AudioDVD supports full 5.1 playback at greater-than-CD bitrates for all channels. The sound quality in any case is more spectacular than anything else a normal electronics consumer can get; even better than the sound found on DVD.
Minidisc is just a crappy tape replacement that's already been passed over by the music industry and everyone else except Sony.
Assuming that you listen to music to enjoy it, even without 5 speakers, you're going to have a better experience with an AudioDVD than any other source.
It really pisses me off that the reason I can't buy more AudioDVDs right now is that my favorite labels (Telarc, for example) are worried that someone could break the format and steal their "perfect" data.
Personally, I want a format that's uncopyable, reasonably priced, and better quality than CDs.
I don't mind supporting the musicians and composers whose music I enjoy, or the record companies that serve my interests (classical music, in my case. Generally not part of the RIAA mess, as far as I can tell). I want my music to remain commercially viable, too - something that a lot of non-top 40 listeners should be concerned about.
Nobody ever said the thing had to have 500GB as one logical volume.
Personally, I keep the stuff on my media PC organized by the borders of its disk drives (MP3s on one disk, divx files on another, porno on a third (and yes, I AM using all 75GB of that disk, dammit) , and the fourth as temp space and porno-overflow.
It's a lot easier to back up that way, too. =)
Water cooling solves the lion's share of PC-loudness problems, unless you're overfond of high-rpm SCSI disks, and is getting less expensive (hardocp reviewed a commercially available $200 water-cooled chassis about a week ago).
I live in an area near a major US city (Chicago). I can't get a 33.6 modem connection, let alone broadband. I have a media box that's similar to what taco describes. Broadband is an afterthought for me, though, and probably will be until I can download a movie in an amount of time similar to that of downloading a song from napster now (note to people who can do that now: I hate you. I hate all of you. Every stinking one of you.). Streaming is unappealing anyway, for the same reason that listening to the radio is unappealing - I'd rather have the additional control over what I'm watching or listening to.
First thing: MP3/Ogg isn't good enough for real audio. It's fine if you're used to a boombox or your $30 computer speakers. MP3s played on my component system sound like crap..AC3 files (ripped from DVDs of concert performances, or DTS-format audio CDs) sound really damn good on everything I've played them back on (including $30 computer speakers), and aren't a whole lot bigger than high-bitrate MP3 files (the audio from Fantasia lives in 300-something MB on my Windows box at home). Presently, there's only a limited subset of computer hardware/software to support AC3 audio. This will change, and you'll want it on the Borg Box too.
DVD Audio is a next generation format. Yup. It's not presently possibly to copy DVD Audio to your PC. Nor does it work over the standard digital connections found on newer receivers (TOSLink or digital coax) - the bandwidth needed for 5 channels - topping out at 9.6Mbps is more than those connectors can handle, according to the DVD Audio FAQ (http://www.digitalaudioguide.com/faq/dvd-audio/ - no link for the goat impaired, sorry). Your borg box will therefore need Firewire or some additional high-speed data connections as well (in a perfect world, the box would have several ports that would allow me to run full, multichannel audio AND high-res video AND relay control information back to the box from locations other than the closet or rack where it lived, but I don't know of any way to make THAT work at all).
Personally, I'd rather have - at minimum - a mega-changer that supports a number of formats (DVD Audio, DVD Video, CD, (S)VCD, MP3 CD). I would rather have this than deal with copying/ripping huge amounts of data (multiples of GBs for a DVD, and it's easier from an interface standpoint, anyway. Besides, assuming you own most of the media you use - ie, you aren't a napster leach, you have to do SOMETHING with it all... )
Audiophiles - and I'm not - will also tell you that TOSLink is not the digital audio connection of choice, due to the fact that minute fluxuations in current to your audio gear apparently cause small additional imperfections in the audio output. Oh well. TOSLink still sounds a lot better than plain ol' phono jacks.
Last thing is, with all the drives, and presumably a decent enough processor to handle DD decoding, divx encoding, you're gonna need some decent cooling. And it'll have to be quiet.
I've got "my" borg box now. Only thing is, at the moment it's in ten different boxes and cost the better part of ten grand.
My setup follows these lines, more or less, with a Sony V444ES receiver hooked up via optical connectors to a pair of 200-CD changers, via digital coax to a water-cooled (for noise reasons. It's barely overclocked at all) 1.2GHz Windows 98 box with 320GB of disk space, a TV/radio Tuner, a Pinnacle external vidcap device hooked up to a JVC SVHS VCR (which is ALSO connected to the receiver directly), and a DVD-ROM, and a JVC DVD Audio player via 5.1 analog connections (for which I have a whopping TWO discs at the moment - telarc needs to get offs its ass). I use a Sony 25" monitor run through the computer, rather than the video I/O on my receiver, for video output @ 1024x768, which is just fine. This system would be outrageously expensive, though, if I hadn't bought it a piece at a time over about 2.5 years. I'm estimating it at around $8,500. My next purchase: A better $#%$-ing remote, then probably a good computer projector to replace the beige monolith that is my display.
I use the TV/Radio tuner to record episodes of "Futurama" and some things on NPR. I rent DVDs and make them into divx.AVIs (or.ac3 files, if that's the part I care about - it takes forever, which is why I like the changer idea better). I have a cordless mouse and keyboard, and a couple of different remotes, so I can do it all from my couch. It's really very nice, except that cabling it was harder than cabling the whole rest of my LAN...
I have the game. I mentioned somewhere above that it's buggy as all hell, that I've had it for just about 17 hours now, and that it crashes my game machine continuously (on startup, when I try to save, when I read a scroll, when I move the cursor). I can't even finish the introductory tutorial with the game in its present state.
I've decided I want my money back. There's no way in hell that this is a finished product.
I gotta concur...
I got the game last night. I've played for a total of three hours. It took down my system - my normally as stable as you can hope Windows will be - eleven times in those three hours. So far, I've learned that going in the rooms in the temple is the surest way I've ever seen to crash my PC... I think I've spent longer trying to skip the intro than play the game.
One could also make the argument that 70-year-old music has stood the test of time long enough to _be_ relevant, as opposed to the forgettable crap that passes for modern popular music.
It'd be the ot calling the kettle black if I didn't mention that I have some Philip Glass and John Adams in my 1590-disk CD collection but I doubt that's what you meant by relevance.
This is probably gonna sound like a bad idea but... I think a really cool place to start is with a language that can easily flow between web and database apps (PHP or Python or something - I don't think I'd use Perl). Querying a database isn't difficult to conceptualize, and could probably be made pretty cool to a lot of kids (say, with sports scores or Britney Spears' vital statisics or something). Teaching them to do it with in a way that can easily transfer to the web - where the fruits of their work are easily visible - would be a really nice motivation.
What I'd do is spend some amount of time teaching one of those stripped-down languages that gets used for "web stuff". Teach them the basics of the language while at the same time asking them to think of creative ways to solve problems. I'd put a lot of emphasis in either working in groups or some decent mentor-type environment where kids aren't just on their own... and tell them all along that what they're going is going to end up on the web. The language they work with is absolutely secondary to the experience of learning. Anyway, after they've done their problem solving or at least taken a stab at writing something like a program, take some time and teach them HTML. This isn't a big deal. It's standard fare for college sophomores majoring in liberal arts nowadays, which means a reasonably intelligent 10-year old should be able to learn it in just a bit more time (no slam against liberal-arts types, they're just typically not technical people). Anyway, teach 'em HTML, then teach them how to get their programs to either work with that HTML or to spit out the HTML pages themselves.
I taught a 12-year old cousin this way, using ASP and HTML (I did some database work for him) - we made set of web pages that kept statistics for his baseball team.
If you're really brave, you might even venture into SQL - at least the basic SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT and DELETE commands. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with that combination.
Ball State University in Muncie, IN had an entire cluster of them as recently as a couple years ago. Purdue University's Calumet campus in Hammond Indiana still teaches "operating system fundamentals" (i.e. how to use a command line for CS students that have never had to use one) and a small number of programming classes on a VMS box (axp.calumet.purdue.edu).
Of course, when the old man that's in charge of those classes finally retires or dies, that VMS box will be someone's Linux/Alpha machine in about two seconds.
I know of no reason to build new systems on the VMS platform, but maybe someone else can explain that one.
Fact of life: Playing a DVD, my Viewsonic P815 looks a hell of a lot better than any TV I've ever seen.
Set at 1280x1024, I'm getting what? Four times the number of scan lines that a TV has (NTSC is 320x200, right?). Even with the crappiest VGA display in the world you can manage 640x480 at a reasonable 60Hz or so... which is still better than a TV.
Plus, most good sound cards have optical connectors and quad speaker output, making a "home theater" setup quite a bit easier to set up and less expensive than the full-blown stereo component experience (C'mon, $40 for a TOSlink cable?)
Personally, I don't see any reason to watch or own a TV.
And if I wanna rent porn and make video clips, I'd do it off VHS tapes... it's what they film the movies on in the first place. =)
I wouldn't have known about the playboy thing, except that the cage I was working in was right next to it... and there was an admin there who couldn't get his 300GB image database to back up properly. I kept joking with him that I was going to plug my laptop in to his switch (which was close enough to the wall of his cage) and see how much "premium content" I could snag. =)
As far as costs and security... a service like Playboy.com would probably be paying about the amount they were paying for the cage at Exodus just for proper bandwidth. Exodus offers all that bandwidth, but with a lot of added warranties against any type of failure. I think that's probably worth the price being paid. Sure, Playboy.com probably doesn't need kevlar lined walls, but I can imagine a certain amount of chaos would ensue if someone decided to go after, say, Etrade's physical setup.
Some other fun things to do at Exodus: Make friends with the guy running the shipping area. While I was there, I needed an extra fiber channel cable - I was shorted one in shipping, and fiber channel cables aren't something you can just go buy at the local computer shop. I asked the shipping manager if maybe I missed a box or something, and told him what I was looking for... he had at least a couple dozen cables - along with several high-end disk drives and an entire Dell server, which had all become the property of Exodus, 'cause no one had come back and picked them up in a decent period of time.
Exodus is a good place to dumpster dive. Their facilities are very low key. I doubt that there's a listed phone number for any of them and the one I visited didn't even have a sign indicating what it was, but if you can identify one... there's lots of interesting stuff being thrown away there. I picked up an entire APC rackmount enclosure while I was there, and a dead Compaq server (which had overheated inside the enclosure). I just happened to be outside when someone was bringing it to the garbage. That was a "kid at christmas" moment for me. That Compaq had a working RAID controller and a dual-port Ethernet card as well (too bad they took all the disks out before they trashed it).
If you're ever working in one, or setting up a cage in one of their facilities, do yourself a BIG favor and bring some kind of chair or stool. There aren't any in the cages, nor any to loan out, and if you're there more than a couple hours, you'll probably want one. Also, a well appointed cage has a land-line phone. Cellular reception in the facility I visited was terrible (go figure), and if you need another phone, well, there was one in the ops area that customers could use, but that's not really a good thing if you need to talk to someone while you're working in a cage.
Walking among the cages at the facility I visited was extremely educational. I would guess that at least 60% of the computers I saw were either Compaqs x86 servers or Compaq Alphas. Probably another quarter were Suns. Almost everything else was Dell. I only saw two SGIs (both in the same cage), one IBM machine (in one of those cute U6 form factors), and maybe a half-dozen VA Linux boxes. One cage I walked past had 42(!) Sun Enterprise 4500s, and 6 Storage Arrays. One has to wonder what was going on in there.
Exodus is a colocation facility. Basically, they have connectivity coming out their ears (one or more OC48s to the other Exodus facilities, OC3s to "most" of backbone carriers, at each site) the in a number of buildings that offer things like highly secured access (full time security staff, kevlar lined walls, 2" thick electronic-keyed steel doors), mutliple power circuits and UPS, extremely regulated environmental conditions. You have to sign an NDA to even walk in their building.
Basically, the Exodus facilities are going to be better than anything a single company could afford to do on their own.
They host sites like Ebay and (at the one I was at) all the Playboy.com stuff.
To me the best part was that everything in their vending machines only cost a dime. =)
"A Wrinkle in Time" by Madelyn L'Engle "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson. "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" et al, by Douglas Adams. "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Heinlein. The Honor Harrington series and the Armageddon Inheiritance series, both by David Weber. "Ringworld" and the other known space books by Larry Niven. "The Andromeda Strain" by Micheal Crichton. Read a couple of those "All time best Science Fiction" short story collections - something to ground her in the old classics. "Hardwired" (which might be a little sleazy for a 13 year old girl, but I read it when I was younger and loved it) by Walter Jon Williams. "Virtual Light" and the "Neuromancer" books are excellent. "The DragonRiders of Pern" by Anne McCaffery
Not forgetting Fantasy, the first eight or 10 Xanth Books by Peirs Anthony are nice for young people, as are the "Theives World" and "Myth" series by Robert Asprin. Anything by Tad Williams is wonderful, as are the "Dragonlance" books by Weis and Hickman.
There are thousands of others I really enjoyed when I was young, but these are the ones off the top of my head.
I need to send my entirely-too-expensive CD-changer in for repair sometime soon (a spring on the door came unwound). Something like this would be a good temporary replacement. However, I've got a pretty high-end amplifier - one that does DTS (which I don't use) and has optical inputs for everything - I'm used to the "no hiss or static" sounds that come from a pure digital setup and good speakers and wires, and I swear the sound that comes from the optical cables is better than what I get out of the digital coax.
Now, I notice this thing doesn't have optical outputs. To me, a DVD player (which I don't need, since I don't have a TV) that doesn't have an optical out probably isn't worth the money since everything inside the DVD should be digital anyway.
At any rate, has anyone tested the Apex unit on a decent amp and set of speakers? How is the sound quality from MP3 to CD audio?
If all I'm interested in is the sound quality, why wouldn't I be better served with a medium capacity CD changer with a good signal to noise ratio and optical outputs?
Alpha Centauri is every bit as fun as CivII. I can't QUITE say more fun, but if you've played CivII, then you certainly know how fun SMAC is as well.
The things that keep me from liking it even more: 1.) Under Windows, SMAC runs in a 640x480 256c window. Period. 2.) It doesn't multitask well with other programs 3.) The color scheme is very, very dark 4.) The sound can get pretty repetitive 5.) The computer opponents CAN be predictable, but aren't always (depends on a lot of things, I guess)
I liked being able to customize my troops, though.
I haven't played a game where I've noticed a 'massive slowdown' near the end, but my game machines are both fairly obscene in terms of hardware.
I only played Civ:CTP one time. My impression was basically that I was glad I didn't buy it.
Most of my PCs use Logitech TrackMan Marbles or Marble+ trackballs. They're simply the best pointing device I've used. But, I'm not a mousing person, so I have a tough time choking down the $50 or so a Marble+ costs. That's why I've bought a number of them from auction sites like onsale.com. Most of the ones I've bought came from computergeeks.com (but were sold from an auction site). If you like the mouse but balk at the price, well, I haven't paid more than $25 including shipping for one yet.
I use my "main" PC about 14 hours a day without any wrist problems, and the placement of the buttons on the Trackman Marble seems to be comfortable for lots of different people with different sized parts. A half-dozen friends of mine have picked one up after using mine.
The only complaint I have about the Marble is that it's a pain in the butt to clean, and it needs to be cleaned fairly often. Other than that, I hope I never see another mouse again.
Some other pointing devices I've liked: the original Microsoft Ballpoint trackball. They're tiny. They don't ever seem to break, and I don't find them uncomfortable to use. Down side: no third button (why I got my first Marble), and the mouse cord is coiled, which is sort of a pain.
Honeywell Footed Mouse: Um, Microsoft wasn't the first company to produce an all-surface mouse. Honeywell's design has two plastic nubs on the bottom surface - I've got one that I run on shaggy carpet. They also have user-replacable button arrangements, including a lefty-mode and a three-button set. Down side: They're hard to find (I think Keytronic now makes these) and they aren't terribly ergonomic. I wish someone would update this one.
Logitech First Mouse: A low-cost mouse that most people seem pretty comfortable with.
I recommend trackballs to people whenever possible. There are lots of good reasons for this, but the big one for me is that there's lots less wrist/arm/hand movement going on in using a trackball than a mouse. Also, there's no need to clear desk space for rolling. =)
I've tried the KVM thing. It didn't work very well, especially since I like high resolution displays (1280x1024+). I also had problems with video signal degradation, 'cause some of my cables wound up being REALLY long.
My house is already networked with 24 ports of switched 100Mbit goodness. vnc was the icing on the cake. Cross-platform. Arbitrary window geometries and color depths AND I could still see what was going on with my main machine(s). With the price of a 2-node 100Mbit ethernet kit hovering just over $100US, I don't know if I'd ever bother with KVM
Caveat: I've tried vnc with machines that quite a bit slower than anything I have (the slow ones were 24MB RAM P200s with generic NICs and video cards), on a 10Mbit LAN. I won't say the word painful. I will say that you should maybe keep a newsreader or something open while you wait.
Still there's a certain joy in being able to play xdoom from a Windows box. I can do that. It's cool.
The version I had for my XT was many, many times better as well. The ships could (optionally) have teleport and shield capabilities and had two different modes of fire and there was AI, so it was possible to have a 1-player game. Much more fun than hitting the thrust a bit so the 2nd player goes crashing into the planet first.
This was just... disappointing.
And yes, java IS the most overhyped, unstable resource hungry idea to enter the industry in the last 10 years. Even when you DO have an up to date processor (the java spacewar runs like crap on the 700MHz dual PIII I'm sitting in front of now, which is running that other overhyped unstable, resource hungry idea that, well, any/.-er can fill in the rest).
My way of creating and remembering passwords is to take a word I know, or phrase, or whatever, and transpose it on my keyboard -- move all the letters one or two letters left, right up or down. Usually I shift one or two characters and one control character. Ususually, after the second or third time I type it, I don't have to look at the keyboard, either. =)
The net result of this is uniformly line-noise-type passwords.
Good Memories of Pinkwater (and being fat)
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I read most of Daniel Pinkwater's books when I was in middle school. I distinctly recall being teased for weeks at a time after the overdue state of "Snarkout Boys and the Avacado of Death" my announced to my 7th grade class.
Part of the fun of Pinkwater's books is finding all the psuedonyms he's used for his work. It was a lot of fun to pick up a book and discover, after reading about ten pages, that it was a Daniel Pinkwater story, regardless of what the cover said.
At any rate, my adult connection with Daniel Pinkwater has been National Public Radio, through his commentaries on "All Things Considered" -- which can be side-splitting at times, just like his books, and book reviews on "Weekend Edition Sunday".
Pinkwater talks a lot about being fat. That's something that I bet I'm not the only /.-er interested in. He's fat and he's... amazingly positive about it. One doesn't hear many fat-positive people ANYWHERE, but Pinkwater is erudite and funny about it, so hearing his voice on the radio is always a joy.
I got a copy of the 5 Stories collection with a contribution to my local public radio station. I let a half-dozen adults borrow and read it before I finally passed it along to my niece.
When I was in H.S., my now-fiance had a terrible crush on me (I had one on her, too). Being typical geek, lacking a clue in the social skills department, I had no idea until one day about 3 years after we graduated, she decided to track down my Email address and start writing me. If she had called me on the phone and said "Hey, I had a crush on you in High School", I probably would've hung up - would've thought she was joking. Email was safe.
Even though we knew each other pretty well before she started writing, there's no way I would've thought of her as anything but a friend if the Email hadn't flowed so freely between us. I still have some trouble saying things in person that I can discuss freely when I write, and she's OK with that.
-- Amazingly enough, my (now) fiance was the THIRD woman (there was a fourth person as well, but um, not a woman) to do that to me -- makes me wonder why nobody can say something like that when I'm still accessible.
I guess my lesson is, you never know what the people around you are thinking. I think asking might actually help. =) --
PS I'm not trying to brag about looks or prowess or whatever. I'm a fat schmoe with pasty skin and thick glasses. Just a lucky fat schmoe.
Brief note on document formats: People are commenting on the fact that a Word copy of the document was not provided, while Wordperfect, PDF and HTML were.
Most legal documents submitted in electronic format have to be submitted in WordPerfect format. It was the industry standard for many years, and the document format has been stable for at least the last three releases of the software.
My mother is a paralegal, and she whines on a daily basis about the fact that there is such a tremendous intertia within the legal community that is centered on WordPerfect 5 for DOS and WordPerfect 6 for Windows. She uses a 300MHz Pentium II to run WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS every day. The lawyers she work for say it's the only thing they can use.
I'm not sure why that inertia exists, but at least where I live, if you hand the court a floppy disk, it'd better have a wordperfect file on it. Everything else is simply unacceptable.
For the parts of the network in my house that I have control over, I use the Muses (the demigods that inspire art and artists).
My main Linux box is Erato ("Lyric Art"). My File (MP3) server is Aoede ("Song"). My Win2k RC2 box is Melpomene ("Tragedy"). My NT4 development server is Thalia ("Comedy") My Sparc20 with an Oracle6 database is Clio ("History")
I chose Muses 'cause most of the names are generally cool. There are 15 or so identified muses in greek myth. I suppose if I ever ran out of those I'd move to the Graces, then Fates, then Furies.
I agree that Greek gods are overdone in general, though. Babylonian (Marduk, Tiamat, Gilgamesh) or Lovecraftian (Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep) are much more entertaining.
A cluster of Linux boxen named after pagan Finnish gods has a certain flair as well.
Maybe I'm missing the point of this, but... As far as I know, all the "standard" development tools under Windows are commercial software anyway. I always thought one of the great things about *nix open-source was the availability of good, free tools (gcc, perl etc.) tools so that ANY user could use and make changes to that source code.
And I don't see that with Windows. The last thing I am is an applications programmer under Windows, but everybody I know uses VC++/C++ Builder/Delphi/ Powerbuilder/VB to do their work. That $400, not to mention 800MB of disk space for VC++, is a pretty big barrier to entry for open source software running on Windows. Perl is the exception, but I don't know a lot of major projects that use perl as the sole language for development. Besides that, some parts of perl don't work the same way between different versions of Windows. Whoops.
What good is source if you can't compile it? (Don't answer that. I know it's nice to see how things work). It's good that people can see it, but since 99% of Windows users don't even have access to development tools, what difference does it ultimately make?
- Sam my copy of visual studio 6 is still in shrink wrap
Geez, the first things that ever gave me an idea of the "shared consciousness" of the internet were the various humorous brick-a-brack that I found on wiretap.spies.com and the like. Some of that material pre-dated anything I can remember from my very first time on the internet, in 1993.
The 100 question purity test was something even my non-geek friends knew about after their first year of college. And they knew where it came from, too.
The original Mosaic start page.
Famous Spam (& other email crap) ------------ The ASCII cow drawings. Neimun-Marcus Cookies recipie. Craig Shergold and those damn cards.
etc. ------------
The GeekCode listing. The jargon file.
The news.announce FAQs. The alt.sex FAQ (all of MY friends read it).
USENET was the global community long before web sites like/. ever came into being. There must be dozens of long-lost threads out there that should be included in such an archive. Serdar Argeric? Kibo? Sparring on the Scientology groups? Linus' initial postings about Linux (an testament to what the efforts of hundreds of programmers working cooperatively can do, if nothing else).
The rec.humor.funny post that got USENET censored at U.C.Berkeley. Briefly.
Posts from the Kremlin (kremvax IIRC) immediately before the fall of the Soviet union -- since these messages were literally the only information that got out of the country at the time. This may very well be the only time that the internet has been the SOLE source of information about an event of such global interest.
The announcement that AOLers would have free access to the internet (mostly USENET at the time, ie Black September).
The Warlord signature (people with.sigs that were excessively long got "warlord-ed". I know I was, but then, I was trying)
The Starr Report (important for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the degree to which the lengthy report brought so MANY web servers to their knees, even 6 years into the "web age" of massive internet growth).
The sex story written by (can't remember the name...) Jake Baker, the gentleman who was arrested in Michigan for writing a story involving the sexual torture of a classmate -- important because it's the first time *I* can recall that someone got in that type of legal trouble for something written on the internet. And probably where the internet's rep (independant of AOLs, which I think suffers for different reasons) for porn-related bad seeds.
How 'bout a representative cascade? (fun when everbody had 80-column newsreaders!)
I can think of lots more, but these are things that were either widely read and understood, or things that shaped both the internet and the outside world.
There was more on the internet than the GPL and RFCs before the web. -- Lutefisk.
Slashdot Mirror
AudioDVD supports full 5.1 playback at greater-than-CD bitrates for all channels. The sound quality in any case is more spectacular than anything else a normal electronics consumer can get; even better than the sound found on DVD.
Minidisc is just a crappy tape replacement that's already been passed over by the music industry and everyone else except Sony.
Assuming that you listen to music to enjoy it, even without 5 speakers, you're going to have a better experience with an AudioDVD than any other source.
It really pisses me off that the reason I can't buy more AudioDVDs right now is that my favorite labels (Telarc, for example) are worried that someone could break the format and steal their "perfect" data.
Personally, I want a format that's uncopyable, reasonably priced, and better quality than CDs.
I don't mind supporting the musicians and composers whose music I enjoy, or the record companies that serve my interests (classical music, in my case. Generally not part of the RIAA mess, as far as I can tell). I want my music to remain commercially viable, too - something that a lot of non-top 40 listeners should be concerned about.
Nobody ever said the thing had to have 500GB as one logical volume.
Personally, I keep the stuff on my media PC organized by the borders of its disk drives (MP3s on one disk, divx files on another, porno on a third (and yes, I AM using all 75GB of that disk, dammit) , and the fourth as temp space and porno-overflow.
It's a lot easier to back up that way, too. =)
Water cooling solves the lion's share of PC-loudness problems, unless you're overfond of high-rpm SCSI disks, and is getting less expensive (hardocp reviewed a commercially available $200 water-cooled chassis about a week ago).
I live in an area near a major US city (Chicago). I can't get a 33.6 modem connection, let alone broadband. I have a media box that's similar to what taco describes. Broadband is an afterthought for me, though, and probably will be until I can download a movie in an amount of time similar to that of downloading a song from napster now (note to people who can do that now: I hate you. I hate all of you. Every stinking one of you.). Streaming is unappealing anyway, for the same reason that listening to the radio is unappealing - I'd rather have the additional control over what I'm watching or listening to.
First thing: MP3/Ogg isn't good enough for real audio. It's fine if you're used to a boombox or your $30 computer speakers. MP3s played on my component system sound like crap. .AC3 files (ripped from DVDs of concert performances, or DTS-format audio CDs) sound really damn good on everything I've played them back on (including $30 computer speakers), and aren't a whole lot bigger than high-bitrate MP3 files (the audio from Fantasia lives in 300-something MB on my Windows box at home). Presently, there's only a limited subset of computer hardware/software to support AC3 audio. This will change, and you'll want it on the Borg Box too.
.AVIs (or .ac3 files, if that's the part I care about - it takes forever, which is why I like the changer idea better). I have a cordless mouse and keyboard, and a couple of different remotes, so I can do it all from my couch. It's really very nice, except that cabling it was harder than cabling the whole rest of my LAN...
DVD Audio is a next generation format. Yup. It's not presently possibly to copy DVD Audio to your PC. Nor does it work over the standard digital connections found on newer receivers (TOSLink or digital coax) - the bandwidth needed for 5 channels - topping out at 9.6Mbps is more than those connectors can handle, according to the DVD Audio FAQ (http://www.digitalaudioguide.com/faq/dvd-audio/ - no link for the goat impaired, sorry). Your borg box will therefore need Firewire or some additional high-speed data connections as well (in a perfect world, the box would have several ports that would allow me to run full, multichannel audio AND high-res video AND relay control information back to the box from locations other than the closet or rack where it lived, but I don't know of any way to make THAT work at all).
Personally, I'd rather have - at minimum - a mega-changer that supports a number of formats (DVD Audio, DVD Video, CD, (S)VCD, MP3 CD). I would rather have this than deal with copying/ripping huge amounts of data (multiples of GBs for a DVD, and it's easier from an interface standpoint, anyway. Besides, assuming you own most of the media you use - ie, you aren't a napster leach, you have to do SOMETHING with it all... )
Audiophiles - and I'm not - will also tell you that TOSLink is not the digital audio connection of choice, due to the fact that minute fluxuations in current to your audio gear apparently cause small additional imperfections in the audio output. Oh well. TOSLink still sounds a lot better than plain ol' phono jacks.
Last thing is, with all the drives, and presumably a decent enough processor to handle DD decoding, divx encoding, you're gonna need some decent cooling. And it'll have to be quiet.
I've got "my" borg box now. Only thing is, at the moment it's in ten different boxes and cost the better part of ten grand.
My setup follows these lines, more or less, with a Sony V444ES receiver hooked up via optical connectors to a pair of 200-CD changers, via digital coax to a water-cooled (for noise reasons. It's barely overclocked at all) 1.2GHz Windows 98 box with 320GB of disk space, a TV/radio Tuner, a Pinnacle external vidcap device hooked up to a JVC SVHS VCR (which is ALSO connected to the receiver directly), and a DVD-ROM, and a JVC DVD Audio player via 5.1 analog connections (for which I have a whopping TWO discs at the moment - telarc needs to get offs its ass). I use a Sony 25" monitor run through the computer, rather than the video I/O on my receiver, for video output @ 1024x768, which is just fine. This system would be outrageously expensive, though, if I hadn't bought it a piece at a time over about 2.5 years. I'm estimating it at around $8,500. My next purchase: A better $#%$-ing remote, then probably a good computer projector to replace the beige monolith that is my display.
I use the TV/Radio tuner to record episodes of "Futurama" and some things on NPR. I rent DVDs and make them into divx
I have the game. I mentioned somewhere above that it's buggy as all hell, that I've had it for just about 17 hours now, and that it crashes my game machine continuously (on startup, when I try to save, when I read a scroll, when I move the cursor). I can't even finish the introductory tutorial with the game in its present state.
I've decided I want my money back. There's no way in hell that this is a finished product.
Don't buy it.
I gotta concur...
I got the game last night. I've played for a total of three hours. It took down my system - my normally as stable as you can hope Windows will be - eleven times in those three hours. So far, I've learned that going in the rooms in the temple is the surest way I've ever seen to crash my PC... I think I've spent longer trying to skip the intro than play the game.
Sigh. It is gorgeous, though.
It'd be the ot calling the kettle black if I didn't mention that I have some Philip Glass and John Adams in my 1590-disk CD collection but I doubt that's what you meant by relevance.
This is probably gonna sound like a bad idea but... I think a really cool place to start is with a language that can easily flow between web and database apps (PHP or Python or something - I don't think I'd use Perl). Querying a database isn't difficult to conceptualize, and could probably be made pretty cool to a lot of kids (say, with sports scores or Britney Spears' vital statisics or something). Teaching them to do it with in a way that can easily transfer to the web - where the fruits of their work are easily visible - would be a really nice motivation.
What I'd do is spend some amount of time teaching one of those stripped-down languages that gets used for "web stuff". Teach them the basics of the language while at the same time asking them to think of creative ways to solve problems. I'd put a lot of emphasis in either working in groups or some decent mentor-type environment where kids aren't just on their own... and tell them all along that what they're going is going to end up on the web. The language they work with is absolutely secondary to the experience of learning.
Anyway, after they've done their problem solving or at least taken a stab at writing something like a program, take some time and teach them HTML. This isn't a big deal. It's standard fare for college sophomores majoring in liberal arts nowadays, which means a reasonably intelligent 10-year old should be able to learn it in just a bit more time (no slam against liberal-arts types, they're just typically not technical people). Anyway, teach 'em HTML, then teach them how to get their programs to either work with that HTML or to spit out the HTML pages themselves.
I taught a 12-year old cousin this way, using ASP and HTML (I did some database work for him) - we made set of web pages that kept statistics for his baseball team.
If you're really brave, you might even venture into SQL - at least the basic SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT and DELETE commands. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with that combination.
Ball State University in Muncie, IN had an entire cluster of them as recently as a couple years ago.
Purdue University's Calumet campus in Hammond Indiana still teaches "operating system fundamentals" (i.e. how to use a command line for CS students that have never had to use one) and a small number of programming classes on a VMS box (axp.calumet.purdue.edu).
Of course, when the old man that's in charge of those classes finally retires or dies, that VMS box will be someone's Linux/Alpha machine in about two seconds.
I know of no reason to build new systems on the VMS platform, but maybe someone else can explain that one.
Fact of life: Playing a DVD, my Viewsonic P815 looks a hell of a lot better than any TV I've ever seen.
Set at 1280x1024, I'm getting what? Four times the number of scan lines that a TV has (NTSC is 320x200, right?). Even with the crappiest VGA display in the world you can manage 640x480 at a reasonable 60Hz or so... which is still better than a TV.
Plus, most good sound cards have optical connectors and quad speaker output, making a "home theater" setup quite a bit easier to set up and less expensive than the full-blown stereo component experience (C'mon, $40 for a TOSlink cable?)
Personally, I don't see any reason to watch or own a TV.
And if I wanna rent porn and make video clips, I'd do it off VHS tapes... it's what they film the movies on in the first place. =)
I wouldn't have known about the playboy thing, except that the cage I was working in was right next to it... and there was an admin there who couldn't get his 300GB image database to back up properly. I kept joking with him that I was going to plug my laptop in to his switch (which was close enough to the wall of his cage) and see how much "premium content" I could snag. =)
As far as costs and security... a service like Playboy.com would probably be paying about the amount they were paying for the cage at Exodus just for proper bandwidth. Exodus offers all that bandwidth, but with a lot of added warranties against any type of failure. I think that's probably worth the price being paid.
Sure, Playboy.com probably doesn't need kevlar lined walls, but I can imagine a certain amount of chaos would ensue if someone decided to go after, say, Etrade's physical setup.
Some other fun things to do at Exodus:
Make friends with the guy running the shipping area. While I was there, I needed an extra fiber channel cable - I was shorted one in shipping, and fiber channel cables aren't something you can just go buy at the local computer shop. I asked the shipping manager if maybe I missed a box or something, and told him what I was looking for... he had at least a couple dozen cables - along with several high-end disk drives and an entire Dell server, which had all become the property of Exodus, 'cause no one had come back and picked them up in a decent period of time.
Exodus is a good place to dumpster dive. Their facilities are very low key. I doubt that there's a listed phone number for any of them and the one I visited didn't even have a sign indicating what it was, but if you can identify one... there's lots of interesting stuff being thrown away there.
I picked up an entire APC rackmount enclosure while I was there, and a dead Compaq server (which had overheated inside the enclosure). I just happened to be outside when someone was bringing it to the garbage. That was a "kid at christmas" moment for me. That Compaq had a working RAID controller and a dual-port Ethernet card as well (too bad they took all the disks out before they trashed it).
If you're ever working in one, or setting up a cage in one of their facilities, do yourself a BIG favor and bring some kind of chair or stool. There aren't any in the cages, nor any to loan out, and if you're there more than a couple hours, you'll probably want one. Also, a well appointed cage has a land-line phone. Cellular reception in the facility I visited was terrible (go figure), and if you need another phone, well, there was one in the ops area that customers could use, but that's not really a good thing if you need to talk to someone while you're working in a cage.
Walking among the cages at the facility I visited was extremely educational. I would guess that at least 60% of the computers I saw were either Compaqs x86 servers or Compaq Alphas. Probably another quarter were Suns. Almost everything else was Dell. I only saw two SGIs (both in the same cage), one IBM machine (in one of those cute U6 form factors), and maybe a half-dozen VA Linux boxes. One cage I walked past had 42(!) Sun Enterprise 4500s, and 6 Storage Arrays. One has to wonder what was going on in there.
Exodus is a colocation facility.
Basically, they have connectivity coming out their ears (one or more OC48s to the other Exodus facilities, OC3s to "most" of backbone carriers, at each site) the in a number of buildings that offer things like highly secured access (full time security staff, kevlar lined walls, 2" thick electronic-keyed steel doors), mutliple power circuits and UPS, extremely regulated environmental conditions. You have to sign an NDA to even walk in their building.
Basically, the Exodus facilities are going to be better than anything a single company could afford to do on their own.
They host sites like Ebay and (at the one I was at) all the Playboy.com stuff.
To me the best part was that everything in their
vending machines only cost a dime. =)
Of course, I don't think they could perform
"Uncle Fucka" on TV...
"A Wrinkle in Time" by Madelyn L'Engle
"Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson.
"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" et al, by Douglas Adams.
"Stranger in a Strange Land" by Heinlein.
The Honor Harrington series and the Armageddon Inheiritance series, both by David Weber.
"Ringworld" and the other known space books by Larry Niven.
"The Andromeda Strain" by Micheal Crichton.
Read a couple of those "All time best Science Fiction" short story collections - something to ground her in the old classics.
"Hardwired" (which might be a little sleazy for a 13 year old girl, but I read it when I was younger and loved it) by Walter Jon Williams.
"Virtual Light" and the "Neuromancer" books are excellent.
"The DragonRiders of Pern" by Anne McCaffery
Not forgetting Fantasy, the first eight or 10 Xanth Books by Peirs Anthony are nice for young people, as are the "Theives World" and "Myth" series by Robert Asprin. Anything by Tad Williams is wonderful, as are the "Dragonlance" books by Weis and Hickman.
There are thousands of others I really enjoyed when I was young, but these are the ones off the top of my head.
I need to send my entirely-too-expensive CD-changer in for repair sometime soon (a spring on the door came unwound). Something like this would be a good temporary replacement. However, I've got a pretty high-end amplifier - one that does DTS (which I don't use) and has optical inputs for everything - I'm used to the "no hiss or static" sounds that come from a pure digital setup and good speakers and wires, and I swear the sound that comes from the optical cables is better than what I get out of the digital coax.
Now, I notice this thing doesn't have optical outputs. To me, a DVD player (which I don't need, since I don't have a TV) that doesn't have an optical out probably isn't worth the money since everything inside the DVD should be digital anyway.
At any rate, has anyone tested the Apex unit on a decent amp and set of speakers? How is the sound quality from MP3 to CD audio?
If all I'm interested in is the sound quality, why wouldn't I be better served with a medium capacity CD changer with a good signal to noise ratio and optical outputs?
Alpha Centauri is every bit as fun as CivII. I can't QUITE say more fun, but if you've played CivII, then you certainly know how fun SMAC is as well.
The things that keep me from liking it even more:
1.) Under Windows, SMAC runs in a 640x480 256c window. Period.
2.) It doesn't multitask well with other programs
3.) The color scheme is very, very dark
4.) The sound can get pretty repetitive
5.) The computer opponents CAN be predictable, but aren't always (depends on a lot of things, I guess)
I liked being able to customize my troops, though.
I haven't played a game where I've noticed a 'massive slowdown' near the end, but my game machines are both fairly obscene in terms of hardware.
I only played Civ:CTP one time. My impression was basically that I was glad I didn't buy it.
Most of my PCs use Logitech TrackMan Marbles or Marble+ trackballs. They're simply the best pointing device I've used. But, I'm not a mousing person, so I have a tough time choking down the $50 or so a Marble+ costs. That's why I've bought a number of them from auction sites like onsale.com. Most of the ones I've bought came from computergeeks.com (but were sold from an auction site). If you like the mouse but balk at the price, well, I haven't paid more than $25 including shipping for one yet.
I use my "main" PC about 14 hours a day without
any wrist problems, and the placement of the buttons on the Trackman Marble seems to be comfortable for lots of different people with different sized parts. A half-dozen friends of mine have picked one up after using mine.
The only complaint I have about the Marble is that it's a pain in the butt to clean, and it needs to be cleaned fairly often. Other than that, I hope I never see another mouse again.
Some other pointing devices I've liked: the original Microsoft Ballpoint trackball. They're tiny. They don't ever seem to break, and I don't find them uncomfortable to use. Down side: no third button (why I got my first Marble), and the mouse cord is coiled, which is sort of a pain.
Honeywell Footed Mouse: Um, Microsoft wasn't the first company to produce an all-surface mouse. Honeywell's design has two plastic nubs on the bottom surface - I've got one that I run on shaggy carpet. They also have user-replacable button arrangements, including a lefty-mode and a three-button set. Down side: They're hard to find (I think Keytronic now makes these) and they aren't terribly ergonomic. I wish someone would update this one.
Logitech First Mouse: A low-cost mouse that most people seem pretty comfortable with.
I recommend trackballs to people whenever possible. There are lots of good reasons for this, but the big one for me is that there's lots less wrist/arm/hand movement going on in using a trackball than a mouse. Also, there's no need to clear desk space for rolling. =)
Then I found vnc.
My house is already networked with 24 ports of switched 100Mbit goodness. vnc was the icing on the cake. Cross-platform. Arbitrary window geometries and color depths AND I could still see what was going on with my main machine(s). With the price of a 2-node 100Mbit ethernet kit hovering just over $100US, I don't know if I'd ever bother with KVM
Caveat: I've tried vnc with machines that quite a bit slower than anything I have (the slow ones were 24MB RAM P200s with generic NICs and video cards), on a 10Mbit LAN. I won't say the word painful. I will say that you should maybe keep a newsreader or something open while you wait.
Still there's a certain joy in being able to play xdoom from a Windows box. I can do that. It's cool.
The version I had for my XT was many, many
/.-er can fill in the rest).
times better as well. The ships could (optionally)
have teleport and shield capabilities and had
two different modes of fire and there was AI,
so it was possible to have a 1-player game.
Much more fun than hitting the thrust a bit so
the 2nd player goes crashing into the planet
first.
This was just... disappointing.
And yes, java IS the most overhyped, unstable
resource hungry idea to enter the industry in
the last 10 years. Even when you DO have an
up to date processor (the java spacewar runs like
crap on the 700MHz dual PIII I'm sitting in
front of now, which is running that other
overhyped unstable, resource hungry idea that,
well, any
My way of creating and remembering passwords is
to take a word I know, or phrase, or whatever,
and transpose it on my keyboard -- move all the
letters one or two letters left, right up or
down. Usually I shift one or two characters
and one control character. Ususually, after the
second or third time I type it, I don't have to
look at the keyboard, either. =)
The net result of this is uniformly
line-noise-type passwords.
I read most of Daniel Pinkwater's books when
I was in middle school. I distinctly recall being
teased for weeks at a time after the overdue
state of "Snarkout Boys and the Avacado of Death"
my announced to my 7th grade class.
Part of the fun of Pinkwater's books is finding
all the psuedonyms he's used for his work. It
was a lot of fun to pick up a book and discover,
after reading about ten pages, that it was a
Daniel Pinkwater story, regardless of what the
cover said.
At any rate, my adult connection with Daniel
Pinkwater has been National Public Radio,
through his commentaries on "All Things
Considered" -- which can be side-splitting
at times, just like his books, and book reviews
on "Weekend Edition Sunday".
Pinkwater talks a lot about being fat.
That's something that I bet I'm not the only
/.-er interested in. He's fat and he's...
amazingly positive about it. One doesn't hear
many fat-positive people ANYWHERE, but Pinkwater
is erudite and funny about it, so hearing his
voice on the radio is always a joy.
I got a copy of the 5 Stories collection with a
contribution to my local public radio station.
I let a half-dozen adults borrow and read it
before I finally passed it along to my niece.
When I was in H.S., my now-fiance had a terrible
crush on me (I had one on her, too). Being
typical geek, lacking a clue in the social skills
department, I had no idea until one day about 3
years after we graduated, she decided to
track down my Email address and start writing me.
If she had called me on the phone and said "Hey, I
had a crush on you in High School", I probably
would've hung up - would've thought she was
joking. Email was safe.
Even though we knew each other pretty well before
she started writing, there's no way I would've
thought of her as anything but a friend if the
Email hadn't flowed so freely between us.
I still have some trouble saying things in person
that I can discuss freely when I write, and
she's OK with that.
--
Amazingly enough, my (now) fiance was the THIRD
woman (there was a fourth person as well, but um,
not a woman) to do that to me -- makes me
wonder why nobody can say something like that when
I'm still accessible.
I guess my lesson is, you never know what the
people around you are thinking. I think asking
might actually help. =)
--
PS I'm not trying to brag about looks or prowess
or whatever. I'm a fat schmoe with pasty skin
and thick glasses. Just a lucky fat schmoe.
Brief note on document formats:
People are commenting on the fact that a Word
copy of the document was not provided, while
Wordperfect, PDF and HTML were.
Most legal documents submitted in electronic
format have to be submitted in WordPerfect format.
It was the industry standard for many years,
and the document format has been stable for
at least the last three releases of the software.
My mother is a paralegal, and she whines on a
daily basis about the fact that there is such
a tremendous intertia within the legal community
that is centered on WordPerfect 5 for DOS and
WordPerfect 6 for Windows. She uses a 300MHz
Pentium II to run WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS every
day. The lawyers she work for say it's the only
thing they can use.
I'm not sure why that inertia exists, but at
least where I live, if you hand the court a
floppy disk, it'd better have a wordperfect file
on it. Everything else is simply unacceptable.
For the parts of the network in my house that
I have control over, I use the Muses (the demigods
that inspire art and artists).
My main Linux box is Erato ("Lyric Art").
My File (MP3) server is Aoede ("Song").
My Win2k RC2 box is Melpomene ("Tragedy").
My NT4 development server is Thalia ("Comedy")
My Sparc20 with an Oracle6 database is Clio ("History")
I chose Muses 'cause most of the names are
generally cool.
There are 15 or so identified muses in greek
myth. I suppose if I ever ran out of those I'd
move to the Graces, then Fates, then Furies.
I agree that Greek gods are overdone in general,
though. Babylonian (Marduk, Tiamat, Gilgamesh) or
Lovecraftian (Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep) are much more
entertaining.
A cluster of Linux boxen named after pagan Finnish
gods has a certain flair as well.
Maybe I'm missing the point of this, but...
As far as I know, all the "standard" development
tools under Windows are commercial software
anyway. I always thought one of the great
things about *nix open-source was the availability
of good, free tools (gcc, perl etc.) tools so
that ANY user could use and make changes to that
source code.
And I don't see that with Windows. The last thing
I am is an applications programmer under Windows,
but everybody I know uses VC++/C++ Builder/Delphi/
Powerbuilder/VB to do their work. That $400, not
to mention 800MB of disk space for VC++, is a
pretty big barrier to entry for open source
software running on Windows. Perl is the
exception, but I don't know a lot of major
projects that use perl as the sole language for
development. Besides that, some parts of perl
don't work the same way between different versions
of Windows. Whoops.
What good is source if you can't compile it?
(Don't answer that. I know it's nice to see how
things work). It's good that people can see it,
but since 99% of Windows users don't even have
access to development tools, what difference does
it ultimately make?
-
Sam
my copy of visual studio 6 is still in shrink
wrap
Geez, the first things that ever gave me an
/. ever came into being.
.sigs that
idea of the "shared consciousness" of the internet
were the various humorous brick-a-brack that
I found on wiretap.spies.com and the like.
Some of that material pre-dated anything I can
remember from my very first time on the internet,
in 1993.
The 100 question purity test was something even
my non-geek friends knew about after their
first year of college. And they knew where it
came from, too.
The original Mosaic start page.
Famous Spam (& other email crap)
------------
The ASCII cow drawings.
Neimun-Marcus Cookies recipie.
Craig Shergold and those damn cards.
etc.
------------
The GeekCode listing.
The jargon file.
The news.announce FAQs. The alt.sex FAQ
(all of MY friends read it).
USENET was the global community long before
web sites like
There must be dozens of long-lost threads out
there that should be included in such an archive.
Serdar Argeric? Kibo?
Sparring on the Scientology groups?
Linus' initial postings about Linux (an testament
to what the efforts of hundreds of programmers
working cooperatively can do, if nothing else).
The rec.humor.funny post that got USENET censored
at U.C.Berkeley. Briefly.
Posts from the Kremlin (kremvax IIRC) immediately
before the fall of the Soviet union -- since these
messages were literally the only information
that got out of the country at the time.
This may very well be the only time that the
internet has been the SOLE source of information
about an event of such global interest.
The announcement that AOLers would have free
access to the internet (mostly USENET at the
time, ie Black September).
The Warlord signature (people with
were excessively long got "warlord-ed". I know
I was, but then, I was trying)
The Starr Report (important for a number of
reasons, not the least of which being the degree
to which the lengthy report brought so MANY web
servers to their knees, even 6 years into the
"web age" of massive internet growth).
The sex story written by (can't remember the
name...) Jake Baker, the gentleman who was
arrested in Michigan for writing a story involving
the sexual torture of a classmate -- important
because it's the first time *I* can recall that
someone got in that type of legal trouble for
something written on the internet. And probably
where the internet's rep (independant of AOLs,
which I think suffers for different reasons) for
porn-related bad seeds.
How 'bout a representative cascade? (fun when
everbody had 80-column newsreaders!)
I can think of lots more, but these are things
that were either widely read and understood,
or things that shaped both the internet and
the outside world.
There was more on the internet than the GPL and
RFCs before the web.
--
Lutefisk.