You are right, SAPRouter is terrible. We still run it somewhere. The machine it runs on has 2 ethernet interfaces, one to the LAN on which the SAP servers are, and one to a cisco with dial-on-demand ISDN connection to SAP headquarters. It is completely unclear why this program has to be inbetween there. It acts as some kind of proxy or firewall or whatever, but nothing that the cisco could not (functionally) do.
It is one of the few programs still running on an old IBM AIX box, but nobody dares touching it now it works. From what I understand, it is used less and less because most functions of this connection are taken over by Internet services. But I am only the network admin, not the SAP guru.
I always wondered why the fact that Google runs on Linux was/is not advertised more prominently by Linux advocates. The fact that Altavista was an Alpha advertising effort is quite widely known, but when someone claims that "nobody would run a serious/widely-used application on Linux" there is hardly anyone mentioning Google as an example of an application that almost every Internet user uses. And that still has an impressing performance.
I don't think that I will buy any new storage system that does not give me at least 10 times the capacity of the previous generation. DVD gives yoou 7-14 times what you could get on a CD. Any new DVD system should have somewhere between 35 and 100 GB of capacity to be really a useful improvement.
23GB may seem attractive, but still requires way too many discs to copy the content of your average PC on it. Maybe not a problem for its first intended application (HDTV), but DVD was also branded "digital versatile disc" instead of "digital video disc" even before it became popular as a video medium.
It usually is not very attractive to switch to a competing app that interfaces with systems like Exchange, Windows Terminal Server, Citrix, etc. This is because you need a "client access license" to use such systems. So, even when you are not using Outlook you still have to pay. In some cases, you are even "forced" to buy the complete product. (e.g. to use Terminal Server you need a Windows license for your workstation. Fine when it already runs Windows, but when it is running a competing system you have to buy that license)
This takes one of the incentives away from switching to a competing environment. To cater for this, you have to develop a competing Exchange server as well (this has already been done, of course). At that moment, it may be more attractive to develop according to an open standard.
This is not really how it works. With GPS you don't measure any angles. The satellites send the current time, and information about their location (in the form of ephemerides). The position is determined by examining the time differences between the received signals. That is why you need 4 satellites: there are 4 unknowns (your position in 3 dimensions, and time) and to solve the set of equations you need 4 equations. With 3 visible satellites you need to make 1 assumption (e.g. constant elevation) to determine your position. When you could measure angles, of course it would be extra information.
Well... I have a large LCD TV (resolution 1366x768) and I use Linux, but for me it is not usable for browsing. This may partly be because it is connected as my second screen, and many of the settings cannot be indpendently made per screen. I agree that Opera is the only browser that handles scaling sensibly.
I can play movies on it using mplayer, but that also is not a very nice solution. When running in fullscreen mode, mplayer scales X and Y independently. I would like a maxed-size picture with black bands where required. Now, when I play a 4:3 movie on my 16:9 screen it is stretched horizontally. To overcome that, I need several commandline options.
All in all I don't use the PC input on my TV nearly as often as I thought before buying it.
When you want to use it as a computer monitor there are other nasty issues...
At first, I would want to say that a 37" panel is unsuitable as a computer monitor. You will be either sitting too close to oversee it, or too far away to read normal fonts. Don't think "now I will be able to surf the web or compose my letters on my TV". That just isn't going to work.
Besides, many TVs have difficulty providing clean 1:1 pixel mapping between the PC input and the LCD screen.
My advise: get a TV to watch TV, get a separate small LCD panel to use as a monitor.
Note that many TVs have a "store demo mode" that is not really what you want to use at home. As a good proportion of customers judges picture by brightness (geee look! that one is bright!) they always are set too bright and tend to wash out. However, once you reset them to typical home conditions, the picture becomes much better. You need to set both contrast and brightness in your own environment (preferably using a testcard) to make sure that the whole greyscale and colorscale are displayed correctly.
Still there is a definate small upperclass of screens that are way better than the rest. Philips makes the "ambilight" models (37pf9986 and now 37pf9830) but I think they are not available in the US. Those really stand out when they are put between other LCD panels in a showroom. So much that you wonder why you would want to buy any of the others.
LCD also has some advantages over plasma. - the power consumption is much lower (does not seem to be of interest to Americans, but still...) - the front surface is dark and does not tend to mirror objects in the room - there is no danger of burn-in of static displays
To me, this looks like typical consumer-electronics-brochure-talk... Not only is it incorrect (Pb and Pr are not Blue and Red, but the difference between Y and Blue or Red), but also there is no reference mentioned. "better color detail". Better han what? Composite?
Here in Europe, every TV has one or more 21-pin SCART connectors. These provide at least audio and composite video, but usually also S-video and/or RGB inputs (when the TV has more than one SCART connector, they usually are not all RGB-enabled). This RGB input is the most direct input, it is directly fed to the tube driving amplifiers via a switch matrix.
I understand that SCART is not used in the US, and that previous models of TV usually had only composite and maybe S-video inputs. Then YPbPr provides a better quality. But there is no quality difference compared to RGB.
For quite some time, any high-quality video source here in Europe (like digital receivers, DVD players and recorders, computers and games) used RGB output for the best picture quality. Only the last year or two, there is a sudden appearance of YPbPr on this kind of equipment. But usually SCART with RGB is still provided.
What I cannot understand is why a connection between some peripheral (like a DVD player) and a TV set has anything to do with bandwidth. There are 3 coaxial cables running between the units, and who cares whether they all carry the same bandwidth signals or two of them use less bandwidth? I know that S-video multiplexes the Pb and Pr signals over a single wire, but what does that have to do with a 3-wire system?
We have had 40 years of color television using RGB, with a color-difference system (either NTSC, PAL or SECAM) used to transfer the signal. The SCART system that has been popular here for some 25 years has provided RGB all the time. And now that we are on the brink of digital-only TV suddenly the electronics industry is presenting us with a "new analog standard" that does not really bring anything new.
I think there is another reason. YPbPr lends itself to conveniently carry the Macrovision DRM system on the Y channel. RGB is (in the televsion world) usually used with a separate composite sync. Macrovision is not usable with that. It could be used with sync-on-green but that is not part of the usual TV capabilities here. I think the sudden rise of YPbPr is an effort to move the analog TV world into a standard that at least provides some DRM possibilities, while forcing full DRM on the digital world. Without such a move, nobody would want to have digital when it restricts their rights, and good-quality (RGB) analog transfer is available a good alternative. SO RGB has to go.
I always wonder why one would want YPbPr so badly... Are there many TVs in your country that support YPbPr and not RGB? Over here, RGB is always there, and YPbPr often is (becoming more prevalent).
RGB has been a color-TV and color-monitor standard from the beginning, and now they want to convert us all to a different standard, requiring extra stuff in between... (as you write, the RGB is encoded to YPbPr on the board, and the TV has to decode it back to RGB again because that is what drives the CRT or LCD)
That Mac Mini/86 would be a Mini-ITX board with some special DRM feature to lock-in OSX, I presume? What other differences are there between an ITX system and the Mac Mini?
No, the problem is not with the local loop. The problem is that they promise more than that they can really deliver, often because they do not test (to gain an advantage over the established phone company that always test first and evaluates the technical and ordering system before offering at a large scale). Advertisements are run and customers enlisted months before the service is even available, which of course causes support call peaks right at the worst possible time.
The whole "we can do it! we are better! our rates are lower!" image that they try to establish of course flies directly back in their face when it turns out that they cannot do it and their downtimes are excessive.
I would say it is their own fault, caused by their over-ambitious rollout plans and under-estimation of customer service, but I understand that from the viewpoint of a make-money-quick manager it costs too much money to do slow start.
This is of course bullshit. When there are 1 million lines in an area that have cost 500 million to establish there is a 500 cost to recoup on every line. A subscriber will pay that over the time he uses the service. Of course there is no 500 to be gained back when that line is dismantled. So they don't do that. However, when you take away the possibility to recoup the cost of the local loop deployment, the phone company will definately go out of business.
Sure you can (and should!) move infrastructural deployment like local loop, cable connections, gas connections from commercial companies to government service. Every house built should come with it, and it should be evenly paid via taxes so the price an individual pays is not dependent on the neighborhood his house happens to be in. That stimulates the even development of infrastructure in urban and non-urban areas. Commercial companies can offer their service on this infrastructure without being dependent on "whoever owns it".
But the USA does not do that, and European countries are moving away from it. Bad move, sure. But explain that to them...
For a DSL line you need CO equipment, and a line. For a phoneline you need (different) CO equipment, nd a line as well. Becuase phoneline service existed first, the price includes the full tariff for the line. So, a DSL offer can, while it requires a line, disregard the cost of it. The customer is already paying it.
Allowing DSL service without phone service at the same rate will cost the company money because the costs of the line are not recovered. You would have to split the phoneline bill in two parts: for the line and for the CO equipment and calls. Then, when you want only DSL you still pay for the line plus DSL service.
In the Netherlands we have a similar situation. Unfortunately the lease price for a bare line is not much below the cheapest phone rate (lowest monthly rate with highest per-minute rate) so it is not very attractive. You save maybe 2 euro per month when you do not call.
Furthermore, those that offer unbundled DSL are usually the cowboys in the market. They have a big mouth full of promises and the lowest rates, but they are also in the top-10 of all consumer complaint lists. When your line works, you are lucky. When it doesn't, the end of the story is many frustrated phonecalls away.
Our ex-state-monopoly telecom company KPN still offers the best DSL network. They are not the cheapest, but for me that is not the only thing that counts.
Why is mozilla.org so against the release of improved versions of the best product they ever made? It has always been a bad idea to fork off browser and mailer programs. They should have stuck with the suite and its options to install only part of it. Now, those who want a browser, mailer and html editor are left with 3 programs, one of which mozilla.org does not support eiter, or the new suite, which they do not support at all.
The ARC-5010 looks attractive in this case. There was one other issue that I did not follow through: I wanted my discs to spindown when the data is not being accessed (I use my setup for videorecording so there are long hours it is not accessed). I am not sure if the ARC-5010 will allow the drives to spin down.
Anyway, in a RAID-5 setup the drives all need to be spinning when some data is accessed. This is a disadvantage over using pairs of drives in RAID-1, where only a single drive is required for reads and two drives during writes. This may not matter much for "office" use. My system is in the livingroom and I prefer one or two spinning drives over 5. Although they are getting quiter all the time.
I am not familiar with the requirements a Mac would have on a NAS. The commercial NAS systems of course support the Mac, but they are a bit costly.
I hope you can get your ARC-5010 based unit delivered, as it seems an attractive solution for you.
Recently I have been looking into adding about a TB of storage to my home network, and the different options:
- an external box like you describe - an external box but with a small motherboard in it, and setting it up as a NAS system on the LAN - the 5-drive cage that is in there added to my system - adding bare drives to my system
For now I have just bought some large drives and added them internal to my system in an arrangement similar to what those cages use (drives stacked vertically into 3 5 inch bays).
I closely looked at the ARC-5010 cage that is used in those external cages. I think it is not a very recent design, and will probably be replaced by a newer type sometime, hopefully soon. That may also explain the stock problems. This unit uses parallel drives only, although it has both a parallel and serial interface to the host system. The boxes you are looking at convert this to USB and Firewire using yet another bridge board. I expect a new drive cage type would have: - serial ATA for the drives - serial ATA, USB and Firewire for the host Making swapbays for serial ATA drives is a lot easier. Also, the current model has performance bottlenecks that are below those of current drives. This may not bother you when you are considering USB and Firewire, but 5 drives directly attached to the computer will have an aggregate throughput that is way above what this unit can do.
In my case, I was not looking at hotswap. I don't mind when I need to shutdown the system to replace a drive, it is for home use (videorecording) only. I wanted it to run on Linux, and that further limited the possibilities. The units you are referring to would work on Linux, although I have read some mixed reports about connecting drives via USB (hangs etc). Using a multi-SATA controller with an external SATA tower would work when the controller is supported. Several of the all-in-one solutions I encountered came with a controller that only works in Windows. However, with external boxes with many drives there is a lot of cable clutter, and a new widget has been introduced: a SATA port multiplier. This allows about 5 drives to be connected via a single external SATA cable. It reduces the throughput, but with SATA 300 it should still be enough. Unfortunately, Linux does not support those external port multipliers at all. When you are using Windows, the least expensive solution could be to use an external cage with sata port multiplier and a single-port SATA controller in the system (whcih still can offer onboard RAID when you like that). However, that will not be a "storage in a box" solution. For that, using a NAS solution could be the better choice anyway, because you access it at a file rather than a filesystem level. However, unless you assemble and configure it yourself (using a small PC motherboard and one of the available NAS solutions) it is going to be much more expensive. Ready-made NAS boxes tend to be quite expensive.
It is quite clear that those countries who have upset others have been the major victims of terrorism. And that is to be expected: terrorism is the way for the underdog to fight someone they cannot fight another way.
Israel is a good example. Small wonder that they have a terrorism problem. America is similarly positioned.
But in the Netherlands, it has been quite some time since we had terrorism. The threat came back solely because of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, that were performed under the "war against terror" invented by Bush. (terrorist attacks in the past century were caused by suppressing a minority group as well)
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You are right, SAPRouter is terrible.
We still run it somewhere. The machine it runs on has 2 ethernet interfaces, one to the LAN on which the SAP servers are, and one to a cisco with dial-on-demand ISDN connection to SAP headquarters.
It is completely unclear why this program has to be inbetween there. It acts as some kind of proxy or firewall or whatever, but nothing that the cisco could not (functionally) do.
It is one of the few programs still running on an old IBM AIX box, but nobody dares touching it now it works. From what I understand, it is used less and less because most functions of this connection are taken over by Internet services. But I am only the network admin, not the SAP guru.
And not in the Netherlands. It is 80 km/h here.
I presume there is some project (with a multi-million budget) to get that unified all over Europe.
I wanted to post an example but some filter at slashdot disallows me. Never mind.
I always wondered why the fact that Google runs on Linux was/is not advertised more prominently by Linux advocates.
The fact that Altavista was an Alpha advertising effort is quite widely known, but when someone claims that "nobody would run a serious/widely-used application on Linux" there is hardly anyone mentioning Google as an example of an application that almost every Internet user uses. And that still has an impressing performance.
I don't think that I will buy any new storage system that does not give me at least 10 times the capacity of the previous generation.
DVD gives yoou 7-14 times what you could get on a CD.
Any new DVD system should have somewhere between 35 and 100 GB of capacity to be really a useful improvement.
23GB may seem attractive, but still requires way too many discs to copy the content of your average PC on it. Maybe not a problem for its first intended application (HDTV), but DVD was also branded "digital versatile disc" instead of "digital video disc" even before it became popular as a video medium.
It usually is not very attractive to switch to a competing app that interfaces with systems like Exchange, Windows Terminal Server, Citrix, etc.
This is because you need a "client access license" to use such systems. So, even when you are not using Outlook you still have to pay. In some cases, you are even "forced" to buy the complete product.
(e.g. to use Terminal Server you need a Windows license for your workstation. Fine when it already runs Windows, but when it is running a competing system you have to buy that license)
This takes one of the incentives away from switching to a competing environment.
To cater for this, you have to develop a competing Exchange server as well (this has already been done, of course).
At that moment, it may be more attractive to develop according to an open standard.
This is not really how it works.
With GPS you don't measure any angles. The satellites send the current time, and information about their location (in the form of ephemerides).
The position is determined by examining the time differences between the received signals. That is why you need 4 satellites: there are 4 unknowns (your position in 3 dimensions, and time) and to solve the set of equations you need 4 equations.
With 3 visible satellites you need to make 1 assumption (e.g. constant elevation) to determine your position. When you could measure angles, of course it would be extra information.
Well... I have a large LCD TV (resolution 1366x768) and I use Linux, but for me it is not usable for browsing.
This may partly be because it is connected as my second screen, and many of the settings cannot be indpendently made per screen.
I agree that Opera is the only browser that handles scaling sensibly.
I can play movies on it using mplayer, but that also is not a very nice solution.
When running in fullscreen mode, mplayer scales X and Y independently. I would like a maxed-size picture with black bands where required. Now, when I play a 4:3 movie on my 16:9 screen it is stretched horizontally.
To overcome that, I need several commandline options.
All in all I don't use the PC input on my TV nearly as often as I thought before buying it.
When you want to use it as a computer monitor there are other nasty issues...
At first, I would want to say that a 37" panel is unsuitable as a computer monitor.
You will be either sitting too close to oversee it, or too far away to read normal fonts.
Don't think "now I will be able to surf the web or compose my letters on my TV". That just isn't going to work.
Besides, many TVs have difficulty providing clean 1:1 pixel mapping between the PC input and the LCD screen.
My advise: get a TV to watch TV, get a separate small LCD panel to use as a monitor.
Maybe it has been some time since you left that scene?
All current Philips TVs come with a store demo mode.
Not only different picture settings, but also rolling demo of the set's features.
I have not checked other brands but it would be amazed if this does not appear on other makes as well.
Note that many TVs have a "store demo mode" that is not really what you want to use at home.
As a good proportion of customers judges picture by brightness (geee look! that one is bright!) they always are set too bright and tend to wash out.
However, once you reset them to typical home conditions, the picture becomes much better.
You need to set both contrast and brightness in your own environment (preferably using a testcard) to make sure that the whole greyscale and colorscale are displayed correctly.
Still there is a definate small upperclass of screens that are way better than the rest.
Philips makes the "ambilight" models (37pf9986 and now 37pf9830) but I think they are not available in the US. Those really stand out when they are put between other LCD panels in a showroom. So much that you wonder why you would want to buy any of the others.
LCD also has some advantages over plasma.
- the power consumption is much lower (does not seem to be of interest to Americans, but still...)
- the front surface is dark and does not tend to mirror objects in the room
- there is no danger of burn-in of static displays
To me, this looks like typical consumer-electronics-brochure-talk...
Not only is it incorrect (Pb and Pr are not Blue and Red, but the difference between Y and Blue or Red), but also there is no reference mentioned. "better color detail". Better han what? Composite?
Here in Europe, every TV has one or more 21-pin SCART connectors. These provide at least audio and composite video, but usually also S-video and/or RGB inputs (when the TV has more than one SCART connector, they usually are not all RGB-enabled).
This RGB input is the most direct input, it is directly fed to the tube driving amplifiers via a switch matrix.
I understand that SCART is not used in the US, and that previous models of TV usually had only composite and maybe S-video inputs. Then YPbPr provides a better quality. But there is no quality difference compared to RGB.
For quite some time, any high-quality video source here in Europe (like digital receivers, DVD players and recorders, computers and games) used RGB output for the best picture quality.
Only the last year or two, there is a sudden appearance of YPbPr on this kind of equipment. But usually SCART with RGB is still provided.
What I cannot understand is why a connection between some peripheral (like a DVD player) and a TV set has anything to do with bandwidth. There are 3 coaxial cables running between the units, and who cares whether they all carry the same bandwidth signals or two of them use less bandwidth?
I know that S-video multiplexes the Pb and Pr signals over a single wire, but what does that have to do with a 3-wire system?
We have had 40 years of color television using RGB, with a color-difference system (either NTSC, PAL or SECAM) used to transfer the signal. The SCART system that has been popular here for some 25 years has provided RGB all the time.
And now that we are on the brink of digital-only TV suddenly the electronics industry is presenting us with a "new analog standard" that does not really bring anything new.
I think there is another reason. YPbPr lends itself to conveniently carry the Macrovision DRM system on the Y channel. RGB is (in the televsion world) usually used with a separate composite sync. Macrovision is not usable with that. It could be used with sync-on-green but that is not part of the usual TV capabilities here.
I think the sudden rise of YPbPr is an effort to move the analog TV world into a standard that at least provides some DRM possibilities, while forcing full DRM on the digital world. Without such a move, nobody would want to have digital when it restricts their rights, and good-quality (RGB) analog transfer is available a good alternative. SO RGB has to go.
I always wonder why one would want YPbPr so badly...
Are there many TVs in your country that support YPbPr and not RGB?
Over here, RGB is always there, and YPbPr often is (becoming more prevalent).
RGB has been a color-TV and color-monitor standard from the beginning, and now they want to convert us all to a different standard, requiring extra stuff in between...
(as you write, the RGB is encoded to YPbPr on the board, and the TV has to decode it back to RGB again because that is what drives the CRT or LCD)
There must be some dark plot here...
That Mac Mini/86 would be a Mini-ITX board with some special DRM feature to lock-in OSX, I presume?
What other differences are there between an ITX system and the Mac Mini?
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence...
No, the problem is not with the local loop.
The problem is that they promise more than that they can really deliver, often because they do not test (to gain an advantage over the established phone company that always test first and evaluates the technical and ordering system before offering at a large scale).
Advertisements are run and customers enlisted months before the service is even available, which of course causes support call peaks right at the worst possible time.
The whole "we can do it! we are better! our rates are lower!" image that they try to establish of course flies directly back in their face when it turns out that they cannot do it and their downtimes are excessive.
I would say it is their own fault, caused by their over-ambitious rollout plans and under-estimation of customer service, but I understand that from the viewpoint of a make-money-quick manager it costs too much money to do slow start.
This is of course bullshit.
When there are 1 million lines in an area that have cost 500 million to establish there is a 500 cost to recoup on every line. A subscriber will pay that over the time he uses the service. Of course there is no 500 to be gained back when that line is dismantled. So they don't do that.
However, when you take away the possibility to recoup the cost of the local loop deployment, the phone company will definately go out of business.
Sure you can (and should!) move infrastructural deployment like local loop, cable connections, gas connections from commercial companies to government service. Every house built should come with it, and it should be evenly paid via taxes so the price an individual pays is not dependent on the neighborhood his house happens to be in. That stimulates the even development of infrastructure in urban and non-urban areas. Commercial companies can offer their service on this infrastructure without being dependent on "whoever owns it".
But the USA does not do that, and European countries are moving away from it. Bad move, sure. But explain that to them...
For a DSL line you need CO equipment, and a line.
For a phoneline you need (different) CO equipment, nd a line as well.
Becuase phoneline service existed first, the price includes the full tariff for the line. So, a DSL offer can, while it requires a line, disregard the cost of it. The customer is already paying it.
Allowing DSL service without phone service at the same rate will cost the company money because the costs of the line are not recovered.
You would have to split the phoneline bill in two parts: for the line and for the CO equipment and calls. Then, when you want only DSL you still pay for the line plus DSL service.
In the Netherlands we have a similar situation. Unfortunately the lease price for a bare line is not much below the cheapest phone rate (lowest monthly rate with highest per-minute rate) so it is not very attractive. You save maybe 2 euro per month when you do not call.
Furthermore, those that offer unbundled DSL are usually the cowboys in the market. They have a big mouth full of promises and the lowest rates, but they are also in the top-10 of all consumer complaint lists. When your line works, you are lucky. When it doesn't, the end of the story is many frustrated phonecalls away.
Our ex-state-monopoly telecom company KPN still offers the best DSL network. They are not the cheapest, but for me that is not the only thing that counts.
Why is mozilla.org so against the release of improved versions of the best product they ever made?
It has always been a bad idea to fork off browser and mailer programs. They should have stuck with the suite and its options to install only part of it.
Now, those who want a browser, mailer and html editor are left with 3 programs, one of which mozilla.org does not support eiter, or the new suite, which they do not support at all.
That can't be true!
Even Microsoft Internet Explorer calls itself Mozilla in its browser string.
The ARC-5010 looks attractive in this case.
There was one other issue that I did not follow through: I wanted my discs to spindown when the data is not being accessed (I use my setup for videorecording so there are long hours it is not accessed). I am not sure if the ARC-5010 will allow the drives to spin down.
Anyway, in a RAID-5 setup the drives all need to be spinning when some data is accessed. This is a disadvantage over using pairs of drives in RAID-1, where only a single drive is required for reads and two drives during writes.
This may not matter much for "office" use. My system is in the livingroom and I prefer one or two spinning drives over 5. Although they are getting quiter all the time.
I am not familiar with the requirements a Mac would have on a NAS. The commercial NAS systems of course support the Mac, but they are a bit costly.
I hope you can get your ARC-5010 based unit delivered, as it seems an attractive solution for you.
Recently I have been looking into adding about a TB of storage to my home network, and the different options:
- an external box like you describe
- an external box but with a small motherboard in it, and setting it up as a NAS system on the LAN
- the 5-drive cage that is in there added to my system
- adding bare drives to my system
For now I have just bought some large drives and added them internal to my system in an arrangement similar to what those cages use (drives stacked vertically into 3 5 inch bays).
I closely looked at the ARC-5010 cage that is used in those external cages. I think it is not a very recent design, and will probably be replaced by a newer type sometime, hopefully soon. That may also explain the stock problems.
This unit uses parallel drives only, although it has both a parallel and serial interface to the host system. The boxes you are looking at convert this to USB and Firewire using yet another bridge board.
I expect a new drive cage type would have:
- serial ATA for the drives
- serial ATA, USB and Firewire for the host
Making swapbays for serial ATA drives is a lot easier.
Also, the current model has performance bottlenecks that are below those of current drives. This may not bother you when you are considering USB and Firewire, but 5 drives directly attached to the computer will have an aggregate throughput that is way above what this unit can do.
In my case, I was not looking at hotswap. I don't mind when I need to shutdown the system to replace a drive, it is for home use (videorecording) only.
I wanted it to run on Linux, and that further limited the possibilities.
The units you are referring to would work on Linux, although I have read some mixed reports about connecting drives via USB (hangs etc).
Using a multi-SATA controller with an external SATA tower would work when the controller is supported. Several of the all-in-one solutions I encountered came with a controller that only works in Windows.
However, with external boxes with many drives there is a lot of cable clutter, and a new widget has been introduced: a SATA port multiplier. This allows about 5 drives to be connected via a single external SATA cable. It reduces the throughput, but with SATA 300 it should still be enough.
Unfortunately, Linux does not support those external port multipliers at all.
When you are using Windows, the least expensive solution could be to use an external cage with sata port multiplier and a single-port SATA controller in the system (whcih still can offer onboard RAID when you like that). However, that will not be a "storage in a box" solution. For that, using a NAS solution could be the better choice anyway, because you access it at a file rather than a filesystem level.
However, unless you assemble and configure it yourself (using a small PC motherboard and one of the available NAS solutions) it is going to be much more expensive. Ready-made NAS boxes tend to be quite expensive.
It is quite clear that those countries who have upset others have been the major victims of terrorism. And that is to be expected: terrorism is the way for the underdog to fight someone they cannot fight another way.
Israel is a good example. Small wonder that they have a terrorism problem.
America is similarly positioned.
But in the Netherlands, it has been quite some time since we had terrorism. The threat came back solely because of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, that were performed under the "war against terror" invented by Bush.
(terrorist attacks in the past century were caused by suppressing a minority group as well)