yeah, I would recommend you stay away from highly integrated systems... things like integrated sound/video/lan will cause more driver headaches than the extra cost of getting cards w/ Creative/nVidia/3Com
I'm mostly a windows 2000 guy so this may be wrong, but does Linux have a way to set an Interface Metric?
Basically that means you assign each eth adapter a number (metric). If more than one is set up with a route to your destination, it tries them in order of lowest metric to highest metric. Simply set up the failover adapter with a metric one higher than the standard one and you're set.
wow... the exact same thing happened to me. Except I was installing a GeForce3... (asus v8200)
It went in OK, but would not switch to VR mode (it has goggles). I tweaked the drivers and rebooted, it wouldnt boot. Safe mode and VGA mode died soon after, and then it wouldnt boot from Win2k CD. So I figure bad card, replace it. When I open the case I see one of the caps near the DIMM slots was on an angle, I figured I kicked it plugging something in. But when I pull the card (w/ everything unplugged, myself grounded), I hear a short hiss. Examination with a flashlight shows 3 caps near the CPU have popped (off base at angle with burnt stuff below, curved top), and the one I saw earlier has completely blown off its base and theres burnt black rubber stuff around it and the one next to it.
I was looking for an excuse to get a KG7, and this works, although it wasn't what I had in mind
If anyone cares, the blown ones are:
By CPU, 1500uF, rated at 6.3v, 105C: 3 blew, cant see markings. From the top, 2nd, 3rd and 6th in the row next to the SlotA
And by DIMMs, a 2200uF 6.3V 105C, right next to DIMM1, top in a group of two.
Dude all you need is some WiFi (802.11B) gear. Get one card for each computer and run in ad-hoc (no base station) mode.
First get two WiFi PC cards. Yes I know you dont have laptops. Add two PCI-PC card adapters and you're set. Total cost $140 per computer, and you get 11MBPS. Also includes encryption if you feel paranoid.
This is industry standard gear, so if you ever decide to upgrade to a 'full' wireless lan you can get a base station and add as many computers as you want.
Also check out this thing, Its WinCE with a generic clamshell, but has two fold points instead of one. This means you can put on a small plastic keyboard cover, flip the display all the way around and use it like a tablet. Also, theres a small CMOS camera in the middle part so you can take pics.
I think a good market for this would be the LAN party... you only have to velcro it to a screen and (aside from cables) you're all set. However without at least a GeForce2, or maybe a Kyro2, its worthless for 3d games.
Now what I'd really like to see is one of these based around something like a nForce chipset. That should allow greater performance (esp. graphics!) while keeping it small.
I wonder if it has one of those Kensington security lock slots...
if a processing-capacity-challenged (most of them, depending on where you are) student/employee/other user sees some computers with login screens and other computers with no screens, he/she/it will assume the computers with no screens are broken, and ignore them.
I disagree with Metallica's decsion to try to stop their trading on napster. I VERY disagree with their trying to get people kicked off.
However, I believe that they still deserve money, because they did write the music. If you feel differently, then dont send them money. Or buy the CD... then they get less.
I have a problem with musicians getting rich. While getting rich often makes them forget who made them rich (its the fans! your fans!), they deserve every dollar.
I DO have a very big problem with them getting the dribblings of this money that happen to fall off the label's table.
Say you buy a CD at Sam Goody for $16. Out of that $16 of your hard earned money, $6 of it goes to Sam Goody. $9.50 goes to the label. And the artist gets MAYBE $0.50 (depending on contract), which gets further split between recording costs, lawyers, agents (usually there to beg the labels to toss a bone) and other expenses.
Bottom line, if your artist is very lucky, he gets $0.10 (ten cents) out of your $16.
Oh wait, they dont get to see ANY money until the label has recouped its investment. So if it cost $1000 to get a glass master, cd label/case/cover designed and in production, the artist doesnt start seeing dimes until after 10,000 CDs are sold.
I think thats wrong. That artist is trying to make his living from that CD and he maybe gets to keep ten cents.
One way around this:
Download your favorite artist's CD off napster/opennap/gnutella/whatever. Burn it to a CD. Then put $16 in an envelope, and send it directly to the artist. This way you spend $16.50 for the CD and the RIAA doesnt get a cent.
I absolutely agree, and for $lots, you can have your very own politician to fight for you. For $lots, you can customize your personal politician, complete with morals (that happen to strongly believe in your causes), a sense of duty (to you), and the cleverness to make everyone else believe this is not the case and get elected.
So call now, our stock of wannabe poiticians is overflowing! We've seen the MP3 battle coming for years and have planted lots of personalized politicians ready for you to own!
America(TM): land of the free (reign of large companies), home of the puddles where free use used to be.
yeah CD is good for compatibility, but when the unit has to fit in your pocket CDs arent it. Even 8cm CDRs are kind of big. I like CF because it has a great balance between physical size, capacity, and compatibility. (small, big and standard)
this only affects smartmedia. SM cards have no controller, the controller is in the device. Thus they can be prone to this defect, although it breaks the SM spec. Another problem with having the controller in the device is that when newer larger cards come out, the old controllers wont work with them.
CF cards on the other hand have a ATA chip built in them. They cannot be fuxored with in the same way as SM cards. Also they do not have upgradability or future-proofing issues. Since it started, CF has undergone only one change... CF type 2. This basically means a thicker card and a power connector on the side like a PC card. CF2 slots are 100% backward compatible.
I think smartmedia is one of the worse choices. Yes it is small, or more notably thin, but that impedes capacity. A quick search of buy.com will show a 64mb card (thats the biggest I saw) for around $80.
I like CompactFlash for a number of reasons. Yes the card is bigger, its about the size of 3-4 SM cards stacked. So thicker is more of what it is. Prices are around the same, a 64mb card starts at ~$75. However, it gets bigger. for $144 you can get 128mb. $230 gets you 192MB. $315 for 256MB. $473 gets 384MB. $630 for 512MB.
And then you get Microdrives.
If you're willing to have the card eat power like popcorn, you can get 1GB of Microdrive for $475. Yes, its a teeny hard drive inside a CF card.
Another advantage of CF is that theres a ATA controller on the card. SM has the controller in the device, so although the cards can be cheaper, some older devices wont work with newer larger cards. Another advantage of having a ATA controller is that the card cannot be easily reformatted like SM cards, so they will always work in all devices, no formats required. I could pop a CF card out of my digicam and pop it into a MP3 player. Then put it in my Jornada organizer and check out the pics, as well as copy some new MP3s I just downloaded. With SM, I would either have to get two cards (one for MP3 format, one for digicam format) or use only one at a time.
Also because of the ATA chip, CF cards can easily be plugged into PCMCIA slots. All thats needed is a $5 adapter to match up the right wires.
And one more.
Because CF is so close to PC Card, the two can be used for similar functions. For example, most Pocket PCs have CF slots. But as well as memory, you can plug in a CF card modem. Or a CF barcode scanner. Or a CF cell phone adapter. The CF slot in a PDA can be used for expansion cards as well as memory. Many such devices exist.
SmartMedia cards do LOOK cooler. The curved line across the contact surface has definate geek appeal. But any true geek would go for functionality over style. Although the CF has a recessed female connector (like a PC card), it also has a metal case. Which means that they are much more durable. And not having exposed pins means they're much less vulnerable to static.
To sum this all up,
SmartMedia isnt that smart. CompactFlash is superior in almost every way, including reliability, standardization, capacity, and versatility.
Friends dont let friends buy SmartMedia or use AOL.
They are evil. So is the MPAA. All they care about is the dollar. They need to understand that less is more... IE stop going after everyone legally, instead release for low cost full quality videos/MP3s WITHOUT SECURITY online and piracy will be gone.
My problem is that many sites post RDFs and then ignore them. End result being you get a nice website with todays news and a nice RDF with news that became outdated last year.
I just noticed this as I was reading their site, and noticed they dropped the word Exchange and scoured it off the right side of the logo .
I havent tried the new scour yet, but on their website there was an option to add your fileserver to SCOUR. I'm gonna assume that the way this new thing will work is it will keep a database of fileservers (carefully screening out the ones with non-MPAA-approved content) and instead of scouring the Exchange (good), you scour the List (not as good)
As I said in an earlier post, the things that attracted and kept users at Scour was (not in order) MP3s (illegal ones), movies (cam, dvd rip, etc), apps (cracked) and porn.
Now lets polish Scour nice and shiny for the big empty suits.
Dump the MP3s (those piss off the RIAA),
dump the movies (they piss off the MPAA),
dump the apps (apps piss off the BSA),
and why not dump the porn too (pisses off some politicians)
What's left? Unless they dont dump the porn, IMHO they will have trouble generating content that will keep users loyal. Peer2Peer is like Whack-A-Mole: For every one you kill two more pop up. And every time one of the popups gains the 'critical mass' of users where ~90% of searches come up with something the user cares about, you get one more juicy worm waiting for a user to bite it and ditch his current service.
They say meals look more tasty when you havent eaten in a while.
If a user is starting to have dry searches (be it for MP3s, porn, movies, apps or whatever is deemed inappropriate and fit for filtering out) that worm is looking more and more juicy and the current hook is rusting off. Combine that with lots of worms, and the attitude stops being 'that one looks better, I think I might switch' and starts being 'Damn this sucks! This isnt working and theres fifty other ones that are. Im gonna ditch the one im on and find a new one.'
Having that happen to users is the worst enemy of any web presence. Especially file searching.
I should have been more clear. I in no way mean that the file format is illegal, it isnt.
However, when I say MP3s or Movies, I refer to the data contained in the files.
Be realistic, a large part if not most of the songs swapped on the Net are illegal. (IE, not authorized by copyright holder)
When I say movies, I mean feature film movies like CAM films and DVD rips. Last time I checked, this is illegal. There are lots of legal movies on the net, just not many legal feature films.
By Apps I mean applications that have been cracked so that you can get the functionality of the full product without paying for it.
I am not going to preach, but give the 'lame ass garage band crap' a listen. Most of the bands today (aside from pop bands IE eminem, backstreet boys, etc) started in garages.
I have not tried the new scour, but if its what you say it is (no mp3, no movie, no porn) then they've just dumped 90% of the people that use it.
First, one interesting tidbit. On the scour page there was a 'add your server to SCOUR' thing which would accept SMB servers. Interesting.
IMHO trying to make scour legal is going to be hard/impossible. Unless someone knows scour better than me, its good points were: (no particular order)
1. MP3s
2. Movies
3. Porn
4. Apps
To be more general, the good thing of Scour was that you could find just about anything.
MP3s are mostly illegal, movies are illegal, apps are illegal and nobody from the 'upstanding' corporate world really wants to deal with porn. The new company claims to remake scour into a legal service. I would like to know what that means. Because they're not being specific. My guess is that one or more of the above list will have to go or be replaced with PPPs (pathetic plastic placeholder).
1. ALL mp3s becomes studio sponsored MP3s (few)
2. Movies becomes Movie Previews (trailers)
3. Porn just might stay, not likely
4. Apps becomes Shareware Apps (not cracked)
In other words, Scour, the insanely great service that would 'scour' thousands of nameless users to get the file *you* want, has become 'rub lighty with soft cloth', a service that will scour fewer IDENTIFIED users and give you everything the RIAA, MPAA feel you should have.
Back on the first point, the add servers. To me this says they're moving away from the full distributed thing, and becoming more like iMesh. With hundreds of volunteer servers instead of thousands of sharing users, the content is under control. Their control. (IIRC, thats a bad thing for this kind of service)
Bottom line: Maybe they can pull it off. But if they start charging fees for filtered content, or filter so much nobody wants it anymore, they will be the next dot.com thats dot.gone.
Re:Ethical and Moral obligations
on
Juno And Privacy
·
· Score: 1
yup, they're dead. or at least 6 feet under and digging themselves out with a plastic spork.
THey're probably gonna say something about 'yeah but we never actually did that' or 'yeah we dont know how it got into final release, we did that in beta and people hated it',
I understand how hard drives work. A system where it would lift off at 1000 and remain stable to 15,000 is not going to happen. However, I am talking about keeping the platter going. IBM drives use load/unload technology, which basically means that when the drive shuts off the heads are lifted off the drive and held in a off-platter landing zone. I am proposing a system where it unloads the head and spins down to 1000... if it needed to access data it would go up to ~5400. The point is to remove the problem of it stopping and dying.
You are correct that I havent a clue as to how a switching power supply works. However, if it isnt too cold outside, my computer can heat my bedroom. While the power supply is not necessarily a heater, the computer is. If its on a 400W PS, and say its using 300 out of the 400, then a substantial amount of that 300 is being converted to heat. not by the PS but by the rest of the computer.
I agree. There are several products that will turn on your fans as needed based on the input of 5-6 thermo probes.
IMHO a variable speed hard drive is a great idea. It would be expensive but I think it would work. It could spin down as far as say 1000 RPM when nothings going on, and up to even 15,000 RPM when business picks up. Expensive though...
Another area is CPU usage. Instead of running the processor in idle loops, turn it off. Or have a variant of SpeedStep for desktops. Current software can just stop accessing it, which saves a fair bit of power because nothing is being computed. Reduces heat too.
Finally, redundant power supplies. On a system with 5 or 6, put one small one in, and have it go on that when in powersave. A 400W power supply is basically a 400W heater that powers your computer too
true... workstations with FPDs have much less energy use. However they are MUCH more expensive and oftem much smaller. I would rather have a big CRT than a small LCD. However prices always come down...
well if you have one app/db/http/etc server running then you have neither the want nor the need for it to go offline. In such a case, the first user that wants something is going to be waiting 10-45 seconds for it to come back online.
However, if you have cluster servers, redundant servers or load balancing where several servers do the same job, but not all the time, then APM is good. For example, say you have a website with a loadbalanced HTTP cluster and a redundant backup cluster. You would want one of the main machines to be always on. When it got overloaded it would wake up one of the others, and grab more of them as load increased in peak hours. Then when everyone went to bed it would suspend those it woke.
For the redundant cluster, they should be kept in a constant state of suspension, but be ready to wake up should the main cluster fail.
As for reliability of the drives, thats why you have RAID arrays. I would rather periodically weed out the weak ones and have the RAID re-distributed than shut them all down, and half dont come back on. Its absurdly unlikely that two drives are going to fail at the same powerup. If one dies, then thats OK. If two dies its not. Give them all ample opportunity to fail and they will do so one at a time. Give them few opportunities and they will die in clumps.
Slashdot Mirror
Megatokyo Megabear
gotta love that
yeah, I would recommend you stay away from highly integrated systems... things like integrated sound/video/lan will cause more driver headaches than the extra cost of getting cards w/ Creative/nVidia/3Com
I'm mostly a windows 2000 guy so this may be wrong, but does Linux have a way to set an Interface Metric?
Basically that means you assign each eth adapter a number (metric). If more than one is set up with a route to your destination, it tries them in order of lowest metric to highest metric. Simply set up the failover adapter with a metric one higher than the standard one and you're set.
wow... the exact same thing happened to me. Except I was installing a GeForce3... (asus v8200)
It went in OK, but would not switch to VR mode (it has goggles). I tweaked the drivers and rebooted, it wouldnt boot. Safe mode and VGA mode died soon after, and then it wouldnt boot from Win2k CD. So I figure bad card, replace it. When I open the case I see one of the caps near the DIMM slots was on an angle, I figured I kicked it plugging something in. But when I pull the card (w/ everything unplugged, myself grounded), I hear a short hiss. Examination with a flashlight shows 3 caps near the CPU have popped (off base at angle with burnt stuff below, curved top), and the one I saw earlier has completely blown off its base and theres burnt black rubber stuff around it and the one next to it.
I was looking for an excuse to get a KG7, and this works, although it wasn't what I had in mind
If anyone cares, the blown ones are:
By CPU, 1500uF, rated at 6.3v, 105C: 3 blew, cant see markings. From the top, 2nd, 3rd and 6th in the row next to the SlotA
And by DIMMs, a 2200uF 6.3V 105C, right next to DIMM1, top in a group of two.
All are JPCON
Dude all you need is some WiFi (802.11B) gear. Get one card for each computer and run in ad-hoc (no base station) mode.
First get two WiFi PC cards. Yes I know you dont have laptops. Add two PCI-PC card adapters and you're set. Total cost $140 per computer, and you get 11MBPS. Also includes encryption if you feel paranoid.
This is industry standard gear, so if you ever decide to upgrade to a 'full' wireless lan you can get a base station and add as many computers as you want.
most are $1k+, but some good looking WinCE based ones.
A list of Tablets
Also check out this thing, Its WinCE with a generic clamshell, but has two fold points instead of one. This means you can put on a small plastic keyboard cover, flip the display all the way around and use it like a tablet. Also, theres a small CMOS camera in the middle part so you can take pics.
I think a good market for this would be the LAN party... you only have to velcro it to a screen and (aside from cables) you're all set. However without at least a GeForce2, or maybe a Kyro2, its worthless for 3d games.
Now what I'd really like to see is one of these based around something like a nForce chipset. That should allow greater performance (esp. graphics!) while keeping it small.
I wonder if it has one of those Kensington security lock slots...
somewhat sad but often true...
if a processing-capacity-challenged (most of them, depending on where you are) student/employee/other user sees some computers with login screens and other computers with no screens, he/she/it will assume the computers with no screens are broken, and ignore them.
I disagree with Metallica's decsion to try to stop their trading on napster. I VERY disagree with their trying to get people kicked off.
However, I believe that they still deserve money, because they did write the music. If you feel differently, then dont send them money. Or buy the CD... then they get less.
I have a problem with musicians getting rich. While getting rich often makes them forget who made them rich (its the fans! your fans!), they deserve every dollar. I DO have a very big problem with them getting the dribblings of this money that happen to fall off the label's table. Say you buy a CD at Sam Goody for $16. Out of that $16 of your hard earned money, $6 of it goes to Sam Goody. $9.50 goes to the label. And the artist gets MAYBE $0.50 (depending on contract), which gets further split between recording costs, lawyers, agents (usually there to beg the labels to toss a bone) and other expenses. Bottom line, if your artist is very lucky, he gets $0.10 (ten cents) out of your $16. Oh wait, they dont get to see ANY money until the label has recouped its investment. So if it cost $1000 to get a glass master, cd label/case/cover designed and in production, the artist doesnt start seeing dimes until after 10,000 CDs are sold. I think thats wrong. That artist is trying to make his living from that CD and he maybe gets to keep ten cents. One way around this: Download your favorite artist's CD off napster/opennap/gnutella/whatever. Burn it to a CD. Then put $16 in an envelope, and send it directly to the artist. This way you spend $16.50 for the CD and the RIAA doesnt get a cent.
I absolutely agree, and for $lots, you can have your very own politician to fight for you. For $lots, you can customize your personal politician, complete with morals (that happen to strongly believe in your causes), a sense of duty (to you), and the cleverness to make everyone else believe this is not the case and get elected.
So call now, our stock of wannabe poiticians is overflowing! We've seen the MP3 battle coming for years and have planted lots of personalized politicians ready for you to own!
America(TM): land of the free (reign of large companies), home of the puddles where free use used to be.
yeah CD is good for compatibility, but when the unit has to fit in your pocket CDs arent it. Even 8cm CDRs are kind of big. I like CF because it has a great balance between physical size, capacity, and compatibility. (small, big and standard)
this only affects smartmedia. SM cards have no controller, the controller is in the device. Thus they can be prone to this defect, although it breaks the SM spec. Another problem with having the controller in the device is that when newer larger cards come out, the old controllers wont work with them.
CF cards on the other hand have a ATA chip built in them. They cannot be fuxored with in the same way as SM cards. Also they do not have upgradability or future-proofing issues. Since it started, CF has undergone only one change... CF type 2. This basically means a thicker card and a power connector on the side like a PC card. CF2 slots are 100% backward compatible.
I think smartmedia is one of the worse choices. Yes it is small, or more notably thin, but that impedes capacity. A quick search of buy.com will show a 64mb card (thats the biggest I saw) for around $80.
I like CompactFlash for a number of reasons. Yes the card is bigger, its about the size of 3-4 SM cards stacked. So thicker is more of what it is. Prices are around the same, a 64mb card starts at ~$75. However, it gets bigger. for $144 you can get 128mb. $230 gets you 192MB. $315 for 256MB. $473 gets 384MB. $630 for 512MB.
And then you get Microdrives.
If you're willing to have the card eat power like popcorn, you can get 1GB of Microdrive for $475. Yes, its a teeny hard drive inside a CF card.
Another advantage of CF is that theres a ATA controller on the card. SM has the controller in the device, so although the cards can be cheaper, some older devices wont work with newer larger cards. Another advantage of having a ATA controller is that the card cannot be easily reformatted like SM cards, so they will always work in all devices, no formats required. I could pop a CF card out of my digicam and pop it into a MP3 player. Then put it in my Jornada organizer and check out the pics, as well as copy some new MP3s I just downloaded. With SM, I would either have to get two cards (one for MP3 format, one for digicam format) or use only one at a time.
Also because of the ATA chip, CF cards can easily be plugged into PCMCIA slots. All thats needed is a $5 adapter to match up the right wires.
And one more.
Because CF is so close to PC Card, the two can be used for similar functions. For example, most Pocket PCs have CF slots. But as well as memory, you can plug in a CF card modem. Or a CF barcode scanner. Or a CF cell phone adapter. The CF slot in a PDA can be used for expansion cards as well as memory. Many such devices exist.
SmartMedia cards do LOOK cooler. The curved line across the contact surface has definate geek appeal. But any true geek would go for functionality over style. Although the CF has a recessed female connector (like a PC card), it also has a metal case. Which means that they are much more durable. And not having exposed pins means they're much less vulnerable to static.
To sum this all up,
SmartMedia isnt that smart. CompactFlash is superior in almost every way, including reliability, standardization, capacity, and versatility.
Friends dont let friends buy SmartMedia or use AOL.
They are evil. So is the MPAA. All they care about is the dollar. They need to understand that less is more... IE stop going after everyone legally, instead release for low cost full quality videos/MP3s WITHOUT SECURITY online and piracy will be gone.
My problem is that many sites post RDFs and then ignore them. End result being you get a nice website with todays news and a nice RDF with news that became outdated last year.
I just noticed this as I was reading their site, and noticed they dropped the word Exchange and scoured it off the right side of the logo .
I havent tried the new scour yet, but on their website there was an option to add your fileserver to SCOUR. I'm gonna assume that the way this new thing will work is it will keep a database of fileservers (carefully screening out the ones with non-MPAA-approved content) and instead of scouring the Exchange (good), you scour the List (not as good)
As I said in an earlier post, the things that attracted and kept users at Scour was (not in order) MP3s (illegal ones), movies (cam, dvd rip, etc), apps (cracked) and porn.
Now lets polish Scour nice and shiny for the big empty suits.
Dump the MP3s (those piss off the RIAA),
dump the movies (they piss off the MPAA),
dump the apps (apps piss off the BSA),
and why not dump the porn too (pisses off some politicians)
What's left? Unless they dont dump the porn, IMHO they will have trouble generating content that will keep users loyal. Peer2Peer is like Whack-A-Mole: For every one you kill two more pop up. And every time one of the popups gains the 'critical mass' of users where ~90% of searches come up with something the user cares about, you get one more juicy worm waiting for a user to bite it and ditch his current service.
They say meals look more tasty when you havent eaten in a while.
If a user is starting to have dry searches (be it for MP3s, porn, movies, apps or whatever is deemed inappropriate and fit for filtering out) that worm is looking more and more juicy and the current hook is rusting off. Combine that with lots of worms, and the attitude stops being 'that one looks better, I think I might switch' and starts being 'Damn this sucks! This isnt working and theres fifty other ones that are. Im gonna ditch the one im on and find a new one.'
Having that happen to users is the worst enemy of any web presence. Especially file searching.
If Scour (not exchange) cant keep themselves tasting good, they're done for.
I should have been more clear. I in no way mean that the file format is illegal, it isnt.
However, when I say MP3s or Movies, I refer to the data contained in the files.
Be realistic, a large part if not most of the songs swapped on the Net are illegal. (IE, not authorized by copyright holder)
When I say movies, I mean feature film movies like CAM films and DVD rips. Last time I checked, this is illegal. There are lots of legal movies on the net, just not many legal feature films.
By Apps I mean applications that have been cracked so that you can get the functionality of the full product without paying for it.
I am not going to preach, but give the 'lame ass garage band crap' a listen. Most of the bands today (aside from pop bands IE eminem, backstreet boys, etc) started in garages.
I have not tried the new scour, but if its what you say it is (no mp3, no movie, no porn) then they've just dumped 90% of the people that use it.
First, one interesting tidbit. On the scour page there was a 'add your server to SCOUR' thing which would accept SMB servers. Interesting.
IMHO trying to make scour legal is going to be hard/impossible. Unless someone knows scour better than me, its good points were: (no particular order)
1. MP3s
2. Movies
3. Porn
4. Apps
To be more general, the good thing of Scour was that you could find just about anything.
MP3s are mostly illegal, movies are illegal, apps are illegal and nobody from the 'upstanding' corporate world really wants to deal with porn. The new company claims to remake scour into a legal service. I would like to know what that means. Because they're not being specific. My guess is that one or more of the above list will have to go or be replaced with PPPs (pathetic plastic placeholder).
1. ALL mp3s becomes studio sponsored MP3s (few)
2. Movies becomes Movie Previews (trailers)
3. Porn just might stay, not likely
4. Apps becomes Shareware Apps (not cracked)
In other words, Scour, the insanely great service that would 'scour' thousands of nameless users to get the file *you* want, has become 'rub lighty with soft cloth', a service that will scour fewer IDENTIFIED users and give you everything the RIAA, MPAA feel you should have.
Back on the first point, the add servers. To me this says they're moving away from the full distributed thing, and becoming more like iMesh. With hundreds of volunteer servers instead of thousands of sharing users, the content is under control. Their control. (IIRC, thats a bad thing for this kind of service)
Bottom line: Maybe they can pull it off. But if they start charging fees for filtered content, or filter so much nobody wants it anymore, they will be the next dot.com thats dot.gone.
yup, they're dead. or at least 6 feet under and digging themselves out with a plastic spork. THey're probably gonna say something about 'yeah but we never actually did that' or 'yeah we dont know how it got into final release, we did that in beta and people hated it',
I understand how hard drives work. A system where it would lift off at 1000 and remain stable to 15,000 is not going to happen. However, I am talking about keeping the platter going. IBM drives use load/unload technology, which basically means that when the drive shuts off the heads are lifted off the drive and held in a off-platter landing zone. I am proposing a system where it unloads the head and spins down to 1000... if it needed to access data it would go up to ~5400. The point is to remove the problem of it stopping and dying.
You are correct that I havent a clue as to how a switching power supply works. However, if it isnt too cold outside, my computer can heat my bedroom. While the power supply is not necessarily a heater, the computer is. If its on a 400W PS, and say its using 300 out of the 400, then a substantial amount of that 300 is being converted to heat. not by the PS but by the rest of the computer.
I agree. There are several products that will turn on your fans as needed based on the input of 5-6 thermo probes. IMHO a variable speed hard drive is a great idea. It would be expensive but I think it would work. It could spin down as far as say 1000 RPM when nothings going on, and up to even 15,000 RPM when business picks up. Expensive though... Another area is CPU usage. Instead of running the processor in idle loops, turn it off. Or have a variant of SpeedStep for desktops. Current software can just stop accessing it, which saves a fair bit of power because nothing is being computed. Reduces heat too. Finally, redundant power supplies. On a system with 5 or 6, put one small one in, and have it go on that when in powersave. A 400W power supply is basically a 400W heater that powers your computer too
true... workstations with FPDs have much less energy use. However they are MUCH more expensive and oftem much smaller. I would rather have a big CRT than a small LCD. However prices always come down...
well if you have one app/db/http/etc server running then you have neither the want nor the need for it to go offline. In such a case, the first user that wants something is going to be waiting 10-45 seconds for it to come back online.
However, if you have cluster servers, redundant servers or load balancing where several servers do the same job, but not all the time, then APM is good. For example, say you have a website with a loadbalanced HTTP cluster and a redundant backup cluster. You would want one of the main machines to be always on. When it got overloaded it would wake up one of the others, and grab more of them as load increased in peak hours. Then when everyone went to bed it would suspend those it woke.
For the redundant cluster, they should be kept in a constant state of suspension, but be ready to wake up should the main cluster fail.
As for reliability of the drives, thats why you have RAID arrays. I would rather periodically weed out the weak ones and have the RAID re-distributed than shut them all down, and half dont come back on. Its absurdly unlikely that two drives are going to fail at the same powerup. If one dies, then thats OK. If two dies its not. Give them all ample opportunity to fail and they will do so one at a time. Give them few opportunities and they will die in clumps.