And there are forensic specialists that analyze shoeprints at a crime scene. Also fibers left behind by clothing and tire tracks.
Yes, they do exist, but despite what TV shows try to tell you, nobody checks for shoeprints when someone breaks into your house and steals everything you own. Unless there is some sort of personal injury, they probably won't even check for fingerprints. In the same way, the police likely aren't going to check to see if the crime against you was "announced" on Facebook.
As others have noted, the whole article is scare tactics to get laws passed to allow police more ability to violate your rights. That's really obvious when you read stuff like the following in TFA:
Many local criminals are working with international hackers—often hired guns in the former Soviet bloc who can help them con people from the other side of the world.
The provocative phrasing ("hired guns", "former Soviet bloc") is just the sort of thing used to try and get people to think that "something must be done about this", just like "it's all for the good of the children".
There's one reason - although honestly I don't remember the original broadcasts having a logo. I've also never seen them available above 720p. Thirdly, the bitrate is a lot higher on blu-ray than from a broadcast.
I could have sworn that my recordings had logos, but you're right...they don't. I guess I was thinking of the Sarah Jane Adventures, which do have logos on the HD broadcasts. I also have The Next Doctor as an HD broadcast, but I think you're right that it was a lower res source, now that I look at it.
I resize to 1280x720 for most things when I store them in my library, so I don't really care about the higher res. As for the bitrate, most of it is likely wasted anyway. Run a Blu-Ray.m2ts through Bitrate Viewer and compare it to a re-compress using "--crf 18" on x264. You'll see that the Blu-Ray has essentially a constant bitrate, while x264 will put the bits where they are needed.
For example, The Avengers Blu-Ray only varies by 74% down and 64% up from the average, while my re-encode varied by 97% down and 438% up. And, that's actually a really wide range for a Blu-Ray.
You mention that your "HTPC only makes noise because..."
Who cares WHY it makes noise. It makes noise. Next...
It makes noise because it is built to do things a Mac Mini can't do, and couldn't do without making noise.
Whatever a "media rack" is.
Have you ever noticed how home entertainment equipment all seems to be the same size? That's so it can fit in a rack that is very similar to a computer rack. Having equipment the same size also makes the installation look nicer.
The best solution is a storage server in a different room, and then you can use anything for a media player..
No, all you need then is ????ft long HDMI and/or RCA cables, and a perfectly-positioned "other room".
Huh? The media player sits next to the TV, and accesses the media over a network connection, which can be wireless.
you don't need a full-fleged computer like the Mini. I've got sub-$100 media players that can play back pretty much anything, and they have no moving parts, so are completely silent, and draw less than 30W from the wall plug.
Oh, you mean like an AppleTV, right?
No, I mean something that can play back any media, like Blu-Ray quality MPEG-4 (Apple TV can't handle level 4.1 H.264), and audio formats like Dolby TrueHD, DTS HD Master Audio (or even plain old DTS), and in formats that people use, like MKV.
Oh, and I note that you DIDN'T crow about how your HTPC was "so much cheaper" than a Mac mini.
I didn't think it needed to be said, as pretty much everything of the same power as a Mac Mini is going to be cheaper. I splurged on the case ($150), and even with that, the 64GB SSD, and Blu-Ray drive, it came in cheaper. Other than Thunderbolt (which is pretty silly and didn't even exist when I built the machine) and Firewire (which nobody sane uses anymore), it's got the equivalent of what the $800 mini has (4-core Core i5 processor, 4GB RAM, 1TB drive). I easily could have cut $300 off the price by getting the same specs as the Mac Mini.
What did I say the first reason was again? Because they were not liking competition with their content services?
Verizon isn't a content provider, and they don't care how they get your money. They're more than happy to have you pay for FiOS or DSL without getting TV service, because they make a lot more profit from being an ISP, as the costs are mostly already paid, so $60 for FiOS gets them around $50 in gross profit, while $60 for TV gets them about $10, and that $4.95 PPV only gets them about $0.50 (the rest goes to the content providers).
I absolutely agree that cable companies that are also ISPs want you to use less Internet and more of their "TV" services, as they don't have enough bandwidth to keep the bits flowing as fast as people want, and they are afraid they might lose customers to other services.
Keeping recorded shows longer than the time it takes you to watch them might not be something that content holders particularly like, but it's definitely *NOT* a violation of copyright as long as all such home recordings are watched in the context of private home viewing.
The court rulings about home recording are pretty clear, and all of them stress the limited time nature that makes it fair use. Once you start building a library, it's infringment.
Secondly, quoting from something or using small snippets of a sourtce is not copyright infringement either (it's fair use, actually), as long as 1) the source is acknowledged; 2) the amount of content so quoted or copied is small (a subjective term, but generally fairly easily agreed upon when its actually applicable) relative to the copyrighted work's entire content; and to some extent 3) is contextually relevant to the larger work in which it is contained.
All of this is completely wrong. You do not need to attribute a source for it to be fair use. Attribution is a scholarly rule, not one of copyight.
Second, courts have found that copying whole works is still fair use, while in other cases even insanely short snippets (1-2 seconds of a 3 minute song) are judged infringing.
Last, none of this matters, because if you are copy stuff from a web page and print it out or send it to someone in an e-mail, you are infringing copyright. Whether you can defend those actions in a court of law using a claim of "fair use" is another matter.
Finally, the only video content that I ever download is either personally made by the uploader, or else is available for legitimate free streaming for a limited time after airing on the applicable tv network's (nationwide, not just a small local station) website.
How have you verified that these files can be legally distributed by the website in question? Seriously, if you really want to not infringe, just going to the website of a network might not be enough, as they have posted videos that are infringing on these sites. It's mostly news, but every once in a while an entertainment show placed there.
Basically, get off your high horse. At this point, anybody who claims to respect copyright the way you do is part of the problem, not part of the solution. People need to be educated that our creative history is being locked up by megacorps who have absolutely no respect for copyright unless they can personally profit from it.
Quiet and small form factor conventional drives have a place in things like Tivos and personal recording devices for TV
Nonsense. TV, especially HD TV is big, VERY BIG.
The main sub-channel on my local OTA HDTV channels averages about 6GB/hour. This means you can fit about 300 hours of HDTV on a 2TB drive. DVRs are not intended to be used as an archive or library of everything you ever want to watch, so 300 hours is way more than enough.
This is why no commercial PVR comes with larger than a 2TB hard drive. You can get 2TB 2.5" drives that are much quieter than equivalent 3.5" drives. They won't fit in a laptop, but they will fit in any PVR. Another advantage for laptop drives is that a PVR could be designed to hold 2-4 drives while still being a reasonable size, and allow expansion in addition to some kind of data protection. And, it would still be very quiet.
The only way the mistakes you describe could occur (and I don't dismiss their possibility) is if they misidentify some particular content as their own.
Or for them to misidentify anything, like whether that IP ever uploaded anything or not (as in the case of the laser printers). It's just one step farther to "no computer at that IP ever ran any file sharing software", and with no penalty for incorrect accusations (and they get 4-5 per IP before they can even be called on it), I guarantee you that lots of false positives will occur, since accuracy isn't the #1 priority on their agenda.
That said, however, I'm quite diligent when it comes to copyright.
So, you've never recorded a TV show and kept the copy for longer than it took you to watch it once?
You've never downloaded any music, video, or even text without first verifying that the site serving the content had permission to do so? You've never shared more than a link to site with someone, but instead shared the actual content (cut and paste to e-mail, printed it out, etc.)?
There are literally hundreds of other examples of things that you likely do that almost certainly mean you have obtained content in such a way that you have violated copyright. In some cases (like here), they might even specifically say they don't care about anybody copying them, and knowing the owners of that site, they wouldn't ever do anything about it, but technically they could change their mind and start enforcing it, because despite anything they say, it's not a legal license to the content, and thus you would be infringing copyright.
If, as is described on the copyrightinformation.org website, the copyright alert system is implemented such that the IP addresses it gathers genuinely are being used by infringers, I don't have much of a problem with this, since I don't download infringing content, nor do I do anything which might permit or enable other people to use my internet connection who may, and I do not hold much sympathy for those who do.
You see folks for years the ISP have oversold the HELL out of their lines, in some cases claiming a good 5 times what they could actually deliver because they counted on so few people actually using what they paid for they could get away with it.
If your theory was correct, then Verizon shouldn't be part of this, as they don't oversell their wired connections. They really do have full bandwidth available to every user. There are times where DSL doesn't get full speed, but that is because of the distance from the CO, not the lack of network bandwidth.
Aren't they protected from liability as long as they act as "dumb pipes"? Doesn't his mean they are opening themselves up for liability? Yeah, I understand the ones that own media companies but what about the rest?
The ones that own media companies could be in even more trouble, if another media company decides to break ranks (which happens all the time in disputes over carry fees).
Suppose that Disney claimed that Comcast wasn't passing on as many infringement notices for Disney material as they should, but were passing on everything for NBC/Universal?
You still can't make the parts that actually carry the pressure of firing with 3D printing techniques. Barrels and bolts will still need to be machined from quality alloy steel, and rifling a barrel requires really specialized equipment as well.
First, you can easily make something that requires great strength using 3D printing if all you are printing is the mold into which you pour molten metal.
Second, barrels and bolts aren't controlled items, so as long as one person can make them, they can be sold to other people.
Third, it's not nearly as hard as you think to make these items. Rifling a barrel has been done for 200 years. If you think that an individual today can't acquire the same quality of equipment that was use to do the job 200 years ago, you're just not thinking straight.
The 2 ft tall part isn't usually a problem, but that damned jet-noise just doesn't cut it in a media application.
If hard drive noise for quiet drives is a problem, then there is no solution, as SSDs are too expensive for the storage amount a media server needs.
Otherwise, though, there is nothing that requires a computer to be noisy. My HTPC only makes any noise because it has a video card that is beefy enough to play games. I have a fanless card that would do just as well if I was only playing media, and the processor is the same Core i5 as the base Mac Mini. The power supply has a fan that only runs when it gets too hot, but it never will as the parts in the machine can't ever draw enough power.
The HTPC case is brushed aluminun with a standard media rack size, and can hold two 3.5" drives and two 2.5" drives internally, which could easily be 10TB (the 2.5" drives don't have height limits, so I can use the Western Digital 2TB drives). This looks far better than a Mac Mini with 2-3 external drives connected to it.
The best solution is a storage server in a different room, and then you can use anything for a media player...you don't need a full-fleged computer like the Mini. I've got sub-$100 media players that can play back pretty much anything, and they have no moving parts, so are completely silent, and draw less than 30W from the wall plug.
Did you try Fizick's DeSpot for the Chevrolet commercial? It worked wonders for me on a HDTV broadcast of a crappy print of Private Benjamin, but I had to try dozens of different combinations of parameters to get the maximum clean with no false positives. It could be tweaked even better by using ConditionalReader and/or masking to not process the frames or areas of frames that had glaring false positives, but that's for some other day.
Here's is my adventure with same - thought it might be of some interest.
First, your link is broken. I fixed it in the quoting I did.
Second, why did you bother, when all the Dr. Who from The Next Doctor onward were available in HD free-to-air in the correct frame rate? I have them sourced from the original broadcasts. There's a logo, true, but no commercials or cuts due to time constraints.
x264 is easy at this point (CRF and --preset slower FTW).
Right now, I'm trying to figure out how to isolate indivdual hues using AviSynth so that my color correction will only target very specific problem areas. I've done a decent job getting worst of the teal and orange look from some of the worst examples (The Terminator remaster, where there was nothing white in the entire movie..it was all blue tinted), as well as getting the green out of Fellowship of the Ring, but those are global changes to get known reference colors to look right.
After that, I want to essentially color grade the movie again to fix the problems that are still left, but do it somewhat automatically, based on the existing color.
*not that I use ipmi, but its presence marks a serious machine room server
Every machines in my home that is a real server (as opposed to a workstation that might share some files at times) has IPMI. It cost me something like $10 more per machine to have it on the motherboard.
If you are dealing with something that is doing "transactions per second" then yes, dedicated hardware all the way
Also, if you're at the point of "transactions per second", then you've got to have something that generates those transactions. If that's not close (network-wise) to the machine running the database, then you're back to "transactions per minute". So, now you're either talking about a much bigger box (for both database plus the data input/output) or multiple boxes.
Medium volume email too. I've run lots of small business mail servers in a VM.
As long as you have at least 4-8GB RAM and reasonable disks, you can handle about one SMTP connection per second with a VM, and that should be enough for even some fairly large businesses. I'd also have multiple SMTP servers for redundancy and load balancing, and separate IMAP servers. Heck, I have that for my home e-mail. Now, if you are talking about running the database that calls itself a mail server (Exchange), then yeah, it doesn't take many users to require a physical machine.
You can fit six or eight easily on a 1U shelf, more if you put them on their sides.
You can fit two Minis side-by-side on a 19" rack, and unless the rack is extra-deep, you can only fit two back-to-front, so that makes four. On a 23" rack, you can fit six.
If you put them on their sides, they require a 5U height, and if you wedge them in, you can fit 13 across a 19" rack, which gives you 26 per 5U which is just over 5 per rack unit, but then they are literally touching, and you'd have to be very careful when adding/removing them. So, 24 per 5U is probably the usable limit.
$24K will buy you a lot of computing power in a 4U rack...enough so that you can set up virtual machines that would be as powerful in actual use as the dedicated Minis with their underutilized CPUs.
So the mini would make a great media server - Plex or something.
A Mini makes a great media player, but without greatly expanding it's footprint using external drives, it makes fairly crappy media server, as you can only put 2TB of disk inside (assuming that 9.5mm is the max height it can handle).
The question is, what's the processing or storage density of a bunch of Mac Minis vs a racked configuration?
You can place 4 Mac Mini boxes in on a 1U rack shelf, assuming the shelf runs the entire depth of the rack. With the 4-core, 8-thread Core i7 processor in the current models, you can get slightly better thread density than most other 1U servers. For memory, other 1U servers will do much better than the 64GB mas combined in the Macs. For storage, the Mini loses badly, as it can only hold two 2.5" drives, and cannot easily or securely connect to a SAN (as it would have to be on the same layer 2 network as the Ethernet connection to the Internet).
Since you are paying for a lot of things you won't use in a colo environment (WiFi, Bluetooth, Thunderbolt, IR receiver, Firewire, SD card slot, audio), you could almost certainly build a machine of the same specs (and close to the same form factor) for less. The only real advantage is that you can sell people individual physical servers if they don't trust virtual machines for some reason. If you go virtual, you can quite easily put more utilized processor, memory, and hard disk in the same amount of rack space as the Mac Mini setup, but you likely couldn't do it with 1U systems.
my younger friends (in their 20's) not only don't have POTS phone service anymore (its all cell phones) but they don't subscribe to tv packages, either. they get a data connection, they download what they want and that's that.
I keep hearing this sort of thing, and if it were true, the ratings for live shows (sports, award shows, etc.) should be dropping dramatically as those are the shows where downloading isn't really an option.
But the Super Bowl and this year's Golden Globe and Academy Awards telecasts show that not only are audiences not getting smaller, but they are also getting younger.
Slashdot Mirror
And there are forensic specialists that analyze shoeprints at a crime scene. Also fibers left behind by clothing and tire tracks.
Yes, they do exist, but despite what TV shows try to tell you, nobody checks for shoeprints when someone breaks into your house and steals everything you own. Unless there is some sort of personal injury, they probably won't even check for fingerprints. In the same way, the police likely aren't going to check to see if the crime against you was "announced" on Facebook.
As others have noted, the whole article is scare tactics to get laws passed to allow police more ability to violate your rights. That's really obvious when you read stuff like the following in TFA:
The provocative phrasing ("hired guns", "former Soviet bloc") is just the sort of thing used to try and get people to think that "something must be done about this", just like "it's all for the good of the children".
It looks like the Blue takes about 20% longer on random I/O, based on these tests. Writes are even worse, at 30-40% longer.
Then, jump to page 8 on those tests, and see that the Black gets 40-60% more IOPS on every workload.
There's a logo, true
There's one reason - although honestly I don't remember the original broadcasts having a logo. I've also never seen them available above 720p. Thirdly, the bitrate is a lot higher on blu-ray than from a broadcast.
I could have sworn that my recordings had logos, but you're right...they don't. I guess I was thinking of the Sarah Jane Adventures, which do have logos on the HD broadcasts. I also have The Next Doctor as an HD broadcast, but I think you're right that it was a lower res source, now that I look at it.
I resize to 1280x720 for most things when I store them in my library, so I don't really care about the higher res. As for the bitrate, most of it is likely wasted anyway. Run a Blu-Ray .m2ts through Bitrate Viewer and compare it to a re-compress using "--crf 18" on x264. You'll see that the Blu-Ray has essentially a constant bitrate, while x264 will put the bits where they are needed.
For example, The Avengers Blu-Ray only varies by 74% down and 64% up from the average, while my re-encode varied by 97% down and 438% up. And, that's actually a really wide range for a Blu-Ray.
You mention that your "HTPC only makes noise because..." Who cares WHY it makes noise. It makes noise. Next...
It makes noise because it is built to do things a Mac Mini can't do, and couldn't do without making noise.
Whatever a "media rack" is.
Have you ever noticed how home entertainment equipment all seems to be the same size? That's so it can fit in a rack that is very similar to a computer rack. Having equipment the same size also makes the installation look nicer.
The best solution is a storage server in a different room, and then you can use anything for a media player..
No, all you need then is ????ft long HDMI and/or RCA cables, and a perfectly-positioned "other room".
Huh? The media player sits next to the TV, and accesses the media over a network connection, which can be wireless.
you don't need a full-fleged computer like the Mini. I've got sub-$100 media players that can play back pretty much anything, and they have no moving parts, so are completely silent, and draw less than 30W from the wall plug.
Oh, you mean like an AppleTV, right?
No, I mean something that can play back any media, like Blu-Ray quality MPEG-4 (Apple TV can't handle level 4.1 H.264), and audio formats like Dolby TrueHD, DTS HD Master Audio (or even plain old DTS), and in formats that people use, like MKV.
Oh, and I note that you DIDN'T crow about how your HTPC was "so much cheaper" than a Mac mini.
I didn't think it needed to be said, as pretty much everything of the same power as a Mac Mini is going to be cheaper. I splurged on the case ($150), and even with that, the 64GB SSD, and Blu-Ray drive, it came in cheaper. Other than Thunderbolt (which is pretty silly and didn't even exist when I built the machine) and Firewire (which nobody sane uses anymore), it's got the equivalent of what the $800 mini has (4-core Core i5 processor, 4GB RAM, 1TB drive). I easily could have cut $300 off the price by getting the same specs as the Mac Mini.
What did I say the first reason was again? Because they were not liking competition with their content services?
Verizon isn't a content provider, and they don't care how they get your money. They're more than happy to have you pay for FiOS or DSL without getting TV service, because they make a lot more profit from being an ISP, as the costs are mostly already paid, so $60 for FiOS gets them around $50 in gross profit, while $60 for TV gets them about $10, and that $4.95 PPV only gets them about $0.50 (the rest goes to the content providers).
I absolutely agree that cable companies that are also ISPs want you to use less Internet and more of their "TV" services, as they don't have enough bandwidth to keep the bits flowing as fast as people want, and they are afraid they might lose customers to other services.
Keeping recorded shows longer than the time it takes you to watch them might not be something that content holders particularly like, but it's definitely *NOT* a violation of copyright as long as all such home recordings are watched in the context of private home viewing.
The court rulings about home recording are pretty clear, and all of them stress the limited time nature that makes it fair use. Once you start building a library, it's infringment.
Secondly, quoting from something or using small snippets of a sourtce is not copyright infringement either (it's fair use, actually), as long as 1) the source is acknowledged; 2) the amount of content so quoted or copied is small (a subjective term, but generally fairly easily agreed upon when its actually applicable) relative to the copyrighted work's entire content; and to some extent 3) is contextually relevant to the larger work in which it is contained.
All of this is completely wrong. You do not need to attribute a source for it to be fair use. Attribution is a scholarly rule, not one of copyight.
Second, courts have found that copying whole works is still fair use, while in other cases even insanely short snippets (1-2 seconds of a 3 minute song) are judged infringing.
Last, none of this matters, because if you are copy stuff from a web page and print it out or send it to someone in an e-mail, you are infringing copyright. Whether you can defend those actions in a court of law using a claim of "fair use" is another matter.
Finally, the only video content that I ever download is either personally made by the uploader, or else is available for legitimate free streaming for a limited time after airing on the applicable tv network's (nationwide, not just a small local station) website.
How have you verified that these files can be legally distributed by the website in question? Seriously, if you really want to not infringe, just going to the website of a network might not be enough, as they have posted videos that are infringing on these sites. It's mostly news, but every once in a while an entertainment show placed there.
Basically, get off your high horse. At this point, anybody who claims to respect copyright the way you do is part of the problem, not part of the solution. People need to be educated that our creative history is being locked up by megacorps who have absolutely no respect for copyright unless they can personally profit from it.
Closer to 500 years.
That's true, but the techniques that are still used today are about 200 years old.
Quiet and small form factor conventional drives have a place in things like Tivos and personal recording devices for TV
Nonsense. TV, especially HD TV is big, VERY BIG.
The main sub-channel on my local OTA HDTV channels averages about 6GB/hour. This means you can fit about 300 hours of HDTV on a 2TB drive. DVRs are not intended to be used as an archive or library of everything you ever want to watch, so 300 hours is way more than enough.
This is why no commercial PVR comes with larger than a 2TB hard drive. You can get 2TB 2.5" drives that are much quieter than equivalent 3.5" drives. They won't fit in a laptop, but they will fit in any PVR. Another advantage for laptop drives is that a PVR could be designed to hold 2-4 drives while still being a reasonable size, and allow expansion in addition to some kind of data protection. And, it would still be very quiet.
The only way the mistakes you describe could occur (and I don't dismiss their possibility) is if they misidentify some particular content as their own.
Or for them to misidentify anything, like whether that IP ever uploaded anything or not (as in the case of the laser printers). It's just one step farther to "no computer at that IP ever ran any file sharing software", and with no penalty for incorrect accusations (and they get 4-5 per IP before they can even be called on it), I guarantee you that lots of false positives will occur, since accuracy isn't the #1 priority on their agenda.
That said, however, I'm quite diligent when it comes to copyright.
So, you've never recorded a TV show and kept the copy for longer than it took you to watch it once?
You've never downloaded any music, video, or even text without first verifying that the site serving the content had permission to do so? You've never shared more than a link to site with someone, but instead shared the actual content (cut and paste to e-mail, printed it out, etc.)?
There are literally hundreds of other examples of things that you likely do that almost certainly mean you have obtained content in such a way that you have violated copyright. In some cases (like here), they might even specifically say they don't care about anybody copying them, and knowing the owners of that site, they wouldn't ever do anything about it, but technically they could change their mind and start enforcing it, because despite anything they say, it's not a legal license to the content, and thus you would be infringing copyright.
If, as is described on the copyrightinformation.org website, the copyright alert system is implemented such that the IP addresses it gathers genuinely are being used by infringers, I don't have much of a problem with this, since I don't download infringing content, nor do I do anything which might permit or enable other people to use my internet connection who may, and I do not hold much sympathy for those who do.
The software being used to determine IPs in the "Copyright Alert System" is the same one that sent a DMCA notices to laser printers.
Still feel certain you won't be getting an alert?
You see folks for years the ISP have oversold the HELL out of their lines, in some cases claiming a good 5 times what they could actually deliver because they counted on so few people actually using what they paid for they could get away with it.
If your theory was correct, then Verizon shouldn't be part of this, as they don't oversell their wired connections. They really do have full bandwidth available to every user. There are times where DSL doesn't get full speed, but that is because of the distance from the CO, not the lack of network bandwidth.
Aren't they protected from liability as long as they act as "dumb pipes"? Doesn't his mean they are opening themselves up for liability? Yeah, I understand the ones that own media companies but what about the rest?
The ones that own media companies could be in even more trouble, if another media company decides to break ranks (which happens all the time in disputes over carry fees).
Suppose that Disney claimed that Comcast wasn't passing on as many infringement notices for Disney material as they should, but were passing on everything for NBC/Universal?
You still can't make the parts that actually carry the pressure of firing with 3D printing techniques. Barrels and bolts will still need to be machined from quality alloy steel, and rifling a barrel requires really specialized equipment as well.
First, you can easily make something that requires great strength using 3D printing if all you are printing is the mold into which you pour molten metal.
Second, barrels and bolts aren't controlled items, so as long as one person can make them, they can be sold to other people.
Third, it's not nearly as hard as you think to make these items. Rifling a barrel has been done for 200 years. If you think that an individual today can't acquire the same quality of equipment that was use to do the job 200 years ago, you're just not thinking straight.
The 2 ft tall part isn't usually a problem, but that damned jet-noise just doesn't cut it in a media application.
If hard drive noise for quiet drives is a problem, then there is no solution, as SSDs are too expensive for the storage amount a media server needs.
Otherwise, though, there is nothing that requires a computer to be noisy. My HTPC only makes any noise because it has a video card that is beefy enough to play games. I have a fanless card that would do just as well if I was only playing media, and the processor is the same Core i5 as the base Mac Mini. The power supply has a fan that only runs when it gets too hot, but it never will as the parts in the machine can't ever draw enough power.
The HTPC case is brushed aluminun with a standard media rack size, and can hold two 3.5" drives and two 2.5" drives internally, which could easily be 10TB (the 2.5" drives don't have height limits, so I can use the Western Digital 2TB drives). This looks far better than a Mac Mini with 2-3 external drives connected to it.
The best solution is a storage server in a different room, and then you can use anything for a media player...you don't need a full-fleged computer like the Mini. I've got sub-$100 media players that can play back pretty much anything, and they have no moving parts, so are completely silent, and draw less than 30W from the wall plug.
I've done a few restorations before, but you can't see any of them other than http://birds-are-nice.me/video/restorations.shtml - all the rest are of various copyrighted videos.
Did you try Fizick's DeSpot for the Chevrolet commercial? It worked wonders for me on a HDTV broadcast of a crappy print of Private Benjamin, but I had to try dozens of different combinations of parameters to get the maximum clean with no false positives. It could be tweaked even better by using ConditionalReader and/or masking to not process the frames or areas of frames that had glaring false positives, but that's for some other day.
bad frame rate conversions undone
Here's is my adventure with same - thought it might be of some interest.
First, your link is broken. I fixed it in the quoting I did.
Second, why did you bother, when all the Dr. Who from The Next Doctor onward were available in HD free-to-air in the correct frame rate? I have them sourced from the original broadcasts. There's a logo, true, but no commercials or cuts due to time constraints.
It's something of a hobby of mine.
I wrote a guide on the subject: http://birds-are-nice.me/publications/Optimising%20x264%20encodes.htm
x264 is easy at this point (CRF and --preset slower FTW).
Right now, I'm trying to figure out how to isolate indivdual hues using AviSynth so that my color correction will only target very specific problem areas. I've done a decent job getting worst of the teal and orange look from some of the worst examples (The Terminator remaster, where there was nothing white in the entire movie..it was all blue tinted), as well as getting the green out of Fellowship of the Ring, but those are global changes to get known reference colors to look right.
After that, I want to essentially color grade the movie again to fix the problems that are still left, but do it somewhat automatically, based on the existing color.
*not that I use ipmi, but its presence marks a serious machine room server
Every machines in my home that is a real server (as opposed to a workstation that might share some files at times) has IPMI. It cost me something like $10 more per machine to have it on the motherboard.
The advantage here is a BIG PIPE with a cheap, mass produced, sub 1U server whose parameters are extremely well known.
Try and actually use that big pipe and see how much your colo costs go up.
If you are dealing with something that is doing "transactions per second" then yes, dedicated hardware all the way
Also, if you're at the point of "transactions per second", then you've got to have something that generates those transactions. If that's not close (network-wise) to the machine running the database, then you're back to "transactions per minute". So, now you're either talking about a much bigger box (for both database plus the data input/output) or multiple boxes.
Medium volume email too. I've run lots of small business mail servers in a VM.
As long as you have at least 4-8GB RAM and reasonable disks, you can handle about one SMTP connection per second with a VM, and that should be enough for even some fairly large businesses. I'd also have multiple SMTP servers for redundancy and load balancing, and separate IMAP servers. Heck, I have that for my home e-mail. Now, if you are talking about running the database that calls itself a mail server (Exchange), then yeah, it doesn't take many users to require a physical machine.
You can fit six or eight easily on a 1U shelf, more if you put them on their sides.
You can fit two Minis side-by-side on a 19" rack, and unless the rack is extra-deep, you can only fit two back-to-front, so that makes four. On a 23" rack, you can fit six.
If you put them on their sides, they require a 5U height, and if you wedge them in, you can fit 13 across a 19" rack, which gives you 26 per 5U which is just over 5 per rack unit, but then they are literally touching, and you'd have to be very careful when adding/removing them. So, 24 per 5U is probably the usable limit.
$24K will buy you a lot of computing power in a 4U rack...enough so that you can set up virtual machines that would be as powerful in actual use as the dedicated Minis with their underutilized CPUs.
So the mini would make a great media server - Plex or something.
A Mini makes a great media player, but without greatly expanding it's footprint using external drives, it makes fairly crappy media server, as you can only put 2TB of disk inside (assuming that 9.5mm is the max height it can handle).
The question is, what's the processing or storage density of a bunch of Mac Minis vs a racked configuration?
You can place 4 Mac Mini boxes in on a 1U rack shelf, assuming the shelf runs the entire depth of the rack. With the 4-core, 8-thread Core i7 processor in the current models, you can get slightly better thread density than most other 1U servers. For memory, other 1U servers will do much better than the 64GB mas combined in the Macs. For storage, the Mini loses badly, as it can only hold two 2.5" drives, and cannot easily or securely connect to a SAN (as it would have to be on the same layer 2 network as the Ethernet connection to the Internet).
Since you are paying for a lot of things you won't use in a colo environment (WiFi, Bluetooth, Thunderbolt, IR receiver, Firewire, SD card slot, audio), you could almost certainly build a machine of the same specs (and close to the same form factor) for less. The only real advantage is that you can sell people individual physical servers if they don't trust virtual machines for some reason. If you go virtual, you can quite easily put more utilized processor, memory, and hard disk in the same amount of rack space as the Mac Mini setup, but you likely couldn't do it with 1U systems.
my younger friends (in their 20's) not only don't have POTS phone service anymore (its all cell phones) but they don't subscribe to tv packages, either. they get a data connection, they download what they want and that's that.
I keep hearing this sort of thing, and if it were true, the ratings for live shows (sports, award shows, etc.) should be dropping dramatically as those are the shows where downloading isn't really an option.
But the Super Bowl and this year's Golden Globe and Academy Awards telecasts show that not only are audiences not getting smaller, but they are also getting younger.