I came accross just that problem (I was given a iPod Nano), so I hacked together a little script. It even supports playlists and contacts (for iPod).
http://dabbelt.zapto.org/palmer/software.html
First of all, my goal was to be able to be able to lose a drive or delete a file and still be able to have a backup somewhere. I also wanted to be able to use my old drives after I upgraded. I also don't yet trust growing a filesystem or RAID array (though I've had great luck with growing XFS). This ruled out any of the RAID levels because I wouldn't be able to recover a file and expansion can be a pain.
Here's what I came up with:
2 computers: Desktop and Server The desktop has a root drive and a media drive. The root drive can be anything you want (just has to have enough space for your programs, if it's a HTPC, anything should be fine). The media drive is always the largest drive (ie, the newest). The media drive is rsynced to the server nightly.
The server has many drives, one of the the root drive (again, doesn't really matter). The others are put into a union using UnionFS (or AUFS, whichever you can get to compile). This is where my backups go. It's kind of like having a filesystem-level JBOD, but it can withstand the loss of drives with only a partial loss of data.
This gives me the advantage of easy expandability (all I do is copy to a new media drive and add the old drive to the union). I also don't have to waste old drives. It also allows me to lose either the newest drive or ALL of the old drives and still not lose any data. It also means that, even if I lose my media drive and a backup drive I will still have many of my files. This makes recovering from a drive failure trivial (assuming I still have enough space), I can just reboot the server and backup again. It also makes recovering from a loss of the server easier because I can just mount each drive by itself and still access the files.
The only disadvantages of this system are that it could waste space (if you have a drive marked as read-only and you modify a file that was on it, it will be copied to a writable drive, but this shouldn't cause a problem for media files because they should rarely change). Also, you have to monitor the union because if you add a drive when the union is not full, you will waste whatever space is in there now (UnionFS will only write to the top drive in a union). When you get a lot of drives in the union, performance will degrade because it will take longer to find which drive the file is on, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem with media files and it will only occur on the backup drive.
For example: Desktop -- 60GB root, 250GB media Server -- 40GB root, 320GB backup
I ran out of space in my 250GB, so upgraded to a 500GB. All I had to do was copy the data from the 250GB to the 500GB, reformat the 250GB, and put it into the server. When the 320GB drive got full (I saw the errors while backuping) I told the server that it had another drive in the union and backup again.
Desktop -- 60GB root, 500GB media Server -- 40GB root, 320GB+250GB backup
Soon I plan add a 750GB or 1TB (depending on price) as media, and will repeat the process.
With the current generation of speed step, the entire CPU runs at the same speed If I run one game, I am using 1 core, but run 2 cores at full speed/voltage
I could have a 4 core laptop: FSB runs at 200mhz (like AMD now, why change things) Everyone should be a multiple of 200mhz, so we just have to deal with multipliers If I am running a torrent, only the "slow" processor would have to run, the others could be off (rather than running clocked down)
1 CPU at 200mhz (deals with low-level system stuff) Disk IO Networking Mouse/Keyboard input Video output
1 CPU at 800mhz, runs my applications Internet Word etc
2 CPUs at 3ghz, runs high performance stuffs Games Video encoding
Video cards could be run in a similar fashion, turning on/off shaders when in 2D/3D, rather than clock speed
A big step towards this is allowing speedstep to change different frequancies for different cores on the same system
Also, the USB drives are mostly flash, which has a limited number of writes, which I really don't want used for swap space
And USB uses up a ton of CPU time (my USB HDD is ~30% of a 2ghz Athlon)
And flash drives have bad read/write speeds (really bad, a few MB/s)
What happens when I pull the device out and it is full of swapfiles?
What if secure docs get paged out to this drive and I pull it out, are those files accessable?
This seems like it could be a security risk:
All my father's documents fit on a 256MB drive, all mine would fit on a 2GB drive
What if I plug this in, get it to prefetch the files, pull the plug, put the USB drive in linux, mount it, and get access to tons of files?
-palmem
My worry is that even with MPEG 4 (which will probably be recompressed MPEG 2 sources anyway for quite a while) they may not have enough bandwith to send me a 1080 line picture without artifacts...
I thought that the point of doing MPEG4 was that it had better compression. This would make less artifacts.
I think that they are suppesed to get the uncompressed stream, and compress that to MPEG4.
I agree with you about how artifacts are more important than resolution, as long as the you don't have flat-pannel (they look horrible unless at the native resolution)
Have you heard of texture-mapped three-dimensional graphics where millions of polygons are rendered at 30 frames-per-second? How about an analog control stick, a direction-pad && familiar action buttons?
I don't know if this has been posted before, but:
It works with wine
I have the stock Gentoo version, from stable portage
The only addition that I have to make is this:
http://frankscorner.org/index.php?p=msi
Then it works, but seems to crash when some buttons are pushed...
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe that's what they want you to think...
I came accross just that problem (I was given a iPod Nano), so I hacked together a little script. It even supports playlists and contacts (for iPod). http://dabbelt.zapto.org/palmer/software.html
Here goes:
http://kpdf.kde.org/
First of all, my goal was to be able to be able to lose a drive or delete a file and still be able to have a backup somewhere. I also wanted to be able to use my old drives after I upgraded. I also don't yet trust growing a filesystem or RAID array (though I've had great luck with growing XFS). This ruled out any of the RAID levels because I wouldn't be able to recover a file and expansion can be a pain.
Here's what I came up with:
2 computers: Desktop and Server
The desktop has a root drive and a media drive. The root drive can be anything you want (just has to have enough space for your programs, if it's a HTPC, anything should be fine). The media drive is always the largest drive (ie, the newest). The media drive is rsynced to the server nightly.
The server has many drives, one of the the root drive (again, doesn't really matter). The others are put into a union using UnionFS (or AUFS, whichever you can get to compile). This is where my backups go. It's kind of like having a filesystem-level JBOD, but it can withstand the loss of drives with only a partial loss of data.
This gives me the advantage of easy expandability (all I do is copy to a new media drive and add the old drive to the union). I also don't have to waste old drives. It also allows me to lose either the newest drive or ALL of the old drives and still not lose any data. It also means that, even if I lose my media drive and a backup drive I will still have many of my files. This makes recovering from a drive failure trivial (assuming I still have enough space), I can just reboot the server and backup again. It also makes recovering from a loss of the server easier because I can just mount each drive by itself and still access the files.
The only disadvantages of this system are that it could waste space (if you have a drive marked as read-only and you modify a file that was on it, it will be copied to a writable drive, but this shouldn't cause a problem for media files because they should rarely change). Also, you have to monitor the union because if you add a drive when the union is not full, you will waste whatever space is in there now (UnionFS will only write to the top drive in a union). When you get a lot of drives in the union, performance will degrade because it will take longer to find which drive the file is on, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem with media files and it will only occur on the backup drive.
For example:
Desktop -- 60GB root, 250GB media
Server -- 40GB root, 320GB backup
I ran out of space in my 250GB, so upgraded to a 500GB. All I had to do was copy the data from the 250GB to the 500GB, reformat the 250GB, and put it into the server. When the 320GB drive got full (I saw the errors while backuping) I told the server that it had another drive in the union and backup again.
Desktop -- 60GB root, 500GB media
Server -- 40GB root, 320GB+250GB backup
Soon I plan add a 750GB or 1TB (depending on price) as media, and will repeat the process.
-palmer
The Asymetric cores idea seems better to me
With the current generation of speed step, the entire CPU runs at the same speed
If I run one game, I am using 1 core, but run 2 cores at full speed/voltage
I could have a 4 core laptop:
FSB runs at 200mhz (like AMD now, why change things)
Everyone should be a multiple of 200mhz, so we just have to deal with multipliers
If I am running a torrent, only the "slow" processor would have to run, the others could be off (rather than running clocked down)
1 CPU at 200mhz (deals with low-level system stuff)
Disk IO
Networking
Mouse/Keyboard input
Video output
1 CPU at 800mhz, runs my applications
Internet
Word
etc
2 CPUs at 3ghz, runs high performance stuffs
Games
Video encoding
Video cards could be run in a similar fashion, turning on/off shaders when in 2D/3D, rather than clock speed
A big step towards this is allowing speedstep to change different frequancies for different cores on the same system
-palmer
Also, the USB drives are mostly flash, which has a limited number of writes, which I really don't want used for swap space And USB uses up a ton of CPU time (my USB HDD is ~30% of a 2ghz Athlon) And flash drives have bad read/write speeds (really bad, a few MB/s) What happens when I pull the device out and it is full of swapfiles? What if secure docs get paged out to this drive and I pull it out, are those files accessable? This seems like it could be a security risk: All my father's documents fit on a 256MB drive, all mine would fit on a 2GB drive What if I plug this in, get it to prefetch the files, pull the plug, put the USB drive in linux, mount it, and get access to tons of files? -palmem
I am running Gentoo with xorg
The touchpad on my Dell Inspiron5150 works OK
Sometimes it is unaccurate
Gentoo...
I think that they are suppesed to get the uncompressed stream, and compress that to MPEG4.
I agree with you about how artifacts are more important than resolution, as long as the you don't have flat-pannel (they look horrible unless at the native resolution)
Yes
http://www.tapwave.com/
And you can ogg and xvid on the zod
I don't know if this has been posted before, but: It works with wine I have the stock Gentoo version, from stable portage The only addition that I have to make is this: http://frankscorner.org/index.php?p=msi Then it works, but seems to crash when some buttons are pushed...