On our way to dinner Friday, my Dad and I were wondering what is the exact difference between a router and a switch. Sounds like something basic most anybody with a home network should know, but at best all we could do was guess/BS our way through the answer. Wikipedia to the rescue.

Router

A router connects networks together, by extracting the destination for a packet and selecting the best path to that destination, then forwarding data packets to the next device. We were pretty spot on with our deduction of a router, that it is a device smart enough to connect two subnets (logical networks) like your home network and your ISP. A commodity linux PC can be used as a route.

Switch

The term switch is a little less specific, sometimes used interchangably with "router", and is really more of a maketing term than a technical term. On the low end, a switch is similar to a simple hub, with enough intelligence to inspect packets and route them only to the destination device. Your run-of-the-mill linksys or netgear hub isn't so smart and just broadcasts packets to all devices on the network, letting them sort out what packets are intended for each on their own. 

By the way, if you don't think a switch makes much of a difference, when I replaced our hub with a switch at home, there was a noticeable increase in file transfer speed between computers on the switch. If won't make your internet connection faster, since switches and hubs are faster than what your ISP provides, but with less packet noise flying around among computers you should notice a difference too.

For a while now, digital cameras have been able to record movies along with just taking photographs. Camera vendors use different video codecs to compress and save the video you take. Common codecs include one of Apple's quicktime codecs (usually saved as a .mov file) and a variety of codecs with the .avi extension. AVI files are commonly associated with Windows Media Player. To make the situation more confusing, movies encoded with the popular DivX codec might be saved by your camera as a. .avi file. Unfortunately, if you're a Mac owner, if your .avi movies won't playback, its likely that you need to install DivX.

The X Lab has a whole page on why some .avi files may not play on Max OS X, and suggestiong for how to play them.

[To further confuse the issue, many DivX-encoded files carry the .avi extension. QuickTime does not include native DivX® support, even though QuickTime 6 and later support the ISO Standard MPEG-4 media compression format and DivX is based on the MPEG-4 standard.]{.Body-Text}

DivX also makes their codec available as a free download, and it can be used from any application with QuickTime exporting capabilities.

Play DivX videos in QuickTime, Front Row and many other 3rd party media players

If installing the codec solves this problem for you, please leave a comment to let me know!

I don't know why I'd expect a summary of survey results to actually have something intereesting in it, but I guess that's a bi-product of something that reads as if it was written by committee.

Latino immigrants who have been in the U.S. for decades and those who arrived as children are less connected than those who arrived more recently or migrated as adults. There are also significant differences by country of origin, with Colombians and Dominicans maintaining more active connections than Mexicans, and with Cubans having the least contact.

Somday, I wish a complete report like this would be available online in HTML, not as a file cryptically name 80.pdf. There are some interesting key finding within the report. "    The share making trips in the recent past is higher among immigrants with long tenure than among the recent arrivals. Acquiring U.S. citizenship, which is more common among those with more years of residence, is associated with higher levels of recent travel." I guess thats a key finding, but is it that surprising? Recent arrivals are less likely to be able to afford a trip back, or if they are here illegaly, would not risk travelling and having to cross again. This is a behavior that will be reinforced and compounded the harder immigration opponents try to make border crossing. In fact, its one reason why the immigrant population has grown over the last 20 years, migrant workers who once returned South after working have been forced to stay in the US permanently rather than undertaking an ever-riskier border crossing.

Another fascinating finding, is that the longer immigrants stay here the more likely the describe themselves as American (56% of those here 30-39 years), plan to stay (73% of those those here 20-29 years, up to 96% of those 40+ years here), and less likley to consider their country of birth as real homelan (only 38% of those here 20-29 years).

Am I knocking this survey - maybe a bit. But it does provide very useful, quantified information, about how attached latino immigrants are to their country, and points out that the longer the stay in the US the less attached, some would call that "assimilated", they become. If you look at the report, skip the summary and executive summary, check out the data, and read the more interesting conclusions at the end.

The long-term trend, however, is toward a steadily deepening commitment to the U.S. Phone calls, travel, remittances---the three major transnational activities--- start off high, but all fall off among those who have been in the U.S. for longer periods of time. By contrast, attachment to this country is strong among recent arrivals and then rises among the long-term immigrants. Even among immigrants living in the U.S. for less than 10 years, more than half are planning to stay for good and a similar proportion report that the U.S. is the locus of their political and social concerns. Levels of attachment are stronger still among more established residents.