During high traffic times, they pretty much have to do the normal timed cycle to allow all traffic through.
But, many traffic lights don't need to be fully operational during non-peak times when traffic is low. Where I used to live, in Michigan, they had basic traffic lights, which they would switch to blinking mode in the evenings (the main road blinks yellow, to allow traffic through; the crossroad blinks read, and people proceed through when they can - after stopping).
In California, with an abundance of tax dollars, they use sensor based traffic lights. So, in the evening when I approach the intersection, it detects me, pauses for several seconds, then stops oncoming traffic to allow me through. I have to stop and wait, and oncoming traffic has to stop and wait. So, it's less efficient for all involved.
The net effect is that I seem to get stopped at EVERY traffic light I hit. Their expensive, over-engineered sensor lights don't seem to operate any better at peak times either.
They pervert science to meet the needs of the big business/polluters.
The end result is that we are at risk. Rates of childhood asthma are way up, carcinogens in the air and water are increasing. They do this under the guise of small government, and deregulation. But, what it really amounts to is a ticket for their big contributors to bypass any responsibility to the people and the environment.. essentially a backdoor tax on you and me - someone eventually needs to deal with the problems they create. Either in cleaning up the messes, cleaning polluted resources like water and air, or paying medical costs resulting from their contaminants. That financial burden gets passed to the tax payers, since Bush/Cheney have given industry a free pass, rolled back regulations, eliminated oversight, and killed any enforcements.
If you think the way they came in and dismissed the problems with Microsoft was bad, you should look into what they did with companies the Clinton administration was prosecuting for environmental issues. They are ten times more egregious.. Companies that cause billions in damage in environmental accidents get most charges dropped, and fines of less than $10,000.
Xorp may be fine for low-end applications, where the cost of hardware is more important than the cost of support and uptime.
But, for any relatively complex network, the tech support offerings of a big player like Cisco becomes very important. And, if they have high performance requirements, the custom hardware in a Cisco or Juniper box is pretty tough to compete with on a general purpose platform.
Even at the low end, it's tough to compete with a Linksys/Cisco box doing basic routing functions. In terms of size, power usage, and noise, a small embedded router box is a much better option than a clunky x86 box running xorp.
A. They neglect to factor in the "Hurricane effect." The President's visits and aid raised him popularity in the area.
Obviously you didn't read the article. The hurricanes effected most of Florida, not just the precincts that used electronic voting. Essentially what they are saying is that if you look at all the voting results for each county, comparing the historical voting patterns you see an increase for Bush across the board. But, the unusual thing is that the precincts using electronic voting increased at a much higher rate than those using manual ballots. They are saying the correlation between the unusual increases and electronic voting is much too broad and consistent to be an anomoly.
B. They performed the same study on Ohio and found no irregularities.
I did not know that. It didn't state this in the article (which you didn't read anyway). But, if true, this would be a strong supporting point for the case of voting fraud in Florida. If the unusual pattern was seen nowhere else, it just makes the results in Florida seem even more suspicious.
I'm not following your logic... The point of the paper trail is that the printed ballot/receipt states who I voted for. I use that as the last confirmation of my intent.. the printed ballot says "Kerry" in the president box.
I then drop that paper ballot/receipt in the box, and if there is a recount, that paper ballot that says "Kerry" on it is counted by hand.
That used to be true, when the vast majority of HDTVs were CRT based. Now that a majority of new TVs being sold are digital progessive displays (LCD projection or front view, DLP projection, Plasma, etc.) there are many native 720p sets available. For example, the Samsing DLPs, which look incredible, are native 720p.
As for 720p material.. ESPN-HD, ABC-HD, and Fox-HD are all 720P sources. With football season in full swing, you can hardly miss all the great 720p sports programming out there.
In my experience (I've had an HDTV TV and receiver for 3.5 years now) there is very little viewable difference in 720p and 1080i content in most cases. They both look fantastic when done right.
The only time I'm unhappy with an HD broadcast is when it has compression artifacts (macroblocking) when the broadcaster tries to stuff subchanels into the stream. Interlaced 1080i doesn't compress as well as progressive 720p, so I have seen many more MPEG problems with 1080i than with 720p. My local ABC broadcaster carries their SDTV broadcast in a subchannel, and I see no ill effects on their 720p subchannel, even with difficult sports programming.
Re:Using gmail.. Don't like it
on
The Webmail Wars
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> No folders. They do not support folders. Sure, they support filters. But I can't use a filter to put mail from a mailing list into a folder. This is good how? What alternative to folders are they providing?
Maybe I'm missing something, but didn't you answer your own question? To get what is effectively a "Folder", use a filter to label the message..
Filter: If subject contains *cocoa-dev*, apply label CocoaML, and skip the Inbox.
It then is not shown in your inbox, but shows up as a new message in the CocoaML label (i.e. the link on the left side shows the number of new messages in parentheses).
This is the same as folders. The only distinction is the way that it is stored on disk, which is irrelevant to the users, since we cannot see/access the storage directly.
This also has the major benefit of allowing a single message to be in multiple Folders/Labels.. So, an e-mail from my sister with pictures of her new puppy can bin in both my Family and Pictures "folders".
Yes, we already have the arpanet -> Internet.. The article does not have a lot of specifics, but the do mentioned "Internet in the Sky". And, I have seen previous articles talking about satellite to satellite communications. Basically, it's a grid of satellites connected by lasers for high speed communications. It would connect to terrestrial networks, and presumably support communication down to mobile nodes - such as jets and military vehicles.
It's a powerful concept.. military grade ubiquitous networking. Complete communication / synchronization / status / tracking of military forces.
I use GMail almost exclusively now.. I check Yahoo! Mail once a week or so, and since switching ISP's I don't use native SMTP/IMAP mail.
The problems with this (which can be solved using this new POP feature) are:
- Offline access. While wifi access makes Internet access much easier, it is by no means ubiquitous. So, when I can't get online it would be very nice to have an offline copy of my mail. POP3 mirroring my GMail to Thunderbird or Apple Mail will solve this nicely.
- Sending e-mail from other applications. I got my Mom hooked on using Adobe Photoshop Album to organize and share all of her digital pictures. And, after changing ISPs (thus losing her old e-mail address) she changed to GMail. These two things didn't mix well.. PS Album uses MAPI to e-mail via your preferred mail client. With SMTP access via GMail, now everything is simple. (other than PS Album's shitty MAPI support. You have to edit the registry to add Thunderbird or Mozilla to the list of supported mail clients. Even then I ran into strange behaviors..)
--- I checked my GMail account, and it currently does not give me the option to enable POP. I guess they are opening it slowly to all users.
Actually, I thought it was bullshit and that type of U.S. litigation was a relativeley recent thing. So, I googled around a bit, and it looks to be true:
http://www.cojoweb.com/selden-motor-car.html
It seems that Mr. Selden, a patent attorney, was working the patent system way back then. He filed for it in 1879, but delayed issuance until cars were more popular.
http://www.bpmlegal.com/wselden.html
The above link has a great image of the "Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers" warning people not to buy unlicensed (Ford) cars.
A google search for 'Selden patent Ford' turns up a lot of good stuff.
- newer drivers from ATI and Nvidia have some support for HDTV resolutions (1080i and 720p) as well as support for custom timings. - The ATI Radeons have an adapter to support component video outputs for HDTVs that don't have RGB or DVI. - Check out "powerstrip", which allows custom timings, including HDTV resolutions, with many cideo cards. - The S3 omnichrome cards claims HDTV support, and is supposed to support component video outputs. But, I don't know if this was ever delivered or if it's still vapor.
But, if you're looking to use 1080i for normal PC graphics, don't bother. The 'i' is for "interlaced" which looks terrible with PC video, and sharp horizontal lines. 720p looks great, if your TV supports it.
Also, since you said 42", you might be using a digital display, like plasma, LCD, DLP, etc. If so, you also need to take the native resolution of the display into consideration. Your TV will scale any video to the resolution of the display, which will make PC desktop video look bad. You want to send it video in the native resolution of the display for best results.
It's certainly true that both the democrats and republicans are greatly influenced by corporate lobbyists. There are still democrats pushing hard for extreme copyright changes. Fritz Hollings, aka Senator Disney, is one of the main proponents pushing for the broadcast flag. He is a democrat.
This is broader than just a partisan issue. Congressmen from both sides have been lobbied to believe that we are in the process of a broad change away from an industrial to an information economy. While this is partly true, it does not justify their conclusion that we need new laws to control the copyrighted material - or to mandate regulations that necessitate computer hardware that takes the control away from the owner and gives it to big media corporations (which is what the broadcast flag does.. if any digital TV is on a PC at all it must be encrypted, and protected at every point from that dangerous owner of the hardware).
That said, beyond this issue you can find MANY examples of republicans being much more influenced by their corporate overlords than democrats. The Bush administration is the most extreme example of corporatism I have witnessed. Read "Crimes Against Nature" by Robert Kennedy Jr. for many examples of Bush emasculating environmental regulations, and appointing former industry lobbyists to EPA offices that should be protecting citizens, not looking out for corporations. Similar examples can be seen in the USDA and FDA. Take a look at "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser for some alarming examples of the powerlessness of these federal regulators under Republican administrations beholden to big business. The November '04 issue of "Vanity Fair" has a followup article by Mr. Schlosser with some shocking examples of the problems we face because of the Bush administration's policies.
What we really need is growth of The Green Party, to counter-balance U.S. Congress Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Business.
Umm, I don't think they are suing their customers.. I have not heard of them suing anyone walking into a theater, or buying a DVD at Target.
They are suing the people who are not their customers, and are instead downloading the movies for free.
I'm not sure why many slashdotters feel entitled to take movies/music/software without paying for it. But, to then play the victim, crying foul because the companies creating the content have the audacity to try and stop it is just silly.
I strongly feel that these companies should not be able to hamstring our computer and home electronics devices with all kinds of usage limitations and restrictions on their capabilities. Plus, the RIAA goes way too far in some of its tactics, and the MPAA has some credibility problems because of some of the jackass claims made by Valenti. But, the general concept of the industry trying to stop piracy of their movies is just fine with me, and completely justifiable when done in a reasonable way.
I hope they keep granting patents that are broader and broader. That just means that they are more likely to piss off the source of U.S. politician's "campaign contributors".. their corporate paymasters.
And we know how fast things get fixed in D.C. when it threatens a politician's ability to stay in office.
Yeah, you're right.. PCI-X boards are usually not very cheap. But, a few searches will turn up some good candidates that are being closed out. Any of which would blow the doors off a 500Mhz PC with 32bit/33Mhz PCI.
A search at Yahoo shopping came back with a SUPERMICRO P4DPE-Q Dual Xeon board for $247. Or, to keep the total cost down, go with a Supermicro P4SCi Single processor P4 board with dual Gig-E ports for $216.. throw in a $50 Celeron, or splurge for a $90 P4 for a larger cache.
Both of those are excellent bargains.. Buy the cheapest CPU you can find for each, and you still have a system orders of magnitude faster than the original poster's 500Mhz PC.
The bandwidth of these server systems is really great compared to a standard PC. I've done some network throughput testing on the full range of boards, and for any serious server application high performance I/O is a must-have.
You may not need much CPU performance for file service.. after all, it's mainly just doing DMA to/from disks. But, I assume it's just your standard PC motherboard, with a single 32bit 33MHz PCI bus.
If you're spending $960 for the disks at Fry's, why not spend another $80 to $250 at that same Fry's and get a current generation motherboard and CPU (they have package deals that are dirt cheap).
For $80, you can get a 5x faster processor, and a much newer chipset with ATA133 and Serial ATA.
For $250, you can get a board with multiple PCI busses, PCI-X and a chipset capable of handling much more throughput than a cheap PC motherboard.
The I/O bandwidth will be your bottleneck with an 8 drive RAID array. The standard 32bit / 33MHz PCI bus only does about 1Gbps. Serving a gigabit ethernet connection will use all your bandwidth by itself.. when you have 8 ATA drives fighting the NIC for bandwidth, you can see a clear problem.
If you're spending that much for the drives, don't hamstring it by skimping on the motherboard. And, in any case, once you have a Linux box installed, you inevitably start using it for many tasks (caching proxy, mail server, ftp server, dns server, www server, etc). So, a beefier system will stand up better.
I didn't use the default File Vault, which encrypts your whole home dir.. I thought the performance hit could be problematic on things like huge iMovie/iDVD projects.
Instead, I used the Disk Utility to create an encrypted sparse diskimage. It's basically the same thing as File Vault, but you selectively put what you want into this other mounted volume. It has worked well for me. I've had no problems after using it for about a year.
The only hassle I have had is that I need to manually mount my "Secured" volume whenever I log in. Since I have some files soft linked into the secured volume, it can cause problems if I forget. There is probably some way to automatically mount it when I log in, but I have not found it yet.
After looking through the WWW sites for Akimbo and DaveTV, I see a distinct lack of mainstream TV.
Since buying an HDTV tuner, and hooking a small antenna to it, I can get all my local stations for free - in a quality leaps and bounds better than what cable or satellite provides. So, there are only a few things keeping me paying those high monthly fees.
- The Daily Show with John Stewart. This could be easily done via Internet TV. I would gladly pay a few bucks a week/month to just get this and not all the other garbage on cable.
- Occasionally, I like to be able to get CNN. But, for the most part I use online news sources, so this is not crucial.
- Sports Programming. ESPN carries a lot of college basketball, sunday night NFL, etc. This would not necessarily transfer over to Internet TV well, because I don't want to request download & see it after the fact.. I want to see it live. Also, when you consider their push into HDTV services.. this is very hard to replicate via Internet. I don't know if this is enough to keep me paying $60++ per month. But, I would be very tempted when my college was being carried on an ESPN-HD game.
- HD movie channels. These are nice to have.. but, DVD's are an acceptable substitute. In a few years, we will have HD-DVD's, decreasing the appeal of HD movie channels.
At this point, I think that if I had the ability to access the few mainstream cable programs I want at a reasonable cost, I would dump cable TV.
These attempts are coming at a bit of a tough time.. HDTV services are growing pretty quickly, raising the bar for quality expectations from TV viewers.
Most of the downloadable / streamable TV content I have seen is pretty much garbage quality-wise.
I don't think they need to do full 720p or 1080i to be competitive, but they certainly need to do better than the smudgey thumbnail videos I have seen.
Maybe taking an HDTV source (where available) then scaling it down to DVD resolutions (720x480) and using MPEG-4 compression could offer a good compromise between quality and size.
So, are there other genetic changes they make to the cats? For example, making them infertile?
Otherwise, how do they prevent people from buying a few of them, breeding them, and undercutting their market?
I am allergic to cats, so I've never really considered getting one before. But, if these come down to the couple hundred dollar range, I might be interested. But, at $3,500/each, I think I'll instead go for that dual 2.5GHz G5 Mac.
That's not a bad looking device. The small LCD display does a nice job with the ebay page they showed in the pictures. But, I still think that to make it a really usable device for WWW browsing, they need to make the screen a bit bigger.
There is plenty of space availble with all that plastic on both sides of the display.
The thing that makes HDTV PVR's relatively easy is that HDTV signals are sent as 20Mbps MPEG2 Transport Streams.. So, they are already compressed, and the computer only needs to write the stream to disk.
To compress HDTV video output (DVI, RGB, or Component) would require compression chips capable of handling 1920x1080 in real time. These are prohibitively expensive, and are currently only used by TV broadcasters in equipment costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To further complicate matters, DVI output from satellite or cable set-top boxes is encrypted (they enforce HDCP usage restrictions). So, even if you had one of those expensive encoding boxes, you still couldn't capture the output. The only currentl solution for satellite is a PVR with an internal hard drive.
One option that may be useful in the future is that some cable carriers are enabling firewire output ports on their cable boxes. This can allow archiving content to D-VHS tapes, future HD-DVDs, or possibly even PC devices. In this model, the MPEG2 stream is sent to the storage device via the firewire - so you don't have the encoding problem.
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During high traffic times, they pretty much have to do the normal timed cycle to allow all traffic through.
But, many traffic lights don't need to be fully operational during non-peak times when traffic is low. Where I used to live, in Michigan, they had basic traffic lights, which they would switch to blinking mode in the evenings (the main road blinks yellow, to allow traffic through; the crossroad blinks read, and people proceed through when they can - after stopping).
In California, with an abundance of tax dollars, they use sensor based traffic lights. So, in the evening when I approach the intersection, it detects me, pauses for several seconds, then stops oncoming traffic to allow me through. I have to stop and wait, and oncoming traffic has to stop and wait. So, it's less efficient for all involved.
The net effect is that I seem to get stopped at EVERY traffic light I hit. Their expensive, over-engineered sensor lights don't seem to operate any better at peak times either.
The Bush administration has emasculated environmental laws, and government oversight of industry.
Check out Robert F. Kennedy's book Crimes Against Nature for a shocking appraisal of the current administration. Another book summary.
They pervert science to meet the needs of the big business/polluters.
The end result is that we are at risk. Rates of childhood asthma are way up, carcinogens in the air and water are increasing. They do this under the guise of small government, and deregulation. But, what it really amounts to is a ticket for their big contributors to bypass any responsibility to the people and the environment.. essentially a backdoor tax on you and me - someone eventually needs to deal with the problems they create. Either in cleaning up the messes, cleaning polluted resources like water and air, or paying medical costs resulting from their contaminants. That financial burden gets passed to the tax payers, since Bush/Cheney have given industry a free pass, rolled back regulations, eliminated oversight, and killed any enforcements.
If you think the way they came in and dismissed the problems with Microsoft was bad, you should look into what they did with companies the Clinton administration was prosecuting for environmental issues. They are ten times more egregious.. Companies that cause billions in damage in environmental accidents get most charges dropped, and fines of less than $10,000.
Xorp may be fine for low-end applications, where the cost of hardware is more important than the cost of support and uptime.
But, for any relatively complex network, the tech support offerings of a big player like Cisco becomes very important. And, if they have high performance requirements, the custom hardware in a Cisco or Juniper box is pretty tough to compete with on a general purpose platform.
Even at the low end, it's tough to compete with a Linksys/Cisco box doing basic routing functions. In terms of size, power usage, and noise, a small embedded router box is a much better option than a clunky x86 box running xorp.
It took me a few seconds to figure out the article was talking about the recording mechanism and not the video quality.
HD = High Definition, as in 1080i or 720p HDTV.
HDD = Hard Disk Drive.
When talking about a video camera there should be a clear distinction.
A. They neglect to factor in the "Hurricane effect." The President's visits and aid raised him popularity in the area.
Obviously you didn't read the article. The hurricanes effected most of Florida, not just the precincts that used electronic voting. Essentially what they are saying is that if you look at all the voting results for each county, comparing the historical voting patterns you see an increase for Bush across the board. But, the unusual thing is that the precincts using electronic voting increased at a much higher rate than those using manual ballots. They are saying the correlation between the unusual increases and electronic voting is much too broad and consistent to be an anomoly.
B. They performed the same study on Ohio and found no irregularities.
I did not know that. It didn't state this in the article (which you didn't read anyway). But, if true, this would be a strong supporting point for the case of voting fraud in Florida. If the unusual pattern was seen nowhere else, it just makes the results in Florida seem even more suspicious.
I'm not following your logic... The point of the paper trail is that the printed ballot/receipt states who I voted for. I use that as the last confirmation of my intent.. the printed ballot says "Kerry" in the president box.
I then drop that paper ballot/receipt in the box, and if there is a recount, that paper ballot that says "Kerry" on it is counted by hand.
Where is the problem there?
That used to be true, when the vast majority of HDTVs were CRT based. Now that a majority of new TVs being sold are digital progessive displays (LCD projection or front view, DLP projection, Plasma, etc.) there are many native 720p sets available. For example, the Samsing DLPs, which look incredible, are native 720p.
As for 720p material.. ESPN-HD, ABC-HD, and Fox-HD are all 720P sources. With football season in full swing, you can hardly miss all the great 720p sports programming out there.
In my experience (I've had an HDTV TV and receiver for 3.5 years now) there is very little viewable difference in 720p and 1080i content in most cases. They both look fantastic when done right.
The only time I'm unhappy with an HD broadcast is when it has compression artifacts (macroblocking) when the broadcaster tries to stuff subchanels into the stream. Interlaced 1080i doesn't compress as well as progressive 720p, so I have seen many more MPEG problems with 1080i than with 720p. My local ABC broadcaster carries their SDTV broadcast in a subchannel, and I see no ill effects on their 720p subchannel, even with difficult sports programming.
> No folders. They do not support folders. Sure, they support filters. But I can't use a filter to put mail from a mailing list into a folder. This is good how? What alternative to folders are they providing?
Maybe I'm missing something, but didn't you answer your own question? To get what is effectively a "Folder", use a filter to label the message..
Filter: If subject contains *cocoa-dev*, apply label CocoaML, and skip the Inbox.
It then is not shown in your inbox, but shows up as a new message in the CocoaML label (i.e. the link on the left side shows the number of new messages in parentheses).
This is the same as folders. The only distinction is the way that it is stored on disk, which is irrelevant to the users, since we cannot see/access the storage directly.
This also has the major benefit of allowing a single message to be in multiple Folders/Labels.. So, an e-mail from my sister with pictures of her new puppy can bin in both my Family and Pictures "folders".
Yes, we already have the arpanet -> Internet.. The article does not have a lot of specifics, but the do mentioned "Internet in the Sky". And, I have seen previous articles talking about satellite to satellite communications. Basically, it's a grid of satellites connected by lasers for high speed communications. It would connect to terrestrial networks, and presumably support communication down to mobile nodes - such as jets and military vehicles.
It's a powerful concept.. military grade ubiquitous networking. Complete communication / synchronization / status / tracking of military forces.
I use GMail almost exclusively now.. I check Yahoo! Mail once a week or so, and since switching ISP's I don't use native SMTP/IMAP mail.
The problems with this (which can be solved using this new POP feature) are:
- Offline access. While wifi access makes Internet access much easier, it is by no means ubiquitous. So, when I can't get online it would be very nice to have an offline copy of my mail. POP3 mirroring my GMail to Thunderbird or Apple Mail will solve this nicely.
- Sending e-mail from other applications. I got my Mom hooked on using Adobe Photoshop Album to organize and share all of her digital pictures. And, after changing ISPs (thus losing her old e-mail address) she changed to GMail. These two things didn't mix well.. PS Album uses MAPI to e-mail via your preferred mail client. With SMTP access via GMail, now everything is simple. (other than PS Album's shitty MAPI support. You have to edit the registry to add Thunderbird or Mozilla to the list of supported mail clients. Even then I ran into strange behaviors..)
--- I checked my GMail account, and it currently does not give me the option to enable POP. I guess they are opening it slowly to all users.
I did not know that.
Actually, I thought it was bullshit and that type of U.S. litigation was a relativeley recent thing. So, I googled around a bit, and it looks to be true:
http://www.cojoweb.com/selden-motor-car.html
It seems that Mr. Selden, a patent attorney, was working the patent system way back then. He filed for it in 1879, but delayed issuance until cars were more popular.
http://www.bpmlegal.com/wselden.html
The above link has a great image of the "Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers" warning people not to buy unlicensed (Ford) cars.
A google search for 'Selden patent Ford' turns up a lot of good stuff.
Ashcroft ensured our safety by covering the breasts of statues in the justice department.
His more radically conservative replacement will complete this initiative, furthering American safety, by requiring burkas for all female statues.
check out the htpc area at avsform.com
Some things to check out:
- newer drivers from ATI and Nvidia have some support for HDTV resolutions (1080i and 720p) as well as support for custom timings.
- The ATI Radeons have an adapter to support component video outputs for HDTVs that don't have RGB or DVI.
- Check out "powerstrip", which allows custom timings, including HDTV resolutions, with many cideo cards.
- The S3 omnichrome cards claims HDTV support, and is supposed to support component video outputs. But, I don't know if this was ever delivered or if it's still vapor.
But, if you're looking to use 1080i for normal PC graphics, don't bother. The 'i' is for "interlaced" which looks terrible with PC video, and sharp horizontal lines. 720p looks great, if your TV supports it.
Also, since you said 42", you might be using a digital display, like plasma, LCD, DLP, etc. If so, you also need to take the native resolution of the display into consideration. Your TV will scale any video to the resolution of the display, which will make PC desktop video look bad. You want to send it video in the native resolution of the display for best results.
It's certainly true that both the democrats and republicans are greatly influenced by corporate lobbyists. There are still democrats pushing hard for extreme copyright changes. Fritz Hollings, aka Senator Disney, is one of the main proponents pushing for the broadcast flag. He is a democrat.
This is broader than just a partisan issue. Congressmen from both sides have been lobbied to believe that we are in the process of a broad change away from an industrial to an information economy. While this is partly true, it does not justify their conclusion that we need new laws to control the copyrighted material - or to mandate regulations that necessitate computer hardware that takes the control away from the owner and gives it to big media corporations (which is what the broadcast flag does.. if any digital TV is on a PC at all it must be encrypted, and protected at every point from that dangerous owner of the hardware).
That said, beyond this issue you can find MANY examples of republicans being much more influenced by their corporate overlords than democrats. The Bush administration is the most extreme example of corporatism I have witnessed. Read "Crimes Against Nature" by Robert Kennedy Jr. for many examples of Bush emasculating environmental regulations, and appointing former industry lobbyists to EPA offices that should be protecting citizens, not looking out for corporations. Similar examples can be seen in the USDA and FDA. Take a look at "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser for some alarming examples of the powerlessness of these federal regulators under Republican administrations beholden to big business. The November '04 issue of "Vanity Fair" has a followup article by Mr. Schlosser with some shocking examples of the problems we face because of the Bush administration's policies.
What we really need is growth of The Green Party, to counter-balance U.S. Congress Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Business.
Umm, I don't think they are suing their customers.. I have not heard of them suing anyone walking into a theater, or buying a DVD at Target.
They are suing the people who are not their customers, and are instead downloading the movies for free.
I'm not sure why many slashdotters feel entitled to take movies/music/software without paying for it. But, to then play the victim, crying foul because the companies creating the content have the audacity to try and stop it is just silly.
I strongly feel that these companies should not be able to hamstring our computer and home electronics devices with all kinds of usage limitations and restrictions on their capabilities. Plus, the RIAA goes way too far in some of its tactics, and the MPAA has some credibility problems because of some of the jackass claims made by Valenti. But, the general concept of the industry trying to stop piracy of their movies is just fine with me, and completely justifiable when done in a reasonable way.
I hope they keep granting patents that are broader and broader. That just means that they are more likely to piss off the source of U.S. politician's "campaign contributors".. their corporate paymasters.
And we know how fast things get fixed in D.C. when it threatens a politician's ability to stay in office.
Yeah, you're right.. PCI-X boards are usually not very cheap. But, a few searches will turn up some good candidates that are being closed out. Any of which would blow the doors off a 500Mhz PC with 32bit/33Mhz PCI.
A search at Yahoo shopping came back with a SUPERMICRO P4DPE-Q Dual Xeon board for $247. Or, to keep the total cost down, go with a Supermicro P4SCi Single processor P4 board with dual Gig-E ports for $216.. throw in a $50 Celeron, or splurge for a $90 P4 for a larger cache.
Both of those are excellent bargains.. Buy the cheapest CPU you can find for each, and you still have a system orders of magnitude faster than the original poster's 500Mhz PC.
The bandwidth of these server systems is really great compared to a standard PC. I've done some network throughput testing on the full range of boards, and for any serious server application high performance I/O is a must-have.
You may not need much CPU performance for file service.. after all, it's mainly just doing DMA to/from disks. But, I assume it's just your standard PC motherboard, with a single 32bit 33MHz PCI bus.
If you're spending $960 for the disks at Fry's, why not spend another $80 to $250 at that same Fry's and get a current generation motherboard and CPU (they have package deals that are dirt cheap).
For $80, you can get a 5x faster processor, and a much newer chipset with ATA133 and Serial ATA.
For $250, you can get a board with multiple PCI busses, PCI-X and a chipset capable of handling much more throughput than a cheap PC motherboard.
The I/O bandwidth will be your bottleneck with an 8 drive RAID array. The standard 32bit / 33MHz PCI bus only does about 1Gbps. Serving a gigabit ethernet connection will use all your bandwidth by itself.. when you have 8 ATA drives fighting the NIC for bandwidth, you can see a clear problem.
If you're spending that much for the drives, don't hamstring it by skimping on the motherboard. And, in any case, once you have a Linux box installed, you inevitably start using it for many tasks (caching proxy, mail server, ftp server, dns server, www server, etc). So, a beefier system will stand up better.
I didn't use the default File Vault, which encrypts your whole home dir.. I thought the performance hit could be problematic on things like huge iMovie/iDVD projects.
Instead, I used the Disk Utility to create an encrypted sparse diskimage. It's basically the same thing as File Vault, but you selectively put what you want into this other mounted volume. It has worked well for me. I've had no problems after using it for about a year.
The only hassle I have had is that I need to manually mount my "Secured" volume whenever I log in. Since I have some files soft linked into the secured volume, it can cause problems if I forget. There is probably some way to automatically mount it when I log in, but I have not found it yet.
After looking through the WWW sites for Akimbo and DaveTV, I see a distinct lack of mainstream TV.
Since buying an HDTV tuner, and hooking a small antenna to it, I can get all my local stations for free - in a quality leaps and bounds better than what cable or satellite provides. So, there are only a few things keeping me paying those high monthly fees.
- The Daily Show with John Stewart. This could be easily done via Internet TV. I would gladly pay a few bucks a week/month to just get this and not all the other garbage on cable.
- Occasionally, I like to be able to get CNN. But, for the most part I use online news sources, so this is not crucial.
- Sports Programming. ESPN carries a lot of college basketball, sunday night NFL, etc. This would not necessarily transfer over to Internet TV well, because I don't want to request download & see it after the fact.. I want to see it live. Also, when you consider their push into HDTV services.. this is very hard to replicate via Internet. I don't know if this is enough to keep me paying $60++ per month. But, I would be very tempted when my college was being carried on an ESPN-HD game.
- HD movie channels. These are nice to have.. but, DVD's are an acceptable substitute. In a few years, we will have HD-DVD's, decreasing the appeal of HD movie channels.
At this point, I think that if I had the ability to access the few mainstream cable programs I want at a reasonable cost, I would dump cable TV.
These attempts are coming at a bit of a tough time.. HDTV services are growing pretty quickly, raising the bar for quality expectations from TV viewers.
Most of the downloadable / streamable TV content I have seen is pretty much garbage quality-wise.
I don't think they need to do full 720p or 1080i to be competitive, but they certainly need to do better than the smudgey thumbnail videos I have seen.
Maybe taking an HDTV source (where available) then scaling it down to DVD resolutions (720x480) and using MPEG-4 compression could offer a good compromise between quality and size.
So, are there other genetic changes they make to the cats? For example, making them infertile?
Otherwise, how do they prevent people from buying a few of them, breeding them, and undercutting their market?
I am allergic to cats, so I've never really considered getting one before. But, if these come down to the couple hundred dollar range, I might be interested. But, at $3,500/each, I think I'll instead go for that dual 2.5GHz G5 Mac.
From the site:
Priced at $3,500, the cost of an ALLERCA kitten is similar or less than some of the more exotic cat breeds available today.
Ummhh.. yeah.. But, it's a bit more than the "free kittens" we all see signs for throughout our home towns.
That's not a bad looking device. The small LCD display does a nice job with the ebay page they showed in the pictures. But, I still think that to make it a really usable device for WWW browsing, they need to make the screen a bit bigger.
There is plenty of space availble with all that plastic on both sides of the display.
The thing that makes HDTV PVR's relatively easy is that HDTV signals are sent as 20Mbps MPEG2 Transport Streams.. So, they are already compressed, and the computer only needs to write the stream to disk.
To compress HDTV video output (DVI, RGB, or Component) would require compression chips capable of handling 1920x1080 in real time. These are prohibitively expensive, and are currently only used by TV broadcasters in equipment costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To further complicate matters, DVI output from satellite or cable set-top boxes is encrypted (they enforce HDCP usage restrictions). So, even if you had one of those expensive encoding boxes, you still couldn't capture the output. The only currentl solution for satellite is a PVR with an internal hard drive.
One option that may be useful in the future is that some cable carriers are enabling firewire output ports on their cable boxes. This can allow archiving content to D-VHS tapes, future HD-DVDs, or possibly even PC devices. In this model, the MPEG2 stream is sent to the storage device via the firewire - so you don't have the encoding problem.