YeshuaAgapao.com Blog

My hoard is actually relativitly small for a typical obsessed Emule or BitTorrent P2P hoarder, although all the ‘lining up’ and ’sorting’ that a typcial HFA does, manifests with me with my programs and multimedia files (it was blocks or cars when i was a kid). The hoard is still under 500GB. About 400GB with installed programs, 300GB without installed programs, and 180GB with niether installed programs or DVD-XVIDs. My external-drive capacity is 330GB on a pair of mirrored 250GB desktop drives and a pair of mirrored 80GB laptop drives. I also have 160GB in my Alienware laptop, which I have installed programs, and an additional copy of my non-DVD movies, Ebooks, RPG books, pictures, docs, Emulator-ROMs, and music.

I knew a few, non-autistic, hoarders who have hoards that are probably multiple terrabytes if they are still hoarding today. Half are porn hoarders the the rest relentlessly hoard warez and MP3s (and today, probably movies). Their MP3 hoards are several tens of gigabytes in 1998 and the warez hoard close to 100GB. My hoard is much smaller, and much much much more organized than these peoples’ hoards. My hoard was a meeger 3GB in 1998 (First MP3s, lots of Pictures and Emulation ROMs), 8GB in 2000 (mostly pictures and ROMs), 40GB in 2002 (huge picture influx), 140GB in 2004 (HUMUNGOUS non-DVD movie, E-Book, and RPG-Book influx), and 300GB today (major growth in DVDs and MP3s and steady growth everywhere else).

I am outgrowing my external hard drives so I went shopping (just did shopping, didn’t buy anything yet). Plus my cat knocked over one my external desktop drives (Western Digital) and it died a slow death over two days (surface scanning / finding bad sectors until it died and froze the machine and became unaccessable & making funny noices after rebooting). It fell down a foot from ontop two external DVD burners and the other external desktop drive, while it was on, landing on the bottom, upright. Desktop drives are far more senstive than laptop drives. A laptop drive (Hitatchi) survived a 3 foot drop from desk to floor, while on, impacting on the corner of the case, and survived with no bad sectors.

I can’t handle loss of my hoard as well as the other, non-autsitic hoarders that I know. These people happilly start over and hoard faster than ever before. I have a much harder letting go of things and I rigorously back up and duplicate my hoard, even though I know that at least 2/3 of it I can re-download from Emule (most of the other third are from the web), but it took for ever organizing it and I can’t remember everything because I’m not blessed with autism-cooperative photographic memory like Rain-Main. Emule has much better longevity than BitTorrent from Torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, about the same as a legal intellectual or small-business web site, if the releaser can get it to at least 10, 20, or 30 complete sources, depending on the leech-factor (high for christian stuff and non-niche legal files, low for niche pirated items, in-between for nich legal items and mainstream piracy) and file size (large files stay on a little longer usually)

****************************************

Apacer Discontinued this . If it was full USB-OTG compliant I would buy this in a hot second. A battery powered USB-OTG DVD burner will let you spew out dozens of copies from any USB device within minutes or hours from any other USB device (depending on how much you fill the DVD) without a PC. Unfortunately this doesn’t do USB-OTG. It came out a few months before I heard of USB-OTG. This can play DVD movies to TV though. It has limited USB-OTG-like connectivity to the built in card-reader, pictBridge printers and some JVC camcorders. So it may be good for photographers who are Area 51 watchers, or those watching that new speculated Area 51 replacement in Utah.

The second link is the model I bought 3 years ago. I gave it to my mother to use as an external DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive to an old laptop becuase I wasn’t using the no-PC DigiCam/Memory Card to CD burn feature that much. It is only usefull only if you needed to really spin out copies rapidly in the field from digital camera sources. Otherwise the Hard Drive versions are more convenient, though I would buy another DVD-burner version like the CP-300 if it were full USB-OTG compliant and kept the DVD-play to TV and the Li-ION battery.

****************************************

The Apacer one is discontinued, but it sux anyway because the Magic Box costs 2/3 as much. This lets you backup things to a hard drive instead of a DVD burner (you buy and put in the hard drive separately. It seems cool. The third link has built-in media playing capability to standard analaog A/V ports (Composite, S-Video, 1/8″ headphone audio or RCA audio – just says standard audio)

****************************************

A best-of-all-products combo of Apacer Disc Steno CP300, Magic Box USB-OTG HDD Enclosure, and 2.5″ Portable Media Enclosure

A dual-drive USB-OTG data copier that had BOTH a DVD-burner AND a 2.5″ laptop hard drive in it. Both hard drive and DVD burner can pull copies from the USB-OTG host port, OR from the other internal device: Port->HD, Port->DVD, HD->DVD, DVD->HD. Then add playing DVD movies to the A/V outputs and playing media files (MPEG 1/2, XVID, DivX, MP3, WMA, AC3, JPG, PNG) off of the hard drive or off of a burned DVD-ROM, all without a PC. $150 plus cost of 2.5″ hard drive and slimline laptop DVD burner looks like a good price.

****************************************

MemoryLabs is still far cheaper than MeritLine on Hard Drives and DVD Burners. Be sure to Pick the Airborne@Home Standard Ground shipping option instead of FedEx-Saver (Default) or FedEx Ground. Memorylabs rips off on shipping from the uninformed. Smart people can find out on their own, and MemroyLabs is losing much ground on the price war on anything thats not a Hard Drive or DVD Burner, so i’m giving out the pseudo-secret now. It is $27 (Airborne@Home) vs $70-80 (FedEx Saver, FedEx Ground) for 2 bare 3.5″ hard drives and 2 bare 2.5″ hard drives. MemroyLabs also sells a lot of CPUs and SuperMicro MoBos. I havn’t price-compared on CPUs or Mobos. But MemroyLabs is flopping (expensive) on prices for DVD/CD media, flash memory, hard drive enclosures, Memory Cards, and MP3 gadgets. But they are defintly killer deals for bulk-packaged (no box) bare-OEM hard drives and DVD burners, as long as you pick the ‘Airborne@Home’ shipping to not get ripped off there. I learned of MemoryLabs from a fan that was waiting to meet some of the San Jose EarthQuake players (MLS; probably just to get autographs really) he knew at the Spartan Stadium. MemoryLabs is based in San Jose, CA. Airborne@Home Ground ships to Pheonix AZ in 2 days, and I’ve never had any defective products from this site (yet).

****************************************

These look cool. This cheaper enclosure has no controller or RAID built in but I don’t care. I need external storage enclosure for several drives that the cat can’t knock over. I’m prety indifferent now, though, because the product description does not specify how the drives in the enclosure will get their power, and whether or not there are any fans (some plastic 5.25″ single-drive enclosures have fans), since it is a plastic enclosure.

****************************************

SATA for your laptops. These let you use desktop SATA hard drives in SATA-Internal to SATA-External enclosures on laptop computers. SATA-2 needs an ExpressCard slot, which is a new kind of slot, so you will probably have one only if your machine is less than a year old. Otherwise you are stuck with SATA-1 cards that fit in regular PCMCIA cardbus slots.

YouTube is browser-cache rippable (cfffc.org, my teenager-years church, is too – if you download sermons, be aware – Pastor Joe doesn’t bother being politically correct and is not afraid to offend, but doesn’t fingerpoint or religion-codemn either). Google Video is GetRight-Rippable. Media Player Classic an play .flvs with the aid of the of the K-Lite Codec Pack. So Rip away! And ignore the DRM section.

****************************************

Who says Lithium Ion is currently higher-density than NIMH? 3.7 volts * 0.75 amp-hours =2.775 watt-hours for the Lithium-Ion AA-size cell, and 1.2 volts * 2.7 amp-hours = 3.24 watt-hours. Lithium Ion is much more sensitive to overcharging and short-circuiting and ignite (Li-Ion) instead of leak or burst (NIMH) when it does get too overcharged or short ciruited, and MIMH can use more basic simple microprocessor chargers, and NIMH is not toxic waste when thrown out. The only issue is that you will need 12 or 13 cells to power a decent laptop, but you at least won’t need multiple banks of them to provide the capacity. A 12-cell NIMH battery pack will outlast a 12-cell Li-Ion battery pack, but you need a minium of 12 cells, which is why vendors prefer Li-Ion. Its not the power density, but the minium volume reqired to provide the needed voltage, especially for very portable laptops and small consumer electronics. My Nikon CoolPix 8800 cammera runs conitunously for a little over 2 hours on 6 AA NIMH (older 2100mah) but a 750mah Lithium-ion (2 14500 cells 7.4v) will last only about 45 minutes. When I get those 2700mah I probably will approach or hit 3-hours of continous operation (I am using the discontinued and overpriced AA module addon). Hopefully the Silver and Zinc-Matrix batteries that are coming out in a few years will make both Li-Ion and NIMH batteries obsolote. For for the meantime I think all the big 14.7v gaming laptops (Alienware Area51m-7000, Dell XPS) that use 12 or 16 cell Li-Ion batteries or 8-Cell laptops that could adapt to using a larger 12-cell battery should switch to NIMH, because it is denser than Li-Ion, just a higher minimum volume to attain a certain voltage.

****************************************

It appears it will be proprietary format and proprietary DRM like Itunes. It seems that it will be more permissive in it’s DRM policies (DVD burning) than most of the competition. But I still prefer unprotected XVIDs that will work on Media Player Classic, so I’m not really interested.

****************************************

K-Lite Codec pack at CodecGuide.com will install the Windows Media codecs for use with media Player classic and other generic media players. THe Mega Codec packs ave the pro/premium versions of QuickTime and Real too.

****************************************

So, Apple’s Intellectual Property tyrrany has made it difficult for FireWire to compete with USB on price??? Oh well. USB isn’t that inferior. Hopefully Blu-Ray won’t make the same mistake, because HD-DVD is more inferior than blue-ray than USB is than FireWire. My Alienware laptop has 2 firewire ports, but I have never used them. I wonder if one can burn DVDs on an external burner over 4x without kicking in the buffer underrun protection? My laptop hard drive can burn 8x to an internal burner, but not 16x. But 4x as a full PC-side buffer, but the Burner’s buffer runs out. Unfortunatly, firewire enclosures cost 25% more than USB ones, partly because of Apple IP tyrrany, so I probably will never know.

****************************************

Typosquatters are like the Junk Mail (snailmail) or Spam Mail (with a good filter). Its a nuisance. I doubt they imitate the site at all as it is a volume operation involving thousands or tens of thousands of domains with dozens or hundreds of corporate targets. It is best to just not click on any of the ads. These sites are easy to spot out once you’ve seen a few.

****************************************

I definitly like ‘lil monsta’ over ‘isheep’. But I probably won’t buy it. I don’t know why the lesser brands won’t go over 1-2GB, but many have SD memroy card slots, so who cares. The 1GB Apacer AU231 is $36.50, add a 4GB SD-card for $80.50 for a total of $117.00. $117 for 5GB is a lot cheaper than a 4GB sansa ($180), 6GB sansa ($220), or 1GB Ipod Nano ($150)

Dell seems to be recalling so many batteries and power supplies lately… I hope it isn’t the end of the 4-6 hour charge up of 2 batteries (14.7V 4400mah) with the machine on (Inspiron 8000-8200). My Alienware Area-51 7700 takes 4-6 hourse to charge 1 battery (14.7V 6600 mah) with the machine off, 8-10 hours with te machine on and relativitly idle, and doesn’t charge at all if i’m playing games or running BOINC / Grid Computing. Maybe its retalliation for Sony’s proposed nasty PlayStation-3 DRM?? That’s a wild speculation though.

****************************************

Isn’t Virtualization used in running 16-bit windows apps and DOS programs under Windows XP? The windows versions of DOSBox and VirtualPC also use virtualization instead of pure emulation. If these things don’t work when I expect them too, this would be a big problem if you needed to run legacy applications.

****************************************

I don’t see much motivation in cloning biometric signatures, so who cares. Cloning e-money smart cards not backed by a central data source is much better. Put $200 on a SRP M-Power card, disney card, food card, etc.., clone it out, spend the money, copy your cloned image back in, and you got $200 in free money again. Like those Game Genie codes that make your money never go down (you have to have enough to buy it but you never actually ’spend it’).

I don’t think i will buy any legal Blue-Ray Movies. I will just download the pirated cracked versions off of Emule. The exploit in the third article is crude and not a true crack but it could be used to rip a whole move. I would want at most two steps (rip/DCSS/concatinate to a single MPeg2 then encode to xvid) for ripping. One step on-the-fly is better (MP3). They do have one-step on-the-fly ripping and encoding for the DVDs but the audio is choppy on the XVID so you still have to use the two-step method.

****************************************

I’m using Emule anyway. I don’t care if you’re picking up stray broadcasts (though it may be different if they are intentional). If you hate it so much, launch your nukes, but you can be assured you puny little island will become cratered radioactive glass in the retaliation (if at least some of them make it through launh and detonate on arrival / are not rusted out duds). Cubans are downloading pirated Moviez and Bookz from all over the world on Emule on their black-market internet connections. If you don’t like, go nuke america, nuke the world, or go massacre your own people, or just eat it and accept the invading freedom. And thats the same for Tunisia, Iran, China, Zimbabwe, and other tyrannical african and southeast asian goverments. Cuba bans all internet usage and computer ownership for its citizens. Internet is limited to tourists in monitored cyber-cafes, goverment officials, and goverment-favorees. Computer equipment is limited to goverment officials and certain communist-run organizations.

****************************************

Thats nice. Force me to pay for proprietary crap and DRM as a part of my new car. At least Honda hasn’t bought into it yet. At least an IPOD can at least will play DRM-cracked AC-3 and plain MP3 files. I will never buy from Itunes. Hopefully they won’t charge a fortune for it if the car maker leaves it as an option. Generic laptop-hard drive USB-OTG MP3 players are really cheap. That’s what I prefer to buy.

****************************************

They hacked around the unsigned driver filter of Windows Vista? Who cares??? It costs $20,000 plus and requires a crapload of red tape to get a driver signed. I’d rather hack. If they plug this hole, another will be found or created, as there is more than just hardcore crinimal motivation to crack this. Microsoft is doing this ’security’ for the ’signing’ licensing money than actual security. The security part is just a coincidence and a part of their propaganda program to get more $20,000-$100,000 driver signing clients.

****************************************

I might be willing to pay taxes for a free wi-fi in my city. Spokane has free Wi-Fi though the free access has a 2-hour per day limit. You can pay $7 or $8 to get unlimited access for a day. Don’t use Emule in the Spokane hotzone because the because both you and the police are in the same dynamic IP pool, and thus the entire spokane hotzone is on BlueTack’s blacklist and you will loose connectivity with about a third of the Emule clients (Yes only a quarter to a third of Emule Users have populated IP-blocklists and only a fraction of that keeps it up to date). Plus Its a Low-ID (no incoming connections), bad for releasers but only a nuisances for leechers. A $2 daily / $10 weekly access fee and a 100MB per day bandwidth limit (though I can easily go over this without Emule) may be reasonable for a subsidized Wi-Fi.

****************************************

WGA is a load of crap. Windoze from Emule with integrated keygens and activation cracks passes WGA. So if M$ tagged you as a pirate, go download windoze XP from Emule and you become a real pirate, but not tagged! I don’t remember which of the arhives do this though. It is possible that the activation crack can ‘crack’ WGA too, but its probably just a keygen that produces keys that match the windows licensing category and license package (if VLK).

****************************************

Wikipedia is already pretty good. I won’t want to give up the free-for-all environment for ‘britannica quality’. A lot of the science articles go far more hardcore than Encyclopedia Britinnica will ever go. If there was a BPAA that was as nasty of the RIAA, WikiPedia would be getting sued already because with or without copyright infringement, it makes me want to buy less science books because I just don’t need them no more Its better just to donate to the Wikipedia.

Here is some stuff I learned about car pollution and the greenhouse effect from HowStuffWorks (and an off-topic bit on electricity):

Gasoline

• aliphatic hydrocarbon (All Hydrogen/Carbon)
• 7-11 (Usually 9) Carbons in a string / line
• # Hydrogens = (# Carbons * 2 + 2)
• 132×106 Joules, 36,650 watt-hours, 125,000 BTU, 31,000 food calories (31,000,000 physics calories; 1 food calorie = 1000 physics colors or 1 physics kilocalorie)

Gasoline Combusion / Pollution

• 100% efficient gasoline combusion passes through the Nitrogen and generates CO2 and H2O from combining the Carbon with Oxygen and Hydrogen with Oxgyen.
• Gas combusion eats up 1 Oxygen Molecule (O2) for every Carbon atom and 1 for every 4 Hydrongen atoms.
• Burning 1 C9H20 molocule consumes 14 Oxygen molecules and produces 9 CO2 molecules and 10 Water Molocules.
• Stoichiometric ratio is about 14.7:1 – For each pound of gasoline, 14.7 pounds of air will be burned.
• Less than 100% efficient gasoline combusion produces CO (Carbon Monoxide; Poisnous), evaporated unburned hydrocarbon gas, and NO/NO2 (nitrogen oxides, NOX; NOS/Nitrous Oxide is N2O; Mucus irritant)
• Sunlight breaks down unburned hydrocarbon vapor, which react with nitrogen oxides to form ground-level ozone.

Farads:

• 1 Columb at 1 Volt.
• 1 Columb = 6.25 * 10^18 Electrons
• 1 Amp = 1 Columb of flow Per Second or 6.25 * 10^18 Electrons per second
• 1 Farad=1 Amp-Second at 1 Volt
• Capacitor is designed for rapid charge/discharge of staged current, not long-term storage.
• 1 Farad as big as a can of Tuna or Larger depending on Voltage capacity (Lower is Bigger b/c of more amp-second capacity?).

Water Vapor is a greenhouse gas also, but it’ll eventually come down as rain. Its the carbon-compound gasses like Carbon Dioxide and Methane that are the baddies. Excessive bacteria in sewage, factory farms, and hyper-fertilized soil, and too many people and their feed/domesticated/pet animals also produce lots of carbon dioxide also. A fuel-efficient car driven 1 hour per day generates the same amount of CO2 as about 240 people simply breathing for an hour. Since peopel drive for about an hour per day it takes about 10 people breathing all day to equal the CO2 from a day’s commute in a fuel efficient car. I’m assuming that people-metabolism and gasoline cumbustion generate about the same amount of CO2 per unit of engergy produced. Probably by the time we get rid of fossil fuels, there will be so many more people on the planet that all their breathing plus the breithing of their pet, feed, and service animals, and all the breathing in backteria in their sewage and fertilized soil, will make up for the difference in CO2 emissions!

How about making Solar powered CO2 processors and then recycle the carbon? Put the O2 back into the atmosphere. Plenty of carbon for plastics, carbon-fiber and other carbon-composites, rather than just letting it sit in the atmosphere. We probably got enough computer technology to develop artificial photosynthesis that may be even more efficient than the plants. With all the jungles being cut down, there will be plenty of Carbon Dioxide (and maybe other carbon compund gasses) for theyse hyper-efficient mass-scale, self powered machines to collect.

I can unofficially fly airplanes, though I am weak on non-GPS navigation from lack of motivation and lining up with runways without memorized/looked up compass numbers and just simply landing, also because of a lack of motivation to practice, because X-Plane isn’t real and I can quit when it gets boring (I usually take off, fly around, often dangerously, get bored and quit). I’ve actually been off an on Microsoft Flight Simulator since 1988 but haven’t learned substantially about flying since getting into X-Plane in 2005. The only thing that keeps me from getting a pilots license now is lack of motivation to spend money on pilot training 40 hours of pilot school is pretty expensive and I probably will not make the vision requirements.

The good thing about X-Plane is that it is FAA-Approvable. The FAA doesn’t approve simulator software, they approve fully assembled training apparatuses. According to what I have read online Anybody who has made a simpit with hardware that follows FAA regulations has had no problems getting approval if X-Plane is the simulation software. I think the FAA approvals on private and low-end corporate sim-pits range from instrument ratings to Commercial Carrier licenses (full-motion only for commercial I believe). DIY is good because any pre-packaged commercial FAA approved training kit you buy, especially if X-Plane is on it because of its pace of updates, will be fairly obsolete, because any change in hardware OR software requires going through the whole approval process again. You can sell / give away exactly identical copies of an approved setup and I think it is either automatically approved or approvable with only minor red-tape. So if you have a $50 copy of X-Plane on your machine, your are using the same exact software that are in fully FAA approved training devices that use X-Plane, even ones approved for accruing hours for commercial carrier permits!!

I’m making a solar powered high flying mutation of the Stemme S10-VT, a Mutation of the Stemme S6-RT, a 500+ knot 2-4 seater propfan aircraft, and a 2-engined ‘flying winnebego’, essentially a 6-8 metric ton aircraft that is 10 meters long and has uber fuel economy, with X-Plane. X-Plane has a few bugs with large, curved propellers pushed closed to the speed of sound (worse on light aircraft), where once you reach 400+ knots, you can sustain it at idle throttle, and if the prop is big enough, you lose control of the RPM and the tip speed is slightly supersonic regardless of RPM setting. It excels in airfoil simulation. Non-airfoil aerodynamics and drag is simplified. Basically Flight simulators is straight table-data for aircraft and X-Plane is Cl/Cd/Cm tables for airfoils and Cd and Surface Area for non-airfoils and I don’t know how engine simulation works, but I know props go through airfoil simulations, not sure about jets (especially the turbines, which are airfoils like ducted props with manipulated air-inflow). Before X-Plane turned into a simulation game, it was an airfoil aerodynamics research program. I would consider X-Plane to be ‘prosumer’ software for research — on the edge of top of the line at the consumer level and bottom of the line at the professional level. For flight training, it is also probably prosumer, but it becomes mid-grade professional when accompanied by professional-level hardware.

Here’s some Links:

• X-Plane FAA approvability brag page
• Precision Flight Controls & X-Plane Professional FAA Approved Advanced and Basic ATDs
• Cat III BASIC A.T.D. FAA and Canadian Transport Approved
• Cat IV M.F.D Modular Flight Deck A.A.T.D. Advanced Aviation Training Device(s)
• Fidelity Flight Simulation Inc – Motus Full-Motion simulator uses Laminar Research’s X-Plane as it’s software
• FAA Aproval letter for a Motus 311p kit with X-Plane software (X-Plane not mentioned on letter)
• Getting FAA Approval – MOTUS simulation device
• Interview with Austin Meyer and Randy Witt of Laminar Research, makers of the X-Plane flight simulator.

Precision Flight Controls’s A-ATDs and B-ATDs and Fidelity Flight Simulation’s MOTUS simulation devices are considered FAA Approvable and X-Plane is also FAA Approvable so mixing the two makes any personalized kit should make it a cinch to get FAA approved.

So What does this mean? Well since Barry Legar’s X-Planes site has been taken down (I have to get off my lazy ass and get these onto Emule as I have hoarded most of his offerings and they are on free-to-distribute licenses so its legal too), here’s some stuff to raise up some paranoia. A Dabbler like me, or an actual analytical spy can reverse-engineer some serious stuff with X-Plane (Orbiter space-flight simulator is hyper-realistic also) and well constructed aircraft such as the ones from Barry Legar. You can analytically reverse engineer performance and tactices from American, European, Russian, and Chinese aircraft to your heart’s content! You can make new experimental aircraft for your own amusement or profit. Self motivated folks with no money (or those who want to hide their training from the law) can learn to fly aircraft almost as good has having real lessons. Then when you eventually go to real flight school, you’d be only filling your self-taught gaps, meaning you’ll still learn a lot of stuff but you can laze through the course also and still pass / get a decent grade.

For those who want to make America more of a Police State, Al-Qaeda (Al-Quaeda, Al-Queida) and like terrorists (or foreign sabotage agents) can train pilots to smack planes into buildings without leaving any fingerprints! The only difference between the $50 X-Plane and the X-Plane ‘professional’ variants seems to be only complicated hardware control device connectivity, but it may only be different in branding and price! Maybe they could also practice their actual attacks such as smacking buildings, nuking Yellowstone, nuking unstable volcanic mountainsides in the ocean, or detonating nukes, bio-nukes, or dirty-bombs, while on a undeviated approach over city terrain (Phoenix has a lot of city terrain approaches). Happy banning! When and if America bans X-Plane / Orbiter it’ll still be pirated on Emule P2P Filesharing (Especially Orbiter as its freeware – legal to pirate and no crack needed) and I’ll still be using it anyway! I personally use x-plane and Orbiter only for my own personal gratification and really could care less who else is using it. More likely, any consumer-available product will probably be barred from further official approvals, but X-Plane has already cheated that with it’s branding strategy and refusal do disclose any difference between versions. I’m pretty sure it is just advanced avionics connectivity, label and licensing terms.

Update 2006-09-25: Barry Legar’s X-Planes site is back up. It has been up for awhile, but I just finally took the time to mention it now. It hasn’t been updated or added to since it went down or gone back up though. Also Austin seems to be working on a hyper-realistic driving (consumer and high-performance road car) simulator going by a sparse mention of a email (Yahoo Group x-plane news) news release and a some of the improvements in the X-Plane 8.50 betas. They are mainly road traffic and a greatly enhanced landing gear tire traction model. These are probably code from the top-secret driving sim being cross-implemented back into the X-Plane 8.50 betas.

I support this cheap laptop. I prefer mass retail/discount/wholesale availability over socialist distribution in the schools though. The Commodore 64 was $150 and people were happy with it. 7″ VGA or SVGA screen, basic 2D video acceleration, and only a 300MHZ processor (very-low-consumption though)? For $150 that will play my SNES ROMS, play old shareware games or older commercial games, word process, and do basic web surfing very well. I want to see this for $125-$150 at my local Wal-Mart. Then offer it through the socialist channels. And Yes I agree to keeping to open-source Linux over anything proprietary apple. Actually I may prefer this over the oragami (Microsoft’s ultra-portable laptop), but it needs to play DVDs via external drive (powering of external drive is not required at this price), Read Ebook PDFs, Play MP3s, Play NES/SNES/GBC/GBA/N64 emulator ROMs with available Linux emulators, interface with external hard drives (doesn’t have to power them for only $100-150), and play XVID files (wherever they are stored) with universal codec packs, and interface (but not necessarily power beyond 100ma) with any USB mass-storage device I may plug into. If this super-cheap laptop can do these things, it might be why Microsoft and Intel hate this. Microsoft and Intel might get wal-marted down.

****************************************

This would appeal to file sharers who like to read books and play emulator ROMs, like me, if it don’t cost too much for its hardware beef. A 4-pound mini-fijutsu tablet-laptop may be better though as the non-keyboard controls won’t be compatible with VisualBoyAdvance, Project64, ZSNES, or FCEUltra.

****************************************

I like non-totalitarian goverments who promote open source software.

****************************************

Seems right. Indiscriminate and childish use of virii weapons of mass destruction by big-ego genius pre-teens, teens, and young adults / college kids transitions to organized crime with a goal and a mission beyond knocking your rival out of a IRC chat room (or better yet his internet connection). That is why the virii and worms these days are very controlled, regulated, and stealthy now, and far more robust than the virii of the late 90s which would bog down your computer as it infects every file in your system in less than 2 hours. There is a lot of psychology behind it now too now that the mob mostly runs this stuff now rather than egotistical teenagers playing with destructive power they don’t understand and effectively aim and control. It is like a teenager using a 10+ megaton nuke central warhead with bio-nuke perimeter MIRV warheads to spread smallpox or a sci-fi like disease with the nuclear shockwave to knock-off his online enemy vs a mob gang using self-replicating, fully automated stealth drones equipped with 0.01 kiloton clean laser-fired micronukes, or cleverly crafted metamorphosis nanoviruses to knock out their organized enemies or to socially engineer people into fraud.

I think telepathy between best friends or close family would be cool. Other forms of telepathy outside of strict useful use of telerecieve and telesend would be like the medical insurance world of screw or be screwed (or likely both if everybody could indiscriminately mind-read). Most RPGs mostly just give modest skill bonuses for close relationships, although GURPs 4th edition adds a mindlink, which is a essentially a permanent or a guaranteed connection telepathic link with one or more people (point cost varies with number – from freakish best friends to a illuminati conspiracy organization like the MIB). Vulcan mind-melds are form of telepathy. Contact-only range, but extremely high bandwidth enough for a two-way full neural-interface level telepathic connection. Most RPGs do not have systems to measure bandwidth, although that would be limited to telepathy and ESP though. Just skill/accuracy and power/range (many have only 1 combined scale). In GURPs, power determines range for ESP, psycoportation, and Telepathy, but for Psychokinesis, its weight, or temperature change rate. Skill determines connectivity for telepathy and overall control for all power categories. There is no mention of bandwidth. I guess a house rule could be made that it would be a function of power and skill and how much of those capacities are being used.

I’ve seen limited uses of holy-spirit assisted telepathy, mostly in the form of prophecy or message verification/repetition, though this is easy to fraud (training/coordination/pre-organized act), and also tongues interpretation is completely unverifiable by nonbelievers, while plain-english or multilingual verification has limited verification capability. But I’m pretty sure the 2-key security system (when ICBMs were manually launched before the mid-80s) for launching nuclear weapons (at least in the USA) and verification / seconding of prophecy have at least slight correlation beyond coincidence, especially since God’s most used communication channels is direct through emotion infested analog human brains and also that drugs and other hallucination-enhancing situations would make one more sensitive to such messages, from any source including your own brain. So I think it probably would be good for God to do extreme messages (voices, images, and especially fully audiovisual and possibly interactive things like angels) between two close friends with holy-ghost assisted telepathy (or high-bandwidth mind-meld) and in situations free of hallucinatory enhancer (extreme heat, LSD, Marijuana, other drugs, extreme hunger/thirst, high blood loss, major depression, severe stress / trauma, etc…). If you think you see an angel or have a strange dream that suggests the end of the world, or tells you to do something radical, then if it ain’t like the telepathic dreams of Explorers (the mid-80s movie) or Vulcan mind-melds (3-way actually w/ god as the 3rd party) with somebody you really trust, I’d ignore it because you might be going looney or just really desperately want something. I think telepathic dreams would be really cool. I know only two movies that cover it, – Explorers and Nightmare on Elm Street 3-4 (Explorers shows it far better).

Another thing that would be cool, if and when the technology is developed, is machine-interface enabled telepathy or even mind meld! Go get your chick, partner, or best friend, or best-friend equivalent family member (likely identical twins), plug-in, and download minds to each other (which is why normal friends, acquaintances, and strangers probably wouldn’t want to do such a thing)! Just simply sharing thoughts directly without any keyboard or mouse would be pretty cool. Apserger people and some HFA, and even normal people would probably really tripp off of it, including me. And you can control the computer and plug in or unplug whenever you want, which is better than other methods (I only seen limited telepathy in holy-roller environments unfortunately), especially drug assisted ones. The only machine-assisted ‘telepathy’ you can get today, in the here and now, is to plug two or more people into conventional networked audio/visual VR systems to get voice-only virtual telepathy, but no direct image communication or voice+images. MMORPGs like World of Worldcraft or Star Wars Galaxies or Everquest is the closest to remote-telepathy that the average joe-smoe will get to in the next few years.

LI-ION batteries always blow up if they are substantially overcharged on high current (like Dells) or if they are shorted for a long time. I wanna keep the ability to charge 2 batteries in 4 hours though….with the machine on. Alienware takes 4 hours to charge 1 battery with the machine off. Dell probably has a separate charge circuit for each bank of 4 cells and the 8000-8200 batteries have 2 banks and the XPS ones have 3 (subwoofer) or 4 (no subwoofer). My Alienware has 3 banks (4×3=12 cells). I think LI-ION cells are up to 2600mah now for the size that laptop batteries use. AND you can build your own batteries too. Don’t leave out the protection chip though.

****************************************

This is cool new technology. It seems public enough to be resistant to be being bought out and shelved. So I hope to see it in my Thumb Drive, Camera/Phone memory card, or even a smy PCS’s main RAM within the next 5-10 years.

Update 7/28/2006 – Broke this post into two because it might be confusing the Google ads.

Meritline.com – Blue-Ray Burners and Discs

Blu-Ray burners for a grand! Single-layer discs running on a unit price of $20-25 per piece. I might be getting one in a year or two when the drive is $250 or less and the media is $2 or less.

I think PCs and PlayStations will adopt blue-ray while hollywood will end up on HD-DVD. I can see an anti-piracy motive on this. Casual pirates won’t be willing to pay the premium price dual-drives or hybrid drives (unless the hybrids become cheap). Only geeks and serious movie watchers would do such a thing. Cuts the ripping population down to a quarter (post-crack-mainstreaming). HDDVD for the TV and BluRay for the PC would be mainstream until the hybrid drives get cheap enough.. Don’t expect me to buy that many HDTV movies if they do this though. Only LOTR, Harry Potter and Star Wars. Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD for me? I would choose BlueRay. Just need a little more patience for the prices to drop.

Here are some links to articles on HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray. It appears that Toshiba is selling its HD-DVD player at a loss, banking on its royalties and license fees from clones and maybe the discs too. If the discs have to pay royalties, that may not be good for HD-DVD, unless its the same for blu-ray also (which I would hate). It is not unusual to undercut a product like that. Many game consoles are sold under-cost to bank on game royalties.

Standalone (no PC) Automatic feed DVD printers

Standalone (no PC) Automatic Loading DVD Duplicators

MeritLine.com isn’t necessarily the cheapest. I didn’t shop around serious enough for pricing. I was surpised on what you could actually get for just a few grand though. So people with a 5-10 grand to spare go get one of these and start spreading the word around, with full automation!