Slashdot Mirror

I guess you missed my point: performance on a computer now is marginal in value. Good enough, is good enough. So long as it's reasonably current, who cares? Really, unless you're in a specialized field or have special needs, how much does a 2.x Ghz chip vs 1.x chip make for you? How much time do you *really* spend waiting for your computer?

A 60 gig drive can be had for just $77 on pricewatch. (and I'm well aware that it's 4200 RPM, not 7200, see above about performance being marginal in value)

My Dell Inspiron 600m has a 60GB, 4200 RPM drive. With 1.5 GB of RAM installed, it manages to run Fedora Core 3, Windows XP, AND Windows 98 simultaneously (VMWare) with enough speed to allow for my primary job to go quite successfully. (I write database software in PHP/PHP-GTK)

I won't argue that laptops aren't more expensive, I never did. But what I'm saying is: It's worth it and now having tasted the fruit, I will not stop eating it! The ability to manage my servers while sitting in my back patio by the pool while the kids swim is priceless.

The ability to show up at a client's location, armed with all relevant and available information (a la email, web, bookmarks, and documents) and update things in realtime according to changing specs in real time is priceless.

If the $150 for a replacement CDROM is a big deal, then you fall under "limited means". Note that your $30 CDRom is a piece of crap that might last a year if you're lucky - a decent, quality, name-brand item with a warrrantee is going to cost more like $75, and you haven't figured in the cost of installation. If you have it done by a "service professional" at your local best buy, it'll be another $50, while the laptop cdrom is installed/removed by just yanking on it.

Hmmm - now your $170 savings just dropped to $75 or so. How much is an hour or two of YOUR time worth?

Actually, smart shoppers should already be grabbing OEM copies of the operating systems. These require a hardware purchase to be legit, so stock up on 99c case screws!

PCI Micro has served me well when it comes to smaller computer stuff, like cables, fans, thermal grease, and cheap, durable mice and keyboards. You can usually find a free shipping code floating around if you dig for it.
Newegg is still my favorite for bigger parts, like motherboards, memory, and DVD burners.
Amazon is usually pretty good about having cheap, quality storage media, like blank DVDs or SD cards.
Pricewatch can find good deals, but only if you're willing to dig through lots of shady stores posting the "buy 10 units" price and jacking it up when you just want one.
And Reseller Ratings is a must when buying from no-name retailers you find on pricewatch. I also like how Reseller Ratings has clear specs on everything, and incorporates Epinions reviews along with their price comparisons.

I used to be a big Pricewatch fan, but lately I'm getting my best prices from Yahoo Shopping. Not to sound politically incorrect, but Yahoo seems to have the best of the little Mom-n-Pop Chinese & Korean shops, in places like City of Industry, who work like crazy to get you the best prices.

Plus I get the best hits on a wide variety of junque at Yahoo - I got hits on an obscure video card with LabVIEW drivers, and a huge old ALR 6x6 server at a government auction, etc.

When searching Yahoo Shopping, be sure to hit the sort-by-price link. Also, if it's a pre-configured product item [e.g. a known book, or DVD, or CD-ROM], then Yahoo will compute the S&H [and order the results by price] if you enter your zip code.

that nobody has mentioned Fry's electronics. You might have to stop by their retail locations for most of the good deals, but they still have some great prices on most everything and you can check various forums for sales flyer scans. You can check out their online store here.

Shoplocal is another decent site for various electronic goods, you can check sales via zip code search, very handy site indeed.

Of course, I think every geek knows the standard site for street prices has to be the good ol' pricewatch.

$50? Decent floppy drives can be had for $5-$10 from many online shops.

pricewatch: floppy drives

I can get Hard drives now from http://www.pricewatch.com/ for $0.38 Cents a gig.

I just get Regular Parallel ATA drives, or put them in a USB drive case.

I just bought 4 x 160Gb Hard Drives at $61 each! for this very purpose.

Backup to the drive then unplug and put pack in the Anti Static bags. I don't bother bolting the drive down, I just leave the computer open with the drive dangling out.

The reason this is better any other solution I have tried, is because I have data dating back to 1976 on media, and after going through 7 or more itteration where the old tape drive hardware is lost or stops working and is no longer available.
Or the tapes get gummy and sticky.

It's a nightmare. I spent almost a month backing out 9 track tape at differnet BPI's and 1/2 and 1/4 tape formats, 4mm Dat drives, 8mm, etc.

So far the best media has been CD, and DVD-Roms, although today they are too small to be useful.
The new Optical disks are not a popular standard like CD ensuring you will be able to read the data back at some point in the future.

Next has been the SCSI and IDE/ATA drives. These have been excelllent in the respect of backward compatablity and being able to read data from computers I had from 15 or more years ago. Heck I have even managed in fire up old SCSI drives from 20 years ago and read the data off it reciently. A 10 Mb SCSI drive I remember thinking $60 a meg was a great deal.

The next largest issue is, will the drive even still spin up.
I recomend keeping multiple copys for that. Luckily my constant upgraging and copy the data to the new drive solved of that.
There are also data recovery services that are excellent with dead drives at about $500 to $1500.

Somehow I have managed to keep almost every bit since 1980 still in my possession. And readily accessable.

Heck I can even run some of my old TRS80 Model1 code from 1979 and C64 stuff on emulators.

1. Buy 3 250GB EIDE or SATA HD's very cheaply.
2. Plug them into your cheap linux PC (with at least a 400Watt powersupply). If EIDE then make sure each drive is on its own (master) channel. If your BIOS supports "hardware" RAID, disable it.
3. Use a low-level drive diagnostic fitness test to burn the drives in so you can be sure they won't fail right away. A great tool for this is The Ultimate Boot CD, as well as the 'badblocks' linux util.
4. Assuming your 3 new drives are drives sdb, sdc, and sdd, with your bootdrive on sda (or hda), you should now partition each of them (instead of raiding the entire disk). I recommend creating one primary partition which is slightly smaller than the fullsize of the harddisk, such that if you buy a replacement drive of another brand and it isn't the EXACT same size, you won't be SOL when adding it. Mark the partition type as "FD", which is the raid autodetect type.
5. Verify that your kernel supports software RAID by checking that /proc/mdstat exists, or by checking for the multidisk "md" module in the output of "lsmod | grep md" after attempting to "modprobe md" and "modprobe raid5". If not supported, then... figure that out yourself.
6. Now the fun part (assuming mdadm's installed):
   mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
   View the status of the raidset construction by cat'ing /proc/mdstat
7. Put a filesystem on the md0 device with mke2fs /dev/md0 (or mkreiserfs, or whatever)
8. Add a line to your /etc/fstab to automount your new raid array at /raid5 or wherever.
9. Oh, and if your distro doesn't automatically detect your array on reboot, you need to fix that by putting this in your init scripts somewhere:
   mdadm --assemble --scan

pricewatch saved itself from ruin by adding shipping costs into the advertized prices. It's long past time for ebay to do the same!

Last I checked I can get 200gb drives for about $100. That's me, just some guy buying one drive, paying 50 cents a gb, so I'm guessing they're paying a lot less buying a petabyte at a time, so what's with the 4x pricing? I understand the need for profit, but 4x?

$600 gets you a pcb, connectors, the fastest RAM available, not to mention the latest consumer-grade GPU. I think that video cards are still a steal compared to the latest CPUs.

Or consider this-- you get a lot more transistors per dollar with video cards.

...on a technical level.

They'd be storing this much information on me: http://www.google.com/search?q=6+million+per+secon d+*+1+month Which works out to about 1.80 TiB

And since hard drives are about $0.3875/GB,
http://www.pricewatch.com/default.aspx?p=http%3A// www.pricewatch.com/prc.aspx%3Fi%3D26%26a%3D4429

That means I'm getting an extra $714.24 value out of my $80 Comcast bill, or whatever they charge now.

And since I only watch my porn that I stream from the internet at H.264 1280p HD (5-6Mbps), caching the data on Comcast's servers is just as good as saving it on my own hard drive.

Now I already know what you're going to say:

Q: I get all my questionable content from the internet at H.264 1920p Full High Definition (7-8Mbps), so streaming is not feasible over a 6mbps cable internet line. It is therefore necessary for me to invest in local caching (hard drives) to maintain the full bandwidth during playback.

To which I say:

A: l/pw?

http://www.google.com/froogle/ or http://www.pricewatch.com/?

I mean, is it really that difficult?

Internal DVD RW IDE $38 http://www.pricewatch.com/default.aspx?p=http%3A// www.pricewatch.com/prc.aspx%3Fi%3D340%26a%3D1396
USB enclosure $25
http://www.pricewatch.com/default.aspx?p=http%3A// www.pricewatch.com/prc.aspx%3Fi%3D340%26a%3D5805
USB video capture $75
http://www.pcmall.com/pcmall/shop/detail.asp?dpno= 340531&store=pcmall&source=pwbfroogle&adcampaign=e mail,pwbfroogle&wt.mc_id=pwbfroogle

As you can see you can get all the parts NOW for under $200. Actually under $150. I am sure Sony and or Microsoft could do it for a lot less if they wanted to.
You want a press release? I am simply putting out what COULD happen. Think about it though. If Tivo can make a unit for $200 with a hard drive, cpu, encoder, and playback software. Why would just a capture card and encoder cost more?

Internal DVD RW IDE $38 http://www.pricewatch.com/default.aspx?p=http%3A// www.pricewatch.com/prc.aspx%3Fi%3D340%26a%3D1396
USB enclosure $25
http://www.pricewatch.com/default.aspx?p=http%3A// www.pricewatch.com/prc.aspx%3Fi%3D340%26a%3D5805
USB video capture $75
http://www.pcmall.com/pcmall/shop/detail.asp?dpno= 340531&store=pcmall&source=pwbfroogle&adcampaign=e mail,pwbfroogle&wt.mc_id=pwbfroogle

As you can see you can get all the parts NOW for under $200. Actually under $150. I am sure Sony and or Microsoft could do it for a lot less if they wanted to.
You want a press release? I am simply putting out what COULD happen. Think about it though. If Tivo can make a unit for $200 with a hard drive, cpu, encoder, and playback software. Why would just a capture card and encoder cost more?

Um... I don't think so... Can you name a $100 (new, not used) video card that'll run HL2/CS:S at a decent framerate (40+ fps)? If you can, then I'll return my $300 video card and buy your $100 card!

You can good prices for Radeon 9800's, X800's, and GeForce FX 5800's and 6800's here

Games such as Half-Life 2 were made when those were the top-of-the-line cards, and were designed to run at full speed. Anything such as a X850 or such $400+ cards is just excess for those games.

If there isn't then your point CAN NOT be made. Even if I gave you the benifit of the doubt, how much does it cost for a common external DVD-RW? About 200? Sure you can get them for a bit less if you want a 2 speed. Most internals go for half that, a good number of them for even less. So, take your 300+ dollar x-box, add a keyboard and mouse for at least 75 dollars and spend another 200 for a dvd burner. all told you have a 600 dollar DVD copy station that plays games. I've seen entire systems (with DVD burns) go for less. And that's from major dealers, not back street hoods. Granted, it's game playing abilities may be weaker, infact no doubt of it, but that generally doesn't bother the "weekend gamer".

Yes, there is a product out of the box that can do it, with the right software (And that sometimes comes with the burner as well.)

$200 for a DVDRW? No thank you, I'm content using Pricewatch so I can get a dual-layer 16x DVD+/-RW for $50.

On average, I still fail to see how a $400 console system is going to beat what I can feasibly build for $250 or less, and just emulate the console, excepting these next-gen consoles, which have amazingly enough decided to use computer architectures instead of easier, native stuff. Why they moved away from RISC when there was so much more that could be done with it, is beyond me.

The CD is no longer the best storage medium for music. Sure, they cost only $0.20:GB (for quality CDs that last more than a couple of years), but they're split onto 6-800MB volumes. Which must be managed by hand, or by inadequate jukeboxes, which are large, very expensive for real automation, very slow for "random access", and have limited capacity even at the (consumer) high end. While hard drives cost , with a combined random-access volume (PC + 4 EIDE drives) as little as $0.60:GB.

With the automation comes convenience, including playlists of all your music, accessible from any Net connection (including your smartphone, plugged into your car stereo, etc). When they change the physical format from 25-year-old "Compact Disc (TM)", your harddrive can ignore the change, and accommodate the new data. When they change the data fromat from CDDA, just run a converter app. None of that works with CDs.

CDs are still a great distribution format. Putting something in people's hands, that they can just pop in a player for music, will remain popular for many years. Virtual distribution has its own virtues, but even cheap, ubiquitous, transparent, wireless, superbroadband won't replace the physical ritual of handing someone something shiny anytime soon.

Sony is obviously blind to this distinction. They're stuck with the CD they invented (with Phillips inventing the data/software) as just "the medium", the product, without seeing its collapse in face of competition with online storage (as opposed to "nearline" storage in CDs). Like the rest of the inbred recording industry they lead, they're working against the distribution benefits of simple CDs, trying to hold on to CDs as storage media. Perhaps to their dying breath.

You bought a 22" LaCie CRT? Damn, dude, those things are expensive. I've been thinking about replacing my 19" Hitachi CM751, which is starting to show its age, and was always kinda fuzzy at 1280*1024 and above. LaCie looks like a worthy replacement but, because they're professional color-balanced monitors, they command a premium over ordinary CRTs. I don't need precise gamma or color balancing; all I really want is 1600*1200@75Hz with no ghosting or fuzz, and without the smear of LCDs.

Schwab

The CD is no longer the best storage medium for music. Sure, they cost only $0.20:GB (for quality CDs that last more than a couple of years), but they're split onto 6-800MB volumes. Which must be managed by hand, or by inadequate jukeboxes, which are large, very expensive for real automation, very slow for "random access", and have limited capacity even at the (consumer) high end. While hard drives cost $0.38, with a combined random-access volume (PC + 4 EIDE drives) as little as $0.60:GB.

With the automation comes convenience, including playlists of all your music, accessible from any Net connection (including your smartphone, plugged into your car stereo, etc). When they change the physical format from 25-year-old "Compact Disc (TM)", your harddrive can ignore the change, and accommodate the new data. When they change the data fromat from CDDA, just run a converter app. None of that works with CDs.

CDs are still a great distribution format. Putting something in people's hands, that they can just pop in a player for music, will remain popular for many years. Virtual distribution has its own virtues, but even cheap, ubiquitous, transparent, wireless, superbroadband won't replace the physical ritual of handing someone something shiny anytime soon.

Sony is obviously blind to this distinction. They're stuck with the CD they invented (with Phillips inventing the data/software) as just "the medium", the product, without seeing its collapse in face of competition with online storage (as opposed to "nearline" storage in CDs). Like the rest of the inbred recording industry they lead, they're working against the distribution benefits of simple CDs, trying to hold on to CDs as storage media. Perhaps to their dying breath.

The CD is no longer the best storage medium for music. Sure, they cost only $0.20:GB (for quality CDs that last more than a couple of years), but they're split onto 6-800MB volumes. Which must be managed by hand, or by inadequate jukeboxes, which are large, very expensive for real automation, very slow for "random access", and have limited capacity even at the (consumer) high end. While hard drives cost $0.38, with a combined random-access volume (PC + 4 EIDE drives) as little as $0.60:GB.

With the automation comes convenience, including playlists of all your music, accessible from any Net connection (including your smartphone, plugged into your car stereo, etc). When they change the physical format from 25-year-old "Compact Disc (TM)", your harddrive can ignore the change, and accommodate the new data. When they change the data fromat from CDDA, just run a converter app. None of that works with CDs.

CDs are still a great distribution format. Putting something in people's hands, that they can just pop in a player for music, will remain popular for many years. Virtual distribution has its own virtues, but even cheap, ubiquitous, transparent, wireless, superbroadband won't replace the physical ritual of handing someone something shiny anytime soon.

Sony is obviously blind to this distinction. They're stuck with the CD they invented (with Phillips inventing the data/software) as just "the medium", the product, without seeing its collapse in face of competition with online storage (as opposed to "nearline" storage in CDs). Like the rest of the inbred recording industry they lead, they're working against the distribution benefits of simple CDs, trying to hold on to CDs as storage media. Perhaps to their dying breath.

First things first. There's a "Rich Dad" series: "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" - the advice rich fathers give their children vs. what most fathers tell their kids. Why do which people work for whom? Who owns the company and who works for the owner of the company? There's an entire series - advice for teens, investment advice...
Free tip for saving money (from me): Use Amazon to do your research about books - finding out a hardback book also has a paperback version, which you are willing to buy, the reviews, what books everyone else bought with it, etc.
Then: go to AddAll and use a book shopping 'bot to scan (40?) online book stores. Frequently, you'll find you can get a book and shopping for less than the book from B&N or Amazon. And occasionally, you can beat the number of days required to ship it|them. It's no different than using Froogle or PriceWatch to shop.
I was taught: go first class, then find the lowest price.

Now - a perfect example wealth and what the market (of 1) will bear in a clash of wealth vs. rich (or middle class)[1] in an episode of Taxi: Cooking for Two . Reverend Jim torches Louie's apartment and Jim's dad says he'll pay whatever Louie tells Jim on the phone (Jim's dad is extremely wealthy, as we see in another episode. Alex points out the danger of doing that - that Louie would fill it out for $1M and Louie tells him that's where they are different. Louie says there's a value low enough that (Louie shrugs his shoulders and makes a quick cheep) and high enough to make him (shudder). And Louie sets about to work through his body motions to find the right value. What happens? Louie $30,000 and Jim's dad okays it. Louie is overjoyed until he learns that Jim's dad was expecting the amount to be more like $200k.


[1] Years ago, "middle class" was a defined value. It seems now as though there's upper class and everyone else.

http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html
We need more support and BSD and Linux etc need to come together on this. I see the article and while it is great wifi is more supported we need more than just wifi we need a site like http://www.pricewatch.com/ that is complete with data and grade the manufactor ( A,B,C,D,F ) based upon cooperation etc. While I applaud Theo for what he has done we have a long way to go and I think Slashdot could put up such a site and even earn revenue from it ! Think of the PR ! Also I am running 3.7 and way to go Theo Happy B-day !

You can't buy AMD from Dell because Dell doesn't sell computers with AMD chips in them. Kinda how you can't get cheese puff type snacks from the Dannon company.

As for where to get them elsewhere, try http://pricewatch.com/ I start every net search there.

For an Opteron board to go past 16GB, you need a quad opetron board + Opteron 800 series CPUs.

Opteron 800 series CPUs are much more expensive http://www.pricewatch.com/h/mn.aspx?i=3&f=1

I dont know if this is the case, but sometimes spending the extra buck on a plextor is worth it. They aren't cheap but I have never had a problem with one. Some of the other value lines like I would find at a rock bottom price on pricewatch haven't been as good to me.

Intel _makes_ money on it's CPUs while AMD barely, sometimes does.

While you may be correct that Intel's manufacturing is cheaper than AMD's, isn't it the case, however, that Intel can (and does) sell slower, less capable processors at higher prices than AMD? It seems to me I've always been able to look at Pricewatch and see equivalent Intel processors priced higher than AMD processors.

To make my point, I picked a processor at "random," an AMD64 3400+ and looked it up on tomshardware and found this performance comparison. Then I went to pricewatch and found the following prices, AMD64 3400+ = $188, Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz: $200. I looked up AMD processors and the first article I read said:

... the Athlon 64, while not priced as aggressively as AMD's chips in the past, ends up offering better performance than the Pentium 4, for less money. What more could you want?

Obviously some people want it to say Intel at any cost.

Thanks, pal, you just ruined pricewatch for me.

Can you help find a stick of 512mb PC133 laptop RAM for around $50-60? There is a reward ;)

1. Go to pricewatch.com.
2. In the search box, type in "pc133 512mb".
3. You're welcome.

Or, you could just do the smart thing and buy your upgrades from a small, local computer shop (or PriceWatch) instead of Dell.

It's not your house - it's all the stuff IN your house. Worst offenders are generic PCs; specifically their case design (RFI/EMI-wise) is absolutely clueless (e.g., see http://www.ac6v.com/comprfi.htm/ for theory and fixes). Second place is firmly held by very, very crappy power supplies that let all the noise OUT of the PC on the power buss (ie. into your wiring). Sam's very useful Notes on the Troubleshooting and Repair of Small Switchmode Power Supplies) will get you started with theory and what [often] goes wrong (disclosure: I'm his sidekick). But:

Pet Peeve: as soon as Name-Your-$14-PC-PS-Manufacturer gets their UL sticker (meaning they can start selling in the US!) the ENTIRE L-C filter from the input of the power supply PCB is shorted out with a series of jumpers. Right, the 120VAC wires go through the save-thy-ass fuse right into the rectifier! No caps, no chokes, nuthin'! (Ok, so what do you expect from a $15 460W PS?) This allows all the noise on the power lines to enter the PC (and fry it - use a surge protector!) *AND* it allows all the noise IN the PC to escape back out and corrupt others (ie. your receiver, TV, etc.) (See: http://cms-emc.web.cern.ch/cms-emc/pdffiles/PhDfil es/PS&filters.pdf section 3.2 Switching mode power supplies for a nice overview). Oh, yeah, and I'm *SURE* all of you have your grounded cable actually grounded, right?

I got a 250W ATX knock-off case for $29 that came with a PS included. Turned the PC on, *ALL* AM stations vanished! Right... I opened it up and shure enough, a jumper from fuse to rectifier. All caps to ground were missing as well (from various points in the circuit). A few moments with a soldering iron (jelly-bean components, salvaged from dead *quality* PSes) and you can't tell the PC is on by listening to AM dial. Day and night difference!

Don't feel bad if you never though of it, this guy obviously never did either... and he should have. http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/psus/index.x? pg=1

But, how do you later chop up the files? I'm glad you asked: I use a hacked version of text-only (yeah!) soundgrab. You can get my latest version from http://repairfaq.ece.drexel.edu/filipg/soundgrab/

My signal comes from a battery-powered (ie. avoids issues with 'corrupted power' ;) digital sony walkman, via a 20-odd foot coax cable to my PC. The further away your receiver is from the source of noice, the better off you are![*] Linux records it from a SoundBlaster Live! with rawrec to a wav file. I have a series of templates (.sg files) for different shows and just fudge them a bit then export to MP3. Piece of cake! I've done a bunch of Dave's shows that way (~700MB worth) for inclusion in a weakness of mine (don't worry, they get some equally-illegit music ;).

Cheers

[*] "The solution to pollution is dilution" - Evil chemistry maxim applied to the wonderul and friendly world of RFI ;-)

It's not your house - it's all the stuff IN your house. Worst offenders are generic PCs; specifically their case design (RFI/EMI-wise) is absolutely clueless (e.g., see http://www.ac6v.com/comprfi.htm/ for theory and fixes). Second place is firmly held by very, very crappy power supplies that let all the noise OUT of the PC on the power buss (ie. into your wiring). Sam's very useful Notes on the Troubleshooting and Repair of Small Switchmode Power Supplies) will get you started with theory and what [often] goes wrong (disclosure: I'm his sidekick). But:

Pet Peeve: as soon as Name-Your-$14-PC-PS-Manufacturer gets their UL sticker (meaning they can start selling in the US!) the ENTIRE L-C filter from the input of the power supply PCB is shorted out with a series of jumpers. Right, the 120VAC wires go through the save-thy-ass fuse right into the rectifier! No caps, no chokes, nuthin'! (Ok, so what do you expect from a $15 460W PS?) This allows all the noise on the power lines to enter the PC (and fry it - use a surge protector!) *AND* it allows all the noise IN the PC to escape back out and corrupt others (ie. your receiver, TV, etc.) (See: http://cms-emc.web.cern.ch/cms-emc/pdffiles/PhDfil es/PS&filters.pdf section 3.2 Switching mode power supplies for a nice overview). Oh, yeah, and I'm *SURE* all of you have your grounded cable actually grounded, right?

I got a 250W ATX knock-off case for $29 that came with a PS included. Turned the PC on, *ALL* AM stations vanished! Right... I opened it up and shure enough, a jumper from fuse to rectifier. All caps to ground were missing as well (from various points in the circuit). A few moments with a soldering iron (jelly-bean components, salvaged from dead *quality* PSes) and you can't tell the PC is on by listening to AM dial. Day and night difference!

Don't feel bad if you never though of it, this guy obviously never did either... and he should have. http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/psus/index.x? pg=1

But, how do you later chop up the files? I'm glad you asked: I use a hacked version of text-only (yeah!) soundgrab. You can get my latest version from http://repairfaq.ece.drexel.edu/filipg/soundgrab/

My signal comes from a battery-powered (ie. avoids issues with 'corrupted power' ;) digital sony walkman, via a 20-odd foot coax cable to my PC. The further away your receiver is from the source of noice, the better off you are![*] Linux records it from a SoundBlaster Live! with rawrec to a wav file. I have a series of templates (.sg files) for different shows and just fudge them a bit then export to MP3. Piece of cake! I've done a bunch of Dave's shows that way (~700MB worth) for inclusion in a weakness of mine (don't worry, they get some equally-illegit music ;).

Cheers

[*] "The solution to pollution is dilution" - Evil chemistry maxim applied to the wonderul and friendly world of RFI ;-)

Their new memory sticks will be available in sizes larger than 32MB so one would hope that in the near future 512MB and 1GB sticks would be made available and for a reasonable price. This would definitely make the video and MP3 playback much more useful.

The main reason I've avoided Sony Digital cameras in the past has been the fact that they use the proprietary sony memory sticks (which are usually quite a bit more expensive than their SD coutnerparts). A quick look in the flash memory section will show how a 256 MB SD stick can be had for $27 while futher down the page the Sony Memory stick costs $38 (40% more).

Then again, having a game system using the same memory as their future cameras and such may help boost its popularity and acceptance. I know that if the PS2 had used standard memory sticks that I would have probably considered a Sony Camera since I would already have the media available.

And as long as we're talking about "memory stick"..

You can save some bucks and get the same sort of thing for cheaper elsewhere. I've had one of these for over a year and it works well. It doesn't play the AAC files though.

You're still talking about a 68000, a chip introduced in 1979 and whose lineup maxes out at 16 mhz with no likelyhood of ever going higher. A low-powered arm would be a far more modern and powerful choice. In addition, a GB of ram these days costs 100 dollars. 256 MB of Compact Flash costs 20 bucks.

The HP calculators are generally more powerful, though they have stagnated too, but they're bloody impossible to use. HP's odd notation is not something to be taken lightly.

TI has long included 3D as a function in its calculators, so obviously there is some demand there. When working with 3 Dimensional graphing in college, I had to pull out my laptop and use Apple's built-in graphing calculator because my 200 dollar TI-92+ would choke on it. TI also includes the useful ability to graph multiple functions on top of eachother, but provides no clear way to tell them apart. Again, color would be useful here.

My old Clie which I use constantly can go for months between charges, has 16 MB of ram, a 16 MHz 68000, a greyscale display, and I bought it for 50 dollars. And it's positively antiquated compared to the Full-color clie I bought my girlfriend with a 400 MHz Arm and 32 MB ram with a Compact Flash card slot for LESS than the cost of the v200.

My point is not that the calculators are useless, my point is that they are taking a years-old design that rightfully should cost about 20 bucks and making a fortune on markup. They're doing the bare minimum required to stay in the game, when they could be doing far, far better for their customers.

The calculator racket is due for a shakeup, and soon. Nobody can rest on their haunches to the degree that TI has and expect to stay on top... If for no other reason than technology has passed them by.

I go by the best price you can get without special deals. @ pricewatch

fully agree. 4200rpm/2.5 (confirmed for minis) is a very dated technology and highly inadequate for OSX. Current largest 4200RPM is 100GB.

5400 RPM are widely available in 40GB to 80GB sizes - $90-150.

only one 7200 RPM in 60GB size. see here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/05/14/hitachi_cr eates_dedicated_notebook_7200rpm/ roughly $150 now.

I love the form factor but paying $150 extra for a decent drive and $55 for memory (http://www.pricewatch.com/h/prc.aspx?i=33&a=4560) assuming case can be open makes it 700+ no monitor/keyboard/mouse

Not sure.

This probably goes for most companies. I bought a new Motherboard, CPU, and memory combination from some bozos I found using Pricewatch. Their ratings seemed good but I had a lousy experience with them. Maybe they are nice when things go right as you suggest. Since things went wrong on my order, I found out they have several web sites for collecting orders. Infinity PC, PC Ontime, and One-Click PC all seem to be the same guys. With bad BBB ratings, they look like crooks hiding behind multiple identities.

After dealing with them, I was glad to go back to NewEgg. I now have a working system again. I had a RMA with NewEgg a few years ago that went very smooth. NewEgg may not be perfect, but believe me when I tell you there are much worse vendors out there!

Newegg

8anet, also known as AcmeMicro

Racks And Stands

Sybercom

TechOnWeb

Amazon (I buy a lot through Amazon because I get a referal kickback for links from my website which is nice)

AccuPC

There are a lot more I'm sure but I can't think of all of them off the top of my head. Oh, I have bought from Monarch Computers also. There are some companies I won't buy from eve again. The main one that comes to mind is Computer Giants. Those folks tried to scam me once on a Maxtor hard drive that went DOA in the first couple of days of testing. Like all the people posting complaints about them on ResellerRatings they tried to con me into paying return shipping to send the DOA drive back. They also said I'd have to pay one of their people to test the drive and confirm it was DOA. Otherwise I'd have to pay to have it sent back to me. Most people find that the drives are OEM or used and that they are selling them as new retail. Yeah, they're a bunch of asshats. That's why merchant review sites are so essential to buying on the Internet. You can't walk into an Internet store, get in a manager's face, and demand your money back for the lemon they sold you when you buy something online. You have to rely on other people's experiences to weed out the crooks. Fortunately for me Maxtor was exceptionally nice about the whole thing and took care of replacing out DOA drive with a brand new replacement. Nice folks @ Maxtor.

Anyhow, I don't always buy the lowest price on Pricewatch and Froogle. I'll buy from a company I know it's going to try and screw me even if I have to pay a little more. I always check eBay before placing an order too. Take for example one of my recent eBay purchases. I priced rack-mount patch cable organizer (wire routing gear) on Froogle. I found a decent model by APC for $25/each. I just happened to search ebay before buying and low and hehold I found Leviton cable organizers for $4.99/each. Each! Ha! Needless to say I bought 4 instead of 1. They are also built extremely well. Always check eBay before buying something online. You may find it for half the price (or less!).

The high price is only for the current version of Dreamweaver. If you go to PriceWatch or PriceGrabber you can find older versions (I bought version 3.0 for around $60.00) for far less than the $400.00 price quoted in the article.

Article doesn't say when this was written, but we're already beyond 3.4 ghz. You can but a 3.6ghz on Pricewatch right now and Tom's Hardware announced a 3.8 ghz being released way back in November 2004, so I don't know why the author is saying 3.4ghz is the top of the line currently and Intel will release a 3.73 ghz in 2005.

When was this written, early 2004?

I do have to laugh a little at it: "This article will appear in Dr. Dobb's Journal, 30(3), March 2005. A much briefer version under the title "The Concurrency Revolution" will appear in C/C++ Users Journal, 23(2), February 2005."

With the author saying "3.4 is out now and 3.73ghz early 2005" while everyone's upgrading to a 3.8 that's been out since 2004 it's gonna make that article look very old and inaccurate.

Where have you been shopping?
Pricewatch is your friend!
Along with GotApex
And my cheezy webpage

2GHz C3 Board: $78
15" Monitor: $92
Complete sys - AMD Athlon 3200+ No OS 128MB 20GB CDROM Integrated VGA & Audio KB/MS: $166

Where have you been shopping?
Pricewatch is your friend!
Along with GotApex
And my cheezy webpage

2GHz C3 Board: $78
15" Monitor: $92
Complete sys - AMD Athlon 3200+ No OS 128MB 20GB CDROM Integrated VGA & Audio KB/MS: $166

20nm across means 1cm^2 can hold 250B(illion) cells, each 1 bit. That's 32GB(yte) chips in a cm^2. I have a 1GB SD chip in my Treo's SDIO slot, which cost $67 today. A 32GB chip is only 5.7 times denser (in each planar dimension). In the other direction, a 32GB SD chip (similarly less dense in the same 32/5.7x scale) today costs $10, which includes the overhead of the rest of the package.

I'm not so jaded that I think 20nm isn't so small. These numbers really scream how tiny a scale in which we're already producing engineering commodities. I just think that we'll see an increase in Flash density, driven more by the exploding market and R&D money than by physical and engineering limits. 3D memory array packages are long overdue: how about taking that 1GB chip, and arraying its 200nm cells within a 32Kx32Kx0.5K array, a millimeter-thick sandwich of cells and address bus layers, for a 0.5TB chip? 4 of those in an SD package would make a great 2TB cell the size of a quarter-dollar coin. By the time the packaging is engineered, the tech discussed in this thread will have shrunk cell size by at worst half, so 8x0.5TB layered chips can not only offer 4TB, but the address busses can offer a hypercube (or higher-order) topology, for parallel accesses.

Then we can get really fancy. Dedicate 1% of the Flash cells among the busses to FPGA logic cells in 100-cell clusters. That tiny parallel machine is now potentially the fastest supercomputer on the planet. That path to a "hypernanocomputer" is purely evolutionary, in terms of IC fabrication. If that were say, Intel, IBM or Fujitsu's roadmap, we could be there within 5 years, maybe 2-3 years. C'mon, someone over at Infineon get to work and really impress us.

...that PriceWatch and Price Grabber are subject to this patent? Seems like they achieve similar functionality in concept.

The drive contains four 400GB Maxtor HDDs which are recognised as a single drive.

A quick glance on http://www.pricewatch.com/m/mn.aspx?i=26&f=1 here and we see 400GB Serial ATA drives go for $355 USD$

400 * 4 = 1.6T
355 * 4 = $1420

Providing you have a old box laying around, you could go out and purchase a serial ata pci card and... There is your 1.6T for a little over $1400.
I'm not saying it's a bad product. Just talking aloud :)

with any of these

Hmm...the specs say they only support up to ATA 100. So that means we're stuck with the 138 GB limit? Looking at pricewatch, it appears that the sweet spot for IDE drives in $/GB terms are 160 GB drives, and that sweet spot tends to move about 12-18 months to the next tier of capacity. I would be all over Arco Data's products if they could support the larger drives that require ATA 133 (have a RAID 5 now, but looking into building large RAID 1 caches tied together with LVM for a hierarchical storage management system because a lot of my data is read less and less frequently over time).

As other posters have mentioned, software raid is fine for RAID 0, 1, 0+1. As you get to RAID 3,RAID 5, and RAID 6, however, your processing requirements go up quite a bit.

A SATA RAID 5 card with hardware XOR engine and a DIMM slot for cache might be a cost-effective option for you. (Goes for ~$180 on Pricewatch, or ~$240 on Dealtime)

Oh, and I would have goine with HGST, Western Digital, or Seagate for your drives... but I suppose hardware failure is what RAID 5 is for :)