I love the fact that you use Gmail and then complain about your IM logs being online. Gmail grabs keywords from your email and shows advertisements based on them! IMSmarter hides the chat logs from everyone else, and (as far as I know) has no plans to be an advertising-supported service.
Also, you can turn off logging if you're really that worried about it.:)
Finally an article I can post on!:) We host IMSmarter's many servers (yay, another Slashdotting for Simpli!) and David is a personal friend of mine. I've been using his service for a few weeks and I can offer you my feedback.
First, the thing about IMSmarter is not what it can do right now, but the platform it's enabling for the future. David has been working hard for the past year developing the backend things; it's just in the past month that he's really started to turn his focus to adding features. Some of the things he's been chewing on include:
1) To-do lists. These are mostly implemented now and are mentioned in the article. They are basically reminders without the cumbersome Outlook interface. "Remind me in 20 minutes to call my friend," you type to the proxy, and it dutifully does so. No more setting up calendar appointments for simple things.
2) Logging (and yes, for the paranoid out there, you can turn this off.) This is actually pretty useful as the logs are stored on a central server. I can't tell you how many times I've logged into my PC from home just to dig through chat logs; now I don't have to.
3) Website updates. This is the one I've been bugging David about. The service will automatically notify your friends when you update your personal website. I can't wait to use this one for my blog.
4) Fedex/UPS tracking. Notifies you when a package you've shipped has arrived, for instance.
Basically, David's vision for this (as I understand it) is to get rid of those hundreds of annoying emails we all get saying "Someone has replied to a thread you posted in" or "Your package has been shipped" or "XYZ updated his blog today." Those are things for which email is not as useful as IM is.
Knowing how motivated David is in this venture, I know we'll see great things from IMSmarter. It still needs maturation -- right now, the platform is there to build on, but not too many implementations have been built. He needs beta testers, and beta testing is pretty simple (you just set up a proxy on your IM client and sign up through their website.) Check it out and mark this one down as "one to watch."
Actually, the tool required to see the code would be a hex editor, not a regular text editor like Notepad. There are plenty available for free for Windows.
Every time one of these phones is reviewed, there are many nay-sayers (who often get modded "Insightful") who say things like, "I just want a phone that can make calls without dropping the signal!"
Sure, we all want that... but keep in mind that the cell phone hardware manufacturers and the cell phone service providers are different companies. This is an article regarding Samsung cell phones. At least in the U.S., Samsung is not a cell phone provider. So if you want fewer dropped calls, call your provider and complain... but don't insist that hardware manufacturers focus on something they don't have control over (the cell phone networks.)
Adding to my earlier rant in this same article, what's up with the Slashdot WAP page? Sure, the articles are nice, but "Top 5 comments" only? How useful is that?
Why doesn't Slashdot have an option to view the whole article including comments? Better yet, why can't we view the article in "light" mode without all that crufty table formatting?
Perhaps I'm asking for a lot from a site that still uses HTML 3.2 (and can't even seem to conform to that standard), but honestly, folks, it's not 1998 any more. There are a lot of people out there who would love to view Slashdot and other sites through Palm-type browsers, but when there's no content, there's not much reason to do so. Phones are becoming more and more advanced, but very few websites seem to be pushing the cutting edge in mobile compatibility.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves. I own (and love) a Treo 600. Got it for $400 on eBay; the best $400 I've ever spent. I love being able to SSH, send and recevie email, and log onto AIM from my phone! However, online wireless content is severely lacking.
My worst pet peeve about the wireless world in general is that there just isn't enough content out there designed for mobile devices. Ever tried to load movies.yahoo.com on a Treo? Even at 144K speeds (twice as fast as a 56K modem), the movies.yahoo.com page takes forever to load because it's a 250K+ page. How about citysearch.com? Also horribly bloated.
I have Small Sites set up as my home page on my Treo, but most of the sites it links to are outdated, toast, or horribly broken. For instance, Yahoo! Movies is on there, but is often broken ("Page not found", anyone?) Citysearch or a comparable site doesn't even make the list.
Why can't I log on, type in my zip code, and get movies, restaurants, maps, and driving directions from my Treo? That's 90% of what I need WAP for. But the "portal" sites seem like an artifact of the dot-com boom -- missing or outdated information, or whole pages that just don't work.
Yahoo/other portal companies, are you listening? Please create a WAP or "wireless-web"-capable interface for me (and the thousands of others like me who know how frustrating it is to load a 200K page on a Treo or similar device.)
In case you, like me, didn't know that much about solar sails, there's a great article at How Stuff Works about them: How Solar Sails Will Work. Looks like a pretty interesting technology!
I'm glad to hear that SuSE has taken the lead in deploying the 2.6 kernel in an enterprise environment. We use White Box Enterprise Linux (www.whiteboxlinux.org; it's an open-source, free clone of RHEL3) in production, and I'm anxiously awaiting the day when Red Hat (and thus White Box) will support 2.6. I know I could compile my own, but I'd rather wait for it to be official.
I last read that RH planned to support 2.6 in 2005. Here's hoping that will be "late 2004" instead.
I can answer your question, as I've just built one as a giant backup solution for our hosting company.
I went with Serial ATA for a couple reasons: 1) It's cheaper and has more capacity than SCSI; 2) Cabling is not a mess as it is with regular IDE (if you've never seen serial ATA cables, the first thing you will notice is that they are small!); 3) It can hotswap, unlike regular IDE; 4) It's not that much more expensive than regular IDE.
I custom-built a 3U server from InterProMicro. They are a small (local if you are in the Bay Area) SuperMicro reseller that does great work. (If you need something, call and ask for Andy. Tell him Erica from Simpli sent you!)
The machine I specced out was as follows: * 3U case with 8 hot-swap SATA drive bays; * 8-port 3Ware 8506-8 SATA RAID controller; * 5x250GB SATA drives in a RAID-5 array; * Dual Xeon processors.
The 5 drives give you 1TB of storage, and expanding up to 8 gives you 1.75TB. I would also recommend a separate mirrored SATA 10KRPM array for the OS if you want really fast speeds.:)
This whole solution (Xeons; 5 drives; 3U case) cost just over $3000... which is pretty reasonable for 1TB of network-accessible storage. Interpro has solutions that go up to 24 SATA drives, which at 250GB each gives you an ungodly amount of space (5.75TB, if my calculations are correct.)
My suggestion is to go with a niche server builder like InterproMicro over Dell or Compaq or any of those guys. You can get the same high quality from a custom manufacturer without paying the steep brand name price from a larger manufacturer. As for the drives, any time the goal is "as much space as possible", SATA should be your first choice.
"In 1995, the year Novell sold Unix to the Santa Cruz Operation, an industry group calling itself the Tool Interface Standard Committee (TISC) came up with a ELF 1.2 standard and to popularize it and streamline PC software development granted users a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license" to the stuff, effectively putting it in the public domain, SCO says.
SCOsource chief Chris Sontag, the SCO VP in charge of the company's hate-inducing IP push, claims TISC, which folded immediately after the spec was published, exceeded its rights even though both Novell and the old SCO - as well as Microsoft, IBM and Intel - were on the committee."
So if SCO had a problem with ELF way back in 1995, why didn't they stop this back then? Obviously they had the choice to -- they clearly knew what TISC was doing. So why did it take SCO until 2003-2004 to point fingers at TISC?
I'm sorry, but this reeks of a last-ditch money-grab by SCO...even more than it did before. The release of ELF into the public domain happened nine years ago. IMHO, SCO should not be allowed to pull this into court because their business model is hurting now. Ridiculous.
Not to go too offtopic here, but as the owner of a hosting company that pushes a lot of bandwidth, our cost per GB is about 34 cents. Slashdot probably pays less than that.
While I agree that they should redo their site, the cost savings would be minimal. I do, however, feel that having a fully-complaint website should be about more than just cost savings. The reason Slashdot doesn't switch over probably has more to do with "it works now, so why bother with changing it" than anything else.
"Dell is selling you a computer with spyware PRE-INSTALLED, and are refusing to help you remove it because the spyware companies are paying Dell to put it there."
No, they're not! I can assure you that if Dell computers came with spyware preinstalled, there would be bigger headlines about it than this. In fact, the linked article doesn't even mention that. It says that if you get spyware installed on your computer, Dell techs aren't authorized to recommend third-party programs to remove it, which was exactly the point of the grandparent -- Dell is not a substitute for a local computer expert.
The only thing that could possibly be construed as spyware is the Dell Support Center, which does come preloaded, but is easily disabled. Compared to some other computer manufacturers (like, say, Sony, which puts their media center crap all over their PCs), Dell is pretty tame!
I can tell by reading your comment that you've never bought a Dell PC. As someone who has recommended the purchase of many Dell PCs, I can tell you that you're dead wrong.
What I meant by it is that I hadn't seen an example of political correctness applying to computer terms yet. Most of the time, I've seen it apply to classes of people, but from what I've seen, it hasn't really infiltrated the computer world.
I will now sit back and prepare to be assaulted by people who can show me otherwise. However, at least you now know what I was thinking.;)
I wouldn't recommend cPanel unless you want to pay for all those lovely spelling errors like "automagicly" and "editted". Seriously, the cPanel developers are worse than the Slashdot admins, and that's saying a lot. I can't believe they expect you to pay so much for their software ($42.50/month/per server for a minimum of 10 licenses?)
While we run cPanel on a few of our servers, I can't say I would recommend use of their system. The hideous spelling errors, plus the fact that updates come out almost daily and we've had some updates that completely broke the system -- no thanks.
I would recommend either Ensim or DirectAdmin for a control panel solution.
I used to work at Cobalt -- we basically saw the writing on the wall two years ago when Sun decided to let go of pretty much everyone working in their "Server Appliance Business Unit".
We currently have 12 Cobalt RaQ servers. We haven't bought any new ones recently; we leased out the ones we had and moved on to cPanel, Ensim, and DirectAdmin.
Of the three control panels we've used, I'd recommend Ensim. They have a RaQ migration script that lets you migrate as many domains as you want painlessly. The script costs around $150 one-time, but it's worth it if you have more than 10 domains or so on your RaQ. Ensim also has virtual users, so two users can have the same name.
I wouldn't recommend cPanel at all. DirectAdmin is a nice control panel, but you'll have to do the RaQ migration by hand, which could be painful.
Build out a nice 1U box with a P4 processor in it. Stick Ensim on it, run the RaQ migration script, and fix any issues you have. You should be fine from here on out, and Ensim is a large enough control panel that they are unlikely to bite the dust any time soon.
Good luck with your transition! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me through our website at www.simpli.biz.
Okay, I know it's bad form to reply to your own post, but I thought I'd add the results of a little Pricewatch search I ran.
I said in my earlier post that you can get 3x8MB cache drives plus a 3Ware IDE RAID card for about the cost of one SCSI drive. Here are the actual cost breakdowns. All prices include shipping.
IDE SYSTEM 1 x 3Ware 7500-4 4-port RAID card: $250 3 x Western Digital WD800JB hard drives (IDE; 80GB; 8MB cache) = $219.
TOTAL for IDE system: $469. Total usable space: 160GB. Bonus points for RAID-5 redundancy.
SCSI SYSTEM 1 x Adaptec 29320 U320 SCSI adapter (64-bit PCI card): $179. 1 x 73GB U320 10,000RPM drive by Maxtor: $296.
TOTAL for SCSI system: $475. Total usable space: 73GB. Bonus points for raw speed.
Now, if you want to run a real benchmark, pit these two systems against each other in a nice server (dual Xeon preferred.) Make sure it's the same hardware being used. This would be a benchmark that I'd be interested in seeing the results from. I'd take any test pitting these types of systems against each other a lot more seriously than any "benchmarks" in the current article.
That "benchmark" was ridiculous. "I have this two-year-old IDE hard drive and I'm going to benchmark it against this SCSI drive. Woop, look! It read my mail directory faster! SCSI must be better!"
Look, I'm not denying that SCSI is faster. But he neglected to even do any other tests! He also neglected to use a newer IDE drive, which hampered the IDE performance dramatically. (Who's going to use a 2MB cache IDE drive in any area where hard drive performance is critical?)
Personally, I'd like to see the test of an IDE RAID array running off a 3Ware card. For the price of one SCSI drive, you can get 3 8MB cache IDE drives, plus the 3Ware card. Oh, sure, it will probably still be a bit slower than SCSI. But at least the benchmarks will show some sort of logical comparison (and the benefit of IDE -- namely, tons of disk space.)
Is it just me, or have the articles posted on Slashdot recently been pretty lame? I just don't understand how some of this stuff gets posted to the front page. This is not a review. This is not a benchmark. It's one guy who tested one application of hard drives and made a conclusion based on that test. This type of stuff can be found in any newsgroup or forum on a daily basis. It should not have been posted to the front page of Slashdot.
I check email using Eudora. No, it won't push it, but you can run Eudora and check email just like you would on your desktop. There are also several other email clients available for the Treo.
The Treo 300 is a great device, and from what I've seen of the 600, it's even better. I will be upgrading.:)
Cogent is now running a special -- $1000/month for 100Mbps Internet access. (Yes, that's 100Mbps, as in 66 times faster than a T1.)
You can't use it solely for web hosting, as I understand, but companies who need Internet access for their work sites are signing up for this in droves. Screw cable -- I'll take 100Mbit for $1000/month any day (provided I have enough users to cover the costs.):)
You have been proven wrong by virtue of this post.
There are several women on Slashdot besides me... KshGoddess, Some Woman, Liora, MsGeek, neuroticia, superflippy... just to name a few! Apparently you just aren't looking in the right places.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I love the fact that you use Gmail and then complain about your IM logs being online. Gmail grabs keywords from your email and shows advertisements based on them! IMSmarter hides the chat logs from everyone else, and (as far as I know) has no plans to be an advertising-supported service.
:)
Also, you can turn off logging if you're really that worried about it.
Finally an article I can post on! :) We host IMSmarter's many servers (yay, another Slashdotting for Simpli!) and David is a personal friend of mine. I've been using his service for a few weeks and I can offer you my feedback.
First, the thing about IMSmarter is not what it can do right now, but the platform it's enabling for the future. David has been working hard for the past year developing the backend things; it's just in the past month that he's really started to turn his focus to adding features. Some of the things he's been chewing on include:
1) To-do lists. These are mostly implemented now and are mentioned in the article. They are basically reminders without the cumbersome Outlook interface. "Remind me in 20 minutes to call my friend," you type to the proxy, and it dutifully does so. No more setting up calendar appointments for simple things.
2) Logging (and yes, for the paranoid out there, you can turn this off.) This is actually pretty useful as the logs are stored on a central server. I can't tell you how many times I've logged into my PC from home just to dig through chat logs; now I don't have to.
3) Website updates. This is the one I've been bugging David about. The service will automatically notify your friends when you update your personal website. I can't wait to use this one for my blog.
4) Fedex/UPS tracking. Notifies you when a package you've shipped has arrived, for instance.
Basically, David's vision for this (as I understand it) is to get rid of those hundreds of annoying emails we all get saying "Someone has replied to a thread you posted in" or "Your package has been shipped" or "XYZ updated his blog today." Those are things for which email is not as useful as IM is.
Knowing how motivated David is in this venture, I know we'll see great things from IMSmarter. It still needs maturation -- right now, the platform is there to build on, but not too many implementations have been built. He needs beta testers, and beta testing is pretty simple (you just set up a proxy on your IM client and sign up through their website.) Check it out and mark this one down as "one to watch."
-Erica
Okay, my bad... I had to turn word wrap on to see it. :)
"in notepad or other editors of your choice..."
Actually, the tool required to see the code would be a hex editor, not a regular text editor like Notepad. There are plenty available for free for Windows.
Every time one of these phones is reviewed, there are many nay-sayers (who often get modded "Insightful") who say things like, "I just want a phone that can make calls without dropping the signal!"
Sure, we all want that... but keep in mind that the cell phone hardware manufacturers and the cell phone service providers are different companies. This is an article regarding Samsung cell phones. At least in the U.S., Samsung is not a cell phone provider. So if you want fewer dropped calls, call your provider and complain... but don't insist that hardware manufacturers focus on something they don't have control over (the cell phone networks.)
Signed, Your Boss
:D )
(Yes, I really am his boss! Note to Slashdotters: Don't send a link to your f1rstp0zt on Slashdot to your boss during your working hours.
Adding to my earlier rant in this same article, what's up with the Slashdot WAP page? Sure, the articles are nice, but "Top 5 comments" only? How useful is that?
Why doesn't Slashdot have an option to view the whole article including comments? Better yet, why can't we view the article in "light" mode without all that crufty table formatting?
Perhaps I'm asking for a lot from a site that still uses HTML 3.2 (and can't even seem to conform to that standard), but honestly, folks, it's not 1998 any more. There are a lot of people out there who would love to view Slashdot and other sites through Palm-type browsers, but when there's no content, there's not much reason to do so. Phones are becoming more and more advanced, but very few websites seem to be pushing the cutting edge in mobile compatibility.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves. I own (and love) a Treo 600. Got it for $400 on eBay; the best $400 I've ever spent. I love being able to SSH, send and recevie email, and log onto AIM from my phone! However, online wireless content is severely lacking.
My worst pet peeve about the wireless world in general is that there just isn't enough content out there designed for mobile devices. Ever tried to load movies.yahoo.com on a Treo? Even at 144K speeds (twice as fast as a 56K modem), the movies.yahoo.com page takes forever to load because it's a 250K+ page. How about citysearch.com? Also horribly bloated.
I have Small Sites set up as my home page on my Treo, but most of the sites it links to are outdated, toast, or horribly broken. For instance, Yahoo! Movies is on there, but is often broken ("Page not found", anyone?) Citysearch or a comparable site doesn't even make the list.
Why can't I log on, type in my zip code, and get movies, restaurants, maps, and driving directions from my Treo? That's 90% of what I need WAP for. But the "portal" sites seem like an artifact of the dot-com boom -- missing or outdated information, or whole pages that just don't work.
Yahoo/other portal companies, are you listening? Please create a WAP or "wireless-web"-capable interface for me (and the thousands of others like me who know how frustrating it is to load a 200K page on a Treo or similar device.)
In case you, like me, didn't know that much about solar sails, there's a great article at How Stuff Works about them: How Solar Sails Will Work. Looks like a pretty interesting technology!
I'm glad to hear that SuSE has taken the lead in deploying the 2.6 kernel in an enterprise environment. We use White Box Enterprise Linux (www.whiteboxlinux.org; it's an open-source, free clone of RHEL3) in production, and I'm anxiously awaiting the day when Red Hat (and thus White Box) will support 2.6. I know I could compile my own, but I'd rather wait for it to be official.
I last read that RH planned to support 2.6 in 2005. Here's hoping that will be "late 2004" instead.
I can answer your question, as I've just built one as a giant backup solution for our hosting company.
:)
I went with Serial ATA for a couple reasons:
1) It's cheaper and has more capacity than SCSI;
2) Cabling is not a mess as it is with regular IDE (if you've never seen serial ATA cables, the first thing you will notice is that they are small!);
3) It can hotswap, unlike regular IDE;
4) It's not that much more expensive than regular IDE.
I custom-built a 3U server from InterProMicro. They are a small (local if you are in the Bay Area) SuperMicro reseller that does great work. (If you need something, call and ask for Andy. Tell him Erica from Simpli sent you!)
The machine I specced out was as follows:
* 3U case with 8 hot-swap SATA drive bays;
* 8-port 3Ware 8506-8 SATA RAID controller;
* 5x250GB SATA drives in a RAID-5 array;
* Dual Xeon processors.
The 5 drives give you 1TB of storage, and expanding up to 8 gives you 1.75TB. I would also recommend a separate mirrored SATA 10KRPM array for the OS if you want really fast speeds.
This whole solution (Xeons; 5 drives; 3U case) cost just over $3000... which is pretty reasonable for 1TB of network-accessible storage. Interpro has solutions that go up to 24 SATA drives, which at 250GB each gives you an ungodly amount of space (5.75TB, if my calculations are correct.)
My suggestion is to go with a niche server builder like InterproMicro over Dell or Compaq or any of those guys. You can get the same high quality from a custom manufacturer without paying the steep brand name price from a larger manufacturer. As for the drives, any time the goal is "as much space as possible", SATA should be your first choice.
Good luck!
From the article:
"In 1995, the year Novell sold Unix to the Santa Cruz Operation, an industry group calling itself the Tool Interface Standard Committee (TISC) came up with a ELF 1.2 standard and to popularize it and streamline PC software development granted users a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license" to the stuff, effectively putting it in the public domain, SCO says.
SCOsource chief Chris Sontag, the SCO VP in charge of the company's hate-inducing IP push, claims TISC, which folded immediately after the spec was published, exceeded its rights even though both Novell and the old SCO - as well as Microsoft, IBM and Intel - were on the committee."
So if SCO had a problem with ELF way back in 1995, why didn't they stop this back then? Obviously they had the choice to -- they clearly knew what TISC was doing. So why did it take SCO until 2003-2004 to point fingers at TISC?
I'm sorry, but this reeks of a last-ditch money-grab by SCO...even more than it did before. The release of ELF into the public domain happened nine years ago. IMHO, SCO should not be allowed to pull this into court because their business model is hurting now. Ridiculous.
Not to go too offtopic here, but as the owner of a hosting company that pushes a lot of bandwidth, our cost per GB is about 34 cents. Slashdot probably pays less than that.
While I agree that they should redo their site, the cost savings would be minimal. I do, however, feel that having a fully-complaint website should be about more than just cost savings. The reason Slashdot doesn't switch over probably has more to do with "it works now, so why bother with changing it" than anything else.
*marks you as a friend* :D
"Dell is selling you a computer with spyware PRE-INSTALLED, and are refusing to help you remove it because the spyware companies are paying Dell to put it there."
No, they're not! I can assure you that if Dell computers came with spyware preinstalled, there would be bigger headlines about it than this. In fact, the linked article doesn't even mention that. It says that if you get spyware installed on your computer, Dell techs aren't authorized to recommend third-party programs to remove it, which was exactly the point of the grandparent -- Dell is not a substitute for a local computer expert.
The only thing that could possibly be construed as spyware is the Dell Support Center, which does come preloaded, but is easily disabled. Compared to some other computer manufacturers (like, say, Sony, which puts their media center crap all over their PCs), Dell is pretty tame!
I can tell by reading your comment that you've never bought a Dell PC. As someone who has recommended the purchase of many Dell PCs, I can tell you that you're dead wrong.
What I meant by it is that I hadn't seen an example of political correctness applying to computer terms yet. Most of the time, I've seen it apply to classes of people, but from what I've seen, it hasn't really infiltrated the computer world.
;)
I will now sit back and prepare to be assaulted by people who can show me otherwise. However, at least you now know what I was thinking.
I wouldn't recommend cPanel unless you want to pay for all those lovely spelling errors like "automagicly" and "editted". Seriously, the cPanel developers are worse than the Slashdot admins, and that's saying a lot. I can't believe they expect you to pay so much for their software ($42.50/month/per server for a minimum of 10 licenses?)
While we run cPanel on a few of our servers, I can't say I would recommend use of their system. The hideous spelling errors, plus the fact that updates come out almost daily and we've had some updates that completely broke the system -- no thanks.
I would recommend either Ensim or DirectAdmin for a control panel solution.
I used to work at Cobalt -- we basically saw the writing on the wall two years ago when Sun decided to let go of pretty much everyone working in their "Server Appliance Business Unit".
We currently have 12 Cobalt RaQ servers. We haven't bought any new ones recently; we leased out the ones we had and moved on to cPanel, Ensim, and DirectAdmin.
Of the three control panels we've used, I'd recommend Ensim. They have a RaQ migration script that lets you migrate as many domains as you want painlessly. The script costs around $150 one-time, but it's worth it if you have more than 10 domains or so on your RaQ. Ensim also has virtual users, so two users can have the same name.
I wouldn't recommend cPanel at all. DirectAdmin is a nice control panel, but you'll have to do the RaQ migration by hand, which could be painful.
Build out a nice 1U box with a P4 processor in it. Stick Ensim on it, run the RaQ migration script, and fix any issues you have. You should be fine from here on out, and Ensim is a large enough control panel that they are unlikely to bite the dust any time soon.
Good luck with your transition! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me through our website at www.simpli.biz.
Thanks!
Okay, I know it's bad form to reply to your own post, but I thought I'd add the results of a little Pricewatch search I ran.
I said in my earlier post that you can get 3x8MB cache drives plus a 3Ware IDE RAID card for about the cost of one SCSI drive. Here are the actual cost breakdowns. All prices include shipping.
IDE SYSTEM
1 x 3Ware 7500-4 4-port RAID card: $250
3 x Western Digital WD800JB hard drives (IDE; 80GB; 8MB cache) = $219.
TOTAL for IDE system: $469.
Total usable space: 160GB.
Bonus points for RAID-5 redundancy.
SCSI SYSTEM
1 x Adaptec 29320 U320 SCSI adapter (64-bit PCI card): $179.
1 x 73GB U320 10,000RPM drive by Maxtor: $296.
TOTAL for SCSI system: $475.
Total usable space: 73GB.
Bonus points for raw speed.
Now, if you want to run a real benchmark, pit these two systems against each other in a nice server (dual Xeon preferred.) Make sure it's the same hardware being used. This would be a benchmark that I'd be interested in seeing the results from. I'd take any test pitting these types of systems against each other a lot more seriously than any "benchmarks" in the current article.
That "benchmark" was ridiculous. "I have this two-year-old IDE hard drive and I'm going to benchmark it against this SCSI drive. Woop, look! It read my mail directory faster! SCSI must be better!"
Look, I'm not denying that SCSI is faster. But he neglected to even do any other tests! He also neglected to use a newer IDE drive, which hampered the IDE performance dramatically. (Who's going to use a 2MB cache IDE drive in any area where hard drive performance is critical?)
Personally, I'd like to see the test of an IDE RAID array running off a 3Ware card. For the price of one SCSI drive, you can get 3 8MB cache IDE drives, plus the 3Ware card. Oh, sure, it will probably still be a bit slower than SCSI. But at least the benchmarks will show some sort of logical comparison (and the benefit of IDE -- namely, tons of disk space.)
Is it just me, or have the articles posted on Slashdot recently been pretty lame? I just don't understand how some of this stuff gets posted to the front page. This is not a review. This is not a benchmark. It's one guy who tested one application of hard drives and made a conclusion based on that test. This type of stuff can be found in any newsgroup or forum on a daily basis. It should not have been posted to the front page of Slashdot.
...works fine with MSN as of now.
Anyone using an earlier version should upgrade to 2.0 to fix any MSN imcompatibilities.
I have a Treo 300, and I use SSH via Top Gun SSH.
:)
I check email using Eudora. No, it won't push it, but you can run Eudora and check email just like you would on your desktop. There are also several other email clients available for the Treo.
The Treo 300 is a great device, and from what I've seen of the 600, it's even better. I will be upgrading.
Cogent is also running GigE for $10,000/month.
Cogent is now running a special -- $1000/month for 100Mbps Internet access. (Yes, that's 100Mbps, as in 66 times faster than a T1.)
:)
You can't use it solely for web hosting, as I understand, but companies who need Internet access for their work sites are signing up for this in droves. Screw cable -- I'll take 100Mbit for $1000/month any day (provided I have enough users to cover the costs.)
You have been proven wrong by virtue of this post.
:)
There are several women on Slashdot besides me... KshGoddess, Some Woman, Liora, MsGeek, neuroticia, superflippy... just to name a few! Apparently you just aren't looking in the right places.