DTV antennas?

They cannot be downtown for several reasons: North of Sacramento is a large airport, in the southern part is an executive airport. Also, land down there is freaking expensive and building permits out here can take forever. Then when you have one a group will barge in and claim that some stripe-winged gnat is breeding there and that it is a rare species and blah, blah, blah.

But the studios are downtown.

es,

Your retail market support voucher program seems to be highly effective at keeping prices high.

The cheapest generic UK Freeview set top digital box is now just =A39.99 or roughly $20 and for $30 you could even get a recognisable brand name unit. See for example:

or slightly more expensive on the high street in Tescos supermarket

So long as they are selling out faster than they can be produced the price will remain high. And if everyone has a $70 voucher burning a hole in their pocket the price isn't likely to fall much below that value.

Regards, Martin Brown

Keep in mind that we have true HDTV, meaming more than 1000 lines. That requires some serious image rendering horsepower.

It's $40 vouchers, max two per household.

Yep, and call up their tech support number and complain that it's "not working." Grrrr...

Better watch out... these days the likes of Google and Microsoft with their "whitespace" initiative are probably even harder on you than the FCC would be if you get caught. :-)

I've done a bit of computer clean-up in the past and just charged people by the hour. I started out writing up reports of what I'd done, but it turned out that most people didn't even care -- I had several people ask me not to spend the 10 minutes writing the reports!

Do you have a memory tester? Or something more heuristic like running Doom in a loop or whatever overnight on a "tester PC?"

---Joel

I know a realtor who has to bring the laptop to detox on a regular basis. Windows has become so complicated that most people don't have the foggiest what to do when it sputters. It's going to be a growing market.

For older folks it's even tougher. Sometimes they can't even find someone who'd come out to swap the burnt out porch light bulb and they can't get on a ladder themselves anymore. Or the central heat filter in the ceiling. And, and, and ...

Joerg, Why do you keep whining over HDTV? I thought you _didn't_watch_ TV ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I am just explaining it for all the others who do watch :-)

However, we do watch the evening news and the occasional old movie. Plus "Dancing with the Stars" and some PBS and there HDTV pictures are truly stunning. Regular DTV is a bit disappointing. Not only because of the shaky modulation scheme but also because the dynamic range seems to be very few bits. Faces of people look like they have stockings pulled over them or maybe they fell face-first into the masquera pot.

Hmm... the first thought that popped into my head when I read this was, "Hey, one could set up a bulletin board system on the Internet looking for volunteers to do this sort of thing and it'd be a lot easier for those willing to volunteer to find work in their area..." ...but of course that presupposes a working computer system, and that's probably one of the biggest requests.

I know some people who probably wouldn't accept the help from a "stranger" anyway -- they'd be too proud, which I can understand, even though it's pretty silly to not let someone change your light bulb or furnace filter based on physical decline due to aging and not a lack of will. (I'm probably thinking of my own parents here...)

These days security is a concern as well -- my wife is always worried that whenever we have garage sales, sell stuff on Craigs List, etc., anyone who's visiting the house is actually casing it for future robbery. :-( When did society become like this?

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Hey,

lling

But most folks have a telephone. This could be implemented on an IVR platform of some sort. I wonder if there'd be a market for that? Would be fairly simple to implement with an Asterisk box. Just thinking out loud...

-mpm

Hi Jim, That means sub-channel. They have sub channels under all the regular channels so they can broadcast other 'stuff' if they want.

When I first got my HDTV last year, I just hooked the cable up to it directly, and didn't get a converter box for it. Used the converter box on the old 25" in the bedroom. Had fun mapping out all the different channels and subchannels in the digital realm, especially since Adelphia kept changing them!

Charlie

-- Charlie Edmondson Edmondson Engineering Inc

I recently used a bootable program called MEMTEST86+ which runs quite a selection of pattern and offset tests on the memory. It can show the specific conditions under which a bad-data error occurs.

It saved me a good deal of grief, I think. It became clear within an hour or so that my motherboard was unable to run with four DDR memory sticks, in a dual-channel mode, with good reliability. The DDR would run OK in single-channel mode, but would start occasionally dropping a bit or two in dual-channel mode.

Some searching on Google led me to conclude that it's actually a motherboard problem (the memory-controller line drivers don't seem to have enough current capacity to drive the capacitance of four DIMMs at the same time). I returned the four DIMMS, bought two larger-capacity ones, and have successfully run these in dual-channel mode at the highest speeds that the motherboard configuration supports... so I'm now a happy camper and probably avoided a whole bunch of occasional nasty intermittent errors and crashes by doing the tests.

It turns out that MEMTEST86+ is available as a standard accessory to the Debian distribution of Linux, so I've started installing it on each new Debian system I set up (using GRUB as the boot manager). Definitely adds peace of mind!

When I was much younger, it was me that was chasing the women. Now that I'm single, unattached, financially above water, older, and fairly reliable, the women are chasing me. That gives me some negotiating room over such things as the location of my latest project. I once thought I had found a suitable match. Then, she decided to take issue with my kitchen chemical and nuclear experiments. I've been told that I can't be domesticated.

It's been worse. About a year ago, I had some surgery done. I didn't have much strength for a few months, so I just stopped cleaning. Things just sat where I dumped them. I'm still recovering from that exercise in neglect.

One of my techs had a slogan and excuse: "The bigger the mess, the better it works". I've often suspected he was right.

The camera was on a tripod, about 1 meter away. A friend was pushing the shutter release very time I rotated. He pushed too hard and caused the tripod legs to bend slightly. I should fix it or do it again, but it's good enough. Incidentally, the method is quite usable for showing 360 product views. Just put the product on a turntable. There are more efficient (less network traffic) methods, but for small images, the Javascript method is good enough.

Mice and power cords are considered consumables. Customers often need or want a mouse for various reasons. Usually, it's because there's so much crud inside their mouse, that it stops working. However, the mess on the door is strictly storage. I could probably find a better way to store mice, where the cords do not tangle, but the door works just fine. The brand new mice are stored elsewhere.

Most of my customers just want someone to talk to when things go wrong. I often feel guilty reading them the manual, but that's what they pay me to do. For the GUM (great unwashed masses), there's the Geek Squad and clones that perform the same function.

Ummm... the local pirate radio station has been busted perhaps 3 or 4 times in 13 years of almost continuous operation, without any visible effects. Radio Free Santa Cruz:

I'll spare you my opinions of the FCC.

I've had it both ways. Most of my customers are happy with one line descriptions. When I do housekeeping, I keep a running log of what was added, deleted, updated, or replaced. However, that's just so that I have something to tell them when they ask. When I send them an invoice, I usually leave out the detail. However, when they ask for detailed invoicing, it usually means that there considering an insurance claim. Those have invariably blown up on me. To cover myself, I take photographs, screen captures of the problems, and occasionally make an image backup (Norton Ghost 2003) of the entire hard disk BEFORE I start working on it.

I used to have a dedicated memory tester, but it only worked with ancient SIMM's. I sold it long ago.

These daze, I use:

These boot from floppy or CD. Really gross memory problems show up almost immediately. Insidious and subtle problems require an overnight burn-in. I run the test in the machine that will be upgraded. To prevent accidents, I usually unplug the HD power and ribbon cables.

For ECC chips, I'm very careful to watch the degree of error correction. Even though they work, a high rate of error correction is a sign of impending doom. I just happen to be running Memtest86+ on a Dell PowerEdge 600c for the last 3 days. The two sticks of 256MB ECC RAM are not showing no errors, but 3 ECC error corrections. I just dumped a towel over the case to raise the inside temperature. Let's see if I can make it fail. For mission critical machines (i.e. servers) where I pre-test the memory and CPU, I never have any problems. The one's I throw together, without adequate testing, sometimes fail. The absolute worst thing to do is buy some RAM on eBay and plug it into a machine that hasn't been backed up. After trashing a few hard disks, thanks to defective RAM, I don't do that any more.

Hey, it sounds a little like NPR. :-)

I'd probably concur.

Thanks for the links; I'll try'em out.

Do you know if regular old OSes like Windows XP keep track of ECC memory corrections anywhere? I have a Dell Optiplex 380 at work here wtih ECC memory, and I've always wondered if that extra bit has ever been neded.

---Joel

No. That's a function of the BIOS and motherboard. The OS never sees the error or the corrections, just the data. There are monitor programs (Intel DMI monitor) that will track the errors reported by the BIOS.

Intel BIOS ECC reporting specs:

I think you mean Dell Precision Workstation 380. For memory info, I like to look up what's compatible at:

Your Precision 380 is at:

It supports both ECC and Non-ECC RAM. PC2-4200/5300 ECC/non-ECC DDR2 SDRAM DIMMs. Supports Dual Channel DDR. Up to 8GB max.

General explanations of ECC memory (and how it's handled).

Thanks for the links.

Yep, I do. I must have had an Optiplex machine somewhere else...

Our IT guy spends money like water, it seems, so the machines around here came with ECC RAM. I've actually never owned a PC myself that had ECC RAM. What are your thoughts on whether or not it's worth the money for regular old general-purpose PCs?

It seemed that ECC RAM used to be much more expensive than non-ECC RAM, although these days it looks like the price multiplier is

ow

Yeah, but you're fatter now so they can catch up! :))

Just kidding. - It was the first thing that popped into my mind.

Plastic zip lock bags work pretty well for storage, by the way. At least it stop cord tangles.

-mpm

While you, i, and many others here know about THERAC, it is still news to some others even though it is a common case study (like Tacoma Narrows Bridge) for engineers. Or maybe that is used to be. Can you provide the synopsis, or must all others dig it up in places like the comp.risk archives.

Then there had to have been some huge and permanent changes, 'cause nobody pushes GE around.