After struggling along with digital cameras without any optical zoom, and after the relatively timely demise of a Konica FC-1 whose trigger failed just after I compiled enough material to create the portfolio for my basic photography class, I've been blessed (heh) with a pair of prosumer-type psuedo-SLR cameras. (It's early, but if I am not consumed by laziness perhaps I could look up what they are actually called... nah.) These are the type with the video viewfinder, which produces a larger and more expensive camera than using a look-through type (or no viewfinder) but allows full use of the camera during the daytime without necessitating a SLR mechanism. I still want a Digital SLR (probably a Rebel) but I'm ecstatic to have what I've got, considering what little I paid.

To wit, I literally inherited one camera, a Konica/Minolta DiMAGE Z6 (yay for leet trademarks) and bought the other from eCost, a Fuji FinePix S700. At the same time I also picked up two free-after-rebate (we'll see) OCZ SD/USB2 cards; you pull off the back and plug them into a USB slot, although I actually haven't tried due to the abundance of laptops with SD readers in the house. I got a 1GB and a 2GB, and the latter is in the Fuji. The quick summary (specs are easy enough to find) is that the former camera has 12x optical zoom, optical image stabilization, 6MP images, looks super goofy, and only shoots QVGA/30fps DPOF video while the latter has 10x, 7MP images, looks super pro, and shoots VGA DPOF video at 30fps, but only does the "digital anti-shake" which is an interpolation function (read: lossy.) Both cameras have a lens just barely adequate for their sensor, which is pretty typical of this type of camera, but both will supposedly produce clear images up to about the middle of the zoom range. The Fuji is a refurb (of course) and came without a lens cap or AV cable, but I got ahold of someone who said they'd send them out to me (I'm still waiting.) The Fuji takes a standard lens cap, filters etc though (the other camera does not, which is another big drawback) so even if they don't make good I can pick something up cheap. The Fuji has twice as many pixels to both the external screen (at 60fps!) and the viewfinder, but no diopter adjustment. Neither camera really has enough pixels to make full use of manual focus, but the Fuji's external LCD is really gorgeous.

The Fuji is my more "pro" feeling camera but I think the other may actually be a better unit. I'll certainly be using the Fuji as my camcorder. I only have the Fuji because it was a rejected Christmas present. The idea was to have an inexpensive but high-quality camera for my lady to take on her impending dental vacation, but it was deemed to be too large. Being excessively large myself, I guess I just tend to forget this is a problem. I propose to replace it with a Nikon Coolpix L14 since they take AA batteries which I consider a must for travel (both of my "new" cameras take four AAs and will shoot 500 pictures on NiMH) but that camera is pretty stupid, so if one is willing to deal with the custom charger there's the Coolpix S6 or the Fujifilm Finepix J10 available right now as well. All three of these cameras shoot VGA-res video and take SDHC cards so as long as you can keep them fed with power they seem to be ideal small cameras for travel. Neither of my cameras will take an SDHC, oddly in the case of the Fuji (which uselessly will take XD or SD cards, as if anyone would ever want to use an XD card for anything. I guess it's handy to have an extra XD card reader though. Maybe.)

I also have sent my laptop in, gotten it back, and put windows xp back on it since I got fed up with Linux on it. This machine was intended for Windows, and honestly I seem to have virtually no problems with this machine and XPSP3. So long as I don't expect too much, anyway :) But there is a story here, and I don't feel like telling it just now.

It's magic, it's tragic, it's my Compaq nw9440 P/N EZ901AA#ABA! The optical drive has been replaced twice for self-ejecting, and one more time because they sent me the wrong drive once. One power supply went bad and "fully" drained the battery twice, which killed it permanently; they sent me the wrong power supply twice, and finally replaced my battery when they sent me the right one on the third go. On my latest support call (optical drive again) they've decided to replace my motherboard and again replace my optical drive - but they spuriously input the wrong email address for me on my last call and I found out that UPS had misdelivered the replacement optical drive the day after it happened when they called me to confirm "my" email canceling the shipment of my replacement optical drive, which was already lost! The really good part? This is a business-class notebook with a three year onsite warranty. The total sticker price with the dock was around three thousand dollars. This laptop has cost me dozens of hours (not counting the funky EDID, poorly implemented intel HDA audio, and garbage Conexant HSF modem which doesn't work properly even with the linuxant driver) and now I'm mad... how do I get even?

hypermicro is selling some very nice dual-processor 1U IBM servers for around two hundred bucks; both are xSeries eserver systems. I got the eserver 325 with dual Opteron 246s and 1GB for $189, and added two 512MB ECC DDR333 DIMMs for a total shipped cost around $230. The system now has a 120GB disk (included) and 2GB of DDR333 with Chipkill ECC. There is also an onboard Ultra320 SCSI controller even though this is an IDE model, it is unused. Rails are included for the second drive bay. The optical drive is a notebook CDROM but it is cabled using full size cables and an adapter board, so it should be trivial to switch. Finally, the system has two 100MHz 64-bit PCI-X slots; I actually had a dual-channel SCSI RAID controller lying around with a whopping 32MB of SDRAM on it, so I threw it in there. Quad USB, AMD chipset, Dual Linux-supported Broadcom GigE ports on the back along with a DB9 serial and a VGA port.

You can also get a Dual Xeon which is very similar; it's 2.8 GHz, has 2GB RAM, and has no VGA port. You need a C2T breakout cable (~$20-50 on ebay) or to add a PCI VGA card (supposedly) in order to get a console; C2T does include PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors, however. This system is however $250 and is not advertised as including a hard disk. Because the types are not advertised I don't know if it's a SCSI model or not. The Xeon probably has slightly more raw processing power. The Opteron certainly has superior memory bandwidth (especially with four DIMMs.)

I am currently installing Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 Server for AMD64 on my system, and intend to provide report of how the install proceeded. I am using a Logitech Netplay USB keyboard and also have plugged in a Logitech Optical Wheel mouse. (I am amassing quite the collection of brand-name space heaters once again, what with my HP/Compaq "mobile workstation", ye olde IBM Thinkpad A21p, and Cisco Catalyst 3548XL. Nothing like the days when I had a stack of Apollos, some RT PCs and an Indigo, though... thank goodness.

Anyway, obviously I haven't completed an install yet, but so far there have been no snags whatsoever. None. I expect to have problems with lm-sensors, but who knows, it might be possible to get lucky. IBM offers some Linux-related downloads for this system, which not only was once the basis of a Linux-base cluster near the top of the Top500 running SuSe 8.

They originally started at $2,919, mind you that's one Opteron 240 and, IIRC, 512MB RAM and no disk (IDE cable is present, SCSI controller is present but no backplane.) Now yours for a much, much lower price.

The full fan speed would be fearsome, but I never expect to hear it except when cold-booting.

I'm using a modem and trying to check out some CVS projects. When svn fails I can just cd into the directory and type "svn up" and it picks right up where it left off. When I do this with cvs, it only updates successfully-downloaded files. Trying to issue the same checkout command from the same working directory as the first time results in EXTREME SLOWNESS as cvs tells me to move aside existing files. How do I resume a cvs checkout in a reasonable fashion? Do I really have to start all over? Because some projects are literally impossible for me to download in a single pass.

This morning I tried to buy a pack of DVD+R DL discs from Newegg and not only is there no shopping cart button (I had to find the cart in my history) but the cart wouldn't work - it just kept telling me it hadn't loaded completely. I refuse to enable three different sites' worth of javascript to make a shopping cart work, so I ended up spending five bucks more for the same thing on Amazon.

I had gone to Newegg this morning only because Geeks.com (with whom I have had better results in general) has been raising prices and is no longer all that compelling. They keep selling refurb laptops for more than I can find an equivalent product new (and usually from an equally or more reputable manufacturer) for example. If I can't stand Newegg or Computer Geeks, where the heck do I shop?

I would very much prefer it if their website were usable on slow connections. I was going to suggest IKEA as an example of the web done right, but they have gone to putting a big fat flash movie on their front page, which requires a newer flash than I have on Ubuntu Gutsy.

"relative speeds...are certainly present and noticeable at far lower velocities e.g. atomic clocks on Concord, GR corrections to GPS satellite clocks etc. Physics professor speaking here :-)." - Roger W Moore

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=523464&cid=23083626

"Everything is funny. Some things just aren't funny to you." - AC

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=441794&cid=22300386

My wife has been wanting a notebook for a while. We've finally decided to drop the cash (not a lot, under $1,500) on one and I've been shopping for a couple of days. I was browsing Best Buy's listings (I know I know, Best Buy is evil...I'm just looking for price comparisons) and noticed they sold Macs.

I should take a moment to say that I've got no problem with Macs. I absolutely hated them prior to OSX, but since they finally got a decent OS I have no objection to owning one. Well, one objection: the obscene price one pays for the privilege of owning a computer with that great Apple logo on it. I've always known there was a difference in price between Macs and PCs in the desktop market, but it was never more than a few hundred dollars in the low end market and I could write that off considering the software package that you get with a Mac versus the utter lack of anything useful installed by a typical PC OEM.

So back to my laptop shopping: I decide to see what Mac has to offer, to see if it's worth getting my wife to an Apple store to try out the OS and see if she likes it. I search by brand, sort by price, and find that for $1,099 I can have a MacBook with a 13-inch screen, 80 GB HDD, 1 GB RAM, and a 2 Ghz Core 2 Duo. A little shopping has shown me several PCs with similar specs for $799 and up. $400 can buy a LOT of software and accessories, offsetting the "whole package" argument made by many Mac fans. The deal-killer for me is the 13" screen; that is absolutely abysmal, I can't even FIND a PC with that tiny screen size.

I'm far from being a PC zealot, but I've had enough Mac zealots here try to convince me that Mac is in fact a better deal, when clearly I can a lot more for my money with a PC. If any of you actually bother to read this, remember this: Mac isn't for the budget-conscious. It's a great platform with solid hardware and an excellent OS, but with a little effort a person can save hundreds of dollars (without sacrificing stability, don't try that tired argument with me) by buying a PC.

"You should use your moderator points to determine if comments are interesting, etc. Not to upvote crap you agree with in the most childish digg-style possible. By validating the parent poster's simplistic and stupid attacks, you're fueling the fire.

Mitt Romney isn't being attacked for his view on drugs: he's being attacked for being a republican. Everyone knows it. Hillary's view on the War on Drugs is identical. Obama actually talks about ramping up the War on Drugs. But they aren't republicans so they aren't subject to the same level of attack.

...I'm not even a republican, and I'm getting sick of this crap. Every election year I have to listen to trolls validate each other's existence while hating huge segments of society. For whatever reason (likely Bush's fumbling presidency), Slashdot leans left, so Romney's embracing of technology is seen as an invitation to attack." - Moonpie Madness

http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=432182&cid=22206250

"Personally, I'd be happy to let the religious folks gather round their altars and sing Hosannahs to their invisbile sky daddy, but unfortunately, that's not enough for them. They need to inflict their beliefs, whether on abortion, or stem cell research, or contraception use, or whatever, on all of us. Why should I trust somebody who closes their eyes to basic scientific fact to make decisions rooted in science that might affect me?" - Lurker2288
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=415294&cid=22005842

"First of all, your arguing against inference. Have you ever seen an electron? Did you ever see your great-great-great-great-grandparents? Did you ever meet anybody that spoke Proto-Indo-European? No, but you can infer these things from the evidence. As to evolution, of course you can observe it. We have nylon-digesting bacteria now when nylon didn't even exist before the 1930s." - MightyMartian
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=415294&cid=22005844

"If you want to send your kids to private school, that's your right. That doesn't mean that you get to take funds away from public schools." - Conspiracy_Of_Doves

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=415294&cid=22005270

Yes, yes it does. If a person is unsatisfied or does not morally support a program or business, they should not be forced to pay for it and perpetuate something they will never use. When public schools finally get the message that their curriculum is so pathetic that the vast majority of parents wish to stop sending their children there, maybe .. just maybe because of dire financial pressure, will they get their act together.

It wouldn't be hard, now, to improve public schools, but it would require moving back the curriculum approximately four years. Eighth graders should not be having trouble with math problems like "-2 + -5". They should not be confused about which ocean is between North America and Europe. They should not be writing at a second grade level.

Administrators and school boards are simply more interested in PR, passing along students who are full year grade failures, and not really ever dealing with serious, repetitive behavior problems. They could care less about what's being taught (unless it's time for the yearly test) and they couldn't care more about how many times you send Young Frankie down to the office for the upteenth offense. (That's the teacher's problem after all.)

I say this as a current public school teacher. Public schools, as they are now, are detriments to our society as a whole. They are a black hole of funding and a student's worst nightmare. Public schools are filled with apathetic, under-EDUCATED teachers who want nothing more than to get their yearly raise and bitch about how they'd rather be doing something else, but they're not talented enough for it.

As long as public schools continue to be funded by the bottomless wallet of taxes, they will continue to fester. Administrations will continue to latch onto ridiculous, time-wasting fads like PLCs as the newest savior of education without every having the slightest thought about the actual material being taught or the standards being enforced. NO... these schools need not become centers of religion. NO... character education is NOT the right course of action. NO... $8 Billion dollars spent on technology, for which teachers who can't even comprehend how to make a table in Word, is not the answer.

Just increase your expectations. That's it, folks. That's IT.

"Well, they're now the proud owners of
network-solutions-hates-non-whites.com
our-ceo-jacks-off-to-goatse.com
batman-touched-my-junk-liberally.com"
-Malevolent Tester

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=410854&cid=21958492

"The real issue is, 9/11 won't happen again. As a country, we've learned our lesson about "just sit tight and wait" when it comes to plane hijacking. Box cutter? You best have a flamethrower next time, because me and everyone in business class are going to beat you to death with our laptops as soon as you start trying to wave that piddly crap in our faces. Akbar Macbook, Bitch!" - SatanicPuppy

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=353633&cid=21273977

"I think, therefore I am an Atheist." - sig of amokk

"Religious fanatic G.W.Bush has killed 100 times more people than religious fanatic Osama Bin Laden." - sig of Nicolas MONNET

Ironically, the rest of his post talked about hyperbolic statements.