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Western Digital Announces 200 Gig Drives
twilightzero writes "Video capture fanatics and pr0n moguls, rejoice! Today marks the official release of the Western Digital 200 GB hard drive! Never again run out of space for your X-10 video stream of the neighbor's house! See the graphic, specs, and press release. This also marks the release of WD drives using fluid dynamic bearings rather than the old BB type." The glorious march of technology continues forward, and digital video fans rejoice. Update: 07/26 03:34 GMT by M : Headline corrected. Taco's at a conference, cut him a little slack.
I don't buy Western Digital drives anymore, unsurprisingly.
The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeout or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools
But *why* does Microsoft feel the need to deface every Slashdotted IIS website with instructions for the administrator of the box?
I mean, when something breaks, why not just have an "5xx Server Error - Oops, this server is overloaded at the moment, please come back when traffic tapers off" or similar visitor-oriented message?
I've had to support Windows users who see this message in a browser window, get confused that there's something wrong with *their* machine, and ask me to fix it!
Either Microsoft's plan is to make newbie users think that the reason they can't view the site is a flaw on their end (not with Microsoft's well-planned attempts to take over the server market as well), or the people who administer Microsoft websites are sufficiently stupid that they don't monitor their site's condition in ways other than visiting it! (ie. find the log files, and go through them periodically)
I think it would be so much more elegant to display a concise error to the website's visitor, and automagically mail a description of the error and corrective instructions to administrator@$HOSTNAME. (One would hope that by the time one is administering a server farm, one could have figured out the mail aliases database, and could have 300 servers reporting in to one e-mail address, yet, interestingly, few of these people appear to have figured out how to hide the ASP error messages...)
If you car breaks down by the side of the road, the gauges on the dashboard aren't flashed on a huge public billboard which instantly appears on the car. Passers-by seeing you and laughing at you: "Ha-ha! He ran out of fuel! Dummy!"
Yet this is *exactly* what IIS does. Don't believe me? How 'bout ASP errors primarily displaying programming bugs in the user-created scripting?
Not withstanding the experience of any particular site under a mighty Slashdotting, and even if Apache on *NIX were inferior, I'd still be embarrassed to run IIS precisely because insults my intelligence... in the public forum of my own webpage.
Yes, these people are paying money (electricity, bandwidth, machine time) to have their mistakes publicized. That sounds like a great way to run a business.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
You actually read this site for the comments and the news? That's crazy! Read comments at -1, Nested. The trolls and the Beuowolf clusters and Natalie Portman and the Linux/Microsoft FUD are what make this site worth reading in the first place.
Sure, Slashdot used to be a hell of place to engage in intelligent conversation, but it's just not that anymore. Usenet used to be too.
But things aren't that way anymore, so we should just accept them as they are and have a laugh.
Hell, on sci.math, some guy used to always post about solving Fermat's Last Theorem using elementary algebra (he may still be doing so, actually). Then some other guy named "Hi" would always reply to his posts telling him to take more meds. Funny shit!
I hate to say it, but Western Digital makes the shittiest drives out there. Without fail, they've been the most unreliable, shortest lived drives that I've ever used throughout my life. I wouldn't trust a Western Digital to save old Nigerian spam. They're junk. They're cheap as hell, but you get what you pay for, and when it comes to hard drives, I'm willing to pay extra.
Saying that WD has a 200 GB hard drive is like saying that Ford came out with a 400 HP Mustang. Who cares? Slap a big engine in a piece of shit, and all you've got is a piece of shit with a big engine.
Isn't that like trying to get oxygen from a vacuum or light from a black hole? ...or an intelligent post from one of the Slashdot janitors?
(Incidentally, what the fuck kind of conference is Taco at? "Bad Code and Patchy Goatees in the World Today"?)
--saint