Re:PC-based DVRs have massive drawbacks...
on
Build Your Own DVR
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Your argument against is actually the beauty of PVR's.
TV full of crap? Get your PVR to record the few shows a week you actually like, that are often on at stupid hours. Then you can sit down at your lesiure and put on whatever you like from what your PVR's recorded over the last few days. Use a PVR as to filter out all that garbage, and suddenly TV is a lot more tolerable.
This is the main reason I have a PVR. It (MythTv) also holds my entire audio collection, about 100 DVD's and 2500 digital photos.
and am not impressed by both your comments. Did it add anything to the discussion? I'll just mod you down, instead. But then I can't explain the reason why I'm modding you down! Bloody modding-and-posting rule! Ok, look, don't feel left out, I'll mod you down in the next article.
Non-skippable playback is one of the most annoying "features" of DVD. It's like the marketing-droids went, "Hey! this *random access* optical disk, lets deliberately cripple it! And,and... we'll make it so that there's no way to tell if you've sat through it before, so we'll make you sit through it every time!! Yeah!!"
As a pilot, I'd be really annoyed that a professional engineer decided to use a really sensitive op-amp in my plane, and to leave it unshielded.
Read through the Risks Digest some time. Stupider things happen - and they happen a lot more often than you would like.
As I mentioned, it's all about removing unknown variables. Has anyone does any rigourous testing of the effects of bluetooth devices on avionics? Yes? No? Don't know? Then lets just keep all the bluetooth activity to a minimum, to be on the safe side:-)
I don't know about you, but I was on a flight out of Singapore once...
Casual Pilot: "Good evening everyone, we're ready to taxi, estimated flight time to Sydney is 8 hours, (blah,blah, casual pilot chatter). Turn off all your cellphones for the duration of the flight, please."
Plane begins to taxi.
Plane abruptly stops taxiing.
Grumpy Pilot: "Whoever's using their cellphone, please turn it *off*. Crew, search the cabin."
After a pause of a few minutes, Plane begins taxiing again.
So, hell, maybe they've got a few blinkenlights that blink when someone's got the phone on. As for bluetooth, yes, the power is miniscule. But as a pilot, you'd be pissed off if the plane you're flying lost some crucial function, because of eg. an overload of some very sensitive preamp that happens to be in the roof just above some passenger using bluetooth.
So, I think they (and I!) would rather just leave the unknown variables out of the whole flying equation as much as possible, thanks very much.
65 million years and a lot of heat and pressure within the earth's crust and mantle (remember continental drift and how the crust is "recycled") will remove all of those objects from existence, if they ever existed in the first place. That's funny , I can still find leaf imprints in 100-million year old coal seams.... why can't I find any evidence of tools?
don't worry about the nuclear-powerplant-style cooling tower - it will go perfectly well with the nuclear-powerplant-style er, power plant that's in your basement:-)
Say, for example, your boot drive goes out in a software RAID configuration.
Hmm, I've never really had that problem with bootable mirrored software RAID's that I've setup. There was a HOWTO about bootable software raid somewhere.... but it's what I used in the following.
I had a lab server on a remote site set up with two mirrored drives and the BIOS set to boot the first drive...then the second. That way, if one died, as they are a mirrored pair, everything still reboots fine. md detects the dud/missing drive and soldiers on with the other one. You shut it down, replace the dead drive, power up and use mdadm to configure your replacement. And it apparently did work, 'cause one week I went to visit the site, and found that one IDE cable had been pulled out, by person(s) unknown(!!).
Of course, this is just with a mirrored drive. All those other raid configurations are a bit more difficult/impossible to deal with, but it's handy to do if all you've got is a shedful of old parts and you need RAID.
That site had a lot of people with the "windows" mentality - unfortunately, I couldn't secure the server anywhere safe: Luser: "Hmmm, I can't reach the file on the server... it must be stuffed!"
(luser hits reset button on front of server)
(again)
(again)
(again)
(luser notices other PC's connect to server fine)
(decides to restart windows on their PC) Luser: "oh, it works now!" Me(reading system logs remotely): "WTF?"
(makes mental note to unplug reset button on next visit)
Still does , in fact:-) I used to work with a leco sulfur analyser that is dos 6.22 based with a 486 PC-on-a-card with an isa backplane'n'stuff. I dropped an old network card in it and (with the appropriate dos drivers and IRQ fiddling) got it to talk nicely with our XP/98/Samba network. We used it to snare the daily results out of it. This was the easiest way to get the data - the alternative was a floppy, printer or serial connection. The tech guys at leco nearly had kittens when I told them I did that though:-)
It sounds as if they've no firm idea on what they need.
Personally, I'd tell them that there is no current alternative that will suit all their requirements, and perhaps they should consider the simple PDF/HTML setup as an interim step. Suggest that perhaps after a 6/12 month bedding-in period, they would then have a good idea of what is needed and then they could head on down the track to something that is suitable for everyone.
Phrase it in lots of PHB-speak though. Something like "aggregate time-based usability heuristic analysis" sounds good. Mention that it would be costly (both in $ and man-hours wasted) to barge off in some direction, any direction, just for the sake of having an online document repository **right now**. Don't be obstructive about it, try and present yourself as the cool head of reason.
Later, in the real world, logs could be analysed as to how people go about accessing the docs. Eg. Perhaps people would prefer to get the whole manual rather than chapter-by-chapter, especially if your documentation is a little... scattered,with references to other chapters/pages/ etc.
Quoth the submitter: "Adobe PDF with a simple HTML index was suggested, is cheap, and is easily workable. Which (of course) immediately made that solution out of the question. LOL!"
The poster was describing how the earth is not like a balloon and that you cannot compare them.
Then, without any apparent thought or reasoning, you try and compare a balloon and a tyre.
Note that he mentioned that there was a small amount of pressure in the balloon. This is because balloons are stretchy - they stretch quite easily when inflated.
Tyres are a lot less stretchy, being: (a) A hell of a lot thicker than your average balloon. (b) bound and reinforced internally with plies to keep the whole thing from blowing up like.... a balloon.
Tyres are a lot closer to a rigid disc than a balloon - they will (generally) only inflate to a certain volume. After that, the air pressure in a tyre rises substantially, allowing you to suspend your 1500kg car on a cushion of air trapped in the tyre.
The benefits are small. The energy needed to shift a payload from the bottom to the top remains the same with or without the structure. The amount of money and energy spent on building the structure needs to be recovered in improved efficiency, and that seems unlikely.
*cough* unless you decide to make the climber electric, or powered by a handy nuke-plant down below (or above), or make it petrol-powered for the first 40 kilometers while there's still air, or something like that. You could even do something such as solar-power it. Who cares if it takes two months (during the day:-) to get to orbit, if it costs you nothing and you've got 10 of them on the ribbon at once?
Remember, solid fuel rockets (or *anything* that "hovers") have to have to supply at least enough thrust to hold you stationary, before you even begin to move up. Unfortunately, this is also the weight of your rocket at launch and so a crapload of fuel is needed. A relatively small, gear-driven climber does not have this problem.
Apart from the fact that may have trouble getting various parts wet , it sounds like the easiest way is to:
Enter room with suit on Fill with water Swish around a bit empty water dump atmosphere back to vacuum water the water boil off your suit - insta-dry! proceed to normal airlock
Pulled from a Propane MSDS: Flammable Limits - Lower: 2.2% Flammable Limits - Upper: 9.5%
Anything outside that, and it won't go bang. Compared to flying shrapnel from a large ruptured compressed air tank, I'd take the propane any day, thanks. You can clear the area if there's a gas leak.... you don't have time to do anything when a air tank lets go.
Pressure of a propane tank at 100 deg F is 175PSI - this is a pressure that can be easily managed. Take note too, that any major pressure loss on a propane tank will instantly drop the temperature of the remaining liquid in the tank (as it boils), resulting in less pressure - check a Pressure-Temperature chart for propane sometime.
Compressed air at a few thousand PSI is a lot more trouble to deal with in an accident.
About 15 years ago, our australian telco (Telecom in those days) began to lose it's monopoly. Authorities realised that soon just about any joe from just about any company would be coming around,fiddling with phone lines. But, oops. Telecom (now telstra) still owns the local loop of copper between the exchange and your house.... and the potential for fark-related-hilarity was obvious to most people.
What to do?
Austel, the telecommunications authority, decided to implement a licensing scheme. Basically , if any part of your network interfaces with the phone lines coming from the street, well, you need to be an austel-licensed cabler to do anything with it. Becoming an austel licensed cabler is not hard, any monkey can do go through the motions.
Perhaps you should investigate asterisk (as some people have mentioned previously). Get all your lines terminated at a patch panel, put a nice server in the cupboard and ethernet from there on out to IP phones and the like. It might come out at the same price at the end, but you'll end up with a much more flexible system. You'll also have the advantage of getting on the IP telecom bandwagon and probably save a heap'o'cash in the long run on your phone bills.
You read the content from all the other news providers that are indexed via google news. They are the ones that understand that no (easily acessible) news is BAD news for your news-distribution-company.
Google provides a short summary, and links to the site in question that provides the article. Surely this can only be a good thing for companies selling news? I would think that if you had a site with AFP content, and now suddenly all your google news hits disappear, you'd be looking for alternative news sources pronto.
Well, there *are* different types of shielding - you can get (for example) quad-screened coax, with a foil inner wrapper and tightly wound outer screen, that has ~98% coverage. Compare that to your cheap-ass made in china cable that is 75% plastic outer sheath, 2 tiny conductors, and a flyscreen-like screen that lets a whole heap'o EM right on in.
If you feel an urge to buy *any* of the stuff on the page, well then monster cable is definitely for you.
A 30 watt solid state amplifier , costing 6000 bucks (!), that doesn't come with a power supply - the battery supply (!!) suggested is another 2000.
Seriously, now - What. The. FUCK.
Oh, and some nice wooden turned volume knobs for that extra sweetness in the audio (!!!) will only set you back another 500 each, because as we all know "the micro vibrations created by the volume pots and knobs find their way into the delicate signal path and cause degradation (Bad vibrations equal bad sound)."
I keep this page bookmarked as "Audiophiles are idiots", and send to anyone who asks me about what kind of cabling they should run for their system.
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument against is actually the beauty of PVR's.
TV full of crap? Get your PVR to record the few shows a week you actually like, that are often on at stupid hours. Then you can sit down at your lesiure and put on whatever you like from what your PVR's recorded over the last few days.
Use a PVR as to filter out all that garbage, and suddenly TV is a lot more tolerable.
This is the main reason I have a PVR. It (MythTv) also holds my entire audio collection, about 100 DVD's and 2500 digital photos.
You don't mind if I invoke godwins law, do you?
and am not impressed by both your comments. Did it add anything to the discussion?
I'll just mod you down, instead.
But then I can't explain the reason why I'm modding you down! Bloody modding-and-posting rule! Ok, look, don't feel left out, I'll mod you down in the next article.
congratulations, you've just decribed FreeNet :-)
Non-skippable playback is one of the most annoying "features" of DVD. ... we'll make it so that there's no way to tell if you've sat through it before, so we'll make you sit through it every time!! Yeah!!"
It's like the marketing-droids went, "Hey! this *random access* optical disk, lets deliberately cripple it! And,and
Fuckers, fuckers, fuckers.
Anyway, see my previous post on my personal solution to the matter.
As a pilot, I'd be really annoyed that a professional engineer decided to use a really sensitive op-amp in my plane, and to leave it unshielded.
:-)
Read through the Risks Digest some time. Stupider things happen - and they happen a lot more often than you would like.
As I mentioned, it's all about removing unknown variables. Has anyone does any rigourous testing of the effects of bluetooth devices on avionics? Yes? No? Don't know? Then lets just keep all the bluetooth activity to a minimum, to be on the safe side
Hmmm. I'm pretty sure that there's a (theoretical) limit - once your black hole is smaller than an atom, well, it doesn't really bump into too much.
Of course, I have no idea of how much matter you need to make a non-subatomic-sized black hole.
I don't know about you, but I was on a flight out of Singapore once...
,blah, casual pilot chatter). Turn off all your cellphones for the duration of the flight, please."
Casual Pilot: "Good evening everyone, we're ready to taxi, estimated flight time to Sydney is 8 hours, (blah
Plane begins to taxi.
Plane abruptly stops taxiing.
Grumpy Pilot: "Whoever's using their cellphone, please turn it *off*. Crew, search the cabin."
After a pause of a few minutes, Plane begins taxiing again.
So, hell, maybe they've got a few blinkenlights that blink when someone's got the phone on. As for bluetooth, yes, the power is miniscule. But as a pilot, you'd be pissed off if the plane you're flying lost some crucial function, because of eg. an overload of some very sensitive preamp that happens to be in the roof just above some passenger using bluetooth.
So, I think they (and I!) would rather just leave the unknown variables out of the whole flying equation as much as possible, thanks very much.
65 million years and a lot of heat and pressure within the earth's crust and mantle (remember continental drift and how the crust is "recycled") will remove all of those objects from existence, if they ever existed in the first place.
That's funny , I can still find leaf imprints in 100-million year old coal seams.... why can't I find any evidence of tools?
Far out man, your post is just a blast from the past!
If you replace every GB with MB, it'd be soooo 1992 again. Well, except for the opteron references.... but you know what I mean, dammit.
don't worry about the nuclear-powerplant-style cooling tower - it will go perfectly well with the nuclear-powerplant-style er, power plant that's in your basement :-)
Say, for example, your boot drive goes out in a software RAID configuration.
:
Hmm, I've never really had that problem with bootable mirrored software RAID's that I've setup.
There was a HOWTO about bootable software raid somewhere.... but it's what I used in the following.
I had a lab server on a remote site set up with two mirrored drives and the BIOS set to boot the first drive...then the second. That way, if one died, as they are a mirrored pair, everything still reboots fine. md detects the dud/missing drive and soldiers on with the other one. You shut it down, replace the dead drive, power up and use mdadm to configure your replacement.
And it apparently did work, 'cause one week I went to visit the site, and found that one IDE cable had been pulled out, by person(s) unknown(!!).
Of course, this is just with a mirrored drive. All those other raid configurations are a bit more difficult/impossible to deal with, but it's handy to do if all you've got is a shedful of old parts and you need RAID.
That site had a lot of people with the "windows" mentality - unfortunately, I couldn't secure the server anywhere safe
Luser: "Hmmm, I can't reach the file on the server... it must be stuffed!"
(luser hits reset button on front of server)
(again)
(again)
(again)
(luser notices other PC's connect to server fine)
(decides to restart windows on their PC)
Luser: "oh, it works now!"
Me(reading system logs remotely): "WTF?"
(makes mental note to unplug reset button on next visit)
Still does , in fact :-) :-)
I used to work with a leco sulfur analyser that is dos 6.22 based with a 486 PC-on-a-card with an isa backplane'n'stuff. I dropped an old network card in it and (with the appropriate dos drivers and IRQ fiddling) got it to talk nicely with our XP/98/Samba network. We used it to snare the daily results out of it. This was the easiest way to get the data - the alternative was a floppy, printer or serial connection. The tech guys at leco nearly had kittens when I told them I did that though
It sounds as if they've no firm idea on what they need.
Personally, I'd tell them that there is no current alternative that will suit all their requirements, and perhaps they should consider the simple PDF/HTML setup as an interim step.
Suggest that perhaps after a 6/12 month bedding-in period, they would then have a good idea of what is needed and then they could head on down the track to something that is suitable for everyone.
Phrase it in lots of PHB-speak though. Something like "aggregate time-based usability heuristic analysis" sounds good. Mention that it would be costly (both in $ and man-hours wasted) to barge off in some direction, any direction, just for the sake of having an online document repository **right now**. Don't be obstructive about it, try and present yourself as the cool head of reason.
Later, in the real world, logs could be analysed as to how people go about accessing the docs.
Eg. Perhaps people would prefer to get the whole manual rather than chapter-by-chapter, especially if your documentation is a little... scattered,with references to other chapters/pages/ etc.
Quoth the submitter :
"Adobe PDF with a simple HTML index was suggested, is cheap, and is easily workable. Which (of course) immediately made that solution out of the question. LOL!"
Way to totally miss the point.
.... a balloon.
The poster was describing how the earth is not like a balloon and that you cannot compare them.
Then, without any apparent thought or reasoning, you try and compare a balloon and a tyre.
Note that he mentioned that there was a small amount of pressure in the balloon. This is because balloons are stretchy - they stretch quite easily when inflated.
Tyres are a lot less stretchy, being:
(a) A hell of a lot thicker than your average balloon.
(b) bound and reinforced internally with plies to keep the whole thing from blowing up like
Tyres are a lot closer to a rigid disc than a balloon - they will (generally) only inflate to a certain volume. After that, the air pressure in a tyre rises substantially, allowing you to suspend your 1500kg car on a cushion of air trapped in the tyre.
The benefits are small. The energy needed to shift a payload from the bottom to the top remains the same with or without the structure. The amount of money and energy spent on building the structure needs to be recovered in improved efficiency, and that seems unlikely.
:-) to get to orbit, if it costs you nothing and you've got 10 of them on the ribbon at once?
*cough* unless you decide to make the climber electric, or powered by a handy nuke-plant down below (or above), or make it petrol-powered for the first 40 kilometers while there's still air, or something like that. You could even do something such as solar-power it. Who cares if it takes two months (during the day
Remember, solid fuel rockets (or *anything* that "hovers") have to have to supply at least enough thrust to hold you stationary, before you even begin to move up. Unfortunately, this is also the weight of your rocket at launch and so a crapload of fuel is needed. A relatively small, gear-driven climber does not have this problem.
Try a MOOSE perhaps? Surely 40 years of materials development since the initial design tests could help to make one without much hassle.
Apart from the fact that may have trouble getting various parts wet , it sounds like the easiest way is to :
Enter room with suit on
Fill with water
Swish around a bit
empty water
dump atmosphere back to vacuum
water the water boil off your suit - insta-dry!
proceed to normal airlock
Pulled from a Propane MSDS :
Flammable Limits - Lower: 2.2%
Flammable Limits - Upper: 9.5%
Anything outside that, and it won't go bang.
Compared to flying shrapnel from a large ruptured compressed air tank, I'd take the propane any day, thanks. You can clear the area if there's a gas leak.... you don't have time to do anything when a air tank lets go.
Pressure of a propane tank at 100 deg F is 175PSI - this is a pressure that can be easily managed.
Take note too, that any major pressure loss on a propane tank will instantly drop the temperature of the remaining liquid in the tank (as it boils), resulting in less pressure - check a Pressure-Temperature chart for propane sometime.
Compressed air at a few thousand PSI is a lot more trouble to deal with in an accident.
About 15 years ago, our australian telco (Telecom in those days) began to lose it's monopoly. Authorities realised that soon just about any joe from just about any company would be coming around ,fiddling with phone lines. But, oops. Telecom (now telstra) still owns the local loop of copper between the exchange and your house.... and the potential for fark-related-hilarity was obvious to most people.
What to do?
Austel, the telecommunications authority, decided to implement a licensing scheme. Basically , if any part of your network interfaces with the phone lines coming from the street, well, you need to be an austel-licensed cabler to do anything with it. Becoming an austel licensed cabler is not hard, any monkey can do go through the motions.
Perhaps you should investigate asterisk (as some people have mentioned previously). Get all your lines terminated at a patch panel, put a nice server in the cupboard and ethernet from there on out to IP phones and the like. It might come out at the same price at the end, but you'll end up with a much more flexible system. You'll also have the advantage of getting on the IP telecom bandwagon and probably save a heap'o'cash in the long run on your phone bills.
You read the content from all the other news providers that are indexed via google news. They are the ones that understand that no (easily acessible) news is BAD news for your news-distribution-company.
Google provides a short summary, and links to the site in question that provides the article. Surely this can only be a good thing for companies selling news? I would think that if you had a site with AFP content, and now suddenly all your google news hits disappear, you'd be looking for alternative news sources pronto.
Well, there *are* different types of shielding - you can get (for example) quad-screened coax, with a foil inner wrapper and tightly wound outer screen, that has ~98% coverage. Compare that to your cheap-ass made in china cable that is 75% plastic outer sheath, 2 tiny conductors, and a flyscreen-like screen that lets a whole heap'o EM right on in.
Check out this site :
Reference Audio Mods
If you feel an urge to buy *any* of the stuff on the page, well then monster cable is definitely for you.
A 30 watt solid state amplifier , costing 6000 bucks (!), that doesn't come with a power supply - the battery supply (!!) suggested is another 2000.
Seriously, now - What. The. FUCK.
Oh, and some nice wooden turned volume knobs for that extra sweetness in the audio (!!!) will only set you back another 500 each, because as we all know "the micro vibrations created by the volume pots and knobs find their way into the delicate signal path and cause degradation (Bad vibrations equal bad sound)."
I keep this page bookmarked as "Audiophiles are idiots", and send to anyone who asks me about what kind of cabling they should run for their system.