I rarely playtest movies in RWs, as for copied movies I can usually get it right the first time.
For self-authored movies, I always use RW for testing. Same goes for my DVD version of Knoppix. (KNX is the ONLY thing I've used CD-RWs for in my life, BTW.)
I also keep my MP3 collection on DVD-R, since that changes once in a while.
I would use RW more often if it weren't for the issue of labeling the disc. I don't want to label an RW as one thing, and then later burn it with something else. MP3 collections are an exception, since I can just label it "MP3s" and the label will always be correct, all of the rest of my RWs are unlabeled "temporary" discs.
With the exception of my first-gen Creative 1X DVD drive, -R discs burned by my Pioneer DVR-105 worked flawlessly everywhere.
-RWs also work flawlessly on every player I've tried except for my friend's Toshiba player, although Nero CDSpeed shows a lot more "jitters" in the read speed with Sony -RWs in my laptop's LG DRN-8080B. TBH, it's a POS drive as far as reading capability. I never had an Optodisc RW that didn't have read errors somewhere on the disc. As to the one disc that didn't read in my friend's player, it's likely that the problem was in the file layout on the disc and not the fact that it was RW vs R.
Meanwhile, I frequent the Dell customer support forums, and the DVD+R drive included on recent Dells has trouble burning discs readable on ANY other drive. This is a Philips drive, the CREATORS of the +R nightmare (Yes, Philips is to blame for the existence of a second format.), and even they can't get compatibility right.
Any DVD-R drive will work with DVD-R aware software under Linux.
Same with DVD+R - FYI, all DVD-R recording software under Linux is based on cdrecord in some manner, while DVD+R requires some oddball program called "growisofs".
Both DVD-R and DVD+R work under Linux. The software for -R seems more mature though.
It rocks. I have one. With Ritek G03 or G04 media (G03 is 1x that reliably burns at 2x with hacked firmware, $1.20/disc or so, G04 is 4x media, $1.80/disc in small quantities and dropping around 20 cents/month), I have not had a single coaster.
Optodisc RW media is a different story. It's worse than 1x Princo -R. 50% of one batch had visible defects, and none read reliably in my laptop.
It is true that the DVR-106 is just a 105 with new firmware. ONE chip has changed, and it's been confirmed that it is functionally identical. The only issue now is that the burner has a calibration EEPROM on it, and if Pioneer changed the EEPROM layout (i.e. what byte is what), then flashing 106 FW into a 105 won't work. Apparently someone has used the control board from a 106 and the remaining hardware from a 105 and it burned + media flawlessly.
The Pioneer drives are the most popular with large-scale duplication houses, and also the Pios are what Apple has chosen for their SuperDrives. (The SuperDrives are all DVR-10x drives. Older ones are 103s, later 104s, and now 105s.)
Using a +R drive is asking for a compatibility nightmare. Dell's latest laptops have an optional DVD+R/RW drive made by Philips, the creator of the +R/RW atrocity, and it has trouble burning discs recognizable in any other drive.
http://www.firmware-flash.com/ is a good place for info on various people's experiences with DVD+-R drives. The Sony dual-format isn't all that it's cracked up to be, the firmware sucks and refuses to burn many 4x discs at 4x.
A few friends of mine were involved in producing their own "talk show" format public-access show, which included reviews of music videos.
Well, the hosts almost always thought that the music videos played sucked. And they would proceed to MST3K it the entire way. The show was hilarious, even before you got to their own custom content like, "A day in the life of Dave and Mike".
And they had the most amusing "press coverage" of Cornell's student elections when that time of year came around. "Is it true that so-and-so has a penchant for hamsters?"
Considering that IBOC has significantly more stringent restrictions on spectral quality, I don't think this will be the case.
I spent last summer working on power amplifiers designed for IBOC applications. The specs we had to meet were a LOT more stringent and our amps were spectrally more pure than your average FM broadcast transmitter these days.
There's a big difference between knowing that you have to turn left onto Foo Place and not knowing exactly how far Foo Place is, and knowing that you have to turn left on Foo Place with the knowledge of exactly how far away Foo Place is supposed to be.
I can get a digital signal at my aunt's house in thie middle of nowhere in upstate NY with Verizon. A few relatives have GSM phones that don't work for 20+ miles in any direction, and all of the relatives with Sprint are roaming.
I get a week of standby time, and a LOT of talk time in digital mode.
No other provider (especially not the GSM providers) can provide service more than 2-3 miles outside of Ithaca, NY. VZW's digital footprint covers almost the entire state. The GSM providers (and Sprint too) can't even cover 100% of the landmass of the most populated state in the nation (New Jersey - Look at the coverage maps of Spring, Cingular, and Voicestream/T-Mobile for NJ.)
The poor users that chose GSM keep on getting "Service Unavailable" errors because GSM can't handle multiple providers in one area gracefully. Back when Voicestream was the only GSM name in town, it wasn't so bad, but I've seen numerous horror stories of people whose GSM phones stopped working and started displaying "Service Unavailable" the moment AT&T or Cingular switched on a tower nearby.
Asterisk and SIP phones
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 1
The one thing I've found is that Asterisk's documentation/manual suck.
The manual gives almost no mention on what sort of IP phones will work. I'm guessing from putting pieces together that some of them support this SIP standard, but they don't explicitly say that. There is no list of tested and compatible IP phones - They hardly list any compatible hardware other than their own linecards and limited Dialogic support. Given that their analog line cards are only four ports per PCI slot, the system has some SERIOUS hardware limitations on the number of possible lines.
Violent video games, at least for my friends and I, was our digital equivalent of a punching bag during high school.
If we hadn't had our near-daily Quake matches, I think it would've been likely that someone would've snapped.
As to the deal of looking forward to the future, Cornell has a (sometimes somewhat offensive) chant at hockey games, of "That's all right, that's OK, you'll all work for us some day!".
Note: Oregon Trail was obscenely easy if you simply stocked up on bullets at the beginning. If something's a problem, you shot it. If you needed food, you shot it.
Unless they've changed, Alienware is one of those manufacturers that sticks a desktop version of the P4 into their machines. ALL of them. I know the Area 51m is such a machine.
i.e. say goodbye to battery life and good thermal performance.
Compaq consistently has the worst quality rep of any PC manufacturer. (Except Packard Smell... Thank God they're gone. Even eMachines is better than Compaq.) We routinely had Compaq laptops come in for service with displays that had simply stopped working.
Toshiba used to be excellent, but like you, I've heard that they've gone downhill over the past few years.
Dell's quality seems to oscillate every few years. Back when I was in school, all of their laptops and desktops were utter shite. The desktops we've been getting at work lately have had AMAZING build quality and impressive design. (The latest ones, at least the latest Precisions, have completely screwless designs and quite well designed ducted cooling.) I have an Inspiron 8200 and it's one of the best laptops I've ever used. The only complaint I have about it is the lack of a display blanking key, a feature I miss from my old TI Travelmate 7100.
Sony Vaios seem to always be overpriced and have all of their accessories external.
IBM Thinkpads are also pricey, but well worth the money if you can afford them. Thinkpads are built like tanks. We NEVER had a Thinkpad less than 4-5 years old come in for service at my campus store when I worked there, and those that did come in after 4-5 years of life were mostly in because of software problems.
But it's got EVERYTHING internal (no need for external bays) and a beautiful 15" screen with resolution that is far higher than Apple's 15" laptop LCDs. Runs every game I have quite well.
It's an Inspiron 8200. Yes, it's not the most portable, but Dell's primary market is businesses. It doesn't matter if the unit is a little heavy if a bulk of your "traveling" is from your cube to the conference room. (Or in the case of where I work, half of the engineers have Dells that move between the docking station on their desk and the benchtop in the lab multiple times per day.)
That said - If you have the money, Thinkpads are the way to go. They are the most durable laptops on the market by far. (Unless you go into the "ruggedized" market, where units like the Panasonic Toughbook reign supreme.) If cost is an issue, Dell makes excellent laptops, especially the Inspiron 8000 series.
Fighter pilots in a G-suit can take 9G loads for a few seconds at a time (or maybe longer) without blacking out.
If the 10g load occurred for only a fraction of a second, it's probably not much worse than going past that sign by the road that says "Dip" a little too fast.
Was quite proud of the fact that she could go to her sorority's formal, get completely trashed, and STILL kick the asses of the guys in her dorm after she returned at 2 AM.
While I can't stand their software, MS typically does make decent hardware (Intellimouse Explorer anyone?)
The MN-500 is no exception - Everywhere I saw, it got quite good reviews. So far, my experience is that it is MUCH more stable than my POS Belkin wireless router that started crashing routinely and then died permanently.
One thing about the MN500 - It stands vertically. I haven't checked it for heat, but that could be one reason it has proven to be more reliable than the Belkin, which always ran quite hot.
You know what you would get if MS did what you were suggesting?
Windows 98
The point is not what COULD be possible if MS were to put millions into an older nearly EOLed version of their OS, but what IS possible. Hey, it would be nice if those features were put into Win95, but it ain't going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
I rarely playtest movies in RWs, as for copied movies I can usually get it right the first time.
For self-authored movies, I always use RW for testing. Same goes for my DVD version of Knoppix. (KNX is the ONLY thing I've used CD-RWs for in my life, BTW.)
I also keep my MP3 collection on DVD-R, since that changes once in a while.
I would use RW more often if it weren't for the issue of labeling the disc. I don't want to label an RW as one thing, and then later burn it with something else. MP3 collections are an exception, since I can just label it "MP3s" and the label will always be correct, all of the rest of my RWs are unlabeled "temporary" discs.
I don't have a dual-format drive.
With the exception of my first-gen Creative 1X DVD drive, -R discs burned by my Pioneer DVR-105 worked flawlessly everywhere.
-RWs also work flawlessly on every player I've tried except for my friend's Toshiba player, although Nero CDSpeed shows a lot more "jitters" in the read speed with Sony -RWs in my laptop's LG DRN-8080B. TBH, it's a POS drive as far as reading capability. I never had an Optodisc RW that didn't have read errors somewhere on the disc. As to the one disc that didn't read in my friend's player, it's likely that the problem was in the file layout on the disc and not the fact that it was RW vs R.
Meanwhile, I frequent the Dell customer support forums, and the DVD+R drive included on recent Dells has trouble burning discs readable on ANY other drive. This is a Philips drive, the CREATORS of the +R nightmare (Yes, Philips is to blame for the existence of a second format.), and even they can't get compatibility right.
Everything is standardized.
Any DVD-R drive will work with DVD-R aware software under Linux.
Same with DVD+R - FYI, all DVD-R recording software under Linux is based on cdrecord in some manner, while DVD+R requires some oddball program called "growisofs".
Both DVD-R and DVD+R work under Linux. The software for -R seems more mature though.
It rocks. I have one. With Ritek G03 or G04 media (G03 is 1x that reliably burns at 2x with hacked firmware, $1.20/disc or so, G04 is 4x media, $1.80/disc in small quantities and dropping around 20 cents/month), I have not had a single coaster.
Optodisc RW media is a different story. It's worse than 1x Princo -R. 50% of one batch had visible defects, and none read reliably in my laptop.
It is true that the DVR-106 is just a 105 with new firmware. ONE chip has changed, and it's been confirmed that it is functionally identical. The only issue now is that the burner has a calibration EEPROM on it, and if Pioneer changed the EEPROM layout (i.e. what byte is what), then flashing 106 FW into a 105 won't work. Apparently someone has used the control board from a 106 and the remaining hardware from a 105 and it burned + media flawlessly.
The Pioneer drives are the most popular with large-scale duplication houses, and also the Pios are what Apple has chosen for their SuperDrives. (The SuperDrives are all DVR-10x drives. Older ones are 103s, later 104s, and now 105s.)
Using a +R drive is asking for a compatibility nightmare. Dell's latest laptops have an optional DVD+R/RW drive made by Philips, the creator of the +R/RW atrocity, and it has trouble burning discs recognizable in any other drive.
http://www.firmware-flash.com/ is a good place for info on various people's experiences with DVD+-R drives. The Sony dual-format isn't all that it's cracked up to be, the firmware sucks and refuses to burn many 4x discs at 4x.
Note that DAoC GMs CAN manifest a physical presence if necessary. They appear as some sort of glowy crystal.
A college town...
A few friends of mine were involved in producing their own "talk show" format public-access show, which included reviews of music videos.
Well, the hosts almost always thought that the music videos played sucked. And they would proceed to MST3K it the entire way. The show was hilarious, even before you got to their own custom content like, "A day in the life of Dave and Mike".
And they had the most amusing "press coverage" of Cornell's student elections when that time of year came around. "Is it true that so-and-so has a penchant for hamsters?"
Considering that IBOC has significantly more stringent restrictions on spectral quality, I don't think this will be the case.
I spent last summer working on power amplifiers designed for IBOC applications. The specs we had to meet were a LOT more stringent and our amps were spectrally more pure than your average FM broadcast transmitter these days.
http://www.aprs.org/
http://www.aprs.net/ and http://www.findu.com/ have some neat APRS interfaces.
There's a big difference between knowing that you have to turn left onto Foo Place and not knowing exactly how far Foo Place is, and knowing that you have to turn left on Foo Place with the knowledge of exactly how far away Foo Place is supposed to be.
I believe even the "direct" calls in iDEN still use the basestation as a repeater at the very least.
Try Verizon.
I can get a digital signal at my aunt's house in thie middle of nowhere in upstate NY with Verizon. A few relatives have GSM phones that don't work for 20+ miles in any direction, and all of the relatives with Sprint are roaming.
I get a week of standby time, and a LOT of talk time in digital mode.
No other provider (especially not the GSM providers) can provide service more than 2-3 miles outside of Ithaca, NY. VZW's digital footprint covers almost the entire state. The GSM providers (and Sprint too) can't even cover 100% of the landmass of the most populated state in the nation (New Jersey - Look at the coverage maps of Spring, Cingular, and Voicestream/T-Mobile for NJ.)
The poor users that chose GSM keep on getting "Service Unavailable" errors because GSM can't handle multiple providers in one area gracefully. Back when Voicestream was the only GSM name in town, it wasn't so bad, but I've seen numerous horror stories of people whose GSM phones stopped working and started displaying "Service Unavailable" the moment AT&T or Cingular switched on a tower nearby.
The one thing I've found is that Asterisk's documentation/manual suck.
The manual gives almost no mention on what sort of IP phones will work. I'm guessing from putting pieces together that some of them support this SIP standard, but they don't explicitly say that. There is no list of tested and compatible IP phones - They hardly list any compatible hardware other than their own linecards and limited Dialogic support. Given that their analog line cards are only four ports per PCI slot, the system has some SERIOUS hardware limitations on the number of possible lines.
Violent video games, at least for my friends and I, was our digital equivalent of a punching bag during high school.
If we hadn't had our near-daily Quake matches, I think it would've been likely that someone would've snapped.
As to the deal of looking forward to the future, Cornell has a (sometimes somewhat offensive) chant at hockey games, of "That's all right, that's OK, you'll all work for us some day!".
Note: Oregon Trail was obscenely easy if you simply stocked up on bullets at the beginning. If something's a problem, you shot it. If you needed food, you shot it.
EVE Online uses a modified version of Python called Stackless Python.
Unless they've changed, Alienware is one of those manufacturers that sticks a desktop version of the P4 into their machines. ALL of them. I know the Area 51m is such a machine.
i.e. say goodbye to battery life and good thermal performance.
I used to work in a computer sales center.
Compaq consistently has the worst quality rep of any PC manufacturer. (Except Packard Smell... Thank God they're gone. Even eMachines is better than Compaq.) We routinely had Compaq laptops come in for service with displays that had simply stopped working.
Toshiba used to be excellent, but like you, I've heard that they've gone downhill over the past few years.
Dell's quality seems to oscillate every few years. Back when I was in school, all of their laptops and desktops were utter shite. The desktops we've been getting at work lately have had AMAZING build quality and impressive design. (The latest ones, at least the latest Precisions, have completely screwless designs and quite well designed ducted cooling.) I have an Inspiron 8200 and it's one of the best laptops I've ever used. The only complaint I have about it is the lack of a display blanking key, a feature I miss from my old TI Travelmate 7100.
Sony Vaios seem to always be overpriced and have all of their accessories external.
IBM Thinkpads are also pricey, but well worth the money if you can afford them. Thinkpads are built like tanks. We NEVER had a Thinkpad less than 4-5 years old come in for service at my campus store when I worked there, and those that did come in after 4-5 years of life were mostly in because of software problems.
Yes, it's big and heavy.
But it's got EVERYTHING internal (no need for external bays) and a beautiful 15" screen with resolution that is far higher than Apple's 15" laptop LCDs. Runs every game I have quite well.
It's an Inspiron 8200. Yes, it's not the most portable, but Dell's primary market is businesses. It doesn't matter if the unit is a little heavy if a bulk of your "traveling" is from your cube to the conference room. (Or in the case of where I work, half of the engineers have Dells that move between the docking station on their desk and the benchtop in the lab multiple times per day.)
That said - If you have the money, Thinkpads are the way to go. They are the most durable laptops on the market by far. (Unless you go into the "ruggedized" market, where units like the Panasonic Toughbook reign supreme.) If cost is an issue, Dell makes excellent laptops, especially the Inspiron 8000 series.
Fighter pilots in a G-suit can take 9G loads for a few seconds at a time (or maybe longer) without blacking out.
If the 10g load occurred for only a fraction of a second, it's probably not much worse than going past that sign by the road that says "Dip" a little too fast.
Was quite proud of the fact that she could go to her sorority's formal, get completely trashed, and STILL kick the asses of the guys in her dorm after she returned at 2 AM.
:)
Drunken gaming was VERY common at school.
Isn't it enough to piss off one 800 pound gorilla?
Now he goes poking another eight of them with a stick.
On Slashdot and in both DAoC and EVE Online.
I nearly did this to my overheating Belkin router.
It killed itself before i got around to it though.
While I can't stand their software, MS typically does make decent hardware (Intellimouse Explorer anyone?)
The MN-500 is no exception - Everywhere I saw, it got quite good reviews. So far, my experience is that it is MUCH more stable than my POS Belkin wireless router that started crashing routinely and then died permanently.
One thing about the MN500 - It stands vertically. I haven't checked it for heat, but that could be one reason it has proven to be more reliable than the Belkin, which always ran quite hot.
You know what you would get if MS did what you were suggesting?
Windows 98
The point is not what COULD be possible if MS were to put millions into an older nearly EOLed version of their OS, but what IS possible. Hey, it would be nice if those features were put into Win95, but it ain't going to happen.