Odd times that you recall, with your $3-4/blank assertion. In an attempt to aid the accuracy of this historic record, I submit the following:
When I bought my 8x Plextor CD-R (note lack of W suffix), for ~$400, within hours of it hitting the distributors' warehouses, there was only two other 8x burners on the market: One from Smart & Friendly, and another from...some other high-end competitor to Plextor whose name escapes me. Yamaha, IIRC, took several months to catch up.
By this time, media was already into the $1 range for generic blanks, and a bit more for higher-quality media. Even Kodak 8x media -- the only 8x-rated media at that time -- sold for $2/ea in jewel cases. I also distinctly recall the sting of paying for 150 very dear TDK "any speed" media, spindled, at $1.50 each, a couple of months later.
Nevermind that it wasn't until a few more months after that (say, a year after the I picked up the Plextor) that 8x writers landed in the $200 category. By that time, media was commonly 50 cents.
It's been years, though. Times have changed.
Now, it's all quite silly. I recently paid $17 for 100 generic, unbranded blanks at a local department store, and each of these $0.17 discs seem to work as well in testing as the few remaining $1.50 TDK blanks I have around. I've been putting them into 128-disc Caselogic folders, which I picked up on sale at the same store for $7 each.
DVD-R media is currently under $2. I suspect that within the next year, that price will halve. At that time, you'll begin seeing both drives and media begin to fly off of the shelves.
It won't be long after that before you'lll notice places like 7-11 replacing their peg-hook of 3.5" floppies with DVD-R media, right next to the CD-Rs which have already been there for years and the 3-packs of dusty condoms, as just another staple of modern life.
If you're really quite serious about A/D quality, look into using an external box for the task. Midiman makes a couple of different, well-performing 24-bit models, and they occasionally pop up on Ebay. Or, you could pick up a nice pawnshop/Ebay DAT or Minidisc deck, and use that.
Not that you need 24 bits to transcribe vinyl, but it does help ensure that you'll not run out of headroom. Later in the process, you can normalize the audio and truncate or dither it down to 16, while preserving every nuance of the album's pops, ticks, and surface hiss.
Plug a box like this into a sound card's SP/DIF input. The stupider, cheaper, more DSP-phobic cards will generally be more likely to do a bit-perfect job of this, such as the $12 Zoltrix Nighingale or other CMI8738-based cards. Along the same lines, do try to avoid anything branded Creative Labs, mmkay? They've got bad habits like irrevocable resampling, and are noisy throughout (even when only doing strictly "digital" things with SP/DIF IO).
That said:
I used to play engineer for a streamed talk radio show. Equipment was limited to the gear in a small project recording studio, none of which was intended for broadcast use, aside from the scrap-built Linux box running liveice and lame.
Since this box needed a sound card, I drove over to the nearest white-box OEM parts dealer and started looking. I picked a YMF744-based (XG) PCI card from AOpen, similar to this one, based primarily on the component count: It was the only card under $50 which was not branded Creative, and appeared to have reasonable analog filter stages and signal paths.
It turns out that this card, along with other Yamaha XG cards, has superb support under ALSA, and that the quality of the converters is not bad.
The control of the card was such that I was able to calibrate it to the output meters on the Tascam console, and monitor the program via digital loopback through its own DAC at 0 gain.
I could then push a button on the console, and switch between monitoring the signal in its original analog state, or after it'd been through a ADC->DAC stage without worrying that varying levels would skew my perception.
In the (somewhat noisy) enviroment I was in, I could hear no difference in overall quality with or without the Aopen card in-line. This cheap sound card was, in a word, transparent, at least for my purposes. Which is all I can ask of any sound card.
ALSA made this easy, but I suspect I'd have trouble doing things so precisely under other operating systems.
But I've noticed that not all XG-based cards are made the same. Hoontech sells, or at least sold a year or two ago, some expensive studio-oriented monstrosities which doubtless sound beautiful. On the other end of things, I've heard some laptops with XG chips which sounded horrible.
Lately, I've been recording my 2-year-old daughter's various noises with an SB Live 5.1. The results are OK, but nothing like what I remember hearing in the studio. I could blame the card's on-board mic preamp or the sound of my apartment, but I fear that shoddy AD plays at least as large a role in the matter.
I'm going outside, right now, with copies of some of my own financial statements.
I'm going to throw them onto the Main Street sidewalk, and stand just near enough to the pile that I can serve hastily-drawn lawsuit papers to anyone who dares to look.
The documents are undeniably my property, after all. Nobody has the right to see them unless I erect a big fucking sign pointing them out, even if they are scattered about a public walkway.
[Moral for the sarcasm-impaired: If you don't want your information to be public knowledge, now or ever, don't let it be publicly available. At all.]
That the landlord pays the municipal water bill for the building doesn't matter - my electric bill is also $50-100.
That pump you run to suck fluid out of the ground probably doesn't cost as much to operate as you might think...
[though, most of my cost is in operating a few very non-green PCs and other electronics that spend their entire life powered up, and cooling them with AC. But I'm betting that things will be near break-even status during the forthcoming Ohio winter, and that I'll make little (if any) use of the electric baseboard heaters here.]
I've had nothing but joy with Ameritech DSL. The installers I've dealt with have all been either clued or nonexistant. Even the troublesome ADSL drop I used at the studio had its problems met by semi-clued support people with actual thinking skills.
As for installations:
At my sister's connection, Ameritech just sent her a dumb DSL modem via UPS. I used an extra Pentium machine they had as a PPPOE-talking Linux-based router, and things were golden from then on, without the slightest hint of instability on any level.
That used to be my idea of a perfect install - give me the hardware, and leave me the fuck alone. But the next experience changed that attitude:
At my mom's office, the installer showed up and saw that a small network was already in-place, but that all ports on the existing hub were in use. When he called me at home, I immediately felt all the usual anxiety about clueless nits destroying my work. He carefully asked if it would be OK to plug one machine into the 4-port hub of the Speedstream router they provided, in order to free up a port. I directed him to move a specific, seldom-used PC over to one of the router's ports. He traced the cable quickly and without complaint.
After that, he correctly noted that the network was set up using static 10.x.x.x addressing, and explained that he was going to configure the Speedstream box to accomidate this instead of its default 192.168.x.x DHCP. I asked him to leave a note on the router indicating its new IP, and had him change the password to something other than "admin".
He asked if it would be OK for him to change the default gateway and DNS settings for each machine on the network. I told him to go ahead.
We thanked eachother for the help, and I hung up knowing that things were installed exactly how I would've done it myself.
This, to me, is an ideal example of how all installations should happen. Whether it's a home security system done by a team of clean-cut pros, or a car stereo by a teenager at the local Best Buy.
Obviously, it "works ok." But when it doesn't work, you'll be without connectivity for appearently unknown reasons until you lease and use a new IP.
Isn't it easier to just leave dhcpd running, automatically grabbing a new address for that once-in-a-blue-moon occasion when they need to assign a different one for you to use?
I set up dhcpd on my FreeBSD router several providers ago, and haven't had to touch it again since.
Back on topic: When the cable guy showed up here this past summer to install RoadRunner, the whole thing went pretty quick. It consisted of me setting the modem on the shelf and plugging it in, while he made a couple of RG-6 patch cords and put a splitter in-line with the TV. A couple of taps to kick dhcpd in the ass, and I was online.
He seemed pleased that he got to take lunch early, and I still have no idea what software is on the CD that came with the modem.
Two years ago, I had the left-side rear hub assembly (or "wheel bearing" or "spindle" depending on which era you learned about cars in) suffer catastrophic failure syndrome.
I was on my way home from work, making a large-radius right turn onto a rural Ohio 2-lane road at about 40MPH, which is not an unreasonable speed for the intersection in question. I'd thought about taking it fast and having fun with things, but decided that I was in no particular hurry and slowed down.
At the midpoint ("apex," or "inside"), the outside rear wheel fell off from the spindle on out. It took with it half of one side of the drum brakes on the back of the car, and smashed the hell out of what remained of t he other half. The body hit pavement, smashing the muffler.
While the car was doing its quick uncontrollable 180, I had the luxury of thinking "I didn't -see- a big fucking pothole there," before glancing at the rear-view mirror and seeing the previously-attached rear tire roll across the road and come to rest at a guard rail, with the brake drum still attached.
The car finally stopped not far from there, after choosing not to dive into the ravine on either side of the road or the river just ahead. It had little to no brake pressure, and the handbrake was disabled due to half of its mechanical system being recently evicted from the vehicle.
I got out, used my cell phone to arrange for a tow truck, collected what parts I could find on the road, checked for obvious gas leaks (there were none). The soccer mom in the minivan behind me stopped and asked if I was ok, before verifying that I had a phone. I assured her that all was well.
I sat in the car listening to Rammstein with the engine running and the heat on until the flat bed showed up.
During this 45-minute period, at least twenty people stopped and offered help. I chatted briefly with a few of them, while the conversation with others consisted of them showing me a phone and me showing them mine.
But, for fuck's sake, I figured that if I was going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere waiting for a towtruck to arrive, I might as well be able to enjoy some good music without interruption instead of standing in the cold on a windy day talking to good people who could do nothing to help my situation but leave me the hell alone.
I scribbled out a sign with a Sharpie I found in the glovebox and put it under the wiper blade:
"I'm OK. You can't help. Yes, I have a phone. Thanks!"
Peace, at last...
Since then, I've felt that a cell phone is highly overrated as a vehicular emergency implement. As long as everyone else has one, it's of little safety benefit to own one yourself.
I find your marked ability to misinterpret the communication of others to be befitting of someone having such pronounced wit as you display.
I suspect that some day, you will make a fine politician. Your needless bellyaching tirades against people who openly agree with you will be certain to garner the public's favoritism at the poll.
Who's to say that incidental, artificially-shifted sand deposits would not be a boon to local fishermen? I'm not afraid to admit that I've got no studies to support this theory. I'm also fairly confident that you don't have any studies on the matter, either.
Which leaves the chance (based on available data) of increased fishing yields due to extreme relocation of water at ~50%. Fair odds for any game, don't you think?
Salt: We, humans, need salt. It's in most products that we eat, and our minds and bodies turn to shit without it. Some of the salt can be sold for industrial or food purposes; the rest of it could (and should!) be returned to the ocean. Probably first by rail, before being dispersed by a freighter over a large area.
Expensive, sure. Who cares?
Have you read anything about the Big Dig lately?
As the same time as farmable land is reduced to such an extent that it becomes significantly more expensive than it is right now to grow food, it will become profitable to pursue other avenues. Eventually, even given the tree-hugger's most apocolyptic enviromental scenarios, it will be worthwhile for some money-minded smart person to plumb Arizona.
There is a certain elegance to such things as SCA backplanes which ATA (in any incarnation) will never achieve.
Which is another point:
They botched SATA by not including power on the bus, having no standardized connector locations, and (at least so far) having no facility for connection of external devices.
The 1-device-per-wire rule of SATA is another detriment: Sure, the cables are fairly small, but can you imagine the rats nest that would be a 12-device SATA system?
SCSI daisychaining is an easy fix for that, and now-common LVD SCSI is quite able to support this number of devices with a single ribbon. And LVD, by its differential nature, is quite resistant to the electrical problems introduced by slice-and-jacket cable rounding techniques that are all the rage these days..
Oh. And you've got your math wrong, Son:
It doesn't matter if 3ware makes a controller with 12 150MBps ports. The 12-port Escalade 8500 you speak of has a 64-bit 33MHz PCI interface, topping out at no more than a paltry 264MBps to be shared by all connected devices.
If you're serious about throughput, try something like this: Two 320MBps channels on a 64-bit, 133MHz PCI bus. Good for real-world transfer rates in the realm of 640MBps, more than twice that of the 3ware product, while keeping a good portion of the PCI bus free the -other- 30 SCSI devices you've got plugged into it.
And none of this says anything about the benefit of SCSI for the home user:
Just bought a new DVD-R, but don't want to toss your old but dead-solid Plextor? SATA requires you to buy another port. SCSI just requires you to plug it in.
Now, if you'll show a single example of me saying that *BSD is useless in any respect, anywhere, I'd love to see it.
My first post in the thread was about possible ways to play a few fun-ish, current games on FreeBSD. I thought it had a rather informative tone, and it was intentionally non-judgemental. I just pointed out a few possible ways to make games run on the system.
I've got FreeBSD doing the grunt work on my network of handling printers, CD-ROMs (it handles multi-disc changers with elegance not found in any other OS), routing, storage, backups, scanning, and everything else that I want to do in a platform-independant fashion. It's dead-solid reliable, and most of the time I don't even think abouts its presense - it just works.
This is, indeed, probably not dissimilar from what most other *BSD users do.
It's a headless box, though, so it's not much good for games...
The most efficient way to move: Don't do it by yourself.
It's easy:
1) Recruit as many people as you can comfortably afford beer and pizza for.
2) Give them beer.
3) Show them where the empty boxes are.
4) Give them beer.
5) Show them where the stuff is that needs moved.
6) Give them beer.
7) Show them where the truck is.
8) Give them beer.
9) Arrive at destination.
10) Give them beer.
11) Order pizza.
12) Give them beer.
13) Eat pizza.
14) Give them beer.
15) Show them where the truck is. Remind them who bought the beer.
16) Give them beer.
17) Have your posessions deposited neatly in your new dwelling.
18) Give them beer.
19) Load them into the just-emptied truck.
20) Give them beer.
21) Wake them up the next morning. Declare that you are out of beer. Take up a collection to cover the cost of the U-Haul moving blanket they broke the seal on and cowered under in an attempt to keep warm*.
22) Send them away. Do not offer to pay them for their gratious efforts**.
23) Have a beer.
24) Begin the never-ending process of putting things into place in their new home.
Good luck!
* This is also a sure-fire way to figure out who your real friends are. Those who complain about sleeping overnight in a cold panel van in a parking lot while you sleep in the warm bed that they carried in for you don't deserve your company.
Perhaps not to you. But then, you aren't everyone. You certainly aren't me.
I'm a little confused as to why you feel the need to be insulting toward me on the basis of my entertainment choices.
Get a SVGA adapter for your console.
Yay. So I can use my slothly PSX at 640x480 (or is it 640x400?) on a monitor that cost more than twice what the console itself did. I suppose I'll just learn to deal with the horrible AI of my computer opponents, too - after all, it's not like I wanted to play a challenging RTS. And you're probably right - I'll never miss the extra screen real estate and detail provided by a 1600x1200 display and a good DAC.
A computer is a gaming machine. And a router. And a file server. And a music pira^H^H^H^Horganizing machine. And a an educational device. And an endless source of pornography.
It does all of these things (and a limitless number of others) with relative ease.
A console plays games. A couple of them even play DVDs. All this for only $200.
I already have computers sitting around for various computational reasons. Why should I be admonished if I want to spend that $200 on a video card, a decent sound card, and maybe a DVD-ROM, to create a superior gaming solution, myself, using the machines I already have?
After all, there is only one of me. If I'm sitting on the couch playing Tekken, then the PC is idle.
Such a redundant waste of technology, console gaming is.
And even after making all that noise, you still haven't shown a single example of why it is bad to play games with a computer, except for the obviously invalid point about it being expensive to do so.
It's not as if a modern gaming-capable machine is only good for gaming, is it? Certainly, it will run gimp with the best of them, compile kernels like nobody's business, and perform any of the other tasks people expect from computers these days.
That it may have a game or two installed does not detract from the multitude of other benefits that computers provide.
And as long as I'm a asserted to be member of the "mindless masses" because I like video games, I'd like to assert that it's OK to be wrong, and to seek and grant forgiveness. Your mother was certainly wrong for conceiving you in the passenger seat of her dealer's '82 LeSabre and failing to abort the resultant crackbaby before it was too late. But now you're all grown up and the water's under the bridge. All those years of being an abused and neglected haven't hurt you a bit, have they? Of course not. That said, some people really are better off as a cum stain on the floorboard, irrespective of how badly their mother wants it -all- and how much her dealer has to give. The resultant offspring's sour upbringing promotes conservative, insecure, neo-Luddite tendancies which make them stand in the way of the progress and aspirations of others in their midst.
Every time I look at my paystub see how much money I get deducted to support state-funded programs, I think about your Mum. Having Medicaid cover her all-expenses-paid trip to the hospital for her unfortunate son's extrusion is obviously the closest thing to the American Dream that people on that side of town ever hope to experience.
Thanks for all the laughs, expensive though they might be.
You see: in general, I do agree with you. Yet, the phraseology of your statements makes them absolutely absurd and equally nonsensical.
It's as if I said to you:
Comfort is not the main reason people choose a car. If it is yours, then what you want is not a car, but a hot tub.
There's a place in my life for console gaming: Driving games, fighting games, and similarly twitch-oriented stuff which translates poorly to a relatively high-latency PC and where resolution approaches non-issue status.
But. Have you ever played an RTS on a console? Ever notice just how desperately it sucks? And I'm a lot more comfortable playing these sorts of games at 1600x1200 on a 19" monitor, than I am staring at my NTSC 20" TV. So, I play RTS on the PC.
This PC needs an operating system in order to play said RTS, as the wonderful days of self-loading diskettes and single-track general purpose computers finally passed as IBM gave up the standards war in the 80s.
This thusly-requisite operating system might as well be free, don't you think? Hence, my previous prose about possible ways to get a few games running under FreeBSD.
In closing, I'd like to submit that computer games are an important and oft-enjoyed segment of my life. A desktop operating system incapable of filling this role is as useful to me as a hot tub, no matter how luxuriously comfortable it may be, is as a means of transportation.
This new 3cm disc can indeed have very high data transfer rates, but it will not rely on absurd spindle speed in order to happen. This is going to be a very low-velocity medium.
While it certainly is physically possible to spin a smaller disc faster than a larger one of similar composition without it turning into shrapnel, there is absolutely no need to do so given the areal densities involved.
I'll use a CD-ROM for comparison, because we're all familiar with them. And I'm going to make quick work of the math, because it's late. And I'm going to use inches, because it's a unit that I'm comfortable with, aside from giving me a good opportunity to upset the more worldly readers of this text. I'm also going to make horribe blind assumptions and assertions, pull numbers out of my ass, and do all kinds of other underhanded things. I haven't even read the fucking article, and I'll probably be modded down for my effort (Note to Mods: if you think I'm wrong, either reply yourself and show me why, or piss off). Here goes:
Let's assume that our 5" CD has a hole in the midde 2" across that can't store information, for a total recordable area of 16.5 square inches. If this disc holds 700MB of usable data, it has an areal density of 42MB per square inch. And as long as I'm not showing my work, I figure this is good for a transfer rate of 19.5 megabytes per second at 28,000 RPM.
Let's assume that the 1.18" disc has similarly-proportioned hole in the center, so that it also has 16% of its area consumed by mounting surfaces. This leaves us with 0.904 square inches of usable area, or 3.6GB per square inch.
Which is to say that data transfer should happen about 85 times faster than a CD, on average, at a given angular velocity. This is also to say that it can produce data rates equal to those which causes CDs to disintegrate, at only 326 RPM.
Multiply that by 10, and you get a nice, sane, 3260RPM device which will be kind on battery life and offer a transfer rate somewhere in the impossible realm of 16GB/second.
And at a CD-shattering-but-probably-safe 28,000 RPM? 1.3 terabytes per second.
How many Libaries of Congress is that per minute?
I don't even want to bother with trying to figure out at what speed such a small disc would itself disintegrate at, given these numbers.
Thus, I submit that the format, in the unlikely event that it ever sees the light of day, will operate at extremely low spindle speeds, have fairly high latency, and excellent sustained transfer rates.
I've been overclocking 9 or 10 years years, with no stability issues. I don't do anything anything extreme with cooling, and in fact have a P100 which has been running at 133 for several years with only a passive heatsink (it is an extremely quiet computer).
I started long before any of this was trendy, with an AMD 386SX/33 which I always ran at 40. I've now got 300 and 333MHz K6-2s, each running at 350. And soon, I'll add an unlocked Athlon XP to the mix. These machines don't crash. Ever.
It's trivial, and simple: Don't go to far. Don't up the voltage beyond manufacturer specification for the speed you're trying to achieve. If anything seems at all funny about the scenario, back down a notch and try again - don't try to "fix" it with fans and peltiers and waterblocks. Once you've found a speed that seems to work, it might not be a bad idea to step it down another notch to help with future operating variables.
The next step is rather simple: Leave it the fuck alone. You've already had all of the overclocking joy that your particular hardware combination will yield. Enjoy your pennies saved and be done with it.
CPUs are rated in the factory using similar methods. They all come off of the same line, and are tested at a high-ish clock speed. If a core fails a test at a given speed, it is retested at consecutively lower speeds until it passes. The resultant number is stamped on the package and/or burned into the multiplier.
In theory, anyway. The reality lately is that toward the end of a given core's life, there's a point at which lower speed chips simply aren't produced anymore, while there is still market demand for them. So, there's a lot of lower-cost, factory-underclocked chips on the shelf, so that AMD and Intel can stay competitive with eachother in the mid-to-low end markets.
This is evident from the price structure of commodity OEM CPUs. When there are 3 or 4 mid-range speeds are within a few dollars of eachother, they're quite likely to be exactly the same part, and may even be from the same batch.
It is inarguable that running some of these chips at faster-than-marked speeds is not in any way overclocking.
And, at any rate, it's heat that destroys CPUs, not clock speeds that are within the design parameters of the core. For this conservative approach to overclocking, added heat very nearly at non-issue status.
Therefore, I strongly suspect that my machines will last forever, as far as I'm concerned, just like every solid state device should (obvious exceptions for dried-up capacitors and flaming power supplies may apply), and that they will always have an extra month or two of useful life in them before they're deemed too slow for the tasks at hand -- for free.
The weather here in Ohio is starting to get chilly. When I had a couple of friends over the other night, one of them remarked to me "Man, why is your door open? It's -cold- outside. Why don't you shut it and turn on the heat?"
I then gave him a brief tour of my furnace: A couple middle-of-the-road FreeBSD and Linux boxen, the slothly Windows machine in the corner, more than 100 pounds of fan-cooled UPS, an extraordinarily warm SMC 10/100 switching hub, HP Laserjet III, an old Scanjet IIcx, 19" monitors, 20" TV, and a stereo that draws a couple hundred Watts at idle.
I had him hold his hand in the (quite warm) exhaust stream from the BSD machine for emphasis.
I then told him that if it did get much cooler out, I would shut the door, but would leave the thermostats alone. My usual trick, which I expect to work fine until December or so, has been to use a fan to circulate heat from the living room to the rest of the apartment.
And even after the snow flies, I'm not sure I'll be switching on the electric baseboard heaters. It seems like it'd be so much more fun to keep the TV on, and the recessed lights above the kitchen sink and range and in the bathroom could stay on more often. If things are still cold, I'll start firing up hideously-inefficient DJ lighting gear until it it warms up, and enjoy the technicolor splendor in the meantime.
Technology is highly underrated as a source of heat in cooler climates. It's also "free" heat, if it's a device you'd leave on whether or not it was cold in the room.
All this for ~$60/mo (or about twice that in the month of July, with AC and circulation fans going 24/7).
At what point did it become an obvious solution to use hideously complex computer hacks just to mix a couple of analog signals together?
All you need is a few telephone interfaces that answer automatically, and a cheap DJ mixer or small PA console to plug them into.
If you feel that you -must- use computer gear, the telephone interfaces can consist of external modems of any speed and ilk which have had the following command issued: ATS0=1&W. Things will be easier if the modem in question already has a headphone or speaker output, otherwise just wire its internal speaker to an (optional, and recommended) 1:1 transformer, and send the resultant signal to the mixer.
If you also want the callers to be able to hear eachother over the phone instead of needing to listen over the radio, you'll also want to wire the mixer's output to the telephone device's input, with a potentiometer or suitable resister and possibly (if the device is meant to power a condenser microphone, as is often the case) a capacitor to block DC.
Since you specifially mentioned that it wasn't a question about FCC regulations, I'll leave out the part about the stiff signal limiting and transmitter system performance. You'll find cheap transmitters at Ramsey Electronics. Be nice to your neighbors, though, and don't stomp on anyone else's frequencies.
That all said: wouldn't it be simpler, cheaper, and perhaps better to just open a voice-enabled forum on Yahoo! Messenger, and advertise the fact in the local newspaper? This would appear to be a superior technical solution to the problem you're appearently trying to solve.
What if you want it to run on the hardware that's being sold today?
Since you didn't stipulate that it be new hardware, visit Ebay and buy something that works with it.
An old S3 Virge or Trio64-based card is still quite fast enough for drawing windows and text on a screen. No idea if either is supported by XFree86 under Minix, though. If all else fails, Tseng ET4000 ISA cards are also fairly quick in human terms.
Other than that, even a nVidia's greatest cards will still function fine as plain VGA adapters.
What other new hardware does one need?
SCSI, for all sane consumer-level purposes, hasn't progressed much in the past half-decade or so - old adapters work justfine with current consumer gear such as CD-ROM drives, scanners, disks, and printers (and this stuff is increasingly consumer-disoriented, expensive, difficult to procure, and is reaching non-issue status).
So. Any old Minix-supported Fast/Wide or UltraSCSI adapter would work justfine for anything you're likely to use with such an unashamedly hobbyist operating system.
At a glance, the Adaptec 154x series is supported, some variation of which you'll be able to connect damn near any past or current SCSI device to without any major trauma.
Sound cards? It supports the SB16. If that's not high-quality enough for your tastes, use an AWE64 Gold (a card which is superior in many ways to all of Creative Labs' other offerings, including the Audigy/Extigy), and plug the the card's SP/DIF output into a good DAC.
Networking gear? If you can't make do with a an 8390, 3c509, or (horror) NE2K under Minux, you really should see a shrink about your masochistic tendancies.
IDE? It's right there. Works. ATAPI CD-ROMs, too. And there's even a Quickcam driver.
Minix is not for the faint of heart, and has never been. But to say that it doesn't work with hardware being sold today is at least a gross mis-statement.
I'm neither agreeing with you, nor disagreeing. Just trying to clear the air a bit...
Sim City is available for damn near everything, including Linux, Palm, and anything that can run graphical Java apps. The Java version was, last I looked, available to play for free on Maxis's page, and should be fine with *BSD.
I don't know the state of Black & White, but I'd be very surprised if someone hasn't been able to make it run under Wine by now.
Oh. And UT should run fine under FreeBSD's Linux ccompatiblity mode.
There's still the whole issue of driver support for modern video and sound cards, but that's nothing new in the free software world, is it?
This is something different. The bitrate at which it operates is not relevant. The subjective effect of this compression scheme is something to be determined by a skilled listener with a good playback chain with a typical amount of bit-rot in the stream, not wild guesswork.
You're doing noone else a favor by spreading FUD in any circle, let alone yourself. Until you have listened to the system for yourself, just shush.
All of 3M's tape products are good, including their duct tape.
I've pulled 3M duct tape off of a window air conditioner after it'd been stuck there, exposed to the elements, for two years without leaving a mess behind.
That said, I still never use duct tape for electronics. I've found some of it to be slightly conductive, which spells bad news for most things electrical.
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Odd times that you recall, with your $3-4/blank assertion. In an attempt to aid the accuracy of this historic record, I submit the following:
When I bought my 8x Plextor CD-R (note lack of W suffix), for ~$400, within hours of it hitting the distributors' warehouses, there was only two other 8x burners on the market: One from Smart & Friendly, and another from...some other high-end competitor to Plextor whose name escapes me. Yamaha, IIRC, took several months to catch up.
By this time, media was already into the $1 range for generic blanks, and a bit more for higher-quality media. Even Kodak 8x media -- the only 8x-rated media at that time -- sold for $2/ea in jewel cases. I also distinctly recall the sting of paying for 150 very dear TDK "any speed" media, spindled, at $1.50 each, a couple of months later.
Nevermind that it wasn't until a few more months after that (say, a year after the I picked up the Plextor) that 8x writers landed in the $200 category. By that time, media was commonly 50 cents.
It's been years, though. Times have changed.
Now, it's all quite silly. I recently paid $17 for 100 generic, unbranded blanks at a local department store, and each of these $0.17 discs seem to work as well in testing as the few remaining $1.50 TDK blanks I have around. I've been putting them into 128-disc Caselogic folders, which I picked up on sale at the same store for $7 each.
DVD-R media is currently under $2. I suspect that within the next year, that price will halve. At that time, you'll begin seeing both drives and media begin to fly off of the shelves.
It won't be long after that before you'lll notice places like 7-11 replacing their peg-hook of 3.5" floppies with DVD-R media, right next to the CD-Rs which have already been there for years and the 3-packs of dusty condoms, as just another staple of modern life.
If you're really quite serious about A/D quality, look into using an external box for the task. Midiman makes a couple of different, well-performing 24-bit models, and they occasionally pop up on Ebay. Or, you could pick up a nice pawnshop/Ebay DAT or Minidisc deck, and use that.
Not that you need 24 bits to transcribe vinyl, but it does help ensure that you'll not run out of headroom. Later in the process, you can normalize the audio and truncate or dither it down to 16, while preserving every nuance of the album's pops, ticks, and surface hiss.
Plug a box like this into a sound card's SP/DIF input. The stupider, cheaper, more DSP-phobic cards will generally be more likely to do a bit-perfect job of this, such as the $12 Zoltrix Nighingale or other CMI8738-based cards. Along the same lines, do try to avoid anything branded Creative Labs, mmkay? They've got bad habits like irrevocable resampling, and are noisy throughout (even when only doing strictly "digital" things with SP/DIF IO).
That said:
I used to play engineer for a streamed talk radio show. Equipment was limited to the gear in a small project recording studio, none of which was intended for broadcast use, aside from the scrap-built Linux box running liveice and lame.
Since this box needed a sound card, I drove over to the nearest white-box OEM parts dealer and started looking. I picked a YMF744-based (XG) PCI card from AOpen, similar to this one, based primarily on the component count: It was the only card under $50 which was not branded Creative, and appeared to have reasonable analog filter stages and signal paths.
It turns out that this card, along with other Yamaha XG cards, has superb support under ALSA, and that the quality of the converters is not bad.
The control of the card was such that I was able to calibrate it to the output meters on the Tascam console, and monitor the program via digital loopback through its own DAC at 0 gain.
I could then push a button on the console, and switch between monitoring the signal in its original analog state, or after it'd been through a ADC->DAC stage without worrying that varying levels would skew my perception.
In the (somewhat noisy) enviroment I was in, I could hear no difference in overall quality with or without the Aopen card in-line. This cheap sound card was, in a word, transparent, at least for my purposes. Which is all I can ask of any sound card.
ALSA made this easy, but I suspect I'd have trouble doing things so precisely under other operating systems.
But I've noticed that not all XG-based cards are made the same. Hoontech sells, or at least sold a year or two ago, some expensive studio-oriented monstrosities which doubtless sound beautiful. On the other end of things, I've heard some laptops with XG chips which sounded horrible.
Lately, I've been recording my 2-year-old daughter's various noises with an SB Live 5.1. The results are OK, but nothing like what I remember hearing in the studio. I could blame the card's on-board mic preamp or the sound of my apartment, but I fear that shoddy AD plays at least as large a role in the matter.
Good luck.
What's wrong with "IMD"? It's a proper acronym, and doesn't look like 90's ELiTE h4xx0r scr1p7 in print:
iT hAs SaNe CaPiTaLiZaTiOn.
And it fits right in these with LCD, CRT, VGA, CPU, AGP, PCI, ISA, AXP, USB, and all those other fun unpronouncible 3-letter acronyms.
If one must abbreviate instead of acronymalize, at least "IMoD" would presents consistant case.
Funny stuff, this.
I'm going outside, right now, with copies of some of my own financial statements.
I'm going to throw them onto the Main Street sidewalk, and stand just near enough to the pile that I can serve hastily-drawn lawsuit papers to anyone who dares to look.
The documents are undeniably my property, after all. Nobody has the right to see them unless I erect a big fucking sign pointing them out, even if they are scattered about a public walkway.
[Moral for the sarcasm-impaired: If you don't want your information to be public knowledge, now or ever, don't let it be publicly available. At all.]
Sounds like my small-ish 2-bedroom apartment.
That the landlord pays the municipal water bill for the building doesn't matter - my electric bill is also $50-100.
That pump you run to suck fluid out of the ground probably doesn't cost as much to operate as you might think...
[though, most of my cost is in operating a few very non-green PCs and other electronics that spend their entire life powered up, and cooling them with AC. But I'm betting that things will be near break-even status during the forthcoming Ohio winter, and that I'll make little (if any) use of the electric baseboard heaters here.]
I've had nothing but joy with Ameritech DSL. The installers I've dealt with have all been either clued or nonexistant. Even the troublesome ADSL drop I used at the studio had its problems met by semi-clued support people with actual thinking skills.
As for installations:
At my sister's connection, Ameritech just sent her a dumb DSL modem via UPS. I used an extra Pentium machine they had as a PPPOE-talking Linux-based router, and things were golden from then on, without the slightest hint of instability on any level.
That used to be my idea of a perfect install - give me the hardware, and leave me the fuck alone. But the next experience changed that attitude:
At my mom's office, the installer showed up and saw that a small network was already in-place, but that all ports on the existing hub were in use. When he called me at home, I immediately felt all the usual anxiety about clueless nits destroying my work. He carefully asked if it would be OK to plug one machine into the 4-port hub of the Speedstream router they provided, in order to free up a port. I directed him to move a specific, seldom-used PC over to one of the router's ports. He traced the cable quickly and without complaint.
After that, he correctly noted that the network was set up using static 10.x.x.x addressing, and explained that he was going to configure the Speedstream box to accomidate this instead of its default 192.168.x.x DHCP. I asked him to leave a note on the router indicating its new IP, and had him change the password to something other than "admin".
He asked if it would be OK for him to change the default gateway and DNS settings for each machine on the network. I told him to go ahead.
We thanked eachother for the help, and I hung up knowing that things were installed exactly how I would've done it myself.
This, to me, is an ideal example of how all installations should happen. Whether it's a home security system done by a team of clean-cut pros, or a car stereo by a teenager at the local Best Buy.
I wish it were a more common tale, however...
Obviously, it "works ok." But when it doesn't work, you'll be without connectivity for appearently unknown reasons until you lease and use a new IP.
Isn't it easier to just leave dhcpd running, automatically grabbing a new address for that once-in-a-blue-moon occasion when they need to assign a different one for you to use?
I set up dhcpd on my FreeBSD router several providers ago, and haven't had to touch it again since.
Back on topic: When the cable guy showed up here this past summer to install RoadRunner, the whole thing went pretty quick. It consisted of me setting the modem on the shelf and plugging it in, while he made a couple of RG-6 patch cords and put a splitter in-line with the TV. A couple of taps to kick dhcpd in the ass, and I was online.
He seemed pleased that he got to take lunch early, and I still have no idea what software is on the CD that came with the modem.
Short story time:
Two years ago, I had the left-side rear hub assembly (or "wheel bearing" or "spindle" depending on which era you learned about cars in) suffer catastrophic failure syndrome.
I was on my way home from work, making a large-radius right turn onto a rural Ohio 2-lane road at about 40MPH, which is not an unreasonable speed for the intersection in question. I'd thought about taking it fast and having fun with things, but decided that I was in no particular hurry and slowed down.
At the midpoint ("apex," or "inside"), the outside rear wheel fell off from the spindle on out. It took with it half of one side of the drum brakes on the back of the car, and smashed the hell out of what remained of t he other half. The body hit pavement, smashing the muffler.
While the car was doing its quick uncontrollable 180, I had the luxury of thinking "I didn't -see- a big fucking pothole there," before glancing at the rear-view mirror and seeing the previously-attached rear tire roll across the road and come to rest at a guard rail, with the brake drum still attached.
The car finally stopped not far from there, after choosing not to dive into the ravine on either side of the road or the river just ahead. It had little to no brake pressure, and the handbrake was disabled due to half of its mechanical system being recently evicted from the vehicle.
I got out, used my cell phone to arrange for a tow truck, collected what parts I could find on the road, checked for obvious gas leaks (there were none). The soccer mom in the minivan behind me stopped and asked if I was ok, before verifying that I had a phone. I assured her that all was well.
I sat in the car listening to Rammstein with the engine running and the heat on until the flat bed showed up.
During this 45-minute period, at least twenty people stopped and offered help. I chatted briefly with a few of them, while the conversation with others consisted of them showing me a phone and me showing them mine.
But, for fuck's sake, I figured that if I was going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere waiting for a towtruck to arrive, I might as well be able to enjoy some good music without interruption instead of standing in the cold on a windy day talking to good people who could do nothing to help my situation but leave me the hell alone.
I scribbled out a sign with a Sharpie I found in the glovebox and put it under the wiper blade:
"I'm OK. You can't help. Yes, I have a phone. Thanks!"
Peace, at last...
Since then, I've felt that a cell phone is highly overrated as a vehicular emergency implement. As long as everyone else has one, it's of little safety benefit to own one yourself.
I find your marked ability to misinterpret the communication of others to be befitting of someone having such pronounced wit as you display.
I suspect that some day, you will make a fine politician. Your needless bellyaching tirades against people who openly agree with you will be certain to garner the public's favoritism at the poll.
Who's to say that incidental, artificially-shifted sand deposits would not be a boon to local fishermen? I'm not afraid to admit that I've got no studies to support this theory. I'm also fairly confident that you don't have any studies on the matter, either.
Which leaves the chance (based on available data) of increased fishing yields due to extreme relocation of water at ~50%. Fair odds for any game, don't you think?
Salt: We, humans, need salt. It's in most products that we eat, and our minds and bodies turn to shit without it. Some of the salt can be sold for industrial or food purposes; the rest of it could (and should!) be returned to the ocean. Probably first by rail, before being dispersed by a freighter over a large area.
Expensive, sure. Who cares?
Have you read anything about the Big Dig lately?
As the same time as farmable land is reduced to such an extent that it becomes significantly more expensive than it is right now to grow food, it will become profitable to pursue other avenues. Eventually, even given the tree-hugger's most apocolyptic enviromental scenarios, it will be worthwhile for some money-minded smart person to plumb Arizona.
There is a certain elegance to such things as SCA backplanes which ATA (in any incarnation) will never achieve.
Which is another point:
They botched SATA by not including power on the bus, having no standardized connector locations, and (at least so far) having no facility for connection of external devices.
The 1-device-per-wire rule of SATA is another detriment: Sure, the cables are fairly small, but can you imagine the rats nest that would be a 12-device SATA system?
SCSI daisychaining is an easy fix for that, and now-common LVD SCSI is quite able to support this number of devices with a single ribbon. And LVD, by its differential nature, is quite resistant to the electrical problems introduced by slice-and-jacket cable rounding techniques that are all the rage these days..
Oh. And you've got your math wrong, Son:
It doesn't matter if 3ware makes a controller with 12 150MBps ports. The 12-port Escalade 8500 you speak of has a 64-bit 33MHz PCI interface, topping out at no more than a paltry 264MBps to be shared by all connected devices.
If you're serious about throughput, try something like this: Two 320MBps channels on a 64-bit, 133MHz PCI bus. Good for real-world transfer rates in the realm of 640MBps, more than twice that of the 3ware product, while keeping a good portion of the PCI bus free the -other- 30 SCSI devices you've got plugged into it.
And none of this says anything about the benefit of SCSI for the home user:
Just bought a new DVD-R, but don't want to toss your old but dead-solid Plextor? SATA requires you to buy another port. SCSI just requires you to plug it in.
Yep. I said that.
Translation for the comprehensionally inept:
An OS which can't play games is not something I want at my desktop. Since FreeBSD can play games, it's certainly a candidate.
Good post.
Now, if you'll show a single example of me saying that *BSD is useless in any respect, anywhere, I'd love to see it.
My first post in the thread was about possible ways to play a few fun-ish, current games on FreeBSD. I thought it had a rather informative tone, and it was intentionally non-judgemental. I just pointed out a few possible ways to make games run on the system.
I've got FreeBSD doing the grunt work on my network of handling printers, CD-ROMs (it handles multi-disc changers with elegance not found in any other OS), routing, storage, backups, scanning, and everything else that I want to do in a platform-independant fashion. It's dead-solid reliable, and most of the time I don't even think abouts its presense - it just works.
This is, indeed, probably not dissimilar from what most other *BSD users do.
It's a headless box, though, so it's not much good for games...
The most efficient way to move: Don't do it by yourself.
It's easy:
1) Recruit as many people as you can comfortably afford beer and pizza for.
2) Give them beer.
3) Show them where the empty boxes are.
4) Give them beer.
5) Show them where the stuff is that needs moved.
6) Give them beer.
7) Show them where the truck is.
8) Give them beer.
9) Arrive at destination.
10) Give them beer.
11) Order pizza.
12) Give them beer.
13) Eat pizza.
14) Give them beer.
15) Show them where the truck is. Remind them who bought the beer.
16) Give them beer.
17) Have your posessions deposited neatly in your new dwelling.
18) Give them beer.
19) Load them into the just-emptied truck.
20) Give them beer.
21) Wake them up the next morning. Declare that you are out of beer. Take up a collection to cover the cost of the U-Haul moving blanket they broke the seal on and cowered under in an attempt to keep warm*.
22) Send them away. Do not offer to pay them for their gratious efforts**.
23) Have a beer.
24) Begin the never-ending process of putting things into place in their new home.
Good luck!
* This is also a sure-fire way to figure out who your real friends are. Those who complain about sleeping overnight in a cold panel van in a parking lot while you sleep in the warm bed that they carried in for you don't deserve your company.
** And this is certain to weed out the rest.
*sigh*
Games are important.
Perhaps not to you. But then, you aren't everyone. You certainly aren't me.
I'm a little confused as to why you feel the need to be insulting toward me on the basis of my entertainment choices.
Get a SVGA adapter for your console.
Yay. So I can use my slothly PSX at 640x480 (or is it 640x400?) on a monitor that cost more than twice what the console itself did. I suppose I'll just learn to deal with the horrible AI of my computer opponents, too - after all, it's not like I wanted to play a challenging RTS. And you're probably right - I'll never miss the extra screen real estate and detail provided by a 1600x1200 display and a good DAC.
A computer is a gaming machine. And a router. And a file server. And a music pira^H^H^H^Horganizing machine. And a an educational device. And an endless source of pornography.
It does all of these things (and a limitless number of others) with relative ease.
A console plays games. A couple of them even play DVDs. All this for only $200.
I already have computers sitting around for various computational reasons. Why should I be admonished if I want to spend that $200 on a video card, a decent sound card, and maybe a DVD-ROM, to create a superior gaming solution, myself, using the machines I already have?
After all, there is only one of me. If I'm sitting on the couch playing Tekken, then the PC is idle.
Such a redundant waste of technology, console gaming is.
And even after making all that noise, you still haven't shown a single example of why it is bad to play games with a computer, except for the obviously invalid point about it being expensive to do so.
It's not as if a modern gaming-capable machine is only good for gaming, is it? Certainly, it will run gimp with the best of them, compile kernels like nobody's business, and perform any of the other tasks people expect from computers these days.
That it may have a game or two installed does not detract from the multitude of other benefits that computers provide.
And as long as I'm a asserted to be member of the "mindless masses" because I like video games, I'd like to assert that it's OK to be wrong, and to seek and grant forgiveness. Your mother was certainly wrong for conceiving you in the passenger seat of her dealer's '82 LeSabre and failing to abort the resultant crackbaby before it was too late. But now you're all grown up and the water's under the bridge. All those years of being an abused and neglected haven't hurt you a bit, have they? Of course not. That said, some people really are better off as a cum stain on the floorboard, irrespective of how badly their mother wants it -all- and how much her dealer has to give. The resultant offspring's sour upbringing promotes conservative, insecure, neo-Luddite tendancies which make them stand in the way of the progress and aspirations of others in their midst.
Every time I look at my paystub see how much money I get deducted to support state-funded programs, I think about your Mum. Having Medicaid cover her all-expenses-paid trip to the hospital for her unfortunate son's extrusion is obviously the closest thing to the American Dream that people on that side of town ever hope to experience.
Thanks for all the laughs, expensive though they might be.
I wasn't going to reply to this. I really wasn't.
You see: in general, I do agree with you. Yet, the phraseology of your statements makes them absolutely absurd and equally nonsensical.
It's as if I said to you:
Comfort is not the main reason people choose a car. If it is yours, then what you want is not a car, but a hot tub.
There's a place in my life for console gaming: Driving games, fighting games, and similarly twitch-oriented stuff which translates poorly to a relatively high-latency PC and where resolution approaches non-issue status.
But. Have you ever played an RTS on a console? Ever notice just how desperately it sucks? And I'm a lot more comfortable playing these sorts of games at 1600x1200 on a 19" monitor, than I am staring at my NTSC 20" TV. So, I play RTS on the PC.
This PC needs an operating system in order to play said RTS, as the wonderful days of self-loading diskettes and single-track general purpose computers finally passed as IBM gave up the standards war in the 80s.
This thusly-requisite operating system might as well be free, don't you think? Hence, my previous prose about possible ways to get a few games running under FreeBSD.
In closing, I'd like to submit that computer games are an important and oft-enjoyed segment of my life. A desktop operating system incapable of filling this role is as useful to me as a hot tub, no matter how luxuriously comfortable it may be, is as a means of transportation.
Without doing any serious math...
This new 3cm disc can indeed have very high data transfer rates, but it will not rely on absurd spindle speed in order to happen. This is going to be a very low-velocity medium.
While it certainly is physically possible to spin a smaller disc faster than a larger one of similar composition without it turning into shrapnel, there is absolutely no need to do so given the areal densities involved.
I'll use a CD-ROM for comparison, because we're all familiar with them. And I'm going to make quick work of the math, because it's late. And I'm going to use inches, because it's a unit that I'm comfortable with, aside from giving me a good opportunity to upset the more worldly readers of this text. I'm also going to make horribe blind assumptions and assertions, pull numbers out of my ass, and do all kinds of other underhanded things. I haven't even read the fucking article, and I'll probably be modded down for my effort (Note to Mods: if you think I'm wrong, either reply yourself and show me why, or piss off). Here goes:
Let's assume that our 5" CD has a hole in the midde 2" across that can't store information, for a total recordable area of 16.5 square inches. If this disc holds 700MB of usable data, it has an areal density of 42MB per square inch. And as long as I'm not showing my work, I figure this is good for a transfer rate of 19.5 megabytes per second at 28,000 RPM.
Let's assume that the 1.18" disc has similarly-proportioned hole in the center, so that it also has 16% of its area consumed by mounting surfaces. This leaves us with 0.904 square inches of usable area, or 3.6GB per square inch.
Which is to say that data transfer should happen about 85 times faster than a CD, on average, at a given angular velocity. This is also to say that it can produce data rates equal to those which causes CDs to disintegrate, at only 326 RPM.
Multiply that by 10, and you get a nice, sane, 3260RPM device which will be kind on battery life and offer a transfer rate somewhere in the impossible realm of 16GB/second.
And at a CD-shattering-but-probably-safe 28,000 RPM? 1.3 terabytes per second.
How many Libaries of Congress is that per minute?
I don't even want to bother with trying to figure out at what speed such a small disc would itself disintegrate at, given these numbers.
Thus, I submit that the format, in the unlikely event that it ever sees the light of day, will operate at extremely low spindle speeds, have fairly high latency, and excellent sustained transfer rates.
I've been overclocking 9 or 10 years years, with no stability issues. I don't do anything anything extreme with cooling, and in fact have a P100 which has been running at 133 for several years with only a passive heatsink (it is an extremely quiet computer).
I started long before any of this was trendy, with an AMD 386SX/33 which I always ran at 40. I've now got 300 and 333MHz K6-2s, each running at 350. And soon, I'll add an unlocked Athlon XP to the mix. These machines don't crash. Ever.
It's trivial, and simple: Don't go to far. Don't up the voltage beyond manufacturer specification for the speed you're trying to achieve. If anything seems at all funny about the scenario, back down a notch and try again - don't try to "fix" it with fans and peltiers and waterblocks. Once you've found a speed that seems to work, it might not be a bad idea to step it down another notch to help with future operating variables.
The next step is rather simple: Leave it the fuck alone. You've already had all of the overclocking joy that your particular hardware combination will yield. Enjoy your pennies saved and be done with it.
CPUs are rated in the factory using similar methods. They all come off of the same line, and are tested at a high-ish clock speed. If a core fails a test at a given speed, it is retested at consecutively lower speeds until it passes. The resultant number is stamped on the package and/or burned into the multiplier.
In theory, anyway. The reality lately is that toward the end of a given core's life, there's a point at which lower speed chips simply aren't produced anymore, while there is still market demand for them. So, there's a lot of lower-cost, factory-underclocked chips on the shelf, so that AMD and Intel can stay competitive with eachother in the mid-to-low end markets.
This is evident from the price structure of commodity OEM CPUs. When there are 3 or 4 mid-range speeds are within a few dollars of eachother, they're quite likely to be exactly the same part, and may even be from the same batch.
It is inarguable that running some of these chips at faster-than-marked speeds is not in any way overclocking.
And, at any rate, it's heat that destroys CPUs, not clock speeds that are within the design parameters of the core. For this conservative approach to overclocking, added heat very nearly at non-issue status.
Therefore, I strongly suspect that my machines will last forever, as far as I'm concerned, just like every solid state device should (obvious exceptions for dried-up capacitors and flaming power supplies may apply), and that they will always have an extra month or two of useful life in them before they're deemed too slow for the tasks at hand -- for free.
Even better:
Someone once told me that the chemicals which cause tearing are most concentrated in the root of the onion.
So, I cut that part off under running water. I also cut the top off with water, and do most of the peeling with the faucet on.
The job goes quicker, the scraps find their way into the garbage disposal more quickly, and my hands don't smell like onion for the rest of the day.
Since I started doing this, I've not have any problems cutting onions, unless they're particularly potent (and then, it's always worth the pain).
I concur.
The weather here in Ohio is starting to get chilly. When I had a couple of friends over the other night, one of them remarked to me "Man, why is your door open? It's -cold- outside. Why don't you shut it and turn on the heat?"
I then gave him a brief tour of my furnace: A couple middle-of-the-road FreeBSD and Linux boxen, the slothly Windows machine in the corner, more than 100 pounds of fan-cooled UPS, an extraordinarily warm SMC 10/100 switching hub, HP Laserjet III, an old Scanjet IIcx, 19" monitors, 20" TV, and a stereo that draws a couple hundred Watts at idle.
I had him hold his hand in the (quite warm) exhaust stream from the BSD machine for emphasis.
I then told him that if it did get much cooler out, I would shut the door, but would leave the thermostats alone. My usual trick, which I expect to work fine until December or so, has been to use a fan to circulate heat from the living room to the rest of the apartment.
And even after the snow flies, I'm not sure I'll be switching on the electric baseboard heaters. It seems like it'd be so much more fun to keep the TV on, and the recessed lights above the kitchen sink and range and in the bathroom could stay on more often. If things are still cold, I'll start firing up hideously-inefficient DJ lighting gear until it it warms up, and enjoy the technicolor splendor in the meantime.
Technology is highly underrated as a source of heat in cooler climates. It's also "free" heat, if it's a device you'd leave on whether or not it was cold in the room.
All this for ~$60/mo (or about twice that in the month of July, with AC and circulation fans going 24/7).
At what point did it become an obvious solution to use hideously complex computer hacks just to mix a couple of analog signals together?
All you need is a few telephone interfaces that answer automatically, and a cheap DJ mixer or small PA console to plug them into.
If you feel that you -must- use computer gear, the telephone interfaces can consist of external modems of any speed and ilk which have had the following command issued: ATS0=1&W. Things will be easier if the modem in question already has a headphone or speaker output, otherwise just wire its internal speaker to an (optional, and recommended) 1:1 transformer, and send the resultant signal to the mixer.
If you also want the callers to be able to hear eachother over the phone instead of needing to listen over the radio, you'll also want to wire the mixer's output to the telephone device's input, with a potentiometer or suitable resister and possibly (if the device is meant to power a condenser microphone, as is often the case) a capacitor to block DC.
Since you specifially mentioned that it wasn't a question about FCC regulations, I'll leave out the part about the stiff signal limiting and transmitter system performance. You'll find cheap transmitters at Ramsey Electronics. Be nice to your neighbors, though, and don't stomp on anyone else's frequencies.
That all said: wouldn't it be simpler, cheaper, and perhaps better to just open a voice-enabled forum on Yahoo! Messenger, and advertise the fact in the local newspaper? This would appear to be a superior technical solution to the problem you're appearently trying to solve.
What if you want it to run on the hardware that's being sold today?
Since you didn't stipulate that it be new hardware, visit Ebay and buy something that works with it.
An old S3 Virge or Trio64-based card is still quite fast enough for drawing windows and text on a screen. No idea if either is supported by XFree86 under Minix, though. If all else fails, Tseng ET4000 ISA cards are also fairly quick in human terms.
Other than that, even a nVidia's greatest cards will still function fine as plain VGA adapters.
What other new hardware does one need?
SCSI, for all sane consumer-level purposes, hasn't progressed much in the past half-decade or so - old adapters work justfine with current consumer gear such as CD-ROM drives, scanners, disks, and printers (and this stuff is increasingly consumer-disoriented, expensive, difficult to procure, and is reaching non-issue status).
So. Any old Minix-supported Fast/Wide or UltraSCSI adapter would work justfine for anything you're likely to use with such an unashamedly hobbyist operating system.
At a glance, the Adaptec 154x series is supported, some variation of which you'll be able to connect damn near any past or current SCSI device to without any major trauma.
Sound cards? It supports the SB16. If that's not high-quality enough for your tastes, use an AWE64 Gold (a card which is superior in many ways to all of Creative Labs' other offerings, including the Audigy/Extigy), and plug the the card's SP/DIF output into a good DAC.
Networking gear? If you can't make do with a an 8390, 3c509, or (horror) NE2K under Minux, you really should see a shrink about your masochistic tendancies.
IDE? It's right there. Works. ATAPI CD-ROMs, too. And there's even a Quickcam driver.
Minix is not for the faint of heart, and has never been. But to say that it doesn't work with hardware being sold today is at least a gross mis-statement.
I'm neither agreeing with you, nor disagreeing. Just trying to clear the air a bit...
Sim City is available for damn near everything, including Linux, Palm, and anything that can run graphical Java apps. The Java version was, last I looked, available to play for free on Maxis's page, and should be fine with *BSD.
I don't know the state of Black & White, but I'd be very surprised if someone hasn't been able to make it run under Wine by now.
Oh. And UT should run fine under FreeBSD's Linux ccompatiblity mode.
There's still the whole issue of driver support for modern video and sound cards, but that's nothing new in the free software world, is it?
Cheers
This isn't MP3.
This isn't OGG.
This isn't PAC.
This isn't VQF.
This isn't AC3.
This isn't RA.
This isn't MPEG-2.
This isn't WMA.
This isn't MP3Pro.
This isn't VOC.
This isn't FLAC.
This is something different. The bitrate at which it operates is not relevant. The subjective effect of this compression scheme is something to be determined by a skilled listener with a good playback chain with a typical amount of bit-rot in the stream, not wild guesswork.
You're doing noone else a favor by spreading FUD in any circle, let alone yourself. Until you have listened to the system for yourself, just shush.
Thanks.
All of 3M's tape products are good, including their duct tape.
I've pulled 3M duct tape off of a window air conditioner after it'd been stuck there, exposed to the elements, for two years without leaving a mess behind.
That said, I still never use duct tape for electronics. I've found some of it to be slightly conductive, which spells bad news for most things electrical.