Indeed. For some odd reason, people have such an aversion to just buying a PC, and hooking it up to the TV.
"Such an aversion". Let's examine this approach:
o More expensive up-front than buying an appliance
o $$$ in time spent researching what to buy, including time wasted reading online parts lists that are mostly obsolete and unavailable
o $$$ in time spent dicking with ordering and assembling hardware
o $$$ in time spent dicking with drivers and getting the software to work
o Resistance from SWIMBO to having a PC in the living room, especially when the fans kick in
o Finding a place to stick the thing
o Yet another system to admin (instead of having a life)
o SWIMBO anger when a software update of one component breaks the whole thing
People who will buy MP4-capable DVD players, who will spend hours re-encoding things so that they can watch it on the screen 20 feet from their PC.
My Oppo DVD unit played just about anything written to a disk until the transpart started being flaky wrt reading DVD-/-R/RW media. I never re-encoded a single thing for it.
I have never had to re-encode a single thing for my Boxee Box. It handles.mkv and divx/xvid.avi files off teh_net just fine. When I get a new DVD for my son I rip it with Handbrake's iPad profile and get a file that plays just fine on our phones, iPad, computers, and the Boxee Box just fine, no re-encoding ever required.
They all want appliances, for some odd reason
In the words of Shatner: "you must be almost 30, have you ever kissed a girl?"
even though the decoding (let alone the encoding) of most popular items requires a rather powerful (by most PC OEM standards) machine.
Boxee Box $179.99. Don't know and don't really care what's inside, but given the cost and size, I can confidently assert that it's far from "rather powerful" by any recent standard.
$800 for an appliance that cannot decode half the formats you have encountered
I'm not aware of a $800 appliance. For that money I'd buy a Mac Mini instead, but luckily I don't have to. See above under "$179.99". Admittedly I have encountered formats that it most likely won't decode, but they aren't formats I give a shit about. Chances are that it wouldn't play those goofy Amiga colormap-cycling animations from the 1980's, but I don't care. It plays any format that I actually get/have content in.
and will not decode the more-CPU / GPU intensive ones coming out later this year?
Vaguecasting just a bit there, aren't you?
Hell yeah, hook that up to the TV. Even has a 20GB hard drive, imagine that.
??? No disk in the Boxee Box, and I wouldn't have bought it if did.
$800 for a PC with stereo out and HDMI, that can decode anything you throw at it? With a 2 TB hard drive? Why would I want that?
Clearly because you value your ongoing viginity and love high-maintenance equipment and components with moving parts that are fond of breaking.
Why does the populace seem to treat machines like lepers?
I can't stress that enough. software and semi-software raid is a joke.
On Linux systems it sure is. Separate layers for RAID, volume management, and filesystem == nightmare. ZFS wipes the floor with any other software or HBA RAID system in almost every way. And before you bring up btrfs -- get back to me when it's real instead of an incomplete vaporware project that's been ready RSN for years.
Among the hassles with HBA RAID:
o Setting it up. On an x86 system, that means an anachronistic venture into BIOS option ROM utilities at least to set up a boot volume for OS installation. Depending on the HBA used, this may require a local or redirected keyboard to enter @#$@#! function keys or local / redirected *video* -- or absurdly complex and scantily-documented CLI syntax even from the OS level -- yes LSI I'm talking about YOU.
o No 3-way mirrors. Until last month no RAID HBA I'd encountered could do 3-way mirrors, and no, RAID 1E doesn't count, in fact it's *worse* than a plain 2-way mirror. HP's new Smart Array HBA's announced with their Gen 8 systems are touted as (finally) supporting 3-way mirrors. I like to think that the RFE I made them enter for this made a difference.
o Limited portability of drives and volumes across systems
o Impossible to mirror plexes / vdevs / submirrors across HBA's for redundancy and capacity.
For performance, yes, hardware is fastest.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. HBA RAID limits one to a single HBA, which in extreme cases can be a bottleneck. There are also plenty of lacklustre RAID HBA's out there, and let's not forget the hassle of monitoring and replacing backup batteries, which most require.
For reliability though, software RAID is better (hardware RAID can have interesting firmware version issues).
Linux running an md RAID array? If the server goes down, pop the drives in another server, a couple of mdadm commands later and the array is up and running.
... if you happen to have the configuration documented ahead of time. MD is a joke; it's messier and flawed even worse that SDS/ODS/SVM.
As for the original topic of testing new disks, with Solaris it's easy to fire up format (1m), retrieve the factory and grown defect lists, get inquiry data, run a write/read/compare surface analysis, lay down a partition table if you have anachronistic hardware, and lay down slices. I have yet to find a tool for Linux systems that even comes close.
Riiiight, because GPL is a magic wand that ensures that the code and all the external dependencies run and will always run on every platform I need.
An increasing percentage of stuff these days only builds and runs on @#$#! Linux systems. Smells like "proprietary lock-in" to me.
[quote]My backup for a multi-boot laptop that other solutions (e.g.: running from one OS) don't seem to work for:[/quote]
How's about the solution of setting up the laptop in a more sensible way? Eg., run one OS, forget the partition / boot loader nightmares, dig through the couch cushions to get $40 for a copy of VMware Fusion and run the other OS's in a VM. Various but occasional operations on x64 server service processors effectively require an MS OS and MSIE, and a VM running XP works beautifully for this purpose.
I'm finding TM hard to love. A few tens of GB internal and ~1TB on a FireWire unit attached to an MBP, backing up over AFP to a 3TB disk in a Mac Pro. Set it up from scratch, it runs a full, then apparent occasional incrementals, then a couple of weeks later it tries to copy over the whole 1TB volume again, then complains partway through claiming that the backup volume is full, yet there's ~1.4TB free on it.
1) There's no reason it should be copying the whole 1TB again when it already has it on disk. TM is supposed to be clever with multiple links to files etc., so I thought it would, as Symantec NBU (spit!) calls it, run incrementals forever and "synthesize" fulls.
2) Reality and what it claims re available space on the volume disagree
Red Hat's support contracts aren't expensive as such things go, but their excuses are unique when problems are reported. Sun might have filed an internal bug report. My experience with RH has mostly fallen into two classes:
1) Go complain to whoever wrote whatever, it wasn't us
2) We can't fix that because it's "upstream" and it would (ominous music) Fork The Distribution
#2 is hilarious because RH is their own upstream. Never have I seen evidence from a customer perspective of the claim that RH pours massive resources into development, and first-level support seems to be incompetently offshored.
DAT is for audio. You mean DDS.
In-drive compression is of limited utility:
1) Backup software can't accurately predict how much a tape can hold, so it has to err on the low side when scheduling
2) Client-side compression often makes sense to decrease bytes that have to go over the wire, and there's little point in a tape drive trying to compress an already-compressed stream.
I immediately had two thoughts:
1) It's hardly news that trees are better collectors than rocks
2) You increase collection ability by presenting a larger footprint relative to the angle of sunlight -- but the guy next door gets shadowed
This is the same sort of myopia popular with the "sustainable beef" people
plus, diesel engines for some reason I can't fathom all make a loud and annoying
GREENK GREENK GREENK GREENK
noise, and their operators act like the universe will explode if they turn them off.
-- used to have a diesel-powered commercial mower
Seagate has had 1TB 3.5" platters since it acquired Samsung's operation, but neither has bothered to put out a 4-platter 4TB drive using them. The tech described by the OP will similarly languish for years until Seagate can bother actually building it into products.
These are at least partly driven by a desire not to look like idiots when a few million extra people are around for the Olympics later this year.
Revamping the menus of thousands of restaurants and getting other businesses to stay open past 5pm must be a herculean task!
I wonder if the flashing sign telling people not to piss in the streets will remain.
I've yet to see an airliner whose exit doors are located in the overhead bins.
Ridiculous baggage fees are only one reason people go out of their way to carry stuff on. Here are some others:
o Careless handling. The airlines carefully disclaim any responsibility for bags or their contents, and they sure take advantage of this. I've had holes torn in my bags and handles ripped off
o Careless rummaging. I've had things disappear from checked luggage and other things damaged. Ever go to a wedding in wrinkled clothes because the oafs behind the scenes used them for stomping practice? And some of you think I should entrust them with $10k worth of fragile photo/computer gear? Yeah, I don't think so. I once packed a spare laptop in a checked suitcase, carefully wrapped. It came out dented and with big swirls scribbled on the lid with some kind of white crayon that was impossible to remove.
o Loss. Ever get to your destination after all the stores close to find that the airline has lost the food you brought for your kid to eat/drink? Ever have Alaska lose the car seat that you *need* to drive your baby home? Or the materials you need to do the job that your employer sent you to do?
o Slow-ass handling. Baggage offloading can often be seen to start before they let anyone off the plane, and since they're too cheap to deplane through more than one door, it takes forever to get off the plane then hike/ride to baggage claim -- at which point they haven't even assigned a carousel to your flight yet. Oh wait, there it goes - you're at #2 and your bags are going to #20. Time for another hike with a screaming baby and a tired wife, then wait as the flight's bags dribble out over the course of half an hour, then you need to fight your way through the 20 family members meeting another passenger, all of whom feel compelled to press up against the carousel. As you wait, dodge the jackoff who traveled with fscking *skis* and who's wandering around swatting people with them.
o Then, if / when you manage to get your bags, notice that despite having paid $50 to exchange them at the origin for claim tickets, there's nobody checking bags as they leave. The first time I flew, in 1986, before checking cost money, there was a uniformed checker doing just that.
Checking bags is decidedly risky, expensive, time-devouring, and roughly seven times the hassle it has any right to be.
The airlines / airports need to make checking bags *feasible* before I can even consider not doing everything in my power to avoid doing so.
What person on the other end? I'm able to submit RMA requests for WD, Hitachi, and Seagate drives from their web site. Select the box that says that no test system is available to run their ms-dos tool, and I'm issued an RMa.
The Winchester House in San Jose isn't attached to the foundations either.
Three things struck me about this:
1) The damage that occurs before the thing fires up
2) What happens when the quake is serious and vertical displacement is more than 3cm
3) What happens when the power cuts out
Given that humans aren't built to guzzle meat, and that no animal routinely drinks another species' milk -- especially past infancy -- the lifestyle choice is yours, not ours.
Same thing happened in Seattle. We voted against new stadia, yet the Kingdome was blown up anyway, including the roof that wasn't even paid for. Then Paul Allen got us to build him two replacements, one of which is used 9 days a year, and the other is used for pansy-ass American League pseudo-baseball.
Slashdot Mirror
Stross's stuff is fun when he isn't rehashing his fantasies re female cops.
Indeed. For some odd reason, people have such an aversion to just buying a PC, and hooking it up to the TV.
"Such an aversion". Let's examine this approach: o More expensive up-front than buying an appliance o $$$ in time spent researching what to buy, including time wasted reading online parts lists that are mostly obsolete and unavailable o $$$ in time spent dicking with ordering and assembling hardware o $$$ in time spent dicking with drivers and getting the software to work o Resistance from SWIMBO to having a PC in the living room, especially when the fans kick in o Finding a place to stick the thing o Yet another system to admin (instead of having a life) o SWIMBO anger when a software update of one component breaks the whole thing
People who will buy MP4-capable DVD players, who will spend hours re-encoding things so that they can watch it on the screen 20 feet from their PC.
My Oppo DVD unit played just about anything written to a disk until the transpart started being flaky wrt reading DVD-/-R/RW media. I never re-encoded a single thing for it. I have never had to re-encode a single thing for my Boxee Box. It handles .mkv and divx/xvid .avi files off teh_net just fine. When I get a new DVD for my son I rip it with Handbrake's iPad profile and get a file that plays just fine on our phones, iPad, computers, and the Boxee Box just fine, no re-encoding ever required.
They all want appliances, for some odd reason
In the words of Shatner: "you must be almost 30, have you ever kissed a girl?"
even though the decoding (let alone the encoding) of most popular items requires a rather powerful (by most PC OEM standards) machine.
Boxee Box $179.99. Don't know and don't really care what's inside, but given the cost and size, I can confidently assert that it's far from "rather powerful" by any recent standard.
$800 for an appliance that cannot decode half the formats you have encountered
I'm not aware of a $800 appliance. For that money I'd buy a Mac Mini instead, but luckily I don't have to. See above under "$179.99". Admittedly I have encountered formats that it most likely won't decode, but they aren't formats I give a shit about. Chances are that it wouldn't play those goofy Amiga colormap-cycling animations from the 1980's, but I don't care. It plays any format that I actually get/have content in.
and will not decode the more-CPU / GPU intensive ones coming out later this year?
Vaguecasting just a bit there, aren't you?
Hell yeah, hook that up to the TV. Even has a 20GB hard drive, imagine that.
??? No disk in the Boxee Box, and I wouldn't have bought it if did.
$800 for a PC with stereo out and HDMI, that can decode anything you throw at it? With a 2 TB hard drive? Why would I want that?
Clearly because you value your ongoing viginity and love high-maintenance equipment and components with moving parts that are fond of breaking.
Why does the populace seem to treat machines like lepers?
Why won't you leave mom's basement?
*Might* be CP but if there is, there's surely more of it than "legitimate" content there.
They sure have -- look how it only took them 13 years to ship TCP/IP with their OS.
GPL, of course, so no proprietary lock-in, ever.
Riiiight, because GPL is a magic wand that ensures that the code and all the external dependencies run and will always run on every platform I need. An increasing percentage of stuff these days only builds and runs on @#$#! Linux systems. Smells like "proprietary lock-in" to me.
[quote]My backup for a multi-boot laptop that other solutions (e.g.: running from one OS) don't seem to work for:[/quote] How's about the solution of setting up the laptop in a more sensible way? Eg., run one OS, forget the partition / boot loader nightmares, dig through the couch cushions to get $40 for a copy of VMware Fusion and run the other OS's in a VM. Various but occasional operations on x64 server service processors effectively require an MS OS and MSIE, and a VM running XP works beautifully for this purpose.
My photos and video of my family take up roughly 1TB at present. "Backed up once on a DVD" would need to be repeated 220+ times.
I'm finding TM hard to love. A few tens of GB internal and ~1TB on a FireWire unit attached to an MBP, backing up over AFP to a 3TB disk in a Mac Pro. Set it up from scratch, it runs a full, then apparent occasional incrementals, then a couple of weeks later it tries to copy over the whole 1TB volume again, then complains partway through claiming that the backup volume is full, yet there's ~1.4TB free on it. 1) There's no reason it should be copying the whole 1TB again when it already has it on disk. TM is supposed to be clever with multiple links to files etc., so I thought it would, as Symantec NBU (spit!) calls it, run incrementals forever and "synthesize" fulls. 2) Reality and what it claims re available space on the volume disagree
Red Hat's support contracts aren't expensive as such things go, but their excuses are unique when problems are reported. Sun might have filed an internal bug report. My experience with RH has mostly fallen into two classes: 1) Go complain to whoever wrote whatever, it wasn't us 2) We can't fix that because it's "upstream" and it would (ominous music) Fork The Distribution #2 is hilarious because RH is their own upstream. Never have I seen evidence from a customer perspective of the claim that RH pours massive resources into development, and first-level support seems to be incompetently offshored.
DAT is for audio. You mean DDS. In-drive compression is of limited utility: 1) Backup software can't accurately predict how much a tape can hold, so it has to err on the low side when scheduling 2) Client-side compression often makes sense to decrease bytes that have to go over the wire, and there's little point in a tape drive trying to compress an already-compressed stream.
I immediately had two thoughts: 1) It's hardly news that trees are better collectors than rocks 2) You increase collection ability by presenting a larger footprint relative to the angle of sunlight -- but the guy next door gets shadowed This is the same sort of myopia popular with the "sustainable beef" people
plus, diesel engines for some reason I can't fathom all make a loud and annoying GREENK GREENK GREENK GREENK noise, and their operators act like the universe will explode if they turn them off. -- used to have a diesel-powered commercial mower
Seagate has had 1TB 3.5" platters since it acquired Samsung's operation, but neither has bothered to put out a 4-platter 4TB drive using them. The tech described by the OP will similarly languish for years until Seagate can bother actually building it into products.
So, you'd be okay with a cell phone being the size of your fridge, just to accommodate the oversized parts required for what you demand?
These are at least partly driven by a desire not to look like idiots when a few million extra people are around for the Olympics later this year.
Revamping the menus of thousands of restaurants and getting other businesses to stay open past 5pm must be a herculean task! I wonder if the flashing sign telling people not to piss in the streets will remain.
Ridiculous baggage fees are only one reason people go out of their way to carry stuff on. Here are some others:
o Careless handling. The airlines carefully disclaim any responsibility for bags or their contents, and they sure take advantage of this. I've had holes torn in my bags and handles ripped off
o Careless rummaging. I've had things disappear from checked luggage and other things damaged. Ever go to a wedding in wrinkled clothes because the oafs behind the scenes used them for stomping practice? And some of you think I should entrust them with $10k worth of fragile photo/computer gear? Yeah, I don't think so. I once packed a spare laptop in a checked suitcase, carefully wrapped. It came out dented and with big swirls scribbled on the lid with some kind of white crayon that was impossible to remove.
o Loss. Ever get to your destination after all the stores close to find that the airline has lost the food you brought for your kid to eat/drink? Ever have Alaska lose the car seat that you *need* to drive your baby home? Or the materials you need to do the job that your employer sent you to do?
o Slow-ass handling. Baggage offloading can often be seen to start before they let anyone off the plane, and since they're too cheap to deplane through more than one door, it takes forever to get off the plane then hike/ride to baggage claim -- at which point they haven't even assigned a carousel to your flight yet. Oh wait, there it goes - you're at #2 and your bags are going to #20. Time for another hike with a screaming baby and a tired wife, then wait as the flight's bags dribble out over the course of half an hour, then you need to fight your way through the 20 family members meeting another passenger, all of whom feel compelled to press up against the carousel. As you wait, dodge the jackoff who traveled with fscking *skis* and who's wandering around swatting people with them.
o Then, if / when you manage to get your bags, notice that despite having paid $50 to exchange them at the origin for claim tickets, there's nobody checking bags as they leave. The first time I flew, in 1986, before checking cost money, there was a uniformed checker doing just that.
Checking bags is decidedly risky, expensive, time-devouring, and roughly seven times the hassle it has any right to be.
The airlines / airports need to make checking bags *feasible* before I can even consider not doing everything in my power to avoid doing so.
So what's left of HGST, then? Ludicrously-price SAN boxes? Toshiba makes desktop drives too, so I'm puzzled by this reasoning.
What person on the other end? I'm able to submit RMA requests for WD, Hitachi, and Seagate drives from their web site. Select the box that says that no test system is available to run their ms-dos tool, and I'm issued an RMa.
So, you reinvented Usenet?
The Winchester House in San Jose isn't attached to the foundations either. Three things struck me about this: 1) The damage that occurs before the thing fires up 2) What happens when the quake is serious and vertical displacement is more than 3cm 3) What happens when the power cuts out
That's just the thing: redigitizing ST:TNG isn't going to make Picard any less of a sleestak, or make Denise Crosby any less of an ugly dyke.
Given that humans aren't built to guzzle meat, and that no animal routinely drinks another species' milk -- especially past infancy -- the lifestyle choice is yours, not ours.
Examples of other things that include fats: o Avocados o Soy milk o Hemp milk o Olive oil
Same thing happened in Seattle. We voted against new stadia, yet the Kingdome was blown up anyway, including the roof that wasn't even paid for. Then Paul Allen got us to build him two replacements, one of which is used 9 days a year, and the other is used for pansy-ass American League pseudo-baseball.