Firstly, the headlights would appear to be bright, but flashing even brighter at 10 or 14Hz.
Secondly, the headlights are pointed down, so the headlights would not (and could not) completely wash out the ccd unless they were pointed at the CCD, in which case the person gets a citation because their lights are not operating correctly.
I doubt they mean you can get real money by playing online - They don't host a currency, they host a coupon or coin system, perhaps. You can, within their framework, convert from real to vitual, but the only way to convert money out is by working for There.
I wonder what they'll do when people start trading stuff external to the game for real cash?
Remove the legacy connectors and you shut out a fairly large market. Point of Sale, is one, but the other big one is being able to replace old hardware. I do work for a small chain of video stores, still running Novell 3.1 and DOS in their stores. The printers use parallel and serial, cash drawers are serial, and barcode scanners are AT or PS2.
Some things (like the barcode scanner) can use USB with BIOS USB legacy support enabled, but the PCI parallel and serial port cards don't work under DOS, and you can't get inexpensive motherboards that support modern cheap processors with ISA slots.
So the support of older peripherals, and support of older systems, is still a sizeable market.
It would be easier if BIOS makers would simply create a "Support Legacy Parallel/Serial USB Dongles" so a USB serial dongle would appear as com1 under dos, etc.
A 60hz cap doubles your mouse input lag from 8ms to 17ms! While your eyes have trouble distinguishing such small time differences, you can "feel" the difference when mousing with 8ms lag versus 17ms lag.
No need to use caps, young man. You're beginning to sound like an audiophile who thinks tubes are better, and records are better than tapes and CDs.
There is no doubt that on the old games you can 'feel' the difference in lag between 60 and 125hz update rates.
The new game, however, does not have the old engine. The new game, it appears, is 'slower' and not so much based on 'fast twitch' shooting style that the old games revolved around. I supect that what this means is the game is more realistic - conforming to a slightly better real-world feel. This real world feel will not need really fast mouse updates.
Besides. I dare you to change the direction of your hand at 60Hz.
The 'feel' you are talking about, I imagine, is the feedback loop you've developed between your eyes and your hands. You're brain knows how long it takes for a movement on the hand to affect the screen image. The problem is overshoot/overcorrection. Your brain adapts a little to the lag to prevent overcorrection, but you can only change the movement of your hand so fast. So a faster read and react rate on the part of the computer enables you to do a little less work, both physically and mentally since the lag is not so bad.
If, as the articles seem to say, the game is 'slower', and aiming correctly is more critical than 'getting the first shot in hte general direction' is, then the 60Hz update rate locked to the display frame rate will actually shorten that lag, and make it easier for your brain to computer, which will make it a completely different game experience anyway.
You only need to interpolate between the last update bones position and the next key-framed bone position.
Ah. So what you're really saying is:
Do physics for frame one
Do physics for frame two
Display frame one
Interpolate between two frames and get an intermediate frame
Do the middle frame
Do the second frame
So you're always one frame behind, and what's on the display has little to do with the controls you are pushing now?
You can't interpolate between two things if you don't have the second thing. If you make everything go in a straight line and do 'guesses' then the frames will look jumpy, since the straight lines or guesses won't really be what your character di in between frames. If you actually want to calculate it a bit more so it's not so much guessing, then you've got half the physics calculations done anyway, so you might as well do all of them.
But then you get back to the problem of round off errors in a variable frame rate engine not being consistant.
Our engine is wicked fast because we calculate everything with integer math. Our physics engine runs at a rate fixed according to time, not machine cycles, so that any computer fast enough for the game will run the physics exactly the same as any other machine, and so integer math round-off errors will be consistant, and can be made up for in the map design.
We chose to fix the frame rate to the same rate as the physics engine so that video cards will not be re-rendering the same frame twice. If they did, then the game would appear jumpy.
If you run at 72fps, and the engine runs at 60, then you'd get a duplicate frame every 5 real frames. Since the controls are tied to the physics engine, the controls would feel laggy 12 times a second, until the frame rate again caught up with the engine.
The optimal setup will have the monitor set to 60Hz, or perhaps a higher frequency that is some multiple of 60Hz, but will result in quick beats: rather than 1 in 5, choose 90Hz so every third frame is a duplicate, or best choose 120Hz.
Or just turn off the flourescent lights. You want a terrifying experience anyway - who wants to play with the lights on?
The problems may extend further than just the converter. It may also be a weak signal, and it could be compounded by the run of cable between the two buildings.
The phone should have a data connection available as well - you might try hooking that up and running an rs-232 cable using the phone's internal modem.
But a cell phone is typically only going to give you 14.4kbps max, unless you have high speed access through one of many providers. It's a 3x speed increase, but read on...
Beyond that, I'd go back to the initial problem: Why do you need a faster than 4.8kbps connection? Turn images off the the browser. Use a lighter web interface, which most big sites now have (or news aggregators and just download RSS feeds) see Slashdot's PDA interface as an example (doesn't seem to be working right now?).
The underlying fact of the matter is that you can't type as fast than 4.8kbps, and you can't read that fast, so the only thing you are missing is visual information such as pictures. These can largely be cached. Weather forecasts can be had in text, and the satellite images are fairly small if you must download that sort of thing. Go straight to the horse's mouth to avoid all that advertising. Bookmark the direct links, and look into viewing the available pages as wml, which some desktop browsers understand (opera, I believe).
In short, there are free ways of going about this to get the same thing done. If you are sending/receiving serious amounts of data, then look into getting a satellite internet connection.
On the positive note, we have a really nice overhead wire rack, that's looking good and all of our wiring is really tight looking; all the colors match, all the cables are labeled, they are all the right length, etc.
"I don't care whether it works boys, just make it look good for the investors, ok?"
Here's a quick and dirty tutorial on why, in this particular setup and with these particular drives, SCSI smoked IDE.
Mostly it was the seek time. Seek time is the amount of time it takes to physically move the disk head from the center of the platters to one or the other edge. It is a pretty good indicator of the average time it takes to go from one spot on the HD to another.
The SCSI's seek time was 2/3 the IDE's seek time.
He was reading a little bit of the beginning of each of 50,000 files. These files are located in a single directory (or, perhaps, in a hierarchy, which would be much worse for the IDE - we'll assume the better case)
So the program asks for the first file name in the directory - disk seeks (in best case) to the sector with that directory's meta-data, grabs the first file (or, if Mutt asked for the files to be sorted by some file system metric, it gets and sorts all of them) and passes that information to mutt. Mutt then requests the first few bytes of said file. Assuming the disk cached a few sectors of directory info then it immediately seeks to the requisite sector, and assuming, as is usual, that the program will want more it reads and caches a few sectors of the file. Assume the file is not fragmented, and no further seeks are required.
Mutt closes the file, then requests the next one. Here's where it gets really messy. If you're lucky, the file system and OS are set up to cache the sorted directory information. But even the unsorted information, for 50,000 files, is unlikely to be cached - so it has to seek back to the original directory sector (possibly re-sort) and then spit out the next. Then it seeks back to the file.
The time to read the data and spit it out is negligible compared to the seek time for small data reads.
Each file read typically takes a minimum of 2 seeks. I say minimum as most modern file systems use a directory information hierarchy which is fairly simple, but it may take more than a few sector reads to find the location of a single file in a directory with a huge number of files.
The SCSI drive has a larger cache. It will see, just as the IDE drive does, that the directory info sectors are being hit hard. Guess which drive is going to be able to cache those sectors better?
Also, for those wondering why the older 9GB scsi had better seek time than the newer 40GB IDE, it is because of the capacity. The head has to settle on a given track before it can read it, and the track isn't just 4 times smaller, it's possibly even 8 times smaller because newer drives have a servo position indicator track between each data track so the heads can crash around and find the right spot quickly. Since the head has to be 'focused' on such a smaller track, it takes more time to settle. This doesn't even take into account that the older (and larger for the time it was built) scsi has more platters than the IDE, and each track is again much larger.
Lastly, I suspect that his mail directory was built over time on the 40GB drive, then copied over to the SCSI drive. Can you say fragmentation? Not just of the files, they are small and probably only require one sector each to read. The directory information, however, is not contained, as one might assume, in one contiguous string of sectors. When another file is added, if the directory expands to another sector of meta data then it'll pick the next free one according to the file system's particular design. It may take up to hundreds of full seek times to find the starting sector of a recently written file. A fair test...would be difficult. Put the same exact file system, down to the same sector by sector data (use ghost or something) with the minimum modifications (scsi drivers) on the same computer and you'll have a fairer comparison.
All of this leads to the undeniable fact, which the author so misguidedly states that, "From my testing I concluded that SCSI being faster than IDE is not a myth. It is very much a reali
I'm choosing projects that are cross platform, such as Gimp, OpenOffice, and tightVNC.
As important as it may be to move away from Windows, it is just as important to support it and show people what open source can do for them now with no long term investment.
You can't replace the OS until all the Apps are in place and equivilant, and it'll be so much easier to convert people if they are already using popular opensource/free software on their current platform.
When the next round of office upgrades come around, they'll look at the price and switch. When the next round of OS upgrades come along, they'll look and switch.
Use your normal print server without spooling, and get a cheap, old print spooler from ebay. You'll be all set as long as you aren't printing megabytes of data at a time.
If you are, then you need to use a computer as a print server.
You may be surprised that 1 in 76 Americans are fully colorblind. 1 in 20, or fully 13.6 million people, are estimated to have red-green colorblindness. About 10% of Males: it does not typically affect females, since the gene responsible is tied to the Y chromosome.
That is a huge slice of the population, and I know there are some developers who don't pay attention, but a large number of them think about it at some point during product development, though it may not make as big a difference as it should.
People who are Red-Green colorblind can still do very well in life, but it makes many things more time consuming. It's not impossible to tell the difference between two colors - they are still a shade off in areas we can detect. It simply takes more time and staring to figure it out. Usually this is fine, but in games you don't get that kind of time.
This site uses 1.6 million colors. Your current eyes only support 256 shades of gray. Please upgrade to a version 4 or greater eyeball before viewing this site.
I suspect that they'll get around that by displaying the phone number and name on the telemarketers display with a button labeled "dial". This is not automatic, such as those systems that dial 4 or more numbers, and only connects the first one to answer, disconnecting the other three.
But I wonder - what about ad supported phones? You are given the phone, and it has gps support with a color display. You agree to receive a number of marketting ads a week, whether by display, voice call, etc, which don't subtract from your minutes in exchange for a number of minutes per week. If you go over, you simply get a few more ads. You can hang up on the ads after, say, 5 or 10 seconds and it'll still count towards your agreement. Location reporting will be used to give you whereads - you'd learn about a concert in the town you're in according to previously discovered preferences.
You can also be interrupted during a normal phone call with a beep and a 15 second message which both parties hear for interstitial ads. These would be worth much more since you aren't likely to hang up, and two people are listening. You could choose to receive some, none, or only these type of ads.
Quite frankly, if someone were to come out with this service, cell phone use would skyrocket, and people would be much more accepting of these ads, since their phone bill is free. Business users wouldn't use them, but consumers would eat them up.
I wouldn't be able to pay for more than the cost of shipping. But at the rate my kids are destroying tapes, I doubt I'll have need of one in a few years.:-)
Find a few independent cabinet makers in the area, and find out how much they'll charge to make you some custom cabinets...that don't look like cabinets.
Of course, you'll be paying through the nose.
Alternately, buy the CAN-AM stuff, then screw wood faces on the front if you want to make it look different, or paint it, or otherwise customize it.
If you were the handyman you so desperately ought to be, you wouldn't have even asked. However, building simple, nice shelving with doors or drawers is not really a hard task.
Of course, what you really ought to do is convert everything to digital, then store them in boxes. A server with a terabyte of raid 5 storage is not going to be much more expensive than the amount of shelving you're going to require. You can rip the DVDs exactly and then use Daemon Tools to access them via virtual dvd drives. You can encode VHS tapes into mpeg4 and they will be small.
Start small - hook the vcr to the TV in card and do one or two tapes a day (one every time you check your email and the previous one is done). Then put them in strong boxes, and store them in a cool, dark place. Better protection anyway. The server will give you access on demand, and the original media is good for proof of ownership, as well as a good backup.
Besides, you probably don't need on demand access for 90% of your collection. You just want it.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, the headlights would appear to be bright, but flashing even brighter at 10 or 14Hz.
Secondly, the headlights are pointed down, so the headlights would not (and could not) completely wash out the ccd unless they were pointed at the CCD, in which case the person gets a citation because their lights are not operating correctly.
-Adam
I doubt they mean you can get real money by playing online - They don't host a currency, they host a coupon or coin system, perhaps. You can, within their framework, convert from real to vitual, but the only way to convert money out is by working for There.
I wonder what they'll do when people start trading stuff external to the game for real cash?
-Adam
Remove the legacy connectors and you shut out a fairly large market. Point of Sale, is one, but the other big one is being able to replace old hardware. I do work for a small chain of video stores, still running Novell 3.1 and DOS in their stores. The printers use parallel and serial, cash drawers are serial, and barcode scanners are AT or PS2.
Some things (like the barcode scanner) can use USB with BIOS USB legacy support enabled, but the PCI parallel and serial port cards don't work under DOS, and you can't get inexpensive motherboards that support modern cheap processors with ISA slots.
So the support of older peripherals, and support of older systems, is still a sizeable market.
It would be easier if BIOS makers would simply create a "Support Legacy Parallel/Serial USB Dongles" so a USB serial dongle would appear as com1 under dos, etc.
-Adam
Check out, as an example, PHP's documentation
-Adam
A 60hz cap doubles your mouse input lag from 8ms to 17ms! While your eyes have trouble distinguishing such small time differences, you can "feel" the difference when mousing with 8ms lag versus 17ms lag.
No need to use caps, young man. You're beginning to sound like an audiophile who thinks tubes are better, and records are better than tapes and CDs.
There is no doubt that on the old games you can 'feel' the difference in lag between 60 and 125hz update rates.
The new game, however, does not have the old engine. The new game, it appears, is 'slower' and not so much based on 'fast twitch' shooting style that the old games revolved around. I supect that what this means is the game is more realistic - conforming to a slightly better real-world feel. This real world feel will not need really fast mouse updates.
Besides. I dare you to change the direction of your hand at 60Hz.
The 'feel' you are talking about, I imagine, is the feedback loop you've developed between your eyes and your hands. You're brain knows how long it takes for a movement on the hand to affect the screen image. The problem is overshoot/overcorrection. Your brain adapts a little to the lag to prevent overcorrection, but you can only change the movement of your hand so fast. So a faster read and react rate on the part of the computer enables you to do a little less work, both physically and mentally since the lag is not so bad.
If, as the articles seem to say, the game is 'slower', and aiming correctly is more critical than 'getting the first shot in hte general direction' is, then the 60Hz update rate locked to the display frame rate will actually shorten that lag, and make it easier for your brain to computer, which will make it a completely different game experience anyway.
-Adam
You only need to interpolate between the last update bones position and the next key-framed bone position.
Ah. So what you're really saying is:
Do physics for frame one
Do physics for frame two
Display frame one
Interpolate between two frames and get an intermediate frame
Do the middle frame
Do the second frame
So you're always one frame behind, and what's on the display has little to do with the controls you are pushing now?
You can't interpolate between two things if you don't have the second thing. If you make everything go in a straight line and do 'guesses' then the frames will look jumpy, since the straight lines or guesses won't really be what your character di in between frames. If you actually want to calculate it a bit more so it's not so much guessing, then you've got half the physics calculations done anyway, so you might as well do all of them.
But then you get back to the problem of round off errors in a variable frame rate engine not being consistant.
-Adam
Translation:
Our engine is wicked fast because we calculate everything with integer math. Our physics engine runs at a rate fixed according to time, not machine cycles, so that any computer fast enough for the game will run the physics exactly the same as any other machine, and so integer math round-off errors will be consistant, and can be made up for in the map design.
We chose to fix the frame rate to the same rate as the physics engine so that video cards will not be re-rendering the same frame twice. If they did, then the game would appear jumpy.
If you run at 72fps, and the engine runs at 60, then you'd get a duplicate frame every 5 real frames. Since the controls are tied to the physics engine, the controls would feel laggy 12 times a second, until the frame rate again caught up with the engine.
The optimal setup will have the monitor set to 60Hz, or perhaps a higher frequency that is some multiple of 60Hz, but will result in quick beats: rather than 1 in 5, choose 90Hz so every third frame is a duplicate, or best choose 120Hz.
Or just turn off the flourescent lights. You want a terrifying experience anyway - who wants to play with the lights on?
-Adam
The problems may extend further than just the converter. It may also be a weak signal, and it could be compounded by the run of cable between the two buildings.
The phone should have a data connection available as well - you might try hooking that up and running an rs-232 cable using the phone's internal modem.
But a cell phone is typically only going to give you 14.4kbps max, unless you have high speed access through one of many providers. It's a 3x speed increase, but read on...
Beyond that, I'd go back to the initial problem: Why do you need a faster than 4.8kbps connection? Turn images off the the browser. Use a lighter web interface, which most big sites now have (or news aggregators and just download RSS feeds) see Slashdot's PDA interface as an example (doesn't seem to be working right now?).
The underlying fact of the matter is that you can't type as fast than 4.8kbps, and you can't read that fast, so the only thing you are missing is visual information such as pictures. These can largely be cached. Weather forecasts can be had in text, and the satellite images are fairly small if you must download that sort of thing. Go straight to the horse's mouth to avoid all that advertising. Bookmark the direct links, and look into viewing the available pages as wml, which some desktop browsers understand (opera, I believe).
In short, there are free ways of going about this to get the same thing done. If you are sending/receiving serious amounts of data, then look into getting a satellite internet connection.
-Adam
On the positive note, we have a really nice overhead wire rack, that's looking good and all of our wiring is really tight looking; all the colors match, all the cables are labeled, they are all the right length, etc.
"I don't care whether it works boys, just make it look good for the investors, ok?"
*shudder*
-Adam
Here's a quick and dirty tutorial on why, in this particular setup and with these particular drives, SCSI smoked IDE.
Mostly it was the seek time. Seek time is the amount of time it takes to physically move the disk head from the center of the platters to one or the other edge. It is a pretty good indicator of the average time it takes to go from one spot on the HD to another.
The SCSI's seek time was 2/3 the IDE's seek time.
He was reading a little bit of the beginning of each of 50,000 files. These files are located in a single directory (or, perhaps, in a hierarchy, which would be much worse for the IDE - we'll assume the better case)
So the program asks for the first file name in the directory - disk seeks (in best case) to the sector with that directory's meta-data, grabs the first file (or, if Mutt asked for the files to be sorted by some file system metric, it gets and sorts all of them) and passes that information to mutt. Mutt then requests the first few bytes of said file. Assuming the disk cached a few sectors of directory info then it immediately seeks to the requisite sector, and assuming, as is usual, that the program will want more it reads and caches a few sectors of the file. Assume the file is not fragmented, and no further seeks are required.
Mutt closes the file, then requests the next one. Here's where it gets really messy. If you're lucky, the file system and OS are set up to cache the sorted directory information. But even the unsorted information, for 50,000 files, is unlikely to be cached - so it has to seek back to the original directory sector (possibly re-sort) and then spit out the next. Then it seeks back to the file.
The time to read the data and spit it out is negligible compared to the seek time for small data reads.
Each file read typically takes a minimum of 2 seeks. I say minimum as most modern file systems use a directory information hierarchy which is fairly simple, but it may take more than a few sector reads to find the location of a single file in a directory with a huge number of files.
The SCSI drive has a larger cache. It will see, just as the IDE drive does, that the directory info sectors are being hit hard. Guess which drive is going to be able to cache those sectors better?
Also, for those wondering why the older 9GB scsi had better seek time than the newer 40GB IDE, it is because of the capacity. The head has to settle on a given track before it can read it, and the track isn't just 4 times smaller, it's possibly even 8 times smaller because newer drives have a servo position indicator track between each data track so the heads can crash around and find the right spot quickly. Since the head has to be 'focused' on such a smaller track, it takes more time to settle. This doesn't even take into account that the older (and larger for the time it was built) scsi has more platters than the IDE, and each track is again much larger.
Lastly, I suspect that his mail directory was built over time on the 40GB drive, then copied over to the SCSI drive. Can you say fragmentation? Not just of the files, they are small and probably only require one sector each to read. The directory information, however, is not contained, as one might assume, in one contiguous string of sectors. When another file is added, if the directory expands to another sector of meta data then it'll pick the next free one according to the file system's particular design. It may take up to hundreds of full seek times to find the starting sector of a recently written file. A fair test...would be difficult. Put the same exact file system, down to the same sector by sector data (use ghost or something) with the minimum modifications (scsi drivers) on the same computer and you'll have a fairer comparison.
All of this leads to the undeniable fact, which the author so misguidedly states that, "From my testing I concluded that SCSI being faster than IDE is not a myth. It is very much a reali
In reference to a particular metric (not the entire suite of tests) he says "Even Windows would probably outperform OpenBSD"
Talk about taking the kids gloves off!
-Adam
Those crazy Europeans, always trying to copy the latest American fad.
When ever will they learn?
-Adam
I'm choosing projects that are cross platform, such as Gimp, OpenOffice, and tightVNC.
As important as it may be to move away from Windows, it is just as important to support it and show people what open source can do for them now with no long term investment.
You can't replace the OS until all the Apps are in place and equivilant, and it'll be so much easier to convert people if they are already using popular opensource/free software on their current platform.
When the next round of office upgrades come around, they'll look at the price and switch. When the next round of OS upgrades come along, they'll look and switch.
-Adam
Or fill it with concrete.
-Adam
The title that hit the cutting room floor for this newer, politically correct title is, of course:
"Shorter People Earn Less"
A new study shows that shorter people earn an average of $789 less per year than their taller counterparts.
-Adam
Use your normal print server without spooling, and get a cheap, old print spooler from ebay. You'll be all set as long as you aren't printing megabytes of data at a time.
If you are, then you need to use a computer as a print server.
-Adam
Ripped from here and here and some mandrake forums. Earliest post appears in February of this year, but it may be earlier.
-Adam
You may be surprised that 1 in 76 Americans are fully colorblind. 1 in 20, or fully 13.6 million people, are estimated to have red-green colorblindness. About 10% of Males: it does not typically affect females, since the gene responsible is tied to the Y chromosome.
That is a huge slice of the population, and I know there are some developers who don't pay attention, but a large number of them think about it at some point during product development, though it may not make as big a difference as it should.
People who are Red-Green colorblind can still do very well in life, but it makes many things more time consuming. It's not impossible to tell the difference between two colors - they are still a shade off in areas we can detect. It simply takes more time and staring to figure it out. Usually this is fine, but in games you don't get that kind of time.
I got the stats from here.
-Adam
This site uses 1.6 million colors. Your current eyes only support 256 shades of gray. Please upgrade to a version 4 or greater eyeball before viewing this site.
-Adam
I suspect that they'll get around that by displaying the phone number and name on the telemarketers display with a button labeled "dial". This is not automatic, such as those systems that dial 4 or more numbers, and only connects the first one to answer, disconnecting the other three.
But I wonder - what about ad supported phones? You are given the phone, and it has gps support with a color display. You agree to receive a number of marketting ads a week, whether by display, voice call, etc, which don't subtract from your minutes in exchange for a number of minutes per week. If you go over, you simply get a few more ads. You can hang up on the ads after, say, 5 or 10 seconds and it'll still count towards your agreement. Location reporting will be used to give you whereads - you'd learn about a concert in the town you're in according to previously discovered preferences.
You can also be interrupted during a normal phone call with a beep and a 15 second message which both parties hear for interstitial ads. These would be worth much more since you aren't likely to hang up, and two people are listening. You could choose to receive some, none, or only these type of ads.
Quite frankly, if someone were to come out with this service, cell phone use would skyrocket, and people would be much more accepting of these ads, since their phone bill is free. Business users wouldn't use them, but consumers would eat them up.
3. Profit!
-Adam
I wouldn't be able to pay for more than the cost of shipping. But at the rate my kids are destroying tapes, I doubt I'll have need of one in a few years. :-)
-Adam
stienman, have you actually DONE this with our cabinets, or know someone that has? I'd be interested to see the results! John @ Can-Am
No, but if you want to send me a unit then I'll do so and send you pictures. Cherry would look nice...
-Adam
cyberpantheon writes "The Globe and Mail is reporting that British Pathe was slashdotted back to the 19th century"
-Adam
A list of the top engine developers for the games, rather than a list of directors with a mix of other important developers.
Ken Silverman ought to be mentioned somewhere...
-Adam
Find a few independent cabinet makers in the area, and find out how much they'll charge to make you some custom cabinets...that don't look like cabinets.
Of course, you'll be paying through the nose.
Alternately, buy the CAN-AM stuff, then screw wood faces on the front if you want to make it look different, or paint it, or otherwise customize it.
If you were the handyman you so desperately ought to be, you wouldn't have even asked. However, building simple, nice shelving with doors or drawers is not really a hard task.
Of course, what you really ought to do is convert everything to digital, then store them in boxes. A server with a terabyte of raid 5 storage is not going to be much more expensive than the amount of shelving you're going to require. You can rip the DVDs exactly and then use Daemon Tools to access them via virtual dvd drives. You can encode VHS tapes into mpeg4 and they will be small.
Start small - hook the vcr to the TV in card and do one or two tapes a day (one every time you check your email and the previous one is done). Then put them in strong boxes, and store them in a cool, dark place. Better protection anyway. The server will give you access on demand, and the original media is good for proof of ownership, as well as a good backup.
Besides, you probably don't need on demand access for 90% of your collection. You just want it.
-Adam