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Media

Ask Slashdot: Suggestions For a Simple Media Server? 420

rueger writes "We live and breathe Netflix, but sometimes want to watch programs downloaded from the 'net. I've been carrying them downstairs on a USB stick, but would prefer to run a small media server on my Mint Linux box. As usual, I thought this would be simple. Install a package on my PC, and use our Netgear NeoTV Max box to play stuff off of the server. Plex was highly recommended, and installed easily, but will see some .mkv files, but not others, for no obvious reason. The one file that does show up plays fine, except that subtitles don't work. And it completely refuses to see the partition full of music. A quick tour of the Plex forums suggests that making this work would take more hours than I'm prepared to spend. Serviio looked good too, and 'sees' my music, and sees the movie folders that Plex couldn't, but won't show the actual .mkv files. And again, it looks like configuring the thing could consume half of my life. So I'm asking: is there a fairly simple, works-right-out-of-the-box, fairly resource friendly media server that will just allow me to play movies that I download without a lot of headaches? (One obvious issue is that movies and TV shows downloaded can be in a any of a dozen formats. I'd love it if the server dealt with that. I'm also open to suggestions for a Roku style box that does Netflix well, but which will also play nicely with a media server. And if any or all of these things can also let me play streaming video off the web (like BBC iPlayer content), I'll be in heaven.)"

Comment Re:another design cue from apple? (Score 1) 408

I know what those keys are for. Especially because I write daily in German, Portuguese, Spanish and occasionally in a couple of other languages, besides English.

And you know why the apple ones were created, and why they didn't use the already existing modifiers, right? And then why microsoft made those, as well. You can find it on the web.

You might not like the symbol (on the alt case, but never mind - the new keyboards call it alt now). I like the cmd symbol, which is the symbol for touristic landmarks in nordic countries.

Oh, and I am hardly a kid anymore.

Comment Re:another design cue from apple? (Score 1) 408

I have had notebooks before that. They had mice and trackpads. Look at this one from hp, idiot:

http://blog.laptopmag.com/wpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/HP-omnibook-300-pop-out-mouse.jpg

I had those pop-out trackballs, some with the trackball over the keyboard, and even with trackballs right next to the screen. So the "magical palm rest" might be a necessity, but no one did it before.

Comment Re:another design cue from apple? (Score 1) 408

I have in my lenovo three indiscernible hieroglyphs: one that turns out to be the old-generation of the windows logo, one that engages the right click on the mouse (why?), and one called Alt-Gr. It seems that Microsoft took what was bad, made it worse and it is now a standard. Never mind the rest of incomprehensible bullshit I have on this keyboard, like "fn" in blue, but also the whole enter key in blue. Or keys for page back and page forth, right next to the up arrow. Or....

Nah, I am fine with the alt key looking like an alternative line.

Comment Re:another design cue from apple? (Score 1) 408

No. Before, notebooks had the keyboard farther from the screen, touching the device's borders. Apple came with the idea of a palm rest, AFAIR.

Some even had printers after the keyboard, like this one:

http://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/computerweekly/photogalleries/233641/194_20_dan-darcys-1993-canon-bj-notebook-bn22.jpg

Cloud

Ask Slashdot: Scientific Computing Workflow For the Cloud? 80

diab0lic writes "I have recently come into the situation where I need to run cloud computing on demand for my research. Amazon's EC2 Spot Instances are an ideal platform for this as I can requisition an appropriate instance for the given experiment {high cpu, high memory, GPU instance} depending on its needs. However I currently spin up the instance manually, set it up, run the experiment, and then terminate manually. This gets tedious monitoring experiments for completion, and I incur unnecessary costs if a job finishes while I'm sleeping, for example. The whole thing really should be automated. I'm looking for a workflow somewhat similar to this:
  1. Manually create Amazon machine image (AMI) for experiment.
  2. Issue command to start AMI on specified spot instance type.
  3. Automatically connect EBS to instance for result storage.
  4. Automatically run specified experiment, bonus if this can be parameterized.
  5. Have AMI automatically terminate itself upon experiment completion.

Something like docker that spun up on-demand spot instances of a specified type for each run and terminated said instance at run completion would be absolutely perfect. I also know HTCondor can back onto EC2 spot instances but I haven't really been able to find any concise information on how to set up a personal cloud — I also think this is slight overkill. Do any other Slashdot users have similar problems? How did you solve it? What is your workflow? Thanks!"

Comment Re:Not Surprising for HP (Score 1) 57

That. And everything else.

American cars are ugly, spend too much fuel, can't withstand bad roads, are too slow and steer too badly to be driven fast as well, and their quality sucks in general. That's why GM has a whole design/engineering team in Germany, to sell cars to the rest of the world.

Too bad that when the japanese started taking over the american market, their cars started to suffer from the same effects: too big, too shabby, too slow, too soft.

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