Also, xbox dosent make the noise that a regular PC will make
Obviously, you and I have been listening to different desktop PCs and XBoxes... I'd go for an X-box for this purpose in an instant, if every one I've heard wasn't so noisy. Silence is in the ear of the beholder. They're also harder to silence. Small quiet fans just don't exist, and the Xbox has a small fan (50, 60mm or something?).
Well, your HTPC has to be on full time to record, so it has to be quiet enough when there are no other sources of noise.
However, I'm very picky about noise, and I've been able to silence drives very successfully. Get a modern quiet one, turn on acoustic management, and soft-mount it. Either suspend it with bungees, rest it on sorbothane foam, or at least use rubber grommets in the drive cage. There are all sorts of discussions about this on www.silentpcreview.com.
I'm amazed by how much bungee-suspension has silenced my hard drive. You have to tackle cooling on a free-suspended drive without the heatsink-effect of a case, but that's not too hard.
Much more difficult than hard drives, I think, is eliminating fan noise while cooling a modern machine. To have quiet fans, you need low airflow (and good fans), so you've got to work hard to make the case airflow as free as possible. Difficult with small HTPC cases particularly, but not impossible.
DVDs of it are available in the USA, and much recommended. I suspect that PBS etc. hasn't picked it up because it pokes fun at the RC church. Perhaps surprisingly to some on both sides of the Atlantic, there's much less deference to authority in the UK and Ireland.
Odd that it's distributed by BBC America in the US, even though it was produced IIRC, jointly by Channel 4 (BBC competitor) and RTE (Irish TV).
You'll only lose power steering and braking in with an auto gearbox (which most europeans shun), or if you're in neutral, or if your car is one of the few with electrically assisted steering.
If the engine's turning, you'll still have power steering and brakes in most manual tranny cars. The former is mechanically run off the engine, and the latter from vacuum, which is there in spades when the ignition is off but the engine turning.
American microbreweries can be pretty good (especially compared to the shit from the big breweries), but I think they're alienating a lot of the drinking public because they haven't worked out how to moderate hoppyness and make more drinkable brews which are still interesting.
It's all a matter of taste, but the attitude seems to be "hops are good, so more hops are better". Similarly with other flavours, hence beers frequently have novelty ingredients or features.
I love to visit the UK, where the small breweries try to produce beers that are interesting, tasty, and slip down a treat. They differentiate themselves subtly (Mmmm, Nethergates Umbel Ale). Most US microbrews are fine for half a pint, but become more and more difficult to drink after that (not to mention the sore head they give me with even moderate intake).
Yeah, this is just my personal taste (and sensitivity to impurities), but interest and drinkability are not incompatible goals.
Re:Electricity cost may be more/less than you thin
on
AMD 90nm Evaluated
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· Score: 1
Good points. There's nothing good about using more power, whether you're worried about the temperature in the room, or the environmental impact, or your wallet.
The guys over at http://www.silentpcreview.com are always interested in lowering power, because that means lower needs for noisy cooling. Some of them have great results with undervolting. There are desktop apps that can change the clockspeed and voltage on the fly, so some of them are running, IIRC, A64s at 1GHz, 0.9V, drawing very low power, then switching up to more normal speeds/voltages on the fly, when required.
There's even at least one app that will do this switching automatically based on load. Many Athlon 64 motherboards are supposed to have that built in ("cool-n-quiet"), but by all accounts it doesn't often work well.
Search the forums over at that site for more info.
The number on your power supply is NOT how much juice the system draws when idle. In fact the spike in power use from turning a system on in the morning is often higher then the amount of power it will draw all night while doing nothing. Of course if you insist on running Quake III in demo mode all night you would have a point.
Some basic electrical knowledge would be useful before posting such nonsense, or for modding it as Interesting!
I'm not sure what this "spike" is of which you speak, but it would require 15000 Amps if your spike is 1 second (roughly, at 120V)! Similarly a continuous 250 Amps if it was 1 minute. I really hope you know how ridiculous that is.
If you need the calculations for this, anyone with a basic high school knowledge of physics could give it to you.
transporters - well we've done with an entangled photon. One down, seventeen quadrillion to go. Hey, it's a start!
continuing the OT, assuming the ridiculous idea existed, who on earth would actually get in one?
I mean, they take all your molecules, convert them to energy or radio waves or whatever the supposed explanation is, and then reconstruct them at the other end. That's not transportation, that's creating a copy and destroying the original. Not for me, no matter how illusory my current existence is! I don't care how many copies of me you make, or where you make them, I want to keep this copy functioning.
"Transport" me by all means, but don't destroy the one at this end. Transporters should remain simply the plot-accelerators they were designed to be.
I find it bizarre that US Christianity is so closely tied with right-wing politics, while in the UK, the stereotypical Christian is a compasionate lefty. Love thy neighbour, blessed are the meek, charity and all that. I don't know about other countries.
The US evangelicals who advocate the supremacy of faith and dogma over acts of charity should perhaps more accurately be described as Paulists than Christians. Christ's viewpoints were a bit of an uncomfortable annoyance that Paul ignored where possible.
Check out
this - it's not the irreverent joke you might imagine.
Hmmm, as a non-American, I assumed most people considered the term "un-American" hypocritical and hollow, and troubling in an Orwellian sense, since the days of the House Committee on Un-American Activities of the 50s.
Is this only a common view outside of the USA?
P.S. Again: You, the guard, all the sheep walking past that piece of garbage, you have no problem with the garbage lying around (I see your trolling did not say anything about garbage beyond falsely stating that I was responsible for the presence of garbage), but when someone makes you notice the garbage, you get mad at the person who made you look, not the one who abandoned its garbage.
Er... has it ever occurred to you that the guard, he, and all the sheep, are the human race, of which you are just another individual? If almost everyone disagrees with you, isn't it slightly more plausible that you might be mistaken, rather than the rest of the world? A lesson that the Whitehouse is painfully slowly in learning too.
"It's the thought that counts", is an idiotic platitude to make children feel better about when they fuck up. It's not your intentions that count, it's your actions, because they're the only things that exist outside your head. Unless you consider yourself to be the only worthwhile person in existance.
So sticking your litter on the wall wasn't an artistic statement, no matter how you chose to see it. It was sticking your litter on the wall, so someone else would have had to tidy up after you.
Re:Think a little more carefully
on
Reverse Graffiti
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· Score: 1
If people ARE allowed to go out and clean because they want to, or because someone pays them to (which is how it currently is) then you don't really have a right to tell them how. If I clean up a street but do a half assed job, still leaving trash (but not adding any) that's fine. If I go to clean a wall of grafitti, but get tired halfway through and leave the other half, that's fine. If I clean a park of all litter except cigarette buts to make a point, that's also fine.
They were creating an image (for advertising), on public property without permission. How they created the image is very much of secondary importance.
Sorry, but I think the whole idea that they were "cleaning" the wall, and just didn't do a complete job, is being almost deliberately obtuse. The literalism that concludes that it is "cleaning" therefore it's "good" is overly simplistic. Life is not black and white.
Helping old ladies across the road is a good deed, but what if they didn't want to go? What if you did it to take them to your shop?
By reducing the size and weight, you sacrifice stability
Absolutely. I definitely wouldn't advocate all cameras should be small and light. However, that's the direction I'd like the compromise.
Chunkier cameras should and will always be available for those who don't want the stability and ergonomic compromise.
While there's no doubt that the features I want (high light sensitivity, wide zoom, and preferably short depth-of-field potential) mean large optics, what I really want is to have the electronics from a tiny camera tacked onto the large lens, so the overall package is as small as is feasible. Right now, I love my Canon G2 but never have it on hand because it's too big to pocket.
I'm with you on this, but standard AA rechargeables conflict with reducing camera size. Also, NiMH batteries loose charge faster than Lithium Ion/Polymer, so if you leave your camera unused for the odd month occasionally, they're not necessarily so great. I'd rather spend the extra $30 or whatever Li* adds to the price.
I don't understand why they can't make the fixed-lens prosumer models the size of the very smallest, apart from the larger optics... Closest to this seems to be the Sony DSC-V1. These cameras should be little more than a lens with an LCD attached (flip and twist)! Small is good - camera's not much use if you can't be bothered to carry it.
Finally, my pet peeve is that the long end of the zoom is usually pushed at the expense of the wide angle. Some start at 38mm equivalent, and lots around 34mm. A lens starting at 28mm is very desirable for me - for capturing vistas and indoor parties. For a 4x lens, give me a 28-112mm over 34-134mm any day (f2.0 of course...).
Slashdot Mirror
However, I'm very picky about noise, and I've been able to silence drives very successfully. Get a modern quiet one, turn on acoustic management, and soft-mount it. Either suspend it with bungees, rest it on sorbothane foam, or at least use rubber grommets in the drive cage. There are all sorts of discussions about this on www.silentpcreview.com.
I'm amazed by how much bungee-suspension has silenced my hard drive. You have to tackle cooling on a free-suspended drive without the heatsink-effect of a case, but that's not too hard.
Much more difficult than hard drives, I think, is eliminating fan noise while cooling a modern machine. To have quiet fans, you need low airflow (and good fans), so you've got to work hard to make the case airflow as free as possible. Difficult with small HTPC cases particularly, but not impossible.
DVDs of it are available in the USA, and much recommended. I suspect that PBS etc. hasn't picked it up because it pokes fun at the RC church. Perhaps surprisingly to some on both sides of the Atlantic, there's much less deference to authority in the UK and Ireland.
Odd that it's distributed by BBC America in the US, even though it was produced IIRC, jointly by Channel 4 (BBC competitor) and RTE (Irish TV).
You'll only lose power steering and braking in with an auto gearbox (which most europeans shun), or if you're in neutral, or if your car is one of the few with electrically assisted steering.
If the engine's turning, you'll still have power steering and brakes in most manual tranny cars. The former is mechanically run off the engine, and the latter from vacuum, which is there in spades when the ignition is off but the engine turning.
American microbreweries can be pretty good (especially compared to the shit from the big breweries), but I think they're alienating a lot of the drinking public because they haven't worked out how to moderate hoppyness and make more drinkable brews which are still interesting.
It's all a matter of taste, but the attitude seems to be "hops are good, so more hops are better". Similarly with other flavours, hence beers frequently have novelty ingredients or features.
I love to visit the UK, where the small breweries try to produce beers that are interesting, tasty, and slip down a treat. They differentiate themselves subtly (Mmmm, Nethergates Umbel Ale). Most US microbrews are fine for half a pint, but become more and more difficult to drink after that (not to mention the sore head they give me with even moderate intake).
Yeah, this is just my personal taste (and sensitivity to impurities), but interest and drinkability are not incompatible goals.
Good points. There's nothing good about using more power, whether you're worried about the temperature in the room, or the environmental impact, or your wallet.
The guys over at http://www.silentpcreview.com are always interested in lowering power, because that means lower needs for noisy cooling. Some of them have great results with undervolting. There are desktop apps that can change the clockspeed and voltage on the fly, so some of them are running, IIRC, A64s at 1GHz, 0.9V, drawing very low power, then switching up to more normal speeds/voltages on the fly, when required.
There's even at least one app that will do this switching automatically based on load. Many Athlon 64 motherboards are supposed to have that built in ("cool-n-quiet"), but by all accounts it doesn't often work well.
Search the forums over at that site for more info.
continuing the OT, assuming the ridiculous idea existed, who on earth would actually get in one?
I mean, they take all your molecules, convert them to energy or radio waves or whatever the supposed explanation is, and then reconstruct them at the other end. That's not transportation, that's creating a copy and destroying the original. Not for me, no matter how illusory my current existence is! I don't care how many copies of me you make, or where you make them, I want to keep this copy functioning.
"Transport" me by all means, but don't destroy the one at this end. Transporters should remain simply the plot-accelerators they were designed to be.
The US evangelicals who advocate the supremacy of faith and dogma over acts of charity should perhaps more accurately be described as Paulists than Christians. Christ's viewpoints were a bit of an uncomfortable annoyance that Paul ignored where possible.
Check out this - it's not the irreverent joke you might imagine.
Hmmm, as a non-American, I assumed most people considered the term "un-American" hypocritical and hollow, and troubling in an Orwellian sense, since the days of the House Committee on Un-American Activities of the 50s. Is this only a common view outside of the USA?
Er... has it ever occurred to you that the guard, he, and all the sheep, are the human race, of which you are just another individual? If almost everyone disagrees with you, isn't it slightly more plausible that you might be mistaken, rather than the rest of the world? A lesson that the Whitehouse is painfully slowly in learning too.
"It's the thought that counts", is an idiotic platitude to make children feel better about when they fuck up. It's not your intentions that count, it's your actions, because they're the only things that exist outside your head. Unless you consider yourself to be the only worthwhile person in existance. So sticking your litter on the wall wasn't an artistic statement, no matter how you chose to see it. It was sticking your litter on the wall, so someone else would have had to tidy up after you.
They were creating an image (for advertising), on public property without permission. How they created the image is very much of secondary importance.
Sorry, but I think the whole idea that they were "cleaning" the wall, and just didn't do a complete job, is being almost deliberately obtuse. The literalism that concludes that it is "cleaning" therefore it's "good" is overly simplistic. Life is not black and white.
Helping old ladies across the road is a good deed, but what if they didn't want to go? What if you did it to take them to your shop?
Absolutely. I definitely wouldn't advocate all cameras should be small and light. However, that's the direction I'd like the compromise. Chunkier cameras should and will always be available for those who don't want the stability and ergonomic compromise.
While there's no doubt that the features I want (high light sensitivity, wide zoom, and preferably short depth-of-field potential) mean large optics, what I really want is to have the electronics from a tiny camera tacked onto the large lens, so the overall package is as small as is feasible. Right now, I love my Canon G2 but never have it on hand because it's too big to pocket.
I'm with you on this, but standard AA rechargeables conflict with reducing camera size. Also, NiMH batteries loose charge faster than Lithium Ion/Polymer, so if you leave your camera unused for the odd month occasionally, they're not necessarily so great. I'd rather spend the extra $30 or whatever Li* adds to the price.
I don't understand why they can't make the fixed-lens prosumer models the size of the very smallest, apart from the larger optics... Closest to this seems to be the Sony DSC-V1. These cameras should be little more than a lens with an LCD attached (flip and twist)! Small is good - camera's not much use if you can't be bothered to carry it.
Finally, my pet peeve is that the long end of the zoom is usually pushed at the expense of the wide angle. Some start at 38mm equivalent, and lots around 34mm. A lens starting at 28mm is very desirable for me - for capturing vistas and indoor parties. For a 4x lens, give me a 28-112mm over 34-134mm any day (f2.0 of course...).