Sysinternals has released so many tools that have made adminning life much easier and revealed what's going on under the hood in ways that would be laborious manually. Thanks again sysinternals for saving the day - i owe you some beer.
Against my spidey-sense I made a few arrays out of the 100 and 120 gb ide offerings from WD- Some did not like being on the controllers (promise and 3ware), some needed a huge ammount of extra power to boot and not recaliberate/reset or spin down(!).
In the end, all 20 are now dead after 2 years of use, the first 15 failed in the first 6 months (and yes all were oem).
I've had a horrible experience with 2 ultratracks-
The controller decided to flag 1 drive in a raid5 as out of sync, (the drive was perfect) then in a few mins. bring it back online and decide that all other drives were out of sync and needed to be rebuilt based on the 1st drive it just de-synched. All the while happily reading the 1st drive's data incorrectly.
On both accounts (after much pressing) promise engineers said the firmware immolated itself. This was all during a few months of uptime on the first occasion and 1 week on a different (test) system and different model of card.
I moved to 3ware since then (about 2 yrs ago) without any real problems. Losing a TB in a redundant system is hard to explain to anyone.
I'm not completely sure. Mapquest and others used to provide this info when they started but don't now. Perhaps they're protecting their map data from other services. now there's wayhoo.com where you can take mapquest map and it will give you gps coords, but it goes up and down (currently down). I'd love to be able to just download waypoints into my gps so I don't get lost and do travel blogging the same way with some maps easily- also taging photos with locations, etc. some of this is available but usually proprietary and not integrated.
Granted, it has limits but the tech hasn't come out of the shop enough to be really explored-
http://web.media.mit.edu/~jpatten/audiopad/
There have been several like it in the last few years with lots of neat uses- mostly design your own interface on the fly or planning/flowcharting apps.
I haven't priced the whole market lately, but under $1k is tricky. There are several options which I've seen but haven't directly used. I highly recommend getting a demo any way possible.
There are some options though-
Sheet fed might be preferable for you, and several small scanners have come out for small offices lately. The 'gotchas' on the small sheet fed models is most don't have double feed prevention, so train your operators to keep a sharp eye on the paper. You can often tell just by the sound when a scanner doublefeeds..
Once again, I haven't tried much on the lower end models but here goes--
This one chimes in at about $915 from the vendor listed above, and IIRC uses led lighting which is great because your lamps don't die, remain consistant, and with rgb leds you can drop out colors nicely for good b+w imaging or more complicated color- lamps for scanners are like blades for the razor/ cartriges for the inkjet- $$$ ($80-500/per lamp) Panasonic's offerings over the last 3 years have been great on the image quality- probably the finest b+w out there, and lots of other scanner brands re-brand some of the panasonic models on the higher end. (kodak, etc). Feeding is usually so-so on all of the lower end but is improving. Since you have consistant input docs this will be an easy problem to handle.
Also- if you have the option to use SCSI on any of the scanners, do so. It's almost always more reliable.
Canon-
Canon DR-2080C Canon's cameras are nice generally, and lots of people like them. Their feeding is considered very good bang for the buck. The vendor listed above has them for about $580 20 pg/min duplex (again no 300dpi specs) I'd probably pick this one if I had to make a blind choice. again rgb led lamps, and it has a passthough for nasty paper.
Fujitsu- the 4097 is nice and very quick with b+w, the fujitsu feeders drive me nuts sometimes and like to streak the glass where the feeder passes the paper. Otherwise they're great, but the fast models are all going to be out of price range. There is a low end one that came out for $350 that won some awards at AIIM but it only scans to pdf and is about 10-15 pg/min color, duplex. (Fujitsu Scansnap FI-5110EO)
Kodak I-50 might be ok for you-maybe.. the software can be great and wretched at the same time and all the nice features are crippled and reserved for their expensive models. The twain & isis interface included with kodaks usually cripples key features of the scanner forcing you to use their software. Always try to check twain/isis vs. included proprietary software that talks direct to the scanner for any kind of scanner you're buying. The feeding systems are usually excellent on kodaks as well as b+w imaging quality. The consumables are notoriously expensive.
I'm do a few things in this industry but have not seen anything hardware wise yet that fits exactly what you're wanting.
Some more information would help though, like-
Do the scans need to be in color, greyscale or bitonal?
What quality? 150dpi in color is often very readable and printable. I know you're using 300 but I'm not totally sure you need to.
What exactly are you capturing? text? barcodes? Photos?
Is the Region of Interest (ROI) consistant throughout the documents or does it change position from image to image?
Is any of this being OCR'd?
Are you wanting to use cheap usb scanners or is something more office grade ok? Lots of cheaper scanners don't get faster with lower dpi and some (a low grade agfa comes to mind) don't change speed for region of interest. It varies though.
Small visioneer paperport products do have an api you can buy. They aren't flatbed, just the tiny sheetfed ones. Most scanners do not have available api or controls, only the garbage that comes with them.
If you can avoid color, do so. Scan to TIFF group IV for b+w, most pages will be in the 20-100kb range at 200-300dpi and print out great for text.
The preview mode is usually 72 dpi or less but often the interface won't let you directly save the preview, some require preview and then scan (suck!)
As others suggested, a dedicated station is hard to avoid with scanners, and another option may be a networked copier if you're trying to keep everything thin client style.
In a sense, the length of tape = capacity. I know there are limits to how much you can wrap around a reel but really, if you took today's tape capactiy in a 9 track format you would have (scientifically speaking ) a fuckload of storage.
I could back up the internet on some travan sludge if the tape was long enough.
Are we primates or are we Mice?!!
Gimmie a 9 track size with SDLT or whatever is best at the moment and add a few extra crc's to the mix, add some splice handling and glue a friggin CD-R to the back of the reel for table of contents info.
Oh yeah... One of the BBC's first radio recording devices used razorblade sized steel to record on. they had to build a whole room with thick walls in case the 'tape' broke because it would unravel and slice through the normal walls... iirc a few techs got cut to ribbons..
Even if they required MS office on the conversion machine (for mass conversions). Yes, even OOo doesn't handle everything perfectly and has to deal with a moving target.
Part of the problem in migration (last I checked) was no nice and reliable way to massivly convert the piles of ms office files to OOo. If users would find a DOC file they'd just go hunting for a machine with word on it. They would also freak out dealing with.DOC email attachments, despite good efforts to educate.
If the users only saw properly rendered OOo files, this problem of adoption would disappear.
Ideally I'd love to see something that would search a whole network for ms office docs and convert them, archive the ms office files as originals and only leave OOo files 'easily' accessable. I'd write one but my skills in this type of thing are too rusty at the moment.
Although OS choices are important, whatever gets the job done right is more important (for the moment).
As many others have mentioned, slide adaptors are poor. Nikon ls-2000 slide scanners are cheap on ebay and do a very nice job, especially when opting to take the time for 5-16 passes, and a multi feed adaptor is available for it.
For ultimate pro-grade quality on the cheap(er), consider buying a used drum scanner. They are labor intensive but worth it.
We should write them some nice 'thank you' letters!
I missed this story and acting on it, but if someone with some political savvy could direct myself and others to the people who listened (and those who didn't) to./'ers input and made decisions with our ideas in mind it would be great!
Firefox has also served me well when cablemodems meet old win98 machines with low ram. IE would just die, but firefox ran ok considering such restrictions as 200mb hard drives, etc.
Unlikely as it is, I hope this is really the view MS takes (and sticks to) about firefox / mozilla. It would be wonderful if ms never 'innovated' anything again for that matter.
In the 80's I taught a series of programming classes to 3rd-6th grade kids. Not just a select few, but the whole grade level for the school.
In 10 mins this might be difficult, but teach them to program! Ask what problems in math are hardest and write an app to do it for them and show the work. I know this sounds horrid but it isn't. It'll spark all the devious plans and interest in their heads. Example run:
WHAT IS THE 1ST NUMBER YOU WISH TO MULTIPLY? 4 WHAT IS THE 2ND NUMBER YOU WISH TO MULTIPLY? 5
OK! THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO DO THAT BUT HERE IS HOW A COMPUTER LIKES TO DO IT (FAST!):
4+4=8 4+8=12 4+12=16 4+16=20
Or something like that. You should of course make it much more illustrative
Anyway the advice is not to underestimate them at all. They'll pick up this stuff really quickly. Most importantly it shows that they don't have to be users but they can be creators! They can make their own games. They in fact DO have a pet/slave robot to do their bidding if they can ask it in the right way.
My classes followed this path (Apple ][): Logo graphics, BASIC, Draw a pic in BASIC, make a text game, Animated pics, Make a game with hi-res graphics, add effects in assembly. Not bad for 10 year olds eh?
Not long after I taught these classes there was a strong shift to remove programming from the curriculum until grade 7 and later grade 10!-- it was much easier to have everyone boot up oregon trail, math blaster, and The Print Shop and zone out to it. Pathetic.
Now most of the kids I run into don't even think it's possible for them to program a computer and thus don't consider creating with one. This screws up and then congeals a lot of concepts of what computers are and how they work.
Also another poster mentioned ripping apart some old computers and showing them all the parts. Couldn't agree more. Very useful..
These were at office environments with lax net policies allowing p2p, games, etc.
I have to say IPcop did the best job and included a lot of nice features. Not without flaws but very solid. It handled 70 computers nicely on a cablemodem including an ftp server. The IDS & firewall worked very well and helped avoid all the worm fun of late. p2p worked generally well, but as you probably know most p2p works best beyond the firewall.
Black box units had most of the problems others noted above and Lots of rebooting problems on dsl pppoe and cable dhcp problems. p2p has not fared very well on any of them (although I have only tried a few recent models from smc, netgear and dlink) and each one behaves a bit different.
Right now I'm using 3 nodes at home on a dlink wireless (g) setup. It's ok. for some p2p apps to work the system has to be outside the firewall. most p2p apps that work do so painfully slow from behind the firewall. Also a few yahoo im feature problems (webcams for instance)
power consumption is low and noise is low too.
also the wireless features may be a motivating factor for you.
I really can't recommend the 3com though. Just too annoying and has that 'resting on our name' feel.
try it out your top pic (probably linksys) and save the receipt.
Slashdot Mirror
Sysinternals has released so many tools that have made adminning life much easier and revealed what's going on under the hood in ways that would be laborious manually. Thanks again sysinternals for saving the day - i owe you some beer.
Western Digital drives in a RAID config.
Against my spidey-sense I made a few arrays out of the 100 and 120 gb ide offerings from WD- Some did not like being on the controllers (promise and 3ware), some needed a huge ammount of extra power to boot and not recaliberate/reset or spin down(!).
In the end, all 20 are now dead after 2 years of use, the first 15 failed in the first 6 months (and yes all were oem).
I've had a horrible experience with 2 ultratracks-
The controller decided to flag 1 drive in a raid5 as out of sync, (the drive was perfect) then in a few mins. bring it back online and decide that all other drives were out of sync and needed to be rebuilt based on the 1st drive it just de-synched. All the while happily reading the 1st drive's data incorrectly.
On both accounts (after much pressing) promise engineers said the firmware immolated itself. This was all during a few months of uptime on the first occasion and 1 week on a different (test) system and different model of card.
I moved to 3ware since then (about 2 yrs ago) without any real problems. Losing a TB in a redundant system is hard to explain to anyone.
and modeled after a chiuaua.
THANK YOU! You're absolutely right!
May the utility gods bless you.
I'm not completely sure. Mapquest and others used to provide this info when they started but don't now. Perhaps they're protecting their map data from other services. now there's wayhoo.com where you can take mapquest map and it will give you gps coords, but it goes up and down (currently down).
I'd love to be able to just download waypoints into my gps so I don't get lost and do travel blogging the same way with some maps easily- also taging photos with locations, etc. some of this is available but usually proprietary and not integrated.
It would make my life much easier. about every map service has removed them from end user view. shame really. Otherwise it's great.
Granted, it has limits but the tech hasn't come out of the shop enough to be really explored- http://web.media.mit.edu/~jpatten/audiopad/ There have been several like it in the last few years with lots of neat uses- mostly design your own interface on the fly or planning /flowcharting apps.
...well it does, doesn't it?!
about their badass HP cameras...
Sorry it took me awhile..
/ KVS2026c_kvs2046c.pdf
I haven't priced the whole market lately, but under $1k is tricky. There are several options which I've seen but haven't directly used. I highly recommend getting a demo any way possible.
There are some options though-
Sheet fed might be preferable for you, and several small scanners have come out for small offices lately. The 'gotchas' on the small sheet fed models is most don't have double feed prevention, so train your operators to keep a sharp eye on the paper. You can often tell just by the sound when a scanner doublefeeds..
Once again, I haven't tried much on the lower end models but here goes--
panasonic-
http://www.scantastik.com/hardware/panasonic/pdfs
24 pages/min duplex at 200dpi, mono. no speed test data listed for 300 (grr).
This one chimes in at about $915 from the vendor listed above, and IIRC uses led lighting which is great because your lamps don't die, remain consistant, and with rgb leds you can drop out colors nicely for good b+w imaging or more complicated color- lamps for scanners are like blades for the razor/ cartriges for the inkjet- $$$ ($80-500/per lamp)
Panasonic's offerings over the last 3 years have been great on the image quality- probably the finest b+w out there, and lots of other scanner brands re-brand some of the panasonic models on the higher end. (kodak, etc). Feeding is usually so-so on all of the lower end but is improving. Since you have consistant input docs this will be an easy problem to handle.
Also- if you have the option to use SCSI on any of the scanners, do so. It's almost always more reliable.
Canon-
Canon DR-2080C
Canon's cameras are nice generally, and lots of people like them. Their feeding is considered very good bang for the buck. The vendor listed above has them for about $580 20 pg/min duplex
(again no 300dpi specs) I'd probably pick this one if I had to make a blind choice. again rgb led lamps, and it has a passthough for nasty paper.
Fujitsu- the 4097 is nice and very quick with b+w, the fujitsu feeders drive me nuts sometimes and like to streak the glass where the feeder passes the paper. Otherwise they're great, but the fast models are all going to be out of price range.
There is a low end one that came out for $350 that won some awards at AIIM but it only scans to pdf and is about 10-15 pg/min color, duplex. (Fujitsu Scansnap FI-5110EO)
Kodak I-50 might be ok for you-maybe.. the software can be great and wretched at the same time and all the nice features are crippled and reserved for their expensive models. The twain & isis interface included with kodaks usually cripples key features of the scanner forcing you to use their software. Always try to check twain/isis vs. included proprietary software that talks direct to the scanner for any kind of scanner you're buying.
The feeding systems are usually excellent on kodaks as well as b+w imaging quality. The consumables are notoriously expensive.
Hope this helps!
--
I'm do a few things in this industry but have not seen anything hardware wise yet that fits exactly what you're wanting.
Some more information would help though, like-
Do the scans need to be in color, greyscale or bitonal?
What quality? 150dpi in color is often very readable and printable. I know you're using 300 but I'm not totally sure you need to.
What exactly are you capturing? text? barcodes? Photos?
Is the Region of Interest (ROI) consistant throughout the documents or does it change position from image to image?
Is any of this being OCR'd?
Are you wanting to use cheap usb scanners or is something more office grade ok? Lots of cheaper scanners don't get faster with lower dpi and some (a low grade agfa comes to mind) don't change speed for region of interest. It varies though.
Small visioneer paperport products do have an api you can buy. They aren't flatbed, just the tiny sheetfed ones. Most scanners do not have available api or controls, only the garbage that comes with them.
If you can avoid color, do so. Scan to TIFF group IV for b+w, most pages will be in the 20-100kb range at 200-300dpi and print out great for text.
The preview mode is usually 72 dpi or less but often the interface won't let you directly save the preview, some require preview and then scan (suck!)
As others suggested, a dedicated station is hard to avoid with scanners, and another option may be a networked copier if you're trying to keep everything thin client style.
... so they could get a clue. Or at least listen to their own CDRH...
http://repairfaq.ece.drexel.edu/sam/lasersam.htm
In a sense, the length of tape = capacity. I know there are limits to how much you can wrap around a reel but really, if you took today's tape capactiy in a 9 track format you would have (scientifically speaking ) a fuckload of storage.
I could back up the internet on some travan sludge if the tape was long enough.
Are we primates or are we Mice?!!
Gimmie a 9 track size with SDLT or whatever is best at the moment and add a few extra crc's to the mix, add some splice handling and glue a friggin CD-R to the back of the reel for table of contents info.
Oh yeah... One of the BBC's first radio recording devices used razorblade sized steel to record on. they had to build a whole room with thick walls in case the 'tape' broke because it would unravel and slice through the normal walls... iirc a few techs got cut to ribbons..
Even if they required MS office on the conversion machine (for mass conversions). Yes, even OOo doesn't handle everything perfectly and has to deal with a moving target.
.DOC email attachments, despite good efforts to educate.
Part of the problem in migration (last I checked) was no nice and reliable way to massivly convert the piles of ms office files to OOo. If users would find a DOC file they'd just go hunting for a machine with word on it. They would also freak out dealing with
If the users only saw properly rendered OOo files, this problem of adoption would disappear.
Ideally I'd love to see something that would search a whole network for ms office docs and convert them, archive the ms office files as originals and only leave OOo files 'easily' accessable. I'd write one but my skills in this type of thing are too rusty at the moment.
Although OS choices are important, whatever gets the job done right is more important (for the moment).
As many others have mentioned, slide adaptors are poor. Nikon ls-2000 slide scanners are cheap on ebay and do a very nice job, especially when opting to take the time for 5-16 passes, and a multi feed adaptor is available for it.
For ultimate pro-grade quality on the cheap(er), consider buying a used drum scanner. They are labor intensive but worth it.
We should write them some nice 'thank you' letters!
./'ers input and made decisions with our ideas in mind it would be great!
I missed this story and acting on it, but if someone with some political savvy could direct myself and others to the people who listened (and those who didn't) to
and.. and.. You can Click but you Can't Hide!
Firefox has also served me well when cablemodems meet old win98 machines with low ram. IE would just die, but firefox ran ok considering such restrictions as 200mb hard drives, etc.
Unlikely as it is, I hope this is really the view MS takes (and sticks to) about firefox / mozilla. It would be wonderful if ms never 'innovated' anything again for that matter.
Windows 95's endless installation screen
5) All intellectual property rights are not to be sold but dissolved and sent to the public domain world wide.
In the 80's I taught a series of programming classes to 3rd-6th grade kids. Not just a select few, but the whole grade level for the school.
In 10 mins this might be difficult, but teach them to program! Ask what problems in math are hardest and write an app to do it for them and show the work. I know this sounds horrid but it isn't. It'll spark all the devious plans and interest in their heads.
Example run:
WHAT IS THE 1ST NUMBER YOU WISH TO MULTIPLY? 4
WHAT IS THE 2ND NUMBER YOU WISH TO MULTIPLY? 5
OK! THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO DO THAT BUT HERE IS HOW A COMPUTER LIKES TO DO IT (FAST!):
4+4=8 4+8=12 4+12=16 4+16=20
Or something like that. You should of course make it much more illustrative
Anyway the advice is not to underestimate them at all. They'll pick up this stuff really quickly.
Most importantly it shows that they don't have to be users but they can be creators! They can make their own games. They in fact DO have a pet/slave robot to do their bidding if they can ask it in the right way.
My classes followed this path (Apple ][): Logo graphics, BASIC, Draw a pic in BASIC, make a text game, Animated pics, Make a game with hi-res graphics, add effects in assembly. Not bad for 10 year olds eh?
Not long after I taught these classes there was a strong shift to remove programming from the curriculum until grade 7 and later grade 10!-- it was much easier to have everyone boot up oregon trail, math blaster, and The Print Shop and zone out to it. Pathetic.
Now most of the kids I run into don't even think it's possible for them to program a computer and thus don't consider creating with one. This screws up and then congeals a lot of concepts of what computers are and how they work.
Also another poster mentioned ripping apart some old computers and showing them all the parts. Couldn't agree more. Very useful..
d-link also earlier mandrake mnf and snf.
These were at office environments with lax net policies allowing p2p, games, etc.
I have to say IPcop did the best job and included a lot of nice features. Not without flaws but very solid. It handled 70 computers nicely on a cablemodem including an ftp server. The IDS & firewall worked very well and helped avoid all the
worm fun of late. p2p worked generally well, but as you probably know most p2p works best beyond the firewall.
Black box units had most of the problems others noted above and Lots of rebooting problems on dsl pppoe and cable dhcp problems. p2p has not fared very well on any of them (although I have only tried a few recent models from smc, netgear and dlink) and each one behaves a bit different.
Right now I'm using 3 nodes at home on a dlink wireless (g) setup. It's ok. for some p2p apps to work the system has to be outside the firewall. most p2p apps that work do so painfully slow from behind the firewall. Also a few yahoo im feature problems (webcams for instance)
power consumption is low and noise is low too.
also the wireless features may be a motivating factor for you.
I really can't recommend the 3com though. Just too annoying and has that 'resting on our name' feel.
try it out your top pic (probably linksys) and save the receipt.
many great companies been aquired and... well.. you decide how their products have faired under norton.
s ourceid=firefox&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=ut f-8
http://www.google.com/search?q=Symantec+Acquires&
I wasn't happy when ghost was bought out, same with quarterdeck- looking back i'm still not happy about it.
@stake-- best of luck to you.