We (The Binghamton University Computer Science Department) employ 2 debian raid servers. They make use of a 3ware ATA 12-port card and their (3ware's) hot-swap enclosures (whoever said hot-swapping with ATA is not possible is incorrect, we do it).
It uses a 9 external 5.25 bay case (enlight) with an Antec 550W power supply to handle the 12 drives (plus a seagate system drive in the internal 3.5" bay). This has worked very well.
We use Maxtor 300GB drives in one machine (RAID55) and have lost 5 of 20 drives we purchased in 6 months. The other uses Western Digital 200GB (RAID5), and we've lost 1 of 12 in a year. Manufacturer DOES matter. WD replaced our drive in days, Maxtor makes you jump through hoops and tries to deny the problem for a while, just to finally decide to replace the drive, then take 5-7 mroe days to get it to you.
All in all, these machines cost us under 7K each and perform very well. However, if I bought one today, I'd get 3ware's SATA card and Seagate's new 400GB SATA drives instead. Whoever said ATA cables are a pain was NOT wrong, and these drives would give much better performance.
When your screen doesn't reflect so much of the ambient light anymore, you can use a projector that outputs less power. For one, this can lead to less hot projector lamps, thus a longer life for them.
Good point. I could use my current projector with a screen like this in low-power mode and still have a good picture. Sweet!
...they could come up with a lamp that would actually last. I've gone through at least 6 InFocus projectors in the last 1.5 years due mainly to bulb failure.
This technique sounds really cool though, perhaps I won't need to have all my windows boarded up anymore....hey, what's that bright thing in the sky outside?
Haha. I intended this as a joke. I really could care less what my karma is on this site. I just found it rather funny. I see you don't agree (either that, or I'm missing the humor in your reply as well).
Man, I haven't been called a "retard" since... third grade I think. Thanks, that really makes me feel like a kid again.;)
I agree, the hardware has been pretty good in these.
However, their inability to get drivers that work well in Windows, and their lack of willingness to work with any OSS group to create drivers for other platforms makes the current generation basically useless.
It would be nice if ATI got back to just making their hardware and let others who are more qualified produce their software for them.
Ahh. Well, that makes me feel better. I was having trouble reconciling my view of the universe with the idea that this movie had a fact even close to correct.
Figures. Two of us post with the same point at the same time (10:37 PM). A.C. gets score 5: Insightful, and I get score 0, Redundant. Guess I shouldn't have taken that extra minute to spellcheck it, eh?
"It is critical that every person be given an opportunity to opt-out of receiving e-mail correspondence promoting commercial products."...so now will I get 3000 e-mails a day asking if I want to opt out of getting a new "perfect" loan?
Of course, now that BugMeNot has been publicized, how long until all these sites check that site often and just disable all accounts that ever get listed there?
Many of my makefiles already do this with my FIXME and TODO comments in my code. Fortunately, it's not "in a window" (unless you count an xterm), nor is it technically in "real-time", so perhaps I'm immune to this patent... because I don't use as many useless or stupid features as they seem to want to include.
I do this already with my own DVD collection (mainly so I can rewatch large numbers of Star Trek and SG-1 episodes without the interruption of changing DVDs). I don't bother with the menus though, I just play each movie as a.vob and have a simple script that lets me select between them with a remote.
Why bother with the menus? I find them annoying for the most part.
Not a flame... but I think SuSE is the best. The following is all IMHO:
I was a RedHat guy, but I just got so fed up. Redhat has gotten way to corporate and they don't seem to care if their software sucks, as long as people use it anyway (sound familiar?). SuSE puts a lot of care into their dist, and they include a lot of extra packages that RedHat never would bother with. The RedHat 5.2 install disk had a bug that would wipe out your entire extended partition!!! Even if you didn't install to that drive! That's crazy, and from what I've seen, SuSE takes more time to do it right and would never let this happen.
...and have you ever tried to actually download anything from RedHat? I find it amazing that noone seems to mind that they have what must be the most unreliable and slow ftp server around. This is AFAICT to get you to pay for a CD. SuSE's sites are fast (though I am losing faith right now... where is 6.1 on their servers???).
SuSE is not perfect of course, no distribution is, but I'd say for people who want an easy to manage system and up-to-date packages pre-tested for your sustem, go SuSE. I first tried it back with 5.x and thought it was the absolute best, except that it wasn't glibc. This shortcoming was corrected in 6.0 and as soon as I had the chance, I SuSE'ed both of my machines and have never been happier.
Well we really didn't want to announce this just yet (as someone already pointed out), but oh well - the more the merrier. Please, at least read the "original GATOS announcement" and submit a success/failure report as specified in there.
And for the record: ATI has been very cooperative, they believed that releasing their specs would give competitors an edge (which is understandable, wrong or not - I'm not going to debate that issue here).
As soon as we (Mostly Øyvind Aabling) managed to reverse engineer most of the workings of the cards, they realized it was no longer a secret and have been very helpful so far.
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We (The Binghamton University Computer Science Department) employ 2 debian raid servers. They make use of a 3ware ATA 12-port card and their (3ware's) hot-swap enclosures (whoever said hot-swapping with ATA is not possible is incorrect, we do it).
It uses a 9 external 5.25 bay case (enlight) with an Antec 550W power supply to handle the 12 drives (plus a seagate system drive in the internal 3.5" bay). This has worked very well.
We use Maxtor 300GB drives in one machine (RAID55) and have lost 5 of 20 drives we purchased in 6 months. The other uses Western Digital 200GB (RAID5), and we've lost 1 of 12 in a year. Manufacturer DOES matter. WD replaced our drive in days, Maxtor makes you jump through hoops and tries to deny the problem for a while, just to finally decide to replace the drive, then take 5-7 mroe days to get it to you.
All in all, these machines cost us under 7K each and perform very well. However, if I bought one today, I'd get 3ware's SATA card and Seagate's new 400GB SATA drives instead. Whoever said ATA cables are a pain was NOT wrong, and these drives would give much better performance.
When your screen doesn't reflect so much of the ambient light anymore, you can use a projector that outputs less power. For one, this can lead to less hot projector lamps, thus a longer life for them.
Good point. I could use my current projector with a screen like this in low-power mode and still have a good picture. Sweet!
...they could come up with a lamp that would actually last. I've gone through at least 6 InFocus projectors in the last 1.5 years due mainly to bulb failure.
...hey, what's that bright thing in the sky outside?
This technique sounds really cool though, perhaps I won't need to have all my windows boarded up anymore.
Haha. I intended this as a joke. I really could care less what my karma is on this site. I just found it rather funny. I see you don't agree (either that, or I'm missing the humor in your reply as well).
;)
Man, I haven't been called a "retard" since... third grade I think. Thanks, that really makes me feel like a kid again.
I agree, the hardware has been pretty good in these.
However, their inability to get drivers that work well in Windows, and their lack of willingness to work with any OSS group to create drivers for other platforms makes the current generation basically useless.
It would be nice if ATI got back to just making their hardware and let others who are more qualified produce their software for them.
...and get one you like quickly, before They implement the broadcast flag on everything and TV tuners become totally illegal. ;)
Ahh. Well, that makes me feel better. I was having trouble reconciling my view of the universe with the idea that this movie had a fact even close to correct.
Thank you for restoring my paradigm.
...you mean that stupid, stupid movie (Armageddon) actually might have had the look of a comet right? Who'd have thought.
;)
--I no longer spellcheck - it cost me 5 points.
Figures. Two of us post with the same point at the same time (10:37 PM). A.C. gets score 5: Insightful, and I get score 0, Redundant. Guess I shouldn't have taken that extra minute to spellcheck it, eh?
You mean all those who have these all-important weblogs don't have any backups of that data anywhere else?
"It is critical that every person be given an opportunity to opt-out of receiving e-mail correspondence promoting commercial products." ...so now will I get 3000 e-mails a day asking if I want to opt out of getting a new "perfect" loan?
Of course, now that BugMeNot has been publicized, how long until all these sites check that site often and just disable all accounts that ever get listed there?
Many of my makefiles already do this with my FIXME and TODO comments in my code. Fortunately, it's not "in a window" (unless you count an xterm), nor is it technically in "real-time", so perhaps I'm immune to this patent... because I don't use as many useless or stupid features as they seem to want to include.
I believe that should be "...releasing Super Glue FUMES on the object. ..." - eh?
I do this already with my own DVD collection (mainly so I can rewatch large numbers of Star Trek and SG-1 episodes without the interruption of changing DVDs). I don't bother with the menus though, I just play each movie as a .vob and have a simple script that lets me select between them with a remote.
Why bother with the menus? I find them annoying for the most part.
Not a flame... but I think SuSE is the best. The following is all IMHO:
I was a RedHat guy, but I just got so fed up. Redhat has gotten way to corporate and they don't seem to care if their software sucks, as long as people use it anyway (sound familiar?). SuSE puts a lot of care into their dist, and they include a lot of extra packages that RedHat never would bother with. The RedHat 5.2 install disk had a bug that would wipe out your entire extended partition!!! Even if you didn't install to that drive! That's crazy, and from what I've seen, SuSE takes more time to do it right and would never let this happen.
...and have you ever tried to actually download anything from RedHat? I find it amazing that noone seems to mind that they have what must be the most unreliable and slow ftp server around. This is AFAICT to get you to pay for a CD. SuSE's sites are fast (though I am losing faith right now... where is 6.1 on their servers???).
SuSE is not perfect of course, no distribution is, but I'd say for people who want an easy to manage system and up-to-date packages pre-tested for your sustem, go SuSE. I first tried it back with 5.x and thought it was the absolute best, except that it wasn't glibc. This shortcoming was corrected in 6.0 and as soon as I had the chance, I SuSE'ed both of my machines and have never been happier.
And for the record: ATI has been very cooperative, they believed that releasing their specs would give competitors an edge (which is understandable, wrong or not - I'm not going to debate that issue here).
As soon as we (Mostly Øyvind Aabling) managed to reverse engineer most of the workings of the cards, they realized it was no longer a secret and have been very helpful so far.