I'll second that - and add that I waited for HL2 until I saw it go on sale for $30 and Doom 3 for $20! Had they not been at the $50+ mark, it would have been opening week. $60 (even $50) breaks the threshold for me of 'impulse buy'. I'm a sucker to pick up a game - newer titles in the $20-30 mark, older titles for under $10 - adding up quickly to good chunks of money. $60 puts it right in the category of requiring due diligence in reviews, fan sites then customers, perhaps one or two people who played it, and even waiting for the first round (or two) of patches. More often then not, I just don't buy anymore until it heads to the bargain shelf. Dropping the price from $60 to $45 is not the bargain shelf either...
Regardless of the legal merits, it speaks volumes about the corporate culture.
Draconian NDA's usually surface well into the interviewing process, so nice to not waste anyone's time with even looking at the company from an employment standpoint. Love to know who they are...
of Small Form Factor computers to be light, portable , and functional (like a Mac Mini?)
This is a power gaming box for lan parties. No question. All the beef of what most people have in a desktop tower in something you can carry with one hand. They are making enough room (and I assume cooling and power) for the latest greatest set of video cards in SLI configuration. The video cards alone cost more than a mini-mac, never mind the CPU and RAM. You don't need that for PVR's, surfing the web, or any home theater option. I'd wager the folks that would buy this are more interested in shoe horning a pair of raptors in RAID 0 configuration than a low voltage laptop hard drive.
Even a spendy laptop for twice the money would not perform like you could make this chassis (properly equipped) do with off the shelf kit.
Fast hardware, but not that fast. (grin) Even sharing the work with distcc takes a good chunk of time. Starting with stage 3, pulling updates from the net and compiling, just getting the base OS up and running without X or apps takes me the better part of the day.
Getting ready to rebuild the current workstation to a server, and build a new workstation in the next couple weeks. I fully expect to botch my first couple attempts to get the SATA drive, video, or AMD64 specific stuff up and running. Rather than download and compile (only to do it a couple more times), I'd like to use the GRP Packages as I sort out the sillies first....
When installing on new hardware - especially stuff that people have been sorting through in the forms - I like to do the first install using the stage three / precompiled packages to do the initial sanity check. From there I'll sort out the bits that need extra work and more often then not trash the install while doing it. Once I got it, I start over and do a proper net install with the lessons learned. The prebuilt stuff only takes thirty minutes to get the system up and running. Starting from source from the net and compiling usually takes me the better part of the day.
What I was hoping for was the GA release for 2005.0. Not tat it matters to folks with running systems, but for new folks it is nice to start with a few months worth of hardware updates in there.
The thing the XML databases are nice for is if folks can't really lock down the schema. Often you have the case where you are mapping attributes to columns, which works fine in a relational database. Then things change over time.... Usually turning a nice relational design into a mess. Being able to use Xpath is great when you are searching for nodes too, once you get your arms around the syntax and assuming the stuff you are storing is XML. Some of the other bits in their toolkit were interesting.
If things are fixed, there are a lot of other options out there for faster manipulation. XMLBeans (now an Apache project, formally BEA) is good stuff. Hibernate is lovely kit for mapping objects to a relational DB.
SoyoUSA is getting out of the motherboard game, but over the last year there were tons of 'almost for free' after rebates out there. After sending the rebate information registered mail, six months later they came back and told me they never received it. Funny, I got a postcard that says you did...
Not worth the $90 to hunt it down beyond what I have done, but I don't factor rebates into the cost/value of the item anymore.
The employees stole and disclosed company trade secrets. The broke the law and are criminals, they should be treated as criminals.
The people that published this material are accessories to a crime and should also be treated as criminals.
Violating a NDA is breach of contract, which opens you up for civil suites but not criminal. If this is a breach of contract, I don't think they are an accessory to a crime. Not to say some clever legal maneuvering (like forcing them to reveal their sources or face contempt charges, or just suing them) won't make the bloggers suffer.
(keeping in mind IANAL, but that probably makes us even)
Odds are it has a headphone jack. Should play mp3 files without issue. Older versions of pocketpc had to hack back in media player to support mp3 format, but I doubt that is an issue anymore.
Even the cheap production is no help if nobody watches the shows. A truly popular show will pull in millions per commercial break, so whether the episode cost $10,000 or $5,000,000 to produce, if nobody at all watches the $10,000 show and the $5,000,000 show gets 50 million viewers, the more expensive show will actually be more profitable.
True enough, unfortunately the viewers / production costs is a very high profit ratio. People are watching! A couple years back I worked a gig where I was building software for a large studio. Two of the business people using the software (and thus spending a bit of time hammering out requirements with) were producers to some of the big reality series. The comments about production costs came from them - lamenting that these shows made so much money that it was getting hard to produce 'real' shows. (not that 'real' in their minds was sci-fi, mind you)
And yes, reality TV is the replacement. Why? Because 90% of the people who watch 90% of the TV in this country honestly enjoy that crap.
I'd say we will see more and more reality shows because they are stupendously cheaper to produce than anything else. Minimal sets, no actors, no script writing, etc. Compare that to sci-fi. Special effects and complex sets are a must, decent acting, and sudo science that is close enough that it allows us to suspend disbelief - all costly if done right, and crap if any of those bits are missing. Episodic TV will get worse but movies will try to get all three right since the reality thing does not work at the ticket counter.
I hope they sort things and don't get delisted...
on
SCO On the Rocks
·
· Score: 1
I was waiting for things to get ugly (heading under a buck) before picking up my SCOX stock certificates. Four dollars + additional fees is too much. It cost me more to have paper stock certificates issued than it did to buy the stock when pets.com went tits up, but framed up they rocked as a white elephant gifts. Them screwing around with the SEC get the symbol changed to SCOXE before I though they would. Grrr. Once again, I squarely shoot my foot trying to predict the stock market.
If you bought an ipod, then you end up using itunes.
You know, I really wish I understood that little gem completely before I bought an ipod shuffle.
I did a bit of homework and found out it could be treated as a USB thumbdrive with FAT32 partitioning. Golden, I can mount that... Unlike many of the players out there, I can't just move my music over to the player's file system. I've got a mixed environment, and was really angry over the amount of work I had to do to export MP3's over to my ipod from my Gentoo box. (Hats off to the gtkpod dev team, btw)
As a lightweight MP3 player / thumbdrive the Shuffle is nice. iTunes, not so good. (iconoclastic stance here on/.) I have a massive CD collection, lovingly ripped, encoded at a nice bit rate, and organized on my file servers. iTunes does not seem to handle the import - the files I have and the files it thinks I have are not the same... More important, I have zero interest in buying DRM media files. AAC may be absolutely wonderful, as may RM or WMA. Good for them, I'll vote with my wallet. For the couple dollar difference, I'll just buy the album on physical CD. When the day comes where CD's are DRM'ed and there are no more options, I'll figure out what to do.
Anyhow, Apple may pitch the iPod as a hardware sale where any music is more or less sold at cost - but they really went out of their way to tie the iTunes software (and thus the on-line store) into the mix. Grrr...
What exactly are you doing that 2.6 isn't cooked-enough for your needs yet?
In my case, a large chunk of the IBM stack had issues. You could do a bit of hacking to get DB2 to work, but WebSphere and WSAD was a PITA on 2.6. They may have patches out there, but that was main reason I finally called uncle on my dev box and rolled back to 2.4.
I've been circling, waiting to update my box. I waited for the 939 boards to show up - finally they did, but the CPU's were priced in the same range as my PII 400 was in the day. No worries, with a few processors out there 3500+ and better, it was just a matter of time before the costs dropped back down to what I expect to pay.
A year later a 3500 is only marginally cheaper....
They added a few slower processors to cover cheap skates like myself rather than change any of the higher end prices. I am so looking forward to Intel finally releasing some reasonably fast x86-64 chips so these CPU's return back to what I'm willing to pay. God help us all if they ever works out there is only one vendor option.
Course the real price drop is probably waiting for only one thing - that I buy my kit today.
You may want to double-check the specs on the mini-itx boards again, as both the itx and mini-mac boards are about the length of a stick of ram. If the cases are larger, it is just the manufacturer using off the shelf parts.
My car's Linux based mp3 player uses a fanless eden 533mhz itx board - the DVD drive is mounted under the mainboard. I had to build the case myself, but what I ended up with was just about 1 cm longer and wider, and a bit shorter than the minimac. I got it because of the low voltage requirements rather than the form factor - and paid less than $250 for all the parts a couple years ago. Looks very much like the case shown in the article or the new Apple box, except it was made from stainless steel and mounted in the boot. About bloody time more case options were out there.... Folding and spot welding are not what I would call fun.
Now what is interesting is the processing power of these low voltage, small form factor machines is 'good enough'. I could play a DVD video with the help of a MP2 hardware decoder on the via 533 or play Diablo if I booted Win32 on it. The stuff today has enough beef to do software MP2 decoding with reasonably low voltage/heat output! Not that you would play Doom 3 on this type of kit, but for those looking to build out silent home theater applications this is a good trend. With Apple now producing a competing (if not superior) option to Via's low voltage / small form factor boards, it looks like Intel may make a more serious push in that direction. That size case requires you to be real careful about heat output, which made the P4 on a small form factor real ugly. I would buy the minimac mainboard alone for my next project, if it was possible - without wanting the extra $350-400 expense from the case, laptop hdd, DVD, and OS. Nice to see the industry starting to trend that way.
The Matrox RT.X10 Suite bundles the Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Encore, and a few other handy bits of kit with their capture card. Goes for about $1100 for the full Monty, $700 for a more limited set. Worth taking a look at... We use it for cutting and splicing training sessions these days, but if you know the tool it cranks out nice stuff.
Can't say I know the Fedora distro (since rh9, switched) SuSE 9.2 will pick up all the hardware on a t40p -- typing this reply on one right now. Picked up the wireless and video card as part of the install. The only 'setting' change was using the GUI to tell it to go 1400x1050 over the default pick.
Try the 9.2 live eval, and see how it does. http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/d ownloads/ftp/live_eval_int.html The FTP install is free, and media
Yes, but this is only for one or two clients. I set up a video server for my little one's movies after she mangled the third copy of a bug's life. She sees a list of movies icons, clicks one, fires up a server instance on the backend, and repeatedly streams the movie until she selects another or hits a time interval. It is fast enough for movies, so tiny sound files should be a breeze. The client bit comes with a nice API that lets you do a fair bit of manipulation.
I'm wondering the same thing as the parent poster - but it is not because I have mad cash for new kit, however, nor want l33t frame rates. I personify cheap...
I'm upgrading my system, so I can either go AGP or PCI-e for the video card for the motherboard. The boards that support SLI also have some other chipset features I want, so I figure $140-200 will be spend regardless of the video card.. The 6800's are going for stupid money right now ($400+). My current AGP ti4200 served me well, but against things like Doom3, HL2, and the latest generation of games... blah. Going forward, it looks like longer term PCI-e may be the way to go. So, what to do? 6600's go for $200 or less these days. By the time my system feels like a dog again, I should be able to buy a 6600 for cheap and do the SLI thing.
The question at hand is can I get by with a single 6600, and add the other card when it is cheap and avoid replacing the current card to give it some extra legs - hoping for an extra year of quality gaming. If it does not stack up to a 6800, then this is not a good option. If it come close, then perhaps a longer play is viable.
When the card hits the 'this is way dog slow' mark, it will end up in a server or sibling's machine, so two cards with the same drivers and what not is a feature... Course, I still have a Matrox millennium card in service... Nothing gets thrown away
>>That sounds like a really cool idea. Do you know where I might be able to find one and how much they would cost? I did some googling but didn't find anywhere that sells them.
How is this redundant? The other poster was making a joke.
If you are serious, I hacked up a 5" PSOne LCD (silly typo, that is what I get for posting without coffee), which was more or less readable if I ran a console in VGA resolution. Paid about $30 for it at the time, and took me the better part of the weekend to figure out how to properly solder the connection. Take a look at http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=62951& page=1&pp=20. All the pin outs, settings, and trouble shooting are in the thread.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll second that - and add that I waited for HL2 until I saw it go on sale for $30 and Doom 3 for $20! Had they not been at the $50+ mark, it would have been opening week. $60 (even $50) breaks the threshold for me of 'impulse buy'. I'm a sucker to pick up a game - newer titles in the $20-30 mark, older titles for under $10 - adding up quickly to good chunks of money. $60 puts it right in the category of requiring due diligence in reviews, fan sites then customers, perhaps one or two people who played it, and even waiting for the first round (or two) of patches. More often then not, I just don't buy anymore until it heads to the bargain shelf. Dropping the price from $60 to $45 is not the bargain shelf either...
Regardless of the legal merits, it speaks volumes about the corporate culture.
Draconian NDA's usually surface well into the interviewing process, so nice to not waste anyone's time with even looking at the company from an employment standpoint. Love to know who they are...
of Small Form Factor computers to be light, portable , and functional (like a Mac Mini?)
This is a power gaming box for lan parties. No question. All the beef of what most people have in a desktop tower in something you can carry with one hand. They are making enough room (and I assume cooling and power) for the latest greatest set of video cards in SLI configuration. The video cards alone cost more than a mini-mac, never mind the CPU and RAM. You don't need that for PVR's, surfing the web, or any home theater option. I'd wager the folks that would buy this are more interested in shoe horning a pair of raptors in RAID 0 configuration than a low voltage laptop hard drive.
Even a spendy laptop for twice the money would not perform like you could make this chassis (properly equipped) do with off the shelf kit.
Fast hardware, but not that fast. (grin) Even sharing the work with distcc takes a good chunk of time. Starting with stage 3, pulling updates from the net and compiling, just getting the base OS up and running without X or apps takes me the better part of the day.
Getting ready to rebuild the current workstation to a server, and build a new workstation in the next couple weeks. I fully expect to botch my first couple attempts to get the SATA drive, video, or AMD64 specific stuff up and running. Rather than download and compile (only to do it a couple more times), I'd like to use the GRP Packages as I sort out the sillies first....
When installing on new hardware - especially stuff that people have been sorting through in the forms - I like to do the first install using the stage three / precompiled packages to do the initial sanity check. From there I'll sort out the bits that need extra work and more often then not trash the install while doing it. Once I got it, I start over and do a proper net install with the lessons learned. The prebuilt stuff only takes thirty minutes to get the system up and running. Starting from source from the net and compiling usually takes me the better part of the day.
What I was hoping for was the GA release for 2005.0. Not tat it matters to folks with running systems, but for new folks it is nice to start with a few months worth of hardware updates in there.
The thing the XML databases are nice for is if folks can't really lock down the schema. Often you have the case where you are mapping attributes to columns, which works fine in a relational database. Then things change over time.... Usually turning a nice relational design into a mess. Being able to use Xpath is great when you are searching for nodes too, once you get your arms around the syntax and assuming the stuff you are storing is XML. Some of the other bits in their toolkit were interesting.
If things are fixed, there are a lot of other options out there for faster manipulation. XMLBeans (now an Apache project, formally BEA) is good stuff. Hibernate is lovely kit for mapping objects to a relational DB.
SoyoUSA is getting out of the motherboard game, but over the last year there were tons of 'almost for free' after rebates out there. After sending the rebate information registered mail, six months later they came back and told me they never received it. Funny, I got a postcard that says you did...
Not worth the $90 to hunt it down beyond what I have done, but I don't factor rebates into the cost/value of the item anymore.
The employees stole and disclosed company trade secrets. The broke the law and are criminals, they should be treated as criminals.
The people that published this material are accessories to a crime and should also be treated as criminals.
Violating a NDA is breach of contract, which opens you up for civil suites but not criminal. If this is a breach of contract, I don't think they are an accessory to a crime. Not to say some clever legal maneuvering (like forcing them to reveal their sources or face contempt charges, or just suing them) won't make the bloggers suffer.
(keeping in mind IANAL, but that probably makes us even)
I'm still trying to come up with a client-side stylesheet that undoes what IntelliTXT and its ilk do.
Adblock will get it. Adblock http://*.intellitxt.* and you are golden.
Odds are it has a headphone jack. Should play mp3 files without issue. Older versions of pocketpc had to hack back in media player to support mp3 format, but I doubt that is an issue anymore.
Even the cheap production is no help if nobody watches the shows. A truly popular show will pull in millions per commercial break, so whether the episode cost $10,000 or $5,000,000 to produce, if nobody at all watches the $10,000 show and the $5,000,000 show gets 50 million viewers, the more expensive show will actually be more profitable.
True enough, unfortunately the viewers / production costs is a very high profit ratio. People are watching! A couple years back I worked a gig where I was building software for a large studio. Two of the business people using the software (and thus spending a bit of time hammering out requirements with) were producers to some of the big reality series. The comments about production costs came from them - lamenting that these shows made so much money that it was getting hard to produce 'real' shows. (not that 'real' in their minds was sci-fi, mind you)
And yes, reality TV is the replacement. Why? Because 90% of the people who watch 90% of the TV in this country honestly enjoy that crap.
I'd say we will see more and more reality shows because they are stupendously cheaper to produce than anything else. Minimal sets, no actors, no script writing, etc. Compare that to sci-fi. Special effects and complex sets are a must, decent acting, and sudo science that is close enough that it allows us to suspend disbelief - all costly if done right, and crap if any of those bits are missing. Episodic TV will get worse but movies will try to get all three right since the reality thing does not work at the ticket counter.
I was waiting for things to get ugly (heading under a buck) before picking up my SCOX stock certificates. Four dollars + additional fees is too much. It cost me more to have paper stock certificates issued than it did to buy the stock when pets.com went tits up, but framed up they rocked as a white elephant gifts. Them screwing around with the SEC get the symbol changed to SCOXE before I though they would. Grrr. Once again, I squarely shoot my foot trying to predict the stock market.
If you bought an ipod, then you end up using itunes.
/.) I have a massive CD collection, lovingly ripped, encoded at a nice bit rate, and organized on my file servers. iTunes does not seem to handle the import - the files I have and the files it thinks I have are not the same... More important, I have zero interest in buying DRM media files. AAC may be absolutely wonderful, as may RM or WMA. Good for them, I'll vote with my wallet. For the couple dollar difference, I'll just buy the album on physical CD. When the day comes where CD's are DRM'ed and there are no more options, I'll figure out what to do.
You know, I really wish I understood that little gem completely before I bought an ipod shuffle.
I did a bit of homework and found out it could be treated as a USB thumbdrive with FAT32 partitioning. Golden, I can mount that... Unlike many of the players out there, I can't just move my music over to the player's file system. I've got a mixed environment, and was really angry over the amount of work I had to do to export MP3's over to my ipod from my Gentoo box. (Hats off to the gtkpod dev team, btw)
As a lightweight MP3 player / thumbdrive the Shuffle is nice. iTunes, not so good. (iconoclastic stance here on
Anyhow, Apple may pitch the iPod as a hardware sale where any music is more or less sold at cost - but they really went out of their way to tie the iTunes software (and thus the on-line store) into the mix. Grrr...
What exactly are you doing that 2.6 isn't cooked-enough for your needs yet?
In my case, a large chunk of the IBM stack had issues. You could do a bit of hacking to get DB2 to work, but WebSphere and WSAD was a PITA on 2.6. They may have patches out there, but that was main reason I finally called uncle on my dev box and rolled back to 2.4.
I've been circling, waiting to update my box. I waited for the 939 boards to show up - finally they did, but the CPU's were priced in the same range as my PII 400 was in the day. No worries, with a few processors out there 3500+ and better, it was just a matter of time before the costs dropped back down to what I expect to pay.
A year later a 3500 is only marginally cheaper....
They added a few slower processors to cover cheap skates like myself rather than change any of the higher end prices. I am so looking forward to Intel finally releasing some reasonably fast x86-64 chips so these CPU's return back to what I'm willing to pay. God help us all if they ever works out there is only one vendor option.
Course the real price drop is probably waiting for only one thing - that I buy my kit today.
You may want to double-check the specs on the mini-itx boards again, as both the itx and mini-mac boards are about the length of a stick of ram. If the cases are larger, it is just the manufacturer using off the shelf parts.
My car's Linux based mp3 player uses a fanless eden 533mhz itx board - the DVD drive is mounted under the mainboard. I had to build the case myself, but what I ended up with was just about 1 cm longer and wider, and a bit shorter than the minimac. I got it because of the low voltage requirements rather than the form factor - and paid less than $250 for all the parts a couple years ago. Looks very much like the case shown in the article or the new Apple box, except it was made from stainless steel and mounted in the boot. About bloody time more case options were out there.... Folding and spot welding are not what I would call fun.
Now what is interesting is the processing power of these low voltage, small form factor machines is 'good enough'. I could play a DVD video with the help of a MP2 hardware decoder on the via 533 or play Diablo if I booted Win32 on it. The stuff today has enough beef to do software MP2 decoding with reasonably low voltage/heat output! Not that you would play Doom 3 on this type of kit, but for those looking to build out silent home theater applications this is a good trend. With Apple now producing a competing (if not superior) option to Via's low voltage / small form factor boards, it looks like Intel may make a more serious push in that direction. That size case requires you to be real careful about heat output, which made the P4 on a small form factor real ugly. I would buy the minimac mainboard alone for my next project, if it was possible - without wanting the extra $350-400 expense from the case, laptop hdd, DVD, and OS. Nice to see the industry starting to trend that way.
The Matrox RT.X10 Suite bundles the Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Encore, and a few other handy bits of kit with their capture card. Goes for about $1100 for the full Monty, $700 for a more limited set. Worth taking a look at... We use it for cutting and splicing training sessions these days, but if you know the tool it cranks out nice stuff.
Can't say I know the Fedora distro (since rh9, switched) SuSE 9.2 will pick up all the hardware on a t40p -- typing this reply on one right now. Picked up the wireless and video card as part of the install. The only 'setting' change was using the GUI to tell it to go 1400x1050 over the default pick.
d ownloads/ftp/live_eval_int.html The FTP install is free, and media
Try the 9.2 live eval, and see how it does. http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/
Yes, but this is only for one or two clients. I set up a video server for my little one's movies after she mangled the third copy of a bug's life. She sees a list of movies icons, clicks one, fires up a server instance on the backend, and repeatedly streams the movie until she selects another or hits a time interval. It is fast enough for movies, so tiny sound files should be a breeze. The client bit comes with a nice API that lets you do a fair bit of manipulation.
http://www.videolan.org/ Multiplatform, works great.
I'm wondering the same thing as the parent poster - but it is not because I have mad cash for new kit, however, nor want l33t frame rates. I personify cheap...
I'm upgrading my system, so I can either go AGP or PCI-e for the video card for the motherboard. The boards that support SLI also have some other chipset features I want, so I figure $140-200 will be spend regardless of the video card.. The 6800's are going for stupid money right now ($400+). My current AGP ti4200 served me well, but against things like Doom3, HL2, and the latest generation of games... blah. Going forward, it looks like longer term PCI-e may be the way to go. So, what to do? 6600's go for $200 or less these days. By the time my system feels like a dog again, I should be able to buy a 6600 for cheap and do the SLI thing.
The question at hand is can I get by with a single 6600, and add the other card when it is cheap and avoid replacing the current card to give it some extra legs - hoping for an extra year of quality gaming. If it does not stack up to a 6800, then this is not a good option. If it come close, then perhaps a longer play is viable.
When the card hits the 'this is way dog slow' mark, it will end up in a server or sibling's machine, so two cards with the same drivers and what not is a feature... Course, I still have a Matrox millennium card in service... Nothing gets thrown away
Until I see a game developed by an AAA game developing company rated at a 1 or a 0, their ratings hold no power in my book
Oh, I think I remember one. Worst $4.99 bargain bin buy ever...
(your point still stands)
>>That sounds like a really cool idea. Do you know where I might be able to find one and how much they would cost? I did some googling but didn't find anywhere that sells them.
How is this redundant? The other poster was making a joke.
If you are serious, I hacked up a 5" PSOne LCD (silly typo, that is what I get for posting without coffee), which was more or less readable if I ran a console in VGA resolution. Paid about $30 for it at the time, and took me the better part of the weekend to figure out how to properly solder the connection. Take a look at http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=62951