You know, this is ridiculous. If you don't want to spend hours downloading the patch (justifiably) then simply order the cdrom for $9. http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/download s/ser vicepacks/sp4/ordercd.asp
All the rest after the service packs are patches; *most* aren't that large to begin with (other than DirectX 9 and Windows DRM -up-your-nose Player).
I can't understand why people bitch about this constantly. It might be $20 per year for the twice-yearly service packs they release.
An important concept learned over time: It may take 10 hours of your time to get 80% through a project, and 100 more hours to get through the last 20% for that "stellar" finish.
At the speed with which software is written and distributed, rarely does anyone have the ability to do the final 20%. The question is, is that 80% enough to do the job without causing major issues? Or, can the last 20% be wrapped into another dev cycle later on down the road?
Obviously this doesn't work for systems which are depended on in life/death scenarios. But, I personally don't care if KDE (for instance) squashed 100% of their bugs before a release. Don't tie up a release for another year to finish off the last 10%!
Microsoft itself (BGates) has stated that new releases aren't there to fix bugs, but rather to provide new functionality. See, the problem is that while you're expending infinite hours troubleshooting that last 20%, the world is moving foward around you.
I worked on Apples during the Performa years and OS7.x years (shudder) and it was a freaking nightmare. I don't believe for a minute that if you peeked under Apple's code hood [today] things would be stellar and shiny. Mac OSX has its problems - you'll just find a nice different set of issues that it has and Linux doesn't.
My grandfather recently passed away, and my grandmother is 92 years old. Both of them are/were in sound mind, and as active as the elderly can be. Working with them the past few years has been enlightening as far as how remotes and items we take for granted day-to-day are giant hurdles for them. ON TOPIC: The engineers who develop these horrible remotes which have a thousand buttons, all which are sub-atomic size, should take into account that there is a *large* population of 70+ people who simply don't purchase and can't use these devices because they're too small to operate, and too complicated. There are *some* large-button remotes out there, but they usually must be set up, which requires even more hurdles.
I'm not sure there's ever going to be a perfect solution for the elderly, but from the remotes I've seen, there's plenty of room for improvement. Sony, to my suprise, are the biggest offenders of tiny-button remotes.
You assume that "smart" people have some sort of advantage. But to what, and what determines that someone is "smart" - the fact they can slog through college and gain initials after their name? Does that make them any more intelligent than than the garbage collector who may be a fantastic artist or musician in his spare time?
Do you assume that managers or CEOs in organizations are so much smarter than anyone else? Or perhaps it's simply that they had connections, and other advantages that you can't identify. When was the last time you found a leading scientist in charge of some vast organization? Basically, knowledge and power are disconnected aspects, although IT magazines and InfoWorld would have you believe that they are attached at the hip, since the connection of the two justifies their goals.
In my opinion, the ability to accumulate knowledge and learn should be a basic human right. And don't worry about absorbing "all there is to know" overnight. When you can identify "all there is to know", then you'll probably have a religion.
As a former Marine who participated in Desert Shield/Storm, and shot very well in the prone, kneeling, and standing positions on the range, I can attest that the M16 ihas serious issues when it comes to reliability in the battlefield (i.e. I need it to fire NOW and not get me killed).
In Kuwait after we found caches of weapons (usually Chinese AK47s still wrapped and greased) we switched immediately to these and confiscated a ton of AK ammo. As an outstanding example, I took one out of the wrapping, removed the bolt, opened the chamber, and DUG it and the bolt into the sand. I then grinded the bolt back in, slapped in a mag, and it fired the entire magazine without jamming once. You simply never had jamming issues with that rifle. My M16 on the other hand (yes, lubed properly) would herk and jam all the time.
Even out on the g*damn RANGE the M16 would jam! For those of you who haven't been in the Corps or Army, you start the morning by going to the armory, getting a weapon issued, and then *cleaning and lubricating* your weapon! Once you get to the range and are finally issued rounds, you CLEAN them indivudually (and the mag) before you put them into the mag. Now at that point, the weapon is about as clean as it can get. And you know what, up and down the line Marines' rifles would jam like mad - and we were in a controlled area, shooting semi-automatic, etc.
You can talk about M16 reliability all you want, but for me and many others in my squad/platoon, reality was a completely different story.
Yeah, I am living in my own personal world, just like we all are. Don't take the "chair" comment so seriously. You're more likely to get more time for downloading some silly song on a P2P than hacking American companies.
I can't pretend to completely understand their plight. However, I work as hard for my $$ just as they did. I don't "deserve" to have it stolen just because I have a better living status. The world is full of inequalities, or *perceived* inequalities. Heck, I think it's unfair that many people have millions, while I struggle in middle class. This is the age-old argument that crime from strife and plight make right. It wasn't that they couldn't put food on their table doing something legitimate - it's that they CHOSE to do illegal activities in order to make a quick dollar.
And... as I stated earlier, the theives are not the only ones at fault. Those who make it so easy to circumvent are too (i.e. banks, etc.)
I hope these guys get the chair. Seriously. My wife and I are *very* careful online, and in all purchases - even so far as shredding all information before it goes into the trash.
The last two weeks we've had identity/credit theft again.. the second time within a year. Let me tell you first hand, this is NO fun. I spoke with our Credit Union representative about this - she stated that members are being hit with this almost nonstop, and it only shows signs of getting worse. Even better, now (she stated) they have perfected forging other things like money orders and the like, which is on the rise as well.
This hacking sounds "interesting" up to the point you've lived through it first hand. Now, I just want these guys caught and put away. However, the responsibility doesn't simply rest on their shoulders. Visa and other Banks should have the pants sued off them for giving the public such a laugh of security in the form of credit cards. Why lawsuits? Because once you hit their precious pocketbooks, they will finally take this stuff seriously. If the public truly understood the depth of how laughable the security is, I think they would experience mass account closures almost overnight.
The ease of use of these things is apalling. Heck, once they have a number, how hard is it to get the rest of the data like address and phone? What a laugh.
People - protect yourselves. I'm looking more into this: [Private Payments] as a method of protecting my primary cards. If anyone else has suggestions, please let me know.
Is that the big companies (Cognos, IBM, Microsoft, and others) sell their slick products very well (hell I used to do it too) to the CEOs and executives. Unfortunately, those slick visualization tools require a HUGE amount of planning and organization in order to produce a single slick graph and/or chart.
Actual data marts or (god forbid) data warehouses which span information from disparate sources require expert project management and control, not to mention buy-in from all departments. Let's not gloss over the security issues, data retention, extraction, and a cornicopia of problems along with it.
Most of these companies get in the door through the following ways:
1. Slick sales 2. The loathed "proof of concept" in which they take some snippet of your data and create a cube which is just good enough to sell the rest of the product. 3. Exaggerated promises
Let's face it - very few companies have 'clean' data out there, and the required work to make dimensions stretch across the enterprise is mind-numbing. Then, just as you have it down and finished, some department installs an upgrade, or switches a product, and you have to redesign your dimensions and ETL all over again. Woohhoooo!
**sigh** I love BI, but companies typically just don't get the actual investment you have to make in order to get those great graphs and drill-downs.
I would bet the farm on the fact you could do it with VMWare. I have found that OSes installed on VMware have no knowledge of their host operating systems, nor does any disk activity from the VMware OS have any affect on the host's partitions/drives, because the 'disk' is actually just a file.
Faced with two bad choices....
on
Copyright Rumblings
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's an old tactic:
First: present the consumer first with a horrible way of doing things.
Second: the consumer will take almost *anything* else, and even something else bad seems good.
This is a regular management tactic in some places. You should be able to sniff this one a mile away.
/. is just noticing this? These install options have been obfuscated for long time in Real Player; it's one of the most insidious pieces of software I've ever come across.
Ensure that after the install you immediately go back through the prefernces and check out *every* possible preference.
A. Ignore DRM solutions and the coming tidal wave of hollywood support and cash and apps that will work with Palladium-type processor hacks.
B. Make your chip support and embrace DRM.
As an investor, I can guess "B" might be your answer...
Robots replacing humans?
on
Tai Chi Robots
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"as these robots could be used to perform dangerous work."
Just think, eventually they will be able to perform all kinds of work, not related to dangerous occupations. Certainly they will end up being cheaper than the human worker over time. I look forward to the day when robots are able to do nearly everything we pay manual labor for now. Then what the hell will we do? What will spurn our economy? Will the average blue collar worker work for the robots instead?
Animation replaces actors/actresses, robots replace blue collar workers, etc. etc. It certainly will be interesting to know what an ever-growing population will do with themselves, and how our economy will change in the next 100 years.
Every company (and even our President) wants us to run purchase more and more, but the jobs are decreasing as we're replaced by efficiencies through technology. I guess in the end we'll just ask one another, "Would you like fries with that?"
It started as an interesting article...
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 1
The article was engaging in that he first told the unsung truth about our IT in this (down) economy; things have basically gotten overly-complex, and IT admins/programmers have been laid off in droves, while the requirements continue to expand on existing infrastructure.
HOWEVER, the rest is drivel, IMHO. We cannot 'recreate' and 'reinvent' things overnight (listen up InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, et al.). Most companies don't get into IT spending because they love it; it's a means to an end, and many times an expense they'd rather do without (including our labor to keep the things running).
Furthermore, you certainly can't get ahead by duct-taping old technology and cutting labor in order to reduce spending, while at the same time singing the praise of newer technology; foisting in infrastructure which is sometimes a quantum leap ahead of what is already in place!
I've been in this industry for many years now, and the one constant I have observed is that the vendors continually push and croon about 'new' things (i.e. mostly fluff on top of the old) while grossly ignoring the true pain of the enterprise - which is how to make smooth, incremental changes in technology platforms and tools over time.
I believe that IT is constantly in a cycle of premature death and rebirth in the infrastructure and coding arena; just about the time something becomes stable, it's considered outdated and old. Scott, there are no "new" paradigms out there. Managers are mezmerized by vendors which teach that that the next perfect thing is just over the horizon - forgetting the thousands of man hours that went into figuring out exactly what they have in place already.
&J
1.5 years running - large RAID box
on
IDE RAID Examined
·
· Score: 1
We've been running a Tyan K7 Thunder dual processor, 2 gigs RAM (I know - overkill, but the machine was built to accomodate its life later as something else). IDE RAID was twofold:
(1) Adaptec 1200A and 2 mirrored drives - 30 gig IBM Deskstar 7200 GXP for OS
(1) Adaptec 2400A and 5 RAID5 7200 75 gig IBM Deskstar 7200 GXP for storage
It is a very tall tower, but everything actually fits in it OK, though the cables would be better served with the smaller round kind.
We've been using it as our major file server for almost a year and a half, no data loss, no drive failures.There might be some gasps at the drives we chose, but I can tell you that keeping 7200 RPM drives cool is the secret to their longevity, and the file server is in a very cold room.
Getting Windows 4.x Server installed on it was a bit challenging, but after a quick call to tech support (and finding out it was a silly Windows issue), everything was very smooth. Eventually it will host Linux or Win2k; yet to be decided.
We've never had a drive go down, but just LAST weekend the motherboard and power supply went south. We went to Fry's electronics and picked up a newer Tyan K7 Tiger (lower end board) and inserted the same RAM and Processors - attached all the drives and fired it up and it ran perfectly!
We've been very fortunate with this system. I think that IDE RAID has been just as good for us as SCSI RAID, and it got us a very large file server at a very inexpensive cost!
HOWEVER, I caution any of you wanting to skimp on $$ that the 4 hour service warranty you might pay from Dell or HP/Compaq, or IBM will cover your ass in a tight situation. Don't base your career on store-bought parts! Also, we still don't have spare drives for our system, which is just plain dumb. Spend the extra $$ and get a drive or two.
Furthermore, consider a backup power supply, because I've found those seem to be degrading in quality over time (I've replaced two at home, and a few at work).
Finally, our original plan was to replace all the IDE drives in the RAID5 array every year. Unfortunately, this hasn't happened. I think that this would be a wise move for anyone building such a system.
I believe you are a bit behind the times. My father recently retired from a major university here in Arizona. One of the things on the plate right now is to remove tenure for teachers.
Increasingly, universities are run as corporations, complete with greed, terrible politics, and lack of interest in their teachers. ASU is a wonderful example of this - there have been articles in the Arizona Republic newspaper about the 'brain drain' hemmoraging from ASU because they just won't pay their teachers even close to what they deserve.
As for any business, you must eventually understand that the future is already written; we are all to be temp workers. I'm not sure how painful this transition will be, but already there are very few bastions of stable, long-term work. Heck, just look at what our president passed (or should I say "snuck" through) on Friday - ability to hire/fire workers, displace federal workers in place of the private sector, etc. etc.
A good friend of mine has tried over and over to get a stable IT job - he's been through it now about ten times in the last year. Each time there was a different excuse, and the last few times they've fired and re-hired the next day for someone who was willing to work cheaper! In his words, "Welcome to Corporate America: do what you can, just don't get caught."
The only real benefit of it that I have been able to tell so far is the ability to use a POP3 client such as Outhouse Express, or Outlook, which my wife uses.
I use KMail w. Yahoo, and it works fine. Retrieveing through POP used to be free, btw. They changed that in order to force more hits on their sites from non-paying customers.
Yahoo gives me only 6mb of email space, and constant ads asking me to 'upgrade' my service for *another* $9.99/yr for only 25mb more space!
Everything else on that service is for pay. If I go log in right now (oh yes and turn off Privoxy) even though I am a paid member, I am still faced with a myriad of flash and java ads. Then there is the giant ad at the bottom when you log in telling you that for $29.99 a year you can get more space, and more this and that. Then finally there are two separate links for mail upgrades on the front of the email page.
Worse yet, my wife also pays for an account, but we get no added benefit of having two paid for email addresses.
The only reason I kept this mail address is the same reason you keep cell phones; we have no loyalty to the provider, but isn't it a pain to switch addresses? I've had this email account for years.
And.. what's the alternative? Hotmail? No thanks. One of the reasons I pay Yahoo is because it's cheaper than running my own email, and it's much more reliable than many others. However, I think that their price points for $9.99 are 1999 customer expectations. Everything is obviously throttled and tiered for marketing, and it sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, this is ridiculous. If you don't want to spend hours downloading the patch (justifiably) then simply order the cdrom for $9.d s/ser vicepacks/sp4/ordercd.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloa
All the rest after the service packs are patches; *most* aren't that large to begin with (other than DirectX 9 and Windows DRM -up-your-nose Player).
I can't understand why people bitch about this constantly. It might be $20 per year for the twice-yearly service packs they release.
An important concept learned over time: It may take 10 hours of your time to get 80% through a project, and 100 more hours to get through the last 20% for that "stellar" finish.
At the speed with which software is written and distributed, rarely does anyone have the ability to do the final 20%. The question is, is that 80% enough to do the job without causing major issues? Or, can the last 20% be wrapped into another dev cycle later on down the road?
Obviously this doesn't work for systems which are depended on in life/death scenarios. But, I personally don't care if KDE (for instance) squashed 100% of their bugs before a release. Don't tie up a release for another year to finish off the last 10%!
Microsoft itself (BGates) has stated that new releases aren't there to fix bugs, but rather to provide new functionality. See, the problem is that while you're expending infinite hours troubleshooting that last 20%, the world is moving foward around you.
I worked on Apples during the Performa years and OS7.x years (shudder) and it was a freaking nightmare. I don't believe for a minute that if you peeked under Apple's code hood [today] things would be stellar and shiny.
Mac OSX has its problems - you'll just find a nice different set of issues that it has and Linux doesn't.
My grandfather recently passed away, and my grandmother is 92 years old. Both of them are/were in sound mind, and as active as the elderly can be.
Working with them the past few years has been enlightening as far as how remotes and items we take for granted day-to-day are giant hurdles for them.
ON TOPIC: The engineers who develop these horrible remotes which have a thousand buttons, all which are sub-atomic size, should take into account that there is a *large* population of 70+ people who simply don't purchase and can't use these devices because they're too small to operate, and too complicated. There are *some* large-button remotes out there, but they usually must be set up, which requires even more hurdles.
I'm not sure there's ever going to be a perfect solution for the elderly, but from the remotes I've seen, there's plenty of room for improvement. Sony, to my suprise, are the biggest offenders of tiny-button remotes.
I believe your logic to be incredibly flawed.
You assume that "smart" people have some sort of advantage. But to what, and what determines that someone is "smart" - the fact they can slog through college and gain initials after their name? Does that make them any more intelligent than than the garbage collector who may be a fantastic artist or musician in his spare time?
Do you assume that managers or CEOs in organizations are so much smarter than anyone else? Or perhaps it's simply that they had connections, and other advantages that you can't identify. When was the last time you found a leading scientist in charge of some vast organization? Basically, knowledge and power are disconnected aspects, although IT magazines and InfoWorld would have you believe that they are attached at the hip, since the connection of the two justifies their goals.
In my opinion, the ability to accumulate knowledge and learn should be a basic human right. And don't worry about absorbing "all there is to know" overnight. When you can identify "all there is to know", then you'll probably have a religion.
As a former Marine who participated in Desert Shield/Storm, and shot very well in the prone, kneeling, and standing positions on the range, I can attest that the M16 ihas serious issues when it comes to reliability in the battlefield (i.e. I need it to fire NOW and not get me killed).
In Kuwait after we found caches of weapons (usually Chinese AK47s still wrapped and greased) we switched immediately to these and confiscated a ton of AK ammo. As an outstanding example, I took one out of the wrapping, removed the bolt, opened the chamber, and DUG it and the bolt into the sand. I then grinded the bolt back in, slapped in a mag, and it fired the entire magazine without jamming once. You simply never had jamming issues with that rifle. My M16 on the other hand (yes, lubed properly) would herk and jam all the time.
Even out on the g*damn RANGE the M16 would jam! For those of you who haven't been in the Corps or Army, you start the morning by going to the armory, getting a weapon issued, and then *cleaning and lubricating* your weapon! Once you get to the range and are finally issued rounds, you CLEAN them indivudually (and the mag) before you put them into the mag. Now at that point, the weapon is about as clean as it can get. And you know what, up and down the line Marines' rifles would jam like mad - and we were in a controlled area, shooting semi-automatic, etc.
You can talk about M16 reliability all you want, but for me and many others in my squad/platoon, reality was a completely different story.
Yeah, I am living in my own personal world, just like we all are. Don't take the "chair" comment so seriously. You're more likely to get more time for downloading some silly song on a P2P than hacking American companies.
I can't pretend to completely understand their plight. However, I work as hard for my $$ just as they did. I don't "deserve" to have it stolen just because I have a better living status. The world is full of inequalities, or *perceived* inequalities. Heck, I think it's unfair that many people have millions, while I struggle in middle class. This is the age-old argument that crime from strife and plight make right. It wasn't that they couldn't put food on their table doing something legitimate - it's that they CHOSE to do illegal activities in order to make a quick dollar.
And... as I stated earlier, the theives are not the only ones at fault. Those who make it so easy to circumvent are too (i.e. banks, etc.)
I hope these guys get the chair. Seriously. My wife and I are *very* careful online, and in all purchases - even so far as shredding all information before it goes into the trash.
The last two weeks we've had identity/credit theft again.. the second time within a year. Let me tell you first hand, this is NO fun. I spoke with our Credit Union representative about this - she stated that members are being hit with this almost nonstop, and it only shows signs of getting worse. Even better, now (she stated) they have perfected forging other things like money orders and the like, which is on the rise as well.
This hacking sounds "interesting" up to the point you've lived through it first hand. Now, I just want these guys caught and put away. However, the responsibility doesn't simply rest on their shoulders. Visa and other Banks should have the pants sued off them for giving the public such a laugh of security in the form of credit cards. Why lawsuits? Because once you hit their precious pocketbooks, they will finally take this stuff seriously. If the public truly understood the depth of how laughable the security is, I think they would experience mass account closures almost overnight.
The ease of use of these things is apalling. Heck, once they have a number, how hard is it to get the rest of the data like address and phone? What a laugh.
People - protect yourselves. I'm looking more into this: [Private Payments]
as a method of protecting my primary cards. If anyone else has suggestions, please let me know.
Sweet - I said this same thing yesterday in a related topic, and got modded down -1 insignificant or something.
WTF?
The last frontier: patent the patenting process.
Sit back and watch the $$ roll in...
Uh, you obviously haven't had to show hundreds of users where their "C" drive is on the computer, or how and where their files are.
On the contrary - IMHO most UIs need a lot more work to reach the average Joe.
Is that the big companies (Cognos, IBM, Microsoft, and others) sell their slick products very well (hell I used to do it too) to the CEOs and executives. Unfortunately, those slick visualization tools require a HUGE amount of planning and organization in order to produce a single slick graph and/or chart.
Actual data marts or (god forbid) data warehouses which span information from disparate sources require expert project management and control, not to mention buy-in from all departments. Let's not gloss over the security issues, data retention, extraction, and a cornicopia of problems along with it.
Most of these companies get in the door through the following ways:
1. Slick sales
2. The loathed "proof of concept" in which they take some snippet of your data and create a cube which is just good enough to sell the rest of the product.
3. Exaggerated promises
Let's face it - very few companies have 'clean' data out there, and the required work to make dimensions stretch across the enterprise is mind-numbing. Then, just as you have it down and finished, some department installs an upgrade, or switches a product, and you have to redesign your dimensions and ETL all over again. Woohhoooo!
**sigh** I love BI, but companies typically just don't get the actual investment you have to make in order to get those great graphs and drill-downs.
&J
of a /. article stating "a wireless phone number for life!", and in the next article: "throw away your ID cards!"
I would bet the farm on the fact you could do it with VMWare. I have found that OSes installed on VMware have no knowledge of their host operating systems, nor does any disk activity from the VMware OS have any affect on the host's partitions/drives, because the 'disk' is actually just a file.
It's an old tactic:
First: present the consumer first with a horrible way of doing things.
Second: the consumer will take almost *anything* else, and even something else bad seems good.
This is a regular management tactic in some places. You should be able to sniff this one a mile away.
/. is just noticing this? These install options have been obfuscated for long time in Real Player; it's one of the most insidious pieces of software I've ever come across.
Ensure that after the install you immediately go back through the prefernces and check out *every* possible preference.
&J
You're a struggling company. You:
A. Ignore DRM solutions and the coming tidal wave of hollywood support and cash and apps that will work with Palladium-type processor hacks.
B. Make your chip support and embrace DRM.
As an investor, I can guess "B" might be your answer...
"as these robots could be used to perform dangerous work."
Just think, eventually they will be able to perform all kinds of work, not related to dangerous occupations.
Certainly they will end up being cheaper than the human worker over time.
I look forward to the day when robots are able to do nearly everything we pay manual labor for now. Then what the hell will we do? What will spurn our economy? Will the average blue collar worker work for the robots instead?
Animation replaces actors/actresses, robots replace blue collar workers, etc. etc. It certainly will be interesting to know what an ever-growing population will do with themselves, and how our economy will change in the next 100 years.
Every company (and even our President) wants us to run purchase more and more, but the jobs are decreasing as we're replaced by efficiencies through technology. I guess in the end we'll just ask one another, "Would you like fries with that?"
And a Merry Christmas to you too!
The article was engaging in that he first told the unsung truth about our IT in this (down) economy; things have basically gotten overly-complex, and IT admins/programmers have been laid off in droves, while the requirements continue to expand on existing infrastructure.
HOWEVER, the rest is drivel, IMHO. We cannot 'recreate' and 'reinvent' things overnight (listen up InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, et al.). Most companies don't get into IT spending because they love it; it's a means to an end, and many times an expense they'd rather do without (including our labor to keep the things running).
Furthermore, you certainly can't get ahead by duct-taping old technology and cutting labor in order to reduce spending, while at the same time singing the praise of newer technology; foisting in infrastructure which is sometimes a quantum leap ahead of what is already in place!
I've been in this industry for many years now, and the one constant I have observed is that the vendors continually push and croon about 'new' things (i.e. mostly fluff on top of the old) while grossly ignoring the true pain of the enterprise - which is how to make smooth, incremental changes in technology platforms and tools over time.
I believe that IT is constantly in a cycle of premature death and rebirth in the infrastructure and coding arena; just about the time something becomes stable, it's considered outdated and old. Scott, there are no "new" paradigms out there. Managers are mezmerized by vendors which teach that that the next perfect thing is just over the horizon - forgetting the thousands of man hours that went into figuring out exactly what they have in place already.
&J
We've been running a Tyan K7 Thunder dual processor, 2 gigs RAM (I know - overkill, but the machine was built to accomodate its life later as something else).
IDE RAID was twofold:
(1) Adaptec 1200A and 2 mirrored drives - 30 gig IBM Deskstar 7200 GXP for OS
(1) Adaptec 2400A and 5 RAID5 7200 75 gig IBM Deskstar 7200 GXP for storage
It is a very tall tower, but everything actually fits in it OK, though the cables would be better served with the smaller round kind.
We've been using it as our major file server for almost a year and a half, no data loss, no drive failures.There might be some gasps at the drives we chose, but I can tell you that keeping 7200 RPM drives cool is the secret to their longevity, and the file server is in a very cold room.
Getting Windows 4.x Server installed on it was a bit challenging, but after a quick call to tech support (and finding out it was a silly Windows issue), everything was very smooth. Eventually it will host Linux or Win2k; yet to be decided.
We've never had a drive go down, but just LAST weekend the motherboard and power supply went south. We went to Fry's electronics and picked up a newer Tyan K7 Tiger (lower end board) and inserted the same RAM and Processors - attached all the drives and fired it up and it ran perfectly!
We've been very fortunate with this system. I think that IDE RAID has been just as good for us as SCSI RAID, and it got us a very large file server at a very inexpensive cost!
HOWEVER, I caution any of you wanting to skimp on $$ that the 4 hour service warranty you might pay from Dell or HP/Compaq, or IBM will cover your ass in a tight situation. Don't base your career on store-bought parts! Also, we still don't have spare drives for our system, which is just plain dumb. Spend the extra $$ and get a drive or two.
Furthermore, consider a backup power supply, because I've found those seem to be degrading in quality over time (I've replaced two at home, and a few at work).
Finally, our original plan was to replace all the IDE drives in the RAID5 array every year. Unfortunately, this hasn't happened. I think that this would be a wise move for anyone building such a system.
Cheers,
&J
I believe you are a bit behind the times. My father recently retired from a major university here in Arizona. One of the things on the plate right now is to remove tenure for teachers.
Increasingly, universities are run as corporations, complete with greed, terrible politics, and lack of interest in their teachers. ASU is a wonderful example of this - there have been articles in the Arizona Republic newspaper about the 'brain drain' hemmoraging from ASU because they just won't pay their teachers even close to what they deserve.
As for any business, you must eventually understand that the future is already written; we are all to be temp workers. I'm not sure how painful this transition will be, but already there are very few bastions of stable, long-term work. Heck, just look at what our president passed (or should I say "snuck" through) on Friday - ability to hire/fire workers, displace federal workers in place of the private sector, etc. etc.
A good friend of mine has tried over and over to get a stable IT job - he's been through it now about ten times in the last year. Each time there was a different excuse, and the last few times they've fired and re-hired the next day for someone who was willing to work cheaper! In his words, "Welcome to Corporate America: do what you can, just don't get caught."
It's the "Bob Dole" approach...
The only real benefit of it that I have been able to tell so far is the ability to use a POP3 client such as Outhouse Express, or Outlook, which my wife uses.
I use KMail w. Yahoo, and it works fine. Retrieveing through POP used to be free, btw. They changed that in order to force more hits on their sites from non-paying customers.
Yahoo gives me only 6mb of email space, and constant ads asking me to 'upgrade' my service for *another* $9.99/yr for only 25mb more space!
Everything else on that service is for pay. If I go log in right now (oh yes and turn off Privoxy) even though I am a paid member, I am still faced with a myriad of flash and java ads. Then there is the giant ad at the bottom when you log in telling you that for $29.99 a year you can get more space, and more this and that. Then finally there are two separate links for mail upgrades on the front of the email page.
Worse yet, my wife also pays for an account, but we get no added benefit of having two paid for email addresses.
The only reason I kept this mail address is the same reason you keep cell phones; we have no loyalty to the provider, but isn't it a pain to switch addresses? I've had this email account for years.
And.. what's the alternative? Hotmail? No thanks. One of the reasons I pay Yahoo is because it's cheaper than running my own email, and it's much more reliable than many others. However, I think that their price points for $9.99 are 1999 customer expectations. Everything is obviously throttled and tiered for marketing, and it sucks.
And my Linux box combined with a rootkit makes it more vulnerable than Windows + Office!
Duh.