Pay someone else to do it. You're saving $65k, right? Give a (small) portion of that cash to someone familiar with OOo, and have them code the changes that you're after.
Just because it's free software doesn't mean that it's afraid of money. Go ahead and buy the features you need.
A lot of what you ask has been available in Linux LVM[1/2] for a Long Time, in FreeBSD for years and years, and in NetApps filers since the Dawn of Time. In userspace, rsnapshots does much of what you mention, along with a variety of related scripts/utilities.
I assume that you know this, but I'm filling in a few holes for anyone else who might feel inspired to code...
Snapshots rock. Making them smarter and more efficient would be very nice.
I always suspected that whenver I've had trouble handling networked media files, that the problem really was that the network was just too bloody fast.
I'm so glad that NetLimiter will finally slow things down to such an extent that I can reliably transfer a WAV recording.
Too bad it's less than one-third the speed of my fucking cable modem.
Talk about pathetic and absurd. It's a stupid idea, and you know it. More bandwidth to the world than across the desk? Fucking-a NOT.
Now: How about spending $25 on a cheap, fast ethernet switch? Not only is it plainly a better solution to the problem, but it's WAY FUCKING CHEAPER than buying a bunch of copies of NetLimiter, and doesn't involve even an iota of a software adjustment, it's cheaper, and it's existance easily understood by any technical people who will appear later on. Oh, and it's faster as greased shit and is plug-and-play when installed in place of the existing 10base-T hub.
Did I mention that it's cheaper to just buy a switch and be done?
And if the obvious uses were the only safe, reasonable, and useful ones, you could just forget about this whole Intar-web thing, let alone discussions about how to integrate a UPS. We'd still be trying to reliably create fire for heat.
And hooking up a standard UPS to your circuit isn't?
What? You'd expect a non-standard UPS to be somehow more suitable?
People do this shit all the time. Properly. Safely. To code. With "standard" UPSs.
There's even documentation describing at least two ways to make it happen here, from people who have a vested interest in not being sued over improper installations.
I wouldn't recommend hooking up a power strip to a UPS either.
Is there anything that you do recommend?
I mean, clearly, it's just impossible to supply a building with power AT ALL. It's just unsafe. Those slippery little electrons might leak out of the outlet and cause a nasty accident, at best, but it's even worse if they stay bottled up inside of the wall, emitting CHAOS and PANDAMONIUM.
Electricity is unsafe. There is simply no safe way to use electricity.
You misunderstand the purpose of a fuse, and a GFCI.
The fuse exists to protect against fire. It heats up and melts, breaking the circuit, before any series-connected wire gets a chance to.
The GFCI exists to protect against electrocution by way of detecting ground faults and shutting down.
Different animals for different problems.
You always have a fuse, even if you don't install one: If things short for whatever reason, something is going to fuse/flash/melt/burn, and it may not be. Everyone agrees that it would be better to use a device made to burn up (or turn off, in the case of a breaker) safely, instead of a random segment of installed wiring heating up uncontrollably.
A GFCI, even if generally a good idea, is only needed in situations where ground faults are likely. Like wherever there's water. Which, hopefully, is not one's server room. A GFCI does not limit current, and does not protect against fire.
And: "Not supposed to"? I think you already discredited yourself, but I'll bite anyway. It'll work fine - it's just a longer length of wire. Some UPSs have restrictions on the type of load (many APC UPSs specify that they're only suitable to power computers), but some others do not. One of the monster Best Ferrups UPSs I have at home is rated to provide 15 amps@120V, unrestricted - it can (and does) start and run vacuum cleaners and power tools without complaint.
So: Break the feed heading into the server room. Terminate one side in a male plug, and the other side in a female. Plug the UPS into this pair of connectors.
Done*.
And then, if required need to disconnect the UPS appliance, simply do so, much as you would any other appliance.
(*Variations might (and probably should) include using double-insulated stranded wire, installing a panel directly after said male plug with fusing/breakers appropriate for the wire and connectors, and also some sane restriction on the length of said male plug's attached cord.)
It is safe: If someone does something stupid, the panel's fuse pops before the UPS does. No smoke. No fire.
It is reliable: If the UPS pops on its own (which they seem to do with alarming regularity, even if they're "good" ones), it will be easy to bypass - just plug the male end into the female socket, without a UPS in between.
What's the big deal? That the output of the battery-backup appliance happens to go through the wall into a series of permanently-mounted outlets? So what?
Would you rather it be attached to a snakepit of inadequate extension cords, as is often the case when someone tries to a room worth of gear from one temporarily-installed UPS?
Good speakers are expensive. It has always been that way, and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future, and as long as the raw materials remain the same and the design process is nontrivial.
It's hard to design a good-sounding loudspeaker system, and it's typically fairly expensive to manufacture, assemble, and ship. A walk (and listen) through any audio store will illustrate this.
But you don't want one good-sounding loudspeaker system: you want FIVE of them, and a subwoofer, too
And you need them all to be small.
And they have to include their own amplification.
Oh. And they've gotta be cheap.
You might not hesitate to spend $300 on a stereo pair of speakers for the living room. In fact, if you were able to find a good-sounding pair of speakers for that price, most folks with a decent ear would probably say you got a great deal.
But you're certainly not going to spend that much on 6 speakers for your $300 Dell, even though you're likely to spend even more time there than in the living room these days...
Why this blatant absurdity seems to be universally true, I don't know.
Whatever the case: Just because you want to use it with a computer, does not mean it suddenly becomes cheap to produce and sell.
Either learn to pony up, set more realistic goals for yourself, or get used to being frustrated. Good speakers will always be more expensive than bad speakers, and 5 speakers will always cost more to make than 2 speakers. It's easy math, and simple estimation will show you just how fucked up your demands are.
These exist. Their sole reason for being is to help out during natural disasters, and provide temporary capacity when people are gathering in rural areas (large festivals, for example).
The problems, as it seems:
Where do you park it? How do you get it there? Once there, who are you going to talk to? (Clearly a cell tower, electromagnetically in the middle of nowhere, does not provide effective communications unless it, itself, can reach the outside world.)
If it isn't alive yet, it's either because there aren't enough to go around, or it is otherwise impossible. And if it's impossible, it's, well, impossible. So there.
As far as making money: Nope. If you're a Verizon/Spring/Cingular/blah customer, and in your home area, they're not going to get an extra cent out of you, expensive temporary cellsite or not, unless you're into overtime on your plan. Hurricane or not, contracts still apply.
I've been running GDS 2 on my laptop all day. It says it's been waiting patiently to get a free bit of idle time to index my tens-of-thousands-of IMAP caches in Thunderbird, which it says needs to be running in order for the stuff to be indexed.
Whether it will work or not remains to be seen. But the support seems to be present.
This is enough for great heaping piles of VoIP traffic, particularly after it gets compressed with g.723.1 or GSM or Speex or some other such lossy codec.
I mean: You've got about half of a PRI/E1/T1 in upstream there. And that, sir, is good for about 24 concurrent -uncompressed- digital telephone calls.
How many dozen teenagers do you think you're going to have?
Upstream might be a problem for some things, but consumer VoIP is not among them.
Measure them, then. I've found that they're typically very close to being 5% off, much of the time.
Whether the manufacturer can save money doing this, and whether they feel like charging differently, is up to them to figure out. But it sure does seem to be fact.
In other news about manufacting tolerances: Resistors spec'd at 5% tolerance are found to consistantly be 5% less than their stated value, in order to save money on raw materials.
Unless the PLL in the motherboard is periodically recalibrated using (for instance) NIST, there's no way in hell that it's ever going to be accurate.
Furthermore, all of these motherboard tests are based on whatever the computer's RTC thinks is reality, but we all know that those drift all over the place. If 1 second != 1 second (and it never does, save for machines properly synchronized to NIST using NTP or somesuch), then the test is meaningless anyway.
Think about the process a bit, and you'll see that there's essentially zero control in the typical PC reviewer's test enviroment (which seems to consist, primarily, of a kitchen table and a digital camera). Components change with time and temperature and voltage, and there's no such thing as a stable consumer-grade clock.
That all being said:
If a part advertised to run at 800MHz actually appears to run at 802MHz, we're talking about an error of only.25%. And that, sir, is a fine margin for a consumer product, being damn near spot-on.
I mean: If you bought a 200 horsepower car, would you be upset if it only produces 199.50 HP? What if it actually made 200.50 HP?
0.25%
If you complained to Honda, or GM, or somesuch, do you really think you'd be taken seriously?
I mean, geez. For fuck's sake, grow up. It's one-quarter of one percent. Try measuring a "pound" of flour, or a "gallon" of milk, or a "liter" of Pepsi sometime.
("Dear Wal-Mart: I recently purchased from your store a gallon of milk. When I took it home and measured it using my graduated cylinders, I found that it was actually 1.0025 gallons, which is clearly not as advertised. Unless I happened to miss a sign reading "Milk values are specified to a tolerance of +/- 0.25%," I want my money back. Thank you.")
Sane? Certainly not, in the context of Joe Slashdotter, and least of all with a laptop in the mix.
1+0 is a striped, mirrored array. It's not sane to make it multiple-failure-resistant, because it turns expensive in arrays of a size that Joe Slashdotter is likely to find useful, whereas RAID 5 would be more cost-effective.
1+5 is very seldom sane at all, even if it is reliable and fast.
1 is insane for more than a two-drive array, as Joe Slashdotter is obviously more inclined to use RAID 5 and enjoy the increase in available space availed by having 3 or more similar discs and parity redundancy instead of literal redundancy.
Thanks for playing, Jeff. Let me know when you come back to reality.
Now, class, everyone here should know that no sane form of RAID can withstand multiple-disc failure. Therefore, no sane person requires more than RAID 1 for redundancy purposes.
And RAID 1 is easy: Remove the CD-ROM from your laptop. Fab an adapter bracket and cable to connect a 2.5" hard drive. Insert into bay previously occupied by CD-ROM. Install requisite software drivers and configure the array appropriately.
Extra points if you find enough space to keep the CD-ROM internal. This might be facilitated by removing a floppy drive, or using fiberglass and resin to mold one or more protuding feet onto the bottom of the laptop within which are contained the componentry of the RAID array.
Everyone knows that the WRT54G does not support 802.11a, but that doesn't somehow negate its usefulness 802.11b/g, does it?
And speaking of 802.11a: Proxim Harmony access points are something like $20. I'm not even going to bother with the math; it's absolutely fucking obvious that you can blanket an average business with them for $12k AND give two to every employee AND have enough spares that the technology will be replaced before the supply closet runs dry.
But it doesn't matter: I knew that you were full of shit as soon as you started going on about how cool the lights on this $12,000.00 smoke detector look. It is thus plainly obvious that you are a salesman, even if you think you're a journalist. (And if you think you're an engineer, you really need to switch careers. With your ability to sprew forth nonsensical bullshit, you'll be able to retire in no time.)
Raid 5? In a single unit? Forget the fact that it's in a laptop - the mere notion of a RAID array in a single device is, itself, absurd.
You get all of the disadvantages of extra mechanical complication, along with none of the advantages (speed[1], or otherwise) of RAID.
Count me out.
[1]: See, it sounds like a good theory. But you'll get more speed by just using a single, larger-diameter disc than you will by using several smaller-diameter discs. If RPM is constant, and diameter increases, then so does linear velocity, and thus data rates. Etc, so on, so forth. Unless you're going to be using lots of independant discs, it's not advantageous. Oh, and it's a laptop, which is presumably meant to run on batteries at least some of the time. It's almost always more efficient to run one motor, than it is to run several of them, along with several sets of controller electronics, and several sets of head actuators, and...
The patent describes a system which looks for excited speech, not loud sounds. (After all, in a modern TV broadcast, -every- sound is loud.)
Oh. You thought of that one, too?
Look, kid: I think it's rather original, and a bit cool, that I might be able to use a baseball announcer to allow my DVR to detect and skip boringness, automatically.
Retarding the state of the art? It seems, to me, that this is a step beyond the current state of this art. It therefore defines "state of the art".
You want to do something better? Improve their concept in some substantial fashion, and patent it yourself. That's why the USPTO exists, after all...
Patents aren't always horrible.
But I suppose you'd prefer the saying "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" to read something like "Build a better mousetrap and the competition will take it directly to the bank while laughing manaically".
Some day, it might be your mousetrap. And when that happens, I strongly suspect that you'd like to keep it yours.
The implication here is that Microsoft is piling up meaningless and obvious patents. Curious if this were the case, I picked the least meaningful-looking one, and read through the app: The Baseball Patent.
Now, I hate MSFT probably a bit more than most people here, but this patent actually a good idea. It describes a technique which allows a computer to automatically show you the important parts of a game, saving vast amounts of time watching batters meander about and pitchers scratching their ass.
The cool part, though, is its simplicity. Rather than learn the rules of the game and a vast array of human likes and dislikes, it just listens for an excited-sounding announcer and flags those parts as being important.
It seems that this technique could easily be applied to, and effectively remove boredom from, any other televised game (except for golf and billiards, which will always be boring).
It's not an obvious technique, and it's almost certainly unique and novel.
Why shouldn't ideas like this be awarded a patent?
Sure, you can model almost anything with almost anything else, as long as you've got the right math. But efficiency goes down the tubes.
For instance, I can make a shitty speaker in a bad room sound (mostly) like an awesome speaker in a good room using something like BruteFIR.
But, I lose system efficiency. To compensate for all the variables and deficiencies, one generally has to expend more amplifier power. Usually, it's a -lot- more. Often, it's more than is available or can be dissipated by the speaker. And nevermind the increased physical stress on the loudspeaker components themselves.
One runs out of dynamic range pretty quickly in this game.
So, you can do the same thing with an LCD, say, and remove ghosting as it happens. But, you will end up with a system with reduced contrast, and added time delay. (You have to correct for the ghost image -before- it actually happens. And if it's a black ghost on a white background, you'll need to correct it with a moment of something brighter-than-white. Which is impossible, unless you redefine white to be something closer to what would normally be grey, and are happy with the overall reduction in brightness in exchange for a lack of motion blur.)
Slashdot Mirror
A variety of FM transmitters can be had at Ramsey Electronics, in kit form or preassembled. They are, generally, not very expensive.
Google for them.
Here's a thought:
Pay someone else to do it. You're saving $65k, right? Give a (small) portion of that cash to someone familiar with OOo, and have them code the changes that you're after.
Just because it's free software doesn't mean that it's afraid of money. Go ahead and buy the features you need.
A lot of what you ask has been available in Linux LVM[1/2] for a Long Time, in FreeBSD for years and years, and in NetApps filers since the Dawn of Time. In userspace, rsnapshots does much of what you mention, along with a variety of related scripts/utilities.
I assume that you know this, but I'm filling in a few holes for anyone else who might feel inspired to code...
Snapshots rock. Making them smarter and more efficient would be very nice.
Yeah. Mod that motherfucker down, too. He's clearly off-topic, what with metadiscussion being cause for castration and all.
:P
At least the mods are still able to chew cock with great proficiency, even at this time of the night!
Cool.
I always suspected that whenver I've had trouble handling networked media files, that the problem really was that the network was just too bloody fast.
I'm so glad that NetLimiter will finally slow things down to such an extent that I can reliably transfer a WAV recording.
Too bad it's less than one-third the speed of my fucking cable modem.
Talk about pathetic and absurd. It's a stupid idea, and you know it. More bandwidth to the world than across the desk? Fucking-a NOT.
Now: How about spending $25 on a cheap, fast ethernet switch? Not only is it plainly a better solution to the problem, but it's WAY FUCKING CHEAPER than buying a bunch of copies of NetLimiter, and doesn't involve even an iota of a software adjustment, it's cheaper, and it's existance easily understood by any technical people who will appear later on. Oh, and it's faster as greased shit and is plug-and-play when installed in place of the existing 10base-T hub.
Did I mention that it's cheaper to just buy a switch and be done?
(Are you some kind of schill for Netlimiter?)
And if the obvious uses were the only safe, reasonable, and useful ones, you could just forget about this whole Intar-web thing, let alone discussions about how to integrate a UPS. We'd still be trying to reliably create fire for heat.
Thanks for playing. You're still a moron.
And hooking up a standard UPS to your circuit isn't?
What? You'd expect a non-standard UPS to be somehow more suitable?
People do this shit all the time. Properly. Safely. To code. With "standard" UPSs.
There's even documentation describing at least two ways to make it happen here, from people who have a vested interest in not being sued over improper installations.
I wouldn't recommend hooking up a power strip to a UPS either.
Is there anything that you do recommend?
I mean, clearly, it's just impossible to supply a building with power AT ALL. It's just unsafe. Those slippery little electrons might leak out of the outlet and cause a nasty accident, at best, but it's even worse if they stay bottled up inside of the wall, emitting CHAOS and PANDAMONIUM.
Electricity is unsafe. There is simply no safe way to use electricity.
Think of the CHILDREN!
You misunderstand the purpose of a fuse, and a GFCI.
The fuse exists to protect against fire. It heats up and melts, breaking the circuit, before any series-connected wire gets a chance to.
The GFCI exists to protect against electrocution by way of detecting ground faults and shutting down.
Different animals for different problems.
You always have a fuse, even if you don't install one: If things short for whatever reason, something is going to fuse/flash/melt/burn, and it may not be. Everyone agrees that it would be better to use a device made to burn up (or turn off, in the case of a breaker) safely, instead of a random segment of installed wiring heating up uncontrollably.
A GFCI, even if generally a good idea, is only needed in situations where ground faults are likely. Like wherever there's water. Which, hopefully, is not one's server room. A GFCI does not limit current, and does not protect against fire.
And: "Not supposed to"? I think you already discredited yourself, but I'll bite anyway. It'll work fine - it's just a longer length of wire. Some UPSs have restrictions on the type of load (many APC UPSs specify that they're only suitable to power computers), but some others do not. One of the monster Best Ferrups UPSs I have at home is rated to provide 15 amps@120V, unrestricted - it can (and does) start and run vacuum cleaners and power tools without complaint.
Seperable by a plug, eh?
So: Break the feed heading into the server room. Terminate one side in a male plug, and the other side in a female. Plug the UPS into this pair of connectors.
Done*.
And then, if required need to disconnect the UPS appliance, simply do so, much as you would any other appliance.
(*Variations might (and probably should) include using double-insulated stranded wire, installing a panel directly after said male plug with fusing/breakers appropriate for the wire and connectors, and also some sane restriction on the length of said male plug's attached cord.)
It is safe: If someone does something stupid, the panel's fuse pops before the UPS does. No smoke. No fire.
It is reliable: If the UPS pops on its own (which they seem to do with alarming regularity, even if they're "good" ones), it will be easy to bypass - just plug the male end into the female socket, without a UPS in between.
What's the big deal? That the output of the battery-backup appliance happens to go through the wall into a series of permanently-mounted outlets? So what?
Would you rather it be attached to a snakepit of inadequate extension cords, as is often the case when someone tries to a room worth of gear from one temporarily-installed UPS?
Good speakers are expensive. It has always been that way, and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future, and as long as the raw materials remain the same and the design process is nontrivial.
It's hard to design a good-sounding loudspeaker system, and it's typically fairly expensive to manufacture, assemble, and ship. A walk (and listen) through any audio store will illustrate this.
But you don't want one good-sounding loudspeaker system: you want FIVE of them, and a subwoofer, too
And you need them all to be small.
And they have to include their own amplification.
Oh. And they've gotta be cheap.
You might not hesitate to spend $300 on a stereo pair of speakers for the living room. In fact, if you were able to find a good-sounding pair of speakers for that price, most folks with a decent ear would probably say you got a great deal.
But you're certainly not going to spend that much on 6 speakers for your $300 Dell, even though you're likely to spend even more time there than in the living room these days...
Why this blatant absurdity seems to be universally true, I don't know.
Whatever the case: Just because you want to use it with a computer, does not mean it suddenly becomes cheap to produce and sell.
Either learn to pony up, set more realistic goals for yourself, or get used to being frustrated. Good speakers will always be more expensive than bad speakers, and 5 speakers will always cost more to make than 2 speakers. It's easy math, and simple estimation will show you just how fucked up your demands are.
These exist. Their sole reason for being is to help out during natural disasters, and provide temporary capacity when people are gathering in rural areas (large festivals, for example).
The problems, as it seems:
Where do you park it?
How do you get it there?
Once there, who are you going to talk to? (Clearly a cell tower, electromagnetically in the middle of nowhere, does not provide effective communications unless it, itself, can reach the outside world.)
If it isn't alive yet, it's either because there aren't enough to go around, or it is otherwise impossible. And if it's impossible, it's, well, impossible. So there.
As far as making money: Nope. If you're a Verizon/Spring/Cingular/blah customer, and in your home area, they're not going to get an extra cent out of you, expensive temporary cellsite or not, unless you're into overtime on your plan. Hurricane or not, contracts still apply.
FYI:
I've been running GDS 2 on my laptop all day. It says it's been waiting patiently to get a free bit of idle time to index my tens-of-thousands-of IMAP caches in Thunderbird, which it says needs to be running in order for the stuff to be indexed.
Whether it will work or not remains to be seen. But the support seems to be present.
768Kbps.
This is enough for great heaping piles of VoIP traffic, particularly after it gets compressed with g.723.1 or GSM or Speex or some other such lossy codec.
I mean: You've got about half of a PRI/E1/T1 in upstream there. And that, sir, is good for about 24 concurrent -uncompressed- digital telephone calls.
How many dozen teenagers do you think you're going to have?
Upstream might be a problem for some things, but consumer VoIP is not among them.
Ok.
Measure them, then. I've found that they're typically very close to being 5% off, much of the time.
Whether the manufacturer can save money doing this, and whether they feel like charging differently, is up to them to figure out. But it sure does seem to be fact.
In other news about manufacting tolerances: Resistors spec'd at 5% tolerance are found to consistantly be 5% less than their stated value, in order to save money on raw materials.
.25%. And that, sir, is a fine margin for a consumer product, being damn near spot-on.
Unless the PLL in the motherboard is periodically recalibrated using (for instance) NIST, there's no way in hell that it's ever going to be accurate.
Furthermore, all of these motherboard tests are based on whatever the computer's RTC thinks is reality, but we all know that those drift all over the place. If 1 second != 1 second (and it never does, save for machines properly synchronized to NIST using NTP or somesuch), then the test is meaningless anyway.
Think about the process a bit, and you'll see that there's essentially zero control in the typical PC reviewer's test enviroment (which seems to consist, primarily, of a kitchen table and a digital camera). Components change with time and temperature and voltage, and there's no such thing as a stable consumer-grade clock.
That all being said:
If a part advertised to run at 800MHz actually appears to run at 802MHz, we're talking about an error of only
I mean: If you bought a 200 horsepower car, would you be upset if it only produces 199.50 HP? What if it actually made 200.50 HP?
0.25%
If you complained to Honda, or GM, or somesuch, do you really think you'd be taken seriously?
I mean, geez. For fuck's sake, grow up. It's one-quarter of one percent. Try measuring a "pound" of flour, or a "gallon" of milk, or a "liter" of Pepsi sometime.
("Dear Wal-Mart: I recently purchased from your store a gallon of milk. When I took it home and measured it using my graduated cylinders, I found that it was actually 1.0025 gallons, which is clearly not as advertised. Unless I happened to miss a sign reading "Milk values are specified to a tolerance of +/- 0.25%," I want my money back. Thank you.")
Sane? Certainly not, in the context of Joe Slashdotter, and least of all with a laptop in the mix.
1+0 is a striped, mirrored array. It's not sane to make it multiple-failure-resistant, because it turns expensive in arrays of a size that Joe Slashdotter is likely to find useful, whereas RAID 5 would be more cost-effective.
1+5 is very seldom sane at all, even if it is reliable and fast.
1 is insane for more than a two-drive array, as Joe Slashdotter is obviously more inclined to use RAID 5 and enjoy the increase in available space availed by having 3 or more similar discs and parity redundancy instead of literal redundancy.
Thanks for playing, Jeff. Let me know when you come back to reality.
Great, ok.
RAID in a laptop. For redundancy.
Now, class, everyone here should know that no sane form of RAID can withstand multiple-disc failure. Therefore, no sane person requires more than RAID 1 for redundancy purposes.
And RAID 1 is easy: Remove the CD-ROM from your laptop. Fab an adapter bracket and cable to connect a 2.5" hard drive. Insert into bay previously occupied by CD-ROM. Install requisite software drivers and configure the array appropriately.
Extra points if you find enough space to keep the CD-ROM internal. This might be facilitated by removing a floppy drive, or using fiberglass and resin to mold one or more protuding feet onto the bottom of the laptop within which are contained the componentry of the RAID array.
Snide remark:
Everyone knows that the WRT54G does not support 802.11a, but that doesn't somehow negate its usefulness 802.11b/g, does it?
And speaking of 802.11a: Proxim Harmony access points are something like $20. I'm not even going to bother with the math; it's absolutely fucking obvious that you can blanket an average business with them for $12k AND give two to every employee AND have enough spares that the technology will be replaced before the supply closet runs dry.
But it doesn't matter: I knew that you were full of shit as soon as you started going on about how cool the lights on this $12,000.00 smoke detector look. It is thus plainly obvious that you are a salesman, even if you think you're a journalist. (And if you think you're an engineer, you really need to switch careers. With your ability to sprew forth nonsensical bullshit, you'll be able to retire in no time.)
Feh.
Raid 5? In a single unit? Forget the fact that it's in a laptop - the mere notion of a RAID array in a single device is, itself, absurd.
You get all of the disadvantages of extra mechanical complication, along with none of the advantages (speed[1], or otherwise) of RAID.
Count me out.
[1]: See, it sounds like a good theory. But you'll get more speed by just using a single, larger-diameter disc than you will by using several smaller-diameter discs. If RPM is constant, and diameter increases, then so does linear velocity, and thus data rates. Etc, so on, so forth. Unless you're going to be using lots of independant discs, it's not advantageous. Oh, and it's a laptop, which is presumably meant to run on batteries at least some of the time. It's almost always more efficient to run one motor, than it is to run several of them, along with several sets of controller electronics, and several sets of head actuators, and...
I use Gentoo, you insatiable prick.
Oh; wait.
No, I use FreeBSD. That keeps me safe.
Er...
What I mean is that I use Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition on a Pentium-M with no-execute support. I'm sure that's safe.
No?
Oh, well.
Obvious, eh?
The patent describes a system which looks for excited speech, not loud sounds. (After all, in a modern TV broadcast, -every- sound is loud.)
Oh. You thought of that one, too?
Look, kid: I think it's rather original, and a bit cool, that I might be able to use a baseball announcer to allow my DVR to detect and skip boringness, automatically.
Retarding the state of the art? It seems, to me, that this is a step beyond the current state of this art. It therefore defines "state of the art".
You want to do something better? Improve their concept in some substantial fashion, and patent it yourself. That's why the USPTO exists, after all...
Patents aren't always horrible.
But I suppose you'd prefer the saying "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" to read something like "Build a better mousetrap and the competition will take it directly to the bank while laughing manaically".
Some day, it might be your mousetrap. And when that happens, I strongly suspect that you'd like to keep it yours.
The implication here is that Microsoft is piling up meaningless and obvious patents. Curious if this were the case, I picked the least meaningful-looking one, and read through the app: The Baseball Patent.
Now, I hate MSFT probably a bit more than most people here, but this patent actually a good idea. It describes a technique which allows a computer to automatically show you the important parts of a game, saving vast amounts of time watching batters meander about and pitchers scratching their ass.
The cool part, though, is its simplicity. Rather than learn the rules of the game and a vast array of human likes and dislikes, it just listens for an excited-sounding announcer and flags those parts as being important.
It seems that this technique could easily be applied to, and effectively remove boredom from, any other televised game (except for golf and billiards, which will always be boring).
It's not an obvious technique, and it's almost certainly unique and novel.
Why shouldn't ideas like this be awarded a patent?
Nice research. It means exactly dick, however.
Key words: "after the sun comes up"
How long after? Who knows! The posting didn't specify.
I never suggested that I wake up at sunrise, but merely that I typically wake up after it is no longer dark outside.
If you want to be a pedantic cocksucker, at least read the fucking words.
Thanks!
I wake up and eat breakfast in the morning (after the sun comes up).
I eat lunch at mid-day (when the sun is roughly over head).
I eat dinner in the evening (usually when the sun is starting to descend).
I go to sleep at night (after dark.)
Does it really matter if I wake up at 0000 isntead of 0800? Does dinner taste differently at 1900 than it does at 1100?
Curious.
Sure, you can model almost anything with almost anything else, as long as you've got the right math. But efficiency goes down the tubes.
For instance, I can make a shitty speaker in a bad room sound (mostly) like an awesome speaker in a good room using something like BruteFIR.
But, I lose system efficiency. To compensate for all the variables and deficiencies, one generally has to expend more amplifier power. Usually, it's a -lot- more. Often, it's more than is available or can be dissipated by the speaker. And nevermind the increased physical stress on the loudspeaker components themselves.
One runs out of dynamic range pretty quickly in this game.
So, you can do the same thing with an LCD, say, and remove ghosting as it happens. But, you will end up with a system with reduced contrast, and added time delay. (You have to correct for the ghost image -before- it actually happens. And if it's a black ghost on a white background, you'll need to correct it with a moment of something brighter-than-white. Which is impossible, unless you redefine white to be something closer to what would normally be grey, and are happy with the overall reduction in brightness in exchange for a lack of motion blur.)