Techie Talk

There's another problem with Japan.

Japan is the only place that makes tape media used by broadcasters, from what I understand.  That stuff just got very, very expensive.

I asked that, too.

These days, most of these guys are using digital tape, no less... which just seems bizarre to me.

The broadcasting industry is only just now starting to dip their collective toe into the digital age.  This industry is so freakishly far behind the technology curve, it's amazing they can get anything done at all.  But then, I suppose this is the industry that hasn't realized that they are soon to be obscoleted by the internet.

This industry will see some changes pretty soon anyway.  Getting away from tape can only be a good thing.

While we aren't involved in digital video storage directly, we are a very helpful component of it.  I just hope we get a little more popular as a consequence.

I honestly do not know why the industry uses tape.  It's very, very expensive for how they use it, and these days you could store everything on digital media, which more cleanly transfers.  Tape isn't very reliable, and I've seen some terrible problems come from it (e.g. garbled captioning, but then, that company used tape in an unapproved way).

I think the industry is just resistent to change.

got my bluetooth working.

Needed to install the firmware:
apt-get install firmware-atheros

and have a recent 2.6.39 kernel running which contains  http://us.generation-nt.com/patch-add-atheros-bt-ar5bbu12-fw-supported-help-202165552.html this patch.
after that this device:
Bus 004 Device 006: ID 0489:e02c Foxconn / Hon Hai
becomes:
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 0cf3:3005 Atheros Communications, Inc.

it seems as if it sometimes doesn't work well during bootup, the RF-Kill switch (FN+F3) for un/re-plugging the device does the job. Note that you need to press it several times to switch on/off wlan+bluetooth, have a tail on syslog/messages open to see whats going on.

so now there are just two things about this acer:

- won't wakeup after suspend

- won't switch to console / back / restart x correctly...

and  with the 4g ram its pretty good useable. was a little fiddling to get the keyboard out, and open the "door" on the lower side... but now its working smoothly.

now this is damn cool:

http://bellard.org/jslinux/

(next to 'to cool to be true')

That's impressive.  Even with all the limitations, and the lack of a network stack (I could see where that would be difficult), that's an awesome page there.

I could imagine using it to help teach people how to write C code, honestly.