My girlfriend and I have encountered documentation for accomplishing this (I'm sure a quick Google will yield the results). However, I haven't bothered trying. The system disk on this machine is just hooked up to the mobo's IDE controller. I have no need for booting from a RAID array. Frankly, I think that's kind of a bad idea. The system should be separate from mass storage in my opinion, but that's just me.:-) (Although I routinely tarball the system out to the larger RAID array on a regular basis.)
Hardware decoding allows for much higher resolution video. Furthermore, specialized hardware typically have more accuracy when decoding the stream. There's additional features too: you can allocate, say, more bits for dynamic color range, fractalize regions that have semi-random "noise" distribution (like tree leaves from a distance) and so on that can improve video quality (to help eliminate obvious artifacts). I am not saying all hardware decoders do this, but these are some advantages. It's very analogous to having specialized 3D hardware to handle graphics rather than "letting the CPU do it".
Specifically, the RocketRaid 133 (based on the HPT372A chipset). The card runs quite well under Linux. The Linux driver from HighPoint is quite good (sadly, only partially open source) and provides a/proc interface. (Don't worry, it compiles just fine in any kernel.) Sadly, I cannot show you output from the interface because Slashdot refuses to let me post it (citing junk characters). Stupid Taco. The interface also allows you to issue commands to the controller without rebooting, but documentation is poor. The BIOS utility is also quite good.
Anyway, the device hosts two RAID-1 arrays, one with 2 80Gb Seagates (ST380021A) and the other with 2 200Gb Maxtors (6Y200P0). They appear as SCSI devices. I have tested the mirroring and I am mostly satisfied.
Basically, I simulated a failure on one disk (removing it then performing some work on the other). When I reattached the drive, the card recognized the "failure" immediately and wanted to build the array. For my first test, I let the BIOS do exactly that. Took a very long time, but the mirror was recreated successfully and there were no problems (I tested by removing the first disk and trying again--the mirror was good). The second test was letting the driver do it after the machine had booted. This was a dismal failure. The card does NOT like rebuilding the mirror once the system is running.
Performance is quite good. Even though this is not HighPoint's latest offering, I am still quite impressed. I don't have any hard benchmarks, but I can post some later if you'd like.
These two arrays are accessed by many machines in my home network over NFS and by on average 5 users logged in remotely. They serve games, web pages, and my software, movie, and music archive. These arrays take a decent amount of stress, but nothing severe.
I'll post more in this thread if I think of anything. I'll answer any questions about the card's performance if you have any.
It seems that everytime Mozilla comes up in the news here at Slashdot, clueless posters come in and start complaining about Mozilla's speed. Mozilla is not just a browser (and other utils like a mailer and so forth). Mozilla is built as an application platform. Yes, it's much more.
Basically, with XUL and JavaScript, Mozilla provides a facility very similar to Java on the client. You can build a complete set of applications with Mozill as the foundation. O'Reilly has a book on the subject that goes into further detail.
If you think back a while ago, Slashdot even ran a story about OEone which has built a complete desktop environment on top of Mozilla.
For what Mozilla actually does under the hood (and considering the application you interact with is itself built on this framework) it's surprisingly fast. And small to boot. You see, Mozilla embodies the original Netscape philosophy of creating an application platform in the browser. This is one of the reasons Microsoft was scared and so eager to kill them off. It would be another Java, but a Java that didn't require developers to create applications.
But I digress. I am sure every Mozilla related story on Slashdot will produce an army of people like you complaining abbout speed. Of course, how old of a computer do you have? I have never understood how anyone can consider Mozilla slow (unless you're dealing with the milestone releases which were full of debug code).
Isn't it odd that Ms does not plan to relaese Virtual PC for the G5?
Microsoft like doesn't want to give more reasons for people to move to Apple's platform. VirtualPC is really a program for facilitating a transition to Apple's platform from Wintel. Of course, it's too early to jump the gun and say that Microsoft are being anti-competitive.
I mean it'd be good revenue if every mac user had to buy VPc and WinXP just so that they can play Doom3 or whatnot..
VirtualPC can't use the native 3D hardware accelleration. There are no plans to. Unfortunately, Microsoft removed the VirtualPC FAQ, so I cannot cite where this is stated.
As for Doom III... it will run on OS X. Carmac first demoed Doom III on OS X. He loves Apple's platform because of the uniformity, which eliminates many nightmares for a game programmer. Trust me, it will be native.
Living longer with a lower standard of living...Priceless
Eh?
How do you figure Canada has a lower standard of living? Try less crime, less poverty, and the health care system is really no where near as bad as most would have you believe. Anyone else wanna back me up?
Tim claims to have found evidence to undermine their patents, although the article is very short on details as to what this evidence might be...
A lot of that going around these days, isn't there?
I'm wondering what implications all this top-secret evidence non-sense will have in the long run. Are we soon going to see court cases where all of the evidence is secret? "Releasing that evidence to the court would violate our IP rights. You will just have to take our word for it that things look bad for the defense with this evidence."
Should I be worried or will such a day never dawn? Lawyers care to comment?
The basis for understanding Trinary Algebra begins with the way that it represents its numbers. They are used to represent two things: Whole and Fractional Numbers. To start with...in Trinary systems, bits are really called
trits. Its short for Trinary Digits.
As if we didn't lack sufficient sexual jokes regarding current computer technology. Now we have to introduce "trits" into the fray. Now we're going to have to explaing to our mothers that they're using 32 trit computers. Or stop people from laughing when we mention we like lots of trits.
I propose we quickly abandon this system in favor of quarternery logic. The possibilities for abuse of a trinary logic system (and its trits) are simply too many.
They are good at pretending, aren't they?
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
·
· Score: 1
From the WiReD article, page 3:
Wrong, says Jef Van Royen, a senior scientist at the Diamond High Council, the official representative of the diamond industry in Belgium. "If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone," he says, during an interview at council headquarters on the Hoveniersstraat in Antwerp. "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week."
So is it still a symbol of love if it paid for the deaths of thousands, was mined by slaves, and serves to keep oppresive militants in power? Often times love endures by good principles. If you have none, love probably isn't going to work out for you anyway.
As for myself, I would never buy a diamond for my love in today's diamond industry. I would however, offer her a synthetic. Even if she wasn't a geek chick, that should be understandable. "Would we want our kids slaving away in a diamond mine?" Anyone with half a rational mind should be able to realize why real diamonds are bad.
Of course, there's nothing rational about people liking diamonds. It's stupid really. "Ooh! Shiny!" People need to move beyond such primative desires.
I suspect that they were considered evil -- not only because of the witch connection, but by their nocturnal activities (hideously loud mating rituals come to mind here). This society still considered breathing night air to be harmful to the health....it wouldn't be a leap of (twisted) logic to say that anything that thrived in such evil conditions was evil, too.
Good point. Alas, such idiocy continues unchecked even today.
Cats were considered to be small demons by the excessively-Chrisitan (and excessively stupid), and routinely killed.
The stupid Christians you're refering to killed cats because cats were often associated with witches as familiars. (Which is of course, stupid in and of itself.) This wasn't because cats themselves were considered evil. You are certainly correct that this foolishness lent itself to the spread of rats.
I guess it's a good lesson to all that even if you perceive something as "evil", chances are it serves an important function in this global eccosystem of ours. If you just start randomly destroying parts of a system because they rub you the wrong way, the system won't work.
By the way, I am staff to two cats. I assure you: they are evil.;-)
...but I think the software is not. Looking at those screenshots, I sneared. It's no improvement over RedHat's desktop, save for some shinier looking icons (pointless). The arrangement tries to look too hacker-like. We don't want a desktop that looks like most things from themes.org. Overall, this reminded me of what most open source interfaces looked like years ago when only 31337 people worked on them. Again, it's good to see backing from Sun, lending their credibility, but over all, I see nothing impressive about this.
On a more humorous note, they'll be sorry they put that comments form on the bottom...
Let's look at a certain detail and some historical fact:
The information meant to be encoded isn't anything that is not already available on the front of the envelope.
The USPS has a history of telling the government to go fuck itself when the government says "we want to do <some privacy violating activity>". For example, the Postal Service said "no" strongly to the government's request to inspect packages and have the USPS engage in TIPS. (Anyone care to fill int the details here?)
Yes, there's plenty of ways this system could be abused. But when it comes to the USPS, I would say not likely.
Yeah, because having to totally tear apart an iBook just to swap out the harddrive makes a lot of sense.
Is this a task you have to do every time you use the laptop? Is it a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly exercise? I think it's likely to fall into the most rare of these categories. I doubt you are replacing your harddrive on a regular basis. Apple hardware is engineered the Right Way for most common activities for common users and very well for uncommon activities for uncommon users in most cases. If you have trouble replacing an integral piece of that design, big deal. That's something they assume technical people are doing, so it's a lower priority. This also isn't a redundant, high-availability server either, so there's no need for the hardware to be hot-swappable in terms of seconds. Deal with it.
As I read this post, I almost got the feeling that it was randomly generated. It seems like a menu of phrases that sound kind of "hacker-esque", somewhat scoped to the topic of compression and binaries, then randomly strung together into a semi-cohensive and partially-coherent post. Of course, I could be totally wrong and this guy is simply talking out of his ass. Apply Occam's Razor.:)
"Man fears the darkness, and so, he scrapes away at the edges of it with fire." -- Ayanami Rei
Despite our ever growing knowledge, reason, and progress, we still have this basic fear. Humans will always fear the night. Keeping perpetual light about us is one of the fundamental reasons for people to create cities. Take this lyric for example (apologies to Kurt Harland):
So I dreamed we were somewhere
And everything you said was real
And everything I said was right
That we don't have to fear the night
I think that's a description of a place humans may never go. Given our grossly falliable nature, we will never get lines 2 and 3 right. And even if a person says something that is real and right, will others believe her? Not likely. "Darkness is simply the absense of light. To mark darkness and too much light are equally blinding." "No! There be monsters, here!"
Think about it, why would ANYONE buy a Mac if not for OSX?
Probably because PowerPC architecture is vastly superior to x86. In addition to that, Apple has very strict engineering standards. They do things that make a lot of sense. If you've ever actually sat down and tinkered with or owned a Mac, you'd understand.
Even when I was looking at buying my 15" Ti Powerbook, I decided that if I hated MacOS X, I'd just run Linux or FreeBSD on it. I bought it beacuse the hardware is of exceptional quality. Offerings from most vendors in the PC market are mostly crap. There's very little money spent into engineering things well, but a lot of money invested in engineering them cheaply. I'll never lay a dime down on another piece of x86 hardware again--it's just not worth it.
I do not understand how Photoshop running under Linux is "thanks to Disney". I have been running Photoshop under Linux the same way for months now, so is it thanks to me that Photoshop runs under Linux? No. It's thanks to these guys because of what these guys started. Try to have some more integrity, would you?
I think it's safe to say that RedHat's announcement yesterday was something of a catalyst for this announcemet.
Many people have argued on whether or not RedHat's move was good or bad. Now I think we can definitively state that it was a Good Thing, although perhaps not in the way RedHat expected.
We knew this was going to happen. For the longest time, SCO has been threatening about licensing fees and other nonsense. We've been holding our breath, wondering when. SCO has been happy to continue the FUD campaign because that would damage Linux the most.
Thanks to RedHat, their schedule has been moved up a bit. SCO must start trying to extort money immediately because the RedHat case is going to demonstrate SCO are full of nonsense. All in all, RedHat's announcement yesterday will help speed this process to its end. Of course, SCO is devious (because their support is devious), so there's no telling what is coming next.
I just really wish IBM would get off their asses and clobber SCO, especially since they just went through the hassle of attaining government security certification for Linux.
This is Microsoft FUD if I've ever heard it. Microsoft's most common argument has always been "Linux isn't going to be around, we are". Interestingly SCO is now parroting that sentiment.
You wanna talk about conspiracies, Mr. McBride? Who bought massiave amounts of SCO stock a few months ago that has a fuming rivalry with Linux. Yes, let's talk about conspiracies...
Slashdot Mirror
My girlfriend and I have encountered documentation for accomplishing this (I'm sure a quick Google will yield the results). However, I haven't bothered trying. The system disk on this machine is just hooked up to the mobo's IDE controller. I have no need for booting from a RAID array. Frankly, I think that's kind of a bad idea. The system should be separate from mass storage in my opinion, but that's just me. :-) (Although I routinely tarball the system out to the larger RAID array on a regular basis.)
Hardware decoding allows for much higher resolution video. Furthermore, specialized hardware typically have more accuracy when decoding the stream. There's additional features too: you can allocate, say, more bits for dynamic color range, fractalize regions that have semi-random "noise" distribution (like tree leaves from a distance) and so on that can improve video quality (to help eliminate obvious artifacts). I am not saying all hardware decoders do this, but these are some advantages. It's very analogous to having specialized 3D hardware to handle graphics rather than "letting the CPU do it".
Specifically, the RocketRaid 133 (based on the HPT372A chipset). The card runs quite well under Linux. The Linux driver from HighPoint is quite good (sadly, only partially open source) and provides a /proc interface. (Don't worry, it compiles just fine in any kernel.) Sadly, I cannot show you output from the interface because Slashdot refuses to let me post it (citing junk characters). Stupid Taco. The interface also allows you to issue commands to the controller without rebooting, but documentation is poor. The BIOS utility is also quite good.
Anyway, the device hosts two RAID-1 arrays, one with 2 80Gb Seagates (ST380021A) and the other with 2 200Gb Maxtors (6Y200P0). They appear as SCSI devices. I have tested the mirroring and I am mostly satisfied.
Basically, I simulated a failure on one disk (removing it then performing some work on the other). When I reattached the drive, the card recognized the "failure" immediately and wanted to build the array. For my first test, I let the BIOS do exactly that. Took a very long time, but the mirror was recreated successfully and there were no problems (I tested by removing the first disk and trying again--the mirror was good). The second test was letting the driver do it after the machine had booted. This was a dismal failure. The card does NOT like rebuilding the mirror once the system is running.
Performance is quite good. Even though this is not HighPoint's latest offering, I am still quite impressed. I don't have any hard benchmarks, but I can post some later if you'd like.
These two arrays are accessed by many machines in my home network over NFS and by on average 5 users logged in remotely. They serve games, web pages, and my software, movie, and music archive. These arrays take a decent amount of stress, but nothing severe.
I'll post more in this thread if I think of anything. I'll answer any questions about the card's performance if you have any.
err... nevermind...
It seems that everytime Mozilla comes up in the news here at Slashdot, clueless posters come in and start complaining about Mozilla's speed. Mozilla is not just a browser (and other utils like a mailer and so forth). Mozilla is built as an application platform. Yes, it's much more.
Basically, with XUL and JavaScript, Mozilla provides a facility very similar to Java on the client. You can build a complete set of applications with Mozill as the foundation. O'Reilly has a book on the subject that goes into further detail.
If you think back a while ago, Slashdot even ran a story about OEone which has built a complete desktop environment on top of Mozilla.
For what Mozilla actually does under the hood (and considering the application you interact with is itself built on this framework) it's surprisingly fast. And small to boot. You see, Mozilla embodies the original Netscape philosophy of creating an application platform in the browser. This is one of the reasons Microsoft was scared and so eager to kill them off. It would be another Java, but a Java that didn't require developers to create applications.
But I digress. I am sure every Mozilla related story on Slashdot will produce an army of people like you complaining abbout speed. Of course, how old of a computer do you have? I have never understood how anyone can consider Mozilla slow (unless you're dealing with the milestone releases which were full of debug code).
Microsoft like doesn't want to give more reasons for people to move to Apple's platform. VirtualPC is really a program for facilitating a transition to Apple's platform from Wintel. Of course, it's too early to jump the gun and say that Microsoft are being anti-competitive.
VirtualPC can't use the native 3D hardware accelleration. There are no plans to. Unfortunately, Microsoft removed the VirtualPC FAQ, so I cannot cite where this is stated.
As for Doom III... it will run on OS X. Carmac first demoed Doom III on OS X. He loves Apple's platform because of the uniformity, which eliminates many nightmares for a game programmer. Trust me, it will be native.
Eh?
How do you figure Canada has a lower standard of living? Try less crime, less poverty, and the health care system is really no where near as bad as most would have you believe. Anyone else wanna back me up?
A lot of that going around these days, isn't there?
I'm wondering what implications all this top-secret evidence non-sense will have in the long run. Are we soon going to see court cases where all of the evidence is secret? "Releasing that evidence to the court would violate our IP rights. You will just have to take our word for it that things look bad for the defense with this evidence."
Should I be worried or will such a day never dawn? Lawyers care to comment?
Another poster provided trinary computing tutorial. On one of the pages for the introduction, the author writes:
As if we didn't lack sufficient sexual jokes regarding current computer technology. Now we have to introduce "trits" into the fray. Now we're going to have to explaing to our mothers that they're using 32 trit computers. Or stop people from laughing when we mention we like lots of trits.
I propose we quickly abandon this system in favor of quarternery logic. The possibilities for abuse of a trinary logic system (and its trits) are simply too many.
From the WiReD article, page 3:
So is it still a symbol of love if it paid for the deaths of thousands, was mined by slaves, and serves to keep oppresive militants in power? Often times love endures by good principles. If you have none, love probably isn't going to work out for you anyway.
As for myself, I would never buy a diamond for my love in today's diamond industry. I would however, offer her a synthetic. Even if she wasn't a geek chick, that should be understandable. "Would we want our kids slaving away in a diamond mine?" Anyone with half a rational mind should be able to realize why real diamonds are bad.
Of course, there's nothing rational about people liking diamonds. It's stupid really. "Ooh! Shiny!" People need to move beyond such primative desires.
Good point. Alas, such idiocy continues unchecked even today.
The stupid Christians you're refering to killed cats because cats were often associated with witches as familiars. (Which is of course, stupid in and of itself.) This wasn't because cats themselves were considered evil. You are certainly correct that this foolishness lent itself to the spread of rats.
I guess it's a good lesson to all that even if you perceive something as "evil", chances are it serves an important function in this global eccosystem of ours. If you just start randomly destroying parts of a system because they rub you the wrong way, the system won't work.
By the way, I am staff to two cats. I assure you: they are evil. ;-)
...but I think the software is not. Looking at those screenshots, I sneared. It's no improvement over RedHat's desktop, save for some shinier looking icons (pointless). The arrangement tries to look too hacker-like. We don't want a desktop that looks like most things from themes.org. Overall, this reminded me of what most open source interfaces looked like years ago when only 31337 people worked on them. Again, it's good to see backing from Sun, lending their credibility, but over all, I see nothing impressive about this.
On a more humorous note, they'll be sorry they put that comments form on the bottom...
How long until the All American doll comes around that teaches children "freedom is a naughty word" or "we don't talk about disobedience"?
Uhm, you're an idiot.
Let's look at a certain detail and some historical fact:
The information meant to be encoded isn't anything that is not already available on the front of the envelope.
The USPS has a history of telling the government to go fuck itself when the government says "we want to do <some privacy violating activity>". For example, the Postal Service said "no" strongly to the government's request to inspect packages and have the USPS engage in TIPS. (Anyone care to fill int the details here?)
Yes, there's plenty of ways this system could be abused. But when it comes to the USPS, I would say not likely.
Is this a task you have to do every time you use the laptop? Is it a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly exercise? I think it's likely to fall into the most rare of these categories. I doubt you are replacing your harddrive on a regular basis. Apple hardware is engineered the Right Way for most common activities for common users and very well for uncommon activities for uncommon users in most cases. If you have trouble replacing an integral piece of that design, big deal. That's something they assume technical people are doing, so it's a lower priority. This also isn't a redundant, high-availability server either, so there's no need for the hardware to be hot-swappable in terms of seconds. Deal with it.
As I read this post, I almost got the feeling that it was randomly generated. It seems like a menu of phrases that sound kind of "hacker-esque", somewhat scoped to the topic of compression and binaries, then randomly strung together into a semi-cohensive and partially-coherent post. Of course, I could be totally wrong and this guy is simply talking out of his ass. Apply Occam's Razor. :)
Despite our ever growing knowledge, reason, and progress, we still have this basic fear. Humans will always fear the night. Keeping perpetual light about us is one of the fundamental reasons for people to create cities. Take this lyric for example (apologies to Kurt Harland):
I think that's a description of a place humans may never go. Given our grossly falliable nature, we will never get lines 2 and 3 right. And even if a person says something that is real and right, will others believe her? Not likely. "Darkness is simply the absense of light. To mark darkness and too much light are equally blinding." "No! There be monsters, here!"
In The Last Starfighter , Alex Rogan's mentor "Grig" described the technology used for displaying their heads up display.
Basically he said it was produced by projecting images onto a field of xeon gas. (Or something along those lines. Anyone care to refresh my memory?)
Seems to me like these guys got their inspiration from the movies. :)
Probably because PowerPC architecture is vastly superior to x86. In addition to that, Apple has very strict engineering standards. They do things that make a lot of sense. If you've ever actually sat down and tinkered with or owned a Mac, you'd understand.
Even when I was looking at buying my 15" Ti Powerbook, I decided that if I hated MacOS X, I'd just run Linux or FreeBSD on it. I bought it beacuse the hardware is of exceptional quality. Offerings from most vendors in the PC market are mostly crap. There's very little money spent into engineering things well, but a lot of money invested in engineering them cheaply. I'll never lay a dime down on another piece of x86 hardware again--it's just not worth it.
I do not understand how Photoshop running under Linux is "thanks to Disney". I have been running Photoshop under Linux the same way for months now, so is it thanks to me that Photoshop runs under Linux? No. It's thanks to these guys because of what these guys started. Try to have some more integrity, would you?
I think it's safe to say that RedHat's announcement yesterday was something of a catalyst for this announcemet.
Many people have argued on whether or not RedHat's move was good or bad. Now I think we can definitively state that it was a Good Thing, although perhaps not in the way RedHat expected.
We knew this was going to happen. For the longest time, SCO has been threatening about licensing fees and other nonsense. We've been holding our breath, wondering when. SCO has been happy to continue the FUD campaign because that would damage Linux the most.
Thanks to RedHat, their schedule has been moved up a bit. SCO must start trying to extort money immediately because the RedHat case is going to demonstrate SCO are full of nonsense. All in all, RedHat's announcement yesterday will help speed this process to its end. Of course, SCO is devious (because their support is devious), so there's no telling what is coming next.
I just really wish IBM would get off their asses and clobber SCO, especially since they just went through the hassle of attaining government security certification for Linux.
This is Microsoft FUD if I've ever heard it. Microsoft's most common argument has always been "Linux isn't going to be around, we are". Interestingly SCO is now parroting that sentiment.
You wanna talk about conspiracies, Mr. McBride? Who bought massiave amounts of SCO stock a few months ago that has a fuming rivalry with Linux. Yes, let's talk about conspiracies...