Should I get a Blu-ray player?

Tom

Several years ago, I discovered Zmanda, as a client of mine was using it. Their Amanda Enterprise works fairly well. It works on Windows as well

For making Windows images, because at heart I'm basically a lazy bastard, I use Acronis True Image Echo Workstation. Fairly painless. I have an XP Pro machine with SP 2, as I find SP3 has broken a few features on an old networked security/surveillance application I have. So I have to run SP2, and it's easy to wipe that drive and put the image back on

The Acronis products are also available for Linux. However, their True Image Server is fairly pricey for those used to paying under $100 for a software package. It does work well, though

As Jonnycat26 pointed out, using NAS makes imaging/backup much easier. I'm sure you caught my reference to a network boot to then wipe the drive on my machine, WipeDrive is available with enterprise/licensing support, which I have. I always unmount one of the drives and stick it in a data-rated firesafe to CYA.

Hope this helps

jay

 

Bizarre. Really, really bizarre. They could not have been much of a "geek" if that was the case

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PortableDevices/iPhone

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PortableDevices/iPod

Well, that sucks. I'm pretty careful to differentiate between "true" friends - I also only have two in my life - and casual acquaintances who are ok to be with

 

The only way you will get to meet someone to go with is to get out of the house.

 

Have you tried a Star Trek conference? I have heard that Trekkies are chic magnets.

We had a conversation on the shuttle from the venue in Detroit about which Star Trek movie was the best. I'm not making this up. A significant number of people participated with well reasoned arguments. It was kind of scary.

Tom

 

Daniel, it sounds like you have decided to wait on a Blu-ray player, but while I am thinking about it I want to add another data point. I have a PS3, as I have mentioned before, and I like it a lot, but there is another limitation to the PS3 that I should mention: it's a fairly sophisticated computer system rather than a dedicated video player. What this means is that it occasionally does weird and inexplicable things that you wouldn't expect from a DVD player. Once in a while I have to power cycle it just as you do with a locked-up computer, or reboot to get it to recognize the remote control. It's not a big thing, but frustrating if you aren't used to the idiosyncrasies of computers.

Tom

 

Odd, I just tried it out on my older iPod and my newer iPod Touch. The Touch was flaky even after the jailbreak sequence, but the older iPod worked fine

This was with Ubuntu 8.10

 

Can you imagine how scary/bizarre if I had been there?

I bet the scary part was the arguments actually making sense. About Star Trek movies, of all things

 

given your background, I hate to ask what may be interpreted as an insulting question, but here goes:

how is your power quality? That is, bad neutral, loose/damaged ground rod at service entrance, "ringing" eg 5th/7th order harmonics, or other power ripples, etc? Are you using decent - eg NOT cheap $20 power bars - power protection?

I use an isolation transformer and a UPS on my home office computer/network/file server loads. Additionally, an isolation transformer and a UPS on my security system (Alarm, video surveillance, etc).

Even with Windoze, I can expect fairly reliable performance. With the embedded video surveillance system I built, which runs on Wind River VxWorks, it has 24x7 operation that easily exceeds 12 month runtimes with no issues

For the "home theater" I have, I use an isolating/filtering transformer from APC, but no UPS. Again, very solid performance

 

Not an insulting question, but very reasonable. Our power quality is okay, as far as normal unfiltered AC goes. Nothing to weird happens on our feed - no big industrial loads or anything of the sort, unless it's me running a welder or other big power tool. The ground and neutral are solid, although the cable ground was a little flaky until I fixed it last year. They didn't used to tie cable grounds to the house wiring ground, and interesting ground loops could easily occur.

I use a good APC UPS for my server and main desktop computers. Some of the less important computers run straight off of the wall. Even then there are very few problems other than power outages from storms and people hitting power polls with cars. My old NT Server used to run for a year or more at a time, but that was though a UPS. I have since retired that server and the UPS.

My A/V equipment runs right off the wall with no conditioning. I'm too cheep to pay for it. I have very few problems, so if there are power quality issues with the A/V they are not common.

The few problems I have with the PS3 are boot related. I suspect they are system timing bugs, but that's just a hunch. They are rare, but do happen. Once the system is up, everything works fine. The most common problem is related to the Bluetooth controllers. All of the PS3 controllers operate over Bluetooth, and once in a while the Bluetooth connection fails to come up with the PS3. A reboot always fixes the problem. This has only happened perhaps two or three times in the year that I have owned the PS3.

I don't play many video games, but one I do have has hung a couple of times. This seems to be a bug related to that specific game and not the system, although once again I am speculating.

My purpose for mentioning the computer nature of the PS3 was to point out a subtle difference between a dedicated box and a multi-purpose computer system. That said, the dedicated boxes are getting more and more computer-like every day. Blu-ray uses Java for the menus, so each player has to be a little Java engine. That's one of the reasons the PS3 loads faster than an ordinary player - it has a lot more horsepower to throw at the menu system.

VxWorks is a stable system. I switched us over to VxWorks back when I was designing MRI scanners. My name still searches up in relation to VxWorks even though that was years ago. I've been out to their headquarters in California. It was a pretty cool place.

Tom

 

Probably not inductive effect to seriously bugger the PF. If you had a workshop that always had a welder going, that would be a different story

I was thinking perhaps a nearby industrial park with a lot of motor loads, especially older variable speed drives. Doesn't sound like the case here

Oh lord help me, is that even *legal* for the cable co to do? Here, the ground cable is bare out of the breaker box. There must be a lug attached to the cable, so the phone co, cable co, alarm co, satellite boob tube, etc can attach their ground wire to it.

If there was a bad or floating ground at your service entrance, you would have noticed other odd things going on. I concur this is not the case

Well, if you could find a decently priced, fairly new MSO-capable scope such as the Agilent 6000 thanks to the downturn in the economy - hint, hint - it would be fairly easy to uncover that sort of glitch

As an example, I have attached some photos directly off a 6000 MSO that uncovered purposely introduced glitches into a CANBus demo board.

Sure sounds like a timing error to me

Eg, poor garbage collection. I once encountered a vague, random, and insane error with a military client RTOS that would then invoke the Hot Restart Groups. It would then get stuck in a Hot Restart loop, the only way to fix was to cold boot the system.

Not exactly a doable option for an unmanned system!

Took a lot of snooping on my part. Turns out somebody on one of the teams made a boo-boo, an error that should *not* have called for Hot Restart was allowed to call the Hot Restart. Once the Hot Restart was called from that glitch, it introduced the same glitch, called the Hot Restart, introduced the same glitch, etc etc

For that reason, very old systems that needed maximum uptime and reliability, such as the vacuum tube Semi Automatic Ground Environment air defense system during the early Cold War, did NOT use interrupts. That's right, not a one.

There were 25 such sites scattered over the continental US, one in North Bay, ON, etc. Each site needed 100 tons of chiller capacity to keep those vacuum tube giants cool enough not to melt from their own heat. Ah, the good ole days!

I'm sure you're aware that you can expect some noise floor, and some errors from non-critical systems. It's usually best to keep Last Known Good and dump the garbage. Which is why this field is so exciting, you never know what will go haywire

We can even see such examples in cell phones and pda's. I've gotten into the habit of either leaving it off all night, or if on call, will just pull the battery, wait 1 minute, and put the battery back in

With a BlackBerry, some users can have problems that require them to re-push the Service Book, as odd things happen: can send an email but can't receive one, can receive an email but can't send one, emails out of sequence eg old archived ones. But Pin-to-Pin works fine. Pull the battery once a day, it should work fine

Yes, it rocks, doesn't it? Of course, we've all learned from debacles like Atomic Energy of Canada and their Therac 25 Cancer Treatment machine

Therac-25 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Do you have any experience with Green Hills? I've programmed with their secure RTOS which is used in a variety of avionics, fly by wire, military, and certain other systems.

 

Good call

 

Real life plays at the highest resolution there is!

 

It will once I get my new prescription. Damn astigmatism is getting worse

 

But that affects your TV viewing too.

 

You bet it does. Primarily causes eyestrain and then a headache. Oddly enough, boozing appears to reduce the eyestrain and headache

 

but does little to improve the picture I suspect, but who the hell cares?

 

Maybe we can develop a corrective transform for your TV instead of fixing your eyes.

Tom