I think also there is a heat issue with the sensors. The bigger, better sensors apparently generate quite a bit of heat that means you can't run them continuously. This is part of the reason you can't usually use the LCD as a viewfinder on SLRs. I think Sony have a system for running the sensor in a low resolution, low power mode for the A100, which means you can use the LCD instead of the viewfinder.
Who is 'we'? If I remember, the weapons inspectors had found no decent evidence, had said they had encountered some difficulties in accessing suspected sites, but that the difficulties were being removed and they needed some more time to confirm that Iraq had no weapons.
I think some people suspected weapons might be present, but no-one had evidence. That's not a great reason to start a war. How would you feel being given the death sentence for suspected murder with no evidence?
Actually yes. Heading off on holiday, I threw plenty of movies on a 4GB memory stick. Watched a couple on the flight out and then deleted them from the memory stick which was being shared with my camera. Only managed to save space for 1 film on the way back though. I wouldn't go out and buy a PSP for this purpose - won it in a raffle:) - but it did a decent job even so. Better quality screen than you get on any cheap planes, and your choice of film.
Just adding another vote for Planet Earth, which really is worth the price of the PS3 more than any game I've yet played! Motorstorm comes close though.
It's frequently a requirement to be wearing work clothes with suits not allowed on sites. I work on warehouse control systems and usually at the start it's officially a construction site. Generally I've found the engineers are on the the work-wear side of the line. Visiting upper management tend to wear suits but in theory (and occasionally in practice also) they then have to be escorted around the site by people wearing the proper gear.
If I'm heading to a site primarily for on-site programming and commissioning, I wear work clothes. If I'm there for training and office-work, I'll wear a suit - just depends on where I expect to spend the day. Middle managers vary their attire similarly. On a one-day visit maybe you see a strict suit/workwear line, but I people just look more senior and executive-like in a suit.
Carbon credits have hardly failed. Governments gave out too many for there to be much of a market for trading them - there are too many around to be worth much for sale, so as a result there is not enough reward for making major efficiency gains. But emissions across Europe are falling - the UK, France and Germany are all on course for a 10% drop, while the US has managed a 15% increase.
Fantastic! So now it's as simple as reading the nice descriptive name and looking that up in a table on a website to find out the speed and cache size. If only there was an even simpler way...
Wow, there's actually some decent looking games in there. I haven't bought any games since the three I got with the console. Of those, Motorstorm is the only one I've played much as a single player game, though Tony Hawk is OK for 2 player mode.
Each time technology replaces a workforce there is a massive recession, prices need to adjust for the lower wages being paid (overall)...
I don't really believe this for one second. Occasionally this may have happened but I can't think of a good example. There may be some civil unrest, and sections of the population out of work for a while, but it's pretty rare that every workplace rushes out to implement new technology on the same day. Over the course of a number of years, that workforce has to find new jobs, and mostly they do. For plenty of workers, it will be higher paid jobs, possibly even looking after / controlling / working with the machines that got their jobs.
Who would want / need an inkjet print to last forever? Prints of any kind degrade over time. The great thing about digital copies is they remain in perfect condition as long as you keep them.
Digital photos are much safer because of the ease of copying. The hard disc and CDs my first digital photos were stored on are now long gone - but the data is still there, on three PCs plus backup DVDs.
I backup my photos and a couple of other bits and pieces onto both my work PC and my parent's PC every few months. It's trivial to keep this many copies of the data - 10 minutes work every few months.
Media servers can require a LOT of storage space (at least if like me, you're not re-encoding your DVDs). I'm already upto 8 discs across two arrays, plus one system disc. I've seen very few MBs with that many ports.
Additionally, nice RAID cards can support adding extra discs to existing arrays etc. i.e. they do most of the stuff that Linux systems can do in software, but in an easier to deal with kind of way.
Both of my RAID cards can send out emails if the hardware runs into trouble. But I guess this is dependent on the software bundled. The idea of hardware RAID is that the OS only sees one drive, so I doubt there is a generic way of seeing an individual drive failing - you probably have to ask the RAID card about the drive's status.
I'd not say RAID 5 is so risky. It does depend though on how you've bought your discs. If you go out and buy 4 discs and a RAID5 controller, that could be more risky, because you might well end up with sequential serial numbers from the same manufacturing batch. That increases the likelihood that discs will fail together. If you get the discs separately, it's a lot safer. I've only ever had one disc fail (out of probably 20 I've had over a good few years). Just buy same capacity discs with different model numbers or at least from different retailers.
Lian Li also sell a very nice option, the V2100, which has 12 3.5" internal bays, plus 7 5.25" bays. With a couple of 4 in 3 adaptors, thats 20 discs plus a CD drive. The 5 in 3 adaptors don't leave enough room for cooling for my liking (even with the fans).
I'm not disagreeing with any point you raise here, but for a media server, this is off-topic. You'll need at most ~20Mb/sec for high bit-rate 1080p videos. Even running multiple streams to different media centers, even the most basic RAID cards have enough performance.
We're talking about a media server here. The vast majority of the content starts off backed up - i.e. the DVD collection. RAID does mean that if a disc fails, you're not sat there with a stack of a hundred DVDs to put back on the hard disc. The other data-loss scenarios are unlikely to affect more than a couple of the DVDs.
As for RAID hardware, get an add-in RAID card that supports configuration on disc. My card was admittedly £180 on it's own, which could have been spent on a lot of disc space. It's just enough above consumer RAID level. If it fails I can just get another, or more likely just swap it under the 3 year warranty. This type of RAID card can nicely sort out the upgrade issues also with online capacity expansion and RAID level migration.
I've recently gone through this process with my own media server. I used two RAID cards and plenty of discs. Separate the media center / media server components! Hard discs are loud and you'll not want them under the TV. Doing it this way means you can select a case as big as is required, and use old components for everything in the server (except the disc subsystem).
My first RAID card is a 5-port affair, which originally had 3x400GB discs, and now upgraded to 5. My second card is an 8-port with at present 3x500GB discs. When it needs the next upgrade, I'll just buy extra 500GB discs - just make sure the cards you buy support online capacity expansion, RAID migration and configuration on disc. Good RAID cards can be expensive but it's well worth it for this sort of thing.
A future upgrade past 4.6TB would involve replacing the 400GB discs on the older RAID card. I plan to just temporarily add new non-RAID discs to the system and transfer the data. Then I can disconnect the old array drives, plug the new ones into the RAID card and use the online RAID migration to bring that data into a new bigger RAID array. Another reason to get decent RAID cards.
I've got all this in a Silverstone Temjin TJ-05 case which supports upto 14 hard discs plus an optical drive. That leaves a space for a non-RAID system disc which is an ancient 60GB drive. The rest of the system is an old Celeron 600 system that was fairly low end when I got it around 2001. It's more than fast enough just running as a file server.
I have almost no ability to tell the operating system which threads I want to run concurrently, and which I want it to time-share.
Locks can be used for this purpose. One system I work on does precisely this because in a sense it is too multi-threaded. There are around a dozen background processes that can all get very busy at once, but only 6 CPUs. We just make one set of them grab a lock while they work, so between them they never use more than one CPU and comms channels and user interfaces can remain snappy. With a bit of work on a library you could enable arbitrary sets of processes to run in exactly the way you like.
We do need more language-level support for parallelism though. I work in real-time multi-user systems where we will likely always need to think about these issues to get the performance right. In that situation, all the necessary tools are present. But for general desktop apps, you'd just want them to split work into threads to keep all the CPU cores busy and get the job done as quick as possible. It should be possible for a compiler to do some of this without the programmer thinking too hard.
There is never going to be one spec. This looks like a great mainstream standard. Capacity support to last quite a few years. Form factor that's small enough for most devices, and directly USB compatible. But there's always going to be at least one bigger and one smaller card.
Compact Flash supports upto 137GB, which is more than can be fitted into that space right now. That's likely to remain the standard in pro cameras for a while. And in a couple of years a new spec will replace that, and probably be incompatible with this. This is quite a big card to fit into a tiny cellphone, so there will always be a spec like Micro-SD as well.
Three standards would be a nice amount, especially if there was some degree of compatibility through adapters. It would be nice if this spec could be extended to a smaller and a bigger form factor that were otherwise fully compatible. Only this form factor can be plugged directly into a USB socket of course.
Suits from back then would probably be a bit worn by now - shiny patches on the elbows etc. Also, I've put on too much weight to fit into a suit from 1997. Even good maintenance at the dry cleaners wouldn't help that.
The nature of the licences forces GPL contributors to remain in the GPL community. I am convinced that BSD code is used a lot more, and has a much bigger 'hidden' community within the commercial sector. I've used BSD code within commercial applications and been very pleased with the results. My day job pays well and any stuff I do outside of that I'm happy to give away - and if someone else could make a profit off it, that's fine too. Unfortunately, other than for a couple of really tiny apps that are completely my own work, I've never had any say on the licence. My own work I just do pure public domain. Everything else has been GPL licenced projects although I prefer BSD.
In the UK, if a million were sold there you'd have a 1/54 chance [or so] of knowing someone who owned a Zune
Is this assuming that no-one knows anybody else?!?!?
FWIW, I know five people with assorted iPods, two with irivers and half a dozen with assorted cheap players. I can't actually remember even having seen a Zune for sale in the shops, let alone met someone who bought one. Has it been launched in the UK yet?
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Weren't liberty cabbage and freedom fries part of the US capitalist propaganda?
Actually, it somehow evoked the memory of Waterworld. Dammit.
Unfortunately, I believe you're thinking of DVD-RAM which is always rewritable, with no write-once version.
I think also there is a heat issue with the sensors. The bigger, better sensors apparently generate quite a bit of heat that means you can't run them continuously. This is part of the reason you can't usually use the LCD as a viewfinder on SLRs. I think Sony have a system for running the sensor in a low resolution, low power mode for the A100, which means you can use the LCD instead of the viewfinder.
Who is 'we'? If I remember, the weapons inspectors had found no decent evidence, had said they had encountered some difficulties in accessing suspected sites, but that the difficulties were being removed and they needed some more time to confirm that Iraq had no weapons.
I think some people suspected weapons might be present, but no-one had evidence. That's not a great reason to start a war. How would you feel being given the death sentence for suspected murder with no evidence?
Actually yes. Heading off on holiday, I threw plenty of movies on a 4GB memory stick. Watched a couple on the flight out and then deleted them from the memory stick which was being shared with my camera. Only managed to save space for 1 film on the way back though. I wouldn't go out and buy a PSP for this purpose - won it in a raffle :) - but it did a decent job even so. Better quality screen than you get on any cheap planes, and your choice of film.
I do the same. If you're in town, half the time it's actually quicker than driving.
Just adding another vote for Planet Earth, which really is worth the price of the PS3 more than any game I've yet played! Motorstorm comes close though.
It's frequently a requirement to be wearing work clothes with suits not allowed on sites. I work on warehouse control systems and usually at the start it's officially a construction site. Generally I've found the engineers are on the the work-wear side of the line. Visiting upper management tend to wear suits but in theory (and occasionally in practice also) they then have to be escorted around the site by people wearing the proper gear.
If I'm heading to a site primarily for on-site programming and commissioning, I wear work clothes. If I'm there for training and office-work, I'll wear a suit - just depends on where I expect to spend the day. Middle managers vary their attire similarly. On a one-day visit maybe you see a strict suit/workwear line, but I people just look more senior and executive-like in a suit.
Carbon credits have hardly failed. Governments gave out too many for there to be much of a market for trading them - there are too many around to be worth much for sale, so as a result there is not enough reward for making major efficiency gains. But emissions across Europe are falling - the UK, France and Germany are all on course for a 10% drop, while the US has managed a 15% increase.
Fantastic! So now it's as simple as reading the nice descriptive name and looking that up in a table on a website to find out the speed and cache size. If only there was an even simpler way...
Wow, there's actually some decent looking games in there. I haven't bought any games since the three I got with the console. Of those, Motorstorm is the only one I've played much as a single player game, though Tony Hawk is OK for 2 player mode.
I don't really believe this for one second. Occasionally this may have happened but I can't think of a good example. There may be some civil unrest, and sections of the population out of work for a while, but it's pretty rare that every workplace rushes out to implement new technology on the same day. Over the course of a number of years, that workforce has to find new jobs, and mostly they do. For plenty of workers, it will be higher paid jobs, possibly even looking after / controlling / working with the machines that got their jobs.
Who would want / need an inkjet print to last forever? Prints of any kind degrade over time. The great thing about digital copies is they remain in perfect condition as long as you keep them.
Digital photos are much safer because of the ease of copying. The hard disc and CDs my first digital photos were stored on are now long gone - but the data is still there, on three PCs plus backup DVDs.
I backup my photos and a couple of other bits and pieces onto both my work PC and my parent's PC every few months. It's trivial to keep this many copies of the data - 10 minutes work every few months.
Media servers can require a LOT of storage space (at least if like me, you're not re-encoding your DVDs). I'm already upto 8 discs across two arrays, plus one system disc. I've seen very few MBs with that many ports.
Additionally, nice RAID cards can support adding extra discs to existing arrays etc. i.e. they do most of the stuff that Linux systems can do in software, but in an easier to deal with kind of way.
Both of my RAID cards can send out emails if the hardware runs into trouble. But I guess this is dependent on the software bundled. The idea of hardware RAID is that the OS only sees one drive, so I doubt there is a generic way of seeing an individual drive failing - you probably have to ask the RAID card about the drive's status.
I'd not say RAID 5 is so risky. It does depend though on how you've bought your discs. If you go out and buy 4 discs and a RAID5 controller, that could be more risky, because you might well end up with sequential serial numbers from the same manufacturing batch. That increases the likelihood that discs will fail together. If you get the discs separately, it's a lot safer. I've only ever had one disc fail (out of probably 20 I've had over a good few years). Just buy same capacity discs with different model numbers or at least from different retailers.
Lian Li also sell a very nice option, the V2100, which has 12 3.5" internal bays, plus 7 5.25" bays. With a couple of 4 in 3 adaptors, thats 20 discs plus a CD drive. The 5 in 3 adaptors don't leave enough room for cooling for my liking (even with the fans).
I'm not disagreeing with any point you raise here, but for a media server, this is off-topic. You'll need at most ~20Mb/sec for high bit-rate 1080p videos. Even running multiple streams to different media centers, even the most basic RAID cards have enough performance.
We're talking about a media server here. The vast majority of the content starts off backed up - i.e. the DVD collection. RAID does mean that if a disc fails, you're not sat there with a stack of a hundred DVDs to put back on the hard disc. The other data-loss scenarios are unlikely to affect more than a couple of the DVDs.
As for RAID hardware, get an add-in RAID card that supports configuration on disc. My card was admittedly £180 on it's own, which could have been spent on a lot of disc space. It's just enough above consumer RAID level. If it fails I can just get another, or more likely just swap it under the 3 year warranty. This type of RAID card can nicely sort out the upgrade issues also with online capacity expansion and RAID level migration.
I've recently gone through this process with my own media server. I used two RAID cards and plenty of discs. Separate the media center / media server components! Hard discs are loud and you'll not want them under the TV. Doing it this way means you can select a case as big as is required, and use old components for everything in the server (except the disc subsystem).
My first RAID card is a 5-port affair, which originally had 3x400GB discs, and now upgraded to 5. My second card is an 8-port with at present 3x500GB discs. When it needs the next upgrade, I'll just buy extra 500GB discs - just make sure the cards you buy support online capacity expansion, RAID migration and configuration on disc. Good RAID cards can be expensive but it's well worth it for this sort of thing.
A future upgrade past 4.6TB would involve replacing the 400GB discs on the older RAID card. I plan to just temporarily add new non-RAID discs to the system and transfer the data. Then I can disconnect the old array drives, plug the new ones into the RAID card and use the online RAID migration to bring that data into a new bigger RAID array. Another reason to get decent RAID cards.
I've got all this in a Silverstone Temjin TJ-05 case which supports upto 14 hard discs plus an optical drive. That leaves a space for a non-RAID system disc which is an ancient 60GB drive. The rest of the system is an old Celeron 600 system that was fairly low end when I got it around 2001. It's more than fast enough just running as a file server.
Locks can be used for this purpose. One system I work on does precisely this because in a sense it is too multi-threaded. There are around a dozen background processes that can all get very busy at once, but only 6 CPUs. We just make one set of them grab a lock while they work, so between them they never use more than one CPU and comms channels and user interfaces can remain snappy. With a bit of work on a library you could enable arbitrary sets of processes to run in exactly the way you like.
We do need more language-level support for parallelism though. I work in real-time multi-user systems where we will likely always need to think about these issues to get the performance right. In that situation, all the necessary tools are present. But for general desktop apps, you'd just want them to split work into threads to keep all the CPU cores busy and get the job done as quick as possible. It should be possible for a compiler to do some of this without the programmer thinking too hard.
There is never going to be one spec. This looks like a great mainstream standard. Capacity support to last quite a few years. Form factor that's small enough for most devices, and directly USB compatible. But there's always going to be at least one bigger and one smaller card.
Compact Flash supports upto 137GB, which is more than can be fitted into that space right now. That's likely to remain the standard in pro cameras for a while. And in a couple of years a new spec will replace that, and probably be incompatible with this. This is quite a big card to fit into a tiny cellphone, so there will always be a spec like Micro-SD as well.
Three standards would be a nice amount, especially if there was some degree of compatibility through adapters. It would be nice if this spec could be extended to a smaller and a bigger form factor that were otherwise fully compatible. Only this form factor can be plugged directly into a USB socket of course.
Suits from back then would probably be a bit worn by now - shiny patches on the elbows etc. Also, I've put on too much weight to fit into a suit from 1997. Even good maintenance at the dry cleaners wouldn't help that.
The nature of the licences forces GPL contributors to remain in the GPL community. I am convinced that BSD code is used a lot more, and has a much bigger 'hidden' community within the commercial sector. I've used BSD code within commercial applications and been very pleased with the results. My day job pays well and any stuff I do outside of that I'm happy to give away - and if someone else could make a profit off it, that's fine too. Unfortunately, other than for a couple of really tiny apps that are completely my own work, I've never had any say on the licence. My own work I just do pure public domain. Everything else has been GPL licenced projects although I prefer BSD.
Is this assuming that no-one knows anybody else?!?!?
FWIW, I know five people with assorted iPods, two with irivers and half a dozen with assorted cheap players. I can't actually remember even having seen a Zune for sale in the shops, let alone met someone who bought one. Has it been launched in the UK yet?