You're making the mistake that someone, somehow, magically has the knowledge to identify the "best" distribution to compare against Windows. Well, most people have no way of knowing what the "best" of anything is, and they don't base their purchasing decisions on that knowledge. Lindows comes with some machines. For the average user, there's no choice in using Lindows on a Lindows machine, in just the same way there's no choice in using Windows XP Home on a Windows XP Home machine. So, in that context, Lindows is a valid choice: it's what's in the machine.
With respect to other distributions, Xandros was selected for a reason. That reason was, the reviewer may have not known any better. But, that reviewer's choice is as valid as any expert's, because that reviewer's choice is likely to be the choice of people in a similar situation.
One of the few products I despise
on
Real's Reality
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· Score: 1
There's a lot of software I don't use because it doesn't work for me, or it's buggy, or I think one of its competitors is better. I just check it out and move on, no hard feelings. But Real Whatsthenamethisweekplayer is the one product that I've uninstalled because it's sneaky, underhand and makes me feel like the parent company is sniggering at me. What a loathsome company, and I'm speaking as one of the idiots who has paid for it in the past, and even THEN been tricked into getting more than I asked for.
I don't care if Real gets "better" in some magic way. I don't want anything to do with it.
The downside in my personal crusade is, of course, that I can't use sites with no alternate streaming products, which perversely makes me loath Real even more:-)
Dataproducts makes third-party cartridges and refill kits for many printers including Epson, Lexmark & HP. They're available under their own name, and are also OEM'd to other companies including Staples. They've got factories in Mexico & Portugal. They're a Hitachi subsidiary so the quality of the stuff is good.
I don't think they do an Epson chip resetter, though. Mine cost $19 from some store somewhere and has reset everything it's come into contact with, no problem.
Here you can see that the drive is rated for 300,000 head load/unload cycles. Here you can pick out the OEM design specs (it's 156 pages)and read that it's rated for 140 operating hours a month. So I'd use it in my MP3 player and camera, but I'm not sure I'd want one in a PC yet.
Re:Three things about the mini...
on
iPod Mini Sells Out
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's a 4GB drive so needs to be formatted as FAT32. Not all digital cameras support FAT32, so they're limited to 2GB. You can test this by creating, say, a 1GB partition on the drive and retrying it a camera that didn't recognise it previously.
You don't need him. You need people who are prepared to send people like him. Suppose there were 10,000 flight-ready astronauts sitting around right now. No-one's going to send them. There's no infrastructure to do it, and there's no will to do it. He doesn't have to be an expert in anything, he just has to want to be there, and encourage other people to be there. Exploration always used to be about loonies at the edge, who failed frequently and succeeded sometimes. Now it's about sensible people, who never fail because they never tried, and I think we'll be poorer because of that.
He was once part of a band of heros. Now he's just another politician.
It's easier to knock people down than to build them up. I'm happy with the concept of "once a hero, always a hero". If nothing else, he showed that old people can go back into space. That may be relevant in a few decades when our robot-obsessed console explorers tell us "gee, we'd like to send real people, but we don't have any anymore."
Frankly I don't care where we go, Moon, Mars or asteroids. Let's just get off this rock.
Absolutely. We should send robots all over, but we should send humans, too, because it does us good to listen to people who have "been there, done that". I have a greater affinity for our fellow humans who have stood on the Moon, than for the manufactured tools we have sent there. When Armstrong stepped onto the Moon, I thought "gee, I could have been there." Now, I think "gee, my kids or my grandchildren could do that", and it's a nice thought.
I think, as a species, we're designed to go look for ourselves.
Check out the 28L3644, but beware of sticker shock. If it's the compact keyboard idea that attracts you, check out any of the Happy Hacker keyboards, which used to be at www.pfuca.com but now appears to be dead.
My computer's battery pack, which happens to be laying disembowelled in front of me at this very moment, consists of 6 cells arranged in 3 sets of 2 cells in parallel, connected serially.
Nothing wrong with parallel connections as long as you charge them either conservatively or intelligently. Note the final design shown in this article actually shows primary cells. Firstly they're nominally non-rechargable, secondly their internal resistance prevents any thought-provoking excursions in the temperature and noise domains.
No it's not, it's terrible. The running costs are immense, and it's unbalanced.
In the first picture, there are a GP and a Varta 9V battery in parallel, with at least two cells, at least one of which is rechargable. So, 9 + (2 x 1.2) = 11.4 V.
In the second picture, there are two Varta 9V primary batteries in parallel, placed in series with two 1.5V Duracell alkalines. So, 9 + (2 x 1.5) = 12 V.
We can assume the difference in non-load voltage is not relevant. But when we consider the power available:
The capacity of each PP9 Varta is at most 450 mAh. (Rechargables are 110 mAh to 150 mAh). Taking the best case in parallel, therefore, 900 mAh. The rechargable AA's are about 1350 to 2300 mAh. If primary AA's are used, then figure on 2400 mAh.
So for an all-primary solution, the AA cells have 2.5 times the life of the PP9 cells. Basically, this design eats PP9 cells and there's no real way of telling which batteries/cells are running out at any given moment.
If one's going to go for a primary cell solution, then it would be better to have, say, 3 x 2CR5 in series or 3 x CR-P2 in series. But obviously a rechargable pack is the optimal solution because it's way cheaper in the long run. Buy them all together, Use them together, recharge them together. Check out packs used for digital cameras.
Re:4 GB CF extraction; Hitachi's card warranty
on
iPod Mini Autopsy
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· Score: 2, Informative
A number of people have reported problems getting the CF to work with their cameras
Most digital cameras don't support CF cards above 2GB because they can't read/write FAT32. If you think you're in that category, try creating a 2GB FAT partition on the CF card to test it. More recent cameras are OK with FAT32.
The Creative Labs 4GB Muvo2 has a Hitachi 4GB drive. The player is sold out most places since people are pulling the 4GB drive for their cameras. Check eBay for listings of disembowelled Muvo2's for sale. In Creative's case, I believe part of the the shortage is due to them re-engineering the player to mecahnically lock the CF card in place, probably with solder.
The part in the iPod is HMS360404D5CF00: this is the same part number Hitachi gives to its standard CF card drive, so I assume people will get it working Real Soon Now.
Of most interest to the long-term health of the iPod, Hitachi warrants the drive for 300,000 head load/unload cycles, and 140 power-on hours per month. Hmmm...
216XL. Typical Casio, no concept of a product that can evolve over time, so there was no followup product. Best way to get good battery life is to dim the screen way down. Panasonic used the design lessons for its own range of ultralights in 2003: bigger screen, etc, still less than 1kg.
Cats are tangentially smart to humans. Our cat had a litter box which he dutifully used until he understood there was a big wide world out there. So my better half (and I use the term loosely) decided the litter box would make a great flower box. So she put it outside, filled it with earth and plants, and waited for spring.
We now have a cat that shits in flower boxes, plant pots, anything that looks like a plant pot, and anything with a picture of a flower on it.
I use an external hardware-based HD copier made by Century. It's OEM'd to someone in the US but I don't know who. Basically, plug any drive into one side, plug any into the other, push a button and it rapidly clones one to the other. It also has a USB2 connection. When connected to a PC, it can be used to mirror an internal drive, clone it or simply be an external drive.
Since it's standalone, it can clone a non-bootable drive. It also seems to be able to clone drives that are too damaged to spin up in a PC.
Recent rescues:
60GB 2.5-inch drive would spin up intermittently. Attached it to the external box, where it had the same problem. So I removed the lid, and got the drive to spin up with a thumb twist on the central boss. I got the drive cloned in 20 minutes, and the drive continued to work for another 40 minutes.
Fujitsu with the (in)famous circuit board problem: Got a replacement drive. Cloned an identical functional drive from another machine in the office onto it. Swapped the circuit board on the functional drive to the non-functional one. Drive started, so cloned it to the original functional drive.
The Century unit has been worth its weight in gold to me over the years. The newest one is smaller & lighter. Around $150.
As can be seen, a screen spinning rapidly about a vertical axis reflects images generated sequentially by a single projector, pointing up. The images first reflect off the mirrored top cover, down onto smaller mirrors arranged around the base of the viewing chamber onto the spinning screen. The full 3-D cycle of images are projected once per revolution of the screen, so the screen sees a slightly different image as it aligns with each mirror.
The screen is near-transparent, so it is possible to look "through" a projected image. Suggested uses include an information display terminal, a video conferencing terminal or an arcade game.
Of course, 24 video cameras at the transmitting side won't be cheap.
On Japanese games shows, the contestants are rarely members of the public. Instead, a small pool of "talents" appear on show after show, channel after channel.
On US game shows, the contestants are usually members of the public; Japanese are aware of this difference. Having a "Japanese game show" booth wouldn't ring true.
My Casio (made by Panasonic) has 2 - 6 hours battery life, 800x600 screen, 80GB aftermarket HD (up from the original 20GB), 512MB RAM, only a 600MHz Transmeta so it's SLOW, PC slot with a 54Mbps wifi card, CF slot with a 384kbps cellular card, firewire, USB, external video, modem, fast ethernet, a hardware switch to boot it into XP or Midori Linux, and weighs next to nothing. It's also two years old, obsolete, and sells for $400 on the used market. Better than vaporware any day of the week.
One of the myriad NTT subsidiaries has a similar technology that "watches" a film and detects scenes, indexing them them either by both video scene changes (which is pretty standard) and also by changes in any captions or voice. Ultimately, I suppose the aim would be to have an index to a film library searchable by scene, what is being said or what a caption is likely to be saying. One byproduct is that a scene builds up into a large static image: in other words, if the camera is panned, tracked or zoomed, the final static image contains the entire video field covered. Pretty neat.
Slashdot Mirror
70MB vdsl off a 1GB fiber feed to the building for $35/month 8-)
With respect to other distributions, Xandros was selected for a reason. That reason was, the reviewer may have not known any better. But, that reviewer's choice is as valid as any expert's, because that reviewer's choice is likely to be the choice of people in a similar situation.
I don't care if Real gets "better" in some magic way. I don't want anything to do with it.
The downside in my personal crusade is, of course, that I can't use sites with no alternate streaming products, which perversely makes me loath Real even more :-)
I don't think they do an Epson chip resetter, though. Mine cost $19 from some store somewhere and has reset everything it's come into contact with, no problem.
And with star endorsement.
Here you go.
Here you can see that the drive is rated for 300,000 head load/unload cycles. Here you can pick out the OEM design specs (it's 156 pages)and read that it's rated for 140 operating hours a month. So I'd use it in my MP3 player and camera, but I'm not sure I'd want one in a PC yet.
It's a 4GB drive so needs to be formatted as FAT32. Not all digital cameras support FAT32, so they're limited to 2GB. You can test this by creating, say, a 1GB partition on the drive and retrying it a camera that didn't recognise it previously.
You don't need him. You need people who are prepared to send people like him. Suppose there were 10,000 flight-ready astronauts sitting around right now. No-one's going to send them. There's no infrastructure to do it, and there's no will to do it. He doesn't have to be an expert in anything, he just has to want to be there, and encourage other people to be there. Exploration always used to be about loonies at the edge, who failed frequently and succeeded sometimes. Now it's about sensible people, who never fail because they never tried, and I think we'll be poorer because of that.
It's easier to knock people down than to build them up. I'm happy with the concept of "once a hero, always a hero". If nothing else, he showed that old people can go back into space. That may be relevant in a few decades when our robot-obsessed console explorers tell us "gee, we'd like to send real people, but we don't have any anymore."
Absolutely. We should send robots all over, but we should send humans, too, because it does us good to listen to people who have "been there, done that". I have a greater affinity for our fellow humans who have stood on the Moon, than for the manufactured tools we have sent there. When Armstrong stepped onto the Moon, I thought "gee, I could have been there." Now, I think "gee, my kids or my grandchildren could do that", and it's a nice thought.
I think, as a species, we're designed to go look for ourselves.
Check out the 28L3644, but beware of sticker shock. If it's the compact keyboard idea that attracts you, check out any of the Happy Hacker keyboards, which used to be at www.pfuca.com but now appears to be dead.
Nothing wrong with parallel connections as long as you charge them either conservatively or intelligently. Note the final design shown in this article actually shows primary cells. Firstly they're nominally non-rechargable, secondly their internal resistance prevents any thought-provoking excursions in the temperature and noise domains.
In the first picture, there are a GP and a Varta 9V battery in parallel, with at least two cells, at least one of which is rechargable. So, 9 + (2 x 1.2) = 11.4 V.
In the second picture, there are two Varta 9V primary batteries in parallel, placed in series with two 1.5V Duracell alkalines. So, 9 + (2 x 1.5) = 12 V.
We can assume the difference in non-load voltage is not relevant. But when we consider the power available:
The capacity of each PP9 Varta is at most 450 mAh. (Rechargables are 110 mAh to 150 mAh). Taking the best case in parallel, therefore, 900 mAh. The rechargable AA's are about 1350 to 2300 mAh. If primary AA's are used, then figure on 2400 mAh.
So for an all-primary solution, the AA cells have 2.5 times the life of the PP9 cells. Basically, this design eats PP9 cells and there's no real way of telling which batteries/cells are running out at any given moment.
If one's going to go for a primary cell solution, then it would be better to have, say, 3 x 2CR5 in series or 3 x CR-P2 in series. But obviously a rechargable pack is the optimal solution because it's way cheaper in the long run. Buy them all together, Use them together, recharge them together. Check out packs used for digital cameras.
Most digital cameras don't support CF cards above 2GB because they can't read/write FAT32. If you think you're in that category, try creating a 2GB FAT partition on the CF card to test it. More recent cameras are OK with FAT32.
The Creative Labs 4GB Muvo2 has a Hitachi 4GB drive. The player is sold out most places since people are pulling the 4GB drive for their cameras. Check eBay for listings of disembowelled Muvo2's for sale. In Creative's case, I believe part of the the shortage is due to them re-engineering the player to mecahnically lock the CF card in place, probably with solder.
The part in the iPod is HMS360404D5CF00: this is the same part number Hitachi gives to its standard CF card drive, so I assume people will get it working Real Soon Now.
Of most interest to the long-term health of the iPod, Hitachi warrants the drive for 300,000 head load/unload cycles, and 140 power-on hours per month. Hmmm...
216XL. Typical Casio, no concept of a product that can evolve over time, so there was no followup product. Best way to get good battery life is to dim the screen way down. Panasonic used the design lessons for its own range of ultralights in 2003: bigger screen, etc, still less than 1kg.
We now have a cat that shits in flower boxes, plant pots, anything that looks like a plant pot, and anything with a picture of a flower on it.
Wait, I've got another clue stick here somewhere.
Hmmm, maybe my $38 for 70Mbps VDSL off a 1GB fiber feed to the building isn't so bad after all.
That's another set of people that need a whack with a clue stick.
Since it's standalone, it can clone a non-bootable drive. It also seems to be able to clone drives that are too damaged to spin up in a PC.
Recent rescues:
60GB 2.5-inch drive would spin up intermittently. Attached it to the external box, where it had the same problem. So I removed the lid, and got the drive to spin up with a thumb twist on the central boss. I got the drive cloned in 20 minutes, and the drive continued to work for another 40 minutes.
Fujitsu with the (in)famous circuit board problem: Got a replacement drive. Cloned an identical functional drive from another machine in the office onto it. Swapped the circuit board on the functional drive to the non-functional one. Drive started, so cloned it to the original functional drive.
The Century unit has been worth its weight in gold to me over the years. The newest one is smaller & lighter. Around $150.
As can be seen, a screen spinning rapidly about a vertical axis reflects images generated sequentially by a single projector, pointing up. The images first reflect off the mirrored top cover, down onto smaller mirrors arranged around the base of the viewing chamber onto the spinning screen. The full 3-D cycle of images are projected once per revolution of the screen, so the screen sees a slightly different image as it aligns with each mirror.
The screen is near-transparent, so it is possible to look "through" a projected image. Suggested uses include an information display terminal, a video conferencing terminal or an arcade game.
Of course, 24 video cameras at the transmitting side won't be cheap.
On US game shows, the contestants are usually members of the public; Japanese are aware of this difference. Having a "Japanese game show" booth wouldn't ring true.
My Casio (made by Panasonic) has 2 - 6 hours battery life, 800x600 screen, 80GB aftermarket HD (up from the original 20GB), 512MB RAM, only a 600MHz Transmeta so it's SLOW, PC slot with a 54Mbps wifi card, CF slot with a 384kbps cellular card, firewire, USB, external video, modem, fast ethernet, a hardware switch to boot it into XP or Midori Linux, and weighs next to nothing. It's also two years old, obsolete, and sells for $400 on the used market. Better than vaporware any day of the week.
One of the myriad NTT subsidiaries has a similar technology that "watches" a film and detects scenes, indexing them them either by both video scene changes (which is pretty standard) and also by changes in any captions or voice. Ultimately, I suppose the aim would be to have an index to a film library searchable by scene, what is being said or what a caption is likely to be saying. One byproduct is that a scene builds up into a large static image: in other words, if the camera is panned, tracked or zoomed, the final static image contains the entire video field covered. Pretty neat.