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http://www.auspcmarket.com.au/...

Don't want to be a dick, but my Macbook Pro 17" has the same key spacing as my Apple Keyboard.

Like this one, with the speakers on either side of a tiny, cramped keyboard?

Or did your mean the new new 2012 models, which clearly have exactly the same keyboard for both the larger and smaller models?

Or maybe your point is that that Apple has made their normal keyboards cramped too?

Compare those to real keyboard, made for people who use them for typing: It has a gap between the numbers and function keys, the ESC button is separate, the function keys are grouped in sets of four, the arrow keys have a space around them in all directions and are normal sized, and there are dedicated keys for insert, delete, home, end, pg-up, and pg-dn, in the standard position, with a space around them.

By the way, I just compared the width of my laptop to my normal, standard-sized desktop PC keyboard. Ignoring the numeric keypad, which I never use, the laptop is 4 cm wider than the desktop keyboard. There is absolutely no reason why it couldn't have been made to have the exact same layout!

The doubly stupid part of this whole thing is that laptop keyboards are replaceable. They're manufactured as this little metal tray thing that can be separated easily from the rest of the laptop. Why don't manufacturers make half a dozen different layouts, and let people chose? Some people may want a numeric keypad, some may want dedicated ins/del/etc... keys instead, some people may want media-control keys, others might prefer properly spaced function keys, etc...

Meanwhile, USB3 disk docks are faster than tape, cost about $100, and take $150 2TB "cartridges".

You're a fucking idiot if you think that handling bare drives (exposed PCB traces etc) is for anyone other than the poorest of hobbyists. At the very least you could buy cheap external USB drives. I don't care if SATA is faster than USB, the shittiest, cheapest external case is 100x more robust than handing a bare drive.

You were doing so well up to that point. Lots of good information and advice. But you had to end with bare SATA drives???

Meanwhile, USB3 disk docks are faster than tape, cost about $100, and take $150 2TB "cartridges".

You're a fucking idiot if you think that handling bare drives (exposed PCB traces etc) is for anyone other than the poorest of hobbyists. At the very least you could buy cheap external USB drives. I don't care if SATA is faster than USB, the shittiest, cheapest external case is 100x more robust than handing a bare drive.

You were doing so well up to that point. Lots of good information and advice. But you had to end with bare SATA drives???

Oh, and a further point, for 1TB or so of storage (bootable) you would need a raid0 or JBOD of 2x 500GB or 4x 250GB, both of which adding up to over $4000AU, now I agree that will be damn fast, however that much speed doesn't matter to me as much as spending all that cash on new video card/mobo/cpu/ram would.

Oh, and a further point, for 1TB or so of storage (bootable) you would need a raid0 or JBOD of 2x 500GB or 4x 250GB, both of which adding up to over $4000AU, now I agree that will be damn fast, however that much speed doesn't matter to me as much as spending all that cash on new video card/mobo/cpu/ram would.

someone with absolutely no experience with enterprise-level businesses

It's actually worse than that. People that should know are surprised:

Staples says companies have found alternate uses for tape, such as for nearline and offline storage.

Apparently it's news to Staple that companies began using table for offline storage about 60 years ago.

You get 1.5TB (3TB compressed) of LTO storage for about $120 in quantity. You stuff a pile of those in a library, configure the backup schedule and go home. The library tells you when to cycle out the tapes. It works really well and all the hardware and software costs less than what the guy who operates it gets paid in a quarter. Volume snapshots solved the last actual problems that this process ever had.

I just did a price comparison. According to a quick online price search, I can get an LTO 5 cartridge for about AUD 155 to AUD 200, but I can buy a Samsung 1.5TB hard drive delivered to my door for AUD 138!

A standalone LTO 5 tape drive has a minimum cost of $thousands, and even a low-cost autoloader is $thousands more.

Meanwhile, I can get a hot swap USB3 external drive box for about AUD 200 including the USB3 controller.

For any small business with less than 1.5TB of compressed data (2-4TB actual data), tapes are dead.

And don't tell me that tapes are somehow more reliable than hard drives, because they're not. A hard drive comes with it's own sealed steel box, and a tape will die just the same if you drop it onto a concrete floor.

What's much more important is that restoring to bare metal is much easier with a USB hard drive, particularly with Windows Server 2008 or later. The VHD backup images can be restored using the standard Windows installer CD. Because USB3 is backwards compatible with USB2 a restore can be done without any special drivers or software.

You know what isn't fun? Chasing down drivers for tape libraries at 3am.

Meanwhile, large corporations are moving to hard drives for different reasons. A chassis that can take ~48 SATA drives is now only 4 to 5 rack units. Even fully populated with 2TB drives it can end up cheaper than an empty tape library of the same capacity. Hard drives are much faster, allowing them to be used in more ways, such as single-instancing and simultaneous backups and restores. Many organisations now do incremental backups every couple of minutes to disk, which would be prohibitively difficult with tapes.

With single-instanced backups, the cost per TB swings towards hard drives in a big way. I've heard of 50:1 compression ratios in practice, and 250:1 is not outlandish. You'd have to buy LTO 5 media for a dollar each to match that!

someone with absolutely no experience with enterprise-level businesses

It's actually worse than that. People that should know are surprised:

Staples says companies have found alternate uses for tape, such as for nearline and offline storage.

Apparently it's news to Staple that companies began using table for offline storage about 60 years ago.

You get 1.5TB (3TB compressed) of LTO storage for about $120 in quantity. You stuff a pile of those in a library, configure the backup schedule and go home. The library tells you when to cycle out the tapes. It works really well and all the hardware and software costs less than what the guy who operates it gets paid in a quarter. Volume snapshots solved the last actual problems that this process ever had.

I just did a price comparison. According to a quick online price search, I can get an LTO 5 cartridge for about AUD 155 to AUD 200, but I can buy a Samsung 1.5TB hard drive delivered to my door for AUD 138!

A standalone LTO 5 tape drive has a minimum cost of $thousands, and even a low-cost autoloader is $thousands more.

Meanwhile, I can get a hot swap USB3 external drive box for about AUD 200 including the USB3 controller.

For any small business with less than 1.5TB of compressed data (2-4TB actual data), tapes are dead.

And don't tell me that tapes are somehow more reliable than hard drives, because they're not. A hard drive comes with it's own sealed steel box, and a tape will die just the same if you drop it onto a concrete floor.

What's much more important is that restoring to bare metal is much easier with a USB hard drive, particularly with Windows Server 2008 or later. The VHD backup images can be restored using the standard Windows installer CD. Because USB3 is backwards compatible with USB2 a restore can be done without any special drivers or software.

You know what isn't fun? Chasing down drivers for tape libraries at 3am.

Meanwhile, large corporations are moving to hard drives for different reasons. A chassis that can take ~48 SATA drives is now only 4 to 5 rack units. Even fully populated with 2TB drives it can end up cheaper than an empty tape library of the same capacity. Hard drives are much faster, allowing them to be used in more ways, such as single-instancing and simultaneous backups and restores. Many organisations now do incremental backups every couple of minutes to disk, which would be prohibitively difficult with tapes.

With single-instanced backups, the cost per TB swings towards hard drives in a big way. I've heard of 50:1 compression ratios in practice, and 250:1 is not outlandish. You'd have to buy LTO 5 media for a dollar each to match that!

*) This really is stupid: 256GB OCZ Z-Drive p84 PCI-Express is $2420, but I can get four of these 60GB OCZ Vertex SATA at $308 each for a total of $1232, or about half. Most motherboards have 4 built-in ports with RAID capability, so I don't even need a dedicated controller!

Let me just point out, I bought 2 SSD drives and used my onboard RAID, only to find out that I was limited to 1 PCIe lane due to the onboard controller's design, and thus was running at the speed of a single one of my SSDs instead of 2, realizing no performance gains from RAID0.

*) This really is stupid: 256GB OCZ Z-Drive p84 PCI-Express is $2420, but I can get four of these 60GB OCZ Vertex SATA at $308 each for a total of $1232, or about half. Most motherboards have 4 built-in ports with RAID capability, so I don't even need a dedicated controller!

Let me just point out, I bought 2 SSD drives and used my onboard RAID, only to find out that I was limited to 1 PCIe lane due to the onboard controller's design, and thus was running at the speed of a single one of my SSDs instead of 2, realizing no performance gains from RAID0.

I'm kinda fed up waiting for the SSD manufacturers to get their act together. There's just no reason for drives to be only 10-50x faster than physical drives. It should be trivial to make them many thousands of times faster.

I suspect that most drives we're seeing are too full of compromises to unlock the real potential of flash storage. Manufacturers are sticking to 'safe' markets and form factors. For example, they all seem to target the 2.5" laptop drive market, so all the SSD controllers I've seen so far are all very low power (~1W), which seriously limits their performance. Also, very few drives use PCI-e natively as a bus, most consumer PCI-e SSDs are actually four SATA SSDs attached to a generic SATA RAID card, which is just... sad. It's also telling that it's a factor of two cheaper to just go and buy four SSDs and RAID them using an off-the-shelf RAID controller! (*)

Meanwhile, FusionIO makes PCI-e cards that can do 100-200K IOPS at speeds of about 1GB/sec! Sure, they're expensive, but 90% of that is because they're a very small volume product targeted at the 'enterprise' market, which automatically inflates the price by a '0' or two. Take a look at a photo of one of their cards. The controller chip has a heat sink, because it's designed for performance, not power efficiency!

This reminiscent of the early days of the 3D accelerator market. On one side, there was the high-performing 'enterprise' series of products from Silicon Graphics, at an insane price, and at the low-end of the market there were companies making half-assed cards that actually decelerated graphics performance. Then NVIDIA happened, and now Silicon Graphics is a has been because they didn't understand that consumers want performance at a sane price point. Today, we still have SSDs that are slower that mechanical drives at some tasks, which just boggles the mind, and on the other hand we have FusionIO, a company with technically great products that decided to try to target the consumer market by releasing a tiny 80GB drive for a jaw-dropping $1500. I mean.. seriously... what?

Back when I was a young kid first entering university, SGI came to do a sales pitch, targeted at people doing engineering or whatever. They were trying to market their "low-end" workstations with special discount "educational" pricing. At the time, I had a first-generation 3Dfx accelerator in one of the first Athlons, which cost me about $1500 total and could run circles around the SGI machine. Nonetheless, I was curious about the old-school SGI machine, so I asked for a price quote. The sales guy mumbled a lot about how it's "totally worth it", and "actually very cost effective". It took me about five minutes to extract a number. The base model, empty, with no RAM, drive, or 3D accelerator was $40K. The SSD market is exactly at the same point. I'm just waiting for a new ''NVIDIA" or "ATI" to come along, crush the competition with vastly superior products with no stupid compromises, and steal all the engineers from FusionIO and then buy the company for their IP for a bag of beans a couple of years later.

*) This really is stupid: 256GB OCZ Z-Drive p84 PCI-Express is $2420, but I can get four of these 60GB OCZ Vertex SATA at $308 each for a total of $1232, or about half. Most motherboards have 4 built-in ports with RAID capability, so I don't even need a dedicated controller!

I'm kinda fed up waiting for the SSD manufacturers to get their act together. There's just no reason for drives to be only 10-50x faster than physical drives. It should be trivial to make them many thousands of times faster.

I suspect that most drives we're seeing are too full of compromises to unlock the real potential of flash storage. Manufacturers are sticking to 'safe' markets and form factors. For example, they all seem to target the 2.5" laptop drive market, so all the SSD controllers I've seen so far are all very low power (~1W), which seriously limits their performance. Also, very few drives use PCI-e natively as a bus, most consumer PCI-e SSDs are actually four SATA SSDs attached to a generic SATA RAID card, which is just... sad. It's also telling that it's a factor of two cheaper to just go and buy four SSDs and RAID them using an off-the-shelf RAID controller! (*)

Meanwhile, FusionIO makes PCI-e cards that can do 100-200K IOPS at speeds of about 1GB/sec! Sure, they're expensive, but 90% of that is because they're a very small volume product targeted at the 'enterprise' market, which automatically inflates the price by a '0' or two. Take a look at a photo of one of their cards. The controller chip has a heat sink, because it's designed for performance, not power efficiency!

This reminiscent of the early days of the 3D accelerator market. On one side, there was the high-performing 'enterprise' series of products from Silicon Graphics, at an insane price, and at the low-end of the market there were companies making half-assed cards that actually decelerated graphics performance. Then NVIDIA happened, and now Silicon Graphics is a has been because they didn't understand that consumers want performance at a sane price point. Today, we still have SSDs that are slower that mechanical drives at some tasks, which just boggles the mind, and on the other hand we have FusionIO, a company with technically great products that decided to try to target the consumer market by releasing a tiny 80GB drive for a jaw-dropping $1500. I mean.. seriously... what?

Back when I was a young kid first entering university, SGI came to do a sales pitch, targeted at people doing engineering or whatever. They were trying to market their "low-end" workstations with special discount "educational" pricing. At the time, I had a first-generation 3Dfx accelerator in one of the first Athlons, which cost me about $1500 total and could run circles around the SGI machine. Nonetheless, I was curious about the old-school SGI machine, so I asked for a price quote. The sales guy mumbled a lot about how it's "totally worth it", and "actually very cost effective". It took me about five minutes to extract a number. The base model, empty, with no RAM, drive, or 3D accelerator was $40K. The SSD market is exactly at the same point. I'm just waiting for a new ''NVIDIA" or "ATI" to come along, crush the competition with vastly superior products with no stupid compromises, and steal all the engineers from FusionIO and then buy the company for their IP for a bag of beans a couple of years later.

*) This really is stupid: 256GB OCZ Z-Drive p84 PCI-Express is $2420, but I can get four of these 60GB OCZ Vertex SATA at $308 each for a total of $1232, or about half. Most motherboards have 4 built-in ports with RAID capability, so I don't even need a dedicated controller!

Wtf? These have been available for about a week.... in Australia.

Maybe America is getting behind the times?

They don't sell a retail version by itself, but you can get an OEM edition, and you can buy it bundled with some tuner cards. The problem is to be made into a mode of pure watching, a state of the same. In fact, if the environment is technologically-driven, so you crumple up the URL from the last tab you were already expecting.

They don't sell a retail version by itself, but you can get an OEM edition, and you can buy it bundled with some tuner cards. The problem is to be made into a mode of pure watching, a state of the same. In fact, if the environment is technologically-driven, so you crumple up the URL from the last tab you were already expecting.

A company here in Sydney, Australia is selling (to Australia and NZ only, sorry) a combination cordless telephone (ie: it works on the telephone network) and USB PC audio device with drivers that speak Skype. Apparently you choose whether you want POTS (plain old telephone system) or USB audio (and thus, I suspect, not just skype but any voip thing you want to run on your computer) from the keypad on the handset. For the same price as the Linksys one in the Slashdot story (those dollars on the Australian web site are Australian dollars), my money goes with the one that is actually a telephone! :-)

They also have the ZyXel Voice-Over-IP Wifi Phone, a device that speaks 802.11b and SIP out of the box - no proprietary Skype restrictions, it's the real deal. The Zyxel device has been around for quite a while IIRC.

A company here in Sydney, Australia is selling (to Australia and NZ only, sorry) a combination cordless telephone (ie: it works on the telephone network) and USB PC audio device with drivers that speak Skype. Apparently you choose whether you want POTS (plain old telephone system) or USB audio (and thus, I suspect, not just skype but any voip thing you want to run on your computer) from the keypad on the handset. For the same price as the Linksys one in the Slashdot story (those dollars on the Australian web site are Australian dollars), my money goes with the one that is actually a telephone! :-)

They also have the ZyXel Voice-Over-IP Wifi Phone, a device that speaks 802.11b and SIP out of the box - no proprietary Skype restrictions, it's the real deal. The Zyxel device has been around for quite a while IIRC.

Australian dollars currently trade at $1.30AU for every $1US.

XFX Geforce 7800 at Newegg is:

$574 dollars
Link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16814150100

XFX Geforce 7800 at AusPCMarket is:

$924 dollars
Link: http://www.auspcmarket.com.au/show_product_info.ph p?input%5Bproduct_code%5D=VI-11PVT70F-256&input%5B category_id%5D=1339

$574 x 1.3 = $746.20

There is a markup, of about 20 percent. Not 150-200% as you have stated, however.

If you want to see more for yourself - look at:

http://www.newegg.com/

vs

http://www.auspcmarket.com.au/

It's not DECT, its not SIP, but hey, if it works.

stop, go, next, usb storage, powered from 12v. the all in one usb car sound system. all for 110AUD bargin. (thats 83USD or 44GBP) i just found it avalible in the us @ 60usd. goddam cheap. http://www.merconnet.com/product_info.php?products _id=345&meRrid=8f4007a167e0b13d2a592a4d98265c96

As I'm sure we all know, upgradability is a big issue with computer hardware. My MythTV box is using a Cooler Master case (but in black), with this motherboard.

I've already added a DVB-T (HDTV in the US) card, which you can't do with this box (i.e. you will never get digital TV with this box).

My box is a bit bigger, but looks like a stereo component (brushed steel). I'm also planning on adding an extra analogue capture card (bringing my capture sources up to three). This will fill the PCI slots on the Micro-ATX board, so I'm damn glad I didn't buy a smaller box!

I've got a DVD-ROM drive, DVD burner and currently one 160GB hard disk. Planning on adding another much bigger hard drive (waiting, waiting, I want 1TB)

If you are thinking of building a PVR (it's a fun project), you really should think about expandability and upgradability.

Also check Jarod's PVR Hardware Database, and his excellent Install Guides page.

Also, don't forget MythTV is a very nice client/server architecture, so you can run your "backend" on some beefy ugly PC in a cupboard, and us anything (including an XBox) as a frontend.

--
"Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
-- Henry Mencken

My blog: http://yi.org/blog, Latest entry : Muscle powered microrobot's

I saw it set up in at a computer shop here in .au in late June. They sell the aquarium window as well.

On a more interesting note, I put that review up on the 30th of August, which was while motherboard manufacturers were still getting busted for even saying that they'd shipped i845 boards, because the chipset hadn't officially been launched yet.

But here in Australia, for some reason, the boards were already being sold retail. I just grabbed those two from m'verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market.

I should probably update the review; I bet Abit and Asus have product pages for those boards, now :-).