He must have been waiting for me to buy a copy.
He must have been waiting for me to buy a copy.
Yeah I think they needed horsepower to run some sophisticated models in Matlab, and Apple had a killer educational discount.
Just seemed odd to pay your way into the Apple ecosystem just to wipe it and install Ubuntu
I remember having my mind blown in college when I saw a Mac Pro tower running Ubuntu in a lab.
Oh right, duh. Thanks.
I believe the optimization came because the denominator was a power of two. In my memory, the function counted up all of the bytes being sent and checked to see that the sum was a multiple of 16 (I think 16 bytes made a single USB endpoint or something; I still don’t fully understand USB).
For starters, you can split up a larger modulo into smaller ones:
X = (A + B); X % n = (A % n + B % n) % n
So our 16 bit number X can be split into an upper and lower byte:
X = (X & 0xFF) + (X >> 8)
so
X % 16 = ((X & 0xFF) % 16 + (X >>8) % 16) % 16
This is probably what the compiler was doing in the background anyway, but the real magic came from this neat trick:
x % 2^n = x & (2^n - 1).
so
x % 16 = x & 15
So a 16 bit modulo just became three bitwise ANDs.
Edit: and before anybody thinks I’m good a math, I’m pretty sure I found a forum post where someone was solving exactly my problem, and I just copy/pasted it in.
Edit2: I’m pretty sure I left it here, but I think you can further optimize by just ignoring the upper byte entirely. Again, only because 16 is a power of 2 and works nicely with bitwise arithmatic.
Lol, no, but in the summers we were allowed to wear t-shirts on Friday.
Thanks!
And it was. They told me to take the rest of the day off which at the age of 22 was unheard of.
Thank you! But this was 12 years ago lol. Think they’ve moved on.
Whoops. Formatting got lost in the transfer. Fixed now.
I’d recommend Ubuntu mostly because it’s going to be the easiest to get working. I recently started playing with Proton on Ubuntu, and it was surprisingly painless. There’s been a lot of improvement over the past few years.
Take a look at https://www.protondb.com/ and search for your games. It’ll let you know how difficult they are to get working and give you tips on helping them run.
Here’s the visual impairments page for stock Ubuntu:
https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/a11y.html.en#vision
There’s stock magnifier support. It’s not great to be honest, but it does allow you to enable crosshairs that will make it easy to find your cursor.
A little more searching found Magnus which might be a better option.
It’s also pretty trivial to install gnome tweaks https://itsfoss.com/gnome-tweak-tool/ and install custom theme elements like high contrast icons and cursors that can help.
What’s funny is that’s how it started. Apple sold movies as early as 2007 before Netflix or Amazon video or whatever and expected you to host the files locally either on your computer or your AppleTV (which had a hard disk drive at the time) and stream it locally over iTunes. If you lost the file, that was supposed to be it.
Of course, you still had to authenticate your files with the DRM service, and eventually they moved libraries online and gave you streaming access to any files you had purchased.
Yeah, but we always run them in native formats, so it’s not a big load on the processor. We only watch the 4K stuff at home where it’s got a hardwired gigabit ethernet connection.
If you saw my other comment, I’m kind of talking myself out of this upgrade since I managed to get qsv working on my current rig.
That shouldn’t be the case. I’d look into getting this fixed properly before spending a ton of money for new hardware that you may not actually need. It smells like to me that encode or decode part aren’t actually being done in hardware here.
Right you are!
Dug into it a little more. There were some ffmpeg flags that weren’t being enabled by the latest release of Photoprism. Had to move to the test build. https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/discussions/4093
While it’s faster than real time now, Photoprism still won’t start streaming until the preview is fully generated, so longer video clips can take a minute or two to start playing. It only has to happen once per file, but it’s still annoying. There’s a feature to pre-transcode video, but it’s only to get in to a streamable format. It doesn’t check bitrate/size until you actually start to play.
I might write a script to pre-generate the preview files, but either way, I don’t think I need to upgrade the server quite yet.
Not yet! But I do have a bunch of different apps running, and I’ve always had to baby it. Looking forward to having more room for activities.
That’s interesting. I’m running a software raid since I’ve been warned of dying raid controllers making your data irretrievable unless you buy an exact replacement. I guess the enterprise folks have that figured out.
Having a little trouble finding details online. Do those two cables going off to the right split off into a bunch of SATA connections?
Yeah, I have an offline backup I do every year in a fireproof safe in my basement. Might open a safe deposit box at some point, but I feel reasonably safe.
Good call on power efficiency. I’ll have to keep that in mind. I think I’m currently drawing around 100W which is mostly the hard drives (the CPU doesn’t even need a fan). I assume that might go up a bit in a new build, but I think the benefits will be worth it.
Not sure what Plex is using, but Shinobi and Photoprism do.
Plex usually runs at native resolution, but it can just barely run if it has to downscale or bake in subtitles in real time. I’ll have to check the settings to see what it’s using.
Edit: Ah, looks like you need to pay for Plex Pass to enable Quick Sync.
At my last job, every time they added or removed someone’s key card access, the system would reboot and everyone would be locked out for like two minutes.
We also had two floors that were connected by a fire stairwell, so you needed a card to re-enter the next floor.
At least twice my card stopped working in the middle of the word day while I was standing in the stairwell and I assumed that they just fired me and assumed I’d see my own way out.
Survived three layoffs at that company.