So. You need to record 15 things, without using too many wires.
Yeah, it'd be neat to use VOIP protocols like h323 and g711. But they're not robust, at all, by design. In intended use, if a network glitch trounces on a VOIP-transmitted spoken word (which happens fairly often, in a delicate balancing act between latency and fidelity), the other party might say "Could you repeat that?" In a recording enviroment, you have no such capability; the glitch is forever.
Additionally, there are no facilities that I'm aware of in common use which permit synchronization of multiple h323 endpoints. In other words, this means that the longer you're recording, the less well-synched things become (if you even manage to get them synchronous to begin with). After a couple of hours, you could well end up several seconds off.
Oh. And the codecs aren't so hot, either. Think 8KHz sampling rate, 64kbit/second maximum bitrate, and uLaw encoding. This is fine for telephone audio, but not for a $25k gig.
Ok, so it's not so neat to use h323.
And, don't get me started on 802.11/a/b/g. You're a fool to use this stuff for anything serious, as things currently stand - especially something serious with hard bandwidth requirements.
Why not do the old-skool thang? Buy/borrow/rent/steal a pile of decent wireless mics. Use whatever your local pro sound rental house suggests after you engage them in conversation about what, exactly, you're attempting to do here.
There's only a few considerations with wireless mics:
Make sure you can actually rack a lot of the recievers near eachother - oftentimes, the tuners go apeshit when in close proximity to eachother. If in doubt, try it beforehand.
You don't want dropouts, but you -really- don't want to hear the 500,000W AM station a few miles down the road.
And, make sure you're using the correct mic for the application. Since you're so fucking vague, we've got no idea if you're recording a press conference, a touring band, or the mating rituals of the Australian wolfhound. (Do you even want anyone's help?)
Oh. And many wireless recievers include some fashion of high-level output, suitable for driving a tape machine directly. You can avoid mixer rentals by using gear in this way, if dollars are tight. (OTOH, if possible, a good console and headphones to tie everything together will save numerous headaches.)
Speaking of tape machines, you need some kind of recorder. You can use a PC and a multi-channel pro-oriented sound card, but they're relatively unreliable - especially on the move (which you may or may not be - it's impossible to read through your obfuscation).
Instead, try multitrack tape. You've heard of it before. Modern nomenclature tends to sound something like "ADAT" when spoken. Such machines are common, cheap, and come in 8-channel chunks. Which means that you'll need two of them, and a toslink cable to keep their clocks synched.
Alas, ADAT is limited to 45 minutes or so per tape. This may limit your possibilities, or it may just mean that you need four machines in linked pairs in order to switch seamlessly to a fresh set of tapes.
Whatever the case, don't reinvent the fucking wheel for one gig. This is -just- analog audio here, and only 15 channels of it, at that. Don't make it any harder than it should be, especially if it's detrimental to the work (see paragraphs 2, 3, and 4.) Furthermore, if you're having a hard time understanding anything I've written here, find someone else to do this project for you; you're simply unqualified.
I've built a portable rack, of the sort constructed with plastic-laminated ply, aluminum extrusions, stout handles and locking hasps. It was a reasonably fun project. I'll not do it again.
First, it was more expensive to buy a pile of parts than to purchase the same parts pre-assembled from Starcase, Anvil, or their kin.
Second, I had to put it together myself, excluding a not-insignificant amount of my life from other -- potentially more-fruitful -- ventures.
Third, Starcase-and-friends have the process down to a science. While I was futzing around trying to decide which type of pop rivet to use and fighting with bad tools and imperfect measurements, the professional box-builders would've been feeding stock through purpose-built jigs and making perfect components the first time around. They've got better assembly methods, better tooling, and better materials such as real, solid, steel rivets instead of hollow, aluminum pop rivets.
Another example of nearly-unavoidable material differences:
I used 1mm ABS plastic as an outer layer, laminated with contact cement, while the standard road case is covered in hard vacuum-laminated fiberglass. Why? Though these fiberglass laminates are readily available to us lay-folk, shipping 4x8 sheets of anything around the country involves freight charges such that the project would've been impossible to complete. Thin ABS can be rolled up and shipped UPS relatively cheaply, and applied to locally-sourced ply.)
So, don't build a rack, kids. Even if it seems like a good idea. It's cheaper, better, and faster to have a custom box built by someone who does it for a living than to go at it yourself.
TVs, being the finicky and almost magical devices that they are, require a good deal of setup at the factory to compensate (to some degree, at least) for component variances and such.
Cheap TVs, I'd surmise, have functional service menus as a result of the following occurances:
Remote controlled sets appeared, and became more complicated, adding microprocessors into the bag of previously-analog parts.
LED channel displays grew passe and of increasing relative expensive, adding a character generator to the microprocessor mix.
Pots became more expensive to install and calibrate than the electronic counterpart, and so (most) were replaced with said electronic widgets.
Once these bits are in place, everything else is just software, the duplication of which is probably without added cost. You'd see that the service mode on most sets is pretty minimal, looking almost an afterthought, if you've played with one at all.
It might be used in the final stages of assembly, and I'd guess that it can be a very valuable tool when doing post-mortems of dead-under-warranty TVs, eliminating the need to disassemble anything in a large number of cases.
Which is all to say that cheap sets have a service mode because it's cheaper that way.
I'm interested in the details of how you've accomplished this conversion. It must've been quite an undertaking.
I mean, let's assume that everything is undamaged and thus easily ripped/recorded. Let us also assume (probably generously) that 75% of your collection is on CD, and further that an average album is 45 minutes.
According to my math, that comes to a bit over 16 years of playback time, just for that 25% of the collection which has no CD counterpart, which seems a bit overwhelming.
(Nevermind that I'm splitting hairs. Or that this flicker usually occurs at fairly high frequency (400Hz comes to mind), because it's cheaper and more efficient. That this frequency makes the flicker rather a non-issue for human eyes is not important in a retort to your rather absolute "constant light" statement.)
Modern TVs have a service mode, which you'll be able to access on your model after a bit of googling (hint: try Usenet, too) for instructions.
On a JVC TV I had, I just had to simutaneously press two buttons ("Display" and "Video Status", IIRC) on the remote to produce a nice color menu of the plethora of configurable shit present in a recent TV. Geometry controls (is this what you're after when you speak of "overscan"?) are just the tip of the iceberg.
Sony TVs require a certain sequence of button-presses to be completed in a certain amount of time, as another example. Their menu is usually not quite as pretty as JVCs.
And I dare say that such features are nearly ubiquitous. The very cheap 19" Sanyo that I've got in the bedroom has a rather expansive array of configurable settings.
The potentiometers may be gone, but the software is there. You just have to find it... (and get a new more-clued repair shop, while you're at it.)
Sounds remarkably similar to FreeBSD 5's snapshot feature. I've used it with dump, with good results.
I started wondering if there's something like this for Linux, but then realized that there's just way too many different filesystems to add the feature in any meaningful, practical way.
Let's keep this in context, shall we, and suppose that I'm borrowing CDs from the library instead of books.
For example:
CDs, which I bring home, burn, and return later on the same day.
The library sends me no bill, because their goods have come back within the allotted time. Meanwhile, I've got a shiney new CD to listen to, for about $US 0.17 -- about half what a cheap, small cup of coffee costs.
Keep this example in mind, and then rephrase your rebuttal in more contextual way. Perhaps you'll appear more sensical.
It will become increasingly difficult to find and extract, on a gradual basis. This difficulty will be reflected in the market price for oil, as it happens. It may be that, eventually, oil will be more precious than gold.
But I'll say it again: Oil isn't going anywhere. Even if it's as scarce as diamonds, it will still be available in some amount. The cycles which produce oil have not ceased: Believe it or not, even our own decomposing corpses will someday become a small puddle of crude.
It is not as if, 75 years from this moment, all oil will instantaneosly cease to exist. Instead, as the price of crude increases, our reliance on it will automatically decrease.
At some point, it will become more economically viable to drive an electric car which is plugged into a wind-powered grid than something which burns dinosaurs.
At the same point, there will plenty of oil left for manufacturing of the requisite wind machines, albeit at somewhat-elevated expense.
As the price continues to increase, other alternatives for crude will become apparent.
Another example:
We make consumer merchandise out of plastic because it's cheaper than other materials. And we make those plastics from crude because it's cheaper than other materials. When oil becomes so expensive that it's cheaper to make goods out of, say, hemp or soy, then that's what the market will direct companies and consumers to do.
An example in reverse:
Aluminum used to be amazingly valuable stuff, due to the difficulty in consolidating it. A big chunk of it tops the Washington Mounument, mostly for this reason. Nowadays, it's cheap enough to throw away after one finishes a can of Coke without thinking much of it, just as one currently burns through 20 gallons of gasoline without a second thought.
This isn't rocket science, nor does it take a PhD in microeconomics to understand and forecast these issues.
The market, with its greedy corporations and frugal consumers, will take care of the "oil problem" just fine by itself.
We've even got a distribution network in-place already for the prizes: The public school fund-raiser companies!
One ought to be able to get at least a 50-cent coloring book and a set of Hello Kitty stickers out of a couple of weeks worth of XP 2100. And of course, every kid who shows up to the meetings gets a free box of Cracker Jacks, even if they've only got a 386.
I can see this proven, time-tested business model working quite marvelously.
You own a modem. Someone updated its software, without you ever agreeing that to let them. That it happened to be a bad "upgrade" is not important -- it's indisputably yours and indisputably on your property, and they fucked with it. Bad cable provider.
You're owed at least the cost of repair/replacement of your modem, and any rental fees you've been charged to that point. In addition, you're due whatever reasonable expenses you incur in claiming these things that you're owed (lawyers, court fees).
If you want, it'd be reasonable to ask for some token for the time you were forced to waste in dealing with this abuse of your personal property. Given the somewhat vague value of an individual's time, you might as well ask for something else that is of vague cost to them - something like n months of service for free, or somesuch other reasonable thing.
Of course, IANAL, I've never even been to the UK, YMMV, caveat emptor, etc.
We get better performance from everything. Rotational speed (latency, throughput), interface improvements (maximum throughput, CPU efficiency), media density (throughput, physical size), bearing longevity (a wobbly disk is a slow disk), and well as incrementally better filesystems -- to name a few.
Which part of the term "storage system" do you not understand? There's a whole slew of component variables, none of which will ever be honed to perfection.
Realize that if you're operating the car correctly (RTFM lately?), you'll pause long enough with the key in the "On" position to observe the function of the dash lights, before starting the car. Motherboards that POST and get on with loading the boot sector in less than a second are not uncommon, as of late.
And Linux, on such specialized, limited machine would boot -fast-. Which means that chances are good that the thing will be at a mid-point in the boot process by the time the box gets killed by the starter.
And don't tell me that you've never switched your car on and listened to the radio/talked to a friend/finished a phone call for a moment before starting it.
But that's not the point, either.
The point is about building a reliable system. I -never- want to be faced with debugging my car's embedded PC during a vacation, just because I got distracted by an attractive girl and missed the window of opportunity for starting the car.
That said:
Even if a cap would solve any of these issues I raised (and I don't think it will, though it will tend to lessen them), the problem is hardly that they're difficult and expensive to come by:
These 100,000 microfarad, 15VDC caps can easily be wired in parallel - and we all know that multiple parallel caps are generally better for current peaks than larger, monolothic caps. At $39.50 per high-current Farad, they're hardly expensive. And the same place has stocked them for many years, making them rather easy to get.
WTF is an iDisk? Can iUse it from my iMac? Over the iNet? What about my iPod, or my girlfriend's iRiver? Will it make my iBook any faster?
iAsked my two-year-old what she thought it might be (iGuessed she might be within the target demographic), but she just said "iKnooow," and refused to divulge anything further.
Marginal. Current CD-R blanks are injection-molded or stamped with a nice spiral groove. They are then coated with dye, covered in aluminum, and sprayed with laquer. Four steps.
Just like...mass-produced music and software CDs are injection-molded or stamped with a nice spiral groove, plus pits containing data. They are then covered in aluminum, and sprayed with laquer. Three steps.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make a mold that has the first session of a multi-session disc, followed by an empty groove. Dye it, plate it, and paint it. Four steps.
You suggest using a fifth step to burn the requisite data onto a conventional CD-R. I'd like to suggest that this is impractical and expensive, and that you might want to think about it for awhile longer.
Capacity:
So what? It's free capacity, anyway. Would you rather have precisely nil free space, as is now the case?
Compatibility:
It will look like a multi-session CD-R. It will feel like a multi-session CD-R. It will act like a multi-session CD-R. This stuff has been documented and stable since sometime in the early 90s.
Kodak does it with their current line of PictureCD products in the 1-Hour Photo nearest you, on commodity hardware just like you have at home. They come from Kodak with the program data already on the disc, and the lab adds a pile of JPEGs.
They did it in the early 90s, too, with their CD-R-based PhotoCD line. Old hat, this.
Software compatibility:
Well, sure: CD-RW would be nice, and expensive. But since most "software" issues with burning are the result of idiots hitting "cancel" and buffer underruns, I submit the following:
1) I don't know of any burning software in common use which allows one to make a bad burn. Yeah, it's easy with mkisofs|cdrecord, but the commandline junkies using those tools directly are generally sufficiently clued as to be able to prevent this sort of badness from occuring.
2) Idiots of the sort who think they can "cancel" a one-time burn are used to being fucked over, in all matters of life. Such a format will not help them become less stupid, nor will it help them win the lottery or have sex with a beautiful woman. Oh well.
3) Burnproof and its non-Sanyo ilk put the buffer-underrun issue to bed some time ago.
4) If trashed TOCs ever really becomes a legitimate issue, a market for software to repair or restore such discs will surface. Some bright young lad from Idaho will make a few bucks selling shareware licenses for it to supplement his potato-digging income, before Roxio decides to have their stab at it.
And: consoles? With burners? That'll be the day...
I recall the same argument some years ago, about CD-R vs. floppies (or was it zip discs, Jaz, LS-120, Bernouli, Syquest, MD-Data, Floptical, WORM, QIC-80, those funky crystalized 2.88-meg discs that only worked in PS/2s, or...). But since there was a massive installed base of CD-ROM readers, it was pretty obvious which format was going to take hold.
Strange, how history repeats.
Assuming the trend holds true: On March 10, Plextor will begun shipping DVD burners, for about a hundred bucks less than I paid for an 8x CD-R from the same company (which, FYI, is still working flawlessly). DVD media prices currently are comparable to what I paid back then for CD-R blanks. New computers ship with the ability to read DVDs, almost as a rule.
Five years? Naah. Things are stable enough right now. In five years, all that will change is speed (you think ATA-133 and U320 are fast? Ha!), price (cheaper than peanuts), and availability (to be available in every 7-11 in the world).
Your definition of "maturity" seems mean the same thing as everyone else's defintion of "elderly." Get with it, man.
As far as I can tell, Kodak is doing the supposedly-new "CDR-ROM" thing with their PictureCD blanks, and has been probably since the format's inception.
They come on spindles of 50, with program data visibly already on the disc. JPEG-formatted pictures are written to the next session. Since the volume of PictureCDs consumed daily is enormous, this program data is almost certainly stamped or molded into the disc during manufacture.
Sadly, unlike the PhotoCD format, this is where the multisession goodness stops (at least with the Kodak-approved software we use at work). Any attempt to put more photos on the disc after the initial burn results in nothing but an error.
Ah, well. The low-res JPEGs on a PictureCD are a far cry from the high-res lossless PhotoCD images of yesteryear, anyhow.
Most modern hard drives (particularly the 2.5" variety, as used in laptops) are able to survive shocks that will damage many humans.
That said, if riding in the car doesn't hurt you, a new(ish) hard drive should be OK, too.
Temperature extremes are another thing, but they're generally able to survive a hot day. Cold is worse - the grease in the bearings will be more viscous, and increase wear on startup; not to mention the trouble of condensation.
Motherboards, on the other hand, are solid-state. There's no functional moving parts. Which is to say that they're largely not affected by vibration or shock.
I suppose it'd be -possible- to shake a poorly-situated AGP card loose, but overall I'd suggest that spending a few years securely mounted in a car would be far less traumatic than a single cross-country trip by UPS Ground.
Clearly. There's nothing wrong with using the battery as a source of current.
But there's a lot more to the system than just a battery, and things turn way fucking different when the car is running. The alternator will generally float the battery at around 14.4V, and the system is not generally able to cope with dynamic loads very quickly - particularly at idle.
And before anyone starts saying that a PC is not a dynamic load, allow me to state that it doesn't matter: There's a plethora of other things in a modern car that present anything but a constant load, and they also connect to the battery.
Try this: Start your car, at night. Switch on the headlights. Observe their brightness. Switch on the rear defroster. Observe how the lights dim, however briefly they do it. Now switch the heater blower to high. Observe how the lights dim again.
This might be stiff enough voltage for quality audio reproduction, but even that is the subject of much debate.
Aftermarket folks have a tendancy to use fairly large capacitors, coincidentally along with a length of wire (read: resistor) to help with these problems, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to do the same with a PC. But is it enough? Analog audio equipment isn't easily damaged by low voltage (things just sound a bit worse, generally), but a modern computer would seem to portray a somewhat different set of needs.
Having seen PCs with quality switching power supplies (read: so tolerant of variable voltage that they rely on it to operate) go into spastic fits from slight brownouts, I submit that a "12 volt" automotive power system is a completely inappropriate means of providing juice for commodity PCs, without a lot of help.
And even once this problem is solved, one must face the issue of how to deal with the issue of doing a clean shutdown when the starter runs, which indisputably causes huge voltage swings that you just don't want a live PC to experience.
It's easy enough kill power to the PC when the key is in the "start" position, but suppose it's a cold morning, you really should've gotten that tuneup 50k miles ago, and things don't fire up immediately.
Crank, crank, crank, whine, whine, click. Cuss, swear, release the key (returning it to "on"), and the PC boots up. After waiting a bit for the starter to cool, turn key back to start, and the PC shuts off immediately. Crank some more, wait some more, PC boots up again. Observe the action of your car stereo while starting your car for an easy hands-on demonstration.
Can anyone really trust EXT3, ReiserFS, softupdates, or journaled NTFS to be able to cope with this random abuse? A simple startup delay (think R, C, and a relay) won't fix it, either.
There's several real advantages over anything consisting of just the simple PCI audio card that many others have suggested:
The converters are outboard, you get an automatic backup of your work for the cost of a VHS tape, the converters are outboard, it can operate independantly of a PC, the converters are outboard, and it's easy to use while intoxicated.
Did I mention that the converters are outboard?
Oh. You also get complete electrical isolation from the RFI monster that is a PC, which will help prevent your mic preamps from picking up seti@home via the temporary wiring disaster that comes along with any recording project.
Just plug it in with toslink. RME cards are supposed to have good support under ALSA. I've used a Lexicon Core2 (under...another OS) with good results.
You also need a bunch of mics, and mic preamps of some variety. I used to use a 24x8 Tascam console before dropping the studio. It served mostly as a big pile of mic preamps with handy signal routing, though I do admit to mixing some things to 2-channel DAT, sans PC, and having a great deal of fun in the process.
Mixer, mic, and preamp selection is a topic of endless debate, so I'll leave it at that, except for one final note:
Ebay is the poor musician's friend. Just because most of this gear is usually fairly expensive, doesn't mean that it must be so.
I bought OS/2 Warp 3.0 (red) from Best Buy, some months before the introduction of Win95. They had a good amount of shelf space dedicated to it, and it was in a fairly prominent spot.
We all know what happened to that product.
Now you're telling me that they did the same thing to BeOS?
Of course! Now it all makes sense.
So it must be official: *Linux is dying, because of Best Buy.
Slashdot Mirror
So. You need to record 15 things, without using too many wires.
Yeah, it'd be neat to use VOIP protocols like h323 and g711. But they're not robust, at all, by design. In intended use, if a network glitch trounces on a VOIP-transmitted spoken word (which happens fairly often, in a delicate balancing act between latency and fidelity), the other party might say "Could you repeat that?" In a recording enviroment, you have no such capability; the glitch is forever.
Additionally, there are no facilities that I'm aware of in common use which permit synchronization of multiple h323 endpoints. In other words, this means that the longer you're recording, the less well-synched things become (if you even manage to get them synchronous to begin with). After a couple of hours, you could well end up several seconds off.
Oh. And the codecs aren't so hot, either. Think 8KHz sampling rate, 64kbit/second maximum bitrate, and uLaw encoding. This is fine for telephone audio, but not for a $25k gig.
Ok, so it's not so neat to use h323.
And, don't get me started on 802.11/a/b/g. You're a fool to use this stuff for anything serious, as things currently stand - especially something serious with hard bandwidth requirements.
Why not do the old-skool thang? Buy/borrow/rent/steal a pile of decent wireless mics. Use whatever your local pro sound rental house suggests after you engage them in conversation about what, exactly, you're attempting to do here.
There's only a few considerations with wireless mics:
Make sure you can actually rack a lot of the recievers near eachother - oftentimes, the tuners go apeshit when in close proximity to eachother. If in doubt, try it beforehand.
You don't want dropouts, but you -really- don't want to hear the 500,000W AM station a few miles down the road.
And, make sure you're using the correct mic for the application. Since you're so fucking vague, we've got no idea if you're recording a press conference, a touring band, or the mating rituals of the Australian wolfhound. (Do you even want anyone's help?)
Oh. And many wireless recievers include some fashion of high-level output, suitable for driving a tape machine directly. You can avoid mixer rentals by using gear in this way, if dollars are tight. (OTOH, if possible, a good console and headphones to tie everything together will save numerous headaches.)
Speaking of tape machines, you need some kind of recorder. You can use a PC and a multi-channel pro-oriented sound card, but they're relatively unreliable - especially on the move (which you may or may not be - it's impossible to read through your obfuscation).
Instead, try multitrack tape. You've heard of it before. Modern nomenclature tends to sound something like "ADAT" when spoken. Such machines are common, cheap, and come in 8-channel chunks. Which means that you'll need two of them, and a toslink cable to keep their clocks synched.
Alas, ADAT is limited to 45 minutes or so per tape. This may limit your possibilities, or it may just mean that you need four machines in linked pairs in order to switch seamlessly to a fresh set of tapes.
Whatever the case, don't reinvent the fucking wheel for one gig. This is -just- analog audio here, and only 15 channels of it, at that. Don't make it any harder than it should be, especially if it's detrimental to the work (see paragraphs 2, 3, and 4.) Furthermore, if you're having a hard time understanding anything I've written here, find someone else to do this project for you; you're simply unqualified.
I've built a portable rack, of the sort constructed with plastic-laminated ply, aluminum extrusions, stout handles and locking hasps. It was a reasonably fun project. I'll not do it again.
First, it was more expensive to buy a pile of parts than to purchase the same parts pre-assembled from Starcase, Anvil, or their kin.
Second, I had to put it together myself, excluding a not-insignificant amount of my life from other -- potentially more-fruitful -- ventures.
Third, Starcase-and-friends have the process down to a science. While I was futzing around trying to decide which type of pop rivet to use and fighting with bad tools and imperfect measurements, the professional box-builders would've been feeding stock through purpose-built jigs and making perfect components the first time around. They've got better assembly methods, better tooling, and better materials such as real, solid, steel rivets instead of hollow, aluminum pop rivets.
Another example of nearly-unavoidable material differences:
I used 1mm ABS plastic as an outer layer, laminated with contact cement, while the standard road case is covered in hard vacuum-laminated fiberglass. Why? Though these fiberglass laminates are readily available to us lay-folk, shipping 4x8 sheets of anything around the country involves freight charges such that the project would've been impossible to complete. Thin ABS can be rolled up and shipped UPS relatively cheaply, and applied to locally-sourced ply.)
So, don't build a rack, kids. Even if it seems like a good idea. It's cheaper, better, and faster to have a custom box built by someone who does it for a living than to go at it yourself.
TVs, being the finicky and almost magical devices that they are, require a good deal of setup at the factory to compensate (to some degree, at least) for component variances and such.
Cheap TVs, I'd surmise, have functional service menus as a result of the following occurances:
Remote controlled sets appeared, and became more complicated, adding microprocessors into the bag of previously-analog parts.
LED channel displays grew passe and of increasing relative expensive, adding a character generator to the microprocessor mix.
Pots became more expensive to install and calibrate than the electronic counterpart, and so (most) were replaced with said electronic widgets.
Once these bits are in place, everything else is just software, the duplication of which is probably without added cost. You'd see that the service mode on most sets is pretty minimal, looking almost an afterthought, if you've played with one at all.
It might be used in the final stages of assembly, and I'd guess that it can be a very valuable tool when doing post-mortems of dead-under-warranty TVs, eliminating the need to disassemble anything in a large number of cases.
Which is all to say that cheap sets have a service mode because it's cheaper that way.
750,000 albums?
I'm interested in the details of how you've accomplished this conversion. It must've been quite an undertaking.
I mean, let's assume that everything is undamaged and thus easily ripped/recorded. Let us also assume (probably generously) that 75% of your collection is on CD, and further that an average album is 45 minutes.
According to my math, that comes to a bit over 16 years of playback time, just for that 25% of the collection which has no CD counterpart, which seems a bit overwhelming.
So: How?
LCDs use a flourescent backlight, driven by high-voltage AC.
AC-driven flourescent lights flicker. Therefore, LCDs flicker.
(Nevermind that I'm splitting hairs. Or that this flicker usually occurs at fairly high frequency (400Hz comes to mind), because it's cheaper and more efficient. That this frequency makes the flicker rather a non-issue for human eyes is not important in a retort to your rather absolute "constant light" statement.)
Modern TVs have a service mode, which you'll be able to access on your model after a bit of googling (hint: try Usenet, too) for instructions.
On a JVC TV I had, I just had to simutaneously press two buttons ("Display" and "Video Status", IIRC) on the remote to produce a nice color menu of the plethora of configurable shit present in a recent TV. Geometry controls (is this what you're after when you speak of "overscan"?) are just the tip of the iceberg.
Sony TVs require a certain sequence of button-presses to be completed in a certain amount of time, as another example. Their menu is usually not quite as pretty as JVCs.
And I dare say that such features are nearly ubiquitous. The very cheap 19" Sanyo that I've got in the bedroom has a rather expansive array of configurable settings.
The potentiometers may be gone, but the software is there. You just have to find it... (and get a new more-clued repair shop, while you're at it.)
Sounds remarkably similar to FreeBSD 5's snapshot feature. I've used it with dump, with good results.
I started wondering if there's something like this for Linux, but then realized that there's just way too many different filesystems to add the feature in any meaningful, practical way.
Let's keep this in context, shall we, and suppose that I'm borrowing CDs from the library instead of books.
For example:
CDs, which I bring home, burn, and return later on the same day.
The library sends me no bill, because their goods have come back within the allotted time. Meanwhile, I've got a shiney new CD to listen to, for about $US 0.17 -- about half what a cheap, small cup of coffee costs.
Keep this example in mind, and then rephrase your rebuttal in more contextual way. Perhaps you'll appear more sensical.
Oil isn't going anywhere.
It will become increasingly difficult to find and extract, on a gradual basis. This difficulty will be reflected in the market price for oil, as it happens. It may be that, eventually, oil will be more precious than gold.
But I'll say it again: Oil isn't going anywhere. Even if it's as scarce as diamonds, it will still be available in some amount. The cycles which produce oil have not ceased: Believe it or not, even our own decomposing corpses will someday become a small puddle of crude.
It is not as if, 75 years from this moment, all oil will instantaneosly cease to exist. Instead, as the price of crude increases, our reliance on it will automatically decrease.
At some point, it will become more economically viable to drive an electric car which is plugged into a wind-powered grid than something which burns dinosaurs.
At the same point, there will plenty of oil left for manufacturing of the requisite wind machines, albeit at somewhat-elevated expense.
As the price continues to increase, other alternatives for crude will become apparent.
Another example:
We make consumer merchandise out of plastic because it's cheaper than other materials. And we make those plastics from crude because it's cheaper than other materials. When oil becomes so expensive that it's cheaper to make goods out of, say, hemp or soy, then that's what the market will direct companies and consumers to do.
An example in reverse:
Aluminum used to be amazingly valuable stuff, due to the difficulty in consolidating it. A big chunk of it tops the Washington Mounument, mostly for this reason. Nowadays, it's cheap enough to throw away after one finishes a can of Coke without thinking much of it, just as one currently burns through 20 gallons of gasoline without a second thought.
This isn't rocket science, nor does it take a PhD in microeconomics to understand and forecast these issues.
The market, with its greedy corporations and frugal consumers, will take care of the "oil problem" just fine by itself.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Extron is to video gear as Blackbox is to networking gear.
They have something that will do what you want. Dig on their page, or give them a call and talk to one of their reps.
Sure.
We've even got a distribution network in-place already for the prizes: The public school fund-raiser companies!
One ought to be able to get at least a 50-cent coloring book and a set of Hello Kitty stickers out of a couple of weeks worth of XP 2100. And of course, every kid who shows up to the meetings gets a free box of Cracker Jacks, even if they've only got a 386.
I can see this proven, time-tested business model working quite marvelously.
Wouldn't that be nice.
I'd love to give JWZ proper attribution, but it seems that Slashdot's sig length limit is so pathetically small that it just won't fucking fit.
You own a modem. Someone updated its software, without you ever agreeing that to let them. That it happened to be a bad "upgrade" is not important -- it's indisputably yours and indisputably on your property, and they fucked with it. Bad cable provider.
You're owed at least the cost of repair/replacement of your modem, and any rental fees you've been charged to that point. In addition, you're due whatever reasonable expenses you incur in claiming these things that you're owed (lawyers, court fees).
If you want, it'd be reasonable to ask for some token for the time you were forced to waste in dealing with this abuse of your personal property. Given the somewhat vague value of an individual's time, you might as well ask for something else that is of vague cost to them - something like n months of service for free, or somesuch other reasonable thing.
Of course, IANAL, I've never even been to the UK, YMMV, caveat emptor, etc.
Good luck.
We get better performance from everything. Rotational speed (latency, throughput), interface improvements (maximum throughput, CPU efficiency), media density (throughput, physical size), bearing longevity (a wobbly disk is a slow disk), and well as incrementally better filesystems -- to name a few.
Which part of the term "storage system" do you not understand? There's a whole slew of component variables, none of which will ever be honed to perfection.
1. Buy said mini-CD player from Best Buy.
2. Disassemble; make note of component manufacturers and part numbers. Call said manufacturer(s) for sample(s).
3. Reassemble. Return unit to Best Buy for a refund.
Well, you missed the point, but that's OK.
Realize that if you're operating the car correctly (RTFM lately?), you'll pause long enough with the key in the "On" position to observe the function of the dash lights, before starting the car. Motherboards that POST and get on with loading the boot sector in less than a second are not uncommon, as of late.
And Linux, on such specialized, limited machine would boot -fast-. Which means that chances are good that the thing will be at a mid-point in the boot process by the time the box gets killed by the starter.
And don't tell me that you've never switched your car on and listened to the radio/talked to a friend/finished a phone call for a moment before starting it.
But that's not the point, either.
The point is about building a reliable system. I -never- want to be faced with debugging my car's embedded PC during a vacation, just because I got distracted by an attractive girl and missed the window of opportunity for starting the car.
That said:
Even if a cap would solve any of these issues I raised (and I don't think it will, though it will tend to lessen them), the problem is hardly that they're difficult and expensive to come by:
These 100,000 microfarad, 15VDC caps can easily be wired in parallel - and we all know that multiple parallel caps are generally better for current peaks than larger, monolothic caps. At $39.50 per high-current Farad, they're hardly expensive. And the same place has stocked them for many years, making them rather easy to get.
WTF is an iDisk? Can iUse it from my iMac? Over the iNet? What about my iPod, or my girlfriend's iRiver? Will it make my iBook any faster?
iAsked my two-year-old what she thought it might be (iGuessed she might be within the target demographic), but she just said "iKnooow," and refused to divulge anything further.
DiDN'7 W3 PU7 THiS 70 B3D iN THE EiGHTiES?
At least, iThought we did...
Manufacturing cost:
Marginal. Current CD-R blanks are injection-molded or stamped with a nice spiral groove. They are then coated with dye, covered in aluminum, and sprayed with laquer. Four steps.
Just like...mass-produced music and software CDs are injection-molded or stamped with a nice spiral groove, plus pits containing data. They are then covered in aluminum, and sprayed with laquer. Three steps.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make a mold that has the first session of a multi-session disc, followed by an empty groove. Dye it, plate it, and paint it. Four steps.
You suggest using a fifth step to burn the requisite data onto a conventional CD-R. I'd like to suggest that this is impractical and expensive, and that you might want to think about it for awhile longer.
Capacity:
So what? It's free capacity, anyway. Would you rather have precisely nil free space, as is now the case?
Compatibility:
It will look like a multi-session CD-R. It will feel like a multi-session CD-R. It will act like a multi-session CD-R. This stuff has been documented and stable since sometime in the early 90s.
Kodak does it with their current line of PictureCD products in the 1-Hour Photo nearest you, on commodity hardware just like you have at home. They come from Kodak with the program data already on the disc, and the lab adds a pile of JPEGs.
They did it in the early 90s, too, with their CD-R-based PhotoCD line. Old hat, this.
Software compatibility:
Well, sure: CD-RW would be nice, and expensive. But since most "software" issues with burning are the result of idiots hitting "cancel" and buffer underruns, I submit the following:
1) I don't know of any burning software in common use which allows one to make a bad burn. Yeah, it's easy with mkisofs|cdrecord, but the commandline junkies using those tools directly are generally sufficiently clued as to be able to prevent this sort of badness from occuring.
2) Idiots of the sort who think they can "cancel" a one-time burn are used to being fucked over, in all matters of life. Such a format will not help them become less stupid, nor will it help them win the lottery or have sex with a beautiful woman. Oh well.
3) Burnproof and its non-Sanyo ilk put the buffer-underrun issue to bed some time ago.
4) If trashed TOCs ever really becomes a legitimate issue, a market for software to repair or restore such discs will surface. Some bright young lad from Idaho will make a few bucks selling shareware licenses for it to supplement his potato-digging income, before Roxio decides to have their stab at it.
And: consoles? With burners? That'll be the day...
I recall the same argument some years ago, about CD-R vs. floppies (or was it zip discs, Jaz, LS-120, Bernouli, Syquest, MD-Data, Floptical, WORM, QIC-80, those funky crystalized 2.88-meg discs that only worked in PS/2s, or...). But since there was a massive installed base of CD-ROM readers, it was pretty obvious which format was going to take hold.
Strange, how history repeats.
Assuming the trend holds true: On March 10, Plextor will begun shipping DVD burners, for about a hundred bucks less than I paid for an 8x CD-R from the same company (which, FYI, is still working flawlessly). DVD media prices currently are comparable to what I paid back then for CD-R blanks. New computers ship with the ability to read DVDs, almost as a rule.
Five years? Naah. Things are stable enough right now. In five years, all that will change is speed (you think ATA-133 and U320 are fast? Ha!), price (cheaper than peanuts), and availability (to be available in every 7-11 in the world).
Your definition of "maturity" seems mean the same thing as everyone else's defintion of "elderly." Get with it, man.
As far as I can tell, Kodak is doing the supposedly-new "CDR-ROM" thing with their PictureCD blanks, and has been probably since the format's inception.
They come on spindles of 50, with program data visibly already on the disc. JPEG-formatted pictures are written to the next session. Since the volume of PictureCDs consumed daily is enormous, this program data is almost certainly stamped or molded into the disc during manufacture.
Sadly, unlike the PhotoCD format, this is where the multisession goodness stops (at least with the Kodak-approved software we use at work). Any attempt to put more photos on the disc after the initial burn results in nothing but an error.
Ah, well. The low-res JPEGs on a PictureCD are a far cry from the high-res lossless PhotoCD images of yesteryear, anyhow.
Most modern hard drives (particularly the 2.5" variety, as used in laptops) are able to survive shocks that will damage many humans.
That said, if riding in the car doesn't hurt you, a new(ish) hard drive should be OK, too.
Temperature extremes are another thing, but they're generally able to survive a hot day. Cold is worse - the grease in the bearings will be more viscous, and increase wear on startup; not to mention the trouble of condensation.
Motherboards, on the other hand, are solid-state. There's no functional moving parts. Which is to say that they're largely not affected by vibration or shock.
I suppose it'd be -possible- to shake a poorly-situated AGP card loose, but overall I'd suggest that spending a few years securely mounted in a car would be far less traumatic than a single cross-country trip by UPS Ground.
Clearly. There's nothing wrong with using the battery as a source of current.
But there's a lot more to the system than just a battery, and things turn way fucking different when the car is running. The alternator will generally float the battery at around 14.4V, and the system is not generally able to cope with dynamic loads very quickly - particularly at idle.
And before anyone starts saying that a PC is not a dynamic load, allow me to state that it doesn't matter: There's a plethora of other things in a modern car that present anything but a constant load, and they also connect to the battery.
Try this: Start your car, at night. Switch on the headlights. Observe their brightness. Switch on the rear defroster. Observe how the lights dim, however briefly they do it. Now switch the heater blower to high. Observe how the lights dim again.
This might be stiff enough voltage for quality audio reproduction, but even that is the subject of much debate.
Aftermarket folks have a tendancy to use fairly large capacitors, coincidentally along with a length of wire (read: resistor) to help with these problems, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to do the same with a PC. But is it enough? Analog audio equipment isn't easily damaged by low voltage (things just sound a bit worse, generally), but a modern computer would seem to portray a somewhat different set of needs.
Having seen PCs with quality switching power supplies (read: so tolerant of variable voltage that they rely on it to operate) go into spastic fits from slight brownouts, I submit that a "12 volt" automotive power system is a completely inappropriate means of providing juice for commodity PCs, without a lot of help.
And even once this problem is solved, one must face the issue of how to deal with the issue of doing a clean shutdown when the starter runs, which indisputably causes huge voltage swings that you just don't want a live PC to experience.
It's easy enough kill power to the PC when the key is in the "start" position, but suppose it's a cold morning, you really should've gotten that tuneup 50k miles ago, and things don't fire up immediately.
Crank, crank, crank, whine, whine, click. Cuss, swear, release the key (returning it to "on"), and the PC boots up. After waiting a bit for the starter to cool, turn key back to start, and the PC shuts off immediately. Crank some more, wait some more, PC boots up again. Observe the action of your car stereo while starting your car for an easy hands-on demonstration.
Can anyone really trust EXT3, ReiserFS, softupdates, or journaled NTFS to be able to cope with this random abuse? A simple startup delay (think R, C, and a relay) won't fix it, either.
People will hate me for saying this, but:
ADAT.
There's several real advantages over anything consisting of just the simple PCI audio card that many others have suggested:
The converters are outboard, you get an automatic backup of your work for the cost of a VHS tape, the converters are outboard, it can operate independantly of a PC, the converters are outboard, and it's easy to use while intoxicated.
Did I mention that the converters are outboard?
Oh. You also get complete electrical isolation from the RFI monster that is a PC, which will help prevent your mic preamps from picking up seti@home via the temporary wiring disaster that comes along with any recording project.
Just plug it in with toslink. RME cards are supposed to have good support under ALSA. I've used a Lexicon Core2 (under...another OS) with good results.
You also need a bunch of mics, and mic preamps of some variety. I used to use a 24x8 Tascam console before dropping the studio. It served mostly as a big pile of mic preamps with handy signal routing, though I do admit to mixing some things to 2-channel DAT, sans PC, and having a great deal of fun in the process.
Mixer, mic, and preamp selection is a topic of endless debate, so I'll leave it at that, except for one final note:
Ebay is the poor musician's friend. Just because most of this gear is usually fairly expensive, doesn't mean that it must be so.
Have you heard of SSL?
If you want things to be secure, encrypt. This goes for any medium, whether cabled or wireless.
I bought OS/2 Warp 3.0 (red) from Best Buy, some months before the introduction of Win95. They had a good amount of shelf space dedicated to it, and it was in a fairly prominent spot.
We all know what happened to that product.
Now you're telling me that they did the same thing to BeOS?
Of course! Now it all makes sense.
So it must be official: *Linux is dying, because of Best Buy.