Sounds idiotic to me. Non-linear steering is great, but any sort of dynamic/adaptive steering that changes according to conditions is stupid beyond belief and will cause an endless stream of accidents because the driver can no longer predict how the car will react to similar steering motions.

-Matt

Reading Rainbow was a wonderful show on PBS that ran for a long long time, and LeVar Burton has been involved with it and with kids education for decades (even before playing his role in Star Trek TNG). Even though it has reached its goal, I'm throwing in a hundred or two myself. My opinion: Anything donated will be well spent, LeVar Burton is just that type of person, who you know you can depend on.

-Matt

Any advise on using monitors for PCB layout under Eagle?

Over half my computer hours are Eagle hours.

Thank you for the link, CSI! I did not know about that one. It looks like a very handy little board that can retrofit into other ISA systems. ( Yes, I can get desperate enough to fire up Eagle and layout a custom ISA motherboard for something like this if the dying dinosaur is important enough ).

Thanks!

I was wondering why my ThinkPads would not see these.

I was looking into that when I was checking out alternatives to sub-gigabyte hard drives to keep legacy systems ( DOS and the like ) alive.

Sandisk's CompactFlash memory cards ( intended for professional video cameras ) seemed to make great SSD's for older DOS systems when fitted with a CF to IDE adapter. I can format smaller CF cards to FAT16 ( using the DOS FDISK and FORMAT commands very similar to installing a raw magnetic drive ). With the adapter, the CF card looks and acts like a magnetic rotating hard drive. I had a volley of emails between SanDisk and myself, and the gist of it was they did not advertise using their product in this manner, and they did not want to get involved in support issues, but it should work. They told me they had wear leveling algorithms in place, which was the driving force behind my volley of emails with them. I was very concerned the File Allocation Table area would be very short lived because of the extreme frequency of it being overwritten. I would not like to give my client something that only works for a couple of months - that goes against everything I stand for.

So, I have a couple of SanDisk memories out there in the field on old DOS systems still running legacy industrial robotics... and no problems yet.

Apparently the SanDisk wear-leveling algorithms are working.

I can tell you this works on some systems, but not on others, and I have yet to figure out why. I can even format and have a perfectly operational CF in the adapter plate so it looks ( both physically and supposedly electronically ) like a magnetic IDE drive in one system ... but another system ( say an old IBM ThinkPad ) won't recognize it. However a true magnetic drive swaps out nicely - albeit the startup files may need to be changed from one system to another.

First, I will say I have worked for a major oil company.

Second, I will say I have read "Twilight in the Desert" by Matthew Simmons, was an ardent follower of The Oil Drum petroleum web site - was more active there than I am here.. That site was full of petroleum engineers and field guys - and I trusted their insight far more than I trust words from any investment advisor sitting behind desk whose job it is to influence my decisions of how to allocate my retirement savings.

And Third, I will say I swallowed the "Peak Oil" paradigm hook line and sinker. Apparently messed up my retirement savings big time by investing in the energy sector as I believed with all my heart that we were in serious decline.

Suddenly fracking made the scene and all the investment buyers saw energy as plentiful again. And the price dropped, And many of the smaller guys sold out.

I cannot help but wonder if all this panic talk is them yet rounding up another round of panicky people and investors to make a poor investment.

I can't help but remember all this talk about how dire our energy situation was coming from our leaders. Then there is no energy crisis, Then there is.

Almost sounds like Donovan singing about petroleum. First there is a crisis, then there is no crisis, then there is.

We pay countless taxes into our government, and countless well-paid bureaucrats are supposed to be leading us, but does anyone up there really know what's going on?

So far, they seem to rank about as reliable as an ouija board.

How in the hell can anyone make rational decisions when no-one seems to take this stuff seriously? It seems lately all our government has wanted to so is snoop. 96% is a helluva big number.

I believe special interest tie guys have the government release all these "facts" in order to manipulate the market.

When I saw fracking, I was and still am concerned that was equivalent to "blowing the gas cap" on a dying oil well as once we relieved the subterranean pressure that was helping to push what was left of the liquid oil to the surface, we were draining the last "fart" from the earth before there was no longer enough energy recoverable from the lift effort than we were able to recover from the oil lifted. It meant the show was over.

I remain very concerned this whole fracking "happy days are here again" thing has been nothing more than a ploy to get control of the remaining oil reserves at a bargain basement price.

It's kinda hard to have any sympathy when only an idiot connects these 'smart' consumer devices to the internet in the first place. These devices do not have any functionality that I can't already get simply using a Roku or AppleTV or Airplay or Chromecast.

I have a bunch of these... VCRs, Receivers (for the integrated Pandora), etc. I leave them all disconnected from the internet, and so should everyone.

Having just one media device be connected to the internet is kinda like picking your poison, but at least you have a choice. And something like a Roku or an AppleTV is going to be far, *far* more secure than the crap you find in VCRs and SmartTVs and other devices of that ilk.

-Matt

I would not be surprised in the least to find voice over internet protocol (VOIP) completely taking over once everyone has access to this technology.

Who needs a cellphone carrier if they have access to the internet?

The providers as we know them now may go back to selling buggy-whips for all I know...

I was driving down the street and noticed something odd about the car in front of me... the keys were dangling off the back of the trunk! We came to a red-light and I hopped out and tapped on the woman's window.

She was rather startled but I put on my most innocent face and she rolled down her window a little and I said "Miss, sorry for startling you but your car keys are dangling off the back of your trunk!". She did a double take and then realized that it was true! Her button ignition switch had worked because the keys just happened to be 'close enough'.

I said "wait a moment, I'll get them for you now" (I didn't want to get them first because she might have driven off and would then not have had her keys at all). I went to the back, got the keys, and handed them to her through the window. She smiled and said thank you.

I went back to my car and managed to get my seatbelt back on and ready to go before the light turned green again.

True story :-)

-Matt

That Canon can actually do 4K video uncompressed. Why he wasn't using Magic Lantern I just don't understand. There's no point comparing ANY 1080p output against 4K output under those lighting conditions, the post production run has so much more information to work with when downsizing 4K output it isn't even funny. Not to mention the poor lens choice.

-Matt

I guess the real question is... why would someone want to take 4K video with a cell phone anyway? What's the point? If the lighting conditions aren't perfect, the output is going to be crap.

But I gotta question the Canon setup... was he intentionally trying to create the worst setup possible? It was clearly not in focus, and I sure hope he wasn't running that Sigma lens either wide-open or fully stopped-down because its junky when it isn't mid-range. And if the intent was to compare 4K video he should have done all the tests with Magic Lantern on the Canon and the YouTube video should have been cropped rather than down-sized. There's so much post-processing being done that those videos just aren't meaningful as-shown. He also didn't define what he meant by 'raw' vs 'not raw'. What exact video mode was he using for the two halves?

Well, you get the picture. It's just not a valid comparison. Apples and Oranges.

In anycase, I think a large percentage of people will be quite happy with their cell-phone cameras and video. Cell phones have taken a huge bite out of the camera maker's point-and-shoot cameras as well as the DSLRs. But it's like the pad-vs-PC war. Those people didn't need the DSLRs in the first place, and the people who care about quality are still going to stick with their DSLRs.

It only takes once expensive vacation with poor shots for someone to start wishing they had brought something a bit better than their cell phones along.

-Matt

Well they don't really make 5.25" HDDs anymore. 3.5" is next on the list to go. I don't bother with 3.5" HDDs anymore myself, in fact, not even for servers. I stopped buying them last year. Everything is 100% 2.5" now. It's a much nicer form factor and easier to match IOPS requirements against the enclosure with today's drive densities.

In the beginning there were 3.5" SSDs. OCZ for example. They rapidly disappeared. If you go on, say, newegg right now, they list 724 2.5" SSDs and exactly 6 3.5" SSDs. 1.8" is starting to creep up, with 16 offerings.

Performance per cubic meter, anyone?

-Matt

You are talking as though joe consumer can actually run something like that when joe consumer cannot. With Android, joe consumer downloads an app from the app store and runs it, and the app happily slurps all of his data. With Apple joe consumer does the same thing and iOS pops up windows asking him if he wants to allow the app to access his contacts, or his GPS position, etc.

Similarly, Apple at least encrypts everything by default. Android requires you to use an option. Apple closes jailbreaks. Android... not.

VPN? You'd better hope Google store does a better job vetting those apps because the little requestor they put up is generated by the app, not by android. Apple puts VPN apps in its store through a sieve.

Joe consumer... you know, 99.9999% of the customers of these devices, can't program a single line of code and thinks linux is some sort of marsupial.

Guess which one is more secure? I'll give you a hint: People who give a shit about the security of their data and the integrity of their device don't choose android.

Google knows this is a problem. They just don't know how to fix it. But they had better pretty damn fast because fewer and fewer people are interesting in giving away all their personal data to every little app they download.

-Matt

Urm. You are implying that this isn't a problem on Android devices? Sorry to break the news to you, but App incompatibilities on iOS get fixed. I've seen Apps on my ipad-2 break every once in awhile, but they don't stay broken for long.

App incompatibilities on Android, particularly when it relates to a driver bug that requires a vendor fix or app-developer work around, often do not EVER get fixed. It's one reason why apps tend to get developed for iOS first, because developing an Android app that works across umpteen different devices each with its own hardware bugs is a nightmare.

-Matt