It's unlimited local calling for $33. I travel too much much to use it (their network is only in certain cities) but I have alot of friends that like it. It's a good replacement for a home phone, even if you talk alot. The bonus is, telemarketers can't call you.
Me? I've been a sprint pcs customer for over 4 years. Their rates don't seem to be keeping up with their competitors though. If they don't have the ability to have unlimited local minutes and nationwide roam (for an extra fee of course) by next nov when the cell number portability law (finally) goes into effect. I'll switch. Till then, I'll hang on.
AWWWW...
Drunks and losers, Dwarves with limps, Flos and ho's and one-eyed pimps - Down the alleyway they creep. They're all your friends when you can't sleep.
Come with me and you will see. A late-night-freak-show-Jubilee! Kick the Sandman in his sack; Stay up late - Insomniac!
Sounds like a great tour to me! I love this show though, he has been to some cool places.
Any power plant. I'm not sure how much you'd see on a tour, but there's some neat tech in these. (My dad works at one so I've seen everything there is...) It's mostly 'low' tech, other than things like control systems. But the scale and the amount of power going through is neat.
NORAD in Colorado Springs, CO or Offutt AFB in Omaha, NE. Norad has some neato tech, and the 'building' is way cool. Offutt AFB has a bit more modern tech (I used to work there, maybe I'm biased), but is basicly the same thing. Both are very high security, so call in advance (at least a couple weeks, maybe a month) so they can do a background check. But it's worth it to see the coolest vax clusters on the planet. (You won't get to actually see them, just the output, but it's still cool. Again, maybe I'm biased, they were my babies for several years) The SAC museum is in Omaha too if you like bombers and stuff.
Any type of steel or metalurgical plant. Those places boggle my mind. (usually located near power plants for cheap electric, at least around my home town)
Chemical plants. Not sure what the security is like near these but it's neet to see how stuff is all heated and mixed together to produce whatever it is they're making. I've been to chevron, dow, and dupont plants (all near my home town also - they call the mid ohio valley, 'chemical valley' for a reason). I'm suprised I don't have an extra limb or something.
Maybe I'm a geek, but I'd like to see some microchips getting made and some surface mount boards getting assembled.
Anyplace that uses robotics is cool. My uncle gave me a tour of the biotech company he built the robots for. If you can get the tour guide or the geeky looking guy standing around at the factory to explain some of details of the tech, do it. I had no idea how far robots had come.
Think about something a little more old fashoned. A hand made wood working shop, a metal shop. Then work your way up to more modern things like windows, and lumber mills.
Get your Laverne and Shirley on at a brewery. Hit someplace that makes snack food or candy. From watching shows on food tv I've noticed they seem alot like chemical plants...
The policy manual is one of the main reasons I use debian. I can look up exactly where something should go and what it's supposed to do instead of digging around trying to figure out what some random developer thought was the 'right' way to do it. If only the LSB were as good as the policy manual, then we wouldn't have a problem with random distros.
Ahh the south. I lived in Biloxi, MS for a while. Talk about low cost of living. It's too bad the state just sucked to live in. I did have some good times in Mobile and New Orleans though. I grew up in Ohio near the WV border, and allthough WV is the 2nd poorest state in the nation MS (number 1) seemed to be several times worse. Maybe it's just the area and the people. [shrug]
$30k/year, talk of budgeting, direct deposit... Sounds like military. Birmingham IAP I bet. You're right, the trick is budgeting. Always have a buffer. I learned my lesson on that a few years ago. Never again, I'm 23 and on the ball now. No house for me for at least the next few years though. I'm too young and single for that. I am thinking about buying a 30k apt in the spring though. I can pay it off in 5-6 years and have 30k to drop on a house downpayment.:)
Yah, I thought about that. But think about how many people will actually read that comment and move here. The same could be said for any other city besides the huge ones. Just in the midwest I'd think of cities like Cincinati, Columbus, Dayton, Springfield (IL and MO), Des Moines (All though we did just lay people off from our division there...), Twin Cities, etc. It does take work to find a job, but you need to have realistic expectations. Don't expect to move to a city this size and make what you made in the bay area. We do have that winter thing to contend with too....
But since I've spilled the beans (not really, any city this sized IS like this). Here's some more info:
Omaha has a ton of insurance (I live 2 blocks from the mutual of omaha towers) and agraculture. (I'm 10 minutes from con-agra's headquarters). Also first national bank is huge. We also have strategic command if you like government work. I'm pretty sure we're the telemarketing capital of the world too. There's a good chance if you call a company and get an automated voice recognition thing it goes through a company here in town called west. Allthough I hear west treats their employees like crap. I had an interview there to be their security engineer/hippa (sp?) guy and turned it down. Two weeks later the guy who got me an interview there jumped ship and started working where I did take a job at. (Which is a kick ass company, pay isn't great, but we make a ton of money (job security) and have a very laid back work env, and no I won't tell you where I work. I'm waiting for a position to open up so I can transfer...)
If you do move here, stop by a LUG meeting and say hi. There's a good ale house a few blocks away that we tend to go to afterwards too. (Also in my neighborhood.)
Oh c'mon, just leave silicon valley. Move to a modest sized city with around a million people in it. Less crime, lower cost of living, and believe it or not, they do use computers.
I live in Omaha, NE, about 800,000 people in the metro area. Granted, we have a higher than average tech/telecom industry than most cities this size, but it's not too hard to find a job. I had my last day on one job of 4 years on a friday this august and started my new job on a monday. I spent about 5 weeks job hunting. I still get offers for jobs almost 5 months later.
You may only make $50k a year, but $200,000 buys a really nice house and $800 buys a really nice apartment. I live in a 3br 2500sq foot apt that takes up a whole floor, 2 blocks from a medical center so my neighbors are doctors and med students, and we (2 roommates and I) pay $1000 a month. Starter houses and not as nice 2 br apts are about $125k and $500/mo respecivly. You won't need to pack heat to make it from your car to your door either.
It's time to cut your losses and say you're willing to relocate.
Maybe if we're lucky congress would win and this will get some press. Maybe then congress will realize they're destroying one of the largest industries in the country so they can pander to the puny entertainment industry. Along with that whole taking away freedom thing. A wake up call like that award could maybe help a bit.
Then again, maybe not...
It's gonna suck in a decade or two when the entire computer industry has moved to a a free country and talking about moving out of the US to get a job will get me thrown in jail as a terrorist.
Don't be surprised to see a beowulf cluster on a list like this 20 years from now. It is having an impact like the microprocessor did. Massive amounts of computing power for cheap compared to the alternatives. People in research and graphics are eating them up like crazy.
That's not just a chip, it's more like a processor card. Chip, external cache, system interface, etc. Not only that, it's a processor card that not many mac owners buy. That's why it's so pricey.
The real cost of a g3/4 chip is around the cost of a p3/4.
Jeeze man, look at the date on the page. Sept 99. A quick google says that in sept 99 the fastest pc cpu was a 600mhz p3. I believe 450mhz g3s were shipping at the time.
I'm not going to get into the differences in the chips at the time, but apple's ads were pretty accurate. Today is a different story though.
Court martial military sysadmins? No way. It's not their fault.
Hear me out here. The people running these systems (from my ex-air force perspective) are between kids out of high school (Airmen) and 20-sometings that have been doing military computer stuff since high school (NCOs). All they know is what the military trained them to do. Guess who decides what to train them in? NCOs and Officers. That's for the military people. There are civilians too, usually retired military. They all have to abide by policies set out by the DOD which are something short sited and not very well thought out. They also leave very little room to impliment no ideas and take care of important problems right away.
The best and the brightest who can actually secure a system don't go into the military. When they do, they're ignored because they're 'young' and have no 'experience'. I fell in the later catagory. There's nothing like the feeling of fixing somebody else's screw up (usually a contractor) and 30 minutes later be taking out the trash or doing some other degrading duty. Needless to say I got out and now make alot more money with alot less hassle, have a boss who listens to me (mostly), and can actually advance in the company and my career without having to wait X number of years and take a test on things that have nothing to do with my job.
Anyway, without going off topic. You can't blame these guys, most of them don't have a clue, those with a clue have their hands tied by stupid policies.
If you want to blame somebody, blame the high ranking Officers, they make the policies and the training programs that made this happen. Of course, that would never happen, some poor Airmen or overworked NCO will get railroaded.
Oh well, I'm free and clear now. At least I got a jump start on life and some free college out of the deal.
Using solid state drives you could probobly do it on the order of about a half billion dollars. Possible indeed. But there are other things you haven't thought of. You didn't say if you need to have this thing on 24/7, but I'm going to assume you do.
1: Power. Solid state drives tend to forget stuff when shut off, so you'll need a UPS in the data center to handle it. No biggie, except when you realize that the batteries are going to need maintence. They do go bad after a while, I know of no batteries that don't. In theory you could do flash memory instead of volitile for about 3 times the cost (512meg ATA flash storage is $300 on pricewatch, add raid, san, etc, pricey but possible)
2: Cooling. Massive amounts of solid state chips are going to generate massive amounts of heat. This means water chillers (most likely) and fans. Both involve moters. Moters go bad. You can build redundent, but eventually both cooling systems will go out.
3: The hardware it's self. CPUs go bad, controllers blow up, ram chips go out, power supplies blow, etc. You can only leave a redundant system alone for so long until it's no longer redundant.
4: Acts of god. Floods, fire, lack of fuel for power, emi. These things happen. You can build two data centers in seperate locations and write one off when something bad happens, but then you're back to no redundancy.
Having worked on a LARGE scale redundent system (Think uncle sam), I can tell you these things do require maintence. Building a system that large without bugs that creep up in a few years time is going to be next to impossible.
That said, it sounds neat. Let me know when you guys need an engineer to build it, it'd be fun.
No, this is like walking into a company's public library and finding a book on a shelf in the corner that wasn't in the card catalog.
Whine and moan all they want, they still stuck it in a public place. They should have stuck it behind a locked closed door. Then it's secure. If you bust open the door, that would be a crime. Finding something sitting in a public place that's not advertised is not a crime.
I know I'd never keep a laptop for 50 years, but I might keep one for 5 years. I'd be happy to have a 5 year battery. Or a flashlight, or a radio, etc. 50 years is an unintentional side effect. Besides, if they use some sort of standard cells, I can just transfer them to whatever device I end up using down the line. That would make it worth the high premium for something like this.
The article says it's planned on being used in small remote devices. If they get this thing down to 1mm and mass produce it, what about using it for things like laptops, cell phones, etc?
Sure, it would take alot of those 1mm cells, but couldn't it be done? I'd love to have a laptop that ran 50 years between replacing the battery, with no charging required.
100 listeners * 480 3 minute songs a day * 30 days a month ----------- 1,440,000 performances a month * $.0007 ----------- $1008 a month in royalties due
right now tag's trance trip has almost 2000 users connected, that's around $20k due in royalties each month.
there's lots of other crap involved too like record keeping, check http://www.kurthanson.com/ for more info.
It suffers from the same problem as web radio. You're sending a digital stream to a user's reciever. Even with a flag, a user could bypass it and copy digital quality music from it. At least that's the theory behind the taxes that web radio must pay to the RIAA.
Essentialy that $.0007 (for now, legislation is in the works to change it) is to pay for the users who will copy the music off the streaming station. Analog broadcasters don't pay it because they're analog. They wanted digital to pay it because it would mean web radio never got a chance to foothold and give them some competition. The RIAA wants it so they can line their pockets, unlike ASCAP/BMI (that most web radio stations pay and all analog pay) that goes right to the artists.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Has anybody used InstantSSL? They claim to work with IE 5+, NS 4+, AOL 5+ and Opera 5+, which they say is 99% of the browsers in use out there. Sounds like a good deal to me.
I'm looking at using the cert to do some credit card auth for a webhosting company, and I don't really think I'd have a problem turning away that 1% of people who can't upgrade to a browser that came several years ago. That whole 80/20 rule kicks in there. I'm sure somebody who can't be bothered to upgrade to a modern browser is going to be a tech support nightmare.
I have this exact same problem. I've given up and resorted to using 60hz refresh only. I checked for lights, moters, dirty power, everything. Remember, this isn't really flickering, this is a kind of shaking. Your eyes will filter it out if you're using a black background, but it's unbearable if you're trying to do anything other than watch a dark movie from accross the room. (I have a 19" sony trinitron in my living room)
Oh, and ALL my monitors do it, 14", 17", 19", cheap to midline to pricey. They also do it in ANY room.
I really wish I knew what caused it... I'm ready to move soon though, so hopefully things will be better then.
Slashdot Mirror
It's unlimited local calling for $33. I travel too much much to use it (their network is only in certain cities) but I have alot of friends that like it. It's a good replacement for a home phone, even if you talk alot. The bonus is, telemarketers can't call you.
http://www.cricketcommunications.com/default.asp
Me? I've been a sprint pcs customer for over 4 years. Their rates don't seem to be keeping up with their competitors though. If they don't have the ability to have unlimited local minutes and nationwide roam (for an extra fee of course) by next nov when the cell number portability law (finally) goes into effect. I'll switch. Till then, I'll hang on.
Any power plant. I'm not sure how much you'd see on a tour, but there's some neat tech in these. (My dad works at one so I've seen everything there is...) It's mostly 'low' tech, other than things like control systems. But the scale and the amount of power going through is neat.
NORAD in Colorado Springs, CO or Offutt AFB in Omaha, NE. Norad has some neato tech, and the 'building' is way cool. Offutt AFB has a bit more modern tech (I used to work there, maybe I'm biased), but is basicly the same thing. Both are very high security, so call in advance (at least a couple weeks, maybe a month) so they can do a background check. But it's worth it to see the coolest vax clusters on the planet. (You won't get to actually see them, just the output, but it's still cool. Again, maybe I'm biased, they were my babies for several years) The SAC museum is in Omaha too if you like bombers and stuff.
Any type of steel or metalurgical plant. Those places boggle my mind. (usually located near power plants for cheap electric, at least around my home town)
Chemical plants. Not sure what the security is like near these but it's neet to see how stuff is all heated and mixed together to produce whatever it is they're making. I've been to chevron, dow, and dupont plants (all near my home town also - they call the mid ohio valley, 'chemical valley' for a reason). I'm suprised I don't have an extra limb or something.
Maybe I'm a geek, but I'd like to see some microchips getting made and some surface mount boards getting assembled.
Anyplace that uses robotics is cool. My uncle gave me a tour of the biotech company he built the robots for. If you can get the tour guide or the geeky looking guy standing around at the factory to explain some of details of the tech, do it. I had no idea how far robots had come.
Think about something a little more old fashoned. A hand made wood working shop, a metal shop. Then work your way up to more modern things like windows, and lumber mills.
Get your Laverne and Shirley on at a brewery. Hit someplace that makes snack food or candy. From watching shows on food tv I've noticed they seem alot like chemical plants...
Hmm I'm hungry now. Have a good trip tho.
The policy manual is one of the main reasons I use debian. I can look up exactly where something should go and what it's supposed to do instead of digging around trying to figure out what some random developer thought was the 'right' way to do it. If only the LSB were as good as the policy manual, then we wouldn't have a problem with random distros.
Ahh the south. I lived in Biloxi, MS for a while. Talk about low cost of living. It's too bad the state just sucked to live in. I did have some good times in Mobile and New Orleans though. I grew up in Ohio near the WV border, and allthough WV is the 2nd poorest state in the nation MS (number 1) seemed to be several times worse. Maybe it's just the area and the people. [shrug]
:)
$30k/year, talk of budgeting, direct deposit... Sounds like military. Birmingham IAP I bet. You're right, the trick is budgeting. Always have a buffer. I learned my lesson on that a few years ago. Never again, I'm 23 and on the ball now. No house for me for at least the next few years though. I'm too young and single for that. I am thinking about buying a 30k apt in the spring though. I can pay it off in 5-6 years and have 30k to drop on a house downpayment.
Congrats on the engangement!
Yah, I thought about that. But think about how many people will actually read that comment and move here. The same could be said for any other city besides the huge ones. Just in the midwest I'd think of cities like Cincinati, Columbus, Dayton, Springfield (IL and MO), Des Moines (All though we did just lay people off from our division there...), Twin Cities, etc. It does take work to find a job, but you need to have realistic expectations. Don't expect to move to a city this size and make what you made in the bay area. We do have that winter thing to contend with too....
But since I've spilled the beans (not really, any city this sized IS like this). Here's some more info:
A good employment place to look for Omaha is http://www.careerlink.org/.
Of course there's the chamber of commerce. http://www.omahachamber.net/
Omaha has a ton of insurance (I live 2 blocks from the mutual of omaha towers) and agraculture. (I'm 10 minutes from con-agra's headquarters). Also first national bank is huge. We also have strategic command if you like government work. I'm pretty sure we're the telemarketing capital of the world too. There's a good chance if you call a company and get an automated voice recognition thing it goes through a company here in town called west. Allthough I hear west treats their employees like crap. I had an interview there to be their security engineer/hippa (sp?) guy and turned it down. Two weeks later the guy who got me an interview there jumped ship and started working where I did take a job at. (Which is a kick ass company, pay isn't great, but we make a ton of money (job security) and have a very laid back work env, and no I won't tell you where I work. I'm waiting for a position to open up so I can transfer...)
If you do move here, stop by a LUG meeting and say hi. There's a good ale house a few blocks away that we tend to go to afterwards too. (Also in my neighborhood.)
Oh c'mon, just leave silicon valley. Move to a modest sized city with around a million people in it. Less crime, lower cost of living, and believe it or not, they do use computers.
I live in Omaha, NE, about 800,000 people in the metro area. Granted, we have a higher than average tech/telecom industry than most cities this size, but it's not too hard to find a job. I had my last day on one job of 4 years on a friday this august and started my new job on a monday. I spent about 5 weeks job hunting. I still get offers for jobs almost 5 months later.
You may only make $50k a year, but $200,000 buys a really nice house and $800 buys a really nice apartment. I live in a 3br 2500sq foot apt that takes up a whole floor, 2 blocks from a medical center so my neighbors are doctors and med students, and we (2 roommates and I) pay $1000 a month. Starter houses and not as nice 2 br apts are about $125k and $500/mo respecivly. You won't need to pack heat to make it from your car to your door either.
It's time to cut your losses and say you're willing to relocate.
Maybe if we're lucky congress would win and this will get some press. Maybe then congress will realize they're destroying one of the largest industries in the country so they can pander to the puny entertainment industry. Along with that whole taking away freedom thing. A wake up call like that award could maybe help a bit.
Then again, maybe not...
It's gonna suck in a decade or two when the entire computer industry has moved to a a free country and talking about moving out of the US to get a job will get me thrown in jail as a terrorist.
Don't be surprised to see a beowulf cluster on a list like this 20 years from now. It is having an impact like the microprocessor did. Massive amounts of computing power for cheap compared to the alternatives. People in research and graphics are eating them up like crazy.
That's not just a chip, it's more like a processor card. Chip, external cache, system interface, etc. Not only that, it's a processor card that not many mac owners buy. That's why it's so pricey.
The real cost of a g3/4 chip is around the cost of a p3/4.
Jeeze man, look at the date on the page. Sept 99. A quick google says that in sept 99 the fastest pc cpu was a 600mhz p3. I believe 450mhz g3s were shipping at the time.
I'm not going to get into the differences in the chips at the time, but apple's ads were pretty accurate. Today is a different story though.
Please step away from your distortion field.
Or mutant ninja turtles...
I do this sometimes, but it's usually because I forgot to make a list and I'm trying to remember the 30 or so things I need to pick up.
Court martial military sysadmins? No way. It's not their fault.
Hear me out here. The people running these systems (from my ex-air force perspective) are between kids out of high school (Airmen) and 20-sometings that have been doing military computer stuff since high school (NCOs). All they know is what the military trained them to do. Guess who decides what to train them in? NCOs and Officers. That's for the military people. There are civilians too, usually retired military. They all have to abide by policies set out by the DOD which are something short sited and not very well thought out. They also leave very little room to impliment no ideas and take care of important problems right away.
The best and the brightest who can actually secure a system don't go into the military. When they do, they're ignored because they're 'young' and have no 'experience'. I fell in the later catagory. There's nothing like the feeling of fixing somebody else's screw up (usually a contractor) and 30 minutes later be taking out the trash or doing some other degrading duty. Needless to say I got out and now make alot more money with alot less hassle, have a boss who listens to me (mostly), and can actually advance in the company and my career without having to wait X number of years and take a test on things that have nothing to do with my job.
Anyway, without going off topic. You can't blame these guys, most of them don't have a clue, those with a clue have their hands tied by stupid policies.
If you want to blame somebody, blame the high ranking Officers, they make the policies and the training programs that made this happen. Of course, that would never happen, some poor Airmen or overworked NCO will get railroaded.
Oh well, I'm free and clear now. At least I got a jump start on life and some free college out of the deal.
Using solid state drives you could probobly do it on the order of about a half billion dollars. Possible indeed. But there are other things you haven't thought of. You didn't say if you need to have this thing on 24/7, but I'm going to assume you do.
1: Power. Solid state drives tend to forget stuff when shut off, so you'll need a UPS in the data center to handle it. No biggie, except when you realize that the batteries are going to need maintence. They do go bad after a while, I know of no batteries that don't. In theory you could do flash memory instead of volitile for about 3 times the cost (512meg ATA flash storage is $300 on pricewatch, add raid, san, etc, pricey but possible)
2: Cooling. Massive amounts of solid state chips are going to generate massive amounts of heat. This means water chillers (most likely) and fans. Both involve moters. Moters go bad. You can build redundent, but eventually both cooling systems will go out.
3: The hardware it's self. CPUs go bad, controllers blow up, ram chips go out, power supplies blow, etc. You can only leave a redundant system alone for so long until it's no longer redundant.
4: Acts of god. Floods, fire, lack of fuel for power, emi. These things happen. You can build two data centers in seperate locations and write one off when something bad happens, but then you're back to no redundancy.
5: Murphy's law. Don't forget, Murphy always wins.
Having worked on a LARGE scale redundent system (Think uncle sam), I can tell you these things do require maintence. Building a system that large without bugs that creep up in a few years time is going to be next to impossible.
That said, it sounds neat. Let me know when you guys need an engineer to build it, it'd be fun.
Female friends of mine seem to think target has a better selection of clothing. It seems walmart doesn't know much about fasion.
No, this is like walking into a company's public library and finding a book on a shelf in the corner that wasn't in the card catalog.
Whine and moan all they want, they still stuck it in a public place. They should have stuck it behind a locked closed door. Then it's secure. If you bust open the door, that would be a crime. Finding something sitting in a public place that's not advertised is not a crime.
I know I'd never keep a laptop for 50 years, but I might keep one for 5 years. I'd be happy to have a 5 year battery. Or a flashlight, or a radio, etc. 50 years is an unintentional side effect. Besides, if they use some sort of standard cells, I can just transfer them to whatever device I end up using down the line. That would make it worth the high premium for something like this.
The article says it's planned on being used in small remote devices. If they get this thing down to 1mm and mass produce it, what about using it for things like laptops, cell phones, etc?
Sure, it would take alot of those 1mm cells, but couldn't it be done? I'd love to have a laptop that ran 50 years between replacing the battery, with no charging required.
It's $.0007 per listener per song
100 listeners
* 480 3 minute songs a day
* 30 days a month
-----------
1,440,000 performances a month
* $.0007
-----------
$1008 a month in royalties due
right now tag's trance trip has almost 2000 users connected, that's around $20k due in royalties each month.
there's lots of other crap involved too like record keeping, check http://www.kurthanson.com/ for more info.
It suffers from the same problem as web radio. You're sending a digital stream to a user's reciever. Even with a flag, a user could bypass it and copy digital quality music from it. At least that's the theory behind the taxes that web radio must pay to the RIAA.
Essentialy that $.0007 (for now, legislation is in the works to change it) is to pay for the users who will copy the music off the streaming station. Analog broadcasters don't pay it because they're analog. They wanted digital to pay it because it would mean web radio never got a chance to foothold and give them some competition. The RIAA wants it so they can line their pockets, unlike ASCAP/BMI (that most web radio stations pay and all analog pay) that goes right to the artists.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Has anybody used InstantSSL? They claim to work with IE 5+, NS 4+, AOL 5+ and Opera 5+, which they say is 99% of the browsers in use out there. Sounds like a good deal to me.
I'm looking at using the cert to do some credit card auth for a webhosting company, and I don't really think I'd have a problem turning away that 1% of people who can't upgrade to a browser that came several years ago. That whole 80/20 rule kicks in there. I'm sure somebody who can't be bothered to upgrade to a modern browser is going to be a tech support nightmare.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&q=site%3Aslashdot.org
Too bad it's indie music broadcast in a non-open format. (Windows media) It doesn't seem to work very well on my indie os.
I have this exact same problem. I've given up and resorted to using 60hz refresh only. I checked for lights, moters, dirty power, everything. Remember, this isn't really flickering, this is a kind of shaking. Your eyes will filter it out if you're using a black background, but it's unbearable if you're trying to do anything other than watch a dark movie from accross the room. (I have a 19" sony trinitron in my living room)
Oh, and ALL my monitors do it, 14", 17", 19", cheap to midline to pricey. They also do it in ANY room.
I really wish I knew what caused it... I'm ready to move soon though, so hopefully things will be better then.