44.1KHz is already overkill as humans can only hear up to about 22KHz anyway,
44.1KHz represents the digital sampling frequency, not the actual audio (waveform) response frequency. In truth, 44.1KHz can only store audio frequencies up to 22050Hz (theoretical) MAXIMUM.
Heavier, perhaps. They don't currently use aluminum or titanium, so it might be possible to make it rigid without a weight increase.
Thicker? Again, not necessarily. And even if so, the head assembly is currently much thicker than the arm, so slightly thicker may not post much problem.
The trade-offs aren't worth it, which is why we don't use vacuum-sealed drives.
I'd say it's a question of casing structure (a vaccum means a LOT of pressure) rather than the arms.
Anyhow, well when platters start nearing the sound barrier, we can talk. That is what this thread is about.
Again before you guys go off about how Windows doesn't "just work" let me tell you it DOES for me on my gaming machine. My spare time these days is spent raiding instead of tweaking my computer and i prefer it that way.
I'd much prefer a couple days of tweaks to get a Linux/BSD system up and working properly, rather than spending hour after hour of my life putting up with an operating system that is incredibly slow for absolutely no reason, is terribly unstable, needs to be scanned constantly for viruses and spyware, needs to be defragmented regularly, and tends to just randomly break.
the head rides a minute cushion of air as the platters whiz by below them.
There's no reason they have to do so. They could make the arm comming off the voice-coil rigid, and adjust it to exact specs in the factory. THEN they could vaccum-seal the drive.
Drives even come with holes so that they can "breath" at different altitudes and temputure.
Some industrial drives are filled with inert gas and sealed shut, for things like high-altitude use.
Back in the day... with my Tandy 2000 and 20 meg drive, you had to run a program telling the drive to park the head; meaning to place the head in good spot to land as the disk slows down when you turn it off.
Umm, that was for the sake of transporting it, so the head wouldn't scratch the platter if the drive was bumped. It didn't have anything to do with the rotation of the platters keeping the head aloft.
If or anyone takes upon themselves to operate a dirve in a vaccum, take pictures and/or video. I wanna see it.
Wouldn't be any more exciting than a head crashing for any other reason... You'd just have a nicely scratched-up platter.
I'm not sure I will ever need more than a few terabytes. I'm not into holographic pr0n and I don't want a TV-quality recording of my life archived for posterity.
Music is still only stereo, and most people are only storing lossy copies of it. When you have lossless 48 channel music at 384KHz, then we'll talk.
How about video? Even with lossy MPEG-2, you can still only store a few dozen hours of HDTV on the largest hard drives. Switch to lossless video, or perhaps holographic, and you'll need a hell of a lot more space.
We don't know what will develop. In a few years, will we all have full-fledged Earth Simulators running on our desktops, deciding when the next rainstorm will be?
How about wearing a device that monitors EVERY neuron, every muscle fiber, etc., to be analyzed to determine if we are beginning to develop any health problems?
Maybe a full copy of your own genome, which can be analysed in-detail by software.
Perhaps with the development of software radio, we'll just set our computers to record ALL of the electromagnetic spectrum, and pick out anything we might want to watch/hear later.
Maybe computer control of cars and servant robots will be possible, not because of wonderful A.I., but because every single possible senario being mapped to an appropriate response, and stored on a gigantic hard drive.
Maybe we'll have our own personal "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy", that detects that you're looking at a specific car, and automatically tells you everything there is to know about it, the company that made it, the driving record of the person associated with the license plate number, etc. Personal histories of every person you look at. Reviews of the movie poster you glanced at. etc.
Or maybe a Matrix-like senario... You'd want to have a lot more movies if you could watch each of them each in a fraction of a second.
Well, now I'm drawing a blank, but that's not bad for what I could come up with in a few minutes. I'm sure in a few years time I could have an incredibly long list.
I mean, instead of releasing a hard drive 2x the size of last year, why can't they skip a generation and release one 10x the last year?
Because we don't yet have the manufacturing technology to place each individual electron on a platter, heads that can read and write to those ultra-dense platters, or the circuitry to support it. Look at something like GMR. They couldn't possibly have used it in hard drives 5 years before it was discovered.
It may sound ironic due to the above, but the computer revolution hasn't been about technological leaps. No, it's been about fast but incremental improvements to manufacturing.
I guess the better answer is, computer technology is close behind current scientific discoveries... If there was a jump, it would have to be artifically created by holding back on developing products with new, slightly better, technology. I really don't see your problem with improvement. It's not as if they are forcing you to upgrade your hard drive every year. I'm using an older 40GB hard drive in this machine right now, and I'm perfectly happy with it. When it fails (out of warranty) I'll go buy one that is many, many times larger, so it's sure not incremental improvement for me.
I had a nice long and detailed response typed out... Then Firefox crashed:-(
What other ways were you talking about?
I don't really want to take the time to detail them here (that's why I typically just mention the simple source-routed+ICMP method) and I'm not finding any good search results on the subject. Perhaps someone else here is more inclined to spend time detailing other methods than I am. I'll cover one more simple method though...
Instead of source-routed packets, you can gain access to another machine on the same network segment as the NAT. After that, you just set the NAT's public address as your default gateway, and you can ping the private addresses directly. Instead of ICMP, you can use TCP packets (see "TCP ping") which obviously can't be filtered.
In order to get FTP to work properly through a NAT, you need stateful inspection and/or rewriting of packets.
Umm, no. Passive FTP will work just fine through a NAT with no workarounds. Active FTP is usually handled by a very simple transparent FTP proxy on the NAT box. This doesn't require stateful inspection of any kind. Any state info kept by a more advanced NAT would be quite the opposite of a stateful firewall. Witness the availablity of consumer NAT routers without firewalls, or with only basic, non-stateful firewalls.
a basic firewall comes "free" once your router has implemented NAT.
No. NAT PROVIDES NO SECURITY WHAT-SO-EVER. No matter how many times it is said, people still don't get it. It REALLY doesn't provide any security. All it does is add a couple simple steps before someone can address your inside machines. NAT is the equivalent of locking your door with a rubber-band.
the CDs and DVDs I buy are levied because I am expected to be pirating music/movies with them.
Well then, I guess you have carte blanche for shoplifting too, since part of the price you pay in a store is to cover the percentage of people that are going to steal merchandise.
Incidentally, people like to bitch about the "blank CD tax" a lot, but the fact is that (in the USA) it only applies to the branded "Audio CDs" not the data CD-Rs that 99% of us use.
To me this seems to be more a test of the linux implementation of teh video card drivers.. and NOT the wine system itself.
Well that is implying that the Nvidia drivers for Windows are much better than for Linux, which is essentially the opposite of my experience with video.
Obviously graphics is the bottleneck, so perhaps it's a case of WINE not translating the video instructions as well as it does for other instructions.
However, there really are a lot of cases where Best Buy will be selling an identical item as the Walmart down the street for a 15% higher price, with absolutely the only difference being that number on the sticker, and in the manual.
So you're going an average speed of 75mph from the moment you leave your home, to the moment you get to the store? Do you live on the median on the highway?
No, I'm about 1/2 mile away, and the speed limit to the onramp is 50MPH, with just one (short) stoplight, and rarely enough traffic to matter.
So the difference is just a matter of a few seconds.
Where I am, you're looking at an average speed of something closer to 50mph, 40 if there's traffic.
Have you ever USED a heat pump in any area that gets below freezing in winter?
Not just any heatpump... a closed-loop ground-source heatpump. Or an open-loop well-water source heat-pump, if you already have a well.
It doesn't matter what the tempurature of the air is, the ground stays within a couple degrees, year-round. It may be -20F above ground, but it will still be around 65F once you go down about 30 feet.
I don't have solar panels used for hot water... [...] Winter would also cause some issues for this... Heating bills are largest in the winter and solar isn't very effective in general when the solar panels are covered in snow...
Everyone says solar, because it's trendy. Truth is, you'd almost certainly get much better use out of a ground-source heat-pump. Doesn't matter what the sun is doing, you can get your home heated or cooled, and all the hot water you need, by a single unit, probably only costing you $10 in electricity per month.
The big cost is burying the lines, which either involves plowing-up a hole the size of a pool. If space is constrained, you can drill a vertical hole the size of a well instead. If you already happen to have a well, you could save a lot by going for a water-source heatpump instead.
I've been trying to get power management to work on PCs for over a decade now, and we're still not there...
S1 (aka. sleep) works on most every system, since it's been around forever, but it'll only save you maybe 2% over the system being normally up and running (doing useful tasks).
S3 (aka. suspend) is the damn-good one. It only uses about 0.5 watts more power than your computer being completely off (I suppose it might be different with a more effecient power supply like a Seasonic). However, it's damn near impossible to get it to work. Windows XP, Linux, FreeBSD. Tried on dozens of completely different machines, and I've never seen it work, once. The drivers for pretty much ALL the hardware need to be written with APCI in-mind.
Hell, if I could just find a list of the motherboards, soundcards, and other components that have drivers on FreeBSD6 that will resume successfully from S3, I'd put together a couple systems with just those componets. Electricity in CA isn't cheap, and I'd be saving lots with instant-on from S3. No more boot-up waits, no more opening-up the same apps every time, etc. Just hit a button, and start working (as soon as the monitor can warm up).
S5 (aka. hibernate) writes out RAM to disk, and reads from disk upon restart. I'm not a particular fan of this method, as it would take quite a while to resume on a system with a large ammount of RAM. Still, it has the potential to be even lower power provided you're going to be away long enough.
So, in my experience, you're still screwed... Just shut-off the machine when you're done.
I think (and this is because of your reference to "Xvid, lavc, etc") that we are discussing totally different markets. My point is not that Cell is a good fit for Apple's mass market segments comprising home and casual hobbyist users.
The reference to Xvid and lavc was only about first-pass encoding speed-ups. lavc, in particular, has codecs for MPEG-1/2/4, WMV1/2, h.263(p), snow, svq1, etc., and "turbo" can speed-up the first pass for all of those, so it's not just useful for home users ripping DVDs.
I am suggesting that the Cell would be good for very high-end Apple customers processing HD "live" in the truck.
Cutting up videos into "chapters" and encoding each on a different processor, as you previously suggested, would not possibly work for "live" encoding. If you try threading for realtime encoding, you have the same drawbacks as I've listed before. And once again, the only intensive part of the process is video encoding, which can be done quite easily on a single purpose-built ASIC, and doesn't need multiple cell processors. In other words, I don't see how this could be even slightly useful for "live" work.
[...] the source and destination format bitrates are so high that cropping, scaling, gamma-correction and the like do use noticeable computation,
Still, no. All it requires is a memcpy, and modern systems have such high memory throughput that it's a non-issue. If you wanted to, you could re-write the crop/gamma/scale/etc. filters so that all the operations could be performed in the same spot in memory, eliminating the memcpy from one filter to the next.
MPEG2 as a source format is laid out in GOPs;
Yes.
MPEG2 as a destination format has predictable (even settable) GOP layouts and settable data rates.
No. Not without sacrificing a lot of quality to do so. Sure, you can always have a strict GOP setting, and CBR encoding, but you will spent a lot more bits on much worse quality, as I've already said.
Parallelization by GOP is precisely what happens in this type of application,
Which is likely part of the reason why standard software encoding beats the crap out of a solution like this at the same bitrates. The more inflexible, the worse the quality.
You are saying that cell might do slightly better than the current crop of vastly ineffecient methods of video compression. Well, you're welcome to it. However, computers have long since surpassed both methods, and it's surely only going to be a short-time before broadcasters come to realize this.
Fifty miles!? Holy shit, dude. You go right ahead and drive over an hour to get to the grocery store, and an hour back again.
An hour? No, 50mi/75MPH=0.66hr, and that's assuming you obey the speed limit.
And that's assuming you are stupid enough to make a special trip from your home, rather than going there from someplace closer. (eg) work
Alternatively, you could change your habbits, and go shopping once every couple months, instead of several times a week like an old woman. Large freezers are cheap.
Besides, I didn't say YOU should do it, I'm just pointing out that most everywhere, people have better options.
"same [...] brand and model" -- Yes, 6th Avenue has the Toshiba 46HM85 for $500 less. It's last year's model. We have the 46HM95 now, and we're not marking it down to last year's model's price. No, I don't care that the only discernable difference is the model number.
I could completely agree with you, up until that one. It's complete bullshit to just change the model number for different retailers, different years, months, days, etc. Why not just use a nice long model string, and make it different for EACH AND EVERY UNIT? It's fucked-up, and I'm sure some big companies are going to get sued for big money within the next few years over such unfair trade practices.
I try not to buy as much from Best Buy these days because of their policies, their prices really aren't the best and they have the absolute worst staff of any retail establishment I have ever set foot in.
Never set-foot in a Walmart? Best Buy is very, very terrible, but Walmart is still worse.
Not once have I had a problem with a Circuit City employee and generally on the products I am after the prices are better also.
Yeah I've had similar experiences. They do website price matching without any arguments; it's explicitly in their terms. In my experience they seem to have more reliable merchandise, so after a couple Best Buy MAG monitors died right out of warranty, I went to Circuit City, got an even cheaper (but better looking) monitor, and it's been working for about 3 years now... And they have some really interesting cheap stuff now. Search their website for "nexxtech" which makes things like decent $10 digital cameras, $10 (analog-tuned, digital-display) shortwave radios, etc.
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44.1KHz represents the digital sampling frequency, not the actual audio (waveform) response frequency. In truth, 44.1KHz can only store audio frequencies up to 22050Hz (theoretical) MAXIMUM.
Though, yes, 384KHz would be over-the-top.
Actually I was talking about the hundreds of 2000 boxes I had to administer. I doubt XP has improved the situation all that much.
Heavier, perhaps. They don't currently use aluminum or titanium, so it might be possible to make it rigid without a weight increase.
Thicker? Again, not necessarily. And even if so, the head assembly is currently much thicker than the arm, so slightly thicker may not post much problem.
I'd say it's a question of casing structure (a vaccum means a LOT of pressure) rather than the arms.
Anyhow, well when platters start nearing the sound barrier, we can talk. That is what this thread is about.
I'd much prefer a couple days of tweaks to get a Linux/BSD system up and working properly, rather than spending hour after hour of my life putting up with an operating system that is incredibly slow for absolutely no reason, is terribly unstable, needs to be scanned constantly for viruses and spyware, needs to be defragmented regularly, and tends to just randomly break.
A stitch in time, my friend.
There's no reason they have to do so. They could make the arm comming off the voice-coil rigid, and adjust it to exact specs in the factory. THEN they could vaccum-seal the drive.
Some industrial drives are filled with inert gas and sealed shut, for things like high-altitude use.
Umm, that was for the sake of transporting it, so the head wouldn't scratch the platter if the drive was bumped. It didn't have anything to do with the rotation of the platters keeping the head aloft.
Wouldn't be any more exciting than a head crashing for any other reason... You'd just have a nicely scratched-up platter.
Music is still only stereo, and most people are only storing lossy copies of it. When you have lossless 48 channel music at 384KHz, then we'll talk.
How about video? Even with lossy MPEG-2, you can still only store a few dozen hours of HDTV on the largest hard drives. Switch to lossless video, or perhaps holographic, and you'll need a hell of a lot more space.
We don't know what will develop. In a few years, will we all have full-fledged Earth Simulators running on our desktops, deciding when the next rainstorm will be?
How about wearing a device that monitors EVERY neuron, every muscle fiber, etc., to be analyzed to determine if we are beginning to develop any health problems?
Maybe a full copy of your own genome, which can be analysed in-detail by software.
Perhaps with the development of software radio, we'll just set our computers to record ALL of the electromagnetic spectrum, and pick out anything we might want to watch/hear later.
Maybe computer control of cars and servant robots will be possible, not because of wonderful A.I., but because every single possible senario being mapped to an appropriate response, and stored on a gigantic hard drive.
Maybe we'll have our own personal "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy", that detects that you're looking at a specific car, and automatically tells you everything there is to know about it, the company that made it, the driving record of the person associated with the license plate number, etc. Personal histories of every person you look at. Reviews of the movie poster you glanced at. etc.
Or maybe a Matrix-like senario... You'd want to have a lot more movies if you could watch each of them each in a fraction of a second.
Well, now I'm drawing a blank, but that's not bad for what I could come up with in a few minutes. I'm sure in a few years time I could have an incredibly long list.
Because we don't yet have the manufacturing technology to place each individual electron on a platter, heads that can read and write to those ultra-dense platters, or the circuitry to support it. Look at something like GMR. They couldn't possibly have used it in hard drives 5 years before it was discovered.
It may sound ironic due to the above, but the computer revolution hasn't been about technological leaps. No, it's been about fast but incremental improvements to manufacturing.
I guess the better answer is, computer technology is close behind current scientific discoveries... If there was a jump, it would have to be artifically created by holding back on developing products with new, slightly better, technology. I really don't see your problem with improvement. It's not as if they are forcing you to upgrade your hard drive every year. I'm using an older 40GB hard drive in this machine right now, and I'm perfectly happy with it. When it fails (out of warranty) I'll go buy one that is many, many times larger, so it's sure not incremental improvement for me.
I don't really want to take the time to detail them here (that's why I typically just mention the simple source-routed+ICMP method) and I'm not finding any good search results on the subject. Perhaps someone else here is more inclined to spend time detailing other methods than I am. I'll cover one more simple method though...
Instead of source-routed packets, you can gain access to another machine on the same network segment as the NAT. After that, you just set the NAT's public address as your default gateway, and you can ping the private addresses directly. Instead of ICMP, you can use TCP packets (see "TCP ping") which obviously can't be filtered.
Umm, no. Passive FTP will work just fine through a NAT with no workarounds. Active FTP is usually handled by a very simple transparent FTP proxy on the NAT box. This doesn't require stateful inspection of any kind. Any state info kept by a more advanced NAT would be quite the opposite of a stateful firewall. Witness the availablity of consumer NAT routers without firewalls, or with only basic, non-stateful firewalls.
Your URL (lensman.net) probably doesn't go where you want it to.
No. NAT PROVIDES NO SECURITY WHAT-SO-EVER. No matter how many times it is said, people still don't get it. It REALLY doesn't provide any security. All it does is add a couple simple steps before someone can address your inside machines. NAT is the equivalent of locking your door with a rubber-band.
Here, instead of repeating myself over and over again, just look at the last time I talked about it:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169925&cid=14
Well then, I guess you have carte blanche for shoplifting too, since part of the price you pay in a store is to cover the percentage of people that are going to steal merchandise.
Incidentally, people like to bitch about the "blank CD tax" a lot, but the fact is that (in the USA) it only applies to the branded "Audio CDs" not the data CD-Rs that 99% of us use.
Well that is implying that the Nvidia drivers for Windows are much better than for Linux, which is essentially the opposite of my experience with video.
Obviously graphics is the bottleneck, so perhaps it's a case of WINE not translating the video instructions as well as it does for other instructions.
Hmm, you have a good point. Most of them certainly are VIA-based motherboards.
Fair enough. Just a misunderstanding.
However, there really are a lot of cases where Best Buy will be selling an identical item as the Walmart down the street for a 15% higher price, with absolutely the only difference being that number on the sticker, and in the manual.
This is often the case with VCRs, TVs, etc.
No, I'm about 1/2 mile away, and the speed limit to the onramp is 50MPH, with just one (short) stoplight, and rarely enough traffic to matter.
So the difference is just a matter of a few seconds.
Good for you.
Not just any heatpump... a closed-loop ground-source heatpump. Or an open-loop well-water source heat-pump, if you already have a well.
It doesn't matter what the tempurature of the air is, the ground stays within a couple degrees, year-round. It may be -20F above ground, but it will still be around 65F once you go down about 30 feet.
It's nothing new, but it certainly is a fraud.
Everyone says solar, because it's trendy. Truth is, you'd almost certainly get much better use out of a ground-source heat-pump. Doesn't matter what the sun is doing, you can get your home heated or cooled, and all the hot water you need, by a single unit, probably only costing you $10 in electricity per month.
The big cost is burying the lines, which either involves plowing-up a hole the size of a pool. If space is constrained, you can drill a vertical hole the size of a well instead. If you already happen to have a well, you could save a lot by going for a water-source heatpump instead.
Okay, fine. I should have specified "Desktop" or "Workstation" systems. It's much easier to make it work on a notebook, where everything is built-in.
I've been trying to get power management to work on PCs for over a decade now, and we're still not there...
S1 (aka. sleep) works on most every system, since it's been around forever, but it'll only save you maybe 2% over the system being normally up and running (doing useful tasks).
S3 (aka. suspend) is the damn-good one. It only uses about 0.5 watts more power than your computer being completely off (I suppose it might be different with a more effecient power supply like a Seasonic). However, it's damn near impossible to get it to work. Windows XP, Linux, FreeBSD. Tried on dozens of completely different machines, and I've never seen it work, once. The drivers for pretty much ALL the hardware need to be written with APCI in-mind.
Hell, if I could just find a list of the motherboards, soundcards, and other components that have drivers on FreeBSD6 that will resume successfully from S3, I'd put together a couple systems with just those componets. Electricity in CA isn't cheap, and I'd be saving lots with instant-on from S3. No more boot-up waits, no more opening-up the same apps every time, etc. Just hit a button, and start working (as soon as the monitor can warm up).
S5 (aka. hibernate) writes out RAM to disk, and reads from disk upon restart. I'm not a particular fan of this method, as it would take quite a while to resume on a system with a large ammount of RAM. Still, it has the potential to be even lower power provided you're going to be away long enough.
So, in my experience, you're still screwed... Just shut-off the machine when you're done.
The reference to Xvid and lavc was only about first-pass encoding speed-ups. lavc, in particular, has codecs for MPEG-1/2/4, WMV1/2, h.263(p), snow, svq1, etc., and "turbo" can speed-up the first pass for all of those, so it's not just useful for home users ripping DVDs.
Cutting up videos into "chapters" and encoding each on a different processor, as you previously suggested, would not possibly work for "live" encoding. If you try threading for realtime encoding, you have the same drawbacks as I've listed before. And once again, the only intensive part of the process is video encoding, which can be done quite easily on a single purpose-built ASIC, and doesn't need multiple cell processors. In other words, I don't see how this could be even slightly useful for "live" work.
Still, no. All it requires is a memcpy, and modern systems have such high memory throughput that it's a non-issue. If you wanted to, you could re-write the crop/gamma/scale/etc. filters so that all the operations could be performed in the same spot in memory, eliminating the memcpy from one filter to the next.
Yes.
No. Not without sacrificing a lot of quality to do so. Sure, you can always have a strict GOP setting, and CBR encoding, but you will spent a lot more bits on much worse quality, as I've already said.
Which is likely part of the reason why standard software encoding beats the crap out of a solution like this at the same bitrates. The more inflexible, the worse the quality.
You are saying that cell might do slightly better than the current crop of vastly ineffecient methods of video compression. Well, you're welcome to it. However, computers have long since surpassed both methods, and it's surely only going to be a short-time before broadcasters come to realize this.
An hour? No, 50mi/75MPH=0.66hr, and that's assuming you obey the speed limit.
And that's assuming you are stupid enough to make a special trip from your home, rather than going there from someplace closer. (eg) work
Alternatively, you could change your habbits, and go shopping once every couple months, instead of several times a week like an old woman. Large freezers are cheap.
Besides, I didn't say YOU should do it, I'm just pointing out that most everywhere, people have better options.
Levi's 501s haven't changed in the past 100 years or so. If the only thing different is a single number on them, it's still a fraud.
I could completely agree with you, up until that one. It's complete bullshit to just change the model number for different retailers, different years, months, days, etc. Why not just use a nice long model string, and make it different for EACH AND EVERY UNIT? It's fucked-up, and I'm sure some big companies are going to get sued for big money within the next few years over such unfair trade practices.
Never set-foot in a Walmart? Best Buy is very, very terrible, but Walmart is still worse.
Yeah I've had similar experiences. They do website price matching without any arguments; it's explicitly in their terms. In my experience they seem to have more reliable merchandise, so after a couple Best Buy MAG monitors died right out of warranty, I went to Circuit City, got an even cheaper (but better looking) monitor, and it's been working for about 3 years now... And they have some really interesting cheap stuff now. Search their website for "nexxtech" which makes things like decent $10 digital cameras, $10 (analog-tuned, digital-display) shortwave radios, etc.