Your telling me that you couldn't have turned that into something creative, i.e. chapter after goatse link..
Poor Billy. He went to the IRS to talk about the fact that he's a bit in the rears with his taxes. Billy was then taken into a room with several large burly men. Needless to say, Billy got the idea, looking at his torn open ass in the mirror what his bank account was going to look like when the IRS was done......
John should have been wearing a seatbelt, but it always managed to wrinkle his nicely pressed suits. Suddenly, a deer jumped in front his car and he swerved to the left, hitting a construction truck kiddy corner. When your bursting through the windshield, you remember the darnest things... it wasn't the glass tearing at his face that he thought of, it was the sound of his pants ripping down the seam as he did a forward summersault through the windshield, right onto the traffic cone...
Needless to say, your telling me that a suffiently demented group of writers couldn't come up with some funny way to work in a goatse link?
Firstly, I'm not sure how your home network is setup but one solution might be to use a traffic shaper and give your VOIP packets the highest priority.
Secondly, this setup sounds very compelling until you start to read between the lines and realize that this guy's got a whole cellar full of hardware...
1. The C-Band satellite dish in his back yard and probably 10+ receivers.
2. Two or three MythBackend Systems each with multiple hardware mpeg encoding cards. These machines would probably also need at least 2 gigE cards each.
3. A database server running mysql to hold all of the recorded program meta data.
4. A storage system capable of storing 30,000 movies/tv shows/mp3's. This solution should be robust enough to support having multiple streams being written (since you've got those 3 mythbackend boxes constantly writing) plus having any number of reads as any number of Myth Front ends read data from the array. So, this would either be some sorta direct connect SAN or some type of NAS toaster with a shit loads of disk on lots of spindles.
5. A couple good gigE switches/router to connect all of this too. You would probably want to look at switches that are capable of trunking and creating VLANS.
6. WAP equipment. I'd go for something that had some really good management tools that'll allow you todo bandwidth throttling, usage monitoring/logging, traffic shaping, etc.
7. A good omnidirectional wireless Antenna so that everybody can connect.
8. An ISP that's a) going to be cool with what your doing (such as speakeasy) b) can provide the bandwidth necessary so that a whole street worth of people can surf the Internet while also chatting on the phone.
Now, there's also some other considerations. Because of the cost of the equipment, Electricity and bandwidth bills, your going to have to charge for this.
So, unless your going to try to get NPO status, your going to have to get a business license and start keeping track of what you take in for profits so you can pay the tax man. Not to mention that the cost of this equipment means that you'll probably need to take out some loans for the initial acquisitions, so you'd have to figure out your THAC0 so that can hit zero to at least break even. Also, you'll need some infrastructure so that you can keep track of who's paid you and how much and who hasn't paid you, etc.
Beyond all that, we haven't even gotten into the aspects of providing tech support for all the clueless users who'll call up at 3am when they can't make a phone call and the problem isn't at your end, it's at the ISP's
Now, you've got 10 people with these Starnix thin clients in they're house hooked up to their TV's. Who's going to do the initial configuration of these things? I doubt they come pre-configured with the mythfrontend (though it would be nice), so you'll probably need to configure these things to all the settings for your myth back end.
Also, since your now their ISP, you can expect (since they're paying you for network access) that they'll be calling you whenever their completely unpatched, spyware addled Windows ME box shits all over itself... Not to mention that they'll be calling you whenever they want to put another piece of wireless equipment in their house, which means you'll have to start page listing all the gear you know works with your setup...
With all that said, this solution would work, it's just going to require a bit more work then Mr. Cringely makes it sound...
I'm not suprised either. What I think happened was that Sun got it in their heads that linux wouldn't ever mature into an enterprise capable unix. Their thought was that you'd have a linux desktop out front and a solaris box out back.
However, where I work we've replaced practically every piece of sun hardware. The only reasons a box is around is because the software isn't yet available for linux.
Though, linux is just at the right place at the right time. If Sun has anybody to blame it should be Intel and AMD who've taken the personal PC and driven the price down while consistently upped its performance.
You have to imagine that Sun goes to the Dell website and looks at their server line and shits themselves when they see the price.
The problem is that you wouldn't be able to add ram or a video card, etc.
The idea is that they'd build a machine abit like a PS2. You'd open it and the ram would either be soldered onto the motherboard or integrated into the CPU along with the video card (and memory), enet, disk controller, etc.
Basically, when you want a new computer, you go out and buy a better model, no upgrading.
I can see your point. It's the persistant problem we see with all hardware/software products. The hardware evolves faster than the software can keep up with it. What needs to happen is the tools for developing the software need to make a leap forward so stuff like level designs with triggers, etc would just work. The designers could just go hog wild and know that the tools are robust enough to not bungle things.
BTW, Champions of Norrath was a great game. My wife and I played the hell out of it and enjoyed every minute of it.
Where I think the blu-ray technology will be great is that you'll make it possible to add all kinds of extra stuff. Just imagine if this technology was available for Champions, how many extra levels, optional side quests, character classes, weapons, etc. that you could have added to game, while not having to compress the crap out of the textures and the like.
I'm sure some smart coder would create an alternative driver to work with the USB port. The problem would be the gackle of MS lawyers that would come after him. Barring him, they'd go after every ISP that hosts the driver. Then they'd go after every person who every downloaded the driver, etc.
I actually don't think that USB will be what the big fight will be over. I think Cringely has the right idea, just the wrong piece of hardware.
My fear is MS getting into bed with the BIOS people and creating a closed standard DRM BIOS. So when you go pop in the boot CD of your favorite distribution you get the bios error:
"Bootable Media doesn't not contain valid authentication signature".
Last time I checked, an American scientist by the name of Robert Goddard built the first liquid fueled rocket. This rocket was the design that Von Braun and others than used to build their V2 designs.
When I first read the headline, I thought it said "Nigeria" not "Niagra" and all I could think of was what the boot messages would look like....
I am of great luck that I have found you in my booting time of need.... Before my father passed away he moved 32 MILLION BYTES of CACHE to a daughter board on the pci bus. I have contacted the pci controller, and explained your GRANT request.... I need you to send me a copy of your PID, your UID, your address and your IRQ.
Their solution of a parasail was perfect. The problem wasn't with the parasail, the problem was with the explosive device that was supposed to deploy it. If blame is to be placed, place it on the person who poorly designed the chute deployment mechanism.
Your solution would have intailed taking a relatively simple sample return canister and attaching solid state thrusters, a gyroscope and either an altimeter (which could survive the riggers of space) or some type of radar. Also, now, you need a computer to watch the radar and keep the capsule pointed thrusters down during the descent, etc. Now, since you need some way to keep the capsule oriented, your going to have to install some sort of yaw and pitch controls, probably cold gas thusters. Now you need tanks of compressed gas, plus the valves to turn the gas off and on. With all this your going to need a power supply that can survive the riggers of space for the whole thing.
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Your telling me that you couldn't have turned that into something creative, i.e. chapter after goatse link..
...
Poor Billy. He went to the IRS to talk about the fact that he's a bit in the rears with his taxes. Billy was then taken into a room with several large burly men. Needless to say, Billy got the idea, looking at his torn open ass in the mirror what his bank account was going to look like when the IRS was done...
John should have been wearing a seatbelt, but it always managed to wrinkle his nicely pressed suits. Suddenly, a deer jumped in front his car and he swerved to the left, hitting a construction truck kiddy corner. When your bursting through the windshield, you remember the darnest things... it wasn't the glass tearing at his face that he thought of, it was the sound of his pants ripping down the seam as he did a forward summersault through the windshield, right onto the traffic cone...
Needless to say, your telling me that a suffiently demented group of writers couldn't come up with some funny way to work in a goatse link?
Firstly, I'm not sure how your home network is setup but one solution might be to use a traffic shaper and give your VOIP packets the highest priority.
Secondly, this setup sounds very compelling until you start to read between the lines and realize that this guy's got a whole cellar full of hardware...
1. The C-Band satellite dish in his back yard and probably 10+ receivers.
2. Two or three MythBackend Systems each with multiple hardware mpeg encoding cards. These machines would probably also need at least 2 gigE cards each.
3. A database server running mysql to hold all of the recorded program meta data.
4. A storage system capable of storing 30,000 movies/tv shows/mp3's. This solution should be robust enough to support having multiple streams being written (since you've got those 3 mythbackend boxes constantly writing) plus having any number of reads as any number of Myth Front ends read data from the array. So, this would either be some sorta direct connect SAN or some type of NAS toaster with a shit loads of disk on lots of spindles.
5. A couple good gigE switches/router to connect all of this too. You would probably want to look at switches that are capable of trunking and creating VLANS.
6. WAP equipment. I'd go for something that had some really good management tools that'll allow you todo bandwidth throttling, usage monitoring/logging, traffic shaping, etc.
7. A good omnidirectional wireless Antenna so that everybody can connect.
8. An ISP that's
a) going to be cool with what your doing (such as speakeasy)
b) can provide the bandwidth necessary so that a whole street worth of people can surf the Internet while also chatting on the phone.
Now, there's also some other considerations.
Because of the cost of the equipment, Electricity and bandwidth bills, your going to have to charge for this.
So, unless your going to try to get NPO status, your going to have to get a business license and start keeping track of what you take in for profits so you can pay the tax man. Not to mention that the cost of this equipment means that you'll probably need to take out some loans for the initial acquisitions, so you'd have to figure out your THAC0 so that can hit zero to at least break even. Also, you'll need some infrastructure so that you can keep track of who's paid you and how much and who hasn't paid you, etc.
Beyond all that, we haven't even gotten into the aspects of providing tech support for all the clueless users who'll call up at 3am when they can't make a phone call and the problem isn't at your end, it's at the ISP's
Now, you've got 10 people with these Starnix thin clients in they're house hooked up to their TV's. Who's going to do the initial configuration of these things? I doubt they come pre-configured with the mythfrontend (though it would be nice), so you'll probably need to configure these things to all the settings for your myth back end.
Also, since your now their ISP, you can expect (since they're paying you for network access) that they'll be calling you whenever their completely unpatched, spyware addled Windows ME box shits all over itself... Not to mention that they'll be calling you whenever they want to put another piece of wireless equipment in their house, which means you'll have to start page listing all the gear you know works with your setup...
With all that said, this solution would work, it's just going to require a bit more work then Mr. Cringely makes it sound...
Well, lets put the pieces together
Bill Gates = Sauron
Microsoft Bob = The Ring of Power
Mount St. Helens = Mt. Doom
It's all coming together now...
The locusts are already here...
Africa had massive (i.e. >10km long swarms) this year...
In the last couple of years all kinds of fun stuff has been stolen in Russia.
Some town went out one day and the only bridge leading into the town had been stolen.
Russia's first steam locomotive was stolen and found cut up for scrap.
I could imagine if someone drove into Gorky park with a <i>Really</i> big truck and loaded a Buran onto it, would people really notice?
All kidding aside, who knows. Maybe they built two of them and that one landed in Burhain.
I'm not suprised either. What I think happened was that Sun got it in their heads that linux wouldn't ever mature into an enterprise capable unix. Their thought was that you'd have a linux desktop out front and a solaris box out back.
However, where I work we've replaced practically every piece of sun hardware. The only reasons a box is around is because the software isn't yet available for linux.
Though, linux is just at the right place at the right time. If Sun has anybody to blame it should be Intel and AMD who've taken the personal PC and driven the price down while consistently upped its performance.
You have to imagine that Sun goes to the Dell website and looks at their server line and shits themselves when they see the price.
The problem is that you wouldn't be able to add ram or a video card, etc.
The idea is that they'd build a machine abit like a PS2. You'd open it and the ram would either be soldered onto the motherboard or integrated into the CPU along with the video card (and memory), enet, disk controller, etc.
Basically, when you want a new computer, you go out and buy a better model, no upgrading.
I can see your point. It's the persistant problem we see with all hardware/software products. The hardware evolves faster than the software can keep up with it. What needs to happen is the tools for developing the software need to make a leap forward so stuff like level designs with triggers, etc would just work. The designers could just go hog wild and know that the tools are robust enough to not bungle things.
I take it your algorithm was very lossy...
BTW, Champions of Norrath was a great game. My wife and I played the hell out of it and enjoyed every minute of it.
Where I think the blu-ray technology will be great is that you'll make it possible to add all kinds of extra stuff. Just imagine if this technology was available for Champions, how many extra levels, optional side quests, character classes, weapons, etc. that you could have added to game, while not having to compress the crap out of the textures and the like.
Actually, it's even worse than that. Off the top of my head these are the people that are in the prison system that aren't prisons.
Guards
Cooks
Councelors
Doctors (most prisons have an internal medical ward)
Explaining satire ruins it. If people don't get it, it's not the fault of the poster...
Thanks!
I'm sure some smart coder would create an alternative driver to work with the USB port. The problem would be the gackle of MS lawyers that would come after him. Barring him, they'd go after every ISP that hosts the driver. Then they'd go after every person who every downloaded the driver, etc.
I actually don't think that USB will be what the big fight will be over. I think Cringely has the right idea, just the wrong piece of hardware.
My fear is MS getting into bed with the BIOS people and creating a closed standard DRM BIOS. So when you go pop in the boot CD of your favorite distribution you get the bios error:
"Bootable Media doesn't not contain valid authentication signature".
That's my fear.
Firstly, inflicting a distribution on anybody that doesn't have a sane package management system is just wrong.
Hence, if you were a good grandson, you'd just log into her machine remotely and update her system for her...
You might like the anime series "Cowboy Bebop".
Great action/characters/plots.
What I want to know was when Cisco got into the gear business.
I knew that Cisco make routing equipment, but I didn't know they had also branched out into gear making!
I'm expecting that when they repair the clock tower in my home town they'll be a "Powered by Cisco" sticker on the side of the thing.
We're in the same boat as you guys. Because of your companies size, you get to negoiate a better price then Joe A. User.
Last time I checked, an American scientist by the name of Robert Goddard built the first liquid fueled rocket. This rocket was the design that Von Braun and others than used to build their V2 designs.
When I first read the headline, I thought it said "Nigeria" not "Niagra" and all I could think of was what the boot messages would look like....
... ...
I am of great luck that I have found you in my booting time of need.
Before my father passed away he moved 32 MILLION BYTES of CACHE to a daughter board on the pci bus. I have contacted the pci controller, and explained your GRANT request.
I need you to send me a copy of your PID, your UID, your address and your IRQ.
Apparently Nokia has a nanoprobe in my brain.
Do a search on the Nokia 9500...
I'll be a believer when I can download a demo and try it for myself.
Otherwise, I'll have to default to my age old motto that harkens from the BBS days.
"In God(s) we trust, all others... voice verify"
Wow!!! You own an aircraft capable of sustained supersonic flight?
I'm jealous.
Your wrong.
Their solution of a parasail was perfect. The problem wasn't with the parasail, the problem was with the explosive device that was supposed to deploy it. If blame is to be placed, place it on the person who poorly designed the chute deployment mechanism.
Your solution would have intailed taking a relatively simple sample return canister and attaching solid state thrusters, a gyroscope and either an altimeter (which could survive the riggers of space) or some type of radar. Also, now, you need a computer to watch the radar and keep the capsule pointed thrusters down during the descent, etc. Now, since you need some way to keep the capsule oriented, your going to have to install some sort of yaw and pitch controls, probably cold gas thusters. Now you need tanks of compressed gas, plus the valves to turn the gas off and on. With all this your going to need a power supply that can survive the riggers of space for the whole thing.
Yet another reason to buy one of those "disposible" digital cameras and hack it...
El Burrito?
Is that when you take a bootable cdrom (also know as an "El Torito") and roll it up?