I struggled with this problem too and ended up building a homebrew raid using OpenSolaris and a large CoolerMaster case full of drives. The ZFS filesystem has been bullet proof on this box since 2005. I ripped all my DVDs to ISO format so that I could preserve the DVD menus on those discs. The box sits on my network and is shared via NFS and Samba.
To play back all those movies on my TV, I put my older Mac Mini on it and have it boot up into a default user and start VLC right away. I use VLC Remote on the ipad to access the library that is NFS mounted on the Mac Mini.
The overall experience has been great! Using the iPad, I can browse hundreds of ISO images, select one and it plays within a few seconds.
The iPad remote solution was the final peice to this puzzle as I was previously using a mouse and keyboard to navigate the movies.
As a DeVRY grad (EET) I have to agree. Some of the best engineers I ever met came from DeVRY. Next time you look at at a micro controller from Microchip or a SPARC processor from Sun/Oracle, you can be 100% sure that a DeVRY grad had something to do with the architecture.
Also, I've met my share of mediocre engineers from MIT, Brown, Carnegie-Mellon and the like. It's more about what you do with your degree than the degree itself.
We looked at doing this at Sun about 15 years ago. We called it "Netscape on a stick". Never really panned out but we had SunOS-on-a-stick that booted rather quickly off a 80MB PCMCIA drive in a tablet prototype we had developed. Yes, Sun had a working tablet in 1995.
I still have to disaggree with that point. 30 years ago, operating systems were much less evolved or even non-existent on systems. So languages like BASIC were useful tools to help abstract the human from the gory details of banging registers and (for me at least) a welcome step up from assembly.
But these days, the focus is on applications and even operating system level tools are abstracted from the hardware using APIs. Fewer people need to know how to bang on the registers. Low level bit-banging is now a specialty and something that a student might spend a few extra years of their education diving into. IMHO it's no longer the foundation for computer programming education.
I learned on BASIC in the 70's but looking at what's available now, teach something with some OO in it. Java, PHP would qualify in my book and comes with some great documentation/forums and other help resources.
I've noticed that if you peel tape in low light, you can see a blue glow as the tape separates (try it for yourself). I wonder though, if this simply a static electrical discharge or evidence of something more going on?
Not exactly world's first. Sun Microsystems had an incredible demo about 12 years ago that involved an array of live web cams. The user's view would shift when they moved their head side to side. You could almost look around objects. They used LCD shutter glasses for the 3D view.
I ran it for a while on my Eee PC. The Intel graphics chip struggled with the 3D (that's not Java's fault), but I don't recall having any problems with the 1GB of RAM it had in the system.
Interesting but Sun hasn't been a graphics company for about 10 years. All their graphics people now work at nVidia.
Also, Darkstar is has nothing to do with graphics. It's a transaction server. Someone like WoW or Second Life could replace all their backend servers with Darkstar to make one contiguous 'world' instead of shards and separate servers for players.
Calling it Gnome was the first mistake. Gnomes are way down on the man scale with trolls and hobbits.
To attract women to the window system, you need a name that emotes tallness, security and wealth ( which are things that women are attracted to in men). Something like "Fireman 8.0" or "RichBastard 7.5" or "Warrior 11 Extreme Edition".
I used to have all these problems and fixed them all by buying a bigger monitor. I found a 20" to be too small so I invested in a 45" HDTV. I sit three feet from it and find that I no longer hunch forward and strain my eyes to make out the text. My eyes focus at a more comfortable 3 feet instead of 18 inches. My posture is much better and my neck pains are history... well almost. A few weeks ago I had to switch back to the laptop for some work and within a couple of days, all my pains returned. I noticed that I was hunched over the keyboard and the 15" screen felt like peering into a keyhole.
Do yourself a favor and buy one of the new 37" to 45" 1080P screens that are coming out and hook it up to your PC. Sit 3 to 4 feet away from it. You won't be disappointed. WoW is way more immersive too.
Do they teach Law in grade school? How about Medicine? What about toaster repair? Why should a grade school teach advanced subjects? You don't need to know how to program a computer to use it.
Programming is a career just like being a Lawyer or a Doctor. It is and should be a high paying profession. Teaching kids who are otherwise not interested in programming is an inefficient use of school resources. Let's teach them to read, write and maybe collaborate using the new tools but let's not bog them down with nerd stuff.
When I was that age, I was very interested in computers. I figured out how to take college classes at 16 years old and learned a little programming. But I was the only person I knew who did that. You also hear about the kid-genius who get's his medical degree at 16. I think these are the exceptions and should not be the rule. Let the average kids ( and maybe the geniuses too) enjoy their childhood rather than pushing them too hard.
and you may get a little vertigo while surrounded by your WoW world.
You get used to it. I set up a Sharp Aquos 45" as my desktop monitor. Sitting 3ft away from it gives a pretty immersive view of games running at 1920x1080i. I was a little sick to the stomach at first, but it soon passed. Now playing World of Warcraft on anything else feels like peering into another world through a keyhole.
I also find that with a big monitor, I don't hunch over the desk anymore to make out the letters. My neck and back problems have dissapeared.
Bigger is better.
To be truely immersive with three monitors, they should probably be in the 24" wide size. Three tiny little 17" or 19" monitors won't cut it. Or better yet, mount three projectors to a rail, line up the edges where the picture meets, and you have a really cool wrap-around experience!
This crap isn't any better than what I could buy ten years ago. Quarter VGA? Blow me Kopin.
Remember the VR craze around 1995? I worked with Kopin and other HMD products ten years ago that were the same experience and they sucked back then too.
Where's the 1920x1080 headmounted displays that also wrap the video around to create that truely immersive viewing experience.
Why do these display companies actually think consumers are giong to buy this stuff if they keep rehashing it without making real imporvements?
You have 3 of them? Some had serial numbers on a label on the front. If you can manage to power one up, the banner should say SparcStation Hawaii with a logo of the Hawaiian islands next to it. Can you get me a picture or send me the serial numbers? As their daddy, I'd like to at least keep a registry of them. I have two of them in the basement collecting dust as well.
Sun also had a laptop design called "Hawaii" back in 1997. Not to be confused with the Voyager portable workstation though. Hawaii never made it to market though. Sun decided to go big iron instead of little gadgets. The Hawaii laptop was based on the MicroSPARC-II 100MHz chip. Had a 1024x768 15" display. 24-bit graphics. Four PCMCIA slots. Touch Pad. 800 MB SCSI drive. We had 802.11 wireless running on it as well.
It was born out of a SPARC tablet project that an advanced development group was working on.
Only about 20 were ever built. One freind used one of them for about three years.
Three and a half years ago I was laid off. Two years ago the job market was still in the toilet. At that time, my 18 months of research concluded that in a bad economy, you should take what you can get. Now that the economy is looking better, I think it makes sense to look for the right job, especially if you're already employed. If you're still unemployed, I think you should take what you can get for the next few months or move into your mom's house.:)
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Shameless plug..... http://robot-army.com/ A fun to build Dancing Delta Robot Kit
I struggled with this problem too and ended up building a homebrew raid using OpenSolaris and a large CoolerMaster case full of drives. The ZFS filesystem has been bullet proof on this box since 2005. I ripped all my DVDs to ISO format so that I could preserve the DVD menus on those discs. The box sits on my network and is shared via NFS and Samba.
To play back all those movies on my TV, I put my older Mac Mini on it and have it boot up into a default user and start VLC right away. I use VLC Remote on the ipad to access the library that is NFS mounted on the Mac Mini.
The overall experience has been great! Using the iPad, I can browse hundreds of ISO images, select one and it plays within a few seconds.
The iPad remote solution was the final peice to this puzzle as I was previously using a mouse and keyboard to navigate the movies.
As a DeVRY grad (EET) I have to agree. Some of the best engineers I ever met came from DeVRY. Next time you look at at a micro controller from Microchip or a SPARC processor from Sun/Oracle, you can be 100% sure that a DeVRY grad had something to do with the architecture.
Also, I've met my share of mediocre engineers from MIT, Brown, Carnegie-Mellon and the like. It's more about what you do with your degree than the degree itself.
We looked at doing this at Sun about 15 years ago. We called it "Netscape on a stick". Never really panned out but we had SunOS-on-a-stick that booted rather quickly off a 80MB PCMCIA drive in a tablet prototype we had developed. Yes, Sun had a working tablet in 1995.
I believe a book titled "The Media Equation" came to this conclusion over twenty years ago.
http://www.amazon.com/Media-Equation-Television-Information-Publication/dp/1575860538/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281639501&sr=8-1
Good book for anyone interested in the media field.
I still have to disaggree with that point. 30 years ago, operating systems were much less evolved or even non-existent on systems. So languages like BASIC were useful tools to help abstract the human from the gory details of banging registers and (for me at least) a welcome step up from assembly.
But these days, the focus is on applications and even operating system level tools are abstracted from the hardware using APIs. Fewer people need to know how to bang on the registers. Low level bit-banging is now a specialty and something that a student might spend a few extra years of their education diving into. IMHO it's no longer the foundation for computer programming education.
Teach BASIC to a child, go to jail. It's the law.
I learned on BASIC in the 70's but looking at what's available now, teach something with some OO in it. Java, PHP would qualify in my book and comes with some great documentation/forums and other help resources.
I've noticed that if you peel tape in low light, you can see a blue glow as the tape separates (try it for yourself). I wonder though, if this simply a static electrical discharge or evidence of something more going on?
Not exactly world's first. Sun Microsystems had an incredible demo about 12 years ago that involved an array of live web cams. The user's view would shift when they moved their head side to side. You could almost look around objects. They used LCD shutter glasses for the 3D view.
Why not ask Sun/Oracle if they will host it on their cloud at network.com? I hear they are giving alot of the capacity away right now.
Offer to lease use of the domain to them for a number of years.
I ran it for a while on my Eee PC. The Intel graphics chip struggled with the 3D (that's not Java's fault), but I don't recall having any problems with the 1GB of RAM it had in the system.
Runs Windows too! What a great way to migrate off that OS!
Interesting but Sun hasn't been a graphics company for about 10 years. All their
graphics people now work at nVidia.
Also, Darkstar is has nothing to do with graphics. It's a transaction server.
Someone like WoW or Second Life could replace all their backend servers with Darkstar
to make one contiguous 'world' instead of shards and separate servers for players.
Hmmm.... Mine gets:
750G * 12 drives = 9TB ( ZFS Raid-Z )
System power consumption 240W
26W per TB.
That's the same number as the 3TB @ 80W machine.
I don't see what the big deal is.
Calling it Gnome was the first mistake.
Gnomes are way down on the man scale with
trolls and hobbits.
To attract women to the window system, you need
a name that emotes tallness, security and
wealth ( which are things that women are attracted
to in men). Something like "Fireman 8.0" or "RichBastard 7.5"
or "Warrior 11 Extreme Edition".
I used to have all these problems and fixed them all
by buying a bigger monitor. I found a 20" to be too
small so I invested in a 45" HDTV. I sit three feet from
it and find that I no longer hunch forward and strain my eyes
to make out the text. My eyes focus at a more comfortable
3 feet instead of 18 inches. My posture is much better and my neck
pains are history... well almost. A few weeks ago I had
to switch back to the laptop for some work and within
a couple of days, all my pains returned. I noticed that
I was hunched over the keyboard and the 15" screen felt
like peering into a keyhole.
Do yourself a favor and buy one of the new 37" to 45" 1080P
screens that are coming out and hook it up to your PC. Sit 3 to
4 feet away from it. You won't be disappointed. WoW is way
more immersive too.
Do they teach Law in grade school? How about Medicine? What about toaster repair? Why should a grade school teach advanced subjects? You don't need to know how to program a computer to use it.
Programming is a career just like being a Lawyer or a Doctor. It is and should be a high paying profession. Teaching kids who are otherwise not interested in programming is an inefficient use of school resources. Let's teach them to read, write and maybe collaborate using the new tools but let's not bog them down with nerd stuff.
When I was that age, I was very interested in computers. I figured out how to take college classes at 16 years old and learned a little programming. But I was the only person I knew who did that. You also hear about the kid-genius
who get's his medical degree at 16. I think these are the exceptions and should not be the rule. Let the average kids ( and maybe the geniuses too) enjoy their childhood rather than pushing them too hard.
You get used to it. I set up a Sharp Aquos 45" as my desktop
monitor. Sitting 3ft away from it gives a pretty immersive
view of games running at 1920x1080i. I was a little sick to
the stomach at first, but it soon passed. Now playing World
of Warcraft on anything else feels like peering into another world through
a keyhole.
I also find that with a big monitor, I don't hunch over the desk anymore
to make out the letters. My neck and back problems have dissapeared.
Bigger is better.
To be truely immersive with three monitors, they should probably be
in the 24" wide size. Three tiny little 17" or 19" monitors won't
cut it. Or better yet, mount three projectors to a rail, line up
the edges where the picture meets, and you have a really cool wrap-around
experience!
Boo! Hiss!
This crap isn't any better than what I could buy ten years ago. Quarter VGA? Blow me Kopin.
Remember the VR craze around 1995? I worked with Kopin and other HMD products ten years ago that were the same experience and they sucked back then too.
Where's the 1920x1080 headmounted displays that also wrap the video around to create that truely immersive viewing experience.
Why do these display companies actually think consumers are giong to buy this stuff if they keep rehashing it without making real imporvements?
Two thumbs down!
You have 3 of them? Some had serial numbers on a label on the front. If you can manage to power one up, the banner should say SparcStation Hawaii with a logo of the Hawaiian islands next to it. Can you get me a picture or send me the serial numbers? As their daddy, I'd like to at least keep a registry of them. I have two of them in the basement collecting dust as well.
Oh, and they did run Linux too!
Not the first Sun Laptop either.
Sun also had a laptop design called "Hawaii" back in 1997. Not to be confused with the Voyager portable workstation though. Hawaii never made it to market though. Sun decided to go big iron instead of little gadgets.
The Hawaii laptop was based on the MicroSPARC-II 100MHz chip. Had a 1024x768 15" display. 24-bit graphics. Four PCMCIA slots. Touch Pad. 800 MB SCSI drive. We had 802.11 wireless running on it as well.
It was born out of a SPARC tablet project that an advanced development group was working on.
Only about 20 were ever built. One freind used one of them for about three years.
Exactly! That's where I did most of my "research" while unemployed.
Three and a half years ago I was laid off. Two years ago the job market was still in the toilet. At that time, my 18 months of research concluded that in a bad economy, you should take what you can get. Now that the economy is looking better, I think it makes sense to look for the right job, especially if you're already employed. If you're still unemployed, I think you should take what you can get for the next few months or move into your mom's house. :)
Yes it is. TechTV did a segment on it a year ago. I thought I came to Slashdot for current stuff?