The Sony unit comes pretty close on a lot of those elements. Especially #1 and #2.
#3 - Isn't that important, IMO. Unless you're plowing through a book per day or more, it's not difficult to load up the unit once a week (or even once a month) with the next dozen books that you want to read. (WiFi is nice for daily RSS feeds if you want it to act like a newspaper though... so I'm not completely against WiFi. It just isn't a must-have for me. I wouldn't mind a docking station setup though, or better RSS support where I connect the unit via USB and it automagically pulls things in.)
#4 - Pretty sure that both the Sony (I know for sure) and the Kindle can load books from other sources. I have a few dozen Project Gutenberg books on my Sony reader (currently working through Stoker's Dracula). Plus some no-DRM books from Baen that were only $4-$6 each.
#6 - The screens on the latest generation are quite good. The pixel density is 170ppi with around 16 shades of grey. Which is just enough to work well. The more ambient light that you have, the better that they look. Glare issues are minor, unless you have a lot of light sources in the room.
#7 - Sony design is very sleek, page-turn time is not that noticeable.
#8 - Sony units are under $300. Which was my "pain threshold" for buying one. Picked mine up for $280 or so back in January.
These aren't the difficult-to-read, expensive ($500+) units from a few years ago. The tech is coming along quite nicely and prices are falling steadily. And the bit of competition between Amazon and Sony is good for us.
I have the Sony PRS-505 eReader as well, and I'm very happy with it (about 2-3 months now). I read on it around 3-5 nights per week for an hour or two at a go. I only have to charge it every few weeks (I have a 1GB Memstick Duo card inserted for extra capacity). I'm very pleased with it, even given its minor quirks (such as the half second page refresh).
I'm not sure it's the best device for trying to read PDFs or technical manuals on. But that's mostly a function of the screen size (all current e-ink reader screens are only 6" diagonal and 170ppi). But, frankly, I don't want a bigger unit. The Sony is a very nice size, easy to hold in one hand for long periods, and there's not much clutter around the screen. The design simply gets out of my way when reading.
The only books that I've bought so far are from Baen's Webscription. Baen offers everything in no-DRM format, in multiple formats, with the ability to download any format that you need. So, even if my Sony dies - I can buy another one (or even a different brand) and still have my Baen books. The only effort on my part might be to convert them into the new reader format. No muss, no fuss, so they get my money.
The rest of my books are from Project Gutenberg. I'm currently wading through a hell of a lot of classics that I've read before (20 years ago) or that I've always wanted to read. I figure there are enough PG books to keep me well occupied for the next few years.
Basically, if you like to read fiction, or at least books without a lot of full-page pictures / diagrams, the e-book is pretty much "there". The price is a shade under $300 now (I paid $280), which is a lot cheaper then it was 2-3 years ago. The resolution is good (I'd like to see 250-300ppi, not the 170ppi), and the overall functionality of the unit is quite good. I was basically waiting for the new screens to come out and for the price to get below $300. Hopefully the prices drop below $200 next year and continue to trend downwards.
(I am a huge paper book reader... when I packed up all of my books to move this past year, they filled an area that is roughly 2 meters cubed. I typically read at least 2 leisure books per month, plus at least one technical manual.)
That's my opinion as well. Spore sounded interesting and I was mildly interested in Mass Effect. But with invasive DRM that requires the game to phone home every 10 days due to the paranoia of EA managers... no sale.
Isn't CentOS the free version of Redhat Enterprise Linux? Why is it in a desktop linux shootout?
My exact thoughts as well. Given that Redhat isn't overly focused on the desktop, but concentrates on servers, I can't see why you would expect it or CentOS to do well on the desktop.
(We run a few CentOS servers. We're very pleased with them and it lets us get our feet wet before we shell out for RH annual license fees for the servers that really need it.)
The closest Mac Mini clone that is x86 and runs Windows is probably the Pandora.
It's a very tiny unit (about the same size as the Mac Mini) with similar capabilities. We just ordered one, so I can't speak to longevity, but it does what it's supposed to and fits in small spaces.
You'll be targeted by the sharpshooters either way. Upgrade the system and they'll complain that you should cater to the lynx-using crowd (all five of 'em), and so avoid the necessity of an upgrade.
You may laugh at lynx (or links) - but you never know when your only connection to the network will be over a text-only connection because things have gotten really screwed up.
(Been there, done that this month. It was an interesting experience, but I was successful in finding the commands needed to get things back to normal. Google was mostly usable, some of the websites from the search weren't. Good thing I had very targeted search terms and knew roughly what I was looking for.)
Needless to say, I'm hoping that I don't have to do it that way ever again.
Most if not all companies who are shipping laptops, Apple, IBM, Dell, etc... Are purchasing or sourcing their LCD panels to a third party. There are only a handful of companies left producing LCD panels.
That basically covers the issue. Because of the large (due to the HDTV push) number of widescreen panels being created, economies of scale are coming into play. Which means that with less and less 4:3 ratio glass being created, prices on 4:3 are going up while 16:9 and 16:10 glass is getting less expensive.
(Personally, I like my widescreen T61. It's almost enough that I can keep two documents side-by-side on the screen instead of shunting the 2nd document off to a 2nd display.)
I'm in a situation where I need to *prove* that someone has opened/read an email. I know there are paid "registered email" services, but they seem a bit overkill to me. And return receipts are jokes, since they aren't widely supported.
The short answer is "don't try to make SMTP do something that it wasn't designed to do".
The long answer - send people unique links to a web server that you control.
Is the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB used in the review any good?
From what I've seen, the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB cards are the best bang-for-the-buck at the moment. I just recently upgraded from a pair of 7950 GT cards in SLI mode to a pair of 8800 GT cards.
(Enough of an upgrade that I'm now CPU-bound instead of GPU-bound. Oops.)
The only element of the design I think is short sighted is the layout -- narrow and long. Most modern LCD displays' aspect ratio is wider than it is long.
Welcome to year 2000.
Those of us with more modern widescreen monitors prefer content that doesn't require a 1600 pixel wide screen. Because we like to multi-task and have multiple windows open without one crowding the screen. There are very few applications that I run full-screen, especially browsers or other text display programs. The text lines get too long and too difficult to read.
(A good target width - if you MUST, foolishly, design your site for a particular pixel width is between 900 and 1000 px. Better designers simply insert expansion areas and design for a minimum width of 750px but allow for content to get as wide as 1500px before it goes screwy.)
One bit of performance advice: if you can get 3 drives, one for the data, one for the indexes, and one for the write-ahead logs, performance will improve drastically.
Even putting just the WALs on a separate set of spindles will help immensely.
(Convincing SELinux to let you do that is a bit more difficult until you learn how to use "ls -Z" and how to set security contexts on the new partition. Which isn't hard, just tedious.)
Adding a DVI port would probably raise the cost by $5-$10, a real no-no on a extremely low cost product. Also many projectors only have VGA. (Which BTW is about the only reason you see an external monitor connector on a laptop anymore.)
Since most (all?) DVI video cards can use an adapter to convert to VGA output, it makes a lot more sense to put a DVI port on the unit and gain the ability to output to both DVI and VGA monitors.
(This is my chief complaint with a lot of PC laptops, such as the Thinkpad T-series.)
OTOH, it is a low-cost product and I'm surprised that they even spent the amount to include a VGA output.
Since when did memory usage become such a big deal?
Because the default heuristic in FF 1.x only worked well for systems with 512MB or less of RAM. On systems with 1GB or more, FF would assume that it could triple or quadruple its memory usage without interfering with the end-user. The big problem was that the heuristic looked at total installed RAM and not just the amount of free memory. (Going from memory here... so details are a bit fuzzy.)
All of which meant that on a 256/512MB machine, FF 1.x would stay fairly sleek at around 30-75MB of usage. But on a 1GB machine, it would pig up to 200-300MB of usage.
Those of us who install more RAM then average are doing so in order to run multiple applications. FF 1.x got directly in our way with its over-aggressive land grab on available memory. Just because I have oodles of RAM installed, doesn't mean that I want my web browser to lap it all up.
I'm a 3GB RAM system right now (WinXP) and firefox 2.x is pigging out at 150MB of RAM. And it was up to 367MB earlier today. I want a Firefox that is about 1/3 of that memory footprint.
In general, you can do most 640x480 (4:3) footage in about 700Kbps with XVid (with 160Kbps for the audio). Give or take 100Kbps either way, depending on how clean the source video is. By comparision, you'd be looking at around 8x that bandwidth to get similar quality with MPEG2. And MPEG2 doesn't scale anywhere near as nicely as a 2-pass XVid.
For 1280x720 footage (16:9), you'll end up somewhere in the 1500-2000 Kbps range for the video stream. I tend to use 1850 Kbps as my default which puts the total stream (including audio) at a bit under 2Mbps. By comparision, MPEG2 for OTA is (IIRC) around 18 or 25 Mbps. With a really clean source video, you may even be able to push down to 1250-1400 Kbps for the video stream.
(Lastly. If you're doing 2-pass XVid encoding, and the results look bad, make sure that you have the latest XVid codec installed. I had a case where the compression was good, but it looked bad on one PC vs a different PC until I updated the codec.)
Out on Long Island NY, I'm seeing cable download rates of 20-30 megabits/sec with upload rates of between 2.5 and 5.0 megabytes/sec. So it's still asymmetric, but it's a darn sight faster then the 1.5 down / 384 up that I had back in Pennsylvania.
(sigh) It makes the T1 line at the office seem *realy* slow now.
OTOH, the T1 line at the office is about 99.98% reliable over the course of a year (roughly 2 hours per year of downtime). My cable line is more like 99.5% (about 3 hours of downtime per month).
There are a lot of lower-end GeForce cards that come with passive heatsinks.
(I prefer to have as few moving parts in my servers as pratically possible. So motherboards with heat pipes and radiators are better then a tiny 40mm fan cooling a chipset.)
Mmm... I do the majority of my work on a laptop (Toshiba Tecras with 1400x1050 screens in the past, a Thinkpad T61 widescreen 1680x1050 now.) Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, a pair of 160GB HDs and a 1680x1050 screen go a long ways towards making this doable. My old machine was a 1.7GHz P4 with only 1GB RAM.
Is it portable? Yes. But it's not an ultralight. But at least I can pickup and go somewhere else to get work done without having to keep machines setup at each location.
Do I own a desktop? You bet. I have two to do heavy lifting (both have about 2TB of disk space for video editing or other work). And if I needed more then 4GB of RAM, then obviously a server/workstation motherboard with room for 32 or 64GB would be a better choice.
Or maybe I'd still use the laptop as my primary and just connect to the "beast" machine to run special jobs. Which would be even better because I could then disconnect and do other work while it churns.
What's the battery life like on the Sony Reader? I'm thinking about getting one, but it's still kinda pricey right now. If they were under $200, I would buy one in an instant. I'm still seeing them for more like $300 right now, and I'm concerned that they don't really have a lot of storage space. I'd be carrying around a lot of reference books which are much larger than their stated average of 1.24MB per book. That could be a problem.
Built-in space is 190MB or so on the internal memory. It has slots for both Memory Stick Duo and SD Cards (not SDHC). So you could (in theory) use 8MB MSD cards and 2GB SD cards to hold additional books.
The caveats are:
- Having a SD card installed does measurably drain battery life, even when the unit is in standby. The MSD cards are apparently more thrifty with power and don't impact battery life as much.
- It takes time for the reader to load the directory on the flash memory card, sort it, and ready it for display. So for practical reasons, you may not want to have more then 50-250 books on a single card. This wait only occurs when you insert the card, not when you pull the device in/out of standby. I just bought a collection of 256MB and 512MB memory cards that I'm planning on using.
Using just internal memory, reading for 2 hours a day or so (figure 60-120 pages per hour), I'm managing to only drain the battery about 25% per week. I generally hook it up to recharge it whenever I get below halfway. Which happens about every 2-3 weeks. If I was using it with a memory stick duo installed, I might have to charge it every 1-2 weeks instead. Some SD cards might make that as frequently as once every 6-9 days.
AIUI, though, the PRS doesn't do pdfs very well, right?
That's more of an issue of trying to pack a 8.5" x 11" PDF down onto a screen that is only a quarter of that size. Even with a 170dpi display, trying to view the PDF in portrait mode is going to be painful. The display is 3.5" x 4.75".
PDFs are not well suited for devices that are a different size then what the PDF was originally laid out for. Their primary use is to preserve physical formating and whitespace, not to encapsulate text in a easily reflowable manner (like HTML, BBeB, Mobi, or other ebook formats).
All that being said, you can press and hold the zoom key on the PRS to switch to landscape viewing mode. Then you can view the top/bottom halves of a PDF page at closer to full size resolution. It's still not perfect, but unless the screen was 600dpi and came with a magnifying glass (or was letter-sized and huge) you'd still have the same issue.
There are tools that can be used to convert PDFs into a more ebook friendly format (allowing the device to reflow the text correctly). Most of them are discussed over at:
All that said, I am not ready to drop $400.00 because of the durability issue. But come $200.00 or less, I will be buying one happily.
My price point as $300 (and you can pick up Sony's 2nd gen reader for about $280), so I went with the PRS-505. I expect that you'll see other e-ink paper readers below $200 within the next year or two.
But then, I'm not interested in the wireless part. I want something that just works, where I load books onto internal memory, or use the Memory Stick or SD card slots. I usually keep 50-60 books on internal memory, and have other books on 256MB or 512MB flash memory cards.
Actually, the main problem with ebooks now that paper-like displays are seeing some progress is the cost. $400 for a Kindle is just nasty
So forget the Kindle and go with the Sony Reader (PRS-505 is the newer model) for around $280?
Yeah, I wish they were less expensive. But they were upwards of $500+ about 2 years ago. So the prices on the units are dropping reasonably quickly (I expect to see readers based on e-ink drop below $200 in the next 12-18 months).
(I'm very happy with my Sony Reader. Been using it daily for a month or two now. Currently working through a list of about 100 Project Gutenberg texts that I've always wanted to read.)
Re:Comics as real literature
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Reading Comics
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· Score: 1
I'll second Transmetropolitan.
The story may not be deep and literary, but it is an extremely memorable series. It's been a few years since I read it, and there are still elements of the storyline that I ruminate upon.
Back in '02, when I suffered a very severe episode. I was put on both medication (EffoxorXR 225mg/day) and monthly CBT counseling.
After 9-10 months of treatment, I felt well enough to try standing on my own two feet without the monthly visits or the daily dosage. The CBT counseling was good for teaching coping skills and learning how to deal with the negative thought patterns. Such as learning to sort my worries into a "things I can change" vs "things that aren't within my control". Things in the former bucket are worth worrying about, things in the latter bucket aren't worth excessive worry. I don't know whether the drugs helped or not, I wasn't real fond of some of the side-effects. On the upside, I've been through treatment once, so it no longer is a scary unknown. So when I do find myself relapsing, I won't delay seeking help. (Which is what then happened in 2004/2005.)
My relapse started in mid-2004 or 2005 (I forget) and I've been on Lexapro 10mg/day ever since. Which is just enough to take the edge off of the depression and allows me to cope and be forward thinking instead of dwelling only on past mistakes. It's a lot gentler on me then the EffexorXR was, but still has a few minor side-effects that are acceptable.
I still have up/down weeks (coming off a 2-week downer), but at least I'm not suicidally depressed during the down weeks. I'm just lethargic and generally "down". I feel more normal ranges of happy/sad, instead of just being numb. I also feel like I'm in control of it, rather then the other way around.
I wish... that I could've been properly treated 20 years ago. That's probably the biggest regret of anything, being able to look back at all the destructive behavior caused by trying to deal with it without help. Makes me sad just thinking about it.
Will I ever go off my current dosage? Probably not. Although I might switch to a generic down the road. The doctor and I agree that we'll probably only tamper with the prescription if it stops working and I relapse.
No, I believe the doctor was saying that of the group of people who have the disease, half of them probably got it due to genetics or a genetic component.
That does not mean that 50% of the population suffers from depression. (I forget what the latest figure is...)
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The Sony unit comes pretty close on a lot of those elements. Especially #1 and #2.
#3 - Isn't that important, IMO. Unless you're plowing through a book per day or more, it's not difficult to load up the unit once a week (or even once a month) with the next dozen books that you want to read. (WiFi is nice for daily RSS feeds if you want it to act like a newspaper though... so I'm not completely against WiFi. It just isn't a must-have for me. I wouldn't mind a docking station setup though, or better RSS support where I connect the unit via USB and it automagically pulls things in.)
#4 - Pretty sure that both the Sony (I know for sure) and the Kindle can load books from other sources. I have a few dozen Project Gutenberg books on my Sony reader (currently working through Stoker's Dracula). Plus some no-DRM books from Baen that were only $4-$6 each.
#6 - The screens on the latest generation are quite good. The pixel density is 170ppi with around 16 shades of grey. Which is just enough to work well. The more ambient light that you have, the better that they look. Glare issues are minor, unless you have a lot of light sources in the room.
#7 - Sony design is very sleek, page-turn time is not that noticeable.
#8 - Sony units are under $300. Which was my "pain threshold" for buying one. Picked mine up for $280 or so back in January.
These aren't the difficult-to-read, expensive ($500+) units from a few years ago. The tech is coming along quite nicely and prices are falling steadily. And the bit of competition between Amazon and Sony is good for us.
I have the Sony PRS-505 eReader as well, and I'm very happy with it (about 2-3 months now). I read on it around 3-5 nights per week for an hour or two at a go. I only have to charge it every few weeks (I have a 1GB Memstick Duo card inserted for extra capacity). I'm very pleased with it, even given its minor quirks (such as the half second page refresh).
I'm not sure it's the best device for trying to read PDFs or technical manuals on. But that's mostly a function of the screen size (all current e-ink reader screens are only 6" diagonal and 170ppi). But, frankly, I don't want a bigger unit. The Sony is a very nice size, easy to hold in one hand for long periods, and there's not much clutter around the screen. The design simply gets out of my way when reading.
The only books that I've bought so far are from Baen's Webscription. Baen offers everything in no-DRM format, in multiple formats, with the ability to download any format that you need. So, even if my Sony dies - I can buy another one (or even a different brand) and still have my Baen books. The only effort on my part might be to convert them into the new reader format. No muss, no fuss, so they get my money.
The rest of my books are from Project Gutenberg. I'm currently wading through a hell of a lot of classics that I've read before (20 years ago) or that I've always wanted to read. I figure there are enough PG books to keep me well occupied for the next few years.
Basically, if you like to read fiction, or at least books without a lot of full-page pictures / diagrams, the e-book is pretty much "there". The price is a shade under $300 now (I paid $280), which is a lot cheaper then it was 2-3 years ago. The resolution is good (I'd like to see 250-300ppi, not the 170ppi), and the overall functionality of the unit is quite good. I was basically waiting for the new screens to come out and for the price to get below $300. Hopefully the prices drop below $200 next year and continue to trend downwards.
(I am a huge paper book reader... when I packed up all of my books to move this past year, they filled an area that is roughly 2 meters cubed. I typically read at least 2 leisure books per month, plus at least one technical manual.)
That's my opinion as well. Spore sounded interesting and I was mildly interested in Mass Effect. But with invasive DRM that requires the game to phone home every 10 days due to the paranoia of EA managers... no sale.
Isn't CentOS the free version of Redhat Enterprise Linux? Why is it in a desktop linux shootout?
My exact thoughts as well. Given that Redhat isn't overly focused on the desktop, but concentrates on servers, I can't see why you would expect it or CentOS to do well on the desktop.
(We run a few CentOS servers. We're very pleased with them and it lets us get our feet wet before we shell out for RH annual license fees for the servers that really need it.)
The closest Mac Mini clone that is x86 and runs Windows is probably the Pandora.
It's a very tiny unit (about the same size as the Mac Mini) with similar capabilities. We just ordered one, so I can't speak to longevity, but it does what it's supposed to and fits in small spaces.
You'll be targeted by the sharpshooters either way. Upgrade the system and they'll complain that you should cater to the lynx-using crowd (all five of 'em), and so avoid the necessity of an upgrade.
You may laugh at lynx (or links) - but you never know when your only connection to the network will be over a text-only connection because things have gotten really screwed up.
(Been there, done that this month. It was an interesting experience, but I was successful in finding the commands needed to get things back to normal. Google was mostly usable, some of the websites from the search weren't. Good thing I had very targeted search terms and knew roughly what I was looking for.)
Needless to say, I'm hoping that I don't have to do it that way ever again.
Most if not all companies who are shipping laptops, Apple, IBM, Dell, etc... Are purchasing or sourcing their LCD panels to a third party. There are only a handful of companies left producing LCD panels.
That basically covers the issue. Because of the large (due to the HDTV push) number of widescreen panels being created, economies of scale are coming into play. Which means that with less and less 4:3 ratio glass being created, prices on 4:3 are going up while 16:9 and 16:10 glass is getting less expensive.
(Personally, I like my widescreen T61. It's almost enough that I can keep two documents side-by-side on the screen instead of shunting the 2nd document off to a 2nd display.)
I'm in a situation where I need to *prove* that someone has opened/read an email. I know there are paid "registered email" services, but they seem a bit overkill to me. And return receipts are jokes, since they aren't widely supported.
The short answer is "don't try to make SMTP do something that it wasn't designed to do".
The long answer - send people unique links to a web server that you control.
Is the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB used in the review any good?
From what I've seen, the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB cards are the best bang-for-the-buck at the moment. I just recently upgraded from a pair of 7950 GT cards in SLI mode to a pair of 8800 GT cards.
(Enough of an upgrade that I'm now CPU-bound instead of GPU-bound. Oops.)
The only element of the design I think is short sighted is the layout -- narrow and long. Most modern LCD displays' aspect ratio is wider than it is long.
Welcome to year 2000.
Those of us with more modern widescreen monitors prefer content that doesn't require a 1600 pixel wide screen. Because we like to multi-task and have multiple windows open without one crowding the screen. There are very few applications that I run full-screen, especially browsers or other text display programs. The text lines get too long and too difficult to read.
(A good target width - if you MUST, foolishly, design your site for a particular pixel width is between 900 and 1000 px. Better designers simply insert expansion areas and design for a minimum width of 750px but allow for content to get as wide as 1500px before it goes screwy.)
One bit of performance advice: if you can get 3 drives, one for the data, one for the indexes, and one for the write-ahead logs, performance will improve drastically.
Even putting just the WALs on a separate set of spindles will help immensely.
(Convincing SELinux to let you do that is a bit more difficult until you learn how to use "ls -Z" and how to set security contexts on the new partition. Which isn't hard, just tedious.)
Adding a DVI port would probably raise the cost by $5-$10, a real no-no on a extremely low cost product. Also many projectors only have VGA. (Which BTW is about the only reason you see an external monitor connector on a laptop anymore.)
Since most (all?) DVI video cards can use an adapter to convert to VGA output, it makes a lot more sense to put a DVI port on the unit and gain the ability to output to both DVI and VGA monitors.
(This is my chief complaint with a lot of PC laptops, such as the Thinkpad T-series.)
OTOH, it is a low-cost product and I'm surprised that they even spent the amount to include a VGA output.
That's been my experience as well.
Killer #1 has always been poor cooling around the drives. And it takes hardly any airflow to keep a drive cool.
Killer #2 has been poor power quality.
Since when did memory usage become such a big deal?
Because the default heuristic in FF 1.x only worked well for systems with 512MB or less of RAM. On systems with 1GB or more, FF would assume that it could triple or quadruple its memory usage without interfering with the end-user. The big problem was that the heuristic looked at total installed RAM and not just the amount of free memory. (Going from memory here... so details are a bit fuzzy.)
All of which meant that on a 256/512MB machine, FF 1.x would stay fairly sleek at around 30-75MB of usage. But on a 1GB machine, it would pig up to 200-300MB of usage.
Those of us who install more RAM then average are doing so in order to run multiple applications. FF 1.x got directly in our way with its over-aggressive land grab on available memory. Just because I have oodles of RAM installed, doesn't mean that I want my web browser to lap it all up.
I'm a 3GB RAM system right now (WinXP) and firefox 2.x is pigging out at 150MB of RAM. And it was up to 367MB earlier today. I want a Firefox that is about 1/3 of that memory footprint.
In general, you can do most 640x480 (4:3) footage in about 700Kbps with XVid (with 160Kbps for the audio). Give or take 100Kbps either way, depending on how clean the source video is. By comparision, you'd be looking at around 8x that bandwidth to get similar quality with MPEG2. And MPEG2 doesn't scale anywhere near as nicely as a 2-pass XVid.
For 1280x720 footage (16:9), you'll end up somewhere in the 1500-2000 Kbps range for the video stream. I tend to use 1850 Kbps as my default which puts the total stream (including audio) at a bit under 2Mbps. By comparision, MPEG2 for OTA is (IIRC) around 18 or 25 Mbps. With a really clean source video, you may even be able to push down to 1250-1400 Kbps for the video stream.
(Lastly. If you're doing 2-pass XVid encoding, and the results look bad, make sure that you have the latest XVid codec installed. I had a case where the compression was good, but it looked bad on one PC vs a different PC until I updated the codec.)
Out on Long Island NY, I'm seeing cable download rates of 20-30 megabits/sec with upload rates of between 2.5 and 5.0 megabytes/sec. So it's still asymmetric, but it's a darn sight faster then the 1.5 down / 384 up that I had back in Pennsylvania.
(sigh) It makes the T1 line at the office seem *realy* slow now.
OTOH, the T1 line at the office is about 99.98% reliable over the course of a year (roughly 2 hours per year of downtime). My cable line is more like 99.5% (about 3 hours of downtime per month).
There are a lot of lower-end GeForce cards that come with passive heatsinks.
(I prefer to have as few moving parts in my servers as pratically possible. So motherboards with heat pipes and radiators are better then a tiny 40mm fan cooling a chipset.)
Mmm... I do the majority of my work on a laptop (Toshiba Tecras with 1400x1050 screens in the past, a Thinkpad T61 widescreen 1680x1050 now.) Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, a pair of 160GB HDs and a 1680x1050 screen go a long ways towards making this doable. My old machine was a 1.7GHz P4 with only 1GB RAM.
Is it portable? Yes. But it's not an ultralight. But at least I can pickup and go somewhere else to get work done without having to keep machines setup at each location.
Do I own a desktop? You bet. I have two to do heavy lifting (both have about 2TB of disk space for video editing or other work). And if I needed more then 4GB of RAM, then obviously a server/workstation motherboard with room for 32 or 64GB would be a better choice.
Or maybe I'd still use the laptop as my primary and just connect to the "beast" machine to run special jobs. Which would be even better because I could then disconnect and do other work while it churns.
What's the battery life like on the Sony Reader? I'm thinking about getting one, but it's still kinda pricey right now. If they were under $200, I would buy one in an instant. I'm still seeing them for more like $300 right now, and I'm concerned that they don't really have a lot of storage space. I'd be carrying around a lot of reference books which are much larger than their stated average of 1.24MB per book. That could be a problem.
Built-in space is 190MB or so on the internal memory. It has slots for both Memory Stick Duo and SD Cards (not SDHC). So you could (in theory) use 8MB MSD cards and 2GB SD cards to hold additional books.
The caveats are:
- Having a SD card installed does measurably drain battery life, even when the unit is in standby. The MSD cards are apparently more thrifty with power and don't impact battery life as much.
- It takes time for the reader to load the directory on the flash memory card, sort it, and ready it for display. So for practical reasons, you may not want to have more then 50-250 books on a single card. This wait only occurs when you insert the card, not when you pull the device in/out of standby. I just bought a collection of 256MB and 512MB memory cards that I'm planning on using.
Using just internal memory, reading for 2 hours a day or so (figure 60-120 pages per hour), I'm managing to only drain the battery about 25% per week. I generally hook it up to recharge it whenever I get below halfway. Which happens about every 2-3 weeks. If I was using it with a memory stick duo installed, I might have to charge it every 1-2 weeks instead. Some SD cards might make that as frequently as once every 6-9 days.
See Mobileread.com forums if you want end-user opinions.
AIUI, though, the PRS doesn't do pdfs very well, right?
That's more of an issue of trying to pack a 8.5" x 11" PDF down onto a screen that is only a quarter of that size. Even with a 170dpi display, trying to view the PDF in portrait mode is going to be painful. The display is 3.5" x 4.75".
PDFs are not well suited for devices that are a different size then what the PDF was originally laid out for. Their primary use is to preserve physical formating and whitespace, not to encapsulate text in a easily reflowable manner (like HTML, BBeB, Mobi, or other ebook formats).
All that being said, you can press and hold the zoom key on the PRS to switch to landscape viewing mode. Then you can view the top/bottom halves of a PDF page at closer to full size resolution. It's still not perfect, but unless the screen was 600dpi and came with a magnifying glass (or was letter-sized and huge) you'd still have the same issue.
There are tools that can be used to convert PDFs into a more ebook friendly format (allowing the device to reflow the text correctly). Most of them are discussed over at:
MobileRead
All that said, I am not ready to drop $400.00 because of the durability issue. But come $200.00 or less, I will be buying one happily.
My price point as $300 (and you can pick up Sony's 2nd gen reader for about $280), so I went with the PRS-505. I expect that you'll see other e-ink paper readers below $200 within the next year or two.
But then, I'm not interested in the wireless part. I want something that just works, where I load books onto internal memory, or use the Memory Stick or SD card slots. I usually keep 50-60 books on internal memory, and have other books on 256MB or 512MB flash memory cards.
Actually, the main problem with ebooks now that paper-like displays are seeing some progress is the cost. $400 for a Kindle is just nasty
So forget the Kindle and go with the Sony Reader (PRS-505 is the newer model) for around $280?
Yeah, I wish they were less expensive. But they were upwards of $500+ about 2 years ago. So the prices on the units are dropping reasonably quickly (I expect to see readers based on e-ink drop below $200 in the next 12-18 months).
(I'm very happy with my Sony Reader. Been using it daily for a month or two now. Currently working through a list of about 100 Project Gutenberg texts that I've always wanted to read.)
I'll second Transmetropolitan.
The story may not be deep and literary, but it is an extremely memorable series. It's been a few years since I read it, and there are still elements of the storyline that I ruminate upon.
Back in '02, when I suffered a very severe episode. I was put on both medication (EffoxorXR 225mg/day) and monthly CBT counseling.
After 9-10 months of treatment, I felt well enough to try standing on my own two feet without the monthly visits or the daily dosage. The CBT counseling was good for teaching coping skills and learning how to deal with the negative thought patterns. Such as learning to sort my worries into a "things I can change" vs "things that aren't within my control". Things in the former bucket are worth worrying about, things in the latter bucket aren't worth excessive worry. I don't know whether the drugs helped or not, I wasn't real fond of some of the side-effects. On the upside, I've been through treatment once, so it no longer is a scary unknown. So when I do find myself relapsing, I won't delay seeking help. (Which is what then happened in 2004/2005.)
My relapse started in mid-2004 or 2005 (I forget) and I've been on Lexapro 10mg/day ever since. Which is just enough to take the edge off of the depression and allows me to cope and be forward thinking instead of dwelling only on past mistakes. It's a lot gentler on me then the EffexorXR was, but still has a few minor side-effects that are acceptable.
I still have up/down weeks (coming off a 2-week downer), but at least I'm not suicidally depressed during the down weeks. I'm just lethargic and generally "down". I feel more normal ranges of happy/sad, instead of just being numb. I also feel like I'm in control of it, rather then the other way around.
I wish... that I could've been properly treated 20 years ago. That's probably the biggest regret of anything, being able to look back at all the destructive behavior caused by trying to deal with it without help. Makes me sad just thinking about it.
Will I ever go off my current dosage? Probably not. Although I might switch to a generic down the road. The doctor and I agree that we'll probably only tamper with the prescription if it stops working and I relapse.
No, I believe the doctor was saying that of the group of people who have the disease, half of them probably got it due to genetics or a genetic component.
That does not mean that 50% of the population suffers from depression. (I forget what the latest figure is...)