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If your house is still being built, beg and plead with the eletrcians to get Cat5 and/or speaker wire put into your walls. I just did the wiring in my house. It sucked beyond the telling of it to cut holes in finished drywall, climb around in my (way too hot) attic, fishing cable. Someday, I...

The less expensive ones are actually made with computer parts. Some even have replaceable DVD drives in them. I uh, don't normally pay attention to low-end electronics, but I bought a KLH DVD Player as a get-well gift for someone the other day. That model at least reads -Rs. The other thing...

9 of 10. I recognized a couple of 'em, and the only one I got wrong was a serial killer pictured with a tie.

I don't know much about Trendware, either, except that they have the outstanding quality of being the lowest priced 64bit PCI GBoC NIC I could find. Probably worth looking in to. Regarding DVD playback and streams per interface... I don't quite know what's going on with that. My theory is that...

One of my labs has 20 1901FPs (and 20 XP2800s... but no internet connectivity or they'd be folding). They're the nicest LCDs I think I've come in contact with. Even better than Apple Cinema Displays.

No more comments on the long post, above?

I've never paid much attention. Icecast works fine @ 10Mbit.

It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect a media server to also be a game server. Most popular games seem to have Linux servers, so I'm not worried about that aspect of things, but would a 1.13GHz P3 suffice for LAN play of Counterstrike or Unreal or whatever kids are playing these days?

i? Sol? Groltz? Am I getting warmer?

Oh yeah, video. The P3TDLE has an ISA slot. Our fictional server is accepting donations. ;)

I could probably write for a couple of hours in this thread right now. This is really what I wanted to do today. re: Video Streams. You can expect 1 100mbit interface to reliably deliver ONE from-the-VOB DVD video. If I try to hit two at once on the same interface, they're fine 90% of the time...

OTOH, the extra $1000 you make as the VAR who delivers a transparent domain-model authentication and file server that leads to saving your customer $10,000 in CALs and license fees is more than worth the hours you put in learning how to do it. Especially when you can do it over and over again. ;)

I was going to make smart-assed comments about how much better automatic picture re-sizing and marginally better page printing are, compared to tabbed browsing, image permissions and popup controls, but I'm tired tonight so let's just leave it at "IE is evil".

I pay for salon.com. $30 for a year. To me that's about right.

Steel mills tend to generate their own power; I think that's the Burns Habor mill formerly known as Bethlehem Steel and now ISG.

Uh, what Coug said is basically true. When George Bush the second took office many of his first days in office were spent reversing EPA policies set by the Clinton administration, in the name of fostering a pro-business environment. I've never really been to Lake Michigan in Indiana. It's right...

I was thinking of something along the lines of an A7M266D or a Supermicro P3TDLE.

It's the PBS/NPR model for web sites (i.e. "User Supported")! This makes a great deal of sense to me as well. Some jerk advertiser - not naming any names (x10) can shotgun ads all over the web for its problems, maybe decide those ads aren't working, or maybe decide they need more attention ON...

In 3 - 4 years I'd fully expect single drives in the 1TB range to be mainstream products, just like 120GB drives are now. In early 1998 I put together a fileserver with a then-mind-bending 36GB of disk space. By 2001 everyone and their brother had a PC with 40GB. I also think that SATA isn't a...

In 3 - 4 years I'd fully expect single drives in the 1TB range to be mainstream products, just like 120GB drives are now. In early 1998 I put together a fileserver with a then-mind-bending 36GB of disk space. By 2001 everyone and their brother had a PC with 40GB. I also think that SATA isn't a...

Communications Streaming Architecture. Another excuse to not put better PCI slots on a desktop board, just like AGP. Because gigabit ethernet can saturate 32bit 33Mhz PCI so easily, Intel gave it its own bus and path to RAM. There's no "CSA slot", it's just a bus-mastered transport between the...

I live in Hobart, which doesn't share a border with Gary. It's only really close to the Miller Beach (the Yuppie/Gay neighborhood that tries really hard to pretend it's a seperate town. My brother lives there. He has a house on the lake... which, if you can get past the fact that you're only 2...

I think in part you have the expectation that Linux is going to just work out of the box someday, because that's the way things are with Windows. Having started with pre-1.0 kernels and the days of CAREFUL research before installing anything (the same research was needed for OS/2 and NT3.1 at...

re: rackmounts without a rack - Think of it as a really big desktop case; there's plenty of places to put one without bolting it in a cabinet, particularly since the large ones are basically cube-shaped. For rackmount cases, the one I've used most recently is the Antec 4U22. It only has 7 3.5"...

What does low-hanging water vapor have to do with making your car dirty? Is the air THAT bad out there? 'Cause I living in the Toxic Waste Capital of the USA (Yes, Gary Indiana is worse than Newark, New Jersey), and our air isn't THAT bad.

CSA is its own bus to RAM, IIRC. Using GBoC/CSA on the i875 would mean extra PCI bandwidth for disk controllers. I'd still like to suggest something in a rackmount case, simply because of cable length limitations with IDE and with tower cases. I don't have any one in particular in mind, but...

They wanted something they could use as a workstation. I can theorize that they might've wanted to realize the performance improvement of the 200Mhz-native bus used by high-end P4s, but they didn't make any other choices that would lead to a fast disk subsystem (e.g. WD *JB drives, RAID0, RAID1...

OK, I know I'm not the only person here who has put together a workgroup storage server. How about some suggestions to do firingsquad one better? The goal of this process will be suggestions that can be integrated into a single article. It might also be a good idea to impose a budget...

There's obviously a market for knowledge about small storage servers like this one. The firingsquad article was linked on slashdot as well, where it got 300ish comments, which stands as a moderately popular article for the day (about like a thread that get 8 or 10 replies here). I think there's...

Funny you should mention that. I was looking at some new-model laptops (probably Dells, although I don't remember and I'm too lazy to look) today and happened to notice upgradeable GPUs on some of the newer models. I think it's a bad trend, since it's another way that fleets can end up...

No giving the brits a free pass! I'd like it to make sense, yes. I've offered to write on the subject of HTPCs, but I'm fairly certain that the only other personhere who would be interested is Fushigi. Spending my free time - I don't usually have a lot of it in a stretch - writing about the...

A couple of other thoughts: They completely neglect the software aspect of this PC. Their stated goal is to use this machine as a workstation as well as a server, which suggests to me that dumbass who wrote this probably wants to put a dumbass OS on it, like 2000 Pro or XP Pro or worst of all...

Might I remind everyone of my offer: Write an article, 1000 words, on a computer related topic, and I'll ship you a 256MB PC3200 DIMM from Crucial.

Dell already has a similar program. I have no idea why. Dell Whiteboxes are more expensive than regular whiteboxes and you're essentially responsible for support (Dell gives you a special support site you can visit). That HP is doing the same thing just says that they're trying to get greedy...

Conversely, it's fairly easy to get a 4, 5, or 6U chassis with support for lots and lots of drive bays, builtin temperature monitoring, and a drive bay arrangement that lends itself easily to dealing with cables that can only be 18" long.

Yeah, 'cause y'know? Rackmount cases need all the heat they can... Oh. Wait. They didn't use a rackmount case, either. Pardon me while I point and laugh.

From slashdot

... proving once again that the people at firingsquad are morons in search of a clue. For that price they should be able to manage 2400GB and a high-end Escalade to put it on.

I ended up buying from a little shop that just opened in Highland Indiana. They keep weird hours - I think they do installs during the day, but they carry Denon and Integra, KEF and B&W. Plus furniture, interconnects and home automation equipment. This after visiting several places over in your...

One of my personal favorites is the Rage Fury Maxx, which divided the screen in half and assigned each half (top v. bottom) to a Rage Fury Pro processor. Obviously, a last gasp before the Radeon. IIRC it benchmarked roughly equivalent to a Vodoo 3500. Also there were two chips from Rendition...

Why does anyone in California need a garage? Garages are for keeping you from having to scrape ice off your windshield. Buck, have you ever even SEEN snow?

KEF Reference series + Integra DTR-8.2 (with builtin cat5 terminals for multiroom speaker wiring and a radio remote) = Heaven. Bliss. Plus the damn thing weighs 60lbs. Perfect for beating Greek medical students who tell me I don't know anything about audio equipment 'cause I don't like Bose.

I am vindicated in my opinion of the Matrix. At last.

While still not Firebird or even Opera, Microsoft has decided there there is in fact something it can do to make IE suck less. If this is enabled by default, it'll probably mean web advertisers will have to come up with new ways to suck more.

So you're actually planning on putting all your stuff in that little hutch they give you? I think that would be a PITA to deal with, as far as getting decent sound goes. I think I'd orient my living room to the straight, bare wall and put everything along that. Put speaker stands behind the...

I just upgraded my gear recently. For chrissakes, if you're spending real money on speakers, listen to them first. Buying speakers over the phone or online is a lot like buying a display online. I auditioned B&W, Mirage and Wharfedale before deciding on an all-KEF setup for my living room...

Basically it comes down to less knowledge of the testing material floating around. There are books out, about what to expect, but the 1st editions never get quite right.

Er, MSN Messenger, that is.

The most annoying thing about MSN? If you take the time to figure out how to remove it from XP, the FIRST THING that happens when you connect to the internet with MSN is that it gets downloaded and reinstalled.

It can get worse than that, of course...