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  1. Mercutio

    DVD Hi-Def format war near end, Blu-ray wins?

    The 40GB PS3 also dropped support for SACD, which is one of the few decent things that Sony has done in the last 15 years or so. I've only had limited encounters with PS3 hardware otherwise, but in my experience, it's loud. Just as bad as an Xbox. Hell, compared to the other stuff in my living...
  2. Mercutio

    DVD Hi-Def format war near end, Blu-ray wins?

    I hate console games. I hate S*ny and I have no interest in having a noisy box shaped as oddly as a PS3 in the stack with my silent home theater stuff. Serenity is on HDDVD. So is the first season of Heroes. So is Battlestar Galactica. All of those are things that I will re-watch multiple...
  3. Mercutio

    Suggest a decent 19" LCD monitor

    Those will not excite Tannin. Those will infuriate Tannin. Everything I'm reading at the moment says that 4:3 displays are going to disappear over the next couple of years. This is just another sign of that.
  4. Mercutio

    EMC release solid state enterprise drives

    All the EMC products I've ever seen have been about the size of a dishwasher, Lunar.
  5. Mercutio

    FairTax

    I'd be more than happy to argue that the job of any worthwhile government is to create and enforce social justice. Also, one of the jobs of the US government is to regulate interstate commerce, which covers an enormous amount of ground.
  6. Mercutio

    Where's everybody?

    Because it's too much work to understand that the anti-intellectual fundamentalist authoritarian nutbags should maybe be kept out of high office?
  7. Mercutio

    DVD Hi-Def format war near end, Blu-ray wins?

    ... or you could go with HDDVD, and have it done properly in the first place. I very strongly suspect that a lot of current BluRay owners aren't going to have the technical know-how to update their players and that a lot of discs are not going to work properly in those older players. I also...
  8. Mercutio

    DVD Hi-Def format war near end, Blu-ray wins?

    Night and day. Upsampled 480p has blocky regions no matter what you do, even with a Faroudja video processor or the ATI/nVidia GPU based cleanup drivers. Real, live 1080p looks like, well, 1080p. No blocks, no strange staticky artifacts. It's crisp and perfect. Several reasons. 1. Low demand...
  9. Mercutio

    Large Drives

    Tannin, I believe they are the same. IBM parts certainly have a history of working between models; I had quite a few parts I shared between T20 and T41 for example. You can probably check their site to be sure but that bridge chip isn't very big in any case.
  10. Mercutio

    Where's everybody?

    To be honest, a lot of the current issues with mortgage lending seem to have started with some really poor decision making on the part of the Federal Reserve and were exacerbated globally by Bush Administration policies which caused a devaluation of the dollar (making it cheaper for other...
  11. Mercutio

    Where's everybody?

    I am going to go ahead and agree with time and Tannin in that there is a staggering amount of ignorance in this thread. Today is my first fairly quiet day of the new year. My problem, lately, is that more of the things that I have been doing have been more like favors and less like things I...
  12. Mercutio

    How much "online" storage do you have?

    My total disk space is 24TB; effectively 8TB of actual storage. I just bought some 1TB drives this morning, but that's so I can decommission several 500GB units.
  13. Mercutio

    How much "online" storage do you have?

    Are we counting drives in or out of arrays? I have a lot in RAID10 configurations, so it makes a difference.
  14. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Newegg's hold music selections include tracks from the Edward Scissorhands and Corpse Bride soundtracks, Last of the Mohicans and various Lord of the Rings movies. I find that highly amusing.
  15. Mercutio

    MAC vs Windows

    There's no excuse for a well engineered notebook to get more than pleasantly warm; I've got a Thinkpad T41 apart right now and they CPU is completely passively cooled; it doesn't even have a heat sink sitting on top of it. Guess what? Thinkpad T41s don't get hot unless you're using them under a...
  16. Mercutio

    Large Drives

    Does your Thinkpad have an Ultrabay, Tannin? You can always buy a SATA Ultrabay and stick your large notebook drive in that. Are there now lots of SFers who have in excess of 5TB of disk space?
  17. Mercutio

    Results from another mass build

    Seagate had a reliability image? One of my replacement 750s couldn't complete a format, either...
  18. Mercutio

    Need new mobo: Suggestions?

    That would be a no.
  19. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Looks less convenient than torrenting. I'll stick with that.
  20. Mercutio

    Where's everybody?

    Work lately has been less sit-at-desk and less talk-on-phone and more this-must-be-fixed-yesterday.
  21. Mercutio

    RAID Adapter Advice

    Windows mirror sets can be made the System drive, just not stripe sets or RAID5s.
  22. Mercutio

    Hard Drives appear as "Disk drive" in Device Manager

    You probably need to install an updated set of INFs for your system chipset. You might also have to delete the devices. Since they're disk drives, you'll be needing to do that in safe mode.
  23. Mercutio

    Need new mobo: Suggestions?

    USMT is a command line version of the File and Settings Transfer Wizard that's handily located in Programs > Accessories > System Tool. I am regularly shocked at the number of techies who have never used (or in some cases, heard of) either FSTW or USMT.
  24. Mercutio

    RAID Adapter Advice

    I had a fancypants ICP RAID controller fail a while back in such a way that it corrupted a large portion of the data on a pair of mirrored drives. I was quite surprised that such a thing could happen on a mirrored set since no parity calculations/striping/whatever was being done. One nice thing...
  25. Mercutio

    DVD Hi-Def format war near end, Blu-ray wins?

    All the stuff that made me want an HD player is still HDDVD only. I bought Serenity in HD before I bought a player.
  26. Mercutio

    6 years of StorageForum!

    I am glad that we're still here. Thank you for all your time and energy, Handruin, and for everyone else who has come by over the years.
  27. Mercutio

    Intel Stock Cooler

    Sooner or later I'll probably need one...
  28. Mercutio

    DVD Hi-Def format war near end, Blu-ray wins?

    BluRay has been cracked for ages, ddrueding. Where the hell have you been? Current builds of AnyDVD even handle the extra-super-duper BD+ content protection without a problem. So, OK, I've used both, and I have to say, I do not like BluRay. The Sony player I tried took a lot longer to boot up...
  29. Mercutio

    Samsung drives unreliable?

    I deploy a couple hundred computers a year with Samsung hard disks. With, say, 1200 drives in service over the last six years, I've had to RMA nine of them.
  30. Mercutio

    N0tebook replacement

    In my experience, Tecras don't have appreciably better build quality than Satellites, and Satellites are horrid.
  31. Mercutio

    Quad core AMD $189.99

    Video encoding is where I feel it, and running VMs.
  32. Mercutio

    Read this guy's column

    Read this guy's tech advice column. See if you can find the part that's really, really, scarily wrong.
  33. Mercutio

    M$ Office SP3 Planned Obsolence

    Or not bother to install the update...
  34. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Article about why popular radio in the US sucks so damned much.
  35. Mercutio

    Odd Internet Troubles (slow...)

    Someone I built a PC for a few months back was telling me she had similar issues - she couldn't get to expedia.com or llbean.com when she was using a local DSL service, though on Comcast or Verizon she was fine. DNS issue? Nope. Her's resolved the same way. Spyware? She didn't have any...
  36. Mercutio

    M$ Office SP3 Planned Obsolence

    There are many tens of thousands of law offices that are still using WordPerfect 6 or even 5. Wordperfect and PDF are the only acceptable formats for electronic court submission in Indiana, and from experience most lawyers think of PCs as typewriters with TVs on them ("What do you need another...
  37. Mercutio

    Another video card

    The cooling system on the bigger 8800s is very nice, until the point when it breaks.
  38. Mercutio

    N0tebook replacement

    Toshiba notebooks hasn't made a good notebook since, oh, probably the mid 90s.
  39. Mercutio

    Your anti-virus software: Which, why, how?

    Vista is still affected by rootkits. Even Vista64 - which cannot be made to run unsigned drivers AFAIK - has had proof-of-concept rootkits installed.
  40. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Hope most of your 2008s suck less than my 2007 did.
  41. Mercutio

    Your anti-virus software: Which, why, how?

    One interesting thing you guys might not know is that all in all antivirus software is becoming less effective. A lot of malware is now wrapped up in rootkits or using non-virus (no replication) infection methods.
  42. Mercutio

    N0tebook replacement

    I'd look at a Lenovo X61. They weigh about 1.5kg and have 12" screens. They *do not* have internal DVD burners. The last ones I deployed, I gave out with 8GB thumb drives, which cost quite a bit less than the Ultrabase that those things need to have their "internal" DVD drive. A T61 (I own two...
  43. Mercutio

    Where's everybody?

    I had the day off and slept a lot. I don't like not having work to do.
  44. Mercutio

    Need KT266A board cheap

    It's the same. I'll need to test the board to be sure it's OK, but it should be.
  45. Mercutio

    Need KT266A board cheap

    I do not have a KT266. I have a Gigabyte KT333 which should be a drop in replacement.
  46. Mercutio

    Need KT266A board cheap

    Yes but there's a time aspect to that as well.
  47. Mercutio

    Need KT266A board cheap

    I'll look.
  48. Mercutio

    MP3 Player (what to buy)?

    No idea. I know I sure don't like iTunes.
  49. Mercutio

    Power supplies

    Moreover, I think the main issue we'd all like to see addressed is reliability, and that's very difficult to do.
  50. Mercutio

    MP3 Player (what to buy)?

    I don't know. iTunes is pretty bad if you're someone who has only ever used Windows. A lot of the UI stuff doesn't work the same way.
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