This is rediculous. I shouldn't have to purchase more ram just to run an OS that everyone is claiming has a small footprint. I started with Slackware in 1994 and I agree it was small then, but if 64MB of RAM isn't enough to run the OS, that's just sad.
FreeBSD seems to still work in small amounts of RAM... two years ago I installed it on a 386 with 8MB/RAM just to prove a point. I would assume it is still similarly frugal today.
I mean, come on, anyone here remember what mp3.com started out as? It was originally a search engine to help you find mp3 files on the web and ftp sites. Essentially a warez engine.
"Show me hard evidence that a Disney production-- not a law they endorsed, not a bill they lobbied for against, but an actual, released to the public (or not) work with the Disney name-- was harmful to the people at large and children in particular, and I'll immediately destroy anything of theirs I own."
What they are guilty of is lowering public standards. For example, people now believe that great movie music sounds like the crap in Lion King, or that Pocahontas was historically accurate.
Sorry, reading posts of whiny tech support personnel is not my idea of humor. Hoo hoo, look at the frustrated tech support d00d "tell off" the stupid customer! Hee hee, those customers are such morons.
"My opinion, having been a Slash reader since the site's infancy, is that there's actually a fairly low level of religious knowledge amongst the learned Slashdot crowd. This tends to [unfortunately] manifest itself in haughty arrogance."
My opinion, having been a Slash reader long before you were, is that you are haughtily arrogant.
Ironically, Armed and Dangerous was released from LucasArts just three months ago, and I preordered it because I could tell it was a funny game that would make me laugh. Sure enough, it was funny and made me laugh out loud.
And they sold enough copies over the Xmas season that it is now possible to buy it from gogamer.com for a mere $12.90. I don't know what it is about LucasArts and funny games, but they keep getting burned by them again and again. It is very possible that the commercial failure of Armed and Dangerous is what crushed Sam & Max.
Sadly, SpinRite is currently useless because it only supports FAT12/16/32 filesystems. If it supported NTFS, it would be infinitely more useful, but Steve hasn't updated it in 6+ years.
My personal experience with TuffTEST Pro (yes, I purchased it legitimately) was that it was completely unable to find known bad PC800 RAM on a dual P4 Xeon motherboard.
Mind you, it's fantastic for troubleshooting my older vintage computers, but I wouldn't use it for modern use.
$connect="wakeonlan --wakeup $machine";// or whatever
Uh, dude, that "or whatever" is more than 50% of the question he was asking. (Unless you are holding out on us with a "wakeonlan" script you have filed away somewhere...)
I must be, because I have had none of the problems all of you are screaming about. I just installed the free version (which was found in three clicks, not twenty -- RTFW) and instead of choosing "typical install" I customized it to not install anything I didn't want. End result is a player that plays the.RM files I want it to when I click on them, nothing more. Message center can be disabled in the program's options, not by going through registry madness.
I do not work for Real, but I am a fan of the technology. Honestly, take a 320x240@30fps clip and compress it to ISDN bitrates using every single major package, including MPEG-4 and DivX, and then tell me Real doesn't kick ass. Because for low-bitrate video, it really does kick major ass.
I can suck shows off of my $399 ReplayTV (lifetime included), edit, and burn to DVD because it has 10mbit built-in. Not only that, but the hardware MPEG encoder is one of the best I've seen in a consumer device. For a price like that, why bother building your own?
486/66 is NOT enough to play anything higher than 128K/s MP3s, and not necessarily with decent quality. Any Pentium 75 or higher has the horsepower.
Speaking of quality, very few 486s have PCI slots, so you'd be restricted to ISA sound cards. And apart from very select few cards (Turtle Beach Multisound), ISA sound cards have crappy fidelity. The Sound Blaster 16, for example, claims 16-bit AD/DA but in fact uses 12-bit converters.
So I'd recommend any Pentium system 75MHz or faster. That would work.
I would mod you down if I were able. If you had really read up on the subject you would know that Autism is not a "disease" -- it is not communicable, etc.
And your comments along the lines of "there is no scientific evidence that autism is a spectrum" are also baseless. My son has been diagnosed as high-functioning autistic (which is obvious if you talk to him) and he has genetically inherited traits from both me and my wife that demonstrate a scale. I am easily distracted, have the ability to intensly concentrate to the point of shutting out the world, love all things computers, etc. -- you could say I have many traits of Asperger's. My wife constantly wants change in our household, has bursts of energy followed by crashes, talks very fast -- you could say she has many traits of ADD or ADHD. All three of us are on a scale that has many points of different or malformed neurological behavior.
I know that my family alone is not a clinical trial. But I have personally met many other families that share the same background (parents are technical or slightly-autistic, child is more pronounced).
They may own the rights, but you can get original IBM 101-key keyboards from ebay regularly for about $12. I own 7 myself (Best. Keyboard. Ever.) for all my machines.
My co-workers hate me, BTW. They claim the noise is deafening, but an average of 100 words per minute can't be wrong!:-)
I'm surprised that people haven't mentioned this by now, but you can get a refurbished 40-hour ReplayTV unit WITH lifetime activation for $329 if you go to www.sonicblue.com. That's like paying $80 for a unit and then $250 for the lifetime activation.
Show me a PC you can build yourself for $330 that does everything a ReplayTV does and I'll eat my hat. Keep in mind that a ReplayTV has a very good MPEG-2 hardware encoder/decoder (I've analyzed the bitstreams myself, it's a very competent VBR encoder) that would normally cost you $199 alone to buy in a card (WinPVR from Hauppauge).
You must remember that, up until VERY recently, all CDROM drives have a little "play" button on them that will blindly seek to track 1 and start playing redbook audio through it's analog and/or digital output ports (you know, the little thin cable that you can never find when you're trying to hook up your CDROM drive to "AUX" on your sound card). You don't even need to have an OS booted -- just supply power to the CDROM drive and press the little button and it will play.
While the above is sarcastic, I'm actually somewhat serious -- what EMI said was perfectly and technicaly valid. Incredibly insulting to the computer user community, but valid.
Something's not right about this one. For example, if you could play it AT ALL then I wouldn't consider it "defective". There is no such thing as copy-protection (other than CSS) for DVDs (yet). Did you actually try it on a set-top player?
I'm surprised the DivX advocates still haven't figured this out over the last three years: DivX (and any non-field-aware format, like VCD) is completely inadequate for archiving anything that started life as video. I'll explain:
Video (I'll use NTSC numbers here) is interlaced, which means that there are two images in every frame: one in the odd scanlines, and another 1/60th of a second later in the even scanlines. This means there are 60 different images per second in captured 720x480 video. When you play back an interlaced format on a progressive device, you get combing -- you can see the individual lines of each image if there's high motion. It looks like ragged "teeth" on the edges of moving objects. So the common answer is to deinterlace by either blending the fields together or throwing one field away, right?
Wrong: What the DivX fanboys conveniently ignore is that doing so throws away half of the images. In other words, motion quality is halved. To put this in computer game terms, you are taking something that runs at 60fps and converting it to 30fps -- I don't think any gamer would agree that throwing away framerate is desirable. Any video source recorded directly to videotape, like documentaries made for TV, newscasts, live sporting events, etc., will have a noticable drop in motion quality if encoded to a non-field-aware format like DivX, VCD, etc.
MPEG-2 is a field-aware format: It was specifically designed to hold 480 lines (again, NTSC numbers here) divided into two fields. DivX and VCD are not field-aware. (The newest DivX 5.0x may be but all of the information being disemminated on using DivX doesn't take this into account.) Because of this, DivX's only legitimate archival use is preserving letterboxed movies stored at 24fps (really 23.976). Any other use and you're butchering the footage to the point where people will look at the TV funny and note how it looks "computer-ish".
If you don't have a DVD burner yet, wait one more year when they'll be as cheap as CD burners. If you can't wait and just have to get something burned to CD, then at least prepare your MPEG-2 assets as either SVCD at 480x480, or "CVCD" (proper term is Half-D1 MPEG-2) at 352x480. Both will play in modern DVD players and you should easily be able to get at least 30-45 minutes of high quality on a CD (up to an hour if encoding 352x480 using a high quality multi-pass encoder like Cinema Craft or TMPEGEnc).
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This is rediculous. I shouldn't have to purchase more ram just to run an OS that everyone is claiming has a small footprint. I started with Slackware in 1994 and I agree it was small then, but if 64MB of RAM isn't enough to run the OS, that's just sad.
FreeBSD seems to still work in small amounts of RAM... two years ago I installed it on a 386 with 8MB/RAM just to prove a point. I would assume it is still similarly frugal today.
A spy movie? How about any movie involving computers?
QuickTime can play xvid encoded movie files with the included MPEG-4 plugin.
Not quite. QT can play *some* MPEG-4 files, but last I checked it cannot handle some of the more advanced aspects of MPEG-4.
I mean, come on, anyone here remember what mp3.com started out as? It was originally a search engine to help you find mp3 files on the web and ftp sites. Essentially a warez engine.
"Show me hard evidence that a Disney production-- not a law they endorsed, not a bill they lobbied for against, but an actual, released to the public (or not) work with the Disney name-- was harmful to the people at large and children in particular, and I'll immediately destroy anything of theirs I own."
What they are guilty of is lowering public standards. For example, people now believe that great movie music sounds like the crap in Lion King, or that Pocahontas was historically accurate.
(I mean the arcade version, not the somewhat lame NES version.) Hell, the screens are in the exact same layout!
Sorry, reading posts of whiny tech support personnel is not my idea of humor. Hoo hoo, look at the frustrated tech support d00d "tell off" the stupid customer! Hee hee, those customers are such morons.
Yeah, sorry. I've got better things to read.
"My opinion, having been a Slash reader since the site's infancy, is that there's actually a fairly low level of religious knowledge amongst the learned Slashdot crowd. This tends to [unfortunately] manifest itself in haughty arrogance."
My opinion, having been a Slash reader long before you were, is that you are haughtily arrogant.
Put the gun down -- you still have one foot left!
"I want a funny game that makes me laugh!"
Ironically, Armed and Dangerous was released from LucasArts just three months ago, and I preordered it because I could tell it was a funny game that would make me laugh. Sure enough, it was funny and made me laugh out loud.
And they sold enough copies over the Xmas season that it is now possible to buy it from gogamer.com for a mere $12.90. I don't know what it is about LucasArts and funny games, but they keep getting burned by them again and again. It is very possible that the commercial failure of Armed and Dangerous is what crushed Sam & Max.
Sadly, SpinRite is currently useless because it only supports FAT12/16/32 filesystems. If it supported NTFS, it would be infinitely more useful, but Steve hasn't updated it in 6+ years.
My personal experience with TuffTEST Pro (yes, I purchased it legitimately) was that it was completely unable to find known bad PC800 RAM on a dual P4 Xeon motherboard.
Mind you, it's fantastic for troubleshooting my older vintage computers, but I wouldn't use it for modern use.
Oops! http://gsd.di.uminho.pt/jpo/software/wakeonlan/
$connect="wakeonlan --wakeup $machine"; // or whatever
Uh, dude, that "or whatever" is more than 50% of the question he was asking. (Unless you are holding out on us with a "wakeonlan" script you have filed away somewhere...)
If you haven't even figured out that the RAM MUST be ECC, you shouldn't be even aloud near the farm.
Why? Will he wake up the animals?
I agree with your sentiment, but maybe you shouldn't be allowed to post on Slashdot until you've done your research (in a third grade grammar text).
You only *now* figured out how to rip DVDs? Turn in your Slashdot login, son; you're not worthy.
I must be, because I have had none of the problems all of you are screaming about. I just installed the free version (which was found in three clicks, not twenty -- RTFW) and instead of choosing "typical install" I customized it to not install anything I didn't want. End result is a player that plays the .RM files I want it to when I click on them, nothing more. Message center can be disabled in the program's options, not by going through registry madness.
I do not work for Real, but I am a fan of the technology. Honestly, take a 320x240@30fps clip and compress it to ISDN bitrates using every single major package, including MPEG-4 and DivX, and then tell me Real doesn't kick ass. Because for low-bitrate video, it really does kick major ass.
I can suck shows off of my $399 ReplayTV (lifetime included), edit, and burn to DVD because it has 10mbit built-in. Not only that, but the hardware MPEG encoder is one of the best I've seen in a consumer device. For a price like that, why bother building your own?
486/66 is NOT enough to play anything higher than 128K/s MP3s, and not necessarily with decent quality. Any Pentium 75 or higher has the horsepower.
Speaking of quality, very few 486s have PCI slots, so you'd be restricted to ISA sound cards. And apart from very select few cards (Turtle Beach Multisound), ISA sound cards have crappy fidelity. The Sound Blaster 16, for example, claims 16-bit AD/DA but in fact uses 12-bit converters.
So I'd recommend any Pentium system 75MHz or faster. That would work.
I would mod you down if I were able. If you had really read up on the subject you would know that Autism is not a "disease" -- it is not communicable, etc.
And your comments along the lines of "there is no scientific evidence that autism is a spectrum" are also baseless. My son has been diagnosed as high-functioning autistic (which is obvious if you talk to him) and he has genetically inherited traits from both me and my wife that demonstrate a scale. I am easily distracted, have the ability to intensly concentrate to the point of shutting out the world, love all things computers, etc. -- you could say I have many traits of Asperger's. My wife constantly wants change in our household, has bursts of energy followed by crashes, talks very fast -- you could say she has many traits of ADD or ADHD. All three of us are on a scale that has many points of different or malformed neurological behavior.
I know that my family alone is not a clinical trial. But I have personally met many other families that share the same background (parents are technical or slightly-autistic, child is more pronounced).
They may own the rights, but you can get original IBM 101-key keyboards from ebay regularly for about $12. I own 7 myself (Best. Keyboard. Ever.) for all my machines.
:-)
My co-workers hate me, BTW. They claim the noise is deafening, but an average of 100 words per minute can't be wrong!
I'm surprised that people haven't mentioned this by now, but you can get a refurbished 40-hour ReplayTV unit WITH lifetime activation for $329 if you go to www.sonicblue.com. That's like paying $80 for a unit and then $250 for the lifetime activation.
Show me a PC you can build yourself for $330 that does everything a ReplayTV does and I'll eat my hat. Keep in mind that a ReplayTV has a very good MPEG-2 hardware encoder/decoder (I've analyzed the bitstreams myself, it's a very competent VBR encoder) that would normally cost you $199 alone to buy in a card (WinPVR from Hauppauge).
You must remember that, up until VERY recently, all CDROM drives have a little "play" button on them that will blindly seek to track 1 and start playing redbook audio through it's analog and/or digital output ports (you know, the little thin cable that you can never find when you're trying to hook up your CDROM drive to "AUX" on your sound card). You don't even need to have an OS booted -- just supply power to the CDROM drive and press the little button and it will play.
While the above is sarcastic, I'm actually somewhat serious -- what EMI said was perfectly and technicaly valid. Incredibly insulting to the computer user community, but valid.
Something's not right about this one. For example, if you could play it AT ALL then I wouldn't consider it "defective". There is no such thing as copy-protection (other than CSS) for DVDs (yet). Did you actually try it on a set-top player?
Well that's ironic.
So is missing the comma in that sentence.
I'm surprised the DivX advocates still haven't figured this out over the last three years: DivX (and any non-field-aware format, like VCD) is completely inadequate for archiving anything that started life as video. I'll explain:
Video (I'll use NTSC numbers here) is interlaced, which means that there are two images in every frame: one in the odd scanlines, and another 1/60th of a second later in the even scanlines. This means there are 60 different images per second in captured 720x480 video. When you play back an interlaced format on a progressive device, you get combing -- you can see the individual lines of each image if there's high motion. It looks like ragged "teeth" on the edges of moving objects. So the common answer is to deinterlace by either blending the fields together or throwing one field away, right?
Wrong: What the DivX fanboys conveniently ignore is that doing so throws away half of the images. In other words, motion quality is halved. To put this in computer game terms, you are taking something that runs at 60fps and converting it to 30fps -- I don't think any gamer would agree that throwing away framerate is desirable. Any video source recorded directly to videotape, like documentaries made for TV, newscasts, live sporting events, etc., will have a noticable drop in motion quality if encoded to a non-field-aware format like DivX, VCD, etc.
MPEG-2 is a field-aware format: It was specifically designed to hold 480 lines (again, NTSC numbers here) divided into two fields. DivX and VCD are not field-aware. (The newest DivX 5.0x may be but all of the information being disemminated on using DivX doesn't take this into account.) Because of this, DivX's only legitimate archival use is preserving letterboxed movies stored at 24fps (really 23.976). Any other use and you're butchering the footage to the point where people will look at the TV funny and note how it looks "computer-ish".
If you don't have a DVD burner yet, wait one more year when they'll be as cheap as CD burners. If you can't wait and just have to get something burned to CD, then at least prepare your MPEG-2 assets as either SVCD at 480x480, or "CVCD" (proper term is Half-D1 MPEG-2) at 352x480. Both will play in modern DVD players and you should easily be able to get at least 30-45 minutes of high quality on a CD (up to an hour if encoding 352x480 using a high quality multi-pass encoder like Cinema Craft or TMPEGEnc).