If it weren't for the evils of DRM, you could do your image-processing on commodity hardware for bugger all cost over however long it took to process the honking great output file.
Pah! I don't hold with these new-fangled h264 codecs(so haven't tried), but if you choose the right player (VLC FTW) a PII-600 can play divx encoded at DVDish res (720 x 480-or-whatever-it-is). Granted, you can't do much else at the same time. Small and pretty are bypassed if you hide it somewhere else, and that takes care of quiet, too. Now if only i can think of a way to keep those DAMNED kids OFF my lawn.
I wanted to watch avi files on my tv, so I thought 'Hang the expense, I shall buy a media centre pc'. Then I thought 'Hang the expense of a media centre pc', stuck an agp card with tv-out in an old PII-600 box, stuck the box in the cellar where i can't hear the fans whirring, wired it through the floorboards to the tv with a £10 s-video-to-scart cable from ASDA-Walmart, got a wireless mouse and keyboard for £25 and now i can net the intersurf and watch old Buster Keaton films at 800 x 600 and all for cheapness. The keyboard and mouse can be tidied away when not in use.:-)
Interesting argument going on here. I prefer to go to the supermarket as the 'deliver-to-your-door' service involves some resentful minimum wage kid picking the goods nearest expiry date and substitution of more expensive brands because your choice is 'out of stock'. My goals (minimise costs over long term) are at odds with those of the shopkeeper (pry as much money out of customers as possible), I am unlikely to achieve them by paying a premium to the store for their lackeys to choose things for me.
I often get mad at red traffic lights as 'the man' has mounted cameras on them so that he can fine me and endorse my driving license if i run the red light even though there is no cross traffic and/or the sensors in the road cannot detect my vehicle (hence i have to wait until another vehicle queues up behind me that is big enough to trigger the traffic lights to change to green).
Efficiency in heating matters when you are comparing apples and oranges.
For me, it is cheaper to heat a house using a gas powered heater than a load of PCs, although gas boilers won't run DOOM lan games while they are heating.
.. or 'miser' as other people put it, I hate to throw away working computers. Instead, I use them as file servers in the cellar (where i can't hear the fans whirring). Even the humble PII has better performance and more simultaneous connections than a NAS enclosure ( or at least the cheap NAS enclosures I have bought ) and lasts a lot longer too.
My formula for home fileserving : cram an old PC with whatever IDE drives you have to hand and run FreeNAS on it, it will be plenty fast enough for 100megabit lan (which is fast enough for me). Whenever a drive fails, throw it away and put in whatever other (usually much bigger) hard drive is kicking around. When the motherboard fails, rescue the disks and build them into another fileserver.
RAID? why bother? Build another fileserver and keep your copies on that.
But what about the noise? Mine are in the cellar, only the spiders and woodworm can hear them.
Ah, but what about the power consumption? Pah! The heat slightly warms the house, reducing the energy used by the (admittedly more efficient) heating system, and is utterly dwarfed by the power consumption of other crap in the house. Also, a headless PII box uses much less power than you might think. Measure it.
Anyhoo, _my_ fileservers cost nothing but electicity, hold over a Terabyte and have uptimes of several months, so there:P
I have had 2 (admittedly cheap-assed) NAS enclosures that died within 6 months of 24-hour operation (the ide drives were fine, just the control card packed in) and a Netgear NAS that got noisy after a couple of months but is still whining away (although it needs power cycling every couple of months). The PII-350 desktop machine, which was old even before it got pressed into service as a server, worked for over 4 years till the psu went pop. The PC could support more simultaneous connections than the NAS enclosures, and faster too. For me today: Freenas FTW.
Governments are clueless about most things. They don't need to worry about how or if things actually work, because as the ruling elite they can fix any problems that directly affect them with a phone call to one of their friends. For example, if John Q Public needs a visa or a passport there are all sorts of hurdles to overcome, if a minister wants something similar for an employee they just ask a buddy in the relevant department to sort it out. If the 'entire government database of everything' got leaked and posted on teh intarwebs, guess which group would have new national id/banking/passport information issued first?
Hmm.. so you reckon there aren't many people on the corporate ladder that are hungry for promotion? Replace 'fired' with 'killed by angry customer'. If a CEO was killed by an angry customer, how much effect would it have on the company's earnings? How long before 'Sorry, but Mr X is in a meeting right now' is replaced by 'Sorry, but Mr Y is in a meeting right now'?
Management is as interchangeable as shop-floor staff, but pay and conditions for upper management is decided upon by upper management.
I don't get the choice of shooting the bad guy, as i live in the UK and we don't need guns unless we are employed to protect important people. Here, if you call the police because of an armed intruder, the cops just surround your property and sit outside till you are dead. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/4740688.stm
'the best and brightest were encouraged to transfer from disparate area to disparate area, regardless of how little competence they actually had in the new area.'
Sounds like our(UK) government. Except for the 'best and brightest' part. And you could replace 'the new' with 'any'.
Thanks, Marketing Guy. What percentage of journalists do you think actually _are_ professional enough to 'read and/or verify things before posting them'? 0.0001%? Less? Maybe it was just you?
Other newsflashes: Senior Management has a different definition of 'work' when it applies to themselves, ie scoffing expense-account food while chatting = work, forwarding emails from a hotel room = work.
Why the size problem? The battery of a notebook or phone is only a small part of the total volume and weight of the device. I would be overjoyed if they simply quadrupled the size of the (existing technology)battery and gave me 4 times the capacity.
Is that how it goes in the states? UK Gov : We are nice and want to sort everything out for you. People : Hey, the media say you are nice! You got my vote. UK Gov : Hurrah! People : Hey, everything is still crap. UK gov : Look at picture of us being concerned whilst we line our own pockets. People : Things aren't improving. UK Gov : We will pay our friends a load of tax money to look concerned and talk on tv about the high level of concern. People : Nobody is actually doing anything constructive. UK gov : STFU! Look, a circus! And bread! People : Ooooh! Cool!
The salvation of the music industry is simple: go back to vinyl. All the nerdy peer to peer texchnology in the world won't stop the fact that the music needs to be digitised first, and every audiophile will tell you that any digitisation utterly ruins the quality. QED
Slashdot Mirror
If it weren't for the evils of DRM, you could do your image-processing on commodity hardware for bugger all cost over however long it took to process the honking great output file.
I don't like the idea of 'culling desirable programming from all the chaff'. Surely one is just left with the chaff?
Pah! I don't hold with these new-fangled h264 codecs(so haven't tried), but if you choose the right player (VLC FTW) a PII-600 can play divx encoded at DVDish res (720 x 480-or-whatever-it-is). Granted, you can't do much else at the same time. Small and pretty are bypassed if you hide it somewhere else, and that takes care of quiet, too. Now if only i can think of a way to keep those DAMNED kids OFF my lawn.
I wanted to watch avi files on my tv, so I thought 'Hang the expense, I shall buy a media centre pc'. Then I thought 'Hang the expense of a media centre pc', stuck an agp card with tv-out in an old PII-600 box, stuck the box in the cellar where i can't hear the fans whirring, wired it through the floorboards to the tv with a £10 s-video-to-scart cable from ASDA-Walmart, got a wireless mouse and keyboard for £25 and now i can net the intersurf and watch old Buster Keaton films at 800 x 600 and all for cheapness. The keyboard and mouse can be tidied away when not in use. :-)
Interesting argument going on here.
I prefer to go to the supermarket as the 'deliver-to-your-door' service involves some resentful minimum wage kid picking the goods nearest expiry date and substitution of more expensive brands because your choice is 'out of stock'.
My goals (minimise costs over long term) are at odds with those of the shopkeeper (pry as much money out of customers as possible), I am unlikely to achieve them by paying a premium to the store for their lackeys to choose things for me.
I often get mad at red traffic lights as 'the man' has mounted cameras on them so that he can fine me and endorse my driving license if i run the red light even though there is no cross traffic and/or the sensors in the road cannot detect my vehicle (hence i have to wait until another vehicle queues up behind me that is big enough to trigger the traffic lights to change to green).
Efficiency in heating matters when you are comparing apples and oranges.
For me, it is cheaper to heat a house using a gas powered heater than a load of PCs, although gas boilers won't run DOOM lan games while they are heating.
Microsoft have pushed OS/2 out of the ATM market by building some security features into the embedded xp to appeal to ATM manufacturers.
.. or 'miser' as other people put it, I hate to throw away working computers. Instead, I use them as file servers in the cellar (where i can't hear the fans whirring).
:P
Even the humble PII has better performance and more simultaneous connections than a NAS enclosure ( or at least the cheap NAS enclosures I have bought ) and lasts a lot longer too.
My formula for home fileserving : cram an old PC with whatever IDE drives you have to hand and run FreeNAS on it, it will be plenty fast enough for 100megabit lan (which is fast enough for me). Whenever a drive fails, throw it away and put in whatever other (usually much bigger) hard drive is kicking around. When the motherboard fails, rescue the disks and build them into another fileserver.
RAID? why bother? Build another fileserver and keep your copies on that.
But what about the noise? Mine are in the cellar, only the spiders and woodworm can hear them.
Ah, but what about the power consumption? Pah! The heat slightly warms the house, reducing the energy used by the (admittedly more efficient) heating system, and is utterly dwarfed by the power consumption of other crap in the house. Also, a headless PII box uses much less power than you might think. Measure it.
Anyhoo, _my_ fileservers cost nothing but electicity, hold over a Terabyte and have uptimes of several months, so there
I have had 2 (admittedly cheap-assed) NAS enclosures that died within 6 months of 24-hour operation (the ide drives were fine, just the control card packed in) and a Netgear NAS that got noisy after a couple of months but is still whining away (although it needs power cycling every couple of months). The PII-350 desktop machine, which was old even before it got pressed into service as a server, worked for over 4 years till the psu went pop. The PC could support more simultaneous connections than the NAS enclosures, and faster too. For me today: Freenas FTW.
Governments are clueless about most things. They don't need to worry about how or if things actually work, because as the ruling elite they can fix any problems that directly affect them with a phone call to one of their friends.
For example, if John Q Public needs a visa or a passport there are all sorts of hurdles to overcome, if a minister wants something similar for an employee they just ask a buddy in the relevant department to sort it out.
If the 'entire government database of everything' got leaked and posted on teh intarwebs, guess which group would have new national id/banking/passport information issued first?
Hmm.. so you reckon there aren't many people on the corporate ladder that are hungry for promotion?
Replace 'fired' with 'killed by angry customer'. If a CEO was killed by an angry customer, how much effect would it have on the company's earnings? How long before 'Sorry, but Mr X is in a meeting right now' is replaced by 'Sorry, but Mr Y is in a meeting right now'?
Management is as interchangeable as shop-floor staff, but pay and conditions for upper management is decided upon by upper management.
WTF? I thought that the reason windows is so bloated and crappy was 'because it has to maintain backwards compatibility' ?
If a Nazi government says it is ok to kill jews, should you go along with it?
Answers to nurembergtrials@thepast.com
I don't get the choice of shooting the bad guy, as i live in the UK and we don't need guns unless we are employed to protect important people.
Here, if you call the police because of an armed intruder, the cops just surround your property and sit outside till you are dead.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/4740688.stm
'the best and brightest were encouraged to transfer from disparate area to disparate area, regardless of how little competence they actually had in the new area.'
Sounds like our(UK) government. Except for the 'best and brightest' part. And you could replace 'the new' with 'any'.
"manager types who are going to be _setting_ schedules which are often impossible to achieve." ?
Thanks, Marketing Guy. What percentage of journalists do you think actually _are_ professional enough to 'read and/or verify things before posting them'? 0.0001%? Less? Maybe it was just you?
Other newsflashes:
Senior Management has a different definition of 'work' when it applies to themselves, ie scoffing expense-account food while chatting = work, forwarding emails from a hotel room = work.
Lower echelon drones work longer than 9-5.
Why the size problem?
The battery of a notebook or phone is only a small part of the total volume and weight of the device. I would be overjoyed if they simply quadrupled the size of the (existing technology)battery and gave me 4 times the capacity.
I have seen loads of pictures of dinosaurs and there is often a volcano erupting in the background. The dinosaurs couldn't care less.
Is that how it goes in the states?
UK Gov : We are nice and want to sort everything out for you.
People : Hey, the media say you are nice! You got my vote.
UK Gov : Hurrah!
People : Hey, everything is still crap.
UK gov : Look at picture of us being concerned whilst we line our own pockets.
People : Things aren't improving.
UK Gov : We will pay our friends a load of tax money to look concerned and talk on tv about the high level of concern.
People : Nobody is actually doing anything constructive.
UK gov : STFU! Look, a circus! And bread!
People : Ooooh! Cool!
Hmm.... I think it is more 'if you have a bulletproof vest, but are persuaded not to bother wearing it...'
What? Police and politicians are bound by the same traffic laws as the plebs? Since when?
The salvation of the music industry is simple: go back to vinyl. All the nerdy peer to peer texchnology in the world won't stop the fact that the music needs to be digitised first, and every audiophile will tell you that any digitisation utterly ruins the quality.
QED