Something like 1 year would be more fair to all parties in my opinion, at least on an item-by-item basis. Don't most movies, games, music albums, etc. make the vast majority of their money in the first few months?
Maybe most movies do, but many only become profitable a few years later.
Besides, to get a movie on Netflix/Redbox I find I have to wait a couple months anyhow... And that's AFTER it is released on DVD, having been in theatres for months. If I knew I could get movies nearly free by just waiting 12 months, I (and everyone else) would do just that.
Copyright is SUPPOSED to be long enough that works have lost most of their cultural relevance, and hence their profitability in most cases. Looking through that list of movies from 1983, while they're all undenyably dated, there are several I'd love to buy (on the cheap), and not for "nostalga".
Hell, I can look at my DVR and give you a list of good movies from before 1983:
2001 A Space Odyssey Alien All Quiet on the Western Front An American Werewolf in London Apocalypse Now Bridge on the River Kwai Conan the Barbarian A Christmas Story Godfather History of the World-Part 1 Raiders of the Lost Ark Jeremiah Johnson Monty Python's The Meaning of Life National Lampoon's Vacation One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Papillon Porkys Porkys II Rambo Scarface Star Wars (1-3) The Thing War Games
And next year would also add at least: 2010 Dune Terminator
Dated or not, TV networks would collectively wet their pants, and January 1st would be a movie marathon of 28 year-old films on every channel.
Comparing a flexible material like a palm tree to an absolutely rigid material like concrete is pure folly. Concrete structures don't bend under load. They crack and break.
They compare concrete columns to palm trees AND BONES... How flexible are bones, again?
Dell has a BMC built in to every server (AFAIK). The add-in card (DRAC) is only needed if you want an extra ethernet port, or the web interface and (GUI) KVM features.
HP has their iLOs built in to every server as well (AFAiK), which will do the IPMI thing once the proper software is loaded.
Supermicro, I recall require(d) an add-in card, but that could be old news.
Just about any plain vanilla Intel server boards have IPMI built-in as well (they wrote the spec after all). Even old P4/Xeon boards have had IPMI (perhaps the older v1.5 spec) built-in for a good number of years.
Tyan is in the same boat, they've been an early adopter of IPMI, too.
These days, IPMI is pretty much standard equipment, like a serial port.
Booting to an iSCSI target is builtin to most servers' firmware at this point. The ToE takes care of the performance issues, and the OS doesn't even know the disk isn't a local block device.
PXE boot (with NFS mounts or whatnot) was the old way. Still works, even the lowest-end PCs can do it easily, but iSCSI SAN over gigE is a much better solution these days.
both Google and Facebook accept a certain percentage of that hardware to break, and leave it broken until the next maintenance window. They make up for it in numbers and handle the redundancy/high availability in software/OS.
I didn't forget that at all... That is the very x86 business model that Dell and HP are serving to begin with. If you need high availability, you don't depend on a single system being up all the time. If that's your business model, then you want a mainframe, NonStop server, or similar.
Most companies aren't big enough to justify a complete custom design. Even the article only gives 3 examples (Google, Facebook & MS).
No they aren't, hence my dual points that 1) They don't really want a "custom" design, just a cheaper one than Dell/HP offers. And 2) Anybody that steps in to offer such a cheap server will make big money, and will appeal to a huge number of companies who have clusters, but aren't big enough to get a custom design up to the economies of scale.
Modern servers have a BMC built-in for OoBM, that speaks IPMIv2. If the server has power, the BMC is running, and getting an IP address via DHCP (or static address if configured).
Besides remote power on/off, querying sensors, etc., IPMI offers serial-over-lan with bios redirection. You get a console over ethernet at the hardware level. ipmitool is great.
Where do these vendors source their hardware from? Do they go straight to Taiwan with specs in hand and have a production run of boards done?
Yep. Google goes to Gigabyte with specs and they start up the assembly line. They're constantly buying more, so "spares" aren't an issue. And when you have a "cloud" environment (we used-to just call them clusters) you don't need identical replacements... Use the same SAS/SATA chipset, and otherwise completely update the design (every few months) and drop it in to replace an old one that failed, no problem.
What happens with industry wide problems, like with what Intel experienced with the SandyBridge CPUs? I ran into some weird issues where a couple of my Dell blades were not seeing all of the RAM.
You can bet that corporations deploying millions of servers exhaustively test their prototypes before going full-scale, and anything not showing-up in their testing is a non-issue. Remember that each design is fixed, one-off, so it doesn't matter that X won't work with some add-in card, or memory of different timings, or whatever. They've already tested it with EXACTLY the components they will use.
with these custom built solutions where companies like Google are designing their own boards, and presumably do not have as much leverage with the BIOS developers.
Google is bigger than you think. In essence, they write their own BIOS, anyhow. Sgabios is a Google invention, and add-on to coreboot (formely Linuxbios). It is well within google's comptency to modify the firmware in their server boards to fix/workaround bugs and issues, though I expect that's rarely if ever necessary, as Linux handles it all once the boatloader hands off to the kernel.
I am sure at some point someone will come up with a server that just has a SD slot in the front for you to put the boot image on at some point.
Nope... PXE and/or iSCSI target LUN, NOT an SD slot. You can do this right now with most servers. TOE and the like. Throw in IPMI + SOL and you don't need the serial ports, k&m, vga, etc. You don't really even need the power button. If we could pull more power over CAT-6, servers wouldn't even need power cables, it could be 100% ethernet... Plug two CAT-6 cables into your newly racked server, and go home.
I just got back from the datacenter, building out new racks of servers, spec'ing out more servers for future expansion, etc. If anyone should be able to understand the story, I should... but I don't. The reporter clearly doesn't understand the topic, so the story becomes completely demented. They're using completely unrelated issues, and even opposing reasoning, to paint a picture of an emerging trend.
Let's shed some light on this murky discussion:
âoePeople want to be able to build it their way,â
No! No they don't. What people want is for servers to be less expensive. Cutting out unnecessary and redundant components is simply one way to get there, without losing anything.
Dell/Hp, why do I need VGA output on my server, along with serial ports, along with a BMC (IPMI - serial-over-lan), along with an add-in OoBM card (DRAC/iLO) that does KVM? Hell, why not video-output to the two-line LCD on the front, let's do that too!
Now, none of these are bad things per-se, until you consider the added hassle. If your server doesn't have VGA out, you can count on video ALWAYS going over the serial port, come hell or high water. But when your Dell/HP COTS server decides to suddenly STOP doing serial port redirection, now that VGA output you didn't want, becomes necessary, and you have to have something wrapped around it (ie. IP-KVM).
Those OoBM cards sound great, until you find 2% have some screwed-up setting somewhere, somehow, and aren't responding... Again, you've got to have some fallback to something else.
Okay, this quickly turned into an off-topic rant, so I digress...
Google didn't build their own servers because they wanted a special RAID controller... they did it because they want CHEAP. Facebook didn't build their own servers because they want DVI instead of VGA video connectors, they did it because they want CHEAP.
There are some other added benefits to custom servers. See my rant above about OoBM, or see Google's 12V batteries. But do you think Google would object if Dell sold them the servers they wanted, except with a few extra GigE ports built-in? Hell no! It's not "I don't want X", it's "I don't need X and don't want to pay a premium to get a server with it."
If somebody would productize Google's servers, maybe adding just a FEW features so it would meet the needs of a larger customer base, and sell it nice a cheap, this "custom server" craze would be over, as the COTS version would become cheaper still. Dell/HP hanging-on to that highest-common-denomination server design, with expensive features rarely needed, and big fat margins, is driving companies to look elsewhere, and elsewhere , right now, just happens to be custom designed. Yet even with the extras on Dell/HP servers, they could still pull customers back, if they'd just drive prices down on their existing servers, until a custom product run is more expensive.
The only question is, if Dell and HP don't want to provide these cheaper servers so many companies want, who will? I don't believe it will continue to be in-house for long, but who will jump in and serve this un-served market segment? Cutting margins is how Dell became so big, who will be the next upstart to come along and out-do them at their own game?
Rsnapshot is for people who don't know that rsync already has the --link-dest option built-in, or can't write a trivial shell script themselves.
If you want something automatic and user-friendly, just install BackupPC from the repo, navigate the web interface to setup a system to be backed up, make sure the ssh-key is in-place, and let it handle everything. I was impressed with how little setup there was on a vanilla centos5x system with a "yum install backuppc" (though that may have been from a 3rd party repo, I don't recall).
This is not gibberish by any stretch. I understood every bit of the summary upon first read (while jet-lagged and half-asleep) found the links directed me to the follow-up info I would want. and with my only point of reference being that I happen to have a basic understanding of what Solr is (ie. search engine, in java).
Consider that:
a) not every/. story needs to be relevant and comprehensible to you.
b) summaries don't need to be book length and include an intro to computer science./. used to be a hang-out of highly technical people, and have stories based on that, not appeal to everyone who knows how to pronounce "Linux".
Anyhow, if you think the summary can be done better, then do it. Write a more approachable summary that doesn't balloon out, or become information-free. Otherwise, STFU while the adults are speaking....
I would consider eliminating dynamic bitrate selection a huge upgrade... it bites me in the ass all the time.
Yes, I have the bandwidth for your super high-def Flash video stream... No, my phone can't play it to save it's life, the CPU power just isn't there with Flash being so nightmarishly inefficient.
The Youtube model just works... Anybody that wants ultra-high bitrates can set it in their preferences, or per-video, and will get it. Those that want super-low bitrates (like me) can get them. WTH should we NOT be allowed to override the idiocy of your automatic algorithm, and why is it so damn important that you use every last drop of bandwidth I have available?
sell the entire manufacturing and industrial base to China, a communist government that killed our own 'brave men in uniform' in the Korean War
Hmm, as opposed to our friendly relationships with Germany, Italy, and Japan (WWII was only a few years earlier). Through the 80s and early 90s it was Japan we were all afraid of, because they were taking all our manufacturing (becoming the #2 economy) and were going to buy out all the US corporations and take over.
Even Vietnam is our valuable trading partner these days, with the same old communist government, and much more stigma about Vietnam than Korea...
the Black Death was ugly. Imagine half the population of your entire city or town dying off in 1 or 2 years. Nasty business that.
I can't imagine... Why, there'd be abandoned houses all over the place, like living in a ghost town. Overgrown yards indicating the sudden departure of thousands of people. It would probably be pretty difficult for people find work, what with all the turmoil. Thank god we live in the future.
What dream? If you keep checking the bargain-bin, you can get decent old computer parts very cheap. I remember picking-up a new but obsolete mobo and duron CPU combo for $60, about 6 years ago.
A couple years ago, I was ordering used P4 computer en-mass to upgrade the obsolete workstations for a large company, at $70 each. That's double the price, but those were full computers, case, hard drive, PSU, etc.
The above is just a bit light on memory, but a $4 upgrade and it will run RHEL6 just fine (KDE4 is slow), making it vastly more capable and useful than the Pi, if you don't need super low power.
There have been plenty of super-cheap systems out there, but they're always lacking in some major area that keeps them from being suitable for general-purpose work, and ruins the economics when you consider all the OTHER supporting equipment you need to make it a real, working system. Refurb x86 will continue to be the most economical options for some time to come.
You've made a complete and total fool out of yourself by spouting off baseless nonsense that flies in the face of observed facts. Condescension is the best you can possibly hope for.
And it seems that type of arrogance to state that gravity is 100% fact, is merely your own assertion based on what we are taught in schools as fact
GRAVITATIONAL LENSING. Doesn't have a damn thing to do with what school you went to. You can grab a telescope and go observe it, in action, RIGHT NOW. At least go look it up.
Also, talking about dogma from what is "taught in schools" just proves you're a school-aged kid. An overwhelming majority of people here have continued their education independently after leaving school, and long-since dumped any dogma that school has imposed. See the discussions on global warming, dark matter, etc., which haven't much made it into school books yet.
Try not to go to far over the edge with your pet theories and disdain of the world. If you also continue learning after you leave school, you'll find that, while your teachers may be idiots who can't intelligently defend or debate the information you've being told, out in the real world there are a large number of very smart people developing all these theories, considering all conceivable alternatives, trying to disprove them all, and more.
- HD content off ATSC, and H264 content from DVB, cannot be decoded by this device at all
Doesn't matter what it can decode. MPlayer will be happy to transcode that H.264 content into MPEG-2 for you, in real-time, for playback on the PVR-350.
- Newegg still offers plenty of GF8400s new, although the prices are going back up now that they're no longer being produced.
The point was TV-out on an NV PCIe card, there's nothing special about a GF8400 specifically. That said, I did check it out, and indeed found ONE specific model with TV-Out available... unbelievably expensive for what it is, but I will withdraw my statement that it's borderline impossible to find. I did check newegg in my previous searches, so maybe just their search / categorization is / was hosed-up.
- With Cool&Quiet enabled, that CPU should be idling somewhere around 20W.
Probably much lower... I can run it fanless with the stock heatsink when idle. The motherboard software claims it's running in the single-digits, but true or not, it's clearly idling properly, and generating miniscule heat.
- Tack on another 10W for motherboard
You just refuse to listen to anyone, don't you? The chipset will reach 70C degrees in a matter of minutes without directed airflow to keep it cool. It's eating a hell of a lot of power, even when idle. Last time I upgraded motherboards I returned a couple due to the overheating northbridges, only to give up and accept that these levels of chipset power consumption are just a fact in our modern high-speed DDR world.
For the record, I'm specifically talking about an Asus M4A88T-M... Take a look, and note the big damn heatsink on the motherboard. Take a look at some other modern motherboards and note how many put a FAN on the northbridge in lieu of a giant heatsink. I don't know what fantasy world you live in where a modern motherboard (+RAM even!) draws under 10 watts.
- That power supply is rated for '80Plus', but you're running well under 20% load, so that rating is rather meaningless.
The rating doesn't specifically apply, but I'm confident it's still nearly as efficient, and I can vouch for it being drastically more efficient than a standard PSU under these conditions.
- If you are peaking over 50W, you either have gobs of high speed memory, or a discrete graphics card.
Nope and nope. A pair of 2GB sticks that run nice and cool without airflow, so there's minimal power draw there. I see minimal increase in power consumption switching from onboard video to a discrete card, and the numbers I've quoted are with onboard video.
- The only power saving features on the desktop P4s were as a life saving measure, to prevent the chip from burning up.
I don't know WTF you're talking about. HALT / C1 power state is basic s%=&*! that's been around since the 486es. Sure, CnQ and the like can do better, but CPUs certainly never idled at their TDP (old S2K disconnect issues not withstanding), and Intel's drive to keep the P4 from burning up led them to do a pretty good job of aggressively shutting down parts of P4 cores, making the lower-end varients idle very low.
- The DDR-based systems bottomed out around 60W TDP, and only went way up from there. The chips never strayed very far from that value even when idle. The only way I could see a P4 system running at 40W is if it were a mobile system, or were manually undervolted and underclocked.
Well I guess it's a good thing you opened your mouth, and we've established just what kind of expert I'm dealing with, here...
No it doesn't. I'm trying to partition my system with RHEL6.0 right now. When it tries to automatically partition the disk, Anaconda blows-up with a "Could not allocate" error.
When I try to manually partition, it only allows me to use the first 2TB, and leaves the rest as "free" which I can NEVER touch. Fill up the first 2TB, and try to create a new partition and it blows up with "cannot allocate".
Maybe RHEL6.1 fixed this, but I doubt it, since I just tested Fedora-16-alpha, and I still have this same damn problem.
RHEL5 at that lifecycle period SHOULD NOT have any new features
No, it should damn-well have come with GPT support from version 5.0, for the important reasons I listed, and you didn't bother to read.
was only good for DVD quality standard definition MPEG2.
Considering that an analog TV can only handle DVD quality standard definition input, that sounds perfectly fine to me.
Any computer that can't manage playback of DVDs in software should simply not be used for anything media related, period.
You're very confused. TV-output is standard resolution by necessity... The INPUT however, could be ATSC, DVB2, whatever. You still need some way to OUTPUT that to a TV, and the old cards (like the PVR-350) can do that as well as anything, and these days may have become the only option to do.
You are correct though, that the market for video cards with analog output is quickly drying up.
Past-tense... It's gone for the consumer, for all intents and purposes. Yet old analog TVs are out there in large, large numbers. Your only hope is to buy OLD hardware, like the PVR-350 (if that's all you can find).
It only supported partial decoding of MPEG2, offering perhaps 40% better performance than CPU alone.
It's more of a sliding scale... The worse your CPU, the better the XvMC speed-up, but you're generally correct. However, the fact that it's ONLY doubling the performance of your CPU is not to be underestimated. There's a large number of systems out there, even still being sold (refurbished) that can't play HDTV with CPU alone. I don't think the old hardware should need to be thrown away. And what's more, keeping the old hardware may be many peoples' only way of keeping their analog TV-output, so there's a pretty good rationale for it.
For between $150 and $200, you can swap out those guts for a modern board, processor, memory, and video card, with much better low power operation
Yes, a modern board, processor, and video card, WITH NO TV-OUT SUPPORT, so this simple $200 upgrade has become at a $600 - $2,000 upgrade. Ouch.
with much better low power operation. If you leave the machine on all the time, you will recover the cost in power consumption in 2-3 years.
Now THAT is complete and total bullshit!
I've got a nice new system next to me... Paid plenty to get a nice low-power 45W TDP Athlon X4 (Quad-core) CPU. Got an 80+ efficient Seasonic PSU in it. Nice silent fans. A "green" hard drive that stays nice and cool. And how much power does it use sitting there idle? 65+ watts
The idle power consumption of the ancient Pentium-4 system I'm using right now? 40 watts.
Increasing bus and memory speeds has driven the power consumption of motherboard chipsets through the damn roof. I noticed this years ago with my first DDR system... With the same CPU, power supply, GPU, etc., it somehow drew 50% more power than my previous system. There was no mystery where that power was going, with a scaldingly-hot northbridge. And you know something... You can't damn-well get specs on motherboard power consumption. I know... I've tried. With each generation, power consumption is going up, even as everything else (except the motherboard) gets more efficient and lower-power.
With e-ink, it looks just like paper and doesn't give you the eyestrain that an LCD or CRT does after reading for a few hours on it.
An LCD is certainly undesirable in direct sun-light. However, I'm an LCD convert myself. In a dimly-lit room, a high-DPI backlit LCD with auto-brightness adjust is awesome to read off of. Paper is inferior, where eye-strain is concerned.
I've never understood the bent spacetime model as it makes little practical sense
"Gravitational lensing" is a known, 100% solid, FACT. Doesn't matter how much you dislike the idea, world+dog has seen it's effects in action, here on planet earth.
I believe there is a combination of electromagnetic forces combined with atmospheric pressure that keeps us grounded
Nice. What keeps the atmosphere (the source of that pressure) grounded, then? Why don't high-altitude (edge-of-space) pilots go floating off? Why don't non-magnetic objects in vacuum start floating? How about the planets themselves, in a nice orbit?
Incidentally, I have a pretty low concentration of magnetic material in my body, and atmospheric pressure is lower the higher you go, so, much like swimming under water, that should mean we FLOAT to the top, not get held-down by it.
The only sense your idea makes is if you redefine your "electromagnetic forces" to something identical to gravity.
Don't take it too hard, kid. We were all angsty teenagers who thought we were smarter than the rest of the world, and developed plenty of misconceptions due to a poor education system and whatnot, which take many years to completely shake off and replace with knowledge.
You're exactly right. Even tuned for the best speed, RHEL6.x with KDE4 drags a P4 down to frustratingly-slow speeds. RHEL5.x on the same P4 is super-snappy.
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Maybe most movies do, but many only become profitable a few years later.
Besides, to get a movie on Netflix/Redbox I find I have to wait a couple months anyhow... And that's AFTER it is released on DVD, having been in theatres for months. If I knew I could get movies nearly free by just waiting 12 months, I (and everyone else) would do just that.
Copyright is SUPPOSED to be long enough that works have lost most of their cultural relevance, and hence their profitability in most cases. Looking through that list of movies from 1983, while they're all undenyably dated, there are several I'd love to buy (on the cheap), and not for "nostalga".
Hell, I can look at my DVR and give you a list of good movies from before 1983:
2001 A Space Odyssey
Alien
All Quiet on the Western Front
An American Werewolf in London
Apocalypse Now
Bridge on the River Kwai
Conan the Barbarian
A Christmas Story
Godfather
History of the World-Part 1
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Jeremiah Johnson
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
National Lampoon's Vacation
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Papillon
Porkys
Porkys II
Rambo
Scarface
Star Wars (1-3)
The Thing
War Games
And next year would also add at least:
2010
Dune
Terminator
Dated or not, TV networks would collectively wet their pants, and January 1st would be a movie marathon of 28 year-old films on every channel.
They compare concrete columns to palm trees AND BONES... How flexible are bones, again?
Dell has a BMC built in to every server (AFAIK). The add-in card (DRAC) is only needed if you want an extra ethernet port, or the web interface and (GUI) KVM features.
HP has their iLOs built in to every server as well (AFAiK), which will do the IPMI thing once the proper software is loaded.
Supermicro, I recall require(d) an add-in card, but that could be old news.
Just about any plain vanilla Intel server boards have IPMI built-in as well (they wrote the spec after all). Even old P4/Xeon boards have had IPMI (perhaps the older v1.5 spec) built-in for a good number of years.
Tyan is in the same boat, they've been an early adopter of IPMI, too.
These days, IPMI is pretty much standard equipment, like a serial port.
Booting to an iSCSI target is builtin to most servers' firmware at this point. The ToE takes care of the performance issues, and the OS doesn't even know the disk isn't a local block device.
PXE boot (with NFS mounts or whatnot) was the old way. Still works, even the lowest-end PCs can do it easily, but iSCSI SAN over gigE is a much better solution these days.
I didn't forget that at all... That is the very x86 business model that Dell and HP are serving to begin with. If you need high availability, you don't depend on a single system being up all the time. If that's your business model, then you want a mainframe, NonStop server, or similar.
No they aren't, hence my dual points that 1) They don't really want a "custom" design, just a cheaper one than Dell/HP offers. And 2) Anybody that steps in to offer such a cheap server will make big money, and will appeal to a huge number of companies who have clusters, but aren't big enough to get a custom design up to the economies of scale.
Modern servers have a BMC built-in for OoBM, that speaks IPMIv2. If the server has power, the BMC is running, and getting an IP address via DHCP (or static address if configured).
Besides remote power on/off, querying sensors, etc., IPMI offers serial-over-lan with bios redirection. You get a console over ethernet at the hardware level. ipmitool is great.
Yep. Google goes to Gigabyte with specs and they start up the assembly line. They're constantly buying more, so "spares" aren't an issue. And when you have a "cloud" environment (we used-to just call them clusters) you don't need identical replacements... Use the same SAS/SATA chipset, and otherwise completely update the design (every few months) and drop it in to replace an old one that failed, no problem.
You can bet that corporations deploying millions of servers exhaustively test their prototypes before going full-scale, and anything not showing-up in their testing is a non-issue. Remember that each design is fixed, one-off, so it doesn't matter that X won't work with some add-in card, or memory of different timings, or whatever. They've already tested it with EXACTLY the components they will use.
Google is bigger than you think. In essence, they write their own BIOS, anyhow. Sgabios is a Google invention, and add-on to coreboot (formely Linuxbios). It is well within google's comptency to modify the firmware in their server boards to fix/workaround bugs and issues, though I expect that's rarely if ever necessary, as Linux handles it all once the boatloader hands off to the kernel.
Nope... PXE and/or iSCSI target LUN, NOT an SD slot. You can do this right now with most servers. TOE and the like. Throw in IPMI + SOL and you don't need the serial ports, k&m, vga, etc. You don't really even need the power button. If we could pull more power over CAT-6, servers wouldn't even need power cables, it could be 100% ethernet... Plug two CAT-6 cables into your newly racked server, and go home.
I just got back from the datacenter, building out new racks of servers, spec'ing out more servers for future expansion, etc. If anyone should be able to understand the story, I should... but I don't. The reporter clearly doesn't understand the topic, so the story becomes completely demented. They're using completely unrelated issues, and even opposing reasoning, to paint a picture of an emerging trend.
Let's shed some light on this murky discussion:
âoePeople want to be able to build it their way,â
No! No they don't. What people want is for servers to be less expensive. Cutting out unnecessary and redundant components is simply one way to get there, without losing anything.
Dell/Hp, why do I need VGA output on my server, along with serial ports, along with a BMC (IPMI - serial-over-lan), along with an add-in OoBM card (DRAC/iLO) that does KVM? Hell, why not video-output to the two-line LCD on the front, let's do that too!
Now, none of these are bad things per-se, until you consider the added hassle. If your server doesn't have VGA out, you can count on video ALWAYS going over the serial port, come hell or high water. But when your Dell/HP COTS server decides to suddenly STOP doing serial port redirection, now that VGA output you didn't want, becomes necessary, and you have to have something wrapped around it (ie. IP-KVM).
Those OoBM cards sound great, until you find 2% have some screwed-up setting somewhere, somehow, and aren't responding... Again, you've got to have some fallback to something else.
Okay, this quickly turned into an off-topic rant, so I digress...
Google didn't build their own servers because they wanted a special RAID controller... they did it because they want CHEAP. Facebook didn't build their own servers because they want DVI instead of VGA video connectors, they did it because they want CHEAP.
There are some other added benefits to custom servers. See my rant above about OoBM, or see Google's 12V batteries. But do you think Google would object if Dell sold them the servers they wanted, except with a few extra GigE ports built-in? Hell no! It's not "I don't want X", it's "I don't need X and don't want to pay a premium to get a server with it."
If somebody would productize Google's servers, maybe adding just a FEW features so it would meet the needs of a larger customer base, and sell it nice a cheap, this "custom server" craze would be over, as the COTS version would become cheaper still. Dell/HP hanging-on to that highest-common-denomination server design, with expensive features rarely needed, and big fat margins, is driving companies to look elsewhere, and elsewhere , right now, just happens to be custom designed. Yet even with the extras on Dell/HP servers, they could still pull customers back, if they'd just drive prices down on their existing servers, until a custom product run is more expensive.
The only question is, if Dell and HP don't want to provide these cheaper servers so many companies want, who will? I don't believe it will continue to be in-house for long, but who will jump in and serve this un-served market segment? Cutting margins is how Dell became so big, who will be the next upstart to come along and out-do them at their own game?
Rsnapshot is for people who don't know that rsync already has the --link-dest option built-in, or can't write a trivial shell script themselves.
If you want something automatic and user-friendly, just install BackupPC from the repo, navigate the web interface to setup a system to be backed up, make sure the ssh-key is in-place, and let it handle everything. I was impressed with how little setup there was on a vanilla centos5x system with a "yum install backuppc" (though that may have been from a 3rd party repo, I don't recall).
This is /.
"Normal people" don't belong here.
No prereq knowledge is required to comprehend the summary.
I see you didn't bother to come up with a better one, as I suggested.
This is not gibberish by any stretch. I understood every bit of the summary upon first read (while jet-lagged and half-asleep) found the links directed me to the follow-up info I would want. and with my only point of reference being that I happen to have a basic understanding of what Solr is (ie. search engine, in java).
Consider that: /. story needs to be relevant and comprehensible to you. /. used to be a hang-out of highly technical people, and have stories based on that, not appeal to everyone who knows how to pronounce "Linux".
a) not every
b) summaries don't need to be book length and include an intro to computer science.
Anyhow, if you think the summary can be done better, then do it. Write a more approachable summary that doesn't balloon out, or become information-free. Otherwise, STFU while the adults are speaking....
At least MPlayer supports seeking in an http stream. There are probably others as well.
I would consider eliminating dynamic bitrate selection a huge upgrade... it bites me in the ass all the time.
Yes, I have the bandwidth for your super high-def Flash video stream... No, my phone can't play it to save it's life, the CPU power just isn't there with Flash being so nightmarishly inefficient.
The Youtube model just works... Anybody that wants ultra-high bitrates can set it in their preferences, or per-video, and will get it. Those that want super-low bitrates (like me) can get them. WTH should we NOT be allowed to override the idiocy of your automatic algorithm, and why is it so damn important that you use every last drop of bandwidth I have available?
You're way off base. There are laws against spam emails, have been for years. And fax spam most definitely persists and thrives.
Hmm, as opposed to our friendly relationships with Germany, Italy, and Japan (WWII was only a few years earlier). Through the 80s and early 90s it was Japan we were all afraid of, because they were taking all our manufacturing (becoming the #2 economy) and were going to buy out all the US corporations and take over.
Even Vietnam is our valuable trading partner these days, with the same old communist government, and much more stigma about Vietnam than Korea...
I can't imagine... Why, there'd be abandoned houses all over the place, like living in a ghost town. Overgrown yards indicating the sudden departure of thousands of people. It would probably be pretty difficult for people find work, what with all the turmoil. Thank god we live in the future.
What dream? If you keep checking the bargain-bin, you can get decent old computer parts very cheap. I remember picking-up a new but obsolete mobo and duron CPU combo for $60, about 6 years ago.
A couple years ago, I was ordering used P4 computer en-mass to upgrade the obsolete workstations for a large company, at $70 each. That's double the price, but those were full computers, case, hard drive, PSU, etc.
Today, an old P4 system minus HDD goes for $40 (order in pairs for cheaper shipping):
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SAMBA845V-24-4-R&cat=SYS
The above is just a bit light on memory, but a $4 upgrade and it will run RHEL6 just fine (KDE4 is slow), making it vastly more capable and useful than the Pi, if you don't need super low power.
There have been plenty of super-cheap systems out there, but they're always lacking in some major area that keeps them from being suitable for general-purpose work, and ruins the economics when you consider all the OTHER supporting equipment you need to make it a real, working system. Refurb x86 will continue to be the most economical options for some time to come.
You've made a complete and total fool out of yourself by spouting off baseless nonsense that flies in the face of observed facts. Condescension is the best you can possibly hope for.
GRAVITATIONAL LENSING. Doesn't have a damn thing to do with what school you went to. You can grab a telescope and go observe it, in action, RIGHT NOW. At least go look it up.
Also, talking about dogma from what is "taught in schools" just proves you're a school-aged kid. An overwhelming majority of people here have continued their education independently after leaving school, and long-since dumped any dogma that school has imposed. See the discussions on global warming, dark matter, etc., which haven't much made it into school books yet.
Try not to go to far over the edge with your pet theories and disdain of the world. If you also continue learning after you leave school, you'll find that, while your teachers may be idiots who can't intelligently defend or debate the information you've being told, out in the real world there are a large number of very smart people developing all these theories, considering all conceivable alternatives, trying to disprove them all, and more.
- HD content off ATSC, and H264 content from DVB, cannot be decoded by this device at all
Doesn't matter what it can decode. MPlayer will be happy to transcode that H.264 content into MPEG-2 for you, in real-time, for playback on the PVR-350.
- Newegg still offers plenty of GF8400s new, although the prices are going back up now that they're no longer being produced.
The point was TV-out on an NV PCIe card, there's nothing special about a GF8400 specifically. That said, I did check it out, and indeed found ONE specific model with TV-Out available... unbelievably expensive for what it is, but I will withdraw my statement that it's borderline impossible to find. I did check newegg in my previous searches, so maybe just their search / categorization is / was hosed-up.
- With Cool&Quiet enabled, that CPU should be idling somewhere around 20W.
Probably much lower... I can run it fanless with the stock heatsink when idle. The motherboard software claims it's running in the single-digits, but true or not, it's clearly idling properly, and generating miniscule heat.
- Tack on another 10W for motherboard
You just refuse to listen to anyone, don't you? The chipset will reach 70C degrees in a matter of minutes without directed airflow to keep it cool. It's eating a hell of a lot of power, even when idle. Last time I upgraded motherboards I returned a couple due to the overheating northbridges, only to give up and accept that these levels of chipset power consumption are just a fact in our modern high-speed DDR world.
For the record, I'm specifically talking about an Asus M4A88T-M ... Take a look, and note the big damn heatsink on the motherboard. Take a look at some other modern motherboards and note how many put a FAN on the northbridge in lieu of a giant heatsink. I don't know what fantasy world you live in where a modern motherboard (+RAM even!) draws under 10 watts.
- That power supply is rated for '80Plus', but you're running well under 20% load, so that rating is rather meaningless.
The rating doesn't specifically apply, but I'm confident it's still nearly as efficient, and I can vouch for it being drastically more efficient than a standard PSU under these conditions.
- If you are peaking over 50W, you either have gobs of high speed memory, or a discrete graphics card.
Nope and nope. A pair of 2GB sticks that run nice and cool without airflow, so there's minimal power draw there. I see minimal increase in power consumption switching from onboard video to a discrete card, and the numbers I've quoted are with onboard video.
- The only power saving features on the desktop P4s were as a life saving measure, to prevent the chip from burning up.
I don't know WTF you're talking about. HALT / C1 power state is basic s%=&*! that's been around since the 486es. Sure, CnQ and the like can do better, but CPUs certainly never idled at their TDP (old S2K disconnect issues not withstanding), and Intel's drive to keep the P4 from burning up led them to do a pretty good job of aggressively shutting down parts of P4 cores, making the lower-end varients idle very low.
- The DDR-based systems bottomed out around 60W TDP, and only went way up from there. The chips never strayed very far from that value even when idle. The only way I could see a P4 system running at 40W is if it were a mobile system, or were manually undervolted and underclocked.
Well I guess it's a good thing you opened your mouth, and we've established just what kind of expert I'm dealing with, here...
Introducing the impossible PC, breaking the laws of physics, out of the box. For a mere $40 you too can have this magic box brought to your door: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SAMBA845V-24-4-R&cat=SYS
No it doesn't. I'm trying to partition my system with RHEL6.0 right now. When it tries to automatically partition the disk, Anaconda blows-up with a "Could not allocate" error.
When I try to manually partition, it only allows me to use the first 2TB, and leaves the rest as "free" which I can NEVER touch. Fill up the first 2TB, and try to create a new partition and it blows up with "cannot allocate".
Maybe RHEL6.1 fixed this, but I doubt it, since I just tested Fedora-16-alpha, and I still have this same damn problem.
No, it should damn-well have come with GPT support from version 5.0, for the important reasons I listed, and you didn't bother to read.
Considering that an analog TV can only handle DVD quality standard definition input, that sounds perfectly fine to me.
You're very confused. TV-output is standard resolution by necessity... The INPUT however, could be ATSC, DVB2, whatever. You still need some way to OUTPUT that to a TV, and the old cards (like the PVR-350) can do that as well as anything, and these days may have become the only option to do.
Past-tense... It's gone for the consumer, for all intents and purposes. Yet old analog TVs are out there in large, large numbers. Your only hope is to buy OLD hardware, like the PVR-350 (if that's all you can find).
It's more of a sliding scale... The worse your CPU, the better the XvMC speed-up, but you're generally correct. However, the fact that it's ONLY doubling the performance of your CPU is not to be underestimated. There's a large number of systems out there, even still being sold (refurbished) that can't play HDTV with CPU alone. I don't think the old hardware should need to be thrown away. And what's more, keeping the old hardware may be many peoples' only way of keeping their analog TV-output, so there's a pretty good rationale for it.
Yes, a modern board, processor, and video card, WITH NO TV-OUT SUPPORT, so this simple $200 upgrade has become at a $600 - $2,000 upgrade. Ouch.
Now THAT is complete and total bullshit!
I've got a nice new system next to me... Paid plenty to get a nice low-power 45W TDP Athlon X4 (Quad-core) CPU. Got an 80+ efficient Seasonic PSU in it. Nice silent fans. A "green" hard drive that stays nice and cool. And how much power does it use sitting there idle? 65+ watts
The idle power consumption of the ancient Pentium-4 system I'm using right now? 40 watts.
Increasing bus and memory speeds has driven the power consumption of motherboard chipsets through the damn roof. I noticed this years ago with my first DDR system... With the same CPU, power supply, GPU, etc., it somehow drew 50% more power than my previous system. There was no mystery where that power was going, with a scaldingly-hot northbridge. And you know something... You can't damn-well get specs on motherboard power consumption. I know... I've tried. With each generation, power consumption is going up, even as everything else (except the motherboard) gets more efficient and lower-power.
An LCD is certainly undesirable in direct sun-light. However, I'm an LCD convert myself. In a dimly-lit room, a high-DPI backlit LCD with auto-brightness adjust is awesome to read off of. Paper is inferior, where eye-strain is concerned.
"Gravitational lensing" is a known, 100% solid, FACT. Doesn't matter how much you dislike the idea, world+dog has seen it's effects in action, here on planet earth.
Nice. What keeps the atmosphere (the source of that pressure) grounded, then? Why don't high-altitude (edge-of-space) pilots go floating off? Why don't non-magnetic objects in vacuum start floating? How about the planets themselves, in a nice orbit?
Incidentally, I have a pretty low concentration of magnetic material in my body, and atmospheric pressure is lower the higher you go, so, much like swimming under water, that should mean we FLOAT to the top, not get held-down by it.
The only sense your idea makes is if you redefine your "electromagnetic forces" to something identical to gravity.
Don't take it too hard, kid. We were all angsty teenagers who thought we were smarter than the rest of the world, and developed plenty of misconceptions due to a poor education system and whatnot, which take many years to completely shake off and replace with knowledge.
You're exactly right. Even tuned for the best speed, RHEL6.x with KDE4 drags a P4 down to frustratingly-slow speeds. RHEL5.x on the same P4 is super-snappy.