I have a 300 gig external Maxtor USB 2.0 & firewire HD & love it. Several friends have bought them on my recomendation and had good results. It's great semi-portable storage. You need to drag around the power brick along with the drive, and probably the USB or firewire cable.
I also have a 512mg USB 007 thumbdrive. It works great for transporting smaller stuff for really portable storage. I'm not sure I'd reccomend the 007 for a thumb drive as some of the others I've seen have been a little more sturdy & had better caps. But it's been rock solid for me and is in no way bad.
If you want links just copy & paste to Google/Froogle.
The Air Force has approved several eye surgeries (including some LASIK), and actually has a medical center dedicated to it. I believe the other branches have recently changed their policies to permit some LASIK or PRK surgeries as well.
If your talking about one of the semi-common Linksys hacks, it's a big problem. When those devices are hacked for more signal output they also get very slopy. They pound out all sorts of interference to other WiFi channels (and non-WiFi as well). I don't recall the links off hand, but some people have done some before/after spectrum analysis of the Linksys WAP's when applying that hack, and after the hack isn't pretty.
Bumping up the power on the WAP is only half the problem. You need a 2 way connection. Pumping 10 watts could get your signal a couple miles, but the little PCMCIA WiFi card on the other end wouldn't have enough juice to get a signal back.
In the long run for your own good and the public good using good directional antennas blows away amped signals.
"We've pumped up the signal strength on our router, but we lose the connection from time to time"
Quite probably other people are doing the same. All of a sudden the spectrum becomes unusable because a couple people decide to blast the hell out of it with excessive power. It's quite easy to pack in a good number of WiFi devices if you follow proper WiFi etiquette
The best course of action is to only use the least amount of signal necessary to get a stable connection & use directional antennas. Directional antennas cause less RF pollution and interference with the rest of the spectrum and when properly aligned give you much better signal to noise ratios. Errant signals from sources not in line with the antennas are rejected much better and your signal should have much less interference.
Using amplifiers isn't the way to a better WiFi world.
I bought a nice rack from the Army's dispo center. It had a 1970's reel to reel tape drive in it, but I just tossed that. Only cost me $15 to boot. Look around for places that are getting rid of old server room junk, and you can probably get a good rack for cheap/free.
There are 2 different kinds of mounting system: Rack's and 2 post racks.
2 post racks are primarly for mounting light telco or network gear and patch pannels on, and really aren't usefull for computers
Computer racks or 4 post racks come in many different shapes and sizes. They pretty much only have a couple standard features... 2 sets of 2 posts mounted 19" appart with a bounch of holes in them marked of in U's (1.25" or so if I remember). The distance between the posts depth wise vary greatly, and some have the back pair adjustable. Most racks have removable side pannels and doors.
As far as rackmount gear, add 25-100% onto the pricetag =-( Rackmount gear is pretty much non-consumer so they design it for higer reliability and higher cost for business. Keep you eye on E-bay and you can pick up some pretty nice rack accessories for reasonable cost.
I've seen several recomendations for just using standard audio gear to mix the inputs (and was looking for something like that lastnight). Any recomendations for a nice low end mixer with 4-8 inputs and 2+ outputs, bonuses for rack mountable.
I don't know how fast SAM's go, but ICBM's are insanely fast. I live on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands (U.S. Army contractor on a U.S. Army base), and they regurarly shoot ICBM's at us (were basically a big target with lots of radar).
Between Vandenberg AFB in California and us it's about 4,500 odd miles. ICBM's hit 27 minutes after lift-off... Pretty zippy when you realize it takes me 8ish hours to do the same thing in a 747.
Go to http://www.paradyne.com/ and check out their Etherloop 1020 modems. I'm not sure if they technically use DSL signaling, but they work GREAT. Up to 10 megabit and up to about 22,000 feet (I think) range. Bandwith drops as distance increases a bit, but it blows most DSL out of the water on range and bandwith.
We are currently using them to phase out some ISDN lines. At $175 a pop (need 1 on each end) it's pretty economical. Currently "modem to modem", but we have some actual DSLAMS were going to be installing shortly.
They will work on just a dry pair, or a pair with tone on it. The builtin POTS splitters work fine, even modem to modem. The only issues are getting access to the cabel plant... not that big a deal for "us" as we are on a military base and own the plant, but probaly dificult for normal telco lines.
Their documentaion is kind of poor, but the products are great. You have to call them and track down a re-seller which is a pain, but worth it.
Gateway VX900 (19") sitting on a KVM. Due to some funkyness "Invalid Scan Frequency" often shows up on the monitor when things go to sleep... After having left the monitor on for probably pushing a year or so, I can barely see Invalid Scan Frequency on the monitor when it is powered off.
I'm guestemating the monitor is no older 3 years, probably less than 2.
It's probably not nearly the problem it use to be, judging from some of the old junker VT100 displays we have sitting around with VERY prominant burn in on them. It looks like it's still something to wory about for monitors that show the same thing day in and day out for months on end.
People will fiddle with all sorts of settings they aren't suppose to, and blow them up software wise almost daily. If you have a HD imaging tool (I like ghost) and build a proper image you can get a trashed system up and running in about 10-15 minutes.
Hardware wise figure the usual suspects, keyboards, mice, joysticks, and any other input devices. They will get broken from abuse, but are relatively cheap these days. Also only go with optical mice, as they are going to be more durable and require no maintnance. Pick cases that you can secure pretty easily as parts will mysteriously vanish if you don't. Flimsely plastic doors and parts are sure to break and should be avoided as well.
There are 2 thougts on securing the systems: Why bother, they are going to break it anyway and I can just re-ghost. or Secure the snot out of it. I'd try and shoot for somewhere in the middle, lock them out of some of the more troublesome parts but don't prevent any games from running. You can always re-ghost the machine when (not if) they break the software.
Make sure you have LOTS of games, and that you have enough licenses for them. Piracy is bad and will get you hammered. Don't let people install their own software. Make sure they don't have any need, the latest titles, patches and mods are a must.
We recently deployed a massive database and property managment system with the client running through Citrix. There are 400-600 users I'm guessing accessing our cluster of 5 or so Citrix servers (Compaq Quad P3 900's 3-4 gigs ram), and they don't perform too bad.
We've sarted putting MS Office, random Oracle applications, our admin tools, & random bastard applications on the servers and they've held up. pretty good for the most part.
Access over ethernet isnt as good as local applications of course, but very useable, modem access is usually ok, but painfull on occasion. The client will run reasonably on a P133, but for the most part we have normal desktops, and Citrix is only used for the supply system or other apps.
We are really only using Metaframe, which displays the application window locally (app looks local, but is actually running on the server), but can gain desktop access if you know the tricks (just some obscure hotkeys to get taskmanager then run explorer), or if we setup users with a desktop session.
We've run into LOTS of problems with printing, as you need to install print drivers for every printer on your network to the Citrix servers. They have a tendancy to blow up the servers as there are many bad drivers out there. Hopefully we will be getting Thin Print up and running soon so we can support more than the basic printers that NT supports.
The servers themselves are a little finiky, but nothing terriably unusual for a MS product. The great advantage of a properly installed and load ballanced Citrix farm though, is when 1 machine blows up there are 4 remaining, and the users at worst just have to log back in, or may never even know the difference.
I live in the Marshall Islands, and our only internet access is via satelites. I work for Raytheon (U.S. army contractor, we more or less run the entire base) in the IT department.
Our best case scenario is aproxamatly 600ms pings just to the far side of the satelite. Add to that 5-10%+ average unavalability, and common 15%+ packetloss and you have a pretty sucky network connection.
I don't pretend to know how the mini-dishes perform. We have 2 different networks routed over seperate circuits and different satelites (irionically the public ISP is routed over the military satelite, and the military network is over a public bird).
Telnet/SSH has about a.5-1.5 second delay, not that bad, unless things are really laggy, in which case it gets really painfull. Web surfing is mostly fine, Everquest is doable, but Quake and any other FPS are out the window.
I am currently living in the Marshall islands working for Raytheon on a US military base making a little under 30k. However to get that same level of income back in the states I'd need to make at least double that (which I could, if/when I decide to go back). Out here I dont pay taxes, have free room & board. The island is 3 miles long so I dont have or need a car and all the payments, maintnence and insurance that goes along with that. There's also the benifit of being on a small tropical island in the middle of the South Pacific (not like I ever see those benifits due to endless work).
Biggest things to look for and worry about is cost of living and quality of life. For me out here the cost of living is pretty much a negative number & quality of life is very good.
Just create a file called "hosts" in the WinNT directory and it will work. Don't remember the syntax for the file off hand, but I think it's the same as the linux hosts file.
They might because due to some twists of some patents Rambus is currently working over several major producers of SDRAM. From what I've heard Rambus found out a way to screw over everybody to jack up prices on SDRAM so we'd migrate to RDRAM. I believe it was in a previous/. post.
I do have to say, of all the people in the computer industry Steve Wozniak it probably one of the coolest, not just in the geek sphere, but as a good person. After all his success with Apple he has ended up back teaching youngsters about his passion of computers. I remember seeing him in an interview talking about how he was sharing part of his profits from Apple with employees that had gotten the short end of the stick.
It's nice to see him getting some recognition. Linus (#2 on my list of cool geeks) has a popular OS named after him and thousands of devoted followers, nice to see some coming to Woz too.
I own a 4 port OmniView SE (PS2 keyboard output & will output to serial or PS2 for each mouse port, PS2 inputs) and like it. It does not scroll at all when I try to use the wheel on my Logitech trackman marble+, but it works fine with a M$ mouse. It will occasionally hang for several seconds when switching for some unknown reason, but thats only very occasionally. Adding and removing machines is easy, but changing the keyboard or mouse is a pain. I have used other KVM's that are easier to use, but the OmniView is the best bang for the buck.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a 300 gig external Maxtor USB 2.0 & firewire HD & love it. Several friends have bought them on my recomendation and had good results. It's great semi-portable storage. You need to drag around the power brick along with the drive, and probably the USB or firewire cable.
I also have a 512mg USB 007 thumbdrive. It works great for transporting smaller stuff for really portable storage. I'm not sure I'd reccomend the 007 for a thumb drive as some of the others I've seen have been a little more sturdy & had better caps. But it's been rock solid for me and is in no way bad.
If you want links just copy & paste to Google/Froogle.
The Air Force has approved several eye surgeries (including some LASIK), and actually has a medical center dedicated to it. I believe the other branches have recently changed their policies to permit some LASIK or PRK surgeries as well.
7 85
http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?storyID=123005
If your talking about one of the semi-common Linksys hacks, it's a big problem. When those devices are hacked for more signal output they also get very slopy. They pound out all sorts of interference to other WiFi channels (and non-WiFi as well). I don't recall the links off hand, but some people have done some before/after spectrum analysis of the Linksys WAP's when applying that hack, and after the hack isn't pretty.
Bumping up the power on the WAP is only half the problem. You need a 2 way connection. Pumping 10 watts could get your signal a couple miles, but the little PCMCIA WiFi card on the other end wouldn't have enough juice to get a signal back.
In the long run for your own good and the public good using good directional antennas blows away amped signals.
"We've pumped up the signal strength on our router, but we lose the connection from time to time"
Quite probably other people are doing the same. All of a sudden the spectrum becomes unusable because a couple people decide to blast the hell out of it with excessive power. It's quite easy to pack in a good number of WiFi devices if you follow proper WiFi etiquette
The best course of action is to only use the least amount of signal necessary to get a stable connection & use directional antennas. Directional antennas cause less RF pollution and interference with the rest of the spectrum and when properly aligned give you much better signal to noise ratios. Errant signals from sources not in line with the antennas are rejected much better and your signal should have much less interference.
Using amplifiers isn't the way to a better WiFi world.
I bought a nice rack from the Army's dispo center. It had a 1970's reel to reel tape drive in it, but I just tossed that. Only cost me $15 to boot. Look around for places that are getting rid of old server room junk, and you can probably get a good rack for cheap/free.
There are 2 different kinds of mounting system: Rack's and 2 post racks.
2 post racks are primarly for mounting light telco or network gear and patch pannels on, and really aren't usefull for computers
Computer racks or 4 post racks come in many different shapes and sizes. They pretty much only have a couple standard features... 2 sets of 2 posts mounted 19" appart with a bounch of holes in them marked of in U's (1.25" or so if I remember). The distance between the posts depth wise vary greatly, and some have the back pair adjustable. Most racks have removable side pannels and doors.
As far as rackmount gear, add 25-100% onto the pricetag =-( Rackmount gear is pretty much non-consumer so they design it for higer reliability and higher cost for business. Keep you eye on E-bay and you can pick up some pretty nice rack accessories for reasonable cost.
I've seen several recomendations for just using standard audio gear to mix the inputs (and was looking for something like that lastnight). Any recomendations for a nice low end mixer with 4-8 inputs and 2+ outputs, bonuses for rack mountable.
I don't know how fast SAM's go, but ICBM's are insanely fast. I live on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands (U.S. Army contractor on a U.S. Army base), and they regurarly shoot ICBM's at us (were basically a big target with lots of radar).
Between Vandenberg AFB in California and us it's about 4,500 odd miles. ICBM's hit 27 minutes after lift-off... Pretty zippy when you realize it takes me 8ish hours to do the same thing in a 747.
Go to http://www.paradyne.com/ and check out their Etherloop 1020 modems. I'm not sure if they technically use DSL signaling, but they work GREAT. Up to 10 megabit and up to about 22,000 feet (I think) range. Bandwith drops as distance increases a bit, but it blows most DSL out of the water on range and bandwith.
We are currently using them to phase out some ISDN lines. At $175 a pop (need 1 on each end) it's pretty economical. Currently "modem to modem", but we have some actual DSLAMS were going to be installing shortly.
They will work on just a dry pair, or a pair with tone on it. The builtin POTS splitters work fine, even modem to modem. The only issues are getting access to the cabel plant... not that big a deal for "us" as we are on a military base and own the plant, but probaly dificult for normal telco lines.
Their documentaion is kind of poor, but the products are great. You have to call them and track down a re-seller which is a pain, but worth it.
Gateway VX900 (19") sitting on a KVM. Due to some funkyness "Invalid Scan Frequency" often shows up on the monitor when things go to sleep... After having left the monitor on for probably pushing a year or so, I can barely see Invalid Scan Frequency on the monitor when it is powered off.
I'm guestemating the monitor is no older 3 years, probably less than 2.
It's probably not nearly the problem it use to be, judging from some of the old junker VT100 displays we have sitting around with VERY prominant burn in on them. It looks like it's still something to wory about for monitors that show the same thing day in and day out for months on end.
Be prepared to have systems die continiously.
People will fiddle with all sorts of settings they aren't suppose to, and blow them up software wise almost daily. If you have a HD imaging tool (I like ghost) and build a proper image you can get a trashed system up and running in about 10-15 minutes.
Hardware wise figure the usual suspects, keyboards, mice, joysticks, and any other input devices. They will get broken from abuse, but are relatively cheap these days. Also only go with optical mice, as they are going to be more durable and require no maintnance. Pick cases that you can secure pretty easily as parts will mysteriously vanish if you don't. Flimsely plastic doors and parts are sure to break and should be avoided as well.
There are 2 thougts on securing the systems:
Why bother, they are going to break it anyway and I can just re-ghost. or Secure the snot out of it. I'd try and shoot for somewhere in the middle, lock them out of some of the more troublesome parts but don't prevent any games from running. You can always re-ghost the machine when (not if) they break the software.
Make sure you have LOTS of games, and that you have enough licenses for them. Piracy is bad and will get you hammered. Don't let people install their own software. Make sure they don't have any need, the latest titles, patches and mods are a must.
> Pardon my naivete, but.... for the love of God,
> Montressor! -- who makes walls out of ceramics?!?!
Bathrooms, kitchens, fireplaces, and exterior walls are relatively common in tile or brick formats. Tile is not uncommon for floors too.
We recently deployed a massive database and property managment system with the client running through Citrix. There are 400-600 users I'm guessing accessing our cluster of 5 or so Citrix servers (Compaq Quad P3 900's 3-4 gigs ram), and they don't perform too bad.
We've sarted putting MS Office, random Oracle applications, our admin tools, & random bastard applications on the servers and they've held up. pretty good for the most part.
Access over ethernet isnt as good as local applications of course, but very useable, modem access is usually ok, but painfull on occasion. The client will run reasonably on a P133, but for the most part we have normal desktops, and Citrix is only used for the supply system or other apps.
We are really only using Metaframe, which displays the application window locally (app looks local, but is actually running on the server), but can gain desktop access if you know the tricks (just some obscure hotkeys to get taskmanager then run explorer), or if we setup users with a desktop session.
We've run into LOTS of problems with printing, as you need to install print drivers for every printer on your network to the Citrix servers. They have a tendancy to blow up the servers as there are many bad drivers out there. Hopefully we will be getting Thin Print up and running soon so we can support more than the basic printers that NT supports.
The servers themselves are a little finiky, but nothing terriably unusual for a MS product. The great advantage of a properly installed and load ballanced Citrix farm though, is when 1 machine blows up there are 4 remaining, and the users at worst just have to log back in, or may never even know the difference.
I live in the Marshall Islands, and our only internet access is via satelites. I work for Raytheon (U.S. army contractor, we more or less run the entire base) in the IT department.
.5-1.5 second delay, not that bad, unless things are really laggy, in which case it gets really painfull. Web surfing is mostly fine, Everquest is doable, but Quake and any other FPS are out the window.
Our best case scenario is aproxamatly 600ms pings just to the far side of the satelite. Add to that 5-10%+ average unavalability, and common 15%+ packetloss and you have a pretty sucky network connection.
I don't pretend to know how the mini-dishes perform. We have 2 different networks routed over seperate circuits and different satelites (irionically the public ISP is routed over the military satelite, and the military network is over a public bird).
Telnet/SSH has about a
Not sure how wireless ISP's do lag wise.
I am currently living in the Marshall islands working for Raytheon on a US military base making a little under 30k. However to get that same level of income back in the states I'd need to make at least double that (which I could, if/when I decide to go back). Out here I dont pay taxes, have free room & board. The island is 3 miles long so I dont have or need a car and all the payments, maintnence and insurance that goes along with that. There's also the benifit of being on a small tropical island in the middle of the South Pacific (not like I ever see those benifits due to endless work). Biggest things to look for and worry about is cost of living and quality of life. For me out here the cost of living is pretty much a negative number & quality of life is very good.
Just create a file called "hosts" in the WinNT directory and it will work. Don't remember the syntax for the file off hand, but I think it's the same as the linux hosts file.
They might because due to some twists of some patents Rambus is currently working over several major producers of SDRAM. From what I've heard Rambus found out a way to screw over everybody to jack up prices on SDRAM so we'd migrate to RDRAM. I believe it was in a previous /. post.
I do have to say, of all the people in the computer industry Steve Wozniak it probably one of the coolest, not just in the geek sphere, but as a good person. After all his success with Apple he has ended up back teaching youngsters about his passion of computers. I remember seeing him in an interview talking about how he was sharing part of his profits from Apple with employees that had gotten the short end of the stick.
It's nice to see him getting some recognition. Linus (#2 on my list of cool geeks) has a popular OS named after him and thousands of devoted followers, nice to see some coming to Woz too.
I own a 4 port OmniView SE (PS2 keyboard output & will output to serial or PS2 for each mouse port, PS2 inputs) and like it. It does not scroll at all when I try to use the wheel on my Logitech trackman marble+, but it works fine with a M$ mouse. It will occasionally hang for several seconds when switching for some unknown reason, but thats only very occasionally. Adding and removing machines is easy, but changing the keyboard or mouse is a pain. I have used other KVM's that are easier to use, but the OmniView is the best bang for the buck.