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  1. Mercutio

    What type are you?

    Teaching is OK. I like to think of it as "curing ignorance". I don't know about IT though. I can't imagine doing anything else for a living, but I can see how hard it is for people to find work. It's scary right now. I guess if I had to get out I'd spend a couple years getting another degree...
  2. Mercutio

    Nvidia launches latest video card...

    Maybe. There's a $30 price difference for what I'd say is a questionable real-world performance gain.
  3. Mercutio

    Nvidia launches latest video card...

    128MB 9700 Pros are around $180. What more do you want?
  4. Mercutio

    [NEWS] - Iomega launches 90GB removable disk

    Now that Iomega's abandoned the Peerless, it's last fail... I mean product, they're starting to become cheap as well. Kits with the 20GB drive are under $100 now. If they dip to below $70 at any point, they'll be a worthwhile purchase; 20GB notebook drives cost about that much. OTOH If Iomega...
  5. Mercutio

    How to get rid of "about:blank" hijacking my sear

    Note that not using IE helps these sorts of problems a bunch, too.
  6. Mercutio

    What type are you?

    On the matter of type, in this case, it's a little hard to determine from your posts. Protector (the SJ type) and Councilor are pretty simlar, after all. It boils down to whether or not one thinks you're compassionate/empathic vs being more detached. And that's a hard thing to see from here...
  7. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Friday through Sunday are normally the "work for me" days of my week. This weekend I've logged 38 hours. I'm actually looking forward to regular workdays and normal work hours. Man I'm tired of it.
  8. Mercutio

    Encrypting CDRW

    You should be able to use EFS. You'll have to encrypt the files/folders first on an NTFS partition, but they don't lose their encrypted status for being put on other media. You'll want to export and store your Encryption certificate on some kind of removable media, and I suppose also carry it...
  9. Mercutio

    Figuring out the graphic card universe...need for a database

    Probably because there's a stable demand for those cards at their current price point. You have to figure that, by now, Matrox has recouped its R&D and Marketing costs on the Parhelia, and that leads me to conclude that they're leaving it at that high price because that's what their customers...
  10. Mercutio

    Win XP compatibility with 16-bit programs

    Most work, but some don't. XP has an application compatibility wizard that can help in some cases. Some programs run on 2000 that don't run on XP, and vice versa.
  11. Mercutio

    Reconnecting External Drive

    That's weird. I unplug and plug stuff all the time with 2k and it works. Firewire and USB both.
  12. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    Daemon Tools will let you mount an image of a CD. It's a very useful tool under any conditions, but I can't see how anyone who plays computer games would want to be without it.
  13. Mercutio

    FPS in 96kb

    Wow.
  14. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    That's exactly the point I'm trying to prove.
  15. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    ... which would be exactly the most horrible way I can think of to beat someone to death. Even worse than the sackfull of Micropolis drives I've always wanted to kill Prof. Wizard with.
  16. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    Windows clustering requires the ultra-expensive "enterprise" versions of Server and won't work properly for your application anyway, since serving games doesn't fit the model of a "stateful" application that can live on a shared data source, and since serving games DOES have an in-game state, it...
  17. Mercutio

    Mobile Athlon XP 2500+, anyone tried one?

    I've bought several Mobile 1700s and 1800s. No mobile bartons yet, though. They run a lot cooler, like 3 or 4C with the same Speeze fan I always use. They probably have some impact on my power bill (not that I can tell) and performance is spot-on for the kind of CPUs they are.
  18. Mercutio

    building a 1U dual Opteron

    I'm particularly fond of reviews like those I see at Anandtech, where every page of a "review" has some kind of ad for the retailer, the board, or the company in question. Yup. Those reviews are entirely unbiased. How much was Anand's last BMW?
  19. Mercutio

    Music

    Not on the client end. You're requesting traffic. Usually that's something that's explicitly allowed. Probably you're just not getting enough of a stream to actually play anything. I need more DSL lines.
  20. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    Technical first: There are several single points of failure there. Let's start with the fact that you have a single server, a single NIC and a single SCSI card. You'll see, above, that I recommended multiple machines for this job, both to spread work around and to have a high degree of failover...
  21. Mercutio

    Nvidia launches latest video card...

    Uh, it looked to me like it took up two PCI slots. But hey, who uses PCI slots for anything like disk controllers, modems, TV cards or NICs these days?
  22. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    I will later this evening.
  23. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    Wrong on many levels.
  24. Mercutio

    Photography Advice

    Flash RAM can be fast because of the whole zero seek time thing. CF can be faster than most flash RAM because it has its own embedded I/O controller (hence things like Lexar "Ultra" CF media). But it isn't fast reading or writing because there's a multi-step electronic process that has to take...
  25. Mercutio

    building a 1U dual Opteron

    A good place to start. These guys sell some must have items like riser cards and fans for 1U cases and other essentials. Their cases aren't bad either, but I've never done personally done 1U-anything. I do know that anything in that form factor is hotter than hell. There's no place for heat to...
  26. Mercutio

    CougTek

    It'll be good to have the news section up and running again, even if the only thing I want to use it for is to make fun of nvidia's latest lawnmow... I mean graphics product.
  27. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    It'd be cheaper on your back end to go SCSI. You could go with a bunch of 74GB 10k SCA drives for maybe $175/apiece, save $50/drive that you could apply to getting a chassis with a large SCA backplane, and you could use a midrange SCSI RAID controller instead of that horribly expensive 12-port...
  28. Mercutio

    Yardsale! Yardsale!

    All three of those drives worked as advertised. Thanks GH.
  29. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    Some games also require special licensing for public use. In reality no one cares, but imagine if, e.g. EA or Microsoft decided to crack down on LAN centers. Once David starts collecting usage stats (assuming he can), perhaps he can sell games/media that he won't be using.
  30. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    But also look at something like this. Combine with Windows Server-style published applications and your space problems are taken care of.
  31. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    You probably ought to talk to these people.
  32. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    The 12-port 3ware 8500 is ~ $700 new. I'll assume the 9500 will take that price point. The 1000MT Quad is $500. 12 Raptors @ $225 apiece = $2700 + probably another $1000 for some kind of enclosure, board, CPU and RAM. That's $5,000, David. Per Server. How many months of rent, utilities and...
  33. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    There are better things for you to spend your money on for your business.
  34. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    Let me modify my previous post slightly: I was thinking 2 Gbit NICs per server machine, not just one. That'd make failover a lot easier.
  35. Mercutio

    UGH! newegg is killing me

    Where've you been man? Haven't seen you here for awhile. I've had a couple of REALLY bad experiences with newegg. The "we're gonna keep your 8500DV" thing, a couple times I've gotten bad batches of boards, and sometimes slow credit processing on RMA refunds. All that said, their prices and...
  36. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    Windows does NOT handle being diskless very well. Lots of folks with an interest in AV have tried it, certainly. The better and cheaper option would be to buy, say, a 160GB drive for each machine with locally contained disk images, or, like I said, ghost over gigabit. Let's call that $2500 in...
  37. Mercutio

    Gaming off the LAN? Feasibile?

    You didn't hear me, but I just said "ick". Let's ask a few questions: Each of your stations has a Raptor, right? GBoC = around 40MB/s in ideal conditions (large files to stream etc). Raptors are what? 35 - 70MB/s? Which will be faster? Your "server" is a vanilla PC with some GBoC cards and...
  38. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Seriously? He finally annoyed the moderators enough that the issue was addressed. The contention among the guys with the "Edit" buttons that his actions, while obnoxious, didn't meet the standards for banning someone. I don't think that's a bad thing. They took their job seriously. Then he...
  39. Mercutio

    Gbit Uplink switches

    I found This one at Newegg. Trendware isn't a brand I'm familiar with, though.
  40. Mercutio

    Gbit Uplink switches

    Has anyone here purchased/used a low-end 24-port switch with a GBoC uplink port? The only ones I've played with were $500 managed jobs from 3Com, and that's a substantially outside my budget.
  41. Mercutio

    Something Random

    That of course begs the question: Is there still a need for an Ignore function?
  42. Mercutio

    Linux nub

    Use what other people you know have. You'll probably run into the same issues that they did, and they'll be able to help you. If you're interested in seriously learning Linux for Unix' sake, I'd suggest Slackware or a *BSD. BSDs aren't Linux, but fundamentally, either way you're going to get...
  43. Mercutio

    Music

    Yu. And I'm using LAME for a codec, if that matters. I probably ought to switch to OGG. IMO 128k OGG sounds better than 192k MP3.
  44. Mercutio

    On this day in history

    I don't know. That's a pretty interesting thing to have a copy of.
  45. Mercutio

    RAID 10 Sanity Check

    You're mirroring first, then striping. As the name implies: 1+0. If you were striping and then mirroring, failing even one drive would fundamentally damage the array - the stripe would be gone, at least, and you wouldn't have a functional "01" array any more. In a mirror + stripe, there's at...
  46. Mercutio

    Music

    It depends. 160kpbs, most recently. 192k, typically. I could go back and encode a bunch of stuff at 128k or 96k to see if that would make my slimserver run better over the internet...
  47. Mercutio

    DNS Cache proggie

    Try just switching DNS servers and see if your problem goes away. Verizon's are 4.2.2.3 - .6 Other than that, if you've got some kind of Network OS sitting around, you could set up a nice caching DNS server.
  48. Mercutio

    Gentoo

    Tried Knoppix yet, Buck? (I'm not trying to hijack your thread, JoJo, this is just where the discussion about Linux is right now).
  49. Mercutio

    Music

    You're thinking of "Music in Changing Parts". I don't know what the album looked like; the Nonesuch CD issue is a cool silvered photo of the composer.
  50. Mercutio

    Gentoo

    What's annoying you?
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