I had the same problem when I was building a HTPC a year ago. At the time I ended up getting a cheap $20 desktop case and a long HDMI so that I could hide the desktop. When I built my second HTPC, I got the Zotac ZBOX (about $200 right now on newegg). I run the xbmc-live distro from a 4GB USB flash drive in the computer, and it runs great (1080p streaming from a network drive or youtube works flawlessly thanks to the recent v10 of xbmc). As for control, you can either use an iphone/droid, an IR receiver (iguanaIR is what I use), or a keyboard/mouse.
I've tested them with Comcast and they accurately measure the advertised bandwidth of my connection(during low usage hours).
Plus, flash is a lesser evil than java, which all the other online bandwidth tests require. All you need to really measure bandwidth is ssh and server access.
Use this to test your connection speed, and make speakeasy your ISP if you want to get the bandwidth that you pay for. It may cost you a bit more, but their technical support, speed, and service policies are more than worth it.
Back in 2000 or 2001 slashdot had a story about a company called C3D (or CDDD which was their stock ticker, website was http://www.c-3d.net/). This company promised 1TB and higher density discs with insane transfer speeds because it was storage...in 3D. They showed a few discs (CD sized) and a reader which were supposedly a prototype of some sort at trade shows. All of this ran their stock up quite a bit. They were promised to replace DVD's in a few years, and eventually hard drives. There was also this credit card device (10gigs) which was rewritable (?), which was to replace traditional hard drives in notebooks.
Deadline after deadline passed, the stock slowly declined ($60 a share was the norm in 2000) due to the market conditions in 2001, eventually causing it to be delisted from the NASDAQ (has a value of $0.01 a share). Rumor has it that the company was founded/owned/something by a former Israeli/Soviet general (the company wasn't located in the US), and that there never was a product (all demos were faked).
How do I know this? I was the fool who bought the stock when it was $20 a share, watched it rise up to $66, and fall to nothing. I believed before and it cost me a decent amount of money.
Holographic media has been a scam before and it'll be one until there is a box with a price tag in a store. Even then, I would be cautious about buying it.
They won't manufacture these things at such a level that they become a cube anytime soon. Each layer is very small (think the micrometer (1/1000 of a millimeter) scale or smaller), and based on the article they're talking about using 3 layers.
The majority of the height of a typical chip is the external packaging, so adding 3 or even 50 layers is unlikely to result in a noticable increase in width, so heat sink design remains unchanged.
Sure the heat would increase if you don't change the design, but no one would do this. See layers for more info.
The benefits to this are huge. Lets say can put down 4 layers or transistors instead of 1. If you were making a processor, you could use 3 of the layers for L2 cache (or L1 cache even), and you could potentially have 9MB of cache (1mb for half layer). Already about half of the die space on modern processors is used for L2 cache, so this would result in a huge performance increase with no redesign.
But realistically no one would do this with current technology as the cost of the processor would increase by a factor of 4 or more.
Another more useful example is taking the 100 billion or so transistors on a processor, and using 1/4th the area by splitting them up in 4 layers. This results in a smaller chip which means a smaller end device.
Combine this with the current pace of miniturization, and you might just surpass Moore's law.
Some Information on Layers: A typical processor or chip is made with a transistor layer, followed by layers of wires (9+ on some intel chips). Being able to stack layers of transistors allows for a huge increase in transistor density, and more efficient designs (less wire = less resistence = less heat). If there is less heat, you can clock the processor higher
Disclaimer: Some of this information may be incorrect or outdated as I've only taken 1 VLSI course, and designed only 1 processor.
It's more like a huge inefficient traffic causing money hole.
While the buses may be cheap to ride, they are twice as slow as a car. Taking an express bus from where I live to the center of town (roughly 1-1.5 miles road distance) takes 30 minutes if there is no traffic (5AM or 9PM). Plus buses have routes that go through side streets (supposedly 2 lane roads that are big enough for one way traffic only), bringing traffic to a complete stop every 2 blocks.
San Francisco stopped caring about trains a long time ago. It's current rail system is BART, which has horrible coverage area.
speakeasy, 9.5. Doubled my speed 2 years ago, there's no waiting time when you call tech support, 8 free email accounts, webspace/ssh access on one of their servers. The also contact their customers immediately if they notice a pc on their network infected with spyware (of the port scanning and/or pinging variety), and provide step by step instructions to get rid of it.
I listed a range of prices you could expect to get, and based on certain jobs, charging $100 an hour is less than geek squad. They charge $160 to install a hard drive, which even with formatting shouldn't take more than an hour (I assume less than 200gigs).
On another note, by travel costs, I meant only those associated with gas, not your own time.
Instead of joining geek squad or some other tech support firm, do it yourself. Create a company, do your own advertising, and do all the tech support work yourself. You could have a base fee of billable hours ($50-100 an hour), plus travel expenses (dependent on distance & appointment time), and you'd still be lower than the cost of a someone from best buys.
Plus you keep all the profits, with the only loss being the wear on your car (which you could probably write off as a business expense).
The best part is you gain contacts and a reputation. Chances are some of these people own their own companies, and might hire you at a higher salary to do some work for them.
I completely disagree with you on several points. First off, I am a person who typically puts 4 hard drives in a case, so my experience is mainly with the low end consumer server market (ie cheap stuff). Also, my sampling of new hard drives has primarily been over the past 6 years.
WD: produce by far the most heat of all drives I've used, and have an extremely high failure rate unless you do something to change this (HD coolers, dedicated intake fans, water, etc.). I've had roughly 15 WD hard drives and while I admit that most of them weren't high end, 12 of them failed (this makes me a bit biased against WD drives). Their RMA process is very quick/easy, and their customer support is very nice though, so I guess they make up for their poor quality of drives.
Seagate - I'm somewhat new to seagate, but the two drives I've bough still work(3 years later). They produce a reasonable amount of heat/virbrations, but it's nothing compared to WD drives. Performance is a bit lower since most of the low end drives have half the cache that they should. High CPU usage is not a fault of the drive, but more likely the drive controller or the OS drivers. Seagate drives are roughly equal to the noise level produced by similar drives at 7200RPM. I agree with your statement about age though (350meg Seagate drive that still works).
IBM - I've only owned 9 IBM drives, and most of them are quite old (>15 years). Of the newer ones that I've owned, they produce less heat than a WD drive of equivalent capacity(80gigs).
Maxtor - these drives are by far the worst of all at 120gigs and 160gigs (200 and up are generally good). I've had 2 120gig drives that shake violently and are painful to touch when running (due to heat).
Now for some general things:
1. Data loss over time is a problem with all hard drives that is NOT typically a fault of the drive itself. Data loss can occur if the drive's electronics are exposed to sufficient heat such that they malfunction and corrupt data that they write. I've had zero data loss (I do automated CRC checks of my frequently accessed data to monitor this). Prior to adding cooling to my hard drives, I had rampant data loss on WD/Maxtor/IBM drives, and many failures.
2. Speed of a hard drive is difficult to measure directly. There is a maximum drive speed, RPM, a bus speed/size, relative fragmentation levels on the drive, seek times, etc. About the only measurement you can trust are seek times, since they tell you how the drive will respond under inideal conditions (a seek after each block of data and a cache miss). Regardless of how the drive feels, this is the only thing you can trust, and it is a good indicator for the quality of the drive (low seek time + low heat + low noise = good)
3. All hard drives unless they have SMART and you use an OS or third party app that checks this, WILL likely die without warning. Typically if you hear a hard drive dying, it's already too late (a stratching noise, or read/write head hitting stuff). Furthermore, even if your drive has SMART, your controller card might not support it, so there's still no warning even with a good controller card.
The problem with maxtor/wd/ibm drives is that they require additional cooling to last a long time. If you just put them in a case with little or no ventilation, they will die (while slowly corrupting your data too). Even if you don't think the drive will overheat, a simple $10 investment that you can attach to any drive is easily worth the cost if it saves your data.
I haven't purchased one of their drives in the past few years but their 2gig drive that I got about 8 years ago still works fine (it's installed in an old server that runs 24/7).
"Actually for many older console systems you do get perfect sound and picture."
Emulating the sound of older game consoles can be a problem. It's the newer ones (SNES and up) where it get easier. Have you actually playing an emulated NES or Genesis game with the sound on? It sounds terrible (especially the genesis, NES might have improved lately) and far from the audio on the real console.
"Redundant hot-swappable power supplies and cooling modules enable the system to keep running"
Each drive is inside an enclosure with some form of dedicated cooling but this article is talking about putting a bunch of hard drives into small spaces with no dedicated cooling other than the normal case fans.
At 5V it uses 780mA per drive (http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_imag e/6/0,1311,sz=1&i=67140,00.jpg).
780mA * 7 = 5.46A
Apple uses a 450W - 650W power supply in their G5's (http://www.welovemacs.com/g5serviceparts.html), and they should be able to support this (650W give something like 40A on the 5V line).
Although I don't know what the power requirements of the other components are, or how well the power supply handles the load.
It's insane putting that many hard drives in that small of a space. Many HD's that close together is just asking for a heat related failure, plus the additional hard drives will obstruct the hot air outflow at the back of the G5, and they'll generate a fair amount of additional heat. Add in the additional cables and this will case a drastic increase the case temperature leading to more noise and potentially component failure.
You can't just cram hard drives into a case as long as there's an open drive bay. I've put 3 hard drives in adjacent drive bays with one 80mm fans for cooling(I now use 2 30mm fans per drive)., and all of the drives overheated causing drive failure and data corruption.
Combining these two ideas will likely cause several of the drives to die within 6 months or less due to the extreme heat.
I have a 17" powerbook and it took a few restarts to get stable. It experianced problems such as loss of trackpad control, and networking (wired and wireless). Also there were issues with the login window, although that issue was likely caused by the BootCache fix.
Ever since Mars was associated with the name "Red Planet", and given the previous mars rover's images, the general public has come to believe that Mars is predominantly red in color. If they were to suddenly see blue skies (despite lack of ocean) and slightly more favorable conditions, they would think the images were fakes.
Sounds like a NASA coverup or an admission of the author's insanity.
Slashdot Mirror
I had the same problem when I was building a HTPC a year ago. At the time I ended up getting a cheap $20 desktop case and a long HDMI so that I could hide the desktop. When I built my second HTPC, I got the Zotac ZBOX (about $200 right now on newegg). I run the xbmc-live distro from a 4GB USB flash drive in the computer, and it runs great (1080p streaming from a network drive or youtube works flawlessly thanks to the recent v10 of xbmc). As for control, you can either use an iphone/droid, an IR receiver (iguanaIR is what I use), or a keyboard/mouse.
Actually there is magnetic equivalent: http://www.ramtron.com/products/nonvolatile-memory/serial.aspx
F-RAM comes in an SOIC, so you'd have to solder some wires to the "Flash Destroyer" board.
I've tested them with Comcast and they accurately measure the advertised bandwidth of my connection(during low usage hours).
Plus, flash is a lesser evil than java, which all the other online bandwidth tests require. All you need to really measure bandwidth is ssh and server access.
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
Use this to test your connection speed, and make speakeasy your ISP if you want to get the bandwidth that you pay for. It may cost you a bit more, but their technical support, speed, and service policies are more than worth it.
More promises, no product move along.
Back in 2000 or 2001 slashdot had a story about a company called C3D (or CDDD which was their stock ticker, website was http://www.c-3d.net/). This company promised 1TB and higher density discs with insane transfer speeds because it was storage...in 3D. They showed a few discs (CD sized) and a reader which were supposedly a prototype of some sort at trade shows. All of this ran their stock up quite a bit. They were promised to replace DVD's in a few years, and eventually hard drives. There was also this credit card device (10gigs) which was rewritable (?), which was to replace traditional hard drives in notebooks.
Deadline after deadline passed, the stock slowly declined ($60 a share was the norm in 2000) due to the market conditions in 2001, eventually causing it to be delisted from the NASDAQ (has a value of $0.01 a share). Rumor has it that the company was founded/owned/something by a former Israeli/Soviet general (the company wasn't located in the US), and that there never was a product (all demos were faked).
How do I know this? I was the fool who bought the stock when it was $20 a share, watched it rise up to $66, and fall to nothing. I believed before and it cost me a decent amount of money.
Holographic media has been a scam before and it'll be one until there is a box with a price tag in a store. Even then, I would be cautious about buying it.
Clearly movies predict the future http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0312843/
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=serenity.h tm
Looks more like $38 million to me, which is roughly the production cost, and most definitely not a failure.
It is disappointing that they didn't reach $80 million, as then there'd be 2 more movies made, but this isn't grounds to give up on the series.
Get 1 thermally insulating box (with sub-divisions), 2 fans, a power supply (AC-DC), and some of these:
c tDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10001&catalogId=10001&p roductId=172056
http://jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Produ
and you're set. You use one fan to cool the hot side, and the other to blow air over the cold side to distribute the cold air.
If you find the right geometry for the box it might just be efficient.
MIRROR:
1 ef0e8bf4d92/index.html
http://mirrordot.org/stories/46bab61809b5dd911662
They won't manufacture these things at such a level that they become a cube anytime soon. Each layer is very small (think the micrometer (1/1000 of a millimeter) scale or smaller), and based on the article they're talking about using 3 layers.
The majority of the height of a typical chip is the external packaging, so adding 3 or even 50 layers is unlikely to result in a noticable increase in width, so heat sink design remains unchanged.
Sure the heat would increase if you don't change the design, but no one would do this. See layers for more info.
The benefits to this are huge. Lets say can put down 4 layers or transistors instead of 1. If you were making a processor, you could use 3 of the layers for L2 cache (or L1 cache even), and you could potentially have 9MB of cache (1mb for half layer). Already about half of the die space on modern processors is used for L2 cache, so this would result in a huge performance increase with no redesign.
But realistically no one would do this with current technology as the cost of the processor would increase by a factor of 4 or more.
Another more useful example is taking the 100 billion or so transistors on a processor, and using 1/4th the area by splitting them up in 4 layers. This results in a smaller chip which means a smaller end device.
Combine this with the current pace of miniturization, and you might just surpass Moore's law.
Some Information on Layers: A typical processor or chip is made with a transistor layer, followed by layers of wires (9+ on some intel chips). Being able to stack layers of transistors allows for a huge increase in transistor density, and more efficient designs (less wire = less resistence = less heat). If there is less heat, you can clock the processor higher
Disclaimer: Some of this information may be incorrect or outdated as I've only taken 1 VLSI course, and designed only 1 processor.
It's more like a huge inefficient traffic causing money hole.
While the buses may be cheap to ride, they are twice as slow as a car. Taking an express bus from where I live to the center of town (roughly 1-1.5 miles road distance) takes 30 minutes if there is no traffic (5AM or 9PM). Plus buses have routes that go through side streets (supposedly 2 lane roads that are big enough for one way traffic only), bringing traffic to a complete stop every 2 blocks.
San Francisco stopped caring about trains a long time ago. It's current rail system is BART, which has horrible coverage area.
speakeasy, 9.5. Doubled my speed 2 years ago, there's no waiting time when you call tech support, 8 free email accounts, webspace/ssh access on one of their servers. The also contact their customers immediately if they notice a pc on their network infected with spyware (of the port scanning and/or pinging variety), and provide step by step instructions to get rid of it.
If you look at the list of things geek squad does (http://www.geeksquad.com/_assets/pdf/GS_Home_Pric es.pdf), you'll see that all of those jobs require less than 3 hours (with the exception of data transfer in some cases).
I listed a range of prices you could expect to get, and based on certain jobs, charging $100 an hour is less than geek squad. They charge $160 to install a hard drive, which even with formatting shouldn't take more than an hour (I assume less than 200gigs).
On another note, by travel costs, I meant only those associated with gas, not your own time.
Instead of joining geek squad or some other tech support firm, do it yourself. Create a company, do your own advertising, and do all the tech support work yourself. You could have a base fee of billable hours ($50-100 an hour), plus travel expenses (dependent on distance & appointment time), and you'd still be lower than the cost of a someone from best buys.
Plus you keep all the profits, with the only loss being the wear on your car (which you could probably write off as a business expense).
The best part is you gain contacts and a reputation. Chances are some of these people own their own companies, and might hire you at a higher salary to do some work for them.
I completely disagree with you on several points. First off, I am a person who typically puts 4 hard drives in a case, so my experience is mainly with the low end consumer server market (ie cheap stuff). Also, my sampling of new hard drives has primarily been over the past 6 years.
WD: produce by far the most heat of all drives I've used, and have an extremely high failure rate unless you do something to change this (HD coolers, dedicated intake fans, water, etc.). I've had roughly 15 WD hard drives and while I admit that most of them weren't high end, 12 of them failed (this makes me a bit biased against WD drives). Their RMA process is very quick/easy, and their customer support is very nice though, so I guess they make up for their poor quality of drives.
Seagate - I'm somewhat new to seagate, but the two drives I've bough still work(3 years later). They produce a reasonable amount of heat/virbrations, but it's nothing compared to WD drives. Performance is a bit lower since most of the low end drives have half the cache that they should. High CPU usage is not a fault of the drive, but more likely the drive controller or the OS drivers. Seagate drives are roughly equal to the noise level produced by similar drives at 7200RPM. I agree with your statement about age though (350meg Seagate drive that still works).
IBM - I've only owned 9 IBM drives, and most of them are quite old (>15 years). Of the newer ones that I've owned, they produce less heat than a WD drive of equivalent capacity(80gigs).
Maxtor - these drives are by far the worst of all at 120gigs and 160gigs (200 and up are generally good). I've had 2 120gig drives that shake violently and are painful to touch when running (due to heat).
Now for some general things:
1. Data loss over time is a problem with all hard drives that is NOT typically a fault of the drive itself. Data loss can occur if the drive's electronics are exposed to sufficient heat such that they malfunction and corrupt data that they write. I've had zero data loss (I do automated CRC checks of my frequently accessed data to monitor this). Prior to adding cooling to my hard drives, I had rampant data loss on WD/Maxtor/IBM drives, and many failures.
2. Speed of a hard drive is difficult to measure directly. There is a maximum drive speed, RPM, a bus speed/size, relative fragmentation levels on the drive, seek times, etc. About the only measurement you can trust are seek times, since they tell you how the drive will respond under inideal conditions (a seek after each block of data and a cache miss). Regardless of how the drive feels, this is the only thing you can trust, and it is a good indicator for the quality of the drive (low seek time + low heat + low noise = good)
3. All hard drives unless they have SMART and you use an OS or third party app that checks this, WILL likely die without warning. Typically if you hear a hard drive dying, it's already too late (a stratching noise, or read/write head hitting stuff). Furthermore, even if your drive has SMART, your controller card might not support it, so there's still no warning even with a good controller card.
The problem with maxtor/wd/ibm drives is that they require additional cooling to last a long time. If you just put them in a case with little or no ventilation, they will die (while slowly corrupting your data too). Even if you don't think the drive will overheat, a simple $10 investment that you can attach to any drive is easily worth the cost if it saves your data.
I haven't purchased one of their drives in the past few years but their 2gig drive that I got about 8 years ago still works fine (it's installed in an old server that runs 24/7).
"Actually for many older console systems you do get perfect sound and picture."
Emulating the sound of older game consoles can be a problem. It's the newer ones (SNES and up) where it get easier. Have you actually playing an emulated NES or Genesis game with the sound on? It sounds terrible (especially the genesis, NES might have improved lately) and far from the audio on the real console.
"Redundant hot-swappable power supplies and cooling modules enable the system to keep running"
Each drive is inside an enclosure with some form of dedicated cooling but this article is talking about putting a bunch of hard drives into small spaces with no dedicated cooling other than the normal case fans.
At 5V it uses 780mA per drive (http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_imag e/6/0,1311,sz=1&i=67140,00.jpg).
780mA * 7 = 5.46A
Apple uses a 450W - 650W power supply in their G5's (http://www.welovemacs.com/g5serviceparts.html), and they should be able to support this (650W give something like 40A on the 5V line).
Although I don't know what the power requirements of the other components are, or how well the power supply handles the load.
It's insane putting that many hard drives in that small of a space. Many HD's that close together is just asking for a heat related failure, plus the additional hard drives will obstruct the hot air outflow at the back of the G5, and they'll generate a fair amount of additional heat. Add in the additional cables and this will case a drastic increase the case temperature leading to more noise and potentially component failure.
You can't just cram hard drives into a case as long as there's an open drive bay. I've put 3 hard drives in adjacent drive bays with one 80mm fans for cooling(I now use 2 30mm fans per drive)., and all of the drives overheated causing drive failure and data corruption.
Combining these two ideas will likely cause several of the drives to die within 6 months or less due to the extreme heat.
Here's a mirror of what's on nintendo's official page:
http://centaur.acm.jhu.edu/~polymorph/zelda/
I have a 17" powerbook and it took a few restarts to get stable. It experianced problems such as loss of trackpad control, and networking (wired and wireless). Also there were issues with the login window, although that issue was likely caused by the BootCache fix.
Ever since Mars was associated with the name "Red Planet", and given the previous mars rover's images, the general public has come to believe that Mars is predominantly red in color. If they were to suddenly see blue skies (despite lack of ocean) and slightly more favorable conditions, they would think the images were fakes.
Sounds like a NASA coverup or an admission of the author's insanity.
http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/113
Quite an interesting read.
can be found here: http://www.voynichinfo.com/