I didn't even think of that, but I think that you're spot on. That being said, I'd imagine that the eventual response will be for the studios to release hybrid discs - DVD on one side, HD-DVD on the other. Then we'll be laughing at the few folks that have both the right player, and the right TV, but still play the wrong side without realizing it. Unless they come up with a way to put a tiny DVD compatible track up front that says "Get a new player, dumbass".
This is going to be even tougher for the rental folks. You just know that Netflix is going to be getting a re-shipment workout when this hits.
I've noticed a whole lot of confused folks in various forums that already think that they have "HD-DVD" - when what they have, in fact, are upsampling standard DVD players.
Funny enough, most of the folks thinking that they had something that hadn't shipped yet owned Sony units. Perhaps this is not a coincidence. But people are going to be pitched DVD players with HD resolution - the confusion that this will breed will probably kill HD-DVD.
Oil is now over $66/barrel. The first big "die off" of movie theaters hit the giant opera house theaters that still existed into the '70's on the main drag. When oil prices spiked, these huge behemoths couldn't afford to heat or cool the huge spaces - so they were consolidated into "multiplexes". And that was before folks have home cinema...
So, the multiplexes reduced the screen sizes, increased the seating density and are moving to digital projection. Those that still use film reels don't hire good projectionists, meaning that prints get dirty and repeatedly spliced. Guess what? They've killed the theater ambience, increased the cost and driving distance - and the home experience is becoming superior (and already is for some part of the population). Movie theaters should have died in the 70's, but the home experience wasn't there yet. In other words, they're dead and they don't know it yet.
The final nail in the coffin will be $100+ oil, and $500 50" screens. Your children will laugh at the weird notion of watching movies with a bunch of strangers.
> But I can't remember video stores that had 8mm rentals... is it just me?
I don't know if it was commonplace, but you could definitely buy short clips of movies in 8mm/Super8 format before the advent of the VCR. I'm talking about Laurel and Hardy, 3 Stooges, some 50's/60's sci-fi, etc. You couldn't buy an entire movie as the reels would just be way too big for a home projector.
Porn was also sold this way (I remember being show the hidden stash that some kid's dad had hidden in a closet). I'd think that this made for some unhappy spouses, as the movies were typically 3-5 minutes long:)
Setting up a projector was such a drag, however, that the market was never likely to develop.
Supermicro has offered AMD solutions for a quite while now - just not under their "main" brand name. If you don't know that their Aplus products exist, you won't find them. Although I'm sure no one would go on record, I'd wager that Intel has pressured a heavily Intel-dependent vendor to not promote AMD's product.
In fact, go to SuperMicro's home page, and you'll notice no mention or links to their AMD based products.
This isn't the first time that this has happened. When AMD first shipped the Athlon, very few board makers dared to ship Athlon solutions for fear of Intel shorting them on chipsets. I recall, but cannot substantiate, that Asus and Abit first shipped Athlon boards under a "shadow brand", much as Supermicro is doing here.
I, for one, cannot wait to buy some of the Supermicro^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h, um, Aplus gear.
They know that there's a huge number of subscribers that are scared shitless about leaving the warm embrace of AOL, and they just won't leave. They figure that some folks will upgrade to AOL broadband, and AOL makes more money on this folks. Others will pay double, even triple for phone dial-up. Just to not lose that wonderful interface. They'll even suffer pain, case in point:
I'm seeing this girl that's just scared to death of computers. AOL auto updated to the new version, and just totally screwed her computer in the process. This is not enough to get her to quit AOL. I fix her computer, requiring a complete OS reinstall, and set it to an older less toxic version... her stupid brother pops in an AOL 9.0 CD to upgrade it. It upgrades to 9.0, and then the cheap ass CD shatters from the high rotation rate of her 56x CD-ROM drive immediately post-install - totally destroys it. Then the software again does a number on her computer... and she still will not quit AOL.
Hell, AOL is now learning what drug dealers have know for a while, and are going to make bucks on it.
First, buy one or more Generic SATA adapters. You can do the same thing with IDE. Note: AVOID PROMISE at all costs. They put something in their BIOS to prevent too many cards in one machine - so you have to buy their RAID crap.
The get as many hard drives as you have ports. I like Seagates - cheap, fast, low temp, 5 year warranty. Good enough. You can get nice 250's for about $100 each.
Shove this into a PC with a couple of extra fans. Go with a low-end Athlon solution, install cpudyn. Heat won't be a problem now, and you might even save on electricity. You can even have cpudyn spin your drives down for you if you don't mind an initial delay.
Make sure you have enough power for all the drives that you're buying (so they can spin up together - only more expensive controller support staggered spinup).
That's it. Install Linux, use md to make your RAID, add NFS and Samba, enjoy. It'll run for years without attention once you're done. The only downside? You're limited by the PCI bus for throughput, but that doesn't sound like an issue for this application.
Anyone use something that can take various spdif inputs (optical, coax), and output a single optical? That's what my HTCP system really needs right now. Something like the Creative thingy mentioned, but with more inputs and some intelligence about what to output.
VIA+Linux is just a great combination - everything is supported in the kernel, everything just works. No install hassles at all, no driver hell.
I have a pair of AMD boxes with this chipset that are just super stable, super fast, and crazy cheap to build. What's not to like? The ASUS boards that I use have a fine Marvell gigE chip on the PCIe bus, and everything just hums along.
What other chipsets have real, non-backwards engineered drivers in the kernel? SIS? ULi? The VIA stuff is getting a little hard to find:(
I just put together a Xeon based server. It was a rare case where a Xeon solution met my needs better than an Opteron based solution.
My company is _very_ sensitive to power consumption. So, I picked a very new motherboard from Tyan, and a Xeon that supported Enhanced Speed Step. I figured that I'd install cpudyn, like I did with all of our AMD boxes, and save a few bucks on electricity.
So, cpudyn doesn't work... because Speedstep isn't supported by Tyan's BIOS. I email Tyan, and I find out two things:
* Tyan wasn't aware that Speedstep was an option on the Xeon platform,
* That none of their BIOS suppliers are supporting Speedstep at this time.
Amazing! Intel put this in the CPU as a way to compete with this great feature from AMD, but you CANNOT USE IT.
This actually has more potential throughput than the Intel solution I mentioned, but is totally polluted by the Nvidia stuff. Might as well disable the on-board gigE under Linux and buy a dual port card instead - thus negating any advantage.
Sorry to single you out, but this reply and most of the other "this is the same/better" seem to have a reading comprehension issue.
The motherboard that I went with has the following characteristics:
THREE individual PCI-X busses. ONE PCIe bus. One PCI bus. Bullet-proof, in-kernel support for everything on the board.
And, well, look - it only costs about 50% less than Opteron boards that have less features. And it has wide availability.
Nothing AMD-only has these characteristics. Nvidia solutions are poison to me, as they should be for anyone running Linux in a demanding fashion.
The fact that you cannot read a block diagram and see that your suggestion is short two busses means that you get to ride on the short bus, along with the rest of the fanboy responses.
AMD fanboys, you can't use your beloved CPU everywhere, sorry. I really wanted to go AMD myself, but Intel wins sometimes.
I'm talking number of *busses*, not slots. The motherboard I mentioned, if memory serves, has FIVE busses:
* Three PCI-X * One PCIe * One PCI...and that means that it is nearly impossible to I/O saturate this machine. There is no equivalent for the Opteron, sadly.
I'm a huge AMD fan, and almost all of my machines are running either A64's or Opterons. But when it was time to build a file server, I went Xeon.
Why? No one offers a motherboard like this on the AMD side of things. The Tyan mobo just sprouts high-speed expansion busses, perfect for a box that will have multiple bonded gigE adatpers, multiple RAID controllers, etc. And everything was recognized by Linux the first time - total piece of cake install. This is because Intel makes **excellent** supporting chipsets that have all of their features well supported by Linux.
AMD boxes need more attention during install for things like gigE controllers and the like - at least that's been my experience. NVidia chipsets are simply not fully supported, and I'm not going to trust backwards-engineered stuff or binary-only releases over Intel-supplied, in-kernel drivers. VIA doesn't make really high-perfomance stuff, either, or at the very least no one is offering it as such.
Sorry, AMD, but until you continuously offer your own chipsets that offer all the options under Linux (and not rely on erstwhile partners like VIA and NVidia), Intel is going to continue to dominate. Intel makes motherboards and chipsets for a reason.
Bundling is inherently good - it benefits the consumer, except in the case of monopoly.
Microsoft established, through questionable means, a monopoly for desktop operating systems. They are now trying to parlay that into other monopolies.
In short, they're being "punished" before they can establish absolute control over things like media formats, network protocols, document formats - although it is more or less too late, now.
Troll is stupid, doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
I have a CM Stacker. It has 11 free 5.25" bays. I put 3->5 drive cages in it, and now have 10 hard drives in 6 bays of space. That, plus a DVD, and I have five full size bays left to go.
Others have answered his other stupid points, but the Stacker is a great case, and a cheap way to build a storage server.
Take away the indy DSL provider, and you'll find that you can't host a server cheaply. This is something that benefits both big business and a government looking to constrain your rights.
Look, my ISP, the excellent Pilosoft in NYC, pays MORE for the line that they lease from Verizon that I would as a direct consumer.
So in other words, my neighbor, who is happy with Verizon's standard crap, pays $19.99/month. I pay $50 for the same thing (well, the same speeds, but with no crap). Verizon gets more than $20 a month for the line, and Pilosoft makes a few bucks, and everyone's happy.
Why is the FCC going to take this away? If anything, Verizon is making more money on me than on my neighbor!
This is about monopoly and a way for the US Gov to further drive the price of free speech and doing business up.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony, say hello to third place. Consumers, say hello to an emergency price drop scheduled for Spring 2007.
I didn't even think of that, but I think that you're spot on. That being said, I'd imagine that the eventual response will be for the studios to release hybrid discs - DVD on one side, HD-DVD on the other. Then we'll be laughing at the few folks that have both the right player, and the right TV, but still play the wrong side without realizing it. Unless they come up with a way to put a tiny DVD compatible track up front that says "Get a new player, dumbass".
This is going to be even tougher for the rental folks. You just know that Netflix is going to be getting a re-shipment workout when this hits.
jh
I've noticed a whole lot of confused folks in various forums that already think that they have "HD-DVD" - when what they have, in fact, are upsampling standard DVD players.
Funny enough, most of the folks thinking that they had something that hadn't shipped yet owned Sony units. Perhaps this is not a coincidence. But people are going to be pitched DVD players with HD resolution - the confusion that this will breed will probably kill HD-DVD.
jh
Oil is now over $66/barrel. The first big "die off" of movie theaters hit the giant opera house theaters that still existed into the '70's on the main drag. When oil prices spiked, these huge behemoths couldn't afford to heat or cool the huge spaces - so they were consolidated into "multiplexes". And that was before folks have home cinema...
So, the multiplexes reduced the screen sizes, increased the seating density and are moving to digital projection. Those that still use film reels don't hire good projectionists, meaning that prints get dirty and repeatedly spliced. Guess what? They've killed the theater ambience, increased the cost and driving distance - and the home experience is becoming superior (and already is for some part of the population). Movie theaters should have died in the 70's, but the home experience wasn't there yet. In other words, they're dead and they don't know it yet.
The final nail in the coffin will be $100+ oil, and $500 50" screens. Your children will laugh at the weird notion of watching movies with a bunch of strangers.
jh
> But I can't remember video stores that had 8mm rentals... is it just me?
:)
I don't know if it was commonplace, but you could definitely buy short clips of movies in 8mm/Super8 format before the advent of the VCR. I'm talking about Laurel and Hardy, 3 Stooges, some 50's/60's sci-fi, etc. You couldn't buy an entire movie as the reels would just be way too big for a home projector.
Porn was also sold this way (I remember being show the hidden stash that some kid's dad had hidden in a closet). I'd think that this made for some unhappy spouses, as the movies were typically 3-5 minutes long
Setting up a projector was such a drag, however, that the market was never likely to develop.
You might want to wash the sand out of your crack.
Supermicro has offered AMD solutions for a quite while now - just not under their "main" brand name. If you don't know that their Aplus products exist, you won't find them. Although I'm sure no one would go on record, I'd wager that Intel has pressured a heavily Intel-dependent vendor to not promote AMD's product.
In fact, go to SuperMicro's home page, and you'll notice no mention or links to their AMD based products.
This isn't the first time that this has happened. When AMD first shipped the Athlon, very few board makers dared to ship Athlon solutions for fear of Intel shorting them on chipsets. I recall, but cannot substantiate, that Asus and Abit first shipped Athlon boards under a "shadow brand", much as Supermicro is doing here.
I, for one, cannot wait to buy some of the Supermicro^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h, um, Aplus gear.
From the article: "The OpenXML format is supported by Intel, Apple Computer, Toshiba, BP and the British Library, among others, Yates said."
OK, so do like or hate Apple today? They're obviously fellating MS in order to continue to have versions of Office created for them, no?
AOL is actually being pretty crafty about this.
They know that there's a huge number of subscribers that are scared shitless about leaving the warm embrace of AOL, and they just won't leave. They figure that some folks will upgrade to AOL broadband, and AOL makes more money on this folks. Others will pay double, even triple for phone dial-up. Just to not lose that wonderful interface. They'll even suffer pain, case in point:
I'm seeing this girl that's just scared to death of computers. AOL auto updated to the new version, and just totally screwed her computer in the process. This is not enough to get her to quit AOL. I fix her computer, requiring a complete OS reinstall, and set it to an older less toxic version... her stupid brother pops in an AOL 9.0 CD to upgrade it. It upgrades to 9.0, and then the cheap ass CD shatters from the high rotation rate of her 56x CD-ROM drive immediately post-install - totally destroys it. Then the software again does a number on her computer... and she still will not quit AOL.
Hell, AOL is now learning what drug dealers have know for a while, and are going to make bucks on it.
First, buy one or more Generic SATA adapters. You can do the same thing with IDE. Note: AVOID PROMISE at all costs. They put something in their BIOS to prevent too many cards in one machine - so you have to buy their RAID crap.
The get as many hard drives as you have ports. I like Seagates - cheap, fast, low temp, 5 year warranty. Good enough. You can get nice 250's for about $100 each.
Shove this into a PC with a couple of extra fans. Go with a low-end Athlon solution, install cpudyn. Heat won't be a problem now, and you might even save on electricity. You can even have cpudyn spin your drives down for you if you don't mind an initial delay.
Make sure you have enough power for all the drives that you're buying (so they can spin up together - only more expensive controller support staggered spinup).
That's it. Install Linux, use md to make your RAID, add NFS and Samba, enjoy. It'll run for years without attention once you're done. The only downside? You're limited by the PCI bus for throughput, but that doesn't sound like an issue for this application.
jh
Both of them have always come through for me.
jh
...is the sound of everyone at HopStop shitting their pants. Shame, because HopStop works really well, at least for NYC.
Anyone use something that can take various spdif inputs (optical, coax), and output a single optical? That's what my HTCP system really needs right now. Something like the Creative thingy mentioned, but with more inputs and some intelligence about what to output.
jh
VIA+Linux is just a great combination - everything is supported in the kernel, everything just works. No install hassles at all, no driver hell.
:(
I have a pair of AMD boxes with this chipset that are just super stable, super fast, and crazy cheap to build. What's not to like? The ASUS boards that I use have a fine Marvell gigE chip on the PCIe bus, and everything just hums along.
What other chipsets have real, non-backwards engineered drivers in the kernel? SIS? ULi? The VIA stuff is getting a little hard to find
I'll believe this when:
* The machines are for sale as prominently as the Intel based stuff.
* The price is competitive (or at least the same as the Intel stuff).
* AMD's advantages are touted on the product page.
* Someone has bought one, and found that execution is good.
Remember, Dell also sells (or did? I lose track...) Linux machines. Supposedly.
jh
I just put together a Xeon based server. It was a rare case where a Xeon solution met my needs better than an Opteron based solution.
My company is _very_ sensitive to power consumption. So, I picked a very new motherboard from Tyan, and a Xeon that supported Enhanced Speed Step. I figured that I'd install cpudyn, like I did with all of our AMD boxes, and save a few bucks on electricity.
So, cpudyn doesn't work... because Speedstep isn't supported by Tyan's BIOS. I email Tyan, and I find out two things:
* Tyan wasn't aware that Speedstep was an option on the Xeon platform,
* That none of their BIOS suppliers are supporting Speedstep at this time.
Amazing! Intel put this in the CPU as a way to compete with this great feature from AMD, but you CANNOT USE IT.
Most certainly my last Intel purchase, ever.
jh
This actually has more potential throughput than the Intel solution I mentioned, but is totally polluted by the Nvidia stuff. Might as well disable the on-board gigE under Linux and buy a dual port card instead - thus negating any advantage.
bzzt.
Sorry to single you out, but this reply and most of the other "this is the same/better" seem to have a reading comprehension issue.
The motherboard that I went with has the following characteristics:
THREE individual PCI-X busses.
ONE PCIe bus.
One PCI bus.
Bullet-proof, in-kernel support for everything on the board.
And, well, look - it only costs about 50% less than Opteron boards that have less features. And it has wide availability.
Nothing AMD-only has these characteristics. Nvidia solutions are poison to me, as they should be for anyone running Linux in a demanding fashion.
The fact that you cannot read a block diagram and see that your suggestion is short two busses means that you get to ride on the short bus, along with the rest of the fanboy responses.
AMD fanboys, you can't use your beloved CPU everywhere, sorry. I really wanted to go AMD myself, but Intel wins sometimes.
jh
Slot bus. If all those slots and gigE ports are sharing one bus, that isn't terribly impressive.
I'm talking number of *busses*, not slots. The motherboard I mentioned, if memory serves, has FIVE busses:
...and that means that it is nearly impossible to I/O saturate this machine. There is no equivalent for the Opteron, sadly.
* Three PCI-X
* One PCIe
* One PCI
jh
I'm a huge AMD fan, and almost all of my machines are running either A64's or Opterons. But when it was time to build a file server, I went Xeon.
Why? No one offers a motherboard like this on the AMD side of things. The Tyan mobo just sprouts high-speed expansion busses, perfect for a box that will have multiple bonded gigE adatpers, multiple RAID controllers, etc. And everything was recognized by Linux the first time - total piece of cake install. This is because Intel makes **excellent** supporting chipsets that have all of their features well supported by Linux.
AMD boxes need more attention during install for things like gigE controllers and the like - at least that's been my experience. NVidia chipsets are simply not fully supported, and I'm not going to trust backwards-engineered stuff or binary-only releases over Intel-supplied, in-kernel drivers. VIA doesn't make really high-perfomance stuff, either, or at the very least no one is offering it as such.
Sorry, AMD, but until you continuously offer your own chipsets that offer all the options under Linux (and not rely on erstwhile partners like VIA and NVidia), Intel is going to continue to dominate. Intel makes motherboards and chipsets for a reason.
jh
Bundling is inherently good - it benefits the consumer, except in the case of monopoly.
Microsoft established, through questionable means, a monopoly for desktop operating systems. They are now trying to parlay that into other monopolies.
In short, they're being "punished" before they can establish absolute control over things like media formats, network protocols, document formats - although it is more or less too late, now.
Troll is stupid, doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
I have a CM Stacker. It has 11 free 5.25" bays. I put 3->5 drive cages in it, and now have 10 hard drives in 6 bays of space. That, plus a DVD, and I have five full size bays left to go.
Others have answered his other stupid points, but the Stacker is a great case, and a cheap way to build a storage server.
jh
Take away the indy DSL provider, and you'll find that you can't host a server cheaply. This is something that benefits both big business and a government looking to constrain your rights.
Look, my ISP, the excellent Pilosoft in NYC, pays MORE for the line that they lease from Verizon that I would as a direct consumer.
So in other words, my neighbor, who is happy with Verizon's standard crap, pays $19.99/month. I pay $50 for the same thing (well, the same speeds, but with no crap). Verizon gets more than $20 a month for the line, and Pilosoft makes a few bucks, and everyone's happy.
Why is the FCC going to take this away? If anything, Verizon is making more money on me than on my neighbor!
This is about monopoly and a way for the US Gov to further drive the price of free speech and doing business up.
jh
Hit submit too quickly :( First line should read: "...but the docs for doing traffic shaping/QoS are, well, non existent".
Oops.
jh