So you want to be charged out-the-ass for this, and you want no flexibility, extensive restrictions on what you can do with it, and no ownership at all of the material you've repeatedly paid for?
They have a dedicated TV for a games console, and generally don't even use a DVD player as a CD player.
Of course not. DVD players, these days, are not designed to be used without the TV turned-on, which eliminates their usefulness as CD players. Because of prices, they've removed the LCD-screen on the DVD-players, which were standard on earlier models.
In-fact, it's sperate components that fit the model you've listed... They each do a crappy job of their own simple tasks, rather than being very good, and infinitely flexible for each task, as a single all-in-one computer is.
We basically need a VCR/DVD player sized component that can do everything.
Most DVRs are already as small as first-generation VCRs (anyone else still remember those monsters?).
A Mac Mini would be a good start, small, quiet,
...and has a tiny, very expensive, very unreliable, 2.5" notebook hard drive in it. It's unsuitable for that one reason alone.
Never-mind that it's not x86 compatible, and so isn't very well supported by decent media players (no binary x86 DLLs for you, no incredibly software optimizations, etc.). Never mind that it's far too slow to playback 1080 content encoded in WMV9 or H.264. Never mind that any TV-capture card you add will have to be external. Never mind that you're going to have to buy some external Blu-ray/HD-DVD ROM for it.
The average home has multiple TVs and even more viewers...a decentralized entertainment system makes no sense at all.
Sure it does, when most people do most of their TV-viewing on the primary (living-room) TV.
With HDTV, most homes have mulitple (old) low-def TVs, and a single HDTV which everyone wants to watch... In that case, decentralized makes the most sense, actually.
and six or so TV decoders.
W.T.F. is a "TV decoder"?
and stream those out to what amounts to a thin client connected to the TV.
No chance. These "thin clients" have to be top-of-the-line PCs to be able to decode 1080 H.264 videos in real-time.
Besides, I'm not real hot on the idea of walking across my house to insert a DVD I want to watch.
In other words, you have to have an ALMOST full-fledged PC next to every TV, anyhow. Sure, you can have them networked, and make it trivially easy for one to transfer shows from the other (which many already do), but I don't see centralization happening. Who's really going to put together a several-terabyte server to hold ALL their media on a single machine?
The future looks far more like Peer-to-Peer networking for multiple (full-fledged) multimedia computers.
i dont think anyone outside of the geek communit cares about DRM.
You think WRONG. Thousands upon thousands of people complaining that they hooked their DVD player up to their VCR's inputs, and it looked crappy. Thousands upon thousands of people trying to record their DVDs to VHS tapes so they could watch them on their "other TV" or so their children wouldn't have to scratch-up the original DVD.
And we still don't have hidef content. They only hidef that I can get is from cable, satellite, or OTA TV.
What a hellish world you must live in. You mean you can ONLY get HD content from Cable, or Satellite, or OTA broadcasts? Oh no! The horror!
CDs are late 70s technology (maybe early 80s). The oldest digital recording I own is from 1978.
CDs didn't require people to buy a new $500 set of EARS to hear an improvement, just the player itself.
but they insist on putting stuff on plastic disks and sell them at a brick and mortar store.
Never under-estimate the bandwidth of a station-wagon full of tapes. Sure, you could get your HD movies through cable/satellite, but then what? Are you going to store 2 movies on your 80GB DVR, then delete them when you want something new? The cost of 50GBs of hard drive space is much more than the cost of a little plastic disk, and much more reliable too (media decoupled from reader, and more tolerant of physical and electrical/magnetic interference).
Time/Warner owns a cable TV outfit and internet, but won't let you download their movies or with little streaming capabilities.
Yeah, that would be good... only 24 hours to download each HD movie on your 756K connection. That's much more convenient than spending a few minutes driving to a store and buying the "plastic disc".
It's even simpler than that, because DVDs today can already do higher resolutions. There's nothing in the DVD spec that limits you to 480 lines.
This is moronic. Any storage media, "can do higher resolutions", but there's no player for it, so you're talking about a computer-only solution, which wont fly in this decade...
The only complexity is storage capacity.
That's ALWAYS been the only problem. If you had unlimited storage, HD wouldn't be an issue at all.
But with the improved compression of MPEG-4 over MPEG-2, you could probably fit 1280x720 (or maybe 1920x1080 in some cases) video onto the same DVD media we use today.
You can fit 1080p on a CD if you want, it'll just look like completely crap. The 50GBs of storage isn't there for nothing, you get far, far more detail and quality when you dramatically increase the bitrate.
Many DVD players today already can play MPEG-4 disks (WMV, AVI, MP4, etc.) so it won't be a big expense for the manufacturers.
The expense isn't in playing MPEG-4 (or MPEG-2), it's in playing it at 6X the resolution, having video hardware that will handle that resolution, and outputs that can display it. At that point, you're spending $500 on a new DVD player for these crappy-quality 720p DVD, and unlike HD-DVD/Blu-ray, you don't get the option of using newer, larger storage for your money.
BTW, where are these players that handle WMV videos? I've seen the Pioneer one for $2K, but that's all.
This "New Sensor Framework" has been in the mainline kernel since 3.5, and working quite well, thank you. I certainly wish other OSes would get this stuff built-in (of course OpenBSD is also lacking a lot of good features that FreeBSD/Linux DO have).
Setting up lmsensors was an infuriating and disgusting mess on Linux. After an hour of kernel recompliations, and i2c/lmsensors version mis-matches, I just gave-up. I decided to simply parse the output of mbmon (most trivial setup, EVER!).
Mac OS 8 may not be as shiny as X but many people preferred it to Windows.
I find that very hard to believe, mainly because I've used it extensively...
Even with the iMac rev A the advocates *of the day* talked about usability and price.
The iMac was vastly over-priced for it's specs, and nobody with remotely human-like hands could possibly use that dammed mouse.
It's look was retro 70s and while some folks liked the look it was *not* what was important to the vast majority of iMac rev A buyers.
You can say that all you want, but the reality doesn't bare you out. Every rational person remembers how the iMac was marketed on it's looks alone, how it sold better when offered in more colors, how Apple aggressively sued anyone else who came remotely close to imitating the design, etc. Never mind how much of a hassle it was for buyers when they found it couldn't read any of their floppy disks, it was completely lacking legacy ports, there were extremely few USB devices available at the time, etc.
So, I can't really imagine how you could possibly get the impression iMac sold so well based on anything other than looks.
This story isn't high-up on the front-page anymore, so I guess there just are enough people clicking now... My mistake.
Still, if you spend any time on slashdot at all, you've seen PLENTY of other times that links to mirrordot and the coral have gone down as quickly as the main website, even though they're surely getting much less traffic.
Exactly. Who needs expensive 3D equipment to make you think you're standing on the sidelines, when you can just get hammered, tackle your floor-lamp, kick an empty bottle through your window, and think you won the game for your team?
If you had an external graphics card it'd work just fine with Video-playback and such, even at pretty high speeds, heck...you could even playback HDTV 1920 without jitter
Only if you're talking about onboard video decoding (which only works with select few codecs, and doesn't allow for any sort of processing). Sending 30fps uncompressed 1920x1080 over USB2/Cardbus would be a show-stopper.
This means you'd be dragging the thing around half the planet and anything Wiggly that can potentially move and get disconnected during transfer should be avoided at all cost,
Everything in your laptop can get disconnected if they don't attach it well enough. Your hard drive is usually only held-in by one screw, or a piece of plastic over it, but they've designed the mechanisms well-enough that everything works. There's no reason they can't do the same for graphics cards. (Note: Mini-PCI really isn't fast-enough for graphics, anyhow.)
I've had such a machine itself, it got warm...the GFX card failed on the laptop simply because it got too hot and the mini-PCI connectors got heated...and if you remember your classroom physics you KNOW that METAL EXPANDS....and vice versa when cooled down....bad idea!
This makes no sense at all. Yes metal expands and contracts, but you should be more worried about the solder connnections on the mobo, rather than connectors... Your hard drive is using a similar type of connector, without problems.
Either you made this little story up, or you simply don't understand why your card actually failed.
So...I don't think that will happen - after all...you're on a LAPTOP...you bought it to be portable....and if you want to drag along a huge powerful graphics card, external Audigy and a gazillion other parts..you might as well pack it all in a desktop pc;) seriously.
Personally, I was thinking of doing something quite similar, for those who want portability, but HATE laptops due to their crappy components, non-interchangeable parts, ergonomics, and high price.
A sub-pizza-box-size PC could be put together, with an LCD screen attached, a keyboard/mouse mount, and some sort of handle or carrying case. You could have room for several half-height PCI/PCIe cards, and a much larger and longer-lasting battery than seen in any laptops.
I wonder when slashcode is going to support inserting to all post links automatically?
Never. The Coral Cache (or mirrordot, or whatever else) go down faster than the website itself. The coral-cache has been/.ed now, since you posted a link to it (only in comments, not even the main story).
Now the mirrordot cache, which will be down moments after I click submit:
By 2008 China alone will have accumulated $1 trilion in USD, just under half of the annual federal budget.
Yes, but they didn't aquire it in a year, and certainly won't cash-out in a year.
I'd like to see your attitude when IBM, Microsoft, every corporation you think of as American, is owned by foreigners, I don't think it's a bad thing but a lot of other Americans will think that's not a good thing.
This is all completely besides the point. Do you even remember the subject, now??? You were saying that USDs are worthless because they can't buy snort or the ports... BFD. USD are anything but worthless, just because there are a handful of things they can't aquire. Nobody buys foreign currency so that they can buy up a foreign country. They do it because the foreign currency is stronger than their local currency, and they expect profit from the deal. There's still nothing stopping people from buying currency, or cashing-out of the currency at full market value, whenever they chose. There's absolutely no reason things like this would cause any sort of a panic.
If you want to rant about foreign investements, go right ahead, but at least be honest about it.
According to the instruction manual to my 1986 IBM keyboard (yes, keyboards used to have 28-page instruction manuals),
You should see the novella of instructions for my 1981 QUME (dumb) terminal (still have one).
every key except the space bar is rate for 20 million keypresses.
The terminals in question have absolutely incredible keyboards. None of that conductive-rubber-paint crap. The keys actually have large metal disks as the contacts. Even after several years of heavy use, having all kinds of junk poored all over them, etc., it just takes a few minutes to open them up and clean them, and they're ready to go for another few years.
so if you can stagger your writes such that erasure is not needed till you really need physical space then you could extend the life of the device quite a bit.
I can't see that working. The whole idea of a cache is to have it storing as much data as it possibly can (ie. constantly full), with extremely fast turn-over on the data. Every single bit read/written to/from the hard drive should be stored in the cache, momentarily.
Historically, though, that has never really paid off. Old expensive PCs don't perform as nicely as new cheap ones do.
Not always, and I'm not sure that's usually the case either... My 200MHz Pentium Pro workstation was generally faster than newer (cheap) systems for years to come. It's going to be a long time before (expensive) 15,000RPM SCSI drives are surpassed by cheap IDE units. Systems built, years ago, maxed-out with 4GBs of RAM, are still perfectly competitive with newer systems.
Besides that, the more expensive systems are sure to be far more reliable as well.
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA: As the first completely open source operating system, [Linux] became the most dominant platform for innovative network products
Sorry guys, but BSD was, without any question, FIRST.
Less than your second (theoretical) 4TB hard drive, for SURE!
I just wish *I* could find a (dual-layer) DVD-Burner jukebox, with drivers for Linux.
So you want to be charged out-the-ass for this, and you want no flexibility, extensive restrictions on what you can do with it, and no ownership at all of the material you've repeatedly paid for?
Of course not. DVD players, these days, are not designed to be used without the TV turned-on, which eliminates their usefulness as CD players. Because of prices, they've removed the LCD-screen on the DVD-players, which were standard on earlier models.
In-fact, it's sperate components that fit the model you've listed... They each do a crappy job of their own simple tasks, rather than being very good, and infinitely flexible for each task, as a single all-in-one computer is.
Most DVRs are already as small as first-generation VCRs (anyone else still remember those monsters?).
Never-mind that it's not x86 compatible, and so isn't very well supported by decent media players (no binary x86 DLLs for you, no incredibly software optimizations, etc.). Never mind that it's far too slow to playback 1080 content encoded in WMV9 or H.264. Never mind that any TV-capture card you add will have to be external. Never mind that you're going to have to buy some external Blu-ray/HD-DVD ROM for it.
Sure it does, when most people do most of their TV-viewing on the primary (living-room) TV.
With HDTV, most homes have mulitple (old) low-def TVs, and a single HDTV which everyone wants to watch... In that case, decentralized makes the most sense, actually.
W.T.F. is a "TV decoder"?
No chance. These "thin clients" have to be top-of-the-line PCs to be able to decode 1080 H.264 videos in real-time.
Besides, I'm not real hot on the idea of walking across my house to insert a DVD I want to watch.
In other words, you have to have an ALMOST full-fledged PC next to every TV, anyhow. Sure, you can have them networked, and make it trivially easy for one to transfer shows from the other (which many already do), but I don't see centralization happening. Who's really going to put together a several-terabyte server to hold ALL their media on a single machine?
The future looks far more like Peer-to-Peer networking for multiple (full-fledged) multimedia computers.
In other words, use a computer.
Not what I was looking for.
Macrovision is a type of DRM, even though it isn't related to CSS.
Downsampling on the analog outputs will be a similar type of DRM.
So you believe, despite people saying they wanted one because of the looks, they actually wanted one because of other reasons they didn't realize?
I think not. You'll need a lot more evidence than that to convince me (or anyone else, I'm sure).
You think WRONG. Thousands upon thousands of people complaining that they hooked their DVD player up to their VCR's inputs, and it looked crappy. Thousands upon thousands of people trying to record their DVDs to VHS tapes so they could watch them on their "other TV" or so their children wouldn't have to scratch-up the original DVD.
What a hellish world you must live in. You mean you can ONLY get HD content from Cable, or Satellite, or OTA broadcasts? Oh no! The horror!
CDs didn't require people to buy a new $500 set of EARS to hear an improvement, just the player itself.
Never under-estimate the bandwidth of a station-wagon full of tapes. Sure, you could get your HD movies through cable/satellite, but then what? Are you going to store 2 movies on your 80GB DVR, then delete them when you want something new? The cost of 50GBs of hard drive space is much more than the cost of a little plastic disk, and much more reliable too (media decoupled from reader, and more tolerant of physical and electrical/magnetic interference).
Yeah, that would be good... only 24 hours to download each HD movie on your 756K connection. That's much more convenient than spending a few minutes driving to a store and buying the "plastic disc".
This is moronic. Any storage media, "can do higher resolutions", but there's no player for it, so you're talking about a computer-only solution, which wont fly in this decade...
That's ALWAYS been the only problem. If you had unlimited storage, HD wouldn't be an issue at all.
You can fit 1080p on a CD if you want, it'll just look like completely crap. The 50GBs of storage isn't there for nothing, you get far, far more detail and quality when you dramatically increase the bitrate.
The expense isn't in playing MPEG-4 (or MPEG-2), it's in playing it at 6X the resolution, having video hardware that will handle that resolution, and outputs that can display it. At that point, you're spending $500 on a new DVD player for these crappy-quality 720p DVD, and unlike HD-DVD/Blu-ray, you don't get the option of using newer, larger storage for your money.
BTW, where are these players that handle WMV videos? I've seen the Pioneer one for $2K, but that's all.
The expense isn't the discs...
Just like you could with VHS tapes. Too bad DVDs didn't fail, right? I mean, with all that terrible DRM, DVDs deserved to fail...
This "New Sensor Framework" has been in the mainline kernel since 3.5, and working quite well, thank you. I certainly wish other OSes would get this stuff built-in (of course OpenBSD is also lacking a lot of good features that FreeBSD/Linux DO have).
Setting up lmsensors was an infuriating and disgusting mess on Linux. After an hour of kernel recompliations, and i2c/lmsensors version mis-matches, I just gave-up. I decided to simply parse the output of mbmon (most trivial setup, EVER!).
I find that very hard to believe, mainly because I've used it extensively...
The iMac was vastly over-priced for it's specs, and nobody with remotely human-like hands could possibly use that dammed mouse.
You can say that all you want, but the reality doesn't bare you out. Every rational person remembers how the iMac was marketed on it's looks alone, how it sold better when offered in more colors, how Apple aggressively sued anyone else who came remotely close to imitating the design, etc. Never mind how much of a hassle it was for buyers when they found it couldn't read any of their floppy disks, it was completely lacking legacy ports, there were extremely few USB devices available at the time, etc.
So, I can't really imagine how you could possibly get the impression iMac sold so well based on anything other than looks.
Yes, that's why the original iMacs, with the terribly crappy OS8, failed so miserably in the market-place.
.
Hmm, my sarcasm meter seems to have exploded.
Okay, I'm game... What's wrong with HP?
With the demise of DEC and Compaq, HP is the only company I'm aware of, still making workstations/servers like they used-to (bullet-proof).
This story isn't high-up on the front-page anymore, so I guess there just are enough people clicking now... My mistake.
Still, if you spend any time on slashdot at all, you've seen PLENTY of other times that links to mirrordot and the coral have gone down as quickly as the main website, even though they're surely getting much less traffic.
Exactly. Who needs expensive 3D equipment to make you think you're standing on the sidelines, when you can just get hammered, tackle your floor-lamp, kick an empty bottle through your window, and think you won the game for your team?
Only if you're talking about onboard video decoding (which only works with select few codecs, and doesn't allow for any sort of processing). Sending 30fps uncompressed 1920x1080 over USB2/Cardbus would be a show-stopper.
Everything in your laptop can get disconnected if they don't attach it well enough. Your hard drive is usually only held-in by one screw, or a piece of plastic over it, but they've designed the mechanisms well-enough that everything works. There's no reason they can't do the same for graphics cards. (Note: Mini-PCI really isn't fast-enough for graphics, anyhow.)
This makes no sense at all. Yes metal expands and contracts, but you should be more worried about the solder connnections on the mobo, rather than connectors... Your hard drive is using a similar type of connector, without problems.
Either you made this little story up, or you simply don't understand why your card actually failed.
Personally, I was thinking of doing something quite similar, for those who want portability, but HATE laptops due to their crappy components, non-interchangeable parts, ergonomics, and high price.
A sub-pizza-box-size PC could be put together, with an LCD screen attached, a keyboard/mouse mount, and some sort of handle or carrying case. You could have room for several half-height PCI/PCIe cards, and a much larger and longer-lasting battery than seen in any laptops.
Never. The Coral Cache (or mirrordot, or whatever else) go down faster than the website itself. The coral-cache has been
Now the mirrordot cache, which will be down moments after I click submit:
http://mirrordot.org/stories/451603e72396736d3165
Yes, but they didn't aquire it in a year, and certainly won't cash-out in a year.
This is all completely besides the point. Do you even remember the subject, now??? You were saying that USDs are worthless because they can't buy snort or the ports... BFD. USD are anything but worthless, just because there are a handful of things they can't aquire. Nobody buys foreign currency so that they can buy up a foreign country. They do it because the foreign currency is stronger than their local currency, and they expect profit from the deal. There's still nothing stopping people from buying currency, or cashing-out of the currency at full market value, whenever they chose. There's absolutely no reason things like this would cause any sort of a panic.
If you want to rant about foreign investements, go right ahead, but at least be honest about it.
You should see the novella of instructions for my 1981 QUME (dumb) terminal (still have one).
The terminals in question have absolutely incredible keyboards. None of that conductive-rubber-paint crap. The keys actually have large metal disks as the contacts. Even after several years of heavy use, having all kinds of junk poored all over them, etc., it just takes a few minutes to open them up and clean them, and they're ready to go for another few years.
You're missing the "pedantic" tag around that...
I can't see that working. The whole idea of a cache is to have it storing as much data as it possibly can (ie. constantly full), with extremely fast turn-over on the data. Every single bit read/written to/from the hard drive should be stored in the cache, momentarily.
Not always, and I'm not sure that's usually the case either... My 200MHz Pentium Pro workstation was generally faster than newer (cheap) systems for years to come. It's going to be a long time before (expensive) 15,000RPM SCSI drives are surpassed by cheap IDE units. Systems built, years ago, maxed-out with 4GBs of RAM, are still perfectly competitive with newer systems.
Besides that, the more expensive systems are sure to be far more reliable as well.