When are they going to re-add 3d acceleration for Virtual PC? I'd love to run Rhinoceros (a 3d CAD app) inside of VPC, but it runs poorly on an unaccelerated card. (I'd also love to run Battlefield 1942, but that will have to be relegated to my gaming x86 for now, as it requires somewhere around a 2ghz cpu for all of the physics and AI.) I remember that sometime in the past they had support for the 3dfx Voodoo 3 cards - where has that gone?
Bah. I hotswapped an IDE CD-burner from one Windows 2000 machine to another. Simple enough - removed the device in Computer Management on the original computer, unplugged power then data, put it in my machine, plugged in data then power, and hit "Scan for PnP-Compliant hardware". Nothing fried yet.
Unfortunately, one of my Linux machines really didn't appreciate the hotswap experience that I accidentally gave it - I was testing a RAID card on it, with the motherboard and card sitting on my desk, and accidentally ripped the card out in the middle of a filesystem stress-test. Oops. *kernel panic*
If you want to run a headless iMac, you could just pop the drive from it into another (similar) Mac, throw a VNC Server app in the startup menu, make sure it launches on boot, and put the drive back in the iMac. Simple enough.
Also, I read a site a while back about someone who had a similar problem to you - an iMac (don't remember the rev) with a dead CRT - he installed a video card in it somehow. Try googling for it.
You have forgotten your place. In Slashdot-land, there are no girlfriends, only clit-mice. (mouses? meese?)
I'd bet that you wouldn't stand using the eraser-mouse either when it started to burn the skin from your fingertips after a heated gaming session (well, for the only computer I bought with one, more like a heated Solitare session, but that's still a game). Touchpads won't do that to you.
I can one-up you with a good Apple-support experience:
I purchased a Powerbook Duo 270c (one of the last 68040-based laptops) and wanted to open it so I could do something to the modem - I don't remember exactly what it was, probably reseating it because it was shipped "roughly". Anyway, I couldn't figure out what was holding down the top panel. So, I called up Apple support (at least 3.5 _years_ after the model line had been discontinued, and I didn't even buy it from them - I got it from a Canadian reseller, with no warranty). The lady kindly walked me through the proceedure of disassembling the screen hinges and gave me pointers on how to lift the frame (which was necessary to get at the modem).
I can see the equivalent experience with {Dell,HPaq,Gateway,Sony,...} support now... "You say you want to... take apart your computer... and poke around with the modem? I'll have to perform basic troubleshooting before I send a field tech. No, I'm sure it will fix the problem. Have you tried reinstalling the drivers?"
ARRGGGHHH!!! How can you stand massaging the pointer-clit in the center of the keyboard to try and USE a computer!? So many hours I wasted, struggling with that eraser. It is the object of all of my hate and bitterness towards this world. Whoever developed that pointing device shall be doomed to eternal suffering in front of a Toshiba Satellite 486/25 with Windows 3.1, my first encounter with the damned nipple-mouse.
</rant>
I prefer the touch pads, personally, and Apple does make the best! Far superior to any I've used on a PC laptop (even some really nice ones [defined as whatever Orifice Depot has out for me to screw with when I'm in there, and that I cannot afford]).
I'd definately like that, but only if it came with an LCARS skin. Star Trek, here we come! Oh, and when the system crashes, the keyboard has to keep the buttons visible but make the backlight flicker. That would add the final touch of authenticity to it...
It's hard to get specs for smaller (whiteboxers and local guys, and homebuilt machines) runs of machines, but Dell, HPaq, IBM, Sun, and all of the major guys participate in the SPEC benchmarks. Try www.spec.org and hit the Benchmark Search Engine. Unfortunatly, though, I wasn't able to find any Apple benchmarks on there with my initial search, but you might try digging a little deeper.
True, you must run the DVD drive's motor, but then the hard drive motor is usually spun down
during that time, and the hard drive consumes about the same amount of power, I think (no laser, but its motor spins faster). When I had a powerbook, the HD would spin down 5 minutes into a DVD and not spin back up until I closed the DVD app and opened a new (not recently used) application, so it obviously caches all of that stuff to RAM.
I agree with the PC MHz cult being wrong (although this is being typed on a dual AthlonMP 2000+ comp, go figure). When I had my PB, it only lagged behind in 3d apps, mainly gaming (Quake 3) and Bryce5. Gaming speed (or lack thereof) and most of Bryce's issues could be directly linked to the 3d Rage II that has no hardware 3d acceleration under OS X, and the rest attributed to the 400mhz G3 it was running (mmm... 12 hour renders, although the multitasking was great - Mozilla roared along with Bryce doing a 300-frame animation render at 1024x768x32bit in the background, with 500k polygons).
The Video section, particularly. I love the TechTV blooper, and the helocrash is entertaining. Poor helicopter, it never stood a chance. I hate to see a waste of a perfectly good machine.
They may require 600 times as much wastewater, but that water isn't really wasted. Paper bags are completely environmentally friendly, as are the components used to make them (no bleach, very few inks if any, very little glue). That water also is used to make not 1 paper bag, but thousands, and is usually on a continuous loop through the manufacturing plant. You probably wouldn't want to drink the water, but only because wood pulp doesn't taste great - but you could anyways. Otherwise, it's completely edible.
When you manufacture a plastic bag, I really don't think that you could drink or eat the byproducts, and neither could any other animal.
1. can I just download headers?
TOP 1,0
(1 is message #, 0 is # of lines to get after headers)
2. can I delete specific Email from the server w/o downloading the whole message?
DELE 1
(1 is message #)
Also - hot-swap is hardware only right now - without specific drivers the OS will not be notified about the change and will therefore cause you troubles (caches not written and so on...) if you try to hot-swap...
In Windows 2000, hot-swap is not an issue. It's designed to take this kind of abuse. Right-click on My Computer and select Manage (or go to Administrative Tools -> Computer Management). Click on Disk Management. Right-click on the left square for any drive that's not in use (not the right rectangle with the partitions in it) and select remove. Note that you might have to right-click the partitions, select to change the drive-letter mappings, and remove all letters for them first. Now, you may safely remove the disk.
Or, if you want to be really mean to Windows, just pull power to the disk. It'll notice shortly and scream at you with removal notices and the like, but they can be safely ignored.
To add a disk, just plug it in. Go back to the disk management console, and click the refresh button. Windows will pick it up shortly. If it's a foreign dynamic disk, right-click it and select import - other than that, all you might need to do is assign a drive letter to it and it starts working.
Now, if you're using a REAL OS (linux), I never quite figured out how to have it dynamically reassign the hd and sd devices while the system was booted up, although I noted that it did have device removal and arrival messages in the dmesg output. If you know, please share!
Have you looked at why Fibre Channel is more expensive? Well, there are a few reasons. FC is designed to be used in HUGE, HUGE datacenter environments. An FC switched fabric can have 16 million devices on it, all speaking SCSI and/or IP. You can run your massive disk array in its own room up to 5km away, thanks to single-mode fiber optics, which are a part of the spec. FC itself isn't too impressive until you look at the bigger picture for it. Another thing it has going for it (like scsi except on a larger scale, unlike Serial ATA unless I'm mistaken) is that in a switched fabric, any device can talk to any other device. For example, my workstation could go over and read a disk that was currently being accessed by 6 other devices from around the datacenter, and it would just put my request in the command queue and respond to it in turn. (Writing is the same way, but you must use a file system designed for multiple writers unless you like FS corruption.)
Another thing, it's currently faster than SCSI. As far as I remember, 4Gbit FC is out, and 8 (or maybe 6) Gbit is on the way. You don't even need all of your devices to talk that fast (most drives are 1Gbit, maybe 2Gbit), as long as your switch can handle the speed differences, as it should be able to. Even the 4Gbit is faster than Ultra/320 SCSI, and the 6 or 8Gbit will kick the pants off of it.
Also, unlike SCSI, the cabling requirements are EASY, and the interface cards are inexpensive. I built a JBOD (just a bunch of disks) out of ST39102FC drives (9.1gb 1" 10000rpm Seagate), and you know what I used to cable it together? Cat5. Standard category-5 ethernet cable, at less than 10 cents a foot. Of course, that doesn't include the power cabling, but that's all standardized anyways. Interfacing to an FC drive? Nothing. I grabbed a copy of the drive's tech manual from Seagate's web site, which had all of the pinouts for the FC connector, the SCA40. I whipped up a board in ExpressPCB (because it's easy to order boards from them and the software's free), ordered the mating SCA40 connector from Mouser Electronics, and soldered it all together. It didn't even require any passive components besides a couple of status LEDs (which are optional of course) - just the connectors. Total cost per drive? $10 for the interface card, give or take a dollar, and the cabling is negligable. Buying the connectors and PCBs in bulk will cut down even farther on the cost (mainly because the SCA40 connectors are $6.50 or so in singles). You can have up to 120 drives on a non-switched loop. I'd love to see a SCSI card do that, not to mention the cabling associated! The FC HBA was a surplus HP part which cost me a whole $25 from Fleabay. I soldered my own cable to it where the GBIC module would normally go (thanks, IBM, for the manual on your GBICs!) and popped it in. Finding drivers aside (hpaq's website sucks), works perfectly.
Of course, one problem with a simple FC loop like what I built is that if you remove a drive, the loop is broken. That problem can easily be solved - Maxim Semiconductor makes a neat little chip that will do port-bypass for you, and the signal for it's already on the SCA connector. Add the chip, the resistor, and the extra PCB space - you've blown a whole $4 more per interface card. Optionally, you could just hook up everything to a FC hub, which handles the bypass automatically. Maxim even sells a chip that basically allows you to build a 4-port FC hub for a few bucks, and they're daisy-chainable to the whole loop capacity of 120 drives.
Tom's Hardware Guide just did a review of 17" LCD panels in its Display guide section. Jump to the conclusion page and you'll find a single 17" LCD that they looked at with the DVI input - the "Belinea 10 17 20". Unfortunately, it's not all that great; the brightness leaves a lot to be desired, and it has serious trailing issues. It does cost only around $650, though. At least solutions in that price range do exist, though they're lacking in quality. Good luck finding a good one.
Unfortunatly, I do not agree with your recommendation for Tyan boards.
My friend bought a Tyan S2460 (Dual-athlon board) which seemed fairly nice from the beginning. Had a few small issues with it, such as the BIOS needing to be flashed before it would work properly with Win2000, but not much. That is, until it ate itself hardware-wise. About 6 weeks after the initial purchase, he was running along playing a game and it shut off. No big deal, right? He had to go do something else, so he unplugged it and wandered off. Comes back and tries to power it on. It makes the worst noise and starts smelling. He rips the power out and pops it open - can't see anything wrong with it, though. On a whim, he decides to go for it - puts the power back in and fires it back up. Quite literally, in fact, as a small surface-mount IC situated almost underneath the AGP slot flames up and smokes. Needless to say, the board was toast.
The sad part is when he went to warranty it, though. Tyan's warranty policies are pretty screwey, apparently. He would've had to mail it to the original retailer, who'd mail it to Taiwan, where it would be replaced and mailed to the original retailer, who would mail it to him. The shipping costs would have been as much as the board itself, as told quite plainly to him by the retailer's CS rep. Obviously, he never filed the RMA request, as he didn't want to take the chance of paying full-fare for another faulty product.
Assuming that you have a metric fuckton of cash to blow, you could make one hell of a RAID system with this and a SCSI card that I have. Go to eBay and buy an IBM ServeRAID 3 SCSI card. This is a card that does RAID onboard, and has 3 Adaptec chips on it for a total capacity of 45 (!) drives (15 per channel, 3 channels). Grab one of those for the whole $35 it cost me to buy originally, 45 SCSI -> IDE controllers, and 45 320GB IDE drives. Instant 14.4 TB raid array! You can only use one channel per raidset, so you'd really have 3x 5tb logical drives to work with (or just 45 drives to software-raid together), but still! Imagine a beowulf cluster of the porn stored on that!
Total cost:
$35 ServeRAID controller
$4500 45x IDE-SCSI adapters @ $100 ea
$23625 45x 320gb IDE drives @ $525 ea
$100 Shitload of cabling
$400 Good enclosure for 45 drives
Total price: $28,660 for 14.4TB, or $1.99 per GB
(Price goes up a bit if you use RAID5, as capacity is dropped some)
I'm assuming you'd be using this with Linux, correct? If you are, this would be _easy_ (although it would work with any other OS you knew how to write drivers for). Two ways:
1. Your machine must have an ISA slot (or you must know how the hell PCI works). Make a card with an onboard micro (something simple - 68HC11, 8052) connected to an unused IRQ and a chip-select system for an address in the middle of ISA adapter card space. Every 1 second, have the micro trigger an interrupt. The OS should see this if it's still alive and kicking in some fashion. If it doesn't see some pattern of 8 writes to that address space within a short period of time, have it short the hardware reset pins together (plug an unused port on the micro into the reset header on the mobo).
2. Same concept, different implementation. Hook a micro (BASIC stamp would be perfect for this, cheap and easy to program) up to the serial port. If it sees the repeating character stream sent out by the OS, all is well. If it stops for more than 1 sec or so, hardware-reset time!
Both of these would be relatively easy to implement for someone with hardware knowledge, and fairly inexpensive (ISA board would be maybe $20 in parts + whatever an ISA prototyping card costs, serial port version $45 for Basic Stamp kit + MAX232ACPE RS232 level-shifter chip and associated capacitors).
I, for one, would love to see engineers pack the infrastructure for 32 Athlons onto a single motherboard. Each Athlon MP uses a dedicated bus to the northbridge, so each processor has its own set of address and data lines, as well as control signals. If I'm not mistaken, the Athlon uses a 32-bit address bus and a 32-bit data bus. Add 16 more lines for various control signals gives us an even 80 lines/processor. 32 processors, each requiring 80 lines, multiplies out to 2,560 signal lines. Remember now that these must all terminate in the northbridge chip, also! That'll be one hell of a chip - I've heard of 700 pin sockets for the Clawhammer, but a chip with close to 3,000 pins? (Remember - it still needs to interface with the PCI bus and southbridge, so add more signals on top of the 2,560 to the chips).
Of course, remember that by then, we'd be on 64-bit busses. That means a 2-fold increase in signal lines for address and data (a total of 144 per chip, plus 16 for misc control signals = 160). 160 * 32 chips = an unheard of 5,120 pins just to talk to the processors.
Imagine a beow... Err, sorry - wrong post. Imagine the number of motherboard layers that would be required to route all of those signals! I'm thinking that the motherboard would probably have somewhere close to 50 layers, making it around an inch thick. Good luck mounting that in your Micro-ATX case that some retailers *cough* HP/Compaq *cough* like to sell with their systems...
Forget harddrive / cdrom - they're semi-bulky, break down easily, and require special environmental concerns. Just burn a ROM with a netboot loader in it, throw it in the ethernet card, and netboot/NFS-root the whole thing. Makes configuration changes and software upgrades that much easier, too - especially if you can have a shared NFS root for the software, and just have each machine mount its own/etc,/var, and/tmp on local ramdisks, copying the barebones files from a template directory and building some on boot (eth0 config, hostname, etc...).
An etherboot-enabled NIC attached to an old P2 system (or K6/2 - those are pretty nice, and the K6/3 or a lowend P3 would have no problems. No athlons for heat concerns!), and a proper video capture card (BT848 or BT868 are nice'n'cheap, but you could go for one with onboard MPEG encoding and use a less-powerful machine) with good Linux support should do wonders.
For powering concerns, if there will be any: Don't bother with a UPS for every machine. Just use ATX motherboards that are Wake-on-LAN compliant. When the power comes on, wait for the network harware to start working again, and broadcast the WOL command. If you're still worried about power/environment concerns (odd 150000v spike from lightning, etc), use a good surge suppressor on the network, power, and video lines and keep a good supply of spare parts on hand.
Does it include an actual Solaris license? I don't know about ver.8, but Solaris 9 free download on SPARC is only licensed for uniproceesor machines (looked into it when I picked up a SPARCstation 20 for $15 a week ago)
By SD video, I assume that you mean 640x480x30fps? A few calculations (assuming 1 byte pixels): 640 x 480 = 307,200 x 30fps = 9,216,000 bytes/sec x 60 sec = 552,960,000 bytes (527 MB, where 1 MB = 1048576 bytes). Obviously it'd be more than a gig if you recoded in 16bit RGB, but who needs that when you have YUY2 4:2:0 or YUV2 4:2:2? Add another 176,400 bytes/sec for 44khz 16bit stereo PCM, or 10,584,000 bytes for a minute. Still not anywhere near 1GB/min as you stated.
When you were thinking SD, did you assume 60fps? NTSC standard is 60 fields/sec, but each field only contains every other line (interlaced), so it becomes 30 frames per second.
Slashdot Mirror
When are they going to re-add 3d acceleration for Virtual PC? I'd love to run Rhinoceros (a 3d CAD app) inside of VPC, but it runs poorly on an unaccelerated card. (I'd also love to run Battlefield 1942, but that will have to be relegated to my gaming x86 for now, as it requires somewhere around a 2ghz cpu for all of the physics and AI.) I remember that sometime in the past they had support for the 3dfx Voodoo 3 cards - where has that gone?
Bah. I hotswapped an IDE CD-burner from one Windows 2000 machine to another. Simple enough - removed the device in Computer Management on the original computer, unplugged power then data, put it in my machine, plugged in data then power, and hit "Scan for PnP-Compliant hardware". Nothing fried yet.
Unfortunately, one of my Linux machines really didn't appreciate the hotswap experience that I accidentally gave it - I was testing a RAID card on it, with the motherboard and card sitting on my desk, and accidentally ripped the card out in the middle of a filesystem stress-test. Oops. *kernel panic*
If you want to run a headless iMac, you could just pop the drive from it into another (similar) Mac, throw a VNC Server app in the startup menu, make sure it launches on boot, and put the drive back in the iMac. Simple enough.
Also, I read a site a while back about someone who had a similar problem to you - an iMac (don't remember the rev) with a dead CRT - he installed a video card in it somehow. Try googling for it.
You have forgotten your place. In Slashdot-land, there are no girlfriends, only clit-mice. (mouses? meese?)
I'd bet that you wouldn't stand using the eraser-mouse either when it started to burn the skin from your fingertips after a heated gaming session (well, for the only computer I bought with one, more like a heated Solitare session, but that's still a game). Touchpads won't do that to you.
I can one-up you with a good Apple-support experience:
I purchased a Powerbook Duo 270c (one of the last 68040-based laptops) and wanted to open it so I could do something to the modem - I don't remember exactly what it was, probably reseating it because it was shipped "roughly". Anyway, I couldn't figure out what was holding down the top panel. So, I called up Apple support (at least 3.5 _years_ after the model line had been discontinued, and I didn't even buy it from them - I got it from a Canadian reseller, with no warranty). The lady kindly walked me through the proceedure of disassembling the screen hinges and gave me pointers on how to lift the frame (which was necessary to get at the modem).
I can see the equivalent experience with {Dell,HPaq,Gateway,Sony,...} support now... "You say you want to... take apart your computer... and poke around with the modem? I'll have to perform basic troubleshooting before I send a field tech. No, I'm sure it will fix the problem. Have you tried reinstalling the drivers?"
ARRGGGHHH!!! How can you stand massaging the pointer-clit in the center of the keyboard to try and USE a computer!? So many hours I wasted, struggling with that eraser. It is the object of all of my hate and bitterness towards this world. Whoever developed that pointing device shall be doomed to eternal suffering in front of a Toshiba Satellite 486/25 with Windows 3.1, my first encounter with the damned nipple-mouse.
</rant>
I prefer the touch pads, personally, and Apple does make the best! Far superior to any I've used on a PC laptop (even some really nice ones [defined as whatever Orifice Depot has out for me to screw with when I'm in there, and that I cannot afford]).
I'd definately like that, but only if it came with an LCARS skin. Star Trek, here we come! Oh, and when the system crashes, the keyboard has to keep the buttons visible but make the backlight flicker. That would add the final touch of authenticity to it...
It's hard to get specs for smaller (whiteboxers and local guys, and homebuilt machines) runs of machines, but Dell, HPaq, IBM, Sun, and all of the major guys participate in the SPEC benchmarks. Try www.spec.org and hit the Benchmark Search Engine. Unfortunatly, though, I wasn't able to find any Apple benchmarks on there with my initial search, but you might try digging a little deeper.
True, you must run the DVD drive's motor, but then the hard drive motor is usually spun down during that time, and the hard drive consumes about the same amount of power, I think (no laser, but its motor spins faster). When I had a powerbook, the HD would spin down 5 minutes into a DVD and not spin back up until I closed the DVD app and opened a new (not recently used) application, so it obviously caches all of that stuff to RAM.
I agree with the PC MHz cult being wrong (although this is being typed on a dual AthlonMP 2000+ comp, go figure). When I had my PB, it only lagged behind in 3d apps, mainly gaming (Quake 3) and Bryce5. Gaming speed (or lack thereof) and most of Bryce's issues could be directly linked to the 3d Rage II that has no hardware 3d acceleration under OS X, and the rest attributed to the 400mhz G3 it was running (mmm... 12 hour renders, although the multitasking was great - Mozilla roared along with Bryce doing a 300-frame animation render at 1024x768x32bit in the background, with 500k polygons).
It's funny. Laugh.
The Video section, particularly. I love the TechTV blooper, and the helocrash is entertaining. Poor helicopter, it never stood a chance. I hate to see a waste of a perfectly good machine.
They may require 600 times as much wastewater, but that water isn't really wasted. Paper bags are completely environmentally friendly, as are the components used to make them (no bleach, very few inks if any, very little glue). That water also is used to make not 1 paper bag, but thousands, and is usually on a continuous loop through the manufacturing plant. You probably wouldn't want to drink the water, but only because wood pulp doesn't taste great - but you could anyways. Otherwise, it's completely edible.
When you manufacture a plastic bag, I really don't think that you could drink or eat the byproducts, and neither could any other animal.
1. can I just download headers? TOP 1,0 (1 is message #, 0 is # of lines to get after headers) 2. can I delete specific Email from the server w/o downloading the whole message? DELE 1 (1 is message #)
Ever compiled Mozilla? (Well don't, it's like watching grass grow).
The name of the image handling library is libpr0n.
Suddenly, it all makes sense...
Or, if you want to be really mean to Windows, just pull power to the disk. It'll notice shortly and scream at you with removal notices and the like, but they can be safely ignored.
To add a disk, just plug it in. Go back to the disk management console, and click the refresh button. Windows will pick it up shortly. If it's a foreign dynamic disk, right-click it and select import - other than that, all you might need to do is assign a drive letter to it and it starts working.
Now, if you're using a REAL OS (linux), I never quite figured out how to have it dynamically reassign the hd and sd devices while the system was booted up, although I noted that it did have device removal and arrival messages in the dmesg output. If you know, please share!
Have you looked at why Fibre Channel is more expensive? Well, there are a few reasons. FC is designed to be used in HUGE, HUGE datacenter environments. An FC switched fabric can have 16 million devices on it, all speaking SCSI and/or IP. You can run your massive disk array in its own room up to 5km away, thanks to single-mode fiber optics, which are a part of the spec. FC itself isn't too impressive until you look at the bigger picture for it. Another thing it has going for it (like scsi except on a larger scale, unlike Serial ATA unless I'm mistaken) is that in a switched fabric, any device can talk to any other device. For example, my workstation could go over and read a disk that was currently being accessed by 6 other devices from around the datacenter, and it would just put my request in the command queue and respond to it in turn. (Writing is the same way, but you must use a file system designed for multiple writers unless you like FS corruption.)
Another thing, it's currently faster than SCSI. As far as I remember, 4Gbit FC is out, and 8 (or maybe 6) Gbit is on the way. You don't even need all of your devices to talk that fast (most drives are 1Gbit, maybe 2Gbit), as long as your switch can handle the speed differences, as it should be able to. Even the 4Gbit is faster than Ultra/320 SCSI, and the 6 or 8Gbit will kick the pants off of it.
Also, unlike SCSI, the cabling requirements are EASY, and the interface cards are inexpensive. I built a JBOD (just a bunch of disks) out of ST39102FC drives (9.1gb 1" 10000rpm Seagate), and you know what I used to cable it together? Cat5. Standard category-5 ethernet cable, at less than 10 cents a foot. Of course, that doesn't include the power cabling, but that's all standardized anyways. Interfacing to an FC drive? Nothing. I grabbed a copy of the drive's tech manual from Seagate's web site, which had all of the pinouts for the FC connector, the SCA40. I whipped up a board in ExpressPCB (because it's easy to order boards from them and the software's free), ordered the mating SCA40 connector from Mouser Electronics, and soldered it all together. It didn't even require any passive components besides a couple of status LEDs (which are optional of course) - just the connectors. Total cost per drive? $10 for the interface card, give or take a dollar, and the cabling is negligable. Buying the connectors and PCBs in bulk will cut down even farther on the cost (mainly because the SCA40 connectors are $6.50 or so in singles). You can have up to 120 drives on a non-switched loop. I'd love to see a SCSI card do that, not to mention the cabling associated! The FC HBA was a surplus HP part which cost me a whole $25 from Fleabay. I soldered my own cable to it where the GBIC module would normally go (thanks, IBM, for the manual on your GBICs!) and popped it in. Finding drivers aside (hpaq's website sucks), works perfectly.
Of course, one problem with a simple FC loop like what I built is that if you remove a drive, the loop is broken. That problem can easily be solved - Maxim Semiconductor makes a neat little chip that will do port-bypass for you, and the signal for it's already on the SCA connector. Add the chip, the resistor, and the extra PCB space - you've blown a whole $4 more per interface card. Optionally, you could just hook up everything to a FC hub, which handles the bypass automatically. Maxim even sells a chip that basically allows you to build a 4-port FC hub for a few bucks, and they're daisy-chainable to the whole loop capacity of 120 drives.
Tom's Hardware Guide just did a review of 17" LCD panels in its Display guide section. Jump to the conclusion page and you'll find a single 17" LCD that they looked at with the DVI input - the "Belinea 10 17 20". Unfortunately, it's not all that great; the brightness leaves a lot to be desired, and it has serious trailing issues. It does cost only around $650, though. At least solutions in that price range do exist, though they're lacking in quality. Good luck finding a good one.
Unfortunatly, I do not agree with your recommendation for Tyan boards.
My friend bought a Tyan S2460 (Dual-athlon board) which seemed fairly nice from the beginning. Had a few small issues with it, such as the BIOS needing to be flashed before it would work properly with Win2000, but not much. That is, until it ate itself hardware-wise. About 6 weeks after the initial purchase, he was running along playing a game and it shut off. No big deal, right? He had to go do something else, so he unplugged it and wandered off. Comes back and tries to power it on. It makes the worst noise and starts smelling. He rips the power out and pops it open - can't see anything wrong with it, though. On a whim, he decides to go for it - puts the power back in and fires it back up. Quite literally, in fact, as a small surface-mount IC situated almost underneath the AGP slot flames up and smokes. Needless to say, the board was toast.
The sad part is when he went to warranty it, though. Tyan's warranty policies are pretty screwey, apparently. He would've had to mail it to the original retailer, who'd mail it to Taiwan, where it would be replaced and mailed to the original retailer, who would mail it to him. The shipping costs would have been as much as the board itself, as told quite plainly to him by the retailer's CS rep. Obviously, he never filed the RMA request, as he didn't want to take the chance of paying full-fare for another faulty product.
Assuming that you have a metric fuckton of cash to blow, you could make one hell of a RAID system with this and a SCSI card that I have. Go to eBay and buy an IBM ServeRAID 3 SCSI card. This is a card that does RAID onboard, and has 3 Adaptec chips on it for a total capacity of 45 (!) drives (15 per channel, 3 channels). Grab one of those for the whole $35 it cost me to buy originally, 45 SCSI -> IDE controllers, and 45 320GB IDE drives. Instant 14.4 TB raid array! You can only use one channel per raidset, so you'd really have 3x 5tb logical drives to work with (or just 45 drives to software-raid together), but still! Imagine a beowulf cluster of the porn stored on that!
Total cost:
$35 ServeRAID controller
$4500 45x IDE-SCSI adapters @ $100 ea
$23625 45x 320gb IDE drives @ $525 ea
$100 Shitload of cabling
$400 Good enclosure for 45 drives
Total price: $28,660 for 14.4TB, or $1.99 per GB (Price goes up a bit if you use RAID5, as capacity is dropped some)
How to deliver a damn good kicking:
Step 1: Perform an on-site visit to the customer
Step 2: Drop a briefcase full of papers
Step 3: Kick 'em as they stoop to pick them up
Success! You have delivered exactly what the customer needs.
Of course, if they don't need a damn good kicking at the moment, save these instructions - you'll want to add it to the feature list at some point.
I'm assuming you'd be using this with Linux, correct? If you are, this would be _easy_ (although it would work with any other OS you knew how to write drivers for). Two ways:
1. Your machine must have an ISA slot (or you must know how the hell PCI works). Make a card with an onboard micro (something simple - 68HC11, 8052) connected to an unused IRQ and a chip-select system for an address in the middle of ISA adapter card space. Every 1 second, have the micro trigger an interrupt. The OS should see this if it's still alive and kicking in some fashion. If it doesn't see some pattern of 8 writes to that address space within a short period of time, have it short the hardware reset pins together (plug an unused port on the micro into the reset header on the mobo).
2. Same concept, different implementation. Hook a micro (BASIC stamp would be perfect for this, cheap and easy to program) up to the serial port. If it sees the repeating character stream sent out by the OS, all is well. If it stops for more than 1 sec or so, hardware-reset time!
Both of these would be relatively easy to implement for someone with hardware knowledge, and fairly inexpensive (ISA board would be maybe $20 in parts + whatever an ISA prototyping card costs, serial port version $45 for Basic Stamp kit + MAX232ACPE RS232 level-shifter chip and associated capacitors).
I, for one, would love to see engineers pack the infrastructure for 32 Athlons onto a single motherboard. Each Athlon MP uses a dedicated bus to the northbridge, so each processor has its own set of address and data lines, as well as control signals. If I'm not mistaken, the Athlon uses a 32-bit address bus and a 32-bit data bus. Add 16 more lines for various control signals gives us an even 80 lines/processor. 32 processors, each requiring 80 lines, multiplies out to 2,560 signal lines. Remember now that these must all terminate in the northbridge chip, also! That'll be one hell of a chip - I've heard of 700 pin sockets for the Clawhammer, but a chip with close to 3,000 pins? (Remember - it still needs to interface with the PCI bus and southbridge, so add more signals on top of the 2,560 to the chips).
Of course, remember that by then, we'd be on 64-bit busses. That means a 2-fold increase in signal lines for address and data (a total of 144 per chip, plus 16 for misc control signals = 160). 160 * 32 chips = an unheard of 5,120 pins just to talk to the processors.
Imagine a beow... Err, sorry - wrong post. Imagine the number of motherboard layers that would be required to route all of those signals! I'm thinking that the motherboard would probably have somewhere close to 50 layers, making it around an inch thick. Good luck mounting that in your Micro-ATX case that some retailers *cough* HP/Compaq *cough* like to sell with their systems...
Forget harddrive / cdrom - they're semi-bulky, break down easily, and require special environmental concerns. Just burn a ROM with a netboot loader in it, throw it in the ethernet card, and netboot/NFS-root the whole thing. Makes configuration changes and software upgrades that much easier, too - especially if you can have a shared NFS root for the software, and just have each machine mount its own /etc, /var, and /tmp on local ramdisks, copying the barebones files from a template directory and building some on boot (eth0 config, hostname, etc...).
An etherboot-enabled NIC attached to an old P2 system (or K6/2 - those are pretty nice, and the K6/3 or a lowend P3 would have no problems. No athlons for heat concerns!), and a proper video capture card (BT848 or BT868 are nice'n'cheap, but you could go for one with onboard MPEG encoding and use a less-powerful machine) with good Linux support should do wonders.
For powering concerns, if there will be any: Don't bother with a UPS for every machine. Just use ATX motherboards that are Wake-on-LAN compliant. When the power comes on, wait for the network harware to start working again, and broadcast the WOL command. If you're still worried about power/environment concerns (odd 150000v spike from lightning, etc), use a good surge suppressor on the network, power, and video lines and keep a good supply of spare parts on hand.
Does it include an actual Solaris license? I don't know about ver.8, but Solaris 9 free download on SPARC is only licensed for uniproceesor machines (looked into it when I picked up a SPARCstation 20 for $15 a week ago)
By SD video, I assume that you mean 640x480x30fps? A few calculations (assuming 1 byte pixels): 640 x 480 = 307,200 x 30fps = 9,216,000 bytes/sec x 60 sec = 552,960,000 bytes (527 MB, where 1 MB = 1048576 bytes). Obviously it'd be more than a gig if you recoded in 16bit RGB, but who needs that when you have YUY2 4:2:0 or YUV2 4:2:2? Add another 176,400 bytes/sec for 44khz 16bit stereo PCM, or 10,584,000 bytes for a minute. Still not anywhere near 1GB/min as you stated.
When you were thinking SD, did you assume 60fps? NTSC standard is 60 fields/sec, but each field only contains every other line (interlaced), so it becomes 30 frames per second.