Imagine a beowulf cluster of.... oh yeah, we're talking about a beowulf cluster..;)
I haven't heard of anything that would be directly applicable to your situation.
I'm sure that there are DSPs that work well for encoding MP3s in real time, intended for MP3 walkmen and stuff.
But you are talking about really cranking them out at faster-than-real-time. Which probably means you want a bank of drives and a traditional PC cluster with whatever CPU will encode fastest. My feeling is that someting with 3DNow/KNI would work better, but I'm not sure.
Besides, general purpose computing is better. If you don't need all of the machines, you can put them to work for other tasks.
If you want to write DVD player software without paying licensing fees, DeCSS is useful.
Consider WinAmp. They were able to assemble a really cool MP3 player without too big of an upfront investment. Had they needed to pay a licensing fee for their MPEG decoder, they would need to assemble the money for a fee and probably wouldn't have started writing it. I remember when WinAmp was first out. All of the other options, commercial or no, just plain sucked. Hence, since a very early version, I have been using WinAmp.;)
Also, from a data preservation standpoint, DeCSS is useful. Say 50 years from now, everybody's using RFCVDs (Really fscking cool versitile disks) instead of DVDs. Say you want to read them. Do you think that the DVD intelectual property holders are going to play nice when the DVD format dies and release the specs? You may have a disk that you can't play. And since the DVD consortium also doesn't want you to do a quality digital copy, you can't even transcode it to a RFCVD.
I don't quite have the same magnitude of a problem, but I have some solutions that work..
My current solution is that I use CD drawers for my computer CD-ROMs and keep them in thinner sleeves -- no jewel cases. I found a bunch of half-height colored jewel cases, so I can double my storage density while still having a hard case for CD-ROMs that I use a lot. The half-height jewel cases are really half height, too. The only drawback is that you have no room along the edges to see what's there. In a drawer styled layout, that's OK, however, since you index by the front. I really don't use those CDs very often, so it's not too problematic.
The next suggestion, which I haven't done, is to keep all of your CDs in a closet, stacked to the ceiling, and then just rip them to MP3. You get about 10x the storage density with CD-Rs, and much much more with an extra hard drive or DVD-R/RW/RAM disks.
Now, I'm going to pull back and turn this into a computer architecture problem to give you an alternate solution. You have already reached the maximum local storage space and have fast access times to all storage. Now we need to introduce paging. Take your 300 most favorite CDs and keep them in a tower placed for maximum access time, indexed, with the full-height cases. This is your cache. Keep the rest of your CDs in a closet, with all of the cards intact, so that you can replace a lesser accessed CD from the cache with a CD from the closet that has been getting heavier usage. This is something that I use and it's rather convenient.
I took a test and was not too surprised by the results. It pretty much told me what I already know about myself.
However, one must be careful when applying these tests. A person with merely adequate intelligence can purposefully skew the test. And most people's test scores will reflect what THEY think they are, not what they REALLY are. I know quite a few people who have a very different opinion of themselves than everybody else sees in them.
There are only 16 personality types. That's a pretty broad brush to paint people with. I'd preffer that if you are going to reduce a person's personality to a word, that you pick something more descriptive. Like "Jerk" or "Dickwad" or "Weenie" or "Nice" or "Helpful".
I have pretty limited experience in the world of IT, but I have seen a personality test. When people interview you, take you out drinking with your potential cow-orkers, etc. they are guaging your personality.
The problem is that if that is widely deployed, the spammers will change the USER AGENT line to some approximation of a common web browser. And then, all the sudden, you won't be able to tell the address collector from the web browser.
Which ruins that technique.
BTW -- That sort of stuff has been around for at least a year, probably more.
Also note that trying to get around the MP3 ban by zipping the files will just piss off the ISP more and incur the threatened $300 fee.
Plus, you might fall into the more than 20% download category with a ZIP file.
However, any other form of digital audio, including MP2 audio, is OK. So that's an effective workaround.
It's pretty simple. Half-Price hosting is budget hosting. They want to sell you the cheapest hosting that most people can be happy with without going bankrupt. Policing sites that have a lot of file and MP3 downloads is annoying, because 85% of those sites will probably have something illegal on them anyways.
So the only other option than switching to a different ISP is probably politely talking to them and seeing if you can set up an alternate plan where you pay $x per month extra and they let you keep the MP3s up.
I'm glad that my ISP doesn't delete my MP3s or software. (Begins knocking furiously on wood)
I have been following the Hurd for longer than Linux has been around.
I think that the biggest problem is that open-source software has been mostly concerned around ESR's scratching an itch sort of programs, that do some sort of task useful to the creator.
And when it comes to open source OS design, all we have been able to do is recreate Unix a large number of times.
The problem with the Hurd is that it's just Unix, all over again. In order for Hurd to compete with Linux, you would have to show that it has some measurable advantages over Linux. And because Linux has the biggest mindshare, followed by BSD, among OS hackers, Hurd will be a toy OS until somebody does something with the Hurd that will give it mindshare.
I personally would love it if the Hurd would re-focus towards becomming a post-Unix OS. Break the Unix compatability, simplify things, and make something that's more attuned for what today's computing is like. That way, Hurd is an evolution in design, not a microkernel trying to catch up with a billion Linux kernel hackers.
I remember the days before the web was anything to sneeze at. I remember the days when gopher ruled. It was extremely handy for me to get FTP access on a system that didn't support it, without needing to resort to FTP mail.
But face it, nobody is going to spend real money on it. The way I look at it, there are a lot of reasons why Gopher died.
Personal publishing wasn't easily available. Remember that one of the main reasons why the web took off was because personal pages were easy to create with the httpds that were out there.
The data wasn't very formatted. In those days, that was good, but, like it or not, today we need more than ASCII text.
The web won the adaptability war. You can do things with the web infrastructure that it wasn't designed for -- Like slashdot, for example. Remember the Law of Software Envelopment: Every program expands until it can read mail. The programs which cannot are replaced by ones that can. Well, you can now read mail with the web infrastructure much better than the Gopher infrastrucre could have been.
With the web, we can do business stuff, professional stuff AND personal stuff. Gopher was good for professional research and some limited personal stuff -- mostly supplied by wiretap.spies.com.
With tables and HTML, we can present more information in a more compact format than ASCII text. And with graphics, we can communicate an idea more with more visual compactness. Gopher was too built around ASCII text terminals.
Really, I look to Gopher as the forerunner of the web. It had to die for the web to take off.
Now, there are arguments that it would be a great information retreval protocal for wireless or other usages. However, IMHO, by the time that you actually build a product around this, you will have the processing power in your personal item for HTML or WML and WAP or HTTP. Furthermore, with either of those protocalls, you have a much richer method of interaction from the user, where the user can submit a form instead of just one search field.
I think that Gopher will always have some sort of a niche, like the people who still do hacking on Apple II computers. It's the same sort of people. The Apple II, IMHO, could have been the Worlds Greatest Computer had things turned out differently. It's great for hacks and research projects and goofing. But Gopher will never stage a comeback.
Well, I'm not going to buy one of these Pentium IV processors.
But it does make sense, given Intel's strategy. While I would, personally, love it if mid-end motherboards shipped default with a second processor slot, it's not always the best of ideas, commercially.
The problem is that the real folks in the PC market are savy enough to know that MHz != speed. So they will buy a Alpha or SPARC with a lower MHz speed over a P4 that is slower in the real performance figures.
Therefore, they are going after the hardcore 31337 gamerz. Look at what they did for 3dfx at the beginning! Those people have enough of a speed fixation that they'll purchase the first system at insane prices, just so that they can have bragging rights and stuff.
I always thought that we were going to see the pennies-on-the-dollar effect for Iridium. Iridium goes bankrupt, they sell the satelites for some reduced rate to another company who thinks that they'll be able to pull it off, New Iridium tries to make it work, wash, rinse, repeat until pow(New,n) Iridium makes a killing on satelite phones.
Which is really too bad. I mean, they spent all of that money to get those satelites up there.
But then again, they designed those things for analog cell phones, so they are useless for anything but standard cell phone transmissions..
The mistake, of course, is that they didn't develop the right set of hardware and the right set of features that would do more than just a phone you could use in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
Oh yeah, and to flame, the multilingual domain names are odd and probably not too useful. I mean, your average non-Japanese/Chinese person probably couldn't even write the characters for the domain name, so you'd hope that you don't have anything important that someone from any of the other countries that can't parse ideographs would want to get at. And what about putting accent marks on something. e-cafe.com could have an accent mark on it, which will just open up more domain name squatting..
Because if they did, they'd have to go after the manufacturers of hard drives, large removable drives, etc.
All that an economical DVD-R drive means is that you will be able to burn larger data disks. DVD-R drives cannot burn exact digital coppies -- the encryption key is zeroed.
So you will still need DeCSS.
Having said that, I want one. I have already run up against the limits of CD-R disks. I record music, do 3D artwork, and other such things. My recent project is at HDTV resolution. 3 minutes of uncompressed HDTV video would fit on a DVD-R. It won't fit on a CD-R.
I'd also love to take all of my older videocassettes and record them to DVD so that I don't have to wory about how long the VHS tapes will last.
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Imagine a beowulf cluster of.... oh yeah, we're talking about a beowulf cluster.. ;)
I haven't heard of anything that would be directly applicable to your situation.
I'm sure that there are DSPs that work well for encoding MP3s in real time, intended for MP3 walkmen and stuff.
But you are talking about really cranking them out at faster-than-real-time. Which probably means you want a bank of drives and a traditional PC cluster with whatever CPU will encode fastest. My feeling is that someting with 3DNow/KNI would work better, but I'm not sure.
Besides, general purpose computing is better. If you don't need all of the machines, you can put them to work for other tasks.
If you want to write DVD player software without paying licensing fees, DeCSS is useful.
;)
Consider WinAmp. They were able to assemble a really cool MP3 player without too big of an upfront investment. Had they needed to pay a licensing fee for their MPEG decoder, they would need to assemble the money for a fee and probably wouldn't have started writing it. I remember when WinAmp was first out. All of the other options, commercial or no, just plain sucked. Hence, since a very early version, I have been using WinAmp.
Also, from a data preservation standpoint, DeCSS is useful. Say 50 years from now, everybody's using RFCVDs (Really fscking cool versitile disks) instead of DVDs. Say you want to read them. Do you think that the DVD intelectual property holders are going to play nice when the DVD format dies and release the specs? You may have a disk that you can't play. And since the DVD consortium also doesn't want you to do a quality digital copy, you can't even transcode it to a RFCVD.
I don't quite have the same magnitude of a problem, but I have some solutions that work..
My current solution is that I use CD drawers for my computer CD-ROMs and keep them in thinner sleeves -- no jewel cases. I found a bunch of half-height colored jewel cases, so I can double my storage density while still having a hard case for CD-ROMs that I use a lot. The half-height jewel cases are really half height, too. The only drawback is that you have no room along the edges to see what's there. In a drawer styled layout, that's OK, however, since you index by the front. I really don't use those CDs very often, so it's not too problematic.
The next suggestion, which I haven't done, is to keep all of your CDs in a closet, stacked to the ceiling, and then just rip them to MP3. You get about 10x the storage density with CD-Rs, and much much more with an extra hard drive or DVD-R/RW/RAM disks.
Now, I'm going to pull back and turn this into a computer architecture problem to give you an alternate solution. You have already reached the maximum local storage space and have fast access times to all storage. Now we need to introduce paging. Take your 300 most favorite CDs and keep them in a tower placed for maximum access time, indexed, with the full-height cases. This is your cache. Keep the rest of your CDs in a closet, with all of the cards intact, so that you can replace a lesser accessed CD from the cache with a CD from the closet that has been getting heavier usage. This is something that I use and it's rather convenient.
I took a test and was not too surprised by the results. It pretty much told me what I already know about myself.
However, one must be careful when applying these tests. A person with merely adequate intelligence can purposefully skew the test. And most people's test scores will reflect what THEY think they are, not what they REALLY are. I know quite a few people who have a very different opinion of themselves than everybody else sees in them.
There are only 16 personality types. That's a pretty broad brush to paint people with. I'd preffer that if you are going to reduce a person's personality to a word, that you pick something more descriptive. Like "Jerk" or "Dickwad" or "Weenie" or "Nice" or "Helpful".
I have pretty limited experience in the world of IT, but I have seen a personality test. When people interview you, take you out drinking with your potential cow-orkers, etc. they are guaging your personality.
The problem is that if that is widely deployed, the spammers will change the USER AGENT line to some approximation of a common web browser. And then, all the sudden, you won't be able to tell the address collector from the web browser.
Which ruins that technique.
BTW -- That sort of stuff has been around for at least a year, probably more.
Also note that trying to get around the MP3 ban by zipping the files will just piss off the ISP more and incur the threatened $300 fee.
Plus, you might fall into the more than 20% download category with a ZIP file.
However, any other form of digital audio, including MP2 audio, is OK. So that's an effective workaround.
It's pretty simple. Half-Price hosting is budget hosting. They want to sell you the cheapest hosting that most people can be happy with without going bankrupt. Policing sites that have a lot of file and MP3 downloads is annoying, because 85% of those sites will probably have something illegal on them anyways.
So the only other option than switching to a different ISP is probably politely talking to them and seeing if you can set up an alternate plan where you pay $x per month extra and they let you keep the MP3s up.
I'm glad that my ISP doesn't delete my MP3s or software. (Begins knocking furiously on wood)
I have been following the Hurd for longer than Linux has been around.
I think that the biggest problem is that open-source software has been mostly concerned around ESR's scratching an itch sort of programs, that do some sort of task useful to the creator.
And when it comes to open source OS design, all we have been able to do is recreate Unix a large number of times.
The problem with the Hurd is that it's just Unix, all over again. In order for Hurd to compete with Linux, you would have to show that it has some measurable advantages over Linux. And because Linux has the biggest mindshare, followed by BSD, among OS hackers, Hurd will be a toy OS until somebody does something with the Hurd that will give it mindshare.
I personally would love it if the Hurd would re-focus towards becomming a post-Unix OS. Break the Unix compatability, simplify things, and make something that's more attuned for what today's computing is like. That way, Hurd is an evolution in design, not a microkernel trying to catch up with a billion Linux kernel hackers.
I remember the days before the web was anything to sneeze at. I remember the days when gopher ruled. It was extremely handy for me to get FTP access on a system that didn't support it, without needing to resort to FTP mail.
But face it, nobody is going to spend real money on it. The way I look at it, there are a lot of reasons why Gopher died.
Really, I look to Gopher as the forerunner of the web. It had to die for the web to take off.
Now, there are arguments that it would be a great information retreval protocal for wireless or other usages. However, IMHO, by the time that you actually build a product around this, you will have the processing power in your personal item for HTML or WML and WAP or HTTP. Furthermore, with either of those protocalls, you have a much richer method of interaction from the user, where the user can submit a form instead of just one search field.
I think that Gopher will always have some sort of a niche, like the people who still do hacking on Apple II computers. It's the same sort of people. The Apple II, IMHO, could have been the Worlds Greatest Computer had things turned out differently. It's great for hacks and research projects and goofing. But Gopher will never stage a comeback.
Well, I'm not going to buy one of these Pentium IV processors.
But it does make sense, given Intel's strategy. While I would, personally, love it if mid-end motherboards shipped default with a second processor slot, it's not always the best of ideas, commercially.
The problem is that the real folks in the PC market are savy enough to know that MHz != speed. So they will buy a Alpha or SPARC with a lower MHz speed over a P4 that is slower in the real performance figures.
Therefore, they are going after the hardcore 31337 gamerz. Look at what they did for 3dfx at the beginning! Those people have enough of a speed fixation that they'll purchase the first system at insane prices, just so that they can have bragging rights and stuff.
I always thought that we were going to see the pennies-on-the-dollar effect for Iridium. Iridium goes bankrupt, they sell the satelites for some reduced rate to another company who thinks that they'll be able to pull it off, New Iridium tries to make it work, wash, rinse, repeat until pow(New,n) Iridium makes a killing on satelite phones.
Which is really too bad. I mean, they spent all of that money to get those satelites up there.
But then again, they designed those things for analog cell phones, so they are useless for anything but standard cell phone transmissions..
The mistake, of course, is that they didn't develop the right set of hardware and the right set of features that would do more than just a phone you could use in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
Oh yeah, and to flame, the multilingual domain names are odd and probably not too useful. I mean, your average non-Japanese/Chinese person probably couldn't even write the characters for the domain name, so you'd hope that you don't have anything important that someone from any of the other countries that can't parse ideographs would want to get at. And what about putting accent marks on something. e-cafe.com could have an accent mark on it, which will just open up more domain name squatting..
I doubt the MPAA will go after this one.
Because if they did, they'd have to go after the manufacturers of hard drives, large removable drives, etc.
All that an economical DVD-R drive means is that you will be able to burn larger data disks. DVD-R drives cannot burn exact digital coppies -- the encryption key is zeroed.
So you will still need DeCSS.
Having said that, I want one. I have already run up against the limits of CD-R disks. I record music, do 3D artwork, and other such things. My recent project is at HDTV resolution. 3 minutes of uncompressed HDTV video would fit on a DVD-R. It won't fit on a CD-R.
I'd also love to take all of my older videocassettes and record them to DVD so that I don't have to wory about how long the VHS tapes will last.
There's always the litigation-free option of starting up a site to cover the project that you did and give the true attributation.
The only prob is that they could try to bring you to court for Libel.