. These speakers are on par with "decent" computer speakers and have the real advantage of being replaceable with something decent a bit later on.
Ebay and ubid are decent sources for inexpensive speakers.
I'm a little foggy going back that far but I'm pretty sure NT didn't add TCP/IP support until 3.5. It was a much better product than Windows for Workgroups, if you had a 12 - 16MB 486 machine to run it on.
SR depends on advertising to survive. If our community takes traffic away from SR, Eugene and Davin starve. We'd rather see SR flourish, and have our site continue with an identity distinct from SR's.
If our site takes traffic away from Slashdot, um, well, maybe Taco has to wait a few seconds before buying another Anime DVD.
We're funded by our own contributions - no ads, and our forums are backed up nightly in a distributed fashion to multiple, global locations (i.e. three of the founders with broadband ftp the database backup tarball "just in case" every night).
I *am* a Storagereview regular (I post there as Mercutio, the second non-admin user whose account was re-created after the crash).
The issue was *not* a disk crash, but the fact that SR's colocation facility wanted to charge $x more to run proper backups, and SR couldn't afford it. During a regular upgrade to either MySQL or phpBB (don't remember which), their DB got dumped on accident. Eugene, SR's admin, posted very early after the site came back up that he has a small stack of DDS and DAT drives sitting around his home that he would've loved to install, if only their ISP would've let them.
Incidently, Storage Review's self-reporting reliability database is back up and running now, if you'd like to participate, feel free, but I'm convinced that self-reported statistics are of fairly little value.
Also, a lot of SR's regulars, including myself, chose to create our own community, distinct from SR, in case Storage Review either shuts down or loses its database again. We can be found at Storage Forum. SR's general membership is not aware of our site - we don't advertise it there out of courtesy to SR's admins, but if you spent time on SR's forums and wonder where Tannin, Clocker, P5_133XL, JamesW, time and some of the other mainstays went, well, now you know.
Was a million geeks all hitting Gnutella at the same time.
Computer Shopper had *great* content in their black-and-white tech section, the part that more-or-less started with "The Hard Edge". Readers of that material could regularly depend on articles detailing changes in CPU architecture, memory technology, optical storage etc.
Kind of like what Tom's Hardware and anandtech do, only good.
The shopper was my guide to life while I was in high school. I managed to build enough decent PCs to afford a dual 486DX/2 machine when I went off to college, mostly financed through the fact that I could *always* find parts a few bucks cheaper if I just dug deep enough into the ads.
If you're listening on any kind of home theater equipment, the difference between CD and SACD or DVD-A is very easy to hear, particularly if you've got a full six channels. If you're listening on crappy headphones or computer speakers, it's less apparent.
You can get CDs to output in 5.1 - sort of - with Pro Logic II, but the difference between that and a true multichannel format is still night and day.
A lot of SACDs are stereo only, but even those are audibly better than CD.
I believe the ultimate goal of these "copy protected" formats will be to send an encrypted signal over ieee1394 - we're starting to see 1394 ports on high-dollar amps, anyway. Neither SACD nor DVD-A will output to a digital connector, although most *do* have those connectors for use with CDs. From what I've read, the equipment manufacturers are claiming that current digital outputs can't meet the badnwidth needs of the multichannel formats, hence the analog 5.1 (six cables) and presumably firewire connectors. This is a stupid thing, but I really want to see a multichannel format move forward, so I'm willing to accept it.
It's less of a big deal than it was, with the new version. Ghost 2003 makes several different bootdisks, including a LanMan client (which can be a PITA for modern NIC drivers) and, IIRC, FTP.
Ghost 2003 also handles local CD-R, USB, USB2 and Firewire disks, and can write an image file to a local NTFS disk, which is a neat trick for a DOS program.
The bigger challenge with the latest version of ghost is remembering where the hell you put the bootdisk you need, since you can't get all the features on the same disk (e.g. no LanMan client + USB2 support).
Ghost is what lets me do other things while I'm at work besides fix PCs.
I license ghost @ something like $11 a copy for all the PCs I'm in charge of, and given the time-savings, it paid for itself in about two weeks.
Still, this looks really good. I like free. I'll probably give it a try next week.
To respond to those asking for more information:
I work for a training company. I'm solely responsible for, at the moment, about 150 non-uniform beige boxes in five different locations. The company only has five full-time employees, but a horde of part-timers. I am the IT department. Just me. Everyone else teaches non-technical classes or has an administrative role. Maintaining 150 random beige boxes, mostly with super-cheap generic motherboards, is exactly as nightmarish as it sounds. Ghost helps a lot but can't fix everything.
I've gotten approval to purchase 60 PCs over the next month, but we're a small business and this is a decidedly large-scale endevour for us (I understand that the PCs we now have were purchased maybe three or four at a time, on a cash basis). I'm completely re-building our network infrastructure - putting in 802.11b and laptops for the full-timers, actual 100Mbit everywhere (and Cisco hardware for my classes), setting up a couple of file servers and dedicated internet access at the remote sites.
That's the plan, at least.
The down side of this is that I have no earthly idea how to properly evaluate financing options vs. leasing vs. paying for equipment outright, and since I've never personally done purchasing for anything NEAR that much equipment, I don't want to be subject to the whims of the salesdroids I'm going to be talking to in a couple of weeks.
To anyone who replies, I thank you very much for your thoughts.
Coulda been worse. They could've done the atari version of ET.
I can copy DTS CDs. In fact, I have done so.
I can even make my own with some specialized software and some decent mono recordings.
I think the main reasons the format hasn't caught on are that most CD players aren't connected to DTS-capable receivers and that DTS discs can be mistaken for normal CDs.
And the lack of copy protection.
SACD and DVD-A players are both readily available. DVD-A can be found on middle-range DVD players from JVC and Panasonic, and on low-end players from Apex. SACD, AFAIK, is Sony-only, but many SACD players are also DVD-capable, so it's entirely possible that if you've bought a player in the last six months or so (I've had DVD-A for 18 months now), you got it without even noticing.
Audio quality from either source is a vast improvement over CD, particularly for those with 5.1 setups. Stereo quality is also noticeably better, particularly on SACDs.
SACD is a "ghost" format, in that it can be put on the same disc with crappy PCM audio. Cost can be about the same as normal CDs (I just saw a couple of Sony Classical CDs with SACD labels at Borders for $15), or substantially more. Usually there are "expensive" SACD discs next to the demo units in large stores. Almost every large electronics store seems to have an SACD demo unit and a few disks; it's a more attainable format.
SACD seems to have fewer multichannel discs, but more really great recordings (Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" etc) than DVD-A. Sony's music library really strong argument for the format.
DVD-A is really, really impressive. When people who don't like my music mention how utterly phenomenal a recording is, I've got to think it's a difference that is noticeable.
The down side to DVD-A is that it is universally more expensive than CD, with prices in line with DVD movies; Best Buy sells most of its DVD-A titles (racked with DVDs, not music) for $18 - $22, which is simply insane. Amazon.com does better, with prices more in line with normal CDs. Best Buy is the only retail chain I've been in with any selection of DVD-A titles, and the selection seems in general to be smaller than that of SACDs.
A friend of mine with a recording-studio background has explained that it's very easy to make an SACD from a multitrack analog master tape, 20 or 30 year old recording, so those will likely be the mainstay of SACD releases for some time.
Last year I did a turn as Bender. I painted a (plastic) garbage can silver and made some arms and legs with the stuff they make clothsdryer ventilation from. It worked and I got to tell people to bite my shiny metal ass.
This year I'm going as a Dirt Devil, a joke that I expect absolutely no one to get.
Buy a $30 radeon PCI that has hardware T&L. Use that for your T&L games and the V5500 for everything else.
I do the reverse. My game box has a voodoo4 PCI and a Radeon 9000 in it, so I can still play my favorite glide game, Mechwarrior 2.
3dfx was and still is a quality product, and there's no reason to get rid of your 3dfx hardware, regardless of what the "oooh! Shiny!" nvidia people tell you.
My boss had a "bring your kids to work so they can play with Kazaa on the multiplexed cable connection" day, and ran into exactly that problem. ... of course, two hours later, the nine-year-old was doing direct searches for that stuff.
Me? I blame Disney.
Slightly OT but...
I live in Northwest Indiana, just across the state line from Chicago and... same deal.
What I've heard from the cable techs who service my company's @work service is that nearly all of the Chicago region has the infrastructure in place to allow at least cable-based broadband to go live, but that AT&T has some kind of policies with profit margins for existing service areas before they start new ones.
I don't know if that's true. I'd be supremely pissed if the thing that's keeping me from getting cable (presently I need two lines to achieve a 28.8-equivalent connection) is the fact that they haven't oversubscribed their service enough in, say, Oak Brook.
That's funny, I usually have mod points at least three times a month. Slashdot is my start page and I usually read two or three articles a day, but seldom post.
And every 10 days or so, I have to look for a way to blow my 5 mod points.
Like jdavidb said, you need to visit less often and post less often.
I don't do MUCH techwork any more, but unfortunately, I've never in my life actually been able to walk away from it.
99% of the time, the only thing needed, hardware-wise, is a #2 philips screwdriver. For safety and completeness, though, a set of "precision" screwdrivers and at least one smallish flathead are good, too. Lest I forget, the possibility of my patient saying "Compaq" on its chassis also merits my inclusion of #8 and #10 Torx, which are both hard to find.
Very thin needlenose pliers, and a thicker set for miscellaneous bending.
A pair of tweezers.
Dental mirror.
Wire snips.
Multimeter & oscilliscope (er, I keep that one in the car).
Dusk mask and thin, wool painters gloves (screw static, I can touchtype in them and they keep my hands from getting cut).
Bandages (in case my hands get cut) & neosporin.
Canned air.
Wrist strap in case my customer is paranoid or something.
Sears 3.6V cordless screwdriver, if I'm working on several machines that day.
2.5" to 3.5" hard disk adaptor.
Intel Pro/100 NIC
8GB 2.5" hard disk, filled w/ software installs & diagnostic packages.
USB CD-RW
8x Parallel CD-ROM.
An assortment of ribbon cables (IDE, 50-pin SCSI, floppy, serial etc).
A collection of power splitters and adaptors
Socket 7 HSF.
Slot 1 HSF
Slot A HSF
80mm case fan
Floppy disk drive
14.4 USR external modem
Some AA batteries
Keyboards: 1 AT-style w/ PS2 adaptor, 1 USB
Mice: 1 serial, 1 USB w/ PS2 adaptor
A lighted magnifying glass
Spray n' wash (in car) and spray-n-wash wipes
Artic Silver
Deodorant & clean shirt
basically lint-free rags
Crimper
Velcro ties & plastic "zip" ties
Cable tester
4-port switch
Spool o' cable & some connectors
Punch down tool.
Known-good 14" monitor (in car, also) and matrox millenium PCI card.
A wide assortment of RAM (presently: 2x72-pin 64MB FPM, 128MB PC100, 256MB PC2100, 64MB 72-pin SODIMM, 256MB 144pin SODIMM, 128MB PC800 RIMM + cRIMM)
Lots of screws & spare jumpers
Dremel tool
Add to that essentially a complete collection of every driver, operating system or software package I've installed more than once (about 70 CDs, I think), and you're basically set.
I carry everything around in a big, soft-sided tackle box.
Hardware that I choose to carry around is generally on the the basis of very wide support. You'd be hard pressed to find an OS that didn't know what to do with a Matrox Millenium, for example.
Last thing: Big bottles of tums and asprin. Not for the work, which is easy, but for the endless demands from people who realize that you know how to fix computers.
... except that those of us wanting those nonstandard , non-hip types of music aren't going to find a lot of it, either in record stores OR through filesharing services.
There is very little incentive for a record store to keep a stock of non-pop/non-hip titles. They sell for less money, and far fewer people buy them. Classical music/jazz/international music are taking space AWAY from the umpteen billion copies of whatever the hell you pop music people are listening to. The very few brick and mortar record shops I frequent keep the same inventory of classical titles, at least, from year to year. THAT's how low tunrover can be.
At the same time, when I jump on a filesharing service, I can't find anything more than the most basic catalog for those non-hip music styles ("Beethoven" returns 200 hits with Kazaa Lite, but if I do a search for something more unusual than that, I'm lucky to get any matches at all). These non-hip types of music, AFAIK, aren't being shared at all, except by oddballs. Personally, I maintain 57GB of classical music that I share through Fasttrack, as a favor to anyone who wants classical music. Maybe 10 people download something from me in a given day.
I think that a lot of fans of "non-hip" music have just gotten to the point where they don't even try to collect recordings any more. Why should they? Record stores basically shit on them and the alternative distribution systemss don't work very well for anything but Britny and dubs of live Grateful Dead concerts.
I'm screaming for something better. I listen to classical music and dammit, an orchestra is awesome in as many channels as possible, unlike, say, bass-heavy pop music.
Sony has a low-end SACD 5-disc changer for something like $150, if you don't need an on-board decoder (i.e., you have a receiver that has 5.1 inputs).
DVD-A has the supreme advantage of sounding better than CD even if you don't have a DVD-A player. Every DVD-A I've bought will play (if not the full 96kHz/192kHz tracks) in a regular DVD-ROM device.
Yes. In every version up to 5.something, which was the last time I tried to use it. On the plus side, Opera recovers fairly gracefully and doesn't hang your PC when it crashes, like some browsers I could mention, but just the same, I think I'd rather use a pre-4.0 version of netscape than ever bother with opera again.
I can't understand why anyone would pay for Opera.
95% of the time, it ends up being about three minutes at everything over 24X. If you're talking edge-to-edge 701MB slightly-overburned discs, you gain a real-life 10 or 15 seconds for every bump over 24X, so a 48X drive winds up being all of about 30 seconds faster in burning.
I just duped a whole bunch of 645MB discs on a pair of LiteOn 48x CD-R drives and Nero's timer, including LeadIn/LeadOut, hit 2:45 every single time.
AFAIK, Cendyne and Buslink are both shipping Lite-On drives at the moment.
A friend of mine had similar problems with an Optorite unit.