I'm about 6 years ahead of you with the same problem. Lot's of pictures and video. Here is my current (and evolving) plan.
1. Everything is live on a NAS in my house. I don't do anything fancy like RAID. It's just a cheap harddrive. I do periodically swap out the hard-drive for a bigger one every few years and haven't had a failure yet...but that is just dumb luck. 2. I store everything in common formats, DVD images and jpeg. I figure that I'll notice if JPEGs or MPEG2 video becomes hard to decode and at that point I'll spend a weekend converting to something more "current". 3. Everything is backed up to a USB hard-drive that I keep in a fireproof media safe that is certified for media (hd, optical etc.). A standard safe won't stay cool enough. 4. Offsite backup using Crashplan. I like Crashplan but Mozy or Carbonite may work as well.
The USB HD in the safe is probably redundant as I really don't know how well it would survive a fire and is also the most likely to be out of date as the backup is a manual operation. I just can't put all of my trust into an external company that I pay $50/year to.
Actually, the OCZ Vertex http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_vertex_series_sata_ii_2_5-ssd/ can sustain about 230MB/s. This is equal to about 2.3 Gb/sec. Allowing for the rate at which SSD technology seems to be changing, I'd say that this standard is just in the nick of time. Chances are that the next thing in high-end, consumer SSDs will saturate a SATA link. If this standard doesn't get pushed out soon, drive manufacturers will be doing ugly, proprietary, OS specific hacks to support multiple SATA links to a single device. In addition, lots of people are packaging multiple physical drives into a single SSD with an internal RAID-0 controller. These are definitely being(or soon going to be) held back by the 3BG/s SATA link.
Great analysis! My wife and I went through this when our kids were born. Genetic diseases were the deal breaker for us. Basically, if you need stem cells, it's unlikely that you want your own cells that likely caused the problem to begin with. Also, the chance that one's cord blood is useful to another family member isn't very likely so that option is out as well. It really remains to be seen if private banking of any bio material will be useful when compared to public banks. In the absence of a major and specific scientific breakthrough, there is just no compelling reason for private banking.
In the end we donated their cord blood and, if needed, we'll use the cord blood bank like everybody else.
Thank god that my seven year old will only hear cursing from N sources rather than N+1. Once we get people to behave and clean up the internet everything should be ok.
First, the US military could destroy the entire US if it wanted to. This is not point, however. In a military coup, the goal is to take over the country not destroy it.
Second, one soldier can control a hundred unarmed civilians with a single combat weapon. Give those hundred people guns of any type and quickly that 100 to 1 ratio approaches 1 to 1. Even at 10 to 1 they are screwed. There's just too many citizens.
Big and powerful weapons are pretty damn useless when trying to control a population. Look at any post-WWII war. Give everyone in this country a shotgun and a long range rifle and we'll be safe from military dictatorship for a long time.
Didn't try it because of the really long line. It was probably the coolest thing in the Emerging Technologies area. Anyway...basically it can make you drift left or right while walking by messing with your sense of balance ( inner ear ). People were dramatically affected at first but many people were able to compensate after only a few seconds. While cool, it is hardly as dramatic as the article would suggest.
I work for Alias and I think that this is GREAT
on
Autodesk Acquires Alias
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The threads on this board are silly. Maya is not going to die on Linux or otherwise. There is too much money to be made. While Max and Maya have some overlap, Max cannot do what Maya does or serve all of Maya's customers. Autodesk doesn't have competition for our AutoStudio product so that is going to stay too. They will keep Alias products around if only because we have a *very* developed services business that is based around Maya and Studio with some *very* large companies.
It would be reckless of me to speculate further what is exactly going to happen, but Maya in particular is quite beautiful under the hood and has a bunch of life left in it. It is very platform independent. It is flexible enough to turn into almost anything that you need it to be. It's not going anywhere.
I'm happy about this. The near term impact is that we will have a more complete pipeline to sell in design, film and games. I bet some really nice Maya-Max translation tools pop up as well.
Because SkyOne and SciFi worked it out that way. Neither really care about pissing off Brits or Yanks. They only care about $.
The show was very expensive. To mitigate risk, SciFi asked SkyOne to split the costs with them. SkyOne said fine but we get to show it first in exchange for helping you out.
Now for season 2, SciFi is confident and probably didn't need any help funding it. As a result SkyOne gets to wait for syndication like everybody else.
Firstly, I work for Alias and our professional services group works with several large companies that are doing exactly what you a describing.
I have seen several companies that throw money at the problem and end up with a bunch of cool software and hardware but the room and experience sucks. Crappy room layout and a clumbsy user experience are very easy to accidentally build. Cable management, convienent connectivity for participants, projector location, screen placement, seating arrangement, etc. are all important to making this a place where people can comfortably collaborate and communicate. It's not just hardware and software.
I'm a nuts and bolts tech guy and normally don't think too highly of such lofty concepts but experience has taught me a lesson.
As I said, we do lot's of work in this area and have lots of relationships and technology to make Visulization Centers happen. Feel free to contact me at wbattestilli at alias.com. In any case, please do think about the room as a whole and design the experience before selecting the tech.
I'll second the parent comment and add a bit to it.
I was born with vision in only one eye. As a result I do not have stereoscopic vision and 3d display technologies do not generally work for me.
My profession ( ironically in 3d Graphics ) has allowed me to play with some immersive VR displays in which the position and orientation of your head is tracked and the displays change to create the immersive effect. This type of environment does allow me to see "3D" in a very similar way to real life.
I believe that I use shadow, focus etc. to see in 3d as other posters have mentioned. The Immersive VR environment showed me that I also use the aparent change in position of an object relative to my change in position. For example, moving my head from side to side I am able to see my monitor change its relative position and orientation to me. From this, my brain deduces the distance from the monitor to me.
In short, I don't thing that monoscopic people will see 3d on a display until it is able to track their position and adapt accordingly.
I will second the statement that the C.Crane FM transmitter is good and probably the only sub $100 transmitter out there worth getting. A few things worth noting:
-There is a very easy hack (tweaking a pot on the board) that can increase it's effective range a bit. Probably not enough to make the FCC get knock on your door but enough to make it work more reliably in a big metal box (car).
-Many places have the FM dial filled up. If there isn't a blank or at least very fuzzy spot on the dial, the FM transmitter approach isn't going to work. You will basically hear a subset of both signals played at the same time. Not even close to acceptable.
Can anybody see this happening if Consumer Reports published a study indicating that a dishwasher wasn't as quiet as claimed or a car wasn't as safe as claimed.
Funny how proving a piece of software isn't as secure as they claimed is somehow special.
Ok, I'm too old and/or an uber-geek and/or married, but I have no idea what "Prada" is.
I'm even clueless relative to a bunch of people who read slashdot. Good thing that my wife dresses me. Otherwise I people would probably laugh at me in public.
Scary.
I don't think that this will happen in 2010...
on
Robots for No Man's Land
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
but it will happen and an interesting danger arises with this revolution in military tech.
Currently, governments and militaries are limited by what they can do because they need citizens to power the military machine.
Once you remove the need for large quantities of citizens two problems arise:
1. Robots will have no problems killing ANYBODY that it's controller tells it to. In the US at least, millitary coup is improbable because soldiers == citizens and would probably not attack the general population if ordered to do so. Robots don't have families and ethics.
2. Wars are currently limited by public opition. When our sons and daughters are no longer dying, the public will have much less to worry about when attacking somebody. With robots , we (the US) may have already started fighting with Syria, Libia, Iran...
I own a Rio and a SliMP3. I got the Rio first. Now that I have the SliMP3, I hate the Rio and am almost ready to throw it away and spend $300 on a Squeezebox. Keep in mind that I'm not a gaget guy and am generally cheap.
The reason: The interface. The Rio screen and UI suck. The SliMP3 has a beautiful screen and the closest thing to a perfect interface that I've ever used. There is no comparison.
Oh, the server software is great too. No Rio project comes close.
Actually, the correct email should be @alias.com. The @aw.sg.com is just force of habit since we changed the name so recently. @aw.sg.com will still work for some time though.
Disclaimer I work for Alias and I do custom development for major film studios but I do not speak for them.
Just to clarify the above post. Alias does not give any customer access to the Maya source code. Many major studios do, however, pay us to develop certain features that they require.
This service is available to any customer. For those interested, feel free to contact me directly.
-- Whitney Battestilli Software Engineer Alias wbattestilli at aw.sgi.com
When someone figures out how to take property (the copyright to some crappy pop music) from BMG, I hope they are prosecuted and sued for stealing. Until then, IT'S NOT PROPERTY! and IT'S NOT STEALING!
It may be wrong, but it needs a different name. Breaking into my house and taking my stereo is not the same thing as copying a Britney Spears CD.
I, being born in 1975, was a kid when this came out. I have found that lots of things that came out when I was a kid were actually really bad. I loved V. If I see it again or see V: Part II, it will probably ruin it for me.
If they are making programs for internal use then they are obligated to release nothing.
If they are distributing the code to another party, then they have to make the source available to that party.
They GPL never says that they have to release the code to the public, however; the party receiving the above mentioned code would have the right to release it to the public under the GPL.
1. It takes a few minutes to get going. 2. Did you have port 6881 open on your computer and could people connect to it from the internet. Without this, your connection speed will suck. 3. It works best when a bunch of people are simultaneously downloading it via BitTorrent. The number of currend downloaders of redhat 9 iso's is probably fairly small by this point compared to when RH9 was first released. A RH mirror may be faster at this point.
The following is a broad generalization of gaming. I ignore lots in the interest of getting back to work ASAP. Please look at the point and not what I failed to mention.
First there was 2D with a few colors. This let us do lots of basically animated board games. There were good ideas because people had been making board games for centuries.
Then we got to the scroller era and every game was the same. Run around, collect stuff. Some were better than others, but within a few years, the genre had run its course and most were just bad coppies of the few innovative ones.
Then we hit the 3D era. Everything now looks like Doom with a gimmic. Some of the gimmics are good, but most are just copies. These games always have lots of guns and flash because the other part of the game can't stand on its own.
What's the problem? There is no shortage of good ideas, the problem is that we can't code those ideas. Any game that doesn't rely on running around and blowing stuff up needs another goal. That goal always revolves around the need for some good AI. The only other successful major genre that I have ommited so far is the RTS game. These work because they are from a macro perspective. The individual AI sucks, but the whole scene behaves mostly ok. Anything that needs an artificial person to behave in a strategic or clever manner just can't be done yet.
When we can do an game where harder doesn't just mean bigger and faster but smarter, the market will explode with "I've always wanted to do this" ideas.
I have long suspected that the industry standard benchmarks have gotten a bit crazy in the past year.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9445 does a pretty good Job sumarizing my thoughts. The benchmarks don't add up. Last year's WinWhatever benchmarks give totally different results than this year's, even on new hardware.
I actually think that AMD is *trying* to be genuine with their rating system, but I also think that special interests have corrupted mainstream benchmarks to make them an unusuable guide.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm about 6 years ahead of you with the same problem. Lot's of pictures and video. Here is my current (and evolving) plan.
1. Everything is live on a NAS in my house. I don't do anything fancy like RAID. It's just a cheap harddrive. I do periodically swap out the hard-drive for a bigger one every few years and haven't had a failure yet...but that is just dumb luck.
2. I store everything in common formats, DVD images and jpeg. I figure that I'll notice if JPEGs or MPEG2 video becomes hard to decode and at that point I'll spend a weekend converting to something more "current".
3. Everything is backed up to a USB hard-drive that I keep in a fireproof media safe that is certified for media (hd, optical etc.). A standard safe won't stay cool enough.
4. Offsite backup using Crashplan. I like Crashplan but Mozy or Carbonite may work as well.
The USB HD in the safe is probably redundant as I really don't know how well it would survive a fire and is also the most likely to be out of date as the backup is a manual operation. I just can't put all of my trust into an external company that I pay $50/year to.
Actually, the OCZ Vertex http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_vertex_series_sata_ii_2_5-ssd/ can sustain about 230MB/s. This is equal to about 2.3 Gb/sec. Allowing for the rate at which SSD technology seems to be changing, I'd say that this standard is just in the nick of time. Chances are that the next thing in high-end, consumer SSDs will saturate a SATA link. If this standard doesn't get pushed out soon, drive manufacturers will be doing ugly, proprietary, OS specific hacks to support multiple SATA links to a single device. In addition, lots of people are packaging multiple physical drives into a single SSD with an internal RAID-0 controller. These are definitely being(or soon going to be) held back by the 3BG/s SATA link.
Great analysis! My wife and I went through this when our kids were born. Genetic diseases were the deal breaker for us. Basically, if you need stem cells, it's unlikely that you want your own cells that likely caused the problem to begin with. Also, the chance that one's cord blood is useful to another family member isn't very likely so that option is out as well. It really remains to be seen if private banking of any bio material will be useful when compared to public banks. In the absence of a major and specific scientific breakthrough, there is just no compelling reason for private banking.
In the end we donated their cord blood and, if needed, we'll use the cord blood bank like everybody else.
Thank god that my seven year old will only hear cursing from N sources rather than N+1. Once we get people to behave and clean up the internet everything should be ok.
First, the US military could destroy the entire US if it wanted to. This is not point, however. In a military coup, the goal is to take over the country not destroy it.
Second, one soldier can control a hundred unarmed civilians with a single combat weapon. Give those hundred people guns of any type and quickly that 100 to 1 ratio approaches 1 to 1. Even at 10 to 1 they are screwed. There's just too many citizens.
Big and powerful weapons are pretty damn useless when trying to control a population. Look at any post-WWII war. Give everyone in this country a shotgun and a long range rifle and we'll be safe from military dictatorship for a long time.
Didn't try it because of the really long line. It was probably the coolest thing in the Emerging Technologies area. Anyway...basically it can make you drift left or right while walking by messing with your sense of balance ( inner ear ). People were dramatically affected at first but many people were able to compensate after only a few seconds. While cool, it is hardly as dramatic as the article would suggest.
The threads on this board are silly. Maya is not going to die on Linux or otherwise. There is too much money to be made. While Max and Maya have some overlap, Max cannot do what Maya does or serve all of Maya's customers. Autodesk doesn't have competition for our AutoStudio product so that is going to stay too. They will keep Alias products around if only because we have a *very* developed services business that is based around Maya and Studio with some *very* large companies.
It would be reckless of me to speculate further what is exactly going to happen, but Maya in particular is quite beautiful under the hood and has a bunch of life left in it. It is very platform independent. It is flexible enough to turn into almost anything that you need it to be. It's not going anywhere.
I'm happy about this. The near term impact is that we will have a more complete pipeline to sell in design, film and games. I bet some really nice Maya-Max translation tools pop up as well.
Because SkyOne and SciFi worked it out that way. Neither really care about pissing off Brits or Yanks. They only care about $.
The show was very expensive. To mitigate risk, SciFi asked SkyOne to split the costs with them. SkyOne said fine but we get to show it first in exchange for helping you out.
Now for season 2, SciFi is confident and probably didn't need any help funding it. As a result SkyOne gets to wait for syndication like everybody else.
Firstly, I work for Alias and our professional services group works with several large companies that are doing exactly what you a describing.
I have seen several companies that throw money at the problem and end up with a bunch of cool software and hardware but the room and experience sucks. Crappy room layout and a clumbsy user experience are very easy to accidentally build. Cable management, convienent connectivity for participants, projector location, screen placement, seating arrangement, etc. are all important to making this a place where people can comfortably collaborate and communicate. It's not just hardware and software.
I'm a nuts and bolts tech guy and normally don't think too highly of such lofty concepts but experience has taught me a lesson.
As I said, we do lot's of work in this area and have lots of relationships and technology to make Visulization Centers happen. Feel free to contact me at wbattestilli at alias.com. In any case, please do think about the room as a whole and design the experience before selecting the tech.
I'll second the parent comment and add a bit to it.
I was born with vision in only one eye. As a result I do not have stereoscopic vision and 3d display technologies do not generally work for me.
My profession ( ironically in 3d Graphics ) has allowed me to play with some immersive VR displays in which the position and orientation of your head is tracked and the displays change to create the immersive effect. This type of environment does allow me to see "3D" in a very similar way to real life.
I believe that I use shadow, focus etc. to see in 3d as other posters have mentioned. The Immersive VR environment showed me that I also use the aparent change in position of an object relative to my change in position. For example, moving my head from side to side I am able to see my monitor change its relative position and orientation to me. From this, my brain deduces the distance from the monitor to me.
In short, I don't thing that monoscopic people will see 3d on a display until it is able to track their position and adapt accordingly.
I will second the statement that the C.Crane FM transmitter is good and probably the only sub $100 transmitter out there worth getting. A few things worth noting:
-There is a very easy hack (tweaking a pot on the board) that can increase it's effective range a bit. Probably not enough to make the FCC get knock on your door but enough to make it work more reliably in a big metal box (car).
-Many places have the FM dial filled up. If there isn't a blank or at least very fuzzy spot on the dial, the FM transmitter approach isn't going to work. You will basically hear a subset of both signals played at the same time. Not even close to acceptable.
In networking: giga = 1000
When refering to any type of computer storage: giga = 2^10.
This is mostly because computer storage is addressed by a processor in some way and processor registers happen to be binary storage devices.
You can't build a 1000 byte RAM chip and expect to address it without doing a calculation to distinguish a valid address from an invalid one.
A 1024 byte RAM chip makes it simple. Just connect 10 address pins to it and any combination is valid.
Networks don't use the 2^10 convention because their rates are not required to be based on powers of 2.
Can anybody see this happening if Consumer Reports published a study indicating that a dishwasher wasn't as quiet as claimed or a car wasn't as safe as claimed.
Funny how proving a piece of software isn't as secure as they claimed is somehow special.
Ok, I'm too old and/or an uber-geek and/or married, but I have no idea what "Prada" is.
I'm even clueless relative to a bunch of people who read slashdot. Good thing that my wife dresses me. Otherwise I people would probably laugh at me in public.
Scary.
but it will happen and an interesting danger arises with this revolution in military tech.
Currently, governments and militaries are limited by what they can do because they need citizens to power the military machine.
Once you remove the need for large quantities of citizens two problems arise:
1. Robots will have no problems killing ANYBODY that it's controller tells it to. In the US at least, millitary coup is improbable because soldiers == citizens and would probably not attack the general population if ordered to do so. Robots don't have families and ethics.
2. Wars are currently limited by public opition. When our sons and daughters are no longer dying, the public will have much less to worry about when attacking somebody. With robots , we (the US) may have already started fighting with Syria, Libia, Iran...
I own a Rio and a SliMP3. I got the Rio first. Now that I have the SliMP3, I hate the Rio and am almost ready to throw it away and spend $300 on a Squeezebox. Keep in mind that I'm not a gaget guy and am generally cheap.
The reason: The interface. The Rio screen and UI suck. The SliMP3 has a beautiful screen and the closest thing to a perfect interface that I've ever used. There is no comparison.
Oh, the server software is great too. No Rio project comes close.
Pixar and all of the major Hollywood studios use Maya extensively in their pipeline.
That being said, they all develop extensive plugins when the standard abilities that Maya provides do not meet their needs.
Actually, the correct email should be @alias.com. The @aw.sg.com is just force of habit since we changed the name so recently. @aw.sg.com will still work for some time though.
Disclaimer I work for Alias and I do custom development for major film studios but I do not speak for them.
Just to clarify the above post. Alias does not give any customer access to the Maya source code. Many major studios do, however, pay us to develop certain features that they require.
This service is available to any customer. For those interested, feel free to contact me directly.
--
Whitney Battestilli
Software Engineer
Alias
wbattestilli at aw.sgi.com
When someone figures out how to take property (the copyright to some crappy pop music) from BMG, I hope they are prosecuted and sued for stealing. Until then, IT'S NOT PROPERTY! and IT'S NOT STEALING!
It may be wrong, but it needs a different name. Breaking into my house and taking my stereo is not the same thing as copying a Britney Spears CD.
I, being born in 1975, was a kid when this came out. I have found that lots of things that came out when I was a kid were actually really bad. I loved V. If I see it again or see V: Part II, it will probably ruin it for me.
I plan to just enjoy the memory.
This is not actually true of the GPL.
If they are making programs for internal use then they are obligated to release nothing.
If they are distributing the code to another party, then they have to make the source available to that party.
They GPL never says that they have to release the code to the public, however; the party receiving the above mentioned code would have the right to release it to the public under the GPL.
1. It takes a few minutes to get going.
2. Did you have port 6881 open on your computer and could people connect to it from the internet. Without this, your connection speed will suck.
3. It works best when a bunch of people are simultaneously downloading it via BitTorrent. The number of currend downloaders of redhat 9 iso's is probably fairly small by this point compared to when RH9 was first released. A RH mirror may be faster at this point.
The following is a broad generalization of gaming. I ignore lots in the interest of getting back to work ASAP. Please look at the point and not what I failed to mention.
First there was 2D with a few colors. This let us do lots of basically animated board games. There were good ideas because people had been making board games for centuries.
Then we got to the scroller era and every game was the same. Run around, collect stuff. Some were better than others, but within a few years, the genre had run its course and most were just bad coppies of the few innovative ones.
Then we hit the 3D era. Everything now looks like Doom with a gimmic. Some of the gimmics are good, but most are just copies. These games always have lots of guns and flash because the other part of the game can't stand on its own.
What's the problem? There is no shortage of good ideas, the problem is that we can't code those ideas. Any game that doesn't rely on running around and blowing stuff up needs another goal. That goal always revolves around the need for some good AI. The only other successful major genre that I have ommited so far is the RTS game. These work because they are from a macro perspective. The individual AI sucks, but the whole scene behaves mostly ok. Anything that needs an artificial person to behave in a strategic or clever manner just can't be done yet.
When we can do an game where harder doesn't just mean bigger and faster but smarter, the market will explode with "I've always wanted to do this" ideas.
I have long suspected that the industry standard benchmarks have gotten a bit crazy in the past year. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9445 does a pretty good Job sumarizing my thoughts. The benchmarks don't add up. Last year's WinWhatever benchmarks give totally different results than this year's, even on new hardware. I actually think that AMD is *trying* to be genuine with their rating system, but I also think that special interests have corrupted mainstream benchmarks to make them an unusuable guide.