True, but you do have to remember that even companies that do make money do NOT, as a rule, let you quit your job to do MLM. There will be a few people who manage to get in at the right time, with the right connections, who make quite a lot of cash, and a bunch of sucks.
And the products are generally with an order-of-magnatude markup, so you are getting cheap crap at inflated prices, not a deal.
460,800,000 bits of information means that your bandwidth needs to be 460 MHz wide. The frequency of the signal doesn't determine how much information can be carried, the bandwidth does. So a 10MHz wide signal at 900MHz is as good as a 10MHz wide signal at 2.4 GHz, bandwidth wise.
Now, there are better encoding schemes for things. A 640x480 screen size like NTSC fits in a 6MHz wide band, through careful use of ancient analog signal processing.
Of course, the way they are doing things, it looks like wireless ethernet and windows terminal server, which can work with a few hundred k or less per second and have room to spare.
Re:But linux is killing unix..for better or for wo
on
Unix Isn't Dead
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· Score: 3, Informative
There's a difference between an OS being used and an OS being a viable platform for future growth.
For example, there's LOTS of people using VMS. Is VMS a viable platform anymore? Probably not, it's just easier for people to buy a newer faster Alpha for their apps then trying to port an app built around VMS features to Unix or Windows.
What you will likely see is that, as Linux gets better, Solaris/AIX/Irix/etc will get pushed to platforms where Linux isn't yet viable.
For a company who makes higher-end servers, Linux makes perfect business sense. The OS doesn't sell the hardware, the hardware forces you to use a particular OS, unless it's Windows. Thus, if you can lay off 25% of your OS development staff and put the other 75% to making Linux work on your platform, you save money and get geek points. Your only risk is that nobody else will make the gamble and you will be left holding the bag. Or that your hardware innately sucks and people are buying it because they got locked into your OS many many years ago.
Not really. XP is for the consumer and workstation versions. The server is Windows.NET and that's not out yet. So as far as they are concerned, everybody should be using Win2k for serving still.
Leave the stuff you can do without at home. This means convert yer Minidisk content to CD-R and leave that piece of gear at home.
Next, if you have a big TV, consider leaving it at home and purchasing a cheap 19-23 inch TV instead. Anything larger is going to be too big for a dorm room anyway.
Now, get a shelf. A good shelf, preferebly from a hardware store, and tall. Put all of your crap on shelf, except for your computer, which goes on the desk.
Thus, all of your cables are now between stuff on the shelf. Go for the cable ties to keep all of them in order. Tape the rest of the wires (that would be the surround speakers and whatever goes between your PC and entertainment system) down to the floor.
If they were really serious, there would be an e-mail address you could forward the Nigerian scam mail to and then would personally track it and give the person the beat-down of their life.
As an incentive, if you reported it, they'd send you the video of the person getting the Cowboy Neal done to them.;)
I speed-read by nature. As in, my brain naturally works that fast, due to me reading the newspaper and paperback after paperback of science fiction since I was in grade school.
Sure, it's great once in a while when you pick out details on something, but if you need to get real comprehension, you will end up reading it two or three times to get the proper amounts of comprehension.
What you gain is the ability to absorb the basic idea of an entire work quickly. But there is a certain specific rate at which your brain can absorb information -- your personal mental bandwidth -- and you can't go any faster. Speed-read too much and you will miss things.
Speed reading is not a technique that will make you more brilliant or anything. Your brain pretty much wired itself up when you were five or so, so you can't take a course on speed reading and become brilliant. It'll just give you a skill of seeming to be more brilliant because you can read fast and pick out the important aspects of a document that may or may not prove useful to you.
I've noticed a similar phenomena. I've been quite vigilant about reporting spammers and have been trying to report them to all of the possible channels, including the SEC if it's yet another pump-and-dump scheme.
The best part is reporting first-time spammers. I make damn sure that when I see a spam I haven't seen before that I report it. I had the great satisfaction of watching some girl who wanted to be the next Britney Spears or something get her website shut down for spamming. Those people are the big spammers of the future. If somebody gets started in spamming and gets their access canned right away, they hopefully will realize that it's not as easy money as the person who set them up with spamming software said it was.
But it is an uphill battle. Some companies are claiming that I did, in fact, opt-in at some point to receiving spam from their "partners". Taking care of those folks and tracking who initially sold my address has resulted quite a bit of improvement in my spam count. I don't have the opt-in networks, just the bulk viagra mails and whatnot coming from Asia, at this point.
I've also noticed that unless you report spammers, they will spam you forever. I have some addresses that haven't been used for years that are still getting spam. I notice this because I get error messages occasionally because the auto-bounce message has nowhere to bounce to.
When I get in one of those moods, I'll crank call all of the 1-800 numbers listed in the spam. That doesn't do anything for the spam count, but it does wonders for my mood.;)
I have had nothing but good results by negotiating away the bad parts of the contracts. Releasing stuff under a pseudonym is NOT going to be very good if your employer ever finds out because then you are intentionally deceiving them to commit the crime of missapropriation of employer intellectual property. As in, can get you into loads of trouble.
Of course, on the other hand, it is up to you to make sure that you are not using employer resources. This means you buy your own copy of Visual Studio if you develop for Windows. This means you don't hack on it at work. This means you might end up owning two copies of Design Patterns -- one for work, one for home.
Be careful about these laws, however.. They mostly cover "inventions", which can be interpreted to mean that your ideas at home and any patents resulting from this can't be assigned, but any code you write may not be enough of an "invention"
Just stick to a language that already works and has a following. C++ is a great bet because lots of people use it and there are plenty of tools out to support it.
I gave up on the perfect language. Doing so is doomed to failure. Make it powerful, and you miss out on simplicity. Make it simple and you can't use it for much. Try to make a good balance for power users that fits your spec, and you'll end up with something that looks like a mix between C#, C++, Java, and Eiffel, slightly better designed, with different syntax and no actual support from anybody but the language creator.
Plus, there are some who believe that no language is complete without functional programming and/or aspects. Some big and cool projects have been done using modern functional languages.
Your best bet is C++ with a cross-platform GUI library like wxWindows or qt. If you want, you can try using one of the garbage collectors for C++ that's available and then you'll have most everything. Or you could just use bounds checker and manage your memory by hand.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I wholeheartedly believe that it should be possible and encouraged for companies to charge for their software. You have spent too much time with Stallman wanabees that you are confusing that with my general distaste for strong-arm tactics.
My point is, there are three categories that we can break companies down into. There are the companies who are anal and legal, where they make sure that every software license is recorded and accounted for. There are the companies who figure that it's their god-given right to pirate software. And then there are the companies who are, in fact, legal, but don't have the necessary documentation to convince the BSA, nor the money to fight them in court.
The problem is that the BSA has done a knockout job of convincing corporations, especially large ones, to stay legal. Which leaves them the small companies, individuals, and strong-arm tactics to milk money from companies who don't necessarily keep good records.
I mean, the biggest problem that most companies face with respect to software licenses right now is not any malicious effort on the part of the management, but instead the employee who installs Photoshop off of the network drive just because it hasn't been locked up properly and he/she doesn't quite understand that the company doesn't have a site license for everything.
That's not the big problem here. The big problem is when the BSA goes after a company who is careful about their software licensing, but who didn't keep good enough records.
Do you keep every single receipt? Remember what the article said, the box is not enough. The license often gets tossed out and only the manuals and maybe the box kept. And the receipt gets thrown out after some time.
Does Fry's or Radio Shack visit my house on occasion to make sure that I can prove to them that every little piece of electronics in my house hasn't been stollen? Do the grocery stores inspect my fridge to make sure I didn't some sausages down my pants last time I shopped?
Very true. I have the dpms on my monitor set similarly.;)
What I was pointing out is that if you were building a low-power machine to be used as a server, you shouldn't stress too much about having a LCD screen instead of a CRT, just get any old CRT, leave it off, and use VNC or X to get at the machine if you need to.
I'll try to give some pointers here, since nobody else is actually contributing anything useful.
First, turn off the monitor. Always. That'll suck a lot of power up.
Don't wory about the power supply capacity, switching power supplies only draw what they need.
For a processor, the latest from Via are pretty frugal, plus you can get away with just a heatsink.
I never quite figured out if you could put an embedded pentium on a desktop pentium motherboard. The socket is the same, it's more a matter of weather you can get the motherboard to supply the right power, so that might be an acceptable alternative. You can't put any of the laptop/embedded pentium II/III/4 processors on a desktop motherboard.
For a motherboard, I'm not 100% sure. I think you probably want a i810/i815 motherboard with the integrated video still there and not much else integrated, except perhaps ethernet. You might have to email the manufacturer of the motherboard to get exact power specs, however.
CD-ROM drives, floppy drives, and hard drives all don't suck up that much power while idle. So don't stress too much about that. They only draw power while they are in use. Although, to be carefuly, you can always remove the CD-ROM and floppy drives.
Try not to put too many pieces of RAM in the system. Ideally you want one DIMM that's big enough. That will generally eat up some power, too.
And don't install anything you don't need. You don't need a sound card in a server machine, so don't put one in.
So my last album was recorded in 16 bit/44kHz off of a Soundblaster AWE64 Gold. Not the greatest audio performance, but better than the 48kHz resampled SB Live.
You should have one or two pieces of analog gear. You probably want to have a mixer, especially if you want to record drums. Mackies are a safe bet and are not much more than the generic stuff. I used to be able to borrow a Mackie, but that's on my list of things to buy.
It's also extremely convenient to have an external compressor or two. I have two compressors and that's more than enough, but I don't do drums.
You want to make sure that your inputs (i.e. the sound card and mic) and the outputs (i.e. the speakers) are of good quality. So make sure you get a good set of studio monitor speakers, a good pair of headphones, and a good sound card. That's been covered already by other people. A new Echo card that does 24/96kHz is also on my list of toys to buy.
Guitar/Bass Multi FX processors are your friend. At least, if you do my kind of music. Last time, I borrowed a digitech processor. Now I own one. The speaker simulators are much less trouble than a real amp.
You probably want to go to a music store and pick out a microphone in person. But you want at least one good vocal mic. If you have an instrument other than a guitar/bass, i.e. a piano or a violin or something, pick up a good instrument mic, too. Shure SM57s are a good bet for instrument mics, but you can probably do better if you look.
You don't need an outboard FX processor, except for guitar/bass FX units. Most good multitracking programs have most of the FX you need built in.
Now, as far as saving money, you are going to end up spending at least $500 on a good set of monitor speakers, either self-powered or speakers and a power amp. Your audio card is at least $400. Your mixer is $400. Your guitar processor is $200-400. Your mics are going to be $200-400. All in all, it'll probably be closer to $2000.
Which is a little much. Most people accumulate things over time. So you don't bother with a mixer right off, just plug a SM57 into your input port. Maybe you already own a guitar processor. Skip out on good monitors and switch between computer speakers and your headphones for the time being. You get the picture.
MS still has fonts, Mozilla doesn't have fonts at all.
None of them work under Linux, naturally.
And it seems like nobody really really cares. The usual web set of fonts -- cartoon sans, trebuchet, verdana, arial, times, etc -- seems to be enough for most text, with graphics doing the fancy fonts. So it's good enough for most and yes, web fonts went the way of channels.
There were usage restrictions on laserdisks. You could still encode macrovision in a laserdisk. And there never was a way to copy a laserdisk at all, because nobody ever came out with a consumer-grade laserdisk player.
My point is, there will be a new format that succeeds DVDs that will take over for movie distribution to HDTV enabled people. But that won't happen for a while. So in the meantime, home theater nuts will buy D-VHS decks and tapes, which will be all obseleted by the DVD successor format.
DVD does not offer HDTV resolution. The widescreen modes can play on a HDTV screen and give you pretty good quality, but it's not as good as HD.
The ideal format would be a DVD-style disk with blue lasers, and a writable/rewritable format available at the launch date. You just know they'll bungle it, but.... But if they had that, it would have enough storage space to do HDTV resolution video while being a nice optical medium. If they delivered writable/rewritable features with it, you could use it to record stuff.
This format would best be introduced in 3-5 years. People will have already converted their collections over to DVD and be looking for new media purchases, HDTV will be more available, and the hardware to make it usable as a substitute for a VCR will be there, too.
The main reason why the DVD format does the NTSC/PAL encoding is to make the player simpler, BTW. That, and good 24fps to 60fps conversion is a pain in the rear to do right in cheap hardware. With an HDTV-format DVD, they might do things the right way.
This is probably going to end up like LaserDisks. It'll be the high-end format that home-theater people are going to use instead of DVDs. And then they'll come out with blue-laser DVDs after DVDs are at 99% acceptance so that people can buy new stuff AGAIN.
Now the question I'd love to see answered is weather you can tape OTA HDTV programming on these new D-VHS VCRs. That might make HDTV *gasp* useful!
I've already gradauted college and I've been carrying laptops since high school. That makes you a young whipper snapper, who is less 'l33t than I, young poster.;)
I have had the best results with a nice Kensington backpack case. It's got a little padding -- it's mostly the G's that kill a dropped laptop, so unless you are using a toughbook or have a massively padded case, the relitive amount of padding doesn't do a damn bit of good. Plus, it's on your back, which makes it hard to bang into things.
Sometimes you can drop a laptop and have it all survive, sometimes you can't. My old laptop was dropped twice. Once it killed the hard drive, once it didn't. Both were from the same height, more or less.
Your laptop will last quite a while if you treat it right. It's best to err on the side of cautiousness. Keep it in a laptop bag when you aren't using it, don't stack more than a book or two on top of it, etc. My last one lasted 5 years before the IDE controller died.
The main statistic that you can get is the number of g's that the hard disk can take. It'll be some number like 3,000 or 5,000 or maybe even more when the drive is powered down. This translates into varying numbers of feet that you can drop it before the drive is useless. In most laptops, either you or the serviceperson can replace the drive, however, and it's usually economically sound to do so.
There are, AFAIK, no statistics about the LCD screens. If your LCD dies, you just got yourself a desktop with a built-in battery backup. It'll die if you drop it, kick it, stack too many books on top of it, or any other form of abuse.
I will say that I rather like the latest Sony laptops. Sony is nice and posts the drivers for their stuff, so you can rebuild your system without getting all of the Sony crap with it.
You can always pay more and get a protection plan, although they try to keep costs down by making it hard to get repairs unless there's clearly a hardware problem.
Don't plan on the machine lasting more than 4-5 years, max.
Oh, and BTW... For chrissakes, take the fscking laptop out of your dorm room. I know far too many college kids who have laptops that just sit on their desks. Which means you paid a premium for the same grade of hardware and created a theft risk, basicly for convenience you didn't use. I *used* my laptop in college, took notes on it, wrote papers on it, etc.;)
There already is a further evolutionary move towards smaller PCs. Just not for premium users.
The MicroATX/FlexATX/WhateverATX form factors are the latest steps towards a smaller PC. You can reuse most of the ATX parts for a smaller system. Of course, the problem is that most people who like premium computers want lots of slots, so that doesn't happen.
So the market of people who want small PCs who aren't willing to buy an already made low-profile PC from someone, who want good parts, is too small to be useful.
Now, eventually motherboards will get smaller for the simple reason that as speeds go up, traces need to be shorter. And when there isn't room for improvement, parts will be integrated. Think of disk controllers, serial controllers, etc.
The main reason why you don't like the Shuttle low-profile system is probably video, which is right now too much of a moving target. Eventually, video will settle down and people will be able to get great 2D/3D for a $25 chip. At least, until they find a new area to push video cards with.
Now, it probably WOULD be possible to attach components to both sides of a motherboard. But you wouldn't want any user servicible parts on the bottom, because that would increase the difficulty of upgrades. This won't give you a perfect reduction in motherboard size simply because the motherboard layout is subject to a lot of finicky tollerences that mean that certain parts need to be in certain places.
I suspect that the ATX form factor could use some changes. I'd like to see explicit support for front-mounted jacks, better management of the LED/Speaker/Etc jumpers, standardized front-mounted ethernet activity lights for rackmount, etc. But remember that the ATX form factor is best extended over time with compatable changes instead of going through massive changes all at once. That's the beauty of FlexATX/MicroATX -- they didn't require massive retooling of assembley lines to the new standard, and you can always stick a FlexATX or MicroATX motherboard into a regular ATX case, in a pinch.
I have seen LCD screens with good quality. My wife's laptop has the second LCD that didn't annoy the !$^$ out of me for certain applications. The Apple Cinema Display is the first LCD, although I've only seen it in stores. You probably saw an LCD that wasn't properly set up. Of course, every time I start using a CRT tube, I have to get/it/ set up properly, too, but that's another matter.
There are two things that annoy me about LCD screens. One is the contrast ratio, and the other is refresh rate.
At some point, the LCD manufacturers hit the contrast ratio that made the blacks look black. Before that, a little bit of the backlight would creep through the blacks. It made things look all muddy. It's fine for office applications, programming, and whatnot. But it made any sort of Photoshop usage nearly impossible, even for web design. This has now been almost fixed. The latest expensive displays are good enough to not be annoying. Granted, I still wouldn't spec out a system intended for prepress with one, but they are OK.
What kills them for me right now is resolution. For the same price as a 1280x1024 LCD, I can get either a 17 or a 19 inch CRT that will do at least 1600x1200. I like a big, high resolution screen.
The refresh rate is getting better, but it's still not quite good enough for games. Of course, for an office PC, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's also great for an office PC because the pixels are very square and very sharp, which makes things easier on the eyes.
But the big thing is that a cheap LCD is going to suck more than a cheap CRT.
However, if you maintained your list of trust properly, it could be managed.
An RBL-like group could mistrust known spammers. You could decide that you will mistrust everybody they mistrust and get rid of a chunk of spammers. A TRUSTe group could trust a large group of ISPs that manage to keep their noses clean.
Trust relationships are difficult yes, but there are successes. Most employees don't steal from their employers, for example. Most marrages don't fail because of cheating, they arrise from personality differences. And creating a trust system between mail server admins would be much easier than creating a trust system between individual people on the 'net.
I suspect the downfall of my idea is that people don't like getting a "Your mail server isn't trusted" message, so all of the mail servers will be far too trusting.
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True, but you do have to remember that even companies that do make money do NOT, as a rule, let you quit your job to do MLM. There will be a few people who manage to get in at the right time, with the right connections, who make quite a lot of cash, and a bunch of sucks.
And the products are generally with an order-of-magnatude markup, so you are getting cheap crap at inflated prices, not a deal.
460,800,000 bits of information means that your bandwidth needs to be 460 MHz wide. The frequency of the signal doesn't determine how much information can be carried, the bandwidth does. So a 10MHz wide signal at 900MHz is as good as a 10MHz wide signal at 2.4 GHz, bandwidth wise.
Now, there are better encoding schemes for things. A 640x480 screen size like NTSC fits in a 6MHz wide band, through careful use of ancient analog signal processing.
Of course, the way they are doing things, it looks like wireless ethernet and windows terminal server, which can work with a few hundred k or less per second and have room to spare.
There's a difference between an OS being used and an OS being a viable platform for future growth.
For example, there's LOTS of people using VMS. Is VMS a viable platform anymore? Probably not, it's just easier for people to buy a newer faster Alpha for their apps then trying to port an app built around VMS features to Unix or Windows.
What you will likely see is that, as Linux gets better, Solaris/AIX/Irix/etc will get pushed to platforms where Linux isn't yet viable.
For a company who makes higher-end servers, Linux makes perfect business sense. The OS doesn't sell the hardware, the hardware forces you to use a particular OS, unless it's Windows. Thus, if you can lay off 25% of your OS development staff and put the other 75% to making Linux work on your platform, you save money and get geek points. Your only risk is that nobody else will make the gamble and you will be left holding the bag. Or that your hardware innately sucks and people are buying it because they got locked into your OS many many years ago.
Not really. XP is for the consumer and workstation versions. The server is Windows.NET and that's not out yet. So as far as they are concerned, everybody should be using Win2k for serving still.
Leave the stuff you can do without at home. This means convert yer Minidisk content to CD-R and leave that piece of gear at home.
Next, if you have a big TV, consider leaving it at home and purchasing a cheap 19-23 inch TV instead. Anything larger is going to be too big for a dorm room anyway.
Now, get a shelf. A good shelf, preferebly from a hardware store, and tall. Put all of your crap on shelf, except for your computer, which goes on the desk.
Thus, all of your cables are now between stuff on the shelf. Go for the cable ties to keep all of them in order. Tape the rest of the wires (that would be the surround speakers and whatever goes between your PC and entertainment system) down to the floor.
If they were really serious, there would be an e-mail address you could forward the Nigerian scam mail to and then would personally track it and give the person the beat-down of their life.
;)
As an incentive, if you reported it, they'd send you the video of the person getting the Cowboy Neal done to them.
I speed-read by nature. As in, my brain naturally works that fast, due to me reading the newspaper and paperback after paperback of science fiction since I was in grade school.
Sure, it's great once in a while when you pick out details on something, but if you need to get real comprehension, you will end up reading it two or three times to get the proper amounts of comprehension.
What you gain is the ability to absorb the basic idea of an entire work quickly. But there is a certain specific rate at which your brain can absorb information -- your personal mental bandwidth -- and you can't go any faster. Speed-read too much and you will miss things.
Speed reading is not a technique that will make you more brilliant or anything. Your brain pretty much wired itself up when you were five or so, so you can't take a course on speed reading and become brilliant. It'll just give you a skill of seeming to be more brilliant because you can read fast and pick out the important aspects of a document that may or may not prove useful to you.
I've noticed a similar phenomena. I've been quite vigilant about reporting spammers and have been trying to report them to all of the possible channels, including the SEC if it's yet another pump-and-dump scheme.
;)
The best part is reporting first-time spammers. I make damn sure that when I see a spam I haven't seen before that I report it. I had the great satisfaction of watching some girl who wanted to be the next Britney Spears or something get her website shut down for spamming. Those people are the big spammers of the future. If somebody gets started in spamming and gets their access canned right away, they hopefully will realize that it's not as easy money as the person who set them up with spamming software said it was.
But it is an uphill battle. Some companies are claiming that I did, in fact, opt-in at some point to receiving spam from their "partners". Taking care of those folks and tracking who initially sold my address has resulted quite a bit of improvement in my spam count. I don't have the opt-in networks, just the bulk viagra mails and whatnot coming from Asia, at this point.
I've also noticed that unless you report spammers, they will spam you forever. I have some addresses that haven't been used for years that are still getting spam. I notice this because I get error messages occasionally because the auto-bounce message has nowhere to bounce to.
When I get in one of those moods, I'll crank call all of the 1-800 numbers listed in the spam. That doesn't do anything for the spam count, but it does wonders for my mood.
I have had nothing but good results by negotiating away the bad parts of the contracts. Releasing stuff under a pseudonym is NOT going to be very good if your employer ever finds out because then you are intentionally deceiving them to commit the crime of missapropriation of employer intellectual property. As in, can get you into loads of trouble.
Of course, on the other hand, it is up to you to make sure that you are not using employer resources. This means you buy your own copy of Visual Studio if you develop for Windows. This means you don't hack on it at work. This means you might end up owning two copies of Design Patterns -- one for work, one for home.
Be careful about these laws, however.. They mostly cover "inventions", which can be interpreted to mean that your ideas at home and any patents resulting from this can't be assigned, but any code you write may not be enough of an "invention"
Talk to a lawyer before making this assumption.
Just stick to a language that already works and has a following. C++ is a great bet because lots of people use it and there are plenty of tools out to support it.
I gave up on the perfect language. Doing so is doomed to failure. Make it powerful, and you miss out on simplicity. Make it simple and you can't use it for much. Try to make a good balance for power users that fits your spec, and you'll end up with something that looks like a mix between C#, C++, Java, and Eiffel, slightly better designed, with different syntax and no actual support from anybody but the language creator.
Plus, there are some who believe that no language is complete without functional programming and/or aspects. Some big and cool projects have been done using modern functional languages.
Your best bet is C++ with a cross-platform GUI library like wxWindows or qt. If you want, you can try using one of the garbage collectors for C++ that's available and then you'll have most everything. Or you could just use bounds checker and manage your memory by hand.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I wholeheartedly believe that it should be possible and encouraged for companies to charge for their software. You have spent too much time with Stallman wanabees that you are confusing that with my general distaste for strong-arm tactics.
My point is, there are three categories that we can break companies down into. There are the companies who are anal and legal, where they make sure that every software license is recorded and accounted for. There are the companies who figure that it's their god-given right to pirate software. And then there are the companies who are, in fact, legal, but don't have the necessary documentation to convince the BSA, nor the money to fight them in court.
The problem is that the BSA has done a knockout job of convincing corporations, especially large ones, to stay legal. Which leaves them the small companies, individuals, and strong-arm tactics to milk money from companies who don't necessarily keep good records.
I mean, the biggest problem that most companies face with respect to software licenses right now is not any malicious effort on the part of the management, but instead the employee who installs Photoshop off of the network drive just because it hasn't been locked up properly and he/she doesn't quite understand that the company doesn't have a site license for everything.
That's not the big problem here. The big problem is when the BSA goes after a company who is careful about their software licensing, but who didn't keep good enough records.
Do you keep every single receipt? Remember what the article said, the box is not enough. The license often gets tossed out and only the manuals and maybe the box kept. And the receipt gets thrown out after some time.
Does Fry's or Radio Shack visit my house on occasion to make sure that I can prove to them that every little piece of electronics in my house hasn't been stollen? Do the grocery stores inspect my fridge to make sure I didn't some sausages down my pants last time I shopped?
Very true. I have the dpms on my monitor set similarly. ;)
What I was pointing out is that if you were building a low-power machine to be used as a server, you shouldn't stress too much about having a LCD screen instead of a CRT, just get any old CRT, leave it off, and use VNC or X to get at the machine if you need to.
I'll try to give some pointers here, since nobody else is actually contributing anything useful.
First, turn off the monitor. Always. That'll suck a lot of power up.
Don't wory about the power supply capacity, switching power supplies only draw what they need.
For a processor, the latest from Via are pretty frugal, plus you can get away with just a heatsink.
I never quite figured out if you could put an embedded pentium on a desktop pentium motherboard. The socket is the same, it's more a matter of weather you can get the motherboard to supply the right power, so that might be an acceptable alternative. You can't put any of the laptop/embedded pentium II/III/4 processors on a desktop motherboard.
For a motherboard, I'm not 100% sure. I think you probably want a i810/i815 motherboard with the integrated video still there and not much else integrated, except perhaps ethernet. You might have to email the manufacturer of the motherboard to get exact power specs, however.
CD-ROM drives, floppy drives, and hard drives all don't suck up that much power while idle. So don't stress too much about that. They only draw power while they are in use. Although, to be carefuly, you can always remove the CD-ROM and floppy drives.
Try not to put too many pieces of RAM in the system. Ideally you want one DIMM that's big enough. That will generally eat up some power, too.
And don't install anything you don't need. You don't need a sound card in a server machine, so don't put one in.
So my last album was recorded in 16 bit/44kHz off of a Soundblaster AWE64 Gold. Not the greatest audio performance, but better than the 48kHz resampled SB Live.
You should have one or two pieces of analog gear. You probably want to have a mixer, especially if you want to record drums. Mackies are a safe bet and are not much more than the generic stuff. I used to be able to borrow a Mackie, but that's on my list of things to buy.
It's also extremely convenient to have an external compressor or two. I have two compressors and that's more than enough, but I don't do drums.
You want to make sure that your inputs (i.e. the sound card and mic) and the outputs (i.e. the speakers) are of good quality. So make sure you get a good set of studio monitor speakers, a good pair of headphones, and a good sound card. That's been covered already by other people. A new Echo card that does 24/96kHz is also on my list of toys to buy.
Guitar/Bass Multi FX processors are your friend. At least, if you do my kind of music. Last time, I borrowed a digitech processor. Now I own one. The speaker simulators are much less trouble than a real amp.
You probably want to go to a music store and pick out a microphone in person. But you want at least one good vocal mic. If you have an instrument other than a guitar/bass, i.e. a piano or a violin or something, pick up a good instrument mic, too. Shure SM57s are a good bet for instrument mics, but you can probably do better if you look.
You don't need an outboard FX processor, except for guitar/bass FX units. Most good multitracking programs have most of the FX you need built in.
Now, as far as saving money, you are going to end up spending at least $500 on a good set of monitor speakers, either self-powered or speakers and a power amp. Your audio card is at least $400. Your mixer is $400. Your guitar processor is $200-400. Your mics are going to be $200-400. All in all, it'll probably be closer to $2000.
Which is a little much. Most people accumulate things over time. So you don't bother with a mixer right off, just plug a SM57 into your input port. Maybe you already own a guitar processor. Skip out on good monitors and switch between computer speakers and your headphones for the time being. You get the picture.
MS still has fonts, Mozilla doesn't have fonts at all.
None of them work under Linux, naturally.
And it seems like nobody really really cares. The usual web set of fonts -- cartoon sans, trebuchet, verdana, arial, times, etc -- seems to be enough for most text, with graphics doing the fancy fonts. So it's good enough for most and yes, web fonts went the way of channels.
There were usage restrictions on laserdisks. You could still encode macrovision in a laserdisk. And there never was a way to copy a laserdisk at all, because nobody ever came out with a consumer-grade laserdisk player.
My point is, there will be a new format that succeeds DVDs that will take over for movie distribution to HDTV enabled people. But that won't happen for a while. So in the meantime, home theater nuts will buy D-VHS decks and tapes, which will be all obseleted by the DVD successor format.
Nope. All DVDs are red-laser, which is great when you realize that CDs were IR-laser. Blue-laser storage hasn't made it out of the research labs yet.
DVD does not offer HDTV resolution. The widescreen modes can play on a HDTV screen and give you pretty good quality, but it's not as good as HD.
The ideal format would be a DVD-style disk with blue lasers, and a writable/rewritable format available at the launch date. You just know they'll bungle it, but.... But if they had that, it would have enough storage space to do HDTV resolution video while being a nice optical medium. If they delivered writable/rewritable features with it, you could use it to record stuff.
This format would best be introduced in 3-5 years. People will have already converted their collections over to DVD and be looking for new media purchases, HDTV will be more available, and the hardware to make it usable as a substitute for a VCR will be there, too.
The main reason why the DVD format does the NTSC/PAL encoding is to make the player simpler, BTW. That, and good 24fps to 60fps conversion is a pain in the rear to do right in cheap hardware. With an HDTV-format DVD, they might do things the right way.
This is probably going to end up like LaserDisks. It'll be the high-end format that home-theater people are going to use instead of DVDs. And then they'll come out with blue-laser DVDs after DVDs are at 99% acceptance so that people can buy new stuff AGAIN.
Now the question I'd love to see answered is weather you can tape OTA HDTV programming on these new D-VHS VCRs. That might make HDTV *gasp* useful!
I've already gradauted college and I've been carrying laptops since high school. That makes you a young whipper snapper, who is less 'l33t than I, young poster. ;)
;)
I have had the best results with a nice Kensington backpack case. It's got a little padding -- it's mostly the G's that kill a dropped laptop, so unless you are using a toughbook or have a massively padded case, the relitive amount of padding doesn't do a damn bit of good. Plus, it's on your back, which makes it hard to bang into things.
Sometimes you can drop a laptop and have it all survive, sometimes you can't. My old laptop was dropped twice. Once it killed the hard drive, once it didn't. Both were from the same height, more or less.
Your laptop will last quite a while if you treat it right. It's best to err on the side of cautiousness. Keep it in a laptop bag when you aren't using it, don't stack more than a book or two on top of it, etc. My last one lasted 5 years before the IDE controller died.
The main statistic that you can get is the number of g's that the hard disk can take. It'll be some number like 3,000 or 5,000 or maybe even more when the drive is powered down. This translates into varying numbers of feet that you can drop it before the drive is useless. In most laptops, either you or the serviceperson can replace the drive, however, and it's usually economically sound to do so.
There are, AFAIK, no statistics about the LCD screens. If your LCD dies, you just got yourself a desktop with a built-in battery backup. It'll die if you drop it, kick it, stack too many books on top of it, or any other form of abuse.
I will say that I rather like the latest Sony laptops. Sony is nice and posts the drivers for their stuff, so you can rebuild your system without getting all of the Sony crap with it.
You can always pay more and get a protection plan, although they try to keep costs down by making it hard to get repairs unless there's clearly a hardware problem.
Don't plan on the machine lasting more than 4-5 years, max.
Oh, and BTW... For chrissakes, take the fscking laptop out of your dorm room. I know far too many college kids who have laptops that just sit on their desks. Which means you paid a premium for the same grade of hardware and created a theft risk, basicly for convenience you didn't use. I *used* my laptop in college, took notes on it, wrote papers on it, etc.
There already is a further evolutionary move towards smaller PCs. Just not for premium users.
The MicroATX/FlexATX/WhateverATX form factors are the latest steps towards a smaller PC. You can reuse most of the ATX parts for a smaller system. Of course, the problem is that most people who like premium computers want lots of slots, so that doesn't happen.
So the market of people who want small PCs who aren't willing to buy an already made low-profile PC from someone, who want good parts, is too small to be useful.
Now, eventually motherboards will get smaller for the simple reason that as speeds go up, traces need to be shorter. And when there isn't room for improvement, parts will be integrated. Think of disk controllers, serial controllers, etc.
The main reason why you don't like the Shuttle low-profile system is probably video, which is right now too much of a moving target. Eventually, video will settle down and people will be able to get great 2D/3D for a $25 chip. At least, until they find a new area to push video cards with.
Now, it probably WOULD be possible to attach components to both sides of a motherboard. But you wouldn't want any user servicible parts on the bottom, because that would increase the difficulty of upgrades. This won't give you a perfect reduction in motherboard size simply because the motherboard layout is subject to a lot of finicky tollerences that mean that certain parts need to be in certain places.
I suspect that the ATX form factor could use some changes. I'd like to see explicit support for front-mounted jacks, better management of the LED/Speaker/Etc jumpers, standardized front-mounted ethernet activity lights for rackmount, etc. But remember that the ATX form factor is best extended over time with compatable changes instead of going through massive changes all at once. That's the beauty of FlexATX/MicroATX -- they didn't require massive retooling of assembley lines to the new standard, and you can always stick a FlexATX or MicroATX motherboard into a regular ATX case, in a pinch.
I have seen LCD screens with good quality. My wife's laptop has the second LCD that didn't annoy the !$^$ out of me for certain applications. The Apple Cinema Display is the first LCD, although I've only seen it in stores. You probably saw an LCD that wasn't properly set up. Of course, every time I start using a CRT tube, I have to get /it/ set up properly, too, but that's another matter.
There are two things that annoy me about LCD screens. One is the contrast ratio, and the other is refresh rate.
At some point, the LCD manufacturers hit the contrast ratio that made the blacks look black. Before that, a little bit of the backlight would creep through the blacks. It made things look all muddy. It's fine for office applications, programming, and whatnot. But it made any sort of Photoshop usage nearly impossible, even for web design. This has now been almost fixed. The latest expensive displays are good enough to not be annoying. Granted, I still wouldn't spec out a system intended for prepress with one, but they are OK.
What kills them for me right now is resolution. For the same price as a 1280x1024 LCD, I can get either a 17 or a 19 inch CRT that will do at least 1600x1200. I like a big, high resolution screen.
The refresh rate is getting better, but it's still not quite good enough for games. Of course, for an office PC, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's also great for an office PC because the pixels are very square and very sharp, which makes things easier on the eyes.
But the big thing is that a cheap LCD is going to suck more than a cheap CRT.
This is true.
However, if you maintained your list of trust properly, it could be managed.
An RBL-like group could mistrust known spammers. You could decide that you will mistrust everybody they mistrust and get rid of a chunk of spammers. A TRUSTe group could trust a large group of ISPs that manage to keep their noses clean.
Trust relationships are difficult yes, but there are successes. Most employees don't steal from their employers, for example. Most marrages don't fail because of cheating, they arrise from personality differences. And creating a trust system between mail server admins would be much easier than creating a trust system between individual people on the 'net.
I suspect the downfall of my idea is that people don't like getting a "Your mail server isn't trusted" message, so all of the mail servers will be far too trusting.