Chillingly possible it may be, but the free market would put a stop to a built-in obsolescence of DVD players.
Sure, the big names like Sony and Panasonic could well have a "nuke yourself 10 years after first boot" backdoor thingywhatnot, but there's always going to be some little techy firm in Taiwan or Malaysia that sees this as an uneccesary expense, and leaves it out, and to hell with what the DVD consortium says - they wouldn't care, and their players would sell like hot cakes once people realised their 300 chunk of Panasonic was going to die in a years time, rendering their 500-strong DVD collection worthless.
Witness the DVD region debacle, at least here in the UK. No-one will buy a player that isn't region free, so no-one bothers to sell them. Multi-market DVD players are shipped with instructions telling users excactly what to do to region-free the player, otherwise they get returned. Case in point: I have a friend who spent 2000 on a 200-or-so Sony DVD multichanger. As soon as he found out it was regino locked, it was returned, and a cheaper no-name brand which was region free out of the box replaced it.
Of course, there's always the uncapitalistic government/business collusion to stop "untrusted" hardware from ever reaching your doorstep, but that's another rant.
The biggest benefit of DDR2 is the much reduced die sizes (and supposed reduced power consumption), resulting in higher yields and therefore cheaper RAM chips.
Although at the moment of course, DDR2 is much more expensive because it's New and Improved.
It's a bit "Me, too!", but I can't live without mouse gestures any more. I've been using Opera (paid for it for both Linux and Windows too) since version 5, and not being able to use gestures whilst browsing the web makes it almost unuseable. Although Opera is my browser of choice, I keep a copy of firefox on my USB key with all the plugins I use added, which makes browsing bearable on clients computers.
Incidentally, there is a little app called StrokeIt that will let you use mouse gestures on a win32 desktop. I stopped using it because it conflicts with my opera gestures (perhaps you can disable it working in certain apps? Never bothered to try, eeep!), but it might be fun for you to try out.
I am *so* sick and tired of all these "stable is hideously outdated" anti-debian trolls. Stable is designed to be used for production systems where downtime is *very* expensive; in my experience, it doesn't go wrong through b0rked dependencies, bugs in software, poor package management, high server load, anything. It just keeps on chugging along. I wouldn't like to run a working desktop on it, but I don't believe that's stable's target audience. Stable is designed for a practically zero-maintenance approach. You can use Cron to automatically keep every single app on the entire computer up to date with the latest releases and (most importantly) security fixes. Our file and outward-facing web server both run stable.
The other important Debian machines in the office run Testing - the cross between unstable and stable. Testing has proved incredibly solid as a desktop OS used for image processing, and the packages are what? A month or three behind the original release? And they don't break your system like unstable (rarely) does. We use testing for our image procesing boxes and our internal development servers.
If you're pissed off that stable has outdated packages, then you're not part of it's target audience. Those of us who care for incredible reliabilty and pain free administration at the expense of the biggest numbers *are* the target audience, and if the rest of them are anything like me I know they will hate all these "latest version of everything" wanting to bring down the reputation Debian has worked so hard to achieve. Stable is there because that's what a significant version of Debian users want; use testing, unstable, or roll your own version of Debian - it's not like no-one else has done it (Knoppix, Xandros... there's dozens).
Oh yeah, the Gentoo thing. I like to use it for my home desktops cos it's very up to date and very easy to customise. Even the "stable" stuff breaks sometimes (for instance, the new stable gentoo sources, 2.4.26-r3, kernel panics my machine whenever my PVR-250 stops recording - never been able to fix this one, so had to roll back to 2.4.25-r3), but uptime and reliability and round-the-clock processing capabilities aren't essential on my desktops. They are, however, essential in my file/DB server. Guess what that runs...
Depending on how you configure it, a Linux OS can do either (even both) server and desktop exceptionally well.
I'm inclined to agree with you that RH, Mandrake etc are getting "bloated" in the sense that a default install will put a load of stuff most people will never use. Other people know what they do and don't need, and go for a minimal install.
This kinda thing is best shown by distros like Debian (and especially) Gentoo and Slackware. They all start off as a bare shell, with news apps being added as and when. The source-based distros take it to even greater extremes; with precompiled packages, you're left to the mercy of what the package maintainers think is a god average configuration. If you compile it yourself, you can choose to leave out support for X, but add support for Y and Z. This is by far the biggest strength of Gentoo, IMO, as it makes all this hideously easy (never used Slack, so can't comment, I imagein it's much the same).
As such, Linux is the swiss army knife of operating syste,ms. One minute it's opening your beer, the next it's carving a kayak, the next it's doing something odd with that strange attachment that no-one knows what it's for.
"Whilst it's all very well for us "FireFox on Linux" users to gloat about our immunity from scumware; we must be aware that the developers of scumware only target IE _because_ it is the most prolific browser. The security weaknesses of IE are more likely the second reason."
Hmm. Wake me up when MS decides to Mozilla the shell for Longhorn. Last time I looked there was *no way* to automatically install plugins and the like without the users knowledge into the shell. Even loading them into the browser is bad enough.
(What the hell is the problem with IE's cache? Is there even a problem with it? Why does eevryone always say "delete your temporary internet files" whenever *anything* goes wrong in IE? Not a troll, just curious)
Back OT, a standardised plugin API can only be good news to everyone. Less maintenance and cross-coding for the browsers and the plugin makers.
*My* 4D laptop anticipates a crash, and goes on to install the bugfixed version from the future. The best part of it is, if I'm late for a piece of work, I can tell my laptop to go back and give me more time to do it.
I'm currently running kernel 3.8.92 and playing Duke Nukem Forever;^)
Like practically every Linux user in this thread, I can't seem to heap enough praise on 3ware either.
I have an Escalade 8506-8 with 3 RAID1 arrays made of 80, 160 and 250GB SATA Western Digital Caviars. Debian boot disc worked fine, saw the drives, installed onto sda.
RAID1 is bollocks-fast for reads. Granted, it's in a 64/66 PCI-X slot, but I get reads of over 70MB/s on the arrays. Coupled with gigabit ethernet, it's a godsend ( fast writes aren't very important on this machines). Compared to the Seagates (35-40MB/s reads), this is damned good for *any* controller.
Emails you when a drive goes down. Notifies you when SMART starts acting up (one of the drives I got was dodgy, I ran with a degraded array until the replacement arrived, and then rebuilt the array - all without powering off:^)
The web management software is great, even though it's closed source and is only supposed to work on RH and SuSE (I pulled is apart and made a.deb, just need to write a proper init script now). IIRC alien will install it pretty well.
I've used a multitude of controllers and RAID cards under Windows and Linux, and the only ones that come close are the high end U160 and U320 SCSI. Promise and Highpoint (AWFUL cards, even under windows where they're *meant* to work) aren't even on the same continent, let alone ball park. Slower, less reliable and not a great deal cheaper either.
That said, for a (small) personal server, a few extra decent IDE controllers and software RAID1 or 10 (or 5 if you're economical, and have a beefy CPU) done in the linux kernel is the way to go. Cheap and pretty reliable, but you don't get hotswap or the pretty management software (and obviously the performance can't match a full hardware solution, except possibly in the more exotic RAID configurations), but it does save you .
Ditto, it puts me off as well, hence why I was hoping it used a heat pipe. They're all contained, so there's little chance of leakage, and no bendy pipes you have to seal.
Also, I imagine (hope!) the coolant/conductive stuff isn't actually electrically conductive in the first place.
Nice to see heat pipes becoming more mainstream, but c'mon Apple! Be honest!
The details on this liquid cooling thing are a bit sketchy, but the diagram doesn't show a pump/compressor.
Is it possible that this is actually using heat pipe tech like that found in the newer shuttles? Namely, block attached to the CPU is linked to a large sink away from the processor, connected by pipes filled with conductive fluid. Large fan cools the radiator.
Net result is of course a complete lack of moving parts other than the (easily replaceable) fan(s). Of course, it doesn't cool as well as a full blown liquid setup, but then the PPC970's don't run *that* hot.
Anyone know any ore about this? Even if it's not entirely revolutionary, it's still interesting tech.
Athlon XP is already competing with Celeron. In the UK, a 2.8 GHz Celery will cost me 86. An Athlon 2800 XP (which as most of you will know will kick the Celery's arse until the cows come home) will cost you... 67!
Both prices taken from aria.co.uk, there may be slight differences elsewhere. But as you can see, the superior Athlon is already undercuttnig the crappy Celeron. The point of the Sempron is to (hugely) undercut the Athlon in order to provide a chip that's cheap as... er... chips.
Myth's method of doing this seems fairly reliable once you fiddle with it a bit. By default, it looks for blank frames, but I told mine to look for blank frames coinciding with scene changes, which is much more reliable.
As also mentioned, you canm tell Myth to automatically skip the commercials once you've finished recording.
It's very cute, and works very well 90% of the time. Ad splash comes up, skip, program restarts.
I'm in the UK, and have been using the TV listings provided by bleb.org for a while now.
They (he) too provides XML files for download, which results in much faster transfers since there's no extraneous stuff to download, and you don't have to do complicated parsing on it either.
What you do need is a (consumer level?) product like MythTV. It works over a network of computers, which can have as many tuners as you can fit in. It can all hang offof on massive RAID array on a master backend.
I have a setup like this, and Myth handles it beautifully. There's and analogue tuner (BBC1 through Channel 5) in the lounge and a digital DVB-T card in my workstation. If I'm recording with the DVB-T card but want to watch BBC1, Myth is clever and turns on the analogue card in the lounge and pipes the input over to my workstation. Very sweet.
Only problem is it's a bitch to set up (don't even get started with getting the tuners to work!) but the market is crying out for a product like MythTV. As far as I know, it's the only PVR software with anything like this functionality.
I love Debian (and gentoo) and do run them on critical servers.
Almost everything is compiled from source but *not on these servers*. Both Debian and Gentoo make it trivially easy to use a "sacrificial lamb" machine to do the brunt of the non-mission critical work, then the binary packages are uploaded to the network apt/ebuild cache, and next time you apt-get or emerge, boomf, in goes the binary package, compiled as if it were compiled on that very machine.
The machine dual boots gentoo (which we use for our linux desktops) and debian stable (which we use for our servers, which has a few custom compiled packages including our own software), with both machines set up to mirror the configuration of the server/workstation in question. This also has the advantage of providing a fallback in case of fire or flood or acts of dog.
Slashdot Mirror
I think 3com knew more than they let on...
Chillingly possible it may be, but the free market would put a stop to a built-in obsolescence of DVD players.
Sure, the big names like Sony and Panasonic could well have a "nuke yourself 10 years after first boot" backdoor thingywhatnot, but there's always going to be some little techy firm in Taiwan or Malaysia that sees this as an uneccesary expense, and leaves it out, and to hell with what the DVD consortium says - they wouldn't care, and their players would sell like hot cakes once people realised their 300 chunk of Panasonic was going to die in a years time, rendering their 500-strong DVD collection worthless.
Witness the DVD region debacle, at least here in the UK. No-one will buy a player that isn't region free, so no-one bothers to sell them. Multi-market DVD players are shipped with instructions telling users excactly what to do to region-free the player, otherwise they get returned. Case in point: I have a friend who spent 2000 on a 200-or-so Sony DVD multichanger. As soon as he found out it was regino locked, it was returned, and a cheaper no-name brand which was region free out of the box replaced it.
Of course, there's always the uncapitalistic government/business collusion to stop "untrusted" hardware from ever reaching your doorstep, but that's another rant.
It looks like the vision was the same then, but they haven't gotten very far.
Look, this is Debian. They don't release things until you have to fire rockets at the thing to stop it working ;)
(Disclaimer - complete Debian fanboy, as I've never had woody go wrong on me once, YMMV :^)
The biggest benefit of DDR2 is the much reduced die sizes (and supposed reduced power consumption), resulting in higher yields and therefore cheaper RAM chips.
Although at the moment of course, DDR2 is much more expensive because it's New and Improved.
It's a bit "Me, too!", but I can't live without mouse gestures any more. I've been using Opera (paid for it for both Linux and Windows too) since version 5, and not being able to use gestures whilst browsing the web makes it almost unuseable. Although Opera is my browser of choice, I keep a copy of firefox on my USB key with all the plugins I use added, which makes browsing bearable on clients computers.
Incidentally, there is a little app called StrokeIt that will let you use mouse gestures on a win32 desktop. I stopped using it because it conflicts with my opera gestures (perhaps you can disable it working in certain apps? Never bothered to try, eeep!), but it might be fun for you to try out.
http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/
Hear frickin' hear!
(Disclaimer: I use Debian and Gentoo exclusively)
I am *so* sick and tired of all these "stable is hideously outdated" anti-debian trolls. Stable is designed to be used for production systems where downtime is *very* expensive; in my experience, it doesn't go wrong through b0rked dependencies, bugs in software, poor package management, high server load, anything. It just keeps on chugging along. I wouldn't like to run a working desktop on it, but I don't believe that's stable's target audience. Stable is designed for a practically zero-maintenance approach. You can use Cron to automatically keep every single app on the entire computer up to date with the latest releases and (most importantly) security fixes. Our file and outward-facing web server both run stable.
The other important Debian machines in the office run Testing - the cross between unstable and stable. Testing has proved incredibly solid as a desktop OS used for image processing, and the packages are what? A month or three behind the original release? And they don't break your system like unstable (rarely) does. We use testing for our image procesing boxes and our internal development servers.
If you're pissed off that stable has outdated packages, then you're not part of it's target audience. Those of us who care for incredible reliabilty and pain free administration at the expense of the biggest numbers *are* the target audience, and if the rest of them are anything like me I know they will hate all these "latest version of everything" wanting to bring down the reputation Debian has worked so hard to achieve. Stable is there because that's what a significant version of Debian users want; use testing, unstable, or roll your own version of Debian - it's not like no-one else has done it (Knoppix, Xandros... there's dozens).
Oh yeah, the Gentoo thing. I like to use it for my home desktops cos it's very up to date and very easy to customise. Even the "stable" stuff breaks sometimes (for instance, the new stable gentoo sources, 2.4.26-r3, kernel panics my machine whenever my PVR-250 stops recording - never been able to fix this one, so had to roll back to 2.4.25-r3), but uptime and reliability and round-the-clock processing capabilities aren't essential on my desktops. They are, however, essential in my file/DB server. Guess what that runs...
As others have said: both.
Depending on how you configure it, a Linux OS can do either (even both) server and desktop exceptionally well.
I'm inclined to agree with you that RH, Mandrake etc are getting "bloated" in the sense that a default install will put a load of stuff most people will never use. Other people know what they do and don't need, and go for a minimal install.
This kinda thing is best shown by distros like Debian (and especially) Gentoo and Slackware. They all start off as a bare shell, with news apps being added as and when. The source-based distros take it to even greater extremes; with precompiled packages, you're left to the mercy of what the package maintainers think is a god average configuration. If you compile it yourself, you can choose to leave out support for X, but add support for Y and Z. This is by far the biggest strength of Gentoo, IMO, as it makes all this hideously easy (never used Slack, so can't comment, I imagein it's much the same).
As such, Linux is the swiss army knife of operating syste,ms. One minute it's opening your beer, the next it's carving a kayak, the next it's doing something odd with that strange attachment that no-one knows what it's for.
"Whilst it's all very well for us "FireFox on Linux" users to gloat about our immunity from scumware; we must be aware that the developers of scumware only target IE _because_ it is the most prolific browser. The security weaknesses of IE are more likely the second reason."
Hmm. Wake me up when MS decides to Mozilla the shell for Longhorn. Last time I looked there was *no way* to automatically install plugins and the like without the users knowledge into the shell. Even loading them into the browser is bad enough.
You need to delete your cache ;^)
(What the hell is the problem with IE's cache? Is there even a problem with it? Why does eevryone always say "delete your temporary internet files" whenever *anything* goes wrong in IE? Not a troll, just curious)
Back OT, a standardised plugin API can only be good news to everyone. Less maintenance and cross-coding for the browsers and the plugin makers.
Seriously, how the hell d'you expect anyone to power this thing?!
The 6800 requires at least a 400W PSU IIRC... does adding another GFX card mean you'll need another 300W for the extra card?
...how long before the search code is integrated into SETI@home and discover aliens searching with their 802.11xxx for hot alien pr0n?!
(It's a joke. Larf.)
Pfah! You're using your 4D laptop all wrong.
;^)
*My* 4D laptop anticipates a crash, and goes on to install the bugfixed version from the future. The best part of it is, if I'm late for a piece of work, I can tell my laptop to go back and give me more time to do it.
I'm currently running kernel 3.8.92 and playing Duke Nukem Forever
Like practically every Linux user in this thread, I can't seem to heap enough praise on 3ware either.
:^)
.deb, just need to write a proper init script now). IIRC alien will install it pretty well.
I have an Escalade 8506-8 with 3 RAID1 arrays made of 80, 160 and 250GB SATA Western Digital Caviars. Debian boot disc worked fine, saw the drives, installed onto sda.
RAID1 is bollocks-fast for reads. Granted, it's in a 64/66 PCI-X slot, but I get reads of over 70MB/s on the arrays. Coupled with gigabit ethernet, it's a godsend ( fast writes aren't very important on this machines). Compared to the Seagates (35-40MB/s reads), this is damned good for *any* controller.
Emails you when a drive goes down. Notifies you when SMART starts acting up (one of the drives I got was dodgy, I ran with a degraded array until the replacement arrived, and then rebuilt the array - all without powering off
The web management software is great, even though it's closed source and is only supposed to work on RH and SuSE (I pulled is apart and made a
I've used a multitude of controllers and RAID cards under Windows and Linux, and the only ones that come close are the high end U160 and U320 SCSI. Promise and Highpoint (AWFUL cards, even under windows where they're *meant* to work) aren't even on the same continent, let alone ball park. Slower, less reliable and not a great deal cheaper either.
That said, for a (small) personal server, a few extra decent IDE controllers and software RAID1 or 10 (or 5 if you're economical, and have a beefy CPU) done in the linux kernel is the way to go. Cheap and pretty reliable, but you don't get hotswap or the pretty management software (and obviously the performance can't match a full hardware solution, except possibly in the more exotic RAID configurations), but it does save you .
...you're getting a Dell.
(Sorry, slow day at work)
Seeign as a heatpipe works on differential temperatures, I imagine the point could be stretched.
Low temperature gradient = not much convective movement of the transfer liquid
High temperature gradient (as your chip gets hotter) = more convective movement
I'd say that could probaably be called dynamic (not sure about controllable though), but I Am Not A Marketeer and I Am Not A Thermodynamics Whiz...
Ditto, it puts me off as well, hence why I was hoping it used a heat pipe. They're all contained, so there's little chance of leakage, and no bendy pipes you have to seal.
Also, I imagine (hope!) the coolant/conductive stuff isn't actually electrically conductive in the first place.
Nice to see heat pipes becoming more mainstream, but c'mon Apple! Be honest!
The details on this liquid cooling thing are a bit sketchy, but the diagram doesn't show a pump/compressor.
Is it possible that this is actually using heat pipe tech like that found in the newer shuttles? Namely, block attached to the CPU is linked to a large sink away from the processor, connected by pipes filled with conductive fluid. Large fan cools the radiator.
Net result is of course a complete lack of moving parts other than the (easily replaceable) fan(s). Of course, it doesn't cool as well as a full blown liquid setup, but then the PPC970's don't run *that* hot.
Anyone know any ore about this? Even if it's not entirely revolutionary, it's still interesting tech.
Athlon XP is already competing with Celeron. In the UK, a 2.8 GHz Celery will cost me 86. An Athlon 2800 XP (which as most of you will know will kick the Celery's arse until the cows come home) will cost you... 67!
Both prices taken from aria.co.uk, there may be slight differences elsewhere. But as you can see, the superior Athlon is already undercuttnig the crappy Celeron. The point of the Sempron is to (hugely) undercut the Athlon in order to provide a chip that's cheap as... er... chips.
Myth's method of doing this seems fairly reliable once you fiddle with it a bit. By default, it looks for blank frames, but I told mine to look for blank frames coinciding with scene changes, which is much more reliable.
As also mentioned, you canm tell Myth to automatically skip the commercials once you've finished recording.
It's very cute, and works very well 90% of the time. Ad splash comes up, skip, program restarts.
I'm in the UK, and have been using the TV listings provided by bleb.org for a while now.
They (he) too provides XML files for download, which results in much faster transfers since there's no extraneous stuff to download, and you don't have to do complicated parsing on it either.
Hmm... all those K's... could KDE really be koded be Klingons?
If so, programming in native Klingon could be a real boon for open source!
Mod parent up indeed. I've been using koepi's XviD builds for nearly a year now, and they've always been top notch.
Don't forget to check out the rest of his stuff, like the very cool OGMcalc (which IIRC is bundled with his installer now).
What you do need is a (consumer level?) product like MythTV. It works over a network of computers, which can have as many tuners as you can fit in. It can all hang offof on massive RAID array on a master backend.
I have a setup like this, and Myth handles it beautifully. There's and analogue tuner (BBC1 through Channel 5) in the lounge and a digital DVB-T card in my workstation. If I'm recording with the DVB-T card but want to watch BBC1, Myth is clever and turns on the analogue card in the lounge and pipes the input over to my workstation. Very sweet.
Only problem is it's a bitch to set up (don't even get started with getting the tuners to work!) but the market is crying out for a product like MythTV. As far as I know, it's the only PVR software with anything like this functionality.
I love Debian (and gentoo) and do run them on critical servers.
Almost everything is compiled from source but *not on these servers*. Both Debian and Gentoo make it trivially easy to use a "sacrificial lamb" machine to do the brunt of the non-mission critical work, then the binary packages are uploaded to the network apt/ebuild cache, and next time you apt-get or emerge, boomf, in goes the binary package, compiled as if it were compiled on that very machine.
The machine dual boots gentoo (which we use for our linux desktops) and debian stable (which we use for our servers, which has a few custom compiled packages including our own software), with both machines set up to mirror the configuration of the server/workstation in question. This also has the advantage of providing a fallback in case of fire or flood or acts of dog.
Gawd don't say that! They'll make a whole new line in "slow" amps...