Opportunity to upgrade
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Well, my trusty Dell laptop HD has probebly died giving me an opportunity to upgrade to the next best thing. The next best thing must still be a laptop, runs Apache, MySQL and PHP, GIMP and screams, for minimum bucks, for all round office use and web development. Is it a MacOSX, Windows XP/Vista or Linux? Any thoughts to put in my note to Santa would be greatly appreciated.
Happy Holidays Robert C
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On Dec 22, 2008, at 10:22 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Well, my trusty Dell laptop HD has probebly died giving me an > opportunity to upgrade to the next best thing. The next best thing > must still be a laptop, runs Apache, MySQL and PHP, GIMP and > screams, for minimum bucks, for all round office use and web > development. Is it a MacOSX, Windows XP/Vista or Linux? Any > thoughts to put in my note to Santa would be greatly appreciated. Ouch, sorry to hear of the death of a loved one! Steve recently became a Switcher, and may have some insights. Mine would be to consider your entire ecology of computational devices: Phones, Cameras, Desktops, Servers/Hosting, Web Services (Google Mail, Cal, Docs), and see them as a whole. Then see if a change or two makes sense in this larger whole. I've not had a desktop for quite some time, but I'm considering a slight move back to one .. or at least a server within my home. Most of us have our laptop become our desktop, and that means mobility is compromised. Then NetBooks peak in, things that are quite light, have better battery life, travel well but are under-powered when looked at in the traditional way. But if supported by the entire ecology, netbooks actually might fit in nicely. And Google Docs are changing the game for many of us .. not only available to us on all our digital devices (yes, you can edit your docs from your phone, netbook, notebook, kiosk, and so on) .. but also easily shared so others can work easily with you. Just a thought. Mainly considering the whole pile of stuff and services! -- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Robert J. Cordingley
[hidden email] wrote:
> Well, my trusty Dell laptop HD has probebly died giving me an > opportunity to upgrade to the next best thing. The next best thing > must still be a laptop, runs Apache, MySQL and PHP, GIMP and screams, > for minimum bucks, for all round office use and web development. Is it > a MacOSX, Windows XP/Vista or Linux? Any thoughts to put in my note > to Santa would be greatly appreciated. To address the `screams' part of the question, perhaps in a somewhat obscure way.. There's this effort to introduce external PCI Express 2.0 ports and cabling: http://ati.amd.com/technology/xgp/index.html There aren't many laptops yet with it, though.. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Fujitsu-Siemens-Amilo-Sa-3650-Gets-Listed-93211.shtml Besides providing high-end graphics to laptops, it could also facilitate hybrid computing where one has a general purpose processor (the laptop) connected to an accelerator blade/box and the two can share memory (@ 4Gbytes/sec!) via a programmable direct memory access controller. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Robert J. Cordingley
Well you all know me, so no surprise: Kubuntu, either 8.04, or 8.10 would be my recommendation. Either of these distros will run nicely on low-end (~$399) laptops, or the higher-end machines as well. You can get an Acer or Compaq laptop with 2 GB ram, DVD burner, wireless g and ~120 GB disk for around $400.
You can also get an Intel dual core Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled for about $550: http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=dncwpl1&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&kc=segtopic~linux_3x --Doug -- Doug Roberts, RTI International [hidden email] [hidden email] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 10:22 AM, <[hidden email]> wrote:
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On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote: Well you all know me, so no surprise: Kubuntu, either 8.04, or 8.10 would be my recommendation. Either of these distros will run nicely on low-end (~$399) laptops, or the higher-end machines as well. You can get an Acer or Compaq laptop with 2 GB ram, DVD burner, wireless g and ~120 GB disk for around $400. At the other end of the spectrum, I just spent $1800 to get a thinkpad x200 tablet, and it also runs Ubuntu 8.10 out of the box. Some tweaks were needed, but nothing like the nvidia driver odyssey and intel wireless runaround my last Dell sent me off on. And it's lighter, runs cooler, longer battery life, and all round feels better built than Dell. The trick with Lenovo turned out to be to find the models it builds in volume for VAR's and buy one of them at the VAR price rather than customizing. -- rec -- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Robert J. Cordingley
> Well, my trusty Dell laptop HD has probebly died giving me an opportunity
> to upgrade to the next best thing. Â The next best thing must still be a > laptop, runs Apache, MySQL and PHP, GIMP and screams, for minimum bucks, > for all round office use and web development. Is it a MacOSX, Windows > XP/Vista or Linux? Â Any thoughts to put in my note to Santa would be > greatly appreciated. "Minimum bucks" might indicate leaning towards the bargain PC or PC laptop. However, at $999 the closeout white Macbooks are (IMHO) quite nice machines. With $80 for VMWare Fusion you can run multiple OS's (Windows, Linux x64, etc.). Alternatively with rEFIt you could have multiple OS's natively (Solaris even) through a boot menu. Having used a white Macbook that runs OS X and Windows XP SP2, Ubuntu 7.x (32-bit), Ubuntu x64 (v. 8.04) since February 2008 I prefer the Macbook to any of the laptops I've used recently (Dell D820, Thinkpad, etc.). There is also the VirtualBox option for a hypervisor and multiple OS's. I agree that the desktops offer better price/performance ratio....a comparable iMac or desktop PC presents better specs for less $$$. On the other end of the spectrum, I'm about to build the second desktop around a Tyan S2925A2NRF low-end server mainboard, the first of which has been in service at a business for year, and functioned flawlessly as a Linux desktop before being re-purposed, now (in someone else's hands) a Windows desktop. You could build a pretty nice desktop machine quite affordably starting with something like this; http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128359 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115017 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231149 -Nick ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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I'll see your VMWare and raise it with a *free* Sun VirtualBox. I dropped all of my VMWare licenses a few months ago and switched over completely to VirtualBox.
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Community Sun's VB is much faster, more flexible, and more full featured for what I need to do with a VM. BTW, I also built my last Linux desktop with components all from NewEgg, about a year ago. Here's what went into that box: --Doug -- Doug Roberts, RTI International [hidden email] [hidden email] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Nicholas Frost <[hidden email]> wrote:
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In reply to this post by Nick Frost
All the discussions of nifty hardware possibilities, along with my
slightly flower-child "whole shebang" view, leads me to ask folks about their larger computing ecology and how it has impacted your choice of new devices, whether desktops, laptops, phones, servers, media (tivo, appletv, ...) and so on. I'm thinking of a few gagets for my future, and a Mac Mini, for example, looks likely for a home server/desktop. My goal is the old Sun Microsystems approach: The Network is the Computer! Thus I'd like to access my media, data, apps and so on from many different places and devices. One example occurred a while back when we bought a SlingBox. Its a nifty device that makes your TV available on the web. That, with a TiVo or similar "PVR", makes time shifted personal media available world wide. In my case, the TiVo can "see" more than just my TV, it also sees all my iTunes and iPhoto media, thus making it too available world wide. I've used it with success from Italy, for example (last year's NFL playoffs). I want to make further advances, with the goal of making all my data/ media available ubiquitously, from any network device (my phone, for example). I haven't gotten involved with Google Docs yet, and probably should. I *have* used Google Apps and Google Code for a recent redfish project and am impressed. I've also followed Roger's Amazon EC2 tutorial and built an "instance". I've also got a great hosting system (Joyent), and use both BingoDisk and S3 and am using WebDav and other "network mounted file systems". Even with all this great stuff, I haven't really connected all the dots yet. For example, with the Mac Time Machine, I should be able to backup my stuff onto Amazon S3 or BingoDisk fairly trivially. If I did that, and had two-way synch working so that if I changed the Network, my laptop(s) would sync with that. Is anyone else pursuing a "The Network is the Computer" approach? Any tales to tell? -- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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Owen,
One cautionary comment regarding Google Docs: it is a very poor second choice to the OpenOffice suite in terms of features, and compatibility to the M$ Office Suite. It's better than nothing, but just barely. I use a lot of the other Google stuff: Calendar, Blogger, Web Picassa, AdSense (Ingrun & I had a nice dinner, with enough $$ left over for a nice bottle of brandy from my AdSense proceeds from the LANL blog), and Google Docs, but only for small, simple text docs. I also use HostMonster.com as one of my ISPs, because they offer *unlimited* disk storage and bandwidth, website domain registration, plus a bunch of other features, all for about $7 per month. Hostmonster is where all the multimedia material for my Tin Star music blog (http://tinstarmusic.blogspot.com) goes . --Doug -- Doug Roberts, RTI International [hidden email] [hidden email] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 1:55 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote: All the discussions of nifty hardware possibilities, along with my slightly flower-child "whole shebang" view, leads me to ask folks about their larger computing ecology and how it has impacted your choice of new devices, whether desktops, laptops, phones, servers, media (tivo, appletv, ...) and so on. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
Owen Densmore wrote:
> One example occurred a while back when we bought a SlingBox. Its a > nifty device that makes your TV available on the web. Which begs the question: Why isn't TV available on the internet anyway? Why download it through one protocol (say analog NTSC) only to uplink through the internet? Or even more silly, download a product from a media distributor like Apple only to upload it again through a relatively slow channel again, i.e. your home networking? Storage is so insanely cheap now, that one can watch DVD quality video from an iPod on a TV. Anything that isn't (in-principle) directly downloadable from vendors with high-speed connections can be pretty much be carried. Is the `Network the Computer'? Not yet for me, the network isn't fully wireless and it has neither predictable bandwidth or latency. A large capacity flash drive that is carried is still better for fixed media products. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Nick Frost
Although minimum expenditure may rule out the MacBook Pro, the price
difference between it and the MacBook has been worth it for me. My wife has a 2.2 GHz MacBook and I have the 2.2 GHz MacBook Pro, each with 4 GB of RAM. Some of the differences are measurable: 15.4" vs 13" screen real estate; also, we both use Skype video quite a bit (when the 128 Kbit "broadband" internet is working for us), and hers is struggling to render the video with both cores nearly maxed out while mine is using about 20% of both cores - I assume the difference is in the dedicated video card of the MBP. Other differences are more intangible, such as my preference for the matte screen vs the glossy screen, feeling of the keyboard. All that said, though, I still prefer even the MacBook over the Windows XP Dell 840 that I had at my last job. But then, I won't get into the whole Mac vs Windows thing :-) For a good "geek box" for doing software development, I must say that Linux would be really tempting, at least if it came pre-installed on a box with all the driver kinks worked out. Actually, I think that "the network is the computer" has turned out amazingly true, although I believe that when Sun coined the phrase, they were talking about LAN instead of the web, which was still in its infancy if even that. Perhaps the pithy phrase now should be "the browser is the computer." If so, then that's another reason for going for the reliability of a Linux box, since the browsers are so similar among platforms (actually, I'm not sure how the browser plug-in situation is for Linux, thinking for example of Flash, so maybe Linux browsers are still problematic). ;; Gary On Dec 22, 2008, at 3:29 PM, Nicholas Frost wrote: >> Well, my trusty Dell laptop HD has probebly died giving me an >> opportunity >> to upgrade to the next best thing. Â The next best thing must still >> be a >> laptop, runs Apache, MySQL and PHP, GIMP and screams, for minimum >> bucks, >> for all round office use and web development. Is it a MacOSX, Windows >> XP/Vista or Linux? Â Any thoughts to put in my note to Santa would be >> greatly appreciated. > > "Minimum bucks" might indicate leaning towards the bargain PC or PC > laptop. However, at $999 the closeout white Macbooks are (IMHO) > quite nice > machines. With $80 for VMWare Fusion you can run multiple OS's > (Windows, > Linux x64, etc.). Alternatively with rEFIt you could have multiple > OS's > natively (Solaris even) through a boot menu. Having used a white > Macbook > that runs OS X and Windows XP SP2, Ubuntu 7.x (32-bit), Ubuntu x64 (v. > 8.04) since February 2008 I prefer the Macbook to any of the laptops > I've > used recently (Dell D820, Thinkpad, etc.). There is also the > VirtualBox > option for a hypervisor and multiple OS's. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2
> I'll see your VMWare and raise it with a *free* Sun VirtualBox. I dropped
> all of my VMWare licenses a few months ago and switched over completely to > VirtualBox. > > http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Community > > Sun's VB is much faster, more flexible, and more full featured for what I > need to do with a VM. Having recalled a similar conversation some months ago, I'll confess that I installed VirtualBox on a Dell D820 under Linux 8.04 (x_64) with very poor results. However, I fully acknowledge that I didn't evaluate Virtual box on different x_64 hardware nor a different version/distribution of the OS (Linux or Solaris), due to $work and a lack of time for further experimentation. Until I (or anyone for that matter) have time to test the performance of VirtualBox on various x_64 Linux platforms, I can only attest to the notably excellent performance of VMWare Fusion on OS X 10.5.x for running 32-bit Windows virtual machines and both 32/64 bit Linux vms. Windows XP SP2 and your average 32-bit Linux distro (e.g. Gentoo) ran reasonably well on an AMD am2 x_64 hardware platform under VMware Workstation 5.x. Having had performance issues with versions of Windows XP on a Dell D820 under VMWare Workstation 6.x, I am beginning to suspect the particular Dell hardware and/or the behavior of said hardware with the graphics Ubuntu codebase/libraries. The point of this is that Virtualbox may be an entirely acceptable and performance-oriented hypervisor, notable for its support of more OS's (Solaris), but VMware is not a bad choice for those willing to pay the reasonable price of admission ($80 for VMware Fusion for OS X or $100+ for VMWare workstation for Linux. My last point being that VMWware workstation relies heavily on GTK and issuing a standard version of the VMWare workstation product for Linux is something of a challenge due to GTK (1.x, 2.x, etc.) variations on a per distribution basis. For those building a box as Doug suggests, I'd say try VirtualBox before shelling out for a VMware workstation license, and if the results are positive, why not pursue the open source free VirtualBox option prior to the commercial product? Virtualization certainly offers a platform/computing versatility that is very appealing for people with diverse application needs. However, for some people features such as snap-shotting and cloning of VM's may be significant features. I'm not advocating for the commercial product (VMware) over the open source one (VirtualBox), but I think Mendel Rosenblum and Co. have a reasonable product worth purchasing under certain circumstances. All of this notwithstanding, I work primarily in a Sun shop (NCGR) and from that perspective VirtualBox deserves every (if not preferred) consideration. -Nick ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
> All the discussions of nifty hardware possibilities, along with my
> slightly flower-child "whole shebang" view, leads me to ask folks > about their larger computing ecology and how it has impacted your > choice of new devices, whether desktops, laptops, phones, servers, > media (tivo, appletv, ...) and so on. If ecology in this case means the interaction of organisms with their environment, then personally I find the question excellent and my experience therewith frustrating in that ecology would dictate that I eliminate the old-school custom dual Opteron mid-tower box at home and the ageing PPC Macintosh G5 (dual 1.8's) and substitute a laptop for energy conservation/efficiency. I try to use the current white Macbook for as much work as possible for this reason. I pale at the thought of how much electricity is used on the average weekend in Santa Fe by fleets of Pentium/Core 2 Duo desktops idling at the various offices in town, to say nothing of the fact that during the week said machines CPU utilization is often < %10 while they are used largely as input devices (Excel, Word, IE7, Firefox, etc.) rather than for processing (wish they all ran the BOINC client!). I think the holistic viewpoint that you refer to Owen is wonderful in that it invites a conversation about equanimity and creativity. I struggle with the solipsistic "what do I (the human) do next to meet my computing wants/needs?" rather than "how do I make smart energy consumption choices for myself and my community (community of Life which includes everything from arachnids to zebras)?" Having worked at two places in Santa Fe replete with scientists, it strikes me that great efficiency of mentation (all for just a few calories!) frequently occurs in environments that are shockingly inefficient from a thermodynamic viewpoint; I refer to the buildings in which I've worked which are anything but "green". At lunch recently I overheard a group of people complaining that the new convention center in Santa Fe wasn't a green building, shortly after I'd reviewed some plans for another new commercial building with a miniscule server room. To return to computing ecology, I wish I had an answer, other than trying to recycle waste heat from the average server room and re-use it to heat office spaces in the winter. With bioinformatics, whether someone is performing Euler short-read assembly on 400 MB of fasta data or wondering if the Sybase database with 27 million rows is going to fall over today, it all results in lots of waste heat from computers using lots of electrical power with a number of runs failing and having to be re-worked for various reasons. If only we had a Peltier noise transducer mechanism that converted server room noise into electricity...:-) At home I've deployed the NSLU2-based file server, which albeit slow is reliable and uses far fewer watts than a mid-tower equivalent, but at the expense of the nice array of five 3.5" drives with a ZFS file system would offer (did that at my last job and left the niftier file server there). I try to use the laptop as much as possible and ignite the desktops and their 80-120mm fans only when I need them for a specific task, such as heating the garage in wintertime to keep our felines warm while the BOINC client pulls data from ClimatePrediction.net! Supposedly Google has a proprietary evaporative cooling system they are using to cool their server rooms which I find very interesting; http://www.google.com/corporate/datacenters/step2.html Anyway, I'm similarly interested in other people's thoughts about the larger question of personal, professional or otherwise computing ecology. -Nick ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Owen Densmore
On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 1:55 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
Old habits die hard. I did a demo of technology for a distributed file system last week using Amazon EC2 for the network. But back home, I've got the local network of retired laptops and miscellaneous hardware fired up, again. Just in time to turn them all off for the holidays. Starting up a half dozen c2d equivalents at EC2 makes me nervous -- what if I forget and leave them running? Like leaving the lights on at home, but they're not at home and I can't walk around and look for them. But if I leave them running doing nothing at Amazon, they probably draw less power than my forgotten light bulbs at home. My scripts for starting EC2 clients just get cruftier. The first twenty times, waiting for the instance to report "running" was a good enough start marker. Then some instances needed a few more cycles to get their sshd's working, so the script wraps the ssh in failure proofing. Then some other instances needed a few more cycles to get their DNS working, so the script wraps the digs in more failure proofing. I can see why this happens, even though all the machines are identical, all the connections equivalent, and all the systems the same. There are paths where everything goes just right, and paths where bad timing prevails. So my little ensemble of virtual blades expands to fill a little phase space of linux boot variations, and my scripts get cruftier. -- rec -- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Nick Frost
My toes are basking in the warm breeze from the back of my AMD64 server as I type this. In the summer I open a window.
Backups are done like this: # #/home/roberts # echo "Starting /home/roberts backup" >>/home/roberts/backup.log date >>/home/roberts/backup.log /usr/bin/rsync -vurltD --delete --exclude-from=/home/roberts/.rsync/exclude /home/roberts /media/usb0 >>/home/roberts /backup.log 2>&1 echo "Completed /home/roberts backup" >>/home/roberts/backup.log date >>/home/roberts/backup.log where /media/usb0 is a slow but fast-enough 1 TB USB drive that powers itself off when not being used. When that one fills up I'll get another and modify the script to rsync in multiple chunks. Crude, but effective. --Doug On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 5:25 AM, Nicholas Frost <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Thanks! I really need to start using rsync for backup and possibly
keeping a couple of pools of data which keep in sync with each other so any one of them can be the latest version. A slightly different problem is solved by Apple's Time Machine. Its the old day-week-month backup strategy that keeps earlier versions of the data, thus making sure you don't wipe out backups with mistaken edits/deletions within the files. Does rsync have a similar stunt .. where you can keep several versions of files? Maybe there's a svn/rsync stunt that would help here. The biggest problem for me is the pathetic bandwidth we typically have nowadays. Makes good backups and time-machine snapshots really slow out to my hosting services and cloud storage. -- Owen On Dec 23, 2008, at 8:49 AM, Douglas Roberts wrote: > My toes are basking in the warm breeze from the back of my AMD64 > server as I > type this. In the summer I open a window. > > Backups are done like this: > > # > #/home/roberts > # > echo "Starting /home/roberts backup" >>/home/roberts/backup.log > date >>/home/roberts/backup.log > > /usr/bin/rsync -vurltD --delete --exclude-from=/home/roberts/.rsync/ > exclude > /home/roberts /media/usb0 >>/home/roberts > /backup.log 2>&1 > > echo "Completed /home/roberts backup" >>/home/roberts/backup.log > date >>/home/roberts/backup.log > > where /media/usb0 is a slow but fast-enough 1 TB USB drive that powers > itself off when not being used. When that one fills up I'll get > another and > modify the script to rsync in multiple chunks. > > Crude, but effective. > > --Doug ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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Yes, if you remove the --delete parameter to the rsync call, then it will not delete files that no longer exist in the source file system. At RTI I don't use --delete when backing up certain project shares, to protect against users' "accidental" file deletions. Of course, you end up with a backup archive that is much larger than the source file system this way. With the --delete parameter, the backup is an exact mirror of the source.
--Doug On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 9:33 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
-- Doug Roberts, RTI International [hidden email] [hidden email] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels
Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> Owen Densmore wrote: >> One example occurred a while back when we bought a SlingBox. Its a >> nifty device that makes your TV available on the web. > Which begs the question: Why isn't TV available on the internet > anyway? Why download it through one protocol (say analog NTSC) only > to uplink through the internet? Or even more silly, download a > product from a media distributor like Apple only to upload it again > through a relatively slow channel again, i.e. your home networking? > Storage is so insanely cheap now, that one can watch DVD quality video > from an iPod on a TV. Anything that isn't (in-principle) directly > downloadable from vendors with high-speed connections can be pretty > much be carried. opportunity for proxies and caches to "help" such that network usage is yet more optimized and delays are (theoretically) yet more reduced. > Is the `Network the Computer'? Not yet for me, the network isn't > fully wireless and it has neither predictable bandwidth or latency. > A large capacity flash drive that is carried is still better for fixed > media products. When Slingbox was first mentioned, I had a similar reaction, then realized that what it is providing is two important things: 1) a bridge for all of the media which are NOT directly downloadable. 2) a surrogate for carrying around your context. even if you *could* get the same material directly from the source, the organization of it is still on your home box. My computer(s) are my computer(s)... my MacBook Pro and my iPhone. Until a few years ago I was strictly Linux/dumb-phone, but Apple has done well by my type of user. I don't watch broadcast (or cable or sattelite) TV except when I'm in a hotel, then only as a novelty, so I don't have much urge or need for this (obvious) feature... so for me a Laptop and a Smartphone go a long way... My MacBook syncs to the iTunes podcasts I might be interested in when it is connected to (any) high speed network, whether it be home, office, sfComplex, UNM/HPC, coffee shop, truck-stop, etc. and my iPhone syncs to it (whenever I remember to connect it which is less and less now that I have a car-charger for it!). If it is not on my MacBook (and) my iPhone, then I assume I need to wait for a network connection to get to it or live with the slow Edge network to give it to me (ultra-timely news). With ubiquitous WiFi and Edge even in the desert mountains of NM, I'm pretty well set. But then I don't watch live sporting events (network news could be called a "sporting event"... like roller derby or pro wrestling or bowling for dollars are sporting events). - Steve ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2
Douglas Roberts wrote:
My toes are basking in the warm breeze from the back of my AMD64 server as I type this. In the summer I open a window.Nick Frost wrote:
I'm with Doug here (warming myself by the heat of my computer). Don't look at your computer as an inefficient information processing machine, but rather as a space heater which gets (some) useful computation out the conversion of electricity to heat! Living in a house that is heated entirely by solar and wood (2 cords/winter), I don't feel bad about a few extra KW of electricity driving some informatically interesting work along the way to becoming heat in my house. I LOVE how warm my MacBook Pro gets sitting in my lap on a frosty day like today! If I ever get my homemade wind-generator online, I will need extra load on windy days anyway! I'll be adding resistive heaters to my house to shunt any overload into (winter only). I think I'll go pull some of my mothballed computers out of the shed and set them up to do SETI (or protein folding)-at-home projects, distributed around the cold spots in my house. The (relative) low efficiency of their operation is a boon in this case! I'll never look at an electric blanket or space-heater the same again! Does anyone know how many KW-hours they use in their "conventional" homes? My biggest power draws are the fan for my active solar panels (drawing hot air into a rock bed in the floor) and my well (when irrigating), I can't imagine that forced-air furnaces don't draw more electricity than my solar system and that most folks add spot-electric heat to their gas-furnace heated homes as well? Thanks Doug! - Steve ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2
Douglas Roberts wrote:
My toes are basking in the warm breeze from the back of my AMD64 server as I type this. In the summer I open a window.Nick Frost wrote:
I'm with Doug here (warming myself by the heat of my computer). Don't look at your computer as an inefficient information processing machine, but rather as a space heater which gets (some) useful computation out the conversion of electricity to heat! Living in a house that is heated entirely by solar and wood (2 cords/winter), I don't feel bad about a few extra KW of electricity driving some informatically interesting work along the way to becoming heat in my house. I LOVE how warm my MacBook Pro gets sitting in my lap on a frosty day like today! If I ever get my homemade wind-generator online, I will need extra load on windy days anyway! I'll be adding resistive heaters to my house to shunt any overload into (winter only). I think I'll go pull some of my mothballed computers out of the shed and set them up to do SETI (or protein folding)-at-home projects, distributed around the cold spots in my house. The (relative) low efficiency of their operation is a boon in this case! I'll never look at an electric blanket or space-heater the same again! Does anyone know how many KW-hours they use in their "conventional" homes? My biggest power draws are the fan for my active solar panels (drawing hot air into a rock bed in the floor) and my well (when irrigating), I can't imagine that forced-air furnaces don't draw more electricity than my solar system and that most folks add spot-electric heat to their gas-furnace heated homes as well? Thanks Doug! - Steve ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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