Um, no. There are Linux programs that encode to flash video. Mplayer will do it. I even wrote a wrapper around it for mass encoding to flv, both the old and new formats. So they exist:)
This is to some extent a lack of Linux system administration capability. There's no standard way to give out a permission that allows only the operations a co-location facility might need to perform - startup, shutdown, IP address change, and maybe encrypted backup.
Actually there is. AFAIK the "sudo" command can be configured to allow the user to only run certain commands (like shutdown, reboot, ifconfig etc...). I know I use it to give users limited access for computer shutdown and reboot, and nothing much else.
I have read/heard about people cloning Oyster RFID cards for a few years now. The only new thing this time round is that someone cracked the encryption, allowing them to actually make modifications, rather than just straight cloning.
As such I assume the ability to read/write to the cards is already well establised and reliable, now people are seeing what they can do when modifying the data.
As far as I know the Oyster system can only take "top-ups" of about 50 pounds, perhaps someone has been trying to use larger sums, which would cause problems with a system not designed for that input.
I use the command line as well and I just bound that key to "screen -R", so that I can resume the last session quickly. If I really need it, I might script a curses interface to let me pick which session to resume, but for now I'm good with it.
There is a program like xbindkeys, but can work from the command line (does not depend on X). I bind things like volume keys and media player keys. I can't remember the name right now, but if anyone is interested, I'll dig it up from somewhere.
As such, I quite like the Windows Key there, even though I rarely use X.
Strongly seconded. I stopped looking once I found rTorrent, great for running on headless machines (like my print server) that already run 24/7. Set it up in screen and come back every couple of days to see how its going. Excellent! (and feature packed too!)
is to buy/sell used computer parts, which I can do elsewhere without the risk or hassle. You wouldn't happen to know of a site where I can do that from the UK?
In the last two months I have bought almost $200 worth of used computer parts off Ebay, none of them have worked as described and getting refunds and returns are proving such a massive headache that I'm thinking of giving up and swallowing the losses.
Needless to say, I have come to hate doing any business on Ebay/Paypal, and would love to have an alternative.
I recently bought an old Jornada 720 PDA for about $60 off ebay.
200MHz StrongARM processor with 32MB RAM, running Windows CE.
But the Jornadas can Run Linux (I run the Jlime distro), and it has a compact flash slot for storage (I put in a 4GB CF Card).
I can VNC, SSH, do X forwarding and do a host of other things. It also has a PCMCIA slot, so many standard PCMCIA cards would work, including wireless and 3G cards.
Also a hardware upgrade is in the works, within the next few months an upgrade will come that will boost the RAM to 128MB for about $100.
All in all, I am really happy with it. Initially typing on it was a bit tricky due to the smaller keys, but I am getting used to it, I can almost touch type now.
Maybe for 802.11*. But people routinely bounce signals off a radio repeater placed 35,000 km off the ground. They already do, that is how they get internet access at the moment, from TFA:
All online connections today are via satellite which has limited bandwidth and is expensive to use. I agree that a 802.11* setup would not exactly solve the entire issue, but then it was more a theoretical idea, that individuals or a group of people could do it on a reasonable budget with off the shelf/hacked hardware.
Also, bouncing things 70,000 km (35,000 km to the satellite, and 35,000 km back) will instill quite a bit of latency, much higher than an 802.11* link that is ~200km.
Is the United States of America the only country in the western hemisphere with satellites? Might some Spanish- or even Portuguese-speaking country be more willing to help out I presume that is why Hugo Chavez is laying cable under the Caribbean to Cuba (says in TFA). But until then, they have satellite. The cable, once (if) done, will provide with a lot of bandwidth and low latency, so its the best bet, just needs to be finished.
From a quick look on Google maps, it would seem that the distance between Cuba and nearest American soil (Key West) is slightly under 200km.
It would be possible to string up a wireless link, indeed the current record is 238 miles (383km - link
), so it is possible.
I think the bigger issue is the legality of doing this. The embargo on Cuba does not only apply to the governments, but to citizens of both countries. You setting up a wifi link is a violation of that embargo, and could get you in serious trouble.
Am I the only one who still thinks parallel ports are useful? They are a great introduction to PC interfacing for electronics. I remember getting into electronics from software when I learned how to program the parallel port to light up some LED's.
Looking at it now, something that would have needed not much else than an old printer cable, LED's and some diodes now would require a micro controller for USB interfacing and a bunch of other components, not to mention added programming complexity. And all those "USB to Parallel port" devices only work with printers, and do not function like a real Parallel port at all. I guess you could argue that the Parallel ports have become a niche, but I would not say that they are obsolete just yet.
Ya, I hate Experts-Exchange and I can't understand why people pay for their stupid service but I love the google glitch. I get all kinds of great answers that way. I just wish these people would post these questions on a public forum in the first place.
In my experience, the "experts-exchange" forum is just copied stuff from other newsgroups and forums in the first place. I can't remember how many times I search for a fix, and find the same text both on the experts-exchange forum and some mailinglist archive somewhere else. I'm sure they have original stuff as well, but most of the time I found that it wasn't the case.
Originally released in 1999, it was open sourced in 2001 (I think) and since then under the GPL. I was addicted to the demo that came out in 1998 and I'm looking forward to trying the GPL version once I get openGL working on my machine (The multiplayer is IMO the best part of that game, some of the missions are not so fun).
Probably because every locale which is stable politically is (as a general rule) developed, with an economy, infrastructure and other traits of modern nations. Chances are, all the stable countries already used up all of their resources getting to the point where they are. As such, countries that are underdeveloped and unstable, may still not have used up their resources, so logically, when searching, we will find the most resources in these unstable locales still untouched.
Funny that. The windows GUI was one of the things I hated the most about windows, I found it inflexible, illogical and such a pain to get anything simpler then the usual done that I used to rip my hair out.
But hey, different people have different things they look for in a GUI, that is why I like choice. You might want to look at XPDE (XP Desktop Environment). A work in progress to give an XP-like desktop to Linux machines. So far it has been very good for long-time XP users to switch to linux (I have switched a lot of "normal" people to linux thanks to this DE), but I have no idea what it is like for power-users. You might want to give it a go before you put money down for a Mac
I know you were being funny, but I can tell you that I do indeed have a similar issue with my DVD's.
I keep a backup copy of my DVD's on a large 500GB Drive, which I then use to stream to my Xbox (using XBMC). Now I noticed that after a while some movie files that were fine before will not play. It tells me that they are corrupted. I can't play them back at all (or I can only play back chunks of it). This is without actually changing the files on the drive.
So I can load up my drive, and not write anything to it for a couple of months, then when I come back I shall find that some movies no longer play.
This is not such a big deal, as I wrote a script which simplifies DVD to Xvid conversion down to one step (just need a minimum of three commands, input file, final movie size and audio quality) and as such re-ripping the DVD's is little more than an inconvenience. But I still find it strange that files that were good before just randomly stop working after a while.
This is not only happening with movies, the same happened with my FLAC files. Some of the original FLAC's I made a few years ago will not play (they give stream errors) even though they worked fine when I first put them there and I didn't modify them since then. These are more of an issue, as the FLACs are archives of CD and other sources that have since been lost/stolen/in disrepair and I don't always have the original source.
I have wondered why this happens, as I have never had it happen before. But these magnetic wobbles might be the cause. I have checked the disk many times using badblocks with no problems and the issues generally affect files I have not read or written to in a while. Maybe this is an issue that has always plagued drives, but the high density of modern ones make it more noticeable.
Either way, I should be getting a new RAID5 750GB array soon, and then hopefully I will have fewer issues like this
Yes, you do. Even the software mod for the XBox is illegal as you are circumventing copyright protection. Any XBox that can run XBMC can also run copied software.
Actually no, it is not all illegal. Hacking/modding the xbox is not illegal (at least not where I live, and to the best of my knowledge (IANAL) under the DMCA it is not illegal, provided you are not doing it to commit copyright infringement). What is illegal is installing a hacked BIOS which allows you to run pirated games.
The XBMC and Xbox Linux projects actually use an open-source, clean room implementation of the Microsoft BIOS. It allows you to run homebrew projects, but it does not allow you to play back pirated games (If you load up one of the hacked Microsoft BIOS'es, then you can run pretty much anything under the sun). Because of this Microsoft were unable to shut out the projects, and I am sure they would like to as it competes with their media centre PC and XBOX360.
Regarding parent posters question. Yes, it is possible to upgrade the Xbox. Indeed there is a company that offers Xbox modding (or buy pre-modded Xboxes), with a new 1.4GHZ Pentium III CPU, and up to 512MB ram (I think).
Of course if you are handy with an soldering iron, have a steady hand and quite a bit of free time, you could probably upgrade the CPU and RAM yourself, it is possible to do it, but I would not recommend it. I don't know the requirements of h.264 decoding, but I think a 1.4GHz machine should be able to do decoding at least.
I still have in my possesion an ad that came with Microsoft Flight Simulator back in the late 80s/early 90s. It was an Intel 386/SX processor for nearly $1000. Just for the bloody chip! It's interesting that I can get a complete system for half that, now.
Hehehe, yeah. I remember that. Hell I still have Microsoft Flight simulator, on a 360k floppy no less. And I even have a 386/SX computer with a whopping 4M of ram to play it on. Although I prefer to play it on my main rig. It's amazing how far we have come in under 20 years. Not only in cost reduction, but in performance. Makes me wonder what it will be like in another 10 or so.
I know its not being a proper member of Slashdot if you RTFA, but the idea of a method of printing invisible markings without ink was quite something. Only when reading TFA did I come across this little gem:
He and the group realized that most paper manufacturers already inject fluorescent brightening agents in paper to enchance its "whiteness," so they worked to create certain combinations of toner that would allow the paper's fluorescence to shine through when exposed to ultraviolet light, Eschbach said.
Very very clever, but it relies on the presence of fluorescent brightening agents in the paper (these are those "ultra bright/white" paper brands that they charge a premium for). This means that those of you of a tin-foilish predisposition can make use of paper which does not contain these agents in order to prevent your printer making any invisible markings using this technique. Unfortunately this makes counterfeiting not that much easier, as the process that banknotes use to add invisible markings are different to this.
It also means that most company paper will not work (I don't know about other people, but where I worked, the paper was usually the cheapest economy stuff you could find, primarily because they used so much of it).
I can assume that either the premium paper companies are in for a surge in sales from this or all the other brands of paper will start adding these agents and it will become standard. We shall see.
P.S I think the article meant "enhance", not "enchance".
It does have some of the best documentation I have come across. In the form of the gentoo-wiki site. I always find what I need in that site, even when fixing problems with other distros. That site deserved a mention for being so damn good, but I forgot to place it in my original post.
*...my Gentoo Linux workstation......my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart
from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy
fan...
Hehehehe, not sure about the others. But that one pretty much described my Gentoo workstation. I have no idea where it came from (I found the PC in a dump), but the mobo is an AMD machine from some time in the 99's/ early 2000's. And yes, it is overclocked (to a whopping 1.2GHz, almost twice its original speed) and a dodgy fan.
But thinking about it. One of the main reasons I made use of Gentoo is in its flexibility. Originally I found it was far easier to do custom compiles and installs on a machine which had all the sources already installed for me (Rather than Debian's apt-get install $foo-dev package idea, which I hated). Also as a beginner I learned a lot from the gentoo install process. Primarily how everything worked together. Things like kernel compiling, runlevels and inittab I learned from gentoo.
Other things I would do is mix and match parts of different systems. For example with GUI's. I would just compile subsets of what packages I needed for make up some custom xfce/e16/wmaker mashup which suited my needs/wants. I don't know of many distro's where you can rip out GlibC and replace it with uclibC and all packages with only the minimal stuff built, while keeping all your tools and installable packages the same (there are many embedded distros out there, but not many that you can make use of as a general purpose distro with all the same packages as the "heavier" distro), or replacing the linux kernel with another one (like FreeBSD).
Also I do tend to notice the speedups from running gentoo highly optimised. But that is probably because my machine is underpowered. If I had a nice, modern dual core machine, the little speed optimisations would probably not be worth the hassle of compiling from scratch. Indeed I would probably not make use of gentoo when I get a new machine (this one is really beginning to show its age).
Unfortunately I have also found that gentoo has been going downhill in the last year or so. Once when I ran it "stable" I would never have a problem compiling packages. But nowadays I keep coming across broken packages, failed compiles and general problems which require headbanging and workarounds. This is what I would expect if I was running the "~x86" or other unstable options, and was not the case when I first started using gentoo (2003). One of the reasons I switched was the relative painlessness of installation and maintenance thanks to portage (which IMO was one of the best package management systems out there) but lately that has not been the case.
I still like gentoo. Where is currently shines for me in for embedded development. It has made developing an embedded environment so much easier, but alas as a main OS nowadays, I feel I am spending more time trying to get it working then I spend using it. When I get my new machine chances are it will not be running Gentoo (But as I do like portage, I may well end up running some sort of gentoo/ubuntu hybrid. With aptitude for those general binary packages and portage for those "must run as fast as possible" performance apps).
sound quality is lower and it will only deliver mono audio
Not exactly true. You can get AM Stereo. Its just that FM took off before AM Stereo became widespread. But it's a standard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-QUAM
I don't know about quality, as I never used AM Stereo. But some people claim AM stereo gives better stereo separation than FM. Plus at a distance of 1m I don't think interference will be a huge problem (AM actually sounds quite good when you don't have interference. Its just that AM is more prone to interference than FM).
"Why the hell do we incist on stacking up on eachother like there's nowhere to go if there's soo much unpopulated land left ?"
I presume its because not all of the unpopulated land is particularly habitable. I think they take into account "land" like deserts, and other lands which are not the best for settlement.
In order for a settlement you need some local resources, at least things like water and electricity. You could pipe water across a desert and then build a city there, but its not exactly cost effective. Plus I'm sure quite a bit of that unpopulated land are in areas where there are armed conflicts/prone to natural disasters/lack of food supply . In which case not many people will want to settle there.
Other things which contribute to us "stacking up on each other" are things like work. Many towns grew into cities because they were good trade routes (its no surprise that many cities follow established trade routes). These towns needed workforce, rural people needed work, and were willing to "stack up " on each other in return for jobs. Look at the history of London during the industrial revolution, especially the slums. It was a hell hole for 80% of the population (many argue to this day that its still a hell hole, although not as bad as then), yet people still came because they needed work.
Local amenities are also easier to access. You do not need to travel 40 miles to the nearest big hospital. Most cities have a few of them. Ditto things like waste disposal and just getting around. Public transport would be a lot more expensive and uneconomical if it had to sprawl across the entire country, linking very small settlements.
Indeed it looks like it is the whole "economies of scale" at play. The more people that are packed in to a given space, the cheaper it is to provide stuff for them, which means that each person gets more per unit cost then if they were spread across. The only thing they don't have a lot of is space.
Also things like security. It's far easier to attack small villages one by one, then it is to lay siege to an entire city.
Thats all that comes to mind at the moment. But I would not be surprised if there are more reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in the same position as you, only recently found about VirtualBox, and have converted all my VMware images using the instructions here (which are distro-agnostic): http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VirtualBox#Converting_from_VMware_images .
:)
Good luck!
Um, no. There are Linux programs that encode to flash video. Mplayer will do it. I even wrote a wrapper around it for mass encoding to flv, both the old and new formats. So they exist :)
This is to some extent a lack of Linux system administration capability. There's no standard way to give out a permission that allows only the operations a co-location facility might need to perform - startup, shutdown, IP address change, and maybe encrypted backup.
Actually there is. AFAIK the "sudo" command can be configured to allow the user to only run certain commands (like shutdown, reboot, ifconfig etc...). I know I use it to give users limited access for computer shutdown and reboot, and nothing much else.
I have read/heard about people cloning Oyster RFID cards for a few years now. The only new thing this time round is that someone cracked the encryption, allowing them to actually make modifications, rather than just straight cloning. As such I assume the ability to read/write to the cards is already well establised and reliable, now people are seeing what they can do when modifying the data. As far as I know the Oyster system can only take "top-ups" of about 50 pounds, perhaps someone has been trying to use larger sums, which would cause problems with a system not designed for that input.
You know, I would love to have a 'Mutilate' function on sites like Facebook. The internet would be so much more fun!
I use the command line as well and I just bound that key to "screen -R", so that I can resume the last session quickly. If I really need it, I might script a curses interface to let me pick which session to resume, but for now I'm good with it. There is a program like xbindkeys, but can work from the command line (does not depend on X). I bind things like volume keys and media player keys. I can't remember the name right now, but if anyone is interested, I'll dig it up from somewhere. As such, I quite like the Windows Key there, even though I rarely use X.
Strongly seconded. I stopped looking once I found rTorrent, great for running on headless machines (like my print server) that already run 24/7. Set it up in screen and come back every couple of days to see how its going. Excellent! (and feature packed too!)
I recently bought an old Jornada 720 PDA for about $60 off ebay.
200MHz StrongARM processor with 32MB RAM, running Windows CE.
But the Jornadas can Run Linux (I run the Jlime distro), and it has a compact flash slot for storage (I put in a 4GB CF Card).
I can VNC, SSH, do X forwarding and do a host of other things. It also has a PCMCIA slot, so many standard PCMCIA cards would work, including wireless and 3G cards.
Also a hardware upgrade is in the works, within the next few months an upgrade will come that will boost the RAM to 128MB for about $100.
All in all, I am really happy with it. Initially typing on it was a bit tricky due to the smaller keys, but I am getting used to it, I can almost touch type now.
Here are some specs And as usual, Google Images is your friendFrom a quick look on Google maps, it would seem that the distance between Cuba and nearest American soil (Key West) is slightly under 200km.
It would be possible to string up a wireless link, indeed the current record is 238 miles (383km - link ), so it is possible.
I think the bigger issue is the legality of doing this. The embargo on Cuba does not only apply to the governments, but to citizens of both countries. You setting up a wifi link is a violation of that embargo, and could get you in serious trouble.
Am I the only one who still thinks parallel ports are useful? They are a great introduction to PC interfacing for electronics. I remember getting into electronics from software when I learned how to program the parallel port to light up some LED's.
Looking at it now, something that would have needed not much else than an old printer cable, LED's and some diodes now would require a micro controller for USB interfacing and a bunch of other components, not to mention added programming complexity. And all those "USB to Parallel port" devices only work with printers, and do not function like a real Parallel port at all. I guess you could argue that the Parallel ports have become a niche, but I would not say that they are obsolete just yet.
Thanks as well ! (just wanted to be counted, kind of curious how many of us are here on Slashdot)
Ya, I hate Experts-Exchange and I can't understand why people pay for their stupid service but I love the google glitch. I get all kinds of great answers that way. I just wish these people would post these questions on a public forum in the first place.
In my experience, the "experts-exchange" forum is just copied stuff from other newsgroups and forums in the first place. I can't remember how many times I search for a fix, and find the same text both on the experts-exchange forum and some mailinglist archive somewhere else. I'm sure they have original stuff as well, but most of the time I found that it wasn't the case.
You might want to give Warzone 2100 a go.
Originally released in 1999, it was open sourced in 2001 (I think) and since then under the GPL. I was addicted to the demo that came out in 1998 and I'm looking forward to trying the GPL version once I get openGL working on my machine (The multiplayer is IMO the best part of that game, some of the missions are not so fun).
Probably because every locale which is stable politically is (as a general rule) developed, with an economy, infrastructure and other traits of modern nations. Chances are, all the stable countries already used up all of their resources getting to the point where they are. As such, countries that are underdeveloped and unstable, may still not have used up their resources, so logically, when searching, we will find the most resources in these unstable locales still untouched.
Funny that. The windows GUI was one of the things I hated the most about windows, I found it inflexible, illogical and such a pain to get anything simpler then the usual done that I used to rip my hair out.
But hey, different people have different things they look for in a GUI, that is why I like choice. You might want to look at XPDE (XP Desktop Environment). A work in progress to give an XP-like desktop to Linux machines. So far it has been very good for long-time XP users to switch to linux (I have switched a lot of "normal" people to linux thanks to this DE), but I have no idea what it is like for power-users. You might want to give it a go before you put money down for a Mac
I know you were being funny, but I can tell you that I do indeed have a similar issue with my DVD's.
I keep a backup copy of my DVD's on a large 500GB Drive, which I then use to stream to my Xbox (using XBMC). Now I noticed that after a while some movie files that were fine before will not play. It tells me that they are corrupted. I can't play them back at all (or I can only play back chunks of it). This is without actually changing the files on the drive.
So I can load up my drive, and not write anything to it for a couple of months, then when I come back I shall find that some movies no longer play.
This is not such a big deal, as I wrote a script which simplifies DVD to Xvid conversion down to one step (just need a minimum of three commands, input file, final movie size and audio quality) and as such re-ripping the DVD's is little more than an inconvenience. But I still find it strange that files that were good before just randomly stop working after a while.
This is not only happening with movies, the same happened with my FLAC files. Some of the original FLAC's I made a few years ago will not play (they give stream errors) even though they worked fine when I first put them there and I didn't modify them since then. These are more of an issue, as the FLACs are archives of CD and other sources that have since been lost/stolen/in disrepair and I don't always have the original source.
I have wondered why this happens, as I have never had it happen before. But these magnetic wobbles might be the cause. I have checked the disk many times using badblocks with no problems and the issues generally affect files I have not read or written to in a while. Maybe this is an issue that has always plagued drives, but the high density of modern ones make it more noticeable.
Either way, I should be getting a new RAID5 750GB array soon, and then hopefully I will have fewer issues like this
Actually no, it is not all illegal. Hacking/modding the xbox is not illegal (at least not where I live, and to the best of my knowledge (IANAL) under the DMCA it is not illegal, provided you are not doing it to commit copyright infringement). What is illegal is installing a hacked BIOS which allows you to run pirated games.
The XBMC and Xbox Linux projects actually use an open-source, clean room implementation of the Microsoft BIOS. It allows you to run homebrew projects, but it does not allow you to play back pirated games (If you load up one of the hacked Microsoft BIOS'es, then you can run pretty much anything under the sun). Because of this Microsoft were unable to shut out the projects, and I am sure they would like to as it competes with their media centre PC and XBOX360.
Regarding parent posters question. Yes, it is possible to upgrade the Xbox. Indeed there is a company that offers Xbox modding (or buy pre-modded Xboxes), with a new 1.4GHZ Pentium III CPU, and up to 512MB ram (I think).
Of course if you are handy with an soldering iron, have a steady hand and quite a bit of free time, you could probably upgrade the CPU and RAM yourself, it is possible to do it, but I would not recommend it. I don't know the requirements of h.264 decoding, but I think a 1.4GHz machine should be able to do decoding at least.
Hehehe, yeah. I remember that. Hell I still have Microsoft Flight simulator, on a 360k floppy no less. And I even have a 386/SX computer with a whopping 4M of ram to play it on. Although I prefer to play it on my main rig. It's amazing how far we have come in under 20 years. Not only in cost reduction, but in performance. Makes me wonder what it will be like in another 10 or so.
I know its not being a proper member of Slashdot if you RTFA, but the idea of a method of printing invisible markings without ink was quite something. Only when reading TFA did I come across this little gem:
He and the group realized that most paper manufacturers already inject fluorescent brightening agents in paper to enchance its "whiteness," so they worked to create certain combinations of toner that would allow the paper's fluorescence to shine through when exposed to ultraviolet light, Eschbach said.Very very clever, but it relies on the presence of fluorescent brightening agents in the paper (these are those "ultra bright/white" paper brands that they charge a premium for). This means that those of you of a tin-foilish predisposition can make use of paper which does not contain these agents in order to prevent your printer making any invisible markings using this technique. Unfortunately this makes counterfeiting not that much easier, as the process that banknotes use to add invisible markings are different to this.
It also means that most company paper will not work (I don't know about other people, but where I worked, the paper was usually the cheapest economy stuff you could find, primarily because they used so much of it).
I can assume that either the premium paper companies are in for a surge in sales from this or all the other brands of paper will start adding these agents and it will become standard. We shall see.
P.S I think the article meant "enhance", not "enchance".
It does have some of the best documentation I have come across. In the form of the gentoo-wiki site. I always find what I need in that site, even when fixing problems with other distros. That site deserved a mention for being so damn good, but I forgot to place it in my original post.
Hehehehe, not sure about the others. But that one pretty much described my Gentoo workstation. I have no idea where it came from (I found the PC in a dump), but the mobo is an AMD machine from some time in the 99's/ early 2000's. And yes, it is overclocked (to a whopping 1.2GHz, almost twice its original speed) and a dodgy fan.
But thinking about it. One of the main reasons I made use of Gentoo is in its flexibility. Originally I found it was far easier to do custom compiles and installs on a machine which had all the sources already installed for me (Rather than Debian's apt-get install $foo-dev package idea, which I hated). Also as a beginner I learned a lot from the gentoo install process. Primarily how everything worked together. Things like kernel compiling, runlevels and inittab I learned from gentoo.
Other things I would do is mix and match parts of different systems. For example with GUI's. I would just compile subsets of what packages I needed for make up some custom xfce/e16/wmaker mashup which suited my needs/wants. I don't know of many distro's where you can rip out GlibC and replace it with uclibC and all packages with only the minimal stuff built, while keeping all your tools and installable packages the same (there are many embedded distros out there, but not many that you can make use of as a general purpose distro with all the same packages as the "heavier" distro), or replacing the linux kernel with another one (like FreeBSD).
Also I do tend to notice the speedups from running gentoo highly optimised. But that is probably because my machine is underpowered. If I had a nice, modern dual core machine, the little speed optimisations would probably not be worth the hassle of compiling from scratch. Indeed I would probably not make use of gentoo when I get a new machine (this one is really beginning to show its age).
Unfortunately I have also found that gentoo has been going downhill in the last year or so. Once when I ran it "stable" I would never have a problem compiling packages. But nowadays I keep coming across broken packages, failed compiles and general problems which require headbanging and workarounds. This is what I would expect if I was running the "~x86" or other unstable options, and was not the case when I first started using gentoo (2003). One of the reasons I switched was the relative painlessness of installation and maintenance thanks to portage (which IMO was one of the best package management systems out there) but lately that has not been the case.
I still like gentoo. Where is currently shines for me in for embedded development. It has made developing an embedded environment so much easier, but alas as a main OS nowadays, I feel I am spending more time trying to get it working then I spend using it. When I get my new machine chances are it will not be running Gentoo (But as I do like portage, I may well end up running some sort of gentoo/ubuntu hybrid. With aptitude for those general binary packages and portage for those "must run as fast as possible" performance apps).
Not exactly true. You can get AM Stereo. Its just that FM took off before AM Stereo became widespread. But it's a standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-QUAM
I don't know about quality, as I never used AM Stereo. But some people claim AM stereo gives better stereo separation than FM. Plus at a distance of 1m I don't think interference will be a huge problem (AM actually sounds quite good when you don't have interference. Its just that AM is more prone to interference than FM).
"Why the hell do we incist on stacking up on eachother like there's nowhere to go if there's soo much unpopulated land left ?"
I presume its because not all of the unpopulated land is particularly habitable. I think they take into account "land" like deserts, and other lands which are not the best for settlement.
In order for a settlement you need some local resources, at least things like water and electricity. You could pipe water across a desert and then build a city there, but its not exactly cost effective. Plus I'm sure quite a bit of that unpopulated land are in areas where there are armed conflicts/prone to natural disasters/lack of food supply . In which case not many people will want to settle there.
Other things which contribute to us "stacking up on each other" are things like work. Many towns grew into cities because they were good trade routes (its no surprise that many cities follow established trade routes). These towns needed workforce, rural people needed work, and were willing to "stack up " on each other in return for jobs. Look at the history of London during the industrial revolution, especially the slums. It was a hell hole for 80% of the population (many argue to this day that its still a hell hole, although not as bad as then), yet people still came because they needed work.
Local amenities are also easier to access. You do not need to travel 40 miles to the nearest big hospital. Most cities have a few of them. Ditto things like waste disposal and just getting around. Public transport would be a lot more expensive and uneconomical if it had to sprawl across the entire country, linking very small settlements.
Indeed it looks like it is the whole "economies of scale" at play. The more people that are packed in to a given space, the cheaper it is to provide stuff for them, which means that each person gets more per unit cost then if they were spread across. The only thing they don't have a lot of is space.
Also things like security. It's far easier to attack small villages one by one, then it is to lay siege to an entire city.
Thats all that comes to mind at the moment. But I would not be surprised if there are more reasons.