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Armacham posted:I saw this video too. How does a supercomputer take 8 minutes to boot into Linux? My 8 year old iMac can boot into El Capitan quicker. In my experience, the more powerful and expensive the hardware, the longer it takes to boot. I believe it's a combination of having more controllers to initialize (and each controller being more complicated), doing more thorough testing, and the hardware/firmware makers not caring as much because they know you don't sit around watching servers reboot every day. Besides, when you're done initializing all that stuff you get to sit around waiting for the OS to do basically the same thing: probe all the buses, find every controller, fire up the appropriate drivers, then probe those controllers for devices hanging off them, perhaps several levels down. This scales quite well, too. Netbooks get through their BIOS init very quickly. Desktops take a moment, expensive workstations are downright slow. Servers still take minutes to reboot, and I can only imagine how slow supercomputers with racks upon racks of interconnects and weird NUMA controller things initialize. As an example, one of the workstations I use is a two year old Dell optiplex that cost a small fortune. They delivered it with the single SSD and DVD burner connected through a cheapish Dell-branded RAID controller; I think it was a H310 (which is a rebranded LSI part). On every boot, that card slowly boots its own firmware, then probes every possible port for something looking like a part of a RAID, and then I don't know ... calibrates itself by calculating pi to a billion digits or something? It took forever to boot, so I ripped it out and moved the drives to ports on the motherboard (driven by the Intel chipset). That took it down to normal desktop-like reboot times. The rack servers are kind of fascinating, though. At some point they test that all the fans work properly by spinning them up and watching the rpm readouts, which alone takes as long as going from off to bootloader in a laptop. Hilariously noisy, too. 
Computer viking has a new favorite as of 08:58 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 08:31
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Computer viking posted:In my experience, the more powerful and expensive the hardware, the longer it takes to boot. I believe it's a combination of having more controllers to initialize (and each controller being more complicated) and the hardware/firmware makers not caring as much because they know you don't sit around watching servers reboot every day. Besides, when you're done initializing all that stuff you get to sit around waiting for the OS to do basically the same thing: probe all the buses, find every controller, fire up the appropriate drivers, then probe those controllers for devices hanging off them, perhaps several levels down. Never reboot 
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Aug 23, 2016 08:51
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Humphreys posted:Never reboot The workstation runs Windows; it's beyond my powers.  I guess I could run it on a hypervisor, but I've got to limit the amount of stuff only I know how works. (I'm way past "job security" and into "nobody can help me with anything I do and there's too much of it for one person".) Computer viking has a new favorite as of 09:22 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 09:15
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Computer viking posted:The workstation runs Windows; it's beyond my powers. I was being a dick - not being serious. Although does sleep mode count as a reboot? If not I have an uptime of quite a long time on one of my laptops. Humphreys has a new favorite as of 10:37 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 10:06
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The state of Personal Computers, nearly 11,000 days ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ce3XUTt3W0
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Aug 23, 2016 11:12
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Humphreys posted:I was being a dick - not being serious. I guessed as much - though running a windows machine on a hypervisor just so you could claim insane uptimes would have a certain appeal. 
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Aug 23, 2016 13:33
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Gonz posted:The state of Personal Computers, nearly 11,000 days ago. I'm kind of surprised that Norton was around back then. Ah, there's a certain beauty to those primitive DOS-based software like that Business Simulator. Speaking of business simulators, anyone play Capitalism 2? It was some older business game that seemed innocent enough but was so difficult that you probably needed an MBA to ever progress. I remember the first tutorial was incredibly brutal right away, it was like: Step 1-Congrats! You're a new business owner! The goal of a business is to make money. Step 2-Here is the concept of supply and demand! Step 3-You can take a look at current consumer trends through this menu (open menu to an incredibly detailed and confusing statistical readout) Step 4-That's it! Now use what you've learned to make your business profitable within three years. -Sorry! You went out of business! It's not like your business only made one thing and you just had to raise and lower prices based on a demand chart, you produced several products and had a very strict timing window to maximize the potential of every single product and just missing one trend would doom your company, like you had to run things perfectly or you would fail the tutorial and have to start from the beginning. I think there were some traps too, like the demand would be high but the profit margin was too low so you also had to factor that when producing something, so just focusing completely on demand would make you lose. This was just the first tutorial of many, although for sure if you could actually survive and even beat the scenarios, you would probably have pretty good knowledge of running a business. Original_Z has a new favorite as of 14:35 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 14:15
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Gromit posted:Related to this, VCD didn't use any of the standard CD error correction that takes up an extra 100Mb or so, so they held more data. i didn't even know they had error correction like that but also im p sure they were only 700mb. throwing out the error correction for an extra 100mb sounds exactly like the thing they would do for 800mb discs tho back in the days of like 2007 you would still find video CD rips all over the place. they were always exactly 700mb and absolutely attrocious quality - its like the difference between a well-used long play VHS and a DVD. you would also see DIVX rips too and divx is also another piece of poo poo codec that people were still using way after it should have been dead. they both looked like poo poo and took up a ton of space for how lovely the video quality was (a reasonable quality 720p rip these days is like ~1 gig) i know video codecs is literally the worst computer related thing you could possibly explain but like jesus christ divx and vcd were so unambiguously bad quality it made me mad when other people downloaded that poo poo nigga crab pollock has a new favorite as of 14:33 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 14:29
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didn't divx/xvid have hardware implementation which is why it was popular? like couldn't buy dvd players and poo poo that could play divx? im not talking about the rental service with the same name a neighbor whose lawn i mowed tried to sell me on it when i was like 15 but the same guy also tried to convince me plasma tvs were the best and to install linux on my desktop so i think he was behind the curve a bit
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Aug 23, 2016 14:39
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Gonz posted:The state of Personal Computers, nearly 11,000 days ago. I'm the "computer font"
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Aug 23, 2016 14:58
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DiVX ;-) started as a hack/crack of a Microsoft MPEG-4 codec, Xvid came as an open source alternative, then DiVX ;-) became DivX or whatever and tried to go legit with their own code and licenced hardware but by then everyone in the "scene" had switched to Xvid and now everything is x264 and proper MP4. The warez scene is always quick to switch to new-fangled codecs and I believe it's much because of Xvid and proper containers (Matroska and MP4 proper) we don't have to deal with a ton of crap codecs and AVI any more, thank God.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:26
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I'm starting to see x265 out there, but I have no idea what the advantage is.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:40
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Gonz posted:The state of Personal Computers, nearly 11,000 days ago. Loaded that video, immediately laugh at how old it looks Then realised it was recorded closer to the year 2000 than the present day is. Now I feel old. Edit: Love the Tommy Lee Jones lookalike presenter. Senor Tron has a new favorite as of 16:37 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 15:44
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drunk asian neighbor posted:I'm starting to see x265 out there, but I have no idea what the advantage is. same as any other advancements in codecs over the years: better quality at smaller file sizes
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Aug 23, 2016 15:44
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Last Chance posted:same as any other advancements in codecs over the years: better quality at smaller file sizes I guess it's still experimental then, because most of what I've seen has been larger file sizes for the same quality.
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Aug 23, 2016 16:25
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drunk asian neighbor posted:I guess it's still experimental then, because most of what I've seen has been larger file sizes for the same quality. Nope
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Aug 23, 2016 16:34
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Gonz posted:The state of Personal Computers, nearly 11,000 days ago. This is practically an SCTV skit, and holy poo poo that Leading Edge promo! I was working at a Software Etc. in 1987 so all of this is quite familiar to me. I miss it in some ways.
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Aug 23, 2016 16:45
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drunk asian neighbor posted:I guess it's still experimental then, because most of what I've seen has been larger file sizes for the same quality. Seconding the no. I've mucked around with converting 264 to 265 and the file size was (I think) halved. I couldn't notice a quality difference although I'm sure I'm not the best at noticing differences.
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Aug 23, 2016 16:45
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Dick Trauma posted:This is practically an SCTV skit, and holy poo poo that Leading Edge promo! I was working at a Software Etc. in 1987 so all of this is quite familiar to me. I miss it in some ways. I'm most of the way through the episode and I'm increasingly convinced that the guy with the beard is trying to bring the whole thing down from the inside.
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Aug 23, 2016 16:51
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Senor Tron posted:I'm most of the way through the episode and I'm increasingly convinced that the guy with the beard is trying to bring the whole thing down from the inside. My next job: SYSTEMS ANALYST ARBITRATION CHEF! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtK11FJSQBY
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Aug 23, 2016 17:10
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Schadenfreude was at an all time high when torrent sites moved away from xvid or whatever to normal codecs. All the people who were burning CDs for their grandparents to play on DVD players got super mad that torrent aggregators were abandoning it while totally unaware that torrent websites don't create the torrents. How dare these nerds not provide me with this free product in exactly the poo poo quality I want it.
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Aug 23, 2016 18:13
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tater_salad posted:I'm the "computer font" 
doctorfrog has a new favorite as of 22:26 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 22:24
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My crazy baby boomer IT manager boss got fired about two weeks ago and I was given his position. This involves emptying 2 full sized filing cabinets with all of his papers. Most of the stuff dates as far back as 1996. He would keep and file faxes sent to him. I'll have to snag a few photos tomorrow but so far my favorite thing is an entire binder dedicated to doing Y2K checks on office systems. Also Windows NT and Office 2003 licenses coming out of my eyeballs.
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Aug 24, 2016 06:33
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drunk asian neighbor posted:I'm starting to see x265 out there, but I have no idea what the advantage is. Smaller file size is an advantage, higher processing power required to play them can be a disadvantage. For example - my PS3 cannot play them locally from USB in Movian. I can however use my Plex Media Server to stream those files.
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Aug 24, 2016 08:28
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A few pages back people were asking about splitting coax. Basically, your signal comes in at around 10db, and that covers the entire bandwidth. HDTV really only requires 3db to look right, where high speed internet needs 5-7db to maintain speed, so any splitter supplied by your provider will likely be a 5/3 splitter. You can see which end is which by looking at the etchings on the splitter itself. When you start splitting that signal after the fact, you lose signal strength, and everything after the split, whether it's internet or HDTV, will suffer.
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Aug 24, 2016 08:30
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You can use an active splitter.
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Aug 24, 2016 08:31
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Speaking of actual relics, I have a small collection of 78 RPM shellac records from the 1920s. I've heard that 78s don't play right without the proper head (an LP/45 head will get wrecked by the records), so do any of y'all know which kind of head I should get to digitize them?
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Aug 24, 2016 08:36
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Casimir Radon posted:You can use an active splitter. True, but most people treat that last few feet of cable as their starting point.
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Aug 24, 2016 08:40
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Speaking of actual relics, I have a small collection of 78 RPM shellac records from the 1920s. I've heard that 78s don't play right without the proper head (an LP/45 head will get wrecked by the records), so do any of y'all know which kind of head I should get to digitize them? Depends on what turntable you have. Some older tables would have a double needle head that flipped over to play 78s. You also generally have to add some extra weight to the arm to get 78s to play correctly. Turntables used to have adjustable weights on the back for this reason. Google your turntable model and 78 to see what is recommended. May also be worth hitting a few thrift stores/craigslist and see if you can find a dual head turntable for cheap before buying a new head for yours. my turn in the barrel has a new favorite as of 08:53 on Aug 24, 2016 |
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Aug 24, 2016 08:49
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Pubic Lair posted:Depends on what turntable you have. Some older tables would have a double needle head that flipped over to play 78s. You also generally have to add some extra weight to the arm to get 78s to play correctly. Turntables used to have adjustable weights on the back for this reason. I actually have a dual-head turntable floating around somewhere in the garage but it's a POS. I've got an Ion TTUSB turntable hooked up to my computer and it's working pretty well. I've got a Numark CC-1 on it right now, so either I'm looking for a needle that'll fit on it or I want a cartridge that'll be compatible with my table. I know I could google all this poo poo but if you know of a solution off the top of your head I'd appreciate it. Grand Prize Winner has a new favorite as of 10:29 on Aug 24, 2016 |
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Aug 24, 2016 09:43
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Gonz posted:The state of Personal Computers, nearly 11,000 days ago. Nice! I hope everyone was paying enough attention to this thread to recognize that when they talked about the rumor of Quantum Link being expanded from supporting just Commodore to also Apple and IBM PC, that that did happen, and that service was called
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Aug 24, 2016 09:51
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I actually have a dual-head turntable floating around somewhere in the garage but it's a POS. I've got an Ion TTUSB turntable hooked up to my computer and it's working pretty well. I've got a Numark CC-1 on it right now, so either I'm looking for a needle that'll fit on it or I want a cartridge that'll be compatible with my table. I know I could google all this poo poo but if you know of a solution off the top of your head I'd appreciate it. I don't know any specifics for your setup, sorry.
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Aug 24, 2016 11:43
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nigga crab pollock posted:i didn't even know they had error correction like that but also im p sure they were only 700mb. throwing out the error correction for an extra 100mb sounds exactly like the thing they would do for 800mb discs tho quote:By the early 1990s engineers were able to digitize and compress video signals, greatly improving storage efficiency. Because this new format could hold 83 minutes of audio and video, releasing movies on compact discs finally became a reality. Extra capacity was obtained by sacrificing the error correction (it was believed that minor errors in the datastream would go unnoticed by the viewer). This format was named Video CD or VCD. Germstore posted:Seconding the no. I've mucked around with converting 264 to 265 and the file size was (I think) halved. I couldn't notice a quality difference although I'm sure I'm not the best at noticing differences. I had a quick look at 265, comparing it directly to a 264 version of the same video. Swapping between equal frames between the two I noticed a loss of texture in skin or clothing, but this was in a still frame. With the movement of video it was probably unnoticeable but I don't recall. The 265 file was half the size as you say and that's quite a plus. My current media player can't play that format though, so I'm not moving to it just yet.
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Aug 24, 2016 12:04
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HEVC / H265 has only just begun to appear as a compression option in Adobe programs and so on. It's meant for up to 8K resolution so it's aim was to get the compression even more efficient so you wouldn't get whopping great files or be forced to export at a lower bitrate. Motion estimation, compensation, deblocking and so forth are improved over H.264 so things in general should appear crisper than if you compared it to H.264. MPC-HC (or it's variants) can play it fine but don't expect any media player boxes to really be able to process this unless it has a firmware update. It'll be sweet when it finally swings into action on more players so you can send clients sub 200mb files that look nice.
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Aug 24, 2016 13:07
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are you all secretly scene releasers because there is no way knowing this much about codecs is normal
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Aug 24, 2016 15:23
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ColoradoCleric posted:are you all secretly scene releasers because there is no way knowing this much about codecs is normal I hear streaming video is pretty popular these days, maybe there's value in knowing how that works? Idk
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Aug 24, 2016 15:53
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It comes with being old and living through the times. Torrents aren't anywhere near where it began, think back to stuff like IRC bots and a few dozen multi-part files (and not even necessarily .r03 and stuff but files that were just truncated on a binary level and you had to recombine through a cli tool). There were also dozens of different types of filesharing systems/skins and of course newsgroups. Once you actually had the file, you had to figure out how to open it in the first place - programs were made whose sole purpose was to figure out what codec the file had, then from there you would have to hunt down the files to let you play that codec. There was no VLC, and for a long time there wasn't even MPC; people were stuck with multiple different video players being installed at the same time - even realmedia Sentient Data has a new favorite as of 16:04 on Aug 24, 2016 |
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Aug 24, 2016 16:01
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ColoradoCleric posted:are you all secretly scene releasers because there is no way knowing this much about codecs is normal up until like six, seven years ago it was an absolute necessity if you were doing anything involving video even just youtube poo poo. like in all of the dumb computer wizzard poo poo i have done over the years nothing comes close to the unnecessary complexity and relative bullshit of video production its a miracle that there are standards now, not just standards but standards that let you play back the same video file on basically every device you own. if you told me in 2009 that we would be watching h.264 video natively in chrome i would have laughed at you
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Aug 24, 2016 16:08
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Sentient Data posted:even realmedia You're giving me Nam flashbacks, man. Realplayer was the loving worst.
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Aug 24, 2016 16:14
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ColoradoCleric posted:are you all secretly scene releasers because there is no way knowing this much about codecs is normal S3Ms please name chang to Secret Scene Releaser TIA.
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