Salvage parts from old PCs, from the AthlonXP / Athlon64 era, including an ancient ATi RADEON 9800, 2 GB of RAM, and a component video cable. Stick it into a smaller-ish desktop case. Connect it to your TV. Configure it to auto-login to Windows (or Linux), map a couple of network shares to your main computer, start XBMC, and give you a nice 10' display to your video library (sitting on the other computer).
Voila! You have the equivalent of an AppleTV, for hardly any dollars (since you have all the spare parts, or they can be had for under $15 each), that can play 720p x264 video files (should be able to handle 1080p, but don't have access to an HDTV to test it with).
Works beautifully. All controlled from a wireless mouse, while sitting on the couch. Could hook it up to a proper remote, but that seems like work to me.;) Especially since this setup is easy enough for the wife to use.:D
I'm "parroting" experience, not "the powers that be".
And I never said anything about the legality of alcohol. Just a comparison on the effects of alcohol/meth on the body. And the effects of meth, especially on the brain, are a hell of a lot worse than alcohol.
Except that it takes years of heavy drinking to start turning your insides into mush (mainly liver/kidneys, which are easily repairable), and only a few months of heavy meth use to turn your brain into mush (which is extremely hard to repair).
Alcoholism tends to grow slowly over time. Meth addiction tends to go from nothing to "holy shit, the bat people are everywhere man, you gotta protect me" in no time flat. Especially if you start smoking it.
And if you quit drinking, your body can recupurate and recover from most of the damage. If you quit meth after years of hardcore use, your body is still messed up.
My sister has ADHD. When she was younger (under 12) we used to have to give her hot chocolate or even mochas before bed in order for her to fall asleep. You get some weird looks from people when you say that ("You give her caffeine so she can sleep?"). But it works.
It's strange how you have to give someone stimulants in order for the body to catch up to the brain, thus evening things out and allowing them to concentrate and "be normal".
She's now on Dexedrin and , both amphetamines, both stimulants, both used to relax/calm her down enough to get on with her day.
The pseudo-real-time auto-pause mode in Icewind Dale is crap, especially with large groups of enemies. It's not turn-based in the least. A real turn-based combat system lets you select the movements/attacks of all your characters. Then everyone (yourself and the enemies) plays out there attacks (thus completing one turn). Then you select all the movements/attacks for your characters. And then they all play out.
Icewind Dale's auto-pause setup was no better than twitch-fest button mashing since it kept pausing things every 2 seconds, freezing all the graphics with effects everywhere. It's like trying to watch a movie with a 2-year-old chewing on the remote constantly hitting play/pause with every bite. There was no flow to the combat like in a real turn-based system.
I miss good ol' fashioned turn-based role-playing games, like the old SSI ADnD-based games (Pools of Twilight, Pools of Radiance, etc).
"RPGs" nowadays are more hack'n slash, mouse-button mashfests than anything else (WoW, Diablo, Icewind Dale, etc).
I don't want to play a twitch-reaction game. I want to control a party of characters and take my time thinking about how to use their various skills together against large groups of enemies. I want turn-based action.
If I wanted a FPS (which I don't, can't stand them), I'd buy one. But I want an RPG. When was the last time you played a paper-n-pencil RPG where it was "whoever can roll the fastest gets to attach"? It's all turn-based.
How did AMD "ignore virtualisation"? Every single Opteron CPU for the past several years (since the 4-digit numbering started) includes hardware virtualisation support, IOMMU support, and all the other fancy CPU/chipset features needed for virtualisation support.
Compare that to Intel where you have to pull out a magnifying glass to read the CPU features matrix in order to find the few CPUs that support all the needed VT-whatever features. Not all Xeon CPUs support each feature. Not all Core i-series CPUs support each feature. Not all Core2 CPUs support each feature. It's a royal crapshoot to make sure you get everything you need.
AMD also came out with hardware virt (SVM) support before Intel (VMX). And talking to the Xen/KVM devs, SVM is much nicer to work with compared to VMX.
The whole reason we're an Opteron shop is due to virtualisation support. It's brain-dead simple with AMD: buy an Opteron. That's it. Done. Install Linux, enable KVM, fire up virt-manager, and carry on with your day.
Not everyone wants a flight SIMULATOR. Some of us want flight GAMES. I don't want to worry about the position of the aelerons, or how many Gs the plane can withstand while turning. I just want to fly around, shoot things, and make big explosions.
Same with racing. All the latest racing "games" are actually driving simulators. Rub the wall once on a turn, blow a tire, game over. Where's the fun in that?
I really miss the games from the DOS/Win9x era. That was the heyday of turn-based RPGs, flight/space combat games that weren't physics simulators, and racing games that weren't driving simulators.
Nowadays, everything is a simulator without any "fun" or "arcade"-ness to them. And every new game is a rehash of a FPS from last year.
Bring back the X-wing, TIE Fighter, Wing Commander, Secret Weapons series of games; the turn-based RPGs like the Forgotten Realms/DragonLance DnD games; the older Need for Speed games. Games that weren't near-perfect recreations of real-world physics and damage, and that were fun to play without ever taking your finger off the throttle.
And that's the kicker that none of the "big media conglomerates" seem to get: it's all about convenience!!
Make it easy for me to give you money for the product I want, in the format I want, at the time I want, on the device I want, and I will give you lots of money!!
Make it a pain, or even impossible, and I'll just download it from a torrent site.
If you are buying in big blocks (500+), then you put together a spec sheet, and put it out to tender and let the companies putting together the bid worry about where they are getting them.
We've been doing this for almost 10 years now. We put together the specs for the machines we want (minimums for CPU, RAM, graphics) to make sure it will be supported by the OSes we run. Then put that out to tender to the local, regional, and national computer shops. Then go through those to find who gives the best price for what we want, with the best support/warranty.
Only an idiot would look at just the company name, and then select from that companies limited portfolio to buy 500+ computers.
If you are buying in bulk, you hold the advantage and can select the parts you want.
If you aren't buying in bulk, then the PC companies have the advantage and can shove anything they want down your throat.
If you're talking so much that your arm is constantly getting tired, such that find yourself using the speakerphone all the time, then plug in that handsfree headphones, or buy a Bluetooth headset.
There's no rhyme or reason to be walking around blasting your conversation at 100% volume for everyone to hear.
Our class used to bug teachers for open-book tests, thinking it would make things easier. And for a few classes, it did.
Then we ran into the teacher whose thought process was "If you want to use the book during the exam, then I'm going to make it so hard that you *NEED* to use the book during the exam".:( And a lot of the questions had answers in the appendices, the footnotes, the sidebars, etc, places you wouldn't normally think to look while flipping through the text.
Most people didn't finish that exam.
And we didn't hound our teachers for open-book exams after that.
My biggest pet peeve with cell phone users are those who *always* use the speakerphone. It's bad enough I have to listen to your side of the conversation. I don't need to hear the other side of it.
And even worse are those who have it on speakerphone *and* hold it within 6 inches of their face. Being on the other end of such calls sounds like someone crinkling aluminum foil... it's barely decipherable as words.
It's a phone. Use it like a phone. Stick it to the side of your head. You know, where the ear and cheek are. It's okay that the phone only reaches halfway down your cheek. The microphone will pick up your voice when you talk normally. It's designed to work that way.
The worst part is that it's not even old people doing it. It's young people, who were "raised with technology" that do it the most.
And it's done on a per-IP basis, not a per-household or per-account basis. Since you get (at least) 2 dynamic IPs per Shaw Internet account, all you have to do is separate your "normal" traffic from your "excessive" traffic.
For example, we setup to routers at our house, with a switch between them and the cable router. They each get a different IP via DHCP.
Torrents and other "bandwidth hogs" go through one router. All other traffic goes through the other router.
That way, when they throttle all traffic through one IP, it doesn't affect our normal web browsing activities.
Turn off disk caching. Turn off Safe-whatever feature (it downloads an entire new database everytime you start Firefox). Change the default timeout for writing open tabs to disk. Change the default timeout for updating your bookmarks. Etc.
There's lots of tweaks you can do to Firefox to make it stop thrashing the disk. It's just too bad these are the defaults.:(
As for speeding up the browser itself, upgrade to FF 9.0.1 (the latest version). 7 reduced memory usage. 8 increased JS speed (which affects the entire browser UI). And 9 improved it even more.
It's still not as fast as Chrome. But compared to 3.6, 4, 5, or 6, it's light-years ahead in terms of speed.
If you switch to using Microsoft Update instead of Windows Update, then MS Security Essentials is listed as an Important Update and will be installed automatically.
ZFS writes transaction groups to disk every 5 seconds by default for several ZFS versions now. Prior to that, the default was 10 seconds for several versions. It was only the earliest version of ZFS that defaulted to 30 seconds between transaction groups.
Our original (now ancient) backup servers were able to get 200 MBps writes to disk, with gzip-9 compression, but no dedup: * 2x dual-core Opteron 200-series CPUs * 8 GB DDR1-RAM * 3Ware 9650 12-port RAID controllers * 24x 500 GB WD/Seagate SATA drives * 32 GB SSD for L2ARC
Pool made up of 3x raidz2 vdevs, each with 8 disks. The 200 MBps writes were done using multiple rsyncs over gigabit ethernet, writing to an empty pool. After many years of use, the throughput dropped down to around 50 MBps.
Our current backup servers were able to get 200 MBps writes to disk, with lzjb compression and dedupe enabled: * 1x 8-core Opteron 6128 CPUs * 24 GB DDR3 RAM * SuperMicro AOC-USAS2-L8i SATA controllers * 24x 2 TB Seagate drives * 32 GB SSD for L2ARC
Pool is comprised of 4x raidz2 vdevs of 6 drives each.
Now that there's 26 TB of deduped data (5.28x) in the pool, the write are much slower. But that's mainly due to limitations in rsync having to read/transfer data for incremental backups.
It most certainly is possible to get over 40 MBps of writes to a ZFS pool with dedupe and compression enabled.
Rsync to a system running ZFS, with dedupe enabled. Works beautifully.
Our primary FreeBSD+ZFS+Rsync backups server has a combined dedup+compression ration of 5.5x at the moment (26 TB of disk space used, meaning over 125 TB of data in the pool). With daily snapshots allowing for easy file recovery from any previous day, and simple server restore (boot off livecd, partition, rsync from backups server). And then it pushes the previous day's backup out to a replication server off-site.
The only downside is that the above really only works with Unix-like systems. Trying to use rsync on Windows is not so fun.
The next release of FreeNAS based on FreeBSD 9.x will include ZFSv28.
And ZFSv28 is available in FreeBSD 8-STABLE, meaning it will be available in FreeBSD 8.3, which means the next release of FreeNAS based on FreeBSD 8.x will include dedupe.
If Volkswagen is turning off the email servers, I can't even do that. I actually have to wait to send the email until they are working, and that might mean that I have to work while I'm supposed to be off. After all, my working hours might not coincide with theirs.
Uhm, no. You can still write and send your e-mail message whenever you want. Your local SMTP server will hold the message until their SMTP server is back online (generally it will retry for up to 4 days, depending on SMTP server settings).
Now, if they leave their SMTP server off-line for a week, then you would have issues sending mail to them. But turning it off overnight will not.
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It stopped being "Xbox Media Centre" back in 2011 when they stopped supporting the Xbox.
It's now "XBMC Media Centre", as it runs on various OSes and devices ... with the exception of the original Xbox.
Salvage parts from old PCs, from the AthlonXP / Athlon64 era, including an ancient ATi RADEON 9800, 2 GB of RAM, and a component video cable. Stick it into a smaller-ish desktop case. Connect it to your TV. Configure it to auto-login to Windows (or Linux), map a couple of network shares to your main computer, start XBMC, and give you a nice 10' display to your video library (sitting on the other computer).
Voila! You have the equivalent of an AppleTV, for hardly any dollars (since you have all the spare parts, or they can be had for under $15 each), that can play 720p x264 video files (should be able to handle 1080p, but don't have access to an HDTV to test it with).
Works beautifully. All controlled from a wireless mouse, while sitting on the couch. Could hook it up to a proper remote, but that seems like work to me. ;) Especially since this setup is easy enough for the wife to use. :D
Ahahahahahahahaha!
I'm "parroting" experience, not "the powers that be".
And I never said anything about the legality of alcohol. Just a comparison on the effects of alcohol/meth on the body. And the effects of meth, especially on the brain, are a hell of a lot worse than alcohol.
Except that it takes years of heavy drinking to start turning your insides into mush (mainly liver/kidneys, which are easily repairable), and only a few months of heavy meth use to turn your brain into mush (which is extremely hard to repair).
Alcoholism tends to grow slowly over time. Meth addiction tends to go from nothing to "holy shit, the bat people are everywhere man, you gotta protect me" in no time flat. Especially if you start smoking it.
And if you quit drinking, your body can recupurate and recover from most of the damage. If you quit meth after years of hardcore use, your body is still messed up.
Alcohol is bad. But meth is 1000s of times worse.
My sister has ADHD. When she was younger (under 12) we used to have to give her hot chocolate or even mochas before bed in order for her to fall asleep. You get some weird looks from people when you say that ("You give her caffeine so she can sleep?"). But it works.
It's strange how you have to give someone stimulants in order for the body to catch up to the brain, thus evening things out and allowing them to concentrate and "be normal".
She's now on Dexedrin and , both amphetamines, both stimulants, both used to relax/calm her down enough to get on with her day.
Yeah, ADHD is a weird chemical imbalance.
I gave up on RPGs on the PC after Icewind Dale, and haven't seen/heard anything since to make it worthwhile trying anything.
The pseudo-real-time auto-pause mode in Icewind Dale is crap, especially with large groups of enemies. It's not turn-based in the least. A real turn-based combat system lets you select the movements/attacks of all your characters. Then everyone (yourself and the enemies) plays out there attacks (thus completing one turn). Then you select all the movements/attacks for your characters. And then they all play out.
Icewind Dale's auto-pause setup was no better than twitch-fest button mashing since it kept pausing things every 2 seconds, freezing all the graphics with effects everywhere. It's like trying to watch a movie with a 2-year-old chewing on the remote constantly hitting play/pause with every bite. There was no flow to the combat like in a real turn-based system.
Hear hear!!
I miss good ol' fashioned turn-based role-playing games, like the old SSI ADnD-based games (Pools of Twilight, Pools of Radiance, etc).
"RPGs" nowadays are more hack'n slash, mouse-button mashfests than anything else (WoW, Diablo, Icewind Dale, etc).
I don't want to play a twitch-reaction game. I want to control a party of characters and take my time thinking about how to use their various skills together against large groups of enemies. I want turn-based action.
If I wanted a FPS (which I don't, can't stand them), I'd buy one. But I want an RPG. When was the last time you played a paper-n-pencil RPG where it was "whoever can roll the fastest gets to attach"? It's all turn-based.
Bring back the turn-based RPGs!!
And a can of Coors Light, obviously.
How did AMD "ignore virtualisation"? Every single Opteron CPU for the past several years (since the 4-digit numbering started) includes hardware virtualisation support, IOMMU support, and all the other fancy CPU/chipset features needed for virtualisation support.
Compare that to Intel where you have to pull out a magnifying glass to read the CPU features matrix in order to find the few CPUs that support all the needed VT-whatever features. Not all Xeon CPUs support each feature. Not all Core i-series CPUs support each feature. Not all Core2 CPUs support each feature. It's a royal crapshoot to make sure you get everything you need.
AMD also came out with hardware virt (SVM) support before Intel (VMX). And talking to the Xen/KVM devs, SVM is much nicer to work with compared to VMX.
The whole reason we're an Opteron shop is due to virtualisation support. It's brain-dead simple with AMD: buy an Opteron. That's it. Done. Install Linux, enable KVM, fire up virt-manager, and carry on with your day.
Not everyone wants a flight SIMULATOR. Some of us want flight GAMES. I don't want to worry about the position of the aelerons, or how many Gs the plane can withstand while turning. I just want to fly around, shoot things, and make big explosions.
Same with racing. All the latest racing "games" are actually driving simulators. Rub the wall once on a turn, blow a tire, game over. Where's the fun in that?
I really miss the games from the DOS/Win9x era. That was the heyday of turn-based RPGs, flight/space combat games that weren't physics simulators, and racing games that weren't driving simulators.
Nowadays, everything is a simulator without any "fun" or "arcade"-ness to them. And every new game is a rehash of a FPS from last year.
Bring back the X-wing, TIE Fighter, Wing Commander, Secret Weapons series of games; the turn-based RPGs like the Forgotten Realms/DragonLance DnD games; the older Need for Speed games. Games that weren't near-perfect recreations of real-world physics and damage, and that were fun to play without ever taking your finger off the throttle.
And that's the kicker that none of the "big media conglomerates" seem to get: it's all about convenience!!
Make it easy for me to give you money for the product I want, in the format I want, at the time I want, on the device I want, and I will give you lots of money!!
Make it a pain, or even impossible, and I'll just download it from a torrent site.
If you are buying in big blocks (500+), then you put together a spec sheet, and put it out to tender and let the companies putting together the bid worry about where they are getting them.
We've been doing this for almost 10 years now. We put together the specs for the machines we want (minimums for CPU, RAM, graphics) to make sure it will be supported by the OSes we run. Then put that out to tender to the local, regional, and national computer shops. Then go through those to find who gives the best price for what we want, with the best support/warranty.
Only an idiot would look at just the company name, and then select from that companies limited portfolio to buy 500+ computers.
If you are buying in bulk, you hold the advantage and can select the parts you want.
If you aren't buying in bulk, then the PC companies have the advantage and can shove anything they want down your throat.
If you're talking so much that your arm is constantly getting tired, such that find yourself using the speakerphone all the time, then plug in that handsfree headphones, or buy a Bluetooth headset.
There's no rhyme or reason to be walking around blasting your conversation at 100% volume for everyone to hear.
Our class used to bug teachers for open-book tests, thinking it would make things easier. And for a few classes, it did.
Then we ran into the teacher whose thought process was "If you want to use the book during the exam, then I'm going to make it so hard that you *NEED* to use the book during the exam". :( And a lot of the questions had answers in the appendices, the footnotes, the sidebars, etc, places you wouldn't normally think to look while flipping through the text.
Most people didn't finish that exam.
And we didn't hound our teachers for open-book exams after that.
My biggest pet peeve with cell phone users are those who *always* use the speakerphone. It's bad enough I have to listen to your side of the conversation. I don't need to hear the other side of it.
And even worse are those who have it on speakerphone *and* hold it within 6 inches of their face. Being on the other end of such calls sounds like someone crinkling aluminum foil ... it's barely decipherable as words.
It's a phone. Use it like a phone. Stick it to the side of your head. You know, where the ear and cheek are. It's okay that the phone only reaches halfway down your cheek. The microphone will pick up your voice when you talk normally. It's designed to work that way.
The worst part is that it's not even old people doing it. It's young people, who were "raised with technology" that do it the most.
And it's done on a per-IP basis, not a per-household or per-account basis. Since you get (at least) 2 dynamic IPs per Shaw Internet account, all you have to do is separate your "normal" traffic from your "excessive" traffic.
For example, we setup to routers at our house, with a switch between them and the cable router. They each get a different IP via DHCP.
Torrents and other "bandwidth hogs" go through one router. All other traffic goes through the other router.
That way, when they throttle all traffic through one IP, it doesn't affect our normal web browsing activities.
Turn off disk caching. Turn off Safe-whatever feature (it downloads an entire new database everytime you start Firefox). Change the default timeout for writing open tabs to disk. Change the default timeout for updating your bookmarks. Etc.
There's lots of tweaks you can do to Firefox to make it stop thrashing the disk. It's just too bad these are the defaults. :(
As for speeding up the browser itself, upgrade to FF 9.0.1 (the latest version). 7 reduced memory usage. 8 increased JS speed (which affects the entire browser UI). And 9 improved it even more.
It's still not as fast as Chrome. But compared to 3.6, 4, 5, or 6, it's light-years ahead in terms of speed.
If you switch to using Microsoft Update instead of Windows Update, then MS Security Essentials is listed as an Important Update and will be installed automatically.
There's also FreeNAS from iX Systems. They even sell hardware boxes with it pre-installed.
And there's ZFSv28 support in FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE and 9.0-RELEASE. Which you can stick onto any hardware you want.
There's even a couple different ZFS options on Linux.
You're not limited to (Open)Solaris solutions to get ZFS with dedupe.
ZFS writes transaction groups to disk every 5 seconds by default for several ZFS versions now. Prior to that, the default was 10 seconds for several versions. It was only the earliest version of ZFS that defaulted to 30 seconds between transaction groups.
Our original (now ancient) backup servers were able to get 200 MBps writes to disk, with gzip-9 compression, but no dedup:
* 2x dual-core Opteron 200-series CPUs
* 8 GB DDR1-RAM
* 3Ware 9650 12-port RAID controllers
* 24x 500 GB WD/Seagate SATA drives
* 32 GB SSD for L2ARC
Pool made up of 3x raidz2 vdevs, each with 8 disks. The 200 MBps writes were done using multiple rsyncs over gigabit ethernet, writing to an empty pool. After many years of use, the throughput dropped down to around 50 MBps.
Our current backup servers were able to get 200 MBps writes to disk, with lzjb compression and dedupe enabled:
* 1x 8-core Opteron 6128 CPUs
* 24 GB DDR3 RAM
* SuperMicro AOC-USAS2-L8i SATA controllers
* 24x 2 TB Seagate drives
* 32 GB SSD for L2ARC
Pool is comprised of 4x raidz2 vdevs of 6 drives each.
Now that there's 26 TB of deduped data (5.28x) in the pool, the write are much slower. But that's mainly due to limitations in rsync having to read/transfer data for incremental backups.
It most certainly is possible to get over 40 MBps of writes to a ZFS pool with dedupe and compression enabled.
Rsync to a system running ZFS, with dedupe enabled. Works beautifully.
Our primary FreeBSD+ZFS+Rsync backups server has a combined dedup+compression ration of 5.5x at the moment (26 TB of disk space used, meaning over 125 TB of data in the pool). With daily snapshots allowing for easy file recovery from any previous day, and simple server restore (boot off livecd, partition, rsync from backups server). And then it pushes the previous day's backup out to a replication server off-site.
The only downside is that the above really only works with Unix-like systems. Trying to use rsync on Windows is not so fun.
The next release of FreeNAS based on FreeBSD 9.x will include ZFSv28.
And ZFSv28 is available in FreeBSD 8-STABLE, meaning it will be available in FreeBSD 8.3, which means the next release of FreeNAS based on FreeBSD 8.x will include dedupe.
If Volkswagen is turning off the email servers, I can't even do that. I actually have to wait to send the email until they are working, and that might mean that I have to work while I'm supposed to be off. After all, my working hours might not coincide with theirs.
Uhm, no. You can still write and send your e-mail message whenever you want. Your local SMTP server will hold the message until their SMTP server is back online (generally it will retry for up to 4 days, depending on SMTP server settings).
Now, if they leave their SMTP server off-line for a week, then you would have issues sending mail to them. But turning it off overnight will not.