During years a stereo was a big piece of electronics
stacked up in a rack with each device in a separate
enclosure. The entire thing was big and expensive, but powerful
and upgradeable. The same thing smaller was available too,
but more expensive and difficult to upgrade due to the
non-standard form factor.
Today most of the stereos are the compact, all-in-one
variety. If you want something else you'll have to go to
a high-end shop, the average discount store doesn't carry
the expensive stuff anymore.
The same thing happens now to PC's too. I'll bet that in ten years
90% of the PC's sold are compact all-in-ones. Maybe you can detach
the keyboard or the screen (like you can detach the speakers
on some compact stereos) but it will be similar to todays laptops.
If you need a bigger [CPU|memory|disk] you'll buy a new one
and pass the old one to your [mother|son|buddy].
I like the second model shown, the detachable keyboard is nice
and the base is short enough that you can place it in front (not on top).
I prefer the Karcher RoboCleaner for one important reason:
It requires almost no manual intervention
You just tell it how often it should go out and clean and once in a while you empty the dirt in the base station. No other interventions are necessary.
Il empties its dirt container itself and recharges itself automatically et the base station.
While many vendors do support other distributions than the big two (RH & SuSE) this is mostly on the desktop. Support on the server side for large servers is pretty much restricted to these two. This is true for hardware also If you want support for larger SMP's, SAN, etc there are not many drivers for other distros. Usually you can just go ahead and try, but if something does not work the support line will tell you to replace your distro xxx with RH/SuSE where thei support it.
I've been involved in quite a few new Linux customer projects. All the time third party software (Oracle, SAP, DB2, etc) was involved as well. The only distros which are *certified* to run this stuff are Rh and SuSE. And customers do want certified installations !
Personally I'm happily running debian and gentoo, but I haven't come across commercial installation of these distributions yet.
Actually a pringles can is a very bad wifi antenna. To work effectovely it should be a couple of meters long. The can shown has a larger diameter, which should be much better.
The cost of the silicon wafers has an enormous impact on the cost of silicon solar cells. If this cost can be brought down with this new technology suddenly solar energy becomes competitive !
We were deploying a commercial application which was shopped by the vendor with Tomcat. As this is the way the app was installed by the vendor we counted on running that way in production.
In the weeks before the official production started we were hosting the classes for the future users. This was the first time we had more than the three developers online at the same time and it failed miserably. We had to restart tomcat every 45 minutes !
As I had previous good experience with Websphere we decided to switch over and this solved our stability problem at once. The first three months it just kept going without any intervention. In the meantime I've added preemptive weekly restart to cron to be on the safe side.
For our environment Tomcat (V3.x & V4.x, I've tried several incarnations) was not stable enough for production. I'm still a bit stumped about this, the app was shipped with Tomcat by the vendor. This might have to do with the hardware (IBM pSeries), I don't now.
It is known that JFS performance can be limited if you perform a lot of activity which modifies the file-system structure. Everything from creating files, renaming to unpacking archives, etc.
One easy fix is to move the log volume of the filesystem to another disk. This can increase your performance a lot. If both are on the same physical volume, all the seeks to write data and the jfs log will kill your performance.
It looks like this device tries to be everything to everybody. But as a result none of the individuel functions is working well.
In addition there are several things looking 'fishy' to me:
The Sega games with 300 Games included, are these properly licensed from Sega ?
The 'region-free' feature. As far as I know it is no longer legal to sell region-free DVD players. Somewhat similar to cell-blocked scanners.
Why is the SCART-Output 'optional' ? At least here in Europe this is an essential feature !
If you want a good DVD you are better off buying a device dedicated to do a good job.
If you want a good MP3 device there is Audio Request with an excellent product.
I'd like to see now a DVD working the same way Audio Request works but for video. Add some Tivo-like features, with disks like the new 180GB Seagate this starts to be possible.
Slashdot Mirror
During years a stereo was a big piece of electronics stacked up in a rack with each device in a separate enclosure. The entire thing was big and expensive, but powerful and upgradeable. The same thing smaller was available too, but more expensive and difficult to upgrade due to the non-standard form factor.
Today most of the stereos are the compact, all-in-one variety. If you want something else you'll have to go to a high-end shop, the average discount store doesn't carry the expensive stuff anymore.
The same thing happens now to PC's too. I'll bet that in ten years 90% of the PC's sold are compact all-in-ones. Maybe you can detach the keyboard or the screen (like you can detach the speakers on some compact stereos) but it will be similar to todays laptops. If you need a bigger [CPU|memory|disk] you'll buy a new one and pass the old one to your [mother|son|buddy].
I like the second model shown, the detachable keyboard is nice and the base is short enough that you can place it in front (not on top).
Markus
I prefer the Karcher RoboCleaner for one important reason:
It requires almost no manual intervention
You just tell it how often it should go out and clean and once in a while you empty the dirt in the base station. No other interventions are necessary.
Il empties its dirt container itself and recharges itself automatically et the base station.
Details here
Markus
While many vendors do support other distributions than the big two (RH & SuSE) this is mostly on the desktop. Support on the server side for large servers is pretty much restricted to these two. This is true for hardware also If you want support for larger SMP's, SAN, etc there are not many drivers for other distros. Usually you can just go ahead and try, but if something does not work the support line will tell you to replace your distro xxx with RH/SuSE where thei support it.
I've been involved in quite a few new Linux customer projects. All the time third party software (Oracle, SAP, DB2, etc) was involved as well. The only distros which are *certified* to run this stuff are Rh and SuSE. And customers do want certified installations !
Personally I'm happily running debian and gentoo, but I haven't come across commercial installation of these distributions yet.
Markus
Actually a pringles can is a very bad wifi antenna. To work effectovely it should be a couple of meters long. The can shown has a larger diameter, which should be much better.
You can calculate the optimal size yourself here.
Markus
The cost of the silicon wafers has an enormous impact on the cost of silicon solar cells. If this cost can be brought down with this new technology suddenly solar energy becomes competitive !
Markus
I've got just one datapoint:
We were deploying a commercial application which was shopped by the vendor with Tomcat. As this is the way the app was installed by the vendor we counted on running that way in production.
In the weeks before the official production started we were hosting the classes for the future users. This was the first time we had more than the three developers online at the same time and it failed miserably. We had to restart tomcat every 45 minutes !
As I had previous good experience with Websphere we decided to switch over and this solved our stability problem at once. The first three months it just kept going without any intervention. In the meantime I've added preemptive weekly restart to cron to be on the safe side.
For our environment Tomcat (V3.x & V4.x, I've tried several incarnations) was not stable enough for production. I'm still a bit stumped about this, the app was shipped with Tomcat by the vendor. This might have to do with the hardware (IBM pSeries), I don't now.
Markus
It is known that JFS performance can be limited if you perform a lot of activity which modifies the file-system structure. Everything from creating files, renaming to unpacking archives, etc.
One easy fix is to move the log volume of the filesystem to another disk. This can increase your performance a lot. If both are on the same physical volume, all the seeks to write data and the jfs log will kill your performance.
Markus
It looks like this device tries to be everything to everybody. But as a result none of the individuel functions is working well.
In addition there are several things looking 'fishy' to me:
If you want a good DVD you are better off buying a device dedicated to do a good job.
If you want a good MP3 device there is Audio Request with an excellent product.
I'd like to see now a DVD working the same way Audio Request works but for video. Add some Tivo-like features, with disks like the new 180GB Seagate this starts to be possible.
Markus