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  1. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    I don't think I'd mind Steadystate on my windows machines, if it worked on Windows Server.
  2. Mercutio

    Conservatives Biggest Consumers of Porn

    Legal brothels in counties below a certain population threshold. They're unbelievably expensive. Prices aren't fixed, but the girls have to pay rent and expensive to the, uh, management, so $500 - $1000 for a "session" is pretty typical. This is why my brother chooses to buy a $500 plane...
  3. Mercutio

    AMD, Seagate demo SATA 6Gbps

    It's a serial interface. One wire to send, one wire to receive. I am thinking it will.
  4. Mercutio

    Seagate 7200.12 1 TB

    I do mirroring with rsync. It's not perfect but mirroring is an availability solution not a true backup.
  5. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I went to the opera today. Well, not really. But something close to that. The movie theater in my town set aside a theater for this afternoon to do a live telecast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. So for $22, instead of the ~$150 it cost the last time I went into Chicago to see a Lyric...
  6. Mercutio

    Conservatives Biggest Consumers of Porn

    Any sex worker in any city that has ever hosted a gathering of political parties will tell anyone who asks that republicans are also voracious consumers of sex services: strippers, massage parlors that offer "happy endings" and prostitutes. This is in no way news. My take is that...
  7. Mercutio

    Seagate 7200.12 1 TB

    End-to-end seek time on LTO4 is something like two and a half minutes. That seems pretty damned fast to me. I remember using a floppy-interface Travan drive as a random access device on my first Linux system. It was... substantially slower than that.
  8. Mercutio

    Seagate 7200.12 1 TB

    Yes, there is. There's not enough demand for desktop drives that can reliably operate at 15k and still have the capacities and costs expected of mainstream products. There's a reason that Raptors didn't take the world by storm, man.
  9. Mercutio

    Gigabyte GA-EP43-UD3L and LPT breakout cable.

    I threw away a lot of big parts. I still have lots of little ones like that.
  10. Mercutio

    Sprint Smartphone

    I just looked, and apparently, Sprint has drastically changed the requirements for a SERO plan. You need an Employee ID number now, so the $35 a month 500 minutes + unlimited data package I enjoy is no longer available except to actual Sprint employees. This frankly sucks. Anyway, I'm using...
  11. Mercutio

    Gigabyte GA-EP43-UD3L and LPT breakout cable.

    Also, who doesn't have hundreds of parallel port breakout cables sitting around from the pre-ATX days?
  12. Mercutio

    Something Random

    There's an inch long cut inside my right nostril. It bled profusely and dried to a big, chunky scab. It's not painful but it is incredibly annoying.
  13. Mercutio

    Sprint Smartphone

    I use an HTC phone because I like they larger screen as compared to the Palm, RIM or Samsung options. My phone has GPS, but I don't ever use it. Nor do I use the hard buttons on the slide out keyboard. I think the Touch is the current equivalent to my phone.
  14. Mercutio

    Thinkpad SL series?

    IBM generally has a low-cost limited feature model in addition a midrange business notebook and an ultraportable. I think the SL is a swipe at some of the dollars that have been going to Vostro notebooks, but Lenovo has such a tiny mindshare in the small business world that I need to spend 10...
  15. Mercutio

    Netbook for the wife

    I got to use an HP Mini last week. It was a bit of a slug with XP on it, but it has a decent-ish keyboard. The RAM upgrade was quite clever, a screwless system that involves using a ball-point pen or something similar to slide a lever and open the panel concealing the memory. My main complaint...
  16. Mercutio

    Twitter..wtf?!?...do U tweet?

    I have a great deal of difficulty understanding the appeal of services like Myspace and Facebook. Of course, I don't have any friends except the ones I keep up with on Internet forum sites like this.
  17. Mercutio

    Gigabyte GA-EP43-UD3L and LPT breakout cable.

    I've run into an awful lot of printers that don't work with those, mainly HP Photo printers. I just keep a bunch of PCI cards around.
  18. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Never trim your nose hairs with a nose hair trimmer that's low on batteries.
  19. Mercutio

    Thinkpad SL series?

    My brother's company issues Ideapads for some reason (they also don't know how to set up their Exchange server but that's another story), and a couple of my customers have them for personal machines. There's nothing wrong with them. They're solid machines with nice keyboards and good screens. I...
  20. Mercutio

    Thinkpad SL series?

    They say Apple on them. That's like $1500 right there. I'd like to say they're just offsetting the cost of developing the design of the Macbook Pro, but it's a gouging. There are content creation people who will pay whatever price Apple puts on a Macbook Pro, to get the high end screen and...
  21. Mercutio

    Thinkpad SL series?

    A Thinkpad - or possibly a Macbook Pro, if you swing that way, is only expensive if it's not a professional tool for you. I'm perfectly willing to spend US$2500 on a notebook, knowing how I'm going to use it and how much I'm going to use it. The biggest problem I have these days is people who...
  22. Mercutio

    Thinkpad SL series?

    Those look like Ideapads that have been upgraded with a subset of Thinkpad features. I don't think Ideapad are awful as far as consumer hardware goes they're probably on par with Inspiron/Vostros from Dell and a step up from Toshiba or Acer.
  23. Mercutio

    Thinkpad SL series?

    Those look like Ideapads that have been upgraded with a subset of Thinkpad features. I don't think Ideapad are awful as far as consumer hardware goes they're probably on par with Inspiron/Vostros from Dell and a step up from Toshiba or Acer.
  24. Mercutio

    Simple video editing and DVD authoring

    Ulead Moviefactory is very easy but it chokes on projects over two hours. Nero Vision works well but sometimes it won't allow certain video quality settings for no reason that I can see. I think every simple application I've tried for DVD authoring is buggy somehow.
  25. Mercutio

    Windows Media Player adds native support for QuickTime files

    Back on topic... both Quicktime Alternative and VLC will play Quicktime without any added modification, but neither of them quite behave in the way that end users expect when visiting web sites that offer streaming quicktime, particularly movie trailer web sites. If Media Player does Quicktime...
  26. Mercutio

    Seagate 7200.12 1 TB

    Hit or miss is very much my experience with recent Seagate drives. I've relegated the 750GB units I have exclusively to online backup. A low heat two platter unit sounds great and I hope a better drive company gets around to producing one soon.
  27. Mercutio

    USB High-speed capable hub?

    Really, most of them. Most of the USB hubs I have are $8 generic POS something-or-others, and I can't say full speed is normally a problem. Maybe the port is going bad or something.
  28. Mercutio

    Windows Media Player adds native support for QuickTime files

    When you quote uda, I have to look at his posts, and that is annoying.
  29. Mercutio

    Apple releases public beta of Safari 4 browser

    It's semantics at this point but if you will note I reserved my name-calling to itunes users, not Safari users. Though there are plenty of webkit browsers out there. And I still have nothing but scorn for anyone who uses itunes.
  30. Mercutio

    Use for old cellphone

    I really prefer it that way, yes. I consider a good month one in which I haven't use my phone for personal reasons at all.
  31. Mercutio

    Use for old cellphone

    AD, I love the data plan on my phone. You're getting raped on the AT&T version, but for me the ability to access the internet essentially anywhere with no additional setup has probably been more useful in my life than whatever capabilities a mobile phone offers. I use my phone to check or add to...
  32. Mercutio

    Use for old cellphone

    AD, I love the data plan on my phone. You're getting raped on the AT&T version, but for me the ability to access the internet essentially anywhere with no additional setup has probably been more useful in my life than whatever capabilities a mobile phone offers. I use my phone to check or add to...
  33. Mercutio

    Apple releases public beta of Safari 4 browser

    Safari has approximately the same level of usability as IE: It's great for downloading Firefox on a Mac. I have used it a time or two on machines that are hosed with Spyware and also have iTunes installed. Apparently if you're a big enough fucking moron to run iTunes in the first place, it's a...
  34. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    The companies that are presently offering successful SSDs generally aren't magnetic storage companies. Samsung might be an exception, but it's so huge that it's anyone's guess how much one group communicates with any of the others.
  35. Mercutio

    mCubed T-Balancer

    Seems a bit frivolous for business use. Probably interesting in a home system, though.
  36. Mercutio

    New computer build for Photoshop CS3 usage.

    I thought the whole thing with CS4 and nVidia required a workstation-type card. Maybe you should be looking for that particular sort of hack.
  37. Mercutio

    Quiet and Rackmount?

    I was thinking about a Quantum SuperChanger. 16 tape capacity with SAS connectivity for $3500 or so. The tapes drop drastically in price once the next generation comes out, but I've gotten 3-packs of LTO4/800s for $80, which is pretty reasonable compared to buying new drives all the damned time...
  38. Mercutio

    Quiet and Rackmount?

    My standard has always been to schedule data synchronization between multiple arrays on different computers. I might lose, say, six hours of data if I hosed the data on one machine, but that's about it. Keeping the arrays fairly small (4TB at this point is probably "small") helps as well. Part...
  39. Mercutio

    Boneruses anDRaises

    In all the time I've worked as a trainer I've only gotten cost of living raises.
  40. Mercutio

    500 GB

    The 320 goes tick... tick... tick... It's noticeable.
  41. Mercutio

    Use for old cellphone

    Women's shelters take them and can reprogram them to be 911 only if they aren't good for anything else.
  42. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I think about 3/4 of my classmates in CS at Purdue left school in 1998 to go partake in the .com boom. I knew a lot of people who were very briefly millionaires. I stayed in Indiana where it just sucks.
  43. Mercutio

    New computer build for Photoshop CS3 usage.

    It's a total PITA to install the drivers before Windows is installed. I have a disk image that has the drivers working, but generally if you have an Intel-based system with the BIOS set to AHCI or RAID, your XP or Server 2003 install will crash before it ever gets to copying the files. You can...
  44. Mercutio

    Quiet and Rackmount?

    Oh, I seldom ran the AC on the rack itself, but my servers have always been desktop parts in 4U cases that are now very, very old and lacking in amenities like SATA backplanes. Heat has never particularly been an issue for my servers. Newegg has a 4U case that supports 20 hotswap 3.5" drives...
  45. Mercutio

    Vista How do I make it like XP?

    I find myself using IDE drives for my OS on my home systems, so I can use the SATA ports for real data storage.
  46. Mercutio

    Vista How do I make it like XP?

    I can put both in my Thinkpad T or R series notebooks, thanks to the magic of the Ultrabay. If you can't you obviously need a better notebook.
  47. Mercutio

    Quiet and Rackmount?

    My rack is enclosed. That's the only thing that makes it tolerable to begin with. I'll probably donate it to my company if I can get rid of it. It's a 42U APC rack and it has an AC unit in it that doesn't work any more. I don't think I like those Antec Enclosures that don't have 3 5.25" bays...
  48. Mercutio

    Quiet and Rackmount?

    I was not aware, or had forgotten, that Antec offered a rackmount chassis. Hmm. This has potential.
  49. Mercutio

    New computer build for Photoshop CS3 usage.

    For RAID1, there's nothing wrong with Intel's Matrix Storage drivers, though installing them on a working system is a bit of a PITA.
  50. Mercutio

    500 GB

    Looks like they might br selling out just THAT fast. I got a notification too. :\
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