If your building servers and are still worried about IRQ's you should realy look into server boards with proper server apics. These general come on workstation and server boards aka anything with multiple proc support but there are a few single proc boards with proper server apics. But otherwise I'll agree anything with an audo out is not designed to be a server board but rather a workstation board at best. The other easy way to tell is less than 4 DIMM slots I havent build a server with less than 6 in years. Eventualy people will stop taking a 20 buck motherboard a proc and ram and calling it a server it's a PC desktop that your using as a server it dosent have the expandability, support for lots of ECC ram, and overall it's lacking in general quality.
Re:I have one of these...
on
Science Faction
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Cripaling household guns just means yet again to protect yourself you will need to be a criminal. What part of people do not want to be forced to rely on police cant our lawmakers get through there heads. Yea less guns in the civilian population makes law enforement easier. Hrm do I care does arebody realy think we need to make it easier? Things are two easy now cop shows up does a probable cause search and plants an 8 ball your doing 5 to 10. No I'm not saying all cops are bad etc etc etc I'm saying we dont have any good technical assurances they arent. Where are the helment mounted cams with tamper resistant storage? Where are the non lethal rounds for cops to use? I would rather people load rubber rounds than the gun not fire. Hell load up a blank a rubber then go to lethal rounds if the first two dont stop then the rest will. Allways remember it should be the right of a homeowner to defend themselves with lethal force cops should play test dummy with any new technology and field test it before it's ever mandated for the home they get paid to get shot at just like a marine it's part of the job.
OK I baught a NEW HP 832 or some such (it's still in the box) with a "disposable" digital camera and some photo paper for 54 bucks on clearance at sears. Now I had a 810c that needed cartigaes that generaly run me at staples 60 bucks a set. If I get them online it's less than half that. But prety much I got a few hunded sheets of photo paper a camera and a printer along with a set of replacement ink. Sell the old printer on ebay (this on is marginialy better)
Remember apples to apples it's a 17" LCD vs s 19" CRT as one is usable dimention and CRT's are tube size with viewable be smaller. A 15" LCD would be the comparable size. On the assumption that your cooling half the year (this varies a LOT with your climate an office in Flordia or New Orleans probably cools all year) these savings can add up. I have done offices in NYC were there are literly BTU generation limits in the lease as the ammount of BTU's these building were designed to handle per square foot realy cant be easily upgraded. The same goes for power.
Now to your colculations I'm showing a 17" CRT on pricewatch at $69 and a 17" LCD at $332 at your minimum power savings numbers thats a bit over 5 years for break even. If you go with my sizing numbers it's 219 for the LCD making the payoff in an even 3 years your worst case not counting AC thats well within the life expactancy of the Monitor.
Corps that dont look into LCD's generaly are being very near sighted. LCD's TCO's are supposed to be lower that CRT's due to reduced power use and thus heat generation. I used to keep pizza warm on top of a pair of 19's thats a LOT of heat to AC in the summer. More often this is a sign of it's not my budget so I dont care syndrome.
Yes Genocide is bad, war is bad it's just a valid method to win a war. We have policial issues about defining who is a combantant and who is not mostly based on who looks bad on the news. War when it comes down to it is about using force to acheive polical goals.
Protacted land wars are idiocy in a modern war they churn through men and materials with no real gain over using shock troop tactics and taking places of political and military interest and bypassing non esential targets. It makes little sence to march up from a friendly nation when we can make a secure beachhead utilizing FAE's and generaly use our mobility to our advantage. You take out the command and control as to effectivly marginalize there forces.
As to the effects of the USA on forign nations yes in a lot of ways we rape and pilliage there countries funny that there government dosent do there job. The point of establishing the right to have and the physical presance of bases in forign nations is for a stabalizing factor. Can you see Iran invading Iraq if they have to go by a US military base with a big military no fly zone and a military exclusion zone on the ground? Add to this the perceived safty of living near a US base for groups like and the effects of US money going into the local economy and people getting to know US soldiers there will be mariages give thins a generation or two and you have a fairly pasified area.
We seem to have two choices in forign pollicy let the rest of the world go to pot and become insular or play police force. I vote for the old adage that with great power comes great responcibility. Inspiring some fear in other nations military to the point they understand they cant win is a GOOD thing Iraq may do that or it may be N Korea ultimatly that gives our polititians the ability to negotiate with a strong hand it's getting the polititians to stop being entirly self centered and looking for corprate kickbacks.
When you get into glassing over cities you have a couple big problems with other. Radiation of those people downwind they do get pissy about it. BTW the planet is roundish making everybody downwind. What we have forgotten or refuse to understand there are two ways of winning a war. Utterly destroying your opponent or pacifing you apponent by making them identify with you. It's funny that they have outlawed either of these approaches because they work. The Romans did the kill the men mary the women approach and were successfull at it. The germans attemped the destroy them all and were vilinified for it. Somewhere we decided that genocide is wrong. I think the last war that the US realy won was vs Japan where we insured that there was no posibility of them every becoming militarily dangerious. We should remember this at the end off all wars insure that we get the rights for lots of military bases all over there country with as many troops as we determine nessicary. When you know what an american looks like and rent him an apartment sell them food it's much harder to unilateraly hate.
More importantly unless they are using stranded cable (aka Whip Cable) they are going to end up with breakage as the line is moved repeatedly. Your normal 1000' pull box is meant to be permantly installed in walls and realy not move much unlike a whip cable thats designed to go from the wall to the end station or from patch to switch.
Ok first off I have been making ethernet cables since the late 80's and I have never done it any way but this if I had a choice. Giving yourself an inch or more of cable to untwist and allign is significantly easier to flatten with your fingers. Using standard rj45 ends and crimper just trim insert and crimp you wont have any untwisted before the plastic seperators. You can also make your life easy and use the AMP pull through connectors no muss no fuss unless your have nonstandard switches and patch pannels that dont have the key slot (cheap switches generaly it's a patend thing or something that I think AMP has about those key slots a knife fixes the issue)
Now as far as home wirering why would you ever be terminating to rj45 ends? You go keystone to patch or keystone in the walls and generaly buy your cat 5 whips (standed cable is better for a whip it's more flexable and not as prone to breakage from repeated flexing) Persoanly I went with the Leviton wall plates and keystones from home depot mostly because they were cheaper than any other vendor I could find. Pull an aditional cable to each end point along with coax and a pull cord with a 2 store house the only hard pull was to the attic distrobution pannel and for that I used a surpluss 50 pair trunk and a few coax runs. One distrobution switch in the attic and one in the basement with a gige connecting the two along with voice, serial and digital sat.
Either way dies it realy matter much? This is more a question of viable business modles and not keeping up with technology. People are willing to rip cd's into mp3 and other formats. People are willing to spend time and effort to download music. People are becomming less and less inclined to buy top 10 garbage albums with a couple good songs that get made into music video's anyway and generaly played 24/7 on the radio via payola and general ownership of the radio stations. Now it would seem that the record industry needs to adapt to a changing envirnment this is what business does or goes the way of the dino. DRM is an attempt to lock the consumers into there current business modle. And how many volcal consumers does it take to call it like it is fraudulent advertising a DRMed CD is not a CD Audio device and should not be shelved with or otherwise displayed with real audio CD's it's like mixing boxed of rat poision and corn starch on the shelves all in very similar boxed so the pulic has a hard time noticing the difference. Personaly I do not own a CD player capable of playing back these non audio CD's because I have higher a higher end CD changer and lots of computer drives. Sorry yes I have one device capable of playing them and it's attached to my alarm clock with a pair of crappy full range speakers with 4 inches of sterio seperation not a decent playback device by any means. This is the growing trend who is going to have a single disk CD player and a DVD player hooked up to there receiver if they have to buy it new? More and more people are looking for one device that can playback anything look at consoles that are trying to become the media center of the house.
OK I rambled there but when it realy comes down to it yes Kazza and the likes make copyright violation easy. The recording industry is trying to get legislated out of changing there stratagy and format. This is what modern business have been doing for 30 years and it's been stagnating our economy because its preventing change and trying to keep the status quo. What should happen make better music provide it in an easier format than Kazza with better quality (think ISP cached outside of bandwith caps downloads of whatever format people want from varing mp3 bitrates to flac and ogg) dont try and change it to a lease etc watermark the data per download. This method keeps the existing uses avalible provided a better service than Kazza at a moderate cost. Now they can sue people that then allow the data up on the net for copyright infringement. If this is the death of chain record stores great it's and archaic distribution method give people that want a disk a kiosk with a burner. Oh yea throw some PGP in there somewhere possibly on the watermark and on the download (a PGP encrypted download that uses the buyers key to insure they are the one that got it maybe a good place for the credit cards to get involved as pgp key repositories as in you enter CC data it gets veried and sends back a PGP public for that CC number they have previously sent the private key to the consumer this makes online CC Fraud significantly harder)
Re:helping the handicapped illegal?
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 1
That may be true but because so may of the parts are cusom or modifed for the DRM while the CPU is cheap the rest of it is VERY custom and those VERY expensive compared to rock bottom PC prices least thats what I think is happening.
OK having done this in the last 12 months lets go over the options.
Slimmp3 and Ethermp3nut or whatever are out there and work well for ethernet attached 2 channel audio. I went with the free as in speech ethermp3nut (right name?) as I'm handy with a sodering iron and have friends that can deal with surface mount. These along with a small amp are good for rooms that you only need 2 channels like the bathroom porches etc pretty much anything without a TV. I have 4 drops of Cat5 in every room (one per wall) and use cheap gige agrigation switches from netgear if I need more ports.
OK now for rooms with TV's my primary concern was the TV room I places the server directly below the TV and install some metal piping to chace cables through (grounded to keep any interferience down) The only thing running analog to the TV is the VGA cable and the Svideo cable running to the receiver the audio comes off a standard sound blaster audigy via fiber to the in room receiver. Firewire and USB 2.0 got chaced up as well to run a DVD-R drive in the sterio rack for DVD/CD playback, ripping and recording. A few pairs of cat 5 are used for IR Blasters and receivers. Video is provided via a Matrox 450 Maxx one out used for the VGA to the TV and the other running svideo to the receiver in the TV Room. The TV room has server method of controling things there is a wireless keyboard and mouse, normal remote comands via lircd (more on this in a moment) a dumb terminal a Palm with IR and any laptop that can get on the 802.11g network. Finialy I'm currently working on adding speach recognition for the complete hal look:)
Other rooms have a pretty standard key pads and screens that work via serial 3 wire. I hacked together a little application to scroll whatever song is playing information and navigate premade playlists that are then passwed back to mpg123 to play it's not perfect but works ok next revision is speach recognition. If thy were close enough (first floor) I used a cheapish 12 channel out 8 in profetional audio card they are easy to come by and generaly support linux check out some garage band supply store to find one, each output looks like a seperate DSP at the application level but still only one IRQ. Because it's a real audio card it outputs a balanced line signal these are much easier to run at distance without interferience. At the other end are pretty straight forward project amps and speakers in the walls I didnt need to go that big wattage wise so these were easy to construct.
Now for the few places that I wasent comfertable running balance line to I used the ethernet to line converters and a receiver this for me was the garage it's detached from the house so I ran multimode fiber a few inces below the ground picking up some cheap 10/100 fiber cards off of ebay and installing them into the linux router with bridging and a boca terminal in the garage thats also hacked to support bridging (have my old 802.11b AP out there for the car) I could have used the audio on the Boca but it just sounded bad (I tried this first) the terminal runs mp3blaster via an xterm to the core server.
The other special room is my bedroom it's the only other TV in the house I have an old trident PCI card that can be jumpered for TV out only (This is a GREAT feature) and that runs a Svideo up (need a booster seeing some artifacts fromt he run) I have a DEC color dumb term attached to an old 9 inch monitor and keyboard in the corner it's directy connected to the server on 3 lines and generly runs mp3blaster or lynx to get to the video playlists and startup mplayer for those. I used 3 ethernut's to give me 5.1 for the receiver in the bedroom and am working on getting mplayer to connect to them correctly.
OK now to the server it's a doul proc Xeon 600 with 2 megs of cache each that I had laying around. Primary video out is a Matrox 450 Maxx secondary is a trident on PCI. I have a few 4 channel out CAD cards that use PCI that can handle the video but need to get scan converters / T
OK I think I figured out his trade secret enough radioactive material cramed inside a simple coil generator works nearly forever well longer then your life expantancy sitting that near to a hot pile:) And when will people learn call it a compound and every F?? out there is looking at you. Now granted not letting investors look inside the black box is one thing but from the sounds of it his partners didnt get to see either.
Re:helping the handicapped illegal?
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 1
Those two things are very different. Backing up PS2 games is one thing and used to be covered under fair use doctorine untill the DCMA. Now making modifications to hardware for the purpose of enabaling the handicapt is allowed under the DCMA one of the few things that is. When you get into things that have significant other uses thats wehre you can get into things the courts need to decide.
Now personaly hack the Xbox make it play nitendo games for all I care. The fact they are sold below cost is not mine nor should it be anybody outside of MS and there compotition. When will people wake up and remember were not hear to support corps if they do stupid things dont bail them out. The fact that the DCMA is protecting corp profit margines is disgusting. Dont want people to be able to copy your games easily use a cart not a CD or DVD.
OK ban spam and direct marketing. People dont want either generaly speaking. It's one thing if a sales person sends me an email about some new product offering thats keeping me in the loop it's a different thing when it's an automated sender from some PR department. Make email like faxes just say no to anything automated that wasent SPECIFICALY requested like the local Deli's lunch specials. Spam is as much trougth in advertising and working against automation.
Light rail is fine and dandy but lets get real what will get people out of there cars an onto rail, SPEED keep the cost about the same and I mean just cost of miliage dont start saying you dont need a car because you cant get to Costco in a train. In the north east HOV lanes are a joke they let busses in them aka slow speed limit driving monsters with no way to be passed. There are three factors in communting convience, speed and cost. Trains by nature are not as convient reducing cost below driving dosent look feasable so speed looks to be the easy thing. This means very fast trains. My current commute to NYC would be about 2 hours via car or 2.5 hours via train or 3 hours via buss. Driving would be rather frustrating the trains up here top out at 60 miles an hour 5 miles less than the posted speed limit and 20 miles less than reasonable driving speeds (before you flame this one, most in CT roads have a 75 MPH design goal for a semi with bias ply tires this is straight from the mouth of DOT design engineers in the 90's) Now if you increase the speed of the train by say three times for a 180 MPH train your talking about a hour long communte if the cost stays the same the lack of convience factor can be mitigated.
Now why things like this arent done mostly due to the litigious nature of our society coupled with the not in my back yard syndrome. People by houses next to the rail lines and then complain about the noise and sue. We live in a countyr where people build houses downwind from a dairy farm and then sue about the odor and win forcing the farmer to adulterate there feed to reduce the emmisions.
OK analog lovers aside but think about this the current resolutions purposed are HDTV ish to the point it will be easy enough to downsample to HDTV. I have seen some of the delivery methods purposed and most use satalite for the heavy lifting. There is definatly the posibility of people hooking up dishes and working out the receiver end to then work on the encrypted digital stream itself. I'm allready picturing next day hdtv rez Divx of new releases comming out of the grand caimens (one of those places where it's still legal to do whatever you want with sat signals last I checked). But I'll just be happy if I dont have to see a movie in the first 3 days of release not to have all the dirty film issues to anoy my viewing.
OK without trying to get into flame bait MS and the buch have move coders that is for sure I have worked with there coders and well they are not in general the brighest in the bunch. I have worked with SGI's coders and they are quite good. Now in all these cases I have only worked with a small subset so it's not a great or proper sample to derive statistics from. Now some of the linux kernel code is great and very functional some is written rather badly but works. Never assume that 1000's of coders is better than a small core generaly you want a few experts or guru's to get something thats great done.
One thing to remember some of IBM's top coders are contributing same thing for SGI and Sun last I checked so in reality this is a MS coders vs everybody else as far as linux coders are concerned.
So far all the lets run things over legacy wiring have failed. There is a 100bt spec for running over cat3 TX I beleive but may be wrong. That gear would be a lot cheaper than some short range DSL. Someday companies will figure out to pull multi strand bundles once. 2 Peices of cat 6 or 7 2 fibers and 2 cat 6 with per existing cat5 patch works out well. There are three costs to installing wires one for the wire thats cheap, another per pull and finialy terminiation costs. Realy the cost is how many end points they need to pull to and how many cables need to be terminated especaly with fiber.
What I realy would like to see is a shared medium fiber for platic fiber with good DB loss numbers so you can use cheap termination and stll work. Thik of it this way if you could fusion Y splice plastic in the ground or on the pole that does lets say a gigabit half duplex on a shared medium with range numbers that are up in the 30km max that would work well enough. You could use cheap light sources on the close in people and and more and mroe expensive light sources as you get further out. Now that just a fantasy copper is just that much cheaper right now.
That might have something to do with the russians just trying to get it done without lots of payouts. They use relitivly cheap and simple rockets not a grossly overcomplicated shuttle.
1) this is doable but when a lot of these places are fly by night it might work when they send the mail but not 2 days later and what about an address that suddenly works when you got to court. You would need some impartial third party to verify this.
2) this just gives them a validated list of addresses for the next round.
3) A lot of spam companies play shell games with companies making a new company for every ISP they try abuse. 28 Days is a LONG time to legitimatly spam from a front.
How about this:
1) Automatic loss of suit if anything forged.
2) Require an ADV tag like CA is doing this makes filtering spam just way to easy and as this is a company requirement for the actualy product seller it becomes more usefull.
3) Make opt out lists be virial, require them to percolate up the the seller and all other companies the address has ever been sold transfered etc. This stops the shell company game.
4) Require that Opt outs function quickly like a few hours from the direct sender. Anything that takes days will just allow them to get a verified address and abuse it as much as possible.
5) You need some sort of verification system at to the insure seller actualy being associated with the spammer otherwise the dirty tricks squad is going to fire up spam houses against there competition and hope people litigate them to death.
In the long run I can see the use of having a whole US led tax on spam. This would make them have to register file paperwork and generaly be easier to track and patrol. If spammers had to pay some tax like a cent an email sent to the gov thats a tax on something people dont want to see aka a good tax for most of the people.
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If your building servers and are still worried about IRQ's you should realy look into server boards with proper server apics. These general come on workstation and server boards aka anything with multiple proc support but there are a few single proc boards with proper server apics. But otherwise I'll agree anything with an audo out is not designed to be a server board but rather a workstation board at best. The other easy way to tell is less than 4 DIMM slots I havent build a server with less than 6 in years. Eventualy people will stop taking a 20 buck motherboard a proc and ram and calling it a server it's a PC desktop that your using as a server it dosent have the expandability, support for lots of ECC ram, and overall it's lacking in general quality.
Cripaling household guns just means yet again to protect yourself you will need to be a criminal. What part of people do not want to be forced to rely on police cant our lawmakers get through there heads. Yea less guns in the civilian population makes law enforement easier. Hrm do I care does arebody realy think we need to make it easier? Things are two easy now cop shows up does a probable cause search and plants an 8 ball your doing 5 to 10. No I'm not saying all cops are bad etc etc etc I'm saying we dont have any good technical assurances they arent. Where are the helment mounted cams with tamper resistant storage? Where are the non lethal rounds for cops to use? I would rather people load rubber rounds than the gun not fire. Hell load up a blank a rubber then go to lethal rounds if the first two dont stop then the rest will. Allways remember it should be the right of a homeowner to defend themselves with lethal force cops should play test dummy with any new technology and field test it before it's ever mandated for the home they get paid to get shot at just like a marine it's part of the job.
OK I baught a NEW HP 832 or some such (it's still in the box) with a "disposable" digital camera and some photo paper for 54 bucks on clearance at sears. Now I had a 810c that needed cartigaes that generaly run me at staples 60 bucks a set. If I get them online it's less than half that. But prety much I got a few hunded sheets of photo paper a camera and a printer along with a set of replacement ink. Sell the old printer on ebay (this on is marginialy better)
Remember apples to apples it's a 17" LCD vs s 19" CRT as one is usable dimention and CRT's are tube size with viewable be smaller. A 15" LCD would be the comparable size. On the assumption that your cooling half the year (this varies a LOT with your climate an office in Flordia or New Orleans probably cools all year) these savings can add up. I have done offices in NYC were there are literly BTU generation limits in the lease as the ammount of BTU's these building were designed to handle per square foot realy cant be easily upgraded. The same goes for power.
Now to your colculations I'm showing a 17" CRT on pricewatch at $69 and a 17" LCD at $332 at your minimum power savings numbers thats a bit over 5 years for break even. If you go with my sizing numbers it's 219 for the LCD making the payoff in an even 3 years your worst case not counting AC thats well within the life expactancy of the Monitor.
Corps that dont look into LCD's generaly are being very near sighted. LCD's TCO's are supposed to be lower that CRT's due to reduced power use and thus heat generation. I used to keep pizza warm on top of a pair of 19's thats a LOT of heat to AC in the summer. More often this is a sign of it's not my budget so I dont care syndrome.
Yes Genocide is bad, war is bad it's just a valid method to win a war. We have policial issues about defining who is a combantant and who is not mostly based on who looks bad on the news. War when it comes down to it is about using force to acheive polical goals.
Protacted land wars are idiocy in a modern war they churn through men and materials with no real gain over using shock troop tactics and taking places of political and military interest and bypassing non esential targets. It makes little sence to march up from a friendly nation when we can make a secure beachhead utilizing FAE's and generaly use our mobility to our advantage. You take out the command and control as to effectivly marginalize there forces.
As to the effects of the USA on forign nations yes in a lot of ways we rape and pilliage there countries funny that there government dosent do there job. The point of establishing the right to have and the physical presance of bases in forign nations is for a stabalizing factor. Can you see Iran invading Iraq if they have to go by a US military base with a big military no fly zone and a military exclusion zone on the ground? Add to this the perceived safty of living near a US base for groups like and the effects of US money going into the local economy and people getting to know US soldiers there will be mariages give thins a generation or two and you have a fairly pasified area.
We seem to have two choices in forign pollicy let the rest of the world go to pot and become insular or play police force. I vote for the old adage that with great power comes great responcibility. Inspiring some fear in other nations military to the point they understand they cant win is a GOOD thing Iraq may do that or it may be N Korea ultimatly that gives our polititians the ability to negotiate with a strong hand it's getting the polititians to stop being entirly self centered and looking for corprate kickbacks.
9.5 pounds but it does have a numeric keypad.
When you get into glassing over cities you have a couple big problems with other. Radiation of those people downwind they do get pissy about it. BTW the planet is roundish making everybody downwind. What we have forgotten or refuse to understand there are two ways of winning a war. Utterly destroying your opponent or pacifing you apponent by making them identify with you. It's funny that they have outlawed either of these approaches because they work. The Romans did the kill the men mary the women approach and were successfull at it. The germans attemped the destroy them all and were vilinified for it. Somewhere we decided that genocide is wrong. I think the last war that the US realy won was vs Japan where we insured that there was no posibility of them every becoming militarily dangerious. We should remember this at the end off all wars insure that we get the rights for lots of military bases all over there country with as many troops as we determine nessicary. When you know what an american looks like and rent him an apartment sell them food it's much harder to unilateraly hate.
More importantly unless they are using stranded cable (aka Whip Cable) they are going to end up with breakage as the line is moved repeatedly. Your normal 1000' pull box is meant to be permantly installed in walls and realy not move much unlike a whip cable thats designed to go from the wall to the end station or from patch to switch.
Ok first off I have been making ethernet cables since the late 80's and I have never done it any way but this if I had a choice. Giving yourself an inch or more of cable to untwist and allign is significantly easier to flatten with your fingers. Using standard rj45 ends and crimper just trim insert and crimp you wont have any untwisted before the plastic seperators. You can also make your life easy and use the AMP pull through connectors no muss no fuss unless your have nonstandard switches and patch pannels that dont have the key slot (cheap switches generaly it's a patend thing or something that I think AMP has about those key slots a knife fixes the issue)
Now as far as home wirering why would you ever be terminating to rj45 ends? You go keystone to patch or keystone in the walls and generaly buy your cat 5 whips (standed cable is better for a whip it's more flexable and not as prone to breakage from repeated flexing) Persoanly I went with the Leviton wall plates and keystones from home depot mostly because they were cheaper than any other vendor I could find. Pull an aditional cable to each end point along with coax and a pull cord with a 2 store house the only hard pull was to the attic distrobution pannel and for that I used a surpluss 50 pair trunk and a few coax runs. One distrobution switch in the attic and one in the basement with a gige connecting the two along with voice, serial and digital sat.
Was that on the job? Drinking the competors brand while being a delivery agent and thus very much a public figure for the company is just bad form.
On there own time well I hope they sued and won for wrongfull termination.
Either way dies it realy matter much? This is more a question of viable business modles and not keeping up with technology. People are willing to rip cd's into mp3 and other formats. People are willing to spend time and effort to download music. People are becomming less and less inclined to buy top 10 garbage albums with a couple good songs that get made into music video's anyway and generaly played 24/7 on the radio via payola and general ownership of the radio stations. Now it would seem that the record industry needs to adapt to a changing envirnment this is what business does or goes the way of the dino. DRM is an attempt to lock the consumers into there current business modle. And how many volcal consumers does it take to call it like it is fraudulent advertising a DRMed CD is not a CD Audio device and should not be shelved with or otherwise displayed with real audio CD's it's like mixing boxed of rat poision and corn starch on the shelves all in very similar boxed so the pulic has a hard time noticing the difference. Personaly I do not own a CD player capable of playing back these non audio CD's because I have higher a higher end CD changer and lots of computer drives. Sorry yes I have one device capable of playing them and it's attached to my alarm clock with a pair of crappy full range speakers with 4 inches of sterio seperation not a decent playback device by any means. This is the growing trend who is going to have a single disk CD player and a DVD player hooked up to there receiver if they have to buy it new? More and more people are looking for one device that can playback anything look at consoles that are trying to become the media center of the house.
OK I rambled there but when it realy comes down to it yes Kazza and the likes make copyright violation easy. The recording industry is trying to get legislated out of changing there stratagy and format. This is what modern business have been doing for 30 years and it's been stagnating our economy because its preventing change and trying to keep the status quo. What should happen make better music provide it in an easier format than Kazza with better quality (think ISP cached outside of bandwith caps downloads of whatever format people want from varing mp3 bitrates to flac and ogg) dont try and change it to a lease etc watermark the data per download. This method keeps the existing uses avalible provided a better service than Kazza at a moderate cost. Now they can sue people that then allow the data up on the net for copyright infringement. If this is the death of chain record stores great it's and archaic distribution method give people that want a disk a kiosk with a burner. Oh yea throw some PGP in there somewhere possibly on the watermark and on the download (a PGP encrypted download that uses the buyers key to insure they are the one that got it maybe a good place for the credit cards to get involved as pgp key repositories as in you enter CC data it gets veried and sends back a PGP public for that CC number they have previously sent the private key to the consumer this makes online CC Fraud significantly harder)
That may be true but because so may of the parts are cusom or modifed for the DRM while the CPU is cheap the rest of it is VERY custom and those VERY expensive compared to rock bottom PC prices least thats what I think is happening.
OK having done this in the last 12 months lets go over the options.
:)
Slimmp3 and Ethermp3nut or whatever are out there and work well for ethernet attached 2 channel audio. I went with the free as in speech ethermp3nut (right name?) as I'm handy with a sodering iron and have friends that can deal with surface mount. These along with a small amp are good for rooms that you only need 2 channels like the bathroom porches etc pretty much anything without a TV. I have 4 drops of Cat5 in every room (one per wall) and use cheap gige agrigation switches from netgear if I need more ports.
OK now for rooms with TV's my primary concern was the TV room I places the server directly below the TV and install some metal piping to chace cables through (grounded to keep any interferience down) The only thing running analog to the TV is the VGA cable and the Svideo cable running to the receiver the audio comes off a standard sound blaster audigy via fiber to the in room receiver. Firewire and USB 2.0 got chaced up as well to run a DVD-R drive in the sterio rack for DVD/CD playback, ripping and recording. A few pairs of cat 5 are used for IR Blasters and receivers. Video is provided via a Matrox 450 Maxx one out used for the VGA to the TV and the other running svideo to the receiver in the TV Room. The TV room has server method of controling things there is a wireless keyboard and mouse, normal remote comands via lircd (more on this in a moment) a dumb terminal a Palm with IR and any laptop that can get on the 802.11g network. Finialy I'm currently working on adding speach recognition for the complete hal look
Other rooms have a pretty standard key pads and screens that work via serial 3 wire. I hacked together a little application to scroll whatever song is playing information and navigate premade playlists that are then passwed back to mpg123 to play it's not perfect but works ok next revision is speach recognition. If thy were close enough (first floor) I used a cheapish 12 channel out 8 in profetional audio card they are easy to come by and generaly support linux check out some garage band supply store to find one, each output looks like a seperate DSP at the application level but still only one IRQ. Because it's a real audio card it outputs a balanced line signal these are much easier to run at distance without interferience. At the other end are pretty straight forward project amps and speakers in the walls I didnt need to go that big wattage wise so these were easy to construct.
Now for the few places that I wasent comfertable running balance line to I used the ethernet to line converters and a receiver this for me was the garage it's detached from the house so I ran multimode fiber a few inces below the ground picking up some cheap 10/100 fiber cards off of ebay and installing them into the linux router with bridging and a boca terminal in the garage thats also hacked to support bridging (have my old 802.11b AP out there for the car) I could have used the audio on the Boca but it just sounded bad (I tried this first) the terminal runs mp3blaster via an xterm to the core server.
The other special room is my bedroom it's the only other TV in the house I have an old trident PCI card that can be jumpered for TV out only (This is a GREAT feature) and that runs a Svideo up (need a booster seeing some artifacts fromt he run) I have a DEC color dumb term attached to an old 9 inch monitor and keyboard in the corner it's directy connected to the server on 3 lines and generly runs mp3blaster or lynx to get to the video playlists and startup mplayer for those. I used 3 ethernut's to give me 5.1 for the receiver in the bedroom and am working on getting mplayer to connect to them correctly.
OK now to the server it's a doul proc Xeon 600 with 2 megs of cache each that I had laying around. Primary video out is a Matrox 450 Maxx secondary is a trident on PCI. I have a few 4 channel out CAD cards that use PCI that can handle the video but need to get scan converters / T
OK I think I figured out his trade secret enough radioactive material cramed inside a simple coil generator works nearly forever well longer then your life expantancy sitting that near to a hot pile :) And when will people learn call it a compound and every F?? out there is looking at you. Now granted not letting investors look inside the black box is one thing but from the sounds of it his partners didnt get to see either.
Those two things are very different. Backing up PS2 games is one thing and used to be covered under fair use doctorine untill the DCMA. Now making modifications to hardware for the purpose of enabaling the handicapt is allowed under the DCMA one of the few things that is. When you get into things that have significant other uses thats wehre you can get into things the courts need to decide.
Now personaly hack the Xbox make it play nitendo games for all I care. The fact they are sold below cost is not mine nor should it be anybody outside of MS and there compotition. When will people wake up and remember were not hear to support corps if they do stupid things dont bail them out. The fact that the DCMA is protecting corp profit margines is disgusting. Dont want people to be able to copy your games easily use a cart not a CD or DVD.
OK ban spam and direct marketing. People dont want either generaly speaking. It's one thing if a sales person sends me an email about some new product offering thats keeping me in the loop it's a different thing when it's an automated sender from some PR department. Make email like faxes just say no to anything automated that wasent SPECIFICALY requested like the local Deli's lunch specials. Spam is as much trougth in advertising and working against automation.
Because they used a loophole to keep there patents hovering and extend ther effective lifespan. It's a Legal loophole that nobody wants to close.
Light rail is fine and dandy but lets get real what will get people out of there cars an onto rail, SPEED keep the cost about the same and I mean just cost of miliage dont start saying you dont need a car because you cant get to Costco in a train. In the north east HOV lanes are a joke they let busses in them aka slow speed limit driving monsters with no way to be passed. There are three factors in communting convience, speed and cost. Trains by nature are not as convient reducing cost below driving dosent look feasable so speed looks to be the easy thing. This means very fast trains. My current commute to NYC would be about 2 hours via car or 2.5 hours via train or 3 hours via buss. Driving would be rather frustrating the trains up here top out at 60 miles an hour 5 miles less than the posted speed limit and 20 miles less than reasonable driving speeds (before you flame this one, most in CT roads have a 75 MPH design goal for a semi with bias ply tires this is straight from the mouth of DOT design engineers in the 90's) Now if you increase the speed of the train by say three times for a 180 MPH train your talking about a hour long communte if the cost stays the same the lack of convience factor can be mitigated.
Now why things like this arent done mostly due to the litigious nature of our society coupled with the not in my back yard syndrome. People by houses next to the rail lines and then complain about the noise and sue. We live in a countyr where people build houses downwind from a dairy farm and then sue about the odor and win forcing the farmer to adulterate there feed to reduce the emmisions.
OK analog lovers aside but think about this the current resolutions purposed are HDTV ish to the point it will be easy enough to downsample to HDTV. I have seen some of the delivery methods purposed and most use satalite for the heavy lifting. There is definatly the posibility of people hooking up dishes and working out the receiver end to then work on the encrypted digital stream itself. I'm allready picturing next day hdtv rez Divx of new releases comming out of the grand caimens (one of those places where it's still legal to do whatever you want with sat signals last I checked). But I'll just be happy if I dont have to see a movie in the first 3 days of release not to have all the dirty film issues to anoy my viewing.
OK so another government is delivering to lobbiest what they want yet again. This is news? Besides the specifics of this case it's just the same old.
OK without trying to get into flame bait MS and the buch have move coders that is for sure I have worked with there coders and well they are not in general the brighest in the bunch. I have worked with SGI's coders and they are quite good. Now in all these cases I have only worked with a small subset so it's not a great or proper sample to derive statistics from. Now some of the linux kernel code is great and very functional some is written rather badly but works. Never assume that 1000's of coders is better than a small core generaly you want a few experts or guru's to get something thats great done.
One thing to remember some of IBM's top coders are contributing same thing for SGI and Sun last I checked so in reality this is a MS coders vs everybody else as far as linux coders are concerned.
So far all the lets run things over legacy wiring have failed. There is a 100bt spec for running over cat3 TX I beleive but may be wrong. That gear would be a lot cheaper than some short range DSL. Someday companies will figure out to pull multi strand bundles once. 2 Peices of cat 6 or 7 2 fibers and 2 cat 6 with per existing cat5 patch works out well. There are three costs to installing wires one for the wire thats cheap, another per pull and finialy terminiation costs. Realy the cost is how many end points they need to pull to and how many cables need to be terminated especaly with fiber.
What I realy would like to see is a shared medium fiber for platic fiber with good DB loss numbers so you can use cheap termination and stll work. Thik of it this way if you could fusion Y splice plastic in the ground or on the pole that does lets say a gigabit half duplex on a shared medium with range numbers that are up in the 30km max that would work well enough. You could use cheap light sources on the close in people and and more and mroe expensive light sources as you get further out. Now that just a fantasy copper is just that much cheaper right now.
That might have something to do with the russians just trying to get it done without lots of payouts. They use relitivly cheap and simple rockets not a grossly overcomplicated shuttle.
1) this is doable but when a lot of these places are fly by night it might work when they send the mail but not 2 days later and what about an address that suddenly works when you got to court. You would need some impartial third party to verify this.
2) this just gives them a validated list of addresses for the next round.
3) A lot of spam companies play shell games with companies making a new company for every ISP they try abuse. 28 Days is a LONG time to legitimatly spam from a front.
How about this:
1) Automatic loss of suit if anything forged.
2) Require an ADV tag like CA is doing this makes filtering spam just way to easy and as this is a company requirement for the actualy product seller it becomes more usefull.
3) Make opt out lists be virial, require them to percolate up the the seller and all other companies the address has ever been sold transfered etc. This stops the shell company game.
4) Require that Opt outs function quickly like a few hours from the direct sender. Anything that takes days will just allow them to get a verified address and abuse it as much as possible.
5) You need some sort of verification system at to the insure seller actualy being associated with the spammer otherwise the dirty tricks squad is going to fire up spam houses against there competition and hope people litigate them to death.
In the long run I can see the use of having a whole US led tax on spam. This would make them have to register file paperwork and generaly be easier to track and patrol. If spammers had to pay some tax like a cent an email sent to the gov thats a tax on something people dont want to see aka a good tax for most of the people.