My experience with older machines is that ripping (extracting the data from the DVD to a raw file) takes about 30 minutes. Transcoding to a compressed format takes 6-8 hours on a 1-1.5 Ghz machine. So say we have good scalability and transcoding time is 4 hours on a 3 Ghz machine (I don't know what the real number is). It would be hard to keep up (ripping) with the cluster if you had 4-5 3 Ghz machines. I don't think the bottle neck is network bandwidth or NFS, its the DVD IO. Now if you had multiple machines ripping, you might be getting somewhere.
For one, this is CA, their job is writing software. But I think you realize that.
As for other situations. If you are going to get a certain level of support for a product (new features, custom installations), that is going to cost you a certain number of dollars, whether it be licensing costs (you need to be a large enough customer to have that level of influence with a vendor), or it be in hiring developer time to work on an OS project.
I would love to see some sort of feature wishlist where smaller companies could vote with their dollars on certain bugs or features. I've heard of bounty systems like this being tried, and I would love to hear more about why they haven't really worked yet.
You are right about the OS community being quick to jump on the "code it yourself" excuse. But that is reality of dealing with volunteers. Some are motivated by competing with commercial products, and will work on features to make that happen. Others are totally unconcerned with what corporations think about their work. At the end of the day, many developers are scratching their own itch and shouldn't be expected to care about what other people want their software to do.
At the same time as some people are quick to jump on this excuse, others are quick to assume that the goal of OS should be to beat proprietary software. This is simply not many peoples goal.
To further expand on this, if CA thinks the kernel is unstable because developers are working on game drivers instead of stability, then they should hire some developers themselves. Part of your contract with open source is that you can't tell a guy working for free that he is working on the wrong thing. If you want a certain feature, here is always a price. There are plenty of examples of open source developers being hired by employers to work on feature the employer is specifically interested in.
I think the issue then becomes, what band has the legal resources to defend the copyrights on their work? If we are saying that bands have a right to sell their own CDs, then there has to be some sort of a copyright on those CDs.
Maybe the price of the CD has to be so low that it wouldn't be worth stealing (value added of the packaging and artwork == price). But then the question still remains, are bands better off with what they get per CD from the recording companies, or that new lower price of their CDs?
Among all of the talk about RIAA and Copyright laws is the bog question: So, what's a band supposed to do then to put food on the table if they can't charge for CDs?
Its pretty much agreed that recording companies abuse artists and consumers alike, but what is the alternative. The biggest suggestion so far is live performance. Being a big fan of seeing bands live, I could imagine this working.
My question is this: Are there any good examples of moderately successful bands and the economics of what they (not the record company) are making of CDs vs Shows vs Merchandise etc. I guess the question is, Can a band live of Concert ticket sales?
I'm sure if something lke this will be able to succeed until we see some big advances in AI and computers that are as tollerant of ambiguity as humans are.
Programming languages grew out of a neccesity to have something that was easy to remember (by virtue of its similarities to english), yet still precise enough for the computer to interpret. At a certain point you still need to define a vocabulary with consistent semantics to be applied to programming concepts.
Whether or not that vocabulary is very rich and sounds almost like spoken english, it all goes out the window when a phrase is used by the speaker in a different meaning than the system had in mind.
There is a good reason that mathematics has its own language. In fact, any specialised are has its own jargon, even its not technical. General purpose English is just too vague to use in some domains.
AI problems always seem to be perpetualy 'a decade' in the future.
What's wrong with having different types of computers for different purposes? Your stanfrd PC is general purpose computer, its never going to be as better (read 'easy') at 1) playing games than a console, 2) making a call than a mobile phone, 3) firing spark plugs as an ICU in car, 4) doing weather simulation as a parralleled behemoth. The upside is that is can do all of these things to one degree or another. If you want to plop down in front of a box and start playing a game without thinking about how to start playing, get a console!
Why does PC gaming _have_ to get better? Would it be so bad if consoles took the best parts of the PC and delivered games with the configuration and installation hassles?
Seems to me the point of the quickstart is just to keep libraries loaded for, well 'quikstarting'. There are other better ways to launch the programs than a menu in your systray. I guess it is a little annoying to have an icon in your tray that has no functional user interaction purpose, but thats what icon hiding is for.
Not sure if you read the link, but the point of the new reactor design is that it is 'walk away' safe. As in it doesn't need expensive control and saftey systems that make current design so expensive.
As has been brought up by other posters, winds, waves and sun are all fine and good, but there are problems, capacity being the main one.
Good article on Wired about a safe way to do Nuclear power. Still need to get rid of the waste, but at least meltdowns wouldn't be a problem.
We've missed out on a lot by not developong nuclear plants over the last 25 years. As other posters have said, its here now, and its the cleanest we have.
Release Schedule in the KDE Developer's corner link to the Feature Plan, which give you a good idea at what is a planned feature, and what's alreay working. Its a long list, but worth a skim.
I appreciate your point about communism not being Soviet Russia's problem. Although whether communism can exist on a large scale with out causing a situation similar to Russia is another valid debate.
However, Adam Smith's capitalism does not work without the 'invisible hand' which is created by rewarding people for their actions. Communism is usually based on "From each according to his ability, to each based on his need". This doesn't leave much room for rewarding people (giving management minumum perks as you say). Even if you decide to reward hard workers or good managers, how do the compensation levels get decided without a free market?
If anything this situation proves that large centrally organized monopolies aren't efficient, and eventually will be replaced. I suspect that more monopolies have been torn apart by market forces than legislation.
I read the article yesterday, and the do mention MythTV. I haven't used either system much, but I do know that Freevo is also easy to install.
The developers say that on one hand, they dislike the reliance of MythTV on X, on the other, they envy MythTV Broadcast Pause feature, something they are still trying to get right.
Now maybe their fear of X is as uncalled for as people who say X makes the desktop slow, but they are aware that MythTV has more features. In all Freevo seems to follow the Unix tradition of assembling small, seperate tools into a loose mass, which is often hard to get right at first than a more monolithic approach.
Traditionally (as in since 1900 or so) the know supply of oil has always been enough for about 30 more year. I.e. in 1900 we were out in 1930. In the 1970s it was shorter, done by 1990. But we always find more.
This isn't to say of course that we will never run out. The reason for this pattern is that it just isn't economical to go out and find more oil when we know about enough to keep us going for 30 years, its hard (read expensive) to find. But over the years we have seen technology do a few things:
Make new fields easier to find Make access to new fields possible Make extraction from old fields more efficient
So far the tech has stayed ahead of consumption. When we do run out, it will not be some apocalypse like event. Oil prices will rise (out of shortage, not artificial rises like we are experiencing now and in the 70s) gradual until other energy sources are more economical. Eventually oil will be so painful to use (economically) that everyone will switch to a new energy source. But that switch will not occur until oil gets more expensive, Forcing it will not help matters!
After selling 10 million iPods (jesus christmas!) I don't think they are moving away from hardware.
What I see more focus on hardware design, the exact opposite of the clone fiasco. They are getting, and supporting, higher margins on their hardware because of their design engineering. No other MP3 player looks or feels as good as the iPod. The Mini looks looks like another homerun, their first small form factor PC and its uniquely Apple and great looking.
Apple's focus has shifted to perfecting the Human-Computer interface. This is what it was all about originally. They are focusing on the look and feel of products, both hardware and software.
Reminds me of the last South Park, Dr. Seuss rhyming, evil creatures,etc. It always amuses me how Cthulu and the rest are so well known in open source circles, but just get blanks looks from most computer geeks, let alone normal people!
Its seems that for many Voice over IP is the final key to being able to have their office anywhere. With VPN and VoIP there aren't many restrictions on where you can have your 'office'.
And yes this a good thing. There is no such thing as being 'to easy to reach' when you need to be in touch. On the other hand, if people get angry when you cut your communications (everything has an off button), that's when you have a problem. Remember, its not the technologies fault, its people who expect you to be on the job 24/7.
You're right. And to be fair I'm not an MS Admin. My experience is with AD in small networks, where the usesrs want something simple like central passwords and roaming profiles. Like I said, I'm not the admin, so I can't vouch for the correctness of the implementation, but there have been nothing but problems. Slow logons, the server requires rebooting, and user management is a pain. I come from a perl background with the motto "Make simple things easy, and hard things possible" I suppose KXP with AD is overkill for this situation, but I don't how else this is done with MS products.
I was thinking just earlier today that my experience with Open Source has made me mistrustful of advertising.
I expect to hear about good products from other people. If I see an ad for something I haven't heard of my initial reaction is "Why haven't I herad of this, is it no good?" If a product is good, word gets around. I'm hesitant to buy any tech product without hearing other's experience with it on sites like Slashdot.
What is truly amazing about the Samba project is their consistent ability to emulate MS screw up, go "buf for bug" is the term I think is used. To implement something like Active Directory, bugs and, which included 4 or 5 different standard (but not quite) services is amazing. Just look at the problems with write support for NTFS. I don't know if its intentional, but MS products are not exactly easy to reverse engineer. Thanks, release us from the horror that is AD on XP!
The only time this hurts google is through their adsd on other websites. Say a scammer puts google ads on his website, then automates clicking on those ads, google then has to pay him for a portion of each click. This hurts google obviously.
Ads on google.com only hurt the advertiser, and as someone mentioned, they knew the deal when they signed up. Each click, fraudulent or not, is unlikely to become a sale.
I suspect that the proportion of fraudulent clicks used to hurt antoher company (by raising their advertising costs) is small compared to the number of scammers trying to make money by hosting google ads. I don't know the proportion of revenue google makes onsite vs. ads hosted on other site, but it would seem off-site ads may have to be stopped until a better business model can be figured out.
Lots of good advice so far about how to deal with kids and computers. But it sounds like the origional poster was interested in how to have the tower tucked away, and how far away.
As far as I know, VGA can go about 25ft. Although there will be signal degradation since it's analog. I'm not sure about DVI.
If you need to go further, or the signal quality is bad enough, many KVM manufactures have Cat5 based solutions for going much much further by doing Analog->Digital->Analog. Probably not cheap, but could be worth looking into.
Slashdot Mirror
My experience with older machines is that ripping (extracting the data from the DVD to a raw file) takes about 30 minutes. Transcoding to a compressed format takes 6-8 hours on a 1-1.5 Ghz machine. So say we have good scalability and transcoding time is 4 hours on a 3 Ghz machine (I don't know what the real number is). It would be hard to keep up (ripping) with the cluster if you had 4-5 3 Ghz machines. I don't think the bottle neck is network bandwidth or NFS, its the DVD IO. Now if you had multiple machines ripping, you might be getting somewhere.
For one, this is CA, their job is writing software. But I think you realize that.
As for other situations. If you are going to get a certain level of support for a product (new features, custom installations), that is going to cost you a certain number of dollars, whether it be licensing costs (you need to be a large enough customer to have that level of influence with a vendor), or it be in hiring developer time to work on an OS project.
I would love to see some sort of feature wishlist where smaller companies could vote with their dollars on certain bugs or features. I've heard of bounty systems like this being tried, and I would love to hear more about why they haven't really worked yet.
You are right about the OS community being quick to jump on the "code it yourself" excuse. But that is reality of dealing with volunteers. Some are motivated by competing with commercial products, and will work on features to make that happen. Others are totally unconcerned with what corporations think about their work. At the end of the day, many developers are scratching their own itch and shouldn't be expected to care about what other people want their software to do.
At the same time as some people are quick to jump on this excuse, others are quick to assume that the goal of OS should be to beat proprietary software. This is simply not many peoples goal.
To further expand on this, if CA thinks the kernel is unstable because developers are working on game drivers instead of stability, then they should hire some developers themselves. Part of your contract with open source is that you can't tell a guy working for free that he is working on the wrong thing. If you want a certain feature, here is always a price. There are plenty of examples of open source developers being hired by employers to work on feature the employer is specifically interested in.
I think the issue then becomes, what band has the legal resources to defend the copyrights on their work? If we are saying that bands have a right to sell their own CDs, then there has to be some sort of a copyright on those CDs.
Maybe the price of the CD has to be so low that it wouldn't be worth stealing (value added of the packaging and artwork == price). But then the question still remains, are bands better off with what they get per CD from the recording companies, or that new lower price of their CDs?
Among all of the talk about RIAA and Copyright laws is the bog question: So, what's a band supposed to do then to put food on the table if they can't charge for CDs?
Its pretty much agreed that recording companies abuse artists and consumers alike, but what is the alternative. The biggest suggestion so far is live performance. Being a big fan of seeing bands live, I could imagine this working.
My question is this: Are there any good examples of moderately successful bands and the economics of what they (not the record company) are making of CDs vs Shows vs Merchandise etc. I guess the question is, Can a band live of Concert ticket sales?
I'm sure if something lke this will be able to succeed until we see some big advances in AI and computers that are as tollerant of ambiguity as humans are.
Programming languages grew out of a neccesity to have something that was easy to remember (by virtue of its similarities to english), yet still precise enough for the computer to interpret. At a certain point you still need to define a vocabulary with consistent semantics to be applied to programming concepts.
Whether or not that vocabulary is very rich and sounds almost like spoken english, it all goes out the window when a phrase is used by the speaker in a different meaning than the system had in mind.
There is a good reason that mathematics has its own language. In fact, any specialised are has its own jargon, even its not technical. General purpose English is just too vague to use in some domains.
AI problems always seem to be perpetualy 'a decade' in the future.
What's wrong with having different types of computers for different purposes? Your stanfrd PC is general purpose computer, its never going to be as better (read 'easy') at 1) playing games than a console, 2) making a call than a mobile phone, 3) firing spark plugs as an ICU in car, 4) doing weather simulation as a parralleled behemoth. The upside is that is can do all of these things to one degree or another. If you want to plop down in front of a box and start playing a game without thinking about how to start playing, get a console!
Why does PC gaming _have_ to get better? Would it be so bad if consoles took the best parts of the PC and delivered games with the configuration and installation hassles?
Seems to me the point of the quickstart is just to keep libraries loaded for, well 'quikstarting'. There are other better ways to launch the programs than a menu in your systray. I guess it is a little annoying to have an icon in your tray that has no functional user interaction purpose, but thats what icon hiding is for.
Even if the data is on the server, if the user has read access (which they may need to do theif job) there is still a risk, no?
Not sure if you read the link, but the point of the new reactor design is that it is 'walk away' safe. As in it doesn't need expensive control and saftey systems that make current design so expensive.
As has been brought up by other posters, winds, waves and sun are all fine and good, but there are problems, capacity being the main one.
Good article on Wired about a safe way to do Nuclear power. Still need to get rid of the waste, but at least meltdowns wouldn't be a problem.
We've missed out on a lot by not developong nuclear plants over the last 25 years. As other posters have said, its here now, and its the cleanest we have.
Release Schedule in the KDE Developer's corner link to the Feature Plan, which give you a good idea at what is a planned feature, and what's alreay working. Its a long list, but worth a skim.
- 3.4-features.html
http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde
I appreciate your point about communism not being Soviet Russia's problem. Although whether communism can exist on a large scale with out causing a situation similar to Russia is another valid debate.
However, Adam Smith's capitalism does not work without the 'invisible hand' which is created by rewarding people for their actions. Communism is usually based on "From each according to his ability, to each based on his need". This doesn't leave much room for rewarding people (giving management minumum perks as you say). Even if you decide to reward hard workers or good managers, how do the compensation levels get decided without a free market?
If anything this situation proves that large centrally organized monopolies aren't efficient, and eventually will be replaced. I suspect that more monopolies have been torn apart by market forces than legislation.
I read the article yesterday, and the do mention MythTV. I haven't used either system much, but I do know that Freevo is also easy to install.
The developers say that on one hand, they dislike the reliance of MythTV on X, on the other, they envy MythTV Broadcast Pause feature, something they are still trying to get right.
Now maybe their fear of X is as uncalled for as people who say X makes the desktop slow, but they are aware that MythTV has more features. In all Freevo seems to follow the Unix tradition of assembling small, seperate tools into a loose mass, which is often hard to get right at first than a more monolithic approach.
Traditionally (as in since 1900 or so) the know supply of oil has always been enough for about 30 more year. I.e. in 1900 we were out in 1930. In the 1970s it was shorter, done by 1990. But we always find more.
This isn't to say of course that we will never run out. The reason for this pattern is that it just isn't economical to go out and find more oil when we know about enough to keep us going for 30 years, its hard (read expensive) to find. But over the years we have seen technology do a few things:
Make new fields easier to find
Make access to new fields possible
Make extraction from old fields more efficient
So far the tech has stayed ahead of consumption. When we do run out, it will not be some apocalypse like event. Oil prices will rise (out of shortage, not artificial rises like we are experiencing now and in the 70s) gradual until other energy sources are more economical. Eventually oil will be so painful to use (economically) that everyone will switch to a new energy source. But that switch will not occur until oil gets more expensive, Forcing it will not help matters!
After selling 10 million iPods (jesus christmas!) I don't think they are moving away from hardware.
What I see more focus on hardware design, the exact opposite of the clone fiasco. They are getting, and supporting, higher margins on their hardware because of their design engineering. No other MP3 player looks or feels as good as the iPod. The Mini looks looks like another homerun, their first small form factor PC and its uniquely Apple and great looking.
Apple's focus has shifted to perfecting the Human-Computer interface. This is what it was all about originally. They are focusing on the look and feel of products, both hardware and software.
Get the details right, and they will come.
Reminds me of the last South Park, Dr. Seuss rhyming, evil creatures,etc. It always amuses me how Cthulu and the rest are so well known in open source circles, but just get blanks looks from most computer geeks, let alone normal people!
Quick, everyone switch to slocate!
Its seems that for many Voice over IP is the final key to being able to have their office anywhere. With VPN and VoIP there aren't many restrictions on where you can have your 'office'.
And yes this a good thing. There is no such thing as being 'to easy to reach' when you need to be in touch. On the other hand, if people get angry when you cut your communications (everything has an off button), that's when you have a problem. Remember, its not the technologies fault, its people who expect you to be on the job 24/7.
You're right. And to be fair I'm not an MS Admin. My experience is with AD in small networks, where the usesrs want something simple like central passwords and roaming profiles. Like I said, I'm not the admin, so I can't vouch for the correctness of the implementation, but there have been nothing but problems. Slow logons, the server requires rebooting, and user management is a pain. I come from a perl background with the motto "Make simple things easy, and hard things possible" I suppose KXP with AD is overkill for this situation, but I don't how else this is done with MS products.
I was thinking just earlier today that my experience with Open Source has made me mistrustful of advertising.
I expect to hear about good products from other people. If I see an ad for something I haven't heard of my initial reaction is "Why haven't I herad of this, is it no good?" If a product is good, word gets around. I'm hesitant to buy any tech product without hearing other's experience with it on sites like Slashdot.
What is truly amazing about the Samba project is their consistent ability to emulate MS screw up, go "buf for bug" is the term I think is used. To implement something like Active Directory, bugs and, which included 4 or 5 different standard (but not quite) services is amazing. Just look at the problems with write support for NTFS. I don't know if its intentional, but MS products are not exactly easy to reverse engineer. Thanks, release us from the horror that is AD on XP!
Here's the script of the origional Spam sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus:
The Spam Sketch
I believe it was out of this sketch that spam came to mean something there was plenty of, but you didn't want...
The only time this hurts google is through their adsd on other websites. Say a scammer puts google ads on his website, then automates clicking on those ads, google then has to pay him for a portion of each click. This hurts google obviously.
Ads on google.com only hurt the advertiser, and as someone mentioned, they knew the deal when they signed up. Each click, fraudulent or not, is unlikely to become a sale.
I suspect that the proportion of fraudulent clicks used to hurt antoher company (by raising their advertising costs) is small compared to the number of scammers trying to make money by hosting google ads. I don't know the proportion of revenue google makes onsite vs. ads hosted on other site, but it would seem off-site ads may have to be stopped until a better business model can be figured out.
Lots of good advice so far about how to deal with kids and computers. But it sounds like the origional poster was interested in how to have the tower tucked away, and how far away.
As far as I know, VGA can go about 25ft. Although there will be signal degradation since it's analog. I'm not sure about DVI.
If you need to go further, or the signal quality is bad enough, many KVM manufactures have Cat5 based solutions for going much much further by doing Analog->Digital->Analog. Probably not cheap, but could be worth looking into.