Like many of the posters here, I've kept around good hardware that works because it works and it's already paid for (please ignore my credit card balances for now...)
My primary archiving box and storage server is a Mirror Drive Door Power Mac G4 tower, which is awesome because it holds 2 DVD drives and 4 hard disks, which is better than most other Apple towers (with the exception of the Mac Pros.) It serves up what I need with OS X 10.5 and whenever I end up needing more storage, I'll throw a SATA card in there to use newer, faster, larger drives.
Sure it's unsupported hardware, but it's solid, it's relatively compact (compared with G5 towers and Mac Pros) and doesn't gobble that much power (survives w/ a ~ 300W power supply.) It gets the job done, and gets no complaints from me or the wife about its performance. Yay for old hardware that works!
I'm not going to get into details, but I'm sure every single one of you reading this can think of a time where folks losing an argument (or folks who ended up with some more campaign donations) realized that this issue they are dealing with is a moral issue that must be addressed.
Maybe they fucked up their planet big time and bailed. Wonder where they went? Maybe we can get someone to educate them on the problems of abusing the environment and temper the fever their old planet has so they don't mess up another one.
Or, maybe they just bought too many carbon credits from the Kang and Kodos Intergalactic Planting Company.
I also have renewed good feelings of purchasing the previous-gen 2.6 GHz 15" MacBook Pro. Not only do I have more expansion options, but I have fewer restrictions on what I can do with my content. Fancy nVidia card be damned, I'm very happy.
I haven't read the whole opinion, because IANAL, and I hate the bloviating that goes on in them.
It seems, though, that if the property was forfeited by its original owner, and the new owner of the property provided it to the police because of things that the previous owner did to it, there should not be a legal issue.
It's kind of like when Paris Hilton failed to pay the rent on her Public Storage (or whatever) space, and the landlord sold the property inside. When the nudie pictures and private journals inside were made public, she had no legal recourse because it was NO LONGER HER PROPERTY by virtue of her non-payment of rent and the statutory forfeiture of the contents of the space.
Then again, I just tried to cite Paris Hilton in a legal argument. Whatever...
You can convince a civil rights attorney that "freetardation", or the retardation of your intellect due to being completely zealous about free software ideals beyond the scope of normal advocacy, is a handicap. If you can, you've got a winner. Better yet, convince the attorney that your free software zealotry is actually a religious movement, and you've got money coming out of the wazoo!
Because even as someone who works on those models, I really hate opening the glass/aluminum iMac models. Suction cups and dust rollers bug the crap out of me.
I would not, however, ever pay Apple for RAM upgrades. EVER. Unless I hit the lottery and didn't care about the extra $$$.
I agree with the other poster. If it takes you 40 minutes to do a hard drive in a MacBook Pro, unless you're a consumer, you have no business being paid to swap drives in a MacBook Pro.
Those machines are also EASIER than the old 15" PowerBook, where one would have to more artfully bend the metal clips above the optical drive back into place before reinstalling the top case. That procedure was the indicator of a tech's experience on Macs.
And if you strip screws on a MacBook Pro, you need to throw your cheap Chinese 99c store tools away and buy some Wiha drivers (or another quality set of tools.)
I remember hearing about the 4.6GB of storage back in the mid-90s, and it was quite underwhelming when it came out. MO never really took off, long-term. This, I think, may be different.
If the technology in this stuff pans out and can be developed economically and scale well over time (MO didn't), I think it has some real opportunities to take off in certain sectors. It's not for everyone, but neither are rackmounted RAIDs, iSCSI and tape loaders.
For naysayers: do any of you think that this company WANTS to release a boat anchor device like it seems to be going by their pictures? If what the company says is true, and this is not vaporware, the physical size of the drive may be a worthwhile trade-off in terms of capacity and reliability. As technology is developed, processes shrink, things get cheaper, and storage capacity gets bigger. I remember old MO drives being big, and as some pointed, out, a single CD-R costing $40.
I'm not going to buy this thing, but I'll certainly be watching its development in the marketplace. It's interesting to watch, just like I did the Apex back in the day.
I wonder if the adipose tissue would be a good source of biodiesel? Would that mean that tubby folks like myself would be contributing more to a green world than skinny vegan tree huggers?
I'd prefer Social Security not even be there and let me spend the rest of my working years (I'm only 25, so enough of them) saving my own goddamn money.
Though I do agree with you, I'd say the bigger debate would be whether or not CEO x or CEO y in fact fucked up in the first place. Same with a possible sacrificial lamb of an IT person.
But I'll admit that about 6 years ago, when moving from one old laptop to another, I accidentally erased all of the data from my main and my backup Jaz disks before ensuring that every piece of data from 6th grade through my first year of college was backed up onto new media. It wasn't that I didn't have a good strategy for backup: it was adequate for my needs at the time. It's not that I didn't know I shouldn't format disks with important stuff on them: I figured I had transferred it already. At age 18, I didn't have the money for recovery services, nor did I have much of a printed record of anything.
What happens when you fuck up that big? Take it like a man, and live with the shitty consequences. Know that there's nobody to blame but yourself, but learn from that catastrophe so it never happens again.
It took me 6 years to get my BA. Part of it was laziness on may part, but if the government was searching through my records, maybe they would find that I could have graduated sooner if there were more sections of the goddamn classes I was trying to register for. Then again, that's what I get for going to a state school. Shoulda gone private and not had to rely on the government subsidy. Oh well. Can't be hypocritical there...
As another poster pointed out, if you take money from the government, you should be held to account more than the general public for the use of the funds.
Slashdot Mirror
Like many of the posters here, I've kept around good hardware that works because it works and it's already paid for (please ignore my credit card balances for now...)
My primary archiving box and storage server is a Mirror Drive Door Power Mac G4 tower, which is awesome because it holds 2 DVD drives and 4 hard disks, which is better than most other Apple towers (with the exception of the Mac Pros.) It serves up what I need with OS X 10.5 and whenever I end up needing more storage, I'll throw a SATA card in there to use newer, faster, larger drives.
Sure it's unsupported hardware, but it's solid, it's relatively compact (compared with G5 towers and Mac Pros) and doesn't gobble that much power (survives w/ a ~ 300W power supply.) It gets the job done, and gets no complaints from me or the wife about its performance. Yay for old hardware that works!
I'm not going to get into details, but I'm sure every single one of you reading this can think of a time where folks losing an argument (or folks who ended up with some more campaign donations) realized that this issue they are dealing with is a moral issue that must be addressed.
Maybe they fucked up their planet big time and bailed. Wonder where they went? Maybe we can get someone to educate them on the problems of abusing the environment and temper the fever their old planet has so they don't mess up another one.
Or, maybe they just bought too many carbon credits from the Kang and Kodos Intergalactic Planting Company.
I also have renewed good feelings of purchasing the previous-gen 2.6 GHz 15" MacBook Pro. Not only do I have more expansion options, but I have fewer restrictions on what I can do with my content. Fancy nVidia card be damned, I'm very happy.
I haven't read the whole opinion, because IANAL, and I hate the bloviating that goes on in them.
It seems, though, that if the property was forfeited by its original owner, and the new owner of the property provided it to the police because of things that the previous owner did to it, there should not be a legal issue.
It's kind of like when Paris Hilton failed to pay the rent on her Public Storage (or whatever) space, and the landlord sold the property inside. When the nudie pictures and private journals inside were made public, she had no legal recourse because it was NO LONGER HER PROPERTY by virtue of her non-payment of rent and the statutory forfeiture of the contents of the space.
Then again, I just tried to cite Paris Hilton in a legal argument. Whatever...
Asking Slashdot readers to stick to science, refrain from discussing conspiracies, AND taking the fun out of a beowulf cluster reference?
This submitter is a black belt troll and you all know it!
In Democrat-heavy districts. After all, these things are created to benefit the evil evil Republicans.
You can convince a civil rights attorney that "freetardation", or the retardation of your intellect due to being completely zealous about free software ideals beyond the scope of normal advocacy, is a handicap. If you can, you've got a winner. Better yet, convince the attorney that your free software zealotry is actually a religious movement, and you've got money coming out of the wazoo!
Because even as someone who works on those models, I really hate opening the glass/aluminum iMac models. Suction cups and dust rollers bug the crap out of me.
I would not, however, ever pay Apple for RAM upgrades. EVER. Unless I hit the lottery and didn't care about the extra $$$.
I agree with the other poster. If it takes you 40 minutes to do a hard drive in a MacBook Pro, unless you're a consumer, you have no business being paid to swap drives in a MacBook Pro.
Those machines are also EASIER than the old 15" PowerBook, where one would have to more artfully bend the metal clips above the optical drive back into place before reinstalling the top case. That procedure was the indicator of a tech's experience on Macs.
And if you strip screws on a MacBook Pro, you need to throw your cheap Chinese 99c store tools away and buy some Wiha drivers (or another quality set of tools.)
I'm just saying...
It might be helpful.
Which means there is no going back once the disk is written.
Just thought I'd mention it.
http://www.inphase-technologies.com/products/default.asp?tnn=3
I remember hearing about the 4.6GB of storage back in the mid-90s, and it was quite underwhelming when it came out. MO never really took off, long-term. This, I think, may be different.
If the technology in this stuff pans out and can be developed economically and scale well over time (MO didn't), I think it has some real opportunities to take off in certain sectors. It's not for everyone, but neither are rackmounted RAIDs, iSCSI and tape loaders.
For naysayers: do any of you think that this company WANTS to release a boat anchor device like it seems to be going by their pictures? If what the company says is true, and this is not vaporware, the physical size of the drive may be a worthwhile trade-off in terms of capacity and reliability. As technology is developed, processes shrink, things get cheaper, and storage capacity gets bigger. I remember old MO drives being big, and as some pointed, out, a single CD-R costing $40.
I'm not going to buy this thing, but I'll certainly be watching its development in the marketplace. It's interesting to watch, just like I did the Apex back in the day.
But can it find my keys without destroying the surrounding environment and then deliver the payload back to me?
Was the guy at Circuit City Scooter Libby?
He just can't get a break...
I wonder if the adipose tissue would be a good source of biodiesel? Would that mean that tubby folks like myself would be contributing more to a green world than skinny vegan tree huggers?
You've looked at my insurance coverage?
If I'm maimed tomorrow, I'll be more than covered without Social Security, thank you.
Wow, there are now three VM solutions built right into the kernel? What are they going to do next? Merge emacs?
I'd prefer Social Security not even be there and let me spend the rest of my working years (I'm only 25, so enough of them) saving my own goddamn money.
I think the sarcasm about support for a long-since-abandoned OS was not understood properly.
I don't know what I'd do without emacs on my Beige G3 tower
Though I do agree with you, I'd say the bigger debate would be whether or not CEO x or CEO y in fact fucked up in the first place. Same with a possible sacrificial lamb of an IT person.
But I'll admit that about 6 years ago, when moving from one old laptop to another, I accidentally erased all of the data from my main and my backup Jaz disks before ensuring that every piece of data from 6th grade through my first year of college was backed up onto new media. It wasn't that I didn't have a good strategy for backup: it was adequate for my needs at the time. It's not that I didn't know I shouldn't format disks with important stuff on them: I figured I had transferred it already. At age 18, I didn't have the money for recovery services, nor did I have much of a printed record of anything.
What happens when you fuck up that big? Take it like a man, and live with the shitty consequences. Know that there's nobody to blame but yourself, but learn from that catastrophe so it never happens again.
Yeah, especially when you buy stuff that isn't based on a ratified spec and then complain about interoperability. Smart folks!
It took me 6 years to get my BA. Part of it was laziness on may part, but if the government was searching through my records, maybe they would find that I could have graduated sooner if there were more sections of the goddamn classes I was trying to register for. Then again, that's what I get for going to a state school. Shoulda gone private and not had to rely on the government subsidy. Oh well. Can't be hypocritical there...
As another poster pointed out, if you take money from the government, you should be held to account more than the general public for the use of the funds.