I've been running off an Acer EasyStore H340 for about a month. I'm very happy with it; it's very cool, quiet (if anything else is making noise, you won't hear it; in a closet, you definitely won't hear it) and plenty fast for most households. 4 hotswap SATA bays, eSATA, USB, and GigE. I can push 75MB/s via NFS to and from it (reading and writing from RAM), which is plenty for streaming video. It comes with Windows Home Server and it's headless, but I popped the drive into another box and installed Ubuntu with an SSH server. Worked like a charm. I'm also running a 2TB software RAID1, mt-daapd (iTunes) and squeezebox servers. I'll probably put Samba on it too.
The only thing I'd change is that a dual core Atom would be better. I actually haven't run into a bottleneck yet, but I wouldn't try reencoding videos on it. I believe the dual core model will be out this month. No affiliation with Acer; I'm just geeked because this is just the quiet, cheap server I've wanted for years. Sounds like sharing your other computers via NFS (automount) or CIFS plus one of these would address your needs; if not, maybe the info will help somebody else.
For some reason commercial software usually seems to lag worst on the 64 bit transition. Windows and OSX lagged Linux, Java and Flash were the last bits on my Linux systems to go 64 bit, etc. They act as if 64 bit is a fad, and people will soon come to their senses and revert to 32.
Does anybody know if the default Android browser will allow blocking Flash when 10.1 ships? I think it's possible that I might find a use for a Flash program on a phone sometime, but if I can't block it by default I'd rather not have it at all. Screen, bandwidth, CPU and battery are at a premium on mobile devices. I'd rather not sacrifice them so I can watch a visual bedlam of ads for products that I will never buy (if you throw Flash ads at me, I boycott you. Ads only affect my buying choices negatively; so really, I'm doing you a favor by blocking your ads, marketing weasels. And I'm saving you money too!).
ANY time the cops, spooks, politicians, corporations-- anybody, really-- claims to have "lost" the evidence, they are lying or they deliberately destroyed it. Like when the CIA, at the behest of Bush, just happened to lose hundreds of torture tapes after they'd been ordered by a court to preserve them. Like they did with much of the Abu Ghraib evidence.
Police in particular can NOT be trusted to police themselves. The few honest cops are often threatened by the rest. Rat on us and good luck when you call for backup...
If you make a product that competes with an existing or future Apple product, it will probably not be allowed to run on the iPhone. Most iPhone apps could run as Flash apps, which would cost Apple revenue, and that would delay construction of Steve's interstellar spacecraft (the only rational reason you need $100 billion vs $1 billion, in my mind, is if you intend to leave the planet; if you do anything else with it you're just an asshole).
I don't see why people are surprised at this. Just stay out of Steve's way and you'll be fine.
That said, I despise Flash. I don't want Flash on my phone unless I can block it by default.
...which is to completely change direction every year or two. x86 on, x86 off, linux is crap, we're the biggest linux vendor, screw linux, solaris, opensolaris, change licenses, x86 off...
I do understand that Solaris technology is excellent, but anybody who counted on Sun maintaining consistent support for it hasn't been paying attention. So if Sun made you happy before, then Oracle should make you happy now; nothing has changed, the strategy spinner is still spinning.
I wish I had mod points right now; this is the most interesting post I've seen in a long time. It gives credit to social networks and current 20-somethings in a way I hadn't quite considered... thanks. Now that I think about it, this "conscious slacker" slacker attitude is a very green one as well. It fits with current realities (concentration of wealth, resource exhaustion) while turning many of its downsides to advantages.
Laughable. The Bush/Obama bailouts were temporary loans to institutions which would otherwise have gone bankrupt. He made a point of putting no significant regulations on Wall Street while the money is out there; soon the money will be repaid and the best opportunity to reign in the banksters will be gone. The government didn't even get voting shares... As for health care, the first items he tossed overboard were nationalized health care, cost savings, drug reimportation, and a public option. Now we have a government mandate to purchase private services. Ooooh, so radical! This is hardly a crushing blow to corporations; in fact, the health care industry is quite happy with the bill. If Obama is servant to anybody, it is the surveillance/military state first (any promise which would have inconvenienced them in any way, he has reversed; most members of both houses of Congress have done the same), and corporations second.
Also, consider all your high school and college teachers, friends, and family. Does every subset of them represent your current beliefs completely? I think that could only be true if you are a robot, programmed by a cult of alien robots, with no individuality or learning behaviour since being released to the wild. What an odd life you must lead. Welcome to Earth, though.
They encourage the use of signature cards instead of PIN cards, even though PIN cards cost them much less to process. That's because they can add their cut on top of that price, and pass the cost on to you.
Signature debt card fraud is about 15 times as high as PIN debt fraud. When was the last time somebody checked your signature on a card?
So, it's more wasteful, and enables vastly more fraud, but the banks love it. But I guess that makes sense; bankers are, after all, parasites and crooks under the protection of law.
Let me give another example of how they don't care about real security. USbank's online banking service now interrupts the standard username/password entry process by asking you a "security question." These questions are things that you could find about most people in a couple of minutes, by looking at Facebook/google, knowing them casually, guessing, etc etc. The answers are shown in the clear. So where, on every other site you've ever used (including, until recently, this one) you'd expect to be typing your password into an obscured field (********), you instead are typing into a box that anybody near you can read. Awesome. And in exchange, the security you get is... a trivial question, and a picture from a handful of pictures you're allowed to set as your "security image". Which anybody within 50 feet can see.
[Reviews comment in case caffeine has led to unfortunate or controversial comments. Nope, looks good!]
Yeah, yeah, it's public. Agreed. And everybody knows there's no difference whatsoever between what some guy can read and an exhaustive, automated audit trail and connection map of everything that has ever been posted. That's why nobody uses search engines, after all.
Roger Ebert wrote about a demo of frame tripling technology: 72fps, backward compatible with current equipment, cheaper than digital. He said that the demo mixed live actors on stage with film, and the audience couldn't tell the difference. You could read the text on the sides of vehicles when they drove by. I always hoped that this tech would make it to theatres, as I VERY often see individual frames at 24 fps. For example, the swooshing/zooming credits at the start of many action movies-- really, anything with strong light/dark contrasts and medium to fast movement. It's headache-inducing to the point where I sit further back than I'd prefer just to minimize the effect.
Instead, George Lucas killed it in favor of lossy digital projection at 24 fps. And now we have 3D, which cuts resolution and brightness, looks even choppier, and entices you to try to focus on various parts of the scene but punishes your eyes when you try (because they'll always be out of focus). I wonder if this will damage people's eyesight.
Then there is Maxivision, which can switch between 24 and 48 fps on the fly... but it's not digital and lossy, so it will fail.
Mmm... progress! Sort of like how cell phones and VOIP have gotten us used to choppy, occasionally silent, sometimes garbled, often dropped (FU AT&T) calls, which, at their best never sound as good as POTS did. And how low quality mp3 and the loudness wars have made most music subtly annoying to listen to-- even remastered versions of stuff I used to love. And how digital/HDTV cable signals are compressed flatter than hammered shit, and you can see color banding/aliasing, especially in dim scenes, but hey! It's DIGITAL, it HAS to be better! Half the time the idiots who buy this crap don't even get the aspect ratio right, can they not SEE?
Oh well. All part of the enstupiding of America, I suppose. [cranky bastard mode: disengaged]
Most tech products improve during their life cycle. Not Sony's. Emulation, Linux... every iteration removes one more feature. By the end of the year, they hope to have removed sound from the PS3, and a year from now the PS3 Omega will do nothing at all.
We must arm NOW! That star *is* a weapon of mass destruction! We don't want the smoking gun to be a black hole! In this vial I have a sample of Hydrogen-- of the EXACT SAME MATERIAL detected in Gliese 710!
Once again, the summary and the linked article neglect to mention the vulnerable OS. Once again, it's Windows. I guess that goes without saying, but it really seems like there's a widespread agreement to refrain from mentioning Microsoft or Windows in articles on viruses and botnets. Seems to me that mentioning the targets, and how to secure them, would be integral to any such story. It could be one sentence and a link, fer chrissakes.
It really seems like the executives at certain companies-- Sony, MS, ATT-- wake up every morning and ask themselves: How can we screw our customers today? What would they pay us not to do?
OTOH, the idea of a demo that weans you off of wanting to play the game before you pay for it... not so bad. Better to find out what dicks they are before you spend the money.
Once cat-torchers have served their time, they should have a fair chance at living a useful life. Which is why people who are cruel to animals should have much longer sentences than are currently meted out. It's very typical to see these broken, soulless, irretrievable individuals laughing on their way into trivial jail terms. No empathy whatsoever.
But yeah, if we must ever let them out, by all means keep them off these lists. They've got human rights, after all. Just install a skunk-scent anklet to protect the neighborhood pets.
Deciding whether to click Okay, clicking it, waiting for it to load and restart-- that takes time. And some of the updates require reboots. It makes sense to aggregate the "Always click okay" stuff and make it happen in the background so it doesn't delay you when you are trying to get something done.
I've thought of this before, too. It applies to OSX as well (iTunes, Quicktime, MS Office, etc. etc). But you'd want to be able to define classes of updates which would be automatic, and classes which wouldn't (for example, many Windows updates still require reboots). And MS has is consistently dishonest when it comes to defining what is a "critical" update and what is a DRM/screw-the-customer update.
The biggest problem here is that the Windows paradigm is that "Nothing the user is doing could possibly be important; my default behaviour is to interrupt, grab focus, maybe give them a chance to bail-- but if nobody answers in 60 seconds, take charge and reboot the machine." I'm sure that there are ways to disable this behaviour, but until they change this philosophy they won't have a usable or trustworthy unified update service.
I know that some people really do, apparently, want to watch full length movies on tiny, tiny, tiny devices. I know that eventually these devices will have decent video out or projection capabilities. I get that I'm not the only market, and I'm totally fine with that.
But what I don't understand is... the media is really putting out the impression that everybody wants to consume TV/movies/books on miniscule screens like the iPhone. Even on an airplane I think that'd get tedious quickly. And I've seen nothing to indicate that the iPhone is competent to deliver video on that scale, even over wifi (if you're on a plane that's serving wireless movies, how busy is that wifi?). Oh well, at least Netflix has the sense to gauge how big the market is.
Can the iPhone battery even make it through 75 minutes of video + wifi?
Maybe this is all really for the iPad. That would make more sense.
Slashdot Mirror
They can take our lives, but they can never take our POOOOORRRNNOOOO!!!!!!
Yes, because Christian morality is the only morality.
I've been running off an Acer EasyStore H340 for about a month. I'm very happy with it; it's very cool, quiet (if anything else is making noise, you won't hear it; in a closet, you definitely won't hear it) and plenty fast for most households. 4 hotswap SATA bays, eSATA, USB, and GigE. I can push 75MB/s via NFS to and from it (reading and writing from RAM), which is plenty for streaming video. It comes with Windows Home Server and it's headless, but I popped the drive into another box and installed Ubuntu with an SSH server. Worked like a charm. I'm also running a 2TB software RAID1, mt-daapd (iTunes) and squeezebox servers. I'll probably put Samba on it too.
The only thing I'd change is that a dual core Atom would be better. I actually haven't run into a bottleneck yet, but I wouldn't try reencoding videos on it. I believe the dual core model will be out this month. No affiliation with Acer; I'm just geeked because this is just the quiet, cheap server I've wanted for years. Sounds like sharing your other computers via NFS (automount) or CIFS plus one of these would address your needs; if not, maybe the info will help somebody else.
For some reason commercial software usually seems to lag worst on the 64 bit transition. Windows and OSX lagged Linux, Java and Flash were the last bits on my Linux systems to go 64 bit, etc. They act as if 64 bit is a fad, and people will soon come to their senses and revert to 32.
Does anybody know if the default Android browser will allow blocking Flash when 10.1 ships? I think it's possible that I might find a use for a Flash program on a phone sometime, but if I can't block it by default I'd rather not have it at all. Screen, bandwidth, CPU and battery are at a premium on mobile devices. I'd rather not sacrifice them so I can watch a visual bedlam of ads for products that I will never buy (if you throw Flash ads at me, I boycott you. Ads only affect my buying choices negatively; so really, I'm doing you a favor by blocking your ads, marketing weasels. And I'm saving you money too!).
Duh, it's Japanese. Sexbot.
ANY time the cops, spooks, politicians, corporations-- anybody, really-- claims to have "lost" the evidence, they are lying or they deliberately destroyed it. Like when the CIA, at the behest of Bush, just happened to lose hundreds of torture tapes after they'd been ordered by a court to preserve them. Like they did with much of the Abu Ghraib evidence.
Police in particular can NOT be trusted to police themselves. The few honest cops are often threatened by the rest. Rat on us and good luck when you call for backup...
If you make a product that competes with an existing or future Apple product, it will probably not be allowed to run on the iPhone. Most iPhone apps could run as Flash apps, which would cost Apple revenue, and that would delay construction of Steve's interstellar spacecraft (the only rational reason you need $100 billion vs $1 billion, in my mind, is if you intend to leave the planet; if you do anything else with it you're just an asshole).
I don't see why people are surprised at this. Just stay out of Steve's way and you'll be fine.
That said, I despise Flash. I don't want Flash on my phone unless I can block it by default.
You're going to hear this a lot, but it's a horrible, horrible thing you're doing and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Also, what do you like for de-duping?
...which is to completely change direction every year or two. x86 on, x86 off, linux is crap, we're the biggest linux vendor, screw linux, solaris, opensolaris, change licenses, x86 off...
I do understand that Solaris technology is excellent, but anybody who counted on Sun maintaining consistent support for it hasn't been paying attention. So if Sun made you happy before, then Oracle should make you happy now; nothing has changed, the strategy spinner is still spinning.
I wish I had mod points right now; this is the most interesting post I've seen in a long time. It gives credit to social networks and current 20-somethings in a way I hadn't quite considered... thanks. Now that I think about it, this "conscious slacker" slacker attitude is a very green one as well. It fits with current realities (concentration of wealth, resource exhaustion) while turning many of its downsides to advantages.
Kudos, kids.
Laughable. The Bush/Obama bailouts were temporary loans to institutions which would otherwise have gone bankrupt. He made a point of putting no significant regulations on Wall Street while the money is out there; soon the money will be repaid and the best opportunity to reign in the banksters will be gone. The government didn't even get voting shares... As for health care, the first items he tossed overboard were nationalized health care, cost savings, drug reimportation, and a public option. Now we have a government mandate to purchase private services. Ooooh, so radical! This is hardly a crushing blow to corporations; in fact, the health care industry is quite happy with the bill. If Obama is servant to anybody, it is the surveillance/military state first (any promise which would have inconvenienced them in any way, he has reversed; most members of both houses of Congress have done the same), and corporations second.
Also, consider all your high school and college teachers, friends, and family. Does every subset of them represent your current beliefs completely? I think that could only be true if you are a robot, programmed by a cult of alien robots, with no individuality or learning behaviour since being released to the wild. What an odd life you must lead. Welcome to Earth, though.
They encourage the use of signature cards instead of PIN cards, even though PIN cards cost them much less to process. That's because they can add their cut on top of that price, and pass the cost on to you.
Signature debt card fraud is about 15 times as high as PIN debt fraud. When was the last time somebody checked your signature on a card?
So, it's more wasteful, and enables vastly more fraud, but the banks love it. But I guess that makes sense; bankers are, after all, parasites and crooks under the protection of law.
Let me give another example of how they don't care about real security. USbank's online banking service now interrupts the standard username/password entry process by asking you a "security question." These questions are things that you could find about most people in a couple of minutes, by looking at Facebook/google, knowing them casually, guessing, etc etc. The answers are shown in the clear. So where, on every other site you've ever used (including, until recently, this one) you'd expect to be typing your password into an obscured field (********), you instead are typing into a box that anybody near you can read. Awesome. And in exchange, the security you get is... a trivial question, and a picture from a handful of pictures you're allowed to set as your "security image". Which anybody within 50 feet can see.
[Reviews comment in case caffeine has led to unfortunate or controversial comments. Nope, looks good!]
You mean advertisers and Stasi. Ugh.
Yeah, yeah, it's public. Agreed. And everybody knows there's no difference whatsoever between what some guy can read and an exhaustive, automated audit trail and connection map of everything that has ever been posted. That's why nobody uses search engines, after all.
Roger Ebert wrote about a demo of frame tripling technology: 72fps, backward compatible with current equipment, cheaper than digital. He said that the demo mixed live actors on stage with film, and the audience couldn't tell the difference. You could read the text on the sides of vehicles when they drove by. I always hoped that this tech would make it to theatres, as I VERY often see individual frames at 24 fps. For example, the swooshing/zooming credits at the start of many action movies-- really, anything with strong light/dark contrasts and medium to fast movement. It's headache-inducing to the point where I sit further back than I'd prefer just to minimize the effect.
Instead, George Lucas killed it in favor of lossy digital projection at 24 fps. And now we have 3D, which cuts resolution and brightness, looks even choppier, and entices you to try to focus on various parts of the scene but punishes your eyes when you try (because they'll always be out of focus). I wonder if this will damage people's eyesight.
Then there is Maxivision, which can switch between 24 and 48 fps on the fly... but it's not digital and lossy, so it will fail.
Mmm... progress! Sort of like how cell phones and VOIP have gotten us used to choppy, occasionally silent, sometimes garbled, often dropped (FU AT&T) calls, which, at their best never sound as good as POTS did. And how low quality mp3 and the loudness wars have made most music subtly annoying to listen to-- even remastered versions of stuff I used to love. And how digital/HDTV cable signals are compressed flatter than hammered shit, and you can see color banding/aliasing, especially in dim scenes, but hey! It's DIGITAL, it HAS to be better! Half the time the idiots who buy this crap don't even get the aspect ratio right, can they not SEE?
Oh well. All part of the enstupiding of America, I suppose. [cranky bastard mode: disengaged]
98% of people will believe they're in the 2% who can "supertask".
Secretly? ...k, I won't tell nobody either, man.
Most tech products improve during their life cycle. Not Sony's. Emulation, Linux... every iteration removes one more feature. By the end of the year, they hope to have removed sound from the PS3, and a year from now the PS3 Omega will do nothing at all.
We must arm NOW! That star *is* a weapon of mass destruction! We don't want the smoking gun to be a black hole! In this vial I have a sample of Hydrogen-- of the EXACT SAME MATERIAL detected in Gliese 710!
Once again, the summary and the linked article neglect to mention the vulnerable OS. Once again, it's Windows. I guess that goes without saying, but it really seems like there's a widespread agreement to refrain from mentioning Microsoft or Windows in articles on viruses and botnets. Seems to me that mentioning the targets, and how to secure them, would be integral to any such story. It could be one sentence and a link, fer chrissakes.
It really seems like the executives at certain companies-- Sony, MS, ATT-- wake up every morning and ask themselves: How can we screw our customers today? What would they pay us not to do?
OTOH, the idea of a demo that weans you off of wanting to play the game before you pay for it... not so bad. Better to find out what dicks they are before you spend the money.
Once cat-torchers have served their time, they should have a fair chance at living a useful life. Which is why people who are cruel to animals should have much longer sentences than are currently meted out. It's very typical to see these broken, soulless, irretrievable individuals laughing on their way into trivial jail terms. No empathy whatsoever.
But yeah, if we must ever let them out, by all means keep them off these lists. They've got human rights, after all. Just install a skunk-scent anklet to protect the neighborhood pets.
Deciding whether to click Okay, clicking it, waiting for it to load and restart-- that takes time. And some of the updates require reboots. It makes sense to aggregate the "Always click okay" stuff and make it happen in the background so it doesn't delay you when you are trying to get something done.
I've thought of this before, too. It applies to OSX as well (iTunes, Quicktime, MS Office, etc. etc). But you'd want to be able to define classes of updates which would be automatic, and classes which wouldn't (for example, many Windows updates still require reboots). And MS has is consistently dishonest when it comes to defining what is a "critical" update and what is a DRM/screw-the-customer update.
The biggest problem here is that the Windows paradigm is that "Nothing the user is doing could possibly be important; my default behaviour is to interrupt, grab focus, maybe give them a chance to bail-- but if nobody answers in 60 seconds, take charge and reboot the machine." I'm sure that there are ways to disable this behaviour, but until they change this philosophy they won't have a usable or trustworthy unified update service.
I know that some people really do, apparently, want to watch full length movies on tiny, tiny, tiny devices. I know that eventually these devices will have decent video out or projection capabilities. I get that I'm not the only market, and I'm totally fine with that.
But what I don't understand is... the media is really putting out the impression that everybody wants to consume TV/movies/books on miniscule screens like the iPhone. Even on an airplane I think that'd get tedious quickly. And I've seen nothing to indicate that the iPhone is competent to deliver video on that scale, even over wifi (if you're on a plane that's serving wireless movies, how busy is that wifi?). Oh well, at least Netflix has the sense to gauge how big the market is.
Can the iPhone battery even make it through 75 minutes of video + wifi?
Maybe this is all really for the iPad. That would make more sense.