It's true that if you have a pretty standard video files like mpegs or avi's or more or less anything created by Windows then it works fine with video. Things start getting quite flaky when you to play that theora/aac file you stuffed in a matroska container, but it doesn't even need to be so non-standard: I tried playing an x264/aac contained in mkv where I had encoded the rawdv using a Quicktime profile in Mencoder. It just refused to play it. They may say they support Matroska on their packaging, but you've got to have the right combination of av codec and container for it to work.
Besides that, the music playing function was truly abyssmal, and from what I have recently heard, has not improved in the 8 months since I last tested a Popcorn Hour A-110. It's really a "video" player. A true "media" player would handle video, music and photos equally well, which Popcorn Hour really does not. But if it works for your needs then that's great, but there are no Ultimate media players on the market as of right now.
I get tired of people constantly evading or failing to compare BOTH OSS drivers and proprietary drivers!
"ATI graphics driver sucks", "Nvidia rules"
PROPRIETARY
-----------
Nvidia rules
ATI sucks
OPEN SOURCE
------------
Nvidia sucks
ATI rules
Intel Excellent, shame about underpowered hardware
Before you all go slagging off ATI, just remember that there is no longer any need to use their proprietary driver! As the OSS driver is really good. Intel has a great open source driver. The laggard is nvidia because you can only use their own proprietary driver and it uses 10% cpu even wen idling compared to oss nv driver. We can also vote with our wallets and buy ATI cards and use the oss driver. If performance is absolutely paramount, and 2fps is a deal maker or breaker, then you probably need nvidia with their driver, but for desktop use/casual to semi-serious gaming, ati has it all.
I tried out Popcorn hour: lacked support for some formats that I had a lot of, interface sucked in some areas.
I have an Xbox360: doesn't support many formats.
My dad has a PS3: doesn't support many open source formats.
Consoles generally have some interface/usability issues.
Consumer Media players generally don't support everything you need and have bad interfaces.
I've come to the conclusion that the only solution is a real computer plugged into your sound system and TV. Wireless to access your router, have a USB disk or preferably a home server with central storage like I have. Then you can run Linux on it and have support for any format on the planet, run XBMC if you want a pretty interface.
The only problem is, that you really want a small box, like an Eeebox or Mac Mini or some such, but they are not exactly cheap, even if they are relatively cheap compared to normal desktops. If you have 3 TVs in the house it means getting 3 Eeeboxes, and the cost adds up! Not forgetting the administration 'cost' of patching the OS on all your boxes. If you only have one main TV it's not really an issue and having a computer makes things quite future proof software wise.
Ideally, I would like a 'broadcast' solution with one PC broadcasting to a small inexpensive wireless receiver plugged into each TV.
No matter how fast your CPU is, it's never enough. Until my CPU can transcode a 2hr video from any format to any other in less than 5 minutes, then it won't be enough.
wow. cool test! Working as an Oracle DBA managing thousands of instances, I know that even if our level 0 backups exist, all it takes is one missing archive log backup to freak us all out if we have to do a restore. We log all backups and monitor all backup logs for errors, and create incident reports automatically if we get an error. I think we have a pretty good system, but it's never going to be fool proof. One thing we don't currently do is validate the backups on the VTL. Even if the team you tested had processes in place for full monitoring of all backups and handled errors in a timely fashion, nothing is going to help them if someone maliciously deletes the backups from tape.
In effect, you weren't testing their ability to perform their job and complete a database restore: you were simply pointing out the fact that they did not have a process in place to validate backups on VTL, which does not really test them as a team. If they had that process, then your evil plan would have failed:)
Taking backups, monitoring logs, and responding to backup failures is a *time consuming* job, even with the best of systems. There comes a point where it is not cost effective to account for every conceivable failure. I'm not saying that validating backups is pointless to implement, but I suspect it is even more time consuming than checking backup logs.
Also, performing restore tests is not feasable nor cost effective when managing many databases. Sure, we do restores of production systems every now and again, and every several months, we might just do a test to freshen us up a bit, but then it's with a test database in-house, not a copy of a production DB from backups. We just use these times to test our restore procedures. To actively test restore procedures on a production DB to see if the backups are ok is only every done if a customer requests it (aka: we get paid to do the test)
simply your world view of how OSS is perceived, but not neccesarily correct. From my point of view, it is already taken seriously by very many large corporations within IT. The London stock exchange runs Linux. The French Police force runs Linux and OOo. Can you get more serious? No, maybe they don't use Gimp there, but that is beside the point. Your argument was that OSS is not taken seriously, which it clearly is.
F-spot is just one of the more brain-dead decisions that Gnome has made. gThumb is *much* better in my opinion, due to it's speed and general usability. It does not have some of the cool features that F-spot has (I especially miss searching a date range, to which the dev told me to write my own glade solution! Not helpful dude. And the tag search is good too in F-spot), but gThumb is a lot faster at image processing than F-spot, probably due to it being based on an unnecessary layer. Ahem... Mono. And gThumb is not so far behind the curve that I would switch to F-spot for it's features.
It's a shame that Gnome decided to drop gThumb from the standard install. And it's the same brain dead logic Ubuntu is using now with dropping Gimp. It is the *only* real option for editing images on Linux and is one of the stars of free software, along with Firefox and OOo. Admittedly it is overkill for image touchup, like redeye etc, which most users will want maybe, but then again, even regular users install Paint hop Pro on Windows, and in that case, Gimp is the equivalent.
Seems to me that Ubuntu is focused on the space requirements of the LiveCD more than anything, and it was that thought that hit me when I read the headline.
Miguel seems to think that there are people within Microsoft who are steering the company towards better relationships with free software. Irrelevant, I say. The corporation, Microsoft, is, like any other corporation, interested in one thing. Profit, and shareholders. There may very well be many people within Microsoft who like open source and even free software, but they will always be overriden by what the legal entity that is Microsoft, wants. Period. Mono is the perfect example of how a corporate entity will behave in a market where profit cannot be made. The corporation will try its absolute best to figure out a way to make profit from the situation. It is after all in the interest of its own survival.
I dont get why manufacturers still haven't figured out how to produce a laptop that works at 3GHz with 10,000rpm discs and DDR3 1033MHz memory when connected to mains, that can be configured or simply automagically drop to 800MHz,4500rpm and lower memory speeds when on battery. Yes, I know speedstep exists, but doesn't seem like there are enough states, and discs that rotate slower on battery do not exist afaik. best of both worlds if they produce this if you ask me.
me too. I can't see *that* many people wanting to wear 3D glasses in the long run. Cool for the first two times then tiring. What happens when you get 10 friends to come over to watch the football, or the entire family wants to watch a film? 6 people wearing goggles? I don't think that will take off anytime soon. Im aware of the fact that 6 people sitting around a TV all silently watching a movie in their own little bubble could be seen as strange--in some families or cultures, terrestrial or otherwise--as 6 people sitting around a TV wearing goggles, but I think it's got to go through the social acceptance challenge first.
The problem with media players is that they always have some bug that is a showstopper for someone. I read a lot of reviews because im ni the market for a good media player and some have good network support but poor music support, whilst others have good movie support and bad at everything else. It IS better to build your own on Linux with MythTV or some such.
What's wrong with ATI? Depends on your point of view, but I suspect you may be comparing apples to oranges.
If you take nVidias own driver and compare to ATIs own driver then yes, I agree that nVidia wins hands down. But we all hate proprietary drivers don't we? So if you compare an nVidia open source driver to..oh wait, it's still in alpha? Ok, if you compare alpha nouvau or whatever it is called, that currently doesn't ship with most distros and doesn't have much 3D support, to the open source driver for ATI cards that are starting to get to the same level of feature completeness that Intel graphics cards enjoy, then ATI wins hands down.
I use an nVidia Go in my laptop and am forced to use the proprietary driver as the open source one just doesnt have the features I need to duel display etc and doesnt even have a decent 2D driver!! However, the system utilisation is much higher when using nVidias driver, you cannot trust them not to botch things on the next release, and if they do, it won't get fixed until they deem it a problem which may be a few releases down the road. Seriously, there are major drawbacks to using proprietary drivers in Linux.
Ive seen all the media players on the market and read loads of reviews and they all have some drawbacks that stop me buying. But I think that this is the way to go because, even though a computer running Linux would be the best media player compatibility wise (in my opinion), I do not want to have to buy a laptop solely for this purpose, as it is a waste of a usable PC. Also, you really need a HDMI out to connect to a TV as VGA doesnt do widescreen and svideo sucks in terms of quality and laptops with hdmi dont come in 13" flavours so you need a more expensive 15" or above laptop. Now, if the video HDMI out of the media player (popcornhour et al) is pretty decent then it's a much cheaper alternative to using a laptop/HTPC that could cost upwards of triple the price.
Can anyone recommend a media player such as tvix or popcornhour or any of the others that has outputs 1080p without hiccups, and supports movies and music just as well as each other (x264,mp4,divx,iso and ogg,aac,flac,mp3, plus good NFSv3 or NFSv4 support)?
Tvix seems to have a great interface but bad on connectivity (think they have issues with the networking). I already have a great home server with all my media so networking is very important to me...i dont want an internal disk in the media player. One last concern I have is that if I stream music through a media player to a AV receiver, does the AV reciever do the decoding or does the media player decode before forwarding to the receiver? If you have a great recevier, then you dont want the signal being messed with by a cheap media player before it reaches the receiver.
The Corporation by Joel Bakan. It goes into great depth about how the corporate system works, details all of the issues in this thread. I found it to be a real eye-opener, and will never trust the corporate model again.
I have a home server; not the "old-pc/laptop given rebirth as a 'server'" kind of server, but a "custom made quad core 4GB DDR3 gigabit 2x1TB WD RE3 RAID1 wrapped in LianLi" kind of server
I got tired of this multiple PC thing and how to manage backups so i built my server and intended to use a netbook/laptop over wifi and have full home dir on server and mount it as/home on laptop upon boot. I will eventually backup home dirs to seperate raid0 array on server and then out to DVD but have not yet got the extra discs for this.
Unfortunately, it's not yet happened. wifi sucks. cannot for the life of me figure out the problem with the transfer speeds but it is highly unreliable. I even considered wiring the house with gigabit. Secondly, NFSv4 is driving me nuts. Cannot get it working with the uids/gids. Mounting works but all uids are screwed up. Guess I need Kerberos, but this is non-trivial to setup and I didnt really want to administer a kerberos server. Thirdly, NetworkManager on Ubuntu only starts on login, despite the 'system-wide' setting, so any NFS mounts I put in fstab will not work: I have not looked into finding a solution for this yet.
But that is my best scenario in any case. Other than that, upload speed on my broadband is in theory 1,3MBit, and in practice 10k/s at the moment. ISP refuses to acknowledge they have an issue. It would be nicer to use the cloud, but I cannot imagine that any cloud service would be ultimately trustworthy. Maybe If there were cloud services that just acted as containers I could upload GPG'd files of my largest content to have it easily available, and have all small documents under a few MB on my server.
Welcome to the Church of Siesmology [names anonymized to protect the guilty] my son. We are your only true friends and will provide for your every need...for the special offer discount of ${chumps_life_savings}.
Whilst Wireless is the way forward, no doubt, it still cannot achieve decent transfer speeds compared to ethernet. I get 11MB/s over 100MBit Ethernet and 2MB/s over 802.11g WPA and 5-6MB/s over 802.11n @ 130MBit.
Lets not forget that 802.11n is in the second iteration of a draft and is *still* not finalised. Recent cards can achieve supposedly 270/300MBit speeds which might get you up to the same 11MB/s rates that 100MBit Ethernet currently provides.
But what about gigabit Ethernet? It has been around for years, cannot be that more expensive to stick in a laptop over fast Ethernet? It will go as fast as your hard drive can read/write data. The next laptop I buy has to have gigabit ethernet! When you're trying to transfer that 8GB dv file from one PC to a laptop over wireless at 2MB/s you realise why you need gigabit. Think this is unusual with 8GB? 10 years ago I was downloading demos at 5-20MB. Then they were 50-70MB and a few years later 100-xxx MB in size. Even if you dont video edit, file sizes in general become larger. In a few years, when bluray movies take off, and x264/mkv torrents become as widely available as xvids were 3 years ago people will need more bandwidth than even current wireless can provide.
And you dont get deadspots and channel conflict with ethernet.
As long as there is freely modifiable software (read GNU/Linux) and the internet, no-one will ever be able to stop 'illegal' file sharing. No matter what measures are taken to protect digital content, someone will always be able to hack it through reverse engineering and release the hack into the wild. bits and bytes will always be able to be copied in some way or another, as a perfect replica of the original. The *only* way I see this being stopped is if everyone on the planet were forced to use an OS and software and hardware that are completely locked down and ultra-controlled by a corporation or government: It's never going to happen so content producers need to accept this and move on to another business model.
Organisations like this are living in the pre-internet era where solid tangible goods could either not be copied or it required specialised manufacturing processes that the general public could not afford, to produce a replica of the original object.
Now most media (books music film etc) is code. That they think they can stop a piece of such content being copied is laughable, but they can maybe create business mechanisms to control production and distribution processes that in some way hinder pirating such that it makes it tedious for the public to copy the content. Or they could just create a business model where they seel content online for a reasonable price and people would probably pay for it if it was easier to get it at an official publisher than a pirate (think better download speeds at the publisher site).
...And I didn't even mention the fact that as batteries die after the first year or two, this will create a requirement to create new batteries exponentially.
I don't get the the current hype about alternative fuels. In Sweden where I live, they introduced E85 a couple of years ago...despite reports already being available about how ineffiecient it was compared to petrol and diesel and how third world countries would have to starve to supply consumers with the capacity needed if Ethanol replaced fossil fuels.
It's the same with batteries. There are a lot of precious materials that go into making a battery, whether it's Nicam or Lithium based, and if everyone on the planet runs their mobile/laptop/car/iPod on batteries, then we are quickly going to run out of those elements needed to make batteries, which is just as bad as running out of fossil fuels.
National Geographic did an excellent article a year or two back that analysed the efficiency of different fuels, both the efficiency of making the fuel and the efficiency of using the fuel (read: energy required to manufacture the fuel and miles per gallon respectively). They found that algea based, or bacterium based fuels offered the absolut best manufacturing efficiency, and one of those (cannot remember) offered a miles per gallon efficiency that blew petroleum and Ethanol based fuels out of the water.
That is the direction we need to go! efficiency is King: Ethanol and batteries are NOT the answer.
Why do I not see many references to Hydrogen cars? Honda Clarity is in production and in use in California according to Top Gear. It runs off liquid Hydrogen; the most abundant element in the universe, and we already have the infrastructure to supply it via normal petrol stations. It may not be the most efficient fuel in terms of miles/gallon, but it will not run out, is not a precious resource and we do not have to re-tool our entire planet (in the form of building new infrastructure: "filling stations" etc) to provide the fuel to consumers.
Whats new here? They could test for Alzheimers 10 years ago. Seems like Sweden is at the forefront of Alzheimers research though. There is a very nice man called Christer who runs the Alzheimers fÃrening (organisation) in Sweden who is *very* active in driving recognition of the disease. I can imagine that a good reason for testing early is to rule out other things. My wifes mother dies of the disease 6 years ago, her uncle now has it, and her other uncle has another dementia, though not Alzzheimers. Talk about running in the family. If my wife starts getting aggressive long-term, then it would be "better" to know if it's Alzheimers, and not depression, or any other disease/reason. At least we could begin with treatment. On another note, I always get depressed when I read about new research...Christer was convinced ten years ago that there would be a cure in ten years.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that if you have a pretty standard video files like mpegs or avi's or more or less anything created by Windows then it works fine with video. Things start getting quite flaky when you to play that theora/aac file you stuffed in a matroska container, but it doesn't even need to be so non-standard: I tried playing an x264/aac contained in mkv where I had encoded the rawdv using a Quicktime profile in Mencoder. It just refused to play it. They may say they support Matroska on their packaging, but you've got to have the right combination of av codec and container for it to work.
Besides that, the music playing function was truly abyssmal, and from what I have recently heard, has not improved in the 8 months since I last tested a Popcorn Hour A-110. It's really a "video" player. A true "media" player would handle video, music and photos equally well, which Popcorn Hour really does not. But if it works for your needs then that's great, but there are no Ultimate media players on the market as of right now.
I get tired of people constantly evading or failing to compare BOTH OSS drivers and proprietary drivers!
"ATI graphics driver sucks", "Nvidia rules"
PROPRIETARY
-----------
Nvidia rules
ATI sucks
OPEN SOURCE
------------
Nvidia sucks
ATI rules
Intel Excellent, shame about underpowered hardware
Before you all go slagging off ATI, just remember that there is no longer any need to use their proprietary driver! As the OSS driver is really good. Intel has a great open source driver. The laggard is nvidia because you can only use their own proprietary driver and it uses 10% cpu even wen idling compared to oss nv driver. We can also vote with our wallets and buy ATI cards and use the oss driver. If performance is absolutely paramount, and 2fps is a deal maker or breaker, then you probably need nvidia with their driver, but for desktop use/casual to semi-serious gaming, ati has it all.
I tried out Popcorn hour: lacked support for some formats that I had a lot of, interface sucked in some areas.
I have an Xbox360: doesn't support many formats.
My dad has a PS3: doesn't support many open source formats.
Consoles generally have some interface/usability issues.
Consumer Media players generally don't support everything you need and have bad interfaces.
I've come to the conclusion that the only solution is a real computer plugged into your sound system and TV. Wireless to access your router, have a USB disk or preferably a home server with central storage like I have. Then you can run Linux on it and have support for any format on the planet, run XBMC if you want a pretty interface.
The only problem is, that you really want a small box, like an Eeebox or Mac Mini or some such, but they are not exactly cheap, even if they are relatively cheap compared to normal desktops. If you have 3 TVs in the house it means getting 3 Eeeboxes, and the cost adds up! Not forgetting the administration 'cost' of patching the OS on all your boxes. If you only have one main TV it's not really an issue and having a computer makes things quite future proof software wise.
Ideally, I would like a 'broadcast' solution with one PC broadcasting to a small inexpensive wireless receiver plugged into each TV.
No matter how fast your CPU is, it's never enough. Until my CPU can transcode a 2hr video from any format to any other in less than 5 minutes, then it won't be enough.
wow. cool test! Working as an Oracle DBA managing thousands of instances, I know that even if our level 0 backups exist, all it takes is one missing archive log backup to freak us all out if we have to do a restore. We log all backups and monitor all backup logs for errors, and create incident reports automatically if we get an error. I think we have a pretty good system, but it's never going to be fool proof. One thing we don't currently do is validate the backups on the VTL. Even if the team you tested had processes in place for full monitoring of all backups and handled errors in a timely fashion, nothing is going to help them if someone maliciously deletes the backups from tape.
:)
In effect, you weren't testing their ability to perform their job and complete a database restore: you were simply pointing out the fact that they did not have a process in place to validate backups on VTL, which does not really test them as a team. If they had that process, then your evil plan would have failed
Taking backups, monitoring logs, and responding to backup failures is a *time consuming* job, even with the best of systems. There comes a point where it is not cost effective to account for every conceivable failure. I'm not saying that validating backups is pointless to implement, but I suspect it is even more time consuming than checking backup logs.
Also, performing restore tests is not feasable nor cost effective when managing many databases. Sure, we do restores of production systems every now and again, and every several months, we might just do a test to freshen us up a bit, but then it's with a test database in-house, not a copy of a production DB from backups. We just use these times to test our restore procedures. To actively test restore procedures on a production DB to see if the backups are ok is only every done if a customer requests it (aka: we get paid to do the test)
simply your world view of how OSS is perceived, but not neccesarily correct. From my point of view, it is already taken seriously by very many large corporations within IT. The London stock exchange runs Linux. The French Police force runs Linux and OOo. Can you get more serious? No, maybe they don't use Gimp there, but that is beside the point. Your argument was that OSS is not taken seriously, which it clearly is.
F-spot is just one of the more brain-dead decisions that Gnome has made. gThumb is *much* better in my opinion, due to it's speed and general usability. It does not have some of the cool features that F-spot has (I especially miss searching a date range, to which the dev told me to write my own glade solution! Not helpful dude. And the tag search is good too in F-spot), but gThumb is a lot faster at image processing than F-spot, probably due to it being based on an unnecessary layer. Ahem... Mono. And gThumb is not so far behind the curve that I would switch to F-spot for it's features.
It's a shame that Gnome decided to drop gThumb from the standard install. And it's the same brain dead logic Ubuntu is using now with dropping Gimp. It is the *only* real option for editing images on Linux and is one of the stars of free software, along with Firefox and OOo. Admittedly it is overkill for image touchup, like redeye etc, which most users will want maybe, but then again, even regular users install Paint hop Pro on Windows, and in that case, Gimp is the equivalent.
Seems to me that Ubuntu is focused on the space requirements of the LiveCD more than anything, and it was that thought that hit me when I read the headline.
Who wants to be a slave to The Man and "conform" to marketing-speak naming conventions?
:) is one of the things that gives character.
Free Naming
Im not a hippy but I think it's sad that people can't get past a name. Are you so superficial? Is management?
Miguel seems to think that there are people within Microsoft who are steering the company towards better relationships with free software. Irrelevant, I say. The corporation, Microsoft, is, like any other corporation, interested in one thing. Profit, and shareholders. There may very well be many people within Microsoft who like open source and even free software, but they will always be overriden by what the legal entity that is Microsoft, wants. Period. Mono is the perfect example of how a corporate entity will behave in a market where profit cannot be made. The corporation will try its absolute best to figure out a way to make profit from the situation. It is after all in the interest of its own survival.
I dont get why manufacturers still haven't figured out how to produce a laptop that works at 3GHz with 10,000rpm discs and DDR3 1033MHz memory when connected to mains, that can be configured or simply automagically drop to 800MHz,4500rpm and lower memory speeds when on battery. Yes, I know speedstep exists, but doesn't seem like there are enough states, and discs that rotate slower on battery do not exist afaik. best of both worlds if they produce this if you ask me.
and that included the time taken to download the changes from the repository over your 2Mbit broadband line during peak hours did it?
me too. I can't see *that* many people wanting to wear 3D glasses in the long run. Cool for the first two times then tiring. What happens when you get 10 friends to come over to watch the football, or the entire family wants to watch a film? 6 people wearing goggles? I don't think that will take off anytime soon. Im aware of the fact that 6 people sitting around a TV all silently watching a movie in their own little bubble could be seen as strange--in some families or cultures, terrestrial or otherwise--as 6 people sitting around a TV wearing goggles, but I think it's got to go through the social acceptance challenge first.
The problem with media players is that they always have some bug that is a showstopper for someone. I read a lot of reviews because im ni the market for a good media player and some have good network support but poor music support, whilst others have good movie support and bad at everything else. It IS better to build your own on Linux with MythTV or some such.
What's wrong with ATI? Depends on your point of view, but I suspect you may be comparing apples to oranges.
If you take nVidias own driver and compare to ATIs own driver then yes, I agree that nVidia wins hands down. But we all hate proprietary drivers don't we? So if you compare an nVidia open source driver to..oh wait, it's still in alpha? Ok, if you compare alpha nouvau or whatever it is called, that currently doesn't ship with most distros and doesn't have much 3D support, to the open source driver for ATI cards that are starting to get to the same level of feature completeness that Intel graphics cards enjoy, then ATI wins hands down.
I use an nVidia Go in my laptop and am forced to use the proprietary driver as the open source one just doesnt have the features I need to duel display etc and doesnt even have a decent 2D driver!! However, the system utilisation is much higher when using nVidias driver, you cannot trust them not to botch things on the next release, and if they do, it won't get fixed until they deem it a problem which may be a few releases down the road. Seriously, there are major drawbacks to using proprietary drivers in Linux.
Ive seen all the media players on the market and read loads of reviews and they all have some drawbacks that stop me buying. But I think that this is the way to go because, even though a computer running Linux would be the best media player compatibility wise (in my opinion), I do not want to have to buy a laptop solely for this purpose, as it is a waste of a usable PC. Also, you really need a HDMI out to connect to a TV as VGA doesnt do widescreen and svideo sucks in terms of quality and laptops with hdmi dont come in 13" flavours so you need a more expensive 15" or above laptop. Now, if the video HDMI out of the media player (popcornhour et al) is pretty decent then it's a much cheaper alternative to using a laptop/HTPC that could cost upwards of triple the price.
Can anyone recommend a media player such as tvix or popcornhour or any of the others that has outputs 1080p without hiccups, and supports movies and music just as well as each other (x264,mp4,divx,iso and ogg,aac,flac,mp3, plus good NFSv3 or NFSv4 support)?
Tvix seems to have a great interface but bad on connectivity (think they have issues with the networking). I already have a great home server with all my media so networking is very important to me...i dont want an internal disk in the media player. One last concern I have is that if I stream music through a media player to a AV receiver, does the AV reciever do the decoding or does the media player decode before forwarding to the receiver? If you have a great recevier, then you dont want the signal being messed with by a cheap media player before it reaches the receiver.
and since when was Cnet impartial? As far as I can tell, they have always written pro-microsoft articles and cannot be trusted.
The Corporation by Joel Bakan. It goes into great depth about how the corporate system works, details all of the issues in this thread. I found it to be a real eye-opener, and will never trust the corporate model again.
I have a home server; not the "old-pc/laptop given rebirth as a 'server'" kind of server, but a "custom made quad core 4GB DDR3 gigabit 2x1TB WD RE3 RAID1 wrapped in LianLi" kind of server
/home on laptop upon boot. I will eventually backup home dirs to seperate raid0 array on server and then out to DVD but have not yet got the extra discs for this.
I got tired of this multiple PC thing and how to manage backups so i built my server and intended to use a netbook/laptop over wifi and have full home dir on server and mount it as
Unfortunately, it's not yet happened. wifi sucks. cannot for the life of me figure out the problem with the transfer speeds but it is highly unreliable. I even considered wiring the house with gigabit. Secondly, NFSv4 is driving me nuts. Cannot get it working with the uids/gids. Mounting works but all uids are screwed up. Guess I need Kerberos, but this is non-trivial to setup and I didnt really want to administer a kerberos server. Thirdly, NetworkManager on Ubuntu only starts on login, despite the 'system-wide' setting, so any NFS mounts I put in fstab will not work: I have not looked into finding a solution for this yet.
But that is my best scenario in any case. Other than that, upload speed on my broadband is in theory 1,3MBit, and in practice 10k/s at the moment. ISP refuses to acknowledge they have an issue. It would be nicer to use the cloud, but I cannot imagine that any cloud service would be ultimately trustworthy. Maybe If there were cloud services that just acted as containers I could upload GPG'd files of my largest content to have it easily available, and have all small documents under a few MB on my server.
Welcome to the Church of Siesmology [names anonymized to protect the guilty] my son. We are your only true friends and will provide for your every need...for the special offer discount of ${chumps_life_savings}.
"Ethernet is dying in the laptop world too"?
I beg to differ.
Whilst Wireless is the way forward, no doubt, it still cannot achieve decent transfer speeds compared to ethernet. I get 11MB/s over 100MBit Ethernet and 2MB/s over 802.11g WPA and 5-6MB/s over 802.11n @ 130MBit.
Lets not forget that 802.11n is in the second iteration of a draft and is *still* not finalised. Recent cards can achieve supposedly 270/300MBit speeds which might get you up to the same 11MB/s rates that 100MBit Ethernet currently provides.
But what about gigabit Ethernet? It has been around for years, cannot be that more expensive to stick in a laptop over fast Ethernet? It will go as fast as your hard drive can read/write data. The next laptop I buy has to have gigabit ethernet! When you're trying to transfer that 8GB dv file from one PC to a laptop over wireless at 2MB/s you realise why you need gigabit. Think this is unusual with 8GB? 10 years ago I was downloading demos at 5-20MB. Then they were 50-70MB and a few years later 100-xxx MB in size. Even if you dont video edit, file sizes in general become larger. In a few years, when bluray movies take off, and x264/mkv torrents become as widely available as xvids were 3 years ago people will need more bandwidth than even current wireless can provide.
And you dont get deadspots and channel conflict with ethernet.
Did you read Risk too? good book.
As long as there is freely modifiable software (read GNU/Linux) and the internet, no-one will ever be able to stop 'illegal' file sharing. No matter what measures are taken to protect digital content, someone will always be able to hack it through reverse engineering and release the hack into the wild. bits and bytes will always be able to be copied in some way or another, as a perfect replica of the original. The *only* way I see this being stopped is if everyone on the planet were forced to use an OS and software and hardware that are completely locked down and ultra-controlled by a corporation or government: It's never going to happen so content producers need to accept this and move on to another business model.
Organisations like this are living in the pre-internet era where solid tangible goods could either not be copied or it required specialised manufacturing processes that the general public could not afford, to produce a replica of the original object.
Now most media (books music film etc) is code. That they think they can stop a piece of such content being copied is laughable, but they can maybe create business mechanisms to control production and distribution processes that in some way hinder pirating such that it makes it tedious for the public to copy the content. Or they could just create a business model where they seel content online for a reasonable price and people would probably pay for it if it was easier to get it at an official publisher than a pirate (think better download speeds at the publisher site).
...And I didn't even mention the fact that as batteries die after the first year or two, this will create a requirement to create new batteries exponentially.
I don't get the the current hype about alternative fuels. In Sweden where I live, they introduced E85 a couple of years ago...despite reports already being available about how ineffiecient it was compared to petrol and diesel and how third world countries would have to starve to supply consumers with the capacity needed if Ethanol replaced fossil fuels.
It's the same with batteries. There are a lot of precious materials that go into making a battery, whether it's Nicam or Lithium based, and if everyone on the planet runs their mobile/laptop/car/iPod on batteries, then we are quickly going to run out of those elements needed to make batteries, which is just as bad as running out of fossil fuels.
National Geographic did an excellent article a year or two back that analysed the efficiency of different fuels, both the efficiency of making the fuel and the efficiency of using the fuel (read: energy required to manufacture the fuel and miles per gallon respectively). They found that algea based, or bacterium based fuels offered the absolut best manufacturing efficiency, and one of those (cannot remember) offered a miles per gallon efficiency that blew petroleum and Ethanol based fuels out of the water.
That is the direction we need to go! efficiency is King: Ethanol and batteries are NOT the answer.
Why do I not see many references to Hydrogen cars? Honda Clarity is in production and in use in California according to Top Gear. It runs off liquid Hydrogen; the most abundant element in the universe, and we already have the infrastructure to supply it via normal petrol stations. It may not be the most efficient fuel in terms of miles/gallon, but it will not run out, is not a precious resource and we do not have to re-tool our entire planet (in the form of building new infrastructure: "filling stations" etc) to provide the fuel to consumers.
Whats new here? They could test for Alzheimers 10 years ago. Seems like Sweden is at the forefront of Alzheimers research though. There is a very nice man called Christer who runs the Alzheimers fÃrening (organisation) in Sweden who is *very* active in driving recognition of the disease. I can imagine that a good reason for testing early is to rule out other things. My wifes mother dies of the disease 6 years ago, her uncle now has it, and her other uncle has another dementia, though not Alzzheimers. Talk about running in the family. If my wife starts getting aggressive long-term, then it would be "better" to know if it's Alzheimers, and not depression, or any other disease/reason. At least we could begin with treatment. On another note, I always get depressed when I read about new research...Christer was convinced ten years ago that there would be a cure in ten years.