OT: Ghostscript, won't install

It's not throwing it away if you donate it to your church or other favorite charity? :-)

But I understand your feelings -- I have an older HP/Compaq laptop I'll probably never get rid of, just because -- even though it's no longer that much of a power-house -- I always thought it was quite well designed for its time and it still works fine as a basic Internet/word processing/etc. machine.

With Apple just about everything seems to be expensive ;-)

I'd definitely be content with a single 30" monitor. You probably do a lot of uC code and stuff, that's different, then you need all the monitor surface you can possibly cram onto the desk.

My high-octane computing runs mostly sans screen, simulations. The usual, I start it, go do some other stuff in the lab, fans kick in, office temp creeps up. Well, at least it did, before I installed the swamp cooler. Since that time it's never gone above 85F.

Wow, and I thought *I* had a lot of LCDs and computers! You've got me beat quite handily! :-)

That's what I've found -- two monitors is really about the same as a single monitor that's, say, 1.5-1.75 times as wide, IMO, whereas 3 monitors is probably as good as one monitor that's pretty close to a full 3 times as wide.

---Joel

They definitely don't want CRTs anymore. There is a fancy hotel over here. When they upgraded their rooms to LCD a barrage of very nice huge CRT television sets were sold via a habitat store. All they could charge in order to generate enough interest was $25.

I still hang on to my old Compaq Contura laptop, has a cracked frame from all the rough landings and so on. Mostly because is was way ahead of everyone else in technolgy back then. Including IMHO the likes of IBM or HP. Only a couple years ago other companies figured out how to get

Samsung NC-10 with over 8h. The trick was: Compaq did that with the archaic NiCd technology. Absolutely amazing. You should have seen the looks of biz folks in seats next to me. Barely over the ocean their highfalutin Thinkpads were at the end, low-bat. I kept typing along, doing CAD, all the way past the first major meal. On guy asked "Does this thing have some nuclear energy source in there?"

I already have a Crapsman RAS that's been following me around for over 35 years. I haven't used it in over 15. I've grown to distrust RASs, which is why I bought my Unisaw when we moved out of VT.

I can't claim to have ever seriously used a RAS, but just looking at them I can see why one would distrust them.

No one's bitten so far at $40; it'll probably end up being free in another week or two here.

(There are a *lot* of RASes on Craigslist locally -- I think it's a lot of children of the guys who bought them back in the '70s; dad has gone to assisted living or is gone for good and the kids are now getting rid of their stuff...)

I'm not worthy of a Unisaw. :-) I have the Craftsman version of the Ryobi BT3000 at present... cool device, but no one would ever mistake its performance for that of a Unisaw.

---Joel

But what is it? Even their site doesn't describe how it's used. Is it an extended desktop, like multi-monitor mode, or is it somehow switched? For $56 there can't be much smarts in there.

way up.

you're

visible

flatscreen

monitor

see the

Walls.

It would have to be bigger than that for me to use it as a monitor without wearing glasses.

chair

...that TSA didn't find first. ;-)

I'd think it would be better with stands at each end so you could slide stuff up underneath. It also seems a bit tall. I only have about 2" under my 24" monitor. My laptop, OTOH, is about 5" off the desk. My eye level is about

I have three screens on the desk in front of me. One isn't hooked to anything currently (it's intended for my Linux machine but I can't get it to work).

I have two of them. One under roof, behind the 40' wide garage, and another in storage. There may even be one more in the stuff my dad left behind when he moved.

Hi Keith,

It's a USB to video adapter -- your plug the USB side into your PC and the video end into a monitor and, poof!, you now have an additional monitor that your PC can use just as though you'd added, e.g., a PCI Express or similar card (...which of course usually you can't do at all on a laptop). You have the choice of digital DVI or analog VGA for the monitor. Internally it's essentially a big frame buffer -- the driver you install on your PC looks like a regular old video card to Windows, and "under the hood" the driver translates the Windows GDI commands (set pixel, draw line, etc.) into some low-level commands sent out over USB that update that frame buffer.

Since Windows just "sees" it as a regular video card, you can use the monitor connected to it for an extended desktop or clone another display.

The only real drawback is that, since USB 2.0 has "only" 480Mbps total bandwidth (and, in practice, rather less), you aren't going to be playing back, e.g., full-motion HD video at 1920x1080 or similar -- if you try, you'll find yourself getting only, e.g., 4-5fps; very chunky movement! However, for regular CAD work, word processing, web surfing, and even watching You Tube videos, it works fine -- you won't notice any speed difference, since none of those uses are particularly bandwidth-intensive.

---Joel

There was a recall on them some time back (I think it's still valid, though). They essentially buy the yoke for $75, or some such. Too many lawsuits.

Could be. I bought mine in '75, I think. It's been apart since we moved from NY in '93. I did use it a lot in that house, though.

I was going to buy a Grizzley but I got an excellent deal on the Unisaw from Amazon. It was only a couple of hundred more than the Griz G0690, after shipping and all.

Cool! Consider it ordered. ;-)

With my Internet connection there isn't much of that going on. I have the second monitor connected to the DVI port anyway. As long as they play nice together...

NEC isn't giving their 30" display away either.

That's always amazed me too. I "justified" a second 1280x1024 monitor when I was contracting based on 10min/wk savings. The real savings was obviously far more, but that was enough to get the point across that monitors are free. It took them nine months to agree (I gave the better monitors to one of the regular employees). We have the same issue now. They're too cheap to buy new monitors for everyone. Of course, when they do they'll buy Dells at list price. Nuts.

wrote in

designer/troubleshooter for

EndoSonics

with

Just the same, v8 _IS_ the buggiest. Really; delete the v.8 product and use a good registry cleaner then install v.9. You will be much happier.

Interesting gadget. But i am a bit of a Linux nut, and would like it to work in Lunix.

There is this curious itch in my brain, somehow i suspect that eSATA or a minor modification of PCIe can make DVI go away (at least for high end).