You do realize that you can reduce this. You can buy a "docking station" that has a USB hub, USB ethernet, and USB audio on one box. Then the KVM can go into that for the mouse/keyboard. You will still need power, firewire (who uses that anymore) and video. But still, that would eliminate two cables.
There are also USB docking stations that include their own graphics chips, but those have their own problems.
SawStop does not make blades. Also, presumably, if the technology was licensed, the individual saw manufacturers would be making their own cartridges and NOT SawStop.
I, as a consumer, WANT this technology, assuming that it can be made affordable. The only way to do that is to take advantage of the economy of scale, which one guy in his garage cannot do. From a consumer's perspective, it makes sense for manufacturers to offer this. It is just the stupid lawyers for the companies that stopped it from happening.
I investigated the SawStop technology when I wanted to buy a table saw. The inventor WANTS his technology in every saw (I exchanged e-mails with the inventor). He tried to get the major saw companies to license his stuff! The problem is that NO SAW COMPANIES want it for just because of law suits.
The logic goes like this: Ryobi makes a top-of-the-line saw with SawStop. Some fool cuts his arm off with a low-end model without the technology. Then, they sue Ryobi for not including it in ALL of their products. The companies thought that by not including it at all, they could claim that not having it was OK, because NOBODY had it. This is the "we do what the industry does" defense, which is also the "everybody does it" defense, almost as good as the "wookie" defense).
SawStop actually makes their OWN saws, but those are in the four-figure range (too much for a homeowner like me who needs to use a table saw every now and then). No doubt if companies like Ryobi, Craftsman, Rigid, et. al. started including this technology as a standard, the price would drop a lot.
I, for one, am GLAD this this decision was made. This means that hopefully saws with SawStop will actually be available in the few-hundred-dollar price range.
Since they got 230MB per second, you can safely assume that the modulation will be in the gigahertz. Good luck seeing that. If they use something like 8B/10B encoding, then they will get a guaranteed 50% duty cycle, so there will never be any brightness variation visible to the human eye.
I RTFA. It says that they achieve the bandwidth by filtering out the blue light. This makes sense, as white LEDs are actually blue LEDs with phosphors added to get the other colors. Phosphors are similar to glow-in-the-dark stuff, so they retain light for a little while. Presumably, the blue filter is only needed over the receiver.
The one questions is: how does your laptop equipped with this technology talk back? Will your laptop have a multi-watt emitter on the top (read "bright white light") lighting up the room for the upstream traffic?
A few mirrors stripped into a single big drive should give excellent performance.
I tried that once. My drives looked like a big, square disco ball. It looked very pretty in my windowed case -- the fan lights reflected off of the mirror stripes on my drives. They did not go any faster, though. Any other ideas?
It really isn't that hard to build a PC yourself. That is the ONLY route I would go for a desktop. You should try it. The very fact that you read/post on/. makes you qualified.
Now, building a laptop yourself does not really buy you much. Yes, there are companies out there that sell a "bare-bones" laptop, but that really means that you get to decide how much RAM and what speed processor you want.
I have no real 1st hand experience (the last "laptop" that I purchased was an Acer netbook that I like), but Toshiba laptops tend to get great reviews (I loved the one that I had 10 years ago). Maybe you should start there.
I have a nice shiny new 1920 x 1080 LCD panel at home (wide screen, of course). I love this monitor for non-gaming stuff. High resolution and a nice, sharp display. However, trying to game on it is another problem. I am currently playing "Knights of the Old Republic II", and it does not have a single resolution setting that works for a wide-screen monitor.
The other bad thing is that the monitor, which is a Dell, always stretches out the display to fill the entire display up, even when it know that it should not -- who actually wants 1024 x 768 to be 16:9?
I found that I when using the DVI interface, I can choose "centered timing" in my Radeon driver. When I set KOTOR2 to 1280x1024, that works well enough to keep me happy. Unfortunately, "centered timing" does not work on an analog output, so that rules out using that setting when I have my netbook hooked up to the monitor (so much for re-playing Fallout 2 on the big monitor).
if you think anyone who's trying to sell you something is anything less than completely full of shit, youre nuts.
It should NOT be this way. My wife runs a small business (see signature), and she bends over backwards (figuratively, not literally) to make sure that customers are happy. The has even refunded people who simply did not like the products, and returned them used (yuck). The products went in the trash, the customer got a full refund (and were also silently banned for life). Sure, she looses money on some customers, but word-of-mouth positive advertising is the best.
Now, if a company is being a complete jerk (say the one mentioned in the original post), the customer simply looses ALL trust in that store, and will likely never shop there again.
This "moral high-ground" is much easier for a place like Amazon, who sells everything. They make money whether you buy an Acer, Asus, MSI, or HP netbook. It really is in their best interest to give honest reviews, as long as the customer buys from THEM in the end. they probably do not care much which brand you buy.
Things are more murky (from a game-theory standpoint) if your business only sell one or a limited number of products lines. An honest review might result in a loss of a sale (deciding on a brand that the store does not carry). However, a dishonest review can result in a sale, but a loss of a customer for life, and the loss of reputation. I still think it makes sense to be honest.
The only problem is that you miss some programming. I love several shows on USA Network and the Discovery Channel. My kids love shown on Nickelodeon. An antenna can't get you those channels.
One reason that I have ALWAYS preferred cable over satellite is that you do not need a set-top box for cable. Since that advantage is going away, there is no reason NOT to go to satellite. Now, cable can say good-bye to its last advantage over satellite.
I can understand that the cable companies want to preserve some bandwidth for their own use. However, I think that net neutrality is too heavy handed, and doing nothing is even worse.
How about this as a compromise: the cable companies have to guarantee a certain "net neutral" bandwidth. Then, this is the bandwidth that they are allowed to advertise.
Therefore, if they have a 20-Gbps link to your house, but they offer 7-Mbps of open bandwidth, with 13-Mpbs reserved for their own downloadable movies, they can only advertise 7-Mpbs service.
This would kind of solve the whole thing. The cable companies can partition the bandwidth any way they like. They can reserve bandwidth for their own movie services. The customer still gets what is advertised.
Makes sense to me... Can anybody poke any logical holes in this (other than "Cable sucks, let's screw them")?
I remember running spice simulations on a 286. It ran slow, but it worked. A 486 would have been a dream to have. Really, Spice is not THAT demanding for simple student-style problems in the first couple of circuits classes.
I have even designed two-layer boards using a Pentium-120 laptop with 24MB if RAM (as a student, about ten years ago). It was not the fastest, but it worked fine -- and that was with a 800x600 display. Yes, the requirements for modern programs are more demanding. I would definitely want at least a 3GHz dual-core if I was doing a 16-layer board (I am glad that I do not do that anymore).
For those who do NOT want to build their own desk...
As far as arranging items, I got a bunch of cheap $3.00 stacking paper trays from my local office supply store. I then cut/drilled/dremmeled holes in the back to run cables. I now have four paper trays that hold: NAS box (biggest, on bottom), small KVM switch, 8-port ethernet hub, 4-port MIDI interface, router, audio mixer, and a cable modem. An extra 5th tray on the top even holds paper. It is a pain to get to the cables if you have to re-arrange something, but it makes my desk look a LOT neater.
The plastic can be brittle, so work slowly, and the plastic "dust" can be messy, so mark inside your house, but cut outside.
As for the cables, Velcro ties are your friend. You can put them on and off easily, which is key if you ever need to rearrange things.
As for my synthesizer (keyboard), that has a power cable, two MIDI cables, and two audio cables. For that, I used spiral wrap (available at Radio Shack) to keep the cables bundled (D.I.Y. snake). I cannot imagine having to replace any of those cables any time so, so spiral wrap is perfect. It works with ANY size cable. The only down side is that spiral wrap is a pain to put on, but the results are worth it.
Another trick is to make it in the audio range, and then have the kids draw a black square on a piece of paper with a pencil. The graphite (carbon) will appear as a variable resistance based on where you put the wires (put one wire at one end and move the other wire around). This will make a kind of crude music synthesizer. All for the cost of a 555, a speaker (piezo is fine), a battery, a battery holder, and a handful of resistors and capacitors.
And it works quite well. Around here, it is the standard solution when one needs to run engineering applications (on Linux) from home. Our home machines have Windows, but NoMachines has quite a nice NX client for Windows. As far as efficiency and general "snappiness" it comes quite close to Windows Remote Desktop, but works well with a Linux host.
Two thumbs up for Google. Maybe they can fix some of the annoying bugs. The NoMachine NX client does NOT work well with two monitors. They claim that this is a limitation of Cygwin (which is apparently a core part of NX client). If Google fixes this, they will have my undying gratitude.
Microsoft, for all its faults, does have a lot of money to throw at problems. I would not be surprised if they had focus groups to pick the default Windows colors. Microsoft may be (mostly) evil, but they are not idiots, especially when it comes to eye candy. They chose colors that more resemble a springtime day (blue for the sky and green for the trees and grass), rather than the color of a strip-mine or a pile of poop after an extra-large burrito meal.
Seriously, I love Ubuntu (my go-to OS of choice), but I really don't like the brown. Yes, you CAN load your own wallpaper, but there are no good wallpapers built-in. In order to change your wallpaper, you have to go searching through Google just to find something. Windows XP has a lot of cool wallpaper built-in, including the "grassy knoll," the brown fly-fishing tiles, clouds, autumn days, a coffee picture, mountains, and fish. It is a little thing, admittedly, but big things mean the difference between a bad and a good product; little things mean the difference between a good and a great product.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you DID give $20, then the developers would have $20 more than if you did NOT buy. I think that this is kind of the point of this.
You do realize that you can reduce this. You can buy a "docking station" that has a USB hub, USB ethernet, and USB audio on one box. Then the KVM can go into that for the mouse/keyboard. You will still need power, firewire (who uses that anymore) and video. But still, that would eliminate two cables.
There are also USB docking stations that include their own graphics chips, but those have their own problems.
Yes, but if you DO get one of these creatures and manage to capture it, infinite water supply!
SawStop does not make blades. Also, presumably, if the technology was licensed, the individual saw manufacturers would be making their own cartridges and NOT SawStop.
I, as a consumer, WANT this technology, assuming that it can be made affordable. The only way to do that is to take advantage of the economy of scale, which one guy in his garage cannot do. From a consumer's perspective, it makes sense for manufacturers to offer this. It is just the stupid lawyers for the companies that stopped it from happening.
I investigated the SawStop technology when I wanted to buy a table saw. The inventor WANTS his technology in every saw (I exchanged e-mails with the inventor). He tried to get the major saw companies to license his stuff! The problem is that NO SAW COMPANIES want it for just because of law suits.
The logic goes like this: Ryobi makes a top-of-the-line saw with SawStop. Some fool cuts his arm off with a low-end model without the technology. Then, they sue Ryobi for not including it in ALL of their products. The companies thought that by not including it at all, they could claim that not having it was OK, because NOBODY had it. This is the "we do what the industry does" defense, which is also the "everybody does it" defense, almost as good as the "wookie" defense).
SawStop actually makes their OWN saws, but those are in the four-figure range (too much for a homeowner like me who needs to use a table saw every now and then). No doubt if companies like Ryobi, Craftsman, Rigid, et. al. started including this technology as a standard, the price would drop a lot.
I, for one, am GLAD this this decision was made. This means that hopefully saws with SawStop will actually be available in the few-hundred-dollar price range.
Bah. Call me when he has a version of Myst on an 8x8 display. I would also be suitably impressed by a port of Duke Nukem Forever.
Since they got 230MB per second, you can safely assume that the modulation will be in the gigahertz. Good luck seeing that. If they use something like 8B/10B encoding, then they will get a guaranteed 50% duty cycle, so there will never be any brightness variation visible to the human eye.
I RTFA. It says that they achieve the bandwidth by filtering out the blue light. This makes sense, as white LEDs are actually blue LEDs with phosphors added to get the other colors. Phosphors are similar to glow-in-the-dark stuff, so they retain light for a little while. Presumably, the blue filter is only needed over the receiver.
The one questions is: how does your laptop equipped with this technology talk back? Will your laptop have a multi-watt emitter on the top (read "bright white light") lighting up the room for the upstream traffic?
I tried that once. My drives looked like a big, square disco ball. It looked very pretty in my windowed case -- the fan lights reflected off of the mirror stripes on my drives. They did not go any faster, though. Any other ideas?
Agreed.
As long as you haven't turned on file encryption (only an option with XP Pro), you can easily recover everything. Do this:
1) Go to a friend's computer. Download and burn a copy of your favorite linux distro (I use Ubuntu).
2) Live-boot from the CD.
3) Mount the hard drive.
4) Insert your favorite USB storage device (make sure it is large enough).
5) Copy ALL important files to the USB drive (probably safest to copy your entire user directory, if your USB drive is big enough.
6) When done, re-format your hard drive and re-install XP.
7) Update your system completely.
8) Re-install all applications you need (office, etc.)
9) Copy your important files off of the USB drive.
Really, it is time-consuming, but I have had to do this exact same process for friends a bunch of times.
As far as the PhD goes, go up to step 5, and then use the friend's computer to print everything. Do steps 6-8 some other day.
It really isn't that hard to build a PC yourself. That is the ONLY route I would go for a desktop. You should try it. The very fact that you read/post on /. makes you qualified.
Now, building a laptop yourself does not really buy you much. Yes, there are companies out there that sell a "bare-bones" laptop, but that really means that you get to decide how much RAM and what speed processor you want.
I have no real 1st hand experience (the last "laptop" that I purchased was an Acer netbook that I like), but Toshiba laptops tend to get great reviews (I loved the one that I had 10 years ago). Maybe you should start there.
Agreed.
I have a nice shiny new 1920 x 1080 LCD panel at home (wide screen, of course). I love this monitor for non-gaming stuff. High resolution and a nice, sharp display. However, trying to game on it is another problem. I am currently playing "Knights of the Old Republic II", and it does not have a single resolution setting that works for a wide-screen monitor.
The other bad thing is that the monitor, which is a Dell, always stretches out the display to fill the entire display up, even when it know that it should not -- who actually wants 1024 x 768 to be 16:9?
I found that I when using the DVI interface, I can choose "centered timing" in my Radeon driver. When I set KOTOR2 to 1280x1024, that works well enough to keep me happy. Unfortunately, "centered timing" does not work on an analog output, so that rules out using that setting when I have my netbook hooked up to the monitor (so much for re-playing Fallout 2 on the big monitor).
It should NOT be this way. My wife runs a small business (see signature), and she bends over backwards (figuratively, not literally) to make sure that customers are happy. The has even refunded people who simply did not like the products, and returned them used (yuck). The products went in the trash, the customer got a full refund (and were also silently banned for life). Sure, she looses money on some customers, but word-of-mouth positive advertising is the best.
Now, if a company is being a complete jerk (say the one mentioned in the original post), the customer simply looses ALL trust in that store, and will likely never shop there again.
This "moral high-ground" is much easier for a place like Amazon, who sells everything. They make money whether you buy an Acer, Asus, MSI, or HP netbook. It really is in their best interest to give honest reviews, as long as the customer buys from THEM in the end. they probably do not care much which brand you buy.
Things are more murky (from a game-theory standpoint) if your business only sell one or a limited number of products lines. An honest review might result in a loss of a sale (deciding on a brand that the store does not carry). However, a dishonest review can result in a sale, but a loss of a customer for life, and the loss of reputation. I still think it makes sense to be honest.
My experience with YouTube on the Wii browser is that, yes, it works. However, the videos are a LOT more pixelated compared to the same video on a PC.
The only problem is that you miss some programming. I love several shows on USA Network and the Discovery Channel. My kids love shown on Nickelodeon. An antenna can't get you those channels.
One reason that I have ALWAYS preferred cable over satellite is that you do not need a set-top box for cable. Since that advantage is going away, there is no reason NOT to go to satellite. Now, cable can say good-bye to its last advantage over satellite.
Not true. It seems that the people who are working on this keep on having "unfortunate accidents."
I wonder if making synthetic diamonds involves placing black cats on broken mirrors under ladders on Friday the 13th?
I can understand that the cable companies want to preserve some bandwidth for their own use. However, I think that net neutrality is too heavy handed, and doing nothing is even worse.
How about this as a compromise: the cable companies have to guarantee a certain "net neutral" bandwidth. Then, this is the bandwidth that they are allowed to advertise.
Therefore, if they have a 20-Gbps link to your house, but they offer 7-Mbps of open bandwidth, with 13-Mpbs reserved for their own downloadable movies, they can only advertise 7-Mpbs service.
This would kind of solve the whole thing. The cable companies can partition the bandwidth any way they like. They can reserve bandwidth for their own movie services. The customer still gets what is advertised.
Makes sense to me... Can anybody poke any logical holes in this (other than "Cable sucks, let's screw them")?
I remember running spice simulations on a 286. It ran slow, but it worked. A 486 would have been a dream to have. Really, Spice is not THAT demanding for simple student-style problems in the first couple of circuits classes.
I have even designed two-layer boards using a Pentium-120 laptop with 24MB if RAM (as a student, about ten years ago). It was not the fastest, but it worked fine -- and that was with a 800x600 display. Yes, the requirements for modern programs are more demanding. I would definitely want at least a 3GHz dual-core if I was doing a 16-layer board (I am glad that I do not do that anymore).
For those who do NOT want to build their own desk...
As far as arranging items, I got a bunch of cheap $3.00 stacking paper trays from my local office supply store. I then cut/drilled/dremmeled holes in the back to run cables. I now have four paper trays that hold: NAS box (biggest, on bottom), small KVM switch, 8-port ethernet hub, 4-port MIDI interface, router, audio mixer, and a cable modem. An extra 5th tray on the top even holds paper. It is a pain to get to the cables if you have to re-arrange something, but it makes my desk look a LOT neater.
The plastic can be brittle, so work slowly, and the plastic "dust" can be messy, so mark inside your house, but cut outside.
As for the cables, Velcro ties are your friend. You can put them on and off easily, which is key if you ever need to rearrange things.
As for my synthesizer (keyboard), that has a power cable, two MIDI cables, and two audio cables. For that, I used spiral wrap (available at Radio Shack) to keep the cables bundled (D.I.Y. snake). I cannot imagine having to replace any of those cables any time so, so spiral wrap is perfect. It works with ANY size cable. The only down side is that spiral wrap is a pain to put on, but the results are worth it.
You need to raise the joke net a little higher. It just flew right over your head.
Another trick is to make it in the audio range, and then have the kids draw a black square on a piece of paper with a pencil. The graphite (carbon) will appear as a variable resistance based on where you put the wires (put one wire at one end and move the other wire around). This will make a kind of crude music synthesizer. All for the cost of a 555, a speaker (piezo is fine), a battery, a battery holder, and a handful of resistors and capacitors.
And it works quite well. Around here, it is the standard solution when one needs to run engineering applications (on Linux) from home. Our home machines have Windows, but NoMachines has quite a nice NX client for Windows. As far as efficiency and general "snappiness" it comes quite close to Windows Remote Desktop, but works well with a Linux host.
Two thumbs up for Google. Maybe they can fix some of the annoying bugs. The NoMachine NX client does NOT work well with two monitors. They claim that this is a limitation of Cygwin (which is apparently a core part of NX client). If Google fixes this, they will have my undying gratitude.
I agree.
Microsoft, for all its faults, does have a lot of money to throw at problems. I would not be surprised if they had focus groups to pick the default Windows colors. Microsoft may be (mostly) evil, but they are not idiots, especially when it comes to eye candy. They chose colors that more resemble a springtime day (blue for the sky and green for the trees and grass), rather than the color of a strip-mine or a pile of poop after an extra-large burrito meal.
Seriously, I love Ubuntu (my go-to OS of choice), but I really don't like the brown. Yes, you CAN load your own wallpaper, but there are no good wallpapers built-in. In order to change your wallpaper, you have to go searching through Google just to find something. Windows XP has a lot of cool wallpaper built-in, including the "grassy knoll," the brown fly-fishing tiles, clouds, autumn days, a coffee picture, mountains, and fish. It is a little thing, admittedly, but big things mean the difference between a bad and a good product; little things mean the difference between a good and a great product.
Democrats too. The only difference is the babies that Republican politicians eat have been born first.