Not really a CAVE, but the three projectors, curved screen, and the two pipe / 2x8 channel late model deskside Onyx2 makes it a "Reality Center". Not too shabby.
Which is smaller and has fewer residents than South Dakota... home of (you guessed it) wheat, barley, durum, sunflowers, and canola. 36 B-52's, some air refueling tankers, 150 Minuteman ICBMs.
My roommate's from there... I quote "North Dakota? Heh... not much going on there. Heck, the largest city in North Dakota is less than half the size of Lubbock, Texas".
Ok, I'm not scared enough to wear a tinfoil suit... but I'm somewhat worried about the rapid growth of wireless gear, especially those gizmos that brag about their ability to trasmit thru almost anything. Is there a point where our wireless usage will begin to cause some damage to the human body? That's a lot of energy zipping around every which way.
I know nothing about this field... but I am curious.
... tens of millions of Slashdot geeks! If you squint, you can see the copper T1 glowing red hot!
On a more serious note, I wonder if mod_gzip and a faster server would help out at least a little bit -- make slightly better use of the limited thrput the T1 provides.
Episode II - ATOC was indeed recorded in 1080/24p resolution (1920x1080). Too bad most digital theaters and home projectors are currently using 1280x1024 DLP elements. *sigh* Gotta start somewhere, I guess.
Kudos on an excellent post! I have been saying the same thing for quite awhile. There is A LOT of room for marketing bullshit to cloud the video sector over the next few years. "High Definition" and "HD" are nothing more than buzzwords and do not describe the quality! I have already seen MANY digital televisions stations pass themselves off as "HD" when in fact they are broadcasting nothing more than standard-resolution 720x480, albeit non-interlaced. What's worse are stations that "upconvert" standard-resolution video to a high definition format such as 1080i (1920x1080).... they're broadcasting in high definition, but the material they're showing is stretched/zoomed to fill all of the pixels and looks NO BETTER than the original standard-resolution material.
Buyer Beware! I dunno about you, but I'm gonna wait. Standard-definition gear is already cheap enough that I've been making great use of it -- DVDs, progressive scan DVD player, Sony Vega and Panasonic Panaflat TV, DolbyDigital & DTS reciever with good speakers.
D-VHS *is* compressed. The bandwidth is actually quite low by HD standards... you'll get full HD resolution, but quite a few artifacts.... still better overall quality than DVD, though.
Uncompressed video is actually a good thing... especially for pros that want to do editing/compositing or want to convert to another format. You *don't* want to introduce compression artifacts and other compression ickyness early on in production. That's a *bad* thing. Compression is a last resort step often used to ease broadcast and/or delivery to the consumer. I have a major beef against overly-compressed HD... if I buy a TV capable of HD resolution, the last thing I want to see are high definition chunks of compression artifact crap on my screen. Compression on the standard television side of things is already bad enough --- look at a sub-par station on digital cable or DirecTV... compression artifacts galore. Not quite RealPlayer quality, but close.
Superbit is just a fancy name for a standard dvd (usually a second release) that has been mastered with a higher bitrate (= better quality, fewer compression artifacts) than "average" DVDs. It is still plain DVD 720x480 resolution, nothing more.
It will be released then, ta dah!, on BETA tape, Digital BETA too. Why, because that's what the professionals use, and have done for years. (You thought the cable company digitized off 35mm film?)
True, most professionals still use Beta... however, and as you somewhat pointed out, they mostly use Digital Betacam ("DigiBeta") and Betacam SP. Both are uncompressed and are more than enough to store NTSC/PAL as good as they'll get. There is no need for anything greater unless you're ready to go to HD. (A side note... while Betacam SP is as good as uncompressed analog gets, DigiBeta came about as a lower cost replacement to D1, the original full-quality digital tape -- however D1 decks easily cost $400K+, an hour worth of blank tape - $400. DigiBeta is a dream come true for mid-sized video firms... NTSC as good as it'll get, uncompressed, and ready for the editing/compositing workstation. Betacam SP looks just as good, but because it's analog, requires time-consuming digitizing before it can be worked with on a workstation or PC/Mac.)
There are many other forms of Beta... including the new Betacam SX (which is compressed digital and suffers from the same compression artifacts that pop up on other similar compressed "DV" formats -- Digital 8, MiniDV, DVCAM, DVCPro. "DV" formats are great for home and small business use, with a compressed data stream of about 25Mbit/sec... but it's often loathed by pros due to artifacting and compositing work. Basicly, if you want full quality, go uncompressed. RAID storage is there, workstation hardware is there. Leave the comprssed stuff to Win/Mac users with their FinalCutPro-type software. Real users want DigiBeta and an Onyx3000 running Discreet Inferno or IFX Piranha.).
Anyhow...
Beta came (somewhat) popular with the release of 1/2" consumer Betamax, based off of the similar but much more expensive 3/4" U-MATIC decks. ED-Beta with 400 lines of resolution came out a few years later. Betacam followed with about 440 lines. Betacam SP with nearly 500 lines followed, providing more than enough quality for broadcast/archival NTSC. With the advent of Betacam SP (and competing Panasonic M-II) the video world began to improve optics as the tape side of things was already as good enough. Though you'll still see a lot of spec sheet padding and other BS when various vendors talk up their "lines of resolution".
An option to order the iMac with the black mouse and keyboard (from the G4 desktop) would be nice as well.... I like the black + crystal look moreso than the white + crystal look.
I'm a sucker for high-tech toys... but I'd pay a premium for an "executive" iMac... one with, say, some brushed aluminum and maybe leather wrist rests below the keyboard. TAM meets 2002 iMac!
How early do I have to come in to get [Sun CEO Scott McNealy] Scott's office?
Belive it or not, McNealy has a supervisor-sized cube (albeit in a corner with some nice windows). If you want to see some nice executive offices, forget the tech industry, the oil folks are where its at. Even a "lowly" VP at ExxonMobil in Houston has over 3,000 square feet of private office/meeting/washroom space... almost as much space as an average size house!
Re:In a world of risk-averse bosses ...
on
Buying Unix?
·
· Score: 2
The X1 / V100 is a fine server for all but the most extreme loads. As someone that knows some server admins that have dealt with the/. effect, I can honestly tell you that bandwidth is a *MUCH* more limiting factor than CPU performance in a heavyily loaded server... unless your site is driven almost entirely from dynamic cgi (perl / php / etc) software. Even then, your software outta have a cache mechanism for handling tens of millions of requests for essentially the exact same thing.
X1 / V100 disk & cpu performance
on
Buying Unix?
·
· Score: 2
It's very easy to upgrade storage in the X1 / V100... uses basic ATA/66 (or is it ATA/100... don't recall) IDE drives. One major difference between the Sun and a cheap 1U PC is CPU performance... even a 1 GHz PIII is significantly faster than the 500 MHz UltraSPARC IIe. Will you notice the difference depends on your usage. Hell, most of the servers I work on are 75 MHz SuperSPARC and 167 MHz UltraSPARCs... network thruput will be your bottleneck by far... unless *everything* your server dishes up is cgi/perl/php based *and* you're a lousy admin.
As far as security, IMHO it's far better to learn the techniques than to just install something that's supposedly more secure by default. Check out http://fixsolaris.sunhelp.org and/or search Google for securing solaris 8.
pretty close to the same thing
on
Buying Unix?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The Netra X1 was the original $995 1U server. The Sun V100 is a tad deeper, has an internal CD-ROM drive, uses the same logic board, is also 1U and costs $995. The only other difference I'm aware of is the version of Solaris 8 that is shipped with the two machines -- X1 has stock Solaris 8, V100 also has a bunch of iPlanet ("SunONE") software included. If you opt for Solaris 9, you get everything anyway...regardless if you go X1 or V100. Educational price on the X1 and V100 is $795.
SGI big iron supports a fancy new flavor of HIPPI that can do 800 MB/sec (that's 6.4 gigabit for the myrinet folks) per link. Up to several links per machine.
So... if you needed such a beast, you could buy several dozen 512 CPU Origin 3800 machines, plus several dozen what-ever-this-new-flavor-of-hippi-is-called cards... boom, fifty gazillion CPUs.
Of course, you'd also a need a fifty acre warehouse and a nuclear power plant...
Until Mac OS X 11.0 / Mac OS XI comes out. Then you'll have to shell out $100 or more for an upgrade. Unless you switch to Darwin... but then you'll lose most of the wizbang monitoring and clustering apps.
The early days of radio sound pretty cool... imagine hearing about your neighbor "pulling music out of the air"! Or how about the first radio singers that "were paid to sing into a can [microphone]"?
I grew up with radio and television... but my friends and I would still string up tincan-and-string communication systems and eventually started moding walkietalkies.
These days the current generation of youngsters can transmit data at nearly half a megabyte per second with inexpensive electronics, a bit of coax, and a modified pringles can!
Every SGI machine out there is licensed for at least some version of IRIX... depends on when the machine was built. The Indigo2 started out with IRIX 4.05 and was sold well into the release of the IRIX 6.5 stream.
The O2 originally shipped in 1996 with the O2-only IRIX 6.3. The Octane originally shipped in 1997 with the Octane/Origin/Onyx2-only IRIX 6.4. Pretty much everything built after May 1998 shipped with the IRIX 6.5 stream. If your machine has at least an R10K/250 CPU, chances are it's licenced for IRIX 6.5.
Depends on where you live and what sort of SGI offices/dealers/VARs are in your area, but most folks have had good luck getting a free/cheap or borrowed CD set of 6.5 and then downloading the latest quarterly update off support.sgi.com.
There's nothing wrong with borrwing the CDs for a version of IRIX your machine can rightfully use. It's not like IRIX will run on non-SGI hardware... nor were MIPS-based SGIs ever sold without the intent of running IRIX.
Lots of $500 Octanes on eBay and $400 Octanes on USENET.
Thankfully many other companies have kept a single price for their OS regardless of system size. IBM AIX is still that way, as is SGI's IRIX. In fact, the only real IRIX cost when buying a new machine from SGI is the (oddly) required media fee of about $200. I've been pretty happy with IRIX, it gets a pretty decent update each quarter, as does the SGI freeware archive (http://freeware.sgi.com) -- I wish sunfreeware.com was.
But then again, if a person buys a brand new 512 CPU SGI Origin 3800 with 1 TB of RAM and and 25 TB of disk, SGI outta toss in a free car. Or house. In the swiss alps.
Not to be a troll, but I think you should consider yourself to be lucky to receive cable television at all in a rural area. I live just two miles outside of a town of about 500, yet I do not have access to public water, waste, garbage, gas, or cable services. My electricity comes from a rural co-op, which thankfully, is quite cheap. Telephone is similar, though my local calling area is worthless... about the only folks I can call local is a town of about 250 that's about 20 miles to the east of me. I can't even call the nearby town nor the nearby city locally.
But that's about the end of my rant. I wouldn't give it up for anything. The trees, the quiet, the river, the lake. "We're from the country and we like it that way". And because of my consulting business I can afford a T1 from Sprintlink.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.njaneer.com/cave_1.jpg
Not really a CAVE, but the three projectors, curved screen, and the two pipe / 2x8 channel late model deskside Onyx2 makes it a "Reality Center". Not too shabby.
Which is smaller and has fewer residents than South Dakota... home of (you guessed it) wheat, barley, durum, sunflowers, and canola. 36 B-52's, some air refueling tankers, 150 Minuteman ICBMs.
My roommate's from there... I quote "North Dakota? Heh... not much going on there. Heck, the largest city in North Dakota is less than half the size of Lubbock, Texas".
Maybe someone should videotape and mirror the meltdown of the webserver!
Ok, I'm not scared enough to wear a tinfoil suit... but I'm somewhat worried about the rapid growth of wireless gear, especially those gizmos that brag about their ability to trasmit thru almost anything. Is there a point where our wireless usage will begin to cause some damage to the human body? That's a lot of energy zipping around every which way.
I know nothing about this field... but I am curious.
... tens of millions of Slashdot geeks! If you squint, you can see the copper T1 glowing red hot!
On a more serious note, I wonder if mod_gzip and a faster server would help out at least a little bit -- make slightly better use of the limited thrput the T1 provides.
I stand corrected.
Episode II - ATOC was indeed recorded in 1080/24p resolution (1920x1080). Too bad most digital theaters and home projectors are currently using 1280x1024 DLP elements. *sigh* Gotta start somewhere, I guess.
Kudos on an excellent post! I have been saying the same thing for quite awhile. There is A LOT of room for marketing bullshit to cloud the video sector over the next few years. "High Definition" and "HD" are nothing more than buzzwords and do not describe the quality! I have already seen MANY digital televisions stations pass themselves off as "HD" when in fact they are broadcasting nothing more than standard-resolution 720x480, albeit non-interlaced. What's worse are stations that "upconvert" standard-resolution video to a high definition format such as 1080i (1920x1080).... they're broadcasting in high definition, but the material they're showing is stretched/zoomed to fill all of the pixels and looks NO BETTER than the original standard-resolution material.
Buyer Beware! I dunno about you, but I'm gonna wait. Standard-definition gear is already cheap enough that I've been making great use of it -- DVDs, progressive scan DVD player, Sony Vega and Panasonic Panaflat TV, DolbyDigital & DTS reciever with good speakers.
D-VHS *is* compressed. The bandwidth is actually quite low by HD standards... you'll get full HD resolution, but quite a few artifacts.... still better overall quality than DVD, though.
Uncompressed video is actually a good thing... especially for pros that want to do editing/compositing or want to convert to another format. You *don't* want to introduce compression artifacts and other compression ickyness early on in production. That's a *bad* thing. Compression is a last resort step often used to ease broadcast and/or delivery to the consumer. I have a major beef against overly-compressed HD... if I buy a TV capable of HD resolution, the last thing I want to see are high definition chunks of compression artifact crap on my screen. Compression on the standard television side of things is already bad enough --- look at a sub-par station on digital cable or DirecTV... compression artifacts galore. Not quite RealPlayer quality, but close.
Superbit is just a fancy name for a standard dvd (usually a second release) that has been mastered with a higher bitrate (= better quality, fewer compression artifacts) than "average" DVDs. It is still plain DVD 720x480 resolution, nothing more.
It will be released then, ta dah!, on BETA tape, Digital BETA too. Why, because that's what the professionals use, and have done for years. (You thought the cable company digitized off 35mm film?)
True, most professionals still use Beta... however, and as you somewhat pointed out, they mostly use Digital Betacam ("DigiBeta") and Betacam SP. Both are uncompressed and are more than enough to store NTSC/PAL as good as they'll get. There is no need for anything greater unless you're ready to go to HD. (A side note... while Betacam SP is as good as uncompressed analog gets, DigiBeta came about as a lower cost replacement to D1, the original full-quality digital tape -- however D1 decks easily cost $400K+, an hour worth of blank tape - $400. DigiBeta is a dream come true for mid-sized video firms... NTSC as good as it'll get, uncompressed, and ready for the editing/compositing workstation. Betacam SP looks just as good, but because it's analog, requires time-consuming digitizing before it can be worked with on a workstation or PC/Mac.)
There are many other forms of Beta... including the new Betacam SX (which is compressed digital and suffers from the same compression artifacts that pop up on other similar compressed "DV" formats -- Digital 8, MiniDV, DVCAM, DVCPro. "DV" formats are great for home and small business use, with a compressed data stream of about 25Mbit/sec... but it's often loathed by pros due to artifacting and compositing work. Basicly, if you want full quality, go uncompressed. RAID storage is there, workstation hardware is there. Leave the comprssed stuff to Win/Mac users with their FinalCutPro-type software. Real users want DigiBeta and an Onyx3000 running Discreet Inferno or IFX Piranha.).
Anyhow...
Beta came (somewhat) popular with the release of 1/2" consumer Betamax, based off of the similar but much more expensive 3/4" U-MATIC decks. ED-Beta with 400 lines of resolution came out a few years later. Betacam followed with about 440 lines. Betacam SP with nearly 500 lines followed, providing more than enough quality for broadcast/archival NTSC. With the advent of Betacam SP (and competing Panasonic M-II) the video world began to improve optics as the tape side of things was already as good enough. Though you'll still see a lot of spec sheet padding and other BS when various vendors talk up their "lines of resolution".
An option to order the iMac with the black mouse and keyboard (from the G4 desktop) would be nice as well.... I like the black + crystal look moreso than the white + crystal look.
I'm a sucker for high-tech toys... but I'd pay a premium for an "executive" iMac... one with, say, some brushed aluminum and maybe leather wrist rests below the keyboard. TAM meets 2002 iMac!
How early do I have to come in to get [Sun CEO Scott McNealy] Scott's office?
Belive it or not, McNealy has a supervisor-sized cube (albeit in a corner with some nice windows). If you want to see some nice executive offices, forget the tech industry, the oil folks are where its at. Even a "lowly" VP at ExxonMobil in Houston has over 3,000 square feet of private office/meeting/washroom space... almost as much space as an average size house!
The X1 / V100 is a fine server for all but the most extreme loads. As someone that knows some server admins that have dealt with the /. effect, I can honestly tell you that bandwidth is a *MUCH* more limiting factor than CPU performance in a heavyily loaded server... unless your site is driven almost entirely from dynamic cgi (perl / php / etc) software. Even then, your software outta have a cache mechanism for handling tens of millions of requests for essentially the exact same thing.
It's very easy to upgrade storage in the X1 / V100... uses basic ATA/66 (or is it ATA/100... don't recall) IDE drives. One major difference between the Sun and a cheap 1U PC is CPU performance... even a 1 GHz PIII is significantly faster than the 500 MHz UltraSPARC IIe. Will you notice the difference depends on your usage. Hell, most of the servers I work on are 75 MHz SuperSPARC and 167 MHz UltraSPARCs... network thruput will be your bottleneck by far... unless *everything* your server dishes up is cgi/perl/php based *and* you're a lousy admin.
As far as security, IMHO it's far better to learn the techniques than to just install something that's supposedly more secure by default. Check out http://fixsolaris.sunhelp.org and/or search Google for securing solaris 8.
The Netra X1 was the original $995 1U server. The Sun V100 is a tad deeper, has an internal CD-ROM drive, uses the same logic board, is also 1U and costs $995. The only other difference I'm aware of is the version of Solaris 8 that is shipped with the two machines -- X1 has stock Solaris 8, V100 also has a bunch of iPlanet ("SunONE") software included. If you opt for Solaris 9, you get everything anyway...regardless if you go X1 or V100. Educational price on the X1 and V100 is $795.
I can imagine.
SGI big iron supports a fancy new flavor of HIPPI that can do 800 MB/sec (that's 6.4 gigabit for the myrinet folks) per link. Up to several links per machine.
So... if you needed such a beast, you could buy several dozen 512 CPU Origin 3800 machines, plus several dozen what-ever-this-new-flavor-of-hippi-is-called cards... boom, fifty gazillion CPUs.
Of course, you'd also a need a fifty acre warehouse and a nuclear power plant...
Until Mac OS X 11.0 / Mac OS XI comes out. Then you'll have to shell out $100 or more for an upgrade. Unless you switch to Darwin... but then you'll lose most of the wizbang monitoring and clustering apps.
The early days of radio sound pretty cool... imagine hearing about your neighbor "pulling music out of the air"! Or how about the first radio singers that "were paid to sing into a can [microphone]"?
I grew up with radio and television... but my friends and I would still string up tincan-and-string communication systems and eventually started moding walkietalkies.
These days the current generation of youngsters can transmit data at nearly half a megabyte per second with inexpensive electronics, a bit of coax, and a modified pringles can!
Kinda funny how it all goes back to a can...
IRIX is too expensive for me to run on my SGI
Every SGI machine out there is licensed for at least some version of IRIX... depends on when the machine was built. The Indigo2 started out with IRIX 4.05 and was sold well into the release of the IRIX 6.5 stream.
The O2 originally shipped in 1996 with the O2-only IRIX 6.3. The Octane originally shipped in 1997 with the Octane/Origin/Onyx2-only IRIX 6.4. Pretty much everything built after May 1998 shipped with the IRIX 6.5 stream. If your machine has at least an R10K/250 CPU, chances are it's licenced for IRIX 6.5.
Depends on where you live and what sort of SGI offices/dealers/VARs are in your area, but most folks have had good luck getting a free/cheap or borrowed CD set of 6.5 and then downloading the latest quarterly update off support.sgi.com.
There's nothing wrong with borrwing the CDs for a version of IRIX your machine can rightfully use. It's not like IRIX will run on non-SGI hardware... nor were MIPS-based SGIs ever sold without the intent of running IRIX.
Lots of $500 Octanes on eBay and $400 Octanes on USENET.
Thankfully many other companies have kept a single price for their OS regardless of system size. IBM AIX is still that way, as is SGI's IRIX. In fact, the only real IRIX cost when buying a new machine from SGI is the (oddly) required media fee of about $200. I've been pretty happy with IRIX, it gets a pretty decent update each quarter, as does the SGI freeware archive (http://freeware.sgi.com) -- I wish sunfreeware.com was.
But then again, if a person buys a brand new 512 CPU SGI Origin 3800 with 1 TB of RAM and and 25 TB of disk, SGI outta toss in a free car. Or house. In the swiss alps.
Not to be a troll, but I think you should consider yourself to be lucky to receive cable television at all in a rural area. I live just two miles outside of a town of about 500, yet I do not have access to public water, waste, garbage, gas, or cable services. My electricity comes from a rural co-op, which thankfully, is quite cheap. Telephone is similar, though my local calling area is worthless... about the only folks I can call local is a town of about 250 that's about 20 miles to the east of me. I can't even call the nearby town nor the nearby city locally.
But that's about the end of my rant. I wouldn't give it up for anything. The trees, the quiet, the river, the lake. "We're from the country and we like it that way". And because of my consulting business I can afford a T1 from Sprintlink.
30,000,000 Kazaa hosts
Jippity! That's a lotta users... more than 25 times the entire population of the state I live in!
after 3 days on and off trying to control iTunes and Photoshop through apache...
Egads!