The nero compression barfs during the credit and theres pixelation everywhere. However the audio and picture stay in sync.
If your audio/video synchronization is good, then you're having much more luck than you know.:) I've made a few DVDs out of content from a Sony DV camcorder. I use some Linux programs, Kino and Transcode, for editing and transcoding. The a/v synch gets so bad that I have to chop up the projects into 5-minute (or so) segments to keep it manageable.:/ I haven't done this in a couple of years, so hopefully there's better stuff out there these days.
I assume by "pixelation" you're probably referring to "blockies", a common MPEG artifact. I've had trouble rendering text (credits) into MPEG2 well, since that's exactly the sort of thing that MPEG doesn't handle well. I wrote a small program to generate titles and credits as DV video files, and while it looks okay on a standard definition tube, you can really see the artifacts when played on a nice LCD or projection TV. The comments others have made about two-pass encoding may help with this -- "hard" scenes like credits can get a higher bitrate, while "easy" scenes like a static picture of the outdoors can give up some bitrate.
This blog entry is nothing but sour grapes that Google didn't solve their problem for them.
I agree completely. After reading TFA (and TFA's TFA), I got the impression that the original authors were naively thinking, "Nofollow isn't helping me personally, and if it has no benefit to me, why would Google do it?"
You're assuming that he _can_ move close to work. If his employer is at Cheyenne mountain, or Roswell New Mexico, he doesn't have that option. Employees are flown in on a commercialesque airline from a normal airline terminal/local airport.
Ummmmm... people don't have the option to live near Cheyenne Mountain? There's a fairly sizable town (Colorado Springs - pop. 360,000) right next to it!
Regardless, I'm surprised that noone has given any thought to reasons why this guy might not be able to move easily. What if his wife has an established career in their current town?
Here's the xorg.conf I use on my Thinkpad T42, with stock comments removed for brevity. This uses the notebook LCD and an external VGA monitor. I think there are several different ways of accomplishing multi-display. This particular configuration may not properly support OpenGL direct rendering. Note that this is using the open-source "radeon" driver, and not the proprietary ATI fglrx driver which doesn't support my "Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]".
I've had great luck running Linux on Thinkpads. The models I've used over the years are: Thinkpad 600, Thinkpad R32, and (currently) Thinkpad T42. The R-series is the "cheap" line of Thinkpads, and I'd recommend paying the extra money for a T-series. My R32 was glitchy with suspend, even after sending it in for repairs.
The only real trouble area for me is being able to effectively use dual monitors (the laptop LCD + an external VGA). It's easy to set up dual monitors, but not so easy (not so possible?) to have your desktop be aware of when you disconnect the external VGA monitor (to, say, go to the coffee house) and know not to pop up new windows on the screen that's not there anymore. This is an area that Windows does a lot better in, and as far as I know this is an issue with running Linux on most laptops.
IBM has recently sold their Thinkpad line of laptops to Lenovo, and I'd be rather cautious about these new Lenovo-produced notebooks. Not because Lenovo is a Chinese company, but because it seems that in many acquisitions quality goes down as the new company discovers corners to cut. The Lenovo Thinkpads may be great for all I know, though.
Another poster commented negatively on Thinkpads and Linux, but I think he was looking at it from a "what OS to run on your notebook" point of view, and not a "what's the best notebook for Linux" point of view. If your work requires Linux, like mine does, I'd definitely look into a Thinkpad.
I'd be very interested in hearing about Linux compatibility with MacBook hardware. If Thinkpads start to suck, I'll probably take a serious look at MacBooks.
AHaving been moved by jobs on 3 different occasions, every time across the country, there are a couple things that I have learned. First, it will cost more than $5k to move, if you include a car. Every time I've moved it has ended up costing me between $6k-$8k.
Wow, that's a lot of money. I think it probably depends mostly on if you have a family or not, and how much stuff you have. I've moved across the country many times as a single guy with about a 1-bedroom apartment worth of stuff, and I've certainly never spent $5k. I can see how it would be much more, though, with a family and a house full of stuff. (I'm not sure what the original poster's situation is.)
I usually just box all my stuff up, load it into a Penske rental truck, drive across the country and drop it off at a new apartment. I fly back to fetch my car.
I haven't trusted long-distance movers with my stuff, yet. I had a friend who had a horrible experience with that, once. I've used movers quite often for in-town moves, though.
Then look into what it will take to live the way *you* want to there. If you're moving from say, NYC to SF, it's probably not drastically different. But if you're moving from somewhere like Augusta or Raleigh (or to some extent Atlanta), and want to live anywhere near the country, or have a decent sized place, you're in for a shock.
This is very true. I've found that these "cost of living" figures don't necessarily accurately represent *your* cost of living change to live the way you want. Average housing prices or average apartment prices don't tell you anything about what the average housing is like. For instance, if you currently live in a shiny new spacious apartment in a relatively new city, say Phoenix, for example, and move to an older city, say the New York area, you might find that to get the same kind of apartment is far more expensive than you'd expect from the already huge "cost of living" difference.
Dude - where does the energy come from? Hydrogen isn't an energy source. It has to be produced somehow (from the water...) requiring more energy than you can liberate. You still then need power plants powered by something - gas? wind? What?
Man, I find it really encouraging that quite a few posters are correcting the grandparent poster. I've always found it frustrating that so many people think that hydrogen (when used for combustion, not fusion) is an ultimate fuel source. The conversation usually goes something like this:
Them: Everything should switch to hydrogen combustion so we can have clean energy forever!
Me: Hydrogen is not an ultimate energy source; it's only useful as an energy storage mechanism, like a battery.
Them: No way, there are cars that can run on hydrogen, a plentiful energy source!
Me: Huh? Where are you going to get hydrogen from?
Them: Water, of course! We can get hydrogen right out of the oceans!
Me: Water is hydrogen that's already been burned. You have to unburn it by putting all the energy back into it.
Them: **confused look**
Me: Sigh. Look, what's the by-product of burning hydrogen?
Them: Clean, environmentally friendly water! That's what makes it so great!
Me: So if I had a portable electrolyzer in such a car, I could take the water by-product, turn it back into hydrogen, put the hydrogen back into the car, and have free energy forever? Violating the law of conservation of energy?
Them: Whoa! I never thought of that, but that just might work!
Okay, so maybe the last line is an exaggeration... by that point, I usually just get confused looks as people struggle to understand why I'm trying to shatter their utopian dreams with pesky "facts". I'm all for using hydrogen to store energy and power our machines, but people need to understand that it's not a primary energy source like coal, natural gas, solar, nuclear power, etc.
I'm curious who you're using. I'm in west Denver, using FRII as my ISP, but they have a deal with Qwest for DSL so my DSL shows up on the Qwest phone bill.
I'm using forethought.net. They currently have DSLAMs in areas around downtown.
I'd like to write Qwest a really nasty little note along the lines of "your service so far has been relatively acceptable, but if I hear one word about you starting to charge content providers money to deliver high-speed content to me, I'll be gone so fast your head will spin"
I really doubt Qwest would do that, in their role as a metro-area data service for ISPs.
Yeah, that's because Speakeasy teams up with companies like Covad that operate their own DSLAMs in the central offices, and can thus bypass a lot of BellSouth badness. If I was in BellSouth territory, I'd definitely try to get a hookup like that.
If you don't have an alternate DSLAM provider in your central office, then you have to buy BellSouth phone service before they'll let you subscribe to DSL.
Most people have only one or two choices for ISPs, and MAYBE three if they're lucky. In my area, I have one cable provider, one telco providing DSL, and I think there's some satellite company that is expensive and has extremely horrid bandwidth.
Keep in mind that in many areas, there are lots of ISPs that can provide you with DSL service. This service is provided by either 1) using the telco's DSLAMs and ATM networks to connect your home to the ISP (the most common method), or 2) using ISP-owned DSLAM equipment co-located at the central office (Speakeasy/Covad, various local ISPs). If you're just using the telco to move your bits across town to the ISP, I doubt the telco is going to bother traffic shaping your data.
I mention this because I think a lot of people don't realize there are more DSL options than just the local telco's internet service. When you go to the telco's home page, they certainly don't go out of their way to let you know about this. There are lots of small and regional ISPs that would love to have your business.
The biggest problem you might encounter with DSL is that many telcos require you to subscribe to phone service before they'll allow you to subscribe to DSL. I know this is definitely the case in BellSouth territory. I've heard that you used to be able to get a "dry copper" (i.e. "alarm circuit") DSL line to an ISP in BellSouth territory (a friend of mine used to have this sort of hookup in Oxford, Miss.), but they've since put an end to that. Where I live (Denver, Colorado), the telco (Qwest) does offer "Naked DSL" so you don't have to bother with a landline if you don't want one.
I have DSL with a local ISP who runs their own DSLAMs in my neighborhood, and it works out well.
Duh, he'll just wake up in a few hundred years after his consciousness is transferred into the memrouy wiped body of a convict, and recieve RNA memory injections and learn to pilot interstellar world seeding ships.
Yeah, it's all fun and games until you wake up to a facist society that is fed up with corpsicle slackers. In other news, I hear that theft of interstellar world seeding ships is at an all time high...
I, too, have this service from Sprint on my Treo 650. Some notable points:
The service is now $15/mo, I believe. Perhaps you can get the $10/mo deal if you are grandfathered in or know how to haggle.
Tethering your notebook to Sprint Vision is, strictly speaking, against the terms of service. However, the reality is that they don't really care as long as you are using it lightly.
You don't need to purchase the PDAnet shareware anymore to tether to a Treo 650; Bluetooth "dial-up networking" profile support was added in a patch this past summer, so you can tether via bluetooth without the use of third-party applications. It was just my luck that I registered PDAnet the week before this patch came out.:) If you want to use a USB cable for tethering, then you'll probably still need PDAnet.
Sprint Vision uses the 1xRTT network.
In my opinion, it's worth the money.
To the ancestor poster who expressed concern about high bills due to paying per kilobyte -- the idea is to get an unlimited plan. I'd be really scared about non-unlimited mobile data plans.:o
For "legal and proper" laptop access (if you're going to be using this more than occasionally), you can get the $80/mo service from Sprint or Verizon ($60 if you are also a cellphone customer), which gives your laptop direct access to their 1xRTT and EV-DO networks.
I use WindowMaker for the window manager. There are probably others that would work well.
Other tools you might find useful for a box dedicated to media: mplayer/mencoder, transcode, dvd::rip, etc. If you have an Nvidia video card, the nvtv application is useful for setting up the overscan.
I record all my shows at a high bitrate with my PVR-250 encoder cards, and about once a month I set up a batch transcoding session with mencoder to transcode all of these to lower bitrate MPEG4 for more permanent storage. I use dvd::rip and transcode for ripping DVDs and transcoding them into MPEG4.
Q: Does it work under Linux?
A: Sure does, although it's a bit more involved that doing it through Windows with our specially patched Winvice 1.6, or even just running TCPserve and connecting with a real C64/C128 via a RS232 adapter and null-modem cable. If your using Mac OS X (Like I am) your kind of screwed though.. unless you have the genius to compile the latest Vice with RS232 emulation for Mac OS X. Otherwise, the site has all of the tools you'll need, assuming it doesn't get Slashdoted.
I've managed to get this working in Linux, and I figured i'd post some hints here. (Since I didn't see any hints in the FAQ.)
Download tcpser4j as instructed, but rename the config.xml file to be "config-linux.xml". (Apparantly tcpser4j looks for this different filename when it is run under Linux.) I already had a full Sun Java environment set up for development, so I don't know if tcpser4j runs with whatever comes with Linux these days.
The config.xml (which you rename config-linux.xml) seems to bind to port 232, which means it must be run as root. (unless you change this to some port number higher than 1024.)
I assume their "specially patched Winvice 1.6" means that its -rsdev1 option accepts a hostname:port in addition to the usual filenames, serial devices, pipes, etc. Since that didn't work for me (it just created a file called "127.0.0.1:232") I used a pipe to 'nc' instead. 'nc' is a simple socket program -- it comes with many Linux distributions. (The RPM is part of Fedora Core.) So, my command line to run Vice ended up looking something like this:
1) You get the clarity of a real cell phone. Some smart phones have really bad static on the 'cell phone' side of them.
This is a valid point. I have a Treo 650, and there were issues with the call sound quality back in the beginning. (The issue was mostly on the "other end", so it was hard for the Treo user to assess.) They've supposedly fixed this in a firmware update, although I haven't really experimented to see if it's really better.
2) Easy to access when your on the phone with tech support for your servers (IBM, Sun, etc). You don't need to 'hold on.. i'll try that and call you back'.
Can you actually be on a phone call, and be using the cellphone for internet from your bluetooth-enabled device at the same time? I'm pretty sure that's not possible with my Treo, at least.
3) Palm has software for your addresses / phone / internet / email.
This isn't really an argument against getting a PDA/phone combo, since it would handle that anyway.:)
Um... there are already gazillions of free wi-fi hotspots that are free. Spammers don't have to wait for T-Mobile hotspots to become free. Besides, many hotspots (probably including T-Mobile) firewall port 25 for good measure.
Free hotspots may not be common in most areas of rural southern MS, but chances are that any area yuppified enough to have a T-Mobile hotspot probably also has free hotspots nearby.
In fact, just last night as I was walking around my neighborhood in Denver, I came across a freakin' laundromat advertising free wi-fi! I had to take a picture.:)
Oh yeah, I'm a huge fan of using speedstep when I'm running on battery. I'm not familiar with cpudynd, but I'm using the "cpuspeed" program that comes with FC4.
I think my theory was that the GUI might be more responsive at the higher speed, and the speedstep might not step up for such a brief/bursty utilization of the CPU. GNOME was feeling a little sluggish, but I think there may be something about FC4 that feels a bit more sluggish than FC3.:/
Open-source desktop environments have made enormous progress over the years. I'm greatly impressed with what GNOME and KDE have been able to accomplish. However, there are still plenty of rough edges that are a problem. (Disclaimer: I haven't checked out KDE for several years now, so they may very well have a lot of these issues covered.)
As mentioned by others in this thread, there are plenty of problems that are impossible or difficult for open-source coders to solve. These include playing DVDs (patents, CSS issues), device drivers (many hardware manufacturers do the dirty work of writing drivers for Windows, and specifications can be hard to get), support for lots of printers, etc.
There are also plenty of problems that can (and probably will) be resolved by the open-source community. I've been struggling lately with the clunkiness of running a dual-monitor desktop in GNOME (as compared to Windows). Many GUI components are far less responsive than their Windows counterparts. (When composing an email in Thunderbird in Windows, I'm accustomed to highlighting a URL then pressing CTRL-L and ENTER rapidly to create a hyperlink. In Linux, that doesn't work because the CTRL-L dialog box doesn't come up fast enough.) And don't even get me started on out-of-the-box support for notebooks, such as power management, hibernate, and whatnot. (My latest install of FC4 had my notebook's speedstep running at ~600Mhz even when plugged into AC, until I manually tweaked some files.)
So, I wouldn't recommend Linux for standard desktop deployments just yet. If the next 3-4 years show as much progress as the previous years, then a solid Linux desktop may be just around the corner. In fact, I think that Linux has the potential to offer a much more solid desktop platform than Windows -- at the very least, it doesn't suffer from the brain-dead Windows memory manager that thrashes my notebooks's slow hard drive around every time I click something.
I keep meaning to dive into some of the code and contribute to GNOME reaching this "last mile" of desktop usability, but I have so many projects on my to-do list ahead of that.:/
It's getting more difficult to find keyboards without "extra features" (also called programmable buttons). And I've yet to find a quality wireless keyboard (radio) that is slim and lacking these "extra features".
YES! I had the same experience the other day when I was roaming around Micro Center trying to find an undorkified keyboard. The few they had looked poorly built and were PS/2 and not USB. (I needed a USB keyboard for my notebook.)
I ended up buying a USB Dell keyboard from someone on ebay, and I like it quite well. Be careful, though -- some Dell keyboards have a non-standard ins/del/home/end/pgup/pgdown key block arrangement for no apparant reason.
Does anyone know of any slim, wireless keyboards?
We had one floating around at work a while back that I fell in love with. It was undorkified (no extra buttons to launch email, etc.) and had a little joystick built-in (which is a lot better than having a separate wireless mouse, for a home-entertainment PC). Unfortunately, I haven't found one like it on sale anywhere. It looked a lot like the keyboard in this picture. Maybe it's the same one, and it's only OEM'ed for other products.
Yeah, I think Tempe may be jumping the gun a bit on their claim to be the first. Southaven (a suburb of Memphis) has been offering a similar service for quite a while, now. It's nowhere near as populous as Tempe, though.
I have a Treo 650, and the "kilobyte meter" at the top of the Blazer web browser has certainly opened my eyes to how heavyweight some web sites are. I can't pull up an article on denverpost.com without pulling down about a megabyte of data. Fortunately, the Treo 650's high resolution and Sprint's fairly speedy data service make this mostly painless, but I have to wonder if high-performance cellphones and heavyweight web sites are hurting Sprint's data network. Also, I bet these sites are really sluggish on 56k modems.
I've been thinking about how to best design a web site to solve this problem. For dynamic web sites, alternate "views" of the site could be automatically selected for different web browsers -- as long as there is sufficient separation between the content and the presentation. Maybe CSS could help, too.
Man, I hate to post a reply just to say "me too"... but, well, me too. I've been contracting for 5 years (much of which for a company which sounds remarkably similar to your "ChipZilla"...)
I think a lot of people must sign up as contractors just to get work, when they have radically different expectations of what it means to be a contractor. These lawsuits only hurt those of us who *want* to be contractors.
Slashdot Mirror
If your audio/video synchronization is good, then you're having much more luck than you know. :) I've made a few DVDs out of content from a Sony DV camcorder. I use some Linux programs, Kino and Transcode, for editing and transcoding. The a/v synch gets so bad that I have to chop up the projects into 5-minute (or so) segments to keep it manageable. :/ I haven't done this in a couple of years, so hopefully there's better stuff out there these days.
I assume by "pixelation" you're probably referring to "blockies", a common MPEG artifact. I've had trouble rendering text (credits) into MPEG2 well, since that's exactly the sort of thing that MPEG doesn't handle well. I wrote a small program to generate titles and credits as DV video files, and while it looks okay on a standard definition tube, you can really see the artifacts when played on a nice LCD or projection TV. The comments others have made about two-pass encoding may help with this -- "hard" scenes like credits can get a higher bitrate, while "easy" scenes like a static picture of the outdoors can give up some bitrate.
Regardless, I'm surprised that noone has given any thought to reasons why this guy might not be able to move easily. What if his wife has an established career in their current town?
Here's the xorg.conf I use on my Thinkpad T42, with stock comments removed for brevity. This uses the notebook LCD and an external VGA monitor. I think there are several different ways of accomplishing multi-display. This particular configuration may not properly support OpenGL direct rendering. Note that this is using the open-source "radeon" driver, and not the proprietary ATI fglrx driver which doesn't support my "Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]".
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Multihead layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" LeftOf "Screen1"
Screen 1 "Screen1" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Synaptics" "AlwaysCore"
Option "Xinerama" "on"
Option "Clone" "off"
EndSection
Section "Files"
RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
FontPath "unix/:7100"
EndSection
Section "Module"
Load "dbe"
Load "extmod"
Load "fbdevhw"
Load "glx"
Load "record"
Load "freetype"
Load "type1"
Load "synaptics"
Load "dri"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "LCD Panel 1024x768"
DisplaySize 380 300
HorizSync 31.5 - 48.5
VertRefresh 40.0 - 70.0
Option "dpms"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor1"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Sony SDM-HS94P (Analog)"
HorizSync 28.0 - 81.0
VertRefresh 48.0 - 75.0
Option "dpms"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "ATI Radeon Mobility 7500"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard1"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "Videocard Vendor"
BoardName "ATI Radeon Mobility 7500"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Screen 1
I've had great luck running Linux on Thinkpads. The models I've used over the years are: Thinkpad 600, Thinkpad R32, and (currently) Thinkpad T42. The R-series is the "cheap" line of Thinkpads, and I'd recommend paying the extra money for a T-series. My R32 was glitchy with suspend, even after sending it in for repairs.
The only real trouble area for me is being able to effectively use dual monitors (the laptop LCD + an external VGA). It's easy to set up dual monitors, but not so easy (not so possible?) to have your desktop be aware of when you disconnect the external VGA monitor (to, say, go to the coffee house) and know not to pop up new windows on the screen that's not there anymore. This is an area that Windows does a lot better in, and as far as I know this is an issue with running Linux on most laptops.
IBM has recently sold their Thinkpad line of laptops to Lenovo, and I'd be rather cautious about these new Lenovo-produced notebooks. Not because Lenovo is a Chinese company, but because it seems that in many acquisitions quality goes down as the new company discovers corners to cut. The Lenovo Thinkpads may be great for all I know, though.
Another poster commented negatively on Thinkpads and Linux, but I think he was looking at it from a "what OS to run on your notebook" point of view, and not a "what's the best notebook for Linux" point of view. If your work requires Linux, like mine does, I'd definitely look into a Thinkpad.
I'd be very interested in hearing about Linux compatibility with MacBook hardware. If Thinkpads start to suck, I'll probably take a serious look at MacBooks.
Wow, that's a lot of money. I think it probably depends mostly on if you have a family or not, and how much stuff you have. I've moved across the country many times as a single guy with about a 1-bedroom apartment worth of stuff, and I've certainly never spent $5k. I can see how it would be much more, though, with a family and a house full of stuff. (I'm not sure what the original poster's situation is.)
I usually just box all my stuff up, load it into a Penske rental truck, drive across the country and drop it off at a new apartment. I fly back to fetch my car.
I haven't trusted long-distance movers with my stuff, yet. I had a friend who had a horrible experience with that, once. I've used movers quite often for in-town moves, though.
This is very true. I've found that these "cost of living" figures don't necessarily accurately represent *your* cost of living change to live the way you want. Average housing prices or average apartment prices don't tell you anything about what the average housing is like. For instance, if you currently live in a shiny new spacious apartment in a relatively new city, say Phoenix, for example, and move to an older city, say the New York area, you might find that to get the same kind of apartment is far more expensive than you'd expect from the already huge "cost of living" difference.
Man, I find it really encouraging that quite a few posters are correcting the grandparent poster. I've always found it frustrating that so many people think that hydrogen (when used for combustion, not fusion) is an ultimate fuel source. The conversation usually goes something like this:
Them: Everything should switch to hydrogen combustion so we can have clean energy forever!
Me: Hydrogen is not an ultimate energy source; it's only useful as an energy storage mechanism, like a battery.
Them: No way, there are cars that can run on hydrogen, a plentiful energy source!
Me: Huh? Where are you going to get hydrogen from?
Them: Water, of course! We can get hydrogen right out of the oceans!
Me: Water is hydrogen that's already been burned. You have to unburn it by putting all the energy back into it.
Them: **confused look**
Me: Sigh. Look, what's the by-product of burning hydrogen?
Them: Clean, environmentally friendly water! That's what makes it so great!
Me: So if I had a portable electrolyzer in such a car, I could take the water by-product, turn it back into hydrogen, put the hydrogen back into the car, and have free energy forever? Violating the law of conservation of energy?
Them: Whoa! I never thought of that, but that just might work!
Okay, so maybe the last line is an exaggeration... by that point, I usually just get confused looks as people struggle to understand why I'm trying to shatter their utopian dreams with pesky "facts". I'm all for using hydrogen to store energy and power our machines, but people need to understand that it's not a primary energy source like coal, natural gas, solar, nuclear power, etc.
I really doubt Qwest would do that, in their role as a metro-area data service for ISPs.
If you don't have an alternate DSLAM provider in your central office, then you have to buy BellSouth phone service before they'll let you subscribe to DSL.
Keep in mind that in many areas, there are lots of ISPs that can provide you with DSL service. This service is provided by either 1) using the telco's DSLAMs and ATM networks to connect your home to the ISP (the most common method), or 2) using ISP-owned DSLAM equipment co-located at the central office (Speakeasy/Covad, various local ISPs). If you're just using the telco to move your bits across town to the ISP, I doubt the telco is going to bother traffic shaping your data.
I mention this because I think a lot of people don't realize there are more DSL options than just the local telco's internet service. When you go to the telco's home page, they certainly don't go out of their way to let you know about this. There are lots of small and regional ISPs that would love to have your business.
The biggest problem you might encounter with DSL is that many telcos require you to subscribe to phone service before they'll allow you to subscribe to DSL. I know this is definitely the case in BellSouth territory. I've heard that you used to be able to get a "dry copper" (i.e. "alarm circuit") DSL line to an ISP in BellSouth territory (a friend of mine used to have this sort of hookup in Oxford, Miss.), but they've since put an end to that. Where I live (Denver, Colorado), the telco (Qwest) does offer "Naked DSL" so you don't have to bother with a landline if you don't want one.
I have DSL with a local ISP who runs their own DSLAMs in my neighborhood, and it works out well.
David
To the ancestor poster who expressed concern about high bills due to paying per kilobyte -- the idea is to get an unlimited plan. I'd be really scared about non-unlimited mobile data plans. :o
For "legal and proper" laptop access (if you're going to be using this more than occasionally), you can get the $80/mo service from Sprint or Verizon ($60 if you are also a cellphone customer), which gives your laptop direct access to their 1xRTT and EV-DO networks.
Other tools you might find useful for a box dedicated to media: mplayer/mencoder, transcode, dvd::rip, etc. If you have an Nvidia video card, the nvtv application is useful for setting up the overscan.
I record all my shows at a high bitrate with my PVR-250 encoder cards, and about once a month I set up a batch transcoding session with mencoder to transcode all of these to lower bitrate MPEG4 for more permanent storage. I use dvd::rip and transcode for ripping DVDs and transcoding them into MPEG4.
I've managed to get this working in Linux, and I figured i'd post some hints here. (Since I didn't see any hints in the FAQ.)
-
Download tcpser4j as instructed, but rename the config.xml file to be "config-linux.xml". (Apparantly tcpser4j looks for this different filename when it is run under Linux.) I already had a full Sun Java environment set up for development, so I don't know if tcpser4j runs with whatever comes with Linux these days.
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The config.xml (which you rename config-linux.xml) seems to bind to port 232, which means it must be run as root. (unless you change this to some port number higher than 1024.)
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I assume their "specially patched Winvice 1.6" means that its -rsdev1 option accepts a hostname:port in addition to the usual filenames, serial devices, pipes, etc. Since that didn't work for me (it just created a file called "127.0.0.1:232") I used a pipe to 'nc' instead. 'nc' is a simple socket program -- it comes with many Linux distributions. (The RPM is part of Fedora Core.) So, my command line to run Vice ended up looking something like this:
That should do it! I'm able to connect to the "new" Quantum Link server from Vice running in Linux now.Free hotspots may not be common in most areas of rural southern MS, but chances are that any area yuppified enough to have a T-Mobile hotspot probably also has free hotspots nearby.
In fact, just last night as I was walking around my neighborhood in Denver, I came across a freakin' laundromat advertising free wi-fi! I had to take a picture. :)
Oh yeah, I'm a huge fan of using speedstep when I'm running on battery. I'm not familiar with cpudynd, but I'm using the "cpuspeed" program that comes with FC4.
:/
I think my theory was that the GUI might be more responsive at the higher speed, and the speedstep might not step up for such a brief/bursty utilization of the CPU. GNOME was feeling a little sluggish, but I think there may be something about FC4 that feels a bit more sluggish than FC3.
Open-source desktop environments have made enormous progress over the years. I'm greatly impressed with what GNOME and KDE have been able to accomplish. However, there are still plenty of rough edges that are a problem. (Disclaimer: I haven't checked out KDE for several years now, so they may very well have a lot of these issues covered.)
:/
As mentioned by others in this thread, there are plenty of problems that are impossible or difficult for open-source coders to solve. These include playing DVDs (patents, CSS issues), device drivers (many hardware manufacturers do the dirty work of writing drivers for Windows, and specifications can be hard to get), support for lots of printers, etc.
There are also plenty of problems that can (and probably will) be resolved by the open-source community. I've been struggling lately with the clunkiness of running a dual-monitor desktop in GNOME (as compared to Windows). Many GUI components are far less responsive than their Windows counterparts. (When composing an email in Thunderbird in Windows, I'm accustomed to highlighting a URL then pressing CTRL-L and ENTER rapidly to create a hyperlink. In Linux, that doesn't work because the CTRL-L dialog box doesn't come up fast enough.) And don't even get me started on out-of-the-box support for notebooks, such as power management, hibernate, and whatnot. (My latest install of FC4 had my notebook's speedstep running at ~600Mhz even when plugged into AC, until I manually tweaked some files.)
So, I wouldn't recommend Linux for standard desktop deployments just yet. If the next 3-4 years show as much progress as the previous years, then a solid Linux desktop may be just around the corner. In fact, I think that Linux has the potential to offer a much more solid desktop platform than Windows -- at the very least, it doesn't suffer from the brain-dead Windows memory manager that thrashes my notebooks's slow hard drive around every time I click something.
I keep meaning to dive into some of the code and contribute to GNOME reaching this "last mile" of desktop usability, but I have so many projects on my to-do list ahead of that.
What RSS aggregator are you using? I use Thunderbird to read RSS feeds, and I see this behavior all the time for several feeds.
YES! I had the same experience the other day when I was roaming around Micro Center trying to find an undorkified keyboard. The few they had looked poorly built and were PS/2 and not USB. (I needed a USB keyboard for my notebook.)
I ended up buying a USB Dell keyboard from someone on ebay, and I like it quite well. Be careful, though -- some Dell keyboards have a non-standard ins/del/home/end/pgup/pgdown key block arrangement for no apparant reason.
We had one floating around at work a while back that I fell in love with. It was undorkified (no extra buttons to launch email, etc.) and had a little joystick built-in (which is a lot better than having a separate wireless mouse, for a home-entertainment PC). Unfortunately, I haven't found one like it on sale anywhere. It looked a lot like the keyboard in this picture. Maybe it's the same one, and it's only OEM'ed for other products.Yeah, I think Tempe may be jumping the gun a bit on their claim to be the first. Southaven (a suburb of Memphis) has been offering a similar service for quite a while, now. It's nowhere near as populous as Tempe, though.
I've been thinking about how to best design a web site to solve this problem. For dynamic web sites, alternate "views" of the site could be automatically selected for different web browsers -- as long as there is sufficient separation between the content and the presentation. Maybe CSS could help, too.
I think a lot of people must sign up as contractors just to get work, when they have radically different expectations of what it means to be a contractor. These lawsuits only hurt those of us who *want* to be contractors.