there are people who are interested in decent secondary display adapters
Define "decent".
If you want a second monitor for just doing debugging, coding, text display, etc. then just about any video card will work just fine. And there's plenty of choices in that arena.
If you want a second monitor for additional display area for 3D projects and similar high-performance needs then you're already better served in getting a modern card -- which, as you say, will have dual head capabilities built in. Even if you found a PCI card with decent 3D it would be crippled by the PCI bandwidth.
Dual head isn't limited to top-of-the-line either... I bought a GF4 Ti4200 card about 2 months ago for a bit over $100 and it has 2 outputs (1 VGA, 1 DVI, and came with a DVI->VGA converter). There were several less expensive/capable cards available as well that had dual head.
The same market that puts in GF MX's and ATI 7000's in current systems. There's a lot of people out there that don't need a $200+ video card. Forgoing 3D entirely on a home PC is a bad move though, since you'll certainly end up with displeased users when they can't play some random game they picked up.
Laptops, OEM systems, business class systems, etc. all sell millions of low end video cards yearly. This market is much larger, and potentially much more profitable, than the small high-end gamer/enthusiast market.
I know. However, just because it exists doesn't mean absolute abandonment is necessary. Heck, a second screen on those single AGP-slot equipped systems could be done via PCI
They used to be, but nowadays the video cards have multiple DACs. My GF4 Ti4200 has two outputs on it for two monitors. Matrox has cards that can drive up to four monitors at once.
It's no longer necessary to have more than one video card to have multiple monitors.
On a side note however, what is PCI (32 and 64 bit) throughput
The PCI you find in your average computer is 133 MBps - 32 bit, 33 Mhz. On servers you may find faster PCI backbones, and I believe the top of the line with the current PCI spec is 64-bit at 66 MHz, giving you 533 MBps transfer rate.
If it's less than, say, 300MBPS, couldn't an external USB2 videocard be made
USB2 is 480 Mbps, not MBps. That's a whopping 60 MB/s, which is well below even PCI 1.1. Oh, and you'll never actually get 480 Mbps from a USB2 device, since that's maximum theoretical speed and never approached in reality.
PCI is less and less viable for graphics as we move on... the bandwidth just isn't there. IIRC, even the GF4MX cards are crippled on a PCI bus... which is pretty pathetic. I don't expect to see any more advanced 3D cards made available on that bus.
It's been stated that Doom 3 won't run at full frame rate on any of today's existing hardware
Reference from Carmack please?
Doom3 is likely to run with full eye candy on an ATI Radeon 9700 (and probably 9500) or a GF Fx (which isn't quite out yet) at 1024x768 with full features enabled and probably anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering.
This is based off Carmack stating that it'll run decently on a GF4 at 1024x768, although without all the eye candy at maximum.
Frankly, nobody seriously expects that SiS is going to trump ATI and nVidia yet... they've been too far behind for too long. They may very well eventually come out with a chipset that's as good or better than the current leaders, but they haven't even managed to get within spitting distance with previous efforts -- and the hype around those chipsets was that they'd be better than ATI/nVidia too.
If they're still available, I doubt that Intel actually does the fabbing... although there's a remote possibility that they do.
Most likely, however, they have some other small chip fab do it for them. The technology needed to fab a 486 is archaic now, and the equipment is available cheaply (cheap to a fab that is... maybe half a million for a PVD instead of $25M for the latest.09 micron PVD... the savings in the photo stage should be even more extravagent) since few people want to buy the machines. Intel probably won't spare the fab space for such a low volume product, but there's a bunch of small fabs out there that would happily enter into a licensing deal.
Of course, even if you manage to get a new 486 chip, you need a MB and memory for it too... and the PS connectors on old MBs are the old AT style, not the newer ATX. Fun fun!
Again, name one instance where MS raised prices AFTER the competition went away
Both Office and Windows exhibit this behavior. Back when Office had stiff competition from competing suites the price was lower. When Windows was facing off against OS/2 it was cheaper as well.
We may see a reduction in price in the near future, since there is some backing behind competing office suites (with HP and Gateway bundling non-MS suites, plus OSS products like AbiWord and OO.org). Windows is feeling increasing pressure on the server pricing from Linux as well.
That said, I can't really whine about the royalties on MPEG4 vs MP9. The royalties on MPEG4 are generally considered excessive in the first place, particularly since most of the R&D by various companies was done as a tax write off. This really isn't a case where the competition can't afford to match prices.
It's really amusing watching this thread as people try to decide which is the lesser of two evils.
I use to run MOO on Win98 with no problems... sound worked fine too. Haven't gotten it working on my most recent PC since I have to find the install disks... just copying the game directory wouldn't work:/
If all companies were required to have their customer service entities live of to an expected level of performance/satisfaction it would do wonders for trust and consumer satisfaction in general.
When we go back to 20% unemployment you'll have great customer service. Because that employee won't want to risk their job by pissing off a customer. Right now you get fired from Best Buy you can get another job in just about any retail joint you want.
And if it pisses you off, then vote with your wallet and stop doing business with them. Been there, done that. Stores have lost my business for years because of bad customer service.
In virtually every field all the license does is create an artificial barrier to entry. Or are you telling me that you've never had (or heard of) a crooked auto mechanic, a bad hair stylist, or a shoddy plumber?
Getting a license is generally little more than paying a fee. Usually there's no testing involved. It's just another revenue source for the county or state. It's also a way to make unionizing more easy, since there's a central registry of everyone in the profession.
Frankly, as far as computer techs go, I've seen plenty of "professional" technicians that don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. And yet they stay working at large outlets like CompUSA, Best Buy, etc. because the customer service there is so crappy it doesn't matter.
Oh, and your licensing isn't going to stop most of the cases you're concerned about. In most states it's legal to do your own auto repair, haircuts, plumbing, electrical work, etc. And you can still call in a pro if you bork it up too much (or go bald/crew cut in the case of the haircut).
So what exactly were you hoping to gain from this?
Bear in mind that the Audiotron and its ilk are nearly first generation products and are guaranteed to have glitches that you might not like. If you demand perfection from your audio system then you'd best give the current generation of players a miss.
Yup... the reason I'm interested in FLAC is that it's lossless, so I can encode the CDs once and be done with it... if I encode them as MP3s, OGGs, or whatever, then I may want to redo it in the future when a player supports something "better". I suppose I could just store the CDs as WAVs, but that's a bit excessive.
I know I'm not a golden ear (but I'm not tone deaf either), so I'm pretty sure that AT would be just fine for audio quality. I just dread taking all the time to encode about 1000 CDs in one format only to reencode them a few years down the line.
From their website it looks like it only handles MP3s and internet audio. Also no digital out.
For the price, I'd rather buy an AudioTron... and even then it can't directly handle OGG/FLAC (it can through a plugin on Linux, if you have the CPU power).
The comparsion chart they have is misleading as well... AudioTron is supported on any system that can use Windows shares. Rio is as well, but somewhat more hackish. The AT is also customizable, and quite a few 3rd party programs have been written for it through the API.
Audiotron keeps tempting me, since they're pretty open with the support, keep upgrading it, and what not. But there's a couple things that stop me dead -
Lack of OGG or FLAC support. And TB has stated that the current Audiotron won't have it either, because it doesn't have the CPU power. Yeah, I know someone has a plugin to convert any format to WAV on-the-fly, but it requires more CPU power than would be present in my network server(s). Realistically, I'm most interested in FLAC.
The second issue, which I'm not sure is still an issue, is that I've heard that the AT has a small "silence" between tracks... not an issue for some music, but for albums like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon there are segways between songs. It's such a trivial issue to properly buffer the data I'm amazed that this problem exists... does it still?
One thing I'd like, but isn't a "must have" is an on screen interface. It'd just be nice.
Who knows, I may buy one eventually anyway, but the limited format support (even though it's better than most of their competitors) irks me.
Mind giving websites for references? I look at some of the various TiVo hacking sites every now and again, but last time I didn't see a way to easily transport shows between TiVos, or store them off on a PC. Everyone seemed more interested in burning to S-VCD, which I couldn't care less about.
If I could move shows between my two TiVos then it'd be really cool. Have plenty of spare drive space and computers to act as an intermediary too.
Re:Excellent things for the work place..
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Assorted CES Gizmos
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Unless you are a student, wristwatches are wholly unnecessary and a matter of preference
Or if you don't have a cell phone/pager/whatever.
When I was tied to a pager I stopped wearing my wristwatch... it was just as convienent to look at the pager really.
I don't need one now, and I won't carry one by choice. Ditto for a cell phone. Maybe if I could eliminate my land line, but since I have DSL that's not an option.
Somebody at Microsoft is smoking crack to think that people would wear a Microsoft watch
While I wouldn't, and obviously you wouldn't, that doesn't mean nobody would. Frankly, the average Joe doesn't think of MS as an evil corporation since MS does a lot of spin control. A lot of people with more money than sense will see this and think "oooh! Nifty!".
And about a year down the road it'll get piled with the various PDAs and other gizmos that last made them say "oooh! Nifty!".
DirecTV has 36 channels of audio programming. It would be fairly trivial to extract only the audio stream from the broadcast once it's been decrypted and pipe it into your car's sound system.
About all it's missing is talk radio... but frankly you can tune into a cable news station and get pretty much the same thing. Yeah, you have commercials again, but I think that both Sirius and XM have commercials on their talk channels as well.
This isn't a satellite radio killer yet though... way too expensive.
You don't get it. Yes, a HTPC can do more, but it doesn't do it as well. Nothing on the home built front comes close to the usability or features of a TiVo within the PVR realm. Sure, you can build one that does other stuff, and that's a valid thing, but every solution out there is kludgy and inelegant.
Of course, if you'd bothered to read some of my past comments you would've noted that I recommend AVSforum for HTPC needs, and that they've been doing HDTV time shifting for two years now. I know quite well of what I speak.
you can upgrade the space to your PC a lot easier than upgrading the space to your TiVO
Not really. If you're competent enough to add a new HD to a PC, you're competent enough to add one to a TiVo. It requires a bit more work, yes, but so what? It requires a lot less work to actually use the thing, which is the whole point. Not to swap components out hourly.
can't be upgraded without voiding the warranty
DirecTiVo's have no such limitation (at least not the Series2's, and I don't think the S1's did either). There's no sticker saying "opening voids warrantee" or any such thing. Besides which, it's a 90 day parts warrantee anyway.
And while, yes, you can stick an absurd amount of disk space in a standard PC, what's the point? I have 110 GB on my TiVo and I've never even come close to filling it.
Maybe if it handled MP3/OGG/FLAC/whatever as well it would be an issue, or if it could do HD, but TiVo doesn't. For what TiVo does do, no HTPC comes even close.
GR is as "defective" as Newtonian physics is. Newtonian physics holds up just great for most things, it's only when you get to really fast or really large objects that it runs into problems. Similarly GR holds just fine for most things in its domain... until you get to too small of particles or time scales.
Of course, this entire thread is about additional support for the "defective" theory, so I guess it's irrelevant as well.
No he's not. The people over at AVS Forum have been doing HDTV time shifting via HTPC for 2 years now.
Re:Isn't the issue in this area $/MIPS?
on
New SGI Altix 3000
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· Score: 5, Informative
No, because $/MIPS is a misrepresentation. Heck, MIPS alone is meaningless, because all it does is take a theoretical maximum of CPU speed. MIPS doesn't take into account anything beyond CPU speed - like memory speed, backplanes, drive arrays, etc.
If you have heavily interrelated datasets, like in just about any thermal dynamics/plasma/weather problem, then there is so much interdependancy between adjacent "cells" that each work unit needs information from adjacent work units constantly. Spread that system out on a cluster solution and you're DOA because your communications between boxes are horrendously slow, with latencies measured in milliseconds instead of nanoseconds. So while you may have some absurd number of MIPS, the reality is that the CPUs are sitting idle 90% of the time waiting for data from some other CPU/memory block.
Take all those CPUs, all that memory, put them in a single box and do the backplanes and memory interfaces right (this is where the cost comes in by the way) and your latency becomes reasonable and you actually get all those MIPS.
It boils down to what the problem set is. If you need an obscene amount of transactions or have a highly interdependant problem set then you're better off with a single large box. If you can break up the problem set and minimize interactions then clustering is your friend.
There's also the issue of maintainance, and while the hardware costs may be lower for a large cluster, the time spent fixing the hundreds of boxes may kill you. Have a single box that's designed for redundancy and you'll pay a fortune for the support contract, but you won't spend an appreciable amount of your time on hardware support on the rare occasions it actually needs something.
Certainly you can disable logging or log to/dev/null in most software. You can also have a cron job that goes off and deletes the logs at regular intervals (and then tells the program to reopen the log, otherwise the file remains undeleted (but not visible) until it's closed, since the program's open is a reference count).
Thing is, you may actually want logs for some small period of time. Most site admins like to know how popular their site is, and logs are one way of doing it. Especially since logs show how many lurkers you have, and not just active posters. Another reason to keep some minimal logging going on is if you get DOS'd, since then you might have a fighting chance of getting things fixed before the attack ends.
It sounds like they have a watcher program that deletes the logs when they get too large... which makes the logs useless for the latter purpose. But you can still use them for the first purpose, which is probably all they really want in the first place.
Alternately they could just be deleting them by hand, but I doubt they're that stupid. If that was true it quickly becomes a case of illegally blocking a police investigation, ignoring a warrant, and possibly contempt of court. IANAL.
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there are people who are interested in decent secondary display adapters
Define "decent".
If you want a second monitor for just doing debugging, coding, text display, etc. then just about any video card will work just fine. And there's plenty of choices in that arena.
If you want a second monitor for additional display area for 3D projects and similar high-performance needs then you're already better served in getting a modern card -- which, as you say, will have dual head capabilities built in. Even if you found a PCI card with decent 3D it would be crippled by the PCI bandwidth.
Dual head isn't limited to top-of-the-line either... I bought a GF4 Ti4200 card about 2 months ago for a bit over $100 and it has 2 outputs (1 VGA, 1 DVI, and came with a DVI->VGA converter). There were several less expensive/capable cards available as well that had dual head.
What is the market for this thing?
The same market that puts in GF MX's and ATI 7000's in current systems. There's a lot of people out there that don't need a $200+ video card. Forgoing 3D entirely on a home PC is a bad move though, since you'll certainly end up with displeased users when they can't play some random game they picked up.
Laptops, OEM systems, business class systems, etc. all sell millions of low end video cards yearly. This market is much larger, and potentially much more profitable, than the small high-end gamer/enthusiast market.
I know. However, just because it exists doesn't mean absolute abandonment is necessary. Heck, a second screen on those single AGP-slot equipped systems could be done via PCI
They used to be, but nowadays the video cards have multiple DACs. My GF4 Ti4200 has two outputs on it for two monitors. Matrox has cards that can drive up to four monitors at once.
It's no longer necessary to have more than one video card to have multiple monitors.
On a side note however, what is PCI (32 and 64 bit) throughput
The PCI you find in your average computer is 133 MBps - 32 bit, 33 Mhz. On servers you may find faster PCI backbones, and I believe the top of the line with the current PCI spec is 64-bit at 66 MHz, giving you 533 MBps transfer rate.
If it's less than, say, 300MBPS, couldn't an external USB2 videocard be made
USB2 is 480 Mbps, not MBps. That's a whopping 60 MB/s, which is well below even PCI 1.1. Oh, and you'll never actually get 480 Mbps from a USB2 device, since that's maximum theoretical speed and never approached in reality.
PCI is less and less viable for graphics as we move on... the bandwidth just isn't there. IIRC, even the GF4MX cards are crippled on a PCI bus... which is pretty pathetic. I don't expect to see any more advanced 3D cards made available on that bus.
It's been stated that Doom 3 won't run at full frame rate on any of today's existing hardware
Reference from Carmack please?
Doom3 is likely to run with full eye candy on an ATI Radeon 9700 (and probably 9500) or a GF Fx (which isn't quite out yet) at 1024x768 with full features enabled and probably anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering.
This is based off Carmack stating that it'll run decently on a GF4 at 1024x768, although without all the eye candy at maximum.
Frankly, nobody seriously expects that SiS is going to trump ATI and nVidia yet... they've been too far behind for too long. They may very well eventually come out with a chipset that's as good or better than the current leaders, but they haven't even managed to get within spitting distance with previous efforts -- and the hype around those chipsets was that they'd be better than ATI/nVidia too.
Go look at AVS Forum and their HTPC forum. Even has a sub-forum for HTPC on Linux.
It's a very, very busy forum though, with a couple hundred threads a day being posted to. But it's the definitive place for HTPC knowledge.
Does your TiVo act as a jukebox as well?
If you have a TiVo Series2, activate the new media options, and have a PC with MP3s on a share then yes it does.
And with a better user interface than you have.
Personally, I have a S1 TiVo, and I wouldn't use this feature anyway. The audio outputs on the TiVo aren't up to snuff in my opinion.
And if you only spent $300 on your HTPC, yours aren't either.
If they're still available, I doubt that Intel actually does the fabbing... although there's a remote possibility that they do.
.09 micron PVD... the savings in the photo stage should be even more extravagent) since few people want to buy the machines. Intel probably won't spare the fab space for such a low volume product, but there's a bunch of small fabs out there that would happily enter into a licensing deal.
Most likely, however, they have some other small chip fab do it for them. The technology needed to fab a 486 is archaic now, and the equipment is available cheaply (cheap to a fab that is... maybe half a million for a PVD instead of $25M for the latest
Of course, even if you manage to get a new 486 chip, you need a MB and memory for it too... and the PS connectors on old MBs are the old AT style, not the newer ATX. Fun fun!
Again, name one instance where MS raised prices AFTER the competition went away
Both Office and Windows exhibit this behavior. Back when Office had stiff competition from competing suites the price was lower. When Windows was facing off against OS/2 it was cheaper as well.
We may see a reduction in price in the near future, since there is some backing behind competing office suites (with HP and Gateway bundling non-MS suites, plus OSS products like AbiWord and OO.org). Windows is feeling increasing pressure on the server pricing from Linux as well.
That said, I can't really whine about the royalties on MPEG4 vs MP9. The royalties on MPEG4 are generally considered excessive in the first place, particularly since most of the R&D by various companies was done as a tax write off. This really isn't a case where the competition can't afford to match prices.
It's really amusing watching this thread as people try to decide which is the lesser of two evils.
I use to run MOO on Win98 with no problems... sound worked fine too. Haven't gotten it working on my most recent PC since I have to find the install disks... just copying the game directory wouldn't work :/
If all companies were required to have their customer service entities live of to an expected level of performance/satisfaction it would do wonders for trust and consumer satisfaction in general.
When we go back to 20% unemployment you'll have great customer service. Because that employee won't want to risk their job by pissing off a customer. Right now you get fired from Best Buy you can get another job in just about any retail joint you want.
And if it pisses you off, then vote with your wallet and stop doing business with them. Been there, done that. Stores have lost my business for years because of bad customer service.
In virtually every field all the license does is create an artificial barrier to entry. Or are you telling me that you've never had (or heard of) a crooked auto mechanic, a bad hair stylist, or a shoddy plumber?
Getting a license is generally little more than paying a fee. Usually there's no testing involved. It's just another revenue source for the county or state. It's also a way to make unionizing more easy, since there's a central registry of everyone in the profession.
Frankly, as far as computer techs go, I've seen plenty of "professional" technicians that don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. And yet they stay working at large outlets like CompUSA, Best Buy, etc. because the customer service there is so crappy it doesn't matter.
Oh, and your licensing isn't going to stop most of the cases you're concerned about. In most states it's legal to do your own auto repair, haircuts, plumbing, electrical work, etc. And you can still call in a pro if you bork it up too much (or go bald/crew cut in the case of the haircut).
So what exactly were you hoping to gain from this?
Bear in mind that the Audiotron and its ilk are nearly first generation products and are guaranteed to have glitches that you might not like. If you demand perfection from your audio system then you'd best give the current generation of players a miss.
Yup... the reason I'm interested in FLAC is that it's lossless, so I can encode the CDs once and be done with it... if I encode them as MP3s, OGGs, or whatever, then I may want to redo it in the future when a player supports something "better". I suppose I could just store the CDs as WAVs, but that's a bit excessive.
I know I'm not a golden ear (but I'm not tone deaf either), so I'm pretty sure that AT would be just fine for audio quality. I just dread taking all the time to encode about 1000 CDs in one format only to reencode them a few years down the line.
From their website it looks like it only handles MP3s and internet audio. Also no digital out.
For the price, I'd rather buy an AudioTron... and even then it can't directly handle OGG/FLAC (it can through a plugin on Linux, if you have the CPU power).
The comparsion chart they have is misleading as well... AudioTron is supported on any system that can use Windows shares. Rio is as well, but somewhat more hackish. The AT is also customizable, and quite a few 3rd party programs have been written for it through the API.
Audiotron keeps tempting me, since they're pretty open with the support, keep upgrading it, and what not. But there's a couple things that stop me dead -
Lack of OGG or FLAC support. And TB has stated that the current Audiotron won't have it either, because it doesn't have the CPU power. Yeah, I know someone has a plugin to convert any format to WAV on-the-fly, but it requires more CPU power than would be present in my network server(s). Realistically, I'm most interested in FLAC.
The second issue, which I'm not sure is still an issue, is that I've heard that the AT has a small "silence" between tracks... not an issue for some music, but for albums like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon there are segways between songs. It's such a trivial issue to properly buffer the data I'm amazed that this problem exists... does it still?
One thing I'd like, but isn't a "must have" is an on screen interface. It'd just be nice.
Who knows, I may buy one eventually anyway, but the limited format support (even though it's better than most of their competitors) irks me.
Mind giving websites for references? I look at some of the various TiVo hacking sites every now and again, but last time I didn't see a way to easily transport shows between TiVos, or store them off on a PC. Everyone seemed more interested in burning to S-VCD, which I couldn't care less about.
If I could move shows between my two TiVos then it'd be really cool. Have plenty of spare drive space and computers to act as an intermediary too.
Unless you are a student, wristwatches are wholly unnecessary and a matter of preference
Or if you don't have a cell phone/pager/whatever.
When I was tied to a pager I stopped wearing my wristwatch... it was just as convienent to look at the pager really.
I don't need one now, and I won't carry one by choice. Ditto for a cell phone. Maybe if I could eliminate my land line, but since I have DSL that's not an option.
Somebody at Microsoft is smoking crack to think that people would wear a Microsoft watch
While I wouldn't, and obviously you wouldn't, that doesn't mean nobody would. Frankly, the average Joe doesn't think of MS as an evil corporation since MS does a lot of spin control. A lot of people with more money than sense will see this and think "oooh! Nifty!".
And about a year down the road it'll get piled with the various PDAs and other gizmos that last made them say "oooh! Nifty!".
Color me blind.
DirecTV has 36 channels of audio programming. It would be fairly trivial to extract only the audio stream from the broadcast once it's been decrypted and pipe it into your car's sound system.
About all it's missing is talk radio... but frankly you can tune into a cable news station and get pretty much the same thing. Yeah, you have commercials again, but I think that both Sirius and XM have commercials on their talk channels as well.
This isn't a satellite radio killer yet though... way too expensive.
This doesn't have DirecPC capability. You won't be getting 'net access through it.
You don't get it. Yes, a HTPC can do more, but it doesn't do it as well. Nothing on the home built front comes close to the usability or features of a TiVo within the PVR realm. Sure, you can build one that does other stuff, and that's a valid thing, but every solution out there is kludgy and inelegant.
Of course, if you'd bothered to read some of my past comments you would've noted that I recommend AVSforum for HTPC needs, and that they've been doing HDTV time shifting for two years now. I know quite well of what I speak.
you can upgrade the space to your PC a lot easier than upgrading the space to your TiVO
Not really. If you're competent enough to add a new HD to a PC, you're competent enough to add one to a TiVo. It requires a bit more work, yes, but so what? It requires a lot less work to actually use the thing, which is the whole point. Not to swap components out hourly.
can't be upgraded without voiding the warranty
DirecTiVo's have no such limitation (at least not the Series2's, and I don't think the S1's did either). There's no sticker saying "opening voids warrantee" or any such thing. Besides which, it's a 90 day parts warrantee anyway.
And while, yes, you can stick an absurd amount of disk space in a standard PC, what's the point? I have 110 GB on my TiVo and I've never even come close to filling it.
Maybe if it handled MP3/OGG/FLAC/whatever as well it would be an issue, or if it could do HD, but TiVo doesn't. For what TiVo does do, no HTPC comes even close.
Uh... whatever.
GR is as "defective" as Newtonian physics is. Newtonian physics holds up just great for most things, it's only when you get to really fast or really large objects that it runs into problems. Similarly GR holds just fine for most things in its domain... until you get to too small of particles or time scales.
Of course, this entire thread is about additional support for the "defective" theory, so I guess it's irrelevant as well.
You are going to be a pioneer on this one.
No he's not. The people over at AVS Forum have been doing HDTV time shifting via HTPC for 2 years now.
No, because $/MIPS is a misrepresentation. Heck, MIPS alone is meaningless, because all it does is take a theoretical maximum of CPU speed. MIPS doesn't take into account anything beyond CPU speed - like memory speed, backplanes, drive arrays, etc.
If you have heavily interrelated datasets, like in just about any thermal dynamics/plasma/weather problem, then there is so much interdependancy between adjacent "cells" that each work unit needs information from adjacent work units constantly. Spread that system out on a cluster solution and you're DOA because your communications between boxes are horrendously slow, with latencies measured in milliseconds instead of nanoseconds. So while you may have some absurd number of MIPS, the reality is that the CPUs are sitting idle 90% of the time waiting for data from some other CPU/memory block.
Take all those CPUs, all that memory, put them in a single box and do the backplanes and memory interfaces right (this is where the cost comes in by the way) and your latency becomes reasonable and you actually get all those MIPS.
It boils down to what the problem set is. If you need an obscene amount of transactions or have a highly interdependant problem set then you're better off with a single large box. If you can break up the problem set and minimize interactions then clustering is your friend.
There's also the issue of maintainance, and while the hardware costs may be lower for a large cluster, the time spent fixing the hundreds of boxes may kill you. Have a single box that's designed for redundancy and you'll pay a fortune for the support contract, but you won't spend an appreciable amount of your time on hardware support on the rare occasions it actually needs something.
Certainly you can disable logging or log to /dev/null in most software. You can also have a cron job that goes off and deletes the logs at regular intervals (and then tells the program to reopen the log, otherwise the file remains undeleted (but not visible) until it's closed, since the program's open is a reference count).
Thing is, you may actually want logs for some small period of time. Most site admins like to know how popular their site is, and logs are one way of doing it. Especially since logs show how many lurkers you have, and not just active posters. Another reason to keep some minimal logging going on is if you get DOS'd, since then you might have a fighting chance of getting things fixed before the attack ends.
It sounds like they have a watcher program that deletes the logs when they get too large... which makes the logs useless for the latter purpose. But you can still use them for the first purpose, which is probably all they really want in the first place.
Alternately they could just be deleting them by hand, but I doubt they're that stupid. If that was true it quickly becomes a case of illegally blocking a police investigation, ignoring a warrant, and possibly contempt of court. IANAL.