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  1. Mercutio

    question HDD thermal management (keeping your cool)

    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...
  2. Mercutio

    Help with safe, secure storage of video footage

    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...
  3. Mercutio

    question HDD thermal management (keeping your cool)

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

    Android Tablets

    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.
  5. Mercutio

    This is a surprise

    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.
  6. Mercutio

    This is a surprise

    Ew.
  7. Mercutio

    This is a surprise

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

    Android Tablets

    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...
  9. Mercutio

    This is a surprise

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

    question HDD thermal management (keeping your cool)

    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...
  11. Mercutio

    Case

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

    Failure rate statistics

    Google knows full well what it is then!
  13. Mercutio

    Failure rate statistics

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

    Low power file server platform?

    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.
  15. Mercutio

    Failure rate statistics

    I prefer the "born wrong" theory.
  16. Mercutio

    Canada

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

    Low power file server platform?

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

    question Mobile Phones

    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.
  19. Mercutio

    Canada

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

    question Mobile Phones

    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.
  21. Mercutio

    Something Random

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

    I need a bed

    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.
  23. Mercutio

    Hacked Wordpress site

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

    Hacked Wordpress site

    Are they attacking Wordpress or php or MySQL?
  25. Mercutio

    FF4 and IE9

    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...
  26. Mercutio

    FF4 and IE9

    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?
  27. Mercutio

    USB 3.0 Cases

    That is shockingly not-hideous.
  28. Mercutio

    Strange

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

    Strange

    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...
  30. Mercutio

    iPhone syndrome

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

    System Recommendation

    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.
  32. Mercutio

    Canada

    Yup, but it comes up first.
  33. Mercutio

    Canada

    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.
  34. Mercutio

    Something Random

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

    Reddit's tales of user stupidity

    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.
  36. Mercutio

    question Mobile Phones

    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...
  37. Mercutio

    Marvell SATA controller okay?

    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.
  38. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    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...
  39. Mercutio

    Mobile Rack

    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.
  40. Mercutio

    Phenom as Server

    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...
  41. Mercutio

    FF4 and IE9

    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...
  42. Mercutio

    System Recommendation

    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...
  43. Mercutio

    FLAC to MP3

    I'm sorry. I meant Xrecode. There's an Xrecode 2 which I believe is widely available nagware, and an Xrecode 1, which is freeware. Good luck finding the freeware one. Formatfactory absolutely does support conversion to and from flac, though. Honest.
  44. Mercutio

    FLAC to MP3

    Formatfactory will do that. ConvertX should do that as well. Formatfactory is great for Windows users. You can point it at a top level directory and it will do everything beneath that point if you ask it to.
  45. Mercutio

    System Recommendation

    I really do like the Antec 300 case. I've gotten the one that ships without a PSU for $30 a few times. It's a step up from the HEC case that I use in budget builds, but it's also physically larger than I would use for a business machine.
  46. Mercutio

    PC Gaming = World of Suck

    This thing seems interesting, not least because an Android gaming platform is a Linux gaming platform.
  47. Mercutio

    Strange

    My posts about Thor and Batman are irrefutable!
  48. Mercutio

    Best movie you've seen

    Nolan's Batman certainly tries to be. He wears realistic armor, doesn't have every possible tool in his utility belt and relies on technology that's mostly within the realm of possibility. The Sky Hook thing from Dark Knight actually exists, for example. Nolan also goes out of his way to avoid...
  49. Mercutio

    Best movie you've seen

    Thor was originally conceived as the actual Norse God of Thunder. In Marvel's current continuity, literal deities are not truly religious figures but rather a specific sort of alien or extra-dimensional being that thrives on and takes power from the the faith or belief of mortals. This is...
  50. Mercutio

    Your home Stereo/sound system/s? What did you buy, how much, and why did you buy it?

    That too. It's either that or run an X-Meridian just for gaming and that seems silly too.
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