OK, so I'm lame enough to reply to myself. Sue me.
Shotgun-style microphone. See telescope, above. This one is actually probably more fun, since fewer people know what the hell they are.
Stethyscope I use one in my apartment to this day to decide if my neighbors are fighting/beating their kids or if it's just a TV that's turned up really loud.
Potato gun. We used to pack one full of undies and shoot it out the dormitory window.
Tools! Particularly a decent drill or cordless screwdriver. I once stole the door from a couple of guys in my dorm who were annoying me. Of course, the utility of a $7 toolset from Walgreens merits its inclusion anyway.
Stereo from hell. I listen to classical music. So did everyone else on my floor and the floors around mine, thanks to me. I used to turn the volume up on my stereo to about halfway so I didn't have to interrupt my favorite symphony just to go to the bathroom (70 feet and probably 40 cinderblock walls away). Think about the opening of "The Big U" for a hint of what I mean. Once I beat anyone else who thought their music should be inflicted on everyone else into submission, I turned mine down too.
Vacuum pump. Another great trick. Make a slight negative pressure inside someone's closed room and watch them get knocked off their feet opening their door. Or break a window, if you aren't careful (I went to an engineering school. Can you tell?)
Quarter-on-a-string or four. To keep from having to actually pay for laundry machines. Laundromats might care. Dorms don't.
Powerful magnet. Wow are these fun.
Overhead projector. Your very own Batsignal.
Racketballs or other suitably bouncy objects. Great fun in the hall.
Block-and-tackle/pulley system. Great for getting contraband into dorms. Where I went to school, the guys on the highest floor of my dorm used one to hoist up alcohol (which was banned in dorms). Also great for moving day.
Button-maker/Tshirt printer. Sounds lame, but actually a decent source of income and not without spurious subversive uses, either.
Instant or digital camera. Roommate in a compromising position? Immortalize him forever!
No sense of shame. This makes dealing with drunks and morons particularly amusing.
My uncle is the Director of Public Health for a county in Illinois that shall remain nameless. When *I* went away to school I got gross of gross-size boxes of condoms. 20,000-something of them. Mostly they got used as water balloons and sold at usurious prices to dorm-mates with an unexpected opportunity.
When a friend had to move away from her boyfriend to start Pharmacy school, I got her a small assortment of vibrators (waterproof, gel, plug-in), some "Astro Glide" and a pre-paid phone card. I've been thanked profusely by both parties for that one.
Web Camera. I had one when I was at school. Once I actually got an SO, it suddenly had a million household uses.
Telescope. For the voyeur in all of us.:)
Subscription to dirty magazine. OK, even if you aren't into that sort of thing, this stuff makes good barter material (nothing like a fratboy too embarassed to buy his own) and, if you're willing to share your bounty, will probably make you a few friends.
Lamination machine. Million household uses for an enterprising college student. Patricularly when paired with an Alaskan or Puerto Rican drivers license.
Anything that makes people think you have a bizarre lifestyle. Nothing like being able to pull on a pair of skintight latex chaps, a 24" dildo and exclaiming to your annoying roommate that you're ready for a quiet evening at home. Note that holy books from weirdo relgions probably work just as well, if you can keep up the right sort of patter.
Damn. I'll probably think of more goodies later. Geez. Guess I'm some kind of pervert. Oh well. At least I'm not an anonymous coward.
I DMed a party through Tomb of Horrors. Only one of eight people in the group had a character survive the Demilich, but it was done.
Me, I like the Slavers series or maybe S2: White Plume Mountain (the one with Blackrazor and Whelm). The whole S-series was awesome beyond belief as a player and as a DM.
The consensus on storagereview.com is that the best all-round drives at the moment are being made by Maxtor and Western Digital. Maxtor, in particular, hasn't had a troublesome drive model in quite some time, and has an excellent service orientation, including a no-hassle RMA service.
Reliability is found in the mid-range 10,000rpm SCSI drives like the Atlas III and in the low-end 5400rpm models, particularly those from Samsung and to a lesser extent Seagate and Maxtor. SCSI drives *do* have longer warranties, if that says anything. In 7200rpm, probably Maxtor or Seagate's offerings.
Quiet: IDE, the choice is just about any 5400rpm drive, or Seagate's Barracuda IV for 7200rpm. Fujitsu's MAN-series SCSI disks are as close as you'll get to quiet, there.
Fast: IDE, 5400rpm: Western Digital's WD800AB. 7200rpm: Either Maxtor's 740X (8.5ms seek) or the Western Digital WD1200JB (transfer rates through the roof). SCSI: Maxtor's Atlas III for 10,000rpm or Seagate's X15-36LP among the 15krpm units.
Is that what you want to know?
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I just started teaching night classes for a local training company. On consecutive nights I teach a class in A+ (PC Hardware), Network+, Server+, 2000 Pro and 2000 Server. Nominally I work as an independent consultant, but that's not going so well right now.
Most of my students are out of work Steelworkers. Almost all of them cite their desire to find a stable career as their reason for seeking certification.
What's sad is, if I had a stable career, I would never be teaching these people - none of whom really have the requisite experience that should go along with any cert (3 - 6 months for A+, one to two years for the others). I can't tell them that. At $2000 per class, how could I?!?
One of the most surprising things about IT certs is the numbers. Since the A+ certiification started in the mid-80s, there have been 260,000 people certified (Comptia certs are for life). Microsoft, which decided that those who obtained NT4 MCSE are still MCSEs after originally stated they wouldn't be starting this year, says there are 470,000 people with the MCSE cert.
There is a lot more need in the world for competent techs than there is for folks who are marginally qualified to work on high-level business systems. There is a lot more need for competent people than there is for certifications.
I tell my students that certification does not mean they're ready for the high-paying jobs they all hear about. I tell them that certifications represent a minimal standard for competency, and that the best thing they can do - whether they get certified or not - is to learn the lessons I teach, not the answers to the questions on the tests.
As a trainer, a certified IT professional, and a genuinely clueful computer guy, it's a lesson I only hope they (and anyone who reads this) take to heart.
I know it's not anytihng nice or informative but I named my machines after the greek Muses... when I run out of those I'll probably add Fates then Furies then probably heroes.
SCSI won't be dead until I can buy a 10 15,000rpm IDE (or USB or firewire, whatever) disks and install them in an external enclosure, or until I can get fibre-channel switches and enclosures for something under the price of a new desktop computer, each.
I'm sharing a complete library of Philip Glass's CDs at the moment (FastTrack/Grokster, and including.ac3 from the DVD-A version of Koyaanisqatsi), and a substantial portion of Samuel Barber's output, all nine Beethoven symphonies,.mp3s of the recent DG Opera releases on DVD (which are PCM only, boo hiss), maybe two dozen other.ac3 files. That's um... a little over 22GB, by itself, out of the 900GB of porn/classical mp3s I'm sharing.
Of course, anyone who wants to download from my congested sub-28.8 internet connection is more than welcome.;)
Live? Man I wish. I've tried using standard tape. Everything sounds like crap. I have a live recording of Glass's "Beauty and the Beast" - taped when his touring production visited my university in 1995. I'd love to clean up enough to put online... sigh.
Add-in PCI IDE controllers such as the various Promise adaptor that are out there have very, very spotty support for ATAPI devices. Big, burly hardware IDE RAID controllers (eg 3Ware) don't work with ATAPI at all.
This is an application to which SCSI is well suited. Not to say you couldn't make it work, but that you're in for a bit harder job.
Incidently, one of my desktop machines (well, actually it's a giant tower) has five Yamaha 4x CD-R drives in it, all on a single Adaptec 2940UW. The machine isn't even that fast (Duron 850MHz) but manages just fine for my CD-duping needs.
I used Netflix to pursue two interests: DVDs of AC3 encoded classical music (which I can rip and play in my PCs), and filling in gaps in my collection of the soft-adult titles released by Playboy (again, ripped and burned to CD). Every once in awhile I grab something odd that my local video store doesn't have on DVD (most recently Brazil and Mishima).
Glaring Omission: For whatever reason, Netflix has just about zero opera performances in its collection. I'm not sure why. Dozens have been released, and there's a lot of other obscure classical music in their collection.
I've used the service for ten months. I live in the midwest, so transit time is usually pretty long, roughly six days per title, and sometimes longer, not the four customer service thinks it should be. Six day both ways == long turnaround between getting new titles, so I subscribe to the 8-movie at a time service (@ $40 a month). I usually manage to cycle through my rentals twice a month.
Netflix offers custom recommendations. I don't find them helpful - the choices were overwhelmingly weighted toward mainstream hollywood movies despite all the other cool stuff in their catalog.
Disappointing.
My mailman does not comprehend that what Netflix is mailing are DVDs. He may not know what DVDs are. I don't know. At any rate, He's been known to shove four or five titles in my tiny mailbox... fold them (snap!) when he's delivering magazines on the same day. Netflix must hate me. I know I've reported seven broken DVDs and I need to report another for the movie that just arrived yesterday.
For awhile the same title was "stuck" in my rent queue. Every time I sent it back, they would send it out again. Annoying, and it went on for a couple months despite mails to customer service.
Here's my main beef: Netflix dropped it's "Mature" title section. At one point they had a fairly large number of titles - Cinemax-style soft-porn (I happen to like that sort of thing. So does my fiance), Playboy's Girls of whatever, that sort of thing. That stuff vanished from the site in December. You can't search for it, you can't review it, the category isn't even there any more. They did this without any announcement or indication on their web site, despite the fact that I regularly receive e-mail indicating that they're tracking my preferences and they know I rent those titles. I emailed customer service about the matter several times. No response. I continue to receive those titles I already had in my queue, though.
Overall I have a number of minor gripes about the service. For most people I *am* sure it's worth more than a weekly trip to the video-rental place costs.
I could never figure out how to advance levels far enough to beat the dungeons and survive the underworld in Ultima V... Demons and Dragons pretty much always kicked my ass.
And I spent hours trying to find a way to NOT have to kill Saduj. For some reason I was convinced I had done something wrong... then I realized that his name is, well, Saduj.
Ultima V was one of the great frustrations of my gaming life.
Last month I was in the market for a new stereo receiver. I looked on Ebay - found what I wanted (an Onkyo TX-DS696) at a decent price ($600 - it retails for around $800). Put in my max bid... and watched it close $200 above retail, with 75% of the bidding in the last two minutes of the auction.
Rather than paying $800 or $1000 for what I wanted, I emailed the guy selling the receiver I had just lost. He offered to sell me the receiever for his shop's actual retail price of $650 + actual shipping. Sweet. I got it two days later, double boxed and in perfect shape.
I've since bought an SACD player the same way.
Quiet SCSI disks: Fujitsu MAJ-series drives. 10k rpm. Reasonably priced, too.
WD Enterprise drives: Again, quiet, and especially cheap, since WD stopped making SCSI drives last summer. TigerDirect's been known to sell new 18GB U160 drives for $99.
The Maxtor Atlas III isn't too bad, either. Very good price/performance.
Most of what I have is, sadly, Seagate Cheetahs and late-model Barracudas. Both models of drives that take soul-killing noise to new levels.
For very-nearly as good operation out of IDE drive, the Maxtor 740X and WD1x00xB drives are great. Very quiet, speedy, and with enormous capacity (80 and 100/120 GB, respectively).
Seagate ATA Barracuda IVs literally don't make noise, but performance is tepid at best - a WD 600AB (5400rpm) performs nearly as well, is just as quiet, and is cheaper.
11 1GHz+ computers, 2 old workstations, 48 ports of Catalyst goodness and an external RAID enclosure. Most of it in a 10x12 room.
First thing is: Open a goddamn window. Block vents if you're worried about screwing up your heating/cooling bill. Get a little Window AC for summertime - not that you're going to get 100 F summer days in Canada, but just in case you need it. The windows in my apartment building are extra-wide, so I have two box fans sitting side-by-side in my window, one blowing air in, the other blowing out.
Scrounge a rack if you have to - the kind musicians use is cheaper than the ones computer people pay for. I pulled mine out of a dumpster at an Exodus NOC. I have a number of the identical tower cases - so I stacked them at the bottom of the rack, and started the rackmount stuff I have (a disk array, a catalyst 5005, KVM, and big ol' UPS) above that.
Rack-mount stuff costs too much money but I love having everything in one place. I'll bet wooden shelves would be just fine if I didn't have stuff that fit inside the rack already.
A $30 "Hobby" labelmaker works great for keeping cables straight. That and a whole bunch of chicken-straps (cable ties) and variety of velcro implements should be considered essential.
Noise is a big problem for me. I lined the inside of some of my louder PCs with dynamat and carpet scraps, but that doesn't help with all the whiny SCSI disks. Not much I can say there. Maybe another ask Slashdot? In the past I wouldn't consider carpet in an area with lots of computers, but since I'm at home, I'm thinking maybe the noise-deadening features of a good, thick carpet might be a good thing.
I don't pay for electricity (obviously!). I have no idea how much all this stuff costs to run. All my machines are on a UPS, though, which is handy. $99 500VA generic units are better than nothing at all. There's a pretty big electrical load in my tiny little apartment, but I'm lucky in that my computer room has, for some reason, outlets on three different circuits. I should think that having outlets on two circuits would be a minimum, particularly if you're in an apartment or older home, where tripping a breaker is either easier or more likely than a new home.
Note to folks who might participate in SR's reliability survey: If you do, please do everyone a favor and list all the drives you possibly can. It's a bit time consuming but the results thereby become that much better.
The SR community will thank you for your contribution.
I'm a fixture over on storagereview.com (you can type it in, I'm not a goatse.cx person). User complaints about the GXP-series have been a literally unceasing topic of discussion since very early this year. The 75gxp is now an assumed unreliable drive - to the point that a single thread about ongoing good experiences with them only garnered a half-dozen replies (one of them mine. I have two 75GB 75gxps that continue to function in a RAID0 array).
I believe SR is now being/.-ed. I can't seem to access it with my crappy modem connection, but few weeks ago, someone typed "75gxp" and "fail" in the search page and got 1500 results. There have also been polls conducted about the GXP's behavior, and there is some evidence suggesting that the more recent 60GXP is just as bad, both in the tech support and General forums. This is a direct contradiction to several posts here stating that the 60GXP has no problem. Other interesting topics, for those willing to visit SR's forums and poke around, include the possibility of class-action litigation (including posts by a soon-to-be-lawyer), statisical analysis of similarities in failed drives - location of manufacture, size, that sort of thing, and many, many tales of RMA woe similar to those of the topic originator.
The 75GXP has been discontinued. If you send in your failed 75GXP today, in all likelihood, you'll get a 60GXP back. 75GB 75GXPs don't have an equivalent size in the newer 60GXP product line. I have no idea what IBM does for those - they were significantly more expensive.
Finally, IBM's DFT utility for Windows and Linux, if you'd like to test out your own 60- or 75GXP. From time to time it is able to correct misbehaving drives' problems, but just as often, if you're to the point of needing to use it, you might as well call in your RMA.
Go on and mod me down. I have a +1 (reminding me of D&D) and I'm not using it.
I read Science Fiction constantly, particularly hard SF from the likes of Larry Niven, or military SF (David Drake, David Weber). I've watched the recent star trek series'. I've seen all the supposedly great new shows on SciFi.
And I yawn. Boring.
X Files used to have its moments (although my favorite X files moment was the episode that involved Sculley and a tatooo. Yum)
There were a couple of times Babylon 5 was mildly interesting.
ST:TNG was utterly predictable. Voyager was just unwatchable.
Blake's 7, Red Dwarf and Dr. Who are all shown on PBS affliates around here. Dr. Who proves it's possible to make an entire TV show out of cardboard, but I don't think it's very good.
Sad thing is, I keep trying to watch, hoping I'll find something great. Nothing is out there that's as compelling as the stuff I can check out at the library.
OK, so what, in my opinion, is the best SF show on TV?
OK. I'm an MCSE. G'won. Get one. It's not terribly difficult - I finished my certification with six weeks of self study, which netted me almost a 50% pay increase over the next eightteen months.
It's worth the time and money.
When I'm working a job as "the linux guy" (or, more typically, "the Sun guy"), it's great to be able to whip out my MCSE ID card when the windows support people start spewing crap about how they think their machines work. Sometimes, that alone is worth the $900 I've paid to get and maintain my cert.
MCSEs are not exclusively clueless. In my experience, it has a lot to do with how the cert was obtained - the people that go for expensive training course are almost invariably idiots - they don't retain anything - and the value of the certification certainly has dropped becuase there's an awful lot of idiots in the world that can afford the $4995 it costs to go to a "boot camp". The really sharp guys - and we are out there - are the folks that took the time to learn the stuff ourselves, on our own.
In reply to the previous comment... Support is absolutely the tradition entry to the field, but there are other choices: new hardware rollouts, break/fix techs, and system operator roles (a job that usually doesn't even require a high school diploma) are also entry-level IT positions with no requirement for certification.
If you're really worried about breaking in, blow a couple hundred dollars on an A+ cert (even more worthless than MCSE) and Windows NT/2000 Workstation/Professional certifications. Someone will hire you for something, probably for around $15 - $18 an hour.
...but what's the big deal about ActiveX support? Other than some web-sites that are strictly internal to the companies I've worked for, I've not been anywhere I *HAD* to have ActiveX.
I thought it was already dead as a general use technology.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so I'm lame enough to reply to myself. Sue me.
Shotgun-style microphone. See telescope, above. This one is actually probably more fun, since fewer people know what the hell they are.
Stethyscope I use one in my apartment to this day to decide if my neighbors are fighting/beating their kids or if it's just a TV that's turned up really loud.
Potato gun. We used to pack one full of undies and shoot it out the dormitory window.
Tools! Particularly a decent drill or cordless screwdriver. I once stole the door from a couple of guys in my dorm who were annoying me. Of course, the utility of a $7 toolset from Walgreens merits its inclusion anyway.
Stereo from hell. I listen to classical music. So did everyone else on my floor and the floors around mine, thanks to me. I used to turn the volume up on my stereo to about halfway so I didn't have to interrupt my favorite symphony just to go to the bathroom (70 feet and probably 40 cinderblock walls away). Think about the opening of "The Big U" for a hint of what I mean. Once I beat anyone else who thought their music should be inflicted on everyone else into submission, I turned mine down too.
Vacuum pump. Another great trick. Make a slight negative pressure inside someone's closed room and watch them get knocked off their feet opening their door. Or break a window, if you aren't careful (I went to an engineering school. Can you tell?)
Quarter-on-a-string or four. To keep from having to actually pay for laundry machines. Laundromats might care. Dorms don't.
Powerful magnet. Wow are these fun.
Overhead projector. Your very own Batsignal.
Racketballs or other suitably bouncy objects. Great fun in the hall.
Block-and-tackle/pulley system. Great for getting contraband into dorms. Where I went to school, the guys on the highest floor of my dorm used one to hoist up alcohol (which was banned in dorms). Also great for moving day.
Button-maker/Tshirt printer. Sounds lame, but actually a decent source of income and not without spurious subversive uses, either.
Instant or digital camera. Roommate in a compromising position? Immortalize him forever!
No sense of shame. This makes dealing with drunks and morons particularly amusing.
Gads, that's awful.
What about those of us who are allergic to latex?!?
My uncle is the Director of Public Health for a county in Illinois that shall remain nameless. When *I* went away to school I got gross of gross-size boxes of condoms. 20,000-something of them.
:)
Mostly they got used as water balloons and sold at usurious prices to dorm-mates with an unexpected opportunity.
When a friend had to move away from her boyfriend to start Pharmacy school, I got her a small assortment of vibrators (waterproof, gel, plug-in), some "Astro Glide" and a pre-paid phone card. I've been thanked profusely by both parties for that one.
Web Camera. I had one when I was at school. Once I actually got an SO, it suddenly had a million household uses.
Telescope. For the voyeur in all of us.
Subscription to dirty magazine. OK, even if you aren't into that sort of thing, this stuff makes good barter material (nothing like a fratboy too embarassed to buy his own) and, if you're willing to share your bounty, will probably make you a few friends.
Lamination machine. Million household uses for an enterprising college student. Patricularly when paired with an Alaskan or Puerto Rican drivers license.
Anything that makes people think you have a bizarre lifestyle. Nothing like being able to pull on a pair of skintight latex chaps, a 24" dildo and exclaiming to your annoying roommate that you're ready for a quiet evening at home. Note that holy books from weirdo relgions probably work just as well, if you can keep up the right sort of patter.
Damn. I'll probably think of more goodies later.
Geez. Guess I'm some kind of pervert. Oh well. At least I'm not an anonymous coward.
I DMed a party through Tomb of Horrors. Only one of eight people in the group had a character survive the Demilich, but it was done.
Me, I like the Slavers series or maybe S2: White Plume Mountain (the one with Blackrazor and Whelm). The whole S-series was awesome beyond belief as a player and as a DM.
The consensus on storagereview.com is that the best all-round drives at the moment are being made by Maxtor and Western Digital. Maxtor, in particular, hasn't had a troublesome drive model in quite some time, and has an excellent service orientation, including a no-hassle RMA service.
:)
Reliability is found in the mid-range 10,000rpm SCSI drives like the Atlas III and in the low-end 5400rpm models, particularly those from Samsung and to a lesser extent Seagate and Maxtor. SCSI drives *do* have longer warranties, if that says anything. In 7200rpm, probably Maxtor or Seagate's offerings.
Quiet: IDE, the choice is just about any 5400rpm drive, or Seagate's Barracuda IV for 7200rpm. Fujitsu's MAN-series SCSI disks are as close as you'll get to quiet, there.
Fast: IDE, 5400rpm: Western Digital's WD800AB. 7200rpm: Either Maxtor's 740X (8.5ms seek) or the Western Digital WD1200JB (transfer rates through the roof).
SCSI: Maxtor's Atlas III for 10,000rpm or Seagate's X15-36LP among the 15krpm units.
Is that what you want to know?
Find out more at www.storageforum.net or www.storagereview.com. We're really very helpful people.
I just started teaching night classes for a local training company. On consecutive nights I teach a class in A+ (PC Hardware), Network+, Server+, 2000 Pro and 2000 Server. Nominally I work as an independent consultant, but that's not going so well right now.
Most of my students are out of work Steelworkers. Almost all of them cite their desire to find a stable career as their reason for seeking certification.
What's sad is, if I had a stable career, I would never be teaching these people - none of whom really have the requisite experience that should go along with any cert (3 - 6 months for A+, one to two years for the others). I can't tell them that. At $2000 per class, how could I?!?
One of the most surprising things about IT certs is the numbers. Since the A+ certiification started in the mid-80s, there have been 260,000 people certified (Comptia certs are for life). Microsoft, which decided that those who obtained NT4 MCSE are still MCSEs after originally stated they wouldn't be starting this year, says there are 470,000 people with the MCSE cert.
There is a lot more need in the world for competent techs than there is for folks who are marginally qualified to work on high-level business systems. There is a lot more need for competent people than there is for certifications.
I tell my students that certification does not mean they're ready for the high-paying jobs they all hear about. I tell them that certifications represent a minimal standard for competency, and that the best thing they can do - whether they get certified or not - is to learn the lessons I teach, not the answers to the questions on the tests.
As a trainer, a certified IT professional, and a genuinely clueful computer guy, it's a lesson I only hope they (and anyone who reads this) take to heart.
Don't spend much time on a shell prompt?
^H = Ctrl-H, the Delete key on your keyboard.
But not Greek gods. That's just passe.
SCSI won't be dead until I can buy a 10 15,000rpm IDE (or USB or firewire, whatever) disks and install them in an external enclosure, or until I can get fibre-channel switches and enclosures for something under the price of a new desktop computer, each.
Seen a 64-bit, 66MHz IDE controller lately?
I'm sharing a complete library of Philip Glass's CDs at the moment (FastTrack/Grokster, and including .ac3 from the DVD-A version of Koyaanisqatsi), and a substantial portion of Samuel Barber's output, all nine Beethoven symphonies, .mp3s of the recent DG Opera releases on DVD (which are PCM only, boo hiss), maybe two dozen other .ac3 files. That's um... a little over 22GB, by itself, out of the 900GB of porn/classical mp3s I'm sharing.
;)
Of course, anyone who wants to download from my congested sub-28.8 internet connection is more than welcome.
Live? Man I wish. I've tried using standard tape. Everything sounds like crap. I have a live recording of Glass's "Beauty and the Beast" - taped when his touring production visited my university in 1995. I'd love to clean up enough to put online... sigh.
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Glaring Omission: For whatever reason, Netflix has just about zero opera performances in its collection. I'm not sure why. Dozens have been released, and there's a lot of other obscure classical music in their collection.
I've used the service for ten months. I live in the midwest, so transit time is usually pretty long, roughly six days per title, and sometimes longer, not the four customer service thinks it should be. Six day both ways == long turnaround between getting new titles, so I subscribe to the 8-movie at a time service (@ $40 a month). I usually manage to cycle through my rentals twice a month.
Netflix offers custom recommendations. I don't find them helpful - the choices were overwhelmingly weighted toward mainstream hollywood movies despite all the other cool stuff in their catalog.
Disappointing.
My mailman does not comprehend that what Netflix is mailing are DVDs. He may not know what DVDs are. I don't know. At any rate, He's been known to shove four or five titles in my tiny mailbox... fold them (snap!) when he's delivering magazines on the same day. Netflix must hate me. I know I've reported seven broken DVDs and I need to report another for the movie that just arrived yesterday.
For awhile the same title was "stuck" in my rent queue. Every time I sent it back, they would send it out again. Annoying, and it went on for a couple months despite mails to customer service.
Here's my main beef: Netflix dropped it's "Mature" title section. At one point they had a fairly large number of titles - Cinemax-style soft-porn (I happen to like that sort of thing. So does my fiance), Playboy's Girls of whatever, that sort of thing. That stuff vanished from the site in December. You can't search for it, you can't review it, the category isn't even there any more. They did this without any announcement or indication on their web site, despite the fact that I regularly receive e-mail indicating that they're tracking my preferences and they know I rent those titles. I emailed customer service about the matter several times. No response. I continue to receive those titles I already had in my queue, though.
Overall I have a number of minor gripes about the service. For most people I *am* sure it's worth more than a weekly trip to the video-rental place costs.
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I could never figure out how to advance levels far enough to beat the dungeons and survive the underworld in Ultima V... Demons and Dragons pretty much always kicked my ass.
And I spent hours trying to find a way to NOT have to kill Saduj. For some reason I was convinced I had done something wrong... then I realized that his name is, well, Saduj.
Ultima V was one of the great frustrations of my gaming life.
Last month I was in the market for a new stereo receiver. I looked on Ebay - found what I wanted (an Onkyo TX-DS696) at a decent price ($600 - it retails for around $800). Put in my max bid... and watched it close $200 above retail, with 75% of the bidding in the last two minutes of the auction.
Rather than paying $800 or $1000 for what I wanted, I emailed the guy selling the receiver I had just lost. He offered to sell me the receiever for his shop's actual retail price of $650 + actual shipping. Sweet. I got it two days later, double boxed and in perfect shape.
I've since bought an SACD player the same way.
WAY better than dealing with the morons on Ebay.
Quiet SCSI disks: Fujitsu MAJ-series drives. 10k rpm. Reasonably priced, too.
WD Enterprise drives: Again, quiet, and especially cheap, since WD stopped making SCSI drives last summer. TigerDirect's been known to sell new 18GB U160 drives for $99.
The Maxtor Atlas III isn't too bad, either. Very good price/performance.
Most of what I have is, sadly, Seagate Cheetahs and late-model Barracudas. Both models of drives that take soul-killing noise to new levels.
For very-nearly as good operation out of IDE drive, the Maxtor 740X and WD1x00xB drives are great. Very quiet, speedy, and with enormous capacity (80 and 100/120 GB, respectively).
Seagate ATA Barracuda IVs literally don't make noise, but performance is tepid at best - a WD 600AB (5400rpm) performs nearly as well, is just as quiet, and is cheaper.
There's no reason for this to be -1. I have a mod point left too. Damn.
Actually I have an external, 4U IBM-branded SCA enclosure but somebody else might want to see this...
My fiance and I are both geeks and neither of us likes to share?
11 1GHz+ computers, 2 old workstations, 48 ports of Catalyst goodness and an external RAID enclosure. Most of it in a 10x12 room.
First thing is: Open a goddamn window. Block vents if you're worried about screwing up your heating/cooling bill. Get a little Window AC for summertime - not that you're going to get 100 F summer days in Canada, but just in case you need it. The windows in my apartment building are extra-wide, so I have two box fans sitting side-by-side in my window, one blowing air in, the other blowing out.
Scrounge a rack if you have to - the kind musicians use is cheaper than the ones computer people pay for. I pulled mine out of a dumpster at an Exodus NOC. I have a number of the identical tower cases - so I stacked them at the bottom of the rack, and started the rackmount stuff I have (a disk array, a catalyst 5005, KVM, and big ol' UPS) above that.
Rack-mount stuff costs too much money but I love having everything in one place. I'll bet wooden shelves would be just fine if I didn't have stuff that fit inside the rack already.
A $30 "Hobby" labelmaker works great for keeping cables straight. That and a whole bunch of chicken-straps (cable ties) and variety of velcro implements should be considered essential.
Noise is a big problem for me. I lined the inside of some of my louder PCs with dynamat and carpet scraps, but that doesn't help with all the whiny SCSI disks. Not much I can say there. Maybe another ask Slashdot? In the past I wouldn't consider carpet in an area with lots of computers, but since I'm at home, I'm thinking maybe the noise-deadening features of a good, thick carpet might be a good thing.
I don't pay for electricity (obviously!). I have no idea how much all this stuff costs to run. All my machines are on a UPS, though, which is handy. $99 500VA generic units are better than nothing at all. There's a pretty big electrical load in my tiny little apartment, but I'm lucky in that my computer room has, for some reason, outlets on three different circuits. I should think that having outlets on two circuits would be a minimum, particularly if you're in an apartment or older home, where tripping a breaker is either easier or more likely than a new home.
Note to folks who might participate in SR's reliability survey: If you do, please do everyone a favor and list all the drives you possibly can. It's a bit time consuming but the results thereby become that much better.
The SR community will thank you for your contribution.
2x, actually. Audio CD-ROM devices are 2x.
I don't remember what the historical reason for the difference is.
I've played master of magic for days at a time on Windows 2000, and I have since the day I loaded the first release candidate.
.pif all the way up.
I disabled sound inside the game - figured it'd cause problems - and pushed all the memory settings in the associated
Given the choice between having sound and not having MoM, I'll take the game.
Plays just fine in DOSemu, too (also without sound).
Also, there are a couple of interesting clone projects. See http://www.classicgaming.com/mom/momhack.html for more info.
I have mod points. I'd rather post...
/.-ed. I can't seem to access it with my crappy modem connection, but few weeks ago, someone typed "75gxp" and "fail" in the search page and got 1500 results. There have also been polls conducted about the GXP's behavior, and there is some evidence suggesting that the more recent 60GXP is just as bad, both in the tech support and General forums. This is a direct contradiction to several posts here stating that the 60GXP has no problem. Other interesting topics, for those willing to visit SR's forums and poke around, include the possibility of class-action litigation (including posts by a soon-to-be-lawyer), statisical analysis of similarities in failed drives - location of manufacture, size, that sort of thing, and many, many tales of RMA woe similar to those of the topic originator.
I'm a fixture over on storagereview.com (you can type it in, I'm not a goatse.cx person). User complaints about the GXP-series have been a literally unceasing topic of discussion since very early this year. The 75gxp is now an assumed unreliable drive - to the point that a single thread about ongoing good experiences with them only garnered a half-dozen replies (one of them mine. I have two 75GB 75gxps that continue to function in a RAID0 array).
I believe SR is now being
The 75GXP has been discontinued. If you send in your failed 75GXP today, in all likelihood, you'll get a 60GXP back. 75GB 75GXPs don't have an equivalent size in the newer 60GXP product line. I have no idea what IBM does for those - they were significantly more expensive.
Finally, IBM's DFT utility for Windows and Linux, if you'd like to test out your own 60- or 75GXP. From time to time it is able to correct misbehaving drives' problems, but just as often, if you're to the point of needing to use it, you might as well call in your RMA.
Go on and mod me down. I have a +1 (reminding me of D&D) and I'm not using it.
I read Science Fiction constantly, particularly hard SF from the likes of Larry Niven, or military SF (David Drake, David Weber). I've watched the recent star trek series'. I've seen all the supposedly great new shows on SciFi.
And I yawn. Boring.
X Files used to have its moments (although my favorite X files moment was the episode that involved Sculley and a tatooo. Yum)
There were a couple of times Babylon 5 was mildly interesting.
ST:TNG was utterly predictable. Voyager was just unwatchable.
Blake's 7, Red Dwarf and Dr. Who are all shown on PBS affliates around here. Dr. Who proves it's possible to make an entire TV show out of cardboard, but I don't think it's very good.
Sad thing is, I keep trying to watch, hoping I'll find something great. Nothing is out there that's as compelling as the stuff I can check out at the library.
OK, so what, in my opinion, is the best SF show on TV?
Futurama.
"Bite my shiny metal ass!"
OK. I'm an MCSE. G'won. Get one. It's not terribly difficult - I finished my certification with six weeks of self study, which netted me almost a 50% pay increase over the next eightteen months.
It's worth the time and money.
When I'm working a job as "the linux guy" (or, more typically, "the Sun guy"), it's great to be able to whip out my MCSE ID card when the windows support people start spewing crap about how they think their machines work. Sometimes, that alone is worth the $900 I've paid to get and maintain my cert.
MCSEs are not exclusively clueless. In my experience, it has a lot to do with how the cert was obtained - the people that go for expensive training course are almost invariably idiots - they don't retain anything - and the value of the certification certainly has dropped becuase there's an awful lot of idiots in the world that can afford the $4995 it costs to go to a "boot camp". The really sharp guys - and we are out there - are the folks that took the time to learn the stuff ourselves, on our own.
In reply to the previous comment... Support is absolutely the tradition entry to the field, but there are other choices: new hardware rollouts, break/fix techs, and system operator roles (a job that usually doesn't even require a high school diploma) are also entry-level IT positions with no requirement for certification.
If you're really worried about breaking in, blow a couple hundred dollars on an A+ cert (even more worthless than MCSE) and Windows NT/2000 Workstation/Professional certifications. Someone will hire you for something, probably for around $15 - $18 an hour.
...but what's the big deal about ActiveX support? Other than some web-sites that are strictly internal to the companies I've worked for, I've not been anywhere I *HAD* to have ActiveX.
I thought it was already dead as a general use technology.