http://forum.lowyat.net/ Tue, 27 Oct 2026 04:29:55 +0800 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1143119 <a href='http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090825/tc_afp/ustelecombroadbanditinternet_20090825230334' target='_blank'>http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090825/tc..._20090825230334</a><br /><br />The United States ranks 28th in the world in average Internet connection speed and is not making significant progress in building a faster network, according to a report released on Tuesday.<br /><br />The report by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) said the average download speed in South Korea is 20.4 megabits per second (mbps) -- four times faster than the US average of 5.1 mbps.<br /><br /><!--SPOILER BEGIN--><div class="spoilertop" onClick="openClose('14d129233feda983f5c9e9f0d15e949e')" style="font-weight: bold"><u>&raquo; Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... &laquo;</u></div><div class="spoilermain" id="14d129233feda983f5c9e9f0d15e949e" style="display:none"><!--SPOILER END-->Japan trails South Korea with an average of 15.8 mbps followed by Sweden at 12.8 mbps and the Netherlands at 11.0 mbps, the report said.<br /><br />It said tests conducted by speedmatters.org found the average US download speed had improved by only nine-tenths of a megabit per second between 2008 and 2009 -- from 4.2 mbps to 5.1 mbps.<br /><br />&quot;The US has not made significant improvement in the speeds at which residents connect to the Internet,&quot; the report said. &quot;Our nation continues to fall far behind other countries.&quot;<br /><br />&quot;People in Japan can upload a high-definition video in 12 minutes, compared to a grueling 2.5 hours at the US average upload speed,&quot; the report said.<br /><br />It said 18 percent of those who took a US speed test recorded download speeds that were slower than 768 kilobits per second, which does not even qualify as basic broadband, according to the Federal Communications Commission.<br /><br />Sixty-four percent connected at up to 10 mbps, 19 percent connected at speeds greater than 10 mbps and two percent exceeded 25 mbps.<br /><br />The United States was ranked 20th in broadband penetration in a survey of 58 countries released earlier this year by Boston-based Strategy Analytics.<br /><br />South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, Denmark and Taiwan were the top five countries listed in terms of access to high-speed Internet.<br /><br />US President Barack Obama has pledged to put broadband in every home and the FCC has embarked on an ambitious project to bring high-speed Internet access to every corner of the United States.<br /><br />According to the CWA report, the fastest download speeds in the United States are in the northeastern parts of the country while the slowest are in states such as Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.<!--SPOILER DIV--></div><!--SPOILER DIV--><br /><br />Too long, i lazy summary also. A-D-Photographer The Museum Of Kopitiam Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:22:47 +0800 http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1129578 <img src='http://d.yimg.com/a/p/ap/20090813/capt.bd52603ef5334aabb543971ae1bdf4bb.obit_les_paul_nyet664.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' /><br /><br />Les Paul, who invented the solid-body electric guitar later wielded by a legion of rock &#39;n&#39; roll greats, died Thursday of complications from pneumonia. He was 94.<br /><br />According to Gibson Guitar, Paul died at White Plains Hospital. His family and friends were by his side.<br /><br /><!--SPOILER BEGIN--><div class="spoilertop" onClick="openClose('0b9b9fb93573b8ca56e5f8938979a43d')" style="font-weight: bold"><u>&raquo; Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... &laquo;</u></div><div class="spoilermain" id="0b9b9fb93573b8ca56e5f8938979a43d" style="display:none"><!--SPOILER END--><br />As an inventor, Paul also helped bring about the rise of rock &#39;n&#39; roll with multitrack recording, which enables artists to record different instruments at different times, sing harmony with themselves, and then carefully balance the tracks in the finished recording.<br /><br />The use of electric guitar gained popularity in the mid-to-late 1940s, and then exploded with the advent of rock in the mid-&#39;50s.<br /><br />&quot;Suddenly, it was recognized that power was a very important part of music,&quot; Paul once said. &quot;To have the dynamics, to have the way of expressing yourself beyond the normal limits of an unamplified instrument, was incredible. Today a guy wouldn&#39;t think of singing a song on a stage without a microphone and a sound system.&quot;<br /><br />A tinkerer and musician since childhood, he experimented with guitar amplification for years before coming up in 1941 with what he called &quot;The Log,&quot; a four-by-four piece of wood strung with steel strings.<br /><br />&quot;I went into a nightclub and played it. Of course, everybody had me labeled as a nut.&quot; He later put the wooden wings onto the body to give it a tradition guitar shape.<br /><br />In 1952, Gibson Guitars began production on the Les Paul guitar.<br /><br />Pete Townsend of the Who, Steve Howe of Yes, jazz great Al DiMeola and Led Zeppelin&#39;s Jimmy Page all made the Gibson Les Paul their trademark six-string.<br /><br />Over the years, the Les Paul series has become one of the most widely used guitars in the music industry. In 2005, Christie&#39;s auction house sold a 1955 Gibson Les Paul for &#036;45,600.<br /><br />In the late 1960s, Paul retired from music to concentrate on his inventions. His interest in country music was rekindled in the mid-&#39;70s and he teamed up with Chet Atkins for two albums. The duo were awarded a Grammy for best country instrumental performance of 1976 for their &quot;Chester and Lester&quot; album.<br /><br />With Mary Ford, his wife from 1949 to 1962, he earned 36 gold records for hits including &quot;Vaya Con Dios&quot; and &quot;How High the Moon,&quot; which both hit No. 1. Many of their songs used overdubbing techniques that Paul had helped develop.<br /><br />&quot;I could take my Mary and make her three, six, nine, 12, as many voices as I wished,&quot; he recalled. &quot;This is quite an asset.&quot; The overdubbing technique was highly influential on later recording artists such as the Carpenters.<br /><br />Released in 2005, &quot;Les Paul &amp; Friends: American Made, World Played&quot; was his first album of new material since those 1970s recordings. Among those playing with him: Peter Frampton, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Richie Sambora.<br /><br />&quot;They&#39;re not only my friends, but they&#39;re great players,&quot; Paul told The Associated Press. &quot;I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.&quot;<br /><br />Two cuts from the album won Grammys, &quot;Caravan&quot; for best pop instrumental performance and &quot;69 Freedom Special&quot; for best rock instrumental performance. (He had also been awarded a technical Grammy in 2001.)<br /><br />Paul was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005.<br /><br />Paul was born Lester William Polfus, in Waukseha, Wis., on June 9, 1915. He began his career as a musician, billing himself as Red Hot Red or Rhubarb Red. He toured with the popular Chicago band Rube Tronson and His Texas Cowboys and led the house band on WJJD radio in Chicago. <br /><br />In the mid-1930s he joined Fred Waring&#39;s Pennsylvanians and soon moved to New York to form the Les Paul Trio, with Jim Atkins and bassist Ernie Newton. <br /><br />Meanwhile, he had made his first attempt at audio amplification at age 13. Unhappy with the amount of volume produced by his acoustic guitar, Paul tried placing a telephone receiver under the strings. Although this worked to some extent, only two strings were amplified and the volume level was still too low. <br /><br />By placing a phonograph needle in the guitar, all six strings were amplified, which proved to be much louder. Paul was playing a working prototype of the electric guitar in 1929. <br /><br />His work on taping techniques began in the years after World War II, when Bing Crosby gave him a tape recorder. Drawing on his earlier experimentation with his homemade record-cutting machines, Paul added an additional playback head to the recorder. The result was a delayed effect that became known as tape echo. <br /><br />Tape echo gave the recording a more &quot;live&quot; feel and enabled the user to simulate different playing environments. <br /><br />Paul&#39;s next &quot;crazy idea&quot; was to stack together eight mono tape machines and send their outputs to one piece of tape, stacking the recording heads on top of each other. The resulting machine served as the forerunner to today&#39;s multitrack recorders. <br /><br />In 1954, Paul commissioned Ampex to build the first eight-track tape recorder, later known as &quot;Sel-Sync,&quot; in which a recording head could simultaneously record a new track and play back previous ones. <br /><br />He had met Ford, then known as Colleen Summers, in the 1940s while working as a studio musician in Los Angeles. For seven years in the 1950s, Paul and Ford broadcast a TV show from their home in Mahwah, N.J. Ford died in 1977, 15 years after they divorced. <br /><br />In recent years, even after his illness in early 2006, Paul played Monday nights at New York night spots. Such stars as Led Zeppelin&#39;s Jimmy Page, Dire Straits&#39; Mark Knopfler, Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Van Halen came to pay tribute and sit in with him. <br /><br />&quot;It&#39;s where we were the happiest, in a `joint,&#39;&quot; he said in a 2000 interview with the AP. &quot;It was not being on top. The fun was getting there, not staying there — that&#39;s hard work.&quot;<br /><!--SPOILER DIV--></div><!--SPOILER DIV--><br /><br /><a href='http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090813/ap_en_mu/us_obit_les_paul' target='_blank'>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090813/ap_en_...s_obit_les_paul</a> A-D-Photographer Movies &amp; Music Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:39:31 +0800 http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1128786 As title. Where to get velcro in KL? A-D-Photographer Serious Kopitiam Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:28:57 +0800 http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1101123 1. <a href='http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1100530' target='_blank'>http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1100530</a> - Malaysian suspected in Indonesia hotel attacks<br />2. <a href='http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1101039' target='_blank'>http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1101039</a> - Manchester United confirm second Malaysia match<br />3. ???<br />4. PROFIT&#33;&#33;&#33;<br /><br />I smell conspiracy. A-D-Photographer The Museum Of Kopitiam Sat, 18 Jul 2009 23:07:06 +0800 http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1101083 <a href='http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090718/ap_on_fe_st/us_odd_wienermobile_wreck' target='_blank'>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090718/ap_on_...nermobile_wreck</a><br /><!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Police said the driver was trying to turn the Wienermobile around in the driveway and thought she was moving in reverse. But she instead went forward and hit the home. It sat in the driveway as if it were stuck in the garage Friday afternoon.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--><br /><br />Discuss. A-D-Photographer The Museum Of Kopitiam Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:20:12 +0800 http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/925416 <a href='http://pemainbolakeranjang.blogspot.com/2009/01/petronas-2009-3on3-grand-finals.html' target='_blank'>http://pemainbolakeranjang.blogspot.com/20...and-finals.html</a><br /><br />let&#39;s forget the greetings stuff and go straight to the point, shall we?<br /><br />- I&#39;m a journalism student, just starting on my final documentary assignment, and I decided to go with basketball tournament because no one else did that in the history of my college.<br /><br />- The soonest tournament is at 15th Feb, the Petronas 3 on 3, and the latest date to submit the form is at 10th Feb. I figured I can secure at least one team to follow on that day, if I&#39;m advertising here.<br /><br />- I pay for your registration (RM60), in return you let me follow you (and your team) around for that day, to anywhere, anytime (the full length of the event). I&#39;ll observe and write down your story of the day (it&#39;ll be the basic narrative script), like what you eat, wear, talk, do, etc. There&#39;ll be a camera and a videocam, so depending on your luck, you might get both following your actions, or just one of them, since there&#39;s several teams to follow.<br /><br />- It&#39;s not commercial, so it won&#39;t come out in tv (besides, i&#39;m nowhere near that kind of quality, yet). It&#39;s just for the course&#39;s dean and lecturers viewing, to see what grade I deserve. If you want a copy, ask and it&#39;ll be given to you. Free of course.<br /><br />If you think it&#39;s cool and don&#39;t mind having someone tailing you during tournaments, send me a PM and we&#39;ll talk more. If you think this idea is stupid and RM60 is not worth the annoyance, kindly take your ranting off somewhere else, and save spaces here for those interested.<br /><br />Spread the word for me, will ya?<br /><br />Have a nice day. A-D-Photographer The Sports Channel Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:28:54 +0800