I don’t want to go back to work. Take my job, please. Half of this week I will be (unsuccessfully) trying not to fall asleep in project roadmap meetings instead of accomplishing anything useful with the first ever face-to-face gathering of our entire Engineering staff. Somewhere in the planning process a good idea went horribly wrong…
The ending sequence of Halo 3 suffers a glaring continuity error in multi-player mode. Overall I don’t think it took Andy & I any longer to finish than Halo 2 but it was much more satisfying. Didn’t really get stuck anywhere, which was nice.
I would rather gouge my eyes out than help fix your damned computer. Get a Mac, call Geek Squad, I don’t care, but until then I am screening your calls and ignoring your emails. Sorry, Dad.
And before the hate mail starts, Dad has been working with computers since before I was born and has been using PCs for much longer than me.
Ordered a Monty Python Black Knight Bobblehead from ThinkGeek for Mini Ron to do battle with. The construction is quite poor, perhaps explaining why his appendages were so easily lost in battle.
Chenbro’s upcoming ES34069 Mini-ITX Home Server / NAS Chassis sounds like the case I’ve been waiting for, with 4 hot-swap 3.5″ bays plus an internal 2.5″ bay in a very compact package. Except for the Mini-ITX part — all the boards with 4+ SATA ports cost as much as the case so it’s easily $600+ for a complete system sans storage and operating system.
The System Builder (OEM) version of Windows Home Server is finally showing up in the North American channel — the rest of the Western world has been able to buy it for months. With a price of nearly $200, unless you are salvaging old hardware the perennially-delayed $599 HP MediaSmart Server looks like a much better value than going DIY.
PCI-Express versions of the Intel Pro/1000 have iSCSI boot support via a flash update. I’m pretty sure that all of the Socket 771/775 systems at work have on-board PCI-E Pro/1000s, so what’s the value proposition of a $500+ Adaptec iSCSI adapter?
The Thumper (Sun x4500) is Designed for Windows. Microsoft’s Jim Gray says it is the fastest Intel/AMD system we have ever benchmarked. Granted, that was way back in January, but I don’t think anyone has released a box with more storage I/O since then.
With a few tweaks, a Sun x4600 can boot 1000 sparse-root zones with ~38GB RAM utilized. What those zones are running is unspecified but each has ~18 processes. I’ve been wondering if a stand-alone Thumper, with it’s tragic limit of 16GB RAM, would be cost effective for offering SFTP storage on a dedicated zone + filesystem basis. The answer? With 370 zones per Thumper, 14,912GB usable storage, and a 30% discount from Sun… Yes, I think so.
Don MacAskill thinks that Dell’s MD3000 storage array is great. I can’t help thinking that an empty MD3000 probably costs more than the database server that Don is attaching it to. How is it that “Enterprise” storage has so strongly resisted commoditization and the downward pricing pressure that is so pervasive in the rest of the hardware business? Stinks of collusion…
