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"Can someone find the old slashdot article about petabyte holographic storage? I don't remember how far back it was, but talking about hundreds + layer holographic storage basically."

Every year there's another "hundreds of layers of storage" article, and we're still sitting here with dual layer DVDs. By the time we see terabyte discs we'll probably all have petabyte hard drives. I remember them talking about blu ray in the 90s, with the prototype arriving in 2000. Back when we had 6gb drives the idea of 50gb discs was amazing, but they dragged their feet so bad creating a standard that by the time it reached market we all moved on to terabyte hard drives. Blu ray burners are still too damn expensive, costing five times ($160 vs $30) more than a DVD burner costs. And once you have one then what? Pay $3 to $7 for each BD-R disc? No thanks, even at $3 for 25gb that's $120 per terabyte, 50% more than a 1 terabyte hard drive.

So forgive me if I don't get all excited every time they announce a new high capacity disc format because they haven't fixed the one they have out now.

"Can someone find the old slashdot article about petabyte holographic storage? I don't remember how far back it was, but talking about hundreds + layer holographic storage basically."

Every year there's another "hundreds of layers of storage" article, and we're still sitting here with dual layer DVDs. By the time we see terabyte discs we'll probably all have petabyte hard drives. I remember them talking about blu ray in the 90s, with the prototype arriving in 2000. Back when we had 6gb drives the idea of 50gb discs was amazing, but they dragged their feet so bad creating a standard that by the time it reached market we all moved on to terabyte hard drives. Blu ray burners are still too damn expensive, costing five times ($160 vs $30) more than a DVD burner costs. And once you have one then what? Pay $3 to $7 for each BD-R disc? No thanks, even at $3 for 25gb that's $120 per terabyte, 50% more than a 1 terabyte hard drive.

So forgive me if I don't get all excited every time they announce a new high capacity disc format because they haven't fixed the one they have out now.

"Can someone find the old slashdot article about petabyte holographic storage? I don't remember how far back it was, but talking about hundreds + layer holographic storage basically."

Every year there's another "hundreds of layers of storage" article, and we're still sitting here with dual layer DVDs. By the time we see terabyte discs we'll probably all have petabyte hard drives. I remember them talking about blu ray in the 90s, with the prototype arriving in 2000. Back when we had 6gb drives the idea of 50gb discs was amazing, but they dragged their feet so bad creating a standard that by the time it reached market we all moved on to terabyte hard drives. Blu ray burners are still too damn expensive, costing five times ($160 vs $30) more than a DVD burner costs. And once you have one then what? Pay $3 to $7 for each BD-R disc? No thanks, even at $3 for 25gb that's $120 per terabyte, 50% more than a 1 terabyte hard drive.

So forgive me if I don't get all excited every time they announce a new high capacity disc format because they haven't fixed the one they have out now.

Newegg has a 50-pack for about $.66 per disk: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817501023

Yeah, much rather have a decent sized case with oversized fans like this one for $54 bucks:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042

I'd spend the extra $646 and, you know, buy the rest of the parts for a pretty good machine..

Uuuhhhh....Anonymous dude? XP Pro X64 is $139 and you can use ALL the RAM you could ever want (I am currently running 8Gb on the CPU and 1Gb on the GPU) and I haven't had any trouble running anything on it except for REALLY old, like Win95 era 16 bit crap on it. If your hardware doesn't have 64 bit drivers you can pick up XP Pro 32 for $134 or XP Home for $89.

So please, don't punish yourself with Vista. I'm sure whatever you did in this life or the last you are REALLY sorry for and don't deserve the "wow, this makes WinME look good!" suffering that is Vista. Just forgive yourself and get a copy of XP. Your sanity and your hairline will thank you for it. Oh, and if you have one of those POS PCs/laptops where they give you ONLY Vista drivers? Just use SIW to find out who made the actual hardware (I'm sure it uses bog standard parts like Realtek and Broadcom) and then hit up driverguide.

Remember, the Internet is your friend, so use it wisely. I know this works because I have exorcised the demon Vista off of many a Dell and HP including laptops and while the drivers may end up a mix of OEMs, they all actually run XP now and run quite nicely, if I do say so myself. So don't suffer the hell that is Vista, be kind to yourself and go back to the goodness that is XP. And if your machine has X64 drivers you can just bypass Win7 while you are at it, as it will be quite awhile before XP reaches EOL, and I seriously doubt anyone will be using 128Gb of RAM by 2014, at least not on anything but a major server. So release your anger grasshopper, and let go of the evil OS. Life is too short to risk a coronary dealing with the soul sucking evilness that is Vista.

Uuuhhhh....Anonymous dude? XP Pro X64 is $139 and you can use ALL the RAM you could ever want (I am currently running 8Gb on the CPU and 1Gb on the GPU) and I haven't had any trouble running anything on it except for REALLY old, like Win95 era 16 bit crap on it. If your hardware doesn't have 64 bit drivers you can pick up XP Pro 32 for $134 or XP Home for $89.

So please, don't punish yourself with Vista. I'm sure whatever you did in this life or the last you are REALLY sorry for and don't deserve the "wow, this makes WinME look good!" suffering that is Vista. Just forgive yourself and get a copy of XP. Your sanity and your hairline will thank you for it. Oh, and if you have one of those POS PCs/laptops where they give you ONLY Vista drivers? Just use SIW to find out who made the actual hardware (I'm sure it uses bog standard parts like Realtek and Broadcom) and then hit up driverguide.

Remember, the Internet is your friend, so use it wisely. I know this works because I have exorcised the demon Vista off of many a Dell and HP including laptops and while the drivers may end up a mix of OEMs, they all actually run XP now and run quite nicely, if I do say so myself. So don't suffer the hell that is Vista, be kind to yourself and go back to the goodness that is XP. And if your machine has X64 drivers you can just bypass Win7 while you are at it, as it will be quite awhile before XP reaches EOL, and I seriously doubt anyone will be using 128Gb of RAM by 2014, at least not on anything but a major server. So release your anger grasshopper, and let go of the evil OS. Life is too short to risk a coronary dealing with the soul sucking evilness that is Vista.

Uuuhhhh....Anonymous dude? XP Pro X64 is $139 and you can use ALL the RAM you could ever want (I am currently running 8Gb on the CPU and 1Gb on the GPU) and I haven't had any trouble running anything on it except for REALLY old, like Win95 era 16 bit crap on it. If your hardware doesn't have 64 bit drivers you can pick up XP Pro 32 for $134 or XP Home for $89.

So please, don't punish yourself with Vista. I'm sure whatever you did in this life or the last you are REALLY sorry for and don't deserve the "wow, this makes WinME look good!" suffering that is Vista. Just forgive yourself and get a copy of XP. Your sanity and your hairline will thank you for it. Oh, and if you have one of those POS PCs/laptops where they give you ONLY Vista drivers? Just use SIW to find out who made the actual hardware (I'm sure it uses bog standard parts like Realtek and Broadcom) and then hit up driverguide.

Remember, the Internet is your friend, so use it wisely. I know this works because I have exorcised the demon Vista off of many a Dell and HP including laptops and while the drivers may end up a mix of OEMs, they all actually run XP now and run quite nicely, if I do say so myself. So don't suffer the hell that is Vista, be kind to yourself and go back to the goodness that is XP. And if your machine has X64 drivers you can just bypass Win7 while you are at it, as it will be quite awhile before XP reaches EOL, and I seriously doubt anyone will be using 128Gb of RAM by 2014, at least not on anything but a major server. So release your anger grasshopper, and let go of the evil OS. Life is too short to risk a coronary dealing with the soul sucking evilness that is Vista.

Think I'll wait for the $150 generic version.

$700 is ridiculous. You can buy very nice cases for under $200 leaving $500 for mb, cpu, graphics, hard drive, ram... hell the entire computer is less than this one case.

I went to the website for the case looking for answers and found no real explanation of why it's $700, just that it's stylish and innovative. Guess it's the equivalent to having a expensive work of art on your wall by a artist no one has heard of but you still spent 20 grand on it.

They discontinued my favorite case. Wish they'd bring it back, mounting a 300mm side fan in that vent would cool the entire PC.

Why this case is a bad idea :

1. $700. That would buy a whole generation of core component upgrades (CPU/video card/RAM)
2. It uses small, noisy fans rather than larger, quiet ones like this case : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811103011
3. Having a sweet looking computer case isn't going to impress anyone any more than having a sweet comic book collection. Save the money for spending things on stuff that actually (theoretically) have a chance of getting you laid, like better clothes or a nicer car.
4. You could buy a vapor chill cooler instead and overclock like mad. This case won't give you any more performance than a standard case.

In short, $700? No Wi Fi? Less space than a server case? Lame.

You've obviously never attempted to buy an accessory at any of these stores. Compare online prices to your typical 'store brand' prices.

This isn't limited to cables, its endemic in brick and mortar stores. Anything other than your baseline items are so heavily marked up that only the uneducated or the desperate would purchase them.

Add on top of this the almost pure profit of their Customer Protection Rackets, and it's not hard to see why they might skimp on the 'pay premium dollar for employees who can provide premium service' plan in favor of 'pay shit for teenaged con-artists who'll scam the rubes for every penny they've got' plan.

If only there were some kind of device to hold a camera. Maybe something with three legs that retract for easy storage and some hinges for holding the camera at different angles....

Of course I agree with you. Any organization of a reasonable size has desktop PCs coming off the regular rotation. Right now that means systems like these DC7600s. They have 3.2GHz single core processor and a gig or two of RAM and gigabit networking. 4 year old Dells have the same Spec. I have a cluster of 8 of these I use for quick stuff down in the basement - they're set for wake on LAN and netboot. Add a cheap gigabit switch and some DRBL configs, and you've got a beowulf cluster. They're useful for checking stuff out, testing VDI solutions and whatnot.

If you're rotating them out they're costless and if your problem works with asymmetrical nodes and you have good power, you've not only solved the computation deficit you've deferred the recycling problem as well. If you have to buy them at $1000 for five, that's $200 per core and you're probably better off buying modern quad-core desktops. The Small Form Factor ones work best for ad-hoc clustering.

But this only works if your needs are smaller - like for a pilot - and if the problem you're solving is not very granular (it can be divided only into larger chunks). For fine grained problems best approachable with shared-memory solutions, or scaling to thousands of cores, you get more bang for your buck with the GPGPU solutions because they have 600 cores on one $1,500 card.

That said, I do agree with you - the problems solvable by a rack of surplus desktops are numerous and interesting.

A number of companies make HTPC or Media Center cases. Some of those have room for normal PCIe cards, and some of them require a riser. The real acid test, though, is whether the heat generated by a decent graphics card is compatible with a quiet living room.

"Reading the PC perspective reviews and a couple of others the 5870 seems to be a bit faster than the GTX285 but not by much, and certainly not by a margin one would expect from a new generation of parts vs old."

I noticed the exact same thing. I was a bit disappointed by the 5870. Only at the highest resolutions, 2560x1600 4xAA 8xAF, did it start beating the GTX285 by a 10% margin. The GTX285 came out in January and is already under $300, how does ATI expect to compete with a $400 card that only offers 10% more at 2560x1600 resolutions that most LCDs don't even support? Even the power consumption isn't significantly different, with the GTX285 using about 10% more.

I'm afraid of what the $300 5850 will look like.

Also seems we won't be seeing support for 3 LCDs anytime soon:
" if you already have some DVI-ready monitors and are looking forward to triple monitor support you might be disappointed to learn that the DisplayPort connection requires an ACTIVE adaptor to be converted to a DVI connection. The adaptors are also expensive (around $100) and are pretty hard to find right now. AMD says they are trying to address this but short of selling their own version I am not sure what pull they have in this regard."

Thanks ATI! Sure it supports 3 LCDs, if you have some kinda special LCD that uses Displayport.

So there really is nothing to see here, move on....

If you are using Windows and have a PCIe slot, you can pick up a 3xxx or 4xxx series ATI card for around the same price that will blow the 1650 out of the water. An open-box 4650 is smoking fast for only $40. If you're limited by AGP, a 3450 is still probably faster than the x1650, and definitely faster than your x1300. Lots of options available on a budget.

If you are using Windows and have a PCIe slot, you can pick up a 3xxx or 4xxx series ATI card for around the same price that will blow the 1650 out of the water. An open-box 4650 is smoking fast for only $40. If you're limited by AGP, a 3450 is still probably faster than the x1650, and definitely faster than your x1300. Lots of options available on a budget.

If you want a compatible upgrade, just check Newegg. An X1650pro would do a lot more for BOINC than your current card, is supported by the exact same drivers, and only runs $54 if you do the free shipping option. A "daughterboard" or even just a new chip would require a heatsink, more power, and so on... a replacement just makes more sense, especially since the newest generations of cards are multiple times more powerful than your current one.

Maybe your thoughts are in the wrong direction? I recently bought a 32 GB Intel SSD, and that would be more then enough for your average laptop, you could then add external storage for your mass storage needs if you need more then that. It however is not enough space for a Vista Ultimate OS drive...time to use Ubuntu instead now that my tuner card is supported by Linux. FYI, I bought the SSD for my MCP, not my laptop as I already have a SSD hooked to my laptop.

NewEgg SATA SSD Drives

As you can see, there are quite a few smaller drives which are actually pretty reasonably priced. Granted, you aren't going to be getting a 100GB SSD for $100, but you can get 32GB for approximately $100

Before reading please note:

1. I've been up for over 24 hours, my brain may not be operating at its best.
2. I personally have not attempted anything like this, but I think I know enough that it should be do-able.

If I make any glaring mistakes please feel free to point them out and make fun of it whole heartedly.

I'm going to assume the following:

1. Recovery time isn't a huge concern.
2. You or someone that works for you is willing and capable to build it.
3. You want, or would like, point-in-time recovery abilities.
4. You don't have a lot of money to spend.

Buy a case that can fit as many hard drives as possible. For example, this case can take up to twelve 3.5" drives (I do not work for Newegg):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811103029

Get a lot of large hard drives, preferable SATA. If you get a case that can take ten to twelve drives, get 1.5TB (~14TB usable space) or 2TB drives (~18TB usable space).

If you have to use a smaller case you'll need to build more than one system.

Get everything else to fill up your case: (motherboard, CPU(s), SATA cards, lots of RAM, gig-e network card, and a power supply).

Install Solaris and give all of the disks to ZFS.

Use rsync to copy the data to your newly built box to create your initial back up, then create a snapshot using ZFS.

For each subsequent back up use the --delete option when running rsync then create a snapshot using ZFS. (ta-da, you have point-in-time recovery capability!)

Depending on how thrifty you can be, and not considering the labour to build and test it, this setup could cost you as little as $4k USD at current prices.

If Solaris x86 supports it, I recommend getting a motherboard or SATA cards that support hot swapping and a case with front loading bays. Being able to replace failed drives (which will happen) is a nice thing.

Beyond this, when your storage requirements go beyond this first build you can just build another box or throw in some eSATA cards and connect some external drives to expand your ZFS pool(s).

Interesting thought, I hadn't realised the Atoms were so cheap.

Example 1. [...]

Wow! *Really* cheap (...in the USA). The cheapest I can find for something like this in the UK is ~£80 ($130).

Get a Kill-A-Watt and have fun measuring all the things in your house. :)

My parents were sent a similar thing by the electricity company, except it's wireless and monitors the consumption of the whole house. The previous (P3?) server used ~60W, but I haven't checked with the current one.

...please be careful with exposed 110V lines...

Yeah... it's 230V here, and their house is old and doesn't have circuit breakers.

If changing would save ~60W, or 0.06kW * 24h * 365 = 525kWh a year. I think they pay 15p/kWh in the day (17 hours) and 5p/kWh at night (7 hours), so that's £63 a year. Looks like I should upgrade!

Interesting thought, I hadn't realised the Atoms were so cheap.

Example 1. [...]

Wow! *Really* cheap (...in the USA). The cheapest I can find for something like this in the UK is ~£80 ($130).

Get a Kill-A-Watt and have fun measuring all the things in your house. :)

My parents were sent a similar thing by the electricity company, except it's wireless and monitors the consumption of the whole house. The previous (P3?) server used ~60W, but I haven't checked with the current one.

...please be careful with exposed 110V lines...

Yeah... it's 230V here, and their house is old and doesn't have circuit breakers.

If changing would save ~60W, or 0.06kW * 24h * 365 = 525kWh a year. I think they pay 15p/kWh in the day (17 hours) and 5p/kWh at night (7 hours), so that's £63 a year. Looks like I should upgrade!

Interesting thought, I hadn't realised the Atoms were so cheap.

Example 1.

Lower cost, lower performance with a C3.

They will require a power supply optimized for lower loads to reap maximum benefit.

My home server is a 1.4GHz AMD Athlon, and I don't know how much power the whole setup consumes (it's actually in my parents' garage, as that gives me free remote backups). I wonder if the cost to manufacture a new PC would outweigh the extra power needed to run the old one? (i.e. environmental argument rather than economic one.)

Get a Kill-A-Watt and have fun measuring all the things in your house. :) Or, if you have a multimeter that can measure AC amps, first measure the AC voltage on the line, then plug the red lead into the amp connector, select amps, and put the meter in series with one side of the power cord (please be careful with exposed 110V lines). Amps * Volts = Watts.

Ballpark, standard desktop PCs pull 100-200 watts at idle; that's roughly 100 KW-h per month. It's a win both economically and environmentally, unless the manufacture of electronics is far worse than I know about.

Interesting thought, I hadn't realised the Atoms were so cheap.

Example 1.

Lower cost, lower performance with a C3.

They will require a power supply optimized for lower loads to reap maximum benefit.

My home server is a 1.4GHz AMD Athlon, and I don't know how much power the whole setup consumes (it's actually in my parents' garage, as that gives me free remote backups). I wonder if the cost to manufacture a new PC would outweigh the extra power needed to run the old one? (i.e. environmental argument rather than economic one.)

Get a Kill-A-Watt and have fun measuring all the things in your house. :) Or, if you have a multimeter that can measure AC amps, first measure the AC voltage on the line, then plug the red lead into the amp connector, select amps, and put the meter in series with one side of the power cord (please be careful with exposed 110V lines). Amps * Volts = Watts.

Ballpark, standard desktop PCs pull 100-200 watts at idle; that's roughly 100 KW-h per month. It's a win both economically and environmentally, unless the manufacture of electronics is far worse than I know about.

Interesting thought, I hadn't realised the Atoms were so cheap.

Example 1.

Lower cost, lower performance with a C3.

They will require a power supply optimized for lower loads to reap maximum benefit.

My home server is a 1.4GHz AMD Athlon, and I don't know how much power the whole setup consumes (it's actually in my parents' garage, as that gives me free remote backups). I wonder if the cost to manufacture a new PC would outweigh the extra power needed to run the old one? (i.e. environmental argument rather than economic one.)

Get a Kill-A-Watt and have fun measuring all the things in your house. :) Or, if you have a multimeter that can measure AC amps, first measure the AC voltage on the line, then plug the red lead into the amp connector, select amps, and put the meter in series with one side of the power cord (please be careful with exposed 110V lines). Amps * Volts = Watts.

Ballpark, standard desktop PCs pull 100-200 watts at idle; that's roughly 100 KW-h per month. It's a win both economically and environmentally, unless the manufacture of electronics is far worse than I know about.

Actually there is an even cheaper and easier way to do it.....go talk to your friendly neighborhood local mom and pop repair shop. We are the biggest packrats there is and often have drawers filled with old PCI cards of all shapes and sizes. We are also usually quite bored and will happily sell you parts cheap, especially if you are doing something cool with them like a server, instead of dealing with the usual "I got a bug looking at pron again. Here fix it" which is what our days usually consist of. I personally have everything from a 2Mb Matrox card up to a 64Mb MX400 lying in my GPU drawer.

So go talk to your local repair shop. you'll find if you BS with us a little we're happy to let you go through the goodie drawers and will sell you cheap anything you want. Think of it like a cheap flea market for PC parts. We just really hate throwing working hardware away when we might find a use for it someday. And before somebody goes "WTF you gonna do with those old crappy GPUs?" I would point not only to this article, but point out the fact I just sold a 12Mb S3 graphics card to a guy for a whole $5 including popping it in for him. It was supposed to be just to get him through until we could get him an AGP card (which I was out of at the time) but the S3 worked great on his Win2K office PC so he said "if it ain't broke, why fix it?".

Those old PCI cards with 8-16Mb of RAM really didn't use hardly any juice at all, probably less than the average IGP does today. 20 minutes worth of BSing with your local repair guy and I'm sure you'll get one for a couple of bucks, with no shipping or waiting. Then if you want to get fancy you can pick up one of the cheapo KVM switches at Newegg, and if you have a problem with your server just "clicky clicky" on the keyboard shortcut and you are good to go. I paid a whole $30 for mine but Newegg has the same model for $26 or $16 for a 2 port. Since you already have the P4 this would be the easiest way to go headless and still have access if something goes wrong.

Actually there is an even cheaper and easier way to do it.....go talk to your friendly neighborhood local mom and pop repair shop. We are the biggest packrats there is and often have drawers filled with old PCI cards of all shapes and sizes. We are also usually quite bored and will happily sell you parts cheap, especially if you are doing something cool with them like a server, instead of dealing with the usual "I got a bug looking at pron again. Here fix it" which is what our days usually consist of. I personally have everything from a 2Mb Matrox card up to a 64Mb MX400 lying in my GPU drawer.

So go talk to your local repair shop. you'll find if you BS with us a little we're happy to let you go through the goodie drawers and will sell you cheap anything you want. Think of it like a cheap flea market for PC parts. We just really hate throwing working hardware away when we might find a use for it someday. And before somebody goes "WTF you gonna do with those old crappy GPUs?" I would point not only to this article, but point out the fact I just sold a 12Mb S3 graphics card to a guy for a whole $5 including popping it in for him. It was supposed to be just to get him through until we could get him an AGP card (which I was out of at the time) but the S3 worked great on his Win2K office PC so he said "if it ain't broke, why fix it?".

Those old PCI cards with 8-16Mb of RAM really didn't use hardly any juice at all, probably less than the average IGP does today. 20 minutes worth of BSing with your local repair guy and I'm sure you'll get one for a couple of bucks, with no shipping or waiting. Then if you want to get fancy you can pick up one of the cheapo KVM switches at Newegg, and if you have a problem with your server just "clicky clicky" on the keyboard shortcut and you are good to go. I paid a whole $30 for mine but Newegg has the same model for $26 or $16 for a 2 port. Since you already have the P4 this would be the easiest way to go headless and still have access if something goes wrong.

If the point is to re-use the old P4, then get a low power PCI video card. If the point is to have a low power server to play with, get something like this: http://www.mwave.com/mwave/skusearch_v3.asp?scriteria=BA25456. Can be found else were, not giving props to MWave. Or if a dual core system is wanted, get this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856167037.

Just need to add memory (SO-DIMM DDR2) and a HD. I went with the first as the single core Atom uses about 3.5 watts less than the dual core. I also went with two WD "green" HDs. It should pull about 50 watts when up and running.

Well, obviously the volatile drives aren't much faster than Intel's SSDs. Most SSDs are already starting to bump against the upper limit of what you can get out of SATAII when doing sequential reads.

The first ones I saw were for the PCI-slot and that one is limited to 133 MB/s and 266 MB/s for 64 bit PCI, both of which are lower rates than SATAII.

PCI Express of course starts at 250 MB/s per lane and tops out at 1 GB/s per lane for the latest version. Compare that to DDR3 which peaks at 12.8 GB/s per channel. To saturate a PCIe x16 lane we could settle for three DDR3 channels.

Size is another concern of course, as most of these things tends to go for sockets to plug the memory into.

So, you could try to top out a system with 160 GB of DDR3 RAM (would require 30 blocks), costing $14,099.7. And I'm not entirely sure, how you'd fit 30 blocks of RAM onto a single PCIe card, even if it's full length. This setup would obviously only be performance limited by the PCIe bus and the card's memory controller.

Now, HP StorageWorks' IO Accelerator 'only' provides about 700 MB/s depending on the workload, but only costs slightly more than half of the DDR3 solition at $7,700.

The biggest problem with the PCIe-based volatile solutions is fitting enough memory to be useful and that you're fucked if there's a bad power outage. The non-volatile PCIe solutions' biggest problemt hey're hideously expensive compared to regular SSDs and the only advantage they have to RAID-0'ed SSDs is the IO performance, as raw speed is faster if you raid a few of Intel's SSDs to a good controller.

And all the PCIe based storage mechanisms have one huge problem - non-bootable.

Braidwood, which is expected to offer anywhere from 4GB to 16GB capacity, will only raise the cost of a PC by about $10 to $20 per system, according to Jim Handy, the Objective Analysis analyst who authored the report.

When comparing that cost increase with the overall cost of a brand new PC it doesn't raise any red flag. Nonetheless, what it must be said is that, as this brainwood technology "resides directly on the motherboard" (i.e., it's yet another component embedded in a motherboard) , this technology will increase all motheboard cost by $10 to $20. That means that this brainwood technology is an excuse to ramp up current motherboard prices from around 20%.

Call me old fashioned but I prefer my hardware cheap without any unnecessary bells ans whistles. In fact, is this technology even capable of doing what the marketing blurb states it does? Nowadays it's hard to purchase a HD with capacity less than 200GB. Is a 4GB buffer really capable of successfully buffering all that data?

Well, I don't have one myself, so in some sense I must agree with the not-worth-it assessment. But it's not really expensive compared to a netbook, if we're talking about the Kindle 2 (the subject of this article) rather than the Kindle DX. It costs $299, which is basically the going rate for netbooks. So it'd be really deciding on features rather than price.

Kindle wins on: battery life, daylight visibility of the display, weight, free 3G internet

Netbooks win on: hardware (CPU/ram/hdd/etc.), color display, can run a normal OS without heroics

Just depends on what you want, I think. Do you care more about the 1.6 GHz Atom vs. 400 MHz XScale? Do you care more about a weight of 2/3 lbs vs 2 lbs? Etc.

Adding hotswappable drive trays to a server triples the cost.

I don't believe this. can you support this assertion of yours?

I personally use a bunch of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817332010

they're not enterprise quality but they do work quite well for what they are. they give decent (but loud) cooling, they allow actual hot swap and they do have temperature sensors (beeping, at least; but no system level alerts).

Those Seagate drives have been fraught with problems since their release. The model they quote is ST31500341AS. The reviews on both Amazon and NewEgg detail the history. Supposedly, Seagate finally got the firmware sorted out, but would you want to test it with a couple grand of drives? More to the point, would you want to support it? That choice has the air of penny-wise and pound foolish.

Win7 promo pricing ended so quickly that it doesn't count. $30 pricing for OSX isn't going to vanish very quickly. ;)

I got my Sennheiser PC161 headset for $40, but that doesn't make it the regular price.

Well, to start, according to Apple that's 13W @ idle, but 110W with CPU load. Big difference.

If powersipping is what you want try the ASRock ION-330 Nettop. The reviewers here couldn't get it to draw more than 40 watts, at full load. But there are differences between this and a Mac-Mini:
1) Mac Mini has a Firewire 800 port, Bluetooth, 802.11n, Mini-DVI-out port, and DisplayPort, and slightly faster processor (although ASRock comes with overclocking package to easily reach 2.1GHz)
2) ASRock has HDMI-out, VGA-out, 1 more USB port, and costs less than 1/2 as much. So with that other $420 you save you could buy a Class 1 USB Bluetooth adapter, a USB 802.11n adapter, and a 24" monitor, and still have change left over for a Dinovo Edge bluetooth keyboard.

Who knows, you just might even be allowed to open it up and upgrade the hardware (RAM, HDD, DVD/RW to Blu-ray, etc) without voiding the warranty.

Well, to start, according to Apple that's 13W @ idle, but 110W with CPU load. Big difference.

If powersipping is what you want try the ASRock ION-330 Nettop. The reviewers here couldn't get it to draw more than 40 watts, at full load. But there are differences between this and a Mac-Mini:
1) Mac Mini has a Firewire 800 port, Bluetooth, 802.11n, Mini-DVI-out port, and DisplayPort, and slightly faster processor (although ASRock comes with overclocking package to easily reach 2.1GHz)
2) ASRock has HDMI-out, VGA-out, 1 more USB port, and costs less than 1/2 as much. So with that other $420 you save you could buy a Class 1 USB Bluetooth adapter, a USB 802.11n adapter, and a 24" monitor, and still have change left over for a Dinovo Edge bluetooth keyboard.

Who knows, you just might even be allowed to open it up and upgrade the hardware (RAM, HDD, DVD/RW to Blu-ray, etc) without voiding the warranty.

Well, to start, according to Apple that's 13W @ idle, but 110W with CPU load. Big difference.

If powersipping is what you want try the ASRock ION-330 Nettop. The reviewers here couldn't get it to draw more than 40 watts, at full load. But there are differences between this and a Mac-Mini:
1) Mac Mini has a Firewire 800 port, Bluetooth, 802.11n, Mini-DVI-out port, and DisplayPort, and slightly faster processor (although ASRock comes with overclocking package to easily reach 2.1GHz)
2) ASRock has HDMI-out, VGA-out, 1 more USB port, and costs less than 1/2 as much. So with that other $420 you save you could buy a Class 1 USB Bluetooth adapter, a USB 802.11n adapter, and a 24" monitor, and still have change left over for a Dinovo Edge bluetooth keyboard.

Who knows, you just might even be allowed to open it up and upgrade the hardware (RAM, HDD, DVD/RW to Blu-ray, etc) without voiding the warranty.

Well, to start, according to Apple that's 13W @ idle, but 110W with CPU load. Big difference.

If powersipping is what you want try the ASRock ION-330 Nettop. The reviewers here couldn't get it to draw more than 40 watts, at full load. But there are differences between this and a Mac-Mini:
1) Mac Mini has a Firewire 800 port, Bluetooth, 802.11n, Mini-DVI-out port, and DisplayPort, and slightly faster processor (although ASRock comes with overclocking package to easily reach 2.1GHz)
2) ASRock has HDMI-out, VGA-out, 1 more USB port, and costs less than 1/2 as much. So with that other $420 you save you could buy a Class 1 USB Bluetooth adapter, a USB 802.11n adapter, and a 24" monitor, and still have change left over for a Dinovo Edge bluetooth keyboard.

Who knows, you just might even be allowed to open it up and upgrade the hardware (RAM, HDD, DVD/RW to Blu-ray, etc) without voiding the warranty.

I am VERY entertained by how they used 256mb of ram as a "ridiculous" amount.... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814187054 hehehe

The GTX 280 goes for $240 on NewEgg. Around a 15 FPS difference for $100.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820183245

Huh. Good luck with that.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820183245

Get yourself an inexpensive ASUS WL520gu router and install the latest tomato firmware. Blammo! Instant wireless bridge for 4 ethernet devices, no client drivers required. You're welcome.

SMC SMC10GPCIE-XFP 10Gbps Ethernet Card, available at NewEgg

Even if there's no serial port, many motherboards still come with a serial header; the white header on the bottom of this board is for a serial port.

I wouldn't say it really directly competes with something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883103221

but I could be wrong.

Yeah, $25 is really expensive.

I see how you could think that I'm claiming every single PC ever made has tv-out, that was poor wording on my part there. Of course I did not mean to claim that, just that most of the computers which can/are being used for gaming have tv-out. I'm not writing my thesis here, but I'm not just making shit up either; I'm basing that claim on my experience with the cards I listed, as well as the trends I see in new hardware. For instance, even in <$100 category, most cards have analog or HDMI output. If that still doesn't match the input on your TV, you probably need to get a better TV. Or an adapter to whatever video-in it has, that could also work.

Also, Bluetooth dongles are cheaper than dirt so that's not really a problem.

I can't really speak for sports games since I haven't played those in ages, but console ports are all shit by default, and I'm always surprised when one turns out not to be completely terrible in every way.

If you do not have the hardware to support Windows 7 then don't upgrade. If your graphics card is the only thing holding you back then take a stroll over to Newegg and start upgrading.

Complaining about hardware that was designed for Windows XP not working in Vista/Win7 is really akin to complaining about hardware that worked fine in Win95/98/ME not working or working well in XP. Eventually you have to upgrade hardware to run modern software. If you think ATI is choosing to end support for a legacy product too early, feel free to buy a nVidia card to replace it. Eventually though, nVidia will discontinue support for their DX9 products the same way they no longer support DX8 products in Vista/Win7. Some point after that, they'll discontinue support for the GT 285 for some future OS.

I have had really good luck with intel boards and you can pick up a decent one for $60 bucks. Add any one of these cpus for $149-$349 plus $45 for 4GB of Ram and you have a pretty fast rig for $254 - $454.