I record a lot of concerts at 24/96 and also have a large collection of music in FLAC format. Current archive is 3.5TB and rapidly growing. It mostly consists of 320 and 250GB S/ATA WD drives.
I have good enclosures and run all my drives cool, 25-29C. Two 120mm case fans, one front, one rear.
I am guessing there isn't anything that can compete with the price-performance of just building another Linux box with 7 or so drives. Is there?
I have been using emacs for just under 20 years, mostly GNU emacs.
The last good release was 19.34b. Unfortunately, that release has not been buildable on Linux for many years.
Every release after 19.34b has been compromised by dumb changes to the default emacs behavior. I seriously question the judgement of the developers who have made those changes *the default*. I agree with improving emacs but not in making so many changes to the default behavior with no reasonably easy way to revert.
Bring back 19.34b!
Anyone know how to get current emacs to appear and behave like that version?
When SGI added BX2 nodes to NASA's Columbia system, the standard air cooling was inadequate. They were forced to do a quick cooling change that added water cooling. Some would call the change a kludge.
More detail on the change, and cooling in general, can be found in this interview with the SGI designers who dealt with the problem.
That is great news. I wish I could take gmail seriously.
I logged in on January 30 to find that all of my inbox mail for the month of January was gone. It wasn't in my trashcan, etc.
I exchanged emails at a Very slow rate with gmail staff. Mostly just responding to their form letters and taking whatever action they requested.
Not until nearly a month later, on Feb 24, did I receive the following pathetic response: Hello,
Thank you for your reply.
We have completed a thorough investigation of your Gmail account, and can confirm that a technical problem did not cause the behavior you reported. We apologize for any inconvenience you might have experienced.
Sincerely,
The Gmail Team
Um, okay. So what did? They have subsequently ignored all inquiries regarding the problem.
I have never lost email on Yahoo or Hotmail.
The good news? I have 100 gmail invites and gmail is no longer beta. Woopee!
I logged in on January 30 to find that all of my inbox mail for the month of January was gone. It wasn't in my trashcan, etc.
I exchanged emails at a Very slow rate with gmail staff. Mostly just responding to their form letters and taking whatever action they requested.
Not until nearly a month later, on Feb 24, did I receive the following pathetic response: Hello,
Thank you for your reply.
We have completed a thorough investigation of your Gmail account, and can confirm that a technical problem did not cause the behavior you reported. We apologize for any inconvenience you might have experienced.
Last Fall, I had a serious focus bug in Enlightenment (e16) that would lock my mouse to a particular region of the screen and require X server restarts. It would usually happen at the worst time, when I was working fast (busy!).
I worked with e-team member Kim Woelders on the problem and he produced a couple of patches after I sent him some good reproducible test cases. We exchanged a total of 39 email messages and it was finally fixed. I'd usually have a patch within 24 hours of sending him a test case.
All of that while they are busy trying to get e17 out. The work that the team does is amazing and I am very grateful.
There is a great deal of variability in VOIP provider performance. Unfortunately, I don't think the carriers are cooperating (with tools) in making it clear where the problems are. Whether on their networks, PSTN gateways, etc, or broadband ISPs. They could do a lot to clear this up. Though the potential for the finger to point at them is a reason for them not to do this.
VOIP quality must be measured over time. How is the performance at 8PM EST on Saturday? How many drop outs on a 1 hour call?
This gets more complicated as ISPs compete for service. I know of someone at Cox who was intentionally messing with VOIP provider traffic (and laughing about it).
I switched to Packet8 in September after using Voice Pulse for 5 months. Voice Pulse call quality had become embarassing, even after trying their higher compression codecs. "Mom, can you hear me??"
Packet8 quality has been excellent (much cheaper too). All this on Comcast. I can even run P2P at 10KB/sec upstream with P8. VP was problematic with no P2P.
A friend who lives 50 miles away has tried Vonage, Voice Pulse and Packet8. They all pretty much suck for him. He is on Comcast but it is former TCI infrastructure.
He agrees that the best VOIP he has ever had were when we use Creative Labs VOIP Blaster between Seattle and Virgina for over a year.
Voice Pulse tech support was useless when it came to outages (yes, they had lengthy outages) or performance problems.
My rule of thumb for VOIP is to be prepared to drop them if performance is bad. Don't waste your time. Don't get caught in a contract or a situation that will be expensive to get out of.
And don't become attached to the phone number. VOIP is a commodity, treat it as a commodity.
Back in the day, I requested a copy around '88. The only format available then was 9 track tape. I think I had to send a real letter requesting it and explaining my intent (curiosity, mostly).
After waiting many weeks, I sent Michael Muuss an email flaming a little (very young and cocky) and asking "Hey, where's my tape!?". I ran across a print out of that email and his reply when I was moving a few years back. He explained that he had to make the tapes himself, etc.
With much pain, I translated the tape to a QIC cartridge and built it on our Sun gear (I was working at an imaging company). It was a large build.
Their 3D editor was pretty neat for the day and I did a little with the ray tracer. The package had, no kidding, a lot of heavy duty ballastic tools that I didn't care about.. That was about it.
But how well do you like your SlimDevice squeezebox?
I actually have one of the earliest Slimp3's (precursor to the Squeezebox). It doesn't even have an enclosure.
I love it. I give the developers a lot of flak because I think they put too much emphasis on new features and not enough on core stability and performance. But the fact is, there is NOTHING that comes close. I don't see how a proprietary product ever could.
I suggest you setup the server software and experiment with Softsqueeze. It is a purely software implementation of the product, firmware and all.
For the remote, you could use one of the really nice graphical universal remotes. A friend does that with his entire hifi/TV setup (but no slimp3) to simplify the madness. He has a mode for himself and a simpler UI just for his wife. It is a very nice way to end the multi-remote problem. I wouldn't be surprised if others have already done that. You might check the mailing lists.
I just set my folks up with a Linux based music server and a Squeezebox. My Mom was pretty put off initially and gave me a long list of reasons why they wouldn't use it. But she was hooked once she tried it.
I ran my original Slimp3 on wifi via WET11/WAP11 combo for a year and it was flawless. However, a friend had terrible problems under XP with a WAP11 and native squeezebox wireless support. I put a lot of time into debugging but we finally said ENOUGH and hardwired his setup. The true source of the problem is not clear. But I subsequently recommend hardwired and not wireless.
Isn't that a bit pricy, considering you'd want one in several rooms?
This is targeted at people who spend $65K on window treatments. People who buy their neighbors a new Mercedes AMG convertible so they don't complain about the new deck which is in violation of the sub rules. Those are real examples from a residential customer I have consulted for.
There really are a lot of ex-microsofties (and others) with lots of cash who want a serious whole-house solution. Unfortunately, while the mesh network buzzword aspect is cool, this product seems to lack the oomph on the backend.
A great deal of effort goes into the very active product development.
One problem I see with this new device is performance. Accessing a lot (100-500 GB) of music through CIFS.. Are you kidding? How is that music going to be indexed? How long is the scanning and indexing going to take? Is the index cached after it is created?
Looks cool. But knowing how much effort goes into fixing the inevitable bugs with such a complex product, I can't see investing in a proprietary and closed solution (especially at this price). The whole focus on CIFS vs. say NFS is also a 'proprietary' red flag and perhaps an indicator of things to come from the self-proclaimed ex-Microsoft team.
The first time I got one, I was worried that it was a drive problem.
I spent a lot of time taking various actions to track this down. Kernel? Cables? Drive? Etc. I finally found some messages about it being an nforce2 problem that occurs under both Windows and Linux. Here it is:
This problem hits me when I run P2P applications. Apprently, something about the disk I/O pattern with P2P..
I have not seen it on my nforce3 system, but I do not run p2p there. Yeah, I bought a freakin' nforce3 despite having this problem..
My nforce3 system (MSI K8N Neo2 plat) has SATA in addition to ATA but I have no SATA drives.
Funny thing.. When my MB's IDE goes out to lunch, the drives on the PCI Promise controller continue to function (echo * works, P2P keeps chugging, etc).
I think I've replaced more mobo's to handle larger drives than I have to support faster CPUs.
Yeah, I guess spending $25 and dropping in a Promise ATA controller is too much effort. Western Digital was even bundling them with the drives for a while.
Funny thing, those controllers perform significantly faster than many built-in IDEs. My nforce2 MBs have IDE defects that cause lockups that require power cycles to clear (reset won't do it). I don't even use the on-board IDE on those boxes.
I have been buying 250 GB Western Digital's from my local Sam's club for $130. Very convenient. I get 58-60 MB/sec on those drives.
The article is a bit slashdotted but it looks like it doesn't go back all that far.
Just a teaser, I have been running a collection of benchmarks since the Pentium 90.
At the time, I was involved in a huge UNIX engineering workstation benchmark. I felt we needed something more constant than the applications to compare performance (the engineering apps constantly change). So I quickly assembled everything I could find that could be easily run. These are mostly 'toy' benchmarks, but the results are still interesting.
For these int benchmarks, higher is better:
c4.s c4.64 dhry21 hanoi heapsort nsieve nsieve TOTAL Kpos/sec Kpos/sec MIPS mvs/sec high High Low MIPS MIPS MIPS P 90 92.7 94.2 68.6 51.2 43.55 111.0 33.3 494.6 md64b 4050.1 4167.8 4914.3 2708.8 3333.7 3333.7 610.4 21782
Float: Higher is better, except for the fft's. flops20 fft tfftdp MFLOPS MFLOPS MFLOPS MFLOPS TOTAL time time (1) (2) (3) (4) P 90 13.3 12.8 18.1 23.8 68.0 3.07 16.81 amd64 1120.9 1004.3 1480.9 1834.7 5440.8 0.04 0.42
The P90 was running RedHat. The AMD64 is my new desktop, a 90nm 3000 OC'd to 2430 Mhz. My data also includes systems from DEC, HP, IBM, Sun and SGI. I also ran 10 matrix multiply benchmarks as part of the effort.
I have never gotten around to publishing the results or the collection of benchmarks.. Maybe it is time.
I know some are pointing to the Cell project as the inspiration here, but Tera was hard at work on this long ago in the form of the MTA
The MTA was a commercial failure. Tera's inability to execute as a company was a major reason.
It is fun to watch Intel chase AMD.
Packet 8 rules
on
The Other VoIP
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I had Voice Pulse for 6 months and the drop outs just became too much. They also have an extremely loud high pitched noise that blows your ear out once in a while.
I switched to packet8 about 2 months ago and it has been great. Big improvement. And my plan costs $20/month instead of $35+.
Earlier in the year, VP wasn't so bad. My guess is they are badly oversubscribed.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I don't feel like a victim.
I record a lot of concerts at 24/96 and also have a large collection of music in FLAC format. Current archive is 3.5TB and rapidly growing. It mostly consists of 320 and 250GB S/ATA WD drives.
I have good enclosures and run all my drives cool, 25-29C. Two 120mm case fans, one front, one rear.
I am guessing there isn't anything that can compete with the price-performance of just building another Linux box with 7 or so drives. Is there?
Because you can kick'em when they piss you off.
I have been using emacs for just under 20 years, mostly GNU emacs.
The last good release was 19.34b. Unfortunately, that release has not been buildable on Linux for many years.
Every release after 19.34b has been compromised by dumb changes to the default emacs behavior. I seriously question the judgement of the developers who have made those changes *the default*. I agree with improving emacs but not in making so many changes to the default behavior with no reasonably easy way to revert.
Bring back 19.34b!
Anyone know how to get current emacs to appear and behave like that version?
Okay.. I've asked this before (and no doubt will again):
Please explain again why the browser does not run in an isolated chroot environment? (at least for Linux users).
I've done a bit of work to make that happen but didn't quite get there. It needs to be a supported part of the browser install.
It helps to run the browser as a User ID with limited permissions but that is still not as good as chroot as part of the installation design.
When SGI added BX2 nodes to NASA's Columbia system, the standard air cooling was inadequate. They were forced to do a quick cooling change that added water cooling. Some would call the change a kludge.
More detail on the change, and cooling in general, can be found in this interview with the SGI designers who dealt with the problem.
That is great news. I wish I could take gmail seriously.
I logged in on January 30 to find that all of my inbox mail for the month of January was gone. It wasn't in my trashcan, etc.
I exchanged emails at a Very slow rate with gmail staff. Mostly just responding to their form letters and taking whatever action they requested.
Not until nearly a month later, on Feb 24, did I receive the following pathetic response:
Hello,
Thank you for your reply.
We have completed a thorough investigation of your Gmail account, and can
confirm that a technical problem did not cause the behavior you reported.
We apologize for any inconvenience you might have experienced.
Sincerely,
The Gmail Team
Um, okay. So what did?
They have subsequently ignored all inquiries regarding the problem.
I have never lost email on Yahoo or Hotmail.
The good news? I have 100 gmail invites and gmail is no longer beta. Woopee!
I logged in on January 30 to find that all of my inbox mail for the month of January was gone. It wasn't in my trashcan, etc.
I exchanged emails at a Very slow rate with gmail staff. Mostly just responding to their form letters and taking whatever action they requested.
Not until nearly a month later, on Feb 24, did I receive the following pathetic response:
Hello,
Thank you for your reply.
We have completed a thorough investigation of your Gmail account, and can
confirm that a technical problem did not cause the behavior you reported.
We apologize for any inconvenience you might have experienced.
Sincerely,
The Gmail Team
I have never lost email on Yahoo or Hotmail.
The good news? I have 100 gmail invites.
Last Fall, I had a serious focus bug in Enlightenment (e16) that would lock my mouse to a particular region of the screen and require X server restarts. It would usually happen at the worst time, when I was working fast (busy!).
I worked with e-team member Kim Woelders on the problem and he produced a couple of patches after I sent him some good reproducible test cases. We exchanged a total of 39 email messages and it was finally fixed. I'd usually have a patch within 24 hours of sending him a test case.
All of that while they are busy trying to get e17 out. The work that the team does is amazing and I am very grateful.
To say that I am a fan is an understatement!
Supply your in-ground sprinkler system with liquid propane and wire it to motion detectors.
And please put it on a webcam so we can watch.
Cool.
Any recs for Linux software to create BIG prints (panoramas or posters) using regular 8.5x11" paper printers?
Anyone have one of those green lasers?
I created them for an early version but my changes were not compatible with more recent versions.
The default key bindings drive me nuts.
What would it take to get emacs bindings into the release?
There is a great deal of variability in VOIP provider performance. Unfortunately, I don't think the carriers are cooperating (with tools) in making it clear where the problems are. Whether on their networks, PSTN gateways, etc, or broadband ISPs. They could do a lot to clear this up. Though the potential for the finger to point at them is a reason for them not to do this.
VOIP quality must be measured over time. How is the performance at 8PM EST on Saturday? How many drop outs on a 1 hour call?
This gets more complicated as ISPs compete for service. I know of someone at Cox who was intentionally messing with VOIP provider traffic (and laughing about it).
I switched to Packet8 in September after using Voice Pulse for 5 months. Voice Pulse call quality had become embarassing, even after trying their higher compression codecs. "Mom, can you hear me??"
Packet8 quality has been excellent (much cheaper too). All this on Comcast. I can even run P2P at 10KB/sec upstream with P8. VP was problematic with no P2P.
A friend who lives 50 miles away has tried Vonage, Voice Pulse and Packet8. They all pretty much suck for him. He is on Comcast but it is former TCI infrastructure.
He agrees that the best VOIP he has ever had were when we use Creative Labs VOIP Blaster between Seattle and Virgina for over a year.
Voice Pulse tech support was useless when it came to outages (yes, they had lengthy outages) or performance problems.
My rule of thumb for VOIP is to be prepared to drop them if performance is bad. Don't waste your time. Don't get caught in a contract or a situation that will be expensive to get out of.
And don't become attached to the phone number. VOIP is a commodity, treat it as a commodity.
Back in the day, I requested a copy around '88. The only format available then was 9 track tape. I think I had to send a real letter requesting it and explaining my intent (curiosity, mostly).
After waiting many weeks, I sent Michael Muuss an email flaming a little (very young and cocky) and asking "Hey, where's my tape!?". I ran across a print out of that email and his reply when I was moving a few years back. He explained that he had to make the tapes himself, etc.
With much pain, I translated the tape to a QIC cartridge and built it on our Sun gear (I was working at an imaging company). It was a large build.
Their 3D editor was pretty neat for the day and I did a little with the ray tracer. The package had, no kidding, a lot of heavy duty ballastic tools that I didn't care about.. That was about it.
But the print out of Muuss' email is a keeper.
But how well do you like your SlimDevice squeezebox?
I actually have one of the earliest Slimp3's (precursor to the Squeezebox). It doesn't even have an enclosure.
I love it. I give the developers a lot of flak because I think they put too much emphasis on new features and not enough on core stability and performance. But the fact is, there is NOTHING that comes close. I don't see how a proprietary product ever could.
I suggest you setup the server software and experiment with Softsqueeze. It is a purely software implementation of the product, firmware and all.
For the remote, you could use one of the really nice graphical universal remotes. A friend does that with his entire hifi/TV setup (but no slimp3) to simplify the madness. He has a mode for himself and a simpler UI just for his wife. It is a very nice way to end the multi-remote problem. I wouldn't be surprised if others have already done that. You might check the mailing lists.
I just set my folks up with a Linux based music server and a Squeezebox. My Mom was pretty put off initially and gave me a long list of reasons why they wouldn't use it. But she was hooked once she tried it.
I ran my original Slimp3 on wifi via WET11/WAP11 combo for a year and it was flawless. However, a friend had terrible problems under XP with a WAP11 and native squeezebox wireless support. I put a lot of time into debugging but we finally said ENOUGH and hardwired his setup. The true source of the problem is not clear. But I subsequently recommend hardwired and not wireless.
Isn't that a bit pricy, considering you'd want one in several rooms?
This is targeted at people who spend $65K on window treatments. People who buy their neighbors a new Mercedes AMG convertible so they don't complain about the new deck which is in violation of the sub rules. Those are real examples from a residential customer I have consulted for.
There really are a lot of ex-microsofties (and others) with lots of cash who want a serious whole-house solution. Unfortunately, while the mesh network buzzword aspect is cool, this product seems to lack the oomph on the backend.
I have a Large music collection which I play through a Slimdevices Squeezebox.
A great deal of effort goes into the very active product development.
One problem I see with this new device is performance. Accessing a lot (100-500 GB) of music through CIFS.. Are you kidding? How is that music going to be indexed? How long is the scanning and indexing going to take? Is the index cached after it is created?
Looks cool. But knowing how much effort goes into fixing the inevitable bugs with such a complex product, I can't see investing in a proprietary and closed solution (especially at this price). The whole focus on CIFS vs. say NFS is also a 'proprietary' red flag and perhaps an indicator of things to come from the self-proclaimed ex-Microsoft team.
The first time I got one, I was worried that it was a drive problem.
I spent a lot of time taking various actions to track this down. Kernel? Cables? Drive? Etc. I finally found some messages about it being an nforce2 problem that occurs under both Windows and Linux. Here it is:
nforce IDE thread
This problem hits me when I run P2P applications. Apprently, something about the disk I/O pattern with P2P..
I have not seen it on my nforce3 system, but I do not run p2p there. Yeah, I bought a freakin' nforce3 despite having this problem..
My nforce3 system (MSI K8N Neo2 plat) has SATA in addition to ATA but I have no SATA drives.
Funny thing.. When my MB's IDE goes out to lunch, the drives on the PCI Promise controller continue to function (echo * works, P2P keeps chugging, etc).
I think I've replaced more mobo's to handle larger drives than I have to support faster CPUs.
Yeah, I guess spending $25 and dropping in a Promise ATA controller is too much effort. Western Digital was even bundling them with the drives for a while.
Funny thing, those controllers perform significantly faster than many built-in IDEs. My nforce2 MBs have IDE defects that cause lockups that require power cycles to clear (reset won't do it). I don't even use the on-board IDE on those boxes.
I have been buying 250 GB Western Digital's from my local Sam's club for $130. Very convenient. I get 58-60 MB/sec on those drives.
The article is a bit slashdotted but it looks like it doesn't go back all that far.
Just a teaser, I have been running a collection of benchmarks since the Pentium 90.
At the time, I was involved in a huge UNIX engineering workstation benchmark. I felt we needed something more constant than the applications to compare performance (the engineering apps constantly change). So I quickly assembled everything I could find that could be easily run. These are mostly 'toy' benchmarks, but the results are still interesting.
For these int benchmarks, higher is better:
c4.s c4.64 dhry21 hanoi heapsort nsieve nsieve TOTAL
Kpos/sec Kpos/sec MIPS mvs/sec high High Low
MIPS MIPS MIPS
P 90 92.7 94.2 68.6 51.2 43.55 111.0 33.3 494.6
md64b 4050.1 4167.8 4914.3 2708.8 3333.7 3333.7 610.4 21782
Float: Higher is better, except for the fft's.
flops20 fft tfftdp
MFLOPS MFLOPS MFLOPS MFLOPS TOTAL time time
(1) (2) (3) (4)
P 90 13.3 12.8 18.1 23.8 68.0 3.07 16.81
amd64 1120.9 1004.3 1480.9 1834.7 5440.8 0.04 0.42
The P90 was running RedHat. The AMD64 is my new desktop, a 90nm 3000 OC'd to 2430 Mhz. My data also includes systems from DEC, HP, IBM, Sun and SGI. I also ran 10 matrix multiply benchmarks as part of the effort.
I have never gotten around to publishing the results or the collection of benchmarks.. Maybe it is time.
I know some are pointing to the Cell project as the inspiration here, but Tera was hard at work on this long ago in the form of the MTA
The MTA was a commercial failure. Tera's inability to execute as a company was a major reason.
It is fun to watch Intel chase AMD.
I had Voice Pulse for 6 months and the drop outs just became too much. They also have an extremely loud high pitched noise that blows your ear out once in a while.
I switched to packet8 about 2 months ago and it has been great. Big improvement. And my plan costs $20/month instead of $35+.
Earlier in the year, VP wasn't so bad. My guess is they are badly oversubscribed.
One way to avoid these types of attacks is to isolate your security sensitive browser sessions.
So, you might have a browser installation dedicated for your realtime brokerage account/banking and another for general surfing.
Ideally, these would even run under different user IDs.
Modern browsers are large and complex. As such, they will always be a security problem. Isolating them seems like a decent solution.
Browsers should allow you to configure java and javascript on a per site basis. Much like you can allow pop-ups from certain sites.
I prefer to have javascript off all the time.
Being able to selectively enable them for certain sites would be nice and would improve security.