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  1. Mercutio

    It's HOT

    It was 93 degrees in my apartment last night at 11PM. With the computers turned off. All of them.
  2. Mercutio

    ASUS BIOS

    That's pretty normal for BIOS updates.
  3. Mercutio

    Media Player Appliances

    I hope you like MPEG2 video.
  4. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    I've noticed an odd behavior from the G1 X25-M in my gaming desktop. I only have one game installed in the 80GB space, City of Heroes, but since I had time to play this weekend, I did. Unfortunately, what I actually spent most of the weekend doing was tracking down weird lag spikes in-game. My...
  5. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    I've noticed an odd behavior from the G1 X25-M in my gaming desktop. I only have one game installed in the 80GB space, City of Heroes, but since I had time to play this weekend, I did. Unfortunately, what I actually spent most of the weekend doing was tracking down weird lag spikes in-game. My...
  6. Mercutio

    Media Player Appliances

    Over the weekend, I got an LG Smart TV Upgrader for $50. For that money it has some stupid apps (meh) and offers DLNA support for streaming video. I've since found the Seagate/WD streaming video doohickeys on Ebay for not much more than the LG, but it's another interesting option.
  7. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    Not any more. These days I'm lucky if I can get three hours of work in on a Saturday. I can do a lot more remotely than I used to but other than basic monitoring I don't need to do much at this point.
  8. Mercutio

    Sans Digital TR5UT-BP 5 drive RAID enclosure

    I had horrible problems using 2TB Seagate green drives in Windows SoftRAIDs. I suspect there's something in the drive firmware that makes them a bad choice for RAID scenarios, like extra-long thermal calibrations or something.
  9. Mercutio

    USB 3.0 drives

    Oh that is quite useful. When I looked before I could not find such an item. I need to get a couple of those. Thank you sir.
  10. Mercutio

    USB 3.0 drives

    I'd kill to get a USB3 PCI card so that I could make it available on all the servers I manage, instead of just the few that happen to have PCIe instead of PCI or PCI-X. Much as I've been advocating for tape, a backup system built on several 1TB 2.5" USB drives that only need one plug would be a...
  11. Mercutio

    Tape Backup Solutions

    I have not yet had a bad tape. They're supposed to last years in use assuming a moderate rotation schedule and to be stable for long-term storage after that.
  12. Mercutio

    Tape Backup Solutions

    I got my library off Craigslist. Take a look at Provantage for the hardware. As I recall they were hundreds cheaper than some of the other usual suspects.
  13. Mercutio

    Tape Backup Solutions

    I've never bothered to turn on compression. It would be a waste of time. I have two backup jobs that are ~13TB and 8.5TB right now. I make a new full backup monthly and just do incremental backups on a weekly basis. It's not a huge deal. I was able to get my Tape Library from a shuttered...
  14. Mercutio

    Job working for Ravenall open/PG&E

    Now move it to the Feedback Forum!
  15. Mercutio

    Flash player stopped working for no apparent reason.

    Your computer got a vacation, and now it has to go back to work. Sucky, sucky work that Adobe makes it do. More sucking than a republican in an airport bathroom. Have I said lately how much I hate flash? Because I hate flash.
  16. Mercutio

    Tape Backup Solutions

    I've found LTO4 tapes for as little as $19 each.
  17. Mercutio

    Scripting help?

    I don't know. I see signs every time I drive to Knoxville.
  18. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Some people pay good money for that sort of thing.
  19. Mercutio

    Scripting help?

    That's Kentucky. I think Interstate 64 in Kentucky is called the Kentucky Memorial Bourbon Trail or something.
  20. Mercutio

    Scripting help?

    Don't get Stereodude started...
  21. Mercutio

    Presenting "The Coffin"

    Of course the ideal would be to have multiple drives. Single point of failure, etc. But in my experience from years of IT work, I've not seen issues of having a tape made in one drive not being readable in a different one. I've seen problems with god-awful backup software not being able to do a...
  22. Mercutio

    Tape Backup Solutions

    I had to become familiar with BE to help out a friend anyway. It's fine. Kind of. There are a bunch of different tape libraries out there. Dell and HP and Tandburg and several other companies make them. The distinctions are pretty minor. There are also larger library systems, but they don't...
  23. Mercutio

    Tape Backup Solutions

    You're going to have to look at library systems, not single drives. You'll find that your mid-range library system will be either an 8-bay or 16-bay changer that will fit in a 1U enclosure. You'll connect it to a SAS controller and the library's full function will be fully supported by only some...
  24. Mercutio

    Presenting "The Coffin"

    If you're doing things right, you should probably have a near-line backup on a NAS or something and something offline for archival storage. Your redundant server might or might not be serving that purpose, depending on how you're syncing it, but it's still not the same thing as having something...
  25. Mercutio

    Sans Digital TR5UT-BP 5 drive RAID enclosure

    Seems like a function that's only found on the cheapest controllers, actually.
  26. Mercutio

    Presenting "The Coffin"

    So you have $3500 worth of disk drives but you're not willing to consider a more stable form of storage?
  27. Mercutio

    Windows 7 - Move Users Directory To Another Drive

    You can specially configure a Windows install disk to point the users folder to a different drive. You could also create a symlink or a junction point in NTFS that points your stuff to where it needs to go, though I'm not 100% certain about whether Windows would be OK with doing that for a...
  28. Mercutio

    Media Player Appliances

    It's not going to happen that way either because there can always be a vastly more efficient codec given sufficient CPU power.
  29. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Apparently the new trend in e-tail is reducing costs for logistics. Newegg's getting worse, Amazon's getting worse. This does not bode well.
  30. Mercutio

    Job working for Ravenall open/PG&E

    IIRC he worked for a bank and then for Pacific Bell, not PG&E.
  31. Mercutio

    Media Player Appliances

    In the end, that comes down to everyone wanting a piece of the pie. That's not going to change. Personally I want devices that are versatile enough to deal whatever is put in front of them. The devices that are best able to do that are computers with general purpose operating systems, not...
  32. Mercutio

    RDP file transfers can't be trusted

    RDP can disconnect and very quickly re-negotiate a connection if the session remains open. I could very easily imagine a circumstance where someplace in the mess of RDP over VPN over internet connection where some part of that connection momentarily stopped working without actually ending the...
  33. Mercutio

    Presenting "The Coffin"

    Coffin 2.0 needs tape backup.
  34. Mercutio

    Scripting help?

    That is correct. Some states won't let you. Indiana is another one. wine.woot.com can only operate in I think 21 states.
  35. Mercutio

    Sandy Bridge problems

    I'm still annoyed with Gigabyte and Intel didn't have any products that conformed to my needs. Asus has mildly annoyed me for years but I don't have any evidence of systemic inferiority in the way that I do for certain other disliked brands of hardware.
  36. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Not that I heard.
  37. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Why is that important enough that it's breaking news? People kill each other all the time. Someone came into my office to tell me about it a little while ago. Here's the rule: If it's not on NPR it's not news.
  38. Mercutio

    Something Random

    What's a Casey Anthony and why do I care what he or she did?
  39. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I live in a fireworks state. People buy their kids fireworks and they're let off continuously at all times of the day and night. There was a six year old wandering around my apartment building with a grill lighter and a bunch of bottle rockets yesterday. Because that's a good idea. You heard...
  40. Mercutio

    Something Random

    It sucked on top of suck. The penalty for fireworks after 9PM should be to have them shoved up your ass, then lit with a flamethrower.
  41. Mercutio

    Sandy Bridge problems

    The NEC USB3 controller still works. I haven't dug out the manual to see how that's routed to the rest of the motherboard logic. I'm halfway inclined to just slap a NIC in it and let it run until it dies some more, not in the least because that's my main desktop. Of course, I'm also going to...
  42. Mercutio

    Avira Alternative

    For now it is. If I get to a point where I'm unsure about the quality of protection provided with Avast, I will evaluate Forticlient
  43. Mercutio

    Active Directory Domain gotcha

    That does make a certain amount of sense, since dcpromo is if nothing else going to involve installing a DNS server for a domain it can manage. If the only options are the reserved APIPA and loopback ranges, it makes sense that it would barf.
  44. Mercutio

    Firefox 5, Opera 11.11 and Chrome 12 all equal...

    I used IE9 for the first time over the weekend. It was decidedly Chrome-like. I'm not sure how far I'd want the browser UI minimalism to go, but that's definitely the direction the biggest browsers are taking. Google is talking about removing the URL bar from the default view in future versions...
  45. Mercutio

    Sandy Bridge problems

    Well, my Asus P8P67 Deluxe died over the weekend at age 58 days. Neither on board NIC nor any of the USB2 ports are functional. So that's nice.
  46. Mercutio

    Avira Alternative

    Fun, true fact for the IT guys here: MSE is only free for commercial installations of 10 computers or less. If you're going to ignore that fact, you might as well install better protection in the first place. I've been told Forticlient is another decent free option. I still haven't felt...
  47. Mercutio

    Avira Alternative

    MSE is generally not acceptable. It's a drag on system resources, misses too much stuff and is lacking what I consider basic functionality. I've never liked Avira's stupid popup, either.
  48. Mercutio

    MBR rootkit

    That really should be the outcome of any security breach, not just a rootkit.
  49. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Maybe some of them. But not Coug.
  50. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Coug is not a Canadian. You know better.
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