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For those who might be buying some things on eBay this month, there are a few holiday coupons: $5 off of $50, code: C2-Holiday2005 $15 off of $100, code: C3-Holiday2005 10% off ($25 max savings), code: C1-Holiday2005 I don't know the expiration dates, but the C1 code worked for me. Enjoy!

I read that on CPF although I'll take it with a grain of salt until I can actually buy the LEDs. Still, it's an interesting development for two reasons. One is of course the increased efficiency, and the other is that they're converting purple light to white without a phosphor (that should...

It's not just the low noise level which is great about Seasonics, but also the efficiency. Mine gets close to 80% according to the silentpc reviews. The latest ones get close to 90! Don't be surprised if in a few years they reach something like 97% or 98% efficiency. That could mean they...

Meow. ^^ :cat: BTW, yes, the Seasonic are in a league of their own. I've been using a Tornado Super Silencer with active PFC for the last 2 years. Very quiet, very stable, and a claimed 0.99 PF.

To explain PFC in more detail, as you may know the power used by our PCs starts off as 120VAC, 60Hz. 120VAC is a sine wave with 60 cycles per second and a RMS (root-mean square) voltage of 120. Now the interesting part. If you've ever had introductory courses to electrical engineering I'm...

I replaced the battery in my APC 650 a few months ago. The original was 11Ah and the new one was 12Ah. In general you have to get the same voltage when replacing a battery so 2 12V in series won't work if the old battery was 12V. You can get a different capacity, usually larger, with no...

That complicates things a bit if you're sending the signal to several places because the load is higher, and could drag down the voltage. That may cause problems, but then again it probably won't. Without knowing the specifics of your system, the only answer is to try it and see what happens...

I assume you mean a low level audio signal. Given that it's low frequency (<20KHz) a pair of wires should do, or better yet a small coax so you don't pick up any interference. I don't think the signal will suffer any audible distortion going only 150 feet. No need to convert to digital and...

Games are almost a non-issue for me. The only ones I play are MS Train Simulator (which uses Direct X), Flight Simulator, and Fly!. Now one thing I might have a problem with is that my CAD PCB tools are still DOS-based. They were purchased over 10 years ago, and aren't used frequently enough...

Well, on the plus side is that my OS and most of my apps (except Train Simulator and Flight Simulator) are on my 4 GB boot partition. I have a 2GB partition used solely for temp files, internet cache, swap file (which is never used anyway). Therefore, it's fairly easy to copy my entire boot...

Yes Tim, I'm still running Win98 but I'll probably be switching to either Windows 2000 or 2003 in the not too distant future. I just want to make sure I can keep most of my installed programs and menu items with an OS upgrade rather than having to start from scratch again.

Welcome aboard, HMTK! I think you'll find this place is a little more civilized than SR, and also with more diversity of opinion.

Yes, exactly, and I admit I'm as guilty as anyone. I just haven't felt like investing the time yet to learn Linux, and also some of the apps I use probably don't have Linux equivalents. Windows may make things quicker or easier for most people when it's working, but that line of thought...

Offering money in return for something done as a favor is often a way of distancing yourself from the person who did you a favor. Instead of thinking of the person as a friend who did something for you gratis, they just become another person you had a business transaction with. Feeling...

I send my condolences Merc for whatever they're worth. I just can't understand how a person could change so drastically as your ex, especially someone in their late 20s. I hate to say this but if she were my ex I think I would put a contract out on her. :diablo: As it is I feel like doing...

It depends upon what you listen to. Some kinds of talk radio can get you really agitated, for example. As for music, a lot of the pop music commonly played on the radio gets you hyper, and it shows in the way people drive. In fact, thinking about it there's really not much I can think of on...

And that's the understatement of the century. NYC is automotive anarchy, for lack of a better description. Here's a short list of what I see on a daily basis: 1. Running red lights. Not right after they turn red, but just going through a light which was red for 20 seconds already like it...

And do you know the reasons for this trend? Your observation is dead on. It started in the late 70s and early 80s, and it's gotten steadily worse. Not surprisingly, it coincides exactly with the time the 55 mph national speed limit, arguably the dumbest thing Congress ever did, was in effect...

I thought this essay on mindset by locomotive engineer Al Krug (also look at the rest of his very excellent site) is relevant to this discussion. Basically, getting into any mindset and doing things by force of habit can lead to disaster. Same with cell phone use, running red lights, etc...

Interesting topic, and a big part of the problem as I see it isn't cell phone use or any other distraction, but rather not having the proper judgment of when you need to concentrate 100% on the driving task. Take city driving, for example. This is the kind I'm most familiar with, or rather...

Or were the platters doing a 360 like Linda Blair's head in the Exorcist? :o Wait a minute, they're supposed to do that. :D

The person I bought it from sent me a replacement so I never knew what was wrong with the original one. The replacement had a 1.3 GHz processor instead of 1.4 GHz, and also a different adaptor. I think what happened was that my adaptor was bad, the processor wasn't, but the person replacing...

They're also great for room lighting and SAD. I find I feel much better since switching over from regular fluorescents. Wow! You're even worse than me. :mrgrn: Hmm, come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea.... I can adapt well enough to dark myself, even getting around by the...

So much for advancement of the human race. I can't believe such a huge percentage of the population can be that ignorant. You can see evolution right before your eyes with fruit flies. Exactly why do these people refuse to believe something which is so obvious? Kind of reminds me of the...

Most of those compact fluorescents are warm white, and regardless of color temperature preferences their spectrums leave something to be desired. I think I mentioned in the other thread that the relatively poor spectrums combined with in some cases flicker from magnetic ballasts might account...

It wouldn't be a bad thing if most books were available free online, especially ones where the author is long dead. We heard the same arguments for music. I don't mind honoring copyrights if the original author benefits, and if there is some sort of time limit after which the work goes into...

I guess that depends on your definintion of what true white is. Now it's true that the spectrum of a white LED has peaks and valleys. Usually there is a peak right around 470 nm (that's the blue primary emitter), and another peak around 580 nm (that's the yellow phosphor). Combined the two...

Honestly, in NYC, and especially Manhattan, owning a car is more trouble than it's worth. A car is totally useless for getting around the city, being both slower and more expensive than the subway. The only use it might have is if you frequently travel outside the city, but even here renting a...

Same here. I have zero need to make or receive phone calls when I'm out. In fact, I consider getting phone calls in general pretty annoying so I certainly don't want to get them when I'm out.

Well, that's certainly great news, especially since this guy seems like a greedy pig. The article said he was making $500,000 a year in the 1980s with insurance. I could probably retire after a few years with that kind of income yet he had to be greedy and make even more money with spam. I'm...

One thing I'm puzzled by here is what self-respecting vet would euthanize a perfectly healthy cat? I tend to think most would just send them off to a no-kill shelter if they were unwanted. I'm also somewhat disgusted by some of the reasons mentioned here that people use to euthanize an animal...

Same here. I just measured my wrist at 6 3/4". A lot of females have wrists larger than that.

I'm with LunarMist and ddrueding on wrist watches. The only time I wear one is when I go on the subway so I have an idea of the time. 99% of the time I go out without a watch. I don't wear rings either. It's too much of a chore worrying about stuff like that. My watch preference is for 100%...

I'm terribly sorry to hear that. It doesn't get any easier, either. Three years ago Tiger passed away. To this day I still miss her. If fact, a few days ago I was having a couple of good crying episodes thinking about her. The way Suzette died was similar to what just happened to you...

I agree this law is beyond ridiculous but I really wish the film industry would voluntarily stop sticking gratuitous sex scenes in practically every movie. I for one don't enjoy them at all. I feel they overuse this plot device due to simple lack of creativity. I also question whether the...

Same here, and that's saying a lot because I'm basically a city person. However, those areas look so remote, so alien, so completely mystifying that it almost makes me want to drop everything I'm doing and spend a few weeks in the outback. Not at all like the "country" around the Northeast...

I never thought of this, but apparently you can tape those postage-paid return envelopes to a package. See here. I'm tempted to mail some of the worst offenders a nice box of used kitty litter. :evil:

I'm not sure I even consider a drive based on DRAM or SRAM drive a real SSD. To me an SSD doesn't require battery backup. Admittedly these have their uses, although just buying a system capable of taking a large amount of RAM will accomplish almost the same thing. Perhaps if we're lucky...

After a brief respite from the heat a few days ago we're back into the high 70s with high humidity. Very uncomfortable and I might add very annoying for October. We've had heat since early June, with the exception of maybe one week in mid-June. :evil: That's 4+ months straight so far. I'm...

Thinking about this a bit more, I can up with a good analogy-LEDs. LEDs have existed commercially for ~35 years but were relegated to niche uses like displays and indicators until the advent of white LEDs about 10 years ago. Between ten and five years ago LEDs made inroads into some small...

Look for the price of these SSDs to drop rapidly once they're mass-produced, and for the capacity to increase. I think mechanical and solid-state disks will co-exist for a while, at least until SSDs reach price parity, with the SSDs being used for boot disks and the mechanicals for bulk, slow...

If I had the room for it, I'd put a train horn on my bike. Nothing else seems to get people's attention these days.

Yep, I've often wondered why have celibacy requirements for priests/nuns unless they're also willing to go the snippity-do-da route so as to all but eliminate their sexuality? I'd say all of the above, but mostly that these societies simply accept behavoirs we don't in America. If you remember...

Even that crosses a gray area because of our ridiculous age of consent laws (as high as 18 in some states IIRC whereas I believe it is around 13 in most other first-world nations). It might be technically illegal to have relations with a 14-year old in many states but it doesn't mean one is a...

Given that quite a few churches have altargirls now weeding out homosexual priests isn't going to completely solve the problem. And how on earth would they do that anyway? Plenty of homosexuals have gotten married to someone of the opposite sex, had kids, lived, and died without anyone ever...

Actually, i, burning the coal at a power station and then using the energy to charge batteries in electric cars is more efficient than coal-to-oil in terms of how much of the energy in the coal actually comes out at the wheels of the car. Let's start with the coal burning power plant. These...

No, there isn't one single thing that can do what fossil fules do, but then we does there have to be? Diversity in energy supply is a good thing, not a bad thing. Right now we can put solar panels on every single family home which will supply most of their power needs. We can switch to...

Yep, the whole point of the degree is to get you to think in a certain way and also to be able to access and learn what you need to know. More than any other profession except possibly computer science, being a good engineer is a continual learning process. Technology waits for no one. By the...

While we're talking about rounded education before college, I vaguely remember some of my teachers talking about how much more students used to learn in the early grades. I think we read some soldier's diaries from WWI where they were quite familiar with classic literature, music, basic...

That's a product of going into a field for all the wrong reasons, Merc, rather than a symptom of being a "typical" engineering undergraduate. I'm guessing you'll find the same thing in law schools and pre med programs. Unfortunately, it's a trend that's growing. You should go into a field...