autonomous_unit

I don't know if you need anything that hifi for a shop environment, what with background noise, improper listening arrangement etc.

However, yes a digital link out to a real hifi is a huge step up from other PC solutions. You avoid any of the noise sources inside the PC, avoid any of the compromises of sending the signal down a long wire to get the amp away from the PC (and how compromised are those soundcards in trying to be both a headphone/small unpowered speaker/line level all in one?).

On top of that, you get a better DAC on a hifi receiver. I remember being surprised at how much better my CDs sounded when I replaced the RCA patch cable from a Sony CD changer with a toslink fiber... just the difference between the old Sony's DAC and the new Yamaha receiver's DAC was astoundingly obvious and this was in a poorly arranged apartment with relatively old and tired speakers.

Any old toslink sound adapter would work, i.e. I have a USB to toslink adapter I carried around the world with me... originally purchased at a shop that specialized in attachments for Sony minidisc players. For some odd reason, they seemed to be ahead of the game in digital audio links at the consumer level. An advantage is that you can use this separate audio/DSP port for just the music and avoid having other OS and application beeps and boops going over the loudspeakers by accident.

Any decent home theatre receiver has digital inputs, and often both optical and copper. I've seen many such Yamaha units on display at places like HomePro, which isn't exactly your hifi specialty shop...

Another issue that has plagued some Linux distributions is having IPv6 enabled by default. With the right set of unfortunate conditions, it can waste a lot of time trying to resolve DNS names via the IPv6 version of DNS, before finally falling back to IPv4.

Note, this wouldn't seem like "Windows is faster" but more like "Linux isn't working at all" because the delay in resolving new web servers would be astronomical!

I don't know Ubuntu but in recent Fedora Core installers, I believe enabling or disabling IPv6 has become an option you could clearly control during the network setup interaction. Anybody who doesn't know what it means can probably safely disable it and enjoy fewer problems as a result.

Also, regarding the antivirus and antispyware... the invulnerability of Linux will remain true only until people start bringing their promiscuous ways with them from the Windows world. Just look at this thread, where a neophyte is encouraged to cut and paste a "sudo" command and then imagine if people had bad intentions...

The somewhat long-standing clock control feature on Athlon64 parts has been called "powernow". You would need to install some AMD powernow driver in the OS that would change the clock rate based on system load.

Some of the newest parts (not sure if this is Athlon or just Opteron) apparently have some dynamic control of the power to parts of the chips to "turn them off" as you say. If this is anything like what Intel have been doing, this happens automatically in the hardware and requires no special software settings.

My experience with powernow has been spotty with Linux, but I am not sure if that would be the same under Windows. I read somewhere that AMD contributes the driver for Linux so you would think they can base it on the same code, but who knows... my experience is that after a while (several days at most), the driver would report that it could no longer control the CPU clock and you seem to get stuck with whatever clock speed it was using at the time. I think this could also have a lot to do with the quality of the motherboards, i.e. chipsets and BIOS. I was mostly using "budget" systems with the AMD CPUs, and never a laptop, so I cannot compare to my Intel experiences which were always IBM laptops or high-end workstation motherboards. Only my very latest socket AM2 X2 system seems to work consistently with powernow.

That said, I think suspending the system may win you a lot more power savings, as mentioned above. These days, the graphics cards seem to waste a lot of power too, and of course disk drives do not keep spinning for free, nor monitors shining brightly.

Also, some people may have been mentioning an "O" visa they had for some other reason, such as supporting a Thai spouse...

The Dell Thailand website gives a phone number (just select country=Thailand from the main Dell website if you want). The sales office seems to actually be run out of Malaysia, and the Dell Malaysia website has more product information. It seems like the responsiveness may vary depending on what sales person you get connected with, but we were able to get some quotes for a desktop machine and LCD via email and then complete the purchase via wire transfer, with equipment delivered to our door. Our price seemed very close to the Malaysian website price, and yes LCDs seem more expensive than in the US.

Right. If you have someone you can trust, using a US address on the filings should not be a problem. According to a preparer I hired previously, and my own experiences now, there is precedence to use a US correspondance address even while filing for the foreign earned income exclusion and disclaiming state residence. She said many expats she helped even used some corporate office address of their employer, who then delivered the IRS correspondance on their behalf.

I used a relative's address in California simultaneously with filing my federal taxes and my non-resident CA taxes (in the first year abroad). I did not try electronic filing however, as I needed a place for a cover letter explaining a very delayed filing... I got my refunds and no issues regarding the address.

I'm not trying to promote any particular view here, but I imagine the "selfish" analysis would follow from the same school of thought that is quick to focus on how the general populace seems to practice something pretty far removed from the teachings of the Buddha. I.e. they've use "Buddhism" to refer to the organized religion and its mass of cultural practitioners rather than the core teachings that transcend culture. Without knowing more about the original guy quoted as saying this, it is of course mere speculation. Another explanation could be simply a bias towards a more evangelical approach. It is hard to really say what is selfish and what is not selfish when it comes to teaching, isn't it? Particularly if you accept that you might be wrong...

As for the prominent westerners who seem to have a new age form of study... I guess the real question is whether they are having any success at all in shrugging off their "delusions"? They face the same challenge as a wealthy Thai person in terms of eventually reconciling these new ideas with their relative wealth, but they have not had an entire lifetime to strike a balance in their minds. Maybe it is worth noting that they have at least shown interest in looking for something "more true" or more fulfilling beyond their current lifestyles?

I am not, nor would I claim to be, a Buddhist. But, I have refered to the general philosophical and metaphysical concepts in trying to explain my own personal views to people who asked...

Fruitbatt, I said "by all accounts" because I indeed meant that other people told me that the particular few women in question had a tendancy to treat every disagreement as a gender battle. It was not a conclusion I drew, but a context that was relayed to me after the fact. I only remember it all now because of the irony.

The sad fact is that agenda-driven people project their agendas onto nearly everything they do, regardless of the real underlying motives of the other people involved. My antagonistic behavior, as far as a gender-warrior agenda goes, is striving to be "gender blind" in my own application of power or authority. In my past, I did volunteer work to help train women who were trying to rapidly jump into graduate studies in my scientific field after having "mistakenly" spent their undergraduate studies in other fields, as part of a program meant to offset a measurable imbalance in the student populations. While I was tutoring them to try to get them up to speed, I expected their professors to grade them by the same rubric as other students... I categorically reject the "you're either with us or against us" mentality of militants of any stripe.

Sheryl, yes I just didn't want to belabor it since I am often long winded here. Antagonism is unfortunately in the eye of the beholder. I was only focusing on why someone might fling around labels like "feminist" after being upset, rather than the ugly self-reinforcing problem of being more easily upset once one gets hung up on issues like this in the first place.

I completely agree with the observation that it seems, statistically speaking, that this web forum has a stronger sexist overtone than most places with which I am familiar. I thought the thread was about "why do people throw around labels" and not "why did so and so get upset in the first place". I didn't actually see the other thread that apparently triggered this one...

Another way to phrase it is that people who are being antagonistic are often pigeon-holed by those who feel antagonized. I've (infrequently) been accused of being a male chauvinist by women who, on all accounts, are hung up on identifying themselves as gender warriors. They don't realize that I'm really just a blundering egotist who pisses off most people eventually, regardless of race, sex, or creed!

The problem is people generalizing from too few data points... they classify you based on some analogy that says a lot about their own world view, and then they brand you with all the flaws they project onto that class of people. This is the same whether we're talking sexists, racists, class warriors, "ageists", or religious bigots. Resentment is so much easier to shoulder when it can be conveniently placed on "them" versus "us". Resentment of "us" leads to uncomfortable questions about group identity and social standing...

If you search you can find older threads on this topic. In short, I'd recommend checking the motor vehicle laws of the state in question. For California and Illinois, I checked and it is legal to drive temporarily on a foreign license and no international permit is required (or means anything). They want to see the real license.

I've rented a car from Hertz at major airports using my Thai-issued license. They have a large book where they look up color photos of foreign licenses to "validate" it. They did this the first time I rented on this license, and not since on repeated trips. The guy at the front gate just looks at my license and the contract which indicates a Thai license is in use.

I am curious whether any of the folks who recommend using a US license are claiming foreign residence for tax purposes. That was one of my motives for not keeping my old California license...

We registered a company in a rented condo (with assistance of landlord) and then reregistered it at a single family dwelling that my wife purchased in her name, getting a work permit for myself as an employee and director of this company and renewing it at the new location.

So, any decision about allowing a work permit is obviously based on multiple criteria and discretion of the officers involved... it is not a simple rule about having a "real" office or not. The objectives for ours included software development and consulting, which is quite conceivable with a minimal office, as we do not need to receive customers nor operate manufacturing machinery etc.

Eventually, I suspect renewal will depend on showing reasonable accounting data etc. and have little to do with the type of office. In the beginning, they just need enough combined evidence to believe it is a legitimate business, I think.

The issue is that you need a server on the "other side" of the GPRS link to do the filtering and compression before the traffic comes over the slow GPRS link to your computer.

I had Linux machines on both sides (in different continents too, which helped with some other reliability problems). I ran privoxy on both sides. The remote privoxy was doing basic ad filtering which really reduces the junk being loaded in a lot of web pages. The local proxy was configured to forward traffic to another port on the localhost. Then, when I was online, I opened an SSH session which forwarded this local port to the privoxy port on the remote host, with compression enabled for the SSH session.

This worked pretty well, but I did not do anything to try to decimate/reduce image content. E.g. a JPEG or PNG image in a web page that is already compressed will not compress further in the SSH gzip stream compression. However, all the HTML will compress quite a bit. There are ways to do that too, but I've never bothered.

Of course, the browser was then configured to talk to the local proxy. It would get errors from the proxy if the SSH link was down, since the local proxy would not be able to contact the remote proxy over the forwarding port.

Amusingly, these things are just low-budget computers running Linux. If you have anybody with Linux skills to help, you could just buy a cheap and fast PC with a larger case to stuff drives into. The end result would be a faster server, most likely with better cooling to protect the disks, and the ability to run other basic services as well down the road. It is also arguably more secure because you can keep the server current with security patches, whereas most of these appliances end up running very out-dated software. But if it is all running behind a firewall it might not matter to you...

These things just run a trimmed down Linux version with regular Linux filesystems on the disks, software RAID, and NFS, FTP, and/or SMB services.

The cheapest way is one of the "corporate" motherboards which have pretty much everything you need on the motherboard: SATA and IDE controllers, gigabit LAN, and onboard video so you can hook up a monitor to configure the thing initially. A mid-range Athlon64 CPU will have more horsepower than the little processors in those storage appliances, and from what I have read, the main performance limiter on those systems is the processor rather than the gigabit ethernet or disks themselves.

That's right. Our Panasonic A/C has the same function and the manual describes it as automatically choosing a thermostat setting slightly lower than ambient temperature so that it will cool the room and then stop, thereby dehumidfying the air without continuing to chill the place beyond what was necessary for that purpose.

And what does uncomfortably dry mean? I've never felt dry at all in Thailand, but I've noticed that when it gets too dry in a mid-western US winter, everything gets statically charged...

(PS-Haven't yet figured out why the CD's have a 300 year life and the DVD's only 100 years. )

These sorts of average life estimates are based on a presumed process by which the medium degrades and starts to develop flaws, eventually hitting a point where the flaws are large enough and/or frequent enough to disrupt the reading process. The higher data density means that the physical features (which are read by the optical reader) are much smaller. Any physical process of degradation will impact many more storage locations at once, thereby placing more strain the error recovery codes until finally it is impossible to recover the original information.

By the way, a truly impressive piece of software out there is called "dvdisaster" which applies more aggressive error correcting codes to optical media. You can use it to master new disks that are much more tolerant to scratches and rot, by dedicating a larger fraction of the total storage area to redundant error codes. They have some very interesting explanations and experimental demonstrations, including recovery of all data off a disk that you'd be surprised even fits in the drive, they've physically damaged it so much...

If you wanted to be charitable, you could instead interpret what the guy said as a sign of his personal growth. If he had come from an isolated, rural area he may have had his head filled with silly misconceptions. I met more than a few farmer's children who went to university with intentions to escape to the big world outside. Quite a few of them came to realize that the world outside was better in their fantasies, and that the limits of their childhood homes were also largely imaginary.

Admittedly, I've never claimed to be a "global traveler", but I've often wondered what motivates travel junkies. It strikes me very much like someone browsing all the magazine covers in a book shop, but never sitting down to actually read a good book...

I'm compulsively truthful and expect the same from my wife. Things get a little heated because I usually cannot help myself but to be undiplomatic at times. Luckily, she is of a scientific bent and can understand this, but after nine years I think there are times she wishes I'd just keep my thoughts to myself for a few minutes. I don't think of it as man vs. woman or western vs. Thai. It is me versus the universe.

We don't do the white lies either:

"Does this shirt make me look fat?"

(perfect ironic back-beat) "No, but it doesn't hide it as well as that other one..."

We didn't talk to any of the forum sponsors but had a similar experience with local lawyers we met via Thai friends and also with one of the big multinational law firms we contacted at one point. Nobody seemed to really grasp the idea that I wanted a work permit but I was not trying to get an extension of stay based on said work permit. I just need a work permit and then can get my extension of stay based on spouse support, given my income and tax payments.

They just want to sell you a "get work permit and annual extension to B visa" package. The problem is, everyone has a common method they have streamlined in their office and they want to apply this to each client to reduce their overheads. A small client doesn't warrant a big effort to learn the unusual corner cases of the laws or to assign more senior staff. (This is all my conjecture after seeing how our interactions went off the rails.)

One thing you might consider is how you plan to run the business after it is started. Will you and your wife handle most legal issues yourself, or will you always outsource this to some service agency? If the former, you might just bite the bullet and do the work permit filing yourself! It really is not rocket science if you have done your own due diligence. We renewed my work permit, moved it (and the company) to another province, etc. ourselves and found the real headaches were not much different than the first filing done with the help of a Thai lawyer. In the end, you still have to visit the work permit office and review documents unless you are the trusting sort who blindly signs whatever a lawyer thrusts in front of you...

I find it odd to turn the airline discussion into a public health discussion, only because I have real doubts that the health of passengers is anywhere on the list of corporate priorities of the airlines (just so long as they don't start dying in the plane).

But regarding the anti-PC argument, do you equally blame tall people for not fitting in economy class? I tried to bring this up earlier but most people were off on a tangent by then.

The problem with airline pricing, like other services, is that people have a peculiar way of viewing fairness and equality when it comes to people. Most people will find it demeaning to use units like "kilograms" or "liters" when talking about people. At the same time, people are usually a bit self-centric and have odd ideas about averages, needs versus desires, etc. Are we purchasing transport for walking meatbags, or are we purchasing a qualitative experience for people?

Being around 6'4" tall (193cm) but having the leg length of a typical 6'6"-6'7" person (200cm), I feel that I need leg room whereas someone shorter only wants it due to ego concerns. Also, the idea that your ticket is a cargo license rather than an allotment for a reasonable amount of personal luggage is peculiar. Maybe shorter people should have a smaller baggage allowance because, let's face it, their clothes are a lot smaller too. Or do they need to change their shorts more often than I do on a trip?

In a complete capitalist system, I can agree that I should pay more for my extra leg room since it reduces the passenger capacity for the airline. However, we are not in such a system, due to the way people relate to one another and to brands. I am thankful that airlines have to be concerned about alienating customers.

Having worked in the public sector before, I was very irritated by the "economy only" travel reimbursement rules for business travel, which potentially put me in danger of blood clots and such. Luckily, the frequent flier programs tend to allow me the upgrades to business that you speak of. I am also grateful that many airline staff realize the predicament for tall people and try to go out of their way to adjust our seating when they can.

All this said, I have a strong suspicion that the baggage limits have more to do with managing ground costs than fuel consumption. Those big or heavy bags need special handling to avoid worker injury, and an excess number of bags surely requires more laborers than a nice container of cargo.

After checking that the speed difference really is due to wireless (by testing on wired LAN as suggested above), you might check and see if the router has a "status" page in its web interface, where you can see wireless LAN statistics. Sometimes, this will have a separate indication for transmission errors. If there is a big number, or if you can actually see the number going up when you periodically view the page, then there might be some local radio interference or other problem.

I mention this only because the wireless "signal strength" indicators sometimes give a false reading. Not always, but enough over the years with different interface cards, drivers, and access points that I'll always check before looking too far for a problem.

You might try changing the wireless channel configuration if you do see errors. Doing a scan from your PC to see what other wireless networks are in range could also be useful, if you live in an apartment or condo block. You want to be on a different channel than everyone else within range.

If you are worried about disk crashes, the best thing is to use a RAID configuration. If a single drive on the market is big enough for your needs, a simple RAID mirroring configuration with two drives can give some peace of mind. You can of course partition it into several smaller volumes.

Of course, backups are the only sure thing, since you can also lose data due to things other than disk crashes. Fire, theft, viruses, simple mistakes when managing other files, buggy software...

Does NTFS really require defragmentation? I would have expected, with larger drives (more percent free space), that fragmentation would not be a serious concern. There isn't really any defragmentation function on Linux, so I have no recent experience with that...

I am a little bit of a cheap geek and find that on my main (Linux) computer, I prefer to buy three drives and run them in a RAID5 parity mode, using the features of the Linux OS rather than any special RAID disk controller. This gives me a better value because I can buy smaller drives that are often cheaper per megabyte, and I get a bit better performance too. (With a RAID mirror on two drives, you only get the effective space of one drive, whereas with RAID5 on three drives I get the effective space of two drives. In either case, I can replace one failed drive and recover without losing any data.)

There is absolutely no relationship between fax and internet. As Deke said, you can attach any kind of fax machine to any real telephone line. The telephone remains unchanged with ADSL but you need a filter to keep the new (very high frequency) ADSL signals from interfering in the usual telephone signals and vice versa.

Is windows software really so mixed up?? You should be able to run a fax program on a computer with an old-fashioned fax modem while still having internet service configured through the ethernet port to the real ADSL modem or router.

Yes you might have a point. I also think the seats should be divided into classes by legroom and then assigned according to inseam length. I always find it absurd when some little short guy next to me is trying to get an upgrade, when his little legs already stick out like a child's and he can freely kick his feet around. Meanwhile, I nearly have to take my knee out of joint just to change the position of my foot on an hourly basis and stir the stale blood from one part of my leg to another... on full flights, they ought to have one of those signs like at the amusements parks: you must be this ---> tall to ride this ride.

We have an HP OfficeJet 7130 (inkjet with scanner and copy mode) and have found that its color printing has degraded. My theory is that we did not use it enough and some ink has dried out in the color print-head (it has separate color and black print heads and ink cartridges). After a couple of "clean print head" cycles, it got a bit better but more cycles after that did not improve things further. It prints streaks when I run a color test page that should be printing some smooth gradations of color. The black ink, on the other hand, seems fully functional.

We've only been through about 3 ink sets in two years, having used it almost exclusively for office printing and photocopying of documents. We only printed a few test photos in the months when we first bought it. It can get a burst of use for a few days and then sit idle for the rest of the month. I do leave it in standby mode because I have noticed that it makes sounds like it is pumping some ink through every day or so, and I figure that is good for it...

All of this is to say that the duty cycle of the printer is also important in considering the cost of ownership and durability. Knowing what I know now, I might have considered a laser for our purposes. Or, at least I would have sent periodic color prints to keep the ink paths open (perhaps once or twice a week). A drawback to the laser is that it consumes MUCH more electrical power.

Taxout, do you know all the rules surrounding the self-employment tax? It is my belief that you also owe "one half self-employment tax" on income earned while in the US when employed by a foreign employer (for example if you visit a US client's site while working for a Thai firm).

That is, on the portion of earned income that is not counted as foreign earned due to temporary presence in the US during the tax year. However, I am not sure where to look in the IRS documentation to verify this right now...