pfarrell Wrote: 
> 
> Right not a lot of twelve way joins.
> 
Grin.  Understood.
> 
> > If you mean how efficiently memory is used, that's more involved
> than
> > we can deal with here.  Call it the same for present purposes.
> 
> I was actually thinking that some RISC processors, the Dec Alpha for
> one
> in particular, end up needing a lot more memory to do a given task
> than an Intel chip would, in part because the RISC vs CISC theory
> and part because the Alpha was 64 bits at a time that lots of PCs were
> will using 16 bit addressing.
> 
I've not seen that practically on the Sparc, at least not on FreeBSD
servers.  You do have to pay some attention to the size of various
integers and the like, but if you do, there really is not much memory
exansion, if any.
> 
> 
> > That's what was my perception.  You can encode once on whatever
> machine
> > you want, transfer, and then the serving should not take that much.
> 
> A lot of people are in love with iTunes and Windows weird closed
> formats, so their SlimServer has to spend a lot of time
> converting (waste a lot of time in some people's minds)
> 
Well, that brings up another question.  I'm obviously suggesting to
encode for a high-fidelity storage of the "master" if you will, which
would be relayed to the stereo  (which is mostly background music for
the intended application -- the main audio system is in another
carefully acoustically-engineered building) and relying on local
processing power (if needed) to do any format conversions when playing
on local computers or when transfering to MP3 players.  

I've not used iTunes or Windows music formats much.  Some sort of front
end is useful, particularly for my granddaughter, but as you can
probably tell, I've not used any of them much.  How fragmented is this
part of the world?  Are these sorts of format conversions possible (at
least those without DRM)?  The store-bought CDs I'd think would be OK,
but how about music downloads? Can these be converted?
> 
> > I figure I can put together this server,
> > with 300GB or so of storage, for about $100.
> 
> Clearly not with SCSI disks, or do you have them laying around as
> well?
> 
No, clearly this is not SCSI, and the cost is for buying all the
components from scratch.  Is SCSI speed for a lightly-loaded server
needed?  I would think that simple data transfer rate would be more
important to stream audio, and for that IDE would be fine (let's leave
reliability out of this for the moment).  SCSI would put it in a whole
'nother price range, but I did just buy a wonderful Seagate 147GB 10K.6
drive for $80 (four years warranty left).  It can be done.


-- 
DrJ
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View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22854

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