Sanyo and Yamaha still make SCSI CD-RW units. Yamaha's are actually ATAPI drives with a SCSI converter. Anyone else who sells a SCSI unit at this point bought it from Sanyo.
I swore by Yamaha SCSI drives until I realized that a Lite-On 32x12x48x ATAPI unit PLUS an ACard IDE to SCSI converter is still cheaper.
So I bought several of those, and now I don't care when my optical drives break.
Basically, the author goes from "Here's all the cool stuff Gecko can do." to "...but it doesn't look like IE and some pages don't detect it properly."
Is that Mozilla's fault? Moz works better and behaves more reliably than any cross-platform GUI program I can think of.
More than that, its unique features (image permissions, javascript controls) barely rate a passing mention by the author. Those are killer features. I'd hate to use a browser that didn't have them.
I felt that the author - and most people writing browser comparisons right now - was too heavily biased by IE-related experiences; I thought he was writing more toward "This is what IE does and this is how Moz is different" rather than an actual browser review.
Try using IE and Moz over a 28.8kpbs internet connection and THEN tell me which you like better.
The 740X is a Quantum design. If you aren't used to "quantum-type" noises, they can be a little off-putting. Seeks are usually a little bit louder than most other brands and of course there's a worrisome "THOK" sound when you power one down. Those are characteristics of Quantum IDE drives.
I understand there are vast difference in the quality of the 740X depending on country of manufacture as well. Usually Singapore is implicated as the "bad" source for drives. I have a good number of 740Xs (nine, at last count, all BB versions). I *don't* find my drives to be loud in the least - WD800BBs and Fireball ASes are both much worse.
Maxtor has a no-quibble exchange policy. If you think the drive is loud, they WILL take it back and ship you another. If it really bothers you, look into using it. Ball-bearing drives regardless of manufacture get louder over time.
Mickey, who likes to deny that he's a WD employee, over at Storagereview.com says the top-of-the-line model will probably, actually be three 66.7GB platters while the lesser models the in lineup will remain 60GB/platter.
IIRC, that's the same thing WD did for their 100GB drive.
If you're the Sivar who frequents SR, you'll probably know me btter as Mercutio.
I've got three of those 250-CD binders full of DVD rips, courtesy of my good friends at WantedList and some similar services. That's just adult titles, mind you. I'm about two-thirds of the way done with my fourth.
I agree that licensed content is entirely too easy to come by but I have a good time finding stuff from, uh, talented amateurs.
And now that my "ex" has decided she's gay, I even have someone to help me look.:)
Fish freak me out. They're always looking at you with beady little eyes. Birds are every possible kind of messy.
Dogs require a little too much maintenence (gotta get home to let Spot out to pee).
But my cats - a pound rescue and a Scottish Fold I've had for several years now - are great geek pets. First of all, they love the computers. Bat-the-cursor, lay on the keyboard, sleep on the giant monitor. They appreciate all the simple geekish joys.
They basically come toilet trained, and clumping litter means two minutes of litter-box cleaning three or four times a week. No big deal. You keep a brush around to keep the shedding down to a minimum (it's not bad on shorthairs, anyway), get 'em a few toy mice and a laser pointer (all household pets, including my ex-'s fish, will play with a laser pointer), and they're basically good to go.
Cats can cuddle up on your lap and are plenty vocal (mostly) if you're in need of another voice. Purring is a smoothing thing. It always relaxes me, anyway.
Cats also live a good, long life. My parents had a cat for 21 years. They're truly an animal for the long-term. They're just all-round good pets.
No. Probably you don't. RAID5 parity calculations pretty much kill write performance on every array I've ever seen. RAID5 gives a lot of bang for your buck, but if you want for-real disk performance AND redundancy, RAID10 is the way to go.
I started at Purdue four years later but your story doesn't sonud much different from mine. I fucking wilted at Purdue. Couldn't stand the place. Or the CS or CPT programs. My personal favorite was a professor who told me he'd never let me pass his class after I told him I found his religious references in class slightly offensive.
I also had a Calc prof who would lecture for up to five minutes in English before lapsing into Spanish... and wouldn't write anything on the chalkboard.
The feeling I got from Purdue is that they should just fire everyone they have teaching and start over.
Maxtor does rock. Put simply, after that down period about six years ago, they got their sh*t together and started making a quality product, and they haven't given up. The price is right, the performance excellent (good to see Maxtor picked up Quantum's tendency to make fast-seeking IDE units.
The other really good product right now is Western Digital. They're IDE only now, unfortunately, but it take a lot of balls to stand up and recall drives from consumers, to fix a manufacturing flaw. They did it, and they earned my respect.
Samsung drives also have a really strong reputation.
In comparison we have IBM, whose last 15k SCSI unit doesn't even best Maxtor's latest 10k Atlas, and whose 7200rpm ATA models are limited by either the "Deathstar" rep or the limitations of a specificied Powered On Hours of Service specification that no one else seems to be using.
We also have Seagate, which makes some fantastic and unique products (the last 50-pin 7200rpm SCSI drive) in SCSI, and has IDE products that, frankly, suck dick. U-series drives have lousy reliability and performance that's matched by two-year old drives that are 1000rpm SLOWER. Even worse, WD's recent 5400rpm products come to wit 2% of Seagate's amazingly quite 7200rpm Barracuda IV in most benchmarks.
I'd *really* like to know where you heard that. I correspond from time to time with folks with @maxtor.com addresses and never heard that particular rumor.
I suppose I disagree on the very basic point that a hard disk is a commodity purchase. RAM is a commodity. I can buy a stick from any of the major manufacturers and know that I'm getting more or less the same level of quality.
Every hard disk on the market right now has some kind of distinguishing characteristic. Folks doing equipment purchasing may not be *aware* of the distinctions, but they are present nonetheless.
Want a high-performance 5400rpm ATA disk? Look at Western Digital's *AB-series drives. Quiet SCSI? Fujitsu has/had that market cornered. Performance at any cost? Seagate's X15-36LP.
I can't say any similar thing about true commodity items like RAM or floppy disk drives.
--
First off, I'm already a reseller, but I've never operated a storefront.
Here's what I like to see: 1. Carry the stuff big stores don't: Keep a few lease-returned systems (and ESPECIALLY monitors) around, Y-power adaptors, silver heatsink compound, ISA and PCI video cards... Simple stuff like that will probably at least get me to come back.
2. Service needs to be your life. Keep the geek in the back happy, and send him on the odd no-charge housecall for your small business customers. Pay a bonus for good, fast work. Don't nickel and dime service customers (installing RAM or an optical drive should be free) when an hour of your tech's time is $100. Service can also be used to build incredible goodwill.
3. Interview your customers if they're looking for whole systems. Can't stress that point enough. Talk to them. Most people stop at price.
4. Don't sell all generic. Don't sell all namebrand. Don't sell all retail. Don't sell all whitebox. The mix is important.
5. Don't stock crap equipment. Step away from the Jetway system board and the truly generic NIC. Name-brand RAM is a good thing to see, too.
My setup is a nice, easy to cool Duron 950MHz with an ATI Rage VIVO, a JVC SVHS VCR for tuning/additional capture, and staggering amounts of hard disk space. Local storage on that box is maybe 360GB (three WD1200ABs), but the storage available to me is approaching 2TB. I use Windows 2000 Pro and a Philips Acoustic Edge to complete the picture.
I cap in highres MPEG1. Why MPEG1? Throw a high enough bitrate (four or five GBs an hour) at it and you can't tell it from MPEG-2 anyway, plus I can then use Virtualdub, probably the single greatest GPL'd software package available for Windows, to do all my editing and encoding work. I haven't found anything that works on MPEG-2 that is nearly so nice as vdub.
It works marvelously. I maybe lose five frames of video per hour captured. Editing out commercials takes only seconds... and then the edited video gets passed to one of my faster boxes for procesing down to a Divx.AVI file or shrinkage to VCD format.
Incidently, VCDs hold around 70 minutes of video, not 30, like someone above me said.
Nothing stops anyone from recording the entire "This American Life" archive and burning it to CD. I have *MY* complete set, anyway.
But I still paid audible.com for the right to download TAL episodes there, and I'm still a contributing member of two different NPR stations. So I guess my personal copies aren't too far out of line.
Dude, at least your girlfriend left you for another GUY.
Me? I'm trying to help MY ex-girlfriend get a date with someone named "Melissa". Not saying that watching girl/girl porno with the woman I used to sleep with isn't fun, but given the choice I'd rather share her bed.
Anyway, you're right. Geeks should have girlfriends. It gets our hopes up.
I wish. A couple of them are duplicating configurations of hardware used by my clients. A couple are notebooks. A couple do nothing but serve files and run backups. The rest consist of a Win98 game machine, a 2000 server for testing, a HTPC (including projector and presentation monitor), a couple Linux boxes and an OpenBSD machine doing firewall duties.
But yeah, with full-size APC rack, a pair of IBM RAID cabinets, a Cisco 5005 and five machines in a walk-in closet, yeah, I can definately get into the pi sort of atmosphere.
I have twelve computers in my apartment and use all of them for something-or-other. Several are just test machines but even with those, I used to run into situations all the time where I saved something on one machine and forgot to do anything with it.
My solution was to write a series of little scripts to copy data from common share points on each machine to a large, central data store, and into a "backed-up" directory on the workstations. Presently my central data store is 600GB of IDE disks in a RAID1 array (10 disks, total). If I lose the central fileserver, all my data, and the scripts needed to recreate the information in that 600GB is sitting out on my workstations
It's kind of a brute force approach, but it works OK. I'm not sure how well it would work for non-local systems, though.
I'm sure there are better ways to do what I do, too, but it's nice to have a single place to look for my MP3s or whatever, while knowing they're backed-up in multiple locations as well.:)
And I have a receiver that handles Dolby Pro Logic II (Onkyo 696)
DPLII interpolates five channels of audio. And it does sound pretty good for surroundsound source material. Stuff that's stereo only (or gads, mono) doesn't do so well. But in general it's realy nice and really compelling to get multichannel. Fact is, most people don't live in a place where acoustics from a single source - such as a symphony orchestra in on a stage - will carry into proper reverberations/echoes... so multichannel makes up for that.
But back to SACD and DVD-A (I have one of those, too). Both sound amazing. I'm not talking about the stare-down your nose "Mine does more analog sampling" or "My uses five channels at 24/96k"... what makes the big differences is improved, much improved use of all five of my main speakers (I won't get in to dealing with the.1, 'cause it's kind of muddy between SACD and DVD-A).
DTS CDs and non-audio DVDs *do* offer much the same benefit, except that there are very few discs in any of the above formats.
Let's put it simply: There is an enormous "Wow" factor to hearing, say Holst's "Planets" from a 5.1 SACD over even the interpolated 5.1 of a CD in DPLII, even for heathen pop-listening folks like my girlfriend. It sounds better. Period.
Slight disclaimer. My involvement in this stunt was basically watching a couple other people do all the work.
Full story:
We did this to a guy who had a nasty habit of leaving a CD Player playing extra-happy xmas songs, then leaving the dorm all weekend. Every weekend. Dorm policies meant nobody could open the door and turn it off, either.
The original plan was to mostly seal the door with tiny bits of rubber, then suck some of the air out of the room, to make the door really hard to open, but that didn't work very well. I think what was ultimately used was a caulk, which did work OK. A hose was run under the guy's door and into another room, where the pump did whatever it had to do (sucking air out of the room, I suppose. I just remember it as being very loud).
After some period of time the hose was cut and sealed, flush with the door.
About three hours later, evil xmas bastard showed up, took about five minutes tugging on his door to get it open... and when he did there was an "pop" sound. He got blown into his room and one of the panes of his window collapsed.
Slashdot Mirror
Sanyo and Yamaha still make SCSI CD-RW units. Yamaha's are actually ATAPI drives with a SCSI converter. Anyone else who sells a SCSI unit at this point bought it from Sanyo.
I swore by Yamaha SCSI drives until I realized that a Lite-On 32x12x48x ATAPI unit PLUS an ACard IDE to SCSI converter is still cheaper.
So I bought several of those, and now I don't care when my optical drives break.
Basically, the author goes from "Here's all the cool stuff Gecko can do." to "...but it doesn't look like IE and some pages don't detect it properly."
Is that Mozilla's fault? Moz works better and behaves more reliably than any cross-platform GUI program I can think of.
More than that, its unique features (image permissions, javascript controls) barely rate a passing mention by the author. Those are killer features. I'd hate to use a browser that didn't have them.
I felt that the author - and most people writing browser comparisons right now - was too heavily biased by IE-related experiences; I thought he was writing more toward "This is what IE does and this is how Moz is different" rather than an actual browser review.
Try using IE and Moz over a 28.8kpbs internet connection and THEN tell me which you like better.
Hey, come visit all your old friends at StorageForum, too, Sivar. Lots of the old hands from SR congregate there.
The 740X is a Quantum design. If you aren't used to "quantum-type" noises, they can be a little off-putting. Seeks are usually a little bit louder than most other brands and of course there's a worrisome "THOK" sound when you power one down. Those are characteristics of Quantum IDE drives.
I understand there are vast difference in the quality of the 740X depending on country of manufacture as well. Usually Singapore is implicated as the "bad" source for drives. I have a good number of 740Xs (nine, at last count, all BB versions). I *don't* find my drives to be loud in the least - WD800BBs and Fireball ASes are both much worse.
Maxtor has a no-quibble exchange policy. If you think the drive is loud, they WILL take it back and ship you another. If it really bothers you, look into using it. Ball-bearing drives regardless of manufacture get louder over time.
Hey Sivar.
Mickey, who likes to deny that he's a WD employee, over at Storagereview.com says the top-of-the-line model will probably, actually be three 66.7GB platters while the lesser models the in lineup will remain 60GB/platter.
IIRC, that's the same thing WD did for their 100GB drive.
If you're the Sivar who frequents SR, you'll probably know me btter as Mercutio.
Oh. You're counting video.
:)
I've got three of those 250-CD binders full of DVD rips, courtesy of my good friends at WantedList and some similar services. That's just adult titles, mind you. I'm about two-thirds of the way done with my fourth.
I agree that licensed content is entirely too easy to come by but I have a good time finding stuff from, uh, talented amateurs.
And now that my "ex" has decided she's gay, I even have someone to help me look.
50,000? You must be new here.
Not counting video I think I have around 17GB.
Short-hair cats.
Fish freak me out. They're always looking at you with beady little eyes. Birds are every possible kind of messy.
Dogs require a little too much maintenence (gotta get home to let Spot out to pee).
But my cats - a pound rescue and a Scottish Fold I've had for several years now - are great geek pets. First of all, they love the computers. Bat-the-cursor, lay on the keyboard, sleep on the giant monitor. They appreciate all the simple geekish joys.
They basically come toilet trained, and clumping litter means two minutes of litter-box cleaning three or four times a week. No big deal. You keep a brush around to keep the shedding down to a minimum (it's not bad on shorthairs, anyway), get 'em a few toy mice and a laser pointer (all household pets, including my ex-'s fish, will play with a laser pointer), and they're basically good to go.
Cats can cuddle up on your lap and are plenty vocal (mostly) if you're in need of another voice. Purring is a smoothing thing. It always relaxes me, anyway.
Cats also live a good, long life. My parents had a cat for 21 years. They're truly an animal for the long-term. They're just all-round good pets.
No. Probably you don't. RAID5 parity calculations pretty much kill write performance on every array I've ever seen. RAID5 gives a lot of bang for your buck, but if you want for-real disk performance AND redundancy, RAID10 is the way to go.
Wow.
I started at Purdue four years later but your story doesn't sonud much different from mine. I fucking wilted at Purdue. Couldn't stand the place. Or the CS or CPT programs. My personal favorite was a professor who told me he'd never let me pass his class after I told him I found his religious references in class slightly offensive.
I also had a Calc prof who would lecture for up to five minutes in English before lapsing into Spanish... and wouldn't write anything on the chalkboard.
The feeling I got from Purdue is that they should just fire everyone they have teaching and start over.
I *still* can't stand that place.
Maxtor does rock. Put simply, after that down period about six years ago, they got their sh*t together and started making a quality product, and they haven't given up. The price is right, the performance excellent (good to see Maxtor picked up Quantum's tendency to make fast-seeking IDE units.
The other really good product right now is Western Digital. They're IDE only now, unfortunately, but it take a lot of balls to stand up and recall drives from consumers, to fix a manufacturing flaw. They did it, and they earned my respect.
Samsung drives also have a really strong reputation.
In comparison we have IBM, whose last 15k SCSI unit doesn't even best Maxtor's latest 10k Atlas, and whose 7200rpm ATA models are limited by either the "Deathstar" rep or the limitations of a specificied Powered On Hours of Service specification that no one else seems to be using.
We also have Seagate, which makes some fantastic and unique products (the last 50-pin 7200rpm SCSI drive) in SCSI, and has IDE products that, frankly, suck dick. U-series drives have lousy reliability and performance that's matched by two-year old drives that are 1000rpm SLOWER. Even worse, WD's recent 5400rpm products come to wit 2% of Seagate's amazingly quite 7200rpm Barracuda IV in most benchmarks.
Most of my knowledge comes from either Storagereview.com or from Storageforum.net
I'd *really* like to know where you heard that. I correspond from time to time with folks with @maxtor.com addresses and never heard that particular rumor.
Not that it doesn't make sense.
Visit StorageForum
Every hard disk on the market right now has some kind of distinguishing characteristic. Folks doing equipment purchasing may not be *aware* of the distinctions, but they are present nonetheless.
Want a high-performance 5400rpm ATA disk? Look at Western Digital's *AB-series drives. Quiet SCSI? Fujitsu has/had that market cornered. Performance at any cost? Seagate's X15-36LP.
I can't say any similar thing about true commodity items like RAM or floppy disk drives. --
Visit StorageForum
First off, I'm already a reseller, but I've never operated a storefront.
Here's what I like to see:
1. Carry the stuff big stores don't: Keep a few lease-returned systems (and ESPECIALLY monitors) around, Y-power adaptors, silver heatsink compound, ISA and PCI video cards... Simple stuff like that will probably at least get me to come back.
2. Service needs to be your life. Keep the geek in the back happy, and send him on the odd no-charge housecall for your small business customers. Pay a bonus for good, fast work. Don't nickel and dime service customers (installing RAM or an optical drive should be free) when an hour of your tech's time is $100. Service can also be used to build incredible goodwill.
3. Interview your customers if they're looking for whole systems. Can't stress that point enough. Talk to them. Most people stop at price.
4. Don't sell all generic. Don't sell all namebrand. Don't sell all retail. Don't sell all whitebox. The mix is important.
5. Don't stock crap equipment. Step away from the Jetway system board and the truly generic NIC. Name-brand RAM is a good thing to see, too.
My solution is Windows. Shoot me.
.AVI file or shrinkage to VCD format.
My setup is a nice, easy to cool Duron 950MHz with an ATI Rage VIVO, a JVC SVHS VCR for tuning/additional capture, and staggering amounts of hard disk space. Local storage on that box is maybe 360GB (three WD1200ABs), but the storage available to me is approaching 2TB. I use Windows 2000 Pro and a Philips Acoustic Edge to complete the picture.
I cap in highres MPEG1. Why MPEG1? Throw a high enough bitrate (four or five GBs an hour) at it and you can't tell it from MPEG-2 anyway, plus I can then use Virtualdub, probably the single greatest GPL'd software package available for Windows, to do all my editing and encoding work. I haven't found anything that works on MPEG-2 that is nearly so nice as vdub.
It works marvelously. I maybe lose five frames of video per hour captured. Editing out commercials takes only seconds... and then the edited video gets passed to one of my faster boxes for procesing down to a Divx
Incidently, VCDs hold around 70 minutes of video, not 30, like someone above me said.
Nothing stops anyone from recording the entire "This American Life" archive and burning it to CD. I have *MY* complete set, anyway.
But I still paid audible.com for the right to download TAL episodes there, and I'm still a contributing member of two different NPR stations. So I guess my personal copies aren't too far out of line.
Dude, at least your girlfriend left you for another GUY.
Me? I'm trying to help MY ex-girlfriend get a date with someone named "Melissa". Not saying that watching girl/girl porno with the woman I used to sleep with isn't fun, but given the choice I'd rather share her bed.
Anyway, you're right. Geeks should have girlfriends. It gets our hopes up.
Try WantedList for NetFlix-like porno-rental of over 10,000 titles.
I'm not affliated in any way, other than as a happy customer.
Looks like you need to invest in some cable management. I like Panduit's stuff myself.
:)
I'd mod your comment +1 Funny if I hadn't already posted. I got the closet only after I promised to move all my stuff *OUT* of the living room.
I wish. A couple of them are duplicating configurations of hardware used by my clients. A couple are notebooks. A couple do nothing but serve files and run backups. The rest consist of a Win98 game machine, a 2000 server for testing, a HTPC (including projector and presentation monitor), a couple Linux boxes and an OpenBSD machine doing firewall duties.
But yeah, with full-size APC rack, a pair of IBM RAID cabinets, a Cisco 5005 and five machines in a walk-in closet, yeah, I can definately get into the pi sort of atmosphere.
I have twelve computers in my apartment and use all of them for something-or-other. Several are just test machines but even with those, I used to run into situations all the time where I saved something on one machine and forgot to do anything with it.
:)
My solution was to write a series of little scripts to copy data from common share points on each machine to a large, central data store, and into a "backed-up" directory on the workstations. Presently my central data store is 600GB of IDE disks in a RAID1 array (10 disks, total). If I lose the central fileserver, all my data, and the scripts needed to recreate the information in that 600GB is sitting out on my workstations
It's kind of a brute force approach, but it works OK. I'm not sure how well it would work for non-local systems, though.
I'm sure there are better ways to do what I do, too, but it's nice to have a single place to look for my MP3s or whatever, while knowing they're backed-up in multiple locations as well.
I have an SACD player.
.1, 'cause it's kind of muddy between SACD and DVD-A).
And I have a receiver that handles Dolby Pro Logic II (Onkyo 696)
DPLII interpolates five channels of audio. And it does sound pretty good for surroundsound source material. Stuff that's stereo only (or gads, mono) doesn't do so well. But in general it's realy nice and really compelling to get multichannel. Fact is, most people don't live in a place where acoustics from a single source - such as a symphony orchestra in on a stage - will carry into proper reverberations/echoes... so multichannel makes up for that.
But back to SACD and DVD-A (I have one of those, too). Both sound amazing. I'm not talking about the stare-down your nose "Mine does more analog sampling" or "My uses five channels at 24/96k"... what makes the big differences is improved, much improved use of all five of my main speakers (I won't get in to dealing with the
DTS CDs and non-audio DVDs *do* offer much the same benefit, except that there are very few discs in any of the above formats.
Let's put it simply: There is an enormous "Wow" factor to hearing, say Holst's "Planets" from a 5.1 SACD over even the interpolated 5.1 of a CD in DPLII, even for heathen pop-listening folks like my girlfriend. It sounds better. Period.
Slight disclaimer. My involvement in this stunt was basically watching a couple other people do all the work.
Full story:
We did this to a guy who had a nasty habit of leaving a CD Player playing extra-happy xmas songs, then leaving the dorm all weekend. Every weekend. Dorm policies meant nobody could open the door and turn it off, either.
The original plan was to mostly seal the door with tiny bits of rubber, then suck some of the air out of the room, to make the door really hard to open, but that didn't work very well. I think what was ultimately used was a caulk, which did work OK. A hose was run under the guy's door and into another room, where the pump did whatever it had to do (sucking air out of the room, I suppose. I just remember it as being very loud).
After some period of time the hose was cut and sealed, flush with the door.
About three hours later, evil xmas bastard showed up, took about five minutes tugging on his door to get it open... and when he did there was an "pop" sound. He got blown into his room and one of the panes of his window collapsed.
We laughed our asses off.
Didn't anyone else play pranks in college?
Depends on the machine. I learned the trick from someone at a video arcade in the early 80s.
Dollar Bills on long pieces of duct tape work, too, BTW. Not that I'm encouraging anyone to actually *do* that since it's probably some kind of crime.
Mostly lived in the dorms. I don't think I seriously attended classes until about my junior year. ;)
My degree is in CS. I took a whopping semester of physics. Engineers or Physics majors looking to correct me, feel free.