For my old Vaio PCG-505F, I've always booted off the net (I used Redhat). I never bought the CDROM drive.
You just need a system with the redhat CD's copied to a directory. Then just put in the pcmcia boot disk and a cheap pcmcia ethernet card and point it to a machine, access is easiest through ftp or http. It's way cheaper than buying the CDROM and faster too.
After owning this sony laptop, I've always liked it. However, the sony proprietary EVERYTHING is a real pain. Special sony memory. Special sony battery. The battery died after quite a short time and I never bought another one because of the sticker shock. I like the special sony charger - It's well designed to wrap the cord around itself. But it too has special connectors and voltages. Sigh.
By the way, if you're into Windoze, you might want to check out CD Space, which lets you encode all your CD's as image files and mount them on "virtual" cd drives. Even games like red alert 2 or diablo 2.
which is generally for VCD's, which will only play on "compatible" dvd players.
However, they have lots of background information, including a huge section on DVD players with compatibility information - showing which will play DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD+RW. Also sections on all kinds of other issues. I believe they have the domain dvdhelp.com, but there's not much to it.
They also have a huge, well documented and well organized Links section to other information.
Although the "and porn" reference might make you think:
"Pipe gigabytes of ripped uncompressed video, warez CD-R images", etc...
I think in the context of video production it means something completely different.
Until I got smarter with my (non-porn, sorry) video "production", I had a firewire card on one system and my CD burner on another system. I would transfer the uncompressed video from my camcorder onto one system. Each file was maybe 12-14gig (maybe an hour?). Then I would edit it and create an MPEG-1 video image. Then I would transfer the 600+mb images to the other system to burn on CD-R (vcd actually).
I couldn't use the first system until the second system was done with the transfer, and it could take a while (though not too long).
I eventually put a newer CD burner on the same system that I captured and edited with. I couldn't overlap the burning and capturing, but
the new CD burner was faster, so I didn't sweat it so much.
However, if I was doing DVD's, I would think that a separate system to burn would make sense - the burn times would be long. Heck, maybe another separate system to render the mpeg-2. And with this utility, you could buy (or reuse) a couple of el-cheapo ethernet cards for a lot less than gig ethernet cards and transfer the 4+gig files a lot faster. Or maybe even a couple of gig cards (though I wonder what it would take for the machines to fill up the pipes)
Anyway, this utility sounds like what a lot of people (legitimately) working with large video files need. Maybe even some "legitimate" (low-budget?) porn...
I was reading an article in Motorcyclist magazine this month regarding the use of cameras to monitor traffic violations.
Apparently, the insurance companies have strategy of gradually introducing traffic cameras - not for speeding, but for red-lights. It seems that the general population would have a backlash against speed cameras, but not against red light cameras.
What they found out is that most red-light offenses occur just when the light turns from red to yellow.
Well, the truth of red-light cameras seems to be that they don't prevent accidents, but they generate revenues and traffic offenses (that allow the insurance companies to charge more money).
However, to decrease the number of violations, it's quite easy to just add 1.5 seconds to the yellow light time and do away with the cameras. This might also make the intersections safer, (though there's no proof that just missing a red light leads to accidents statistically)
But the big plan is to get cameras into society that are "acceptable", then quietly move onto other cameras. Like speed cameras.
Maybe new dvd players will just add the new formats to their list of compatible formats. Current DVD players support lots of data formats: dvd, cd, vcd. Better ones support mp3 and svcd/xvcd/xsvcd. Lots of current inexpensive players have more than one laser to support most of the different physical formats: dvd, cd, cd-r, cd-rw, and even the newer dvd-r, dvd-rw, dvd+rw.
I predict if you can fit a whole movie in 500mb, then we'll soon be seeing a way of decoding these movies and putting them on a CDR. Then people will be motivated to take advantage of this - and keep them forever.
There's a lot of people out there creating VCDs. It's getting pretty easy to put video on a VCD, and many dvd players will play it (even though some don't even mention that they will). Some dvd players will only play VCDs encoded on CDRW's since they're closer to the laser frequency of DVD's than CDR's.
The original format is VCD, which is 352x240 at 1150kbits/sec and will play on most dvd players. Then there's svcd, xvcd and xsvcd with higher bit rates and faster drive spin speeds.
I think your counter-example is actually a perfect example of exactly what I'm talking about.
Television has not evolved at all. Because everyone has been caught up in making a "standard box", there has never been an increase in resolution or whatever because it makes every minor detail a stumbling block. They have tried to create a new standard (HDTV), but it's taken forever.
I think your idea may work at first, but once the standards are in place, it won't evolve. The sticking point would be the "anything else..." part.
For instance, if your system had gone into place when ISDN was "the leading edge", right now they would still be working with standardized boxes to make ISDN ubiquitous and nobody would have broadband.
I just think that these kind of things always end up tailored for the least common denominator and don't allow you to throw everything out and try a new technology.
But maybe I'm just taking exception to the "standardized hardware boxes thing". It would be interesting to "own" my own strand(s) of fiber to some public office and sign something to say that "I choose registered service provider 0020043 to connect to the other end".
My first time playing it I found myself chuckling *uncontrollably* while shooting *hordes* of oncoming monsters. Lots of monsters. Some of them hundreds of feet tall. (I was playing a network game cooperatively with a friend). I was rolling on the floor when I first picked up a cannon.
The only thing that could be improved would be to add some more levels... say 200 or so... Yeah, 200 levels... that's a nice round number...
how @home seems to be getting SLAMMED...
on
Broadband Crackdown
·
· Score: 2
Since code red hit, my cable modem light has been on continuously. Dumping the packets my system sees finds that the bulk of the requests are ARP requests to find the destination machines that code red wants to connect to.
A typical code red request is something like:
"infected" broadcasts: ARP request: who is 24.1.2.3?
24.1.2.3 machine replies: ARP reply: I am (here's my MAC address)
"infected" sends connect packet to 24.1.2.3:80, etc...
However, @home in my area seems to be one large broadcast domain. Althought 24.1.2.3 is not on my subnet, I do see the ARP request from the infected machine. But there are LOTS of them. So the bulk of the packets are arp requests and this is what is REALLY flooding the network. Of course, I also get connect requests to port 80, but there are numerically a lot less packets.
This may only apply to my area though... ymmvw.
so filtering port 80 will help prevent infections, but I wonder how much traffic it will cut down on.
I bought a sony vaio pcg-505f a couple of years ago for $1300 and it's worked wonderfully. It's really small and light. The power adapter is also small and light, which makes a big difference.
The only problem I've had is that the battery died. Not a big deal to me as I don't really use it on the plane while flying.
I run redhat and I actually use it mostly for storage. It's great to save and distribute my digital camera photos when travelling - or to load my rio 500 with audiobooks and tunes.
I would say less than the weight of a magazine if computer shopper was still in it's heyday, but nowadays it's about the size and weight of 2-3 magazines at the airport. It's always small enough to pack in my smallest bag.
I think the price of the vaio family has steadily climbed as sony adds features. It looks like the average price has climbed to $2500 or so...
The convenience is not the same. You don't find much ogg music on the net. There isn't enough support for ogg in common rippers, cd-authoring tools, and portable players.
Heck, there is probably more support for WMA in these areas... sigh.
I also think the special effects and/or props are done really well. Maybe I don't see the holes in them, but they always seem to be "just right". They never seem to have a "cheap" feel to them and aren't overdone. I think their subtlety adds a quality feel to the show that the other hollywood heavy-handed sci-fi shows overshoot.
Other shows seem to lose their engrossing quality to me because things always are overdone. When it comes to alien beings, do they always have to look the Zergs in StarCraft? It seems easier to view an alien planet that has trees to me than an alien planet with cheap props. (unless the trees are from "just outside L.A." locations - they won't cut it)
Maybe better effects are really well done to the point of being invisible. I heard that forest gump had more digital effect footage than jurassic park. You get more engrossed.
By the way, it comes in great on Dish Network. But I'll bet it looks really good on their showtime HDT channel, but they don't have a PVR for that yet...:-(
You know, I thought the same thing as she did in the past. I'd worked for large companies and I knew how incompatibilities cropped up and it was just from engineers being distanced from their customers.
Well, I was chatting with an ex-microsoft employee who had moved over to the white-side and he put things in perspective. Microsoft has strategic meetings where they sit around a table and say "how can we own this?"
That put a different light on all those subtle incompatibilities I had always had to deal with.
Backslash instead of slash in paths... / for options instead of - (remember switchchar?..someone took it out) CR/LF instead of NL. ^Z as EOF. blah, blah. I wonder how many of these are deliberate?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they should read:
How We Lost the Moon, A True Story By Frank W. Allen
This is a sci-fi short-story about some scientists who "accidentally" created a black hole.
whoops...
Forget CD-ROM booting.
For my old Vaio PCG-505F, I've always booted off the net (I used Redhat). I never bought the CDROM drive.
You just need a system with the redhat CD's copied to a directory. Then just put in the pcmcia boot disk and a cheap pcmcia ethernet card and point it to a machine, access is easiest through ftp or http. It's way cheaper than buying the CDROM and faster too.
After owning this sony laptop, I've always liked it. However, the sony proprietary EVERYTHING is a real pain. Special sony memory. Special sony battery. The battery died after quite a short time and I never bought another one because of the sticker shock. I like the special sony charger - It's well designed to wrap the cord around itself. But it too has special connectors and voltages. Sigh.
By the way, if you're into Windoze, you might want to check out CD Space, which lets you encode all your CD's as image files and mount them on "virtual" cd drives. Even games like red alert 2 or diablo 2.
Worked just fine for me:
d f
http://www.airlinepilots.com/Safety/FedExFlt705.p
amazing.
I heard on the news that Bank One was matching donations, but on looking at their website, it looks like it might be employee donations.
Does anyone know of any matching donations programs?
I think people should check to see if their employees match funds.
a good site is:
vcdhelp.com
which is generally for VCD's, which will only play on "compatible" dvd players.
However, they have lots of background information, including a huge section on DVD players with compatibility information - showing which will play DVD-R, DVD-RW and DVD+RW. Also sections on all kinds of other issues. I believe they have the domain dvdhelp.com, but there's not much to it.
They also have a huge, well documented and well organized Links section to other information.
Although the "and porn" reference might make you think:
"Pipe gigabytes of ripped uncompressed video, warez CD-R images", etc...
I think in the context of video production it means something completely different.
Until I got smarter with my (non-porn, sorry) video "production", I had a firewire card on one system and my CD burner on another system. I would transfer the uncompressed video from my camcorder onto one system. Each file was maybe 12-14gig (maybe an hour?). Then I would edit it and create an MPEG-1 video image. Then I would transfer the 600+mb images to the other system to burn on CD-R (vcd actually).
I couldn't use the first system until the second system was done with the transfer, and it could take a while (though not too long).
I eventually put a newer CD burner on the same system that I captured and edited with. I couldn't overlap the burning and capturing, but
the new CD burner was faster, so I didn't sweat it so much.
However, if I was doing DVD's, I would think that a separate system to burn would make sense - the burn times would be long. Heck, maybe another separate system to render the mpeg-2. And with this utility, you could buy (or reuse) a couple of el-cheapo ethernet cards for a lot less than gig ethernet cards and transfer the 4+gig files a lot faster. Or maybe even a couple of gig cards (though I wonder what it would take for the machines to fill up the pipes)
Anyway, this utility sounds like what a lot of people (legitimately) working with large video files need. Maybe even some "legitimate" (low-budget?) porn...
So I was looking around and found some
interesting interviews. I guess he's a chess outlaw.
I was reading an article in Motorcyclist magazine this month regarding the use of cameras to monitor traffic violations.
Apparently, the insurance companies have strategy of gradually introducing traffic cameras - not for speeding, but for red-lights. It seems that the general population would have a backlash against speed cameras, but not against red light cameras.
What they found out is that most red-light offenses occur just when the light turns from red to yellow.
Well, the truth of red-light cameras seems to be that they don't prevent accidents, but they generate revenues and traffic offenses (that allow the insurance companies to charge more money).
However, to decrease the number of violations, it's quite easy to just add 1.5 seconds to the yellow light time and do away with the cameras. This might also make the intersections safer, (though there's no proof that just missing a red light leads to accidents statistically)
But the big plan is to get cameras into society that are "acceptable", then quietly move onto other cameras. Like speed cameras.
sigh.
Cyrix did the same thing a number of years back.
As a matter of fact, a quick search shows that they got in hot water for this tactic as this Register Article shows.
Of course, maybe it won't matter.
Maybe new dvd players will just add the new formats to their list of compatible formats. Current DVD players support lots of data formats: dvd, cd, vcd. Better ones support mp3 and svcd/xvcd/xsvcd. Lots of current inexpensive players have more than one laser to support most of the different physical formats: dvd, cd, cd-r, cd-rw, and even the newer dvd-r, dvd-rw, dvd+rw.
Check out http://www.vcdhelp.com/dvdplayers.php
I predict if you can fit a whole movie in 500mb, then we'll soon be seeing a way of decoding these movies and putting them on a CDR. Then people will be motivated to take advantage of this - and keep them forever.
There's a lot of people out there creating VCDs. It's getting pretty easy to put video on a VCD, and many dvd players will play it (even though some don't even mention that they will). Some dvd players will only play VCDs encoded on CDRW's since they're closer to the laser frequency of DVD's than CDR's.
The original format is VCD, which is 352x240 at 1150kbits/sec and will play on most dvd players. Then there's svcd, xvcd and xsvcd with higher bit rates and faster drive spin speeds.
a good info site is: http://www.vcdhelp.com
It's mostly PC-oriented. I'd like to hear about people who've created VCDs under linux. (most win98 users can't create video files greater than 2g)
I think your counter-example is actually a perfect example of exactly what I'm talking about.
Television has not evolved at all. Because everyone has been caught up in making a "standard box", there has never been an increase in resolution or whatever because it makes every minor detail a stumbling block. They have tried to create a new standard (HDTV), but it's taken forever.
I think your idea may work at first, but once the standards are in place, it won't evolve. The sticking point would be the "anything else..." part.
For instance, if your system had gone into place when ISDN was "the leading edge", right now they would still be working with standardized boxes to make ISDN ubiquitous and nobody would have broadband.
I just think that these kind of things always end up tailored for the least common denominator and don't allow you to throw everything out and try a new technology.
But maybe I'm just taking exception to the "standardized hardware boxes thing". It would be interesting to "own" my own strand(s) of fiber to some public office and sign something to say that "I choose registered service provider 0020043 to connect to the other end".
Will sure help Microsoft's market share.
don't forget the special searches:
Google Linux search
Google BSD search
Google iMac colors search
You might want to give Serious Sam a shot.
My first time playing it I found myself chuckling *uncontrollably* while shooting *hordes* of oncoming monsters. Lots of monsters. Some of them hundreds of feet tall. (I was playing a network game cooperatively with a friend). I was rolling on the floor when I first picked up a cannon.
The only thing that could be improved would be to add some more levels... say 200 or so... Yeah, 200 levels... that's a nice round number...
Since code red hit, my cable modem light has been on continuously. Dumping the packets my system sees finds that the bulk of the requests are ARP requests to find the destination machines that code red wants to connect to.
A typical code red request is something like:
"infected" broadcasts: ARP request: who is 24.1.2.3?
24.1.2.3 machine replies: ARP reply: I am (here's my MAC address)
"infected" sends connect packet to 24.1.2.3:80, etc...
However, @home in my area seems to be one large broadcast domain. Althought 24.1.2.3 is not on my subnet, I do see the ARP request from the infected machine. But there are LOTS of them. So the bulk of the packets are arp requests and this is what is REALLY flooding the network. Of course, I also get connect requests to port 80, but there are numerically a lot less packets.
This may only apply to my area though... ymmvw.
so filtering port 80 will help prevent infections, but I wonder how much traffic it will cut down on.
I bought a sony vaio pcg-505f a couple of years ago for $1300 and it's worked wonderfully. It's really small and light. The power adapter is also small and light, which makes a big difference.
The only problem I've had is that the battery died. Not a big deal to me as I don't really use it on the plane while flying.
I run redhat and I actually use it mostly for storage. It's great to save and distribute my digital camera photos when travelling - or to load my rio 500 with audiobooks and tunes.
I would say less than the weight of a magazine if computer shopper was still in it's heyday, but nowadays it's about the size and weight of 2-3 magazines at the airport. It's always small enough to pack in my smallest bag.
I think the price of the vaio family has steadily climbed as sony adds features. It looks like the average price has climbed to $2500 or so...
The convenience is not the same. You don't find much ogg music on the net. There isn't enough support for ogg in common rippers, cd-authoring tools, and portable players.
Heck, there is probably more support for WMA in these areas... sigh.
s/HDT/HDTV/
I also think the special effects and/or props are done really well. Maybe I don't see the holes in them, but they always seem to be "just right". They never seem to have a "cheap" feel to them and aren't overdone. I think their subtlety adds a quality feel to the show that the other hollywood heavy-handed sci-fi shows overshoot.
Other shows seem to lose their engrossing quality to me because things always are overdone. When it comes to alien beings, do they always have to look the Zergs in StarCraft? It seems easier to view an alien planet that has trees to me than an alien planet with cheap props. (unless the trees are from "just outside L.A." locations - they won't cut it)
Maybe better effects are really well done to the point of being invisible. I heard that forest gump had more digital effect footage than jurassic park. You get more engrossed.
By the way, it comes in great on Dish Network. But I'll bet it looks really good on their showtime HDT channel, but they don't have a PVR for that yet...
You know, I thought the same thing as she did in the past. I'd worked for large companies and I knew how incompatibilities cropped up and it was just from engineers being distanced from their customers.
..someone took it out) CR/LF instead of NL. ^Z as EOF. blah, blah. I wonder how many of these are deliberate?
Well, I was chatting with an ex-microsoft employee who had moved over to the white-side and he put things in perspective. Microsoft has strategic meetings where they sit around a table and say "how can we own this?"
That put a different light on all those subtle incompatibilities I had always had to deal with.
Backslash instead of slash in paths... / for options instead of - (remember switchchar?
Hasn't microsoft already brok^H^H^H^H embraced-and-extended TCP/IP lots of times before?
There was a time when Sun servers responded "slowly" to windows HTTP requests because microsoft changed the behavior of TCP slowstart, etc...
I'm sure there are other examples.
Man, that sure sounds strange to my ears. I wonder what stuff the press will be explaining in a few more years...
Surely You're Joking Mister Feynman by Richard P. Feynman
This was actually a text for a few Penn State compsci courses (though it was optional).
I also liked Peopleware by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister