It's called an Archimedes' Screw. It has advantages (especially in high-torque applications), but it is not very useful for moving water a long distance. Out of a ditch (a few meters), yes. Out of a *well* (tens of meters), no.
Too late at night to find the stupid FCC reg, so you can Google it, but...
Part 15 devices (such as 802.11) are limited to 1W EIRP
. That means that you can use a 1W amplifier with a *0*db antenna. Any antenna with gain limits your maximum power to below 1W.
Part 97 (Amateur Radio services) are allowed to use 1,500W, and not EIRP. So that's why even though he's using Part 15 equipment, he's using it in a Part 97 manner.
Seconded. We use BackupPC for all of our server backups. Many of our clients run Domino, where file-locking is not an issue. For those clients running Exchange, we use NTBACKUP to back up the Exchange data store (and system state) and then BackupPC to back that up off-machine.
Works for us. Have done whole-server restores (only a couple of times) with this. I've never bothered to try a bare-metal restore on Windows, so YMMV. Our clients are small enough that bare-metal doesn't buy that much.
You can't pry my Treo 700p from my cold, dead hands, but playing MP3's alone juices the battery in under a day. Add streaming, and I'm lucky to get more than a couple of hours.
So it's great if you only want to listen to music for a little bit. But trying to listen all day is out, unless you want to buy (and carry and keep charged) a bunch of batteries. That's where the iPod has the Treo beat.
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be +1 Funny or not, but...
WinChip lives on in the VIA C7 series of chips. I've got lots of them around (in firewalls and other embedded style devices). They are dog-slow, however: about half as much work accomplished per clock speed as a PIII.
Their big advantage is power consumption, and therefore size. They're used in Mini-ITX systems, which are about the size of a CD jewelbox, and are easily available without CPU fans (or very small fans for the faster models).
I use them in a custom-packaged firewall solution that contains no moving parts: a Mini-ITX board with no CPU fan, and flash-based storage. They work extremely well, and even the inefficient 600MHz processors they use are overkill...
Ironically, I've always thought that OS/2 would have made a *great* PDA OS. Full preemptive multitasking, networking, GUI, etc. and it runs very happily on a 100MHz system with 64MB of RAM. My Treo 700p is 312MHz and has 128MB of RAM...
Of course, BeOS seemingly would have made an equally good base, but that didn't seem to have worked out well, either...
You are correct: PDF's often rely heavily upon more than just text content: otherwise, they wouldn't have been created as PDF. This is not always the case: the Redbooks I mentioned before are perfectly readable as plain text. However, not everything works that way.
I haven't seen text-to-PDF converters for the Palm, but I haven't really looked. I do it on the PC before I send it to the Palm. The PDF readers I've used are *not* text-to-PDF converters: they try to display the 8.5x11-based documents on the tiny screen, as the user created it. It's awkward... PDF-to-text is usually better than that, and better than nothing. But good? Not necessarily...:)
This isn't really a Palm-vs-PocketPC issue. It's a 4-square-inch-screen issue. It's what you lose for having a tiny form factor. It's better than not having the PDF (such as on an airplane), but it's not a panacea....
Re:So who owns what and who?
on
Palm to go Linux
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There's two 700 smartphones. The 700w, a Verizon Wireless exclusive, and the 700p. I've had 3 clients return the 700w's and get 680/700p's. I've had only a couple of them keep the 700w's.
I've used a 700p myself for nearly a year. Much more reliable than the 600p it replaced. I've been *very* happy with it...
Re:Handhelds and PDF?
on
Palm to go Linux
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've owned a Treo 300, 600 and 700. I've read PDF's on all of them.
HOWEVER: It is not easy. The best is the 700. The high-res screen (320x320) makes a big difference. But even then, you're talking about using a device that has a screen that's 2 inches x 2 inches to try to read a document formatted for 8.5 x 11. The whole idea of a PDF is to preserve precise paper-based formatting. Working with that on a handheld is awkward at best.
Your best option is to convert the PDF to text and read the text on the PDF, using some sort of eReader (Plucker or,A HREF="http://www.isilo.com/">iSilo come to mind). I read lots of PG material that way, as well as IBM Redbooks that I've converted to text.
Usually PC Connection. However, I was too lazy to actually punch up the numbers for the reply. I wasn't sure I wasn't being trolled, so I wasn't going to waste more time than I already had.
As for CD/vinyl: I have a friend of mine that swears by records and his Technics turntables. I'm very happy with CD. I've never had the opportunity to compare same-source material between the two. In any case, the convenience and durability of CD has a lot going for it...
Seriously. What's the point? What are you trying to accomplish? You can't hear the difference at 256kps lossy versus lossless, so why waste you're life converting your already lossess music archive from CD form to harddrive form?
There are so many thing wrong with this statement...
1) Hearing artifacts at 256kbps. I will agree that even with decent speakers you may not be able to hear them. But with good gear, it's *noticable*. I used to have a pair of B&W DM602-S3 speakers as my mains and MP3's were fine. Then I upgraded to the 704's. All of a sudden I had to throw away my entire collection of MP3's: the artifacts just slapped you in the head.
2) Why have your media on hard drive? Why *not* have your media on hard drive? And if you're going to go through the work of ripping them, why not rip them *once* (to a lossless format) and be done with it? To save a few gig of hard drive space? Let's assume 1,000 CD's. Is that enough? An audio CD holds Seeing as a 400GB hard drive is going to cost less than $200 ($400 if you mirror them), what is the point of "saving space"? Especially when you figure that those 1,000 albums cost probably $10,000 - $20,000? And what did your time cost to rip 1,000 albums? At $5/hour and 10 minutes per album, you spent over $800 just to do the ripping! So why in the world would you want to do it *twice*, just so you can save a little bit of storage?
Of course, there's also the very real possibility that IHBT...:)
It's not something we usually sell by itself as a standalone solution. It's something that we provide to our customers as part of an overall solution. Having said that, there's no reason why we couldn't... Hhere's some more details:
The cost is $1500 for the backup server as well as integration into the network for a single file server. Usually we can do additional servers *very* quickly, so they end up getting included as well. It does *not* include the cost of the removable drives, but does include the cost of the trays. All you have to do is add whatever size IDE drives you want to store your backups on. The reason they're not included is because the amount of data you may want to store will necessarily be different than everybody else. Storing 700GB of data will cost more than storing 50GB...
If you want to back up more than 700GB of data (i.e. more than will fit on a single IDE drive), then this is not the product for you. This pretty dramatically alters the type of hardware you need. The technique is still sound, but the execution is *very* different. At that point , you need to know a *lot* more about your data before you can design an effective (including cost-effective) strategy.
The hardware we use for this is, to me, unreasonably expensive: our hardware costs for this solution are over $600. However, it's a small, attractive (even flashy!) and *reliable* setup, and customers seem to appreciate the size and appearance. Small is expensive. Having said that, if you have Linux experience, you can put together a very similar solution yourself with any old (reliable) client-type computer and either removable or external hard drives for less.
All of the software we use is Free Software: CentOS, BackupPC, etc. All of the installation and configuration details have been taken care of to make sure that it works correctly the way that our customers want it to work. We've been using it for a couple of years now, and we've been *very* happy with the results.
If you would like more details about it, I'd be happy to give them to you, whether you're interested in buying one from us or not. Feel free to use the Contact Us part of the website, or my AIM ID is the same as my/. ID.
We provide a BackupPC based solution for our customers. It's a Mini-ITX computer that is sized and shaped somewhat like an external tape drive. It uses removable IDE drives to back up data.
Our clients love it. It's fast, powerful, easy to navigate, and proactively notifies them when there are issues. We've done everything from restore individual files to complete disaster recovery.
The "client" needed on any target you want to back up (like, say, a Windows file server) is just rsync running as a daemon. You can also add encryption with SSH, but we don't. All-in-all, it just works.
Then I went a little farther: why not use this as motiviation? Set up a very bad penetration test (Columbo-style), and give the person a $500 bonus for "catching" the person. The person doesn't even need to know it's a setup.
What do you think everyone in the office's going to do from then on? You can *bet* they're going to scrutinize every vendor that comes in the door... That's a *cheap* security upgrade...
That is an interesting point. I've never thought about it quite in that way. And you are right about the "don't change it" part, but the heaven part is debatable...":)
My thought on that is this: while a specific religion may not change, my choice to belong to one can. And *should* change, if the beliefs and requirements disagree with what I as a person believe are right. And that includes believing in *any* religion in the first place. But that's no different than belief in science. It's not an all-or-nothing, once-made-always-made choice. It's something that you constantly have to re-prove to yourself.
Of course, the interesting thing is, if you believe in an all-knowing Creator, you would *expect* that he would not need to change his mind to fit the moment--in fact, you would expect him to consistently outline his standards, and keep it that way. Otherwise, he wasn't very all-knowing, now was he?:)
Maybe that's the difference between religion and science, and why some people are significantly opposed to it: religion requires that a person admit that their personal knowledge and judgement is not absolute. Of course, the things that people *do* in the name of "religion" (e.g. war, terrorism, etc.) certainly does not help people to value religion, either...
Anyway, an interesting point. You are correct: religion does not (well, should not) change. Science does. For some, maybe that change is comforting. For others, it conflicts with the idea of an intelligent Creator.
Why is it that "Faith in religion is BAAAADDD!!!" but "Faith in science is GOOOOODDD!!!" around here?
And for the record, real faith is *not* blind belief in *spite* of evidence. It is belief in something that has not *yet* been proven, but most everything *else* related to that subject *has* been proven. Hebrews 11:1.
Cable TV is false economy unless you're a stay-at-home parent.
As the husband of a stay-at-home Mom (and home-schooled daughter), I can think of no worse "economy" than watching enough television (of *any* kind) to where the cost-per-hour (even just talking *actual* costs) becomes an important metric.
And that's measured in *any* way you'd like, from hard financial data all the way to the value of the brain cells wasted in the process...
Of course, if you equate/. with TV viewing, then I start to feel pretty guilty myself...:)
I forgot to mention that in my above post. I hadn't known really about the CTRL-W: I hadn't needed to know. However, now that the button is all over the place, the keyboard shortcut comes in much more handy now.
I've always used CTRL-N and CTRL-T, so CTRL-W should not be that big of a deal. But it is...:)
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I *just* started playing Oregon Trail II last night with my daughter. And it was still a lot of fun!
It's called an Archimedes' Screw. It has advantages (especially in high-torque applications), but it is not very useful for moving water a long distance. Out of a ditch (a few meters), yes. Out of a *well* (tens of meters), no.
You know, you make it just too easy... Like clubbing baby seals. The irony.
I love it. You mock a person's intelligence, yet can't tell the difference between ringing a bell and removing the skin of a fruit...
Too late at night to find the stupid FCC reg, so you can Google it, but...
Part 15 devices (such as 802.11) are limited to 1W EIRP
. That means that you can use a 1W amplifier with a *0*db antenna. Any antenna with gain limits your maximum power to below 1W. Part 97 (Amateur Radio services) are allowed to use 1,500W, and not EIRP. So that's why even though he's using Part 15 equipment, he's using it in a Part 97 manner.
KC8PWV :)
Seconded. We use BackupPC for all of our server backups. Many of our clients run Domino, where file-locking is not an issue. For those clients running Exchange, we use NTBACKUP to back up the Exchange data store (and system state) and then BackupPC to back that up off-machine.
Works for us. Have done whole-server restores (only a couple of times) with this. I've never bothered to try a bare-metal restore on Windows, so YMMV. Our clients are small enough that bare-metal doesn't buy that much.
Cool products! Thanks for the links.
Two words: Battery life.
You can't pry my Treo 700p from my cold, dead hands, but playing MP3's alone juices the battery in under a day. Add streaming, and I'm lucky to get more than a couple of hours.
So it's great if you only want to listen to music for a little bit. But trying to listen all day is out, unless you want to buy (and carry and keep charged) a bunch of batteries. That's where the iPod has the Treo beat.
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be +1 Funny or not, but...
WinChip lives on in the VIA C7 series of chips. I've got lots of them around (in firewalls and other embedded style devices). They are dog-slow, however: about half as much work accomplished per clock speed as a PIII.
Their big advantage is power consumption, and therefore size. They're used in Mini-ITX systems, which are about the size of a CD jewelbox, and are easily available without CPU fans (or very small fans for the faster models).
I use them in a custom-packaged firewall solution that contains no moving parts: a Mini-ITX board with no CPU fan, and flash-based storage. They work extremely well, and even the inefficient 600MHz processors they use are overkill...
Ironically, I've always thought that OS/2 would have made a *great* PDA OS. Full preemptive multitasking, networking, GUI, etc. and it runs very happily on a 100MHz system with 64MB of RAM. My Treo 700p is 312MHz and has 128MB of RAM...
Of course, BeOS seemingly would have made an equally good base, but that didn't seem to have worked out well, either...
You are correct: PDF's often rely heavily upon more than just text content: otherwise, they wouldn't have been created as PDF. This is not always the case: the Redbooks I mentioned before are perfectly readable as plain text. However, not everything works that way.
I haven't seen text-to-PDF converters for the Palm, but I haven't really looked. I do it on the PC before I send it to the Palm. The PDF readers I've used are *not* text-to-PDF converters: they try to display the 8.5x11-based documents on the tiny screen, as the user created it. It's awkward... PDF-to-text is usually better than that, and better than nothing. But good? Not necessarily... :)
This isn't really a Palm-vs-PocketPC issue. It's a 4-square-inch-screen issue. It's what you lose for having a tiny form factor. It's better than not having the PDF (such as on an airplane), but it's not a panacea....
There's two 700 smartphones. The 700w, a Verizon Wireless exclusive, and the 700p. I've had 3 clients return the 700w's and get 680/700p's. I've had only a couple of them keep the 700w's.
I've used a 700p myself for nearly a year. Much more reliable than the 600p it replaced. I've been *very* happy with it...
I've owned a Treo 300, 600 and 700. I've read PDF's on all of them.
HOWEVER: It is not easy. The best is the 700. The high-res screen (320x320) makes a big difference. But even then, you're talking about using a device that has a screen that's 2 inches x 2 inches to try to read a document formatted for 8.5 x 11. The whole idea of a PDF is to preserve precise paper-based formatting. Working with that on a handheld is awkward at best.
Your best option is to convert the PDF to text and read the text on the PDF, using some sort of eReader (Plucker or ,A HREF="http://www.isilo.com/">iSilo come to mind). I read lots of PG material that way, as well as IBM Redbooks that I've converted to text.
Usually PC Connection. However, I was too lazy to actually punch up the numbers for the reply. I wasn't sure I wasn't being trolled, so I wasn't going to waste more time than I already had.
As for CD/vinyl: I have a friend of mine that swears by records and his Technics turntables. I'm very happy with CD. I've never had the opportunity to compare same-source material between the two. In any case, the convenience and durability of CD has a lot going for it...
There are so many thing wrong with this statement...
1) Hearing artifacts at 256kbps. I will agree that even with decent speakers you may not be able to hear them. But with good gear, it's *noticable*. I used to have a pair of B&W DM602-S3 speakers as my mains and MP3's were fine. Then I upgraded to the 704's. All of a sudden I had to throw away my entire collection of MP3's: the artifacts just slapped you in the head.
2) Why have your media on hard drive? Why *not* have your media on hard drive? And if you're going to go through the work of ripping them, why not rip them *once* (to a lossless format) and be done with it? To save a few gig of hard drive space? Let's assume 1,000 CD's. Is that enough? An audio CD holds Seeing as a 400GB hard drive is going to cost less than $200 ($400 if you mirror them), what is the point of "saving space"? Especially when you figure that those 1,000 albums cost probably $10,000 - $20,000? And what did your time cost to rip 1,000 albums? At $5/hour and 10 minutes per album, you spent over $800 just to do the ripping! So why in the world would you want to do it *twice*, just so you can save a little bit of storage?
Of course, there's also the very real possibility that IHBT... :)
It's not something we usually sell by itself as a standalone solution. It's something that we provide to our customers as part of an overall solution. Having said that, there's no reason why we couldn't... Hhere's some more details:
The cost is $1500 for the backup server as well as integration into the network for a single file server. Usually we can do additional servers *very* quickly, so they end up getting included as well. It does *not* include the cost of the removable drives, but does include the cost of the trays. All you have to do is add whatever size IDE drives you want to store your backups on. The reason they're not included is because the amount of data you may want to store will necessarily be different than everybody else. Storing 700GB of data will cost more than storing 50GB...
If you want to back up more than 700GB of data (i.e. more than will fit on a single IDE drive), then this is not the product for you. This pretty dramatically alters the type of hardware you need. The technique is still sound, but the execution is *very* different. At that point , you need to know a *lot* more about your data before you can design an effective (including cost-effective) strategy.
The hardware we use for this is, to me, unreasonably expensive: our hardware costs for this solution are over $600. However, it's a small, attractive (even flashy!) and *reliable* setup, and customers seem to appreciate the size and appearance. Small is expensive. Having said that, if you have Linux experience, you can put together a very similar solution yourself with any old (reliable) client-type computer and either removable or external hard drives for less.
All of the software we use is Free Software: CentOS, BackupPC, etc. All of the installation and configuration details have been taken care of to make sure that it works correctly the way that our customers want it to work. We've been using it for a couple of years now, and we've been *very* happy with the results.
If you would like more details about it, I'd be happy to give them to you, whether you're interested in buying one from us or not. Feel free to use the Contact Us part of the website, or my AIM ID is the same as my /. ID.
We provide a BackupPC based solution for our customers. It's a Mini-ITX computer that is sized and shaped somewhat like an external tape drive. It uses removable IDE drives to back up data.
Our clients love it. It's fast, powerful, easy to navigate, and proactively notifies them when there are issues. We've done everything from restore individual files to complete disaster recovery.
The "client" needed on any target you want to back up (like, say, a Windows file server) is just rsync running as a daemon. You can also add encryption with SSH, but we don't. All-in-all, it just works.
C'mon: 2nd link on Google...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantrap
I thought exactly the same thing.
Then I went a little farther: why not use this as motiviation? Set up a very bad penetration test (Columbo-style), and give the person a $500 bonus for "catching" the person. The person doesn't even need to know it's a setup.
What do you think everyone in the office's going to do from then on? You can *bet* they're going to scrutinize every vendor that comes in the door... That's a *cheap* security upgrade...
I'm really surprised that you didn't mention the tubes...
There's a *real* problem with this. Constant power output means *maximum* power output, 100% of the time.
Think about it...
That is an interesting point. I've never thought about it quite in that way. And you are right about the "don't change it" part, but the heaven part is debatable..." :)
My thought on that is this: while a specific religion may not change, my choice to belong to one can. And *should* change, if the beliefs and requirements disagree with what I as a person believe are right. And that includes believing in *any* religion in the first place. But that's no different than belief in science. It's not an all-or-nothing, once-made-always-made choice. It's something that you constantly have to re-prove to yourself.
Of course, the interesting thing is, if you believe in an all-knowing Creator, you would *expect* that he would not need to change his mind to fit the moment--in fact, you would expect him to consistently outline his standards, and keep it that way. Otherwise, he wasn't very all-knowing, now was he? :)
Maybe that's the difference between religion and science, and why some people are significantly opposed to it: religion requires that a person admit that their personal knowledge and judgement is not absolute. Of course, the things that people *do* in the name of "religion" (e.g. war, terrorism, etc.) certainly does not help people to value religion, either...
Anyway, an interesting point. You are correct: religion does not (well, should not) change. Science does. For some, maybe that change is comforting. For others, it conflicts with the idea of an intelligent Creator.
Why is it that "Faith in religion is BAAAADDD!!!" but "Faith in science is GOOOOODDD!!!" around here?
And for the record, real faith is *not* blind belief in *spite* of evidence. It is belief in something that has not *yet* been proven, but most everything *else* related to that subject *has* been proven. Hebrews 11:1.
Cable TV is false economy unless you're a stay-at-home parent.
As the husband of a stay-at-home Mom (and home-schooled daughter), I can think of no worse "economy" than watching enough television (of *any* kind) to where the cost-per-hour (even just talking *actual* costs) becomes an important metric.
And that's measured in *any* way you'd like, from hard financial data all the way to the value of the brain cells wasted in the process...
Of course, if you equate /. with TV viewing, then I start to feel pretty guilty myself... :)
I forgot to mention that in my above post. I hadn't known really about the CTRL-W: I hadn't needed to know. However, now that the button is all over the place, the keyboard shortcut comes in much more handy now.
I've always used CTRL-N and CTRL-T, so CTRL-W should not be that big of a deal. But it is... :)