Nope. I just buy them at CompUSA or Best Buy. Pretty standard fare. I've actually had better luck with the hole in the wall shops compared to them. But seeing that big box stores have put the locals out of business, I don't havemuch choice other than mail order now...
Actually the one that smoked was in a completely different system a few years back (it was a 4 gig drive). And it smoked because the WD was so shitty that they left a solder bead on the power connector that short the 12v line. I'm lucky it didn't host the rest of the system or burn out the PS. I remember taking the drive out and looking for the cause of the problem and there was a big glob of solder bridging two of the power lines on the circuit board right where the connector gets soldered on. That's specifically what made me never go back to WD.
I did have the drives packed tightly into the internal 3.5" bays. But I recently changed that and they have a good amount of spacing now. I found two more bays at the top of the case I didn't notice before (above the top CD-ROM bay on a plate just below the top of thecase). The system also has two new fans, but I still have a drive that is failing in that system according to the 'smartctl' utility. It's only the Maxtor that is going to fail and the new Hitachis seem to be doing ok after a month. I still think that the problem is the Maxtors that I bought from CompUSA. And WD, I just don't trust them as far as I can throw them.
Well... I actually tested out all of the hardware along the way. I swapped out the PS after the last set of drive failures, I also put a power filtering UPS between the house electrical and the system, and I got new IDE cables. The only thing I haven't changed is the IDE controllers and I highly doubt that those would cause drive failures since they only deal with low voltages on the IDE bus. I suspect the drive manufacturers.
That's usually been the single source of the most noise in my systems. HD manufacturers need to make quieter drives. I used to be a hardcore Maxtor fanatic, but with three out of four drive failures (250 gig drives) in only two months, I am hunting for a new manufacturer. I bought Hitachis to replace the dead Maxtors but I am leeary of them since their technology used to be IBM and it only took one "DeathStar" drive from IBM to convince me that they made shitty drives. I can't stand Western Digital since I had three drives in a row fail from them over the course of a year and two fo those were replacements for WD drives that died before. One of them even smoked in my case when I installed it! Nearly caused a fire. Thanks WD but no thanks. So that leaves Seagate which I haven't had any experience with so far. I miss Micropolis who used to make super quiet SCSI A/V drives back in the 90s.
Considering how badly modern television in the U.S. sucks (Reality TV? Who fucking cares? At least the brits do theirs more like docos) compared to the U.K., it's surprising that we don't download as much. Back when sites like BuckTV.net used to be up, I found myself downloading programs mostly from the U.K. or older U.S. shows that aren't yet available on DVD. I was able to see the excellent series "The Worst Week of My Life" just a week behind british viewers thanks to BuckTV and eDonkey. The series finaally premiered here on BBC America six months later and with commercials. There has to be someone out there who will address the needs of those of us who want high quality programming (movies and TV series) without commercials, on demand, and from around the world. As far as I can tell, this was the closest thing going...
Idiot. Not a holiday. A real permanent move. This entails moving all of my posessions overseas, finding a job that will pay me the equivalent of what I get here, buying a home that is about the same in terms of the cost of living and neighborhood and the legal mumbo jumbo of becoming a citizen of another country in which I wasn't born. That's a tall order and is going to cost a lot more than airfare. Also consider my having to move a wife and kid with me. No... you're the shmuck. Now get back to your meatbeating rah rah "patriotism"
Imagine playing at a laser tag arena with this set up. You don't need the laser tag arena to has props any more. Just use this to superimpose Doom 3 characters over your friends and populate the arena with "ghost bots" (bots in the game without a real physical counterpart in the laser tag arena). Now THAT would be an awesome experience. I've played laser tag once and it was a lot of fun, but it really needed more atmosphere than the arena actually presented (ie. Needed to be more the like the excellent games Doom or Quake). With that said, I still think Quake I was the best FPS ever created. It had great atmospherics so you didn't even have to play the game if you didn't want to. My friends and I just used it as a way to IM each other with a much cooler interface.
Easy. I hate being stuck here but I have no hopes of being able to afford to leave for greener pastures (EU). BTW I did read the article. Very interesting. I can relate to the guy quite a bit in terms of having the compulsion to count. When I was a kid I had a collection of notebooks in which I wrote numbers by hand in the following fashion:
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14
etc...
I couldn't stop. I would spend hours doing this because it was fun and comforting. I also get very bothered when objects on my desk or in my bedroom get moved out of the order I placed them in. I need patterns. I also will not cross a a crosswalk unless the sign says "Walk" even if there is no car coming or everyone else is crossing anyway. I feel like I am part of a machine and I must obey all rules. I also have a very hard time knowing how to react to other people. I actually have to think about what reaction to project in most situations. But these are just personality quirks though as I know I'm not autistic or obessive compulsive and I'm definitely not a savant. But I definitely feel for the guy and people like him.:)
He's also a christian. Now why is it that potentially 51% of the voters in the U.S. are opposed to gays and probably more of them think that you can't be gay AND christian at the same time. It's a sad and twisted country I live in.
Hey... you like buying a computer every two or three years? Fine. I want mine to last almost ten. I bought a dual processor P II box back in 1997. It's still working as my central home server and still very relevant to today's hardware (USB stuff, etc...) Not to mention, you should look through my JEs to see what you can really do with a box that has a lot of horsepower. It's much better to sink a lot of money into a super powerful box that will be able to run all applications you want for nearly the net decade than it is to buy a cheap box now.
I've lived in and completely rewired (electrical) and wire (network) two old homes (1905 and 1914 respectively) during the past five years. The one thing that is key to being able to account for future developments is having at least two hollow channels from top to bottom that can be accessed on every floor. Typically, your plumbing is already run like that. Electrical less so, but it should be. And phone/data also should be. So since you're building from the ground up, make sure to have one channel for electricity and another for phone/data or just data if you plan on using VoIP.
I don't think gadgets are really the way to go here. What you want is to make sure that you account for maximum bandwidth from each room to a centralized location. Cat 5 enhanced or Cat 6 would be currently good choices. As time progresses it appears that having every room wired allows you to do a multitude of things sine Ethernet seems like it will virtuall carry EVERYTHING (Multimedia, Internet, Phone, what have you). Probably a minimum of two drops per room with at least on drop up close to the ceiling for mounting a wireless access point in any location or a wired camera if you want something before those wireless TPZ come down in price.
Next, I would suggest that you really don't need gadgets as much as you need a really good powerful centralized home server. Dual (or more if you can afford it) CPUs is a great way to go. Think about it as your central app/file server first and get a few laptops to be used as thin clients. Then add to that box the hardware to become a VoIP "call manager" and the laptops can double as phone stations in addition to some 802.11 Cisco SIP Phones for more practical use. Also add TV functionality to that server so that it can be a PVR with your laptops again working as viewing stations. (If you're Linux based, this is all very easy to do) You can then set up another dedicated machine wherever you have your real TV to act as another head for the PVR on your server. That's why the wiring is important... with Gigabit over copper you can watch live TV from your MythTV PVR.:)
It' not (and never has been) about the gadgets, it's all about the hardware and what you do with it. Best of luck!
I had a Vorbis listening party this past Summer at my home. I told everyone to bring their favorite CDs and that I would rip their favorite track from the disc using MP3 and Vorbis. I did so at 64, 128, 256 and 384 k bitrates. We had a wonderful time conducting blind listening comparisons using both the AKG and Sennheiser cans as well as my Tannoy studio monitors, Yamaha stereo speakers and the Bose 901 series loudspeakers. (Each set in a room seasoned with the best in acoustics) Under such discriminating environments, Vorbis beat MP3 hadns down every time. Some people couldn't even tell the diffrerence between the 64k Vorbis and the 256k MP3. ONly going to prove my point that Ogg Vorbis is FAR superior to any other codec.
After we had dinner (a fine French meal with wine if you must know), it was time for more listening tests. Initially the crowd was a little resistant, but by the time we'd listened to the wonderfully executed "Get Ur Freak On" by Missy Elliot for a fifth time, the crowd agreed that Ogg Vorbis was the winner hands down.
It was a wonderful day and a great victory for Ogg Vorbis as I told everyone present that now that they were aware of the quality the Vorbis provides, they should show all of their friends and family. I provided them all with archive DLTs of the test set (music that they all brought with them) so that they could give it to their IT guys at work and have them load it up on the their Linux or Unix servers and share with their colleagues. They all promised that they would talk to their IT guys.
So, this article has no idea what it's going on about because it isn't aware of the change that is taking the nation by storm with regard to Ogg Vorbis. I urge all of you to show your family and friends the right way to archive digital audio media and advise them to abandon MP3 and proprietary codecs. If you don't then it will be on your own hands...
Whilst I appreciate being modded up as informative for the parent post, I find it scary that someone may have actually taken my post regarding sphinxes and gnomes to heart. After all, there is a major flaw in the previous post. I left out the most important detail that Bill Gates was an escapee from the Roswell UFO crash in the 40s. Hence his power to subjugate gnomes and corral giant trolls (Ballmer).:P Sorry for the oversight.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that your SIG? "Idiot"? ;P
Is Google finally... EVIL? ;P
Nope. I just buy them at CompUSA or Best Buy. Pretty standard fare. I've actually had better luck with the hole in the wall shops compared to them. But seeing that big box stores have put the locals out of business, I don't havemuch choice other than mail order now...
Hehehe... my friends say the same thing. They still don't get why I move 215 gigs of data a night either.
Actually the one that smoked was in a completely different system a few years back (it was a 4 gig drive). And it smoked because the WD was so shitty that they left a solder bead on the power connector that short the 12v line. I'm lucky it didn't host the rest of the system or burn out the PS. I remember taking the drive out and looking for the cause of the problem and there was a big glob of solder bridging two of the power lines on the circuit board right where the connector gets soldered on. That's specifically what made me never go back to WD.
I did have the drives packed tightly into the internal 3.5" bays. But I recently changed that and they have a good amount of spacing now. I found two more bays at the top of the case I didn't notice before (above the top CD-ROM bay on a plate just below the top of thecase). The system also has two new fans, but I still have a drive that is failing in that system according to the 'smartctl' utility. It's only the Maxtor that is going to fail and the new Hitachis seem to be doing ok after a month. I still think that the problem is the Maxtors that I bought from CompUSA. And WD, I just don't trust them as far as I can throw them.
Well... I actually tested out all of the hardware along the way. I swapped out the PS after the last set of drive failures, I also put a power filtering UPS between the house electrical and the system, and I got new IDE cables. The only thing I haven't changed is the IDE controllers and I highly doubt that those would cause drive failures since they only deal with low voltages on the IDE bus. I suspect the drive manufacturers.
That's usually been the single source of the most noise in my systems. HD manufacturers need to make quieter drives. I used to be a hardcore Maxtor fanatic, but with three out of four drive failures (250 gig drives) in only two months, I am hunting for a new manufacturer. I bought Hitachis to replace the dead Maxtors but I am leeary of them since their technology used to be IBM and it only took one "DeathStar" drive from IBM to convince me that they made shitty drives. I can't stand Western Digital since I had three drives in a row fail from them over the course of a year and two fo those were replacements for WD drives that died before. One of them even smoked in my case when I installed it! Nearly caused a fire. Thanks WD but no thanks. So that leaves Seagate which I haven't had any experience with so far. I miss Micropolis who used to make super quiet SCSI A/V drives back in the 90s.
Considering how badly modern television in the U.S. sucks (Reality TV? Who fucking cares? At least the brits do theirs more like docos) compared to the U.K., it's surprising that we don't download as much. Back when sites like BuckTV.net used to be up, I found myself downloading programs mostly from the U.K. or older U.S. shows that aren't yet available on DVD. I was able to see the excellent series "The Worst Week of My Life" just a week behind british viewers thanks to BuckTV and eDonkey. The series finaally premiered here on BBC America six months later and with commercials. There has to be someone out there who will address the needs of those of us who want high quality programming (movies and TV series) without commercials, on demand, and from around the world. As far as I can tell, this was the closest thing going...
My my my... I hit a nerve with all the little junior troll dolls didn't I? ;P What fun!
But... users never know what's good for them. ;P
Idiot. Not a holiday. A real permanent move. This entails moving all of my posessions overseas, finding a job that will pay me the equivalent of what I get here, buying a home that is about the same in terms of the cost of living and neighborhood and the legal mumbo jumbo of becoming a citizen of another country in which I wasn't born. That's a tall order and is going to cost a lot more than airfare. Also consider my having to move a wife and kid with me. No... you're the shmuck. Now get back to your meatbeating rah rah "patriotism"
Imagine playing at a laser tag arena with this set up. You don't need the laser tag arena to has props any more. Just use this to superimpose Doom 3 characters over your friends and populate the arena with "ghost bots" (bots in the game without a real physical counterpart in the laser tag arena). Now THAT would be an awesome experience. I've played laser tag once and it was a lot of fun, but it really needed more atmosphere than the arena actually presented (ie. Needed to be more the like the excellent games Doom or Quake). With that said, I still think Quake I was the best FPS ever created. It had great atmospherics so you didn't even have to play the game if you didn't want to. My friends and I just used it as a way to IM each other with a much cooler interface.
Easy. I hate being stuck here but I have no hopes of being able to afford to leave for greener pastures (EU). BTW I did read the article. Very interesting. I can relate to the guy quite a bit in terms of having the compulsion to count. When I was a kid I had a collection of notebooks in which I wrote numbers by hand in the following fashion:
:)
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14
etc...
I couldn't stop. I would spend hours doing this because it was fun and comforting. I also get very bothered when objects on my desk or in my bedroom get moved out of the order I placed them in. I need patterns. I also will not cross a a crosswalk unless the sign says "Walk" even if there is no car coming or everyone else is crossing anyway. I feel like I am part of a machine and I must obey all rules. I also have a very hard time knowing how to react to other people. I actually have to think about what reaction to project in most situations. But these are just personality quirks though as I know I'm not autistic or obessive compulsive and I'm definitely not a savant. But I definitely feel for the guy and people like him.
He's also a christian. Now why is it that potentially 51% of the voters in the U.S. are opposed to gays and probably more of them think that you can't be gay AND christian at the same time. It's a sad and twisted country I live in.
Hey... you like buying a computer every two or three years? Fine. I want mine to last almost ten. I bought a dual processor P II box back in 1997. It's still working as my central home server and still very relevant to today's hardware (USB stuff, etc...) Not to mention, you should look through my JEs to see what you can really do with a box that has a lot of horsepower. It's much better to sink a lot of money into a super powerful box that will be able to run all applications you want for nearly the net decade than it is to buy a cheap box now.
Another cool person to add to my friends list! :)
I know you may be being facetious, but most of your posts indicate that you are more of a DIY cool guy. Onto my friends list you go. :)
I've lived in and completely rewired (electrical) and wire (network) two old homes (1905 and 1914 respectively) during the past five years. The one thing that is key to being able to account for future developments is having at least two hollow channels from top to bottom that can be accessed on every floor. Typically, your plumbing is already run like that. Electrical less so, but it should be. And phone/data also should be. So since you're building from the ground up, make sure to have one channel for electricity and another for phone/data or just data if you plan on using VoIP.
I don't think gadgets are really the way to go here. What you want is to make sure that you account for maximum bandwidth from each room to a centralized location. Cat 5 enhanced or Cat 6 would be currently good choices. As time progresses it appears that having every room wired allows you to do a multitude of things sine Ethernet seems like it will virtuall carry EVERYTHING (Multimedia, Internet, Phone, what have you). Probably a minimum of two drops per room with at least on drop up close to the ceiling for mounting a wireless access point in any location or a wired camera if you want something before those wireless TPZ come down in price.
:)
Next, I would suggest that you really don't need gadgets as much as you need a really good powerful centralized home server. Dual (or more if you can afford it) CPUs is a great way to go. Think about it as your central app/file server first and get a few laptops to be used as thin clients. Then add to that box the hardware to become a VoIP "call manager" and the laptops can double as phone stations in addition to some 802.11 Cisco SIP Phones for more practical use. Also add TV functionality to that server so that it can be a PVR with your laptops again working as viewing stations. (If you're Linux based, this is all very easy to do) You can then set up another dedicated machine wherever you have your real TV to act as another head for the PVR on your server. That's why the wiring is important... with Gigabit over copper you can watch live TV from your MythTV PVR.
It' not (and never has been) about the gadgets, it's all about the hardware and what you do with it. Best of luck!
Go to http://www.preventsenseofhumorloss.com/ for information about how you TOO can prevent sense of humor loss. ;P
Life at the Ogg House:
;P
I had a Vorbis listening party this past Summer at my home. I told everyone to bring their favorite CDs and that I would rip their favorite track from the disc using MP3 and Vorbis. I did so at 64, 128, 256 and 384 k bitrates. We had a wonderful time conducting blind listening comparisons using both the AKG and Sennheiser cans as well as my Tannoy studio monitors, Yamaha stereo speakers and the Bose 901 series loudspeakers. (Each set in a room seasoned with the best in acoustics) Under such discriminating environments, Vorbis beat MP3 hadns down every time. Some people couldn't even tell the diffrerence between the 64k Vorbis and the 256k MP3. ONly going to prove my point that Ogg Vorbis is FAR superior to any other codec.
After we had dinner (a fine French meal with wine if you must know), it was time for more listening tests. Initially the crowd was a little resistant, but by the time we'd listened to the wonderfully executed "Get Ur Freak On" by Missy Elliot for a fifth time, the crowd agreed that Ogg Vorbis was the winner hands down.
It was a wonderful day and a great victory for Ogg Vorbis as I told everyone present that now that they were aware of the quality the Vorbis provides, they should show all of their friends and family. I provided them all with archive DLTs of the test set (music that they all brought with them) so that they could give it to their IT guys at work and have them load it up on the their Linux or Unix servers and share with their colleagues. They all promised that they would talk to their IT guys.
So, this article has no idea what it's going on about because it isn't aware of the change that is taking the nation by storm with regard to Ogg Vorbis. I urge all of you to show your family and friends the right way to archive digital audio media and advise them to abandon MP3 and proprietary codecs. If you don't then it will be on your own hands...
Laugh it's funny!
Shhh! Don't harsh my buzz man. ;P This is a Kodak moment if there ever was one and I just took a screenshot to prove it to my friends.
Whilst I appreciate being modded up as informative for the parent post, I find it scary that someone may have actually taken my post regarding sphinxes and gnomes to heart. After all, there is a major flaw in the previous post. I left out the most important detail that Bill Gates was an escapee from the Roswell UFO crash in the 40s. Hence his power to subjugate gnomes and corral giant trolls (Ballmer). :P Sorry for the oversight.
...The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership. Summer Swim anyone?