Drunk driving impairs motor skills but not so much judgement and awareness. Cell phone use impairs judgement and awareness, but not so much motor skills.
Guess which one proves to be more dangerous in the long run?
Business more "efficient" than government? Nah...
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 1
Not on the same scale it ain't! Your Libertarian friends will eagerly spout this pablum about how much more efficient business is than government at doing the same thing, but it's a big load of mis-framed crap. Even Microsoft and IBM aren't as large as the United States government, nor do they serve "markets" more than a mere fraction of what it serves (i.e., the ENTIRE U.S. population). Businesses, even at such a vastly smaller scale, create enormous amounts of waste and inefficiency, and if you scale them and their wastefulness up to the scale of governments you find that the efficiency track record of the corporate world ain't so rosy after all.
Really the deception in this favorite Libertarian refrain should be obvious to anyone who's taken a systems analysis class: one of the things you learn is that as any network of people grows larger - be it a corporation or a government - the number of internal communication channels grows exponentially (or is it geometrically?). It should come as no surprise, then, that inefficiency and waste grows at just about roughly the same rate. In order to compare the efficiency of two human networks, you have to compare them at the same scale.
This happens all the time. I belong to several local freecycle (freecycle.org) groups, and people routinely offer old PCs. I've accepted a couple myself (which I refurbish and then freecycle again), and in both instances I found personal information remaining on them, even though the former owners were giving them to a complete stranger.
In the first instance, I sent them a followup reply advising them to wipe the drives of any future systems they might decide to freecycle; rather than express relief and thank me for the information, they spitefully ignored me as if I were some wacko out to con them.
The first poster is mistaken. There are more specific "literacies" to define the more narrow specializations which he describes. "Computer literacy", on the other hand, describes a Big Picture understanding of the whole field, a MacGyver, a jack of all trades: he may not know every last specialized detail that a trained network engineer knows, but he has a breadth of exposure to the entire field that he can quickly figure out or learn those details, and be able to do much the same for any other specialization.
Such "computer literate" jacks-of-all-trades are not popular - or hired - in the corporate world where systems and departments are so large that having a small army of tunnel-vision specialists makes better economic sense for the corporate bottom line. On a smaller mom-and-pop scale, however - perhaps in a developing country - they would be quite indispensible because they can perform multiple roles, and while not performed as efficiently or surgically as their specialized counterparts, they are far more econoomical on a small scale.
From what I gather, computer science curriculums have changed dramatically in the last twenty-five years, changed from that jack-of-all-trades focus to ones of much more narrow specialization. That may or may not be a good thing, depending on where and how you want to make a life and name for yourself.
Where do they figure they're gonna find an endless source for all this paladium? Do they expect to reclaim and reuse every scrap of it? And most importantly, what happens when the so-called "developing" nations, who aren't prepared economically or technologically to take advantage of this proposed system yet, actually are ready to begin using it - after the developed nations have raped the planet of the bulk of palladium and left the difficult unprofitable pickings for the johnny-come-latelys? Who, by the way, are in part johnny-come-latelys because their other natural resources have been plundered before they could develop them? That's how all the superpowers, from Rome to Russia, were born: control of natural resources.
Yep, this is exactly the kind of tool that Microsoft and other Big Software wants to have and see widely used. The more that people begin seeing software as deliverable "content" rather than the buy-it-at-Sears appliance that it is, the easier it will be for Microsoft and other Big Software companies to force us to pay for it all every month.
This is the same subscription business model that Big Software has been drooling over for more than a decade. Big Software is just green with envy at the consistent cashflow and profits that their brethren in Big Media enjoy, and they've been scheming how they can repackage software as "content" and coerce people to buy it EVERY MONTH rather than just once like appliances from Sears and tools from Home Depot.
This "pay-as-you-go" spin is just that: the latest spin on the same idea. They figure that people won't perceive it as paying a subscription FOR THE SAME SOFTWARE THEY ALREADY HAVE if instead it's a network application that doesn't permanently reside on their computer, that they didn't have to physically buy at the store or even purchase, download, and install online.
I have to give them credit... it's psychology genius, and they may get away with it this time. All they have to do is dupe a majority of the ignorant computer-using masses, and the rest of us that see this for what it is will be drug along unwillingly, kicking and screaming to no avail.
Those of us reading this here might as well drop trou and bend over now, because unless Ma and Pa User is aware of the deception here we're all screwed.
One of those recurrent mutations is the genes responsible for the various forms of autism, including Asperger's Syndrome and the high-functioning forms, for which there are far more undiagnosed than diagnosed cases.
That's right, Disney stole the patented idea of a toy company here in the States, which was producing and selling a PATENTED wooden mouse toy with articulated joints (IIRC), which had the name "Micky" (without an "e") emblazoned across its chest. This was around the 1920's, IIRC. Disney saw the toy and basically fashioned a cartoon character after it.
Subsequently the producer (and patent-holder) of the Micky toy sued Disney for infringement, but in yet another amazing patent debacle the company LOST the suit and Disney walked away with the ability to continue creating "Mickey" cartoons and calling them his own creation.
Apparently Disney's "invention" of Mickey was neither the first nor the last time he would engage in such plagiarism. Not only could he not draw worth a damn, then, he couldn't invent worth a damn, either. I guess that leaves the term "entrepreneur" to describe Disney?
... ethically, that is. For all our alleged superiority over other primates, mammals, and vertebrates, our ethics are still scarcely better and our politics every bit as brutal as that of chimpanzees (yes, they indeed do have politics).
This struggle Wikipedia is facing, trying to prevent deliberate and malfeasant attempts to deceive and misinform, is perfectly demonstrative just how little progress our species has made to evolve beyond the anything-goes constraints of the limbic part of our brains.
Unfortunately, barring or restricting editing rights is not an ethical solution, either: how can anyone be certain that those in full control of Wikipedia won't also abuse the ability and use it to misinform when it suits an agenda?
I'll tell you folks roughly the same thing I told the CPUC at the public hearings about the SBC-AT&T merger:
Telecom and Internet is a part of our national infrastructure, just as surely as are our roads, the air we breathe, and the radio frequency spectrum. Do we let the construction companies that build and maintain the roads OWN the sections to which they've contributed their efforts? Do we let the corporations who lease segments of RF spectrum own them outright? Do we allow the contractors who build our NASA spacecraft and military equipment continue to own what they've built?
No, we don't; those roads, those radiowaves, those spacecraft and tanks and jets, being part of the common infrastructure and used for the common good, belong to all of us.
So why is it that we've allowed telecom companies, beginning with AT&T, to own the sections of common infrastructure which they've constructed? Shouldn't that infrastructure also be recognized as a commonly shared resource, one owned by all of us?
It's my contention that a grievous mistake was made more than thirty years ago, when AT&T was deemed a monopoly and partitioned. It was indeed a "monopoly", because the infrastructure which they helped create was a monolithic and commonly shared resource, exactly in the same fashion as is our system of roads.
The mistake that was made was allowing that resource to be privately owned in the first place. In partitioning AT&T, that shared resource was still privately owned but now by multiple corporations rather than one. What should have happened all those years ago is that AT&T should have been required to become some form of non-profit and truly public entity, perhaps a government agency or contractor - in the same vein as defense contractors - or a non-profit corporation with public oversight. It should not have been sectioned-up, along with our shared electronic resource.
I suspect the logic behind that mistake extends back even further in our history, to the time of the railroads. Rather than recognizing that the railroads would become part of the common infrastructure and funding their construction with that understanding and with public funds, we left it to greedy ambitious entrepreneurs to do it, and retain control of what they had built. We repeated that mistake again with the telegraph system, and yet again with the first telephones. As a nation, we should never have allowed this to happen.
Fast forward back to here and now, and this looming threat of these corporations - which still own the pieces of this national infrastructure - setting up the equivalent of toll booths at all the major intersections and deciding who has to pay and how much. The immediate problem isn't the root problem, it's a mere symptom of the much older problem.
We had the chance - multiple chances - decades ago to make the correct decision about the long-term ownership of our shared national telecom roadways. We made grievous errors then, in our capitalistic zeal; I see little likelihood those errors in judgement will be corrected now. They will be further compounded, unless we the true owners of that infrastructure finally revolt and take back the deed.
Yep, now they need to take their new-found understanding and examine the behavior and choices of religious people in the same fashion.
What they will find, of course, is that the two groups exhibit exactly the same brain activity and behavior.
Closed-minded fanatics of any particular stripe are a dangerous breed. They care more about what makes them "feel good" and gives them the easiest emotional reward than fairness and identifying reality and truth.
This is truly classic, isn't it? This fellow is self-confident (or arrogant) enough to think that HE can write The Book that everyone else has failed to effectively write (or so he says). What's his first action in pursuit of that goal? He comes here, to Slashdot, soliciting free advice and ideas, from which he intends to pick and choose for inclusion as his own ideas in his own book, from which he will monetarily and perhaps even culturally profit.
As mentioned elsewhere in this endless commentary, I can confirm both that the Buffalo TeraStations are quite slow, even using a 1000base-T network, and that Buffalo's tech support is horrid. I would not recommend a TeraStation to anyone, even those looking to save money. Fortunately for me I was able to convince Outpost.com to accept it back for a full refund, even after a couple frustrating months of ownership; I doubt Buffalo would have given me the time of day if I'd been forced to ask the same of them directly.
I wound up building my own solution for less cost, but one which has much better performance:
LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 150-4 controller
4 x Hitachi 250GB SATA II drives
Addonics 4-in-3 drive enclosure
I got the Hitachi drives for about $100 apiece, though a guy in Fry's was buying what might have been the same drive yesterday for $50 with hefty rebates. I chose the Hitachis because of good internal performance and overall specs and because they demonstrated the best effectiveness-to-price ratio that I could find at the time. The fact that they happened to also be SATA II wasn't even an issue, since there's not a single current 7200 RPM drive with a platter-to-buffer data rate that can even match the 150MBps bandwidth provided by SATA I. Basically SATA II is, for the moment, nothing but a marketing gimmick.
The LSI Logic controller was inexpensive and somewhat "obsolete", but received good reviews and demonstrated average or better performance. I had also decided that I wanted to avoid partial-software RAID controllers, so that excluded a number of competing products, and since I didn't have PCI-X or PCI-Express slots, only PCI 2.2, there were several newer products I couldn't even consider without a new or major system upgrade. Of those choices that remained that didn't cost a small fortune, I concluded the MegaRAID was my best choice.
Finally, the Addonics enclosure allowed me to cram the four drives into the space of three 5.25" bays. It also offered flexibility, since Addonics also sells an external drive chassis into which the enclosure fits; that would allow me to make the RAID array external if I should ever need to do so.
I've had the result functioning for almost two months now without a hitch, with much better performance than the TeraStation, and for less than what I paid for the TeraStation. Since I already have a 1000base-T network (in part thanks to the Buffalo misadventure), I'm also sharing the RAID array on the network with good results. I also don't have to deal with Buffalo's uncooperative and unresponsive excuse for tech support; the unfulfilled promise of support is far more stressful than having no support at all. My couple conversations with LSI Logic's support staff have been notably more productive.
The old cliche is true: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. That cliche applies to Buffalo TeraStations.
For me, at least, Thunderbird still ain't ready for stage work. No version of Thunderbird, including the last, has been able to successfully import my Outlook messagebase; it crashes in trying to do so, and I wind up with a partial import.
Call me picky or anal-retentive (because it's true), but I need to keep a complete history of my conversations and activities. If a new e-mail client can't allow me to carry that history forward, then it's largely useless to me. I'm retentive for good reason: my memory is utterly horrid and unreliable, so I hoard reminders of everything, whether I'm certain I'll need them or not. (I sure hope I can con my mother into writing my bio before she passes, because she's the ONLY one of the two of us that remembers it.)
Thunderbird needs more work in that department before I'll use it.
Either you're such a newb that you don't even realize that this Nautilus 500 is very nearly a carbon copy of the original Koolance Exos from several years ago, or you're NOT a newb, know full well how un-innovative this product is, yet chose to hype and pimp it anyway.
Either you're such a newb that you don't even realize that this Nautilus 500 is very nearly a carbon copy of the original Koolance Exos from several years ago, or you're NOT a newb, know full well how un-innovative this product is, and yet chose to hype and pimp it anyway.
BING is tricky: it stores multiple customized MBRs, and then loads whichever one is appropriate for the boot configuration which you choose. It also has an option to support MORE than four primary partitions; when that's enabled, not only does that let you have as many environments as you please, usually with no worries about OS conflicts with partition sizes and locations, you can quite literally dictate exactly which volumes are visible to which environments. It doesn't just merely mark those volumes as hidden, it removes them from the MBR/partition table which that OS uses to boot.
The only downside, and I'd think it's a small one for most people, is that (using the extra primaries option) you can no longer use other partition management software, because it no longer knows the physical layout of the volumes and would corrupt the ones it can't "see". BING has decent built-in partition management, however, even supports imaging to USB opticals. It might also be a bit less technical and dumbed-down for yer ma and pa, but it's fine for geeks.
You're a brainwashed dupe for thinking a singular review in a vacuum is somehow better than a comparative point-for-point review. Just because most reviewers are now too lazy and unmotivated - and enjoying the benefits they get of "hyping" a product - to do comparative reviews doesn't mean that singular reviews are more useful. Comparative reviews are MUCH more expensive and time-consuming to conduct, so what do you suppose motivates the choice of singular reviews?
It means just what it means: you're being fed only what someone else controlling the signal wants you to read. As often as not what "content" is chosen and what form it takes is for the maximum benefit of those creating it... not for the benefit of you the cannon-fodder reader.
You may not be able to stop the signal, but what's in it ain't always true or best.
It's really bad review journalism that so many reviews, like this one, are done in a virtual vacuum. None of a product's features or characteristics have meaning as an absolute... they're only meaningful *relative* to other similar competing products. That makes perfect sense, since even human intelligence isn't and can't (yet?) be measured as an absolute. Neither has meaning except relative to a peer.
I'd like to see AnandTech and all other sites offering things called reviews to save their words and efforts until they can do the job right, with a full comparative head-to-head spread. "Reviews" in a vacuum like this raise an obvious question of motivation: is this an actual objective review, or merely a verbose conspiratorial marketing ad?
How much economic significance can one attribute to a drop in sales of far less than even one percent? How much impact from innumerable other variables can one manage to ignore to make a DESIRED theory sound plausible?
BusinessWeek shows us how to make a laughingstock of statistics and the "science" of economics.
Mark
My letter to inventgeek.com about the article
on
DIY LCD Backlight Repair
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Gentlemen and Ladies:
Jared Bouck shouldn't be allowed to leave the house or go to the bathroom without a proofreader looking over his shoulder. You do understand the concept of proofreading, don't you?
Thanks so much for helping to elevate the literacy rate, especially amongst technorati who, as we all know, are already legendary for their spelling and grammar skills.
I'm still using the PrevX Home free version, which no longer appears to be available (typically). However, as inexpensive as the PrevX1 product (still in beta) appears to be for a single-use license, it still appears to be a good value.
After using PrevX Home for nearly a year, my perception is that it's a very aggressive system-internals monitoring tool. While that aggressiveness can get annoying at times, notably when installing or removing software, that aggressiveness can be liberally customized (with some effort) and in any case the benefit - having a trojan-, rootkit-, and spyware-free system - far outweighs the annoyance.
There is a small cost in CPU cycles and disk performance for this monitoring, of course, but my Athlon XP 2500+ system has handled it well enough without severe penalty; I might not recommend it for owners of more obsolete CPUs or hard disk technologies.
There's another option for you to consider, one that was oddly not included in ZDNet's review.
Slashdot Mirror
Drunk driving impairs motor skills but not so much judgement and awareness. Cell phone use impairs judgement and awareness, but not so much motor skills.
Guess which one proves to be more dangerous in the long run?
Not on the same scale it ain't! Your Libertarian friends will eagerly spout this pablum about how much more efficient business is than government at doing the same thing, but it's a big load of mis-framed crap. Even Microsoft and IBM aren't as large as the United States government, nor do they serve "markets" more than a mere fraction of what it serves (i.e., the ENTIRE U.S. population). Businesses, even at such a vastly smaller scale, create enormous amounts of waste and inefficiency, and if you scale them and their wastefulness up to the scale of governments you find that the efficiency track record of the corporate world ain't so rosy after all.
Really the deception in this favorite Libertarian refrain should be obvious to anyone who's taken a systems analysis class: one of the things you learn is that as any network of people grows larger - be it a corporation or a government - the number of internal communication channels grows exponentially (or is it geometrically?). It should come as no surprise, then, that inefficiency and waste grows at just about roughly the same rate. In order to compare the efficiency of two human networks, you have to compare them at the same scale.
Sneaky Libertarians!
This happens all the time. I belong to several local freecycle (freecycle.org) groups, and people routinely offer old PCs. I've accepted a couple myself (which I refurbish and then freecycle again), and in both instances I found personal information remaining on them, even though the former owners were giving them to a complete stranger.
In the first instance, I sent them a followup reply advising them to wipe the drives of any future systems they might decide to freecycle; rather than express relief and thank me for the information, they spitefully ignored me as if I were some wacko out to con them.
The first poster is mistaken. There are more specific "literacies" to define the more narrow specializations which he describes. "Computer literacy", on the other hand, describes a Big Picture understanding of the whole field, a MacGyver, a jack of all trades: he may not know every last specialized detail that a trained network engineer knows, but he has a breadth of exposure to the entire field that he can quickly figure out or learn those details, and be able to do much the same for any other specialization.
Such "computer literate" jacks-of-all-trades are not popular - or hired - in the corporate world where systems and departments are so large that having a small army of tunnel-vision specialists makes better economic sense for the corporate bottom line. On a smaller mom-and-pop scale, however - perhaps in a developing country - they would be quite indispensible because they can perform multiple roles, and while not performed as efficiently or surgically as their specialized counterparts, they are far more econoomical on a small scale.
From what I gather, computer science curriculums have changed dramatically in the last twenty-five years, changed from that jack-of-all-trades focus to ones of much more narrow specialization. That may or may not be a good thing, depending on where and how you want to make a life and name for yourself.
Where do they figure they're gonna find an endless source for all this paladium? Do they expect to reclaim and reuse every scrap of it? And most importantly, what happens when the so-called "developing" nations, who aren't prepared economically or technologically to take advantage of this proposed system yet, actually are ready to begin using it - after the developed nations have raped the planet of the bulk of palladium and left the difficult unprofitable pickings for the johnny-come-latelys? Who, by the way, are in part johnny-come-latelys because their other natural resources have been plundered before they could develop them? That's how all the superpowers, from Rome to Russia, were born: control of natural resources.
Yep, this is exactly the kind of tool that Microsoft and other Big Software wants to have and see widely used. The more that people begin seeing software as deliverable "content" rather than the buy-it-at-Sears appliance that it is, the easier it will be for Microsoft and other Big Software companies to force us to pay for it all every month.
This is the same subscription business model that Big Software has been drooling over for more than a decade. Big Software is just green with envy at the consistent cashflow and profits that their brethren in Big Media enjoy, and they've been scheming how they can repackage software as "content" and coerce people to buy it EVERY MONTH rather than just once like appliances from Sears and tools from Home Depot.
This "pay-as-you-go" spin is just that: the latest spin on the same idea. They figure that people won't perceive it as paying a subscription FOR THE SAME SOFTWARE THEY ALREADY HAVE if instead it's a network application that doesn't permanently reside on their computer, that they didn't have to physically buy at the store or even purchase, download, and install online.
I have to give them credit... it's psychology genius, and they may get away with it this time. All they have to do is dupe a majority of the ignorant computer-using masses, and the rest of us that see this for what it is will be drug along unwillingly, kicking and screaming to no avail.
Those of us reading this here might as well drop trou and bend over now, because unless Ma and Pa User is aware of the deception here we're all screwed.
One of those recurrent mutations is the genes responsible for the various forms of autism, including Asperger's Syndrome and the high-functioning forms, for which there are far more undiagnosed than diagnosed cases.
That's right, Disney stole the patented idea of a toy company here in the States, which was producing and selling a PATENTED wooden mouse toy with articulated joints (IIRC), which had the name "Micky" (without an "e") emblazoned across its chest. This was around the 1920's, IIRC. Disney saw the toy and basically fashioned a cartoon character after it.
Subsequently the producer (and patent-holder) of the Micky toy sued Disney for infringement, but in yet another amazing patent debacle the company LOST the suit and Disney walked away with the ability to continue creating "Mickey" cartoons and calling them his own creation.
Apparently Disney's "invention" of Mickey was neither the first nor the last time he would engage in such plagiarism. Not only could he not draw worth a damn, then, he couldn't invent worth a damn, either. I guess that leaves the term "entrepreneur" to describe Disney?
Mark
... ethically, that is. For all our alleged superiority over other primates, mammals, and vertebrates, our ethics are still scarcely better and our politics every bit as brutal as that of chimpanzees (yes, they indeed do have politics).
This struggle Wikipedia is facing, trying to prevent deliberate and malfeasant attempts to deceive and misinform, is perfectly demonstrative just how little progress our species has made to evolve beyond the anything-goes constraints of the limbic part of our brains.
Unfortunately, barring or restricting editing rights is not an ethical solution, either: how can anyone be certain that those in full control of Wikipedia won't also abuse the ability and use it to misinform when it suits an agenda?
Mark
I'll tell you folks roughly the same thing I told the CPUC at the public hearings about the SBC-AT&T merger:
Telecom and Internet is a part of our national infrastructure, just as surely as are our roads, the air we breathe, and the radio frequency spectrum. Do we let the construction companies that build and maintain the roads OWN the sections to which they've contributed their efforts? Do we let the corporations who lease segments of RF spectrum own them outright? Do we allow the contractors who build our NASA spacecraft and military equipment continue to own what they've built?
No, we don't; those roads, those radiowaves, those spacecraft and tanks and jets, being part of the common infrastructure and used for the common good, belong to all of us.
So why is it that we've allowed telecom companies, beginning with AT&T, to own the sections of common infrastructure which they've constructed? Shouldn't that infrastructure also be recognized as a commonly shared resource, one owned by all of us?
It's my contention that a grievous mistake was made more than thirty years ago, when AT&T was deemed a monopoly and partitioned. It was indeed a "monopoly", because the infrastructure which they helped create was a monolithic and commonly shared resource, exactly in the same fashion as is our system of roads.
The mistake that was made was allowing that resource to be privately owned in the first place. In partitioning AT&T, that shared resource was still privately owned but now by multiple corporations rather than one. What should have happened all those years ago is that AT&T should have been required to become some form of non-profit and truly public entity, perhaps a government agency or contractor - in the same vein as defense contractors - or a non-profit corporation with public oversight. It should not have been sectioned-up, along with our shared electronic resource.
I suspect the logic behind that mistake extends back even further in our history, to the time of the railroads. Rather than recognizing that the railroads would become part of the common infrastructure and funding their construction with that understanding and with public funds, we left it to greedy ambitious entrepreneurs to do it, and retain control of what they had built. We repeated that mistake again with the telegraph system, and yet again with the first telephones. As a nation, we should never have allowed this to happen.
Fast forward back to here and now, and this looming threat of these corporations - which still own the pieces of this national infrastructure - setting up the equivalent of toll booths at all the major intersections and deciding who has to pay and how much. The immediate problem isn't the root problem, it's a mere symptom of the much older problem.
We had the chance - multiple chances - decades ago to make the correct decision about the long-term ownership of our shared national telecom roadways. We made grievous errors then, in our capitalistic zeal; I see little likelihood those errors in judgement will be corrected now. They will be further compounded, unless we the true owners of that infrastructure finally revolt and take back the deed.
Mark
Yep, now they need to take their new-found understanding and examine the behavior and choices of religious people in the same fashion.
What they will find, of course, is that the two groups exhibit exactly the same brain activity and behavior.
Closed-minded fanatics of any particular stripe are a dangerous breed. They care more about what makes them "feel good" and gives them the easiest emotional reward than fairness and identifying reality and truth.
This is truly classic, isn't it? This fellow is self-confident (or arrogant) enough to think that HE can write The Book that everyone else has failed to effectively write (or so he says). What's his first action in pursuit of that goal? He comes here, to Slashdot, soliciting free advice and ideas, from which he intends to pick and choose for inclusion as his own ideas in his own book, from which he will monetarily and perhaps even culturally profit.
Dude, that ain't how open source works.
As mentioned elsewhere in this endless commentary, I can confirm both that the Buffalo TeraStations are quite slow, even using a 1000base-T network, and that Buffalo's tech support is horrid. I would not recommend a TeraStation to anyone, even those looking to save money. Fortunately for me I was able to convince Outpost.com to accept it back for a full refund, even after a couple frustrating months of ownership; I doubt Buffalo would have given me the time of day if I'd been forced to ask the same of them directly.
I wound up building my own solution for less cost, but one which has much better performance:
LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 150-4 controller
4 x Hitachi 250GB SATA II drives
Addonics 4-in-3 drive enclosure
I got the Hitachi drives for about $100 apiece, though a guy in Fry's was buying what might have been the same drive yesterday for $50 with hefty rebates. I chose the Hitachis because of good internal performance and overall specs and because they demonstrated the best effectiveness-to-price ratio that I could find at the time. The fact that they happened to also be SATA II wasn't even an issue, since there's not a single current 7200 RPM drive with a platter-to-buffer data rate that can even match the 150MBps bandwidth provided by SATA I. Basically SATA II is, for the moment, nothing but a marketing gimmick.
The LSI Logic controller was inexpensive and somewhat "obsolete", but received good reviews and demonstrated average or better performance. I had also decided that I wanted to avoid partial-software RAID controllers, so that excluded a number of competing products, and since I didn't have PCI-X or PCI-Express slots, only PCI 2.2, there were several newer products I couldn't even consider without a new or major system upgrade. Of those choices that remained that didn't cost a small fortune, I concluded the MegaRAID was my best choice.
Finally, the Addonics enclosure allowed me to cram the four drives into the space of three 5.25" bays. It also offered flexibility, since Addonics also sells an external drive chassis into which the enclosure fits; that would allow me to make the RAID array external if I should ever need to do so.
I've had the result functioning for almost two months now without a hitch, with much better performance than the TeraStation, and for less than what I paid for the TeraStation. Since I already have a 1000base-T network (in part thanks to the Buffalo misadventure), I'm also sharing the RAID array on the network with good results. I also don't have to deal with Buffalo's uncooperative and unresponsive excuse for tech support; the unfulfilled promise of support is far more stressful than having no support at all. My couple conversations with LSI Logic's support staff have been notably more productive.
The old cliche is true: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. That cliche applies to Buffalo TeraStations.
Mark
For me, at least, Thunderbird still ain't ready for stage work. No version of Thunderbird, including the last, has been able to successfully import my Outlook messagebase; it crashes in trying to do so, and I wind up with a partial import.
Call me picky or anal-retentive (because it's true), but I need to keep a complete history of my conversations and activities. If a new e-mail client can't allow me to carry that history forward, then it's largely useless to me. I'm retentive for good reason: my memory is utterly horrid and unreliable, so I hoard reminders of everything, whether I'm certain I'll need them or not. (I sure hope I can con my mother into writing my bio before she passes, because she's the ONLY one of the two of us that remembers it.)
Thunderbird needs more work in that department before I'll use it.
Steve:
Either you're such a newb that you don't even realize that this Nautilus 500 is very nearly a carbon copy of the original Koolance Exos from several years ago, or you're NOT a newb, know full well how un-innovative this product is, yet chose to hype and pimp it anyway.
Which is it?
Mark
Steve:
Either you're such a newb that you don't even realize that this Nautilus 500 is very nearly a carbon copy of the original Koolance Exos from several years ago, or you're NOT a newb, know full well how un-innovative this product is, and yet chose to hype and pimp it anyway.
Which is it?
Mark
BING is tricky: it stores multiple customized MBRs, and then loads whichever one is appropriate for the boot configuration which you choose. It also has an option to support MORE than four primary partitions; when that's enabled, not only does that let you have as many environments as you please, usually with no worries about OS conflicts with partition sizes and locations, you can quite literally dictate exactly which volumes are visible to which environments. It doesn't just merely mark those volumes as hidden, it removes them from the MBR/partition table which that OS uses to boot.
The only downside, and I'd think it's a small one for most people, is that (using the extra primaries option) you can no longer use other partition management software, because it no longer knows the physical layout of the volumes and would corrupt the ones it can't "see". BING has decent built-in partition management, however, even supports imaging to USB opticals. It might also be a bit less technical and dumbed-down for yer ma and pa, but it's fine for geeks.
Made by Terabyte Unlimited: http://terabyteunlimited.com/
Mark
You're a brainwashed dupe for thinking a singular review in a vacuum is somehow better than a comparative point-for-point review. Just because most reviewers are now too lazy and unmotivated - and enjoying the benefits they get of "hyping" a product - to do comparative reviews doesn't mean that singular reviews are more useful. Comparative reviews are MUCH more expensive and time-consuming to conduct, so what do you suppose motivates the choice of singular reviews?
It means just what it means: you're being fed only what someone else controlling the signal wants you to read. As often as not what "content" is chosen and what form it takes is for the maximum benefit of those creating it... not for the benefit of you the cannon-fodder reader.
You may not be able to stop the signal, but what's in it ain't always true or best.
Mark
It's really bad review journalism that so many reviews, like this one, are done in a virtual vacuum. None of a product's features or characteristics have meaning as an absolute... they're only meaningful *relative* to other similar competing products. That makes perfect sense, since even human intelligence isn't and can't (yet?) be measured as an absolute. Neither has meaning except relative to a peer.
I'd like to see AnandTech and all other sites offering things called reviews to save their words and efforts until they can do the job right, with a full comparative head-to-head spread. "Reviews" in a vacuum like this raise an obvious question of motivation: is this an actual objective review, or merely a verbose conspiratorial marketing ad?
Mark
How much economic significance can one attribute to a drop in sales of far less than even one percent? How much impact from innumerable other variables can one manage to ignore to make a DESIRED theory sound plausible?
BusinessWeek shows us how to make a laughingstock of statistics and the "science" of economics.
Mark
Gentlemen and Ladies:
Jared Bouck shouldn't be allowed to leave the house or go to the bathroom without a proofreader looking over his shoulder. You do understand the concept of proofreading, don't you?
Thanks so much for helping to elevate the literacy rate, especially amongst technorati who, as we all know, are already legendary for their spelling and grammar skills.
Sincerely,
Mark A. Craig
"If you give in and help support our crusade to concentrate wealth, we'll cut you in for a small share of it."
rearing its ugly head. Yep, getting gobs of cash EVERY month is a whole lot more attractive than simply getting it at point of sale.
Just say no!
http://shield.prevx.com/
I'm still using the PrevX Home free version, which no longer appears to be available (typically). However, as inexpensive as the PrevX1 product (still in beta) appears to be for a single-use license, it still appears to be a good value.
After using PrevX Home for nearly a year, my perception is that it's a very aggressive system-internals monitoring tool. While that aggressiveness can get annoying at times, notably when installing or removing software, that aggressiveness can be liberally customized (with some effort) and in any case the benefit - having a trojan-, rootkit-, and spyware-free system - far outweighs the annoyance.
There is a small cost in CPU cycles and disk performance for this monitoring, of course, but my Athlon XP 2500+ system has handled it well enough without severe penalty; I might not recommend it for owners of more obsolete CPUs or hard disk technologies.
There's another option for you to consider, one that was oddly not included in ZDNet's review.
Mark