No, they are just using nice webcams, not the $15 USB ones. From the article, they state that they are Firewire, not USB, have hardware MPEG encoding, and lots of customization, like color calibration and shutter speed. By "consumer webcams", they don't mean Staples bargin bin cams, they mean $150 per camera rich person cams.
This is on Stanford Servers, they are just chuckling at the millions of hits per minute they are getting now. I downloaded all the videos at 100+ Kbps, during the height of the/. effect.
Dual processors do a lot for a GUI's responsiveness. My dual 550 P3 system is a lot more responsive for everyday tasks than the 2.8 and 3.2 GHz machines I often work on. Also, I have run OS X (10.2) on a G3, and let me tell you it is miserable. Everything studders, even the nice genie effect and dock. Multitasking is impossible, and at idle the CPU is at 55%.
Your right, so I will post it. I use Macs and PCs a lot, for Photoshop, Dreamweaver, ect... It really bugs me about the one button. Apple did have the first moused based OS, and it had one button. For some reason they have stuck to that, even though times have clearly changed. OS X Natively supports 2 button + scroll wheel mice. All you have to do is plug one in. But for some reason, Apple still ships a rather low quality (easily broken and not-all-that-accurate) one button mouse, forcing people to hold-click and apple-click on everything. I think that most people would find 2 buttons slightly more user friendly than that wierd combo.
Lots of people do high end sound/graphics/video stuff on macs. To do that, they need special non-consumer cards, like sound cards that can handle 32 inputs, DSP co-processors, or non-compressed serial HDTV inputs cards. You are right, most people don't need PCI cards on Macs, or on many PCs. This is why Apple's consumer lever boxes (iMac, eMac) have no expansion beyond USB and Firewire. As to why this box has one, I would say because they had room and a PCI bus, why not solder a $.25 plastic slot onto the board and call it a feature.
I read an article awhile back (a couple of months ago) about the Toyota people doing a motocross race treatment on a Prius. Once the thing is floored, the batteries last for about 2 miles, or one lap, then the thing relies on the wimpy gas engine alone. Hybreds will never be race cars, since they get their electric power from stopping, which one generally tries not to do in racing, and the batteries discharge when you accelerate, which you are always trying to do in racing.
I won't argue that we desparately need them, but we are definitely not pushing, more like a gentle, sporatic, resentful nudge. I'm not trying to sound paranoid (and not succeeding), but Big Oil and the Big Three don't want hydrocarbons to go away anytime soon, since it is death for Big Oil, and a big inconvience to the Big Three, since car costs can't go up too fast, and LiIon Bateries are expensive.
He was definitely trying to justify it on his site by saying it cheered people up. It seems to me it went a little far for something like that. He could have "come out" earlier and passed it off as a "virtual house" without tricking people.
Flash is cheap, but it is also small. When was the last time you built a server with a 1.0 GB HD? It can be done with a barebones *nix, but when you say server, you usually want to serve STUFF. Also, the more you put on a flash card, the faster it wears out, because less space is available for write evening algorhythms to do their thing. With 32Gb flash, that means soon 8-16GB CF cards could be $60.
It would be even easier to skip the SVGA or DVI part and go directly to LVDS, which is the native protocol for LCD screens. It would also be a lot cheaper, since when you buy an LCD Monitor you pay for the panel AND the DVI/VGA to LVDS converter. Doing a direct LVDS connection would also save you more money since you could simply get a used laptop panel, some of which go for $25 US on eBay.
Tapes have never been a consumer item. They are slow (well, not too bad, but in terms of read/write speed vs. capacity). They are also hobbled by the fact that they are a linear media, and reading or writing any one thing to a tape take forever. As such, 99.9% of tapes are used by businesses to store their data, which for the most part is not pirated copyrighted material.
No, back in the olden days of 1995, Windows NT actually ran natively, not with Virtual PC, on PPCs. Granted, this was not on any PPC, like Macs, but only IBM equiptment that had the right BIOS. Obviously, with such a small market, it did not sell well, and they discontinued all of the NTs except x86 (like PPC, Alpha, RISC). Now it is possible to run windows on a PPC using an emulator, which in essence tricks the OS into thinking it is running on a PC, and translating all of the processor commands into a PPC equivalent. This has a heavy processor overhead. On the next XBox, the processor will run a very small and limited NT kernel natively, with possible (but at this point unlikely) emulation of the x86 for XBox 1 games.
The sad thing is they probably put 10x as much effort into this as into the international space station...
Almost anything can run fast with a nice 10,000 RPM SCSI drive and 1024MB of RAM. I am talking more down to earth systems here.
No, they are just using nice webcams, not the $15 USB ones. From the article, they state that they are Firewire, not USB, have hardware MPEG encoding, and lots of customization, like color calibration and shutter speed. By "consumer webcams", they don't mean Staples bargin bin cams, they mean $150 per camera rich person cams.
This is on Stanford Servers, they are just chuckling at the millions of hits per minute they are getting now. I downloaded all the videos at 100+ Kbps, during the height of the /. effect.
Massive forced child labor workshops.
Dual processors do a lot for a GUI's responsiveness. My dual 550 P3 system is a lot more responsive for everyday tasks than the 2.8 and 3.2 GHz machines I often work on. Also, I have run OS X (10.2) on a G3, and let me tell you it is miserable. Everything studders, even the nice genie effect and dock. Multitasking is impossible, and at idle the CPU is at 55%.
Your right, so I will post it. I use Macs and PCs a lot, for Photoshop, Dreamweaver, ect... It really bugs me about the one button. Apple did have the first moused based OS, and it had one button. For some reason they have stuck to that, even though times have clearly changed. OS X Natively supports 2 button + scroll wheel mice. All you have to do is plug one in. But for some reason, Apple still ships a rather low quality (easily broken and not-all-that-accurate) one button mouse, forcing people to hold-click and apple-click on everything. I think that most people would find 2 buttons slightly more user friendly than that wierd combo.
Remember though, like all Macs except ones over $2500, it comes with a pitiful (if you plan to open two browser windows at once) 256 MB of RAM.
Lots of people do high end sound/graphics/video stuff on macs. To do that, they need special non-consumer cards, like sound cards that can handle 32 inputs, DSP co-processors, or non-compressed serial HDTV inputs cards. You are right, most people don't need PCI cards on Macs, or on many PCs. This is why Apple's consumer lever boxes (iMac, eMac) have no expansion beyond USB and Firewire. As to why this box has one, I would say because they had room and a PCI bus, why not solder a $.25 plastic slot onto the board and call it a feature.
As long as there are dead flies hovering in the air at conviently spaced intervals.
Playing compressed video on a 33MHz ARM with no real graphics buffer, sounds completely possible!
I read an article awhile back (a couple of months ago) about the Toyota people doing a motocross race treatment on a Prius. Once the thing is floored, the batteries last for about 2 miles, or one lap, then the thing relies on the wimpy gas engine alone. Hybreds will never be race cars, since they get their electric power from stopping, which one generally tries not to do in racing, and the batteries discharge when you accelerate, which you are always trying to do in racing.
I won't argue that we desparately need them, but we are definitely not pushing, more like a gentle, sporatic, resentful nudge. I'm not trying to sound paranoid (and not succeeding), but Big Oil and the Big Three don't want hydrocarbons to go away anytime soon, since it is death for Big Oil, and a big inconvience to the Big Three, since car costs can't go up too fast, and LiIon Bateries are expensive.
Why use a hub? It just slows your network down. Now-a-days, I can't see that there would be much difference in cost or power consumption.
He was definitely trying to justify it on his site by saying it cheered people up. It seems to me it went a little far for something like that. He could have "come out" earlier and passed it off as a "virtual house" without tricking people.
Flash is cheap, but it is also small. When was the last time you built a server with a 1.0 GB HD? It can be done with a barebones *nix, but when you say server, you usually want to serve STUFF. Also, the more you put on a flash card, the faster it wears out, because less space is available for write evening algorhythms to do their thing. With 32Gb flash, that means soon 8-16GB CF cards could be $60.
If you want to get away from it all, don't bring your Wi-Fi enabled laptop. This is not a complicated problem.
It would be even easier to skip the SVGA or DVI part and go directly to LVDS, which is the native protocol for LCD screens. It would also be a lot cheaper, since when you buy an LCD Monitor you pay for the panel AND the DVI/VGA to LVDS converter. Doing a direct LVDS connection would also save you more money since you could simply get a used laptop panel, some of which go for $25 US on eBay.
It was also discovered that by permanantly grounding the clock, the RCA cable modem could be turned into a full fledged Radeon 9700 Pro...
Tapes have never been a consumer item. They are slow (well, not too bad, but in terms of read/write speed vs. capacity). They are also hobbled by the fact that they are a linear media, and reading or writing any one thing to a tape take forever. As such, 99.9% of tapes are used by businesses to store their data, which for the most part is not pirated copyrighted material.
The RIAA oked it, but SCO is suing after it found something closely resembling its code in the DNA coding for aerobic respiration.
And trickle down economics really does work!
No, back in the olden days of 1995, Windows NT actually ran natively, not with Virtual PC, on PPCs. Granted, this was not on any PPC, like Macs, but only IBM equiptment that had the right BIOS. Obviously, with such a small market, it did not sell well, and they discontinued all of the NTs except x86 (like PPC, Alpha, RISC). Now it is possible to run windows on a PPC using an emulator, which in essence tricks the OS into thinking it is running on a PC, and translating all of the processor commands into a PPC equivalent. This has a heavy processor overhead. On the next XBox, the processor will run a very small and limited NT kernel natively, with possible (but at this point unlikely) emulation of the x86 for XBox 1 games.
But if you just HAVE to be sick, the Mayo Clinic is a great place to do it.
But if you have to be sick, the Mayo Clinic is a dandy place to do it in.