...sales of the company's products may decline, the company may have to reduce the prices it charges for its products...
Wow, if this sort of brave new thinking catches on, there might be cheaper compact discs from the RIAA and lower movie ticket prices from the MPAA!
Microsoft really *DOES* innovate, after all! And to think, the previous "best practice" by other companies was raising prices by collusion and suing the dissentors!
A friend of mine got a hold of the leaked alpha and on a GF2 GTS it was running around some where at 15 fps with all options turned on at 1280x1024...
Oh your friend told you that did he?
OK, first of all, the leaked alpha was only optimized for the R300 core.
So when I fired up my overclocked GF4 TI4200 and tried to run any of the 3levels in the alpha, I got 0.7FPS? (Graphics settings were largely unchangeable.)
Next time I read something like this, I am submitting it to snopes.com.
"Rumors started circulating on the internet in early 2003 that the upcoming release of ID Software's DOOM 3 would, quote, 'work on all hardware back to a 486DX2/66 with a VESA localbus graphics card with at least 1MB of graphics memory, and 16 megsabytes of RAM.'"
Maybe in the "special 16 color ASCII" mode that Carmack's been secretly working on!
That grand will be me a heck of a lot of blow, man.
Obviously I was doign some when I posted. I eamnt to say, BUY me a lot of blow. And "spin all youw ant about engineer" should be "spin all you want about engineering."
Yeah, you can get a 499 dollar Dell, but it has the standard equipment of a four year old model.
That's FUD, and it's WRONG. The Dell 2350 series ($499 and up) STARTS at a Celeron 1.7 GHz, 40GB hard drive, 256MB DDR RAM, a 48x CD-Rom, and a free monitor and printer. Includes Windows XP and other software bundle.
Four years ago, early 1999, our company was buying Pentium II 350MHz machines, with 64 megsabytes of RAM, 6 GB hard drives, and a 16x CD-Rom, with a 15 inch monitor, for about $1200. Add $150 if we wanted NT4.0 on it.
So let's see, you're getting a 1.7 GHz CPU (and spin all youw ant about engineer and how great OS X is; that Celeron 1.7 will bring it against a 1GHz G4), and a "free" monitor, for $1000 less?
That grand will be me a heck of a lot of blow, man.
DirectX... in a HTPC? Isn't "uptime: two weeks (unattended)" the #1 requirement to even rival a VCR?
That's ripe fruit to pick. My media center PC has been up and running for months (since I built it) on a Celeron 800 and Win2k Pro; the server it pulls data from has been up since I moved into my house 6 months ago running an Athlon XP1600+ and Win2k Server.
And based on my experiences with RedHat 8, I'd also wager to say that my Celeron 800 boots faster than your Linux box.
No Microsoft apologist here, but hey, the right tool for the right job.
Directx 9 cards are all well and good... but the most important point that reviewers have so far overlooked is the fact that there are currently *NO* directx9 games out at the moment.
And I suppose you're also against purchasing tickets in advance of a movie that doesn't come out for two more weeks? If the standard has moved up a version, and the forthcoming products are all using that standard, what could you POSSIBLY have against cards that advertise that they support that new standard?
Not only that, but the number of games which actually utilise a Geforce 3's features (let alone a Geforce 4) are few and far between.
That's a load of malarky. I don't even game that much, just some UT2003 and Quake3 with friends. Moving up from a GF2MX to a GF4TI was a "stupid mad" jump-- in video quality (T&L, AA, Aniso-Filtering) and framerate (smoothness, playability) performance as well. The memory increase from 32 megs SDR 24 months ago to 128 megs DDR today also allows for much better texture performance; look at reviews of Jedi Knight II. It's almost unplayable without 64 megs of DDR graphic memory, and 128 takes it up yet another notch.
[obFlame] And look at that, your karma-trolling worked! By posting irrelevent, but insightful-sounding commentary, you got points. Yay! Score -1, Wrong.;D
I know at 21, you have doubtlessly experienced a great many things in your life. And you seem an intelligent gent on the whole. But there are a couple of things that I disagree with, and wanted to toss your way. (Moderators, quit modding me and reply, please.)
I'm personally of the opinion that nobody should be driving a car >10 years old...But even my 71 Super beetle runs MUCH better then most 6-7 year old cars i see driving around, burning a quart of oil every ten feet.
Now, leaving aside the hypocracy of these two sentences; first of all, not everyone is financially capable of affording a "newer" car.
Now, I'm right there with you about the morons who drive cars into the ground, giving them premature "clunker" status, but you're apparently not very familiar with internal combustion engines. There have only been two major "emissions" advancements in the past 30 years; the introduction of the catalytic converter in mid 1970s and the elimination of carburetor in the late 1980s. There have been advancements in air bags, anti-lock brakes, and other safety measures... but engineered and driven properly, cars have done OK without these features.
After proclaiming that all these great advancements to emissions and safety have made it of paramount importance to own a car less than 10 years old, you go on to say that all current cars are turned to crap in 3-6 years. This is not so. There are many cars that are well cared for; washed every week, oil changed at every 3000 miles without exception, mufflers replaced immediately when a hole develops, etc. The problem you are seeing is stupid buyers buying poorly maintained cars, and stupid drivers poorly driving and maintaining cars. Yes, I have seen 5 year old Caddies that blow blue smoke, and have likely never had an oil change. I have also seen certain 71 Super Beetles that blow nasty chunks of filthy blackness into their wake as well.
As for my 1976 Mercury Cougar XR-7, it happily runs in my garage once a week for 30 minutes, gets its oil changed regularly, and passed California emissions last year before the owner sold it to me. (Now that it is in Ohio with Historic plates on it, I no longer need the emissions checks on it.)
So yes, they don't make cars like they used to. But people also don't respect property like they used to either. The lazy lease people will keep paying their monthly stupidity fee (which licenses them to treat their drivetrain any way they want) from here until eternity, but that doesn't mean all modern cars are crap.
criminal penalties for copyright violation--that means federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
No federal prison for copyright violations (assuming that the corporate lawyers can convince a judge to sentence a baby-faced, 20-something first time offender to PRISON) is the same white-collar country-club that they send people to for mail fraud. Low security, 3 square meals, plenty of visitation.
Yeah right! And deny AT&T, SPrint, and MCI/Worldcom their God-given right to make capital on every call over 20 miles away?
Besides, think of all the jobs of people who have to lay and support the long distance cablign infrastructure! Would you put them on teh street just because there is technology available that is faster, cheaper and better?
I think the only way to settle this is to charge ISPs for revenue loss by long distance companies, since IP telephony is CLEARLY being used to *STEAL* long distance phone calls that the public should be paying for.;D
are there going to be any PCI releases faster than the GeForce 2 MX400? Probably not.
Actually, go to CompUSA and you'll find stacks and stacks of Radeon 7500 PCI and GeForce4 MX440 PCI cards, at not terribly jacked-up prices. IN fact, this Radeon 9000 has dual monitors and TV out for under $100, and that would SPANK a GF2 mx200.
PCI isn't fast enough for heavy graphics use
Actually, they did a review of PCI Radeons versus AGP ones last year (wish I could find the article), and at that time, the PCI card performed at about 80-90% of the AGP card with the same chipset and RAM. Even though AGP 8x has the possibility of running at 533MHz, not many systems will come close to being able to manage all that data across AGP, CPU, and memory. For average gamers, an older PC with only PCI slots... $100 for a GF4 MX440/64 meg PCI card will get them through to the next system upgrade; which brings us to:
you can probably get a replacement motherboard for under $50?
Very true, but you also need a CPU and new RAM (in most cases) as well. Almost everything is DDR now. Even if you get an ECS K7S5A, which can use your old PC133 RAM OR PC2100 DDR, you still have to drop 60-200 dollars for an Athlon to run on it.
Now, I'm all about cheap components and such, but if the guy has $100 for a vid card but doesn't have $400 for a CPU, RAM, mobo *AND* Vid card, maybe buying the Radeon 7500 or GF4mx is the right thing. Otherwise save the bucks and wait for the other $300, and get the DDR ram and nice CPU too.
You didn't even pay attention to the site you were cutting and pasting from. No receipts or other documents are required, and it is limit one claim per consumer. And I personally can guarantee that I have purchased at least one major-label CD during the perios in question.
Speak for yourself; unless more than two million people file a claim, everybody who bothers spending 60 seconds to fill out the simple form gets a check for $20. I'll take that.
I have no idea why anyone would ever need a TB drive at home...
I save almost everything I collect. Most of it is archive, but I currently have 8 Maxtor 120GB IDE drives in a RAID5 array, at 60% utilization.
This includes spidered caches of many websites, every email that I have received since the tragic formatting of my 230 meg hard drive in 1994, high-resolution copies of every digital photo I have ever taken or scanned, the usual downloads and media archives.
At my current rate of consumption, I expect to be using "online media" capacity of over 2TB in 3 years.
And I am a home user who can't really afford drives, even at a buck a gig.
Granted, my offline backups of "urgent" data only includes about 10 gigs, but I am really quite attached to my data. It's almost like a sickness.
Apple, apparently. The news about the Powerbooks brought a lot of Mac junkies online looking for more data, and Slashdot has a really good overview posted.
Steve, where are the software trade-in incentives? I own Photoshop 6 and 7, Dreamweaver MX, and Microsoft Office XP for the PC. [...] Why can I not trade in my two boxed Photoshop-for-PC copies and receive Photoshop 7 for Mac OS. The cost to move to a Mac is almost doubled by the $1500 worth of software that I already have for my PC.
Why would you ask Apple to take in software from some vendor, presumably just to throw it out, and GIVE you $1500 worth of some other company's software? Would you walk into Campell's headquaters, drop a case of opened cans of soup on their desk, and demand Progresso instead because you don't like the kind of bowls you bought to eat your soup in?
How about either 1) Ask the software vendors in question about a trade-up deal, or 2) Buy new software for Mac in the first place?
That's part of the TCO for owning a Mac, and one of the two big reasons (software availabity, especially games; plus hardware cost) that I finally abandoned Apple after 19 years of loyalty.
Re:Why is this being "dignified" by Slashdot?
on
Stealth Force Beta
·
· Score: 1
Second, why condone this sort of DANGEROUS and often illegal behavior.
Who peed in your Cheerios this morning, mate?
People are fully within their rights to risk their lives for others' humor. The problem is the morons who try to sue other people for their own (or deceased relative's) incompetence or bad luck.
If my son was crushed by an elevator doing something like this, I would mourn his loss forever, but who would I blame? It was clearly his free will, lack of sensability, and probably poor parenting that caused the situation.
It's funny that this is being raised as a question now... I have six Maxtor 120 gig drives on their way to me now, to go with the two 120s I already have, and they will be connected to a pair of ATA133 cards from Promise. Total cost is around $1200.
I intend to software RAID-5 them using Windows 2000 Server (and yes, I have a separate "basic disk" 30 gig boot drive). This will give me 840 gigabytes of space on my server. My data comsumption right now is 520 gigs worth of 40s, 80s and 120s. This is in music, movies, and above all, TV shows.
I will be backing up the drives on a set of 40/80GB DLT tapes, using a borrowed drive, and putting those tapes in a fireproof safe offsite. That will at least give me a static backup, until I can borrow the drive and buy more tapes again.
The risks as I see them are: total loss of data due to theft or natural catastrophie, power supply failure, etc. The other downside is the slow speed of software RAID-5 using 5400 RPM drives with 2 megs cache.
In this case, about 10 gigs of the data is what I consider "critical." I back this up regularly to CD-R and keep a copy offsite. The rest can likely be regenerated by re-ripping my CD and DVD collections (also susceptible to theft, or other loss), and downloading the TV shows from P2P, assuming that is still an option at the time of data loss.
Why do I collect so much data? I'm not sure. I think it is because I'm a packrat; and I also fear for the day when information, data, and media are gray market materials. I want to have the bits in my hands if and when the great big lock of doom is put on the world's multimedia.
Just thought I would chip in with my anecdotal experience and say, "Go for it."
Slashdot Mirror
Estimated time before a "DeGRid" app appears on the 'net, completely removing the offending number from the file?
I say 6 days from first retail release!
Not only does this prove that "Germans don't do xyz, they do BEER," it is also a sign that American religion needs some serious reform. :)
...sales of the company's products may decline, the company may have to reduce the prices it charges for its products...
Wow, if this sort of brave new thinking catches on, there might be cheaper compact discs from the RIAA and lower movie ticket prices from the MPAA!
Microsoft really *DOES* innovate, after all! And to think, the previous "best practice" by other companies was raising prices by collusion and suing the dissentors!
A friend of mine got a hold of the leaked alpha and on a GF2 GTS it was running around some where at 15 fps with all options turned on at 1280x1024...
Oh your friend told you that did he?
OK, first of all, the leaked alpha was only optimized for the R300 core.
So when I fired up my overclocked GF4 TI4200 and tried to run any of the 3levels in the alpha, I got 0.7FPS? (Graphics settings were largely unchangeable.)
Next time I read something like this, I am submitting it to snopes.com.
"Rumors started circulating on the internet in early 2003 that the upcoming release of ID Software's DOOM 3 would, quote, 'work on all hardware back to a 486DX2/66 with a VESA localbus graphics card with at least 1MB of graphics memory, and 16 megsabytes of RAM.'"
Maybe in the "special 16 color ASCII" mode that Carmack's been secretly working on!
That grand will be me a heck of a lot of blow, man.
Obviously I was doign some when I posted. I eamnt to say, BUY me a lot of blow. And "spin all youw ant about engineer" should be "spin all you want about engineering."
Oh well, back to the mirror and the razor blade!
Yeah, you can get a 499 dollar Dell, but it has the standard equipment of a four year old model.
That's FUD, and it's WRONG. The Dell 2350 series ($499 and up) STARTS at a Celeron 1.7 GHz, 40GB hard drive, 256MB DDR RAM, a 48x CD-Rom, and a free monitor and printer. Includes Windows XP and other software bundle.
Four years ago, early 1999, our company was buying Pentium II 350MHz machines, with 64 megsabytes of RAM, 6 GB hard drives, and a 16x CD-Rom, with a 15 inch monitor, for about $1200. Add $150 if we wanted NT4.0 on it.
So let's see, you're getting a 1.7 GHz CPU (and spin all youw ant about engineer and how great OS X is; that Celeron 1.7 will bring it against a 1GHz G4), and a "free" monitor, for $1000 less?
That grand will be me a heck of a lot of blow, man.
DirectX ... in a HTPC? Isn't "uptime: two weeks (unattended)" the #1 requirement to even rival a VCR?
That's ripe fruit to pick. My media center PC has been up and running for months (since I built it) on a Celeron 800 and Win2k Pro; the server it pulls data from has been up since I moved into my house 6 months ago running an Athlon XP1600+ and Win2k Server.
And based on my experiences with RedHat 8, I'd also wager to say that my Celeron 800 boots faster than your Linux box.
No Microsoft apologist here, but hey, the right tool for the right job.
What part of T&L, Anti-Aliasing, and Anisotropic Filtering did I forget to boldface so you would recognize them as feautures?
I must have forgotten to mention them while trying to ignore those fancy programmable shaders... silly me.
Directx 9 cards are all well and good... but the most important point that reviewers have so far overlooked is the fact that there are currently *NO* directx9 games out at the moment.
;D
And I suppose you're also against purchasing tickets in advance of a movie that doesn't come out for two more weeks? If the standard has moved up a version, and the forthcoming products are all using that standard, what could you POSSIBLY have against cards that advertise that they support that new standard?
Not only that, but the number of games which actually utilise a Geforce 3's features (let alone a Geforce 4) are few and far between.
That's a load of malarky. I don't even game that much, just some UT2003 and Quake3 with friends. Moving up from a GF2MX to a GF4TI was a "stupid mad" jump-- in video quality (T&L, AA, Aniso-Filtering) and framerate (smoothness, playability) performance as well. The memory increase from 32 megs SDR 24 months ago to 128 megs DDR today also allows for much better texture performance; look at reviews of Jedi Knight II. It's almost unplayable without 64 megs of DDR graphic memory, and 128 takes it up yet another notch.
[obFlame] And look at that, your karma-trolling worked! By posting irrelevent, but insightful-sounding commentary, you got points. Yay! Score -1, Wrong.
Joel,
:)
My apologies for the confusion between your comments and the parent to yours (you didn't mark dhovis' words as his, so I took them to be yours).
So most of my arguments are meant for him, but are probably applicable to both of you.
Dear sir,
I know at 21, you have doubtlessly experienced a great many things in your life. And you seem an intelligent gent on the whole. But there are a couple of things that I disagree with, and wanted to toss your way. (Moderators, quit modding me and reply, please.)
I'm personally of the opinion that nobody should be driving a car >10 years old...But even my 71 Super beetle runs MUCH better then most 6-7 year old cars i see driving around, burning a quart of oil every ten feet.
Now, leaving aside the hypocracy of these two sentences; first of all, not everyone is financially capable of affording a "newer" car.
Now, I'm right there with you about the morons who drive cars into the ground, giving them premature "clunker" status, but you're apparently not very familiar with internal combustion engines. There have only been two major "emissions" advancements in the past 30 years; the introduction of the catalytic converter in mid 1970s and the elimination of carburetor in the late 1980s. There have been advancements in air bags, anti-lock brakes, and other safety measures... but engineered and driven properly, cars have done OK without these features.
After proclaiming that all these great advancements to emissions and safety have made it of paramount importance to own a car less than 10 years old, you go on to say that all current cars are turned to crap in 3-6 years. This is not so. There are many cars that are well cared for; washed every week, oil changed at every 3000 miles without exception, mufflers replaced immediately when a hole develops, etc. The problem you are seeing is stupid buyers buying poorly maintained cars, and stupid drivers poorly driving and maintaining cars. Yes, I have seen 5 year old Caddies that blow blue smoke, and have likely never had an oil change. I have also seen certain 71 Super Beetles that blow nasty chunks of filthy blackness into their wake as well.
As for my 1976 Mercury Cougar XR-7, it happily runs in my garage once a week for 30 minutes, gets its oil changed regularly, and passed California emissions last year before the owner sold it to me. (Now that it is in Ohio with Historic plates on it, I no longer need the emissions checks on it.)
So yes, they don't make cars like they used to. But people also don't respect property like they used to either. The lazy lease people will keep paying their monthly stupidity fee (which licenses them to treat their drivetrain any way they want) from here until eternity, but that doesn't mean all modern cars are crap.
criminal penalties for copyright violation--that means federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
No federal prison for copyright violations (assuming that the corporate lawyers can convince a judge to sentence a baby-faced, 20-something first time offender to PRISON) is the same white-collar country-club that they send people to for mail fraud. Low security, 3 square meals, plenty of visitation.
It's still prison, but it's far from "OZ" on HBO.
Why not just give every phone an IP adress?
;D
Yeah right! And deny AT&T, SPrint, and MCI/Worldcom their God-given right to make capital on every call over 20 miles away?
Besides, think of all the jobs of people who have to lay and support the long distance cablign infrastructure! Would you put them on teh street just because there is technology available that is faster, cheaper and better?
I think the only way to settle this is to charge ISPs for revenue loss by long distance companies, since IP telephony is CLEARLY being used to *STEAL* long distance phone calls that the public should be paying for.
If you overclock the Xeons (And newer P4 CPUs) too high...
"Prepare to go to HyperThread."
"Go to HyperThread!"
*WHOOSH*
"My God, they've gone plaid!"
(Just to keep on topic, this is a very informative shootout between HT/non-HT Intel and AMD SMP processors setups here.)
Just couldn't resist the Spaceballs reference, tho!
are there going to be any PCI releases faster than the GeForce 2 MX400?
Probably not.
Actually, go to CompUSA and you'll find stacks and stacks of Radeon 7500 PCI and GeForce4 MX440 PCI cards, at not terribly jacked-up prices. IN fact, this Radeon 9000 has dual monitors and TV out for under $100, and that would SPANK a GF2 mx200.
PCI isn't fast enough for heavy graphics use
Actually, they did a review of PCI Radeons versus AGP ones last year (wish I could find the article), and at that time, the PCI card performed at about 80-90% of the AGP card with the same chipset and RAM. Even though AGP 8x has the possibility of running at 533MHz, not many systems will come close to being able to manage all that data across AGP, CPU, and memory. For average gamers, an older PC with only PCI slots... $100 for a GF4 MX440/64 meg PCI card will get them through to the next system upgrade; which brings us to:
you can probably get a replacement motherboard for under $50?
Very true, but you also need a CPU and new RAM (in most cases) as well. Almost everything is DDR now. Even if you get an ECS K7S5A, which can use your old PC133 RAM OR PC2100 DDR, you still have to drop 60-200 dollars for an Athlon to run on it.
Now, I'm all about cheap components and such, but if the guy has $100 for a vid card but doesn't have $400 for a CPU, RAM, mobo *AND* Vid card, maybe buying the Radeon 7500 or GF4mx is the right thing. Otherwise save the bucks and wait for the other $300, and get the DDR ram and nice CPU too.
Nothing bugs me quite like crackers. Skanky caucasion folks hanging around in overalls, doing meth. Always makin' the cops visit our trailer park...
What?? I've misunderstood the meaning of "crackers" in this context? Oh.
Nevermind!
(PS - I like cheese crackers with peanut butter.)
Glad someone else noticed the irony of a (non-redundant) post about redundancy that got modded as... Redundant. :)
You didn't even pay attention to the site you were cutting and pasting from. No receipts or other documents are required, and it is limit one claim per consumer. And I personally can guarantee that I have purchased at least one major-label CD during the perios in question.
Speak for yourself; unless more than two million people file a claim, everybody who bothers spending 60 seconds to fill out the simple form gets a check for $20. I'll take that.
I have no idea why anyone would ever need a TB drive at home...
I save almost everything I collect. Most of it is archive, but I currently have 8 Maxtor 120GB IDE drives in a RAID5 array, at 60% utilization.
This includes spidered caches of many websites, every email that I have received since the tragic formatting of my 230 meg hard drive in 1994, high-resolution copies of every digital photo I have ever taken or scanned, the usual downloads and media archives.
At my current rate of consumption, I expect to be using "online media" capacity of over 2TB in 3 years.
And I am a home user who can't really afford drives, even at a buck a gig.
Granted, my offline backups of "urgent" data only includes about 10 gigs, but I am really quite attached to my data. It's almost like a sickness.
use mirroring RAID. You get much faster data rates, and you have backups.
No, you have redundancy. Backups are the thing you do twice every night and take offsite to different, hazard-proof locations with physical security.
Right?!?
Who Slashdotted Slashdot?
Apple, apparently. The news about the Powerbooks brought a lot of Mac junkies online looking for more data, and Slashdot has a really good overview posted.
Steve, where are the software trade-in incentives? I own Photoshop 6 and 7, Dreamweaver MX, and Microsoft Office XP for the PC. [...] Why can I not trade in my two boxed Photoshop-for-PC copies and receive Photoshop 7 for Mac OS. The cost to move to a Mac is almost doubled by the $1500 worth of software that I already have for my PC.
Why would you ask Apple to take in software from some vendor, presumably just to throw it out, and GIVE you $1500 worth of some other company's software? Would you walk into Campell's headquaters, drop a case of opened cans of soup on their desk, and demand Progresso instead because you don't like the kind of bowls you bought to eat your soup in?
How about either 1) Ask the software vendors in question about a trade-up deal, or 2) Buy new software for Mac in the first place?
That's part of the TCO for owning a Mac, and one of the two big reasons (software availabity, especially games; plus hardware cost) that I finally abandoned Apple after 19 years of loyalty.
Second, why condone this sort of DANGEROUS and often illegal behavior.
Who peed in your Cheerios this morning, mate?
People are fully within their rights to risk their lives for others' humor. The problem is the morons who try to sue other people for their own (or deceased relative's) incompetence or bad luck.
If my son was crushed by an elevator doing something like this, I would mourn his loss forever, but who would I blame? It was clearly his free will, lack of sensability, and probably poor parenting that caused the situation.
Does the program's author happen to proclaim on his web page:
:)
"I am the CLIT Commander!"
?
(Sorry, it was just such a fun movie, I had to plug it.
It's funny that this is being raised as a question now... I have six Maxtor 120 gig drives on their way to me now, to go with the two 120s I already have, and they will be connected to a pair of ATA133 cards from Promise. Total cost is around $1200.
I intend to software RAID-5 them using Windows 2000 Server (and yes, I have a separate "basic disk" 30 gig boot drive). This will give me 840 gigabytes of space on my server. My data comsumption right now is 520 gigs worth of 40s, 80s and 120s. This is in music, movies, and above all, TV shows.
I will be backing up the drives on a set of 40/80GB DLT tapes, using a borrowed drive, and putting those tapes in a fireproof safe offsite. That will at least give me a static backup, until I can borrow the drive and buy more tapes again.
The risks as I see them are: total loss of data due to theft or natural catastrophie, power supply failure, etc. The other downside is the slow speed of software RAID-5 using 5400 RPM drives with 2 megs cache.
In this case, about 10 gigs of the data is what I consider "critical." I back this up regularly to CD-R and keep a copy offsite. The rest can likely be regenerated by re-ripping my CD and DVD collections (also susceptible to theft, or other loss), and downloading the TV shows from P2P, assuming that is still an option at the time of data loss.
Why do I collect so much data? I'm not sure. I think it is because I'm a packrat; and I also fear for the day when information, data, and media are gray market materials. I want to have the bits in my hands if and when the great big lock of doom is put on the world's multimedia.
Just thought I would chip in with my anecdotal experience and say, "Go for it."