TiVo: An Introduction for the Few Who Dont Know Yet
TiVo will change your life... for the better. Plain and simple: record shows by telling TiVo to record them (not when, what channel, how long, etc.), record all new episodes of X, record all movies w/ so-and-so in them, etc. High Points: Most people know the basics of the concept. Here's the low-down on the things I'm asked most... 1. You can record one thing and watch something else already recorded. 2. You can get a dual tuner TiVo, but you'll need two SEPARATE feeds to the TiVo (i.e., two lines from your satellite dish). Then you can record 2 things at once or watch one/record another. These are more expensive, but you can get a DirecTiVo w/ dual tuner cheaper and then the monthly TiVo fee is about half normal. 3. Pause live TV - if you don't realize the value of this, I can't explain it. :) TiVo has many different versions which all some slight variations. If you want to go beyond 'average guy' level, check out this forum. Comparison to ReplayTV: TiVo seems to have a better interface from what I've seen and what others have said. It's easier to use. However, ReplayTV is more easily hackable - you can access it from the web and the PC easier to convert/archive shows, etc. I have a DVD recorder for this which is another post for another time. Both can be made to do mostly the same things, but you get the idea. My Suggestion I recommend the DirecTiVo Hughes HDVR2 (dual tuner) w/ the Triple LNB dish (this is the oval dish w/ 4 lines from it and it's HDTV ready). It's got the satellite converter box built in so it's only one box to deal w/, the TiVo monthly fee is less and it's dual tuner. This model isn't as hackable as some TiVo's, but it can do some and if you want to go beyond the basics than you probably haven't read this far. Sites: http://www.dvrinfospot.com http://www.TiVo.com http://www.TiVoCommunity.com http://www.WeaKnees.com ...and, of course, The Armchair Geek (see below). Bear Cahill is a software engineer in the Dallas, TX area and runs a few websites: The Armchair Geek (thearmchairgeek.com), Webpage Hosting Info (webpagehostinginfo.com), Go To College Online (gotocollegeonline.com) and The Video Exchange Community (videoexchange.org) Publish freely if this resource box is included and links maintained as links.
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TiVo: An Introduction for the Few Who Dont Know Yet
TiVo will change your life... for the better. Plain and simple: record shows by telling TiVo to record them (not when, what channel, how long, etc.), record all new episodes of X, record all movies w/ so-and-so in them, etc.
Unclogging Epson Print Heads
Tools needed:
How to Avoid Getting Ripped-Off When You Purchase A New Printer
It's no big secret that printer companies like HP and Brother are marketing their printers with the cost of refilling the cartridges in mind. Just the other week my family and I were at our hometown Wal-Mart and we were amazed at the price of a new printer. With joy we threw it in the cart never once thinking about the cost of refilling the contraption.
When Good Color Goes Bad...
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How to Read Zener Diode Code
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USB Hubs and Ports Explained
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RAID Disk Recovery
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The Printer Cartridge Review
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SED is Coming
One of the bigger challenges facing display manufacturers is to develop a picture with the same warm characteristics as Cathode Ray Tube, but with far less weight and size.
The Making of Energy Efficient Datacenters
The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron is a wonderful movie to watch. It is based on the book, The anatomy of greed, written by a former employee of Enron, Brian Cruver. One interesting thing that comes on our minds is the size of all power companies. They are all huge. We all depend on power for just about everything and yet very rarely do we think about conserving energy. A typical PC for example takes about 135 watts of power. A data center with about a 1000 servers should typically take about 135 x 1000 Watts or 135 Kilowatts and that would just power the computers. This does not include the air-conditioning and lighting. According to to a research paper sponsored by The California Energy Commission in a datacenter about 50% of the total energy consumed is by the servers and
about 35% is the air conditioners.
Here are some interesting research done in this field -
Feeling the heat- An interesting paper by Liebert describing the challenge
of effectively managing the heat dissipation in datacenters.
Heat-Density Trends in Data Processing, Computer Systems, and Telecommunications
Equipment- This white paper provides valuable
current data and best available insights regarding historical and
projected trends in power consumption and the resulting heat
dissipation in computer and data processing systems (servers and
workstations), storage systems, and central office-type
telecommunications equipment.
This problem can be solved by making better energy efficient air
conditioners and by making more energy
efficient computers. Many companies have taken a lot of interest
in subject. However, nothing substantial has been done primarily
because of the market requirements. The end users still want to host
their sites on the fastest processors which drives the market with the
latest processors. Going at this rate we would reach a time soon when
the energy required would be much higher than the energy available in
the market.
Intel, AMD, Transmeta and Via have all released processors which
consume very low power. A typical Pentium or AMD processor consumes
about 25 Watts of power, whereas these low powered processors take only
about 5 watts of power i.e. about 5 low powered processors would
consume as much power as a single main stream processor of today. These
low powered processors are also generally fan less processors which
means lower noise levels too. Intel has the centrino which has a lower
power consumption than the regular pentiums. Intel also has the arm
processors but those are RISC. Our prime focus would be AMD, Transmeta
and Via. They all have some very promising products.
One thing to be noted is that most of these low powered processors work
only at about 1.2GHz or lower. So they won't be as fast the pentium4s.
Which means one would have to host lesser sites per server. A good
recommendation would be upto a maximum of 600 sites on a
regular pentium 4 server. A low powered processor should comfortably
take about 200 sites. One advantage of these low powered processors is
that they have a very small form factor too. This means that one can
have more such servers in the same space that is typically allocated to
a high powered servers. All datacenters use a profitability matrix
based on the following rule: Performance/Per
Watt/Per Cubic Foot. This is one place where the low powered
processors really score high.
AMD Geode? NX Processor family
comprises of the AMD Geode? NX 1250@6W processor, the AMD Geode?
NX 1500@6W processor and the AMD Geode? NX 1750@14W processor. The
first two in these consume only 6Watts of power and run without a
cooling fan. According to AMD they provide the highest x86 performance
for fan less operations. They are based on the mobile AMD Athlon
processor technology.
Transmeta was one of the first companies to develop low powered processors.
For a long time Transmeta was known as the company where the
Microsoft co founder Paul Allen had interests in and the place
where Linus Trovalds, the father Linux, worked. Both of them are no
longer part of the organization. Today they are known for the two
processor families they have - The transmeta crusoe and
the transmeta
efficeon
Transmeta Crusoe?-
processors range from 500Mhz to 1.2 Ghz. According to Transmeta,Crusoe is a unique combination
of software and hardware. It's this radical design that gives Crusoe its
important advantages, and manufacturers of all kinds of electronic
devices their first truly innovative new platform in over 25 years.
Thanks to Crusoe, mobile devices can be made smaller and lighter than
ever. These new devices will be more comfortable to use, too, because
Crusoe generates very little heat a problem that plagues the industry's
legacy hardware-only processors. And because it uses far less power,
mobile devices running on Crusoe run far longer on a single battery
charge, and Crusoe-powered ultra-dense servers do far more work per
watt, far more efficiently.
Transmeta
Efficeon processors are the higher end processors from Transmeta
and they run at upto 1.6Ghz and have high performance I/O interfaces.
They are built upon Fujitsu's next-generation 90nm silicon technology
featuring transistors with a length of just 40nm.
The entire Transmeta range not just uses the x86 instruction set, they
also have full multimedia instruction support (MMX, SSE-SSE2).
Transmeta has done very little in marketing in terms of selling their
products for the server market. Like all other companies they have
focussed on mobile products, set-top boxes etc.. While these products
are
great for the mobile market, they do have a great potential in the
server market. FIC, JM-Net etc. have some products for the server
market
which run on the Transmeta processors.
Via, the Taiwanese
manufacturer
purchased the Cyrix processors and has since gotten out of the race of
faster processors with AMD and Intel. Instead they are focussing on fan
less, low-powered processors. They have the Eden and the C3 range of
processors. The power consumption varies from only 7watts to
15Watts. Additionally, the processors come with the
PadLock Hardware Security Suite which provides a platform approach to
computer security, ensuring uncompromising security performance. These
features include the implementation of the Quantum-based VIA PadLock
RNG (Random Number Generator), and the VIA PadLock ACE (Advanced
Cryptography Engine) supporting AES encryption.
According to Via, the VIA Eden-N
Processor is the world's smallest, lowest power and most secure
native x86 processor. It is a mere 15mm x 15mm in terms of size and
consumes between 2.5W @ 533MHz to 7W @ 1GHz.
Via again like Transmeta has not focussed in the server market. The
images above give a good idea of the benefits of this processor in the
server market. For datacenters, Via may be the best in the
Performance/Per Watt/Per Cubic Foot matrix.
Companies like Hitachi make some very good low powered hard disk drives
which have a very small form factor. They have both IDE's at 7200 rpm
as well as SCSI hard drives.
Many may think it is better to take higher end servers as the power or
heating problem does not directly affect them. As mentioned earlier a
server driven by a low-powered processor would be able to take just
about 200 sites. This means that a person with 600 sites would need to
take 3 such servers instead of one higher powered server. Here are some
benefits of this scenario.
One of the biggest factors influencing the performance of sites on the
internet is the capability of the network card (ethernet) .
When all sites are
hosted on just one server, they all would use the same network
card to push the data. Now if these sites are distributed among 3
servers the amount of data that the sites can push would be 3 times
more
which means faster access to the sites. Another benefit is that if one
of the site goes down all 600 people would not be effected, rather only
1/3rd the number of sites would be affected.
Hence, the number of support request would be lesser. And finally, such
processors are very affordable. Typically they would be just a third of
the cost of regular mainstream processors.
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To Upgrade or Not?
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Quality Recovery and Rework - When It All Goes Wrong
When Quality is the Target, but not the Result, what do you do?
Where does technology come from?
Ever wonder where all the cool gadgets come from? Ever wonder who gets to try this stuff out first? Usually the war machine scientists get it first, try it out and find an application by using it for destruction; an obvious outlet for the human species and our desire to blow things up. It then moves into the private sector for important projects like, Microwave Ovens, Nuclear Energy, aviation space travel, telecommunications, Internet (which of course Al gore created first?), even Hummers, the ultimate SUV was created to cruise troops around in, Helicopters, hydrofoils, you name it man it came from military first.
How To Choose The Best Student Laptop?
How To Choose the Best Student Laptop?
Laptop Security -Where?d My Laptop Go?
Laptops are lovely. They are convenient, mobile, powerful and prestigious.
They are also thief magnets. Over 400,000 laptops disappear each year, leaving their owners wondering where they went, what is happening with their data and what to do next.
Some of the laptops are just lost ? left in cabs, at hotels, restaurants and at conferences and events. Many of these laptops (but not all) find their way back to their lucky owners.
Some are stolen by people ? many of them co-workers, service staff or people taking advantage of a "moment of opportunity" ? who just want to have a laptop.
Some are stolen by professional "Laptop Lifters" who may work in teams to steal the laptops for resale.
And others are stolen, not for the laptop itself, which may be a bonus, but for the data on the laptop's hard drive ? financial or identity data or business plans or data.
For example:
QualComm's CEO had his laptop stolen while he was conducting a Press Conference. Reportedly, some of QualComm's most valuable secrets were on that laptop, unencrypted and only protected by an easily bypassed password.
A Department of State laptop containing high level information on nuclear proliferation was stolen right from State's headquarters. Two administrators were fired and other personnel were reprimanded.
Think about it ? What other piece of equipment or personal possession do we routinely carry around that is worth over a thousand dollars, by itself, and may be worth thousands more in data? Why wouldn't that be attractive to thieves?
A large part of the problem is less on the hardware or software end of things, it's in the HUMAN side of things. By raising our awareness many of the vulnerabilities can be greatly lessened.
There are 3 areas of vulnerability: 1) Securing the actual laptop, 2) Securing the Data, 3) Getting the laptop back.
Ink Cartridge Recycling 101
Let's take a moment to think about the topic of ink cartridge recycling. In our modern world we just keep throwing our trash away without sparing it a second thought. But where does all this left over trash go? It all goes to the local landfill polluting the land and water table. Is there anything we can do towards "saving the planet"? What if you could help save the planet and make some money doing it? It sounds too good to be
true doesn't it? Right now there are companies that will take away your empty ink cartridges and give you money in return!
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