RobDude - I hear your frustration. Personally, it's been quite some time since I had a *serious* hardware problem. Yeah, I struggled, until about the time Suse 9 came out. With that download, everything "just worked" for me. Things have gotten better since then, as well. But, that doesn't help the guy with this thing, or that gadget for which there IS NO SUPPORT! So, I hear you.

Did you contact the vendor of the gadget that refused to work? Yeah - it's a pain, just one more pain in a long list of pains when the gadget doesn't work. But, I hope you DID contact the mfgr, and give them a good cussing out.

Doing so makes them aware that more and more of the world is using Linux, and that they can make money by supplying a driver for us. I've contacted several, myself. It ain't that big a deal, but if it helps to convince one mfr to support Linux, well, I've done a little bit for the community.

BTW - you are aware that not every distro and/or repository supports the same hardware? If you feel like experimenting, you might try some Live-CD's to see which if any makes your gadget work. Just an idea......

x video issues here as well. all i get is a blinking cursor on the screen after the reboot when the installation finishes. It won't fall back to the generic drivers. FWIW, puppy linux runs just fine on the same hardware. So does open Suse.

Alas, as others have pointed out upthread, the high-temp superconductors don't work well for magnets. All superconducting materials lose their superconductivity at a certain magnetic field-strength threshold; for high-Tc materials, that threshold is much lower than it is for "conventional" superconductors.

Even if that weren't an issue, the ceramic materials are generally too brittle to stand up to the mechanical forces inside a high-field magnet coil.

Our lab has experimented with high-Tc superconducting probes for MRI. Even though they're high-Tc, we still end up cooling them to the liquid-helium range.

Some cursory research suggests the following applications:

-- electric motors, possibly for vehicle propulsion
-- maglev devices
-- magnetic refrigeration

It sounds to me like the primary application of superconductivity is in devices that incorporate magnets. Medical imaging devices like MRIs may also be affected by this discovery.

All of this is due to the fact that superdoncuting magnets produce stronger magnetic fields than conventional electromagnets and are cheaper to operate

I did a little work on MRM, which has an infrared seeker in it, and peak gee-loads were in the 8k-gee range (call it 75,000 m/s^2) as I remember.

I have followed Burning Man for many years. I have not attended myself, so maybe I am not qualified to comment, but in the best Slashdot tradition......

I have enjoyed hearing tales of Burning Man from my friends, and I find the images a videos facinating. However it is now clear that the organizers are interested in money, and by attempting to prevent others from capitalizing on the event, are positioning themselves to do the same.

Like the famous funeral held in Haight-Ashbury in 1967 to protest commercialization of the movement, Burning Man should recognize that their creative cycle has come to the point where the appropriate thing to do is bring it all home and walk away.

Burning Man, we knew ye well.

Kurt

Sorry to disagree with you, but the EFF is right on here. If someone chooses to march around naked at burning man, an event open to the public on public ground, and someone else takes a picture and publishes it, your screwed if this bothers you.

If you are concerned about the possibility that a picture of your naked carcass will be spread all over the internet, don't walk around naked in an area where people have cameras. Are you now inhibited because your mama might see you naked on the internet? Maybe, but the artists I respect don't much give a damn about what other people think, and if walking around naked is how they express their art, then that's what they are going to do. Photos welcome.

I fully support Burning Man and the original idea behind it.

Kurt

Main point about why this is absurd is that these folks generating solar electricity are buying power as well as selling power to the power company. They may not be buying as much, but they are buying. As far as a "connection fee" All the power companies that I have dealt with recently (I am an architect) Charge a fairly substantial fee when they install a service.

Furthermore, there is now a market for "green power" In our area (North Carolina), the power company encourages solar, and will pay more for the power generated by photovoltaics than they charge for power from the mains. This is because they can turn around and sell this power for more to customers who have LEEDS certified buildings, or for purposes of a tax credit.

This power company is going at it all wrong.

Kurt

They might as well have asked for the keys to your house, the combination of your safe, and all your banking account info. They didn't do that because it is well understood that this is wrong. I bet the form and policy were made up by someone who's only exposure to social networking sites was over the shoulders of their kids. And this is probably where the idea of asking for passwords came from.

Kurt

If your DOS app. will print to a file, you can print from DosBox. I use DosBox to run an old DOS based Cadd Program. When I want to plot a job to our HP plotter, I select HPGL/2 and plot to a file. I have a little script invoked by a launcher on my Fedora desktop which will copy the file to the plotter que, and then delete the file. Same trick works with a postscript printer.

By the way, Dosemu supports both printing and networking, and has better support for fullscreen graphics. Dosemu is easy to install on Ubuntu. Not so much on Fedora.

Kurt

Text mode apps are great because they fire up quickly, look and act the same on different platforms, can be highly functional and flexible, and use moderate resources. For all these reasons, they will use less of your time. So if your time is important to you, learn to use them.

Kurt

I one (actualy two) for the personal use of me and my family in the original G1G1 program. They arrived on time, are very robust little computers. Great battery life, super screen and with the latest software load, suspend to ram and other goodies work just great. We use them as our travelling computers. I loaded mplayer, opera and midnight commander on the little beast, built a cord so we could run it off the power plug in the car, and we are good to go. I bought a 120 gig usb powered HD for the little beasty, and ripped and loaded our dvd collection on the hard drive. Many hours of driving entertainment for the kids. The wifi is fabulous, and it never met a hotel setup it couldn't connect to instantly. For those hotels with hardwired ethernet, a $10 usb ethernet port does it all.

We are pleased.

Kurt

That's interesting. After reading your post, I ran the same command on my Thinkpad T-23 and also had a hard stop after about 30 sec WTF?

Kurt