I just helped a 60-year-old man deal with this. His bank couldn't refuse the transaction because it wasn't billed from AOL.com but as a point-of-sale transaction. In other words, instead of being a recurring monthly charge from a known entity, it was just like the poor guy had walked up and handed AOL his credit card once a month. Which somehow meant that it was a different category of transaction that could not be blocked by the bank in question.
Even more humorous, the guy's son (now a 24 year old off playing GI Joe in Iraq) had set him up with the account around four years previous. He's been a DSL subscriber essentially the whole time, didn't even know he had AOL service. And AOL told him that his son would have to cancel the account. The one on the old man's credit card. In his name, not his son's.
After more than 40 minutes of arguing and another 20 talking to his bank, I think he's cancelling the card AOL was billing. I can't wait to hear that AOL forced the account back open, 'cause I'm sure that's what will happen next.
My experience with DDO was that grouping SUCKED. There was such a limited amount of content that probably 90% of the people you group with at any time will have done whatever it is that your group is doing. The other 10% have no idea what the hell is going on in the game; they were powerlevelled or they are someone's kid brother messing around or something.
So either you group with a bunch of people who just want to clear a dungeon as fast as humanly possible, know exactly where to go, what to do and in what order, and 100% don't care whether or not you want to listen to the narrator or enjoy the mission content, or you're with a bunch of people who probably don't know how to play the game.
In other words, the only way to enjoy the neat atmosphere of the game is to play through a dungeon by yourself. That means doing lowbie dungeons by yourself over and over and over.
There's pretty much only one class in D&D that can solo, and that's a Cleric. Hope you like Clerics, 'cause that's basically the only way you're going to get to experience content!
While I'm at it, I'm also going to say that I hate teamspeak with a fiery passion. There's nothing more obnoxious than trying to get into an "RPG" frame of mind while some dickhead is quoting Eminem raps, talking abuot what the rest of the group is watching on TV while they play, or how uber their other characters are. I realize this is tangental to the issue of soloing, but a big part of why I unsubscribed was that I got to a place where I could no longer solo content, and I had *zero* good group experiences in around 5 weeks of nightly play.
"All I have read are bad reviews of Microsoft's next operating system upgrade. Are there really any reasons (yet) for an average user to pay the money to upgrade from Microsoft Windows XP Pro to Microsoft Windows Vista?"
From my testing, the Microsoft (ical-based) calendar app looks like it'll be kind of nice. And there's some nice new things for deployments and in group policy, but that's not really "average user" stuff. Average users will be pissed off when they find out that none of the default games are stored on the PC any more. Wanna play Solitaire? Too bad. You aren't connected to the internet.
I've found that the Omega Drivers will install fine on such systems. I've had to reinstall XP on several laptops with weirdo custom ATI chipsets before. I'm somewhat bothered by using a non-official driver, but enough gamers use Omega drivers that I'm sure there would be an uproar if they were seriously flawed somehow.
The bigger issue with Vista is that the beta versions I've tried (my Vista Beta 2 file transfer manager has been stuck at 0% for two days now) is that it doesn't allow the installation of unsigned drivers. I haven't found a signed driver for any sound device I have on any PC I own. Of the laptops I've tried Vista on, 802.11 was only supported on two out of four, and only one modem was supported. I'm not sure how "custom" wireless NICs or modems are; there aren't many vendors for those chips. Regardless, Vista doesn't wanna work with them.
Oddly enough, my folks are using SuSE 10 with VLC at home.:P
Based on my observations as a software trainer, the overwhelming majority of users aren't aware of the extra functions media player provides in the first place.
Based on my experiences as a support guy, dealing with Media Player-related issues is a lot more hassle than it's worth, e.g. "Why can't I play this DVD?" or "Why can't I play this file back?" or "What the hell is a codec, anyway?" Gods help you if users start playing with the skins support. "Where'd my play button go?!?"
Microsoft could do just fine to have a simple media player (e.g. version 6.4, which shipped with Windows 2000, or Media Player Classic) which does the things consumers expect a media player to do without a bunch of extra crap bolted on. Throw RealJukebox or WinAmp a bone if you need ripping and library support, or at least put those features in a different program that can be removed from a default windows install.
I'm perfectly willing to disagree, since I don't want or think it's the responsibility of my OS vendor to provide me with a heavyweight media player, especially one I can't remove from that OS.
That is an MMO I would want above all others. The universe is so well-developed and so well documented that it would match just about any kind of interest one might have. I can see meaningful paths for crafting, skills, player-run economy, player advancement in terms of command or hereditary title.
The scope and scale could run from individual infantry and battle armor fights up to mechs and to deep space battles with aerospace units and dropships.
If the machine is any kind of functional before you get started, you can run Belarc Advisor to fish the Windows and Office product codes out of the registry. I don't care what was there before, those are the numbers I type back into the boxes when I have to reinstall. I see numbers from Belarc that match the ones on the sticker maybe 2/3s of the time. I'm not sure what happens the other third, and to be honest it's none of my business.
Woe be to software developers who persecute The Chosen of the Flying Spaghetti Monster! I foresee noodly vengence! When the seas turn red from Marinara and the pirates run rampant through the streets of Moscow, all will know the power and glory of Pastafarianism!
Not to be petty, but you brought up "a couple calendars for your friends" before there was any discussion of numbers at all.:P
I deployed Contact in a couple settings of up to a few hundred users. That may not be "Enterprise" enough for some people, but it's a damned big single office. I administered HP OpenMail (same software) in environments of several thousand simultaneous users. I thought it sucked a lot less than other big messaging servers I had and have dealt with (Groupwise and Exchange).
I'm not convinced of the value of enterprise support. From a business standpoint, would an unsupported commercial product really be worse than recommending or implementing an open source messaging system?
In the case of Exchange or some other product, as their IT Contractor/Consultant/Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, I would expect primary support tasks to fall to myself and/or my dedicated staff, rather than calling EnterpriseAppVendor at the first sign of trouble. I've supported all manner of enterprise-level products without ever needing to invoke paid support for them.
Besides, you're the one who brought up that "dozen" number.
The same thing might be said of Exchange; I support a few businesses that have either Windows Small Business Server or Exchange on Windows Server just so that something less than a dozen people can share a calendar. I wouldn't expect them to get useful support from Microsoft for their problems either.
In my experience (admittedly a couple versions old now) it was a solid product that left little to be desired. Abandoned or not, if the sheep can use share their Outlook calendars and I don't have to use Windows + Exchange, that counts as a win.
Samsung Contact is a really sweet messaging server. And it gets next to no marketing, as far as I can tell, which is too bad, 'cause it does all the Exchange-only crap that Outlook supports.
Once, on a cold and lonely contract, I was forced to migrate some poor enterprise from Windows 2000 + NDS to VINES. I think I'm going to hell for that.
I met the guys who write and draw "Hero Happy Hour" at comic conventions a couple times. The book is a fun read, and the creators are funny guys. They know they aren't going to make a fortune, they're just making a comic because they want to make a comic. I've never seen any publicity for their comic until now, which is a damned shame. "Hero Happy Hour" is easily the best small press/amateur title I've ever picked up. Anyone who is into comics would do well to pick up whatever issues they still have in print, 'cause they're worth the money.
Anyway, I remember Marvel and DC claiming trademark on Super-Hero in the early 80s if not earlier, and just about everyone who writes about people with super-powers, who doesn't work for Marvel or DC, uses some other term to describe them. I can't believe they're enforcing their trademark on a couple guys whose comics have a print run that's probably 1/100 the size of an average "big name" book, but they've had the right to do so for over 20 years.
Four identical Athlon64/3000s, 1GB RAM, Gigabyte K8VM800 motherboards, 4x7k250s, 3x7k400s, 1xSP1614 PATA, 3Ware 8506-4LP, Intel Gbit NICs. These machines run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Someday I will get motivated enough to upgrade them to some other form of Linux.
Game Machine: Athlon64X2/4400. 3GB RAM. Soltek motherboard. PCIe X850 Pro. X-Mystique. 2x7k400s, 2 7k250s (SATA), 300GB Maxline, 2 SP1614Ns, 7k400 (all PATA). LiteOn DVD Burner. LiteOn 32x CD Burner (both on "SCSI Buddies" connected to an Adaptec 2940UW) - and yes, every drive bay in that P180 is full. 600W Enermax PSU, Onkyo TX-NR801. 21" Dell CRT, 19" Scepter LCD. Antec P180 case. This machine presently dual boots Windows Server 2003 Web Edition and SuSE 10.
TechStation (aka "Pokey"): AthlonXP/2500. 1GB RAM. Radeon 9600VIVO. 1x 120GB drive (either a Samsung or a Maxtor). 5-in-3 SATA enclosure that usually has nothing in it. Asus A7N8X. LiteOn DVD Burner. 15" LCD and 12-year-old 17" Mag display. Cybex Video Switch. Spends most of its time in SuSE 9.3, but it's mostly a hardware test machine, so I've got DOS and 2000 on it, too.
ComputerUnderMyBed: Sempron 3400, 1GB RAM. Radeon 9550. GA-K8VM800. 20" Samsung LCD. 2xSP1614Ns. Runs SuSE 10. Exists mostly so that I can send E-mail and remote control all the other computers from someplace comfortable. I am just that lazy.
Laptop: Thinkpad T40. 1.6GHz P4m. 1GB RAM. 80GB hard disk. It's a remote control for the other machines or "the office that lives in my car".
Laptop #2: Gateway MX7515: Athlon64/4000, 1GB RAM, 100GB slow-ass hard disk, DVD burner, 256MB X600 Pro graphics. I switch between an XP install and 2003 Web edition. Too damned heavy to carry around. I've been using it as a comic/ebook reader.
I'm using an 8-port TrendNet GigE switch at the moment, and a Sonicwall SOHO device for a firewall. I have a Linksys 802.11A+G router that I use for WLAN (2.4GHz is FAR too crowded for anything to connect in my apartment, though).
My ex-'s garage is home to the rest of my computers, mostly machines that I barely used, or used only for various client needs. My ex-'s partner uses them to copy DVDs, but I can "visit" them if I need to via VPN. These machines are mostly AthlonXPs of various stripes, and IBM P4 desktop, but there's also a Sparc 20, and an UltraSparc10, some Motorola StarMAX machines, an original Mac, several old Dell and IBM laptops and an HP PA-RISC machine. Also my old IBM RAID enclosures, my Cisco 9005 and most of my older spare parts .
Total storage for what I've got would be something like 12TB, but I'm pretty big on redundancy, so it's really more like 8TB.
Pool of Radiance - upgrade(?) to CGA from Hercules mono and to 3.5" floppy. First time I installed it, onto 360k floppies, it took something like 5 hours.
Tradewars - upgrade from 1200bps modem to 9600bps modem
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica - upgrade from 14" SVGA to 17" SVGA (Mag DX17F, I still have the damned thing), and to 4MB ET4000 video card so I could use truecolor at 1280x1024 and look at the pretty pictures at full size.:D
Quake - I saw it on a 486/100 and decided I needed a better computer. I ended up with a dual Pentium-133 with an unheard-of 128MB RAM. Yup, Quake ran pretty well on that guy.
I'm hovering at around 12TB for the computers in my home. All commodity hardware.
1. IIRC 3ware cards are limited to 2TB per array in 32-bit OSes. Not a HUGE deal, but something to keep in mind if you're running Windows or haven't gotten around to installing 64-bit Linux on your Athlon64.
2. I like having dense arrays, but I also like mirrored data. Each of my fileservers therefore has 2 arrays - a RAID5 on a 4-port 3Ware card and a software RAID0 (It's that or JBOD). I replicate the changes on each of the RAID5s on the RAID0 of a different machine (in a different room) twice a day. RAID0 is generally a bad idea for storing, oh, pretty much anything. I'm not a big fan of it. On the other hand, I'm storing redundant data to begin with.
An IBM T20 would probably fit the bill very nicely. Around 800MHz but with modern comforts like DVD+CD-R and support for that all important full GB of RAM; they support dual batteries and I believe there's an appropriate UltraBase station + battery. I'm not sure how long a loaded-with-batteries T20 lasts on a one charge. It's longer than an 8 hour workday, at least.
You must be speaking of the single "helper app", namely iTunesHelper.exe
Yup. That's the one. I loaded iTunes because I got a free song in off a Coke bottlecap. For that I was punished with an autostart application for a program I never particularly cared to start again. Yes, eventually it annoyed me enough to pull it out of Windows' registry, but why was it there to begin with?
That's because, being OS X UI elements, they work better.
Really? So it was worth all that developer time Apple spent reinventing the wheel? And the button? And the scrollbar? All so it could kinda-sorta look like an OS I don't have?
Is that system you use an improvement on the Artist/Album/Trackname system that iTunes uses?
Nope, as "artist" can mean several different things to someone who likes classical music (Composer? Soloist? Orchestra? Conductor?) and "album" doesn't mean much of anything. If you've ever searched for music on a site like Amazon, you'll notice that the generic search system will say something like "For classical music, search with this other tool". That's 'cause our organization is a little more complicated, and metadata is a little more important.
I store my music in a set of folders that essentially works as "Composer/Work" (so all 14 versions of Beethoven's 9th Symphony that I have are in the same directory, Beethoven/9th Symphony) and maintain additional metadata with symlinks extracted from the ID3 tags (e.g. the name of the CD, conductor or performer if those are part of the ID3 data). Since I pretty much only work from CDs I own, I have control over those things, and organization is just a perl script away (so I have a Performer/Solti directory that symlinks to all the CSO performances that I have). This works just fine for me and works well for compilation albums as for recordings of a single specific piece; I can quickly get to whatever I want or need. Another script scavenges my MP3s file share to create a list of the.M3U files I have (I generate one for every CD when I rip it). I can access and play the songs, sorting the list either by composer, performer or by the name of the work in the M3Us from the web.
Understand, this is something that I created seven or eight years ago. Presently, it serves for about 320GB of music (all CDs I own, FWIW).
And - for my needs at least - it works far better than the lame-ass library systems in programs like Songbird or iTunes. I own an Escient Fireball to index the music and movies in my CD and DVD jukeboxes, but when it comes to my digital media, I think I do a better job myself.
I have a few classical tracks in my library. What identifiers are too simplistic or missing to properly categorize this music?
As I recall (haven't seen itunes in a while), the sorting and search features were VERY limited. I couldn't find something by performer AND composer, for instance, only by whichever of performer or composer happened to be in the "Artist" descriptor in iTunes. iTunes also didn't offer a better tag than the highly generic "classical" (maybe "Baroque" or "Opera"... I don't recall) to describe my music. Again, that's not helpful. I wanted things like "Minimalist" or "Pre-Renaissance" or "Plainsong".
I'm curious to know what method you use to duplicate the iTunes Library's Smart Playlist feature.
itunes' playlist feature didn't look that smart to me. From the very generic description on Apple's site, it appears to be a way to shuffle around a playlist in some random or organized fashion. That tool probably wouldn't mesh well with how I listen to music. Skipping around random tracks isn't as much fun when the 40-minute long work you want to hear is broken up into four different MP3 files that should be heard in order.
Are you sure you've ever looked closely in the Preferences settings for iTunes? It doesn't sound like you have.
I dimly recall looking at it. I wanted the option to use LAME as an encoder. Tha
OK, I looked at Songbird. It's slow. Clearly it's meant to be some kind of heavyweight application that'll maybe-someday compete with the features of itunes.
But, um, what's up with even thinking itunes is a good thing to copy?
itunes is itself slow, installs a bunch of helper apps on my Windows computers that aren't very helpful since I don't have an ipod, and it uses a bunch of non-native UI elements that don't behave quite the same way as the Windows equivalents. The all-important library feature that seems to be the main cause for sucking at the itunes-cock doesn't appear useful to me. I don't know why. Maybe because I use a sensible system for identifying my music files using the filesystem? Or maybe because classical music doesn't lend itself as well to what I see as the overly simplistic and under-customizable identifiers itunes has? Regardless, the itunes library didn't do anything I couldn't do five other ways, without using itunes, and the Songbird version is no different.
itunes can rip music, something I've done with cdex for a while. itunes isn't as good at it as cdex, which lets me choose my codec and even my file naming scheme. It can make my organization for me, if I let it.
itunes can play music, too? Meh. So can XMMS. So can WinAmp, Foobar, VLC or, hell, PowerDVD. I have m3u playlists. They work fine.
What is itunes giving that I don't already have? Why are so many here worshipping that specific program?
My Firefox 1.5 with 5 Tabs open is only using 84,740k. Azureus on my machine (5 active downloads, 3 seeds) is using 72,912k if I count the running java process. I don't think that's too bad in either case.
Now, Firefox with three or four HUNDRED open tabs is kind of beastly, but then, what else was I going to do with that second gigabyte of RAM, anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
I just helped a 60-year-old man deal with this.
His bank couldn't refuse the transaction because it wasn't billed from AOL.com but as a point-of-sale transaction. In other words, instead of being a recurring monthly charge from a known entity, it was just like the poor guy had walked up and handed AOL his credit card once a month.
Which somehow meant that it was a different category of transaction that could not be blocked by the bank in question.
Even more humorous, the guy's son (now a 24 year old off playing GI Joe in Iraq) had set him up with the account around four years previous. He's been a DSL subscriber essentially the whole time, didn't even know he had AOL service. And AOL told him that his son would have to cancel the account. The one on the old man's credit card. In his name, not his son's.
After more than 40 minutes of arguing and another 20 talking to his bank, I think he's cancelling the card AOL was billing. I can't wait to hear that AOL forced the account back open, 'cause I'm sure that's what will happen next.
Vista has a Calendar program which supports iCal servers.
Just sayin'.
My experience with DDO was that grouping SUCKED. There was such a limited amount of content that probably 90% of the people you group with at any time will have done whatever it is that your group is doing. The other 10% have no idea what the hell is going on in the game; they were powerlevelled or they are someone's kid brother messing around or something.
So either you group with a bunch of people who just want to clear a dungeon as fast as humanly possible, know exactly where to go, what to do and in what order, and 100% don't care whether or not you want to listen to the narrator or enjoy the mission content, or you're with a bunch of people who probably don't know how to play the game.
In other words, the only way to enjoy the neat atmosphere of the game is to play through a dungeon by yourself. That means doing lowbie dungeons by yourself over and over and over.
There's pretty much only one class in D&D that can solo, and that's a Cleric. Hope you like Clerics, 'cause that's basically the only way you're going to get to experience content!
While I'm at it, I'm also going to say that I hate teamspeak with a fiery passion. There's nothing more obnoxious than trying to get into an "RPG" frame of mind while some dickhead is quoting Eminem raps, talking abuot what the rest of the group is watching on TV while they play, or how uber their other characters are. I realize this is tangental to the issue of soloing, but a big part of why I unsubscribed was that I got to a place where I could no longer solo content, and I had *zero* good group experiences in around 5 weeks of nightly play.
"All I have read are bad reviews of Microsoft's next operating system upgrade. Are there really any reasons (yet) for an average user to pay the money to upgrade from Microsoft Windows XP Pro to Microsoft Windows Vista?"
From my testing, the Microsoft (ical-based) calendar app looks like it'll be kind of nice. And there's some nice new things for deployments and in group policy, but that's not really "average user" stuff.
Average users will be pissed off when they find out that none of the default games are stored on the PC any more. Wanna play Solitaire? Too bad. You aren't connected to the internet.
I've found that the Omega Drivers will install fine on such systems. I've had to reinstall XP on several laptops with weirdo custom ATI chipsets before. I'm somewhat bothered by using a non-official driver, but enough gamers use Omega drivers that I'm sure there would be an uproar if they were seriously flawed somehow.
The bigger issue with Vista is that the beta versions I've tried (my Vista Beta 2 file transfer manager has been stuck at 0% for two days now) is that it doesn't allow the installation of unsigned drivers. I haven't found a signed driver for any sound device I have on any PC I own. Of the laptops I've tried Vista on, 802.11 was only supported on two out of four, and only one modem was supported. I'm not sure how "custom" wireless NICs or modems are; there aren't many vendors for those chips. Regardless, Vista doesn't wanna work with them.
Oddly enough, my folks are using SuSE 10 with VLC at home. :P
Based on my observations as a software trainer, the overwhelming majority of users aren't aware of the extra functions media player provides in the first place.
Based on my experiences as a support guy, dealing with Media Player-related issues is a lot more hassle than it's worth, e.g. "Why can't I play this DVD?" or "Why can't I play this file back?" or "What the hell is a codec, anyway?" Gods help you if users start playing with the skins support. "Where'd my play button go?!?"
Microsoft could do just fine to have a simple media player (e.g. version 6.4, which shipped with Windows 2000, or Media Player Classic) which does the things consumers expect a media player to do without a bunch of extra crap bolted on. Throw RealJukebox or WinAmp a bone if you need ripping and library support, or at least put those features in a different program that can be removed from a default windows install.
I'm perfectly willing to disagree, since I don't want or think it's the responsibility of my OS vendor to provide me with a heavyweight media player, especially one I can't remove from that OS.
FWIW I don't like iTunes either.
Oh, good god yes.
That is an MMO I would want above all others. The universe is so well-developed and so well documented that it would match just about any kind of interest one might have. I can see meaningful paths for crafting, skills, player-run economy, player advancement in terms of command or hereditary title.
The scope and scale could run from individual infantry and battle armor fights up to mechs and to deep space battles with aerospace units and dropships.
That would be just be awesome.
If the machine is any kind of functional before you get started, you can run Belarc Advisor to fish the Windows and Office product codes out of the registry. I don't care what was there before, those are the numbers I type back into the boxes when I have to reinstall. I see numbers from Belarc that match the ones on the sticker maybe 2/3s of the time. I'm not sure what happens the other third, and to be honest it's none of my business.
Woe be to software developers who persecute The Chosen of the Flying Spaghetti Monster! I foresee noodly vengence! When the seas turn red from Marinara and the pirates run rampant through the streets of Moscow, all will know the power and glory of Pastafarianism!
RAmen
Not to be petty, but you brought up "a couple calendars for your friends" before there was any discussion of numbers at all. :P
I deployed Contact in a couple settings of up to a few hundred users. That may not be "Enterprise" enough for some people, but it's a damned big single office. I administered HP OpenMail (same software) in environments of several thousand simultaneous users. I thought it sucked a lot less than other big messaging servers I had and have dealt with (Groupwise and Exchange).
I'm not convinced of the value of enterprise support. From a business standpoint, would an unsupported commercial product really be worse than recommending or implementing an open source messaging system?
In the case of Exchange or some other product, as their IT Contractor/Consultant/Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, I would expect primary support tasks to fall to myself and/or my dedicated staff, rather than calling EnterpriseAppVendor at the first sign of trouble. I've supported all manner of enterprise-level products without ever needing to invoke paid support for them.
Besides, you're the one who brought up that "dozen" number.
The same thing might be said of Exchange; I support a few businesses that have either Windows Small Business Server or Exchange on Windows Server just so that something less than a dozen people can share a calendar. I wouldn't expect them to get useful support from Microsoft for their problems either.
In my experience (admittedly a couple versions old now) it was a solid product that left little to be desired. Abandoned or not, if the sheep can use share their Outlook calendars and I don't have to use Windows + Exchange, that counts as a win.
Samsung Contact is a really sweet messaging server. And it gets next to no marketing, as far as I can tell, which is too bad, 'cause it does all the Exchange-only crap that Outlook supports.
Once, on a cold and lonely contract, I was forced to migrate some poor enterprise from Windows 2000 + NDS to VINES. I think I'm going to hell for that.
I met the guys who write and draw "Hero Happy Hour" at comic conventions a couple times. The book is a fun read, and the creators are funny guys. They know they aren't going to make a fortune, they're just making a comic because they want to make a comic. I've never seen any publicity for their comic until now, which is a damned shame. "Hero Happy Hour" is easily the best small press/amateur title I've ever picked up.
Anyone who is into comics would do well to pick up whatever issues they still have in print, 'cause they're worth the money.
Anyway, I remember Marvel and DC claiming trademark on Super-Hero in the early 80s if not earlier, and just about everyone who writes about people with super-powers, who doesn't work for Marvel or DC, uses some other term to describe them. I can't believe they're enforcing their trademark on a couple guys whose comics have a print run that's probably 1/100 the size of an average "big name" book, but they've had the right to do so for over 20 years.
Nero Burnrights
I realize that not everyone with Windows will have Nero, but it's a common solution to a common problem.
Four identical Athlon64/3000s, 1GB RAM, Gigabyte K8VM800 motherboards, 4x7k250s, 3x7k400s, 1xSP1614 PATA, 3Ware 8506-4LP, Intel Gbit NICs. These machines run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Someday I will get motivated enough to upgrade them to some other form of Linux.
:D
Game Machine: Athlon64X2/4400. 3GB RAM. Soltek motherboard. PCIe X850 Pro. X-Mystique. 2x7k400s, 2 7k250s (SATA), 300GB Maxline, 2 SP1614Ns, 7k400 (all PATA). LiteOn DVD Burner. LiteOn 32x CD Burner (both on "SCSI Buddies" connected to an Adaptec 2940UW) - and yes, every drive bay in that P180 is full. 600W Enermax PSU, Onkyo TX-NR801. 21" Dell CRT, 19" Scepter LCD. Antec P180 case. This machine presently dual boots Windows Server 2003 Web Edition and SuSE 10.
HTServer: Athlon64/3500. 3GB RAM. Soltek motherboard. PCIe X800AIW . X-Mystique. 3Ware 7506-12. 10xPATA SP1614s, 2x7k250s. LiteOn DVD Burner. 5U case. Thermaltake 680W PSU. Machine runs 2000 Server. Integra DTR-8.2 Receiver. Samsung 60" DLP monitor.
TechStation (aka "Pokey"): AthlonXP/2500. 1GB RAM. Radeon 9600VIVO. 1x 120GB drive (either a Samsung or a Maxtor). 5-in-3 SATA enclosure that usually has nothing in it. Asus A7N8X. LiteOn DVD Burner. 15" LCD and 12-year-old 17" Mag display. Cybex Video Switch. Spends most of its time in SuSE 9.3, but it's mostly a hardware test machine, so I've got DOS and 2000 on it, too.
ComputerUnderMyBed: Sempron 3400, 1GB RAM. Radeon 9550. GA-K8VM800. 20" Samsung LCD. 2xSP1614Ns. Runs SuSE 10. Exists mostly so that I can send E-mail and remote control all the other computers from someplace comfortable. I am just that lazy.
Laptop: Thinkpad T40. 1.6GHz P4m. 1GB RAM. 80GB hard disk. It's a remote control for the other machines or "the office that lives in my car".
Laptop #2: Gateway MX7515: Athlon64/4000, 1GB RAM, 100GB slow-ass hard disk, DVD burner, 256MB X600 Pro graphics. I switch between an XP install and 2003 Web edition. Too damned heavy to carry around. I've been using it as a comic/ebook reader.
I'm using an 8-port TrendNet GigE switch at the moment, and a Sonicwall SOHO device for a firewall. I have a Linksys 802.11A+G router that I use for WLAN (2.4GHz is FAR too crowded for anything to connect in my apartment, though).
My ex-'s garage is home to the rest of my computers, mostly machines that I barely used, or used only for various client needs. My ex-'s partner uses them to copy DVDs, but I can "visit" them if I need to via VPN. These machines are mostly AthlonXPs of various stripes, and IBM P4 desktop, but there's also a Sparc 20, and an UltraSparc10, some Motorola StarMAX machines, an original Mac, several old Dell and IBM laptops and an HP PA-RISC machine. Also my old IBM RAID enclosures, my Cisco 9005 and most of my older spare parts .
Total storage for what I've got would be something like 12TB, but I'm pretty big on redundancy, so it's really more like 8TB.
My utility bill is about $210/month.
Pool of Radiance - upgrade(?) to CGA from Hercules mono and to 3.5" floppy. First time I installed it, onto 360k floppies, it took something like 5 hours.
:D
:D
Tradewars - upgrade from 1200bps modem to 9600bps modem
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica - upgrade from 14" SVGA to 17" SVGA (Mag DX17F, I still have the damned thing), and to 4MB ET4000 video card so I could use truecolor at 1280x1024 and look at the pretty pictures at full size.
Quake - I saw it on a 486/100 and decided I needed a better computer. I ended up with a dual Pentium-133 with an unheard-of 128MB RAM. Yup, Quake ran pretty well on that guy.
glQuake - Orchid Farhenheit.
Unreal - Voodoo 3 3000 + Celeron @450MHz, another 128MB RAM
Quake 3 - I first tried a Geforce2 GTS, which was a POS and soured me on nvidia forever. I think I went to an original Radeon after that.
Since then, the pace of my upgrades have exceeded that of any game that's come out.
I'm hovering at around 12TB for the computers in my home. All commodity hardware.
1. IIRC 3ware cards are limited to 2TB per array in 32-bit OSes. Not a HUGE deal, but something to keep in mind if you're running Windows or haven't gotten around to installing 64-bit Linux on your Athlon64.
2. I like having dense arrays, but I also like mirrored data. Each of my fileservers therefore has 2 arrays - a RAID5 on a 4-port 3Ware card and a software RAID0 (It's that or JBOD). I replicate the changes on each of the RAID5s on the RAID0 of a different machine (in a different room) twice a day.
RAID0 is generally a bad idea for storing, oh, pretty much anything. I'm not a big fan of it. On the other hand, I'm storing redundant data to begin with.
An IBM T20 would probably fit the bill very nicely. Around 800MHz but with modern comforts like DVD+CD-R and support for that all important full GB of RAM; they support dual batteries and I believe there's an appropriate UltraBase station + battery. I'm not sure how long a loaded-with-batteries T20 lasts on a one charge. It's longer than an 8 hour workday, at least.
Plus they're probably dirt cheap by now.
You must be speaking of the single "helper app", namely iTunesHelper.exe
Yup. That's the one. I loaded iTunes because I got a free song in off a Coke bottlecap. For that I was punished with an autostart application for a program I never particularly cared to start again. Yes, eventually it annoyed me enough to pull it out of Windows' registry, but why was it there to begin with?
That's because, being OS X UI elements, they work better.
Really? So it was worth all that developer time Apple spent reinventing the wheel? And the button? And the scrollbar? All so it could kinda-sorta look like an OS I don't have?
Is that system you use an improvement on the Artist/Album/Trackname system that iTunes uses?
Nope, as "artist" can mean several different things to someone who likes classical music (Composer? Soloist? Orchestra? Conductor?) and "album" doesn't mean much of anything.
If you've ever searched for music on a site like Amazon, you'll notice that the generic search system will say something like "For classical music, search with this other tool". That's 'cause our organization is a little more complicated, and metadata is a little more important.
I store my music in a set of folders that essentially works as "Composer/Work" (so all 14 versions of Beethoven's 9th Symphony that I have are in the same directory, Beethoven/9th Symphony) and maintain additional metadata with symlinks extracted from the ID3 tags (e.g. the name of the CD, conductor or performer if those are part of the ID3 data). Since I pretty much only work from CDs I own, I have control over those things, and organization is just a perl script away (so I have a Performer/Solti directory that symlinks to all the CSO performances that I have). This works just fine for me and works well for compilation albums as for recordings of a single specific piece; I can quickly get to whatever I want or need.
Another script scavenges my MP3s file share to create a list of the
Understand, this is something that I created seven or eight years ago. Presently, it serves for about 320GB of music (all CDs I own, FWIW).
And - for my needs at least - it works far better than the lame-ass library systems in programs like Songbird or iTunes. I own an Escient Fireball to index the music and movies in my CD and DVD jukeboxes, but when it comes to my digital media, I think I do a better job myself.
I have a few classical tracks in my library. What identifiers are too simplistic or missing to properly categorize this music?
As I recall (haven't seen itunes in a while), the sorting and search features were VERY limited. I couldn't find something by performer AND composer, for instance, only by whichever of performer or composer happened to be in the "Artist" descriptor in iTunes. iTunes also didn't offer a better tag than the highly generic "classical" (maybe "Baroque" or "Opera"... I don't recall) to describe my music. Again, that's not helpful. I wanted things like "Minimalist" or "Pre-Renaissance" or "Plainsong".
I'm curious to know what method you use to duplicate the iTunes Library's Smart Playlist feature.
itunes' playlist feature didn't look that smart to me. From the very generic description on Apple's site, it appears to be a way to shuffle around a playlist in some random or organized fashion. That tool probably wouldn't mesh well with how I listen to music. Skipping around random tracks isn't as much fun when the 40-minute long work you want to hear is broken up into four different MP3 files that should be heard in order.
Are you sure you've ever looked closely in the Preferences settings for iTunes? It doesn't sound like you have.
I dimly recall looking at it. I wanted the option to use LAME as an encoder. Tha
OK, I looked at Songbird. It's slow. Clearly it's meant to be some kind of heavyweight application that'll maybe-someday compete with the features of itunes.
But, um, what's up with even thinking itunes is a good thing to copy?
itunes is itself slow, installs a bunch of helper apps on my Windows computers that aren't very helpful since I don't have an ipod, and it uses a bunch of non-native UI elements that don't behave quite the same way as the Windows equivalents. The all-important library feature that seems to be the main cause for sucking at the itunes-cock doesn't appear useful to me. I don't know why. Maybe because I use a sensible system for identifying my music files using the filesystem? Or maybe because classical music doesn't lend itself as well to what I see as the overly simplistic and under-customizable identifiers itunes has? Regardless, the itunes library didn't do anything I couldn't do five other ways, without using itunes, and the Songbird version is no different.
itunes can rip music, something I've done with cdex for a while. itunes isn't as good at it as cdex, which lets me choose my codec and even my file naming scheme. It can make my organization for me, if I let it.
itunes can play music, too? Meh. So can XMMS. So can WinAmp, Foobar, VLC or, hell, PowerDVD. I have m3u playlists. They work fine.
What is itunes giving that I don't already have? Why are so many here worshipping that specific program?
My Firefox 1.5 with 5 Tabs open is only using 84,740k. Azureus on my machine (5 active downloads, 3 seeds) is using 72,912k if I count the running java process. I don't think that's too bad in either case.
Now, Firefox with three or four HUNDRED open tabs is kind of beastly, but then, what else was I going to do with that second gigabyte of RAM, anyway?