I would add to this the mobile power it has too - all of which I've wanted from iTunes for a long time.
With PlexPass I can tell each client what I want to sync, how much space to use, how many episodes to sync etc, so my mobile devices always have what I need to watch - and it'll do it over WiFi and cell connections too.
If I want an episode on the way into work, Plex will remove it from my iPhone and automatically queue up the next for the trip home. What isn't downloaded will stream, whether I'm in the house or not.
The real beauty of Plex for me is the persistent access to my media library, from anywhere I am, on any device, be it the LG SmartTV in my living room, iPads, iPhones, computers, etc.
I can sign-in to Plex from any computer anywhere (with sufficient bandwidth, and the transcoding takes care of that), and I can view all media. I've yet to meet someone (especially non-geeks) who aren't totally blown away by it.
At the moment we're fighting to remove all the legacy Sun systems from our datacenters, and love the chance to remove these old machines.
They're rock solid, and do a great job. Our databases still run very very well on them, frequently more stabily than newer X86 kit they're being replaced with.
However:
1) Power usage is insane. The datacenter team reported the larger boxes (ie, 12U type beasts like this) use the same power as whole racks of the standard IBM/HP type pizza boxes we can replace them with. Modern Xeons are multi-cored/multi-threaded enough to compete seriously with the older SPARCs, and do a good job of it, without needing their own power station too fuel and cool them.
2) Parts are getting harder to find, and vastly more expensive. As they age the cost of supporting them sky-rockets, and with parts being harder to find if something breaks there is downtime to fix it. That's not a good situation to be in. Indivual parts for these old machines (eg. spare HBA card, etc) are now becoming as expensive as a new replacement system.
Given that the McDs connections are pretty fast, and pretty reliable, it's actually handy to use as a backup.
Couple of years ago the connection at home was being flaky and finally gave out. Problem was, it was a major DR test day at work, and I needed to be online from home for 12 or so hours.
I just grabbed the laptop, blackberry, and powercord, and went 5 mins down the road to the 24hour McDs. Sat there for hours til my ass was numb, happily on my work BB using hands-free, and worked away for hours.
I wasn't disturbed, had unlimited food and drinks available. Really, not the worst place to work at all. I had more space there than I get at my desk job, and better food and drinks too. Work don't have iced tea on tap.
The McDs connection was enough to remote desktop into my XP desktop at work, without lag or dropping. I was impressed how stable it was. Most places can't handle basic browsing that well given the number of people sharing, but that was totally solid.
Except that MS can't sell the licenses for all their other products if the OS is RHEL.
So, they lose the OS license, but also the licenses for SQL, and CRM, and Exchange, and SharePoint, and Terminal Services, and all the other stuff that might be running on there.
What I find most telling about the article is that they tested the connection using a single consumer grade article.
I'm techy enough to be on/., but I don't spend too much time at home living in a high-tech wonderland. However, on the network at home we have the following devices:
5 iPhones (view 2 wireless APs) 4 laptops 1 desktop 2 XBoxes with live Wii Roku box AppleTV
All those devices stream media from the internet, play games on the internet, etc. That one single laptop can't handle the connection is fine, but as a household between myself, my wife, and kids, we do cumulatively use a lot of media. Have kept our unlimited data plans for the iPhone, my son has peaked at 8Gb in one month of data usage over 3G. That's on a single phone.
Between video chat, games, working remotely and streaming a desktop session, netflix, hulu, amazon video, etc there is a huge amount of bandwidth required at home. I find that Verizon FiOS does a great job. I can't stand the company, but the product is top notch.
Yes, I'd love more bandwidth at home, just treating a home network connection as a single device is rediculous. I want everything in the house to be networked, and controllable.
I would advise you to take a harder look; whole universities, companies and public sectors of entire states have been using Linux for years now.
Yes, and we have a 5 figure number of linux servers, but who wants to enter those details into this site? Who would allow us? And, their sendmail script, running on all those machines? Not a chance.
None of the major users of linux will want to waste their time with this. This is really for retentive power users who want to show off their linux usage. I know, I've been getting the annual email for years, it still lists my first machine from 10 years ago on there. Well, it did until I finally updated the list properly this year.
But, really, this is about people showing off their personal machines, nothing more. I don't see how the stats can possibly be accurate.
Clearly a huge difference, and if you can't tell the difference (and the *huge* significance of getting it wrong) I think you should leave Slashdot immediately.
Oh, before the flames start to really burn... yes, joking.. blah, blah, blah
Is it possible that people are complaining about the wrong thing here? Sure, the discussion about whether to run or not is interesting, but how about whether people should have been informed or not?
Given that there were memos sent to numerous organisations, and yet the information was not disseminated at the will of Obama, isn't there a more pressing question here?
Like, why would the president want to scare the crap out of southern manhattan? It's not a huge stretch to assume that flying a 747 low over Manhattan would scare people...
Last Xmas we went back to the UK to see family. We live in NYC. My wife has an iPhone and uses it religiously. She hit $1000 pretty easily in the UK, but at that point ATT sent us a text, and cut off the data service, leaving the voice service on.
That seemed a pretty sensible default to me.
Similarly, when I had a UK cell phone with Vodafone on vacation I've received messages asking me to call to confirm my high phone usage and charges when I hit 2-3 hundred pounds sterling (~$500 maybe).
I can't imagine why ATT didn't alert them in this case.
I've seen programs with this sort of functionality before for Symbian several years ago.
However, you end up paying a premium for a function that will at most prompt the thief to through their new phone out the window. If your phone is stolen then you want it back, I don't care otherwise, I don't want to spend money to not have it.
How about no commercials would save TV? It's the commercials that people hate, so remove them.
TV needs people to watch it, and more and more people don't want to because of the ads.
If 24 is actually 18 hours long, that says something awful about how much advertising is on tv.
Ok, no ads, means no money for tv, so:
Why not reduce ads to a level at which they stop being so intrusive? Have a couple at fewer times and charge more. Make better TV to get more viewers and spots can become more expensive. Revenue could stay the same, and TV would actually improve.
"They are easy to use (usability), and they don't 'tell you what to do.'"
Which is one of the main reasons I hate MySpace. Aside from it being slow, I loathe that it is so easy to customise. It means that every person can mess up the CSS and HTML and destroy the look and feel of the site. By not telling people what to do they all run off and do things I that damage the site.
Of course, they all think their own page with a flashing bright backgroud, three different audio tracks playing, and text that blends into the every other item to make it unreadable is just beautiful.
You think that all those dedicated Adobe users wouldn't just buy the Windows version to run on their Macs that now run Windows?
The people who really spend the money on Adobe software will buy it regardless. Yes, they might prefer a Mac version, but if it isn't there they will buy the Windows version instead.
I realise Apple is getting a lot of press at the moment, and there is a certain amount of feeling that Slashdot is a publicity machine, but they tend to receive little support at the server end.
Tiger server actually performs very well, and admin is a synch. Given that you are starting from scratch you could easily get a some xserves...
Group messaging: Jabber server, built in. There is Active directory and Samba support build in.
In fact, just about everything is built in.
If you don't like that solution, just look at the xserves. They're beautiful.
Just a couple of extra cents thrown into Slashdot's fountain.
Congratulations on the well thought out, objective arguement put forth. A single reason why not to use each language. No positive points considered at all. None of Java's flaws mentioned either.
I actually, have no qualms with using Java, I just prefer to see rational, complete arguements on Slashdot. Something seldom posted.
However, I fail to see the issue with using a proprietary language. The project is open source and will remain that way, and Sun cannot change that. Sun could change Java to spite it, but why would they deliberately harm a free, almost acceptable alternative to a rival's application?
I use Apple's OSX, I don't use BSD's, NeXT's, Apple's OSX, and I don't use GNU Linux, I use Linux. I dislike the standard open-source, free-software bigotry, on licences. I imagine the majority of coders are working to create a decent alternative because they want just that, not out of some need for a jihad against an evil enemy. Why create such a fight. If that effort went into coding the results would be considerably better free software.
ZeroConf is the official name, Apples used to use Rendezvous, now it's Bonjour.
You won't have seen it advertised explicitly, it simply sits and works.
It is used for sharing in the iApps: iTunes iPhoto chatting in iChat Finding servers to use in the Server Admin tools, Transmit (the Panic FTP client) supports it, It is used to find file shares on the network, using AFP
Anywhere networking just happens, without having to do anything more than simply turn it on chances are Bonjour is behind it.
Slashdot Mirror
I would add to this the mobile power it has too - all of which I've wanted from iTunes for a long time.
With PlexPass I can tell each client what I want to sync, how much space to use, how many episodes to sync etc, so my mobile devices always have what I need to watch - and it'll do it over WiFi and cell connections too.
If I want an episode on the way into work, Plex will remove it from my iPhone and automatically queue up the next for the trip home. What isn't downloaded will stream, whether I'm in the house or not.
The real beauty of Plex for me is the persistent access to my media library, from anywhere I am, on any device, be it the LG SmartTV in my living room, iPads, iPhones, computers, etc.
I can sign-in to Plex from any computer anywhere (with sufficient bandwidth, and the transcoding takes care of that), and I can view all media. I've yet to meet someone (especially non-geeks) who aren't totally blown away by it.
At the moment we're fighting to remove all the legacy Sun systems from our datacenters, and love the chance to remove these old machines.
They're rock solid, and do a great job. Our databases still run very very well on them, frequently more stabily than newer X86 kit they're being replaced with.
However:
1) Power usage is insane. The datacenter team reported the larger boxes (ie, 12U type beasts like this) use the same power as whole racks of the standard IBM/HP type pizza boxes we can replace them with. Modern Xeons are multi-cored/multi-threaded enough to compete seriously with the older SPARCs, and do a good job of it, without needing their own power station too fuel and cool them.
2) Parts are getting harder to find, and vastly more expensive. As they age the cost of supporting them sky-rockets, and with parts being harder to find if something breaks there is downtime to fix it. That's not a good situation to be in. Indivual parts for these old machines (eg. spare HBA card, etc) are now becoming as expensive as a new replacement system.
Given that the McDs connections are pretty fast, and pretty reliable, it's actually handy to use as a backup.
Couple of years ago the connection at home was being flaky and finally gave out. Problem was, it was a major DR test day at work, and I needed to be online from home for 12 or so hours.
I just grabbed the laptop, blackberry, and powercord, and went 5 mins down the road to the 24hour McDs. Sat there for hours til my ass was numb, happily on my work BB using hands-free, and worked away for hours.
I wasn't disturbed, had unlimited food and drinks available. Really, not the worst place to work at all. I had more space there than I get at my desk job, and better food and drinks too. Work don't have iced tea on tap.
The McDs connection was enough to remote desktop into my XP desktop at work, without lag or dropping. I was impressed how stable it was. Most places can't handle basic browsing that well given the number of people sharing, but that was totally solid.
Traditionally WWII movies use English actors to play Nazis too - for most of the 20th century anyway, less so more recently.
The stronger, more aristocratic and English the accent, the more evil the Nazi.
Except that MS can't sell the licenses for all their other products if the OS is RHEL.
So, they lose the OS license, but also the licenses for SQL, and CRM, and Exchange, and SharePoint, and Terminal Services, and all the other stuff that might be running on there.
As a consumer, I rather like being empowered.
Neither the MPAA, nor the RIAA have every tried to empowered their consumers.
I want to be empowered and force content creators to create good content, not be offered and forced to take the best of a poor to mediocre offering.
What I find most telling about the article is that they tested the connection using a single consumer grade article.
I'm techy enough to be on /., but I don't spend too much time at home living in a high-tech wonderland. However, on the network at home we have the following devices:
5 iPhones (view 2 wireless APs)
4 laptops
1 desktop
2 XBoxes with live
Wii
Roku box
AppleTV
All those devices stream media from the internet, play games on the internet, etc. That one single laptop can't handle the connection is fine, but as a household between myself, my wife, and kids, we do cumulatively use a lot of media. Have kept our unlimited data plans for the iPhone, my son has peaked at 8Gb in one month of data usage over 3G. That's on a single phone.
Between video chat, games, working remotely and streaming a desktop session, netflix, hulu, amazon video, etc there is a huge amount of bandwidth required at home. I find that Verizon FiOS does a great job. I can't stand the company, but the product is top notch.
Yes, I'd love more bandwidth at home, just treating a home network connection as a single device is rediculous. I want everything in the house to be networked, and controllable.
I would advise you to take a harder look; whole universities, companies and public sectors of entire states have been using Linux for years now.
Yes, and we have a 5 figure number of linux servers, but who wants to enter those details into this site? Who would allow us? And, their sendmail script, running on all those machines? Not a chance.
None of the major users of linux will want to waste their time with this. This is really for retentive power users who want to show off their linux usage. I know, I've been getting the annual email for years, it still lists my first machine from 10 years ago on there. Well, it did until I finally updated the list properly this year.
But, really, this is about people showing off their personal machines, nothing more. I don't see how the stats can possibly be accurate.
that's why it only appears when typing in boxes for which it is applicable - URLs and email addresses.
The rest of the time it isn't there.
Yes, and I had it running on OSX about 5 years ago too as part of Salling Clicker.
It's just remote control software, but one of the functions was to detect the presence of the phone.
Alernatively you can turn up the volume as you walk away too, or pause music, video, etc.
F-16s, stupid...
Clearly a huge difference, and if you can't tell the difference (and the *huge* significance of getting it wrong) I think you should leave Slashdot immediately.
Oh, before the flames start to really burn... yes, joking.. blah, blah, blah
Is it possible that people are complaining about the wrong thing here? Sure, the discussion about whether to run or not is interesting, but how about whether people should have been informed or not?
Given that there were memos sent to numerous organisations, and yet the information was not disseminated at the will of Obama, isn't there a more pressing question here?
Like, why would the president want to scare the crap out of southern manhattan? It's not a huge stretch to assume that flying a 747 low over Manhattan would scare people...
Wow, as if my excellent karma didn't give me enough reason to be proud.
So, more points to work hard and get? I can't wait to devote myself to Slashdot even more slavishly.
Well, at least for posting here I get something.
You have to have a double-tab of the home key set to take you to Phone Favourites...
I have it set to Home, and it doesn't work.
Last Xmas we went back to the UK to see family. We live in NYC. My wife has an iPhone and uses it religiously. She hit $1000 pretty easily in the UK, but at that point ATT sent us a text, and cut off the data service, leaving the voice service on.
That seemed a pretty sensible default to me.
Similarly, when I had a UK cell phone with Vodafone on vacation I've received messages asking me to call to confirm my high phone usage and charges when I hit 2-3 hundred pounds sterling (~$500 maybe).
I can't imagine why ATT didn't alert them in this case.
Yes, but it considered particularly rude and offensive to do so.
Many many more people quietly refuse than do so publicly.
I've seen programs with this sort of functionality before for Symbian several years ago.
However, you end up paying a premium for a function that will at most prompt the thief to through their new phone out the window. If your phone is stolen then you want it back, I don't care otherwise, I don't want to spend money to not have it.
The rocket launcher was features as a gadget to get for Xmas last year on the Register in the UK.
Sold by Marks and Spenser for 20 quid.
And now only available in Aus? Someone didn't check things out properly. This is Slashdot, what's new?
I've seen this IM worm... it's called AIM Triton.
It installs it's own browser: AIM Browser.
It requires a Plazo addressbook to use the address book features, or even to set your own information.
And it leaves an awful lot of crap on your desktop. Even after selecting the "No desktop icon" option.
Oh, and it crashed when I try to quit it. I guess the programmers never thought anyone would actually try to quit their amazing app.
Back to GAIM for me.
How about no commercials would save TV? It's the commercials that people hate, so remove them.
TV needs people to watch it, and more and more people don't want to because of the ads.
If 24 is actually 18 hours long, that says something awful about how much advertising is on tv.
Ok, no ads, means no money for tv, so:
Why not reduce ads to a level at which they stop being so intrusive? Have a couple at fewer times and charge more. Make better TV to get more viewers and spots can become more expensive. Revenue could stay the same, and TV would actually improve.
"They are easy to use (usability), and they don't 'tell you what to do.'"
Which is one of the main reasons I hate MySpace. Aside from it being slow, I loathe that it is so easy to customise. It means that every person can mess up the CSS and HTML and destroy the look and feel of the site. By not telling people what to do they all run off and do things I that damage the site.
Of course, they all think their own page with a flashing bright backgroud, three different audio tracks playing, and text that blends into the every other item to make it unreadable is just beautiful.
You think that all those dedicated Adobe users wouldn't just buy the Windows version to run on their Macs that now run Windows?
The people who really spend the money on Adobe software will buy it regardless. Yes, they might prefer a Mac version, but if it isn't there they will buy the Windows version instead.
I realise Apple is getting a lot of press at the moment, and there is a certain amount of feeling that Slashdot is a publicity machine, but they tend to receive little support at the server end.
Tiger server actually performs very well, and admin is a synch. Given that you are starting from scratch you could easily get a some xserves...
Group messaging: Jabber server, built in.
There is Active directory and Samba support build in.
In fact, just about everything is built in.
If you don't like that solution, just look at the xserves. They're beautiful.
Just a couple of extra cents thrown into Slashdot's fountain.
Congratulations on the well thought out, objective arguement put forth. A single reason why not to use each language. No positive points considered at all. None of Java's flaws mentioned either.
I actually, have no qualms with using Java, I just prefer to see rational, complete arguements on Slashdot. Something seldom posted.
However, I fail to see the issue with using a proprietary language. The project is open source and will remain that way, and Sun cannot change that. Sun could change Java to spite it, but why would they deliberately harm a free, almost acceptable alternative to a rival's application?
I use Apple's OSX, I don't use BSD's, NeXT's, Apple's OSX, and I don't use GNU Linux, I use Linux. I dislike the standard open-source, free-software bigotry, on licences. I imagine the majority of coders are working to create a decent alternative because they want just that, not out of some need for a jihad against an evil enemy. Why create such a fight. If that effort went into coding the results would be considerably better free software.
Bit of a rant, sorry.
ZeroConf is the official name, Apples used to use Rendezvous, now it's Bonjour.
You won't have seen it advertised explicitly, it simply sits and works.
It is used for sharing in the iApps:
iTunes
iPhoto
chatting in iChat
Finding servers to use in the Server Admin tools,
Transmit (the Panic FTP client) supports it,
It is used to find file shares on the network, using AFP
Anywhere networking just happens, without having to do anything more than simply turn it on chances are Bonjour is behind it.
Alex