Comment Retired (Score 1, Funny) 404
Retired at fifty, you young folk keep working whilst I take it easy (and get off my lawn).
Ganty
Comment Network Card (Score 1) 715
Turned on the computer and smelled smoke. The NIC had released its magic smoke and was dead after that.
Southwest Adds 'Mechanical Difficulties' To Act Of God List
223
War, earthquakes, and broken washers are all unavoidable events for which a carrier should not be liable if travel is delayed according to Southwest Airlines. Southwest quietly updated their act of God list a few weeks ago to include mechanical problems with the other horrors of an angry travel god. From the article: "Robert Mann, an airline industry analyst based in Port Washington, NY, called it 'surprising' that Southwest, which has a reputation for stellar customer service, would make a change that puts passengers at a legal disadvantage if an aircraft breakdown delays their travel. Keeping a fleet mechanically sound 'is certainly within the control of any airline,' Mann said. 'Putting mechanical issues in the same category as an act of God — I don't think that's what God intended.'"
Comment Language Problems (Score 3, Insightful) 572
Stargate Universe in Hungarian loses some impact, so does CSI Crime Scene Investigation. I therefore download episodes as they are shown and watch them in English. OK, so I am a pirate, but I can't see how MGM or CBS lose out here?
Ganty
Comment Re:picnic? (Score 1) 122
The picnic was rained off but hundreds of us did form a big '42' in Moscow Square and then move on to Millennium Park for 42 science experiments.
Comment Ask A Radio Ham (Score 3, Interesting) 398
I do research into high IP3 HF receiver front ends, other radio hams are working with software defined radios, recovering digital signals from noise, DSP chips and even the way the brain perceives sound.
Ganty HA5RXZ
Comment Retired (Score 1) 338
Retired at fifty. Take note, this is what happens when you save for your retirement.
Ganty
Submission + - Why Is Linux Notebook Battery Life Still Poor?
Ganty writes: "I recently purchased a Lenovo W500 notebook and after 'downgrading' to XP and creating a dual partition I found that I had a battery life of nearly three hours using the long life battery, at this point I was a happy camper because it means that I can watch a DVD during a flight. I then tried various Linux distributions and found the battery life under FOS to be VERY disappointing with an average of 45 minutes before a warning message. After settling on Ubuntu I then spent three days trying various hardware tweaks but I only managed to increase the battery life to one and a half hours.
Unwanted services have been disabled, laptop mode has been enabled, the dual core CPU reduces speed when idle and the hard drive spins down when not needed.
Obviously Apple with their X86 hardware and BSD based OS have got it right because the Macbooks last for hours, and a stock install of MS Windows XP gives me three hours of life. Why is battery life on notebooks so poor when using Linux? Some have suggested disabling various hardware items such as bluetooth and running the screen at half brightness but XP doesn't require me to do this and still gives a reasonable battery life.
What have I missed?
Ganty"
Unwanted services have been disabled, laptop mode has been enabled, the dual core CPU reduces speed when idle and the hard drive spins down when not needed.
Obviously Apple with their X86 hardware and BSD based OS have got it right because the Macbooks last for hours, and a stock install of MS Windows XP gives me three hours of life. Why is battery life on notebooks so poor when using Linux? Some have suggested disabling various hardware items such as bluetooth and running the screen at half brightness but XP doesn't require me to do this and still gives a reasonable battery life.
What have I missed?
Ganty"
Comment Don't Buy Sony (Score 1) 291
Fifteen minutes battery life on a two year old Vaio notebook. I also have the letters rubbing off the keyboard and Sony refuse to touch the machine because wiping the hard drive and installing Linux 'voided the warranty'.
Ganty
Comment Headphones (Score 5, Insightful) 379
The inability to use your own headphones is a big problem, in fact this makes the new shuffle unusable for me as I can't use earbuds.
Ganty
Comment DTMF (Score 5, Informative) 215
"Essentially, we're looking to be able to power up/down and reboot some computers, and be able to start/stop some programs."
Dial in using the telephone system and use a sequence of DTMF tones on your telephone keypad to carry out a task. This will be low bandwidth (about 2,700 Hz) and low cost.
Ganty
