These printers have an estimated 1.5 million pages of "print-life". You should get one that is in the 50k to 100k (printed pages) range. If you maintain it well (don't let it catch too much dust) it should really out-live 3 or 4 generations of PCs around your house;-) The Brother printer from the top of the thread also looks good - I'd seriously consider it, if I needed a printer now.
I think the main problem is that game-development has become too expensive. You should come-up with ideas for games that are not so expensive and resource-consuming to realize. Because if you don't, development could soon become so expensive that even the Windoze-only market can't pay-up for it. Not to mention that a large percentage of current games are just sequels to old successful games anyway...
Don't you hate it when companies ship product X with "year" as the version-number or title actually in "year - 1"? Just like you can't really buy sandals in summer because the silly shoe-shops have already stocked the autumn-ware?
MSFT is responding to consumers and posponing the release of Office2007 until it matches the year it is shipped in. As Windows Vista bears no release-date name, its release-date is bit arbitrary...;-)
Often, there are just no specs. You only get source code. For Windows, of course. The humans who wrote the sources may have left the company already... People speculated that this was also the problem with the "Adaptec-clash". Adaptec was rumoured to simply not have "documents" - just source. And source is usually only available via NDA....
If that is not the case for Hifn, then I'm sorry - but they do make it hard to believe there are actually sane people working there...
This happens with almost every product that gets imported from somewhere. Read about how the workers live and work on the pineapple and banana-plantations that DelMonte and Dole have begun to outsource to local contractors so they don't need to take the heat on the bad working-conditions.
Chances are your house is full of electronics made in sweatshops around the world (there was an article some time back linked on slashdot or kuro5hin). And the multi-national corporations are playing the different sweat-shop countries off against each other.
Picking Apple for it is, well, somehow understandable, because a lot of people have an iPod - but the fact is that almost all of the world's laptop are pieced together in that area (by a handful of OEMS/ODMs), too and nobody cares.
It's a really depressing thought that a big part of our prosperity here in the western hemishpere is really gained by squeezing it out of the already-poor population of developing-countries.
> PPC Macs are much more expensive than Intel Macs
In fact, Apple will have a hard time beating the price of a Dual DualCore G5. Just compare what a fully stacked XW9300 or Ultra40 would cost. Also, the the PPC-Mini was cheaper than the current Intel Mini - IIRC.
Why do Linux-distributions (both so-called "Enterprise" and the "Home-Users"'s) refuse to produce any kind of sensible documentation? Neither RHEL nor SLES ship with man-pages for the various device-drivers that come with the kernel. Just compare this to a FreeBSD or OpenBSD system, where every single device-driver also has a decent man-page that actually does make sense. Don't talk about TLDP - most of the stuff is hilariously out-of-date - but as APIs and ABIs are unstable by design, it's no surprise nobody is going the extra mile of actually documenting the stuff he wrote.
Easy: Areca RAID6 controllers. Or the latest 3Ware SX series. But I'd choose Areca today. RAID6 is a huge improvement over RAID5 - in everyday use and even more so when you're actually running with a degraded drive or rebuilding it online. The 12-port PCIe version is just 799$.
pfSense, now in late beta, is the solution.
It's FreeBSD 6.1+OpenBSD's pf + ALQ-Traffic-Shaper+IPSEC+PPTP + CARP + lot's more stuff all wrapped into an easy to understand interface.
Forget about all the other firewall "GUIs" (or lame attempts at GUIs) you've seen before, especially for the unreadable, ever-changing Linux-firewall engines.
pfSense has the performance, the feature-set, the reliability and the usability to be a real Checkpoint- and Netscreen-killer.
One quote from the mailing-list says it all: "I tested all the firewalls and GUIs that are available on freshmeat - and pfSense was the only one that didn't suck".
Obviously, you don't want to go W2K3+XP (or Vista...). But that's irrelevant. Can't you just make a "unexaggerated" assessment of the current situation (which PCs you have, what CPU/Mem/HD) and what it would cost to upgrade to W2K3+XP (and Vista, because that's the "Next Big Thing")? MSFT gives away the software to.edu customers more or less, so it's really about HW-cost. Make a comparative sheet with running an OSS-environment or a mixed environment (all apps on W2K3-server, connect via rdesktop from Linux/FreeBSD clients). Of course, *they* want XP. Believing anything else is lunacy. If you don't want to do the XP-adventure, you can say "Goodbye" and let some other MSFT-droid do the work - as far as I've understood your wording, neither party here can force the other to go a certain route.
> usually backed up from other mediums such as CDs and DVDs
This is a very euphemistic way of saying: "I download moviez, mp3 and porn via P2P all day and even though I usually don't view any movie twice, I still don't want to throw away anything, because I just can't delete anything".
How that could get an "ask slashdot"-posting is left as an exercise to the reader.
What, in god's name, are they going to "sell off"? Oh, the Itanium servers? Yeah, the soaring Itanium-server market - I bet investors are already beating a path to their doorstep to be part of the Itanium Eco-system.
> I would be -very- interested to hear somebody come up with a > real solution to this problem---a backup mechanism that real > people can use so that normal, typical individual computer > owners can back up their machines without paying a small fortune.
Not possible if you've got more than the size of a DLT-tape of "data". When I rescued the hard-disk of my neighbour, I asked him what data he had besides his 8000-ish titles of MP3-files and a couple of downloaded StarWars seasons, the answer was: "None." Not a single document or anything else worth saving on a 160 GB disk. He was most concerned about his MP3-collection, though - he was almost in tears:-)
Just because PC-technology has allowed almost everybody to have data-center size disk-capacities at home, doesn't mean that these people are capable of handling these amounts of storage - to the contrary.
Tape is relatively "secure" - at least, the tapes are not as fragile as HDs.
In the end, it's all a question of how much money is needed to re-create the data or how much money is lost if the data is lost. Use this as a rough guidance for determining backup-media and backfrequency (and retention time for the media).
If your data is worth next to nothing, why invest in a big 20x tape-library?
> Here's a clue: real wealth comes from real savings. > Federal manipulation of currency inflation and interest rates makes dollar savings worthless. > Savings of any form in the US dollar will get you exactly that. No worth.
While I'd say your investment in gold is a bit risky - it seems like gold-prices have been rising continously for almost 6 years now (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000081&s id=au0kxz2v7Sm8), but gold can de-valuate quickly and then nobody wants to buy it - I'd also not underestimate the dangers of money-inflation. One way to get rid of a giant budget-deficit is to just "inflationate" it away...
So, the strategy is not totally "looney", just not mainstream;-)
I love powerful PCs/workstation (drools over Dual-Core Dual HP XW9300). But I also hate the noise of powerful PCs. This freakshow of a power-supply is IMO useless in any real-world scenario (except for maybe being a good bad example), in addition to setting a silly precedent for non-intelligent and downright wasteful use of resources. People should get used to the fact that soon they won't be able to afford the power-consumption of such a beast anymore.
Come on - you cannot tell me that nobody @@stake didn't know that this was bound to happen.
It's not rocket science - just mentally create a "short-list" of successful Symantec-aquisitions, compared to a "short-list" of aquisitions where the product ended as pure and utter crap.
Or how else can you explain the comment "Oh no - that was the only such service that was actually good and usable" someone blurted on a (mailserver-)mailinglist about the recent aquisition of Brightmail by Symantec...
I found that funny at first, but also find it sad, because it's always sad to loose a good product - and I know it's even more sad for the people envolved in creating the original product. So much sweat, blood and tears....swoosh... all flushed down the toilet.
Slashdot Mirror
These printers have an estimated 1.5 million pages of "print-life". ;-)
You should get one that is in the 50k to 100k (printed pages) range. If you maintain it well (don't let it catch too much dust) it should really out-live 3 or 4 generations of PCs around your house
The Brother printer from the top of the thread also looks good - I'd seriously consider it, if I needed a printer now.
When they dare to release in Q4, the service-packs will follow quicker than you can say "Bob".
I haven't read the article, but doesn't cooling things to a few K consume a sizeable amount of energy?
I think the main problem is that game-development has become too expensive.
You should come-up with ideas for games that are not so expensive and resource-consuming to realize.
Because if you don't, development could soon become so expensive that even the Windoze-only market can't pay-up for it.
Not to mention that a large percentage of current games are just sequels to old successful games anyway...
> Where would all the drives go?
R ackmount-Chassis/5U-Rackmount-Chassis-48-Multilane -SATA-hot-swap-34-depth-1350W-redundant-power-supp ly-RMC5D/
Here:
http://www.rackmountnet.com/Rackmount-Chassis/5U-
But you need 1 RU more. It's 5 RUs.
Amazing that SUN (or Andy B.'s Keralia) was able to cramp it into 4 RUs.
Don't you hate it when companies ship product X with "year" as the version-number or title actually in "year - 1"?
;-)
Just like you can't really buy sandals in summer because the silly shoe-shops have already stocked the autumn-ware?
MSFT is responding to consumers and posponing the release of Office2007 until it matches the year it is shipped in.
As Windows Vista bears no release-date name, its release-date is bit arbitrary...
Often, there are just no specs.
You only get source code. For Windows, of course.
The humans who wrote the sources may have left the company already...
People speculated that this was also the problem with the "Adaptec-clash". Adaptec was rumoured to simply not have "documents" - just source.
And source is usually only available via NDA....
If that is not the case for Hifn, then I'm sorry - but they do make it hard to believe there are actually sane people working there...
This happens with almost every product that gets imported from somewhere.
Read about how the workers live and work on the pineapple and banana-plantations that DelMonte and Dole have begun to outsource to local contractors so they don't need to take the heat on the bad working-conditions.
Chances are your house is full of electronics made in sweatshops around the world (there was an article some time back linked on slashdot or kuro5hin). And the multi-national corporations are playing the different sweat-shop countries off against each other.
Picking Apple for it is, well, somehow understandable, because a lot of people have an iPod - but the fact is that almost all of the world's laptop are pieced together in that area (by a handful of OEMS/ODMs), too and nobody cares.
It's a really depressing thought that a big part of our prosperity here in the western hemishpere is really gained by squeezing it out of the already-poor population of developing-countries.
> PPC Macs are much more expensive than Intel Macs
In fact, Apple will have a hard time beating the price of a Dual DualCore G5.
Just compare what a fully stacked XW9300 or Ultra40 would cost.
Also, the the PPC-Mini was cheaper than the current Intel Mini - IIRC.
So they introduced a spouse-track.
Next thing you know is they start a dating-site....
Why do Linux-distributions (both so-called "Enterprise" and the "Home-Users"'s) refuse to produce any kind of sensible documentation?
Neither RHEL nor SLES ship with man-pages for the various device-drivers that come with the kernel.
Just compare this to a FreeBSD or OpenBSD system, where every single device-driver also has a decent man-page that actually does make sense.
Don't talk about TLDP - most of the stuff is hilariously out-of-date - but as APIs and ABIs are unstable by design, it's no surprise nobody is going the extra mile of actually documenting the stuff he wrote.
Easy:
Areca RAID6 controllers.
Or the latest 3Ware SX series.
But I'd choose Areca today. RAID6 is a huge improvement over RAID5 - in everyday use and even more so when you're actually running with a degraded drive or rebuilding it online.
The 12-port PCIe version is just 799$.
> how much does OpenBSD give to those projects that it uses
By generating a big chunk of (mostly security-oriented) patches that most other projects like to ignore right away.
It's FreeBSD 6.1+OpenBSD's pf + ALQ-Traffic-Shaper+IPSEC+PPTP + CARP + lot's more stuff all wrapped into an easy to understand interface.
Forget about all the other firewall "GUIs" (or lame attempts at GUIs) you've seen before, especially for the unreadable, ever-changing Linux-firewall engines.
pfSense has the performance, the feature-set, the reliability and the usability to be a real Checkpoint- and Netscreen-killer.
One quote from the mailing-list says it all: "I tested all the firewalls and GUIs that are available on freshmeat - and pfSense was the only one that didn't suck".
> Maildir style delivery is a pain for backups.
Traditional backups, yes.
But store the Maildirs on a NetApp-filer and snapshot them daily....
Obviously, you don't want to go W2K3+XP (or Vista...). .edu customers more or less, so it's really about HW-cost.
But that's irrelevant.
Can't you just make a "unexaggerated" assessment of the current situation (which PCs you have, what CPU/Mem/HD) and what it would cost to upgrade to W2K3+XP (and Vista, because that's the "Next Big Thing")?
MSFT gives away the software to
Make a comparative sheet with running an OSS-environment or a mixed environment (all apps on W2K3-server, connect via rdesktop from Linux/FreeBSD clients).
Of course, *they* want XP. Believing anything else is lunacy.
If you don't want to do the XP-adventure, you can say "Goodbye" and let some other MSFT-droid do the work - as far as I've understood your wording, neither party here can force the other to go a certain route.
cheers,
Rainer
> usually backed up from other mediums such as CDs and DVDs
This is a very euphemistic way of saying:
"I download moviez, mp3 and porn via P2P all day and even though I usually don't view any movie twice, I still don't want to throw away anything, because I just can't delete anything".
How that could get an "ask slashdot"-posting is left as an exercise to the reader.
What, in god's name, are they going to "sell off"?
Oh, the Itanium servers? Yeah, the soaring Itanium-server market - I bet investors are already beating a path to their doorstep to be part of the Itanium Eco-system.
Pitty for SGI, but it seems it's over now.
> I would be -very- interested to hear somebody come up with a
:-)
> real solution to this problem---a backup mechanism that real
> people can use so that normal, typical individual computer
> owners can back up their machines without paying a small fortune.
Not possible if you've got more than the size of a DLT-tape of "data".
When I rescued the hard-disk of my neighbour, I asked him what data he had besides his 8000-ish titles of MP3-files and a couple of downloaded StarWars seasons, the answer was: "None." Not a single document or anything else worth saving on a 160 GB disk.
He was most concerned about his MP3-collection, though - he was almost in tears
Just because PC-technology has allowed almost everybody to have data-center size disk-capacities at home, doesn't mean that these people are capable of handling these amounts of storage - to the contrary.
Tape is relatively "secure" - at least, the tapes are not as fragile as HDs.
In the end, it's all a question of how much money is needed to re-create the data or how much money is lost if the data is lost.
Use this as a rough guidance for determining backup-media and backfrequency (and retention time for the media).
If your data is worth next to nothing, why invest in a big 20x tape-library?
cheers,
Rainer
> Here's a clue: real wealth comes from real savings.
s id=au0kxz2v7Sm8), but gold can de-valuate quickly and then nobody wants to buy it - I'd also not underestimate the dangers of money-inflation.
;-)
> Federal manipulation of currency inflation and interest rates makes dollar savings worthless.
> Savings of any form in the US dollar will get you exactly that. No worth.
While I'd say your investment in gold is a bit risky - it seems like gold-prices have been rising continously for almost 6 years now (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000081&
One way to get rid of a giant budget-deficit is to just "inflationate" it away...
So, the strategy is not totally "looney", just not mainstream
I would do that, but it seems it is enough to leave the wrong house at the wrong time.
And don't mention the "incommunicado"-detentions...
> The worst part of the workers in this country is the demands they make and our government backing those demands up.
Dude, you've never been to Germany then....
I love powerful PCs/workstation (drools over Dual-Core Dual HP XW9300).
But I also hate the noise of powerful PCs.
This freakshow of a power-supply is IMO useless in any real-world scenario (except for maybe being a good bad example), in addition to setting a silly precedent for non-intelligent and downright wasteful use of resources.
People should get used to the fact that soon they won't be able to afford the power-consumption of such a beast anymore.
Christ! What's next? No more dupes? No more early "FreeBSD x has been released"?
An early New Years Resolution?
I'm speechless.
Come on - you cannot tell me that nobody @@stake didn't know that this was bound to happen.
It's not rocket science - just mentally create a "short-list" of successful Symantec-aquisitions, compared to a "short-list" of aquisitions where the product ended as pure and utter crap.
Or how else can you explain the comment "Oh no - that was the only such service that was actually good and usable" someone blurted on a (mailserver-)mailinglist about the recent aquisition of Brightmail by Symantec...
I found that funny at first, but also find it sad, because it's always sad to loose a good product - and I know it's even more sad for the people envolved in creating the original product. So much sweat, blood and tears....swoosh ... all flushed down the toilet.