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That card you got looks identical to my card. But though mine says "SBT-SRD4", the Sabrent SBT-SRD4 NewEgg sells looks a little different (the jumper block at the left end is missing on mine and yours).

What mobo are you using?

I got a $20 enclosure with 17 drive bays in it, and a 300W power supply. I've got a dozen SATA drives, each drawing under 10W, and 5 EIDE, drawing under 20W each.

At first I just got a dozen SATA/EIDE USB slaves for $10 each, and plugged them all into a USB hub, with just the single USB cable stretching out of the case over to another full PC's USB socket. But that is so slow, especially when copying big music or video files between drives (and through the single USB cable to the CPU and back). Playing multiple media files to different terminals in my house is too much bandwidth for the single USB, too. Running 4 USB from the big enclosure to the 4 sockets in the server PC isn't much better, because it all goes through the same CPU and PCI bus.

So I got 3 Sabrent SBT-SRD4 4xSATA controller PCI cards, because they were $25 each. But when I tried to boot them in a few different motherboards (pre-HP Compaq P3/1.2GHz, IBM P4/3.2GHz), none of them got past the POST to even start booting the OS. I want to use them with Linux, but with the failure to even boot I'm not hopeful about driver support, either.

I bought them from CompUSA (still alive, online only), which hasn't replied to (email only - no phone available) tech support requests. Nor has Sabrent itself. I'm not hopeful that they'll refund my money, since everything else about this transaction has sucked.

So what I want to know is what cheap motherboard (no need for graphics or anything else other than at least 3 PCI slots and 100Mb-1Gb ethernet) will work with these SATA cards? If they're really duds, what is the cheapest way to get 12 SATA drives controlled, even if they're not that fast, over to 100Mb/Gb ethernet? Either SATA cards + motherboard, or even a fat mobo with a dozen SATA ports. I'd even settle for just 4-8 SATA ports to get started. I'm talking under $200 if possible.

Ideas? If it works, then 8-9 of them should support the 100 HDs the original question was asking about.

After I upgraded my laptop's HD I got a SABRENT SBT-EKU25 External Enclosure for the old drive. It's USB powered, it's incredibly lightweight and works great under Linux and Windows.

LMS does allow local applications to talk to AMT, but the vulnerability exists over the network whether you have LMS or not.

According to Intel's disclosure (upon which your linked page was based), the correct way to fix this vulnerability is to update the firmware. If you can't do that then you are directed to unprovision the Intel manageability SKU to prevent network attacks and then disable LMS to mitigate against local attacks. From the INTEL-SA-00075 Mitigation Guide :

These mitigations are intended to prevent unauthorized activation and use of Intel manageability SKUs, Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT), Intel® Standard Manageability (ISM), and Intel® Small Business Technology (SBT) that have not applied the firmware update addressing the vulnerability.
...
Intel highly recommends that the first step in all mitigation paths is to unprovision the Intel manageability SKU to address the network privilege escalation vulnerability. For provisioned systems, unprovisioning must be performed prior to disabling or removing the LMS.

So the original advice that disabling LMS is all you need to do (or not run Windows) was incorrect as it may lead people to believe that they are safe when they can still be affected by network intrusions.

Not counting a small collection of primitive electronic and mechanical calculators (and my prized possession, a Pickett Log Log slide rule, for which I was mocked by the non-geeks in my high school), my first real Personal Computer was an IBM PS/2 Model 30 purchased with student loan money 30 years ago. That helped launch a career that has lasted until this day. Favorite memories include having a text chat with a friend over a 2400 baud modem connection (it was like magic) and dialing a BBS in eastern Europe just for the thrill of doing it. And then there was the time I dialed the BBS of a software vendor (SBT) in Sausalito, California. I hung up for some reason, and when I tried to connect again a few minutes later, the phone call would not go through. Then I turned on the news and heard about the Loma Prieta earthquake.

When Microsoft switched to web-based navigation for Windows, I thought "Idiots! But luckily no one else will be this stupid".

At that time I was working with SBT accounting systems, that ran Foxbase or FoxPro on dBase files. We already had the joy of different runtimes for different clients but then came web-navigation-based installers. Even better, the installers only worked on certain version of Internet Explorer/Windows. Fortunately I forget the details, but finding a way to make your latest product UNinstallable was a pretty spectacular example of the lunacy of jumping on the latest fad.

The tax at the checkout thing is because unlike VAT, our sales tax is a local thing, that varies by county, and city, and sometimes state.

Example: California is mostly broken up by city (or town, or village, or whatever) but does have some oddball, street address based variants. Washington is broken up by zip+four code. Another state has only one state-wide rate (My client in Oregon needed me to add out-of-state sales tax to their rickety SBT system.)

The politics of sales tax increases, and who gets a slice of them, is probably an industry unto itself, employing an unknown number of toadies and bureaucrats and enriching corrupt politicians across the country.

I did some work for the Riverside County controller's office back in the 90s. At the time, they published an annual tome showing the breakdowns of tax collected and tax disbursed for any address in the county. It ran eight or nine hundred pages, and - while it was necessary for internal use - it was also sold to real estate agents for around $85/copy.

[At the time, they were in the process of converting it to CD media].

The non-overloaded code has a readability problem, I agree. But for example the Scala Built Tool, SBT, has operator overloading abused to hell and it makes complex build files useless to read for all but really experienced SBT users. The XML-driven Java build tool Maven, the Groovy-driven Java/Groovy build tool Gradle, and the Clojure-driven Java/Clojure build tool Leiningen are all much easier to read. Though to be fair, Groovy supports operator overloading, the Gradle team just chose not to abuse the feature for build management.

Look at some SBT examples, for example https://github.com/playframewo... In that file we have %, +=, :=, , none in a mathematical context, all on top of normal Scala operator syntax =, ==, =>, _, etc... I'm surprised I didn't see ")*&%()*$&%&&*XR&R^NO CARRIER" at the end of the file.

Java doesn't have obscure syntax - part of that is the language itself, part of that is the fact that it explicitly doesn't support operator overloading and that prevents people from making incomprehensible DSLs ( Scala's SBT, anyone? )

On the other hand, in terms of "readable" I still think calling Java readable assumes a familiarity with C style syntax. I think if you took someone that never read or wrote code before and showed them 100 line, idiomatic programs in Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Lisp, Haskell, C, Fortran, COBOL, Basic, and a few other languages that Java would not top the list for readability. My guess is that the winners would be Basic, COBOL, and Python.

One of the biggest reasons C++ became popular was that it was a relatively small step away, in terms of syntax, from C. I really think Java became popular mostly because the syntax is a small step away from C++.

Has anyone been using this for Scala development with the android-sdk-plugin? I've been working on my first Scala android app and see it as a big improvement over Java. The only negative is that I've been using sbt+emacs instead of the blessed android dev environment (which used to be Eclipse) so I've been missing some features.

C# > Java
Scala ? C#
Kotlin ? C#
Groovy ? C#
Clojure ? C#

NuGet ? Maven
NuGet ? Gradle
NuGet ? Leiningen
( NuGet > SBT because _ > SBT )

It's safe to say C# trumps Java. But even with .NET as open source under the excellent MIT license, I'm not sure .NET trumps the JVM and the JVM ecosystem.

Believe it or not, CIL (or MSIL in Microsoft-speak), the bytecode for .NET, is an ECMA standard, and implementations of both .NET JIT'ers and standard libraries exist for practically all modern platforms, thanks to Mono. So I'd say: "competition for portable applications". Really! Just take a look at Gtk#. As a result, there are numerous applications for Linux written in .NET languages (e.g., Banshee). Having written huge amounts of code in both JVM languages (Java, Scala, JRuby, and Clojure) and .NET languages (F# and C#), I would take .NET over the JVM for a new project any day.

Also, to pre-emptively swat down this counter-argument: while the Mono people and Microsoft may have had some animosity in the past, it is most definitely not the case any more. Most of the Mono people I have spoken to (yes, in person) say that their relationship with Microsoft is pretty good.

Build systems and dependency management for the JVM are their own mini-nightmare. .NET's approach isn't perfect but compared to [shudder] Ant, Maven, Buildr, SBT, and on and on and on... it largely just works.

Dammit, Slashdot scrubbed out all of the overloaded operators in SBT. They include percent, percent-percent, less than less than equals, colon equals, less than colon equals, less than plus equals, and probably others - those are only the ones I've encountered so far. You can write a tremendous amount of build configuration with a very tiny SBT build file, but I think it starts to look like intentionally obfuscated Perl.

I think operator overloading is generally a good thing, it allows things like defining natural syntax for complex numbers or the quaternion group or matrix libraries or whatever. I think languages should allow it, or something roughly similar. But it's easy to overuse the feature, and in my humble opinion the Scala Lift project and SBT do. It's especially a problem because most search engines don't work well with characters outside of alphanumeric. You have to remember to use SymbolHound or something similar to figure out what the hell all the fancy characters mean.

For your part h), see also SBT, the Simple Build Tool for Scala, with operators
Items I think you're missing:
i) REPL for rapid exploration of language features.
j) If the language is compiled, fast compilation times. This to me is a massive reason to prefer Go and D to C++ when you're building something that has to be near C++ for speed but does not need to hook deeply into existing C++ code.

I also disagree on your need for strong static typing. Let's say you have some kind of object with functions doX and doY and some functions that manipulate those objects. Then you interface with a third party library that happens to have objects that also have doX and doY you should be able to use interchangeably with your functions and objects. In the world of Java and C#, you need to make a common interface and recompile the whole set, including the third party library, to get that to work. With Scala, you can work around it by using implicit conversions but it's still an added layer of complexity. In Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, or Clojure, it just works. Sure you can screw up and have type errors - but you're three days into writing your unit tests when the Java/C#/C++/Scala guy is still defining his damn interfaces.

I think what you need for this to really work is two fundamental changes. First, the directory hierarchy would need to be redone so that you can install and run multiple versions of different libraries at the same time. The Nix package manager tries to do this, though I'm not sure how well it succeeds.

Second, current Linux package managers have no ties to the dependency management systems that have been created around different languages. The Perl community has CPAN ( Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) and the command line tool 'cpan' that facilitates downloading and installing a CPAN Perl module and all of its dependencies. Ruby and Python have something similar with Ruby gems and Python easy_install. Java does the same with Maven or with Ant + Ivy or SBT. Haskell has the 'cabal' tool to install Haskell modules with automatic dependency resolution from their Hackage repositories. What I presume would really help is if some people made dpkg (the Debian and Debian offspring package manager), rpm (the Red Hat package manager), or newer package managers like Conary or Nix to be fully aware of the various programming language package management tools.

I'll have it finished Tuesday.

Get back to us when someone will care enough about Scala and SBT to actually bother logging in to respond to one of the five users of your language.

To hell with this, where's my built-in Scala 2.8.x and SBT support? Instead I get PHP and "Guided installation to JDBC driver". Nice. Thanks.

My experience with making changes in accounting software is that it tends to break other things, that don't come up until bills are due or the end of the quarter. Quash those bugs, wait till the end of the fiscal year, find THOSE bugs, rinse, repeat. Heaven help you if you had any other custom work done in other accounting modules that year! Also: as an out of state business I don't care what your tax rates are per zip code - south dakota is so low on the radar that for a lot of companies its just cheaper to overpay the sales tax than figure it out. If a real state like California Texas or New York did something like that, there'd be hell to pay. Anyways my point is that accounting software in many cases is speghetti code from decades of incremental updates. Simply "writing a patch and applying it" simply doesn't work with a lot of larger, customized accounting software. Its hard to outsource programming for programs like SBT accounting and other bedrock apps most people use but loathe to work on.

Twenty years ago, I was 2 years out of high school. I'd completed one year of a Computer Science degree, but my parents split up and I had no money to continue. I took a job at a small consultant/reseller in my hometown - I met the UPS guy at the door each morning, and spent the day putting away everything that came in, and preparing stuff to ship out that afternoon. At some point, I started tinkering with FoxPro, helping one of the consultants there modify SBT Accounting to do some custom stuff. Through to course of deploying and supporting those modifications, I started doing some Xenix administration.

Flash forward to today - I'm the senior production DBA for an 18,000-employee, 24x7 company, and I crossed the 6-figure salary threshold last January. Over those 20 years, I've done FoxPro/dBase/Clipper development, classic ASP web development, PHP development, Windows and Unix/Linux administration, network security work. For the last seven years, I've been focusing mainly on DBA work, and today my job is 100% SQL Server and Oracle administration, tuning, and development work. Sadly, many of the biggest messes that I've had to clean up in my career have been caused by college educated, degree-bearing "professionals". A degree doesn't guarantee ability.

It can be done without a degree, but it takes a certain mentality. You have to live & breath this stuff. When others go home to play WOW or Xbox all night, you need to be experimenting with something new, teaching yourself some new skill. You need to be downloading, installing, and breaking (and subsequently FIXING) various Linux distributions. You need to participate in online communities.

Why use a crappy cable co DVR with a slow interface that crashes constantly? You said yourself you had to replace it 3 times. I have 3 tivos, my original series 1 is over 7 years old and still working strong. Tivo is a superior product and justifies a premium. If you ever had one then you can not use anything else and be completely satisfied. It's much like an iPod vs generic mp3 player. BTW, My TivoHD cost me $264 at best buy. Hardly a big expense when most HD setups are easily >>> $2K. And my net monthly cost went DOWN by $7/month because cable co charges $6.95 for box plus $7 for DVR service. Now my service cost for my tivoHD cost $6.95/month plus no additional cost for cable card. For me it was a no brainer whe the Tivo HD came out. SBT