Off the shelf NAS units generally suck. Do yourself a favor, buy good hardware and run an OpenSolaris ZFS machine. Then just export the filesystems out over NFS, SMB, iSCSI, whatever. Older servers are often available for cheap that would work well. Spend a little money on the core components, don't buy the cheapest SATA controller you can find, get a nice server grade card. I use Supermicro USAS-L8i cards in my server and they work VERY well. ~$120, 8 port, PCIe, LSI chipset, supported in OpenSolaris, Linux, and Windows. Those are the only OSes I tested personally. I'm sure the BSDs and others support them as well. Don't skimp on the other parts either, for example, ECC RAM can be had for a small price premium. This sort of thing is probably the biggest reason most NAS units suck, they skimp on the parts. Your system is only as good as its crappiest part.
I've got a system running great with 4 1.5TB Samsung drives and I'm going to move the 4 400G Seagates over in a week or so to be sure I don't have any issues with the new array. I'll probably add 4 more in a month or so, possibly using another HD brand, WD maybe?
Transformers don't work with DC. He would have to build a full on switching power supply. Those can be made lightly, but it's expensive to build one that can push the kinds of current that a lipo battery can produce.
Very few areas have a system like the poster is talking about. Look up the UTOPIA project for one example I am familiar with, though can't get. The government builds the network and leases space on it to all comers for the same prices. In reality, you end up able to choose from many different providers for internet, phone, and even TV. It's working very well. It's much like the government building the roads and charging people to use them via taxes and such. We can choose to have our packages delivered by FedEx, UPS, USPS, whatever. It works well taken on the whole.
Something like those secureID tokens or the Paypal security device. Standardize a protocol for them so we can use the same damn one everywhere. Biometrics are crap, for any affordable devices. But a reasonably secure password/passphrase with a token or smartcard would be very secure with little effort from the users. The problem is that everyone is trying to create their own little systems that can't inter-operate. Even if the stupid Paypal token isn't the best security out there, combined with a decent password it would be very hard to crack. It's also easy to use, keeping acceptance and compliance high. They are also reasonably cheap. Now you need my username, password, and the token. Significantly harder to crack while being rather easy for the user to deal with.
Good god I hate that "feature" in Windows. Not only does it pop up and take over the input devices, it turns the damned accessibility mode ON when it does! Stupid POS software. My XP laptop is so very close to getting Linux installed on it in large part because of stupid things like that. If the video card were supported by OSX, I'd install that instead as I'd at least have a decent GUI as well as a nice CLI.
Remember, they are targeting lightweight machines here. One notch above cell phones processor/memory wise. Not powerful computers like we commonly run Linux on these days. ARM chips with ~128Meg of RAM. Gnome and KDE simply can't run in that environment, though X11 itself could. It might not offer anything you can't get with Firefox+Linux or Win+Chrome on a powerful machine. But it can offer a very snappy version of that on low power computers. If you don't need the speed and RAM of a big notebook or desktop computer, but do mostly web browsing and email, a cheap, slow CPU with long battery life might be the way to go. Not really targeted at most/. user types. More like their mothers. Another plus is that being Linux based, none of the current Windows malware/viruses can infect it. Not that they couldn't write new malware I suppose, but if they properly use the UNIX security model, it should keep down the background infections. The (l)user in question would have to provide the admin password and such.
My primary desktop is a Mac Mini. It works great with X11 apps, but I don't use them often. Everything I have wanted to do has had a Cocoa version available so I just used that. Even OpenOffice has a native version now. It is nice to have X11 available if I want it though.
But in the case of internet connections, it can, and in fact IS done. Provo is an excellent example, they have a program started in that area called UTOPIA. The government pays for the fiber (to the home) and any company can provide services over it. For data connections, it's not hard at all to do this and set up systems to bill the ISPs in whatever way they need to and the ISPs then bill the end users. Separation of pipe and data. I believe it's the only way to solve this issue. That and basic truth in advertising. If they air advertising that claims to sell "unlimited" service, it damn well better be unlimited. Anything less if fraud and they should be kicked off the network.
With modern materials, we could probably build one now. The best thing is, a nuclear lightbulb design would probably pollute less than the byproducts of the chemical propellants we use now. But, of course, it's nuclear, and therefore bad. *sigh*
Um, anyone with an HDTV has an RGB input. They call it component video, and it's been available on every HDTV ever shipped, and some newer SDTVs. HDMI and DVI are quite new in comparison. The HDFury claims to be able to take HDMI/HDCP and output component 1080p. That's a damn handy device when paired with older non-HDCP displays and things like the HD-PVR that can record component and output h264 digital streams.
Irritating as hell that one would have to spend a couple hundred on something like that when we have perfectly capable component video inputs and outputs though.
Nope. They didn't just print more money for the coupons. The money came from the people that bought licenses for the freed up spectrum. Part of the fees paid for the license were set aside for the converter box program.
But you still need to buy 5 disks. When I upgraded my Linux based RAID5 I bought 2 disks and added them to the existing array. It took hours to resliver the array, but it worked fine. For enterprise applications, replacing all the disks at the same time is fine. Or just adding new disks. For SOHO users, that's not so good.
I won't argue about some of the advanced features of ZFS, but this is one area that could use improvement. And I really think that if it were available in Linux, someone would have already written it.
I can max my connection speed either way. In theory it's faster with a local mirror, and certainly costs the ISP less upstream bandwidth, but in practice it doesn't matter for many people. And ISP NNTP servers tend to suck anyway, so you might actually do better on "the wild Internet".
You don't need to use paypal, but you CAN. If you just click the "buy now" button, you can use a CC. The only downside to Paypal is that they won't let you do porn, so if you don't care about that, it works fine. If you want the erotica groups, just use a CC. I'm doing it now with a Visa card and it works fine. Just didn't feel like using Paypal for it. $11/mo and working every bit as good as Giganews did.
For a download based service, sure, I can see that. But streaming sucks, more so on video. Unless connections get a whole lot better, I'm not the least bit interested in streaming. With downloads, I can do HD, no problems. About 1GB per hour at the standard illegal sources last time I checked. It doesn't take a whole lot to screw up a stream with those sorts of bandwith requirements. Downloads just go a little slower for a bit. Unencrypted, 720p or 1080p, h264 video (3Mbit/sec minimum, probably about 6Mbit/sec for 1080p), AC3 audio, MKV container preferred.
Sell me that, with a fast server to download from and an RSS feed I can automate the process from, for a reasonable price, and I *WILL* buy. Reasonable price would be about half what the season goes for on Blu-Ray. I'm not getting media, packaging, shipping, etc., so I won't pay for it either. And if I'm paying, it must be ad-free. If I'm not paying, or getting a significant discount, ads would be acceptable. I personally wouldn't take any more than about 5min/hour of ads though. If I'm paying, it must also include re-download rights. Perhaps restricted to off-peak, or with a small fee for using up said capacity, but a very small fraction of the original purchase price. I would also require that the episodes be made available by midnight of the original air date. If they want to compete with PirateBay and friends, they have to provide all of the above. People will pay for the convenience, quality, and knowing they are legal. Cause paying customers issues, and they will go elsewhere, or just not bother. The studios have the ability to take the online market by storm and keep it. They just have to step up. Not that they will.
Streaming crap quality with encryption... Not interested.
Cool thing about Cat5 is you can terminate all the jacks with RJ45 wired for ethernet and plug RJ11 phone lines right in. Works great.
I've seen a number of houses in the last 5 years or so built with Cat5, though the electricians running the lines daisy-chain them as they are speced for phone, not networking. Retarded, but people expect to have "normal" phone connections, not a patch panel. I wired my house before the walls went in. Every room got 2 Cat-5e, and 2 RG-6. Double for the entertainment areas. The wire was chosen mostly because the bundled wire was a great price for 5e and it works fine for gigabit.
Cat6 is NOT required for gigabit. It was designed for Cat5 wire and works just fine up to 100m over it. I've done it myself, works fine. I don't know why people keep repeating this myth on tech sites.
Site is run by Broadcom, they make and sell 802.11 chipsets. They say real world throughput is about 160Mbps (link speed means about as much as a politician's word). Real world speed on my wired LAN is ~980Mbps. In what world is 160Mbps "almost as fast" as 900+Mbps?
Simple physics, wireless simply can't compete with wired for speed. Wired is also switched, wireless is shared. More than one stream on the network and they all suffer.
Hmmm... I REALLY like the look of that Plex software. I'm going to install that on my Mac Mini tonight and give it a go. How are you getting 5.1 sound out of the mini? I don't remember seeing an optical port on mine. Or is it part of the headphone just like the old Minidisc players did it?
I really like MythTV, but this looks really nice as well. Always nice to have options.
I highly recommend the HDHomeRun. I've been using one since they came out and it's been working very well. Some of the firmware updates actually helped reception as well. Very cool.
Get good hardware, and it's easy as can be. For the backend, most anything will work as you're just recording data streams from the converter card/box. It's all about I/O speed on the backend. Get a big CPU if you want to do transcoding or commercial flagging. For the frontend, the only way to go is a small platform box (micro-ATX or mini-ITX) with an NVidia integrated graphics chipset, 8000 series or better. A low-end CPU is fine, people are using Atom based machines now with the release of the ION platform. The GPU does all the decode and display via VDPAU. All the CPU does is menus and I/O. Install from an integrated distro (Mythdora, Mythbuntu, etc) and it's even easy to get the software working. One of my frontends doesn't even have a hard drive. It boots from a USB flash stick.
I use an HDHomeRun for the tuner. Dual tuner box connected over Ethernet. No kernel level drivers required, fully supported in Myth stable. I'm OTA only, though it does support QAM for unencrypted cable.
In a word, yes. Electronics stores know that many people are not going to have the required cables and don't want to wait to get one online. So they jack up the prices and make a ton of profit on them. Even if I need one quickly, overnight shipping is cheaper than most places sell the cables locally, so I'll wait till tomorrow.:)
Same thing with most cables, look at USB or Firewire cables at Best Buy and the like sometime. Ethernet as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Off the shelf NAS units generally suck. Do yourself a favor, buy good hardware and run an OpenSolaris ZFS machine. Then just export the filesystems out over NFS, SMB, iSCSI, whatever. Older servers are often available for cheap that would work well. Spend a little money on the core components, don't buy the cheapest SATA controller you can find, get a nice server grade card. I use Supermicro USAS-L8i cards in my server and they work VERY well. ~$120, 8 port, PCIe, LSI chipset, supported in OpenSolaris, Linux, and Windows. Those are the only OSes I tested personally. I'm sure the BSDs and others support them as well. Don't skimp on the other parts either, for example, ECC RAM can be had for a small price premium. This sort of thing is probably the biggest reason most NAS units suck, they skimp on the parts. Your system is only as good as its crappiest part.
I've got a system running great with 4 1.5TB Samsung drives and I'm going to move the 4 400G Seagates over in a week or so to be sure I don't have any issues with the new array. I'll probably add 4 more in a month or so, possibly using another HD brand, WD maybe?
Transformers don't work with DC. He would have to build a full on switching power supply. Those can be made lightly, but it's expensive to build one that can push the kinds of current that a lipo battery can produce.
Very few areas have a system like the poster is talking about. Look up the UTOPIA project for one example I am familiar with, though can't get. The government builds the network and leases space on it to all comers for the same prices. In reality, you end up able to choose from many different providers for internet, phone, and even TV. It's working very well. It's much like the government building the roads and charging people to use them via taxes and such. We can choose to have our packages delivered by FedEx, UPS, USPS, whatever. It works well taken on the whole.
Something like those secureID tokens or the Paypal security device. Standardize a protocol for them so we can use the same damn one everywhere. Biometrics are crap, for any affordable devices. But a reasonably secure password/passphrase with a token or smartcard would be very secure with little effort from the users. The problem is that everyone is trying to create their own little systems that can't inter-operate. Even if the stupid Paypal token isn't the best security out there, combined with a decent password it would be very hard to crack. It's also easy to use, keeping acceptance and compliance high. They are also reasonably cheap. Now you need my username, password, and the token. Significantly harder to crack while being rather easy for the user to deal with.
Good god I hate that "feature" in Windows. Not only does it pop up and take over the input devices, it turns the damned accessibility mode ON when it does! Stupid POS software. My XP laptop is so very close to getting Linux installed on it in large part because of stupid things like that. If the video card were supported by OSX, I'd install that instead as I'd at least have a decent GUI as well as a nice CLI.
Remember, they are targeting lightweight machines here. One notch above cell phones processor/memory wise. Not powerful computers like we commonly run Linux on these days. ARM chips with ~128Meg of RAM. Gnome and KDE simply can't run in that environment, though X11 itself could. It might not offer anything you can't get with Firefox+Linux or Win+Chrome on a powerful machine. But it can offer a very snappy version of that on low power computers. If you don't need the speed and RAM of a big notebook or desktop computer, but do mostly web browsing and email, a cheap, slow CPU with long battery life might be the way to go. Not really targeted at most /. user types. More like their mothers. Another plus is that being Linux based, none of the current Windows malware/viruses can infect it. Not that they couldn't write new malware I suppose, but if they properly use the UNIX security model, it should keep down the background infections. The (l)user in question would have to provide the admin password and such.
My primary desktop is a Mac Mini. It works great with X11 apps, but I don't use them often. Everything I have wanted to do has had a Cocoa version available so I just used that. Even OpenOffice has a native version now. It is nice to have X11 available if I want it though.
But in the case of internet connections, it can, and in fact IS done. Provo is an excellent example, they have a program started in that area called UTOPIA. The government pays for the fiber (to the home) and any company can provide services over it. For data connections, it's not hard at all to do this and set up systems to bill the ISPs in whatever way they need to and the ISPs then bill the end users. Separation of pipe and data. I believe it's the only way to solve this issue. That and basic truth in advertising. If they air advertising that claims to sell "unlimited" service, it damn well better be unlimited. Anything less if fraud and they should be kicked off the network.
Nuclear rocket motors were built in the 60s but got canned because of the fear of radiation and materials of the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Thermal_Rocket
With modern materials, we could probably build one now. The best thing is, a nuclear lightbulb design would probably pollute less than the byproducts of the chemical propellants we use now. But, of course, it's nuclear, and therefore bad. *sigh*
It's easier to encrypt digital signals?
Um, anyone with an HDTV has an RGB input. They call it component video, and it's been available on every HDTV ever shipped, and some newer SDTVs. HDMI and DVI are quite new in comparison. The HDFury claims to be able to take HDMI/HDCP and output component 1080p. That's a damn handy device when paired with older non-HDCP displays and things like the HD-PVR that can record component and output h264 digital streams.
Irritating as hell that one would have to spend a couple hundred on something like that when we have perfectly capable component video inputs and outputs though.
Nope. They didn't just print more money for the coupons. The money came from the people that bought licenses for the freed up spectrum. Part of the fees paid for the license were set aside for the converter box program.
But you still need to buy 5 disks. When I upgraded my Linux based RAID5 I bought 2 disks and added them to the existing array. It took hours to resliver the array, but it worked fine. For enterprise applications, replacing all the disks at the same time is fine. Or just adding new disks. For SOHO users, that's not so good.
I won't argue about some of the advanced features of ZFS, but this is one area that could use improvement. And I really think that if it were available in Linux, someone would have already written it.
I haven't tried it personally with Paypal. That's just what Astraweb said on their pages when I was signing up. If it works for you, even better. :)
I can max my connection speed either way. In theory it's faster with a local mirror, and certainly costs the ISP less upstream bandwidth, but in practice it doesn't matter for many people. And ISP NNTP servers tend to suck anyway, so you might actually do better on "the wild Internet".
You don't need to use paypal, but you CAN. If you just click the "buy now" button, you can use a CC. The only downside to Paypal is that they won't let you do porn, so if you don't care about that, it works fine. If you want the erotica groups, just use a CC. I'm doing it now with a Visa card and it works fine. Just didn't feel like using Paypal for it. $11/mo and working every bit as good as Giganews did.
For a download based service, sure, I can see that. But streaming sucks, more so on video. Unless connections get a whole lot better, I'm not the least bit interested in streaming. With downloads, I can do HD, no problems. About 1GB per hour at the standard illegal sources last time I checked. It doesn't take a whole lot to screw up a stream with those sorts of bandwith requirements. Downloads just go a little slower for a bit. Unencrypted, 720p or 1080p, h264 video (3Mbit/sec minimum, probably about 6Mbit/sec for 1080p), AC3 audio, MKV container preferred.
Sell me that, with a fast server to download from and an RSS feed I can automate the process from, for a reasonable price, and I *WILL* buy. Reasonable price would be about half what the season goes for on Blu-Ray. I'm not getting media, packaging, shipping, etc., so I won't pay for it either. And if I'm paying, it must be ad-free. If I'm not paying, or getting a significant discount, ads would be acceptable. I personally wouldn't take any more than about 5min/hour of ads though. If I'm paying, it must also include re-download rights. Perhaps restricted to off-peak, or with a small fee for using up said capacity, but a very small fraction of the original purchase price. I would also require that the episodes be made available by midnight of the original air date. If they want to compete with PirateBay and friends, they have to provide all of the above. People will pay for the convenience, quality, and knowing they are legal. Cause paying customers issues, and they will go elsewhere, or just not bother. The studios have the ability to take the online market by storm and keep it. They just have to step up. Not that they will.
Streaming crap quality with encryption... Not interested.
Which is one of the reasons I now run MythTV.
Cool thing about Cat5 is you can terminate all the jacks with RJ45 wired for ethernet and plug RJ11 phone lines right in. Works great.
I've seen a number of houses in the last 5 years or so built with Cat5, though the electricians running the lines daisy-chain them as they are speced for phone, not networking. Retarded, but people expect to have "normal" phone connections, not a patch panel. I wired my house before the walls went in. Every room got 2 Cat-5e, and 2 RG-6. Double for the entertainment areas. The wire was chosen mostly because the bundled wire was a great price for 5e and it works fine for gigabit.
Cat6 is NOT required for gigabit. It was designed for Cat5 wire and works just fine up to 100m over it. I've done it myself, works fine. I don't know why people keep repeating this myth on tech sites.
Yeah sure...
http://80211n.com/80211n-speed.html
Site is run by Broadcom, they make and sell 802.11 chipsets. They say real world throughput is about 160Mbps (link speed means about as much as a politician's word). Real world speed on my wired LAN is ~980Mbps. In what world is 160Mbps "almost as fast" as 900+Mbps?
Simple physics, wireless simply can't compete with wired for speed. Wired is also switched, wireless is shared. More than one stream on the network and they all suffer.
Hmmm... I REALLY like the look of that Plex software. I'm going to install that on my Mac Mini tonight and give it a go. How are you getting 5.1 sound out of the mini? I don't remember seeing an optical port on mine. Or is it part of the headphone just like the old Minidisc players did it?
I really like MythTV, but this looks really nice as well. Always nice to have options.
I highly recommend the HDHomeRun. I've been using one since they came out and it's been working very well. Some of the firmware updates actually helped reception as well. Very cool.
Get good hardware, and it's easy as can be. For the backend, most anything will work as you're just recording data streams from the converter card/box. It's all about I/O speed on the backend. Get a big CPU if you want to do transcoding or commercial flagging. For the frontend, the only way to go is a small platform box (micro-ATX or mini-ITX) with an NVidia integrated graphics chipset, 8000 series or better. A low-end CPU is fine, people are using Atom based machines now with the release of the ION platform. The GPU does all the decode and display via VDPAU. All the CPU does is menus and I/O. Install from an integrated distro (Mythdora, Mythbuntu, etc) and it's even easy to get the software working. One of my frontends doesn't even have a hard drive. It boots from a USB flash stick.
I use an HDHomeRun for the tuner. Dual tuner box connected over Ethernet. No kernel level drivers required, fully supported in Myth stable. I'm OTA only, though it does support QAM for unencrypted cable.
In a word, yes. Electronics stores know that many people are not going to have the required cables and don't want to wait to get one online. So they jack up the prices and make a ton of profit on them. Even if I need one quickly, overnight shipping is cheaper than most places sell the cables locally, so I'll wait till tomorrow. :)
Same thing with most cables, look at USB or Firewire cables at Best Buy and the like sometime. Ethernet as well.