unRAID is NOT OpenSourced. It does run on Linux but it has closed source portions and it is locked to a USB key that you register. If the key dies Tom is damned good about replacing the license for you - been there done that. Tom does comply with the GPL, any code he modifies that's GPL is included with unRAID. His closed source stuff he keeps to himself and for the service he provides I'm okay with that. I run two of his servers and he's been very helpful over the many years. Slow to update software, bug fixes for new hardware can be slow too, but I have no complaints....
Except with unRAID, sorry I don't need enterprise RAID at home but the hardware you chose is solid and the 5n1 adapters rock! I can stream 1080P video with DTS on a 100meg NIC, I sure don't need RAID 5 or 6 spinning my drives all day, let them spin down:)
You DO realize that normal SD DVD had DRM too right? It had the SAME sorts of restrictions that BD has now and so did HD-DVD! The only difference was that the DRM was easier to defeat because they couldn't swap keys as they were compromised. You're not doing anything different now with DVD than you would be with BD. Strip the DRM from BD, re-encode if you want it smaller, and then watch that much nicer picture. It's harder, it's more time consuming, and you don't end up with menus and advertisements. You can keep the director soundtracks though if you want:-)
I'd also argue that a laser beam does no damage to a DVD or BD. The damage these gets is from oxygen leaking into the media and oxidizing the metal. This is real, it's happened to some of my CD. Scratches happen but so long as they aren't on the label side they can be recovered with a buffer - a car wax like Nu-Finish with distillates works wonders too.
BTW - where did the GP imply piracy at ALL in his posting? I didn't get that and if you saw MKV and thought that meant piracy then you need to get out more. MKV is THE best container to store video content in. It supports most codec, supports subtitles - both forced and normal, supports multiple videos if you want, can support multiple soundtracks, and can even support menus if people would make tools for it. I see nothing in his post about piracy, I DO see someone with the same issues I have archiving BD which is apparently a medium you've not educated yourself on enough.
Umm, why not strip the DRM from the BD and store those too? the picture really is much better even if you re-encode them for smaller storage. I have a post above about this but yeah it's doable. I also have about the same amount of storgae as you but it's not backed up other than the unRAID software's protections. It's simply too expensive to have a full dupe for me:(
XBMC however on the old hardware it's not going to do high bitrate HD. Better to go ION hardware or an aTV with XBMC, it's been ported to Linux, Windows, and OSX - Plex is based on it.
Sure! You just have to get the right hardware and after tinkering with ESX for awhile I gave up on it. None of my onboard NICs were supported! No thanks, wake me when it's running on broader hardware support.
Atom machines running Ubuntu and XBMC are my front-ends, I use MCE remotes and HDMI for sound and video. 1080P with an ION chipset accelerated using VDPAU is wonderful. Sound can be a hassle to get working with Alsa but it can be done. If this sounds too expensive or complex or whatever - look at the WDLive that was just revamped. $99, supports local storage, wireless, and network shares. XBMC is way nicer though!;-)
Backend I mentioned this above - unRAID with many SATA disks, works well and sips power when the drives sleep.
Ripping... Slysoft AnyDVD-HD for decryption of BD (yes Win7). I use eac3to to pull the audio and video from the disks. I use x264 to encode and I wrap it all in MKV containers. When there are forced subs I use BDsup2Sub to get them compatible for MKV. As a front-end for the ripping and encoding I use meGUI. It has a GUI for eac3to and can encode the video and even audio if you want. I have some tutorials on various sites for how I do that, feel free to ask questions though. you will want a fast CPU or lots of time - a movie takes me 2-3 hours to encode. 4cores with hyperthreading running 4+ghz gets me 18FPS or so . You can go faster with lower quality or even use the GPU with some packages but they will not have the same options in my experience. Note that there are some gotcha's. Figuring out which track is the proper video track is a treat and audio can be a hassle too. THD I sample down to AC3:-( DTS I can handle and so can ALSA. Forget menus, and if you want the director's cut plus others FFMPEG doesn't support MKV's ability to store just the extra scenes and chapter skip - hard to explain but it's how BD stores multiple versions. A raw rip of a BD can be nearly 40gigs or more (forget storage size but SOME will use it). Kung-Fu Panda2 for instance - 17Gig for the raw movie. Animated so it squishes nice - 5gig no sound. AC3 audio so compressed already and it's 450megs for the audio, I leave it alone. I have other movies at 34gigs that shrink to 11 with 800meg soundtracks so you get the idea. A DTS track will be say 1.2Gig, I don't compress these.
For regular DVD I again use Slysoft's product and DVDShrink. I store to ISO format and I do not re-encode. DVD are tiny compared to BD!
Ummmm, why two nic? The HDD and it's bus are the bottleneck - I cannot max out a gig-E nic now on my server but can play 1080P via x.264 with surround sound DTS encoded on a 100meg connection. No stuttering, no issues, no muss no fuss. It's wired for gig-E but sadly this nic refuses to synch at it.
I WOULD run some sort of redundant storage. However I wouldn't go traditional RAID. Striping data across disks along with parity makes for lots of speed, also means the disks never shut down. No thanks! I happen to use unRAID from Lime Technology. Parity isn't striped, it's held on a single disk. Each disk uses a standard format - ResierFS (ick). But's journaled and standard enough that recovery is easier. On top of that I can pull a disk and get data from it on another machine - one disk removed I still see all my data. Last but not least - if I lose multiple disks at once I only lose the data on THOSE disks and not the entire thing. Losing one disk I lose nothing. In 6+ years or so I've never lost more than one disk. Since parity isn't striped and neither is data one of my servers has ALL drives spun down and quiet, the other has just 2. Between them I have a bit over 22TB worth of disk BTW and not all are 2TB disks but as I fill smaller ones I swap in 2TB disks, the system migrates the data fine. Other programs can be run on this system, it's Linux based, but it's trickier than a full OS install - which has been done by some too.
Honestly to me it sounds like his current setup is working save for disk space. Why not just upgrade to 2TB disks? Surely he has more than 4 ports? If add-on cards are needed they are plentiful. I would also suggest using 4n1 cages for easy swapping. A low speed CPU is fine, underclock it maybe too - HDD bus is the bottleneck!
Why do you say that's not possible? e-book authors are already racking up 500K in item sales although not on just one book yet that I know of. Now when you consider they often get more than $1 a sale yeah I can see a million bux being made. In fact I can see it being made more easily! Kripes look at say Angry Birds - think the guy who programmed that hasn't made a million? At least?
Is a 17% cut for you and a 52% cut for the publisher for eternity a good deal for you? Seriously? You ought to go read Konrath's blog - lots of it.... http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ Oh and they get to control pricing forever too - and will use it to prop up sagging paper sales and slow ebook adoption....
Is a 17% cut for you and a 52% cut for the publisher for eternity a good deal for you? Seriously? You ought to go read Konrath's blog - lots of it.... http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/
How about hours saved on a video encode or 30 minutes on a large code compile? Render any animation? People who do this are often not just doing it to play games anymore, there's plenty of CPU intensive tasks out there other than games.
Agree, I see these guys doing max speed runs that aren't sustainable and I shrug. When you can hold that speed for days on end then I'm more interested. I'll take a near 50% overclock that's stable any day of the week and keep my RAM and peripheral buss speeds down where they can be stable.
Video encoding Crypto cracking Compiling Rendering
Just a few of the things that overclocking is good for. What might suit you doesn't necessarily suit everyone else.... Now imagine your current machine with 4cores, 4 more hyperthread pseudo cores, and a higher clock. A clock that BTW isn't 1:1 with what you have now so even a slower clocked i7 might be faster than what you have. Still so sure it makes no difference? If so then yeah you're right web surfing and reading email aren't boosted by overclocking.
Well except that today's 3.4GHZ CPU can run nearly 5ghz with proper cooling while still running all 4 cores+. The increase in cores IS nice but sadly compiling with -j4 on my Atom machines I run into issues with the code almost as often as not and have to compile single thread - it sucks! That's compiling XMBC BTW and it takes awhile. Now, encoding video? Hell's yes the more cores the better! I have seen huge increases in FPS overclocking when encoding video, it can save hours and hours. I wish x.264 was using the GPU....
An Intel 2600K from 3.6ghz to 5ghz isn't completely uncommon and that's 4 real cores plus 4 added hyperthreads. C2D were pushing a 30%+ overclock too and that's two generations older.
Ummm no. For starters you don't know how high his was clocked. Mine were clocked up pretty good and when there were cooling failures the machine always locked up before any damage was done. I had one friend bring me back a machine I'd built for her because it was locking up. It was a P2 machine I think, had a slot processor card like the 300A did. Anyway, I am looking at the thing and cannot quite figure out what's wrong, why does the heatsink look funny? I reach in and grab the heatsink promptly leaving burned fingerprints on it! Turns out the fan had become unplugged and was no longer providing any airflow. The machine had apparently been like this for weeks before she brought it to me. All I did was plug the fan back in and it becamestable. That machine was overclocked about 40% and there was never an issue with it afterwards either.
That's also not a long build time. Overclocking my machine and moving from a 2 core Hyper machine to a 4core Hyper saves me HOURS when I'm encoding video. A long multithreaded compile is likely much the same I'd imagine. Judging from what I see on my two differently clocked Atom machines that compile XBMC even small changes make a difference on longer compiles...
I still overclock and nearly every PC I've ever owned has been overclocked to include an 8088 clocked up with a radio crystal back in the day (not a great idea). I was playing with water cooling and Peltiers before you could buy ANY hardware for that off the shelf too. Cut down heatsinks, PVC caps, fountain pumps, and overseas sourced Peltiers made for some really quick computers for their time! Games were fast, looked great, and I ran RC5 cracking programs to use up idle cycles for years.
Fast forward to the present. I still game but I am not quite into the really crazy high end stuff. I still use a PC for gaming almost exclusively. I no longer run programs in the background to eat up spare cycles and the cooling of my room thanks me for it. I AM running a water cooled CPU though using mostly off the shelf stuff that doesn't leak, my CPU is rock stable and not quite pushed to the edge. I upgraded my computer in the not so distant past for more speed and I'm pondering doing it again to the later SandyBridge architecture from my older i7 920 (4.1ghz). I'm also looking at the new 6core CPUs that have come out but they strip H.264 instructions apparently.:-(
Why? Well it certainly isn't gaming since right now games seems woefully poor at using multiple cores! Now I have another "hobby" and that is compressing video. I buy BluRay, rip them, and put them on my personal server for viewing on efficient Atom powered STBs (overclocked though lol). When I was doing this with a C2D running in the mid 3-4ghz range some movies like Watchmen took 8 hours or more to encode with my high settings. Now I can do a movie in 2 hours or less while still having CPU available to do other things. If I move to the more efficient CPUs produced now, and especially if x.264 supports their ENcoding instructions one day, my times will drop again as I should be able to hit close to 5ghz. At that point I'll either encode with higher settings or just enjoy that it's as fast as it's going to get. I boot from an SSD so that's quick enough. My video card is a fairly pedestrian GTX275 which might get a bump too, I'm not sure.
I have tinkered with using the GPU to encode as well. Right now my CPU alone can keep up with encoding on my GPU alone but mixing my GPU and CPU together (I found ONE package doing that and it wasn't x.264) was noticeably faster but severely limited my encoding options so I've stuck to CPU brute force. I'm hoping that with CUDA being open sourced more programs will begin using the GPU too.
I've processed A LOT of video and I do video for friends too sometimes. Being able to run tons of apps, lots of browser windows, and generally not care too much about what is and isn't running is a side benefit. I may try BF3 out but doubt it'll be so much better than UT2K4 that I'll be sold as it will likely be exponentially more difficult to play. I'd love to find more things to do with the CPU power I have and I do try to use power wisely. My server(s) are actually underclocked and sleep their drives when not being accessed, my video front-ends draw less than 15watts apiece, the PSU in this box is Silver rated and under 650watts. Rendering or compiling code would be fun but I am neither developer nor artist. Those of us who are could certainly find value in overclocking! I know a certain Apple guy who was pretty butt hurt his 8 core powerhouse costing quite a bit more than my computer couldn't encode video as quickly when he challenged me:-)
P.S. Yeah, I tinker with cars too, it's fun. I also laugh at those who talk about "shortened CPU lives" - get a clue. I have had exactly ONE CPU die and that was within the first 24 hours - warranty replaced. I've had overclocked CPU go for 5 years or more being passed down with no issue. This 920 has seen temps as high as 90C under full load for hours at a time when I had voltages too high and it's still ticking fine. My current peak is recorded as 75C. If you REALLY want to drop some heat water cool the video card, sadly these water blocks tend to be pretty custom and I don't do it since an upgrade on the video means a costly new block.
They doubled the length of their COURT FILING not their requirements. They revised their court filing to more clearly state their case and in doing so added in pages of requirements to the filing that weren't there to begin with. Further - Oracle used another college as an example of a successful implementation of their project doing similar sorts of work but FAILED to mention the fine print of the fact that the other college was using FOUR times the resources that this one had at it's disposal. There's also an interesting blurb in the article about Oracle demonstrating the system doing application management and representing this as being base functionality when in fact it was 3rd party code that they later wanted the university to purchase at additional cost from the sounds of it....
Is your reading comprehension really that bad or were you biased against the university to begin with? It remains to be seen who's at fault here but it sure doesn't sound great for Oracle right now.
If you had bothered to read the source article it sounds like the University did just that. Their documentation appears solid as to failures, they had a pretty extensive list of requirements, they used real-life use cases tests for bidding companies to demo against, they documented ALL interaction with Oracle, and it looks like this was a FFP contract that Oracle may have simply underestimated. It's interesting that Oracle stated they had a similar project ongoing for another school that was going well - with FOUR times the resources being applied than this university had available but that this fact wasn't revealed to them. Oracle supposedly demonstrated an applicant management process during their demos and apparently represented this as part of their base capability - then at implementation revealed that it was 3rd party code or libraries that would have to be purchased. Gee, no vendor would ever do that right?
What it will be to a court to decide is if the issues that were run into were as a result of the university or Oracle but the university certainly seems to have documented their case well. Your conclusion that they somehow simply believed and trusted Oracle on this doesn't appear to match up with the source article - perhaps you didn't bother to read it and simply read the sparse/. summary?
They don't have to - plenty of current authors outsource this to include cover art and editing at a huge savings over what the publishers charge. This isn't a good reason to stick with publishing houses...
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unRAID is NOT OpenSourced. It does run on Linux but it has closed source portions and it is locked to a USB key that you register. If the key dies Tom is damned good about replacing the license for you - been there done that. Tom does comply with the GPL, any code he modifies that's GPL is included with unRAID. His closed source stuff he keeps to himself and for the service he provides I'm okay with that. I run two of his servers and he's been very helpful over the many years. Slow to update software, bug fixes for new hardware can be slow too, but I have no complaints....
Except with unRAID, sorry I don't need enterprise RAID at home but the hardware you chose is solid and the 5n1 adapters rock! I can stream 1080P video with DTS on a 100meg NIC, I sure don't need RAID 5 or 6 spinning my drives all day, let them spin down :)
You DO realize that normal SD DVD had DRM too right? It had the SAME sorts of restrictions that BD has now and so did HD-DVD! The only difference was that the DRM was easier to defeat because they couldn't swap keys as they were compromised. You're not doing anything different now with DVD than you would be with BD. Strip the DRM from BD, re-encode if you want it smaller, and then watch that much nicer picture. It's harder, it's more time consuming, and you don't end up with menus and advertisements. You can keep the director soundtracks though if you want :-)
I'd also argue that a laser beam does no damage to a DVD or BD. The damage these gets is from oxygen leaking into the media and oxidizing the metal. This is real, it's happened to some of my CD. Scratches happen but so long as they aren't on the label side they can be recovered with a buffer - a car wax like Nu-Finish with distillates works wonders too.
BTW - where did the GP imply piracy at ALL in his posting? I didn't get that and if you saw MKV and thought that meant piracy then you need to get out more. MKV is THE best container to store video content in. It supports most codec, supports subtitles - both forced and normal, supports multiple videos if you want, can support multiple soundtracks, and can even support menus if people would make tools for it. I see nothing in his post about piracy, I DO see someone with the same issues I have archiving BD which is apparently a medium you've not educated yourself on enough.
Umm, why not strip the DRM from the BD and store those too? the picture really is much better even if you re-encode them for smaller storage. I have a post above about this but yeah it's doable. I also have about the same amount of storgae as you but it's not backed up other than the unRAID software's protections. It's simply too expensive to have a full dupe for me :(
XBMC however on the old hardware it's not going to do high bitrate HD. Better to go ION hardware or an aTV with XBMC, it's been ported to Linux, Windows, and OSX - Plex is based on it.
Sure! You just have to get the right hardware and after tinkering with ESX for awhile I gave up on it. None of my onboard NICs were supported! No thanks, wake me when it's running on broader hardware support.
Well... you do know MythTV can run in Windows now right? I'm betting with a little work NetFlix could indeed be up and running....
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythTV_on_Windows
Not the submitter but.... i do lots of this :)
Atom machines running Ubuntu and XBMC are my front-ends, I use MCE remotes and HDMI for sound and video. 1080P with an ION chipset accelerated using VDPAU is wonderful. Sound can be a hassle to get working with Alsa but it can be done. If this sounds too expensive or complex or whatever - look at the WDLive that was just revamped. $99, supports local storage, wireless, and network shares. XBMC is way nicer though! ;-)
Backend I mentioned this above - unRAID with many SATA disks, works well and sips power when the drives sleep.
Ripping... Slysoft AnyDVD-HD for decryption of BD (yes Win7). I use eac3to to pull the audio and video from the disks. I use x264 to encode and I wrap it all in MKV containers. When there are forced subs I use BDsup2Sub to get them compatible for MKV. As a front-end for the ripping and encoding I use meGUI. It has a GUI for eac3to and can encode the video and even audio if you want. I have some tutorials on various sites for how I do that, feel free to ask questions though. you will want a fast CPU or lots of time - a movie takes me 2-3 hours to encode. 4cores with hyperthreading running 4+ghz gets me 18FPS or so . You can go faster with lower quality or even use the GPU with some packages but they will not have the same options in my experience. Note that there are some gotcha's. Figuring out which track is the proper video track is a treat and audio can be a hassle too. THD I sample down to AC3 :-( DTS I can handle and so can ALSA. Forget menus, and if you want the director's cut plus others FFMPEG doesn't support MKV's ability to store just the extra scenes and chapter skip - hard to explain but it's how BD stores multiple versions. A raw rip of a BD can be nearly 40gigs or more (forget storage size but SOME will use it). Kung-Fu Panda2 for instance - 17Gig for the raw movie. Animated so it squishes nice - 5gig no sound. AC3 audio so compressed already and it's 450megs for the audio, I leave it alone. I have other movies at 34gigs that shrink to 11 with 800meg soundtracks so you get the idea. A DTS track will be say 1.2Gig, I don't compress these.
For regular DVD I again use Slysoft's product and DVDShrink. I store to ISO format and I do not re-encode. DVD are tiny compared to BD!
Hope that helps some :-)
Ummmm, why two nic? The HDD and it's bus are the bottleneck - I cannot max out a gig-E nic now on my server but can play 1080P via x.264 with surround sound DTS encoded on a 100meg connection. No stuttering, no issues, no muss no fuss. It's wired for gig-E but sadly this nic refuses to synch at it.
I WOULD run some sort of redundant storage. However I wouldn't go traditional RAID. Striping data across disks along with parity makes for lots of speed, also means the disks never shut down. No thanks! I happen to use unRAID from Lime Technology. Parity isn't striped, it's held on a single disk. Each disk uses a standard format - ResierFS (ick). But's journaled and standard enough that recovery is easier. On top of that I can pull a disk and get data from it on another machine - one disk removed I still see all my data. Last but not least - if I lose multiple disks at once I only lose the data on THOSE disks and not the entire thing. Losing one disk I lose nothing. In 6+ years or so I've never lost more than one disk. Since parity isn't striped and neither is data one of my servers has ALL drives spun down and quiet, the other has just 2. Between them I have a bit over 22TB worth of disk BTW and not all are 2TB disks but as I fill smaller ones I swap in 2TB disks, the system migrates the data fine. Other programs can be run on this system, it's Linux based, but it's trickier than a full OS install - which has been done by some too.
Honestly to me it sounds like his current setup is working save for disk space. Why not just upgrade to 2TB disks? Surely he has more than 4 ports? If add-on cards are needed they are plentiful. I would also suggest using 4n1 cages for easy swapping. A low speed CPU is fine, underclock it maybe too - HDD bus is the bottleneck!
Why do you say that's not possible? e-book authors are already racking up 500K in item sales although not on just one book yet that I know of. Now when you consider they often get more than $1 a sale yeah I can see a million bux being made. In fact I can see it being made more easily! Kripes look at say Angry Birds - think the guy who programmed that hasn't made a million? At least?
Is a 17% cut for you and a 52% cut for the publisher for eternity a good deal for you? Seriously? You ought to go read Konrath's blog - lots of it.... http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ Oh and they get to control pricing forever too - and will use it to prop up sagging paper sales and slow ebook adoption....
Is a 17% cut for you and a 52% cut for the publisher for eternity a good deal for you? Seriously? You ought to go read Konrath's blog - lots of it.... http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/
Kids hell, I know a TON of adults that began reading again in earnest when Potter came out! You think those overnight lines were all for kids? :-)
Seriously? If this is tracked I'd love to know that this is significant in some way and not just a blip...
How about hours saved on a video encode or 30 minutes on a large code compile? Render any animation? People who do this are often not just doing it to play games anymore, there's plenty of CPU intensive tasks out there other than games.
Agree, I see these guys doing max speed runs that aren't sustainable and I shrug. When you can hold that speed for days on end then I'm more interested. I'll take a near 50% overclock that's stable any day of the week and keep my RAM and peripheral buss speeds down where they can be stable.
Video encoding
Crypto cracking
Compiling
Rendering
Just a few of the things that overclocking is good for. What might suit you doesn't necessarily suit everyone else.... Now imagine your current machine with 4cores, 4 more hyperthread pseudo cores, and a higher clock. A clock that BTW isn't 1:1 with what you have now so even a slower clocked i7 might be faster than what you have. Still so sure it makes no difference? If so then yeah you're right web surfing and reading email aren't boosted by overclocking.
Well except that today's 3.4GHZ CPU can run nearly 5ghz with proper cooling while still running all 4 cores+. The increase in cores IS nice but sadly compiling with -j4 on my Atom machines I run into issues with the code almost as often as not and have to compile single thread - it sucks! That's compiling XMBC BTW and it takes awhile. Now, encoding video? Hell's yes the more cores the better! I have seen huge increases in FPS overclocking when encoding video, it can save hours and hours. I wish x.264 was using the GPU....
An Intel 2600K from 3.6ghz to 5ghz isn't completely uncommon and that's 4 real cores plus 4 added hyperthreads. C2D were pushing a 30%+ overclock too and that's two generations older.
Ummm no. For starters you don't know how high his was clocked. Mine were clocked up pretty good and when there were cooling failures the machine always locked up before any damage was done. I had one friend bring me back a machine I'd built for her because it was locking up. It was a P2 machine I think, had a slot processor card like the 300A did. Anyway, I am looking at the thing and cannot quite figure out what's wrong, why does the heatsink look funny? I reach in and grab the heatsink promptly leaving burned fingerprints on it! Turns out the fan had become unplugged and was no longer providing any airflow. The machine had apparently been like this for weeks before she brought it to me. All I did was plug the fan back in and it becamestable. That machine was overclocked about 40% and there was never an issue with it afterwards either.
That's also not a long build time. Overclocking my machine and moving from a 2 core Hyper machine to a 4core Hyper saves me HOURS when I'm encoding video. A long multithreaded compile is likely much the same I'd imagine. Judging from what I see on my two differently clocked Atom machines that compile XBMC even small changes make a difference on longer compiles...
I still overclock and nearly every PC I've ever owned has been overclocked to include an 8088 clocked up with a radio crystal back in the day (not a great idea). I was playing with water cooling and Peltiers before you could buy ANY hardware for that off the shelf too. Cut down heatsinks, PVC caps, fountain pumps, and overseas sourced Peltiers made for some really quick computers for their time! Games were fast, looked great, and I ran RC5 cracking programs to use up idle cycles for years.
Fast forward to the present. I still game but I am not quite into the really crazy high end stuff. I still use a PC for gaming almost exclusively. I no longer run programs in the background to eat up spare cycles and the cooling of my room thanks me for it. I AM running a water cooled CPU though using mostly off the shelf stuff that doesn't leak, my CPU is rock stable and not quite pushed to the edge. I upgraded my computer in the not so distant past for more speed and I'm pondering doing it again to the later SandyBridge architecture from my older i7 920 (4.1ghz). I'm also looking at the new 6core CPUs that have come out but they strip H.264 instructions apparently. :-(
Why? Well it certainly isn't gaming since right now games seems woefully poor at using multiple cores! Now I have another "hobby" and that is compressing video. I buy BluRay, rip them, and put them on my personal server for viewing on efficient Atom powered STBs (overclocked though lol). When I was doing this with a C2D running in the mid 3-4ghz range some movies like Watchmen took 8 hours or more to encode with my high settings. Now I can do a movie in 2 hours or less while still having CPU available to do other things. If I move to the more efficient CPUs produced now, and especially if x.264 supports their ENcoding instructions one day, my times will drop again as I should be able to hit close to 5ghz. At that point I'll either encode with higher settings or just enjoy that it's as fast as it's going to get. I boot from an SSD so that's quick enough. My video card is a fairly pedestrian GTX275 which might get a bump too, I'm not sure.
I have tinkered with using the GPU to encode as well. Right now my CPU alone can keep up with encoding on my GPU alone but mixing my GPU and CPU together (I found ONE package doing that and it wasn't x.264) was noticeably faster but severely limited my encoding options so I've stuck to CPU brute force. I'm hoping that with CUDA being open sourced more programs will begin using the GPU too.
I've processed A LOT of video and I do video for friends too sometimes. Being able to run tons of apps, lots of browser windows, and generally not care too much about what is and isn't running is a side benefit. I may try BF3 out but doubt it'll be so much better than UT2K4 that I'll be sold as it will likely be exponentially more difficult to play. I'd love to find more things to do with the CPU power I have and I do try to use power wisely. My server(s) are actually underclocked and sleep their drives when not being accessed, my video front-ends draw less than 15watts apiece, the PSU in this box is Silver rated and under 650watts. Rendering or compiling code would be fun but I am neither developer nor artist. Those of us who are could certainly find value in overclocking! I know a certain Apple guy who was pretty butt hurt his 8 core powerhouse costing quite a bit more than my computer couldn't encode video as quickly when he challenged me :-)
P.S. Yeah, I tinker with cars too, it's fun. I also laugh at those who talk about "shortened CPU lives" - get a clue. I have had exactly ONE CPU die and that was within the first 24 hours - warranty replaced. I've had overclocked CPU go for 5 years or more being passed down with no issue. This 920 has seen temps as high as 90C under full load for hours at a time when I had voltages too high and it's still ticking fine. My current peak is recorded as 75C. If you REALLY want to drop some heat water cool the video card, sadly these water blocks tend to be pretty custom and I don't do it since an upgrade on the video means a costly new block.
They doubled the length of their COURT FILING not their requirements. They revised their court filing to more clearly state their case and in doing so added in pages of requirements to the filing that weren't there to begin with. Further - Oracle used another college as an example of a successful implementation of their project doing similar sorts of work but FAILED to mention the fine print of the fact that the other college was using FOUR times the resources that this one had at it's disposal. There's also an interesting blurb in the article about Oracle demonstrating the system doing application management and representing this as being base functionality when in fact it was 3rd party code that they later wanted the university to purchase at additional cost from the sounds of it....
Is your reading comprehension really that bad or were you biased against the university to begin with? It remains to be seen who's at fault here but it sure doesn't sound great for Oracle right now.
If you had bothered to read the source article it sounds like the University did just that. Their documentation appears solid as to failures, they had a pretty extensive list of requirements, they used real-life use cases tests for bidding companies to demo against, they documented ALL interaction with Oracle, and it looks like this was a FFP contract that Oracle may have simply underestimated. It's interesting that Oracle stated they had a similar project ongoing for another school that was going well - with FOUR times the resources being applied than this university had available but that this fact wasn't revealed to them. Oracle supposedly demonstrated an applicant management process during their demos and apparently represented this as part of their base capability - then at implementation revealed that it was 3rd party code or libraries that would have to be purchased. Gee, no vendor would ever do that right?
What it will be to a court to decide is if the issues that were run into were as a result of the university or Oracle but the university certainly seems to have documented their case well. Your conclusion that they somehow simply believed and trusted Oracle on this doesn't appear to match up with the source article - perhaps you didn't bother to read it and simply read the sparse /. summary?
They don't have to - plenty of current authors outsource this to include cover art and editing at a huge savings over what the publishers charge. This isn't a good reason to stick with publishing houses...