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Man, that looks like a nice case, but they have one almost like it.. but 3 glass sides! https://www.frys.com/product/9... Then put that extra money to some nice looking custom loop.. once i get sick of the AZZA case I have, or need more space(doubtful lol) thats the one im picking up.

Yes and VGA projectors look like shit at even just a quarter of the projected size mentioned here. This projector they’re hawking is a joke.

Even moreso when I can buy a VGA projector that does 1024x768 vs 854x480 with a max brightness of 3000 lumens vs the pathetic 50 lumens of Motorola’s projector. And the projector costs the same amount of money and doesn’t require me to buy some shit-tier phone to use it.

Yeah the stock market is full of rampant speculation, but I think Wall Street is probably has it right. I know I will be modded down for pointing this out but Coffee Lake is sold out everywhere, Ryzen is not. Although Ryzen has made AMD competitive, most PC builders are still buying Intel.

Given that it took Intel 8 months to add Coffee Lake in between Kaby Lake and Cannon Lake and it took AMD 5 years to develop Ryzen... the situation that happened between 2003-2006 when AMD was the technically superior choice is unlikely to ever happen again. The good news is that Ryzen has made AMD just slightly profitable again, so at least they are no longer in danger of imminent bankruptcy.

Yeah the stock market is full of rampant speculation, but I think Wall Street is probably has it right. I know I will be modded down for pointing this out but Coffee Lake is sold out everywhere, Ryzen is not. Although Ryzen has made AMD competitive, most PC builders are still buying Intel.

Given that it took Intel 8 months to add Coffee Lake in between Kaby Lake and Cannon Lake and it took AMD 5 years to develop Ryzen... the situation that happened between 2003-2006 when AMD was the technically superior choice is unlikely to ever happen again. The good news is that Ryzen has made AMD just slightly profitable again, so at least they are no longer in danger of imminent bankruptcy.

Fry's Electronics

Fry's is pretty awesome in a pinch. I always stop by during my annual CES/Vegas trip.

This motherfucker right here. Fuck, yeah.

I want and need a 3.5mm jack.

Here you go. Eight bucks and they often put it on sale for five.

I think, I believe, just an opinion, that Microsoft is in its last gasps of being an IT company. Its tried and failed to fit into the new (well, relatively new/web 2.0/cell phone/Web App/Internet of Everything world, and has yet to even come close to dominating it. Being a long time user of Android tablets after knocking around a local Fry's Electronics one day I got a wild hair up my ass and bought a Windows 8 tablet, just to see. It some English made thing (Backstreet, I think?) on sale for under $70. One thing I liked about it is it has an HDMI port, so I could use it as a sort of solid-state vcr, if nothing else. But I couldn't transfer videos from my pc to its sdcard. Count 1. I also had a real hard time seeing text on the screen, the rez was very high and the screen is pretty small. Count 2. The UI is also very Windows-like and hard to use as a tablet, really. Last count. Even after the free upgrade to Windows 10.1 it wasn't much better. That tablet now sits in my drawer of curiosities.

I wish I'd realize they were phasing out the iPod Classic, because since it wasn't running iOS it didn't need to worry about an OS upgrade making it useless. I'd have bought another one.

Now that there are 128 GB iPod Touches, there is less need for the iPod Classic (yes, I know it is (or rather was) 160 GB).

And you must not have looked too hard for an iPod Classic; they are still in the Distribution Chain, and will likely be available as "refurbs" for some time to come.

Here's one on Amazon

And another on Amazon

And Fry's

Came to say this. If you want a great build, include these:

An Asus Strix GTX 970
A Seasonic Platinum 1050w
A 120mm/140mm CPU cooler, at least a Hyper 212 Evo
A 4xxx Intel chip
A SSD
A case with lots of ventilation so you won't need extra fans. For maximum Wife Acceptance Factor, consider mini-ITX.

Noise? What noise? If your motherboard is willing to shut off your CPU fan at idle, you'll be at 0db (except for electrical noise). Even during heavy gaming the thing will barely make a whisper.

Need more help? SPCR has you covered.

Is there anywhere else you should buy computer parts from? Their hardware all seems to be competitively price, and their customer service is outstanding.

I stopped using Newegg when Fry's started matching internet prices. If you live near a Fry's, they are quite simply the best. You get your product immediately, and there are no friggn RMA hassles/expenses if something goes wrong.

This conversation resonates with a topic I've been looking into for some time now: wireless security cameras.

DLink, among others, sells wireless security cameras; they were pretty cheap ($60 before rebate) at Fry's.

Supposedly these are easy to set up: you put one at home, let it hook up to your home wireless router, and it will take pictures which it will upload to DLink; then while you are vacationing in the alps or Bahamas, you can get on the internet and look at how the thieves are (or, more hopefully, are not) breaking into your empty house.

The thing is, not only am I basically telling the Internet world that I have an empty house to break into, but there is a device in my home which could be trying to root my other devices on my network, and which would have a legitimate reason to be talking to some outside agency. For all I know, there could be malware on the camera under the control of DLink, or some renegade (former?) employee at DLink, or not at all related to DLink (the way some iPods came preinstalled with Windows malware).

Is there some sort of encryption and security that can be put into/around these cameras to keep it from doing anything underhanded? The only thing I can think of is to stop it from phoning home altogether (ie. don't use the DLink SeeYourOwnHome.Dlink.com type video upload service and just store stuff on my home server), but maybe other Slashdotters can come up with something more creative.

I admit this is not exactly the type of "Encrypted Digital Camera/Recording Devices" that the OP was talking about (the original question is more about protecting the camera from the outside), but I thought I'd use the opportunity to draw on the Slashdot wisdom about protecting the rest of my home from the camera.

Thanks for any ideas or links you can provide.

Since Bellingham is already a hot-spot for Vancouver-ites doing their cross-border shopping, it's gotta be easy to book vendors! Looks like a great event.

Not necessarily. Unless you hit a sale at Fry's, computer stuff is often cheaper in Vancouver than in Bellingham or Seattle.

My criterion for bringing something back is 50% off the Canadian price, or just plain unobtainable.

The border people can be unpredictable: I've been waived through and told to have a nice day on a day trip with $800 worth of stuff, and I've done all the paperwork for $50. On one memorable trip I had collected a new telescope mount in Anacortes. Even the cashier said "ouch!" when she punched it up in the computer.

...laura

Discontinued, but still available for $110. http://www.frys.com/product/6708525
Also, hello again Brien King. But you knew me under a different username.

56 dollars

For the price I paid for my iPad,I could load up my backpack with 10 of these. Imagine a beowulf of tablets!

http://www.frys.com/product/6992727?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG $90 for 16GB is hardly "too high to be practical". I also question many peoples claims on memory usage. My kid will load half a dozen tabs and leave them running for days at a time with no problems. Pages loaded with Flash no less, and he doesn't have the problems. My suspicion is that there is some specific, semi-common use case that leaks memory. Something like running some plugin that leaks memory.

Anything Arduino... Make bots / gadgets, automate the home, tinker everywhere... http://www.frys.com/search?search_type=regular&sqxts=1&query_string=Arduino&cat=0&submit.x=23&submit.y=11

It's not a nationwide chain by any stretch.

http://www.frys.com/ac/storelocator/index.jsp

Arizona, Nevada, Indiana, Illinois, Georgia, Texas (there's 8 in TX)...

Here's one for $19.95

http://www.frys.com/product/5697251?

On sale yes I have seen them as low as $19.99

Here is an HP keyboard+mouse combo not on sale for $29.99

http://www.frys.com/product/6160829

East of the Mississippi? Try everywhere that isn't CA or TX. Fry's is only in 9 states.. and 7 of those states only have 1 or 2 stores
http://www.frys.com/ac/storelocator/index.jsp

You won't find a cheap cable anywhere unless you go to an Online retailer that makes their own cables.

False. Frys has cheap cables. I wouldn't doubt it is partially because of competition with places like monoprice, but you can find cheap ones in some stores.

Here's the first one I found that was actually available at my local store. $4.29 for a 6 foot cable. That's a bit pricey, but I do see cheaper ones in their ads fairly often.
http://www.frys.com/product/6393841?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

(There was a $.90 one listed that's a Sony, but it was unavailable in my closest stores.)

I also got a Sager laptop a couple months ago and the LED screen it came with is absolutely fabulous and the best screen I have ever owned. It puts my Sharp Aquos LCD TV (~4 years old) to shame.

I didn't see the 9.5mm size mentioned at first, but considering that the larger drives failed so often I am extremely weary about trying out a smaller form factor drive until they too have been thoroughly tested: http://www.frys.com/product/6063518?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

This Windows 7 tablet is on sale at this very moment for 549 dollars. Less than a comparable iPad. Yet, it collects dust on the retailers' shelves.

..when the local Fry's (actually, 3 of them that are within a 10-mile radius of me) and Altex carries aisle after aisle of discreet components? Oh, and at reasonable prices too.

It's really a no-brainer: RS sold out long ago, and they're no way they'll get their piece of the market back. In fact, the answer is so obvious, I'm really not sure what the question is.

...the Fry's sponsored device will be for sale at Fry's

If I read this right, my suggestion would be to look at frye's

http://www.frys.com/template/computerspc

From then (ownership on) you can use the old dell hardware for spare parts or add them into the new pc (memory, CD /DVD/ NIC / VID CARD, POWER SUPPLY, etc. when it can be used.

Yes.

but I think the maturity of hard disk technology and the minimum cost posed by the complicated mechanical design will make hard disks obsolete for most applications in a few more years.

Such has been the claim for easily more than a decade and yet HDDs are still around.

Hey, people thought 3.5" disks would be here forever, too.

Since when did they leave? Floppy drives and floppy disks.

Weird name, but works well. Round $130 normally.

http://www.frys.com/product/5859653

Reviewers seem to find the Belkin and Linksys units flaky, but the Ipevo gets good reviews. We have one. Don't use it much, but it's worked everywhere we've tried.

You could also hack together something with an old Windows CE unit (i.e. Dell Axim x51v has the power, but Wifi it a bit weak.)

Or maybe get a tablet PC (Fujitsu U810, Oqo) with a headset, optionally bluetooth. They use a normal OS (Windows, Linux, even Mac OS) not the wacky cut-down ones on those other machines.

The potato battery, like the others, requires copper and zinc electrodes, which are expensive.

Quote: "... five to 50 folds cheaper than commercially available 1.5 Volt D cells and Energizer E91 cells..."

The Energizer brand is heavily advertised and is extremely expensive, about $1.89 per AA size battery. Normal alkaline cells cost about 6 1/4 cents, $0.0625., 30 times less expensive.

The rest of the difference may be due to manufacturing and sales cost.

What is the shelf life of a potato battery? Probably short.

It seems to be fraud.

I don't know if she has anyone around to help her, but if she does she might want to buy a big HDTV antenna and ditch the current VCR, maybe you can get her this one as a gift http://www.frys.com/product/5634671?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG ? This site also looks like it has some good resources for you to look through http://www.antennaweb.org/aw/welcome.aspx .

There are actually a ton of cheap network-attached HDMI media hubs available. It shouldn't be too tough to use these as network-attached displays controlled by your tablet over wifi. Maybe soon we'll see this sort of thing provided in coffee shops and airports and wherever.

... is to simply put the extra disks on it.

My main desktop at home has been running Ubuntu Linux for the last 6+ years, and for the last 3 years I migrated the functions of my NAS (which used to run on a separate linux box) to it, so I have one box less to administer, to consume power, or to break down.

I have currently 10TB of total disk space using 5 2TB disks (8TB usable, when you account for the RAID5 redundancy overhead), but could easily migrate to 20TB on 10 2TB disks (16TB usable, and gaining extra redundancy by moving from RAID5 to RAID6). The result is:
- Very upgradeable (starting with 250GB disks back in 2004, I've migrated all the way to 2TB disks, and will continue doing so; the old disks are simply replaced with the newer/bigger ones and re-purposed as off-line storage, being plugged on a eSATA dock when I need them
- very fast (as the disks are on the machine itself, it's much faster than acessing the files on a NAS over the network);
- very usable (it's all mapped on a couple of ReiserFS filesystems, created on top of LVM volumes, directly accessible without needing to mount anything or configure anything over the network);
- very reliable (I'm protected against any one of the five disks failing, thanks to RAID5 configured on top of Linux MD, through for more disks RAID6 is really recommended, and ReiserFS in my experience is very reliable against crashes and power outages, at least *much* more reliable than EXT3 and XFS).
- very cheap: I've used the SATA controller already available on my motherboard, providing for 6 SATA disks, and apart from the disks I only had to spend money on a multi-disk internal rack: these are great, they fit 5 SATA disks on 3 x 5.25" bays on the front of your desktop, are very cheap (around $75) and give you hot-swapping and great ventilation (via a large, low-noise fan in the back) to boot. Just be sure to use a computer case that has no "rails" or other protuberances between each 5.25" bay, or else you won't be able to insert the rack as it spans 3 bays.

You could use a SATA RAID controller (or even SAS disks and a SAS controller), but I found that it's quite expensive, and unnecessary as the above setup gave me all the speed I needed, and them some.

In short, I'm very satisfied with my setup, and I recommend it to anyone who has large disk space requirement at home.

Some pointers to the hardware I'm using:
- Motherboard: Asus M4A78-EM which is reasonably cheap, very stable and has 6 SATA ports (5 internal and 1 external), fitting the bill perfectly;
- Disks: Seagate SATA 2TB 5900RPM Retail kits : The retail kit (instead of the bare OEM drive) gets you a disk with FIVE years of warranty (instead of just 3 years) and comes much better packaged (so reducing the chances of early death due to shocks during transportation).
- 5-disks-on-3-bays internal SATA enclosure: NORCO SS-500 : great little bay, as described above. - External eSata dock: Startech SATADOCKU2E: with it, when I replace my old (smaller) disks with new big ones, I can re-purpose the old ones immediately as off-line storage,very efficiently (my motherboard already has an eSata connector) and very cheaply (I store the disks on plastic storage cases when they are not docked, very cheap and compact.

Hope the above is of help.

Ummm, did you look at those items? Only the first one is a thin client, the others are just very small computers running regular windows.

HP's offering: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-3640405-4063703.html - $199
This is ARM-based mind.

From Dell:
http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/desktops/inspiron-zino-hd/pd.aspx?refid=inspiron-zino-hd&s=dhs&cs=19
$250 right now, but was about $200 during black friday

From Acer:
http://www.frys.com/product/6054148

HP's offering: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-3640405-4063703.html - $199
This is ARM-based mind.

From Dell:
http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/desktops/inspiron-zino-hd/pd.aspx?refid=inspiron-zino-hd&s=dhs&cs=19
$250 right now, but was about $200 during black friday

From Acer:
http://www.frys.com/product/6054148

$200, has been $180.
To be fair, all these products are very recent, and I wouldn't expect anyone to be aware of them.
There are others too, but they tend to cost more.

Does apple even sell full version of their OS that don't come bundled with their hardware?

Yes Apple sells the OS X, Snow Leopard now, DVD. You can order it online, in an Apple store, or from retailers. Those who live near a Fry's Electronics can buy Snow Leopard there. If there is no Fry's near you, as much as I wish there were one near me so I could buy electrical and electronic components there isn't, you can also buy it at BestBuy.

Falcon

Google: Billions and Billions of Servers.

Do you want Fry's with that?

It's not that hard to find working equipment from 1993 today. I suspect it will be pretty straight forward to read a CD-RW or USB stick. Not convinced that 16 years is a short while, how about this? Fry's still sells floppy disks for some bizarre reason.
Maybe pack a small computer (take the 3V coin cell out) would smooth things along. Although should be easy enough to find on a classified ads (if craigslist is still around) or online auction (if ebay didn't collapse under its own stupidity by then). HDMI should still be easy to find 16 years from now, so you might consider paying a DVI to HDMI cable (DVI will probably be replaced with a new connector in a matter of a few years) assuming that small computer has DVI (eeebox? a bit slow might be an embarassment to show a future generation). I would avoid VGA, likely video and computer equipment of the future won't muck with analog. It's cheaper to dump analog support and go pure digital from a manufacturing point of view than support both.

Fry's has the Acer Aspire One on sale for $300 - it comes standard with a 3 cell battery (1 - 2 hours)

I have it -- its a great 2nd portable computer for spare web browsing, coding, mp3, and old-school 2d gaming.
http://shop1.frys.com/search?search_type=regular&sqxts=1&query_string=acer+aspire+one&cat=0&submit.x=0&submit.y=0

Just got these spare parts from Amazon...

9 Cell ( 7+ hours!) Spare Battery, $75
http://www.amazon.com/HQRP-Replacement-Lithium-Ion-Subnotebook-Mousepad/dp/B001P0F71G/

Spare AC Adapter, $21
http://www.amazon.com/HQRP-Replacement-Subnotebook-Netbook-Mousepad/dp/B001ODA6II/

Cheap way to get XP Home :-)

--
"Gamestar: A famous game developer, or player"

Fry's is also the best place to find hobbyist stuff like kits, discrete components(though very expensive compared to wholesale), hardware, wiring harnesses for car stareos, and test equipment like power supplies and O-scopes.

Plus, the psychedelic Lewis Caroll theme inside the large stores is pretty cool when you're high on dope.

Yup, just RS-232 with TTL matching circuitry. A little board like this one does just fine although you do have to give the board +5VDC and jumper TX/RX to the appropriate pins on the drive. For the 7200.11s, there is a block of four pins adjacent to the SATA data connector on the back of the drive - the pin closest to the SATA connector is RX, and the one right next to it is TX. Note that this will just give you a terminal interface to the controller, as opposed to letting you actually use the drive for its intended purpose.

This is just freakin' cool.

Fry's isn't open at this hour, but I built one of those a few years ago and dug it out of my parts box, and yes, you can talk to the bare metal of the drive this way. (Failing that, I found a schematic that does the same thing with a 74LS14, seeing as how most serial ports can speak TTL now by default!)

Anyways, looks like there are commands for diagnostics, memory peeking/poking, raw sector reads/writes, the works. 38400 8N1, or 9600 8N1. (Googling around, looks like some Samsung drives with Marvell "CPU"s like 57600 8N1)

Got the T> prompt, level "T" meaning "T"ests, and you can "Q"uery it. There appears to be self-help, pressing "?".

/A, /C, /1..9, seems to change command levels
At level C (F3 C&gt prompt, "F3" refers to the architecture, "C" refers to the level), you can get a list of all commands with "Q", for Query.
^V echoes commands on, useful.
^C resets/spinsdown the drive.

More googling...

Looks like there are two groups of people: One group of Eastern European hackers intent on protecting their commercial ability to do data recovery -- there's an expensive but slick GUI wrapper around some of the common fixes, and everyone in Eastern Europe (I wound up in a Russian and a Polish forum) seems friendly enough to talk about hacking the terminal interface, but (obviously) doesn't want to give a cookbook answer. (I do kinda respect the "Read between the lines of our hints and you'll eventually figure it out!" attitude, though. :)

For instance, the tail end of this video (which is basically the "cookbook" answer for the commercial product, and provides a lot of hints at the DIY solution -- the video doesn't show the commands being sent via the terminal window, as I guess that'd make it too easy :)... but the status window of the commercial tool, plus the status bits at the bottom of the GUI screen, makes it clear what's going on. Specificlaly, the status log shows the results of commands that have arguments that look an awful lot like the ones that the drive's self-help output, like this one:
Level T m: Rev 0001.0000, Flash, FormatPartition, m[Partition],[FormatOpts],[DefectListOpts],[MaxWrRetryCnt],[MaxRdRetryCnt],[MaxEccTLevel],[MaxCertifyTrkRewrit es],[ValidKey]

The video also shows some drive (or drive board?) powering on/off activity. These appear to be the level 2 commands "U" (SpinUpDrive), "Z" (SpinDownDrive), and/or the level 1 command "e" (SpinDownAndResetDrive. And/or some other commands that I haven't figured out, to power down the drive so that the PCB can be removed for the BSY fix, then power it back up again after the PCB's plugged back into the "drive" half of the drive.

Not sure if those are the same as the power on/off things the video is showing, or if there are other commands to control power. Also not sure about things like SmartControl, (level 1 "N"), but maybe that's how to clear things like the SMART list (/1 to get to level 1, then N1 to clear it?)

There also appears to be a fairly active thread at msfn.org about a "Look, just hook the drive up to a serial port, and be careful not to make any typos, and remember that all the control-characters are case-sensitive" sor

Yup, just RS-232 with TTL matching circuitry. A little board like this one does just fine, although you do have to give the board +5VDC and jumper TX/RX to the appropriate pins on the drive. For the 7200.11s, there is a block of four pins adjacent to the SATA data connector on the back of the drive - the pin closest to the SATA connector is RX, and the one right next to it is TX. Note that this will just give you a terminal interface to the controller, as opposed to letting you actually use the drive for its intended purpose.

Note - if you blow your drive up, it's all on you. :-) I've not actually tinkered with my drives in such a manner, but it seems a few folks have, with good results.

Where the hell do you live that you can buy a terabye of storage at a retail store?

What? Did you just step out of a time machine from 1990? Where can't you buy a terabyte of storage?

Here's a terabyte for $119, with an external enclosure.

Frys.com has some affordable solutions. Pricewatch seems to have a scant selection, although very unique.

Intelligent or not, either they will cave to market pressures, or the format will vaporize and another will take its place.

I think this has happened, and they just don't realize it. This external drive box supports up to five of these 1TB drives. Net that's $800 for 5TB of storage, today. 5TB of storage at BD's 6MB/s is about 200 hours of BD video. Come to think of it, that's about all of it. Another one could store 2000 hours of DVD video, which is more than anybody should want to have on hand. Just one 1TB drive can store more high fidelity music than you could listen to in a lifetime. 1.5TB drives are already out, and these prices are expected to drop given the season and the market.

What exactly are people doing with this stuff if they're not storing content? Backing up their email?

The drives are moving so fast they don't even shelve them off the skids in some stores. Internals, externals, NAS devices and PCs designes with 8 SATA ports and bays are getting fairly common. There's a good chance that by the time Sony "gets it" they'll be selling into a market where everbody already "has it" because they weren't willing to wait - even though they were willing to pay at the time they're not going to pay to download a movie their friend already brought over to watch on a portable drive.

Why would anyone use flash for virtual memory? You can get 4GB of DDR2 SDRAM for seventy bucks, or two gigs for less than half that. Notebook SO-DIMM prices are about the same.

With DDR2 prices so cheap, I don't see why anyone (with a modern enough system to use DDR2) is swapping data to disk regularly. Certainly not anyone who can afford a SSD.

Why would anyone use flash for virtual memory? You can get 4GB of DDR2 SDRAM for seventy bucks, or two gigs for less than half that. Notebook SO-DIMM prices are about the same.

With DDR2 prices so cheap, I don't see why anyone (with a modern enough system to use DDR2) is swapping data to disk regularly. Certainly not anyone who can afford a SSD.