This whole story sounds just about completely made-up to me. I've talked with a lot of blind people who use Linux, and they all say how great it is, and how completely impossible it is to use Windows.
A few Linux distros were put together for the express purpose of making a distro for the disabled. Some, like Slackware, come ready for disabled users, having a "speak-up" enabled kernel on the CD, meaning you only need to type a few characters before it will start reading output to you...
The individual who they detailed in the article presumably already had someone set-up Windows for him, installing all the speech software necessary. His problem is that he'd have to install Linux (not hard really, hook-up a null-modem cable between computers), get speech-synthesis working, and he apparently doesn't understand English in the slightest, needing brazilian translation as well.
This frustration doesn't strike me as being any more serious than the standard Windows user trying to switch to Linux, when he's not familiar with it... They just don't want ANY CHANGES at all. I really don't see this as a disability issue at all.
I wasn't talking of the hypotetical future, but of *now*.
They aren't available *now*, so you could only possibly be talking about the (near) future.
I said "going" (as in currently) from cdrom to DVD gives like 10 times the storage.
If you really meant it that way, it's a very, very stupid and pointless comparison to make. Why not talk about going from floppies to Blu-ray as well?
This is *currently* true, there are *still* machines sold with combo-drives that can only burn CDs, but that can read DVDs.
There are still machines sold that can only write to floppies...
It doesn't matter if the reason for only 25GB is the drives or the discs -- the fact remains: if you buy it at launch, you can burn 25GB.
Yes, but you've got a built-in FREE upgrade as soon as dual-layer media comes out, which you completely left out of your value comparison.
I'm getting real annoyed with this arbitrary re-definition and backpedaling, so I'm just going to stop now. You can try to justify this anyway you want...
I never said blueray will never provide value. Just that on these terms (the ones quoted in the article) it's horrible value.
And the iPod is on TV. That doesn't mean everyone has one.
No, it doesn't mean everyone has one. It just means that 80% of people have one, which is not to be scoffed at.
They have in dasn mp3 players. They have computers. They have DVD or CD players which support MP3.
I very, very rarely see in-dash mp3 players. Computers are a non-issue, as you can download any audio codec you like, trivially. DVD/CD players are a fair point, but they're not a huge installed base.
This is still besides the point, though. Many people ARE and WILL BE encoding their content into non-DRMed AAC, which certainly does completely undermine your point.
You're reading a lot into my post that really isn't there.
The buying and selling of used goods has at best a tenuous relationship to the sale of new goods that are still being produced.
No, that's not true at all. Look at something like the car market, where the "resale value" is used to market the new products, and can drive the "new" prices up. CDs are just so much cheaper, that they don't get as much attention.
The new CD market drives the 2nd hand market, not the other way around.
That's very hard to believe, and you haven't provided ANY evidence to support this claim at all. There's plenty of reason to believe people would buy fewer CDs, or only buy them at reduced prices, if they knew they wouldn't be able to sell them.
And you make the assumption that anyone that even sells RIAA material should go out of business.
That's ridiculous, I didn't say anything even close to that, and I can't imagine how you could read such crap into my words. The only thing I said was, profits from used-CD sales are likely helping to subsidize stores that also sell RIAA CDs, thereby indirectly HELPING the RIAA.
You made a very strong claim that buying used CDs is not helping the RIAA at all, which is simply not the case. Although only in small part, you are still supporting them.
I really don't want graphics cards with better cooling systems. I want them to RUN COOLER in the first place. Water-cooling a device just allows you to push the problem back a little further, before it really starts causing problems. Pretty soon you'll have to upgrade your power supply and home airconditioner to use a shinny new GPU.
All three of these things fit nicely into the current DVD/CD sizes,
You could have said the same thing when DVDs came around. I mean, VCDs and SVCDs worked just fine for video... Disc space is disc space. People will find many, many uses for it.
At most, it's 1-2 hours of little bobby's Soccer game/birthday party. Which still fits on a DVD via MPEG4 (even in HiDef).
No, it only fits on a DVD if you do heavy filtering and denoising, such as WMVHD DVDs, which kill detail, cause compression artifacts, etc. Hell, you could fit 2 hours of HD content on a CD too, it'll just look crappy.
Besides, to PLAY that MPEG-4 HD DVD, you're going to need a to buy a special player. Guess what, it's going to cost just as much as an HD-DVD player, and have less flexibility and less future upgradability. After all, Blu-ray and HD-DVD player can play HD content encoded in MPEG-2/H.264/WMV9 on a DVD.
The new DVDs aren't big enough to make an impact on the backup market (where you need 100s of GB per disk to even be considered),
That's just utter nonsense. Who defined this completely aribitrary value for minimum media sizes for back-ups? You realize you can spread data over multiple discs, don't you?
and they are (and will remain) far more costly than ordinary CD/DVD-RW media.
You could have said the same thing about DVD media when it first came out.
They have some attractiveness for PC and console gaming, but even there, without a huge amount of in-game video, current DVD capacity will suffice for years for the vast majority of games.
You could have said the same thing about CDs when DVDs were first comming out.
DRM and other factors will hurt uptake even more. Honestly, I figure it's going to take at least 20 years before the new DVD format have anywhere near the penetration that DVDs and VCRs do now.
You could have said exactly the same things about DVDs before they came out (and would have been terribly, terribly wrong).
I figure there will be a generation skip here - the replacement for HD-DVD/Blu-Ray should show up around 2020, and consumers are smart enought to see it,
That's a pretty brain-dead thing to say. HD-DVDs and Blu-ray discs hold content in the highest resolution that it is possible for HDTVs to display. Since NTSC TVs have been the standard for 75 years now, I don't see any reason to believe that HDTV/ATSC will be upgraded any time soon. I'm sure holographic display is much more than 20 years away, so I don't expect any issues with keeping HD-DVD or Blu-ray for the next 100 years.
so I'm predicting that the new DVD formats will peak at about 10% of the current DVD market, if that.
Yes, well, I'm predicting that you'll be terribly, terribly wrong.
going from CDROM to DVD gives you 10 times as much storage.
Not even close. CD to DVD-5 gave an improvement of just over 6x. DVD-5 to DVD-9 gave less than a 2x improvement.
Going from DVD to 1.st gen blu-ray gives you not even a factor of 3
That's dual-layer DVDs to single-layer blu-ray discs. HOWEVER, you can't buy a blu-ray drive that will only burn single-layer discs (unlike the case with DVDs)... The very first one will be entirely capable of burning dual-layer blu-ray discs, so you're really talking about an almost 6x improvement (very much like the transition from CDs to DVD-5s).
and the price gets multiplied by like 50. Not worth it.
Prices drop dramatically very quickly. You'd have to be crazy or stupid to buy a new device at full price when it first hits the market.
OK, so the bluray-discs are going to cost less air-freigth, that's about the only benefit I see.
How about not being susceptable to G-forces. How about being impervious to electrical and magnetic fields? How about having the data uncoupled from the drive? How about very likely lasting an extremely long time (Blu-ray is based on Sony's amazing M.O. technology).
As for rewarding the RIAA for behavior that I find distasteful, I don't reward them. How? I buy most of my cds used.
Sorry, but no. You're still rewarding them, just much less-so than if you bought CDs new. Driving up the resale value allows them to sell CDs for more than they could when the CDs were new.
Besides, I bet you bought those CDs from a company that sells lots of new RIAA CDs as well, and you're helping them pay the rent, stay in business, etc.
I will definitely build my next PC, but have been amazed at how many fans are in a typical build. You're looking at at least three fans (PSU, CPU, and case fan)
More of the larger and slower fans are better than fewer, faster fans.
though typically the northbridge has a fan too. Those really concern me because they're so small. Unfortunately only expensive ATX motherboards have passively cooled northbridges.
Even the passively-cooled northbridges need a fan, they just leave them off to fool you. My Asus and MSI motherboars would burn-up without very good airflow across the northbridge heatsink. Northbridges are well on their way to using more power than the CPU, and yet they still get tiny heatsinks and fans, and really can't handle tempuratures as high as CPUs while remaining stable... This stuff is ass-backwards now.
However, you REALLY, REALLY should be looking at AMD64s (Opteron, Sempron64s, Athlon64s, Turions, etc.) which have the memory-controller integrated on the CPU now, nearly eliminating the need for a northbridge, and certainly eliminating the reason for northbridges to be so damn hot.
Nobody in their right mind would use AAC or WMA for non-encrpyted files,
Not true at all for AAC. AAC is becomming quite popular, because it does have very good quality at very low bitrates. You can find numerous AAC files on P2P networks, downloadable from websites, etc.
Programs such as iTunes, Quicktime, and Winamp are strongly biased towards AAC encoding. The MP4 video standard depends on AAC. AAC is really taking-off, and this small fact COMPLETELY and totally underminds your entire post.
LAME has brought a level of quality to the mp3 format that none thought possible, and it keeps up suprisingly well with "more advanced" codecs. I see no reason to use anything else...
It is a lot better than any other MP3 encoder, but it still fall far short of newer codecs like Vorbis (even despite the years of stagnation of Vorbis development).
I reason is, because a device with twice the storage (to use higher-bitrate MP3s instead of Vorbis) would cost a lot more... And, even at the highest bitrates, LAME still can't do as well as modern codecs at 128, on some materials.
Dude, you hooked your air cooled pc up to your duct system...and you're knocking this guy for running a few tubes through his pc?
I must have missed something here. I wasn't "knocking" him for using liquid cooling, I was going through the limitations of such systems (price, diminishing returns, etc) because he was recomending everyone go out and switch to such systems.
You'll have to clarify. I really don't understand your comment at all.
Hell, the FCC (like all the Nanny State agencies) is so far outside the original scope of the Federal Government it's not funny.
So is television, radio communications, satellites, electricity, software, etc.
Progress marches on, and the world has to adapt. Just because YOU don't happen to like the way things are working, doesn't make it unconstitutional by any stretch of the imagination.
I'm sure a large majority of people in the country support the FCC regulating decency on the airwaves. It's certainly well within their charter to do so.
You can often fix those bad motherboards; I desoldered the bad cap and soldered in a good replacement on a co-worker's Abit PIII motherboard, and he says it's worked fine since.
That works if the cap went open. If the cap shorted, then it's destroyed other components in the process.
Personally, I returned my motherboard to MSI (about 4 years outside of warranty) and they replaced it with a much newer, much more expensive model, which I'm using right now...
You'll pay a premium for "rubber grommets for component mounting".
"A premium" being $0.25 each?
I know a lot of people are concerned over heat. Truth is, computers can run really fucking hot with no problems. 50c is a good number to be happy with. Even 60c isn't a big problem. Just make sure the hard drives are getting cool, fresh air.
60c isn't a problem FOR THE CPU, but it is for everything else in the system. I doubt you'll get through POST with a 60C northbridge (Thank God AMD rid us of dammed hot and unstable northbridges). Your PSU won't last a week at 60C. Your GPU will certainly start throwing visual glitches at you. And your RAM doesn't stand much of a chance, either. Hard drives are the most critical, of course, so keep them as cool as possible.
There is little you can do to quite a bad power supply.
That's completely untrue. Open it up. Remove the stock fan, and replace it with a nice quiet 80mm unit. Makes even the loudest $5 PSUs nearly silent. If you know how to solder, you can mount a 3-pin fan adapter very easily. If not, splicing the wires works fine.
Between the fan and the exit, stuff in some crumpled dryer sheets. These allow air flow but really deaden the noise. You can also use several stacked dryer sheets over the intake fans as well.
They "allow" a lot LESS airflow, and in a month, when they've become clogged with dust, lint, and hair, they'll be choking off your fans, and your system will cook. I've tried various filters, and have given-up on all of them. They just don't work.
Finally, take the fucking thing off the desk. There is no reason to have the PC on your desk. Put it under the desk or behind it.
Agreed. Having it on carpet, and further away from your ears, makes for a huge improvement.
You know that box that the thing came in, use that to make a "computer cozy". Cut a few holes for air and cover them with dryer sheets. Cut another hole for the CD-ROM and cover that with a dryer sheet hinge.
Gah! So now you've got an incredibly ugly card-board box with holes in it, instead of your nice-looking PC case... suffocating your PC, starving it of air, holding much of the hot air in, making it take up much more space, making it much harder to service, etc. That's a really, really, really terrible idea.
Right. It's not ludicrously expensive anymore... Now it's only ridiculously expensive. What an improvement!
Meanwhile, for ~$30 in fans and a good heatsink, you can make any system practically-silent, without major work or modifications. I would know, my 100watt DVR is barely above the noise floor.
cuts noise out of the picture completely,
Umm, no, absolutely not. You've got to have a pump to circulate the fluid and a fan over the radiator to disperse all that heat. Finally, liquid cooling doesn't make your hard drives, CD/DVD Drives, or (buzzing) electrical components, any quieter. I've long-since reached that point with my fan-based system.
Plus, with my fan-based system, I hook it up to some ducting, and the fans blow most of the heat right out of the building. Obviously that would be much more difficult with liquid-cooling.
Sound is pretty easy. You can get good 8 channel PCI sound cards for $20. Put two of those in the system, and do some ALSA configuration tricks to make each pair of outputs act like a seperate audio device, and you've got 8 stereo channels... One for each user. No big deal.
3. doesn't require simultaneous use of resources;
For the price of your 9 desktops, I can put together a multi-core system that will be as fast as all of them put-together, with as much memory, more than enough disk space, etc., so even on the odd chance EVERYONE hits the "render" or "compile" buttons at EXACTLY the same time, it will still be just as fast as each user having a seperate PC. Most often, it will be much faster, thanks to pooling of CPU power (less latency for task completion), RAM (applications sharing memory space, disk caching, etc.), and faster Disk/IO (thanks to RAID).
4. has a server very close to all the displays.
You've lost me there. Are you calling the 8-head system a server now? You're going to need a situation where you have 8 displays grouped fairly near each other, of course, but that won't pose a problem in most labs.
And those are only some of the limitations and issues that you're ignoring.
No, those are (mostly) issues which I've addressed multiple times, while you continue to completely ignore my points. How many times, and how many different ways to do I have to say : "it's still price/performance-competitive with 8 individual lower-end PCs" before it even registers with you?
If you just reply with another post making the same baseless claims, not even attempting to refute the points I've made, I'm just going to ignore it. Arguing with a brick wall is just an utter waste of my time.
Thank you for explaining concepts like hot-swapping to me. It wasn't necessary, but thank you anyway.
Yes, well, it certainly does seem necessary to explain basic concepts, which you have been completely ignoring, or dismissing off-hand.
You're not even challenging what I've said, you're just ignoring it. If you have a lab where you need completely idiots to be able to administer the machines, fine. You're completely dismissing this idea, not because it's doesn't have numerous advantages, but because your particular circumstances are strange.
Well, in most computer labs environments the eight PCs will often be being used simutaneously, especially so in a teaching environment, such as a school, college or university.
Yes, USED simultaneously, but everyone isn't going to be running their most CPU-intensive app at the same time.
Even if they ARE, it's still price/performance-competitive with 8 individual lower-end PCs.
If eight PCs are needed, then a ninth identical system can be bought too, as a spare if one goes down, giving a level of redundancy that a hydra solution can never give
When the power supply goes out in one of the PCs, you have to actually switch to the 9th system. With the hydra, it will just transparently switch power supplies in the background, without interruption. The same is true for failed hard drives in a RAID1, RAID10 or RAID5 with hot-spares. So, the hydra has a level of redundancy that seperate PCs can never give...
but there must be a PPC app somewhere (notepad?) you can run,
Well the built-in programs are obvious. I also remember Diskeeper having a download for PPC, so your PPC Windows disk will never have to be fragmented...
and if you can find a compiler, Firefox would probably work, assuming NT4 had a PPC build.
Yeah, but who would install Windows to get Firefox, or any other open-source app? People want Windows so they can run propritary Win32 apps like the newest 3D games.
Linux is an excellent name, it has a good pronounciation, resembles unix, and doesn't require explaining an in-house joke.
Linux is an in-house joke on UNIX (which is an in-house joke on......)
You don't need to explain anything to pronouce Postgres either.
Mozilla still sounds like a bad pun on japanese horror movies.
It is, but it also requires lots of explanation of the in-joke (should somebody ask). You should try to explain to a clueless Netscape user that Mozilla is the next version of Netscape. Fun!
Like everything else, take the name at face value, OR explain the inside joke... Postgres can work either way, too.
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This whole story sounds just about completely made-up to me. I've talked with a lot of blind people who use Linux, and they all say how great it is, and how completely impossible it is to use Windows.
A few Linux distros were put together for the express purpose of making a distro for the disabled. Some, like Slackware, come ready for disabled users, having a "speak-up" enabled kernel on the CD, meaning you only need to type a few characters before it will start reading output to you...
The individual who they detailed in the article presumably already had someone set-up Windows for him, installing all the speech software necessary. His problem is that he'd have to install Linux (not hard really, hook-up a null-modem cable between computers), get speech-synthesis working, and he apparently doesn't understand English in the slightest, needing brazilian translation as well.
This frustration doesn't strike me as being any more serious than the standard Windows user trying to switch to Linux, when he's not familiar with it... They just don't want ANY CHANGES at all. I really don't see this as a disability issue at all.
They aren't available *now*, so you could only possibly be talking about the (near) future.
If you really meant it that way, it's a very, very stupid and pointless comparison to make. Why not talk about going from floppies to Blu-ray as well?
There are still machines sold that can only write to floppies...
Yes, but you've got a built-in FREE upgrade as soon as dual-layer media comes out, which you completely left out of your value comparison.
I'm getting real annoyed with this arbitrary re-definition and backpedaling, so I'm just going to stop now. You can try to justify this anyway you want...
So you're comparing apples to rocks... Great.
Walking down the sidewalk... is that moral or immoral?
No, it doesn't mean everyone has one. It just means that 80% of people have one, which is not to be scoffed at.
I very, very rarely see in-dash mp3 players. Computers are a non-issue, as you can download any audio codec you like, trivially. DVD/CD players are a fair point, but they're not a huge installed base.
This is still besides the point, though. Many people ARE and WILL BE encoding their content into non-DRMed AAC, which certainly does completely undermine your point.
Err, not YOU, the GP... Sorry.
You're reading a lot into my post that really isn't there.
No, that's not true at all. Look at something like the car market, where the "resale value" is used to market the new products, and can drive the "new" prices up. CDs are just so much cheaper, that they don't get as much attention.
That's very hard to believe, and you haven't provided ANY evidence to support this claim at all. There's plenty of reason to believe people would buy fewer CDs, or only buy them at reduced prices, if they knew they wouldn't be able to sell them.
That's ridiculous, I didn't say anything even close to that, and I can't imagine how you could read such crap into my words. The only thing I said was, profits from used-CD sales are likely helping to subsidize stores that also sell RIAA CDs, thereby indirectly HELPING the RIAA.
You made a very strong claim that buying used CDs is not helping the RIAA at all, which is simply not the case. Although only in small part, you are still supporting them.
I really don't want graphics cards with better cooling systems. I want them to RUN COOLER in the first place. Water-cooling a device just allows you to push the problem back a little further, before it really starts causing problems. Pretty soon you'll have to upgrade your power supply and home airconditioner to use a shinny new GPU.
You could have said the same thing when DVDs came around. I mean, VCDs and SVCDs worked just fine for video... Disc space is disc space. People will find many, many uses for it.
No, it only fits on a DVD if you do heavy filtering and denoising, such as WMVHD DVDs, which kill detail, cause compression artifacts, etc. Hell, you could fit 2 hours of HD content on a CD too, it'll just look crappy.
Besides, to PLAY that MPEG-4 HD DVD, you're going to need a to buy a special player. Guess what, it's going to cost just as much as an HD-DVD player, and have less flexibility and less future upgradability. After all, Blu-ray and HD-DVD player can play HD content encoded in MPEG-2/H.264/WMV9 on a DVD.
That's just utter nonsense. Who defined this completely aribitrary value for minimum media sizes for back-ups? You realize you can spread data over multiple discs, don't you?
You could have said the same thing about DVD media when it first came out.
You could have said the same thing about CDs when DVDs were first comming out.
You could have said exactly the same things about DVDs before they came out (and would have been terribly, terribly wrong).
That's a pretty brain-dead thing to say. HD-DVDs and Blu-ray discs hold content in the highest resolution that it is possible for HDTVs to display. Since NTSC TVs have been the standard for 75 years now, I don't see any reason to believe that HDTV/ATSC will be upgraded any time soon. I'm sure holographic display is much more than 20 years away, so I don't expect any issues with keeping HD-DVD or Blu-ray for the next 100 years.
Yes, well, I'm predicting that you'll be terribly, terribly wrong.
Not even close. CD to DVD-5 gave an improvement of just over 6x. DVD-5 to DVD-9 gave less than a 2x improvement.
That's dual-layer DVDs to single-layer blu-ray discs. HOWEVER, you can't buy a blu-ray drive that will only burn single-layer discs (unlike the case with DVDs)... The very first one will be entirely capable of burning dual-layer blu-ray discs, so you're really talking about an almost 6x improvement (very much like the transition from CDs to DVD-5s).
Prices drop dramatically very quickly. You'd have to be crazy or stupid to buy a new device at full price when it first hits the market.
How about not being susceptable to G-forces. How about being impervious to electrical and magnetic fields? How about having the data uncoupled from the drive? How about very likely lasting an extremely long time (Blu-ray is based on Sony's amazing M.O. technology).
Sorry, but no. You're still rewarding them, just much less-so than if you bought CDs new. Driving up the resale value allows them to sell CDs for more than they could when the CDs were new.
Besides, I bet you bought those CDs from a company that sells lots of new RIAA CDs as well, and you're helping them pay the rent, stay in business, etc.
More of the larger and slower fans are better than fewer, faster fans.
Even the passively-cooled northbridges need a fan, they just leave them off to fool you. My Asus and MSI motherboars would burn-up without very good airflow across the northbridge heatsink. Northbridges are well on their way to using more power than the CPU, and yet they still get tiny heatsinks and fans, and really can't handle tempuratures as high as CPUs while remaining stable... This stuff is ass-backwards now.
However, you REALLY, REALLY should be looking at AMD64s (Opteron, Sempron64s, Athlon64s, Turions, etc.) which have the memory-controller integrated on the CPU now, nearly eliminating the need for a northbridge, and certainly eliminating the reason for northbridges to be so damn hot.
Not true at all for AAC. AAC is becomming quite popular, because it does have very good quality at very low bitrates. You can find numerous AAC files on P2P networks, downloadable from websites, etc.
Programs such as iTunes, Quicktime, and Winamp are strongly biased towards AAC encoding. The MP4 video standard depends on AAC. AAC is really taking-off, and this small fact COMPLETELY and totally underminds your entire post.
It is a lot better than any other MP3 encoder, but it still fall far short of newer codecs like Vorbis (even despite the years of stagnation of Vorbis development).
I reason is, because a device with twice the storage (to use higher-bitrate MP3s instead of Vorbis) would cost a lot more... And, even at the highest bitrates, LAME still can't do as well as modern codecs at 128, on some materials.
I must have missed something here. I wasn't "knocking" him for using liquid cooling, I was going through the limitations of such systems (price, diminishing returns, etc) because he was recomending everyone go out and switch to such systems.
You'll have to clarify. I really don't understand your comment at all.
No. It's not a "moral" issue, by any stretch of the imagination.
I sincerly doubt anyone considers a "teen orgy scene" in a high-budget TV series to be protected political speech, or a case of real censorship.
So is television, radio communications, satellites, electricity, software, etc.
Progress marches on, and the world has to adapt. Just because YOU don't happen to like the way things are working, doesn't make it unconstitutional by any stretch of the imagination.
I'm sure a large majority of people in the country support the FCC regulating decency on the airwaves. It's certainly well within their charter to do so.
That works if the cap went open. If the cap shorted, then it's destroyed other components in the process.
Personally, I returned my motherboard to MSI (about 4 years outside of warranty) and they replaced it with a much newer, much more expensive model, which I'm using right now...
"A premium" being $0.25 each?
60c isn't a problem FOR THE CPU, but it is for everything else in the system. I doubt you'll get through POST with a 60C northbridge (Thank God AMD rid us of dammed hot and unstable northbridges). Your PSU won't last a week at 60C. Your GPU will certainly start throwing visual glitches at you. And your RAM doesn't stand much of a chance, either. Hard drives are the most critical, of course, so keep them as cool as possible.
That's completely untrue. Open it up. Remove the stock fan, and replace it with a nice quiet 80mm unit. Makes even the loudest $5 PSUs nearly silent. If you know how to solder, you can mount a 3-pin fan adapter very easily. If not, splicing the wires works fine.
They "allow" a lot LESS airflow, and in a month, when they've become clogged with dust, lint, and hair, they'll be choking off your fans, and your system will cook. I've tried various filters, and have given-up on all of them. They just don't work.
Agreed. Having it on carpet, and further away from your ears, makes for a huge improvement.
Gah! So now you've got an incredibly ugly card-board box with holes in it, instead of your nice-looking PC case... suffocating your PC, starving it of air, holding much of the hot air in, making it take up much more space, making it much harder to service, etc. That's a really, really, really terrible idea.
Right. It's not ludicrously expensive anymore... Now it's only ridiculously expensive. What an improvement!
Meanwhile, for ~$30 in fans and a good heatsink, you can make any system practically-silent, without major work or modifications. I would know, my 100watt DVR is barely above the noise floor.
Umm, no, absolutely not. You've got to have a pump to circulate the fluid and a fan over the radiator to disperse all that heat. Finally, liquid cooling doesn't make your hard drives, CD/DVD Drives, or (buzzing) electrical components, any quieter. I've long-since reached that point with my fan-based system.
Plus, with my fan-based system, I hook it up to some ducting, and the fans blow most of the heat right out of the building. Obviously that would be much more difficult with liquid-cooling.
Yes, that much is a requirement.
Sound is pretty easy. You can get good 8 channel PCI sound cards for $20. Put two of those in the system, and do some ALSA configuration tricks to make each pair of outputs act like a seperate audio device, and you've got 8 stereo channels... One for each user. No big deal.
For the price of your 9 desktops, I can put together a multi-core system that will be as fast as all of them put-together, with as much memory, more than enough disk space, etc., so even on the odd chance EVERYONE hits the "render" or "compile" buttons at EXACTLY the same time, it will still be just as fast as each user having a seperate PC. Most often, it will be much faster, thanks to pooling of CPU power (less latency for task completion), RAM (applications sharing memory space, disk caching, etc.), and faster Disk/IO (thanks to RAID).
You've lost me there. Are you calling the 8-head system a server now? You're going to need a situation where you have 8 displays grouped fairly near each other, of course, but that won't pose a problem in most labs.
No, those are (mostly) issues which I've addressed multiple times, while you continue to completely ignore my points. How many times, and how many different ways to do I have to say : "it's still price/performance-competitive with 8 individual lower-end PCs" before it even registers with you?
If you just reply with another post making the same baseless claims, not even attempting to refute the points I've made, I'm just going to ignore it. Arguing with a brick wall is just an utter waste of my time.
Yes, well, it certainly does seem necessary to explain basic concepts, which you have been completely ignoring, or dismissing off-hand.
You're not even challenging what I've said, you're just ignoring it. If you have a lab where you need completely idiots to be able to administer the machines, fine. You're completely dismissing this idea, not because it's doesn't have numerous advantages, but because your particular circumstances are strange.
Yes, USED simultaneously, but everyone isn't going to be running their most CPU-intensive app at the same time.
Even if they ARE, it's still price/performance-competitive with 8 individual lower-end PCs.
When the power supply goes out in one of the PCs, you have to actually switch to the 9th system. With the hydra, it will just transparently switch power supplies in the background, without interruption. The same is true for failed hard drives in a RAID1, RAID10 or RAID5 with hot-spares. So, the hydra has a level of redundancy that seperate PCs can never give...
Well the built-in programs are obvious. I also remember Diskeeper having a download for PPC, so your PPC Windows disk will never have to be fragmented...
Yeah, but who would install Windows to get Firefox, or any other open-source app? People want Windows so they can run propritary Win32 apps like the newest 3D games.
Linux is an in-house joke on UNIX (which is an in-house joke on......)
You don't need to explain anything to pronouce Postgres either.
It is, but it also requires lots of explanation of the in-joke (should somebody ask). You should try to explain to a clueless Netscape user that Mozilla is the next version of Netscape. Fun!
Like everything else, take the name at face value, OR explain the inside joke... Postgres can work either way, too.