and i thought of your reply when i posted;)
and besides you asked: "Isn't doing ANYTHING for seven hours straight every single day hazardous to your health?"
sleep is still a valid counterexample:P
i also believe there are probably professional athletes, musicians, dancers, writers, etc. who all practice their respective crafts for seven hours a day, every day and are in good health.
yes, but i thought it was precisely the recording of the neural sig that was the hard part. there was a wired article not too long ago (ah, found it --i think it was the one with the ucla researchers) about just how imprecise/crude the recording is w/ current (non-invasive?) technology.
but limited to 15" displays, according to dr. bott. i remember looking at the moniswitch when i was thinking of getting the apple cinema display. no dice. i'm not sure i understand what the technical limitation is on the dr. bott switch. even a single link dvi can drive the typical 17" sxga displays.
gefen's doesn't mention any limitations (which isn't to say that it would work with high-res lcd's like the samsung 240t).
well, firstly, software is a pretty blanket term. an example a prof of mine used to give: throw a rock off of a cliff and you can call it a computer program for calculating gravitational force. or that pencil sitting on your desk is implementing (an extremely simple) program: on or off, depending on how you look at it.
but more to the point, is there anything in the everyday sense of executable code that lives on a dvd? you might as well start arguing that audio cd's are software--after all audio cd's contain 1's and 0's representing music and it's the job of the cd player to execute that code....
would you say cd's are software because xmms or winamp can use the upc code (or whatever unique identifier it is that they use) to query freedb/cddb in conjunction with a lyrics database to present artist/track/title/lyrics information?
you can try to make subtle arguments about software, but ultimately you're just performing a reductio ad absurdum: if you somehow end up proving that dvd movies are no longer movies, it only proves there's something flawed in your argument.
when i first read the headline, i thought it read "webconomics" and i was going to have to shoot hemos.
and i'm sure somewhere out there, some pundit actually did come up with that one. "hey, 'e-economics' and 'i-economics' just doesn't sound right with that double vowel beginning--but isn't 'webconomics' just grand? doesn't that just capture the spirit of the age?"
i think it's a bigger shortcoming that there's only one cf slot (at least it's type 2). kind of a bummer to have to choose between hard disk or network connectivity.
but using bluetooth to untether the input device would be great. i'd say the display too, but there's still the matter of power.
you're right, ecrix is pretty close. i'd heard of vxa, but never checked it out before. how do you think their stuff compares to onstream's? any anecdotal evidence?
one of the concerns i have about these less well-known/mainstream devices is that even if the price/specs seem right, are these actually going to work when you need them to? meaning, not just the backing up process, but the restore. i don't know how many times i've had problems restoring from both dlt and dds at work--problems ranging from bad media to incompatibilities with different models or even generations of drives, etc. and that was using equipment that far exceeds my home budget.
anyway, any comments you have regarding either the ecrix or onstreams would be appreciated.
upon first reading michael's post, i thought this wouldn't work, because ie has that annoying behavior of examining the first bytes of file to determine its mime type, sort of like apache's mime-magic module. and then ie in 5.5sp1 had to go and break the content-dispostion header, but i digress.
anyway, i tried to recreate this bug, with no luck. maybe someone can explain what i'm doing wrong, assuming this is a valid hole in i.e.:
server: apache 2.0.28 beta for win32
client: ie 5.5 sp2 (not sure if it's stock sp2 or has a hotfix on top of sp2. there's some Qxxxxxx following in the "about" box)
in httpd.conf, created the following:
<Directory "c:/foo/bar">
#AddType audio/x-wav.bat
#AddType audio/x-wav.txt
AddType application/octet-stream.txt
AddType application/octet-stream.bat
</Directory>
created two files:
a.bat:
@echo off
format a:
b.txt:
this is a just an.exe renamed to b.txt
ie renders the.bat file as text in the browser.
in the case of the.txt, ie prompts to open or save, defaulting to save. selecting open opens the binary file in notepad.
changing the mime-type to audio-x-wav just renders the files as text in the browser (no prompting in the case of the txt/exe).
but sumthin like this was just posted on ask slashdot recently...
actually, most of the points made in the earlier story apply here.
and as i'm sure others will/have jumped in to say, there's a big gap between failover/redundancy afforded by a raid setup or external hard disk and tape backups. it, like so much else, depends on what you need.
i'm pretty discouraged personally. i don't really see an affordable way to do real backups of a couple hundred gigs of data. it's probably going to have to be a mixed setup. most of the data is static: flac & mp3's. so maybe that just needs one offsite backup that's done to a couple hard disks--basically a mirror. then get some kind of tape system for the other 40gigs or so of slowly or quickly changing data that i also want to keep a couple snapshots of for historical purposes, as well as rotate offsite. still not sure what the latter solution should be.
i have an old dds2 drive. but that's 8gb max compressed. dlt or ultrium is way out of budget. maybe an onstream. but i don't know anyone who's actually got one--any firsthand reports on these? and how likely is whatever onstream uses likely to exist/be supported in say 5 years or beyond?
i have one...somewhere. i used it with a 17" viewsonic awhile back. worked great. it had composite and svideo inputs.
dunno what the connectors are on the ps2 so dunno if this works on that. if you really want, i can poke around in the closet later to see if i can find a mfr/model.
finally. sharing a 28.8 modem with my roommate this weekend was very painful. incidentally, i'm very impressed/happy with openbsd's handling of ppp-on-demand + nat + ipf.
in general things seem pretty much the same, except:
- no more static ip:(
- no more web proxy server
- max downstream has a lower cap?
with @home, i could grab things like the sun jdk at some ridiculous speeds. i remember on several occasions in the past year getting the whole ~30MB file in ~2 minutes. i was utterly amazed by those speeds--i didn't think it was possible to reach those speeds on a cable modem. not sure if it had to do with their web proxy server or not--i always imagined it must have.
just tried downloading the 1.3 jdk with attbi, and the download caps at about 111 KB/s. @home always claimed a 1.5Mb/s cap, but there always seemed to be exceptions to that.
anyone tried playing a multiplayer network game like quake3? i remember latency sucked with @home compared to my friend's dsl.
Given the page views at vwvortex, i'm sure many have heard of the lawsuit that the Jim Ellis VW dealership in Atlanta, Georgia brought against George Mantis. The dealership sued Mantis recently, alleging that the comments Mantis posted to a VW web forum were libelous/slanderous.
If you haven't already, I highly recommend you have a read (although the length of the thread at this point easily rivals some of the longest ever seen even on/.). It started out with a few disgruntled customers, and when the dealership tried to snuff the thread by serving papers to both Mantis and VWvortex, it became a giant stink, with international media coverage and even a grassroots legal defense fund. If you look at the timestamps about 7 pages in, you really get a sense of how fast and across how many vectors information can travel.
FYI: The dealership seems to be backtracking now, and supposedly will be in settlement talks this Friday. Hopefully this translates into an even stronger position for Mantis to deal from.
I read this page, but I am at a loss to see what the difference would be between using this and say, bzip2, which is a lossless compression scheme.
That's a good question. Offhand, I don't know how the compression ratios compare between bzip2 and flac. I know flac does a much better job than zip.
The other benefit of flac is that there are plugins available for winamp and xmms. Also, AFAIK, there's been some recent streaming-related work in progress--might have made it into the recent 1.0.1 release.
lol. i had forgotten about this till now =) i had an apple iie w/ a double disk drive, and you're right, that was just the shit then. my friends and i used to use this cheat. i don't remember if you could easily use a sector editor on the disk to modify your players too. you could do this with the bard's tale (anyone remember this game?). i think i learned hex because of that game.
the kewlest bios update i ever saw was just a few weeks ago when i was looking to see if there were any bios updates available on a compaq proliant i inherited. on the compaq support site, i found a linux rpm bios update. i'd never heard of such a thing before and it was sooooooo easy. no need to boot off a floppy, or even start up in single user mode. just download, rpm -ivh and reboot.
why don't more folks do this i wonder? i used to hate compaq desktops almost as much as those packard bells and gateways. now i'm feeling the urge to purchase a couple proliants for work.
zoombah made the following argument:
P1. You are a SOHO user.
C1. You just want safe recovery of your data in the event of a malfunctioning disk.
C2. You don't need to prevent against natural disasters, etc.
C1 and C2 don't follow from P1. Just because Kzip is a SOHO user doesn't mean his backup needs are limited to protection against disk failures.
I think hard disk storage is outstripping backup capability. For under USD1000 I can easily add 300GB of raid 5 storage. Backing that up to tape in a reasonably timely fashion (say 6-8hrs unattended overnight) is prohibitively expensive. Let alone the added media costs associated with the not unreasonable requirement to be able to do backups on a regular schedule (such that I can rotate a backup off site at least once a week and archive monthlies).
In a SOHO environment, I can easily imagine the desire to maintain off site backups--your apartment could burn down, someone could break in and guess what? rip off your nice ide raid file server and other computers, some freak lightning strike might blow right past your surge supressors and fry all the computers on your SOHO lan, etc. etc.
Tape backups also help protect against accidental/malicious data destruction. For argument's sake, say the poster's 300GB of storage was on a Mac. Partitioned. And then he ran the new iTunes =) kaput, raid or no. And no backup to go to. Anyway, you could come up with similar/better examples with a little thought--virus, cracker, well-placed bottle of beer....
If WinXP's network code is fast with all the supported uses (for example, using an NT SMB server rather than SAMBA), and is only slow when using SAMBA, don't you think perhaps the conclusion that SAMBA's SMB interoperability is broken is more reasonable than the conclusion that XP's is?
argh. microsoft has repeatedly broken samba compatibility for no other discernable reason other that to break samba compatibility (most recently, win2k sp2). of course we can all imagine why microsoft feels motivated to do so, but that doesn't fault the samba developers. which isn't to say that samba isn't at fault in this case, but precedent certainly would lead most to look to microsoft initially as the cause.
isn't dynamat only for dampening *vibration* noise? this seemed to be the consensus on the ars technica case and cooling boards.
you might solve the vibration noise by just mounting your fans with rubber grommets. seems like you'd want to look into some actual acoustic foam (i think sonex makes some good ones) for lining the inside panels of your case.
of course i'm sure lining the inside of your case with dynamat has some general sound-dampening effect--but so would lining your case with carpet or cork.
where are you getting that about the cases? i don't see anything even remotely resembling the PCP personal case...and if you have seen similar cases out there it's far more likely that they're generic clones of the PCP cases and not vice versa.
Check out PCP's full-tower and compare to CalPC's. When I was looking into getting a case 3 years ago, I spoke w/ PCP and CalPC on the phone--no one was willing to give me a definitive yes/no answer to who made the PCP case, but the answer was definitely more like "it's not our policy to discuss that" rather than positively confirming or disconfirming. You might even do a search on the arstechnica case forum--this has come up before as I recall.
As far as PCP PS's go, as I said in my original post, I was just questioning based on what I knew of their cases. I did a lot of poking around a couple of years ago. The various case/cooling forums (ars, anand, hardocp) while they have their PCP fans, seemed to me, on the whole, to rate them as overpriced for what you get. But ultimately that's hearsay. But, for instance, last time I was in the market for a 300w PS (2 yrs ago), PCP claimed a great db rating on their best PS, but the fan overall was rated at a pretty conservative CFM. It wasn't as though PCP came up with some revolutionary sound dampening mechanism that no other PS mfr came up w/. At best it was temp. regulated (but so are a number of PS's) plus stepped down (which would obviously lower the noise, but also the cooling ability). I'll prolly be looking at getting a new 400w soon, if you're really happy w/ your PCP, I'll check that off in my anecdotal reference store.
Slashdot Mirror
and i thought of your reply when i posted ;)
:P
and besides you asked: "Isn't doing ANYTHING for seven hours straight every single day hazardous to your health?"
sleep is still a valid counterexample
i also believe there are probably professional athletes, musicians, dancers, writers, etc. who all practice their respective crafts for seven hours a day, every day and are in good health.
ah yes. and that explains the health of eight-hour work-a-day adults around the world, eh? ;)
or those crazy teenagers who sleep for seven hours in a day?
yes, but i thought it was precisely the recording of the neural sig that was the hard part. there was a wired article not too long ago (ah, found it --i think it was the one with the ucla researchers) about just how imprecise/crude the recording is w/ current (non-invasive?) technology.
but limited to 15" displays, according to dr. bott. i remember looking at the moniswitch when i was thinking of getting the apple cinema display. no dice. i'm not sure i understand what the technical limitation is on the dr. bott switch. even a single link dvi can drive the typical 17" sxga displays.
gefen's doesn't mention any limitations (which isn't to say that it would work with high-res lcd's like the samsung 240t).
well, firstly, software is a pretty blanket term. an example a prof of mine used to give: throw a rock off of a cliff and you can call it a computer program for calculating gravitational force. or that pencil sitting on your desk is implementing (an extremely simple) program: on or off, depending on how you look at it.
but more to the point, is there anything in the everyday sense of executable code that lives on a dvd? you might as well start arguing that audio cd's are software--after all audio cd's contain 1's and 0's representing music and it's the job of the cd player to execute that code....
would you say cd's are software because xmms or winamp can use the upc code (or whatever unique identifier it is that they use) to query freedb/cddb in conjunction with a lyrics database to present artist/track/title/lyrics information?
you can try to make subtle arguments about software, but ultimately you're just performing a reductio ad absurdum: if you somehow end up proving that dvd movies are no longer movies, it only proves there's something flawed in your argument.
He has, and you and your post shall be smitten for using his name in vain ;)
when i first read the headline, i thought it read "webconomics" and i was going to have to shoot hemos.
and i'm sure somewhere out there, some pundit actually did come up with that one. "hey, 'e-economics' and 'i-economics' just doesn't sound right with that double vowel beginning--but isn't 'webconomics' just grand? doesn't that just capture the spirit of the age?"
i think it's a bigger shortcoming that there's only one cf slot (at least it's type 2). kind of a bummer to have to choose between hard disk or network connectivity.
but using bluetooth to untether the input device would be great. i'd say the display too, but there's still the matter of power.
it does sound like a hoax. on one of their pages, they say they were at the CES in vegas last week. anyone here who attended that saw this?
lol. try calling the phone numbers listed on some of the contact/service pages.
and wtf, who uses a tray-loader for vehicles anyway?
you're right, ecrix is pretty close. i'd heard of vxa, but never checked it out before. how do you think their stuff compares to onstream's? any anecdotal evidence?
one of the concerns i have about these less well-known/mainstream devices is that even if the price/specs seem right, are these actually going to work when you need them to? meaning, not just the backing up process, but the restore. i don't know how many times i've had problems restoring from both dlt and dds at work--problems ranging from bad media to incompatibilities with different models or even generations of drives, etc. and that was using equipment that far exceeds my home budget.
anyway, any comments you have regarding either the ecrix or onstreams would be appreciated.
upon first reading michael's post, i thought this wouldn't work, because ie has that annoying behavior of examining the first bytes of file to determine its mime type, sort of like apache's mime-magic module. and then ie in 5.5sp1 had to go and break the content-dispostion header, but i digress.
.bat
.txt
.txt
.bat
.exe renamed to b.txt
.bat file as text in the browser.
.txt, ie prompts to open or save, defaulting to save. selecting open opens the binary file in notepad.
anyway, i tried to recreate this bug, with no luck. maybe someone can explain what i'm doing wrong, assuming this is a valid hole in i.e.:
server: apache 2.0.28 beta for win32
client: ie 5.5 sp2 (not sure if it's stock sp2 or has a hotfix on top of sp2. there's some Qxxxxxx following in the "about" box)
in httpd.conf, created the following:
<Directory "c:/foo/bar">
#AddType audio/x-wav
#AddType audio/x-wav
AddType application/octet-stream
AddType application/octet-stream
</Directory>
created two files:
a.bat:
@echo off
format a:
b.txt:
this is a just an
ie renders the
in the case of the
changing the mime-type to audio-x-wav just renders the files as text in the browser (no prompting in the case of the txt/exe).
so what's the big deal?
but sumthin like this was just posted on ask slashdot recently...
actually, most of the points made in the earlier story apply here.
and as i'm sure others will/have jumped in to say, there's a big gap between failover/redundancy afforded by a raid setup or external hard disk and tape backups. it, like so much else, depends on what you need.
i'm pretty discouraged personally. i don't really see an affordable way to do real backups of a couple hundred gigs of data. it's probably going to have to be a mixed setup. most of the data is static: flac & mp3's. so maybe that just needs one offsite backup that's done to a couple hard disks--basically a mirror. then get some kind of tape system for the other 40gigs or so of slowly or quickly changing data that i also want to keep a couple snapshots of for historical purposes, as well as rotate offsite. still not sure what the latter solution should be.
i have an old dds2 drive. but that's 8gb max compressed. dlt or ultrium is way out of budget. maybe an onstream. but i don't know anyone who's actually got one--any firsthand reports on these? and how likely is whatever onstream uses likely to exist/be supported in say 5 years or beyond?
i have one...somewhere. i used it with a 17" viewsonic awhile back. worked great. it had composite and svideo inputs.
dunno what the connectors are on the ps2 so dunno if this works on that. if you really want, i can poke around in the closet later to see if i can find a mfr/model.
Never ever ever use the so-called-word "Webcurity" again.
ah yes, let's let that one slip into forced webscurity.
finally. sharing a 28.8 modem with my roommate this weekend was very painful. incidentally, i'm very impressed/happy with openbsd's handling of ppp-on-demand + nat + ipf.
:(
in general things seem pretty much the same, except:
- no more static ip
- no more web proxy server
- max downstream has a lower cap?
with @home, i could grab things like the sun jdk at some ridiculous speeds. i remember on several occasions in the past year getting the whole ~30MB file in ~2 minutes. i was utterly amazed by those speeds--i didn't think it was possible to reach those speeds on a cable modem. not sure if it had to do with their web proxy server or not--i always imagined it must have.
just tried downloading the 1.3 jdk with attbi, and the download caps at about 111 KB/s. @home always claimed a 1.5Mb/s cap, but there always seemed to be exceptions to that.
anyone tried playing a multiplayer network game like quake3? i remember latency sucked with @home compared to my friend's dsl.
inconceivable
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
.
.
.
For you soulless bastards who didn't get that: here
Given the page views at vwvortex, i'm sure many have heard of the lawsuit that the Jim Ellis VW dealership in Atlanta, Georgia brought against George Mantis. The dealership sued Mantis recently, alleging that the comments Mantis posted to a VW web forum were libelous/slanderous.
/.). It started out with a few disgruntled customers, and when the dealership tried to snuff the thread by serving papers to both Mantis and VWvortex, it became a giant stink, with international media coverage and even a grassroots legal defense fund. If you look at the timestamps about 7 pages in, you really get a sense of how fast and across how many vectors information can travel.
If you haven't already, I highly recommend you have a read (although the length of the thread at this point easily rivals some of the longest ever seen even on
FYI: The dealership seems to be backtracking now, and supposedly will be in settlement talks this Friday. Hopefully this translates into an even stronger position for Mantis to deal from.
sysadmins and teenagers alike seem to love 'em.
and isn't aol hyping some blackberry device now?
i'm not sure what the coverage is like for the palms, but the blackberrys seem to work just about everywhere.
I read this page, but I am at a loss to see what the difference would be between using this and say, bzip2, which is a lossless compression scheme.
That's a good question. Offhand, I don't know how the compression ratios compare between bzip2 and flac. I know flac does a much better job than zip.
The other benefit of flac is that there are plugins available for winamp and xmms. Also, AFAIK, there's been some recent streaming-related work in progress--might have made it into the recent 1.0.1 release.
lol. i had forgotten about this till now =) i had an apple iie w/ a double disk drive, and you're right, that was just the shit then. my friends and i used to use this cheat. i don't remember if you could easily use a sector editor on the disk to modify your players too. you could do this with the bard's tale (anyone remember this game?). i think i learned hex because of that game.
the kewlest bios update i ever saw was just a few weeks ago when i was looking to see if there were any bios updates available on a compaq proliant i inherited. on the compaq support site, i found a linux rpm bios update. i'd never heard of such a thing before and it was sooooooo easy. no need to boot off a floppy, or even start up in single user mode. just download, rpm -ivh and reboot.
why don't more folks do this i wonder? i used to hate compaq desktops almost as much as those packard bells and gateways. now i'm feeling the urge to purchase a couple proliants for work.
zoombah made the following argument:
P1. You are a SOHO user.
C1. You just want safe recovery of your data in the event of a malfunctioning disk.
C2. You don't need to prevent against natural disasters, etc.
C1 and C2 don't follow from P1. Just because Kzip is a SOHO user doesn't mean his backup needs are limited to protection against disk failures.
I think hard disk storage is outstripping backup capability. For under USD1000 I can easily add 300GB of raid 5 storage. Backing that up to tape in a reasonably timely fashion (say 6-8hrs unattended overnight) is prohibitively expensive. Let alone the added media costs associated with the not unreasonable requirement to be able to do backups on a regular schedule (such that I can rotate a backup off site at least once a week and archive monthlies).
In a SOHO environment, I can easily imagine the desire to maintain off site backups--your apartment could burn down, someone could break in and guess what? rip off your nice ide raid file server and other computers, some freak lightning strike might blow right past your surge supressors and fry all the computers on your SOHO lan, etc. etc.
Tape backups also help protect against accidental/malicious data destruction. For argument's sake, say the poster's 300GB of storage was on a Mac. Partitioned. And then he ran the new iTunes =) kaput, raid or no. And no backup to go to. Anyway, you could come up with similar/better examples with a little thought--virus, cracker, well-placed bottle of beer....
If WinXP's network code is fast with all the supported uses (for example, using an NT SMB server rather than SAMBA), and is only slow when using SAMBA, don't you think perhaps the conclusion that SAMBA's SMB interoperability is broken is more reasonable than the conclusion that XP's is?
argh. microsoft has repeatedly broken samba compatibility for no other discernable reason other that to break samba compatibility (most recently, win2k sp2). of course we can all imagine why microsoft feels motivated to do so, but that doesn't fault the samba developers. which isn't to say that samba isn't at fault in this case, but precedent certainly would lead most to look to microsoft initially as the cause.
isn't dynamat only for dampening *vibration* noise? this seemed to be the consensus on the ars technica case and cooling boards.
you might solve the vibration noise by just mounting your fans with rubber grommets. seems like you'd want to look into some actual acoustic foam (i think sonex makes some good ones) for lining the inside panels of your case.
of course i'm sure lining the inside of your case with dynamat has some general sound-dampening effect--but so would lining your case with carpet or cork.
Check out PCP's full-tower and compare to CalPC's. When I was looking into getting a case 3 years ago, I spoke w/ PCP and CalPC on the phone--no one was willing to give me a definitive yes/no answer to who made the PCP case, but the answer was definitely more like "it's not our policy to discuss that" rather than positively confirming or disconfirming. You might even do a search on the arstechnica case forum--this has come up before as I recall.
As far as PCP PS's go, as I said in my original post, I was just questioning based on what I knew of their cases. I did a lot of poking around a couple of years ago. The various case/cooling forums (ars, anand, hardocp) while they have their PCP fans, seemed to me, on the whole, to rate them as overpriced for what you get. But ultimately that's hearsay. But, for instance, last time I was in the market for a 300w PS (2 yrs ago), PCP claimed a great db rating on their best PS, but the fan overall was rated at a pretty conservative CFM. It wasn't as though PCP came up with some revolutionary sound dampening mechanism that no other PS mfr came up w/. At best it was temp. regulated (but so are a number of PS's) plus stepped down (which would obviously lower the noise, but also the cooling ability). I'll prolly be looking at getting a new 400w soon, if you're really happy w/ your PCP, I'll check that off in my anecdotal reference store.