I've got a couple of these....and even a few without the number pad on the side (great for slide out 19" rack trays). I found a guy at a computer show that was selling them for $5.00 ea!
The PC industry mentality of cheap replaceable stuff has rubbed off on the electronics business. Long ago computer companies used to make heavy duty, durable cases, power supplies, fans that lasted 10 years, and keyboards you could use as a sledgehammer (and not break).
Ahhh, those were the days. I've still got some IBM keyboards and AT power supplies (with big honking red switch on side) well over 10 years old that still work.
PC manufacturers realized that no one was keeping these products for 10 years, so why go to the extra expense of building it for that long a life? Average consumers and businesses usually keep computers 3-5 years...so why make it last longer?
Electronics companies realized this about 3-5 years ago. I used to work for a national electronics chain, and a small specialty high-end shop. Both types of stores had declining prices and declining quality. The feature-itis of the past few years only made things worse.
I have a Sony ES home CD player that I bought 10 years ago (Burr-Brown converters...etc) and it still works...it's built like a tank. But it sits in its box....why? Because I replaced it with a $199.99 pioneer DVD player that plays DVDs, MP3s, VCDs, CDs...etc...and it sounds great! Will it last 10 years? No way, but who cares...for $200 i'll buy the latest thing when this one tanks.
I bought my VW Golf two years ago, and i'm very pleased with it, except for that crappy in-dash radio they MADE me buy. I could not buy the vehicle without buying the radio. Maybe we can organize a Factory Radio Refund Day?
Likewise, my townhome came with really terrible, contractor grade windows. I hate them. I was not allowed to buy the townhome without these windows. Maybe I can get my money back for them as well?
Finally all the Macs in my organization run one flavor of Mac OS or another. I could not buy these things without Mac OS. Maybe I can convince Steve Jobs to give me $100 for each copy of Mac OS I don't use?
Face it, bundling is prevalent every where you look. Just because it's "software" doesn't mean you can "un-bundle" one particular aspect of a product you don't like.
The issue is switch capacity at the long distance carrier. (I suspect verizon is carrying their own long distance in the north east.)
I wasn't griping about one specific company; I was speaking about telecommunications in general. The myth of the telecommunications "glut" is just that....a myth.
There isn't enough fiber (in the right locations) and their aren't enough companies with the ability to build a larger, more competitive, voice/data infrastructure. That's why T1s and T3s are still relatively expensive.
Telcos are wringing every last drop out of their networks...to the breaking point. If a disaster occurs and many people rush to use the communications networks, society and the telcos are going to realize that their communications networks as they stand now will crack under the load.
OK, so my organization is going to be regulated because we use 802.11? What about Internet Explorer? With a weekly security flaw found in the world's most popular browser; shouldn't the feds regulate the development and deployment of such a widely used bit of software? It seems there are many more opportunities to commandeer a machine via IE than 802.11.
Heat pipes traditionally need some medium in the pipe to "transport" the heat. (usually air) This particular heatpipe uses phase change methanol. A similar process is used in your refridgerator to transport heat away from the inside of the fridge.
The difference here is that there is no active compressor to facilitate the phase change.
$100 more gets you a floppy drive and windows. OEM versions of windows XP Pro run around $130.00(home version is even cheaper)....way less than the cost of the hardware.
MS software is cheap; sure the quality isn't great, but look at Microsoft's competitors: Oracle, IBM...etc. All these guys compete in the corporate space with better, much more expensive products.
The only time Microsoft's software looks expensive is when you compare it to free software. Then everything looks expensive.
My point is this: Run software that suits your purpose for the lowest cost...free or otherwise.
Yeah, try making a long distance call between 4:30pm and 6:30pm during the week. Forget about it! It seems most carriers (wireless and land line) have stopped building out capacity and kept on adding subscribers. The voice networks are stretched to the breaking point.
I'm not asking for the world...I live in central NJ, I just want to be able to call PA or North Jersey. It's hard to believe that there isn't enough capacity to allow that.
Now I can't even make reliable voice calls...do you think for one minute unsatisfied cellular customers are going to spring for spotty, slow data services....YEAH RIGHT, KEEP DREAMING!
Parity calculation and disk write speed
on
IDE RAID Examined
·
· Score: 2
Wouldn't your (raid 3) array performance be bounded by the overhead of parity calculation? Wouldn't the write performance be made worse by restricting all parity writes to one hard drive? It seems by distributing parity among all drives raid 5 still carries the parity calculation overhead, but is faster at writing the parity simultaneously to all drives. Am I just splitting hairs here?
-ted
Re:The problem with hardware RAID
on
IDE RAID Examined
·
· Score: 4, Informative
None of my ATA raid controllers requires identical drives. In the case of disimilar capacities, the array views all drives as the smallest drive in the array.
Later on in the life of the array, you can eventually replace the remaining drives and then resize the partition.
Dude, i've got an IBM/cyrix PR 233 you can have!
on
IDE RAID Examined
·
· Score: 2
Windows 2000 Advanced server on a 486? Are you one of those guys that enjoys pain?
Seriously...if you want the PR 233 and the AT motherboard (with AGP...maybe even 64 or 128 MB memory), reply to this and we'll figure out the shipping address thing. I can't let you suffer like this man!
-ted
Not to be a Promise pitch man, but...
on
IDE RAID Examined
·
· Score: 2
I'm getting one for my house with 200GB drives....they also make an 8 drive version....mmm....
-ted
Real world SUCESSFUL application of ATA raid
on
IDE RAID Examined
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I've got 5 servers (one is an Exchange 2000 server) at a school with about 200 users. All servers are running some form of promise ATA raid 1 setup for boot drives and some also use an ATA raid 1 for their data drives. The file server and mail server use Adaptec 2400A raid controllers with four 100GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration. All hard drives are western digital 7200 RPM drives.
No one complains about speed issues. Everything seems to work very well.....at a fraction of the cost of SCSI.
I love the look on visitors' faces when they see our servers have 300-600GB of available storage...for very little cost. (Backing up all that data still requires SCSI tape arrays...not cheap.)
I've had a couple of drives tank on me here and there, but no data loss yet...just replaced the failed drive...rebooted and in about 20 minutes the array was completely rebuilt.
I am a fan of SCSI (got plenty of SCSI raid at my house) but when you've got to stay under a budget, you can't beat ATA raid.
Evidently you are not a stockholder in any public company....do you even look at your 401k? Do you even have one?
The health of America's companies is important to eveyone...sure, guys like you always blame the "man" for keeping you down...but where is your retirement invested? I'm willing to bet that it is in publically held companies. Financially strong companies have the luxury of being able to do the right thing...financially weak companies can not...they lay off people and take shorcuts in the environment and their local communities. Unions do not help the strength of America's companies.
I do not consider myself above the laws of supply and demand, I could be laid off, and i'd just go out every day and job hunt...and if I couldn't find a job, i'd shovel crap and do whatever I can to pay the bills until I find something better. I don't want to be part of a union that destroys the company I work for (and invest in!). Sure, some companies are run by weasles, but not all of them. (On another note....some unions are run by weasles....but not all of them.)
Also, my pager HAS gone off at 3am, and guess what? I knew about that when I took the job as the network admin! Doctors realize this when they decide they want to care for people as a career and they accept it. Do you want a crabby, bitchy, emergency room doctor working on you at 3am? I don't...hopefully that person will like and care about their job, and will only be there because they want to....not because some union guaranteed them the job.
-ted
1024 different radio frequencies???
on
Molecular Photography
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The researchers fired an electromagnetic pulse containing 1024 different radio frequencies close to 400 megahertz at the molecule
Gee...if it takes that many requencies to read 1024 bits, imagine how many you'd need to access the memory space of the average desktop PC. You'd need the whole damn electromagnetic spectrum! I wonder if the FCC will grant them a license for that?
I know now the Steel industry needs protectionist tariffs to survive.
My father-in-law worked for Bethlehem Steel for most of his life...as a non-union engineer. He got to see first hand how the unions helped destroy the company. I know they weren't the only cause...but they did not make the company stronger.
Sure, I know things were terrible...people getting injured and killed on the job...but eventually the lawsuit juggernaut that is America would have caught up with the abusive companies without the aid of the unions.
Just ask Halliburton and the Asbestos litigants. Most of them are non-union people with their own private suits...
I stand by my original claim....unions are not the answer.
Name one industry that has benefited from the introduction of unions. Steel, Education, auto; of these industries would have been better off without unions. Sure the very vocal bottom 20% loves the fact that a union virtually guarantees their pay and job security, but what does that do to the final product?
Unions only increase costs, decrease productivity, and guarantee that the industry will need a government bail-out or protection in 20-30 years.
These down times are just what the tech industry needs. The excess capacity of HTML jockeys and MCSEs will go find other jobs flipping burgers where they should have been in the first place if not for the dot com boom.
Slashdot Mirror
Should You Trust Website Customer Reviews?
Heh..that's like determining your self esteem level by your Slashdot moderation points..
-ted
I've got a couple of these....and even a few without the number pad on the side (great for slide out 19" rack trays). I found a guy at a computer show that was selling them for $5.00 ea!
-ted
The PC industry mentality of cheap replaceable stuff has rubbed off on the electronics business. Long ago computer companies used to make heavy duty, durable cases, power supplies, fans that lasted 10 years, and keyboards you could use as a sledgehammer (and not break).
Ahhh, those were the days. I've still got some IBM keyboards and AT power supplies (with big honking red switch on side) well over 10 years old that still work.
PC manufacturers realized that no one was keeping these products for 10 years, so why go to the extra expense of building it for that long a life? Average consumers and businesses usually keep computers 3-5 years...so why make it last longer?
Electronics companies realized this about 3-5 years ago. I used to work for a national electronics chain, and a small specialty high-end shop. Both types of stores had declining prices and declining quality. The feature-itis of the past few years only made things worse.
I have a Sony ES home CD player that I bought 10 years ago (Burr-Brown converters...etc) and it still works...it's built like a tank. But it sits in its box....why? Because I replaced it with a $199.99 pioneer DVD player that plays DVDs, MP3s, VCDs, CDs...etc...and it sounds great! Will it last 10 years? No way, but who cares...for $200 i'll buy the latest thing when this one tanks.
-ted
I bought my VW Golf two years ago, and i'm very pleased with it, except for that crappy in-dash radio they MADE me buy. I could not buy the vehicle without buying the radio. Maybe we can organize a Factory Radio Refund Day?
Likewise, my townhome came with really terrible, contractor grade windows. I hate them. I was not allowed to buy the townhome without these windows. Maybe I can get my money back for them as well?
Finally all the Macs in my organization run one flavor of Mac OS or another. I could not buy these things without Mac OS. Maybe I can convince Steve Jobs to give me $100 for each copy of Mac OS I don't use?
Face it, bundling is prevalent every where you look. Just because it's "software" doesn't mean you can "un-bundle" one particular aspect of a product you don't like.
-ted
How exactly, do you service a sewerpipe once it has fiber running through it?
-ted
I use verizon.
The issue is switch capacity at the long distance carrier. (I suspect verizon is carrying their own long distance in the north east.)
I wasn't griping about one specific company; I was speaking about telecommunications in general. The myth of the telecommunications "glut" is just that....a myth.
There isn't enough fiber (in the right locations) and their aren't enough companies with the ability to build a larger, more competitive, voice/data infrastructure. That's why T1s and T3s are still relatively expensive.
Telcos are wringing every last drop out of their networks...to the breaking point. If a disaster occurs and many people rush to use the communications networks, society and the telcos are going to realize that their communications networks as they stand now will crack under the load.
-ted
OK, so my organization is going to be regulated because we use 802.11? What about Internet Explorer? With a weekly security flaw found in the world's most popular browser; shouldn't the feds regulate the development and deployment of such a widely used bit of software? It seems there are many more opportunities to commandeer a machine via IE than 802.11.
-ted
Heat pipes traditionally need some medium in the pipe to "transport" the heat. (usually air) This particular heatpipe uses phase change methanol. A similar process is used in your refridgerator to transport heat away from the inside of the fridge.
The difference here is that there is no active compressor to facilitate the phase change.
-ted
liquid -- in this case, methanol -- to vapor
If we can't trust society with a cup of hot McDonalds coffee how can we trust people with phase change methanol?
I can see the warnings stickered to future laptops: Do not use this laptop near an open flame. Smoking near this laptop is strictly prohibited!
-ted
Actually the MS "tax" isn't really that high.
$100 more gets you a floppy drive and windows. OEM versions of windows XP Pro run around $130.00(home version is even cheaper)....way less than the cost of the hardware.
MS software is cheap; sure the quality isn't great, but look at Microsoft's competitors: Oracle, IBM...etc. All these guys compete in the corporate space with better, much more expensive products.
The only time Microsoft's software looks expensive is when you compare it to free software. Then everything looks expensive.
My point is this: Run software that suits your purpose for the lowest cost...free or otherwise.
-ted
What exactly does Harvard hold the patent on? The genetic structure of the onco-mouse, or the process of making one?
If it's only the process, couldn't we just get a bunch of mice and make them smoke cigarettes for years until they have cancer....and then sell them?
-ted
Yeah, try making a long distance call between 4:30pm and 6:30pm during the week. Forget about it! It seems most carriers (wireless and land line) have stopped building out capacity and kept on adding subscribers. The voice networks are stretched to the breaking point.
I'm not asking for the world...I live in central NJ, I just want to be able to call PA or North Jersey. It's hard to believe that there isn't enough capacity to allow that.
Now I can't even make reliable voice calls...do you think for one minute unsatisfied cellular customers are going to spring for spotty, slow data services....YEAH RIGHT, KEEP DREAMING!
-ted
Boy, isn't that nice of them?
I guess XP doesn't have the driver built in?
-ted
Wouldn't your (raid 3) array performance be bounded by the overhead of parity calculation? Wouldn't the write performance be made worse by restricting all parity writes to one hard drive? It seems by distributing parity among all drives raid 5 still carries the parity calculation overhead, but is faster at writing the parity simultaneously to all drives. Am I just splitting hairs here?
-ted
None of my ATA raid controllers requires identical drives. In the case of disimilar capacities, the array views all drives as the smallest drive in the array.
Later on in the life of the array, you can eventually replace the remaining drives and then resize the partition.
-ted
HERE
Windows 2000 Advanced server on a 486? Are you one of those guys that enjoys pain?
Seriously...if you want the PR 233 and the AT motherboard (with AGP...maybe even 64 or 128 MB memory), reply to this and we'll figure out the shipping address thing. I can't let you suffer like this man!
-ted
I just saw this:
I'm getting one for my house with 200GB drives....they also make an 8 drive version....mmm....
-ted
I've got 5 servers (one is an Exchange 2000 server) at a school with about 200 users. All servers are running some form of promise ATA raid 1 setup for boot drives and some also use an ATA raid 1 for their data drives. The file server and mail server use Adaptec 2400A raid controllers with four 100GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration. All hard drives are western digital 7200 RPM drives.
No one complains about speed issues. Everything seems to work very well.....at a fraction of the cost of SCSI.
I love the look on visitors' faces when they see our servers have 300-600GB of available storage...for very little cost. (Backing up all that data still requires SCSI tape arrays...not cheap.)
I've had a couple of drives tank on me here and there, but no data loss yet...just replaced the failed drive...rebooted and in about 20 minutes the array was completely rebuilt.
I am a fan of SCSI (got plenty of SCSI raid at my house) but when you've got to stay under a budget, you can't beat ATA raid.
-ted
Windows admins are cheaper than Unix admins.
-ted
Evidently you are not a stockholder in any public company....do you even look at your 401k? Do you even have one?
The health of America's companies is important to eveyone...sure, guys like you always blame the "man" for keeping you down...but where is your retirement invested? I'm willing to bet that it is in publically held companies. Financially strong companies have the luxury of being able to do the right thing...financially weak companies can not...they lay off people and take shorcuts in the environment and their local communities. Unions do not help the strength of America's companies.
I do not consider myself above the laws of supply and demand, I could be laid off, and i'd just go out every day and job hunt...and if I couldn't find a job, i'd shovel crap and do whatever I can to pay the bills until I find something better. I don't want to be part of a union that destroys the company I work for (and invest in!). Sure, some companies are run by weasles, but not all of them. (On another note....some unions are run by weasles....but not all of them.)
Also, my pager HAS gone off at 3am, and guess what? I knew about that when I took the job as the network admin! Doctors realize this when they decide they want to care for people as a career and they accept it. Do you want a crabby, bitchy, emergency room doctor working on you at 3am? I don't...hopefully that person will like and care about their job, and will only be there because they want to....not because some union guaranteed them the job.
-ted
The researchers fired an electromagnetic pulse containing 1024 different radio frequencies close to 400 megahertz at the molecule
Gee...if it takes that many requencies to read 1024 bits, imagine how many you'd need to access the memory space of the average desktop PC. You'd need the whole damn electromagnetic spectrum! I wonder if the FCC will grant them a license for that?
-ted
I know now the Steel industry needs protectionist tariffs to survive.
My father-in-law worked for Bethlehem Steel for most of his life...as a non-union engineer. He got to see first hand how the unions helped destroy the company. I know they weren't the only cause...but they did not make the company stronger.
Sure, I know things were terrible...people getting injured and killed on the job...but eventually the lawsuit juggernaut that is America would have caught up with the abusive companies without the aid of the unions.
Just ask Halliburton and the Asbestos litigants. Most of them are non-union people with their own private suits...
I stand by my original claim....unions are not the answer.
-ted
Name one industry that has benefited from the introduction of unions. Steel, Education, auto; of these industries would have been better off without unions. Sure the very vocal bottom 20% loves the fact that a union virtually guarantees their pay and job security, but what does that do to the final product?
Unions only increase costs, decrease productivity, and guarantee that the industry will need a government bail-out or protection in 20-30 years.
These down times are just what the tech industry needs. The excess capacity of HTML jockeys and MCSEs will go find other jobs flipping burgers where they should have been in the first place if not for the dot com boom.
-ted
Do your VLANS share the same physical cable? If so, how are they connected? Do you use a one-armed router?
-ted