I've done this. I built the techno-house with the $6000 new-fangled HD projector. Ran a dozen balanced coax lines with 75ohm crimped connectors on both ends plus a conduit for future upgrades. Five years later the standards had changed and any future projector would need a factory manufactured cable. That's the thing with the new video - data is run in parallel to get the throughput and the timing is so critical that you effectively can't homebrew the connectors. Personally, I'd probably do Cat6, maybe fiber for good measure to most places, then just put in a 3" conduit to the PJ location with some pull strings.
With remote systems getting better and smaller, there's always a chance of putting a decoder box on the far end of ehternet and feeding it on its own network. You'll have the have all the decodeing horsepower near the PJ, but you can always make some room in the ceiling. In a pinch you can pull a cable to your remote location through the conduit. Monoprice.com now sells 100' HDMI, and they don't cost your first born. Sure, they're 100-130 bucks a piece, but that used to be the cost of a 25' model (or a 12' if you liked Monster) - and they didn't even make a 50 footer two years ago.
Leave lots of air for future cables, wire for ethernet, keep your money in the bank until you're really ready to build out, sleep soundly.
And don't invest in the home server just yet. Games (and codecs, for that matter) will always take as much horsepower as is available, and the pricepoint for efficiency will still likley be distributed computing. Why? Failure tolerance and volume efficiency. IOW, you're more likely to network a half dozen iMacs and some NAS than have big iron in your basement. That may change in 20 years, but I wouldn't go planning for it now.
Exactly. I'm too young to remember the actual transition as I never paid to lease a phone, though I do remember the breakup of AT&T, aka Ma Bell. It's amazing how seemingly unalterable truths are so easily sent by the wayside. Can you imagine trying to argue today that allowing more than one long distance provider would lead to the collapse of the whole system, or an uncontrolled upward spiral of costs (LD used to be $0.25/minute 30 years ago)?
I think the labels have a significant, substantiated fear of casual piracy, but the result of a DRM free marketplace might not be as dire as they might expect. Oddly enough, AllOfMP3 kind of proved that with their lossless codec sales. People actually paid WalMart prices for the music (FLAC encodes cost something like $0.60-$0.90, iirc). Voluntarily. I know that that's a sore spot for many, but I view it as a proof of concept. Kids will share because they don't have the funds, but have the time. Adults will share, but will be more likely to buy if it's cheap enough because time is a more precious commoditiy to them. Maybe the industry should focus on producing material that targets the paying demographic?
They own it, regardless of who created it. It's their's in the controlling ownership sense, not by any creative mastery. Letting their product out of the door without loking it down would be as foolish as, say, letting people own their phones. Phones will always be leased becuase that's the way the phone industry works and there's just no way to run a successful telecom company otherwise. Oh, right. Thought I was back in the 1970s again.
Yes, but there are more under 25s in the over-400k range than there are in the 5 digit range, I'd venture (even if you consider just a percentage, not gross numbers).
Then again, maybe/. really is just for old people.
You're going to need just over 6Gb/s of data trasfer, presuming 24 bits and 10% overhead. That doesn't bode well for long runs. I presume you'll be using a computer for this (as no consumer grade video does 1080/120), so you may as well put your computer/scaler near where the projector is and plan on a network connection that will handle the compressed traffic.
I agree with you, but the great thing about climactic change is that if humans arent' causing most it, and we follow the recommendations that suggest we minimize our impact on the climate, we still come out ahead. More specifically, if the climate is heating up by Some Other Means (TM), then there is nothing we can do to stop it (really, on a global scale we're pretty ineffective). It doesn't matter if we curb greenhouse gasses or not. However, if we are a major cause of the climate change, then by curbing our CO2 output we may slow that process and the end result (hopefully) will be a less severe globale temperature shift. A backup bonus is a diversification of energy sources, and a reduced total energy comsumption.
Etiher way...we win. Oh, sure, there are dollars involved - but it's a closed system - nobody is magically creating wealth, we are just moving it around to different places.
Look, if you don't have the evidence to disprove her (apparent) knowledge of such events, I suppose you'll just have to save any punishement for that stranger, when her or she appears.
That's what most of the posts supporting these guys appear to believe.
Yes, my/. spelling is lousy. Blame it on the school system or my frigid office or my poor cognitive skills. *shrug*
I have met lots of technical people in the world, and I'm always a bit skeptical of those who are more interested in process than in product. I used to be one of those people, to be honest. Then I found out that in industry, polish is good, but without substance you have no credibility. Who knows, you may be good at both. I'm surprised that you think that OSX has some odd monopoly on harware IO, since most modern operating systems in the Intel family have been able to do DMA transfers for quite some time (a decade at least).
You are clearly very fond of your computers, as are your colleages. It is very possible that you are in one of the few places where any OS would work well. You clearly have the resources for machines and software coding to match your application. Enjoy it - it's rare.
You might want to check retail prices of flash drives. While a single card may be expensive in an 80GB size, the underlying memory is not. Nearly all flash formats in retail channels are available for about $10-15/GB at the sweet spot. That would be $600-900 for an equivalent amount of memory. Remember - a non-swappable device memory isn't limited to a stock form factor, and memory sizes are shrinking. I just got my first microSD card - 1GB for $12 - it's insanely small, and there is a 4GB model being released now/soon. At apples flash pricing, I would expect a 64GB model to run them under $300. Now, that's still not going to fit in the current pricing model, but it may in a year. A good question to ask is how badly they're going to want to put a bunch of HD video on the yet-to-be-released (sub SD) widescreen.
That's because the Mac guy just looked out the window and saw that it was raining and decided to cancel the picnic while the PC guy went outside to eat soggy sandwiches and get soaked by the afternoons "partly cloudy" weather.
I believe it was a DC forecaster who once said "I just shoveled 8 inches of partly cloudy off of my driveway" after missing the forecast the day before. It pays to have a sense of humor when you're in the meteorology business.
Actually, you're only considering the accuracy of the scientific forecast. That is essentially useless to the end user - what they (I) want is accuracy of the reported forecast. The difference? I don't care when the actual prediction was made, I want to know that when I look at the forecast, it is likely to be correct. A very accurate forecast that is only updated once every three days is not nearly as useful as a farily accurate forcast updated every ten minutes. The former would be the best by your yardstick, but wouldn't necessarily help determine if the likilihood of a hail storm was high for this afternoon as much as the latter.
What are hard core scientists - persumably people doing work - doing making such frequent presentations and running high traffic websites on their desktop workstations? Shouldn't they be doing research (aside from grant requuests, I suppose) and not tying up a desktop running a web server? I think most IT folks would cringe at every employee running their own webserver in their organization.
I presume you found far more efficient applications to run on your Macs, and the switch of OS made the switch of applications automatic. Since MacPros use the same processors available to Windows and Linux Oses, one must presume that the new applications you chose are the things running better, as calculations are calculations to a processor.
I guess I'm a little skepticle of your fanboi wording.
You missed Free Beer. Best not to lose that entire demographic.;-)
In fact, I've already suggested that if Obama really wants to win, he needs to add that in the platform. Oddly enough, I haven't gotten any response back yet.
If it means a saved trip, that's $150 in billable time for a close job.
I got a Stanley FatMax laser distance meter last year - $99 shipped. I got it for an 8000SF church admin building I had to map. A helper and I did the whole thing - two levels and about 40-50 rooms total, including a labyrinthine lower level, in about 6.5 hours. I'd say it would have been a 2 day job with a tape measure. The best part is that once we got back, the building closed within an 1". Freaking amazing - I'd say we would have been off more with a tape.
Oddly enough, I just had to do something like this on a building I'm working on. It's old, so the brick coursing isn't quite 8". I doubt this does pincushion correction, which is a shame, as there was about 4" in my photo (printed with photoshop at 3/4" scale). Also, a little bit of perspective, though not bad for handheld. I suppose this might correct for pure perspective.
That's actually a good point - there is still demand and ad revenue for live events. Though I actually do know folks who will record and then watch a sporting event. Personally, I don't know how they do it - the entire fascination with sports for me is the fact that there is no way to know the outcome.
This distribution method is getting fantastically close to an ideal condition for me. With TV shows available for a resonable price, along with cheap movie rentals, all downloadable to a TiVo that will also pull in OTA broadcasts, the only thing left is some a la carte cable/sat programming for sports and (possibly) news and I can see my entertainment dollars shifting. In fact, if it weren't for espn, I could probably ditch satellite altogether (future streaming feed, perhaps?). Hopefully this will all play out before DTV turns of my HDTivo, and I'll have a great way to tell DTV where they can shove their in-house brand dvr.
That's insane - you either have few lights in your house and gas heating and hot water, or that chandelier was lighting a football field. And your math may be bit off. If your lamp accouted for 25% of your costs, and you replaced the lamps with fluorescents at the same light output (75% energy savings) your electric bill should have only dropped by (3/4 of 25, carry the 2,...) 18.8%, or 1/6 of your bill. Still, to have a single fixture account for 25% of your electric bill is amazing. At my office - about 1300SF, the lighting accounts for 25% of my electric. Now, that's with 32W T8 lamps, but the light level is easily 2x that of a residential building, is on 10-11 hours per day, and lights the entire space. And my electric bill is only about $120 at the office. To do that in a single incandescent fixture would require 900W of lamps, run 12 hours a day, 30 days per month. Yikes.
240x320? That's just nasty. It should be at least 150dpi, preferably 200. Switching time is no big deal, though the refresh rate seems a bit silly (50hz refresh on a device which takes can only actually refresh at 2hz?).
C'mon - you all know it's true. Get any group of average white people together and try to get them to do the Electric Slide and it truly is a parody of the original.
(FWIW - I once worked as a bartender for a Shriner's convention in Washington D.C. To see 400+ people out on the floor doing the Electric Slide properly, with style, is truly a sight to behold.)
I should have completed my thought. This would be a wonderful thing to get involved in on a personal level. Do some OSS stuff, go help the local charity that doesn't have the cash to pay for a support person. Get involved in the community.
But please don't take your pension and my social security and offer services which are priced lower than normal wholesale costs. In the international arena it's called dumping and it's illegal. Remember - this guy is being supported on SS (or will be in a few years - by the time he's worth anything) - so it's not exactly apples to apples.
And I'm not really worried that one guy is going to topple the system. It's more a suggestion to the retired community as a whole - please don't go competing with the working folk for "real" work. Get out, enjoy yourself, channel your efferts into making the community better. Who knows, maybe if the baby boomers tried a little harder to work on their communities, there might not be quite the need for all the taxes we pay to keep those things going on the public dole. (Now I am waxing theoretical!)
Actually, I don't code. In fact, I do something that typically requires local expertise. Still, it happens in a lot of places where there are retirees who think and extra couple thousand bucks might be nice, so they enter the market. And they put someone out of business as a result. But, hey - they manage to fill their time so they weren't bored.
Again - this hasn't happened to me, but I know certain places where this has occured (can you say Florida?).
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I've done this. I built the techno-house with the $6000 new-fangled HD projector. Ran a dozen balanced coax lines with 75ohm crimped connectors on both ends plus a conduit for future upgrades. Five years later the standards had changed and any future projector would need a factory manufactured cable. That's the thing with the new video - data is run in parallel to get the throughput and the timing is so critical that you effectively can't homebrew the connectors. Personally, I'd probably do Cat6, maybe fiber for good measure to most places, then just put in a 3" conduit to the PJ location with some pull strings.
With remote systems getting better and smaller, there's always a chance of putting a decoder box on the far end of ehternet and feeding it on its own network. You'll have the have all the decodeing horsepower near the PJ, but you can always make some room in the ceiling. In a pinch you can pull a cable to your remote location through the conduit. Monoprice.com now sells 100' HDMI, and they don't cost your first born. Sure, they're 100-130 bucks a piece, but that used to be the cost of a 25' model (or a 12' if you liked Monster) - and they didn't even make a 50 footer two years ago.
Leave lots of air for future cables, wire for ethernet, keep your money in the bank until you're really ready to build out, sleep soundly.
And don't invest in the home server just yet. Games (and codecs, for that matter) will always take as much horsepower as is available, and the pricepoint for efficiency will still likley be distributed computing. Why? Failure tolerance and volume efficiency. IOW, you're more likely to network a half dozen iMacs and some NAS than have big iron in your basement. That may change in 20 years, but I wouldn't go planning for it now.
Exactly. I'm too young to remember the actual transition as I never paid to lease a phone, though I do remember the breakup of AT&T, aka Ma Bell. It's amazing how seemingly unalterable truths are so easily sent by the wayside. Can you imagine trying to argue today that allowing more than one long distance provider would lead to the collapse of the whole system, or an uncontrolled upward spiral of costs (LD used to be $0.25/minute 30 years ago)?
I think the labels have a significant, substantiated fear of casual piracy, but the result of a DRM free marketplace might not be as dire as they might expect. Oddly enough, AllOfMP3 kind of proved that with their lossless codec sales. People actually paid WalMart prices for the music (FLAC encodes cost something like $0.60-$0.90, iirc). Voluntarily. I know that that's a sore spot for many, but I view it as a proof of concept. Kids will share because they don't have the funds, but have the time. Adults will share, but will be more likely to buy if it's cheap enough because time is a more precious commoditiy to them. Maybe the industry should focus on producing material that targets the paying demographic?
They own it, regardless of who created it. It's their's in the controlling ownership sense, not by any creative mastery. Letting their product out of the door without loking it down would be as foolish as, say, letting people own their phones. Phones will always be leased becuase that's the way the phone industry works and there's just no way to run a successful telecom company otherwise. Oh, right. Thought I was back in the 1970s again.
Yes, but there are more under 25s in the over-400k range than there are in the 5 digit range, I'd venture (even if you consider just a percentage, not gross numbers).
/. really is just for old people.
Then again, maybe
You're going to need just over 6Gb/s of data trasfer, presuming 24 bits and 10% overhead. That doesn't bode well for long runs. I presume you'll be using a computer for this (as no consumer grade video does 1080/120), so you may as well put your computer/scaler near where the projector is and plan on a network connection that will handle the compressed traffic.
Very nice.
/.ers with a UID as high as yours weren't born when it was released.
Top Secret references are all too rare these days. Most
I agree with you, but the great thing about climactic change is that if humans arent' causing most it, and we follow the recommendations that suggest we minimize our impact on the climate, we still come out ahead. More specifically, if the climate is heating up by Some Other Means (TM), then there is nothing we can do to stop it (really, on a global scale we're pretty ineffective). It doesn't matter if we curb greenhouse gasses or not. However, if we are a major cause of the climate change, then by curbing our CO2 output we may slow that process and the end result (hopefully) will be a less severe globale temperature shift. A backup bonus is a diversification of energy sources, and a reduced total energy comsumption.
Etiher way...we win. Oh, sure, there are dollars involved - but it's a closed system - nobody is magically creating wealth, we are just moving it around to different places.
How are we going to make soylent green?
Look, if you don't have the evidence to disprove her (apparent) knowledge of such events, I suppose you'll just have to save any punishement for that stranger, when her or she appears.
That's what most of the posts supporting these guys appear to believe.
Yes, my /. spelling is lousy. Blame it on the school system or my frigid office or my poor cognitive skills. *shrug*
I have met lots of technical people in the world, and I'm always a bit skeptical of those who are more interested in process than in product. I used to be one of those people, to be honest. Then I found out that in industry, polish is good, but without substance you have no credibility. Who knows, you may be good at both. I'm surprised that you think that OSX has some odd monopoly on harware IO, since most modern operating systems in the Intel family have been able to do DMA transfers for quite some time (a decade at least).
You are clearly very fond of your computers, as are your colleages. It is very possible that you are in one of the few places where any OS would work well. You clearly have the resources for machines and software coding to match your application. Enjoy it - it's rare.
You might want to check retail prices of flash drives. While a single card may be expensive in an 80GB size, the underlying memory is not. Nearly all flash formats in retail channels are available for about $10-15/GB at the sweet spot. That would be $600-900 for an equivalent amount of memory. Remember - a non-swappable device memory isn't limited to a stock form factor, and memory sizes are shrinking. I just got my first microSD card - 1GB for $12 - it's insanely small, and there is a 4GB model being released now/soon. At apples flash pricing, I would expect a 64GB model to run them under $300. Now, that's still not going to fit in the current pricing model, but it may in a year. A good question to ask is how badly they're going to want to put a bunch of HD video on the yet-to-be-released (sub SD) widescreen.
That's because the Mac guy just looked out the window and saw that it was raining and decided to cancel the picnic while the PC guy went outside to eat soggy sandwiches and get soaked by the afternoons "partly cloudy" weather.
I believe it was a DC forecaster who once said "I just shoveled 8 inches of partly cloudy off of my driveway" after missing the forecast the day before. It pays to have a sense of humor when you're in the meteorology business.
Actually, you're only considering the accuracy of the scientific forecast. That is essentially useless to the end user - what they (I) want is accuracy of the reported forecast. The difference? I don't care when the actual prediction was made, I want to know that when I look at the forecast, it is likely to be correct. A very accurate forecast that is only updated once every three days is not nearly as useful as a farily accurate forcast updated every ten minutes. The former would be the best by your yardstick, but wouldn't necessarily help determine if the likilihood of a hail storm was high for this afternoon as much as the latter.
What are hard core scientists - persumably people doing work - doing making such frequent presentations and running high traffic websites on their desktop workstations? Shouldn't they be doing research (aside from grant requuests, I suppose) and not tying up a desktop running a web server? I think most IT folks would cringe at every employee running their own webserver in their organization.
I presume you found far more efficient applications to run on your Macs, and the switch of OS made the switch of applications automatic. Since MacPros use the same processors available to Windows and Linux Oses, one must presume that the new applications you chose are the things running better, as calculations are calculations to a processor.
I guess I'm a little skepticle of your fanboi wording.
And this is different from other large applications like, say, Vista how?
You missed Free Beer. Best not to lose that entire demographic. ;-)
In fact, I've already suggested that if Obama really wants to win, he needs to add that in the platform. Oddly enough, I haven't gotten any response back yet.
If it means a saved trip, that's $150 in billable time for a close job.
I got a Stanley FatMax laser distance meter last year - $99 shipped. I got it for an 8000SF church admin building I had to map. A helper and I did the whole thing - two levels and about 40-50 rooms total, including a labyrinthine lower level, in about 6.5 hours. I'd say it would have been a 2 day job with a tape measure. The best part is that once we got back, the building closed within an 1". Freaking amazing - I'd say we would have been off more with a tape.
Oddly enough, I just had to do something like this on a building I'm working on. It's old, so the brick coursing isn't quite 8". I doubt this does pincushion correction, which is a shame, as there was about 4" in my photo (printed with photoshop at 3/4" scale). Also, a little bit of perspective, though not bad for handheld. I suppose this might correct for pure perspective.
That's actually a good point - there is still demand and ad revenue for live events. Though I actually do know folks who will record and then watch a sporting event. Personally, I don't know how they do it - the entire fascination with sports for me is the fact that there is no way to know the outcome.
This distribution method is getting fantastically close to an ideal condition for me. With TV shows available for a resonable price, along with cheap movie rentals, all downloadable to a TiVo that will also pull in OTA broadcasts, the only thing left is some a la carte cable/sat programming for sports and (possibly) news and I can see my entertainment dollars shifting. In fact, if it weren't for espn, I could probably ditch satellite altogether (future streaming feed, perhaps?). Hopefully this will all play out before DTV turns of my HDTivo, and I'll have a great way to tell DTV where they can shove their in-house brand dvr.
a toaster oven, a meat thermostat and a stopwatch.
Interesting...and I think I can picture it...but is it really any better than a midget, a trapeze and a running start?
Fair enough, I suppose. But wouldn't a 1 bit interface at 320x240 4.8" be a bit pixelated looking?
That's insane - you either have few lights in your house and gas heating and hot water, or that chandelier was lighting a football field. And your math may be bit off. If your lamp accouted for 25% of your costs, and you replaced the lamps with fluorescents at the same light output (75% energy savings) your electric bill should have only dropped by (3/4 of 25, carry the 2,...) 18.8%, or 1/6 of your bill. Still, to have a single fixture account for 25% of your electric bill is amazing. At my office - about 1300SF, the lighting accounts for 25% of my electric. Now, that's with 32W T8 lamps, but the light level is easily 2x that of a residential building, is on 10-11 hours per day, and lights the entire space. And my electric bill is only about $120 at the office. To do that in a single incandescent fixture would require 900W of lamps, run 12 hours a day, 30 days per month. Yikes.
240x320? That's just nasty. It should be at least 150dpi, preferably 200. Switching time is no big deal, though the refresh rate seems a bit silly (50hz refresh on a device which takes can only actually refresh at 2hz?).
C'mon - you all know it's true. Get any group of average white people together and try to get them to do the Electric Slide and it truly is a parody of the original.
(FWIW - I once worked as a bartender for a Shriner's convention in Washington D.C. To see 400+ people out on the floor doing the Electric Slide properly, with style, is truly a sight to behold.)
I should have completed my thought. This would be a wonderful thing to get involved in on a personal level. Do some OSS stuff, go help the local charity that doesn't have the cash to pay for a support person. Get involved in the community.
But please don't take your pension and my social security and offer services which are priced lower than normal wholesale costs. In the international arena it's called dumping and it's illegal. Remember - this guy is being supported on SS (or will be in a few years - by the time he's worth anything) - so it's not exactly apples to apples.
And I'm not really worried that one guy is going to topple the system. It's more a suggestion to the retired community as a whole - please don't go competing with the working folk for "real" work. Get out, enjoy yourself, channel your efferts into making the community better. Who knows, maybe if the baby boomers tried a little harder to work on their communities, there might not be quite the need for all the taxes we pay to keep those things going on the public dole. (Now I am waxing theoretical!)
Actually, I don't code. In fact, I do something that typically requires local expertise. Still, it happens in a lot of places where there are retirees who think and extra couple thousand bucks might be nice, so they enter the market. And they put someone out of business as a result. But, hey - they manage to fill their time so they weren't bored.
Again - this hasn't happened to me, but I know certain places where this has occured (can you say Florida?).