Re:not much of a challenge, how about $150 compute
on
Building a $200 Linux PC
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Motherboard with video and sound integrated - 40$ , CPU - 37$ , case + psu - 30$, memory 20$
We're at 127$ right now, well maybe at 135$ if we include mouse+keyboard
The hard drive is what would push us over the edge, so how about we just replace it with a 8GB memory stick that's 13-15$ ? 2 GB for the OS should be enough (you would install a Linux in much less space if you want to) and you still have 6 GB left for documents and files.
Sure, it costs about $20k but what the hell, some cars are more expensive. You won't be able to use Windows 7 on it anyways, as I think it's limited to two physical processors.
If I hear a song on the radio and i record it am i pirating it ? If i watch vh1 or mtv and i'm recording the show am i pirating it ?
(we don't even have to get into drm - get a digital camera and record the screen of your tv - you're recording the unique rendition of a television channel performed by your tv )
Big ass case - for example this one with 10 internal hard drive slots and 5 DVD sized slots which you can convert using something like this that converts 3 x 5.25" into 4 x 3.5" drives, so you'd have 14 hard drives in total.
There are cheaper cases with only 8 or 9 standard 3.5 inch slots for hard drives and at least 3 x 5.25" slots, so the least amount of hard drives you could store is 12. But you don't have to be limited by the slots already made. You could get 2 metal plates, drill some holes and screw the drives in a column on the plates and lock this column with some screws to the bottom of the case or to the side panel.
Motherboard - any will do, most have 5-6 sata connectors. There are cheap 50$ sata controllers that add 4 sata ports so you can plug two of these and you have 14 sata ports in the computer. You don't even need to get 1 to 5 port extenders which only slow down the transfer.
The only thing you have to worry with something like this is to get a good power supply - ideally one of those with a single voltage rail or 4 independent voltage rails in which case you make sure to attach 4-5 drives on each rail so that the load is balanced.
As for the hard drives themselves, check the specifications on WD's site, on Seagate's site, and pick the ones that heat the less and maybe even check reviews for heat information. Though it's enough to have some 120 mm fans in front of the case blowing air to keep them chilled. 5900 rpm drives are fast enough for your needs.
So get a LCD that rotates 90 degrees... it's called pivot function or something. I have a Samsung 2494HM that's 24" 1920x1080 but there are others, for example the 24" 1920x1200 panel SAMSUNG 2443BWT http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001323
You get the best of both worlds, 1200 pixels width that works for 95% of the websites out there, perfect for a A4 page too, and lots of height so you don't scroll a lot.
Mirrors, in case it's slashdotted
on
Full ACTA Leak Online
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Here's some mirrors of the original document, in case the original site is slashdotted:
Perhaps he just needs to upgrade to a better soundcard, geared towards semi-professionals and professionals. For example M-Audio is a company known to produce produces quality soundcards with multiple input and output jacks and break out boxes. Here's the category page: http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=recording You can find PCI cards, USB sound cards and even Firewire devices on that page.
These usually have low mAh values, so that they can be charged reasonably fast and because almost a third of the actual battery is the usb plug and whatever else is needed. For example, what I see on the page is rated 1300 mAh, which sucks, because I can currently purchase 2700mAh batteries for less than the price of those batteries.
I agree, it's not OK even for a regular person. I wasn't thinking about the profit of one company when I wrote that paragraph, I was thinking more in the line of how many people's lives can be affected if a company's movie is removed even temporarily. Not all companies are huge, with lots of money and high budgets so something like this can affect a smaller company big time.
For example, let's say you and 3-5 of your friends receive a grant to produce a short movie or a documentary.You work for several months on this, now at the end you start advertising it and spend your own money printing banners and fliers, make deals and possibly pay in advance a CDN or some servers for people to download your movie from, and sending emails to people to download it... and the next day after all these go out, your hosting company, youtube and so on receive DMCA complaints. Your video is down and can't be put back for 10-14 days - you're screwed, unless you have money left to repost it somewhere in the meantime and let people know about the changes.So you may spent money just to keep the project alive and be forced to not pay your people because of this, making all their lives worse.
As far as I know, DMCA requires Google to keep the video down for a "cool out period" of 10-14 days. So even if you're right and the video was legitimate, the video has to stay down for at least 10 days, and then it's restored.
That's Ok for a regular person, but if someone actually makes a living out of videos and its competitor simply sends a DMCA complaint to Youtube (or your hosting company if you host the videos yourself on a rented dedicated server) claiming copyright over it, he's able to disrupt your business easily. The (ridiculous and almost never applied) penalties for lying are often worth doing this.
In the case of this video, I don't think Google has received a complaint... I think their automated software simply detected the signature of a Warner song and followed the default rule of handling audio tracks for this publisher : block it (mute the video in plain language).
As far as I know (and I'm no expert, just good at googling) , the radiation levels from antennas are relatively safe about 3-5 meters away from them but depending on the type of antenna their beam can kind of focused in one direction so that 3-5 meters estimation could mean a measurement ouside the beam direction and if the apartment is inside the beam the radiation could be above safe levels. For example, I've heard that in my country, if you live on the last floor of a building and an antenna is above, the antenna must be on a pole at least 2-2.5 meters high so that distance between the apartments below and the emitter is around 3 meters.
Cellphone antennas would not be uni-directional so there shouldn't be any focused beam or whatever it's called but who knows what other antennas will be installed in the future on the same pole.
So from a radiation point of view you may be safe, but you never know how sensitive you are or how sensitive your family / children etc will be.
Second, while you may not care so much, the property will be harder to sell in the future because of that antenna.
BT will still only do FTTP, aka fiber to the premises - that's why they place all those ugly boxes to the corner of the road... it's still copper from that box to user's home and still limited upload speeds.
Why make your life harder converting fiber to copper, pulling copper cable inside the house, using a modem to convert copper to utp and so on when you can just get a fiber to utp adapter for less than 100$.... The reason they chose to work with adsl and dsl and all that crap is because they can lock users into their own telephony and modems they give you are if not cheaper then proprietary - you'll pay a dollar or so rent for it for as long as you subscribe when it probably costs them 20-30$ a piece.
The one company that I recommend to everyone when it comes to shared hosting is ICDSOFT.com It will be extremely hard for you to find a bad review on the Internet, simply because their service is impecable...
I've used them for a year until I switched to a dedicated server and each time I had a question their tech support answered within 5 minutes with precise answers. The main think about them is that they're not oversold - each account can hold only one website, you get only about 100-500 GB of bandwidth, 10-50 GB of disk space and several databases and free webmail/pop3/smtp with limited number of email accounts, and each server had their own RAID 5 setup. When I had the website hosted there my server had about 120 websites hosted on it. This is actually great especially when you start your website as you'll know the server won't be overloaded, you won't have 10.000 websites on the server with all files being retrieved from a NAS (as Dreamhost does) and you won't have the accounts of 400-1000 people who abuse the "unlimited bandwidth and space" feature and stream music to their office from the hosting account or basically people that have Youtube clones on shared hosting accounts (as it happens on Dreamhost) Most people when they see they get only a few hundred GB of bandwidth they go on looking for hosting companies with unlimited bandwidth, but in reality for a startup website on a sharing account even 100 GB of bandwidth is enough. If your website becomes popular enough to go over 100 GB of bandwidth used, you'll afford to get a 60$ a month server with 2 TB of bandwidth and 200 GB of disk space.
I've also used Dreamhost.com and Site5.com for a while, between ICDSoft and my own dedicated server, mainly because it was a good deal - used coupons to get one year for something like 10$. Site5.com was just slow, the control panel sucked....
Dreamhost was slowish, overloaded (the server I was on had about 12000 websites on it), the quality of the websites is lower (blogs which are not optimized therefore abusing PHP and MySQL servers) and the NAS where this web server was retrieving from was shared between about 5-6 web servers so you can imagine a 1gbps link from a NAS was used by about 100.000 websites. Also, their servers and hardware have issues all the time - there's no single day where one of their NAS would not crash, or one of their websites would die or the email server shared between 20-30 web servers would fail and so on... you can check dreamhoststatus.com to see how often they fail.
And actually MPC-HC is capable of decoding videos using the hardware h264 decoder the laptop probably already has built in. CoreAVC would just decode the video in software.
I'd run conduit with fiber AND utp Cat5(e). Cat5e is good for up to 1gbps, fiber is also good and there are no fiber to utp adapters for 60-100$ a piece (up to 1gbps) and in the future there will be adapters for 10 gbps and the fiber will be re-usable.
I'd be more impressed if Google would donate even $50-100.000 to Wikileaks - it brings almost as much good as Wikipedia. Not every benefit is directly visible.
Yeah right, because Gates does it out of their hearts... you're an idiot if you think that. They're just investing their money in vaccines and patenting everything.
Of course, Google donates because it has interest in Wikipedia to, they don't do it because they woke up the wrong way today.
If only it was 100 mbps without any restrictions and filtering, it would be enough. As the infrastructure will use fiber optics, the upgrade to faster speeds will be much easier compared to going from DSL to fiber.
That's not how I see it. You have to defragment the big drive first, to have all executables and OS files at the start of the big disk. Then you use the software they give you to fill up the SSD with the data at the start of the big disk and after a reboot, reads and writes to those first 32 GB or so of the big disk will pass through the SSD.
From what I read in the article, you have to defragment the big hard drive because the SSD will fill up with the data at the beginning of the drive. The read and write requests are just caught by whatever chip they use so when the OS requests a read from the start of the drive, the data from SSD is sent instead. Same for writes.
So the SSD acts just like level 2 cache for the first 32-64-whatever GB of the big disk. The rest will never be optimized.
RIAA offered to settle for 25 grand, with some conditions that would make the lawsuit results not apply to other trials, if I understood correctly. I believe they feared this would cause a precedent and as a consequence they'd get such small fines.
They can do everything the description says with id3v2 tags. Perhaps just an extension to the id3v2 tag standard that would allow embedded javascript or html would be enough for all interaction they would need.
Slashdot Mirror
Motherboard with video and sound integrated - 40$ , CPU - 37$ , case + psu - 30$, memory 20$
We're at 127$ right now, well maybe at 135$ if we include mouse+keyboard
The hard drive is what would push us over the edge, so how about we just replace it with a 8GB memory stick that's 13-15$ ? 2 GB for the OS should be enough (you would install a Linux in much less space if you want to) and you still have 6 GB left for documents and files.
Yes, this 900$ motherboard, 32 x 8GB memory modules each about 450$ and four 305$ processors and a 200$ power supply will let you test 256 GB of memory.
Sure, it costs about $20k but what the hell, some cars are more expensive. You won't be able to use Windows 7 on it anyways, as I think it's limited to two physical processors.
It will only get interesting when it's OVER 9000 !
You're over complicating things.
If I hear a song on the radio and i record it am i pirating it ?
If i watch vh1 or mtv and i'm recording the show am i pirating it ?
(we don't even have to get into drm - get a digital camera and record the screen of your tv - you're recording the unique rendition of a television channel performed by your tv )
Correct.
Big ass case - for example this one with 10 internal hard drive slots and 5 DVD sized slots which you can convert using something like this that converts 3 x 5.25" into 4 x 3.5" drives, so you'd have 14 hard drives in total.
There are cheaper cases with only 8 or 9 standard 3.5 inch slots for hard drives and at least 3 x 5.25" slots, so the least amount of hard drives you could store is 12. But you don't have to be limited by the slots already made. You could get 2 metal plates, drill some holes and screw the drives in a column on the plates and lock this column with some screws to the bottom of the case or to the side panel.
Motherboard - any will do, most have 5-6 sata connectors. There are cheap 50$ sata controllers that add 4 sata ports so you can plug two of these and you have 14 sata ports in the computer.
You don't even need to get 1 to 5 port extenders which only slow down the transfer.
The only thing you have to worry with something like this is to get a good power supply - ideally one of those with a single voltage rail or 4 independent voltage rails in which case you make sure to attach 4-5 drives on each rail so that the load is balanced.
As for the hard drives themselves, check the specifications on WD's site, on Seagate's site, and pick the ones that heat the less and maybe even check reviews for heat information. Though it's enough to have some 120 mm fans in front of the case blowing air to keep them chilled. 5900 rpm drives are fast enough for your needs.
So get a LCD that rotates 90 degrees ... it's called pivot function or something. I have a Samsung 2494HM that's 24" 1920x1080 but there are others, for example the 24" 1920x1200 panel SAMSUNG 2443BWT http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001323
You get the best of both worlds, 1200 pixels width that works for 95% of the websites out there, perfect for a A4 page too, and lots of height so you don't scroll a lot.
Here's some mirrors of the original document, in case the original site is slashdotted:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28853862/201001-acta
http://www.mediafire.com/?wdnjg2nrmne
http://rapidshare.com/files/367572656/201001_acta.pdf
http://hotfile.com/dl/34373604/038b957/201001_acta.pdf.html
Perhaps he just needs to upgrade to a better soundcard, geared towards semi-professionals and professionals. For example M-Audio is a company known to produce produces quality soundcards with multiple input and output jacks and break out boxes.
Here's the category page: http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=recording
You can find PCI cards, USB sound cards and even Firewire devices on that page.
Otherwise, there are still plenty of sound cards with line-in, including USB ones: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=Property&Subcategory=57&Description=&Type=&N=2010290057&srchInDesc=line&MinPrice=&MaxPrice=
These usually have low mAh values, so that they can be charged reasonably fast and because almost a third of the actual battery is the usb plug and whatever else is needed. For example, what I see on the page is rated 1300 mAh, which sucks, because I can currently purchase 2700mAh batteries for less than the price of those batteries.
I agree, it's not OK even for a regular person. I wasn't thinking about the profit of one company when I wrote that paragraph, I was thinking more in the line of how many people's lives can be affected if a company's movie is removed even temporarily. Not all companies are huge, with lots of money and high budgets so something like this can affect a smaller company big time.
For example, let's say you and 3-5 of your friends receive a grant to produce a short movie or a documentary.You work for several months on this, now at the end you start advertising it and spend your own money printing banners and fliers, make deals and possibly pay in advance a CDN or some servers for people to download your movie from, and sending emails to people to download it... and the next day after all these go out, your hosting company, youtube and so on receive DMCA complaints. Your video is down and can't be put back for 10-14 days - you're screwed, unless you have money left to repost it somewhere in the meantime and let people know about the changes.So you may spent money just to keep the project alive and be forced to not pay your people because of this, making all their lives worse.
As far as I know, DMCA requires Google to keep the video down for a "cool out period" of 10-14 days. So even if you're right and the video was legitimate, the video has to stay down for at least 10 days, and then it's restored.
That's Ok for a regular person, but if someone actually makes a living out of videos and its competitor simply sends a DMCA complaint to Youtube (or your hosting company if you host the videos yourself on a rented dedicated server) claiming copyright over it, he's able to disrupt your business easily. The (ridiculous and almost never applied) penalties for lying are often worth doing this.
In the case of this video, I don't think Google has received a complaint... I think their automated software simply detected the signature of a Warner song and followed the default rule of handling audio tracks for this publisher : block it (mute the video in plain language).
I wouldn't risk living there.
As far as I know (and I'm no expert, just good at googling) , the radiation levels from antennas are relatively safe about 3-5 meters away from them but depending on the type of antenna their beam can kind of focused in one direction so that 3-5 meters estimation could mean a measurement ouside the beam direction and if the apartment is inside the beam the radiation could be above safe levels. For example, I've heard that in my country, if you live on the last floor of a building and an antenna is above, the antenna must be on a pole at least 2-2.5 meters high so that distance between the apartments below and the emitter is around 3 meters.
Cellphone antennas would not be uni-directional so there shouldn't be any focused beam or whatever it's called but who knows what other antennas will be installed in the future on the same pole.
So from a radiation point of view you may be safe, but you never know how sensitive you are or how sensitive your family / children etc will be.
Second, while you may not care so much, the property will be harder to sell in the future because of that antenna.
BT will still only do FTTP, aka fiber to the premises - that's why they place all those ugly boxes to the corner of the road... it's still copper from that box to user's home and still limited upload speeds.
Why make your life harder converting fiber to copper, pulling copper cable inside the house, using a modem to convert copper to utp and so on when you can just get a fiber to utp adapter for less than 100$....
The reason they chose to work with adsl and dsl and all that crap is because they can lock users into their own telephony and modems they give you are if not cheaper then proprietary - you'll pay a dollar or so rent for it for as long as you subscribe when it probably costs them 20-30$ a piece.
For some reason my mind went to Cassandra Crossing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cassandra_Crossing)
The one company that I recommend to everyone when it comes to shared hosting is ICDSOFT.com It will be extremely hard for you to find a bad review on the Internet, simply because their service is impecable...
I've used them for a year until I switched to a dedicated server and each time I had a question their tech support answered within 5 minutes with precise answers.
The main think about them is that they're not oversold - each account can hold only one website, you get only about 100-500 GB of bandwidth, 10-50 GB of disk space and several databases and free webmail/pop3/smtp with limited number of email accounts, and each server had their own RAID 5 setup. When I had the website hosted there my server had about 120 websites hosted on it.
This is actually great especially when you start your website as you'll know the server won't be overloaded, you won't have 10.000 websites on the server with all files being retrieved from a NAS (as Dreamhost does) and you won't have the accounts of 400-1000 people who abuse the "unlimited bandwidth and space" feature and stream music to their office from the hosting account or basically people that have Youtube clones on shared hosting accounts (as it happens on Dreamhost)
Most people when they see they get only a few hundred GB of bandwidth they go on looking for hosting companies with unlimited bandwidth, but in reality for a startup website on a sharing account even 100 GB of bandwidth is enough. If your website becomes popular enough to go over 100 GB of bandwidth used, you'll afford to get a 60$ a month server with 2 TB of bandwidth and 200 GB of disk space.
I've also used Dreamhost.com and Site5.com for a while, between ICDSoft and my own dedicated server, mainly because it was a good deal - used coupons to get one year for something like 10$. Site5.com was just slow, the control panel sucked....
Dreamhost was slowish, overloaded (the server I was on had about 12000 websites on it), the quality of the websites is lower (blogs which are not optimized therefore abusing PHP and MySQL servers) and the NAS where this web server was retrieving from was shared between about 5-6 web servers so you can imagine a 1gbps link from a NAS was used by about 100.000 websites. Also, their servers and hardware have issues all the time - there's no single day where one of their NAS would not crash, or one of their websites would die or the email server shared between 20-30 web servers would fail and so on... you can check dreamhoststatus.com to see how often they fail.
And actually MPC-HC is capable of decoding videos using the hardware h264 decoder the laptop probably already has built in. CoreAVC would just decode the video in software.
I'd run conduit with fiber AND utp Cat5(e). Cat5e is good for up to 1gbps, fiber is also good and there are no fiber to utp adapters for 60-100$ a piece (up to 1gbps) and in the future there will be adapters for 10 gbps and the fiber will be re-usable.
I'd be more impressed if Google would donate even $50-100.000 to Wikileaks - it brings almost as much good as Wikipedia. Not every benefit is directly visible.
Yeah right, because Gates does it out of their hearts... you're an idiot if you think that. They're just investing their money in vaccines and patenting everything.
Of course, Google donates because it has interest in Wikipedia to, they don't do it because they woke up the wrong way today.
If only it was 100 mbps without any restrictions and filtering, it would be enough. As the infrastructure will use fiber optics, the upgrade to faster speeds will be much easier compared to going from DSL to fiber.
That's not how I see it. You have to defragment the big drive first, to have all executables and OS files at the start of the big disk. Then you use the software they give you to fill up the SSD with the data at the start of the big disk and after a reboot, reads and writes to those first 32 GB or so of the big disk will pass through the SSD.
From what I read in the article, you have to defragment the big hard drive because the SSD will fill up with the data at the beginning of the drive. The read and write requests are just caught by whatever chip they use so when the OS requests a read from the start of the drive, the data from SSD is sent instead. Same for writes.
So the SSD acts just like level 2 cache for the first 32-64-whatever GB of the big disk. The rest will never be optimized.
RIAA offered to settle for 25 grand, with some conditions that would make the lawsuit results not apply to other trials, if I understood correctly. I believe they feared this would cause a precedent and as a consequence they'd get such small fines.
Now of course they play the good guys
They can do everything the description says with id3v2 tags. Perhaps just an extension to the id3v2 tag standard that would allow embedded javascript or html would be enough for all interaction they would need.