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My last place was a duplex managed by a condominium association. I don't want to maintain a home at all, especially not if there exists even the remotest possibility that I could be on the hook for "Whoops, this was built improperly and it's going to fall down around you no matter what you do"...

I typically buy Optiarc drives because they're quiet and don't do stupid things when you try to rip DVDs in the way that Sony and Toshiba branded drives do. I've had very few issues with Optiarc drives over time. Other than a couple people I know who steal movies (and kill drives) like fiends, I...

I still have at least one Travan drive that I got in 1994 and a DC2120 that is even older than that. Now I'm kind of curious to see if I can recover any of my old homework from those tapes.

Of course, that's 100 years for archival media. I suspect that the sort of discs most people buy for data storage (as opposed to audio or video, which have different error correcting schemes) probably exhibit bit rot after just a couple years.

Yes I am.

All my windows face southeast. My AC is a window unit. I have two portable AC units but I'm not allowed to vent them out of my apartment (it would be "unsightly"). I'm also not allowed to replace the AC I've been given by the landlord with a larger one and for some reason my particular apartment...

He does say the data set will grow with time, something that legitimately favors tape as the capacity increases. Most vendors claim stable data storage for 25 or 30 years.

I'm currently arguing with Fedex over the definition of a "reasonable" delivery attempt to my workplace. They said they made their first delivery attempt at 8:16PM on Thursday. At my office, mind you. That's eight at night. They said they made their second attempt at 3:28PM on Friday. The...

Airflow in my apartment is such that whether I ran the AC or not, I would effectively only cool five square feet around the air conditioner. My apartment faces southeast. Air simply does not move within it. I've tried doing complex arrangements of fans but that really doesn't help either since...

Tape is indeed the best option for your circumstance. Since you'll need the data potentially for decades, you'll probably want to purchase at least two devices that are capable of reading your tape format, or perhaps you might need to avail the services of a company that can transfer to new...

My apartment will be 90F+ until probably late September.

The problem with that, or with any modded firmware on that tabliet, is that you lose hardware support for Flash and Divx. Viewsonic only wants to support their build of Android 2.2 and according to them anything else voids the warranty.

The Usonian and Mission cases in the first link are definitely on the right track. I like oak and cherry wood with lots of geometric stylings, especially vertical lines.

Ew.

Mine would be a lot more tasteful than any of those.

Viewsonic's notoriously bad 10" tablet is today's woot deal. Apparently the thing was so bad that Staples yanked them from stores and sent back its entire order, which is why they're easy to find at fairly low prices ($270). They're good hardware, but they have to have a third party Android...

If I designed a case it would look like mission-style oak on the outside and be full of 3.5" hot swap trays.

I basically don't have open 3.5" drive bays anywhere. If there is a bay, it has a drive in it, whether or not that drive is actively cooled and regardless of how close it is to other drives or components. Despite the fact that I own many dozens of hard disks, actually losing one is vanishingly...

Yes. I have a customer looking for a pink case. Is that one purchasable?

Google knows full well what it is then!

My theory holds that Seagate drives are also born wrong. Which is why I've suddenly become very interested in MRAOPCR technology.

The point in any case is the replicate data across more than one set of drives in more than one physical set of hardware. I'm not sure I care how I do it as long as it gets done.

I prefer the "born wrong" theory.

Boobs are still awesome and exist to make us happy. This fact is inarguable.

MooseFS looks potentially interesting. I had not heard of it until just last night.

I am? The only broken smartphones I hear about with anything like regularity are Blackberries. My working theory about that is that people are breaking them in order to get sexier phones.

Lunar, if you have objections to seeing large Canadian racks, I think you might need to get your testosterone levels checked.

I'm quite certain that every mobile phone I've ever owned will still turn on. Some of them don't work any more because the networks they used are no longer in use, but I've never broken a phone. I'd say mobile phones are generally quite durable and reliable, now that I think about it.

A thousand posts is a very respectable number of posts to have.

It's a nice bed. It is very large and up very high. I had to make some stairs so my oldest cat can get up on it. I have no complaints directly related to the bed, only to the length of time needed for delivery.

Also, do you control the whole machine or are you just dealing with an account on a hosting provider's server?

Are they attacking Wordpress or php or MySQL?

I should have amended my statement to software-only options. Given that VirtualPC is essentially free (and has dreadful support for anything that isn't Windows), I'm kind of surprised that there isn't a new VMware Server on the horizon. Maybe supporting it is too much of a pain? And yes I am...

It appears that VMware Server is really, really broken with Firefox 4 and as far as I know it never worked with Chrome. And that support for VMware Server 2 ended in January. So I guess the best free option from VMware is now to make the VMs with Server and then run them through VMware Player?

That is shockingly not-hideous.

Also, I just found this nifty Google tool for syncing MS Office documents with Google docs.

It would not be entirely unreasonable to just have something on-site downloading everyone's E-mail via POP, but that doesn't help for contacts and calendar stuff. One nice thing about Thunderbird is that it's not terribly difficult to make it sync all that stuff so that local copies exist...

Today's free thingy on Amazon's App store is Plants vs. Zombies.

Response to the Japanese quake and component shortages perhaps? Usually the "-UD" designation from Gigabyte refers to the use of all Japanese-made solid caps instead of electrolytic ones.

Yup, but it comes up first.

I'd just like to say that a Google Image Search for Canadian huge rack shows just how correct I am about the horny Canadian babes even when safesearch is turned off. Not that checking anything on Google Image search with safesearch off is a good idea while one is at work.

I am not touching that one. Someone else can do it.

Now, to lighten our day ever so slightly, here's a nice long thread from Reddit about all the ways that the universe has conspired to build a better idiot. It makes for some rather amusing reading.

I bought a Galaxy tablet last week. I'm going to give it out as a gift, but from the little bit of playing around with it, I think it's a little bit heavier than I would like and I don't think the battery lasts all that long (maybe eight hours, rather than the claimed 12). As a general purpose...

I've built machines that have used them as standard SATA ports without issue. I've not tried to use one for RAID support. As standard SATA ports, they appear to be entirely acceptable. In particular, I found Marvell's eSATA3 controller a lot better than Sil's.

Every Intel thing I've sent back ever, they send me an Email that indicates that the defective product has been examined and found to be covered by its warranty or not. In one case I sent in a motherboard where I was told that the CPU socket had two bent pins, so they never checked the issue...

There's a little freeware program called DiskMon that can be configured to show disk activity on a Windows machine. It might be what you're looking for, and it's the sort of thing that would go nicely on a tiny little LCD if you really needed it to be available all the time.

I don't think that's a horrible idea. You're planning a server system, so the extra power utilization won't be ridiculous. I'd be a little concerned about the motherboard, but I suspect that for the cost-savings of looking at AMD, you can afford to factor in the cost of a couple spare...

I got tired of waiting for a couple of my important addons to get updated for FF4 support. I spent about 10 minutes googling for how to tell FF to make my older addons work in version 4, so here's the deal: Open about:config Create a new boolean value called extensions.checkCompatibility.4.0...

Intel motherboards also tend to be eight-layer PCBs rather than six, which is most common on AMD stuff. I'm not sure what the impact of that decision is, but I am sure that it makes the Intel boards more expensive. Also, I've found it a lot easier to get entirely solid cap designs for Intel...