Hmm.. There's no reason why you couldn't just perform the download via HTTP if your target customer or audience has the bandwidth.
If you're concerned about the customer losing connectivity, you could always just break the file up into small chunks for download.
Both FTP and HTTP, depending on clients and servers, supports continuation-downloading(ie, recovering from where you left off.) So if one connection flakes out, you can always recover.
The long and short of it?
HTTP(S) or FTP(s/FTP), it doesn't matter. With both, you can restrict access and/or grant access to specific files. You can recover from some point or offer split files. With HTTP, you can have the information piped through a back-end piece of code so that you can monitor who does what when, but something similar can be done with FTP as well.
If you've already got a webserver going and secured, you're probably better off offering the files via HTTP. Nothing unprofessional about it.
Fact is, if your target audience is the general public, you'll fare better with HTTP. Why? Because while most people who are online will probably have access to a web browser and know how to download HTTP files, they may not have an FTP client or necessarily know how to use their browser as an FTP client.
Me? I offer photos and docs online via HTTP. It's easier and I can control the visual aspect of the "download area" to create a more professional look than that of the "industrial" FTP interface.
Nothing wrong with FTP or sFTP. I use them at work and at home. But then again, when I find a site which offers HTTP or FTP? I pick HTTP to download first. It's only when I'm still looking for something that I go with FTP... which, by the way, becomes difficult to navigate on some clients. A nicely generated webpage featuring the item via HTTP would be much more elegant.
From what I read of the article, it would appear that he's running the standard distro and may not have taken into account the GUI's still running on the systems or perhaps has some other background task on the system which would cause significant delay.
In either case, the testing sounded rushed and once he's worked out how to "tune" the system, then he should be getting more reliable figures.
I don't think the issue was how much faster or slower the walmart pc's would work as a cluster, but rather, whether or not the extra work and technical skill required for "modifying" the xbox to make it cluster was worth it.
This isn't to say the Xbox isn't a potentially powerful clustering unit.
Personally, I like the idea of a Linux running Xbox as a console. But I also realise that it would require alot more work than my going to a local computer store and picking up the same dollars worth in computer parts and building my own console/nodes.
I was at a shop just this last weekend and picked up a box for Debian(about $6). I was going to get it setup on one of my three boxes.
Currently, I have a Fujitsu Stylistic 1000 running the "Pebbel" distro based on Debian(apt-get there has been a great help!). 2 (GNU)Linux systems running Suse. And one WinXPpro system I'm hoping to migrate off of and to Debian or Gentoo Linux.
Since I've already got the Debian disks, guess I'll give that a go.:)
Thanks alot! Very encouraging to hear more (GNU)Linux in the classroom!
If that isn't good enough then all I can say is, "come on Debian, be reasonable." Information wants to be free but you're trying set all sorts of childish stipulations on that freedom.
Hmm... well, here's the thing. Debian represents the effort to protect that freedom. I agree that it can be a hinderance in terms of getting things one likes to be included, but when the companies and corporations come down trying to enforce one thing or another, Debian can keep their distro "free as in freedom" because they stuck to their rules and licenses.
I guess one can say that they are being reasonable by being very clear cut about it. This makes it difficult for projects with codes of various backgrounds and licenses, but it makes it so that the whole of their distro is clean(legally) and clean(operationally). It helps to keep the ability of the information in the distro to be free.
The stipulations they set aren't childish in anyway. They are the requirements of their distribution, which is that code/software added to their distro needs to be GPL compabitible.
Despite the fact that the devices are still a ways off from being grain sized or small enough to be easily missed(dime sized?)... it still makes me worry.
The general feeling I got from the article and from the background site is that each of these are essentialy DSP units, providing the necessary filtering before sending the data back.
I'm not so much afraid that each of these little bugs would have a video camera. But I am concerned that together, they could be used to reconstruct the light they percieve and/or sounds/RF patterns.
I guess my fears stem from where I see the technology heading or could be heading.
I definitely agree with you that a high energy RF sweep would essentially disable most, if not all, of the bugs. But then again, how many of us cary tesla coils or emp pulse generators in our pockets? ^_-
Even down to the size of a dollar bill or a half dollar. You could pack a wireless bug that can broadcast 400-500 video lines worth of resolution with sound from commodity parts. These folk are working with scaled down component kits.
With a few dozen of these, it wouldn't be impossible to have them each gather a fragment of a picture and piece them back together at the main system.
The problem, I think, is the fact that people don't really grasp that there are pragmatic differences of belief along with legal ones between the different distros of GNU/Linux.
With Debian, they are trying to create a distro which is GPL compatible through and through. And the thing is, if that means not including something in their distro, then they are not including that something. All to keep the legal issues of their distro as clean as possible.
This isn't saying that Debian is sacrificing quality, if anything, because of their approach, their distro probably works quite smoothly and efficiently.
Nothing prevents you from acquiring the packages you want to use. They are only enforcing their right to not include packages and/or softwares which violates their license and/or sense of what is right/wrong.
It's just a different way of seeing to how things work.
I've switched from Slackware to Redhat. From that to Mandrake. Then from that to Suse, which is what I'm currently using. Now, I'm thinking of switching to Debian.
Will the restrictions they have on the default distro hinder my experience on my Linux box? Probably not. If I need code, I certainly know how to go and perform the "download, configure, make and make install" dance. I'm no stranger to coding and software installations.
The point is, there will be people who value one facet of life greater than another. Some people could care less about licenses. That's fine. Just understand that there are those who do.
Not just licenses, but philosophy, ethics, morals, and laws.
Well, there is always the option of rewriting the code in question from scratch so that it works with the existing program code which is GPL compatible.
It would take time, but it would not be impossible. Though I would guess that alot of the library and codec stuff would be kinda hard to recode from scratch. ^_^;;
Okay... so basically, we're talking about particle sized sensors and a built-in networking capability. Sensors meaning heat, sound, light, and whatever else they need to orient themselves like GPS, orientation, etc.
So what's to prevent people from spreading this stuff in public washrooms/baths/changing rooms to spy on people while they undress?
What's to prevent this from being sprinkled onto unsuspecting passerbys and used to basically stalk them and their children?
What's to prevent this from being used on ATM machines or any other place where sensitive information needs to be kept secret from prying eyes and people who seek to commit fraud?
What's to prevent people from using this to gain insider information by spreading it in corporate meeting and board rooms while they are visiting, at production factories during a tour, or even at random hotel rooms for the heck of it?
What's to prevent the abuse of this technology?
I'm not saying the technology doesn't have great and beneficial uses. Military and Security uses come to mind. As does scientific research and observation. It can go a great way to help prevent spousal abuse and domestic violence, tell us when children ARE being abused or if fraud is being committed. It can even help to serve as an effective way of adding home security without all of the cameras. And help to monitor the weak and sickly who might otherwise not be monitored effectively through normal means.
I'm just left wondering whether or not this is a tool/technology which will essentially erradicate privacy.
I think we've all seen it in various scripts and plots of movies and novels: A genius or otherwise intelligent individual has a great idea and a certain leaning towards a particular goal. However, they are so enamoured by the lab, the people, or perhaps even the very materials that he works with that he forgets that he had agreed to certain rules.
While iCommune isn't being taken over, the ideas and goals that the coder had were not compatible with the "rules" that the SDK imposed. Perhaps he is in the clear, but that would require legal recourse.
But the thing is... Apple is in it for the money, no matter how pretty the products are or how flowery the company's leader's words are. Some things which they think they can allow into the wild, they release the code for. Some things which they think they would like to keep for themselves, they hold back. That's their right and perogative.
I would presume the coder liked the Apple look and feel. That he probably owned an Apple and supports the Apple community spirit. And in his enthusiasm in exploring ideas and writing code, ultimately slipped past the boundaries of the base he has picked to write and develop that program on.
Apple and he did the right thing. He returning their SDK and starting from scratch and going under the GPL.
All in all... there's nothing wrong with writing programs for the Apple platform. But then again, it's a case of "live and learn" and as the case turns out... "Coder beware..."
Then wouldn't it figure that if your selections changed or were generated dynamically and thus, were not static, then the patent wouldn't apply?
Dynamic links to dynamic content
Dunno, since I've been coding pages since 1995, when I got online through my school, most of the web content I was creating along with my friends were all basically, static links linking to dynamic content. Ie, a link from your page to your page's statistics or logs page; a static link to a dynamic link.
Another example would be people who have their.plan files accessible via the web through a link. Static link to dynamic content.
There is quite a bit of prior art... just need to find it. ^_^;;
If you want to reduce the number of nodes, you need to increase the capacity of each individual unit. One way of doing that would be to use a PCI backplane with a motherboard "card". This would give you more than the 4 or 5 PCI slots on most motherboards.
Go with a FireWire or USB2.0 capture device instead of a capture card. You can connect 4 capture devices to a 4-port FireWire or USB2.0 PCI card. So, if you only devote 3 PCI slots to your input sources, you still get between 6-12 concurrent input streams via FireWire or USB2.0. The problem is finding a TV tuner you can control via software through the FireWire and USB2.0 links. But that would solve your problem of recording alot of different shows at the same time with fewer CPU count.
If you plan on having the storage local, you'll want to go Raid. Hardware Raid would be better than software Raid.
If you use a seperate machine for storage, I'd go with NFS or netcat over GigaEthernet to a FileServer with striped volumes on mirrored or Raid-5'd disks. netcat would be better since it has lower overhead than NFS.
So, with 2 Computers, you will be able to capture from 1-12(depending on how many cards and ports you use) individual channels/sources to a very fast file server which can then serve out the streams or burn them locally to DVD(s).
ADC, Canopus, Sony, and a few others produces AVFireWire/USB2.0 adaptors, but they are for signal source and output and not for tuners/channels. Some resources listed below:
Basically, they are USB tv tuners which captures to MPEG1 or MPEG2... if you're running under Linux anyways, you can re-pipe through Mjpegtools to resize and recompress to MPEG2 format for use with DVD playback on the fileserver.
So how does this reflect on people who are living amoungst us today?
Let's take a look, shall we?
Let's take your average war vet or accident victom who now depends on prosthetics. Based on the Judge's observations, these people are now no longer completely human because they have robotic parts on their bodies. The handicaped, wheelchair bound, etc are now relegated to being not fully human. (Or into the world of goblins, ghosts, robots, etc...)
Body builders who have bulging masses of muscle brought on by years of hard work and exercise are now classifiable as robots due to their unnatural bulk. Surely, no normal human would look anything like that. They must be non-human creatures as well.
Geeky or just spend too much time working in an underground research lab? Skin pale and senstive to light? Perhaps even a little rotound? Guess what? You're now no longer quite human either. More mole/vampire/cog than human. Wonder if this means we can stop paying taxes?;)
People with breast implants or erection hardware... more well endowed than the average human? Able to become a rod of steel in mere moments? Able to bash your significant other into submission with your monstrous mammaries? Well, you just might not be human either.
Personally, while finding this slightly amusing... it is also quite disheartening. To see the elements of what make us human being overshadowed by the cold objective dissection and sorting of who is... and who isn't completely human.
truely sad... that a judge would make such a judgement without either thinking of the consequences, or wording the judgement more appropriately. I'm just waiting for the lawyers to pounce on this one, pouring over legal documents for references to "human"... or businesses deciding that it doesn't need to give health care to some of it's employees because they really aren't "human"...
By all metrics Microsoft is getting it's arse soundly kicked, at this rate they're gonna have to make the xbox do somethign more than play games to try to get the thing selling.
How about it divorcing it's parent(MS) and stop sucking? Sounds like two things that would increase it's appeal rather quickly.
Considering each Xbox cost more to make than what they are charging, then yes, buying the xbox will help MS lose money.
The development cost is recouped, normally, through software, and from hardware only after the hardware has been optimized or the parts having been reduced in price.
Personally, I'll wait until the price of the Xbox is low enough so I can buy them and use them as footrests for my PS3.
Hmm.. hasn't another company tried this before? Or at least, something like it? Granted, 3DO was trying to do both hardware and software and include every whizbang feature into it, but still, seems eerily similar.
Personally, I don't think the Xbox will be the centerpiece of an entertainment center. Why? Because by the time it gets to that stage, various aspects would have change:
Tivo would have already put out their new revision of the Tivo hardware, which already runs linux, has an installed user base, and grassroots support. They also don't have the nasty habit of slapping people around with lawsuits.
Playstation3 would most likely have come out and will have generalized computational hardware, making it better suited to be a entertainment unit. If I had to choose between a console from Sony or from MicroSoft, I would go with Sony. They have much better ideas coming out of their development teams for both hardware and software.
MS might decide that this company who is doing this application is a threat to them and decide to either buy it up outright or slap a lawsuit against them for providing a means/incentive for people to modify their systems. Considering this company is going to be using the xbox-deb-Linux distro, it leaves too big of a hole for people to break out of the application and start firing up their own linux programs on the box. I'm sure MS would love people running Linux and making their own games on the Xbox.
In the end, 3DO ended up backpeddling and dropped hardware and went completely to software. Their idea was too big and too early. With Dreamix and the MS-Xbox, I think a powerful central home entertainment setup is a good idea, but ultimately, MS will most likely crush it either through legal proceedings or through the buy-then-shutdown methodologies.
I'll stick with my Tivo2, which can record 193 hours and my PS2 which I hope will soon be joined with it's relative, the PS3 when it arrives.
And today... a class action lawsuit making use of the DMCA is brought against the makers of sporks by the makers of forks, claiming that the use of protrusions on the spork's modified "spoon" shape was a component taken from the "fork" design, violating their NDA.
On a semi-related note: Makers of spoons are filing a similar suit against the makers of sporks.
Spork makers' stocks are seeing a decline in stock valuations....
Well, unless I'm mistajken, the current Tivos have analog tuners to get normal TV stations. This is fed into their hardware MPEG(2, I think) compression and then stored on disk.
I'm thinking they might be changing the bitrate of the compression or recompressing on the fly to mpeg4.
I thought the DirecTivo had a normal TV tuner so that you could watch regular TV? The reason why I think this is because the selling point of the DirecTivo was that you could capture a stream from one tuner while watching a show on another tuner.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.. There's no reason why you couldn't just perform the download via HTTP if your target customer or audience has the bandwidth.
If you're concerned about the customer losing connectivity, you could always just break the file up into small chunks for download.
Both FTP and HTTP, depending on clients and servers, supports continuation-downloading(ie, recovering from where you left off.) So if one connection flakes out, you can always recover.
The long and short of it?
HTTP(S) or FTP(s/FTP), it doesn't matter. With both, you can restrict access and/or grant access to specific files. You can recover from some point or offer split files. With HTTP, you can have the information piped through a back-end piece of code so that you can monitor who does what when, but something similar can be done with FTP as well.
If you've already got a webserver going and secured, you're probably better off offering the files via HTTP. Nothing unprofessional about it.
Fact is, if your target audience is the general public, you'll fare better with HTTP. Why? Because while most people who are online will probably have access to a web browser and know how to download HTTP files, they may not have an FTP client or necessarily know how to use their browser as an FTP client.
Me? I offer photos and docs online via HTTP. It's easier and I can control the visual aspect of the "download area" to create a more professional look than that of the "industrial" FTP interface.
Nothing wrong with FTP or sFTP. I use them at work and at home. But then again, when I find a site which offers HTTP or FTP? I pick HTTP to download first. It's only when I'm still looking for something that I go with FTP... which, by the way, becomes difficult to navigate on some clients. A nicely generated webpage featuring the item via HTTP would be much more elegant.
Just my two cents.
From what I read of the article, it would appear that he's running the standard distro and may not have taken into account the GUI's still running on the systems or perhaps has some other background task on the system which would cause significant delay.
In either case, the testing sounded rushed and once he's worked out how to "tune" the system, then he should be getting more reliable figures.
still, a very cool hack to follow through on.
I don't think the issue was how much faster or slower the walmart pc's would work as a cluster, but rather, whether or not the extra work and technical skill required for "modifying" the xbox to make it cluster was worth it.
This isn't to say the Xbox isn't a potentially powerful clustering unit.
Personally, I like the idea of a Linux running Xbox as a console. But I also realise that it would require alot more work than my going to a local computer store and picking up the same dollars worth in computer parts and building my own console/nodes.
Very cool hack though. :)
Ah... so Gentoo downloads the source code and automagically compiles it...
Cool. :)
Definitely something to test out. :)
Thanks for the very informative info!
Wow.. sounds pretty straightforward.
I was at a shop just this last weekend and picked up a box for Debian(about $6). I was going to get it setup on one of my three boxes.
Currently, I have a Fujitsu Stylistic 1000 running the "Pebbel" distro based on Debian(apt-get there has been a great help!). 2 (GNU)Linux systems running Suse. And one WinXPpro system I'm hoping to migrate off of and to Debian or Gentoo Linux.
Since I've already got the Debian disks, guess I'll give that a go. :)
Thanks alot! Very encouraging to hear more (GNU)Linux in the classroom!
*LOL*
Not touching this one. :) (But I agree that stability and ease of apt-get is not limited to Debian alone. ^_-)
If that isn't good enough then all I can say is, "come on Debian, be reasonable." Information wants to be free but you're trying set all sorts of childish stipulations on that freedom.
Hmm... well, here's the thing. Debian represents the effort to protect that freedom. I agree that it can be a hinderance in terms of getting things one likes to be included, but when the companies and corporations come down trying to enforce one thing or another, Debian can keep their distro "free as in freedom" because they stuck to their rules and licenses.
I guess one can say that they are being reasonable by being very clear cut about it. This makes it difficult for projects with codes of various backgrounds and licenses, but it makes it so that the whole of their distro is clean(legally) and clean(operationally). It helps to keep the ability of the information in the distro to be free.
The stipulations they set aren't childish in anyway. They are the requirements of their distribution, which is that code/software added to their distro needs to be GPL compabitible.
Despite the fact that the devices are still a ways off from being grain sized or small enough to be easily missed(dime sized?)... it still makes me worry.
The general feeling I got from the article and from the background site is that each of these are essentialy DSP units, providing the necessary filtering before sending the data back.
I'm not so much afraid that each of these little bugs would have a video camera. But I am concerned that together, they could be used to reconstruct the light they percieve and/or sounds/RF patterns.
I guess my fears stem from where I see the technology heading or could be heading.
I definitely agree with you that a high energy RF sweep would essentially disable most, if not all, of the bugs. But then again, how many of us cary tesla coils or emp pulse generators in our pockets? ^_-
Even down to the size of a dollar bill or a half dollar. You could pack a wireless bug that can broadcast 400-500 video lines worth of resolution with sound from commodity parts. These folk are working with scaled down component kits.
With a few dozen of these, it wouldn't be impossible to have them each gather a fragment of a picture and piece them back together at the main system.
I've been thinking of switching away from Suse Linux to Debian because of the ease of update. Everything else I end up re-building anyways...
I keep hearing about Gentoo Linux. How does it compare?
The problem, I think, is the fact that people don't really grasp that there are pragmatic differences of belief along with legal ones between the different distros of GNU/Linux.
With Debian, they are trying to create a distro which is GPL compatible through and through. And the thing is, if that means not including something in their distro, then they are not including that something. All to keep the legal issues of their distro as clean as possible.
This isn't saying that Debian is sacrificing quality, if anything, because of their approach, their distro probably works quite smoothly and efficiently.
Nothing prevents you from acquiring the packages you want to use. They are only enforcing their right to not include packages and/or softwares which violates their license and/or sense of what is right/wrong.
It's just a different way of seeing to how things work.
I've switched from Slackware to Redhat. From that to Mandrake. Then from that to Suse, which is what I'm currently using. Now, I'm thinking of switching to Debian.
Will the restrictions they have on the default distro hinder my experience on my Linux box? Probably not. If I need code, I certainly know how to go and perform the "download, configure, make and make install" dance. I'm no stranger to coding and software installations.
The point is, there will be people who value one facet of life greater than another. Some people could care less about licenses. That's fine. Just understand that there are those who do.
Not just licenses, but philosophy, ethics, morals, and laws.
Well, there is always the option of rewriting the code in question from scratch so that it works with the existing program code which is GPL compatible.
It would take time, but it would not be impossible. Though I would guess that alot of the library and codec stuff would be kinda hard to recode from scratch. ^_^;;
Okay... so basically, we're talking about particle sized sensors and a built-in networking capability. Sensors meaning heat, sound, light, and whatever else they need to orient themselves like GPS, orientation, etc.
So what's to prevent people from spreading this stuff in public washrooms/baths/changing rooms to spy on people while they undress?
What's to prevent this from being sprinkled onto unsuspecting passerbys and used to basically stalk them and their children?
What's to prevent this from being used on ATM machines or any other place where sensitive information needs to be kept secret from prying eyes and people who seek to commit fraud?
What's to prevent people from using this to gain insider information by spreading it in corporate meeting and board rooms while they are visiting, at production factories during a tour, or even at random hotel rooms for the heck of it?
What's to prevent the abuse of this technology?
I'm not saying the technology doesn't have great and beneficial uses. Military and Security uses come to mind. As does scientific research and observation. It can go a great way to help prevent spousal abuse and domestic violence, tell us when children ARE being abused or if fraud is being committed. It can even help to serve as an effective way of adding home security without all of the cameras. And help to monitor the weak and sickly who might otherwise not be monitored effectively through normal means.
I'm just left wondering whether or not this is a tool/technology which will essentially erradicate privacy.
I think we've all seen it in various scripts and plots of movies and novels: A genius or otherwise intelligent individual has a great idea and a certain leaning towards a particular goal. However, they are so enamoured by the lab, the people, or perhaps even the very materials that he works with that he forgets that he had agreed to certain rules.
While iCommune isn't being taken over, the ideas and goals that the coder had were not compatible with the "rules" that the SDK imposed. Perhaps he is in the clear, but that would require legal recourse.
But the thing is... Apple is in it for the money, no matter how pretty the products are or how flowery the company's leader's words are. Some things which they think they can allow into the wild, they release the code for. Some things which they think they would like to keep for themselves, they hold back. That's their right and perogative.
I would presume the coder liked the Apple look and feel. That he probably owned an Apple and supports the Apple community spirit. And in his enthusiasm in exploring ideas and writing code, ultimately slipped past the boundaries of the base he has picked to write and develop that program on.
Apple and he did the right thing. He returning their SDK and starting from scratch and going under the GPL.
All in all... there's nothing wrong with writing programs for the Apple platform. But then again, it's a case of "live and learn" and as the case turns out... "Coder beware..."
Hmm... if the patent covers:
Static links to dynamic content
Then wouldn't it figure that if your selections changed or were generated dynamically and thus, were not static, then the patent wouldn't apply?
Dynamic links to dynamic content
Dunno, since I've been coding pages since 1995, when I got online through my school, most of the web content I was creating along with my friends were all basically, static links linking to dynamic content. Ie, a link from your page to your page's statistics or logs page; a static link to a dynamic link.
Another example would be people who have their .plan files accessible via the web through a link. Static link to dynamic content.
There is quite a bit of prior art... just need to find it. ^_^;;
There is something to be said for the beauty of pure engineering and pure technology without the politics to distort that purity.
Given enough money, anything is possible.
If you want to reduce the number of nodes, you need to increase the capacity of each individual unit. One way of doing that would be to use a PCI backplane with a motherboard "card". This would give you more than the 4 or 5 PCI slots on most motherboards.
Go with a FireWire or USB2.0 capture device instead of a capture card. You can connect 4 capture devices to a 4-port FireWire or USB2.0 PCI card. So, if you only devote 3 PCI slots to your input sources, you still get between 6-12 concurrent input streams via FireWire or USB2.0. The problem is finding a TV tuner you can control via software through the FireWire and USB2.0 links. But that would solve your problem of recording alot of different shows at the same time with fewer CPU count.
If you plan on having the storage local, you'll want to go Raid. Hardware Raid would be better than software Raid.
If you use a seperate machine for storage, I'd go with NFS or netcat over GigaEthernet to a FileServer with striped volumes on mirrored or Raid-5'd disks. netcat would be better since it has lower overhead than NFS.
So, with 2 Computers, you will be able to capture from 1-12(depending on how many cards and ports you use) individual channels/sources to a very fast file server which can then serve out the streams or burn them locally to DVD(s).
ADC, Canopus, Sony, and a few others produces AVFireWire/USB2.0 adaptors, but they are for signal source and output and not for tuners/channels. Some resources listed below:
Resources
WinTV Products:
http://www.hauppauge.com/html/usb_data.htm
A USB TV Tuner
http://www.snapstream.com/buy/buy-tunerusb.htm
More USB TV Tuners...(wintv repackaged)
ATI Wonder USB
http://www.ati.com/products/pc/tvwonderusb/
http://shopper.cnet.com/shopping/resellers/0-114 36-311-3850079-0.html
ATI usb tuner card...
Basically, they are USB tv tuners which captures to MPEG1 or MPEG2... if you're running under Linux anyways, you can re-pipe through Mjpegtools to resize and recompress to MPEG2 format for use with DVD playback on the fileserver.
But yeah, it's doable. :)
Good luck and have fun!
So how does this reflect on people who are living amoungst us today?
Let's take a look, shall we?
Personally, while finding this slightly amusing... it is also quite disheartening. To see the elements of what make us human being overshadowed by the cold objective dissection and sorting of who is... and who isn't completely human.
truely sad... that a judge would make such a judgement without either thinking of the consequences, or wording the judgement more appropriately. I'm just waiting for the lawyers to pounce on this one, pouring over legal documents for references to "human"... or businesses deciding that it doesn't need to give health care to some of it's employees because they really aren't "human"...
Some stats from http://www.the-magicbox.com/topten.htm
Hardware Sales Chart
I dunno, I thought the Xbox was meant to be competing against the PS2, not the PSone... :)
Seriously, though, the Xbox is not just getting their rear ends kicked, they are getting it minced and handed to them in a bucket.
MS should seriously consider, just why they are in this market...
How about it divorcing it's parent(MS) and stop sucking? Sounds like two things that would increase it's appeal rather quickly.
Considering each Xbox cost more to make than what they are charging, then yes, buying the xbox will help MS lose money.
The development cost is recouped, normally, through software, and from hardware only after the hardware has been optimized or the parts having been reduced in price.
Personally, I'll wait until the price of the Xbox is low enough so I can buy them and use them as footrests for my PS3.
Hmm.. hasn't another company tried this before? Or at least, something like it? Granted, 3DO was trying to do both hardware and software and include every whizbang feature into it, but still, seems eerily similar.
Personally, I don't think the Xbox will be the centerpiece of an entertainment center. Why? Because by the time it gets to that stage, various aspects would have change:
In the end, 3DO ended up backpeddling and dropped hardware and went completely to software. Their idea was too big and too early. With Dreamix and the MS-Xbox, I think a powerful central home entertainment setup is a good idea, but ultimately, MS will most likely crush it either through legal proceedings or through the buy-then-shutdown methodologies.
I'll stick with my Tivo2, which can record 193 hours and my PS2 which I hope will soon be joined with it's relative, the PS3 when it arrives.
Dang... I own an APC... *frown* Guess I'll be checking mine to see if it is a disaster waiting to happen..
Save my computer, but burn my home down?
Maybe we'll starting seeing more aluminum housings or even steel housings to help dissapate heat.
And today... a class action lawsuit making use of the DMCA is brought against the makers of sporks by the makers of forks, claiming that the use of protrusions on the spork's modified "spoon" shape was a component taken from the "fork" design, violating their NDA.
On a semi-related note: Makers of spoons are filing a similar suit against the makers of sporks.
Spork makers' stocks are seeing a decline in stock valuations....
When I hear about these things, I think about the following:
A scene in Simpsons where the "Merry Bobbins" flies away only to be sucked into an airliner engine...
In the Jetsons, people on jetpacks "banging heads while flying"... except in real life, there would be more "banging and splattering"...
From "The Wizard of Oz"... an army of people with these things in flying monkey costumes heading out to terrorize trick-or-treaters on Halloween.
... Actually, that last idea doesn't sound half bad....
Well, unless I'm mistajken, the current Tivos have analog tuners to get normal TV stations. This is fed into their hardware MPEG(2, I think) compression and then stored on disk.
I'm thinking they might be changing the bitrate of the compression or recompressing on the fly to mpeg4.
I thought the DirecTivo had a normal TV tuner so that you could watch regular TV? The reason why I think this is because the selling point of the DirecTivo was that you could capture a stream from one tuner while watching a show on another tuner.