Yeah, Max, I was thinking the same thing. It's not like they pulled this plant out of a block of permafrost with a specific date on it. Species of plants come and go all the time, especially on volcanic islands. Of course, they are going to find undocumented plants every few years as these cycles occur.
The excitement in the writer's words don't seem so authentic either. I suspect that the company doing the cultivation is also the one who first reported this as news. Nothing beats the media for mis-guided information and free advertising.
Want to see a creature who's roots date back to the beginning of life on Earth? Look in the mirror. Wow. There, the same gimmik and you didn't have to spend thousands of dollars on a silly little tree.
It sounds like you have a general over-heating problem if you are having both of those symptoms at once.
I had problems like this a few years back with a generic lamp. I resolved the problem, initially, by putting the lamp in a cooler part of the room, under an AC vent. I later made a permanent fix by drilling 4 3/8" holes on the lamp's base, next to the bulb. This allowed enough hot air to escape to keep things around the right tempurature, even after many hours of continuous use.
Having owned a number of lava lamps, I have found the brand Lava-lite to be the most consistent lamps. They have a secret formula that lava lamp hacks have been unable to duplicate effectively.
One of the things I was considering trying, and would be open to ideas on, was to hook up a spare heatsink/peltier combo I have to the top and a heatpipe that evacuates the peltier's hot side to the bottom of the lamp. If I could get enough of the heat down to the bottom, then I could eliminate the applicance bulb completely, then go with cold cathode or superbright LED lighting on a chaser circuit... Nothing like taking a 40watt lamp and jazzing it up to use 180watts..:)
The stinker is finding flexible, heat conducting pipe... Any suggestions on where I can obtain this sort of thing?
I just live by the "You get what you pay for" theory; Five finger discounts excluded.
It just sounds like there's a lot of stuff here that likely doesn't tie in together all that well. Low price == cheap parts. I could be wrong here, but would be interested in some feedback from someone who owns one of these things.
I don't think you will be watching a DVD on this 'media PC'. I didn't see anything in the specs about it having a DVD drive.
Personally, I think this is your typical cheapy.tw fleamarket-ish product that will appeal to people who do not understand what they are buying. To those people, I can see this quickly becoming a CD just an expensive CD player.
I priced out building a miniATX entertainment system with quality parts and water or peltier cooling for noise concerns. Using a Lian Li miniATX desktop case, ATI AIW, audio, dvd drive, etc the price works out to around $650. I wish I had my list with me so I could be more precise. The keyboard and mouse combo I wanted has not been released yet, so I'm waiting till September to build this baby.
I see this device not catching on because once you drop 256MB ram, a P4 CPU and heatsink in it, you'll have spent about the same as for a custom job you could assemble yourself with superior components.
The only area I've not done much reading on is how to set it up to boot 'n go. I am assuming there are media linux distros that boot up and go straight to a nice media gui. I know the same can be accomplished by switching your shell in Win32 to whatever media application you want when the system boots, too.
Any suggestions on software or related forums would be a quality addition to this threat, imo.
"'Live' broadcasts can also be recorded." - Why's that mentioned? I think any PVR can do that. A broadcast is a broadcast, the material is the same whether it's 'live' or not.
"It looks like this is being marketed to Russian cable companies as an all-in-one portal, since they also include electronic ordering capabilities and "near video on demand";"
Any PVR has that functionality when combined with a proper/integrated tuner and PPV channels. If I know I am watching movies Friday night, I will pick some PPV movies to record during the day. With most providers you have the same movie with staggered timeslots where the movie starts every 15-60 minutes. I assume PPV overseas is similar.
"I wish American PVRs had all these features by default (ethernet, USB, microphone, camera inputs...)"
I think this unit gives up more than it gains in functionality by only having one tuner. I don't see anything in their product description about recording one show on 'live' tv while watching another 'live' show. I don't consider it a true media center until you've got the ability to record one show and watch another one. This doesn't sound like a big deal to the uninitiated, but nothing is more lame than having a PVR and the associated freedoms, then get forced watching something your roomie wanted to record because you can't change channels. The hardware cost for a second tuner is not much at all, well worth the extra $20-30..
Most american units have USB ports on them. I think that about covers the gambit of devices you would be attaching (camera, ethernet, keyboard, etc). I see the 'nifty' factor in being able to babble off how many types of ports something has, but I've noticed the people who own things with lots of ports tend to not own anything to connect to them. The different types of ports also run up the costs of manufacture for features that aren't needed or used. Much like all those funky ports on 8-bit Nintendos and other game systems of yesteryear's 'future expansion slot' thingys that nothing ever connected to. You have a PC, hook your stuff up to it. You have a PVR, use it to watch television.:)
One nifty feature UTV has is the ability to record a whole timeslot hitting record at any time before the slot expires. That's handy when you are just randomly watching stuff on TV, find something, only get to watch the first 15 minutes before the phone rings and you have to leave. Just hit record and the whole thing is recorded from the beginning.
I am guessing this will be a good hack unit. I don't care about that stuff with PVRs like most folks on here seem to do. From my experiences with modifying these types of devices, I become the only person in the house who can operate them. I'll stick to devices other people in the house don't depend on to modify..:-)
I don't mean to sound rude here, but beyond Russia getting a PVR I don't see how any part of this is news, unless it's a slow news day, especially when I have a unit I spent $40 on almost two years ago and it has way more features minus integrated DVD. I'm not crazy about all-in-one systems either. You try to hack it, break it, you are out a DVD player and a PVR. Same goes for just daily usage, break the tuner time to buy a new DVD player too.
Always buy your components separately and avoid bundles if you want quality. Typically, the parts in multi-function devices are purchased from the lowest bidders. I'd rather be wise, save my money, read some reviews and buy a separate DVD player, PVR, tuner, amp, speakers, etc. You spend a little more but end up with a superior result and the ability to replace parts. Think you are too broke for that logic? You won't be thinking it when your DVD player dies and you have to get a whole new unit. Also, where's the component video connectors for HDTV? Is that dvd player progressive scan?
I apologize, I always post like 20 paragraph messages in regards to home video links. I'm very anti-hype after seeing so many new products all to find they are crap later on.:)
Yeah. It's nasty. I think GM's idea was to make everything modular. This would do away with purchasing a new car every few years.
For example, your interior and body are in perfect condition but you killed the chasis by driving 250k miles on it. You could go to the dealer and for a fee, move your body over to a new chasis.
Likewise, if you bought a sports car and knocked up your girlfriend, you could go to the dealership and have them pop a minivan body on your cruiser's chasis.
I really love the idea of this. My cars always have absolutely perfect interiors and a straight body, but I kill them with milage. I'd be more than happy to pay $5,000-8,000 every 4-6 years to replace my entire chasis and keep my $20,000 body and interior.
We really need something to happen. It's disturbing to see the rate resources are burned with Americans replacing their cars every few years.
Thanks for the information. K-lite has never let me down in the movie department. That is, until I start searching for an english subbed version of a Hong Kong film.
Using Kazaa or the other 'stock' clients for this network is terrible. You have no extended searching options or the ability to jump supernodes. It's an entirely different story if you download K-lite and use all the extended features.
For example, you can 'search more' every 30 seconds for 20 minutes for a particular artist and come back to find hundreds of matches. I'll sometimes search for 'Divx' or 'DVD' with a minimum file size match of 600MB. You'll find enough stuff to keep you downloading and burning for weeks.
I'll check out mldonkey and emule. I've got a linux box with VMWare installed, so whatever is out there should work.
I am assuming it would be on topic if everyone exchanges ideas on good P2P networks. If anyone would reply to this thread and drop some thoughts, that'd be great.
What's the best networks for obtaining game system ISOs, movies, software, etc?
Well, using your logic we don't need P2P at all. I share files just because I pay for my bandwidth whether I use it or not.
Your second point holds much weight with me. I don't advertise exactly what sort of content I download, but most of what I've downloaded and enjoyed, I've bought. If I download something and dislike it, it gets deleted.
I quit buying and listening to most big industry owned music a few years ago. It's not that hard to do when it finally occurs to one's self how music for the masses has been narrowed down to a few big musicians.
Top 40, R&B, Hip Hop, Country, Rock. Such simple categories for a simple, ADD public. None of the way music is promoted by the industry works with intelligent adults. That's why hormone pumped teenagers who make the least income are the biggest buyers and target audience. If the RIAA would grow up and focus more on 18-35 year olds with wide-ranging tastes, they'll eventually find themselves way better off.
It's just easiest to market to the lowest common denominator. Most other methods require some level of intelligence. Down with the RIAA.
Hey, I am one of those people. I've got about 40 gigs of movies and documentaries shared on K-lite. All of them are public domain and downloadable from the Moving Pictures Database on Archive.org. During the past three months, none of them have been downloaded even once.
In other news, I had an mp3, named after a particular Metallica song, of my voice saying to not buy, purchase or download anything Metallica related. I'd rather just see those meatheads not sell another album or concert ticket. Now, that's been downloaded hundreds of times.
It's no real mystery what people do with P2P applications.:)
Agreed. Back when I was a hardware tech in the early 90's, I recall building pools of identical machines for customer orders. For burn-in, I would loop benchmarks for 24 hours before shipping them out. There was typically 1-2% difference in identical systems.
People tend to forget the complexity of a PC and the inevitable, microscopic differences each part made. Thus differences in resistance, heat generated, and performance.
I recall 1979 when going to one of the annual, local GM fairs with my dad (he worked there). I was about 10 years old and amazed with the robotic equipment they had out for demonstration.
When the mighty GM executives came out to give their speeches about the auto industry, I remember them saying 10% of the cars on the road would be electric by 1985.
My point is, I don't trust anything that comes from these huge companies. All you can be assured of is that they will release information about something right after the patent process of whatever makes it unique, then sit on it for decades since there is no real push in the industry to change things around.
It will require little guys like this one popping up on the radar for them to get things rolling.
Yeah, I didn't feel like typing out all the network devices in the chain of things. But yes, a proxy, a good IDS box, proper firewall rules, proper subnetting, keeping antivirus signatures and your Windows updates updated helps a great deal.
These sort of things minimize your chance of problems. Nothing is truely secure, imo. It just limits your liability if|when the shit hits the fan.
SMS is nasty, but it works sorta. It's price doesn't matter much when you are F500, though.
Personally, I want to see the whole world format their collective hard drives and install FreeBSD.
Amen to that. Yeah, I come across as a bit of an enabler of doom sometimes. It's just what has paid the bills for a while now.
I remember the good old days when you could tell your boss you saved her $3000 in software licenses with a nifty BSD or Linux web server and come back from lunch to find a stack of gift certificates to buy.com and thinkgeek.com as a reward for a solid contribution to the company.
I guess I half-heartedly accept the inefficient drama that plays out in most companies. I've seen VP's take multiple, agreeing sets of independantly published results on how well a particular open source and closed source package compare, then go closed source because of 'support contracts' and 'all the other fortune 500 companies are using this now, why aren't we?'. Basically, he was impressed by a vendor or consultant, maybe college buddies with them. I don't know, all I know is that eventually most battles are lost to the commercial applications even when they are lacking.
It's sad. But I have my priorities. They might not be heroic, but they are highly adaptible.
Oh, the human rights thing was just for a little umpf for a slow reading thread.:)
I'm light as a feather. I'm just giving a single view I've seen expressed by multiple corporations.
It's a dirty world out there, just because I remind folks of it, doesn't mean I support it's practice.
The funny thing is, you can talk about such practices all day around non-techies and they will see it as a part of business and normal, efficient practice. Speak of giving Sally access to the servers she needs and nothing else to AOL Chat people and generic geeks, and suddenly Hitler, mistreatment of jews, human rights and everything else under the sun comes out as a comparison.
Also, the engineer isn't the one making IT policy decisions. That's typically done at a VP per the advice of engineers. Perhaps you were speaking of a train conductor/engineer. Beats me. Either way, no human rights are destroyed, no dead babies are born, no other horrible things are going to happen when you give an employee a computer for a job and expect them just to do their job with it.
For instance, you don't supply construction workers with Internet access while they are digging a ditch. You don't issue a company car for employees to take cross-country personal road trips in. What makes everyone think supplying unrestricted Internet access or OS freedom while at the office is so important? They need to be doing their job. You know, that thing that pays the bills and keeps capitalism flowing.:)
"I see the smiley, so I'm hoping this is mostly a joke, but if a company harbors contempt for it's employees, it is doomed. If the option is "my way or the highway", the good employees will eventually choose the highway, regardless of the economy. All you will have left will be compliant losers who don't think for themselves, managed by control freaks who have to do all the thinking for them, deciding which color pen to use."
I'm not saying it's the way things should be. It's just the way things have evolved in larger companies. The reality of a 'right to work' state is basically what I said. It's just like office dress codes, codes of conduct, etc in the workplace.
I would quit dribbling over worries about what OS is used and that sort of thing. Just think about all the poor saps in this world who are stuck having their hair cut a certain way, wearing uniforms, being forced to address any slime-ball customer as 'sir' or 'maam', codes against visible tatoos, etc. These are far more intrusive control measures employers inflict on their employees, not to mention far more widespread than, say, a tight IT policy where Jill can access all the databases required to do her work, but not her favorite manporn site.
Notice though, how I never said that any of these companies do not allow various OS's in particular circumstances. It's just another of 1000 rules in any corporation. To get around the problem, simply fill out a helpdesk request for permisson/reasons for the need of a 'non-standard' OS to be installed and they can get with your technical lead and make sure the request is valid and you are in the clear if there is a job need for it.
Anyway, always assume my thoughts in these posts are incomplete. I just type and hit submit. My goal is to generate thoughts more than to give factual details with all my points well covered.
That's why you have firewalls, SMS updates, proper subnetting with segregation of workstations & servers and a tight IT policy. You have to maintain what control you can establish or the end result will be no control.
Again, my thoughts are not hypothetical and just parts of the practice needed to maintain a minimal security level.
Good thinking, but if you fire someone and make an example out of them that is brought up by managers on a regular basis when dealing with new hires or other employees, you put yourself in the position of facing a possible suit from the fired employee.
In most companies large enough to have a HR team, you will typically find policies that managers must abide by concerning terminations and what details you share with anyone about them.
From a company's angle, they must do a bunch of things that sound really silly to cover themself in such situations. All that stuff is silly and sounds like crap until you can honestly speak out during litigation demonstrating evidence that your company did all it could do, in a reasonable means, to protect itself from said situation.
It's much like having a cop watch you intentionally walk in front of a car in hopes of quick money. Sure, the injury will be the same but you have nobody to collect from since it was your own dumb self that jumped in front of that car with reckless intent.
No FUD, sir. Information Security groups have got to view the employees of a large company as untrusted, unproven people as a whole. Our capitalist and litigation happy society requires this. It's not like when you go through any other form of security it's loving and trusting. Look at airport security, the police, anything to do with protection usually starts off with the attitude of not being too terribly trusting.
Also, I was not trying to give a full IS proceedure, just a quick run of some thoughts of what I have experienced in the past decade.
For starters:
Linux, MacOS, etc is not 'sub-optimal', if your corporation purchased copies of Windows with their workstations, it seems like an even larger disregard for cashflow to not utilize what they paid for. Your scientific and my engineering minds think 'Well, I get more done in Linux', of course we do, but when you sit in with a Loss Prevention group the removed/unused copies of software are considered a total loss.
Your situation is what would be considered a special case by an IT staff. You are a scientist. Silly goose, you will probably need all kinds of things a typical employee will not need. Think about the percentage of scientists versus customer service reps and support people in call centers. Think of the costs associated with each one of these people anually versus what you cost. It's a big difference.
You speak at the end about trust and the suggestion that a network operate transparently without many restrictions. You have to understand that most companies are not in the ISP business for their employees. If you sit down in front of a computer in an office, it's their network, their assets, their butt on the line, their bandwidth costs, etc.
For example, I have worked in a group who's new office was suffering terribly. About a 1400 user network, but the bandwidth leaving the building was always pegged. Upon watching traffic for a few days, it appeared that a major portion was porn and streaming media traffic. We implemented a filter file for the proxy and traffic went from ~97% down to ~30% utilization. This sort of thing is very cost effective and saves people from themselves (female employee walks up on porn mongering male, female complains, male goes unpunished, female cooks up discrimination suit, etc -- just preventative medicine, not a cure for a likely issue in the future).
I guess those who are knocking my tales have never been exposed to a real IT group before. Either that, or they are prepared to lose their jobs someday due to a lack of enforcement or policy that matches your typical fortune 500 company. The suits will not have much pitty for your balls to give excess freedom to employees with their investor-purchased resources.
The downfall of your average geek is the inability to ever see things from an executive, bean counter, or investor's point of view. Threats are real, liability is real, the end result of your investments are real. The joy of an office behind a very trusting packet filter is short lived and a flagerant disregard for company assets, especially if the company is publically held. Your investors are well within their power to take you to court and sue you for every dime you have if there is big enough loss associated with an act that was easily prevented. We never know the limitations of these types of suits because they are civil and not criminal. In a civil suit, you never know if you are going to be made an example. For instance, the massive settlements on people burning themselves with McDonalds coffee. You just don't know what's going to happen. At least with a criminal case, there are boundries clearly defined by law.
You go back to being a scientist and I'll go back to saving people like you from yourselves with your lack of understanding regarding the need for real security policy. I promise I won't pick apart or call FUD when you speak of something technical regarding your line of work... That is, if you don't tell me ficticous realities about how e
It actually will not help much. I've used both generic and that silver based Artic Gold (can't remember if that's the brand or not). I use MotherBoard Monitor to monitor temps on my XP/Game system which is equiped with a SLK-800 heatsink and 80mm fan.
There is a 0 degree difference between using the sivler stuff and the generic goo. I've also swapped from the goo to silver paste on my old dual 700 when replaceing a processor. No measurable difference in heat/performance.
Your best bet with those DSL routers:
Find a good 486 heatsink/fan combo, mix a drop of silver compound with a very small drop of epoxy, then mount the sucker on your DSL router's CPU. Use a bench clamp or book (or some combination) to secure the heatsink/fan overnight while the compound hardens. The next morning, your DSL router should run nice and cool. Keep in mind, if you use too much epoxy in your mixture, that heatsink will not be coming off there. A lighter mix will result in something you can knock off there with the handle of a screwdriver if you ever need to get it off.
I've found old 486 sinks and fans are very handy at cooling off just about anything they'll fit on except for peltier solutions.
If the cost of $5 is prohibitive, check your closet for old computers and find your free parts there.
I am not buying into this article for the fact that I've worked in large 'shops' of 2,000 workstations up to about 8,000. None of these shops would find, then allow a non-approved OS to continue to run on their networks. This type of thing is basic "Information Security did a weekly scan, found it, helpdesk siezed the machine and re-imaged it with Windows 2000" routine.
I used to agree with giving employees freedom to run whatever OS they are comfortable with, but you have to keep into consideration the Information Security view on things. A *nix OS with a few network tools installed, gcc, and some skills can lead to a lot of problems for the company.
Think that's silly? Think again. Think about doing technical support for bitter and unthankful lusers. Your boss is an asshole. You make $23k/year and missed your shot as an [insert engineer/developer position here] before the bubble popped. No hope for a future with the company since they have a revolving door system in place where 3/4 of the low-level staff is on temporary contracts that expire every 90-300 days.. I know, it's sad and I've seen a lot of talent from people stuck in these types of jobs and feel terrible for them. But, this is a common person in technical call centers. I've seen enough from that single profile to type pages, but I'll stop and save it for another post.
Do you trust this employee enough to let him run FreeBSD? You want him having direct access to the 'net without a proxy? I doubt it, especially not after that email where he asked questions about what type of traffic you monitor and how you do audits. What if he's okay but his box ended up getting owned because he downloaded bad BitchX source? That would mean another three day stint of no sleep doing emergency penetration tests, mirroring HD images, finding the exploits, sitting in meetings and explaining what all was affected hoping you didn't miss something critical. That's the tip of the ice berg when it comes to what happens when your office gets owned. Even if workstations are usable, every workstation on the local subnet and server they have ports open to via the firewall have to be investigated. This brings productivity for the money-making sides of the company to a crawl while sysadmins and security folks work to get things safe again. Somewhere around noon, the guy from Public Relations will likely be on the phone wanting to know what to tell CNN when he calls them back. Likely, there will be a news source online with details of how the exploit took place, but completely wrong and now the public and shareholders are going to wonder if credit card numbers were stolen, your ability to properly maintain infrastructure, etc. Then your stock price falls $2/share. That's potential millions depending on how big your company is.
Sorry to ramble, I just wanted to stress the importance of IT policy and the headaches that can happen when the policy is too lax. I'm very pro-Linux/BSD, but not in an enviroment where it's not needed (All those workstations came with an OS you paid for anyway). I also think this treatment of unapproved OS's is very common due to thoughts and situations like the one above.
"1) You can't get the pix out without cracking the camera software, which no doubt includes some serious access control as well as undocumented and perhaps non-standard interfaces, connectors, and protocols. (And they might hit you for DMCA violation by a number of routes, including claiming copyright to the pix themselves until you return the camera.)"
They can't and won't claim copyright to the pictures you took with their camera. Unless they have a required CC deposit or written/signed rental agreement with you, it's pretty easy to say it's your camera until you give it back, if ever.
Regardless of the protocols, etc not being standards, most people I know (including me) would want the $10 2Mpixel eye from the thing. It's likely nothing special, a standard composite signal likely comes off it like any other digital camera.
$10 for whatever usable parts you can get out of the thing is well worth it. I would never plan on using a hunk of crap like that for my vacation pictures, but cheap parts for a security cam, eyeballs for your household robot, your cat cam, etc sound appetizing to me!;-)
"Microsoft, whose operating system runs 80 percent of the world's computers, has adopted the new addressing scheme in its Windows XP operating system, but it's switched off by default. The latest version of Apple's operating system is also IPv6-compatible.
The open-source community has also begun incorporating IPv6 into its own operating systems."
Oh yes, we have 'just begun' to put IPV6 support in Linux, FreeBSD, etc.. I think these features were evident in the open source OS's before Microsoft and Apple made the switch.
I could be wrong. It's happened once or twice before.;)
Klite/Kazaa and my VPN works fine, as does serving a battlefield, counter-strike, web and ftp server. The only things I can't seem to run are Microsoft's video conference software and old MSN gaming zone games.
NAT is a hack itself. IIRC, the fellow who came up with the concept called it a waste of time for anyone who wasn't totally hard up for IP space.
A billion IPs are available. None of your appliances are going to connect via a 'real' IP address, either. I don't know why this gets brought up in the topic of every article associated with NAT and a lack of public IPs. The future of home networking will likely remain on a single IP driven by a soho router device that provides service to appliances and devices in your home via NAT for at least several years to come.
Cell phones and other handheld devices are not directly connected to the Internet. They are typically on private IP space behind a proxy as they aren't designed for general web traffic, just very specific protocols w/ low traffic.
NAT is 'just fine' if you are a consumer who would like to keep their Internet bills under $50/mo during the sunset of the IPV4 years.
The argument that NAT doesn't work 'if you don't do much with your computer' doesn't fly with me. I have supported a 3,000+ user network's firewalls where 99% of the traffic was processed by NAT or by proxy (I'm just making up that 1% was workstation to workstation traffic!). All these things 'you can't do' can be encapsulated and shipped from one office to another via a VPN, meanwhile your public facing servers can have individual IPs or be under NAT as well with some fickle fwd rules on the firewall. Don't bring up security here, you just because you NAT doesn't mean one interface and no subnets.
My point is, you can do a lot more with NAT than people would have you think. Just because they couldn't get their Windows box to do some silly feat from behind NAT doesn't mean it's impossible. Regardless, making this stuff work is what keeps many/. readers employed.
I'm not defending NAT, I've just had no problems with it in a demanding corporate enviroment. It seems like a viable alternative for a few more years to come.
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Yeah, Max, I was thinking the same thing. It's not like they pulled this plant out of a block of permafrost with a specific date on it. Species of plants come and go all the time, especially on volcanic islands. Of course, they are going to find undocumented plants every few years as these cycles occur.
The excitement in the writer's words don't seem so authentic either. I suspect that the company doing the cultivation is also the one who first reported this as news. Nothing beats the media for mis-guided information and free advertising.
Want to see a creature who's roots date back to the beginning of life on Earth? Look in the mirror. Wow. There, the same gimmik and you didn't have to spend thousands of dollars on a silly little tree.
It sounds like you have a general over-heating problem if you are having both of those symptoms at once.
:)
I had problems like this a few years back with a generic lamp. I resolved the problem, initially, by putting the lamp in a cooler part of the room, under an AC vent. I later made a permanent fix by drilling 4 3/8" holes on the lamp's base, next to the bulb. This allowed enough hot air to escape to keep things around the right tempurature, even after many hours of continuous use.
Having owned a number of lava lamps, I have found the brand Lava-lite to be the most consistent lamps. They have a secret formula that lava lamp hacks have been unable to duplicate effectively.
One of the things I was considering trying, and would be open to ideas on, was to hook up a spare heatsink/peltier combo I have to the top and a heatpipe that evacuates the peltier's hot side to the bottom of the lamp. If I could get enough of the heat down to the bottom, then I could eliminate the applicance bulb completely, then go with cold cathode or superbright LED lighting on a chaser circuit... Nothing like taking a 40watt lamp and jazzing it up to use 180watts..
The stinker is finding flexible, heat conducting pipe... Any suggestions on where I can obtain this sort of thing?
I just live by the "You get what you pay for" theory; Five finger discounts excluded.
It just sounds like there's a lot of stuff here that likely doesn't tie in together all that well. Low price == cheap parts. I could be wrong here, but would be interested in some feedback from someone who owns one of these things.
I don't think you will be watching a DVD on this 'media PC'. I didn't see anything in the specs about it having a DVD drive.
.tw fleamarket-ish product that will appeal to people who do not understand what they are buying. To those people, I can see this quickly becoming a CD just an expensive CD player.
Personally, I think this is your typical cheapy
I priced out building a miniATX entertainment system with quality parts and water or peltier cooling for noise concerns. Using a Lian Li miniATX desktop case, ATI AIW, audio, dvd drive, etc the price works out to around $650. I wish I had my list with me so I could be more precise. The keyboard and mouse combo I wanted has not been released yet, so I'm waiting till September to build this baby.
I see this device not catching on because once you drop 256MB ram, a P4 CPU and heatsink in it, you'll have spent about the same as for a custom job you could assemble yourself with superior components.
The only area I've not done much reading on is how to set it up to boot 'n go. I am assuming there are media linux distros that boot up and go straight to a nice media gui. I know the same can be accomplished by switching your shell in Win32 to whatever media application you want when the system boots, too.
Any suggestions on software or related forums would be a quality addition to this threat, imo.
True to all that. I was just taking the position of a spoiled american technophile. :)
"'Live' broadcasts can also be recorded." - Why's that mentioned? I think any PVR can do that. A broadcast is a broadcast, the material is the same whether it's 'live' or not.
...)"
:)
:-)
:)
"It looks like this is being marketed to Russian cable companies as an all-in-one portal, since they also include electronic ordering capabilities and "near video on demand";"
Any PVR has that functionality when combined with a proper/integrated tuner and PPV channels. If I know I am watching movies Friday night, I will pick some PPV movies to record during the day. With most providers you have the same movie with staggered timeslots where the movie starts every 15-60 minutes. I assume PPV overseas is similar.
"I wish American PVRs had all these features by default (ethernet, USB, microphone, camera inputs
I think this unit gives up more than it gains in functionality by only having one tuner. I don't see anything in their product description about recording one show on 'live' tv while watching another 'live' show. I don't consider it a true media center until you've got the ability to record one show and watch another one. This doesn't sound like a big deal to the uninitiated, but nothing is more lame than having a PVR and the associated freedoms, then get forced watching something your roomie wanted to record because you can't change channels. The hardware cost for a second tuner is not much at all, well worth the extra $20-30..
Most american units have USB ports on them. I think that about covers the gambit of devices you would be attaching (camera, ethernet, keyboard, etc). I see the 'nifty' factor in being able to babble off how many types of ports something has, but I've noticed the people who own things with lots of ports tend to not own anything to connect to them. The different types of ports also run up the costs of manufacture for features that aren't needed or used. Much like all those funky ports on 8-bit Nintendos and other game systems of yesteryear's 'future expansion slot' thingys that nothing ever connected to. You have a PC, hook your stuff up to it. You have a PVR, use it to watch television.
One nifty feature UTV has is the ability to record a whole timeslot hitting record at any time before the slot expires. That's handy when you are just randomly watching stuff on TV, find something, only get to watch the first 15 minutes before the phone rings and you have to leave. Just hit record and the whole thing is recorded from the beginning.
I am guessing this will be a good hack unit. I don't care about that stuff with PVRs like most folks on here seem to do. From my experiences with modifying these types of devices, I become the only person in the house who can operate them. I'll stick to devices other people in the house don't depend on to modify..
I don't mean to sound rude here, but beyond Russia getting a PVR I don't see how any part of this is news, unless it's a slow news day, especially when I have a unit I spent $40 on almost two years ago and it has way more features minus integrated DVD. I'm not crazy about all-in-one systems either. You try to hack it, break it, you are out a DVD player and a PVR. Same goes for just daily usage, break the tuner time to buy a new DVD player too.
Always buy your components separately and avoid bundles if you want quality. Typically, the parts in multi-function devices are purchased from the lowest bidders. I'd rather be wise, save my money, read some reviews and buy a separate DVD player, PVR, tuner, amp, speakers, etc. You spend a little more but end up with a superior result and the ability to replace parts. Think you are too broke for that logic? You won't be thinking it when your DVD player dies and you have to get a whole new unit. Also, where's the component video connectors for HDTV? Is that dvd player progressive scan?
I apologize, I always post like 20 paragraph messages in regards to home video links. I'm very anti-hype after seeing so many new products all to find they are crap later on.
Yeah. It's nasty. I think GM's idea was to make everything modular. This would do away with purchasing a new car every few years.
For example, your interior and body are in perfect condition but you killed the chasis by driving 250k miles on it. You could go to the dealer and for a fee, move your body over to a new chasis.
Likewise, if you bought a sports car and knocked up your girlfriend, you could go to the dealership and have them pop a minivan body on your cruiser's chasis.
I really love the idea of this. My cars always have absolutely perfect interiors and a straight body, but I kill them with milage. I'd be more than happy to pay $5,000-8,000 every 4-6 years to replace my entire chasis and keep my $20,000 body and interior.
We really need something to happen. It's disturbing to see the rate resources are burned with Americans replacing their cars every few years.
Thanks for the information. K-lite has never let me down in the movie department. That is, until
I start searching for an english subbed version of a Hong Kong film.
Using Kazaa or the other 'stock' clients for this network is terrible. You have no extended searching options or the ability to jump supernodes. It's an entirely different story if you download K-lite and use all the extended features.
For example, you can 'search more' every 30 seconds for 20 minutes for a particular artist and come back to find hundreds of matches. I'll sometimes search for 'Divx' or 'DVD' with a minimum file size match of 600MB. You'll find enough stuff to keep you downloading and burning for weeks.
I'll check out mldonkey and emule. I've got a linux box with VMWare installed, so whatever is out there should work.
I am assuming it would be on topic if everyone exchanges ideas on good P2P networks. If anyone would reply to this thread and drop some thoughts, that'd be great.
What's the best networks for obtaining game system ISOs, movies, software, etc?
Well, using your logic we don't need P2P at all. I share files just because I pay for my bandwidth whether I use it or not.
Your second point holds much weight with me. I don't advertise exactly what sort of content I download, but most of what I've downloaded and enjoyed, I've bought. If I download something and dislike it, it gets deleted.
I quit buying and listening to most big industry owned music a few years ago. It's not that hard to do when it finally occurs to one's self how music for the masses has been narrowed down to a few big musicians.
Top 40, R&B, Hip Hop, Country, Rock. Such simple categories for a simple, ADD public. None of the way music is promoted by the industry works with intelligent adults. That's why hormone pumped teenagers who make the least income are the biggest buyers and target audience. If the RIAA would grow up and focus more on 18-35 year olds with wide-ranging tastes, they'll eventually find themselves way better off.
It's just easiest to market to the lowest common denominator. Most other methods require some level of intelligence. Down with the RIAA.
Hey, I am one of those people. I've got about 40 gigs of movies and documentaries shared on K-lite. All of them are public domain and downloadable from the Moving Pictures Database on Archive.org. During the past three months, none of them have been downloaded even once.
:)
In other news, I had an mp3, named after a particular Metallica song, of my voice saying to not buy, purchase or download anything Metallica related. I'd rather just see those meatheads not sell another album or concert ticket. Now, that's been downloaded hundreds of times.
It's no real mystery what people do with P2P applications.
Yeah, the CPU is definitely a bottleneck when I try to run Doom3-alpha at 1600x1200.
Agreed. Back when I was a hardware tech in the early 90's, I recall building pools of identical machines for customer orders. For burn-in, I would loop benchmarks for 24 hours before shipping them out. There was typically 1-2% difference in identical systems.
People tend to forget the complexity of a PC and the inevitable, microscopic differences each part made. Thus differences in resistance, heat generated, and performance.
I recall 1979 when going to one of the annual, local GM fairs with my dad (he worked there). I was about 10 years old and amazed with the robotic equipment they had out for demonstration.
When the mighty GM executives came out to give their speeches about the auto industry, I remember them saying 10% of the cars on the road would be electric by 1985.
My point is, I don't trust anything that comes from these huge companies. All you can be assured of is that they will release information about something right after the patent process of whatever makes it unique, then sit on it for decades since there is no real push in the industry to change things around.
It will require little guys like this one popping up on the radar for them to get things rolling.
Yeah, I didn't feel like typing out all the network devices in the chain of things. But yes, a proxy, a good IDS box, proper firewall rules, proper subnetting, keeping antivirus signatures and your Windows updates updated helps a great deal.
These sort of things minimize your chance of problems. Nothing is truely secure, imo. It just limits your liability if|when the shit hits the fan.
SMS is nasty, but it works sorta. It's price doesn't matter much when you are F500, though.
Personally, I want to see the whole world format their collective hard drives and install FreeBSD.
Amen to that. Yeah, I come across as a bit of an enabler of doom sometimes. It's just what has paid the bills for a while now.
:)
I remember the good old days when you could tell your boss you saved her $3000 in software licenses with a nifty BSD or Linux web server and come back from lunch to find a stack of gift certificates to buy.com and thinkgeek.com as a reward for a solid contribution to the company.
I guess I half-heartedly accept the inefficient drama that plays out in most companies. I've seen VP's take multiple, agreeing sets of independantly published results on how well a particular open source and closed source package compare, then go closed source because of 'support contracts' and 'all the other fortune 500 companies are using this now, why aren't we?'. Basically, he was impressed by a vendor or consultant, maybe college buddies with them. I don't know, all I know is that eventually most battles are lost to the commercial applications even when they are lacking.
It's sad. But I have my priorities. They might not be heroic, but they are highly adaptible.
Oh, the human rights thing was just for a little umpf for a slow reading thread.
I'm light as a feather. I'm just giving a single view I've seen expressed by multiple corporations.
:)
It's a dirty world out there, just because I remind folks of it, doesn't mean I support it's practice.
The funny thing is, you can talk about such practices all day around non-techies and they will see it as a part of business and normal, efficient practice. Speak of giving Sally access to the servers she needs and nothing else to AOL Chat people and generic geeks, and suddenly Hitler, mistreatment of jews, human rights and everything else under the sun comes out as a comparison.
Also, the engineer isn't the one making IT policy decisions. That's typically done at a VP per the advice of engineers. Perhaps you were speaking of a train conductor/engineer. Beats me. Either way, no human rights are destroyed, no dead babies are born, no other horrible things are going to happen when you give an employee a computer for a job and expect them just to do their job with it.
For instance, you don't supply construction workers with Internet access while they are digging a ditch. You don't issue a company car for employees to take cross-country personal road trips in. What makes everyone think supplying unrestricted Internet access or OS freedom while at the office is so important? They need to be doing their job. You know, that thing that pays the bills and keeps capitalism flowing.
"I see the smiley, so I'm hoping this is mostly a joke, but if a company harbors contempt for it's employees, it is doomed. If the option is "my way or the highway", the good employees will eventually choose the highway, regardless of the economy. All you will have left will be compliant losers who don't think for themselves, managed by control freaks who have to do all the thinking for them, deciding which color pen to use."
I'm not saying it's the way things should be. It's just the way things have evolved in larger companies. The reality of a 'right to work' state is basically what I said. It's just like office dress codes, codes of conduct, etc in the workplace.
I would quit dribbling over worries about what OS is used and that sort of thing. Just think about all the poor saps in this world who are stuck having their hair cut a certain way, wearing uniforms, being forced to address any slime-ball customer as 'sir' or 'maam', codes against visible tatoos, etc. These are far more intrusive control measures employers inflict on their employees, not to mention far more widespread than, say, a tight IT policy where Jill can access all the databases required to do her work, but not her favorite manporn site.
Notice though, how I never said that any of these companies do not allow various OS's in particular circumstances. It's just another of 1000 rules in any corporation. To get around the problem, simply fill out a helpdesk request for permisson/reasons for the need of a 'non-standard' OS to be installed and they can get with your technical lead and make sure the request is valid and you are in the clear if there is a job need for it.
Anyway, always assume my thoughts in these posts are incomplete. I just type and hit submit. My goal is to generate thoughts more than to give factual details with all my points well covered.
That's why you have firewalls, SMS updates, proper subnetting with segregation of workstations & servers and a tight IT policy. You have to maintain what control you can establish or the end result will be no control.
Again, my thoughts are not hypothetical and just parts of the practice needed to maintain a minimal security level.
Good thinking, but if you fire someone and make an example out of them that is brought up by managers on a regular basis when dealing with new hires or other employees, you put yourself in the position of facing a possible suit from the fired employee.
In most companies large enough to have a HR team, you will typically find policies that managers must abide by concerning terminations and what details you share with anyone about them.
From a company's angle, they must do a bunch of things that sound really silly to cover themself in such situations. All that stuff is silly and sounds like crap until you can honestly speak out during litigation demonstrating evidence that your company did all it could do, in a reasonable means, to protect itself from said situation.
It's much like having a cop watch you intentionally walk in front of a car in hopes of quick money. Sure, the injury will be the same but you have nobody to collect from since it was your own dumb self that jumped in front of that car with reckless intent.
No FUD, sir. Information Security groups have got to view the employees of a large company as untrusted, unproven people as a whole. Our capitalist and litigation happy society requires this. It's not like when you go through any other form of security it's loving and trusting. Look at airport security, the police, anything to do with protection usually starts off with the attitude of not being too terribly trusting.
Also, I was not trying to give a full IS proceedure, just a quick run of some thoughts of what I have experienced in the past decade.
For starters:
Linux, MacOS, etc is not 'sub-optimal', if your corporation purchased copies of Windows with their workstations, it seems like an even larger disregard for cashflow to not utilize what they paid for. Your scientific and my engineering minds think 'Well, I get more done in Linux', of course we do, but when you sit in with a Loss Prevention group the removed/unused copies of software are considered a total loss.
Your situation is what would be considered a special case by an IT staff. You are a scientist. Silly goose, you will probably need all kinds of things a typical employee will not need. Think about the percentage of scientists versus customer service reps and support people in call centers. Think of the costs associated with each one of these people anually versus what you cost. It's a big difference.
You speak at the end about trust and the suggestion that a network operate transparently without many restrictions. You have to understand that most companies are not in the ISP business for their employees. If you sit down in front of a computer in an office, it's their network, their assets, their butt on the line, their bandwidth costs, etc.
For example, I have worked in a group who's new office was suffering terribly. About a 1400 user network, but the bandwidth leaving the building was always pegged. Upon watching traffic for a few days, it appeared that a major portion was porn and streaming media traffic. We implemented a filter file for the proxy and traffic went from ~97% down to ~30% utilization. This sort of thing is very cost effective and saves people from themselves (female employee walks up on porn mongering male, female complains, male goes unpunished, female cooks up discrimination suit, etc -- just preventative medicine, not a cure for a likely issue in the future).
I guess those who are knocking my tales have never been exposed to a real IT group before. Either that, or they are prepared to lose their jobs someday due to a lack of enforcement or policy that matches your typical fortune 500 company. The suits will not have much pitty for your balls to give excess freedom to employees with their investor-purchased resources.
The downfall of your average geek is the inability to ever see things from an executive, bean counter, or investor's point of view. Threats are real, liability is real, the end result of your investments are real. The joy of an office behind a very trusting packet filter is short lived and a flagerant disregard for company assets, especially if the company is publically held. Your investors are well within their power to take you to court and sue you for every dime you have if there is big enough loss associated with an act that was easily prevented. We never know the limitations of these types of suits because they are civil and not criminal. In a civil suit, you never know if you are going to be made an example. For instance, the massive settlements on people burning themselves with McDonalds coffee. You just don't know what's going to happen. At least with a criminal case, there are boundries clearly defined by law.
You go back to being a scientist and I'll go back to saving people like you from yourselves with your lack of understanding regarding the need for real security policy. I promise I won't pick apart or call FUD when you speak of something technical regarding your line of work... That is, if you don't tell me ficticous realities about how e
It actually will not help much. I've used both generic and that silver based Artic Gold (can't remember if that's the brand or not). I use MotherBoard Monitor to monitor temps on my XP/Game system which is equiped with a SLK-800 heatsink and 80mm fan.
There is a 0 degree difference between using the sivler stuff and the generic goo. I've also swapped from the goo to silver paste on my old dual 700 when replaceing a processor. No measurable difference in heat/performance.
Your best bet with those DSL routers:
Find a good 486 heatsink/fan combo, mix a drop of silver compound with a very small drop of epoxy, then mount the sucker on your DSL router's CPU. Use a bench clamp or book (or some combination) to secure the heatsink/fan overnight while the compound hardens. The next morning, your DSL router should run nice and cool. Keep in mind, if you use too much epoxy in your mixture, that heatsink will not be coming off there. A lighter mix will result in something you can knock off there with the handle of a screwdriver if you ever need to get it off.
I've found old 486 sinks and fans are very handy at cooling off just about anything they'll fit on except for peltier solutions.
If the cost of $5 is prohibitive, check your closet for old computers and find your free parts there.
I am not buying into this article for the fact that I've worked in large 'shops' of 2,000 workstations up to about 8,000. None of these shops would find, then allow a non-approved OS to continue to run on their networks. This type of thing is basic "Information Security did a weekly scan, found it, helpdesk siezed the machine and re-imaged it with Windows 2000" routine.
I used to agree with giving employees freedom to run whatever OS they are comfortable with, but you have to keep into consideration the Information Security view on things. A *nix OS with a few network tools installed, gcc, and some skills can lead to a lot of problems for the company.
Think that's silly? Think again. Think about doing technical support for bitter and unthankful lusers. Your boss is an asshole. You make $23k/year and missed your shot as an [insert engineer/developer position here] before the bubble popped. No hope for a future with the company since they have a revolving door system in place where 3/4 of the low-level staff is on temporary contracts that expire every 90-300 days.. I know, it's sad and I've seen a lot of talent from people stuck in these types of jobs and feel terrible for them. But, this is a common person in technical call centers. I've seen enough from that single profile to type pages, but I'll stop and save it for another post.
Do you trust this employee enough to let him run FreeBSD? You want him having direct access to the 'net without a proxy? I doubt it, especially not after that email where he asked questions about what type of traffic you monitor and how you do audits. What if he's okay but his box ended up getting owned because he downloaded bad BitchX source? That would mean another three day stint of no sleep doing emergency penetration tests, mirroring HD images, finding the exploits, sitting in meetings and explaining what all was affected hoping you didn't miss something critical. That's the tip of the ice berg when it comes to what happens when your office gets owned. Even if workstations are usable, every workstation on the local subnet and server they have ports open to via the firewall have to be investigated. This brings productivity for the money-making sides of the company to a crawl while sysadmins and security folks work to get things safe again. Somewhere around noon, the guy from Public Relations will likely be on the phone wanting to know what to tell CNN when he calls them back. Likely, there will be a news source online with details of how the exploit took place, but completely wrong and now the public and shareholders are going to wonder if credit card numbers were stolen, your ability to properly maintain infrastructure, etc. Then your stock price falls $2/share. That's potential millions depending on how big your company is.
Sorry to ramble, I just wanted to stress the importance of IT policy and the headaches that can happen when the policy is too lax. I'm very pro-Linux/BSD, but not in an enviroment where it's not needed (All those workstations came with an OS you paid for anyway). I also think this treatment of unapproved OS's is very common due to thoughts and situations like the one above.
My stories are actual events portrayed by actors.
"1) You can't get the pix out without cracking the camera software, which no doubt includes some serious access control as well as undocumented and perhaps non-standard interfaces, connectors, and protocols. (And they might hit you for DMCA violation by a number of routes, including claiming copyright to the pix themselves until you return the camera.)"
;-)
They can't and won't claim copyright to the pictures you took with their camera. Unless they have a required CC deposit or written/signed rental agreement with you, it's pretty easy to say it's your camera until you give it back, if ever.
Regardless of the protocols, etc not being standards, most people I know (including me) would want the $10 2Mpixel eye from the thing. It's likely nothing special, a standard composite signal likely comes off it like any other digital camera.
$10 for whatever usable parts you can get out of the thing is well worth it. I would never plan on using a hunk of crap like that for my vacation pictures, but cheap parts for a security cam, eyeballs for your household robot, your cat cam, etc sound appetizing to me!
"Microsoft, whose operating system runs 80 percent of the world's computers, has adopted the new addressing scheme in its Windows XP operating system, but it's switched off by default. The latest version of Apple's operating system is also IPv6-compatible.
;)
The open-source community has also begun incorporating IPv6 into its own operating systems."
Oh yes, we have 'just begun' to put IPV6 support in Linux, FreeBSD, etc.. I think these features were evident in the open source OS's before Microsoft and Apple made the switch.
I could be wrong. It's happened once or twice before.
Yes, I do all of the above minus VOIP behind NAT.
/. readers employed.
Klite/Kazaa and my VPN works fine, as does serving a battlefield, counter-strike, web and ftp server. The only things I can't seem to run are Microsoft's video conference software and old MSN gaming zone games.
NAT is a hack itself. IIRC, the fellow who came up with the concept called it a waste of time for anyone who wasn't totally hard up for IP space.
A billion IPs are available. None of your appliances are going to connect via a 'real' IP address, either. I don't know why this gets brought up in the topic of every article associated with NAT and a lack of public IPs. The future of home networking will likely remain on a single IP driven by a soho router device that provides service to appliances and devices in your home via NAT for at least several years to come.
Cell phones and other handheld devices are not directly connected to the Internet. They are typically on private IP space behind a proxy as they aren't designed for general web traffic, just very specific protocols w/ low traffic.
NAT is 'just fine' if you are a consumer who would like to keep their Internet bills under $50/mo during the sunset of the IPV4 years.
The argument that NAT doesn't work 'if you don't do much with your computer' doesn't fly with me. I have supported a 3,000+ user network's firewalls where 99% of the traffic was processed by NAT or by proxy (I'm just making up that 1% was workstation to workstation traffic!). All these things 'you can't do' can be encapsulated and shipped from one office to another via a VPN, meanwhile your public facing servers can have individual IPs or be under NAT as well with some fickle fwd rules on the firewall. Don't bring up security here, you just because you NAT doesn't mean one interface and no subnets.
My point is, you can do a lot more with NAT than people would have you think. Just because they couldn't get their Windows box to do some silly feat from behind NAT doesn't mean it's impossible. Regardless, making this stuff work is what keeps many
I'm not defending NAT, I've just had no problems with it in a demanding corporate enviroment. It seems like a viable alternative for a few more years to come.