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Any way I look at it, I don't see a compelling reason to use WHS. Either I can buy some kind of NAS device (e.g. a Buffalo Terastation) that does the same thing for about what WHS + a PC + a bunch of hard disks cost, and simplify my administrative duties to maybe a half-dozen mouse clicks, or if...

I would have mentioned that if you hadn't.

There's always FreeNAS.

I use a Logitech bluetooth keyboard for PS/3. There's another RF-based system I was looking at, which is more compact and uses a trackball rather than a trackpad.

Probably. Such is the Hitachi way.

I strongly prefer having CRC checks above and beyond the file system for data integrity. I like having reasonably expansive amounts of data (more than the size of a single disk) and more than anything else I don't mind doing the data management you're talking about it. If I'm shepherding...

Well, sure, but I hate keeping equipment I have very little chance of using on hand.

For what it's worth, I've had a lot of trouble partitioning and formatting Seagate 1.5TB drives on Windows machines that seem to test fine once I formatted them under Linux.

I don't look at "no RAID to manage" as anything like an advantage.

Hitachi always seems to want to push performance and capacity. I suspect theit 2TB drive will not be a 5400rpm "green" model.

If I can't buy one at a local screwdriver shop, it's not standard enough. PSUs fail and I don't want to tell someone their PC will be down for a week.

I use Centos systems with 6TB drives of drives in RAID5 that are regularly rsync'd to a second array in a different PC. Works well. I stopped at 6TB so I can have a hot spare handy. I'm still using for file servers, though.

That non-standard case gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Indiana does not charge a tax like that. I can throw monitors in dumpsters all day long here and no one gives a shit. That is not a good thing. It's $16. If you can't handle a $16 charge for disposing of electronics you don't deserve to own them in the first place.

And here's the state rankings in Education. Generally speaking the states at the top of the list are blue states with a low population.

It should be noted that all but two of the 2004 red states are the ones which accept the most handouts from the federal government and generally have the least educated populations, while the 2004 blue states are among the most productive, well educated and receive the least money from the...

Given the state of California's state budget I'm sure this up-front fee is doing some small amount of work in filling the gap. Indiana barely even has recycling, at least where I live. People do separate things, but the same truck picks it up and I've watched them throw it all in together.

Hawking makes an inexpensive antenna that I've found helpful in the past, but ddrueding's are even cheaper so I'd say go with those.

Sort of. As I recall some of the library files are different and you can add the Linux ones to your BSD machine and most stuff will work. What I remember most about BSD compatibility with Linux was the way it was announced on USENET. The post was titled: "You may now play Doom"

Totally sweet fan-made Lord of the Rings movie. In HD. With good production values and CG.

The guy who brought it to me is an Oracle consultant. He carried this thing on planes with him. Near as I can tell the only games he ever played were solitaire and freecell. Acer has better product documentation than Alienware, and that's saying something.

I've been brought another Alienware notebook to play with. This one is a P4/3200 with an x800 Mobility Radeon in it. I can't figure out what kind of Alienware notebook it is, because there are at least five different kinds that are marked "Area 51" and this piece of shit doesn't match any of...

No question that for any but the most popular Linux distros I'd be downloading via FTP. BSD has always been a sort of second place choice. I've had machines running it in the past, but for the most part it lags Linux for hardware support and in adding new features; one of the reasons I ended up...

A person I do work for (did work for, since I haven't seen her in ages) is a Private Investigator who mostly does background checks for a living. With the stuff she's licensed to have access to, she could build a pretty accurate description of my life without having to get up from her computer...

In contracting it's pretty common for me to just sit down where ever to use a phone or a PC. I've picked up handsets that have a quarter inch layer of grey funk on them from someone's ear, and found mice that have the same waxy buildup on the left button and wheel. That's when I go wash my...

XP is a lady of empowered femininity who seeks to satisfy the broadest possible range of partners. Vista is a stupid ugly stuck up bitch.

Most smart torrent users have a setting turned on that says "don't send packets to clients not using encryption." That's why your transfer rate drops. But Comcast at least just rate-limits everything that exceeds a certain upload speed for a certain period of time, without regard for what kind...

I suspect Google will release an app that does that before Microsoft does. Google certainly seems to be the name brand in GIS stuff for the average user these days.

I might mention the really very good support for legacy software, the excellent technical documentation and learning resources and the availability of skilled professionals to meet service needs. Basically, even if Windows itself kind of sucks there's a good infrastructure behind it.

Gigabyte boards have mostly been fine. The other two brands I bought heavily in that period, Biostar and MSI, seem to have plenty of issues with caps. I'm really thinking I want to see solid caps on everything at this point. Capacitors have been an issue for years.

I really like my Netshelter WX. It's in my living room. I use it as a tall coffee table.

And kind of ironic, too, given who you work for.

The fastest "mainstream" 939 CPU I'm aware of is the x2/4800. There's probably some Opteron chips that are faster but it was the tip-top of performance before AMD moved to AM2. Those systems are about three years old now, and I'm seeing capacitor failures on some of the lower-cost boards I...

I buy movies to support the people who make them, even though I'm an unrepentant pirate. I bought "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" even though it was made available free on the internet first. There's still not all that much I want to see on Blu-Ray but for example Iron Man is absolutely...

I usually run my batteries down to about 25% charge before I plug in. If I know I'm going to be operating on AC for a while I pull the battery completely.

I have three at the moment. One is a spare and the other two are attached to PCs attached to large LCDs. I've ripped all my HDDVDs but I still buy new ones on Ebay when the mood strikes me. They're easier to deal with than BDs.

I don't care what it breaks. I'm telling people to install it because it's more secure than IE6. I do wish they had implemented Vista's sandbox mode on XP for even more security, but apparently MS is loathe to give up one of the few reasons someone might seriously look at Vista.

That's WAY more configuration than I want to bother with on a $250 computer

He'll do a damned sight better than that other group of fundie retards.

Actually it's borderline terrifying. At least one of my customers can't believe anything that's not a retail copy of windows or the OEM preload on a Dell or Lenovo is a valid copy of Windows. I can give him CoAs all day long but I get bitchy calls about the completely normal WGA updates every...

Lesson learned: Only use versions of Windows that don't have activation.

Those thingies you're talking about make DVD-VRs, which give about 95% of computer players or editing applications fits. DVD players are better but a lot of them glitch in playing back DVD-VRs as well.

I can't tell the difference between 4xFSAA and no FSAA on City of Heroes at 1080p.

If you have the resolution so high, you don't those things to begin with.

I already had four day work weeks as a condition of my employment.

Someone who does content creation for a living with professional tools MIGHT have need of an 8 CPU system. And to be fair, a middle of the road Dell Precision is also north of $5k. I could build that machine for $2500, though.

They need very expensive motherboards that go in systems that tend to not be whisper quiet. In fact, Xeon systems pretty much always wind up sounding like jet engines because of the size of motherboards and types of cases that are used with them. The only real reason to look at 3300-series...

Well, as of yesterday my paycheck for my salaried job was just reduced by 20%. My brother just lost his $80,000 a year 100% telecommuting job and wants to move in with me because apparently the idea of saving a little money is foreign to someone with a master's in Finance. The unemployment...

I concur.

Given the price v. performance of modern mid-range video cards I don't think you're going to find many unhappy customers. And for that matter, someone who buys a $100 video card might not be terribly discriminating about performance to begin with.