Lyrics. Discography. Buy album. Information Society's album "Peace & Love Inc." has a track "300bps 8,N,1" which is designed to be played into a modem. Original release date was October 1992, and I'm not sure if it was available on Vinyl or only on CD.
The Celestrak website didn't do a very good job of explaining what data it has, but it doesn't sound like it's all that big. The main data format seems to be a two-line record, so maybe 200 bytes, and I don't know how many satellites or pieces of space junk they're tracking, but it's probably on the order of 10K-100K of them. So that's probably 2-20MB of data, which you should be able to serve handily with any spare doorstop Pentium200 machine even if it's updated hourly. If it's 20MB, just put the sucker up on BitTorrent, and if it's 2MB, you might not even bother with that, or else put it up on your favorite P2P network.
Back before the US government had Terrorists to scare us with, there were COMMIES! COMMIES UNDER THE BEDS! Commies Plotting to corrupt our Precious Bodily Fluids! Ohhhh, Nooooooo!!! And instead of Weapons of Mass Destruction, they had NU-CU-Lur Bombs!
Anyway, the Feds had a bunch of export control laws to prevent Commies from getting Big Computers that they could use to design better Nukes, as well as laws to prevent Commmies (and Americans) from getting crypto.
Those of us who were on Usenet 20 years ago remember the first Kremvax announcement (after the Russians had gotten a couple of Vaxes.)
The Cray-1 Supercomputer was about the speed of the Pentium 133 doorstop I'm typing on right now (while my regular PC is getting fixed.)
The Cray-2 supercomputer was pretty similar to some of the formerly-high-end graphics cards you can get for about $50 these days.
The Sony Playstation 2, when it was about to out, violated the Supercomputer export control rules, which is why they were suddenly bumped up a couple of times.
Gimongous Privacy-Invading Database Computers of the 1980s had less storage than that iPod in your pocket, and the user interfaces were less friendly.
Fundamentally, computers do keep getting faster, but they've been Fast Enough for Government Work for a long time - Moore's Law says that just about anything you can buy at WalMart is faster than a high-end niche-market governments-and-big-corporations computer of a decade ago. The ideal computer for terrorism isn't some supercomputer - it's three pounds of wetware that's really pissed off. The way to deal with it is not to clamp down on exports of technology or circle the wagons into a laager to keep the enemy hordes out or declare anybody with interesting oil reserves to be a Rogue State - it's to stop acting like an Evil Empire and pissing people off by supporting oppressivegovernmentsaround the world.
If you can use IAX2 trunking, then yes, you can probably fit that many if you want. That does require you to be running all the calls to the same place, or at least to a single place that does fan-out; if you're calling N different places it won't work, because the big problem is the overhead involved with fat IP/UDP/RTP headers on a small voice sample.
The most popular voice compression algorithms these days use 8kbps for the voice codec itself, but that's a large number of small packets; vanilla IP headers typically bump that up to 23-36kbps per call. You can avoid this in a couple of ways, either by doing header compression which gets you into the 11-13kbps range, or by using voice native over layer 2 (frame or ATM) without the IP, or by packing voice bits from multiple calls into a single packet (arbitrarily low overhead if you've got lots of calls on the same route.)
Your point that you'll probably already be on satellite is right on. People like to quote 150ms numbers about the maximum latency they'll accept, forgetting that the world's fairly far around, and while VOIP's a little bit sensitive to latency and adds a small amount of delay, the big delays are just unavoidable physics and the human ear's willingness to work around it. As long as you've got echo suppression / cancellation, the excess latency is a bit annoying but nothing killer.
So back in the mumblety-late-60s, a buddy of mine was working communications at Offutt AFB, home of the Looking Glass weapons-of-really-mass-destruction flying control center. The Looking Glass bird had a small PBX on board to connect users to each other and to the rdio uplinks from the ground. You can get to that PBX by dialing the right phone numbers on the base PBX. The military had a private worldwide phone system called AUTOVON that had interesting features like call priority and preemption.
One day somebody on the bird saw two red lights on on the PBX, but didn't see anybody talking on the phone, and needless to say this was.... disturbing.... So they went to track it down - some grunt had gotten a 16-button Autovon phone (with the extra precedence TouchTones) and had dialed the base PBX, dialed up to the bird's PBX, dialed across it to an outgoing line back to the ground, which needless to say had permission to call anywhere in the world at any priority it wanted, and was yakking with his buddies in Guam (normally something a grunt didn't have authorization to use routine scarce resources for, much less tandem-routing through Looking Glass. He was very busted.)
The Offutt PBX also had an FX line to somewhere a few hundred miles away like Des Moines - if Bad Things were happening in Omaha, you could access it remotely, and folks on the bird could use it to call out and find if people were Not Dead Yet.
The folks at the aquarium in San Francisco's Pier 39 said that octopuses usually live about 3-4 years, but that they're usually only big enough to catch after they're about 3 years old, so they don't last long once they get them. (They usually get theirs from local fishermen.) That aquarium is basically an underwater Habitrail for people to walk through, surrounded by water tanks, and when they did have an octopus a couple of years ago, it was pretty cool to watch.
Back when Mozilla was first released, one part of the process was apparently to clean up the vulgar comments in the source code. Somebody distributed a handout at the Mozila Release Party with most of the deleted lines.
Slashdot not only fails to render correctly with Firefox, it also fails with Mozilla. I think I've even had problems under IE, though I hardly ever use that. It's bad HTML-like code that does it.
Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Winnipeg have lots of detail. Alberta and Saskatchewan don't have much detail - you can't zoom in on Edmonton, for instance. Chicoutimi, QC has big streets but not small street names - it's more detail than Edmonton but less than Toronto. Kamloops BC is low-detail like Edmonton, but Nanaimo BC is street-level.
Driving directions don't work very well out in the prairies either - I could get directions from Calgary to Edmonton, and Calgary to Toronto, but not Edmonton to Toronto.
It's got lots of street detail in Toronto, but much less detail about Edmonton or Calgary, and far less detail about Inuvik or Tuktoyaktuk NT. Zooming in on Toronto gets you streets; zooming in on Edmonton either gets you blank white space (Mozilla) or panels with dead-link icons (IE). Also, it seems to be flaky about whether you tell it "toronto" or "Toronto ON" or "Toronto on" - not sure if that was capitalization or different choices or servers.
It doesn't know how to give driving directions from Edmonton to Toronto - but it does know Edmonton to Calgary and Calgary to Toronto, which is just weird.
I'm actually surprised that all they're making from spammers is $5M, but if the direct amounts are that small, great. But how much does that spam itself cost them? It increases the load on their mail servers, an costs a lot of money in the spam filtering they need to do for their customers and for their company's internal email systems, sysadmin time, and lawyer time. While spam is a huge fraction of email traffic, it's not a huge fraction of total bits transmitted on a typical big ISP's network, because web surfing is a lot bigger (and Bittorrent is about 35%, and other P2P file-sharing is pretty bit too.) But they probably are making some extra money from customers buying bigger pipes to carry the spam they're receiving.
One difficulty with being a really big ISP is that you don't have simple centralized decisionmaking. You have a whole lot of sales people who get commissions for selling services to different geographical territories and market-segments, and your sales person who sells to the under-$100K/year market in Northern Louisiana is typically going to sell people T1s first and *then* discover that they're spammers rather than the other way around - at most he's going to have done a credit report on the customer to decide if they can pay their bills. Sure, there are contracts that say that customers aren't allowed to spam, but it takes a while to figure that out, especially if the customer does business as Billy-Bob's Bait Shop rather than Spammers-R-Us.
The objective of Google's Pagerank algorithms is to find the pages that are most likely to be interesting to human readers and put them first. The best way to make a page come up first is to write something that's actually interesting to humans and make sure Google can find it.
SEOs are in the business of taking pages that aren't actually interesting to humans and tweak them so Pagerank will give them an artificially high ranking anyway. Since the algorithms are just algorithms, not Artificial Intelligences, it's possible to do a certain amount of reverse-engineering and accomplish this, and Google has had to tweak their algorithms over the years to detect SEO cheating and down-rate it, and there's an arms race between the two sides.
SEOs do also have a side business of advising clients to write pages that are not only interesting, but also are friendly to indexers - things like putting the keywords into the appropriate parts of the document instead of having them be part of the cutesy animated dancing graphics, and coincidentally that also makes the page more friendly to humans as well as machines. But that's something a 1-page FAQ can do just fine, if web page authors bother reading it.
Dude, you're gonna get a Beowulf cluster of Dells:-)
There are 8760 hours in a year, so Sun would charge $8760 per CPU-year, which seems like a lot - you can buy Pentium white-box computers for about $200-300, and probably AMD64 for around $500 with minimalist video and CPU more comparable to a Sun. Call it $876, just to be a round 10% of Sun's yearly rental, and a lot of technician time per box. Alternatively, blade servers are going to cost you more per CPU, but be a lot easier to manage, and they're still easily under 20% of Sun's price. Obviously if you need to run one problem on 1000 CPUs for a couple of days, renting time makes sense, and if you need to run big-CPU problems all year, buying it's likely to make sense.
Not counting labor and real estate, the tradeoff's probably about a month or two of usage - a university can almost certainly cost-justify building their own, because they'll find ways to keep it busy. A business might or might not, and the real advantage for a business is that they get answers back in days instead of months.
Anybody who has to support lots of backwards-compatibility automatically has a much bigger job than someone who doesn't, so bloatware tends to increase exponentially. And certainly, increased resources mean that you can increase the number of features you support - some of the efficiency of early code was because people did lots of tweaking on the efficiency, but a lot of it was that they weren't including as many features and weren't tweaking the appearance as much.
One of the biggest components of Slashdot hype about so many projects is "It's got skins, so the user can customize all the decorations however they like!", and there was a lot less of that on early software, where the graphics capabilities were more limited and the slowness of doing that really hurt. If anti-aliasing fonts is too slow, don't do it. If letting the user pick the color table values for window system features doesn't take much work, fine, let them do it, but don't add infinite amounts of it. Focus on functionality, not decorations.
My wife ran a tax-consulting business during much of the 80s and early 90s. At one point, she was running her business on a dog-slow 386sx laptop with Windows and Turbotax, and had to drag up some old files for a customer that were in a text-based spreadsheet that she'd used on her DOS 8086-clone laptop a few years before. Man, it was fast! It hadn't been fast on the old 8MHz machine, but now she had 16 MHz with more than twice the MIPS and lots of RAM (probably 4MB?), and was running the machine in DOS mode instead of Windows mode, and it just ripped along.
Peru has a history of corrupt left-wing military governments of various sorts, generally with little understanding of economics. People like liberal economist Hernando de Soto and novelist Mario Vargas Llosa have written about some of the problems with them - things like taking 9 months to get enough permits to open a simple business (it's much faster if you bribe everybody who issues permits, but the usual approach for poorer people was to simply not get the permits, and then pay the higher bribes when police come and harass you after you're in business.) The lack of enforceable property rights for most of the population was a serious problem - people couldn't get things like mortgages because of lack of clear land title.
The Shining Path revolutionaries were wacko Maoists who could support themselves quite well because of the US's well-organized program for funding world terrorism and domestic crime, i.e. providing muscle to drug-lords who exported cocaine to the US at many times the free-market price. Many years they were more competent at violence than the government armies, and certainly were able to stick around for decades longer than they could have without US aid.
Fujimori was somewhat like a crazier version of Ross Perot with less knowledge of economics - he did a bunch of things that were Not Stupid, which placed him well above average, used a lot of violence, including against many people who deserved it as well as people who didn't, staged a coup against his own government (I really had trouble following that one... but perhaps Bush/Cheney will show us how professionals do it), and was certainly not the best government the country could have had, but neither were his predecessors.
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are a lot of Nth-generation Chinese-Americans. Some speak Chinese, many don't, and of course there's also the different dialects, with Cantonese-speaking Hong Kongers, Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese, the occasional Hakka or other dialects. Sometimes business around here gets done in Chinese, when most of the people around are Chinese, but sometimes it's English.
When I lived back east, I had a coworker whose grandparents had immigrated to the US from Japan. They were ethnic minorities, and she'd occasionally have people walk up to her assuming she was Chinese and start speaking Chinese at her, which wasn't useful (she'd do just fine in French, and knew a bit of kitchen Japanese from mom talking to grandma.) I assume ABCs have similar issues, unless they happen to speak the right dialects fluently.
One of my former coworkers was ABC. His sister and her also-ABC husband moved to Japan, doing some kind of high-tech management. The husband did ok, but the wife got tired of it really fast. It seems that even though she had a perfectly good college degree and was highly competent, and Japanese are used to Western women working and not acting Japanese, as an Asian she was expected to behave like a proper salaryman's wife even though she was Chinese, and being American-born she had no intention of putting up with that nonsense. She found a good job back in the States fairly quickly; it took her husband a bit longer, but he had the motivation that she was back here.
I'm sure that the output sound quality doesn't suck, and I use headsets when I work at home so I don't mind not having 5.1 or whatever the current flavor of audio output is. But there's no native audio input - you need to buy a $35 iMic or other overpriced USB peripheral or else an even higher-end USB sound system, instead of either plugging in a cheap mike or having a wimply little mike built-in like most laptops do these days.
That means you can't just run voice chat software or VOIP telephony, and you can't usefully run GarageBand, unless you add on some extra-cost hardware or have USB-flavored instruments. Seems like an odd choice for Apple, since they're trying to steal desktops from Wintel, and a small quiet portable mac would fit much of the artist market almost as well as a laptop would.
I don't understand the need for high-end video cards for games - Nethack ran just fine on my VT100, or my Trident 9750 with 4MB of video RAM, unless you want the silly graphics version, and when I want non-intellectual games, Solitaire runs fine on an 80286 or better.:-)
If you're the kind of power gamer that can't live with a Radeon 9200, you're probably not buying $500 Windows boxes to play games on either - you're probably going for $300-500 video cards, and machine prices over $1000 including the fastest Pentium or AMD chip you can get for the CPU, over 1GB of some overclocked flavor of RAM, kilowatt power supply, and various blinkylights, so if you want a Mac, you're probably in G5 territory, not Mac Mini territory.
The real question for a Mac Mini is whether it's good enough to do basic video editing (presumably with extra RAM added, and probably with a Firewire/USB2 external disk, though possibly just an Ethernet back to another server box if 40-80GB will handle your active storage needs.) If it does, then you can use it for everything that you'd expect from a $500 box, and just about everything you'd expect from a Mac, and it's got a good enough sound system to run GarageBand (I'm assuming there's some way to plug in MIDI instruments without having to buy too much extra adapter hardware.) (Urrrk, wait, it looks like there's no microphone jack, just a headphone output? That *would* suck!)
The police arrested him because The Big Telephone Company thought he was hacking stuff, and they reported him to the police for hacking. It wasn't because he was using Lynx, because they didn't have a bloody clue that he was using Lynx...
In civilized countries, there's usually more court proceedings than appears to have happened in this case, and part of the surprise here is that the police didn't just politely knock on his door and ask him to "assist them in their enquiries" as the localism goes, they broke the door down violently, something they normally do only if you're engaged in violent crime or you're Irish. On the other hand, there are some vile scamemrs out there trying to rip people off with fake tsunami-relief appeals.
Sounds like a good libel case here, if BT doesn't pay him off first. Hope nothing was burgled out of his apartment (other than by the police) while he was locked up, and if anything was, BT's responsible for that too.
In the US, most mailboxes on houses don't lock, and most mailboxes in apartment complexes are rows of little boxes that do lock. Stealing mail isn't very common, though it does happen. Private delivery services don't use the Post Office mailboxes, because of postal monopoly rules, and many people in rural areas have second or third boxes near their mailboxes for newspapers, etc.
It's not difficult to make mailboxes that let you put letters into them without a key and only take them out with a key (or with thin pliers:-) Most apartment mailboxes use this for outgoing mail.
Slashdot Mirror
Lyrics. Discography. Buy album. Information Society's album "Peace & Love Inc." has a track "300bps 8,N,1" which is designed to be played into a modem. Original release date was October 1992, and I'm not sure if it was available on Vinyl or only on CD.
The Celestrak website didn't do a very good job of explaining what data it has, but it doesn't sound like it's all that big. The main data format seems to be a two-line record, so maybe 200 bytes, and I don't know how many satellites or pieces of space junk they're tracking, but it's probably on the order of 10K-100K of them. So that's probably 2-20MB of data, which you should be able to serve handily with any spare doorstop Pentium200 machine even if it's updated hourly. If it's 20MB, just put the sucker up on BitTorrent, and if it's 2MB, you might not even bother with that, or else put it up on your favorite P2P network.
I thought it was "free joints" that he liked...
A friend of mine points out that gravity detection is definitely one of our senses - we've even got a sense organ for it, located in the inner ear.
Anyway, the Feds had a bunch of export control laws to prevent Commies from getting Big Computers that they could use to design better Nukes, as well as laws to prevent Commmies (and Americans) from getting crypto.
Fundamentally, computers do keep getting faster, but they've been Fast Enough for Government Work for a long time - Moore's Law says that just about anything you can buy at WalMart is faster than a high-end niche-market governments-and-big-corporations computer of a decade ago. The ideal computer for terrorism isn't some supercomputer - it's three pounds of wetware that's really pissed off. The way to deal with it is not to clamp down on exports of technology or circle the wagons into a laager to keep the enemy hordes out or declare anybody with interesting oil reserves to be a Rogue State - it's to stop acting like an Evil Empire and pissing people off by supporting oppressive governments around the world.
If you can use IAX2 trunking, then yes, you can probably fit that many if you want. That does require you to be running all the calls to the same place, or at least to a single place that does fan-out; if you're calling N different places it won't work, because the big problem is the overhead involved with fat IP/UDP/RTP headers on a small voice sample.
Your point that you'll probably already be on satellite is right on. People like to quote 150ms numbers about the maximum latency they'll accept, forgetting that the world's fairly far around, and while VOIP's a little bit sensitive to latency and adds a small amount of delay, the big delays are just unavoidable physics and the human ear's willingness to work around it. As long as you've got echo suppression / cancellation, the excess latency is a bit annoying but nothing killer.
One day somebody on the bird saw two red lights on on the PBX, but didn't see anybody talking on the phone, and needless to say this was .... disturbing.... So they went to track it down - some grunt had gotten a 16-button Autovon phone (with the extra precedence TouchTones) and had dialed the base PBX, dialed up to the bird's PBX, dialed across it to an outgoing line back to the ground, which needless to say had permission to call anywhere in the world at any priority it wanted, and was yakking with his buddies in Guam (normally something a grunt didn't have authorization to use routine scarce resources for, much less tandem-routing through Looking Glass. He was very busted.)
The Offutt PBX also had an FX line to somewhere a few hundred miles away like Des Moines - if Bad Things were happening in Omaha, you could access it remotely, and folks on the bird could use it to call out and find if people were Not Dead Yet.
The folks at the aquarium in San Francisco's Pier 39 said that octopuses usually live about 3-4 years, but that they're usually only big enough to catch after they're about 3 years old, so they don't last long once they get them. (They usually get theirs from local fishermen.) That aquarium is basically an underwater Habitrail for people to walk through, surrounded by water tanks, and when they did have an octopus a couple of years ago, it was pretty cool to watch.
Back when Mozilla was first released, one part of the process was apparently to clean up the vulgar comments in the source code. Somebody distributed a handout at the Mozila Release Party with most of the deleted lines.
Slashdot not only fails to render correctly with Firefox, it also fails with Mozilla. I think I've even had problems under IE, though I hardly ever use that. It's bad HTML-like code that does it.
Is there any plan to make their logo visually similar to one of the other BSDs? Or do the logos really matter to anybody except marketing geeks?
Driving directions don't work very well out in the prairies either - I could get directions from Calgary to Edmonton, and Calgary to Toronto, but not Edmonton to Toronto.
It doesn't know how to give driving directions from Edmonton to Toronto - but it does know Edmonton to Calgary and Calgary to Toronto, which is just weird.
One difficulty with being a really big ISP is that you don't have simple centralized decisionmaking. You have a whole lot of sales people who get commissions for selling services to different geographical territories and market-segments, and your sales person who sells to the under-$100K/year market in Northern Louisiana is typically going to sell people T1s first and *then* discover that they're spammers rather than the other way around - at most he's going to have done a credit report on the customer to decide if they can pay their bills. Sure, there are contracts that say that customers aren't allowed to spam, but it takes a while to figure that out, especially if the customer does business as Billy-Bob's Bait Shop rather than Spammers-R-Us.
SEOs are in the business of taking pages that aren't actually interesting to humans and tweak them so Pagerank will give them an artificially high ranking anyway. Since the algorithms are just algorithms, not Artificial Intelligences, it's possible to do a certain amount of reverse-engineering and accomplish this, and Google has had to tweak their algorithms over the years to detect SEO cheating and down-rate it, and there's an arms race between the two sides.
SEOs do also have a side business of advising clients to write pages that are not only interesting, but also are friendly to indexers - things like putting the keywords into the appropriate parts of the document instead of having them be part of the cutesy animated dancing graphics, and coincidentally that also makes the page more friendly to humans as well as machines. But that's something a 1-page FAQ can do just fine, if web page authors bother reading it.
There are 8760 hours in a year, so Sun would charge $8760 per CPU-year, which seems like a lot - you can buy Pentium white-box computers for about $200-300, and probably AMD64 for around $500 with minimalist video and CPU more comparable to a Sun. Call it $876, just to be a round 10% of Sun's yearly rental, and a lot of technician time per box. Alternatively, blade servers are going to cost you more per CPU, but be a lot easier to manage, and they're still easily under 20% of Sun's price. Obviously if you need to run one problem on 1000 CPUs for a couple of days, renting time makes sense, and if you need to run big-CPU problems all year, buying it's likely to make sense.
Not counting labor and real estate, the tradeoff's probably about a month or two of usage - a university can almost certainly cost-justify building their own, because they'll find ways to keep it busy. A business might or might not, and the real advantage for a business is that they get answers back in days instead of months.
One of the biggest components of Slashdot hype about so many projects is "It's got skins, so the user can customize all the decorations however they like!", and there was a lot less of that on early software, where the graphics capabilities were more limited and the slowness of doing that really hurt. If anti-aliasing fonts is too slow, don't do it. If letting the user pick the color table values for window system features doesn't take much work, fine, let them do it, but don't add infinite amounts of it. Focus on functionality, not decorations.
My wife ran a tax-consulting business during much of the 80s and early 90s. At one point, she was running her business on a dog-slow 386sx laptop with Windows and Turbotax, and had to drag up some old files for a customer that were in a text-based spreadsheet that she'd used on her DOS 8086-clone laptop a few years before. Man, it was fast! It hadn't been fast on the old 8MHz machine, but now she had 16 MHz with more than twice the MIPS and lots of RAM (probably 4MB?), and was running the machine in DOS mode instead of Windows mode, and it just ripped along.
The Shining Path revolutionaries were wacko Maoists who could support themselves quite well because of the US's well-organized program for funding world terrorism and domestic crime, i.e. providing muscle to drug-lords who exported cocaine to the US at many times the free-market price. Many years they were more competent at violence than the government armies, and certainly were able to stick around for decades longer than they could have without US aid.
Fujimori was somewhat like a crazier version of Ross Perot with less knowledge of economics - he did a bunch of things that were Not Stupid, which placed him well above average, used a lot of violence, including against many people who deserved it as well as people who didn't, staged a coup against his own government (I really had trouble following that one... but perhaps Bush/Cheney will show us how professionals do it), and was certainly not the best government the country could have had, but neither were his predecessors.
When I lived back east, I had a coworker whose grandparents had immigrated to the US from Japan. They were ethnic minorities, and she'd occasionally have people walk up to her assuming she was Chinese and start speaking Chinese at her, which wasn't useful (she'd do just fine in French, and knew a bit of kitchen Japanese from mom talking to grandma.) I assume ABCs have similar issues, unless they happen to speak the right dialects fluently.
One of my former coworkers was ABC. His sister and her also-ABC husband moved to Japan, doing some kind of high-tech management. The husband did ok, but the wife got tired of it really fast. It seems that even though she had a perfectly good college degree and was highly competent, and Japanese are used to Western women working and not acting Japanese, as an Asian she was expected to behave like a proper salaryman's wife even though she was Chinese, and being American-born she had no intention of putting up with that nonsense. She found a good job back in the States fairly quickly; it took her husband a bit longer, but he had the motivation that she was back here.
That means you can't just run voice chat software or VOIP telephony, and you can't usefully run GarageBand, unless you add on some extra-cost hardware or have USB-flavored instruments. Seems like an odd choice for Apple, since they're trying to steal desktops from Wintel, and a small quiet portable mac would fit much of the artist market almost as well as a laptop would.
If you're the kind of power gamer that can't live with a Radeon 9200, you're probably not buying $500 Windows boxes to play games on either - you're probably going for $300-500 video cards, and machine prices over $1000 including the fastest Pentium or AMD chip you can get for the CPU, over 1GB of some overclocked flavor of RAM, kilowatt power supply, and various blinkylights, so if you want a Mac, you're probably in G5 territory, not Mac Mini territory.
The real question for a Mac Mini is whether it's good enough to do basic video editing (presumably with extra RAM added, and probably with a Firewire/USB2 external disk, though possibly just an Ethernet back to another server box if 40-80GB will handle your active storage needs.) If it does, then you can use it for everything that you'd expect from a $500 box, and just about everything you'd expect from a Mac, and it's got a good enough sound system to run GarageBand (I'm assuming there's some way to plug in MIDI instruments without having to buy too much extra adapter hardware.) (Urrrk, wait, it looks like there's no microphone jack, just a headphone output? That *would* suck!)
In civilized countries, there's usually more court proceedings than appears to have happened in this case, and part of the surprise here is that the police didn't just politely knock on his door and ask him to "assist them in their enquiries" as the localism goes, they broke the door down violently, something they normally do only if you're engaged in violent crime or you're Irish. On the other hand, there are some vile scamemrs out there trying to rip people off with fake tsunami-relief appeals.
Sounds like a good libel case here, if BT doesn't pay him off first. Hope nothing was burgled out of his apartment (other than by the police) while he was locked up, and if anything was, BT's responsible for that too.
It's not difficult to make mailboxes that let you put letters into them without a key and only take them out with a key (or with thin pliers :-) Most apartment mailboxes use this for outgoing mail.