way cool, and $700 is small potatoes for those systems with that kind of data on it. I wonder how much the negative publicity alone is costing those companies?
To discount your argument, you're claiming that OpenBSD gets more secure with every release. However the point was that the most current version of IE sat aroud for a while, no longer being developed. Stop developing OpenBSD (and make the last version the most popular) and I'm sure that, over time, more and more security holes will be found.
I made no such claim. I did claim that over time, there are fewer holes. I'm sure new bugs/exploits can be introduced in each new version. The point is, OpenBSD as a whole is far more secure than just IE6 alone. Now keep in mind that one's a full OS, the other merely an "application" running on an OS, and the magnitude of the security issues start boggling the mind.
Oh, and OpenBSD and its *nix kindred tend to run the things hackers are truly interested in. But because it's "hard", many just grab a few tens of thousands of windows boxes (easy!) and then try to take down those *nix sites via DDOS attacks.
They are interested in grabbing the most boxes as possible, with the least amount of effort.... Going after windows will get you more boxes to carry out your DDOS attack.
Take a look at your statement, and then my original statement. The reason they're going after windows boxes is because it's easier than hacking into the actual target - *nix boxes. DDOS is the fallback ploy. If they could own the actual target system, there'd be no need for bot nets, as they could take down the target site at will, or do more unscrupulous activities, like putting up their own content or stealing data.
Firefox has had a few problems, and they were quickly and effectively patched. FF has the advantage of being OSS, which means that the less malicious hackers will find the bug and report it rather than abuse it, simply because they are sympathetic to OSS projects.
IIRC, those Firefox exploits that were "severe" in the way IE6's holes are "severe" were very few. Heck, my folks use FF and IE, one each. Guess which system hasn't had a single issue with malware, exploits, etc, in over 2 years? Hint: it doesn't start with I and end with E...
Recall the EI7 zero day exploit? What's funny was, that was a zero day exploit for the beta, which probably had all of 0.0001% of the market - yes, that's pulled out of the air, but it certainly wasn't large.
Bear in mind that there are a lot of anti-MS types out there just waiting for a new version of IE so they can bang out the first exploit for it to show that MS is weak. And, of course, there's the fact that IE7 is going to be the dominant browser in a few years, whoever gets a head start on cracking it now will have the advantage later when they're making grabs for zombie PCs or burying adware on your system.
I'm not saying any of that makes up for all the difference, but it's definitely something we need to consider. Firefox simply doesn't attract the vitriol that anything made by MS does.
Yes, there's a lot of anti-MS types out there. However, Truth By Blatant Assertion, TBBA, doesn't win you any points. I assume the first exploit was for bragging rights, certainly not for having a head start on grabbing zombies in a couple of years. The fact that MS makes it so easy for them even with a "secure" browser is what should worry everyone who uses it, or any technology that depends upon it (Outlook or Word, anyone?)
But I agree with you - simply using the IDE password feature on the HD would be a major hindrance to data theft. Couple it with file encryption, and it'd be well nigh impossible to crack within the usable lifetime of the data.
IE6's security woes have more to do with hooks into the OS, being based on code to support the incredibly badly architected ActiveX, and just plain bad coding than market share.
Heck someone wrote a virus or two for OS X, which supposedly holds somewhere between 2% and 4% of the market. Firefox has almost 10%, yet I don't recall it having the kind of security exploits that seem to plague every version of IE, including IE7. Recall the EI7 zero day exploit? What's funny was, that was a zero day exploit for the beta, which probably had all of 0.0001% of the market - yes, that's pulled out of the air, but it certainly wasn't large.
And to discount your "IE6 has just been around too long" argument, there's fewer and fewer holes in products like OpenBSD, which have been around far longer than all versions of IE combined. Oh, and OpenBSD and its *nix kindred tend to run the things hackers are truly interested in. But because it's "hard", many just grab a few tens of thousands of windows boxes (easy!) and then try to take down those *nix sites via DDOS attacks.
Seriously- XP, sitting doing nothing, nothing open- uses 20% of my Macbook's CPU.
Welcome to the Windows world. XP, sitting doing nothing, on a native PC install, uses between 4% and 11% of the CPU on an Athlon 64 3000.
Life isn't as bad as all that. First off, remove all unnecessary services to reduce both your memory footprint and your idle CPU consumption. You'll have to tweak that list a little, but my XP system at home runs in about 100MB of RAM with 1-2% CPU. It also only has 6 services running, and no AV software. It boots up in less than 40s, and that's on a 2.4 GHz P4 w/ 1GB RAM.
As for the no AV, if you don't download anything, don't use MS applications (use Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gaim instead) and have a hardware firewall or two between you and the internet, the risk of a virus or worm is quite small. (I do occassionally install and run AV software for a check, or when I do download something from an unknown source)
Lastly, if you're running McAfee or Norton AV software, switch to something else. Both of those are resource hogs, both in memory and CPU. AVG seems a better product in that regard on all counts.
Actually I can recall seeing this option on way more SCSI than IDE/SATA RAID controllers. Most IDE/SATA controllers I've used (eg: 3ware) only let you specify drives to create and array from and don't then allow you to choose the size of that array. SCSI RAID controllers tend to be more advanced (for obvious reasons).
My experience is a little dated: LSI/Mylex extremeRaid and 250 series, AMI MegaRaid (several, all older), the Dell PeRC controller circa 2002 or so). On the IDE front it's all IDE, no SATA: Promise, Adaptec (2003 or so) HotPoint, and a Sigma based controller, forgot the name. I actually haven't played with any new RAID controllers in 2 or so years.
If any of those allow multiple LUN configurations of drives, then I never used them that way. Maybe my "old school" habits just made me ignore anything like that... that's always possible.
The SATA RAID cards in our PE750s definitely allows this, and they're Adaptec derivatives. I'm pretty sure the ROMB in our PE[12][78]50s also allow it, although it has been a very long time since I've even tried to do such a thing (the utility of it is questionable in 99% of cases, and there is also the typically negative performance impact I mentioned before). A couple of big IBM Quad-Xeon boxes we setup in one of our US locations also offered that functionality (I remember this because one of the other admins setup "OS" and "Data" logical drives, something I considered to be pretty pointless given the conditions).
I should also note that I concluded that all the low-end IDE controllers are a waste of money compared to software RAID available with any decent OS. Once you get into the realm of hardware IDE RAID controllers that start to perform better than software raid, you wind up in the same price range as SCSI.
There are many scenarios for where disk performance is not critical, but reliability (and transparency) is. Not to mention ease of setup.
With that said, the performance of pretty much all non-RAID SATA and IDE controllers - once you get to a worthwhile density of 4+ drives per controller - is typically awful. Added to that, they usually don't play well with multiple cards per machine, or heavy simultaneous access from multiple drives (ie: software RAID usage). Even if you're only planning to use software RAID, you really need to buy "high end" RAID controllers like 3ware if you want a decent 8-port+ SATA controller.
(As I recently discovered when I though I'd try a couple of Promise SX8 cards for our newest disk array. Unfortunately, they suck, so now we have to shell out an additional AU$1200ish for a pair of 3ware 9550SX-8s - and that's assuming we can convince the vendor to let us return the Promise cards and get a refund, AU$1800 otherwise. I really think there's a market out there for solid, fast, non-RAID 8-port+ SATA controllers - if only someone would pander to it.)
Well, I didn't know we were talking about performant large enterprise setups. In those cases, I'd seriously look into large SCSI arrays. The controllers in that class are rock-solid, and, as mentioned previously, about the same price range or cheaper than their SATA/IDE counterparts. You can pick up ~150GB U160/320 SCSI drives for roughly $100-150 single price (just under $1/GB). This would solve several of your SATA issues without breaking the bank (I'm aware you can buy cheaper SATA drives, but it sounds like performance is also an issue, in which case your price for SATA drives jumps to be comparable to that available for low-tier SCSI drives.) Even better, with 3 or 4 channel SCSI controllers, you can setup arrays on single controllers with up to 5 drives per channel for performance up to 15 drives per channel for size. Best of all, systems works reliably with up to 4 of these controllers in them. Sounds like a way better deal than SATA to me. Your only issue would be getting array space....:)
I've got that issue as well. Good point. So far I've only done air-cooled, but was considering a liquid cooled system. This definitely helps, esp after all the "my water cooled system leaked!" posts. I was actually considering a low-viscosity non-conductive oil, similar to the concept of the oil-filled/cooled PC.
That's a hard lesson learned there, spend the $35 for a non-conductive liquid and save hundreds, if not thousands in hardware costs. The same thing applies to UPSes.
Side work is rarely worth it. Most of the time you are going to bust your ass, for what? A couple hundred extra bucks a month? Is that really worth two sets of work deadlines in your life? Side work obligations are usually hard to shed and once you make the decision to stop, you are looking at a good 6 more months of weaning people off.
Get a hobbiest project. Doesn't have to be OSS, just something cool you like to do. I spend time at work all day writing glue code and database reports. When I get home that's the _last_ thing I want to code. So I have a few hobby projects invoving gumstix and servos and other embedded type programming.
First off - if you're only getting a few extra hundred a month for that amount of effort, you made yourself a bad deal. I finally caved and did a side project - a friend of mine asked for help, and it seemed interesting enough, so I agreed but only within very strict limitations signed in a contract, including my maximim amount of time I would spend.
I would also recommend that you only work on POC's and transfer knowledge, if you're doing side projects, unless you're intending to make them fulltime. I wound up doing about 40 hours work with about 500 LOCs, integrating 3 separate systems together in a base framework that wound up being as robust as they needed. (IOW, the POC is actually very near to their final code requirements, meaning they only have to do minor tweaks). They're very happy, I'm happy, and I'm done. New work = new contract.
Even though this is a friend, on the biz side we made it clear from the get go that we would work within strict limitations. Don't get caught in the trap of "well, I need one more thing". Every time something like that comes up, my response is - it's possible, but only if it fits in with my schedule, otherwise I can't perform to the expected level.
Even with the low 40 hours of work, this still affected my family life for 3 weeks, as I have a FT job and family.
Last note, just because you think you have lots of spare time and are "bored", I'm willing to bet you don't have near the amount of time you think you do. Take on a small project first, with strict limits on how much of your time will be used. Make damn sure you can accurrately estimate how much of your time it will take. That last bit is very very important.
I'm guessing that would be IDE controllers? I haven't seen a SCSI RAID controller that works on anything less than the physical drive as the smallest granular unit. While I haven't played with the newest IDE RAID controllers, the ones from a couple of years ago were all based on whole disks.
I should also note that I concluded that all the low-end IDE controllers are a waste of money compared to software RAID available with any decent OS. Once you get into the realm of hardware IDE RAID controllers that start to perform better than software raid, you wind up in the same price range as SCSI. At this point, you have to ask yourself what your purpose for RAID is. Generally, speed is SCSI's forte, whether on single drives or large arrays for DB purposes. So if it's just a fast mass store, perhaps a manual disk dupe snapshot is a better solution than an IDE raid. That's the route I've gone for my large data storage, and it makes for easy backups - no tapes, just extra drives that I copy and pull out whenever the data changes (this particular data doesn't change often, it's archival, so once the disk is full, it's done.)
It depends on whether you have enough HDs. Because of the drive access patterns of most OSes, it's better for performance to RAID 1 OS drives. It's also better to have your swap file on a seperate physical HD, or RAID0 set (Depends upon how much you intend to swap - we set ours up on the RAID 1 system drive, with a very small fixed size, as we shouldn't be paging in the first place).
RAID5 doesn't gain any performance until you hit 4 or more drives. RAID5 on three drives is usually a performance penalty. Generally you only RAID5 your data stores with 5+ drives if you need speed and redundancy, and can't afford to have a full RAID10 setup (mirrored and striped, not striped and mirrored - there's a huge difference should a drive die)
Note that all of these solutions only safeguard you against a hardware failure. None are a substitute for backups. However, you can use mirroring for backing up data, which is feasible depending upon your hardware and size of the drives and load on the server. Depending upon the data, it may be better to just copy snapshots of the array(s) if you can afford to take the box offline, or can deal with inconsistent snapshots (email comes to mind in this case).
You've got to be kidding. a gigabit ethernet connected drive will, at the theoretical limit, deliver 125MB/s or so of data. Here's a quick listing of PCI Bus speeds:
Now, I don't know about you, but a single Gb/s ethernet port is going to have a hard time filling up any of those busses except the oldest one. And let's not even talk about the additional latency involved with a network connection.
It depends on what your RAID array is there for - speed or size. You generally can only optimize for one or the other. (Actually, cost is in there too, pick any 2...)
Now, with well designed SCSI systems, you can swamp the PCI Express X8 channels. With a moderately designed SCSI system, you can swamp the PCI 64 bit 66MHz system. You don't even have to have u320 to do it. A couple of old Mylex 1164p's will do, 3 channels each, running LVD drives.
The only problem is that 25 18 and 36 GB SCSI drives sure are hot and noisy, so I cut it down to 5 36s and 8 18s. I use mine for video editing. Oh, and the entire rig only cost me about $500 5 years ago. (also had 20 9GB scsi drives, thankfully they're almost all gone now, at least that's what my wife keeps saying....:)
If you're patient and have time, Fry's will have decent $90+ Antec cases on sale for as little as $15 after rebates etc. I picked up one two weeks ago for $14.95, and it includes a 350W PS. I also picked up the SmartPower 500W PS for $15.
I have those too (MP3 CD players) but I must admit, the iPod is nicer. Can only hold about 100-150 songs on a CD. Now if DVDs were playable as MP3 files...or AAC or some other format for that matter, now that would be sweet. Even so, it takes a lot of DVDs to hold one iPod's collection.
I have to admit I haven't really gotten into podcasts, probably because I don't much care for talk radio either. Probably an outgrowth of being in meeting hell at various points over the past ten years, with one stint of 3 day meetings every week lasting almost 2 years. I don't really like listening to people yap on my own time anymore. *shrug*
As for RIAA music, I generally don't buy any of their mainstream stuff because it's all mechanically produced crap. There's a couple of bands I do listen to, but mostly, I get the fringe artists in the "alternative" realm, although what that means these days varies with whom you ask. I've started watching IMF on and off again (a music channel available on Dish that at least plays bands from around the world, and some lesser known acts from the US) which has been quite interesting, if they'd only dump the one category of music I pretty much despise.
to use an iPod, or whatever your particular mp3 poison may be.
An AUX plug in your car radio or a connection kit makes the sound quality far better than either of those. And there's no commercials. No bad music. No repeats for hours and hours and... well, you get the idea.
About being able to read non-encrypted data - that is true, but it's going to take a lot more than the average person to do so. The controller board isn't the problem - the problem is that the password is written to a generally unavailable sector on the drive, all controller boards currently made that I know about respect the pw on that sector, thus, changing out controller boards is irrelevant.
The only way I know of getting around this is to take the drive apart, manually remove the pw, put the drive back together, and hope you can read it once.
There's the ability in all modern drives to set a hardware password. It's virtually unbreakable, has little to no speed impact, but don't forget it. There's no known backdoor.
Illinois state law says that schools are allowed to act in the best interest of a student, as a parent when the parent is not around (ie, during school days). It does not say schools can discipline students for their thoughts and actions outside of school and not during school time. However, schools are taking it upon themselves to do this regardless.
You know, thinking about this, all this monitoring outside school time of students has to cost money. Maybe that's why our students are underserved? Maybe a law needs to be written taht school personel can only pay attention to students @ school and school functions, outside of that they don't get paid. Maybe cutting their funds 5 to 10% would get the message across? My bank account would certainly like that.
I have not seen the blog --- did he write any libel (sp) information about people? If that is the case I could see that as grounds for expulsion. If he said his math teacher was a XYZ and said math teacher is not...
Actually, I would say none of those activities are grounds for expulsion. Lawsuits, maybe, by the math teacher, but not expulsion.
What's next? Kid cuts in front of their english teacher in the grocery store line and that teacher gets them expelled for it?
Schools should only have jurisdiction over students when on their grounds or in their care, such as at school functions off-campus. Otherwise, it's not their problem nor their business.
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way cool, and $700 is small potatoes for those systems with that kind of data on it. I wonder how much the negative publicity alone is costing those companies?
I made no such claim. I did claim that over time, there are fewer holes. I'm sure new bugs/exploits can be introduced in each new version. The point is, OpenBSD as a whole is far more secure than just IE6 alone. Now keep in mind that one's a full OS, the other merely an "application" running on an OS, and the magnitude of the security issues start boggling the mind.
Take a look at your statement, and then my original statement. The reason they're going after windows boxes is because it's easier than hacking into the actual target - *nix boxes. DDOS is the fallback ploy. If they could own the actual target system, there'd be no need for bot nets, as they could take down the target site at will, or do more unscrupulous activities, like putting up their own content or stealing data.
IIRC, those Firefox exploits that were "severe" in the way IE6's holes are "severe" were very few. Heck, my folks use FF and IE, one each. Guess which system hasn't had a single issue with malware, exploits, etc, in over 2 years? Hint: it doesn't start with I and end with E...
Yes, there's a lot of anti-MS types out there. However, Truth By Blatant Assertion, TBBA, doesn't win you any points. I assume the first exploit was for bragging rights, certainly not for having a head start on grabbing zombies in a couple of years. The fact that MS makes it so easy for them even with a "secure" browser is what should worry everyone who uses it, or any technology that depends upon it (Outlook or Word, anyone?)
and I thought I was paranoid with 2 NAT layers!!!
But I agree with you - simply using the IDE password feature on the HD would be a major hindrance to data theft. Couple it with file encryption, and it'd be well nigh impossible to crack within the usable lifetime of the data.
IE6's security woes have more to do with hooks into the OS, being based on code to support the incredibly badly architected ActiveX, and just plain bad coding than market share.
Heck someone wrote a virus or two for OS X, which supposedly holds somewhere between 2% and 4% of the market. Firefox has almost 10%, yet I don't recall it having the kind of security exploits that seem to plague every version of IE, including IE7. Recall the EI7 zero day exploit? What's funny was, that was a zero day exploit for the beta, which probably had all of 0.0001% of the market - yes, that's pulled out of the air, but it certainly wasn't large.
And to discount your "IE6 has just been around too long" argument, there's fewer and fewer holes in products like OpenBSD, which have been around far longer than all versions of IE combined. Oh, and OpenBSD and its *nix kindred tend to run the things hackers are truly interested in. But because it's "hard", many just grab a few tens of thousands of windows boxes (easy!) and then try to take down those *nix sites via DDOS attacks.
Life isn't as bad as all that. First off, remove all unnecessary services to reduce both your memory footprint and your idle CPU consumption. You'll have to tweak that list a little, but my XP system at home runs in about 100MB of RAM with 1-2% CPU. It also only has 6 services running, and no AV software. It boots up in less than 40s, and that's on a 2.4 GHz P4 w/ 1GB RAM.
As for the no AV, if you don't download anything, don't use MS applications (use Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gaim instead) and have a hardware firewall or two between you and the internet, the risk of a virus or worm is quite small. (I do occassionally install and run AV software for a check, or when I do download something from an unknown source)
Lastly, if you're running McAfee or Norton AV software, switch to something else. Both of those are resource hogs, both in memory and CPU. AVG seems a better product in that regard on all counts.
My experience is a little dated: LSI/Mylex extremeRaid and 250 series, AMI MegaRaid (several, all older), the Dell PeRC controller circa 2002 or so). On the IDE front it's all IDE, no SATA: Promise, Adaptec (2003 or so) HotPoint, and a Sigma based controller, forgot the name. I actually haven't played with any new RAID controllers in 2 or so years.
If any of those allow multiple LUN configurations of drives, then I never used them that way. Maybe my "old school" habits just made me ignore anything like that... that's always possible.
Well, I didn't know we were talking about performant large enterprise setups. In those cases, I'd seriously look into large SCSI arrays. The controllers in that class are rock-solid, and, as mentioned previously, about the same price range or cheaper than their SATA/IDE counterparts. You can pick up ~150GB U160/320 SCSI drives for roughly $100-150 single price (just under $1/GB). This would solve several of your SATA issues without breaking the bank (I'm aware you can buy cheaper SATA drives, but it sounds like performance is also an issue, in which case your price for SATA drives jumps to be comparable to that available for low-tier SCSI drives.) Even better, with 3 or 4 channel SCSI controllers, you can setup arrays on single controllers with up to 5 drives per channel for performance up to 15 drives per channel for size. Best of all, systems works reliably with up to 4 of these controllers in them. Sounds like a way better deal than SATA to me. Your only issue would be getting array space.... :)
I've got that issue as well. Good point. So far I've only done air-cooled, but was considering a liquid cooled system. This definitely helps, esp after all the "my water cooled system leaked!" posts. I was actually considering a low-viscosity non-conductive oil, similar to the concept of the oil-filled/cooled PC.
That's a hard lesson learned there, spend the $35 for a non-conductive liquid and save hundreds, if not thousands in hardware costs. The same thing applies to UPSes.
First off - if you're only getting a few extra hundred a month for that amount of effort, you made yourself a bad deal. I finally caved and did a side project - a friend of mine asked for help, and it seemed interesting enough, so I agreed but only within very strict limitations signed in a contract, including my maximim amount of time I would spend.
I would also recommend that you only work on POC's and transfer knowledge, if you're doing side projects, unless you're intending to make them fulltime. I wound up doing about 40 hours work with about 500 LOCs, integrating 3 separate systems together in a base framework that wound up being as robust as they needed. (IOW, the POC is actually very near to their final code requirements, meaning they only have to do minor tweaks). They're very happy, I'm happy, and I'm done. New work = new contract.
Even though this is a friend, on the biz side we made it clear from the get go that we would work within strict limitations. Don't get caught in the trap of "well, I need one more thing". Every time something like that comes up, my response is - it's possible, but only if it fits in with my schedule, otherwise I can't perform to the expected level.
Even with the low 40 hours of work, this still affected my family life for 3 weeks, as I have a FT job and family.
Last note, just because you think you have lots of spare time and are "bored", I'm willing to bet you don't have near the amount of time you think you do. Take on a small project first, with strict limits on how much of your time will be used. Make damn sure you can accurrately estimate how much of your time it will take. That last bit is very very important.
I'm guessing that would be IDE controllers? I haven't seen a SCSI RAID controller that works on anything less than the physical drive as the smallest granular unit. While I haven't played with the newest IDE RAID controllers, the ones from a couple of years ago were all based on whole disks.
I should also note that I concluded that all the low-end IDE controllers are a waste of money compared to software RAID available with any decent OS. Once you get into the realm of hardware IDE RAID controllers that start to perform better than software raid, you wind up in the same price range as SCSI. At this point, you have to ask yourself what your purpose for RAID is. Generally, speed is SCSI's forte, whether on single drives or large arrays for DB purposes. So if it's just a fast mass store, perhaps a manual disk dupe snapshot is a better solution than an IDE raid. That's the route I've gone for my large data storage, and it makes for easy backups - no tapes, just extra drives that I copy and pull out whenever the data changes (this particular data doesn't change often, it's archival, so once the disk is full, it's done.)
This isn't possible with hardware RAID, or at least none that I've used. An entire disk is used as part of an array.
It depends on whether you have enough HDs. Because of the drive access patterns of most OSes, it's better for performance to RAID 1 OS drives. It's also better to have your swap file on a seperate physical HD, or RAID0 set (Depends upon how much you intend to swap - we set ours up on the RAID 1 system drive, with a very small fixed size, as we shouldn't be paging in the first place).
RAID5 doesn't gain any performance until you hit 4 or more drives. RAID5 on three drives is usually a performance penalty. Generally you only RAID5 your data stores with 5+ drives if you need speed and redundancy, and can't afford to have a full RAID10 setup (mirrored and striped, not striped and mirrored - there's a huge difference should a drive die)
Note that all of these solutions only safeguard you against a hardware failure. None are a substitute for backups. However, you can use mirroring for backing up data, which is feasible depending upon your hardware and size of the drives and load on the server. Depending upon the data, it may be better to just copy snapshots of the array(s) if you can afford to take the box offline, or can deal with inconsistent snapshots (email comes to mind in this case).
There's some nice stats located here
Now, I don't know about you, but a single Gb/s ethernet port is going to have a hard time filling up any of those busses except the oldest one. And let's not even talk about the additional latency involved with a network connection.
It depends on what your RAID array is there for - speed or size. You generally can only optimize for one or the other. (Actually, cost is in there too, pick any 2...)
Now, with well designed SCSI systems, you can swamp the PCI Express X8 channels. With a moderately designed SCSI system, you can swamp the PCI 64 bit 66MHz system. You don't even have to have u320 to do it. A couple of old Mylex 1164p's will do, 3 channels each, running LVD drives.
The only problem is that 25 18 and 36 GB SCSI drives sure are hot and noisy, so I cut it down to 5 36s and 8 18s. I use mine for video editing. Oh, and the entire rig only cost me about $500 5 years ago. (also had 20 9GB scsi drives, thankfully they're almost all gone now, at least that's what my wife keeps saying....:)
That's because when 99.999% of the people are downloading, it's hard to grow that percentage significantly....
If you're patient and have time, Fry's will have decent $90+ Antec cases on sale for as little as $15 after rebates etc. I picked up one two weeks ago for $14.95, and it includes a 350W PS. I also picked up the SmartPower 500W PS for $15.
about $54B
Kind of like Gollum: "me unix, me, unix, me preeeecccciiiiioooooouuuuusssss unix"
By the way, why does this new /. CSS render sooooooooooooo slow in IE7b2?
Because, like almost all things MS, it sucks?
I have those too (MP3 CD players) but I must admit, the iPod is nicer. Can only hold about 100-150 songs on a CD. Now if DVDs were playable as MP3 files...or AAC or some other format for that matter, now that would be sweet. Even so, it takes a lot of DVDs to hold one iPod's collection.
I have to admit I haven't really gotten into podcasts, probably because I don't much care for talk radio either. Probably an outgrowth of being in meeting hell at various points over the past ten years, with one stint of 3 day meetings every week lasting almost 2 years. I don't really like listening to people yap on my own time anymore. *shrug*
As for RIAA music, I generally don't buy any of their mainstream stuff because it's all mechanically produced crap. There's a couple of bands I do listen to, but mostly, I get the fringe artists in the "alternative" realm, although what that means these days varies with whom you ask. I've started watching IMF on and off again (a music channel available on Dish that at least plays bands from around the world, and some lesser known acts from the US) which has been quite interesting, if they'd only dump the one category of music I pretty much despise.
to use an iPod, or whatever your particular mp3 poison may be.
... well, you get the idea.
An AUX plug in your car radio or a connection kit makes the sound quality far better than either of those. And there's no commercials. No bad music. No repeats for hours and hours and
About being able to read non-encrypted data - that is true, but it's going to take a lot more than the average person to do so. The controller board isn't the problem - the problem is that the password is written to a generally unavailable sector on the drive, all controller boards currently made that I know about respect the pw on that sector, thus, changing out controller boards is irrelevant.
The only way I know of getting around this is to take the drive apart, manually remove the pw, put the drive back together, and hope you can read it once.
There's the ability in all modern drives to set a hardware password. It's virtually unbreakable, has little to no speed impact, but don't forget it. There's no known backdoor.
You know, thinking about this, all this monitoring outside school time of students has to cost money. Maybe that's why our students are underserved? Maybe a law needs to be written taht school personel can only pay attention to students @ school and school functions, outside of that they don't get paid. Maybe cutting their funds 5 to 10% would get the message across? My bank account would certainly like that.
Actually, I would say none of those activities are grounds for expulsion. Lawsuits, maybe, by the math teacher, but not expulsion.
What's next? Kid cuts in front of their english teacher in the grocery store line and that teacher gets them expelled for it?
Schools should only have jurisdiction over students when on their grounds or in their care, such as at school functions off-campus. Otherwise, it's not their problem nor their business.