A small refrigerator will cost you under $100 (at least, here in the US it does), and will keep your server as cold as you want. As a bonus, it will also chill your beer.
Check the BTU rating of said fridge before purchase. Most small fridges are designed to 1 cool warm objects placed inside and remove the heat that leaks inside from the outside. To do both of these jobs a small capacity cooling system is used. If your computer can produce heat faster than the cooling system can remove it, the temprature will rise inside until it is warm enough for the heal leaking out and pumped out to equal the heat produced. Im many cases it could be quite a bit over ambient.
Remember your objective is to keep the PC at a temprature below nighttime ambient in the room, not above ambient.
and will keep your server as cold as you want... As long as the server is not turned on.
Put a wall mounted AC in it and pack it full. Use two if you have them, and need the room.
Be sure to properly size the AC unit. An AC unit over capacity will short cycle and have reliability issues. An undersize unit may run all the time and not cycle off long enough to properly defrost itself leading up to ice blocked airflow. If you are in a high humidity location, then look for a unit which can bypass or reheat some air to lower the humidity. Some room AC units in trying to reach high effeciency do not do a good job keeping the dew point much below room temprature. You do not want corrosion in a PC.
Asking as someone who wasn't around when Usenet was the biggest thing, is this really as proliferate as torrent sites? --
Oh yeah! The only thing that realy shut down the popularity was the very lousy spam to content ratio. It was worse than the current e-mail situation. For the most part, it became useless except for the few with lots of time on their hands to sift through the rubble heap that remained of usenet.
Like in the early days of e-mail, It was very popular for finding information online. Now it's just a drag to find anything as the content is too diluted to be of much use.
The sad part is, the field staff (myself included) realized it early on and tried to report this problem to management. Management refused to listen to the cries for help from the field and chalked it off as incompetence on the field staff's part.
I hope the good folks at Light Factory are reading this forum. I bought the trial version because it had a good introductory price. I tried the software and it had a couple minor anoyances such as requiring MS SQL which would run all the time even if you didn't use the software. Bad open ports and SQL running all the time was bad. The software was keyed tied to your registration name. Nice watermark ware with my name in it. Not bad. A hot spare would work in case of a broken machine. They came out with a free upgrade that removed the need for MS SQL! Hot diggidy dog. Nice. However the upgrade requires re-regestering the software and the software now uses the hardware as a dongle. No hot spare? No dice. They lost me as a repeat customer right there to the competition. Was it worth it to prevent a possible pirated copy?
I'm not sure where we stood in case of an SBA audit, but anyone who had an iced install had a dongle locked in their desk.
In an office situation having a central key athority for say 50 seats is a solution not requiring a dongle. Install as many copies as you want. None work until they check out a key. If a machine dies, plug in the hot spare and revoke the key for the dead machine and issue a key to the hot spare. No dongle required and the audit is simple.
If I have my choice, a box with a site lisence is the way to go. MS office is one copy per machine. Star Office on the other hand came with a home/SOHO site lisence. Guess which one I bought for home use. Star Office has been replaced with Open Office. The price was better.
If at all possible I avoid Dongleware simply because it gets in the way of keeping a system up without asking mother may I at every turn or hardware failure. A dongle adds a level of complexity and fragility while adding to the cost of the package without adding any value to the end user. This lower end user value at a higher cost is a bad sales point for the software developer.
Now back to the original topic.. I can buy some DVD's for less then $5.00. How much cost is this going to add to a competitors product? Remember, it has less data area and can't contain as much data as the other DVD's. What compelling reason would the DVD contain to convince me to pay a premium for a low capacity media?
I hope the patent holder understands the market. It looks like a solution looking for a problem.
Wow. I really want to crawl under my desk and find a free USB port on the back of my computer where there is enough space for something the size of a CD not to run into the cables back there so that the disc can exchange keys,
This is not for movies. It must be for some software package. I can't find a USB port anywhere on my living room DVD player.
Who in their right mind thinks they can make DVD's that can't play in a DVD player? This must be a software thing and not a movie.
they finally realize that people liked the software, but couldn't overcome the licensing problems that came with it. In my opinion, we haven't recovered from it since...
Thanks for noticing. Many software houses did the toss it out and see if it sells. Having had to deal with a dongle that got borrowed and having the critical software die including any possiblility to restoring from a backup set my policy.. No dongles ever. Too bad you had to learn the hard way instead of asking your customer base. Some software now tries to use your PC as a dongle. I've had hardware die. I know you are worried about piracy. I'm even more worried about failed software. What's worse, no sales or some sales and some piracy. Your choice.. Pick one.
Note that if you do a re-install you will need the dongle again, but at least for day to day operations no more 3-7 dongles packed onto the parallel port conflicting with each other.
Number 1 reason I don't do dongles. Ever had a visitor borrow your dongle? Any software that can't be backed up and restored on another machine is broken by design. Things happen to hardware. The software should run on any present or future hot spare. If it doesn't then I consider it a severe risk to run. I don't buy dongleware.
Does anyone REALLY believe that making software free (as is the case with open source) will suddenly leave our economy starved of new software?
Nope.. I always believed in using the right tool for the job. If OSS does not provide new software, then commercial interests will make it and sell it because there is a market.
There will always be a market for custom applications. The market is shrinking as there is more general purpose software that can cheaply be adapted for many custom applications reducing the need for expensive solutions. Look at the embeded market for expamples. What software runs on your router, print server, PVR, etc.? More often than not, it's Linux.
If nothing else, I'm convinced the mere existence of OSS actually makes a huge difference in the economy, albeit its effect is indirect.
I agree. I built my kids PC. Loaded Ubuntu. The money saved from not buying XP and Office went directly into buying a NAS* box which runs Linux. I'm sure if the NAS box ran MS software, it would have been more expensive.
The difference in the economy is less money is spent on software leaving more money for other things.
If I use my affinity card, then I get 2% cash back on my porn and sex toy purchases *and* 10 cents per gallon off gasoline for that month!
I mean, that alone is enough to let the world know about my private quirks for me!
Find a store without a customer loyalty card. In the US simply use a spreadsheet and keep track of your reciepts by store and item. One store has a special discount on bananas for 20 cents off the retail price of 79 cents a pound with your loyalty card. The store I shop has bananas for 39 cents a pound and no discount. Guess where I shop!
On average, it is about %20 cheaper to shop at the store without the discount than shop at one using a loyalty card for discounts. How much is a loaf of bread? $1.65 or $0.79. One store will give you a generous 30 cent discount once in a while and proudly show your savings on your reciept. Guess which one?
There are way too many "under the table" deals and person-to-person deals to make cash go away.
There are too many transaction fees with non-cash. I buy gas with cash simply because there is a $0.45 fee for using an ATM card. On a 10 gallon fillup (hybrid) that would add $0.045 per gallon. Cash has no transaction fee. Fees are even worse in some convience stores with fees as high as $0.70 for purchases under $8. They don't want you to use a card for small purchases such as a cup of coffee.
Register the site in the Bahamas and bingo! Or better still, keep it registered in the EU and get content from abroad. Problem solved, period.
Even simpler. Post the videos. Put on a disclaimer that the site contains no broadcast streaming video as in not television. Put a link to Netflix, Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, etc. Put a video checkout button instead of a view button on the blog videos. Now the site looks like a local Blockbuster video rental store and not like a television with scheduled programming. Does it look like television or looks like video library? Make it clear you are not running streaming content and not running a broadcast schedule and therefore not television.
That works only in the smallest and most simplistic installations.
Yup.. Where are the most bots? They are on a home LAN on a cable modem where children collect all the cute toys.
I gave up on the kids machine from too many reformats in two years and stuck on Ubuntu. No major problems since. They are waiting for Flash 9 for Linux to use on MySpace.
On the shelf right above my monitor is my printer shelf with the LAN switch and router. If something starts spewing, it gets noticed. Client/server traffic is easy to spot as only two ports have a burst of high traffic. Something port scanning tends to light up the switch between the bot and the WAN. If I get slow net response to loading pages, I make it a point to check the switch first and the router second. From there I walk over to the busy computer to see if it's a user download of media, patches, VOIP, or something else.
If an idle computer is spewing, it gets unplugged to free up bandwidth and left unplugged from the net until it is analyzed and fixed.
I work at a hospital. Sometimes I wonder whether our computers really are as secure as they should. All the computers have AVG installed, but is there something else I can do to check?
Set a network switch or hub right behind your keyboard so you can see the status lights. If it seems a little busy when you are not doing anything, somebody may be using your computer remotely. I think more computers need the NIC status lights on the front of the monitor, not the back of the PC.
You want to fight the war on power consumption? Incandescent light bulbs. In regards to energy consumption, they are perhaps the most inefficient piece of technology today; and they are everywhere.
Be careful of blanket assumptions. I was stuck in a home with an electric central furnace. In the winter I would pull out all the CF lamps and replace them with conventional lamps. The reasoning was to heat the ocupied rooms and let the other rooms cool. Resistive heat whether from a lamp or furnace has very close to the same effeciency. Ocupied rooms had lights on and vacent rooms were dark. In the winter the PC was left on 24/7. In the summer it was off as much as possible.
In the summer when I wanted to run AC, I made sure all the bulbs were CF. Why pay to heat the room to add load to the AC?. Switching to an LCD display cut power consumption considerably. Next on the list is to upgrade to the Core 2 Duo CPU with it's 65 watt power profile.
I never mentioned TVs and neither did you. I also never said difference, I said TOTAL.
You said "Receiver".
The book with my NTSC television lists it as a Television Reciever. HD monitors in the store are listed as HD Television Monitor. I said Reciever and I meant Reciever. If I wanted just a tuner, I would have specified a component Television Tuner which connects to a Monitor.
I said Reciever and I meant Reciever.
Maybe this is just a language thing between the US and the UK. I say Flashlight and you say Torch. I use a Torch for welding, soldering and brazing.
From the page.. The noun television receiver has one meaning:
Meaning #1: a receiver that displays television images
Synonyms: television, television set, tv, tv set, idiot box, boob tube, telly, goggle box
Anyway using this definition above, check the prices of US analog Television Recievers and Digital Television Recievers. To make it work I expect to connect power and an antenna with no aditional set top boxes or external tuners.
Of course what I got was a real Red Book-compatible audio CD.
Did they bother to put the Compact Disk logo on the cover so I can tell it apart from the un-CD's next to it on the shelf?
I agree on downloading directly from the band. Walking into a CD isle at my local retailer is an exersise in frustration. Can you spot a real red book CD on the shelf? I gave up trying It took too much online research to find out and while online, I could find a copy cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
It works for keeping a human cool, why not servers?
Servers don't sweat. Unless you plan on misting your servers with spray bottles regularly, evaprotive cooling is useless.
A small refrigerator will cost you under $100 (at least, here in the US it does), and will keep your server as cold as you want. As a bonus, it will also chill your beer.
Check the BTU rating of said fridge before purchase. Most small fridges are designed to 1 cool warm objects placed inside and remove the heat that leaks inside from the outside. To do both of these jobs a small capacity cooling system is used. If your computer can produce heat faster than the cooling system can remove it, the temprature will rise inside until it is warm enough for the heal leaking out and pumped out to equal the heat produced. Im many cases it could be quite a bit over ambient.
Remember your objective is to keep the PC at a temprature below nighttime ambient in the room, not above ambient.
and will keep your server as cold as you want... As long as the server is not turned on.
Put a wall mounted AC in it and pack it full. Use two if you have them, and need the room.
Be sure to properly size the AC unit. An AC unit over capacity will short cycle and have reliability issues. An undersize unit may run all the time and not cycle off long enough to properly defrost itself leading up to ice blocked airflow. If you are in a high humidity location, then look for a unit which can bypass or reheat some air to lower the humidity. Some room AC units in trying to reach high effeciency do not do a good job keeping the dew point much below room temprature. You do not want corrosion in a PC.
Not that it is impossible or even unlikely but I am curious how it will get around having to contact microsoft to validate the windows version.
1 Man in the middle
2 Packet spoofing
3 ?
Pick one or a combination.
Why does slashdot link to his articles?
1 Because in this instance, what he said is plausable however improbable.
2 Slashdoters love new FUD on MS products. Someone may be able to disable your PC remotely.
Asking as someone who wasn't around when Usenet was the biggest thing, is this really as proliferate as torrent sites?
--
Oh yeah! The only thing that realy shut down the popularity was the very lousy spam to content ratio. It was worse than the current e-mail situation. For the most part, it became useless except for the few with lots of time on their hands to sift through the rubble heap that remained of usenet.
Like in the early days of e-mail, It was very popular for finding information online. Now it's just a drag to find anything as the content is too diluted to be of much use.
The sad part is, the field staff (myself included) realized it early on and tried to report this problem to management. Management refused to listen to the cries for help from the field and chalked it off as incompetence on the field staff's part.
I hope the good folks at Light Factory are reading this forum. I bought the trial version because it had a good introductory price. I tried the software and it had a couple minor anoyances such as requiring MS SQL which would run all the time even if you didn't use the software. Bad open ports and SQL running all the time was bad. The software was keyed tied to your registration name. Nice watermark ware with my name in it. Not bad. A hot spare would work in case of a broken machine.
They came out with a free upgrade that removed the need for MS SQL! Hot diggidy dog. Nice. However the upgrade requires re-regestering the software and the software now uses the hardware as a dongle. No hot spare? No dice. They lost me as a repeat customer right there to the competition. Was it worth it to prevent a possible pirated copy?
I'm not sure where we stood in case of an SBA audit, but anyone who had an iced install had a dongle locked in their desk.
In an office situation having a central key athority for say 50 seats is a solution not requiring a dongle. Install as many copies as you want. None work until they check out a key. If a machine dies, plug in the hot spare and revoke the key for the dead machine and issue a key to the hot spare. No dongle required and the audit is simple.
If I have my choice, a box with a site lisence is the way to go. MS office is one copy per machine. Star Office on the other hand came with a home/SOHO site lisence. Guess which one I bought for home use. Star Office has been replaced with Open Office. The price was better.
If at all possible I avoid Dongleware simply because it gets in the way of keeping a system up without asking mother may I at every turn or hardware failure. A dongle adds a level of complexity and fragility while adding to the cost of the package without adding any value to the end user. This lower end user value at a higher cost is a bad sales point for the software developer.
Now back to the original topic.. I can buy some DVD's for less then $5.00. How much cost is this going to add to a competitors product? Remember, it has less data area and can't contain as much data as the other DVD's. What compelling reason would the DVD contain to convince me to pay a premium for a low capacity media?
I hope the patent holder understands the market. It looks like a solution looking for a problem.
Wow. I really want to crawl under my desk and find a free USB port on the back of my computer where there is enough space for something the size of a CD not to run into the cables back there so that the disc can exchange keys,
This is not for movies. It must be for some software package. I can't find a USB port anywhere on my living room DVD player.
Who in their right mind thinks they can make DVD's that can't play in a DVD player? This must be a software thing and not a movie.
they finally realize that people liked the software, but couldn't overcome the licensing problems that came with it. In my opinion, we haven't recovered from it since...
Thanks for noticing. Many software houses did the toss it out and see if it sells. Having had to deal with a dongle that got borrowed and having the critical software die including any possiblility to restoring from a backup set my policy.. No dongles ever. Too bad you had to learn the hard way instead of asking your customer base. Some software now tries to use your PC as a dongle. I've had hardware die. I know you are worried about piracy. I'm even more worried about failed software. What's worse, no sales or some sales and some piracy. Your choice.. Pick one.
c. will lose the god damned dongle for
Read the article. The disc and the dongle are one and the same. If you lost the dongle, you lost the disc.
Note that if you do a re-install you will need the dongle again, but at least for day to day operations no more 3-7 dongles packed onto the parallel port conflicting with each other.
Number 1 reason I don't do dongles. Ever had a visitor borrow your dongle? Any software that can't be backed up and restored on another machine is broken by design. Things happen to hardware. The software should run on any present or future hot spare. If it doesn't then I consider it a severe risk to run. I don't buy dongleware.
Binary Software is obsolete in 10 years.
ask microsoft... they declare their software "obsolete" 4 years after release...
Which is why my newest machine has Ubuntu instead of obsolete XP. I got tired of my kids machine joining botnets.
I printed under various OS's
I looked at its souce security, not set dissallow printing
Offtopic..
I wonder if he sells printers and is looking to boost ink sales by getting everyone to try to print it?
Sorry about the offtopic comment.
Does anyone REALLY believe that making software free (as is the case with open source) will suddenly leave our economy starved of new software?
Nope.. I always believed in using the right tool for the job. If OSS does not provide new software, then commercial interests will make it and sell it because there is a market.
There will always be a market for custom applications. The market is shrinking as there is more general purpose software that can cheaply be adapted for many custom applications reducing the need for expensive solutions. Look at the embeded market for expamples. What software runs on your router, print server, PVR, etc.? More often than not, it's Linux.
If nothing else, I'm convinced the mere existence of OSS actually makes a huge difference in the economy, albeit its effect is indirect.
I agree. I built my kids PC. Loaded Ubuntu. The money saved from not buying XP and Office went directly into buying a NAS* box which runs Linux. I'm sure if the NAS box ran MS software, it would have been more expensive.
The difference in the economy is less money is spent on software leaving more money for other things.
*(Network Attached Storage)
If I use my affinity card, then I get 2% cash back on my porn and sex toy purchases *and* 10 cents per gallon off gasoline for that month!
I mean, that alone is enough to let the world know about my private quirks for me!
Find a store without a customer loyalty card. In the US simply use a spreadsheet and keep track of your reciepts by store and item. One store has a special discount on bananas for 20 cents off the retail price of 79 cents a pound with your loyalty card. The store I shop has bananas for 39 cents a pound and no discount. Guess where I shop!
On average, it is about %20 cheaper to shop at the store without the discount than shop at one using a loyalty card for discounts. How much is a loaf of bread? $1.65 or $0.79. One store will give you a generous 30 cent discount once in a while and proudly show your savings on your reciept. Guess which one?
There are way too many "under the table" deals and person-to-person deals to make cash go away.
There are too many transaction fees with non-cash. I buy gas with cash simply because there is a $0.45 fee for using an ATM card. On a 10 gallon fillup (hybrid) that would add $0.045 per gallon. Cash has no transaction fee. Fees are even worse in some convience stores with fees as high as $0.70 for purchases under $8. They don't want you to use a card for small purchases such as a cup of coffee.
The solution is pretty simple:
Register the site in the Bahamas and bingo! Or better still, keep it registered in the EU and get content from abroad. Problem solved, period.
Even simpler. Post the videos. Put on a disclaimer that the site contains no broadcast streaming video as in not television. Put a link to Netflix, Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, etc. Put a video checkout button instead of a view button on the blog videos. Now the site looks like a local Blockbuster video rental store and not like a television with scheduled programming. Does it look like television or looks like video library? Make it clear you are not running streaming content and not running a broadcast schedule and therefore not television.
That works only in the smallest and most simplistic installations.
Yup.. Where are the most bots? They are on a home LAN on a cable modem where children collect all the cute toys.
I gave up on the kids machine from too many reformats in two years and stuck on Ubuntu. No major problems since. They are waiting for Flash 9 for Linux to use on MySpace.
BANG!" goes the ClueHammer
On the shelf right above my monitor is my printer shelf with the LAN switch and router. If something starts spewing, it gets noticed. Client/server traffic is easy to spot as only two ports have a burst of high traffic. Something port scanning tends to light up the switch between the bot and the WAN. If I get slow net response to loading pages, I make it a point to check the switch first and the router second. From there I walk over to the busy computer to see if it's a user download of media, patches, VOIP, or something else.
If an idle computer is spewing, it gets unplugged to free up bandwidth and left unplugged from the net until it is analyzed and fixed.
I work at a hospital. Sometimes I wonder whether our computers really are as secure as they should. All the computers have AVG installed, but is there something else I can do to check?
Set a network switch or hub right behind your keyboard so you can see the status lights. If it seems a little busy when you are not doing anything, somebody may be using your computer remotely. I think more computers need the NIC status lights on the front of the monitor, not the back of the PC.
You want to fight the war on power consumption? Incandescent light bulbs. In regards to energy consumption, they are perhaps the most inefficient piece of technology today; and they are everywhere.
Be careful of blanket assumptions. I was stuck in a home with an electric central furnace. In the winter I would pull out all the CF lamps and replace them with conventional lamps. The reasoning was to heat the ocupied rooms and let the other rooms cool. Resistive heat whether from a lamp or furnace has very close to the same effeciency. Ocupied rooms had lights on and vacent rooms were dark. In the winter the PC was left on 24/7. In the summer it was off as much as possible.
In the summer when I wanted to run AC, I made sure all the bulbs were CF. Why pay to heat the room to add load to the AC?. Switching to an LCD display cut power consumption considerably. Next on the list is to upgrade to the Core 2 Duo CPU with it's 65 watt power profile.
I never mentioned TVs and neither did you. I also never said difference, I said TOTAL.
You said "Receiver".
The book with my NTSC television lists it as a Television Reciever. HD monitors in the store are listed as HD Television Monitor. I said Reciever and I meant Reciever. If I wanted just a tuner, I would have specified a component Television Tuner which connects to a Monitor.
I said Reciever and I meant Reciever.
Maybe this is just a language thing between the US and the UK. I say Flashlight and you say Torch. I use a Torch for welding, soldering and brazing.
I was using the definition as found here.
http://www.answers.com/topic/television-receiver
From the page..
The noun television receiver has one meaning:
Meaning #1: a receiver that displays television images
Synonyms: television, television set, tv, tv set, idiot box, boob tube, telly, goggle box
Anyway using this definition above, check the prices of US analog Television Recievers and Digital Television Recievers. To make it work I expect to connect power and an antenna with no aditional set top boxes or external tuners.
Of course what I got was a real Red Book-compatible audio CD.
Did they bother to put the Compact Disk logo on the cover so I can tell it apart from the un-CD's next to it on the shelf?
I agree on downloading directly from the band. Walking into a CD isle at my local retailer is an exersise in frustration. Can you spot a real red book CD on the shelf? I gave up trying It took too much online research to find out and while online, I could find a copy cheaper.