If you are sticking with your carrier it makes more sense to do it there, especially If you are at a contract earmark where you usually get some money knocked off your phone for renewing. If you're not at that point it's not as big a deal, but it seems like having to deal with a middle man is a hassle ( who do you go with when there are problems? Usually first stop is your carrier so why put yourself in a position where 2 companies can try and pass the buck off to the other). Do you have a specific phone on mind? If you do you can call and price check it, but unless you're saving over 50 bucks it doesn't seem like it's worth the potential hassle. Usually the price point at retailers seems to be around the same point unless they're doing a super special, I think you'd get more of a deal online, but then you might have shipping ( but with more expensive purchases the greater chance of free shipping). I like doing things in the carrier store because they usually do all the set up and make sure your stuff has transferred and everything is working ( especially if you have a smart phone and aren't too hands on, they'll make you're 3 email addressed sync with the thing way quicker than reading how, make sure your recipt gets sent to your phone etc. )

If you're going because you don't know what phone you want and there's more selection you can go and play with all the phones and then just find one online either at the manufacturers website, amazon or someother place that has multiple sellers or your carriers site if it's a phone they cover, but not cool enough to crowd the store with (and if you're trying to renew with options that's probably a place that will have some discounting) unless you're getting an ungodly deal at a box store with a rebate coupon you won't see for months it's probably gonna work out to prettymuch the same thing

Also make sure the phone you get is covered by your carrier if youre going outside them. It seems a little rarer nowadays now that apple has stopped being stupid and other phones have relaxed being stupid in return, but you really don't wanna end up with trying to fight your network to let your new shiny toy play with everyone else. If you can avoid dealing with customer service you will be much happier in your purchase

Honestly since June 29th, 2007 I haven't spent a single second thinking about cell phone purchases because it has been such a no-brainer to order the best cellphone in existence directly from the people who made it, but...

It seems dumb to add another level of bureaucracy (aka "support") by shopping at a reseller like Best Buy (infamous for their upselling and shitty customer service) or Car Toys.

For that reason, I'd buy from as close to the source as possible, unless there is some promotion going on or something very specific you're after.

Just up front you can get cablemodem from Comcast without any contracts, promotions, or any additional services starting around $40/month. I pay $70/month after taxes for 15mbit download 3mbit upload. Additionally, now a days you can get DSL without having phone service, but this wasn't possible 5ish years ago.

Andrew Beck identified the (by far) #1 problem already: it costs a shitload of money to lay all the wiring to allow a neighborhood high-speed internet access, and the companies that invest this money to build a network from their datacenters to the last-mile of someone's residential (or even commercial) property do not want to share their network.

Phone companies got forced to in the 90s as DSL happened. They were classified as Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILECs) -- implying they are the big boys who laid the wiring. They were forced, by the government, to lease this wiring to Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) and they fought it the entire way. The biggest CLEC you may have heard about locally is Covad, a company that's sole purpose (when I worked intimately with them in an ISP context) was to lease ILEC equipment and resell it to ISPs like Speakeasy.

This mostly worked out but believe me, sometimes working with your CLEC was a hassle because you were just an ISP, and sometimes getting the CLEC to kick some ILEC ass was a hassle, because they are just a CLEC. It was about what you could expect from the forced-sharing of a monopoly.

As this was happening Comcast came along and built a better network using better technology and probably stated very early that one of their major goals is to not find themselves in the position phone companies did, and I'm sure they are very well protected against an ILEC/CLEC situation and will likely never open their network -- by force or choice. I'd like to throw out that Comcast is built on local (albeit very large) franchises, so it's not like they are completely closing the door to people who want to do business with them.

So now we live in a world where we can go to the monopoly for a reliably fast connection for a relatively decent price. Or you can go the DSL route and end up with a monopolistic ILEC like Qwest (who is a shitty ISP by most accounts, go read the reviews) or a much less shitty CLEC -- which is likely going to be a pretty cool company (like Speakeasy) that charges way too much because they can't compete and make a profit.

Go price Speakeasy's DSL and tell me any of that pricing looks attractive, but that's your best alternative to Comcast in Seattle. And remember Speakeasy was bought from its local owners by Best Buy maybe 3-4 years ago, but they seem to have not fucked it up too badly.

Another interesting thing is happening in some places. Instead of letting companies build these very impressive, datacenter to last-mile, ISP-orientated networks and then lock everyone out like Comcast did, Verizon is doing with FiOS, and the phone companies tried to do in the 90s, certain municipalities are deciding to invest in their own fiber network as more of a city service that can be resold to anyone who wants to buy it. This is happening in a very limited and commercial-orientated way in Pioneer Square right now as part of McGinn's mayoral platform.

But I think a better example is the UTOPIA project in Utah. It is a perfect case study of someone doing exactly what you described: building a modern, sustainable network that cut out ILECs, CLECs, and monopolies like Comcast, and then offering free reign over access to its gigabits of speed.

Without getting into a detailed history, it kind of worked. It was way more expensive than anyone thought so the cities that invested in it lost a ton of money at first, and all of the local ISPs (ran by nerds with a vision) ended up going out of business, but now that it is in markets in Wasatch Valley that actually care about high speed fiber (aka not the far-off suburbs where people give less fucks about the internet), it is picking up, and any respectable ISP (locally owned, ran-by-nerds who love open computing, competent) is now reaping the benefits because they suddenly have a mature UTOPIA network to sell product on, and not very many competitors, and price points that destroy Comcast at the moment. You can get 100mbit/100mbit for around 40 bucks in Murray, Utah, and I hope Murray is seeing some profit too. It's a win-win-win for communities, for businesses, and for open-computing -- but it was a total disaster for the first 80% of its existence.

I hope that's where we're headed. I hope cities are realizing that network infrastructure is as important as electrical service, and I hope they realize all the ways they can monetize their investment in building fiber networks in their neighborhoods, and then reinvest that back into the community.

Sounds a little bit like a hippie pipe dream but it also sounds better than Comcast :)

Anyway, that's large parts of why you are forced into 4 decisions essentially when picking an ISP: 1) wireless like Clear, don't bother, they suck -- wifi at this scale isn't good enough yet (throw all the "4G" offerings from cell phone providers into this category as well). 2) DSL from Qwest, cheap as hell, shitty quality. 3) DSL from a CLEC like Covad or Speakeasy, expensive, significantly slower than cable (but still totally fine IMO), and high quality networking (latency and stability). or 4) Comcast.

FINALLY, for the record, cable is usually a better overall decision than DSL for home internet access, but this isn't always the case, and I have nothing but love for a high quality SDSL line. People tend to throw DSL under the bus too quickly.

There's a large problem with the internet. You need a wire coming to your house. It's just not feasible for multiple companies to run wires all over the place to sell competing services. Imagine if it was that way with water or power?

So, you are stuck with two wires coming to your house (3 if you are lucky enough to live in a FiOS area). You have the phone companies copper wire and the coax run by the cable company (in this case Comcast). Both of these companies are natural monopolies and as such are regulated. The phone company has to allow anyone to sell you service over their lines. The problem is that DSL is slow. It just can't compete with cable on speed. If you truly want to stream high quality video, it's rarely going to cut it.

That leaves you with Comcast. Unfortunately Comcast is not required to allow anyone else to sell services over their lines. Without this kind of regulation, you are unlikely to see much competition on price.

What we need is a new telecommunications act that breaks up the cable providers. The company that owns the lines needs to be different than the ones who sell you video and internet service. They also need to be different than the people producing the content (Comcast owning NBC should be a no no).

Unfortunately, I don't see this happening any time soon.

An HDTV is made up of an array of pixels. There are 1920 horizontal pixels and 1080 vertical pixels. That means there are 2073600 total pixels on a screen.

On an LCD (all current LED TV's are LCD's). There is a panel that lets light through each pixel location. This means the light is actually generated by a back light. In a traditional LCD, there are cold cathode tubes (similar to a fluorescent lights) behind the screen on the edges. The down side to this configuration is that the LCD panel can not block 100% of the light, some always escapes, so they can not show true black. The other problem is that since the light source is on the edges, the blacks will be less black along the edges (if you show a black screen, you will see a gradient of grey that gets lighter towards the edges).

An LED lit LCD replaces the cold cathode light with LED's. LED's have an advantage that they are brighter, smaller, more reliable, and more power efficient. However, most LED lit TV's don't offer any increase in picture quality because the lights are still along the edges (this is how they make them so thin).

There is another kind of LED lit LCD that is more expensive and a little rarer. It's a full array back lit screen. What this means is that there is an array of LED's directly behind the screen. Only the areas of the screen that are showing something are lit up. This makes the blacks much better. It's still not perfect. If you have a bright image in the middle of a dark screen, you will see a halo of grey in the black around the image. The more LED's you have the better the picture. But you rarely see more than 500 or so back there.

Another problem with LCD's is that the whole panel must be refreshed each time the picture changes. Progressive scan pictures have 60 frames a second which means that the LCD panel needs to refresh at least that many times. All of them will do this and some will do 120 or 240 times a second. However, what actually maters is the pixel response time (and it's almost never given). You can only tell if this is a problem by watching fast movement on the TV.

On a Plasma TV, each pixel is individually throwing off light. This means that individual pixels can be updated without refreshing the whole screen and true blacks can be shown. However, because of this they use more power; are heavier; are thicker; and aren't as bright. Also, since they require glass (LCD's don't but often have it anyway) they have more problems with glare.

The final thing to consider is 3D. Most 2012 models are going to have 3D whether you want it or not (it doesn't cost anything to add it in to the TV). There are two modes of 3D in the home. There is RealD passive and Active Shutter. Active shutter glasses work by turning on an LCD panel in one eye of the glasses. This blocks the light to one eye and allows each eye to see a different image. The downside is that the glasses require power, are expensive, and the picture is subject to cross talk. Some LCD's and all Plasmas use this technology. Passive 3D works by showing alternating lines of polarized picture and black. The glasses only allow in one kind of polarized light into each eyes. So on every frame you get 540 lines going to each eye. This means that the picture isn't quite as sharp. But there is no cross talk and the glasses are dirt cheap (you can use the ones they give you for free at the theater). On a screen 42" or smaller, you probably can't even see the difference.

Hope I answered all your questions.

Well I left my 6th floor window cracked too long during the ice storm and it froze open. I had to use a blowdryer and a flat head screwdriver to get it closed. The combo worked well so I highly recommend it as a solution to ice related problems.

It was the worst thing that happened to me during the storm.

(this post may be sarcastic)

http://www.crutchfield.com/learn/learningcenter/home/tv_flatpanel.html

This is a pretty great article that gives a good explanation of what to expect.

Short answer to a complicated question -- If viewing quality is your primary consideration, purchase the best plasma television your budget can afford, preferably a Panasonic which is the leader in that technology. The image quality will be much closer to a traditional CRT television, especially when watching motion-intensive content such as action/sports, or playing games. And black will actually be black, which is not the case with the other types. If you stay away from the 3-D models, you can obtain stellar quality for a very reasonable price.

On the radio, I don't know, but in nightclubs and bars it is very much still possible to make a living as a good DJ. Picking the right tunes for the party and blending them at the right moments is an art, and people flock to clubs that have a good artist.

Commercial radio has totally gone to satellite shit though. Seattle's music stations suck ass. I just listen to KOMO 1000 AM news all day when I'm driving around because we are in such a radio desert.

Someday I have a dream that Seattle will have a music radio station with a strong signal that doesn't suck ass. Someday...

Shovel as soon as it falls, and hit it with salt early and often. And don't listen to the whiny environmentalist bullshit that salt is bad for the salmon. They spend 80% of their life in saltwater. A little bit of saltwater runoff into Lake Washington is not going to kill them. Especially given the infrequency of the storms here that necessitate salt use. We don't have to worry about it often enough that the amount of saltwater incursion that might happen is really going to damage the fisheries. Salt away.

The biggest hurdle to recovery after an ice storm is the thousands of ice-covered trees that snapped power lines. One lady on KOMO reported that she had 200 trees down on her 5 acre property in Puyallup. They have to repair the main trunk lines that Bonneville Power runs from the hydroelectric dams before they can even get to the thousands of side streets with smaller residential power lines that are knocked out. It's gonna take a while. Those guys are working 40 on 6 off busting their balls to restore power. If you're driving near one of the crews working to bring power lines back up. "give 'em a brake" and slow down.

Well, do you mean the Clear Channel "Morning Zoo" route where you make appearances at car lots and cleavage-y sports bars to appease your local advertisers? I'm sure there's going to be a need for those idiot loudmouths for the next five or ten years, at least until accurate advertising metrics are able to be provided to local businesses. I'm sure Clear Channel is going to hit a brick wall when the accuracy of their existing listener metrics is put to the test.

NPR/localized stations should whether the next few years much better.

Most radio stations are owne by mega corporations now. Unless you want to work for college radio you kinda out o luck. There are alot of Internet based string radio, you could go that route but I don't know if that's something you could get a viable paycheck from

Of course, you need to cover your own liability and follow local municipal laws for keeping your sidewalk safe and clear. This may require you to use whatever means necessary to shovel/remove ice and compacted snow. Any of those salts and chemical preparations have an impact on the substrate (can be corrosive and destructive to concrete and metal over time) and affect soil and nearby plants.

In our case the sidewalk is immediately adjacent to a storm drain that is marked as going to local streams so runoff goes directly into the Puget Sound aquatic environment. With the even slightly warmer temperatures the sidewalk was fairly easy to clear with a shovel and a little work. Liberally distributing benign sand can give a safer less slippery surface and not have the detrimental chemical effects on soil and water resources. You could even sweep much of it up when the sidewalk is dry later and put it back in a bucket for re-use in the future.

The ice and snow will be gone quickly. The broken tree limbs and branches will require a little more work to prepare for pickup or curbside recycling. The other major concern is the weakened or cracked branches that have yet to fall or may fail and drop in a future storm or because of wind. Survey your trees the best you can and remove those that can be done so safely yourself. Hiring someone to take care of the larger and more difficult dangerous ones may be necessary.

You may also want to survey your homes rain gutters, roofing surface, etc. to identify damage, shifting or weakening due to the extra weight that was evident in this last storm because of the freezing rain/ice storm.

I live in the Midwest, where we are guaranteed several bouts of freezing rain a year. We salt our sidewalks, as it's the only way to quickly get rid of the ice and eliminate the fall hazard. It's not so cold in Seattle that you couldn't use straight table salt to melt your sidewalk ice. Ice melt is a mix of rock salt (NaCl) and other salts (frequently potassium chloride and calcium chloride). Use it as directed on the package and your concrete and yard won't be damaged, especially since the melting ice will dissolve and dilute the salt. If you have a dog, though, don't let it eat the salt or lick its paws after walking on it--wipe the paws off to prevent tummy upset or worse.

The problem with waiting for the sun is that you frequently get glaze ice while you wait, which isn't fair or safe for you or pedestrians.

Here's our plan of attack when we get snow and ice: shovel any snow, then spread salt over remaining ice. It makes it safe for pedestrians and easier to shovel off the next snowfall. And the bonus trick for cars: if your mirrors get iced, spray them with alcohol to melt it off without stripping the adjustor gears. Rubbing or drinking both work as long as you use high-proof stuff.

Are you sure that your problem isn't just thermal in nature? Buy a new CPU fan and replace it with decent thermal paste before you buy a new CPU, as I doubt that'll solve the issue you're mentioning.

CPUs are rarely the problem with any system, and thermal issues are the number one problem, certainly with any laptop.

If no one gives you a cheap way to do it you can do things like this in aftereffects. But I'd look for some online tutorials before purchasing, it can be an overwhelming program so you'll have a bit of basics to cover and learn the layout ( it definitely isn't as intuitive of a program as other adobe products). Depending on where you work there may be some discounts on software, search around the adobe site and see if there is anything that pertains to where you work (schools and non-profits should always check sites before they purchase at full price any software, and some give breaks for other industries, that said it will still be pricey, just not jaw drop pricey).
Here's some sites to look for instructional videos
Videocopilot.net
Creativecow.com
There is also a subscription based site that has alot of stuff but it's 25 a month lynda.com and an adobe tv ( don't have that site written I'm my notes, but you should be able to search for it.

edit: i misread your question and thought you were talking about photo stitching :)

sorry! and good luck

Have you thought you might have a virus?
Have you defragged AND done a maleware scan immediately afterward? Or vice versa?

The Ballard Windermere Real Estate office is holding a free electronics recycling event this Saturday Jan-14. From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. bring your unwanted electronics to 2636 NW Market St from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Many items will be collected including computers, televisions, stereos, cell phones, cameras, batteries and washers/dryers, to just name a few. Microwaves, Styrofoam and kitchen appliances will not be accepted. The event is being put on by Ballard Windermere and SBK Recycling.

Kinda late, but it may just be the bandwidth limitations of her ISP. Is she using cable or DSL? Dial up even? That's more likely than anything if you ask me. Other tweaks recommended are all good but won't help with bandwidth, just maximize it. You're probably home now but I'm curious what helped and if the issues I mentioned are a big factor.

I was having some issues with my netbook recently, and updating the display adapter driver helped. You should try this to see if it helps - you'll need to open Device Manager from the control panel, then look at the properties of your display adapter driver.

You can try updating the driver using Windows, but that didn't work for me - I had to go to the driver manufacturer's website, download the new driver, and then go back into the update driver window to locate the downloaded driver. Do make sure you download new drivers directly from the manufacturer's website; there are a lot of "driver download" websites but I wouldn't trust them.

You might also try googling your laptop's display driver and your problem - for example mine was "asus 1015pn NVIDIA ion display adapter fails." Sometimes you can find an online forum with good answers.

Another issue might be that your laptop doesn't have enough RAM to run videos - I upgraded from 1GB to 2GB on my netbook, but it's still a bit sluggish sometimes. I also had a lot of problems with Chrome plug-ins crashing, but Firefox seems to work fine. Opening a page you have trouble with in both Chrome and Firefox might help you figure out if it's something about your computer or something about Chrome.

Have you tried vlc player? It's free and way better than windows player. I'm a Mac person so I can't help you trouble shoot but vlc plays most video files ( which is great for macs cuz it will play .avi files without having to convert files without a bunch of codecs for any Mac people reading this question). Are there files something you used to be able to play but can't now or have they never worked ( the files could be corrupted). Try downloading a copy of vlc (video LAN player is the full name but you should find it easy googling vlc)

I think this is it.

Be sure to search Ebay using the model number of the remote and also a search using the model number/description of the master unit it controls. You can set it up so that each search is run daily and the results are emailed to you if any listings are found meeting your search criteria.

I have picked up additional remote control units for televisions this way to have available at different places in the room so one is always available and in easy reach. Separate remotes bought this way never cost very much.

The universal programmable units are another solution (as mentioned here already by others) - look to CNET or other resources for reviews of these units to see how they rate for usability. etc.

If you can't find one check out the universal remote selections. You can usually program an auxiliary device on them. I have no idea which are better Or what else you would want on it ( so how many "ports") my moms has buttons for tv, cable, DVD, and auxiliary. If you only have one device on it ignore the other buttons.

I don't know, but if you are on twitter, send a tweet to @BestBuy and ask them. They have 3,000 people on duty to respond to twitter questions about tech items, and they will find the remote for you. They found the oddly-specific HDMI cable I needed in about 5 minutes.

Sorry, not sure about how to do that. I use Time Machine for my daily backups. For me it was as simple as finding the location of the new file, going back in time and seeing the old file in it's place and copying it.

I assume that is $50k. Seems high to also want royalties based on my contracting experience, but I got out of the freelance game before apps blew up so maybe that scene is different.

And like infernactual said, royalty deals can be a total pain in the ass as assets transfer hands and lawyers get their hands on the fine print of the contract.