Jim Henderson wrote:
> Eventually went and got a keyboard and monitor and plugged in - Vista had 
> reverted *every* *damned* *change* *I* *made*.

Weird. I've occasionally had it happen where it "couldn't load my 
profile" when I remote loggined, leaving me with everything as if I was 
logging in for the first time. But logging out and logging back in 
always fixed that. I figured a temporary timing failure somewhere.

> HP very *helpfully* requires that you use the actual OS the drivers are written for
in order 
> to extract them. 

The abusiveness of HP's "rescue disks" are one of the many reasons I no 
longer will buy any HP machine. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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nemesis wrote:
> Perhaps SP1 did improve things a bit, I guess...

Oh yeah. SP1 on any Microsoft OS (post DOS at least) is a necessary 
precursor to being usable. They tend to ship things long before they're 
actually ready for the general public. It's all that sort of tuning 
stuff they put in the SPs, while the first release I'm convinced is more 
to give the HW and SW vendors a chance to get their stuff working OK 
with it. Even XP pre-SP2 wasn't all that great. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> 
> Cool, I've been thinking about putting a system like this together, this 
> is a useful parts list. :-)  How's it work for you?

Nicely. I've wrote a bunch of PHP-scripts, so the system works on it's
own and I can control it over a web-browser. I'll release the software
after it seems even remotely releaseable. It works already, but the code
is ugly (and there's some minor clitches). It also has automated
CD-ripping system - I just drop a disc to CD-ROM, Xplayer rips it,
checks CDDB for disc information and encodes it to FLAC. My goal is to
make a system which is usable also by others, not just me.

http://www.zbxt.net/~aero/xplayer.png
http://www.zbxt.net/~aero/xplayer_trackinfo.png

> Jim

-Aero

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Darren New wrote:
> 
>> Yep, pure business. I'm pretty sure if I was running a company like
>> Nvidia I'd work exactly the same. I might do some time-shifting for the
>> drivers, but releasing Vista-drivers for G400-aged card... No way.
> 
> I don't know how far back they really go, but I remember it was least a
> couple of generations. And, of course, it's a thing that's easy to point
> out, unlike (say) reliability. You just point to the web pages and say
> "See? We do that."
> 

Yep, Matrox has done that - and I'd probably do that, if I was running a
company like Matrox (traditionally quality and long lifetimes rather
than extreme speed). Above I ment that if I was running a company like
Nvidia, which wants to stay at the top of speed with its cards.

-Aero

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On Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:53:43 +0200, Eero Ahonen wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> 
>> Cool, I've been thinking about putting a system like this together,
>> this is a useful parts list. :-)  How's it work for you?
> 
> Nicely. I've wrote a bunch of PHP-scripts, so the system works on it's
> own and I can control it over a web-browser. I'll release the software
> after it seems even remotely releaseable. It works already, but the code
> is ugly (and there's some minor clitches). It also has automated
> CD-ripping system - I just drop a disc to CD-ROM, Xplayer rips it,
> checks CDDB for disc information and encodes it to FLAC. My goal is to
> make a system which is usable also by others, not just me.
> 
> http://www.zbxt.net/~aero/xplayer.png
> http://www.zbxt.net/~aero/xplayer_trackinfo.png

Cool, are you doing other types of media as well, or so far just music?

Jim

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On Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:37:45 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Eventually went and got a keyboard and monitor and plugged in - Vista
>> had reverted *every* *damned* *change* *I* *made*.
> 
> Weird. I've occasionally had it happen where it "couldn't load my
> profile" when I remote loggined, leaving me with everything as if I was
> logging in for the first time. But logging out and logging back in
> always fixed that. I figured a temporary timing failure somewhere.

Huh, yeah, I tried rebooting the machine a couple of times, and it just 
completely forgot what it was supposed to do.

>> HP very *helpfully* requires that you use the actual OS the drivers are
>> written for in order to extract them.
> 
> The abusiveness of HP's "rescue disks" are one of the many reasons I no
> longer will buy any HP machine. :-)

I can understand that.  If I weren't running Linux, I think I'd probably 
do the same.  I have to admit, though, I really like the machine I 
bought.  It runs Linux very nicely. :-)

Jim

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Sun, 02 Nov 2008 16:33:39 -0200, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>> OTOH, I read about a developer who quit contributing to the Linux kernel
>> because he was tired about devs caring about companies saying
>> $BULLSHT_BENCHMARK now gives lower results, instead of caring about the
>> desktop becoming faster for users. (it was about lowering latency and
>> improving the process scheduler, which would give better speed to the
>> desktop)
> 
> I hadn't read that one...

Found link:

http://apcmag.com/why_i_quit_kernel_developer_con_kolivas.htm

This is the part I was referring to:

"And there are all the obvious bug reports. They're afraid to mention these.
How scary do you think it is to say 'my Firefox tabs open slowly since the
last CPU scheduler upgrade'? To top it all off, the enterprise users are
the opposite. Just watch each kernel release and see how quickly some
$bullshit_benchmark degraded by .1% with patch $Y gets reported. See also
how quickly it gets attended to."

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> http://apcmag.com/why_i_quit_kernel_developer_con_kolivas.htm

Heh. """Hardware driven innovation cannot be afforded by the market any 
more. There is no money in it. There will be no market for it. Computers 
are boring."""  Yeah, right. Because nobody gets excited about OLPC, or 
a PS3, or a new graphics processing pipeline design, or SSDDs, or 
hardware RAID, or multi-touch screens, or virtualization, or ....

This guy's starting to sound like that Alan Kay interview.

"""Computers of today may be 1,000 times faster than they were a decade 
ago, yet the things that matter are slower."""  Yeah, because with 
uptimes of months or years, the length of time it takes to boot is of 
supreme importance.

"""Money was pouring into development from all these big names into 
developing Linux's performance in these areas.""" Ding ding ding!

He tinkers with Linux scheduling. I wonder if he realizes that UNIX 
scheduling has always sucked ass compared to anything contemporary. The 
scheduling tables in the mainframe I worked on actually had to be 
compressed in memory (in the sense of sparse, I guess) because they'd 
otherwise take up too much core. And UNIX at the time was saying "let's 
nuke him if he's compute bound, and otherwise bump him up." I still 
don't know if they even have the concept of a minquan.  Sheesh. But it 
certainly sounds like he was getting it working much better. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> 
> Cool, are you doing other types of media as well, or so far just music?

Every possible file. It searches for all files in configured basedirs
and you can define the player-software (and if the file is playable at
all) by filetype. I'm throwing video files straightly to full-screen X
with "export DISPLAY=localhost:0;/usr/bin/mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=3,0
-vo x11 -fs -zoom". Apache is running on the same user that has the
right to play the files, just to make things easier (the machine is
dedicated, after all).

And yeah, it normally plays randomly the radio-playable marked tracks
and you can browse and search them - you'll need to log in to see the
files you have permissions to (ables ie. you to give your kids
permission to play cartoons, but not porn).

> Jim

-Aero

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Eero Ahonen wrote:
> Every possible file. It searches for all files in configured basedirs

Reminds me of a description I read some months ago. A quiet dedicated 
commercial Linux server with nothing but a web interface. It would read 
all your POP and IMAP accounts and consolodate them into one imap 
server, would run bittorrents you gave it the torrents for, would serve 
files, a printer, a web server, basically all the kinds of things you'd 
want in a nerdy home server. It was like $600 with a big HD on it, and 
you just plug it in and go.

Only on sale in Sweeden or something, sadly enough.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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