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Asus has a couple $500-ish i3 based ultrabooks that probably aren't awful and I'd be pretty happy with a Samsung Series 5. We're talking about 1366x800 screens and the low power forms of i3, but something that's definitely functional as a computer. And these days a 10" Android tablet is...

I don't know all the people who are coming, so I think it's important at first to play games that don't have an involved rule set or complex set up. My hope is that I'll be able to do this every few weeks if I can get a group of regulars to play with. One of my friends is a huge fan of...

I'm actually planning to do a table top gaming night on Friday. I play Magic occasionally with a bunch of young ladies and that's a lot of fun, but it's contingent on them not having anything else to do. Our games get spoiled often as not. So my plan right now is to get a group of people...

I spent some time this weekend with a Surface Pro and here's what I think: It's too goddamned heavy. It's subjectively every bit as fast as my Thinkpad (which is 1.1GHz faster and has two extra cores) for everyday PC tasks like web browsing and Word Processing. Programs open, you can sort-of do...

In my experience, putting consumer drives in RAID appears to be a good way to kill them much more quickly. As far as I can tell, the only "supported" RAID setup anybody is offering is RAID0 on ICHx RAID on Windows.

Is a used SSD that isn't subject to the constraints of physical abuse really any worse than an MHD that might've been dropped or otherwise had undue wear inflicted upon it?

I'd say it's a good buy, but I say that as someone with shelf full of Thinkpad replacement parts. The 160GB drive isn't as valuable as it used to be but it's still a 160GB SSD. The great unknown would be the battery life, which would probably be on its last usable legs at this point, and OEM...

Completely safe for work but a teensy bit gory/violent seven minute short film that is totally worth all seven minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gryenlQKTbE

I'm leaning toward the i5 myself. Expensive graphics cards increasingly seem like a waste of money to me, since almost every mainstream high-profile title still has to run on crappy console systems.

A philosophical question: An i3 3220 + Radeon 7850 ($300-ish) or i5 3570 + Radeon 7750 (also $300-ish). I suppose the issue here is whether or not a typical gamer-type is going to notice the extra real cores on an i5 and whether they will be more of a benefit than the extra graphics horsepower...

L2ARC Caching for a 60TB zPool. :D

Cowboom.com has some pretty good deals on refurbished current generation consoles, by the way. I don't like the idea of "always online" in part because the time I most want to game is when "online" is least accessible. I'm more apt to fire up something if my internet connection is already being...

Apparently the new Xbox is going to require an internet connection for any and all applications. The latest rumor is that it'll stop working if it's disconnected for more than three minutes. Hope you don't live someplace with lots of 2.4GHz interference, gamers.

Since I posted this thread, I sent a couple boards to Gigabyte and had 'em returned, all without hearing back from Asus, which I contacted on the same day as Gigabyte. Unfortunately, I would have to pay twice as much to get an Intel, SuperMicro or Tyan dual LGA1366 motherboard as I would for...

I don't make presentations in that fashion. I might make a graphic to illuminate a particular point, but my general sense is that that act of making Powerpoint-like presentation is antithetical to the process of good communication. Even when I was in college I judged the classes I could skip...

It's against my religion.

Crap. That solves the hell out of that.

I did look at Rackspace. They were stratospherically expensive. Which doesn't actually surprise me. Openstack is more or less what I'm contemplating. Until recently, there wasn't anything like a local Colo option, but right now I rent 2U of space with unmetered power and unmetered 100Mbit...

I'm not so much arguing as making an observation about what commercial vendors seem most willing to support. RedHat *is* a mess, which is why I stepped away from it as well. At any rate, it's not that difficult to roll your own NAS, but I'm sure Coug doesn't want one more entirely different...

Windows is, as usual, a requirement for what I'm deploying. There's a data center not all that far from where I live. I'm contemplating just renting 2U of space for $50/month. I think I could stick a couple boxes in that and call it a cloud.

I use SuSE at home, but I understand that RedHat/Fedora/Oracle derivatives are still the generally preferred choice for commercial applications. I wonder how much Microsoft's support for Novell and SuSE influenced decision making at EMC.

Hyper-V's official Linux support is limited to SuSE, which is pretty much nobody's first choice for "server" Linux other than Microsoft.

There's a lot of stupid involved in this. I think the appeal of EC2 in this case was the idea of only paying for resources being used, but like I said this was coming from the customer so who the hell knows what they actually think they want.

It's kind of a meaningless marketing distinction since the hardware is capable of being either, but Ultrabooks run full-blown desktop OSes, which means they're going to lose the instant-on/fast connection capabilities of a mobile device.

One of our clients is looking for a "cloud" solution for our hosted application and EC2 looks downright reasonable compared to some of the managed hosting providers I've looked at. i do actually think they want to be fully buzzword compliant rather than needing any specific from Amazon, but...

Has anyone ever put together an Amazon EC2 instance? The pricing estimator is a little overwhelming.

I've configured 4 and 8 bay units from Drobo, QNAP, Synology and Buffalo, but somehow I don't think that experience translates to the high dollar units. I will say that I've liked Synology's firmware better than anyone else's, in spite of their slightly goofy "let's obscure the details of what...

A Mac user I support got a new MBP not all that long ago to replace his old Mac Pro tower. The first thing he wound up getting for it was a USB 3 to gigabit ethernet adapter. And then a USB 3 hub, because apparently MBPs only have two USB ports. I don't think Surface/Surface Pro need a docking...

Neither of my spare Evos has ever been activated as a phone. I carry one as a camera and use the other as a music player and GPS. The screens are most definitely unlocked. They are not necessarily CHEAP, but I do really like Grace Audio's internet radios. They're very easy to set up and...

She's fine. Apparently she's run in to a problem in home-buying that the property she most wants to own fails a radon test. Apparently that is not uncommon for homes in the area where I live. Nits, your lurker status is preserved. :P

Surely there's a local Craigslist/Ebay equivalent?

I take very few pictures. One of my friends has some of the blue hair-ing process but I don't have any. Has anyone here had any experience with Radon remediation? Nits wanted me to ask.

One of my students carries a Samsung Galaxy audio player. He quite likes it, but it's physically very close to the HTC Evo I carry around all the time and shockingly expensive for an audio player. I suspect you could get a very similar level of functionality from any three year old Android phone...

It's really not a big deal at all to add some folders to the standard libraries. It takes maybe a minute to add the standard four. I'd prefer to move the whole \Users directory structure, but THAT is a lot of work since Windows still doesn't do symlinks quite right for system directories. It's...

MHDs often have issues well before they finally shuffle off. SMART errors, changes in characteristic noises etc. All of those things are something more than nothing, which is the totality of what an SSD will do. I'm not arguing against backups or against SSDs. I just don't think they're an...

Intuit is awesome at making sure filling out tax documents in the US remains complicated.

The problem with not having a MHD is that SSDs die without any warning at all. One day they work and the next day they don't. In a managed environment with shared resources and such, that might not be a big deal, but for home users and typical laptop systems, that's a huge, huge problem. Windows...

If you have a desktop with an SSD, you NEED to have a traditional drive as well. Use it for backups, use it for your pagefile. Use it for hibernation. If you're using Windows 7 or anything *nix, put your home directory on it as well.

Windows is not going away for mainstream business software. I don't like their crap with development frameworks either (and, hey, I'm not a programmer because I don't want to be a programmer), but it does strike me that there's nothing stopping people from using older tech. For the most part...

I once ran in to a server that a "techie" DBA had set up that RAID10 implemented on the hardware controller and software RAID5 for the main storage volume. The guy could NOT understand why his writes were topping out at 2MB/sec with 15k SCSI drives.

Really not that many people have to think about electricity on a way that requires knowledge of its units of measure on any kind of regular basis. Most likely, it's something people learn in a two week span during their seventh grade science class and never need again. Which also describes the...

My hair is blue because ladies are better at Xbox than I am.

Most of my students are electricians. They'll be happy to tell all manner of horrifying stories about bad installations and what electricity does to things. I lost a bet and now I have a blue streak in my hair. So far, no one I work with has even noticed.

That's where all the fancy IT Trainer learnin' comes in handy. :)

Open gpedit Go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Personalization Choose "Do not display the lock screen" and change it to enabled.

For any version of Windows 8, if you configure a program to run automatically on login via Task Scheduler, you can skip straight to the desktop as well.

I really like Canon LiDE scanners. If you're used to a 15kg monster I suspect you'll be quite happy moving up regardless.

He's going to run softraid on top of hardware raid. His write performance will be every kind of absymal and he clearly doesn't belong anywhere near a $500 RAID controller.

I don't think brain control is all that far off, really. MS has the Kinect and fancier phones are looking at what your eyes are doing already.

I don't think Intel needs a schedule any more. It's more like "We'll release things superior to everything AMD makes when we get around to it." Though the socket proliferation is bothersome.