65" Rear Projection CRT with Component, Composite, and S-Video
Desktop computer with some kind of old ATI All In Wonder card with s-video hooked up to the tv.
All of the videos reside on an ubuntu smb share. Playback with vlc.
The tv and the computer are at right angles on an inside corner so watching tv from the computer chair sucks. It's set up so we can watch broadcast tv on the computer, tv or both. Video from the server can be watched on the tv, computer, or both.
Works great for everything except hd due to a) old playback computer, b) old tv, c) network lag (permanently installed cable limited to 10 mbps, permanently means in concrete)
Lack of hd notwithstanding, it's fine. I never jumped on the hd bandwagon, and besides, what is hd going to do for Family Guy, Futurama, and Southpark anyway?
Use VBS... it was designed to replace batch files and it can do all of the same stuff. Even more, I recon.
After all, 100 million script kiddies can't be wrong. Just make sure the user has the ability to tell the printer to STOP printing test pages and that the vbs doesn't automatically copy itself to all other attached computers on the network...
I'm pretty certain that it'll still have a mic port. This will double as a line-in in a pinch. Just turn down the recording source as mics produce a lot lower level than a line-in.
I helped a tech-savvy friend with this. He asked how I knew that the signaling was compatible. Lulz were had.
In any given 365.25 day period (a day period is measured as the approximate time it takes the planet Earth in the system Sol to make one full revolution on its axis) there is a statistical probability of ~0.95 ± 0.05 that my friend will have two parties similar to the one described above.
Said parties will be spaced apart by ~182.75 days ± 30 days with every second party being held on either October 31st if it's a Friday or Saturday, or the arbitrarily picked Friday or Saturday immediately prior.
BTW, I'm not sure if this is Slashdot's fault or mine but ± should be a tolerance symbol.
A friend of mine averaged two Halloween parties a year. The date of the first one in any given year was usually about half way to Halloween, usually at the end of April. The invitations always called it "Halfway to the Haunt".
The idea is that finding a decent costume for a Halloween party in October is easy. Doing so in April is, in fact, quite difficult.
It's unexpected, it gets people interested, and it gives nerds an uncommon challenge. The conversation describing what you're doing that particular day is always a little interesting as well: "Sorry, I'm busy on Saturday. Going to a Halloween party." "Oh ok... wait, what?"
Seems to fit the bill nicely.
How long do you think it would take for security researchers to find a vulnerability in Storm Worm that allows the researcher to take full control of several million PCs themselves? Imagine if you could get it to run World Community Grid work units...
Smallest B&W laser goes to the Brother HL-2040 (or 2070 if you like network). It retails for $119.98, but I've seen it down to $79. The network version is $149.99.
I have a hard time imagining any scenario where space could possibly be that limited, so I have to believe you're just unaware of those problems, or have been sucked-in by the advertising.
A typical sales conversation goes like this:
Me: What kind of printer are you looking for?
Customer: Ooooh I want an All-In-One(tm). [Typical positive response to advertising hype.]
M: I can't recommend one of those unless you really need one. We have much nicer scanners separate for a fraction of the price.
C: My home office used to be a closet.
You'd be surprised how many people actually think a 12 square foot area is an acceptable area to use a computer. I am reminded by this when people stop asking about features of the printer and pull out their tape measure to get the physical size of the machine. HP makes it convenient by providing the dimensions of the printer on the box.
The scary part? We actually sell computer desks that small. Want a good desk? Go to costco an pick up one of those 6 foot long white injection-molded plastic folding tables. Optical mice hate them, but that's what a mouse pad is for. I have Two 21" monitors (one's a CRT), a 14"x14" graphics tablet, largish bookshelf speakers, and room to eat on this thing.
Some of the newer HPs that come to mind, specifically the LaserJet 2600 (the no frills color laser printer) has exactly five consumables: Four Toners and Paper. They put the drum in the toner cartridges. This makes them slightly more expensive up front but eliminates a bi-quarterly drum replacement that can cost as much as $190. The toners average about $79 each.
Some of the other ones out there have very in expensive cartridges: the Samsung CLP color machines use a set that averages about $55 for each of the four toners. Don't know the drum replacement price though.
I sell printers daily and, I confess, being a common consumer myself, I bias all my sales towards the best deal for the customer. Based on everything he said about the printer...
Canon
PX-160
printer/scanner/copier
The cartridges are expensive, they don't have much ink in them and there are no third party or refilled carts for it
...it looks like he meant the Canon PIXMA MP160.
This uses those cartridges that have the cheap head built in. I try not to sell these kind of printers. Instead I show customers the ones without head on the ink tanks.
As far as Canon printers go, I recommend anything that takes the 3e series of inks, the 6 series of inks, or the 8 series of ink. I still haven't figured out why some Canon printers take a 5 black in addition to an 8 black... at the same time...
Most of Epson's and all of Brother's inks have no head attached to the cartridge.
HP, Dell, and Lexmark all typically have the head attached, but HP has a few floating around that don't.
HP 02 series, 10 series, 11 series, 14 (both black and color) and 88 series all have separate heads. Most of the modern photosmart printers use the 02 series, and all of the OfficeJet Pro series use the 88 series.
Apparently, I've become a printer geek so I'll now check it off the list.
Ahh... good ol' solid ink printing... Xerox Phaser 8400. We use this one at the $large_retail_store I work at for printing all of the price tags and other sale related things (full page ads, web pages, etc). Think about 500 pages a day.
I don't have a good estimate on the price per print, [read: I'm tired and don't want to do the math] but the site says a typical box of six sticks of black ink will give you about 6,800 pages for $104.99. Slightly more expensive than your typical toner printer...
If I get into a real pro vs. con session, this post will likely be modded down because some bastard thinks it's spam. I just happen to like the printer.
Funny... my store's website has a much higher price than Xerox for the same ink...
If you carry around a large amount of cash (say $100), and somebody mugs you for it, you're out $100. Same goes for the property management firm (in this case, the college): if they have $100 in their office and it gets stolen, along with somebody's lunch, they're out that $100. However, thanks to FDIC insurance, if somebody robs a bank of $100, the Federal Reserve is out $100, not the bank.
Sure cash has no transaction fees like credit/debit transaction fees, and doesn't require verification like checks (or fees if you outsource that like a lot of larger retailers do), but businesses don't like to deal with cash as it's a bigger liability than any of the other aforementioned methods (due to potential robbery, fraud, lack of paper trail, etc.).
I hate writing checks and I don't like to use my credit card for paying bills. I regularly pay via money order. They're not free, but the fee isn't usually all that much, typically a few dollars.
You can get money orders from many convenience stores, grocery stores, and post offices. Most banks will also let you purchase them. Some banks will give them to you for free if you are a client. I usually end up with Western Union money orders from 7-eleven.
The only institutions (if I understand correctly) that won't accept money orders is insurance companies. You'll probably be better off paying with a cashier's check instead (I can't recall the difference here).
I agree that electronic eject is generally a bad idea, but consider also that a mechanical ejection while the disk is spinning at... say... 52x... will scratch the hell out of the disk when the ejection mechanism lowers the disk onto the tray. I've paperclip-ejected disks while they were spinning in the past. It's not pretty. Though to solve this, the eject button should also apply a break to the spindle and stop the disk dead in its tracks before ejecting.
Anyway, to solve your race against doomsday scenario, I propose using the button on the keyboard at any point during POST. It will even pause during the memory check. If you're using a non-standard keyboard or a laptop, take the time to locate this button prior to powering on.
Alternatively, (and I've done this before as well), you can use a paper clip to eject the drive with the power off. Put the disk in the tray and close it about half way. The drive will typically close as soon as power is applied and will detect the disk before POST is complete.
Lastly, if the case is open and I'm trying to get a disk in the drive without booting the harddrive, (starting with the system turned off) I disconnect the power cable from the harddrive, power on, insert the disk, power off, reconnect, and power back on. Works like a charm.
On my (ack) windows xp system, that button hibernates my computer. i've hit it by accident on many more than one occasion. And... this configuration has saved me on more than one occasion from smaller Big Red Button disasters as little kids *love* that little moon shaped button as well as the bright red button from radio shack I mounted on the front of the computer case that does the exact same thing...
I'm planning on wiring up an Easy Button for the power button for my current case mod project, dubbed "Office Space". It will, of course, will have a switch on the side for when kids are present. Flip switch off and it does its normal "That was easy" bit. Otherwise, it hibernates the computer.
According to TFA, the average imprisonment term is less than that of copyright infringement. Women being considered 2nd class to men would be the only way to explain how something that hurts an entity (corporate or personal) financially has a greater punishment than something that hurts primarily women physically, mentally, and for a long time.
(And me before you get all technical on me, I did say primarily women, but men can be raped as well...)
'Hi, this is Jim from ACME inc, you're competitors. Would you mind giving me a copy of all the financials and support documents pertaining to you IT department so that we can compare ourselves to you? We won't use it for competitive advantage, honest!'
'Yeah, Hi Jim. Thank you for calling. It looks like I might be able to, sorta, ya know, help you out in this matter, but first I'm gonna have to ask if you could go ahead and send us _your_ financials and supporting documents pertaining to _your_ IT department as well. Just go ahead and send that to me, Bill Lumberg at Initech, thanks. And please make sure you don't forget to use the _new_ cover page when sending over the TPS report.'
Yes, I'm trying to be funny, but I also want to bring up the point that if there was an even exchange going on (i.e. I'll show you mine if you show me yours), this request is more likely to go through.
'Hi, this is Jim from Acme. We're in the process of benchmarking our IT department... yeah I know... I got it... OK stop laughing, it's rude... anyway, I was wondering if I send you our IT department financials and supporting documentation so you might be able to benchmark your own department, you could send us yours?'
I'm proud to say that I've never intentionally sold a Zune. Any time somebody is interested, they get to hear about the WiFi and the 3 plays in 3 days DRM for all music, even if they recorded it themselves. The common response? "That's gay. You have any other MP3 players?"
I'm also pushing Linux on anybody asking about Vista, bit it's kinda difficult since my store doesn't sell Linux...
Any suggestions for other 'product swaps'? Any favorite music players out there? (We have Creative Zen, Sansa, Muvo, iRiver, and the new Walkman).
I'm intentionally ommiting the name of where I work, and replies should too as I don't want to affect their Google pagerank, but they have naming rights to a rather large basketball and hockey stadium in Los Angeles.
This is based on what you wrote. I have not read the article yet. 0 miles in 0 hours tells you that your speed is NOT infinite. That's all it tells you. By the same logic, you could argue that 1 mile in 0 hours (= infinite speed) would be the same as 5 miles in 0 hours.
I'm just writing down my notes on this logic. If I messed up some logic here, please feel free to beat me with the logic stick metaphorically by replying and letting me know why I should be beaten.
Additionally, I think you'd need a decent CMYK scanner to scan it back in.
The trick, I think, is to use shades of a specific color channel instead of the channel either being on or off. Each channel gets 256 possible values (8 bits per channel, 32 bits per pixel (CMYK, not RGB)). The problem is printers typically have no mechanism for shading the inks used and instead dither them. The solution would be to use larger pixels (i.e. lower resolution) than the smallest the printer is capable of.
Lower resolution = higher color quality (per pixel) = fewer data pixels Higher resolution = lower color quality (per pixel) = more data pixels
Each page could provide a color calibration bar that allows the scanner to determine the saturated and unsaturated points of the paper and ink.
If you really want to complicate things, some of the more expensive photo printers out there (newer HP Photosmart and Canon Pixma lines) use MORE than just CMYK. The HPs use six inks (CMYK, Photo Cyan, Photo Magenta) and the Canon use up to nine inks (CMYK, Photo Black, Photo Cyan, Photo Magenta, Red, and Green)
And to further complicate things, one of the HP lines also has a gray scale tri-color cartridge available. (I work at a major retailer that happens to sell printers and inks. You learn a lot about printers and ink this way.)
For the issue of bleeding across pixels, I'd use a color laser jet instead of ink jet. That takes it back down to the simple CMYK instead of the absolutely ridiculous CMYKPBPCPMRG that Canon uses.
Slashdot Mirror
My setup includes:
65" Rear Projection CRT with Component, Composite, and S-Video
Desktop computer with some kind of old ATI All In Wonder card with s-video hooked up to the tv.
All of the videos reside on an ubuntu smb share. Playback with vlc.
The tv and the computer are at right angles on an inside corner so watching tv from the computer chair sucks. It's set up so we can watch broadcast tv on the computer, tv or both. Video from the server can be watched on the tv, computer, or both.
Works great for everything except hd due to a) old playback computer, b) old tv, c) network lag (permanently installed cable limited to 10 mbps, permanently means in concrete)
Lack of hd notwithstanding, it's fine. I never jumped on the hd bandwagon, and besides, what is hd going to do for Family Guy, Futurama, and Southpark anyway?
Use VBS... it was designed to replace batch files and it can do all of the same stuff. Even more, I recon.
After all, 100 million script kiddies can't be wrong. Just make sure the user has the ability to tell the printer to STOP printing test pages and that the vbs doesn't automatically copy itself to all other attached computers on the network...
I'm pretty certain that it'll still have a mic port. This will double as a line-in in a pinch. Just turn down the recording source as mics produce a lot lower level than a line-in.
I helped a tech-savvy friend with this. He asked how I knew that the signaling was compatible. Lulz were had.
Been trying to get my gf, who's into s/m, more interested in computers in general. I think you helped me find my solution.
Guess I have to make to Slashdot-friendly...
In any given 365.25 day period (a day period is measured as the approximate time it takes the planet Earth in the system Sol to make one full revolution on its axis) there is a statistical probability of ~0.95 ± 0.05 that my friend will have two parties similar to the one described above.
Said parties will be spaced apart by ~182.75 days ± 30 days with every second party being held on either October 31st if it's a Friday or Saturday, or the arbitrarily picked Friday or Saturday immediately prior.
BTW, I'm not sure if this is Slashdot's fault or mine but ± should be a tolerance symbol.
A friend of mine averaged two Halloween parties a year. The date of the first one in any given year was usually about half way to Halloween, usually at the end of April. The invitations always called it "Halfway to the Haunt". The idea is that finding a decent costume for a Halloween party in October is easy. Doing so in April is, in fact, quite difficult. It's unexpected, it gets people interested, and it gives nerds an uncommon challenge. The conversation describing what you're doing that particular day is always a little interesting as well: "Sorry, I'm busy on Saturday. Going to a Halloween party." "Oh ok... wait, what?" Seems to fit the bill nicely.
Don't they also call those 'lightning rods'?
How long do you think it would take for security researchers to find a vulnerability in Storm Worm that allows the researcher to take full control of several million PCs themselves? Imagine if you could get it to run World Community Grid work units...
Smallest B&W laser goes to the Brother HL-2040 (or 2070 if you like network). It retails for $119.98, but I've seen it down to $79. The network version is $149.99.
Toner: Brother TN-350 $62.99, 2500 pages at 5% page coverage (letter/a4 size)
Drum: Brother DR-350 $108.99, 12000 pages
The one I recommend:
HP LaserJet 1020 (not available with network). Retails for $179.99, but I've also seen this one down to $79.99
Toner: HP 12A $69.98, 2000 pages at 5% page coverage (letter/a4 size)
Drum: Included in HP 12A cartridge
A typical sales conversation goes like this:
Me: What kind of printer are you looking for?
Customer: Ooooh I want an All-In-One(tm). [Typical positive response to advertising hype.]
M: I can't recommend one of those unless you really need one. We have much nicer scanners separate for a fraction of the price.
C: My home office used to be a closet.
You'd be surprised how many people actually think a 12 square foot area is an acceptable area to use a computer. I am reminded by this when people stop asking about features of the printer and pull out their tape measure to get the physical size of the machine. HP makes it convenient by providing the dimensions of the printer on the box.
The scary part? We actually sell computer desks that small. Want a good desk? Go to costco an pick up one of those 6 foot long white injection-molded plastic folding tables. Optical mice hate them, but that's what a mouse pad is for. I have Two 21" monitors (one's a CRT), a 14"x14" graphics tablet, largish bookshelf speakers, and room to eat on this thing.
I dunno about double the price...
Some of the newer HPs that come to mind, specifically the LaserJet 2600 (the no frills color laser printer) has exactly five consumables: Four Toners and Paper. They put the drum in the toner cartridges. This makes them slightly more expensive up front but eliminates a bi-quarterly drum replacement that can cost as much as $190. The toners average about $79 each.
Some of the other ones out there have very in expensive cartridges: the Samsung CLP color machines use a set that averages about $55 for each of the four toners. Don't know the drum replacement price though.
I sell printers daily and, I confess, being a common consumer myself, I bias all my sales towards the best deal for the customer. Based on everything he said about the printer...
...it looks like he meant the Canon PIXMA MP160.
This uses those cartridges that have the cheap head built in. I try not to sell these kind of printers. Instead I show customers the ones without head on the ink tanks.
As far as Canon printers go, I recommend anything that takes the 3e series of inks, the 6 series of inks, or the 8 series of ink. I still haven't figured out why some Canon printers take a 5 black in addition to an 8 black... at the same time...
Most of Epson's and all of Brother's inks have no head attached to the cartridge.
HP, Dell, and Lexmark all typically have the head attached, but HP has a few floating around that don't.
HP 02 series, 10 series, 11 series, 14 (both black and color) and 88 series all have separate heads. Most of the modern photosmart printers use the 02 series, and all of the OfficeJet Pro series use the 88 series.
Apparently, I've become a printer geek so I'll now check it off the list.
I don't have a good estimate on the price per print, [read: I'm tired and don't want to do the math] but the site says a typical box of six sticks of black ink will give you about 6,800 pages for $104.99. Slightly more expensive than your typical toner printer...
If I get into a real pro vs. con session, this post will likely be modded down because some bastard thinks it's spam. I just happen to like the printer.
Funny... my store's website has a much higher price than Xerox for the same ink...
If you carry around a large amount of cash (say $100), and somebody mugs you for it, you're out $100. Same goes for the property management firm (in this case, the college): if they have $100 in their office and it gets stolen, along with somebody's lunch, they're out that $100. However, thanks to FDIC insurance, if somebody robs a bank of $100, the Federal Reserve is out $100, not the bank.
Sure cash has no transaction fees like credit/debit transaction fees, and doesn't require verification like checks (or fees if you outsource that like a lot of larger retailers do), but businesses don't like to deal with cash as it's a bigger liability than any of the other aforementioned methods (due to potential robbery, fraud, lack of paper trail, etc.).
I hate writing checks and I don't like to use my credit card for paying bills. I regularly pay via money order. They're not free, but the fee isn't usually all that much, typically a few dollars.
You can get money orders from many convenience stores, grocery stores, and post offices. Most banks will also let you purchase them. Some banks will give them to you for free if you are a client. I usually end up with Western Union money orders from 7-eleven.
The only institutions (if I understand correctly) that won't accept money orders is insurance companies. You'll probably be better off paying with a cashier's check instead (I can't recall the difference here).
I agree that electronic eject is generally a bad idea, but consider also that a mechanical ejection while the disk is spinning at... say... 52x... will scratch the hell out of the disk when the ejection mechanism lowers the disk onto the tray. I've paperclip-ejected disks while they were spinning in the past. It's not pretty. Though to solve this, the eject button should also apply a break to the spindle and stop the disk dead in its tracks before ejecting.
Anyway, to solve your race against doomsday scenario, I propose using the button on the keyboard at any point during POST. It will even pause during the memory check. If you're using a non-standard keyboard or a laptop, take the time to locate this button prior to powering on.
Alternatively, (and I've done this before as well), you can use a paper clip to eject the drive with the power off. Put the disk in the tray and close it about half way. The drive will typically close as soon as power is applied and will detect the disk before POST is complete.
Lastly, if the case is open and I'm trying to get a disk in the drive without booting the harddrive, (starting with the system turned off) I disconnect the power cable from the harddrive, power on, insert the disk, power off, reconnect, and power back on. Works like a charm.
On my (ack) windows xp system, that button hibernates my computer. i've hit it by accident on many more than one occasion. And... this configuration has saved me on more than one occasion from smaller Big Red Button disasters as little kids *love* that little moon shaped button as well as the bright red button from radio shack I mounted on the front of the computer case that does the exact same thing...
Page 809 - 817 of http://www.mcmaster.com/
(Just do a search on that site for 'Push-button switches')
Damn, it would be easier if you could just copy + paste the url...
I'm planning on wiring up an Easy Button for the power button for my current case mod project, dubbed "Office Space". It will, of course, will have a switch on the side for when kids are present. Flip switch off and it does its normal "That was easy" bit. Otherwise, it hibernates the computer.
But that's only because I don't believe in reason.
I guess I mis-rtfa. My bad.
According to TFA, the average imprisonment term is less than that of copyright infringement. Women being considered 2nd class to men would be the only way to explain how something that hurts an entity (corporate or personal) financially has a greater punishment than something that hurts primarily women physically, mentally, and for a long time.
(And me before you get all technical on me, I did say primarily women, but men can be raped as well...)
'Yeah, Hi Jim. Thank you for calling. It looks like I might be able to, sorta, ya know, help you out in this matter, but first I'm gonna have to ask if you could go ahead and send us _your_ financials and supporting documents pertaining to _your_ IT department as well. Just go ahead and send that to me, Bill Lumberg at Initech, thanks. And please make sure you don't forget to use the _new_ cover page when sending over the TPS report.'
Yes, I'm trying to be funny, but I also want to bring up the point that if there was an even exchange going on (i.e. I'll show you mine if you show me yours), this request is more likely to go through.
'Hi, this is Jim from Acme. We're in the process of benchmarking our IT department... yeah I know... I got it... OK stop laughing, it's rude... anyway, I was wondering if I send you our IT department financials and supporting documentation so you might be able to benchmark your own department, you could send us yours?'
I predict that from now on, zonkdogfology will be a common tag for all articles that relate to google search...
I'm proud to say that I've never intentionally sold a Zune. Any time somebody is interested, they get to hear about the WiFi and the 3 plays in 3 days DRM for all music, even if they recorded it themselves. The common response? "That's gay. You have any other MP3 players?"
I'm also pushing Linux on anybody asking about Vista, bit it's kinda difficult since my store doesn't sell Linux...
Any suggestions for other 'product swaps'? Any favorite music players out there? (We have Creative Zen, Sansa, Muvo, iRiver, and the new Walkman).
I'm intentionally ommiting the name of where I work, and replies should too as I don't want to affect their Google pagerank, but they have naming rights to a rather large basketball and hockey stadium in Los Angeles.
This is based on what you wrote. I have not read the article yet.
0 miles in 0 hours tells you that your speed is NOT infinite. That's all it tells you.
By the same logic, you could argue that 1 mile in 0 hours (= infinite speed) would be the same as 5 miles in 0 hours.
I'm just writing down my notes on this logic. If I messed up some logic here, please feel free to beat me with the logic stick metaphorically by replying and letting me know why I should be beaten.
Additionally, I think you'd need a decent CMYK scanner to scan it back in.
The trick, I think, is to use shades of a specific color channel instead of the channel either being on or off. Each channel gets 256 possible values (8 bits per channel, 32 bits per pixel (CMYK, not RGB)). The problem is printers typically have no mechanism for shading the inks used and instead dither them. The solution would be to use larger pixels (i.e. lower resolution) than the smallest the printer is capable of.
Lower resolution = higher color quality (per pixel) = fewer data pixels
Higher resolution = lower color quality (per pixel) = more data pixels
Each page could provide a color calibration bar that allows the scanner to determine the saturated and unsaturated points of the paper and ink.
If you really want to complicate things, some of the more expensive photo printers out there (newer HP Photosmart and Canon Pixma lines) use MORE than just CMYK. The HPs use six inks (CMYK, Photo Cyan, Photo Magenta) and the Canon use up to nine inks (CMYK, Photo Black, Photo Cyan, Photo Magenta, Red, and Green)
And to further complicate things, one of the HP lines also has a gray scale tri-color cartridge available. (I work at a major retailer that happens to sell printers and inks. You learn a lot about printers and ink this way.)
For the issue of bleeding across pixels, I'd use a color laser jet instead of ink jet. That takes it back down to the simple CMYK instead of the absolutely ridiculous CMYKPBPCPMRG that Canon uses.