Window air-contitioners use this material to filter the dust from the interior air before passing it through the evaporator coils. A package with a sheet a yard or so square (folded up in the package, of course) can be bought for a dollar or three at a competent hardware store or home center and is trivial to trim to size with a scissors. That ought to be enough to last you for years, or to outfit your whole local Users' Group.
I would avoid furnace-filter material, as that tends to be fibrous (and thus messier, when cut down to a smaller size), rather than the foam that you describe, and is tailored for use with a motor rated for a whole horse-power or more, which would probably be too restrictive when paired with a computer-case fan.
Was going to do that. No account. To create one they email me the pw, at work I don't have full email access. But thanks for the suggestion.
What, no webmail?
Actually for "you will be emailed your activation code" type activities, I recommend: http://www.mailinator.com/
It's convenience itself: just make up an email account (up to 15 chatracters) @mailinator.com and use that to fill in the form with. There's no need to CREATE an account ahead of time: that is done automatically whenever an email is recieved. You don't even need a password!
Why hastle yourself with YET ANOTHER hotmail account for ANOTHER password when you only need to use it once?
The link title is a little misleading.
on
Apple Easter Egg
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I was rather excited about the Macintosh System 7.1 CD finally becoming available online, and similarly disappointed that the only bit now available is the easter-egg movie.
As nice as that is, that's not what the title of the link says.
Although Macintosh System 6.0.x, System 7.0.1, and System 7.5.3 are both available for download for free from Apple (in "convenient" floppy-disk-sized pieces for those systems that have no CD-drive), System 7.1 remains unavailable (except via eBay, of course) due to, I believe, some liscencing issues with PowerTalk, or something. It's vaguely rediculous that software that is useful only for computers that are basically free/garbage at this point should still be subject to that kind of restriction when the newer 7.5.3 isn't.
There's a high probability that issues like that in Apple's history is what leads their management to either aquire technologies outright (like NeXT) or develop an equivilant in-house (like Dashboard instead of Confabulator) instead of liscencing them (like Be wanted Apple to do with BeOS.)
It means that the only force to consult in the future when deciding what happens to a given bit of code is Apple itself. MUCH simpler.
Actually, there were never any Macintosh floppy drives that had an eject button that I am aware of. (And I've got multiple examples of classic MacDom cluttering up an upstairs closet.) At least, none built into the Mac itself.
You see, Apple has made computers other than Macintoshes: there was the Lisa (both with a 3.5" floppy drive and with the doomed 5.25" "Widget" drives), the Apple/// and the Apple ][ line. Some of those Apple ]['s were in production concurrently with some Macintoshes, and were designed to use the same peripherals as the Macs (my family's first computer was an Apple//gs, which used ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) keyboards and mice, and external 800k 3.5" floppy-drives. The same drives that could be used as external floppies with a Macintosh. And the Apple//gs needs an eject button on the floppy-drive (no hard-drive to load the OS off of, so "eject from software" isn't always there), so the drive has an eject button.
Woz himself has some things to say on the subject. (He receives more email than any human should, really, and publishes his replys at http://www.woz.org
in particular states that Woz did not use VRAM at all in the Apple I, but instead went with 7-bit PMOS shift-registers in a 4-pin package.
Can you imagine buying a whole chip to store just 7 BITS, in this day and age? (I didn't think so. Not to mention that PMOS is obsolete in favor of CMOS and others.)
The Minnesota Science Museum has a hands-on section that, when I was a kid, included an exercise-bike that was connected to an electric generator that generated more electricity the faster that you pedaled. In front of the bike was a series of electrical loads: a light bulb, a radio, a black-and-white TV and a color TV; that each turned on in turn as the person pedaling reached the necessary output to drive the device in question. The black-and-white TV was a workout, but the color TV could only be turned on by a few of the most athletic students in my class (of 20), and then only for less than a minute at a time. (and this was only a 13" TV!)
For example, you might try "Bohnanza." It's yet another of the many great games from Germany. The Premise is that you are a bean-farmer ("bohn" is German for "bean") whose income depends upon having the most matching bean-cards in each of your two fields (you can purchase another in the course of the game) when you harvest. The trick is, you have to play the cards in your hand in order, and you have to play at LEAST one card from your hand every turn, as well as drawing two cards that can be traded to other players (but must be played before your turn ends!), for a total of three cards to two fields every turn. The card-trading can get kind of intense. Very fun. The cards have great and funny art on them, too.
Also, for a different kind of strategy, you might try out 1313 Dead End Drive. It's a game about inheritance. You start the game with a WHOLE bunch of heir game-pieces, dealt out to the players at random and in secret (any player can move any Heir piece during their turn), which must be moved out of the house/board in order to recieve their share of the loot. There is also a deck of action cards that let you do things like trip one of the many booby-traps within the house (thus eliminating an Heir, which causes their share of the loot to descend to the next Heir in the hierarchy (right down to the dog and cat)) or swap an Heir card with another player. The game ends when the deck runs out of action-cards, and the winner is the player whose heirs (the ones that made it out of the house alive) inherit the most loot.)
The semiconductor paint can be applied to a flexible substrate , such as a polymer sheet , through a simple web printing process, to create an array of ultra-thin solar cells.
Does this mean I can turn my roof into one huge solar panel by "painting" solar panel on it?
Hey, if you can figure out how to run your roof through a high-speed printing-press, then go for it!
("web printing" is what is used to print newspapers, amongst other things)
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Tivos, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Tivo that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Tivo's faster Linux architecture.
Well, let's see. TiVo's these days are going for $50-100. So to be fair, you should compare a Wintel system in the same price range. A 386, maybe?
I could go on disproving you by counter example, but I think that this is enough.
(Those are all completed auctions, by the way: ones where there was an actual winning bidder. I even excluded auctions below $50. Why, for $10, I could have picked up a 486!
There are two psychological/intellectual factors at work in the popularity of the iPod
1) Everyone (yes, EVERYONE) is stupid. We're all just stupid at different times and about different things. Computer geeks rarely make good interior-decorators. Engineers rarely have a talent for creative-writing.
2) People hate to be made to feel stupid. Apple makes the iPod easy to master in part by having a small, simple, focused feature-set: giving the user less to figure out makes them less likely to feel stupid while using the product (a feeling which is almost certain to be associated with the product in the user's mind.)
I blame this phemomenon for the widespread vilification of the Technical Support industry (setting aside overseas outsourcing for the moment.) The majority of the work of a support technician is not to perform tasks themself, but instead to walk the user through tasks which are quite easy to perform, but often very difficult to understand (and oftentimes with the goal of repairing something that the user themselves broke through the result of their ignorance.) Calling Tech-support makes people feel stupid, so they hate it.
The iPod DOESN'T make people feel stupid, so they love it.
I was just looking at what exactly WalMart.com offers in the way of laptops right NOW, and you don't have to spend $100 more to get wireless and 256MB of RAM. in fact, you don't even have to remove Windows.
Not a bad deal, in my estimation, even if you intend to wipe the drive and install Linux (assuming that Linux drivers are available for all of the included devices. As I don't intend to do so, I won't research whether, in fact, they are or not.)
Laptop? Who said anything about a LAPTOP? The word was PORTABLE.
Remember, the original iMac (the one with the 15" CRT and the G3 processor) had a handle built into the back for carrying it.
Think even further back: Compaq founded the IBM-PC-Clone explosion with a machine that weighed 34 pounds, but included a built-in CRT, and, yes, a carrying handle.
This $100 PC doesn't need to be ultra-light or ultra-power-efficient, or even include batteries like a laptop would. It just needs to be cheap and self-contained.
The fanless system that you linked to is twice the price of the system linked to by the paerent as being "pretty close" to a Mac Mini.
I selected similar components for each (1.2 Ghz cpu, CDR/DVD, XP-Home, 40-gig HD, 256 Mb RAM) and your selection came out to $1400+, while the parent's was $712.
Dude! It sounds like you Canadians are getting a SERIOUSLY raw deal.
If I forget to redeem a new card before my due-date, I have 60 days to redeem a new one before I lose my accumulated minutes of talk time.
What's more, if I choose to, I can redeem up to three two-month cards AT ONCE, extending my due-date up to 120 days (the limit for standard cards), or two one-year cards at once, thus extending my due date by up to 730 days (the limit for year-cards.)
SAY! I just realized that I left the two months from the 400-minute card out of my cost-calculations. So, my $370 would actually buy me 28 months of service! 370/28 =$13.21/month.
I'm sorry that TracFone isn't available to you, if Fido is as bad as you say.
I don't know which pay-as-you go service that YOU use, but I have a TracFone (a Motorola V120, specifically), and the minutes DON'T EXPIRE.
Perhaps you are suffering from a misconception that arises from the 'need' to buy a new card every two months in order to keep the cell-phone active. Just because the card has more minutes on it doesn't mean that the minutes from your OLD cards aren't any good any more; quite the opposite, in fact. New cards ADD their minutes to the existing balance of minutes available to the phone.
In essence, each minute-card amounts to a two-month service-contract for your phone.
Of course, if you REALLY don't need any more minutes, you could just buy a one-year/100-minute card: at $100, it's $20 cheaper than buying 6 of the cheapest (40 minutes/$20) minute cards that they offer.
And, hey! A "just in case" cell phone for $8.34 a month is quite the deal! (It's $10 a month, if you count the intial cell-phone purchase ($40, but comes with a starter-card good for two months or 20 minutes, whichever comes first, so that makes it $140/14 months.))
In my case, I've figured that I've bought the phone and its two-month sampler card($40), a one-year+double-minutes/300-minute card for this year ($150), I'll pick up a 400-minute card before that runs out ($80), and just get a plain one-year card for next year($100.) In total, I'll have spent $370 and received 26 months of service. $370/26=$14.23/month. By using coupons that came with the phone, I'll be getting 1430 minutes of talk time (I got an extra 10 minutes for activating the phone online. Anonymously, even! You don't have to register to perform the activation) which comes out to 55 minutes/month. Which, for me, is more than enough.
And I don't have to send out a check every month. (or reconcile another automatic transaction with my checking balance.)
For guys that don't talk much (like myself, although this post seems to belie that), it's not a bad deal at all.
It doesn't seem like it would be all that hard: after all, (from other posts) all that you need to learn to whistle are three tones, and all that you need to sing (not hum: that would mean closing your mouth, which would make it rather tough to whistle.) are the other three tones.
I once rented a movie starring Dan Akroyd and Walter Matthau named "Couch Trip", I believe, where Akroyd's character manages to dial the phone in just such a manner, while wearing a straight-jacket.
Appreciate the people you are talking about are people
Actually, no. It was my impression that we were talking about WORK, not people.
WORK is about what you DO, not who you are. The problem here seems to stem from confusion by some (apparently. mainly females) that criticism of their work is a direct criticism of THEM as PEOPLE.
I, myself, once had a co-worker who couldn't understand the need to document (that is, prove) the need for a policy change and just expected the company to do it on her say-so (because of who she was, and not what she'd done.)
Toys like Barbie don't help matters much. I won't speculate about the motives behind the people who created the doll and it's proportions
Actually, from an interview with the "creator" of Barbie that I once read, the "prototype" of the original doll was actually a gag-gift for soon-to-be-married bachelors purchased in Germany. A sort of a "now that you've found your "perfect" woman, we're going to give you something impossible to compare her to" kind of gift: the kind that validates the single status of the giver in the face of the choice of the fiancé to give up bachelorhood.
TEMPEST is a name associated with techniques to limit the amount of EM radiation emitted by devices used to handle sensitive information.
It is a countermeasure to "Van Ek Phreaking", the blow-'em-away demonstration of which was a cart with a monitor and $100 worth of Radio-Shack parts that displayed the pictures that were on monitors in the curtained-off "non-disclosure-only" areas at a trade show, as it was wheeled by the booths.
Heck, even if you were to connect a drive like that to the firewire-800 port (800mbps) port on a new (today) PowerMac G5, it'd take over 277 HOURS to fill that tape! (assuming complete bus saturation and an 8-bit-byte)
Gah. I return my volume of The Complete Shakespeare to the shelf, only to find the novel that I failed to name above: The Cunning Man
by
Robertson Davies
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Excel comes to mind.
MS settled the trademark infringement lawsuit by agreeing to always refer to it as "Microsoft Excel".
Eventually, MS just bought the original trademark owner, thus ending the issue completely.
Window air-contitioners use this material to filter the dust from the interior air before passing it through the evaporator coils. A package with a sheet a yard or so square (folded up in the package, of course) can be bought for a dollar or three at a competent hardware store or home center and is trivial to trim to size with a scissors. That ought to be enough to last you for years, or to outfit your whole local Users' Group.
I would avoid furnace-filter material, as that tends to be fibrous (and thus messier, when cut down to a smaller size), rather than the foam that you describe, and is tailored for use with a motor rated for a whole horse-power or more, which would probably be too restrictive when paired with a computer-case fan.
What, no webmail?
Actually for "you will be emailed your activation code" type activities, I recommend:
http://www.mailinator.com/
It's convenience itself: just make up an email account (up to 15 chatracters) @mailinator.com and use that to fill in the form with. There's no need to CREATE an account ahead of time: that is done automatically whenever an email is recieved. You don't even need a password!
Why hastle yourself with YET ANOTHER hotmail account for ANOTHER password when you only need to use it once?
As nice as that is, that's not what the title of the link says.
Although Macintosh System 6.0.x, System 7.0.1, and System 7.5.3 are both available for download for free from Apple (in "convenient" floppy-disk-sized pieces for those systems that have no CD-drive), System 7.1 remains unavailable (except via eBay, of course) due to, I believe, some liscencing issues with PowerTalk, or something. It's vaguely rediculous that software that is useful only for computers that are basically free/garbage at this point should still be subject to that kind of restriction when the newer 7.5.3 isn't.
There's a high probability that issues like that in Apple's history is what leads their management to either aquire technologies outright (like NeXT) or develop an equivilant in-house (like Dashboard instead of Confabulator) instead of liscencing them (like Be wanted Apple to do with BeOS.)
It means that the only force to consult in the future when deciding what happens to a given bit of code is Apple itself. MUCH simpler.
Just hold down the mouse-button and turn it on: the Mac will eject the disk from the drive before it even attempts to boot.
You see, Apple has made computers other than Macintoshes: there was the Lisa (both with a 3.5" floppy drive and with the doomed 5.25" "Widget" drives), the Apple /// and the Apple ][ line. Some of those Apple ]['s were in production concurrently with some Macintoshes, and were designed to use the same peripherals as the Macs (my family's first computer was an Apple //gs, which used ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) keyboards and mice, and external 800k 3.5" floppy-drives. The same drives that could be used as external floppies with a Macintosh. And the Apple //gs needs an eject button on the floppy-drive (no hard-drive to load the OS off of, so "eject from software" isn't always there), so the drive has an eject button.
But it's not for the Macintosh.
http://www.woz.org/letters/general/92.html
in particular states that Woz did not use VRAM at all in the Apple I, but instead went with 7-bit PMOS shift-registers in a 4-pin package.
Can you imagine buying a whole chip to store just 7 BITS, in this day and age? (I didn't think so. Not to mention that PMOS is obsolete in favor of CMOS and others.)
The Minnesota Science Museum has a hands-on section that, when I was a kid, included an exercise-bike that was connected to an electric generator that generated more electricity the faster that you pedaled. In front of the bike was a series of electrical loads: a light bulb, a radio, a black-and-white TV and a color TV; that each turned on in turn as the person pedaling reached the necessary output to drive the device in question. The black-and-white TV was a workout, but the color TV could only be turned on by a few of the most athletic students in my class (of 20), and then only for less than a minute at a time. (and this was only a 13" TV!)
Also, for a different kind of strategy, you might try out 1313 Dead End Drive. It's a game about inheritance. You start the game with a WHOLE bunch of heir game-pieces, dealt out to the players at random and in secret (any player can move any Heir piece during their turn), which must be moved out of the house/board in order to recieve their share of the loot. There is also a deck of action cards that let you do things like trip one of the many booby-traps within the house (thus eliminating an Heir, which causes their share of the loot to descend to the next Heir in the hierarchy (right down to the dog and cat)) or swap an Heir card with another player. The game ends when the deck runs out of action-cards, and the winner is the player whose heirs (the ones that made it out of the house alive) inherit the most loot.)
Hey, if you can figure out how to run your roof through a high-speed printing-press, then go for it!
("web printing" is what is used to print newspapers, amongst other things)
AMD 450 MHz. $50
Intel P2 450 MHz. $50
Grape iMac (333 MHz.) $50.
Pentium 333 with 17" monitor. $50.
I could go on disproving you by counter example, but I think that this is enough.
(Those are all completed auctions, by the way: ones where there was an actual winning bidder. I even excluded auctions below $50. Why, for $10, I could have picked up a 486!
1) Everyone (yes, EVERYONE) is stupid. We're all just stupid at different times and about different things. Computer geeks rarely make good interior-decorators. Engineers rarely have a talent for creative-writing.
2) People hate to be made to feel stupid. Apple makes the iPod easy to master in part by having a small, simple, focused feature-set: giving the user less to figure out makes them less likely to feel stupid while using the product (a feeling which is almost certain to be associated with the product in the user's mind.)
I blame this phemomenon for the widespread vilification of the Technical Support industry (setting aside overseas outsourcing for the moment.) The majority of the work of a support technician is not to perform tasks themself, but instead to walk the user through tasks which are quite easy to perform, but often very difficult to understand (and oftentimes with the goal of repairing something that the user themselves broke through the result of their ignorance.) Calling Tech-support makes people feel stupid, so they hate it.
The iPod DOESN'T make people feel stupid, so they love it.
It's as simple as that.
Just $568 (+ S&H) gets you the base 1.1 GHz AMD notebook with Windows and a "bonus" 128 MB memory-module" (which you have to install yourself.)
Not a bad deal, in my estimation, even if you intend to wipe the drive and install Linux (assuming that Linux drivers are available for all of the included devices. As I don't intend to do so, I won't research whether, in fact, they are or not.)
Remember, the original iMac (the one with the 15" CRT and the G3 processor) had a handle built into the back for carrying it.
Think even further back: Compaq founded the IBM-PC-Clone explosion with a machine that weighed 34 pounds, but included a built-in CRT, and, yes, a carrying handle.
This $100 PC doesn't need to be ultra-light or ultra-power-efficient, or even include batteries like a laptop would. It just needs to be cheap and self-contained.
Something like a Netpliance iOpener, pehaps?
And, in fact, a Google search for 'actress piano-player crypto patent' returns no results.
Would you care to enlighten the rest of us?
The fanless system that you linked to is twice the price of the system linked to by the paerent as being "pretty close" to a Mac Mini. I selected similar components for each (1.2 Ghz cpu, CDR/DVD, XP-Home, 40-gig HD, 256 Mb RAM) and your selection came out to $1400+, while the parent's was $712.
If I forget to redeem a new card before my due-date, I have 60 days to redeem a new one before I lose my accumulated minutes of talk time.
What's more, if I choose to, I can redeem up to three two-month cards AT ONCE, extending my due-date up to 120 days (the limit for standard cards), or two one-year cards at once, thus extending my due date by up to 730 days (the limit for year-cards.)
SAY! I just realized that I left the two months from the 400-minute card out of my cost-calculations. So, my $370 would actually buy me 28 months of service! 370/28 =$13.21/month.
I'm sorry that TracFone isn't available to you, if Fido is as bad as you say.
Perhaps you are suffering from a misconception that arises from the 'need' to buy a new card every two months in order to keep the cell-phone active. Just because the card has more minutes on it doesn't mean that the minutes from your OLD cards aren't any good any more; quite the opposite, in fact. New cards ADD their minutes to the existing balance of minutes available to the phone.
In essence, each minute-card amounts to a two-month service-contract for your phone.
Of course, if you REALLY don't need any more minutes, you could just buy a one-year/100-minute card: at $100, it's $20 cheaper than buying 6 of the cheapest (40 minutes/$20) minute cards that they offer.
And, hey! A "just in case" cell phone for $8.34 a month is quite the deal! (It's $10 a month, if you count the intial cell-phone purchase ($40, but comes with a starter-card good for two months or 20 minutes, whichever comes first, so that makes it $140/14 months.))
In my case, I've figured that I've bought the phone and its two-month sampler card($40), a one-year+double-minutes/300-minute card for this year ($150), I'll pick up a 400-minute card before that runs out ($80), and just get a plain one-year card for next year($100.) In total, I'll have spent $370 and received 26 months of service. $370/26=$14.23/month. By using coupons that came with the phone, I'll be getting 1430 minutes of talk time (I got an extra 10 minutes for activating the phone online. Anonymously, even! You don't have to register to perform the activation) which comes out to 55 minutes/month. Which, for me, is more than enough.
And I don't have to send out a check every month. (or reconcile another automatic transaction with my checking balance.)
For guys that don't talk much (like myself, although this post seems to belie that), it's not a bad deal at all.
I once rented a movie starring Dan Akroyd and Walter Matthau named "Couch Trip", I believe, where Akroyd's character manages to dial the phone in just such a manner, while wearing a straight-jacket.
It's a reasonably funny film.
Actually, no. It was my impression that we were talking about WORK, not people.
WORK is about what you DO, not who you are. The problem here seems to stem from confusion by some (apparently. mainly females) that criticism of their work is a direct criticism of THEM as PEOPLE.
I, myself, once had a co-worker who couldn't understand the need to document (that is, prove) the need for a policy change and just expected the company to do it on her say-so (because of who she was, and not what she'd done.)
She now works elsewhere.
Actually, from an interview with the "creator" of Barbie that I once read, the "prototype" of the original doll was actually a gag-gift for soon-to-be-married bachelors purchased in Germany. A sort of a "now that you've found your "perfect" woman, we're going to give you something impossible to compare her to" kind of gift: the kind that validates the single status of the giver in the face of the choice of the fiancé to give up bachelorhood.
*Envisions freight being hauled by vehicles with a translucent Apple logo on the side...*
It is a countermeasure to "Van Ek Phreaking", the blow-'em-away demonstration of which was a cart with a monitor and $100 worth of Radio-Shack parts that displayed the pictures that were on monitors in the curtained-off "non-disclosure-only" areas at a trade show, as it was wheeled by the booths.
Heck, even if you were to connect a drive like that to the firewire-800 port (800mbps) port on a new (today) PowerMac G5, it'd take over 277 HOURS to fill that tape! (assuming complete bus saturation and an 8-bit-byte)
Gah. I return my volume of The Complete Shakespeare to the shelf, only to find the novel that I failed to name above:
The Cunning Man
by
Robertson Davies